Philip Athans - Baldur's Gate 2 - Shadows of Amn

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Baldur’s Gate 2
A Forgotten Realms novel
By Philip Athans
Proofed by BW-SciFi
Ebook version 1.0
Release Date: August, 27th, 2004
Everything that was the essence of Abdel Adrian disappeared into a roiling vortex of rage, bloodlust, and
wild, kill-frenzied mania. His body contorted—he could feel that, and it hurt. He was changing again. He
didn't know exactly what was happening to him, how it was happening to him, or why it was happening to
him. He could feel it and experience it only for the first few moments, then any greater consciousness was
replaced by the pure murderous impulses of the Bhaalspawned demon he had become.
This one's for The Group:
Gordon
Laura
Mike
Andy
Eric
Carl
and Julie
Chapter One
Late in the summer of the Year of the Banner, Abdel Adrian, son of the God of Murder, returned to
Candlekeep a hero.
Gates that had been closed to him only weeks before were thrown open this time. A man he'd known all
his life, a man who had accused him of murder, who had locked him up like an animal, who had all but
handed him into the clutches of the Iron Throne, had embraced him with a smile of relief and confidence.
"Abdel," Tethtoril said, a tear coming to his eye, "Abdel, I'm so glad you've returned to us. I can only
hope your stay this time will be a long one, and you'll—"
"Abdel!" a thin, reedy voice sounded behind him. Abdel turned to see a face he hadn't seen in—how
long? A year?
"Imoen," Abdel breathed, meeting the slight girl's hasty embrace. "Imoen, you've grown into—"
"Don't say it, Abdel," she interrupted, a smile soften-ing her voice and making her eyes dance.
"You're a sight for sore eyes, kid," he told her, and they embraced again.
She held him and said, "I'm sorry about Gorion. I'm so sorry."
Abdel's breath caught in his throat, and he forced a weary sigh.
"He didn't die in vain," Tethtoril offered.
Abdel looked up and was surprised that Tethtoril seemed to have moved farther away. The sky over the
secretive bailey of Candlekeep roiled with green-gray clouds. Abdel could smell lightning but couldn't see it.
He was delighted to be able to return to his home with his head held high, but there was a heaviness in the
air and someone missing—no, more than someone—too many people. Where was Jaheira? She'd come
with him from Baldur's Gate, surely, and there was Xan, but didn't he get lost somewhere along the road?
Abdel remembered Xan arguing with the ghoul Korak, then something happened—
"Abdel," Imoen whispered, her breath cool against his bare chest. Abdel didn't remember taking off his
shirt. Imoen shivered against him, and he looked down at her. He was easily a foot and a half taller than the
girl. Imoen was beginning to fill out, her little girl's pro-nounced joints smoothing into her arms, her hips
rounding, and her ribs fading into smooth, pale skin. Her hair was long, and it blew into Abdel's face,
sting-ing his eyes. He breathed out a little laugh and made to gently pull her away, but she wouldn't let go.
Her small grip on his strong arms tightened and tightened some more when she whispered, "What's
happening to me?"
He said her name again, then winced when one of her fingernails pierced his skin. Blood ran out of the
wound, trailing down the top of her finger and past her wrist.
"Something's happening to me," she whispered, her voice deteriorating into a guttural, inhuman grunt.
She actually snorted, spraying Abdel with freezing-cold spittle.
"Imoen," he said, and when she didn't respond, he pushed her away more forcefully. He might have
been the only man on the Sword Coast able to push back against her suddenly superhuman strength, but he
had no time to be pleased with his physical prowess. He hissed at the sight of this young girl's face. Her
nor-mally refined features were twisted and ugly, and her mouth was growing into a gaping, fang-lined
abyss. A tongue, forked and long like a snake's, shot out and tasted Abdel's bare chest with a touch so chill
it made the huge sellsword shudder.
The thing that had once been Imoen made a sound that made Abdel shout in return, as if he could launch
the sound of his own voice against it in battle. Imoen's reddening eyes bulged to several times their natural
size with a look as scared and confused as it was hungry and malign. A string of curses spat forth from her
quivering mouth, already bleeding where the razor-sharp edges of her teeth pulled against the purple mass
of her lips.
