invention, the frogsuit, and the first test of your leadership.”
“Of course!” the kender said, as seriously dutiful as he could. Then, when the commodore turned to assign the last two members of the expedition, he whispered to the professor, “Still, it’s gonna be fun.”
To fill out the shore party, Commodore Brigg chose ensigns Merliguttal and Wigpillow, for they were the two largest gnomes on the ship, the strongest and the most capable of carrying the large barrel he was sending with them to collect fresh water. However, Ensign Merliguttal proved much too large to fit into the last frogsuit. In fact, the suit would hardly come up to his waist, and only then after it was stretched almost to splitting. The professor admitted that he had run out of material and so had to make a smaller suit.
In the end, the only member of the crew small enough to fit into this small suit was Ensign Gob, the gully dwarf, and he was none too keen about allowing the gnomes to stuff him into the slithery garb. Loudly and vehemently he proclaimed, “Stinks unnatural!” Clearly, he thought they were feeding him to some kind of small black creature that was all mouth, for he screamed and wailed, thrashed and bit, as only a cornered gully dwarf can. Luckily, Doctor Bothy had plenty of anti-infection ointment, as gully dwarf bites can sometimes prove lethal if not properly treated.
He seemed to calm somewhat once the fish bowl was placed over his head. Perhaps it was the closeness of his own body’s odors crowding inside the glass helmet that made him think of his gully dwarf warren and took his mind off the strangeness of his predicament. Or perhaps it was the duckfeet keeping him firmly rooted to the deck, unable to run. In any case, something resembling a smile spread through the thick, greasy mat of his beard. Then he fainted. Professor Hap had tightened his neck seal a bit too much, probably on purpose. Once loosened, he awoke in a better humor. “Do again,” he requested, pointing at his throat.
They lined up along the edge of the deck, six in a row, and a queerer, more outlandish lot had never before been witnessed on the face of Krynn. They looked like something from another world, with their tight black suits and glass helmets, and backs swelling and deflating with each breath.
“What about the sharks?” Sir Grumdish asked, his voice sounding tiny inside his helmet.
“Yes, what about the sharks?” Chief Portlost concurred.
“You haven’t forgotten about the sharks, have you?”
“Of course not,” Professor Hap said as he stooped and opened the small, flat weapons box. From it, he took a strange device that set every gnomish heart palpitating with excitement. Its conglomeration of hoses and tubes, and its dangerous pointy end, looked most promising indeed.
“What is that?” Razmous asked, intrigued.
“UANP,” the professor answered. “Underwater Arrow of Normal Proportions. It works on the same principle of the UAEP, except it is considerably smaller. The arrow is loaded here-” he pointed to the dangerous end where a large steel arrowhead protruded. “Water is pumped in through the hoses using this hand pump,” he demonstrated, cranking out one of the tubes and pressing it back into place. He handed the weapon to Sir Grumdish, who eyed the strange device with an appraising glance. He hefted it and aimed along the length of the tube at a sharklike shadow passing near the ship.
“The firing mechanism is here,” the professor said, pointing at a large red button on the side. “Be careful, though. You have only one shot, and I’ve had time to build only three.” So saying, he distributed the other two weapons to Chief Portlost and Ensign Wigpillow.
“Gentlegnomes and kender,” Commodore Brigg intoned solemnly, addressing the members of the shore party. “Go with the blessings of Reorx, wherever he may be.” He saluted, thumping himself on the forehead and chest, then tugging his beard. The others returned the salute to the best of their abilities, banging their fists against their glass helmets. With a muffled scream, Ensign Gob tumbled overboard and sank out of sight.
