Krynnspace, Krynn, Khur desert
Twenty Elnamerrna crewmen
Rainmonth 14th, 2461 E. Y. or Fourthmonth 11th, 357 A. C.
Anna Lyselntri had passed through the portal and out of it. She had flown a short distance, only to crunch heavily onto the rocky sands of the Khur desert.
Then she had known no more for a time.
She had awakened an unknown length of time later, coughing and hurt. The human lady pushed herself up and glanced all around her.
She saw her nineteen comrades sprawled like dolls all over the immediate area—which unfortunately was not a forgiving place to be thrown. Autumn Deleskaran lay nearest to her, bleeding from a wound on her cheek. The others looked little better off, but Anna pulled out her magical ioun stone and tossed it up, making it circle her head.
After a moment, she felt a little better. The magical stone healed one's body at a very slow rate, but still far faster than natural recovery. She decided that she would share it out after it had healed her a bit. For the moment, she pulled bandages out of her backpack and used them to attend her friends' wounds.
She noticed a strange shimmering a short distance away, but she didn't move toward it. Her survival sense told her to leap through it—likely it was the Krynn side of the portal—but she couldn't leave her fellow crewmen to die. She moved swiftly among them, bandaging and pouring drops of alcohol on their wounds.
Kerliak stirred as she bandaged a gash on his arm.
"Kerliak," she called, shaking the scro by the shoulder.
He grunted, woke up slowly, then leaped to his feet as Anna finished the arm bandage.
"Ulgh," he muttered. "This place looks nasty. Can we go back to that dead planet?"
"Maybe," Anna replied. "There's a shimmer in the air back that way—" she pointed vaguely in the direction of it, though neither of them knew what direction that was; they didn't have their bearings here.
"It might go away, so let's get the others on their feet and try it," she added, passing her healing ioun stone to the scro.
Kerliak assisted her in cleaning up the others and getting them moving. Kerliak passed the ioun stone around to the ones hurt worst. When they were ready, Anna hurriedly led them to the shimmering she had seen.
The terrain in that direction had a slight, but noticeable, down slope—probably the reason it had battered them so much when they'd been thrown onto it. Anna quick-stepped over the rocky sand as fast as she could, but the terrain felt rough and it slowed her down. She figured that only a dwarf, or perhaps a gnome, could move across this place easily.
Finally, her eye caught that shimmer again, but as she'd feared, it was fading. She waved the others to follow and leaped through...
Dead moon of the third planet in a rogue crystal shell
Twenty Elnamerrna crewmen
Rainmonth 14th, 2461
A disorienting, dizzying passage through the extradimensional tunnel brought Anna's feet back to the dusty stone of the dead moon in the rogue crystal shell. She darted forward to make room for the others coming behind her, and then waved them through at a steady rate.
She looked around quickly as the others arrived, but no one remained alive. The arches just stood there, heartless stone. She did take note of the bodies of several dead drow, slain in the fight, but she saw nothing else of interest.
Anna grimaced. She dreaded being stranded, either here or in the Khur desert on Krynn. Fearing the worst, she looked up at the black sky, her gaze avoiding the unpleasant sight of the primary, and looked for the Elnamerrna.
Nothing. The sky was as she remembered it from before, naught but blackness, with strange flashes. These looked very bizarre, as they resembled heat lightning of pastel colors, but far above the atmosphere. Anna looked within those flashes, hoping to see even a speck that might be the Elnamerrna, but she saw no such thing. Unless, by incredible luck, she was still landed nearby, the ship was gone.
Autumn—the real person from the planet Oerth—glanced around at the others.
"Which one of us is in charge?"
Most of them shrugged, but Kerliak pointed at Anna.
"She's senior to all of us, I think," he commented, "and you have military experience, do you not?" he added, facing her once more.
"Yes," Anna nodded. "I fought in the Milandian War on my home world—front lines."
"Anyone have a problem with having Anna lead?" Kerliak asked, raising his voice.
"Nah, give 'er a chance," replied one man.
Lyreth spread his hands, not wanting the mantle of leadership himself.
"All right," Anna said serenely, hiding her nervousness. "Let's split up into groups of four. We'll meet back here at that thing—" she pointed at the mushroom-shaped artifact, "—in half an hour. Try to find the Elendrans' ship, and check on where the Elna was."
After they had divvied up into five groups, Anna waved them off in five directions to search. Nevertheless, when the twenty of them met again, they had found no one.
"The Elnamerrna's gone," Autumn reported to Anna, "as we expected."
Lyreth spoke up, however.
"We found the enemy ship. It's over there, behind those stone trees."
Anna's eyebrows rose and she took a step.
"Take us there."
Lyreth did. They left the region of the artifact with its stone cones and archways, and found a copse of petrified trees. Lyreth led them around and behind the bizarre-looking copse and they looked upon the Elendran ship.
It strongly resembled a black widow spider, but magical runes covered its abdomen. It sat on its belly with its eight legs supporting it upright.
"It's probably trapped," Lyreth said to Anna. "Damned drow."
"Maybe not," Anna replied. "I'm hoping they were in a hurry. Maybe they just abandoned it."
"Why go in there at all?" queried another crewman, a human lady.
"You're not afraid, are you?" Anna asked mildly.
"No, not that," the woman replied, her voice also steady. "I'm afraid we won't want to make it fly."
"What?" Anna asked, puzzled.
"The cursed drow might've used a lifejammer, Anna," Lyreth reminded. He turned to the other human lady.
"I'll take my turn, Bonnie, if it means we can leave here and find the Elna. We can't stay here, and I don't really want to go to Krynn." He paused. "I'd be afraid to try changing the view in that arch again. Remember what happened to Jalaysa."
Bonnie bit her lip, knowing he was right.
Anna stared hard at the Elendran ship, eyes cold. Lifejammers... evil devices that drained a victim's life energy to make a ship move, instead of using stored-away magical power as a normal spelljammer helm did. She hated the things, but they would make a ship fly without a spellcaster. Other means existed—Anna had used them, had spelljammed even though she had never in her life cast a spell—but lifejammers were simple, easy, and cruel.
Just the way the drow liked it.
