Warning: Chapter contains Xzar giving a Friendship Speech. This is the wrong fanfic to cross over with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, isn't it?
—
You stunk after nine days on board ship; curse it, he was starting to think like the drow would have it. Gangplank thudded into place at nightfall, though they'd moored all day. Slipped out and went up past a harbour town, all stained wood and unkept streets; up along high thin rope bridges, between enough vampires to stop any funny business. They left the crew behind on the ship; they'd be expecting to go back, then. The Shadow Thieves were well out of it, in worse health than ever, chained up and flopping together while the bloodsuckers Lassal and Valen pulled them along with ridiculous strength. No chance for help from them. Above on a high cliff stood a grey building that looked like it'd been assembled by some mad mage at the patchwork, a piece here and a piece there in crazy jagged lines that couldn't fit together. No village idiot could have failed to guess what that was. The bridges swayed in the wind above long falls below; the vamps weren't any lighter than they'd been alive and the thieves' chains weighed them well down. Bodhi's mouth was a red slash on her pale chin, and if she'd been less dangerous Montaron would've accused her of dribbling her meals. Asylums were the mad wizard's natural home, though it seemed more like the place scared Xzar silent. Perhaps he should scare him more often; it shut him up. Encourage the drow to go after him for a change.
Her hips swayed below her armour ahead of him, Viconia holding her head high as if the bloodsuckers were there for her escort instead of she near as much a prisoner as the thieves. She looked only in front, neither glancing to left or right. Ye never understood her easily. Gone off at him, brought him to her cabin, added more pain than good times to it until he'd grown sick of her. Enough folk already trying to spit him and cut him. Ye could say she'd been bored enough to try a second taste of halfling freeman, or ye could say she was all sorts of angry. He'd seen her torment the blind worshipper into swearing to Shar, as coldly as he slit a quick throat himself. She burned and froze by turns, and looked at him as if she wasn't seeing him there at all. Could've been an insight there, but it was the woman's business when or if she talked. The trouble was more often to stop her complaining.
Parts of Spellhold were scaffolded, half-built as if carpenters had run off and never came back. Old fraying ropes hung parts of the construction work, spare planks and lashed-together platforms washed by rain and dust. They'd come close to the stone bricks of the main part of it, high up enough that the harbour town was small as a wasps'-hive below. And getting rid of the last chance they had to escape before they entered the place, Montaron knew. Too many vamps, that Tanova's red eyes flickering over to the ones she'd geased, Bodhi's large bosom swaying in the mess of straps she wore with dark fluid trickling down it. The mad mage looked near as pale as one of the creatures in the night now.
The asylum's doors creaked open like the hinges had been sealed close; lock on them seemed elaborate enough, most likely mage-fiddled. The smell of the vamps close to him was fit to make ye lose dinner, all old blood and rotting pieces. Bloke who walked out, Montaron told himself, wasn't so very much to look at for a longlimb—tall and muscled, a stiff-skinned face, long trousers under a bare chest and heavy boots. The face was so stiff it had to be unnatural, but he didn't have the look of a vamp.
"Bodhi. At last you've come, dear sister..."
Then the mad mage started moving; and though the bloodsucker Lassal tried to grab him he wove forward on the last rickety bridge, pointing a finger at the stiff-faced longlimb.
"You're empty," Xzar began, "please get away from me! It's cold all around the planes, ice from a broken shadow. You're not human; you're fallen a long way and a long way to go yet; and the hunger inside you could eat a thousand souls and never become the thing you crave." The mad mage's speech was strong enough to hold things for a moment, and with that crazy strength for the moment he dodged past the vampires—and got to waving his hands close to the bloodsucker's brother. Some sort of wild divination trance. "Icarus," Xzar said, "you have more than one name and both are curses; your wax wings burned in the light; Shattered One—fractus, ireni—"
Montaron had searched for his bolts, his smuggled holy-water; but even before him the bloodsucker Lassal had shaken off that quick madness, and knocked Xzar unconscious to the ground by a neck-twist that stopped just short of killing him.
