by Филип Этанс
Even Bodhi wasn't ready for the reaction she got.
* * *
Abdel never made the conscious decision to betray Jaheira and take Bodhi—still a stranger—as his lover. Like most things over the last few days, it just happened.
He let the tension slide out of his hands and arms, to be replaced by the smooth feel of her linen dress and her cool, soft skin under it. She held him in arms stronger than any woman had ever held him in. Bodhi's mouth closed on his, and her breath tasted of the earth. It was a primal smell—more a feeling that a scent. Her lips were cool, almost cold, and the chill they sent down Abdel's spine made him feel more awake than he had in days. His body burst into full life. The blood that coursed through him carried different signals, went to different places, but was powered by the same superhuman passions that drove his fighting arm and his ability to kill without hesitation. It was less an ability than a need, like the need to breathe.
When their tongues met there was no going back for Abdel. His eyes burned in his head, and he surrendered to the strange woman's rhythms the same way he surrendered to the clanging-steel rhythms of an opponent. They came together in the same kind of hesitant, exploratory dance of two swordsmen parrying blows and searching for weaknesses and openings. Her dress came off like an opponent's shield being batted away, and he shed what limited clothes he wore himself in the same way he would remove any encumbrance that might interfere with his sword arm's range of motion. The feel of the floor was cold and rough, but Bodhi accepted most of it at first. It scratched her, and she flinched away from it—flinched into Abdel, who responded to the weakness by pulling her up and to him. They were moving completely without thought, pretense, or plan now. They were completely together in a single, crystalline moment. It was the sort of moment Abdel had never experienced, even in his most intense blood frenzy, or his most violent, kill-crazy melee. This was no tavern wench or camp follower, and the transaction they made was one that went to the blood, not just the purse.
It was at the beginning of what both of them knew on a silent, accepting level, was the end of it that her face slipped to his throat. Her cool breath brushed against his corded neck. Abdel heard a hollow, popping crack that in an even semi-lucid state he would have recognized as a joint dislocating.
There was a warm wetness on his skin, and he took a deep breath as Bodhi pressed her face into his neck. Her body convulsed once so violently they almost came apart all at once. Abdel held her tightly, and her back seemed to pop under his grip. She was breathing fast and hard through her nose with a rhythmic hiss-hiss-hiss and made a guttural, animal sound in her throat. Her chest, pressed as flat as her chest could be pressed against his, vibrated with the sound.
Her body quivered through a series of spasms that made it seem as if every muscle in her body had been granted individual will, and every one was fighting for escape or supremacy. Abdel's own release came as this passionate frenzy began to subside, and Bodhi's face came away from his neck. Abdel's vision blurred, and his head spun. She pressed a cold-fingered hand to his neck and held it there hard while Abdel almost swooned like a widow at a summer funeral.
* * *
This was no man.
He was right, Bodhi thought. By the darkest layers of the Abyss, Irenicus was right. This was no man. No man at all.
She was afraid, rightfully so, that Abdel would kill her if he realized what she'd done. She'd tasted only a little—well, maybe more than the little she intended. She was curious, but now that it was over, she realized she had been hoping Irenicus was right about Abdel. He was so very right.
She'd fed on hundreds of men, maybe thousands, from all walks of life. She'd tasted the blood of shepherds and princes, generals and pikemen. She'd fed on the fey blood of elves, the bitter humors of orcs, and all manner of the Underdark's primitive shadow-stalkers. The taste of blood, to her, had become like the cuisine of the living. Some was good—prepared well by a good, wealthy, comfortable life—some was left to its own devices, left to rot or congeal in its destitute chef's muddy veins. Abdel's blood was like nothing she'd ever tasted before.
To the blunt sensitivity of her tongue, Abdel was the strong young man he appeared to be. When it seemed like her head was going to explode in a shower of frenzied light, the simple taste stopped being important. When her whole body pressed into the experience then burst into flowers and starbursts and every explosion of red, whirling hell, she stopped being the predator and became a sort of worshiper, begging for the favor of a fickle but generous god.
