A brief diversion back into Baldur's Gate, with no connection to my previous BG story or characterizations. A somewhat different style this time, more centred on moments and vignettes, and intended to be six parts long. As always, I own little, and reviews and thoughts are always welcome.

Part One: The City of Coin

The wind coming in off the docks was brisk and freighted with salt. Even this late, the city below thrummed with the clamour of the night, footfalls and running and half-shouted conversations. Tayna leaned out of the casement for another long moment, her gaze picking out the torches near the market square, the wide looping lines of the alleyways, and the white-tipped roll of the waves.

Grudgingly, she slouched back in the windowseat. As reluctantly, she stared at the room around her, the heavy fall of the drapes and the table with its assortment of lanterns and parchment and the dagger she had left there.

Strange, she thought, to be back in the world and to have it change again so rapidly, so joltingly fast.

Fifteen days past, they had crammed themselves into one of the smaller rooms at the Copper Coronet, and only then because Jaheira apparently knew the stocky man at the tap. Fifteen days, while she had tasted the heavy stink of Irenicus' dungeon still on her clothes and in her mouth and along the shiny stripes of her scars. Fifteen days, while Yoshimo murmured that he knew something of the thieves here, of the way they worked, of the way they flitted through the city as if it might be theirs. Fifteen days, while she had begun to remember how to tease open locks and palm her daggers quietly and viciously and then, eventually, she had been introduced to Mae'Var.

And this morning, while the dawn light was still grey, she had killed him, her dagger carving his throat apart.

The knock at the door startled her out of her thoughts. "Yes, what?"

The door opened, letting in a flood of candlelight and Edwin Odesseiron, red robes whispering over the plush rugs.

"Oh, hello." She jerked her head at him, motioning him in. "Should I even ask why you're lurking around at this time of night?"

"Am I to presume from today's little adventure that you continue to work for Renal Bloodscalp?"

"Still haven't quite grasped the concept of a conversation, I see. And yes, with a name like that, when he hands me a guildhouse, how could I possibly say no?" When his expression stayed unreadable, she sighed. "Alright. You know what? I'm more strapped for coin than you probably were when you turned up here."

"I was not."

"Sure. You just got bored and decided to try a job change."

The side of his mouth shifted. "Mae'Var had need of my skills."

"Fair enough." She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, tired suddenly, the feeling of it washing under her skin. "Look. Think this through before you tell me I'm insane, alright?"

Edwin scowled. "Why? Are you about to propose marriage?"

"Nothing quite so terrifying." She let her hands slap back down onto her knees. "You want to work together?"

"Together," he repeated, as if she had asked him casually to take a stroll off the edge of the world.

"Yes. You and me. Well, and everyone else."

His eyes narrowed. "Why?"

"Because I need a heap of gold. And you look like you could do with some fresh air."

"A searingly witty observation."

"I need a spellcaster, alright?"

"Ah. Now we come to the why of it." He clasped his hands together, his fingers heavy with the glint of jeweled rings.

"Gods above and below, you're stubborn as granite, you know?" She glared up at him. "I've only been in this city a few days. I've got nothing past a handful of copper, some shaky alliance with Renal Bloodscalp, and a long way to go to find Imoen again."

"I noticed her absence." His head tipped to one side. "How exactly did you manage to fail so spectacularly this time?"

She pushed back the sudden, vicious urge to shout at him to leave, take his damn spellbook and the slight smile she could see on his lips and walk away from her. "We were caught. Ambushed. And after a long time underground, we got ourselves out and that's when the damn Cowled Wizards showed up. They took her and I need to get her back. Along with lots of other trivial details."

"And so you come to me for help."

"Yes, I suppose so, and you can wipe that smug smirk off your face before I punch it off, wizard."

"Well," he said, and grinned mirthlessly. "Let us see if we can come to some beneficial agreement."

"The usual. You put in a share of the work, you get a share of the gold. You get too scared of anything big and ugly we need to fight, you can leave."

"As if I have ever shied from the battlefield," he retorted. "You have a plan?"

