The Broken Sphere (29 page)

He smiled as reassuringly as he could under the circumstances and clapped her on the shoulder. “I know you did, Harriana,” he told her firmly. “I know you weren’t a sluggard. Nobody thinks you were. I don’t think it would have mattered even if you’d found her sooner.” He looked down into the diminutive woman’s eyes and saw the specter of guilt fade from them. “Now, tell me what happened.”

Harriana shrugged. “I come down to the hold just a couple of minutes back, looking for a sail patch. I keeps my repair things back aft there, by the mast foot.” She pointed aft, toward where assorted gear had been stacked against the hold’s rear bulkhead. “On the way I passes the bilge watch.”

The Cloakmaster nodded. The woman was referring to a wooden hatch, about two feet square, giving access to the bilges and the keel under the hold deck for repair or inspection. “So you passed the bilge hatch,” he prompted.

“And I sees it’s open,” the halfling said. “Not all the way, like, but just a thumbspan. I think there’s somebody down there, inspecting the bilges. So, just to be friendly like, I opens the hatch and I calls down, ‘halloo.’

“And that’s when I sees her.” Harriana pointed at Blossom’s still body. “The helm-priest, just lying all huddled up at the bilges. She doesn’t look comfortable,” she went on with a shrug, “so I thinks she might be hurt. I calls for help, and these two” – she pointed out Dargeth and Anson – “they answer. They drags the helm-priest out, and then we just fells like the blazes.”

Teldin looked questioningly at the two. It was Anson, predictably, who answered. “That’s how it was, Captain,” he confirmed. “We thought she’d maybe been checking the bilges, fell in, and hit her head. We didn’t think it might be her neck until we saw it.” He hesitated, obviously uncomfortable. “Did we do wrong, pulling her out?” he asked quietly. They say you don’t move them with less …”

It was Djan who answered, his voice quiet but carrying, You didn’t do her any harm, Anson, or you either, Dargeth. nobody could have done her any more harm by the time you got here.”

The two men looked noticeably relieved. “Captain,” Anson started tentatively, “one thing I wondered … What was Blossom doing in the bilges anyway? Checking the keel?

“That’s right.” Again it was Djan who responded – louder, more firmly this time. He stood and strode over to join Teldin and the others. “She was checking the keel, like I ordered her to.”

The Cloakmaster shot the half-elf a quizzical glance. There was something strange about his friend’s manner. He trusted Djan, and it wouldn’t do to question him about it here.

“I think you were right, Anson,” Djan continued, “I think she must have slipped, fallen, and landed badly. A tragic, fluke accident.” He turned to the half-orc. “Dargeth, would you see to the body, please? Pick the people you need.” Then he looked over at Teldin – meaningfully, the Cloakmaster thought – and said, “Captain? I think we’ve got to discuss the watch list. Can we speak in your cabin?”

*****

As soon as Djan and Julia had followed him into the cabin and shut the door behind them, Teldin turned to his first mate. “Could someone tell me what in Paladine’s name is going on?” he asked quietly.

Djan pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. There was something in his expression that Teldin hadn’t seen before – a tension that chilled the Cloakmaster to the bone. “I didn’t send Blossom to check the keel,” he said bluntly.

“Then, why …?” Teldin’s voice trailed off. A sharp pang of suspicion stabbed his chest. He suggested softly, “So the crew wouldn’t think … what?”

“Blossom’s neck was broken,” Djan answered, “but not in a fall.” He looked up, meeting the Cloakmaster’s gaze squarely for the first time. “Somebody killed her, Teldin. Somebody – a skilled warrior, I’d say – broke her neck with his hands. Then he stuffed her in the bilges.” He blinked thoughtfully. “I say ‘he,’ but it could just as easily have been a woman, I suppose. Breaking a neck isn’t hard if you know how to go about it.” He shook his head briefly, as if forcing his mind back to the subject at hand. “Somebody killed her,” he repeated. “It wasn’t an accident. We’ve got a murderer on board.”

Teldin pulled a chair over and sat down. He nodded slowly.

“Do you have any idea who?” Julia asked. Her face was pale and drawn.

