"Why do you think she was killed there?" Julia asked.
Djan chuckled mirthlessly. "You try carrying Blossom more than a couple of paces," he suggested. "Anyway, the hold's the only place deserted enough to get away with it."
"He must have known the body would be found soon enough," Teldin pointed out.
The half-elf nodded agreement. "But he didn't need it to stay hidden for long," he explained. "Just long enough to fade back into the woodwork, so to speak."
Teldin was silent for a few moments. A murder, he thought. That's a long step up from sabotage, isn't it? A murderer among the crew. Someone who wants to… what?
What does he want? he asked himself. Why kill Blossom? Why kill a helmsman? And there he had his answer. If you look at it from the right standpoint, it's not that much different from sabotage. If you want to slow down a ship or cripple it, you can sabotage its rigging or you can eliminate its source of power. With Blossom dead, the Boundless had only one official helmsman left-the dwarf, Dranigor. Eliminate Dranigor, or just incapacitate him somehow, and that just leaves me. Then do something about me, and the ship's dead in space….
"Put some kind of a guard on Dranigor,'' the Cloakmaster told Djan. "Come up with some kind of excuse." The half-elf, nodded. "I like the way you handled things back there," he added.
Djan's lips quirked in a half smile. "I was making it up as I went along," he said, "but I had to do something. If the crew figures out we've got a murderer aboard, then everything we've done-you've done-to build morale goes out the porthole… and I think I want to get off this ship." His smile faded. The murderer knows I made it up," he went on grimly, "and he knows that you two know now as well. But I couldn't see any way of avoiding that."
Teldin waved that aside. "I don't think that matters much," he decided. He paused. "Can we ask around-see if anyone did make a head call during the half hour in question?'"
Djan looked doubtful. "I can try," he reflected. "I will try, but I can't be too obvious about it, or people will guess what happened."
The Cloakmaster nodded sadly. "You're right, of course." He patted his friend on the shoulder. "Well, do what you can," he suggested, is there anyone other than the three of us that you think we can trust?"
"Beth-Abz?" Julia proposed.
Djan nodded agreement. "If the beholder wanted Blossom out of the way-for whatever reason-it could have just disintegrated her, and we'd have thought she fell overboard or something." He stood. "I'll get on to things, Captain," he promised, in the meantime,… I suggest we all watch our backs."
*****
Djan had been as good as his word, Teldin thought five days later. He'd asked around, just as he'd said he would, trying to get a line on anyone who might have been inexplicably missing around the time of Blossom's death. But, for obvious reasons, he'd had to be very circumspect, and that had seriously limited his effectiveness.
At first, the Cloakmaster had considered helping his friend by asking his own oblique questions, but then had discarded the idea as counterproductive. The whole purpose was to prevent anyone in the crew from attaching any significance to the questions, and-almost by definition--any queries by the captain, the master of the ship, would attract such significance. Although it galled him to sit back and let Djan do all the work, he had to admit that this was the most logical course.
After two days, Djan had sadly admitted to Teldin that he hadn't found out anything useful. Nobody could remember seeing someone acting in a suspicious manner-but that didn't really mean much, he'd stressed, since he couldn't let anyone think that his questions were important.
A highly skilled priest or mage would have come in really handy, Teldin told himself. He'd heard enough folk tales about powerful spellcasters being able to speak with the souls of the dead. Surely Blossom herself-her soul, wherever it happened to be at the moment-would be able to shed light on the details of her death, and even the identity of her killer. But the only person aboard of sufficient aptitude for such a task had been Blossom herself.
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.