"How is she?" asked Lirenna.

     Thomas was kneeling beside Tassley, one of her hands in his, his other gently stroking the silky blonde hair away from her face. The bleeding from her scalp had slowed, although there was still blood leaking around the double layer of cloth he'd tied around her head.

     He looked up, relieved to see that his wife had escaped unharmed. "I think she's starting to stir. I don't think she's suffered any permanent harm."

     "Where's Tim? Why isn't he here?"

     "He's looking after the moon trogs. Gods, I hope they're okay! I was a little sharp with him when he went to them first, but when I think how frail those little guys are..."

     Lirenna nodded, but she was looking around at the broken glass littering the floor and the spilled contents, some of which were emitting strange vapours. "She can't stay here. Can we get her to the infirmary?"

     Thomas nodded and carefully gathered her up in his arms. As he carried her gently towards the door, neither of them noticed a bottle that had rolled under the table, where it was leaking a pale yellow liquid into the spilled powders the two wizards had been mixing just before the attack. As Lirenna closed the door behind them, the powders began to dissolve into the liquid and the darkened room was dimly lit by an unearthly greenish light...

☆☆☆

     They arrived at the infirmary to find Timothy there, carefully laying a badly injured moon trog into one of the beds and speaking the words that activated the dormant low gravity spells around it to provide a more comfortable environment for the frail humanoid. Two soldiers were bringing two more moon trogs in, and soon all the available beds were filled, including the two in the isolation rooms where individuals suffering from unknown diseases could be quarantined to protect the rest of the crew.

     The cleric wiped a weary hand across his brow when he saw the wizards enter, and told the soldiers to arrange some blankets on the floor. "I don't think I can do any more healing today" he apologised. "Not unless it's really life or death. I'm just too tired. Gods, but it was bad out there! Four dead now, and we might still lose another couple." He helped Thomas lay Tassley carefully on the blankets. "What happened? Did something hit us?"

     Thomas could only shake his head. "Can we do anything?"

     "Yes, you're healers now. Take as many bandages as you can carry out to deck six and dress their injuries, carefully! You can break their bones without knowing you're doing it, those bones that aren't broken already."

     He bent to examine Tassley while Thomas and Lirenna hurried over to the cupboard and began filling their arms.

☆☆☆

     Those moon trogs who'd been the most seriously injured, and whom Timothy had healed, directed the two wizards to where the still injured moon trogs had been gathered. Most of them were now conscious, having recovered somewhat, and were cradling broken limbs as they stared about in numb shock, but it was those who were still unconscious, and unable to help control their own bleeding, that the the two wizards were most concerned about and they set about bandaging wounds as swiftly but gently as they could. Some of the casualties questioned them as to what had happened, but the two wizards had no answers and could only pray that whatever it was wouldn't happen again.

     "Something must have hit us," Thomas whispered to his wife, low enough that no-one else could hear, "but I don't understand how that could happen. They should have seen anything big enough to do this to us from thousands of miles away."

     "Could it have been an attack?" whispered back Lirenna, holding onto a stanchion to keel herself from floating away. "But I thought it was a dead world. Totally uninhabited."

     "Maybe it's not as dead as we thought." He stared at the curving outer wall, on the other side of which was nothing but the hard vacuum of outer space. If something had hit them, was the hull damaged? Could they be about to suffer an air leak? He became acutely aware that no-one was wearing Necklaces of Vacuum Breathing and he felt a strong impulse to get back into the human decks, where there'd be another wall between them and the emptiness surrounding them. How did the moon trogs stand being this close to death? he wondered. The knowledge that only a few inches of steel stood between them and the judgement of the Gods? But, of course, they lived their whole lives in that situation and were accustomed to it. They just didn't let it worry them.

     Suddenly Lirenna looked up in alarm. "Tom! Do you smell something?"

     Thomas stared at her, then sniffed carefully. "No," he said. "It's probably just something broken. A bottle of something."

     "No, it's sharp and acrid. Laboratory smells." She stared about herself, her patient momentarily forgotten, and her eyes widened in fear as they fixed on a nearby section of the inner wall. "Tom! Look!"

