Plague of Spells

by Bruce R Cordell

  She blinked away fruitless comparisons and dead memories. The Sea Mother’s creed would crumble soon enough, and she would usher in a new age of greatness.

  Nogah rose from the lounging pool. She retained her hold on the Dreamheart with both hands. For all her familiarity with the relic, it remained an awkward size.

  Rivulets of clear water trailed on the tile behind her as she moved from her quarters to the outermost chamber of her hall.

  There, under a great dome, her growing congregation would hear Nogah speak, as they had done for many previous tendays. Today, Nogah thought, I will show them something so extraordinary their souls will be mine forever.

  An audience was already gathering in the chamber, some murmuring in anticipation, others looking timid and uncertain. Many she recognized, but as with most days, she saw several new faces too, who’d heard rumors of her sermons. There were even a few sullen locathah. Word of Nogah’s creed was spreading. Soon enough, she’d have to find a larger place to conduct these gatherings. She’d already moved three times to accommodate the growing crowds. This spacious hall, half submerged under a mother-of-pearl dome, was located at the very periphery of Olleth.

  Nogah’s popularity grew despite her excommunication. The disruptions following the Year of Blue Fire were ongoing, and theocratic control over the city was still unsteady. On the other hand, things were much better than they had been a decade earlier, when random outbreaks of spell-plague might suddenly ignite and burn away a kuo-toa or mutate him into a monster. Nogah’s timing couldn’t have been better.

  When she began preaching her new creed, the church stripped Nogah of her status as a whip of the Sea Mother. Nogah’s ability to utter prayers in the Sea Mother’s name failed. They thought her helpless. They moved to strip her of life and limb too. But the Dreamheart trumped their power. Nogah’s doctrine proved stronger that day. She had killed two whips with the power of the relic and sent the remaining priest fleeing from her hall.

  The Sea Mother’s influence was on the wane, while Nogah’s strength was bolstered by a power more ancient! Her flukes warmed just to think of it. Her growing power emanated from the Dreamheart, or at least, was channeled by the stone from some strange, grim source.

  The corpses of the three additional kuo-toa whips who’d returned later to slay her for blasphemy were proof enough that Nogah’s claim of approaching transcendence was no idle boast.

  These stories and other similar accounts of Nogah’s defiance were galvanizing interest in her sermons. She couldn’t have planned it better if she’d tried.

  The ex-whip walked out onto a dimly lit dais beneath the humid dome, buffeted by hundreds of kuo-toa voices immersed in excited speculation. Only a few saw her.

  “My children,” Nogah said to the gathered crowd. They quieted instantly.

  “My children, you have come to hear the truth. The truth! After a lifetime of lies, you deserve to know.”

  Whispers skirted the chamber’s periphery. Illumination began to leak away, but around Nogah, the light intensified like approaching dawn.

  Nogah continued, “I, like you, also believed the lies. I believed them so much, I entered the service of the Sea Mother. Like many of you, I was willing to sacrifice everything to her, regardless of the cost to myself. It was our way! How could I do otherwise?”

  Eager murmurs rippled through the throng, reflecting off the knee-deep, clear water that filled the chamber. It was almost completely dark, even to kuo-toa senses. But Nogah shone like a star come to earth. Their attention was rapt upon her; she could feel their combined gazes like a caress.

  Despite the sermons being declared taboo by the hierarchy of Olleth, the curious still found her. After all, what other kuo-toa had ever disregarded the commands of the combined opinion of the Sea Mother’s whips with such impunity without being immediately expunged?

  But she commanded their attention with more than spectacle; as Nogah spoke, she leached subtle dream magic from the relic she clutched like a talisman, and broadcast it into the receptive mind of every creature present.

  “I, like you, accepted my lot. Even as a whip of the Sea Mother, I was below Her notice. To Her, I was as a slug—useful, barely, but worth not one bit of regard. I gave Her my undying attention and service. In return, She gave … what?”

  A twitter of angry voices sparked in answer across the darkened audience.

  Nogah interrupted, “Nothing! Nothing but more demands, still more commands for sacrifice. I obeyed, for what could I do? What could you do?”