Seeing no other choice, she moved cautiously toward the drow ship. She found its point of entry in the form of a hatch in the lower abdomen.
Anna reached above her head to pull on it, then scrambled aside to avoid any traps that the spies may have placed there. When nothing happened, she moved back under the oval hole and peered upward, not expecting to see much.
Indeed, she did not. As one might figure with a light-hating race like the drow, the interior of the scout ship had no illumination of any kind.
"Pitch black," she muttered.
"Good thing for them that it isn't real bright around here," Kerliak commented.
Anna pursed her lips and looked up at their problem. She did not relish the idea of hoisting herself up into a completely unlit area. No stairs or ladder presented themselves with the opened hatch.
"How did they—oh," Bonnie groaned, realizing.
"A lot of drow can levitate," Lyreth reminded, voicing her thought.
"Anyone have any way to make light?" Anna called out to all of them.
One gunner, a human woman, shouldered her way to Anna. She whispered a command word to a wand, and it burst into strong light. This she handed to Anna.
Anna smiled, satisfied. "Thanks, Kendra. Kerliak, Gresss, come here, please."
When the scro and the grommam stood on either side of her, she slung her shield over her shoulder and told them, "Lift me up there. I'll have a look around."
When they did, Anna gripped the lip of the hole with her gloved hands and hoisted herself up with a grunt. She raised the glowing wand with her left hand even as her right hand seized the hilt of her sword, ready to draw it and fight if need be.
Nothing leaped from the darkness to strike her. The Elendran ship both sounded and felt empty, abandoned, even... cast-off. Anna frowned.
"They sure took some awful risks to get rid of us and take over our identities," she thought aloud. "They even abandoned their own ship to get it done. I wonder what they're trying to prove."
No one answered, so Anna went back to business, hoping she could find out someday.
She fished a coil of rope out of her backpack, secured it to a post, and dropped it down to the others.
The twenty of them explored the craft. Some of the Elendran instrumentation looked familiar, some did not. Anna and the others had no qualms about working with magic—anyone who did would never have been hired by Tyfelian and Kiran—yet they could not fathom all of the drow items in the scout ship.
Anna made a mental note to mention these to Tyfelian if she ever saw him again. They might be useful to the Elnamerrna, and the scout ship itself might have salvage value.
Anna reached the Elendran ship's bridge and looked it over, scrutinizing every detail.
The spy ship's bridge was oval, not rectangular like a typical ship's bridge. It was wider than it was long, and moderately full of Elendran magical devices. Here on the bridge, most of these defied any guesses as to what purpose they might have served. Anna guessed that she was seeing analogues to the Elnamerrna's outeye, passage device, portal locator, and perhaps the unseen crewmember device, but she knew that she could only speculate.
Lyreth walked slowly around the perimeter of the bridge, glaring at the eight oval-shaped windows that gave a fine view of the desolate terrain outside the craft.
"What's this?" Anna asked when they'd finished exploring and all of them had assembled on the bridge. She pointed at what seemed to be the spelljammer helm.
Several crewmen looked it over, but shrugged or shook their heads, mystified. The helm looked like a chair, all right, but all resemblance to a normal spelljammer helm ended there. It was fashioned entirely of some unknown crystalline substance. Anna thought that it looked like a gargantuan, cut diamond, but that seemed impossible. Anna had never even heard of a precious stone of that size.
Greatly daring, Anna sat upon it. Several crewmen gasped at her recklessness—who could say what a strange helm would do to someone?—but nothing happened.
She attempted to extend her awareness into the chair, into the ship, but she could not. She had no magical powers beyond the magical devices she carried, so the helm did not react to her in any way.
Frustrated, Anna left the seat.
"Won't work," she muttered.
"Not for a bunch o' armor-plated sword-swingers," Kerliak commented. "If we had just one caster, we could do it," he grimaced. "I'd figure," he added, shrugging, since they didn't know exactly what the helm was.
Anna glared at the helm. "I sure wish I'd qualified to be a holy knight," she groused. "Maybe this thing uses powers from people with inborn abilities."
"Like any drow," Lyreth commented.
Anna thought.
"We know we can't fly," she said slowly, "and we can't stay here for long. Our rations won't hold out."
Lyreth bit his lip.
"We could try to use that arch to go directly to the Elnamerrna," he observed.
"If they're in the phlogiston, the portal won't reach them," another elf commented. "There can be no planar travel in the Flow."
"We don't know that, Quathan," Lyreth countered softly. "We don't know what that artifact can do. It's worth a try, at least."
"Agreed," Anna granted. "I don't believe it'll work—not if they're in the Flow, and I'm sure they are—but we shouldn't leave that stone unturned."
"I found the larder," Kerliak said. "We can stuff our backpacks, but for what?"
Anna sighed. "As I said, we can't stay here... and Tyfelian isn't coming back for us. I think we all know that. He doesn't even know there's anyone to come back for."
"Are you sure?" Kerliak queried. "Maybe he just hasn't made it back yet."
"No," Anna told him. "He would never have left if he thought we were still here. Those miserable drow stole our identities—I saw one change to look just like me when she tossed me through. I don't know how somebody slipped that over on him, but they did. He'll come back if he ever finds out, but that might be months—even years. No telling, since we don't know why those drow did what they did."
"Then... what?" asked Autumn.
"I think we need to fill our packs with all the food and water we can, because we're about to visit Krynn's Khur Desert," Anna dropped it on them hard. "We'll try using the arches to open a portal to the Elna, first, but if they're in the Flow..." she trailed off, letting the implications speak for themselves.
"What about Quatha Vellar, instead?" Bonnie interjected.
Anna looked somewhat interested in that idea, but Lyreth, better versed in magic, shook his head.
"If we change the view in that arch, we'll run the risk that it'll jump right back to that demon lord's throne," he reminded, "and I've no idea how to make the others work again. Still, I agree with Anna that we should try it once, to see if we can get right to the Elnamerrna."
"Go," she said. "I'll join you in a few minutes... I need to find some papyrus and a scroll tube."
"What for?" Kerliak asked, curious.
"To leave a note," Anna replied.
Anna went about her search as they filed out of the ship's bridge. When she found some blank papyrus sheets in the navigation desk, she rustled out a quill and a vial of ink.
