The Broken Sphere

by Nigel Findley

  That constraint wasn’t important now. Teldin figured he could lift the ship as fast as the cloak would let him, confident that the air resistance would only decrease with altitude, until the Boundless emerged into the vacuum of wildspace. By the time the vessel was at an altitude at which the mini-suns could conceivably threaten it, it would be traveling so fast that nothing could keep pace with it.

  “Ready,” Julia announced, setting her sextant aside. “We’ve got a window directly overhead.”

  Teldin nodded wordlessly. Tension still gripped his chest and throat, but as always he found his communion with the cloak kept the stress tolerable, almost as if it were affecting someone else. He looked forward to where Djan stood on the foredeck. The first mate waved and gave him a thumbs-up gesture.

  It was time to go. Teldin felt the power of the cloak grow around him, flow through him. Light flared, a nimbus of bright pink that seemed to shine right through his bones. He felt the ship around him like an extension of his body, an extension of his will. As responsive as thought itself, the large squid ship lifted clear of the ground.

  Teldin held the vessel at an altitude of fifty feet or so over the meadow, as he repeated his mental “inspection.” Now that it was airborne, the stresses on the ship’s hull and keel were slightly different. The staved-in planking of the hull had shifted slightly – nothing critical, he decided – but the keel felt as solid as a rock. Gently at first, he put the ship into a climb, feeling out its maneuverability, ready to respond instantly to any instability or other hint of problems. With his wraparound awareness, he saw the verdant forest drop away below him.

  The ship was steady, responding instantly to his mental commands. He let the speed build up slowly, as he simultaneously brought up the bow. Again the torn planking of the hull complained, but again he judged it to be nothing dire. Ever more confident with the ship’s solidity, he pushed the Boundless to the maximum speed he felt was safe within the atmosphere. Rigging creaked and sang in the wind that penetrated the vessel’s air envelope, an audible counterpoint to the tension that still gripped his heart. He brought the bow up even farther. The contrast between what his sense of balance and what his eyes told him became profound. While he felt as though he were standing upright on a horizontal surface, the horizon of the planet was canted at an angle of sixty degrees or more as the squid ship hurtled toward the freedom of space.

  Julia was back at the sextant, tracking the mini-suns once more. “No change,” she announced quietly. “The window’s still open.”

  Teldin nodded. He could feel the resistance of Nex’s atmosphere lessening, and he added a touch more speed. The ship was now flying faster than a dragon, faster than a swooping eagle. Soon, he knew, it would be traveling unimaginably faster still.

  Below the ship, the surface of the world was changing from the landscape of a map to a sphere. From this altitude, he could easily see the curvature of the horizon.

  Without warning, the keening of the wind through the rigging died. They were clear of the planet’s atmosphere, Teldin knew. The only air around them was that which the ship carried along with it, and that was traveling at the same speed as the vessel itself. In other words, there was no more air resistance. He extended his will, through the cloak, and the Boundless leaped forward.

  “Coming up on the mini-suns,” Julia said.

  “Any change?” he asked.

  She shook her head, her copper hair gleaming in the ruddy light of the fire bodies. “They’re all still on course.”

  “Let them stay that way,” he muttered.

  The passage through the region of the mini-suns turned out to be purest anticlimax. At the ultimate helm’s full spelljamming speed, the squid ship flashed through the danger zone and out into the emptiness of wildspace. If the Mind of the World had even noticed their departure, it hadn’t shown the slightest sign. According to Julia’s readings, no mini-sun had diverged even a fraction of a degree from its normal course.

  For the first time since the Boundless had lifted from the planet, Teldin let himself relax. “Please tell Blossom that she has the helm,” he said quietly to Julia, and he heard her relay the message down the speaking tube. Only when he felt the priest extend her will did he let the power of the cloak fade from around him. The ship immediately slowed to normal spelljamming speed from the velocity imparted by the ultimate helm.

  “Blossom wants to know what course to set,” Julia announced.

