The Maelstroms Eye (19 page)

“Really?” Gaye said, unfazed. “We were all going there anyway until we crashed here. What’s the difference?” She wiped her hands off on Teldin’s sheets again. “Anyway, I’ve already been talking with the gnomes. I told them you were looking for the
Spelljammer,
and they were quite excited about helping us out. So get some rest.” Gaye patted Teldin’s shoulder. “You’ve been a big hero, but you need a little more nap time. Then we’ll visit the big snail and find the
Spelljammer
and tell all our friends about it.”

The kender padded over to the window and hoisted herself onto the ledge with youthful grace. Turned so that she faced out, she leaned back and gave Teldin a last wave.

“I’ll ask Aelfred if I can help with your problem, whatever it is,” she called, then swung herself off the ledge, disappearing from view.

“No!” Teldin cried, half sitting up. He waited with terror for the awful crash that he knew would follow as the crazy kender hit the ground.

No crash came. Wind stirred the tree leaves outside the window. Some very loud machine could be heard in the distance, probably a fan boat rumbling across the lake.

Teldin swung his feet off the bed, wadded up the now-filthy sheets, and carefully made his way over to the window. Thanks to the gnomes’ healing magic, his legs had outwardly recovered from their injuries on the
Probe,
but they ached abominably with every step. Limping to the window, he peered down to find a trace of the kender.

There was nothing on the ground but grass, running right up to the infirmary walls. Gaye was nowhere in sight.

Stunned, Teldin looked down at the wall itself. There were no handholds, no pipes, nothing at all that she possibly could have used to climb up the wall to his window. He looked up, and it was then that he saw the last bit of a piece of rope flick over the roofs gutter, pulled up by unseen hands, Gaye’s. Teldin felt a stab of admiration with his relief.

He was heading back to his bed when he heard short footsteps outside, marching up to his door. As he swung his feet under the sheets again, shaking the dust off as well as he could, Teldin heard a rapid, continuous knocking sound from a spot low on the door.

“I’m busy,” he said, too worn out to see anyone else. He figured the knocker had to be a gnome, and his legs were still aching from moving around. He fell back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling.

Haifa minute passed before the knocking resumed, Maybe if I tried real hard, Teldin thought, I could choke myself with this cloak and save the neogi and everyone else the trouble. Maybe then I could get some rest.

The knocking went on and on.

“Come in!” Teldin shouted in surrender. “Just come in!”

“I’m not bothering you, am I?” came a voice outside his door. It was Dyffed. “I wouldn’t do this, you understand, but some matters have come up since we landed here, and I felt that I should probably discuss them with you when you had a free moment, and I didn’t think you’d be doing anything right now, so I thought I’d come by and —”

“Come in, come in, come in, come in, come in!” Teldin shouted, too tired to throw something at the door.

“Ah, then I’m glad I’m not bothering you,” said Dyffed cheerily, letting himself in. Sporting a thick bandage on top of his bald head, tied down with a strip of white cloth, the little gnome also wore a new set of gold-rimmed spectacles, probably having lost his previous pair in the ship crash. He was dressed in maroon pants, a white shirt with a round, stiff front made of white paper, and a gaudy green-and-gold jacket with at least eight pockets visible on the front. His short beard was neatly trimmed, and Teldin could tell that the gnome had probably had a bath, his first in a while.

“You’re looking splendid, if a bit pale,” said the gnome, beaming up at Teldin from the side of the bed. “They’ve gone and put you in the humans’ ward, too, so the doorknobs are all at your height and the water closets don’t bump your ankles and you can sleep without feeling you’ve been stuck in a bookshelf. Simply splendid. I must tell you, your joke about One Six Nine is quite the rage around the yacht club, and even First Commodore Smedlookinblakburdincan was quite beside himself, laughed until he nearly vomited and had to be taken outside and given water. Marvelous sense of humor, but that’s not why I’m here. Just sign these.” The gnome pulled a stained sheaf of papers from an inside pocket of his jacket and spread them out on Teldin’s chest. He then produced a short, black stick with a coppery point on one end. “You can use my portable hydraulic transcription device if you like,” he added, “but mind the ink. Refilling it takes four hours.”

