Unexpected Encounter
For the first twenty feet of his descent, he held his breath, half from fear, half from awe, until he noticed a trail of bubbles rising up from beneath him. Glancing down, he saw the gully dwarf spiraling away below, arms wagging above his head. From the gully dwarfs bladderpack, the cloud of bubbles was spreading upward. Conundrum passed through the bubble-cloud, experiencing for a moment a queer tingling sensation, as if he were submerged in a glass of tricarbonated water (one of Doctor Bothy's more recent attempts at a cure for hiccoughs). The fancy passed, and then he purposefully exhaled and created his own cloud of bubbles. He craned his head around inside the helmet to watch them ascend, and saw the duck-feet of his four companions not very far above his outstretched hands. The surface of the water, seen from below, glimmered like a pool of quicksilver, and the Indestructible hovered above them all, like a huge, dark whale pausing for a breath of air.
A thump from below caught Conundrum's attention. It was the gully dwarf, plumping down awkwardly in a puff of sand. Conundrum flapped his arms to keep from landing atop the gully dwarf. He settled to the bottom and quickly shuffled aside to make room for the others. Once submerged, his shoes didn't feel quite so heavy as they had on board the ship. He gave Gob a reassuring smile and reached out to pat him on the shoulder. Gob, his eyes bugged-out either in wonderment or fear, gave a tentative smile back.
The others floated down around him like so many strange birds in a dream, arms a-flutter to guide their descent. Their faces looked blue inside their helmets, and Razmous's topknot dangled in his face. The kender expedition leader puffed and blew and crossed his eyes, but to no avail; his hair insisted on tickling his nose.
"I wonder if I can get my hand up inside my fishbowl," the kender said as he squirmed and tried to withdraw one arm into his frogsuit. Strangely enough, everyone could hear him, even if it did sound as if he were talking through a pillow. When he spoke, his words were accompanied by an outrush of bubbles from his bladderpack.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Chief Portlost warned. The chief was more than a little green around the edges of his heard, and his eyes looked large and bulging with fear behind his glass helmet.
"Why not?"
"Let's just get to shore and stop the nonsense," Sir Grumdish snarled as he fingered his UANP and eyed a shark that had approached to investigate the strange new visitors to its territory.
"We can't go without-" Razmous began, but then a large barrel filled with ballast stones dropped on his foot. Only his heavy, lead-lined duckfeet shoes prevented broken toes.
Conundrum unhooked the rope used to lower the barrel from the ship, while Sir Grumdish and Ensign Wig-pillow tipped it off the kender's foot. They rolled it over on its side and dumped out enough of the ballast stones to make it float, buoyed by its wooden slats. It hovered in the water before them, as though in a dream. Ensign Gob was assigned to push it.
They set out, climbing up a long winding valley between two towering coral reefs. A modest current pushed against them as they walked, and their heavy boots made for slow going. The seafloor here was of old gray coral, ground away by the steady current of the inflowing stream, while white sand filled all the reefs' hollows and crevasses. Wherever there was sand, there were small dark spiny urchins, like little pincushions dropped by some seamstress in her fright, and sometimes they came across an old bare bone, or part of a skull, sticking up out of the sand. Razmous found a bony finger with a glimmering golden ring still dangling from it, but he had no pouches in which to tuck it away for safe keeping.
To either side, long valleys lay between the reefs, stretching hack into the blue haze like aisles in a darkened temple. In these, they came across the wrecks of ships. Some were ancient and worm-eaten, half overgrown by the wild luxuriant coral. Others appeared newly sunk. Were it not for the jagged holes in their sides or bows, they might even now be running before the wind in some faraway sea. Seeing the dark gaping mortal wounds of these ships filled everyone except the kender with a strange loathing and horror, as if by looking too long they might glimpse the pale cold corpse of some doomed sailor peering out, his flesh pecked by fishes, his eyes still staring wide at some ancient peril. They hurried on as quickly as they could.
