Into the Void

livelihood lay in trading messages and information would consider the 'mysterious employer' as a normal condition, and as a sacrosanct trust.

As the two had spoken, the Probe had slipped lower into the atmosphere. The world below had changed, unnoticed, from a section of a sphere to a flat plane that was for the first time truly below the vessel. As the viewpoint had changed, features had expanded and retreated, to be lost by distance and curvature. The southeastern tip of the island had expanded until it filled almost the entire view beneath the Probe. It continued to expand, too, bringing home to Teldin just how fast the ship was descending. The scattered clouds that had been just streaks overlaying the distant landscape were suddenly great islands of fleecy white, fantasy landscapes that could in tales become the homes of pegasi or dragons. The ship then plunged into one of the drifting islands, and everything was white. Teldin felt moisture on his face. Tendrils of mist whipped past him.

With breathtaking suddenness, the ship was out of the cloud and the view was clear again. They were much lower now, perhaps not much higher than the tallest mountain. The peninsula had vanished. There was just an indented coastline, roughly straight for as far as he could see in either direction.

There was no farmland, he noticed with some surprise. Did that mean that all the food necessary to support a city was shipped in from elsewhere? It wasn't that the region was barren; in fact, it seemed like it would make excellent farmland. Everywhere was lush and green, like the tended private parkland of a noble-except that this private park stretched from horizon to horizon. There were regions of uninterrupted greenery that could only be woods. At one point a thin line of green meandered through grasslands to reach the sea-a river lined with trees; it could be nothing else. The land was beautiful here, Teldin thought. There were much worse places for a man to settle down and make his living. Perhaps after this business with the cloak was finally concluded, he could buy himself some land here and be happy. Of course, where would he get the money? Ah, well, he told himself with a grin, burn those bridges when you come to them.

Rianna took his shoulder and pointed. The Probe had continued its spiral approach and was now on a different heading. While he'd initially been looking to sea, Teldin was now gazing inland. He was still unsure about the scale, but he guessed that the parkland extended five miles or so from the coast. Then, suddenly, the flat landscape changed. Rising out of the plain like walls were rugged, tree-covered hills. There was no hint of foothills. It looked almost as though the hills had just been placed randomly in the midst of arable land. Okay, let's set one down here, he could imagine one godlike workman saying to his fellow. The hills probably weren't that tall, he thought, but the contrast with the surrounding terrain made them look much higher. What would it be like to live at the foot of one of those? he found himself wondering. Claustrophobic? Or would you eventually get used to it and just not notice anymore?

He turned to Rianna. 'Who delivered the mountains?' he asked jokingly.

She laughed in reply. 'If they want to compete in my business, I'm getting out of it.'

The ship continued its slow spiral, dropping lower and lower with each turn. Teldin found himself looking at the coastline again, but now he was close enough to the ground to see the narrow white-sand beaches that lined the ocean. From here it looked as though the parkland came within a hundred feet or less of the water, then there was a low cliff-it was difficult to tell how high, because of the foreshortening effect of the ship's altitude-dropping down to a narrow strand, then the ocean. From this angle it wasn't the pure blue he'd seen from higher up; it had taken on a deep, almost metallic green and had gentle wrinkles like the marks of hammer blows on the forged steel of a plow blade. He could make out here and there the white froth of waves breaking on the sand.

Rianna squeezed his shoulder again and pointed forward.

There was the city, Rauthaven, a walled port town built around the circumference of a small bay that made for a perfectly sheltered harbor. Breakwaters extended from both sides of the bay's mouth, closing the entry into the harbor down to a narrow passage. There were watch towers at the extreme ends of the breakwaters, and Teldin imagined that in time of war chains could be drawn across the passage. The harbor itself looked packed with ships; vessels ranging from tiny fishing boats to coasters to ships-of-the-line swung at anchor, seemingly at random.

