The six closest men screamed and fell back. Alhabara scrambled away and cried out, "Kill them!"
The man nearest the bird on the right tried to rush past it to get at the man and the elf, but the diatryma's powerful neck snapped as he passed, driving the beak into his shoulder with such force that it snapped bone and dislocated his shoulder so badly that it left his arm swinging numbly several inches down from its previous position, and far to the back. The man yelped and tumbled to the grass, howling pitifully.
Charon's Claw and his jeweled dagger in hand, Entreri leaped at the trio on the left. Back-to-back with him, Jarlaxle snapped his wrist, bringing a magical dagger into his hand from his enchanted bracer. A second snap elongated that dagger into a slender sword, which the drow flipped to his left hand and used to parry the nearest khopesh in the same movement.
His right hand snapped again and the bracer answered. While working his sword brilliantly and fluidly to keep that troublesome khopesh at bay, he retracted and flung the dagger at the last in line. Hardly slowing, he wrist-snapped, retracted, and threw again, and again.
The man was good with his blade and quite agile. After five throws, he only had one dagger-wound in one thigh, and that had been no more than a glancing blow. His friend tried to press the attack on Jarlaxle, but the agile drow easily held him at bay, even working his sword around the khopesh to stick him lightly in the ribs.
And all the while, Jarlaxle kept up the flow of daggers, spinning end over end and coming at the man high, low, and center with no discernable, thus no defensible pattern. The man couldn't anticipate, he could only react, and in that state, another blade got through, grazing the side of his face, then a third—a solid strike into the shoulder of his sword arm.
Worse for him, and for his friend, Jarlaxle's pet bird intervened, trampling the man as he pressed in on Jarlaxle. The man managed to bang his khopesh off the giant creature's leg, but the bird stomped him, then jabbed down with three hard pecks.
Jarlaxle sent it off after Sultan Alhabara, as he turned his attention to the remaining man. His next dagger came forth and he did not throw it, but snapped his hand to elongate it into a second, sister blade.
He stalked at his wounded opponent.
A trio of arrows soared in from the side, shot from a tree across the oasis.
Jarlaxle saw them too late to avoid them.
* * * * *
Entreri turned left, then went went that direction and forward, moving to the flank of the trio so that they all couldn't get at him at once. He led with an underhanded sweep of his dagger, one that, because of his bold stride forward, caught the swinging sword up near the hilt and allowed him the leverage to turn it out with just that small blade. Without room to maneuver his own sword, he came across with a right-hand punch instead, cracking Charon's Claw's pommel into the man's cheek.
He followed through with the punch past the man's broken face, extended his left arm, taking both the khopesh and the man's arm out wide with him, and rolled his sword arm over that extension then down and under.
Feeling pressure from a second attacker coming in behind him, Entreri rolled right over the arm, a complete flip that left him on his feet, and he came up strong, lifting his sword arm high, gashing the bandit's arm in the process. A twist had the man rolling over Entreri's hip, flailing helplessly.
"You are dead," Entreri promised, for the man had no defense at all. "Except…"
Entreri reversed his grip as he dropped his sword arm, and he stabbed out behind him as he did a sudden reverse pivot.
The blade drove into the gut of a second bandit, the one who had been in the middle of the trio, the one who had drawn first.
"I promised him that he would die first," Entreri explained. He kicked the prone man—who had dropped his khopesh to hold his badly torn arm—in the face and leaped past him, dagger and sword working in complimentary circles to foil the attack of the third man.
It was all going so smoothly and easily, he thought, but then he noted that dozens of others were closing in, hooting and raising swords and bows. A quick glance back showed him arrows diving for Jarlaxle. Beyond the drow, he saw his other companion, one better forgotten, roaring down the side of the dune on his war pig, holding tight with his powerful legs, his arms out wide and swinging morningstars left and right.
* * * * *
"Wahoo!" Athrogate yelled, the clear and steady tone of his shout defying the jolting, stiff-legged romp down the side of the dune. Despite those stiff legs and their shortness, Athrogate learned that his magical boar could cover tremendous ground.
