Teldin's eyes scanned the upper deck of the Perilous Halibut, noting a simple gold railing running around the edge. The railing was, of course, at the height of a typical gnome's waist-in other words, just about the height of a human's knees. It wouldn't do to get close to it and trip over the side of the ship.
"I can't believe we're lucky enough to have this whole ship to ourselves," Aelfred said. Teldin and Sylvie turned to stare at him in amazement. Aelfred glanced aside at them, putting a finger momentarily to his lips.
"Ah, nothing lucky about it at all," said Dyffed, pleased. He dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. "Nothing at all. Experimental ships are sent out all the time from here, and most have come back. Or some of them have, at least. I last heard the return figure was closer to twelve point eight percent, including all ships bearing the expected casualties but not counting fragmental returns if they couldn't tell which
'iip the fragments belonged to. But that's neither here nor shi there, of course, for though this is its first flight test, the Perilous Halibut is of a proven theoretical model, the first of its kind to be built, and we have nothing whatsoever to fear, nothing at all, unless the tail falls off." Dyffed chuckled, glancing at the tall threesome behind him. "An old gnomish joke, you understand."
No one else so much as smiled.
Dyffed coughed and went back to admiring the Perilous Halibut. "Yes, this lovely ship will be ready to fly at any time, right after a few last adjustments are made. Then she'll be fit for space."
"Ah, adjustments," said Aelfred with interest, "by which you mean…" He waited and looked at the gnome.
"Oh, the usual things, of course," said the gnome. "Check a few fittings, tighten a few bolts, install the lavatories, order the weapons, unpack the helm and install that, then run the usual experiments to find out if it can float. It should float, or at least it does on paper. By that, I mean that the ship doesn't float on paper, but rather it floats on water, as the expression-"
"Do you mean the ship has no weapons or helm right now?" Teldin asked, barely beating Aelfred to the question. Dyffed cleared his throat and managed to look everywhere but directly at Teldin. "Well, deck weapons were accidentally left off the design prints at first-careless of me-but we did manage to find places to put one, a ballista, right there on the front-the bow, as I believe it's called. Perhaps someday we'll have our, um, ah, birthday party mounted there instead."
"Birthday party?" Sylvie asked, an eyebrow raised. "Are you serious?"
Dyffed quickly eyed Teldin, then grinned and waved his arms elaborately. "Yes, oh, yes, we're going to have a birthday party-right, Teldin?-to celebrate her first birthday. I mean, to celebrate the admiral's birthday. We should have the helm installed within the hour, give or take a bit, if we can get the paperwork filled out. All we can do in the meanwhile is sit back with our fingers in our ears and hope everything works properly. Ah, which reminds me, I need to bring out a piece of old equipment and run some tests on it before we leave for One Six Nine. It's a locating device, something One Six Nine called a 'thingfinder,' which he made for us. We, of course, have improved upon it-just a tiny bit, mind you-and if it hasn't decayed or been sat upon, it should lead us right to old Thirteen Squared's address without fail. Remarkable device-operates completely on thought power. Not as efficient as hydrodynamics, I know, but-ah, I see someone signaling me, so I shall have to leave you here to marvel at the marvel, as it were. Don't touch the riveting or the tail." Dyffed was off at once, striding purposefully toward a group of other gnomes standing near a maze of scaffolding at the ship's stern.
Teldin watched Dyffed go, shaking his head slightly as he did. He turned away and kept his arms crossed in front of him as he looked the outside of the ship over, occasionally chewing on a thumbnail.
"Do you know," said Aelfred, who had adopted a similar posture, "that in the last three and a half years, I have never once taken a long voyage on a spelljammer other than the Probe? And not once, never, did I ever ride on a gnomish ship." He nodded thoughtfully.
"I don't like this," Sylvie said, her hands jammed into her pockets. "Our chances of getting killed look awfully good."
The three stood in silence after that, looking at the ship and listening to the gnomes argue and hammer things in the distance.