Abdel pushed her farther away, and the touch of her naked skin was freezing, and the texture was dry
and rough, almost scaly. Abdel reached behind him and found the pommel of his sword though he swore he
couldn't feel the strap across his bare chest. The sword came out with a shriek of metal on metal that
harmo-nized with the Imoen-beast's keening wail. Abdel didn't think about what he was about to do to this
girl he'd known since she was a baby, who'd put up with his sullen moodiness and occasionally cruel
taunting through their cloistered childhood, a kid who wanted to follow him on his adventures and was
pushed aside at every turn.
Abdel brought his sword down hard and fast. He cut off her head and screamed as it fell to the brittle
brown grass of Candlekeep, and he was still screaming when he woke up, right into another, all-too-real,
nightmare.
Abdel may have been a hero, but he had not returned to Candlekeep. He saw the light coming from the
brazier first, then closed his eyes and felt the heat. The copper bowl full of orange-hot embers was too
close to him. He tried to bend away from it, but his naked back moved only a fraction of an inch before it
met a rough, cold stone wall. Abdel flinched away and adjusted again. Try as he might in those first few
moments between dream and reality, he couldn't find the happy medium his body was demanding.
The unforgiving iron manacles chaffed his wrists, and the sound the chains made when he moved
mocked him. Abdel growled, a low, animal noise deep in his throat, and clenched his fists.
He blinked his eyes open and saw a man enter the cell. He was short and fat, with a stinking abundance
of body hair thick with sweat around the black leather straps of his simple girdle and harness. There were
tools hanging from the straps, most of which Abdel didn't recognize. The strange man met Abdel's gaze and
smiled, revealing a single tooth hanging yellow and jagged from his upper gum. The man's beard was
uneven, broken by a rough burn scar that did nothing to add attractiveness or even character to his round
face.
"You are awake," the man said slowly, careful to pro-nounce each word as if language was new to him,
or at the very least difficult.
"Jailer . . ." Abdel started to say, then his parched throat closed on him, and his eyes watered. He
sucked in a breath and started choking from the smoke from the brazier, dehydration, and the ache from a
bruise he didn't remember getting.
"Dungeon master," the man murmured, looking away from Abdel, then pausing as if seeing the brazier
for the first time. As he reached up to grab a poker hanging from a hook on the wall to Abdel's right, he
said, "Dun-geon master, not jailer. This is not a jail, it is a dungeon."
Abdel sighed, trying to meet the man's blank, glazed stare, but to no avail. The man was an idiot.
"What—" Abdel croaked as the man set the poker into the burning coals and held it there. "What is your
name, Dungeon Master?"
The man smiled but didn't look at Abdel. "Booter," he said, "is my name. My name is Booter."
"Where am I?" Abdel asked, his voice beginning to really come back now. "How did I get here?"
"My boss's place," Booter drawled, scraping the tip of the iron poker against the bottom of the copper
bowl. "My boss took you. I do not know where he took you from."
"Who is your boss?" Abdel asked, eyeing the poker suspiciously. He could feel the anger building, and
though he was starting to remember trying to pull the chains out of the wall and failing, he kept his voice as
level as he could.
"Who is your boss?" Abdel asked again as Booter pulled the poker out of the hot coals and dragged it
across Abdel's chest. He screamed, smelling his own skin and hair burning and feeling every popping blister
and seared inch of flesh in a pain that was almost a living thing on its own. His scream drowned out most of
Booter's answer to his last question, but Abdel was sure he heard the man say "Shadow Thieves."
He couldn't be in Amn, could he? * * * * *
Abdel had seen Jaheira murdered by Sarevok. As he went to spill his half-brother's vile blood, Jaheira
was returned to the world of the living by the prayers of the priests of Gond at the request of soon-to-be
Grand Duke Angelo of Baldur's Gate. It was fully a day after Sarevok's death that Abdel saw Jaheira alive
again. She'd cried in his arms, and Abdel, drained of his ability to feel anything, just held her. They slept
little, though the sense of relief was there. So much was over, but so much had been lost in the process.
Instead of sleeping, they went on long walks through the dark streets of Baldur's Gate. Citizens, merchants,
trades-men, and soldiers alike recognized Abdel and tipped their chins to him in silent thanks. Word of
Sarevok's deadly plans spread quickly through Baldur's Gate, a city, like so many others, that all but ran on
gossip.
They were walking together again, that last night, neither of them speaking. Jaheira's hand draped limply
in the crook of Abdel's elbow. He took one long-strided step for every two of hers, and though it hurt his
battle-weary knees to walk that slowly, he was happy to stay alongside her. Every once in a while he would
look down at her, and she would smile.
