A/N: Got this out a fair bit later than I hoped. Still, here it is, now with plot progression!
Chapter 17: The Seedy Underbelly of Baldur's Gate
"-. .-"
Cyrus had almost been arrested on the spot when he emerged from the previously scream-filled homestead looking like gory death on two legs. He'd almost been attacked outright even. The Flaming Fist mercenary had balked, drawn his sword and looked about to rush between him and his Resilient Sphere.
Unfortunately for the man and the boy in the protective forcefield, the blind, gore-splattered dwarf was disturbed, achy and very, very aware that he had just been stabbed over a dozen times. Stabbed over a dozen times because a fool of a boy had been skulking around at night aiming to sneak into the Umberlee Temple only to linger in a dark alley longer than he planned after he thought he saw something flying overhead. Which was probably Cyrus himself, but the dwarf so named felt in no way charitable enough to cut the fool boy any sort of slack for the minor part he played in his abduction, or anything else.
Oh no, there was no mood left to indulge in any sort of nonsense. "Oh you poor boy… You are IN SUCH TROUBLE! What in all the planes were you thinking, child?! Gallivanting through the streets at night?!"
"What... but... but it wasn't my faul..."
"Oh no, you don't! If you want to play the odds, you had best be sure you take responsibility for yourself! The goddess of luck does not endorse DUMB luck or foolish risks! Your father is a priest of Tymora! Would you have me think he hasn't explained this to you over and over?! I swear, if you were mine you'd be off to your room and never see the outside of it before you're four score and twenty!"
"But… I… I…awe…"
"Not another word, lad! The smiling lady condones adventure not blind stupidity! Why I ought to…"
Casson opened his mouth-
"Young man, the next thing out of your mouth had better be silence or the words 'Yes Sir!' or so help me, I will put you over my knee!"
Casson gaped at him, stunned, then when he noticed the utterly livid glare Cyrus was sending him he shut his mouth, gulped and meekly said "Yes sir."
Cyrus managed to hold his glare for a few more seconds, but then he sagged wearily and dismissed the Resilient Sphere with a brief wave of his hand, sighing. "Right then. Come over here and let me check on you properly then."
That had been fifteen minutes ago and he still hadn't gotten around to actually doing that due to the Flaming Fist mercenary. Well, not from close up. The man had balked and hurried to keep the two as far apart as he could, denying him his intention to check on the lad on account of not taking him at his word. The dwarf looked too much like an insane murderer himself with that glare and all the blood on him, he said. Go figure. Cyrus supposed he could probably have used one of the dozen other responses he'd lined up instead of going back downstairs, ripping Neb's head off and coming back out to push the blood-seeping thing into the man's arms as "evidence." Unfortunately for the man's currently upturned stomach, as he'd noted before Cyrus was in no mood to indulge any sort of extra nonsense.
Now he was being "escorted" both in front and behind by Flaming Fist mercenaries, the original one, Marvin, behind him with Casson – who kept staring at him thinking Cyrus couldn't feel him doing it – and the other leading them to the Flaming Fist Headquarters in the city's Southeast, a woman named Schael Corwin. She was broadcasting plenty of suspicion and outright mistrust. Not openly, but Cyrus had yet to run into anyone whose soul state was hidden from him. Well, except Torrin Ironstar but he wasn't quite sure about him yet. Corwin also had some well repressed indignation over being assigned night time patrol duty but Cyrus could only guess at the reason. The other mercenary had treated her with deference and even gave her a verbal report when they met up, despite them being of apparently equal rank. Recent demotion then? There didn't seem to be any probable cause for such a thing. The dwarf couldn't see any arrogance or ambition in her, not ambition for its own sake at least, and all the deaths she'd inflicted had been against criminals or otherwise in the heat of fighting. Fairly expertly too. As far as law enforcers went, she was among the cleanest he'd met so far. Perhaps that was the reason? The Flaming Fist had some rather serious corruption issues going on at the moment.
