Baldur's Gate (7 page)

“Amnian,” Xzar said, holding the vial out to Abdel, “yes?”

“There it is,” Montaron said, “the proof, just sittin’ ‘ere on the floor fer any fool—no offense, Xzar—to see. Amnian make, fer certain.”

“What is this?” Jaheira asked harshly.

“Amnian,” Xzar said, shaking and bringing his hands up.

“Nithrik glah—” the mage started to mumble.

Abdel grabbed the mage’s hands and said, “Stop it Xzar!” so loudly Montaron and Jaheira both covered their ears.

The mage looked at Abdel with fiery anger in his eyes and shrieked, “Don’t touch me!”

Montaron drew his sword, and Abdel let the mage’s hands fall away and grabbed for his own sword. By the time the big wide blade came out of its sheath Abdel could see that the halfling had drawn not on him but on Jaheira and Khalid. Even before Abdel could make sense of the situation, all four of them were armed, and Xzar seemed ready enough to begin another casting.

“Amnian treachery,” Montaron spat, and even Abdel could see the hafling was over selling the point. “Ye saw the vial, Abdel, just like the one ye bought from the vendor in Nash—” and the halfling stopped abruptly and looked at Abdel.

“What vial I bought in Nashkel?” Abdel asked, his fingers tightening on the hilt of his sword.

Xzar twitched, and his hands came up. Abdel reacted fast, but maybe it was something in the unnatural magic light, or the gradual downward slope of the passageway, or the still, dusty air, but he wasn’t fast enough. Khalid was coming in with his sword, and just by instinct Abdel batted the blade away and sliced back. He felt his blade sink into the Amnian’s midsection, and there was an echoing cry that might have been either Khalid or Jaheira, maybe both. Xzar mumbled something, and Abdel distinctly heard Montaron say, “No!”

Blood splashed in Abdel’s face, and he closed his eyes for just a second. His timing was fortunate because at that exact moment Xzar’s magical light grew brighter, and Jaheira and Montaron both cursed. Abdel felt Khalid fall. His broadsword was still stuck in the Amnian’s side. Abdel let the sword fall but kept his left hand on it. He reached for his dagger with his right hand, but before it came fully out of the sheath he was struck between the legs by something small, hard, and moving fast. The air burst from his lungs, and he stumbled backward. His hand came off the dagger and he heard the clatter of metal on stone. He didn’t wait for the echoes to fade before he put his right hand back on his big broadsword and pulled it out of the fallen Amnian.

“After her!” Montaron screamed, and Abdel, blinking to clear his vision from the blood, and the blow to the groin, followed.

As the footsteps of the halfling and the big sellsword faded into the echoing distance of the dark mine, Xzar bent and retrieved the heavy silver dagger. He took a moment to admire the engraving and didn’t give chase. He turned in the direction of the entrance and slipped the dagger into his big leather belt pouch.

“Yes,” the mage muttered to himself, “yes, so far, yes.”

Abdel could see that the torchlight bothered Montaron. The halfling protested when he stopped to light it, but they hadn’t gone very far from the muttering mage before Abdel couldn’t see at all. At the speed Jaheira had fled, Abdel guessed she had enough elf blood in her to be able to see in the dark like one. Montaron was not only able to see in the dark, he very vocally preferred it to any level of illumination.

There were more side tunnels—lots more—than Abdel expected, and he was beginning to realize he would be lucky to find his way back to the entrance, let alone find Jaheira. He was outdistancing Montaron, and Abdel realized he’d have an even worse go of it if he lost the halfling too. He slowed, breathing hard, and eventually stopped all together.

“Forget it… kid …” Montaron gasped as he came up next to Abdel and stopped, doubling over with his hands on his knees. “She’s… gone.”

Abdel wiped his sweating brow with one strong forearm and nodded, though he hated to admit defeat. The torch sputtered in a sudden draft, and Abdel smelled something that wasn’t there before. It was a smell like a wet dog, and there was wet leather… sweat maybe.

“Smell that?” he whispered.

Montaron looked up, nodded, and peered into the darkness. Assuming Abdel would follow, the halfling began to creep toward a side passage. Abdel did follow, his broadsword still in his right hand, the torch he’d made from a scrap of dirty cloth and a strip of wood torn from a ceiling support in his left hand. When they came to the corner of the nearest side passage, Montaron peeked around and immediately put out a hand to keep Abdel from going any farther.

