The rest of their journey was uneventful, and three days later they saw a great open space ahead of them where the skyscrapers ended. They crept onwards a step at a time as if expecting hordes of Masters to jump out at them at any time, but the area was spookily quiet, without even a breath of wind to disturb the fallen leaves. It gave the Tharians the very strong impression that they were approaching a graveyard. Of course, the whole continent was a graveyard, with the skyscrapers the tombstones of the civilisation that had once flourished here, but whatever ghosts had once lurked within them had long since departed.

     The place they were now approaching, though, was, they could somehow sense, a place of much more recent death. A place where corpses still stirred uneasily in their graves and rose on occasion to torment the living. Thomas couldn't help but notice that the signs of human occupancy had completely ceased some miles back. The road they were following now was evenly overgrown, without the track worn along the centre by travellers, and the buildings they were passing showed no signs of having been entered by curious explorers. Both the southerners and the feather people avoided this area, Thomas thought. Maybe we should also think twice before going any further. But Saturn and the others might be waiting up ahead. Thomas knew they had to go on, but he had the uncomfortable impression of being watched every step of the way.

     They hugged the crumbling skyscraper when they came at last to the spaceport, and crouched behind a pile of overgrown rubble to have a look at what lay ahead. The silver ships of the Masters were there, just as they'd expected, their metallic hulls gleaming in the light of the sun. Clearly still largely intact and in good condition. Between them, though, half buried in the rising soil and tangled undergrowth, were other shapes, reduced by the ages to little more than bare frameworks of corroded girders, like the bare skeletons of long dead monsters. Ships, thought Thomas, but dating back to the days of the original Ringbuilders. It was a miracle that anything of them remained at all.

     "Look over there!" hissed Roj Villa.

     The others looked in the direction indicated. Across on the other side of the landing flat, which had to be at least a mile across, was a collection of metallic buildings, smaller and of a different architectural style from the skyscrapers. Newer looking too, like the ships.

     "The Masters' encampment," said Matthew quietly, as if the inhabitants might hear him. "Where they co-ordinated their activities. Wonder if anyone's home?"

     "Looks deserted to me," said Drenn. "There's greenery growing right up against the door. No-one's been in or out for some time."

     "Maybe there's a back door," suggested Jop Sonno, but even he sounded doubtful. The whole complex had a deserted look to it. There were vines and creepers growing up the walls and across the roof, reaching even up the cluster of antennae standing at the far end with loose tendrils hanging down and sprouting bright flowers.

     "Look over there!" cried Matthew, however, with alarm and urgency in his voice. "Over there, by the biggest ship. The one with the holes in the side."

     They immediately saw what he meant. The vegetation had been trodden down around the ship, and a wide area around the nose had been cleared completely. Also, the holes in the ship's hull were clean and rectangular. Not areas of damage but places where panels had been deliberately removed to allow access to what was inside. Clearly a sign that maintenance and repair was going on. Masters, or felisians from the Bescot? Did they dare hope?

     "We need to get a closer look," said Drenn. "I'll go in alone. The rest of you..."

     He was interrupted by a wild shout from Jop Sonno, however. "Look! Look! It's them! It's them!"

     He was pointing to where a pair of figures had emerged from the ship, and they saw immediately that they were human sized figures, dressed in felisian clothing. They paused as they heard the cavalryman's wild shout, and called back to someone else still inside the ship. A moment later that person emerged. An aged figure, bent by years of toil and study and with an eyepatch over one eye. Saturn!

     Thomas had never thought he'd be so glad to see him and he'd jumped up and was waving excitedly before he knew what he was doing.

☆☆☆

     "So, here we all are again," said the elderly wizard half an hour later.

     The reunion had been a frenziedly joyous affair, and they were all still wearing silly grins on their faces. Even Saturn's dour demeanour had softened for a moment, particularly when he looked at Thomas, and the younger wizard had the distinct impression that his mentor was actually pleased to see him, although in a way that he found vaguely unsettling.

     He didn't have time to analyse the feeling, though, as Timothy was happily pumping his hand and demanding to know what they'd been up to in the weeks since they'd last seen each other. When Thomas mentioned his injured leg, still a bit stiff from time to time despite Drenn's healing spells, the cleric of Caroli sat him down and pulled up his trouser leg to see for himself.

     "I'm glad to see you all safe and well," continued Saturn, meanwhile. "Except poor Parcellius, of course."

     Thomas had felt a strong pang of guilt as he'd reported the alchemist's death, as if he'd been personally responsible, guilty of some terrible incompetence, and it hadn't been made any easier by learning that all of Saturn's group had survived, although not without the occasional serious injury that Timothy had had to heal. Saturn, using a more powerful form of the Teleportation spell, had landed his group safely on the ground in a wide open space between buildings after which they'd immediately set off to make contact with the locals. His matter of fact account of their first day on the ground made Thomas feel like a bumbling fool in comparison.

