Chapter 3

The survivor

—

"So…she's not coming down today too, I take it?"

Jaheira flicked a glance at Yoshimo. "No."

Her unwanted companion nodded, leaning back in his seat. Unperturbed by her short response. Of late, she wondered what it took to unsettle the man, he took everything from mutilated dead bodies to rudeness in the same relaxed stride. Perhaps he really was the seasoned bounty hunter he claimed to be.

She still didn't know what to make of him. They'd found him scavenging weapons from a dead man in the upper level of their captor's dungeon. His story was that he'd gone to sleep in a comfortable bed one night and woke up the next morning in a cage. Drugged and kidnapped as a test subject, Imoen had suspected. Jaheira had her own reservations, though. His alibi seemed too convenient, and unlike Elene and herself, he'd walked away from those dungeons free of physical and mental injuries. Curious, given their captor's twisted proclivities.

"Maybe tomorrow then," he offered with a hopeful smile.

Wordlessly, Jaheira downed her drink, wishing she shared his optimism. Despite improving in appearance, Elene had barely gotten out of bed for the past three days. At first, she chalked it down to the lingering injuries from her ordeal in the madman's dungeon. She'd offloaded every healing spell in her repertoire on the other woman and still, all Elene did was stare at the wall or sleep. At best, she would sit by the window and watch the comings and goings on the streets. Then it became increasingly obvious that the damage to her mind was the greater evil. There were no spells to remedy that, unfortunately. Only the passing of time could help her recover.

Time they didn't have as their coffers dwindled. They'd come away from their captors with only the clothes on their back, along with every scrap of material they managed to scavenge as they made their escape. Almost all Jaheira and Yoshimo had flogged to fences and merchants, netting them just enough to pay for room and board for the next tenday or so.

Beyond that…well. She needed to figure something out.

"I took the liberty of reaching out to some contacts in the city last night. I may be able to come up with a lead in the next few days," said Yoshimo.

Jaheira stirred. "What kind of lead?"

"A way to get back your friend. The one taken by the mages."

"How does a foreign man make headway so quickly in such an unfriendly city?" she asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Oh, I have my ways," he replied, all smoke and mirrors.

Once again, she slipped into silence. She still had doubts on his intentions, but if he could secure a lead, he was welcome to try. Whether or not she would take him up on the help was another matter altogether. As for her, she already had something in mind. Her only hope was that the Harpers in Athkatla remembered her from the last sojourn to the city more than a decade ago. The last time she had been here was on a mission with Belgrade…and Khalid.

Her fingers tightened around the hard clay mug in her hand as Khalid's smiling face flashed through her mind. Inevitably, the next thought was the state his…body was in when they'd found him in the madman's dungeon. Khalid, her sweet, golden Khalid. Reduced to a test subject, naught but meat to be poked and prodded for the sake of observation. That he was already dead did not lessen the sting of finding him in that manner. The villain will burn for what he'd done to her husband, of that she would make sure of. Times like this, Jaheira began to understand her former travelling companion Kivan, and what fuelled his relentless crusade for vengeance.

It helped that rage papered over the crushing grief of loss.

A grubby dwarf bumped into the back of her chair, dislodging her temporarily from her dark rumination. This early in the morning, the common room was filled with day workers starting their day or bleary-eyed drunks who'd never left from the night before. A relatively harmless bunch. Even so, she reached instinctively for the gold pouch at her belt, not trusting the miscreants frequenting the Copper Coronet to keep their hands to themselves. Judging from the suspicious characters slipping into the guarded chambers on the far side of the tavern, she guessed that there was more to this place than meets the eye.

"I will be away for the rest of the day," she told her companion. "I'd prefer if you could stay behind and make sure food gets sent up. Or watch out for Elene if she eventually does make her way down. Just in case."

"Now you're trusting me to look after your ward?" he asked, a slight edge in his tone.

"You are our ally, are you not?"

