Conundrum

mayor and a few of his closest advisers huddled behind a newly-fortified observation post hastily constructed atop a nearby hill, to watch and make sure nothing else untoward happened. The garbage scow had been towed out to sea and sunk a few days before, to remove any last temptation for Commodore Brigg to try to prove the soundness of his clearly unsound submersible design.

But even if it hadn’t, the commodore was having nothing to do with further tests or demonstrations. He counted himself lucky that the Knights of Neraka hadn’t been around to give him trouble during all the sinkings, and he wasn’t about to send for more money to scrape and paint the ship, much less refloat her after another mishap. The ship, such as it was, would have to do, come what may. Besides, he reasoned as only a gnome can reason, if the ship sank one more time, they’d likely have to call off the mission altogether as the ship would rust to bits. ’Twas better not to risk it.

He ordered the ship ahead three-quarters as she cleared the docks. Quietly, in the dead of night, they steered Indestructible out of the harbor and into the Fjord of Gunthar. Conundrum joined Commodore Brigg atop the conning tower. He watched the strange white moon of Krynn sink into the dark North Sirrion Sea.

“So that’s the sea,” Conundrum commented as he leaned against the rail beside the commodore.

“One of them,” Commodore Brigg answered quietly.

Chapter 6

The Indestructible cruised northward with a following sea and a favorable wind for many days and nights. Mount Nevermind, the home of the gnomes, receded in the distance, its great summit the last portion of Sancrist Isle still visible by sunset of the third day of their voyage. Come morning, the gnomes and their kender companion found themselves sailing in the midst of the open ocean.

Many of the gnomes, including a few members of the Maritime Sciences Guild, had never been out of sight of land. They took turns, when duty permitted, coming up on deck and gazing in awe at the great gray rolling sea. Sir Grumdish took one look at the heaving waves and unbroken horizon and turned as yellow as a sheet parchment. Professor Hap-Troggensbottle had been many times to sea in his quest to discover the nature of the buoyancy of very-large rocks, so the sights held little wonder for him. But he was often seen above decks collecting buckets of seawater, which he took below to continue his experiments in his cabin. Exactly what he was doing remained a mystery.

Razmous was literally all over the ship during these exciting first days, so much so that some of the crew began to speculate that there were actually three identical kender onboard. In the first days of the voyage, he fell overboard and had to be rescued so many times that he was ordered to wear a pair of large, inflated shark bladders under each arm and a fifty foot rope around his waist, which was fastened to the mast any time he was on deck, under threat of indefinite confinement in the bilge. The next time he fell overboard, they hauled him aboard without having to lower sails and stop the ship. He was wet and bedraggled but keen for another go.

Commodore Brigg and Navigator Snork spent most of their duty time in the conning tower, directing the ship’s course, taking navigational readings from the sun and stars, and ordering the trimming of sails as circumstances and winds dictated. When off duty, they plotted (with Razmous’s help) their future course beneath Ansalon. Conundrum was invited to attend these high-level sessions, as his training for the Guild of PuzzlesRiddlesEnigmasEtcetera included the study of labyrinthine documents. In these sessions he proved himself a valuable companion, as he was able to sort out the kender’s unnumbered and unlabeled maps on more than one occasion.

Razmous’s map, drawn by the navigator of the ill-fated MNS Polywog, was of hideous complexity-a many-headed hydra of tunnels, passages, dead ends, switchbacks, wells, and caverns, a three-dimensional nightmare that the navigator had rendered onto a series of two-dimensional pages, enough to fill a book. Though the landmarks were carefully noted to exacting standards, the navigator had failed to mark the Polywog’s actual course beneath the continent, which seemed to indicate that the map was but a copy of the original. It also meant that, if Snork and Conundrum couldn’t unravel the two-hundred page map before they began the undersea leg of the journey, they’d be almost as lost as if they didn’t have any map at all. So, as they crossed the North Sirrion Sea and came in sight of Northern Ergoth on the twelfth day, Conundrum, already having shown aptitude, was promoted from his position as chief officer in charge of seating to first assistant cartographer. He had an important task, and felt happy and contented. He moved his bunk into his cousin’s cabin, and they stayed up many a night with the kender Razmous, poring blissfully over the tangle of maps by the light of a lamp swaying from an overhead steam pipe.

Far across the sea, in the city of Flotsam, in the middle of the common room of the Sailor’s Rest, one of the better inns in the city, two men attacked each other with knives. The fight had just begun and people were still leaping over tables and crashing through chairs trying to get out of the way of the two flashing blades. The innkeeper was still in the kitchen, a ladle lifted to his lips to taste the soup, turning his head in surprise at the commotion beyond the door.

The city of Flotsam had been built on a cliff overlooking the Blood Sea of Istar, that great red ocean created when the fiery mountain struck Krynn, destroying the city of Istar and its Kingpriest who, in his pride, demanded of the gods what the hero Huma had received in humility. The city and all the land about it had been blasted into the earth by the anger of the gods, and the sea rushed in to fill the void, creating the Blood Sea. Once, a whirlpool had swirled at its center, a great maelstrom that sucked down any ship that sailed too near. Some said that at the bottom of the maelstrom lay the smashed temple of the Kingpriest and a bottomless chasm that opened directly into the Abyss. But the whirlpool had been quelled almost forty years ago, when the god Chaos was driven from Krynn, taking with him all the other gods.

Flotsam was built at the head of a deep bay of the Blood Sea, at a place where shipwrecks and anything else the maelstrom-or for that matter the rest of Krynn-vomited up, washed ashore. Once a free city, Flotsam now lay within the domains of the great red dragon Malystryx, the most powerful dragon in all of Krynn. Several years ago, she had destroyed the old city, burning much of it to the ground. What remained was but a ramshackle shadow of the former city, a slum of tacked-together shacks and shanties for the most part, with here and there a more permanent building rising from the refuse. The streets and alleys of Flotsam were filled with every sort of ne’er- do-well, brigand, pirate, and cutthroat that Krynn could produce. Mercenaries from Kern, ogres from Blode, and Ergothian pirates sought work in the galleys and vessels that paid the proper bribes to the proper people and so were allowed to dock alongside the very merchant ships they would pillage and sink should they meet on the open sea. It was all a very nicely organized state of affairs, everything balanced on a knife’s edge of fear.

Even so, being one of the more sturdily-built structures in the more respectable part of town, the Sailor’s Rest rarely experienced these sorts of disturbances of the peace. This was an inn frequented by those made somewhat more respectable by wealth, no matter how ill-gotten their riches might be, people who subscribed to the pretense of civilized manners even though in practice they employed the selfsame cutthroat behaviors (and the selfsame cutthroats) so common in other parts of the city. A knife fight here among the salvaged and sea-tarnished silver and pirate-looted tableware was a rare occurrence indeed.

Still, most of the patrons of the inn showed an uncanny and unexpected agility in their flight from danger. Only one remained seated, his enjoyment of the excellent baked flounder seemingly undisturbed by the life-and- death struggle taking place mere feet from his table. The two men snarled and circled one another, shifting their knives from hand to hand, seeking some advantage, while he watched them as if watching some farce staged for his own personal amusement.

One of the knife wielders was a semi-successful exporter of cypress lumber, the other a waiter of some years” experience, with an impeccable reputation for discretion. The nature of their dispute was unknown, so suddenly had it erupted. One moment, the waiter was serving the exporter his steamed prawns, the next he was dumping the butter down the front of the man’s shirt. It had escalated just as quickly to knives. The waiter’s shirtsleeve was torn at the shoulder, the cypress merchant’s coat was split neatly down the back from the collar to