The Ultimate Helm (36 page)

Attached with a golden chain to the original ultimate helm, the cloak, together they formed a single, inseparable device: the helm created for the First Pilot to command the ship, the amulet to help guide the captain
 –
and the
Spelljammer –
to their twin destinies.

Years later, they were separated, forced to wait for destiny to once again bring them together. Without the amulet, the
Spelljammer
was captained haphazardly by other captains with other helms
 –
such was the nature of spelljamming. The true helm, the Ultimate Helm, the creators knew, eventually would find its way back to the true captain, perhaps many centuries after they had been forgotten. The cloak and the amulet would be joined again, and the Last Pilot would sail the
Spelljammer
to its ultimate fate.

—  Why me?
Teldin said again.
 — Who am I?

—  You are the Last Pilot.

— Why?

— You are the Son of the Architect.

— Who? Who am I?

— This is the purpose for which you have sought. It was foreordained for you to find your destiny here, where it began millennia ago. Only you are the Chosen. Only you have the courage and the Helm and the Compass and the need. You are the Last Pilot.

—  There have been too many deaths already,
Teldin said.
 — Something else must be done.

—  It is our destiny to end and begin again, to renew, to punish, to rejoice, to live.

They were silent. The Cloakmaster thought for a minute, perhaps a year, as the
Spelljammer
knew time. Then he spoke.

—  Tell me. What happens when a
Spelljammer
dies?

They spoke together then, for a long time,... minutes, perhaps, or years.

Then they were decided, and for the first time since the coming of the Cloakmaster, the
Spelljammer
sang out joyously, spreading the colors of hope upon the eddies of the flow. The
Spelljammer
cast forth a seed of being, of pure, magical energies, that shot through Teldin’s awareness and across the universe, and he felt it explode against its target, permeating ancient metal with its dormant energies.

Teldin waited until the
Spelljammer’s
song was finished, then he spoke.

—  I need one last thing,
he said.
 — For me.

—  For... life...

The two agreed as one, for the destiny that Teldin sought was the destiny that had always been.

The
Spelljammer
sang with a song of Teldin. In Herdspace, a kender, lost in a healing, meditative trance, woke suddenly and heard the song. Music filled with latent energies and inner fires coursed through her, and she answered with a thought that knew no physical boundaries.

The Cloakmaster heard, and he opened his eyes.

Chapter Thirty-One

“... The statues could only be those of the ship’s captains. The weapons, the artifacts, the vessels under glass – all must have some purpose that I have not yet fathomed.

“The secrets of this accursed ship will soon be mine, I vow. I know the nature of the helms, and I know of the magic that each person here unwittingly breathes. This prison is intolerable! I wonder if any of the items in the Armory are actually helms, and if they can help me escape....”

The journal of Arcane;

following the reign of Jokarin

Na’Shee was the first to react. She leaped upon Stardawn and hurled him to the floor. Her hand went up, ready to smash into the elf’s face, but the elf threw a powerful right jab into her jaw.

She was knocked across him. Stardawn scrambled up and jerked the sword from the Cloakmaster’s lifeless chest. He angled the blade toward the dark shape of the Fool. “The Cloakmaster is dead, now, Fool!” the elf shouted. “I shall be captain now, as it always should have been!”

He placed his hand on one of the throne’s pedestals, then stared down, waiting for the trickle of energy to flow up his arm, bonding him to the
Spelljammer.

The Fool laughed.

“
You killed the captain, elf.
” the Fool said. “
You killed my plans for the
Spelljammer.
The helm is gone with the Bonding, and you have only your own, pitiful delusions to live for
.”

The others in the party pulled out their weapons as the Fool approached. He lifted a hand, and an invisible wave of force sent the warriors sprawling into the walls. Djan’s head collided with the wall, and the world went dark around him.

The Fool spun on Stardawn. To the elf lord it was as if the Fool suddenly sailed from the floor to stand before him upon the dais. Two skeletal hands clasped tightly around Stardawn’s throat.

The Fool’s eyes glimmered brightly, blazing into Stardawn’s eyes. He felt the strength wash out of him, felt his legs go limp, and the Fool clasped him high in the air with one hand around his neck.