     Thomas looked, and gasped in fear. A section of wall a foot across was melting like hot wax, the liquid metal being pulled inwards by the gravity of the human deck beyond. He suddenly realised that his magic sense was tingling like crazy. He'd been so concerned with his patients up until then that he hadn't noticed.

     He cursed and cast a Termination spell, a spell designed to end the effects of other spells by disrupting the carefully arranged patterns of magic that made them work, but as he'd feared it had no effect. It wasn't an organised spell that was dissolving the wall but spontaneously released raw magic. As formless as water and as impossible to break. "Get Saturn!" he barked, and Lirenna kicked off through the air to obey, leaving Thomas staring at the widening hole in horror.

     He could guess what had happened. All those bottles in the lab. All those powders and potions mixing haphazardly. He pictured the scene again in his mind's eye as he'd last seen it. Dozens of broken bottles and spilled dishes. It was possible, likely even, that there were other magics being spontaneously released in there, and with all the magics already aboard the ship, all carefully designed not to interfere with each other, what chaos and mayhem might these new magics cause? Magics that weren't so carefully balanced?

     Every magic aboard the ship might be thrown into chaos, he realised with alarm. The gravity, the Lifegiver, the Orb of Skydeath Protection... It's not that bad, he told himself, praying it was true. It's just one minor spontaneous casting that'll fizzle out in a couple of minutes, the way they almost always do.

     His mind kept turning back to something that had happened a couple of years before, though, just after he'd started as Pondar Walton's assistant. A young wizard in another building had made a mistake, mixed the wrong ingredient in a potion he was making for his master, and a spell had spontaneously cast itself, causing a small whirlwind to erupt in the laboratory. The gale force winds had whipped up every loose object in the room, including hundreds of spell ingredients, each of which had added to the chaos being unleashed until the whole research area had had to be evacuated.

     It had looked for a few moments as though they might lose that whole half of the valley! Thomas remembered standing in graduation field with Edward and Tassley and several other wizards young and old, watching the crazy nimbus of light and crackling energy dancing above the buildings. Feeling the crazily dancing patterns of magic as they built and built towards an unknown but terrifying crescendo. He remembered watching the half dozen senior wizards cautiously edging their way towards the building like firefighters approaching an inferno, remembered praying to all the Gods that they'd be successful in their attempt to repair the damage and extinguish the magical maelstrom. He remembered the relief he'd felt when the dancing light and flickering lightnings had gradually ebbed away and died.

     They'd gotten away with it that time, but Pondar had given them a long lecture the next day, as they waited to hear if the buildings were safe to enter once more. He'd told them that they'd come within a few minutes of complete disaster, of something truly catastrophic happening, such as a portal opening into one of the lower planes releasing demons to flood through and take possession of the world.

     Such things had happened on other worlds, he'd told them, and Thomas had nodded as he'd remembered some of the less pleasant of Elmias Pastin's travellers tales. Pondar had spent the whole morning drilling into them the importance of avoiding spontaneous spell casting, and now it had happened again, right here, aboard the ship on which he was serving. The ship aboard which his wife was serving! He felt beads of sweat appearing on his forehead as he watched the hole widening, the molten droplets of metal pulled inwards and out of sight.

     He concentrated on his magic sense, trying to determine whether there were other spell effects going on in there, while he prayed silently that Saturn would be able to stop it. Two years before it had taken six senior wizards. Here, they only had Saturn. No-one else from Lexandria could teleport aboard while they were out of their own universe, and even if they could it would take them a full day to get there. Maybe it'll stop by itself, he thought hopefully. That was what usually happened. It'll burn itself out and just stop.

     Maybe it would, but it hadn't yet. The hole continued to widen, now almost wide enough that he could have climbed through if he'd dared touch the liquid metal. He could clearly see the laboratory through it. He could see several places where spilled potions were mixing, and half a dozen of them were smoking ominously. One of them was glowing with a dangerous ruddy red light. He felt himself trembling with fear, and he backed away as if from a stick of dynamite whose fuse was now burning very short indeed...

