“There they are!” said Diana, pointing.

     They looked over the side of the carpet to see their four teammates emerging from the emerald building, Naomi leaning against Dennis’s shoulder. Shaun gave a command and this time the carpet obeyed, dropping slowly to land on the ground. The cleric jumped off to examine the black girl, taking her back inside the emerald building so she could examine her wounds in privacy, and a few minutes later they emerged again, Naomi fully healed and restored to her old self.

     “What happened?” Shaun asked Dennis excitedly. “What did the Oracle tell you?”

     “Can we discuss this later?” said Thomas, however, looking up at the sky anxiously. “We’ve only got a few hours ‘till dawn. We ought to get out of here!”

     “He’s right,” agreed Teasel. “Let’s go.”

     Shaun took the carpet across the lake to where the others had left the second carpet along with their armour and weapons, and brought it all back. Dennis and Arroc hurriedly got dressed again, then unrolled the second carpet. They all got aboard and sat down, and then the two carpets took off, carrying the seven teammates away from the island and back towards the mainland.

     Shaun, Thomas and Diana had made the journey once before and so knew how long it took, and they watched the eastern sky anxiously as a rosy pink radiance spread across the wispy marestails, heralding bad weather to come. The second the yellow sun peeped above the horizon, they knew, the two carpets would turn and head back towards Belthar, carrying the teammates with them and ignoring any further commands from them. Any chance of Centaur team going to the Ruby Keep themselves and recovering the Scrolls of Skava would vanish, and they’d have to wait back at Redhill while someone else got all the glory. Thomas watched the little islands passing by beneath them and seriously considered landing on one of them. They could get a boat back to the mainland. It would take longer, but it would still be they who got the scrolls and the honour. He looked at the sky again, judging the time left until dawn, and then looked down at the sea, judging how far they still had to go. He swallowed anxiously. They might just make it...

     They did, with about half an hour to spare. Diana gave a cry of excitement, pointing ahead, and they saw the jagged peaks of the Majestic Mountains on the horizon, silhouetted black against the angry red sky. They urged the carpets to greater speed, leaning forward and gripping its leading edge with white knuckles, and at last they saw dry land ahead of them; a rocky beach against which high waves crashed, sending a salty spray high into the air. They ordered the carpets to land right on the edge of the sea, where they were soaked through by the incoming tide, and they jumped off, expecting them to take off again at any moment. The carpets just sat there, though, buffeted by the waves, so they pulled them higher up the beach in case the water affected their magic.

     “Right, we’ve got a decision to make,” said Shaun as the others gathered round. “Do we stay on the carpets and let them take us back to Belthar? With our knowledge of the location of the scrolls we’d be heroes. There’s no need for us to do any more. Someone else can go get the scrolls. Or we can let the carpets go back without us and get the scrolls ourselves. What do you say?”

     “I say we go for the scrolls,” said Thomas excitedly. “We’ve come this far. Come this close. Why not go all the way?”

     “Someone ought to go back,” said Dennis, though. “Someone’s got to tell Redhill where the scrolls are in case we don’t make it. We can’t take the risk of the knowledge dying with us.”

     “Resalintas’s scroll was destroyed when the farspeaking spell backfired,” said Thomas gloomily, but he brightened as a thought occurred to him. “We can write a note and pin it to one of the carpets. Just a simple note saying where the scrolls are.”

     “Good idea,” agreed Dennis. He looked up at the sky. “Better be quick.”

     The wizard found a piece of paper and a lump of charcoal from his backpack. “Don’t refer to the scrolls by name,” warned Shaun as Thomas scribbled rapidly. “Just in case the note falls into the wrong hands.”

     “Of course not!” snapped the wizard, annoyed that his friend could think him so stupid. He then rolled up the note and tied it to one of the tassels hanging from the carpet’s leading edge. “There, that should do it. Just so long as the carpet doesn’t run into any bane birds on the way back.”

     He stepped back, glad to have accomplished the task in time, but he needn’t have hurried. It was another ten minutes before the carpets rose slowly into the sky and began to head back north. They stood and watched until they were out of sight, and then Shaun gave a sigh.

     “Well, we’re on our own now,” he said, blinking his eyes wearily. “Shall we make a move now, or...”

     “I don’t know about you, but I’m whacked out,” said Dennis, sitting down on a rock. “What do you say we find somewhere comfy to make camp and catch up on our sleep?”

     Thomas objected, being eager to be off, but he was outvoted, so they moved a few hundred yards inland to a cave from which an underground river emerged. Inside, they found a dry, level space and settled down to rest.

☆☆☆

     The rain arrived at around midday, and the din the downpour made woke them up, feeling much refreshed.

     They looked out at the terrible weather and decided to wait where they were until it stopped. They wouldn’t be helping the war by catching pneumonia, and so they spent the rest of the day filling each other in on what they’d done and experienced during the time they’d been separated.