Still, as much as Cyrus would have liked to know if and how Angelo Dosan might have been behind her predicament, that was just one of many things on Cyrus' mind as he walked down the street, and not even the most important. No, somewhat older matters weighed on him, chief among them the confusion over why his odds of dying hadn't shifted when he made the Teleport scroll back at the Friendly Arm. Granted, he'd used five charges from Father's Staff of… Circumnavigation? It was a good enough name for a Staff of the Magi with such an unusual spell set, Levitate instead of Web, Etherealness instead of Planeshift and, a pleasant and convenient surprise despite the lower arcane circle, Overland Flight instead of Monster Summoning IX. Easily the most useful spells among the schools Father was barred from. If Gorion had had it during the ambush, they'd have escaped easily or more likely won outright.
The odd foursome emerged from the decrepit alleys onto one of Baldur's Gate main streets, but Cyrus didn't pay that much mind even though he had to tune out the rapping that the two human's metal boots started to make on the cobblestone. Not a difficult task, especially compared to ignoring the incessant itch in his eye sockets.
Why didn't the act of scribing a 5-th circle spell cause a reaction? If his theory about Mystra's increased attention was true then it explained why he didn't feel anything amiss when he cast Make Whole & Fabricate the day prior, but the Teleport scroll had come after the revelation of Elminster's daughter and Mystra's subsequent involvement.
Cautiously, the dwarf built the matrix for Clairvoyance in his mind and then psionically grabbed the Weave and formed it into the proper shape.
The invisible magical sensor appeared around the corner of the home they passed through. Cyrus didn't get any feedback from it – he'd have had to be connected to the Weave for that, another spell to add to the list of those he had to psionically duplicate – but it didn't matter. He only wanted to see if the odds of his death would mount again and they hadn't.
How curious and unhelpful.
Over the next few minutes Cyrus repeated the experiment half a dozen times, this time merely casting Greater Magic Weapon over and over on his sword and the two magic stones he palm-spun as he walked. All entirely Weave-based and yet the odds of his death stayed null.
What had he gotten himself into? And could whatever it was not be bothered to conceal him or whatever it was doing while he was fighting that insane creature in the slums? Or did combat somehow make it harder to do for some obscure reason?
He suppose he was about to find out.
Cyrus Anwar suddenly came to a halt in the middle of the footway, causing Marvin and Casson to almost bump into him. He ignored both of them, looking instead down at the ground. Or, rather, the slithering combination of hunger/darkness/madness that had just entered his range up ahead.
"Hey! A little warning!" demanded Marvin the Mercenary. "People are walking here! Hells, you should be walking!"
Cyrus continued to ignore him and kept watching the soulless pustule coming towards them from underground.
"I hope you have an explanation for your sudden halt, sir," Corwin said curtly, arm on the hilt of her sword.
"I feel like death," the dwarf said flatly, sniffing the air. "I smell like death, after a fashion."
"You stopped in the middle of the road because you smell like death," Marvin repeated incredulously, oblivious to the menace that was almost upon them.
"That's right. Also," the dwarf suddenly exploded into motion, leaping in a whirl and nailing the man behind him in the chestplate with a double kick that sent the mercenary flying "Carrion Crawler," he finished as he landed. Then he grabbed a fear-frozen Casson under an arm and jumped away just as the sewer grate beneath his feet blew upwards, smashed through by a monstrosity with the appearance somewhere between centipede covered in pus-spilling boils and tentacle monster.
Cyrus landed on the other side of the road the moment the aberration realized the failure of its ambush.
"By the Gods!" Corwin cried, drawing her sword.
"Umberlee's salty trench!" Marvin cursed. Unfortunately, even though he was no slower to the draw than Corwin he was already on the ground and, more importantly, within lunging distance of the monster, something said creature realized as well.
"Argh!" Marvin cried out, trying and failing to roll away from the monster. The 5-meter-long crime against nature emerged fully from the sewer opening and sprung right for him, and though it largely missed him it easily coiled like the arthropod it resembled and nailed him across the front with three of its eight tentacles as it turned. "Curse, y-yo-" the man choked on his words and fell paralysed by the secretions on the tentacle prods, easy pickings for the large, chitinous, yellow aberration.
Which was when Corwin charged shield-first into its front section from the side, crushing an eyestalk and knocking it away from her fellow, or at least drawing its attention.
From what Cyrus could tell at least. He couldn't exactly see properly at the moment.
Fortunately, for most things he didn't need to.