"Who are—these, Bodhi?" the stiff-faced longlimb said in a voice like chips of metal. Montaron had watched the face, and at last he'd seen it: a mask, made of skin. He'd thought the bloodsuckers were the worst threat. He'd been wrong, and looking at the pale blue holes set in the mask was enough to turn bowels to water. He tried to hide it, stand it out.
"Pawns known to the godspawn, brother. The drow amuses me almost enough to keep." Bodhi sniffed the air, raising her head. "He has come to the town; he must be indulging in some pathetic do-gooding before he dares come to us. I smelt his presence. Where is your promise to me?"
"You were ever impatient," the masked one said. "House your minions in the coffins below; bring your thieves to the jar room. And keep your pawns well from my sight." The blue gaze fell on Xzar again, as if deadly rage sought to break free from it; then to the drow second, and instead of posing Viconia stood still. Montaron waited below notice, for it happened often to halflings by fools.
—
"It's friendship," the mad wizard speechified, pacing the corners of the small windowless cell with a finger raised in the air. "A spark in the heart of all of us. Not literally, unless you hook hearts up to a lightning generator. A candle in the void of the deep darkness...often, indeed, caused by us. Even monsters are not monstrous all the time. A golden thread that brought us this far; even if we fail now we'll always have Athkatla, where my laboratory was destroyed and we were captured by vampires. And Imnesvale, where we were framed for crimes by the Twisted Rune. And Tradesmeet, where we were set on our current disastrous path. And still, Monty, Lady DeVir, if you die perhaps I won't say that I never loved you. Because after we've shared this fantasy and adventure together, we've formed one big happy family. Friendship, a ship big enough to carry two in fair weather— I mean, magic of itself. Friendship, kindled in..."
Montaron ignored him. He'd paced the room half a hundred times himself, checking floor tiles and having the drow stand on the stool to press her hands to the ceiling. The door was barred from the outside, and warded against using mage-spells; not even the idiot Rashemi could have forced it. He sat and waited. Pressure of the spells stopped him from killing the mage-vampire or Bodhi herself. But one of the fledglings— Viconia could try to shatter its concentration, and perhaps they could bring it down without killing. Then break the joint and hide out in the shadows of the island. The small island.
Mask take it. Down, but not out; Montaron wasn't one to worship oblivion like the Sharran. More than a day, he thought. They'd gone through a clay flask of water and a few loaves of dry bread, and improvised a chamberpot in the corner. The door splintered in like a hurricane when Bodhi punched through it.
His hands on the crossbow were suddenly numb and Tanova's spell was about to make him retch. The chief vampire posed in what had been the doorway, her skin flushed light pink as if she'd just eaten, her barely-there outfit still straining around her full breasts. Bodhi's lips were red as an apple, and her gaze had turned near-black instead of crimson. She dusted away splinters from her hair.
"I simply don't know my own strength these days," she breathed, her chest not far from Montaron's eye-level and rising and falling while she spoke quickly. "I could lift oliphaunts with one hand—swing a trapeze across the cliffs of Tethir—ride a centaur all night—either way—"
"You have changed, elg'caress," Viconia said stiffly, counting on the surface-elf vamp not knowing a word of drow.
"You're...a diamond," the mad mage said. "Something held amidst facets, gem-binding—"
"I'm also bored," Bodhi said. She grabbed Xzar with one hand and threw him into the opposite wall, outside the room. "It is decided. I will have a hunt. Benrulon is bound for the maze of madness. I will lock you there and you will join him and tell me of the loss of his soul." That was mage-stuff. Montaron followed Viconia out to watch the bloodsucker standing over the wizard. "No stream of mad nonsense to regale me with? If I had not fed already I would be tempted to test if you lied of the duration of that enchantment gushing through your veins. Or if I knew you were going to give me an interesting fight."
"You've grown exuberant, lady-vampire," Xzar said, brushing plaster fragments from his robes. "Whose head did you cut up for that pink-tinged optimism? Would you dive into the lost tombs of the sea's darkness for fun?"
