Baldur's Gate (29 page)

Abdel thought of Jaheira, then his promise to Tamoko, and his fingers relaxed just enough that Sarevok managed to push him away and to the side, almost breaking Abdel’s neck in the process. As he rolled onto his back, Abdel could see two guards—one of them Julius—rushing to put out a fire. The fire was burning on Jaheira’s chest.

“Jaheira!” Abdel screamed, and he spun at the movement next to him, though at that instant he cared about nothing more than the half-elf woman who lay sprawled and burning on the floor. Sarevok stood and bounded toward the big glass window. Abdel let him go.

Angelo shouted, “Sarevok!”

Abdel slid across the polished floor to Jaheira’s side. There was an enormous crash as Sarevok leaped through the window. Duke Angelo slid to the floor next to Jaheira, and Abdel reached out to grab him.

Angelo called out, “Get a priest!” but Abdel didn’t hear him. He was too busy screaming into the lifeless eyes of the woman he loved.

Abdel stabbed the doppelganger so hard his hand followed his broadsword through the creature’s body. He could feel the thing transform while his arm was still inside it, but even that sensation wasn’t shocking enough to distract Abdel from what he’d come here to do. Thanks to Sarevok’s own, nearly compulsive, record-keeping they’d been able to find the entrance to the subterranean labyrinth of old sewers and catacombs the doppelgangers had been using to infiltrate nearly every corner of the city of Baldur’s Gate. All the tunnels led in one direction. As Abdel tossed aside the dead doppelganger, he peered into the murky darkness and somehow knew they were close, but didn’t know exactly what they were close to.

“This way?” Duke Angelo asked Abdel, his voice clipped and professional. The press of soldiers from Angelo’s Flaming Fist, men who fought in the memory of Scar and Eltan, almost pushed the half-elf forward.

“This way?” Abdel said finally, “Yes, I think so, but I can’t be sure.”

“Maerik,” Angelo called.

The stocky sergeant pressed through his comrades, nodding expectantly.

“Take your men and Ferran’s,” Angelo ordered, “back to the last side passage. Err to your left.”

Maerik said, “Yes, sir,” and was off faster than even Angelo expected. These men were fighting for their homes now.

“Temil,” Angelo said to a short, thin, gray-haired woman in flowing satin robes, “you and your men go left up there and try to circle around. I’m going with Abdel and taking Julius’s men with me.”

The mage smiled and swept her robe around in a flourish. Her men followed her warily, obviously not used to taking orders from a sorceress, but knowing their duty.

Abdel didn’t wait for Angelo to catch up. He was off down the passage fast, stepping lightly on his toes, ready for anything. Angelo followed more cautiously, and his men slowed him down. Abdel heard their voices and their footsteps growing more distant as he moved on, but he just couldn’t wait for them.

When Tamoko stepped out in front of him he slid to a halt, and he realized who she was before he killed her.

“Tamoko,” he said, “where is—”

She drew her strange curved sword as fast as anyone Abdel had ever seen draw steel. Her eyes blazed at him, but Abdel couldn’t tell what she felt at that moment. She was injured. Her black silk clothes were stained a darker black. Abdel knew as much by the smell as anything that she was bleeding, and bleeding badly. A trickle of blood was running down the right side of her face from under her black hood. She was breathing heavily, and Abdel saw her fighting not to stagger as she advanced on him, one pained step at a time.

“Tamoko…” he said, and she shook her head. Abdel saw a tear trace a line down her left cheek.

“I was … orokashii,” she said, “I was disloyal… I was disloyal.”

Abdel put his sword up, ready to defend, but not to kill.

“He killed Jaheira,” he told her, though he wasn’t sure exactly why.

“I know,” Tamoko whispered. “Of course he did.”

“He needs you,” Abdel told her, “but he doesn’t deserve you.”

“It is I who does not deserve him,” she said and attacked.

Abdel was staggered at his own ability to block her Z-shaped assault. It was fast—for any other swordsman but her. She stumbled at the end of it, throwing herself off balance in what must have been the first time in years, maybe ever.

“I won’t kill you,” he told her.

“I have to kill you,” she replied and attacked again, this time taking a nick out of Abdel’s side. He roared more with frustration than pain. She stepped back quickly, and her knees gave out all at once. Her chin hit the flagstone floor, and Abdel heard her teeth clack together. She put her arm out to stop her fall a good second after she’d already hit the floor.

