Conundrum

Chapter
19

“Well, Chief, this may complete your Life Quest,”

Commodore Brigg said. “This is a wondrously bad mishap by any definition. I hope you’re recording it.”

Chief Pordost’s head appeared at the top of the ladder. “Thanks for reminding me! Let me get my notebook.” He disappeared below decks.

Now, seawater completely filled the view from the porthole. They saw a pair of large booted feet kicking madly and rising slowly upward. A stream of bubbles poured out of the gaping hole in the galley’s side and vanished upward as well. The sunlight shining through the water grew steadily dimmer and browner.

“How deep do you suppose it is here, Navigator?” the commodore asked, almost as if he were asking for the time of day.

Snork shook his head and shrugged, unable to find words, then turned back to the porthole. Gradually, it grew darker and darker, until it was like a large black eye peering back at them. And still they sank, the two ships twirling round and round each other. Commodore Brigg didn’t voice his greatest concern-that they’d come to rest on the sea floor upside down, or worse, beneath the galley. That’s why he didn’t order the ballast tanks flooded, for he hoped the Indestructible’s buoyancy might keep them on top, if not pull them free entirely.

As the two ships sank deeper and deeper into the Blood Sea, the hull of the Indestructible began to pop and groan in a most alarming fashion. The deck beneath their feet buckled, bowing up a good three inches during the course of their descent. Here and there, where the hull was exposed, they noticed water droplets forming around the ship’s seams, and the air grew noticeably cooler. Every once in a while, the entire ship shuddered from stem to stern, rattling their teeth and everything else not bolted to the deck. Outside the ship, the sea slowly grew as black as a dark elf s heart.

Suddenly, there was a groan, and a shudder more violent than any they had yet experienced passed through the length of the ship. They felt the ship slow, settle, and come to rest with a bump on the bottom of the Blood Sea. Commodore Brigg looked around at his officers and crew that had gathered in the forward corridor and around the ladder leading below. He thrust out his chin, his beard bristling defiantly, and tugged at the bottom of his jacket. “Well,” he said. “Here we are.”

Razmous stood before the porthole, his jaw hanging open like a broken gate, his eyes glazed. Conundrum touched his arm, and slowly the kender’s head swiveled round to look down at him.

“Isn’t it fantastic?” the kender asked dreamily.

“I can’t take this any more,” Sir Tanar said in a voice tinged with hysteria. His claustrophobia seemed to be getting the better of him at last. He ran toward the ladder leading up to the hatch. “My magic will save me,” he snarled. “To the Abyss with the rest of you!”

Sir Grumdish caught the Thorn Knight around the legs and dragged him to the deck before he could reach the ladder. He and the professor sat on Sir Tanar’s back to keep him from rising. The wizard clawed at the floor, spitting curses and threatening to kill them all. Doctor Bothy hurried from sick bay and administered a sedative to the base of the Thorn Knight’s skull. Sir Tanar went limp at the blow, though he continued to moan and gibber incoherently. The doctor passed his reflex hammer to Conundrum in case the Thorn Knight needed another dose of sedative, then directed Sir Grumdish and the professor to carry the Knight to his cabin.

The two gnomes heaved Sir Tanar’s limp bones between them and staggered forward, the doctor and Conundrum following. They entered Sir Tanar’s chambers and tossed him into his hammock. Sir Grumdish staggered back, blowing heavily and digging his knuckles into the small of his back. In the blue light of the glowwormglobes, his white beard looked grayer and older than before, and there were dark circles under his eyes.

“Why, oh why did I ever come on this voyage?” he moaned. “I should be questing after dragons, not dragging hysterical wizards back to their cabins. I miss the smell of fewmets, the crackle of a fire at night, the sound of a sword unsheathing. A pox on the maritime sciences!”

“Now, now,” Doctor Bothy said. “I’ve got something that will cure you. Come to sick bay and I’ll give you a little nip.” The two departed.

Sir Tanar lay in his hammock, twitching feebly, his eyelids fluttering. Conundrum stood at his side, filled with an unreasoning concern. He didn’t quite understand why he should be worried about this human, but he couldn’t help the way he felt. Even as he stroked the Thorn Knight’s brow and tried to comfort him, deep down inside he felt repulsed by the sight of the ungainly, sprawling, pale-skinned human. It was quite mystifying.

To take his mind off his conflicting emotions, Conundrum watched the professor, who was at that moment standing before the how porthole, a blue glowwormglobe resting in the palm of his outstretched hand. At first, Conundrum wasn’t sure what the professor was looking at, but as he gazed closer, his eyes met with a startling, fascinating, and thoroughly gruesome sight.

They were inside the galley.

