The Maelstroms Eye (30 page)

“What’s wrong with Teldin?” Gaye asked, unable to wait any longer.

“What? Oh.” Dyffed cleared his throat. “He’s got a runny nose and he’s sneezing a lot.”

“Yes, we know that!” Gaye exclaimed. “But why?”

“Beats me,” said the gnome with a shrug. “Maybe it’s something in the air.”

“It’s the rastipedes,” said Aelfred with a smile. “I dealt with one a few years ago in Greyspace. They communicate with each other by smell. Most of us can barely detect it, but I’ll bet a year’s pay that our man Teldin is allergic to the odor. A buddy of mine had the same thing. There’s nothing you can do about it except avoid rastipedes whenever possible. Sorry about that, old son.”

“Teldin’s allergic to those bugs?” Gaye asked. “Thank Paladine it wasn’t kender.”

I almost wish it had been kender, Teldin thought miserably. His sinuses were swollen far beyond normal limits, and he could barely breathe. He had never had an allergy before in his life, and he hoped he’d never get another.

“It will pass,” Aelfred added, raising a mug of ale to his lips. “Give it a couple of days, and you’ll be fine. In the meantime, the rastipedes and our crew are building a wagon for the ship. We should have it out of the water by this evening.” He drank deeply and smacked his lips.

“Any other news?” Teldin managed to ask, his voice now outrageously nasal. He heard Gaye giggle.

“They’re giving us a map of the area,” said Aelfred. “It should give us a start on finding what we came here for.”

The fal, Teldin thought, rubbing his face. He tried to picture a giant black slug that could talk, but it wasn’t possible. He’d almost forgotten about the fal in the last few days since the – what were they again? – since the scro’s ship began trailing them.

“Here he comes,” said Gaye, “and he’s got a map!”

Teldin’s eyes watered again as the rastipede jogged up on its eight legs, moving more rapidly than seemed possible for its size. The creature did indeed have a large rolled-up sheet of paper in its claws, which it presented to Aelfred and Gaye. “Teldin sick?” asked the insect being.

“I’m afraid so,” said Aelfred, unrolling the map. “Where are we now on this?”

The rastipede turned its attention to the map, trotting over to stand behind the big, blond warrior. A clawed green finger reached down and pointed to a spot on the map that Teldin could not see from where he sat. “We here.”

“There?” asked Aelfred, surprise in his voice. “What’s this in the center, then?”

“Lake,” said the rastipede, looking up from the map to point toward the shore where the other insect folk and the gnomes were laboring.

Gaye gasped, and Teldin could see her eyes widen as she peered at the sheet of paper. “Isn’t that weird? Dyffed, look at this! Isn’t that bizarre?”

Teldin could stand it no longer. He got up from the rock and tried to get into the crowd, even as his nose stopped up completely as he approached the insect being. “What’s going on?” he wheezed, hating the sound of his voice.

Aelfred managed to lower the top end of the map. Teldin looked down. A large blue footprint appeared to take up most of the center of the map. Teldin blinked, his teary vision clearing for a moment, and he saw the rastipede’s claw pointing steadily to a forested spot on the leading edge of one of the footprint’s four thick toes.

Aelfred looked up at the lake, then down at the map. He snorted and smiled. “Mother Nature having one of its jokes,” he said. “Looks like something stepped there, doesn’t it?”

“Something did step there,” said Dyffed, peering at the map through his gold-rimmed spectacles. “Quadrupedal megafauna. One of the bigger ones, I’d say.”

There was a short silence.

“Dyffed,” said Aelfred conversationally, “that lake is about a hundred and twenty miles long.”

The gnome merely nodded. “I’d say a hundred and thirty, myself, a third the she of Ironpiece. Just a rough guess, of course. We can make more accurate measurements when we’re airborne again.”

The silence returned. Aelfred lowered the map and looked off into the distance, in the direction the leading edge of the footprint indicated. “Then how big …?” he started to say, but his voice trailed away. Teldin and Gaye followed his gaze, looking over the treetops and into the infinite blue beyond.

“We’ll know soon enough,” Dyffed said cheerfully, still looking at the map. “One Six Nine lives on top of one.”

Chapter Thirteen

Within a few hours, Teldin’s allergy had begun to clear up. His head felt less likely to burst, and he could go for almost twenty minutes before sneezing. The frustration of it was still torture, but he felt he could command at least a shred of dignity when he walked about, as long as he kept upwind of the rastipedes.

