by Филип Этанс
She wanted to scream his name but could only moan tightly under her iron chin strap. The jailer stopped and shifted his weight onto one foot, and Jaheira's eyes went wide at the sudden burst of motion. Abdel's hair was what she noticed first. Long, black, and matted with what looked like sweat and blood, it whipped up over his back. His set, determined face followed just as fast. The jailer started to fall backward at the sudden shift in Abdel's considerable weight, and Abdel pulled his shoulders back, bringing his chest away from the jailer's hairy shoulder while kicking his feet forward. The effect was to send the fat jailer tumbling onto his ample rump, while Abdel came solidly to his feet in a puff of dirt, rat droppings, and straw.
Abdel's hands were tied tightly in front of him, but Jaheira realized that wouldn't slow him down nearly enough to save the jailer's life. The burns and cuts blossoming over Abdel's body didn't register with Jaheira at first. He stepped back with his right leg and kneeled next to the jailer. Jaheira realized Abdel had been tortured and gasped as much at that thought as the sight of Abdel's hands coming up, his elbow falling past the jailer's head, and those two huge, godlike arms tightening around the still-stunned jailer's neck.
Why did Jaheira want Abdel to stop? She didn't know, she just didn't want him to kill, not out of anger, not when he didn't have to. Did he have to?
Abdel seemed to see Jaheira for the first time just before he started to twist the jailer's head. Their eyes locked, and Jaheira could see fire—literally a faint yellow glow—flare suddenly in Abdel's eyes. She realized he'd noticed the iron strap on her head. She had no idea what he'd been through, so she couldn't know what he was imagining she'd been through. She made her eyes wide and tried to shout at him with her mind. She wanted him to stop.
He couldn't hear her thoughts, but her face, smashed into the mask as it was, was plain enough, and Abdel stopped short of killing the jailer. He squeezed the man's neck, didn't twist it, and the jailer woke up just in time to try to take one breath, then pass out again.
"Jaheira," Abdel whispered as he strained at the ropes that held his wrists together.
She closed her eyes and jerked her head back once in hopes that he would understand. He stopped trying to get his hands free and moved to her. The burns on his chest and thighs were purple welts, and he was trickling blood from more than two dozen tiny cuts. He came to her cage and reached in. Without thinking she slid closer to him, pressing her body against the bars. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she had to close her eyes when he leaned closer to her. She felt his nakedness brush against her shoulder, and she heard the loud clatter of iron on iron as he fumbled with the lock on her mask, oddly ignoring the fact that she was still in a cage.
He cursed and pulled, wrenching her neck painfully. There was a whining sound and a crack, and the strap around her chin fell away. He stood quickly and moved to the locked door of the cage. Muscles bunched along his massive arms, and the cage door broke free with one hard yank. Bits of metal clattered on the stone floor, followed by the louder clang of the barred door Abdel easily tossed aside.
"Kyoutendouchi!" the Kozakuran exclaimed. "Now free the rest of us!"
Abdel ignored him, taking Jaheira's chin gently in his bound hands. "Did he …?" Abdel asked, the yellow light returning to his intense eyes for half a heartbeat.
Jaheira opened her mouth to speak, and her jaw cracked painfully, but she managed to say, "No, no, he just left me here with these two. I don't know them."
Abdel looked at the other prisoners, then back at Jaheira.
"Get the keys," Jaheira said to Abdel. "Get the keys from the jailer."
Abdel smiled, said, "Dungeon master," and retrieved the keys.
He went to unlock the Kozakuran's cage but stopped when he passed near Jaheira. Abdel moved to embrace her, but she pushed him away.
She closed her eyes and said, "In the name of Our Lady of the Forest, by the will of the Supreme Ranger, by the touch of the daughter to Silvanus."
Abdel felt a cool nettling pass over him, and when he touched his own chest, the pain from the cuts had gone away—the cuts themselves had healed.
"I didn't know you could do that," he whispered, shocked.
"I haven't been calling on Mielikki enough," Jaheira admitted, blushing, "or listening carefully enough to her call."
