Deep in the Flow, behind the lines of the scro navies
Elven Imperial Navy Special Forces Unit 42, a.k.a. the starship Elnamerrna
Darkmonth 23rd, 2459 Engethi Years reckoning
"There it is," the drider said, snapping a finger up to point ahead, out of the Elnamerrna's cargo bay at the eternal rainbow mist of the phlogiston. There, his eyes narrowed at the blot of slightly warmer color that had just come into view.
The human beside him took a step back, slipping past the ballista, to take a curious horn down from a tiny shelf. There was a nut on the mouthpiece end of it, and the man twisted it to a side that bore a tiny drawing of a crow.
"Crow's nest, Kiran," the man said to the horn.
"Crow's nest, Hajri," said a heavily accented voice, by appearances coming from right behind Kiran.
"We've spotted it out there now, Hajri," Kiran advised. "What can you tell us?"
"We wanted to find the Iridescent, sir," Hajri replied. "That is her. She is wrecked. I see..." the lookout's voice trailed off with confusion, "... fire damage to the wings, and the landing platform on her shoulders is demolished. It looks like the platform exploded."
Kiran covered the horn's mouthpiece end with his hand.
"Tyfelian, I thought fire was uncontrollable in the Flow."
"So did I," the drider replied, having no answers.
"Any chance of survivors, Hajri?"
"No, sir. I see no way anyone could have survived whatever burned that hull," Hajri said slowly, but then his voice became excited.
"Kiran, explosions in the flow—almost dead ahead!"
"Call the bridge and cue the helm, Hajri," Kiran replied.
"Aye, sir."
Kiran shut off the horn and put it back on the shelf. He then looked back at Tyfelian.
The drider squeezed his half drow elf, half spider bulk past the ballista and walked quickly through the central hallway of the upper weapon bay to the stairs leading to the main deck.
The two walked down the stairs and wheeled to the ship's portside, past the posted guards and watchdogs, to reach a door to the bridge. Tyfelian opened the door hurriedly and his eight legs swept him inside.
"I got Hajri's cues," an elf lady sitting in the spelljammer helm advised him.
Tyfelian nodded and moved to the back of the bridge. There, he climbed the short stairs leading up to the raised command area and the two large chairs there, their backs against the bridge's rear wall.
Kiran took the one on his right, while Tyfelian slid the captain's chair aside and turned around to face front. There they waited.
They did not have to wait long, for quickly enough one of the voice horns on the desk between them came alive with Hajri's voice.
"Bridge, crow's nest."
"Bridge, Tyfelian."
"We have found three elven man-o'-war ships. They are under attack by..." the lookout's voice trailed off again, this time with uncertainty.
"By unknowns, sir. I cannot identify the attackers." His voice caught sharply with a slight gasp. "One man-o'-war destroyed, sir. It looked like a fire attack, causing an explosion... but I do not understand how that is possible," Hajri finished, fear evident in his voice.
"We'll find out, Hajri," Tyfelian said to help the lookout compose himself. "How long until we can help the elf ships?"
"Only a couple of minutes."
"Battle stations," Tyfelian said to Kiran.
Kiran relayed the battle stations order with the other voice horn on the desk.
"All hands, stand to battle stations. All wizards to weapon bays, Jaclyn to the bridge. All hands, battle stations."
"Hajri, let me know who the enemies are the moment you can tell," Tyfelian called to the lookout.
"Aye, sir."
"Tash?"
"Hm?" asked a drow woman with highly unusual blond hair from the navigation desk.
"Where are we?"
Tash didn't need to look at her charts of the Flow to answer, but she did place a hand on one for emphasis, probably the one showing a map of their current location, Tyfelian figured.
"Behind the lines of the scro navies. Rather far behind," she said solemnly. She realized that Tyfelian would want a more specific answer than that, so she went on to say, "About sixty-five days out from Moragspace."
Tyfelian briefly tightened his lips behind his fangs, not liking the answer. In unexplored space, the "distance" of sixty-five days meant an extremely remote area. He did not allow it to distract him, however. He just waited out the tense moments for Hajri's next call. Again, it did not take long.
"I have spotted the attackers, sir, but I still cannot identify. They are flying eleven spider-shaped vessels. By the looks of them, they are probably metallic, and very small."
"Spider-shaped..." Kiran murmured. "The neogi?"
"No, sir, I do not think so. The design is very akin, but these are too small to be neogi deathspiders, or even mindspiders, unless the neogi have made smaller ones." The lookout groaned. "Another man-o'-war destroyed, sir. Same method—fire."
Tyfelian shook his head.
"That doesn't sound good at all," he muttered. "I'm glad Alzja put those runes on the hull, or we might get toasted if we fight them... even with Jaclyn protecting us."
