Reaching the other side of the drawbridge, the road passed through a long tunnel through the castle’s outer wall and under a number of rooms and corridors before opening out into a large courtyard a hundred yards across. The ground they were now standing on seemed to consist of powdered ruby that crunched like gravel under their feet, and there were a number of doors and other openings in the four walls around them.

     “Which door shall we take?” asked Dennis, looking nervously from one to another as if expecting a horde of ogres to come charging out at them at any moment.

     They looked around thoughtfully, but suddenly Diana frowned and put a hand to her head. “I feel strange,” she said. “I think...” Her eyes closed and she collapsed to the ground with a soft sigh.

     Shaun stared in horror, but he was also feeling strange. Light headed, as if he'd stood up too fast. “What’s going on?” he demanded.

     Thomas began to speak, but then he reached urgently for his spell components, desperate to cast a defensive spell. Waves of dizziness were sweeping over him, though, and he found to his alarm that he couldn't remember any of the words. His eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed beside the cleric.

     Teasel and Dennis were the next to fall, and Naomi staggered over to Shaun to cling onto his arm, a look of panic on her face. The soldier was unable to offer any support, though, as he also found himself fighting wave after wave of dizziness, and a moment later he also lost consciousness. He and Naomi fell together and landed in a tangled heap, her head on his arm.

     Arroc was the last to fall. He looked around in horror at his companions, lying unconscious on the ground, and felt waves of dizziness beating upon his head. His strong trog constitution had allowed him to last longer than the others, but he knew he only had a few moments before he too succumbed. Unless he could fool them somehow. He let himself fall to the ground, therefore, and pretended to be unconscious while summoning all his willpower in an attempt to stay awake.

     It worked. A moment later the dizziness passed and he heard the crunching footsteps of a number of people walking across the crushed ruby gravel towards them. “Okay, what have we got here?” a man’s voice asked.

     “Four humans,” said another man, and Arroc resisted the impulse to open his eyes a slit to try to see him. Their one chance lay in his lying perfectly still. “A nome, a throwback trog and a felisian.”

     Throwback trog? thought Arroc in confusion. What’s a throwback? Have I been insulted?

     It was the last teamster mentioned that concerned the first speaker, though. “A felisian?” he exclaimed. “What’s a felisian doing here on Tharia?”

     “A spy perhaps,” replied the other. “Or a scout. Who cares? This is the one we’re interested in. The wizard. Give me a hand.”

     There was the sound of grunting and straining, and Arroc imagined Thomas being picked up and slung across the speaker’s shoulders. Then there came the sound of footsteps leading away.

     “Take the others to the waiting room,” the first speaker then said, and Arroc felt himself being picked up and slung across someone’s shoulders like a sack of potatoes. He heard the others also being picked up, and then they were carried across the courtyard to one of the keep’s entrances.

     Now that they were moving, Arroc dared to open his eyes a slit. Behind him he saw Dennis being carried by a man dressed entirely in red, with the design of the two legless dragons sewn above the left breast of his tunic and a ruby held in the middle of his forehead by a metal headband. Behind him, at the back of the procession, Naomi was being carried by another man dressed identically. The soles of her feet showed up brightly in contrast to her dark skin, and her tiger skin had ridden up her back as she was picked up, giving the trog a fine view of her glossy black buttocks.

     They went down corridors and around corners until they came to a room containing a dozen padded couches lined up along the wall. The teamsters were carefully laid out on the couches and then the men left, closing the door behind them as they went.

     Arroc lay perfectly still for a few minutes longer, just in case, and listened hard, but he heard nothing except the soft breathing of his companions. He opened his eyes a slit and risked a careful look around, but saw nobody, so he quietly and carefully sat up on the couch.

     The room had no windows and only one door. Walls, floor and ceiling were made of the same semi-transparent ruby as the rest of the keep, but were too thick for him to see through, either with normal vision or infravision. The only furniture was the twelve couches; six of them occupied by himself and his companions, the rest empty.

     They seemed to have been left alone, so the trog got down and went to examine the others. They were breathing regularly and had strong heartbeats, as if they were merely sleeping, but no amount of shaking or slapping would bring them round. They were in some kind of spell induced coma, and it was obvious that they’d be of no use to him until the spell was broken. He was on his own.

     He went over to the door and listened carefully, trying to detect the sound of guards on the other side. He heard nothing, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. The guards might be standing silently, making no noise, or the door might simply be impervious to sound. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to trust his luck and hope their captors had put all their faith in the sleep spell.

     He took hold of the door knob, turned it as gently and quietly as he could and gave the door a gentle tug. It didn't move, and neither did it when he pushed instead. It was locked. “Drass!” cursed the trog in frustration.

     He pulled again, then pushed again, harder, and then lost all patience and attacked it furiously with his scimitar, all thought of stealth forgotten, but all his fury and his massive trog strength failed to make a single mark on the smooth, translucent ruby. In the end he gave up, defeated, and stamped up and down the length of the room, shaking in helpless anger.

