The Ultimate Helm (20 page)

Then she was gone.

Blood seeped through Teldin’s torn clothes, over his skin. The cloak was pure and untouched. The blood seemed to bead off it, as though magically repelled.

CassaRoc cleared a path through the rats bodies, kicking them away. Blood was smeared thickly over his boots. He jerked aside the door and shouted into the corridor. “Come on, now! We’ve got to get this place cleaned up!” Then he looked around and shook his head. To the Cloakmaster he said, “This is bad business, Teldin. Bad business.”

Teldin nodded. His cloak hung heavy across his shoulders. He felt perhaps more tired, more exhausted, than he had ever felt before.

CassaRoc’s men stopped in the doorway and craned their necks to look in. No one really wanted to come in and wade ankle-deep in rat carcasses, but after CassaRoc explained to them the attack on Teldin, they were more than willing to haul HarKenn to his quarters. A healer was called for the guard and for Teldin, and other warriors went to get shovels and barrels from the basement, in order to dispose of the rat carcasses. Emil even came up and inspected the room on his own. “I’ll get the mops,” he said happily.

After most of the warriors had charged off, Chaladar excused himself. “I must check on the Chalice tower,” the grand knight said to CassaRoc. “His wounds are more numerous than I thought. I’ll send Leoster over again, in case he is needed. In the meantime, I suggest you double your guards on duty.”

CassaRoc agreed, and, as the paladin left, he shouted up the tower for his healer. In a few moments, a priestess known as J’Kai stepped carefully into the room and examined Teldin. She took him behind the bar and bathed his wounds with fresh water.

First she dried his wounds, then took a jar of white lotion from a pouch at her waist and lathered the medicine into the bites. “I count almost a hundred wounds,” she said, then she told him not to move very much. “Leoster will be here soon. This will take care of superficial infections, but this is the work of the undead. Leoster will be better able to heal you than I.”

Teldin thanked her and drew his cloak around him. His wounds felt hot and stinging
 –
purified, in a way, he thought
 –
but he felt as though more than blood had been drained from him from today’s events.

CassaRoc’s warriors filed in then, bearing implements to clear the room of the dead vermin. Another of his guards ran in, spied CassaRoc helping with the clean-up, and spoke with him for a few minutes.

CassaRoc came over to Teldin as the guard hurriedly left. “It doesn’t seem like it’s going to stop,” he said.

Teldin was too tired to talk. CassaRoc said simply, “Our allies are itching to get into battle with the neogi. With the attacks organized by the beholders and their allies, our alliance thinks the time is right, when the neogi forces are weakened.” He paused. “If they don’t hear from us soon, they’ll start without us.”

Teldin almost wanted to laugh. “The beholders. Our allies realize, don’t they, that we’ll have the beholders to battle after we defeat the neogi.”

CassaRoc shrugged. “Not everyone is known for using their brains in the heat of battle.”

CassaRoc and Teldin started when they heard shouts echoing from the level above. “What now?” CassaRoc said.

CassaRoc stepped into the corridor and started for the stairs, when a guard almost rushed into him in his flight down the stairs. The guard gasped for breath. “CassaRoc, we don’t know how it happened.”

“How
what
happened?”

The warrior shook his head in regret. “Somehow, they overpowered Hath. They have the lady Cwelanas.”

CassaRoc turned in the doorway, but Teldin had overheard and had already jumped from his seat at the bar. The three of them ran up the stairs, three steps at a time. Teldin felt as though he were surging with energy, and all he could imagine was Cwelanas’s sleeping face.

The inside of Cwelanas’s room was dark and smelled strangely of the secret potions of the mage Leoster. In Cwelanas’s place, the guard, Hath, lay quietly on the bed, staring at the ceiling with blank eyes.

Teldin scanned the room, then stood above the guard for a moment before speaking.

“Hath, what happened here?”

The man neither heard nor saw him. His eyes stayed at some invisible vista, seen only by him. His face was blank and gaunt, and his white eyes seemed as though they would burst from his head.

Teldin bent down and gripped the man’s shoulders. He was filled with anger, with worry over the fate of Cwelanas. He placed his face in plain sight before Hath’s eyes. “Hath, we have to know. What happened here?”

