Plague of Spells as-1

by Bruce R Cordell

  "Yeah, quick studies, they are. I seen 'em both hurl spells, which is better than most the old mages can claim, except for all the liars."

  "Good," she crooned.

  Seren stepped forward. "Yes, I am here to help; I don't know about him." The wizard waved toward Japheth. "Thing is, I don't know with what. The good captain wouldn't tell me. He just kept repeating that meeting you would be worth my while."

  The kuo-toa gazed a few more heartbeats at Seren, then swiveled to stare at the warlock.

  Japheth's buzzing thoughts finally lined up enough for him to say "I have the proxy of the shipping magnate, Behroun Marhana of New Sarshel. While I have many talents of my own, I can also call upon my patron's material and financial resources, if I judge what I hear today to be in Marhana's interests."

  Nogah rasped something in a tongue Japheth didn't know, and then added, "Listen, then, and see."

  The kuo-toa gestured toward the balcony opening. "What do you see?" she asked.

  Beyond the balcony's stone railing rolled the wide sea. The Green Siren rode the swells, and the numberless marine creatures along the shore continued to fulfill ancient drives to eat and propagate. Japheth also saw the other kuo-toa below the surface, much closer now than they had been before. They must be moving closer in case their mistress needed help in dealing with her visitors.

  Captain Thoster said, "A whole lot of nothing. So?"

  "I see a world ready to be plucked," replied Nogah. Japheth tried to ignore her squishy, lisping inflection to Common, like she was trying to suck the marrow out of a bloody bone with each word. His state of mind made it difficult to concentrate.

  She continued, "I see a world crying out for new direction. A world where those who align themselves properly will be rewarded with riches beyond their wildest dreams. What do you say to that?"

  "I see that every time I pull alongside a merchant ship and demand the contents of their hold," boasted Thoster.

  "Baubles compared to what I offer." Nogah sniffed.

  "What exactly do you offer?" asked Seren.

  "I offer you a measure of protection and even control when I summon up old lords and old races. When I call upon antique powers that dwarf any our world has heretofore known, everything changes. I'm offering you the chance to survive that change, and what's more, profit from it. Perhaps even exercise some measure of control over the events that fate might otherwise dictate."

  Neither Thoster nor Seren had an immediate reply. They seemed a little taken aback. Japheth said, "A very kind offer, to be sure. Especially since most of us have just met. You must want something from us, if you're willing to give so much?"

  The kuo-toa whip nodded, her eyes blinking rapidly. She said, "Of course."

  "If you have the strength to call up these 'old lords and old races,'" queried Japheth, "beings that can reorder the world in the manner you describe, what help from us could you possibly require?"

  "Ah, that is the tangle, drylander. I have lost the talisman required to begin. It was stolen from me, and I need help to retrieve it."

  "Sure," said Thoster. "Why's it you can't get aid from Olleth itself, a city filled with kuo-toa? Come, Nogah, what need have you for me and folks I can gather?"

  "You are perceptive, Captain Thoster. One of the reasons I enjoy our dealings so much. But your assumption is incorrect; Olleth will not help me. In fact, they want me dead."

  "You're a whip. They can't strip you o' that."

  "They can. They have. I have been named race traitor, blasphemer, and I've been excommunicated from the Sea Mother's church. No kuo-toa will have anything to do with me, other than try to skin my hide as a trophy."

  Japheth held his tongue, even though he could see kuo-toa below the water line with his crimson gaze. Obviously Nogah exaggerated the degree to which her own race reviled her. The kuo-toa he could see there were drawing closer still. Many had moved so close to the tower's base that the warlock could no longer see them below the balcony's floor. The kuo-toa had a strangely feral look to them-their eyes were smaller than Nogah's, more bestial. Strange.

  Also, the day's light was waning. A sea mist was rolling in across the waves. Already the Green Siren was enveloped and lost to sight. The fog's leading face churned onward, sending streamers of mist snaking toward the shore and tower. Japheth had never seen anything like it. Then again, he rarely traveled by sea. For all he knew, the phenomenon was natural. The kuo-toa he saw converging through the wave-tossed shallows were not alarmed by the advancing mist. In fact, by their sudden unnerving grins, it seemed they welcomed its arrival.

