The Broken Sphere

by Nigel Findley

  Beth-Abz was silent for a moment. Teldin cursed silently in frustration. He knew that the eye tyrant had a frustrating inability to easily remember human and demihuman names – probably because they didn’t communicate the same information about clan and nation as did beholder names. “It was the small one,” Beth-Abz said slowly, “the small one on the bridge.”

  Did that mean Julia?

  “And another, a larger one.”

  “Describe them to me,” Teldin ordered.

  “The smaller one …” Suddenly the beholder fell silent. One of its eyestalks had suddenly convulsed, driving directly upward from the top of the creature’s body. The other nine pivoted around to stare at the wayward eye. “The smaller one … ° it started over.

  The eyestalk convulsed again, another joining it in its spastic motion. The creature’s loose-lipped mouth opened slightly, and a gobbet of yellow-white saliva dribbled down its lower surface to drip on the deck.

  “What’s the matter?” Teldin asked, suddenly alarmed.

  “I feel pain,” Beth-Abz said, its voice taking on a strange, bubbling tone. “Sharp pain. I feel …”

  Another convulsion racked its eyestalks – all of them, this time. The creature made a sound like a cough, and saliva sprayed Teldin’s jerkin, looking puslike against the black fabric.

  “What is it?” Teldin asked again.

  “Pain …” the beholder gurgled. Its huge central eye rolled wildly, the horizontal pupil contracting down to a black line, then suddenly expanding so large that the pale-colored iris almost vanished. It coughed again, but now green-black bile – or was it blood? – sprayed out with the spittle.

  Teldin stepped back, horror and fear churning in his chest. What in the hells was happening?

  Beth-Abz rocked, like a ship in heavy seas, listing one way then the other, as though it could no longer control its levitation power. The eyestalks convulsed again. The beholder crashed to the deck.

  “What is it?” Teldin screamed at the stricken creatures. “What?”

  The great mouth worked, made gargling sounds as Beth-Abz tried to answer. It coughed again, spewing bile and bright blood.

  A brilliant green beam lashed out from one of the minor eyes, lanced out into space.

  Teldin heard yells of alarm from the crewmen on deck, the thundering of running feet as they sprinted for safety. He backed off another couple of steps, wanting desperately to join them in their flight, but unable to take his eyes from the agonized creature.

  Another beam – pinkish red this time – burst from another eye and persisted for a second or two as the eyestalk lashed about wildly. The beam swept through the air like a scythe, cutting into a pack of sailors struggling to get through the door into the forecastle. One of them screamed, a huge gout of blood bursting open in his back. The sailor fell, to lie still in a spreading pool of scarlet.

  Now all of the thrashing, weaving secondary eyes were cutting loose with their magical powers. Beams of green, yellow, and actinic blue-white hissed through the air, striking wildly all over the ship. Teldin heard rather than saw the top of the mainmast detonate into splinters. The body of the dead sailor was struck by another beam, bright violet this time, and it was hurled into the air as though shot from a catapult. The green beam lashed out again, blasting a hole clean through the deck.

  “By Paladine’s blood …!” Teldin gasped.

  He had to get out of here, had to get clear of the creature’s magical convulsions. Its death throes? What else could they be? He turned and sprinted for the door into the sterncastle. More screams sounded in his ears, mixed with the rending of tortured wood as something forward blew apart. He grabbed the door handle and flung it open as another beam – this one as black as night – played momentarily over the planking by his head. He ducked low and flung himself through the door into the helm compartment.

  There was nobody on the helm – no need for a helmsman when the ship was drifting in space – and the compartment was empty. Teldin leaped behind the heavy wooden chair that was the helm itself and crouched low.

  Not a moment too soon. A green beam lanced through the forward bulkhead, exploding a man-sized area into dust before continuing straight through the rear of the hull and out into space. Even over the sound of the destruction, Teldin could hear the gargling, choking sounds of Beth-Abz’s death.

  Another concussive blast sounded from the deck outside, then silence.

  Teldin crouched behind the helm for almost another minute before emerging into the scene of devastation that was the Boundless.

