by Филип Этанс
She looked over to where a small group of soldiers were fighting with a pair of more skilled Shadow Thieves. They fought over the prone form of a young woman—the one who had been captured in Baldur's Gate with Abdel.
"That one too?" Bodhi asked loudly.
Oh, yes, Irenicus's voice answered in her head, that one too.
Where are you? she asked him without speaking.
Gone from there, he answered, as I suggest you do as well. These soldiers are as endless as raindrops and even more irritating. You could take days just killing them one after another.
One in each hand, then, she thought with a smile, then said aloud, "Abdel, until we meet again…."
* * *
Abdel wrenched free of the clutching hands of his friend and turned back into the chaos-filled chamber. He caught another glimpse of Imoen's face. Someone he couldn't see was pulling her by the hair. Abdel's head spun. What was she doing here?
He growled in rage and frustration when two soldiers drew arrows, pointed them at him, and one of them shouted "Just stop it! Stop right there!"
Abdel charged forward, trying to get in too close before the archers could react, but the lingering smoke made it hard to tell where he was, and the simple presence of Imoen threw him so badly he ended up just running into a deathtrap. He heard the bowstrings vibrate, and in the blink of an eye he felt one, then another jabbing pain in his chest. He took a deep breath, and the attempt made him flinch and cough, which only caused more pain. His foot slipped on a piece of broken crystal. He heard one of the soldiers laugh, then the other or maybe both grunt out all the air in their lungs. Abdel went down, twisting his ankle painfully, and he cursed all the way to the floor.
Abdel's head hit the flagstones, and the sound of battle was replaced by a shamefully hollow thud. There was a roaring in his head, and the light dimmed, then focused into a spot of hazy blur in the middle of his vision. Abdel tried to blink, but his eyelids actually hurt. He thought he might have groaned, but he couldn't be sure. Abdel was out cold.
* * *
The next thing Abdel was conscious of was the word "need," and the second was the pain. The roaring sound was still in his head, and there were specific points of agony flaring up as his body seemed to come back to life an inch at a time. The specific points faded in and out of an overall dull throb.
With his eyes still closed, Abdel tried to put a hand to his temple, but moving his elbow somehow made his head hurt worse, so he just let his arm fall, feeling the rough stone beneath him.
"I know, Boo," a strange voice said, "I know."
"Get up, my friend," another voice demanded. The order seemed entirely ludicrous to Abdel, who had every intention of staying exactly where he was for the rest of his life.
"Boo!" the first voice—Abdel remembered the red hair, the strong touch as this man pulled him away from something.
"Get up, now, get up!" The second voice was Yo-some-thing.
"Yo. . sho … yo …" Abdel murmured, the sound riding around the inside of his head on a little chariot of dull pain.
"Yes, sir, yes it is Yoshimo," the voice said.
It can't be, Abdel thought. They were pulling me away from Jaheira and …
"Imoen," Abdel said aloud and opened his eyes to a comfortable orange glow and the faces of the men who stopped him from saving the lives of two women he cared very deeply for. Abdel sat up, as unpleasant as it was, and started carefully planning the deaths of the two men.
"I am Minsc," the red-haired man said, smiling around blood that was oozing from a ragged cut on his right cheek, "and it is a pleasure to fight alongside you. Boo tells me your name is Abdel."
"Boo?" Abdel asked before he really even thought about it.
Minsc was wearing a simple, tattered tunic, which he held bunched at his chest with his left hand. He smiled and opened a fold in the dirty cloth to reveal a tiny brown and white rodent with eyes like black buttons. A pointed pink nose and whiskers twitched as it sniffed the air in front of Abdel.
"This is Boo," Minsc said with the smile of a pleased toddler. "He protects me with his stern intelligence."
Abdel ran quickly through several possible responses in his head before settling on, "Fine."
The big sellsword looked up for the Kozakuran, but he and Minsc were alone now in the intersection.
"Yoshimo!" he called, but there was no response.
"If you say so, Boo," Minsc whispered, then said to Abdel, "He must have already gone. I mean, Boo thi—says he's already gone."