"That heap of gold I mentioned. Should get me some more help from the Shadow Thieves."

"Friends in low places," Edwin said, musingly. "This will take time, you realise."

"Of course I realise. Though I'm not exactly planning on lazing around for the next few weeks."

"No, I'm sure there's work aplenty for someone who enjoys rushing into fights with the kind of insane abandon you usually display."

She spluttered on a sudden laugh. "Gods, Edwin. And here I was worried that you'd've changed."

"Changed? Me?"

"Maybe found a heart somewhere." She pushed upright. "You want to stay on at the guildhouse? And no, I haven't checked the rest of the rooms for fleas just yet."

"Shame," Edwin said mildly. "Then we are agreed?"

"What, you want a handshake now? A scrawl in ink or blood?"

"Ink often stains worse than blood."

She grinned, crookedly. "True. Deal?"

"Very well."

"And yes," she said, before he could say anything else. "I'm sure you'll live to regret it, as well."

"Of that I have little doubt."

Left alone with the quiet and the fluttering lanternlight, Tayna leaned over the table. There, she blinked gritty eyes and forced herself to look at the mess of parchment again, names and numbers and Renal's brisk, unflinching instructions. Last remnants of Mae'Var's treachery to be chased down and done away with, and gold to be funneled through the docks and into Renal's counting-rooms, with the hazy promise of help to Brynnlaw Island.

Scowling to herself, she traced her way down the first sheaf of parchment again, the letters buckling under her gaze. Giving up, she trudged her way back into the windowseat and curled herself there until the lanterns sputtered out and sleep finally claimed her.

The morning brought the scent of brine at the windows, and Jaheira, as she bustled in, a tray in one hand. "Tayna? You're awake?"

"I am now." Squinting, she straightened up and winced when something in her shoulder pulled. "Breakfast? You're too good to me."

"I'm sure," Jaheira said wryly. "Did you sleep?"

"Not well," she admitted.

Jaheira nodded silently. She laid the tray on the table before she said, "It will take time."

"Yes. Yes, I know. I'll get there." The words came out too brightly and too fast, and she damn well knew Jaheira could hear straight through them.

"Yes." Jaheira waited until she was sitting, reaching for the fresh bread and crumbling cheese. "I do not mean to suggest that you are doing anything untoward."

Tayna frowned around the bread. "So what you really think, is..?"

"I know that things are uncertain."

"That's one way of saying it."

Jaheira sat in the chair opposite. "And I know it seems like we must rush after Imoen right away. But we do not know this city, and we do not know its streets or its people."

"You seem to be doing a lot better than me."

"Child. I'm older than you. Yes, I have been here before. A long time ago, before my path was tangled with yours."

"Thank you," Tayna said ruefully. "I suppose I deserved that."

Jaheira's gaze softened. "I simply hope that you are careful."

"I'm always careful. Well, alright. Not always." She stared down at the plate. "I guess I'm trying to find my footing right now. It's a lot of gold they're wanting, and it'll be a lot of days before I can hand it over."

"And every day is a day that Imoen is in Spellhold. Yes," Jaheira said fiercely. "I understand."

She exhaled sharply, the breath rushing from her chest. "And I can't very well do a damn thing to help her if I'm unprepared."

"Yes."

"Can I ask you something?"

Jaheira stiffened slightly. "Of course."

"The guildhouse. Good idea, bad idea, or catastrophically awful idea?"

A smile ghosted across Jaheira's mouth. "Sometimes the way forward we might prefer is not the one offered."

"So, partly good and partly bad. Least I'm not the only one thinking that."

"I did not say that. I think it will serve us well, to a point. Do not mire yourself in too deeply."

"Gods, I'm sorry. I don't mean to heap it all on you." Tayna scooped up a corner chunk of the cheese.

"You are not," Jaheira said, and there was that flatness in her voice again.

That wrenching flatness that Tayna knew masked the raw pain of grief, half-buried. She could ask again if Jaheira was fine, was well, but she supposed there was little point since they both knew it would be a lie. She recalled it, blade-sharp and terrible, how they had dragged themselves out and up into the sunlight, Jaheira on one side of her, Imoen on the other, Yoshimo and Minsc trailing behind. How the broken pieces of lives lay behind them, trapped under the stone.