  Thoster was saying, "For the sake of argument, let's say you ain't lying to me. You really do need my help and that of these others. Who stole this talisman from you, and where can we find the thief?"

  The warlock wanted to know more about these "old lords and old races." Japheth had some experience with ancient beings who promised great power. Nothing was ever simple when it came to such extraordinary guarantees. The single "old lord" he had discovered and entered into a pact with had ultimately proved an alarming force in Japheth's life.

  Certainly, if not for the Lord of Bats, the crimson road would have claimed the warlock long before now. Being alive, no matter the situation, had to be preferable to being dead. Right? It was a question he often asked himself. And despite his ties, he did delight in the various arcane tricks and amazing curses he was now able to call upon. And what about the impressive space hidden within the folds of his cloak? Other men would give far more than he to be able to wear such a thing as an article of clothing.

  On the other hand, if not for the pact he'd sworn to the Lord of Bats, he wouldn't have to daily attend to the bidding of Behroun Marhana, a fouler and pettier man Japheth had yet to meet. What a convoluted series of events had put him in such thrall, he mused. If only-

  "You're insane!" Seren's sudden accusation brought Japheth back to the present. While he had been touring, for the hundred thousandth time, his past indiscretions and failures, the others had continued their discussion. Something had riled up the war wizard, and even Thoster's eyes were wide with unexpected surprise. What had he missed?

  Nogah raised a conciliatory, webbed hand. "I grant that on its face, the task we must accomplish…"

  A rivulet of mist edged across the tower and into the balcony. It seemed a live thing, a fog tentacle seeking something.

  "How peculiar," said the warlock. He wondered if the opaque cold front was natural weather after all. For one thing, his dust-enhanced vision was having difficulty piercing it.

  Alerted by his comment, the kuo-toa glanced at the advancing mist streamer. She shrieked, then lisped, "Gethshemeth knows!"

  She backed away from the advancing streamer. She rasped, "The mist is merely a cloak-it hides whatever force the great kraken has thrown at us!"

  Great kraken? Japheth repeated mentally. What folderol is this?

  The war wizard spat out a flurry of loose syllables and waved her red-runed wand. A gentle breeze issued from nowhere to blow toward the balcony opening. The mist's ominous advance slowed, hesitated, and then began to retreat in the face of the mild but unrelenting draft. But how long would the woman's casting keep it at bay?

  An ululation of feral anticipation soared up from somewhere below the tower, hollow yet somehow more threatening because of the muffling, mysterious mist.

  "The kuo-toa…" began Japheth, his voice a dry croak. He tried to shake off the lethargy the traveler's dust sometimes produced when he didn't succumb to its vision of the burning road. "The kuo-toa outside that are converging on us-are they with you, Nogah?"

  She hissed, blinked rapidly. She said, "Fool! I told you I am anathema in Olleth. The Sea Mother has demanded my head for my affront. But worse, all those I subverted with the Dreamheart now follow Gethshemeth, the great kraken. It sends them against me now, lest I contrive a plan to take back what it stole!"

  Seren broke in. "Fool? You're asking us to go against a great kraken and call u
s fools?"

  The moist patter of many squishy feet sounded loud on the open stair.

  Captain Thoster drew his slender straight-sword from its silver sheath. Metallic disks inset flush in the blade's side whirred and spun with golem-like precision. A greenish fluid pulsed within straight, hair-thin conduits that ran from hilt to tip, whetting the fine edge of the blade with an emerald sheen. Thoster called it his Blade of Venom, an antique but deadly weapon found among Lantan's watery remains. A product of vanished gnome craftsmen, who infused knowledge of golems and gears into their works.

  Seren began the opening phrases of a spell.

  Anusha… Japheth couldn't see her. Was she gone, or had the sensitivity granted by his traveler's dust passed?

  "Are we facing the great kraken itself?" asked Thoster. The captain stared into the wide, fog-obscured opening on the balcony. "It could reach this high, I think."

  Japheth replied, his voice growing surer, "I saw only kuo-toa converging, no kraken small or great."