“He killed you too,” Abdel asked her as she lay there on the floor trying to move, then just trying to breathe. “Didn’t he? For helping us?”

Angelo came up behind Abdel and asked, “What is this—” but Abdel stopped him with a hand to his chest.

“Tamoko?” Abdel asked the dying woman.

From the floor, she said, “I release you… from your vow. I cannot… he must… shiizumaru… he must die.”

“Tamoko,” Abdel said, but by the time he finished saying her name, she was dead.

It wasn’t absolutely necessary, for the completion of the ritual, for the other sixteen priests in the inner sanctum of the High House of Wonders to be chanting. It was an aid in concentration for High Artificer Thalamond Albaier, though, and a chance for the lesser priests to see the greatest of all Gond’s miracles.

The fact that the woman lying sprawled and lifeless across the marble altar had elf blood in her veins didn’t help, but the high artificer had been asked to perform this ceremony at the request of the new leader of the Flaming Fist, so he was doing everything in his substantial power to see that it happened. The candles that burned in the room were blessed of Gond, the air was scented with incense grown in the greenhouses of Wonderhome itself, and the artificers and acolytes gathered there chanted in disbelief at seeing this ritual performed three times in as many tendays. The first two times, the outcome had been Gond’s will but had gone against the wishes of the high artificer and his secular friends.

This time, perhaps it was the wavering in the high artificer’s own faith that made the difference. Gond might have thought a demonstration was due.

A sharp, jagged breath was drawn in, followed by a hollow wail that made every hair in the chamber stand on end.

“Abdel!” Jaheira screamed as she was born once more onto the face of Toril.

*

Abdel had no idea how far underground he was. He followed the passageway, leaving Tamoko’s body behind, with Angelo and an increasingly anxious group of Flaming Fists. They were good men, but this was a bad situation, and all Abdel could do was trust in Angelo’s ability to lead them. A lot of people—all of Baldur’s Gate—would have to start doing that.

The passageway ended in a small, low-ceilinged chamber with one other exit. A wide archway opened to a much larger chamber, and the unmistakable orange glow of torchlight lit the space beyond.

Abdel took a deep breath. Through that archway, he knew, he would find his half brother, a man he’d seen only once before, and only for the length of time it took his brother to kill the woman he loved. Abdel didn’t want to kill anymore, had even naively hoped that Tamoko would be able to show Sarevok that there was human blood in his veins too, but now he’d come here for one reason and one reason only.

He stepped through the archway with sword in hand, and a sizzle of cold electricity passed through his body at the sight of the chamber beyond.

The space was enormous, and though Abdel was no engineer or miner, he couldn’t imagine what was keeping the ceiling—and what must have been two hundred feet or more of earth and bedrock above it—from falling in. The rows of stone pillars that lined each of the long sides of the rectangular chamber looked more ornamental than practical. Carved into the stone of the pillars and the walls alike were scenes of unimaginable horror. Screaming faces of men, women, children, and beasts leered out at Abdel, their faces frozen in a moment of pure agony—the moment of traumatic death. Only an artist who had visited the deepest pits of the Abyss could have carved such faces.

The far end of the room was dominated by a stepped dais, several yards on a side, that rose perhaps twenty feet off the flagstone floor. An altar fit for sacrifices and carved with the same tormented faces dominated the top of the dais. Torches set into wall sconces fashioned from hideous wrought-iron gargoyles lit the chamber with an unsteady illumination. Candles dripped blood-red wax onto the floor of the dais, candles set in golden candelabra twisted into the forms of dying women.

Sarevok was waiting for him. He stood behind the hideous altar, and a semicircle of figures stood around him, men in black robes, their hands poised in front of them in odd gestures that might have been some attitude of prayer.

Sarevok’s armor reflected every nuance of their father’s evil. Fashioned from what must have been iron—iron as black as midnight—the plates covered every inch of the tall man. Blades whose razor edges gleamed in the dancing light rose from exaggerated randers like miniature wings and flared from his vambraces like the raking claws of some clockwork raptor.

Set into the center of this cruel suit was a sigil Abdel recognized from the cover of the cursed book: a skull ringed by drops of blood. Sarevok looked like some huge, black iron beetle.

