Plague of Spells

by Bruce R Cordell

He blinked and turned away. He would find no answers here.

  But Starmantle’s skyline tugged at his thoughts, unearthing a memory of his daughter, Ailyn.

  “Oh,” he gasped. The shock of his awakening had robbed him of why he’d set forth from Starmantle … how long ago? A mortal fear for Ailyn’s safety squeezed all the breath out of his chest.

  “I must go to Nathlekh,” he whispered.

  A screech snatched his attention back to the demolished city. A humanoid figure bounded up from the nearest blue-burning fissure. Three more gibbering figures appeared over the ravine’s lip as the first saw Raidon. It gabbled something that almost sounded like, “I told you I smelled supper,” and charged.

  It was naked. Its flesh was drawn tightly over its bones. A carnivore’s sharp teeth clacked in its mouth, and eyes like hot coals fixed on Raidon, communicating a ravenous appetite so pure it was nearly mystical.

  A ghoul?

  A seam on the charging creature’s stomach opened, revealing a gaping, toothed cavity. A tentacle-like tongue emerged from the abdominal mouth, flicking like a purple flame.

  It was not a ghoul, or at least not completely. It was something aberrant.

  As Raidon fell into the left guarding stance, unexpected coolness tickled his chest. A quick glance down revealed the symbol upon his chest flickering with empyreal flame.

  Surprise ambushed him, nearly distracting him from heeding his attacker.

  The creature was upon him. Melting from guarding stance to offensive stance, Raidon caught a clawing strike with his left hand, pulled the arm diagonally forward and down, and delivered a hammer blow to the back of the creature’s elbow with his right fist. The ghoul-like monster screamed with both mouths. Its right arm now flexed loosely from the elbow, the joint shattered.

  The monster’s two compatriots rapidly approached. Their abdominal maws drooled and gibbered like the first’s. Raidon retained his hold on his foe’s broken arm. He twisted his body around, tripping the creature with a foot, and hurled its body into the oncoming attackers.

  One of the two newcomers was slow to dodge Raidon’s contrived missile. It stumbled and went down in a tangle of limbs. They began to writhe and thrash, clawing and biting each other.

  The final creature paused. Its eyes gleamed as it studied the monk. Blood, not its own, darkened its cheeks and chin. Its lower, abdominal mouth chomped and writhed, and grinding noises issued from it. Raidon glimpsed something white and red inside being chewed.

  “Hunger does not rule me as it does my brothers,” the creature crooned in an awful, piping tenor. “I just ate.”

  It could speak! Could it explain what had occurred? His normal rule of avoiding all interaction with abominations was suborned by his need to learn.

  Raidon clenched his fists and demanded, “What happened here?”

  The creature cocked its head and blinked. It was obviously taken aback by its prey’s lack of fear. It responded, “We have selected you to be our meal.”

  “No, no. Tell me, what happened to Starmantle? How much time has passed since the blue fire came? I woke encased in—”

  The creature tittered, “You are soft in the brain? Scream and run, as food should. Trouble me not with memories of the Spellplague!”

  “Spellplague? What is that?”

  The creature growled, turned, and swept its arm past the grappling, biting forms of its “brothers” to Starmantle’s skyline. “The Spellplague was the blue fire that came when the Weave failed. Pockets of it still live here. It is a fire that eats all things. Like a ghoul!” It wheezed in something like laughter.

  “A blue fire that eats?” prompted Raidon. He remembered his compatriots and stones alike burning away in the fiery blast that preceded his long darkness.

  “Some things the blue fire consumed, leaving nothing behind. Other things, it ate, then spat back, different than before … plaguechanged.”

  Raidon took in the warped landscape and the warped creature. He asked, “Is that what happened to you?” Raidon gestured at the creature’s abdominal maw.

  It tittered again. “Maybe … maybe not,” it replied. It huffed with amusement as if recalling a funny story, but this one it refrained from sharing. Then the ghoul pointed at Raidon’s bare chest. “But you! You are spellscarred, yes? You hold back some trick to surprise me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The image of the firestorm branding him with the Cerulean Sign swam before Raidon’s inner eye. The coolness on his chest increased. It wasn’t painful—it was more like the feeling when the sun moves behind a cloud … or like the coolness of his amulet when it detected enemies it was forged to destroy.