  "Well… maybe we ain't all dead!" exclaimed Thoster. A small grin chased away worry lines with deeper grooves. "Fish-men I can handle. No offense, Nogah." The captain turned to face the stairs, his blade whirring and clicking like a hungry insect.

  Unless the kraken has come in the meantime, thought the warlock. Better be sure.

  Japheth projected an arcane summons into the space hidden within his cloak, to his hidden fortress, shadow-drenched Darroch Castle. The call roused those he sought from their lightless roosts. Crying and chirping their eagerness in registers higher than men could hear, they emerged as a dark swarm from Japheth's billowing cloak.

  Seren and Nogah both exclaimed in tones surprisingly similar for such disparate family trees. Thoster, familiar with the warlock's many abilities, grinned wider.

  The cloud of flapping black motes arced straight into the wall of mist, immediately lost to sight.

  But bats did not rely on eyes alone, and now, neither did Japheth. Nay, he was the bat swarm. Closing his eyes on the tower interior, he opened his perceptions to the audibly sculpted, texture-defined world the bats inhabited.

  His fingers, grown long and composed only of sound, caressed the tower as its rounded sides fell away behind. The wet, uncertain boundary of the sea lapped up from below. Bipeds with large, noise-muffling eyes and hard scales scampered from the water's edges up the beach of sound-scattering sand, to join their brethren already snorting and giggling at the tower's base.

  Japheth directed the darting swarm out over the water. His touch-sight stretched down to pat the sea's inconstant surface. The water was impenetrable, but its fluid, ever-changing nature betrayed the shapes of what lay beneath. Mostly, that was bulging swells of water that rolled endlessly to the shore, there to break and froth on the sand. But the swarm also discerned schools of fish as small mounds sliding along the surface, the edges of a half-formed coral reef, and what might even be a drowned shipwreck.

  Nowhere could he perceive what he most feared to discover: great, sinuous bulges in the water hinting at tentacles hundreds or more feet in length, or a great bulblike central body with a brain more ancient than the founding of Impiltur. Japheth had seen pictures of kraken in the Candlekeep stacks.

  He found no evidence of such a shape, but something else was fast approaching.

  A handful of ballista-like shapes arrowed through the water. They left V-shaped wakes behind each one's single high fin that pierced the boundary into air. Sharks, and big ones. Worryisomely, the contours of reflected sound revealed each bore a rider, but the swirling seawater foiled him from teasing out real shape from fancy.

  The swarm veered closer, darting down to intersect the line of the onrushing fins.

  Japheth saw a warty arm rise from the water and point. He had just a heartbeat to study it, to recognize that its oozing, sound-absorbing flesh wasn't the scaled arm of a kuo-toa, before pain cut his connection to the swarm.

  He opened his eyes, his mouth dry.

  "What?" said Captain Thoster.

  "Kuo-toa, maybe twenty. Well, maybe they're not exactly kuo-toa; they looked warped somehow. And, I think… a covey of water witches."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) Green Siren on the Sea of Fallen Stars

  The slushy, damp patter of kuo-toa feet on the stairs knifed terror through Anusha. She instinctively tried to get away-

  The girl woke in her flesh body as if from a nightmare, breathing hard and struggling to sit up.

  Pain smote her forehead. Dazed, she fell back, blinking in darkness broken only by a ruler-straight thread of light that ran from near her left temple down past her left foot. It was the seam of the travel chest's lid, in which her body slept away her dream travels. Not for the first time, she imagined it was like this inside a sarcophagus. Unlike most sarcophagus residents, though, she could leave whenever she wanted.

  She slid open the custom-installed bolt that unlatched the lid from inside. With only a little effort, she pushed away the covering. Brightness brought tears to her eyes. Even though the light from the cabin's porthole was dimmed by mist, she had to squint.

  The roiling fog beyond the porthole was the same mist she'd seen rushing across the water to blockade Hegruth Island. The same mist that cloaked the scaled, fishy kuo-toa as they converged on the tower.

  Her cheeks warmed. They couldn't have hurt her, or probably even seen her. Yet she had done the equivalent of scream and run. Had Japheth seen her depart in fear? She hoped not. He probably had.

  "Am I such an infant, to flee at the first hint of danger?" she wondered aloud. "You can do better."

