The Ultimate Helm tcc-6

by Russ T. Howard

  Behind him, Djan and CassaRoc examined their weapons and their armor. CassaRoc's had obviously seen a lot of action. His armor was dented across his chest and scarred from many sword thrusts. Djan had borrowed light armor from CassaRoc's cache and finished tugging it over his lithe frame just as CassaRoc snapped a heavy cloak around his neck. They looked at each other in silent appraisal then turned to the Cloakmaster as though they were saying, "We're ready." Teldin turned. "Almost time," he said. Djan nodded.

  Teldin concentrated. Slowly, his cloak and amulet shrank again into a thin necklace, which he covered with the collar of his shirt. Then, before his companions' staring eyes, the contours of his face shifted. His hair changed color, his shoulders widened, and his form shrank by several inches. For the charge to the neogi tower, it would not do to have the Cloakmaster be seen by all of his enemies.

  "No matter how much you do that, I'm never going to get used to it," Djan said. Teldin asked, "How do I look?"

  "Look for yourself," CassaRoc said. He held up a small piece of polished steel.

  Teldin stared at the familiar face in the mirror. The craggy features, the angry light behind his eyes-just looking at himself made the old feelings churn inside, fear and hatred mingling with love-"You look quite good," Djan said. "Anyone in particular?" Teldin remembered the stern lessons of his father, his heavy hand, and how he had practically chased a young Teldin off the farm to find peace, the only peace he could truly find: alone, on the dangerous, bloody fields of the War of the Lance.

  He looked up from the mirror. "No one important." He led them from the room to the tower entrance. CassaRoc's warriors waited anxiously along the walls of the corridor, adjusting scabbards and cloaks, nodding as the leaders passed, and barely casting a glance at Teldin. They had been told of Teldin's planned strategy to cross the ship; despite his disguise, they recognized him by the hastily painted insignia were slung with uncanny accuracy. One struck an umber hulk just above its miniature eye and pierced its skull; the other found its target in the thick flesh of the other hulk's neck.

  The hamster bared its sharpened teeth and slashed out at the misshapen giants. Blood spurted from deep gashes across the hulks' chests and dripped from the hamster's mouth.

  As one, the umber hulks wavered on their flat feet. The loss of blood and the speed of Emil's poison sent them weakly to their knees. They fell to the deck, their arms and legs flailing helplessly, white foam bubbling rapidly from their gaping mouths.

  Then they were still.

  The warriors erupted with a cheer for their first victory of the War of the Cloakmaster. Emil waved gleefully at Teldin. "This is GhoTaa," he said, quickly, laughing. "I trained him myself."

  Teldin shook his head, amazed at the little warrior's prowess, and smiled. "Good work, Emil," he shouted. "You keep surprising me."

  Emil grinned broadly, and his face turned a bright red. "You should see what I can do with pigeons and weasel bats."

  The hamster snorted and spat umber hulk blood onto the deck. Teldin stepped away, remembering the giant hamster that had once tried to eat him.

  Emil laughed, but he and the warriors found they had no more time to congratulate themselves. The fighters of the halfling community rounded the open market and joined the human ranks.

  As a combined army, they charged across the landing field at the Spelljammer's bow and passed around the council chambers, turning toward the neogi tower in the distance. The fighting had increased since their last report from the tower watch. Here on the starboard side, the skirmishes had broken out in full. The warriors ran past the bloody corpses of human and neogi alike, and helped defend several lone warriors who had been ambushed by neogi slaves and umber hulks.

  They rounded the corner of the captain's tower. Teldin looked up briefly and wondered what, if anything, he could find inside to help him discover his answers. Then they were in the street between the tower and the goblin quarters.

  Teldin ordered his squad to take the lead, and he and Djan sprinted for the squat neogi tower, visible in the near distance.

  Something small and silver whistled through the air. The warrior to Teldin's left fell, a star of steel embedded in his head.

  Then the street echoed with a high-pitched war cry, and Teldin's squad was surrounded by warriors clad from head to toe in red silk. There were about thirty of them. The remainder of CassaRoc's fighters were not far behind, but the strange combatants engaged Teldin's men immediately, baring wicked, curved blades and razor-sharp shurikens of steel. One of Teldin's warriors cried out "Shou!" then was struck down by the powerful kick of a red-garbed fighter. A single sword thrust quieted Teldin's man permanently.

