Baldur’s Gate, page 4
“You have come here to meet me, though,” the Amnian said. “I am Khalid.”
That was it. Khalid—the last word his father spoke as his life drained from his punctured eye, then Abdel remembered that there was another.
“Jah,” he said, “I was to meet Khalid and Jah.”
“Jaheira, yes,” Khalid said, grinning ear-to-ear, but still nervous, “she is my wife. She is here.”
The Amnian turned instinctively toward a table on the other side of the room, but the crowd blocked his view.
“Come,” he said, “sit with us, and tell us what befell your father. He was a great man, a hero in his own way, and he will be missed.”
“What do you know of it?” Abdel asked, bile suddenly rising to the back of his throat. His voice was full of menace. “What was he to you?”
Khalid stared at Abdel as if the sellsword had suddenly transformed into a cobra. He was scared of Abdel, and he was not at all able to hide it.
“He was a friend,” Khalid answered, “that is all. I mean no disrespect.”
Abdel wanted to say something rude to the Amnian, but he couldn’t. Instead he fished in his pouch for money for a sixth pint of ale. He came out with only three coppers.
“Bhaal!” he cursed loudly, stood, and threw the coppers into the crowd.
A drunk somewhere muttered something mildly offensive after having been clipped on the temple by one of the hard thrown copper coins. Abdel shot to attention, and more than one man, even innocent ones, scurried off to darker corners. Sweat broke out visibly on Khalid’s upper lip.
“Gods,” the Amnian said, “what did he tell you?”
Abdel looked down at the Amnian but said nothing.
“I will be happy to buy you a drink,” Khalid said. “Please, come with me. We don’t want any more attention do we?”
Abdel grunted and let himself be led through the crowd. He caught sight of Montaron for only the briefest of moments. The halfling was holding a silk purse, and Abdel was sure the little man winked at him.
Abdel took a couple of deep breaths to try to calm himself, and when Khalid said, “Here she is,” Abdel looked up, and his breath caught.
Jaheira was beautiful. Half-elf like her mate, she too must have had a human parent from Amn. The two looked oddly alike, but both the elf and human sides favored Jaheira the more. Her face was wide and dark, her lips full, and her eyes bright—nearly the same violet as Khalid’s—and they sparkled with intelligence. Her face was framed in thick hair that might have been black if she were all human, but her elf blood highlighted it with streaks of fiery copper. Even though she sat, Abdel could tell she was strong of build, rugged even. She wore a bodice of hard leather that was scratched from what might have been blade strikes. She was armored.
When her eyes caught his, he saw rather than heard her gasp. Abdel sat without looking at the chair. He couldn’t pull his eyes away from hers, and she did nothing to discourage him. Her full lips twitched like her husband’s. She was nervous too, and though Abdel would never come between a man and his wife, he couldn’t help hoping that she was nervous for different reasons than Khalid was.
“Why was I sent here?” Abdel asked them both, though he continued to look at Jaheira. “My father didn’t live to tell me.”
“How did Gorion die?” Jaheira asked.
“Sellswords,” Abdel said, “like me. We were ambushed on the Way of the Lion. I killed the men who attacked us but not soon enough.”
“There are forces that didn’t want us to meet,” Khalid said, “Gorion knew that. It was…” the Amnian hesitated, and Abdel thought he might be lying, “it was why Gorion wanted you to come with him to meet us.”
“My father was a monk,” Abdel said, “a priest, a man of letters and such. What could he have been caught up in that would set such forces against him? What are you people about?”
Abdel was growing angry again. He hadn’t been able to blame the mercenaries for Gorion’s death. Those men were just doing what he himself had done all his adult life. Someone had paid them, and it took real money to hire five experienced killers for a wilderness ambush.
“There are… forces,” Jaheira said, her voice barely audible in the crowded room, “who want to bring war.”
A comely servant girl set down two pints of ale. Abdel kept his eyes on Jaheira as he downed his, again in one swallow.
“So what else is new?” he asked sarcastically. “I’ve made a living from one ‘force’ or another wanting war. It’s what people do.”
