Conundrum

by Jeff Crook

  “Flood aft ballast!” the commodore shouted. With a gurgling purr, the Indestructible began to tilt backward, lifting her streaming bow from the water.

  Meanwhile on the shore, Captain Hawser dug the crab’s legs into the sand and continued to push while Chief Portlost, at the controls of the pinchers, lifted with all his might. Charynsanth flapped like a trapped butterfly, her wings buffeting the crab like thunder, while her slavering jaws snapped at the metal braces protecting the two gnomes and tore off the last sections of its bronze shell.

  The giant, its hair and beard smoldering, raw flesh showing through its cracked and charred skin, lunged in with a boulder and began to beat both the dragon and the crab. One blow caught Charynsanth across the snout, stunning her. Another broke off the crab claw gripping the dragon’s rear leg. Recovering, Charynsanth lunged into the air, her mighty wings pummeling the wind. Commodore Brigg sank down in the conning tower as her wingtips brushed inches overhead.

  With a roar of hatred, the giant launched its boulder. The huge stone cracked Charynsanth squarely across the brow as she banked round for an attack. The force of the blow snapped her head around as if she had come to the end of a string. Her wings fell limp and, tumbling backward in the air, she plummeted like a lead weight. With a tremendous thudding splash, she followed Sir Grumdish to the cavern’s flooded floor, a storm of bubbles hissing and popping on the surface long after the waves of her impact had subsided.

  With a victorious roar, the giant then turned on Captain Hawser and Chief Portlost, still inside the mechanical crab. They backed away, waving their one remaining claw before them. The giant limped across the sand and retrieved its club, then turned with a snarl and charged. Captain Hawser threw the crab forward, and the two came together with a deafening crash and roar.

  Commodore Brigg had seen enough. Without aiming, he shouted “Fire!”

  Conundrum slammed both buttons at the same time. The Indestructible lurched back as twin jets of water shot out from her bow. Two huge arrows streaked across the cavern. One struck with a quivering, meaty thwack in the giant’s back, and the other glanced off the crab with such force that the mechanical contraption went spinning across the beach and slammed into the cavern wall. The giant clutched vainly at the enormous arrow in its back, then toppled face down in the sand. With a last groan, it breathed no more.

  Commodore Brigg sighed with relief and turned his attention to the crab. It lay in a tangled heap of metal against the wall, no sign of life within its twisted remains. A thin blue exhalation of smoke curled up from its midst. Brigg’s breath caught in his throat, and he turned and slid down the ladder to the bridge.

  He landed with a thump beside Conundrum. “We’ve got to get to shore!” he cried, then turned and shouted down to engineering, “Engage the main flowpellar!”

  The ship lurched forward.

  “Steer her into shore,” the commodore ordered, pushing Conundrum toward the wheel. “Run her aground. It doesn’t matter.”

  “What’s wrong?” Conundrum asked.

  “My brother,” the commodore answered, his voice tight with emotion, “and the chief. I’ll get Doctor Bothy’s spare kit. Just steer her in and put her on the beach.” With those words, he ducked through the forward hatch and disappeared.

  Conundrum gripped the wheel nervously, staring out through the porthole at the carnage on the beach. The giant lay with their arrow sticking out of its back like a tree. Beyond it, resting against the wall with a tendril of smoke rising from its midst, lay a heap of metal that Conundrum recognized after a few moments as the crab.

  The sandy shore slid toward them, and Conundrum held the Indestructible on a steady course. Commodore Brigg banged around in sick bay like a gnomish percussion corps, all the while growling a string of dwarven curses vile enough to strip the rust from the ship’s hull. Below him, the last four members of the crew cranked the ship’s drive springs tight and saw to the oiling of the gears. They were good sailors, and Conundrum admired them. In the midst of this chaos, they kept to their duty, while he held the wheel of the ship as though, were he to let go, he might fly to pieces.

