Baldur's Gate (2 page)

Abdel, as he was wont to do, simply asked his father what was on his mind. Gorion had smiled and laughed.

“‘And hid his face amid a crown of stars?’” Gorion asked, quoting some bard Abdel vaguely recognized.

“Staey of Evereska?”

“Pacys,” Gorion corrected, “if memory serves.”

Abdel only nodded, and Gorion asked him a simple question: “Will you come with me somewhere?”

Abdel sighed deeply. “I can’t stay, father, and you know I’ll have no more of your books and scrolls—”

“No, no,” Gorion cut his son off with a heavy, worried laugh, “none of that. I meant somewhere outside the confines of Candlekeep. A place called the Friendly Arms.”

Abdel had to laugh. Of course he’d passed through this legendary roadhouse on more than one occasion. He’d gone there a few times to find work, or wine, or women, and had never failed to find at least one of the three. What his father might want there, he couldn’t hazard a guess.

“There are two people there … people I must meet,” Gorion said, “and the road is treacherous.”

“Is this something to do with my parents … my mother?” Abdel asked, though he had no idea why, and even tried to stop the words as they passed unbidden through his lips.

Gorion’s reaction was the same as every time Abdel brought up the subject of the mother and father he never knew. The old monk was pained by the thought.

“No,” Gorion said simply. Then there was a long, strained, awkward pause before he said, “Not your … not your mother.”

He wanted to go to the Friendly Arms to meet some people who had some information for him, that was all. Gorion’s life had been centered around the gathering of other people’s information, so Abdel was hardly surprised by the request. He agreed, of course, since he’d probably have wandered into the Friendly Arms on his own anyway. Having his father along for company on the road would be a pleasant change of pace.

So the two of them walked out of Candlekeep together for the first time that next morning, and they’d made it well past highsun of the third day out of Candlekeep, following the wide, well-traveled Coast Way road, before finding their way blocked by a band of cutthroats.

Abdel rushed to the side of his fallen father at the first sudden sign of life.

It was a ragged, gurgling intake of breath, and Abdel crawled toward it like a drowning man to a floating barrel. His wounded side sending brilliant flashes of pain from his waist up to his neck and into the space behind his eyes, Abdel fell to the ground more than sat. He tried to say “Father,” or something else, but the sound stuck in his throat, lodged there painfully until he thought the word itself would choke him.

His father’s one remaining eye wandered, searching blindly, and his left hand fumbled in a pouch at his belt. His right hand was twitching with painful spasms, clawing at gravel as if trying to push the pain away.

“Mine—” Gorion managed to say; just that one, clear word.

“Yes,” Abdel breathed, his throat tightening again to cut off any more words, and his eyes once more filling with tears at the sight of his bleeding, dying father.

“Stop it,” Gorion said, again in an unbelievably clear voice. He said something else then, something Abdel couldn’t make out.

The old monk’s hands came up, and Abdel blearily realized he was working a spell. Gorion touched him roughly, the dying man’s hand falling more than reaching to the young sellsword’s side. A wave of warmth washed over Abdel’s midsection, and the burning pain abated all at once. Gorion hissed out a long, pained breath and Abdel, the wound in his side now closed, almost completely healed, said, “And now you.”

Gorion didn’t begin another casting. “Last one,” the monk croaked out.

Abdel wanted to spit his anger at his foster father for wasting his single healing prayer.

“You’re dying,” was all he could say.

“Stop the war… I’m not—”

Gorion’s body shuddered with a wracking cough, and his left hand came up with a sudden jerk that made Abdel flinch. Gorion was holding a tattered scrap of parchment in his hand, and it tugged in the goosefeather-fletched quarrel still protruding from his ruined eye. The parchment picked up some blood. Abdel reached out to catch his father’s hand, and Gorion let go of the parchment.

“I’m taking you back to Candlekeep,” Abdel said, shifting noisily in the gravel as he made to lift Gorion in his arms.

“No,” the monk grunted, stopping him. “No time. Leave me… come back for me…”

Gorion’s body was seized by a shuddering wave of pain, and Abdel sighed at the sight of it.