  The creature tittered, then said, “Spellscarred or not, you are made of meat. It wouldn’t do to let a sack of blood and meat wander off untasted.”

  The creature lunged. The monk reflexively extended one leg in a buffer-kick intended to keep his opponent at bay long enough for Raidon to follow up with a real attack.

  He had only a moment to understand his mistake when his foot plunged directly into the gaping, abdominal mouth.

  The mouth began to chew. Pain, the worst he’d ever experienced, exploded up his leg. He nearly cried out.

  Raidon jerked savagely, trying to retract his foot. The abdominal maw’s tentacle-tongue whipped up around his calf, holding him fast. The white teeth within the cavity mashed and clacked, and red fluid bubbled and spilled forth. Was that all his blood?

  The ghoul’s head snapped forward, its real mouth hardly any less horrid than the one trapping the monk’s foot. It struck at Raidon’s throat.

  The monk’s rising uppercut smashed teeth and jolted the creature’s head away. Raidon wouldn’t be overcome so easily.

  The creature savagely jerked on his leg with its clutching tentacle, pulling his leg farther into its abdominal cavity. His foot, calf, knee, and lower thigh … how could it be? His whole lower leg was inside the thing, and the questing tentacle began to wrap around his thigh. More reddish fluid spilled forth in thin, steaming rivulets. How could his foot and calf fit inside the gaunt monster? Had it bitten off his lower leg? Queasiness clawed at Raidon’s focus.

  Agony poured up his nerves, making his arms quiver and his head ring. Would it hurt so abominably if his leg were already unattached? He desperately hoped the ghoul was bigger on the inside than its shape suggested.

  The chill on Raidon’s chest intensified. Without quite knowing why, he lay his left palm across the symbol blazoned there. A snap, and contact was made. Cerulean energy poured into him. It was the energy his amulet once lent him in the presence of aberrations.

  A sky blue gleam shone from his body. It seemed the Cerulean Sign etched on his chest was more than a mere tattoo.

  It was alive with the old power of his amulet.

  His touch awakened it.

  The symbol emanated the cleansing light he had once been able to invoke from his destroyed amulet. The Sign embodied the purity of the natural world. It was anathema to aberrations.

  The ghoul’s eyes widened as its horrible, abdominal tongue retracted. The cavity spat Raidon’s leg out with such force that he fell to the ground.

  His foot remained attached. “Thank Xiang,” muttered Raidon. The thing’s second mouth was bigger on the inside than the outside. But strips of skin were absent from his extremity, dissolved away as if by acid, revealing red and oozing muscle.

  It was the most serious wound Raidon had ever received. But his mind passed over that particular realization to consider what he’d just invoked, unaided.

  He had become his amulet. The energy pouring “into” him issued from him. Raidon grasped his focus, visualizing his mind and body again as lines of flashing energy. The glimmer of blue he had earlier observed blazed cerulean at its heart. At its edges, it burned the wilder, darker blue hue of the Spellplague. Had the firestorm he’d survived … had it infused him with his amulet’s power? If so, why was its cerulean color contaminated—

>   The ghoul-thing smashed into him, bearing him to the ground. Raidon blinked away his untimely retrospection too late. The creature’s claws and both mouths tore at his flesh. It panted, “I don’t like your taste. Maybe you’ll taste better dead.”

  A thumb to the creature’s eye and a knee to its side did little to dislodge the ghoul. A crushing elbow directly to the creature’s throat cut short its constant, maddening titter. That blow would have killed a mortal man outright.

  The ghoul-thing was undead, and its nerves did not communicate messages of pain. Raidon struggled in its grasp, his breath coming quicker. The monk’s deep knowledge of how to attack vital areas, like pressure points, joints, and organs, was almost useless against the walking dead.

  He squirmed right, trying get out from under the crushing weight, then shucked left, hoping to fake out the creature. The ghoul’s tongue-tentacle held the scrabbling monk fast.

