Plague of Spells as-1 Page 7

  She shouted over a murmur of protest, "Instead, you will be exalted! Come with me and find a new future. Even now, I can feel the current change. I am ascendant! I am the handmaiden of an ancient strength that begins, even now, to turn its attention back to the world it so long forgot."

  With a performer's flourish, Nogah released her grip on the Dreamheart. It did not fall. It was as steady in the air as a stone resting on solid earth. Then it began to ascend as the light emerging from it became elongated strands of swaying light. The relic reached a central position in the chamber and paused. The lashing tendrils of light grew ever longer and more elaborate, while the beat of its thunderous, repeating note thudded ever louder. The hearts of all those present began to synch to the overpowering, pelagic beat.

  Nogah screamed, "Behold!" Her voice was amplified, not drowned, by the crashing noise.

  "There lies a realm, beyond ours, of purity and power! A place where thought becomes action and death is just another concept, mutable as a lie. The gods, jealous of their own power, have long blocked mortals from this land beyond all other places. But not all knowledge of it is lost. Here and there, portions of that outlying realm touch the world. Where such contact occurs, reality itself is blessed! When the touch persists, great wonders can be evoked!"

  The self-styled handmaiden of the Dreamheart gestured and concentrated. The weaving strands of light swirled into a massive braid. A braid with a bulge at the center, where the Dreamheart was cupped in the tendrils of its own creation.

  The braid rotated and pulsed in the air, like a gorged serpent slowly digesting a recent meal.

  The bulge at the braid's center pulsed in time to the throbbing boom, expanding with each beat. The multicolored threads suddenly convulsed and unraveled, revealing the cavity it had grown within it. Of the Dreamheart, there was no sign. Instead there was a featureless expanse of pale radiance, like moonlight seen from behind a cloud, radiance so old that it should have failed long ago, but persevered.

  "Look you well-the light falling into your eyes is older than all the light in the world, older than birth fires of the gods themselves. Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it glorious? Can't you feel your mind unravel in wonder in its-"

  A great crash, louder still than the Dreamheart's pulsing music, broke through Nogah's ritual of awe. The sound came from above, at the dome's rear.

  Watery, afternoon light flooded across the startled, blinking audience. The moonlight radiance winked out. The Dreamheart was revealed as an unadorned stone. It dropped like a dead weight into the massed audience. A scream burbled away; the stone crushed the skull of a kuo-toa standing directly below it.

  A strident voice called out from the newborn fissure, "Cease your blasphemy, in the name of the Sea Mother!"

  *****

  Half blinded by the sudden glare, Nogah was still able to pick out the silhouettes of at least two senior whips bedecked in holy battle armor. With them stood the bulky forms of four kuo-toa monitors, warriors trained to fight with nothing but their own bodies since birth.

  The audience screamed with one throat in terror of being found in the company of a blasphemer. Nogah tried to command them to turn on their attackers. But now the shouts of panic easily drowned out her directions. They hadn't stared into the enchantment she'd prepared long enough for them to fall under her sway. Her long-prepared ritual was undone.

  A wild scramble in the bowl of the dome commenced as her audience sought to escape. Kuo-toa began to lose their lives as they were trampled by their fellows in blossoming panic.

  She'd have to start anew, but she pushed all thoughts of preparations out of her head. All her attention was required to save her scaled hide from the attacking Sea Mother loyalists. Nogah leaped into the audience even as blasts of whip-directed lightning scoured the ground where she stood. The edge of the bolt caught her. She yelped but kept moving. Her natural resistance saved her from most of the bolt's fury. Still, Nogah knew she couldn't stand up to many more such blasts.

  The stampeding congregation was like a storm-tossed sea. The attacking whips had closed off the exits! The trapped kuo-toa surged back and forth across the constricted space. Nogah fought through the press of thrashing bodies with Dreamheart-enhanced strength. She trod on more than a few mewling forms already brought low. Even out of contact with the relic, she was able to draw strength from it Even now her lightning-burned skin healed.

