The Adversary

by Erin M. Evans

  “My name is Dahl Peredur,” he said. “I was taken by accident, brought to this place with another. I stole the uniform to escape the fortress. And then I stole these clothes when I realized walking around in that uniform gets me punched. I’m not with the wizard, I don’t know the wizard. I’m just trying to figure out what in all the Hells and farther planes is going on so I can get word out to the proper people and maybe—maybe—save you all.”

  “How soon?” Tharra asked from the shadows. Oota shot her a dirty look.

  “What makes you think we need saving?”

  “Look, you’re not military—the children make that clear,” Dahl said. “You’re not a village—you have almost no way of feeding yourselves beyond the rations and the gardens, and I haven’t found a drop of bloody liquor in this whole town. That wall says this is a prison—a war camp—but I can’t figure out what it is you’ve done to deserve that. You clearly weren’t here before. If you’re displaced, then no one has good intelligence on what Shade is doing. What is it?”

  Oota gave him a toothy smile. “We like to say ‘the misfortune of being blessed.’ ” The crowd tittered.

  Dahl bit back his frustration. “What does that even mean? You’re all being so damned cryptic—I can help you.” He looked over at Tharra and rolled his right sleeve up past the elbow. He rubbed his forearm, as if it were bothering him, and muttered under his breath, “Vivex prujedj.” Under his fingers, a harp and moon sigil burned up through the skin, shining blue with hidden magic before fading to a normal, indigo tattoo. He moved his hand to his wrist, so that Tharra could see the mark.

  “You have something to say, Goodman Peredur,” Oota said, “you need to speak up.”

  “I’m on your side,” Dahl said to Tharra. “What do I need to do to convince you of that?”

  Oota laughed once, as if he’d made a weak jest. “Hamdir,” she said, and one of the human guards stood. “Our guest complains he’s thirsty. Get him a flagon of the wizard’s finest.” She looked to Tharra. “Unless you object?” she said, all false compliance.

  Tharra stared at Dahl. “It’s the only way to be sure.” Dahl’s stomach knotted.

  Behind Oota, the guard poured a measure of dark liquid into a plain flagon, then an equal measure of water. He held the flagon as far from his body as possible as he carried it to Oota, but Tharra intervened and took the vessel from him.

  “Who do you intend to share the vision with?” she asked.

  Oota lifted her chin. “Do you imply I can’t?”

  Tharra gave her a look of disappointment. “When did we become enemies, Oota? Of course that’s not what I mean.” She looked into the vessel. “I’m offering to do it myself. Take the headache off your hands,” she added with a friendly smile. “You’ve too much to do.”

  Oota watched her, guarded. “We’re not enemies,” she said, somewhat warily. As if she were saying it as much for the crowd’s benefit as Tharra’s. “We are good friends and allies. But why,” she added, slyer, “are you offering yourself?”

  Tharra considered Dahl again. “Well, I did give him that bruise. I like to know I’m right. Or at least, take my lumps if I’m wrong.” She kneeled beside Dahl. The fumes of alcohol were enough to tickle Dahl’s nose even at that distance. Twenty-five ales behind schedule, he thought, and he’d take what he could.

  Tharra gave the murky liquid a distasteful grimace. “I’d like to say you should have told me you were one of the Shepherd’s flock right at the start,” she murmured. “But I suspect you’d tell me that’s not how you do things.” Tharra swirled the flagon. “And I’d wager Oota’d demand you drink anyway.”

  “If that’s all I have to do—”

  “Two things you ought to know: This dungwater is what the shadar-kai drink when they’re feeling bored. I don’t know what they distill it from, I don’t care to know. It’s potent, rough, doesn’t slow you down like regular alcohol will. Sweeter than a penniless wastrel with a sick old granny.”

  “But it’s just spirits? I can handle a rough round.” Dahl gave a short laugh. “Right now, I could take a few rough rounds.”

  “Not just spirits,” Tharra said. “You drink it straight it’s as like to make you blind as mad. Or worse. You want something better than our bucketbrewed scrap-wine, you have to water it down.”

  “What’s the other thing?” Dahl asked, after she’d been silent a moment.

  Tharra looked up at him. “You shouldn’t drink the water around here either. Welcome to your first taste of ‘the wizard’s finest.’ ” Tharra looked down into the cup. “How did you get here?”