  Nogah raised the Dreamheart over her head. The light around her shone twice as bright from the relic. Twisting and twining strands of radiance burst out of the stone to extend up and over the heads of the audience.

  “I have an answer for you.”

  A sound, low and rumbling, began to beat from the relic, like a dead heart shocked and stuttering back to life.

  Nogah spoke, “You have a choice. Will you stay shackled to the Sea Mother and Her stagnant servitors, or leave Her behind? A new way beckons, right here, right now! I offer you a new vision to pursue. If you pledge yourself to me, your sacrifices and service will not go unrewarded.”

  She shouted over a murmur of protest, “Instead, you will be exalted! Come with me and find a new future. Even now, I can feel the current change. I am ascendant! I am the handmaiden of an ancient strength that begins, even now, to turn its attention back to the world it so long forgot.”

  With a performer’s flourish, Nogah released her grip on the Dreamheart. It did not fall. It was as steady in the air as a stone resting on solid earth. Then it began to ascend as the light emerging from it became elongated strands of swaying light. The relic reached a central position in the chamber and paused. The lashing tendrils of light grew ever longer and more elaborate, while the beat of its thunderous, repeating note thudded ever louder. The hearts of all those present began to synch to the overpowering, pelagic beat.

  Nogah screamed, “Behold!” Her voice was amplified, not drowned, by the crashing noise.

  “There lies a realm, beyond ours, of purity and power! A place where thought becomes action, and death is just another concept, mutable as a lie. The gods, jealous of their own power, have long blocked mortals from this land beyond all other places. But not all knowledge of it is lost. Here and there, portions of that outlying realm touch the world. Where such contact occurs, reality itself is blessed! When the touch persists, great wonders can be evoked!”

  The self-styled handmaiden of the Dreamheart gestured and concentrated. The weaving strands of light swirled into a massive braid. A braid with a bulge at the center, where the Dreamheart was cupped in the tendrils of its own creation.

  The braid rotated and pulsed in the air, like a gorged serpent slowly digesting a recent meal.

  The bulge at the braid’s center pulsed in time to the throbbing boom, expanding with each beat. The multicolored threads suddenly convulsed and unraveled, revealing the cavity it had grown within it. Of the Dreamheart, there was no sign. Instead there was a featureless expanse of pale radiance, like moonlight seen from behind a cloud, radiance so old that it should have failed long ago, but persevered.

  “Look you well—the light falling into your eyes is older than all the light in the world, older than birth fires of the gods themselves. Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it glorious? Can’t you feel your mind unravel in wonder in its—”

  A great crash, louder still than the Dreamheart’s pulsing music, broke through Nogah’s ritual of awe. The sound came from above, at the dome’s rear.

  Watery, afternoon light flooded across the startled, blinking audience. The moonlight radiance winked out. The Dreamheart was revealed as an unadorned stone. It dropped like a dead weight into the massed audience. A scream burbled away; the stone crushed the skull of a kuo-toa standing directly below it.

  A strident voice called out from the newborn fissure, “Cease your blasphemy, in the name of the Sea Mother!”

  Half blinded
by the sudden glare, Nogah was still able to pick out the silhouettes of at least two senior whips bedecked in holy battle armor. With them stood the bulky forms of four kuo-toa monitors, warriors trained to fight with nothing but their own bodies since birth.

  The audience screamed with one throat in terror of being found in the company of a blasphemer. Nogah tried to command them to turn on their attackers. But now the shouts of panic easily drowned out her directions. They hadn’t stared into the enchantment she’d prepared long enough for them to fall under her sway. Her long-prepared ritual was undone.

  A wild scramble in the bowl of the dome commenced as her audience sought to escape. Kuo-toa began to lose their lives as they were trampled by their fellows in blossoming panic.

  She’d have to start anew, but she pushed all thoughts of preparations out of her head. All her attention was required to save her scaled hide from the attacking Sea Mother loyalists. Nogah leaped into the audience even as blasts of whip-directed lightning scoured the ground where she stood. The edge of the bolt caught her. She yelped but kept moving. Her natural resistance saved her from most of the bolt’s fury. Still, Nogah knew she couldn’t stand up to many more such blasts.