The men came out of the shadows in the manner of professional kidnappers. They were already
surround-ing Abdel and Jaheira before they made their presence known. It took only the blink of an eye for
Abdel to real-ize what was happening and not much longer to draw his sword. In that same space of time,
three of the kid-nappers moved in.
Abdel brought his sword around, above his head, and was startled by the shrill sound of metal on metal,
then a hard jerk that succeeded in taking the blade out of his hands. His arms were still moving forward fast
and hard—faster now that the sword was no longer weighing them down—and it was a small thing to alter
the direction of the swing enough to smash his heavy right fist into a masked man's face. There was a loud
crack, and Abdel could feel the attacker's nose collapse under the blow.
Jaheira grunted, and Abdel looked over to see a black-masked man holding the half-elf in a painful
headlock.
"I'll break her—" the man started to say, but finished with a hard exhale when Jaheira brought her elbow
in sharply to his ribs. His grip loosened enough for her to wriggle out, and Abdel spared a glance behind
him.
Another masked man was frantically unraveling a long length of black steel chain from around Abdel's
heavy broadsword. Abdel took two long strides at him, and the man ducked the first kick with admirable
speed. Slipping across the damp cobblestones to avoid Abdel's left fist, the attacker spun his chain out at his
side and narrowed his eyes in warning.
The huge sellsword only smiled and feinted an attack. The masked man fell for it and twirled his chain
up and across at Abdel's face, but it swished harmlessly short. Abdel punched the man in the ribs hard with
his left hand, and all the air blew out of the masked man's lungs. The thug fell to his knees. Abdel put him
down with a kick to the head.
Jaheira shot her elbow back and up this time into her attacker's face. This man, too, fell to the ground,
and Jaheira smiled at Abdel and almost started to wink before another masked man grabbed her from
behind.
"Enough of this," a heavily accented voice called from the shadows. "Just take them." The voice was
com-manding and impatient, but the masked men didn't seem to react to it at all.
Jaheira was pulled back and over by the much bigger man who'd grabbed her from behind, and Abdel's
blood boiled at the sight of it. Someone grabbed him roughly from behind, and Abdel bent forward quickly
from the waist, throwing this attacker to the street with a crack, a curse, and a clatter of metal on stone
when the dark-clothed man's dagger skittered out of his grip.
Abdel picked up one foot to stomp on the man, and a voice behind him said, "Bhaalspawn!"
Abdel's head spun almost as fast as his body did, and he made to face the man who had dared to use
that name for him after all he'd been through to rid Faerun of his own brother.
Something dry and surprisingly light hit Abdel in the chest, and there was a puff of powder in the air in
front of him, powder so light it was almost smoke. Abdel breathed in to muster an appropriate curse, and he
got a sharp, bitter taste in his mouth, and his eyes clamped themselves shut tightly.
"Abdel!" Jaheira called out.
Abdel growled, and his head spun. He shifted one foot out to his side to account for the sudden extreme
list of the boat he was—but wait, he wasn't standing on a boat... .
There was another light thud, and Abdel's eyes rolled around to see Jaheira waving at a similar cloud in
front of her face. She made to look at him, but her eyes just rolled up into her head, and she slumped back
into the arms of a masked man behind her.
Abdel tried to growl again but just gagged. He felt someone touch his arm, knew it wasn't Jaheira, and
tried to make a fist. His fingers wouldn't bend, and he had only one clear thought: That's strange, before his
knees gave way, and he was out before he could see the cobblestones rush up at his face.
* * * * *
Abdel roared in rage, frustration, and bloodlust, but not in pain, even when Booter latched onto the
second fingernail with his needle-nosed pliers.
"This will hurt too," the self-styled dungeon master murmured, then pulled hard, tearing the fingernail up
and off in one swift, cruel motion.
Abdel held his teeth together tightly and swore to more gods than he thought might be listening that he
would kill this "dungeon master" in a most telling way, and he would do it soon.
Chapter Two
Jaheira clenched her jaw tightly closed inside the iron band that held her mouth shut. She could breathe
through her teeth and drink water, but she couldn't speak, and though they'd been there for what felt like at
least two days, she wasn't able to eat. She'd been iden-tified as a mage by her masked captors, though that
wasn't quite true. A druid in the service of Our Lady of the Forest, Mielikki, Jaheira could call upon that
divine power to cast the little miracles people called "spells," but she was no mage. Still, she had to admit
that they'd been right to keep her from speaking. She could have warped the wood in the door that held
them in this dark, stinking chamber, spoken to the roots weaving through the ill-kept stone blocks that made
up the walls, or even just taken the rot and disease out of the stagnant, bitter water she had been given. She
would have had to speak to do any of those things.