His spirits rose at the sight of her entering the bridge from the starboard door; she had entered the bridge as if the mention of her name had cued her to do so. She climbed the steps to the command platform and took a seat at the conference table at Kiran's left. An attractive human woman in her early forties, Jaclyn settled down in the chair and flashed a smile at the two men, indicating that she was ready.
"We are almost there," Hajri called.
Tyfelian's fangs tightened on his lower lip with tension. He was not especially afraid for himself, but he felt dread for the elf ship.
He found out quickly that there was a good reason to be afraid for that ship and its crew.
"We are too late," Hajri called. "They got the last man-o'-war, sir. I still count eleven ships. They are retreating from us, sir."
"Call cues to the helm to follow them, Hajri," Tyfelian called up.
Only a moment later, the Elnamerrna shot off in pursuit.
Hajri had not spotted all of the spider ships. As the Elnamerrna left the area of the battle, a twelfth one eased away from the wreck of the last man-o'-war.
On its bridge, within the spider-eyed "head," a small, slender figure in a dark robe peered out into the flow with a spyglass. The spyglass allowed her to spot the Elnamerrna just as the silver-painted triop jumped to spelljamming speed and disappeared into a nearby flowriver.
The woman arched her black-skinned hand over her shoulder to get the helmsman's attention and pointed urgently in the direction the Elnamerrna had taken.
The spider ship stealthily followed the aptly nicknamed 'Silver Triop' and itself surged to flowspeed as it entered the flowriver.
Elnamerrna
Near an uncharted crystal shell
Darkmonth 23rd, 2459 EY
"Bridge, crow's nest," called a different voice later that day.
"Bridge, Tyfelian," the drider responded.
"Crystal shell ahead," the female voice went on. "I still have the enemy ships in sight. They're headed right for the outer wall." She started to pause to let Tyfelian speak, but then she saw something else.
"Make that nine crystal shells ahead. I can't see one of them, I'm thinking. The big one's dead in the center, and I see seven attendant spheres around it in loose spiral flowrivers. By the layout I'm seeing, I think there are eight attendants in all."
"Sharp watch, Trula," Tyfelian told her. "Kiran, resume battle stations. Jalaysa," he called to the elf at the helm, "if they go in there, take us to a different place on the shell wall for our passage."
Jalaysa nodded quietly.
"They're using their passage devices," Trula called her sighting.
"Use ours, Tash," Jalaysa requested.
Jalaysa's keen pilot's eye watched as the crystal shell's outside wall neared and Tash murmured the command phrase over the Elnamerrna's passage device. In her wraparound view, Jalaysa saw the portal open with the expected flashing sparks of green lightning.
When it cleared, the elf lady looked into the crystal shell. It had a central sun, she noted immediately—but she also noticed that it was not a very bright sun—and with that knowledge, she cautiously made the Elnamerrna enter. Behind her, she heard Tash set to work examining the planetary locator right away, and she wrote figures quickly to get her bearings in this unexplored shell.
Jalaysa saw nothing in the immediate area, but Trula called down a sighting moments later.
"I've got the enemy ships," she advised Tyfelian. "They're heading away from us, starboard thirty, up eleven."
Tash swiftly projected that course, marking it with a yardstick.
"That's toward the next-to-farthest planet, but that course will make them pass near the farthest one," she tossed Tyfelian's way, glancing vaguely in his direction briefly. "This crystal shell isn't so big... say, three days to the outer planet."
"Pursue them, Jalaysa."
Kiran looked at Tyfelian curiously.
"We're very far behind the lines of the scro navies already... shouldn't we be getting back to the front lines?" he asked very quietly. He would not compromise Tyfelian's command presence by questioning his judgment openly.
Tyfelian merely smiled, however, as if he were actually glad that Kiran had asked that question.
"Not just yet. Our mission is to find out who's behind these attacks," he reminded. "More than twenty elf ships have vanished in this general area in the last two years, and the gods only know how many scro ships."
Kiran frowned puzzledly.
"How do you know that?" the human asked gently. "I mean, about the scro vessels... that isn't something Elven Imperial Intelligence would relay."
"No, but Dukagsh Command would know it."
Jaclyn laughed from her spot to Kiran's left.
"Let me guess," she accused Tyfelian. "You have some ears open among the scro?" the psion guessed, a grin beginning to form.
Tyfelian smiled and shook his head. It was not a negative answer; instead, it said, 'I can't tell you that,' in no uncertain terms. He would not have admitted to having disloyal or unscrupulous scro feeding him information, even to his friends—not during a time of war. Fortunately, however, the truth allowed him to evade the question.
"You might call this a cooperative effort. Our current mission has the blessing of both Lionheart and Dukagsh Command."
Kiran raised an eyebrow at Tyfelian, wondering exactly what he meant.
"I didn't know there were any communications between Lionheart and Dukagsh Command."
