Into The Void

by Nigel Findley

  The burly warrior was staring in open stupefaction. He blinked his eyes hard, as if to clear them, then he shook his head. “I don’t believe it,” he said flatly. “I out and out don’t believe it. Teldin, this is your doing?” He instantly answered his own question. “Of course it is – who else’s?” He shook his head again, then his face suddenly split in its familiar asymmetrical grin. “By the gods,” he roared, “I can think of some situations where I wish I could have done that.”

  Estriss kept his white eyes fixed on Teldin. That was considerably faster than the first time, he announced. This change took perhaps ten seconds, the first almost a minute. How do you feel?

  “Well,” Teldin started … and stopped. When he’d worn Aelfred’s face, he hadn’t consciously noticed the fact that his voice was unchanged. Now, though, his male voice was coming from Dana’s female lips. Until that moment, the fascination – and the personal fear – of what he was doing had filled his mind. The initial shock had faded, however, and the consequences of what he was doing really began to penetrate.

  This is wrong, he found himself thinking, very wrong. He shut his eyes and melted away Dana’s features as quickly as he could. He checked the mirror. Yes, he was Teldin again. A little shakily, he sat down on the illithid’s bare bunk.

  Estriss was watching him fixedly. What is wrong? he asked. Was there pain? Exhaustion?

  “No,” Teldin mumbled. “No, none of that.”

  The cold you felt the first time, was it repeated? More intense, or less?

  “What? Oh, less. Much less.”

  How do you feel now? Are you more tired than you were before?

  “A little. Not much.”

  The illithid might have had another question, but Aelfred’s deep voice cut him off. “What’s wrong, Teldin?”

  “This is,” Teldin snapped. “This whole thing. Putting on somebody else’s face.”

  Estriss’s tentacles gestured incomprehension. Why? Why is this wrong?

  “It is.” Teldin hesitated, searching for the right words to communicate what he felt so clearly inside. “It’s a lie,” he tried. “I … I was brought up to value the truth, both in myself and in others. The truth. It’s what I’ve always worked toward. It’s …” Suddenly he recalled a phrase from a book his grandfather had given him years ago. “‘The truth is a light,’ “he quoted, “‘a light that banisheth the shadows which beset us.’ Do you understand what I’m saying? This —” his gesture included himself, the cloak, the mirror “— this is a lie.”

  There was silence for more than a dozen heartbeats, then Aelfred asked gently, “You probably wouldn’t feel so strongly if you hadn’t chosen Dana’s face, would you, now?”

  Good question, part of Teldin’s mind responded. Would I? Probably not. He shrugged.

  The experiments may have disturbed you, Estriss said firmly, but they were important and valuable. Consider what we have learned. The cloak has powers related to shapeshifting, which are now under your control. The first time you used this power, you felt the drain quite strongly, but the second time you found it much easier and the drain was considerably less. Is that not so?

  Teldin had to agree.

  Then you are starting to control the tendency to give up your own energy, Estriss continued. Correct? And finally … He leaned forward urgently. Finally, you have gained a great advantage over those who may be pursuing you. Do you not see that? They may be searching for a man of six feet with short brown hair. Would they spare a second glance it a woman of five feet with blond hair to her waist?

  Teldin nodded slowly. That was true, but … “What if they can track the cloak itself?” he asked.

  If that is the case, there is nothing you can do, but are we certain that everyone whose hand is turned against you can detect the cloak itself? It seems to me much more likely that only some few have this ability, if any. Against the others, you now have a significant advantage.

  “It’s one I’m not comfortable with,” Teldin muttered.

  Perhaps that comes from lack of focus, Estriss replied. To his surprise, Teldin sensed more emotion in the illithid’s mental voice than ever before. I heard what you said about valuing what is true. For myself, I would extend that. I value what is right. How best can we, both of us, serve the right, Teldin Moore? By allowing this cloak of yours to fall into the hands of the neogi? Or by doing whatever is in our power to prevent that? I know what my answer must be.

