Conundrum Read online

  The giant arrow scribed a tremendous arc hundreds of feet in the air across the brilliant blue sky. The people along the docks (and the gnomes) suddenly realized, to their horror, that the projectile was bound to fall to earth somewhere within the confines of the city. Commodore Brigg cringed as he bobbed in the water.

  The UAEP descended like a hive of bees, buzzing madly over the first row of warehouses, past streets of homes and businesses, onward and downward toward the city square. It streaked down an alley, slicing through clotheslines strung between the buildings like so many strings of a harp, before passing over the crowd gathered to listen to the mayor’s dedication speech. It then struck off the head of the statue of Lord Gunthar, as neatly as an executioner’s blade, just as the mayor and the sculptor were triumphantly pulling aside its covering sheet. The head leaped from Lord Gunthar’s shoulders in nothing less than complete surprise and landed on the mayor’s foot, breaking only his pinky toe, by some strange luck. The giant arrow careened off the statue, passed through the open second story bedroom window of the house of Nathan the Tailor, through the open bedroom door, down the hall, and out the open staircase window without touching a thing or waking any of the occupants of the house. From there, it skipped once off the shallowly-pitched roof of a chicken house, frightening its occupants out of three days” laying before coming to a quivering stop inside the slat wood fences of a pig sty owned by the dwarf Dernbannin-who was busy at his forge next door and heard the whole thing, he would loudly proclaim in the months that followed- and neatly skewering his prized and much-beloved pig, Humphrey Afterwards, no one could say who squealed the louder: Humphrey, or the mayor with his broken pinky toe.

  Meanwhile, out on the bay, twenty-one heads surfaced in the general vicinity of the sunken submersible, greatly defying the odds a second time. Of course, there were only twenty crew members on board at the time she sunk. The extra head belonged to a very angry oyster diver who had nearly been crushed under the Indestructible as she settled to the bottom of the harbor. He’d been working the oyster beds, completely unaware that the Indestructible was to launch that morning, else he’d have never come within a hundred leagues of the place, he would later declare in court.

  Three weeks later-the gnomes having learned much about re-floating and re-outfitting sunken submersibles after the first time the Indestructible sank-Commodore Brigg stood in the conning tower and leaned against the rust-covered aft rail as his ship slipped for the third time from her moorings. Indestructible, fully provisioned and stocked with a handsome supply of fresh Humphrey sausages, pulled quietly away from the quay under its own spring-generated power. Its once-gleaming black iron hull was now a dull rust red. Across the bay, the city of Pax slept, for the most part blissfully unaware. Only the mayor and a few of his closest advisers huddled behind a newly-fortified observation post hastily constructed atop a nearby hill, to watch and make sure nothing else untoward happened. The garbage scow had been towed out to sea and sunk a few days before, to remove any last temptation for Commodore Brigg to try to prove the soundness of his clearly unsound submersible design.

  But even if it hadn’t, the commodore was having nothing to do with further tests or demonstrations. He counted himself lucky that the Knights of Neraka hadn’t been around to give him trouble during all the sinkings, and he wasn’t about to send for more money to scrape and paint the ship, much less refloat her after another mishap. The ship, such as it was, would have to do, come what may. Besides, he reasoned as only a gnome can reason, if the ship sank one more time, they’d likely have to call off the mission altogether as the ship would rust to bits. ’Twas better not to risk it.

  He ordered the ship ahead three-quarters as she cleared the docks. Quietly, in the dead of night, they steered Indestructible out of the harbor and into the Fjord of Gunthar. Conundrum joined Commodore Brigg atop the conning tower. He watched the strange white moon of Krynn sink into the dark North Sirrion Sea.

  “So that’s the sea,” Conundrum commented as he leaned against the rail beside the commodore.

  “One of them,” Commodore Brigg answered quietly.