The first mate shook his head. “It could have been just about anyone, really,” he answered. “It definitely happened less than half an hour before Harriana found the body. But half an hour’s a long time on a ship this size, and it doesn’t take long to kill someone if you’ve got a mind to.” He sighed. “Somebody leaves his watch station – he claims it’s a lead call – or slips out of his hammock. Or, if he’s off duty and awake, he just goes belowdecks. Nobody’s going to question him. He finds Blossom, leads her down to the cargo hold on some pretext. He kills her –
snap!
 
–
and disposes of the body. Then he just strolls back to wherever he’s supposed to be and waits for the commotion to start so he can look suitably shocked and horrified.”

“Why do you think she was killed there?” Julia asked.

Djan chuckled mirthlessly. “You try carrying Blossom more than a couple of paces,” he suggested. “Anyway, the hold’s the only place deserted enough to get away with it.”

“He must have known the body would be found soon enough,” Teldin pointed out.

The half-elf nodded agreement. “But he didn’t need it to stay hidden for long,” he explained. “Just long enough to fade back into the woodwork, so to speak.”

Teldin was silent for a few moments. A murder, he thought. That’s a long step up from sabotage, isn’t it? A murderer among the crew. Someone who wants to … what?

What does he want? he asked himself. Why kill Blossom? Why kill a helmsman? And there he had his answer. If you look at it from the right standpoint, it’s not that much different from sabotage. If you want to slow down a ship or cripple it, you can sabotage its rigging or you can eliminate its source of power. With Blossom dead, the
Boundless
had only one official helmsman left – the dwarf, Dranigor. Eliminate Dranigor, or just incapacitate him somehow, and that just leaves me. Then do something about me, and the ship’s dead in space ….

“Put some kind of a guard on Dranigor,” the Cloakmaster told Djan. “Come up with some kind of excuse.” The half-elf, nodded. “I like the way you handled things back there,” he added.

Djan’s lips quirked in a half smile. “I was making it up as I went along,” he said, “but I had to do something. If the crew figures out we’ve got a murderer aboard, then everything we’ve done – you’ve done – to build morale goes out the porthole … and I think I want to get off this ship.” His smile faded. The murderer knows I made it
up,”
he went on grimly, “and he knows that you two know now as well. But I couldn’t see any way of avoiding that.”

Teldin waved that aside. “I don’t think that matters much,” he decided. He paused. “Can we ask around – see if anyone did make a head call during the half hour in question?’”

Djan looked doubtful. “I can try,” he reflected. “I will try, but I can’t be too obvious about it, or people will guess what happened.”

The Cloakmaster nodded sadly. “You’re right, of course.” He patted his friend on the shoulder. “Well, do what you can,” he suggested, is there anyone other than the three of us that you think we can trust?”

“Beth-Abz?” Julia proposed.

Djan nodded agreement. “If the beholder wanted Blossom out of the way – for whatever reason – it could have just disintegrated her, and we’d have thought she fell overboard or something.” He stood. “I’ll get on to things, Captain,” he promised, in the meantime, … I suggest we all watch our backs.”

*****

Djan had been as good as his word, Teldin thought five days later. He’d asked around, just as he’d said he would, trying to get a line on anyone who might have been inexplicably missing around the time of Blossom’s death. But, for obvious reasons, he’d had to be very circumspect, and that had seriously limited his effectiveness.

At first, the Cloakmaster had considered helping his friend by asking his own oblique questions, but then had discarded the idea as counterproductive. The whole purpose was to prevent anyone in the crew from attaching any significance to the questions, and – almost by definition – any queries by the captain, the master of the ship, would attract such significance. Although it galled him to sit back and let Djan do all the work, he had to admit that this was the most logical course.

After two days, Djan had sadly admitted to Teldin that he hadn’t found out anything useful. Nobody could remember seeing someone acting in a suspicious manner – but that didn’t really mean much, he’d stressed, since he couldn’t let anyone think that his questions were important.

A highly skilled priest or mage would have come in really handy, Teldin told himself. He’d heard enough folk tales about powerful spellcasters being able to speak with the souls of the dead. Surely Blossom herself – her soul, wherever it happened to be at the moment – would be able to shed light on the details of her death, and even the identity of her killer. But the only person aboard of sufficient aptitude for such a task had been Blossom herself.

