21 Flamerule
"Viconia, please," Imoen moaned.
"You are kke lotha elg'caress," Viconia said, "and I have no intention of lessening the pain given to yourself."
My head, like Imoen's, was splitting in two. The grass below us spun and the sunlight was agony.
"Weakly indulging in city carousing whilst I was busy healing him," Faldorn said, overly sanctimoniously, her nose in the air. It was true that Ajantis was walking with us, his arm limp and damaged for good but still there, and that meant that he could improve. He stalked in front, though; away from the temple. "What was it to you what happened to him?"
Imoen moaned weakly. "'m sorry...hurts..." I could not even find the strength to talk. Hard to explain; Ajantis...
Gods are merciless, he said. Nalin tried to call him back, but he refused to hear.
"Ogre country," Shar-Teel yelled back to us. "You don't get to sit around and sleep."
"We camp north of the Peaks at nightfall," Ajantis ordered coldly.
Viconia snarled; her eyes glittered from the depths of her hood, and she panted in her breathing. "Oh, but it burns so, torturers." There were welcome cool shadows; but also few tall trees in this hilly country. Behind every rock could lurk something more horrible than the pain that beat inside me.
Shar-Teel forged ahead. We should have stayed in Nashkel at least a day longer; but nothing until Ulgoth's Beard once more. It would have been easy to rest on the gold we had; she was just greedy, to want to go back and collect from that dwarf for that dagger and then sell everything in the Gate...
Not the Gate.
We marched on. The demonknight's dagger hung from Shar-Teel's belt. Faldorn's wolf howled.
It was late afternoon, and we hadn't been attacked by anything. Somehow the pounding pain had gradually gone down; but it was as lovely to walk all day as always, or rather as dirt-encrusted and tiring. We could have afforded horses... Shar-Teel had gold and platinum coin, and jewels and spare weaponry.
"We are...away," Ajantis said, and sank down below a tree that had begun to yellow already. He placed his head on his right hand. Shar-Teel scowled, but when Faldorn said that her wolf smelt nothing about allowed the early rest.
I set together sticks for a fire; Imoen dripped oil to one of her pans for the mutton we'd purchased from Nashkel.
"Stand up," Shar-Teel said to Ajantis, and kicked him in the leg; "show me what you've got left, boy."
His balance was all wrong, I thought as they began, Ajantis using only his right hand with his sword and uncertainly moving against Shar-Teel. I could know that sort of thing, now.
"Watch it from burning!" Imoen hissed; I went back to learning how to cook.
"Yeah, and chop up the loaf—and take the cheese I put on top, it's not going to last much longer." Imoen shook her head. "And when you're done that scrape the burnt bits off the bottom, I'm not like Shar-Teel or Faldorn 'cause I've got a sense of taste left—" She sprinkled some fragrant thyme into her pot.
The barley loaf was growing badly stale; and yet everything eaten in hunger tasted better than any imported cuisine cooked by a Waterdhavian or Zazesspuran chef. From Faldorn's ideas on raw meat, she thought so for everything chased by oneself. A rare steak was acceptable in a home with a respectable cook, but otherwise... Druidic digestion. Somewhere away from us her wolf howled again. Viconia lay dramatically and indolently under overhanging rock, a book in her hands—one of the Volo's Guide series, the one about the Fields of the Dead. It was denounced even more than the other ones by real historians in Baldur's Gate. I sliced open the hard bread carefully; a knife could slip so easily.
"It hangs open as a drunkard's snoring mouth." Shar-Teel dealt another blow to Ajantis' left side, his thigh; it was only with the flat of her sword, and he winced and fell to his right knee.
"You have won," he said. "You humiliate me and that is all..."
"Yes." Shar-Teel examined the shine of her blade; it caught the sunlight brightly. "Nothing like making some male scream to finish the day with."
"He has known female paladins," the squirrel interjected, perched upon a tree, looking as if she intended to glare with her black beady eyes at Shar-Teel. "Certainly the boy can be inept with female company. Why, you ought to hear some of his attempts of courtesy! Lady Irlana, you are a most beautiful lady, miss and all that mealy-mouthed sort of thing. Well, I shall save the end of that story for another time. But if you seek to blame him for—"
"For taking mobile rations that talk back, too," Shar-Teel said—her hands were not particularly far from her crossbow; Aquerna released an outraged squeak and scuttled further into the covering branches of the tree.