Teldin made no move to take the black stick. He valiantly resisted the urge to punch the gnome in the nose. “What are you talking about? What are these?”

“Ah,” said the gnome, pointing a stubby finger at various sections of the papers as he spoke. “This is a legal statement giving me permission to accompany your expedition to the
Spelljammer
 – not just any spelljammer, of course, but the one-and-only
Spelljammer
 – purely for scientific purposes. This is a release form that absolves you from any responsibility for all accidents, illnesses, or injuries, to include death and/or dismemberment, that I might suffer while in your company. This is a release form that absolves me from any responsibility for all accidents, illnesses, or injuries, to include death and/or dismemberment, that you might suffer as a result of anything that I do for research purposes. This is a waver that grants —” Teldin snatched the papers out of Dyffed’s hands and almost wadded them into a ball. Instead, with the greatest single effort of willpower he ever recalled using, he carefully handed them back to the gnome. “I am not signing anything,” Teldin said with finality, “and it doesn’t matter if you want to go or not. We have no ship. We’re stuck here.”

“Oh, but we do have a ship,” Dyffed corrected him. “The Board of Admirals has given us an excellent ship from the naval ya – um, um, yacht docks, silly of me – an excellent ship from the yacht docks, ready for its trial run. Within a few days, we shall be off to see One Six Nine.”

The charade about the “yacht club,” on top of everything else, managed to push Teldin’s temper to its limits. “Why do you persist in calling this a yacht dub?” he demanded. He half sat up in bed again, feeling his face flush with anger. “This is a naval base for spelljammers, isn’t it? Gnome spelljammers?”

“Shhh!” Panicked, Dyffed waved his hands in front of Teldin’s face. “Careless vocalizations produce maritime disasters!” he hissed, glancing fearfully at the open window.

“Damn it, everyone
knows
this is a naval base!” Teldin protested. “I knew that when Gomja brought me ashore on his boat! All the gnomes wear uniforms, you have huge catapult and ballista towers surrounding this valley, you have a military dry dock, and even your security commander told me it was a naval base!” As he uttered those last words, Teldin instantly wished he could take them back. He had undoubtedly just sunk Gomja’s whole career.

“First Colonel-Commander Herphan Gomja has a security clearance that allows him to say it’s a naval base, but you don’t!” Dyffed retorted, unfazed. “As Colonel-Commander Gomja says, the void holds many foes, even if that’s not logically correct because a void should be empty and hold nothing. Regardless, we ask that you please not refer to this base, the lake, or the airspace above it, out to a fifty-mile altitude, as anything other than a yacht club. If our enemies knew that we were working on a coherent-beam, synergized thaumamplifer here, they’d —” The gnome froze, his face filled with horror at his words. “No! I meant, if they only knew we were working on a secret birthday party for the admirals here, they’d be all over us. It’s the nature of space monsters, always crashing birthday parties.” Dyffed drew a shuddering sigh, his face pale. “I’ve been working on this weapons project for so long, I almost forgot the code words.”

Teldin thought about this latest revelation. Whatever this secret weapon was, he didn’t want to be around when it was set off. “Forgive my asking,” he said, “but were you working on this, uh, birthday party at the Rock of Bral?”

“What? Oh, yes, I was. Their library was of considerable help, too, though I don’t think they understood a scrap of what I was doing there. Elves!” The gnome rolled his eyes. “Wonderful people, of course, but absolutely no concept of real science. The admiral and I got along quite famously, though, thanks to his interest in the
Spelljammer
 – that’s the one-and-only
Spelljammer,
of course, not just any spelljammer. We used to talk about that for days. He must have asked me a thousand questions about it. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you get a proper schooling, none of this ‘Everything I Needed to Know I Learned on Dungeon Level One’ nonsense. That was why he had me go with you, so I could perform a scientific analysis of the
Spelljammer
when you found it, then answer all of his own questions about it later.”

The gnome paused for breath, and Teldin broke in. His worst suspicions were dangerously close to being confirmed. “What kind of questions was Admiral Cirathorn asking about the
Spelljammer?”

