Baldur's Gate (25 page)

The man he’d hit fell heavily on the floor in front of the big sellsword, and Abdel used the broken staff like a club to parry one swipe, then another, then another, from two guards coming at him with stout oaken cudgels.

“Submit!” a commanding voice bellowed from somewhere just outside the narrow door as the guards continued to spill into the room. “Submit to the justice of Candlekeep, and it will all go that much—”

Abdel took another guard down with a fast, short jab to the temple with the rounded end of the staff.

“—easier for you both!”

Abdel heard Jaheira grunt and looked to see her doubled over. The guard who’d hit her in the stomach with a staff was smiling, and Abdel didn’t like that smile one bit. Jaheira rolled her shoulder and pinched the end of the staff against her body, sending it into the leering guard’s gut. The man coughed once and stepped back. Abdel was hit on the arm with a cudgel, and it felt like his whole body was shaken. He punched out at the guard, who flinched back far enough to save himself from the fist, but not the broken staff, which came in low from Abdel’s other hand and crashed into the side of his knee. There was a loud pop, and the guard screamed and fell to the floor.

Jaheira pulled back on the staff still pinned to her side, and the guard let go. She staggered back half a step, and the guard punched her squarely in the side of the jaw. It was a tight-fisted, full-out punch that men rarely, if ever, threw at women, and the sight of it made Abdel’s blood boil almost as much as the sight of Jaheira falling heavily to the ground, blinking, stunned, and rapidly losing consciousness.

Abdel didn’t think, he stabbed. Spinning the broken staff through his fingers, he brought the pointed, splintered end to bear and grunted. The guard who’d punched Jaheira was still grinning when he turned to see Abdel coming at him. He didn’t have even the split second it would have taken him to wipe the grin off his face before he was impaled on the broken staff. The sharp wedge of wood split the guard’s chain mail like cotton, and the weakened wood shattered and splintered as it passed through the guard’s guts and out his back, making a tent out of the unbroken chain mail behind.

One of the other guards screamed in shocked horror, and Jaheira passed out, a sad look passing briefly over her face before it went still and slack-jawed. Two men jumped Abdel from behind, and the touch of their cold chain mail sent a shiver through him. He managed to bat one away with a fast elbow that shattered the guard’s teeth and sent him back on his rump, mumbling curses and beginning to cry. The other guard was stronger, and Abdel couldn’t immediately shake her.

“It’s murder now, for certain,” the guard growled into Abdel’s ear, as if justifying to herself that she would have to kill this man she’d known all her life.

“Pilten!” Abdel gasped “What—?”

“Sleep!” the voice from the corridor shouted, and Abdel’s head spun.

He was trying to say, “No,” as he fell, but all that came out was a grunt. He could feel something rattle his throat that might have been a snore, but he didn’t feel his head hit the floorboards.

He was unconscious for a matter of minutes — long enough to be chained securely at the wrists and the ankles. He came to when they were dragging him down the corridor, the guards taking pleasure in the occasional retributive shot with the blunt staves and cudgels they carried. Abdel realized he’d killed one of the guards and let his neck go limp. Something in him wanted to take the punishment the guards were meting out, but that something was very new in him.

“… and the guard makes nine,” Tethtoril said from the other side of the barred door. Once again Abdel and Jaheira were caged like animals. They were together this time — unusual even for the more humane dungeons of Candlekeep — and unchained. The bruise on Jaheira’s face was already starting to fade. Tethtoril had called on the power of Oghma to heal her as they were dragged to the dungeons. She was awake, horrified, and bemused.

“We didn’t kill those men,” she said, her voice betraying her growing anger. “We came here to prevent — “

“Is this yours?” Tethtoril interrupted. She gasped when she saw the bracelet he was holding. If she’d allowed herself time to think, she might not have said what she said next.

“Yes, where did you find it?”

It was the bracelet that Xan had dropped in the bandit encampment, the same camp in which he found that most unholy tome of Bhaal. The look on Tethtoril’s face made Abdel’s heart sink. The man was disappointed in him. Abdel admired Tethtoril, had admired him all his life, and though he had no idea who these other eight men were he was accused of killing, he did kill the guard who’d struck Jaheira. Not even Tethtoril could save him from that.

“The guard …” Abdel asked weakly, with very little hope. “Is there any chance?”

