The Broken Sphere (33 page)

The crew didn’t help. It was all human – a necessity, he had to admit, but still a disappointing one. Like most of his race, he enjoyed the company of his own kind. But there had been none of his race available, and, anyway, “Grampian” – the identity he’d maintained for much too long now – was human, and would presumably hire a human crew.

He sighed, a high-pitched whistling sound. Still, the quarry was near, now: still in the crystal sphere it had entered two days ago, the same sphere Grampian’s ship had entered, too, just hours before. Why remain here? he wondered. What was so fascinating that the quarry would remain in this vicinity? The question troubled him slightly. Anything that fascinated the quarry might turn out to be of help to him. And anything that helped the quarry would hinder Grampian.

Or perhaps the quarry just doesn’t know where to go next, he mused. That was possible, wasn’t it? Perhaps even probable. Grampian had been surprised by the quarry’s moves of late. Apparently the quarry
had
found something important in the Great Archive – why else the voyage to that tiny crystal sphere, deep in the Flow? And why else the trip to this undistinguished sphere, this valueless world in the vicinity of which the quarry now remained?

Still, any line of inquiry could play out at any time – Grampian knew that all too well from personal experience. Perhaps that had happened to the quarry.

Well, it wouldn’t matter soon enough. Grampian’s ship was closing the gap rapidly. It would arrive in another few days, unless the quarry decided to move on.

And, if Grampian’s plan worked as he expected it to, the quarry wouldn’t be
able
to move on. Grampian felt the muscles of his assumed face – quite different from his own muscles – twist thick lips into a smile. If all was happening according to schedule, his agent aboard the quarry’s ship should already be seeing to that. He nodded slowly. He’d chosen well with that agent, an intelligent operative, and highly innovative.

Grampian sat back in his chair, staring out of the red-tinged, ovoid porthole set in the bulkhead of the captain’s day room. Yes, he thought, a few more days, and then we’ll see what we shall see.

*****

Teldin emerged from his cabin into the saloon. His head felt stuffed full of cotton batten, and his eyes felt as though somebody had thoughtfully taken them out and sanded them for him while he’d slept.

Slept, he thought bitterly. If you could call what I did “sleep.” He’d tossed and turned for hours, replaying scenes over and over again on the stage of his mind. His betrayal by Rianna Wyvernsbane, the line of reasoning that supported his suspicion of Julia … Even an unhealthy volume of sagecoarse hadn’t stilled the churning thoughts and allowed him to relax.

And now he was paying the price for his “medication.” Lights seemed too bright, even the small lanterns in the saloon, and sounds too intense. Even the sound of someone making two bells had sounded like the tolling of doom. And smells –
anything
seemed capable of making his stomach writhe. He needed food, he decided, something bland but solid, to settle his stomach.

Unfortunately, he saw, a settled stomach wasn’t what he’d find in the saloon. There was only one of the. crew members there – the beholder, Beth-Abz. It was hovering beside one of the mess tables, telekinetically manipulating some food into its gaping maw. While Teldin had long ago come to consider the eye tyrant a friend, he still had difficulty watching Beth-Abz eat, particularly now, he thought. The creature’s meal, a joint of meat big enough to feed a family of four, totally raw and still dripping blood, hung in the air before it.

The Cloakmaster’s stomach knotted, threatening to empty itself at any moment. With a grunted greeting, he hurried aft, through the door, and out onto the cargo deck.

He breathed deeply, drawing the cool, clear air into his lungs. Thankfully, he felt his nausea subside and the cobwebs in his head start to dissolve. Damn fortunate thing Beth-Abz didn’t have to eat often, he told himself with a wry smile. Even with maybe one meal like that a week, the beholder was a serious drain on the ship’s provisions. Fortunate, too, that the
Boundless
had come equipped with a “freezebox,” a magical device of arcane manufacture that kept food fresh for protracted lengths of time. Beholders were carnivorous, after all, and Beth-Abz had proven unable to stomach cooked food. If they hadn’t been able to keep raw meat fresh in the freezebox, they’d have had to let the young eye tyrant off the ship long ago. Even with a good supply of food, Teldin mused, Beth-Abz probably found the proximity of the rest of the crew a real stimulus to his hunger – much the same as if the Cloakmaster were living and working in a well-stocked larder …

He shook his head. What am I doing? he asked himself. Inventing more troubles for myself? As if I don’t have enough ….

He looked out over the port rail. Garrash was a distant, ruddy disk about as large as an apple held at arm’s length, its fire ring still clearly visible. After his frustrating conversation with Zat, Teldin had ordered the ship to stand off from the planet. Not from any fear of the great metal creatures; they seemed – well, not harmless, but not inclined to do any harm. More than a dozen of the metallic beings had congregated in the vicinity of the squid ship, seemingly fascinated by the fact that there existed one of the “tiny, scurrying things” that could actually communicate with them. The great, mirrored triangles had taken to cruising close to the
Boundless
for a better view … and scaring the wits out of Teldin’s crew in the process. Even though he knew the beasts meant no harm, the Cloakmaster could understand his crew’s reactions. Seeing another one of the things – one hundred feet long, one hundred and fifty wide – drifting in space a spear cast off the beam was enough to frighten
him.

For that reason, he’d pulled the ship back to this distance. Zat and its fellows had seemed not inclined to travel so far just to satisfy their curiosity, and had returned to their normal life, which had let the crewmen return to theirs.

