23 #3
The maintenance door was locked in a somewhat lackadaisical fashion. Astarion opened the lock while den Suriel lit the mummy’s body on fire and dropped the head atop it. Like the other one, it oozed greasy black smoke.
The corridors on the other side of the door were significantly larger than the ones they had come through, and they were laid out as if someone had thought very hard about sewer maintenance and drawn up plans with labels like Seatower Storm Drain Overflow and Upper City Drainage Station.
This being Baldur’s Gate, that master plan had suffered the ravages of centuries, at least two guild wars, and a brief infestation of kobolds.
(Astarion remembered the kobolds vividly because one had poked its head out of the privy to yell at him mid-stream, to the severe detriment of both his aim and his emotional health.)
The maintenance tunnels might have survived those events easily enough, except that the average denizen of the Lower City would steal everything not nailed down, then come back with a pry bar for the nails.
To them, the tunnels were a giant storehouse of only slightly pungent bricks to be ripped out and used for building.
Now there were missing walls and low crawl spaces connecting areas that probably should not have been connected, with the result being that a really good rain could make the streets of the Lower City run yellow, and not with gold.
Fortunately, the nearest access door lay in Bloomridge, which had both money and elevation.
Astarion felt his boots had suffered enough without wading through raw sewage and was glad to see that these floors were quite dry.
The crispness of the graffiti seemed to indicate that the high-water mark was somewhere below.
“That door leads onto the river steps,” den Suriel said, pointing. “We can go out from there.”
“Feel free,” Astarion said, hanging back. “I will be waiting here for the next six hours or so.”
The aasimar turned. “What? Why?”
Astarion gestured to the door. Cracks of light glowed around the edges. They left a painful dazzle across his vision when he looked away. “I would prefer not to turn into a pile of ash, thank you very much.”
“Oh. Oh! Hmm.” The paladin frowned. “I see. I can’t just leave you here.”
“We could arrange a place to meet up?” Astarion caught a glimpse of den Suriel’s expression and put a hand over his heart. “Darling, you don’t trust me? I’m hurt.”
“If our positions were reversed, would you trust you?”
“That requires me to imagine being a paladin, and I fear that strains even my capacity for fantasy. Do they have a knightly order for great deeds of decadence?”
“Sadly, the Church of Sharess, Lady of Pleasure, does not actually field any knightly orders.”
“That’s a shame. She’s the goddess with all the cats, right? I always rather liked cats.” Astarion moved down the hallway, away from the cracks of daylight, and inspected the walls.
“Why, do they taste good?”
Astarion didn’t bother to look at the aasimar. “My dear paladin, do you go around eating other people’s pets?”
“Errr…no?”
“Neither do I. I am an elven nobleman. I have strong opinions about wine vintages, painting techniques, and property taxes. I did not lose all culture and civilization merely because a vampire happened on me in a dark alley. And as we are stuck with each other for the immediate future,
please try to remember that, hmm?”
A bit too late, Astarion remembered that he was trying to engage the man’s sympathy. Damnation. I suppose I should have acted hurt and told him about the cat I had in Silverymoon.
“You’re right,” den Suriel said. “That was unkind of me.”
Now Astarion did turn to look at him, and caught an unexpected glimpse of shame on the aasimar’s face.
He probably shouldn’t be surprised—paladins were basically a thin armored coating over a guilty marshmallow center—but he had expected den Suriel to feel that anything said or done to a vampire was justified.
“It’s fine,” Astarion said. “It’s hardly the worst thing I’ve been accused of.”
“Do you know, you are not at all like I expected a vampire to be?”
“I shudder to think what you did expect.” Astarion located a crawl space of a room that would be shielded from the light if someone opened the maintenance door.
“Oh, you know.” Den Suriel dropped to his knees and followed him into the room. “Ancient, powerful, delighting in the misery of others…stable of comely young victims on leashes…”
“If I had that last, I wouldn’t be lurking in the sewers right now, believe me.”
“I must say you don’t look that ancient, either.”
“I’m a little over two hundred. What about you?”
“A hundred and three.”
“You don’t look it. I suppose it must be all that clean living I’ve been hearing about.”
Den Suriel laughed before he remembered he wasn’t supposed to and turned it into a cough. “Clean living. Yes. That.”
“At any rate,” Astarion said, removing his jacket and rolling it into a pillow, “I am twice your age and need my rest if I am to remain this extraordinarily good-looking. You may wake me when the sun goes down.”
“Aren’t you worried I’ll kill you in your sleep?”
“Darling,” Astarion said, rolling over, “if you can’t trust an oath-sworn paladin, who can you trust?”
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