Plague of Spells

by Bruce R Cordell

  His palms broke out with moist itch, even as his mouth dried. He recognized the signs; he’d gone too long since last he’d stepped foot on the road. He should take a pinch now. Just a single grain, that would be—

  He squeezed his eyes shut, slightly disgusted at the sudden veering of his desire. He had resisted the urge to stride the road longer than normal, and now he was out of sorts. The itch on his palms grew more pronounced. Why did he resist the urge?

  Anusha was the reason, he admitted.

  Why was he suddenly so concerned with how she viewed him? It wasn’t like him. Then his cloak fluttered of its own accord, as if something beneath its dark folds sought escape. Had he imagined it, or was his control over the portal stitched into the cloak’s hem fraying with his lack of concentration? He couldn’t restrain a worried groan.

  A voice in his ear interrupted his internal dread. “Are you well, Japheth?”

  The warlock blanched and spun around, recognizing the whisper a moment too late to quell his reaction. Anusha had apparently been standing next to him all along.

  From the poop deck, Japheth saw Captain Thoster’s large hat swivel toward him for a moment, then back to the approaching tower.

  Barely moving his lips, Japheth said to thin air, “Do not startle me so. The captain notices my strange antics of late.

  I think he’s worried about the ghost in the gorgon heart.”

  He thought he heard a suppressed giggle, nothing else. The girl’s physical remove from reality made her rash, he thought.

  Then again … wasn’t he being equally rash avoiding that which was required, if not now, then later? It wouldn’t matter what she thought of him if his mind spun free of reason for failing to set spiritual feet on the crimson road.

  His shaking hands produced a small, dull tin. From it, he produced a grain of traveler’s dust.

  “Japheth,” came her instant whisper. He ignored the entreaty. He tilted his head toward the sky and dropped the miniscule crystal into his left eye.

  The itch faded. His breathing steadied, and his hands ceased their shake. By the time the tin was restowed in the folds of his cloak, he saw the outline of Anusha’s dream form fold itself into the scene. He smiled her way, then looked out again past the wooden railing.

  The air was like crystal, the sky an open glass, and the water a translucent skin that his enhanced vision easily, joyfully pierced. The many wakes in the water were indeed, as earlier surmised, fish, though swimming among the crowd were several scaled humanoid forms, half hidden among the schools, keeping their heads just below the water’s surface. Japheth wondered if those creatures were associated with the entity they were to meet. He mentally shrugged—it didn’t matter that much to him at the moment, as the drug’s euphoric effect blew through his mind like a gust of cool air.

  Something emerged from the tower balcony. Some sort of humanoid, kin to those swimming beneath the surface in front of the tower. He’d made an astute guess.

  Though still relatively far, Japheth’s dust-enhanced vision saw the figure had a round face surmounted by wide, bulbous eyes that stared back at him, rarely blinking. Its lipless mouth was a long slit bisecting the lower face, closed, though he suspected rows of needle teeth within. The creature wore a gold crown on its head like an artificial crest. Its garments were singularly gold-hued, as was its pincer-headed staff. This must be the … female they had come so far to meet.

  Captain Thoster’s voice rang out across the waves, apparently magically augmented by Seren, “Hail, Nogah of Olleth! We have come, as you asked. Let us parley and see how we may serve each other, and in so doing, serve ourselves!”

  The creature replied, her words also supernaturally loud, though blurred and lisped, as if being formed by a vocal apparatus never meant to choke out Common. She said, “Well met, Captain Thoster. Welcome to my abode, again.”

  The captain barked orders. The anchor was let out. The ship’s launch was prepared for a landing party, then carefully lowered over the side. Those going ashore would include the captain, Seren, Japheth, and several nervous crew members.

  Japheth just stared, absorbing all the frenzied activity but apart from it. Whorls and swirls of dazzling color intruded upon his vision, and just as reality seemed to waver in favor of a winding road of ruby, Thoster called him over to the side of the ship where they’d lowered the launch. Japheth forced his mind back from the imaginary trip it yearned to take. Instead, he climbed down a knotted rope ladder into the rocking launch.

  Anusha’s roiling, uncertain outline wavered at the prow. She gazed at the tower, though all aboard the ship but he failed to see her. The crew pulled on the launch’s oars, not bothering with putting sail to the single, short mast. Quickly enough, the craft crossed the distance between the anchored Green Siren and the squalid shore.

  Japheth disembarked. Seawater slopped over the top of his boots and soaked his feet. The odor of decaying fish burned his nostrils. Once the boat was pulled up onto the beach, the landing party made for the base of the tower, Thoster and Seren in the lead, followed by four pirates with their weapons drawn. Japheth brought up the rear. The girl, whose sleeping body still lay in the Green Siren, kept him company.

  A gaping hole in the tower’s base opened onto narrow basalt stairs that circled upward in shallow loops, tracing the tower’s circular exterior. When they reached the first landing, the weapon-wielding pirates preceded Thoster and the others into the chamber where their host waited.

  The room was moist, and the ceiling was so low the captain’s hat threatened to scrape it. As before, Japheth’s drug-heightened sensitivity revealed a translucent, greenish sparkle to the captain’s skin in a regular, repeating pattern.

  The warlock realized the pattern he saw below the captain’s skin resembled the fishy scales of the creature standing before them, she who Thoster called Nogah.

  Emboldened by his altered state, Japheth broke the mutual silence. “You are no sea elf, that’s certain.”

  Nogah fixed the warlock with her dinner-plate eyes and blinked.

  Captain Thoster laughed, then said, “Nay, sea elves ain’t been seen much in the Fallen Stars since the Spellplague. Except for Myth Nantar, their cities mostly shook to rubble, and they’re keeping beneath the waves—who knows when they’ll be back, or if. Nogah here is kuo-toa. She’s a ‘whip,’ which means something like a queen-in-waiting, maybe. Her folks have been gathering in the waters hereabouts ever since they seized Olleth—”

  “Captain Thoster,” lisped the kuo-toa whip, “your swift arrival is much appreciated. But who are these two?” The creature gestured with her staff toward Seren and Japheth. She didn’t react to Anusha, who stood at the kuo-toa’s elbow in immaterial guise.

  “Nogah, these are the ones I promised who can help,” said the captain. “Seren is a wizard, and Japheth says he’s a warlock.”

  “They can access arcane magic?” she inquired, her eyes blinking rapidly.

  “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, 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, 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?

  A 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 us 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 golemlike 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-ob
scured 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.