The half-elf was silent for a moment. "I've never seen anything like it," he admitted at last. "The magical power involved was… well, it was staggering. Most attack spells I'm familiar with have ranges measured in hundreds of yards. What was our altitude when we were struck? Fifteen leagues? Twenty?"

"Something like that," Teldin agreed.

"Then I take back any sarcastic comments I made about the impossibility of world-altering magic," Djan announced dryly. "If your Juna were trying to convince me of their existence, I think they should consider the point made."

"Was it the Juna?" Julia asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

Teldin didn't answer immediately. What was it that the elves at the embassy on the Rock of Bral had told him? That the ruins of the "Star Folk's" works are sometimes guarded with magic so powerful and old that it's lost its meaning, and now strikes out in its madness at all who trespass? It was something like that, even though he couldn't recall the exact words. And that could well describe what had happened to the Boundless. "I don't know," he admitted. "Perhaps. Or perhaps we triggered something mindless that they left behind."

"How can we find out?" Julia pressed.

"I'd guess these Juna will make it clear to us if they actually exist," Djan answered. "Not that I'm overly enthusiastic about meeting creatures who can fire fifteen-league-long bolts and cause mini-suns to chase ships out of the sky."

Teldin shook his head impatiently. Discussions such as this weren't going to do them any good. Whether or not Nex was home to living Juna, the knowledge wouldn't be of any value unless the Cloakmaster could get off-planet again and act on the knowledge, would it? And that would require a functional ship.

"I'm going down into the bilges," he announced. "Can someone give me a light?"

*****

"Can it be fixed?" Teldin asked.

Teldin, Djan, and Julia were sitting in the Cloakmaster's cabin. Although the squid ship had come down on a fairly even keel, the cant to the deck was enough to be irritating. The small oil lamp suspended by chains from the overhead didn't hang straight, and when he leaned back in his chair, Teldin kept thinking he was on the verge of going over backward. Overhead the Cloakmaster could hear the crew moving about, working on repairing the peripheral damage that the rigging had taken. Wasted effort, he thought glumly, unless we can do something about the hull and the keel.

"The hull, yes," Djan replied at once. "The bow took a fiend's beating, and then there's the hole farther aft. But still, that's just a matter of patching and reinforcing. I think the ship's next landing would be its last, particularly if we put down on water, but I could guarantee you the hull would handle normal flight… if that were the only problem.

"Unfortunately, it isn't," the half-elf continued. "You saw the keel, Teldin. It's split right through amidships, almost split just forward of the mainmast, with cracks just about everywhere else." He shrugged. "If the damage was localized to one spot, I'd say let's try strapping it and take our chances. But the way it is now, the moment it's put under any stress-like trying to take off-it's going to shatter into half a dozen pieces."

"Can we replace it?" Teldin asked-then instantly knew from his comrades' expressions that it was a stupid question.

"Replacing a keel's not much different than building an entire ship," Julia explained gently. "It takes facilities and resources we just don't have here."

"The Boundless will never fly again," Djan concluded. "I'd stake my name on it."

Teldin nodded slowly. He'd suspected as much from the moment he'd lowered himself into the squid ship's bilges. Even to his relatively inexperienced eye, the damage had seemed just too extensive. "You may as well tell the crew to lay off," he said, trying to keep the disappointment out of his voice. "Tell them to save their energy for…" For what? he asked himself. For building another ship? Julia had as much as said that was impossible. For making a life here, then?

As though she could sense his worry and mentally overhear his questions, Julia laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "We can think about all this later," she pointed out reasonably. "You're on Nex, where you wanted to be. Don't you want to find out more about it before you start obsessing about getting off-planet again?"

He met her ironic smile with one of his own. "You're right, of course," he admitted. "Julia, Djan, would you care to join me for a little exploration?"

*****

The meadow felt springy and resilient-and undeniably, vibrantly alive-under his feet as Teldin dropped the last couple of feet from the rope ladder. How long has it been since I walked on good, honest grass? he asked himself. How long since I've had fertile earth under my feet, and not ship decks or paved city streets? Far, far too long. He crouched down, ran his fingers over the grass…

To discover that it wasn't grass, not as he thought of it at least: not single, narrow blades rising out of the earth. Instead, the "grass" here was composed of stalks from which sprouted a dozen tiny branches, each bearing tiny, almost circular leaves. Each plant looked, then, like a miniature tree standing about an inch tall. Still, he told himself, grass is as grass does. This is still a meadow.

He climbed back to his feet as the rest of the scouting party joined him. Julia and Djan were with him, of course, as was Beth-Abz-in human form, at the Cloakmaster's order. They were accompanied by the half-orc Dargeth, plus another burly crewman, both armed with short swords and slings. The latter three had come along solely on Djan's insistence. It hadn't occurred to Teldin that they'd need any kind of defense. But of course it should have, he chided himself. Someone or something on the planet had tried- multiple times-to blast the Boundless out of space and kill them all, and that someone/something might try again at any moment, regardless of how peaceful this planet looked. Well, with the disguised beholder and two strong sword arms at his back, he felt as well protected as it was possible to be.

At the moment, though, it was all too easy to forget about the danger. The environment around him was so beautiful, so peaceful. At first glance, the steep-sided gorge could easily be part of a mountain range on Krynn or Toril, and the forest that enshrouded it wouldn't look out of place on any of the other worlds Teldin had visited.

That was at first glance. On closer inspection, however, there were enough jarring elements to keep the Cloakmaster constantly aware that this world was quite different from any other he'd visited. There was the sky, first of all. The azure blue and pure-white clouds were familiar, but instead of the disk of a normal sun, the light came from half a dozen speeding mini-suns crisscrossing the sky.

Then, too, there was the forest itself. While speeding above the trees in the stricken squid ship, Teldin had thought they were standard deciduous trees-oaks, perhaps, or maybe larches. Now he could see that they didn't match any tree species he was familiar with… if they could even be called trees at all, he added mentally. In fact, they looked like vastly larger versions of the "grass" plants he'd examined a few moments before. Their overall shape was reminiscent of normal trees, but that was about it. Instead of bark-covered trunks, he could see that the central member of each plant was as green as the leaves were, and much more fibrous-looking. To the touch, however, they felt rock-hard, without even the minuscule give of an old oak. If the Boundless had slammed into those trunks, he knew, the impact would have been the same as if the ship had struck a rock outcropping.