They tore through Trademeet's city streets, and came across more screaming. Guard on patrol had his throat half ripped out by blades, and his pal was worse: the Hidesman had torn the ribcage apart and ripped the skin and flesh in bloody pieces from his body, but unlike that skinless crawling thing he was dead and gone. Viconia bent down to the wounded one and held the parts of the man's throat together, then chanted a prayer to Shar to heal them in part.
"Which way?" she demanded, holding her black circle above his face, and she dropped his head back into the mud and dirt when he pointed. The skin torn from the other was rough and the Hidesman would still look like a monster when they found him, and then they'd kill him for all the trouble he'd caused them.
"It occurs to me," Viconia said a few moments later, panting, shaking mud from her boots and the ends of her cloak, "that if we do not—need to?" She laid a hand to a wall to rest a moment. Rain stuck her hair together. Montaron waited impatiently. "Your mage revealed your order to the killer, he seeks your alur, the one above you," Viconia counted off on her fingers. "If he slays the female, then your promotions are the same as for drow, are they not? Besides, saving a darthiir would be so tedious."
"There'd be paperwork if'n she ended up dead," Montaron said.
"So then the mage imagines a reward in rescuing her. G'rffte tlu natha ulnar: gratitude is a lie. Especially from superior to subordinate," Viconia said.
"Ye grasp politics fast," Montaron told her.
"Or we should chase the Hidesman down and slay him for affronting us," Viconia said, and her tongue flicked around her mouth as if she wanted to taste blood. "This weather is foul. Despise him for the inconvenience already given."
"Make up your mind."
"—This is on the surface world. I will try once your way."
—
Grateful? Not bloody likely. He'd fought and stabbed down the Hidesman's body, got it and its red-stained skins from where it had found the Zhentarim among the Trademeet merchants. Viconia cured his wounds; Lairilow poured some potion over the corpse that dissolved most of it, wrapped it in one of her carpets, and levitated it away.
"The others of the Rune are dead?" she said. "I want a full report by dawn tomorrow, curse your eyes. Any witnesses?" The elf reached for her pipe and blew an angry tide of smoke at them, puffing heavily to calm herself down again.
"Not for long," Montaron promised. What the mad mage thought he was going to do with the skinless flesh left behind—
He'd sewn Darsidian Moor's skin onto a young longlimb woman, hers all along. She had a cloak wrapped around her body and touched her skin as if she was trying to fix it in place. Xzar's long needle flashed silver as he pulled and tightened on parts of it, piecing together the gaps Montaron had opened and smoothing it over the flesh below. Sometimes he muttered spells. As damned creepy as everything else from the mad wizard.
"It's—there, now. Please, stitch it more closely at the back of my scalp—" The girl wildly pushed her fair hair aside. "He pulled it off me and his skin was crawling—and my skin is still crawling off me—"
"Their gifts lurk in you," Xzar said, using thread that looked like very thin catgut. "Call yourself Raissa Skindancer now, if you'd prefer. You can't not expect this sort of thing to change you on the inside."
"Raissa Versdaughter," the woman said. "I am Raissa Versdaughter from Tradesmeet. My father grows leeks. My mother's a washerwoman. I'm going to marry Tiris next spring—Tiris!" she cried out. "He was with me, but I think he ran away. I don't think those monsters caught him."
"Fascinating. You speak of monsters almost as if you aren't one of us," Xzar said, taking up her hand and detachedly examining the fit of the skin on her fingers.
"I'm in love with Tiris," she went on after her probably-gutless coward of some other peasant. "But how can I marry him if all I want to do is eat his skin?"
"...A more common question than you think," Viconia said, "eat your male's skin anyway once you are done with him. Often I think that all males are fit only to be hunted for sport."
"Do you know who we are?" Montaron demanded, stepping above the woman. Let the mad wizard whistle all he liked while he 'sperimented on fixing her; she'd heard him say they were Zhents and she was old enough that he'd have no trouble pulling the blade across her throat once Xzar was finished with his use for her.
She stared gormlessly up. "You k-killed the Hidesman and the other monster and saved me," she said, beginning to sob out of her eyes. Montaron couldn't have told the difference between her and someone with the skin they were supposed to be in, now; but it was cursed odd to have the shape the Moor'd worn speaking ordinary and starting to cry.