The dwarf clamped his legs tight and sent his morningstars swinging wide left and right. He crossed from sand to grass, and the nearest bandits moved to intercept, a couple leveling spears.
Athrogate just howled louder and kept straight his course, thinking to pick off the prodding spears with his weapons. As he bore in, however, he found that his mount was more than a beast of burden. The boar had been summoned from the fiery pits of the Nine Hells, where battle was constant. Both its temperament and its armament were well suited to that harsh environment. It broke its stride only briefly, so it could snort and stomp a hoof, and as it did, a burst of orange flames rushed out from its body, a complete ring of wispy fire rolling away as it dissipated.
"Bwahaha!" Athrogate howled in gleeful surprise, and as the boar drove on, the dwarf clamped his legs tighter around it and adjusted the angle of his spinning weapons.
The bandits fell back and curled, shocked by the fiery burst. A bit of residual flame burned on one's robes, while the other had wisps of smoke rising from his singed hair. And both showed bright red skin where the flames had touched them.
Neither was really harmed by the burst, but as Athrogate rushed between them, the weight of his already heavy blows was only enhanced by the momentum of the boar. One man took a hit in the chest and went into a nearly complete backward somersault, except that he landed on his face instead of his feet. The other somehow maintained his footing after the strike.
But the morningstar had taken him across the side of his head, and though he was standing, he was far, far from consciousness. Athrogate was many strides away before he crumbled to the ground.
"Wahoo!" the dwarf roared wildly, thoroughly enjoying it all.
* * * * *
The arrows hit Jarlaxle's magical barrier barely an inch from the drow. They just stopped, in mid-air, and fell to the ground. The enchantment wasn't going to last, though, the drow knew, and so he looked out at the tree and the archers and used his innate magic to summon a globe of darkness over them.
"I'm blinded!" he heard one man cry, and he smiled, for he had indeed heard that false claim before.
The man before him was a stubborn one, he found, who came on yet again. With a sigh, Jarlaxle met his slashing khopesh, executing a downward diagonal, with a double-sword block. A turn to face the three locked blades gave him all the leverage he needed, and he easily drove the sword down.
He retracted suddenly, and the man nearly overbalanced. The drow began a "rattling parry," where both his swords rolled out a tapping drum roll on the blade. As his opponent finally began to compensate against the almost continual push, Jarlaxle side-stepped and with a sudden flourish rushed his sword downward, reversing the tip to point at the ground and taking the khopesh down with it.
The bandit pushed back, and found his blade climbing freely, but only because Jarlaxle had disengaged. The drow rolled his arms out wide, right blade closest to his opponent and angled out and down, left blade angled out and up. He tilted his body accordingly to provide maximum balance to the pose.
But it was a pose he held only briefly, for he drove his blades back in with sudden fury, the right blade coming up and under the khopesh down near the hilt, the left slamming down near the thicker end of the blade.
The bandit couldn't negotiate the alteration of pressure, and the drow's swipes tore the blade from his hands completely and sent it into a spin. Jarlaxle he
ld that spin, the khopesh rotating around its hilt and the drow's right-hand sword.
The bandit stared at it as if mesmerized.
"Here," the gracious Jarlaxle offered, and he released the sword from its twirl, sending it up into the air back toward the bandit. The man looked up, his hands went up, and just before the khopesh landed in his grasp, the sole of the drow's boot landed against his face.
He hit the ground before the khopesh bounced atop him.
Jarlaxle glanced at Entreri. "Summon your…" he started to cry, but before he had even finished, Entreri's nightmare arrived on the scene, snorting fire and pawing the ground.
The poor remaining bandit on that side had already been stripped of his weapons, and the sight of the hellish horse stripped him of his sensibilities as well, apparently, for he blubbered something undecipherable and half-ran, half-crawled away, crying and screaming all the way.
Entreri leaped astride the powerful nightmare, and kicked the steed into a gallop that drove back the nearest group of approaching bandits. A pair of spears and an arrow came at him, but Jarlaxle's magical shield held them back.
