Around him, Teldin’s warriors were battered by the onslaught of the Shou. Djan successfully blocked the efforts of his opponent, but the contest was evenly matched between them. Despite the arrival of CassaRoc’s lead warriors, the Shou fighters were expert in hand-to-hand combat and fought with a speed that Teldin found amazing. Half of his squad was already unconscious or bleeding, and the remaining Shou doubled up on his other warriors.
The leader, it appeared, had reserved Teldin for himself.
The Shou danced around Teldin with the practiced air of a panther toying with its prey. His sword flicked out to nick Teldin countless times on his cheeks and arms.
Anger built within Teldin like the white-hot flames of a gnomish furnace. His companions were falling around him, even as more of CassaRoc’s warriors arrived.
He felt the familiar, cold-hot tingle of energy surround him like an enveloping blanket. Time seemed to slow; the fighter swung his sword with ever-decreasing speed, until it seemed to almost stop just a few inches from Teldin’s face.
Then Teldin swung up with his sword. A shower of sparks erupted from the weapons’ impact, then Teldin kicked out and sent the Shou fighter sprawling across the deck.
Slowly, the fighter sprang up, fury glinting in his dark eyes.
The cloak whipped around Teldin like a thing alive. The fighter pounced, his hands and feet cocked in positions of attack.
Then Teldin screamed inside. The cloak spread out, and whirling shurikens of pure energy shot out from the coruscating lining of the cloak. One star impaled the Shou in the palm of a hand; another burned deep into a thigh. The shurikens found their targets all across the fighter’s body, in his torso, his arms. Wherever they hit, his flesh and clothes burned with the white heat of a sun.
The final shuriken shot out from the cloak like a blazing comet. The Shou assassin went down, a burning crater of smoking, cauterized flesh centered in his forehead. His eyes stared blankly into the endless flow. The energy of the cloak’s shurikens faded into wisps of white smoke.
The remaining Shou fighters paused in midattack as their leader dropped stone dead to the deck. With renewed energy, CassaRoc’s men pressed the attack and quickly felled half of them. Djan’s opponent fell as a misplaced sword thrust was knocked aside by Djan’s practiced block and the sharp point of Djan’s blade tasted for the first time the blood of the Shou. Within a minute, the other Shou backed away individually, then decided to make an escape for the comparative safety between the close towers of the citadel region.
In retreat, the Shou threw their remaining shurikens at Teldin and his men and called out with angry, impotent threats of revenge. The humans’ shields effortlessly knocked away the razor-sharp weapons. A dozen bolts shot from the warriors’ crossbows, mostly missing their targets as the Shou wove singly through the buildings and disappeared. Two Shou were dropped with clean shots by a pair of Hancherback’s halflings.
The alliance warriors quickly assessed themselves, then started again for the neogi tower. Only a handful of men were lost in the skirmish with the Shou, and Teldin knew – as did CassaRoc the Mighty – that before the war was over, much more Shou blood would be spilled, if not to gain the Spelljammer, then in simple revenge for the ambush upon Teldin and the loss of CassaRoc’s men.
At the entrance to the neogi tower, the humans quickly dispatched the small squad of minotaurs left behind to secure the doors. Then the entrance was pummeled by CassaRoc’s heavy battering ram. With a splintering groan, the doors broke open to reveal the darkness inside the neogi tower.
The fighting became furious as the humans swarmed inside and pressed their foes. The towering ogres inside the entrance chamber numbered about five, the minotaurs about ten. The butchered corpses of neogi and umber hulks littered the floor, together in death with the less numerous corpses of their enemies. Behind them, directing the fighting throughout the building, were five angry beholders. At sight of the assembled humans, the beholders floated quickly through the inner door and disappeared into the central corridor.
The entrance chamber was taken quickly, as the enemies were dispatched simply by the human alliance’s strong numbers. Teldin pressed the attack into the tower’s central hallway and ordered squads into each of the tower’s six other chambers. “Find the elf!” Teldin shouted. “Bring her to me!”
