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60. Honor Among Thieves


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#1 Guest_Oryx_*

Posted 18 July 2004 - 02:42 AM

60. Honor Among Thieves

“So then I cast a fireball – well, triggered it from my wand – and my aim was right on with Dyna’s, and then I cast another one, and it was right on with hers again, and then the smelly wyverns couldn’t take the heat, could they, huh?”

“’Twas a truly grand spectacle…” Garrick turned to Imoen on the log and tipped his head to her.

“Truly...” Viconia drawled, eyes glazing over, fists rammed into the cheeks of her sagging head.

“And I shall truly commit it to parchment once I…uh, have some,” Garrick blushed.

“Truly…” Viconia’s head sagged further in a limp nod, and blearily studied the clover between her boots.

Garrick and Imoen exchanged glanced, smiled conspiratorially, and bard added with trepidation, “And I shall truly revel in snatching each coin from our drow friend’s purse…”

“Truly…” Viconia yawned, and then froze for a moment. Her eyes opened wide, and narrowed at the bard, and her smile was as thin. “Try it, and you’ll spend the rest of your days pickpocketing left-handed…”

“I am left-handed…”

“Judging by you marksmanship,” Viconia smiled sweetly, “You’re no-handed.”

“That’s not true!” Imoen pouted. “And he can juggle!”

“Oh, he can juggle,” Viconia mocked a swoon, putting the back of a hand to her brow and keeling over on her log until her head hit Safana’s shoulder. “And when we reach the Surgeon’s brother you can juggle him to death…”

“Not likely,” Safana snickered, rolling her eyes down from the night sky above to the bard across the campfire, “Now his singing, on the other hand…”

“Oh c’mon guys, don’t be such negative nannies…” Imoen huffed and crossed her arms over her chest, then bounced up and plopped down on the other side of Safana, pawing her shoulder. “We’re goin’ on our first ‘dungeon crawl’ tomorrow! Then we’ll really be heroes…and you can show me how to jimmy all the locks and foil all the traps maybe if I’m good I can do a few myself? "Pleeeeeeeze…pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease…”

The pirate groaned, but Viconia nudged her and grinned, “Yes, perhaps you could let the girl…take care of one of the traps for us.”

“Woohoo!” Imoen threw her hands all the way around Safana and Viconia’s necks, hugging until Safana thought he face would match the hue of the drow’s. “Heeeey…” Imoen drew back, folding her arms again and waggling one free finger at Viconia, “That isn’t very nice…”

“Thank you,” the drow smiled.

Safana huffed, and left the log, but gave Imoen a pat on the thigh before doing so. “Stay close to me in the mines tomorrow, Immy…we we’ll make it out just fine…”

She linked her hands behind the small of her back and traipsed out from the campsite, noting with a vague irritation that Onyx was still gone with Minsc, probably caught up in some inane firewood-hauling contest. She arched her back, stretching her abs and ribs, searching for any lingering indication of the grave wound she’d suffered in the wyvern’s nest. She remembered little more than grinding pain all over the middle of her body, she must have been nearly bit in two…then coming to with the dull pain of a head that had been thrown against rock. All magically healed now, but her heart lurched as she weaved through tree and underbrush, still thick at this higher elevation. She had nearly died today. It was true that she nearly had several times before, usually things she could have prevented by not doing things she wasn’t wise to have done, but she was still jarred, still scared. Tomorrow her consort would plunge the party down into a mine likely choked with men and hobgoblin mercenaries, and overseen by a wizards; perhaps one of smaller ability, perhaps not. According to the Surgeon, Davaeorn had been at it for some time, and so likely he was of some power. Stretched as her roadway tales and pillow musings were, she had been in many fights, many heists and escapades, but none of them the sort Imoen was so naively excited about, plunging headfirst into a deep entrenched lair of the enemy; even if they did have the element of surprise, they would not get far with it.

Something spidered up her back, starting rather low, and she pivoted on a heel, a knife already drawn from her sleeve to her palm, and she found the tip against Coran’s belt, where four rabbits fallen to his bow now hung in a sack. The tattooed elf’s grin held, though, and he whistled, “You are rather uncouth today, my dear.”

“Watch what you say, Elf!” she sneered, using her taller stature over him to full advantage leaning in with the knife, but lowered it after a moment, and didn’t react to the hand that had only turned with her, now half draped about the small of her body.

Coran sighed longingly, in a mockery of a lovestruck lad, "Sometimes, Safana, I find myself attracted to you, despite your shallow spiteful demeanor."

