Nigel Findley - The Broken Sphere

He had the Boundless, which represented freedom to move. He had the amulet, which gave him access to the Spelljammer's perceptions. He had friends and allies around him. He had options. His major obstacle, he decided, was an unwillingness to explore those options.

Take the amulet, for example. As a matter of course, throughout the voyage, he'd been using the artifact, hoping to sense something that he recognized through the Spelljammer's strange perceptions, something that would give him a clue about the Spelljammer's location. So far he hadn't seen anything useful, but there was always the next time, wasn't there, and then the time after that? Eventually he'd have to see something that would give him some guidance.

Why not now, for instance?

He raised his head and looked at his two friends. Neither had moved. Both were watching him, their expressions showing how they empathized with his pain, but they respected his privacy too much to interfere.

I have friends, he reminded himself again. And that was the most empowering thought of all. He felt new energy flow through him, felt a broad smile spread across his face. As he watched, his friends echoed that smile-a little more tentatively-though they couldn't have known what was going through his mind.

"I'm trying the amulet again," he told them. He reached down to his belt pouch and extracted the bronze disk. The smooth metal felt heavy in his hands. Pregnant with possibilities? he wondered. He ran his thumb over the smooth surface, felt it slightly warm-from its proximity to his body heat, or for some other reason?

Djan stirred in his chair. "Do you want privacy for that?" he asked quietly.

Teldin considered for a moment, then shook his head. "It's not what you'd call an exciting show," he said with a grin, "but, if you don't mind, I think I'd like the company."

He pulled his chair closer to the table and rested his forearms on the flat surface, with the amulet cupped in both hands. He stared at it intently, as though trying to memorize its texture, its color, its every feature. Simultaneously, he slowed and deepened his breathing, feeling the tension drain out of his shoulders and neck. In their own good time, he let his eyes shut. A tingling up and down his spine told him that the cloak was glowing with a bright bronze light. He felt a shift-there was no other way to describe it-inside his brain. And then his awareness seemed to blossom painlessly out through the top of his head and into the blackness of space.

*****

Fire!

Fire everywhere, filling his entire perception. Surrounding the entire Spelljammer with liquid flames. Surreal flashes and bursts of yellow, green, even lightning-blue, against the red background.

Yet the fire wasn't licking at the Spelljammer, it wasn't consuming it, or even heating the structure of the great ship. An ovoid bubble of clear, fire-free air surrounded the vessel, in much the same way as a normal ship's atmosphere envelope excluded most of the phlogiston when in the Flow. Is it flying through a sun? the Cloakmaster asked himself.

For the briefest of instants-so fleeting that it could easily have been an illusion - Teldin felt a flash of pleasure, aesthetic pleasure from the massive vessel, as though it sensed and appreciated the beauty of this sea of fire, Teldin thought. But that didn't make sense, did it?

And then, with shocking suddenness, the fire was gone from around the Spelljammer. Space was black and star-specked once more…

Except dead astern. The fire was still there, a seemingly endless plane of silent yellow-red flames churning and writhing. And then, rising above the flame plane like the sun over Krynn's Great Ocean, he saw a massive disk, glowing the dull red of a dying ember….

For a few moments, Teldin was totally disoriented. Then he realized just what it was he was seeing.

The brick-red disk was a massive fire body, like a great, bloated sun. Even though there was nothing to give it scale, he knew- thanks to the strange perception bestowed by the amulet-that the fire world was titanic, as many times larger than the world of Krynn as the Spelljammer was larger than the Boundless. The "endless plane of flames," he saw now, was a broad ring of yellow fire that girdled the huge world around its equator. So broad was the ring that a spelljamming vessel would have taken perhaps a quarter of an hour to traverse it, and the ring itself was probably a full hour of fullspeed flight from the "surface" of the fire body. The Spelljammer, it seemed, had plunged right through that ring of fire.

The scene was spectacular-one that couldn't exist twice in the universe, Teldin told himself. Maybe this was the opportunity he'd been waiting for, when the Spelljammer was near a recognizable world. He "looked" around, seeking more distinguishing features to eliminate the chance of error.

There was something: a dark, circular area on the face of the great fire world, covering an appreciable fraction of the visible disk. A weather pattern in the fire? he wondered.

And something else, shapes moving among the yellow flames of the fire ring. Great, angular shapes-winged forms like strange spelljamming ships built along unfamiliar configurations. Yet how could ships exist in the fire ring? he wondered. The Spelljammer had done it, but now he knew that it was only some magical attribute of the mysterious ship that had let it survive unscathed….

The view changed again. A small, bright disk-little more than a point-of burning, blue-white light rose above one limb of the dark red world. Sunrise on a sun…

*****

Without warning, the strange vista collapsed in upon itself. There was a wrenching sense of discontinuity, then information from Teldin's normal senses flooded back into his mind.

He opened his eyes and looked into the concerned faces of his two friends. Setting the amulet down on the table, he wiped pinpoints of cold sweat from his brow. His fingers were trembling, he realized, and his heart pounded as if he'd run a footrace.

Why? he asked himself. Why did using the amulet sometimes take so much more out of him than others? Was it something to do with distance-and did that then mean the Spelljammer was a great distance away?-or was it something else? There was so much about the amulet, and its relationship with the Spelljammer and the ultimate helm, at he didn't understand.

"Well?" Julia asked. "Anything?"

"I think so." Teldin's voice sounded tired in his own ears. from the solicitude that showed in his friends' expressions, he guessed he looked as bad as he sounded… if not worse. "Maybe something important." He went on to de-scribe what he'd seen in as much detail as he could. "I can't imagine that there could be more than one place like that in the universe," he concluded dryly.

"I think you're right," Djan said. His voice was quiet, but held a timbre of tightly controlled excitement. "A fire world a half day's flight in diameter, with a fire ring," he went on, ticking points off on his fingers. "A dark spot-maybe some kind of weather pattern, you think. And all orbiting a smaller, blue-white sun. I think it has to be Garrash."

"Garrash," Teldin echoed. "You've been there?"

"I didn't say that," the half-elf corrected. "I read about it once in the Geonomicon -that's a book describing almost a hundred of the more fascinating worlds ever discovered- but your description definitely matches what I remember."

"Where is Garrash?" Teldin demanded. "Near here? Far?"

"I don't remember," Djan admitted, shaking his head.