  Raidon was pinned on his back. The creature’s disgusting, abdominal jaws gave it an unholy advantage, and the pain in his leg was slipping more and more into his consciousness, threatening to cripple his ability to seize the initiative. Even as he inched one hand toward the sign on his chest, the ghoul managed to grab his wrist. It quickly snatched his other wrist too. Its claws bit painfully into his palms.

  It tittered, “No, you mustn’t touch! Hold still, now, while I nibble the skin from your face.”

  Raidon’s focus faltered. Concentrate! Hold onto your calm, or you are lost, he commanded his wavering discipline. But what chance did he have if he could not reach the symbol?

  If I have the power of my amulet, what need have I to touch it to trigger it? Wasn’t he always in contact with it, since it was part of himself?

  He concentrated on the cool point above his heart. The symbol of a dead order. The Cerulean Sign. He imagined himself touching it with a tendril of thought. The Sign was a metaphor, an emblem that served as a door, a door Raidon visualized himself swinging wide, revealing wonders beyond …

  The Sign on his chest pulsed. Shafts of cerulean light speared heavenward. Where the light touched the aberration, it howled. Pain was no longer beyond its ability to sense.

  The ghoul’s abdominal tongue retracted, and it writhed and fell away from Raidon. The light from the Sign faded.

  The monk staggered to his feet, shaking and bleeding. Zai zi, he was sorely hurt! If he didn’t tend to his raw foot and lower calf soon, he’d lose his leg, then soon enough his life.

  The ghoul remained prone, writhing and drooling without regard to its environment. Its senses were overloaded, maybe burned out. He’d seen a similar response many times during his decade of abomination hunting. The Sign’s mere manifestation affected weaker aberrations just so. The most powerful aberrations were less affected. Lucky these were not the most potent of their kind …

  A flicker of movement brought Raidon’s attention up and back. The ghoul-thing’s two compatriots had ceased their rivalry. They stared at Raidon and the glowing symbol on his chest with calculating and fearful eyes.

  Despite their trepidation, they advanced.

  They saw the Sign and obviously recognized its potential to eradicate them, but they could also smell his blood. Raidon supposed that smell pierced their sense of self-preservation. For these ghoul-monstrosities, hunger was a drive purer and fiercer than fear.

  They charged.

  The monk cried, “Husks of abominable hunger, see the Cerulean Sign!” His chest blazed anew with sky blue light. Shafts of radiance flashed like blades from his body to lance the attackers.

  One of the ghouls sidestepped the glow, but the other ran headlong into the brilliance. Its eyes shuttered in pain as the purifying radiance dazzled it. It tripped and fell, mewling.

  The second ghoul, oblivious of its “brother’s” fate, reached him. A claw slipped past Raidon’s shielding forearm, slashing directly across the symbol tattooed on his chest.

  The Sign’s radiance instantly failed.

  Raidon fell back, holding his focus. He released a flurry of fierce kicks to the ghoul’s knees even as it clawed and tentacle-lashed him. While the creature couldn’t feel physical pain, its body could be broken with sufficient force. Unfortunately, he couldn’t kick with his ravaged leg.

  Simultaneously, he shuffled left as he dodged, slipped, and blocked the ghoul’s assaults. His adversary was too intent on sinking its teeth into Raidon to worry about the terrain. When the ghoul was in position, Raidon feinted, then pushed. It tripped backward over the ghoul who had nearly bitten off the monk’s leg, who was just rising from its dazed fall.

  Raidon took advantage of the reprieve to glance down at his chest. A bloody stripe bisected the symbol blazoned there. He closed his eyes and dragged forward his healing visualization yet again. There was no time to deal with his foot—but that was the lesser issue now. He concentrated on his upper body. He saw the partially severed lines of his symbol within the greater model of his own body.

  In a manner no different from the method he used to heal other minor hurts, he imagined the severed lines growing closer, bridging the gap, and rediscovering the connection just severed. Coolness returned to his chest. Not as strongly as before, but enough.

  Raidon’s eyes opened. His opponents were already on their feet and advancing.

  He pulsed with cerulean light once more.

  Both creatures screamed when the light touched them. This last radiance proved too much for them. Shrieking and crying, they retreated backward toward the gates of Starmantle.

