Teldin glanced at the
Valkyrie,
a slender drakkar, or longship, built on Dagmar’s icy homeworld, then skeptically considered the dracons. Each beast had to weigh at least a quarter ton. “I’m not sure we can carry you, even for a relatively short distance.”
“Dagmar would know for sure,” Hectate put in.
Teldin nodded. He’d acquired Dagmar along with the drakkar, and the first mate knew the
Valkyrie
down to its last plank and barnacle. Teldin led the way to the ship, then sprinted up the boarding plank and caught Dagmar’s arm as she rushed past.
“These dracons want passage. Their ship is orbiting Garden. Can we handle the extra weight for a couple of days?”
The. first mate studied the huge creatures, taking in their fine armor and weapons. As they awaited her decision,
Chirp shifted his weight from one massive foot to another and Trivit nibbled nervously at his claws. Finally Dagmar nodded crisply. “The
Valkyrie could
use a couple of fighters. They come.” Her tone was without expression, and she strode off without a backward look at her new crewmen. Teldin and Hectate exchanged a glance and a shrug. Teldin was beginning to suspect that the brusk first mate had a soft spot for strays.
It took three extra planks and a tense half hour to maneuver the overjoyed dracons onto the
Valkyrie,
and during that time Teldin saw no sign of pursuit by the beholder. With a sigh of relief, he gave the order to sail.
At Teldin’s signal, Om, the ship’s taciturn gnome technician, fired up the machine that drove a mysterious tangle of pipes and gears attached to the oars. The machine started with a smoky belch and a long, grinding whine of protest. Om crouched beside the contraption, her small brown face wrinkled in concentration and her tiny hands flying as she wielded one gnome-sized tool after another. From time to time she stood and augmented her efforts with a well-placed kick.
Teldin watched, amused. At first he had been put off by the idea of a gnome-powered ship, but since the machine took the place of twenty oarsmen per watch, it kept the crew to a minimum. To Teldin’s way of thinking, the fewer people he endangered, the better. The contraption worked quite well, thanks to the gnome who apparently devoted her life to keeping it running. Om was a rarity among tinker gnomes. For one thing, her inventions worked; for another, she never said two words when one would do the job and spoke not at all when a grunt would suffice.
Soon the oars began to move rhythmically. As the ship backed away from the dock, the dracons raised their high, fluting voices in one of the bawdiest chanteys Teldin had ever heard. He was pleased to note that the dracons were excellent sailors. Under Dagmar’s instruction, they hoisted the sails with disciplined exuberance. Rozloom had retired to the galley, somewhat crestfallen from the discovery that the only women on board were Dagmar and Om.
Leaving his strange crew to their tasks, Teldin headed for the ship’s stern, to the small raised room that housed the bridge. Hectate Kir was already there, bent intently over a star chart. Teldin took his place on the helm, and his cloak began to glow with the pale sunrise pink that signaled the start of its spelljamming magic.
Until just recently, Teldin was only able to use his cloak as a helm when there was no other working helm on board. With his limited crew, however, he could hardly break a helm every time he needed to move. He’d practiced until he could wield the cloak in the presence of a functional helm. He made a point of sitting in the helm at such times – no sense in advertising the fact that the spelljamming magic came, not from him, but from his cloak – yet he could do nothing to dim the cloak’s magical pink glow. Teldin slid a sidelong glance toward the navigator. The half-elf took note of the cloak’s latest color shift and shrugged.
Not for the first time, Teldin felt a surge of relief over Hectate’s utter lack of curiosity in matters not directly relating to star charts. Hectate Kir seemed to be the only being in wildspace who had no interest in the cloak. He was a simple soul, content to do his job and mind his own business. For a moment Teldin envied the half-elf. His own average, ordinary life on Krynn seemed so distant that it well could have been a story he’d heard about another man. That life had been taken away, leaving him with a dangerous legacy and a quest that he had yet to fully comprehend. With a sigh, Teldin turned his concentration to the task at hand.
