The Ultimate Helm (18 page)

Phosphorescent lichen and moonwort grew in patches along the smooth, porous walls, affording just enough pale light for Gaye to explore. Using the foul breeze as a compass, she felt her way through the warrens by following the steadily increasing stench of death. Several times she took wrong turns onto branching paths, then doubled back within seconds, realizing her mistakes.

Deep within the
Spelljammer’s
port wing, Gaye stumbled upon a source of the psychic odor she was following. The chamber she discovered was hollow, like an air bubble, and strewn with gnawed bones and dried, brittle hay. The hay had been piled to form nests, and on seven of these piles lay the corpses of human warriors. The still bodies of black rats lay along the walls and in heaps on the floor. She sensed outward and felt the chilling death force that lay dormant inside the bodies, and she knew that these were the undead, and that this was their hidden lair. The sense of evil was pervasive. It was too much for just a handful of zombies, and she realized that there were many undead hiding in the warrens, far more than anyone had ever guessed.

She wondered who their master was.

As she examined the long-dead humans, the bodies of the rats twitched as one, jerking as though they were waking up. They massed and started toward her. She gasped in fear and jumped back instinctively, thinking they were attacking; then they passed harmlessly through her invisible essence and continued on through the tunnel in a black, slithering mass of undead vermin. She laughed nervously.

Where are they going? she wondered. What call do they answer? She willed herself forward and followed them. Their sharp claws clacked hollowly against the tunnel floor. Their black eyes gleamed with pinpricks of unholy light.

At an intersection of six tunnels beneath the
Spelljammer’s
citadel district, the rats converged with other armies of rats, swarming from the other tunnels. Here, at this junction, the smell of death and coldness grew much stronger. As the undead rats squirmed deeper into the ship, Gaye stayed behind and reached out with her psionic senses. In her mind, one tunnel loomed darker, more claustrophobic than the others. It smelled foully of ancient evil.

Her senses led her to the tunnel closest to her left. The trail of magic was strong inside the tunnel, and the path took her to a curtain of darkness that seemed almost solid. It curled like black smoke at her feet, at the touch of her ethereal hands, and she knew that the chamber beyond was the source of all the undeath in the warrens. The power emanating from within was considerable, tingling coldly against her intangible form. It was a force that seemed to permeate from the very walls, infecting the
Spelljammer
like a disease.

She stepped through the black wall of mist and gazed in silent terror.

Gaye had never seen an undead creature such as the one before her now. It resembled a lich of some kind, she thought, some form of which she had no knowledge. Its flesh was not rotted, but rather incredibly corrupt, stretched taut, like mummified skin, over its prominent bones. Its eyes were bright stars hidden deep inside shadowed eye sockets, and its black, hooded cloak kept its skeletal body in the concealment of cold, soothing darkness. A heavy ruby amulet, burning with a fierce red fire, hung at its chest. And as she watched it, her psionic senses were overwhelmed, and feelings and images and tastes and smells flooded through her uncontrollably, chilling her with their very touch. She tasted blood on her tongue, the cold sensation of raw evil coursing through her veins. She wanted to scream.

The lich spoke in low tones, an evil hiss that seemed to resonate throughout the organic chamber. His fingers twitched with the clack of dried bones as he wove a spell of forgotten antiquity. The words were ancient, unknown to her; but in them she could feel the ring of history, of chanting voices long stilled, of gods long ago desecrated.

Gaye realized it was the rats he was controlling, and at once she could feel that he could see through the eyes of his vermin.

Then she was seeing through his eyes, the dead eyes of his rats, as well: the dark passageways, the dim light panels on the walls, the guard posted at the entrance. She realized that the rats were winding their way through the Human Collective and into the Tower of Thought.

She saw the wave of rats as they swarmed over the lone human guard, their yellow teeth snapping hungrily into flesh as he stumbled and ran, bleeding, up the stairs, toward
 
—

Gaye screamed in her mind.
Noooooo!

—
toward Teldin...

The master lich turned toward her. His spell was a forgotten whisper on his thin, translucent lips. “Ehhh?” he said. “Someone is there
...”