  The illithid turned away suddenly and busied itself with returning the silver mirror to the desk drawer. It was almost as if Estriss felt embarrassed by his emotional outburst, Teldin realized with surprise.

  Aelfred was watching him silently, understanding in the big man’s eyes. Teldin bowed his head. “You’re right,” Teldin said quietly. “Thank you for reminding me of that.”

  Estriss shrugged off the thanks. It is only logical, he said. What is also logical is that you should practice this ability of the cloak every day, perhaps several times each day. The drain you felt was less the second time, but it was still there.

  “I don’t know what in all the hells you’re talking about,” Aelfred rumbled, “but just on principle I back the captain. Practice. It’s important.” He was silent for a moment, then went on, “One thing: I don’t think it’s a good idea to let the rest of the crew know about any of this. I think they’ve accepted you as some kind of warrior-mage —” he snorted with amusement at this “— so that won’t worry them, but if they don’t know if the person they’re on watch with is who they think it is, or it’s you practicing … It’s going to do something to morale, if you get my drift.”

  “I understand.”

  Aelfred slapped Teldin comradely on the arm. “Well,” he said, “if you don’t have any more miracles to show me, I should get back on duty. We’ve got some of the new inductees on the rigging, and if I don’t keep an eye on them, we’re just as likely to end up back at Krynn as we are at Realmspace.” He grimaced. “I know it’s a touchy subject, but your diminutive friend, Horvath, has threatened to oversee repairs. Scary.”

  *****

  Despite Aelfred’s misgivings, the remainder of the journey through the flow was notable for its lack of mishaps. The “new inductees,” as Aelfred called them – actually the surviving members of the deathspider’s boarding party – seemed to integrate with the rest of the Probe’s crew without any major difficulties. Over the first couple of days after the battle, Teldin could tell a “new inductee” a ship-length away. There was something about the way they walked and stood, as though they wished they could sink into the deck or the bulkhead and just fade from view – “trying to look invisible” was Aelfred’s phrase for it. If anyone spoke to them – or even looked at them – they flinched, as though they expected to be beaten. Or worse, Teldin speculated, remembering his own experiences with neogi on Krynn.

  Plus, they had a tendency to stand around, trying to look invisible, unless they had specific orders to do something. On the third day after the battle, Teldin saw a perfect example of this. One of the hammership’s regular crewmen – a little man named Garay – was standing on the rail, cleaning the sheaves of a rigging block with a marlin spike. As he shifted position, the spike fell from his hand. It landed on the deck, barely a foot in front of a new inductee named Tregimesticus, who just stood there, looking at the spike near his feet.

  “Well?” Garay called down from the rigging. “Aren’t you going to pick the bloody thing up?”

  Tregimesticus jumped as though he’d been whipped, snatched the spike off the deck, and scampered up the rigging to place it right into Garay’s hand.

  When the man was gone, Garay climbed down and came over to where Teldin was standing. “Dead from the neck up,” the crewman grumbled. “I’ll be flogged if any of them come around to right thinking.”

  Surprisingly, though, some of them did start to come around. Perhaps they were the ones who hadn’t been aboard the death-spider as long – nobody felt comfortable asking, of cou
rse – or perhaps they were just the ones who naturally had stronger wills. In any case, of the ten “new inductees,” four seemed slowly to be returning to the land of the living. They started talking to the other crew members – even when they hadn’t been spoken to first – and even began to strike up friendships. The other six, including Tregimesticus, didn’t seem so lucky or so adaptable. They followed orders with a speed that made the regular crew of the Probe look like sluggards, but they never showed anything that could be mistaken for initiative, and they kept the habit of trying to look invisible.

  In any case, the voyage progressed uneventfully. For Teldin, it was a pleasurable time. There was something comforting about the strict routine aboard the Probe. Aelfred returned him to normal watch-standing, which meant that eight hours out of every day was spent scanning the flow for possible danger. The rest of the time he was free to do as he liked. He still shared the cabin with the three surviving gnomes – Horvath, Miggins, and Saliman, but found that his watch-standing schedule was opposed to theirs; when they were on watch, he was asleep, and vice versa.