She remembered being jumped while walking with Abdel in Baldur's Gate and had assumed that she'd
been brought to the same place as he, though she hadn't seen him since regaining consciousness in the
cage. When she awoke, she met two others. Each of them had their own cage. They could see each other,
and the other two could speak, but they were kept apart.
One of the others was an odd, stocky, well-built man with long red hair and a patchy orange beard. He
had apparently taken some kind of small rat or large mouse as a companion. Jaheira looked at the babbling
lunatic with a mix of fear and pity. She wasn't afraid that he might harm her or try to take advantage of
her—they were in separate cages after all. No, Jaheira was afraid that she might end up like him. Would
she be locked away, restrained, told nothing for so long that her mind, like this poor fool's, might unravel?
"It's all right, Boo," the red-haired man muttered to his rodent companion. He'd noticed Jaheira looking at
him, and before she realized she was making him uncomfortable and turned away, she saw him tilt his head
down and to the side, revealing a jagged, still-bruised scar running along the right side of his head.
A heavy blow must have addled him then, Jaheira hoped. Maybe he wasn't left here too long.
"A fine group we have here, yes?" the second prisoner asked her, obviously noting her discomfort with
the red-haired man. "The silent rodent, the madman, me, and you."
She looked at him blankly, unable to figure out what this one wanted her to say, even if she could speak.
He was a strange looking man, with features nearly like an elf's but not really. She had seen only one other
person like him before: the woman Tamoko, lover of Sarevok. Abdel had told her Tamoko came from
Kozakura, on the other side of the world, east of the endless Hordelands. This one was a man, of course,
but different from Tamoko in other ways too. His face was rounder, softer, as was his body. He seemed
well fed but not fat, strong but not muscular. He wore a simple black blouse and loose-fitting black trousers,
a uniform not unlike the ones worn by her captors. Jaheira mistrusted this man for that reason and for other,
less concrete ones.
"If my name was Boo," the Kozakuran tried to joke, "I would be in a better situation, I think."
She tried to squeeze out a smile but realized it looked more like a sneer. Maybe she did mean to sneer
after all.
"I want to get out of here, Boo," the red-haired man said to his little friend. The rodent didn't respond, but
the Kozakuran man did.
"Indeed, Boo," he said too loudly, "get us out of—"
The lock drew back sharply, and the door vibrated, sending loud, almost painful waves of sound through
the cramped chamber. The door swung open, and Jaheira blinked in the brighter light from the guttering
torch in the narrow corridor. The same fat, soft-spoken half-orc in the leather harness who brought them
their water from time to time shuffled in with something over his shoulder. The big jailer was obviously
struggling with his heavy burden, and Jaheira quickly realized it was a man, then realized it was Abdel.
She wanted to scream his name but could only moan tightly under her iron chin strap. The jailer stopped
and shifted his weight onto one foot, and Jaheira's eyes went wide at the sudden burst of motion. Abdel's
hair was what she noticed first. Long, black, and matted with what looked like sweat and blood, it whipped
up over his back. His set, determined face followed just as fast. The jailer started to fall backward at the
sudden shift in Abdel's considerable weight, and Abdel pulled his shoulders back, bringing his chest away
from the jailer's hairy shoulder while kicking his feet forward. The effect was to send the fat jailer tumbling
onto his ample rump, while Abdel came solidly to his feet in a puff of dirt, rat droppings, and straw.
Abdel's hands were tied tightly in front of him, but Jaheira realized that wouldn't slow him down nearly
enough to save the jailer's life. The burns and cuts blos-soming over Abdel's body didn't register with
Jaheira at first. He stepped back with his right leg and kneeled next to the jailer. Jaheira realized Abdel had
been tor-tured and gasped as much at that thought as the sight of Abdel's hands coming up, his elbow falling
past the jailer's head, and those two huge, godlike arms tight-ening around the still-stunned jailer's neck.
Why did Jaheira want Abdel to stop? She didn't know, she just didn't want him to kill, not out of anger,
not when he didn't have to. Did he have to?
