Baldur's Gate (17 page)

The dwarf grinned, then winced. A huge purple-black bruise blossomed on Yeslick’s forehead, making any sort of facial movement painful.

“Thanks to you two,” he said, slowly, his voice muffled by his own throat.

At first Abdel thought the dwarf must be as slow of mind as he was of speech. Hours later, when the Iron Throne slavers were dead or scattered into the forest, he realized that Yeslick was anything but stupid. The dwarf fought with foresight and experience, and a calm certainty that he was smarter than his opponents. The Iron Throne had scraped the bottom of the barrel for recruits at this camp, though. Abdel lost count of how many inexperienced mercenaries he killed—at least eight—and he had barely broken a sweat, though he did have one nasty cut on his left forearm from some bumbling fool’s lucky slice with a short sword.

“How did you come here, Yeslick?” Abdel asked, hoping he wouldn’t insult the steady dwarf by asking. “How did these fools manage to get a dwarf like you in chains?”

Yeslick laughed and sat heavily on a loose rock. “If it was these fools who chained me,” he said, tossing the chain away to let it clatter and shed drips of the guard’s blood on the uneven floor, “I would have to kill myself for the shame of it. It was Reiltar himself who done me in.”

“Reiltar?”

The dwarf looked up at Abdel and squinted at him in the dim light. “Come to the surface with me, lad,” the dwarf said, “and I’ll tell you my story.”

“This doesn’t sound right, Yeslick,” Turmod of Clan Orothiar said, his gravelly voice echoing in the tight mine shaft. “Hear?”

Turmod took his heavy iron pick to the wall again, and there was—at least to the assembled dwarves—a noticeable change in the tenor of the ring. Yeslick was in charge of this cutting party, and he’d been charged with thirty feet a day, and he was going to keep that goal. The engineers had sent them here, pointed them in the right direction, and gone off to another part of the mine as soon as Yeslick and his crew of fifty had started digging. Dwarf engineers had made mistakes before, but not Orothiar engineers. When they decided a tunnel should go in one direction, it always headed straight for whatever ore they were looking for. This time they were after iron, and odd clang aside, Yeslick felt confident there was iron in the direction in which they were digging.

“Keep going,” Yeslick told his crew.

“You heard it—” Turmod started. Yeslick interrupted by holding up one rough hand.

“At least send for one of the engineers, Yeslick,” Turmod offered.

Yeslick felt a wave of relief wash over him. If he got an engineer out here he’d only appear cautious, not cowardly. He wouldn’t have actually made a decision, so he wouldn’t ever have to back it up. Yeslick knew he was too young to lead a mining detail and so did the miners who followed him. He was a smith by trade and by training, but every dwarf in clan Orothiar took a turn in the mines, and this was Yeslick’s. He’d “earned” the leadership of the crew by impressing one of the mine masters. He’d impressed the master with his smithery, of course, not his digging, but it didn’t matter to that particular mine master. The engineers would point them in the right direction, all Yeslick really had to do was occasionally remind his crew to pause for the occasional sip of water or taste of jerked rothe. Dwarves liked to work, liked to dig, so he wouldn’t have to force them to dig, or beg to keep them on task. He did have to stop to make periodic measurements, though, to make sure they were digging in the right direction, but that wasn’t too difficult.

“Jomer,” Yeslick said, and a young dwarf he’d gone to reading classes with dropped his pick and looked over at him, “go fetch the engineers. They should be down the thirty-third shaft by now. Tell them we’ve run into something… or are about to.”

Jomer nodded and scurried off into the darkness.

Yeslick looked at a smiling Turmod and said, “Well, don’t just stand there grinning. We can keep digging till they get here. Whatever’s in that rock is still a ways away.”

Turmod, apparently content that the engineer would be on his way, turned around and began banging away at the rough stone at the end of the tunnel, oblivious to the danger that hid only a few feet beyond.

As the years turned into decades, Yeslick would think back to that moment time and time again. He always found it difficult to believe that the strange sound of the picks clanging off stone was the only signal. He couldn’t believe there wouldn’t have been a trickle first, even a spot of wetness or a spurt or something. The stone wasn’t even wet, didn’t even absorb any of the water behind it. He was a good smith and a bad miner, but he was a dwarf, and he should have been able to tell that there was a lake of freezing-cold water only a few inches away. He blamed himself for what happened next, but as the years dragged on, he came to accept the truth. It was the engineers—the infallible Orothiar engineers—who had pointed them in the wrong direction. It wasn’t his fault.