☆☆☆

     Lord Ruby entered the examination chamber in which Jasper and Garnet had undressed Thomas and laid him out on the couch, and he looked down at the wizard with an expression of hope and expectation. Behind him were three others; a man and a woman dressed all in blue and a woman dressed all in green. All six had the design of the two legless dragons embroidered on the tunics they wore, the women’s just above the swell of their left breasts, and they all wore large gemstones on their wrists, each one the same colour as the clothes they wore.

     “Is this the one?” said the woman in green, looking down at the naked wizard. “Not bad looking, in a skinny sort of way.” The woman in blue shot her a venomous look which the first woman pointedly ignored.

     “Back off, Jade,” warned the Gem Lord, scowling at her. “He’s not to be interfered with. There are two other young men in the waiting room if you really can’t help yourself.”

     “Bah! Sword waving muscleheads!” spat Jade contemptuously. “You can find a thousand like them in any decent city.”

     “Then why don’t you?” said Jasper angrily. “We’ve got important work here. We need to concentrate.”

     “What have you found out?” asked Lord Ruby, ignoring the cry of protest from the woman.

     “We’ve confirmed the Oracle’s report,” said Garnet, waving a gem encrusted artifact over the wizard’s chest. “Mentally, he’s an almost perfect match, better than any of the others. I’d say we’ve got a good chance.”

     “And physically?”

     “A genetic predisposition to heart disease, but that’s easily cured,” replied Jasper. “Other than that he’s in good shape, as Jade just pointed out.”

     “You’d say he’s got the strength and stamina to survive the procedure?” asked the Gem Lord.

     “Definitely,” agreed his subordinate. “Whether he accepts or rejects the implant, he’s in no danger.”

     “Let’s hope we’re successful this time,” said the man in blue, coming forward. “We have so little time left. What chance do we have of finding another suitable host before... You know.”

     “It’s nothing less than a miracle we found this one,” agreed Garnet.

     “Indeed,” agreed the Gem Lord. “Imagine if we’d had to search all the cities of the world looking for a suitable host. It would have been hopeless! It was Lord Emerald’s genius to make them come to us instead, to create a place to which anyone with the right mental attributes would be sure to come sooner or later. Who else but he could have conceived of the Oracle? Haven’t I always said he was the greatest of us all?”

     Jade glowed with pleasure, as she always did when someone gifted her master with such high praise.

     “Pity the Oracle couldn’t have sent him to us last year, during his first visit,” said the man in blue sullenly.

     “How could it have, when he didn’t ask his question?” snapped back Jade defensively, her green eyes flashing. “It did as much as it could when it informed us that a possible match had been found. We just had to hope that he would return one day to ask his question, as indeed he did.”

     “Calm down, the pair of you,” said Lord Ruby, turning his smouldering red eyes on each of them in turn. “Laz, you have the seed?”

     “The woman in blue reached into a fold of her robes and produced an object about the size of a blackbird’s egg. It was round, made of something that looked like blue glass or polished sapphire, and shone with its own inner light.

     “Good,” said the Gem Lord. “Are we ready?”

     Jasper and Garnet glanced at each other, then looked down at the naked wizard breathing softly on the couch. They strapped his arms and legs down, put a strap across his chest and put a strap of leather in his mouth, between his teeth. “Ready,” Garnet then said, looking up.

     “In an ideal world, we’d ask for his consent before we did this,” said Topaz, frowning in concern as he regarded the sleeping wizard.

     “In an ideal world we wouldn’t have to do it at all,” replied Lord Ruby.

     “We should still ask him!” the man in blue protested. “Wake him up, explain it to him...”

     “And what if he says no?” asked the Gem Lord gently. “What then?”

     Topaz had no answer to that, and simply watched guiltily as the woman in blue drew some shapes on Thomas’s chest with her finger. “Will he feel it?" she asked, staring at the sleeping wizard with an intensity that caused the Gem Lord some concern. He would have preferred that Lapis Lazuli not been there, but the woman had been adamant and had further insisted that it be she who carried out the procedure. Since it was a simple enough operation he'd given in to her request, but seeing the look on her face now he found himself beginning to regret it.

     “He won't feel a thing,” Jasper said reassuringly. “He’ll just sleep right through it.”

     She nodded and continued her preparations, muttering strange words under her breath as she did so, and Topaz moved closer to stare down into Thomas’s sleeping face. “Forgive us,” he said in a soft voice. “One day you’ll understand why we have to do this.” The wizard just carried on breathing softly, oblivious to everything that was going on.

     The woman in blue finished her preparations and held the seed above Thomas’s chest, chanting the words of a spell under her breath. The glow of the seed intensified until it shone like a star, and the others had to shade their eyes, even Lord Ruby himself. “Here we go,” she said. “Fifth time lucky.” She touched the seed to the wizard’s skin.

