The Ultimate Helm (40 page)

B’Laath’a hung back and watched as Coh shambled up and came for her again. She swung her sword in a deadly arc that missed his face by an inch. He advanced slowly, snapping at her with his venomous teeth, though one long fang was very obviously missing in the front. She backed away, sweeping the sword in front of her as protection.

He lunged for her. She swung the sword out, and Coh slipped behind the swing and slashed down with a claw. The sword fell to the deck. Blood streamed from a wound across the back of her hand. Coh picked up her sword and tossed it blindly into the forest of jamberry trees.

“Now
theee
how you are good no
th
ting with,” Coh said, lisping.

He snapped up one of his forelegs and scraped her hard again in the face. Her head snapped back. Blood spattered the ground.

He coiled back his head for one lightning-quick lunge that would have shredded the flesh from Cwelanas’s neck, but the elf ducked, feeling Coh’s yellow teeth snap just inches away, where her face had been. She leaped straight between his black legs and wrapped her arm around his neck.

The pain in her arm and shoulder was like white fire as she kept Coh’s reptilian head tight against her shoulder. Her other arm shot up with her dagger clasped in her fist, and she plunged the blade deep between his ribs, into his lungs, in his side, in his neck.

The undead neogi squirmed against her, squealing in pain as each thrust brought him closer to true death. Cwelanas’s arm and body dripped slick with Coh’s tainted blood. His claws raked her back and legs, but did no damage to her chain mail vest.

She felt the anger in her building as she plunged the dagger deep into his body repeatedly, and still the damned thing would not die. He thrashed against her, wriggling his head in a vain effort to tear loose from her stranglehold. He managed to bring her around in front.

Cwelanas then kicked out hard and connected a powerful knee into his belly. The air blew out of him, and as he was momentarily stunned, she slipped the dagger under his spiderlike legs and plunged it up into his heart. His blood spurted onto her like hot oil, and she pulled out the blade and drove it straight into one of his black, undead eyes.

He squealed like a fiend from the Abyss. His head thrashed madly, and with both hands she thrust the dagger deeper into the eye socket, then heaved until she felt the steel crack through bone and plunge directly into the reptile’s soft, unliving brain.

The neogi jerked once, spasmodically, then Coh slid limp to her feet. His jaws snapped once in an involuntary effort to close around his quarry’s flesh. His head fell back, onto the ground, the hilt of the dagger deep in his eye socket. Blood oozed from between his dead lips.

Cwelanas put her arm to her stomach, suddenly nauseated. The world spun around her. She put out an arm to maintain her balance, but her feet would not move properly. The smalljammer loomed ahead in the trees, but she realized that she was not moving. Somewhere she heard claws scraping through the leaves of the gardens. From somewhere, a dim thought came to her: B’Laath’a.

Her shoulder burned, flaring bright with pain, and B’Laath’a attacked from the side, throwing himself upon her and snapping with his dripping teeth.

She held back his slithering head with her good arm. It was all too much, the killing, the ceaseless attacks by Teldin’s enemies. She felt her anger burning hot inside her, building like a furnace, then she realized that it was her vest of chain mail that seemed to burn, emanating with power.

It is more than a helm, she realized. It has the powers of Teldin’s cloak!

She relaxed inside, still keeping the vengeful neogi at bay, and concentrated on the blossom of heat that she felt pulsing in her heart. B’Laath’a stopped his attack and stared at her, then his eyes widened, and she clasped him to her in an embrace from which he could not escape.

Power coursed through her with the heat of molten steel. The chain mail glowed, and in a burst of energy, B’Laath’a was flung away with the force of a ballista and sent hurtling into the light panels in the ceiling high above.

The neogi crashed into a crystal panel. Cwelanas dimly heard his bones crack upon impact. Then the mage fell from the ceiling and landed with a dull, sickening crunch near the smalljammer. Blood oozed from a score of breaks and lacerations across his body. His eyes, empty, devoid of their innate, unhuman evil, stared blankly at her.

The elf tried to stand, then fell to the ground, her side aching with cold fire from the undead neogi’s bite. She thought she heard a cry, but the world was nothing but a blur around her, and she let herself fall deep into the sweet sleep of unconsciousness.

