Baldur's Gate II Shadows of Amn (10 page)

“That’s right,” the coordinator said, his voice echoing in the big room, “come and get me, thug.”

Abdel hopped once, then again, and the coordinator’s brow furrowed. The sellsword leaped high into the air about midway to where the coordinator was standing. The strange man let out a single barking laugh and came running at Abdel, obviously intending to meet him somewhere in the middle.

Abdel hit the bottom of Jaheira’s iron maiden hard enough to make it swing. Jaheira bumped into the cold iron bars with bruising force, and Abdel hung on with his left hand, letting the sword come to rest in his right. The coordinator was almost underneath him when he started mumbling through some incantation.

Ready for anything, Abdel dropped his arm back and changed his grip on the sword. He looked up, fixed the iron maiden’s swinging padlock in his mind, and everything went black. He pulled up short so fast that a muscle in his shoulder twisted painfully. He couldn’t see the lock and couldn’t risk a blind swing at it. He could injure, even kill Jaheira.

“That was easy,” the coordinator’s mocking voice drifted up from below.

Knowing he was only about eight feet off the ground, Abdel simply let go of the cage and dropped. He hit the floor on his feet and kept his sword in front of his forehead, blade parallel to the ground to block any attempts to split his skull. The darkness was absolute. He couldn’t see the blade that must have been a hand’s span in front of his face. He couldn’t see his feet— couldn’t even see the bridge of his nose.

“Abdel…” Imoen shouted. The sound of her voice—perturbed, impatient, immature—made him feel very nostalgic for the simpler days in the safety of Candlekeep. What was she doing here? “Abdel, I can’t see you!”

A muffled sound came from above, and Abdel got the idea that it was Jaheira trying to say the same thing. She might have been telling him to risk hurting her if there was a chance of getting her out.

“You came here exactly when I wanted you to,” the coordinator said, his voice echoing too much for Abdel to get a decent fix on his position in the absolute darkness. “You can swing your sword around all you want—even break the ladies free of their maidens—but you can’t kill me, and you can’t get out of here. You will serve my needs, even if we have to play for a while before it happens. I have a little time, at least.”

It was three years before, in Roaringshore, when Abdel joined a merchant caravan headed for Kheldriwer. He was tasked with guarding a wagon filled with fine wine. It was easy enough work—who would steal wine between Roaringshore and Kheldriwer. Well, the caravan master had failed to mention a certain group of priests of Selune from whose temple the wine had been stolen. The priests descended on the caravan on a high pass across the Troll Hills. One of the spells they’d used that day seemed familiar to Abdel now. A globe of darkness had descended over the wagon. That day, Abdel had managed to stumble out of the globe of darkness, which ended—luckily for Abdel—a few inches from the edge of a steep cliff. Assuming this spell was at least similar, and the whole room wasn’t dark, Abdel picked a direction and ran.

Over the sound of his own footsteps, Abdel heard the coordinator say, “Come on and die then. You’re not the only one. I know you’re asking yourself why—why Imoen.”

Abdel stumbled, almost stopped short, but kept on. He came out of the darkness all at once, and the coordinator had moved farther away.

Abdel stopped then, adjusted the grip on his sword and asked, “More lies?”

The coordinator shrugged, smiled, and motioned to the iron maiden in which Imoen still stood trapped.

“What’s going on here, Abdel?” the girl asked impatiently.

The coordinator laughed and said, “You’re not the only one, boy. She has the blood too. She has the blood of Bhaal, and all I need is one of you. Though I’d prefer both.”

“That’s a lie,” Abdel said without actually wanting to. He couldn’t help but look up at Imoen, who was simply confused, tired, dirty, and afraid.

“Abdel?’ she asked quietly.

The coordinator said something Abdel thought might have been “out of the vessel,” whatever that meant, but the rest of it was gibberish. Knowing the man was casting some spell, Abdel had no choice but to run at him and hope he got there before the spell went off.

He was close.

Whoever was dragging Abdel’s body was stuffing it into an iron maiden.

Sound was starting to become clearer, and Abdel could hear a muffled voice that might have been Jaheira—still masked. He’d failed her. Oh, how he’d failed her!

