The Captain returned to the bridge to see that the felisian homeworld had swollen to a fat crescent in the scrying mirror. "It looks just like Tharia," he muttered. He turned to Haskar. "Do all inhabited worlds look the same from space?"

     "As a general rule," agreed the felisian. "Blue seas and white clouds. There was a desert world we came across once that was all brown, but that was the exception."

     "That'll make it easy to spot them from a distance," said Karog. "When we enter a new universe, all we need to do is look at each planet through a spyglass. Look for the blue ones."

     “Some don’t have living worlds,” said the felisian, though. “Only about one in five of the universes we’ve visited.”

     “How many universes have you explored?” asked the trog. “How many of the worlds of the sheaf?”

     “About a third, or thereabouts. When we found your world, we concentrated all our efforts there.”

     "How far away are we now?" asked Strong.

     "About half an hour from entering orbit," replied the trog. "Then we'll need to know where to land."

     "Our felisian friend will be helping us there," said Saturn, turning his eye upon him.

     Haskar nodded and drew a map from the chart cabinet, unrolling it on the table. It was a crudely drawn sketch he’d drawn before leaving Tharia, showing the major continents in outline and with the names of the major population centres written in the felisian's neat handwriting.

     "You all live in one corner of this one land mass?" the wizard asked, looking at it.

     Haskar nodded sadly. "We used to be spread across the whole planet. Wandering tribes that crossed each others path only every twenty to thirty years, but the Masters rounded us all up and took us there, to their landing site. Now we stay together so that every female has as many mates as possible, to maximise their chances of pregnancy. Once our numbers have grown, and if our fertility improves, maybe we will return to our old ways. That is what we all dream of."

     "If your lower fertility is a result of some disease or ailment, we may be able to help you," offered Timothy. "A sufficiently faithful follower of Caroli can cure almost anything."

     "That would be wonderful," said Haskar doubtfully.

     Saturn, meanwhile, was giving orders to the scrying mirror to bring up magnified images of the planet. "Every land mass looks the same," he muttered. "You're sure it's at thirty degrees north?"

     "Give or take a few degrees," replied Haskar. "Geography was never one of my strengths."

     "Even a few degrees equates to hundreds o' miles," said Karog, however. "If their communities are as small as he says they are, they'll be hard to spot until we're right on top o' them. We might spend months looking for them."

     "Now that we have their full co-operation, they'll set up some kind of beacon to guide us in," said Saturn. "Isn't that right, my friend?"

     The felisian nodded. "They will have a ship stationed over Place-of-Toil. It will guide you down."

     "Place-of-toil?" asked Timothy.

     "The place where the Masters made us work, and the place where they left their machines when they left. We named it that so that the cubs would never forget what happened to us there."

     Strong glared at the cleric for the deviation. "Keep a look out for that ship," he told Tana Antallan, the only one of them wearing a Helm of Farsensing. The shae acknowledged the order and continued concentrating on the images of surrounding space the Helm was feeding him.

     Five minutes later Tana informed them that he'd spotted the ship, and the others donned their own helmets to look as well. Strong gave instructions to the orbmaster to guide them closer to the ship, while Saturn turned the scrying mirror on it. The spell Saturn had cast to allow them to communicate with another ship through the scrying mirror had long since lapsed and the wizard couldn't cast it again until the residual, randomised magic it had left behind had faded, so Strong decided to allow Haskar to use his communications apparatus. Maybe the gesture of trust would go some way towards mending relations between the two worlds.

     Soon, therefore, he was speaking to the captain of the felisian ship, but the felisian kept referring back to his superiors on the ground, the elders of the felisian race, before replying to Strong’s questions. Things would go a lot easier if he could talk to the elders himself, he thought. That would be his next demand, although it was likely that the elders would want to speak to him as well.

     Maybe they would consent to a face to face meeting, he thought. Either here on the Jules Verne or down on the planet surface. Once they could talk to each other, express their respective concerns and give reassurances, once they had a chance to get to know each other, he had no doubt that mutual respect and understanding would soon follow. He smiled in anticipation. This was what being a Captain was all about. This was the sort of duty he'd always dreamed of and he could hardly wait to get started.