  The Cloakmaster was silent for a few moments. Then, “Tell her to take us out the way we came in,” he decided, “That’ll do for the moment. I need to talk some things over with you and Djan.”

  *****

  Teldin stared fixedly out of the Boundless’s starboard “eye” port, as if looking for an answer to his questions in the unrelieved blackness of wildspace. Behind him he heard Djan shift uncomfortably in his chair.

  “You don’t know where to go next,” the half-elf said quietly, is that it?”

  The Cloakmaster nodded wordlessly.

  “The People didn’t know where the Juna disappeared to?” Julia asked.

  “No,” Teldin replied. “Message Bearer said they’re just gone.”

  “But they did mention the Broken Sphere,” Djan reminded him.

  “Yes,” Teldin agreed, “but they didn’t say anything meaningful about where it is. Just that it’s ‘at the center of all things,’ and ‘between the pearl clusters’ or something. Does that mean anything to either of you?” He turned his back on the porthole to look at his friends.

  Djan shook his head. “That sounds like myths I’ve heard in the past,” he said, “about the First Sphere, the Cosmic Egg.”

  The Cloakmaster nodded. “Me, too,” he agreed, remembering what he’d read in the Great Archive on Crescent.

  “There was nothing new?” the first mate asked.

  “Only that the People link the Spelljammer with the Broken Sphere,” Teldin said, “and with the Juna. But I’ve heard both those connections before.”

  “And it doesn’t help anyway,” Djan concluded. “People have been looking for the First Sphere for a long time and they’ve never found it. What are the odds that we’d be the first?”

  Teldin glanced over at Julia, saw the pensive expression on her face. “What is it?” he asked. “Did you think of something?”

  She looked up, a little surprised to be jolted out of her reverie. “Probably not,” she said slowly, “it’s probably nothing …” She smiled self-deprecatingly. “But … you said something about ‘pearl clusters,’ didn’t you?” The Cloakmaster nodded. “Well, from the Flow, crystal spheres often look like pearls, don’t they?”

  “So?” Teldin wanted to know.

  “So, what if there’s somewhere in the universe where the crystal spheres are very close together?” she suggested. “Where they look like clusters of pearls? Maybe that’s where you’ll find the Broken Sphere.”

  A half-forgotten memory tugged at Teldin’s consciousness. What was it …?

  Then it came back to him. It was an image he’d seen through the perceptions of the Spelljammer via the amulet, while he was cruising in the Ship of Fools to the world of Crescent. An image of half a dozen crystal spheres so tightly packed that some were separated by less than the diameter of a single sphere – gathered together against the backdrop of the Flow like a cluster of gargantuan, magical pearls ….

  Excitement washed over him like a wave. Breathlessly, he described the image to his friends. “Is there any place like that on the charts?” he asked.

  His excitement turned into depression again as he saw them both shake their heads. “Not on any charts I’ve seen,” Djan answered for both of them. “Maybe it’s on some specialized chart somewhere, but most of the charts you can buy show only the important ‘known’ spheres, the ones that are on standard trade routes.” He laid a hand on the Cloakmaster’s shoulder in commiseration. “I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you different.”

  Teldin looked at his friends
with empty eyes. “Then I’ve got nowhere to go,” he said quietly.

  Chapter Nine

  Teldin felt drained, physically exhausted. He slumped into a chair and lowered his head into his hands.

  What now? he asked himself. Where do I turn? What do I do?

  This was the first time he really had no clues, no leads to follow. Since that first night, the night the spelljammer had smashed his farmhouse and set his life on a new course, he’d always had some goal to pursue. At first it had simply been escape. Then it was the gnomish port within Mount Nevermind. Then the arcane on Toril, followed by the elves of Evermeet, the fal of Herdspace, and on and on, until finally it was the forbidden world of Nex. There’d always been something to go after next, something to keep him going …

  Until now. The Juna were gone from the universe, or might as well be, for all the chance Teldin had of ever finding them. The Broken Sphere was … somewhere in the infinite universe, but he had no usable clues to lead him toward it.

