20. Lawful Awful Stupid Skirmish Showdown
[i]
Torm, I strive for
The charisma to change evil when I can,
The strength to destroy evil when I must,
And the wisdom to recognize each,
Amen.
[/i]
- Sir Maximus Prime of Longsaddle
[i]
Topsy-turvy, who's to say,
What's right, what's wrong; but be that your way,
And I see no up, I see no down,
Then how could I say that you were the clown?
[/i]
- Jakk'Dalis, [i]Riddles of the Jester[/i]
15 FLAMERULE 0500 CANDLEKEEP
"Captain, three horsemen approach!" yelled a guard from atop the gate of Candlekeep, upon which rain fell from an overcast predawn sky.
It was so. Onyx of Candlekeep, Minsc of Rasheman, and Valygar Corthala were riding hard, even as they came to their destination, Candlekeep, and halted just before the gate. After the departure of Jaheira and a farewell parting from the rest of their Athkatla-bound company in Nashkel at dinner the night before, they had ridden through the night, dispatching a few attacking highway-robber men and hobgoblins along the way, all from horseback with deftly shot arrow and mightily thrown axe, without breaking stride. They had stopped only once, very briefly in Beregost, to see mayor Keldath Ormlyr once again and to tell him of the ultimate success of the mission, and the defeat of the mastermind of the slave-trade, that had sold to the Chaos Circus the now-freed victims that the good mayor had been instrumental in returning to their homes.
And now, after riding from Nashkel through the night, riding from the gnoll stronghold the previous day, and fighting through it and the undersea palace the previous night and the day before, the two rangers and the paladin, beginning their third day without sleep, came to Candlekeep with great longing in their hearts that had brought them as quickly as if in the balance still hung the fates of the thousands who now would never know bondage, who would not become what Aerie had been made so long ago; one of so many pawns in the last game of Tyranodon, the ancient creature who manipulated the demihuman races, not by fighting them himself, but through the instrument of slavery, which by nature pits them against one another, finding like beasts and not men. But now the true monster was slain, yet the three still rode to Candlekeep, towards a free and avenged Aerie, and Imoen, and Nalia, as swiftly as if this were the final and most important leg of the quest. Because for them, in a way, it was.
But Tyranodon's game was not quite over, for though he was gone, and struggled not against men, what he had wrought would now bring them to arms against one another one more time.
The three men dismounted, and Onyx, helmless and in his shining blue dragonscales, raised an empty right gauntlet and greeted the guard who met them at the foot of the wall.
"Hark, Sir Onyx!" cried Jondalar, captain of the guards, having come out himself to see for the first time in fourteen-and-a-half months the youth that under his guidance and first learned the ways of a swordsman, and now returned with the bearing of a man, and the repute of a (slightly controversial) hero.
"Hail, Captain Jondalar," the cavalier smiled. The two men exchanged a mighty handshake and roared with laughter, falling into a backslapping hug.
"You know the rules," the guard captain sighed. "Please tell me you brought a book! Of course," he looked back at the gate furtively, "I've got the one that the last guy brought me still handy."
The cavalier chuckled and drew forth a tome. "This one should do. Found it night before last in an undersea palace, would you believe?"
"Well, well!" Jondalar laughed heartily. "You'll have to tell me more of your stories tonight around some mugs of ale! Why, I can't even read it title of this tome though, not even recognize the language.but no matter!" he laughed as Onyx returned a shrug. "I'm sure Phlydia can identify it. She's a lorekeeper of Oghma now! Why," he winked, "I'll bet you'll be wanting to see her again, young man! She sends word she's in her quarters in the library."
"Phlydia." a faraway look came over the cavalier's eyes, and he looked up into the clouds and the rain. "Yes.I should see her."
His attention was snapped back when the gate opened and his ranger friends led the horses through, and he dashed after them, while Jondalar chuckled heartily.
"How you friends holding up?" Onyx patted the backs of the sturdy rangers.
"Oh - YAWN - fine," Valygar's mouth stretched as he looked at the paladin, who didn't seem to be even a mite tired. "You and that endless stamina," he chuckled.
"Boo says Bebe wants breakfast now!" Minsc spoke up. "Bebe has been eating a lot lately, Boo says! And throwing it up in the mornings."
"Alright," Onyx laughed, "The best - well, only - place is Winthrop's, a.k.a. the Candlekeep Inn, it's at the northwestern corner of town, against the outer wall. I tell you what, you guys stash the horses - there's a stable right next to the inn - and order up breakfast, I'll duck into the library; but I'll be with you in just a minute."
".Wouldn't brave Onyx rather see Aerie first?" Minsc gave the paladin a slap on the back, a bit hard even by the standards of bonhomie between the mighty warriors. "We all miss our witch, don't we, Boo!"
"Yes, and Nalia. And Imoen, of course," Valygar added with a smile.
"They won't be awake yet, I bet," Onyx shook his head, "Let's let 'em finish their beauty sleep - not that a one of 'em needs it, and surprise 'em when they come down in the morning. I'll only be a minute."
With that the cavalier split off from the rangers, who led the horses to the right, around the north side of the inner wall, and Onyx began to make a beeline straight for the gate through it.
"Hark, you there! Sir Onyx!" called a figure from across the grassy courtyard to his left, before he had gotten through the gate in the inner wall. Onyx looked left, peered through the rain at the tall armored figure who spoke, and at the shorter armored figure next to him, who appeared to be none other than Sir Anomen Delryn.
"Greetings, Anomen!" Onyx called cheerily and waved, as if ignoring or forgetting the bad terms on which they'd last parted, less than a tenday ago, though it seemed to both like an age. "And who is your friend? He's nearly the size of Minsc! A Tyrran, by the look of him." Onyx walked toward the men, who approached him, and the met in the outer courtyard to the south of the library, between the inner and outer walls of Candlekeep.
"Sir Judas Iscarias, justknight of Tyr indeed!" the taller man spoke. "And Sir Anomen Delryn, watcher of Helm!"
"So I have heard," Onyx smirked with lighthearted sarcasm at the second, obviously needless introduction. "Tell me, Anomen," he questioned the Helmite, with a suspicious air, "What brings you to Candlekeep, with company?"
"I will make no pleasantries or smalltalk about it," Anomen puffed, "Sir Onyx - blast it, what's your last name, or do you even have one, anyway?"
"A question and an answer for another day," the cavalier said simply.
"Well then, Sir Onyx, you are under arrest conduct unbecoming a knight: for illegal use of evil weaponry, for illegal association with known evil witches, for illegal execution of an illegal mission, and for illegal methods of interrogation. You are to come with us immediately to the Most Noble Order of the Radiant Heart where you will stand court martial."
".and face." Onyx put on a penchant face, as if he were carefully considering a voluntary opportunity.
".well, it will be decided there," Anomen copped out, "but I'd expect, if not further penalties.explusion!!" he hung on the last word like it were a death sentence.
Onyx began to laugh out loud, causing Judas's face to tighten and Anomen's to go slackjawed. "Truly, truly ridiculous. If you were other than Sir Anomen Delryn, that is to say someone possessed of a sense of humor, I'd think this a joke, but as it stands I will merely infer you are acting on actual orders from some incompetent, if not corrupt, official of the Order." Onyx smirked while Anomen and Judas exchanged unconfident glanced. "I have an offer for you."
"It was no offer, it was an order." Judas stated firmly.
"Well, then mine is an offer," Onyx retorted, "I will not accompany you back to Athkatla just now; but I expect I shall be there again in good time. You may return to the Order, and conduct a trial without me, and expel me or whatever you feel like." He smiled and shrugged with both authentic and projected nonchalance, and an utterly shocked look passed over Anomen's face at his flippant attitude. "Or the Order's judging bureaucrats may wait until I return, and then face trial with me there. Expel me, ban me from entering the Order, whatever," he smiled again at Anomen, "But know that I will not stand for so-called penalties such as fines or imprisonment, which infringe upon my own rights rather than strip me of Order-bequeathed privileges, for I have done nothing that another good adventurer could or would not do."
"Good is not the issue, lawfulness is," Judas growled, looking down at Onyx and touching the scales-of-justice emblem on his breastplate.
"Then you admit they need not align," the cavalier gazed up with his steel blue eyes into the Tyrran's sea green, smiling calmly.
"They..that's not an issue here!" Judas balked, losing the confidence his great height usually instilled.
"No, that's [i]the[/i] issue here, my friends," Onyx continued, with a voice that was quite confident, but not quite smug. "Behind what you are doing here today, and what you are doing with your lives."
Judas and Anomen exchanged nervous glances, and the Helmite spoke first. "What we are doing with our lives is being [i]knights, mister[/i] Onyx. And our job is to align the two ideals, which you seem to have forgotten."
"[i]Forgotten[/i]?" Onyx arched an eyebrow. "How about [i]tried[/i]. Is it always possible?"
"Of course!" Anomen said reflexively.
"Good is objective and universal, yes?" Onyx inquired.
"Of course," Anomen said more thoughtfully.
"And law can change, if you move over land, or in time?" Onyx inquired.
"Well, yes," Anomen shrugged.
"So..." Onyx nodded his head suggestively.
Anomen thought carefully for a second and smiled. "It's because, within limits, what can be good can actually be a function of the law, that law is mutable is no contradiction, for all other circumstances of situation are mutable too. There is a value in obeying conventions, for example law may provide for certain allowed assumptions in contracts."
"I agree," Onyx nodded, "But surely, in say, drow society.."
"When we say lawful we speak of just laws," Judas added quickly.
"Fair enough, if after-the-fact," Onyx shrugged, "So we speak now of justice instead of laws."
"It's not semantic," Anomen answered the sarcastic tinge on Onyx's voice. "Justice, too, is universal."
"And how do we mortals determine it?" Onyx asked.
"Well, for our purposes today, studying the chivalric code will do," Anomen replied after a hesitant moment of though.
Onyx answered, "Even if you are correct in that a most knights wouldn't behave this way, which I can believe, rhat doesn't mean they shouldn't. Heck, I could go on about the things most of us do wrong."
Anomen looked increasingly hesitant and merely said, "Such things are not for me to judge."
".a knight never surrenders his own judgment." Onyx countered. Anomen balked and felt a sense of déjà vu.
"Onyx!" Anomen pleaded. "You'll be expelled from the Order!"
"Do you know what the different between you and me, is, [i]Sir[/i] Delryn?" Onyx asked with a calm stare. "For you, your official knighthood was the most important day of your life. For me, it was the least important of the last four things I had done; the other three being the deeds for which the fourth wad conferred - routing a corrupt baron and parlaying with peaceful 'monsters' in Imnesvale - a discussion of its own we should have, as I've been thinking on this lately - and bodyguarding a spoiled but innocent girl.. It's the deeds that make us noble, not the titles."