Of course, the likelihood of Elene leaving the room or even interacting with him was slim to none, except she wasn't going to tell him that. And in all honesty, Elene was hardly a defenceless lamb – even without the use of magic, she was still lethal with her knives. Truth be told, Jaheira simply didn't want to be followed. Yoshimo levelled an appraising look at her, one she met without flinching. If he thought he could unnerve her with his probing silence, he was barking up the wrong tree. She'd been playing this game for longer than he'd been alive. Ally or no, she would like to keep this particular card close to her chest.

"Very well. Let me know if you need assistance," he replied at last.

Jaheira nodded, already getting to her feet. For once in recent days, nothing ached with her movement. It seemed that her body was making good recovery from weeks of incarceration. Urgency demanded it.

The main door creaked hideously as she palmed it open. She blinked against the early morning rays, the sudden brightness a jarring contrast to the tavern's dim interior. Foot traffic outside was beginning to pick up, men and women heading out for work or errands, the murmur of voices a familiar ambient noise of a big city. She joined the ranks of Athkatlans in the streets, though she received curious looks from milling commoners. Not a surprise. She'd always favoured the elven side of her heritage in appearance, and elves were uncommon in Athkatla.

In truth, her recollection of the city was vague, at best. Athkatla was the heartland of merchants, where the only things that mattered were the coin in your purse and how much you were willing to pay for a good or service. The rumours in the north gush that the roads of Athkatla were paved with gold. While untrue, gold did determine your fate here. Anything goes in the City of Coin, even slavery, for as long as you have a permit, or paid the required taxes. The Council of Six ruled over the cesspool of trades and intrigue, the shadowed hand which played off pieces against each other, all in the name of making more profit, always more profit.

Athkatla's cold-blooded philosophy was much in line with the Iron Throne of Sembia but overlaid on a population of about a million inhabitants. No different than the wild, really. Except here, merchants would eat one another for coin, and not for survival. It is no wonder the nefarious Shadow Thieves made their home here.

She'd hated the place on her first visit, and she hated it just as much now.

For the first time that day, though, Jaheira allowed herself to think of Imoen. The poor girl had been in a state when they'd reunited in the dungeon. She whispered of experiments, horrors in the dim grey expanse of those dungeons, of talking to men in jars. It rattled Jaheira to see the girl like that. While Elene had always carried a seed of darkness within her, Imoen was like the sun in their group. Always ready with a nonsensical observation, and good cheer to derail even the worst of Xan's doom-mongering. The Imoen who stood up against their captor in the rubble, though, was desperate to do anything to avoid going back to his cage.

There was no doubt in her mind that Imoen was in the custody of the Cowled Wizards. The Wizards were nothing more than enforcers of one of the powerful families in Athkatla, the patriarch of which sat on the Council of Six. It would be difficult, but not impossible to extract Imoen from their grasping tentacles. Jaheira suspected that they simply needed to find the right leverage to negotiate with these wizards. Coin would most definitely be one of the requirements. Beyond coin, though, they needed clout.

Her pursuit of clout was what led her away from the slum district and back to Waukeen's Promenade. After her hard work bringing down the Iron Throne, surely the Harpers owed her enough to help with their current situation. Though she secretly accepted that seeking them out was itself an act of desperation on her part, given how unhelpful they were when the tide turned against her group in Baldur's Gate.

I only need to find them.

An uncomfortable feeling had been gnawing at her since the day before, when she'd tried to re-activate her old network. The usual boltholes, the dead drops, they all seemed abandoned, for months at least. Logic dictated that of course Belgrade wouldn't maintain the same modus operandi for so long, as an experienced field agent, he would have regularly switched up how he ran his operation. Still, it was all too quiet for her liking.

The bazaar was already in full swing by the time she arrived at the grand white promenade around ninth bell. A section in the north had been cordoned off, guards milling back and forth while workmen got started on shifting the rubble from the destruction wrought by the masked man days earlier. They'd already made significant progress on the rebuilding, Jaheira could see. Naturally. Every day the stalls weren't up in that area meant another day of lost business. That simple couldn't be allowed to stand.

