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The master maggots kept beasts.
Of all kinds, from everywhere west and north and wester still, that were of more interest to import than the common ones of two legs they already kept chained. And even then the creatures of the west were better off than them all, because the beasties were always given their meat.
In the main hall, the western wall had been stripped of its pretty plastered paintings, fair pastel colors scraped flake by flake away by the claws of the creature within. It had been a grand spectacle when it came in, a solid iron cage dragged in with chains by Bhaal’s people in chains, snarling and hissing and swiping. The bottom of the cage was littered with hay. It stank. Piss and rancid meat and blood.
It was feline, a brilliant orange and striped through with black. Its tail lashed, lashed like his tail lashed like it would never stop. Snarling, its teeth were knives. Swords. Scimitars.
In his mind’s eye, Bhaal had seen a bolt break. A pin snap, a lock fail, and there it was. The beast was a hunter, that much was clear, it would see the opportunity and it would pounce. White marble gone red. Finery and bodies torn and torn again. Bulging eyes bursting in their sockets. Gasping throats ripped out, the crunch and snap, gurgle gush and groan and die.
But it didn’t. Of course it didn’t. It paced and snarled and the crowd recoiled and oohed and ahhed, but the cage clicked into place in the bracket space against the wall. Where it had stayed. Where it was locked.
It was from a jungle across the sea, he heard from Donatiya as they slopped the pigs. She said they had started with a party of trappers and trackers and spearsmen half a hundred strong. They set out for a green land thick with trees and lush with fruit and ferns. Only five men had emerged from the ship to collect the reward. Three of them were missing limbs.
Night and day and dusk and dawn, drawn and quartered and threaded and gone. The creature was prodded with spears and barbs to shrieks of delighted rancor, stools were set up for artists and the painterly to come and gawp and scratch their pencils and slop their paints to try to imprison it further on their papers and canvases.
Every so often, the master meats would push one of Bhaal's kin into the cage.
When they did, they would serve the guests layered pastries drenched in syrup, hot enough to blister his hands. The last to suffer as such had been old Keret, and they gathered while his widowwife put his name to the wall underground. Scratched it into the sandstone with her shaking hands til blood ran down from her cracked fingernails and made pearls in the dust.
The hall was golden and candlelit, and the pigs in priests’ robes were there. Gluttonguests of honor. They flounced about in wrappings of white, that which should have been graveshrouds turned into vestments. It was there in that hall he had been consigned, serving and starving with hands full of fine food, wrapped in one of the fine bedlahs that got knotted around the waist of whoever was made to wander the floor and be seen and noticed and touched.
Music strained and looped through the air, flutesong snakes and a stomping horsehoof beat. The housemasters suckled like leeches on the holy men’s words, swelling and fawning and never without a saltwater smile stretching their lips. The air stank of incense and a dozen dozen perfumes. The crowd swayed and bubbled at a dull roar.
There was the Lordmaster, there were his men. The stout man with the khopesh had steel-toed boots. He had kicked little Talliya before the doors had opened, because she hadn’t shined the weapon properly. Bhaal had led her away and borne the other strike upon his back, helped the child gain back her breath, while imagining shoving the sword down the man’s throat and burying it in his stomach. His gutstrings would make fine presents, here, they would roast his heart on the fire, she and the littles could paint the floor with his blood. Let the priests mop it up with their whitesome robes.
None of them were allowed to look the guests in the eyes, so Bhaal had taken to looking at tongues and thinking of ripping them out. From what he could see, the lord seemed distracted that night. His head dipped and turned and cast about the room, he fiddled with a crystal flute and clicked his rings.
“The Lord’s looking pale. Wherefore’s he searching for his sorts?” he asked. Ramas and he had returned to the kitchens at the same moment.
“A visitor,” Ramas said, “from the Murglands.”
“What descends?”
“A crown,” they both shuffled forward in the line, “or a small one. A crown either way.”
“Royal brooding. Which one be it?”