  *****

  The Cloakmaster knelt alongside Djan, examining Beth-Abz’s corpse. The dead beholder lay on its side on the deck, looking like some kind of partially deflated kickball. Its eyestalks, which, only minutes ago, had lashed the ship with magical destruction, hung limply. The big central eye was open, the black pupil contracted so far as to be an almost invisible hairline. The area of the mouth and the deck around it were spattered with blood and bile and partially digested meat. Teldin wrinkled his nose, suppressing his nausea only through a titanic act of will. The stench was terrible.

  Although Djan’s face showed his own distaste, he dipped a finger in the horrid liquid and raised it to his nose. He coughed – a tight, gagging sound – and wiped the finger clean on a cloth he pulled from his belt pouch. “Bitter almonds,” the first mate said quietly. “Poison.”

  Teldin rose unsteadily to his feet. He looked around.

  The Boundless looked as though it had been through a major action, suffering mightily under the heavy weapons of an opposing ship. The upper half of the mainmast was gone, as was much of the portside rail. The dying beholder’s disintegration beam had blown half a dozen holes in the main deck and in the fore – and sterncastles. One of the stern spanker fins had been half torn away, and the mainsail was shredded, its fragments tied into complex knots, courtesy of the eye tyrant’s telekinetic beam. The keel, the Cloakmaster could feel, as he extended his perception through the ultimate helm, had been cracked again – not critically, but enough to put the ship at serious risk if it had to weather any heavy maneuvering.

  He sighed, shaking his head slowly. “Casualties?” he asked Djan.

  The half-elf’s shoulders slumped. “Four dead, not including Beth-Abz,” he announced, his voice exhausted. “Six wounded, two seriously. One – Harriana – not expected to live.”

  Teldin felt his head bow forward as if under a crushing weight. More dead. And how many more to follow before this was all over?

  He forced his depression into the deepest recesses of his mind. Deal with that later, he told himself. Right now you’ve got to be the captain … and be seen to be the captain. He pulled himself up to his full height.

  “Start the repairs,” he ordered loudly. “Prepare the bodies for burial. And whatever the wounded need, give it to them.”

  As crewmen scurried off to attend to their duties, the Cloakmaster turned to Djan and asked him quietly, “You’re sure about the poison?”

  “As sure as I can be,” the first mate confirmed, his own voice barely above a whisper. “Somebody killed Beth-Abz, almost killed the Boundless as well.”

  “How is the ship?”

  Djan shrugged. “We can sail – slowly – but we can’t fight,” he replied, confirming Teldin’s own analysis. “Dranigor’s one of the wounded, but” – he glanced at Teldin’s cloak– “but I suppose that doesn’t hamper us as much as it might.”

  “Be thankful for small favors, you mean?” The Cloakmaster clapped his friend on the shoulder and squeezed – gaining as much reassurance from the gesture as he gave. “You’re right, of course.”

  The half-elf lowered his voice even more, so much that Teldin had to lean forward to catch his words. “The crew knows about Beth-Abz,” he said grimly. “There’s no way to cover this one up. They all know he was poisoned, and they know that means one of them did it.”

  Teldin nodded. As with Blossom’s death, the guilty party could h
ave been anybody on board – literally anybody. Every crew member had free run of the saloon and the galley, of course, they had to be able to eat when they needed to. There wasn’t a lock on the freezebox, as there might have been on some ships. Teldin had insisted on an honor system for such things, and it had worked fine. Until now, he reminded himself. Anybody could have slipped in, at any time during the voyage, and insinuated the poison into Beth-Abz’s food. By unspoken consent, the meat that would be kept raw for the beholder was stored separately from the crew’s provisions, so there’d been no risk that the poisoner would end up eating his own poison for dawnfry. The killer would have had to bring his or her own poison aboard, of course, possibly when the Boundless was last in port. But that wouldn’t have been much of a problem. The Cloakmaster knew all too well how easy it was to buy just about anything around the docks of a major port like Starfall, and there was no way of knowing what a crew member brought aboard in his duffel, or even in his belt pouch. The only issue was the forethought and planning involved – it had been a long time since the squid ship had made landfall, but this whole thing reeked of a complex, organized plan, didn’t it?