Haste.
Corwin, who'd been about to try and block the crawler's tentacle swipe with her shield, suddenly doubled up in speed and expertly deflected the attack instead, swinging her sword and cutting two tentacles off for good measure. The carrion crawler arched backwards like an injured cat but it didn't sound like one, skittering and clipping its mandibles as its tentacled face hissed and chittered. It would have been the perfect opening for an attack on the vulnerable underbelly but Corwin chose instead to hover protectively over her fallen and paralyzed comrade.
The moment loomed.
Planar trait: non-gravitic.
Weightlessness settled upon him as he overlapped his Astral Realm upon the Prime Material.
There was a reason he made it to Baldur's Gate in six hours despite how the basic spell of flight should have taken ten or twelve. Quite simply, Cyrus cheated.
The blind dwarf flew upwards, then when he was above the monster he waited for the right moment – it came when the crawler decided to grapple with the woman instead of swipe or spit its paralytic venom at her – and reversed direction, hurtling straight for it as fast as he could.
He slammed into the back of the aberration feet first – the monster shrieked like a thousand chittering bugs and arched its body just as he wanted – then he swooped up, locked his arms around its chitinous neck and, leaning on his power of Flight for the proper leverage, suplexed the thing right into the stone-cobbled road, face-first.
Thanking you kindly Thearabho for teaching wrestling so well. The man was getting a hug whenever Cyrus dropped by next.
Half the crawler's teeth – sharp fangs all – got knocked loose or outright flew out from the impact. More importantly, the creature was stunned and easy to roll over, insofar as a 5-meter chitinous worm bug could be considered easy to move at all crawling and writhing aimlessly. The dwarf pushed it off him, flew to his feet, landed next to the monster's head and drew Sightless in the same move, then marshalled his weight and strength to cut the thing's head off with one, clean chop.
The front-most section of the carrion crawler burst free of the rest of its body, then in a display of macabre fortune it landed on the side and actually rolled a few times, finally falling flat at Casson's feet.
Stillness descended and silence fell.
Then the boy fell on his bottom and bent to the side, emptying his stomach.
During the next couple of minutes, Cyrus took advantage of Corwin's attention being taken by her fellow Flaming Fist to finally give Casson that proper health scan he'd been meaning to. It only confirmed that he was fine save for a bump on the head, though the shock of the gory battle, the realization that he'd nearly died (twice) and the horrible stench of the monster sprawled in the middle of the road played their part as well.
"There now, lad," Cyrus said softly, on one knee and rubbing the boy's back while sending small traces of healing energy into him.
Casson shuddered and retched again in spite of it.
The dwarf smiled lopsidedly, rueful. "It's different when you're conscious for it, isn't it? Almost dying."
"Please tell me you have a way to make me forget tonight every happened," the boy croaked.
"That would only mean you'll revert to thinking night-time wanderings are a good idea," the dwarf said flatly.
Casson moaned piteously.
"Then you'll be back to thinking you'd be able to sneak into the Water's Queen's House without Umberlee's clergy killing you on sight."
The child groaned and wiped his mouth, sick and tired both literally and figuratively, but he didn't say any more foolish things so Cyrus counted that as a win.
Cyrus stood and gave the area a once over, making sure no other souls were nearby other than the three with him and the residents of the various homes around them. Then, since he was quite simply done with all this nonsense, he decided it just wasn't in his best interest to wait for his eyes to regenerate naturally. Unfortunately, curing blindness and deafness wasn't something he'd practiced. Not so unfortunately, his inherent regeneration meant that he didn't need to know that specialised miracle as long as he could take that regeneration and overcharge it.
The dwarf called forth almost every shred of his power in two, bright, misty spheres above his palms, then he pressed them against his eyes.
The itching in his eye sockets escalated to a low burn, but instead of three or four hours for his eyes to recover, they healed in the same number of minutes.
When it was over, Cyrus blinked owlishly to adjust to being able to see again, then he swayed on his feet, feeling an unwelcome weariness settle over him. Like he hadn't eaten in days, not that he was that well acquainted with starvation considering how well Gorion always took care of him. But he'd always have that memory of Khelben finding him in the Candlekeep catacombs and separating him from the Cursed Tome of Everything. The dizzy spell was the same, and that darkness encroaching on his vision familiar.
