Jeff Crook: Conundrum

“Live and let Liv,” he said with a sneer. He searched under the flap without lifting it, finally finding the small metallic disk concealing the firetrap. His sensitive fingertips detected the trap’s invisible tabs, and he pressed them in the correct order to deactivate it. “Do you think you will?”

“Will what?” she asked. She stirred the water in the bowl with her hand, testing its temperature.

“Live,” he answered as he opened the flap and shook the contents out on the bed.

Shrugging, she leaned over the bowl and began to splash water on her face and the back of her neck.

From the upraised pack, a round silver plate tumbled out on the bed. As Tanar picked it up, he felt an electric jolt pass through his fingertips and up his arm. He almost cried out in surprise, but he managed to bite his tongue as he stared in wonder at it.

It seemed an ordinary enough thing-a piece of fine silver flatware from some noble lady’s dowry-that is, until one noticed the runes engraved around its rim. And the aura of powerful magic that surrounded this thing was palpable. As he held it, he felt a delicious tingling numbness in all his limbs. He marveled that this woman could have had this thing in her possession for so long without feeling its power. He could almost smell it, like hot metal baking on the stove.

Then it occurred to him that she probably wasn’t a magic-user. The powers that be would have chosen her to deliver it for that very reason. Any mage on Krynn would give his soul for an item such as this, for with it he could power spells. Artifacts from the time before Chaos could be used to power spells, but such items were rare as a red dragon’s good will. He wondered what its powers were and who had sent it to him. More importantly, he wondered why.

Inside the backpack, he found a sealed letter. He examined the red wax seal, recognized its authenticity, and broke it open. He unfolded the note and spread it on the bed between himself and the woman. She had opened her blouse and was squeezing water over her shoulder with a rag. A muddy pool had begun to collect on the wooden boards at her feet.

The note read:

To Sir Tanar Lobcrow, Knight of the Thorn,

The object accompanying this letter is a communication device of great power. You are ordered to keep it near at hand, for I shall soon be contacting you through it. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to contact me until after such time as I have initiated contact with you. At that time, you will receive instruction as to its uses and powers.

You are, however, granted permission to use it sparingly to power your own spells. I cannot stress enough that you are to use its magic sparingly, and only in the direst emergency.

You are further ordered to kill the messenger. If you fail, she will take your place.

— The Voice of the Night

Sir Tanar looked up from the letter to find the woman toweling off with a flour sack. Her back was half turned, but he took no chances. Reaching across the bed, he touched the silver plate and began to chant the words to his protection spell. Magic, so long stagnant, surged through his veins.

At the weird sound of the chanted words, Liv turned, her eyes widening in alarm.

Normally, they would not have drawn much attention passing through the streets of the port city of Pax. Gnomes were a common sight here. They had their own shipyard, such as it was, though they didn’t just build ships there. The shipyard was located at a safe distance from nearly everything else of importance in the city, including the dump. Once upon a time, the dump had been much closer to the shipyard, but a gnomish milk-freezing experiment gone horribly awry had set the dump on fire, and it burned for forty days. The citizens relocated the dump closer to their city’s walls, while the gnomes spent the next eight years trying to perfect the garbage-burning steam-driven sugared milk freezer.

But it wasn’t every day that the citizens of Pax witnessed four gnomes and a kender leading a beer wagon horse, astride which sat a Knight of Solamnia in full battle armor, bound upright in the saddle by an intricate web of ropes. The first real Knights of Solamnia they met upon entering the city tried to arrest them and free their captured “brother.” Only when they sliced through the ropes and their restrained and heretofore silent fellow Knight toppled in two pieces from the saddle did they believe the gnomes” protestations of innocence. Sir Grumdish was especially vociferous, demanding satisfaction with an immediate formal joust in a nearby rutabaga patch. Commodore Brigg and the others helped him set his armor back in the saddle while the offending “churls” rode away, scratching their heads.

“I told you we should have thrown a blanket over him,” Razmous said as the street ahead grew thick with curious citizens. People hung out of the windows that crowded close along the narrow lanes. Whole taverns emptied into the street. Fishwives gawked and jeered noisily from the stalls in the market. Sir Grumdish gnawed his beard and eyed the crowd nervously, as if he might lay about him with his sword at any moment.

They were followed most of the way from the city gate to the gnomes” shipyard by a concerned contingent of grim-faced Knights of Solamnia. It was apparent they believed that Sir Grumdish’s mechanical armor, though it contained no dead or captive brother Knight, was the ill-gotten booty of shady adventures, and they wondered if some law or other was being broken. That a kender was involved did not lighten their moods. Commodore Brigg’s obvious military rank held them at bay-for the moment-until their lawyers and clerks could scour the Measure and the city laws for some rule by which they could clap the five diminutive miscreants in irons.

In any case, the gnomes and kender arrived at the shipyard without serious incident. Most of the curious citizens eventually dispersed. The Knights stopped at a safe distance, then posted a guard before returning to their duties. Meanwhile, Commodore Brigg and his companions paused on the overlooking bluff to take in the marvel and majesty of the scene spread below them.

The bluffs dropped steeply down into the water, providing Pax with its famous deepwater harbor that brought ships from all over Krynn during the balmy months when the seas allowed travel between Ansalon and Sancrist Isle. However, no foreign vessels crowded the quays of the gnomes” shipyard, as it was located across the bay from the city. Instead, each berth held its own peculiar addition to the Maritime Sciences. At one dock, several dozen gnomes were busily installing a giant six-bladed, steam-powered fan into the hull of what appeared to be a large, flat-bottomed ship. Commodore Brigg explained that this ship, the MNS Blowfish, was a Class A prototype of a self-powered ship that would create its own wind to fill the sails. The fan was being mounted onto a hydraulic elevating swivel base that would allow them to change the direction of its airflow, to take advantage of the wind for drying laundry and sea soaked cargoes, and other such menial tasks. They had been forced to invent hydraulics first, of course, before they built the hydraulic elevating swivel base, but this new technology promised all sorts of uses, like keeping doors from slamming shut or for crushing garbage into neat little easy-to-burn cubes.

“In fact,” the commodore continued proudly, “hydraulics is also the primary technology behind our newest secret weapon, the Underwater Arrow of Epic Proportions-UAEP, for short. You can see one being loaded into the Indestructible now.”

To the left of the Blowfish lay a vessel nearly twice its size, but of curious dimensions and features. It actually looked rather like two ships that had been placed deck to deck, like the two halves of a clam shell, hammered together, then covered from stem to stern and keel to keel with iron plating. Amidships, a conning tower had been built, and behind this a deck of sorts, where ropes, lines and anchors lay amongst piles of boxes and stacks of barrels. Two footrails leading forward from the deck allowed access to the bow of the ship, so that the sailors wouldn’t have to navigate the sloping hull just to secure a bowline or the rigging that ran from the bow to the short mast around which the conning tower was built. From the top and bottom keels, just forward of the mast, projected two pairs of curious fan-shaped structures (not unlike fins), while at the stern, enclosed inside its D-shaped rudder, was a large six-bladed fan much like the one being installed in the belly of the Blowfish. Near the bow of the ship, below the craft’s midline, there was a closed round door, shut like a great eye in sleep.