Chapter Thirty-Six

“...No warrior stands alone, least of all he chosen by fate to deliver some higher meaning to his actions.

“Each champion who has come here has had two things in common: a blind drive to succeed at his individual goals, and a charisma that pulls to him warriors who will stand ready to see his destiny through.

“In so doing, these warriors may find their own wondrous destinies....”

Seversen, scribe,
Book of the Rushing Rapids;

reign of Tomsun the Drinker

The rainbow lights of the phlogiston glittered off the Broken Sphere’s cracked shell, flickering as though to the beat of some secret symphony. The sphere seemed less the shattered remnant of an eons-old disaster than a giant backdrop, an empty theater where an act of the second Unhuman War was being played out for the ghosts of the dead.

From port came an elven armada, the largest ship of the elven fleet. With a wingspan of three hundred feet, the armada was a hundred tons of death bearing a hundred elves, fourteen heavy weapons, and three explosive bombards. As the Cloakmaster watched through the eyes of the
Spelljammer,
hatches opened on the sides and belly of the butterfly-shaped armada, and a swarm of smaller attack flitters was deployed, buzzing speedily toward the
Spelljammer.

From the bow came the smallest of the attacking vessels. A sleek scro battlewagon, shaped like an attacking wild boar, hurtled toward the
Spelljammer.
One hundred and fifty feet long, the battlewagon, proudly christened
Eviscerator
; seemed almost as dangerous as the armada, for it carried fourteen medium weapons, a ram, and four bombards. In addition, it was equipped with a wildfire projector, which could spew a highly pressurized stream of fire, the way fountains spewed water. The ship was crewed by 160 ferocious scro fighters, reared, like their ancestors, the orcs, on a diet of hatred and blood.

From starboard came a Shou tsunami, second only to the
Spelljammer
in length. Like an impossible centipede, the massive vessel squirmed through space as if it were alive, three times the length of the armada’s wingspan. Its segmented hull held two hundred Shou warriors, and its powerful defenses consisted of twenty-two heavy weapons, six bombards, and three jettisons. Hatches above each of the ship’s legs held individual locust ships, which, when released en masse, would create a swarm that could wreak destruction on their enemies. The locusts were each equipped with a single light weapon, but were more often used in suicide dives against other craft and were sometimes filled with smoke powder, in order to blow the enemy into the gods’ embrace.

The scro warriors upon the flat, outer decks of the battlewagon were engaged in small arms combat with the armada, the ship of their most hated enemies, the elves. Arrows from the scro archers arced through the flow in showers, skewering the elves unlucky enough to pull duty on unprotected decks. Three elves manning a ballista fell under the scro onslaught, one elf tumbling over a rail to fall into the phlogiston like a limp doll.

As the
Spelljammer
increased its speed and the fleets of its enemies followed toward the gap in the Broken Sphere, the scro halted their battle with the elves and turned to concentrate on the great ship bearing down on them.

The Cloakmaster watched as the scro scrambled across the decks of the battlewagon to prepare for the attack, then the first wave of flitters from the elven armada penetrated the
Spelljammer’s
air envelope and buzzed the decks. Archers hidden inside each flitter aimed their bows and crossbows toward the emplacements in the
Spelljammer’s
towers. The elves shot on sight, killing a dwarf who was notching a crossbow on the Chalice tower and injuring eight other warriors on the Tower of Thought and the wing batteries.

The
Spelljammer
shook as a trio of boulders crashed into the roof of the ship’s stores and into the open market, now abandoned. The battlewagon had loaded its eight catapults and was already sending two more heavy shots toward the
Spelljammer.
Dust and rubble slammed into the streets as boulders tore through the walls of the council chambers. A load of iron shot hurtled over the towers in an ever-spreading cone, weakening battlements as they crashed into stone and crushing the skulls and bones of warriors under their weight.

Pain erupted throughout the Cloakmaster’s body as each new injury wounded the
Spelljammer.
He winced as flitters shot arrows toward the ship’s great eyes. He screamed as a heavy ballista bolt shot from the armada and the steel-tipped missile pierced the roof of the Armory. He felt himself weakening, the
Spelljammer
slowing as the Broken Sphere grew larger in his eyes.

