Boundless

by R. A. Salvatore

  Alvilda shrank back from it.

  Inkeri flipped the ruby necklace over her head and set it around her neck. “Do you think it wise to betray us, sister?” she warned, using a term that used to be one of endearment and their special bond. Alvilda was her cousin, not her sister, though they had been raised side by side.

  “You gave her the bracelet,” Alvilda accused, holding fast to her outrage.

  “And the being within it will protect your baby Sharon in these dangerous times.”

  “No!” Alvilda yelled back. “No, a hundred times no! It took her eyes.”

  “It did not take them,” said Inkeri.

  “Who is it? What fiend?” Alvilda demanded.

  “I do not know,” Inkeri admitted, but in that other voice, the giant’s voice, the voice that had been in Alvilda’s head when she had worn the necklace. “It does not matter.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Put on the necklace,” the demon within Inkeri warned, and to accentuate the point, Inkeri began to thicken then, her limbs becoming huge and powerful, her hair growing wildly and turning orange, her face becoming that of an orangutan.

  “And if I do not?” Alvilda stuttered.

  The words were barely out before the creature standing before her, no longer Inkeri but a greater demon known as Barlgura, rushed forward with frightening speed and grabbed her like a child’s rag doll in one massive, and massively powerful, hand. It lifted the necklace up to place over Alvilda’s head, and the woman reflexively tried to block it.

  Barlgura squeezed powerfully, taking the breath from Alvilda, who crumpled to her knees and curled forward, trying to alleviate the pain. She felt a rib snap. She felt her heart being squeezed.

  The necklace went over her head, and Inkeri—and suddenly it was Inkeri again—let her go.

  “This is no game, sister,” Inkeri told her as she slumped there on her hands and knees, gasping against the waves of pain. “And no time for weakness. We have started a war against powerful enemies, and with powerful allies who are less merciful than those we battle. You cannot change your mind.”

  Alvilda looked up at her pitifully. “Sharon is my little girl,” she whispered, and every word hurt.

  Shut up! demanded a voice in her head, one that sounded like the growl of a starving feral dog.

  Alvilda closed her eyes. She knew this demon, her new possessor, a six-limbed glabrezu, with four arms, two of them ending in pincers that could cut a man in half. She had seen Inkeri transform into the fiend on more than one occasion, and never with pleasant consequence. Indeed, every time Inkeri had let the glabrezu come forth, she had not, by her own admission to Alvilda, been able to coax it back into the phylactery until it had torn some person asunder.

  “Sharon’s bracelet protects her,” Inkeri said calmly. “And the necklace hanging about your neck protects you. Do not make me repeat this lesson.”

  Alvilda watched as Inkeri left the drawing room of House Margaster. For all of the other problems, she wasn’t angry that Inkeri had swapped necklaces with her. The one she had been wearing contained a beast more cunning and powerful than this one, she was certain.

  Perhaps she could control this one.

  She felt inside the laughter of the dog-faced glabrezu at that absurd notion, and the voice now in her head promised, I can make you kill your little girl.

  She cried out, her sobs drowned by the demon’s laughter.

  “You be telling Lady Donnola that I’m expecting a hundred bottles of your finest for this,” the grizzled farmer Yasgur scolded Regis and Dahlia as they sat at his old dinner table in the ramshackle front room of his old farmhouse. The place was impressive, or had been in its heyday, as Yasgur had been in his heyday, only a few years before. Even now, with his health declining, though the lanky man had barely entered middle age, Yasgur was considered by his neighbors to be quite the character, and not always in a positive way. His relationship with Donnola Topolino exemplified that, but even more, it was rumored that he wasn’t on bad terms with the current rulers of Luskan.

  Any time anyone inquired about such things, Yasgur always and only replied, “Neighbors are customers.”

  Dahlia looked to Regis, who shrugged, unsure of how to proceed.

  “I’m sure that Lady Topolino will repay you handsomely with wine as soon as she can,” Dahlia said, and Regis had to admit that it wasn’t a lie, after all.