“Your father—” then another cough. A single tear dropped from the only eye that Gorion had left to cry with, and he managed to say, “Khalid,” and, “Jahi—” before his last breath hissed away and his eye turned skyward.

Abdel cried over his father until Gorion’s right hand stopped twitching. The sellsword’s hand brushed the parchment, and without thinking he took it in his grip. He sat there for a long time on the road, surrounded by the dead and the call of crows, until he could finally stand and begin to prepare his father’s grave.

Tamoko could not see what her lover saw when he stared into the empty frame. There might have been a picture in there once, perhaps a mirror of silvered glass, but now it was just a frame, hanging by small brass chains from the ceiling of Sarevok’s private chamber. Sometimes he would stare at the thing for hours at a time, occasionally muttering a curse or jest to himself, or taking scribbled notes down in an expensive notebook bound in gem-encrusted leather. Tamoko could not read the language of Faerun, was uncomfortable even with the intricate characters of her native Kozakura, so she had no idea what he was writing. She knew only that Sarevok saw things in that frame, kept track of things, kept watch on his pawns—and he had many pawns.

She sat with her legs folded on the wide, too-soft bed—a silk sack eight feet on a side stuffed with feathers—and tried to meditate. Something was prickling the back of her neck, though, and it was distracting her.

The smooth silk of Tamoko’s black pajamas hissed against the silk of the bed and sent a chill of goosebumps up her thin, strong arms. She was a small woman, not even five feet tall, with the smooth skin of a pampered lady and the strength of a berserker. A life of constant training made her what she was: a killer, in every sense of the word.

She didn’t bother to close her eyes, but kept her tongue on her palate and concentrated on her breathing, and on the blood flowing quickly through her veins.

The room was dark and the air still, two things that normally helped her to center herself, but not today. Today the air in Sarevok’s private chamber, deep in a complex of rooms few ever saw the inside of, felt heavy and dead. The steady orange candlelight, barely flickering in the still air, made her blink. The dampness made her silk garments stick to her every modest curve.

Minutes dragged on, and she continued to struggle to meditate. When Sarevok stared this intently and seemed this disappointed, it usually meant he was going to ask her to kill someone, so she would need her concentration.

“My brother,” Sarevok said suddenly, so suddenly a lesser trained assassin might have flinched, but not Tamoko, “is on the path.”

“Your brother?” she asked, too quickly, and Sarevok took a long, unsettling time to turn around.

“I have at least this one brother, yes,” Sarevok told her in that voice she often thought was—not seductive—maybe seductive….

A cold chill ran down her spine, making her angry with herself. There was something about Sarevok, to be sure, that she knew she should be on her guard about. He wasn’t a man, not a human, that was certain. Even the barbarian men of Faerun were more like her own kind than Sarevok was. She had no idea what he was, but she liked it. He wore power around him in a haze like Faerunian women wore perfume. She could imagine him steeped in it. He was decisive and sure, not blundering about at the whim of a god, nor blindly attached to some infantile cause, nor forever in search of shiny metal disks. Sarevok wanted power—power and something else. As afraid as Tamoko sometimes felt in his presence, she couldn’t help but admire him. The fact remained that when they were together, in the dark, with nothing physical coming between them, even then he could tell her only what he wanted her to know, and he never wanted her to know much. He was in control, always.

“The nature of his death?” she asked, meaning two things: that she knew she was here to kill for him, and that she was loyal enough not to ask why.

Sarevok laughed, and the sound made Tamoko smile—not because his laugh was particularly pleasant, but because it wasn’t at all pleasant. Indeed, this was no mere man.

“Then he will live?” she concluded.

Sarevok continued to smile his dire wolf’s smile and leaned forward, then rose and slithered onto the bed, coming slowly toward her. For the briefest fraction of a heartbeat, she wanted to back away, to escape the hard, tight, masterful embrace she knew was coming, but that was her mind’s reaction. Her body’s was something else entirely.

They slid together easily, and the touch was warm, welcoming, and full of the promise of danger that drew her to him in the first place, kept her coming back, and finally made her his slave. She’d killed for him ten, twelve, fifteen times—she’d allowed herself to lose count—and would easily kill a hundred more if he would look at her like that, hold her like that, move into, through her, then past her like that, just one more time.