The city itself rose up the sides of the low hills that surrounded the bay. Once more altitude made it difficult to estimate sizes, but Teldin thought that the buildings were generally small and the streets wide and spacious. The larger of those streets radiated outward and uphill from the harbor like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Narrower streets followed generally concentric curves around the harbor. Around the city's walls, however, this sense of order broke down. The harbor was roughly circular, but the outlying regions of the city were much more irregular. For example, the city extended farther along the coast to the northwest, which put the harbor nearer the southeast end of the town. The buildings got larger as you headed northwest, until the largest of all were atop the low hill-with, no doubt, a spectacular view down into the harbor. Those would have to be the homes of the noble families, or whoever it was who governed the city, plus the richest of the merchants, Teldin thought.

In his travels, Teldin had seen a few cities, but nothing to rival Rauthaven in beauty. Krynn cities generally looked like jumbled assortments of buildings, some stone, some wood, tossed together with no kind of overall plan. Architectural styles warred and colors dashed. Here, even though they varied in size, all of the buildings seemed to share one architectural style, leading to a sense of harmony he'd never experienced before. The colors, too, were consistent. The vast majority of the buildings had white walls, with sloping roofs of what could only be red tile. As he watched, the sun came out from behind a cloud and the city practically glowed. He felt the breath catch in his throat. Again he found himself thinking, I could live here.

The Probe had changed course again and was now heading out to sea. This only made sense, Teldin reasoned: There was no space for the hammership to land within the harbor, and the natives might get a little nervous about a strange flying vessel heading straight for them.

Now there was an issue. He turned to Rianna. 'Are they likely to shoot at us?' he asked.

Her reply was a chuckle. 'Only if we do something untoward,' she elaborated. 'Believe it or not, Rauthaven gets a considerable share of Toril's spacefaring traffic. Mostly that's

because the whole of Nimbral is much more open to magic, and to things that would be too strange for the rest of Toril. It's also got a lot to do with its sheltered harbor. Spelljamming ships are built for space, even those that can land on the water-like this one-and they don't do well in heavy seas. So when you put one down, you want to get it into a snug harbor, and right quick, too.'

'How are we going to land?' Teldin asked. It was interesting. In all the conversations he'd had on spelljamming with Estriss, Aelfred, and the others, this was one topic they'd never touched on.

'It depends on the harbormaster,' Rianna replied, not quite answering his question. 'The lookouts will have spotted us by this time, and the harbormaster will be giving us our instructions on wind direction and speed, where we should drop anchor, that kind of thing.'

'Give us orders? How?'

'By flags. And-' Rianna pointed over the rail to the harbor that was now below them '-there they are.'

Teldin leaned over the rail, but not too far. While they had been in space with, presumably, uncounted millions of miles to fall, he'd felt no sense of vertigo, but now that they were only a thousand feet up, he felt an uncomfortable stirring in the pit of his stomach.

Rianna seemed to sense his discomfort and had the perfect cure for it. She leaned into him again so the sides of their bodies were pressed together from knee to shoulder. Teldin, not surprisingly, found he no longer noticed his vertigo. Rianna pointed again.

He sighted along her arm. At the innermost point of the harbor, directly opposite the passage through the breakwater, was another watchtower-like structure-presumably the harbormaster's office or whatever served its function in Rauthaven. From this angle, he could easily see a tall flagpole atop the building. A string of small, brightly colored flags extended the entire length of the pole. All except the uppermost were similar to the signal flags he'd seen used in the army. In pride of place atop the string was a larger flag that bore a red device-from this height, it was impossible to make it out- on a field of green. No doubt this was the flag or ensign of the city itself.

Teldin tried to read the message in the flags, using the code he half-remembered from his military service, but got only gibberish. They must be using a different code. The only information he could glean from the message was that the wind was blowing from the west-and this solely from the direction the flags were fluttering. 'What do they say?' he asked.

'Wind from the west, ten knots,' Rianna told him. 'We're told to identify ourselves.' She looked back over her