Key of Stars

by Bruce R Cordell

The approaching swimmers had already halved the distance. Though still mostly hidden beneath the waves, Thoster knew what they were: kuo-toa. He also knew there were many, many more than the few dozen he could see along the surface.

  Crew swarmed the railing around Thoster. Most had their swords and axes drawn, but a few fired crossbow bolts into the swell of the approaching tide. The bolts struck the frothing water with no apparent effect.

  “Don’t waste your shots!” Thoster yelled. “Wait until they breach!”

  He drew his venomous blade. Its cunning gears immediately began to spin and click, pulling poison from the ever-full reservoirs hidden in the hilt.

  The kuo-toa reached the ship and swarmed up the sides.

  Ten or twelve attackers fell back into the waves, crossbow bolts buried in their heads, necks, or chests. But others leapt from the water to take the place of the fallen. The kuo-toa gave voice to a wordless chant that prickled Thoster’s spine. It was the same melody as the one emanating from Xxiphu.

  The second wave of climbers reached the railing, and nearly as one, the crew slashed, stabbed, and clubbed the boarders. A dozen more kuo-toa fell back into the water. Scarlet threads of blood spread through the lapping waves.

  A crewman screamed as a kuo-toa harpoon skewered him through the chest. The attacker wrenched the harpoon, pulling the crewman forward over the rail. The man yelled again before he hit the water. Thoster kept his eyes on the spot where the man had gone under, even as he dispatched two boarders with his sword. The crewman didn’t surface again.

  A yell pulled his attention to the ship’s port side. A separate wave of kuo-toa poured over the railing there, unopposed. The damn things had surrounded Green Siren!

  “ ’Ware behind you!” he screamed at his crew. Their attention was fully occupied with the initial boarders, who’d apparently served merely as a distraction.

  Thoster swept his sword through three more starboard attackers, then charged across the deck to a wedge of spear-wielders who’d come over on the port side. The kuo-toa hissed and cried out in a disturbing language whose slick consonants made him queasy. He didn’t know the words, but … The sounds were hauntingly familiar.

  He growled and engaged the lead kuo-toa. It was more proficient than the ones he’d already dispatched, damn it all. The two sides of the wedge continued to move forward, attempting to wrap and surround him!

  A kuo-toa on his flank shoved a spear into Thoster’s left hip.

  “Umberlee’s lying lips!” he said.

  He took a step back, but his sword found the throat of an attacker. The creature blackened with poison and fell, but another kuo-toa immediately stepped into the gap.

  Thoster tried to take another step, but the smooth curve of the mainsail ended his retreat. At least they couldn’t get behind him, he thought.

  The exclamations of his crew grew more desperate. Thoster couldn’t spare a moment to assess the situation. It was all he could do to keep the five creatures pressing him from sliding something sharp into his viscera.

  Then the kuo-toa on his right spit up blood and dropped. A sheen of light briefly illuminated … something standing behind it.

  The creature next to it turned to see what happened to its comrade, but before it could complete its motion, it screamed. It joined the first on Green Siren’s deck. The same sparkle of golden light hinted at an invisible presence.

  “Anusha?” the captain said, and plunged his sword through one of the remaining confused kuo-toa.

  Yet another of his attackers shrieked and fell.

  “None other!” came the woman’s voice from an empty point in space.

  The combined effort of his poisonous blade and her invisible one broke the wedge of attackers into so many unmoving fishy corpses.

  The deck vibrated beneath his boots an instant before Yeva appeared from the doorway leading to the ship cabins. Four milling kuo-toa rushed her. She glanced in their direction. A corona briefly flared into an elaborate pattern of light haloing her head, and two of the four tumbled and lay still.

  The other two didn’t flinch. One stabbed Yeva in the stomach; its spear broke on her metal body. The other tried to run past her through the door, but she stopped it cold with an iron punch to the face.

  “Why are the kuo-toa attacking us, Captain?” said Anusha’s voice.

  He shrugged. “They’re babbling something, but I ain’t proficient in fish talk,” he said, grabbing his amulet.

