The Broken Sphere

by Nigel Findley

  Still, it sickened him. There seemed something … base, something ignoble about it. Wasn’t it more – “acceptable” wasn’t quite the right word – to fight, to kill, to die, for a cause more honorable, more based in principle, than profit? Take the War of the Lance, for instance. Large portions of Krynn had been laid waste, but didn’t it matter that the cause was worthy?

  Not to the dead. The thought bubbled up from some dark corner of his mind. He remembered those he’d known who’d died in the war. Did it matter to them why they’d died?

  With a disgusted shake of his head, he focused back on the arcane before him. Now wasn’t the time to worry about philosophical digressions. “What if I told you I had no interest in breaking your monopoly?” he asked T’k’Ress.

  The creature’s thin lips drew back from the solid, bony ridges that served it as teeth, a disgusting expression that Teldin guessed it had learned from humans. “I might believe that you tell the truth for the moment,” T’k’Ress said, no hint of humor in its voice, “but trust that you tell the truth for all time? Thai you would never consider it? No.” It shook its head. “I could never trust so much.”

  Djan spoke up for the first time. “If you’d won,” he asked quietly, “if you’d defeated Captain Moore and taken the cloak, would you have donned it yourself?”

  T’k’Ress’s tiny eyes opened as wide as they’d go in an expression of almost ludicrous surprise. “I?” Still, none of the creature’s emotion sounded in its voice. “Never. The benefits might be high, but the risks and costs would almost certainly prove higher. Where would be the benefit to me?” It gave its strange, twisting shrug again. “Perhaps eventually I could find a way of realizing a profit without risking the monopoly, but it would take much thought.”

  “Tell me how you planned to acquire the cloak,” Teldin told the arcane.

  “You already know.”

  “Tell me,” the Cloakmaster snapped.

  “As you wish,” T’k’Ress said mildly. “I tried to block your research into the Spelljammer on Crescent. When that failed, I hired Berglund to intercept you.”

  “What was that nonsense about Falx?” Teldin demanded.

  The arcane spread its long hands. “It seemed unwise to tell a hireling the truth,” it explained, “lest he should fail … as he did. Had he succeeded, I would have met his ship en route to Falx and taken my prize at that point. As it was, you perhaps spent energy in preparing to counter a threat from a direction where no threat existed.

  “In all honesty, I did not expect Berglund to succeed,” T’k’Ress confided. “You were, by all accounts, an innovative man and a skilled ship’s captain. It would be foolish to trust to a single stratagem.”

  “So you put spies – saboteurs, murderers – aboard my ship,” Teldin growled.

  Unaffected by the Cloakmaster’s anger, T’k’Ress nodded. “Dargeth and Lucinus, yes. Dargeth was a mage with a mind of great subtlety, one of the finest dissemblers I have ever met. Lucinus, too, was a fine operative.” The creature raised its hairless eyebrows in interest. “What fate did they meet?” it asked incuriously.

  “During the battle they tried to escape,” Djan answered. “Their guards were forced to kill them both.”

  Teldin knew that the half-elf was telling the complete and utter truth, but the arcane obviously didn’t believe him. Not that it mattered one whit to the creature, the Cloakmaster could see by its expression. He felt anger, hatred, burning in his chest.

  “What happens now?” T’k’Ress asked quietly.

  That was the question, wasn’t it? But as soon as the question was posed, the answer appeared fully formed in his mind. “We maroon you here aboard the Boundless,” Teldin told him coldly. “We take your ship.”

  “Aboard the squid ship?” For the first time, the Cloakmaster could hear alarm in T’k’Ress’s voice. “Is it not crippled?”

  “Not totally.” It was Djan who answered. “It’s dead in space for the moment, but you should be able to repair it … eventually.”

  “But the helm —”

  “Should be functional,” the half-elf cut T’k’Ress off. He grinned fiercely, his expression echoing Teldin’s emotions. “If not, you should be able to repair it, shouldn’t you? It’s part of the arcane monopoly, after all.”

  “But …” T’k’Ress looked worried now. “But I sell helms —”

  It was Teldin’s turn to cut him off. “You don’t repair them, is that what you’re trying to say?” He smiled coldly. “I’m afraid you’re not going to find me too sympathetic.”