  Teldin knew little about the Shou, only that they were a race of oriental humans whose religious adherence to the Path made them deadly to anyone they considered an infidel. It was no wonder that they had never responded to Teldin's request of a treaty: they wanted the Spelljammer for themselves, to prove across the spheres that the holy Shou path was the true Path.

  Djan quickly jumped into the fray, his sword singing through the air as he brought it down toward a Shou fighter. The shou's blade came up, and sparks flew as steel met steel.

  Teldin whipped out his sword and started forward to aid his friend. Then his head buzzed with a warm feeling, a sense of urgency. Instinctively, he jerked back his head, and a shuriken whizzed just an inch past his face.

  He spun around.

  His antagonist wore a suit of black silk and a hood of scarlet. His sword gleamed in the chaotic light, and the man approached him cautiously. "You are the one," he said. The man's accent was strange, clipped as though the Common tongue were awkward to him. "Cloakmaster. You are not invisible to our wu jen."

  Teldin knew that his disguise was then pointless. As the fighter's sword went up, Teldin took a defensive stance with his sword, and he felt his features return involuntarily to their original shapes. The Shou, he thought. They had the chance to be our allies. Now this. Just another obstacle keeping me from Cwelanas.

  "Come on," Teldin said. "Let's get this over with. I have neogi to kill."

  "Don't count on it," the masked fighter said, and he leaped toward Teldin, his sword a rapid blur of flashing steel.

  As Djan locked into combat with his own assailant, Teldin parried and thrust up, blocking the Shou fighter's overhead thrust. The two warriors met with a ringing of steel, their blades locked together above their heads. The Shou lashed out with a foot and knocked one leg out from under Teldin. The blades disengaged. Teldin ducked under the Shou's blade and swung his sword out, to be thrust aside effortlessly. The Shou laughed.

  Around him, Teldin's warriors were battered by the onslaught of the Shou. Djan successfully blocked the efforts of his opponent, but the contest was evenly matched between them. Despite the arrival of CassaRoc's lead warriors, the Shou fighters were expert in hand-to-hand combat and fought with a speed that Teldin found amazing. Half of his squad was already unconscious or bleeding, and the remaining Shou doubled up on his other warriors.

  The leader, it appeared, had reserved Teldin for himself.

  The Shou danced around Teldin with the practiced air of a panther toying with its prey. His sword flicked out to nick Teldin countless times on his cheeks and arms.

  Anger built within Teldin like the white-hot flames of a gnomish furnace. His companions were falling around him, even as more of CassaRoc's warriors arrived.

  He felt the familiar, cold-hot tingle of energy surround him like an enveloping blanket. Time seemed to slow; the fighter swung his sword with ever-decreasing speed, until it seemed to almost stop just a few inches from Teldin's face.

  Then Teldin swung up with his sword. A shower of sparks erupted from the weapons' impact, then Teldin kicked out and sent the Shou fighter sprawling across the deck.

  Slowly, the fighter sprang up, fury glinting in his dark eyes.

  The cloak whipped around Teldin like a thing alive. The fighter pounced, his hands and feet cocked in
positions of attack.

  Then Teldin screamed inside. The cloak spread out, and whirling shurikens of pure energy shot out from the coruscating lining of the cloak. One star impaled the Shou in the palm of a hand; another burned deep into a thigh. The shurikens found their targets all across the fighter's body, in his torso, his arms. Wherever they hit, his flesh and clothes burned with the white heat of a sun.

  The final shuriken shot out from the cloak like a blazing comet. The Shou assassin went down, a burning crater of smoking, cauterized flesh centered in his forehead. His eyes stared blankly into the endless flow. The energy of the cloak's shurikens faded into wisps of white smoke.

  The remaining Shou fighters paused in midattack as their leader dropped stone dead to the deck. With renewed energy, CassaRoc's men pressed the attack and quickly felled half of them. Djan's opponent fell as a misplaced sword thrust was knocked aside by Djan's practiced block and the sharp point of Djan's blade tasted for the first time the blood of the Shou. Within a minute, the other Shou backed away individually, then decided to make an escape for the comparative safety between the close towers of the citadel region.