When the Indestructible rammed the galley, her iron-shod bow had punched completely through the galley’s wooden hull and become lodged in the hole. Sir Tanar’s cabin was located in the bow of the Indestructible, so the light from the professor’s glowwormglobe shining through the forward porthole actually illuminated the interior of the pirate ship’s hold. The murky water, filled now with freshly-stirred mud from the sea floor, seemed nearly as thick and opaque as tarbean tea, and things floated in it, things difficult to identify because they were hovering, without gravity pressing them down into their accustomed shapes. What appeared at first to be a shred of fog proved in fact to he a bolt of diaphanous silk, partially unrolled, stolen from the-gods-only-knew-where. Personal items littered the scene-brushes, curry combs, leather flasks crushed flat by the weight of the water, a cracked mirror, a hunk of half-eaten meat with teeth marks plainly visible'.

But what filled Conundrum with horror were the bodies, six at least. They were all minotaurs, but a sickening feeling washed over Conundrum when he looked at their bestial faces. In each case, the mouth hung open, and the tongue, mottled gray, dangled out the side. The eyes, too, were open, and seemed to be staring at something very far away. Their ears, their big bovine ears, struck him as the most pathetic. Soft, keen, intelligent, they swayed in the gentle currents and eddies still swirling through the hold, as though they yet listened for the order to abandon ship.

Conundrum turned away, trying to blank the vision from his mind. He ground his teeth and clawed at his curly red beard in frustration. All he ever wanted to do was solve puzzles. He wasn’t a warrior or a sailor. The sight of the drowned pirates filled him with cold loathing, and disgust, and pity-yes, pity-even for an enemy, even for a monster like a minotaur.

Doctor Bothy stuck his head into the room. “How’s the patient?” he asked.

Conundrum composed himself and looked at Sir Tanar. The Thorn Knight had regained consciousness. He sat up and glared about, feeling the back of his head and counting the lumps.

“Feeling better?” the doctor asked with a smile. Behind him stood Sir Grumdish, cheeks flushed and beaming happily. “I could give you another shot if you are still nervous.”

“No!” Sir Tanar shouted, then winced. “That won’t be necessary,” he finished in muted tones, but his eyes flashed with hate.

“Good, the commodore wants everyone on the bridge.”

The officers and crew of the MNS Indestructible drew together around the commodore. Their trembling white beards and drawn faces turned to him in the dim blue light. He’d ordered all but one glowwormglobe covered in order to darken the bridge. This allowed them to see, through the bridge porthole, the professor’s light shining from the bow porthole inside the sunken galley. It revealed to them the true gravity of their situation.

They were strangely silent-quiet as no gnome should be. Usually, given a situation calling for ingenuity and daring, they would have all been talking at once as rapidly as their tongues could wag, proposing, discussing, arguing, counter-arguing, counter-proposing, revising, and discarding a dozen ideas and theories all at the same time. But they needed to he able to get their hands on the problem, so to speak, and this was something quite beyond anyone’s grasp. For the problem literally lay outside their ship, and that was the one place none of them could go, not even wearing the professor’s diving suit. The steel head of the ram could not be withdrawn from the heavy beam into which it had embedded itself. The Indestructible and the pirate galley were bound together, irreversibly it seemed.

The commodore had called them all together to discuss their options, but when it seemed no one had anything to say, no theories to offer or experiments to try, he turned to Chief Portlost. “Chief,” he said, “how long would it take to reverse the engine?”

“Well, if we were in dry dock and I had a full crew of engineers,” he pondered, tapping his front teeth with a pencil, “I should say a month at least. Of course, it would require dismantling the ship.”

“That doesn’t sound practical, given our present situation,” the commodore said.

“Yes, I agree,” the chief replied. “You must admit, this is certainly a remarkable and unforeseen occurrence. You would have thought we would have included a reverse gear in the design from the beginning, wouldn’t you? This will require months, simply months of investigation. There’ll be interviews, and committees, and commissions, and possibly even a task force. We’ll produce a study of the events, with speculation and conclusions. It should run at least ten thousand pages. That is, if we live, of course.”

“The good thing is,” Snork offered, “we’ll know better with the next ship design.”

Everyone agreed that this was indeed an excellent point. “Should we call the next prototype the Class D?” the commodore asked.

“That would be the logical progression,” Chief Portlost answered. The mood among the crew began to lighten somewhat, now that they had something positive to think about-the design of the next ship. Several spontaneous discussions broke out, and one argument.

But Sir Tanar silenced all debates when he cried, still a little hysterically, “There isn’t going to be another ship, you… you… you… gnomes! You’re all going to die here. We’re trapped! Trapped like rats!”

He glared wildly around at the small, brown faces turned toward him, then stepped back when he saw Doctor Bothy edging toward him, reflex hammer in hand.