The man who was stuffing his body into the cage seemed to be standing behind the point in space where Abdel’s immortal soul was floating. Abdel tried to speak but couldn’t find anything that felt like a mouth. He saw blood dribble from behind him onto his dead body.

The cage was closed over bis corpse, and Abdel wondered why anyone would be bothering to lock a dead body in an iron maiden. The hands didn’t belong to the coordinator. They were too rough, and too dirty. The blood dribbled some more, and Abdel thought this man must be Mai Cheirar, still bleeding from the eye Abdel had sliced open.

If it was Mai Cheirar, Abdel thought his soul must be floating somewhere just on the smelly pirate’s chest.

The hands shifted to a chain and began hauling on it slowly, obviously struggling with the weight. The iron maiden was being drawn up.

“You can hear me, Abdel,” the coordinator’s voice sounded. He seemed to be speaking from the bottom of a well—or was Abdel at the bottom of the well? “I’ll put you back in your body soon enough, Son of Bhaal. You’ll need to be whole to serve me. You’ll need to feel every precious sting.”

Imoen’s otherwise normal, reasonably happy life had become, over the last tenday or so, a sort of hell that alternated between boring, painful, and horrifying. The latter was the case now.

Abdel had appeared rather suddenly, and when he did, the relief she felt was almost orgasmic in intensity. She’d certainly been waiting long enough for this so-called “Hero of Baldur’s Gate” to come and save her. His new girlfriend was of little use but as a model for how to grow up haughty and ineffectual. The “coordinator”—he called himself Irenicus, a name he obviously made up himself—was a raving lunatic with a decent command of magery, but he had an ego so out of control and delusions so deeply implanted in his worm-ridden psyche, it was a wonder he could manage anything but a slow, twitching drool.

The iron maiden hurt, as had the leather collar, the chains, the ropes, the grabbing, and the cold-fingered hands of one vampire after another. They were rarely fed, and when they were, it was gruel obviously prepared by a chef suffering from some combination of head injury and sense of humor.

Abdel had come in sword literally blazing, but had managed to get himself killed. He made it a few steps out of the circle of darkness, then was dropped in his tracks by another spell. Imoen had seen a couple people die before. Reginald of Wide Girth, a monk she knew in passing, dropped dead of heartstop seconds after walking in on her while she was bathing. She always took that personally. Yorik—another monk—fell off the top of the Shrine of Oghma, though no one knew why he was up there in the first place. All attempts to restore life to his broken body failed, leading many in Candlekeep to assume Oghma wanted him dead for some reason. That one was kind of a mess.

Abdel’s death looked a lot more like Reginald’s than Yorik’s. His body just up and quit.

Imoen sobbed when she realized he was dead. She began mourning him right away with half her brain and railed against him with the other half. This was Abdel the mighty? Sellsword par excellence who defeated Sarevok, Son of Bhaal, and saved the Sword Coast from years of bloody war? Irenicus was obviously a mage, yet Abdel just ran at him, swinging his sword. Imoen had to admit, at least to herself, that Irenicus actually went easy on him. It was obviously some death spell. Wizards had more creative, more dramatic, more painful, more lingering, and more humiliating ways to kill someone.

Yeah, he was lucky.

Then Irenicus told Abdel’s dead body that he wasn’t dead after all and had his reeking henchman lock Abdel in his own iron maiden.

This gave Imoen another ray of hope, though this time it was rather less fulfilling. He’d be locked up like her and Jaheira, but if Abdel was alive, they’d at least have some chance. She’d seen him bend metal that was stronger and thicker than the bars of the hanging cages. Powerful as his spells may be, Irenicus wouldn’t stand a chance if Abdel managed to get close with either fist or blade.

Then there was all this stuff about her being Abdel’s secret sister—or half sister. Not that she needed any more proof that Irenicus had gone mad a long time ago, but here was a delusion that made no sense at all. Granted, she always knew she was adopted, that the kindly old innkeeper named Winthrop wasn’t her real father. Candlekeep had a lot of orphans—it was something the monks just did.

She’d heard that Abdel was the son of some dead god, but what … that means every orphan was? That would make Candlekeep demigod central, wouldn’t it.