Teldin sighed, rubbing his face with his hands. "I'm not crazy about this, either, but I sailed on a gnomish ship once, when I left Krynn, and I'm still alive. Of course, I wasn't on it very long. Let's find out when this thing takes off. We may as well enjoy ourselves before we have to go."
"What's this 'birthday party' he was talking about?" asked Sylvie, looking at Teldin. "He thought you knew about it."
"It's some sort of secret weapon that they're taking with us on the ship," Teldin said. "Dyffed won't say anything about it that I can understand."
"Secret weapon," said Aelfred noncommittally. All three stared at the black ship a little while longer.
Aelfred finally uncrossed his arms and sighed heavily. "Teldin, did the gnomes recover any of those sagecoarse casks from the Probe?" he asked.
Teldin thought. "Just one. It's at the lake docks, Pier Twelve, with the rest of what they could salvage."
Aelfred nodded solemnly. He took a last look at the Perilous Halibut, then turned without a word and walked off at a casual pace toward the hangar doors and the docks beyond. Sylvie followed with only a slight hesitation.
Teldin watched them go, then looked back at the black ship and sighed.
*****
There had been no sign of Gaye at the infirmary in the morning. Inquiries to the gnomes who were carrying the personal belongings of Teldin and his companions to the Perilous Halibut brought a variety of long responses, all of which could be boiled down to a simple "I don't know." Gomja said he would take a walk around the base and find out what she was up to, then he disappeared, too.
Teldin wandered aimlessly around the base for several hours, inspecting the variety of bizarre gnomish ships. He was mildly fascinated by the heavily armed, shiplike deathglories and the tiny clockwork spellfighters, watching as they took off on their deep-space patrols. In time, he found himself standing inside a hangar, feeling his cloak flap against his legs. The cloak had become a dark rich emerald hue, almost black, just within the last hour.
Did that color mean anything? he wondered. Why does this cloak do anything at all? What's the point of it? The frustration was neverending.
He looked around, frowned, and spotted Dyffed speaking with two other gnomes across the hangar, perhaps two hundred feet away. They were bunched together and appeared wry secretive, but their arms were waving and gesturing wildly in some intense discussion.
Teldin was suddenly seized with a perverse urge to know what they were talking about. He couldn't walk over to them and ask. That is, he couldn't-unless he were a gnome. He pushed the thought away, but it came back unbidden. What would he learn if he were suddenly a gnome? What would they tell him?
He'd never tried to use his cloak's powers to change his shape into a gnome. He'd had good success with human-sized male and female forms, but this was different. His old inhibitions against assuming other forms had eroded steadily in recent weeks under the twin pressures of curiosity and frustration. Things had been out of his control for too long.
Teldin looked around and spotted some gnomish work clothing hanging from a peg. On impulse, he casually walked over to pick it up. The gnomes paid no attention to him. Teldin walked on until he had stepped behind a large stack of wooden crates shrouded in darkness. After a brief, final moral struggle, he carefully looked around, then removed his own clothing. He felt intensely foolish, worrying that someone would see him at any moment. Why am I doing this? he asked himself, struggling out of his pants. Because I want to know what's going on, he answered himself. I want to know what this secret big-named device is that Dyffed's so fired up about. I'm tired of being left in the dark.
When he was undressed, he hesitated and strained to hear any sounds of someone approaching. Satisfied, he closed his eyes and stood perfectly still.
Miggins. He remembered the friendly little gnome who once had traveled with him on the Probe and was now left far behind on Toril; then he pictured his own features and body slowly melting down to Miggins's size. He felt a tingle of power surge through his shoulders as the cloak released its energies, and he avoided opening his eyes to look around. The floor grew larger, making his feet scuff the floor as they pulled apart. In his mind, his face took on Miggins's features, down to the gnome's excited grin.