He also learned from Sylvie and the now-friendly rastipedes that the antimagical effects of the lake water apparently extended for a few feet around the lake itself. The leader of the armed rastipedes, he recalled, had been careful to motion Teldin away from the water when he came ashore, no doubt so that its own spell for translating languages would function.

By the time Teldin thought to see if his cloak’s powers had been negated by the lake water, the necklace part had dried off and was working normally. Given the presence of the rastipedes, Teldin put off any further test of lake-water effects on the cloak until later.

“We’ve just about got the ship in position,” Aelfred said, sitting down beside Teldin on a fallen tree near the edge of the forest. The big warrior held a wooden cup full of ale, fresh from the ship’s stores. “Those rastipedes are damn good engineers. Between them and the gnomes, they had some weird crane-and-pulley system set up and going in about three hours. They hauled the ship right out of the water like it was a toy. Amazing what you can do without magic.” He took a swallow from his cup, then offered it to Teldin.

“No, thank,” Teldin said. “I’ve had more than my share already.” He sniffed and rubbed his stuffed-up nose. “Medicinal purposes, of course.”

Aelfred gave his friend a lopsided grin. “You’ve saved our lives several times running now, and the gods reward you with this. There’s no justice.” He turned around, hearing footsteps from behind them. “Come on over,” he called. Teldin turned just as Sylvie walked up and casually sat on the log beside Aelfred.

“You get some rest?” Aelfred asked, nudging the half-elf gently in the side. “You’ve stayed up too long already.”

Sylvie elbowed Aelfred back, though more sharply. “I can’t get to sleep now,” she said glumly. “Sunset and night can’t be possible in this sphere because the land area is exposed to overhead sunlight all the time. I can’t find a place that’s dark enough to sleep. Someone did a bad design job when this sphere was being made.” She poked at the leaves on the ground with the toes of her soft shoes. “I’m in a bad mood. Just ignore me.”

Aelfred laughed, but Teldin stared at Sylvie in astonishment at her revelation that night wasn’t possible here. He’d been wondering for some time now when the huge sun was going to drop toward the horizon; he now felt intensely foolish for not having realized that “sunset” was out of the question. How did the natives get along without night? This was the strangest world he had seen since entering wildspace.

“Lady, you can be as mean as you want, and I promise not to pay any attention to you at all,” said Aelfred, grinning from ear to ear. He began to stroke Sylvie’s back with his right hand. After a moment, she closed her eyes and visibly relaxed. “Besides, some people do manage to get to sleep here. The rastipedes live underground, for instance. They sleep in shifts, so two-thirds of their colony is always awake. I was talking with their leader a while ago – he has no name, as we know it, since their language is based in part on smell – and he told me about their life here. They’re descended from a spelljammer crew. Their ship landed in the lake just like ours did, but their ship broke up on landing, so they just stayed on. They run the forest and most of the land on this side of the lake. One of them could give an ogre a fit. Teldin did us a real favor in talking things out with them, even if our buddy the giff wanted to charge them.” Aelfred reached over and gave Teldin another punch to the shoulder.

“You know,” said Sylvie slowly, “I was thinking earlier that there was something odd about the horizon, where the view was clear through the trees. The earth and sky fade together in a blur, with the land reaching slightly up into the sky. Then it hit me that I was seeing the curvature of the inside of the crystal sphere.”

Sylvie suddenly turned around to face both Aelfred and Teldin. “Did either of you think about how big this place is?” she asked. “Seriously, I mean. Do you know how huge this place really is?”

“Looked damn big to me,” Aelfred said, “but Dyffed told me a few weeks ago in the phlogiston that Herdspace wasn’t the biggest crystal sphere there was.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Sylvie said, brushing her long silver hair back over her pointed ears. “This crystal sphere could be half the size of any major one, but it would still have more living space inside it than a million planets. Think about it: We’re living on the inside of a crystal sphere, which is maybe a million times bigger than a world. Do you see what I’m saying?”

Teldin thought about it and shivered slightly. The idea was almost too crazy to believe. He realized that he could not picture how truly big a single world was, much less imagine the size of the inside of a crystal sphere. “Then what’s beyond the atmosphere?” he said, pointing up at the sky.

Sylvie looked up for a moment, shading her eyes and squinting against the glare. “There could be some planets orbiting the sun, but I don’t see any of them. Dyffed said there weren’t any there, anyway. Maybe the air envelope on the inside of this sphere extends all the way up to the sun, though – blue sky everywhere you go, and clouds a thousand miles high. I don’t know.”