"Madam, could I interest you in spices from Calimshan?"

"Step right up for the greatest show you'll ever see!"

"'Ere, the finest jewellery from the north, a discount if you buy three pieces!"

Jaheira ignored the calls of the surrounding merchants, the proprietors gesticulating wildly at her as she moved past. There was only one shop she was interested in, and it lay several doors away, exactly where it had been just over ten years ago.

The Adventurer's Mart sprawled across three alcoves on the west side of Waukeen's Promenade, several floors below the smithies and tanners. A red-cheeked dwarf stood at the entrance handing out colourful fliers, promoting an offer for a quiver of arrows thrown in upon the purchase of one of the enchanted bows on the first-floor displays. Jaheira filed that tidbit of information away for future reference as she wandered into the rows of shelves offering everything from armour to weapons to potions. The store was stacked to the brim with equipment designed to keep the average adventurer alive.

Deep within the store, past a display shelf laden with shields, a half-elven man perched at the counter with a bored expression as he watched a human in dark robes wave a set of bracers at him. Jaheira stood back to watch the exchange.

"You said these bracers were supposed to grant protection! False advertising, I say! Did nothing of the sort, I nearly lost my arm to that brigand," complained the robed man.

"Sir," the half-elf drawled in reply, "I said the protection offered was for scrapes and bruises, not a sword strike. If I had a bracer that can make you invulnerable to swords, believe you me, it would cost a lot more than a few hundred gold."

The robed man sputtered with indignation. "Charlatan! I demand a refund!"

"If I give you a refund on that basis, I'd have to reimburse all my other customers as well. If you feel that strongly about it, I suggest you write to the local council with a complaint, and we shall see if your point stands in court."

The smile he graced the other man was bland, harmless even. Yet the mere mention of 'court' caused the other to balk.

"Er, I don't see why that would be needed. Why can't we settle this here?"

"For the paperwork, of course, make sure everything is above board." The half-elf's eyes were glinting by that point. "I trust you have yours, as I have mine. They will need to see the permits for magic, naturally."

"Um, naturally."

The half-elf tapped the counter casually. "So? To whom may I serve my defence papers to?"

"Alright, fine," the robed man huffed. "You can keep the money. But rest assured I will never frequent this place again!"

As the man whirled away in disgust, the half-elf muttered under his breath, "See that you don't."

Jaheira waited for a few seconds after the robed man departed before approaching the counter. Up close, the half-elf could be deemed handsome, accentuated by a certain debonair edge which reminded her annoyingly of an old associate named Coran. The difference was that his tanned features were lined, and crow's feet had begun to form around his eyes, though his hair remained the same cinnamon brown as it had been years earlier.

"Ribald Barterman, at your service. I…" He turned to greet her. Then paused. "Ah."

"I take it you remember me, Mister Barterman," said Jaheira, her tone dry.

He nodded warily even as his eyes flicked over her shoulder, as if searching for accomplices. She didn't miss the fact that he'd dropped one hand from the counter, concealing it from view. "Miss Jaheira. It's been a while. Is it just you for today?"

"Indeed." She watched him for a few breaths before plunging in. "Can I speak with you?"

"We're speaking, aren't we?"

She glared. "In private."

Ribald sighed, then after a moment, gestured for her to follow him.

He led her past several shelves of what were surely spell components at the back of the store, and into a private room hidden behind a deep blue curtain. The room was sparsely decorated, only a table and a few chairs, with some drinks lined up on a decorative table in one corner. Somehow, it looked different from the last time she'd been here. As though something was missing…

"What happened to the painting?" Jaheira asked, jerking her chin toward a barren wall near the drinks.

"Sold it," Ribald answered, and that was that.

Meaning he must have been offered a small fortune. He had such a soft spot for it. Either that or he'd fallen on hard times.