“And I might find you attractive, Coran, if you weren’t so irritating.” She pulled away from him, and made a pirouette on one heel, turning about the long way in the direction of camp so as not to face him.

The archer let his eyes rove down and up again, smiling crookedly. “A fine figure like yours shouldn’t be risked in an occupation such as adventuring. Come, do tell.”

“I have told…” she stopped in her tracks, and sighed, tossing back her hair and leaning back against a tree, facing the elf. “And yes, most of it was true. You know what I am and why.”

Coran grinned and too quick even for her reflexes, his hands were out like ghosts slipping around her waist and palming the bark of the tree. Safana groaned begrudgingly, not so much offended but embarrassed at her failure of evasion, while the elf whispered in his tenor brogue, “And If you weren't such a self-serving wench... I don't think I'd find you half as attractive."

She snickered and cracked a smile, and flicked her eyes back up to his, "You could be... somewhat more creative in your insults."

"Safana,” Coran sighed, “You are full of such subtle wit and charm."

“That isn’t an insult!”

“Which makes it a creative one.”

“Encore please, go trade punchlines with Garrick. Now, what’s a dandy dilettante like you adventuring for?”

“My dear, dear Safana,” the elf chuckled, “I’ve more or less got what I came here for..”


Safana huffed, and pushed back Coran by the hollow of his throat as he leaned in. “Do you really think I’d surrender myself to you? What a laugh…”

“Not quite,” he shook his head and grinned, “Even if you do have the most beautiful...uh…eyes. I’ve come with a touch more of a proposition than that. The wyvern heads are ours, and that’s what I’ve come for.”

“That and me, you mean,” Safana lifted her chin and pushed out her chest, and she breathed in the elf’s face. “Or you wouldn’t be telling me what you’re about to, would you?”

“If you didn’t already know,” Coran stole two fingers to her throat, which wound about like the legs of an ice skater, with a phantasmal lightness that had her clamp her teeth around a shiver, “You wouldn’t be worth bothering with. It is true I could use your help, but don’t you think we could make a delightful team? I have a certain associate; he’ll be at the house where we met or back in the city by now, with a gambit sweeter still. Not quite a kidnapping…consider it his ladylove’s liberation, with some correspondence to encourage daddy to forward the dowry. Come now…” he sing-songed, fingers weaving over her cheek with intricate caresses, “The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.”

Safana shuddered and clutched the treebark behind herself for a moment, then lowered her chin to her chest, alternately staring at the ground and the direction camp would be through the trees. She busted her hip through Coran’s caging arm, and he wisely stood still while she paced; indeed he seemed to meld away into the forest like blown leaves and leave her in privacy and peace. A profitable and enjoyable four days it had been in the eclectic and strongly aligned company. Onyx was an entertaining consort; there weren’t many men yet his age she would have even considered. A green but inborn warrior, a nascent but cohesive leader for this group, and a naïve but passionate lover to her…what stood out most, as it had been a rarity for her and was in her world view, was that he was kind to her. Whether it was ingrained adherence to some chivalric code, the fawning of an enchanted youth, or a choice to care about her, she knew not. She knew not what he felt, nor what she did, for she had forgotten how to ask herself. She saw them, hand in hand, swallowed into a pit in the earth filled with a hundred hobgoblin highway bandits, at its pit, halfway to the Hells, a wizard shrouded in an invincible sphere casting lighting from his fingertips. She cried out at the moment it struck her in the chest biting in like the wyvern’s maw, and she opened her eyes, realizing she had slumped down against a tree and hugged herself. She rose, and sighed. “Nothing’s worth dying for.”

--

Viconia praised the waning crescent moon as it touched its zenith. Her eyes grew glassy and she fell into a deep meditative trance. Her mind wandered through the endless dark shroud of her Goddess, offering praise and taking power for another night. Though her senses remained alert, it was no longer her shift; Coran had come from his reverie and now sat upon the log by a dead fire, while she sat cross legged behind her tent, wreathed with fern fronds, tall trees meeting the sky above save where the darkened moon looked upon her from overhead. Some unknown minutes later, a faint scratching disturbed only her most superficial ring of consciousness as Coran idly rubbed a stone to an arrowhead, and a faint hum, some glacially metered elvish ballad, wafted mercifully dampened from closed lips. A minute later, a rustling of canvas echoed closer to the core of her consciousness.