"Enough!" Judas growled, and looked down at Anomen, who seemed troubled.
Anomen stammered. ".I.uh..Onyx.I have my orders. YOU ARE UN- UNDER ARREST!"
As Anomen's cracking voice ceased, Judas put his hands behind his head and began to draw out his enormous two-handed holy sword.
Onyx had appraised the two before him carefully. Judas stood a little to his left, Anomen to his right. He had been resting his hands on his belt with pretended casualness, just happening to put his left palm against the hilt of the Axe of the Unyielding, and the right palm against the hilt of the Flail of Ages.
As Judas's sword came cleaving through the air in a huge overhead swing, Onyx heard the unexpected but unmistakable clicks of crossbows firing from both his right and left. Thinking quickly, he began stepping forward into a low kneel, while pulling the axe and the flail out from his belt. As he moved forward and down, he caught Judas's gaze, and looked deep into the other paladin's deep green eyes and smirked. Judas looked into the other paladin's steel blue eyes, and something about the man's face worried him. It wasn't quite a scolding look, but the look of a man who is quite sure of himself, and is watching you making a fatal mistake.
As Onyx's left knee touched the grass and two bolts flew through the air over his head, he swung his left arm forward with the Axe of the Unyielding, slicing into Judas's leg, whose sword, still arcing down, fell down behind the cavalier, who was practically at the Tyrran's feet and safely inside the sword radius. Onyx simultaneously swung the Flail of Ages around for an underhand whiplash toward Anomen's ankles. While the axe made a clean vorpal slice straight through Judas's lower leg and severed it just below the knee, the five heads of the flail snaked around Anomen's lower legs, crackling with elemental energy and interrupting the priest's chant.
Onyx heard the two snipers, whom he had yet to spot, fire their crossbows again and pulled back and up out of his crouch. Judas, with his huge sword held forward, was caught off balance on his one remaining foot, and began to topple forward, and Anomen's legs were swept out from under him by the flail's grasp as Onyx pulled back. The result was that Judas and Anomen soon occupied the air Onyx just had, and a bolt went flying into each of them, piercing even their enchanted full plate. The cavalier found himself rightfully apprehensive of the apparent power of the invisible crossbows, but wasted no time in pulling his flail far enough back to sweep Anomen flat on his back, while strapping his axe to his belt again. Judas was lying face-first in the mud, struggling to pull out his greatsword, which had plunged several feet into the earth. Anomen was beginning another chant on his back, and while Onyx reached for his longsword Namarra, sheathed on his back, he twirled the flail to unwrap it from Anomen's ankles and then brought it back and around for an overheard swing.
As Onyx unsheathed the Neversleep sword, all sound around him was immediately dimmed, and he did not hear the next twin clicks of the crossbows as his flail arced over his head. While he brought the flail down onto Anomen's chest, disrupting the priest's chant and sending ripples of the weapon's alteration magic through him, he pointed the sword forward and squeezed the handle. Namarra glowed briefly and a spell shot from its tip. Anomen had already begun yet another chant, but he felt his mouth moving sluggishly as the flail's full impact washed over him, and when the sword's spell burst in front of him, his string of strange syllables was cut off even as his tongue continued to flap. Onyx also noticed Judas's grumbles suddenly silenced, but then he felt bolts piercing the armor on both his arms and sink into his biceps.
Onyx grimaced, but turned and began to run while resheating Namarra and snatching an invisibility potion at his belt. Trying to hold the potion, with a bolt in the arm's bicep, he was barely able to get it to his lips before dropping it, and as he consumed it, he looked down and could see the grass through his own now-invisible legs. He stopped in his tracks and hit the dirt. He smiled when he saw two bolts fly several feet in front of him - he'd predicted that the snipers would guess their suddenly-invisible mark to maintain trajectory. He heard the crossbows clicking again, and realized unhappily that, though invisible, his prostrate form was making a very large and very visible imprint in the mud. He quickly rolled aside just as two bolts struck the ground where he had just been. He realized that he was both making a muddy trail of footprints, and making a seemingly hollow space devoid of falling rain. He was invisible, but not undetectable in this foul weather. The next bolt missed by a mile, but the one after came straight for him, but mercifully ricocheted off his helmet. Despite the ring in his ears the projectile from the obviously-high-powered launcher was causing, he kept running, pulling the bolts out of his arms so that the wounds would start regenerating, and soon was against the outer wall of the keep. He went along it until he found a ladder leading up to the ramparts, and began to scale it.
Adonis Narcissus laid low on the ramparts of the outer wall, his crossbow pointing into the courtyard below. He had been expertly tracing the muddy footprints and deflected raindrops caused by the invisible man, and had seen his last bolt bounce off him. But then his quarry had effectively disappeared against the rough background of a section of the outer wall further along the rampart. Adonis fired randomly at the junction of the ground and the wall, expecting his prey would be running along the edge. He leaned a bit further over, and fired below himself, lest Onyx now be below him at the foot of the wall.
Then Adonis looked the other way, on the other side of where the man had disappeared, and noticed a ladder. He became quite scared as its possibilities occurred to him. He fired a few shots at the ladder, but hit nothing, then began firing along the level of the rampart itself. He nearly pissed in his armor when one of his bolts bounced off the air. Suddenly, at just that point, Onyx materialized out of the air, now holding the gigantic Fortress Shield in his left hand and spinning the Flail of Ages overhead in his right. Onyx whipped forward, and crashed the flail's heads into Adonis's heavy crossbow. The Sune-worshipping knight screamed like a girl as electricity and acid burned his fingers and the crossbow slipped from them and clattered to the ground.
Meanwhile, back in the courtyard, Judas stoically grimaced against the pain of his severed leg. Vorpal wounds are the epitome of clean wounds, and like them, they heal quickly and get infected less, but are extremely painful. Vorpal severed limbs are actually quite easy to reattach with magical healing, as the perfectly flat faces of the cut will fit easily, and this is what Judas was now trying to do. He tried to call to the priest lying beside him for healing, but only silence came out of his mouth, and this made him realize Anomen wouldn't have been able to cast a spell anyway. The paladin smiled as he remembered his own subvocal healing ability, and as he pressed his severed limb against the stump beneath his knee, he willed the healing power of his hands upon the wound.
And nothing happened.
Judas tried again, and still nothing happened. He searched within himself, and tried to find his holy powers, but he could not. Worried, he reached over to his sword, which lay stuck into the ground, to grab the hilt and feel the reassuring power of a holy avenger when it was in your grasp. But as he moved his hand around the hilt, an invisible force, liked repelling magnetism, pushed him away. Then he remembered the look Onyx had given him as he fell into a crouch, the calm, knowing stare of the famed cavalier as he was attacked by a fellow paladin. Judas had thought Onyx was smirking at the tactical blunder that had allowed him to dodge his blow and sever his leg, but now he realized it had been a moral blunder over which the cavalier had given him that look. Judas broke into a cold sweat as the answer finally dawned on him. He was fallen.
The sharp pain of his yet-unhealed leg snapped his attention away the abysmal sinking of his heart, and he rolled onto his back, and pulled a large healing potion off his belt with his right hand. While using his left hand to hold the severed leg flush against the stump, he uncapped and chortled the potion with his right, and to his relief he could feel the flesh of his stump reach out and grow against the flesh of the severed limb. He realized, though, that the severed part was not returning the favor, as its bloodstream was of course disconnected, and so the potion wasn't getting to it, causing the wound to close asymmetrically and leave him with a useless limb.
Regretfully, he winced and forcibly popped his reattached lower leg back off the stump, and took out another healing potion. This time, rather than ingesting it he poured it over the both faces of the slice, and pressed them together. Healing potions can work topically as well as by ingesting, though not as well, and the lower and upper leg slowly began fusing together. Once he felt the circulation return to the severed leg, he drank the rest of the potion. Now he could feel it getting into his reconnected bloodstream and the tissues reconnecting much faster. He drew out another and drank, and the feeling returned to his foot and he found he was becoming able to move it again. The sheared tibia and fibula bones each fused, the muscles began complete again, and the skin grew back together; but he was left with only a neat ring of a scar around his leg just below the knee.
Back up on the outer rampart, Adonis screeched as the crossbow left his hands. Onyx had approached Adonis on the south rampart from the west, which would put his shield arm toward the inside of the Keep, and sure enough, a bolt came flying from the sniper on the inner wall's rampart, and glanced off the Fortress Shield. Adonis held his two ornate shortswords out - Onyx caught himself appraising his foe's handsomeness, and realized that the shortswords looked like small versions of his own Blade of Roses. He noticed the emblems of Sune on the man's armor.
"A paladin of...[i]Sune[/i]?" Onyx asked incredulously.
Adonis sighed. "Oh boy, I get that sooo much. Yes, silly, a paladin of Sune!" He grew cross and charged Onyx with his shortswords waving wildly. The cavalier stuck his large shield forward to meet both of them, and another bolt came sailing for his now-exposed side but mercifully the fortress shield magically deflected that one too. The cavalier found himself wishing he had his fiance's reflective shield - then he could take out the other sniper without even having to find his position!
The small, wiry paladin of Sune bounced off the larger paladin's tower shield, but soon charged again, this time slashing one sword low and the other high. Onyx moved his shield up to block the high one, and swung his flail down and wrapped its heads around the low ones and the man's left forearm behind it. He pushed the man's upper body and right arm back with his shield, and pulled his left arm toward him with his ensnarled flail, and with the quick jerky movement managed to half-disarm of the weak paladin.
"Yeow!" Adonis yelled as his off blade was pulled from his left hand by the flail. He quickly brought his remaining weapon down under the shield and stabbed forward, using the momentum from the pull. The rosy shortsword plunged into Onyx's stomach, through his blue dragonscales, through his thick abs and just under his ribcage, but the impaled cavalier managed to knee Adonis in the face, sending him back, and the shortsword sliding back out of his belly before it cut into his intestines.
As the Sune-paladin's right arm fell back, Onyx brought his shield down on it hard, smashing the man's wrist against the ground and breaking it audibly, and nearly severing the entire hand. Onyx stepped on the flat of the sword with his left foot and easily slid it away under his boot. He lifted the shield and brought his flail around for an underhand swing at Adonis's head, but the roseknight had pulled a dagger out of his own boot with his left hand and successfully stabbed Onyx in the stomach again just as the flail smashed into the face of his helmet. He was knocked back onto the stones, and Onyx ignored the dagger lodged in his belly while he charged forward and brought his flail down in a massive overhead swing upon Adonis's head. Even through the helmet, he managed to give Adonis a concussion, and the paladin of Sune went limp on the stones.