Teldin’s shape eclipsed the light from the corridor. The guard’s eyes blinked once, then slowly swiveled to look Teldin in the eyes. “C
 –
Cloakmaster?”

Teldin nodded. “Yes, yes, it’s
 
—”

Then the guard’s eyes rolled up to expose only the whites.

His back arched in sudden, violent pain, bending him like a bow above the bunk, and thick black smoke roiled from his mouth and nose. Teldin released his grasp, feeling the intense heat building within the man’s flesh.

“
Cloakmaster
,” Hath said, but his voice was a hiss, the telltale rasp and the broken syntax of a neogi.

“Cloakmaster,... elf hostage have we in place you find cannot. Save you must Cwelanassss, shemeat... precious is your cloak we need. Barter no. One chance only: cloak for meat. Find us you will. Soon do, before shared meat is by brood
...”

Then Hath collapsed onto the bed, his eyes gray with the heat of the black fire churning out of him. The smoke stopped as suddenly as it had started. His body caved in with a sickening sigh. CassaRoc felt the guard’s wrist, then jerked his hand away from the intense heat.

He looked at Teldin and shook his head.

Teldin stood silently, then grunted and kicked the end table-across the room. CassaRoc and the others watched him, almost sharing his loss. “Neogi bastards!” Teldin shouted.

“I recognized the voice from council meetings. That was Master Coh. He’s the one that’s taken her,” informed CassaRoc.

He stroked his long beard and thought about it. “I tell you, he has something to do with the attack. Coh is a black mage. I’d wager that he and the Fool are plotting something together.”

Teldin took a deep breath. He faced CassaRoc. “No damned neogi is going to harm Cwelanas again,” he said. He placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. “Alert Chaladar, Leoster, and our allies. Start getting the warriors together and arm them – arm them well.

“Break out the catapults. We’re getting into this war far sooner than I had intended – but I’ll be damned if I let Cwelanas die under the claws of the neogi.”

Chapter Seventeen

“...
Many are the servants of evil. They are drawn to the flame of goodness like moths in the dark, and their mistress is the Queen of the Abyss.
...”

Admiral Loquestor Hellfire VI, elf lord;

reign of Blacksteed

Far beneath the inhabited citadel that stretched across the back of the
Spelljammer,
the being once known as Romar, who was once a captain of the great ship many years ago, sat upon his bleached throne of bones. In a globe of sight floating above the floor the Fool watched the neogi community being attacked by the beholders and their vicious allies. He watched as the neogi were chased into their tower like the sadistic cowards he knew they were.

He gestured with a skeletal hand. The globe’s view shifted, and he watched as the Cloakmaster shook an enchanted human in the Tower of Thought, and the guard erupted in black flame.

“Coh.” The Fool hated the sound of that disgusting neogi name.

He should not have been surprised, but he had had no idea that Coh could possibly have been that cunning. “He has his own agenda,” the Fool spoke to himself. “And he has nowhere else to run but to sanctuary.” He laughed. “Here.”

His laughter echoed off the walls. “But I have my own sweet agenda,” he said, “and it does not call for a further alliance with a trained neogi. The woman will be mine, whether he knows it or not, and Coh
...”
He giggled madly, mocking the neogi master. “And mine will neogi master be. Coh meat will be.”

The Fool rose from his throne, laughed, and kicked out at an undead rat, laid flat on its back. The corpse bounced off the wall. The Fool was still weak from the fledgling’s psionic attack, but she would not be given a second chance to defeat him at his own work.

Oh, no.

“Gaeadrelle Goldring, the kender... oh, she will die, too. Oh, yes... a glorious, painful death, one especially suited for hurting me –
me!
 – the one true captain...”

The Fool glowered angrily and screamed to himself.

“She will return... if only to help her precious Cloakmaster... and I will be ready to taste her fear...” He pondered a moment and grinned. “Perhaps my... servants would enjoy the taste of her soft, raw flesh... her cold terror
...”

He decided. “The kender will be dealt with. But first, the neogi.

“Then, death for all... as I take the
Spelljammer
to its ultimate destiny... inside the fiery depths of the Broken Sphere.”

Even in his humiliation, the Fool laughed and laughed and laughed.