"That's all very interesting, young miss," the Kozakuran said, "but I and my very dear fellow prisoner are still hoping to complete what I can only guess is a much welcomed escape."
Abdel looked at Jaheira, who smiled, then he unlocked the Kozakuran man's cage.
"Many and varied thanks, respected sir," the man said. "I am Yoshimo of the Faraway East, and you are my newest friend."
Abdel only grunted at the man, who stood on surprisingly steady legs, rising to a height nearly two feet short of the top of Abdel's head.
"Jaheira," the half-elf druid said, standing and stretching sore, hunger-weakened muscles, "and this is Abdel."
She didn't bother to watch for any reaction to either her name or Abdel's. She was too busy breathing, working her sore jaw, and stretching her cramping legs.
"It's all right, isn't it, Boo?" the red-haired man muttered over and over as Abdel unlocked his cage. The big sellsword was obviously taken aback by the prisoner's mad demeanor.
"Do any of you know the way out of here?" Abdel asked.
Jaheira had to shrug, and Yoshimo looked at the red-haired man as if sure he would have the answer.
The man shrugged, pointed to the only door, and said, "Through there?"
Jaheira allowed herself a laugh and made to follow Abdel and the red-haired man out.
* * *
They came out into an all-out melee.
The four escaped prisoners followed the sounds of battle, since it seemed the only thing to follow, through twists and turns in narrow tunnels that confounded even Jaheira's sense of direction. The red-haired man still seemed oblivious to anything but the rodent he carried cupped in his hands. He would ask the animal if it was all right to turn this corner, safe to go up that set of steps, wise to pass through some doorway. No one but him ever heard the thing answer, but he always followed the rest of the escaping prisoners.
They came into a wide, low-ceilinged chamber dominated by huge roselike growths of orange crystal. Black-clad men were locked in combat with other black-clad men, and neither side seemed to be winning. No one even noticed them at first and even when a few did glance their way, they were all too busy fighting to the death to do or say anything.
"I don't know if this is better than the cages or not," the Kozakuran said dryly.
"There!" Jaheira shouted, pointing to a door on the other side of the chamber.
"Is it all right, Boo?" the red-haired man asked the rodent.
"It's the only way out," Yoshimo said, putting a hand on the madman's shoulder.
"Boo says it's all right," the man said, addressing another human for the first time.
A man in black robes fell screaming to the ground only a dozen paces in front of them. The two assassins who'd killed him looked up sharply at the little group and came on fast, swords drawn.
Jaheira called on Mielikki, closing her eyes just after seeing the still naked Abdel rush forward to meet the charging assassins. She took a tiny sprig of tree root she'd pulled from the wall in the chamber of cages and secreted under her torn, sweat-soaked blouse. The root grew in her hand, and she smiled at the feel of it in her palm. In no more than two heartbeats it was a sword of polished wood with a gleaming blade that showed its razor sharpness.
"Your side!" the red-haired man shouted just in time, and Jaheira dodged the warhammer coming at her from her left.
The wielder was a black-robed assassin with all-too-human eyes overcome with panic and bloodlust. She backed up two steps, which was enough time to recover, and brought her wooden sword up in time to parry another hard strike from the warhammer. She sliced her sword in low and scraped across the assassin's left knee, then his right, and th
e man went down like a sack of wet rice.
"You will learn the price of your failure, you …" a harsh male voice shrieked above the melee, the rest of his obviously enraged statement lost in the echoes of steel on steel.
Jaheira heard someone cast a spell just as another assassin came at her with a quarterstaff raised high. She threw her sword at him and kept her eyes glued to it. The assassin made to dodge the thrown blade but was surprised when the unlikely weapon stopped in midair and reversed its direction, striking for his throat as if it were being wielded by some invisible swordsman.
"We know our price!" a shrill male voice shouted over the general din. "Give us our payment, necromancer!"
The assassin parried each thrust from the goddess-given sword but was soon being pressed back into a stone-block wall. Jaheira had to concentrate on the blade, using her own will at this distance as she would have to if she were holding the blade.