"There aren't any official communications," Tyfelian laughed. "But there have to be discreet communications... for any possible surrender, if nothing else," he explained.
Kiran's questioning expression eased into one of amusement at that, but his eyes still looked at Tyfelian with alarm.
"I see... but what if we go in there and find an entire neogi civilization... or some civilization, at least?"
"Then we'll leave, but that will accomplish our mission," Tyfelian replied evenly. "We'll know who's behind the attacks."
Kiran sat back into his chair, satisfied but deeply concerned. He did not like dealing with the likes of neogi, or whatever race it was out there, during the difficult and bitter war with the scro. He resigned himself to it, seeing no way out but to follow through and verify who the attackers were, and to return alive with that knowledge.
Uncharted crystal shell, near the outermost planet
Elnamerrna, in battle
Darkmonth 26th, 2459 EY
A seemingly innocuous sack tumbled across space with other debris fired from the spider ship's jettison. Trula glanced sharply at the rubbish even as, far below her at the helm, Tyfelian turned the Elnamerrna to avoid the shot. She would have had no time to relay the danger with the voice horn, however, even had she recognized the dangerous surprise package for what it was.
The sack hit the Silver Triop's hull portside of the cargo bay and exploded in a horrific blaze of flame and concussive force. Trula grabbed the lip of the crow's nest to steady herself as its blast rocked the Elnamerrna more than a little, right through the gravity correction of the spelljamming helm.
Inside the bridge, Tyfelian's eyes went hard with angry surprise and transferred pain, and his eight spider legs tightened on the helm. He had tried to avoid the jettison shot on general principles, not because he knew the meaning of such a little sack.
Now, he wished that he had succeeded, wished that he had more experience at the helm. Tyfelian had managed to make the ship duck all such loads so far, but against eleven ships, it was only a matter of time before one slipped by him. Jaclyn's psionic defenses, however solid against enemy spell attacks, were useless against an assault that burst directly upon the hull.
Tyfelian had felt the burning impact through the helm, despite the defensive magical runes protecting the hull. The runes dissipated and absorbed most of the destructive power of the explosion, but the drider still understood how dangerous it was.
"Helm, crow's nest!" Trula called to him.
"Helm, Tyfelian," he replied distractedly.
"There's sacks in the jettison loads! One of 'em hit us and blew up!"
"Gunpowder sacks!" exclaimed an elf lady at Tyfelian's left elbow. She was not Jalaysa; this elf wore the plain gray uniform of an Elven Imperial Navy engineer. "That could've blasted a hole in the hull, Tyfelian. Better take them out fast, or get us out of here."
Tyfelian stared at the offending spider ship, one of four remaining enemy ships, in the external view provided by the helm. He thought, then made his decision.
He turned the Elnamerrna, lined up her nose on the enemy vessel, and willed a burst of full speed. Seconds later, he was rewarded with that crunching sound of ripping metal that could be nothing else but a ship being torn asunder. His view of the nearby ice planet was momentarily blocked, but returned swiftly.
The Silver Triop's ram struck the spider ship and it collapsed under the impact. The ram, well designed and reinforced in several ways, transferred little pain to Tyfelian with the devastating attack, but his expression changed from triumph to astonishment in an instant, for the spider ship was not very large and all of its gunpowder sacks exploded at once.
"Damn it!" Tyfelian roared furiously at his mistake. Fortunately for the Elnamerrna, Alzja's defensive runes had not yet reached their limit, and they took it.
"Not that way!" his elf engineer scolded him. "That could've gotten us all killed, Tyfelian!"
"I'll remember, Kershaya," Tyfelian said. He felt chastised, but he did not show it.
Trula, gasping at Tyfelian's audacity, looked down from the crow's nest to see the runes of fire protection flare into light—very bright, white-hot light—as they absorbed the flames. She also noted twisted shrapnel scattering all over the front of the Elnamerrna's hull, shredded metal from the alien ship's structure clanging and rolling.
Then she saw the bodies.
The corpses of the aliens rolled like dolls among the wreckage, to come to rest on the hull in various places across the frontal hull. Curious, she looked more closely, as these did not look like neogi, nor their notorious slaves, the umber hulks.
Tyfelian, his face knotting with determination, turned the Elnamerrna again to look for the remaining three ships, but Trula's voice rose again from the horn.
"Helm, crow's nest, emergency!"
"Helm, Tyfelian."
"There's bodies all over the hull, Tyfelian—but they're not neogi. They're drow! "
"Drow?" Kiran echoed from the back of the bridge.
Kershaya's head turned sharply toward the voice horn slung from the spelljammer helm. She hissed softly with hatred at the mere mention of that race in a sentence not referring to the three unusual drow she worked for on the Elnamerrna.
"Drow, for sure," Trula repeated, looking over the bodies of the black-skinned elves through the spyglass.