Then Jarlaxle was up on his own black steed behind Entreri, who kicked his nightmare into a run. The two were swept up in Athrogate's wake, then thundered past the dwarf and his war pig. A battery of archers rose from behind one wagon, but almost as they stood, they, too, began screaming about blindness, as Jarlaxle's magical darkness engulfed them.
Behind the riding trio, Jarlaxle's diatryma continued its rampage, and the bandits had to settle for that fight.
Out the far side of the oasis, running free across desert sands once more, the three covered nearly a mile before Jarlaxle pulled up and bid his friend do likewise.
"Bwahaha!" Athrogate roared. "I can't ever be thankin' ye enough for me new pet! Bwahaha! Snort! Bwahaha!"
Jarlaxle offered him a smile, but turned on Entreri. "That went well," the drow said dryly. "All of my lessons in diplomacy were wasted on you, it seems."
Entreri started to respond, but he noticed then that a new feather was already growing inside the band on Jarlaxle's magnificent hat. He just shook his head and spurred his steed forward.
"We should be going back," said Athrogate. "More to hit!"
Jarlaxle never turned from the departing Entreri, and without a response, he kicked his nightmare into a run behind his departing companion.
"Bah," Athrogate snorted in disappointment.
He gave a wistful glance back toward the oasis, and reluctantly followed.
CHAPTER 22
INDULGING THE GODS
Well, now we're knowing why the last fool died," Athrogate said when he and his two companions entered the house that had been offered to them in the southwestern quarter of Memnon.
They had come into the city earlier that morning, and on Entreri's insistence—at least for himself—had eschewed the better sections of the port, where all the taverns were located, and had gone straight to a ramshackle district where the houses were no more than flimsy walls and floors of stone and dirt—and that was for the people fortunate enough to even have a shelter at all. Many of their neighbors, the poorest citizens by far in the city, slept on the side of the sandy avenues, often without even lean-tos to protect them from the occasional rains. A flash of gold from Jarlaxle had spared the trio that fate, at least, and the man, one of the clerks from the Protector's House, the temple of Selûne, had told them of their good fortune, for the owner of the house had recently departed the mortal world, leaving it open for the taking.
Jarlaxle groaned when he entered behind the dwarf, and knew he had greatly over-bribed the clerk. The place was no more than four walls, a roof that showed as much sky as reed, a floor of dirt, and a single table of piled stones so covered by crawling bugs—evil-looking reddish-brown critters with long pincers and an upward-curling tail—that it seemed obvious to the drow that the creatures had called the place home for a long, long time.
Athrogate walked over to the table and snorted, seeming amused. "Back home, we had a name for this," he said, and he extended one fat thumb and squished a crawler flat with a crunching sound. "Buffet."
"Do not dare eat that," said Jarlaxle, and Athrogate gave one of his characteristic "bwahahas" in reply.
Entreri walked in last. He glanced around and gave it all hardly a thought.
"Seemin' a bit too familiar to ye, by me own thinkin'," Athrogate teased.
Entreri looked at him out of the corner of his eye, but just shook his head and turned away. "They have midday services in the square overlooking the docks," he said to Jarlaxle. "I will be there, south side of the Protector's House." He turned and started back out the ill-fitting door.
"You are leaving us?" the drow asked.
"I never invited you here to begin with," Entreri reminded him as he walked away.
"Bwahaha!" roared Athrogate.
"Enough, good dwarf," Jarlaxle said, though he never took his eyes off the door. "This is difficult for our friend."
"Place didn't seem to bother him all that much," said Athrogate.
Jarlaxle turned to face him. "This?" he asked. "I suspect that Artemis Entreri is well acquainted with similar accommodations. But returning to this city, the place of his birth and early life, brings with it some painful memories, I would expect, which is why he needed to come here."
To Jarlaxle's surprise, Athrogate winced at that, and nodded but didn't otherwise reply, a very uncharacteristic response that revealed quite a bit to the perceptive, worldly drow.
"So are ye thinking the time's come to do some drinking?" the dwarf blurted. "I a'weighin' to go hear the prayin', or to make me a treat with these critters to eat! Bwahaha!"
