Baldur's Gate (16 page)

Jaheira screamed and said, “No, oh no.”

Sections of the woman’s pale, bloated flesh had been stripped away, eaten by her thousand crawling charges. Her face was a bruised, purple, venom-soaked mockery of the human form. One roll of flab actually fell across her forehead, blocking one eye. They were keeping her alive in here, alive but immobile, paralyzing her maybe with their poisons just to use her as a breeding ground. Abdel didn’t have anything left in him to vomit out, and thought his guts might come next. He couldn’t imagine the Abyss being any worse and wondered if maybe they had followed the ghoul off of Toril itself and into some nightmare dimension. What had Xan called it? Spider Hell.

“Jaheira,” Abdel said, ripping his mind free of the horror.

“Abdel,” she gasped, “Abdel, help me…”

He crossed to her, glancing at the bloated woman whose one porcine eye followed his path.

“I’m here,” he told her, and those two words seemed to relax her. She was wrapped tightly in the sticky webs, and Abdel didn’t have any idea how he was going to get her out.

“Fire,” the bloated woman said. “Take fire to the webs, and you can free her.”

“What are you?” Abdel asked, not looking the thing in the face.

“A victim,” she answered. “My name is Centeol.”

“What have you done?” Abdel asked her. “What could you possibly have done to deserve this?”

“I fell in love,” she said sadly, “and that was enough.”

Abdel felt himself sob. It might have been the first time in his life he’d ever done that.

“Do I have to beg?” Centeol asked.

“What?”

“Kill me,” she said.

Abdel stood and blinked tears from his eyes. Jaheira passed out. Her breathing echoed loudly and smoothly in the big chamber. Abdel held his sword in both hands, reached up as high as he could, and pierced the cursed woman’s flesh with a single powerful stroke. Centeol grunted and died as her bloated abdomen ripped open. A torrent of blood, spent venom, spiders of a thousand species, and unborn ettercaps poured over Abdel. There was so much of it, it knocked him off his feet. He kept his eyes and mouth closed, but some of it got in his nose. Crawling through a pile of viscous gore, Abdel managed to slide more than walk to Jaheira. She was heavy, dead weight, and he was exhausted and demented enough to have to strain to lift her. The webs stuck to him and actually helped him hold her.

He walked out of that evil dome, and when he got into the tree line he started running. Branches and thorns poked and ripped at both of them, but he didn’t care. He kept running until he got to a fast-running stream. It must have been several miles from the spider wood. It was dark and cold.

He set Jaheira down and pulled himself painfully away from the web. He tore a scrap of cloth from his thick trousers and wrapped it around a sturdy branch, forming a simple torch. It took him a while to find his flint and steel by touch alone, but he eventually had the torch lit. He never stopped to think in the hours it took to carefully burn the webs away from the still unconscious Jaheira. He wiped blood and drying venom from his eyes as he worked. The sun was coming up when he finally had her free. She opened her eyes and looked at him, then closed them again and cried. He removed her clothes slowly, carefully, then removed his own and carried her into the surprisingly warm water of the stream. He lay down next to her, letting the water wash them both clean. She cried for a long time, and he held her there and cried too.

After a time, they climbed out of the water, and Abdel tried not to look at her as he started to wash his clothes. She left her own filthy garments where they lay and just stood there, staring at his back, knowing, like he did, that they would never be apart again.

“One missing guard doesn’t frighten me, fool,” Sarevok growled into the empty picture frame. He paused, waiting for or listening to an answer Tamoko couldn’t hear.

She stared at her lover’s back and tried with no luck to center herself. Here she was again, in Sarevok’s bed, watching him peer into, then talk into, then shout into, then threaten into that accursed frame. He was nervous, Tamoko could see that. Things weren’t going against him. Sarevok wasn’t the type of man, if man he was, who would tolerate that. If some part of his plan was going awry, he would have gone out himself to fix it rather than sit and issue commands from afar. He trusted no one, including Tamoko, and suffered fools and lackeys with only a modicum of patience. Still, he was intent on something. Something was coming to a head, and she didn’t know what it was, but she could feel it out there, in the winds.

