23
Darkness and the smell of dust. Cold stone leaching the heat from his body. Grit under his fingertips. And the ceiling was close, far too close, and the air didn’t move, so the smell of dust mixed with the smell of unwashed velvet and the unmistakable musty odor of ancient bones.
Astarion knew all those sensations, knew them more intimately than any lover. He was in the mausoleum, in the locked crypt only three paces wide. He had torn his nails to the quick and shredded his flesh until he was scraping his own exposed finger bones against the stone door.
Not again, he thought, feeling the mindless animal panic rising in his chest. Not again!
But if not again…was it still?
What if he’d never gotten out at all? What if he had been here all this time, and his release had only been a dream brought on by madness, the people in that dream his own creations? Dalyria, Yousen, den Suriel, all puppets born of confinement and loneliness.
“Astarion?”
The tortures had felt real enough, but no more real than the agony of his fingertips.
The great upheavals, the Spellplague and the Time of Troubles, that had rearranged the gods in the heavens—perhaps those had only been fever dreams as he starved and died and was reborn, as endlessly as a god himself.
“Astarion, I think you’re dreaming.”
I’m an elf. I don’t dream. And I know that, so…is there someone else here?
That rich, rough voice was familiar, but of course it would be if Astarion had hallucinated it in the first place.
And it must be a hallucination, because no one came and spoke his name while he was trapped in the crypt.
He heard people walk by sometimes, but his tongue was so swollen in his mouth that he could not call out to them.
Mist condensed on the cold marble door sometimes, and he was able to lick it off, but it was not enough to slake the thirst of a mouse, let alone a man.
“Astarion?”
Someone touched his shoulder, and Astarion’s hand shot up and caught their wrist with the speed of a striking snake. His eyes came open, and he stared into the blank white eyes of an aasimar.
“Tell me this,” he growled, the dream still clinging to him like scraps of fog. “Are you real?”
“I think so,” den Suriel said, “but I don’t have any way to prove it.” The paladin’s voice was deliberately soothing, gravel turning to stones washed in a streambed. “You’ve been having a nightmare.”
“This isn’t the crypt?”
“It’s part of the sewer system, remember?”
“Oh.” Astarion swallowed. “Yes, of course.”
There was a pulse beating slow and steady under his thumb, and he realized he was still clutching den Suriel’s wrist.
He peeled his fingers off, one at a time.
The man had removed his gauntlets, fortunately, or Astarion would have either dented the metal or dented his own hand.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. This is normal.” Astarion sat up.
“Crying in your sleep is normal?”
“I was not crying,” Astarion snapped. “I was probably gasping. There wasn’t much water there.”
Den Suriel reached over to his gear, snagged a waterskin, and offered it to Astarion.
The water was tepid but tasted as good as anything that wasn’t blood could taste. He drank, grateful and annoyed with himself for being grateful.
“Did you wake up in a crypt when you died?”
Astarion lowered the waterskin. “I fear the Ancunín family crypt was sold to some nouveau riche trader centuries ago. No, this crypt was a punishment. The old man locked me inside for a year without food or water.”
The aasimar’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth to say something, then clearly thought better of it. After a long moment, he said, “A year is a long time.”
“Believe me, I’m aware.” At the end of the year, Astarion had been a shriveled husk, nothing but bones and fangs and madness. “Did you know that when you’re that dehydrated, your eyes shrink as the fluid is absorbed? I could actually fit my finger into the socket with them.”
Den Suriel’s lips pulled back in clear disgust. “That’s appalling.”
“I was remarkably short on ways to amuse myself. I suppose I should have been meditating on my crime, but that lost its entertainment value after the first tenday or so.”
“Crime? What crime could possibly justify that?”
The words It’s none of your business were on Astarion’s tongue, but he was supposed to be a tragic figure, and this was, in certain lights, a tragedy. And it was all true.
“My master took a liking to a young man and sent me to bring him back to the palace. It was not a task I wanted to perform. He was…innocent.”
Innocent, and he looked at me as if he had just learned what desire was.
I should have turned him down that first night, told him to go home and not come back.
I should have found some drunken sot and lured him back to the palace and hunted elsewhere.
In those days, Cazador had not required so much prey.
Astarion had been allowed to take his time selecting a victim, spending days, even tendays on the hunt.
So he had gone back the next night, and the one after, and the one after that, and every night Sebastian was waiting for him with all the joy and terror of a man in love for the first time.
“So you refused?” den Suriel asked.
“I tried.” Astarion made a soft, bitter sound in his throat.
“I thought I had found a loophole. I was required to bring him back to the palace. So long as I didn’t go back, it didn’t count. I told him to leave the city, that it wasn’t safe, but he thought he was in love with me.”
Astarion shook his head. “It turns out that vampire lords are even less fond of loopholes than gods. You can guess what happened after that.”
“You tried, though.”
“For all the good it did me.” Astarion hadn’t been in love with Sebastian so much as with what Sebastian represented.