Abdel sighed and brushed grit and the dust of shattered orange crystals from his body. He was suddenly aware that he was still naked, but he didn't bother to blush in the presence of the madman.
"Boo says this way," Minsc told him, then started off down one of the passages.
"That's the way back?" Abdel asked, determined to find Jaheira and Imoen.
"I'm afraid not, my friend," Yoshimo's voice came from the darkness of a side passage.
"Yoshimo?" Abdel called, his sword at the ready. The Kozakuran emerged from the darkness, smiling contentedly.
"Indeed it is I, sir," Yoshimo replied. "I have found the way out."
"I don't want to get out," Abdel stated flatly. "I need to get back to where we left Jaheira."
"If that were possible, my friend," Yoshimo said, "I would applaud your courage and send you on your way. But alas, that passage collapsed just as we passed through."
"Boo says this way," Minsc repeated.
Yoshimo ignored the madman and looked Abdel up and down. "You are not in a condition that will help you to help her," he said to Abdel. "Perhaps we should get out of here, regroup, and come back for your friend. I knew her for only a short time, but it was my opinion that she will be able to care for herself for at least this nearly as short time, no?"
Abdel clenched his teeth to bite back an angry response. He hated more than anything to admit it, but the Kozakuran was right. Yoshimo nodded and turned back into the dark passageway. Abdel got up and followed him, having no better idea which way to go.
* * *
It was possible that the learned men Abdel grew up around in the library-fortress of Candlekeep had a name for this peculiar feeling of recognition, but if they did, Abdel didn't know it.
"There's a dirty picture scratched into the railing at the end of the ramp," Abdel told Minsc and Yoshimo. They both just looked at him quizzically.
They'd come up out of the tunnels by climbing rusted iron ladder rungs into a dusty, empty room as big as a barn. There were wide doors on the two short ends of the rectangular building and a normal-sized door on one side. The little door was closer to the wooden trapdoor they'd climbed out of, so they went out that way into the hazy light of early evening.
There was a straight wooden deck outside the door. A low wooden rail wrapped around it and led down the scratch-planked ramp to the hard dry dirt the warehouse was standing on. Around them was the subdued bustle of a city well into the process of settling down at the end of the day.
Minsc, sighing with a shaking fatigue, ambled down the ramp and looked at the spot on the railing Abdel had pointed to.
The red-haired man smiled, showing yellow teeth turning gray, and said, "How'd you know that?"
"I've been here before," Abdel said, looking around and having to squint even in the dim light. "I guarded this place once with a man named Kamon who I later had to kill."
"You know where we are then?" Yoshimo asked him. "Where are we?" Minsc asked the little rodent he was carrying.
Abdel answered for the animal, "Athkatla. We're in the city of Athkatla—in the realm of Amn."
Minsc looked up and chuckled, said, "You're naked." He looked back down at the little animal and said with a laugh. "He's naked, Boo."
Abdel sighed and looked down at his grimy, bruised body. The arrow wounds had not only stopped bleeding but had begun to close and didn't hurt at all anymore. He looked at the two fingernails that had been torn off and saw, with no
small surprise, that they had both begun to grow back. Abdel was only now feeling like he had any time to think, and he wondered at the sudden speed with which he seemed to be able to heal.
"We shall have to find some clothes for you, my friend, and maybe find some help," Yoshimo offered.
"Help?" Abdel asked absently, then turned his gaze over a city he remembered as rough and unforgiving but still ruled by law. "Good idea."
* * *
Abdel tried a number of different hand postures, various walks, or a combination of both to try to cover the fact that he was walking down the street stark naked, but eventually he just had to resign himself to the fact that, regardless of where he put his hands, he was walking down the street stark naked.
The streets weren't very busy, and as they proceeded, Abdel started to get his bearings. He'd visited the city more than once. They were north of the Alandor River, which cut through the middle of the city to the Sea of Swords, flowing from some mountain source to the east. The warehouse was set against the wide strand in what the locals called—with typical Amnian imagination—the River District. Most of the activity in the city, even this time of day, would be concentrated around the terraced marketplace called Waukeen's Promenade. That was across the river. Abdel wanted to find some clothes before he tried to go there. As he thought back to his days guarding the warehouse, he remembered a local dive not far to the east, on the way to the single bridge that spanned the river between the River District on the north bank and the appropriately titled Bridge District to the south.