“Tall. Hurbryn, dark, wrapped for winter— face all painted up like one of the Scribe’s damned.”
Bhaal said something like mm. Interesting.
“But,” Ramas shuddered, looking back through the arched doorway towards the burbling bloat of guests, “I like it not. An air about them, both of them. Keep thy curiosities behind thy teeth, for all’s sake.”
Bhaal’s ear flicked towards the scrape of a knife against bone deeper into the kitchens and he felt himself nod.
False assurance bought more time than any attempted explanation, as he’d learned.
Bane swirled his wine and scowled into the goblet. There was ice in it. A novel and exciting way to spoil an otherwise exceedingly mediocre night.
Dhaztanar and the cluster of land that called itself Semphar jutted up against the western borders of Murghôm, and the journey from Murghyr had crossed the breadth of the country. It had been six days and six and a half nights of travelling, as they’d stolen away from Castle Ternwith in the dead of darkness, and admittedly, it was rather nice to be welcomed and ushered into a crystal-spired palace rather than tossing some coin at a glowering innkeep.
Though even those who could afford the ludicrous opulence of such towers and enameled outer wall mosaics had their failings. The hands that’d taken their horses were hesitant and filthy, and though he’d put his own stirrups up out of sheer habit, the Crown Prince of Murghôm’s had been left to snag on whatever happy nail caught their fancy. Such an oversight didn’t even merit being called pathetic, it was just sloppy.
Through the ride hence, woods had turned sparse, then into warm, roiling dunes of sand in the distance and great, baked flats of rock. The air lost all moisture, the ever-present threat of rain far behind them and lingering over the lake. Dhaztanar’s tallest buildings cast glares from leagues away in the comfortable sunlight of the desert, fitting, he supposed, for one end of the Golden Way, where wealth pooled and festered. Night had dropped her blanket just as they’d arrived, and the wretched chill of the desert wind swept through the city and its endless stream of caravans alike.
Acting as a temporary herald, Bane had brought them open gates and a Prince’s welcome into the fine manor they’d needed. And just as the sheafs of parchment in the castle library had promised, the house and main hall were already lit through with flickering firelight, braziers licking up through the open spaces built between the walls and roofs that sheltered them. The master of this particular house was another human, one of the types that was very obviously fighting as hard as he could against the creeping ravages of age, flanked by two tieflings. He conducted himself with an arrogance and grandiosity that would have been better distributed amongst three men, yet still couldn’t manage to keep the startled look out of his eyes when he first clapped his bloodshot eyes on the white clay and ash upon Myrkul’s face. Proof of concept, Bane supposed, that it was functioning as intended.
Tripping over themselves to admit such an illustrious new guest, they’d forced the lord of the house himself to raise his own voice instead of the announcers. The Crown Prince of Murghôm, and… they’d quibbled for a moment, then come back up with “Master of the Horse” for him.
Awe-inspiring, wasn’t it.
Which brought him back to the heavy goblet of average wine and ice. It had been pressed into his unarmored hand, by yet another tiefling. This time, he had seen the three rough black lines down their chin.
Thou lookest as if someone’s poured gall in thy goblet. Were it merely a whisper, Myrkul’s words would have been indistinguishable over the din of noise, but Message was favored for a reason.
‘Tis good as. We are beset already with the chill of night, what good is such a concoction?
Bluster. Our host can afford to store the ice during the day. As if to make the point, the Prince of Murghôm politely took a sip.
I thought he would have had the mind to consider that such a thing is not nearly so impressive to us. The lake freezes near nightly and it is just as frigid here ere the set of sun.
Not all prefer to be baked in an oven as thou seemest to. The day’s heat is not yet spent.
Bane rolled his eyes, casting briefly over the hall. Wind was sweeping through the open wall.
Aye, it shall become even worse the longer we are forced to entertain here. You’ve seen the Scriveners?
Yes.
The priests and nuns flitted about the throngs of people like tufts of wool, dandelion seeds in the wind. Odd, he thought, white for the servants of such a bloody god.
