Which the killer had known, he thought with grim certainty.

In the five days since the murder, he'd found himself eyeing every crew member he encountered. Is he the one? he kept wondering. Or is it him? The knowledge that a murderer was constantly nearby had been unsettling enough, but what had made it even worse was that he had to hide his suspicions, his knowledge.

Even without the rest of the crew knowing that Blossom had been murdered, her death had seriously weakened morale aboard the Boundless. He'd overheard muttered conversations among the crew that the squid ship was a jinxed vessel. Some crew members seemed to be linking Blossom's "accidental" death with that of Merrienne, the lookout who'd fallen to her death from the mainmast crow's nest. The crew still considered the incident with the boom, just outside the Heartspace crystal sphere, to have been an accident, not the sabotage that it actually was. That made two tragic, pointless, fluke deaths. And sailors seemed almost universally superstitious, Teldin had noticed, whether they sailed the rivers of Ansalon or the void of wildspace. A third "accidental" death, and the crew would be convinced that the Boundless was a ship of ill omen.

Still, he couldn't let himself dwell on such things, Teldin knew. His crew depended on him-on him and his officers-more now than ever before… even though they might not be fully aware of it themselves. They were trusting him to guide them through the troubles that had beset them and might continue to do so, to protect them, even to convince them that the Boundless wasn't a jinxed ship after all. He owed them that much, he recognized-or, at least, his best efforts-and didn't feel that their expectations were in any way unreasonable. Bonds of duty go both ways, he'd frequently reminded himself. He owed his crew his best efforts.

Yet, right or wrong, those expectations put even more pressure on him.

At least they were now close to Garrash, looping around the vast planet in an orbit that would take them just under a week to complete. The ship's current attitude presented its starboard beam to the world, which guaranteed Teldin a spectacular view from his cabin's large "eye" porthole.

From the ship's present position, Garrash was a swollen ember-red disk, not quite circular, but slightly bloated in places, as though the world's gravity was barely capable of restraining its burning atmosphere. Looping around it was the fire ring, glaring with bright yellow-red light. From this point of the ship's orbit, Teldin was looking at the fire ring from directly above, showing it as perfectly circular, concentric with the planet itself, a thin band of flames. Djan had told him it was only-only!-a quarter-hour of spelljamming flight wide, but since that was only one-fiftieth the diameter of the planet itself, in comparison it looked like little more than a line. When the Boundless had first approached Gar-rash, they'd been seeing the fire ring from edge on. Since the band was only twenty or so leagues thick, it had been invisible from any significant distance, and Teldin had feared they'd somehow come to the wrong system. Today, however, there was no doubt.

So we've reached Garrash, he told himself. Where's the Spelljammer?

The previous night watch, he'd used the amulet again, striving to maintain his contact with the Spelljammer for longer than he'd ever done before. For almost an hour, his senses had been united with those of the great ship. During that time, he'd seen a small, bluish fire body-presumably the primary of the system the ship was in-and countless views of the distant stars. But there'd been no glimpse of Garrash, the fire ring, or-and here he'd admitted to wild hopes-the Boundless itself in orbit around the great world.

The star patterns hadn't been any help. Even now that they were within the Vistaspace crystal sphere, Djan and the navigator had charted only a fraction of the system's stars. The patterns he'd seen hadn't matched anything on those incomplete starcharts. But that didn't really mean much, one way or another, did it? Also, the bright blue-white sun might have been the primary of the Vistaspace system, but it might just as well have been in an entirely different sphere. At least he still hadn't seen any hint that the Spelljammer had passed through a portal into the Flow, or that it was about to do so in the near future.

Throughout his contact, he'd also tried to connect with the mind of the mysterious ship-if it had anything resembling a mind-not just its wide-ranging suite of senses. Some tinge of emotion-or thought, even-might have given him some clue as to his quarry's location. But, though he'd sometimes felt such emotions in the past-or thought he had, he forced himself to add-nothing came through the link this time.

After an hour he'd let the contact slip away, returning to a physical body that was panting with exertion and drenched in cold sweat. Nothing.

Still, the Spelljammer had been here. It had passed close to Garrash itself, apparently sailing right through the fire ring. And, during its passage, the ship had sensed other vessels-if that's what they were-moving within the ring itself.

That's the last real clue I've seen, he told himself, the best lead I've got. He sighed.

He wrapped the cloak around his shoulders and headed aft, to where Dranigor sat on the helm. "Take us down," he ordered quietly, "closer to the ring."

*****

Standing on the afterdeck, Teldin imagined he could feel the heat of the fire ring on his face, just a baseless fancy, he knew. While the ring burned hot enough to ignite the squid ship like dry kindling, both Dranigor and Djan had reassured him that this heat didn't radiate far through the vacuum of wildspace. If necessary, they'd told him, he could bring the Boundless within a league of the ring without undue risk, maybe even closer.

Let's hope it won't be necessary, he thought. Even from this distance-a league or so from the ring, a distance inconsequential in comparison to the width of the band of fire- the violence of the Garrash system was impressive, terrifying. The huge planet itself, more than an hour's full-speed flight away, filled the sky. He could see the writhing, tortured surface of the atmosphere, churning and bubbling with heat, sometimes sending out great flames and prominences that soared many thousands of leagues above the surface before falling back. The comparison with the magical bolts rising from the surface of Nex were unavoidable, and every time another prominence started to climb into the heavens, fear squeezed his heart. Would this one fall back like the others? Or would it continue out into space, questing blindly for the ship, to send it down in fiery destruction?

He could see the great, dark circle-the weather pattern or whatever it was-near the distant limb of the planet. From this range, he could see that it wasn't black, as he'd thought initially. It was just a darker red than the rest of the world, appearing black only in comparison to the brighter fires around it. The circle-which Djan had taken to calling the Great Storm-was actually a great cone, the half-elf had explained to him, easily large enough to swallow tens of thousands of worlds the size of Krynn, extending far down into the heart of the world. The Great Storm was much colder than the rest of the flaming atmosphere, so much colder that Djan had guessed a spelljammer might be able to descend some distance into it before bursting into flames.

The ring itself was a spectacle in its own right. From a distance it had seemed perfectly flat, but now Teldin could see that its surface churned, too, as though currents of unimaginable speed and ferocity were flowing through its liquid fire. Its light was largely yellow, but sometimes rivers or bubbles of flame burned at the surface in different colors- red, emerald green, even sometimes lightning blue. The result was an impression of barely contained violence.