Tethtoril put a hand to his forehead and pretended to be thinking about the question. He obviously didn’t want the guards to see him cry. When he’d gathered himself, he pulled from the same leather bag from which he’d produced Jaheira’s bracelet a wide-bladed dagger. The blade sparkled in the lamplight, and the blood drying on it glistened around the edges where it met the shiny silver.

“Before I was shown this,” the old monk said, fixing a stern, hurt, disapproving stare on Abdel, “I might have thought so.”

“Tethtoril,” Abdel said, “you can’t think…”

Abdel didn’t finish the thought because he understood that of course Tethtoril could think him capable of killing any number of men. He knew Tethtoril recognized the dagger—he’d been in the room when Gorion had made a great show of presenting it to him. Abdel only now recognized the voice that had put him to sleep as Tethtoril’s. The old monk had seen him disembowel a guard for striking Jaheira a hard but recoverable blow. Of course Tethtoril could think him capable. He was capable.

“Pilten,” Tethtoril said, and the guard Abdel had known when they were both children stepped forward. “Take these and… all of this… and secure it.”

Pilten nodded once in acknowledgment, spared Abdel a disappointed look, then took the bundle that included Abdel’s sword, the letter from Gorion, the pass stone—Tethtoril made a point of showing Abdel that he’d put it in the leather bag—and the incriminating evidence and walked away.

“Go with her,” Tethtoril said to the others, “all of you.”

The other guards were reluctant to leave the old monk.

“I will be quite all right,” he said, lifting his chin in an expression of simple authority. The other guards shuffled off, and there was the sound of many doors closing.

“I will do what I can,” Tethtoril said to Abdel, sparing a glance at Jaheira, “but you’ve left me little to work with.”

“Send word to Baldur’s Gate, perhaps,” Abdel said, “to Eltan?”

Tethtoril nodded, though there was very little hope showing in the old monk’s face.

“I’ve disappointed you,” Abdel said quietly.

Tethtoril forced a weak smile and nodded.

Abdel touched his nose and, like the rest of him, it had turned to glass. The surface was smooth and cold, and there was a distinct tinkling sound when he opened his eyes. His head reeled at first. He wasn’t used to being so high up. The horizon was wider and deeper. There was a huge, dark-green blanket of forest stretching for what must have been miles.

The forest was filled with people in rough black robes. At first it sounded to Abdel like the people were humming, but then he realized they were chanting—they were chanting his name.

“Ab-del, Ab-del, Ab-del,” over and over again in a steady cadence that melded together into a single voice, a voice that was familiar to Abdel, a voice that repelled him.

He took a step back and was surprised when it seemed like whatever structure he was standing on moved back with him. This made his head spin all the more, and a sigh escaped his crystal lips. He put one foot forward to try to balance himself but couldn’t. It was then that he realized he wasn’t standing on a tower—he was the tower.

He fell forward, unable to move his cut glass body, which must have weighed thousands of tons, either quickly or gracefully. He must have been a hundred feet tall or more, and it took him a long time to fall, the trees rushing up at him. When his center of gravity shifted enough, his shins started to crack. The sound of it was loud and would still have been disturbing even if it wasn’t his legs. As his face rushed toward the ground and he came closer and closer to her, he saw Jaheira.

She was looking up at him, her eyes bulging in abject horror. He was falling on her—a shattering glass titan that would crush her at the same time it ripped her to shreds. He couldn’t stop himself from falling, and she didn’t seem able to run. She screamed his name, and it sounded as angry and frustrated as it did fearful. She held up her hands, and Abdel tried to scream out her name, but his voice caught in his glass throat and shattered it. His head fell off and hit Jaheira hard enough to drive her into the ground as it shattered into a trillion screeching fragments.

Abdel came awake with a start, and Jaheira was holding his shoulders, her face close to his. She looked angry and smelled awful.

Memory flooded back to him in torrents, and he remembered being put to sleep by Tethtoril—was it Tethtoril?— and being dragged to the dungeons under Candlekeep and thrown into a cell with Jaheira. He remembered Tethtoril promising to help, then himself telling Jaheira to be patient. He remembered curling up on a surprisingly comfortable cot and watching Jaheira do the same on the other side of the room. He remembered a guard blowing out the little oil lamp, then he was asleep and dreaming he was a hundred-foot-tall god shattering over the woman he loved.

“You don’t smell very good,” he said, forcing a weak smile.

