Spelljammer: The Cloakmaster Cycle, Book 02 - Into the Void by Nigel Findley

Author:Nigel Findley [Findley, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-5607-6154-9
Publisher: Fanversion Publishing
Published: 2020-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Despite Aelfred’s misgivings, the remainder of the journey through the flow was notable for its lack of mishaps. The “new inductees,” as Aelfred called them—actually the surviving members of the deathspider’s boarding party—seemed to integrate with the rest of the Probe’s crew without any major difficulties. Over the first couple of days after the battle, Teldin could tell a “new inductee” a ship-length away. There was something about the way they walked and stood, as though they wished they could sink into the deck or the bulkhead and just fade from view—“trying to look invisible” was Aelfred’s phrase for it. If anyone spoke to them—or even looked at them—they flinched, as though they expected to be beaten. Or worse, Teldin speculated, remembering his own experiences with neogi on Krynn.

Plus, they had a tendency to stand around, trying to look invisible, unless they had specific orders to do something. On the third day after the battle, Teldin saw a perfect example of this. One of the hammership’s regular crewmen—a little man named Garay—was standing on the rail, cleaning the sheaves of a rigging block with a marlin spike. As he shifted position, the spike fell from his hand. It landed on the deck, barely a foot in front of a new inductee named Tregimesticus, who just stood there, looking at the spike near his feet.

“Well?” Garay called down from the rigging. “Aren’t you going to pick the bloody thing up?”

Tregimesticus jumped as though he’d been whipped, snatched the spike off the deck, and scampered up the rigging to place it right into Garay’s hand.

When the man was gone, Garay climbed down and came over to where Teldin was standing. “Dead from the neck up,” the crewman grumbled. “I’ll be flogged if any of them come around to right thinking.”

Surprisingly, though, some of them did start to come around. Perhaps they were the ones who hadn’t been aboard the deathspider as long—nobody felt comfortable asking, of course—or perhaps they were just the ones who naturally had stronger wills. In any case, of the ten “new inductees,” four seemed slowly to be returning to the land of the living. They started talking to the other crew members—even when they hadn’t been spoken to first—and even began to strike up friendships. The other six, including Tregimesticus, didn’t seem so lucky or so adaptable. They followed orders with a speed that made the regular crew of the Probe look like sluggards, but they never showed anything that could be mistaken for initiative, and they kept the habit of trying to look invisible.

In any case, the voyage progressed uneventfully. For Teldin, it was a pleasurable time. There was something comforting about the strict routine aboard the Probe. Aelfred returned him to normal watch-standing, which meant that eight hours out of every day was spent scanning the flow for possible danger. The rest of the time he was free to do as he liked. He still shared the cabin with the three surviving gnomes—Horvath, Miggins, and Saliman,

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