  Dahl frowned as Tharra pushed the liquid toward him. He started to answer, to repeat what he’d said before, but she tipped a measure of the drink into his mouth. Even watered, it was sweet as honey and burned like fire as it tripped over his windpipe and set him coughing. He managed to swallow it down.

  Tharra forced another gulp on him and another, and by the third drink, Dahl’s head was already spinning—potent stuff. Tharra seemed to steel herself and drained the rest of the cup.

  “That it?” Dahl asked, his tongue feeling thick.

  And then everything went black.

  When Dahl’s vision cleared, he was standing in the middle of a temple. Rust-colored tiles. Pews and reading stands. A high domed ceiling. And a familiar face walking toward him. The bottom of his heart dropped out.

  “No,” he shouted. “No! I’ve lived this enough.”

  “Nothing happened,” he heard himself say, as he had eleven years before. Dahl turned around and saw a younger version of himself, sad and sick with fear.

  “Oghma, Mystra, and lost Deneir,” he said. “Don’t make me do this.”

  “I know,” Jedik said, walking straight through Dahl, to stand beside his younger self.

  “I tried. I tried, and tried,” the younger Dahl said. “It’s still broken and I can’t fix it, I can’t fix it!” The paladins behind the old loremaster looked on, stern and cold. Looking for all the world as if they had never thought anything of Dahl but that he was trouble and a nuisance. A poor use of the order’s charity. A millstone.

  “You smug bastards,” he cried, the words he wished he’d said. “Stop standing there gloating and help me fix this or go to the Hells.” They didn’t move. “I don’t care what you think!” But he caught himself: he did. He had. Dahl blinked hard as if he could clear the illusion from his eyes.

  “Can’t hear you,” Tharra called. She was standing a distance away, watching. She shook her head. “Not that you’re going to realize that in a few more breaths.”

  “This isn’t your business!” Dahl shouted. “This is nobody’s business.”

  “Apologies,” Tharra said. “The wizard’s finest can be a bit particular. I should have been more specific this time. But it will be over soon enough.”

  Behind Dahl, his younger self was weeping uncontrollably as everything he’d worked for, everything he’d sought was ripped away without warning or reason. He squeezed his eyes shut as he heard Jedik say, “Tell me, Dahl, how does it serve Oghma to simply give you the answers you’ve been sent to seek? When you are sworn to the God of Knowledge, you are sworn to serve knowledge, to seek it, to free it.” He shook his head. “It is in your power to know. So find the answers.”

  The world blurred away from him, stretching Jedik’s words into a buzz of nonsense. Tharra’s voice spoke over the clamor, How did you get here?

  “I have a name for you,” Jedik was saying. It was nearly three years later, and Dahl had returned from another fruitless quest to find the answer to Oghma’s question. “Aron Vishter. Go to Waterdeep.”

  “And what will he tell me,” the younger Dahl said bitterly.

  “Lies,” Dahl said. Aron Vishter had been a traitor of the highest order. But he hadn’t known that then, and neither had Jedik.

  “He will give you another path. When you stare ahead too long and hard, you miss what passes by the side.” Jedik squeezed his shoulder. “Let th
e Harpers give you something else to look at.”

  How did you get here?

  The loremaster’s quarters were abruptly gone, replaced by a shabby tavern, and Dahl was sitting on a stool, beside his younger self—their edges blurring together. He was shuffling papers nervously, sipping an ale, waiting to meet Tam Zawad for the first time. That was when the twins came in.

  “He’s not here,” Farideh said, and it was strange to feel his younger self’s revulsion and fear. Was there something there he should have known? “We should wait.” She looked up at Dahl, and they were suddenly sitting nearby at the bar as well. She frowned at Dahl, at his younger self. “Can we help you?”

  “No,” his younger self said, all full of venom and anger. Dahl winced.

  “Gods,” Havilar said. “Are you listening to yourself? This is probably how you attract such creepers. One fellow—one good-looking fellow!—in this whole taproom is giving you notice, and you jump down his throat.” She grinned at Dahl. “Excuse my sister. She’s better at worrying than enjoying herself, but she’s in the market for a good tutor.”