And I have seen none of the scripture we seek upon them. Myrkul continued.
Despair not so easily. You’ve not spoken to one yet.
Then fix a remedy for it.
Fix it thyself! Thou’rt the unexpected event at this ball, surely thou hast some necromantic nonsense to speak of with an acolyte.
Myrkul sighed, but moved in the direction of a handful of white-robed Scriveners nonetheless. Going in the same direction, Bane idly began tracing the hall over the heads of the crowd.
The farthest long side was not even a wall at all, it was a collection of pillars that left the entire gathering open to the night. Beyond, some kind of terraced garden. The far short side had a set of small doors nearly swallowed by a thicket of writhing marble, stark white and washed warm by the braziers that burned by their heads. The opposite was tiered, steps up to a flattened stage where a set of musicians had been placed… rather, chained. Hm.
They were linked together at the ankle, one long chain of clamorous instruments and clanking percussion. He glanced over his shoulder; Myrkul was speaking with the Scriveners, out loud this time, best to leave him to his exceptional social graces. Slavery was not so overt in Murghôm, wrought with deeds of debt instead of irons and manacles, and it was not limited to those with horns. The rest of the floor was peppered with tieflings, bearing serving trays and platters and those same lines crawling down their faces.
They seemed to return to a depression, a trick of a wall to conceal some kind of passageway that likely led to the kitchens, and—
There was something jutting out of the solid wall, clumsily placed and decidedly incongruous. Heavy metal, with bars that had rusted into the socketed fittings that supported the low ceiling. No throng of people gathered around it, which meant it was either empty or what was in it was so commonplace that it no longer merited any interest.
The scriptures are on their person, Myrkul’s voice said in his mind, clay tablets worn as jewelry.
We shall restrategize, then. He paused, Unless thou thinkest thou canst persuade a waif to give up their sacreds here and now?
Ha.
A distraction, then. We must separate one from the rest. Hold a moment, there is something I must investigate.
Blasted heath. A single book would be easy to steal, a scroll even moreso, but such a method of carrying holy texts promised only short verses or parables. And he had no doubt in his own ability to liberate the fragments from their faithful, but the sheer quantity of those in attendance would wind up the hours far beyond that which the party allowed.
The crowd did not part so easily for him, but the way across the hall was relatively short. Slaves scattered out of his way, a small red one passing close to his back. Ferns in ornately carved, heavy receptacles dotted the length of the wall, and pale plaster frescoes were chipping off into dusty piles on the floor. Closer, the cage looked about… twelve feet long, perhaps smaller, and inside was a creature that lay dejectedly against the bars.
The bestiaries had pages for it, a jungle hunter of the western tropics. The bestiaries were also incredibly inaccurate, but that was to be expected from animals the authors had only heard bad descriptions of in their lifetime. This beast had no mane, for one, but it was vividly banded and far larger than a man, bulk coiled atop bare metal and sparse, filthy straw, all of it brown-reds with dried blood.
The entire short wall of the cage looked to be a swinging door, secured by a heavy, unguarded iron bolt. He could imagine at the awe it was meant to inspire, the latest and greatest thing at which to gawp, they spared no expense to entertain Dhaztanar’s finest.
Bane stopped paces away from the cage, watching its flank rise and fall with its breaths. Its green eyes were pale and unfocused, bored with the crowd. Just how much money went into something like this? More sunk into the procuring than the upkeep, living luxury rotting before their eyes, it was—
“Enjoying the view, Ignan?”
The Ignan in question paused. Slitted his eyes at the creature, the cage, then turned.
He looked down his nose at a short barrel of a man with some kind of curved sword imperiously held at his side, at the small squadron of guardsmen in meticulously shined armor. Very obviously imported with the intention of bestowing import.
“‘Tis certainly unlike any other beast in this hall.” he said.
The master of the house’s retinue, no doubt. The stout man chuckled as if he’d done something terribly clever. Roaming windbags, free to wander and drink and insult whomever they pleased.
