The Broken Sphere

deck, looking like some kind of partially deflated kickball. Its eyestalks, which, only minutes ago, had lashed the ship with magical destruction, hung limply. The big central eye was open, the black pupil contracted so far as to be an almost invisible hairline. The area of the mouth and the deck around it were spattered with blood and bile and partially digested meat. Teldin wrinkled his nose, suppressing his nausea only through a titanic act of will. The stench was terrible.

Although Djan's face showed his own distaste, he dipped a finger in the horrid liquid and raised it to his nose. He coughed-a tight, gagging sound-and wiped the finger clean on a cloth he pulled from his belt pouch. 'Bitter almonds,' the first mate said quietly. 'Poison.'

Teldin rose unsteadily to his feet. He looked around.

The Boundless looked as though it had been through a major action, suffering mightily under the heavy weapons of an opposing ship. The upper half of the mainmast was gone, as was much of the portside rail. The dying beholder's disintegration beam had blown half a dozen holes in the main deck and in the fore- and sterncastles. One of the stern spanker fins had been half torn away, and the mainsail was shredded, its fragments tied into complex knots, courtesy of the eye tyrant's telekinetic beam. The keel, the Cloakmaster could feel, as he extended his perception through the ultimate helm, had been cracked again-not critically, but enough to put the ship at serious risk if it had to weather any heavy maneuvering.

He sighed, shaking his head slowly. 'Casualties?' he asked Djan.

The half-elf s shoulders slumped. 'Four dead, not including Beth-Abz,' he announced, his voice exhausted. 'Six wounded, two seriously. One-Harriana-not expected to live.'

Teldin felt his head bow forward as if under a crushing weight. More dead. And how many more to follow before this was all over?

He forced his depression into the deepest recesses of his mind. Deal with that later, he told himself. Right now you've got to be the captain… and be seen to be the captain. He pulled himself up to his full height.

'Start the repairs,' he ordered loudly. 'Prepare the bodies for burial. And whatever the wounded need, give it to them.'

As crewmen scurried off to attend to their duties, the Cloakmaster turned to Djan and asked him quietly, 'You're sure about the poison?'

'As sure as I can be,' the first mate confirmed, his own voice barely above a whisper. 'Somebody killed Beth-Abz, almost killed the Boundless as well.'

'How is the ship?'

Djan shrugged. 'We can sail-slowly-but we can't fight,' he replied, confirming Teldin's own analysis. 'Dranigor's one of the wounded, but'-he glanced at Teldin's cloak-

'but I suppose that doesn't hamper us as much as it might.'

'Be thankful for small favors, you mean?' The Cloakmaster clapped his friend on the shoulder and squeezed- gaining as much reassurance from the gesture as he gave. 'You're right, of course.'

The half-elf lowered his voice even more, so much that Teldin had to lean forward to catch his words. 'The crew knows about Beth-Abz,' he said grimly. 'There's no way to cover this one up. They all know he was poisoned, and they know that means one of them did it.'

Teldin nodded. As with Blossom's death, the guilty party could have been anybody on board-literally anybody. Every crew member had free run of the saloon and the galley, of course, they had to be able to eat when they needed to. There wasn't a lock on the freezebox, as there might have been on some ships. Teldin had insisted on an honor system for such things, and it had worked fine. Until now, he reminded himself. Anybody could have slipped in, at any time during the voyage, and insinuated the poison into Beth-Abz's food. By unspoken consent, the meat that would be kept raw for the beholder was stored separately from the crew's provisions, so there'd been no risk that the poisoner would end up eating his own poison for dawnfry. The killer would have had to bring his or her own poison aboard, of course, possibly when the Boundless was last in port. But that wouldn't have been much of a problem. The Cloakmaster knew all too well how easy it was to buy just about anything around the docks of a major port like Starfall, and there was no way of knowing what a crew member brought aboard in his duffel, or even in his belt pouch. The only issue was the forethought and planning involved-it had been a long time since the squid ship had made landfall, but this whole thing reeked of a complex, organized plan, didn't it?

He sighed again, feeling the weight of his responsibility threatening to swamp him once more. For Djan's benefit, he tried to force a smile-but he feared as he did it that it would look more like a rictus. 'Try to get us as spaceworthy as possible,' he suggested.

'And then?' the half-elf asked softly.

Teldin had no answer for him but a shrug.

*****

The Cloakmaster thrashed, straining against sweat-soaked linen ropes. He moaned deep in his throat.

He knew he was asleep, knew he was dreaming, but that didn't make the dream any less horrific.

The dead Beth-Abz was hovering before him, the beholder's eyestalks limp and inert, its central eye sightless. Still it moved, tracking him with its blind eyes as he ran wildly around the deck of the Boundless. The creature's slack-lipped mouth was open, drooling blood and bile onto the deck beneath it.

And there was something stirring within that gaping mouth, something trying to free itself from the prison of the eye tyrant's body. It writhed and mewled, Coated with dark blood. As he tried to escape Beth-Abz's empty stare, Teldin couldn't see well enough to recognize just what it was that was trying to free itself and emerge into the light. But he had the unescapable feeling that he would recognize it if he only looked long enough. And that when he did recognize it, the horror would drive him insane. He moaned, running for the door leading into the forecastle, to his own cabin.

But before he could reach it, the door swung open. Someone stood there, the corpulent figure of Blossom, her head hanging unnaturally to one side. She smiled. Teldin recoiled in horror and sprinted past the beholder, heading for the door to the sterncastle.

Again the door opened before he could reach it, revealing Merrienne. Little Merrienne, the young woman who'd plunged to her death from the crow's nest as the squid ship had left Heartspace. The side of her head was slightly flattened, the skull staved in from its impact with the deck. Still she managed to bare her bloody teeth at Teldin in a warm smile…

Other figures were appearing from everywhere, climbing the ladder from belowdecks, descending from the fore- and afterdecks, even clambering over the rails from somewhere overboard. Allyn, the gunner's mate, and Vernel. Manicombe and Harriana. More-figures from deeper in the past. Dana, the gnome. Shandess, the forward gunner on the old Probe. Sylvie, the navigator, slain by an elven ballista shot in Herd- space. And still they came, all those who'd died while helping him in his quest-all those that he, in a way, had killed. They surrounded him, a ring of smiling faces atop torn or shattered bodies, pressing ever closer, forcing him nearer and nearer to the floating corpse of Beth-Abz.

He heard a sound. From deep within the body of the beholder it came, a sibilance of movement.

The thing within the eye tyrant, trying to escape?

But, no, it came from elsewhere, he recognized now. From all around him, maybe? Yet not that either. No, it came -somehow-from outside this horrible reality altogether….

And with that, Teldin was awake. He lay motionless in his bunk, staring up into blackness, every nerve fiber tingling. By the gods, what a nightmare. He was growing all too used to night terrors, but this had been particularly…

What was that! He stiffened.

It was the noise from the dream: a faint sibilance from somewhere in the darkness around him, as of something brushing softly against the deck. A foot? That was it-stealthy movement.

Was it the saboteur, the murderer, sneaking up on him, ready to finish him off as well? He'd latched the door of his cabin, but he knew all too well how little hindrance that would prove to someone with any skill at lockpicking.