Still, there was many a marvel to behold, and despite the sharks, the greatest danger they faced was losing their leader to an aqueous version of wanderlust. Luckily, Razmous still had on his lead shoes, or he might have escaped them altogether and vanished down some dark coral cave where giant eels were waiting to devour him. Surely few other kender had ever seen anything quite so marvelous and lived to tell the tale.
Yet all found themselves filled with an almost kenderish childlike delight. They saw jellyfish that so resembled the underside of a Palanthian lady in her hoop skirts and frowsy pantaloons that Conundrum blushed to see them and nearly fogged up the inside of his helmet. In a. deep coral grotto, Razmous pointed out a giant clam that could have easily swallowed him whole, and very nearly did. They saw corals and fish of every size, shape, and description, from huge man-swallowing anemones to finger-long shrimp that carried tiny hammers instead of claws. The shrimp beat these minute weapons against the stone with a startling crack whenever anyone approached too closely. Colors were strangely muted, but their eyes quickly adjusted and began picking up subtle variations in the grays and blues of corals that were almost as beautiful as if they had been vibrantly alive with every color of the rainbow.
What interested them most were the sharks. There were dozens of them, of every shape and kind. They saw the long, flat docile kind that were nearly invisible against the sand, and only spurted away when you were almost stepping on them. They saw the square-snouted toothy kind that circled them endlessly, perhaps wondering if frogsuited gnomes-and kender, but likely not gully dwarves-were good to eat. But mostly there were the small, thin ones than moved through the water like dragonflies in a lazy summer glade in the woods. These had white tips on the ends of their fins, and long curved tails like pirate swords. Once, they spotted a monstrously big shark, but it ignored them, swimming slowly over their heads with its toothless maw gaping wide as a beer barrel. It disappeared into the bluish haze of distance, headed out to the open sea on business of its own.
Nevertheless, and despite the distractions, they eventually reached shallower water. The light grew by stages brighter and less blue, and things about them began to take on color. The sand, they found, was not white but a peculiar shade of tan, like the hide of a lion. In the shallows they encountered numerous skates and huge dark rays like magical underwater flying carpets. There were also a good deal more of the square-nosed toothy sharks, and these were more aggressive or curious than their reef cousins. They swam closer, and one even bumped Sir Grumdish from behind. Perhaps it smelled his fish bladder breathing apparatus. Certainly the six divers did. They had all had their fill of its faint but nonetheless fishy odour, and were none too glad to unstrap their helmet seals and breathe fresh air again once they had come safely to the shore. They clambered out of the surf and collapsed on the beach, dragging their water barrel after them. Ensign Gob stumbled all over his duckfeet, fell facedown on the sand, and couldn't get back up. Conundrum tried to help the gully dwarf, only to have him slip through his fingers like melted butter and fall onto his back. The gully dwarf lay there, thrashing like an overturned turtle.
"What's the matter with Gob?" Razmous asked.
"He's like a wet bar of soap," Conundrum answered as he struggled to lift the gully dwarf to his feet. "I can't get hold of him. Help me."
Together, they managed it, but only by lifting Gob by his helmet. When wet, their frogsuits exuded some peculiar, odorless oil, probably to help the diver slip more easily through the water. But once dry, the suits returned to their normal-if it could be called normal-rubbery state. Conundrum and Razmous helped Gob out of his lead shoes.
Once they had all removed their helmets, duckfeet, and bladderpacks, the five intrepid explorers-and the gully dwarf-gathered around the upended barrel. Three hundred yards from shore, the Indestructible appeared as a dark hump in the water, crawling with activity. Inland, the silent hills rose up wave upon shingled wave. Where the stream cut through them, a wide band of greenery crowded either bank, softening the grim browns and stony grays. In the sand of the beach were the deep, cloven hoofprints of numerous goats, as well as what appeared to be the soft pugmarks of a prowling leopard.