Besides, if she was a daughter of some dead god, wouldn’t she have some powers? She should have at least been able to seduce women—gods do that, don’t they? She should be able to lift boulders, withstand the breath of a dragon (thankfully, she’d never had an opportunity to test that one), or do at least one thing that was beyond the normal abilities of mortal humans.

Imoen was mortal enough.

She’d stopped trying to ask questions a long time before. Irenicus almost never answered at all, but when he did, it was usually some sarcastic quip that told her nothing and seemed designed to either make her more curious, or make her feel bad about herself. Imoen was neither curious, nor would she ever feel bad about herself, so the exercise had quickly become tiresome.

Things had changed suddenly though, and she just couldn’t help it.

“When are you going to bring him back to life?” she demanded. “Do it!”

Irenicus stopped and looked up at her. Their eyes met, he winked, and he went on about his business. Men, Imoen thought. Bastards.

Imoen watched the preparations for the ritual with only minimal interest. This strange man was going on about his strange work—work that would certainly end in her death. Memorizing the details, ins, outs, and nuances of it wouldn’t help her escape or keep her alive, so she opted to spend her last hour or so trying to find a way out of the hanging cage.

The room was lit by torches, then candles were lit, then more candles, then braziers of hot coals that made it so hot in the room sweat was pouring off her. She could see the other woman—Abdel’s woman—also looking for weak spots in the bars or floor of her cage and not finding any. She was sweating too. Abdel, naked now and slipping in and out—mostly out—of consciousness was sheeted with sweat. He never opened his eyes, and when Irenicus’s people moved him, he let them, oblivious to what they must have in store for him.

When the chanting started, Imoen was more irritated than afraid. It wasn’t an entirely pleasant sound. It went on for what seemed like days, was surely hours. They moved her cage, and all she could do was twist in it, trying to stay out of their reach and unbalance the cage at the same time. She wasn’t very heavy, so she couldn’t unbalance anything. The men who were helping Irenicus were mad—every last one of them just raving lunatics—and they smelled awful. Some of them looked at her with undisguised lust in their eyes, and she couldn’t help but be impressed with herself that she managed to keep from vomiting.

They put her close to Abdel—close enough that she knew if he’d just wake up, he’d be able to save them all. She was aware of the first few minutes of the ritual. There was a sound—chanting, mumbling, muttering, and murmuring—and light, heat, and rending, searing pain. Imoen remembered hearing herself cry out, then she burst into laughter, then collapsed into tears.

Irenicus said something like, “It’s happening. It’s really happening.”

Imoen’s vision blurred, turned yellow, then became more acute. She saw details in the stone but couldn’t understand what she was seeing. It was a crack in one brick in the far corner of the room, or some enormous canyon seen from miles in the sky. Irenicus laughed, and her vision went yellow again. She heard Abdel roar, and her body flushed and turned warm, wet, then tightened.

All sense disappeared all at once, and she was aware of only one thing. She wanted to kill. She lusted for it. Death. Murder. Pain.

She wanted to find the one person most valuable, most beloved to all people, and she wanted to kill it—kill him—kill her. She wanted to make someone cry. She wanted to feel hot meat twist in her fingers while the victim—her victim—screamed and writhed in her grip. She wanted blood to spray into her face, into her mouth, across her breasts and all over her body. She wanted to submerge herself in gore and bathe in screams.

She screamed herself into an impenetrable darkness behind her eyes. It was one word, a word that had never meant anything to her: “Father!”

Her voice was all wrong; her body felt all wrong. She heard something that might have been a lion or a dragon or the God of Murder scream in incoherent rage and agony next to her, and the sound empowered her. Her hands were bigger now—everything was bigger now, and the cage couldn’t contain her—she didn’t even remember she was in a cage.

A man’s voice said,”… too much,” then “… too fast, I can’t …” and there was a series of wet popping sounds that made Imoen sigh in twisted, evil pleasure, and she raged out of her cage with speed she knew she couldn’t really be capable of.

A tiny voice like a child’s coo in the wilderness came to her, and she recognized it as her own.

“What have I become?” she asked herself, and the thing that she had become set that question aside to instead savor the taste of an asylum inmate’s head. The brain exploded in her mouth, and it was good.

Through the wild yellow haze, she saw a flash of light, then heard someone say, “He left us! He—” and she was feeding again, and the blood was hot and perfect, and she wanted more, more, more!