"Well," Tayna said, her voice shattering the febrile silence. "I suppose I should go and learn just how many thieves are milling around under my roof right now, and how best to make them most useful."

The days unraveled beneath rippling grey skies and slowly, she learned the twisting streets of the city and its darkest corners and the paths the best marks took. Most days found her out of the guildhouse, or else sparring in the small courtyard, padded practice blades with Yoshimo eventually giving way to the careful grace of unsheathed steel. She learned each alleyway and each salt-whipped wharf in the docks, and to whom it belonged, and how best to have her thieves muscle their own way in. Most nights she slept badly, flinching awake when the wind gusted too hard against the casement. More than once she woke sodden with sweat, her heart galloping, and half-expecting to see the shadows shift and blur and shape themselves into Irenicus.

A crisp morning saw her in the courtyard, sword in hand and circling Yoshimo as he watched her with hawkish intensity. He moved first, side-stepping and arcing his blade towards her. She blocked, twisting her wrist in the same motion. Another snake-fast step took him past her and she followed, her gaze never leaving his upraised sword. Across the courtyard and back, and back again, she matched him stroke for punishing stroke.

Deceptively lightly, Yoshimo spun, his blade rattling hard against hers. She lunged further, the hilt of her sword snagging across his. He grinned, his black eyes dancing, and she had time to swear before he twisted, the flat of his blade thudding solidly against her shoulder.

"I yield," Tayna muttered, halfway to smiling regardless. She swiped at her hair, clinging to her forehead. "You win."

"You did well."

"Nice. Placate me some more, why don't you?"

Yoshimo's grin broadened. "Not at all, my friend."

She drove her sword back into its battered, unadorned scabbard. Breathing hard, she yanked at the laces at her collar before she touched her shoulder cautiously. "Be paying for that one in the morning."

She threw another smile to Yoshimo before crossing the courtyard. At the door, she discovered Edwin, standing with his shoulders against the wall and his expression unreadable.

"What?" she demanded. "You're about to offer advice? Suggestions?"

"As if you would listen."

"Well. I might pretend to."

"Charming," he said, angling one eyebrow up.

She paused long enough to glare at him. "I don't lecture you on your spellcasting."

"I beg to differ."

"Alright. That was once."

"You are," Edwin said, and hesitated. "Stronger and faster than I remember."

"My goodness. Was that my one compliment for the month?" She shouldered the door open and winced. "Did you need something in particular?"

"I have a letter for you, and the rather insistence presence of a Shadow Thief – ah, no, a Shadow Mistress – going by the name of Ama, who demands your presence."

Tayna jumped her way up the steps and into the cool gloom of the armoury. "Right now?"

"Not at all. After dark, at the Promenade. No weapons."

She snorted. "Right. She thinks I'm that stupid, does she?"

The wizard pressed a folded square of parchment into her hands. "She is certainly hoping so. (And given some of your prior choices, I can understand why.)"

"Very funny." She cracked the parchment open. "So what did you tell her?"

"That you would meet as requested," he answered, his voice suspiciously bland.

"Mmm. Think she'll mind if I bend the terms of the negotiation somewhat?"

"Given that I am assuming you will not be letting her live past the meeting should she unsurprisingly reveal herself to be treacherous, then I doubt she will have the time to form a significant opinion on the matter."

Tayna hid her smile. "Your mind is a slippery place to be, isn't it?"

"And yours is not?"

"Depends on the mood I'm in."

Rain rolled across the city, hammering against roofs and gutters. Soaked to the bone, Tayna slipped into the guildhouse after sunset, aching from the day and a new slice that crossed between her shoulders. Nodding to the cutpurses at the door, she ducked out of the sheeting rain and upstairs and into the bustling warmth of the kitchen. She paused long enough to peel off her gloves and hold her hands out to the crackling heat at the hearth. Indolent moments later she flopped onto the bench between Edwin and Yoshimo, still close enough to the fire that she could feel the wonderful seeping warmth of it.