“Kobolds,” the halfling whispered, and the clatter of stone on stone sounded from the side passage. Assuming the kobolds had heard them, Abdel stepped around the corner and rushed them.

There were three of the filthy little creatures. One was obviously standing guard but wasn’t the first to see Abdel come around the corner. Abdel made eye contact with the one who was standing next to a small iron cart. The third kobold was standing on this one’s shoulders and was pouring something over the load of ore stacked in a jumble in the cart. The kobold on the bottom yelped—a rich, city-woman’s small dog’s yelp—and its knees buckled a little in fright or in the beginning of an attempt to run. The guard spun but not at Abdel. Instead the fool looked at its partner, who yelped again when Abdel cut the guard’s head off.

This time the kobold on the bottom did run, sending the one on top spilling face first into the cart. There was a jumble of dog noises Abdel didn’t wait to hear, and the bottle crashed when it fell from the kobold’s hand. The little creature who first noticed Abdel made off down the tunnel at a dead run, and Abdel paused only long enough to rip the throat out of the one in the cart with the tip of his bloody broadsword.

Montaron was next to him by then and held a hand up to stop Abdel from chasing off into the darkness after the fleeing kobold.

“What were they doin’?” Montaron asked.

It took a second or two for Abdel to answer. The blood was rushing through his head again, and he wanted to chase down the other kobold so badly he could taste it.

“I don’t know,” he answered finally, “pouring something on these rocks.”

Abdel motioned in the general direction of the cart and the two dead kobolds but kept his eyes glued on the wall of darkness ahead of him, tuning his ears for any faint echo of the little humanoid’s footfalls.

“Filthy beasts, eh kid?” Montaron commented, kicking the severed kobold head lightly so it rolled across the uneven floor, following the downward slope in the direction his comrade had fled. Kobolds were tiny, doglike humanoids with proportionally huge, long-fingered hands, long, curved, pointed ears like a bat’s, and short, pointed horns like a lizard’s. Their wrinkled skin seemed orange in the torchlight but was probably brown. They were dressed in filthy rags, fashioned into crude vests and loincloths, and they smelled awful.

Montaron squatted next to the headless kobold and flicked at a broken bottle with the tip of a finger.

“What is that?” Abdel asked, glancing at the back of the halfling’s head.

“What’s what?”

“That bottle,” Abdel said, “what were they pouring on those rocks?”

“ore,” Montaron corrected, “not rocks … iron ore. I’ll assume, if ye don’t mind, that whatever it is, it’s what’s causin’ this iron plague.”

“Kobolds?” Abdel asked, his voice full of skepticism. He’d heard many stories about kobolds and had run into a few that had dug their way into the basement of an inn in Liam’s Hold. These were not creatures who created some Realms-shattering conspiracy to contaminate iron ore and bring about a war between powerful surface nations. Kobolds, as far as Abdel had heard, were cowardly subterranean wretches who hovered at the edge of extinction and whose lack of intelligence was supplemented by a decided lack of ethics.

“Not likely, my friend,” Montaron said, laughing, “but paid to do it? Paid by Amnians to brin’ ‘arm to the people o’ Baldur’s Gate?”

“And you’re certain it’s not the other way around,” Abdel said, nodding at the broken earthenware bottle. “The vial I bought in Nashkel—the one I never showed you—was silver and of fine craftsmanship. If you say that is an Aninian vial, well, surely this bottle can’t have come from the same place.”

Montaron shrugged but didn’t turn around. Abdel was still waiting for the halfling to respond when there was the unmistakable shuffle of gravel in the dark passage, and Abdel took two long, fast strides down the tunnel. The torchlight caught the kobold’s eyes first, and the two big orange spots shone brightly, widening in surprise and fear. There was a poodle yelp, and the thing turned and ran. Abdel didn’t hesitate this time but was off like a shot.

He tried to track the kobold by sound mostly and seemed to do well. As the little creature slipped into one nearly concealed side passage after another, Abdel started to get a feel for running down the rough, gravelly incline in the tricky light of the torch. Eventually he could see the kobold’s back as it continued to run for its life. Abdel had to assume that Montaron had been able to keep up and was becoming worried that he wouldn’t be able to retrace his steps back to the mine cart without the halfling.