The water came out all at once. They were working, Yeslick, Turmod, and the others, banging away at rock and then, just all at once, they were underwater. There was a loud sound right away, then an eerie silence. Yeslick held his breath, closed his eyes, prayed to Moradin, and was tossed like a cork in hurricane seas for what seemed like forever. He’d timed himself, years later, and never made it past about a hundred and fifty heartbeats, but he could swear that day he had held his breath for hours.

Eyes closed, right hand tight over his nose and mouth, his left arm flopping free to strike rocks and the bodies of his crew at hard, slamming, random intervals, Yeslick rode a backwash out the top of the tunnel and into a natural cave system he never knew existed. He came to the surface a few times and gasped for air reflexively, though he didn’t have any clear, conscious thought for his own life then. He came up for air maybe half a dozen times before he finally passed out.

He woke up coughing, some impossible to determine length of time later—days? He lived—along with two members of his crew, including Turmod and a handful of others who had found ways out—by sheer luck. What was left of clan Orothiar wanted nothing to do with them. They dug in the wrong place, the elders said. Turmod killed himself. It was his pick that made the final strike that let in the water that destroyed the mine. Yeslick went away, just started walking, and ended up in Sembia. He got work doing the one thing he could always get work doing. He was a good smith, and as the years passed, creeping ever closer to a century away from the mines of the Orothiar, he let himself forget.

And then he met Reiltar.

“Reiltar took an interest in my work,” Yeslick told Abdel. “I’m a good smith, and many a man in Urmlaspyr—all of Sembia—had heard my name. I did some work for him, some specialty stuff that looking back … well, it gives me the heebie-jeebies, I can tell you that much.”

Abdel nodded, not sure what the “heebie-jeebies” were, but content that it was some kind of dwarf thing.

“Damn me for the gnome-kissing dolt I must be,” the dwarf continued, “but I counted that lanky, elitist bastard a friend. I hired on with him eventually, did some work— some weaponsmithing even—for this trade group of his. He never explained to me what the Iron Throne was, and I never asked. Frankly, I didn’t care.

“I used to live here, in these very tunnels—well, these are new, but tunnels near here. Before we hit that lake other crews hit iron, and lots of it. Reiltar, he got me drunk, got me talking about the old times, got me crying about the old times. I let him in on a strike, the way he saw it. He brought me back here in chains to work it for him, afraid I’d claim it for my own, maybe, or in the name of a clan that’s long moved on, without me, to the Bloodstone Lands. I’d have given that piece of rothe dung the mine, he could have had every nugget of iron in the place. I was in Sembia, and though I didn’t like it much, I sure as a gnome’s curious didn’t want to come back here.”

“This Reiltar,” Abdel asked finally, “he leads the Iron Throne?”

“What are you here for, son, if you don’t know that?”

“He runs this gang of his from Sembia?”

The dwarf didn’t answer, just smiled.

“Abdel!” Jaheira called. He looked up and saw her running toward them out of the light at the end of the tunnel. “There you are.”

“Jaheira,” he said, smiling, happy to see her as well. They’d split up when the fighting got heavy, and he trusted her safety to a pack of dwarves who turned out to take somewhat better care of her than she’d enjoyed the last tenday or so with him.

“I may have something,” she said. “I saw a sigil on the crates of supplies and tools, and on one of the wagons. All this stuff is coming from the Seven Suns, a trading coster we’ve had our suspicions about.”

“We?” Yeslick asked. Abdel only smiled when Jaheira blushed.

“They’re from Baldur’s Gate,” Jaheira added.

Abdel sighed and said, “Close enough to look into, but our new friend Yeslick here tells me we’re looking for a man named Reiltar—and he’s in Sembia, not Baldur’s Gate.”

“Oh, no,” Yeslick said, “Reiltar’s never been out here. He has a man—I don’t know his name—in Baldur’s Gate.”

Baldur’s Gate.

Abdel and Jaheira picked up a rickety ferry on the south bank of the River Chionthar. Abdel had never thought to ask if Jaheira had ever been as far north as this, but when she first caught sight of the city, sprawled over the north bank of the mile-wide river, she could do little but stare in awe. There was something about the look on the beautiful half-elf’s face that warmed Abdel’s heart. He saw the little girl in her.

