Saturn didn't waste time trying to find a door but simply disintegrated a small hole in the wall of the block. He then moved aside to allow air to escape, giving no thought for the consequences to anything or anyone inside. He showed no reaction when nothing happened, however. No hiss of escaping air. Nothing whatsoever. He simply raised the wand again and disintegrated a larger hole in the wall, large enough to pull himself through.

It was totally dark inside, until the elderly wizard cast a light spell creating a small ball of radiance that floated beside him as he moved. Behind him, Matthew poked his head through the opening and looked warily around before following Saturn in, followed in turn by the other Tharians.

As soon as they were all in, Saturn cast a Wall of Stone spell at the hole to close themselves in, then cast another spell. A new one that Thomas had never seen before. Its effect wasn't immediately obvious, but soon the Tharians realised that they could hear again. Saturn had filled the chamber with breathable air.

"How long will the air last?" asked Drenn.

"That depends upon the volume of the chamber," Saturn replied. "The spell will create just enough air to fill a volume of up to a million cubic feet at normal sea level pressure. This place is large enough that there should be enough air to last us several hours, but so long as we're wearing the Necklaces of Vacuum Breathing it doesn't matter how long we stay. I filled the place with air so we could talk, not because we need it to breathe."

Thomas looked around. It had clearly been a dwelling place of some kind. A place where someone had lived. Someone's home. The chamber they'd broken into had been a bedroom, but it wasn't immediately obvious which of the walls had been the floor, or even whether it had had a floor. The block was currently without gravity, and if it had always been that way then they may not have seen any need to keep to a single up and down direction.

The idea that the inhabitants had lived without gravity was supported by the straps lying across the bed, similar to those used by the moon trogs to hold themselves in place while they tossed and turned in their sleep. The size of the bed suggested that the inhabitants had been roughly human sized, maybe just a little smaller. There were several drawers and cupboards in the walls, so stiff from disuse that Matthew and the other soldiers had to exert all their strength to open them, but when they finally succeeded they were rewarded only by clothes and various personal items that Saturn merely glanced at before discarding with a scowl of disappointment.

Pushing themselves out through the door, they found another bedroom further down the corridor containing two smaller beds. The children's bedroom. The blankets disintegrated into a fine powder as Drenn touched them, and the elastic straps broke away in his hand, crumbling to powdery fragments that formed a cloud around his head. The priest coughed and waved his hands, which only fanned the cloud out into the rest of the room, and the Tharians left hurriedly before they breathed it in as well.

"Nobody home," said Matthew as they entered a much larger room, one wall of which contained a large window through which a splendid view of the ring could be seen. The living room, thought Thomas. The place where the inhabitants had relaxed in the evenings, reading a good book or entertaining guests. The room was almost perfectly cubic in shape, with each wall a dozen yards square, and the wide space they contained was crossed by spars and beams to which padded handholds were attached. The Tharians used them to help guide themselves around, just as the original inhabitants must have done. Attached to the spars were various items of furniture, some of which, looked like rock climbing harnesses and could only have been the local equivalent of chairs. The inhabitants would presumably have buckled themselves in to stop themselves drifting about the room while they read books or whatever it was they did in their leisure time.

There was nothing resembling a conventional chair, nor any of the other items of furniture common to Tharian homes that relied on gravity to hold things in or on them. No tables, no shelves. There were strange blocks of metal attached to the walls, though. Objects whose purpose and function they could only guess at.

One object caught Roj Villa's attention, though, and he called the others across to look at it. It looked like a picture frame, about a foot across and made of a strange material that not even Parcellius could identify. Inside was a sheet of glass, and under it was a sheet of paper on which the very faintest trace of an image could be seen.

"It looks like a face," said Timothy, holding it close to his face and squinting at it. "A human face I think, but I can't quite make it out."

"Bring it," commanded Saturn. "Look for any other small objects. Things that might have been personal possessions. And look for books. Books with pictures in particular."

They searched around, and Drenn found a bookshelf a few minutes later, the contents of which were held in place by a sheet of glass that hinged on one of its long sides like a door. When the priest opened it, though, the books began to disintegrate as soon as the air touched them. Saturn hurried across and cast a spell on them. The same spell he'd used on the felisians' homeworld to preserve the artifacts they'd found there. He was then able to remove a large block of transparent crystal in which the books were held like insects in amber.

"Good," he said in satisfaction. "There must be something useful in amongst all this."

Thomas, meanwhile, had been looking out of the window, fascinated by the view, and suddenly he saw something that grabbed his attention. "Matt, look!" he cried, pointing. "Look at that!"

"At what?" asked the soldier. All he could see were hundreds of angular blocks, lit on one side by the harsh yellow light of the sun and on the other by the softer blue light of the planet that glowed beside them. It was indeed an awesome sight, an almost hypnotic sight that he could have stared at for hours on end, but there was nothing he could see that they hadn't seen on the way over from the felisian ship. "I don't see anything."

"Look!" insisted the wizard. "You see that big block? The one with the yellow stripes across it? Look at the block beside it, on the right. See?"

Matthew looked, and gave a gasp when he saw it. "A flashing light!" he cried. "There's a light flashing on it!"

"What's that?" demanded Saturn, pushing himself across to look. "A light?"

"Tom saw it," said Matthew, indicating the younger wizard. Saturn scowled at him but said nothing."

"Maybe there's someone inside," said Timothy excitedly. "Survivors. We have to go take a look."

"We'll finish here first," said Saturn. "I can only cast the Air spell once a day. We might as well get our moneysworth from this one. There's still plenty of rooms to explore. We'll split up, two groups of four. No-one goes off alone." No sooner had he said that, though, than he pushed himself off through another door, neither knowing or caring whether anyone came with him.

The theory that the ring dwellers had never had gravity, if anyone had still had any doubts, was confirmed by the arrangement of rooms in the rest of the block. Corridors led off in all directions, including up and down, and they found another bedroom which had beds on two walls meeting at a corner. If one of them had been a floor, the other bed would have been fixed to the wall. It was another child's bedroom, as evidenced by a cupboard full of toys including dolls, animals and strange objects that Thomas somehow sensed were small models of larger objects, although what those objects might have been he couldn't imagine. They were all brittle, crumbling to dust the moment anyone touched them, but Saturn froze them in crystal again and delegated Jop Sonno to carry them.

It was Parcellius who made the most important discovery of the day, though. Growing bored and frustrated by having nothing to do but follow the others around, he wandered back towards the living room area, intending to stare out through the window until it was time to leave. Just before arriving, though, he spotted a doorway they'd missed before. Saturn's light spell was so bright that it had cast an impenetrable shadow across that wall, but the light had followed the wizard into another room, leaving the rest of the block lit only by the heavily filtered and many times reflected sunlight that made it in through the living room window. Some of that sunlight fell upon a doorway they'd passed before without seeing, and with a quickening of interest he pulled himself through.

The others came a couple of minutes later in response to his shouts, and as Saturn's light glared out the entrance again the alchemist had to actually go back out into the corridor to show them the way in. The room beyond was very dark, but once the alchemist's eyes had adapted there had been just enough light for him to see what it contained, and as Saturn brought his light in he got his first clear sight of it.