Anson stared at him for a moment, then hurried to obey.
T'k'Ress surged halfway out of its seat, before Djan steadied his crossbow at its head and snapped, "No!" The arcane's eyes flicked back and forth between Teldin's sword and the half-elf s crossbow.
"Think about it, T'k'Ress," the Cloakmaster hissed. "If you don't want to tell us, you've got two ways to go. The quick way"-he inclined his head toward the crossbow-"or the lingering way." He stroked the blade of his sword almost lovingly. "It's your choice.
"Or…" He paused, drawing out the tension. "Or you can tell us what you know. As I said, it's your choice."
For a terrible moment, he thought the arcane was going to resist, was going to call his bluff.
But then T'k'Ress seemed to deflate, as all the resistance went out of it. "I will tell you what you need to know," it said, "if you swear to let me live."
It was difficult to keep the triumph out of his face, but Teldin figured he'd managed it. He shrugged, as though the issue was hardly worth discussing. "We'll see when you're finished if it's worth your life," he said as coldly as he could.
"It will be, I assure you," the arcane said hurriedly. "If you will take me to the captain's day room on the command deck, I will even show you."
Teldin glared fixedly at the arcane, letting the tension build as high as he dared. Then he nodded briskly. T'k'Ress sagged with relief, wiping at its eyes with a six-fingered hand. While its eyes were covered, the Cloakmaster flashed Djan a smile of victory.
*****
The arcane had to hunch forward to fit under the low, curved roof of what it called the captain's day room. On the uppermost deck of the nautiloid, this was little more than a broad extension of the causeway that supported the captain's chair. The only furniture was a human-sized chair, a small map table…
And something that looked like a narrow, waist-high pedestal, on which to display a small sculpture or other work of art. Its fluted column was intricately carved wood, so dark as to be almost black. Its circular top, about two feet in diameter, was a flat sheet of smoky white crystal, smooth and cool to the touch. On closer inspection, Teldin could see fine black lines graven into the crystal's surface-a dozen lines crossing the circle, intersecting at a single point, and six concentric circles centered around that point.
Now, in the dimly lit compartment, the crystal glowed with a faint greenish light. On its surface-or, more properly, a fraction of an inch below it-were small blobs and traces of color, pink, dark blue, and green.
T'k'Ress ran its long, slender fingers almost lovingly over the smoked-crystal surface. "A planetary locator," it said. "You have heard of these?"
Teldin nodded. Even though he'd never seen one, he knew of them. They were devices built by the arcane, operating on principles that no other race had yet come to understand, though many had tried.
"What's so important about this?" he asked. He still had his sword drawn, and he toyed with it meaningfully.
"You do not know the principle behind the planetary locator," T'k'Ress explained quickly. "Few beyond my race do, I believe. The locator detects planetary bodies by the perturbations they cause in what we call the 'loomweave.'"
"So?" the Cloakmaster demanded.
"I have heard that the falmadaraathae have tried to understand the operating principle of the locator," T'k'Ress went on, somewhat elliptically. "They have had some minimal success. They have some conception of the loomweave… yet they use their own term for the phenomenon."
"The paramagnetic gradient," Teldin guessed.
"Correct," the arcane confirmed.
Teldin nodded slowly. He remembered the images that Zat had fed into his mind. At the time, he'd compared the twisting, whirling fields of colors-yet-not-colors to skeins of spiderweb-thin fibers. The 'loomweave? Yes, the word was definitely appropriate.
Djan still had his crossbow leveled at the arcane's head. Now the half-elf inclined his head to indicate the crystal-topped pedestal. "So this detects the loomweave?" he demanded.
"So I have said," affirmed the arcane. "It is a subtle example of technomagic." Its tone was proud, almost smug.
"What about secondary eddies?" Teldin wanted to know.
"In its present form, it detects tertiary disturbances in the loomweave," T'k'Ress told him. "But…" For a moment it hesitated, again apparently considering resistance, then it pressed on. "To detect the tertiary eddies, it must also detect the secondaries, if only to ignore them. The locator is simply set not to display them. Do you understand?"
Teldin forced himself to nod firmly, even though the truth of the matter was that he hardly understood anything the creature was saying.
Fortunately, Djan seemed to be following T'k'Ress a little better. "And you can adjust the display," he said, as more of a statement than a question.
T'k'Ress inclined its head. "I can."
"Then do it," the Cloakmaster ordered.
*****
"It is ready," T'k'Ress announced almost an hour later.
Teldin had tried to watch the adjustments the creature was making to the mysterious pedestal, trying to make some sense of them, but to his eyes it had seemed that the arcane was doing nothing more than running its slender, many-jointed fingers around the circumference of the crystal display and over different portions of the supporting pedestal. "Show me," he ordered.
T'k'Ress simply pointed at the circular display on the locator's upper surface.
Teldin moved forward, careful not to block the line of fire of Djan's crossbow. This could be some kind of trick, he reminded himself wryly. He leaned over the locator and examined the display.
From what little he'd heard about planetary locators, the devices normally showed simple, discrete dots to represent planets and other astronomical bodies, their colors indicating their true nature. This display was very different, the Cloakmaster noted at once. Instead of clean, discrete circles and dots, the crystal surface was covered with a shifting network of hair-thin red lines, making an almost impossibly fine mesh. In places, the mesh seemed to fold in on itself, twisting into some complex pattern.
Here, for example. With his forefinger he traced a place on the display where the mesh-shading from red to yellow-was twisted into great loops, whirling up and around like some impossible skein of wool. Encompassing the loops was a circle of intricate patterns rendered in burning yellow-white, where the spiderweb-thin lines wove in and out, spiraling and knotting around each other.
It was the loomweave, he knew with sudden certainty. It was the same twisting, swirling field of energy that Zat had shown him, in orbit near the fire ring of Garrash. The perspective was different now, and the detail and resolution so much less. The colors, too, weren't right-on the display there were colors, not the strange analogues that the Cloakmaster had sensed. This was Garrash and its ring he was looking at-or their presence as defined by eddies in the loomweave.
Teldin shook his head, almost incapable of believing it. Now, for the first time, he had the tool he needed to find the "center of all," the Broken Sphere.
He looked up at Djan and felt a broad, triumphant smile spread across his face. "Transfer the crews," he told his first mate. "We sail immediately."
Chapter Fifteen
Teldin Moore drove the nautiloid outward from the vicinity of Garrash, toward the boundary of the crystal sphere, at the maximum speed the ultimate helm could manage. He sat in the single human-sized chair in the captain's day room. Through the wraparound perception of the cloak he saw the crippled squid ship falling rapidly away behind them.