     Then he heard the sound of a door opening and footsteps marching across the floor of the laboratory, and he gave a gasp of relief to see the hem of Saturn's black robes through the bubbling, smoking hole. He heard the older wizard utter a blistering curse and begin the hurried casting of a spell, and Thomas warned the moon trogs to back away in case they were caught in the spell effect. He guessed it was a Scrub spell he was casting. A spell he'd never actually seen in action but which he knew was used to remove all trace of residual magic from a room in preparation for the casting of other, more sensitive spells. It was also used in just such a situation as was happening here. It acted on all forms of magic like water on fire. Only an anti-magic spell was more powerful as a way of ending spell effects. He had a good idea what was happening, therefore, when he felt the cold wash of power sweeping over him and saw the rim of the melted hole darkening as the eerie green glow suffusing it was snuffed out.

     He breathed a sigh of relief, and tentatively touched the rim of the hole with a metal ruler he found in a nearby storage cabinet. The melted and now refrozen metal gave a reassuring ting of solidity. "Thank the Gods!" he gasped in relief. "That was scary!"

     "Master Gown," said Saturn angrily, stooping to peer down through the hole in the floor. "Would you like to explain why you didn't make the laboratory safe the moment you saw the spillage of so many substances? I did not expect such reckless negligence from you."

     "Tassley was hurt!" replied Thomas, surprising himself with the vehemence of his defence. "We had to take care of her first."

     "By neglecting the laboratory you endangered the whole ship," snapped back Saturn. "Be sure that this will not look good on your record. I expected better of you, Gown. I thought you had more sense than..."

     The older wizard fell silent, though, when he heard Thomas's gasp of horror. The metal ruler, which he was still holding, had suddenly started melting, starting from the point where he'd touched it to the melted hole, and when he looked at the hole he saw that its rim was smoking and bubbling again. Saturn's spell had, it seemed, only put it to sleep for a few moments. Saturn cursed and began the casting of another spell, while Thomas watched the ruler shortening with alarming speed towards his shaking fingers..

     A nightmarish image filled his head, of his hand melting like that, and then his arm, his flesh melting away from the bones to float away in the zero gravity in obscenely quivering blobs, and he flung the ruler away before the rational part of his mind could intervene to stop him. The ruler struck a bulkhead, bounced off it to hit the curving outer wall, bounced off other fittings and items of furniture and ended up spinning in the air, throwing off blobs of molten metal until there was nothing left of it. Everywhere a molten blob came to land, though, a new hole began to form, smoking and bubbling as the cancer spread.

     "You fool!" screamed Saturn furiously. "Get everyone out of there and seal the airtight doors. Quick!"

     Thomas obeyed, shaking with terror and numbing guilt. What had he done? The most powerful spell Saturn had hadn't stopped it, and now he'd spread it across half the ship, multiplying the problem and maybe dooming everyone aboard. He grabbed a wounded moon trog and guided him as gently as he could towards the nearest of the bulkheads separating deck six into eight separate sections, while around him other, healthy moon trogs attended to the other injured.

     Two sections of deck six contained nuclei of melting metal, and it took the moon trogs several minutes to remove certain vital items of equipment before they could close the doors on them. As they were doing so, Thomas watched the pit in the outer wall growing wider and deeper with alarming speed. Watched as blobs of silver liquid broke away to settle elsewhere and create new nuclei, the contagion spreading and breeding like a horrid disease.

     "Maybe it'll stop," said a moon trog hopefully. They held the last door open for a little longer so they could watch, but then they heard the terrible hiss of escaping air and knew that the outer hull had been breached. Thomas closed the door, feeling more wretched than ever before in his life, and wondered how long it would be before the door was eaten through and they had to retreat to the next section. How many Necklaces of Vacuum Breathing did they have? Not enough for everyone aboard, that was for sure. Not enough by half!

     Tears of shame and guilt leaked from his eyes as he hurried back to the connecting corridor back to deck two to give his report and accept the terrible responsibility. They'd demagestrate him for this, he thought, and he deserved it. How could he have been so stupid?