When Teldin felt the power stop flowing, he opened his eyes again. The floor was much closer to his face now, and the hangar seemed bigger. He raised his arms, noted how short and brown they were, how stubby his fingers looked. His hand came up to his face and touched it, and he knew without doubt that those whiskers and that outrageously big nose were his. Teldin tugged on a chin hair and winced. It had worked. He was now a gnome. He was so astounded that he could hardly speak.
He reached for the gnome clothing, marveling at how different everything seemed from his new height and how far he had to reach to get anything. It was like being a child again. He noticed then that he was still wearing the cloak in its full-length version, and he quickly shrank it down to necklace size. Moments later, he had tugged on the work clothing-Gods, he wondered to himself, do these gnomes ever take baths?- and carefully hid his own clothing. With a deep breath, he walked with short, quick paces out from behind the crates and headed as nonchalantly as he could toward the three gnomes across the hangar.
It took a lot longer to get to the gnomes than he had expected, being as unused to his short legs as he was. Nonetheless, he was within hearing distance before his legs felt as if they would give out from the rapid pace.
Dyffed was examining a red box held by one of the other gnomes, a shaggy-haired character with spectacle lenses as thick as the bottoms of ale steins. The wild-haired gnome was dressed in a filthy gray smock, and he constantly mumbled short phrases like "Careful!" and "No! There!" The third gnome looked like a bored bureaucrat type, wearing a loud striped suit that Teldin was coming to associate with the government officials on this particular world. The three spoke in Gnomish, which Teldin understood, thanks to his cloak. Teldin was becoming accustomed to having the cloak translate foreign languages for him, and it appeared to be more proficient at it now than it once had been. Translated or not, however, Teldin could barely understand anything the gnomes were saying at the moment.
"I don't see where the meridional field radiation is being bottled," said Dyffed. "See, you've got this-"
"No, not there," mumbled the wild-haired gnome. He tried to point something out to Dyffed, but the other gnome paid no attention and tried to pull the red box from the wild-haired gnome's hands.
"See, it's all reversed here in the paraboloid process," Dyffed said, rattling the object and poking a finger into it. "The bottle should be flow separated here, by the little blue widget-"
"Careful!" said the wild-haired gnome, stepping back and sheltering the box in his arras, a fierce look on his bearded face. "Don't touch that!"
"Oh, for the love of Reorx's maiden aunt, I wasn't going to touch the little blue widget." Dyffed grabbed for the box and poked around inside it again. "Oops," he suddenly announced, an expression of surprise as he jerked back his finger.
Remembering that "Oops!" was a universal word of danger among the tinker gnomes of Krynn, Teldin slowed and came to a stop only a dozen feet from the threesome. He could see that the red box had a dark, glassy plate at one end. The back of the box was open and filled with gears, wires, and glowing things.
"Aaagh!" cried the wild-haired gnome, tugging the red box away from Dyffed's fingers and peering into it with an agonized expression. " 'S all ruint!"
"There, there," Dyffed soothed, snatching the box away from the other gnome. "Let's simply give it a field test and see if it's really rained." Dyffed looked around briefly, spied Teldin's gnomish shape and ignored him, then scanned the hangar. "I know! We'll look for Teldin Moore!"
For a second, Teldin feared he had been found out, even though he hadn't the faintest idea of how that was possible. The gnomes watched as Dyffed held the red box up to his face so that he peered into the dart glass plate.
"All I should have to do is concentrate, of course, and this should… do the trick…" Dyffed's voice faded as he slowly rotated in a counterclockwise direction. Teldin noted that the other two gnomes carefully ducked when the box was aimed in their direction, and he would have done the same except that Dyffed gave a peculiar little cry and aimed the box directly at him.
"Why…" Dyffed raised the box, looked hard at Teldin's gnomish form, then looked into the box again, pointing it at Teldin's head. "Obviously a defect," he muttered. "Cheap foreign parts."
"Locate him" said the wild-haired gnome in a worried voice, nudging Dyffed and pointing at Teldin.