"So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?" He prompted as he took a seat, the façade of a friendly shopkeeper falling away now that they were hidden from prying eyes. "I'll be blunt, I haven't worked with your kind for years after the last mess you lot got me into. Nearly got me killed." Then, he wrinkled his nose. "Or worse, sued."

Odd, she didn't remember the last job with Ribald being quite so dramatic. They had been in Athkatla to seize smuggled magical equipment meant to bolster a tyrant in the south. Belgrade was in charge, with Khalid and herself acting as muscle. Ribald had pointed them to the goods and gave them some toys to play with to help improve the odds. They'd spent some late nights strategising how best to execute the operation, and as far as she knew that mission had been a roaring success. Maybe something happened after she and Khalid left the city.

"Nice to see you kept your priorities intact after all these years," she remarked.

"What can I say, I'm a proud son of Amn."

Jaheira settled into the chair opposite him, reminded that Ribald was a prickly bastard when he chose to be. She let out a slow exhale before laying her proverbial cards on the table. "I was hoping you could point me in the direction of 'my kind', as you call them."

He stared. "Why would you need my help with that? Surely you'd know how to find them."

"Normally I would agree," she admitted through gritted teeth. "But the circumstances of how I ended up here were…beyond my control. And the terrain is no longer familiar to me."

"A lot has changed in ten years." He canted his head, the act vaguely cat-like. "That why Khalid's not with you?"

A lump formed in her throat at the mention of his name, but she forced the words out. "Khalid is no longer with the living."

"Ah. My…apologies. He was a good man."

Platitudes. He barely knew him.

"Where's Belgrade?" she asked instead, reining in the sudden burst of irrational umbrage.

His eyebrows furrowed. "You don't know?"

"If I knew, would I be asking?"

Ribald took a deep breath, his eyes never leaving hers. Inwardly, she braced herself. She could tell she wasn't going to like what he was about to say next.

"He's dead, Jaheira. Been dead for almost a year."

Despite her mental preparation, his statement hit her like a hammer. Stunned, she sank deeper into her chair. Normally, she was more careful about concealing her reaction, but this discovery shocked her to the core. "What…how did he die?"

"No one knows for sure," Ribald shrugged. "He was found in an alley near the slums. Didn't look like murder, from what I heard. He was just…dead."

Belgrade. Another friend lost, so soon after Gorion. It was almost too much to take in. A small tremor ran through her as she wiped a hand down her face, fighting to regain composure as the names of the dead piled up in her mind. Deep, slow breaths helped to steady her. She would not cave in front of this man. She would not.

"I'm sorry."

"Who is running operations now, then?" she asked, her voice coming out rough.

A knowing look crossed Ribald's features. It was the face of a man who knew what it meant to lose friends, and when to drop the subject. "Meronia, I think her name was. Last I heard, she operates out of the Docks."

She remembered the woman. Even as an initiate, Meronia had been clever, deadly, ambitious. Belgrade had a soft spot for her as well, was grooming her for a leadership role at some point. It came as no surprise that she would take over, and that she would locate in the Docks. Finding her among the labyrinth of warehouses would be a challenge, though. A thief by profession, Meronia was the type of operator who wouldn't be found unless she wanted to be found. Jaheira had her work cut out for her.

"Thank you," she ducked her head. "I…appreciate you telling me this."

Ribald nodded. He seemed to grapple with his curiosity for a moment, before asking, "What happened to you?"

Seconds ticked by as she wondered how much she could share with the man. Eventually, though, she recognised the opportunity to find out more about what they were up against. "We were captured by a mage not far from Baldur's Gate. He brought us here, imprisoned us in his laboratory for the better part of a month."

"Here?" His eyebrows shot up at that. "He must be a man of influence, to be able to operate a lab under the noses of the Cowled Wizards."

"Powerful, as well. You saw what he did to the Promenade."