Tyfelian steeled himself against terrible memories and kept the Elnamerrna moving toward the remaining three enemy ships. He suppressed his own rising hatred and anger, reminding himself sternly that these drow were not the same ones that he had known on his home world, not the ones responsible for getting him turned into a drider. It was almost a given that they were just as evil, but they had nothing to do with Tyfelian's past, and most likely didn't even know anything about it.
Tyfelian tried to push such thoughts out of his mind and concentrate on the battle, but it was hard. He finally did, but he felt that the calming influence of the spelljamming helm might have helped. Most typically, emotional control did not come easily to the drider.
"Turn the ship forty degrees to starboard as we pass them, and after that, do a rollover," Kershaya hinted. "That will give more of our weapons and wizards a chance to attack."
Taking the cue, Tyfelian did exactly that. The Elnamerrna flew by the spider ships in an arc at the fairly gentle angle.
Sure enough, the four enemy ships suffered more gravely under the assaults of the Silver Triop's wizards and heavy weapons during and after the turn. One of them exploded when a ballista bolt hit one of its weapon bays. Its gunpowder magazine there blew up, the result of a chain reaction that started when the bolt hit one of the sacks. This blasted half the vessel to scrap metal.
"Once the green helmsman turned the ship the right way," Tyfelian reprimanded himself. He circled and twirled the Elnamerrna capriciously, trying to avoid more heavy weapon fire, especially from the enemy vessels' jettisons.
Soon enough—or not soon enough, from Tyfelian's tense viewpoint—the drow ships were out of action, variously shot by catapult and ballista loads to the point that they could not fly, or simply destroyed when their gunpowder ammunition exploded.
Tyfelian slowed the Elnamerrna and looked around for more targets. Seeing none, he reached for the voice horn. A thought had occurred to him, and he wanted to pursue it.
"Crow's nest, helm."
"Crow's nest, Trula."
"Give me a full sweep for more enemy ships, Trula."
Trula did. Up in the crow's nest, she turned slowly, sweeping her spyglass in arcs, full circle.
"I see nothing, Tyfelian. We got 'em all."
Tyfelian smiled, now more interested in his sudden thought than in piloting. He hurried the ship into distant orbit around the crystal shell's outermost planet, then called over his shoulder.
"Kiran, take the helm. I just finished orbit placement," he advised the paladin as he came up to helm.
Tyfelian released his spider legs' grip on the helm. Kiran looked at him curiously, figuring that the perch could not have been comfortable, but Tyfelian had made no complaints, nor did he now.
"I'll be in the cargo bay. I'll send some of the crew out to get that garbage off the hull, but I want a look at those drow."
Tyfelian watched Kiran take the seat and waited a moment for the human to attune himself to it, then he went on.
"Join me when you can get someone else here."
Kiran nodded.
"I didn't know any drow lived in space," Tyfelian said to Kershaya.
"I've heard hearsay... not much more than space legends," the elf engineer replied.
"Come with me," he offered. "Let's have a look."
"Good... good," the sinister robed woman murmured, staring at the Elnamerrna through one of the twelfth spider ship's eyes. She cared nothing about the spider ships that had just been destroyed; her focus was completely on the Elnamerrna. She said nothing as the silver vessel locked into orbit around the planet, but a wide smile nearly covered her face.
Now that she was close enough, for long enough, she sent her awareness across space and swept it over the Elnamerrna. She felt the presence of several powerful beings—the human and the drow on the bridge, the drider in the cargo bay, the woman in the crow's nest, and another drow leaving the upper weapon deck really stood out to her detection power.
She ignored them all. The other one, a human woman on the bridge, caught her attention and held it hard.
The Master wanted a ship with beings of power. This ship boasted six of them, but one of them had to be a psion. The Master had been very specific about that. Without one, his plan would be impossible to implement.
Rumor had it that this ship carried one, so she had hoped that somehow it would be the silver-painted triop sent by the cursed elves to investigate the heavy attacks upon elf and scro vessels. She could not rely solely upon rumor, however—she had to be sure.
Those attacks had to be widespread enough to attract attention, yet not serious enough that the elves or the scro would send task forces out to put a stop to the aggression. The entire operation was extremely expensive—the drow of this crystal shell did not want anyone to know its location—and as a result, the attacks would have to be canceled as soon as possible.
The robed figure's heart hammered with excitement. If the rumors were true, she could shut down the military operations at once, for she knew without close examination that the other five beings of power were suitable for The Master's purposes. It was the psion who had to pass closer inspection.
The human on the Elnamerrna's bridge verily glowed with power to the robed figure's psionic probe. The emanations from her were powerful, incredibly powerful. The unseen pursuer had never seen the like. She realized that this human psion over on that silver ship was beyond her ability to kill, probably capable of manifesting powers that she could not even imagine.
