Sea Map
Commodore Brigg placed the tube to his ear, listened for a moment, then put it to his mouth again. As he began to blow, his outpuffed cheeks were suddenly filled with seawater. He dashed the spewing hose from his mouth, coughing and gagging. The stern of the ship began to sink, lifting her how out of the water. Commodore Brigg opened the hatch to see what was the matter, but this only hastened the ship's demise. Green seawater fountained forth from the opened hatch, bowling the commodore overboard while vomiting out much of the crew along with the water. The Indestructible slipped stern foremost beneath the waves, pausing only long enough to launch one of its UAEPs in a concussive explosion and spray of green seawater.
The giant arrow scribed a tremendous arc hundreds of feet in the air across the brilliant blue sky. The people along the docks (and the gnomes) suddenly realized, to their horror, that the projectile was bound to fall to earth somewhere within the confines of the city. Commodore Brigg cringed as he bobbed in the water.
The UAEP descended like a hive of bees, buzzing madly over the first row of warehouses, past streets of homes and businesses, onward and downward toward the city square. It streaked down an alley, slicing through clotheslines strung between the buildings like so many strings of a harp, before passing over the crowd gathered to listen to the mayor's dedication speech. It then struck off the head of the statue of Lord Gunthar, as neatly as an executioner's blade, just as the mayor and the sculptor were triumphantly pulling aside its covering sheet. The head leaped from Lord Gunthar's shoulders in nothing less than complete surprise and landed on the mayor's foot, breaking only his pinky toe, by some strange luck. The giant arrow careened off the statue, passed through the open second story bedroom window of the house of Nathan the Tailor, through the open bedroom door, down the hall, and out the open staircase window without touching a thing or waking any of the occupants of the house. From there, it skipped once off the shallowly-pitched roof of a chicken house, frightening its occupants out of three days" laying before coming to a quivering stop inside the slat wood fences of a pig sty owned by the dwarf Dernbannin—who was busy at his forge next door and heard the whole thing, he would loudly proclaim in the months that followed—and neatly skewering his prized and much-beloved pig, Humphrey Afterwards, no one could say who squealed the louder: Humphrey, or the mayor with his broken pinky toe.
Meanwhile, out on the bay, twenty-one heads surfaced in the general vicinity of the sunken submersible, greatly defying the odds a second time. Of course, there were only twenty crew members on board at the time she sunk. The extra head belonged to a very angry oyster diver who had nearly been crushed under the Indestructible as she settled to the bottom of the harbor. He'd been working the oyster beds, completely unaware that the Indestructible was to launch that morning, else he'd have never come within a hundred leagues of the place, he would later declare in court.
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Three weeks later-the gnomes having learned much about re-floating and re-outfitting sunken submersibles after the first time the Indestructible sank-Commodore Brigg stood in the conning tower and leaned against the rust-covered aft rail as his ship slipped for the third time from her moorings. Indestructible, fully provisioned and stocked with a handsome supply of fresh Humphrey sausages, pulled quietly away from the quay under its own spring-generated power. Its once-gleaming black iron hull was now a dull rust red. Across the bay, the city of Pax slept, for the most part blissfully unaware. Only the mayor and a few of his closest advisers huddled behind a newly-fortified observation post hastily constructed atop a nearby hill, to watch and make sure nothing else untoward happened. The garbage scow had been towed out to sea and sunk a few days before, to remove any last temptation for Commodore Brigg to try to prove the soundness of his clearly unsound submersible design.
But even if it hadn't, the commodore was having nothing to do with further tests or demonstrations. He counted himself lucky that the Knights of Neraka hadn't been around to give him trouble during all the sinkings, and he wasn't about to send for more money to scrape and paint the ship, much less refloat her after another mishap. The ship, such as it was, would have to do, come what may. Besides, he reasoned as only a gnome can reason, if the ship sank one more time, they'd likely have to call off the mission altogether as the ship would rust to bits. 'Twas better not to risk it.
He ordered the ship ahead three-quarters as she cleared the docks. Quietly, in the dead of night, they steered Indestructible out of the harbor and into the Fjord of Gunthar. Conundrum joined Commodore Brigg atop the conning tower. He watched the strange white moon of Krynn sink into the dark North Sirrion Sea.
"So that's the sea," Conundrum commented as he leaned against the rail beside the commodore.
"One of them," Commodore Brigg answered quietly.
The Indestructible cruised northward with a following sea and a favorable wind for many days and nights. Mount Nevermind, the home of the gnomes, receded in the distance, its great summit the last portion of Sancrist Isle still visible by sunset of the third day of their voyage. Come morning, the gnomes and their kender companion found themselves sailing in the midst of the open ocean.
Many of the gnomes, including a few members of the Maritime Sciences Guild, had never been out of sight of land. They took turns, when duty permitted, coming up on deck and gazing in awe at the great gray rolling sea. Sir Grumdish took one look at the heaving waves and unbroken horizon and turned as yellow as a sheet parchment. Professor Hap-Troggensbottle had been many times to sea in his quest to discover the nature of the buoyancy of very-large rocks, so the sights held little wonder for him. But he was often seen above decks collecting buckets of seawater, which he took below to continue his experiments in his cabin. Exactly what he was doing remained a mystery.
Razmous was literally all over the ship during these exciting first days, so much so that some of the crew began to speculate that there were actually three identical kender onboard. In the first days of the voyage, he fell overboard and had to be rescued so many times that he was ordered to wear a pair of large, inflated shark bladders under each arm and a fifty foot rope around his waist, which was fastened to the mast any time he was on deck, under threat of indefinite confinement in the bilge. The next time he fell overboard, they hauled him aboard without having to lower sails and stop the ship. He was wet and bedraggled but keen for another go.
Commodore Brigg and Navigator Snork spent most of their duty time in the conning tower, directing the ship's course, taking navigational readings from the sun and stars, and ordering the trimming of sails as circumstances and winds dictated. When off duty, they plotted (with Razmous's help) their future course beneath Ansalon. Conundrum was invited to attend these high-level sessions, as his training for the Guild of PuzzlesRiddlesEnigmasEtcetera included the study of labyrinthine documents. In these sessions he proved himself a valuable companion, as he was able to sort out the kender's unnumbered and unlabeled maps on more than one occasion.
Razmous's map, drawn by the navigator of the ill-fated MNS Polywog, was of hideous complexity-a many-headed hydra of tunnels, passages, dead ends, switchbacks, wells, and caverns, a three-dimensional nightmare that the navigator had rendered onto a series of two-dimensional pages, enough to fill a book. Though the landmarks were carefully noted to exacting standards, the navigator had failed to mark the Polywog's actual course beneath the continent, which seemed to indicate that the map was but a copy of the original. It also meant that, if Snork and Conundrum couldn't unravel the two-hundred page map before they began the undersea leg of the journey, they'd be almost as lost as if they didn't have any map at all. So, as they crossed the North Sirrion Sea and came in sight of Northern Ergoth on the twelfth day, Conundrum, already having shown aptitude, was promoted from his position as chief officer in charge of seating to first assistant cartographer. He had an important task, and felt happy and contented. He moved his bunk into his cousin's cabin, and they stayed up many a night with the kender Razmous, poring blissfully over the tangle of maps by the light of a lamp swaying from an overhead steam pipe.