As the cloak’s magic waxed, Teldin’s senses expanded to encompass the ship and its surroundings. He
was
the ship, and at the same time he had the odd sensation that he was floating high above it, looking down over it and the dock. Teldin knew the moment the cloak helm was fully operational, for the sounds and scents of the river port were cut off abruptly as the ship became encased in its own envelope of air. It was uncanny the way all sounds of life on the asteroid – the cries of the gulls, the congenial insults exchanged by the fisherfolk on nearby boats, the faint distant bustle of market life – could be extinguished as abruptly as one might blow out a candle’s flame. The sound of water lapping at the drakkar’s hull was their only sensory tie to the port. At Teldin’s silent command, the
Valkyrie
rose straight out of the river. Water rushed off the hull with a thunderous roar, and the drakkar rose into the night sky.
The archaic design of the bridge limited Teldin’s natural vision, but with his expanded senses he could see the river port fall quickly away. Within moments the trade asteroid below them was an oddly shaped lump of rock, then just one of many that clung to the roots of the celestial plant known as Yggdrasil’s Child. It was a bizarre construction, but Teldin did not doubt that the image in his mind mirrored the reality beneath the ship. Despite his recent travels on a dozen worlds and through the wonders of wildspace, Teldin’s imagination was not capable of conjuring such a place. Garden was just the roots of the “plant,” and it looked like a tangle of odd-shaped beads that some giant child had strung and, tired of them, flung aside. Or, perhaps, a young potato plant torn from the soil, complete with small, clinging tubers.
“I wonder where the rest of the plant is,” Teldin said idly.
“Well, it’s not on the star charts, sir,” replied Hectate Kir with his usual flair for understatement.
The navigator’s unintentional humor brought a quick smile to Teldin’s face. Having heard some of the legends concerning Yggdrasil’s Child, he could see why it’d be hard to chart. It was said to be a celestial plant so large that it encompassed, not only worlds, but other planes of existence. Such a thing was so far beyond Teldin’s ken that merely thinking about it made his mind spin.
The ship shuddered faintly as it passed through the edge of Garden’s atmosphere. As always, Teldin was amazed at the intense blackness of wildspace. Back on Krynn he’d thought of night skies as black, but since then he’d seen that a thousand shades lay between the blackness of wildspace and the midnight blue skies he’d witnessed with his feet on his home world.
At two bells, Teldin turned the helm over to Klemner, a minor cleric of Ptah. He made his way below to the small mess, curious to know whether Rozloom’s boasts had been founded in reality. He was amazed by the festive atmosphere that the aperusa had created. The galley tables had been pushed into a companionable cluster. Conversations were muted and fragmented as the crew members tucked away fresh fish and vegetables, bread still warm from the oven, and a sticky confection made of flaky pastry, dried fruit, and honey. Rozloom made the rounds of the room like a genial host at a well-run party. Teldin quickly filled a tray and seated himself.
“Join you, sir?”
Teldin looked up into Hectate’s thin, serious face. He nodded, and the navigator set his well-laden plate down on the table and took the chair across from Teldin. “I see you approve of our new cook,” Teldin said dryly.
Taking in Teldin’s rueful expression, the half-elf asked, “Having second thoughts, sir?”
“Always,” Teldin acknowledged with a touch of sadness. He could ill afford to trust even those who seemed trustworthy, and the gypsy “king” hardly qualified as that.
“Rumor has it that Rozloom has started a batch of ale brewing,” Hectate said, dangling Teldin’s favorite indulgence before him. “He couldn’t be all bad, sir.”
Teldin winced – imperceptibly, he hoped – and returned the half-elfs smile with a fleeting one of his own. Teldin’s attitude toward elves had been soured by a series of bad experiences, and for some reason Hectate’s features took on a decidedly elven tinge whenever he smiled. Thank the gods that he didn’t do it very often, Teldin thought wryly.
“Rozloom seems likable enough,” Teldin said cautiously, surprised to find that he could in fact like a man who was so blatantly self-serving.
“But …?”
Teldin shrugged, struggling to form his reservations into words. “The man seems to have no convictions,” he began. “Most people, for good or bad, have some set of principles that guide their actions. From what I’ve seen so far, I’d have to say that Rozloom runs on pure self-interest. How can you sail with someone who’ll follow the prevailing wind, no matter what?”
The half-elfs smile disappeared, and his eyes dropped. For a long moment he sat in silence, his meal forgotten.
“What is it, Hectate?” Teldin asked at length.
“Sometimes, sir, staying a chosen course despite the winds can be dangerous. There’s such a thing as holding too strongly to convictions,” the navigator said softly. Without explanation, he rose to his feet and walked out of the galley, leaving Teldin staring blankly after him.
