by Филип Этанс
Imoen was as uncomfortable underground as any surface dweller. Even before she was nearly killed by the rockworm, she was always looking over her shoulder, sensitive to every random noise or shift in the cool subterranean breeze.
They rested again, and Imoen, who had been able to walk only with the help of either Abdel or Jaheira, had fallen into a deep sleep. Jaheira gathered mushrooms. Only she had some idea which might be edible and which deadly poison. Abdel scoured the area for signs of the rockworms or any other unpleasant denizens of the Underdark. He saw a few pinpoint reflections in the darkness. Abdel took them to be the eyes of the ever-present rats that always kept out of the pool of torchlight. He took some odd comfort from the presence of the furry scavengers. Rats he knew what to do with.
When he came back to the big stalagmite Jaheira had told them not to move Imoen away from, he saw that the half-elf had collected a good sampling of the native fungus. Abdel grimaced at the collection of gray mushrooms and thought for the hundredth time about trying to kill one of the big rats. Jaheira held a mushroom out to him with a weary but understanding smile, and he waved it off.
"I can't live on those damned things much longer," he told her.
She shrugged, took a bite of the mushroom, and chewed it with an uninterested expression.
"That necromancer—or whatever he is—did something to me," Abdel said. "I'd be happy to let him go wherever he's going in peace—at least if it meant I could climb out of this hole once and for all—but he—"
"He has plans for you," Jaheira told him with obvious certainty. "He must have plans for you both. If he's going to attack Suldanessellar for some reason, maybe he intends to use you as a kind of weapon."
"But you said he couldn't control us, me and Imoen," Abdel said, nodding at the sleeping girl. "What does he mean to do … get me to go there, then get me angry? Let me ravage the place in the form of some … whatever it is?"
Jaheira shrugged, her face a dark mask of fear. "That could be enough." She shuddered visibly and added, "You couldn't believe what..»
Abdel forced a smile and said, "My father's legacy again, I guess."
Jaheira nodded.
Abdel sighed and took a reluctant bite from a mushroom. "Why Imoen?" he asked. "And how? If this. . thing, this force or whatever it is, is in me already, I guess I have to understand and believe that, knowing what I know about myself, but Imoen?"
"You may have to accept that Imoen shares that blood with you, Abdel," Jaheira said quietly.
Abdel sighed. It was an easy enough connection. If the monks of Candlekeep had brought one of the offspring of Bhaal into their midst to watch over him, why not another? Why not a daughter? Winthrop was no more Imoen's father than Gorion was Abdel's.
"You never told me how you found us," Jaheira said. "How did you know to come to that madhouse?"
"It was Bodhi. ." Abdel blushed and turned away. He hadn't considered. . but that had just been a dream, hadn't it? He hadn't really touched Bodhi that way, been touched that way by …
Jaheira looked as if she was going to say something, but Abdel looked at her in such a way that made her keep quiet. Jaheira could see that Abdel was thinking deeply about something. He could see her recognize this, and her face changed, softened somehow even, as the corners of her mouth drew down.
"Vampires have certain powers, Abdel," she said. He shook his head in answer, but she continued, "You weren't necessarily—"
"Stop," he said, too loudly. "Please."
"We should take advantage of Imoen's need for rest," she said, not looking at him, "and rest ourselves."
Abdel nodded, but neither he nor Jaheira moved for along time.
Chapter Fourteen
"Your skin," Bodhi said, her eyes sliding slowly along the drow's lithe body, "it's so … May I touch you?"
The drow woman smiled and shrugged. Bodhi brushed the back of one finger against the drow's cheek, and the woman leaned into the touch, smiling. Bodhi recognized the subtext of that smile. She'd offered it herself in the past, usually right before she made a vampiric thrall out of someone.
"Satisfied?" the drow Phaere asked playfully.
"No," Bodhi replied, taking her hand away, "but there are other … priorities tonight."
"Is it night?" Phaere asked playfully, lightly, but with the understanding that something terrible could happen any second.
"Force of habit," Bodhi admitted. "My apologies."
