Nigel Findley - The Broken Sphere

Now, in the dimly lit compartment, the crystal glowed with a faint greenish light. On its surface-or, more properly, a fraction of an inch below it-were small blobs and traces of color, pink, dark blue, and green.

T'k'Ress ran its long, slender fingers almost lovingly over the smoked-crystal surface. "A planetary locator," it said. "You have heard of these?"

Teldin nodded. Even though he'd never seen one, he knew of them. They were devices built by the arcane, operating on principles that no other race had yet come to understand, though many had tried.

"What's so important about this?" he asked. He still had his sword drawn, and he toyed with it meaningfully.

"You do not know the principle behind the planetary locator," T'k'Ress explained quickly. "Few beyond my race do, I believe. The locator detects planetary bodies by the perturbations they cause in what we call the 'loomweave.'"

"So?" the Cloakmaster demanded.

"I have heard that the falmadaraathae have tried to understand the operating principle of the locator," T'k'Ress went on, somewhat elliptically. "They have had some minimal success. They have some conception of the loomweave… yet they use their own term for the phenomenon."

"The paramagnetic gradient," Teldin guessed.

"Correct," the arcane confirmed.

Teldin nodded slowly. He remembered the images that Zat had fed into his mind. At the time, he'd compared the twisting, whirling fields of colors-yet-not-colors to skeins of spiderweb-thin fibers. The 'loomweave? Yes, the word was definitely appropriate.

Djan still had his crossbow leveled at the arcane's head. Now the half-elf inclined his head to indicate the crystal-topped pedestal. "So this detects the loomweave?" he demanded.

"So I have said," affirmed the arcane. "It is a subtle example of technomagic." Its tone was proud, almost smug.

"What about secondary eddies?" Teldin wanted to know.

"In its present form, it detects tertiary disturbances in the loomweave," T'k'Ress told him. "But…" For a moment it hesitated, again apparently considering resistance, then it pressed on. "To detect the tertiary eddies, it must also detect the secondaries, if only to ignore them. The locator is simply set not to display them. Do you understand?"

Teldin forced himself to nod firmly, even though the truth of the matter was that he hardly understood anything the creature was saying.

Fortunately, Djan seemed to be following T'k'Ress a little better. "And you can adjust the display," he said, as more of a statement than a question.

T'k'Ress inclined its head. "I can."

"Then do it," the Cloakmaster ordered.

*****

"It is ready," T'k'Ress announced almost an hour later.

Teldin had tried to watch the adjustments the creature was making to the mysterious pedestal, trying to make some sense of them, but to his eyes it had seemed that the arcane was doing nothing more than running its slender, many-jointed fingers around the circumference of the crystal display and over different portions of the supporting pedestal. "Show me," he ordered.

T'k'Ress simply pointed at the circular display on the locator's upper surface.

Teldin moved forward, careful not to block the line of fire of Djan's crossbow. This could be some kind of trick, he reminded himself wryly. He leaned over the locator and examined the display.

From what little he'd heard about planetary locators, the devices normally showed simple, discrete dots to represent planets and other astronomical bodies, their colors indicating their true nature. This display was very different, the Cloakmaster noted at once. Instead of clean, discrete circles and dots, the crystal surface was covered with a shifting network of hair-thin red lines, making an almost impossibly fine mesh. In places, the mesh seemed to fold in on itself, twisting into some complex pattern.

Here, for example. With his forefinger he traced a place on the display where the mesh-shading from red to yellow-was twisted into great loops, whirling up and around like some impossible skein of wool. Encompassing the loops was a circle of intricate patterns rendered in burning yellow-white, where the spiderweb-thin lines wove in and out, spiraling and knotting around each other.

It was the loomweave, he knew with sudden certainty. It was the same twisting, swirling field of energy that Zat had shown him, in orbit near the fire ring of Garrash. The perspective was different now, and the detail and resolution so much less. The colors, too, weren't right-on the display there were colors, not the strange analogues that the Cloakmaster had sensed. This was Garrash and its ring he was looking at-or their presence as defined by eddies in the loomweave.

Teldin shook his head, almost incapable of believing it. Now, for the first time, he had the tool he needed to find the "center of all," the Broken Sphere.

He looked up at Djan and felt a broad, triumphant smile spread across his face. "Transfer the crews," he told his first mate. "We sail immediately."

Teldin Moore drove the nautiloid outward from the vicinity of Garrash, toward the boundary of the crystal sphere, at the maximum speed the ultimate helm could manage. He sat in the single human-sized chair in the captain's day room. Through the wraparound perception of the cloak he saw the crippled squid ship falling rapidly away behind them.

There'd been a couple of tense moments as the arcane's mercenary crew had filed aboard the wrecked Boundless. Even though they were unarmed and facing the weapons of Teldin's crew-and even though their employer, T'k'Ress, had specifically ordered them to go peacefully-Teldin could hardly believe it when all were aboard and he backed the nautiloid's ram out of the squid ship's hull.

For a moment, Teldin felt a twinge of guilt at marooning the arcane and its men aboard a ship that might never sail again. But the emotion was fleeting; all he had to do was remember the faces of his dead comrades-and, particularly, Julia's peaceful, bloodless countenance-and his regrets evaporated like a snowball thrown into a sun.

Through his omnipresent senses the Cloakmaster saw Djan climbing the ladder to join him in the small day room. He smiled at his friend. "How's the crew?" he asked.

"Adapting as well as can be expected," the half-elf responded. "We can maneuver, but we don't have the men to fight with this ship."

Teldin nodded. Crewing even one weapon would take too many men away from more vital duties. "We'll just have to stay out of trouble, then."

Djan nodded. He didn't say anything else immediately, but neither did he make any move to leave. On his face Teldin saw the expression that he'd come to associate with unpleasant thoughts. "Out with it," he told his friend at last.

The half-elf sighed and seated himself on the edge of the map table. "That was too easy," he said softly. "You know that, don't you?"

Teldin nodded unwillingly. He'd been thinking the same thing. The monopoly that the arcane, as a race, possessed over spelljamming technology was of almost inconceivable value. Yet T'k'Ress had given Teldin a means of finding the Spelljammer- and thus potentially destroying that centuries-old monopoly-while putting up virtually no fight. Certainly, Teldin had threatened the creature with torture and death, but even a modicum of resistance would have shown his threats to have been empty bluff.

Even if T'k'Ress had utterly believed that Teldin would kill it, surely the magnitude of the loss to its race if the monopoly were destroyed would be reason enough to sacrifice itself. And even if the creature had no loyalty to any beyond itself, it must have realized that destroying the monopoly would earn itself the eternal enmity-and probably the vengeance-of every member of its race. It just didn't make sense…