would lead these things to the Son of the Architects, who held these concepts dear in his soul, and would die for his ideals as the Last Pilot…'
The Cloakmaster saw it with the Spelljammer's eyes. The scro battlewagon was listing dangerously, descending toward the Spelljammer at incredible speed.
He reached out with his senses and felt Gaye. He felt her warm, golden glow, distant, weak, but still alive and, without words, he knew that all was right. Then he reached out and touched the battlewagon, looking ahead with one of the Spelljammer's innate senses that transcended understanding and human explanation.
He asked a question.
He saw a ship, a star, a broken sphere.
He understood, and it was good.
The Eviscerator plummeted down from the flow. A ballista missile from the Tower of Trade unexpectedly hit the ship's wildfire projector, and the stern of the scro battlewagon erupted into flames that trailed the ship like a cape of fire.
Teldin willed the ship to move, and the Spelljammer turned gracefully. The starboard wing lay spread out before the hurtling battlewagon to act as a landing field, but the Eviscerator was sailing in from starboard. And the centaur tower lay directly in its fiery path.
The maimed face of the battlewagon met the stonework of the centaur tower head on. It crashed through the tower, then bounced once, twice, and started rolling as flying chunks of stone rained all around it. A trail of flaming wildfire followed, quickly spreading across the starboard wing as quick as liquid fire, igniting the flow in a series of explosions.
The fiery substance burned through the outer hull to catch fire inside the ship's porous body. The scro battlewagon careened over the wing and spun blindly into the starboard door of the gardens, tearing a huge, jagged hole in it before bouncing off the Spelljammer's bow and tumbling into the phlogiston.
The explosion at the bow hurled the Spelljammer up and shot the jagged remains of the battlewagon into the ship's underbelly. The Cloakmaster reeled under the explosive force, then sought out the Spelljammer's consciousness, felt the cold wildspace of the Broken Sphere surrounding him, and he again became one with the ship. He straightened their course toward the remnant of the star.
He reached out and saw Cwelanas and CassaRoc, Djan and Estriss, Na'Shee and Chaladar safe in the smalljammer, and he touched their souls in a final farewell gesture. Cwelanas shook herself; CassaRoc got up from the floor and placed a hand on her uninjured shoulder, wondering why he was suddenly thinking of Teldin.
— You must go now, Teldin told Cwelanas. -This may be your last chance.
She did not hear him, but she felt the meaning of his words in her soul. She nodded to herself, and the smalljammer levitated inches above the earthen floor of the gardens and angled toward the rent in the door.
The battlewagon's wildfire spread quickly into the gardens, choking the air with oily black smoke. Teldin felt part of his soul, the Spelljammer's soul, lift then. In a minute, as the Shou tsunami and its plague of locusts, twice as dangerous as the elven flitters, descended upon the Spelljammer, he watched as the smalljammer flew from the wound in the door and accelerated, turning sharply past the great ship's rams and shooting past, flying like a missile out through the gap in the Broken Sphere, and into the endless void.
— Good, Teldin said.
— Good, the Spelljammer said.
And their voices were one.
The Spelljammer increased its speed.
The locusts that fell upon the Spelljammer from the tsunami were all armed with light weapons. They flew through the streets and between towers crazily, their missiles and catapults reaching places that the Spelljammer's crew originally thought were safe. Some locusts were loaded with smoke powder and deliberately rammed into the most heavily fortified towers, committing fiery suicides that were designed to burn out the enemy.
Selura Killcrow, crushed beneath a load of medium boulders shot toward a group of her fighters, died under the onslaught.
Korvok the Fell, who had proudly boasted that he was the foulest man in all the spheres, died as a Shou mage from the tsunami targeted the Tenth Pit with a spell of detonation and the walls themselves exploded with their own latent energy.
Arvanon, the lizard priest of the Spelljammer, died as the wildfire from the wrecked battlewagon filled the gardens with a roiling fireball.
Kaba Danel, the leader of the dracons, died as a wave of arrows from some unseen vessel spilled across the top of the dracon tower and found a target in his chest.
The forgotten captains imprisoned in the Dark Tower- Jokarin, Theorx, and Miark-all died true deaths under the weight of the tower's rubble.
Unholy fires broke out across the Spelljammer. The roof and upper floors of the dwarven citadel exploded in flame as a pair of locusts slammed into it, killing more than a hundred dwarves in a single blow. A squadron of locusts swarmed over the port towers and stormed them with lightning bolts of pointed steel. Ogres died under tons of rubble. The kasharin butchered themselves with their death rays for lack of living targets. The towers of Trade and Thought fell under the locusts' assault, to become nothing but a pile of rubble and shattered bones.
The tsunami itself came on then. Missiles and boulders, iron shot and jettisons, flew through the flow unerringly, piercing the Spelljammer's eyes, shattering the buildings arranged behind the bow, destroying what was left of the dracon tower. The giff tower fired its quadruple bombard, and the top of the tower exploded in a huge gout of orange flame. The phlogiston around it burst into a cascade of fire, and the Cloakmaster knew-felt-that Diamondtip and the giff were gone.
He felt hot anger surge through him as his people died, as the beauty, the wonder, of the Spelljammer's existence was obliterated by the wolves of war. His fury accelerated up his spine, collecting in his tail with the force of a nova.
The tail blazed white with the light of a thousand stars, and a shimmering torpedo of energy shot like a comet straight into the bow of the Shou tsunami. The sky lit up with the purifying light of vengeance.
The Spelljammer sped up and tore through the dust cloud that had been the tsunami. Cold black planets shot past. The ships that had been following disappeared behind him, becoming specks against the ragged outline of the flow. A trail of phlogiston followed the Spelljammer as though the ship were dragging a fiery leash. Teldin reached out with his mind and touched the souls of the ship's survivors. He exerted his will, and the air envelope was filled with a sweet narcotic that brought peace to the ship's remaining inhabitants.
— Understand, he implored, and he showed them what must be done.
And they understood.
Aeyenna was a broken star, still active, but not whole, clearly dying a slow death. It grew in Teldin's eyes, blossomed like a brilliant, shining promise.
He gauged the ship's impossible speed of thought through wildspace, and the distance between he and the stellar remnant. Energy flickered teasingly along his spine and burned hot in the tip of his tail.
— Aeyenna, he sang loudly, the First Sun.
He focused on the remnant burning in wildspace before him.
— Be strong. Be pure.
— Be renewed.
At the last instant, before he expelled the Spelljammer's final, explosive star, Teldin thought — Cwelanas,… I do love you.
Then the globe of energy shot out toward its target inexorably, perfectly, without mercy… into the Spelljammer itself.
The great ship exploded, its rubble and fragments and bodies and the shards of its hull becoming fire, spreading out through the Broken Sphere in a million blazing meteors.
For an instant, against the black wall of the sphere, the ship became a firebird, outlined in light and flame.
But the Spelljammer lived.