"There is a tavern not far from here," Yoshimo said.
"The Copper something?" Abdel asked.
"The Copper Coronet," the Kozakuran replied. "You know it?"
"I know taverns," Abdel admitted.
Chapter Four
"Good," the pale woman said quietly as she dragged Jaheira and the other woman through the storm drain, "he likes long hair."
Jaheira struggled against the woman's viselike grip but succeeded only in pulling out some of her own hair. She stumbled and grunted in pain when her head was jerked up, but she found her feet again and fell more than walked along the round stone tunnel. It was difficult to believe that this woman could manage to drag another woman, let alone two women, by the hair through a tunnel she couldn't even stand up in, but this stranger was doing just that. Jaheira tried to trip her on more than one occasion, but the woman avoided her feet easily, not even seeming to notice the attempts.
The other prisoner was a pretty young woman, maybe not even twenty years old. Her face was stained with dust and tears, and her eyes were sunken and exhausted. She was hanging just at the edge of consciousness, as if sleepwalking. Like Jaheira, the other captive's hands were tied behind her with rough, scraping rope.
"Who are you?" Jaheira asked the powerful woman for the third time since she'd regained consciousness in the stranger's less than tender care.
"Silence," the woman said.
Jaheira was vaguely aware that someone was following them, but she couldn't turn her neck enough to see behind her.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked, ignoring the woman's command.
The pale woman laughed—not an unpleasant sound, surprisingly—and said, "I can rip your tongue out of your mouth and feed it to my rats, if you'd like."
"Just—" Jaheira started to protest, but stopped when the woman's powerful hand came away from her hair, and she stumbled to the slimy, damp stone. The woman slapped her hard across the face with the back of her hand, and Jaheira fell back. Her head spun, and she was aware of a spreading numbness on her face and a cold wetness soaking into her tattered shift.
Someone with ice-cold hands grabbed Jaheira roughly from behind. His hands found her breasts, and she stiffened at the coldness of his touch. He hoisted her to her feet to face the glowering woman. Jaheira turned her head to try to see the man who was holding her this way, but he shifted his grip, pushing her forward. She heard a ringing click in her right ear like bone snapping against bone.
"No!" the woman said sharply, and Jaheira realized she was speaking to the man holding her.
"But this one is so warm," the man said, his voice low and sibilant, cool against Jaheira's neck, "so sweet."
Jaheira gasped and looked at the woman, who caught her eyes and smiled in a way that made Jaheira blush. "She is at that," the woman said, "but I need her for more than blood. . for now."
"Will I have her then?" the man asked eagerly.
"No," the woman said, letting her eyes trail up and down Jaheira's body, "I'll want her for myself, I think." The word «vampire» appeared in Jaheira's head like an explosion, and she gagged at the feeling of the thing's cold breath on her.
"Where are you taking us?" Jaheira heard herself ask. She'd never felt this powerless but couldn't make herself submit.
The woman smiled, seemed almost charmed by Jaheira's defiance. "Your friend is very special," she said. "I suppose you know that."
Jaheira looked at the woman, still hanging by the hair in the slim vampire's iron grasp, and said, "I don't know this woman."
"I wasn't talking about her," the vampire said.
It wasn't a difficult thing for Jaheira to realize she was talking about Abdel. Being the son of Bhaal, the killer of Sarevok, and the enemy of the Iron Throne, Jaheira didn't have much trouble believing that Abdel had enemies even he didn't know about, but why this vampire, why the Shadow Thieves, she couldn't fathom.
"He got away didn't he?" Jaheira asked, finding a flicker of hope. "He got away from you."
The vampire took a deep breath in, and Jaheira was surprised when the vampire's ample bosom moved out and up, was surprised that the undead thing really took in air or needed to breathe at all.
