The Ultimate Helm tcc-6

by Russ T. Howard

  The kasharin turned toward Teldin and grimaced.

  Red energy flickered behind its great eye as its orb swelled with power.

  Teldin raised his shield and sword. He thought briefly of hurling himself toward the thing, driving his sword into its eye as they both died, the mummy in its own blood, he, a charred corpse.

  The kasharin shook as its energies built up inside it. The great eye flared red. The death ray shot toward him, a blazing beam that seared the air.

  Teldin threw up his shield protectively, knowing it was useless. Then he was hammered from the side by a heavy weight, and the death beam licked across his shoulder and found a minotaur standing beyond the humans.

  Teldin fell to the deck, his left arm trapped beneath him. The weight blocked his view as the minotaur imploded. Teldin twisted his head and looked up. All he saw was plaid.

  "I couldn't let it kill you, sir," Emil said.

  The Cloakmaster looked behind the small warrior. Others from the Tower of Thought were rushing their way, firing crossbow bolts and tossing spears at the unhumans and the kasharin.

  Teldin smiled and reached for his sword as Emil stood up. "Just in time," Teldin said. Then he looked up as a round shadow fell across him, from behind his savior's shoulder. "Paladine's blood!" Teldin shouted. "Watch out, Emil!"

  The little fighter turned. A kasharin had floated within a few feet of him, and its great eye flared an angry red as it stared solely at Emil.

  The fighter took a step back and fumbled under his cloak for his slingshot, but the air hummed with the power of the kasharin's death ray. Emil was blown back, his skin blistered and smoking with the power of the kasharin's fury.

  Teldin leaped up. Emil twisted in agony as the kasharin's death magic burned within him. "Spelljammer-" Emil had time to say. "Save.. the Spelljammer-"

  Then Emil died in a gout of red-hot energy that was as bright to Teldin as the light of a thousand suns.

  He had had enough. Teldin screamed into the flow, at the fighting, the senselessness of it all. He screamed at the treachery of the races, at the friends who had betrayed him in his quest across the spheres, at the friends and lovers who had died, at their murderers and their selfish desires.

  At the death.

  He reached down and gripped a huge battle-axe that a minotaur had dropped while fleeing the ruins. He spun and screamed aloud, raising the axe high above his head, and he drove it deep into the kasharin's great eye. Energy flickered around the steel as Teldin pulled it out, then swung it hard into the kasharin's crusted body. Scales split as the axe cleaved through the mummy's dead flesh. Thin black blood sprayed Teldin's arms and burned like acid. Teldin screamed as he jerked the axe out of the kasharin and plunged it deep into its crimson eye. He screamed as the kasharin plopped lifeless to the deck.

  He screamed as he chopped into its body until all that was left were pieces of blackened scales and diseased flesh. He screamed as he felt hands on him, pulling him toward the elf tower and away from the beholders' murder machines.

  Teldin, he heard Estriss say dimly, as though at a distance,

  Teldin, we must hurry. Teldin jerked his shoulder away. The warriors watched him as Estriss approached slowly, his hands held peaceably before him. Teldin, you must listen… The Cloakmaster's glazed eyes slowly focused on the mind flayer. We have to leave here, Estriss said. The Spelljammer needs you.

  The warriors broke into a run, Teldin at the rear, lost in thought. He looked up briefly as he felt pebbles fall across his shoulder, then a corner of the beholder ruins collapsed under a heavy rain of boulders and iron shot from a ship in the flow. The war was on in full force, and in the heat of senseless violence, the Spelljammer had become less an object of conquest than an enemy to be destroyed.

  Stardawn led them to the heavily guarded entrance of the Elven High Command. The guards stopped them and formed a protective shield around them while the battles with the kasharin widened and the beholder-mummies spread between the towers.

  Then Stardawn led them through the entrance chamber and the audience gallery to the darkened, spiral staircase at the lower level. They started up, twisting toward the battlements, and wound their way slowly to the top, climbing single file up the narrow staircase. At the uppermost landing, Stardawn took a heavy key from his belt and opened the door to the battlements. Here the air of the Spelljammer's protective bubble seemed thinner, and their cloaks and hair waved in a slight breeze. They hurried across the stone battlement and stopped at the sealed entrance of the Armory.