  She savored the thought that her abilities would redouble again when she renewed direct contact with the Dreamheart-

  A flailing finger jabbed her left eye. An elbow clipped her right side. A big, sticky kuo-toa grabbed Nogah around her waist and tried to use her body to lever himself off the floor. His was a hysterical strength; she barely avoided being pulled down. She had to get clear… No. She'd joined the panic for a reason. Despite the dangers of the crush, she had to retrieve the relic. Just another few moments and she would have it.

  The four monitors leaped from the fissure to land amid the screaming kuo-toa commoners. The monitors' finned hands, feet, knees, and elbows were weapons every bit as lethal as swords and spears. They began killing a path through the crowd toward Nogah, even as she continued to move toward them, — or in truth toward what lay between them and herself. The relic cast a shadow on her mind, so that she knew exactly its distance from her.

  What? The Dreamheart was moving! One of the panicked congregation had it. The kuo-toa was using it to batter his way to the left, toward some chimera of safety the idiot imagined he would find there…

  The thief made surprising progress. Actually, not so surprising, Nogah realized. Even unconscious of its true nature, the fellow was energized by the stone. Soon enough, he would make it to the wall. And what then? Perhaps he would unconsciously borrow strength enough from the stone to create an exit.

  The monitors continued to close on her, thinning the crowd with brutal efficiency. If the monitors cared so little about Olleth's citizens, then the whips still perched on the breach above were probably even now readying another bolt to blast her and any creature around her. They wouldn't hold back for fear of killing an innocent. And the idiot kuo-toa continued to draw away from Nogah, as if on purpose!

  Nogah mentally reached for the stone, straining the thin connection that remained between them. Through that link she attempted to summon fire.

  The Dreamheart roared with black flame. A piercing scream emerged from the thief an instant before his body flashed away to cinders. The stone fell back to the floor, already cooling.

  The crowd shrank from the cremated residue, creating a buffer. Nogah rushed triumphantly into the space and snatched up the Dreamheart. Her link with the relic resurged. It made her a little giddy. The reunion wasn't a moment too soon.

  A ray of brilliant green energy burst from the head whip's pincer staff. Wherever the ray reached, portions of the floor, clothing, and screaming kuo-toa disappeared in puffs of gray dust. The ray touched down some ten or so feet from Nogah, then tracked toward her.

  She sucked energy from the relic, hardening her form against the ravening green ray. When the emerald light touched her, she couldn't help flinching. Then she smiled. The Dreamheart provided her more than enough strength to withstand the prayers of destruction granted by the Sea Mother. That was the point of her sermons, that she, Nogah, was ascendant. The green ray played over her form as if no more than colored light.

  Nogah decided it was time to show all the kuo-toa of Olleth that Nogah wasn't to be trifled with. Time to seize the reins of power. Time to call up the relic's untapped reservoir of energy, more than she had ever tried before.

  The relic still hid most of itself from Nogah, despite her small successes in channeling some of its fringe energies. Every day she learned a little more. For instance, she discovered the relic could command the minds of certain kinds of creatures. Not a tenday ago she had urged the Dreamheart to extrude mental tendrils of influence across the Sea of Fallen Stars. Tendrils seeking creatures of the deep who might be c
onvinced, with the relic's aid, to do Nogah's bidding.

  More than one of those questing lines had grown taut since then. Like fishing lines, Nogah knew she had hooked some big ones.

  Now comes the great gamble, she thought. Not knowing exactly what she summoned, Nogah mentally tugged on one of the Dreamheart's tendrils of influence. As she did so, a name resounded in her mind.

  Gethshemeth.

  The name was familiar…

  Oh.

  Nogah's recognition nearly severed the summoning tendril of connection. Gethshemeth was a great kraken, a monstrosity of the sea bottom. Truth be told, the kuo-toa of Olleth had hoped Gethshemeth was slain in the Spellplague. The great one had been an ally of the morkoth Arcanum and had no love for the whips for their part in wiping out the former residents of the city.

  Could even the Dreamheart hold Gethshemeth to her wishes?

