of worn silver coins of an unfamiliar make. I gave them to Dromel for packing. We are not doing too badly now, though steel coins would be better.
We are waiting now on the beach for Hunter to return. Twig is chattering about fools she’s known on sea voyages. Dromel is stretched out in the sun, seemingly asleep. Pate walked off to see the ruined cottages once more for himself. I do not look forward to packing the five of us aboard our little undersea ship again, but at least we have aired out our ship and ourselves for a few hours. I think the others find my body odor far worse than they do each other’s. They probably think it is like an animal’s, like cattle maybe. It would figure. Hunter gets utterly filthy and never notices it; Dromel is a compulsive washer but has foul breath. Our smallest companion is always spotted with oil from working with the deepswimmer’s machinery. He-
Someone is shouting from the ruins. It sounds like P-
That was strange. I had a moment of confusion, probably from the day’s tension and exertions. I cannot remember what I was going to write. Strange.
We are going to call it a day and board the deep-swimmer before evening falls. I do not look forward to packing the four of us aboard our little undersea ship again, but at least we will smell more tolerable for a short while. Time to close until I continue tonight on the sea bottom.
Day 12, evening
We waded out to the deepswimmer and got aboard without incident, before twilight came. We have survived our first day on Enstar. I wonder what we did right. I wonder if we did anything wrong.
There was a curious incident once we were aboard. I remember that the air in the deepswimmer had an alien smell to it, though at first I did not mention this to my comrades, being unsure of the cause. Twig then went in search of a change of clothing, and while rummaging in the rear of the cabin brought out a dirty blanket and a cloth bag filled with small garments. None of it looked familiar to me; it seemed to be of human make, but sized for a child or a gnome. Dromel and Hunter frowned, examining the clothing in detail. Neither claimed it was his own. It certainly wasn’t mine.
Out of curiosity, I pressed one of the items, a shirt, to my nostrils and inhaled. I did it again, then held the shirt up to my eyes in the dim phosphor light. It did not smell like any of the four of us, and the scent was fresh and strong, less than a day old. That was not possible unless-
“Someone has been aboard the deepswimmer while we were out,” I said.
The other three were stunned. “The hatch was sealed,” said Dromel, looking around. His face was notably paler even in the faint phosphor glow.
I tossed the shirt aside and grabbed for the dirty blanket, jerking it from Twig’s fingers. “Hey, I was looking at that, you big buffalo!” she yelled. I ignored her protests and pressed the blanket to my muzzle, then inhaled deeply.
“It was a gnome,” I said, sifting quickly through the odors. “A male gnome, who had machine oil on him. He has eaten our food.” I drew back from the blanket. That gnome’s scent was the alien element I had detected in the air when we had come aboard.
I moved slowly around the deepswimmer cabin, smelling the walls, the floor, and the machinery. The others moved out of my way, watching me.
“He was here among us,” I said. “He has been among us for days.” There was only one explanation, I thought. The gnome must have been invisible. We could not possibly have missed him. A gnome is not that small, and a tinker gnome would not know how to hide himself even if he had a book on the subject.
“A gnome?” shouted Twig. “A gnome got into our deep-swimmer?”
Hunter said nothing, only looking carefully around the cabin with his right hand on the long-bladed forester’s knife sheathed at his side.
“A gnome,” said Dromel. He seemed about to say something else, but fell silent instead. He looked down at the small, ragged pair of trousers in his hands.
“We’d better see if he took anything while he was here,” said Hunter, with only a brief glance at Twig. “We could be missing valuables.”
“Oh,” said Dromel loudly. He smacked himself on the forehead. “I am an idiot. Please forgive me. Nothing is wrong.”
“What? Nothing’s wrong?” asked Twig in astonishment. “Someone sneaked aboard our deepswimmer and nothing is-
Dromel waved his hands about, cutting the kender off. “Nothing is wrong at all,” he said, with some exasperation. “No one sneaked aboard. This is probably my fault. I brought a few extra items aboard before we left. I wanted some extra clothing in case of emergencies, and I bought a load from the first person I saw, someone in the dock market, a peddler. I bet these are from that batch. She must have gotten them from a gnome. I never checked. That was foolish of me. I forgot all about it in the excitement.”
There was a little silence here, broken by Hunter. He sighed with a trace of disgust. “Understandable,” he said, making it clear that he would never have committed the same mistake. He took his hand from the grip of his knife and rubbed his face.
“Ooooohh.” Twig was plainly disappointed. “So no one sneaked aboard? We’re here all by ourselves?” Her eyes darted about the cabin, hoping to pick out the intruder and prove Dromel wrong. There was no one around but us, however.
I stared at Dromel, but he avoided my gaze. “We’d best get some sleep while we can,” he said, his voice imitating confidence. “Tomorrow’s going to be another day, and maybe the lucky one for us.” He wadded up the small pair of trousers and tossed it behind him into the rear of the cabin, without a second glance.
I watched Dromel at the propeller crank, trying to lower the deepswimmer. He struggled with it in vain before asking for assistance. “I must have gotten weaker since we got here,” he said. “It was easier the first time.”
I turned the crank with one hand, with little effort.
“We’re safe down here, right?” asked Twig. “I mean, those old shadow ghosts can’t find us here. That’s what you told us, right?” She had no trace of fear in her voice, only natural kender curiosity-and an innocent desire to irritate.
“
“Because they hate water, right?” continued Twig. “You said that those shadow ghosts don’t seem to like water, maybe because they’re cold inside and might freeze solid and get stuck that way. You said they hate fire, too, but we can’t burn anything on the deepswimmer or we’ll burn up, too. Best of all, the shadow ghosts don’t even know we’re here, they can’t see us down here at all, and that’s why we have a deepswimmer, so-”
Dromel’s face betrayed his anger. “We are perfectly safe here, as I’ve told you many times,” he said, his voice rising. “If we weren’t, we would all be dead now. They would have killed us the first night we were here.”
Twig’s face screwed up in concentration. “I thought you said they didn’t just kill people. You told me they came to Enstar and Nostar during the Chaos War and they made people disappear forever.”
Dromel hesitated. He almost glanced toward the back of the cabin, his face radiating anxiety. “They are believed by some authorities to do something like that,” he said quietly, “but there is no proof to it. The idea, actually, is that whoever shadow wights touch and slay is forever erased from the minds of the living. It is not just disappearing, it is erasure from all living memory, much worse than mere death. The victim is obliterated, wiped completely from mind and heart, gone, forgotten for all time. The body is evaporated, or turned to vapor, or something equally horrid. Only the. . the clothing is left.”
I thought then of the clothing that Twig found in the fishing boat. Had someone gotten into that boat long ago, foolishly hoping to escape the shadow wights by hiding in shadows?
“Gone,” said Twig. She sighed. “That would be horrid. I can’t imagine anything worse than nothing at all. That would be dreadful!” Her childlike face lit up with triumph. “But we have the relicsl Relics from the warsl”
Dromel was preparing for bed. Hunter looked bored. He curled up at his usual place at the bow and drifted away into his elven reverie, or whatever it was that passed for his sleep.
Twig watched as I took out my diary, but she did not ask to read it. She merely frowned at me, sniffed, then began examining her pouches for her day’s haul in little treasures.