He willed it off and – Prestidigitation to clean up the new gore and filth from everywhere –reached into the Bag of Holding he had tied to his belt. Gorion had insisted he fill it with all essentials and take it with him. Essentials like the bar of dried rations he pulled out of it. Cyrus ate it quickly, vine leaf wrapping included, and felt a bit more dwarven afterwards.
He came to his full senses to see Corwin looking at him oddly from where she crouched next to her still paralyzed brother-in-arms. More immediately concerning was that Casson had huddled next to him and was basically hugging himself while looking hungrily at the last ration bite. Cyrus blinked at him, chewing slowly and faintly amazed at the oy being capable of feeling hunger after puking his guts out and with the deathly stench of that thing still permeating the air. Then he sighed, pulled out another ration and handed it over. "That there is Bentley Mirrorshade's own recipe, lad, so be sure to mention him in your prayers to the Smiling Lady, eh?" He wasn't even joking, making rations that did their job and were tasty was hard work that even Imoen had never mastered.
The boy nodded furiously and proceeded to seemingly inhale the bar, though he did take the time to cast the vine leaves aside. Ah, children's whims. Cyrus wondered what his life would have been like if he'd been able to feel them.
Probably a lot harder on Gorion. Then again, maybe not.
Setting those thoughts aside, the dwarf ate the last piece of his own ration and went over to the fallen man to heal his paralysis under Corwin's wary permission. He didn't actually figure out how to do that either, but he did manage to give the man's fortitude the boost it needed for Marvin to recover on his own.
Then, Cyrus walked over to the sewer opening and gazed down into its dark depths. Or, well, grey depths since he could see in the dark just fine now that his eyes were healed, even if darkvision came in black and white.
"What is this thing?" Casson asked from where he'd walked to stand near the monster. He looked like he was seriously contemplating poking it with a stick. Or a toe, since he lacked one.
"Carrion Crawler," Cyrus answered, not looking away from the sewer opening and ignoring the stench coming out of it. It wasn't any worse that the foul odour of death given off by the monster itself. "A burrowing aberration from the Far Realm, the plane of madness. It generally scavenges the dead but it will prey on the living occasionally as well, especially when summoned and commanded to do such things by a capable enough spell caster as happens to be the case here."
"Wait, what?" Marvin rasped, still sluggish but now able to stand.
"Not as eloquently as I would have put it but pertinent," Corwin added, walking over to stand next to the dwarf. The woman seemed to think and her soul light wavered between suspicion and discretion. "Citizens have been randomly disappearing from this section of the city over the past few weeks. Initially the disappearances were scattered but lately people have been disappearing from the streets of the city every night. We have actually been scouring the city trying to find the culprit, but so far to no avail. People have begun to get scared, and very few are willing to leave their homes at night." The woman grimly looked from the sewer opening to the monster and back. "I suppose now we know the one responsible." And the suspicion emerged stronger than ever. "Tell me, though, since it does beg the question. How claim you to know the answer to what the Flaming Fist has been working day and night to find out?"
The question was one he expected but while he never lied that didn't mean he answered every question someone posed.
Instead, the dwarf gave the three humans there a roaming look, re-read the murderous history of the aberration that lied dead in the middle of the road and nodded to himself, then reached up and sent a pillar of pyrotechnic sparks into the sky.
"What are you doing?" Corwin demanded from where she'd leapt back the moment she saw him using magic.
Cyrus could have told her many things in response. Like how he did just go through a night-time sprint, saved more than one life and also happened to be in the unenviable position of having been stabbed to near death several times tonight. He also could have explained how and why he decided that he was simply done with this reactionary nonsense. But he hadn't been asked about any of that, so he just said "Sending a signal to any other Flaming Fist nearby."
Then he jumped down the hole.
"-. .-"
"So let me see if I have this down correctly. You jumped into the sewers in the middle of the night, fought your way through half a dozen monstrous spiders of three different kinds, killed a… tribe of kobolds including their 'god'."