Safana’s fingers pushed open the flap, and for a moment tinged her sweat-glazed bare body and that of her lover both in the weak moonlight. She glanced down across his form, bit her lip, and slid from the tent without a sound, a bundle in hand. Though she moved outside the ring of tents, Coran rose from his log and stared with intense nonchalance as she dressed in her cottons and leather armor, then donned boots and belt and blades. She tiptoed further from the circle, not aware Coran was gaining on her until he had passed her and then some, his dimness was eerie and his silence eerier still. The elf peered with ease through the night, and exhaled with grand relief when he saw no white shapes where the horses were tethered and now slept; Lance and Amalthea were elsewhere.

For balance, both wyverns’ heads and been sacked and tied about the same horse, Viconia’s midnight black mare which had the least weight, one female elf, to bear. They were loosed now of course for the comfort of the mare, but Safana approached her head, emitting a low feline purr from the depths of her throat; Coran was certain he made out a repeating ”Shrrrssss….”. The mare woke, and licked Safana’s hands and nuzzled her chest like a foal its mother. Coran grinned, and with the pirate’s help they tied the wyvern-heads’ sacks upon each of its shanks, and Coran untethered the mare while Safana slipped onto the saddle, then Coran behind her. While the other three horses slept on, the mounted pair moved off into the night.

After the two had crept away from the tents, Viconia had risen, and stalked after at a fair distance, just enough to see tem with her sight even better attuned to the darkness than the surface elf’s, a thin smile upon her face. When she saw they were taking her horse, though, not Minsc’s bulky gelding, her eyes flared wide, and she darted back to camp, pitching her head right into the still-open flap of Onyx’s tent and rapping her fingernails upon his bare chest. “Sargtlin, rise, to arms! After them! Your female and the moon elf betray you, and flee; and he takes other trophies still from you!”

The paladin shot up and scrambled for his clothing while comprehending the message, and his teeth clenched in range, but his hands worked with efficacy. “No time for armor!” Viconia hissed while he stood outside the tent buckling his boots while Viconia slid the baldric of his bow-sheath and quiver about his chest and buckled it tight. Onyx was projecting his anger and Lance sensed it, crashing through the brush meeting them between the other horses and the tents. Onyx mounted, and reached down, clasping Viconia’s forearm and she his, ripping her off the ground like a plucked flower. The drow felt into the saddle with Lance already breaking. She loaded her sling, then clutched Onyx’s waist with her left hand and held the weapon hanging in her right.

Lance’s nostrils flared, hungry for their scent, and he took the same mount the party had come to their campsite that eve. They sped downhill, many leaves and pine-needles brushing Onyx and Lance alike or catching in Viconia’s up-flying hair as she kept the human for her shield. They came to the flat valley where the streams cut across, and Viconia made out other hoof beats through Lance’s, but they were picking up speed. “We’ve been heard!” she hissed, “Faster!” She ducked forward as Onyx did the same, hunching right over Lance’s neck as the bonded mount made a breakneck gallop weaving tree to tree. Under the starlight, soon even Onyx could see the black horse and its riders. Safana and her mare were not cutting so fast through the forest, the pirate grimacing and shielding her eyes with one hand as she wove the animal. Coran now sat backwards on his saddle, no stirrups, thighs clutching tight and wedged along the inner sides of the wyvern-heads’ sacks, which bounced ungainly with each swerve of the horse. He already had his bow in hand.

“Stop!” Onyx roared. “We mean you no harm! Let us part in peace!”

Cupping his hand to his mouth, Coran called back, “That we did, human warmonger! Luck be a Lady, and She is always on the side of the romantic!”

Onyx growled, and Lance charged on, to race around and cut off the mare, but as they gained Coran drew from his quiver, notched an arrow and leaned sideways in his saddle, releasing the missile. It veered in under Onyx’s left armpit, piercing into his side at a shallow angle and out again the edge of his back, where it entered Viconia. He groaned and she hissed, twirling her sling while he drew an arrow of his own. Both fired, awkwardly from their shared saddle, worse yet snapping the arrow through them both and making both halves twist inside them. Coran did not even flinch as arrow and bullet scattered in the darkness, rather he released a second arrow into Onyx’s chest, then a third. The paladin groaned and reached for another arrow, while Viconia attempted to cast a holding spell, but the mere jostling broke her concentration and she cursed aloud. Onyx loosed his arrow, with struck one of the already-slain wyvern’s heads through its canvas sack, and Coran released a fourth arrow that passed under his right armpit, impaling Viconia above her right breast. She choked and groaned, slumping forward against the paladin who himself was pained and weak, and relented, communicating to Lance who now decelerated abruptly.

“Great peril yields great beauty!” Coran cheered, and released a final arrow at their surrendered pursuers before punching his fist into the air. The arrowhead hit Lance between the eyes, and the mount whinnied terribly, and sank to the ground. Onyx slumped over his horse’s neck, dribbling blood over his lower lip while the backwards-mounted elf disappeared into the darkness ahead.