She ran a hand down her smooth, strong arm and concentrated on the feeling of that simple touch. Sarevok had touched her like that but not recently. As whatever was happening gained its momentum, his interest in her had waned. She missed him, missed his touch, and every day she grew more afraid. She wasn’t afraid of Sarevok, though she’d seen that he was capable of extraordinary cruelty. She was afraid for him. She saw the potential in this commanding individual, and she couldn’t help thinking he was wasting his potential. This man who had an air of supernatural strength to him—mental strength as much as physical strength— was serving some master even as he planned a rise in his own power. He was wasting his many gifts on a grab for—what? Power? Gold? He could have Tamoko, a trained assassin who gave herself freely to no one before. He commanded unnatural creatures—doppelgangers the least of them. Men trembled at the sound of his voice, the burning of his stare. Tamoko knew this man could be king of the world, but he seemed interested only in mines, and ore, and bandits. He employed bandits.

She wanted to say something, convince him that he could have more, that he could be more, but she held her tongue. She was afraid even thinking these thoughts in front of him, was sure he knew what she was thinking and was only biding his time, waiting for her to outlive her usefulness.

He will kill me then, she thought, kill me slowly like the others. Could he really touch me the way he has, kiss me the way he has, and kill me like that, like a traitor, scorned and dishonored?

The fact that he could, that she knew he could, made her shudder.

“What do you mean you can’t find the book?” Sarevok said, his voice as heavy as the world itself. “He wasn’t supposed to see the book.”

“There are men, and elves,” Jaheira reported quietly, “and a large number of dwarves. They’re in chains.”

“Slaves,” Abdel agreed.

Jaheira twitched, brushed away a spider that wasn’t there, then shivered in the cool air. She wasn’t comfortable in the tree. She kept looking at it like it might come to life and grab her, grab her and drag her off. Abdel had been watching her for a day and a half, very closely, and though at first she was uncomfortably like Xzar, eventually her twitches and panicked brushings of her neck and shoulders, the ruffling of her hair, started to go away. Abdel couldn’t blame her. It would be a long time before he’d look at a spider the same way he used to. Jaheira believed the little spider that had bitten her had carried some mind-altering poison she was still feeling the effects of.

“There’re too many,” Jaheira said, nodding at a cluster of guards. The men were obviously sellswords, dressed in piecemeal armor. There were no uniforms or heraldry of any kind evident in the mining camp, at least not on the edge of it, which was all Abdel and Jaheira’s vantage point allowed them to see.

They’d found the mining camp almost by accident. After escaping the spiders they had wandered the Cloak Wood in more or less complete silence, each trying to get past the experience. They’d heard voices first, of guards and slaves, then the sound of whips and the clatter of chains. The camp was set up in a clearing at least as broad as the one occupied by the spiders. In the center of this clearing, though, was a low hill. Cut into the side of the hill was a wide, square opening propped up with stout wood planks. Iron tracks led into the mine, and there were a number of functional hand carts, some filled with the dull rocks Abdel had come to know as iron ore.

“So what do we do?” Abdel asked, eyeing the cluster of guards with murderous intent.

“We can’t just rush in there and attack, Abdel,” she answered. “These people must be expecting someone to wander past here, even in the middle of the Cloak Wood. They must have a trail somewhere to get that ore from here to the bandit camp. Xan …” she paused after saying his name but didn’t cry. Abdel thought she might have cried herself out. “Xan said they were hoarding ore there.”

“With the Nashkel mines closed up,” Abdel said, “they’ll be able to get a good price for these rocks in Baldur’s Gate.”

“They won’t sell it there yet, though. They’ll wait until the war starts or maybe until the war is finished.”

Abdel eyed her closely and asked, “You’re still convinced that someone wants to start a war, that someone wants Amn and Baldur’s Gate to rip each others’ throats out?”

She looked at him sadly and said, “I don’t have any idea what I believe anymore, Abdel, I really don’t. I was sent—I came here to find out…”

Abdel let her think he wanted her to go on. She had her secrets, of course, but Abdel had no idea how to tell her he just didn’t care. Whatever she wanted, whatever she was doing—preventing a war, starting one, protecting some rich Amnian’s interests—he didn’t care.

“We can’t sit in this tree forever,” Jaheira said, biting her bottom lip.

