heard shouts in Unhuman tongues spread over the decks. He felt the flow rush around the Spelljammer's sphere of air. He felt its song ring through each cell of its huge body… and in his own mind.
At the same time, he was the Julia. He felt the flow rush past the whorls of his hard-bodied shell ship. He felt the nautiloid shudder as he reached out with his mind and plucked the helm away from his helmsman, Corontea, and imagined that both ships were slowing…
He saw the forward views from both their bows. He was both ships at once, staring down at each other, measuring the too-quickly decreasing space between them.
He grew calm and closed his eyes. He imagined a whirling ball of air between the two ships, a cyclone of invisible energy, growing, growing, into a storm of power.
The nautiloid moved on, shifting softly, slowing almost imperceptibly. The Spelljammer, unstoppable, huge, came on, hurtling toward his flimsy ship.
His cloak, impossibly alive, floated around him, mirroring the manta shape of the Spelljammer. Teldin lifted his amis and felt the power flow through him, channeled into magical energy by his ancient cloak. He visualized the windstorm of invisible energy between the ships, and he willed it to grow larger, stronger, into a cushion of raw force to keep the two craft apart.
The nautiloid was slowing, buffeted by the cold winds spinning from Teldin's mind storm; but the Spelljammer was too big, too powerful. Its weight collided with his invisible storm of wind and kept plunging on. He pushed out with his mind, summoning the powers of the cloak and willing the energy storm to withstand the impact. At the same time, he visualized the Julia and shoved it farther away.
Then he opened his eyes, and the realization hit him without warning. The Spelljammer was alive! This great ship was alive. It was sentient. And it knew him. It was coming for him.
For him'.
— Are you worthy?
He wanted to cower, to hide in the protective folds of his cloak and watch as his ship was crushed under the Spelljammer's enormous mass; but the Spelljammer was too huge, too purposeful. Teldin could feel that its innate sentience kept it single-minded, determined.
And strong.
Teldin began to sweat with the strain of keeping the ships apart. The Spelljammer's strength was too much; still the huge vessel grew closer, blotting the Broken Sphere completely from his view.
The wedge between the ships grew increasingly small as his own faith ebbed. He heard himself grunting with the immense strain of keeping the ships apart; he saw a human upon a tower, pointing toward him with a sword, and he shook his head like a caged animal, feeling a hidden strength blossoming within him like a radiant flower.
Live, he thought. I… will… livel
The Spelljammer hurtled toward him. It dwarfed his tiny ship and threatened to impale the nautiloid upon its spiraled turrets.
Live!
At his neck, the ancient amulet began to glow. Cold sparks of energy flickered along its mazelike pattern. The chain burst away from the amulet and fell at his feet, and the bronze disk glowed and burned itself into the clasp of his cloak, welding itself as though it had always belonged there.
At once, he felt his feet lift from the wooden planks of the deck. His cloak billowed around him like a thing alive as he floated only inches above the doomed ship. He heard the scream of a woman aboard the Spelljammer, the cries of humans running hurriedly away, warning others of the nautiloid's imminent crash. Beneath him, in the belly of the Julia, he heard the cries of his own crew members as their impending deaths grew near.
Live!
He stared down at the Spelljammer and noticed for the first time the great, empty expanse along its closer wing. He closed his eyes. His hands balled into fisis. He pulled his amis together across his chest, and imagined himself as a hand, a giant hand of golden energy forming against the black backdrop of the Broken Sphere, pulsing with the limitless power of the cosmos. He willed the hand to ball into a mighty fist, coalescing beneath the starboard wing of the Spelljammer.
He opened his eyes. His cloak flapped like wings in an invisible windstorm. The amulet blazed at his neck like a miniature sun.
With one thought, Teldin willed the Spelljammer to bank up at an angle. Instantly, the fist of power swung up and hammered into the great ship's belly. The Spelljammer shuddered under the impact, the primal force of Teldin's mind. Its starboard wing tilted up to meet the nautiloid, and Teldin focused on the great empty area along the wing.
In the instant that the nautiloid was pummeled into splinters by the onslaught of the Spelljammer's indestructible wing, Teldin felt himself flung away by the limitless powers of the cloak. It wrapped itself around him in a thick, protective cocoon. Shards of shell and metal and wood shattered around him. Sharp points of debris flung against his cloak as the nautiloid smashed into the wing. The ship almost screamed with the painful groans of metal and wood being ripped apart. The chambered nautiloid blew away like nothing more than ashes, and underneath it all, he could hear only the screams of his terrified crew.
Then, silence.
The Cloakmaster tumbled blindly through the air and landed hard on the great ship's wing. Teldin rolled helplessly as debris from his ship rained upon him. He willed himself to stop, and the cloak shivered, halting his movement. Then he stood on shaky legs, and the cloak unwrapped itself from his body.
The nautiloid's remains stretched before him, a road of twisted metal and broken shell across the Spelljammer's great wing. It was a road he had taken once and could never return along. His fate, his destiny, his future, lay here. He was alive. But his crew lay under the wreckage that had brought them all to their fates, and he turned to shout for help.
There was a scream. One man-Djan! — kicked his way out from under the heavy debris, pulling a limp body behind him. Teldin rushed to help. Djan and his charge-Corontea, Teldin made out-were thirty feet away from the nautiloid when it ruptured in a great gout of heat and flame, spewing fiery wreckage across the Spelljammer's wing.
Spontaneously, the phlogiston that permeated the Spelljammer's air envelope ignited, and Teldin and Djan and the unconscious Corontea were blasted fifty feet away by the explosion.
The Cloakmaster pushed himself off the deck as flaming shards fell around him. He covered his head with the Cloak of the First Pilot and rushed to Djan's side as smaller explosions shuddered around them. He knocked away tiny embers of wood that were sparkling near Djan, and he reached down to help the half-elf pull Corontea away from the flames and to safety.
'She was crushed under a beam,' Djan said. He turned to stare at the Julia's blackened remains. The back of his gray clothes were scorched and black. 'I–I couldn't reach anyone else,' he said, panting. He shook his head as though to clear it, but he sagged down onto the deck, and his voice became barely a whisper. 'They're all trapped in there.'
'Djan, don't-'
But the half-elfs eyes rolled up, and Djan fell into oblivion.
Teldin placed his fingers upon Djan's neck. Good-there was still a pulse. He looked up. He could still make it over to the crash and tear through the wreckage to find the others- there were thirteen other crewmen trapped under thirty-or-so tons of debris. He stood and had time to take just a single step, then he pulled up short at the shrill cry of hatred that emanated behind him, like the chilling howl of a hungry war wolf.
He spun abruptly. He eyes widened in sudden fear, and he reached for the sword hanging at his waist.
He cried out, 'By the gods!'
But an adequate defense was too late. The neogi that had crept up behind him, held tight in the arms of its enslaved umber hulk, screamed an ululating cry of death at the Cloakmaster. The misshapen umber hulk, its mandibles clacking in rage, raised its broadsword high above its head and swiftly brought it down, straight down toward the Cloakmaster's skull.
