They reached the independent city of Mala two days later, after having battled against an unexpected headwind, and they anchored half a mile from the shore. They spent the next five hours waiting for a pilot boat to came out and guide them in past the treacherous, ever shifting sandbanks of the Tew estuary so that they could dock in the city's harbour.

      Mala was an independent city, belonging to no nation or kingdom, and subsisted almost entirely on traffic passing along the great river, between the coastal Kingdoms and those situated upriver, deep within the continent. The river was too shallow along most of its length for the deep keeled ocean vessels, and the shallow hulled river barges could not survive the rough weather of the open ocean, so all traffic passing from ocean to river or vice versa had to be transferred to the appropriate type of vessel. Mala provided this service, for a price, and so lucrative had this trade become that it had grown from a relatively minor seaport to a major city in only a couple of hundred years.

      On the farther shore of the estuary, so many miles away across the turgid, muddy waters that it was visible only as a dark line on the horizon, stood the ruins of an even larger city, Old Mala, that had grown during the days of the Agglemonian Empire. In those days a canal had run from the Tew to the Great Lake, connecting it to the Western Sea, and the river itself had been dredged to a much greater depth. This had allowed the great sailing ships to sail directly from Arnor itself to every port along the Western and Southern Seas, and it had all had to pass through Mala, which had become one of the largest, richest and most glorious cities in the Empire.

      When the Empire had fallen, however, trade through the city had all but ceased and its main source of income had dried up. Within a few short years it had become a virtual ghost town, a mere shadow of its former self, which had survived for about a century longer as the capital of a small bandit empire that controlled an area of a few thousand square miles between the Tzeentra Marshes and Fengalla Forest. Even this hadn't lasted long, however, as evil creatures had moved into the vast, deserted outer regions of the city, warring with its remaining inhabitants and eventually driving them out.

      Most of the city's wealth was reputed to still be there, though, carefully hidden by the city fathers in the last days before their departure, and every so often someone would go in there in search of it, but the city's new inhabitants, still lurking in the ruins, made sure that they rarely left alive. Even an entire army, sent by the nearby Kingdom of Kenestra, had failed to clear the city out, and the ill fated expedition of 6188 had served only to give the city such an evil reputation that the river's entire southern shore was now shunned for a hundred miles along its length. There were cities like Old Mala all over the continent, the largest being the ruins of Arnor itself. Relics of the glorious age of Imperial splendour, now dark and dangerous and avoided by all sensible people.

      The six travelers decided to spend a couple of days in Mala before looking for a ship to take them on to Greenwing Island. They were all thoroughly fed up with sea travel, with the awful food and the seasickness, and the women were feeling even worse than the men from having been confined to their cabin for most of the voyage. They decided to take a day or two to see the sights and visit some of the city's major landmarks, therefore, and Thomas went to visit the local library, as he always did, on the off chance that it had some information they could use. From his past disappointments he had little hope that it would, and he told the others so as he left, so they were surprised to see him bursting with excitement upon his return that evening, clutching a sheaf of handwritten notes as he burst into the boarding house's common room.

      "I've found it!" he cried. "It's all here, all of it! All the answers! Everything!"

     
      "Calm down, Tom," said Diana, surprised but delighted and infected by his excitement. "Slow down and tell us everything."

      "I was looking through the library, not really expecting to find anything, when there it was, sitting right in front of me, a copy of ‘De Carnis Mysticum', one of the rarest and most valuable books in the world. Those idiots've got no idea what they've got there! They think it's just another old book, something they rescued from Old Mala when they built the new city. It's in amazingly good condition. Some wizard must have cast a preservation spell on it. I took it down and held it in my hands, actually held it in my hands! By the Gods, I never dreamed that one day I would actually hold a copy of..."

      "Yes, all right Tom," interrupted Jerry, knowing that he would keep on about the book all night if they let him. "Did it say where the Sceptre of Samnos is?"

      "What? Oh, no. Nothing like that." The others groaned in frustration. "But it did have a lot of stuff in it about the Sceptre, like why and when it was made and why priests of Samnos are unable to claim it themselves. I wrote it all down here." He waved the notes at them.

      "Well," said Shaun. "What does it say?"