  In retreat, the Shou threw their remaining shurikens at Teldin and his men and called out with angry, impotent threats of revenge. The humans' shields effortlessly knocked away the razor-sharp weapons. A dozen bolts shot from the warriors' crossbows, mostly missing their targets as the Shou wove singly through the buildings and disappeared. Two Shou were dropped with clean shots by a pair of Hancherback's halflings.

  The alliance warriors quickly assessed themselves, then started again for the neogi tower. Only a handful of men were lost in the skirmish with the Shou, and Teldin knew-as did CassaRoc the Mighty-that before the war was over, much more Shou blood would be spilled, if not to gain the Spelljammer, then in simple revenge for the ambush upon Teldin and the loss of CassaRoc's men.

  At the entrance to the neogi tower, the humans quickly dispatched the small squad of minotaurs left behind to secure the doors. Then the entrance was pummeled by CassaRoc's heavy battering ram. With a splintering groan, the doors broke open to reveal the darkness inside the neogi tower.

  The fighting became furious as the humans swarmed inside and pressed their foes. The towering ogres inside the entrance chamber numbered about five, the minotaurs about ten. The butchered corpses of neogi and umber hulks littered the floor, together in death with the less numerous corpses of their enemies. Behind them, directing the fighting throughout the building, were five angry beholders. At sight of the assembled humans, the beholders floated quickly through the inner door and disappeared into the central corridor.

  The entrance chamber was taken quickly, as the enemies were dispatched simply by the human alliance's strong numbers. Teldin pressed the attack into the tower's central hallway and ordered squads into each of the tower's six other chambers. "Find the elf!" Teldin shouted. "Bring her to me!"

  The grimy walls, already dark with the spattering of neogi blood, became redder as the humans sliced into the battle between their enemies. Neogi blood pooled innocently with minotaur and ogre, and, inevitably, human.

  Teldin crashed into the tower's most opulent chamber, Coh's study, by kicking open the door with his powerful legs. Inside, four neogi were torturing a beholder, one of the eye tyrants that had fled when the humans attacked the tower.

  Teldin was a blur as he raced between the neogi, lashing out with his sharp sword to cleanly slice through their bony legs, to skewer one neogi through its round belly. The anger was hot in him, and his sword cut through the reptiles with unseen ferocity. Within minutes, three neogi lay dead in pools of their own black blood. The fourth huddled against the wall, blood oozing from twenty shallow wounds across its squat body, one segmented leg dangling helplessly by a shred. The tortured beholder lay dead on the floor, its great eye staring emptily up at its withered eyestalks.

  The Cloakmaster's sword sliced through the air in front of the neogi. The eellike head snapped back in fear. "Coh," Teldin said. "I want him. Where is he?"

  The hostage shot a furtive glance to a large, ornate box resting on a stone pedestal. The neogi began to laugh. "Coh is here not, meat. Shemeat you want taken is. Never will find her you, unless cloak is With a scream of rage, Teldin's sword plunged into the neogi's black neck. It's pointed tongue quivered as the beast gurgled in death and fell limply to the blood-stained floor.

  Teldin examined the beholder the neogi had killed. Its huge eye was glazed over in death, and behind it was an open trapdoor. The Cloakmaster put it together instantly: the other beholders had used the trapdoor to escape-the same secret door Coh had used to smuggle Cwelanas secretly away. He slammed the trapdoor shut and spun around. Perhaps Coh used it to escape, too, he thought.

  Teldin turned and walked over to the decorated box. Its edges were trimmed with gold, and its handle was studded with sapphires. He reached for the hinged door on the front and opened it.

  He stepped back, his mouth open in horror.

  The head that watched him had once been that of a human. The gray skin was stretched across its skull like ancient parchment, and, as Teldin watched, the sunken eyes blinked open. It saw Teldin and spoke to him with a soft voice tinged with both regret and ancient anger.

  "I serve he whom you seek. He has taken the woman into the elven veins, and you will not find her."

  "The veins," Teldin said. "You mean the warrens?"

  "Give him the cloak, or all you love will die."