Jaheira was sincerely confused by his last statement, but when she turned a questioning gaze on her husband, Abdel knew she was asking something else, something more important and more frightening to her. Khalid nodded, and Jaheira turned back to Abdel.
“This is different,” she said, her voice even quieter, and Abdel had to strain to hear her. “This is your bro—”
A glass bottle disintegrated against the back of Abdel’s head, and Jaheira had to flinch away from the shards of glass. Abdel didn’t bother to wipe the residual wine off the back of his head or pick the glass from his black hair. He stood up and turned, and the crowd parted as if they were puppets attached to his joints. At the door, a far throw away, was the man who’d been dragged out by the three gnome guards. The chair thrower.
The big, stinky man was so drunk he could barely stand. Abdel stared hard at him, and the world around him seemed to slip away into blurred, echoing inconsequence.
Abdel heard only the drunk, who said bluntly, “What.”
The sellsword’s dagger flashed across the room like a sliver from a lightning bolt, and Abdel’s blood rushed through his head at the heavy thunk of the wide silver blade burying itself in the drunk’s chest. The force of it knocked the man over, and though he twitched once, then a second time, he was dead before his head hit the floor.
Abdel smiled and let the ecstasy of the kill wash away the anger and tunnel vision. When he came out of whatever trance it was he’d found himself in, it was as if the inn had plunged into pandemonium.
Khalid pushed him from behind and said something like, “What have you done?”
Inn patrons scattered, and serving wenches dropped their trays, spattering ale and wine over the fleeing or stunned revelers. Strangely, the serving girls advanced on Abdel, and he thought for a moment that it might be true what they said—that the serving girls here were really golems in disguise. Abdel smiled broader still. He didn’t care.
“Wait!” called a familiar voice.
The gnome woman at the bar let out a shrill whistle, and the serving girls stopped. Even Abdel paused as he went for the sword at his back. The voice had been Montaron’s.
“Thief!” the halfling called again.
Montaron was kneeling over the body of the drunk and producing one purse after another from the dead man’s pants.
“He must have been picking pockets all ni—here’s mine!” Montaron said, his voice loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.
“Fortunate for you,” Khalid whispered to a still uncaring Abdel. “It would have been murder otherwise.”
Gooseflesh whispered up the backs of Abdel’s arms at the sound of that word: murder. He shook his head and approached the halfling, Khalid and Jaheira following closely.
“We’d better be goin’,” Montaron said when Abdel was close enough that only he could hear the halfling’s whisper.
“Aye,” Abdel said. “My dagger.”
Montaron smiled weakly and handed the wide-bladed knife to Abdel. No blood dripped from it, though Abdel didn’t even remember seeing Montaron pull it out of the man’s chest, let alone wipe the blood away. Even drunk, reeling from the kill, Abdel admired Montaron’s finesse.
The sellsword was only barely sober enough to realize he wouldn’t find work here now, even if the drunk was a thief, and he’d thrown his last three coppers to the crowd.
“Nashkel?” Abdel asked.
“Yes,” Khalid said, his voice edged with incredulity, “yes, Nashkel. Gorion knew that was where we were planning to go?”
Abdel turned to look down at the Amnian, then to the halfling who was regarding Khalid with a face like a stone mask. Khalid returned the stare with a questioning glance.
Xzar came out of nowhere and said, “Five, then? Who are they, these two?”
Inn patrons started making advances toward the purses now displayed against the bloody chest of the dead drunk, and Abdel let himself be both pulled and pushed out of the inn. He smiled, though he wanted to cry. For his sins, he would let himself be pulled and pushed all the way to Nashkel.
“We won’t be the only ones trying to help,” Jaheira told Abdel as they walked the seemingly endless miles to Nashkel.
“I’d say not,” Montaron piped in.
Jaheira spun on the stout halfling, obviously not appreciating this intrusion any more than she’d appreciated the numerous others from both Montaron and Xzar over the last seven and a half days.
Montaron only smiled at her and said, “Sun’s bright t’day, eh girl?”
