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There's no Urge in his head. It's silent now, bled out of him with all that was Bhaal’s, smeared on the stone floor of the Temple or claimed back in Bhaal’s red-drenched realm.
Shaundral felt the agonising taint of his father’s essence as it was torn from him, but when he woke from death he didn't ask where it went. It was gone, that was what mattered.
He was stained by it, though. It isn't possible to go so long steeped in a god’s hate without a mark, he's sure of that.
When he slips a pillow under the gore-matted hair of his victim, he lifts him with a tender, careful touch, like the corpse is merely sleeping. He sees the blood under his nails, but who could do this in his stead? There's no one left with clean hands.
He undoes the golden belt cinching the man’s coat, and remembers the smooth metal of its complicated buckles.
“Enver,” he said. “You're trying to keep me out.”
“If a few layers were enough to do that, our plans wouldn't have progressed this far. Use that clever mind of yours for once.”
He rolls his eyes. He wants to tear it all away with his teeth, to be done with this facade.
Shaundral blinks away the memory. He strips the heavy coat away, setting it aside although the leather is scorched and ruined. Gortash’s shirt he has to cut away from the skin, and he leaves the golden sleeves in place.
He pries the Netherstone from the back of Gortash’s claws, and this time he doesn't let the memory of them raking down his back sweep him away.
With the Stone freshly secured in a pouch to join its siblings, Shaundral sets Gortash’s hand down. There are scars across his knuckles, brawler’s marks, and Shaundral supposes he knew them once. Kissed the knobs of the joints, where they'd once collided with teeth.
He doesn't remember, but he thinks he would have.
Stripped to the waist, the wound in Gortash’s chest is clear. Shaundral’s sword plunged between the third and fourth ribs, at an angle to skewer the heart and avoid the sternum, and the wound gushed when he pulled his weapon free.
Gortash’s chest is still, the thick curls across his breast that Shaundral once found so pleasing ruined with sweat and yet more blood. His skin is pale, but he's so freshly dead that the bruise-pallor of lividity hasn't set in, and when Shaundral feels along the bottom of his ribcage, he’s only a little cool to the touch.
Shaundral takes a long knife, slices a deep gash through the skin, and plunges his blade up through Gortash’s newly exposed diaphragm. He cuts and severs, then thrusts his hand up into the cleared channel, seizing his target in his fist.
An airless lung drapes itself over his hand, and he shrugs it off with a twist of his wrist.
He wants to tuck Gortash’s heart in with his own. He could open his own chest along the seams Kressa left him, crack his ribs and insert it there, where it could sit blanketed by his living lights.
It would only rot there. Gortash is dead, and he is not.
Then the rotting thing would poison him, and he'd die slowly.
Gortash died in moments. His eyes were glazed over before Shaundral could lift his head from his work to look into them.
They watch now. Shaundral doesn't do him the disservice of closing them. He would want to see this, wouldn't he?
He's not sure. Gortash hated it when he arrived at a meeting still bloody from sacrifice, and complained about the disrespect.
Shaundral breathes in the scent of the organ in his hand. It's cooling offal, part of him says, iron-rich and oozing. It would take a discerning butcher to distinguish it from the heart of a pig, and having tasted both, Shaundral isn't impressed by the difference.
One is a prayer to Father Bhaal, he remembers. The other is unworthy of his altar.
Bhaal will not have this, he thinks. Shaundral promised him Gortash, in due time, when he was afraid of what would happen if he didn't, and yet he will not have him. He thought of no god when he took this life. He hopes Bhaal feels the loss as keenly as he does.
He raises the heart to his lips to kiss it. It’s nestled in stripes of fat, with muscles striated in brownish red and white that make him think of a semi-precious gem.
Gortash may have liked it better, made of stone instead of meat. Shaundral thinks stone is uglier than the glorious structures of a body, and would always rather see sinews and arteries.
He thinks it delighted him once, to know that the Steel Watch Gortash was making would still need those. Even dead, the visceral had supremacy over the so-called perfection of the machine.
There's a white hot surge of anger in him, irrational and all-encompassing. What was this arrogant man thinking, hiding up here among his metal traps? He was soft flesh, not steel, however many times he peered through those constructs of his like he could see into Shaundral’s shredded brain.
Shaundral sinks his teeth into the organ. It yields to him, but there's a satisfying resistance against his bite, and when he tries to tear it apart, the tough parts hold. It's stringy, with membranes that he needs to gnaw on to soften, and it fills his mouth with the thick blood that it couldn't finish pumping.
He gulps that down, and tears off a chunk of an artery that follows down his gullet without chewing first. When he tries to work his jaw on the heart, bits get stuck between his teeth, and a mouthful becomes too much to swallow.
Perhaps the tight grip he feels on his own beating heart is a form of sympathy pain. Gortash’s body is far beyond pain, unlike those he bit into while their bodies struggled vainly against the inevitable.
His stomach lurches. There's a lump in his throat that makes the next bite a struggle to get down, and when he looks at Gortash’s now ragged heart to see if he's bitten into a spot toughened by disease or damage, it's blurry.
The gathering tears sting at the corners of his eyes. When he brushes them away with the back of his hand, he knows he's smearing blood across his brow, his eyelids, the bridge of his nose, because he can feel it clinging sticky to his skin.
He tears a fresh strip off anyway, and forces himself to swallow it. As his teeth struggle, he uses his fingers to help, and one sinks deep into the puncture wound left by his killing blow.
Shaundral sobs. He knows he wanted this, once.
“Go on,” says Gortash’s memory. He feels familiar lips against the tip of his ear. “Have a little courage, my dearest. Now is not the time to lose your nerve.”
When he returns to the Elfsong tavern, his face is scrubbed, his teeth picked clean of every trace. He takes the stack of stolen Gortash posters from beside his bed, and one by one he tosses them into the fireplace.