“Not like any dreck from your swamplands, eh?”
Bane felt his lip twitch up in the beginnings of a sneer, and forced himself to look out to the spread of room before him. Very well, then. Enough had been endured for one night.
“I do wonder at keeping a hunter with nothing to hunt— though, seeing how thy master treats his guards, I suppose I need not.”
A few pikesmen bristled— those minutely clever enough to recognize the beginnings of an insult.
“His care is all for show and none for substance, and ‘tis written over all.” A wave of his gauntleted hand toward the party hid the somatics that produced its echo. “I suppose thou enjoyest it. No risk to thee, though its strength far outmatches thine own.”
The deadbolt was simple, flick of the Hand’s spectral wrist and a crack of the whip to startle the beast, and they’d be off.
“Thou hast all the show of dominance, and yet… I need not go on. The similarities are glaring enough.”
The bolt slid, and was— shoved back the opposite direction?
“That thing took a shipful of men and their lives to bring it back,” the retinue’s spokesman said, completely heedless of the insults, “reckon your Prince’d want for something of the cost.”
“Thou hast vastly overestimated his care for such things. And mine.”
He could hear the bolt grinding against the old iron as he worked it again, and the answering screech as it was again shoved back into place.
“There’d be no reason for him or you being here—”
Scrape. Shove.
“ —less your Murklands want something from our master. And if’n he does—”
Scrape. Shove.
“—there’s a certain amount that goes to the others of the house—”
Scrape. Shove—
Bane whirled around, teeth bared, whatever racket the guard was trying to elucidate completely forgotten, and wrenched the bolt free of its moorings and— the hand of that same scrawny red tiefling.
The cage’s door shrieked open, metal grating on aged metal, and amidst the shouting of the guard behind him, the whip cracked at the creature’s back.
The music faltered, and the gasps swiftly turned to screams, weapons scraped on scabbards and the beast pounced forward, startled, pupils pinpricks of black in that watery green, fixed on some distant point deep in the crowd. Its lips peeled back, dagger-fangs exposed in an enormous feline snarl, and it moved.
Panic well and truly established, a fragment of the guard broke off under no obvious direction, trotting, clumsy, clanking armor after an instrument of death several times faster and more efficient than they. The remainder rather predictably had their attention on him, and the tiefling that had caused so much unnecessary trouble was nowhere to be found. A matter for later.
The fall hitch of the whip slapped the ground as he flicked his wrist. Indignant, piggish fury burned in the short man’s eyes.
Bane smirked in full now, raising his gauntlet in challenge.
Bull-baiting.
It had taken one crack of the whip in the distance for the Scrivener’s veiled heads to perk up like pigeons’, and it had only taken five more for them to cluster together, flighty and quivering, like those same birds.
They’ve retreated, the whole white flock of them, into the high corner, just to the right of the stage. It must feel comforting, secure, but it looked more to Myrkul like a cage of their own making.
“We can look after ourselves,” promised a stooped elder with a tremor in his voice, “we travel nowhere without the Seneschal’s power.”
Murmurs, prayers tumbled forth.
“I do not doubt that,” Myrkul said, looking over the crowd and catching yet another flash of fire. “I think it best if you remain here—”
Another series of deafening snaps scored the air. He resisted the urge to sigh.
“I must… find my compatriot.”
Raise Dead might be best performed out of sight of the Scriveners, if he was to maintain the role of as innocent of a necromantic scholar as could exist. A Shield would do in its stead, just until he was out of view.
The place was run through with bones, it was built on them. A different feeling than the sense of the skeletons beneath Ternwith, but still. Comfort.
Myrkul glanced to the left. The namir— they would call it something different in Common, but the cat was obviously preoccupied with the many swirling targets that the guests had made themselves. Bright colors and loud noises almost certain to attract its attention.
