Their success at crossing the border gave them a feeling of elation, a feeling that they’d taken another step closer to getting home, but on the third night afterwards Thomas was crushed by a Farspoken message from Lirenna that he’d been lying awake waiting for.

     “Don’t teleport up to the ship!” she said first of all, as she did every time. “We’ll be going back through the portal in just a few minutes and…” There was a pause, and Thomas’s heart faltered as he felt the grief and despair that was transmitted along with her words. “…and this time we won’t be coming back. I know you’re still alive! I know you are, but everyone else… They say Saturn would have sent a Farspoken message by now if you were still alive and… They want to go on exploring the other worlds through the portal. They can’t do that if we have to keep coming here, to this universe. They say that there’s no point in us coming here anyway if we can’t go to the planet to rescue you, if all we can do is send these messages. The felisians still have a ship stationed beside the portal in our universe. If you somehow manage to make it back through, they can contact us using the Master’s communications apparatus.”

     There was another, longer pause before she spoke again. “I’m going to leave the ship. I’ll be waiting back in the University, so I’ll hear at once when you come back.”

     Thomas sensed her wiping away tears, unable to find the right words to say what she wanted to say. He also sensed something else. There was someone with her, comforting her. Holding her as she wore the Coronet of Farspeaking on her head.

     “I know you’re still alive!” she said at last. “I’m waiting for you!”

     The connection was broken abruptly, as if the demi-shae didn’t want the full extent of her anguish to be transmitted through the telepathic link, and Thomas’s eyes squeezed closed all by themselves, without any command from him. Beside him, he heard the others giving exclamations of despair, anger and disbelief as they also heard the news, passed on by other members of the Jules Verne crew simultaneously, but Thomas remained silent and just lay there, grateful for the darkness that prevented the others from seeing him shivering, as if with a fever, and wiping away his tears.

☆☆☆

     "How do the Malganians know what's inside southern territory?" asked Matthew, looking at the map spread out on the floor. They were planning their final approach to the spaceport, only three or four days journey away now, picking a route that avoided a group of sizable southern settlements between them and it.

     "Probably the same way we do," replied Thomas. "Stolen maps. Spies going into southern territory to bring back information. They've probably been spying each other out ever since they first came into contact with each other."

     The Flight Leader nodded. "So we've still got to be careful. They'll be on the lookout for strangers wandering around, just like the Malganians."

     "Bound to be," agreed the wizard. "We've got an advantage now, though. We can speak their language, try to bluff our way through..." He paused as a thought came to him. "Do they speak the same language, or do they have their own? Oh well, I've got the Translation spell."

     The densely populated region they were about to skirt around would make it too dangerous to stop and forage for food, so they spent a day hunting where they were, wanting to be carrying a full load of food before setting off on the last lap. While the soldiers were out chasing rabbits, Thomas remained in the skyscraper and spent his time memorising every detail of the room, getting to know it well enough to use it as a teleportation destination. If danger threatened, he didn't want to have to teleport back into Malgania and have to cross the border again. Once was enough!

     He wondered what the Malganians would think if they knew that he could now cross the border at will, teleporting with a single spoken word. No doubt they would be horrified! Maybe even terrified! It occurred to him that, despite the number of spells he'd cast since first arriving on this world, the locals still had no idea that he had special powers. Still had no inkling that there was any such thing as magic.

     He'd stunned a great many soldiers during their first day after their arrival on this world, of course, and several other soldiers had seen their colleagues falling unconscious, but they didn't seem to have figured out that Thomas had been responsible. Maybe they thought they'd used darts tipped with a drug of some kind, or something like that. And his use of Fist of the Father to break out and escape had evidently been interpreted as a natural collapse of the building, something that must happen from time to time. Having no knowledge of magic, they interpreted everything he did in terms of what they could understand.

     He was disturbed by the sound of voices coming from outside the building. Young voices. He froze, listening intently. The voices were speaking the same language as the Malganians but with a strange accent and the wizard found it hard at first to understand what they were saying. Had they been discovered? They were only children, no doubt of that, but they wouldn't be all alone out here. There were bound to be adults nearby to whom the children could run to, to tell that they'd seen strangers, and once they'd done that the chase would be on again with nowhere to run except back towards the border.

     His guts twisted with unease as he contemplated what they could do if the children saw Matthew or one of the others. Kill them? Kill children? Unthinkable, but how else could they stop them reporting to the adults? Grab them? Leave them tied up or unconscious somewhere where the adults wouldn't find them until long after the Tharians had gone? But what if they hid the children too well and the adults never found them? Thomas swallowed uncomfortably, knowing there was nothing they could do to the children, not without turning into monsters themselves. If they were seen, they would just have to run and hope they could lose the adults amongst the ruins of the ancient ruined city.