“Speak for yourself.” The commodore pshawed. “You don’t understand, do you? Humans never do. You humans look at us, and you see a funny little people, a race of preposterous inventors. Sometimes you find our inventions useful, like the gnomeflinger, and sometimes they seem ridiculous, like the gnomeflinger. You’re always ready to take our successes and profit by them, but you are also always ready to disparage our mishaps, not knowing that the mishap is at least as important as the success, if not more so. For only from the mishap do we learn.” He turned back to the crew. “Now,” he said, his lips setting into a grim line. “We know what can’t be done. Tell me what can be done.”

“We can escape in the ascending kettles,” Conundrum offered, reminding them of his invention.

“Possibly, and I had already thought of that,” the commodore said. “But I am not yet ready to abandon the Indestructible. She’s not a perfect ship, but she is mine. And besides, even if we did escape, that would only leave us lost in the middle of the Blood Sea.”

“What about the ascending and descending flowpellars?” Chief Portlost asked. “We might use them to wiggle free.”

“They’re pinned in the retracted position by the galley’s hull,” Snork answered.

“But we might still wiggle free,” Chief Portlost countered, “by repeatedly flooding and emptying the aft ballast tank.”

“Now that’s an idea,” the commodore said.

“What we really need is some rearward thrust,” Conundrum said. “If we could put a pole out and push against the galley somehow. Perhaps through the Peerupitscope?”

“The UAEPs!” Professor Hap-Troggensbottle exclaimed.

“What about them?” the commodore asked. “There isn’t room to fire them. The arrow probably wouldn’t even make it all the way out of the pressure tube, and what good would that do us?”

“You’ve all felt the way the ship lurches back when they are fired,” the professor said excitedly. “The outward force of the released pressurized water generates a momentary reverse force on the ship.”

“He’s right,” the chief agreed.

“If we fire the tubes without the UAEPs inside, I calculate we could generate approximately twice the normal force,” the professor continued. “That, in combination with the positive and negative buoyancy induced by the repeated flooding and evacuating of the aft ballast tank, might be enough to break us free.”

“By Reorx, I think you’ve got something, Professor!” the commodore applauded. “All right, gnomes, let’s make it so. Sir Tanar! Come here, if you would, sir.”

The Thorn Knight approached, warily eyeing Doctor Bothy, who still stood by with his anesthetic hammer ready. The rest of the crew scurried to their tasks, except for Conundrum and Razmous, who stood close by, listening. Conundrum hoped the commodore wouldn’t offend the Thorn Knight.

“See here, you’re a wizard, right?” the commodore asked.

Sir Tanar’s eyes narrowed, and he straightened himself almost to his full height, but carefully, so as not to bump his skull on the pipes overhead. “I am,” he answered guardedly.

“Well, we could use some light out there, to see how we are progressing. I’ve always heard wizards could make lights appear with a snap of the fingers. Is it true?”

“The light spell is one of our simpler forms of magic,” Tanar said with caution.

“Well, do you think you could cast one for us?” the commodore said. “I’d think better of you, if you did.”

“But what shall I cast the spell upon?” Sir Tanar snapped. “I must have a target.”

The commodore glanced around for a moment, considering. His eyes finally came to rest on the Peerupitscope. “There!” he said, pointing at the place where the scope passed through the hull of the ship. “Cast your spell there, and then we’ll raise it up until the light is outside the ship.”

Sir Tanar allowed that this was rather a good idea. He slowly approached the Peerupitscope, ducking his head to avoid a pipe, all the while eyeing its cool, gleaming metal cylinder. Where it passed through the hull of the ship, a black, flexible seal prevented the seawater from rushing in around it. Even so, he noticed a few droplets of moisture gathered around the seal, and he thought about all that dark weight of water pressing down on top of them. This settled him to the task at hand.

He closed his eyes, stilling the wild angry beating of his heart, concentrating on the magic flowing sluggishly through his veins. A few years ago, he might have cast this simple spell with hardly a thought. Now, he knew it would cost him.

He opened his eyes, lifted one arm and pointed a clawlike finger at the top of the Peerupitscope. A brilliant white light flared into being, starkly illuminating the bridge of the Indestructible and casting harsh shadows in its corners and recesses. Conundrum squinted in the sudden light, but Razmous blinked at it in open-mouthed wonder.

Sir Tanar staggered, feeling drained. The spell had exhausted the last of his powers. “Conundrum,” he said weakly. The gnome rushed to his side, but Razmous was too busy staring in awe at the magical light to notice, and the commodore was shouting down to engineering to be ready at the ballast tanks.

“Help me to my cabin. I am… too weak.” Tanar sighed as he sagged against Conundrum, carefully, so as not to overburden him. The two staggered forward, forgotten by everyone in their excitement.