She wanted to do it again so badly she made herself crawl away from him. She'd been alive for centuries, and it was that experience that kept her from going back for more. She'd already taken enough blood from him to make him light-headed. That worked, luckily, in her favor. Abdel couldn't tell he'd been bitten. He lay back on the flagstone floor and let the wash of the experience pass through him. She'd done a good job of stopping the bleeding, but when her vision finally cleared enough to look back at him and see something more than a bright-burning deity, she saw that the wound was already healing. He should heal fast but not quite that fast.
She wiped the blood from her lips and chin with the palm of her hand, then licked the blood off her hand hungrily, her naked back turned to Abdel, so he couldn't see her in this feral moment. He started breathing deeply and regularly, and she knew he would be up and looking at her soon, if he wasn't already. She scrambled for her dress, found it, and with hands trembling like a schoolgirl's, she slipped it over her head and did her best to smooth it around her hips without having to stand.
She didn't think she'd be able to stand.
* * *
Abdel's neck tickled and when he scratched it, it hurt just a little, but he didn't pay it any mind. He propped himself up on one elbow, and though he was sure he would see Bodhi next to him, he didn't see her at all. From behind him came the rustle of cloth and he turned slowly, his head heavy and his body sluggish. She was there, smoothing her wrinkled red linen dress over her soft round hips. Abdel couldn't help but smile, though he knew he must look like a love-struck fool.
He didn't know what to say, so he just stared at her until she turned one cheek to him to sneak a glance. Abdel wasn't sure how to feel about her obvious reluctance to face him. He suddenly felt very naked and grabbed for the trousers slumped on the floor next to him.
"I didn't hurt you," he said quietly, hopefully.
"No," she said quickly, part of a long, sibilant breath.
He pulled on the trousers, cursing under his breath at the trouble he had pulling them on. His hands were strangely weak, shook a little, and the pants were just so tight on him.
"Where will you go?" she asked him, her voice—louder now—echoing in the empty stone chamber, the cellar of the Copper Coronet.
Abdel didn't answer for what seemed like too long. He had to figure out what she meant. He'd done a lot of thinking on his way back from killing Aran Linvail and had come to some conclusions.
"You know where I need to go," he told her, "don't you?"
"You killed him in his house?" she asked, her voice tight.
He stood slowly, his knees stiff, and went to the stairs. He looked back at her once, his eyes heavy, clouded, somehow dull, then he went up the stairs and reached around for a burlap sack soaked in blood. From the top of the stairs he threw the sack at Bodhi's feet. When Aran Linvail's severed head rolled out of it, Bodhi took a deep breath and tried not to smile.
"I don't need to kill someone else for the other twenty thousand, do I?" he asked.
"Do you know the madhouse?" she asked him.
Abdel tipped his head to one side like a dog. It was an odd question.
"Madhouse?" he asked, coming down the stairs to face her, avoiding the blood as he walked.
She turned to look at him, and in the dwindling lamplight, he thought she might have blushed.
"She's being held there," she said. "They're both being held at Spellhold. It's a madhouse … an asyl
um for the insane."
Abdel sighed. His head was beginning to clear, and he was just so tired. His mind was a confusion of a million emotions and thoughts that made no sense to him. He knew he was being manipulated by this woman and her friend Gaelan Bayle. He knew he was being targeted by the Shadow Thieves for something Sarevok did—ridiculous enough. He knew somehow a young girl from his past—a past that seemed so distant it was like another life all together—was caught up in all of it. He didn't care anymore whom he had to kill, who wanted how much gold, or what had to happen. The only thing that made sense to him was finding Jaheira and Imoen and making them safe again. So they were in a madhouse, a prison, a dungeon, wherever. He knew there would be more strings attached to anything else Bodhi told him, but those were strings he'd have to cut once Jaheira and Imoen were safe.
"Where is this place?" he asked Bodhi.