With a wave of his hand, an aura of shimmering energy erupted around Gaye, revealing her form to the master lich.

His eyes sparkled with the color of blood. The skull-like face seemed to smile.
A guest
, he said telepathically.
I have a guest.
He beckoned once with a skeletal arm, and Gaye was jerked forward, toward him.

Welcome to my palace,
he said.
My palace. A palace of the dead... and the undead.

He laughed, and his laughter was the sound of a soul screaming in torment. Gaye’s blood went cold.
I do not know who you are,
he said,
but
I...
I am called... the Fool.

Chapter Fifteen

“... In response, I say that the design of the Spelljammer is obviously deliberate, and that the citadel has a secret, more far-reaching purpose than man can understand. Perhaps each tower has some larger purpose than to simply house the individual races. Who can say, since only the lower floors of the Armory are ever open to us? Who can say until we gain entry into the Dark Tower?

“We may never know. The Spelljammer tends to hoard its secrets like a jealous dragon....”

Rambergius, cleric of the Tower of Thought;

reign of Coronas.

The rats were a black carpet, swarming up the tower stairs in a sea of rotted fur and gnashing yellow teeth. The stairway was hidden by their solid black mass, and they moved up the tower in an undulating wave, their ragged claws scraping the stone steps.

“Get him up!” Teldin shouted. CassaRoc and Chaladar lifted HarKenn from the stairs. “Get him inside!” he said. “It’s rats! Gods! I’ve never seen so many rats.”

Teldin backed up the stairs and rushed through the open door with the warriors. He slammed the door behind them and bolted it. Still, the gap under the door seemed too wide to him, too vulnerable; as Teldin watched, a long black snout appeared under the door. Claws and teeth ripped at the wood.

Teldin lashed out with his boot and crunched the rat’s snout under his foot. Black blood trickled from its shattered jaws. The rat was still for a moment, then twitched back to unlife and started clawing at the door in increasing fury.

“Undead,” Teldin said. “The rats are all undead.”

CassaRoc stared at him in surprise. Chaladar said, “It can be only the Fool.”

Teldin nodded unconsciously. Chaladar’s words rang true. Instinctively, he knew the paladin was right.

They were trapped in the common room. The bolted door was their only exit, and, as they watched, the gap at the bottom was gnawed larger under the fury of the rats’ yellow fangs.

CassaRoc hefted HarKenn in his arms and laid him out at one end of the bar. The guard moaned once, then fell unconscious. Blood oozed from his wounds and dripped onto the bar.

The warriors drew their swords and waited. They knew the blades were virtually helpless against the undead swarms, unless they could somehow sever the rats’ spines or chop them until they truly died; but they had no other weapons, and the rats were attacking in too large numbers.

“Fire would do it,” CassaRoc said.

“If we could have a fire in the flow. You saw what happened at the neogi tower,” Teldin said. “It would bring the tower down on us all
 –
right where the Fool wants us.” Chaladar said, “No. I believe he wants you.”

CassaRoc nodded. “This is another assassination attempt, Teldin. He doesn’t care about us. It’s you he wants.”

“Because of the Dark Times?”

“No,” Chaladar said. “He would have no concern of the Dark Times, since he lives in darkness. He wants you for some other reason.”

Teldin placed the light rod on a table and stared down at his amulet. The rats had chewed ragged the bottom of the wooden door. “Me
...”

Teldin sagged and let the amulet fall against his chest. He looked over to the rats. Their claws and teeth were flashes of dull ivory, and splinters of wood were spewed across the floor by their razorlike teeth. Then one was squealing, squirming its fat body through a chewed-out gap along the floor. It leaped straight at Teldin.

Chaladar cried out. The paladin’s sword was a silver flash as it swung down and sliced the rat in two. Its hind legs scrabbled to move forward; its jaws snapped at Teldin’s booted feet. Then it ceased, finding true death at last.

“We’re going to have to do something,” CassaRoc said.

Chaladar frowned at the oily blood smeared on his sword. From outside they could hear CassaRoc’s warriors shouting for them, warning others of the rats. CassaRoc yelled back, “We’re trapped in here! Call a mage! We need help!”