  Too late for second thoughts. The great kraken was already close, as if anticipating being called. Or, as if the kraken had felt the Dreamheart's questing tendril days ago and had traveled over the last tenday to investigate the source of the strange flavor in the water…

  "Nogah!" screamed one of the kuo-toa whips, "I see you! Though you struggle like a minnow in the net, we have you now! Give yourself up to the Sea Mother's just retribution for a blasphemer! Every moment you struggle is another eon your soul shall twine in the Sea Mother's grotto!"

  Nogah shook her head in negation, almost sadly. She said, "It is your struggle that ends today. If you flee immediately or forswear the Sea Mother here and now, as I have done, perhaps I shall not take your life."

  Incredulity widened both whips' already bulbous eyes. One of the monitors, having closed nearly to within striking distance, gave out an involuntary yelp of indignation.

  Then a shadow fell across the whip's shoulders. It rose from behind them.

  There was a sound like a bursting bladder, and one of the whips was gone.

  Where the sky and light had been visible through the shattered ceiling was now a mountain of undulating, dun-colored flesh. Then came the stench of a thousand rotting fish, and the second whip screamed.

  Gethshemeth had come.

  A tentacle as tall as a tower squirmed into view. The remaining whip brought up his pincer staff and began to scream a prayer of dreadful power. Too late. The tentacle smashed down upon him. A spray of fluids rained down onto the kuo-toa below, whose own screams escalated in pitch.

  Nogah concentrated on the Dreamheart and her connection to Gethshemeth. She sensed the kraken's powerful mind through the link. The squid-like brain was not suffused with hate, as Nogah would have supposed, for being forced to the will of another. No, the kraken felt only curiosity. And a gruesome sort of giddy greed.

  A monitor punched her with a fist that felt more like an iron mace than flesh. Two more blows hammered her and she was down, screaming, protecting not her own body, but the Dreamheart. Blood pooled in one of her eyes, blurring her vision.

  Nogah directed a mental image of the two monitors who remained within the chamber into the relic, and out along the tendril connected to Gethshemeth.

  Three more tentacles groped in through the fissure, crumbling the rent wider with the force of their entry.

  Nogah screamed, her words mush with hurt, "Your flesh is forfeit for striking me, groveler!"

  The monitor had time enough to glance back before one of the kraken tentacles snatched him up and retracted, bearing him instantly away. A faint scream and crunch followed.

  The remaining monitor stood his ground, assuming a guarding stance. When the second tentacle lashed forward, he evaded, and in doing so, landed a kick. The kick's amazing strength sent an undulating wave up the tentacle. A mighty, monstrous voice roared in surprise.

  The third barbed tentacle snapped forward, encircling the monitor around the neck. With a yank and snap, the kuo-toa warrior's head parted from its body.

  Quiet descended on the ruined hall then, save for the raw-throated whimpering of the surviving congregation. They were too terrified to scream any longer.

  A tentacle propelled itself along the broken ground and dead bodies. It quested toward Nogah like a side-winding serpent. It touched her on the leg, then reared up. The tip of the tentacle waved back and forth, as if waiting.

  Nogah took short, painful breaths as she watched Gethshemeth's boneless limb gesticulate. Aches from the monitor's attack made her vision unsteady. It occurred to her that she needn't suffer so. With a thought, she drew wholeness from the Dreamheart. Well-being sparked out from her hands, up her scaled forearms, and vanquished the pain. Her facility with the stone was increasing.

  Nogah rose, using the Dreamheart to push herself up before finally lifting it to cradle it in her arms like a newly hatched child.

  Scarlet light bathed the room. Nogah looked up at the widened fissure in the ceiling. A single, vast, red eye peered down through the rent. Her heart stuttered, and her breath caught.

  Leave foolishness behind you, Nogah reprimanded herself. She was master, and this great leviathan of the deep was leashed to her will via the Dreamheart. Why else had it come?

  Nogah spoke, "Great one of the depths, I thank you for your service."

  The eye regarded her, unblinking. She felt curiosity through the light mental connection the Dreamheart provided.