Then she began to write.
Anna securely tied a knot around the scroll tube she had found, and then tied the full rope around the mushroom artifact. She watched the golden energy column with alarm, but it did not react in any way to her intrusion.
After she was done, she stepped over to the others. Lyreth was talking to the stone archway. She suppressed a laugh at the sight of an elf talking to a rock.
The arch flickered upon a view of the Rainbow Ocean—or at least, that's what Anna thought it looked like. It had little color. The sight lasted only a couple seconds, however, and Anna guessed that the device was balking at opening a portal into the Flow.
"Here, let me try," Kerliak said to Lyreth, trying to edge in front of the arch.
Lyreth shrugged and stepped aside.
"Look, I don't give a damn where it is—show me the starship Elnamerrna!" the scro growled at the arch.
The device did not react for a moment, almost as if offended, but then the image swirled onto a view—of sorts—of the starship.
"The Flow," Kerliak muttered unhappily.
"The Rainbow Ocean's ugly with no color," Autumn spat, recoiling from the sight.
Anna's expression hardened. No color at all graced the view they saw of the vessel, and the endless fogs of the phlogiston looked unpleasantly like mud through the color-blind arch. The Elnamerrna appeared as a ghastly shade of off-white, but Anna stepped right up to the arch anyway.
"Inside the bridge," she said to the arch.
The view changed, but still no color appeared. Anna looked over the back of Tyfelian's chair. Tyfelian was not within it, but she thought she saw Kiran's hand lying on the desk between the chairs.
Up forward, she saw more of interest.
By her perceptions, "Gresss" had the spelljammer helm. She could see only the back of his head, but "Gresss's" apelike appearance was hard to mistake.
The phony grommam pushed the helm hard, driving the ship deeper into the Flow.
"That isn't me," the real Gresss, standing behind her, snarled. "I've never logged a single hour at the helm!"
Anna glanced at him and bit her lip, but then both she and Autumn gasped as the lithe, armored figure standing beside the helm turned.
"Autumn" barked orders at her fellow spies. Anna and the others on the dead moon could not hear her, but they paid little heed to that.
Anna couldn't help but look at the image in the arch, and at the real Autumn.
"It's like looking into a trick mirror," Autumn said, her teeth biting off the words.
Anna picked up a rock, took aim for "Autumn's" head, and threw it at the arch.
The rock caromed off of an unseen barrier. Anna scowled as it clattered back to the ground.
"This thing can't take us into the Flow," Lyreth groaned as Anna's earlier supposition stood confirmed. The elf glared at the immeasurably old magical device. "I was hoping you were wrong..." he said to her.
"So was I," Anna said softly.
"I'm impressed by the fact that it can even look into the Rainbow Ocean," the elf said wonderingly.
He moved away from the arch a step.
"The Khur Desert on Krynn it is, then," Lyreth shrugged helplessly. "I'd prefer Quatha Vellar for sure, like Bonnie said, but I have a strange feeling... if we try to look somewhere besides Khur, we're going to see that demon again."
"How do you mean?" Anna queried.
"I don't know... a human would call it a 'gut feeling.' I think it's safer to change the view in one of those arches back to a destination right before the present one."
Anna's shoulders slumped.
"Ansalon isn't a place I'm keen on visiting right now," she said slowly.
"Not that I disagree, but why not?" Kerliak asked.
"I've lived the nightmare of continent-wide war on my home planet," Anna replied, though her eyes never left the arch. "Fing told me Ansalon's torn apart by war. Ruined cities, border disputes every other month, lost army soldiers running around everywhere..." she swallowed, vividly recalling her wartime and post-war experiences, back on Erilonia.
She seriously considered telling the arch to change its destination to Quatha Vellar, despite the grave risk. Had she been alone, she would have done just that, but there were nineteen other lives to consider.
Anna used the time that it took for her to draw a deep breath to try to recall everything that Fing had ever told her about Ansalon, then she used that breath to speak to the arch.
"Krynnspace, Krynn, Ansalon, Khur Desert."
Listraeespace
Elnamerrna
Greenmonth 31st, 2461
"There," Jaclyn said to Barolcot as the steel triangle straightened out hard.
"I hate t'ask ya to do this stuff, but they ain't no other way," the dwarf grunted as he retightened the bolts with heavy swings of his mallet. "These here repairs prob'ly'd be impossible without magic and mindbender help."
Jaclyn snaked a mild dirty look at Barolcot for his use of the less-than-complimentary word "mindbender," but she let it pass as the Elnamerrna creaked alarmingly all around them, reminding herself that Barolcot's strengths lay in engineering, not language skills.
"I'm not sure you can do it even with our help," Jaclyn noted, looking around uneasily.
"Aw, that's nothin'," Barolcot shrugged. "She's just gettin' stretched out good again."
Jaclyn hoped devoutly that he was right. She had enough experience to be a qualified crewman—and indeed, she did that sometimes, to give some random crewman a day off—but she had little knowledge of the ship's structure or how to repair it. To her senses, the Elnamerrna still seemed ready to fall apart at any moment.
"It'll take time, gal, but we'll get 'er right enough t'get t'Quatha. Then we can fix 'er up like new." The engineer's voice had nothing but confidence.
"He's unusual for a dwarf," Jaclyn thought. "Most dwarves don't like magic or psionic powers one bit, but he works with us right along."
Jaclyn pondered for a moment, but she didn't know enough about Barolcot or his history to guess—barring reading his mind, which she would never do to a friend except in the most dire circumstances.
So, she set the idea aside and moved along to the next part of the ship's skeleton that needed a bone straightened.
The repair efforts took six days, but Barolcot finally judged the Elnamerrna ready to fly again. As the canny engineer had predicted, the helm grabbed the ship's structure and she lifted readily to climb toward space.
They left Listraeespace and charted course for Hearthspace with bitter regret. Sildara watched Tash work her figures and consult the maps for the proper course. She knew that the blond drow felt the same bitterness as she did.
"I want so much to go the other direction... to help you find your crewmen," she said to Tyfelian and Kiran.