  “Berglund and the mercenaries will not wish to go along,” the arcane pointed out desperately.

  “Then it’s up to you to make them, isn’t it?” Teldin snapped. “You’ll recall my colleague has a crossbow pointed at your large blue head. And you can be dead sure he’s not going to set it down until you’re all safely aboard the squid ship and we’ve pulled away.”

  T’k’Ress studied Teldin’s face. “Would you really kill me?” it asked, its voice a high-pitched whisper.

  “After all of his friends you’ve killed? What do you think?” Djan shot back.

  Teldin kept his face expressionless, pleased that the half-elf’s answer had really been no answer at all. That’s my weakness, he thought grimly. Could I order Djan to put a crossbow bolt into the arcane’s head, just like that? And would he obey? The trick, then, was to maintain the bluff so strongly that T’k’Ress wouldn’t dare call it.

  The arcane was silent for a moment, its small eyes – shiny, like small, polished stones – studying Teldin’s. Then it dropped its gaze and looked away.

  It has its answer, Teldin thought. Let’s hope it’s the right one.

  T’k’Ress looked up again. “And as for you?” it asked Teldin. “You will continue to pursue the Spelljammer, will you not? Where will you go?”

  Teldin hesitated. Why not tell it? he asked himself, with a rush of frustration. It’s not as if I really know anyway. “To the center of all,” he said, “between the pearl clusters. Down the secondary eddies of the paramagnetic gradient.”

  Something changed in the arcane’s eyes – a flicker of recognition, of understanding. It knows, the Cloakmaster realized. “You know about the paramagnetic gradient, don’t you?” he demanded harshly. “You know what it is. And you know how to measure it, don’t you?” Yes, he thought, his certainty increasing as he asked the questions. Yes, I’m right.

  “And you …” T’k’Ress started. Then it shut its mouth with an audible click.

  “And I don’t,” Teldin confirmed. He strode up, glared up into the blue giant’s cadaverous face. “But, by Paladine’s blood, you’re going to tell me.”

  “No.” The arcane shook its head firmly. “No, I will not.”

  Slowly, with what he felt as a terrible certainty, Teldin drew his short sword. He rested the blade across the flat of his left palm, stared intently into the mirror-bright blade as if an answer could be found there. Both his hands were trembling, he noted almost detachedly. “Then I’ll hurt you, T’k’Ress,” he said quietly. In his own ears, his voice sounded devoid of emotion. It could as well have been the voice of Death itself. “I’ll hurt you as you’ve never been hurt before, more than you’ve ever thought you could be hurt. I’ll keep hurting you until you tell me what I want to know. And you will tell me,” he added, a touch more conversationally, “eventually. And you know what?” He raised the short sword so that its tip pointed right between the arcane’s black-marble eyes. “I hope you don’t tell me for a good, long while.”

  T’k’Ress stared down, aghast, its blue skin paling with horror. Its mouth worked silently for a moment before it could force any words out. “You would not do this …” it gurgled.

  Teldin drew his lips back from his teeth in a killing smile and echoed Djan’s words. “After all of my friends you’ve killed? What do you think?” He turned to Anson, standing – open-mouthed with shock – by the door. “Bring some ropes to secure our friend,�
� he told the sailor. Then, as an afterthought, added, “And some absorbent cloths, too.”

  Anson stared at him for a moment, then hurried to obey.

  T’k’Ress surged halfway out of its seat, before Djan steadied his crossbow at its head and snapped, “No!” The arcane’s eyes flicked back and forth between Teldin’s sword and the half-elf’s crossbow.

  “Think about it, T’k’Ress,” the Cloakmaster hissed. “If you don’t want to tell us, you’ve got two ways to go. The quick way” – he inclined his head toward the crossbow – “or the lingering way.” He stroked the blade of his sword almost lovingly. “It’s your choice.

  “Or …” He paused, drawing out the tension. “Or you can tell us what you know. As I said, it’s your choice.”

  For a terrible moment, he thought the arcane was going to resist, was going to call his bluff.