"Actually a shaman," Cyrus noted from where he was sitting on a stool and prying off whatever pieces of acid-corroded splint mail still hung off him. The gathered people gave him looks of various sorts though, as far as he could tell from their souls since he wasn't really looking at them, so he decided to elaborate. "I tossed a fireball at them as I passed by."
"Right, so you fought your way through half a dozen monstrous spiders and then killed half a tribe's worth of kobolds as you passed by, then you retraced the path of the carrion crawler to what turned out to be an ogre mage summoner who'd been using the sewer system as a lair from which he sent out carrion crawlers nightly to kidnap people for treasure."
"That was the essence of his monologue, yes," the dwarf confirmed, dropping yet another bit of metal on the pile that used to be his suit of armour.
Officer Scar of the Flaming Fist shook his head. "At that point the ogre mage attacked and unleashed two more crawlers on you and the two Flaming Fists that followed you down there. You focused on the crawlers to take them out before they could paralyze anyone, which allowed the caster to get off a fireball – which burned everyone but you– and a hail of acid arrows – that missed everyone but you."
"Don't remind me," Cyrus grunted, tossing out the latest bit of metal from his now useless armour and glaring at the pile of metal disgustedly. Hell of a time for enemy casters to get smart and target his equipment rather than him directly. "This is the second armour that didn't live to see its second day. One more and this is going to become a truly aggravating theme." And this one didn't have the excuse of poor iron either.
Scar shook his head, increasingly baffled. "Irritated by the damage to your equipment, you then proceeded to…" The man paused, blinking, before continuing to read with a distinct hint of incredulity. "To tackle the ogre mage, grab him by the scruff of his leather tunic and fly him out of the sewers through the nearest opening – incidentally shattering his collarbone against the side of the pothole edge – after which you flew straight up another 20 meters, spun once to gather momentum and hurled the ogre mage straight at the ground, which concluded with the creature broken and dead in the middle of the road."
"Seems to be a theme with him," Marvin muttered from his corner. "He left the kid and the crawler in the middle of the road too."
"Maybe he should have left you on the side of the road then," Casson muttered from the small stool next to Cyrus.
Officer Scar sighed, rubbing circles into his temple where he sat at his desk, setting Corwin's report of her night shift aside and taking up Marvin's. His rumpled state was indicative of having been roused too early but he was alert enough despite that. "So, putting aside the misunderstanding that preceded all this, you undertook the chain of events I just described after hunting down an elusive serial child killer and rescuing his latest intended victim. Something that involved a life and death battle with the enslaved spirits of 32 children, an engagement during which you were cut, skewered, stabbed, slashed – once even across both eyes which should have left you permanently blind, barring clerical intervention – and otherwise cut up…"
"… 15 times," Cyrus supplied helpfully. Then, when everyone from the secret evil turncoat to the second-in-command of the Flaming Fist stared at him, he shrugged. "I regenerate."
"Right then," Scar uttered, not knowing what else to say. Cyrus sympathised with him. The craggy-faced man – Harold Loggerson – was a firm believer in the law and devoted to the ideals of civilization and, more than that, his commander Duke Eltan above and beyond even his own life. Scar's history of kills and near-deaths was vivid even though his spirit wasn't particularly bright. Neutrally-aligned souls were like that, Cyrus had noticed. Constricted and dimmer than they should be as a result of the self-rejection inherent in living by the idea of balance between good and evil. But he wasn't going to hold that against a human when the gods themselves worked by the same fallacy more often than not.
"There is something in all of this that just doesn't make sense,' Scar finally said, dropping Marvin's report on the existing pile of paperwork. "How did you know to go and do all that?"
"Yes, how did you know?" The Flaming Fist officer who ostensibly had the night shift asked, voice a perfect blend of curiosity and polite suspicion. "To hear Marvin say it, you were just walking along the road in the middle of the night only to suddenly stiffen and charge off in a random direction like a bat out of Baator."
Cyrus looked at the questioner for a long, long moment.
Then he hummed, pulled his pipe from his bag, lit it, drew a long pull of smoke and, after ignoring the glares and Corwin's protests in particular over the disrespect he was showing Scar in his own office, exhaled the smoke straight in the direction of the one who'd asked him the question and answered Angelo Dosan completely seriously. "I'm a Bhaalspawn. I just know these things."