     Saturn got up to leave, but a look from the Captain stopped him in his tracks. "Leaving us, Saturn?" Strong asked. "Please remain seated. I may have more use for you once the negotiations begin."

     "You don't need me any more," Saturn replied. "I have urgent business elsewhere."

     "What kind of business?" demanded Strong.

     "Wizard business," snapped Saturn impatiently. He then strode from the room, leaving Strong cursing behind him. Damn the man! He knew he couldn't chew him out with the felisians overhearing every word they said, but he'd be sure to have a private word with him later. This sort of behaviour simply could not be tolerated!

☆☆☆

     Saturn made his way to the hanger deck, a sneer of contempt on his face. Let him talk, he thought. Talking was all he was good for, but at least it served a useful purpose. He would keep the felisians distracted while Saturn did what they'd come here to do. Determine whether this planet had once been home to the Shipbuilder civilisation.

     On the hanger deck, the enlisted men were still busy preparing one of the scout ships for launch. Saturn ignored them and boarded the other ship, glancing, as he paused by the stairhouse, at the door in the forecastle leading to the orb room. The room in the ship's prow containing the Orb of Levitation. As well as allowing the ship to defy gravity, it also contained the Separation magics that kept all the other magics infusing the ship from interfering with each other. This was the magic that no human wizard had been able to duplicate since the days of the Agglemonian Empire and that the shae folk were determined to keep out of human hands.

     The door had been magically locked by the shae folk to keep out prying eyes, but Saturn was pretty sure he could get through without leaving any sign he'd been there. One glance at the orb would tell him much. Maybe everything he needed to know to duplicate the artefact, but it was a distraction he didn't need right now. Later, perhaps, when he had more time. He went belowdecks, therefore, making his way to the chart room where he turned to the small ship's scrying mirror.

     He gave the word of command to activate it and used it to explore the surface of Veglia directly under their position. As they'd suspected, they were directly over the felisians' main centre of habitation. A chaotic mass of ruined buildings and heaped rubble. All that was left of the Masters' colony and work camp, heavily overgrown with grass and creepers except for those small areas that had been cleared by the present occupants. Mostly, they were living in the ruins of the Masters' buildings, which they'd made some attempt to rebuild and restore, and nearby he saw what had to have been industrial centres, although they were incomprehensible in appearance and purpose to the wizard.

     He saw another ship similar to the one lying alongside the Jules Verne, however, lying in pieces and with felisians working busily all over it, either trying to repair it or stripping it of all its useful components. He couldn't tell which. Saturn knew enough about navies, though, to know that a significant fraction of all their ships were in dock at their home port at any one time, and as this was the felisians' only home port, and as it only had one ship in it, that meant they only had a very small fleet. Three or four ships at most. He nodded to himself in satisfaction. That tied in with what Haskar had said, although they would have to search the rest of the planet for any more population centres before they could be absolutely sure of it. For all they knew at present, there might be millions of felisians and hundreds of ships on one of the other continents.

     That's where we should be, he thought in annoyance. Down there. Looking around, gathering facts. Not stuck up here talking. The felisians were just trying to delay them, probably so they could use the time to hide something. Well, the Tharians had other ways of getting down, and Strong could make himself useful for once by keeping the elders occupied. Making them think they were all still up here while Saturn was down on the surface looking at all the things they didn't want him to see.

     He picked an out of the way spot, therefore. Close enough to the gutted ship to be within easy walking distance while far enough away that his arrival wouldn't be noticed. Then he examined it closely. Fixing every detail in his memory so he could use it as a teleportation destination.

     It took fifteen minutes or so to get a good enough mental picture of the spot, and then he sent a Farspoken message to Thomas. "Saturn to Gown. Report to the Trill-Dal immediately, dressed in outdoor clothes."

     The younger wizard arrived ten minutes later, wearing a heavy weatherproof cloak and walking boots and looking puzzled. "Are we going somewhere?" he asked.

     "Down there," replied Saturn, indicating the view in the scrying mirror. "Have you read your teleport spell recently?"

     "Yes, of course. I check every day to see if it's changed."

     "Good. Give me your hand."

     They held hands, Saturn deactivated the scrying mirror, spoke the words of the teleportation spell, and the two wizards vanished.