  So what was he to do now? What? What course was he to instruct the helmsman to set?

  Where was the Cloakmaster to go now?

  It was a terrifying, overwhelming sensation, this aimlessness. For so long, he’d been following a path. It had been a twisting, cryptic one, granted, and often one that he had lit —

  He desire to follow, but now there was nothing. He felt as if he’d been set adrift on the trackless ocean, given no map and no instruments, no way of charting a course.

  Since the beginning of his quest, he’d been wishing for freedom. Wasn’t that what he had now? And, if so, why was it so traumatic?

  But this isn’t freedom, is it? he asked himself. The cloak still exists; I still wear it. And the enemies who’ve been after me from the outset are still out there, searching for me. No matter what I do to hide myself, they’ll eventually find me.

  That was the difference, he decided; that was where much of the anxiety came from. Before, the fact that he was being hunted had been almost secondary. He was being active. Now he had no choice but be reactive, responding to the actions of others.

  No. He felt some deep, basic part of himself rebel, strive against the depression that weighed him down. No, he thought again, I still have options. I’m still the master of my own destiny. So I’ve met an obstacle; I’ve met obstacles before, and I’ve never let them stop me. What’s so overwhelming about this one?

  He had the Boundless, which represented freedom to move. He had the amulet, which gave him access to the Spelljammer’s perceptions. He had friends and allies around him. He had options. His major obstacle, he decided, was an unwillingness to explore those options.

  Take the amulet, for example. As a matter of course, throughout the voyage, he’d been using the artifact, hoping to sense something that he recognized through the Spelljammer’s strange perceptions, something that would give him a clue about the Spelljammer’s location. So far he hadn’t seen anything useful, but there was always the next time, wasn’t there, and then the time after that? Eventually he’d have to see something that would give him some guidance.

  Why not now, for instance?

  He raised his head and looked at his two friends. Neither had moved. Both were watching him, their expressions showing how they empathized with his pain, but they respected his privacy too much to interfere.

  I have friends, he reminded himself again. And that was the most empowering thought of all. He felt new energy flow through him, felt a broad smile spread across his face. As he watched, his friends echoed that smile – a little more tentatively – though they couldn’t have known what was going through his mind.

  “I’m trying the amulet again,” he told them. He reached down to his belt pouch and extracted the bronze disk. The smooth metal felt heavy in his hands. Pregnant with possibilities? he wondered. He ran his thumb over the smooth surface, felt it slightly warm – from its proximity to his body heat, or for some other reason?

  Djan stirred in his chair. “Do you want privacy for that?” he asked quietly.

  Teldin considered for a moment, then shook his head. “It’s not what you’d call an exciting show,” he said with a grin, “but, if you don’t mind, I think I’d like the company.”

  He pulled his chair closer to the table and rested his forearms on the flat surface, with the amulet cupped in both hands. He stared at it intently, as though trying to memorize its texture, its color, its every feature. Simultaneously, he slowed and deepened his breathing, feeling the tension drain out of his shoulders and neck. In their own good time, he let his eyes shut. A tingling up and down his spine told him that the cloak was glowing with a bright bronze light. He felt a shift – there was no other way to describe it – inside his brain. And then his awareness seemed to blossom painlessly out through the top of his head and into the blackness of space.

  *****

  Fire!

  Fire everywhere, filling his entire perception. Surrounding the entire Spelljammer with liquid flames. Surreal flashes and bursts of yellow, green, even lightning-blue, against the red background.

  Yet the fire wasn’t licking at the Spelljammer, it wasn’t consuming it, or even heating the structure of the great ship. An ovoid bubble of clear, fire-free air surrounded the vessel, in much the same way as a normal ship’s atmosphere envelope excluded most of the phlogiston when in the Flow. Is it flying through a sun? the Cloakmaster asked himself.

