The Ultimate Helm

Chapter Twenty-Two

A squadron of ten of CassaRoc's warriors charged from the neogi tower and formed a half-circle around the entrance. Immediately, Teldin's party ran through the door and was encircled by the warriors as they started their run to the library tower.

The fighting was steadily increasing across the Spelljammer, as the fear of the Dark Times swelled unreasonably and chaos took sway. Goblins and elves battled ferociously near the minotaur tower, which had been abandoned since the alliance of the minotaurs with the eye tyrants. Behind them, near the beholder ruins, the humans watched as a group of halflings beat back a trio of giants that had cornered them near the minotaur quarters.

From all corners of the Spelljammer, the clash of steel rang through the streets and alleys, punctuated by the wails of the dying and the war screams of the victors.

The warriors pushed their tightly knit wedge through the elf-goblin battle, scattering the unhumans with a minimum of bloodshed. The fighting was rapidly disintegrating into a free-for-all, and Teldin had organized this protective wedge to get his party through the nearest bottleneck of fighters, so that they could make a run past the goblin quarters for the library.

Past the minotaur tower, where they easily cut through a halfhearted gauntlet of ragged goblin fighters, the human wedge split apart and doubled back to the neogi tower. Teldin, CassaRoc, Chaladar, Estriss, Djan, and Na'Shee quickened their pace and bolted across a wide expanse of open deck for the library tower, situated alongside the captain's tower. Here, the ship was free of fighting and bloodshed. Teldin afforded a quick glance up, into the flow, and his pace slowed momentarily. The fleets encroaching on the Spelljammer were almost there. Teldin quickly gauged the distance to the closest vessel, a wasp ship, and decided it would be within ballista distance within half an hour.

"We see them!" Chaladar shouted. "Come on, Cloakmaster! We can do no good out here!"

They turned at the corner of the goblin quarters. The library tower, across the avenue, had been tightly sealed years ago, and the interior had never been seen since. The library's double doors were barricaded with brick and mortar, probably thick enough to withstand a battering ram, Teldin guessed.

"What now?" CassaRoc asked. He idly scratched his thickly bearded chin.

"I know you told me the tower had been sealed, but I had no idea it was this fortified," Teldin said.

Chaladar offered, "We should have brought a battering ram."

They had talked about a ram before, in the neogi tower, but the neogi had no use for battering rams, and the humans did not want to take a chance fighting their way across to the Tower of Thought. Too many lives could be lost.

Teldin stared at his objective and sighed angrily. There were no windows, no other doors, nothing.

"Damn."

Teldin felt himself staring at the sealed doors, and without realizing it at first, his arms began to sizzle with the familiar embrace of his cloak's energy. He heard CassaRoc say something, but the words seemed sluggish, barely understandable.

The muscles in his arms burned with fire. The energy flowed through him, embodying his frustration, his anger. Time slowed around him; the edge of his vision was a blur, and all he could see was the stone and mortar blocking him from his goal.

His mind swam, and, with certainty, he felt I'm supposed to be here.

He slid his sword from its scabbard. The energy that fluctuated through him shot out of his hands. As though it were encased in an aura, the energies of the cloak infused his steel and lit the metal from within, burning with a light that was pure and radiant, explosive.

A scream echoed in his ears, then Teldin realized it was a cry from his own mouth as he leaped up the short flight of steps and swung the sword into the stone barrier.

The sword broke through rock with a clap of thunder. His steel was invulnerable, alive, biting through the stone as though it were bread. Mortar and rock and brick flew out from the onslaught of the Cloakmaster's powerful blade, and he attacked the barrier again, relentlessly, heedless of the chalk and dust that surrounded him in a pale cloud.

The others stood frozen as the Cloakmaster disappeared in the cloud of dust, a raging berserker against a wall of rock. "Teldin!" CassaRoc shouted. "Are you all right?"

Chunks of brick and stone rained to the deck. There was a final cry, then the dust settled slowly and Teldin stood before a gaping hole in the barrier, untouched by the dust that had surrounded him. The wooden doors inside had been no match for the sharp power of Teldin's blade. The Cloakmaster had splintered a wide hole through the doors, and the darkness inside beckoned them with mystery.

He turned to face his companions. The power still pulsed through him; they could see the lines of rage and inner strength mapped like pulsating veins across his face. Then he sagged as the power of the cloak flooded out of him. At once, the sword began to vibrate in his hand, and, with a loud snap that echoed off the tower walls, the sword shattered into bent pieces of battered steel and clanged to his feet.

