When she leapt, Neria's arms and legs pulled back against her body and she became a howling blur of dark metal.
Jaheira took one step back. Her heel found the end of Davaeorn's staff and she stepped down hard; it sprung up, leveraged over his body, into her hands. In a moment, she found the rune of power and swung.
It was like batting a rubber ball. The staff struck Neria and smashed her aside, sending her small, light body against the wall where it rebounded with the horrid shriek of metal on stone and hurtled back at Jaheira, striking her in the shoulder and knocking her out full-length. Her body fell over Davaeorn's.
Neria stood up, snapping her joints. For a moment she resembled nothing so much as an enormous chitin-covered, double-jointed insect. Her clawed hands uncurled.
Using the staff for leverage, Jaheira sprang up. She had it leveled again before Neria closed. They stood, both breathing heavily, and reassessed each other.
"You think I have wronged you?" panted Jaheira. "But at what price your vengeance? You may be alive but you have lost all right to call yourself human. You are less a human being than—that creature, there." She cut her head at Davaeorn.
"He was a fool," whisper-sung Neria. "Too many irons in the fire. I – have only one aim now…"
They both stopped at a voice in the doorway: surprised, faint, and not a little confused.
"I say. What the bloody hell is this?"
Keeping one eye trained on Neria, Jaheira turned her head. A thin elf stood in the doorway, dressed in a tattered robe, his mouth hanging open. Behind him stood Felix and Shar-Teel, craning their heads to see.
The sight of the boy's face should have made her glad, but instead a profound and inexplicable sadness came over her.
"Jaheira!" said Imoen.
"Khalid?" said Felix.
Neria shifted her weight in an instant, without a sound, and flung herself at Xan.
Although tired, starved and giddy with sudden freedom, Xan came to his senses in a moment. Even as Neria's feet left the ground he held out his hand and shouted: "Sivaah Moonblade!"
Jaheira's eyes were hardly quick enough to follow what happened. A small blur shot through the air, quicker even than Neria, and Xan caught it easily and pulled it apart and the air was filled with blue-white fire. He swung. Neria rolled back, giving a scream like a hissing kettle.
Xan stood gasping, holding an unsheated blade that glowed like a fragment of a star. Its sheath lay on the ground by his feet. Neria stood well back of him, trembling as she scrambled upright.
"Oh my god," said Felix.
Xan smiled tightly. "Lucky guess."
Neria clawed at a bookshelf to keep her feet. Blood ran in a twisting rivulet over the contours of her armor-skin. Then suddenly she was still, and her breathing stopped altogether.
Xan and Jaheira, both clutching their weapons, watched her.
She shook her head. When she spoke again, it was in a changed voice: "Interesting."
It took Jaheira a moment to realize what she was hearing. It was a man's voice that now issued from the mouth-hole of Neria's mask.
"There are quite a few of you, now," said the man, and Neria's body was motionless. Then the head moved slowly, mechanically, glancing down. "Well, one less, anyway."
Jaheira flinched.
"In any case, I will meddle no more at present. The matter is of little concern to me, and I would be loathe to attract – attention."
"Who are you?" said Felix, loudly, but Xan seemed to guess something he had not. The elf's eyes were wide. Gripping Felix's arm, he said slowly:
"Master Lightfoot, invoke the name of your god. By Corellan and the Tree we are in more trouble than I could have conceived…"
Jaheira, of a similar mind, called out: "Silvanus! Protect thy servant now!"
Neria, in her now-deep, silvery male voice, laughed and said: "Did I not just say that I was leaving? You flatter yourselves. I have other matters to attend to. Yet—" Again, she glanced around at the ruin in the small room, more than it seemed it could have contained: blood and bodies, splinters and embers. "You have done my work today. I suppose I should be pleased." Her empty eye-holes rose to look directly at Felix. "And I have no doubt you shall, in the future, do my work with a vengeance.
"Good-bye."