  He sighed again, feeling the weight of his responsibility threatening to swamp him once more. For Djan’s benefit, he tried to force a smile – but he feared as he did it that it would look more like a rictus. “Try to get us as spaceworthy as possible,” he suggested.

  “And then?” the half-elf asked softly.

  Teldin had no answer for him but a shrug.

  *****

  The Cloakmaster thrashed, straining against sweat-soaked linen ropes. He moaned deep in his throat.

  He knew he was asleep, knew he was dreaming, but that didn’t make the dream any less horrific.

  The dead Beth-Abz was hovering before him, the beholder’s eyestalks limp and inert, its central eye sightless. Still it moved, tracking him with its blind eyes as he ran wildly around the deck of the Boundless. The creature’s slack-lipped mouth was open, drooling blood and bile onto the deck beneath it.

  And there was something stirring within that gaping mouth, something trying to free itself from the prison of the eye tyrant’s body. It writhed and mewled, Coated with dark blood. As he tried to escape Beth-Abz’s empty stare, Teldin couldn’t see well enough to recognize just what it was that was trying to free itself and emerge into the light. But he had the unescapable feeling that he would recognize it if he only looked long enough. And that when he did recognize it, the horror would drive him insane. He moaned, running for the door leading into the forecastle, to his own cabin.

  But before he could reach it, the door swung open. Someone stood there, the corpulent figure of Blossom, her head hanging unnaturally to one side. She smiled. Teldin recoiled in horror and sprinted past the beholder, heading for the door to the sterncastle.

  Again the door opened before he could reach it, revealing Merrienne. Little Merrienne, the young woman who’d plunged to her death from the crow’s nest as the squid ship had left Heartspace. The side of her head was slightly flattened, the skull staved in from its impact with the deck. Still she managed to bare her bloody teeth at Teldin in a warm smile …

  Other figures were appearing from everywhere, climbing the ladder from belowdecks, descending from the fore – and afterdecks, even clambering over the rails from somewhere overboard. Allyn, the gunner’s mate, and Vernel. Manicombe and Harriana. More figures from deeper in the past. Dana, the gnome. Shandess, the forward gunner on the old Probe. Sylvie, the navigator, slain by an elven ballista shot in Herd-space. And still they came, all those who’d died while helping him in his quest – all those that he, in a way, had killed. They surrounded him, a ring of smiling faces atop torn or shattered bodies, pressing ever closer, forcing him nearer and nearer to the floating corpse of Beth-Abz.

  He heard a sound. From deep within the body of the beholder it came, a sibilance of movement.

  The thing within the eye tyrant, trying to escape?

  But, no, it came from elsewhere, he recognized now. From all around him, maybe? Yet not that either. No, it came – somehow – from outside this horrible reality altogether ….

  And with that, Teldin was awake. He lay motionless in his bunk, staring up into blackness, every nerve fiber tingling. By the gods, what a nightmare. He was growing all too used to night terrors, but this had been particularly …

  What was that! He stiffened.

  It was the noise from the dream: a faint sibilance from somewhere in the darkness around him, as of something brushing softly against the deck. A foot? That was it – stealthy movement.

  Was it the saboteur, the murderer, sneaking up on him, ready to finish him off as well? He’d latched the door of his cabin, but he knew all too well how little hindrance that would prove to someone with any skill at lockpicking.

  His eyes were wide open, but he could hardly see anything at all. The cabin’s lantern was out, and the only illumination was faint starlight coming in through the two “eye” portholes.

  He remained totally motionless, focusing all of his concentration into his eyes and ears. For a moment he considered using the cloak, borrowing the enhanced senses of the ultimate helm, but he immediately dismissed that as foolish. The moment he tried to access that power, the cloak would glow with its magical light, giving the assassin – if that’s what had made the sound – a perfectly lit target at which to strike.

  The sound came again. Yes, it was stealthy movement. There was no doubt any longer. Somebody was crossing the cabin – slowly, oh, so cautiously – from the door to Teldin’s bunk, mounted against the forward bulkhead.