Abdel seemed to see Jaheira for the first time just before he started to twist the jailer's head. Their eyes
locked, and Jaheira could see fire—literally a faint yellow glow—flare suddenly in Abdel's eyes. She
real-ized he'd noticed the iron strap on her head. She had no idea what he'd been through, so she couldn't
know what he was imagining she'd been through. She made her eyes wide and tried to shout at him with
her mind. She wanted him to stop.
He couldn't hear her thoughts, but her face, smashed into the mask as it was, was plain enough, and
Abdel stopped short of killing the jailer. He squeezed the man's neck, didn't twist it, and the jailer woke up
just in time to try to take one breath, then pass out again.
"Jaheira," Abdel whispered as he strained at the ropes that held his wrists together.
She closed her eyes and jerked her head back once in hopes that he would understand. He stopped
trying to get his hands free and moved to her. The burns on his chest and thighs were purple welts, and he
was trickling blood from more than two dozen tiny cuts. He came to her cage and reached in. Without
thinking she slid closer to him, pressing her body against the bars. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she
had to close her eyes when he leaned closer to her. She felt his nakedness brush against her shoulder, and
she heard the loud clatter of iron on iron as he fumbled with the lock on her mask, oddly ignoring the fact
that she was still in a cage.
He cursed and pulled, wrenching her neck painfully. There was a whining sound and a crack, and the
strap around her chin fell away. He stood quickly and moved to the locked door of the cage. Muscles
bunched along his massive arms, and the cage door broke free with one hard yank. Bits of metal clattered
on the stone floor, followed by the louder clang of the barred door Abdel easily tossed aside.
"Kyoutendouchi!" the Kozakuran exclaimed. "Now free the rest of us!"
Abdel ignored him, taking Jaheira's chin gently in his bound hands. "Did he ... ?" Abdel asked, the yellow
light returning to his intense eyes for half a heartbeat.
Jaheira opened her mouth to speak, and her jaw cracked painfully, but she managed to say, "No, no, he
just left me here with these two. I don't know them."
Abdel looked at the other prisoners, then back at Jaheira.
"Get the keys," Jaheira said to Abdel. "Get the keys from the jailer."
Abdel smiled, said, "Dungeon master," and retrieved the keys.
He went to unlock the Kozakuran's cage but stopped when he passed near Jaheira. Abdel moved to
embrace her, but she pushed him away.
She closed her eyes and said, "In the name of Our Lady of the Forest, by the will of the Supreme
Ranger, by the touch of the daughter to Silvanus."
Abdel felt a cool nettling pass over him, and when he touched his own chest, the pain from the cuts had
gone away—the cuts themselves had healed.
"I didn't know you could do that," he whispered, shocked.
"I haven't been calling on Mielikki enough," Jaheira admitted, blushing, "or listening carefully enough to
her call."
"That's all very interesting, young miss," the Koza-kuran said, "but I and my very dear fellow prisoner
are still hoping to complete what I can only guess is a much welcomed escape."
Abdel looked at Jaheira, who smiled, then he unlocked the Kozakuran man's cage.
"Many and varied thanks, respected sir," the man said. "I am Yoshimo of the Faraway East, and you are
my newest friend."
Abdel only grunted at the man, who stood on sur-prisingly steady legs, rising to a height nearly two feet
short of the top of Abdel's head.
"Jaheira," the half-elf druid said, standing and stretch-ing sore, hunger-weakened muscles, "and this is
Abdel."
She didn't bother to watch for any reaction to either her name or Abdel's. She was too busy breathing,
work-ing her sore jaw, and stretching her cramping legs.
"It's all right, isn't it, Boo?" the red-haired man mut-tered over and over as Abdel unlocked his cage. The
big sellsword was obviously taken aback by the prisoner's mad demeanor.
"Do any of you know the way out of here?" Abdel asked.
Jaheira had to shrug, and Yoshimo looked at the red-haired man as if sure he would have the answer.
The man shrugged, pointed to the only door, and said, "Through there?"
Jaheira allowed herself a laugh and made to follow Abdel and the red-haired man out.
* * * * *
They came out into an all-out melee.
The four escaped prisoners followed the sounds of battle, since it seemed the only thing to follow,
through twists and turns in narrow tunnels that confounded even Jaheira's sense of direction. The
red-haired man still seemed oblivious to anything but the rodent he carried cupped in his hands. He would
ask the animal if it was all right to turn this corner, safe to go up that set of steps, wise to pass through
some doorway. No one but him ever heard the thing answer, but he always fol-lowed the rest of the
escaping prisoners.