The warriors joined Teldin at the top of the stairs. Chaladar handed him a spare sword from his belt. "Good work," the paladin said understatedly.

Teldin was silent. He pointed his new sword toward the ragged gap in the door. "Let's go," he said, then he crawled through.

Once inside, he stared up into the blackness, waiting as the warriors each came through and stopped behind him. Na'Shee reached into a pouch on her belt and pulled out one of the Spelljammer's smaller light rods, which was essentially a hand-sized crystal of the same luminescent material that made up the ship's light panels. Djan did the same, and the library was lit with a dim, bluish glow that barely reached the edge of the second floor.

They stood in a meager foyer, and tall pillars stretched up into the darkness to some point high above. The pillars were cracked, blackened with the fiery evidence of the destruction that had gone on here years before.

Around them, bookshelves stretched away into the shadows, but the shelves were bare except for thick black drifts of ash that fluttered in the breeze singing through the doors. The shelves themselves were but blackened skeletons of their former selves; the ladders that led up to them were charred and useless.

"What went on here?" Djan mused, turning to take in all the destruction.

Chaladar spoke reverently. The thick smell of smoke and soot hung on everything like a shroud. "It was during the time of Jokarin the Bold, or so the legend goes. Neridox, a mad wizard, was supposed to have sealed himself up here in the tower. As to the fire that obviously raged through here, I have no clue. This is not part of the tale."

The group slowly spread out on the lower floor. At the rear of the building, a flight of stone steps led up into the balconies that made up the second floor. The floor was covered with layers of ash and soot and lay undisturbed by the passage of time or by previous visitors.

Teldin stopped at a bookcase and reached out. He pulled a chunk of blackened leather from a mound of ash and wiped it off with his fingers. He could read part of a title written in gold:

Ok f the ere derer

He tossed it to the black floor. "There is nothing here," he said to himself, "nothing here at all."

"All these books," Djan said. "Gone. What good does it do to burn a book?"

"It is the evil that men do," Chaladar said softly, "that must be cleansed, not the wisdom that can lead them out of the darkness and into light."

There is a another level, Estriss said in Teldin's mind. The others heard the mind flayer as well, and they turned toward the Cloakmaster.

Teldin took the first step, and the group made its way up the stairs to the balconies. Here, the situation was the same as below: long walls of nothing but ash, grim testimony to the wisdom that had been ignored by the madness of long-forgotten violence.

Together they walked along the port gallery and stopped at a spiral staircase in the corner. Na'Shee held up her light and took a few steps down. "Nothing," she said. "It looks like it was a storage room of some sort."

Teldin nodded. Na'Shee came up beside him and gasped at the sight behind him. The others turned. Djan held up his light rod. The body they found was little more than a skeleton, mummified in its own blackened flesh. It was seated behind a desk between two spiral staircases. Its mouth gaped open in a soundless, eternal cry, and the dagger that had killed the man was still stuck in the dried skin between his ribs. "Who was he?" Djan inquired.

CassaRoc whispered, "Probably the mage Neridox, murdered." He swallowed. "So much for his vengeful spirit. This is not part of the legend either."

The desk crumbled apart at their touch, and afterward they explored the second level and the storage room under the starboard staircase. They met below, after their searches on both floors had turned up nothing salvageable. "There has to be something here," CassaRoc said. "No," Chaladar said. "I've been looking for secret doors or rooms. All I found was a sealed door, probably leading into the captain's quarters. There is nothing left." "I can feel it," Teldin said. He absently touched his amulet.

He staggered back, blinking.

"Cloakmaster, what is it?" Na'Shee asked, reaching for him.

He moved her hand away. "Light," he said. "I touched my amulet, and my eyes were filled with a bright-"

Teldin's chest grew warm in a surge of unbidden power, and light blazed forth from his amulet in a cone of pure brilliance. Chaladar threw his arm across his eyes. "What are you doing?" he shouted.

"I don't know!" The energy of the light sizzled in Teldin's ears. He turned, and the beam of light pierced the darkness of the library, dispelling its secret shadows as Teldin cast it over the walls of shelves. "It's never done anything like this before!"

He passed it over CassaRoc and Estriss, who spun away from its blinding white glow. It picked out the far corners with a circle of white light, then Teldin turned, and the beam of light moved across the pillars and toward the staircase.

Teldin stopped suddenly and let the light focus in the center of the room, between the support pillars. The others gathered around him and stared. "Do you see that?"

The others stood transfixed, silent.