"One of my brothers is there," she said.
"What does that have to do with me?" he asked. "Should I kill him too?"
"No," answered Bodhi, "he's on our side. His name is Jon Irenicus."
"He's mad?" Abdel asked, not bothering to point out that he wasn't sure he and Bodhi could ever be on the same "side."
She looked at him sharply this time and turned away just as fast, but Abdel could see the unmistakable flash of anger in her eyes.
"I'm sorry," he said quickly. He needed to know what she knew.
Bodhi's shoulders slumped, and she said, "He was falsely accused—manipulated by the Shadow Thieves, who control the asylum. They took him there to get him out of the way, to torture him, to make him witness the great evil they're going to make."
Abdel swallowed in a throat suddenly dry.
"They've got Jaheira and Imoen there too," Bodhi said. "I can get you there and get you in." Bodhi looked up at the ceiling, not looking at him. "It must be near dawn up there."
Abdel glanced up at the ceiling himself and found no answers there.
"I have to go," she said.
"If Jaheira and Imoen are being kept at this madhouse as you say," Abdel told her, "nothing could keep me from going there."
"And will you help my brother?" she asked.
Abdel sighed. He'd been manipulated into all of this but.. "Of course," he promised.
"I have to go," she whispered, tracing something into a scatter of sawdust on the floor. "You will see this mark on a wall at the base of the tallest tower on the island. As quickly as you can, say the word 'nchasme' or you will be burned to cinders. A way in will be opened for you."
"Wait," he said, an edge he didn't like still playing havoc with his voice. "Stay with me—I mean … go with me."
She moved slowly to the stairs and put one foot on the bottom step. He took a step toward her but knew he couldn't go any closer.
"I can't," she said simply. "It's almost..»
"Bodhi," he said.
"The captain can get you there," she said, her voice loud and clear. "There's only one madhouse. It's on an island. You'll need a boat. I beg you … I beg you to go there. And remember the word—"
"Nchasme," he repeated, glancing down at the sawdust. She'd traced two wavy, parallel lines like water, with something that might have been an eye between them on the right-hand side.
Her eyes red and her face drawn and weary, she looked back at him. With a tight, forced smile, she ascended the steps, opened the door, and passed quickly through it.
Chapter Eight
Having taken the form of a bat, Bodhi flew with all her still considerable strength to race the lightening sky to the asylum's jagged, unforgiving towers.
She alighted on a high minaret and turned her face to the east. The sky was a deep blue that became both lighter and more blue as she transformed into a woman again. Hanging sixty feet from the ground in a slim, shuttered window, Bodhi sneered at the patch of crinkled gray-brown horizon that would soon enough explode into a light that would fry her to ashes with its first tentative reawakening. Bodhi hated the sun, despised the light. Every day mocked her, showed her that as long as she lived—through century after century of supreme immortality—she still had a weakness.
She looked down at the waves crashing over the rocks below and thought of Abdel. A surge of power, riding on the god's blood even now coursing through her own brittle veins, passed over her, and she smiled, letting her long, graceful canine teeth slip from the protective wrap of her gums. She hissed at the sun as the first sliver of it broke the line of the horizon.
The light touched her hand as—still hissing her impotent defiance—she backed into the window and went to draw the shutter behind her. Where the light touched her there was an uncomfortable heat, just on the edge of pain. Bodhi drew the shutter closed all the way and held her singed hand in her other, examining it closely. The sun's light had touched it. It should have all but burned off, but instead it was barely kissed with red.
She smiled and drew in a breath, almost considering throwing wide the shutters to spit her challenge at the hated sun. Instead, she moved to the door leading to the stairs down, which led to more stairs down, which led to a little locked room where sat an old, weathered casket. Abdel, she thought, Son of Bhaal.