     The seed disappeared, soaking into Thomas’s flesh like a drop of water into a sponge. Nothing happened for a moment, but then the wizard’s body arched upwards in spasm, straining against the straps as he was wracked by a series of convulsions so violent as to almost tear the muscles from his bones. Lapis Lazuli gasped in sympathy, her hands flying to her mouth, but she was comforted by the fact that, being unconscious, he couldn’t feel a thing. When he woke up he might ache a bit all over, but he wouldn’t have suffered any permanent harm. Not if Jasper’s assessment of his physical condition was accurate.

     The spasms continued, each one worse than the one before. The tendons stood out on his neck, wrists and legs, and he fouled himself on the couch. Gradually, however, it passed, and a few moments later he was lying still again, his arms twitching a little and his chest rising and falling as he gasped for breath.

     Garnet passed the gem encrusted artifact across the wizard’s body again, while Jasper unfastened the straps holding him down. “There’s been no immediate rejection,” he said at last. “The seed has opened and settled itself. It’ll go dormant now until he’s ready for the next stage.”

     “And that’ll take years, during which he might still reject it,” said Lord Ruby.

     Garnet nodded in agreement. The Gem Lord’s subordinates then fetched some soap and water to clean up the wizard and the couch while the others moved away to the other side of the room.

     “All this, and he’ll probably die when the Shadowhosts conquer this world,” said Topaz unhappily. “Have you reconsidered your decision not to find another home for him?”

     “I have not,” replied the Gem Lord. “He has to stay in this world, no matter what.”

     “Even though this world is doomed?” cried the man in blue passionately. “If he dies, we die! You know that!”

     “We don’t know that this world is doomed,” replied the Gem Lord, annoyed at having to go over the same old arguments for the thousandth time. “And even if we knew for certain that it was, we still couldn’t take him away from it. Our future depends on the growth of the seed, and it can only grow as its host grows. He can grow best in his own world. Move him elsewhere, and the stress of having to adapt to a new environment would disturb his psyche, leading to a greater chance of rejection. Our future depends on his remaining here.”

     “Then we have no future!” cried Topaz in despair. “You’ve seen the progress of the war. Seen how the Shadowhosts have swept across the land meeting virtually no opposition. If Tharia becomes an undead world, not only will that lad be lost to us but there'll be no more living humans from which to choose a new host. He is our last chance.”

     “There must be something we can do to help save this world,” cried Jade. “I refuse to accept that, with all our power, we can only sit back and watch while this world dies.”

     “If you've thought of something since the last meeting, I would be overjoyed to hear it,” said the Gem Lord, not without compassion. “You know the facts as well as I, though. All our power is back in the Realms. We have virtually no power in the worlds of the natural planes. The ability to alter the outcome of a war is certainly beyond us.”

     “We could send flights of gem steeds. Even without magic, a thousand steeds and riders descending upon the Shadowhosts…”

     “You've seen the size of the armies doing battle in the north,” said Lord Ruby patiently. “All our armies combined would make little difference, and would alert the Agii to our existence. If they discovered that we exist, and what we intend…” Jade nodded in reluctant acceptance. “No,” The Gem Lord continued. “the only thing we can do is give them what they came here for. The Scrolls of Skava. Who knows, maybe the priest is right. Maybe his plan really will end the war.”

     He returned to the wizard on the couch, the others following him, and they looked gravely down at him while Jasper and Garnet finished their work. “Just one more thing to do now,” said Jasper, reaching for another magical instrument. “We want to give him every chance we can.”

     He applied the instrument to the centre of Thomas’s chest, gave a word of command and the wizard’s skin glowed with a pearly light for a moment, rendering him partially transparent. Then he removed the instrument and the wizard returned to normal. “That’s his heart condition dealt with,” he said with a grin. “Would have been pretty ironic if the Shads were defeated and he dropped dead from a common heart attack. And as a free bonus he’s now immune to all known natural diseases.”

     “Pity we couldn’t do anything about the unnatural ones,” said Topaz gravely.

     “As I said, our power in this world is severely limited,” replied Lord Ruby.

     “Yeah,” agreed the man in blue. “It’s just the thought that our last hope is about to go out into a world full of Shads, shologs, vampires, werewolves, the Gods alone know what else. A single arrow from the puniest little buglin could be the end of us all.”

     There was an uncomfortable silence as they contemplated the fact, looking down at the naked wizard and his weak, fragile body. Over the centuries they’d come to take their immortality for granted, but all of a sudden their continued existence was hanging from the very narrowest of threads. “Perhaps it would be a good idea for us to renew our relationships with the Gods,” suggested the Gem Lord at last. “How long has it been since any of us last bowed our heads in prayer?”

     There was a snort of derision from Jade. “If we’re finished with him, shouldn’t we be sending him on his way?”

     “Yes,” agreed the Gem Lord, turning to Jasper and Garnet. “When you’re finished, get him dressed and put him back with the others. Then let them wake up. The rest’s up to you. Don’t mess it up.”

     “You can count on us, Lord,” replied Garnet, bowing his head. “We know what to do.”

     “Good,” replied the Gem Lord, who then turned and left the room, followed by Jade and Topaz. Lapis Lazuli remained for a moment longer, staring down at the wizard with a strangely hopeful expression, before leaving also and leaving the two men to do their work.