The Ultimate Helm Page 13

  He ripped open his shirt.

  Above his heart, his skin glowed in the shape of the amulet. The flesh was warm, pulsating with a tingle of gentle heat.

  “The design!” Teldin said.

  A pattern, a maze inside the circular ring, glowed on his chest. He remembered the message from Gaye: Follow the woven heart.

  “This is how I find it,” he said. “‘Follow the woven heart.’ Somehow, this is a map... no, a compass, that will lead me to the adytum.”

  CassaRoc came over and placed his finger on the glowing pattern. “I don’t feel a thing.”

  “It’s warm,” Teldin said.

  “Not to me. Is it always like this?”

  “This is the first time I’ve seen it.” He thought for a moment. “No. I saw it in a dream. But I don’t think it was really a dream.”

  CassaRoc looked questioningly at Chaladar, then back to Teldin. “Maybe it’s time to go looking for this... adytum of yours.”

  “Maybe,” Teldin said, “but I don’t know what to do once I get there. Perhaps a visit to the library tower would be best.”

  A guard then entered the room and told CassaRoc that an elven messenger had arrived with a decision. The leaders decided to go down and receive the elf alone, as he had been ordered to hurry back to the Elven High Command and assist in the battle against the goblins.

  Several minutes later, Teldin nervously paced the confines of CassaRoc’s common room, waiting for CassaRoc and Chaladar to return.

  Despite his host’s generosity and the increasing trust and loyalty of his warriors, Teldin was growing increasingly claustrophobic inside the Tower of Thought. It had been hours since his conversation with Cwelanas, and the uncertainty of the entire situation on board the Spelljammer had begun to gnaw at him.

  He did not crave action or bloodshed; he simply wanted to get out of the damned tower and explore, to search, to finally do what he had come here for.

  He touched his amulet and watched the light reflect off its engraved surface. Is this the feeling Estriss had asked about? The yearning to be active, to search for his answers out there, among the others?

  Is this the call?

  He walked behind the bar and poured himself a mug of cold water, then gulped down half the mug and filled it up again.

  The desire to leave, to get something done, burned at him like the sign of the amulet upon his chest.

  He looked up suddenly and cocked his head. There had been a noise from somewhere outside, like a clap of thunder, or an explosion. Out in the hall he heard shouting and the sound of the warriors’ feet as they rushed to their positions throughout the tower.

  He flung open the door. “What’s going on?” he shouted.

  There were cries from above, then a warrior rushed by. Teldin reached out and grabbed his arm. “Wait. What’s happening?”

  The fighter gasped, then managed, “The neogi. They’ve started fighting the neogi.” Then he turned and ran up the tower stairs.

  Teldin heard more warriors rushing up the stairs, then CassaRoc and Chaladar ran up beside him. “The war has definitely begun,” CassaRoc said. “Chaladar’s scouts spied the start of the battle not five minutes ago. The beholders, the minotaurs, and the ogres just couldn’t wait. They’re all in it together.”

  “They’re in the neogi tower now,” Chaladar said. “They may not be able to hold it. Already a fire has started. The explosion blackened the face of the beholder ruins. The minotaurs are struggling to put it out, but who knows what will happen with this war? Their pointless battles may destroy us all.”

  “What are we going to do?” Teldin asked.

  “Nothing,” CassaRoc said. “Absolutely nothing... yet.” He held up a folded piece of paper, decorated with a broken seal of red wax. “A communiqué from our friends, the elves.”

  He cleared his throat. “‘We, the Elven High Command of the Sphere Wanderer Spelljammer; do hereby promise all aid and assistance during the coming times of war to the Cloakmaster, Teldin Moore. We do hereby sign in treaty with the Cloakmaster and his allies, the Human Collective, to fight to the death our mortal enemies, and to ensure the safety and purity of the elven race.’”

  “And it’s signed by Stardawn and the elven leader himself, Admiral Drova Highstar.”

