Chapter Text
A husky whisper floated through the deserted common room of the inn. “Mam krute udghatitam…”
Caleb Widogast moved his glowing hand in a slow pattern before the multi-faceted object on the table in front of him, careful to keep his voice and the light of his magic low enough that he wouldn’t wake anyone.
“Mam krute udghatitam…”
Patience, he told himself for the umpteenth time.
This was, of course, getting increasingly difficult as the days wore on and opportunities to steal away with the beacon seemed to grow fewer and farer between. It had been a month since they’d obtained it in the fiasco at Zadash. And now, here they were still on the run, spending the night in another rundown inn in another backwater town, with Caleb no closer to learning the artifact’s secrets.
“Aham bhavantam udghatayitum aagyapayami…”
Patience, little spark.
He smashed his fists onto the table on either side of the beacon, which sat there as dark and quiet as ever.
“Couldn’t sleep either, huh?”
He blinked at the threshold of the inn’s open staircase, where Beauregard Lionett, one of his traveling companions, had appeared. She was standing in the dim lantern light with a narrow-eyed look upon her face.
“Beauregard,” Caleb stammered. “This… isn’t what it looks like.”
Beau folded her sinewy arms. “Really? Cause it looks like you snuck off in the middle of the night to mess with something that could blow up the whole town if you so much as look at it sideways.”
Caleb set his hands on the table wearily, his shoulder’s hunched. It was exactly this of which he’d been afraid. It reminded him of the horror in Nott’s eyes during his standoff over the beacon with Ikithon, when he’d lowered his hand instead of destroying his old master.
“You don’t understand,” he said.
Beau advanced on him until she was standing at his shoulder. “I thought you learned something about chasing power from being an ex-volstrucker. Was I wrong?”
“Nein! It’s… I…” He flexed his fingers into the tabletop, choosing his words. “I don’t want power, not anymore. But I must understand the artifact.”
“Why? Because Ikithon will find you and spank you if you don’t?”
“Because he told me it could change my past!”
Beau blinked and let her hands fall to her sides. “What the hell are you talking about?”
He straightened to look at her directly, his eyes pleading. “Beauregard, that night. The fire. The screams. I cannot close my eyes without it all pounding in my ears. If there’s a way, even a chance that I could take it all back…”
“Take it all back?” Beau shook her head incredulously. “Caleb, do you realize how dangerous it is to fuck with this thing? I saw what it did to an entire fortress full of the Empire’s worst and dullest, not to mention the buildings and the trees and everything else within a giant’s pissing distance. And by the way, Ikithon had it for Gods-only-know how long and he couldn’t figure it out. How arrogant do you have to be to think you can?”
“Arrogant?” Caleb’s normally soft voice took on a rare edge. “You think it’s arrogance that I want my parents back after I burned them in front of my own eyes? And for what? The Empire? A master who would would’ve cut out my heart if it put one more spell in his pocket?”
Beau put her face close to Caleb’s, her blue eyes boring into his. “You can’t change the past, Caleb. All you can ever do is the next right thing, and this isn’t it!”
“Beauregard, please,” Caleb whispered. “If you could undo the worst thing you’ve ever done, wouldn’t you do it?”
Beau’s jaw clenched. “I’m starting to think the worst thing I ever did was trust you.”
Slowly, Caleb’s own blue gaze hardened. “You never trusted me. You may hold your family in contempt, but I loved mine. How could I expect someone with no heart to understand what it’s like to have a broken one?”
Just for a moment, so brief it might have been a trick of the flickering lantern light, something flashed across Beau’s face. Something he didn’t recognize on the face of the steely, untouchable monk.
“No. Beauregard, I didn’t mean that. I…”
“Caleb,” she said, “I’m going to go cool off. When I come back, that thing better be back in Jester’s bag of holding where it belongs, or I swear by the Mistress of Divine Knowledge, I’ll tie a fucking ribbon around it and give it back to the Kryn.”
She knocked into his shoulder on her way to the door, which she slammed behind her. An instant later, Nott came running down the stairs, her eyes darting around in panic.