"Is that all there is to Athrogate?" Jarlaxle asked in all seriousness, cutting short the dwarf's outburst. Athrogate stared at him hard, suddenly sobered.
"You are free of all feelings, it seems, other than your own humor," Jarlaxle pressed, and Athrogate's face tightened with every word. "Such as it is. Is there nothing but your pleasure?"
"I might be saying the same to yerself."
"You might, but my answer would involve a long history of explanation."
"Or ye might be telling me to mind me own business."
"Indeed, and which will you do, my hairy friend?"
"Ye're going to a place where ye don't belong."
"Your level of carefree is not attained without cause," said the drow. "Something to drink, something to hit, and a joke to make them groan—is that all there is to Athrogate?"
"Ye don't know nothing."
Indeed, Jarlaxle thought and smirked and decided to keep the irony of that double negative to himself. "So tell me."
Athrogate ground his teeth and slowly shook his head.
"Should I fill you with potent drink before I ask such things?" Jarlaxle asked.
"Ye do and ye'll find the ball end of a morningstar crunched into the side o' yer head."
Jarlaxle took the threat with a laugh, and let it drop. In discussion, at least, for in his thoughts he played it through over and over again. Something had created Athrogate as he was; something had broken the dwarf to that base level, where he had no emotional defense other than a wall of ridicule and self-ridicule, fastened by the occasional rap of a mighty morningstar and hidden by the more-than-occasional drink.
Jarlaxle nodded, thinking that he had just found something interesting, something he meant to explore, despite the dwarf's very serious threat.
* * * * *
The scene was all too familiar to Artemis Entreri and sent his thoughts careening back across the years. Before him, in the wide square that fronted the gigantic Protector's House, by far the largest structure in that part of the city, stood, sat, and lay the rabble of southwestern Memnon. They were the dispossessed, the poorest of the poor in the city, nearly all of them suffering the maladies so common among those who could not find enough to eat or drink, who could not keep clean, who could not find shelter from the rain.
> But they were not hopeless. No, the men on the eastern side of the square, richly dressed and bejeweled, would not allow for such a state of despair. They called out in melodic voices of the glories of Selûne and of the wonders that awaited her servants. Their pages went among the crowd, offering good news and good cheer, speaking of salvation and promises of an eternity free of all pain.
But there was more to this than cheerleading, Entreri knew all too well. There were promises of immediate relief from ailments, and even suggestions—normally reserved for grieving parents—that the afterlife for their dearly departed could be made even more accommodating than the promises of their god.
"Would you have your child suffer on the Fugue Plane a moment longer than he must?" one young acolyte said to a tearful woman not far from Entreri. "Of course not! Come along, good woman. Every moment we tarry is another moment your dear Toyjo will suffer."
It wasn't the first time the acolyte had pulled that same woman forward, Entreri could tell, and he watched as the pair shuffled through the crowd, the acolyte tugging her along.
"By Moradin, but yerselfs are calling me kin heartless," Athrogate muttered as he and Jarlaxle walked up beside Entreri. "Such a brotherhood ye got here. Makes me want to be findin' a wizard that'd polymorph me into a human." He ended with a fake sniffle, and wiped his eye.
Entreri flashed him a sour look, but as he was no more enamored with his fellow humans than was Athrogate, he really had no practical response. He looked to Jarlaxle instead—and did a double-take, still not used to seeing the drow with golden hair and tanned skin.
"You know this scene?" Jarlaxle asked.
"They are selling indulgences," Entreri explained.
"Selling?" Athrogate snorted. "These dirty fools got coin for spending?"
"What little they have, they spend."
Athrogate snorted as one particularly skinny man ambled by. "Ye might be better off in buying a cookie, if ye're asking me."
"The priests will heal their wounds for a fee?" Jarlaxle asked.
"Minor healing, and temporary at best," said Entreri. "Most who wish for physical heals are wasting their time. They are selling the indulgence of the god Selûne. For a few silver pieces, a grieving mother can spare her dead child a tenday in the Fugue, or can facilitate her own way when she dies, if that is her choice."
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