Both of them looked back at her with sincere agreement, but one had only to glance around at the bridge—especially the makeshift, hastily constructed ceiling—for absolute certainty that a rescue mission was not a good idea at the moment. Tyfelian bowed his head with sorrow and frustration.
"That'd pract'ly be suicide," Barolcot groaned. "The Elna ain't in no shape to go nowhere but straight to a drydock. But you can bet your last copper we'll go get 'em soon's we can."
"Then we'll go back and find that rogue shell," Tyfelian explained. "When we do, we'll use that artifact to find them, or maybe..." he frowned. "Sildara, do you know whether the Elendrans use some kind of helm that anyone can pilot?"
"They do not, unless they've changed that policy," the Listraeean replied. "They use crystal helms, which only a spellcaster can use, or lifejammers, naught else that I know of. Why do you ask?"
"I thought that perhaps they'll find that scout ship and fly it themselves."
"Are there any spellcasters among them?"
"No."
Sildara cast her eyes down sadly.
"Then there is no way they can fly the Elendran vessel, unless it has a lifejammer or some helm like nothing I've ever heard of the Elendrans using. I'm sorry."
"In that case, we'll still go back to that rogue shell if we can find it again, and use the artifact to go to Krynn," Tyfelian stated. "Even if they could return to the moon through that portal, there's nothing to eat or drink there."
He thought for a moment.
"Assuming they did come back through, where would they go? That portal could take them anywhere."
"They would've tried to come here," Kiran replied, thinking hard. "But if we'd made it into the Flow..." he trailed off, letting the facts speak for themselves. "In their situation, Quatha Vellar would be my first choice."
Sildara glanced at Menlina, by her side at the table to Kiran's left. Menlina sighed dismally but her expression brightened after a few seconds.
"Instead of that world of Krynn, perhaps they would think to go to the same destination we're heading for," she offered optimistically. "Hope against all odds that we find them waiting for us at Quatha Vellar?" she smiled, a hint of a positive outlook returning.
Tyfelian said nothing, but he raised his eyebrows at that thought.
"They might, but I wouldn't if I were them," Kiran said grimly. "I wouldn't want to chance meeting that demon again."
A troubled look on Kiran's face caught Menlina's attention.
"Something wrong?" she asked the paladin.
"I was thinking of a trick we once played on a scro captain," Kiran explained grimly. "I thought it was ironic just desserts at the time, but now it doesn't seem to be as funny."
"A trick?" Menlina queried.
"A trick," Kiran verified. "We were looking for a certain magical device important to the war effort, but so was Captain Wrackblood. When we found a spy on our ship, Tyfelian imitated his voice in a hummerfly message—to give Wrackblood misleading information... he said that the item was in Krynnspace, when it wasn't."
"Be careful of lies... they can come back to haunt you," Menlina murmured.
Kiran raised an eyebrow.
"An old proverb of ours," she explained. "It comes from the fact that Elendrans are so dishonest." Her expression was neutral, but then she looked apprehensively at Tyfelian—the one who had told that particular lie, for a good cause.
But Tyfelian just looked back at her thoughtfully.
"Ghosts of conscience, ghosts of fate, always coming back," he said. "Yes, they do seem to backfire sometimes. But this is one ghost that we're going to put to rest," he said firmly.
His steadfast gaze went back to the outeye. To Kiran, his large eyes seemed like unseeing, darkened pools of shock and rage that looked not forward, but backward, to a tanar'ri lord and a dead world with a wide-open door to everywhere.
The Elnamerrna reached Hearthspace in four days with the local charts supplied by the Listraeeans. They entered the gigantic crystal shell and made way for one of the Wall Gateways, those magnificent shortcuts so vital to travelers within Hearthspace.
Sildara and Menlina watched the outeye curiously as the Elnamerrna approached a Wall Gateway. The Gateway appeared as a hoop of thick, solid rock half a mile across. Within the hoop lay total darkness; around its perimeter loomed the buildings and towers of a fortress complex, undoubtedly heavily armed.
"Hearthspace is almost unbelievably big," Tash told them. "Once, it was listed as a minor hazard to navigation because of that."
"How big can it be?" Menlina asked with a raised eyebrow. "Surely no more than two or three months to cross it."
Jaclyn smiled. "For us, that's true, maybe. For a ship that flies at normal speeds, it'd be closer to a year."
Sildara and Menlina looked stunned. They had never even heard of a crystal sphere that large!
"But the Itreyans—Itreya is our fourth planet—came up with a shortcut. The Gateways," Jaclyn said.
In response to their curious looks, Tyfelian raised a hand to keep Jaclyn and Tash quiet, and smirked, "You'll see."
"Bridge, crow's nest," the voice horn called with Lygalliz's voice.
"Bridge, Kiran," the human replied with his horn.
"They're flashing a message. They're asking where we want to go."
"Tell them, the Gateway nearest to Quatha Vellar."
"Aye," Lygalliz responded and began to flash the hooded lantern.
"They don't ask you to identify yourselves?" Sildara queried.
"No, no...they know who we are. A triop with silver paint isn't hard to remember," Kiran said gently, smiling. "And, the Itreyans are a very kind people—but still, we'll have to pay a toll for passage."
"What race are they?" Menlina put in.
"All races," Tyfelian told her. "They come from a unified planet—the only one I know of except really small worlds."
"We've received clearance," Lygalliz advised from the horn.
"Thank you, Lygalliz," Kiran said warmly to the hurwaet, then shut off the horn.
Jalaysa flew the ship right up to a particular tower whose top had been painted red. The personnel in that tower pushed out a long plank from its roof to thump down—or up, perhaps, depending upon one's point of view—into the Elnamerrna's lower forward ballista bay. She had no upper bays at the moment.
Jalaysa watched, through the view provided by the spelljammer helm, as a courier from the tower came out to collect the toll. An Elnamerrna crewman met him halfway and handed over a heavy bag filled with coins.
After the men had returned to their respective posts, the tower's workers pulled the plank back and into their tower. The Elnamerrna moved off, toward the Gateway.
Jalaysa flew the Silver Triop straight into the blackness within the stone hoop. Sildara and Menlina, like everyone else, felt a woozy sensation as the ship passed through it. Then, they were in another place entirely, with another Gateway right behind them.