"So much the better," the robed figure whispered, "that you are so powerful. You'll be more powerful yet, very soon."
She dismissed her probe even as the human woman on the other ship stiffened, sensing it.
"Never mind, my dear dream lady," murmured the figure. "You'll have something else to sense in a short while."
She closed her eyes and sent her awareness into space again, but not with clairsentient power this time. Her telepathy reached out and called to The Master.
"My lord, I have found a suitable vessel. There is a psion on board—call to her now."
The Master made no response, but the robed woman expected that. He would take care of the matter.
Elnamerrna
Uncharted crystal shell, in orbit around the outermost planet
Darkmonth 26th, 2459 EY
Tyfelian, Kershaya, and Tash watched with interest as his crewmen outside on the hull carefully folded the drow bodies down into the cargo bay through its wide-open door.
They had to be careful, for a huge runic inscription covering the entire bay deck reduced everything in it to one-tenth of normal size. From Tyfelian and Kershaya's points of view, the crewmen were dropping drow cadavers fifty feet tall into the bay. Tash used magical telekinesis to help guide them down.
Other crewmen standing on the deck dragged the bodies aside after they had shrunk to, from their perspective, normal size. The shrinking process was thankfully quick, but not instantaneous.
Tyfelian and Kershaya moved to a lineup of bodies after several had accumulated. The drider's upper, humanoid torso bent down to examine one. The first one he checked was a male, killed by concussive blasts and severe burns. His clothing was largely blown to shreds.
"A cleric," he said, surprised. "The men are almost never clerics in Tatissadane," he remarked.
"It's the same in Krenxentonmora and Alnzoor'kranzoa," Tash called over to him from where she was guiding a drow corpse down to the deck. "Pretty much a dead-end profession for the men. Literally."
Tyfelian and Kershaya both laughed at that comment, but then Tyfelian spotted something that explained the drow man's profession.
He had worn the unholy symbol as a necklace. It was not a choker, but it was tight. It had slid up onto his right shoulder, either when he'd been killed or when Tash's telekinesis had placed him here. Tyfelian snagged it with his finger and carefully pulled it out from under the tattered cloak, then he yanked hard on the chain to snap it, so he could inspect the symbol closely.
"He didn't worship the Spider Queen," Tyfelian commented. "This isn't one of her symbols."
It was a curious object, a transparent sphere within another transparent sphere, set in a flat copper circle. The spheres were of the smoothest quartz, or had been, since the larger, outer sphere now sported a nasty crack. Runes had been engraved, and then colored in and magically energized, on both sides of the copper circle, but Tyfelian could not read them.
He frowned as he thought he recognized the design of the copper loop, but he could not place it.
For that reason, he looked over to one of the guards standing post alongside several watchdogs at one of the two entries to the bay. He started to call to the guard, but someone else made an entrance then and Tyfelian paused.
Kiran came into the bay. The paladin waited out the moment that it took for him to shrink in the corridor outside, and then he walked into the bay.
"Find a relief?"
Kiran nodded, moving toward the drider with a swift step. He looked around remorsefully at the drow bodies. The paladin did not like to kill. He lost no sleep over killing clearly evil individuals like the scro or these drow, but he made no secret of the fact that he wished everyone in the multiverse would be nice and just get along.
A fool's dream, of course—everyone knew it, including Kiran himself. He looked back to Tyfelian resignedly.
Tyfelian had caught the look and shared a look of sympathy. He didn't actually enjoy killing, either—not anymore. The drider was an explorer at heart, but he and the others had come into space in the midst of a major war, so peacetime exploration had to wait.
Tyfelian used the short moment before Kiran came to his side to call to the guard as he'd started to do a moment before.
"Riagros?"
"Sir?" the human replied.
"Bring Alzja to me."
"Aye, sir," Riagros replied and left the bay.
Tyfelian held out the unholy symbol on its chain for Kiran to take.
"Kiran, do you recognize this symbol?"
Kiran did not take it, and in fact backed away a step.
"It looks familiar," Tyfelian went on a little lamely. He watched Kiran's reaction with curiosity.
"It should," Kiran said severely, eyeing the object. His face, youthful for a man over thirty, tightened with distaste. "It's an Erarzi turning charm! I don't know the unholy symbol set into it, but that copper hoop is an Erarzi charm," he spat. "I've never seen anything like that except in a history book, back home."
"What the hell would an Erarzi device be doing here, clear across the known universe from home?" Tyfelian wondered aloud.
Kiran shook his head, equally surprised to see something familiar—at least, familiar from history—this far across space from the home world.
"That is oozing evil," the paladin said, eyes narrowing on the object.
A crewman shinnied down one of the ropes and approached them.
"Captain?" she called to Tyfelian, smiling.
"Yes?"
