“Leave it!” the commodore barked. “There’s no time. A dragon is headed this way.”

Only Sir Grumdish perked up at these dire words, for to kill a dragon was his Life Quest. But a dragon was far beyond their power to battle, and the commodore knew it. While Doctor Bothy squeezed his enormous bulk through the hatch, Sir Grumdish and the professor quickly gathered up as many air bottles as they could carry and hurried below. They were followed by their assistants, but even so, numerous bottles remained above decks.

“Here, you’re not getting a free ride!” Commodore Brigg shouted at the gray-robed wizard. “Go help them move those bottles below.”

Sir Tanar remained rooted to the deck, his sweaty palms gripping the rusted rail of the conning tower. Someone tugged on the sleeve of his robe, and looking down, he saw Snork gazing up at him with worried eyes. “Come along,” the gnome said. “Help us get the bottles below. We may need them all!”

Slowly, Tanar followed the navigator down from the conning tower. As he crossed the deck, Commodore Brigg stood up with a tremendous load of air bottles stacked into his short arms. There still remained a loose pile of several dozen, more than he and Snork combined could carry, yet seawater was already washing over the aft deck as the Indestructible commenced to submerge. One wave lifted a bottle and carried it overboard. Sir Tanar watched it bob in the wake of the ship.

“Good idea,” he said as he started picking up bottles. “I’ll help.” In a few moments, he arms were full, but still he stooped to grab a few more. He wanted all the air that he could carry inside that ship when it submerged. He was certain there wasn’t enough for all of them as it was.

“You go on,” Snork said. “I can get the rest of these.”

Tanar nodded and hurried away as Snork stacked the last dozen bottles in the crook of his arm. Snork glanced around and, satisfied that he had not missed any, waded to the hatch and climbed inside the ship. The door clanged shut behind him, and two crew members hurriedly sealed it.

“Where’s Sir Tanar?” the commodore asked as Snork stood dripping on the deck of the bridge.

“He went ahead of me with an armload,” Snork answered. Conundrum and Razmous took their own loads and disappeared with them below decks.

“Shame he wasn’t washed overboard,” Commodore Brigg muttered as he raised the Peerupitscope. He pasted his eyes to it, then his whole body went rigid. “We got below just in time,” he hissed.

A muffled roar echoed against the hull of the ship. The dim, murky water outside the forward bridge porthole suddenly burst into brilliant red light and began to boil. Commodore Brigg recoiled from the Peerupitscope, the skin around his eyes scorched by the heat.

“It’s a good thing I designed it to Peer Up dragons, too,” Doctor Bothy commented. “The metal and lenses should even withstand that blast of dragonfire.”

Glaring at the doctor, Commodore Brigg turned and shouted below, “Engage descending flowpellar!”

“Engaging descending flowpellar, aye.”

“Come about due north, Mr. Snork.”

“Coming about due north, aye.”

“Secure stations.”

“Hull integrity secure. Peerupitscope undamaged.” “Portholes holding, sir!”

Above them, the dragon roared again in frustration and anger.

The Blood Sea of Istar seemed a different place entirely than what they had crossed but two months earlier. With the first hint of autumn came the season of stormy weather. Squalls were frequent on the sea now, rising up black on the horizon and catching the ship before they knew what was happening. Indestructible was not designed to weather such weather, and those on board suffered cruelly during their passage north, especially Conundrum, Sir Grumdish, and the Thorn Knight, who were not sailors by trade. They might have submerged and run beneath the waves, hut the commodore wanted to reserve their strength for the real work of subnavigating the continent. It wouldn’t do them any good at all to use up all their air bottles before they began the last stage of their journey. They dove only when the weather gave them no other choice, like when they encountered a typhoon on the fifth day out.

In any case, they still had to surface from time to time so that Snork could take readings and plot their course. The Blood Sea was a vast and featureless place, with no islands in its midst to guide a sailor. Not many sailors ever sought out the middle of the Blood Sea. Most who sailed these waters were searching either for the nearest port or a fat, lumbering merchant ship. Now that the Maelstrom had disappeared, few knew or even cared to know exactly where it had once been. Most maps drawn before the Chaos War failed to pinpoint the center of the Blood Sea at all. The old cartographers left this area blank, or drew in a large whirlpool and surrounded it with dire warnings. The main problem was that the location of the Maelstrom varied by as much as a hundred leagues, depending on which map one consulted. Of all the maps of the Blood Sea that the gnomes had borrowed or purchased, only the kender’s map of the subnavigational course of the MNS Polywog purported to show where it once lay.

It was to this place that Snork attempted to navigate the Indestructible, and this was no easy task. The weather played havoc with his calculations, both in the way the wind drove them helter-skelter across the sea whenever they ran “on top"-as they called it when the ship sailed on the surface-but also in how the clouds hid the sun for days on end. He navigated primarily by calculating the position of the sun above the horizon. He compared these readings with the time of the day and the date on various charts and arrays compiled by his family over many generations at sea, and from these he was able to determine their position anywhere on Krynn to within a league or two. He hoped.

The only good thing about the weather was that it kept the pirates away.

Professor Hap-Troggensbottle spent these last days sequestered in his quarters, perfecting some experiment or other. In those rare moments when he emerged to visit the galley or the head, he spoke to no one and no one spoke to him, for he had rather a crazed look in his eye.

That is, no one spoke to him-except Razmous. The kender seemed to regard the professor’s silence as something of a personal challenge to his kenderhood. He lurked in wait many an hour outside the professor’s quarters just to catch a glimpse of the inside of the room whenever he emerged, and to engage him in conversation about his experiments or anything else that came to mind. One time, he even followed the poor professor into the head and prattled on about the peculiar antics of his uncle, Morgrify Pinchpocket, before the commodore dragged him out and gave the kender a good dressing-down.

Occasionally, when he wasn’t feeling as though his stomach was about to perform a ballet, Conundrum was able to draw Razmous away to discuss the map of the subcontinental passages. At other times, Conundrum spent his hours locked away in the cabin he shared with his cousin, poring over Snork’s books on navigation and the sea. The activities and operations of the ship were of little interest to him. He’d had his fill of seamanship during his stint as chief officer in charge of oilage. But navigation was another matter entirely. As a member of the guild of puzzles, mazes, and that sort of thing, the study of charting courses on the open sea fascinated him.

The least sailorly of them all, Sir Tanar, spent most of his time curled into a ball of misery in his cabin, his face as green as the kender’s vest. He marked the time by the ensign who entered his cabin every twelve hours to feed the glowworms in his berth’s glowwormglobe. He almost imagined he could hear the tiny worms munching on their breakfasts and dinners of moss, and this made him all the more ill. But he was too weak to protest.