  The sky was filled with vessels battling among themselves or twisting down toward the Spelljammer with their weapons armed. Teldin shook his head. All this… for what?

  My destiny.

  The warriors took positions around Teldin, who turned to face the double doors into the Armory. The doors were sealed with a disk of metal that gleamed like silver, bronze, and gold all at once. A three-pointed star was molded into its surface.

  "Have people tried to get in this way before?" Teldin asked Stardawn.

  The elf nodded. "The seal can be broken with the right weapon, but after our people have gone inside, they've been tossed out, unconscious or dead, and the thing seals up again."

  Teldin nodded and stood squarely in front of the door. The seal was exactly the size of his amulet, he saw, and bore the sign of the Juna. He smiled and instinctively closed his eyes.

  He felt the breeze flow between his outstretched fingers, through his hair. The cloak flapped softly against him. Its energies billowed through his body like a cool-warm breeze, and the three-pointed star shone in his mind's eye as a focal point for his powers.

  Then his amulet glowed from within. The sign of the star was revealed in white-hot light and crackling bolts of energy flew between the two disks, flowing along the contours of the amulet's pattern like a maze to be solved, as though the pattern were a combination to a lock.

  The amulet flared a brilliant blue-white, and the metal seal melted away from the doors with a final bolt of energy from Teldin's amulet. The doors burst open by themselves, and the darkness of the Armory greeted them. The molten droplets that had been the armory's seal fluttered on the floor as though they were alive, and they trickled silently into the shadows ahead of the warriors.

  "This is what you were meant to do," Djan said. "This is what it has all led up to."

  Teldin smiled at his friends. "Let's go in."

  A series of twin explosions echoed off the surrounding towers. The warriors turned as the ship rocked with the impact. "There!" Na'Shee shouted, as a great ball of flame erupted from the giff tower.

  "What is happening here?" Teldin said to himself. "This has to come to an end." He touched his amulet protectively and closed his eyes. "This must all end soon."

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  "… The Armory and the Dark Tower are mysteries waiting to be solved. Adventurers have sought their secrets, only to be rudely dispatched by the Nameless Servants. Rumors abound, chief among them that the enemies of the Spelljammer are imprisoned in the holds of the Dark Tower, and that the Armory bears weapons and treasures unimaginable and very well protected…" Rambergius, cleric of the Tower of Thought; reign of Coronas.

  The number of ships that Teldin and CassaRoc had originally seen through CassaRoc's spyglass had now almost quadrupled, dotting the flow with vicious shapes that were speeding dead on for the Spelljammer. There were seventy-one of them now-tsunamis, tyrants, wasps, deathspiders, scorpions, eelships, and more-swarming through the flow like black, furious insects, grappling each other with their hooks and lines, battling among themselves with their catapults and powerful ballistae.

  Many aboard those ships had touched the cloak; many knew of magic spells to trace the cloak and the warrior who had claimed it. They came from all across the spheres to rendezvous here, where their crystals and spells and philters and psionic powers had told them they would find the legendary Spelljammer and its ultimate helm, the Cloak of the First Pilot. Behind t
he ships, mere specks against the chaotic phlogiston, more ships followed-twenty five warships, in a fleet as yet unidentified, racing toward the Spelljammer recklessly.

  All were converging in a dance that had started an eon before, a dance that played on amid the music of death and violence.

  The ships battled ferociously in their zeal to both defeat their enemies and reach the Spelljammer first, to assume command of the godlike vessel. A specially outfitted wasp dove straight for a nautiloid and rammed straight through the side of its shell-like hull. Immediately, a score of warriors swarmed over the grappling ram and through the great rent in the nautiloid, attacking its crew upon sight.

  Below the Spelljammer, a squid ship and a hammership battled it out at medium range. Iron-tipped missiles were shot from the three ballistae on board the squid, and two of the projectiles tore through the underbelly of the hammership. The other shot went wild and bounced harmlessly off the underside of the Spelljammer's port wing.