“
Mine..
.” the Fool said, as though to himself. “
You have ruined it all... and you shall pay
.”

Stardawn’s eyes went wide with terror. The dried, brittle skull that was the Fool’s face seemed to open in a smile. Stardawn shuddered in the Fool’s grasp, his limbs twitching in an uncontrollable paroxysm of fear. The Fool covered the elf’s face, his mouth and nose, with his hand. Two fingertips of bone touched the elfs eyes gently, like a lover’s embrace.

Stardawn screamed. He flailed violently in the Fool’s cold grasp, and his life force was sucked from his body like smoke, consumed hungrily like a sweet morsel, and the Fool laughed at his meal.

He flung the elf’s body to the floor at the warriors’ feet. CassaRoc stood uneasily, half-dazed, and the others brought themselves around as the Fool crept toward them.

“All shall pay,”
the Fool said softly.
“All shall pay for stealing my revenge.”

The master lich halted suddenly. A sphere of light formed around the warriors, a protective bubble of force. Inside the shield, a glow appeared, and the astral form of Gaye Goldring materialized, burning with a strength the Fool had never conceived. The lich spoke a chant, and the shield shuddered as his spell flickered at its edges, ineffective against the kender’s psionic strength.

“How?” he asked.

Inside the shield, the warriors turned away from the Fool and gasped, staring behind him.

Then the Fool felt himself levitated, held in a grip of power that spun him around to face his assailant. His black, shining eyes dimmed in uncomprehending fear.

The Cloakmaster stood before him, holding the Fool in midair with the forces of his new life with the
Spelljammer.
He willed the Fool closer, and his vision, filled with dream-scapes and worlds beyond imagining, focused on the dead face of the master lich.

“No more,”
the Cloakmaster said.

The Fool struggled against the forces that held him. He gestured with his hands, and the Cloakmaster was slammed back into his throne by a fist formed from the air. The Fool dropped and jumped off the dais, summoning his strength. He pulled his deathblade from its rotted scabbard. “
You have died once already, Cloakmaster. I believe you can die again.”

The air swirled between them, coalescing with flares of magic. An aura formed in the air, took shape, and the Cloakmaster reached out and plucked the spell from the air.

The energies flickered in his hand, outlining a blade of power, pulsating with his own life force. He leaped, and the blades met between the two enemies, death and life, sparks flying from their swords.

Inside the shield, the warriors could feel the thick tension in the
adytum,
the two primal forces battling for supremacy of the
Spelljammer.
Estriss looked after the unconscious Djan, and the others stood ready, weapons out, to join in the fray.

The Cloakmaster and the Fool were behemoths of raw power, battling around the chamber in a ballet that would only lead to death. Their blades collided and rang, were knocked to carve deep wounds into the
Spelljammer’s
walls. The Fool drew first blood, slipping under the Cloakmaster’s guard to slice deep into his forearm. But blood did not flow from the wound, and the Cloakmaster battled on, heedless, seething with power.

Forgotten, alone in the corner, was Cwelanas.

She pulled her iron chains from the floor and wrapped them around one arm. The Fool was concentrating solely on the fight. He had forgotten all about her, and she could finally move.

Teldin fought with the strength and speed of a storm, but the Fool’s powers were considerable, and she knew that there was little she could do to help Teldin defeat the creature, unarmed as she was.

But there was something she could take....

The Fool was a lich of some kind, she knew, though she had never seen or heard of a lich quite like this one. She thought back, trying to remember what she knew of their weaknesses, their fears. She looked up, saw the Fool’s eyes blazing with evil fire, and she realized what had been bothering her all along.

The Fool did have a weakness.

It was called a phylactery, a container of some kind in which the lich stored its life force in exchange for powers granted by the gods or otherworldly forces of darkness.

Usually these phylacteries were heavily guarded by the lich, hidden in some secret place, for if the phylactery were ever destroyed, the lich would be destroyed, its life force claimed by the entity that originally had granted its dark powers.

What if a lich, or a different, more powerful type of lich, had become so arrogant that it no longer guarded its phylactery? What if this master lich, in its egotistical sense of invulnerability, even wore its phylactery, say, as an ornament, a piece of jewelry, out in the open for all to desire?