"A far less powerful magic than the Elendrans' spansphere portals, but permanent," Alzja noted. "All it takes is a toll at a Gateway to shorten your journey.
"I'd say it's well worth it," Tyfelian said.
Tash called navigation cues to the helm, and Jalaysa made the Elnamerrna dart away toward Quatha Vellar.
Hearthspace, Shipyard Station Quatha Vellar
Elnamerrna
Summer's Days 1st, 2461
Jalaysa eased the Silver Triop down toward a drydock on the underside of Quatha Vellar, where the true shipyard sprawled over the entire surface of the coin-shaped aarakocra base. She listened intently to the cues called to her, but this time she took cues not from navigation, but from the crow's nest.
"Ease right just a trifle," Lygalliz called to her.
Jalaysa, with the wraparound view provided by the spelljammer helm, had already realized that her aim was off, but she could not tell by how much, exactly—the ship had gotten too close.
"Bring the nose up level to the seventh landings of the scaffolds," the hurwaet again cued the helm.
Jalaysa did, but she eyed a pole placed directly in front of the dock as a reference for "seventh landing." As far as she could tell, the Elnamerrna now floated about ten feet directly above the cradle.
After just a few seconds, Lygalliz verified that.
"Down, helm. Straight down."
Down came the Elnamerrna. She bumped into the cradle in exactly the correct spot and with the right standing. In a matter of just moments after that, the dockyard workers pulled on windlasses.
Scaffolding rose and surrounded the ship. It closed in until it completely enclosed the vessel at a distance of about two feet.
Through the outeye, Tyfelian watched it rise with a mixture of relief and agitation. He disliked the downtime for repairs, but then again, the ship needed repairs so badly that no one could argue the point. He sighed with resignation and told Jalaysa to let down the helm, then he picked up the voice horn.
"All hands, the ship is docked. Shore leave is authorized for all personnel. Lock up your quarters—the repair teams don't need to go in there. All personnel, gather the watch dogs and take them to the crew quarters."
Tash and Alzja gathered up the navigation papers and started out of the bridge. Everyone else filed out, too, with heavy hearts, but Tyfelian waved the guards over to himself.
"Guards, take command here. See to it that only the shipwrights work on the bridge... Barolcot will handle the carpentry work in here once they're done. I've already assigned guards to watch on the outside of the bridge."
"The secret door?" whispered a guard, glancing at the back of the bridge.
"Right... no one learns about that if we can help it."
The two guards stepped up to the command platform and gingerly took the seats as Tyfelian and Kiran left.
Barolcot stood outside the portside doorway as they came through it. Kiran paused to regard it. The door was gone; the dwarf himself had removed it, claiming that it was a loss. Barolcot fell into pace with them as they headed toward the cargo bay.
The dwarf didn't look too happy.
"Something wrong?" Tyfelian asked.
"Yeah... I won't be doin' the work."
"It's always hard to just stand and watch while someone else does the work," Kiran sympathized, "especially when it's something important like a ship. But you're just one person, Barol. Fixing this mess would take months all by yourself."
"I'd like to supervise at least," Barolcot noted as dockyard hands began to pass them, moving in the opposite direction.
"No need," Tyfelian replied. "The Elna couldn't be in better hands. These workers know exactly what they're doing, or they wouldn't be here."
"High standards," Barolcot murmured, still not happy with the situation.
The three of them had reached the cargo bay. Most of the crew was entering just as they did, and they milled around in the huge place with the dogs. With the extensive and severe damage to the cargo bay door, no mundane way existed that could open it, but Tyfelian waited out the moments that it took for his wizards to lift it just a bit—enough for a person to walk out through it.
The bay door wobbled and shook like a dry leaf in a stiff breeze, but it held together and ten crewmen jammed debris into the gap to keep it opened.
Tyfelian and his entourage entered the bay, shrank, walked out through the gap, and paused for the shrinking magic to let go and make them normal-sized again.
Scaffolding met them. No unobstructed view of the shipyard existed, in any direction.
Tyfelian reached over and grabbed a beam, then climbed down it. Kiran followed, then Barolcot at a slower pace. Along their way, they dodged workers who had started to remove the chitinous hull plates. Through the openings in the hull, they spotted more workers within the ship, swiftly loosening the oversized torque bolts that held the ship together.
They reached the bottom, then climbed up the long ramp out of the repair bay. There, they found an older aarakocra man, the yard supervisor, waiting for them.
Tyfelian talked with Kiran for a moment as Barolcot pulled out a scroll case and handed it to the yard supervisor. The papers—real papers, not papyrus sheets—in the case showed detailed drawings of the Elnamerrna, firm specs on the hull's parts, and measurements of the interior arrangement.
"Bigger than the usual triop," his sensitive ears heard Barolcot tell the supervisor. "Makes a lot o' difference in the parts, 'specially the plates. Watch out for that."
Kiran moved close to the supervisor to murmur in his ear—wherever a bird-man's ears were—"Sorry for his pushiness... he likes that ship really well."
The supervisor wrote down a few notes to himself as he nodded. His beak could not smile, but his eyes twinkled at Kiran.
"We've worked on your ship before, but it was only a paint job... no repairs. She was brand new at the time. So I need this information," he said kindly, his voice squawking. "But I'm impressed by your being able to make her fly again at all, in that condition." His eyes flickered on the totally missing upper weapons deck, though they could barely see the area through the scaffolding.
"Can you fix that?" Tyfelian queried anxiously.
"Oh, most surely," the supervisor replied. "Like new. But some of the plates will have to be handcrafted. With a larger ship, they're not quite the same as for the regular design." His claw worked the quill as he wrote on a papyrus sheet. "Are there any areas of the ship that are not to be worked on?"
"The crew quarters," Kiran told him. "It isn't needed... and on the bridge, shipwrights only. Our own engineer will do the carpentry there."
"Certainly. I'll send you the total price," the aarakocra told them as he finished writing, and they all turned to regard the scaffolded ship. "But lucky for you, chitin isn't expensive."
The small group broke up, the supervisor moving toward the ramp to squawk commands at the workers.