  The hammership dipped precariously, losing speed and altitude. The captain refused to give up, and she responded to the squid ship's attack by banking and aiming the catapults at the body of the squid. Boulders were sent hurtling through the flow to crash into the squidship's top deck and straight through the bottom. The broken bodies of mind flayers floated out, twisted and bloody, to be swallowed into the cold, lifeless flow.

  The hammership listed to port and started spiraling down. Within seconds, the wounded ship spun out of control. Its downward gyre suddenly slowed. For a moment, it looked as if the hammership was straightening, slowing its momentum. Then the ship veered wildly off course and took off on an erratic path straight for the black wall of the Broken Sphere, where it crashed helplessly into the impervious crystal wall, spitting bodies and splinters of wood and metal into the emptiness.

  Above the Spelljammer, two dragonflies swooped down to overtake a slow-moving Shou dragonship. Warriors aboard the swifter dragonflies stood ready on the main deck, their bows and crossbows cocked and armed. Each dragonfly closed in on one side of the Shou craft, and as they sailed past, the dragonflies' arrows arced through the flow like birds flying in formation. Most of the Shou warriors on the dragon-ship's deck were at the ship's three large weapons and were left unable to protect themselves from the bolts that suddenly appeared from the sky, blindly nailing their brothers in their chests and heads.

  The survivors on deck wasted no time and quickly shot their catapults and ballistae at the dragonflies as they swooped past. But the Shou weapons were too slow, and their boulders were sent harmlessly into the phlogiston. The missile shot from a Shou ballista hissed just feet past a speeding dragonfly, and found a target in the hull of an elven man-o-war that had been descending on the Spelljammer.

  The elven ship suddenly changed course, the missile protruding from its side like an oversized spear. The Shou watched as the ship banked and turned straight for them, seemingly on a suicide run. As the vengeful elves on the deck readied their catapults and ballistae, elves at the bow were aiming at the dragon ship with their hand-held weapons.

  The man-o-war closed in. At the last second, the elven warriors simultaneously let loose their fire. The dragonship rocked under the onslaught of granite boulders that battered the decks and crushed Shou under their weight. The black waves of arrows and bolts from the elves skewered the Shou on deck, and the iron-shafted ballistae impaled the dragon-ship's hull as though it were made of paper.

  The man-o-war swept gracefully up and over the Shou craft so that its hull passed inches from the tip of the dragonship's sail. The elven ship was up and away, gaining distance between itself and the battle and providing time to repair the Shou's ballista damage. The dragonship lurched far to starboard, and Shou warriors slid across the angled deck to grasp futilely for handholds along the sides of the ship. Some were able to grab hold of staves along the main deck; most, though, spilled into the flow, to float there with the bodies of the dead.

  Across the vista of the Rainbow Ocean, sidewheelers and shrike ships, a whaleship, even a dwarven citadel sculpted i from an asteroid, assaulted one another with their weapons of wood and steel and magic. Catapults twanged, reverberating through the flow as their stone shot was sent careening into the hulls of other vessels. The war for the Spelljammer hud become a free-for-all, one more battle in a second Unhuman War-a war that would very likely produce no clear victor, except for the bloodthirsty warrior known as Death.

  The Spelljammer quietly sailed in orbit around the Broken Sphere. Its mighty wings swept through fields of insignificant debris that had once been enemy ships. All of the doors of all its primary towers had been opened, and the peoples of the Spelljammer were abandoning their battles with the ship's other inhabitants and were preparing to defend their ship- and take the last invading ore or neogi with them.

  Mages upon several tower roofs sent their arcane spells into the flow. Rays of light and power emanated toward the attacking ships and blew holes into their hulls. Upon the roof of the Guild tower, Leoster and his most accomplished wizards stood in a circle, chanting their individual spells and focusing the powers of the magical plane through their bodies. Rings of scarlet light and energy emanated from their hands and were blown toward the enemy fleets like the smoke rings of giants. They encircled a pirate hammership in a concentric cage, and the vessel crumbled under the feet of the crew, its planks and nails and hull falling apart, disintegrating like brittle, ancient plaster.