"That be correct," Montaron said, for she'd been writhing around on the ground like a worm on Xzar's little announcement. "Some folk'll say we're the criminals of Imnesvale; but it weren't us, just orcblood over there who set the blame on us." Raissa nodded as if she believed him.
If'n Xzar had one skill it was convincing innocent villagefolk to go for the torches and pitchforks and mobs to drive him off; anything to muddy the waters of their eventual hanging wouldn't hurt.
"Raissa Skindancer," Xzar repeated. "Do you feel like you could dance into my skin now? How about Monty's?"
"You know too much about skin," the girl said quickly. "Your magic would stop me." She looked up at Montaron. "I might," she said. "I'd start at the feet and peel open the skin up to the abdomen, and then— No! I don't want it. I can feel everything they were inside me."
"I've learned a lot through working on you," Xzar said cheerfully, as if he was looking down at the barely-dressed woman and seeing only how he'd fastened back her skin over her bones. "There, I think that's the last thread tied off. I'm quite good at sewing. Do you want to get up and travel the world with the giftings locked inside you?"
"I want to go home," Raissa said blankly; then she looked down to realise how much she was showing and gathered her cloak further around herself. She shivered in her skin. "If I do take the skin and reach inside—Tiris—"
"Then come to search for us," Xzar said, his face all deaths-head grin in his sickly green magelight, and Montaron remembered the sort of things the mad mage had made him see through his eyes.
They wouldn't be in Trademeet long; and by the time the latest killer in their streets got started it would be none of their business. Pissant little town.
—
It had stopped raining at long last, and in nature-feeling Trademeet there was a pavilion and brazier out on the rooftop. Easier way back to the inn on thieves' crossings above houses than disturbing so-called decent folks' rest after they'd gone to the trouble of saving them from a pair of skinning killers. Montaron roasted a length of sausage-meat he'd been saving from a street-hawker's; smelt like the fine combination of dog and horse that might have once been within nodding distance of a pig. He let it burn blackened and piping hot. The drow's drying cloak and hair stunk far worse, but he didn't need to tell it to her. That Sharran armour was as smooth and dark as ever, as if some pesky enchantment kept the worst of the weather off her.
"Amauna the prophetess promised eternal darkness as a fate," the mad mage said, lying flat on the top of the wall and staring up into the stars like the lunatic he was. "Eternal torment, for we are willing to do monstrous things. But there are stars in the void tonight. So much magical knowledge to steal from obscurity to shining, so little time."
"There's no roof to this world," the drow said, glancing upward. "Wide impassable space. The first time I saw the night I thought at least it was gentler than your day, but the stars only remind of how great the distances. So much that lies impassable above you, and in the Underdark one hates the unknown for its ability to conceal traps. I wondered if ground-crawlers could fall from the end of the world and drown in the depths above.
"Of course, your lifespan is short enough without it and I pity you for it," she all but spat to finish it off.
"My kind's the same, longer-lived than humans," Montaron said, "but I don't waste my time speculating on what'll come. Chances are it'll be on the end of a blade taking the other bastard down at the same time."
"We've already lived, Monty," Xzar said. "I saw— In divinations it's so easy to lose your way or die. You saved Miss DeVir and she helped us against the Harpers, and we're still alive against the currents of fate. You should only pretend mad divinations exist to go against them. Everything dies."
"Shar likewise promises the eternal void to come," Viconia said, preaching again and holding up her symbol. "If she is merciful..." The drow's voice changed, going softer as if she meant to speak to herself. "It will be oblivion."
Enough of the hin deities'd have it in for him by now, Montaron reckoned, Arvoreen especially after the stunt they'd pulled with Fentan. Black Dog take him and Mask stop his innards ripped out and roasted by demonkin. No point in thinking of it. "Got a death wish? Don't take it near me, drow," he said.
"You've one of your own by eating that thing," she sulked. "Make me some turnips in milk with pepper."
"Try fillin' your mouth with sausage?" he said, for it were too easy.