They came into a wide, low-ceilinged chamber domi-nated by huge roselike growths of orange crystal.
Black-clad men were locked in combat with other black-clad men, and neither side seemed to be winning.
No one even noticed them at first and even when a few did glance their way, they were all too busy
fighting to the death to do or say anything.
"I don't know if this is better than the cages or not," the Kozakuran said dryly.
"There!" Jaheira shouted, pointing to a door on the other side of the chamber.
"Is it all right, Boo?" the red-haired man asked the rodent.
"It's the only way out," Yoshimo said, putting a hand on the madman's shoulder.
"Boo says it's all right," the man said, addressing another human for the first time.
A man in black robes fell screaming to the ground only a dozen paces in front of them. The two
assassins who'd killed him looked up sharply at the little group and came on fast, swords drawn.
Jaheira called on Mielikki, closing her eyes just after seeing the still naked Abdel rush forward to meet
the charging assassins. She took a tiny sprig of tree root she'd pulled from the wall in the chamber of cages
and secreted under her torn, sweat-soaked blouse. The root grew in her hand, and she smiled at the feel of
it in her palm. In no more than two heartbeats it was a sword of polished wood with a gleaming blade that
showed its razor sharpness.
"Your side!" the red-haired man shouted just in time, and Jaheira dodged the warhammer coming at her
from her left.
The wielder was a black-robed assassin with all-too-human eyes overcome with panic and bloodlust.
She backed up two steps, which was enough time to recover, and brought her wooden sword up in time to
parry another hard strike from the warhammer. She sliced her sword in low and scraped across the
assassin's left knee, then his right, and the man went down like a sack of wet rice.
"You will learn the price of your failure, you ..." a harsh male voice shrieked above the melee, the rest of
his obviously enraged statement lost in the echoes of steel on steel.
Jaheira heard someone cast a spell just as another assassin came at her with a quarterstaff raised high.
She threw her sword at him and kept her eyes glued to it. The assassin made to dodge the thrown blade but
was surprised when the unlikely weapon stopped in midair and reversed its direction, striking for his throat
as if it were being wielded by some invisible swordsman.
"We know our price!" a shrill male voice shouted over the general din. "Give us our payment,
necromancer!"
The assassin parried each thrust from the goddess-given sword but was soon being pressed back into a
stone-block wall. Jaheira had to concentrate on the blade, using her own will at this distance as she would
have to if she were holding the blade.
She wondered what Yoshimo and the red-haired man were doing, what had happened to Abdel, and
whether or not the other door really was a way out when the single word "Sleep!" shouted from somewhere
to her right made her do just that. * * * * *
Abdel knew that running into the green cloud would be a bad idea, but he'd already started in that
direction when it suddenly appeared in front of him, engulfing the two black-clad men he was trying to
defend against. The cloud had obviously been conjured by some mage mixed in among the assassins. The
sound of murmur-ing voices had been part of the general cacophony the whole time. Abdel and the two
assassins were overcome with the powerful stench of death and decay. They wanted to kill each other, but
all they could do was retch. If Abdel had had anything in his stomach, he would have emptied it onto the
floor beneath the cloud. Instead, he just stood there and coughed until a man crashed into his back, and he
was pushed, pulled, nearly carried out of the cloud.
"I will destroy you all!" a strange man, a man Abdel couldn't see, screamed. "Your blood will serve me
as your pitiful efforts could not!"
Abdel looked back through watering eyes in time to see Jaheira fall to the floor limply, Yoshimo standing
impotently by her side, stepping back as two black-robed men grabbed for her. The man with red hair was
suddenly standing next to Abdel and had what a more lucid Abdel might have described as a wholly
inappro-priate grin plastered to his face.
"Abdel!" a woman's voice screamed at him, thin and weak.
He was more confused that Jaheira seemed sur-prised to see him than that she could shout at all, then
realized it wasn't Jaheira's voice.
"Imoen?" he gasped around another body-wracking dry heave. He looked up and saw a face he'd seen
most recently in a dream but not in real life for many months. The impossibility of her presence washed
over Abdel like a cold rain, and the sellsword was quite simply flummoxed.
"We have to go," the red-haired man shouted with an almost cheerful tone. "Boo insists!"