She wondered what Yoshimo and the red-haired man were doing, what had happened to Abdel, and whether or not the other door really was a way out when the single word "Sleep!" shouted from somewhere to her right made her do just that.
* * *
Abdel knew that running into the green cloud would be a bad idea, but he'd already started in that direction when it suddenly appeared in front of him, engulfing the two black-clad men he was trying to defend against. The cloud had obviously been conjured by some mage mixed in among the assassins. The sound of murmuring voices had been part of the general cacophony the whole time. Abdel and the two assassins were overcome with the powerful stench of death and decay. They wanted to kill each other, but all they could do was retch. If Abdel had had anything in his stomach, he would have emptied it onto the floor beneath the cloud. Instead, he just stood there and coughed until a man crashed into his back, and he was pushed, pulled, nearly carried out of the cloud.
"I will destroy you all!" a strange man, a man Abdel couldn't see, screamed. "Your blood will serve me as your pitiful efforts could not!"
Abdel looked back through watering eyes in time to see Jaheira fall to the floor limply, Yoshimo standing impotently by her side, stepping back as two black-robed men grabbed for her. The man with red hair was suddenly standing next to Abdel and had what a more lucid Abdel might have described as a wholly inappropriate grin plastered to his face.
"Abdel!" a woman's voice screamed at him, thin and weak.
He was more confused that Jaheira seemed surprised to see him than that she could shout at all, then realized it wasn't Jaheira's voice.
"Imoen?" he gasped around another body-wracking dry heave. He looked up and saw a face he'd seen most recently in a dream but not in real life for many months. The impossibility of her presence washed over Abdel like a cold rain, and the sellsword was quite simply flummoxed.
"We have to go," the red-haired man shouted with an almost cheerful tone. "Boo insists!"
"We will kill you first, necromancer," a man screamed from somewhere in the middle of the battle, "then take what you owe us … take the son of.." The voice was lost again under the din of battle.
A wave of bright purple fire washed across everything, and Abdel was thrown across the rough floor. All throughout the underground chamber, people were being scattered. Chunks of orange crystal came out of the ceiling, the walls, and the floor. Weapons came out of hands, and at least one boot was pulled off a foot and hit Abdel in the face. Everywhere there were dangerous, heavy, sharp things flying through the air and people sailing upside down, crashing into the ceiling, walls, floor, and each other.
Abdel called, "Jaheira!" then, with a wild, yellow-eyed look of incomprehensible fate in his eyes, "Imoen!"
What was Imoen doing here? The last time Abdel had seen the young woman—barely more than a little girl—was behind the sheltered walls of Candlekeep. She was an irritating kid who didn't take Abdel seriously enough at all, was openly disrespectful and catty, and one of the few friends Abdel ever had in the monastery-fortress where he'd grown up. He couldn't begin to fathom what she might be doing in this place. She was a captive of these men who might be Shadow Thieves, but how, when, and why had they taken her from Candlekeep?
A handful of the warring assassins were on fire now in the wake of the bizarre, obviously magic-spawned explosion. There was a thick stench of smoke, burned hair, and blood. A few men were getting to their feet. Some crawled around searching for weapons. Others had started to kill each other already. Most of the room was blocked from Abdel's sight by a growing pall of smoke, but he started in anyway.
"Imoen!" he called sharply and was sure he heard her answer, though now there was a growing cacophony of steel on steel again ringing through the chamber. A piece of the ceiling fell in front of him, and he had to step back to avoid it. Someone grabbed him roughly from behind, and Abdel whirled with his right fist in front of him.
The red-haired man grunted and stepped back fast. Abdel was surprised enough that he missed hitting the madman.
"Gotta go!" the madman said. "Boo demands it! Boo demands—"
He stopped when he saw Abdel raise his fist again, and he flinched when it looked as if Abdel was going to punch him. Instead, the big sellsword pushed him down by one shoulder and saved his life in the process. A gleaming steel blade arced through the air where the madman's red scalp had been less than the blink of an eye before. Abdel had to bend backward an inch or two himself to avoid its singing tip.