  “Hundred bottles,” the thin, large-nosed man insisted. “Going to throw me a party they’ll be talking about a century after I’m dead and buried! Invite every bard on the Sword Coast to come and play, and aye, but we’re going to play!”

  “Two hundred bottles, if you invite us!” Dahlia said, and Yasgur wheezed and whooped so forcefully that the two guests feared he might fall over dead.

  He winked at the woman. “Don’t even make it your best. With that many, no one will know anyway.”

  “The best for me and you, then,” Dahlia promised with a return wink.

  Yasgur laughed, or wheezed, again, and left the two alone.

  Dahlia smiled at him as he departed, then turned back to find Regis staring at her with his jaw hanging open.

  “When we get Entreri back, Yasgur there is in for some trouble,” the halfling said flippantly.

  But Dahlia scowled at him and seemed in no mood for humor. The mere look had the hair on the back of Regis’s neck standing up, and he marveled at (and was terrified by) how quickly the elven woman had changed moods, from playfully teasing Yasgur to a chilling darkness.

  “We’ll get him back,” Regis said to her, because he needed to say something. “If they still have him . . .”

  He paused as Dahlia’s eyes widened, then went dangerously narrow.

  “They have him,” Regis stuttered. “I am certain. We will bargain . . .”

  “With what?”

  “That is what we need to figure out!” said the halfling, perhaps too enthusiastically, given the returned scowl.

  Dahlia dismissed him altogether, then, taking one last bite of the stew Yasgur had given them, pushed back forcefully from the table. “Bargain,” she snorted.

  “These types love money above all else,” Regis stammered.

  “When they’re dead, we’ll take him back,” Dahlia told him. “Simpler.”

  Regis had to merely nod, for what else could he do? Dahlia was already out the farmhouse door.

  Much later that night, Alvilda Margaster padded silently through the family’s great mansion, easing up to the door of the bedroom where her daughter, Sharon, slept. Nervously, the woman put her ear to the door, hoping to hear the rhythmic breathing of sound sleep.

  She grimaced, unsurprised, to hear the child’s voice muttering “—mentormentormentormentor—” in a long, unbroken chain.

  Alvilda sucked in her breath and tried not to cry. She pictured her dear Sharon, with her curly red hair and those sparkling gray eyes that smiled when she laughed and always seemed to be looking for a reason to dance.

  At least, they had once been gray, Alvilda reminded herself.

  Go and kill her, said the voice in Alvilda’s head. The woman reached up and grasped the bauble hanging on the chain about her neck, wanting nothing more than to tear it off and cast it away.

  But she could not.

  Her skin is so soft. It will be easy and then you will worry no more, her demon told her. She hated this demon even more than the other—how she hated this one!—for the glabrezu monstrosity seemed to want nothing more than death and wanton carnage. Its every whisper to her was a coaxing to murder.

  So soft . . . the voice said.

  Alvilda pictured her little girl lying there among the pillows. Yes, she thought, how easy it would be to kill . . .

  With a start, the woman rushed away from the door and down the grand, sweeping staircase and along to the main sitting room below, where Inkeri sat before the hearth, sipping some strong liquor.

  “I want that necklace back!” Alvilda demanded,
approaching.

  Inkeri, who had started to point to the small table before the liquor cabinet, pulled back her hand and looked curiously at Alvilda. “Well met to you, too, dear sister.”

  “I want that one back,” Alvilda stated, holding out her hand. “And I’m not your sister.”

  “The ugly ape?” Inkeri asked skeptically, fingering the ruby on the gold chain.

  “If you think it so ugly now, then why did you demand it from me?” Alvilda asked.

  “If you think it not ugly, then why did you so readily give it over?” Inkeri countered.

  Alvilda glared at her, and Inkeri sighed. “I took it because this is not a barlgura,” she said. “Not any barlgura. No, this is Barlgura himself, the fiend for whom this type of demon is named. He holds trust with the great Demogorgon, who was destroyed by the drow of Menzoberranzan.”

  Alvilda stared at her in confusion.

