'Come on,' Teldin said. 'Let's get this over with. I have neogi to kill.'
'Don't count on it,' the masked fighter said, and he leaped toward Teldin, his sword a rapid blur of flashing steel.
As Djan locked into combat with his own assailant, Teldin parried and thrust up, blocking the Shou fighter's overhead thrust. The two warriors met with a ringing of steel, their blades locked together above their heads. The Shou lashed out with a foot and knocked one leg out from under Teldin. The blades disengaged. Teldin ducked under the Shou's blade and swung his sword out, to be thrust aside effortlessly. The Shou laughed.
Around him, Teldin's warriors were battered by the onslaught of the Shou. Djan successfully blocked the efforts of his opponent, but the contest was evenly matched between them. Despite the arrival of CassaRoc's lead warriors, the Shou fighters were expert in hand-to-hand combat and fought with a speed that Teldin found amazing. Half of his squad was already unconscious or bleeding, and the remaining Shou doubled up on his other warriors.
The leader, it appeared, had reserved Teldin for himself.
The Shou danced around Teldin with the practiced air of a panther toying with its prey. His sword flicked out to nick Teldin countless times on his cheeks and arms.
Anger built within Teldin like the white-hot flames of a gnomish furnace. His companions were falling around him, even as more of CassaRoc's warriors arrived.
He felt the familiar, cold-hot tingle of energy surround him like an enveloping blanket. Time seemed to slow; the fighter swung his sword with ever-decreasing speed, until it seemed to almost stop just a few inches from Teldin's face.
Then Teldin swung up with his sword. A shower of sparks erupted from the weapons' impact, then Teldin kicked out and sent the Shou fighter sprawling across the deck.
Slowly, the fighter sprang up, fury glinting in his dark eyes.
The cloak whipped around Teldin like a thing alive. The fighter pounced, his hands and feet cocked in positions of attack.
Then Teldin screamed inside. The cloak spread out, and whirling shurikens of pure energy shot out from the coruscating lining of the cloak. One star impaled the Shou in the palm of a hand; another burned deep into a thigh. The shurikens found their targets all across the fighter's body, in his torso, his arms. Wherever they hit, his flesh and clothes burned with the white heat of a sun.
The final shuriken shot out from the cloak like a blazing comet. The Shou assassin went down, a burning crater of smoking, cauterized flesh centered in his forehead. His eyes stared blankly into the endless flow. The energy of the cloak's shurikens faded into wisps of white smoke.
The remaining Shou fighters paused in midattack as their leader dropped stone dead to the deck. With renewed energy, CassaRoc's men pressed the attack and quickly felled half of them. Djan's opponent fell as a misplaced sword thrust was knocked aside by Djan's practiced block and the sharp point of Djan's blade tasted for the first time the blood of the Shou. Within a minute, the other Shou backed away individually, then decided to make an escape for the comparative safety between the close towers of the citadel region.
In retreat, the Shou threw their remaining shurikens at Teldin and his men and called out with angry, impotent threats of revenge. The humans' shields effortlessly knocked away the razor-sharp weapons. A dozen bolts shot from the warriors' crossbows, mostly missing their targets as the Shou wove singly through the buildings and disappeared. Two Shou were dropped with clean shots by a pair of Hancherback's halflings.
The alliance warriors quickly assessed themselves, then started again for the neogi tower. Only a handful of men were lost in the skirmish with the Shou, and Teldin knew-as did CassaRoc the Mighty-that before the war was over, much more Shou blood would be spilled, if not to gain the Spelljammer, then in simple revenge for the ambush upon Teldin and the loss of CassaRoc's men.
At the entrance to the neogi tower, the humans quickly dispatched the small squad of minotaurs left behind to secure the doors. Then the entrance was pummeled by CassaRoc's heavy battering ram. With a splintering groan, the doors broke open to reveal the darkness inside the neogi tower.
