Writer's note: have noticed that I have consistently been misspelling Balthazar. I may go back and correct this in the fullness of time… maybe.
Wiping his dripping face with his own shirt, Rasaad meandered topless back into the shade. This particular bout of sparring had not been one of his better performances. Sweat made it tough to get a proper grip for wrestling but the oppressive, relentless heat slowed him. He'd won just the same.
"You have sunburn," Viconia remarked frostily.
"I don't suppose you could blow some of your coldness my way?" Anomen moaned. Bards often compared summer in his home city of Athkatla to the inside of an oven, but it had nothing on Amketheran and the knight was suffering badly.
The drow looked down her nose at him. She was not in the mood for humour. Few places in the cool depths of the Underdark could offer anything so blisteringly unpleasant as this place, but this was not her main source of malcontent. Arowan had not only escaped but would soon have the city of Baldur's Gate at her disposal. Lolth's threats, silent since Deepstone but not withdrawn, hung over her still and as for Rasaad… she prodded Anomen with her foot.
"You look weak."
"Brrr. Thank you my lady, most helpful," Anomen grinned. "Verily, your tongue could frost a volcano."
He was swaying slightly, his lips cracked from dehydration. Though he was drinking the same amount as the rest of the party it seemed he was more susceptible to the heat. Viconia folded her arms impatiently. The last thing she needed was for the health of her allies to fail. He was singing now under his breath. Was it merely heat stroke or had the repeated trauma that this rivvil had endured touched him in the head?
Protection from Fire. It wasn't much but it was the only spell she had that might help in this situation. She cast it on him and waited. Gradually, the knight started to relax a little from the discomfort of the sun, but his grip on his armour did not shift.
"Thanks," he panted, closing his eyes and resting his back against the wall.
Viconia turned only to find that Rasaad was closer to her than she had thought and their fingertips brushed as she passed. She was mortified to feel her heartbeat quicken.
"That was kind of you Viconia," the monk said quietly.
He had meant it as a compliment, forgetting for a moment to whom he was talking. From the point of view of a drow, casually labelling her 'kind' was a brutal and uncalled for insult. To denizens of the Underdark 'kind' and 'weak' were synonymous terms.
Viconia hunched up sulkily in the shade, casting her protection spell over herself as well. It offered little respite from the soaring temperatures but a little was better than none. Rather pointedly, she did not do the same for Rasaad.
"What would you do?" Sarevok repeated the question. It was hard to tell with his eyes, modified as they were, but his expression might have been beseeching.
"You're asking me?" Coran blinked. Sarevok was still leaning against the bed post for support. His shoulders had stopped heaving, but his battered spirit had let his body go limp with fatigue like a grotesque seven-foot puppet.
"Yes I suppose I am," Sarevok said resignedly. "You are, after all, Bhaal's closest friend. Nobody has ever really known him better than you."
Coran scratched his auburn hair, wincing at how uneven the length was since Jaheira had butchered it. Once he would have hoped that some of those topless monks might view him with interest. Now he knew that they were viewing him with interest, but their interest lay in how such a scrawny, poorly attired wreck of a man had landed a physical specimen like Sarevok.
"I can't answer."
Sarevok threw a pillow at him bad-temperedly. This had the potential to be a more violent act than it sounded since these monks stuffed their pillows with sand, but it was a half-hearted effort and Coran side-stepped it.
"Sod off then," the demi-god muttered.
"I mean I can't answer that because I'm not you. For me choosing mortal life over ascension could easily mean I'd live another thousand years or more. Whereas you're, what? Quarter way through your life already and half of that will be spent in decline."
"What a sunny picture you paint."
"On the other hand, nobody wants to die. Even if you do know you'll come back as a god. Probably. So long as Arowan and Balthazar don't get their way."
"I've died once. It's not that big a deal," Sarevok replied grumpily.
"If not, you've gone to astonishing lengths to prevent it from happening again," Coran observed. Sarevok watched the elf who was staring at a crack in the wall, a distant expression in his green eyes. What was it about this shallow, unimpressive thief that had bound Bhaal to him so tightly in not one but two lifetimes? Coran seemed to snap out of his reverie and sighed. "Then again you are very similar, you and Freya. In a lot of ways."
Sarevok made a sceptical noise and made to get up. He needed to take a walk and clear his head. Surely it would be easier to think if he could just take a break from the oppressive heat.