"I think you'll like this. We found a chart of this crystal shell," the crewman said with bubbly enthusiasm as he handed it to the drider. "It's in Drowic, so I can't read it."
Tyfelian unrolled the chart. It was scorched a bit, and ripped in a few places, but it was usable.
"Thank you, Autumn," he said to the crewman with feeling. He looked at it for several moments, and found that he could read the labels, though the letters were formed in a slightly different manner than the written Drowic he had learned as a child.
"'Elendraspace' is the name of this crystal shell, and the planet we're orbiting is called 'Bala'bomen," he said to Kiran and Autumn.
Tyfelian continued to examine the chart, frowning, until Riagros returned with Alzja.
Riagros resumed his security post straight away after he had shrunk down, and Alzja walked into the bay, past him and away from him.
The stately drow lady smirked the moment she saw Tyfelian, Kiran, and Kershaya. Her unusual weapons—hand axes—swung from her hips as she strode toward them purposefully. Pouches for spell material components adorned her weapons belt, and she wore a holy symbol, a map compass, as a choker necklace.
Despite the fact that she stood less than five feet tall, she had a superior demeanor. She carried herself with calm, almost arrogant assurance. Moreover, the pretty, black-skinned face sported that exasperating smirk and eyes that, though small for a drow elf, held an intensity that made anyone meeting her gaze feel shorter than she was.
"Alzja," Tyfelian began, using a hint of his command voice to remind this mischievous, uncooperative dark elf who was in charge, "can you read these runes?" he asked, holding the charm out for her to take.
Unlike Kiran, she took it gingerly and looked it over closely.
"Yeah," she said casually. "It's an Erarzi turning charm," she noted, drawing slightly impatient looks from the three others, since they already knew that. "These disgusting runes are chants against holiness. They make a dark cleric able to damn angels and paladins, not just undead," she told them, handing the thing back to Tyfelian.
"What in Celestian's name is that doing in space?" she demanded.
"Don't know," Tyfelian murmured.
"Vesgar Longhart found one of those things—on Emperor Rastalken's neck," Kiran said with a faint snarl in his voice. "The Erarzis used them against the Embimuran holy knights, back in those days," he added, looking almost sick.
"The Erarzis were dangerously insane, especially the clerics," Alzja tacked onto Kiran's line. "And trinkets like that little son o' a bitch are the reason why. That thing is dangerous. Destroy it."
Tyfelian shrugged and walked his eight legs over to a tool cabinet mounted on the cargo bay's rear wall. He opened it with his free left hand and selected a large hammer from the selection of many differently sized hammers hung there.
Hefting it with a satisfied bite of his fangs over his lower lip, Tyfelian put the evil charm on top of the huge windlass that raised and lowered the cargo bay door.
The drider backed away as far as he could, then eyed the strike and gave the device a mighty wallop with the heavy hammer.
The antique device exploded with a deafening bang, showering Tyfelian and the windlass with quartz fragments and copper shards. A whirling, crackling ball of electricity exploded from the broken charm. Appearing to be nearly a living thing, this electrical form seemed almost to stand up on top of the windlass, and then it leaped to Tyfelian and engulfed him.
"Ty!" Kiran shouted. He ran to the drider, who was slumping, but the electrical force vanished even before he got there.
Tyfelian's humanoid torso collapsed over the windlass. His hand dropped the hammer to thud on the deck and tumble away. The drider tried to grab hold of the windlass to support himself, but his grip slipped. His eight spider legs slid flat, and the legs on his left side lifted a little as he fell over to his right. He would have fallen right over except that Kiran caught him clumsily—the drider was huge. Even his humanoid portions were taller than Kiran, and the paladin grunted with the weight.
"Ty?" Kiran said with concern.
Alzja was there, and she looked closely at Tyfelian, but she shook her head, hinting to Kiran that she saw no injuries. She stepped back a little and started casting a spell to check further, but Tyfelian sprang into action.
The powerful arms spread out wide, moving incredibly fast. They struck Kiran and Alzja. The drow lady literally got lifted off of her feet and flew halfway across the cargo bay.
Kiran, much heavier and wearing weighty chain mail armor, was only pushed back a step. He grabbed Tyfelian's arms to restrain him, but all that did was to start a wrestling match that Kiran knew he couldn't win. Tyfelian was considerably stronger than he was, and had far greater weight in the drider form to put behind that muscle. The guards ran to help him, however, and the wrestling became a bit more even.
"What are you doing away from your stations?" Tyfelian roared. "Get back where you belong!"
Confused, Kiran merely continued trying to pin the drider with the help of the guards, but it was all that four men, and Autumn, could do to even hold him still.
"You're mine!" the drider yelled.