  His reserves were exhausted. He turned his back on a chilling, rain-laden wind from the north. He looked south toward Gulthmere Forest. Black smoke furled into the sky, and he caught a whiff of burning pine. The already blasted forest was burning, again.

  Without a word, Raidon hobbled west. He wondered which would be the agent of his death: his wound, pursuing Starmantle ghouls, fire, or freezing rain?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR)

  Olleth, Sea of Fallen Stars

  Nogah regarded the Dreamheart with unblinking eyes. She clutched the stone in both webbed hands. A year ago she’d pried it from the earth’s nadir. Since then, she’d not allowed a day to go by that didn’t include spending time with the orb.

  The not-quite-spherical chunk of unfamiliar mineral was her all-encompassing passion. Though unimpressive to the eye, its presence was more than merely physical. It existed on the plane of mind too. There, the Dreamheart was a scintillating font of color, dreams, and possibilities. It was a beacon of power and a literal promise of knowledge and dominance to any kuo-toa with the temerity to take heed and listen.

  Nogah listened. Oh, yes.

  At first the influence was felt only when she slept. Images capered in time to unearthly sounds, nightmarish but also fascinating. But the stone had learned to reach her waking mind too. More and more lately, phantasms of glory visited her while she was fully conscious. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes eerie in their beauty, the visions always left her dazed. It frustrated Nogah that once the visions faded, she couldn’t quite recall their full consequence.

  Subconsciously, she retained more. Sometimes she would inadvertently refer, without the least forethought, to ancient events about which she couldn’t possibly know anything. Only after the words escaped her throat did she pause in surprise, trying to pin down the origin of her own comment. Swirling images of a churning void and atonal vibrations were all she could consciously access.

  Such gaps seemed an easy price to pay for the arcane secrets she slowly teased from the Dreamheart. From these abilities did her own aspirations spring. She imagined Faerûn shaped anew, under kuo-toa sway!

  Of course, many of her too timid compatriots did not yet share her goals. They were too used to the old ways and reliance on old allies. Nogah smirked. Despite themselves, she convinced more and more to her way of thinking. They were beginning to accept the better place kuo-toa deserved in the world. In a world where Nogah would be
transcendent. But first, she must bring all of Olleth to her side.

  The city of Olleth was once a watery realm ruled by spell-savvy morkoth, who called their magocracy the Arcanum of Olleth. These cruel creatures ruled a city built on the labor of slaves. Morkoth slaves included captured individuals of several other aquatic races, including uncivilized locathah and even vicious sahuagin. In their arrogance, the morkoth ambushed a kuo-toa delegation that traveled beneath the Sea of Fallen Stars under a truce vouchsafed by the Sea Mother herself. Half the kuo-toa embassy was slain and eaten, and the survivors were brought to Olleth to serve morkoth masters forevermore.

  The Arcanum erred when it failed to purge the surviving whips from their new contingent of kuo-toa slaves. Whips pledged to the Sea Mother make poor slaves, for their resources are only a prayer away. Within a decade, the Arcanum suffered so many setbacks, uprisings, and disasters, secretly orchestrated by kuo-toa whips both within Olleth and hidden outside the city, that it teetered on the edge of collapse.

  Thus most believe that even in the absence of the Spellplague, when one in three morkoth mages dissolved in blue flashes and the remainder lost their grip on slave-taking spells, Olleth would have fallen to kuo-toa anyway. Regardless, in the aftermath of that day, the kuo-toa rose up and claimed the city for themselves.

  Surviving morkoth of Olleth were purged, though a few escaped. Other creatures were allowed to remain, slaves still, beholden to new masters. The kuo-toa of Olleth called out to their kin, and so it was that kuo-toa came to the Sea of Fallen Stars in large numbers for the first time. Of the Arcanum, only bitter memories remained, as well as a few morkoth specimens preserved in pickling fluid to remind future kuo-toa generations of their past trials.

  Nogah wondered how the old morkoth Arcanum would have reacted if they had found the Dreamheart?

  They would have pursued the very stratagem Nogah had chosen, she supposed, and probably more successfully. They would not have had to put up with resistance among their fellows, who feared breaking tradition more than anything else. The Arcanum hadn’t been tied to the dogma of a progenitor god like the kuo-toa were.