Chapter 2

Hours later, Artemis Entreri was not surprised at all to awaken on the cold, damp floor of a poorly lit dungeon. His grogginess and pounding headache told him he'd likely been drugged by some type of dart, and he suspected the crossbow bolt had been to blame.

A small, warm hand briefly touched his forehead, and Entreri wrenched open his eyes in an attempt to determine if the hand in question belonged to a particular drow elf. Sure enough, Jarlaxle was sitting by him on the floor and looking a bit worse for wear. The assassin felt relieved to see the elf still alive, but the many bruises decorating the mercenary's face reminded the man that their position was precarious indeed. Why had they been taken alive? And by whom? This Waylein man Jarlaxle had mentioned earlier?

Entreri pushed himself to a sitting position with great effort and scooted himself back to lean against the wall by his companion. He took a moment to try to clear his thoughts, but everything seemed fuzzy. The light of the single torch outside their cell appeared hazy to him, and the rhythmic dripping of water somewhere in the cell seemed to echo in his head. Despite this, every single cut, bruise, knot, and bump on his body didn't hesitate to make itself known.

"How are you feeling, my friend?" the elf asked, his voice conveying a slight weariness beneath his customary lightheartedness.

"Groggy," Entreri answered truthfully. His drugged mind fought to sort out all the details, and the man's face screwed into a frown as he noted that Jarlaxle didn't seem quite . . . right.

With a sudden clearing of his mind, Entreri realized that Jarlaxle was not wearing his outrageous hat, his customary eye patch, or his multi-colored cape. He wasn't wearing any jewelry or his bracers. In fact, Jarlaxle wasn't wearing any of his own clothing or items at all. He was adorned in nothing more than an oversized and long-sleeved white cotton shirt that laced up the front and a pair of slightly baggy brown cotton pants. Entreri stared with comprehending horror—their captors had determined the nature of their prisoners.

"They took your clothes," the assassin stated.

"An unpleasant process even when one is half-drugged," Jarlaxle quipped. "And such horrid taste in clothing they have, as well!"

Entreri shook his head over the drow's undefeatable spirit, but he couldn't miss noting that Jarlaxle looked a bit chilled in the wrinkled, thin, and nearly see-through cotton. He sat curled in upon himself, his knees bent up so he could rest his chin upon them and his arms wrapped loosely about his legs. Small ebon-skinned elven feet protruded from the ends of the pants legs, and even as Entreri watched a flash of goosebumps ran up Jarlaxle's neck and onto his bare head. Of more concern to the assassin, however, were the red splotches that had bled through the shirt in places. "How severely are you injured?" he asked.

Jarlaxle graced him with a self-depreciating grin. "Oh, I will live."

"For now," Entreri growled, not at all happy with the situation. Of course his own hat was gone, along with his belt and cloak. He could only hope that Charon's Claw had killed at least one of the soldiers when they took it from him . . . provided that the dead magic zone had not also stopped that particular effect of sentient sword. "What have you figured out?"

"We are the prisoners of one Brok Waylein, although I am unsure why we have been captured. We're free of the dead magic zone, but one of our captors is a wizard of not inconsiderable skill. Also, I know where our quarry, Merrick, is."

Entreri raised an eyebrow.

Jarlaxle waved in a grand gesture toward the cell across from theirs. The assassin glanced over and saw a large blonde man leaning against the bars of his own cell, his arms sticking through the bars.

"Welcome to the first of the nine hells," the man quipped in a deep baritone voice, a wry grin lighting up his wide face. His large nose was helplessly crooked, which to Entreri made him look somewhat like a stereotypical pirate.

"Just perfect," the assassin retorted.

"Perhaps you would like to expand upon that comment?" Jarlaxle asked Merrick, standing and walking up to the bars.

Merrick's expression turned thoughtful. "Should I help those sent to hunt me down?" His wide grin returned, flashing an impressive set of straight, if yellowed, teeth. "Ah, why not? In short, Waylein is a sadist." Merrick's tone left no doubt to the depth of his conviction.

Jarlaxle paused to consider this revelation and leaned against the bars of his own cell, matching Merrick's posture. What a human would define as sadism would likely fall short of the drow concept, but it was nothing to dismiss, either. "How so?"

"He brutally tortures all his prisoners to the point of insanity, and even oft times lets them live with the horrors they've experienced," the man replied, obviously trying to maintain bravado with his matter-of-fact tone.

Behind him, Entreri made an odd, short sound—something between a snort and a growl. Jarlaxle glanced back to the man and noted his typically grim expression. He sat with one leg down and crooked in and the other bent up, an arm slung over the raised knee. The assassin glanced away as Jarlaxle regarded him and stared at the far back corner of their cell.

"Many of Waylein's victims die in the forest because he lets them go to wander around aimlessly in their madness," Merrick continued, no doubt hoping to rouse fear in his would-be captors. "Those that are found often recover from their many physical injuries, but they spend their rest of their lives slobbering on themselves and blurting nonsensical sentences."

Jarlaxle faced the man again and nodded. "And you are here because . . .?"

"I was sent to assassinate him," Merrick replied, and his tone suggested that Jarlaxle not inquire further.

The mercenary decided one more question couldn't hurt; the man seemed to almost gleeful about giving out the disturbing information. "And he would take us alive because . . .?"