Yet another bolt whizzed harmlessly near Onyx, and the cavalier strapped his flail to his belt, crouched down, and held his shield toward the courtyard, completely blocking himself from the sniper. He pulled the dagger out of his stomach, and while his two stomach gashes were regenerating, he gripped one hand onto his axe hilt to speed the healing, and pressed the other over the wounds to stifle the profuse bleeding. Once they had ceased, he reached into the bag of holding at his belt and pulled a length of rope from it. With both hands, he tied Adonis's feet together. He then tied the other end of the rope around one of the outer guardstones of the wall, and then grabbed and easily lifted the Sunite's small, rather feminine body. The knotted knight regained consciousness just in time to feel himself getting tossed over the edge of the rampart, and shrieked wildly as he began to fall. He screamed again when he suddenly stopped falling and realized that he was suspended in midair, almost flush with the outside of the keep wall, dangling upside-down with a rope around his feet, and staring at an inverted scene of the coastline stretching south of Candlekeep. Upside-down cows peered down from the grass-and-mud "ceiling" of his field of vision and mooed curiously.
"I'll be back; just hang around," Onyx quipped and downed another invisibility potion.
Back in the courtyard, Judas now stood on two solid legs, and then loaded and aimed his crossbow up at Onyx just in time to see Adonis get thrown over the rampart and disappear. He fired potshots but didn't hit anything, and he noticed Puritus doing the same from atop the inner rampart behind him. Anomen, too, had gotten to his feet and had silently armed his sling, but then the cavalier vanished from sight again.
"To the ladders, you fools!" Puritus called from atop the inner wall. "He'll have to come back down the ladders!"
Judas and Anomen each began running to the bases of the two ladders that ran up outer wall, one on either side of where Onyx had disappeared. Puritus continued making potshots at the outer rampart with his crossbow; unlike Adonis, he wasn't clever enough to notice the slight rain-silhouette the cavalier was making. In fact, he didn't even notice the strange indentation that suddenly appeared in a stack of hay at the base of the outer wall. Nor did he notice the line of muddy footprints that began forming next to this haystack and grew in a straight line towards the base of the wall that he stood upon. Nor did it occur to him that his shout to Judas and Anomen could have given away to his prey his position behind the guardstones of the inner rampart.
While Anomen and Judas stood near the bases of their respective ladders, and Anomen wiggled his mouth hoping his powers of speech would return so he could cast a detect invisibility or true sight spell, a deva suddenly materialized from nowhere at the base of the inner wall, just below where Puritus had shouted from.
Puritus was still making potshots when a deva suddenly flew up into his field of vision just in front of him. He nearly dropped his crossbow in terror, and when he did shoot it at her, it bounced off an invisible thing or force just in front of her, and then Puritus realized in even greater terror that the deva had her arms clasped as if she had them around the waist of an invisible man. Then she flew over the guardstones and let go, and Puritus could hear a crunch of two heavy boots just in front of him. Onyx materialized out of the air, holding his large shield in front of Puritus's crossbow and beginning a swing with his flail. Puritus immediately countered with the turn-and-run-like-a-coward technique, and the heads of the Flail of Ages raked lightly across the back of his armor. He jumped off the inner edge of the wall and landed in a thick flowerbed, and while the deva swooped down after him, he made a bolt for the front door of the library itself. He heard the flowerbed crunch again as Onyx landed after him, and opened and ran through the doors just as a throwing axe lodged itself in the oakwood where his head and just been.
Judas and Anomen had seen the action on the inner rampart from their positions and began running towards it. When both Puritus and Onyx leaped over the inside of the wall, they headed for the gate leading through the inner wall and to the library. But just as they passed through the gate, the deva swooped down at them. Anomen hit the dirt in terror, but she grabbed Judas by the back. He struggled and waved his crossbow around, but could not aim it at her, and the deva was strong, and he could not break her grasp. She flew him high up and outside the Keep, over the water, and dropped him in.
"HEEELP!!" he shouted as he splashed into the rain-pelted ocean, "I can't swim!!!" he let his crossbow go and tried to dogpaddle, but his full plate wasn't helping at all. "Heeelp!!! I'm gonna drown!!!"
"Try standing up, wayward warrior," the deva sang. Judas stopped struggling and pushed his legs straight down and.planted them in sand, and then stood up with the water barely reaching his armpit. He breathed a huge sigh of relief, his head easily above the water, and took a deep breath while pulling off his waterlogged helmet and brushing his long black hair out of his face.
Anomen helplessly watched the deva fly off with the Tyrran, and then popped up again as they disappeared. He ran after Onyx, who had followed Judas inside the library. Once inside, he heard boots going up the stairs in the center of the library, and continued following while brandishing his mace and shield.
He could hear Onyx yelling "Come back here, coward!" a flight of stairs above him. For the cavalier too was going up and up only to chase the fleeing Puritus.
Onyx couldn't believe how cowardly [i]and[/i] stupid this guy he was following him was. His boots echoed crisply off the marble stairs above, and made him quite easy to follow; much easier than say, detouring over a carpeted floor would have been. Furthermore, what was he going to do once he reached the top floor, a dead end? Fly away on a magic carpet?
At last Onyx came to the fifth floor just as he heard Puritus reaching the sixth, whose footsteps then grew quieter as he raced across the carpet of the floor above. Onyx stopped, having heard someone chasing [i]him[/i] a floor below; either Judas or Anomen he assumed, but kept stepping in place so that it would sound like his footsteps were continuing up the last flight of stairs.
Anomen balked in surprise when he rounded the stairs onto the landing of the fifth floor, and suddenly Onyx stepped out from behind a bookcase and smashed his huge shield straight into the Helmite with incredibly ramming force, sending him tripping backwards and crashing head-over-heels back down the stairs again.
"Have a nice [i]trip[/i]!" Onyx shouted cheerily after him and resumed ascending the stairs.
"MMMPH OOF OWW MMMPF BY HELM OWW MMMPF!" Anomen declared eloquently as he rolled down flight after flight, at last managing to quit rolling as he sprawled out on the first floor landing, his legs still sticking up the last few stairs. He looked up at the ceiling of the first floor, hurting all over, and feeling embarrassed at his flailing and screaming manner on the way down. Then it occurred to him - he'd made sounds! The silence had worn off! Though he ached all over, he began chanting a powerful healing spell on himself, and the bruises under his armor healed, and as he laid sprawled at the foot of the stairs with his legs above his head, invigorated blood poured into his mind.
Onyx had now made it to the sixth, top story and looked around for Puritus. He cast a detect evil, but sensed nothing. [i]Well, I should,[/i] he thought to himself. Then he noticed something that made him smile, for at last the rain and mud were working to his advantage. A trail of wet carpet and occasional streaks of mud led away from the stairwell past columns of books. Onyx followed them, strapping his shield to his back and drawing out his fiery longsword Angurvadal with his shield arm.
The tracks reached a corner of the library, and then disappeared. Onyx cursed under his breath. The sniper's boots must have dried off. He rounded the corner and continued on, trying to peer into every possible hiding place and listen carefully for the sounds of running boots. He suspected the cowardly man would try to make it back to the staircase, and he was keeping it in his line of sight. He could've stayed at the stairway, and essentially laid siege to his foe, but the morning was getting on and he still wanted to be back at the Inn when Aerie awoke. And he prayed that if Phlydia really was in the library at this hour, this skirmish would bring no harm to her in any crossfire. His plan was to lure the cowardly Helmite to the stairway by leaving it, but be able to beat him there once his foe made the dash.
Then he heard a breath behind him, even though he'd heard no footsteps coming up, and he thought of something. Perhaps the man's trail hadn't disappeared because his boots had dried off, but because that's where the trail ended. Perhaps he hadn't been the only one carrying an invisibility potion today.
His thoughts were confirmed by a sharp pain between his shoulderblades as a bolt sailed into his back. His heart spasmed as the bolt lodged in it and sent a terrible crying pain throughout his chest. He turned to see Puritus standing exactly where the bootprints had disappeared, strapping a crossbow to his waist and drawing a two-handed sword out of a sheath on his back. Onyx tried to lift his armaments, but his pierced heart gave out a terrible shriek and his arms faltered. As Puritus charged with his sword held menacingly, Onyx managed to raise his right arm, spin the flail around over his head, and lash out. The heads snaked around the blade and hilt of the sword and Onyx yanked sideways. As the electricity head crashed into Puritus's wrists and gave him a nasty shock that caused his fingers to spasm, Onyx's yank pulled from his hands the sword, caught in the coils of the other four heads. The greatsword crashed into the bookshelf next to it. Unable to extricate his weapon from the sword and the bookshelf, Onyx let the flail handle go. Wincing with the pain of raising his other arm nearer his heart, he brought Angurvadal up and charged Puritus. The Helmite shrieked and began to jog back while Onyx pursued him. His back smacked into a bookshelf, and as Onyx bore down on him, he began chant in an archaic tongue.
A terrified look came over his face when nothing happened, except that Onyx brought the flaming tip of Angurvadal to his neck and pressed it against the thin chainmail running from his chin to collar between his breastplate and helm. The sword began to heat the metal and sear his throat, and the cavalier applied just enough pressure to make it obvious that he could plunge it straight through the chain and his neck if he wished. Onyx held himself outwardly firm, but really he was losing control fast. The bolt had struck true, stuck right through his heart, which had ceased beating. His muscles were starting to tingle, and soon he would lose his motor skills. With the bolt in his heart, even his natural regeneration, augmented by that of the sheathed axe's hilt he clasped again with his right hand, would not heal such a mortal would with the bolt still lodged in the way.
Moving only his mouth, Puritus tried to cast his spell again but nothing happened.
"Don't bother," Onyx wheezed emotionlessly, even as blood dribbled from his mouth and his pierced lung made his voice hollow and airy. "You have lost your powers. Speaking of which." He reached around between his shoulder blades with his right hand. He placed his palm upon the back of his platemail where blood was gushing forth, and his hand glowed blue for a moment. Onyx smiled as he felt the bolt within him dissolve and the muscle tissue of his heart reconnect and his lung reseal, and the flow of blood dribbling out of his mouth cease. His heart resumed beating, his muscles ceased tingling as proper bloodflow returned to them, and his breathing lost its punctured wheeze.
"Such a simple spell!" Puritus cried in manic at his own failed attempt, seemingly oblivious to the near-miracle Onyx had just performed on himself. "How could I miscast it twice?"
"You know the answer," Onyx told him, "You are fallen."
Puritus went deathly pale. "That.can't be! I'm carrying out the will of the Order!"
"The Order [i]knights[/i]men and women - and, sadly, only certain lineages, to date. It does not make them [i]paladins[/i]."
"Ah.but I am also carrying out the wills of Helm and Torm!"
"The will of Helm? Perhaps. The will of Torm? No, as we can see."
"It's not fair! I was merely following orders!"