"-. .-"
They wanted to arrest him, obviously. Especially the lower-ranked and excitable. Like Marvin.
Try it, lad, and I'll turn you into a lemming.
It was what Imoen would have said anyhow. And though he couldn't cast Polymorph, Rodent Form was just one of many interesting spells he'd acquired recently. Rhialto's spellbook had been useful like that.
How can you just say that so easily?
That had been Corwin. A truly honest person, Cyrus thought as he beheld the breaking dawn. Almost as honest as him.
Because having murderers or madmen for parents wasn't a punishable offense in the Lords' Alliance, last I heard.
The dwarf looked away from the sunrise and slowly descended, resolving to acquire a timepiece at some point. He'd almost run late to his meeting. Not that the one he was meeting knew of the meeting but he was going to be meeting him anyway.
Now if you'll excuse me, I am on a timetable so I simply must be off.
Cyrus touched down lightly on the roof and inspected the grounds of the estate he was on. It wouldn't do to be spotted by any roaming guards or early-working servants.
You can't expect to walk out after just blurting something like that!
Scar had cut in at that point, dismissing the increasingly agitated Marvin and asking Cyrus what his plans were, particularly if he intended to be in the city for the foreseeable future.
I'm afraid not. I only arrived last evening and expect to be gone by afternoon. I have some matters to see to, a fair bit further south.
Angelo Dosan's nearly lightless spirit had churned viciously even though he didn't show anything openly. No doubt he would be reporting him to Sarevok immediately. Possibly had already, in the time since he left the Flaming Fist Headquarters and went invisible to avoid any chance of Angelo trying to ambush him or send stalkers after him. Cyrus didn't mind people knowing he'd been in the city. He counted on it actually. All the better for Sarevok not to expect him to be anywhere near Nashkel or Cloakwood in the near future. The dwarf hadn't intended these outcomes at all when he decided to fly over but he was going to make the best of the random encounters.
Please wait here for a time, then. There are some loose ends that must be settled before you leave.
Which was another way for Scar to say he was getting paid. A lot. A thousand and a half gold for the ogre mage, two and a half thousand for Neb, and an additional bounty of three thousand gold paid by the Sashenstar family for discovering the fate of their daughter, one of many whom the ogre mage's crawlers had claimed. He would also have gotten Neb's soul pearls, which Scar's men had gathered up along with everything else relevant in that homestead. But he gave those to Corwin and told her to offer them as sacrifice to the nearest Ilmater temple since she was a member of that particular congregation. In all, even without those gems his new fortune added up to seven thousand, enough to buy a high-end house within Baldur's Gate's inner walls and still have some left over.
Still nowhere near the amount it would take to buy or build something as opulent as the estate he was standing on top of, but that wasn't what he was here for. Speaking of which, it was about time. Early enough for some measure of privacy but not too early for the hour to seem too ungodly.
Cyrus lifted off the roof, descended until he reached the window he needed, checked to make sure it really was the right room, then settled in his position and rapped on the window with the tip of his pipe stem.
Two minutes and several raps on the glass later, the rumpled but alert lord of the manor threw his window open. "Either this is a prank, a damned bird or a really unimaginative assassination attempt," he muttered and stuck out a heavy crossbow, loaded for bear. "Who's out there!?"
"Greetings."
"Tyr's bollocks!" Entar Silvershield jumped, startled oath spilling from his lips as he backed away as much as he could, pointing his crossbow straight at where the dwarf stood horizontally on the wall, the man having missed him completely despite that the dwarf hadn't been trying to hide at all. Within the room, Cyrus sensed the man's wife coming awake suddenly, soul light flaring in fright. "How the… Who in the Abyss are you!?" The man demanded.
"I am Cyrus Anwar, son of the Sage Gorion of Candlekeep and technical Bhaalspawn."
The crossbow bolt smacked him in the forehead.
And that was why he'd taken to smoking his Pipe when meeting important people. Protection from Arrows was a matter of life and death.
Rubbing at his bruised skull with the back of his pipe hand, Cyrus used the other one to hold up Eddard's cloak clasp along with the letter he'd had the younger man write his father the previous night. "I come in peace," the dwarf drily told the trigger-happy man before he had a chance to fully reload. "Really."