  “Not Matron Zhindia Melarn,” Inkeri explained. “The other drow. Those who once opposed Zhindia, but who will soon learn better. Sharing my body with Barlgura requires all the politesse I can find, dear sis— dear cousin, and more than you could manage.”

  “You were angry when the other demon—when this demon—failed you when you thought you had the halfling thief caught in Neverwinter,” Alvilda accused.

  “Do you find your familiar demon too weak, dear cousin?”

  Alvilda blanched at that, and even more when the glabrezu added in her thoughts, Yes, dear cousin, do you? Pray tell.

  Truly Alvilda felt trapped here, more than she had ever believed possible. And since she felt it, so too did the demon, and in her mind, she heard its laughter.

  “I don’t like this one,” Alvilda said.

  “I doubt it much likes you,” Inkeri replied without hesitation. “It is a demon, after all. Do you fancy that Barlgura was much impressed by you, or that the great fiend cared at all about you, or about me, other than for what you or I could bring to it?”

  “This one wants me to kill my girl,” Alvilda pleaded.

  “That’s because it is stupid,” Inkeri replied, but not in her voice. In the voice of a giant, rumbling and grating and hissing all at once, and on the edge of a shriek with every syllable. The woman began to laugh, mocking her, Alvilda knew.

  “It compels me!” Alvilda cried.

  “Then go,” said Inkeri, in her own voice once more. “Go and kill your helpless little child.”

  Alvilda gasped—the demon within her urged her to obey, and she even took a step toward the stairs. But there she stopped, seeing Sharon, her precious little Sharon, coming down.

  Not walking down the stairs, she noted.

  Floating down the stairs.

  “You cannot, but it will be entertaining to watch you try,” Inkeri teased from her chair. “She is more powerful than you, silly Alvilda.”

  The woman hardly heard Inkeri, held fast by the specter of her white-eyed tiny child floating down the stairs like some ghost or vampire.

  “You cannot, Mummy,” the little girl said in her tiny voice. “Don’t worry.”

  “Cannot?” Alvilda breathed.

  “Kill me, Mummy.”

  Back behind Alvilda, Inkeri laughed. The demon inside Alvilda laughed. Sharon came to the doorway and looked at her Auntie Inkeri, and she too began to laugh, an innocent childish giggle that seemed so horribly out of place coming from the cherubic face of the little red-haired girl who had only white where her beautiful gray eyes used to be. She nodded at Inkeri and kept floating, right out of the room to the entry foyer.

  Alvilda rushed to get in front of her, her back against the door. “Where are you going?”

  “I am already there, of course.”

  “What? You cannot leave.”

  “I am not,” said the child, but she moved for the doorknob.

  Alvilda desperately grabbed the child’s arm.

  “Careful, cousin,” Inkeri warned, her voice and expression telling Alvilda that she was thoroughly enjoying this.

  The warning was not without merit, Alvilda knew, but she grasped Sharon’s arm tightly anyway.

  The white-eyed girl looked up at her, smiling, but it seemed to Alvilda to be a wicked smile indeed.

  “Should I make you a cocoon, Mummy?” Sharon sweetly and innocently asked.

  Alvilda blanched. A cocoon. Like the eternal torment Sharon had put upon the human assassin, Artemis Entreri.

  “Don’t leave,” Alvilda pleaded. Her hand grasped nothing at all then, so suddenly, as Sharon became less than corporeal and simply walked right through Alvilda and then through the closed front door.

  The woman gasped and cried out, then fell to the floor, sobbing. Her guilt closed in all around her, more profoundly than Alvilda had ever thought possible, so much so that the waves brought as much confusion to her as guilt itself!

  And in that moment of darkness, she heard a discordant and sweet sound: her child’s laughter.

  What do we care? the vicious glabrezu demon asked in her head. The creature will be unharmed and will return, you fool. If you lose your heart, I will devour you wholly and abuse your mortal form until the skin has fallen from your bones. Then I will find another host. One strong enough to kill the child.

  Alvilda Margaster hardly heard the last threat, for that one word, creature, assaulted her. Creature. The ugly demon had called her beautiful Sharon a creature.