"A paladin does not surrender his own judgment."
"But.." Puritus then made several gurgling noises in his feeble attempts to make a retort. "How was I to know?"
"Firstly, you didn't even [i]try[/i] to know. Did you ask my side before attacking me? No. Did you find out whether I had fallen, as you were probably led to believe or wrongly inferred I must have? No. You know what happens when a paladin attacks a paladin. Either you failed to find out the truth of my deeds, or you inferred incorrectly that they were unjust."
"I was deceived!"
"Aye, but you also let yourself be deceived."
"But.your deeds are unjust!"
"Unconventional? Yes - for a paladin, at least. Unpopular? Apparently, at least within certain circles. Unjust? Please, tell me how."
"You have disobeyed the Order."
"The Order does not decide justice. Human decisions are subjective, justice is not; the rules and laws of men cannot change it."
"You use vampiric weapons."
"And how is that unjust? I use them only upon evildoers. Torm explicitly allows his priests to control undead - yes, I know, Helm does not - holding a vampiric sword is no worse than controlling a vampire. How could it be unjust to drain the life of an evildoer, whom it is just to kill outright?"
"Blackrazor may shatter their soul forever."
"A damned soul is forfeit in the same manner as an evil life; in that it may be ended if necessary to curtail the evil it does. All else equal, I'd not wish the loss of the soul, and with it loss of any chance for redemption in the afterlife, but can that be put ahead of an innocent life or soul?"
"You have tortured for information."
"My response is the same. An evildoer, by their actions, forfeits their otherwise inalienable rights of life and liberty. Though such practices may be grisly, undesirable, and abhorrent; the course of action that is unjust is putting the interests of the evildoer above the rights of the innocent."
"You have associated with an evil drow Sharite."
"You speak of miss deVir? She did no evil while in my company. She was redeemable, and though I know not her recent whereabouts, if she has not yet been burned at the stake by yahoos like yourself, I imagine she is redeemable still. We can detect evil, but are not always charged to destroy it on sight. There are other ways of overcoming it. Paladins fight with words as well as swords. To convert an evil foe to good, like to wield an evil weapon for good, is to do twice the good of destroying it, for its power is then reversed. Not to mention the benefit to the former evildoer herself."
"Your justice is not righteous. Your logic is wrong."
"There is only one justice. There is only logic. I am not infallible, but here I am right. If you cannot see it, it is your loss. I need not justify myself to you theologically, for as we can see, Torm knows I am in the right, nor need I justify myself to you in [i]your[/i] flawed perception, for it is I who have you at swordpoint."
"You mean to kill me then? I knew it! I KNEW IT!" Puritus shrieked without regard for dignity, and Onyx noticed a small, warm puddle had appeared on the inside of one of his boots.
"No," Onyx stated calmly, "I merely restrain you for my own safety. It is you who brought the Law of the Sword to bear this day, and I think we both know the alignment of that ethos."
Puritus continued to babble in panic. "I knew you were a killer! A Bhaalspawn!"
"Not for a tenday now, actually. But that, too, is not a crime, it is not unjust. Despite the Order's racist entry requirements, lineage and creed are separable. Even the essence of Bhaal, while I still had it, was always under my control. Though parentage does seem to play a part in personality, it merely influences, not controls; like a stream with a current that is never too fast to swim against if one tries. Ultimately, it is an individual's responsibility and power to make choices. All is at the discretion of the individual."
"But you mean to kill me, don't you, killer?"
"No, I do not, though it would be justified. I am merely going to confiscate your weapons, as you have behaved as an assassin and I cannot trust you." Onyx lifted his free right hand from the hilt of the Axe of the Unyielding, and grabbed the hilt of the bastard sword at Puritus's belt. "This one's a holy avenger - you won't need it now anyway," the cavalier chuckled.
The Helmite paladin's hands reflexively flinched forward for his weapon, but ceased again when the cavalier pressed the tip of his flaming longsword closer against his neck. Onyx drew the bastard sword out of its sheath and then slid it into his bag of holding after deftly opening it with two fingers. Onyx then unhooked the crossbow from the man's belt and placed it away too.
"As I am no thief - although the customs of spoils would make these mine if I wished," Onyx continued, "I will return your armaments to the Order when next I am there. If they do not expel you, or if the weapons are your own property and they actually honor that," he said with acidity directed not at Puritus, "I am sure they will return them. Otherwise, I'm sure they will put them in the hands of someone more capable, both morally and tactically." Puritus let out a bratty whimper but said nothing coherent. "Keep your shield, armor, and quiver. I have left your friends alive and still armed; they can protect you on your journey back."
Onyx withdrew Angurvadal from the paladin's throat and turned to walk back along the aisle of bookshelves. He untangled the Flail of Ages and Puritus's two-handed sword from where they were lodged in a bookshelf, and put them in his bag. Then, seeming more bored than relieved (in fact it was his recent loss of circulation which, in his sleep deprived state, had left him quite lightheaded), he continued pacing down the aisle to the other wall of the floor, where he gazed out an east-facing window and looked inland, through the dim light of the overcast, rainy morning, the sun just beginning to peak out. He took off his helmet, laid it on a table next to the window, and leaned over the windowsill.
"You know," he told Puritus as he barely heard the man walking up the aisle behind him, "Out this window, over those hills, stretches Faerun, and further on Kara-Tur. I knew a man from there. A conflicted man, but I believe he could have been a good man. He was not given the chance to be redeemed in life, only in death. Fare the well, Yoshimo, and I pray Ilmater has had mercy upon thy soul."
He paused in thought and then continued. "Imoen and I used to play in this library. The old monks forbade that, of course, so we tried to stay quiet. We would play at adventurers, beginning on the ground floor, and working our way up. The 'monsters' of course, came either entirely out of our imagination, or were represented by the monks whom we had to sneak past. Imoen always did love sneaking."
While Onyx continued rambling, he leaned his head leaning out the window and listened to the crashes of the waves. He was hunched forward over the windowsill, and his shoulders blocked his ears from the inside of the floor of the library, and thus the sounds of Puritus drawing a dagger from within his own gauntlet and tiptoeing up behind him were quite muffled. Then a loud running noise came from the marble stairwell, and Puritus winced in terror, but as if by some great mercy the cavalier did not turn around. "Ah, Anomen is here to join us," Onyx said, without turning from the window, "How nice."
The Helmite heard him, and came walking towards their corner of the library, and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Puritus standing just behind Onyx with a dagger drawn, holding it high in a reverse grip, clearly meaning to plunge it into the back of the cavalier's bare neck.
"Dear Sir Delryn," Onyx began calmly without looking into the room, "I was just explaining to my fallen paladin friend here the error of your mission. You see."
"ONYX WATCH OUT!!!!!" Anomen screamed as Puritus lunged.
Onyx reacted to the warning almost too quickly. He sunk into a kneel, his arms and chin pulling back fluidly and moving just over and down past the windowsill as Puritus fell high and forward upon him. The neck-stabbing fallen paladin reacted too slowly, and his legs smashed into Onyx's crouched form while he was still bringing his upper body forward and down for the stab, turning his linear momentum into an angular head-over-heels trajectory.
Carried forward by the weight of his armored torso and arms, particularly his right arm outstretched forward, Puritus flipped over Onyx, who bowed his head forward to let the man's waist roll smoothly over his broad shoulders, and his stomach landed on the windowsill and slid along it, carried by his momentum. As Puritus's upper body flew out the window, he dropped his dagger at the sight of the ground six long stories below and began to shriek and flail wildly. He made the grave error of bending his knees and waving his hands forward, causing his center of gravity to move ever-so-slightly over the edge of the windowsill. Like a perfect lever, set on the windowsill against his rigid lower chestplate, he tipped forward and began to slide further out the window. The metal of his armor grated across the stone, then that of his leggings, and finally he went hurtling out of the sixth floor into the empty air.
Onyx mused, "Death comes."
Puritus fell past the fifth floor, flailing like a dancing puppet.
".to us all."
Puritus dropped past the fourth floor, crying like a terrified child.
".But to you."
Puritus sailed past the third floor, babbling like a lunatic.
"..it comes."
Puritus hurtled past the second floor, quivering like a dying bird.
".without."
Puritus plummeted past the first floor, silent and still as stone.
".honor."
He landed headfirst with a sickening and deafening crash of bones and metal upon the patio stones just outside the library doors, his rigid helmet and torso parting at his neck, the weakest point of stress relief. So too with his other joints, and his body was dashed to large chunks as it sank into the stones, metal plates cutting through flesh, and his head and limbs went flying into nearby patches of colorfully and carefully arranged flowers.
Onyx and Anomen now stood by adjacent windows and looked down at the wreckage below. A monk was carefully walking up to inspect it, hiking up the skirt of his robe above the bloodied grass. The rain was still falling, washing the trickling blood along the cracks between the cobblestones into the grass rather than allowing it to pool.
"Why did you warn me?" Onyx asked Anomen, turning to him, while putting his helmet into his bag of holding.
The Helmite bit his lip. "Because he attacked unchivalrously. Because he was fallen. Because you spared my life. Because you deserved a trial. Because your actions did not merit death. Because they may not be unjust at all. I don't know, Onyx, I'm confused, and I don't know. I don't know what Helm wanted me to do. I don't know what the Order wanted me to do. I don't know what was right to do."
"But it sounds like you are beginning to understand that those three are not always the same."
"The Order may not always be right, I suppose. Please don't - "
"Don't worry, you know I of all people won't say anything to them. Speak freely."
"Okay. As for Helm, well,."
"You don't want to blaspheme him, I understand."
Anomen bit his lip again and nodded silently. Onyx placed his left gauntlet upon the priest's right shoulder forgivingly and spoke. "I am sure he looks approvingly upon you today. I believe that if the gods wished for their servants to be unthinking, they would use golems, not men. We have free will. No matter our laws, rules, order, and edicts, there is always a place for judgment calls and individual thinking. Good and truth may be absolute, but that does not necessarily make any particular being infallible. Not even a deity. After all, are they really so different from us? As Elminster says, gods may become mortals, and mortals may become gods."
".Such is life in the Realms." Anomen finished and Onyx smiled.
Just then the pitter-patter of three light pairs of feet and two heavier pairs could be heard ascending the stairs. Onyx grinned broadly. "And I should know. Such has been my life. But it is now a mortal life. But life." he touched his right hand to Aerie's handkerchief, tied around his left arm, ".goes on."
Three young women in mage robes and elven chain appeared from around a bookshelf, followed by a dreadlocked man and a bald one. Aerie and Imoen rushed to Onyx's sides and hugged him, and he wrapped his arms around them; and Minsc laughed and strode over to Anomen and nearly crushed him in a bear hug, and Nalia and Valygar held back and wrapped their arms around each other's waists, and looked at Onyx, who stood tall above his sister and lover in front of the window, the rays of the sunrise coming through the window, as the rain ceased and the clouds parted outside, filling in around him and creating a glowing golden-white halo around the beaming knight.