  Teldin took it from CassaRoc and read it, though slowly. Teldin had never read very much, nor very well. “Can we believe this?”

  Chaladar shrugged. “Personally, I trust very few people. These elves think they’re needed everywhere, or nothing would get done. Frankly, I’d rather have them with us than against us, but I don’t want them at all.

  “Ah, well. The Human Collective will never fall, even if the elves fight against us.”

  “And Stardawn?” Teldin said.

  “Trust your mind flayer friend on that,” CassaRoc said. “Stardawn is his own man. He has his own agenda.”

  “What does that mean?” Chaladar inquired.

  “’Means I wouldn’t trust him farther than I could spit,” CassaRoc said.

  “‘He’s mad that trusts in the honor of an elf.’”

  They both stared at Chaladar.

  He shrugged. “Poetry. I read it somewhere.”

  The Cloakmaster spoke to himself. “They’re all so formal and proper, the elves, but in the end,” he said, crumpling the message, “it’s just a piece of paper.”

  Chaladar nodded. “Well said.”

  CassaRoc finished the ale he had earlier left on the table. He made a face; it had grown too warm. “Come on,” he said. “Why don’t we go up to the Guild tower and take a look?” Teldin said, “At what?”

  CassaRoc smiled. “The battle with the neogi. We can see over the ship from the top of the Guild. With luck, the neogi and the others will kill each other off. Maybe we won’t have to fight them at all.”

  “Too bad,” Chaladar said, smiling grimly. “Too bad.” CassaRoc led the way down into the lower floors of the tower. There, a series of passages led to the other human towers, and across into the cavernous Human Collective.

  Leoster’s guards recognized CassaRoc and Chaladar and let the three men pass. Within the Guild tower, Teldin saw many of King Leoster’s fellow nobles going about their daily duties; but many more were occupied with activities that clearly fell beyond their chores as noble warriors: gardening, researching such topics as the temperatures of differing wildspace and the tooth sizes of unhuman races, and collecting games and ancient books. One noble, a council member named Charnom, even boasted an extensive collection of jokes from across the known spheres... most of which were off-color, and had to do with buxom females of all the known races.

  At the top of the Guild tower, six guards had been posted, keeping watch on all sides. The Rainbow Ocean was a flare of brilliant colors, a swirling chaos surrounding the Spelljammer on all sides. Teldin, CassaRoc, and Chaladar went to the starboard side and peered over the roofs of the other buildings, toward the neogi tower.

  CassaRoc pointed. “There. Do you see?”

  Teldin was instead looking for the trail of wreckage left by the Julia across the Spelljammer’s wing. He felt a sense of loss, of innocence left behind, but he could not find the wreckage on the wing; it appeared that some great hand had swooped down and cleared away the charred debris.

  “There!” Chaladar cried. Teldin turned and saw a plume of black smoke rising into the ship’s huge air bubble from a thick, round tower at the stern. A band of minotaurs was struggling to put out what was left of the fire before the resulting explosions of phlogiston brought the tower down upon their heads.

  “They better get that out soon,” CassaRoc said. “The Spelljammer could be in trouble if the flow were to explode too much.”

  The warriors watched for a while, but the real battle had been pushed into the tower. One of Chaladar’s guards said that the ogres had forced their way inside, cutting senselessly through a flank of about twenty neogi and their umber hulks. The reptilian neogi had retreated into their tower, fol
lowed quickly by the attacking ogres and their monstrous allies. Even from this great distance, Teldin could easily make out pools of blood spattering the deck.

  For the first time, Teldin had a chance to admire the spiraling towers and the mixture of architecture spread out along the Spelljammer’s immense back. The flow played like fire along the golden spires and glistened off the winged statue atop the horned tower. He felt the amulet calling him, pushing him toward the tail of the ship. The symbol burned at his chest; now that he could see his goal, the Spelljammer’s call seemed even stronger.