"I satiated my curiosity, little man. Don't provoke me to inflict the torture you deserve for that line." The ioun stone was the same colour as her hair, floating close to it like she wore a headband. "You're different to your kin, aren't you? They say a lot about halflings on the surface. They're supposed to be a weak people who exist only within groups and crowds to protect themselves."
"Most longlimbs only care for stuffing their faces and lazing around the same. Shiv enough people who chat about happy pipeweed-stuffing halflings and ye get to hear as little about it as you'd like. What I'd for family's long gone. Aside from the mad wizard and ye I don't deal with other folks' fool blithering and cock-ups," Montaron said.
"Oh, yes," the drow said. "We tend to kill our family members ourselves in the Underdark. It saves time. Some of my sisters and husbands were truly far below the intelligence threshold of a drow."
"I don't have the time to spare to nosewipe brats who should know better. Good riddance to the Bhaalspawn brat and his crew. Killed a sister of mine once—it was faster that way. Doesn't matter." The Zhentilar would've done slower and worse to her. Ye got to the point where slitting throats mattered less. "I'm more'n most who aren't walking the ground any more."
"In the Underdark you would be an arena slave, I suppose," Viconia said. "I would wager a few days' service from pleasure slaves on you. If you concealed your weapons well enough you would win most fights. You use shadows, and stood against the two of the waess-dancers at once. Not an untalented assassin, little man."
"Call me assassin again and say a funeral prayer for your hamstrings. I'm no fancypants assassin giggling in pretty black ruffled cloaks about how dark they are. I kill people for coin," Montaron said. "There's a difference."
"Assassins are higher in the social order even in this reversed world." The drow smoothed down her armour. "You're capable. I have gained in the service of Shar and will yet recapture the power I lost. And your wizard..."
Xzar had stopped talking, praise be for the sake of ears everywhere; the mad mage's eyes were closed where he lay down on the ledge. Viconia bent over him and peeled back an eyelid to see rolling white below. She'd a fine-fingered touch when she wanted: Xzar usually slept light and woke up screaming. This time he stayed dead to the world and still as a corpse, and Viconia turned back from him.
"He's quite powerful, isn't he?" she said. "Addled, but it does not harm his magery. Indeed, if he were not, he might be more...difficult to manage. Think of his battles. Perhaps more powerful than you estimate."
Montaron weighed it in his mind, halfway swallowed a piece of his burned meal, and spat it out in shock. "Ye mean to say that behind my back the boy's become some kind of archmage?" he hissed, while Xzar slept on behind. The vamp and the orcblood—they'd been skilled enough, but not that—
"Hardly so," the drow said contemptuously. "But we may as well keep him, I suppose. At the least he—draws attention—"
There was no argument about that use for the mad mage; a chance for the likes of them to slip into the shadows behind the pyroclastics.
"I want all the power I had in the Underdark," Viconia said, and swayed her hips as she walked toward him; she wasn't all that tall for an elf, and it wasn't that he found her length menacing. "I want wealth enough to have beljurils good only for adorning my toes," she said, and he didn't suggest she'd trip. "I want Shar to reign above all who cross my path, of course. I want servants and slaves to carry out my will. I want a place to stay, a matron's estate and all that hedonism could demand. I want treasures, and guards, and pleasure slaves and armour and weapons and the gifts to strike enemies down from a far distance. I want sanctuary to rest—" She broke it off. "I do not hope, for that is worthless and Shar wills it so, but I want.
"And I want you to set higher goals." She stopped short of him, smiling thinly. "You really have no standards at all, do you? It's close to a strength."
Ye made out best alive by sticking to the shadows and showing up at the conqueror's side to give a few last backstabs to the fool who bit off more power than they could chew. "We see back in Athkatla," Montaron said, and the plan Why not step up the game and take from the bastards all that we can came to him. "The mad mage gets all these funny ideas now and then. Could work out."
A distant rumble of thunder sounded above them, and as if buckets of water were suddenly dropped down the rain fell once more and doused the brazier. A cloud of hissing steam sprang up and Viconia cursed the weather.
"Get inside, mad wizard," Montaron said, loudly enough to wake him, "we've already established that the cleric's no idea how to cure colds." The black clouds blocked the sky and he sought warmth and shelter.
—