on,' he said. 'Why don't we go up to the Guild tower and take a look?'
Teldin said, 'At what?'
CassaRoc smiled. 'The battle with the neogi. We can see over the ship from the top of the Guild. With luck, the neogi and the others will kill each other off. Maybe we won't have to fight them at all.'
'Too bad,' Chaladar said, smiling grimly. 'Too bad.'
CassaRoc led the way down into the lower floors of the tower. There, a series of passages led to the other human towers, and across into the cavernous Human Collective.
Leoster's guards recognized CassaRoc and Chaladar and let the three men pass. Within the Guild tower, Teldin saw many of King Leoster's fellow nobles going about their daily duties; but many more were occupied with activities that clearly fell beyond their chores as noble warriors: gardening, researching such topics as the temperatures of differing wildspace and the tooth sizes of Unhuman races, and collecting games and ancient books. One noble, a council member named Charnom, even boasted an extensive collection of jokes from across the known spheres… most of which were off-color, and had to do with buxom females of all the known races,
At the top of the Guild tower, six guards had been posted, keeping watch on all sides. The Rainbow Ocean was a flare of brilliant colors, a swirling chaos surrounding the Spelljammer on all sides. Teldin, CassaRoc, and Chaladar went to the starboard side and peered over the roofs of the other buildings, toward the neogi tower. CassaRoc pointed. 'There. Do you see?' Teldin was instead looking for the trail of wreckage left by the Julia across the Spelljammer's wing. He felt a sense of loss, of innocence left behind, but he could not find the wreckage on the wing; it appeared that some great hand had swooped down and cleared away the charred debris.
'There!' Chaladar cried. Teldin turned and saw a plume of black smoke rising into the ship's huge air bubble from a thick, round tower at the stern. A band of minotaurs was struggling to put out what was left of the fire before the resulting explosions of phlogiston brought the tower down upon their heads.
'They better get that out soon,' CassaRoc said. 'The Spelljammer could be in trouble if the flow were to explode too much.'
The warriors watched for a while, but the real battle had been pushed into the tower. One of Chaladar's guards said that the ogres had forced their way inside, cutting senselessly through a flank of about twenty neogi and their umber hulks. The reptilian neogi had retreated into their tower, followed quickly by the attacking ogres and their monstrous allies. Even from this great distance, Teldin could easily make out pools of blood spattering the deck.
For the first time, Teldin had a chance to admire the spiral-ing towers and the mixture of architecture spread out along the Spelljammer's, immense back. The flow played like fire along the golden spires and glistened off the winged statue atop the horned tower. He felt the amulet calling him, pushing him toward the tail of the ship. The symbol burned at his chest; now that he could see his goal, the Spelljammer's call seemed even stronger.
They decided they had had enough, and they made their way back through the Guild tower, then into the collective and into the lowest level of the Tower of Thought. HarKenn, one of CassaRoc's guards, nodded as they entered. He bore several large weapons upon his leather belt and had smaller weapons hidden under his cloak and in his boots. His helmet was of an odd design, and the light shone off it in multicolored flashes.
The warriors passed and were near the doorway to the second level when they heard screams from below. They instantly wheeled about and ran back the way they had come.
The screams and shouts grew louder, and they stopped HarKenn as he stumbled up the stairs, and fell into the Cloakmaster's arms, bleeding from almost a hundred tiny wounds along his thick legs.
Teldin shook him while Chaladar reached for a light rod fastened to the wall. 'HarKenn, what is it man? What happened to you?' Then Chaladar held up the light rod, and CassaRoc saw all the blood, painting the warrior's legs so that his wounds were nearly invisible.
HarKenn's eyes were wide with fear. Teldin held the light up and peered the way HarKenn had come, up from the shadows.
CassaRoc slapped the guard. His whimpering stopped. 'HarKenn, tell us! Who did this to you?'
In Chaladar's light, they could see black movement on the stairs below, moving rapidly toward them like a rippling sea of fur. Sparks of white light glared at them angrily.
Teldin said, 'CassaRoc,…'
HarKenn began to mumble. Spittle bubbled in the corner of his mouth. Without warning, he reached out and grabbed Teldin's tunic. His grip was like that of a vise, and he pulled Teldin into his face.
'The rats!' HarKenn shouted. His eyes gleamed with the pure light of madness. 'The rats in the walls! They're chewing their way out!'
Chapter Fourteen
'… Does not the creation of a thing wondrous also imply that a thing fearsome has been born? These things may be one and the same; they may be separate, individual entities. 'Something evil lives here, I sense: a lamprey of evil, surviving on the Spelljammer's wastes….'
The maze that was the Spelljammer's marketplace was alive with sounds and exotic aromas, with the pungent tastes of foods and spices from Oerth and Edill, of liquors from Toril and spiced vegetables from Coliar. Merchants shouted for attention, proclaiming that their wares were far better than any other's. The populace chattered, livestock and domestic animals lowed and barked, and from all over the Spelljammer Gaeadrelle Goldring felt the ship's life force pulsing like energy, with the latent powers of a sun.
She walked the deck invisibly, her astral body projected from a sphere that many of the Spelljammer's inhabitants had never heard of, and she took in all the sensations of life that she could discover: the wail of an infant, the taste of charraka from mermen of Conatha, the scent of a perfume from Krynn.
And she smiled at the wonder of the life force that was the Spelljammer, the force that had called to Teldin Moore in answer to his own quest: for adventure, for purpose, for life.
She turned as a cool breeze rushed through her silently, like a dark, psychic wind. It does not belong here, she thought suddenly, and she shivered once, feeling her body in Herd-space shiver in immediate response.
She concentrated, and her psionic senses spread out before her in an invisible web of psionic energy. The cold comes from there, she thought, looking out over the Spelljammer's landing field and toward its bow, and brings with it the taste of darkness.
The feelers of the gargantuan ship stretched out into the phlogiston like twin battering rams. Gaye reached out with her arms and let her psionic senses play over the bow, and she felt the evil wind pass through her like ice, blowing from starboard.
Inside the cavernous tear duct hidden below the ship's starboard eye Gaye discovered one of the unknown entrances to the ship's secret warrens, which ran like veins through the body of the Spelljammer. The breeze, a cold, dark wind tinged with the cold scent of death, sang through the tunnel. She took a step back, assaulted by the unnatural taint to the putrid air, then she forced herself forward into the organic tunnel, down into the ship's body.
Phosphorescent lichen and moonwort grew in patches along the smooth, porous walls, affording just enough pale light for Gaye to explore. Using the foul breeze as a compass, she felt her way through the warrens by following the steadily increasing stench of death. Several times she took wrong turns onto branching paths, then doubled back within seconds, realizing her mistakes.
Deep within the Spelljammer's port wing, Gaye stumbled upon a source of the psychic odor she was following. The chamber she discovered was hollow, like an air bubble, and strewn with gnawed bones and dried, brittle hay. The hay had been piled to form nests, and on seven of these piles lay the corpses of human warriors. The still bodies of black rats lay along the walls and in heaps on the floor. She sensed outward and felt the chilling death force that lay dormant inside the bodies, and she knew that these were the undead, and that this was their hidden lair. The sense of evil was pervasive. It was too much for just a handful of zombies, and she realized that