The drow woman crossed the dimly lit chamber, her slippered feet whispering on the fine spidersilk rug. She uncorked a decanter of wine, picked up a glass and tipped it toward Bodhi, who only shook her head.
"You're not afraid of me," Bodhi said.
"Should I be?"
"I'm a vampire," Bodhi said directly. "That unsettles people."
Phaere laughed, the sound tickling Bodhi's ears in a way that was at once pleasurable and disturbing. "I'm not 'people, Bodhi. I am drow."
"You say that like you're the only drow."
"And you speak as if you're the only vampire."
Bodhi nodded in conciliation and sat in a deep armchair upholstered in a strange, soft leather. She touched the leather in the same way she'd touched the drow's ink-black skin.
"Halfling," the drow offered. "Very expensive."
Bodhi knew she'd passed another not-so-subtle test by not recoiling from the fabric.
"You have the pieces of the lanthorn," Phaere said, changing the subject.
Bodhi nodded and said, "My brother will hold up his end of the bargain as long as you do."
"I'm drow," Phaere said. "We're all about bargains. I'm a decoy, aren't I?"
Bodhi laughed and nodded, shrugged, and said, "And you'll get what you want in the process, Phaere."
The drow smiled, her violet eyes twinkling.
"I like it here," Bodhi said, her eyes caressing the richly appointed room, lingering on the tall window overlooking the subterranean city. "The sun never shines here."
"Vampire paradise," Phaere murmured.
"Drow paradise," Bodhi replied.
Phaere looked at her sharply and said, "We weren't always down here."
Bodhi returned the drow's stare and said, "You'll get what you were promised if you do what you have promised."
"The mythal," Phaere said.
"Power," Bodhi concurred. "Enough to destroy your mother, yes?"
Phaere smiled and turned away. "I won't expect you to understand the subtleties at work. It's not just matricide."
"Of course not," Bodhi said quietly, though she knew that's exactly all it was.
* * *
It started with mist.
They'd been underground for some unmeasurable length of time and had fallen into a sort of routine, the three of them. The Underdark held certain surprises, but each was dealt with in turn. They persevered and continued on. They found traces of Irenicus and someone else at odd intervals—enough so they knew they were on the right track.
The mist, at first, was just the next oddity in the long string of oddities that defined their adventures in the Underdark. The mist was cool, not too thick, and didn't even really seem unnatural. It wasn't too hard for Abdel to believe that even the Underdark could have its variations of weather.
They continued on, maybe a little more cautiously. The three of them tried to keep closer together so as not to become separated in the mist.
"I find it hard to believe," Imoen said, "that this is just some random thing."
She'd recovered from her nearly deadly wound but not completely. Her face was drained of color, maybe a bit gaunt. She seemed gray and was tired almost all the time. Jaheira prayed over her, and it helped a little but always fell short of what might constitute a "cure."
"I have to admit," Jaheira replied, "that this is a little out of my field of expertise, but I don't think we have to panic."
Abdel drew his broadsword and smiled. "I'll try not to panic, but if something's using this mist for cover.."
"It can b
e dangerous down here," an unfamiliar voice echoed out of the mist.
Abdel stopped, planting his feet, ready for anything, even though the voice was obviously a young woman's and not terribly threatening on its surface.
"Over there," Imoen said and pointed into the swirling heart of the mist.
It was a girl in her late teens. She was pretty and blonde, with features so perfect she looked like some Netherese statue—the kind people said were actually petrified slaves made perfect by magic, then frozen as stone for all time. She was dressed in a simple white silk toga, and a fine silver chain wove through her almost white hair. Her eyes were crystal blue and glistened in the feeble torchlight.
"You don't have to be afraid of me," she said. "My name is Adalon."
"I'm not afraid of you," Abdel told her, "but I find it hard to believe that a girl like you could just happen to be wandering around down here alone, cloaked in mist, casually strolling through the Underdark like—"
She cut him off with a laugh that implied a wisdom greater than her age. "Not much gets by you, does it Abdel Adrian, Son of Bhaal, Savior of Baldur's Gate?"