"You talk," Bodhi said. "It's funny, drow, I would have guessed the human to be your consort, though he is not nearly so pretty as his blood smells. What on Toril is the small man for? I favour my male thralls large and easily broken; as for those women I take with a bite and a gaze, I have enjoyed a wider range... Perhaps I shall eat the Bhaalspawn's silly little lover in front of him, just to watch his expression. Or perhaps I shall have the big Helmite for my own, for his muscle pleases me. Or to rid myself of the sound of the Thayvian's voice—I have heard it twice and that was enough, and I wonder if he would still speak through his nose with a throat gushing open? I wish I could kill them all and do it again to see how it brings the most pain. I am restored and I have a world at my feet, and they will all fear and worship on their knees. Am I a goddess, not-person?" She spun the mage around with another push; and then she was by them as well, harrying them to where she wanted. She raced like an arena-beast starved for a week, panting not at all.
"All goddesses think they are," Xzar said, stumbling along by her, "all goddesses want to eat people, too. All goddesses might or might not affirm the consequent fallacy. You could have platters of blood like dining-tables."
"Goddess—next to Shar that undead slattern is iblith—" Viconia whispered; Montaron caught her speech, but the mad wizard had the bloodsucker's attention.
"What at middle age threads back to its birth? What has many mouths but one breath? What nurtured a bull-monster and was destroyed by a scarlet thread?" Xzar carried on.
"An easy one, mage!" Bodhi said, laughing. "The labyrinth, of course—why, once I ran through one that ended the same as the beginning, the trees that formed it twice my height, a hunt within for deer—and then I killed it, and those who whelped me were upset because it got too bloody. I swear by the dark powers I was too good for them! Perhaps I shall hunt you in the same way—"
"Only illusionists hide, lady vampire. Necromancers seek the dead—even the woken dead. It flies like a false light in a prism; it does not lie weary in death; blood-flush to its cheeks like the flesh of a mellow apple..."
"Words may be your servants, spellcaster—and I had too many of them from my brother." Down a set of stairs Bodhi pushed them into another small room; this one stunk of magery. Viconia scowled. "You will use them on the Bhaalspawn. I can't wait to watch your progress. Should I strangle the little halfling with my bare hands, teach you to obey...? Oh, later, perhaps; I smell my brother working. Farewell, mortal ones."
Another seal slid shut behind them. Montaron swore at the moment the floor gave way. He tried to stop himself with a dagger, but something had made the wooden chute hard as steel and the drow's body knocked into his. They landed down like so much old rubbish, in a cell behind thick stone. The chute folded back up and moved itself away far above them. Viconia chanted a healing spell for her bruises; but the mad mage was actually grinning.
"Monty," he said, "just listen to me. She was empty like her brother but now she's full, she's got something, but he's even worse, the waxen wings—he is cold and he cannot stop the monster he has become with a thousand meals of people—no, it's important to you too, Miss DeVir. Because it'll be all right, and you have to come back for me. Just believe me—" The mad mage spread his hands, talking wide-eyed and unhinged and not at all convincing. "Bodhi used the singular nominative pronoun when she spoke to me. You join Benrulon, she said to me."
He'd heard her himself. Montaron shook his head at the fool's ramblings. "To me," Xzar repeated, waving his hands in the air as if he was trying to cast something on them, his eyes a bright mad green. "She meant you-as-one-person. She wasn't talking to you two. Can you believe that strongly enough for the geas? Come on, Monty. She ordered me locked in here and to give Benrulon an account of my madness and confinement; and you two are free to explore. You're not mad. You'll get through it." He smiled crookedly. "Believe me now?"
"Yes, kivvil," Viconia said. She moved around the painted-wood room, examining the walls, and Montaron saw himself that the panelling wasn't nearly so solid as the old cell.
"Come back to me," Xzar said. "Don't leave me alone here."
Viconia paused, her fingers inches from a section of panelling that could be slid aside by careful hands. "Perhaps," she said, unkindly. Montaron brought it loose, and across the room a decoration of an ogre head slid halfway open in reply.
—
A/N: Quotage from the Devil's Dictionary.
—