  He needed a weapon. The idea flashed through his mind. The hand-crossbow …

  He grunted softly, drawing the sound out into a low mumble – hoping he sounded like a sleeper disturbed by a dream. He rolled over, pulling the blanket up around his chin, simultaneously letting a hand flop down over the edge of the bunk. His fingers brushed the deck, then touched something else: the crossbow, cocked and loaded with a single bolt. One shot. It had to be sufficient enough to either incapacitate the assassin or slow him down sufficiently for Teldin to escape or summon help. Slowly, carefully, he wrapped his hand around the small wooden stock and let his finger rest on the trigger.

  In his mind he rehearsed his moves. Bring the small weapon up quickly – but not so quickly that he dislodged the bolt from its seat – simultaneously flipping off the safety catch with his thumb. Aim and shoot.

  But aim where? He opened his eyes as wide as they’d go, trying to pick up every iota of light in the room.

  Yes, there was something – a faint, cold shimmer. Starlight washing over steel. The blade of a short sword. His pulse was pounding in his ears, so loud that the assassin had to hear it. The faintly gleaming sword blade was only five feet away from him.

  He tried to imagine the position of the body behind that blade. Assume it’s a right-hander, he told himself. The odds are ten to one in your favor. That would put the swordsman’s body … there!

  In a single movement he brought the hand-crossbow up, flicked the safety, and pulled the trigger. The small weapon jerked in his hand as the bowstring sang. He imagined he could hear the bolt cross the open space, and undeniably could hear it drive into his would-be killer’s flesh.

  Light, that’s what he needed now. He expanded his awareness through the cloak and squinted as the pink light flared from behind him, flooding the compartment.

  From his virtually omnipresent viewpoint, he could clearly see the crossbow bolt’s feathered haft protruding from the lower chest of the assassin.

  It was Julia. By Paladine’s blood, it was Julia ….

  The short sword dropped from the copper-haired woman’s nerveless fingers. She clutched at the bolt, driven into her chest just below her right breast, and she crumpled.

  Teldin flung the tiny crossbow aside and dived off the bed toward her.

  Oh, no. By the gods, no … His eyes filled with tears, and his heart felt as though
it were about to twist inside out.

  There’s a difference between suspicion and knowledge, he realized with a sickening impact. He’d suspected Julia. He thought he’d reconciled himself to the fact that she could have been the one. But that reconciliation had only been in his own imagination, he understood now. Now he knew that, again, a woman he’d loved – Why not use the word? he asked himself bitterly – had betrayed him, had tried to kill him. And he, in turn, had killed her.

  What is it? he wanted to scream to the heavens so that the gods could hear him. What fa it you want me to learn so badly that you keep repeating the same damn lesson?

  The light of the cloak faded. The enhanced perception slipped as his emotions overwhelmed his control over the cloak.

  The knot in his throat felt so hard that it threatened to choke him as he knelt by the fallen woman and cradled her head in his hands. In the faint wash of starlight, her face was peaceful, youthful – the way it had looked on the pillow beside him when he’d woken in the night and turned to watch her sleep. Her eyes were closed. For a moment, he thought she was already gone, then he saw her chest rise and fall and saw a tiny bubble of air emerge from the bloody wound.

  “Why!” he cried hoarsely. “Why, may the gods damn you?” Her eyes flickered and opened. Normally bright, her eyes were dulled now. They rolled wildly for a moment, and Teldin knew that whatever it was she was seeing, it wasn’t this small compartment. Then they cleared slightly and focused on his face. “Teldin,” she murmured.

  “Why?” His voice was a whisper this time, but sounded even more tortured in his own ears.

  “Is it dead?”

  “What?”

  “Is it …” Her voice faded; he brought his ear closer to her mouth. “Is it dead?” she repeated.

  Was what dead? What was …?

  He heard it again. The faint brushing sound that had roused him from sleep and warned him of Julia’s approach.

  Behind him …

  He snapped his head around, saw something hurtling at him from the shadows under the starboard port, a shape of black on black. He hurled himself aside, not an instant too soon. The object flew past his ear, struck the bulkhead with a sound of stone on wood, and fell onto his bunk.