The Broken Sphere Read Free Page B

or take. While he’d tried to use the liquor sparingly, only when he felt he couldn’t handle the insomnia any longer, his self-control had been slowly slipping. For the last three – or was it four? or even more? – nights running, he’d hit the sagecoarse hard. He shook his head carefully, so as not to aggravate the dull ache. This isn’t the way it should be, he repeated.
    Slowly he swung himself out of bed. Not bothering to dress, he expanded the cloak to its full size and wrapped it around his body. He headed out onto the deck, stopping only at the water barrel to wash the sour, dead taste out of his mouth.
    Wildspace in this crystal sphere was cool but not cold.
    The air was brisk on his skin through his cloak and cotton undergarments. Although it made his headache spike momentarily, the relative chill seemed to clear the cobwebs from his brain, giving his thoughts more clarity. He removed the starchart from its tube and unrolled it, comparing what it showed him with what he could see over the Foots railing.
    This was the major problem with traveling alone, he admitted to himself. Even using the cloak, he could control the ship only for limited periods before he grew too exhausted to continue. At first he’d managed only four or five hours before his thoughts started to fog up and his control of the vessel started to slip. With practice, though, he’d brought himself along so he could helm the Fool at full speed – more than four times normal spelljamming speed, he guessed, even without additional crew – for more than twelve hours. In that time, he figured – based on what Sylvie, the late navigator for the Probe, had once told him – the small vessel could travel more than a hundred million leagues. A literally unimaginable distance, he thought for the thousandth time, particularly for a know-nothing farmer. That was a distance equivalent to traveling around Krynn’s equator more than seven thousand times in a single day. How could people ever take spelljamming travel for granted?
    Anyway, helming the ship accounted for twelve hours of every twenty-four. The rest of the day was taken up with the maintenance chores that every ship requires, with charting and checking his course, but mainly with sleep. During that time the Fool simply drifted. In wildspace, it usually – and “usually” was the key word – kept to roughly the same course it had held when under power, and maintained a decent speed. Travel in the Flow was quite another matter, there were rivers, eddies, even whirlpools, in the phlogiston that could catch the drifting ship and fling it in totally unpredictable directions. Considering, Teldin was surprised he’d ended up at the crystal sphere he’d wanted to reach.
    It had been worth the inefficiency, and the risks, however.
    On first leaving Radole, he hadn’t had any real plans. He’d just wanted to get away – away from the elves, away from the bionoid Hectate, away from everyone and everything that reminded him of the burden on his shoulders. His first couple of days in space he’d spent mired in self-pity, alternately cursing himself and the fate that had seen fit to afflict him with the ultimate helm. Eventually, he’d rid himself of these negative feelings as he’d known he would, and was able to concentrate on finding a solution, rather than just dwelling on the problem.
    If he’d hoped to come up with the answer, the one, simple key that would solve everything, he’d have been disappointed. What he did find, however, was a new way of looking at the matter. Plainly put, he didn’t have to make a decision now – at least, not the central decision, whether or not to become the Spelljammer’s next captain. Even if he were to decide – either in the affirmative or the negative – exactly how would that change things here and now? If he chose “no,” he had to learn how to be rid of the cloak, and how to keep it out of the hands of those who’d use the