  Tharra snorted from behind the bar, and Dahl scowled at her as the room turned blurry, and things jumped around. Tam was suddenly standing in front of him.

  “Good gods,” Tam said, looking Dahl up and down. “You? Where did you get the impression that eavesdropping like a gawping spectator made for good spycraft?”

  Dahl colored, even though this had happened years ago, even though he’d been right. He started to answer, but the tavern was gone, and they were in a cave, deep under the Nether Mountains, the warped mummy of a mad arcanist stomping toward him, away from a cluster of devils. Farideh looked back at him. “Go,” she said to Dahl. Her expression softened. “Many thanks. For coming back for me.”

  He was lost in the jumbled memories now. “No—are you mad? That thing—”

  How did you get here?

  Between steps the arcanist turned into a pillar of flames, the cavern, the library burned all around him. He was standing in the flames. He was sitting in the woods, showing Farideh a ritual while her sulking devil watched over them. He was talking to the devil in a shabby inn, handing him the rod he’d gotten her as an apology. Did she still have that?

  Still? he thought. You just gave it to her.

  He was in Baldur’s Gate, collecting the evidence he’d gathered in Neverwinter, then slipping out the door he’d used in Proskur to visit the woman he’d been seeing while he kept tabs on the Dragon Lords. A man in ornate armor passed him by, laughing, and Dahl shivered at the avatar’s passing. He wet his mouth, but the dryness persisted.

  The skin of his arm seared and he flinched against the tattooist’s needle. “This will be safer,” Tam was saying. “You can’t lose it, can’t show it accidentally, can’t have it stolen.” The shape of the harp and moon surged up under his skin, the tattoo filling in, healing over seconds, not days. “It might take a while to get used to.”

  He looked up and saw Tharra, watching him curiously. The wizard’s finest, Dahl thought, rubbing his arm. This isn’t real.

  And then they were in Procampur.

  “Whatever you think you’ve discovered, it’s clear Oghma was right to oust you from our ranks,” the stern paladin told him, while Jedik sat watching, at a loss for words. “Whether it was your own doing or the poor advice of your companions, you participated in the destruction of priceless wisdom.”

  “Wisdom that would have destroyed tens of thousands of people,” Dahl protested. “Especially when the Shadovar closing in took hold of it.”

  “And the knowledge is not to blame for the actor’s use of it!” the leader of his order had shouted. “You made your decisions. And Oghma has made his.”

  How did you get here?

  The desk became his father’s grave, and Dahl was kneeling before it, in the middle of the night, clutching a bottle and trying to get numb. He’d died after Dahl admitted he’d fallen, and the Oghmanytes didn’t want him back. He’d died thinking Dahl was a failure. He toasted the headstone, tipped the bottle back, and he was in Nera’s taproom.

  “I think you need some time out of the field,” Tam was saying.

  “A demotion,” Dahl said, angry, aching.

  “Not a demotion,” Tam said. “You’re clever at analyzing reports, I’ve said it before. I could use that.” He drank from his own ale. “Some would say I could use someone who keeps me from going out and seeing what’s happening for myself. And I trust your eyes.”

  “But it’s a demotion.”

  Tam regarded him seriously. “Not a demotion. There’s nothing wrong with honing your skills inside the house—it’s where I spent most of my early years, and here I am.” Then he added quieter, “But as your friend, I’ll not deny, I think you could use some time out of the field after the last year.”

  A desk, a desk, a desk. More parchment than Dahl could remember blurring into a drift of the stuff, then a blizzard. A mission in the city here and there. And pinning down Rhand, that one hot summer. The desk melted into the figure of the brown-haired apprentice, hastily dumped in the alley near to Rhand’s manor, before the Shadovar fled. One eye missing, one hand at the wrist, the fingers of the other hand blunted short with a sharp knife. He bolted far enough to vomit. When he stood, his Zhentarim agent was standing there. “From what I understand,” she said carefully, “they are dead. Killed between here and Suzail. Maybe Brin has better details.” And he closed his eyes and thought of Farideh, missing a hand at the wrist, a silver eye, a bloom of blood staining half her blouse.

  “Dahl?” Farideh said, and he was in the taproom once more, Tharra beside him instead of Khochen. The urge to repair things Farideh didn’t know were broken was hard to fight. He looked down at the deck of cards in his hand. It wouldn’t fix this. It would only slow it down.