"Some days I hate this city," she muttered.

"For any particular reason?" Yoshimo asked.

"Honest thieving's getting harder."

Edwin smirked. "Dipped your sticky little fingers in something you should not have, did you?"

Her cape was heavy with the rain, the long edges of it trailing. She shucked it off, and ignored Edwin's pointed glare when the wet fabric slid against him before pooling on the floor.

"Coming from the man who was hoping to blackmail the previous guildhouse leader, that's delightfully hypocritical." She reached for the ale jug and a cup and poured, waiting until the froth bumped the rim. "Actually I spent most of the morning knee-deep in the gods know what in the sewers, then tried to pickpocket a wizard, and then spent the afternoon in a planar prison. And then I got rained on walking back from the Five Flagons afterwards. Still glad you stayed here today?"

"Overwhelmingly," he muttered. "Wait. Planar prison?"

"Yes, actually." She gulped at the ale. "You remember the tiefling we ran into at the Five Flagons, Raelis Shai?"

"Yes. She wanted help tracking down a missing actor."

"That's the one. You assumed he was face-down in a brewery somewhere, or face-down in a brothel."

Edwin frowned. "And he was not. (A witty observation gone to waste, for once.)"

"No, he wasn't." She grinned and explained, the slow, frustrating crawl through the sewers, the wizard's gem, the whirling portal that had sucked her into the planar prison, the floor all treacherous and moving and sinking beneath her feet when she tried to move too fast.

Edwin blinked slowly at her. "So did you at least manage to acquire anything arcane or possibly useful from this planar prison?"

"Well, I may have made off with a few shiny things. You can look them over and see if anything grabs your fancy." She reached past his elbow, purloined a chunk of bread from his plate, and ignored his scowling response. "I love that you want to know more about the possibility of arcane artifacts than the wyvern I fought."

"The wyvern is presumably dead, and equally presumably, you did not think to bring its skin, tongue or blood for spell components. (Though perhaps understandably, since bottling wyvern blood can be a trial.)"

Tayna grinned and bit into the bread. "You are so predictable, wizard."

"I am not."

She dipped the bread into the rich swirl of the gravy. "So how much fun aren't you having, given the hold the Cowled Wizards have over this city?"

"Most amusing."

"Are you finished eating?" When he did not reply, she eased his plate between them both. "Don't look at me like that. I've had a long day."

"Not long enough to halt the insufferable way your mouth runs."

"You want to get paid this week?"

Something close to a smile threatened at the corner of his mouth. "If at all possible."

The late evening air was brisk with the tang of salt. Tayna sat perched on the wall behind the guildhouse, the long low wall that ran in a wide, lazy loop around the back of the stables. Below, the cobbled streets sloped away towards the wharves, slick with spray and gleaming. For long moments she stared at the heaving surge of the sea, her gaze darting between the ships moored there, masts tilting slightly with every roll of the waves.

Beside one of her elbows lay an empty plate, and beside the other, an ale jug. She lifted the tankard and swallowed.

"I'm impressed. You managed to sneak out without that puppy-dog paladin following you."

Tayna snorted on the drink, coughed. "He's not a paladin. He's a priest. And how is it exactly that you can move so quietly wearing those?"

Edwin glanced down at his robes. "I am a man of many talents. (Not that these simian-brained fools seem to realise their good fortune in having me along.)"

She patted the wall beside her. "Come and sit. What brings you out here, anyway?"

He sat, the folds of his cowl veiling most of his profile. "This morning, you said you needed to speak to me."

"And then we spent the rest of the day running madly around the city. Yes."

"What do you expect if you say yes to every single wretched individual who comes begging to your door with a melancholy story and an implausible excuse?"

"Lovely." She stared at the top of the tankard, aware of the wizard's unusual listening silence. "I don't remember. Not really. Not entirely. I remember some things. I remember Irenicus above me. How he'd cut and watch the blood run, and heal me up, and do it again, and again. As if he was trying to find something in me. Cut something out of me."

