Plague of Spells (8 page)

In a manner no different from the method he used to heal other minor hurts, he imagined the severed lines growing closer, bridging the gap, and rediscovering the connection just severed. Coolness returned to his chest. Not as strongly as before, but enough.

Raidon’s eyes opened. His opponents were already on their feet and advancing.

He pulsed with cerulean light once more.

Both creatures screamed when the light touched them. This last radiance proved too much for them. Shrieking and crying, they retreated backward toward the gates of Starmantle.

His reserves were exhausted. He turned his back on a chilling, rain-laden wind from the north. He looked south toward Gulthmere Forest. Black smoke furled into the sky, and he caught a whiff of burning pine. The already blasted forest was burning, again.

Without a word, Raidon hobbled west. He wondered which would be the agent of his death: his wound, pursuing Starmantle ghouls, fire, or freezing rain?

The Year of the Secret (1396 DR) Olleth, Sea of Fallen Stars

Nogah regarded the Dreamheart with unblinking eyes. She clutched the stone in both webbed hands. A year ago she’d pried it from the earth’s nadir. Since then, she’d not allowed a day to go by that didn’t include spending time with the orb.

The not-quite-spherical chunk of unfamiliar mineral was her all-encompassing passion. Though unimpressive to the eye, its presence was more than merely physical. It existed on the plane of mind too. There, the Dreamheart was a scintillating font of color, dreams, and possibilities. It was a beacon of power and a literal promise of knowledge and dominance to any kuo-toa with the temerity to take heed and listen.

Nogah listened. Oh, yes.

At first the influence was felt only when she slept. Images capered in time to unearthly sounds, nightmarish but also fascinating. But the stone had learned to reach her waking mind too. More and more lately, phantasms of glory visited her while she was fully conscious. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes eerie in their beauty, the visions always left her dazed. It frustrated Nogah that once the visions faded, she couldn’t quite recall their full consequence.

Subconsciously, she retained more. Sometimes she would inadvertently refer, without the least forethought, to ancient events about which she couldn’t possibly know anything. Only after the words escaped her throat did she pause in surprise, trying to pin down the origin of her own comment. Swirling images of a churning void and atonal vibrations were all she could consciously access.

Such gaps seemed an easy price to pay for the arcane secrets she slowly teased from the Dreamheart. From these abilities did her own aspirations spring. She imagined Faerűn shaped anew, under kuo-toa sway!

Of course, many of her too timid compatriots did not yet share her goals. They were too used to the old ways and reliance on old allies. Nogah smirked. Despite themselves, she convinced more and more to her way of thinking. They were beginning to accept the better place kuo-toa deserved in the world. In a world where Nogah would be transcendent. But first, she must bring all of Olleth to her side.

The city of Olleth was once a watery realm ruled by spell-savvy morkoth, who called their magocracy the Arcanum of Olleth. These cruel creatures ruled a city built on the labor of slaves. Morkoth slaves included captured individuals of several other aquatic races, including uncivilized locathah and even vicious sahuagin. In their arrogance, the morkoth ambushed a kuo-toa delegation that traveled beneath the Sea of Fallen Stars under a truce vouchsafed by the Sea Mother herself. Half the kuo-toa embassy was slain and eaten, and the survivors were brought to Olleth to serve morkoth masters forevermore.

The Arcanum erred when it failed to purge the surviving whips from their new contingent of kuo-toa slaves. Whips pledged to the Sea Mother make poor slaves, for their resources are only a prayer away. Within a decade, the Arcanum suffered so many, setbacks, uprisings, and disasters, secretly orchestrated by kuo-toa whips both within Olleth and hidden outside the city, that it teetered on the edge of collapse.

Thus most believe that even in the absence of the Spellplague, when one in three morkoth mages dissolved in blue flashes and the remainder lost their grip on slave-taking spells, Olleth would have fallen to kuo-toa anyway. Regardless, in the aftermath of that day, the kuo-toa rose up and claimed the city for themselves.