Abdel waited the half second it took for the sword blade to finish its fast arc, then punched out with his left hand in one abbreviated movement that snapped the swordsman's neck back nearly enough to kill him. Losing blood from a viciously cut lip, the man went down hard, blinking all the way. As he fell, Abdel deftly slid the sword out of his hand, and just as the soldier hit the battered flagstone floor, Abdel had the sword up to parry another soldier's uncertain strike.
Soldiers wearing tabards Abdel immediately recognized as Amnian were flooding into the chamber from doorways the sellsword hadn't noticed before. In the smoke, screaming, and confusion, Abdel couldn't tell who was who, and neither could the soldiers, who just took on everybody in the place as they came in.
"Gotta go!" the red-haired man, now standing again in front of Abdel, said.
Abdel parried another swing from the confused soldier, who kept glancing down at Abdel's naked body and blushing. The son of Bhaal batted the Amman's sword away and punched him in the face hard enough to send him down to join his friend on the floor.
"Imoen," Abdel said. He couldn't fathom how these kidnappers had managed to get Imoen out of Candlekeep. She had been an orphan who ended up in the care of Winthrop, an innkeeper well known and well liked in Candlekeep. Winthrop was an easier man than Gorion, less demanding, and Imoen's frivolous ways and casual demeanor were easy to explain. She was a good kid and didn't deserve to be here.
"Boo," the red-haired man said, kicking a black-clad assassin in the groin and taking his sword out of his hand as he went down, just like he saw Abdel do, "says 'Gotta go! "
Chapter Three
Even a lesser vampire is strong enough to break a human's neck. This was proven three times in a single minute as two of Bodhi's thralls protected her from the rushing advance of the guards.
Bodhi looked through the smoke-filled chamber and sighed in profound disappointment. The Shadow Thieves had come, angry apparently at the handling of this Abdel person and the girl. She hadn't even seen this man Abdel. The Shadow Thieves had asked Bodhi and Irenicus to capture him, but Irenicus seemed as interested in him and this girl he described as Abdel's half-sister as the Shadow Thieves were. This is why they'd kept the prisoners longer than the Shadow Thieves wanted them too.
The response from the assassins was a testament to both their impatience and the level of desire they had for at least these two prisoners. Bodhi hoped that the guild of assassins she was gathering herself—on orders from Irenicus—would be as devoted.
Now the militia had appeared, attracted by what, Bodhi coul
dn't be sure. Maybe there was an informant among the Shadow Thieves. Maybe the noise and the shaking of the ground was something they could actually hear or feel on the surface. Maybe, Bodhi thought with a wry smile, the neighbors were complaining.
She tightened her grip on the girl's long, soft hair and kicked out at a running soldier, lifting him two feet in the air by his groin and laughing as he fell to the floor with tears streaming from his eyes and blood beginning to soak through his leather codpiece.
"Imoen!" a solid, deep voice called from somewhere in the confusion, and Bodhi looked up to find the source of the voice.
She almost allowed herself a gasp at the sight of the huge man, naked and straining against a red-haired man who was trying to pull him out of the room. He was beautiful, this naked one. He almost seemed to glow. Bodhi felt something she hadn't felt in a long time, since before she entered her state of undeath. The feeling made her smile.
"Abdel," the girl whose hair she was holding whimpered. This made Bodhi grin even wider.
"This is Abdel?" the vampire whispered, not caring that Imoen couldn't hear her over the sound of the melee.
A soldier slid to a stop in front of her, leveled a crossbow at her face, and shrieked, "Release the girl and step—" in a shrill voice cut off when one of her thralls stepped in.
The lesser vampire twisted the crossbow back into the soldier's throat. The steel tip punctured skin, and the soldier jerked, releasing the catch and sending the bolt slicing through his own throat with nearly enough force to behead him. The man coughed once, and the thrall opened his mouth, straining for the taller man's neck. The soldier's eyes rolled toward the thrall in abject horror, then blinked when a spray of blood covered his face. Bodhi's servant was feeding, and she let him.