Alzja picked herself up and shook her head vigorously to shake off the hard throw. She watched the fight between Tyfelian and the others curiously, trying to figure it out. She swiftly cast a spell on Tyfelian, but there was no effect, visible or otherwise.
"I'll kill you!" Tyfelian screamed at her.
Tyfelian craned his head forward and his fangs flared to bite Kiran. He made contact, but the fangs just stabbed ineffectively off the human's armor at the upper chest near the left shoulder.
The drider then tried a different tactic. He flexed his spider legs and began to drag himself—and four men and Autumn!—across the bay.
Kiran saw right away that Tyfelian was heading outside. Out there, on the hull, he would have an advantage—with the ability of his spider legs to walk easily almost anywhere, he could more readily shake off his captors.
Alzja circled around the drider and the five men to get behind Tyfelian as he crawled, and they were dragged, away from the windlass. Tyfelian spotted her circling and turned to keep track of her, but she swiftly got behind him. He swiveled the spinnerets on the back of his abdomen and shot off a web, but he could not see her and missed badly.
The drow darted in to cast a spell and touched Tyfelian's abdomen. Normally, this would have left her wide open to any attack the drider chose to make, but again he couldn't see her, and he was quite occupied with just trying to keep moving, with four men, a woman, and a paladin on him.
The spell had some effect; Kiran and the guards watched Tyfelian warily, but the drider eased back from his resistant pose.
"I'm all right now," he lisped, gasping.
Kiran and the guards backed away slowly, still cautious, but Tyfelian just stood there, dazed and disoriented.
"Like I said, those damned symbols made the Erarzis dangerously insane," Alzja deadpanned.
Jaclyn, sitting at the conference table on the bridge, stared hard at nothing, trying to figure out who was magically or psionically watching her.
She extended her senses beyond the bridge, through the entire ship, but found nothing. She felt only the familiar structure of the Elnamerrna, the fifty-three people on board, and the customary resonance of powerful magic on the hull and inside the ship. The spelljamming helm throbbed like a smoothly running gnomish machine, and the runic inscriptions on the hull felt like an outer line of defense, to her enhanced senses.
Jaclyn extended her clairsentient probing farther, outside the ship, beyond the air envelope around it, out into space.
Nothing. Whoever it was had stopped scrying, or at least looked elsewhere, before Jaclyn had responded.
Jaclyn started to close down her psionic probing powers, but she kept them going as she witnessed something that put her shoulder blades back against the seat with surprise.
A blast of psionic presence made her narrow her eyes, as if against a brilliant light, but it was only a movement analogous to the discomfort of her mind at what she sensed. Her eyebrows rose with alarm when she realized that the presence was on board the ship, and she almost reached to the voice horn to call to Tyfelian, but she wanted to examine it more closely with her psionic senses.
She started to do so, but like the earlier scrying it vanished before she could scrutinize it. She sat there for some minutes, extending her senses again to find out where such an overwhelming psionic presence might have gone.
Tyfelian opened the portside door and stumbled in, interrupting her thoughts. Kiran and Alzja were at his figurative heels. The drider looked unsettled and a little unkempt, making Jaclyn rise with alarm. He headed for the command platform, but he slowed long enough to hand over the captured map into Tash's eager hands.
The blond drow watched him uncertainly, however, putting off the joy of perusing the map until she found out what had happened to the drider.
"Ty!" Jaclyn called over to get his attention. When he looked at her while climbing the stairs to the command platform, she went on.
"I just felt a psionic presence of unbelievable strength, it was just there suddenly, and then it was gone," she told him, stammering a little.
"Where? The cargo bay?" Tyfelian asked, trying to focus on the subject.
"Maybe," Jaclyn said, a little helplessly. "It was on the ship, I know that much, but it vanished before I could know exactly."
"We found an Erarzi turning charm on one of those drow," Tyfelian explained. He watched her expression closely to determine whether she knew what that meant.
When her expression tensed with unease, he continued.
"It possessed me or something when I broke it. I-"
"Let me in," she interrupted, a fingertip brushing against his temple.
Tyfelian quieted and tried to clear his thoughts to allow Jaclyn to probe his mind. He felt her mental presence inside his brain and accepted her. Any other psion would certainly have met Tyfelian's fists or swords at the first telepathic touch, but he trusted Jaclyn.
Tyfelian blinked, as it seemed to him that the bridge vanished, to be replaced by a vision. There was no change in setting; they still stood on the same bridge, but alone. Alzja, Kiran, and the guards were absent, and Tyfelian himself was different. He stood before her in his former, proper form, that of a half-elf of drow blood. This mental image was drawn from both his and her memories, for he had known Jaclyn for over a decade.
Tyfelian understood that this was how his mind reacted to Jaclyn's gentle mind probe. She seldom, if ever, bothered to visualize anything in the mental realm, but Tyfelian had no psionic powers or training, so his brain processed the experience the only way it could—as a private moment in the same place as before.
