Once outside and clear of the du’Vaul tent, Tosh saw Azal returning on his horse. He waved to his bodyguard, who had stopped and was staring upwards above them.

“What is he looking at?” Tosh asked.

“He’s been yanked around through time and space. He can see things others can’t,” Tessa said.

“I have as well,” Tosh said.

“Not like him. You got a Gate to buffer you. He’s a bit different.”

“How do you know this?” Tosh asked, looking at Tessa with a bit of concern. “Is he a danger to me? The mission?”

“Neither. He is a victim of his own deeds. He is your protector. Let him be concerned.”

“Very well.” Tosh said as he watched Tessa lifted her hand up and snap her fingers, which made the large hoop of stone of her Gate appeared in the sky above their heads.

“She’s not going to be happy to deal with Ironmonger robots. She doesn’t like them very much,” Tessa said to Renard and Tosh. “Or at all, really.”

Tosh shrugged and then turned to Azal and saw that the one time bandit’s face was turned upward to see the stone ring of the Gate slowly spinning above them, a look of absolute awe on his face.

“Never traveled by one of these?” Tosh asked.

“No. They were always closed to me. But I have been ripped from one end of the galaxy to the other, and tossed about in time like a cork in a storm. It is still something of beauty, sahib.”

“Keep your weapons loose,” Tosh whispered to Azal. “The ring can spit us out in any of a dozen places before we reach our destination.”

“It doesn’t take us directly there?” Azal asked. “That is the reason for—“

“This particular Gate has a strange sense of what is ‘needed’ for those who use its power to travel,” Tosh said.

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“I am ready,” Azal said. He gripped his dagger at his hip and then touched the shoulder strap of his rifle, pulling the weapon tighter to his back.

“Next stop, Shatterspike. Well, pretty sure, at least,” Tessa said as the Gate lowered itself, growing larger enough to fit around all six passengers.

Traveling through the Gate was as strange as Tosh remembered. His stomach quailed, his vision warped and twisted, blurring into a kaleidoscope of colors and felt smells, tasted the very power of the Gate as a hard toffee with an electrical current running through it, with an aftertaste of absinthe licorice. However, he thought it was a good thing that he could land on his feet this time when the Gate expelled them onto a plain of black grass, stiff and brittle looking.

At first, when he felt the grass crackle under his feet, Tosh thought it was from a fire. Yet, when he looked up, he saw in the sky a glowing ember of light, a disk a handspan across when he put his hand up to it. The light was feeble, not bright enough to be a star, but it gave off illumination. A little better than a full moon on Earth. The sky itself was dotted with two to three dozen bright stars, competing with the light of what he thought to be a dying star.

“Is this Shatterspike?” Tosh asked, looking up at the ember circle in the sky.

The air had a strange rotten stench, as if they’d landed near a refuse heap. He was about to say something when Renard let out a gasp behind him. When Tosh saw Renard and the robots appear, Renard went ass-over-tea-kettle into the dirt. Then watched as Renard’s two Ironmonger robots helped pick him up, standing him up. Renard was laughing as he stood, then cackling. He pointed to something behind Tosh.

Tosh turned around, stunned that he had missed the massive structure behind him.

Before them, a dozen paces from the where they’d landed was the brittle, broken half mile tall and wide steel and shattered glass dome of Shatterspike.

“I didn’t think that Shatterspike existed on such a planet with a dying star,” Tosh said.

“Not a dying star,” Tessa said. “That’s a brown dwarf. Not enough mass to make it to be a real ‘star,’ but more than enough mass to start the first fusion reactions.”

“Oh, like the Eye of Jove?” Azal said.

“Yes, very much so,” Tessa said.

“We will return,” Renard said to the Guildie. He then pinned Tosh with a look. “Time to earn your cousin’s debt.”

“Be careful out here,” Tosh said to Tessa. Though, he was sure that whatever tried to attack her would regret its own existence.

“No problem, Nix has my back, don’t you, sweetie?”

The serpent head emerged again and gave a strange soft purr as Tessa stroked his head again.

“You be careful too,” Tessa whispered to Tosh. “I don’t like them.”

“Same,” Tosh whispered back.