Then a whisper, a change in the air, and the black body became a shadow again and sunk against the wall. Jaheira moved to strike but too late: in a moment, there was no sign Neria, only the ordinary shadows cast by the stuttering lamps.
"Mercy," Xan breathed out.
Felix looked from one adult to the other, frantically. "Who was that?—What was that?"
"Cyric," said Jaheira, dully. "The Black Sun. Speaking through his servant."
"I concur," said Xan, still shaking. "You know it when a god addresses you."
The crowd in the door had begun to shuffle forward, Shar-Teel, Felix and Imoen following Xan, Fetch and Carry following Felix. Jaheira stood motionless, leaning on Davaeorn's staff. They all stood together, looking, seeing, drawing their own conclusions, and a long moment followed.
The room was the end of many stories. No one who stood there that day was unaffected, or unmoved.
Fetch and Carry looked at the contorted body scarcely recognizable as the Master. His hands, with the staff torn from them, were contorted over his heart as if his last action had been to clutch greedily at something just beyond his reach. They were too stunned to be happy. In the narrow world of their lives, Davaeorn had been a god, the all-father of gods, and his death was as inconceivable as it was joyous. Joy would come later. For the moment, their dull shock was the same as Felix's, Imoen's and Jaheira's.
Only Shar-Teel looked around with indifference, seeing only blood, a sight she was well accustomed to. She let Felix down when he tried to move, and he crawled forward on his hands and knees.
Jaheira moved slowly across the floor to where Khalid lay. Her face was expressionless.
Khalid's eyes fluttered open.
"I-I-I-is she g-gone?" he asked, a feeble joke at his own expense, as if he had been playing possum.
Jaheira should have felt a mad hope; instead there was nothing. Some internal part of her knew. There would be no second chance.
"Khalid!" Imoen exclaimed, and ran to him. "Oh, you're alright!" she said, trying to hug him around the shoulders.
But Xan stood by the iron table, handling the bloodstained, bone-bladed dagger. "The sacred relic of a mad, dead god of evil." He looked at Khalid, shaking his head. "My friend, I—I honestly don't know what to tell you."
"He's fine!" said Imoen tightly. "We can heal him; Jaheira has spells—"
But Jaheira was silent, holding her husband's hand. Imoen grabbed her shoulders.
"What're you waiting for, huh? Heal him! Heal him heal him heal him! Heal—"
Not unkindly, Jaheira shrugged off her hands. "Silence, child," she said quietly.
Felix sat back, clutching his hurt leg, watching.
"While you are yet with us," said Jaheira, whispering now, "is there—is there anything you wish to say?"
Khalid's eyes seemed to slide in and out of focus; suddenly they settled on Felix.
"F-Felix?"
"I'm here, Khalid. I'm right here."
"C-c-come closer. Will you?"
Felix shuffled closer, until Khalid looked directly up at him.
"F-F-F-Felix. W-we…you…"
Wordlessly, Felix took his other hand. Imoen was looking from him to Jaheira as if they had both gone mad.
"Thank you," said Felix. "I would be poorer today if – if we had not traveled together."
"That's g—g-g-ood…good to hear. F-Felix, I. I'm s-sorry, you k-know…"
"But Khalid. There's nothing to be sorry about."
"F-Felix, your…" Then, strangely, he attempted to move his head, and his eyes swung out toward Xan. He managed to raise his hand and made a pathetic gesture, curling the fingers. Although surprised, Xan understood. He knelt and handed Khalid the dagger that had pierced his back. Khalid accepted it without hesitation: he seemed to bear it no malice.
"No," said Jaheira, but there was no conviction in her voice.
"F-F-Felix," said Khalid, looking again at Gorion's ward, Felix Lightfoot, son of Leticia. "Y-y-y-our f-f-f-f—"
"No," said Jaheira.
Felix felt an impulse to stop him, to yield to Jaheira's wishes; he almost didn't want to hear what was about to be said.