  The stampeding congregation was like a storm-tossed sea. The attacking whips had closed off the exits! The trapped kuo-toa surged back and forth across the constricted space. Nogah fought through the press of thrashing bodies with Dreamheart-enhanced strength. She trod on more than a few mewling forms already brought low. Even out of contact with the relic, she was able to draw strength from it. Even now her lightning-burned skin healed.

  She savored the thought that her abilities would redouble again when she renewed direct contact with the Dreamheart—

  A flailing finger jabbed her left eye. An elbow clipped her right side. A big, sticky kuo-toa grabbed Nogah around her waist and tried to use her body to lever himself off the floor. His was a hysterical strength; she barely avoided being pulled down. She had to get clear … No. She’d joined the panic for a reason. Despite the dangers of the crush, she had to retrieve the relic. Just another few moments and she would have it.

  The four monitors leaped from the fissure to land amid the screaming kuo-toa commoners. The monitors’ finned hands, feet, knees, and elbows were weapons every bit as lethal as swords and spears. They began killing a path through the crowd toward Nogah, even as she continued to move toward them, or in truth toward what lay between them and herself. The relic cast a shadow on her mind, so that she knew exactly its distance from her.

  What? The Dreamheart was moving! One of the panicked congregation had it. The kuo-toa was using it to batter his way to the left, toward some chimera of safety the idiot imagined he would find there …

  The thief made surprising progress. Actually, not so surprising, Nogah realized. Even unconscious of its true nature, the fellow was energized by the stone. Soon enough, he would make it to the wall. And what then? Perhaps he would unconsciously borrow strength enough from the stone to create an exit.

  The monitors continued to close on her, thinning the crowd with brutal efficiency. If the monitors cared so little about Olleth’s citizens, then the whips still perched on the breach above were probably even now readying another bolt to blast her and any creature around her. They wouldn’t hold back for fear of killing an innocent. And the idiot kuo-toa continued to draw away from Nogah, as if on purpose!

  Nogah mentally reached for the stone, straining the thin connection that remained between them. Through that link she attempted to summon fire.

  The Dreamheart roared with black flame. A piercing scream emerged from the thief an instant before his body flashed away to cinders. The stone fell back to the floor, already cooling.

  The crowd shrank from the cremated residue, creating a buffer. Nogah rushed triumphantly into the space and snatched up the Dreamheart. Her link with the relic resurged. It made her a little giddy. The reunion wasn’t a moment too soon.

  A ray of brilliant green energy burst from the head whip’s pincer staff. Wherever the ray reached, portions of the floor, clothing, and screaming kuo-toa disappeared in puffs of gray dust. The ray touched down some ten or so feet from Nogah, then tracked toward her.

  She sucked energy from the relic, hardening her form against the ravening green ray. When the emerald light touched her, she couldn’t help flinching. Then she smiled. The Dreamheart provided her more than enough strength to withstand the prayers of destruction granted by the Sea Mother. That was the point of her sermons, that she, Nogah, was ascendant. The green ray played over her form as if no more than colored light.

  Nogah decided it was time to show all the kuo-toa of Olleth that Nogah wasn’t to be trifled with. Time to seize the reins of power. Time to call up the relic’s untapped reservoir of energy, more than she had ever tried before.

  The relic still hid most of itself from Nogah, despite her small successes in channeling some of its fringe energies. Every day she learned a little more. For instance, she discovered the relic could command the minds of certain kinds of creatures. Not a tenday ago she had urged the Dreamheart to extrude mental tendrils of influence across the Sea of Fallen Stars. Tendrils seeking creatures of the deep who might be convinced, with the relic’s aid, to do Nogah’s bidding.

  More than one of those questing lines had grown taut since then. Like fishing lines, Nogah knew she had hooked some big ones.

  Now comes the great gamble, she thought. Not knowing exactly what she summoned, Nogah mentally tugged on one of the Dreamheart’s tendrils of influence. As she did so, a name resounded in her mind.

