22 KYTHORN (NIGHT)

BLINDED, KALEN AWOKE TO A CHAFING SENSATION IN HIS lower half. Well accustomed to his benumbed body, he recognized the signs of being dragged. He heard whispers like soft squeaking. The smell—a mixture of sweat and vomit—indicated a sackcloth hood over his head.

“I see you haven’t washed the hood since the last time I was in town,” he murmured.

Thunder clapped as someone boxed his right ear.

He couldn’t see where they were going, but growing up in this foul place gave him a good grasp of the streets, with all their rank odors and other minutiae. The numbness helped: his disconnect from his body sharpened his other senses.

He recognized a gravely crunch underfoot and heard dozens of bickering voices that blended together—a fishmonger’s market, down by the docks: Rat Alley. Despite the foul hood, he smelled seawater and a combination of rot and sour ale that indicated they were in the vicinity of one of the gang taverns. Likely, that meant the Drowned Rat tavern, home of the Dead Rats.

Kalen found it darkly amusing that Ebbius the tiefling hadn’t mentioned that his old friend Toytere was running the Rats these days. That could have been pertinent information, when someone wanted him dead as badly as Toytere did.

His captors dropped him onto cold, hard stone. That alone told him they were at least twenty feet underground. That he wasn’t dead he took as a blessing, though just at the moment, he’d not have minded oblivion. He ached, and considering his curse took the edge off pain, that meant he was badly hurt.

Someone yanked Kalen’s hood off, and he saw a root cellar turned prison cell. A ragged man with jaundiced eyes spat at his feet, then left the room through a stout wood door.

Kalen’s eyes adjusted and he saw the dim outline of Rhett sitting nearby. The boy was just waking. “Saer Shadowbane?”

“Call me Kalen.” He worked the ropes that bound his wrists behind him.

“These are tight,” Rhett said. “Whoever tied these knew what they were doing.”

Kalen regarded him dizzily. “Were you conscious when they bound you?”

“A little. Why?”

“If you flex your muscles when the ropes go on, then relax, the ropes loosen.”

“Oh.” Rhett laughed mirthlessly. “That would have been great to know at the time.”

“Indeed.” Kalen worked at his bonds.

“As long as we’re not going anywhere,” Rhett said after a moment. “Do you mind if I ask what’s going on? I mean, with our captors and their impending murder of us and all.”

“The gang that has us is called the Dead Rats. Why we’re alive, I don’t know, but no doubt it’s for a reason. Keep silent and don’t give them a different reason.”

“Got it,” Rhett said, then continued right on talking. “And that woman? The black-skinned demon?”

“Sithe. She’s—” Kalen paused. He wasn’t sure what Sithe was. He’d fought demons and their scions before, but none like her. “She’s the Rats’ chief enforcer.”

“Well, as long as she’s the best they have, we’ve naught to fear!” Rhett said cheerily. “Except for the bit where she mopped the cobblestones with our faces.”

“True enough.” Kalen saw his fingers turning purple. The ropes gave a little—he could now pull himself free at need, but to what end? He couldn’t get out the door.

“And that other voice I was hearing earlier? Pitched high—a bit like a child’s?”

“Halfling called Toytere,” he said. “Old friend of mine from many years ago—fortune-teller, con artist, thief, and the like. His play was always telling the future. Not that his prophecies ever came true, except when it was the worst for everyone involved.” Kalen shifted toward Rhett. “He was a Dead Rat when I knew him. If he’s running the gang—and it looks like he is—then he must have moved up in the world.”

“You’re from Luskan?”

Kalen smiled despite himself. “Usually it’s the grim manner that gives it away.”

“You don’t seem that grim to me,” Rhett said. “Determined, aye?”

“You don’t know me at all, boy.”

“Fairly said. But this Toytere seems to—and he doesn’t like what he knows.”

“I shouldn’t have come to your rescue in that alley. No doubt it was a trick.” Kalen scooted toward Rhett, then fought another wave of dizziness. “Why did you come after me?”

“As I said, to be your apprentice,” Rhett said. “My Valabrar, Rayse—that is, Araezra Hondyl, dismissed me. She said I could either go back to Waterdeep to face the magistrate for dereliction of duty or I could desert. She gave me the night to decide.”