  But then T’k’Ress seemed to deflate, as all the resistance went out of it. “I will tell you what you need to know,” it said, “if you swear to let me live.”

  It was difficult to keep the triumph out of his face, but Teldin figured he’d managed it. He shrugged, as though the issue was hardly worth discussing. “We’ll see when you’re finished if it’s worth your life,” he said as coldly as he could.

  “It will be, I assure you,” the arcane said hurriedly. “If you will take me to the captain’s day room on the command deck, I will even show you.”

  Teldin glared fixedly at the arcane, letting the tension build as high as he dared. Then he nodded briskly. T’k’Ress sagged with relief, wiping at its eyes with a six-fingered hand. While its eyes were covered, the Cloakmaster flashed Djan a smile of victory.

  *****

  The arcane had to hunch forward to fit under the low, curved roof of what it called the captain’s day room. On the uppermost deck of the nautiloid, this was little more than a broad extension of the causeway that supported the captain’s chair. The only furniture was a human-sized chair, a small map table …

  And something that looked like a narrow, waist-high pedestal, on which to display a small sculpture or other work of art. Its fluted column was intricately carved wood, so dark as to be almost black. Its circular top, about two feet in diameter, was a flat sheet of smoky white crystal, smooth and cool to the touch. On closer inspection, Teldin could see fine black lines graven into the crystal’s surface – a dozen lines crossing the circle, intersecting at a single point, and six concentric circles centered around that point.

  Now, in the dimly lit compartment, the crystal glowed with a faint greenish light. On its surface – or, more properly, a fraction of an inch below it – were small blobs and traces of color, pink, dark blue, and green.

  T’k’Ress ran its long, slender fingers almost lovingly over the smoked-crystal surface. “A planetary locator,” it said. “You have heard of these?”

  Teldin nodded. Even though he’d never seen one, he knew of them. They were devices built by the arcane, operating on principles that no other race had yet come to understand, though many had tried.

  “What’s so important about this?” he asked. He still had his sword drawn, and he toyed with it meaningfully.

  “You do not know the principle behind the planetary locator,” T’k’Ress explained quickly. “Few beyond my race do, I believe. The locator detects planetary bodies by the perturbations they cause in what we call the ‘loomweave.’”

  “So?” the Cloakmaster demanded.

  “I have heard that the falmadaraathae have tried to understand the operating principle of the locator,” T’k’Ress went on, somewhat elliptically. “They have had some minimal success. They have some conception of the loomweave … yet they use their own term for the phenomenon.”

  “The paramagnetic gradient,” Teldin guessed.

  “Correct,” the arcane confirmed.

  Teldin nodded slowly. He remembered the images that Zat had fed into his mind. At the time, he’d compared the twisting, whirling fields of colors-yet-not-colors to skeins of spiderweb-thin fibers. The ‘loomweave? Yes, the word was definitely appropriate.

  Djan still had his crossbow leveled at the arcane’s head. Now the half-elf inclined his head to indicate the crystal-topped pedestal. “So this detects the loomweave?” he demanded.

  “So I have said,” affirmed the arcane. “It is a subtle example of technomagic.” Its tone was proud, almost smug.

  “What about secondary eddies?” Teldin wanted to know.

  “In its present form, it detects tertiary disturbances in the loomweave,” T’k’Ress told him. “But …” For a moment it hesitated, again apparently considering resistance, then it pressed on. “To detect the tertiary eddies, it must also detect the secondaries, if only to ignore them. The locator is simply set not to display them. Do you understand?”

  Teldin forced himself to nod firmly, even though the truth of the matter was that he hardly understood anything the creature was saying.

  Fortunately, Djan seemed to be following T’k’Ress a little better. “And you can adjust the display,” he said, as more of a statement than a question.

  T’k’Ress inclined its head. “I can.”

  “Then do it,” the Cloakmaster ordered.

  *****

  “It is ready,” T’k’Ress announced almost an hour later.

  Teldin had tried to watch the adjustments the creature was making to the mysterious pedestal, trying to make some sense of them, but to his eyes it had seemed that the arcane was doing nothing more than running its slender, many-jointed fingers around the circumference of the crystal display and over different portions of the supporting pedestal. “Show me,” he ordered.