As if the universe had read his mind, the sunlight streaming through his window blacked out. The two men looked at each other, puzzled, for there had not been a cloud in the sky not even on the far horizon. Coran raced to the window, looked out, then retracted his head with a yell.
"Oh fuck!" he shouted.
Sarevok shoved him aside and looked out of the window. Perched on the roof above their heads, its scaley neck swinging over the courtyard was a dragon. More of its fellows had crept over the battlements, flicking the defenders over the side as they went. They must have snuck over the clifftop that the monastery was carved into to avoid detection, but the monks and the mercenaries had noticed them now.
Somewhere deep in the temple a gong reverberated and in response the dragons roared. Fire and lightening flashed from outside, as the two men hurried to arm themselves. In the courtyard below, Rasaad was steering Viconia out of harm's way while Anomen hastily donned his precious armour.
"Is wearing dragonhide armour to fight dragons a good idea?" Jaheira hissed. "Don't you think it might infuriate them into targeting us instead of Balthazar's people?"
"I think we are all targets, no matter what we are wearing!" Anomen retorted as screams and wails rose from the unlucky town beyond the monastery's high walls.
Balthazar was hastening from his private rooms from one door, moments before Sarevok and Coran emerged from another.
"What happened to our warning system?" he asked Onoros furiously.
"I cannot tell you why, but the gnome has abandoned his post," the monk replied, pointing at the rooftops of Amkethran. Viconia eyed the unmanned telescope, bit her lip guiltily and said nothing hoping that her role in that would never come to light. So much trouble over a pair of shiny pantaloons.
"Has Abazigal been sighted?" Balthazar demanded.
"No, but that slimy son of his is leading the attack."
Balthazar moistened his lips and smiled. He followed Onoros to the battlement where the beast watched the progress of the assault, head swaying like an eel. The monks had been caught unawares but they were rallying. Cannon and crossbow were firing continually and even as they watched, a green dragon high above them got caught in the wing and dropped out of the sky with a crash.
The dragon who had first approached them on their ride from the undead battlefield was observing the progress of the assault from atop a small watchtower. He was so absorbed in watching the fight that they were able to get quite close before he even noticed them.
"Draconis!" Balthazar called.
"There you are," the dragon smirked. "What a puny little mite you are. You are not worthy to carry our divine blood. Come, let me relieve you of it."
"Not again!" moaned Coran. Who could have predicted that his and Freya's little scam to pass of wyvern skulls as the real thing for money could have ended with him becoming a veteran dragon slayer. "Sarevok, if you can scrape enough scales off the neck I can finish it with an arrow of detonation."
"You seem very confident that this will work," muttered Sarevok.
"Trust me," sighed Coran, "We've done this before."
Sarevok drew his father's sword. His own sword. Was there a difference, really, between his father's possessions and his own? He was coming to seriously doubt it. When he held the blade and thought of fighting dragons, he could almost remember doing so. No specific details, but the flavour of how it had felt to battle a dragon like this one. Was it real or merely his imagination after Coran described it to him?
"Are you alright, my friend?" Rasaad asked, noticing how pale Sarevok had grown.
Sarevok nodded mutely and the party moved in to attack the dragon, following the tried and tested strategy that Coran and Freya had worked out together. Sarevok hacked at its scaley throat with his father's sword, Viconia healed and Rasaad provided a distraction but just as Coran was about to loose his arrow, Balthazar called to them to stop. A single cannon shot rang out from the battlements, puncturing the dragon's left wing, grounding him.
"If you wish to live, wyrm, you will resume bipedal form."
Draconis looked around for aid but none was forthcoming. The attack was failing. Beyond the walls of the monastery many of the houses had been flattened by the carcases of fallen dragons. Abazigal would arrive soon with the main army. Draconis's was only intended as a sneaky first strike, but his father had not broken the horizon yet and would not arrive in time.
He shrunk back to reveal a petulant young man with thin blue lips and watery grey eyes. Though wingless in this form, it seemed his injury still bothered him, since the juvenile dragon cradled his left arm in his right, rubbing it ruefully.
The monks and mercenaries were still running about the courtyard and battlements hollering to one another. A bucket chain was forming from the well to quench some of the more dangerous patches of fire. More dragons had been sighted approaching from across the desert. Balthazar paid them no heed. He and Onoros seized Draconis by the shoulders and marched him deep into the monastery.