“That sounds like Araezra.”

“You know her?” Rhett asked. “Oh right, you were in the Guard. How could you not know the most beautiful woman there?”

“Indeed.” Kalen suspected Rayse would hate that description, but then, Rhett was a boy and could be forgiven for not understanding.

Kalen still felt woozy. That meant he was bleeding, even if he couldn’t see or feel it. At least he’d made it closer to Rhett—two paces separated them.

“Listen,” Kalen said. “I’m not going to last.”

“But you’re a paladin, are you not? Call on your god and heal yourself.”

“It isn’t so easy,” Kalen said under his voice. What he was going to ask of the boy, he had promised himself he would never do again. But there was no choice—not if he wanted to find Myrin. “You give it a try.”

“Me?” Rhett said. “I’m just a guardsman. I don’t have any healing gifts.”

“The sword,” Kalen said. “Helm’s sword. It chose you.”

“A helm wielding a sword? Are you sure you’re well?”

“The god Helm … Listen. Can you get over to me?”

Rhett sidled up to Kalen, moving easily. “Here I am.”

“Touch my hands.”

“Well, goodsir, I don’t think we’re quite that intimate.”

“Just do it,” Kalen snapped. “Do you serve a god?”

“Torm the Loyal Fury, God of Law and Justice.”

“He’ll do.” Kalen grimaced. “Concentrate. Pray. Try to heal me.”

“But—” Rhett might have offered another argument, but his words trailed off into a startled gasp. His hand burned with bright white light—healing light. Kalen felt the soothing power flow into him. He welcomed it, but feared it as well.

At least he wasn’t apt to expire any moment. For that, he was grateful.

“How?” Rhett whispered.

“The sword,” Kalen said. “Vindicator marked you as a paladin.”

“But I don’t even have the sword anymore,” Rhett said. “They took it away.”

“It doesn’t matter—not to the Threefold God,” Kalen said, his voice cold. “You’ll bear his mark until you die in his service.”

“Am I your squire now?” Rhett asked.

“No,” Kalen barked, so forcefully that Rhett almost fell over.

“Why not?”

The viewing panel opened with a scrape of metal on stone and their words dropped into silence. They sat, back-to-back, staring at the door.

The door swung open and a man stood there. He had a weathered, weasel-like face, a bristly red beard, and a small stature. He swore under his breath at a pair of thugs behind him.

“A blessed day it is,” said Toytere, “when I see you so well, Little Dren.”

In his high boots and ridiculous tallhat with its silver brooch, Toytere looked much bigger than he should have, but then, that was the point. Unlike the Rats in the alley, with their ragged leathers and red scarves, their leader opted for a crimson waistcoat and a deep blue doublet that might have come from a Waterdhavian salon. He carried a black lacquer cane tipped with a burnished gold rat that wore a mischievous grin. He could find a home on a pirate ship or at a high-society revel with equal ease, though in either case, he’d make folk nervous.

“Let the boy go, Toytere.” Kalen nodded over his shoulder. “He isn’t part of this.”

Toytere patted Rhett’s cheek. “I never be taking you for a fancy man, Kalen.” He’d kept his hard-to-place accent, which had grown more pronounced. It came from somewhere far south of here—possibly the moors or deep in the Heartlands.

It reminded Kalen of the source of Toytere’s anger: his sister.

“It’s me you want, not him,” Kalen said.

“True, true, but we’ve a use for pretty lads here in the city of vice.” Toytere pulled back from Rhett and swaggered over to Kalen. “Also, this be not about what I be wanting, but rather, what she be wanting. And she be wanting you alive.”

“She?” Kalen asked. “You have a mistress, do you? And here I thought you’d climbed high in your shit hole of Faerûn.”

Toytere grasped Kalen’s collar and pulled the man’s face toward his winning smile of pointed teeth. Several teeth were missing from that smile, but it held no shortage of unsettling charm. “She say she wants you breathing—she not specify unharmed.”

With that, Toytere punched Kalen in the jaw, knocking him into Rhett. Both men groaned. “Godsdamn it,” Rhett said. “I didn’t even say anything.”

“That be for Cellica,” Toytere said, cracking his knuckles. “First of many, no?”