Surviving morkoth of Olleth were purged, though a few escaped. Other creatures were allowed to remain, slaves still, beholden to new masters. The kuo-toa of Olleth called out to their kin, and so it was that kuo-toa came to the Sea of Fallen Stars in large numbers for the first time. Of the Arcanum, only bitter memories remained, as well as a few morkoth specimens preserved in pickling fluid to remind future kuo-toa generations of their past trials.

Nogah wondered how the old morkoth Arcanum would have reacted if they had found the Dreamheart?

They would have pursued the very stratagem Nogah had chosen, she supposed, and probably more successfully. They would not have had to put up with resistance among their fellows, who feared breaking tradition more than anything else. The Arcanum hadn’t been tied to the dogma of a progenitor god like the kuo-toa were.

She blinked away fruitless comparisons and dead memories. The Sea Mother’s creed would crumble soon enough, and she would usher in a new age of greatness.

Nogah rose from the lounging pool. She retained her hold on the Dreamheart with both hands. For all her familiarity with the relic, it remained an awkward size.

Rivulets of clear water trailed on the tile behind her as she moved from her quarters to the outermost chamber of her hall.

There, under a great dome, her growing congregation would hear Nogah speak, as they had done for many previous tendays. Today, Nogah thought, I will show them something so extraordinary their souls will be mine forever.

An audience was already gathering in the chamber, some murmuring in anticipation, others looking timid and uncertain. Many she recognized, but as with most days, she saw several new faces too, who’d heard rumors of her sermons. There were even a few sullen locathah. Word of Nogah’s creed was spreading. Soon enough, she’d have to find a larger place to conduct these gatherings. She’d already moved three times to accommodate the growing crowds. This spacious hall, half submerged under a mother-of-pearl dome, was located at the very periphery of Olleth.

Nogah’s popularity grew despite her excommunication. The disruptions following the Year of Blue Fire were ongoing, and theocratic control over the city was still unsteady. On the other hand, things were much better than they had been a decade earlier, when random outbreaks of spellplague might suddenly ignite and burn away a kuo-toa or mutate him into a monster. Nogah’s timing couldn’t have been better.

When she began preaching her new creed, the church stripped Nogah of her status as a whip of the Sea Mother. Nogah’s ability to utter prayers in the Sea Mother’s name failed. They thought her helpless. They moved to strip her of life and limb too. But the Dreamheart trumped their power. Nogah’s doctrine proved stronger that day. She had killed two whips with the power of the relic and sent the remaining priest fleeing from her hall.

The Sea Mother’s influence was on the wane, while Nogah’s strength was bolstered by a power more ancient! Her flukes warmed just to think of it. Her growing power emanated from the Dreamheart, or at least, was channeled by the stone from some strange, grim source.

The corpses of the three additional kuo-toa whips who’d returned later to slay her for blasphemy were proof enough that Nogah’s claim of approaching transcendence was no idle boast.

These stories and other similar accounts of Nogah’s defiance were galvanizing interest in her sermons. She couldn’t have planned it better if she’d tried.

The ex-whip walked out onto a dimly lit dais beneath the humid dome, buffeted by hundreds of kuo-toa voices immersed in excited speculation. Only a few saw her.

“My children,” Nogah said to the gathered crowd. They quieted instantly.

“My children, you have come to hear the truth. The truth! After a lifetime of lies, you deserve to know.”

Whispers skirted the chamber’s periphery. Illumination began to leak away, but around Nogah, the light intensified like approaching dawn.

Nogah continued, “I, like you, also believed the lies. I believed them so much, I entered the service of the Sea Mother. Like many of you, I was willing to sacrifice everything to her, regardless of the cost to myself. It was our way! How could I do otherwise?”

Eager murmurs rippled through the throng, reflecting off the knee-deep, clear water that filled the chamber. It was almost completely dark, even to kuo-toa senses. But Nogah shone like a star come to earth. Their attention was rapt upon her; she could feel their combined gazes like a caress:

Despite the sermons being declared taboo by the hierarchy of Olleth, the curious still found her. After all, what other kuo-toa had ever disregarded the commands of the combined opinion of the Sea Mother’s whips with such impunity without being immediately expunged?

But she commanded their attention with more than spectacle; as Nogah spoke, she leached subtle dream magic from the relic she clutched like a talisman, and broadcast it into the receptive mind of every creature present.