15 FLAMERULE 0500 CANDLEKEEP
"Captain, three horsemen approach!" yelled a guard from atop the gate of Candlekeep, upon which rain fell from an overcast predawn sky.
It was so. Onyx of Candlekeep, Minsc of Rasheman, and Valygar Corthala were riding hard, even as they came to their destination, Candlekeep, and halted just before the gate. After the departure of Jaheira and a farewell parting from the rest of their Athkatla-bound company in Nashkel at dinner the night before, they had ridden through the night, dispatching a few attacking highway-robber men and hobgoblins along the way, all from horseback with deftly shot arrow and mightily thrown axe, without breaking stride. They had stopped only once, very briefly in Beregost, to see mayor Keldath Ormlyr once again and to tell him of the ultimate success of the mission, and the defeat of the mastermind of the slave-trade, that had sold to the Chaos Circus the now-freed victims that the good mayor had been instrumental in returning to their homes.
And now, after riding from Nashkel through the night, riding from the gnoll stronghold the previous day, and fighting through it and the undersea palace the previous night and the day before, the two rangers and the paladin, beginning their third day without sleep, came to Candlekeep with great longing in their hearts that had brought them as quickly as if in the balance still hung the fates of the thousands who now would never know bondage, who would not become what Aerie had been made so long ago; one of so many pawns in the last game of Tyranodon, the ancient creature who manipulated the demihuman races, not by fighting them himself, but through the instrument of slavery, which by nature pits them against one another, finding like beasts and not men. But now the true monster was slain, yet the three still rode to Candlekeep, towards a free and avenged Aerie, and Imoen, and Nalia, as swiftly as if this were the final and most important leg of the quest. Because for them, in a way, it was.
But Tyranodon's game was not quite over, for though he was gone, and struggled not against men, what he had wrought would now bring them to arms against one another one more time.
The three men dismounted, and Onyx, helmless and in his shining blue dragonscales, raised an empty right gauntlet and greeted the guard who met them at the foot of the wall.
"Hark, Sir Onyx!" cried Jondalar, captain of the guards, having come out himself to see for the first time in fourteen-and-a-half months the youth that under his guidance and first learned the ways of a swordsman, and now returned with the bearing of a man, and the repute of a (slightly controversial) hero.
"Hail, Captain Jondalar," the cavalier smiled. The two men exchanged a mighty handshake and roared with laughter, falling into a backslapping hug.
"You know the rules," the guard captain sighed. "Please tell me you brought a book! Of course," he looked back at the gate furtively, "I've got the one that the last guy brought me still handy."
The cavalier chuckled and drew forth a tome. "This one should do. Found it night before last in an undersea palace, would you believe?"
"Well, well!" Jondalar laughed heartily. "You'll have to tell me more of your stories tonight around some mugs of ale! Why, I can't even read it title of this tome though, not even recognize the language.but no matter!" he laughed as Onyx returned a shrug. "I'm sure Phlydia can identify it. She's a lorekeeper of Oghma now! Why," he winked, "I'll bet you'll be wanting to see her again, young man! She sends word she's in her quarters in the library."
"Phlydia." a faraway look came over the cavalier's eyes, and he looked up into the clouds and the rain. "Yes.I should see her."
His attention was snapped back when the gate opened and his ranger friends led the horses through, and he dashed after them, while Jondalar chuckled heartily.
"How you friends holding up?" Onyx patted the backs of the sturdy rangers.
"Oh - YAWN - fine," Valygar's mouth stretched as he looked at the paladin, who didn't seem to be even a mite tired. "You and that endless stamina," he chuckled.
"Boo says Bebe wants breakfast now!" Minsc spoke up. "Bebe has been eating a lot lately, Boo says! And throwing it up in the mornings."
"Alright," Onyx laughed, "The best - well, only - place is Winthrop's, a.k.a. the Candlekeep Inn, it's at the northwestern corner of town, against the outer wall. I tell you what, you guys stash the horses - there's a stable right next to the inn - and order up breakfast, I'll duck into the library; but I'll be with you in just a minute."
".Wouldn't brave Onyx rather see Aerie first?" Minsc gave the paladin a slap on the back, a bit hard even by the standards of bonhomie between the mighty warriors. "We all miss our witch, don't we, Boo!"
"Yes, and Nalia. And Imoen, of course," Valygar added with a smile.
"They won't be awake yet, I bet," Onyx shook his head, "Let's let 'em finish their beauty sleep - not that a one of 'em needs it, and surprise 'em when they come down in the morning. I'll only be a minute."
With that the cavalier split off from the rangers, who led the horses to the right, around the north side of the inner wall, and Onyx began to make a beeline straight for the gate through it.
"Hark, you there! Sir Onyx!" called a figure from across the grassy courtyard to his left, before he had gotten through the gate in the inner wall. Onyx looked left, peered through the rain at the tall armored figure who spoke, and at the shorter armored figure next to him, who appeared to be none other than Sir Anomen Delryn.
"Greetings, Anomen!" Onyx called cheerily and waved, as if ignoring or forgetting the bad terms on which they'd last parted, less than a tenday ago, though it seemed to both like an age. "And who is your friend? He's nearly the size of Minsc! A Tyrran, by the look of him." Onyx walked toward the men, who approached him, and the met in the outer courtyard to the south of the library, between the inner and outer walls of Candlekeep.
"Sir Judas Iscarias, justknight of Tyr indeed!" the taller man spoke. "And Sir Anomen Delryn, watcher of Helm!"
"So I have heard," Onyx smirked with lighthearted sarcasm at the second, obviously needless introduction. "Tell me, Anomen," he questioned the Helmite, with a suspicious air, "What brings you to Candlekeep, with company?"
"I will make no pleasantries or smalltalk about it," Anomen puffed, "Sir Onyx - blast it, what's your last name, or do you even have one, anyway?"
"A question and an answer for another day," the cavalier said simply.
"Well then, Sir Onyx, you are under arrest conduct unbecoming a knight: for illegal use of evil weaponry, for illegal association with known evil witches, for illegal execution of an illegal mission, and for illegal methods of interrogation. You are to come with us immediately to the Most Noble Order of the Radiant Heart where you will stand court martial."
".and face." Onyx put on a penchant face, as if he were carefully considering a voluntary opportunity.
".well, it will be decided there," Anomen copped out, "but I'd expect, if not further penalties.explusion!!" he hung on the last word like it were a death sentence.
Onyx began to laugh out loud, causing Judas's face to tighten and Anomen's to go slackjawed. "Truly, truly ridiculous. If you were other than Sir Anomen Delryn, that is to say someone possessed of a sense of humor, I'd think this a joke, but as it stands I will merely infer you are acting on actual orders from some incompetent, if not corrupt, official of the Order." Onyx smirked while Anomen and Judas exchanged unconfident glanced. "I have an offer for you."
"It was no offer, it was an order." Judas stated firmly.
"Well, then mine is an offer," Onyx retorted, "I will not accompany you back to Athkatla just now; but I expect I shall be there again in good time. You may return to the Order, and conduct a trial without me, and expel me or whatever you feel like." He smiled and shrugged with both authentic and projected nonchalance, and an utterly shocked look passed over Anomen's face at his flippant attitude. "Or the Order's judging bureaucrats may wait until I return, and then face trial with me there. Expel me, ban me from entering the Order, whatever," he smiled again at Anomen, "But know that I will not stand for so-called penalties such as fines or imprisonment, which infringe upon my own rights rather than strip me of Order-bequeathed privileges, for I have done nothing that another good adventurer could or would not do."
"Good is not the issue, lawfulness is," Judas growled, looking down at Onyx and touching the scales-of-justice emblem on his breastplate.
"Then you admit they need not align," the cavalier gazed up with his steel blue eyes into the Tyrran's sea green, smiling calmly.
"They..that's not an issue here!" Judas balked, losing the confidence his great height usually instilled.
"No, that's [i]the[/i] issue here, my friends," Onyx continued, with a voice that was quite confident, but not quite smug. "Behind what you are doing here today, and what you are doing with your lives."
Judas and Anomen exchanged nervous glances, and the Helmite spoke first. "What we are doing with our lives is being [i]knights, mister[/i] Onyx. And our job is to align the two ideals, which you seem to have forgotten."
"[i]Forgotten[/i]?" Onyx arched an eyebrow. "How about [i]tried[/i]. Is it always possible?"
"Of course!" Anomen said reflexively.
"Good is objective and universal, yes?" Onyx inquired.
"Of course," Anomen said more thoughtfully.
"And law can change, if you move over land, or in time?" Onyx inquired.
"Well, yes," Anomen shrugged.
"So..." Onyx nodded his head suggestively.
Anomen thought carefully for a second and smiled. "It's because, within limits, what can be good can actually be a function of the law, that law is mutable is no contradiction, for all other circumstances of situation are mutable too. There is a value in obeying conventions, for example law may provide for certain allowed assumptions in contracts."
"I agree," Onyx nodded, "But surely, in say, drow society.."
"When we say lawful we speak of just laws," Judas added quickly.
"Fair enough, if after-the-fact," Onyx shrugged, "So we speak now of justice instead of laws."
"It's not semantic," Anomen answered the sarcastic tinge on Onyx's voice. "Justice, too, is universal."
"And how do we mortals determine it?" Onyx asked.
"Well, for our purposes today, studying the chivalric code will do," Anomen replied after a hesitant moment of though.
Onyx answered, "Even if you are correct in that a most knights wouldn't behave this way, which I can believe, rhat doesn't mean they shouldn't. Heck, I could go on about the things most of us do wrong."
Anomen looked increasingly hesitant and merely said, "Such things are not for me to judge."
".a knight never surrenders his own judgment." Onyx countered. Anomen balked and felt a sense of déjà vu.
"Onyx!" Anomen pleaded. "You'll be expelled from the Order!"
"Do you know what the different between you and me, is, [i]Sir[/i] Delryn?" Onyx asked with a calm stare. "For you, your official knighthood was the most important day of your life. For me, it was the least important of the last four things I had done; the other three being the deeds for which the fourth wad conferred - routing a corrupt baron and parlaying with peaceful 'monsters' in Imnesvale - a discussion of its own we should have, as I've been thinking on this lately - and bodyguarding a spoiled but innocent girl.. It's the deeds that make us noble, not the titles."
"Enough!" Judas growled, and looked down at Anomen, who seemed troubled.
Anomen stammered. ".I.uh..Onyx.I have my orders. YOU ARE UN- UNDER ARREST!"