He stopped and stared at Kalen, his eyes glazed. His grin faltered. From between his lips emerged a soft, droning hum.

“What—what’s happening?” Rhett asked.

“The Sight,” Kalen said. “He can’t see or hear us.”

“Sight?”

“Seeing the future, reading minds—in his case, it’s not all a con. He sees glimpses, so there’s probably no escape for us.”

“Wonderful,” Rhett said. “He seems pretty upset about this ‘Cellica’ lass.”

“She—” Kalen fought down a lump in his throat. “She’s his twin sister.”

“Ah, the protective brother,” Rhett said. “And what befell yon lass? You broke her heart? Left her at the altar?”

“Not exactly.” He remembered an awful morning a year ago, tinged with the smell of blood. Cellica—his adopted sister—gave him a last disapproving smile.

“With child, then? Can humans and halflings even—?”

“She’s dead.”

“Oh.” Rhett sounded somber. “This … this is worse than I thought, isn’t it?”

“Much.”

Toytere shivered and returned to the world. His expression fell a bit, as though disappointed, and he waved at them. “Well,” he said to the Rats who had remained in the hallway. “Go on. Take them.”

“To her?” The thugs at the door shivered visibly. “To—to the Witch-Queen?”

“Aye, rotters!” Toytere swayed out of the room. “Whom you think?”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Rhett murmured. Kalen shook his head.

The guards jerked the two men to their feet and ushered them into a corridor that smelled of rich earth and old blood. Two rooms branched off the cramped tunnel: the cell they had been in and another one whose door lay in moldering pieces against the opposite wall.

“Does nothing in this city hold together?” Rhett said, pretending not to have spoken when the guards glared at him. He looked to Kalen. “The Witch-Queen?”

Kalen shrugged. “Apparently.”

“Torm’s blade, but this will go well.”

“Shut up!” One of the guards put a fist into Rhett’s belly.

The boy groaned. “Godsdamn it.”

Kalen had last seen the interior of the Drowned Rat fifteen years previous, and it hadn’t changed much. It seemed bigger once upon a time, but then, he’d been much smaller. The tavern’s ramshackle walls curled with age and the weight of the roof until it resembled less a man-made structure than a cavern hollowed out by a thousand small talons. A rat’s nest, for true.

Unlike other gang taverns in Luskan, the Drowned Rat boasted no ostentatious audience chamber. A simple raised dais sat at the end of the common room, a place where bards might have sung in days not quite as awful as these. A padded chair faced away from the main room, floating above the dais. Even at this distance, Kalen could feel the power in the occupant of that chair. It awakened the spellscar that burned inside him: it yearned in that direction.

The Witch-Queen, Kalen thought. If he could capture the queen, the court would fall.

They had one chance at this. He focused on the short sword sheathed at the nearest guard’s belt. If he could get that, they might yet find a way to bargain themselves free.

The hall stood empty but for a pair of toughs hunched over a card game, like rats surveying their hoard. They looked up at Kalen and Rhett with beady, distrusting eyes. Their lips drew back from their yellowed teeth. Sithe stood impassive on the dais—in the light, she was easier to see but no less intimidating—holding Vindicator sheathed in its lacquer scabbard.

“Me lady.” Toytere addressed the dais. “The intruders, as you—”

Kalen feigned a lurch, as though his step had faltered, to cover pulling free from his bonds. When his captor leaned forward to restrain him, Kalen slammed his forehead into man’s face. The Rat fell back, and Kalen snatched the sword from his belt.

The room reacted slowly. Toytere turned toward them, and Sithe drew out her axe. Kalen dashed right past her—he stood no chance against her in his current condition, even if he could get Vindicator—and bore down on the Witch-Queen’s chair. Capture the queen.

The chair pivoted and sudden thunder split the air. Kalen’s eardrums rang as an unstoppable wave of force flung him back like a carelessly cast-off doll. He flew five paces before he crashed back to the floor, deafened and coughing.

Gods. The beating he’d taken must have addled his wits something fierce. The Witch-Queen of the Dead Rats looked like—

Blue hair swirled as Myrin shook it back from her face. “Kalen?’ she asked.

Rhett leaned toward him. “You know the Witch-Queen?” he asked.