The Fool knew that Death, ultimately, was a cosmic comedian. And who better to be court jester to Death than the Fool?

Chapter Eighteen

“One shall come under the auspices of shadow.

One shall come to deliver the darkness.

One shall come whom all have wronged.

One shall come without purpose.

One shall find purpose.

One shall be the Redeemer.

All are One”

Prophecies of Bama, pirate bard of Duval;

reign of Fausto.

“Ships ahoy!”

The shout from the roof echoed down through the Tower of Thought, and Teldin thought he could hear the cry repeated loudly from the other nearby towers of the Human Collective.

He stepped out of the tower’s weapons room and started up the stone stairs to the roof. Outside he found CassaRoc and Chaladar staring up into the sky. CassaRoc raised a cylindrical tube to one eye and stared through it. He squinted against the bright light of the flow. “I don’t know,” he said to the paladin. “Never seen their like before.”

Chaladar held out his hand. “Let me see.”

CassaRoc handed him the tube, rimmed in brass. Chaladar aimed and peered through it for a long time. “Vaguely Shou design, I think. The wings, or fins, are like those of dragons. I’m not sure, though. They’re some of the largest vessels I’ve ever seen.”

Teldin came up behind them. “The spyglass. Is it gnomish work?”

CassaRoc turned, surprised. “We didn’t hear you come up.” He nodded. “Yep. Bought it off a gnome a few years back, around Evermeet. The only thing a gnome has ever designed that has a practical use, I’d say. Well worth the silver I paid.” Teldin took the glass and hefted it. He had used one before, in another sphere. This one seemed more streamlined and advanced, a tube carved of wood, about a foot long, with glass disks affixed to both ends by rings of brass. He aimed at a distant tower and looked once, marveling at the device’s seemingly magical ability to bring far objects into clear focus; then he aimed it toward the speck in the phlogiston where the two leaders had been looking.

In seconds, he spotted them. CassaRoc pointed out five other areas in the flow, where only distant specks could be seen against the swirling chaos.

Teldin whistled.

In all, nineteen ships were closing on the
Spelljammer.
Six were deadly deathspiders and a mindspider – probably planning to rendezvous with B’Laath’a, Teldin surmised – and, far in the distance, were two incredibly huge vessels that Teldin could not identify, ships that resembled giant, finned centipedes. As they sailed, the ships’ segmented hulls twisted as though worming their way through the flow. Beyond them, Teldin picked out three hammerships, an elven man-o-war, a squid ship, two nautiloids, a galleon, and three wasps.

“The deathspiders,” he said. “I could be wrong, but I have a hunch that the neogi will try to take advantage of B’Laath’a, the neogi mage who assaulted Cwelanas. They’ll be sure to join the neogi in their fight against us, and they’ll probably try to kill me again as well.”

Chaladar nodded. “Vicious, evil beings.”

CassaRoc said, “Be sure to expect other assassination attempts, too.”

“The other ships nearby,” Teldin continued, “I’ve never seen before. They remind me of dragon ships with the colors, and the ornamentation, but much larger. And I’ll tell you this: they don’t look friendly.”

“They’re still a few hours away. We still have time to get to the neogi and get Cwelanas back,” CassaRoc said.

Teldin was silent.

Cwelanas. Yes, we will get her back.

They stared into the flow for a while, keeping track of the converging ships. Even at this great distance, they could tell that some ships were already battling among themselves. Ballistae were firing from the deathspiders, and missiles were sent hurtling into a deck of a hammership. Catapults aboard the hammership rained boulders upon the swifter deathspiders, but they turned away before they could take much damage.

Teldin looked down upon the
Spelljammer
with CassaRoc’s gnomish spyglass. From the tower, he could see that the open market had closed, probably for fear of war, and that sporadic fighting among the races had already broken out across the ship. A better view could be had from the pinnacle of the Guild tower, Teldin knew.

“What does the watch atop the Guild tower report?” he asked.

Chaladar leaned back against the tower railing and removed his helmet. He ran his fingers through his long hair. “The fighting has increased at the neogi tower,” he said. “The bastards seem to be rallying, perhaps because they know their allies are on the way. And look.” Chaladar pointed down. “The neogi are starting skirmishes all over the ship. They’re using their slaves and umber hulks to terrorize the humans.”