* * *
In the days since Minsc started working at the Copper Coronet, the place had never been so clean. After a full night of working, the red-haired madman always stayed through the morning to clean up and wouldn't go to sleep until the miniature giant space hamster he carried with him told him it was all right. No one was happier about this than Abdel, who returned to the tavern exhausted, still crammed into his borrowed trousers, and in need of a boat.
When the big sellsword came up the stairs from the cellar, Minsc greeted him with a smile and said, "The big man, Boo, it's the big man!"
"Minsc," Abdel said, "I need your help."
Minsc smiled and looked down at the little animal sitting contentedly on his shoulder, nodded, and said, "Anything you want, if you help me move the captain."
Abdel stepped into the common room, a dark space that smelled noticeably better now than it did the last time Abdel was here. There were no windows, and though the sun was bright outside, Minsc was working by the light of a single candle. In a particularly dark corner was a grizzled old man, passed out and snoring loudly.
"The captain?" Abdel asked, vaguely recognizing the old drunk.
Minsc nodded, still smiling, and crossed to the old man. "Let's go, Captain Havarian! Closing time!"
Abdel smiled for the first time in a long time and tried to think of a god to thank. "This man has a ship?" he asked Minsc.
Minsc shrugged, lightly tapping the old man's face, and said, "He's supposed to be some kind of big pirate captain, but he's been here—alone—every night since I've been here."
"I need him awake," Abdel said, glancing around the tavern until his eyes stopped on Minsc's wash bucket. "I need a ship."
Abdel picked up the bucket and threw the full load of water square into the old man's face. Havarian burst into blustering consciousness, roaring a word that made even Abdel blush before barking out, "We're scuttled, lads, we're hard aground!"
Minsc laughed loudly, and Abdel put a hand on the delirious pirate's shoulder in a futile attempt to steady him.
"What in the name of blue-green Sekolah. ." the pirate sputtered, then finally fixed blurry eyes on Abdel.
"I need a ship," the sellsword said, close in to Havarian's face.
The captain laughed—a gravelly, almost choking sound—and said, "Passage costs, lad, but I can take ye as far as Luskan, if yer need be."
"I won't need to go that far," Abdel said.
"Good," the old man said, "but it'll cost ye wherever ye're goin'."
"I have nothing to pay you with, old man," he admitted, "but perhaps we can work something—"
The old man coughed out a laugh and managed to stagger to his feet. "Poor son of a…" Havarian growled. "I'm going home."
"I can lend you some coin," Minsc said. Both Abdel and the
captain whirled on him. The act of whirling made the old sailor fall heavily on his rump, eliciting another grumbled curse. "How much do you need?"
Abdel looked at Havarian for an answer. Rubbing his bruised rear, the old pirate asked, "How much ye got?"
* * *
"I thought you had a ship," Abdel said, scowling at the still-drunk captain and against the glare of the sun from the sea.
From where he sat sprawled in the bow of the little dinghy, Captain Havarian belched resoundingly and said, "Yer friend with the mouse couldn't afford a ship. Besides, I didn't charge ye for the clothes."
Abdel grunted and let the subject lie. He concentrated on rowing, keeping to the course the captain had set for them. Havarian seemed to know all about the island asylum, though he wouldn't tell Abdel any specifics about it. He just kept saying, "Bad port, that one, bad port."
The captain had given him clothes that fit reasonably well. Abdel wore a simple white sailor's blouse and sturdy though short trousers under the chain mail tunic Bodhi had arranged for him. The heavy broadsword hung from a simple thong sling he'd made himself waiting for Havarian to get the boat. He felt awake, alert, and ready for battle for the first time in a while. He hadn't slept, but it didn't matter. His finger and other wounds, including the nasty puncture to his gut, had healed completely.
Havarian fished around in the bottom of the boat and smiled when he came up with a stout earthenware bottle sealed with a cork. He popped the cork out between his ragged, gray-yellow teeth and downed a huge swallow of whatever was contained inside. When he took the bottle from his lips his eyes bulged dangerously, as if they were going to pop out of his head, and he seemed to be either trying to take a deep breath in, or scream.