Chapter
8
Conundrum quickly-or as quickly as one can while wearing a thirty-pound shoe on each foot leaped overboard and followed Ensign Gob to the bottom. He feared that the gully dwarf might panic and try to tear off his glass helmet. But as he sank, he felt a similar terror building in his chest, which he struggled to control while at the same time feeling an almost overwhelming sense of marvel and wonder at seeing the mysterious depths of the sea. He had expected everything to be dim and murky, and indeed everything in the distance was lost in a gray-blue haze, but the things closest to him-the lacy fronds of coral, the billowy puffs of pale white jellyfish, the swirling clouds of tiny silver fish, and even the occasional grim-toothed shark cruising the reefs outer edges-appeared as distinct as though cut from paper and pasted to the outside of his helmet.
For the first twenty feet of his descent, he held his breath, half from fear, half from awe, until he noticed a trail of bubbles rising up from beneath him. Glancing down, he saw the gully dwarf spiraling away below, arms wagging above his head. From the gully dwarfs bladderpack, the cloud of bubbles was spreading upward. Conundrum passed through the bubble-cloud, experiencing for a moment a queer tingling sensation, as if he were submerged in a glass of tricarbonated water (one of Doctor Bothy’s more recent attempts at a cure for hiccoughs). The fancy passed, and then he purposefully exhaled and created his own cloud of bubbles. He craned his head around inside the helmet to watch them ascend, and saw the duck-feet of his four companions not very far above his outstretched hands. The surface of the water, seen from below, glimmered like a pool of quicksilver, and the
A thump from below caught Conundrum’s attention. It was the gully dwarf, plumping down awkwardly in a puff of sand. Conundrum flapped his arms to keep from landing atop the gully dwarf. He settled to the bottom and quickly shuffled aside to make room for the others. Once submerged, his shoes didn’t feel quite so heavy as they had on board the ship. He gave Gob a reassuring smile and reached out to pat him on the shoulder. Gob, his eyes bugged-out either in wonderment or fear, gave a tentative smile back.
The others floated down around him like so many strange birds in a dream, arms a-flutter to guide their descent. Their faces looked blue inside their helmets, and Razmous’s topknot dangled in his face. The kender expedition leader puffed and blew and crossed his eyes, but to no avail; his hair insisted on tickling his nose.
“I wonder if I can get my hand up inside my fishbowl,” the kender said as he squirmed and tried to withdraw one arm into his frogsuit. Strangely enough, everyone could hear him, even if it did sound as if he were talking through a pillow. When he spoke, his words were accompanied by an outrush of bubbles from his bladderpack.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Chief Portlost warned. The chief was more than a little green around the edges of his heard, and his eyes looked large and bulging with fear behind his glass helmet.
“Why not?”
“Let’s just get to shore and stop the nonsense,” Sir Grumdish snarled as he fingered his UANP and eyed a shark that had approached to investigate the strange new visitors to its territory.
“We can’t go without-” Razmous began, but then a large barrel filled with ballast stones dropped on his foot. Only his heavy, lead-lined duckfeet shoes prevented broken toes.
Conundrum unhooked the rope used to lower the barrel from the ship, while Sir Grumdish and Ensign Wig- pillow tipped it off the kender’s foot. They rolled it over on its side and dumped out enough of the ballast stones to make it float, buoyed by its wooden slats. It hovered in the water before them, as though in a dream. Ensign Gob was assigned to push it.
They set out, climbing up a long winding valley between two towering coral reefs. A modest current pushed against them as they walked, and their heavy boots made for slow going. The seafloor here was of old gray coral, ground away by the steady current of the inflowing stream, while white sand filled all the reefs’ hollows and crevasses. Wherever there was sand, there were small dark spiny urchins, like little pincushions dropped by some seamstress in her fright, and sometimes they came across an old bare bone, or part of a skull, sticking up out of the sand. Razmous found a bony finger with a glimmering golden ring still dangling from it, but he had no pouches in which to tuck it away for safe keeping.
To either side, long valleys lay between the reefs, stretching hack into the blue haze like aisles in a darkened temple. In these, they came across the wrecks of ships. Some were ancient and worm-eaten, half overgrown by the