  When he touched it, his sense of the ethereal music sleeting through his head faded, and the chant the creatures uttered lost its familiarity. But something in him was kin to the fatherless biters, and both Anusha and he knew it. She did him the courtesy of not pursuing the issue.

  Another wave of kuo-toa swept over the railings on both the port and starboard sides simultaneously.

  “How many are there?” Yeva yelled.

  “Too many,” he said. “Yeva, you and Anusha are worth five of my crew put together. Hold ’em off the port side. I’ll help the lads keep starboard clear.”

  He swept into the press, wielding his sword like a scythe; with it, he reaped.

  But no matter how many kuo-toa they killed, more leaped out of the water. Their awful, lisping chant, voiced nearly as one, was thick in the air. The words tugged at him, urging him to accept some terrible insight. Part of him wanted to look. Most of him wanted to turn tail and run the other way.

  Thoster’s shadow reached out across the deck for an instant as thunder cracked, too close.

  He whirled and saw Yeva lying unmoving, face down. Her metal skin glowed a dull red. Where her body touched the deck, wood smoldered.

  Two kuo-toa with elaborate headdresses and brandishing pincer spears stood near the fallen woman. Residual sparks of electricity danced between them. They reminded him of the priestess Nogah, whose strange message had pulled him into the mess in the first place. If those two shared anything like the power Nogah had been able to command, Green Siren was in trouble.

  Kuo-toa stampeded through the doorway Yeva had guarded, into the crew cabins.

  “They’ll find my luggage!” came Anusha’s voice.

  She briefly materialized, resplendent in golden armor. She hewed into the rear flank of the creatures swarming the cabinway.

  “Here! This way!” she yelled. “I’m right here!”

  A few of the boarders turned to engage her. Most didn’t.

  The anxiety fluttering in his stomach redoubled. Green Siren was being swamped beneath a horde whose numbers seemed endless. If ten or twenty kuo-toa appeared for every defender, the ship would be lost no matter how much power he, Yeva, or Anusha could bring to bear individually. And Yeva didn’t look like she was part of the fight any longer. Anusha might soon follow; if she wasn’t able to defend her body, her phantom self would be snuffed out too.

  He had to do something. But he was terrified to try.

  “You’d rather be dead?” he muttered to himself as he pushed his sword into the stomach of a kuo-toa trying to do the same to him with its spear. His enemy curled into a knot of unmoving scales.

  With his shaking free hand, Thoster grabbed his amulet. He jerked hard, parting the leather strand securing it around his neck. He dropped it into a jacket pocket.

  The ethereal music resolved to a symphony of dire portent and crystal-clear meaning. The chant of the kuo-toa sounded in nearly perfect accompaniment. The kuo-toa were indeed set to guard the ocean beneath the hovering city of Xxiphu.

  With his mind now naked to the penetrating emanation, Thoster was commanded to do the same.

  “No,” he said. “I am Eneas Thoster. I am slave to no one!”

  The clamor of Xxiphu’s melody redoubled. He resisted the authority the music tried to assert over him. It did not have the right. Xxiphu was claiming dominion where it should have none. And Thoster wasn’t going to stand for it.

  His fear turned suddenly to anger.

  Something inside him reacted. Like a burning taper set to a pile
of oil-soaked tinder, rage flared in his chest. It filled him up like waves fill a bay at stormcrest. It was intoxicating. His eyes and mouth popped wide, and he screamed out a challenge. His voice was louder and deeper than was humanly possible, but he was too caught up in the surge of his fury to marvel at the volume.

  His wrath burned away his wall of denial. Time to stop hiding from himself.

  He was of kuo-toa lineage.

  Denying it was a childish pursuit. Because, he suddenly understood, the blood that flowed in his veins was akin to the scaly forms that surged around him, but … it was also more potent. There was a strength in him that the kuo-toa around him lacked.

  He reached for that strength, and it fitted itself to him like a comfortable pair of gauntlets.

  His shadow wavered on the deck, seeming to inflate for a moment before becoming his own shape again.

  Thoster’s gaze fell upon the two kuo-toa wielding lightning. They stared back at him. Their confident grip on their pincer spears grew slack in confusion.

