A fantastic jolt of pain cut through the ogre's next breath. He dropped his own sword again and tried to grasp the short sword's hilt with both hands, releasing his injured eye at the same time, but the world began to spin and grow black around the edges. The walls tilted, and he felt himself fall-then the world was gone.
A bright light flashed in the window at the end of the hall, followed almost at once by an ear-shattering boom of thunder.
Teldin stepped back from the dead ogre and looked at Gaye. She took a hesitant step toward him.
"I hope you're not mad at me," she said. Then her eyes rolled up, and she fell forward on her face.
*****
Outside, Teldin saw a huge fire burning out of control along the lake docks. A strange vessel, like a giant blue scorpion, lay tilted to one side, half of it crashed into a storage shed by the lake. Flames licked around the vessel's jointed legs and up its arched tail. Scorpion ship, Teldin thought dully, holding the kender's limp body close in his arms. The orcs found us. How? How could they, with a whole world to search? How have any of them ever found me? It was driving him mad.
A fast shadow shot by over his head. Teldin instinctively ducked and started to run, crouching over Gaye to shield her. He heard the distant shouts of gnomes in hand-to-hand combat, wild cries and curses from nonhuman throats. Another shadow passed by overhead, and something dropped from it to strike the roof of a large warehouse to his left. A wide ball of orange fire splashed upward from the oily impart, the muffled whoomp of the blast stinging him with its heat.
Sirens were going off everywhere. The air was filled with echoing cracks and thumps as the air-defense engines fired. A chorus of screams sounded above and behind him, followed by a tremendous crash and the shattering of wood as a spelljammer fell and pancaked upside-down into the pavement near the infirmary.
"Teldin Moore!" came a loud, nasal shout. Teldin looked around and saw Dyffed waving at him from the low, wide door of a gnomish troop barracks. He instantly ran for the gnome, Gaye held tight against his chest. Dyffed's neat brown suit was ripped and burned, and he clutched a pair of pistols. As Teldin came up, the gnome stepped out of the doorway to let him by, then raised both pistols and fired them simultaneously into the air. A hideous cry rang out, and Teldin turned in time to see a body fall from a snakelike spelljammer passing overhead. Dyffed stepped back into the barracks as the body smacked the stones a short distance away.
"Damned inconvenient time for an air raid," Dyffed said conversationally, picking up two more loaded pistols from a table that appeared to be covered with them. Teldin noticed then that two other gnomes were in the room, loading pistols from chests full of smokepowder, shot, and weapons as quickly as their short fingers could move. The hazy air stank of burned powder.
"I was just going over for supper," Dyffed went on, squinting into the sky from the doorway again. "The cooks, Reorx bless them, had promised me a hot bowl of their best seven-weed soup. Never got as far as the third armory. I heard the alert siren and was told to set up an ambush point here, and then there were ships all about me, falling right out of the sky through the clouds like hail. How's the kender?"
"Her ankle's cut badly," Teldin said, laying the kender down on a gnome's child-sized bunk bed. He banged his head on the bottom of the upper bunk as he tried to straighten up, swore, then carefully stood and rubbed his head. "I've wrapped the wound, but she needs a spell or potion to heal it. I couldn't find anyone in the infirmary, not even the patients."
"That's because they're all at their antispelljammer stations. Didn't you hear the warning siren?" Dyffed looked at Teldin, then looked back outside. "Ah, I forgot. You're a human, of course, silly of me. Haven't got the same range of hearing as we do-a shame, too, if you ask me. We do have sirens that humans can hear-and elves and goblins and everyone else can hear them, too, for that matter-but we always sound the high-pitched gnome sirens first, as it gives us a leg up, you might-oops!" Dyffed instantly raised both pistols and fired, aiming them straight out the door. The loud reports stung Teldin's ears, but he still heard the clatter and thump of a body falling on the pavement outside. "As you might say, I was saying," Dyffed finished, tossing the pistols on the floor and grabbing two more from the table. "It makes the enemy think we didn't know they were coming. I could use a hand here, if you don't mind."
Teldin grabbed for two pistols himself, torn between watching Gaye and fighting. Dyffed didn't look up as Teldin joined him. The gnome merely raised his pistols and fired out the door. Teldin raised his weapons and found himself staring right at a wounded humanoid warrior in studded black armor, looking vaguely like a pig-nosed man, not ten feet away. It staggered toward the door with a curved sword clenched in his gloved fist. Teldin's fingers tightened on the triggers, guns aimed at the humanoid's head. The sharp double crack snapped off his hearing, filling his head with a painful whine, and acrid smoke instantly obscured his vision and stabbed his nostrils. Dyffed shoved Teldin in the legs, pushing him out of the doorway and back into the room as the black-armored humanoid collapsed across the doorway, sword clattering into the room. Bloody droplets splashed across the floor at Teldin's feet.