     "You actually entered one of their settlements?" asked one of the felisians in amazement. "We spent all our time keeping as far from them as possible!"

     "It wasn't that much of a risk," said Thomas, feeling a little puzzled. "We knew we could teleport out at the first sign of danger, as indeed we did."

     He stared at Saturn, unable to imagine the fearsome wizard hiding in fear from small groups of soldiers. The Saturn he knew, or thought he knew, would have been through the gates of the first settlement they came to, strutting around like a king and terrorising the inhabitants. Could he have seen a danger here that the rest of them were unaware of?

     Saturn saw the younger wizard looking at him and guessed what he was thinking. "I lost my spellbook on the first day," he explained, looking Thomas defiantly in the eye as if daring him to comment. "Soldiers attacked, taking us by surprise. I was knocked out. The others fought them off, but when I woke I found that a soldier had searched me while I was out. He took my spellbook and some of my material components." Anger burned on his face. "That man had better hope I never track him down, and I intend to try as soon as our path back home is secure. I will teach him what it means to take a wizard's spellbook!"

     The rage that was now taking possession of him was terrible to behold, but Thomas felt only a terrible pity for him. Only another wizard could understand what Saturn was going through right now. "So that's why you never tried to contact us," he said softly. "Never cast a Farspeaking spell."

     "I tried to contact the ship, the first time they came back to try to find us," agreed Saturn, "but they must have been back in our universe before my message reached them. It used up the last of my magic, I'd already used up most of my magic up on the ring, it took me several days to absorb enough magic to cast the spell again."

     Thomas nodded. "The spell changed," he guessed. "The next time you tried to cast it, you couldn't because it had changed."

     Saturn nodded. "Without my spellbook I couldn't read the new version. My other spells worked for a while, but they all changed, one at a time." He stared at Thomas with an unsettling intensity, "I need to borrow your spellbook, memorise your spells. You still don't know any really high level stuff, but what you do have will still be a big improvement over my present situation."

     He held out a thin, bony hand, still staring commandingly at the younger wizard, and Thomas handed it over with intense reluctance. He knew he had to share it, that having another wizard able to cast spells might mean the difference between life and death in the days ahead, but he still didn't like being without it. On the other hand, it might help to finally get him back in the older wizard's good books. He could hardly continue to hold a grudge against him while borrowing what was just about the most intensely personal item in a wizard's possession. He fingered the sheets of paper in his pocket on which he'd written Fist of the Father, now glad he'd decided not to write it in his spellbook with the rest of his spells. If Saturn had seen it there, he would have had some hard questions to answer.

     He watched the older wizard leafing through his spellbook, feeling like a father watching his child being groped by a pervert, and he went off with Matthew and Timothy to take his mind off it. The cleric told them of their never ending struggle to stay out of the hands of the southerners who were apparently even more suspicious and aggressive than the Malganians. No attempt to learn their language had been possible, and without the ability to teleport out of danger they hadn't dared enter any of the southern settlements.

     Since their group therefore knew far more about the planet they were standing on than Saturn's group, Matthew and Thomas went on to tell everything they'd learned in Shonnla, while Saturn and the felisians gathered around to listen. Saturn began asking questions, and the account turned into an intensive debriefing as he squeezed them for every drop of information they possessed.

     "And you can all speak their language?" the elder wizard asked nearly an hour later.

     "To a greater or lesser extent," replied Drenn. "Gown speaks the language best, he seems to be almost fluent, but all the rest of us can speak it well enough to make ourselves understood."

     Saturn nodded, and Thomas was astonished to see a look on the elder wizard's face that he could have sworn was envy. Thomas imagined that the unknown soldier who'd stolen Saturn's spellbook was currently receiving such a barrage of malice and hatred from it's rightful owner that he should have been struck stone dead, assuming he was still alive. It was possible that the unfortunate man was dead already, though. Senior wizards almost always placed powerful protective spells on their spellbooks, spells that would inflict a terrible curse upon anyone else who so much as opened it, and Thomas didn't think that Saturn was the type to overlook such a vicious precaution.

     The elder wizard kept his feelings under tight control, though, and simply nodded. "Good," he said. "You'll be able to act as interpreters if we have any future dealings with the locals, although if my colleagues here are successful in their attempt to repair this ship we may be leaving very soon."

     "Only if we return to work," agreed Tager Yee with sharp looks at his crew. "But with the addition of so many more eager hands, the work might be finished even sooner than we expected."

     "Yes," said Saturn to Thomas. "You and the rest of you, help the felisians fix the ship." He then dismissed them from his thoughts and wandered off with Thomas's spellbook, turning the pages thoughtfully.