  Farideh stumbled into him again, again acting oddly. She didn’t look at him, but somewhere in between. Was she drunk or drugged or something else? No time to tell—he reached out to steady her and they both vanished.

  They fought the shadar-kai again. She told him to run. He stole the armor, sent the message, found his way to the wall. All over again, he made his way to Oota’s court, to the cup of the wizard’s finest easing toward his lips. Not again, he thought. Not again . . .

  But it came again, fast and hard. Dahl’s fall, that first mission to find the library, the blur of grief and anger, Farideh, Rhand, the shadar-kai. Tharra and Oota and the cup of the wizard’s finest easing toward him.

  How did you get here?

  And it started again. And again. It would go on forever, he felt sure, and Dahl would be trapped, reliving the painful past, battered by moment after moment, until—

  “No!” he shouted. Dahl opened his eyes, years and years and years later, looking up at a patchy thatch roof. He lay spread-eagled in the dirt, his head pounding and his stomach rebelling against his ribs. He shut his eyes again and that sent the world spinning. “Gods’ books.”

  “So does he lie?” a too-loud voice said. Dahl curled away from it, hands over his head. Oota—the name sifted up through his memory like a lost coin drifting in the sand. With it came the rest: the camp, the fortress, and the wizard’s finest. He shuddered.

  “No,” Tharra said, sounding hoarse. “Not a word. He’s what he says.” Dahl tried opening his eyes again. She was standing over him. “Bit more too.”

  “Tell me there’s an antidote.”

  Tharra smiled. “Time. Few good heaves. The spirits aren’t the worst of it, but you can’t much avoid the visions.” She hauled Dahl to his feet, and Dahl swallowed the saliva that flooded his mouth. He wasn’t going to vomit in the middle of everyone like some common drunk.

  Again, he thought, noticing the puddle of sick near where he’d fallen.

  “Get him out of here,” Oota said. “We can talk later.”

  “Come on,” Tharra said. “Let’s get you somewhere quiet.” She helped Dahl back out into the sunlight, and Dahl’s resolv
e failed. He was messily sick in an alley before Tharra got him back into the hut he’d spent the night in and ducked back out. She came back shortly with a bundle of rations and a small bucket.

  “Here—this is safe. From the cistern,” Tharra said, handing Dahl a dipper of water.

  Dahl gulped it down. Tharra grinned at him. “So. You’re out of Waterdeep. They always said you lot were skilled. How in the Hells did you get past the wall? The waters skipped over that.”

  “Luck,” Dahl said. Bad luck, he thought. “I got pulled in by mistake. I got a pair of sendings out to Waterdeep already. Tam’s sending reinforcements.” That sounded better than rescuers. “If I can get more components I might be able to find out how many and how soon.”

  Tharra took the dipper from his shaking hands and filled it again. “You Waterdhavians,” she said, sounding like his eldest sister-in-law. “Excess is in your blood, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not from Waterdeep,” Dahl said. “I’m from Harrowdale.”

  “Harrowdale?”

  “Near enough. My father’s farm—” Dahl stopped—not his father’s, his brothers’ now. “It’s to the west of New Velar. About a day.”

  Tharra’s smile widened. “My brother-in-law had family outside Harrowdale. Tassadrans originally, but they’ve been there since the Sembians invaded. Did you know a fellow called Melias by some happenstance?”

  “Bearded fellow with a field full of beehives?”

  Tharra laughed. “Second cousin.”

  “He traded honey for my mother’s apple butter every year.” He finished the dipper. “So you’re from the Dalelands too?”

  “Mistledale. Though lately,” she said, with a wry smile, “I wander. A Harper’s lot.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Funny though,” Tharra said. “I’ve got watchers up along the border line. Not a far reach to grab a Harran lad clever enough to slip out of a fortress that well-guarded. A few different turnings and you might have been my fledgling instead of the Shepherd’s.”

  More than a few, Dahl thought. And if he had? He wouldn’t have gone to Procampur, he wouldn’t have become a paladin. He wouldn’t have lost his powers. Would he have let the contact in Rhand’s manor die? Would his father have died? Would he have been prouder of Dahl if he’d stayed in Harrowdale and kept a farmer’s cover?