Conundrum

Chapter

17

The Blood Sea of Istar seemed a different place entirely than what they had crossed but two months earlier. With the first hint of autumn came the season of stormy weather. Squalls were frequent on the sea now, rising up black on the horizon and catching the ship before they knew what was happening. Indestructible was not designed to weather such weather, and those on board suffered cruelly during their passage north, especially Conundrum, Sir Grumdish, and the Thorn Knight, who were not sailors by trade. They might have submerged and run beneath the waves, hut the commodore wanted to reserve their strength for the real work of subnavigating the continent. It wouldn’t do them any good at all to use up all their air bottles before they began the last stage of their journey. They dove only when the weather gave them no other choice, like when they encountered a typhoon on the fifth day out.

In any case, they still had to surface from time to time so that Snork could take readings and plot their course. The Blood Sea was a vast and featureless place, with no islands in its midst to guide a sailor. Not many sailors ever sought out the middle of the Blood Sea. Most who sailed these waters were searching either for the nearest port or a fat, lumbering merchant ship. Now that the Maelstrom had disappeared, few knew or even cared to know exactly where it had once been. Most maps drawn before the Chaos War failed to pinpoint the center of the Blood Sea at all. The old cartographers left this area blank, or drew in a large whirlpool and surrounded it with dire warnings. The main problem was that the location of the Maelstrom varied by as much as a hundred leagues, depending on which map one consulted. Of all the maps of the Blood Sea that the gnomes had borrowed or purchased, only the kender’s map of the subnavigational course of the MNS Polywog purported to show where it once lay.

It was to this place that Snork attempted to navigate the Indestructible, and this was no easy task. The weather played havoc with his calculations, both in the way the wind drove them helter- skelter across the sea whenever they ran “on top'-as they called it when the ship sailed on the surface-but also in how the clouds hid the sun for days on end. He navigated primarily by calculating the position of the sun above the horizon. He compared these readings with the time of the day and the date on various charts and arrays compiled by his family over many generations at sea, and from these he was able to determine their position anywhere on Krynn to within a league or two. He hoped.

The only good thing about the weather was that it kept the pirates away.

Professor Hap-Troggensbottle spent these last days sequestered in his quarters, perfecting some experiment or other. In those rare moments when he emerged to visit the galley or the head, he spoke to no one and no one spoke to him, for he had rather a crazed look in his eye.

That is, no one spoke to him-except Razmous. The kender seemed to regard the professor’s silence as something of a personal challenge to his kenderhood. He lurked in wait many an hour outside the professor’s quarters just to catch a glimpse of the inside of the room whenever he emerged, and to engage him in conversation about his experiments or anything else that came to mind. One time, he even followed the poor professor into the head and prattled on about the peculiar antics of his uncle, Morgrify Pinchpocket, before the commodore dragged him out and gave the kender a good dressing-down.

Occasionally, when he wasn’t feeling as though his stomach was about to perform a ballet, Conundrum was able to draw Razmous away to discuss the map of the subcontinental passages. At other times, Conundrum spent his hours locked away in the cabin he shared with his cousin, poring over Snork’s books on navigation and the sea. The activities and operations of the ship were of little interest to him. He’d had his fill of seamanship during his stint as chief officer in charge of oilage. But navigation was another matter entirely. As a member of the guild of puzzles, mazes, and that sort of thing, the study of charting courses on the open sea fascinated him.

The least sailorly of them all, Sir Tanar, spent most of his time curled into a ball of misery in his cabin, his face as green as the kender’s vest. He marked the time by the ensign who entered his cabin every twelve hours to feed the glowworms in his berth’s glowwormglobe. He almost imagined he could hear the tiny worms munching on their breakfasts and dinners of moss, and this made him all the more ill. But he was too weak to protest.

His cabin was ridiculously small, located as it was in the bow of the ship above the Toaster. There almost wasn’t room for him to stretch his hammock, and before he’d succumbed to seasickness, every time he stood up, he smacked his head on some beam or pipe. Sometimes, when the ship was being tossed about particularly violently by some storm, he imagined that he was dead and buried in a gnomish spring-driven coffin. The porthole caused him the most grief. Through it, he had a front seat to. the worst heavings of the sea when they surfaced. When submerged, he witnessed the bounty of the sea in all its loathsome varieties, from grim-toothed sharks grinning through the shreds of their latest meal to stomach-churning jellyfish splattered and oozing across the porthole’s glass. It was enough to give the most seasoned of assassins the heaves.

After three days and nights, the Indestructible finally managed to crawl out from beneath the typhoon, and at dawn the commodore ordered the ship surfaced and aired out. Those who had suffered the most from seasickness received a few hours of much-needed rest, as did the ship’s springs and gears, for they had worked without pause for most of those three long days and nights. Lines and poles were brought out and rigged along the aft deck so that the galley staff could catch fresh fish for supper. A keg of beer was broached, and for the first time in many days, the professor, never one to miss out on beer, emerged from his cabin. Sir Grumdish practiced his swordplay, even teaching the commodore a few tricks with the cutlass.

Meanwhile, Navigator Snork stood in the conning tower and took fresh bearings on the newly risen sun. He then consulted his navigational charts and maps, and after checking the position of the sun once more, announced loudly that they had arrived. He estimated that the ruins of Istar lay somewhere directly below them. A great cheer went up from the ship, and in the galley Sir Tanar, drinking tarbean tea-the first thing he’d been able to keep down in days-wondered at the commotion.

“We’ve made it, sir!” the cook said as he poured the Thorn Knight another cup.

“Made what?” Sir Tanar asked.

“Istar, sir! Bless me. The commodore says we’ll dive tomorrow!”

At these words, Sir Tanar’s eyes narrowed, and the words to a charm spell sprang to mind, but the magic felt sluggish and unwieldy in his veins. “I’d like a word with the commodore in my cabin,” he said. “Will you tell him?”

“Aye,” the cook said, running his bandaged hand lovingly over the battered pewter pot in which he had brewed tarbean tea for over forty years now.

“Dive to the bottom of the chasm?” the commodore snorted. “You’re mad. Everyone knows it’s bottomless.”

“But it might not be,” Sir Tanar said in oily tones. “It might lead somewhere interesting.”

“Where?” The commodore laughed. “The Abyss?”

“Aren’t you the least bit curious?” the Thorn Knight asked.

“I am!” Razmous shouted from behind the closed door.

“No! I’ll listen to no more talk of the Abyss,” the commodore barked. “This ship is subnavigating the continent, and that’s that. If you don’t like it, we can put you off here and now. My orders are to take you along, and there’s nothing in there about listening to your ideas. If you give me any more trouble, you’ll be feeding the sharks before you can snap your fingers.”

The words of a defensive spell came to Tanar’s mind, but he held them. His magical communications device was stored in its box inside a crate across the room, and without it, his spell had little chance of success.

“Keep that in mind,” Commodore Brigg finished as he opened the door.

Razmous tumbled into the room. The commodore stepped over the red-faced kender and strode away.

Conundrum entered immediately after the commodore was gone and helped Razmous to his feet. Without a word, Razmous bowed and hurried after the commodore. Conundrum started to follow, but Sir Tanar clutched at his sleeve.

Ever since that day at the Sailor’s Rest, when the Thorn Knight had enspelled him with a single word, Conundrum had felt uncomfortable around Sir Tanar. The wizard was the first human with whom he’d had any regular dealings, and he found he didn’t much care for their ways. He thought humans dull and stupid because they