The kobolds came at him from all sides, bursting into the tight radius of his torchlight from the impenetrable darkness beyond. Abdel wasn’t stupid enough to try to count how many of them ambushed him, he just started fighting for his life. He used the heavy broadsword in his right hand and the burning torch in his left hand with equal abandon and equal effectiveness. Kobolds died bleeding or burning, and the distinction was irrelevant to Abdel. Occasionally one would get in a lucky cut with a rusted dagger, crude flint axe, or stolen woodworking tool, or make a lucky poke with a spear that wasn’t much more than a stick with a sharp rock tied to the end of it. Abdel took maybe a dozen little wounds, none of any consequence, and killed as many kobolds before the few that still lived exhausted their meager supply of courage and slipped back out of Abdel’s torchlight.

The fight was a cacophony of yelps and clinks and grunts, and Abdel’s ears rang from it, but he was sure the voice he suddenly heard echo through the tunnel was Jaheira’s. He couldn’t make out a word, but the tone was unmistakable. She was calling for help.

His torch was starting to go out, but Abdel did nothing but follow the sound of Jaheira’s pleading voice for what seemed like hours but might have been only minutes. He occasionally heard the scrape and scuffle of kobold feet on gravel in the darkness, and he could still smell the wet dog stench of them all around, but he went on. He needed to find her, even after it occurred to him that she might not want him to find her—someone, surely, but not him. Killing her husband might make any woman feel that way. Abdel put the fact that he hadn’t seen Montaron in a very long time out of his mind as well.

He came to a wide intersection where five tunnels all converged in a roughly circular chamber. The ceiling was still just barely tall enough for Abdel to stand at his full height. In the center of the room was what appeared to Abdel’s untrained eye to be a natural sinkhole. The floor dropped away abruptly. He heard Jaheira call, “Anybody!” clearly now, and there was no doubt in Abdel’s mind that the voice was coming from somewhere down inside the sinkhole.

He rushed to the side and screamed, “Jaheira!” so loudly that the echoes masked the sound of the half a dozen kobolds who rushed him from behind.

The things were no bigger than three feet tall, well under half Abdel’s height, and he certainly outweighed each by five or six times, but the six of them together were enough to push him forward that fraction of an inch that made falling into the pit impossible to avoid.

Abdel shouted a curse to his own stupidity on the way down. Two of the kobolds yelped, and a third whimpered. Three of them were either too stupid or too slow to avoid falling in after him. Abdel somehow managed to land on one of them. The scrawny little beast didn’t provide much cushion, and when they hit the floor maybe twenty feet down Abdel felt every ounce of the force of the impact, and so did the kobold, judging by the loud, splintering crack.

Abdel didn’t get up right away and didn’t think to open his eyes. The sounds of the kobolds’ dying from the fall were unmistakable. From above the three survivors yelped and barked and cooed in their own primeval language. Abdel was angry and disappointed in himself, but that didn’t help him breathe. In the first few seconds after hitting the hard stone floor he could only exhale. Drawing air into his lungs seemed like some kind of lost art. “Abdel!”

Jaheira’s voice sounded closer now, and Abdel pulled in one huge breath at the sound of it. He didn’t breathe well right away, but at least he felt like he’d be normal again someday.

This was also when he realized he’d lost his torch in the fall, and it had gone out. Gasping for air, he crawled around the floor at the bottom of the sinkhole in complete darkness until he found the torch. It took him so long to get it lit again, Jaheira finally gave up calling for him, and he still didn’t have breath enough to answer her.

When the torch finally caught Abdel saw that he was in an even larger chamber than the one above, and he was not alone.

The smell of the man hit him at the same moment Abdel saw him, and the sellsword nearly gagged. The man was rushing at him with a club fashioned from a heavy tree branch. The attacker’s face was not entirely human and had the tell tale snoutlike nose and the nubs of tusks of a half-orc.

The club came down, and the half-orc shouted in incoherent rage. Abdel brought his sword up and easily batted the attack away while shifting his weight and bringing his feet under him to stand. The half-orc recovered so slowly Abdel had time to find his bearings. Confident that the half-orc was too slow to parry a simple slash to the throat, Abdel swung his sword in a fast arc. The blade met resistance and stopped. The half-orc was strong enough to stop the slice, the club was strong enough to remain intact, and the half-orc proved faster than Abdel imagined he’d be.