“What’s happening? What’s all the noise? Are we under attack???”
Caleb signed and looked at the empty space where Beau had just been. “Not yet.”
@
A barn owl was startled out of its roost by the heavy beat of Beau’s fists and feet on the hitching post in the town square. Empty except for a few passing sailors and prostitutes who were too drunk to notice her, the dark area echoed with the rhythmic sound of her strikes.
Thud thud whack thud…
No heart?
Thud whack crack thud…
Had he actually just said that to her? The man who murdered his fucking parents had the actual balls to tell her she had no heart?
Thudthudthudthudwhack…
Well, at least she had a goddam brain! And that was more than she could say for that shit-smelling, magic-fucking garbage wizard!
ThudsmackwhackthudthudthudwhackthudthudCRACK!
Panting, Beau fell back from her last kick to the hitching post and looked at the splintered, foot-sized dent she’d just put into the wood. Dairon would be proud.
She swiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. She still felt too restless to sleep and too angry at Caleb to go back to the inn. It was another few hours before dawn. At least that would give her some time to figure out what she would say to him if she returned to find him screwing around with the beacon again.
To him, and the others.
Hoping to find a tavern still open, she set off down an adjacent street that turned out to be even more deserted than the square. Divine Mistress, these townspeople went to bed early. Didn’t anyone around her drink?
She was about to try another way when a sound from back in the square caught her attention. Footfalls, scuffling, the impact of flesh on flesh, cruel laughter. It was the should of a fight, and unless she was wrong, a very uneven one.
Spinning on her foot, she jogged back the way she’d come. There, in pool of lamplight, a single person in a tattered, hooded cloak was down on his hands and knees with whatever he’d been carrying – a purse with a few spilled coins, an empty tankard, some loose sheets of parchment – strewn about him on the ground. Standing over him were five hulking brutes with their backs turned to Beau. One of them put a boot into the cloaked figure’s side and shoved him the rest of the way to the ground.
“Please,” came the shaking voice from within the hood. “I meant no disrespect. Take whatever you want!”
“I tried to give you that chance, didn’t I?” said the one who’d kicked him. “I said we could do it the easy way or hard, yeah? Then you had to go and try to run.”
Beau hopped into a fighting stance and put her fists up into a guard position. “Five against one, guys? You forget your balls in whatever tar pit you crawled out of?”
The gang turned to face her: two half-orcs, two half-elves, and a dragonborne, judging by their ears. The lower halves of their faces were masked by black cloths printed with the jagged grin that was the sigil of the Cerberus Assembly.
Beau braced herself and spared a glance at their victim. “Run.”
But he didn’t. Slowly, almost casually, he got up and stood behind the wall of brutes. Then he pushed back the hood of his cloak to reveal pointed ears and a big gray beard on a jowly, smug, and very familiar face.
“Hello, Beauregard,” Zeenoth said.
The sight of her former steward, the man who’d betrayed the Cobalt Soul and everything they stood to protect, seemed to flip to a switch that turned off Beau’s common sense or any other thought but throttling him. With a cry, she launched at him. Somewhat stunned by her brazenness, the gang standing between her and the object of her ire didn’t react until it was almost too late.
One of the half-orcs sprang to intercept her. As if on a trap-door, she dropped to a crouch, leaving his hook punch to swish through empty air. Spinning on the ball of her foot, she struck out with a sweeping kick that caught a pair of beefy shins, sending the half-orc crashing to the ground. She popped up and put him the rest of the way down with an elbow to the back of his neck.
Before she was even on balance again, she looked up to see a large fist descending out of the starry sky toward her head. She twisted out of the way just in time for the half-elf’s fist to plunge into the stone street with a sickening crack. He let out a gasp that was cut short by Beau’s punch to his face.
As he crashed to the ground, Beau stepped on the side of his head, making his eyes bulge as she spring-boarded into the wall of the nearest building, which she launched off of with both feet and nailed a flying heel to the dragonborn’s throat. The moment she landed, the remaining half-orc and half-elf set upon her with a flurry of punches and kicks, forcing her to back up as she deflected and blocked one after the other.