“Captain Teldin Moore.” A voice that could have come from a clogged sewer sounded behind the Cloakmaster. He turned.

Beth-Abz had followed him out onto the deck. The beholder had swallowed its meal, but drips of blood around its thin lips still were enough to start Teldin’s stomach churning again.

“Well met, Beth-Abz,” the Cloakmaster said, backing off a step to stay out of range of the creature’s slaughterhouse breath.

“Captain, …” the creature started, then its deep-pitched voice trailed off. There was something about the way its ten eyestalks moved that made Teldin think it was uncomfortable. What’s this about? he wondered, with a chill of foreboding.

“Captain,” it started again, moving closer and lowering the volume of its voice. A miasma of blood and other nauseating odors washed over Teldin, but he forced himself to stand his ground. “Captain, I have heard two of the crew talking about damage to the ship.”

“The ship’s damaged?” Teldin demanded.

The beholder’s eyestalks weaved a complex pattern. “I am not communicating well,” it said quietly. “I find my thoughts are somehow sluggish. What I mean is that they were speaking of
causing
damage to the ship.”

Sabotage! “Who?” Teldin saw a couple of the crewman on deck glance over as they heard his barked question. He forced himself to pitch his voice lower, and repeated, “Who? Who was it?”

Beth-Abz was silent for a moment. Teldin cursed silently in frustration. He knew that the eye tyrant had a frustrating inability to easily remember human and demihuman names – probably because they didn’t communicate the same information about clan and nation as did beholder names. “It was the small one,” Beth-Abz said slowly, “the small one on the bridge.”

Did that mean Julia?

“And another, a larger one.”

“Describe them to me,” Teldin ordered.

“The smaller one …” Suddenly the beholder fell silent. One of its eyestalks had suddenly convulsed, driving directly upward from the top of the creature’s body. The other nine pivoted around to stare at the wayward eye. “The smaller one … ° it started over.

The eyestalk convulsed again, another joining it in its spastic motion. The creature’s loose-lipped mouth opened slightly, and a gobbet of yellow-white saliva dribbled down its lower surface to drip on the deck.

“What’s the matter?” Teldin asked, suddenly alarmed.

“I feel pain,” Beth-Abz said, its voice taking on a strange, bubbling tone. “Sharp pain. I feel …”

Another convulsion racked its eyestalks – all of them, this time. The creature made a sound like a cough, and saliva sprayed Teldin’s jerkin, looking puslike against the black fabric.

“What is it?” Teldin asked again.

“Pain …” the beholder gurgled. Its huge central eye rolled wildly, the horizontal pupil contracting down to a black line, then suddenly expanding so large that the pale-colored iris almost vanished. It coughed again, but now green-black bile – or was it blood? – sprayed out with the spittle.

Teldin stepped back, horror and fear churning in his chest. What in the hells was happening?

Beth-Abz rocked, like a ship in heavy seas, listing one way then the other, as though it could no longer control its levitation power. The eyestalks convulsed again. The beholder crashed to the deck.

“What is it?” Teldin screamed at the stricken creatures. “What?”

The great mouth worked, made gargling sounds as Beth-Abz tried to answer. It coughed again, spewing bile and bright blood.

A brilliant green beam lashed out from one of the minor eyes, lanced out into space.

Teldin heard yells of alarm from the crewmen on deck, the thundering of running feet as they sprinted for safety. He backed off another couple of steps, wanting desperately to join them in their flight, but unable to take his eyes from the agonized creature.

Another beam – pinkish red this time – burst from another eye and persisted for a second or two as the eyestalk lashed about wildly. The beam swept through the air like a scythe, cutting into a pack of sailors struggling to get through the door into the forecastle. One of them screamed, a huge gout of blood bursting open in his back. The sailor fell, to lie still in a spreading pool of scarlet.

Now all of the thrashing, weaving secondary eyes were cutting loose with their magical powers. Beams of green, yellow, and actinic blue-white hissed through the air, striking wildly all over the ship. Teldin heard rather than saw the top of the mainmast detonate into splinters. The body of the dead sailor was struck by another beam, bright violet this time, and it was hurled into the air as though shot from a catapult. The green beam lashed out again, blasting a hole clean through the deck.

“By Paladine’s blood …!” Teldin gasped.

He had to get out of here, had to get clear of the creature’s magical convulsions. Its death throes? What else could they be? He turned and sprinted for the door into the sterncastle. More screams sounded in his ears, mixed with the rending of tortured wood as something forward blew apart. He grabbed the door handle and flung it open as another beam – this one as black as night – played momentarily over the planking by his head. He ducked low and flung himself through the door into the helm compartment.

There was nobody on the helm – no need for a helmsman when the ship was drifting in space – and the compartment was empty. Teldin leaped behind the heavy wooden chair that was the helm itself and crouched low.

Not a moment too soon. A green beam lanced through the forward bulkhead, exploding a man-sized area into dust before continuing straight through the rear of the hull and out into space. Even over the sound of the destruction, Teldin could hear the gargling, choking sounds of Beth-Abz’s death.

Another concussive blast sounded from the deck outside, then silence.

Teldin crouched behind the helm for almost another minute before emerging into the scene of devastation that was the
Boundless.

*****

The Cloakmaster knelt alongside Djan, examining Beth-Abz’s corpse. The dead beholder lay on its side on the 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.