"Simple!" Merrick chirped with a rueful grin, although his smile was too forced to uphold his bravado. "Anyone who enters the forest invades his territory, and he loves to torture each and every person he meets!"

This time, Entreri's response was closer to a snort. "So we're here only for his sadistic pleasure?"

Merrick grew quite somber and serious, his cheerful façade slipping momentarily. "Yes, I'm afraid we are, and obviously dangerous types like ourselves are walking targets to be sure. Frankly, the man's atrocities are quite legendary among the . . . ah . . . less savory sorts of the region. My employer has a score to settle on the behalf of several family members, and the tale, if I were at liberty to tell it and were so inclined, would make even a drow elf uncomfortable, I dare to say."

Jarlaxle paused to digest those words. The odds did not appeal to him, but he was far from despair. His entire life had been nothing more than the overcoming of astounding odds, and the mercenary firmly believed that he would find a way out. Still, it had been a long time since he had felt so naked, alone without weapons or magical items. Well, not alone perhaps. Provided Entreri didn't decide to betray him, Jarlaxle had an angry assassin who didn't require weapons in order to kill.

Jarlaxle smiled to himself and abandoned those thoughts. He wasn't helpless, and he hadn't met a problem yet he couldn't solve.

"I find it interesting to see a dark elf in these lands," Merrick commented. "Why here?"

"Ah, the adventure," Jarlaxle remarked lightly, and the man laughed.

"A bit too much of it, perhaps," Merrick bantered, "for if you wanted to be tortured senseless I'm sure you could've just stayed home."

"Indeed," the mercenary agreed, "but likely the torture will have a different flavor here."

Merrick laughed again, although the sound was punctured by hollowness. "Maybe it will, at that."

Jarlaxle could feel Entreri's smirk without even having to turn around to look, but heavy rattling interrupted their dark jests. The three could hear the dungeon door open, and moments later a half-dozen soldiers arrived with two unconscious prisoners, a man and a woman. The pair were taken to the end of the cellblock and deposited, but the soldiers stopped at Merrick's cell on the way out.

"Time to face Waylein," the captain remarked.

"Oh, joy," the assassin quipped, but offered no resistance as the soldiers led him out.

Jarlaxle assumed that the man had a plan, but he wondered how effective it would be considering one of the six soldiers was the wizard he'd identified on his way to the dungeon. Mentally wishing the man the best of luck, the elf watched as the group disappeared down the hallway. When all the rattles and clicks subsided, Jarlaxle returned to his spot by Entreri.

"I suppose you're already deeply into your planning," Entreri remarked.

Jarlaxle smiled but didn't respond. In truth, he needed more information, but his initial assessment suggested their best course of action was to overwhelm the soldiers who would come for them later. As he sat and pondered the details, the chill of the floor seeped through the seat of his pants, and before long he shivered. To his mild surprise, the assassin looked at him with a tiny flash of concern, although he said nothing and the concern passed instantly. Such a complex one, this human, far more complex than he first seemed.

"Shall we make our move when they come for us, or shall we wait until we're out of the dungeon?" the assassin asked.

"There is the matter of the wizard," Jarlaxle answered, for once not intending to be cryptic. He was simply distracted.

Artemis Entreri, so used to the elf's evasive answers, didn't bother to even sigh. The mercenary was brilliant, he knew, and he simply trusted that Jarlaxle would reveal his plan at an appropriate moment. It was fortunate that the assassin found Jarlaxle so compelling, for surely any other would have died for frustrating the dangerous man so. But Entreri, in his own way, was vaguely amused by it despite his irritation, and felt reasonably sure that the elf held no malicious plans for him. Let him have his mysteries, the assassin mused, for surely I have mine.

Jarlaxle, however, had pursued a minor tangent that his friend's grammatically proper words had evoked. During his centuries of perilous games and intrigue, the drow had developed the ability to follow several lines of inquiry or planning at once. Even as his mind mulled over the matter of their escape, he considered once again an oddity about his friend: the man seemed educated. He spoke with grammatical correctness and could read and write. Jarlaxle assumed that Entreri had likely spent at least half his childhood living in Calimport's streets, homeless and half-starved. How did such a child become literate? The guilds might ensure that their bright recruits had basic reading skills for reasons of practicality, but would they really take time to so thoroughly train someone to read, write, and speak? Or had young Artemis Entreri come to the streets already literate? If he had, what did it mean about his childhood?

Ever was Jarlaxle trying to piece together the puzzle of Artemis Entreri.

Numerous rattles and clicks announced the return of the soldiers. "We move as one," Jarlaxle instructed quickly, "you on the left and me on the right." As he stood, he gathered within himself the innate magic of the drow, preparing to drop a globe of darkness upon the soldiers as the second stage of their attack.

But the companions never had the chance to act. The wizard, expecting such a move, froze them in place with a spell, which settled upon them so heavily Jarlaxle could barely draw breath.

The soldiers entered the cell with ease and grabbed Entreri. "You're off to meet Master Waylein, too," the captain leered as they hauled him away.

Jarlaxle watched the fading procession with narrowed eyes, his anger over the frustrating situation burning coldly in his stomach before he could rein in his emotions. He hoped that the guild houses of Calimport trained their people in torture-resistance. Entreri would be no use to him mad, and Jarlaxle had to admit he simply didn't want to see his friend suffer such a fate.