  6

  The Indestructible cruised northward with a following sea and a favorable wind for many days and nights. Mount Nevermind, the home of the gnomes, receded in the distance, its great summit the last portion of Sancrist Isle still visible by sunset of the third day of their voyage. Come morning, the gnomes and their kender companion found themselves sailing in the midst of the open ocean.

  Many of the gnomes, including a few members of the Maritime Sciences Guild, had never been out of sight of land. They took turns, when duty permitted, coming up on deck and gazing in awe at the great gray rolling sea. Sir Grumdish took one look at the heaving waves and unbroken horizon and turned as yellow as a sheet parchment. Professor Hap-Troggensbottle had been many times to sea in his quest to discover the nature of the buoyancy of very-large rocks, so the sights held little wonder for him. But he was often seen above decks collecting buckets of seawater, which he took below to continue his experiments in his cabin. Exactly what he was doing remained a mystery.

  Razmous was literally all over the ship during these exciting first days, so much so that some of the crew began to speculate that there were actually three identical kender onboard. In the first days of the voyage, he fell overboard and had to be rescued so many times that he was ordered to wear a pair of large, inflated shark bladders under each arm and a fifty foot rope around his waist, which was fastened to the mast any time he was on deck, under threat of indefinite confinement in the bilge. The next time he fell overboard, they hauled him aboard without having to lower sails and stop the ship. He was wet and bedraggled but keen for another go.

  Commodore Brigg and Navigator Snork spent most of their duty time in the conning tower, directing the ship’s course, taking navigational readings from the sun and stars, and ordering the trimming of sails as circumstances and winds dictated. When off duty, they plotted (with Razmous’s help) their future course beneath Ansalon. Conundrum was invited to attend these high-level sessions, as his training for the Guild of PuzzlesRiddlesEnigmasEtcetera included the study of labyrinthine documents. In these sessions he proved himself a valuable companion, as he was able to sort out the kender’s unnumbered and unlabeled maps on more than one occasion.

  Razmous’s map, drawn by the navigator of the ill-fated MNS Polywog, was of hideous complexity-a many-headed hydra of tunnels, passages, dead ends, switchbacks, wells, and caverns, a three-dimensional nightmare that the navigator had rendered onto a series of two-dimensional pages, enough to fill a book. Though the landmarks were carefully noted to exacting standards, the navigator had failed to mark the Polywog’s actual course beneath the continent, which seemed to indicate that the map was but a copy of the original. It also meant that, if Snork and Conundrum couldn’t unravel the two-hundred page map before they began the undersea leg of the journey, they’d be almost as lost as if they didn’t have any map at all. So, as they crossed the North Sirrion Sea and came in sight of Northern Ergoth on the twelfth day, Conundrum, already having shown aptitude, was promoted from his position as chief officer in charge of seating to first assistant cartographer. He had an important task, and felt happy and contented. He moved his bunk into his cousin’s cabin, and they stayed up many a night with the kender Razmous, poring blissfully over the tangle of maps by the light of a lamp swaying from an overhead steam pipe.

  Far across the sea, in the city of Flotsam, in the middle of the common room of the Sailor’s Rest, one of the better inns in the city, two men attacked each other with knives. The fight had just begun and people were still leaping over tables and crashing through chairs trying to get out of the way of the two flashing blades. The innkeeper was still in the kitchen, a ladle lifted to his lips to taste the soup, turning his head in surprise at the commotion beyond the door.

  The city of Flotsam had been built on a cliff overlooking the Blood Sea of Istar, that great red ocean created wh
en the fiery mountain struck Krynn, destroying the city of Istar and its Kingpriest who, in his pride, demanded of the gods what the hero Huma had received in humility. The city and all the land about it had been blasted into the earth by the anger of the gods, and the sea rushed in to fill the void, creating the Blood Sea. Once, a whirlpool had swirled at its center, a great maelstrom that sucked down any ship that sailed too near. Some said that at the bottom of the maelstrom lay the smashed temple of the Kingpriest and a bottomless chasm that opened directly into the Abyss. But the whirlpool had been quelled almost forty years ago, when the god Chaos was driven from Krynn, taking with him all the other gods.

