Conundrum

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 co

“So that’s the sea,” Conundrum commented as he leaned against the rail beside the commodore.

“One of them,” Commodore Brigg answered quietly.

Chapter

6

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 co

Razmous’s map, drawn by the navigator of the ill-fated MNS Polywog, was of hideous complexity-a many-headed hydra of tu

Far across the sea, in the city of Flotsam, in the middle of the common room of the Sailor’s Rest, one of the better i

The city of Flotsam had been built on a cliff overlooking the Blood Sea of Istar, that great red ocean created when the fiery mountain struck Kry

Flotsam was built at the head of a deep bay of the Blood Sea, at a place where shipwrecks and anything else the maelstrom-or for that matter the rest of Kry

Even so, being one of the more sturdily-built structures in the more respectable part of town, the Sailor’s Rest rarely experienced these sorts of disturbances of the peace. This was an i

Still, most of the patrons of the i

One of the knife wielders was a semi-successful exporter of cypress lumber, the other a waiter of some years” experience, with an impeccable reputation for discretion. The nature of their dispute was unknown, so suddenly had it erupted. One moment, the waiter was serving the exporter his steamed prawns, the next he was dumping the butter down the front of the man’s shirt. It had escalated just as quickly to knives. The waiter’s shirtsleeve was torn at the shoulder, the cypress merchant’s coat was split neatly down the back from the collar to the hem, so that the two halves swung freely whenever he lunged or dodged, teeth bared.