Teldin saw Sylvie frown as she stared straight up. “That’s odd,” she whispered. “Is the sun getting darker?”

Teldin and Aelfred immediately leaned back and looked up. Teldin thought he had noticed a slight dimming in the light, but he had put it down as a visual quirk.

“Damn,” said Aelfred. “It is getting darker. I can tell now. Gods of Toril, what’s going on here?”

Teldin heard a sudden increase in the volume of the gnomes’ distant conversation. Several were calling to each other about the sun going out. They sounded quite panicked. He hardly blamed them.

“Maybe we’d better get back to the ship,” said Aelfred, rising to his feet, his cup forgotten on the ground. “We can ask our multilegged friends if this is natural and harmless, or if we’re supposed to scream now.”

“Aelfred,” said Sylvie. “If the sun is —”

“You no fear,” said a chirping, singsong voice behind them. They turned in surprise to see a tall rastipede approaching, its eight legs thumping softly through the undergrowth. Teldin couldn’t tell if it was the leader he had spoken with earlier. They all looked so much alike.

“Sun is healthy,” said the insect-centaur. “Sun have not much light now. World is dark soon. World you have no night? You fear dark?”

“You mean the sun is going out?” Teldin asked in amazement. His nose twitched, but he fought the urge to sneeze. “We are not afraid of the night, but we thought there was no night here because the sun couldn’t set.”

“I not listen you true,” said the rastipede, twisting its head slightly. “You say ‘set’? What is ‘set’?”

Teldin started to explain what a sunset was, but the urge to sneeze overcame him too rapidly. He backed away, trying not to fall over, as he sneezed violently two dozen times in a row. Sylvie abruptly took over for him, quickly explaining to the rastipede the rudiments of day and night on spherical worlds. The rastipede appeared to be even more confused as she spoke, asking a stream of strange questions, until Sylvie finally gave up.

“It’s no use,” she said. “They’ve lived here for so many generations that they don’t remember what it’s like to live on a regular planet. They’ve never seen their sun set. The sun just goes out, and it gets dark. The sun goes back on again eventually, and that’s dawn here.” She looked up at the rapidly darkening star. Teldin looked up, too, and found that he could now see the sun’s broad, reddened disk clearly. It was featureless and smooth, seemingly perfect.

Aelfred dropped his gaze. “I’m in serious need of a drink. If there’s anything left of that little keg of ale we pulled off the ship, let’s drain it and get some sleep. This place has been very entertaining, but I’ve almost lost all sense of time. And you,” he said, nudging Sylvie again, “you need your beauty est. You’ve worked too hard. I’m your captain, and I’m ordering you to turn yourself in for a nap.”

“Will you tuck me in?” Sylvie asked straight-faced, then glanced at Teldin and colored, biting her lip.

Aelfred saw her expression and laughed, putting his arm around her. “Sure, I’ll tuck you in,” he said. “Excuse us, Teldin. I’ve got some official duties to perform.”

Sylvie mumbled something in embarrassment as Aelfred led her away to the ship. Teldin managed to smile in spite of himself, then sneezed and sneezed until he felt he would never stop. When he finally finished, exhausted, he looked up and noticed that the rastipede was gone, too.

Grandfather, he thought to himself as the red sun went out overhead, the things you’ve missed. If I die from this wretched allergy and find you by Paladine’s side, I’m going to tell you some tales that will lay you out all over again.

*****

Nightfall could not have come soon enough for the ship’s tired crew. Dyffed and the other gnomes, once they had gotten used to the phenomenon, watched the sun go out until the gnomes were nearly incapacitated from stiff necks. During the sun’s fade-out, the gnomes built a bonfire and talked with the rastipedes until exhaustion overcame the former and they fell asleep across the lakeshore in every possible spot. The insect folk stayed up, moving to and fro among the sleeping travelers and keeping guard over them.

Teldin watched it all, unable to sleep because of his allergy. The rastipedes were changing their guard in shifts, he noticed; a few would leave together just as other rastipedes would approach the informal encampment. He decided the new creatures were fresh from the underground home that Aelfred had spoken of. It was impossible to tell, really, but as a theory it wasn’t a bad one. If they were communicating by smell, as Aelfred had suggested earlier, then they were “talking” up a storm.