Exposed in the beam of the amulet's arcane light, an ornate, oblong mirror floated above the floor. The mirror was full-length, floating on end inches above the floor. In the mirror's image Teldin saw the library.

The books were many, he could see, and the library was lit by torches and candlelight. Wildspace, he thought, then realized that it did not matter. It's a reflection, perhaps of a time long past.

Or, perhaps of a time… a time that is forever.

A smile crossed his lips, and he reached out for the mirror.

"Wait, Teldin!" Djan yelled.

Djan's voice seemed far behind him. Teldin's fingertips touched the surface of the looking glass, and he stepped in as though the glass were a liquid rippling around him.

Silence. Complete, utter silence. The amulet flickered once, and the beam of light disappeared like the light of a snuffed candle flame.

Teldin looked around. The books reached to the ceiling, on all the balconies, stacked in piles in the corners, on the desk of Neridox or someone nameless who came long before him. The titles gleamed in gold and silver, along bindings of brown leather and black: A Right and True Telling of the Creation of All That Is… The Sky God and its Children… The Magic of Imagination, Life and the Magic that is Existence… Spelljammer: A Historie, by one so Honored to be an Observer.

In the center of the library, as in the library he had just left in reality, Teldin found an artifact, floating above the floor in a timeless spell created by magic unimaginable to him. It was a globe of black crystal, like the Broken Sphere outside, shimmering with an iridescence, an energy, that shone from within. It spun rapidly, flickering light across his face with millisecond images of times long past, of events long forgotten- battles alongside the giff's tower-a cry of triumph as an ore ship exploded in a sea of wildspace-the singing of the Spelljammer as it communed with an undersea beast ofHarraka.

The obsidian globe floated at arm level above the floor, crackling silently with energies he could feel in his fingers as he reached for it, energies he knew were the burning fires of the collected knowledge of the wanderer known as the Spelljammer… — And he became one…

"Where is he?" Chaladar shouted.

"The mirror," Djan surmised, taking a step toward it. He reached out as though to touch it, then drew back his hand. "How…?"

Wait, Estriss said in their minds. Look inside. See if the Cloakmaster is well.

Djan glanced into the mirror and saw only a reflection of the library as it had seemingly appeared an unknown time ago: filled with books, well-lit, ready to be used. "He is not there," he said. "No one is there."

"Well, where is he?" CassaRoc asked.

He is there, the mind flayer said. Give him a chance. He will return.

"This is nonsense," Chaladar said. "This is evil. The Cloakmaster must be returned-"

Then, almost with an audible sigh, the surface of the mirror shimmered, rippled, and Teldin, the Cloakmaster, leaped from inside it. The mirror faded away, back into its former state of invisibility.

CassaRoc gripped Teldin's arm. "Speak to me, Teldin. Are you all right?"

Slowly, the Cloakmaster looked up. He smiled weakly, and his eyes seemed filled with an inner peace that he had never before known.

"Yes. Yes, I am fine."

"What happened in there?" Na'Shee asked. Estriss hung back. Teldin glanced up and saw the mind flayer looking his way.

"I have found my destiny," Teldin said. "Some of my answers are clear."

Estriss sucked in a breath. His facial tentacles twitched in agreement. Yes, Cloakmaster. I should have suspected… You have seen the person you are to be.

"Tell us," CassaRoc said. "What happened?" They all stared silently at the Cloakmaster. Estriss bowed his head unknowingly.

"The wisdom of the Spelljammer is in there, inside the loculus," Teldin said, "hidden for ages. I touched it, briefly. I became one with it." "And?" Chaladar said.

"I know my destiny now. I know why the cloak called to me. I know why it came to me, why I left Krynn to seek my fate among the spheres."

The others watched him curiously, waiting. "Djan, you call it verenthestae. I don't know what to call it, but I am supposed to be here. I am supposed to be on the Spelljammer. This is what my life has been all about, and I never even realized." He held up a length of his cloak. "This is the Cloak of the First Pilot-the first pilot of the Spelljammer itself. It is an ultimate helm… it is the Ultimate Helm, created at the same time as the Spelljammer and somehow eternally intertwined with its destiny. It is the helm of the first pilot, and-" He stopped. "It is my helm.

His voice grew lower, more determined. "This is mine, truly mine-and with it, I have to accept my destiny.

"No more war. No more blood, no more hate. This is a chance for life, for me. And I-"

He paused, looking at each one of them in turn. "I never dared to believe it. I'm not sure I believe it even now, even though I know it in here." He placed his hand over his heart, over the amulet.

Softly, the Cloakmaster told them. "I… am to be the next pilot of the Spelljammer. This is my destiny.