  A dozen yards from shore now. A half dozen. Then the shore vanished in an explosion of water as Charynsanth rose up before the ship, like a leviathan, wings spread wide and streaming water in sheets. The Indestructible crashed to a stop against her belly, throwing Conundrum forward against the wheel so hard that it drove the air from his lungs. He hung on, gasping, watching in horror as the dragon’s claws closed round the bow of the ship.

  Charynsanth forced the ship’s nose down into the water as he she leaned over the conning tower. The giant’s boulder had only stunned her, but Sir Grumdish’s sword was still embedded in her neck, her life’s blood flowed out around it. She was dying, but she would see to it that everyone and everything died with her.

  The conning tower hatch was still open. Charynsanth leaned over it, sucking her last breath in through nostrils frothing with her own blood. The fires boiled in her belly. Staring up through the hatch, Conundrum saw her jaws part, blood streaming out between her long cruel fangs to fall hissing on the deck of the bridge. He smelled the brimstone. He saw the moment of his death arriving.

  And then he knew what he had to do. He crossed the bridge in three bounds as dragonfire boiled down through the conning tower. He leaped, grabbed the handle, and released the ram.

  It shot out, impaling Charynsanth on its cold steel spike. She reared back in pain, screaming the dragonfire from her lungs in a white-hot plume that fountained upward. In her death throes, she kicked the Indestructible free, sending it skittering across the water, thick black smoke billowing from the top of the conning tower.

  Conundrum’s action had bought them only a little time. Enough of Charynsanth’s dragonfire had poured into the bridge to set everything on fire, including Conundrum. His white guild robe went up in flames. He screamed and fell to his knees as the deck cracked and split underneath him. A column of fire shot up from belowdecks, and the floor dropped away beneath him.

  Commodore Brigg picked himself up from the deck of the sick bay where he had fallen when the ship lurched to a stop against the dragon’s belly. At first, he thought that Conundrum had run the ship aground, but then he heard the Toaster engaged and the dragon’s roar of pain. He rushed to the door, jerked it open, and got a face full of fire for his trouble. Flames roared down the passage from the bridge and licked around the open doorway. Quickly snatching a blanket from a nearby examination table, he wrapped it around his body and lunged out into the inferno, his only thought to save his ship.

  He arrived at the bridge to find half the floor vanished, swallowed up by a column of fire roaring up from below decks. Of Conundrum and his remaining crew, he saw no sign. The conning tower and its escape hatch were well within the flames and out of his reach, but through the forward porthole, he saw that the ship was still moving, that its engines were still engaged. Knowing that he had but one choice, he staggered through the flames to the dive control station. Grasping the scorching bronze levers in his hands, he jerked them down, opening the ship’s fore and aft ballast tanks. Immediately, the burning wreck of the Indestructible dove beneath the waves.

  The surface of the water crawled up the glass of the forward porthole. It seemed to take forever for the ship to submerge. Commodore Brigg gagged and choked on the smoke, waiting for what he knew would happen, what he knew was his only chance to save the ship, while flames crowded closer and closer around him.

  Finally, the Indestructible slipped beneath the waves, and as it did so, water roared down its open Snorkel. A fountain of chill water blasted across the bridge with the force of a tidal wave, knocking Commodore Brigg from his feet and washing him aft. He grasped the broken half of the Peerupitscope as water continued to pour in, washing over the smoking decks and pouring through the hole in the bridge deck, dousing the fires in the crew quarters below.

  Even as the fires were extinguished, the interior of the ship g
rew dark, dark as the blackest cavern in the deepest bowel of the earth. Commodore Brigg looked up. Outside the Indestructible, there was only inky blackness. The ship had sunk through the hole in the bottom of the cave, down through the hole the professor had explored, into the bottomless abyss that led to the underside of the continent of Krynn.

  And she was still sinking.