"Disgustingly uncivil," voiced the squirrel, but Shar-Teel ignored her. She bent and rummaged through a pack on the ground, wrenching out a buckler. She threw it at Ajantis, hitting him on the head. "Think you could heft that, milksop?"
He gave her only a pale glare, forcing the small shield to be fastened to his wounded arm, and stood again. At least it stopped some of Shar-Teel's blows. When he wasn't strong enough to parry with his sword and slipped to the side; when he even raised his left arm to let her blade scrape along it. She wore a terrible grin, and smiled each time she hit him.
"He's not bad," Imoen said, the cheerfulness in her voice perhaps slightly forced. "Only just been injured and all. Pretty brave just to be doing that."
Maybe she was close to being right. Imoen scraped a root she'd had Faldorn find for her across the pot, the light brown flakes falling evenly.
"Imoen, how would you beat a demon?" I said; and then she lost control of the scraping. The root fell; she scraped her hand on the wide knife she used, swearing. I helped her bind the shallow cut.
"Like the one Durlag fought, I mean," I added. She snatched her knife back from me, gesturing with it.
"Demons! Talk about gullynapping chitchat, ya bufflehead!" She shook her head, a hard glint in her eyes. "Don't tell me you're thinking... Don't tell me a couple days of not being attacked means you or Shar-Teel're bored already and want me to..."
"I'm just curious." I reached for the cheese she'd asked for. "We know it—" I did not say the name— "could...hurt people...by looking at them. What magic's there against that? Is it like basilisks?" In the dwarven histories I'd read of late: one had to know.
"Well, don't scare me like that, mutton-mongerer!" She furrowed her brow, chewing on her tongue. Despite the handkerchief around her hand, she kept shaving the gingifer root; I thought she might be adding too much of it. "Pretty good question there, kiddo. Some of that stuff doesn't have reflections at all or does but they can't see it reflecting back, Mr G. used to say, 'cause they're from other planes and what they look like's orthogonal to this one." I thought I understood what she meant by her magical theory. "And vampires, the reflections thing goes for vamps as well. When it's basilisks you just reflect it back at 'em with a tough enough mirror, but you're right, kiddo, you can't do that when it's...those things," Imoen said.
"So you'd just have to let people die until you killed it?" Or rather, become like Grael. That was awful because you knew it might come and there was nothing you could do about it at all: inexplicable, unavoidable horror.
"Tymora's snout, no!" Imoen said, her hands and knife moving in the air. She'd grated the gingifer entire. "Just lemme think a moment. Gazes, things against gazes, Mystra's left elbow..." She tossed the pot up and down across the fire, forcefully moving the strips of meat with the things she'd added to it. "Magic!" Suddenly she flipped the pot too quickly, and a part of the meat fell down from it. "Well, guess Faldy wouldn't mind that piece." She glared at it, picked it up, and scraped most of the dirt away. "If'n only you wouldn't distract me!"
"Magic? What kind of magic?" I said, watching her.
"Magic potions. Found one of 'em in the tower itself, near the outside—" She held up a small, dwarven-made vial she'd hung from of her pouches. "Protect against basilisks by magic. You drink 'em; smell like silver polish and fresh water. They work by the Weave reflectin' it away...so I just bet it'd work against Nine Hells gazes. There! Imoen the Brilliant solves another problem." She sniffed at her cooking. "Mm. Not quite up to Garrick, but Puffguts'd laugh to see how I've taken to doing work."
"That's good," I said; the dirt below our feet was light brown, nothing like the stone of the tower. "Islanne's was the casting that weakened as well..." It came to pass that Durlag Trollkiller and Arlo Stoneblade ventured into the bowels of the Great Ryft. They fought the hideous tanar'ri Aec'Letec, and with a single blow of his axe Durlag slew the demon's body...
"Weakened," Imoen repeated, reaching across for bread and cheese from me, talking over her mouthful. "Well. Still don't understand it all, do I?" she said; her shoulders rose as if she was a porcupine starting to bristle. "Anyway, demonknights're enough!" She glanced over at Shar-Teel again. "Go fight her yourself if you want her kept busy, kiddo." I would, then, I thought. The Burning Earth and the smaller shortsword, in balanced coordination as tutors had briefly shown me once, as the steps to a different kind of dance that Shar-Teel showed; I was better than I'd been.
"I know," I said. "I've just been reading a lot lately, that's all." And thinking about it. History was real when you had to fight the beasts that lived in the tales...
"Well, stop being buffleheaded." Imoen picked up a waterskin. "And drink something else for a change."
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kke lotha elg'caress: rude little bitch.
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