Dyffed hesitated, lost in thought. “Oh, the usual things, of course, that a scholar of history might ask. How big was it, what kind of weapons would it carry, how could you control it, where would you find it, what sorts of military things might you do with it if you had it, would your cloak have any effect on it, that sort of thing. Natural curiosity.”

Natural curiosity, hell, Teldin thought. I should have known. Why in the name of the Abyss do I keep trusting everyone I meet and hoping they won’t stab me in the back with the first chance they get? I never thought the elves would do it, but I’ve not been seeing this in perspective. The
Spelljammer
is more valuable than gold; it’s real, raw power, and no one can turn away from it, not the neogi, not the mind flayers, not the pirates, evidently not the orcs who attacked us, and apparently not even the elves. Possibly not even the gnomes.

“At any rate,” Dyffed went on cheerfully, “my research assistants and I shall accompany you when you leave to find the
Spelljammer.
We’re going to find out what makes the
Spelljammer
squeal, as they say, but first we’ll be off to see dear old One Six Nine. I’ve communicated with him only by parcel for the last sixty years. He was quite a help to me on the, uh, um, birthday party. We’ll be bringing it with us, by the way. It should be a marvelous trip.”

*****

Night fell across the face of Ironpiece. Watches changed at the naval base, and spelljammers began landing in the evening, the last of those returning from the battle that had been joined after the
Probe’s
escape. Teldin heard from various nurses and technicians that the humanoid and elven ships had fought each other mercilessly, but both sides had been driven away from Ironpiece by the gnomes’ dreadnoughts, deathglories, spellfighters, and other craft. Confusion had reigned at first as to whether the elves were allies or enemies, but the matter was resolved on a practical level when an elven man-o-war opened fire on a deathglory. From that point on, it was every side for itself. As usual, the gnomes took the greatest casualties from their own experimental weapons. Once the humanoids had retreated and the elves had simply vanished (minus one of their man-o-wars), the gnomes had mopped up and gone home. Teldin went to sleep with a certain amount of satisfaction at the news.

The infirmary’s inhabitants slept. In the dark corridors, a handful of gnome attendants snored on their stools or wrote medical notes by candlelight. One of them was in the middle of listing a series of proposed experiments to determine the best design for a new lighting system for the infirmary – one that would not burn the place to the ground, as the previous natural-gas system had done sixty years earlier. She finished with another page, admiring the simplicity of her design – to have giant, refillable wicks installed in the walls – and set it on the ever-growing pile beside her.

“Somnoluncia, parafar, nombilbulum”
came a whispered voice from the darkness down the hall to her left.

Startled, the gnome looked up – and immediately started to yawn. She leaned back, a quill pen and a stack of unblemished paper sliding from her lap as she fell off her stool. A soft thump sounded as she hit the floor, accompanied by the sound of an upended ink bottle rolling away across the floor to empty its contents in a widening puddle.

Out of the darkness came a darker thing, floating soundlessly up to the snoring gnome. The figure observed the slow rise and fall of her chest, then moved on to the door on her right. There the figure took a last look around – then it simply moved through the entry as if the door did not exist.

Beyond the door the darkness was broken by faint light from a window. After an appropriate wait to assure that the rhythmic breathing from the bed in the room was genuine, the figure silently drifted closer. A lone being slept there, curled up like a baby. The sheets were bunched up at the foot of the bed. Peace was written across the sleeper’s face.

The dark figure raised a finger of white jointed bone and pointed it at the sleeper’s head.

“Obedia ooamei, ptejarki noh,”
it said quietly. The rhythmic breathing from the victim immediately became heavier and deeper. The sleeper’s eyes opened and stared at the wall, seeing nothing. The dark thing felt relief. The controlling spell had worked on the first attempt.

“Much from me this spell has cost, but much need I have of you, live meat,” the dark thing whispered. “Much for me in the weeks to arrive you will do. The cloakmaster to approach I dare not. Dangerous he is, and because of him my not-servants exist not. But you in my service will be, hidden slave with hidden master, you by all trusted, yes. My words now attend you will, much to learn, and my dreams to fulfil. Power everlasting mine will be, the cosmos to hold.”

The dark figure spread its arms wide, covering the window and the light, and began the next enchantment.

*****