"The gods made us all," said Dyffed, grabbing two more pistols, "but smokepowder made us all equal. Old gnome saying, you understand. Seemed appropriate."
Teldin grabbed two more pistols himself from the huge stack of them now on the table. The two gnomes loading them worked madly. A figure suddenly appeared in the doorway. Teldin snapped his pistols up-and froze just before he could squeeze both shots off.
It was Sylvie, her clothing splattered with blood, clutching a messy, long dagger in her hands. He lowered the pistols at once. "Teldin!" Sylvie called, out of breath. "Teldin, we've got… we've got to get to the Halibut! The gnomes are taking off! The base…"
Dyffed shoved at Sylvie's legs and forced her into the barracks room, then fired twice out the door again. Teldin tried to get to the door and listen to Sylvie at the same time, but she stopped him with her free hand.
"There are…" she finally said, after swallowing hard. "There are humanoid ships, apparently orcish, landing all over the place. We have to get out of here. Aelfred's been looking for you, and Gomja. Gomja had brought us back to the hangar just before the orcs came. We're going to get into wildspace, where they can't catch us, before it's too late." A low, muffled boom echoed across the port.
Teldin nodded back at the silent form on the bunk bed. "Can you carry her?" he shouted, too excited to think that Sylvie was right in front of him. The half-elf navigator saw Gaye and gasped, hurrying over to the kender's side and sheathing her dagger without wiping it off. In a moment, she had Gaye cradled in her arms.
"I'll never get my seven-weed soup tonight," Dyffed said sadly, stuffing four pistols into his wide belt and carrying two more. "First the hamsters, then this. Not my day at all. Shall we be off?"
Teldin nodded, taking a deep breath. Sylvie came up behind him. "Teldin, she's still bleeding," she whispered.
Teldin glanced at Gaye's pale face, then looked outside, across the broad, clear pavement, to the far-away hangar where the Perilous Halibut waited. Fires leaped into the sky everywhere, and black clouds rolled and drifted across the whole base. Few figures were visible in the open, most dodging from building to distant building. The sky was clear of spelljammers. They've all crashed or landed, Teldin decided. The ores must be down and waiting for us, too.
"Let's go," he said, then dashed out of the building, pistols up, running for the distant hangar. "Come on!" he shouted back, waving Dyffed and Sylvie on as they followed him.
Behind them, oblivious to everything, the two gnomes loaded pistols until there was no place left to put them.
*****
Twenty minutes later, the Perilous Halibut, its helm having been installed by accident two days earlier, burst through the thin wooden roof of the hangar. Cracked lumber and splinters sprayed through the air behind it. Sylvie was at the helm, there being no one else with the spell power to fly the ship as fast as she. The Halibut roared along beneath the cloud cover for many miles, leaving the naval base and a mass of pinned-down and burning humanoid ships far behind it. Borrowing an idea from Dyffed, Sylvie had the cloud-concealed ship simply fly off the edge of Ironpiece, where enemy ships were not likely to look for it. Luck was with them. The sky was overcast right to the edge, and they saw no sign of any humanoid ships when they sped away into the void. The ship's dark, nonreflective color proved to be a marvelous asset in hiding it against the black backdrop of wildspace.
Teldin looked out of the open jettison platform at the Halibut's stern as they left Ironpiece. Seen edge-on, the world was now just a rapidly receding band of light against the distant constellations. Once they were safely away, he knew, Sylvie would take the time to draw out the course through the phlogiston to get to Herdspace. Sylvie, alone out of everyone else, had remembered to ask the gnomes for the navigational charts to Herdspace. This she'd done shortly after she had been taken to the infirmary, and she'd stored the charts with her belongings. We don't deserve to have someone that smart with us, he mused.
Not that Gomja was a slouch, either. He had taken charge of the evacuation, pointing out that the humanoids obviously knew where Teldin and company were, and waiting at the base for the humanoids to go away was a losing game. It was better to get off-planet into wildspace again and try to outdistance the enemy fleet before it caught on. Funny, thought Teldin, how we thought landing on Ironpiece would solve our troubles. Instead, our troubles just followed us right down to the ground.