  One spoke. Her voice slurred as it attempted Common. “What … What is this? Who are you … Should we know you?”

  Thoster didn’t have an answer for her.

  Anusha’s form wavered into existence once again, convulsing. It disappeared in a puff of golden light. A scream, Anusha’s physical, fleshy scream, echoed down the crowded cabinway. The invaders had found her sleeping body. Time was up.

  He bellowed out a command of his own. “Stop your attack!” He felt his voice partly reaching into that same mental plane in which Xxiphu’s mental command reverberated.

  All around him, kuo-toa paused.

  Thoster raised both hands over his head, the palms spread wide. A vibrancy tingled beneath his skin, a feeling of freedom that, for the first time, didn’t terrify him. He wanted to see what he truly was.

  Time for worry was long past. He channeled all the power surging through him into his voice. “Leave these waters, kuo-toa!” he called. “By the right of my blood, which I share with you, listen to me! Forsake this false idol, lest it command you to your doom.”

  His last word hung in the air and in the ethereal space beyond hearing like the tolling of a cathedral bell. His shadow enlarged once more for the length of a heartbeat. When the sound finally died away, Thoster slumped to the decking, utterly wrung out.

  But he was grinning from ear to ear. Across the entire ship, kuo-toa turned from their onslaught. One by one, they returned to the Sea of Fallen Stars.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

  Feywild

  Taal strode across a vista of bare rock, jagged boulders, and the occasional stunted tree. Malyanna went before him, silhouetted by the golden illumination that rimmed the approaching horizon. The black hound Tamur slipped in and out of the shadows at the periphery of his vision.

  They were leaving the Watch on Forever’s Edge behind. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be giddy at the prospect.

  A thought occurred to him.

  “My lady,” he said, “Why do we travel by long roads when your shadow beast could whisk us through shadow to our destination in an instant?”

  “The roads we must ultimately travel are broken, and lie tangled in half-meshed demiplanes,” the eladrin noble said. “Even routes through shadow would prove laborious, since Tamur has never physically visited the site we seek.”

  “I see,” said Taal, even though he didn’t, really. What did it matter? The Edge dropped farther and farther into the darkness behind them, while ahead, the trees grew thicker, the light more glorious, and the sense of desolation lighter.

  Finally they topped a rise, and looked down into a valley verdant with growth, ringing with bird song, and brightened by slanting beams of sunlight. Tears welled in his eyes.

  Fireflylike motes of brilliance darted on gusts of cool wind. Falls in the far distance were a thread of silver that plunged down from majestic cliffs. The land was effervescent and alive, filled with a vigor that burned in every blade of grass, every tree leaf, and even in the towering white clouds that loomed above in the sky.

  “Faerie,” he said, his throat tight.

  “Just so,” Malyanna replied.

  “Where do we go from here?” he asked.

  “From here—Oh!” she cried.

  Malyanna clutched her temple. “Something’s happening. Tamur!” she said.

  The hound looked up from the root tangle of a large tree it was sniffing. Its ears twitched. Its tail was curled down and its ears laid back. The dog did not like the Feywild. It slunk over to Malyanna.

  “To the observation balcony, Tamur,” the woman said. “The last one we visited. As quick as you can!”

  The great dog lifted its head in the air, sniffed, then padded down the slope to where the ground was broken with several jutting rocks. Malyanna and Taal followed.

  “What is it?” asked Taal.

  The eladrin noble ignored him.

  As Tamur drew closer to the stones, their shadows lengthened and deepened. The mastiff passed into the dimness.

  Taal followed Malyanna into the stone’s murky shade.

  Cold whispered against his neck.

  From within the boulder’s shadow, the stone seemed like a hole in the Feywild itself. Tamur stepped through, and they followed.

  Beyond lay a shifting corridor of gloom.

  Taal’s boots sunk a few inches with each step into the floor. The air was as cold and as still as a winter’s night. Taal’s breath steamed, though Tamur’s and Malyanna’s did not.

  He’d wondered, having seen Malyanna and the mastiff fade into shadow on more occasions than he could count, what they experienced. And he knew it for what it was: a bleak, cold path with nothing to recommend it except speed of travel.