"Sune's tits. That mage?" He shook his head. "It's a wonder you made it out in one piece. An even greater wonder that the Cowled ones didn't deal with him before he kicked off that rampage. What did he want with you?"

"He didn't exactly share his plans," she shot back drily.

He rubbed the back of his neck. "I suppose not." Then his features turned earnest. "Look, if you need adventuring supplies, just come on over. I can't give you a discount across the board but…I'll see what I can do for you."

"Why are you offering?" she asked, unable to keep the suspicion out of her voice.

"For old times' sake."

Despite his affected nonchalance, she recognised the sympathy in his eyes. Ah yes, pity the bereaved widow, the Harper set adrift. A part of her wanted to throw the offer back in his face. She was no victim; she didn't need his pity. Even as a child, she'd survived a revolution that killed her family, then manoeuvred her way through dozens of missions for her druid circle and the Harpers in the years after. She would survive this as well, without his help!

Then…she remembered Elene. Her broken sobs deep in the night when the girl thought she'd already fallen asleep. And she thought of Imoen's wide, fearful eyes just as she was taken from them. They needed every shred of help and advantage they could get, especially since she couldn't rely on Belgrade anymore. And so, as much as it pained her to, she smothered her pride.

"I will see you soon then," she told him as she stood. "Inform me if anyone comes looking."

She couldn't leave his store quickly enough.

For a long while, she wandered the promenade. As suspected, the bazaar had expanded since her last sojourn here, the stalls spilling out beyond the giant amphitheatre to cater to not only more goods, but also street shows and entertainment. The narrow lanes between stalls grew steadily more packed as the sun rose higher in the sky. In the end, Jaheira opted to purchase a set of skewered meat for lunch and ate them by the steps of the east entrance to the bazaar. Not because she was hungry, mind. The news of Belgrade's demise had shrivelled the last of her appetite for the day. Indulging in something as mundane as eating at least gave her an excuse to sit and think, all the while observing the men and women who crossed her path.

Within the throng, though she sat surrounded by people, she'd never felt so alone.

As the wave of melancholy washed over her, she pushed herself back to her feet. No time to mope. There was work to be done. Resentment flashed through her at the thought of Elene likely still in bed. If only all of them had the luxury to mourn as she did.

Jaheira cut back through the narrow alleys she'd come from, aiming to cross the slums, then the Alandor river towards the Wave District, where the docks were. Her brisk steps and stormy expression kept the way clear as she walked. She had a short timeframe to work with, to sniff out traces of Meronia in the docks. Although it was seven hours from dusk, the streets were dangerous after dark especially with whispers of a raging guild war, so she had to be safely within the Coronet before nightfall. While working alone gave her plenty of freedom, it also left her with no one to watch her back.

As she passed through the Bridge District, though, her eyes snagged on a familiar sign which made her pause. Two white hands bound by a red thread. A temple of Ilmater. Invariably, Khalid's kind eyes appeared in her mind.

If things had been different…they would have brought Khalid here, to the home of his patron deity. And kept him there while the rest of them scrounged, begged, and stole the money needed to afford a resurrection. Except his body had been desecrated. When they found him, most of his organs were gone, and they didn't have the luxury of time to turn the lab upside down to go on a macabre search for his remains. Barring direct intervention from the Gods, he would remain lost to them. All they could do for him in the end was to set fire to the lab, ensured that none could ever defile him again. At the time, it had been enough for her.

"Do you think we'll ever stop adventuring, and just…settle down?"

It was an idle question from long ago, asked in the dying hours of the night. Khalid looked pensive even as he asked then, as if he was trying to puzzle out his own answer. His dark red hair blazed warmly in the firelight, and she decided then and there that it didn't matter for as long as he was by her side, surprising even herself with such sappiness. He'd smiled at her, of course, but there was melancholy in that expression, one wholly unfamiliar to her. Now, she was left to wonder if he somehow knew of the cruel fate that would befall him even then.

Swallowing her grief, she also wondered if she would ever find her way without him.