Conundrum

darker and darker, until it was like a large black eye peering back at them. And still they sank, the two ships twirling round and round each other. Commodore Brigg didn’t voice his greatest concern-that they’d come to rest on the sea floor upside down, or worse, beneath the galley. That’s why he didn’t order the ballast tanks flooded, for he hoped the Indestructible’s buoyancy might keep them on top, if not pull them free entirely.

As the two ships sank deeper and deeper into the Blood Sea, the hull of the Indestructible began to pop and groan in a most alarming fashion. The deck beneath their feet buckled, bowing up a good three inches during the course of their descent. Here and there, where the hull was exposed, they noticed water droplets forming around the ship’s seams, and the air grew noticeably cooler. Every once in a while, the entire ship shuddered from stem to stern, rattling their teeth and everything else not bolted to the deck. Outside the ship, the sea slowly grew as black as a dark elf s heart.

Suddenly, there was a groan, and a shudder more violent than any they had yet experienced passed through the length of the ship. They felt the ship slow, settle, and come to rest with a bump on the bottom of the Blood Sea. Commodore Brigg looked around at his officers and crew that had gathered in the forward corridor and around the ladder leading below. He thrust out his chin, his beard bristling defiantly, and tugged at the bottom of his jacket. “Well,” he said. “Here we are.”

Razmous stood before the porthole, his jaw hanging open like a broken gate, his eyes glazed. Conundrum touched his arm, and slowly the kender’s head swiveled round to look down at him.

“Isn’t it fantastic?” the kender asked dreamily.

“I can’t take this any more,” Sir Tanar said in a voice tinged with hysteria. His claustrophobia seemed to be getting the better of him at last. He ran toward the ladder leading up to the hatch. “My magic will save me,” he snarled. “To the Abyss with the rest of you!”

Sir Grumdish caught the Thorn Knight around the legs and dragged him to the deck before he could reach the ladder. He and the professor sat on Sir Tanar’s back to keep him from rising. The wizard clawed at the floor, spitting curses and threatening to kill them all. Doctor Bothy hurried from sick bay and administered a sedative to the base of the Thorn Knight’s skull. Sir Tanar went limp at the blow, though he continued to moan and gibber incoherently. The doctor passed his reflex hammer to Conundrum in case the Thorn Knight needed another dose of sedative, then directed Sir Grumdish and the professor to carry the Knight to his cabin.

The two gnomes heaved Sir Tanar’s limp bones between them and staggered forward, the doctor and Conundrum following. They entered Sir Tanar’s chambers and tossed him into his hammock. Sir Grumdish staggered back, blowing heavily and digging his knuckles into the small of his back. In the blue light of the glowwormglobes, his white beard looked grayer and older than before, and there were dark circles under his eyes.

“Why, oh why did I ever come on this voyage?” he moaned. “I should be questing after dragons, not dragging hysterical wizards back to their cabins. I miss the smell of fewmets, the crackle of a fire at night, the sound of a sword unsheathing. A pox on the maritime sciences!”

“Now, now,” Doctor Bothy said. “I’ve got something that will cure you. Come to sick bay and I’ll give you a little nip.” The two departed.

Sir Tanar lay in his hammock, twitching feebly, his eyelids fluttering. Conundrum stood at his side, filled with an unreasoning concern. He didn’t quite understand why he should be worried about this human, but he couldn’t help the way he felt. Even as he stroked the Thorn Knight’s brow and tried to comfort him, deep down inside he felt repulsed by the sight of the ungainly, sprawling, pale-skinned human. It was quite mystifying.

To take his mind off his conflicting emotions, Conundrum watched the professor, who was at that moment standing before the how porthole, a blue glowwormglobe resting in the palm of his outstretched hand. At first, Conundrum wasn’t sure what the professor was looking at, but as he gazed closer, his eyes met with a startling, fascinating, and thoroughly gruesome sight.

They were inside the galley.