  Gethshemeth.

  The name was familiar …

  Oh.

  Nogah’s recognition nearly severed the summoning tendril of connection. Gethshemeth was a great kraken, a monstrosity of the sea bottom. Truth be told, the kuo-toa of Olleth had hoped Gethshemeth was slain in the Spellplague. The great one had been an ally of the morkoth Arcanum and had no love for the whips for their part in wiping out the former residents of the city.

  Could even the Dreamheart hold Gethshemeth to her wishes?

  Too late for second thoughts. The great kraken was already close, as if anticipating being called. Or, as if the kraken had felt the Dreamheart’s questing tendril days ago and had traveled over the last tenday to investigate the source of the strange flavor in the water …

  “Nogah!” screamed one of the kuo-toa whips, “I see you! Though you struggle like a minnow in the net, we have you now! Give yourself up to the Sea Mother’s just retribution for a blasphemer! Every moment you struggle is another eon your soul shall twine in the Sea Mother’s grotto!”

  Nogah shook her head in negation, almost sadly. She said, “It is your struggle that ends today. If you flee immediately or forswear the Sea Mother here and now, as I have done, perhaps I shall not take your life.”

  Incredulity widened both whips’ already bulbous eyes. One of the monitors, having closed nearly to within striking distance, gave out an involuntary yelp of indignation.

  Then a shadow fell across the whip’s shoulders. It rose from behind them.

  There was a sound like a bursting bladder, and one of the whips was gone.

  Where the sky and light had been visible through the shattered ceiling was now a mountain of undulating, dun-colored flesh. Then came the stench of a thousand rotting fish, and the second whip screamed.

  Gethshemeth had come.

  A tentacle as tall as a tower squirmed into view. The remaining whip brought up his pincer staff and began to scream a prayer of dreadful power. Too late. The tentacle smashed down upon him. A spray of fluids rained down onto the kuo-toa below, whose own screams escalated in pitch.

  Nogah concentrated on the Dreamheart and her connection to Gethshemeth. She sensed the kraken’s powerful mind through the link. The squidlike brain was not suffused with hate, as Nogah would have supposed, for being forced to the will of another. No, the kraken felt only curiosity. And a gruesome sort of giddy greed.

>   A monitor punched her with a fist that felt more like an iron mace than flesh. Two more blows hammered her and she was down, screaming, protecting not her own body, but the Dreamheart. Blood pooled in one of her eyes, blurring her vision.

  Nogah directed a mental image of the two monitors who remained within the chamber into the relic, and out along the tendril connected to Gethshemeth.

  Three more tentacles groped in through the fissure, crumbling the rent wider with the force of their entry.

  Nogah screamed, her words mush with hurt, “Your flesh is forfeit for striking me, groveler!”

  The monitor had time enough to glance back before one of the kraken tentacles snatched him up and retracted, bearing him instantly away. A faint scream and crunch followed.

  The remaining monitor stood his ground, assuming a guarding stance. When the second tentacle lashed forward, he evaded, and in doing so, landed a kick. The kick’s amazing strength sent an undulating wave up the tentacle. A mighty, monstrous voice roared in surprise.

  The third barbed tentacle snapped forward, encircling the monitor around the neck. With a yank and snap, the kuo-toa warrior’s head parted from its body.

  Quiet descended on the ruined hall then, save for the raw-throated whimpering of the surviving congregation. They were too terrified to scream any longer.

  A tentacle propelled itself along the broken ground and dead bodies. It quested toward Nogah like a side-winding serpent. It touched her on the leg, then reared up. The tip of the tentacle waved back and forth, as if waiting.

  Nogah took short, painful breaths as she watched Gethshemeth’s boneless limb gesticulate. Aches from the monitor’s attack made her vision unsteady. It occurred to her that she needn’t suffer so. With a thought, she drew wholeness from the Dreamheart. Well-being sparked out from her hands, up her scaled forearms, and vanquished the pain. Her facility with the stone was increasing.

  Nogah rose, using the Dreamheart to push herself up before finally lifting it to cradle it in her arms like a newly hatched child.