  32

  Conundrum awoke in a small bed, lined with soft white pillows, covered by a white blanket with blue ticking. A window near the bed was thrown open, and outside, a gentle afternoon shower pattered against the wall, falling in a hush through naked gray treetops stretching away into the distance. A cool wind flowed in through the window, stirring the filmy white curtains hanging to either side. The room contained seven other beds like the one in which he lay, but they were all empty, their linens neatly folded and stacked on the corner of each mattress. He sat up on his elbows and looked around in wonder.

  It seemed an ordinary infirmary, only there weren’t any nurses or doctors or engineers or mishaps officers scurrying about, taking peoples” temperatures and prescribing soapy water enemas and treatments of epsom salts. The ward was strangely silent.

  He rose from his bed and walked to the window, staring out over the silver gray treetops dripping with rain. It was winter here-wherever here was. It had the look and smell of Darkember, as the Solamnics called it, Bleakcold to the kender.

  Tears started in his eyes. At first he didn’t know why, but then he remembered-the kender, Razmous Pinch-pocket. The memory of the Indestructible’s unflappable cartographer brought everything flooding back to him. There was the battle with the giant and the dragon, and the fire onboard, the deck collapsing beneath his feet, him falling, falling into a light that burned like a thousand suns. And then darkness. Nothingness.

  How did he get here? Where was here? And where was everybody else-Commodore Brigg, Captain Hawser, Chief Portlost, Razmous, even Sir Tanar? He leaned out the window and scanned the ground below. A narrow path wound through the trees, beside which marble benches stood at regular intervals, but there was no one moving along the path, and the benches were all empty.

  He turned away in frustration and scanned the empty ward once more. At the far end of the room, a single door provided the only exit. The walls of the room were made of stone, the floor of polished stone flags, the ceiling overarched with thick wooden beams and roofed with timber planks. Three windows provided the only light.

  The room had all the appearance of perfect order and sterility, neither warm nor cold, neither inviting nor forbidding. There were eight identical beds, four along either wall. Under each bed lay a shiny metal bedpan, and beside each bed stood a small table with a washing bowl resting atop it. Pushed against the wall opposite the door was a desk on which lay several thick books, a bottle of ink, and a feather. A simple wooden chair was pushed beneath it. Hanging on the wall beside the desk was a tall mirror. Conundrum saw himself in it, but it took him several moments to notice the difference. His flaming red hair, so unusual in gnomes, had turned bone white.

  Conundrum turned away in shock. As he fingered his beard and ran his hand through the thin strip of hair circling his otherwise shiny, bald head, his eyes came to rest on a thick, black leather-bound book sitting on the table beside his bed. The edges of the pages appeared to have been burned, the cover warped and cracked as though doused with water and then carelessly allowed to dry without first oiling it. He picked it up, and a smell arose from its pages that brought choking sobs to his throat. He sat heavily on the edge of his bed, his fingers trembling as he stroked the cover, terrified, afraid to open it, afraid not to.

  At last, he bent back the cover and examined the first page.

  Ship’s log—MNS Indestructible

  Over the next few hours, Conundrum gingerly turned the cracked and brittle parchment pages, reliving each stage of his journey, from the day the Indestructible first sank in the harbor of Pax, to her second sinking and final successful launch, through the journey north and east around the continent of Ansalon. He read with a certain measure of pride and delight the commodore’s account of his exploits with the chaos monster. He laughed at the antics of the kender, duly recorded in Commodore Brigg’s own rough, masculine script and dispassionate scientific writing style, which only made them funnier. He then marveled at the description of the modifications installed during their period in Flotsam, and he learned for the first time of the commodore’s misgivings about taking on the Thorn Knight.

  The mention of the Thorn Knight seemed to lift a veil from Conundrum’s eyes, and he remembered with painful clarity that moment in Sir Tanar’s cabin when he planned to take over the ship. He realized then that the Thorn Knight had murdered his cousin, and that his own testimony about the “accident” had all been a lie planted in his mind by Sir Tanar’s magic. Bitter hatred filled his heart then-hatred for the Thorn Knight for using him to cover his own crime and aid his attempt to wrest the Indestructible from the commodore’s control.