A heavy hand dropped on Teldin's shoulder, startling him. "Someone wants to see you, old son," Aelfred said with a crooked smile. "We managed to scrape a healing potion together from somewhere for our kender."
Wordlessly, Teldin followed his friend down the too-narrow corridor to the equally cramped room that was now serving as Gaye's room. He had barely begun to figure out where anything was aboard this flying black coffin. Already he was starting to hate it.
Aelfred opened the door. Teldin had to stoop slightly because of the low ceiling and barely fit through the doorway. Gaye was in bed, looking at him with a pale, anxious face. "You mad?" she asked in a soft voice. Teldin half smiled. "No. You okay?" Gaye's face cleared with relief, and she settled back in her small bed. It had been sized for a gnome, and she just barely fit it. "I'm okay."
Teldin managed to sit on the edge of her bed without crowding her too much. "I saw you poke the ogre in the face with that stick. That was a lucky shot, but you should have just run and let me handle it."
"Oh," she said. She was about to say more but didn't, simply shrugging instead. "Thanks."
Teldin rubbed his face, thinking. "We're heading for that sphere that Cirathora called Herdspace, though I don't bow how we're going to find the fal once we get there. Dyffed was going to give us a device, a locator of some kind, that we could use when we got to Herdspace. I got it, then lost it when the, uh, hamster swallowed me. We'll have to hope for a lucky break when we get there."
Gaye looked down at her lap. "What did the locator look like?" she asked.
"Little red box," he said. "He called it a thingfinder. The humanoids might have gotten it, but its more likely that one of the gnomes on the base has it now. We can't go back for it. The scro are all over the place." He patted Gaye's feet under the blanket, then stood up to leave. "I've got to find out what's going on aboard our new ship. I'll come back to check on you in a little while."
Gaye didn't look up as Teldin headed for the door. He heard her call his name once, and he turned before he left.
Gaye was still looking down. Her arm was out, handing something to him. It was a red box with an open back and a dark glass window on it.
"I found this when I was out earlier," she said. "Is this it?" She dared to look up.
Ironpiece was a bright spot of light against a stupendous backdrop of stars as the pair of doors at the stern of the Perilous Halibut came open. The figure there looked out but was oblivious to the splendor of wildspace. Instead, the figure stepped around the rear jettison, from which shrapnel could be launched at trailing foes, then carefully scanned the void.
Despite its apparently mechanical trappings, the gnomish covered lantern the figure bore was powered by a simple magical spell that provided continual light. The gnomes had merely added assorted gears and sparking devices that made the lantern weigh three times what it normally would, yet none of the devices worked and all had frozen in place with rust. Still, the light inside was as bright as ever.
After a few moments, the figure spotted a faint, blinking light trailing the ship. It was the signal. Carefully, the figure raised the lantern and, recalling the code that had been so painfully learned, began to open and shut the lantern's cover, sending the first of many messages that its master awaited. Only the stars saw the figure's face and noted its grief.
Chapter Ten
The scro who broke the news did not sweeten its bitter taste, simply gave the facts.
"Sit, five ships out of Captain Sharak's force of twelve have reported back from Ironpiece. The rest were disabled by ground fire. Our casualties are estimated at one hundred and fifteen troops. The gnomes were somehow able to detect Sharak's approach even after our fleet had distracted or disabled their orbital scouts, as the gnomes were quite ready for us on the ground. Neither Teldin Moore nor his companions could be found. He may have escaped us."
The eight naval and marine commanders crowded into General Vorr's office said nothing in their humiliation. Vorr looked calmly at the tall, black-armored scro, who stared back without apparent qualms. "Captain Geraz, do you have any idea of where Teldin might be?"
"Sir, I've heard several reports of gnomish ships fleeing during the fighting," Geraz said, slurring his words a bit. "One ship crashed through the rooftop of a hangar and fled into the sky, another took off normally, and a third crashed into the lake. Our troops were able to capture enough papers to indicate that one of the ships that got away was of an experimental design, a long-range craft, but Intelligence is having trouble translating the gnomes' notes.
"We followed the lich's directions for finding Teldin in the infirmary. One of our ogres, your bodyguard Gargon, found him in the infirmary, but Gargon was slain. We recovered the body for questioning by the war priests and learned that the ogre was killed by a human in a cloak-Teldin, we believe. Two scro reported seeing a man in a cloak with a female half-elf and a gnome enter a hangar just before a black spelljammer craft smashed through the roof and fled."