Even the longest voyage eventually comes to an end, Teldin reminded himself, and this one was no exception. The crystal sphere boundary of Vistaspace was fifteen days behind them, and Garrash was no more than five days ahead. From this distance, the mighty world appeared as nothing more than a point of ruddy light, occasionally tinged with a brighter yellow that had to come from its fire ring. Even the Cloakmaster's spyglass wasn't sufficiently powerful to resolve the fire world into a visible disk.

They'd been fortunate, the Cloakmaster knew. By sheer luck, the point at which they'd penetrated the Vistaspace crystal sphere was relatively near-on a cosmic scale-to Garrash. If the planet's orbital plane had been oriented differently, or if the world were at a different point along its orbit, their voyage would have been fifteen days or more longer.

Throughout the voyage, Teldin had used the amulet regularly to keep tabs on the Spelljammer-not every day, but at least every few days. The results had been inconclusive. Since that first time, the great ship's perception hadn't included anything as distinctive as Garrash and its fire ring. Each time he'd used the amulet, Teldin had seen nondescript views of star-studded blackness-obviously wild-space, but within which crystal sphere? Conceivably, the patterns of the stars might have given some idea-at least confirmed that the vessel was still within Garrash's crystal sphere-but the Boundless didn't have a detailed starchart of Vistaspace on board.

Still, Djan had pointed out, the fact that Teldin had never once seen the Flow seemed to hint strongly that the Spell-jammer hadn't yet left the sphere. The Cloakmaster wasn't as firmly convinced as his half-elven friend. After all, he knew from his reading at the Great Archive that the manta-shaped ship seemed able to complete in a day or two voyages through the phlogiston that would take any other vessel weeks. Yet, he had to admit, the odds of finding his quarry still in Vistaspace rose with each observation.

Of course, as Djan had stressed to him several times before, crystal spheres are almost inconceivably huge. Large though the Spelljammer may be on the scale of ships, and even of worlds, considered on this scale it was a very small needle in a very large haystack. Thus, actually locating the Spelljammer could turn out to be a task in and of itself.

Julia and Djan had both agreed with him that the best place to start was in the vicinity of Garrash itself, however. At least that was a recognizable "landmark" in the vastness of the void.

From his cabin, Teldin heard Julia "make" eight bells-sounding the ship's brass bell in the stern-indicating the time. The beginning of the forenoon watch, he thought. That put the time at about eight in the morning, according to the groundling clock. He hadn't been awake long, and he had yet to make an appearance on deck. He'd long since lost his farmer's habit of rising early, and he'd been getting up progressively later recently as he'd gone to sleep well past four bells in the bottom of the night watch-past two in the morning. That'll change, he told himself firmly. I'll make it change. Yet still there was some part of his mind that cast doubt on his resolve.

He reached above his head, pressing both his forearms flat against the overhead, feeling the muscles of his back and legs stretch. His stomach felt like a fist clenched around emptiness, and the stretch only intensified the sensation. Breakfast, he thought.

The four sailors sitting in the saloon just aft of his cabin greeted him politely. Nothing was cooking in the galley-he was between meals, after all, too late for what the crew still called dawnfry and too early for highsunfeast-but the cook had left out a plate of cold meats, pickled vegetables, and a sliced loaf. Teldin built himself a hand meal, which he munched as he headed out onto the main deck.

Djan called a cheery, "Well met," down to him from the afterdeck as Teldin emerged from the forecastle. He waved back and started to head aft to join him.

It was then that the commotion broke out belowdecks, just a muffled yell at first, but quickly followed by the pounding of running feet. Teldin stopped in his tracks, looked questioningly up at Djan.

A figure-it was Dargeth-dashed up the ladder from the cargo deck and the crew's quarters. His face was pale. "It's Blossom," he gasped.

Blossom? She's on the helm… But, no, this was the forenoon watch, wasn't it? That meant it was the dwarf, Dranigor, currently helming the ship. "What about Blossom?" he demanded.

"She's hurt bad," the half-ore told him. "Maybe dead, I don't know."

"Where?"

Dargeth pointed down the ladder he'd just climbed. "The cargo deck."

Teldin went down the ladder so fast that he might as well have jumped. He heard footsteps behind him-Djan probably, he thought. At the bottom, he turned left, then left again, sprinting aft past the foot of the mainmast.

There was a small crowd already there, five or six crewmen crouching or kneeling in a group at the aft end of the dimly lit cargo hold near the mizzenmast. As they saw him, they all backed away, giving him his first view of Blossom.

The rotund woman lay flat on her back, arms outstretched. Her eyes were closed, her round, cherubic face at peace, as though she were asleep, Teldin thought. Even from a distance he could see great bruising on the right side of her neck, under her ear-a great, spreading hemorrhage under the skin, reddish pink, not yet turned to purple. "Where's a healer?" he demanded.

Then he saw the angle at which her head lay, and he knew there was nothing a healer could do. He dropped to one knee beside the corpulent shape and touched two fingers to the unbruised side of her throat just to be sure. For an instant, he thought he could feel some feeble trill of life left in the woman, but then it was gone. Was that just my imagination, my own anxiety? he asked himself. Or did I feel the woman die? Regardless, he knew that Blossom was dead.

He looked away and saw Djan kneeling beside him. "I'll deal with this," the half-elf told him quietly. "You talk to the crew."

Teldin nodded, climbed slowly to his feet. The crowd of crewmen-larger now-had backed away, leaving a respectful space around the captain, Djan, and the dead priest. The Cloakmaster could see Julia at the back of the group, by the mainmast. "Who found her?" he asked.

"I did, Cap'n." One of the sail trimmers-a stout halfling woman named Harriana-stepped forward. She looked uncomfortable, slightly pale. At first Teldin wondered why, but then she added, "I sing out as soon as I found her, Cap'n, I promise you. I wasn't no sluggard about it…."

He smiled as reassuringly as he could under the circumstances and clapped her on the shoulder. "I know you did, Harriana," he told her firmly. "I know you weren't a sluggard. Nobody thinks you were. I don't think it would have mattered even if you'd found her sooner." He looked down into the diminutive woman's eyes and saw the specter of guilt fade from them. "Now, tell me what happened."

Harriana shrugged. "I come down to the hold just a couple of minutes back, looking for a sail patch. I keeps my repair things back aft there, by the mast foot." She pointed aft, toward where assorted gear had been stacked against the hold's rear bulkhead. "On the way I passes the bilge watch."

The Cloakmaster nodded. The woman was referring to a wooden hatch, about two feet square, giving access to the bilges and the keel under the hold deck for repair or inspection. "So you passed the bilge hatch," he prompted.

"And I sees it's open," the halfling said. "Not all the way, like, but just a thumbspan. I think there's somebody down there, inspecting the bilges. So, just to be friendly like, I opens the hatch and I calls down, 'halloo.'