“I, like you, accepted my lot. Even as a whip of the Sea Mother, I was below Her notice. To Her, I was as a slug—useful, barely, but worth not one bit of regard. I gave Her my undying attention and service. In return, She gave… what?”

A twitter of angry voices sparked in answer across the darkened audience.

Nogah interrupted, “Nothing! Nothing but more demands, still more commands for sacrifice. I obeyed, for what could I do? What could you do?”

Nogah raised the Dreamheart over her head. The light around her shone twice as bright from the relic. Twisting and twining strands of radiance burst out of the stone to extend up and over the heads of the audience.

“I have an answer for you.”

A sound, low and rumbling, began to beat from the relic, like a dead heart shocked and stuttering back to life.

Nogah spoke, “You have a choice. Will you stay shackled to the Sea Mother and Her stagnant servitors, or leave Her behind? A new way beckons, right here, right now! I offer you a new vision to pursue. If you pledge yourself to me, your sacrifices and service will not go unrewarded.”

She shouted over a murmur of protest, “Instead, you will be exalted! Come with me and find a new future. Even now, I can feel the current change. I am ascendant! I am the handmaiden of an ancient strength that begins, even now, to turn its attention back to the world it so long forgot.”

With a performer’s flourish, Nogah released her grip on the Dreamheart. It did not fall. It was as steady in the air as a stone resting on solid earth. Then it began to ascend as the light emerging from it became elongated strands of swaying light. The relic reached a central position in the chamber and paused. The lashing tendrils of light grew ever longer and more elaborate, while the beat of its thunderous, repeating note thudded ever louder. The hearts of all those present began to synch to the overpowering, pelagic beat.

Nogah screamed, “Behold!” Her voice was amplified, not drowned, by the crashing noise.

“There lies a realm, beyond ours, of purity and power! A place where thought becomes action and death is just another concept, mutable as a lie. The gods, jealous of their own power, have long blocked mortals from this land beyond all other places. But not all knowledge of it is lost. Here and there, portions of that outlying realm touch the world. Where such contact occurs, reality itself is blessed! When the touch persists, great wonders can be evoked!”

The self-styled handmaiden of the Dreamheart gestured and concentrated. The weaving strands of light swirled into a massive braid. A braid with a bulge at the center, where the Dreamheart was cupped in the tendrils of its own creation.

The braid rotated and pulsed in the air, like a gorged serpent slowly digesting a recent meal.

The bulge at the braid’s center pulsed in time to the throbbing boom, expanding with each beat. The multicolored threads suddenly convulsed and unraveled, revealing the cavity it had grown within it. Of the Dreamheart, there was no sign. Instead there was a featureless expanse of pale radiance, like moonlight seen from behind a cloud, radiance so old that it should have failed long ago, but persevered.

“Look you well—the light falling into your eyes is older than all the light in the world, older than birth fires of the gods themselves. Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it glorious? Can’t you feel your mind unravel in wonder in its—”

A great crash, louder still than the Dreamheart’s pulsing music, broke through Nogah’s ritual of awe. The sound came from above, at the dome’s rear.

Watery, afternoon light flooded across the startled, blinking audience. The moonlight radiance winked out. The Dreamheart was revealed as an unadorned stone. It dropped like a dead weight into the massed audience. A scream burbled away; the stone crushed the skull of a kuo-toa standing directly below it.

A strident voice called out from the newborn fissure, “Cease your blasphemy, in the name of the Sea Mother!”

*****

Half blinded by the sudden glare, Nogah was still able to pick out the silhouettes of at least two senior whips bedecked in holy battle armor. With them stood the bulky forms of four kuo-toa monitors, warriors trained to fight with nothing but their own bodies since birth.

The audience screamed with one throat in terror of being found in the company of a blasphemer. Nogah tried to command them to turn on their attackers. But now the shouts of panic easily drowned out her directions. They hadn’t stared into the enchantment she’d prepared long enough for them to fall under her sway. Her long-prepared ritual was undone.

A wild scramble in the bowl of the dome commenced as her audience sought to escape. Kuo-toa began to lose their lives as they were trampled by their fellows in blossoming panic.