Tyfelian moved off to get a better view. He found one on an unused levitating platform. It floated a little above the level of the Elnamerrna's gravity line. He climbed up onto it.
The half-drow watched the Quatha Vellar dockhands start to take the ship apart on the outside and he saw their couriers run off to order more chitin plates.
His expression hardened as he thought of his crewmen, stranded on Krynn or perhaps facing starvation or dehydration on the dead moon, if the artifact no longer operated and would not let them leave. They could perhaps find the Elendran wolf spider and get food and water from it, he realized, but that would not keep them alive forever... maybe not very long, in fact, if it happened to be low on supplies.
"Quickly... quickly," he murmured, yearning to go.
Krynnspace, Krynn, Khur Desert
Twenty Elnamerrna crewmen
Rainmonth 15th, 2461 E. Y. or Fourthmonth 12th, 357 A. C.
Anna trudged across the bizarre landscape of Khur. She judged her direction by the sun, hoping that on Krynn, as on most worlds, the sun rose from the eastern horizon. She had once seen a map of Ansalon drawn by Tyfelian, when the half-drow had visited Krynn by way of a dwarven citadel ship, so she knew roughly where the Khur desert was, and that Kendermore lay east of it.
What she did not know, however, was how far into the desert the portal had placed her and her friends.
Anna sipped at her water skin and kept going. The ground was rough—broken rock covered by sand, and here and there, she spotted ridges that looked a lot like coral reefs.
"Isn't that coral?" Kerliak asked her.
"Yes, I think it was," Anna said thoughtfully. "This world suffered a great upheaval three hundred odd years ago. They call it 'the Cataclysm'. It changed the map, so to speak. This whole region might've been sea bottom before that."
Anna wiped sweat off her brow.
"Feels hot for... late spring, feels like," she muttered.
Bonnie sniffed.
"I smell salt," she said to Anna. "The coast must not be far away."
"Probably," Anna replied. "But we're not interested in the ocean. We need to get to Kendermore and get our bearings. Then we can try to find a way off-world."
Kerliak regarded the human lady with a thoughtful smile.
"You got something against Krynn?"
"Not especially, but Fing's stories about the War of the Lance don't thrill me. I know what it's like right after a war that spans a whole continent—I fought with the Tharcian forces on my home world, to the very end and a little after. Border disputes might flare up any time—and you don't want to be in the middle of one if it happens. And—there's Krynn's dragons and draconians."
"Fighting dragons is dangerous business," Kerliak remarked. "One wrong move or one wrong protective spell, and your name is in the history books. And that's if you're lucky."
"Yes, and Krynn's draconians are nasty soldiers," Anna agreed. "Fing told me that some of them turn to stone when you kill them, and other types blow up right in your face."
She shivered as if with a chill despite Khur's heat. She had grown accustomed to shipboard life, and the thought of fighting such monstrosities without Tyfelian's canny guidance and keen swords, and also without spellcaster support, alarmed her considerably.
To her relief, though, she looked up at the horizon from the desert sands a short time later, to see a mass of trees in a ragged line.
"Kendermore's forests!" she blurted happily. The castaway Elnamerrna crewmen quickened their pace and made the outermost fringes of the woods before sundown.
Anna called for camp to be made, and set guards. She herself took first watch with three others. They spent a largely miserable but uneventful night in the outer reaches of Kenderhome, and then Anna led the march eastward once more.
The woods they'd found turned out to be, not Kendermore's forests, but just a woods area in the middle of the plains lying west of Kendermore. The smell of the sea got stronger and stronger as they marched. Anna tried to remember the map she'd seen, and wondered if she and her party might not be on an isthmus, a narrow neck of land between two bodies of salt water... but her memory told her that the isthmus connecting Goodlund to the Ansalon mainland was very wide—too wide to smell the sea from the center of it.
"Are we sure we know where we're going?" Autumn asked Anna as they broke camp at dawn on the third day.
"Not exactly, except I'm sure that Kendermore lies east... we're in northern Balifor right now. I studied one of Tyfelian's maps once, so I know that much. But I don't know exactly where we are, so the best thing to do is get somewhere where we I do know where we are."
Not about to argue with that, Autumn slung her backpack over her shoulder and fell into march-step with Anna. The leader had more to say, though.
"After we get our bearings, we have to go to Palanthas or maybe Mount Nevermind," she said, loudly enough for all to hear. "Palanthas is the only place I know of that starships land on this world, but maybe the gnomes of Mount Nevermind could get us into space. I don't like the idea of flying in those technological ships of theirs, but if there's no other way... " she shrugged.
"How do you know all this?" Kerliak asked her.
A wry smile formed on Anna's pretty face.
"Fing," she replied. "Live with a kender, learn about Krynn. It's that simple."
Kerliak's bestial face found a smile, too, and he snickered.
"Perhaps we can get out of this mess after all," he said softly. More loudly, he added, "I hope we get to hear that kender's voice again."
Anna muttered, "Never thought I'd hear someone say that about a kender..."
Nevertheless, a wistful look in her eye belied her words.
They kept heading eastward for days... they lost count of how many, as days turned into weeks and time became blurry—but then they found woods, a heavy forest canopy. Encouraged, they quickened their pace. They learned the hard way that they were moving too fast, though, for they suddenly got caught—at least thirty kenders seemed to appear out of nowhere, surrounding them with drawn weapons.
Daggers, but still drawn weapons.
Not really feeling very scared, Anna ventured, "Hello."
"Hello! Welcome to Kendermore!" the lead kender said to them with a wide, friendly smile.
Anna reflexively put a hand on her weapons belt to keep it from being lifted, but the complete incongruity—getting stopped at dagger point by a border patrol that simultaneously offered a warm, hearty greeting—made her smile and giggle softly.
The lead kender's smile slipped a bit.
"How rude!" he said, miffed, but not at her laughter. He glared at Anna's hand on her belt buckle.
"Never mind," Anna said quickly, letting her hand drop. She started to say more, but the lead kender spoke first.
"I...dent...uh...fy...yourself," the kender stumbled over the big word.
Trying very hard not to laugh, Anna replied, "Anna Lyselntri, late of the starship Elnamerrna, out of Quatha Vellar of Hearthspace." She looked at the kender curiously. "You speak Stellar Common?"