Jaheira sighed impatiently and said, “It’s not me.”

She turned to the bars, and there was the ghoul, Korak.

“Abdel,” he said in the voice of the chanting people of Abdel’s nightmare. “Abdel, I help you.”

The reeking undead thing held up a heavy iron ring hung with a dozen or more big keys. Clinging to the ring was a severed hand already turning gray, its knuckles still white in its death grip.

“He’s been following us,” Jaheira said, backing off so Abdel could stand. He brushed straw from his bliaut and rolled his shoulders, hearing them pop and grind from a cold night on the dungeon cot.

“You killed the guard?” Abdel asked the ghoul directly. Korak smiled, held up the ring again, and said, “I help you. I want to help you.”

“Go away,” Abdel said, even as the ghoul started trying keys in the big lock.

“I’m not convinced this is a good idea either, Abdel,” Jaheira said, “but I’m not sure we have much choice. Murderers are executed here like everywhere else, aren’t they?” There was a loud clank and a squeak. Abdel looked over to see Korak swing the gate open.

The ghoul smiled a black-toothed smile and said, “Come.”

“If you step one foot in here, Korak,” Abdel said, “I will kill you with my bare hands.”

“Abdel,” Jaheira said, ignoring the ghoul, “if they could get to Scar—with doppelgangers—if they could get into the ducal palace in Baldur’s Gate… they could get in here.”

“Tethtoril will help us,” Abdel protested. “I’ve known him all my life. He’s a good man, and he won’t hang either of us.” “If he isn’t already dead,” Jaheira said sternly. Korak hovered in the open doorway and said, “Coming now?”

“That was Tethtoril who locked us in here last night,” Abdel assured her. “If it was a doppelganger why wouldn’t he just kill us?”

“Would Tethtoril?” Jaheira asked. Abdel’s only answer was a confused look, so she continued. “If that was a doppelganger it would have to behave the way Tethtoril would behave. It could be up there right now, gathering more false evidence against us—evidence of crimes committed by doppelgangers who look just like us—evidence that it’ll use to convict us and execute us. To everyone else it’ll all seem perfectly rational, perfectly just. We’ll be blamed for everything… the Iron Throne, Reiltar or Sarevok, or whoever is behind this will have won.”

Abdel didn’t want to believe that possibility, but he had to at least consider it. He turned away and breathed too deeply of the air now fouled by the presence of the rotting ghoul. He coughed and looked up in time to see Korak hold up one finger then skip away, taking the oil lamp he was holding with him. The cell was plunged into darkness, and the absence of light helped to clear Abdel’s mind.

“So we can’t trust anyone,” he said simply.

“I don’t think we can,” she replied as simply. “We can trust Gorion’s letter, though. You have a half brother named Sarevok, who I’m guessing is Reiltar’s—the Iron Throne’s— ‘man’ in Baldur’s Gate.”

The light came back quickly with Korak, and the ghoul dropped the precarious load he was carrying, letting it clatter on the flagstones outside the cell. Their armor was there, Abdel’s broadsword, and the pass stone. Abdel was happy when he realized Korak had used a key to open the cell, so the ghoul didn’t know the power of the stone. It would be their ticket out.

The last item Abdel pulled from the sack was his dagger, the wide-bladed silver dagger Gorion had given him so long ago. It felt good in his grip, not because it could rip any man’s guts out, but because it was given to him by someone he cared about, and who cared about him.

“You lost your sword,” he said to Jaheira. She looked up at him and nodded. He turned the dagger around in his hand and offered her the handle.

“Thank you,” she whispered, taking the weapon. “I’ll take good care of it.”

They stood, and Abdel took Jaheira lightly by the elbow and whispered into her ear, “Didn’t we decide this ghoul was working for the Iron Throne?”

Jaheira shrugged and whispered, “I haven’t the slightest idea, but we can always kill him later.”

Abdel smiled sadly and guided her to the open cell door.

Even in the most curious summer afternoons of Abdel’s youth, he’d never seen this side of Candlekeep. Under the monastery, for what seemed like endless layer upon endless layer, was a series of catacombs and sewers that was like an infinite labyrinth. It didn’t take Abdel long, who didn’t have much of a sense of direction underground, to get lost completely, and he and Jaheira soon found themselves in a position they’d both promised themselves and each other they’d never be in again. They were blindly following the vile-smelling Korak.