A man missing several pieces of shined armor limped past him, four parallel cuts weeping blood down his face. A curved sword scraped along the tile, loose in his right hand. Headed for the terrace, it seemed, where most of the guests had fled, escaped into the open night while the creature prowled.
“How fares it?” he called.
Bane, who had the majority of his whip wrapped around a guardsman’s throat and was in the process of driving his gauntleted thumb through the man’s eye, pressed the metal further into the socket. It squelched as the man screamed.
“Excellent well,” he answered, “aside from the wretch that sought to stop me.”
Myrkul did not answer, which was most often taken as an answer in itself.
“A servant, some—” and splat went the eye on the ground, “—callow youth was closing the latch, for no apparent reason—”
“I bid him do as such.”
“What?!”
Bane straightened, flicking the whip loose from the corpse’s neck, eyes blazing as he stalked closer.
“Why wouldst thou—”
“I was mere moments from hearing of the state of the Scriveners’ temple,” Myrkul said, “this journey was five tendays in the making.”
“We know already their pilgrimages are slow.”
“I learned that they journeyed by the western winds for the first half. They crossed the Sea to be here.”
Bane’s brows furrowed as he thought, gaze casting this way and that. The location of Jergal’s temple was a closely guarded secret. And finding out more was the first of many steps they would have to take.
“I would not have learned it if thou hadst put thy plan into action earlier. I had to stall thee somehow.”
Bane huffed and tossed a limp hank of hair back over his shoulder.
“And what didst thou do? Pay the child?”
“First, I’m— doubtful that he is truly a child, he may simply be short, second, I…”
That impatient, prompting look. Go on.
“...promised his freedom if he inhibited thee.”
“WHEREFORE WOULDST THOU—”
Bane abruptly spun away from him, hands gnarled into claws, the flares at the end of his hair flickering and and lashing for an instant. Then he huffed a truly long-suffering sigh, and turned again.
“Fine. We will deal with thy charity later, now we must decide upon more than a direction. Thou marshall’st us the way we were going, towards the Alamber Sea, we need a goal. Information.”
“This information is at our fingertips, Bane.” Myrkul said, nodding in the direction of the clustered white wraiths, “Forget not the Scriveners.”
“What dost thou suggest? That we rob them at whip-point?”
Funny.
Myrkul turned, spread his hands, felt for the thanatic threads that wove over the material plane. Death suffused all. Death covered all. And it lay thick here, at their feet.
Pull at the gravedirt, pull at the water, let the onyx hum and sing. A coalition of fresh corpses looked balefully up at him, glazed eyes and soft flesh begging for putrefaction. He could raise them and watch as they waddled clumsily at his commands, burdened and weighed down with flesh and useless organs.
Or choose the alternative. Clean, strong bone, cloaked together in magic and bound to their brethren. Empty, peaceful sockets gazing forwards, as much magic as the flesh-bound, but more dexterous, more swift.
Rise, then. Up from the comfortable darkness of the palace foundations, rise from the mortar and brick-lain crypts. Rise, he has need of them. Rise, give up the respite of the grave, for but a day, then rest will return. Rise, and render aid.
Rise.
When Bhaal was a child, when his horns had just started to grow in, prayer seemed to be the center of everything.
At dawn and at dusk, all his kin would gather in their quarters and carved out hollows under the ground, where it was cool in the day and colder still at night, they would gather and they would pray.
Lord of Death, grant us solace in knowledge that your end is eternal and awaits us all.
They would pray and they would beg, all of them, the old teaching the young, to pray and exalt and beg for a swift death one day, their only hope, their only release from the yoke on their backs. From the chains round their ankles and wrists. From the marks that were slashed onto their faces to show them to the world as such.
Bhaal prayed differently the moment he learned how things could die.
Strength. To break bones, to twist necks, to dig his claws in past flesh, to force a crudely sharpened stone through the gut of a rat he caught, to make bleed and make smaller and make helpless and make dead. Fortitude, to bear the strikes and the scrapes and the thrown-to-the-grounds and the spittle and the kicks.