Abdel pretended not to see the fire of warning in the halfling’s eyes. Abdel was confident that Montaron was smart enough to keep his hands off Jaheira.
“This iron shortage,” Jaheira continued, trying to ignore Montaron, “could well lead to war between my people and yours.”
Abdel stopped, and the others hesitated in their steps, but all except Jaheira continued on.
“My people?” Abdel asked. He turned to face Jaheira, and it was the first time in the days since they’d met at the Friendly Arms that he’d looked her in the eye. Abdel, unsure of himself in many ways, was nervous around this strong, beautiful woman, and it embarrassed him. They were traveling with her husband.
“Amn, and…” she stopped, realizing she wasn’t sure where he was from. “Gorion was from Candlekeep. He raised you as his son there, yes?”
“He did,” Abdel said, again embarrassed though he didn’t quite know why.
“Then perhaps…” she started again. “Well, a war between Amn and Baldur’s Gate, for one… with Candlekeep caught in the middle.”
“Candlekeep can take care of itself,” Abdel stated simply. He turned and started walking again, but slowly, allowing Jaheira to stay at his side.
They were several paces behind their companions now, and Abdel surveyed the unlikely crew. Xzar kept swatting at something though there were few if any insects about. The mage muttered to himself constantly, though since Jaheira had joined them, Abdel was distracted enough by her not to be troubled by Xzar. Montaron would glance back at them from time to time, apparently feeling left out or, for reasons known only to himself, afraid. Khalid walked purposefully onward and spoke little. When he had spoken over the last seven and a half days it was about what he called “the mission.”
Abdel, Montaron, and Xzar were headed for Nashkel to seek work guarding the iron mines there. For Jaheira and Khalid, there seemed to be some more noble cause, and as much as the woman tried to turn Abdel’s heart to it, he just couldn’t understand her urgency.
“Men fight,” he told her, ignoring her grunt of protest. “Amn and Baldur’s Gate, Amn and Tethyr, Tethyr and Tethyr… it is the way of things, the way I make a living.”
Jaheira sighed and said, “It doesn’t have to be.”
“It doesn’t have to be what?” He asked, smiling, “The way of things, or the way I make a living?”
Montaron laughed from in front of them, and Abdel realized the halfling could hear them. This made Abdel smile.
“Someone is deliberately sabotaging the iron supply at Nashkel and other mines,” Jaheira pressed, though something in her tone made it clear she’d say a little more, then let it rest until at least the next day. They were still more than half a tenday north of Nashkel.
Montaron stopped and, smiling, turned around. “An’ what o’ that, fair Jaheira,” the halfling asked. “Let ’em sabotage away, I say, an’ when we get there, we’ll find the culprit an’ turn ’im in fer a great, ’uge reward.”
Jaheira didn’t even acknowledge Montaron as she passed.
“Reward?” Abdel asked.
“Sure, lad,” Montaron said, clapping the big sellsword on the forearm, “what’d ye think we were walkin’ fer a tenday an’ three fer, justice?”
Jaheira spun on the halfling and spat, “What would you know of justice, thief?”
Montaron’s eyes hardened for just a fraction of a second, and Jaheira took a step back. As if sensing the confrontation, Khalid stopped and turned but made no move to approach. Abdel kept his eyes on the halfling.
“Easy, lass,” Montaron said, chuckling. “It’s all just business, ain’t it?”
“And what business are you in, Montaron?” she asked.
“If ye’re talkin’ about those purses at the Friendly Arms,” he said jovially, “maybe ye should thank me fer gettin’ the boy out o’ there.”
“Getting the boy out o’ there?” Khalid asked, his voice nearly lost to the breeze and a squawking crow.
Montaron looked at him and smiled.
“Sure,” he said, “an’ us all.”
“Sleep lightning,” Xzar suddenly shouted, “lightning sleep.”
Abdel, Montaron, Jaheira, and Khalid all looked in the direction of the babbling mage. Xzar was nearly fifty yards ahead of them now, obviously oblivious to the conversation. Abdel laughed first and Montaron, then Khalid joined him, but a silent Jaheira was the first to march off after Xzar.