  For the briefest of instants – so fleeting that it could easily have been an illusion – Teldin felt a flash of pleasure, aesthetic pleasure from the massive vessel, as though it sensed and appreciated the beauty of this sea of fire, Teldin thought. But that didn’t make sense, did it?

  And then, with shocking suddenness, the fire was gone from around the Spelljammer. Space was black and star-specked once more …

  Except dead astern. The fire was still there, a seemingly endless plane of silent yellow-red flames churning and writhing. And then, rising above the flame plane like the sun over Krynn’s Great Ocean, he saw a massive disk, glowing the dull red of a dying ember ….

  For a few moments, Teldin was totally disoriented. Then he realized just what it was he was seeing.

  The brick-red disk was a massive fire body, like a great, bloated sun. Even though there was nothing to give it scale, he knew – thanks to the strange perception bestowed by the amulet – that the fire world was titanic, as many times larger than the world of Krynn as the Spelljammer was larger than the Boundless. The “endless plane of flames,” he saw now, was a broad ring of yellow fire that girdled the huge world around its equator. So broad was the ring that a spelljamming vessel would have taken perhaps a quarter of an hour to traverse it, and the ring itself was probably a full hour of fullspeed flight from the “surface” of the fire body. The Spelljammer, it seemed, had plunged right through that ring of fire.

  The scene was spectacular – one that couldn’t exist twice in the universe, Teldin told himself. Maybe this was the opportunity he’d been waiting for, when the Spelljammer was near a recognizable world. He “looked” around, seeking more distinguishing features to eliminate the chance of error.

  There was something: a dark, circular area on the face of the great fire world, covering an appreciable fraction of the visible disk. A weather pattern in the fire? he wondered.

  And something else, shapes moving among the yellow flames of the fire ring. Great, angular shapes – winged forms like strange spelljamming ships built along unfamiliar configurations. Yet how could ships exist in the fire ring? he wondered. The Spelljammer had done it, but now he knew that it was only some magical attribute of the mysterious ship that had let it survive unscathed ….

  The view changed again. A small, bright disk – little more than a point – of burning, blue-white light rose above one limb of the dark red world. Sunrise on a sun …

  *****

  Without warning, the strange vista collapsed in upon itself. There was a wrenching sense of discontinuity, then information from Teldin
’s normal senses flooded back into his mind.

  He opened his eyes and looked into the concerned faces of his two friends. Setting the amulet down on the table, he wiped pinpoints of cold sweat from his brow. His fingers were trembling, he realized, and his heart pounded as if he’d run a footrace.

  Why? he asked himself. Why did using the amulet sometimes take so much more out of him than others? Was it something to do with distance – and did that then mean the Spelljammer was a great distance away? – or was it something else? There was so much about the amulet, and its relationship with the Spelljammer and the ultimate helm, at he didn’t understand.

  “Well?” Julia asked. “Anything?”

  “I think so.” Teldin’s voice sounded tired in his own ears. from the solicitude that showed in his friends’ expressions, he guessed he looked as bad as he sounded … if not worse. “Maybe something important.” He went on to describe what he’d seen in as much detail as he could. “I can’t imagine that there could be more than one place like that in the universe,” he concluded dryly.

  “I think you’re right,” Djan said. His voice was quiet, but held a timbre of tightly controlled excitement. “A fire world a half day’s flight in diameter, with a fire ring,” he went on, ticking points off on his fingers. “A dark spot – maybe some kind of weather pattern, you think. And all orbiting a smaller, blue-white sun. I think it has to be Garrash.”

  “Garrash,” Teldin echoed. “You’ve been there?”

  “I didn’t say that,” the half-elf corrected. “I read about it once in the Geonomicon – that’s a book describing almost a hundred of the more fascinating worlds ever discovered – but your description definitely matches what I remember.”

  “Where is Garrash?” Teldin demanded. “Near here? Far?”