The Ultimate Helm

Chapter Twenty

"… All things, in time, age. All things, in time, become corrupt. The Wanderer is timeless, yet lives still on our physical plane and is subject to both physical and magical laws. Like all things, the Wanderer must change with time, and in no place is this aging more evident than in the areas known as the Warrens. Where once, legend tells us, flowed rivers of magic, now only cold winds blow like the breath of fiends, and men who explore there seldom return…" Davibruc, cleric, whose son was lost in the warrens; reign of Bender the Weaver.

Darkness materialized around her. The warm glow that emanated from her astral body flickered on the walls around her. It was a tunnel, and Gaye felt the chill of the warrens permeate her soul.

Shapes began to form in the air around her, and the sound of the banshee's plaintive moan rang through her, filling her with a nameless dread, a loneliness that she had never known. She felt herself weaken more as the spirits became more tangible, and then the specters and the banshee had her surrounded. The fear they engendered was almost palpable, and their cloud of terror enveloped her, pulling her astral form away from Teldin just as he had reached for her.

Gaye felt the claustrophobic darkness of the warrens become solid around her. She had been transported to the warrens, where the banshee's powers would not be weakened by the light of the phlogiston. Beyond, in the darkness that owned the warrens, she caught a vague glimpse of a neogi master and its enslaved umber hulk, disappearing into the blackness. A woman screamed… then she heard the rattling laughter of the master lich.

The Fool, she thought. These are his agents… his slaves. She knew without thinking that they had been sent as the Fool's revenge.

The spirits numbered four. Three specters were the undead souls of humans who had been unlucky enough to explore the warrens years earlier and fall into the Fool's lair. The banshee was the soul of a tormented, undead elf who had been cursed by his guilt at helping the Fool unwittingly destroy a sector of the Elven High Command.

The banshee wailed, and its moan echoed through the chamber. Gaye shivered uncontrollably as numbness passed through her with a ripple of unimaginable coldness. The specters reached out. One's smoky hand touched her shoulder, another touched her head, and she was chilled, frozen immobile by their ephemeral touch.

The banshee's wail grew louder. She felt her breath constricting, her heart beating in frantic terror in response to the spirit's unholy wail.

Her mind raced for a strategy against the Fool's servants. Her psionic abilities, weakened as they were from the Fool's previous attack, seemed trivial against the spirits; nothing less than an exorcism would disperse these ethereal slaves of the Fool.

In desperation, she concentrated on warmth, on her own inner fires, to remove the paralysis the spirits had caused. Her fingers grew warm, and her hand erupted in a ball of golden energy.

The shades drew back abruptly, wailing in fear of her purifying light.

She knew she was too weak to summon again the brilliant fury of a nova, but perhaps there was another tactic that could save her, that would send these undead back to the Abyss.

Then she knew.

Paralyzed with fear, she focused inward. She visualized her latent energies as a flickering flame, suddenly growing in power. She imagined warmth creeping through her body, dispelling the paralysis with white heat.

The light at her fingertips was shrinking. The spirits crept closer toward Gaye, reaching for her with their spectral fingers. The banshee screamed, renewed by the encroaching darkness, and its howl was the sound of the wind singing through black trees and between tombstones, through the caverns of the dead.

Gaye swallowed her fear and sent her sight inward. She channeled her mental energies and visualized her powers in front of her, glowing beyond the surrounding circle of undead, in a tangible form outside of her body.

The spirits halted. The shimmering outline of a doorway appeared, a misty doorway through which she could pass to another world, even another ship.

But her purpose here was different, not a goal of escape, but one of defense. As the dimensional doorway materialized, which she had created as an opening to the sunlit world of Toril, the black chamber was flooded with warm daylight from Realmspace.

The banshee screamed in blazing pain. Its clawed hands of smoke went to its eyes. The spirits flickered weakly, silhouetted against the doorway, and the undead were blown away like wisps of black smoke on a torrential wind of light.

The banshee's wail died in her ears. Gaye sagged against the wall, drained of will and energy. The doorway dissipated and left her in darkness. Her astral form began to fade away.

Her last thought before she returned, unconscious, to her body in Herdspace was, I must warn Teldin.

Then she could think no more, and the warrens once again fell into shadow.