     Thomas listened in rapt fascination as Teasel told them about the Gem Lords. “So you see,” the nome said as she finished, “these Gem Lords may have had something to do with the Oracle’s origin. Maybe it was even they who created it. Else why would the Oracle bear the emblem of the Gem Lords?”

     “I think you may have gotten it backwards,” said Thomas, though, with a grin. “I suspect that the Oracle is older than the Gem Lords. A lot older. It’s more likely that one of the Gem Lords came to the Oracle seeking some piece of information or other, saw the emblem of the two dragons and decided to adopt it for himself. Since the existence of the Oracle was, and still is, known to very few people, no-one would have known that he hadn’t invented it for himself. Doesn’t that make much more sense?”

     The nome was forced to admit that it did but, paradoxically, the wizard found that he wasn’t at all convinced by his own argument. The Emerald Oracle. The Ruby Keep. Was it possible...?

     But no. Teasel had said that the Gem Lords had failed to become well known ‘within their own lifetimes’, which implied that their lifetimes had come to an end. The secret of immortality hadn’t been discovered until centuries later, so they couldn't have become immortal wizards, who might conceivably still be alive today. But there had been raks back then...

     Thomas shook his head to stop the shaky chain of logic his imagination was trying to forge. He was in danger of constructing a towering edifice of a conclusion out of a few tiny scraps of evidence and he was wise enough to know that such constructions tended to be wildly inaccurate and ludicrous when the truth was finally revealed. Better to wait until he had more evidence.

     Teasel then told the others about her own question, and the news that her brother was still alive and well, although shipwrecked in the Western Sea. None of the others had known she had a brother, but they were delighted nonetheless and determined to stop at the next town they came to, to send a message to Pastora. A ship would have to be sent to rescue him as soon as possible.

     Then Dennis told them about his question, and the fact that the enemy had seventeen raks. Thomas nodded, accepting the figure without comment. It was more or less what everyone had thought, but it was still nice to have confirmation.

     “And what about you?” the wizard asked Arroc. “What question did you ask?”

     “It was a personal matter,” replied the trog sullenly, looking down at a carving knife he was turning over and over in his hands. “I don’t want ter talk about it.”

     Thomas looked at Dennis, who shrugged dismissively, and they reached an unspoken agreement to respect the trog’s privacy. The conversation turned to other matters while the cave was lit up by flashes of lightning from outside. The storm was gathering force.

     “We thought we’d never get through that drassing maze,” Dennis said, emphasising the depth of his feelings with a savage swipe of his drystone on his sword. “The mentality of the people who designed it...” Shaun, Thomas and Diana grinned broadly, remembering their own experiences the year before. “Still, at least it wasn’t bad all the way through.”

     “What do you mean?” asked Shaun, frowning in puzzlement.

     “The first half was terrible,” said Dennis, “but once we passed a certain point it got much easier. The Oracle must have thought it had tested us enough.”

     “When we went through it was bad all the way through,” said Thomas with a thoughtful glance at Shaun. “Right up to the entrance of the Oracle chamber itself.” A worried frown spread slowly across his face.

     “What is it?” asked Naomi anxiously. “What are you thinking?”

     “You remember I told you that the Oracle refused to tell us what was written on the scrolls,” said the wizard. “It would only tell us where the scrolls were, not what they said.”

     “Yeah. So what?”

     Thomas looked up at the black girl, then looked at Dennis. “When we got back to the mainland for the first time, we tried to use the Farspeaking spell to tell Resalintas where the scrolls were, but it blew up in my face. I suggested, not quite seriously, that someone or something wanted us to go to the Ruby Keep personally. Us and no-one else.”

     Realisation came slowly to Dennis’s face, along with a trace of fear. “And then all the traps and deceptions in the maze suddenly disappear, allowing us to see the Oracle and get back to the mainland just in time. Any later and we wouldn’t have had time to make it back before dawn. We’d have been carried back to Belthar whether we liked it or not.”

     Teasel and Naomi began to look frightened, and even Arroc looked up. “What do you suppose would have happened if we’d decided to let the carpets take us back home?” asked Shaun nervously. “How much do you bet the carpets would have crashed before we’d gone far?”

     “Or maybe just taken us straight to the Ruby Keep,” agreed Naomi.

     “No, this is absurd!” said Diana, however. “What reason could the inhabitants of the Ruby Keep have for wanting to see us? Us? I mean, we’re nobody!”

     “Perhaps we’ll find out when we get there,” said Thomas darkly.

     They all fell silent then, thinking nervous, unhappy thoughts while outside the storm continued to rage noisily; flashing with lightning, crashing with thunder and punishing the ground mercilessly with a seemingly endless barrage of cold, pounding rain.