  Curiosity sidling toward yearning.

  Nogah decided to send the great kraken away. She had proved she could summon the creature at need. She was growing uncomfortable under the creature's unwavering scrutiny.

  She issued a mental command of dismissal through the relic.

  The link jerked and parted, gone. Nogah took an involuntary step back.

  The eye finally blinked. A basso scream blasted through the hall: Gethshemeth's voice.

  "You misunderstand my role."

  Each word was so loud it was like a separate assault. Nogah sputtered. "I… you… you are here because I commanded your aid…" "No."

  The negation was like a gate crashing down, cutting off escape.

  "I am here for what you retrieved for me from below."

  "The stone is mine!" yelled Nogah in sudden understanding, clutching it and pulling back. "I summoned you, and I can dismiss you. Leave me!"

  The tentacle tip swaying before Nogah lashed forward and struck her with the strength often monitors.

  She blacked out. A moment later, consciousness blinked back. She was in the air, tumbling head over flippers. She didn't have the Dreamheart. "No-"

  A wall arrested Nogah's trajectory. If not for her residual claim on the relic's power, she would have died in that instant.

  As it was, she slid to the floor and crumpled into a heap. She could only blink as the kraken's tentacle tip encircled the Dreamheart. Tentacle and relic retreated up through the hole in the ceiling.

  "That which was ancient before the world breathed is now mine."

  Nogah tried to rise, collapsed. "Divinity itself is now within my reach." Nogah sobbed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) West of the Ruins of Starmantle

  The rain sputtered a while longer, then stopped. It hadn't been enough to douse the wildfire that blazed to the south, burning a swath through the seedling pines of Gulthmere Forest. In some places, the fire flared so bright it cast orange highlights on the low clouds. Winding columns of smoke and soot twisted up toward those same clouds, merging into a single, ashen morass.

  Raidon Kane coughed in the damp, sooty air. He wondered how far he had traveled. Not far, given his condition. Then how long had it been since he staggered west from Starmantle's crazed gates? Plaguechanged ghouls nearly ended him there. One tried to eat his leg. Raidon worried more about the creature's claim, that the monk was "spellscarred."

  His exhaustion was a physical weight lying on his back. He was feverish, and his damaged foot had at last gone numb. His body's overwhelming fatigue tried to convince his mind that an immediate nap was the best possible choice
.

  Raidon struggled to crawl onto a large outcrop. He imagined it would be more defensible than the plain. He'd seen jackals sniffing around, and he worried other predators might be trailing him from Starmantle. Undead predators with too many mouths.

  The rain made the outcrop slick. He kept losing his grip. Even when he found a good hold, the piece crumbled, sending him sliding back toward the ground.

  Once a small ledge broke under his weight to reveal a cyst of red spiders, each the size of one of Raidon's hands. The wildfire gleamed ominously from their scarlet carapaces. The arachnids clacked oversized fangs at Raidon, and then scurried away in a single line like a tendril of blood.

  He was nearly to the top. Then a spasm in his acid-burned foot caused him to backslide. He slid down half the distance he had just so laboriously climbed.

  "By Xiang's seven swords."

  Raidon's concentration was absent. He couldn't summon the mental discipline necessary to heal his wounds. The skin from his foot and leg was peeling away, and blood constantly oozed from the raw wound. Dirt crusted everything. Infection had likely already set in.

  Raidon tried to push aside concerns over his injury. He couldn't worry about that now. He needed sleep, and a safe place for it.

  A new pain seared. The nerves in his lower leg were not quite dead. The sting sawed right through the shreds of his focus. Raidon slid all the way back down to the outcrop's base, scraping skin from his fingers and forearms.

  He lay face down in the mud, coughing into the cruel earth that apparently had decided this day was to be his last.

  Would that be so bad, he wondered?

  "Try again, Raidon," came a voice from nowhere. "You have nothing more to lose."

  The monk raised his head from the mud to glance weakly around. He was alone.

  Of course. As his mind gave up its sovereignty over reason, he supposed chimeras would appear to bedevil him.