  Conundrum flipped through the last pages, only briefly scanning the contents as he searched for the answers now burning bright as dragonfire in his heart. What happened after the dragon set the ship on fire? How did he get here? Where was everyone else? Finally, near the end of the log, he found what he was looking for. He read:

  Knowing that the flowpellars were still engaged and the Snorkel was in the open position, I did the only thing available to me. I flooded the ballast tanks. Ship sank straightaway and water from the open Snorkel quickly doused the flames, as I had intended. Unfortunate side effect being that we were sinking. Closed Snorkel and hatch, but the ship had already passed into the bottomless chasm leading to the professor’s underside of the continent. Could only hope that he was right. Meanwhile, set about checking for surviving crew and pumping out the water.

  Found Conundrum badly burned but still alive. Ensigns Dnat, Felthallow, Ruark, and Rimbortion burned almost beyond recognition, but still at their posts in the engine room. Recommend them for special recognition, if this ship survives. Unable to pump out the ship. Speculate that at such depths, pressure outside hull too great to expel water from inside ship through bilge valves. Used ascending flowpellar to slow and control descent, but main controls were shot. Had to do everything by hand.

  Finally reached bottom of continent, found it much as Professor had described-a great roof of rock stretching away in all directions, millions upon millions of tiny glowing shrimp bumping their heads against it. It was at this time that I observed that the Indestructible was leaking air, for bubbles were forming on the rocky underside of the continent. Noticed that the bubbles did not stay in one place. Instead they moved like quicksilver along the undersurface of the stone, indicating upward slope, although slope was not detectable through normal observations. Concluded that upward slope led to edge of continent. Set course and engaged flowpellars.

  It has been five days now since we sank, and I regret leaving behind my brother and the others, although I doubt that any of them still lived. Razmous Pinchpocket, if still alive, is a kender, and so I have little concern that he will find his way out eventually. The others… I would have preferred to confirm their fates before departing, but I had no choice.

  The MNS Indestructible is nearly out of air and the lower deck is completely flooded, including engineering. Amazingly, the spring engines have continued to run, outperforming by several hours the length of time needed between windings. I have welded the controls into place to hold the ship on course, should I faint from want of air. My initial concerns about the bilge were unfounded. I effected repairs, and it is now working, slowly emptying the ship of its weight of water, and she is rising up toward the surface. Last night, we came out from under the continent and are now coursing through open sea, though deep beneath its surface. I think it is New Sea, but I cannot be sure without taking navigational readings.

  The ship will live up to her namesake, I think, though I fear none of us will survive
. Conundrum- hangs on somehow. His burns seem to be healing with the help of some ointments I found in Doctor Bothy’s spare kit—lucky for us that the Medical Sciences Guild has long known the best cures for burns.

  Air grows thinner by the minute. We shall not reach the surface in time. This log shall be our testament to the endurance of the will of gnomes, if it and this ship are ever found. I pray to Reorx who is no more that it does. We should not die in vain.

  Conundrum turned the last page and found it blank. He closed the log, sighed, and lifted his eyes slowly from its worn cover. Before him stood a woman wearing long white robes with the symbol of the sun emblazoned on the breast. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a simple ring of silver, revealing a sad, smiling face, soft and radiant.

  “It is good to see you awake at last, Conundrum,” she said, “but you should not tire yourself overmuch. You arrived here only seven days ago, and you were at the door of death.”

  “Here? Where is here?” Conundrum asked.

  “This is the Citadel of Light,” she answered softly.

  “I’ve heard of this place,” he said excitedly. “This is where the healers are. You must have healed me!”

  “Not I,” she corrected. “One more powerful than I. We have healed your body, but not your spirit. That is why we left your book here with you, so that you might find it and read it. There is much grief in your tale, and much joy. You needed to know its ending.”

  “But I still don’t know its ending,” Conundrum said. “How did I come here, and what happened to Commodore Brigg?”