"I am to be the next-"

His words were forgotten as two events occurred simultaneously. The Spelljammer shuddered violently beneath their feet, and the thunderous sound of some collision with the Spelljammer echoed through the hole in the doors.

"It seems the war has finally come to us," Teldin said. "The fleets have arrived."

He started toward the doors, then halted abruptly. He bent over in silent pain, and the warriors rushed to him as he sank to his knees.

They watched as Teldin opened his arms. The amulet glowed from within, and his chest pulsated with an inner light, casting a warm glow upon the ashen floor. He clutched his hand to the amulet. "Not now," he said. "Not now."

Cloakmaster? Estriss inquired.

Teldin looked up. Their eyes met, and Teldin's pain was reflected in the mind flayer's silence.

His chest sizzled with inner fire. He looked down. The insignia, the design that was his link to the Spelljammer, was glowing again on his chest.

The sign… Estriss said. He clasped Teldin's arm. It's calling you again. You will have to answer the Compass soon, or it will consume you. Estriss paused to catch his breath. You must follow its feelings, its strengths. It will lead you to the adytum.

The Spelljammer shook again. Ash fell upon the party from the tower's tallest shelves.

"The war for the Spelljammer begins in earnest now," Teldin began to rail. "Cwelanas must be rescued. And now I must answer the Spelljammer's summons. This is more than one man can do!"

"Teldin," Djan said calmly. "This is your destiny. Like it or not, you are the Cloakmaster, and you must choose-soon."

Teldin knew he could not abandon Cwelanas. He had come too far to lose his love, his faith, without fighting for her as hard as he could. He took a deep breath and tried to concentrate. Where is she? How do I find her?

A voice rang in his ears, and he saw a face-a head- speaking to him tonelessly… He has taken the woman into the elven veins, and you will not find her…

"The warrens," he said. The burning in his chest throbbed with the beating of his heart. "There is an entrance to the warrens somewhere in the Elven High Command."

He stood and started slowly for the door. "Damn the war. Cwelanas comes first. The Spelljammer can defend itself for the moment. Cwelanas needs my help more than-"

He spun around as though he had been kicked. His chest glowed with a hot fire, and the amulet seemed to be a brand, searing itself into his flesh. The pattern blazed through his tunic, shining with the light of an ancient, three-pointed star.

Then he pitched forward onto the blackened floor.

CassaRoc rolled him over. "Teldin!" he shouted. "Teldin!"

But Teldin could hear only the call of the Spelljammer.

The call came to him powerfully, overriding all neural synapses and conscious thought in one immeasurable burst of energy. It came to him in images and in bits of words. Sounds. Emotions. Sensations that resembled taste and touch and smell.

Above all, there was the yearning, the need.

— Lonely!

He wanted to shake his head, to deny his guilt. He had not meant to ignore the call, but it was all happening so fast, and Cwelanas needed him, and he didn't know — Where are you?

Here! he shouted in his mind. Here!

— Come, it said, tugging at his mind, his emotions, his very being.

Where? he implored. Where?

In a blaze of light, it showed him.

He stood naked in the shadow of the Spelljammer's great tail. He smelled the stench of death from the neogi tower, then saw the light from the flow play like gold fire along the towers across the Spelljammer's back. It concentrated in a yellow pinpoint within the stem of the ship's tail, above the Dark Tower. The glow pulsated like a beating heart, like the burning tattoo upon his chest, and he realized the route he must take to achieve his ultimate destiny.

— Worthy? he felt.

Yes, he said.

— Need! it cried, and a part of him cried out with it.

— Finish!

— Complete!

— Create…!

His eyes blinked and adjusted to the real time inside the neogi tower. CassaRoc had slapped him. "What happened?" he wondered aloud.

"You passed out," Djan said.

"I know," Teldin said. "I know." He clasped Djan's arm. "Don't you understand? Now I know. I know. I know how to get to the adytum. I know what I must do."

They helped him stand. He placed his hands upon Cassa-Roc's and Na'Shee's shoulders. "The Spelljammer is calling me. It needs me."

He looked into their eyes, almost pleading. He did not want to go. Cwelanas was trapped in a hideaway of Coh, or the Fool, and her life depended on him.

But the amulet-no, the ship-was calling, and part of him answered willingly, as though he belonged here. And he knew he had no choice.

"The war is going to have to wait. I have to get to the adytum. May the gods forgive me, but I must answer the Spelljammer's summons.. now. I pray that Cwelanas will not be lost to me again."