“Thank you…Lord…” Onyx gurgled, looking down the face of his mount. The arrowhead and been mercifully shallow in the beast’s thick skull, already fallen out and to the ground. Onyx dropped his bow limply to the ground but a foot or two away, and pressed the hand between the horse’s glazed eyes, as if petting it, healing the wound. “Sorry Lance…” he coughed, then went dizzy. He and Viconia slumped off the saddle together, hitting the ground, which jarred the arrows inside them with a twisting, tortuous pain.

“Get up…On…” Viconia’s voice was wheezy, her right lung punctured, but she and Onyx gripped one another and rolled up to a sit. For all her pain, her hands worked like constructs of their own, unbuckling Onyx’s baldric and pushing bow and quiver off his back. “Snap…” she commanded, and waved her hand over the three feathered shafts growing from his chest like flowers. Rather, though, he gripped and snapped off most of the arrow above her right breast; gripping with both hands to steady the half going inside her while he broke off the other. Her hands reached under his, snapping off the two arrows embedded in his chest, one would have entered his heart but for the flesh of his left pec and the incomplete draw of the longbowman on that shot, and pulled free of his ribs the shaft that had snapped in half while in herself too. The blood from this last flowed.

“Rip…” she wheezed, and Onyx gripped the collar of his cotton tunic and ripped it asunder raggedly down the chest, throwing apart and slumping off his shoulders the torn garment. She nodded her chin downward and he gripped her collar, and ripped hers away. “Pull…” she coughed, and they reached past one another to the shafts broken short to allow the tearing, now they made quick smooth jerks to extricate the arrowheads from each other’s bodies, and pressed hands to staunch the immediately bleeding and to heal. Viconia chanted in her tongue as dark as this night, and the blue flowing light crept into him, while the sand wreathed his hands and seeped into her. They lightly tested each other’s flesh, and finding it whole withdrew their hands. Onyx looked away from her at once, and hung his head. “Save your modesty,” she snickered and sat back proudly.

“It isn’t that,” he rubbed his temple, and put his hand over his eyes, “I am a fool…I am embarrassed, and I am shamed.”

We are shamed,”she growled, glaring murder to the west, “Seek honor in revenge, sargtlin. We may cross paths with them again…tell your mayor of this once you can, it is his bounty…they may beat us, but he will trust your word, they will be outlaws then, wanted thieves!” He nodded, and his face grew red, anger or sadness or both. She raked her fingernails lightly down his spine. “Rue not the loss of two ‘allies’, we are fortunate they proved themselves false now, not in the mines before the wizard tomorrow. Rue not the loss of the bounty’s gold, for it is likely less than the two-eighths shares they would have claimed of tomorrow’s spoils. Rue not the loss of a mrimm d'ssinss, she was a common whore, far past your women’s prime, yet shortsighted as a child.”

While she said this, water conjured from within her fist trickled upon his shoulders, down his back and chest, washing away the sweat and blood. He breathed with some peace, and closed his eyes, only to have them shoot open again and accost her. “You, Viconia, may yet be the vilest traitor of all. Why should I trust you? Why should I listen to you?”

She smiled smugly, and lifted her triangular chin. “I yet spit on your sun-god and always shall…”

“..and I shite upon your dark moon…”

She chuckled throatily, “Yet I am wise enough to see the merits for myself in your ends, and so they are our ends.”

“For now.”

She nodded, as if to an apt pupil. “You know by dogma and self interest. You bring me wealth, allies against the witch hunters, and a quest of revenge against an entity for which Shar has little love. You possess the wisdom to know when I might leave or even betray you, and when I have no reason…you know by dogma and self interest. I recognize this in you, and so in this mutual, rational entwinement, you may twist this dark drow witch to your noble, just ends. You say your god seeks good in ill, the blade of grass springing from the bare rock, you should delight in this.”

He turned to face her again, and raised his own chin. “Yes. You prove useful enough, for now, cleric.”

“Of course,” she flicked her thumb across his pec where the arrow wound had been, wiping away the last crust of blood her water had not cleansed. She then held her hands over herself, tiny waterfalls spilling out of her fists over her thumbs and bathing her hair and upper body in a wash of water carrying away the chase’s grime. “Forget them, sargtlin, let the memory wash away, erase your weakness with forgetfulness and find your strength in this quest. Life is loss, Onyx, you know this well, yet we have the power to take far more.” She leaned in and stole a silken kiss from his lips.




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