  “Collect yourself, sister,” Inkeri warned. “Our battle has only just begun, and I’ve no room for weaklings.”

  That threat Alvilda Margaster heard quite clearly.

  “That hat you wear,” Dahlia said. “It creates disguise?”

  Regis tapped his beret and almost instantly appeared as a human child. Another tap and he was a dwarf, full beard and all.

  Dahlia motioned with her hand.

  Regis stared at it, at her, doubtfully.

  “Give it to me.”

  “Not in your future, lady,” the halfling answered.

  Dahlia shook the red-streaked black hair from her face and narrowed her eyes into a threatening glare at Regis. She directed his gaze with her own, to the house at the end of the lane, and pointed up at it.

  “Artemis, the man I love, is likely in there,” she said. “With your hat, I can get in there to save him. Are you sure that you wish to deny me that?”

  “I am sure that I am going in there beside you,” Regis said. “And that I know better how to utilize my beret, and that I am no liability when swords are drawn.”

  Dahlia turned back upon him, her scowl unrelenting.

  “Do you doubt it?” Regis said into that threatening visage, not backing down at all. “You would have died in the alley. My blades and resourcefulness saved you then, and my potions healed your wounds at Yasgur’s farm. I need prove nothing more to you, Lady Dahlia.”

  “That is a house full of demons,” Dahlia warned.

  “All the more reason for you to want me by your side.”

  Dahlia’s scowl softened, and she even managed a nod and a bit of a grin.

  “How best do we manage to get in?” Regis asked.

  Dahlia’s smile widened and she took off immediately, sprinting down the lane, full charge.

  “Oh,” Regis gasped, his feet moving to keep up before he had even digested the implications.

  Little Sharon walked the dark streets of Waterdeep’s night. This was a city controlled by great and powerful lords, many of them paladins sworn to uphold justice and goodness. But it was still a city, a place of many men and women of all the races. And, as in any city, the night did not belong to the paladin lords.

  Many sets of eyes turned to follow the red-haired little girl as she wandered on her merry way, most simply caught by the unusualness of the spectacle—this was no halfling woman, clearly, but a human child.

  And for others, the most important added word in that sentiment was a helpless human child.

  Outwardly, Sharon paid the leering scoundrels no heed, and didn’t need to look at th
em, with their greasy fingers and snot-covered faces and ragged clothes, to know their intent, or even to know which might act upon that bad intent. For she could look much deeper than that, could hear their inner voices as clearly as they could hear their own.

  All of those voices, every impulse, every desire, every doubt, every intent.

  She knew, then, the approaching danger when a couple, a human man and a woman, moved down one alleyway as she passed it, knew that they’d turn, knew that the man was reaching for her from behind.

  Sharon turned to smile at him.

  “Ah, her eyes!” cried the woman, middle-aged and scrawny. “Blind!”

  “Then we might just let her live,” said the man, grabbing Sharon hard by her collar. “If she plays nice with us.”

  “Oh, I see you,” Sharon told him.

  He picked her right off the ground, moving her very near his face and into the cloud of his smelly breath. “Do you, then? Then might we kill you when we’re done, aye.”

  In response, Sharon produced a cloud of her own. She coughed, and from her mouth came a swarm of flying insects, wasplike, but with tiny human heads. Most converged on the man’s face, while others flew to the woman, and there, they began viciously stinging and biting. The man dropped Sharon immediately and began slapping at his face, then fell to the ground thrashing and rolling and crying in pain.

  Sharon watched him with great satisfaction, and noted the woman running away, getting stung and bitten at every step. She was not as irredeemably bad as her partner, Sharon knew, for guilt had weighed on her and only fear had overruled that guilt, not desire.

  No, this filthy monster on the ground was the worse, by far, and Sharon let her minions know it.

  “Finish your work quickly, my little friends,” she whispered, magic carrying the command to every wasplike creature she had loosed.

  Sharon nodded, satisfied by a good night’s work, then started back for House Margaster. She was still in sight of the thrashing man when the wasp creatures left him, flying up under the eaves of the nearest building to begin their nest that they might complete their task.