“Oy, you boys there!” a gruff voice called out. Abdel thought they might have been discovered and put a hand on his sword just in case. “Get that cart loaded onto the wagon as soon as it stops. I want it on its way to Beregost by highsun.”

The speaker was a round but well muscled man with a shaved head. At first Abdel thought the man was another half-orc, but he was just ugly. He was wearing simple peasant clothes but swaggered and spoke with the confidence of command. The guards turned when he spoke but not to the leader. They looked at a group of dwarves—half a dozen of them—all chained together. The dwarves spared mute glances at the guards and shambled reluctantly over to the round man. One of the dwarves said something, but Abdel was too far away to hear.

The round man spoke next, but his loud voice was drowned out by the clattering rumble of an approaching wagon. It was a stout, well-built vehicle pulled by two strong, wide-hoofed horses and driven by a short man in chain mail. The driver brought the wagon to a stop and quickly jumped down from his seat. He approached the leader with a limp, and the dwarves started to slowly transfer big chunks of iron ore from one of the steel mining carts to the wagon. The leader held up a hand to silence the driver and motioned to one of the guards. The sellsword stepped up and took his whip to one of the dwarves. Jaheira turned her head from the sight of the torture. The lashing had its intended effect, though. The dwarves started loading faster.

“They seem to be concentrating their guards on this side of the camp,” Abdel said.

“It’s the only path—the only way in,” Jaheira offered.

“They don’t expect anyone to get through the spiders,” Abdel said, “and whatever else this cursed wood might have in store for wandering do-gooders.”

“So?”

“So,” Abdel said, “we go around the back.”

At first, the slaves Abdel freed refused to even run away. They looked at him suspiciously, didn’t even want to speak at first.

“Go!” Abdel whispered harshly, his voice echoing with a disturbingly distinct metallic clang.

One man, dirty, weak, sweating, and coughing with every other breath, said, “I know … my place, master. Please don’t… test me.”

Abdel exhaled sharply and just turned away, pressing his back against the rough stone wall of the mine. He looked back at the five men now standing in a pile of broken chains. Two of them looked at each other, then at Abdel, and one of them smiled. Abdel nodded in response and slipped into the side passage.

“Abdel,” Jaheira whispered, and he took three long, quiet strides into the dark tunnel, stopping so close at her side their arms touched. “They won’t all run, will they?”

“They think I’m one of the guards, testing their loyalty.”

“They’ll get the idea,” Jaheira said. “We can’t carry them out.”

“This way,” Abdel said. He didn’t wait for her to acknowledge, just went off deeper into the tunnel.

The mine was lit periodically by oil lanterns hung from hooks driven into the stone ceiling. Some of the slaves were elves, most were dwarves, so they could see in the dark. The humans tended to work only pushing the heavy carts on their tracks, so they didn’t need much light to work. Abdel had a difficult time navigating the tunnels, so he relinquished the lead and put his faith in Jaheira’s superior eyesight and attention to detail.

“Here,” she whispered and ducked into a side passage almost too quickly for Abdel to see where she’d gone.

He followed her and came into the short passage. Jaheira was whispering to a group of dwarves who were sitting on the floor. Their picks were leaning on the wall, and they were slothfully munching some kind of jerky, and one of them had a big canteen.

“You have got to be kidding,” one of the dwarves said in heavily accented common.

“We can break your chains,” Jaheira told him, “but you’ll have to take it from there.”

“How many have you freed?” the dwarf, whose beard was long even for a dwarf and going gray in patches, asked.

“Almost two dozen so far,” Abdel told him quietly, “including you five.”

“How many dwarves, lad?” the dwarf asked pointedly.

“You five make twelve,” Jaheira answered.

The dwarf grinned, showing gray, yellow, and broken teeth. His voice was slow, dull, like the life had been lashed out of it. He scratched at the iron manacle around his left ankle that trailed a thick chain to the left ankle of the next dwarf in line. They were fastened together that way, in series, all five of them.

“A dozen dwarves’ll do ya, lass,” the dwarf said, making his four companions grin. “The name’s Yeslick. Looks like we got a revolt on our hands.”

The Iron Throne slaver died screaming, and Abdel thought the man was just pitiful. He glanced over at Yeslick, who had just finished beating the last guard to death with a length of chain, and said, “Looks like you’re free, my friend.”