Which the killer had known, he thought with grim certainty.

In the five days since the murder, he’d found himself eyeing every crew member he encountered. Is he the one? he kept wondering. Or is it him? The knowledge that a murderer was constantly nearby had been unsettling enough, but what had made it even worse was that he had to hide his suspicions, his knowledge.

Even without the rest of the crew knowing that Blossom had been murdered, her death had seriously weakened morale aboard the
Boundless.
He’d overheard muttered conversations among the crew that the squid ship was a jinxed vessel. Some crew members seemed to be linking Blossom’s “accidental” death with that of Merrienne, the lookout who’d fallen to her death from the mainmast crow’s nest. The crew still considered the incident with the boom, just outside the Heartspace crystal sphere, to have been an accident, not the sabotage that it actually was. That made two tragic, pointless, fluke deaths. And sailors seemed almost universally superstitious, Teldin had noticed, whether they sailed the rivers of Ansalon or the void of wildspace. A third “accidental” death, and the crew would be convinced that the
Boundless
was a ship of ill omen.

Still, he couldn’t let himself dwell on such things, Teldin knew. His crew depended on him – on him and his officers – more now than ever before … even though they might not be fully aware of it themselves. They were trusting him to guide them through the troubles that had beset them and might continue to do so, to protect them, even to convince them that the
Boundless
wasn’t a jinxed ship after all. He owed them that much, he recognized – or, at least, his best efforts – and didn’t feel that their expectations were in any way unreasonable. Bonds of duty go both ways, he’d frequently reminded himself. He owed his crew his best efforts.

Yet, right or wrong, those expectations put even more pressure on him.

At least they were now close to Garrash, looping around the vast planet in an orbit that would take them just under a week to complete. The ship’s current attitude presented its starboard beam to the world, which guaranteed Teldin a spectacular view from his cabin’s large “eye” porthole.

From the ship’s present position, Garrash was a swollen ember-red disk, not quite circular, but slightly bloated in places, as though the world’s gravity was barely capable of restraining its burning atmosphere. Looping around it was the fire ring, glaring with bright yellow-red light. From this point of the ship’s orbit, Teldin was looking at the fire ring from directly above, showing it as perfectly circular, concentric with the planet itself, a thin band of flames. Djan had told him it was only – only! – a quarter-hour of spelljamming flight wide, but since that was only one-fiftieth the diameter of the planet itself, in comparison it looked like little more than a line. When the
Boundless
had first approached Garrash, they’d been seeing the fire ring from edge on. Since the band was only twenty or so leagues thick, it had been invisible from any significant distance, and Teldin had feared they’d somehow come to the wrong system. Today, however, there was no doubt.

So we’ve reached Garrash, he told himself. Where’s the
Spelljammer?

The previous night watch, he’d used the amulet again, striving to maintain his contact with the
Spelljammer
for longer than he’d ever done before. For almost an hour, his senses had been united with those of the great ship. During that time, he’d seen a small, bluish fire body – presumably the primary of the system the ship was in – and countless views of the distant stars. But there’d been no glimpse of Garrash, the fire ring, or – and here he’d admitted to wild hopes – the
Boundless
itself in orbit around the great world.

The star patterns hadn’t been any help. Even now that they were within the Vistaspace crystal sphere, Djan and the navigator had charted only a fraction of the system’s stars. The patterns he’d seen hadn’t matched anything on those incomplete starcharts. But that didn’t really mean much, one way or another, did it? Also, the bright blue-white sun might have been the primary of the Vistaspace system, but it might just as well have been in an entirely different sphere. At least he still hadn’t seen any hint that the
Spelljammer
had passed through a portal into the Flow, or that it was about to do so in the near future.

Throughout his contact, he’d also tried to connect with the mind of the mysterious ship – if it had anything resembling a mind – not just its wide-ranging suite of senses. Some tinge of emotion – or thought, even – might have given him some clue as to his quarry’s location. But, though he’d sometimes felt such emotions in the past – or thought he had, he forced himself to add – nothing came through the link this time.

After an hour he’d let the contact slip away, returning to a physical body that was panting with exertion and drenched in cold sweat. Nothing.