Cwelanas knew then what she must do.

The others stayed protected behind the kender’s psionic shield. Cwelanas took a deep breath and gathered all her strength, giving form to all the rage and frustration she had felt, helpless in the Fool’s grasp.

Then, in one swift lunge, Cwelanas leaped to her feet. Her heavy chain uncoiled and she flung herself between the combatants, swinging the chain in the air. With the snap of brittle bones, the chain whipped around the Fool’s head.

One bony hand shot up and grasped her wrist. The Fool laughed in her face, his skull splintered above its right, dead eye. “
You cannot hurt me, woman. You
 —”

Then its eyes seemed to widen in fear. Her other hand had found the Fool’s amulet and gripped it tightly in one fist. She yanked hard once. A golden link shot away from the necklace, and the amulet came loose from the Fool’s neck.

“
No
!” it screamed.
“No! Give me that!”

Cwelanas shoved the Fool away. It staggered back a step, then rushed for her, fury blazing in its hollow eyes.

But her arm was back. She put all her strength behind the throw, and suddenly the amulet was sent flying across the chamber, to be plucked from the air effortlessly by the Cloakmaster.

“Destroy it!” Cwelanas screamed. “Destroy it now!”

The Cloakmaster dropped it to the floor, and he brought the heavy heel of his boot down upon it, shattering the ruby facets.

With an explosion of scarlet energies, the amulet burst. The Cloakmaster stepped away as crimson smoke erupted in a widening circle in the floor. A storm of orange and black smoke, streams of magical fire and raw power, shone through the widening circle of light to cast its deep red glow upon the Fool’s horrified countenance.

The circle of flame fluctuated, widened, flaring brilliantly with extraplanar energies, then a great shadow eclipsed the light blazing from the fiery, otherworldly plane. One great, clawed hand reached out from somewhere unreal, somewhere unimagined on the plane of the groundlings, and into our universe from its own.

The Fool screamed, “
Noooooooo
!”

The fiendish being was more than twice Teldin’s size, and it stepped from its own funereal plane into the
adytum
, glowing, scarlet smoke trailing in its wake. It gestured with its four arms, two ending in powerfully clawed hands, the others with sharp pincers that could disembowel a man with one casual swipe. The fangs in its shaggy canine head were jagged and sharp, and it snarled ferally at the shielded warriors who backed away from it. Its blank eyes burned an angry red, and it moved to stare first at the Cloakmaster, then Cwelanas, then finally on the skeletal form of the Fool.

Its laughter echoed like thunder throughout the chamber, reverberating off the walls so loudly that the fighters could feel it in their feet.
I KNOW WHY I HAVE BEEN SUMMONED!
The words boomed through their heads as the thing spoke telepathically.

The thing roared ferociously, moving slowly toward the Fool. The lich lifted Cwelanas before him and used her as a shield, backing as far away as possible.

It was one of the tanar’ri, a dark god of the Abyss. The shaggy glabrezu stomped across the
adytum
and looked down at the quivering Fool.

ROMAR, THE FOOL!
The tanar’ri lord roared its demonic laughter. Smoke curled from its lips and nostrils.

With the swipe of one impossibly large hand, the glabrezu knocked Cwelanas from the Fool’s grasp and sent her hurtling against the kender’s shield. Cwelanas had time to cry out once as her bones shattered against the impenetrable shield, then she fell to the bubble’s base, unconscious.

Blood pooled around her head. Her face was scarred with gashes from the glabrezu’s claws. Gaye instantly enlarged the bubble to take in Cwelanas, and CassaRoc bent to examine the elfs wounds.

All felt the glabrezu’s voice pounding in their minds.
ROMAR! YOUR TIME HAS COME!
The Fool cowered behind the Cloakmaster’s throne. His bony hands were crossed protectively in front of him.
OUR CONTRACT IS CONCLUDED! YOUR SOUL IS MINE!

The glabrezu reached out with one of its pincers. The Fool shrank down to his knees, and the long pincer raked across the Fool’s cheek, drawing a line of thin black blood. The Fool raised his puny hands in supplication to the tanar’ri.