Another convulsion racked its eyestalks-all of them, this time. The creature made a sound like a cough, and saliva sprayed Teldin's jerkin, looking puslike against the black fabric.

"What is it?" Teldin asked again.

"Pain…" the beholder gurgled. Its huge central eye rolled wildly, the horizontal pupil contracting down to a black line, then suddenly expanding so large that the pale-colored iris almost vanished. It coughed again, but now green-black bile-or was it blood?-sprayed out with the spittle.

Teldin stepped back, horror and fear churning in his chest. What in the hells was happening?

Beth-Abz rocked, like a ship in heavy seas, listing one way then the other, as though it could no longer control its levitation power. The eyestalks convulsed again. The beholder crashed to the deck.

"What is it?" Teldin screamed at the stricken creatures. "What?"

The great mouth worked, made gargling sounds as Beth-Abz tried to answer. It coughed again, spewing bile and bright blood.

A brilliant green beam lashed out from one of the minor eyes, lanced out into space.

Teldin heard yells of alarm from the crewmen on deck, the thundering of running feet as they sprinted for safety. He backed off another couple of steps, wanting desperately to join them in their flight, but unable to take his eyes from the agonized creature.

Another beam-pinkish red this time-burst from another eye and persisted for a second or two as the eyestalk lashed about wildly. The beam swept through the air like a scythe, cutting into a pack of sailors struggling to get through the door into the forecastle. One of them screamed, a huge gout of blood bursting open in his back. The sailor fell, to lie still in a spreading pool of scarlet.

Now all of the thrashing, weaving secondary eyes were cutting loose with their magical powers. Beams of green, yellow, and actinic blue-white hissed through the air, striking wildly all over the ship. Teldin heard rather than saw the top of the mainmast detonate into splinters. The body of the dead sailor was struck by another beam, bright violet this time, and it was hurled into the air as though shot from a catapult. The green beam lashed out again, blasting a hole clean through the deck.

"By Paladine's blood…!" Teldin gasped.

He had to get out of here, had to get clear of the creature's magical convulsions. Its death throes? What else could they be? He turned and sprinted for the door into the stern-castle. More screams sounded in his ears, mixed with the rending of tortured wood as something forward blew apart. He grabbed the door handle and flung it open as another beam-this one as black as night-played momentarily over the planking by his head. He ducked low and flung himself through the door into the helm compartment.

There was nobody on the helm-no need for a helmsman when the ship was drifting in space-and the compartment was empty. Teldin leaped behind the heavy wooden chair that was the helm itself and crouched low.

Not a moment too soon. A green beam lanced through the forward bulkhead, exploding a man-sized area into dust before continuing straight through the rear of the hull and out into space. Even over the sound of the destruction, Teldin could hear the gargling, choking sounds of Beth-Abz's death.

Another concussive blast sounded from the deck outside, then silence.

Teldin crouched behind the helm for almost another minute before emerging into the scene of devastation that was the Boundless.

*****

The Cloakmaster knelt alongside Djan, examining Beth-Abz's corpse. The dead beholder lay on its side on the deck, looking like some kind of partially deflated kickball. Its eyestalks, which, only minutes ago, had lashed the ship with magical destruction, hung limply. The big central eye was open, the black pupil contracted so far as to be an almost invisible hairline. The area of the mouth and the deck around it were spattered with blood and bile and partially digested meat. Teldin wrinkled his nose, suppressing his nausea only through a titanic act of will. The stench was terrible.

Although Djan's face showed his own distaste, he dipped a finger in the horrid liquid and raised it to his nose. He coughed-a tight, gagging sound-and wiped the finger clean on a cloth he pulled from his belt pouch. "Bitter almonds," the first mate said quietly. "Poison."

Teldin rose unsteadily to his feet. He looked around.

The Boundless looked as though it had been through a major action, suffering mightily under the heavy weapons of an opposing ship. The upper half of the mainmast was gone, as was much of the portside rail. The dying beholder's disintegration beam had blown half a dozen holes in the main deck and in the fore- and sterncastles. One of the stern spanker fins had been half torn away, and the mainsail was shredded, its fragments tied into complex knots, courtesy of the eye tyrant's telekinetic beam. The keel, the Cloakmaster could feel, as he extended his perception through the ultimate helm, had been cracked again-not critically, but enough to put the ship at serious risk if it had to weather any heavy maneuvering.

He sighed, shaking his head slowly. "Casualties?" he asked Djan.

The half-elf s shoulders slumped. "Four dead, not including Beth-Abz," he announced, his voice exhausted. "Six wounded, two seriously. One-Harriana-not expected to live."

Teldin felt his head bow forward as if under a crushing weight. More dead. And how many more to follow before this was all over?

He forced his depression into the deepest recesses of his mind. Deal with that later, he told himself. Right now you've got to be the captain… and be seen to be the captain. He pulled himself up to his full height.

"Start the repairs," he ordered loudly. "Prepare the bodies for burial. And whatever the wounded need, give it to them."

As crewmen scurried off to attend to their duties, the Cloakmaster turned to Djan and asked him quietly, "You're sure about the poison?"

"As sure as I can be," the first mate confirmed, his own voice barely above a whisper. "Somebody killed Beth-Abz, almost killed the Boundless as well."

"How is the ship?"

Djan shrugged. "We can sail-slowly-but we can't fight," he replied, confirming Teldin's own analysis. "Dranigor's one of the wounded, but"-he glanced at Teldin's cloak-

"but I suppose that doesn't hamper us as much as it might."

"Be thankful for small favors, you mean?" The Cloakmaster clapped his friend on the shoulder and squeezed-gaining as much reassurance from the gesture as he gave. "You're right, of course."

The half-elf lowered his voice even more, so much that Teldin had to lean forward to catch his words. "The crew knows about Beth-Abz," he said grimly. "There's no way to cover this one up. They all know he was poisoned, and they know that means one of them did it."

Teldin nodded. As with Blossom's death, the guilty party could have been anybody on board-literally anybody. Every crew member had free run of the saloon and the galley, of course, they had to be able to eat when they needed to. There wasn't a lock on the freezebox, as there might have been on some ships. Teldin had insisted on an honor system for such things, and it had worked fine. Until now, he reminded himself. Anybody could have slipped in, at any time during the voyage, and insinuated the poison into Beth-Abz's food. By unspoken consent, the meat that would be kept raw for the beholder was stored separately from the crew's provisions, so there'd been no risk that the poisoner would end up eating his own poison for dawnfry. The killer would have had to bring his or her own poison aboard, of course, possibly when the Boundless was last in port. But that wouldn't have been much of a problem. The Cloakmaster knew all too well how easy it was to buy just about anything around the docks of a major port like Starfall, and there was no way of knowing what a crew member brought aboard in his duffel, or even in his belt pouch. The only issue was the forethought and planning involved-it had been a long time since the squid ship had made landfall, but this whole thing reeked of a complex, organized plan, didn't it?