They’d been on the road for four and a half days and in that time had never been as close as they had been in the water, when they clung to each other as much to stave off the cold and madness as simply to touch. Jaheira was mourning her husband and to a surprisingly equal degree, Xan. Abdel had never traveled with anyone for very long. He’d known Jaheira now almost as long as he’d known anyone. He’d fought alongside men who’d died before—died close enough to spill some of their blood on him—and he never found it in him to mourn. Gorion’s death had changed all that. The sellsword used to revel in death, in killing, more than as a symbol of victory or a simple turning of the great wheel of life. Now, he saw the pain in it, and he hoped he could kill as easily when he needed to, and thought maybe he wouldn’t kill so easily when he didn’t.

When Abdel finally turned his attention to the city across the gray water, he felt a fresh sense of wonder. Certainly it wasn’t the most beautiful city in the world. He’d never been to Waterdeep, but Abdel knew this was no City of Splendors. It was no Myth Drannor, no Karsus, paled in comparison to even Suzail and Calimport, but after nearly two months of the backwater towns of the Sword Coast, well … Baldur’s Gate was no Waterdeep, but it sure beat Nashkel.

The ferry rocked violently in the cold water, and Abdel grunted at the queasy feeling already beginning to take hold in his otherwise iron stomach. The rocking came more from the incompetence of the ferryman than the currents or wind.

“Ferryman!” Abdel called to the hopelessly frail old man manning the tiller.

Six younger men worked at oars and refused to look up for anything. There were a few other passengers, including a rather unpleasant smelling ox. The ferryman made no move to indicate that he’d heard Abdel, so the sellsword approached him, zigzagging across the pitching deck.

“Ferryman,” he said again, and this time the old man shot him an annoyed look.

“We’ll get there, we’ll get there,” he croaked. “What d’ya think we are, a bunch of golems?”

“Do you need a hand, old man?” Abdel offered.

“I’m fine, kid,” the old man spat out. “I’m just old, my knee ‘urts, and I don’t give a shite no more.”

Abdel laughed, and the old man looked offended for a heartbeat or two, then laughed along with Abdel. Ending in a spasm of phlegmy coughs, the ferryman stepped aside and let Abdel take the tiller.

“Steer ‘er if you want to, son,” he said, sitting stiffly on an old barrel that had been nailed to the deck, “I’ll take what I can get.”

Abdel had never actually steered a ferryboat before and was surprised at the strength he had to expend to keep the boat on course, let alone steady, and wondered that the old man could do it at all. Jaheira stood next to him and ran her fingers through her hair, letting it flow freely in the chill breeze.

“It’s amazing” she said, and Abdel nodded before she could say, “that anyone could live in such a midden pit.”

This took Abdel by surprise, and he said, “You don’t find it…”

“Rank?’ she finished. “I’ll say, and look at that harbor. What in Umberlee’s name were they thinking? How could they possibly defend this city?”

“This river makes a convincing wall,” Abdel said weakly. He’d never actually considered Baldur’s Gate from a tactical point of view.

The city sat at a point in the wide river where the water took a sudden bend to the north before continuing on to the Sea of Swords. Once they’d crossed the bulk of the width of the river, the old ferryman kept nudging Abdel, so he’d keep the ferry close, but not too close, to the rocky river bank now on their right side as they approached the busy harbor. The bend in the river made a sort of bay, and the city proper bent around that bay in a roughly horseshoe shape. Most of the city was surrounded by a high curtain wall that never ceased to impress Abdel. The number of stonemasons that must have been required, the time, the resources, all of it made Abdel marvel at the power behind the city’s rulers. Rulers who, like him, were mercenaries, or had once been.

Few of the buildings in the city were taller than two stories, most of them shops with apartments above. There were houses, and cramped row houses. The air over the city was thick with smoke from countless fireplaces. Years of smoke had stained the once pale waddle and daub a dark gray. The sea of squat structures was occasionally punctuated by the odd unusual edifice. Even though it sat far back in the city’s northernmost district, Abdel could see the tops of three of the seven towers of the High Hall, the city’s ducal palace. The steeply arched roof of the temple of Gond—the so-called High House of Wonders—blocked the other four towers. To the west, jutting out on a brick-lined island and connected to the city by a strong stone bridge was the Seatower of Balduran, a fortress of five tall, round towers linked by a high wall, crinkled with battlements. Here the city’s protectors, a mercenary company called the Flaming Fist, kept watch over the busy harbor.