  This didn’t mean that they never met, of course. As soon as he had time after the battle, Teldin made a point of tracking down Miggins. He found the young gnome in the starboard side stateroom that had been converted into an infirmary for the many injured in the deathspider’s attack. Teldin found it uncomfortable to enter the cabin-like many people who depended on health and strength for their livelihood, he found it deeply disturbing to be around those who were physically impaired – but he forced his qualms out of his mind and put on a smile.

  Miggins was almost indecently glad to see him. Although he hadn’t seen it, he’d heard about Teldin’s exploits on the forecastle. As always, the tales had grown with the telling, and Teldin found that he’d become a sort of personal hero to the youth. Teldin was a little troubled about this but decided this was neither the time nor the place to change Miggins’s attitude.

  Miggins was progressing well and was glad to tell Teldin all about it. His left arm was grievously wounded, and there was a significant chance that he’d never regain full use of it, but at least the healers’ initial concern – that they’d have to amputate to save the gnome’s life – had turned out to be baseless.

  Conversation had inevitably turned to Dana, “I miss her,” Miggins had admitted, “but, you know, I could never really think of her as a gnome. She was more like one of you big folk. She was never too interested in the way things work, and she liked action much more than she did talk.”

  Teldin had nodded, remembering her feisty manner and the way she’d tried to stand up to Aelfred in the longboat.

  “Ah, well,” Miggins had continued, “at least she died the way she always said she wanted to – in battle.”

  Another one who died a “good” death, Teldin had found himself thinking. What would be a good death for me? Or does it really matter?

  The injured gnome tired easily, so he’d left soon thereafter. It had saddened him to talk about Dana, but in another way it had been somehow freeing, as if in talking about her – celebrating her existence – he’d come to terms with her passing.

  In the days that followed, even though he didn’t see the gnomes, he was reminded of their existence by shipboard gossip. Virtually everyone aboard had a favorite “gnome story,” about how the small creatures would have “remodeled” the Probe if somebody hadn’t caught them before the damage was done. Teldin’s favorite was Miggins’s suggestion that a hole be cut in the hull to allow the underside of the hammership to be used as a secondary weapons platform. Explanations that this would make the vessel as seaworthy as a brick when it put down on water didn’t dissuade the young gnome. All he did was come back with a bewildering description of baffles and gaskets to solve the problem. Predictably, some of the less patient crew members threatened the small creature with death if he so much as mentioned the idea again.

  When he wasn’t sleeping, Teldin had taken to wandering the ship and talking with those crewmen he met. This had turned out to be a very good idea. Initially the crew had treated him with a respect that contained a healthy measure of fear. They’d stayed out of his way – after all, wasn’t he a fighter-mage who could cut them in two or burn them down in their tracks? – and called him “sir.” Teldin had decided that the best way to react to this was not to react at all. If he’d told them not to call him sir, he knew they’d have stopped, but that would just have reinforced the aura of authority that he’d inadvertently acquired. Instead, he’d chosen to talk with them exactly the same way he had when he’d first come aboard the Probe. Let them call him sir. He’d chat with them the way he always had and ask the same naive questions.

  To his surprise, this tactic had worked, and quickly. At first, most of the crew had been a little reticent in answering him, but he’d just talked on freely, and he could almost feel the reserve melt away. The first time that a crewman had laughed at one of his questions and clapped him companionably on the shoulder, he’d taken it as a major victory. Within a couple of days, the crewmen of the Probe were treating him as one of them – in fact, more so than they ever had. The one exception was that they never asked him about what happened on the forecastle, or about any details of his apparent powers.

  That was all to the good, he figured. Let them reach their own conclusions. It was highly unlikely that anyone would guess the cloak’s significance. The fewer people who knew about that, the safer he felt.