Then another rat was inside with them, and another, and another. Within minutes, the floor was strewn with the severed torsos of the black vermin, and more were streaming through the widening gap in the door.

The trio kicked and sliced their way through the rats and climbed up on the bar. Three rodents leaped up and were killed instantly by the grand knight’s swift sword. Some scrambled up the wooden bar using their sharp, dead claws, and were crunched under Teldin’s heavy boots or skewered by CassaRoc’s blade.

The floor was a slimy mass of dark blood, of dead and undead vermin. Teldin paused and focused, concentrating on his cloak and its powers, but its hidden energies refused to be summoned. The powers of the cloak seemed to be exhausted, and Teldin considered if its magic did not work on the undead... and if it would work on the Fool.

The undead rats came on.

Teldin said, “The cloak will not help us, and we can’t stay here and try to chop them all in half. There are just too many.” As he said this, two rats leaped onto the bar and dove for his legs. He lashed out and kicked one across the room; the other drove its fangs into his flesh, and he screamed in pain. CassaRoc reached down and tore it away, then bent it back in his bare hands until its spine snapped with a loud crack.

“We might have to make a run for it,” Teldin said.

“Where do we go then?” CassaRoc asked. “They’ll just come after you again.”

“The Fool is the one we have to stop,” Chaladar said angrily. “He is the one controlling this evil.”

The rats leaped and scrambled over each other in their frenzy to reach the Cloakmaster. The warriors lashed out with their swords and their heavy boots, but the rats swarmed from under the door with increasing ferocity, spitting chunks of wood from their bleeding mouths. Sweat ran from the warriors’ faces as they speared the vermin on their blades, and CassaRoc’s bar ran with the rats’ black blood.

Then the wooden door rocked under the impact of a great weight. Again the door shuddered in its frame. The heavy iron bolt squealed as the weight hammered the door again and again.

Then the bolt sprang out of its braces and the wooden door shot open. A wave of rats poured into the room, chattering with unnatural hunger, and, from the corridor beyond, a large black creature crawled in on eight clawed legs. Its long yellow teeth gleamed in the light, and it focused its eellike eyes on Teldin and smiled. Gray drool oozed from its lips.

“A neogi,” CassaRoc said.

“No, look!” Teldin said, pointing. “It’s the one Na’Shee shot when I crashed on board.”

The neogi hissed at Teldin, focusing its black eyes on him. A bloody crossbow bolt protruded straight through its neck.

Teldin said, “It’s undead.”

****

“Distracted are they,” said one squat lieutenant, crouching in the shadows at the bottom of the Tower of Thought.

“Undead of the rats because.”

“Guards all main level on. This way follow.”

The two furry shapes scurried up the tower’s back stairs. Their black claws clacked against the stone. Behind them, two tall, muscular shapes followed, lumbering blindly up the stairs.

On the upper level, they paused to listen through the wooden door. At the leader’s command, the tallest of the huge shapes opened the door and stepped into the dimly lit corridor.

The guards at the door stared openly and quickly whipped out their swords, but the giant intruders reached them in seconds. One guard went down from a single hammering blow to his forehead. The other managed one lunge at his grotesque attacker, then was gripped from behind. His attacker’s mandibles quickly closed on the guard’s soft neck, and he died as his blood spilled onto the floor.

The intruders opened the door to Cwelanas’s quarters. She lay in the bed, in restful sleep.

The furred black leader grinned. “Now... now, ours the shemeat is. Soon, soon, cloak perhaps ours will be.”

Silently, the unhuman intruders approached Cwelanas.

Chapter Sixteen

“... Many obstacles the Cloakmaster must overcome, for enemies many he will find, chief among them the unreason and hatred that unhumans generate for all others. It is this hatred, many believe, that has created a being which leeches off the soul of the Spelljammer, whose desire is nothing less than the Spelljammer’s destruction. Revenge is its heart; evil, its soul.

“Was this evil once human? Doubtful is that, according to the legends that have circulated for years....

“But that is all we have: legends, rumors – no facts....

“Of but one thing we can be certain: great evil walks these decks...”

Prince Arastor of the Human Collective,