Jaclyn studied him for only a moment. She was looking at parts of him that even he did not understand, for the mental joining was an incredible closeness, far deeper than physical intimacy, but Tyfelian's mind did not know how to envisage aspects of his personality. Hence, to his senses, she appeared to be looking him over in the manner of a physician. As Alzja, perhaps, would—and had, for the arrogant drow woman was indeed a proficient doctor though she did not flaunt the title.
"You're hurt," Jaclyn's mental voice said. "Let me help."
Tyfelian suppressed a laugh as she set about, to his senses, to use psionic powers to heal several painful injuries—head wounds, mostly—on his apparently humanoid body. She was repairing damage to his mind, not his physical form, of course, but he didn't know how to visualize her actions any other way.
"I can't tell what it was," Jaclyn noted, " but it went after the part of your mind that gives you knowledge of right and wrong. Practically ripped it to shreds in fact, and then it made you think faster—so fast you couldn't keep up with it all."
"How did Alzja snap me out of it?" Tyfelian asked curiously. He was not certain whether his real, drider, body had spoken aloud or not, but he didn't really care.
"I'm not sure," Jaclyn thought to him with a warm wave of affection for their drow friend, "but whatever spell she chose healed your mind... a slipshod healing, but it put everything back in place. I don't think any spell could've done better. It was just a little messy.
" You'll be able to think straight in a minute," she said as she healed a "wound" on his neck. "My telepathy is a lot better for this kind of thing, but after that spell, you would've healed eventually."
Already feeling less fuzzy in his mind, Tyfelian asked another question.
"Is it a good thing that you and Alzja got to me as fast as you did?"
"Oh, yes," Jaclyn replied severely. "After some time, a month, maybe even less, the damage would've been permanent, and irreversible."
Tyfelian said nothing further, just allowed her to continue her ministrations. Finally, she stepped back and smiled.
"There, all better."
Jaclyn seemed to grow more distant then, and Tyfelian knew that she was leaving his mind gently. He shuddered to think of the havoc she could have wrought if it were an enemy, and not he, whose psyche she was separating from her own. Likely, he felt, she could have made the effect of that Erarzi charm seem trivial.
Jaclyn, still attuned to his mind enough to read his surface thoughts, smiled with amusement at his overestimation of her powers. Telepathy was nothing but an afterthought to, even a side effect of, her prime mental abilities. Her ability to attack mentally, while quite formidable, was not as finely tuned as that of a true telepath.
She shared this knowledge with him, silently even in the mental realm, but he did not fully understand it. There was no way he could.
The real bridge started to fade back into Tyfelian's perceptions when he felt the throbbing pulsations begin. His mental image of Jaclyn frowned puzzledly, and they both realized at the same time that Tyfelian's need to see this experience in his mind's eye worked to his advantage for understanding what the pulses meant.
He visualized it as standing on a beach, at night, with the surf surging around his boots, with Jaclyn walking away from him. He felt another wave, a splash really, and it felt like it had come from someone farther out from the shore than he was.
Someone in trouble out there.
He tried to look out across the envisioned water, but Jaclyn left his mind at that moment, causing the ocean to vanish like the memory of a dream upon awakening, and he felt bitterness as, from his point of view, his cursed drider body formed around him. It had felt good to be a humanoid again for a few minutes.
Jaclyn, still feeling those pulses, looked around at nothing again, trying to discern their source. She turned around to face the front of the bridge, extending her senses outward once more.
"What was that, Jaclyn?" Tyfelian asked.
Jaclyn didn't answer, just kept concentrating on the strange pulses.
"Someone's calling to us for help," she said softly, discerning the meaning that Tyfelian had already guessed.
"Is it that thing that possessed me?" Tyfelian asked warily.
"No," Jaclyn replied slowly. "It isn't here, not on the ship. It feels like a... little animal, trapped outside in the snow..." she broke off abruptly.
Her left hand waved in the air as if trying to find something in darkness. She continued doing that for several seconds, but then her first finger extended and pointed to the Elnamerrna's portside and down.
"Not here," she repeated. "Down there, on the world below... in the ice."
"Yes... yes," the shadowy figure in the trailing spider ship breathed.
"Are they headed down to The Master?" the navigator queried excitedly.
"They are," the woman replied. "There they will do what we cannot, apprentice."
"It is fine to see this happening," the navigator stated. "The Master has been waiting too long for this."
"Since the conjunction awakened him," the dark woman noted.
"It awakened him?" the navigator asked, surprised.
"It did. He was deep in sleep, but not any longer."
Well satisfied, the navigator went back to work at the station, while the woman lowered her spyglass and looked at the view of the ice planet with arrogance and triumph.
"You can do it," she coaxed the alien ship's crew. "I know you can do it."