  Crimson lightning shot from the eyes of an elven mage upon the tower of the Armory, and an illithid ship exploded in the phlogiston in a flash of ethereal red fire, which, for some reason, did not ignite the volatile flow.

  A sleek vipership angled up toward an octopus and increased its speed. Its piercing ram gleamed in the light of the flow as the distance between them grew smaller. The octopus saw the viper immediately and fired its heavy ballistae at too close a distance. The missiles hummed past the viper and disappeared into the flow. The viper impaled the octopus through its bulbous hull, erupting into the chart room and captain's quarters. Then the decks of the viper ran busy with its crew, shooting grappling lines across the gap between the ship. Weapons sang out and swords clashed as the octopus was quickly boarded and taken.

  The two ships were then surrounded in a bubble of green light, cast from a coordinated group of psionicists upon one of the Spelljammer's main batteries. The two ships quivered, then shook apart, fluttering into dust and chips of wood, to be blown forever on the winds and eddies of the flow.

  Five thousand feet off the Spelljammer's bow, two bee-class wasps furiously engaged an angelship. The wasps fired six ballistae straight into the hull and wings of the angelship. Then one wasp disengaged while the other grappled the angelship and boarded it. The wasp flitted around, as though it didn't know what ship to attack next, then it homed in on the Spelljammer and sped forward in a graceful, descending arc.

  Laughter came from the top of the giff tower. Lord High Gunsman Rexan "Diamondtip" Hojson had spied the wasp in the corner of his eye, and he instantly decided that this was the perfect test for his quadruple bombard. He shouted the order to lower the tower's sides to reveal the weapon. The walls slid open, and the light of the flow played gloriously off the surface of the giffs explosive bombard.

  Diamondtip kept the wasp in his sights and carefully plotted the ship's planned trajectory. He shouted orders to his gunnery crew, outfitted in thick, protective helmets that fully covered their heads. Their uniforms were heavily padded and woven with an elven material that would not catch fire.

  The giffs secret weapon swiveled smoothly around on its platform, and one of its four bombards was aimed precisely according to Diamondtip's orders. The other bombards were loaded and ready to fire, should the first bombard miss its target.

  The wasp flew closer and closer, buzzing almost like its insect counterpart. As it made its approach to the Spelljammer, Diamondtip could see the wasp's extra ballistae being loaded for a close run.

 
; Then the wasp was inside the Spelljammer's air envelope, and Diamondtip screamed, "Fire!"

  The bombard's recoil shook the giff tower as the sound of the explosion reverberated through Diamondtip's thick skull. At the same time, the phlogiston-permeated air in the tower burst into flame. Diamondtip was thrown into a wall by the shock wave, and the giff strapped to the bombard seats struggled to regain their composure, shaking off the effects of the phlogiston. Luckily, their uniforms, scorched as they were, kept back the heat of the explosion.

  Above the Spelljammer, the wasp was engulfed in a ball of flame that bounced across the landing field to scatter into flaming shards of debris. Where the burning wasp skipped, a wake of explosions followed as the phlogiston ignited.

  The gunner who fired turned to Diamondtip and raised his hand in salute. Then the giff tower rang with low, hearty laughter, the sound of victory. The ride had been a little rough, but the quadruple bombard worked. The tower, Diamondtip estimated, could take perhaps a score or more explosions before it would threaten to collapse beneath them, and definitely less if they used all four bombards simultaneously.

  To die in an explosion…

  Diamondtip congratulated his gunners, then pointed into the flow. "I see our next target!" he shouted happily. The gunners turned to their bombards, and Diamondtip rejoiced in the exhilaration of an explosive, honorable death, which only a giff could appreciate.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  "… Fear can take many forms and can affect people in many ways. Jokarin the Bold, fearless in all endeavors and champion ofReorx, would not disclose to me what occurred in the place he calls the adytum. "Even the bravest of us all can sometimes have a shadow fall across his heart…"

  Namu, philosopher of the Guild; journal

  Na'Shee was the last to pass through the great doorway, and as she crossed the threshold into the Armory, the double 1 doors behind her closed by themselves. She spun as she heard the doors slam against the door frame, and she grasped the handles and twisted hard. The doors were shut solidly. "Locked," she said. "We're locked in."