Warning: Chapter is named after this book: crevette. livejournal. com[slash] 113659. html. All responsibility for brainbreak is abridged. Chapter contains sexual content and discussion of rape, possibly triggery. Evil characters being sordid serious evil as well as cartoony evil. Interesting link to writing about rape and the anime Claymore: anamardoll. com[slash] 2011[slash] 08[slash] claymore-rape-and-rules. html, though I do not obey her rules. Again, warning for lack of fluffy Zhentarim in this fic. Backstory element I probably won't be using again.

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"Ye want us to ship out to the middle of nowhere?" Montaron traced the four of the bloodsuckers: sunlight lasted, but time weren't quite on his side. The lead kept scratching at her chest, strong enough that she was all but ignoring his weapon.

"It's simple," she purred in that high child's voice. "The Bhaalchild knows you; you're a little something extra for me."

"This one's blood smells nice and spicy," one of her men said, over the mad mage. "Mistress Bodhi, might we save time and eat them?"

"Oh—" Xzar said in a falsely high voice of his own, batting his eyes like a woman. "Go ahead! Drink my blood. You know you want to."

The mage-vampire crossed to him in that loping unnatural stride of the bloodsuckers and sniffed. "He's done something to himself. The blood smells...very good. Sweeter than that squealing circus-elf. Unfortunately the necromancer has added some poison to it. I suspect it would draw us to its scent and slay us." She shrugged her veil-laden shoulders.

"And I slipped the same into Monty and Miss DeVir's food," Xzar said sharply. "You can't eat us, at least for a month or so."

A lie; Montaron made damned sure that the mad mage didn't tamper with the food after the disaster with polymorph and firebreathing. Maybe there were still rabbits with dragonbreath lurking in those hills. Worked in their favour, though.

"I could lock you in a sealed crypt with a few of my disposable fledglings," the lead-vamp said. "They kill you and remain there; please don't start to bore me, mageling."

"That's a nice staff," the mage-vampire said, taking it from Xzar's frozen hand. "I think I'll keep it."

"It's a symbol of what happens when you introduce a planar transportation engine into the fuel of a rogue-stoned pocket dimension and turn every creature there inside out in empty Realmspace," the mad mage went on, "Monty, Miss DeVir, I think the Sunder Wet It have become slightly less of a present matter—though I did use one of your gemstones on the jump, the glow like the wing of a flightless bird in the sea—"

"Ye ruined one o' the rogue-stones? Blasted mage, they're worth thousands of gold—"

"It's a very nice staff," the mage-vampire repeated, and made herself start glowing with dweomer-shields that meant serious bad news in the field.

"Ignore the males," Viconia said, striding toward the vampire like she owned the place. "We females know better how to get to a point, don't we?"

"Finely said, woman," Bodhi replied. "I should consider keeping you. Gifts and intelligence and a dark charisma. You submit to a lower geas from Tanova; travel with us; and when you are called on speak to Benrulon as former companions. You were—transported—by those with cowls, you understand?"

"We don't work for free," Montaron burst out. The bloodsucker and the drow glared. "Ye must have coin aplenty from your graves," he went on. "Add a carrot to the mix—"

"Bold for a small man," Bodhi said. "The least useful of you three for our purposes. Yet I promise you will be rewarded for your efforts. The more so if you prove yourselves. We sail at dusk."

—

Geas-spells crackled and settled inside you like a cross between lightning bolts and bad cheese. It didn't go too far, Montaron told himself; and sooner or later the vamps would've overpowered them.

"When you meet Benrulon speak of being sentenced," the mad mage repeated to himself. Over and over again. He'd sat drooping, minding it; where Montaron didn't think much of the single order to kill. The sister was a young thing when he'd met her, a thief; the boy must've managed to grow up."When you meet Benrulon's sister speak of being sentenced. Speak of the times in the past. Stay with them until I order to kill. Kill then. Kill them. Show my brother that he thinks too much of himself. Kill the Bhaalspawn if it endangers me. Kill the Bhaalspawn if it endangers one of my fledglings. Kill the Bhaalspawn. Swear it. Kill."

The vamps had the bottom of the ship to themselves, and they got the mad mage to do up potions. They'd live prisoners to feed on, four ex-Shadow Thieves chained up in the hold; and like as not some of the crew at that. Montaron had always hated boating. It was cramped as a city alleyway but with not half the diversions. The crew were slipshod and shabby as far as he could tell, and that weren't a pleasant thought when their flimsy sails and masts and creaking planks were all between them and a watery grave. He'd had to teach a few a lesson at blade's point on not calling halflings funny names. All he did was sharpen weapons and stretch his muscles, where in the city he'd get all he needed in doing bloodshed. After the first few days the crew started to get bored of poking the vamps' mercs, or got drunk enough to lie around and lift not a finger to run the boat.

