Twenty years after the end of the Fourth Shadowwar, Thomas Gown is a happily married family man with a beautiful wife and a perfect son. When he takes his son back to Lexandria University to arrange for his wizardly education, however, he learns tha...
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It was another week before the test chamber was ready to begin its journey, and everyone in the valley turned out to watch its departure.
The modified chamber, standing in the middle of Graduation Gield well away from the nearest buildings and sources of magical interference, was possibly the most unlikely looking spaceship in the history of any universe. It consisted of two boxes. A relatively small transparent box, looking like a cube of glass, sitting on top of a much larger steel box; smooth and silvery and gleaming in the morning sunlight. Various bits of hardware and equipment could be seen in the upper, transparent box, marring the perfection of its crystal clarity, and a ladder reached up to it, leaning against the bulk of the teleportation chamber. A couple of senior wizards were walking slowly around it, giving it a close examination to make sure all was well and casting the occasional diagnostic spell, looking for problems not visible to the naked eye.
"Here they come!" shouted someone, and the whole crowd craned their necks to see a man and a trog making their way across the field from the teaching buildings. These were the lucky two (or unlucky, depending upon your point of view) who had been chosen to make the journey to Kronos. The man was Gunther Fugh, a middle aged wizard who'd played a large part in the rebuilding of Kronosia and who was, therefore, familiar enough with it to construct the mental image necessary for the teleportation spell, and the trog was Karog Gunlubber. A cleric of Caratheodory, the God of Mathematics.
Although most of the navigation would be carried out by observers down on Tharia, with instructions relayed up to the test chamber by means of Coronets of Farspeaking, it had been decided to include a cleric of Caratheodory as a member of the test chamber's crew, along with various navigation and measuring devices, so that they would be able to navigate themselves, should it become necessary for them to do so.
For the strange and rather reclusive worshippers of the God of Mathematics, the mental manipulations that the constant stream of incoming data would require were a form of worship, the only satisfactory way of communicating with their bizarre and unpredictable deity. So holy and revered was the practice, though, the formulating and solving of obscure theorems that had no meaning to those outside their faith, that the majority of them considered it sacrilegious and demeaning to apply it to everyday world problems. When, during the goblin wars for instance, a cleric of Caratheodory had used mathematics to work out the trajectories of catapulted boulders so that they would hit the enemy with greater accuracy, he had been shunned by his order and forbidden to return to the tunnels of his birth, forcing him to live the rest of his days among humans, who had benefited greatly from his presence.
Fortunately, Karog belonged to a small breakaway sect who thought that mathematics was glorified and made meaningful by its application to real world problems, and it was members of this sect, the application heretics, who most often came into contact with members of other races, the Purists being much more stay at home-ish. Even if he'd been raised as a Purist, though, Karog had grown fond enough of the humans among whom he'd lived most of his life that he thought he would have used his mathematics to help them anyway. The final approach to the tiny moon, in particular, was something with which the ground observers would be of little help and which Gunther and Karog would have to handle on their own.