"Why do people keep calling me that?" Abdel asked. It was his way of asking how she could possibly know him.
"You work with Irenicus," Imoen assumed aloud.
A look of impatience crossed Adalon's pretty features for half a heartbeat, then she smiled and said, "Not in a million years, Imoen."
"But you know us," Jaheira said. "You're here waiting for us. Tell us what you want."
"I want to help you," she said.
Abdel sighed and stepped closer to her, his sword still in his hand. She didn't seem the least bit afraid of him.
"We're not even sure how to help ourselves," he said. "Who or what are you, and what do you want with us? What does Irenicus want with us?"
A flash of yellow light passed in front of his eyes, and somehow the girl seemed to notice it.
"Calm yourself, Abdel," Adalon said. "He's changed you. He's brought out what was inside of you—what you, with Jaheira's help, have managed to keep deep inside of you. Your father's blood powers his avatar, and you will lose yourself to it if you let yourself."
"Why?" Jaheira asked.
"You'll have to ask Irenicus that," the girl said. "I'm sure you'll get a chance—Abdel will at least—soon enough. Irenicus has designs against Suldanessellar, and I've been a friend of Suldanessellar for a long time. I don't want to see harm come to them. I can help you help them, help you help yourselves, help you get to Irenicus. If he gets what he wants, Abdel will lose his soul, and Imoen will waste away to nothing, Suldanessellar will lay in ruin, and Irenicus will be immortal. That's not a world I'd like to live in."
"What are you?" Imoen asked.
"If I told you I was a dragon," the girl said, addressing Imoen with a soft tilt of her head, "would you believe me?"
Imoen let out a breath but didn't look away. "I stopped choosing what to believe in a while ago, thank you."
"What do you want in return?" Abdel interjected. If there was one constant in his dealings with people, elves, dragons, sons of dead gods—whoever—it was what Gorion used to call quid pro quo.
"The drow of Ust Natha have stolen my eggs," Adalon said. "I want them back."
Abdel sighed and took a step back from her. "This is madness. This is all madness."
"Eggs?" Jaheira asked. "You have … eggs?"
"So I could tell you I was a dragon, and you wouldn't believe me, druid?" Adalon asked, a wry smile playing at the sides of her lips. "Come back this way, where there's more room."
With that the girl turned away and slipped behind an outcropping of rock, disappearing from view. Jaheira made to follow her, but Abdel held out a hand to stop her.
"Please tell me you're not going with her," he said. "If this isn't a trap, I'm—"
"Give it a rest, Abdel," Imoen said wearily, passing them both and following the mysterious girl.
Jaheira offered Abdel a defeated smile and slipped past his hand. From around the corner there was a sound like leather being scraped against stone, but the sound was loud enough that it might have been a whole army clad in leather armor crawling across the floor.
"You're going to walk into a dragon's lair," Abdel said to Jaheira's receding back, "at the very least."
"And if I wanted to kill you, Son of Bhaal," Adalon's voice rumbled from around the corner, "you'd be dead already." Her voice was louder, deeper—the same but somehow larger.
Abdel followed Imoen and Jaheira. As he came around the outcropping, he almost ran into Jaheira's back. Before he could say anything, he looked up and saw the reason the half-elf had come to such a complete stop.
To say that the dragon was the biggest living thing Abdel had ever seen would have been a tragic understatement. He'd seen smaller castles.
The thing's body reflected Imoen's torchlight a thousandfold. Her skin was silver, polished to a high sheen, rippling with muscles and tightly woven scales. The palpable sense of power that washed out from the thing effectively paralyzed all three of the tiny little people who stood before her. Adalon was a creature of godlike beauty.
"You will save Suldanessellar," her voice washed through the cavern from a throat eight times as long as Abdel was tall. "I will give you the way into Ust Natha. You will find my eggs and return them to me. You will defeat the plans of Irenicus there and stop the drow army from invading the glens of Tethir. You will return to me, and I will lead you out of this godsforsaken hole in the ground. You will confront Irenicus and regain your soul from him if it leads you to Hell. You know you never had any choice, Abdel Adrian, Son of Bhaal, Pawn of Evil, Tool of Good."