      "Well, apparently, it all goes back a long, long way, way back before any of the humanoid races first appeared on Tharia. The Gods are immortal, as you know. They've existed for millions of years and have been fighting amongst themselves, Good against Evil, non stop all the time. The two war Gods in particular have always been at war with each other, even before there was anybody to worship them and fight their wars for them. Anyway, it seems that before we came along, there were all kinds of other creatures inhabiting this world, creatures unimaginably different from anything still alive today, and they worshipped the Gods just as we do. Both the familiar Gods we know of, and a whole bunch of others that we've never heard of.

      "They fought each other, just like we do. Good versus evil. The fighting almost never stopped, and to help their worshippers each of the war Gods created a Sceptre of Power, by means of which the priest holding it could channel a much greater portion of that God's power than normal, enough power to cause enormous destruction to their enemies. They used all kinds of other weapons as well, of course, and as well as the kind of weapons we would recognise they had all sorts of other kinds. Magical weapons more powerful than anything the Immortal wizards had, and another kind of weapon that I'm not sure I understand, weapons that used something called natural philosophy."

      "I've heard of that somewhere," said Jerry. "The trog alchemists are supposed to use it, I think. It's what makes their glowbottles work, and other things they make. Trogs can't use magic, so they use this natural philosophy thing instead."

      "That's right," said Thomas. "But the people I'm talking about, the ones that lived before humanity, used a far superior form of it. Their natural philosophy weapons were so powerful that they made our kind of weapons, and even magic, completely obsolete. Every time they fought a war they would invent even more powerful and destructive weapons so that the next war would be even more terrible than the last. Then, one day, they fought a war so terrible that they were completely wiped out and the whole planet left a barren wasteland.

      "The Gods were astonished and terrified. They had had no idea that natural philosophy could be so powerful. Without worshippers they went into a kind of decline, the book was rather vague on that point. I suspect even the author didn’t fully understand. The Gods need worshippers, but no-one really knows why. Do they hunger, starve? Maybe they just get lonely and go to sleep until the world heals itself and another race of sapient beings evolves. They like having worshippers, though. That much is certain, and they had to go without them for millions of years. They didn’t want it to happen again, so they took steps to make sure that no such war would ever be fought again.

     "It was a kind of covenant that all the Gods, and the two war Gods in particular, would follow to limit the violence of any future war. A set of rules they would follow. One of these rules was a ban on all but the most primitive use of natural philosophy, allowing only as much as the trogs use today."

      "What about the Sceptres?" asked Diana impatiently.

      "I was getting to that," said Thomas, annoyed at the interruption. "The Sceptres were also much too powerful for comfort but, since they had been created by the Gods themselves, They were unable, or perhaps just unwilling, to destroy them, so instead They drew up a set of rules guiding their use. There were many rules, but Orillos, who wrote the book, only knew a few of them. Where are they?" He searched among his notes, dropping a few on the carpet before finding the sheet he was looking for.

      "Ah, here we are. First of all, each Sceptre must be placed in a closely guarded stronghold from which it can only be claimed by someone who's proven his or her worth and courage. Furthermore, Priests of the War Gods are forbidden to claim them themselves. They must be claimed by those who do not worship either of the war Gods, who may then pass them on to those who do.

      "Secondly, each Sceptre may only be used three times before it is returned to its stronghold. Each usage of the Sceptres lasts seven hours, after which it becomes dormant once more. After the third usage a minion of the war God comes to reclaim it and hide it away once more. It cannot then be claimed again until at least a hundred years have passed.

      "Thirdly, the two Sceptres may not be used on the same battlefield at the same time. If an attempt is made to activate the second Sceptre within ten miles of the first Sceptre while it is active, the second Sceptre is instantly reclaimed and returned to its stronghold."

      He shuffled his notes and tucked them into his backpack. "That's it," he said. "Fascinating, eh?"

      "Fascinating, yes," said Lirenna, "but it doesn't really help us. It doesn't say where the Sceptre of Samnos is now?"

      "It says where it was, but the book was written nearly a thousand years ago and the Sceptre's been claimed four times since then. Every time it's reclaimed by a minion of Samnos, its hiding place is moved, so it's no longer in the place mentioned in the book. I suppose we could go there anyway if we run out of other options, on the offchance we might find a clue of some kind there..."

      "But in the meantime we're still going to the Emerald Oracle, hoping that it can tell us," said Diana. "Still, what you've found out could be useful. I was wondering why it was necessary for a cleric of Caroli to claim the thing."