As Anomen's cracking voice ceased, Judas put his hands behind his head and began to draw out his enormous two-handed holy sword.
Onyx had appraised the two before him carefully. Judas stood a little to his left, Anomen to his right. He had been resting his hands on his belt with pretended casualness, just happening to put his left palm against the hilt of the Axe of the Unyielding, and the right palm against the hilt of the Flail of Ages.
As Judas's sword came cleaving through the air in a huge overhead swing, Onyx heard the unexpected but unmistakable clicks of crossbows firing from both his right and left. Thinking quickly, he began stepping forward into a low kneel, while pulling the axe and the flail out from his belt. As he moved forward and down, he caught Judas's gaze, and looked deep into the other paladin's deep green eyes and smirked. Judas looked into the other paladin's steel blue eyes, and something about the man's face worried him. It wasn't quite a scolding look, but the look of a man who is quite sure of himself, and is watching you making a fatal mistake.
As Onyx's left knee touched the grass and two bolts flew through the air over his head, he swung his left arm forward with the Axe of the Unyielding, slicing into Judas's leg, whose sword, still arcing down, fell down behind the cavalier, who was practically at the Tyrran's feet and safely inside the sword radius. Onyx simultaneously swung the Flail of Ages around for an underhand whiplash toward Anomen's ankles. While the axe made a clean vorpal slice straight through Judas's lower leg and severed it just below the knee, the five heads of the flail snaked around Anomen's lower legs, crackling with elemental energy and interrupting the priest's chant.
Onyx heard the two snipers, whom he had yet to spot, fire their crossbows again and pulled back and up out of his crouch. Judas, with his huge sword held forward, was caught off balance on his one remaining foot, and began to topple forward, and Anomen's legs were swept out from under him by the flail's grasp as Onyx pulled back. The result was that Judas and Anomen soon occupied the air Onyx just had, and a bolt went flying into each of them, piercing even their enchanted full plate. The cavalier found himself rightfully apprehensive of the apparent power of the invisible crossbows, but wasted no time in pulling his flail far enough back to sweep Anomen flat on his back, while strapping his axe to his belt again. Judas was lying face-first in the mud, struggling to pull out his greatsword, which had plunged several feet into the earth. Anomen was beginning another chant on his back, and while Onyx reached for his longsword Namarra, sheathed on his back, he twirled the flail to unwrap it from Anomen's ankles and then brought it back and around for an overheard swing.
As Onyx unsheathed the Neversleep sword, all sound around him was immediately dimmed, and he did not hear the next twin clicks of the crossbows as his flail arced over his head. While he brought the flail down onto Anomen's chest, disrupting the priest's chant and sending ripples of the weapon's alteration magic through him, he pointed the sword forward and squeezed the handle. Namarra glowed briefly and a spell shot from its tip. Anomen had already begun yet another chant, but he felt his mouth moving sluggishly as the flail's full impact washed over him, and when the sword's spell burst in front of him, his string of strange syllables was cut off even as his tongue continued to flap. Onyx also noticed Judas's grumbles suddenly silenced, but then he felt bolts piercing the armor on both his arms and sink into his biceps.
Onyx grimaced, but turned and began to run while resheating Namarra and snatching an invisibility potion at his belt. Trying to hold the potion, with a bolt in the arm's bicep, he was barely able to get it to his lips before dropping it, and as he consumed it, he looked down and could see the grass through his own now-invisible legs. He stopped in his tracks and hit the dirt. He smiled when he saw two bolts fly several feet in front of him - he'd predicted that the snipers would guess their suddenly-invisible mark to maintain trajectory. He heard the crossbows clicking again, and realized unhappily that, though invisible, his prostrate form was making a very large and very visible imprint in the mud. He quickly rolled aside just as two bolts struck the ground where he had just been. He realized that he was both making a muddy trail of footprints, and making a seemingly hollow space devoid of falling rain. He was invisible, but not undetectable in this foul weather. The next bolt missed by a mile, but the one after came straight for him, but mercifully ricocheted off his helmet. Despite the ring in his ears the projectile from the obviously-high-powered launcher was causing, he kept running, pulling the bolts out of his arms so that the wounds would start regenerating, and soon was against the outer wall of the keep. He went along it until he found a ladder leading up to the ramparts, and began to scale it.
Adonis Narcissus laid low on the ramparts of the outer wall, his crossbow pointing into the courtyard below. He had been expertly tracing the muddy footprints and deflected raindrops caused by the invisible man, and had seen his last bolt bounce off him. But then his quarry had effectively disappeared against the rough background of a section of the outer wall further along the rampart. Adonis fired randomly at the junction of the ground and the wall, expecting his prey would be running along the edge. He leaned a bit further over, and fired below himself, lest Onyx now be below him at the foot of the wall.
Then Adonis looked the other way, on the other side of where the man had disappeared, and noticed a ladder. He became quite scared as its possibilities occurred to him. He fired a few shots at the ladder, but hit nothing, then began firing along the level of the rampart itself. He nearly pissed in his armor when one of his bolts bounced off the air. Suddenly, at just that point, Onyx materialized out of the air, now holding the gigantic Fortress Shield in his left hand and spinning the Flail of Ages overhead in his right. Onyx whipped forward, and crashed the flail's heads into Adonis's heavy crossbow. The Sune-worshipping knight screamed like a girl as electricity and acid burned his fingers and the crossbow slipped from them and clattered to the ground.
Meanwhile, back in the courtyard, Judas stoically grimaced against the pain of his severed leg. Vorpal wounds are the epitome of clean wounds, and like them, they heal quickly and get infected less, but are extremely painful. Vorpal severed limbs are actually quite easy to reattach with magical healing, as the perfectly flat faces of the cut will fit easily, and this is what Judas was now trying to do. He tried to call to the priest lying beside him for healing, but only silence came out of his mouth, and this made him realize Anomen wouldn't have been able to cast a spell anyway. The paladin smiled as he remembered his own subvocal healing ability, and as he pressed his severed limb against the stump beneath his knee, he willed the healing power of his hands upon the wound.
And nothing happened.
Judas tried again, and still nothing happened. He searched within himself, and tried to find his holy powers, but he could not. Worried, he reached over to his sword, which lay stuck into the ground, to grab the hilt and feel the reassuring power of a holy avenger when it was in your grasp. But as he moved his hand around the hilt, an invisible force, liked repelling magnetism, pushed him away. Then he remembered the look Onyx had given him as he fell into a crouch, the calm, knowing stare of the famed cavalier as he was attacked by a fellow paladin. Judas had thought Onyx was smirking at the tactical blunder that had allowed him to dodge his blow and sever his leg, but now he realized it had been a moral blunder over which the cavalier had given him that look. Judas broke into a cold sweat as the answer finally dawned on him. He was fallen.
The sharp pain of his yet-unhealed leg snapped his attention away the abysmal sinking of his heart, and he rolled onto his back, and pulled a large healing potion off his belt with his right hand. While using his left hand to hold the severed leg flush against the stump, he uncapped and chortled the potion with his right, and to his relief he could feel the flesh of his stump reach out and grow against the flesh of the severed limb. He realized, though, that the severed part was not returning the favor, as its bloodstream was of course disconnected, and so the potion wasn't getting to it, causing the wound to close asymmetrically and leave him with a useless limb.
Regretfully, he winced and forcibly popped his reattached lower leg back off the stump, and took out another healing potion. This time, rather than ingesting it he poured it over the both faces of the slice, and pressed them together. Healing potions can work topically as well as by ingesting, though not as well, and the lower and upper leg slowly began fusing together. Once he felt the circulation return to the severed leg, he drank the rest of the potion. Now he could feel it getting into his reconnected bloodstream and the tissues reconnecting much faster. He drew out another and drank, and the feeling returned to his foot and he found he was becoming able to move it again. The sheared tibia and fibula bones each fused, the muscles began complete again, and the skin grew back together; but he was left with only a neat ring of a scar around his leg just below the knee.
Back up on the outer rampart, Adonis screeched as the crossbow left his hands. Onyx had approached Adonis on the south rampart from the west, which would put his shield arm toward the inside of the Keep, and sure enough, a bolt came flying from the sniper on the inner wall's rampart, and glanced off the Fortress Shield. Adonis held his two ornate shortswords out - Onyx caught himself appraising his foe's handsomeness, and realized that the shortswords looked like small versions of his own Blade of Roses. He noticed the emblems of Sune on the man's armor.
"A paladin of...[i]Sune[/i]?" Onyx asked incredulously.
Adonis sighed. "Oh boy, I get that sooo much. Yes, silly, a paladin of Sune!" He grew cross and charged Onyx with his shortswords waving wildly. The cavalier stuck his large shield forward to meet both of them, and another bolt came sailing for his now-exposed side but mercifully the fortress shield magically deflected that one too. The cavalier found himself wishing he had his fiance's reflective shield - then he could take out the other sniper without even having to find his position!
The small, wiry paladin of Sune bounced off the larger paladin's tower shield, but soon charged again, this time slashing one sword low and the other high. Onyx moved his shield up to block the high one, and swung his flail down and wrapped its heads around the low ones and the man's left forearm behind it. He pushed the man's upper body and right arm back with his shield, and pulled his left arm toward him with his ensnarled flail, and with the quick jerky movement managed to half-disarm of the weak paladin.
"Yeow!" Adonis yelled as his off blade was pulled from his left hand by the flail. He quickly brought his remaining weapon down under the shield and stabbed forward, using the momentum from the pull. The rosy shortsword plunged into Onyx's stomach, through his blue dragonscales, through his thick abs and just under his ribcage, but the impaled cavalier managed to knee Adonis in the face, sending him back, and the shortsword sliding back out of his belly before it cut into his intestines.
As the Sune-paladin's right arm fell back, Onyx brought his shield down on it hard, smashing the man's wrist against the ground and breaking it audibly, and nearly severing the entire hand. Onyx stepped on the flat of the sword with his left foot and easily slid it away under his boot. He lifted the shield and brought his flail around for an underhand swing at Adonis's head, but the roseknight had pulled a dagger out of his own boot with his left hand and successfully stabbed Onyx in the stomach again just as the flail smashed into the face of his helmet. He was knocked back onto the stones, and Onyx ignored the dagger lodged in his belly while he charged forward and brought his flail down in a massive overhead swing upon Adonis's head. Even through the helmet, he managed to give Adonis a concussion, and the paladin of Sune went limp on the stones.