  The fact that his watches and those of the gnomes were staggered turned out to be a blessing. He knew, for example, that there were eight hours out of each day when he’d be alone in the cabin. At those times, he could shut the door, secure it with a small wooden wedge, and know he wouldn’t be interrupted. Each day he took advantage of the privacy to practice the cloak’s shapeshifting abilities.

  Estriss was right, it turned out: Each time he used the power, it became easier. The chilled, strained feeling lessened steadily until it vanished altogether, and the residual fatigue also faded away. His control improved significantly as well. He could now change his face in two or three heartbeats, and without the total concentration the first few shifts had required.

  His control now extended to more than his face. Carefully, he’d experimented with changing the appearance of his body as well. He was still cautious with this part of it. Never had he tried any major changes – like shrinking to the size of a gnome or expanding to the bulk of an umber hulk, for example – but he now regularly altered his build to match Aelfred’s muscular physique or Vallus’s willowy bone structure.

  No matter how hard he tried, however, he couldn’t affect the clothes he wore. When he took on Aelfred’s physique, his jerkin almost burst at the seams; when he duplicated Vallus or Sylvie, his clothes hung on him like a tent. The only exception was the cloak itself: whatever form he took, it subtly enlarged or contracted to fit perfectly around whatever neck he happened to have at the time.

  His voice was also a problem. At first he’d assumed that, when he took on Aelfred’s body, the larger chest cavity would give him the same booming voice as the first mate. It didn’t happen that way, however. If there was any change in his voice, it was of the utmost subtlety – and he couldn’t be totally sure that even this wasn’t wishful thinking. Whether he looked like Aelfred Silverhorn or Vallus Leafbower, he always sounded like Teldin Moore. The contrast was even more noticeable when he took on the form of Sylvie, the navigator, or Julia, the second mate. Although the throat and mouth were female, the voice was most definitely male. There was absolutely no way he could use the cloak’s powers to impersonate another person if the “audience” had ever heard the real person speak.

  That was just as well, he concluded. He still felt there was something inherently wrong with taking another’s form, no matter what the motive. The knowledge that it was impossible to take another’s complete identity was somehow reassuring.

  Chapter Nine

  So the rest of the voyage passed. Fifty-th
ree days from Krynn they reached the crystal shell that contained Realm-space. So inured to the wonders of space did Teldin find himself that he didn’t feel disappointed when he learned that they’d pass through the shell during his sleep period. When he went to bed for his fifty-third night aboard the Probe, the view through the cabin’s porthole was the tempestuous colors of the flow. When he woke several hours later, the cabin was dark for the first time in week and there was blackness on the other side of the port. Teldin swung himself out of his hammock and went on deck.

  The sky around the hammership at first looked identical to the familiar one that he’d seen all his life: velvet blackness studded with stars shining with a light that looked somehow brittle. After a few moments, though, the familiarity slipped away. The orientation of these stars was nothing like what he was used to. There seemed many more of them, clustered into totally alien groupings. The constellations that had been his friends from childhood were nowhere to be seen, and his mind was unable to impose any order on the stars that he saw. Over to the port side, just over the rail, was something that he’d never seen before: a smoky haze, glowing faintly. When he looked at it directly, it seemed to fade away, but when he looked at it with peripheral vision, he could make out a kind of structure to it.

  That structure was familiar, he realized with a mild shock. It reminded him unmistakably of the weather pattern he’d seen over Krynn as the Unquenchable pulled away from the planet. There was the same circular core, with curving arms sweeping out from it. The only thing that was missing was the sense of motion that the storm had given him. Maybe it was the black, featureless background, or the motionless stars that surrounded it. In any case, the sensation that this pattern gave him was one of limitless distance. The Probe’s crew had told him that it was no more distant than the other stars, but that both the stars and this swirling shape were actually gates to another plane – the Plane of Radiance – set into the inner surface of the crystal sphere. No matter what he knew, he felt that this spiral pattern was unimaginably farther than the other points of light.