He'd walked in on the drow in bed with one of the male vamps, his face where teeth would be painful to bite. Then she started chanting prayers to Shar, like she wanted control; and the bloodsucker raised his head and shook it free of her.

"That itches, mortal female," he said. "Mistress Bodhi will be displeased that you try it."

"Get out," she said in a temper, flinging an iron candlestick holder at the vamp's head, "Bodhi may take her itches and fornicate with whichever sheep she prefers. You are disgustingly cold and—" Montaron figured it best to leave in a hurry, not that he was afraid of what she could do to him. There weren't many spells she could cast that blade or bolt couldn't beat by speed.

Kill the vamps. Kill the Bhaalspawn first; nothing to make that difficult. Let the mad mage think about what was said. No chance that the vamps wouldn't see them as meals once they were done. He patted the small package of blessed bolts he'd smuggled aboard. Water from the same Tymoran, shards of the Umar sun bullets, and stakes to hammer in the gravedirt were easy to improvise out of ships' planks. Bloodsuckers were fast and bloodsuckers had powers and bloodsuckers could take ye into thrall easy as blinking: make your first shots count and count good, keep a watch out and don't let them see your eyes, know where they are always.

"...And it's an asylum, Monty, they take you there and lock away your magic. I really didn't want to go there," the mad mage tried to explain.

"Ye'd be the kind of person they build these things for. Excellent cover," Montaron said.

"Vampires are cold," Xzar said. "They're animate, but they only look like people until they move or say something. Something that looks human but isn't—it doesn't bother me, but it bothers people who think of vampires as pale pretty people with a skin condition and an overbite, and haven't done their research into corpses. When they get close, you smell the rubbish-heap of decay under their skin. And when they bite, it's not a pair of sweet delicate pinpricks like a fine needle to the neck. They're hungry, and they'll feast by tearing into your neck like the blades of a rusted saw. It takes only a minute or two for a human to bleed out from the jugular; and it's hardest to heal jagged wounds. Blood's all they live for: not magic and not trying to mock flesh and not the lives of each other. Although Lassal keeps saying I drive him mad." He blinked.

"Your blood'll really poison them, necromancer? Give me some of it," Montaron said. "Small pellets of glass on my bolts—smash 'em inside the skin and let it spill. I'd want some fireseed mix, but the Amnians weren't selling any."

"It would become inert too soon, but I can fix that," Xzar said. "Thank you, Monty. Clever thought."

If ye tended to dispose of folk working for you, sooner or later the talk of it spread; 'twas why so-called Lady Desmonda of the Keep couldn't get good help after the number of servants found half-witted for life following a session or two with her. Bets were on whether she were bloodsucker or squidface or demon in private. But when the reputation wouldn't spread, ye did as ye felt like. "Kill 'em when she says it," Montaron said. "Nothing in there that says she's got to speak all the time, right?"

"A good point. Ways to work in, defy; ways to get away from it all—"

"Ways to kill the lot of 'em," Montaron said. "Ye do know the drow's taken to sleeping with the enemy, don't you?"

"—I've never properly understood the meaning of that term. It's hardly restful," Xzar said. "Or one could put it that she's testing protections against the undead. Anyway, they're our present employers. That's close to friendship, isn't it?"

—

Crew were subdued and half bloodless by the fifth day or so; in the dark the ship shone out lit signals in different colours across the sea, as if they were smugglers or pirates. Viconia went out in the open, hoodless, high-stepping across the deck and swaying easily with the rhythm of the boat.

"Male, are your surfacer tales of sea-serpents true?" she called to a crewsman polishing some planks. "Or the one about sailing far enough—too far. To the endless horizon over the void. How is it possible to know your direction when there are no cave walls to guide you?"

"What is—true?" the man said blankly, like a vampire'd gone too far in sipping life out of him. His name'd been Gorwin. "Serpents twining. Blood-coloured, I suppose, twisting out of you. I don't know. I don't know nothing. My new name is Carry."

"We've been out five days," Montaron said, though in truth he wasn't one for sea-voyaging. "Not likely the end of the world's here."

"Sail far enough and the waters pour from the sky down below the square of the world," Gorwin said. "But I've not seen it. And not these waters."

"The horizon already and always vanishes into nothing," Viconia said, annoyed. "It's natural to think that in this wide place the end is close. The black seas of the Underdark are wide, but they are ever protected by dark stone glowing in moss."

"There's no end," the mad mage chimed in, rising up from a crouch below the shadow of the deck. "The world is round. You can prove the length of a ribbon around it by measuring the angle of the sun in two places at the same time and knowing the meridian arc..."

"Now that's crazy talk," Gorwin said.

"Enough madness," Montaron said.

"A ridiculous notion even by the standards of your usual nonsense, male," Viconia finished. "Rot from your corpses settling into your skull?"

"Crazy men on a ship," Gorwin said. "Women. Living corpses. Blood in the hold. Unlucky, I tell you. I am Carry. I must go." Shuffled off, poor-bastard; touching a hand to the rough scarf around his neck every so often.