Yet another bolt whizzed harmlessly near Onyx, and the cavalier strapped his flail to his belt, crouched down, and held his shield toward the courtyard, completely blocking himself from the sniper. He pulled the dagger out of his stomach, and while his two stomach gashes were regenerating, he gripped one hand onto his axe hilt to speed the healing, and pressed the other over the wounds to stifle the profuse bleeding. Once they had ceased, he reached into the bag of holding at his belt and pulled a length of rope from it. With both hands, he tied Adonis's feet together. He then tied the other end of the rope around one of the outer guardstones of the wall, and then grabbed and easily lifted the Sunite's small, rather feminine body. The knotted knight regained consciousness just in time to feel himself getting tossed over the edge of the rampart, and shrieked wildly as he began to fall. He screamed again when he suddenly stopped falling and realized that he was suspended in midair, almost flush with the outside of the keep wall, dangling upside-down with a rope around his feet, and staring at an inverted scene of the coastline stretching south of Candlekeep. Upside-down cows peered down from the grass-and-mud "ceiling" of his field of vision and mooed curiously.
"I'll be back; just hang around," Onyx quipped and downed another invisibility potion.
Back in the courtyard, Judas now stood on two solid legs, and then loaded and aimed his crossbow up at Onyx just in time to see Adonis get thrown over the rampart and disappear. He fired potshots but didn't hit anything, and he noticed Puritus doing the same from atop the inner rampart behind him. Anomen, too, had gotten to his feet and had silently armed his sling, but then the cavalier vanished from sight again.
"To the ladders, you fools!" Puritus called from atop the inner wall. "He'll have to come back down the ladders!"
Judas and Anomen each began running to the bases of the two ladders that ran up outer wall, one on either side of where Onyx had disappeared. Puritus continued making potshots at the outer rampart with his crossbow; unlike Adonis, he wasn't clever enough to notice the slight rain-silhouette the cavalier was making. In fact, he didn't even notice the strange indentation that suddenly appeared in a stack of hay at the base of the outer wall. Nor did he notice the line of muddy footprints that began forming next to this haystack and grew in a straight line towards the base of the wall that he stood upon. Nor did it occur to him that his shout to Judas and Anomen could have given away to his prey his position behind the guardstones of the inner rampart.
While Anomen and Judas stood near the bases of their respective ladders, and Anomen wiggled his mouth hoping his powers of speech would return so he could cast a detect invisibility or true sight spell, a deva suddenly materialized from nowhere at the base of the inner wall, just below where Puritus had shouted from.
Puritus was still making potshots when a deva suddenly flew up into his field of vision just in front of him. He nearly dropped his crossbow in terror, and when he did shoot it at her, it bounced off an invisible thing or force just in front of her, and then Puritus realized in even greater terror that the deva had her arms clasped as if she had them around the waist of an invisible man. Then she flew over the guardstones and let go, and Puritus could hear a crunch of two heavy boots just in front of him. Onyx materialized out of the air, holding his large shield in front of Puritus's crossbow and beginning a swing with his flail. Puritus immediately countered with the turn-and-run-like-a-coward technique, and the heads of the Flail of Ages raked lightly across the back of his armor. He jumped off the inner edge of the wall and landed in a thick flowerbed, and while the deva swooped down after him, he made a bolt for the front door of the library itself. He heard the flowerbed crunch again as Onyx landed after him, and opened and ran through the doors just as a throwing axe lodged itself in the oakwood where his head and just been.
Judas and Anomen had seen the action on the inner rampart from their positions and began running towards it. When both Puritus and Onyx leaped over the inside of the wall, they headed for the gate leading through the inner wall and to the library. But just as they passed through the gate, the deva swooped down at them. Anomen hit the dirt in terror, but she grabbed Judas by the back. He struggled and waved his crossbow around, but could not aim it at her, and the deva was strong, and he could not break her grasp. She flew him high up and outside the Keep, over the water, and dropped him in.
"HEEELP!!" he shouted as he splashed into the rain-pelted ocean, "I can't swim!!!" he let his crossbow go and tried to dogpaddle, but his full plate wasn't helping at all. "Heeelp!!! I'm gonna drown!!!"
"Try standing up, wayward warrior," the deva sang. Judas stopped struggling and pushed his legs straight down and.planted them in sand, and then stood up with the water barely reaching his armpit. He breathed a huge sigh of relief, his head easily above the water, and took a deep breath while pulling off his waterlogged helmet and brushing his long black hair out of his face.
Anomen helplessly watched the deva fly off with the Tyrran, and then popped up again as they disappeared. He ran after Onyx, who had followed Judas inside the library. Once inside, he heard boots going up the stairs in the center of the library, and continued following while brandishing his mace and shield.
He could hear Onyx yelling "Come back here, coward!" a flight of stairs above him. For the cavalier too was going up and up only to chase the fleeing Puritus.
Onyx couldn't believe how cowardly [i]and[/i] stupid this guy he was following him was. His boots echoed crisply off the marble stairs above, and made him quite easy to follow; much easier than say, detouring over a carpeted floor would have been. Furthermore, what was he going to do once he reached the top floor, a dead end? Fly away on a magic carpet?
At last Onyx came to the fifth floor just as he heard Puritus reaching the sixth, whose footsteps then grew quieter as he raced across the carpet of the floor above. Onyx stopped, having heard someone chasing [i]him[/i] a floor below; either Judas or Anomen he assumed, but kept stepping in place so that it would sound like his footsteps were continuing up the last flight of stairs.
Anomen balked in surprise when he rounded the stairs onto the landing of the fifth floor, and suddenly Onyx stepped out from behind a bookcase and smashed his huge shield straight into the Helmite with incredibly ramming force, sending him tripping backwards and crashing head-over-heels back down the stairs again.
"Have a nice [i]trip[/i]!" Onyx shouted cheerily after him and resumed ascending the stairs.
"MMMPH OOF OWW MMMPF BY HELM OWW MMMPF!" Anomen declared eloquently as he rolled down flight after flight, at last managing to quit rolling as he sprawled out on the first floor landing, his legs still sticking up the last few stairs. He looked up at the ceiling of the first floor, hurting all over, and feeling embarrassed at his flailing and screaming manner on the way down. Then it occurred to him - he'd made sounds! The silence had worn off! Though he ached all over, he began chanting a powerful healing spell on himself, and the bruises under his armor healed, and as he laid sprawled at the foot of the stairs with his legs above his head, invigorated blood poured into his mind.
Onyx had now made it to the sixth, top story and looked around for Puritus. He cast a detect evil, but sensed nothing. [i]Well, I should,[/i] he thought to himself. Then he noticed something that made him smile, for at last the rain and mud were working to his advantage. A trail of wet carpet and occasional streaks of mud led away from the stairwell past columns of books. Onyx followed them, strapping his shield to his back and drawing out his fiery longsword Angurvadal with his shield arm.
The tracks reached a corner of the library, and then disappeared. Onyx cursed under his breath. The sniper's boots must have dried off. He rounded the corner and continued on, trying to peer into every possible hiding place and listen carefully for the sounds of running boots. He suspected the cowardly man would try to make it back to the staircase, and he was keeping it in his line of sight. He could've stayed at the stairway, and essentially laid siege to his foe, but the morning was getting on and he still wanted to be back at the Inn when Aerie awoke. And he prayed that if Phlydia really was in the library at this hour, this skirmish would bring no harm to her in any crossfire. His plan was to lure the cowardly Helmite to the stairway by leaving it, but be able to beat him there once his foe made the dash.
Then he heard a breath behind him, even though he'd heard no footsteps coming up, and he thought of something. Perhaps the man's trail hadn't disappeared because his boots had dried off, but because that's where the trail ended. Perhaps he hadn't been the only one carrying an invisibility potion today.
His thoughts were confirmed by a sharp pain between his shoulderblades as a bolt sailed into his back. His heart spasmed as the bolt lodged in it and sent a terrible crying pain throughout his chest. He turned to see Puritus standing exactly where the bootprints had disappeared, strapping a crossbow to his waist and drawing a two-handed sword out of a sheath on his back. Onyx tried to lift his armaments, but his pierced heart gave out a terrible shriek and his arms faltered. As Puritus charged with his sword held menacingly, Onyx managed to raise his right arm, spin the flail around over his head, and lash out. The heads snaked around the blade and hilt of the sword and Onyx yanked sideways. As the electricity head crashed into Puritus's wrists and gave him a nasty shock that caused his fingers to spasm, Onyx's yank pulled from his hands the sword, caught in the coils of the other four heads. The greatsword crashed into the bookshelf next to it. Unable to extricate his weapon from the sword and the bookshelf, Onyx let the flail handle go. Wincing with the pain of raising his other arm nearer his heart, he brought Angurvadal up and charged Puritus. The Helmite shrieked and began to jog back while Onyx pursued him. His back smacked into a bookshelf, and as Onyx bore down on him, he began chant in an archaic tongue.
A terrified look came over his face when nothing happened, except that Onyx brought the flaming tip of Angurvadal to his neck and pressed it against the thin chainmail running from his chin to collar between his breastplate and helm. The sword began to heat the metal and sear his throat, and the cavalier applied just enough pressure to make it obvious that he could plunge it straight through the chain and his neck if he wished. Onyx held himself outwardly firm, but really he was losing control fast. The bolt had struck true, stuck right through his heart, which had ceased beating. His muscles were starting to tingle, and soon he would lose his motor skills. With the bolt in his heart, even his natural regeneration, augmented by that of the sheathed axe's hilt he clasped again with his right hand, would not heal such a mortal would with the bolt still lodged in the way.
Moving only his mouth, Puritus tried to cast his spell again but nothing happened.
"Don't bother," Onyx wheezed emotionlessly, even as blood dribbled from his mouth and his pierced lung made his voice hollow and airy. "You have lost your powers. Speaking of which." He reached around between his shoulder blades with his right hand. He placed his palm upon the back of his platemail where blood was gushing forth, and his hand glowed blue for a moment. Onyx smiled as he felt the bolt within him dissolve and the muscle tissue of his heart reconnect and his lung reseal, and the flow of blood dribbling out of his mouth cease. His heart resumed beating, his muscles ceased tingling as proper bloodflow returned to them, and his breathing lost its punctured wheeze.
"Such a simple spell!" Puritus cried in manic at his own failed attempt, seemingly oblivious to the near-miracle Onyx had just performed on himself. "How could I miscast it twice?"
"You know the answer," Onyx told him, "You are fallen."
Puritus went deathly pale. "That.can't be! I'm carrying out the will of the Order!"
"The Order [i]knights[/i]men and women - and, sadly, only certain lineages, to date. It does not make them [i]paladins[/i]."
"Ah.but I am also carrying out the wills of Helm and Torm!"
"The will of Helm? Perhaps. The will of Torm? No, as we can see."
"It's not fair! I was merely following orders!"
"A paladin does not surrender his own judgment."
"But.." Puritus then made several gurgling noises in his feeble attempts to make a retort. "How was I to know?"