—
No!
he screamed. —
We’re too close to give up! We can’t!

The
Spelljammer
was silent, or perhaps his voice was the voice of the
Spelljammer
itself, screaming as one, sharing pain, sharing senses, sharing death.

—
No
!

He began to grow warm and thought that he felt a light touch upon his being. He instantly felt stronger, flooded with an energy that he recognized as his own, a reserve he did not know he had.

Then Gaye Goldring’s face, translucent, glowing, floated before him.

“
I’m here,”
she said. “
You have not given up yet. You can’t.”

— So close,
he said.

“
Yes, you’re close. Look..
.”

The
Spelljammer
was so close now that the immense gap in the Broken Sphere was no longer visible, even though it was more than a hundred miles distant. The Cloakmaster could clearly see the darkness inside, the cold rocks that had once been the first planets, and the fiery remnant of the star, Aeyenna, flaring as errant swirls of phlogiston were sucked into the core.

“
You have the strength, Teldin. You’ve got it inside you. I’ll be with you to help you reach the sphere. I’ll do everything I can.”

Gaye faded from his sight. He knew she had already helped him, bringing forth his own strength with merely a touch of her empathic powers. He barely heard her finish with,
“I’ll be out there...”

Then the
Spelljammer
lurched forward, increasing its speed. The Cloakmaster moved, and the
Spelljammer’s
huge wings moved in unison, sucking in a thick stream of phlogiston and pulling it in its wake.

The enemy fleets followed behind, occasionally firing their catapults and ballistae, but generally content, for now, to allow the three larger ships to do their work for them. Together, the fleets all sailed for the Broken Sphere.

The decks of the
Spelljammer
rang with explosions from the giff bombards, from the twang of the ship’s powerful catapults as loads were shot toward the attacking vessels. Lord Diamondtip, his ponderous ears protected by a helmet layered with thick cloth, laughed every time a ship was hit by his smoke powder weapons. A beholder tyrant ship came just a bit too close and shot an ineffective volley of stone and iron shot toward the giff tower. Diamondback ordered his soldiers to “Rotate and fire at will!” and the four-bombard platform was rotated twice, each gun firing in turn until the beholder ship was hammered into chunks. Finally, the tyrant exploded in the phlogiston, and the towers of the
Spelljammer
vibrated with the resultant explosion as the flow ignited in a ball of glorious fire.

Diamondtip patted the wall of the giff tower. The surface was blackened with the force of the explosions, the immediate ignitions of the surrounding flow, but the tower still held. “Stay with me,” Lord Diamondtip said to the tower. “Stay with me.”

The elven flitters that had disgorged from the armada swooped down at the
Spelljammer
and through its streets like deadly wraiths. The light craft were built for speed, and the archers cramped inside whittled away at the
Spelljammer’s
defenses with the sting of an insect. Some flitters even carried elven mages, who cast their spells of shadow or invisible force with a single, rapid pass.

The weaponry atop the dwarven citadel proved invaluable against a heavily outfitted nautiloid that seemed to swoop in from nowhere. The nautiloid shot four heavy ballistae and four heavy catapults simultaneously at the starboard wing batteries. Some of the shot went high and took out a portion of the roof of the Shou tower; but the weapons had been carefully aimed and destroyed the top floors of the human and elven batteries. The elven battery then caught fire, and a huge explosion ripped through the building and blasted stone chunks in a wide fan across the tail and the aft towers.

The starboard batteries responded quickly with their heavy weapons, but the dwarves directly beneath the nautiloid had the advantage of proximity. As the shadow of the nautiloid passed over their heads, Lord Agate Ironlord Kova ordered his troops to return fire. In the adjoining tower, Vagner Firespitter, as well, shouted to his dwarves to “Fire until we blow the scum right out of the flow!”

The nautiloid was sandwiched between the assaults of the dwarven communities and battered mercilessly with loads of iron shot until a final missile from one of Firespitter’s light ballistae pierced the chambered hull. The ship burst into a ball of flame. It fell in a flaming arc upon the beholder ruins and rolled off the stern of the
Spelljammer
, leaving a trail of exploding phlogiston as it fell from the deck.