“This one,” he breathed into her ear—the sound seemed made more of heat than air— “will live… for a time.”

He pulled away suddenly, and she heard herself gasp. She was disciplined enough to keep herself from blushing, but a twinkle in Sarevok’s eye told her he noticed. Sarevok always noticed.

“The two Zhentarim,” he told her, “will live for a time as well, but only for a time. I will bring them here from Nashkel.”

“They have been useful to you,” Tamoko said, her voice sounding small next to his, “so they shall die quickly.”

Sarevok laughed again and Tamoko had to work hard to suppress a shudder. It wasn’t excitement she felt this time.

“Let us not jump to any hasty conclusions, darling girl,” he said. “They have the ability to fail me—especially the little one.”

During the days of the Avatars, the Black Lord will spawn a score of mortal progeny. These offspring will be aligned good and evil, but chaos will flow through them all. When the Murderer’s bastard children come of age, they will bring havoc to the lands of the Sword Coast. One of these children must rise above the rest and claim their father’s legacy. This inheritor will shape the history of the Sword Coast for centuries to come.

Nonsense.

Abdel couldn’t believe it, but there it was. The sheet of stiff parchment his father had thought so important that he clutched it with his last quiver of energy in a dying hand, that he smear it with his own blood, was a disconnected bit of rambling about—what? Some dead god, maybe, if the reference to Avatars was indeed about the Time of Troubles when gods walked Toril like men, and, like men, died there.

When he’d first started to read it, over the still form of his father, Abdel had been certain it was some personal message, some secret his father had been keeping from him. When he first unfolded it and turned his still weeping gaze up to the graying sky, he thought it must have been about his mother; maybe a message from her, a letter she’d written to her infant son moments before she died, or gave him up, or sent him away, or sold him, or anything—anything that would provide some explanation for why he never knew her.

Instead it was just nothing, a scrap of words that formed a bit of some prophecy, that may or may not come true, but wouldn’t, Abdel was sure, have anything to do with him.

“Whatever is to come to pass, old man,” Abdel said to his father, just before he laid him into his shallow grave, “you won’t be around to see it. Maybe I won’t be either.”

He wanted to say something else. He searched his mind and his heart for some prayer, for some line of verse or story, for some memory. He struggled to find words, some marker to the winds that this man had passed from its breath, but there was nothing.

The rain started as he filled dirt and gravel over the dead body of his father, and Abdel let the rain wash away his tears. When he was done he stood to his full height and turned his face up toward the cold droplets. He ran one hand through his thick black hair and closed his eyes, letting the rain wash away Gorion’s grave dirt and blood.

His father had tended to the wound in his side. It had been deep, but it was now almost healed. He refused to feel the lingering pain, but it was difficult.

He wouldn’t live with a wounded heart. His father was dead at the hands of bandit sellswords. Someone paid to kill him and probably paid well. It was business, that was all, but by failing to kill Abdel too, it was business left undone—left for Abdel to finish himself.

Abdel, son of Gorion, adjusted his chain mail tunic, scuffed his hard leather boots on the gravel to clear away some of the mud, shifted his shoulders to center the weight of the big broadsword that hung from his back, found a stick, and set it upright in the disturbed earth. He hung on the wet wood the tiny silver gauntlet that his father had worn on a thin gold chain around his neck, knowing some anonymous traveler would be along soon enough to steal it.

“I’ll be back for you,” he said, then turned his back and walked away.

It was impossible to tell what made the horrific sound that snatched Abdel out of a restless sleep, or how far away the source of it was, but he was on his feet in an instant.

He had buried his adopted father that day and made it to where the Way of the Lion from Candlekeep met the long, well-traveled Coast Way road. A stone marker had been erected there. Intricately carved from a solid block of granite, it had been a welcome sight when he’d seen it, days ago, on his way back to Candlekeep. Now, it was a reminder of all he had lost since then. With Gorion gone, Abdel wasn’t even sure he’d be allowed back into Candlekeep.