The fighting became furious as the humans swarmed inside and pressed their foes. The towering ogres inside the entrance chamber numbered about five, the minotaurs about ten. The butchered corpses of neogi and umber hulks littered the floor, together in death with the less numerous corpses of their enemies. Behind them, directing the fighting throughout the building, were five angry beholders. At sight of the assembled humans, the beholders floated quickly through the inner door and disappeared into the central corridor.
The entrance chamber was taken quickly, as the enemies were dispatched simply by the human alliance's strong numbers. Teldin pressed the attack into the tower's central hallway and ordered squads into each of the tower's six other chambers. 'Find the elf!' Teldin shouted. 'Bring her to me!'
The grimy walls, already dark with the spattering of neogi blood, became redder as the humans sliced into the battle between their enemies. Neogi blood pooled innocently with minotaur and ogre, and, inevitably, human.
Teldin crashed into the tower's most opulent chamber, Coh's study, by kicking open the door with his powerful legs. Inside, four neogi were torturing a beholder, one of the eye tyrants that had fled when the humans attacked the tower.
Teldin was a blur as he raced between the neogi, lashing out with his sharp sword to cleanly slice through their bony legs, to skewer one neogi through its round belly. The anger was hot in him, and his sword cut through the reptiles with unseen ferocity. Within minutes, three neogi lay dead in pools of their own black blood. The fourth huddled against the wall, blood oozing from twenty shallow wounds across its squat body, one segmented leg dangling helplessly by a shred. The tortured beholder lay dead on the floor, its great eye staring emptily up at its withered eyestalks.
The Cloakmaster's sword sliced through the air in front of the neogi. The eellike head snapped back in fear. 'Coh,' Teldin said. 'I want him. Where is he?'
The hostage shot a furtive glance to a large, ornate box resting on a stone pedestal. The neogi began to laugh. 'Coh is here not, meat. Shemeat you want taken is. Never will find her you, unless cloak is With a scream of rage, Teldin's sword plunged into the neogi's black neck. It's pointed tongue quivered as the beast gurgled in death and fell limply to the blood-stained floor.
Teldin examined the beholder the neogi had killed. Its huge eye was glazed over in death, and behind it was an open trapdoor. The Cloakmaster put it together instantly: the other beholders had used the trapdoor to escape- the same secret door Coh had used to smuggle Cwelanas secretly away. He slammed the trapdoor shut and spun around. Perhaps Coh used it to escape, too, he thought.
Teldin turned and walked over to the decorated box. Its edges were trimmed with gold, and its handle was studded with sapphires. He reached for the hinged door on the front and opened it.
He stepped back, his mouth open in horror.
The head that watched him had once been that of a human. The gray skin was stretched across its skull like ancient parchment, and, as Teldin watched, the sunken eyes blinked open. It saw Teldin and spoke to him with a soft voice tinged with both regret and ancient anger.
'I serve he whom you seek. He has taken the woman into the elven veins, and you will not find her.'
'The veins,' Teldin said. 'You mean the warrens?'
'Give him the cloak, or all you love will die.'
Teldin raised his sword. 'Why does he want it so? If he gains the cloak, then everyone will die during the Dark Times.'
'You are just as much a fool as my master predicted. This has nothing to do with the Dark Times. The cloak is the key! The cloak is what drew mage B'Laath'a to the Wanderer!
'The cloak is power incarnate! It is the Spelljammer itself! The Fool has promised-'
'The Fool?' Teldin shouted. 'Coh is in with the Fool? Where is Cwelanas? Tell me!'
The gray head turned its eyes away, realizing it had already given away too much.
Teldin shouted once again for answers, but the head would not speak. He screamed in rage. His sword flashed, and he thrust the blade through the zombie's mouth so hard that the steel splintered through the back of the box. The zombie's dead eyes rolled up into its sockets. Then Teldin turned and strode out of the room.
The tower was theirs. As Teldin had defeated the cowering neogi in Coh's chambers, CassaRoc's warriors and the halfling fighters had overwhelmed the combined forces of the Beholder Alliance. Most of their enemies had