  T’k’Ress simply pointed at the circular display on the locator’s upper surface.

  Teldin moved forward, careful not to block the line of fire of Djan’s crossbow. This could be some kind of trick, he reminded himself wryly. He leaned over the locator and examined the display.

  From what little he’d heard about planetary locators, the devices normally showed simple, discrete dots to represent planets and other astronomical bodies, their colors indicating their true nature. This display was very different, the Cloakmaster noted at once. Instead of clean, discrete circles and dots, the crystal surface was covered with a shifting network of hair-thin red lines, making an almost impossibly fine mesh. In places, the mesh seemed to fold in on itself, twisting into some complex pattern.

  Here, for example. With his forefinger he traced a place on the display where the mesh – shading from red to yellow – was twisted into great loops, whirling up and around like some impossible skein of wool. Encompassing the loops was a circle of intricate patterns rendered in burning yellow-white, where the spiderweb-thin lines wove in and out, spiraling and knotting around each other.

  It was the loomweave, he knew with sudden certainty. It was the same twisting, swirling field of energy that Zat had shown him, in orbit near the fire ring of Garrash. The perspective was different now, and the detail and resolution so much less. The colors, too, weren’t right – on the display there were colors, not the strange analogues that the Cloakmaster had sensed. This was Garrash and its ring he was looking at – or their presence as defined by eddies in the loomweave.

  Teldin shook his head, almost incapable of believing it. Now, for the first time, he had the tool he needed to find the “center of all,” the Broken Sphere.

  He looked up at Djan and felt a broad, triumphant smile spread across his face. “Transfer the crews,” he told his first mate. “We sail immediately.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Teldin Moore drove the nautiloid outward from the vicinity of Garrash, toward the boundary of the crystal sphere, at the maximum speed the ultimate helm could manage. He sat in the single human-sized chair in the captain’s day room. Through the wraparound perception of the cloak he saw the crippled squid ship falling rapidly away behind them.

  There’d been a couple of tense moments as the arcane’s mercenary crew had filed aboard
the wrecked Boundless. Even though they were unarmed and facing the weapons of Teldin’s crew – and even though their employer, T’k’Ress, had specifically ordered them to go peacefully – Teldin could hardly believe it when all were aboard and he backed the nautiloid’s ram out of the squid ship’s hull.

  For a moment, Teldin felt a twinge of guilt at marooning the arcane and its men aboard a ship that might never sail again. But the emotion was fleeting; all he had to do was remember the faces of his dead comrades – and, particularly, Julia’s peaceful, bloodless countenance – and his regrets evaporated like a snowball thrown into a sun.

  Through his omnipresent senses the Cloakmaster saw Djan climbing the ladder to join him in the small day room. He smiled at his friend. “How’s the crew?” he asked.

  “Adapting as well as can be expected,” the half-elf responded. “We can maneuver, but we don’t have the men to fight with this ship.”

  Teldin nodded. Crewing even one weapon would take too many men away from more vital duties. “We’ll just have to stay out of trouble, then.”

  Djan nodded. He didn’t say anything else immediately, but neither did he make any move to leave. On his face Teldin saw the expression that he’d come to associate with unpleasant thoughts. “Out with it,” he told his friend at last.

  The half-elf sighed and seated himself on the edge of the map table. “That was too easy,” he said softly. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Teldin nodded unwillingly. He’d been thinking the same thing. The monopoly that the arcane, as a race, possessed over spelljamming technology was of almost inconceivable value. Yet T’k’Ress had given Teldin a means of finding the Spelljammer – and thus potentially destroying that centuries-old monopoly – while putting up virtually no fight. Certainly, Teldin had threatened the creature with torture and death, but even a modicum of resistance would have shown his threats to have been empty bluff.

  Even if T’k’Ress had utterly believed that Teldin would kill it, surely the magnitude of the loss to its race if the monopoly were destroyed would be reason enough to sacrifice itself. And even if the creature had no loyalty to any beyond itself, it must have realized that destroying the monopoly would earn itself the eternal enmity – and probably the vengeance – of every member of its race. It just didn’t make sense …