Kimmuriel studied Jarlaxle as the other mercenary shuffled through a stack of reports, glancing at each one before moving onto the next. Jarlaxle had activated his eye patch, keeping the psionicist out of his mind, but he was uncharacteristically quiet. Normally, Kimmuriel would be parrying remarks about his sour demeanor by now.
"Matron Baenre had an interesting tale for me a tenday ago." Jarlaxle said, his visible eye intent on Kimmuriel. This particular office was in the upper story above a tavern. In the room below them, it sounded like a fight had started. Kimmuriel had no doubt the dwarf was involved and his suspicion was confirmed almost immediately by ringing laughter.
Jarlaxle had paused to listen and hadn't continued his statement. Kimmuriel raised an eyebrow. "Matron Baenre?"
Jarlaxle smiled, but it seemed insincere, which Kimmuriel thought odd. By allowing Kimmuriel to see the insincerity, he was making a point of some kind. Perhaps he was attempting to be intimidating, but it was unusual for Jarlaxle to use anger rather than confidence for that purpose. Perhaps he was just trying to throw Kimmuriel off-balance by acting abnormally?
"Yes. She tried to convince me that you had rearranged my memories during that affair with the Netherese."
Kimmuriel blinked twice, then smirked. "That is quite a tale. What could she hope to gain by feeding you so foolish a lie?"
Internally, Kimmuriel was cursing. Jarlaxle had been trying to throw him off-balance and had succeeded admirably. He had been so distracted by Jarlaxle's facial expression he hadn't thought about what Quenthel might have said to Jarlaxle, and so had been caught entirely off-guard by the reference. He had managed to recover, but looking at the cold look in Jarlaxle's eye, he knew he hadn't been quite fast enough.
"Perhaps she was hoping I would kill you," Jarlaxle said coldly. In the room below, wood scraped against stone and people yelled. If a fight broke out up here, no one would hear it.
"If you did that, Bregan D'earthe would be severely weakened," Kimmuriel said. He realized that he was stating the obvious and stifled a wince, knowing Jarlaxle would see the delaying tactic for what it was. "That would benefit her right now."
Jarlaxle exhaled slowly. The fingers of his right hand curled, as if to summon a dagger. "Then it seems we're at an impasse," he said.
If you kill me, some of the band will turn against you and you will no longer have a psionicist, Kimmuriel thought. If I kill you, most of the group will mutiny. Bregan D'earthe will fall apart and I'll be a houseless rogue again. An impasse, indeed.
Jarlaxle kept speaking. His voice was iron. "You'll restore my memories. All of them."
"Why?" Kimmuriel asked, despite having few objections to this; there was nothing more damning in the memories than the fact that Kimmuriel had tampered with them in the first place, but simply acquiescing would be showing weakness. Jarlaxle's visible eye narrowed, though whether in suspicion or anger Kimmuriel couldn't tell.
"The next time I speak to Quenthel, I would rather she not have any nasty surprises for me."
There was little that could be said to argue with that. "Very well. You'll need to remove your eye patch."
Jarlaxle didn't move for a moment. Kimmuriel scowled. "You'll need to allow me in your mind to fully reestablish your access to those memories. You could probably sort out which ones are fake, but it would take months, perhaps years. Nor would it be as thorough. You would miss some."
Below them, the fighting had died down. The silence was heavy between them. Kimmuriel sighed.
"If you look at the memories you already know are false, you'll notice they're-" Kimmuriel searched for a word. He'd never had to explain this to a non-psionicist before. "They're slippery, hard to focus on. That will be the case with any changes I make to your mind."
Jarlaxle nodded and removed his eyepatch. His eyes didn't leave Kimmuriel the entire time.
"You should sit." Kimmuriel dragged a wooden chair closer to the desk. "This will take a few hours."
Barrabus the Gray took in a deep breath as he stepped onto the Luskan docks. The brisk salt-sea air wasn't enough to entirely banish the the sewage and smoke drifting in from the river. Moonlight rippled on the water and boards creaked underfoot. Despite not knowing where he would go first, he began to walk.
Luskan had changed since Barrabus had last seen it. There was a gaping hole in the skyline where the Hosttower had been. Most people walking by seemed to avoid walking directly through the rubble, prefering to walk around even when it took them far out of the way. In a city where goblins lurked in the shadows and demon-worshippers preached freely in the moonlight, no one was quite comfortable enough to walk over the ruins of the Hosttower.
Barrabus had heard about the explosion and about the civil war that had followed. Luskan, which had been an icy, grimy pisspot even before the Spellplague, was now more wretched than it had been before. Although the High Captains had largely survived the war and the Spellplague, they no longer held the authority they once had. Luskan ruled itself by the tooth and claw and no one claimed to tame it. It was, then, the perfect place for a Netherese deserter to hide.