She side-stepped a punch to her face, grabbed and twisted the half-orc’s forearm, flipping him into his partner with a crash of heavy bodies. And just like that, there was nothing between her and Zeenoth but a few feet of open air. She reached for him.
A sharp pain in her neck, followed by instant dizziness so intense that she stumbled to her knees.
Blearily, she put a hand to her neck and her fingers closed on a small, hard, tapered object still embedded there. Pulling it free, she had just enough time to interpret the watery vision as a small dart before she was set upon again.
She struck out again at the bodies lumbering toward her, but it was as if she were moving in a vat of honey, sluggish, almost drunkenly. She felt herself tackled from what felt like all sides, and though she continued to fight with enthusiasm if not capacity, she quickly found herself under a pile of men who were all trying to punch, kick, or restrain her at once.
“Hold her!”
“I’m trying, I’m trying!”
A blow to the side of her face stunned her long enough for the dragonborn to wrench her arms behind her back while one of the half-elves tied them there with a rough piece of twine. Panting, the two of them each took one of her elbows and pulled her upright, while the others groaned their way to their own feet.
“Gods,” they all said simultaneously.
Beau spat a mouthful of blood from a split lip onto the dragonborn’s shoe. “Had enough yet?”
Zeenoth, who hadn’t bothered to move the entire time, put his hands on his ample hips. “Pathetic. You let one human do this to you?”
“You said she was a pain in the ass,” one of the half-orcs said. “You didn’t say she could fight like a mother.”
Zeenoth’s mouth tilted. “Both are true, though the former tends to eclipse the latter.”
Beau laughed bitterly. “Don’t flatter me. It’s cheap.”
“Same old Beauregard,” Zeenoth said with the condescending tone he always seemed to have. “Too brave to resist a stranger in need, to foolish to know when it’s a trap.”
Beau glared at him. “What do you want, Zeenoth?”
“Him? He wants money, of course.”
Beau tried to pinpoint where this lightly-accented woman’s voice had come from, but whatever had been on the dart made focusing difficult. Zeenoth made it easier by turning to the side, and allowing a newcomer to approach. Blond hair, scars on her neck that crept up to her face, and a brown cloak open to show heavily marked forearms.
Astrid tucked her dart gun into her belt. “I on the other hand am looking for something far less common, Tracey.”
The sight of the volstrucker burned away the cobwebs in Beau’s drug-addled brain, and she lunged against the grip on her arms. “You fucking -!”
A blow to her midsection from one of the half-orcs knocked the breath from her body, making her double over and cough. When she could breathe again, she found Astrid just an arm’s-length before her with her perfect posture and dead eyes.
“What’s the matter, Astrid?” Beau wheezed. “Couldn’t beat me yourself so you thought you'd try hiring these losers?”
Zeenoth glanced at Astrid nervously, apparently smart enough to know what happened to most people who pissed off a volstrucker. Astrid ignored him, her eyes just growing that much colder.
“To be fair,” she said, “I thought there would be more of you. Speaking of which, where are your friends?”
Beau shrugged. “I don’t know. Knowing them, they’re off somewhere luckin’, yuckin’, suckin’ up-chuckin’, and fuckin’. Guess which one does which.”
Astrid took Beau’s chin in her hand and looked at her appraisingly. “You know, you could actually be quite attractive if you weren’t so pesky. Be a shame if such bone structure were to get, shall we say, restructured.”
“Hey. If you wanted to get freaky, all you had to do was ask.”
Beau’s head snapped to the side under Astrid’s backhand. “Where are your friends, and where are they keeping the beacon?”
Beau bared her teeth, bloody from a trickle of blood from her nose, and looked right at Zeenoth. “Suck my dick.”
The redness flooding Zeenoth’s cheeks was so satisfying that Beau almost missed Astrid’s nod to the half-elf, followed by his club to the back of the monk’s head. Beau grunted and fell limp in the grip of her captors. In the ensuing quiet, Astrid shook her head.
“She’s just as insufferable as you said.”
Zeenoth gave her a look. “You don’t know the half of it.”