"Pick your side, drow," Montaron said, "rotting corpses or the likes of us?"

"In the Underdark," Viconia said slowly, "a pair of females together is called a—"

"Floor show?"

"Conspiracy. You're an amateur plotter, little man. Though now you mention it, there were—shows of males in the Underdark," Viconia said. "Men with men serving for the pleasure of females. It was always the most amusing when the two males were unwilling to mate with each other, for then it solely served the desires of the priestesses watching... Reluctantly their dry lips met each other's flesh, again and again, until or if the demonstration was attractive enough for a female to take them."

"Mad wizard? Ye likely have something else urgent to go off and do," Montaron said; it worked on getting the mad mage to scuttle off like a rabbit.

"No, I think your wizard might be too interested," the drow said, and laughed. "My third husband hated it when I wanted him taken by a slave. As did the slave. A tall, muscular type...brainless, of course, worthless, but handsome. I delayed sending him to the spider pits for a month after he slipped and broke one of my crystal vases because he pleaded so prettily. Then I chose my husband to be hunted down for the sport of the House; I'd grown bored of him. We rode large tizzin, scaled-ones, in a maze of caverns, letting him believe for a few hours he'd a chance of fleeing. Then I caught my prey and...finished him. First one way, strapped to a saltire, and then the other."

Drow ways weren't surfacer ways, but they could be close enough. "Once I was in this gang of toughs, and we'd branched out to insurance-selling," Montaron said. He shouldn't have cared much for long tongue-waggings. "Be a shame if anything were to happen to your stall, mate, that sort of thing. There was a bunch of rivals out for the same thing, and our leading boys—pair o' longlimb brothers, vicious as anything—decided it was time to teach proper respect. Found where that bunch went, then we were told to fire the house."

Two-floor falling-apart place in the slums, no light showing anywhere near and the rats scuttling through the gutters. He could see it clear enough in his head still, and taste the smell of it.

"Shived a pair of sentries and started laying down oil rags, then it got messy," he said. "Brassy Graves came out as if he'd wanted it for a trap, wearing jewels like he was too good for Cotting-street, a pair of his seconds. They threw cheap smoke at us, and then they got Crimald bad in the eye."

Spouted thick as a fountain over the dirt on the old cobblestones. Crimald howled like a stuck pig and his brother had come in from behind to brain the other thug. Montaron had thrown a dagger or two, slipping between the longlimb bastards and trying to stay alive, because back then he hadn't been any near the scrapper he was now.

"But Graves had undercut us, and we got the better o' them soon enough, though Brassy himself showed his white tail running off. Piled up oil rags exactly as we planned and lit it to burn," Montaron said. "Ronvald still weren't happy with what happened to his brother, and Crimald was raging like a wild barbarian. That's when Brassy's people came running out of his place, a pickpocket kid who got out fast enough and Brassy's whore. She was an elfblooded thing, small and cat-spitting."

Frightened, for her man had abandoned her. Not so pretty in the face, twisted and dirty as any streetwalker in those quarters. Tangles of smoke-streaked coppery hair and an old grey dress. He'd still been young enough to be scared when Ronvald grabbed her and punched her to the chest, and she crumpled easy as a lit match.

"Brassy's whore, like I said. Crimald laid into her one-eyed, screaming about what Brassy's gang'd just done to him. Flung her against a wall and took her there, because she was one of them." The elfblood had only screamed for the beating; from all he'd seen she was half out of it by the time Crimald had her. "One of Brassy's. Then he passed her to his brother."

Ronvald liked to fancy he was the subtle one, and he dug fingernails in the girl's skin to make her moan.

"Show her which gang had the real men, they said. Show Brassy what we did to his. Passed her around to all of us. I wasn't much, then, but I did the same."

Not a real man if ye don't. She'd been all but unconscious come his turn, lying in the black mud as bruised and torn as the dress on her back, cold-fleshed. It'd been over thankfully quickly; halfling had to show himself the same as the rest. Better to pay for it and keep it simple. Only time he'd forced a woman.

"Haven't done the sort since," Montaron said. "Glad ye had happy times down there below the ground, drow."

"Roles are reversed on the surface," Viconia said, so icily that he watched her carefully. "That female made herself weak. There is no responsibility to give bounty to the weak. Surfacers lack our sophistication, but not our...abilities. A ritual called the Blooding is proof of drow adulthood." She changed subject quickly. "I travelled briefly to the surface and killed a human, one of those nauseating priests of sickly-sweet charitable deities. I was cloaked and feigned to be a beggar in need, then brained him with my mace. He was another weakling. The strong prey and one does not support the lazy. Again and again the Underdark and the goddess Shar teach the lessons of survival. If at times I forget it—then I have come to remember." She looked down on him. "I tried farming in Beregost after I left the Bhaalspawn, male," she said. "I walked away from it."

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