Lord of Death god of the grave of every wretched thing that has ever sorrowed and died, god of undertakers and the writing on the walls so that we may remember grant it give it will it bless it bless me, bless me that I may broaden your domain bless me that I may inflict it upon others let me repay the pain I have been given a thousandfold bless me that I may kill and kill and kill again in your name, I will kill in your name if only you grant me the power to kill, grant it give it will it bless it bless me bless me bless me please.
And so it went, day by day, dusk by dusk and dawn by dawn, for years. Always praying, always begging, beseeching, claws sunk into the sand for an answer that would not come. The walls grew thicker and more choked with names, they whispered ever louder of the blood that soaked them, he helped move the rocks as they carved out a new chamber to hold more of their dead, more of their names.
Nothing.
Not a word, not a sign.
Not even so much as a shift in the kitchens with a knife in his hand.
He saw many moons and winters, his horns grew taller but never curled back, and in time, new children began to appear in the chambers, tucked behind their parents’ legs, as the begging, the pleading was poured into their ears like water. Like it was life itself. Like that was life itself. Dirty and dusty and smeared with sorrow.
Outside, here, now, where all the guests had fled in all their finery, the night sky was still water. Perfect, reflective, clear and sharp as the ice he stole on occasion, every panicked step was a drumbeat, every glint of light on a jewel or a tooth or the white of an eye a note, the humming gasps and shrieks of terror zithers of strings.
A song, true and real, and to dance with it was like drawing breath.
The blade in his hand, the dark of the night clear to his eyes— all broke. All would break, as the knife slid between ribs and plunged through soft, corpulent richflesh, pale and pestilent and shredded and wet and red, red, red as jewels, as beads as seeds as countless droplets of the sweetest of wine. Blood, life, rich and heady and slicking his arms, puddling around his feet, heavy and metallic on his tongue, laughter, joy screaming up from his raw throat. All was clear.
All was clear.
The guardsman had survived his encounter with the efreeti. He’d been lashed round the leading hand and pulled directly into the path of that black gauntlet, then shoved aside as another keeper ran forward. He’d fled the fight. He’d flown directly out, through the pillars with all the screaming grazeguests, cattle stampeding and trampling.
Bhaal took his time.
Outside on the pavilion, the pillars did not stop. Instead, they turned lighter, into wood, and grew a lattice at their top. It was supposed to be covered with plants or enormous sheets of gossamer fabric, but neither had been demanded, and so, they were easily climbed.
He crouched there, did not blink, did not breathe, coiled his tail around one of the boards to steady his shaking, eager hands and soul. Watched the man stumble and falter, cough and attempt to breathe, eyes fixed on the inside of the hall. Heat and light poured from the inside, new agony screamed melodic into the air, horror, he saw horror and sicked revulsion, terror and pain in the guardsman’s eyes—
Plik went the droplets of blood on the stone.
Plik they went as he looked down and beheld them.
Plik they went as he finally, finally looked up.
Bhaal’s shoulder rattled painfully as he hit the ground, but it blurred and faded like shifting sand. Around the pretty khopesh, between the gaps in the shiny armor that caught the light of the fire inside, and through the leather and cloth and skin. The man screamed, throat taut and bared to the perfect sky. Ash settled on his teeth. Gray on bone white.
Bhaal took the scream, took it in his hands, wedged his fingers into the cavernous, yawning space of a mouth, he took the scream and made it sing. Made it more, so much more, filled it with the crack of bone and the ripwhisper of flesh, the gurgle of blood filling and spilling as he pulled, farther apart for more of the music more of the cries more of all—
“This is the one?”
His head snapped up and around, behind him, an ambush an attack he could fight off.
“The very same. Does thy memory fail thee so easily?”
The Murklands. Yes, that was it. The Crown Prince and the efreeti.
“To be fair, he is quite… changed. From last I laid eyes upon him.”
Bhaal stood. Did not wipe his hands or drop the—
“Is that my knife?” the efreeti demanded, long hair flaring and snapping in the night wind.
