The Worlds of the Sheaf

Veglia - Part 6

     They arrived two feet above the rubble strewn ground, as a result of Saturn's unfamiliarity with the area, and fell to the ground with muffled curses. Thomas bruised an ankle on a sharp lump of broken brick and sat while he examined it carefully. Not broken, just a small scrape. He sighed with relief. It could have been worse, he could have broken a leg, or materialised half inside a wall.

     He glared at Saturn, hating him for endangering his life so casually, but the elder wizard wasn't paying him any attention. He'd landed safely on a flat piece of level ground and was now looking about warily to see if they'd been spotted. There was no-one about, but the felisians knew they could teleport and so they had to suspect that there might be Tharians on the ground already. They would have people out looking for visitors.

     "I'm going to cast an Invisibility spell so we can move freely," he said, searching his pouches for the material components. "I want you to concentrate on your magic sense. You will inform me the moment you sense Rossemian magic."

     "Yes, master," replied Thomas apprehensively. "You suspect this is the Shipbuilders' world, then?"

     "That's what we're here to find out," replied the elder wizard. He cast the spell, and Thomas felt a slight tingling as it had its effect on his body.

     "Cats have a highly developed sense of smell," he remarked. "They might be able to smell us."

     "I am aware of that," replied Saturn indignantly, as if offended by the implication that he might have overlooked the possibility. "That is why we've materialised downwind of the ship. Only those behind us will be able to smell us." He moved out into the open, beckoning the younger wizard to follow.

     The two invisible wizards could see each other as vague, shadowy shapes moving through the overgrown, rubble strewn ruins, and although he knew in his head that they couldn't be seen by anyone who wasn't invisible themselves, he still felt himself tensing up nervously when they saw their first felisian.

     He appeared almost human, only the fur covering his face and his slitted yellow eyes betraying his true nature, and he was heading straight in their direction. Saturn pressed up against the wall as he approached, and Thomas followed suit. He held his breath, worried that his scared panting would give him away, but the felisian passed them by without giving any sign he'd noticed anything and the younger wizard breathed a sigh of relief. Saturn appeared completely unperturbed, though, as if he'd had not the slightest doubt, and strode out into the street with complete confidence, Thomas running to keep up.

     A few yards further on they entered the large, open area containing the ship. There were at least a dozen felisians in view. Some just walking through, some sitting as if taking a break from their work. Some were working on the ship, and Thomas was struck by the variety of cat traits they displayed. Most had thick fur covering every visible part of their bodies, while others had the bare skin of a human. Some had pointed ears and slitted eyes, others had completely human faces. Some had tails, others lacked them.

     Then he saw something that made his guts shrivel with horror. At first he thought it was an ordinary big cat, about the size of a tiger, padding across the square as if it was as much a citizen as any of the bipeds, but then it turned its head in his direction and he gasped in shock to see a completely human face, complete with a prominent roman nose and a high forehead testifying to the presence of a human sized brain. Thomas stared at it in horrified fascination, wondering whether it was trapped in that form all the time. What would it be like to have no functional hands? To need help from other people to do even the most mundane things? And yet the creature seemed perfectly happy, as if it were accustomed to its condition and didn't begrudge the others their more human bodies. Maybe it can change, he thought. Either to fully human or fully cat. Maybe it hunts its food, like a real tiger. He continued to stare at the, the, (the person! he reminded himself) until Saturn grabbed his elbow impatiently and dragged him on.

     Now that they were closer, they could see that the felisians were definitely taking the ship apart. One of them was at the top of a ladder against the ship's hull and holding some kind of tool in his hands. He was pressing the tool against the smooth, silvery metal, where it was making a thin cut as he moved it as if it was a saw, although it was making no noise and didn't seem to be requiring any kind of effort from the felisian using it. Thomas concentrated on his magic sense, but there was nothing. Neither the ordinary kind of magic nor the Rossemian variety. He shook his head when Saturn looked enquiringly at him, therefore. "Must be a Masters artefact," the older wizard muttered, and paid it no further attention.

      They crossed the square towards the ship, but when they were only halfway across something on the other side of the square caught Saturn's attention and he strode across to investigate. They passed within a few feet of several felisians as they went, but only one of them reacted. A young female, if her face and the width of her hips were any indication. She was walking towards one of the rebuilt buildings, but as Saturn passed her by she paused in mid step and looked around, puzzled. Thomas, just a couple of yards behind, froze in fear, but after a couple of moments she continued on, her eyes fixed on her destination.

     Saturn looked back at him in annoyance and Thomas hurried to catch up, wondering what it was that had almost given them away. Was it their scent? Or had she heard something? The sound of their steps perhaps. This is dangerous, he realised. If they catch us snooping around like this, it'll seriously damage our chances of making friends with them. They'll think we're spying on them, preparing for an invasion. He just prayed they could accomplish what Saturn had come here to do and get back up to the ship before anyone discovered them there.

     He thought Saturn was going to enter the building he was heading for, but he stopped to examine the wall instead and now Thomas could see that it was different from the other buildings they'd seen so far. The buildings of the masters were made of some kind of rock, moulded into bricks like clay or concrete but harder and heavier. The top part of this wall was like that, but the foundations it was sitting on seemed to be made of a completely different material unlike anything he'd ever seen before. On the outside it was white and crumbling to powder, but as Saturn rubbed at it with his hand they saw that underneath it was a pale blue. Strong and solid.

     "The remains of the first city to stand on this spot," he muttered under his breath. "Haskar said such ruins are to be found all across the planet. There was a mighty civilisation here once, so long ago that the felisians have no memory of it. They assume that it was their ancestors that built them, but that's all it is. Just an assumption."

     "The Rossem ship wasn't built of anything like this, though," pointed out Thomas.

     "That means nothing. This material could have been developed later. Maybe much later. We know that the Rossem ship drifted in space for thousands of years before crashing on Tharia. When we've finished with the ship we must examine these ruins more thoroughly." He turned away from the building and headed back for the ship.

     There was no sign of a hatch or a gangway, but the partial disassembly of the ship had created half a dozen openings in the hull they could get in through and Saturn climbed up a ladder that had been left in place. Joining him at the top, Thomas saw him stepping up onto a wooden platform that had been placed in front of an inclined desk. He remembered the description of the Masters he and the others had been given during their mission briefing and remembered that they were significantly larger and more massive than either humans or felisians. The desk had probably been set at a comfortable height for them, but it was level with Thomas's head and he couldn't see what was on it until he'd joined Saturn on the platform.

     Once there, he saw that it was covered with a sheet of glass in which various geometric shapes were glowing in various colours, some of them accompanied by some symbols of an alien language. A pair of felisians were busy taking apart another desk on the other side of the room, using a smaller version of the cutting tool, and a box standing beside them was filled with pieces of intricate machinery trailing wires and fibre optic cables. They were chatting to each other in their own language which Saturn understood but Thomas didn't, but the younger wizard doubted they were saying anything very interesting. He wondered what the instruments they were collecting were for, and wondered whether Saturn had any more idea than he did.

     Saturn waved him over and whispered into his ear. "Walk about the room. Use your magic sense."

     Thomas nodded and did as he was told.