This time Abdel couldn’t attribute the eerie glow in his half brother’s eyes to any trick of the light. They blazed yellow from behind a mask of jagged teeth-like ribbons of steel. Horns that must have been ripped from the skull of a demon curved from the sides of the otherwise impenetrable helmet.

“Abdel Adrian,” Sarevok said, his voice rolling through the chamber.

Abdel expected him to say something more, but Sarevok only laughed. The sound set the robed figures off, and they rushed headlong at the mercenaries coming timidly into the room behind Abdel.

“To arms!” Angelo screamed, and a wild, incoherent battle cry rose up from the throats of the mercenaries.

The black-robed cultists chanted and murmured. Waves of darkness, blue glowing missiles, and bursts of flame scattered the first rank of Flaming Fists.

The men quickly regrouped, and a few of the cultists went down to ordinary steel. Then it was just all-out havoc. Abdel thrilled to it. He let himself have that feeling—just this once more. Sarevok still stood in place and none of the cultists would come within ten feet of Abdel. The brothers locked eyes, and Abdel brought his sword up in a salute he didn’t think his brother deserved. He offered the salute to the memory of the people in his life that Sarevok had killed: his true father, Gorion; his only love, Jaheira; and his friends Khalid, Xan, and Scar.

Sarevok smiled a wolfs grin, and they came at each other.

Abdel advanced quickly and made it more than halfway across the room before he had to slash through a robed figure that had stumbled in front of him. Sarevok came down the steps of the dais two at a time and brought a huge, black, two-handed sword up and over his head as Abdel leaped over the fallen cultist.

The sound their swords made when they smashed together made Abdel’s ears ring. There was a momentary flash of what might have been respect in Sarevok’s eyes when his brother’s sword took the full force of his strike.

The sound of steel on steel echoed through the giant room. Men screamed, women screamed, dozens died. There was a dull, rumbling sound, searing heat, and red-orange light— a fireball going off close to Abdel and Sarevok. Neither of the sons of Bhaal let it distract them.

Sarevok whirled his sword down and to the left, and Abdel nearly didn’t meet it with his own blade in time to keep from being sliced in half. Abdel batted his brother’s sword away, getting the distinct impression that Sarevok wanted just that. He couldn’t stop himself from stepping in close, but Abdel realized he’d been seduced into the move in time to crouch, his tired knees creaking in protest. Sarevok let one hand come off his sword, and his blade-lined forearm whistled over Abdel’s head.

In too close, Abdel had to roll on his rump to get out of the way. Sarevok tried to step on him once while he was still on the ground, and Abdel swiped at the armored leg as it came down. His broadsword spanked off Sarevok’s black-iron jamb with a shower of sparks and a sound that made Abdel’s gums curl. He hit his brother’s leg hard enough that Abdel realized the armor had to be enchanted. He’d taken the leg off armored men with the same attack in the past.

Abdel was on the ground and vulnerable, but Sarevok took three long steps backward, bringing his sword up in front of him in the guard position.

He can’t bend down, Abdel thought. That armor might help me.

Springing to his feet, Abdel grunted and went at his brother again. Abdel intended to rush in, drawing Sarevok’s defenses high, then slide down between his brother’s legs and attack him from below, where he was vulnerable. In the din of battle, though, Abdel didn’t hear his brother’s quickly mumbled incantation. Sarevok’s hands had come off his sword, which hung straight in the air in front of him as if suspended from above. His fingers worked a complex pattern in the air in front of him.

Instinctively, Abdel ducked and covered his face with one powerful arm. Clenching tightly to his sword, he rolled on the floor and spun to the side as the space between him and his brother burst into a bright rainbow of multicolored light. The magical effect fanned out in front of Sarevok and held itself in a triangular pattern, almost three-dimensional, that sliced through the air just above Abdel’s head. There were screams, and sounds like popping, and a wave of the smell of burning flesh that seemed too closely timed to the spell not to be a result of it. Cultists and Flaming Fists alike were dying. Pain flared across Abdel’s back, then burned into his side when he stood and ran, cutting a wide semicircle around to his brother’s left. There was an eerie sizzling sound coming from his chain mail tunic, but Abdel knew he would die if he didn’t force himself to ignore the sound, the pain, and the injury, however serious it was.