When the Indestructible rammed the galley, her iron-shod bow had punched completely through the galley’s wooden hull and become lodged in the hole. Sir Tanar’s cabin was located in the bow of the Indestructible, so the light from the professor’s glowwormglobe shining through the forward porthole actually illuminated the interior of the pirate ship’s hold. The murky water, filled now with freshly-stirred mud from the sea floor, seemed nearly as thick and opaque as tarbean tea, and things floated in it, things difficult to identify because they were hovering, without gravity pressing them down into their accustomed shapes. What appeared at first to be a shred of fog proved in fact to he a bolt of diaphanous silk, partially unrolled, stolen from the-gods-only-knew-where. Personal items littered the scene-brushes, curry combs, leather flasks crushed flat by the weight of the water, a cracked mirror, a hunk of half-eaten meat with teeth marks plainly visible'.

But what filled Conundrum with horror were the bodies, six at least. They were all minotaurs, but a sickening feeling washed over Conundrum when he looked at their bestial faces. In each case, the mouth hung open, and the tongue, mottled gray, dangled out the side. The eyes, too, were open, and seemed to be staring at something very far away. Their ears, their big bovine ears, struck him as the most pathetic. Soft, keen, intelligent, they swayed in the gentle currents and eddies still swirling through the hold, as though they yet listened for the order to abandon ship.

Conundrum turned away, trying to blank the vision from his mind. He ground his teeth and clawed at his curly red beard in frustration. All he ever wanted to do was solve puzzles. He wasn’t a warrior or a sailor. The sight of the drowned pirates filled him with cold loathing, and disgust, and pity-yes, pity-even for an enemy, even for a monster like a minotaur.

Doctor Bothy stuck his head into the room. “How’s the patient?” he asked.

Conundrum composed himself and looked at Sir Tanar. The Thorn Knight had regained consciousness. He sat up and glared about, feeling the back of his head and counting the lumps.

“Feeling better?” the doctor asked with a smile. Behind him stood Sir Grumdish, cheeks flushed and beaming happily. “I could give you another shot if you are still nervous.”

“No!” Sir Tanar shouted, then winced. “That won’t be necessary,” he finished in muted tones, but his eyes flashed with hate.

“Good, the commodore wants everyone on the bridge.”

The officers and crew of the MNS Indestructible drew together around the commodore. Their trembling white beards and drawn faces turned to him in the dim blue light. He’d ordered all but one glowwormglobe covered in order to darken the bridge. This allowed them to see, through the bridge porthole, the professor’s light shining from the bow porthole inside the sunken galley. It revealed to them the true gravity of their situation.

They were strangely silent-quiet as no gnome should be. Usually, given a situation calling for ingenuity and daring, they would have all been talking at once as rapidly as their tongues could wag, proposing, discussing, arguing, counter-arguing, counter-proposing, revising, and discarding a dozen ideas and theories all at the same time. But they needed to he able to get their hands on the problem, so to speak, and this was something quite beyond anyone’s grasp. For the problem literally lay outside their ship, and that was the one place none of them could go, not even wearing the professor’s diving suit. The steel head of the ram could not be withdrawn from the heavy beam into which it had embedded itself. The Indestructible and the pirate galley were bound together, irreversibly it seemed.

The commodore had called them all together to discuss their options, but when it seemed no one had anything to say, no theories to offer or experiments to try, he turned to Chief Portlost. “Chief,” he said, “how long would it take to reverse the engine?”

“Well, if we were in dry dock and I had a full crew of engineers,” he pondered, tapping his front teeth with a pencil, “I should say a month at least. Of course, it would require dismantling the ship.”

“That doesn’t sound practical, given our present situation,” the commodore said.

“Yes, I agree,” the chief replied. “You must admit, this is certainly a remarkable and unforeseen occurrence. You would have thought we would have included a reverse gear in the design from the beginning, wouldn’t you? This will require months, simply months of investigation. There’ll be interviews, and committees, and commissions, and possibly even a task force. We’ll produce a study of the events, with speculation and conclusions. It should run at least ten thousand pages. That is, if we live, of course.”

“The good thing is,” Snork offered, “we’ll know better with the next ship design.”