“‘Twas easy to take!” Bhaal said, completely without thinking.
“It—” his unarmored hand jumped to the sheath on the small of his back, “How didst thou—”
“Perhaps thou shouldst keep it in a place where thou canst better see it.” the Prince suggested, completely without tone.
The efreeti hissed, water thrown over coals, and a laugh bubbled up in Bhaal’s aching throat.
“I think I shan’t part from this,” he said, “it hath done me an excellent service.”
“And the same would have sufficed for any other knife.”
“We can obtain thee a new knife. And a better scabbard.” said the Prince, obviously used to this sort of thing.
“Absolutely not—”
“There is the matter of what I owe thee,” the Prince went on, speaking over the efreeti’s head to Bhaal.
“Yes!” he shrieked, near-crowed it. “What of it? How wilt thou pay?”
“Thy master is dead already,” the Prince said, “and so are the holy men.”
Bhaal spat on the ground, more blood than saliva.
“They are no holy men of mine.” he growled, “I place none of my faith in the Seneschal.”
“But does the death of thy master complete the matter?”
“Ha! No. It passes like a welcome affliction through the family. Unless thou hast already slaughtered his son, I now belong to him.”
The two went silent for a moment.
“Passage out of the city, then.” The venomous efreeti said, “or thou canst arrange for transport upon a caravan. If he is determined to head anywhere for himself—”
“I do not,” Bhaal said, tilting his chin up at them, “We die how we are made to live. Mostly.”
He stood. Stuck the dagger, his dagger now, through one of the bedlah’s ties. Picked up the khopesh, swung it, spun it, tested the weight and slashed. A good weapon. A very good weapon.
“He’ll come with us.” The Prince said, like a rock dropped into water.
“What.” The efreeti ground out.
“We need someone like him. Someone who can fight.”
“Who can fight— what we have is someone who can slaughter!”
“Is that not better in some regards?”
“To thee, perhaps, but this mission does not require more souls upon it!”
“What is this mission?” Bhaal asked, walking closer. Looking up at them was not anything particularly new, it was rare to meet someone as slight as he. He cocked his head in the efreeti’s direction.
“We seek Jergal.”
“To play cards with?”
“No—”
“Out with the truth then!”
“We seek to usurp Jergal.”
Oh. Well then.
“The information regarding the power of the gods is— fragmented, it is scattered and ill-recorded, but, I believe it is possible for a transfer of power to happen. The power is the gods’ to use and deal with as they please, there is no reason they should not be able to move it as they please. The transfiguration of the material by the divine is documented in legend and myth, and—”
The efreeti clawed his armored hand, staring out into the endless benighted desert. His eyes burned, frantic, feverish.
“And we will be the recipients of that power. Jergal’s power. He will yield it to us, one way or another.”
Bhaal looked down. Considered the point of the khopesh resting on the ground. It was, well and truly, a completely insane idea.
“Very well,” he said, “when dost thou wish to leave?”
They blinked at him.
The Prince looked at him from painted sockets. “Is that all thou wishest to know?”
“If it is as bound to happen as he thinks it is,” Bhaal said, gesturing at the efreeti, “I shall learn more upon the road.”
“That is the least of all reactions I have had to that proposal.”
“I just watched thee unleash a jungle beast on a room full of people. I am out of surprise for the night.”
“We should leave,” the Prince interrupted, “as quickly as possible. There are charred remains in there to which others will not take kindly.”
“And thou knowest the city best,” the efreeti said, “we shall retrieve our horses and… follow thee.” he sighed.
“Right.” Bhaal nodded, moving to that the khopesh’s scabbard, then—
“What are you called? In casing I need to yell for thee.”
“Myrkul Bey al-Kursi.” said the Prince, in a tone that had doubtless been repeated in royal courts.
“Bane Aldrics.” Testing and irritated.
“Bhaal Abiram,” he said, “of the knife, the sword, and freedom.”