  They decided they had had enough, and they made their way back through the Guild tower, then into the collective and into the lowest level of the Tower of Thought. HarKenn, one of CassaRoc’s guards, nodded as they entered. He bore several large weapons upon his leather belt and had smaller weapons hidden under his cloak and in his boots. His helmet was of an odd design, and the light shone off it in multicolored flashes.

  The warriors passed and were near the doorway to the second level when they heard screams from below. They instantly wheeled about and ran back the way they had come.

  The screams and shouts grew louder, and they stopped HarKenn as he stumbled up the stairs, and fell into the Cloakmaster’s arms, bleeding from almost a hundred tiny wounds along his thick legs.

  Teldin shook him while Chaladar reached for a light rod fastened to the wall. “HarKenn, what is it man? What happened to you?” Then Chaladar held up the light rod, and CassaRoc saw all the blood, painting the warrior’s legs so that his wounds were nearly invisible.

  HarKenn’s eyes were wide with fear. Teldin held the light up and peered the way HarKenn had come, up from the shadows.

  CassaRoc slapped the guard. His whimpering stopped. “HarKenn, tell us! Who did this to you?”

  In Chaladar’s light, they could see black movement on the stairs below, moving rapidly toward them like a rippling sea of fur. Sparks of white light glared at them angrily.

  Teldin said, “CassaRoc,...”

  HarKenn began to mumble. Spittle bubbled in the comer of his mouth. Without warning, he reached out and grabbed Teldin’s tunic. His grip was like that of a vise, and he pulled Teldin into his face.

  “The rats!” HarKenn shouted. His eyes gleamed with the pure light of madness. “The rats in the walls! They’re chewing their way out!”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “... Does not the creation of a thing wondrous also imply that a thing fearsome has been born? Ttoese things may be one and the same; they may be separate, individual entities.

  “Something evil lives here, I sense: a lamprey of evil, surviving on the Spelljammer’s wastes....”

  Leoster III;

  reign of Jokarin.

  The maze that was the Spelljammer’s marketplace was alive with sounds and exotic aromas, with the pungent tastes of foods and spices from Oerth and Edill, of liquors from Toril and spiced vegetables from Coliar. Merchants shouted for attention, proclaiming that their wares were far better than any other’s. The populace chattered, livestock and domestic animals lowed and barked, and from all over the Spelljammer Gaeadrelle Goldring felt the ship’s life force pulsing like energy, with the latent powers of a sun.

  She walked the deck invisibly, her astral body projected from a sphere that many of the Spelljammer’s inhabitants had never heard of, and she took in all the sensations of life that she could discover: the wail of an infant, the taste of charraka from mermen of Conatha, the scent of a perfume from Krynn.

  And she smiled at the wonder of the life force that was the Spelljammer, the force that had called to Teldin Moore in answer to his own quest: for adventure, for purpose, for life.

  She turned as a cool breeze rushed through her silently, like a dark, psychic wind. It does not belong here, she thought suddenly, and she shivered once, feeling her body in Herdspace shiver in immediate response.

  She concentrated, and her psionic senses spread out before her in an invisible web of psionic energy. The cold comes from there, she thought, looking out over the Spelljammer’s landing field and toward its bow, and brings with it the taste of darkness.

  The feelers of the gargantuan ship stretched out into the phlogiston like twin battering rams. Gaye reached out with her arms and let her psionic senses play over the bow, and she felt the evil wind pass through her like ice, blowing from starboard.

  Inside the cavernous tear duct hidden below the ship’s starboard eye Gaye discovered one of the unknown entrances to the ship’s secret warrens, which ran like veins through the body of the Spelljammer. The breeze, a cold, dark wind tinged with the cold scent of death, sang through the tunnel. She took a step back, assaulted by the unnatural taint to the putrid air, then she forced herself forward into the organic tunnel, down into the ship’s body.

  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, an
d 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