He’d been young and innocent himself once.
Even at the time, he’d known it was irrational, and yet he’d felt that if he could save this one foolish child, he could somehow save himself.
He’d only been a vampire spawn for a decade then. He thought he knew how bad things could get. He’d been as na?ve as Sebastian in that regard.
Astarion shook out his jacket and grabbed his pack, suddenly disgusted with himself for talking about the crypt at all.
He’d used his body to seduce a victim more times than he could count.
He no longer felt anything much about it.
Spreading his emotions out for den Suriel felt different, though.
The one thing Cazador couldn’t get to was his memories, and yet here Astarion was, using them to manipulate a man for Cazador’s ultimate benefit.
He felt as if he were selling off pieces of his soul.
“Come on. It’s dark out.”
He was already out of the crawl space when he heard den Suriel say, “Even when we fail, I must believe that trying counts for something, and the world is a little better for it.”
It was such a paladin thing to say. Astarion rolled his eyes. But the worst thing, the absolute worst, was that, despite himself, he did feel a tiny bit better because of it.
He stalked toward the river door but halted when den Suriel called his name. That golden gravel voice did something to the syllables that went straight to Astarion’s groin—and, through a somewhat more roundabout fashion, his brain.
“Just a moment, if you will.” Den Suriel held up one hand. “There’s something behind that wall over there. I noticed it when we came in.”
Astarion followed his gaze to one of the many walls that had been scavenged for brick. Behind it lay a tumbledown corner of the old city ruins, the stones so old and broken that not even the denizens of Baldur’s Gate had found a use for them.
“Just through that gap. I can swear I see something.”
“My dear paladin, we’re in a sewer system. The best thing you can find in a hole here is live rats. Everything else is downhill from there.”
Den Suriel ignored him, stepping cautiously through the opening in the brick. Astarion stifled a sigh. If the man hadn’t been so potentially useful…
“There. I thought so.” Den Suriel leaned back so that Astarion could see. “Don’t you recognize the shape? It’s a shrine.”
“A shrine? To what, the god of drains?”
“I’m not sure. It doesn’t feel evil, though.” Den Suriel unslung his pack and knelt down, brushing dust aside with his hands.
“One wouldn’t expect a god of drains to be evil. A trickster, possibly.” Astarion considered. “Though it occurs to me that a priest who could lay hands on plumbing would rapidly become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Clearly you specialized in the wrong thing.”
Den Suriel snorted but continued to clean.
Now that some of the crumbled stone was cleared away, Astarion could make out a niche and what might long ago have been a font of some sort.
He was astonished that the paladin had spotted it, but perhaps if you were a servant of the divine, you developed a sense for things like this.
“It’s been here a long time,” den Suriel said, tracing his fingers along a worn carving. “I don’t recognize the god.”
“Looks rather snakelike. Snake gods are hardly ever good news.”
“True, but not always. Centuries ago, serpents were considered a symbol of healing. And this is at least that old.” Den Suriel sat back on his haunches. “A little local god, I think. Perhaps a forgotten aspect of a larger one.”
“Wonderful. We have struck a blow for archaeology this day. Can we go?”
“One moment.” The aasimar reached into his bag of holding, fished around for a moment, then extracted several objects.
Astarion rolled his eyes and leaned against the wall.
Nine Hells, why did it have to be a paladin?
Sure, they’re good at smiting undead, but then they have to make friends with every scrap of a god between here and the abyss.
Even snakes—if it is a snake, and not a worm or a shoelace or a symbolic representation of death to all who gaze upon it.
From where he was standing, the snake looked cross-eyed. That was probably just damage to the carving, but with its tongue sticking out, it had a distinctly unintelligent expression.
Den Suriel, undaunted, broke off a piece of waybread and set it in the niche, then poured a palmful of salt atop it.
A stub of candle followed. “I offer this gift freely, ancient one,” he said, lighting the candle.
His voice was calm and completely unselfconscious.
“If you have a blessing to impart, I ask that you give it. If not, I ask only that you continue to endure.”
Astarion was working on a complicated punch line about snakes and getting on one’s knees when the candle flame wavered, and something happened.
It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t much of anything, to be honest, except that there had been two people in the hallway, and for just a moment, there were three.
The third was invisible and voiceless, but Astarion felt them nevertheless, there and gone, along with a scent so faint that it might have been the ghost of incense.
It was hardly a miracle. A miraclet, perhaps. It also made Astarion irrationally angry.
I went on my knees to any god that I thought might have me and begged them for help after I was turned.
Not one answered. Not one so much as glanced in my direction.
And this thick-skulled, muscle-bound bastard, with his earnestness and his conviction, casually calls up a god that barely even exists anymore?
He stalked away, heading toward the river stairs. Like the old god, he had no power of belief in him, no blessings to be given. All he had left, all he had had for many years, was the power to endure.
* * *