Down many flights of steps they descended leaving the scorching heat of the surface far behind them. The battle cries faded until they could no longer hear them and still they continued to descend deeper and deeper down a torchlit spiral staircase.
Following Balthazar, the party had to go slower now for there were no handholds but the walls were growing damp at this depth. A slippery moss had colonised the steps beneath them. It was hard to make out against the gloomy torchlit stone and more than once they came close to losing their footing.
The further down the corkscrew spiralled the tighter it seemed to wind. Narrower walls made even the air seem thinner. None of them found it comfortable but Viconia especially was growing edgy in the darkness.
"A little too close to home drow?" chuckled Sarevok.
"Silence, eunuch!" she spat contemptuously. "I refuse to be mocked by a louse so cowardly that he would willingly allow himself to be gelded of his own divine essence!"
Suffocating, stale air. It even tasted faintly of the nasty ankle-twisting moss. At last the stairwell came to an end, deep in the rockface. A short corridor was split into cells. Some of them had been bricked up and at first Coran thought that they had reached a deep catacomb. Perhaps the sacred burial place of honoured monks. Then he heard mumbling from behind the bricks.
"By the gods, is this a prison?" he gasped in horror.
Draconis was eyeing the cells in trepidation, and Coran did not blame him. He could think of few worse fates than to be bricked up in one of these tiny rooms. Each had a few bricks missing near the top to pass in food and a filthy, stained chute about an arm's width leading out of them near floor level. No need to ask what those were for; each was directed into a small bucket of excrement.
"No, it is not a prison," replied Balthazar. "This order has a tradition of cloistering. The monks here have chosen to live a life of solitary meditation."
The dragon looked at the bricked off cells, aghast. Why anyone would volunteer for such a life of darkness, filth and deprivation was beyond him. Coran and Sarevok both turned automatically to look at Rasaad but judging by the expression on his face, even the Selunite monk struggled to see anything in this but madness.
"Monks make the stupidest humans," Viconia nodded wisely to Draconis.
"So I see. Why am I here?" the young dragon asked, trying to sound defiant rather than petrified but failing miserably.
"Because your father cannot reach you down here in his usual form," replied Balthazar simply, "And if you attempt to transform yourself, you will be crushed by the rock."
"I am to be used as bait then?"
"Yes…" replied Balthazar delicately as Onoros loomed behind the dragon. There were two neat kicks accompanied by crunching bone and howling from Draconis. He dropped to the ground, unable to support himself on shattered kneecaps rocking back and forth and screeching. "But there is also the matter of removing your own Bhaal essence."
Sarevok's golden eyes narrowed and his sword, which had not left his hand, now raised in readiness.
"I do not recall you mentioning anything about shattering my body and burying me alive!"
"It was the quickest way to ensure that he does not try to escape or aid his father when he comes for him," replied Balthazar. "Such measures will not be needed for you. You are cooperating, and also, not a dragon."
"This won't work!" Draconis howled, "Father will starve you out!"
"Then he will starve you too," Balthazar replied serenely. "As a monk, I assure you that I am conditioned to fasting. You will succumb to hunger long before I do. Now I will make my offer one last time. Surrender your god essence now and when this is over you may leave a free dragon. Refuse, and once you have drawn Abazigal here I will slaughter you."
Draconis cursed, raged and moaned in agony clutching at his ruined legs. To distract himself, Coran climbed a bricked wall with a torch and peered down at one of the cloistered monks. What he saw made him wish that he hadn't been cursed with curiosity. The frail, emaciated creature below had not been exposed to light in a long time. It (there was no way to discern the monk's gender) recoiled from Coran's torch and the elf hastily withdrew it.
Minutes ticked on into hours and Draconis' will began to break as the pain in his limbs intensified.
Finally, cursing Balthazar, he held out his hand weakly and Onoros collected the blood in a vial just as he had with Sarevok.
"Very well. Begin the ritual," Balthazar ordered briskly.
"I thought you said it took three days," frowned Sarevok.
"I am not staying down here for three days," Viconia declared flatly.
"It can be done faster," Balthazar said as the monks in the walls struck up an eerie chant and Onoros drew an assortment of herbs and potions from his tunic, adding them to the dragon blood in the vial. Balthazar leaned in close to the party, his voice masked from Draconis's hearing by the chanting of the monks. "But not as reliably."