  A gurgle of hunger diverted her self-rebuke.

  With one hand, she grabbed a piece of unwrapped hardtack from the clutter on the adjoining cot. Her other hand sought the wineskin Japheth had also provided. She bit and chewed the stale, unsalted biscuit-like texture, moistening it with the watered-down wine. She had incorrectly supposed that spending most of her time lying still and dreaming would cut her appetite by half or more. Instead, the yawning chasm in her stomach told her she must eat, if she was going to launch yet another dream walk. The activity seemed to suck far more out of her than a natural dream. Already her clothing was becoming loose and baggy. If she didn't increase her food intake, she would waste away to a dream in truth.

  Anusha choked down the last of the biscuit, took another pull on the skin, and then pulled the lid closed as she reclined back into the travel chest.

  After several rafts of empty moments floated past, she recognized the hard truth her body already knew.

  She wasn't the least bit sleepy.

  "Oh, please!" she whispered fiercely, frustration making her voice shrill.

  She spent a few more moments attempting to control her breathing and calm her thoughts. It simply wasn't working. Her heart still pounded with the memory of kuo-toa on the tower stairs.

  Her hand moved almost of its own accord, feeling through the things she kept with her in the chest. She found the cold silver vial Japheth had provided two days earlier. The "elixir of somnolence," he'd called it.

  A drug, she knew it to be in truth. One she was on the cusp of taking, despite her disdain for Japheth's habit.

  "No time for prissiness," she remonstrated. She twisted off the lid and brought the cold vial to her lips. The taste of blackberries bloomed across her tongue, and her lips tingled as if she'd bitten into a mint leaf. Recalling Japheth's words about counting down from ten, Anusha quickly re-stoppered the vial.

  She didn't feel any different. Had he given her colored water? Perhaps the warlock- everything blurred away.

  She stood outside the travel chest, intangible as a hallucination.

  Japheth's potion wasn't colored water that was certain.

  Anusha rushed from the cabin, slap through the door without pausing. The guard dog, Lucky, still standing vigil in the narrow hallway, yipped and wagged his tail. She took a moment to pat his head, saying, "I'll bring you a tre
at later, I promise!"

  She emerged from below the stern deck onto the main deck. The crew stood in disorderly groups, weapons in hand, glancing nervously into the impenetrable vapor that pressed in on all sides. The high masts poked up into a ceiling of white, fluffy film. It was as if the entire ship was cocooned in a great down pillow.

  Now what? Could she swim in her condition? Walk along» the bottom? Her dream form didn't need to breathe. She sup-1 posed she could pass through water as easily as solid walls.,|

  A crewman at the starboard railing suddenly gasped f out a surprised oath. He pointed over the deck. He yelled, "Something's coming out of the soup!"

  Anusha and several pirates joined the man at the Tailing.

  A woman emerged from the fog. She balanced on some sort of low raft, narrow and long, adorned with a protruding fin like a shark's. A shape stroked alongside the woman on her strange raft, just beneath the surface, but lingering fog made the swimming thing impossible to identify.

  The woman was old! Her flesh was sickly and yellow, covered with warts and oozing sores. Her hair was filthy and appeared to be composed of rotting seaweed.

  The woman's gruesome appearance pulled a groan of horror from the crew. Several crumpled, as if all the strength fled their limbs, like water pouring from a cup.

  The newcomer gurgled like a creature on the edge of drowning; it was a titter of delight. The crone locked her gaze on the pirate who'd first identified the old woman's approach. A red pulse lit her eyes from within, flashing so brightly the scarlet glow illuminated the fog a dozen paces in all directions.

  The crewman gasped, then fell to the deck, his limbs and head suddenly as loose as a rag doll. He was dead.

  The remaining crew screamed and bellowed in a decidedly non-pirate fashion. They scrambled away from the railing, knocking into their fellows and, in some cases, trampling them. Anusha was right in among the retreating crew, voicing her own shock and fear, though her voice was lost among the others' cries. Those who couldn't run pulled themselves from the ship's edge. In moments, the only one still by the railing was the one whose heart had been silenced with an evil look. All eyes stared at the railing, silhouetted against the roiling mist, dread thundering in their chests.