Chapter Three
Tekura leaned farther into the dome of the port window, drawn by the austere beauty of the world below her, set in wildspace like a vast opal against a black velvet cloth. The swirling pattern of white streaks on the orb’s surface charmed her even though it probably indicated that a numbing blizzard awaited them. Intending to share the beauty, the elflike woman glanced back at the three ship’s officers.
Zeddop, their lamentable wizard, was slumped in the thronelike helm, his eyes glazed as he poured magical power into the ship, and his short silvery hair sticking up in random spikes around his pointed ears. Behind him stood the captain and the navigator, huddling together over a stolen star chart and completely absorbed with the challenge of charting their course. Sadness touched Tekura as she studied her adopted kin: Wynlar, a quiet scholar forced into a role of war leader, and his niece Soona, who possessed an exotic, flame-haired beauty reminiscent of elven royalty, as well as a reluctant talent for seduction. Soona had employed both gifts to learn of the secret gateway into the ice planet’s atmosphere.
As part of a centuries-old pact, a magical network enveloped the planet and alerted elven patrol ships whenever a craft entered or left the planet’s atmosphere. A long-ago elven admiral had created a randomly shifting gate to allow elven spy ships to slip through the net. Eventually the admiral’s overzealous activities were detected by the Imperial Fleet. The elves had supposedly reprimanded him, but they kept the gate open and secret. Tekura would bet her left hand that they weren’t above using it either.
“Merciful Ptah!” the captain swore in a dull whisper. His gaze was fixed on the starboard window, and the star chart he had been studying a moment before dropped unheeded to the floor.
Soona and Tekura stared into the velvet blackness, squinting as they tried to make out the danger their sharp-eyed captain perceived. “Over there, near Vesta,” Wynlar directed them, pointing toward the domed windows that were set like eyes on either side of the forecastle. Each window yielded a view of Vesta, one of the three large moons of the ice planet Armistice.
A shadow touched the edge of the pale violet disk. The small group watched with horrified fascination as the shadow grew, slowly metamorphosing into the silhouette of a huge, twisted butterfly.
“Man-o-war,” murmured the captain, stating what they all knew. An elven man-o-war was one of the most powerful and feared ships of wildspace. Their shrike ship was a sleek, birdlike vessel that could dart and maneuver like a spacebound sparrow, but in battle it would present little challenge to the elven ship. If the stolen cloaking device did not hide the shrike ship from the elves, their illegal cargo would not reach Armistice and their dream of revenge would die with them.
“It’s coming straight at us,” Soona reported in a voice tight with fear.
And coming fast, Tekura noted silently. The man-o-war had changed its course and was growing larger with frightening speed. Within moments they could see plainly both the ship and the dark purple shadow it cast back upon the moon.
“Tell me, Tekura, is your plan worth tackling
that?”
demanded Zeddop, nodding toward the approaching ship.
A small, hard smile twitched the young woman’s lips, but her gaze never left the man-o-war. “If the cloaking device works, Zeddop, we won’t have to fight,” she replied, absently tucking a strand of silvery hair behind one pointed ear.
It
has
to work, Tekura thought fiercely, as if the force of her will could strengthen the magic cloaking device. The price she’d paid to obtain it was simply too high for her to accept the possibility of failure. The cloaking device already had cost years of her life, years spent pretending to be everything she abhorred. Passing as an elf, she had worked as a technician on one spelljamming vessel after another until her reputation earned her a post with the Imperial Fleet. Finally, her mission had required her to kill. The ironic justice of this did not escape her – after all, the elves had designed her kind as living weapons – but the necessary act had bruised and sullied her spirit. Whenever the burden grew too heavy, Tekura remembered the look on those elves’ faces when she had gone into the Change: first shock, then terror incongruously mixed with disgust. They had disdained her even as she had cut them down.
The man-o-war came on, pushing aside Tekura’s memories. Soon they would have to either run or fight. Tekura shot a glance at the captain. As she expected, Wynlar’s angular face was contorted by powerfully conflicting emotions. Although their mission depended on getting past the elven patrol ship, every instinct urged the captain toward battle. It was a compulsion Tekura knew too well, a compulsion she read upon every face in the room. To their race, running from a fight was not only unthinkable, but almost impossible. They were, after all, living weapons.