"You f-f-f—" Try as he might, Khalid could not pronounce the word. His face was growing paler, and his lips trembled more violently. Far from seeming pained, a smile was beginning to spread over his face, and his eyes cut from Jaheira to Felix as he pronounced with something like rapture: "Felix your f-f-f-a—"
His eyes fell shut again. His lips, paralyzed, stopped making sound. Jaheira's eyes shut. Felix fell back, releasing the dead man's hand, looked at the ceiling and moaned.
He understood.
Vaguely, as if in a dream, he heard Jaheira speaking: "Silvanus…guide his soul to the light…send him to the end that he deserved..."
After that, the world became splinters. Waking later, he would remember scenes and glimpses, but not how his legs had carried him from unbearable encounter to the next. He must have moved on his own, but it had been as if in a trance.
He remembered—
A huge shining disc, like a metal sun, glaring out of the wall in front of him. He tried to comprehend what he was looking at it; what he was meant to do with it. Imoen shook his arm and repeated to him over and over until he finally understood.
The disc was a metal plug that held the water back. If it were opened, using a key that Fetch had found in Davaeorn's study, the river that had carried them this far would flood through the tunnels, purging everything.
He looked behind him, at the wraith-like bodies of slaves pressed rank on rank. For a moment he sincerely believed that he was in hell. Then he shook his head, and for a moment could think clearly.
"Yes," he choked, "do it! Flood it. Drown it. Drown everything. Do it."
Then there were patches of darkness. Movement. Shouting and singing.
The slaves teemed about in the open bailey aboveground, raising their arms to the heavens, embracing each other and weeping. Fetch and Carry worked together to support an old man – or a man who had come, through many hard years of life, to seem old – who looked at each of them in turn with tears in his eyes.
The sun looked hatefully down on everyone. Felix wanted to shoot it out of the sky.
Then there was sitting on the grass, in the cool, immense night, with the sound of crickets everywhere. Cool. Wet. Open. Free. He sat and clutched his knee, his splinted leg straight in front of him, and looked at the ground.
Far off in the forest came a keening sound, like a wild animal. He remembered, after pondering it for minutes, that it was Jaheira. She was out in the woods by the burial-mound she had dug herself, where they had laid Khalid to rest.
The memory returned to him over and over as he kept forgetting, and each time it was as painful as the time before. He brushed off hands and questions fluttered past him unheard. He sat on the grass, his head spinning, while Jaheira wailed a dirge in some ancient elven tongue that only Xan understood.
Xan was smoking a pipe. "Really," he said, "I'm sure he was a very brave fellow and all, but the woman does carry on so."
"W-what're you saying?" said Imoen, in her now-hoarse way, angry but also puzzled. "It's l-like she barely cares at all! You saw the way she was; she didn't say anything; she just carried him out there…Didn't say anything…Didn't even cry. Just said that little prayer, and s-singing this song I guess is the first thing she's really done…I-I guess that's just her way, but—how can you say she carries on?"
"You both don't get it," said Felix, and was astonished that he had opened his mouth. They were astonished as well. "You see…" he began; it was the first time he had spoken since they had come out under the sky. "Jaheira's – half-elven. Imoen, she – she'll have other lovers. She's been alive a long time. But Xan – she won't live forever. And Khalid, he – he meant a lot to her. I think."
Then he was lying down, feeling as if they were asleep but somehow still thinking, when a sudden awareness caused him to open his eyes and raise his head.
An unfamiliar female face hovered over him. It was not Imoen or Jaheira, and for a moment he was panicked—then he recognized the filthy blonde hair, the hollowed cheeks, the unsmiling mouth.
"You," he whispered. "What – what do you want?"
Shar-Teel looked at him for a long time, kneeling by him. Then she said, with a quiet, smothered hatred: "No. I don't care if you never knew him. You don't know what it's like."
Then she was gone, too, and he rolled on his side and blankly wondered why, why, why.