  Flotsam was built at the head of a deep bay of the Blood Sea, at a place where shipwrecks and anything else the maelstrom-or for that matter the rest of Krynn-vomited up, washed ashore. Once a free city, Flotsam now lay within the domains of the great red dragon Malystryx, the most powerful dragon in all of Krynn. Several years ago, she had destroyed the old city, burning much of it to the ground. What remained was but a ramshackle shadow of the former city, a slum of tacked-together shacks and shanties for the most part, with here and there a more permanent building rising from the refuse. The streets and alleys of Flotsam were filled with every sort of ne’er-do-well, brigand, pirate, and cutthroat that Krynn could produce. Mercenaries from Kern, ogres from Blode, and Ergothian pirates sought work in the galleys and vessels that paid the proper bribes to the proper people and so were allowed to dock alongside the very merchant ships they would pillage and sink should they meet on the open sea. It was all a very nicely organized state of affairs, everything balanced on a knife’s edge of fear.

  Even so, being one of the more sturdily-built structures in the more respectable part of town, the Sailor’s Rest rarely experienced these sorts of disturbances of the peace. This was an inn frequented by those made somewhat more respectable by wealth, no matter how ill-gotten their riches might be, people who subscribed to the pretense of civilized manners even though in practice they employed the selfsame cutthroat behaviors (and the selfsame cutthroats) so common in other parts of the city. A knife fight here among the salvaged and sea-tarnished silver and pirate-looted tableware was a rare occurrence indeed.

  Still, most of the patrons of the inn showed an uncanny and unexpected agility in their flight from danger. Only one remained seated, his enjoyment of the excellent baked flounder seemingly undisturbed by the life-and-death struggle taking place mere feet from his table. The two men snarled and circled one another, shifting their knives from hand to hand, seeking some advantage, while he watched them as if watching some farce staged for his own personal amusement.

  One of the knife wielders was a semi-successful exporter of cypress lumber, the other a waiter of some years” experience, with an impeccable reputation for discretion. The nature of their dispute was unknown, so suddenly had it erupted. One moment, the waiter was serving the exporter his steamed prawns, the next he was dumping the butter down the front of the man’s shirt. It had escalated just as quickly to knives. The waiter’s shirtsleeve was torn at the shoulder, the cypress merchant’s coat was split neatly down the back from the collar to the hem, so that the two halves swung freely whenever he lunged or dodged, teeth bared.

  The man at the table put down his fork and calmly sampled his wine. He wore gray robes decorated at the hem with hermetical symbols stitched in red and gold thread. Though seated, he was obviously a tall man, for his arms stuck well out from the sleeves of his robes as he rested his elbows on the table. His hair, black as pitch and cropped close, complemented the darkness of his eyes.

  The two men continued to circle warily, thrusting and feinting, testing one another for an opening. Suddenly, the waiter stumbled into an overturned chair, dropping his defenses for a moment to catch himself against a table. The lumber merchant launched himself with a scream of victory, but the waiter’s stumble was a cleverly concealed ploy, for he immediately sidestepped and prepared to catch the unwitting lumber merchant on the tip of his knife.

  At that moment, the innkeeper intervened with a stout length of oak, cracking the waiter’s knife from his hand with a swift blow to the wrist. He then turned on the merchant and swatted the man across the forehead with his club, felling him before he could recover from his flying leap. A third blow behind the knees swept the waiter from his feet even as he was stooping to recover his dropped blade. His head cracked against the wooden floor.

  The man in the gray robes set his napkin on his plate and stood.

  “My apologies, Sir Tanar,” the innkeeper said in a curious accent. He flashed an oily smile from beneath a thin black moustache. “I am not knowing what has come over these two. They act like some kind of madness has gripped them.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” the gray-robed man said. “I would have intervened, but I did not wish to destroy the excellent furnishings of your dining area.”