"No," the kender replied. "I'm speaking Kenderspeak, and so are you."
Anna blinked. She looked at Kerliak, at her side.
"Stellar Common, every word," the scro stated.
Anna felt baffled, but she had no time (or desire, truth be told) to question the good fortune that had eliminated a language barrier, for the kender went on.
"Starship eln-uh-mair-nuh? What's that mean? What's a starship look like? Shaped like a star? How big is it? How fast can it sail through the water? Could it sail into the Blood Sea of Istar and come back out? Where's your homeport? And how'd you get here?"
The other kenders all started talking at once, so Anna spoke up again, addressing the lead kender.
"I'm afraid we've gotten lost," Anna told him, stifling her laughter still. He sounded so much like Fing when she told stories! She wanted to make a friendly gesture, so she answered his questions.
"Elnamerrna means 'fighting chance'... she looks kind-of like a catfish a hundred and fifty feet long, painted silver... she doesn't sail on water, a starship can fly... I don't know anything about the Blood Sea, just where it is, sort-of... um... we call Quatha Vellar our homeport... and we came here accidentally," she finished, hoping she'd remembered all his questions.
"Oh!" the kender cried. "I'd love to see the Blood Sea from up above!" He sheathed his dagger and exclaimed, "Are you from another world?"
"Yes, but..." Anna started to explain, but the kenders all started talking again. The lead kender waved Anna into step beside him, and the twenty castaways marched beside thirty kenders for six nerve-wracking hours.
The kenders talked nonstop and kept lifting belongings off of the Elnamerrna crewmen (and each other—that wasn't hard to notice), and the twenty crewmen felt like they were floating in a tide that carried them east toward something they didn't know for sure that they wanted to reach.
Then they stood in Kendermore, where things got worse.
"Where's that patrol?" Anna asked her comrades, but the thirty kenders who had escorted them to Kendermore had vanished.
"Probably forgot all about us already," Autumn laughed, then she swore as she noticed that she was missing a dagger. Irritated grumbling from the others advised her that the entire troupe had the same problem with some of their belongings.
Anna closed her eyes briefly, resigned. This seemed a nightmare. She had no idea where to go in the kender town, so she simply led her party around at random, looking for help and watching her belt pouches closely.
She approached a tired-looking kender who was leaning against a low fence around some kind of official building... or so she thought, for with kender buildings, it was hard to tell. The kender had an apple in his hand and seemed to be eating away, lost in thought—or as close to that state as kenders ever get, at least.
"Excuse me, good sir," she said to the kender. He turned at the sound of her voice, looked happily surprised at the sight of the pretty human lady, then said, "Hm?"
"Could you tell me how one might find a kind wizard hereabouts, or a good dragon, perhaps... some way to move quickly across the land to Palanthas?"
The kender offhandedly pointed down the street, using the hand that held the apple.
"Try talking to our leader. His name's Kronin and he's in town right now. He's the one in the green tunic."
Anna flashed him a smile, then moved off down the street to find the kender leader.
"This will be interesting..." she trailed off, speaking to Kerliak.
"Can't imagine that the kenders even have a leader," the scro noted.
"They're so much like children," Anna murmured in agreement, then strode down the street to find Kronin.
Hearthspace, Shipyard Station Quatha Vellar
Elnamerrna, docked, still under repair
Summer's Days 7th, 2461
"We need to get this figured out once and for all," Tyfelian tried to explain. "We don't know what the Elnamerrna's about, and I'm not setting off on a rescue mission flying a ship that might not be what it looks like."
"Ty, the Elnamerrna is just a ship," Jaclyn pleaded with the half-drow. "There's no way that she could be alive."
"There's something about the ship that seems to be alive," Tyfelian countered. "She talks to me once in a while."
This met with more than one furtive glance from the command crew. They stood all around him—or, more accurately, the levitating platform he stood upon or others like it nearby. Half a dozen of the general crew with Sildara and her team also stood around on the ground, watching curiously.
Tyfelian seriously considered telling them to go away, uneasy about how they might react if the object of his search eluded even his wizards and psion, but he could not think up a good excuse to do so. He could have simply ordered them away, but that was not his style.
"Use your spells and psionics," Tyfelian told them, with the last words looking at Jaclyn. "Find out what the ship really is."
Tash, Alzja, Jalaysa and Jaclyn glanced at him, hesitant and confused.
Tyfelian's face eased into a relaxed but firm expression.
"That's an order," the half-drow told them, arching his brows, but he softened his voice. He did not want to sound like a raving drill sergeant, but his friends were balking at the strange request, and he had to know.
"Throw the book at that ship and find out why she talks to me."
"What if we find nothing at all?" Alzja queried, essentially putting a finer point on Jaclyn's doubts.
"You will. When we were in Listraeespace, the Elnamerrna talked to me. Not with words, but with feelings, images, metaphors..." he paused.
The wizards, the psion, and the rest of the crew didn't know what to say, so he went on when he found the words.
"I sensed her in my heart, my mind... I know there's more to that ship than just steel and chitin and wood," he stated.
Tash frowned puzzledly.
"You felt a presence there? How? There were fifty people aboard at the time. Even if the ship does have life, how could you have told her apart from all of the rest of us? And why has not Jaclyn felt this, too?"
"She spoke to me directly," Tyfelian replied, "and Jaclyn is a metabolic psion, not a true telepath," dismissing the matter with a wave of his hand. "Barol!" he called over to the dwarf.
Barolcot glanced up to let Tyfelian know he was paying attention.
"Lower the scaffolding."
Barolcot yelled to some off-duty aarakocra dockhands, whom Tyfelian had tipped to stay at their posts after their workday was over, for this very purpose. They pulled on the windlasses and the scaffolding around the Silver Triop slowly lowered, folding down on itself from the top, over and over, until the entire mass of scaffold layers lay flat in a huge ellipse circling the docking pier.
The Elnamerrna sat there in all her unpainted glory. Standing on the levitating platforms gave them all a fine oblique view of the vessel, at about the same angle as some of Barolcot's perspective drawings.