"Will he come for you?" the vampire asked her, though Jaheira could tell by the look in her eyes that she already knew the answer.
"He will," Jaheira said simply.
"And if not for you," the vampire said, glancing down at the young woman now passed out on the damp stone at her feet, "he'll come for this one."
"Who is she?" Jaheira asked, then breathed in sharply when the man grabbed her tighter, hurting her, arching her back against him.
The vampire woman hit her again with the back of her hand, and the sound of the blow rang through Jaheira's head with a snap that warned of a broken jaw. The half-elf's eyes blurred, and she felt as if she was falling, though the cold man was still holding her firmly.
As she lost consciousness again, she heard the vampire say, "I will drain you slowly, bitch."
The man behind her sighed, and the vampire woman said to him, "You know what to do. I have other places to be."
* * *
It was called the Copper Coronet, and it looked as bad, and smelled as bad, as Abdel remembered. He'd been there several times but had made no friends. He had not a single coin and nothing to barter with, so he knew he'd have to rely on something that was always in short supply in a place like this: charity.
"Oy," a drunk old man sitting near the door exclaimed when Abdel strode confidently into the tavern with Minsc and Yoshimo in tow, "whatta we got 'ere?"
"Hey, now," the bartender barked, a look of stern disapproval crossing his distinctly ugly face, "what kind of place you boys think this is?"
"We were waylaid," Abdel said, looking the barkeep directly in the eyes. "They stole everything."
"You ever learn how to use those muscles?" the old man asked incredulously, then coughed out a series of guttural grunts that might have been a laugh.
Abdel ignored the old drunk but nudged Minsc when the madman started talking to his pet again. The red-haired man looked up, but was curious, not embarrassed. "Alas," Yoshimo broke in, speaking first to the old drunk, then to the dark, swarthy barkeep, "our enemies had muscles too, and the aid of more than one wu-jen."
"I need clothes," Abdel said, clearing his throat uncomfortably. "I need clothes, maybe something to eat, and some water, and I need to speak with Captain Belars Orh
otek as soon as one of your boys can fetch him here."
The barkeep looked at the sellsword blankly for a long time, so long in fact that Abdel narrowed his eyes to peer at the man, checking to see if he was still alive or had died, staring, on his feet.
"Did you—" Abdel started to say but was stopped by the barkeep's loud whoop of laughter. Tears streamed out of the man's eyes, and he quickly lost the rhythm of his breath and started gasping between body-wracking guffaws. This did not make Abdel happy, but short of strangling or pummeling the bartender, he had no idea what to do.
"Indeed," Yoshimo started to say, "it is amusing, but—"
"Easy there, stranger," the barkeep said, glancing back and forth between Yoshimo and Abdel. "Word travels faster in Athkatla than you do, boys, and the three of you are hard to miss. Her name's Imogen, right?"
Abdel's jaw fell open, and without thinking he said, "Imoen."
"Imoen, then," the barkeep said. "Anyway, I know where she is and who's holding her, but information costs in Athkatla."
Fire rose in Abdel's blood, and his head throbbed. The barkeep's eyes went wide, and he took a step back, suddenly not confident that the bar would keep him safe from the massive sellsword.
"I need to make a living," the man said, "and your lady friend has made some very, very powerful enemies. If they know I sold them out, they'll be… unhappy with me, if you know what I mean. I might need to pick up stakes, right? Make a fresh start in a new town."
"How could you possibly—?" Abdel started. "I suggested this place for a reason, my friend Abdel," Yoshimo interrupted. "This man is Gaelan Bayle, and there is little that might go on in—or under—this city that escapes his notice. He demands a stiff price, because his information is always correct." Abdel glowered at Yoshimo and said, "I'm no fool, Kozakuran. What's going on here?"
"Yoshy-boy brought you here because he knows I know what's going on around here, Abdel Adrian, Son of Bhaal, Savior of Baldur's Gate, friend of the missing Imoen who was taken by Shadow Thieves who were none too happy about your late half-brother's bandying their not-so-good name about the Gate … oh," he said, "does that sound like I might know what I'm—"