“Thank you for that, by the way,” Abdel said to Montaron.
“Not at all, kid,” Montaron said, “yell repay me, I’m sure.”
They’d passed through Beregost on their way from the Friendly Arms, even slept in real beds at an inn Montaron insisted on paying for. Their stay there seemed all too short, even for Abdel, who was as used to sleeping under the stars as inside, and it was a relief for all of them when they finally entered the mining town of Nashkel.
Abdel didn’t know if it was good luck or bad that there seemed to be some kind of festival going on in a fallow field outside town. On their way south he’d heard nothing but bad news from Jaheira and Khalid—even from Montaron—that made him think Nashkel would have been some kind of ghost town by the time they got there. The image he’d formed of it in his mind had been one of desperate miners begging on the street, shops and other businesses closed, families loading carts to head for greener pastures, and the sort of morose drunkenness he’d seen in too many Sword Coast taverns.
Instead the small town was alive with color. Carts were set up in every available space, and traveling merchants were showing their wares. Three men in parti-colored clothes were juggling flaming torches, a gnome was playing a rousing tune on what looked like a cross between bagpipes and a caravan wagon, and healthy children were running everywhere, apparently no worse for wear. There were soldiers in the street, dressed in the colors of Amn.
Montaron nudged Abdel and drew the sellsword’s attention to a small group of young women the halfling apparently found attractive.
“I’d like to investigate their mines, eh kid?” the halfling joked, then nearly doubled over laughing.
Abdel was pretty sure he knew what the little thief meant, but he didn’t reply.
Jaheira grunted and said to the halfling, “When this town is overrun by soldiers, women like that will be very busy.”
“Women like that,” Montaron said, “are always busy. Besides, not many more Amnian soldiers’ll waste their time here.”
“You sound like you’d be happy to see them march north, halfling,” Jaheira said. “Maybe you already know what is wrong here.”
Montaron laughed, but the sound had an edge to it that Abdel had been hearing more and more often in the last thirteen days.
“I know nothin’, girl,” Montaron told her, “less even than ye, if all this talk o’ war is true.”
“Someone wants blood to spill in Baldur’s Gate and Amn,” Jaheira said, “that I know.”
“An’ what if it’s an Amnian wantin’ it, girl?” Montaron asked, a crafty look curling the side of his mouth. “Will ye be so dead set to stop it then?”
Jaheira inhaled sharply and was about to say something when she stopped abruptly and turned on Abdel. He was trying not to laugh, and it showed.
“This is very serious,” she said.
Abdel smiled and nodded.
“We should find an inn,” Khalid said, purposefully breaking into the deteriorating conversation. “We can get a good night’s sleep and head to the mines in the morning.”
Jaheira nodded and followed him into a crowd of festival goers. Abdel watched her walk away, and Montaron noticed him noticing her. The halfling disappeared into the crowd.
“We will go, son of Bhaal,” Xzar said, startling Abdel.
The sellsword turned on the wiry mage and said, “Go with Khalid, mage.”
Xzar hesitated, and Abdel reached for his arm.
“Touch me!” Xzar shrieked. “Don’t touch me!”
Two dozen or more people stopped what they were doing and turned to look at Abdel, though it was Xzar who was obviously insane. Abdel sighed, trying to breathe out his desire to kill the twitching mage, then just walked away.
Abdel knew where they all went, but he didn’t go with them to the inn. He’d worked and traveled with others before, some of whom he liked and some of whom he didn’t. He’d traveled with women before, but none who moved him like Jaheira. He’d met a thousand men like Khalid, he reckoned, quiet, serious types on a mission. Montaron, halfling or otherwise, was a dime a dozen on the Sword Coast; a crafty survivor who knew what was in every pocket and behind every locked door—or would know, eventually. Xzar was a puzzle. He’d met madmen before, too, he figured, but this one was mad and highly intelligent at the same time—delusional and capable of wielding magic.