  “I am thanking you,” the innkeeper said. He motioned violently at the two men sprawled on the floor. Three waitresses and the cook rushed out and dragged them into the lobby. “Of course, this evening’s meal shall be compliments of the house.”

  “I thank you,” Sir Tanar said as he casually sucked his teeth.

  “It is our pleasure, Master,” the innkeeper acknowledged. Bowing once more, he hurried away to welcome and reassure those guests cautiously reentering the room. Waiters and other members of the staff scurried about, righting tables, clearing away spilled dishes, and refilling glasses with complimentary wine.

  Sir Tanar made his way from the common room to the lobby and then up four flights of stairs before turning down a long hall decorated with red carpets and paintings of oceanside scenes. At the end of the hall, a window looked out over the docks below. To the left of the window was a door. As Sir Tanar approached the door, his footsteps slowed, for a tiny ringing sound beckoned to him from beyond the door.

  His listened for a moment, his head cocked curiously. The bell rang again, insistently.

  “Damn!” he swore as he sprinted for the door. He slid to a stop on the rug in front of the door, already fumbling in his pockets for the key. Frustrated, he placed his palm against the door, spoke a single arcane word, and burst the door from its frame, leaving it hanging by one twisted hinge.

  He rushed into the room as the ringing grew louder and more urgent than before.

  Fumbling at a dresser beside the ornate bed, he jerked open a drawer and removed a wide, flat wooden container like a jewelry box. He turned and dashed the cluttered contents from the top of his desk before setting the box gently on a leather mat, then pulled up a chair, sat on its edge, and opened the box.

  Soft black felt covered the interior of the box’s bottom and hinged lid. The felt glimmered like a night sky filled with stars, for sewn into the ebon cloth were numerous small clear crystal gems, red garnets, green peridots, and blue aquamarines. In the box’s lid was set the magical silver plate he had received a month or so before. Since that time, he had not been yet been contacted as promised, although he had used the object’s magic to better his situation in small ways.

  Even as he gazed at the plate, the ghostly image of his reflection vanished and the last ringing tones faded. A black darkness appeared in the center of the upright plate, spreading slowly like oil. Nothing could be seen in that darkness, yet he felt something staring at him. He scowled and shifted uncomfortably.

  “I have been waiting for you to answer my summons,” said a voice that leaped fully formed in the air. Though deep as the roots of a mountain, the cadences, the rhythm, and the demanding tone of the voice was female. But it was strange, distorted, as though spoken over a great distance or from the depths of a deep well.

  “Your forgiveness. Mistress,” Sir Tanar said as he tilted his head slightly in a how.

  “You know how I dislike waiting,” the Voice of the Night continued.

  “I was not in my room, Mistress. I was taking some refreshments-” he began.

  “You will d
ine in your room from now on,” she interrupted. “I will not be kept waiting.”

  “Yes, Mistress,” he acquiesced reluctantly.

  “I am glad to see that you survived my messenger. I shall soon have need of you, Tanar,” she continued.

  “As you wish,” he said.

  “You are a Knight of Neraka, Tanar, yet you serve me. What is your loyalty to the Dark Queen?”

  “The goddess Takhisis is no longer with this world, nor with us,” the Thorn Knight answered. “I am loyal to myself.”

  The darkness in the platter seemed to grow even darker, if that were possible. Feeling the anger welling from it, Tanar added, “As well as those I have sworn to obey.”

  “Very good, Tanar,” the Voice of the Night said. “You may yet please me in some small way. Still, you must obey the commands of your superiors. That is why I have contacted you. You will be receiving orders from your usual contacts in several days. I will contact you at that time. Meanwhile, I remind you not to abuse the powers of this magical communication device.”

  “Yes, Mistress,” Tanar said, bowing as the darkness in the plate faded. In moments, he found himself looking once more at his own distorted image dimly reflected in the plate’s shining surface.