The grimy walls, already dark with the spattering of neogi blood, became redder as the humans sliced into the battle between their enemies. Neogi blood pooled innocently with minotaur and ogre, and, inevitably, human.
Teldin crashed into the tower’s most opulent chamber, Coh’s study, by kicking open the door with his powerful legs. Inside, four neogi were torturing a beholder, one of the eye tyrants that had fled when the humans attacked the tower.
Teldin was a blur as he raced between the neogi, lashing out with his sharp sword to cleanly slice through their bony legs, to skewer one neogi through its round belly. The anger was hot in him, and his sword cut through the reptiles with unseen ferocity. Within minutes, three neogi lay dead in pools of their own black blood. The fourth huddled against the wall, blood oozing from twenty shallow wounds across its squat body, one segmented leg dangling helplessly by a shred. The tortured beholder lay dead on the floor, its great eye staring emptily up at its withered eyestalks.
The Cloakmaster’s sword sliced through the air in front of the neogi. The eellike head snapped back in fear. “Coh,” Teldin said. “I want him. Where is he?”
The hostage shot a furtive glance to a large, ornate box resting on a stone pedestal. The neogi began to laugh. “Coh is here not, meat. Shemeat you want taken is. Never will find her you, unless cloak is —
With a scream of rage, Teldin’s sword plunged into the neogi’s black neck. It’s pointed tongue quivered as the beast gurgled in death and fell limply to the blood-stained floor.
Teldin examined the beholder the neogi had killed. Its huge eye was glazed over in death, and behind it was an open trapdoor. The Cloakmaster put it together instantly: the other beholders had used the trapdoor to escape – the same secret door Coh had used to smuggle Cwelanas secretly away. He slammed the trapdoor shut and spun around. Perhaps Coh used it to escape, too, he thought.
Teldin turned and walked over to the decorated box. Its edges were trimmed with gold, and its handle was studded with sapphires. He reached for the hinged door on the front and opened it.
He stepped back, his mouth open in horror.
The head that watched him had once been that of a human. The gray skin was stretched across its skull like ancient parchment, and, as Teldin watched, the sunken eyes blinked open. It saw Teldin and spoke to him with a soft voice tinged with both regret and ancient anger.
“I serve he whom you seek. He has taken the woman into the elven veins, and you will not find her.”
“The veins,” Teldin said. “You mean the warrens?”
“Give him the cloak, or all you love will die.”
Teldin raised his sword. “Why does he want it so? If he gains the cloak, then everyone will die during the Dark Times.”
“You are just as much a fool as my master predicted. This has nothing to do with the Dark Times. The cloak is the key! The cloak is what drew mage B’Laath’a to the Wanderer!
“The cloak is power incarnate! It is the Spelljammer itself! The Fool has promised —”
“The Fool?” Teldin shouted. “Coh is in with the Fool? Where is Cwelanas? Tell me!”
The gray head turned its eyes away, realizing it had already given away too much.
Teldin shouted once again for answers, but the head would not speak. He screamed in rage. His sword flashed, and he thrust the blade trough the zombie’s mouth so hard that the steel splintered through the back of the box. The zombie’s dead eyes rolled up into its sockets. Then Teldin turned and strode out of the room.
The tower was theirs. As Teldin had defeated the cowering neogi in Coh’s chambers, CassaRoc’s warriors and the halfling fighters had overwhelme
d the combined forces of the Beholder Alliance. Most of their enemies had escaped, probably to regroup later, but the beholders had done much of the humans’ jobs for them, annihilating almost all of the neogi aboard the Spelljammer, even killing the great old master in its dank, bloody pit, along with its few premature hatchlings that had been nurtured inside its belly.
Teldin approached CassaRoc and Djan and sheathed his sword. “She’s gone,” Teldin said. “Coh has escaped, into the warr —”
He stopped suddenly, and his friends turned to watch. A hazy light was forming beside them, glowing reddish at the borders. The men took a step back, brandishing their weapons.
A shape formed inside the light and faced Teldin. Gaye Goldring appeared before them, still weak from her encounter with the Fool and the rats.