"Firstly, you didn't even [i]try[/i] to know. Did you ask my side before attacking me? No. Did you find out whether I had fallen, as you were probably led to believe or wrongly inferred I must have? No. You know what happens when a paladin attacks a paladin. Either you failed to find out the truth of my deeds, or you inferred incorrectly that they were unjust."
"I was deceived!"
"Aye, but you also let yourself be deceived."
"But.your deeds are unjust!"
"Unconventional? Yes - for a paladin, at least. Unpopular? Apparently, at least within certain circles. Unjust? Please, tell me how."
"You have disobeyed the Order."
"The Order does not decide justice. Human decisions are subjective, justice is not; the rules and laws of men cannot change it."
"You use vampiric weapons."
"And how is that unjust? I use them only upon evildoers. Torm explicitly allows his priests to control undead - yes, I know, Helm does not - holding a vampiric sword is no worse than controlling a vampire. How could it be unjust to drain the life of an evildoer, whom it is just to kill outright?"
"Blackrazor may shatter their soul forever."
"A damned soul is forfeit in the same manner as an evil life; in that it may be ended if necessary to curtail the evil it does. All else equal, I'd not wish the loss of the soul, and with it loss of any chance for redemption in the afterlife, but can that be put ahead of an innocent life or soul?"
"You have tortured for information."
"My response is the same. An evildoer, by their actions, forfeits their otherwise inalienable rights of life and liberty. Though such practices may be grisly, undesirable, and abhorrent; the course of action that is unjust is putting the interests of the evildoer above the rights of the innocent."
"You have associated with an evil drow Sharite."
"You speak of miss deVir? She did no evil while in my company. She was redeemable, and though I know not her recent whereabouts, if she has not yet been burned at the stake by yahoos like yourself, I imagine she is redeemable still. We can detect evil, but are not always charged to destroy it on sight. There are other ways of overcoming it. Paladins fight with words as well as swords. To convert an evil foe to good, like to wield an evil weapon for good, is to do twice the good of destroying it, for its power is then reversed. Not to mention the benefit to the former evildoer herself."
"Your justice is not righteous. Your logic is wrong."
"There is only one justice. There is only logic. I am not infallible, but here I am right. If you cannot see it, it is your loss. I need not justify myself to you theologically, for as we can see, Torm knows I am in the right, nor need I justify myself to you in [i]your[/i] flawed perception, for it is I who have you at swordpoint."
"You mean to kill me then? I knew it! I KNEW IT!" Puritus shrieked without regard for dignity, and Onyx noticed a small, warm puddle had appeared on the inside of one of his boots.
"No," Onyx stated calmly, "I merely restrain you for my own safety. It is you who brought the Law of the Sword to bear this day, and I think we both know the alignment of that ethos."
Puritus continued to babble in panic. "I knew you were a killer! A Bhaalspawn!"
"Not for a tenday now, actually. But that, too, is not a crime, it is not unjust. Despite the Order's racist entry requirements, lineage and creed are separable. Even the essence of Bhaal, while I still had it, was always under my control. Though parentage does seem to play a part in personality, it merely influences, not controls; like a stream with a current that is never too fast to swim against if one tries. Ultimately, it is an individual's responsibility and power to make choices. All is at the discretion of the individual."
"But you mean to kill me, don't you, killer?"
"No, I do not, though it would be justified. I am merely going to confiscate your weapons, as you have behaved as an assassin and I cannot trust you." Onyx lifted his free right hand from the hilt of the Axe of the Unyielding, and grabbed the hilt of the bastard sword at Puritus's belt. "This one's a holy avenger - you won't need it now anyway," the cavalier chuckled.
The Helmite paladin's hands reflexively flinched forward for his weapon, but ceased again when the cavalier pressed the tip of his flaming longsword closer against his neck. Onyx drew the bastard sword out of its sheath and then slid it into his bag of holding after deftly opening it with two fingers. Onyx then unhooked the crossbow from the man's belt and placed it away too.
"As I am no thief - although the customs of spoils would make these mine if I wished," Onyx continued, "I will return your armaments to the Order when next I am there. If they do not expel you, or if the weapons are your own property and they actually honor that," he said with acidity directed not at Puritus, "I am sure they will return them. Otherwise, I'm sure they will put them in the hands of someone more capable, both morally and tactically." Puritus let out a bratty whimper but said nothing coherent. "Keep your shield, armor, and quiver. I have left your friends alive and still armed; they can protect you on your journey back."
Onyx withdrew Angurvadal from the paladin's throat and turned to walk back along the aisle of bookshelves. He untangled the Flail of Ages and Puritus's two-handed sword from where they were lodged in a bookshelf, and put them in his bag. Then, seeming more bored than relieved (in fact it was his recent loss of circulation which, in his sleep deprived state, had left him quite lightheaded), he continued pacing down the aisle to the other wall of the floor, where he gazed out an east-facing window and looked inland, through the dim light of the overcast, rainy morning, the sun just beginning to peak out. He took off his helmet, laid it on a table next to the window, and leaned over the windowsill.
"You know," he told Puritus as he barely heard the man walking up the aisle behind him, "Out this window, over those hills, stretches Faerun, and further on Kara-Tur. I knew a man from there. A conflicted man, but I believe he could have been a good man. He was not given the chance to be redeemed in life, only in death. Fare the well, Yoshimo, and I pray Ilmater has had mercy upon thy soul."
He paused in thought and then continued. "Imoen and I used to play in this library. The old monks forbade that, of course, so we tried to stay quiet. We would play at adventurers, beginning on the ground floor, and working our way up. The 'monsters' of course, came either entirely out of our imagination, or were represented by the monks whom we had to sneak past. Imoen always did love sneaking."
While Onyx continued rambling, he leaned his head leaning out the window and listened to the crashes of the waves. He was hunched forward over the windowsill, and his shoulders blocked his ears from the inside of the floor of the library, and thus the sounds of Puritus drawing a dagger from within his own gauntlet and tiptoeing up behind him were quite muffled. Then a loud running noise came from the marble stairwell, and Puritus winced in terror, but as if by some great mercy the cavalier did not turn around. "Ah, Anomen is here to join us," Onyx said, without turning from the window, "How nice."
The Helmite heard him, and came walking towards their corner of the library, and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Puritus standing just behind Onyx with a dagger drawn, holding it high in a reverse grip, clearly meaning to plunge it into the back of the cavalier's bare neck.
"Dear Sir Delryn," Onyx began calmly without looking into the room, "I was just explaining to my fallen paladin friend here the error of your mission. You see."
"ONYX WATCH OUT!!!!!" Anomen screamed as Puritus lunged.
Onyx reacted to the warning almost too quickly. He sunk into a kneel, his arms and chin pulling back fluidly and moving just over and down past the windowsill as Puritus fell high and forward upon him. The neck-stabbing fallen paladin reacted too slowly, and his legs smashed into Onyx's crouched form while he was still bringing his upper body forward and down for the stab, turning his linear momentum into an angular head-over-heels trajectory.
Carried forward by the weight of his armored torso and arms, particularly his right arm outstretched forward, Puritus flipped over Onyx, who bowed his head forward to let the man's waist roll smoothly over his broad shoulders, and his stomach landed on the windowsill and slid along it, carried by his momentum. As Puritus's upper body flew out the window, he dropped his dagger at the sight of the ground six long stories below and began to shriek and flail wildly. He made the grave error of bending his knees and waving his hands forward, causing his center of gravity to move ever-so-slightly over the edge of the windowsill. Like a perfect lever, set on the windowsill against his rigid lower chestplate, he tipped forward and began to slide further out the window. The metal of his armor grated across the stone, then that of his leggings, and finally he went hurtling out of the sixth floor into the empty air.
Onyx mused, "Death comes."
Puritus fell past the fifth floor, flailing like a dancing puppet.
".to us all."
Puritus dropped past the fourth floor, crying like a terrified child.
".But to you."
Puritus sailed past the third floor, babbling like a lunatic.
"..it comes."
Puritus hurtled past the second floor, quivering like a dying bird.
".without."
Puritus plummeted past the first floor, silent and still as stone.
".honor."
He landed headfirst with a sickening and deafening crash of bones and metal upon the patio stones just outside the library doors, his rigid helmet and torso parting at his neck, the weakest point of stress relief. So too with his other joints, and his body was dashed to large chunks as it sank into the stones, metal plates cutting through flesh, and his head and limbs went flying into nearby patches of colorfully and carefully arranged flowers.
Onyx and Anomen now stood by adjacent windows and looked down at the wreckage below. A monk was carefully walking up to inspect it, hiking up the skirt of his robe above the bloodied grass. The rain was still falling, washing the trickling blood along the cracks between the cobblestones into the grass rather than allowing it to pool.
"Why did you warn me?" Onyx asked Anomen, turning to him, while putting his helmet into his bag of holding.
The Helmite bit his lip. "Because he attacked unchivalrously. Because he was fallen. Because you spared my life. Because you deserved a trial. Because your actions did not merit death. Because they may not be unjust at all. I don't know, Onyx, I'm confused, and I don't know. I don't know what Helm wanted me to do. I don't know what the Order wanted me to do. I don't know what was right to do."
"But it sounds like you are beginning to understand that those three are not always the same."
"The Order may not always be right, I suppose. Please don't - "
"Don't worry, you know I of all people won't say anything to them. Speak freely."
"Okay. As for Helm, well,."
"You don't want to blaspheme him, I understand."
Anomen bit his lip again and nodded silently. Onyx placed his left gauntlet upon the priest's right shoulder forgivingly and spoke. "I am sure he looks approvingly upon you today. I believe that if the gods wished for their servants to be unthinking, they would use golems, not men. We have free will. No matter our laws, rules, order, and edicts, there is always a place for judgment calls and individual thinking. Good and truth may be absolute, but that does not necessarily make any particular being infallible. Not even a deity. After all, are they really so different from us? As Elminster says, gods may become mortals, and mortals may become gods."
".Such is life in the Realms." Anomen finished and Onyx smiled.
Just then the pitter-patter of three light pairs of feet and two heavier pairs could be heard ascending the stairs. Onyx grinned broadly. "And I should know. Such has been my life. But it is now a mortal life. But life." he touched his right hand to Aerie's handkerchief, tied around his left arm, ".goes on."
Three young women in mage robes and elven chain appeared from around a bookshelf, followed by a dreadlocked man and a bald one. Aerie and Imoen rushed to Onyx's sides and hugged him, and he wrapped his arms around them; and Minsc laughed and strode over to Anomen and nearly crushed him in a bear hug, and Nalia and Valygar held back and wrapped their arms around each other's waists, and looked at Onyx, who stood tall above his sister and lover in front of the window, the rays of the sunrise coming through the window, as the rain ceased and the clouds parted outside, filling in around him and creating a glowing golden-white halo around the beaming knight.