"We will kill you first, necromancer," a man screamed from somewhere in the middle of the battle, "then
take what you owe us ... take the son of. .." The voice was lost again under the din of battle.
A wave of bright purple fire washed across every-thing, and Abdel was thrown across the rough floor.
All throughout the underground chamber, people were being scattered. Chunks of orange crystal came out
of the ceiling, the walls, and the floor. Weapons came out of hands, and at least one boot was pulled off a
foot and hit Abdel in the face. Everywhere there were danger-ous, heavy, sharp things flying through the
air and people sailing upside down, crashing into the ceiling, walls, floor, and each other.
Abdel called, "Jaheira!" then, with a wild, yellow-eyed look of incomprehensible fate in his eyes,
"Imoen!"
What was Imoen doing here? The last time Abdel had seen the young woman—barely more than a little
girl—was behind the sheltered walls of Candlekeep. She was an irritating kid who didn't take Abdel
seri-ously enough at all, was openly disrespectful and catty, and one of the few friends Abdel ever had in
the monastery-fortress where he'd grown up. He couldn't begin to fathom what she might be doing in this
place. She was a captive of these men who might be Shadow Thieves, but how, when, and why had they
taken her from Candlekeep?
A handful of the warring assassins were on fire now in the wake of the bizarre, obviously
magic-spawned explosion. There was a thick stench of smoke, burned hair, and blood. A few men were
getting to their feet. Some crawled around searching for weapons. Others had started to kill each other
already. Most of the room was blocked from Abdel's sight by a growing pall of smoke, but he started in
anyway.
"Imoen!" he called sharply and was sure he heard her answer, though now there was a growing
cacoph-ony of steel on steel again ringing through the cham-ber. A piece of the ceiling fell in front of him,
and he had to step back to avoid it. Someone grabbed him roughly from behind, and Abdel whirled with his
right fist in front of him.
The red-haired man grunted and stepped back fast. Abdel was surprised enough that he missed hitting
the madman.
"Gotta go!" the madman said. "Boo demands it! Boo demands—"
He stopped when he saw Abdel raise his fist again, and he flinched when it looked as if Abdel was
going to punch him. Instead, the big sellsword pushed him down by one shoulder and saved his life in the
process. A gleaming steel blade arced through the air where the madman's red scalp had been less than the
blink of an eye before. Abdel had to bend backward an inch or two himself to avoid its singing tip.
Abdel waited the half second it took for the sword blade to finish its fast arc, then punched out with his
left hand in one abbreviated movement that snapped the swordsman's neck back nearly enough to kill him.
Losing blood from a viciously cut lip, the man went down hard, blinking all the way. As he fell, Abdel deftly
slid the sword out of his hand, and just as the soldier hit the battered flagstone floor, Abdel had the sword up
to parry another soldier's uncertain strike.
Soldiers wearing tabards Abdel immediately recog-nized as Amnian were flooding into the chamber
from doorways the sellsword hadn't noticed before. In the smoke, screaming, and confusion, Abdel couldn't
tell who was who, and neither could the soldiers, who just took on everybody in the place as they came in.
"Gotta go!" the red-haired man, now standing again in front of Abdel, said.
Abdel parried another swing from the confused sol-dier, who kept glancing down at Abdel's naked body
and blushing. The son of Bhaal batted the Amman's sword away and punched him in the face hard enough
to send him down to join his friend on the floor.
"Imoen," Abdel said. He couldn't fathom how these kidnappers had managed to get Imoen out of
Candlekeep. She had been an orphan who ended up in the care of Winthrop, an innkeeper well known and
well liked in Candlekeep. Winthrop was an easier man than Gorion, less demanding, and Imoen's frivolous
ways and casual demeanor were easy to explain. She was a good kid and didn't deserve to be here.
"Boo," the red-haired man said, kicking a black-clad assassin in the groin and taking his sword out of his
hand as he went down, just like he saw Abdel do, "says 'Gotta go!'"
摘要：

Baldur’sGate2AForgottenRealmsnovelByPhilipAthansProofedbyBW-SciFiEbookversion1.0ReleaseDate:August,27th,2004EverythingthatwastheessenceofAbdelAdriandisappearedintoaroilingvortexofrage,bloodlust,andwild,kill-frenziedmania.Hisbodycontorted—hecouldfeelthat,andithurt.Hewaschangingagain.Hedidn'tknowexact...

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