As Tyfelian had predicted, the well-equipped and very competent repairmen of Quatha Vellar had fully repaired the damaged parts of the hull and had done a fabulous job of rebuilding the upper weapon deck entirely. The magical runes of protection remained to be cleaned up (or redone entirely, in the case of those for the upper weapon deck), new weapons had not yet been installed, and the ship needed a full repaint job, but she was whole again.
Alzja spoke to Tyfelian as Barolcot stepped over to them.
"Ty, this is madness," she hissed at him. "You'll lose a lot o' face with the crew if we don't find anything here—there's seven o' them right over there. Now, I know I mentioned those old legends to you, but really... ships aren't living things."
Tyfelian started to respond, but Barolcot butted into their conversation.
"It's a big multiverse, Alzja darlin'," he noted. "Ya think you know that for sure? I know I don't. If Tyfelian says the ship talked at 'im, then maybe she did. You and your spellslingin' friends can find out. So just do it. If it's nothin', it's nothin'. But if it's somethin', then we'd best find out all there is t'know 'bout it."
"You sound like you believe him," Jaclyn noted quietly.
"I do. Back in Listraeespace, when we got our top deck ripped off... that damn ship never shoulda flew 'nother foot under 'er own power, not without dockin'. I didn't think you could get the hull back together good 'nough with your tellie-kenn-ace-us, and neither'd I figger them iron walls'd help more'n a bit.
"How do you think we made 'er fly one last time without no drydock? I sure's hell don't know! It shouldna worked, but it did."
Tyfelian seemed about to say something to the effect that Barolcot had seemed a lot more confident at the time, but he changed his mind and just fixed a look of sincere appreciation on the engineer for a moment, then turned back to the wizards and the psion.
"Proceed. Tash, please cast a divination window so we all can see the results."
The crew made some noises of agreement, so, as Alzja threw a look at Tyfelian that dripped the words, "You've lost your mind," Tash cast the window.
A large sheet of glass a quarter inch thick appeared in midair between the Elnamerrna and the crew. It would show any onlooker what a divination caster saw with such magic, in the direction captured by its view.
Tash then cast another spell. This one rendered the Elnamerrna's hull somewhat translucent, though no interior details could be seen, only major walls and hallways. The effect looked much like what one might see had the entire hull been partially phased into the Ethereal Plane.
"All right..." the blond drow murmured, grasping the side of the divination window. "When you cast a divination spell or use a clairsentient power with this window, you have to touch it and name the effect you're about to do. We'll start with the basics," she said, turning to regard the window.
"Detect magic," she said, and cast the spell.
The Elnamerrna's image in the window began to glow in various spots. On the bridge, the spelljammer helm showed right through the hull as a fiery star of white light in the shape of a chair, and the planetary locator and passage device seemed to be dimmer companion stars near it. The outeye looked like a rectangular rainbow wall forming the forward wall of the bridge itself. The unseen crew member device glowed with an eerie purplish radiance to Tash's spell, looking like a triop flying by the star of the spelljammer helm... a triop within a triop.
The voice horns located all over the ship shone like tiny crescent moons. Amidships, at the crew quarters, and forward, the cargo bays—all enchanted with field-type shrink magic—appeared as dark, swirling, multi-colored fog. The storage areas, located on either side, top and lower deck, just astern of the cargo bays, held any number of enchanted weapons, shields, and armor suits. All of those pieces of equipment were less powerful ones than the crew normally used, taken from vanquished foes.
Tyfelian, ever the canny one, kept them stored in case he needed to sell them for money to be used for repairs. This time, indeed, the repair bill would be steep and he expected to be forced to sell some, but for now, the magical battle equipment was obvious to see even through the semi-transparent hull. With Tash's spell in operation, it seemed to glow like burning oil.
The view looked mildly spectacular, but Tash dismissed her spell with a wave of her hand and a shrug.
"Nothing unexpected there."
Alzja cast upon the window. "Detect life," she stated, naming the spell.
The Silver Triop's appearance did not change this time. A murmur went up from the command crew.
Not concerned or even surprised, Tyfelian held his reserve, watching quietly.
Jalaysa cast. "Detect undead."
Again, there was no result, but Jalaysa cast a second time.
"Detect evil."
Once more, the image of the Elnamerrna in the divination window remained the same. Jalaysa stepped aside and Jaclyn moved up to the side of the window.
Jaclyn touched the window and said, "Detect spirit presence." She closed her eyes and made the mental effort to do just that.
She opened them again and cast a half-bored look at the floating window, expecting to see no change. Her shock was total when the entire vessel began to glow.
"Look!" Fing cried.
An aura emanated from the Elnamerrna in the face of Jaclyn's clairsentient power. The unearthly bluish glow filled an ellipse around the ship, out to the limits of where her air envelope would form when the vessel flew in open space. It seemed centered upon the spelljammer helm, but it remained quite bright even at its periphery.
"What in the gods' names is that?" Alzja yelled. Tash likewise locked her eyes, suddenly unblinking, on the window, and Jalaysa's eyebrows nearly climbed up into her silvery-blond bangs.
Jaclyn, astonished to the point that she stood there blinking at the window for some moments, recovered and scrambled to touch the divination window again.
"Detect thoughts."
There was no visible effect, but a soft and pleasant female voice suddenly intruded on the gathering.
"I wonder why you all left. It feels kind-of empty now. Hmm."
"Who said that?" Tyfelian shouted.
"Now, what are you daredevils doing?" the voice purred. "What's that glass thing floating there?"
More in control now, Jaclyn touched the divination window and said, "Mindlink," then enacted the power.
"You needn't look at me like that. I'm better now," the voice said.
"Hello," Jaclyn called through the window, though she'd done that for the benefit of the others—with the mindlink power, speaking aloud was not necessary.
"Wha-" the voice caught, startled. "Who said that?" it queried, not mocking Tyfelian's earlier yell, but asking from true curiosity. "I don't recognize your voice... or anyone else's, either—yet."
"I did," Jaclyn replied. "I'm Jaclyn Agalerrnon, defense officer of the starship Elnamerrna. May I ask your name?"
"Why of course, though you know already... I think," the pleasant voice returned. "I'm the starship Elnamerrna. A pleasure to finally get to talk with you."