The words spilled out in a shaking rush and clumsily she reached for the tankard again.

"He never told you why."

"No. No. He spoke about potential. Gods know what potential he meant. He never – bastard never gave me the courtesy of any kind of explanation."

"He knew what you were?"

Despite herself, she smiled lopsidedly. "Oh, yes. I remember screaming at him what my name was, and he'd call me Bhaal's daughter. Stupid part is that that got me more angry. And he never even told me his name. We got it out of a bunch of terrified dryads he'd gotten his hands on. And no," she added. "I don't know what he was doing to them, and I didn't want to ask."

"Dryads," the wizard said thoughtfully. "What else?"

"Room upon room," she said. "Tanks. Jars. Some of them empty. Some of them with – well, things in them. Things that might have been human."

"So he was experimenting. Keeping captives alive in extreme conditions, perhaps."

"Yes, I thought the same." She grappled with it for a sudden lurching moment, the memory of it swallowing her thoughts. Forcing her voice flat, she said, "He had golems, and a whole damn contingent of duergar. Figured they were smithing for him. That or protection."

"That is quite the set-up." His head turned, his eyes narrowing. "Such an enterprise could not be undertaken quickly. Or easily."

"Or without a heap of gold to smooth the way." She shrugged. "And yes, I'm thinking what you're thinking."

"Are you, indeed?"

"You're wondering, with how long it must've taken him to prepare, whether he was waiting for me, or whether I was the first Bhaalspawn in the region to make his ears perk up."

"I would not have sunk to such phrasing, but yes. I was wondering."

"Thank you."

Edwin frowned. "For what, precisely?"

"For just listening."

"Well," he said, hovering as if he had to search for the words. "I can be magnanimous on occasion."

She nudged him. "Don't make a habit of it. I'll end up not recognizing you."

"I crumble beneath your wit." He turned, quickly enough that his knees bumped hers. "What will you do to him?"

"Find Imoen. Get her free."

"That is not what I asked."

She hesitated. "You going to be shocked if I say I want to give it all back to him, one day at a time until he can't think straight through the pain either?"

Edwin grinned wolfishly, all teeth. "On the contrary, I believe it to be only the beginnings of what you should give to him."

"Oh, you're so sweet sometimes. Anyone ever tell you that?"

"Never, and they would not wish to," he said pointedly. "How did it happen?"

"Why? So you can tell me what an idiot I was when we got ourselves ambushed?"

The wizard's eyebrows arched.

"Alright," she said grudgingly. "We'd cleared Baldur's Gate days before. Just wandering, you know? Nothing to do, nothing we needed to do. Few jobs here and there on the way through the countryside."

"And?"

"And that's actually it. I woke up one morning. It was before sunrise, and after I got out of the damn tent and before I got to the fire, someone had his arms around me and then I hit the ground very hard."

"His?"

"Not Irenicus," she said, and frowned. "At least, I don't think so. I don't know. I don't – some days it's harder to remember. What would you do if you were me?"

The wizard's gaze did not stray from the rolling waves, white-tipped and cold. "Take my anger to my foes, tear them apart, and after that, discover what potential Irenicus was talking about and use it to make clear my own power."

She grinned shakily. "I meant, what would you do if you were me and you had my personality and not yours?"

"Oh, limitations, is it? Then I suppose I would find time to rescue your brat of a friend, eviscerate Irenicus along the way, and then wander in circles wondering just what to do next."

"Sometimes I don't know why I bother asking you anything." She topped up the tankard, hesitated, and held it out to him. "Take it or don't take it."

Edwin clasped his hands around the tankard, eying the ale as if it should have been poisoned.

"Yes, I know you prefer wine. No, I'm not going back inside to find any for you."

"Well," he said, and lifted the tankard. "On such wretched occasions, one must suffer along with the lowborn."

"You're such a bastard sometimes," she said mildly. "Did you stop off in the counting-room today?"

"I did."

"Impressed?"

"Well," he said, and passed the tankard back. "A little."