He had actually expecting it to be much worse. From the rumors, the nominal ruler of Luskan changed with the tide and the crumbling roads and bridges spoke to that truth, as did the swarming mass of activity that rattled the moonlit streets. There were muggings and and brawls in what seemed like every alleyway and a pale man in black robes definitely tried to convince him of the benefits of demon-worship before Barrabus had glowered him away. But despite all that, people who might have otherwise been at each others' throats for supplies were managing to coexist. As the rosy fingers of dawn reached over the city walls, the chaos dimmed down into something almost orderly.
The same straggling line of farmers that were found, in some variation, outside every city at sunrise, wandered through the gates with their carts of turnips. Burly men and women with gnarled hands still hauled nets onto their dinghies and pushed out to sea. The farmers were a little more nervous and fishers more gruff than in most cities, but they were still a sign that the city itself, tattered and chaotic though it may be, was functioning. There was more murder and petty crime than expected in a "civilized" city, but it wasn't the frenzied convulsions of a city about to eat itself alive.
To anyone else, this semblance of peace might have spoken to the resilience and underlying goodness of humanity as a whole. Barrabus the Gray knew better than that. He saw the vibrant chaos of Luskan and realized that there had to to be an underlying cause, some level of authority that was keeping the city from turning on itself.
The ship he'd come in on had docked at midnight, Barrabus realized. In any other city, that meant smugglers. Why would someone bother smuggling unless there was somebody enforcing the import tariffs?
Whoever was keeping Luskan from self-destructing would, by necessity, know who was coming and going. If he didn't want to comb through every filthy tavern and dilapidated shack in the City of Tattered Sails to find his deserter, Barrabus would have to find them and ask.
Jarlaxle opened his eyes as Kimmuriel pulled his hands away from his forehead. He frowned. He felt off-balance, like there was someimportant lingering just out of his sight, but nothing else seemed to have changed.
"That was it?"
Kimmuriel's lip twitched.
"I assumed you would want me interfering as little as possible. I simply removed the block and made the false memories easier for you to identify." He shrugged. "I could go through and make you relive the actual chain of events, if you'd prefer that. But I am told it's less traumatic if you rediscover them on your own."
"Did you not say that would take months?"
"It would have taken months for you to undo the work I did suppressing them. I took care of that step. It should only take about a tenday for you to work through the rest."
"A tenday?"
"Yes. You might..." Kimmuriel grimaced "...feel strange. Resting will help."
Jarlaxle studied his lieutenant. If Kimmuriel wanted him out of the way while he arranged a coup, this would be one way to do it. He didn't think that Kimmuriel would do that. But he hadn't thought that Kimmuriel would break into his mind for Quenthel Baenre, either.
But if that's what he was up to, so much the better if he thought Jarlaxle was recuperating. Jarlaxle put up his normal grin and stood up. Kimmuriel tensed, clearly recognizing the front for what it was, clearly nervous about what it meant. That was almost enough to make Jarlaxle feel better. Not quite, but it helped him keep his smile until he'd left the building.
He made it all the way to his bed before his smile fell. In the walk back, he'd found himself strangely exhausted. Whether it was the confrontation or Kimmuriel's work he wasn't sure. He collapsed into sleep, dreaming of fire and smoke.
Finding Luskan's peace-keepers, as it turned out, still involved a lot of combing through filthy taverns and dilapidated shacks. Whoever was keeping the peace, they were staying quiet about their influence. That meant it wasn't the High Captains or any local temples. With that in mind, Barrabus looked for the next likely culprit: thieves guilds.
Any information he had on Luskan's thieves guilds was woefully out of date, so he'd have to start from scratch. He began by looking for likely headquarters that such an organization might use.
It would have to be large enough to house supplies for the guild, along with any profits they might make. It would need to be inconspicuous, yet secure from attack. And it would usually be near a central hub. It might have a secondary function acting to disguise it, such as a tavern or an inn.
There were a large number of buildings in Luskan that fit that description. The first one he tried seemed to be a brothel. So was the second. The third was being held by a bunch of earnest-faced men with weapons; from their conversation, Barrabus guessed they were the remains of Luskan's city guard who had holed up together for safety. That was interesting, but not useful. The fourth was guarded too obviously to be Luskan's secret peace-keepers, but Barrabus broke into it anyway, just in case; it turned out to be a very stubborn merchant company trying to hold on to their records.
The fifth building seemed, from an outside glance, to be entirely deserted. Barrabus made a mental note to look more closely at it when the sun was down. But high noon was a bad time to break into a building and he needed to sleep.
Luskan still had functional inns. He paid for a room at the nearest one and collapsed into unconsciousness. If he had dreams, he was lucky enough not to remember them.
–
For a prompt a little while ago, I wrote a quick scene with Kimmuriel's pov that takes place after this chapter. There's a link to it on my profile. (At least, there should be. If it didn't work, give me a shout and I'll try to fix it.)