Nigel Findley: Into the Void

It was night, but a night such as Teldin Moore had never seen before. The sky was darker, a deep velvet blackness, and the stars brighter, more immediate, somehow closer. If he could just climb the gnomish ship's watchtower, Teldin found himself thinking, climb up to where the lookout crouched on his small platform… He might be able to touch a star, pluck it from the sky, and hold it like a gem, glittering coldly in his hand. He settled his slender, lanky frame more securely against the ship's starboard rail and leaned back farther to gaze directly upward. He brushed a lock of hair from his eyes.

Teldin was a man of thirty-two summers, a little under six feet tall with a light build. His features were finely chiseled- handsome, he'd been told many times, but in a comfortable way, attractive rather than beautiful. His smile was warm and winning, and women were attracted by the way it made his striking, cornflower-blue eyes sparkle. His sandy hair had a strong natural curl to it, making it difficult to control unless he kept it cropped fairly close to his head. Although slender-waisted, he had shoulders that were quite broad and slim arms that were surprisingly strong, though they didn't show large muscles.

The deck of the vessel shifted beneath his feet, strangely, not like the small river-going boats with which Teldin was familiar. It surged upward, like a thing alive, and Teldin tightened his grip on the rail. Steeling himself for the vertigo he feared-but which, surprisingly, had yet to come-he turned, looking over the rail, and down.

Below was land, not a river or an ocean, land that spread from horizon to horizon in the light of two of Krynn's three moons, looking like a tapestry of the most intricate detail. The gnomish vessel had been climbing steadily since it had pulled away from Mount Nevermind, and already Teldin was as far above the land below as the highest mountain peak. His home-the only environment he'd ever known, or ever dreamed of knowing-was two leagues and more beneath him and receding with each passing moment.

Sadness pierced him, a mourning for what he'd lost, what he was forsaking, perhaps forever. For a moment, he tried to pick out the familiar landmarks that had demarcated his life: the fields, the granaries, the market towns, the rivers, and the hills where tough, hardy sheep grazed, oblivious to the vessel that climbed into the sky above their heads-as oblivious as he had been, short weeks before. Part of him wanted to cling for as long as possible to the familiar, the safe.

But what he saw wasn't safe, he remembered with a pang. Death was below him, death that had come from the same sky that now beckoned him. He wanted to weep like a child for those he knew who had died: friends from his home; the tinker gnomes who had helped him when no one else would; and, most of all, Gomja-that sometimes-buffoonish, sometimes-noble creature who had sacrificed himself so that Teldin could live. At least the giff had met his end in the way he'd always desired, in battle after defeating overwhelming odds. As the barrel-chested creature had wished, his death had meant something, and in those last moments he'd known it. Would Teldin be able to say the same when his own time came? It was a thought that had never troubled him before. What did "dying well" matter to a farm boy?

That's all Teldin was and, until recently, all he'd really thought of being. His home had always been his land and, since his war years, he'd never wanted more. The world was large, as his grandfather had always told him, but he had little desire to see any more of it than the breadth of his family's farmlands. The thought that there were other worlds, other lands beyond the moons, had never occurred to him until the strange ship had crashed from the sky and shaken Teldin from his comfortable life.

The rigging overhead complained quietly as a gust of night-wind rocked the ship. To stave off its chill, he pulled tighter about him the cloak he'd been given by the grievously wounded stranger-that sky-traveler, that spelljammer. Hers had been the first death-a peaceful one, as such things go, as she'd faded quietly away despite everything Teldin had tried to do to prevent it, lying there in the mangled wreckage of her ship and Teldin's home. That death wasn't the last.

The spidership had come, a huge black shape sinking silently out of the nighttime sky. The horrors, too, had come. The smaller ones-half spider, half eel-and the larger, with their rending claws and clashing mandibles. Others had died, and their deaths had been far from peaceful.

With an effort of will, Teldin wrenched his gaze from the ground, and turned it back to the sky above. That was where his life was now-where it had to be-away from the land that had given him birth and sheltered him for thirty years. His life would be among the stars. He shivered, but not from the cold. Perhaps seeking some kind of reassurance, he ran his hand over the coarse fabric of the cloak, no different in texture from any other traveling cloak, but somehow slightly colder than fabric had any right to be. It was a strange gift from one who knew she was dying, but an important one, if the traveler's rambling was to be believed. Teldin remembered for the hundredth-thousandth?-time the dying traveler's cryptic last words: "Take the cloak. Keep it from the neogi. Take it to the creators." The words still seemed as meaningless to him as when he'd first heard them. He shrugged, relegating the words to the back of his mind. His life up until now had been notably free of mysteries. He'd have to learn how to handle such things.

The vessel heeled slightly as the wind blew across its beam. A chill breeze caressed Teldin's face. He drew a deep breath in through his nose, hoping to catch for one final time the familiar scents of home-mown grass, blossoms, and the rich smell of good brown earth, but he was too high. The winds here were clean and crisp-sterile, one part of his brain told him, empty of life; fresh, another part countered, new and full of promise.

He looked down once more and gasped aloud with wonder. The view below had changed from a flat tapestry to something he could hardly have described, even to himself. The land curved away to the left and to the right in huge sweeping arcs. The table-flat land that his emotions had found so familiar had become a sphere. He knew from some schooling that the world was round, but to know it and to actually see it were two very different things. The sphere that was Krynn appeared to him in all its glory.

The sky above-and below?-was clear, but in the distance he could see moonlight-washed banks of clouds, spread out like a ghostly landscape of the dead. He could no longer make out any landmarks, but over there… that must be the great ocean. He searched his brain vainly for the name. A huge weather system, a spiral, was motionless when viewed from this height, but the shapes of the tortured clouds still seemed to imply violent action.

He turned to his right, to the aft of the vessel. There the distant limb of the planet seemed afire, burning gold. Then, in a silent concussion of light, the arc of the sun appeared above the edge of the world.

Teldin turned away, wiping streaming eyes. For the first time he noticed the small figure standing at the rail next to him. The figure's head, topped by a mass of gray braids, barely came up to his waist.

The gnome grinned up at him, teeth flashing white in the dark, wind-tanned face. "Impressive, wouldn't you say?" he asked. "Sunrise from space-one of the great gifts the universe gives to us. It's still a wonder to me, even after all these years."

Teldin wrestled with his memory, seeking the gnome's name, and was impressed with the small man's courtesy in speaking slowly. "Yes," he said wanly, "impressive." He sighed and admitted defeat. "You are… Wysdor?"