"I know," Abdel whispered. "I know."
The dragon reared up, and all three of them stepped back instinctively.
"You won't get into Ust Natha looking like that," the dragon said.
The massive creature intoned a string of unintelligible syllables, and Abdel's arms twitched with the desire to attack the thing before whatever spell it was casting managed to burn him to cinders. At the end of the string of arcane words, the dragon waved a huge silver-taloned claw over their heads, and Abdel felt his skin crawl. The sensation was more than a little unsettling.
He looked down at himself expecting to see insects covering his skin, but what he saw was actually more disturbing than that. His skin had turned the color of obsidian. He looked over at Jaheira, who was looking at her own arms. She'd turned black too, and her ears, once gently pointed, were now needle-sharp on top. Her hair had turned white and her eyes violet. Imoen was looking down her own shirt, her brow wrinkled and black as night.
"That's.. " Imoen said. "That's just…"
"You'll look like drow, sound like drow, be able to understand the language of the drow," the dragon said confidently (she said everything confidently). "You'll have access to the city… but only for a short time. The spell will wear off in—"
"This is so bad," Abdel said. "This is insane. We all belong back in that madhouse."
"Abdel…" Jaheira said, a warning tone in her voice.
Abdel sighed, thought for a second about being quiet, going along with the whole thing as Jaheira obviously wanted him to do.
"No," he said, turning his back on the dragon, "this is ridiculous. Why would we ever do this? We're going to just stroll into a drow city … a drow city. . because we happen to run into a dragon who tells us we should, so we can defeat the plans of someone who, as far as we're concerned, has already been defeated. We're together. I got what I wanted. So this Irenicus is going to attack some elf town I'm not welcome in anyway. That sounds more like their problem than mine."
"Abdel," Jaheira said, her voice impatient but gentle, "I know you don't really believe that. You can't let Irenicus have his way with innocent people."
"And what about all this Bhaal stuff?" Imoen asked. "You think it's all right that we just sort of turn into mindless murdering monsters from time to time?"
"There is ver
y little time for—" the dragon started.
"So you think he's going to just reverse that if we find him?" Abdel asked. "He probably wouldn't even know how to if we could somehow convince him to do it. I'm not even convinced it was any of his doing. My blood has betrayed me in more ways than that, with very little outside help."
Abdel turned on Jaheira and said, "You wanted me to change, so I've changed. Now you want me to go off on a mission of vengeance. We follow Irenicus to this elf town, then what? Kill him? Ask him to reverse that ritual? Beg him to?"
"I'll be more than happy to kill him," Imoen offered, "if you don't want to."
Abdel crouched and put his head in his hands. "So let's kill him, but do we have to—"
He didn't see the dragon pull in a deep, full breath, but he stopped talking when a blast of freezing cold air actually picked him up and blew him off his feet. There was a series of screams from deeper in the cavern. Abdel rolled to his feet, bits of white frost falling off him like snowflakes. He spun in the direction of the screams and saw half a dozen figures quite literally frozen in place, ice hanging from them and pieces of them already snapping off under their own weight. Behind them, another half dozen figures scattered among the stalactites. The torchlight was dim, but it didn't take Abdel more than a second to realize the figures were drow.
Chapter Fifteen
Abdel had seen hundreds of people killed in hundreds of ways, but seeing the silver dragon Adalon rage through the drow was unlike anything he'd ever imagined.
The enormous creature moved forward as fast as a lizard a thousandth its size. She shattered the six frozen drow on her way through, and Abdel could only jump aside and get out of her way.
The sound of crossbows firing echoed through the cavern, and Abdel thought he saw at least one thin quarrel skip off one of Adalon's shining silver scales, but the dragon didn't flinch in the slightest. He heard a number of swords drawn, and that reminded him to draw his own. Seeing the coal black color of his skin as it passed across his face made him pause.