The warriors in the neogi tower stopped to see what was happening. Teldin walked toward her.
“Gaye,” he said, unaware that her appearance was an astral projection, “are you really here?”
I must warn you, Teldin, she said suddenly, of the Fool and his plans for the Spelljammer. He wants nothing less than complete control. He wants you —
Her telepathic voice seemed to strangle, and the room became dimmer, as though the light were being absorbed.
Darkness flickered around her, and three gray shapes formed around her, swirling out from dark cyclones of smoke. The room grew cold, and the warriors covered their ears as a wind sprang from nowhere, chilling them with an unnatural wail.
The shapes floated toward Gaye, their dark arms outstretched, surrounding her. Simultaneously, another shape appeared behind her, swirling with gray smoke, howling a scream of undying pain and rage that made several warriors fall to their knees.
The humans covered their ears at the cold pain that flooded through them. Teldin immediately reached out for the kender.
At once, Gaye and the apparitions disappeared before his eyes, an expression of terror frozen on her face as the undead closed on her.
The room was silent as the screams faded around them.
“That – that was a banshee,” Djan said. “Very, very bad.”
Teldin stared at where the kender had vanished.
“Gaye,” he said softly. “Gaye.”
Chapter Nineteen
“... And, lo, the loculus shall remain even though I be lost in the Red Chamber. My spells are powerful and will last far longer than I. The Historie will be available until the end of things, waiting for the Son of the Architects to claim it as his own....”
Neridox, librarian; journal 1009;
reign of Jokarin.
The secret passageway the beholders had discovered in Coh’s quarters led to a concealed exit across from the hulk tower. As the humans took the neogi tower and the fighting on the Spelljammer escalated between the races, the surviving beholders plunged into the tunnel and made their escape. The hidden exit opened near the beholder ruins, directly across from the neogi tower.
Once the beholders were inside, the monarch, Gray Eye, called for a war conference and quickly assessed the casualties. Two beholders had fallen: one to the four neogi, captured during the escape from the attacking humans, and the other, snapped in two by the powerful jaws of the neogi great old master as it thrashed mindlessly in hatred at its attackers. One beholder had lost an eyestalk to an umber hulk, and then, in anger, had ordered the ogre allies to dismember the hulk instantly.
Gray Eye’s eyestalks twitched visibly in rage. The leader’s ioun stones circled him crazily, reflecting his volcanic temper. “Our primary enemies are defeated,” Gray Eye told the survivors. “We were victorious, and our alliance has served its purpose: to do our warring for us, with a minimum of casualties to the beholders.
“If they have not yet been defeated by the humans, they soon will be – or the survivors will live to return to their towers and lick their wounds.”
Gray Eye floated quickly from side to side across his dais, as though he were pacing in thought. His teeth gnashed in anger. Then he faced his brethren and called to his second in command. “Blehal, go to our allies. Convince them that the war must continue, and to bring out their reserves. We will all meet here within the hour.”
“But, Lord,” Blehal said, “who shall I tell them we are attacking?”
Gray Eye smiled cruelly. His smaller eyestalks undulated like snakes above his milky great eye. “This war is far from over. The beholders must reign supreme, or we will be left for dead when the Dark Times arrive. The victors of this war will own the Spelljammer, and I intend for us to become the victors. As one mighty force, our alliance will prove deadly to our most despised enemies, the elves.”
The beholders glared balefully at their leader, drinking in his murderous threats. “Soon we will toast our victory by drinking the blood of all our enemies.” Gray Eye spun to face Blehal. “Go! Tell them to arm themselves for war!”
Blehal bobbed once in servitude and floated out of the room, two fellow beholders following closely behind him as protection. Gray Eye dismissed the others and floated silently above his dais, his mind filled with glorious dreams of victory and conquest.
It was not simply the Dark Times, though that was an unmatched impetus for his brethren to do his bidding. His purpose was more profound, for he knew the true nature of Teldin’s cloak, and he wanted it for himself. Let the Dark Times come. What will it matter? I will have all the power I will ever need to survive – to rule over the universe! The Spelljammer will be my ultimate weapon.