  They followed the sniffing hound down the interminable corridor for what must have been at least a bell, maybe two. So much for speed …

  When the cold threatened to become unbearable, he called upon the power of his totem. A layer of warmth, like invisible tiger fur, formed around him.

  When the corridor ended, Taal was unprepared. One moment he trudged through shadow. The next, he was standing on a roofed stone balcony overlooking a stormy seascape from a staggering height. His totem yowled in sudden, tense warning. Wherever they were, it wasn’t a safe place.

  At least it wasn’t as cold … though the tang of brine and rotting fish wrinkled his nose.

  Malyanna rushed to the curblike railing and looked over. He joined her. The moment he did so, he knew why his totem had cried warning. He was standing on a balcony of what could only be the aboleth city of Xxiphu.

  His gaze fell down the side of a clifflike drop: Xxiphu’s exterior face. Terrible images were carved on the age-worn exterior, depicting thousands of interconnected images he couldn’t quite comprehend. Some inscriptions flowed and changed their shape.

  The city’s base was lodged in the foot of a snow-topped mountain. No … that wasn’t what he was really seeing. It was a cloud top! Xxiphu rode the storm face like an observation tower. And miles lower yet stretched the dappled surface of the Sea of Fallen Stars.

  Taal’s head threatened to spin, but iron discipline proved his anchor. He avoided showing any visible reaction.

  Malyanna stabbed a finger down toward the water. “It’s that ship, Green Siren! Always meddling!”

  Taal narrowed his eyes, searching. He saw a dot trailing a hair-thin wake almost lost in the glare off the sea. Was that it? The speck didn’t seem especially threatening from their position.

  “I divined no one would have the stomach to continue opposing me,” the eladrin noble continued, “but they found determination somewhere. Fools. I should have made a greater effort to destroy them instead of letting them flee.”

  “What, they think to enter Xxiphu again now that it’s partly roused?” he said.

  She swung around to glare at him. “Who knows?” she replied. “I hope they do; they’ll find many more aboleths
awake this time! But they’ve disrupted the Calling.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Ancient bloodlines, touched ages ago by the aboleths, yet live and breed on Faerûn,” Malyanna explained. “Xxiphu can command their loyalty by calling in the debts of their dead ancestors. Somehow, someone on that craft severed what I set in motion days ago. Japheth, I expect. I wonder …”

  “Yes?” Taal said.

  “Why hasn’t the Lord of Bats slain him yet?”

  Taal had no answer.

  Malyanna leaned farther over the curb and studied the point, her eyes narrowed with concentration. Taal asked for sharpness of eyesight from his totem. The dot instantly enlarged, becoming a ship in truth. He saw figures on deck, but they were too far away to make out as individuals. None had the dark clothing and milk-colored skin he associated with the Lord of Bats.

  “Perhaps he grew tired of the chase?” Taal said.

  “Or they slew him,” she said, shrugging. “Anyhow, if Green Siren is here, I can leave to retrieve the Key of Stars unopposed. The pretend Keeper who sought to bind the Eldest in the crown chamber, or Japheth with his Dreamheart-sworn pact, will count for nothing once I have the Key.”

  Before Taal could ask what Malyanna meant by “pretend Keeper,” his attention was drawn to a shadow on a nearby cloud. He shifted his gaze and couldn’t restrain a gasp.

  A kraken writhed through the air, no more then a hundred yards from the balcony. One dinner-plate eye fixed on Taal as it passed. He shuddered and looked away.

  The eladrin paid the swooping horror only a passing glance. “Tamur! Take us to the Forest of Moths,” she said.

  A lane of shadow whisked them away from the hovering atrocity called Xxiphu.

  The darkling road deposited them in the middle of a thousand birdsongs. Trills, coos, and shrill whistles resounded through the living, bark-wrapped pillars enclosing them, all of which glowed with a silver radiance. The trees supported layer upon layer of mounting canopy. Breaks in the canopy revealed stars in a vast darkness. They were at least as grand as the stars of Taal’s long vanished youth.