The Ultimate Helm

The Cloakmaster Cycle Six

THE

ULTIMATE HELM

Russ T. Howard

THE ULTIMATE HELM

Copyright © 1993 TSR, Inc.

All Rights Reserved

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of TSR, Inc.

Random House and its affiliate companies have world wide distribution rights in the book trade for English language products of TSR, Inc.

Distributed to the book trade in the United Kingdom by TSR Ltd.

Distributed to the book and hobby trade by regional distributors.

Cover art by Michael Scott.

Spelljammer
is a registered trademark owned by TSR, Inc. The TSR logo is a registered trademark owned by TSR Inc. All TSR characters, character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks owned by TSR, Inc.

First Printing: September 1993

These ePub 
and Mobi 
editions by Dead^Man February, 2012

Scan by Dead^Man

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-61099

987654321

ISBN: 1-56076-651-4

TSR, Inc.

P.O. Box 756

Lake Geneva, WI 53147

U.S.A.

TSR Ltd.

120 Church End, Cherry Hinton

Cambridge CB1 3LB

United Kingdom

the first, sort of,

for Maria
 
—

for always believing,

for always being there.

...
pour toujours
...

and for my parents,

who would have loved this,

no matter what.

Thanks go to George Beahm for the years of encouragement and friendship – and the gracious use of his printer at the last minute – and special thanks go to some adventurers extraordinaire-. Darin DePaul and Mike Speller, two fine writers and actors who allowed me to help Otis T. Wren save Christmas (with the assistance of Albert Schweitzer), and Jackie, Captain of the Starship McBride, a great friend who helped keep me sane and relatively normal during my exile in Florida.

“...
but always dress for the hunt
.”

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar.

Wordsworth

To strive,

To seek,

To find,

And not to yield.

Tennyson

Prologue

“… which the Spelljammer has seen many times before in its ageless travels. It is, instead, the coming of the one called the Cloakmaster that will herald a time of darkness unparalleled by any other. According to the scrolls of the Ancient Ones, war shall be called upon all, and the Cloakmaster’s shadow will fall across the spheres.

“Alas, the scrolls of the Ancient Ones were lost in the wars after the Blinding Rot, and the sinister purposes of the Cloakmaster are known no longer …”

The journal of Sketh, beholder mage, transcribed by Enslaved human scribe, Hofrom;

reign of Miark.

He stood on the upper deck of the nautiloid
Julia
, facing into the endless flow, where the course of his destiny had finally led him. The colors, the radiant brilliance of the phlogiston, flared against the ship’s protective bubble of air and illuminated his taut features, the square jut of his lightly bearded chin, the corded muscles along his tanned arms. His long brown hair waved in a slight breeze caused by the ship’s great speed through the flow. With each eruption of light, his swirling cloak changed its color, from purple, to deep blue, to crimson; and as the nautiloid sailed ever closer to its goal, the cloak grew warmer, more comfortable around his shoulders, as though it had always belonged there, Perhaps this ages – old cloak – which had been worn through the millennia by elves and orcs, reigar and wizards, had been hoarded by a golden dragon, and had been fought over in the Battle of Thrandish, where five thousand humans and unhumans had died for the control of a long-forgotten sphere-had always and ultimately been his alone to bear.

The master of the cloak

Teldin Moore was sailing to his destiny

He shivered at the enormity of the sphere before him. He was here!
Finally!
He pulled the cloak around him, gazed out over the prow of his nautiloid, and wondered at the twists of destiny that had started him on a simple quest and had ultimately pulled him to this place, an unimaginable distance from his home on Krynn, and to an unimaginable life for a groundling farm boy.

This was the Broken Sphere.

Teldin took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

It waited for him out there, in the rainbow swirl of the flow: a glimmer of barely reflected light against the cracked, black wall of the sphere.

The
Spelljammer.

He felt it singing to him, seducing him like a siren, singing a song of wonder, of endless delight and exploration. Of worlds and places uncharted, undreamed of. Of a universe all his own.

Of life.

Why me? He almost said out loud. He looked down at the bronze medallion that the beautiful kinder Gaedrelle Goldring had given him. She had stolen it from an ogre during an attack of the Tarantula Fleet, and had given it to Teldin to help him on his quest for the legendary
Spelljammer
. A gleaming disk of untold power, it now hung around his neck, and he could feel its history, its antiquity, resonating in his fingertips. Who am I to have been called out here? I only wanted answers … What is this cloak? Why can’t I take the thing off?

And what does it want with me?

He sighed. I only wanted some answers. Now they have led me to a sphere so ancient that it has become only a myth – a legend forgotten even by the races who had lived there.

Teldin sighed. Why me?