     If they were lucky, though, the situation wouldn't arise. From the happy, carefree tone of the children's voices it was obvious they hadn't yet seen anything to alarm them, and hopefully Matthew and the others would see them before they were seen by them. They could just hide until the southerners had gone, then continue on their way themselves.

     "Look at me!" cried one of the children, and Thomas heard a thump like someone landing after a long jump. "Betcha can't do that!"

     "Sure I can!" replied the other child indignantly, and Thomas heard scrabbling across piles of rubble followed by another thump. "See? Told you!"

     "What about this then?"

     More scrabbling, and it went on for longer this time, as if he were climbing higher up the overgrown pile of rubble. Thomas waited tensely for the boy to fall and break a bone, bringing adults swarming across their camp site. Go away! he told them in his mind, trying to send out a telepathic compulsion to drive them off. Get out of here! It's dangerous here, you'll hurt yourself!

     The children failed to receive his sendings, however, and a moment later came a thump and an oof! as the boy jumped. "Ha! That was a longer jump than a Bigger!"

     "I can jump twice as far!" replied the other excitedly. "I can jump farther than the biggest Bigger who ever lived!"

     More scrambling, and Thomas's heart leapt into his throat as the rubble slipped with an awful grinding sound. Careful! the wizard thought anxiously, but the other child just laughed as his companion scrambled higher up the slope.

     "That's not high!" he cried derisively. "Lame Lanny could jump higher than that!"

     "No he couldn't!" the other retorted defiantly. "I'm higher than a Bigger!"

     "You're uglier than a Bigger!"

     Before the first child could defend his doubtless good looks, though, there was another rumble of sliding rock and the child cried out as he slipped and slid half way back to the ground. "Are you okay?" the other child asked fearfully. There was a pause followed by "You're bleeding!"

     "I'm okay," the first child declared bravely. "Come on, let's play over there."

     Thomas breathed a sigh of relief as he heard them running away and he relaxed once more, turning his attention back to his spellbook.

     The conversation he'd overheard kept coming back to him, though, and one word in particular. Biggers. What was a Bigger? Something big and ugly, evidently, and presumably able to jump great distances, but was it just something they'd dreamed up, some figment of southern folk imagination, or... He felt himself growing excited as another possibility occurred to him. Could the people living hereabouts have actually seen some kind of creature fitting that description? Something big...

     The Masters were big. The felisians had said so, and they'd seen them for themselves, had been their slaves for generations. And then there were their silver ships, clearly designed for creatures considerably larger than either humans or felisians. Was it possible that the Masters had established a colony somewhere nearby? Perhaps right alongside the spaceport towards which they, the Tharians, were headed with all speed? The Masters were scavengers of the ruins of lost civilisations, he reminded himself. That was why they'd gone to the felisians' world in the first place, to scrabble among the ruins of the Citybuilder civilisation for whatever might have survived. They might have come here for the same reason.

     They would have to proceed with great caution from here on in, he told himself. Even greater caution than they'd shown approaching the border. The Masters had quite happily rounded up the entire felisian race to be a slave workforce. They might well be using humans the same way, and if the Tharians weren't careful they might end up as just five more slaves.

     Or I might be reading far too much into the comments of a pair of children, he thought in amusement. It's just as likely that the Biggers were merely the local bogeymen, made up by the adults to control their children. Behave or the Biggers will get you. He smiled wryly at himself. Yes, that was all it was. He really had to get a rein on his overactive imagination.

     When the others returned and he repeated the incident to them, however, they were less willing to dismiss the idea. "A colony of Masters waiting for us up ahead is a very real possibility," said Drenn grimly. "Someone flew those ships here, after all. Recently. Would they have just gone off and left their ships unattended?"

     "Those ships might have been there for thousands of years," pointed out Thomas. "They might have been there since this city fell."

     The priest shook his head. "The ground level has risen several yards since the fall of the Ringbuilder civilisation. Look how deep the soil covering the original roads is. If those ships were as ancient as the rest of the city they would be half buried, but the map clearly depicts them as standing on the ground, their lowest points above ground level. Remember also that the felisians said the ships up in the ring were recent arrivals. No more than a few centuries old."

     "He's right," agreed Matthew. "There were Masters on the felisian world until recently. There were Masters in the ring until recently. I think it's virtually certain there were Masters here very recently, and they might well still be here. I think we have to be prepared to run into them."

     Thomas nodded, accepting the point, and when they set out again the next morning they proceeded as slowly and cautiously as if they were approaching a nest of dragons.