  Teldin raised his sword. "Why does he want it so? If he gains the cloak, then everyone will die during the Dark Times."

  "You are just as much a fool as my master predicted. This has nothing to do with the Dark Times. The cloak is the key! The cloak is what drew mage B'Laath'a to the Wanderer!

  "The cloak is power incarnate! It is the Spelljammer itself! The Fool has promised-"

  "The Fool?" Teldin shouted. "Coh is in with the Fool? Where is Cwelanas? Tell me!"

  The gray head turned its eyes away, realizing it had already given away too much.

  Teldin shouted once again for answers, but the head would not speak. He screamed in rage. His sword flashed, and he thrust the blade through the zombie's mouth so hard that the steel splintered through the back of the box. The zombie's dead eyes rolled up into its sockets. Then Teldin turned and strode out of the room.

  The tower was theirs. As Teldin had defeated the cowering neogi in Coh's chambers, CassaRoc's warriors and the halfling fighters had overwhelmed the combined forces of the Beholder Alliance. Most of their enemies had escaped, probably to regroup later, but the beholders had done much of the humans' jobs for them, annihilating almost all of the neogi aboard the Spelljammer, even killing the great old master in its dank, bloody pit, along with its few premature hatchlings that had been nurtured inside its belly.

  Teldin approached CassaRoc and Djan and sheathed his sword. "She's gone," Teldin said. "Coh has escaped, into the warr-"

  He stopped suddenly, and his friends turned to watch. A hazy light was forming beside them, glowing reddish at the borders. The men took a step back, brandishing their weapons.

  A shape formed inside the light and faced Teldin. Gaye Goldring appeared before them, still weak from her encounter with the Fool and the rats.

  The warriors in the neogi tower stopped to see what was happening. Teldin walked toward her.

  "Gaye," he said, unaware that her appearance was an astral projection, "are you really here?"

  1 must warn you, Teldin, she said suddenly, of the Fool and his plans for the Spelljammer. He wants nothing less than complete control. He wants you Her telepathic voice seemed to strangle, and the room became dimmer, as though the light were being absorbed.

  Darkness flickered around her, and three gray shapes formed around her, swirling out from dark cyclones of smoke. The room grew cold, and the warriors covered their ears as a wind sprang from nowhere, chilling them with an unnatural wail.

  The shapes floated toward Gaye, their dark
arms outstretched, surrounding her. Simultaneously, another shape appeared behind her, swirling with gray smoke, howling a scream of undying pain and rage that made several warriors fall to their knees.

  The humans covered their ears at the cold pain that flooded through them. Teldin immediately reached out for the kender.

  At once, Gaye and the apparitions disappeared before his eyes, an expression of terror frozen on her face as the undead closed on her.

  The room was silent as the screams faded around them.

  "That-that was a banshee," Djan said. "Very, very bad.

  Teldin stared at where the kender had vanished.

  "Gaye," he said softly. "Gaye."

  Chapter Nineteen

  "… And, lo, the loculus shall remain even though I be lost in the Red Chamber. My spells are powerful and will last far longer than I. The Historie will be available until the end of things, waiting for the Son of the Architects to claim it as his own…"

  Neridox, librarian; journal 1009; reign of Jokarin.

  The secret passageway the beholders had discovered in Coh's quarters led to a concealed exit across from the hulk tower. As the humans took the neogi tower and the fighting on the Spelljammer escalated between the races, the surviving ' beholders plunged into the tunnel and made their escape. The hidden exit opened near the beholder ruins, directly across from the neogi tower.

  Once the beholders were inside, the monarch, Gray Eye, called for a war conference and quickly assessed the casualties. Two beholders had fallen: one to the four neogi, captured during the escape from the attacking humans, and the other, snapped in two by the powerful jaws of the neogi great old master as it thrashed mindlessly in hatred at its attackers. One beholder had lost an eyestalk to an umber hulk, and then, in anger, had ordered the ogre allies to dismember the hulk instandy.

  Gray Eye's eyestalks twitched visibly in rage. The leader's ioun stones circled him crazily, reflecting his volcanic temper. "Our primary enemies are defeated," Gray Eye told the survivors. "We were victorious, and our alliance has served its urpose: to do our warring for us, with a minimum of casualties to the beholders.