In the beholder ruins, Gray Eye laughed softly to himself. His enemies would soon fall, and the cloak would be his.
He could already taste the sweetness of elf flesh on his tongue.
Chapter Twenty
“... All things, in time, age. All things, in time, become corrupt. The Wanderer is timeless, yet lives still on our physical plane and is subject to both physical and magical la ws. Like all things, the Wanderer must change with time, and in no place is this aging more evident than in the areas known as the Warrens. Where once, legend tells us, flowed rivers of magic, now only cold winds blow like the breath of fiends, and men who explore there seldom return....”
Davibruc, cleric, whose son was lost in the warrens;
reign of Bender the Weaver.
Darkness materialized around her. The warm glow that emanated from her astral body flickered on the walls around her. It was a tunnel, and Gaye felt the chill of the warrens permeate her soul.
Shapes began to form in the air around her, and the sound of the banshee’s plaintive moan rang through her, filling her with a nameless dread, a loneliness that she had never known. She felt herself weaken more as the spirits became more tangible, and then the specters and the banshee had her surrounded. The fear they engendered was almost palpable, and their cloud of terror enveloped her, pulling her astral form away from Teldin just as he had reached for her.
Gaye felt the claustrophobic darkness of the warrens become solid around her. She had been transported to the warrens, where the banshee’s powers would not be weakened by the light of the phlogiston. Beyond, in the darkness that owned the warrens, she caught a vague glimpse of a neogi master and its enslaved umber hulk, disappearing into the blackness. A woman screamed... then she heard the rattling laughter of the master lich.
The Fool, she thought. These are his agents... his slaves. She knew without thinking that they had been sent as the Fool’s revenge.
The spirits numbered four. Three specters were the undead souls of humans who had been unlucky enough to explore the warrens years earlier and fall into the Fool’s lair. The banshee was the soul of a tormented, undead elf who had been cursed by his guilt at helping the Fool unwittingly destroy a sector of the Elven High Command.
The banshee wailed, and its moan echoed through the chamber. Gaye shivered uncontrollably as numbness passed through her with a ripple of unimaginable coldness. The specters reached out. One’s smoky hand touched her shoulder, another touched her head, and she was chilled, f
rozen immobile by their ephemeral touch.
The banshee’s wail grew louder. She felt her breath constricting, her heart beating in frantic terror in response to the spirit’s unholy wail.
Her mind raced for a strategy against the Fool’s servants. Her psionic abilities, weakened as they were from the Fool’s previous attack, seemed trivial against the spirits; nothing less than an exorcism would disperse these ethereal slaves of the Fool.
In desperation, she concentrated on warmth, on her own inner fires, to remove the paralysis the spirits had caused. Her fingers grew warm, and her hand erupted in a ball of golden energy.
The shades drew back abruptly, wailing in fear of her purifying light.
She knew she was too weak to summon again the brilliant fuiy of a nova, but perhaps there was another tactic that could save her, that would send these undead back to the Abyss.
Then she knew.
Paralyzed with fear, she focused inward. She visualized her latent energies as a flickering flame, suddenly growing in power. She imagined warmth creeping through her body, dispelling the paralysis with white heat.
The light at her fingertips was shrinking. The spirits crept closer toward Gaye, reaching for her with their spectral fingers. The banshee screamed, renewed by the encroaching darkness, and its howl was the sound of the wind singing through black trees and between tombstones, through the caverns of the dead.
Gaye swallowed her fear and sent her sight inward. She channeled her mental energies and visualized her powers in front of her, glowing beyond the surrounding circle of undead, in a tangible form outside of her body.
The spirits halted. The shimmering outline of a doorway appeared, a misty doorway through which she could pass to another world, even another ship.
But her purpose here was different, not a goal of escape, but one of defense. As the dimensional doorway materialized, which she had created as an opening to the sunlit world of Toril, the black chamber was flooded with warm daylight from Realmspace.
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