Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3)(26)

“For the benefit of Tiago Baenre, you mean,” she remarked.

Ravel had to take another deep breath—and pointedly remind himself that these sisters of his were priestesses of Lolth, and surely loved her more than they cared for him. They had attended Arach-Tinilith, the greatest of the Menzoberranzan academies, and Berellip, in particular, had excelled in that brutal environment. Ravel had to take care in dealing with these two. He fancied himself smarter than almost any drow, perhaps excepting Gromph Baenre, but in a moment like this, he understood that arrogance to be more a matter of determined attitude than a true belief.

“If for Tiago Baenre, then surely for House Xorlarrin,” he answered. “That one might prove important to us.”

“Which is why I will bed him this very night,” Berellip replied.

“And I tomorrow,” Saribel quickly added.

Ravel looked from one to the other, and truly was not surprised. “Tiago is intrigued with our House.”

“He is an upstart male who does not like his place in life,” Berellip explained.

“And so House Xorlarrin interests him,” said Ravel. “For it, above any others, expects achievement from its males, and rewards such achievement with respect.”

“This is an advantage of House Xorlarrin throughout Menzoberranzan,” Berellip agreed. “For in Xorlarrin alone are males allowed some true measure of respect.”

“Then you understand my disrespect,” Ravel said, or started to, for somewhere between the first word and the fifth, a snake-headed whip appeared in Berellip’s hand. She lashed out at him, the three heads of her weapon snapping forth, fangs bared, tearing the flesh of his face.

He threw himself backward and to the floor, but Berellip pursued and struck him again and again. His main robes were enchanted, of course, and offered him some protection, but those wicked snakes found their way around it, tearing his shirt and skin alike.

He felt the agonizing poison coursing through his veins almost, even as new eruptions of fire from fresh bites assailed him.

Saribel was there then, her own whip in hand, adding two more serpent heads to the vicious beating. It went on and on, Ravel’s senses stolen by the sheer agony of it. At last they stopped striking him, but still he writhed, poison assaulting his nerves and muscles, forcing him into spasms of sheer agony.

Sometime later, a bloody Ravel dared to sit up again, to find Berellip sitting comfortably in her chair, with Saribel off to the side as if nothing had happened.

“So ends our advantage with Tiago Baenre,” the mage managed to gasp.

Berellip smiled and nodded to a nearby goblin, who rushed over with an armful of clothes—clothing to exactly match the now-tattered nonmagical garments.

“The end of this chamber is silenced, and you will look the same. Tiago will know nothing of this,” Berellip assured him. “Dress!”

Ravel grunted repeatedly as he struggled to his feet, his joints still aflame from the wicked whip poison.

“Dear sister,” Berellip teased as Ravel slipped out of his blood-soaked and ripped robes, “we are but a tenday from Menzoberranzan, and have only four more sets of replacement clothing for our dear brother. Whatever shall we do?”

Ravel’s hateful stare might have carried some threat with it had he not been so wobbly, even falling back over to the ground at one point.





A COLLISION





He was not a man prone to fits of nostalgia, not a man whose thoughts filled with wistful images of what had gone before, mostly because most of what had gone before wasn’t worth replaying. But the small human assassin with grayish skin found himself in a strange, for him, emotional place one afternoon outside of Neverwinter.

“Artemis Entreri,” he whispered, and not for the first time this day. It was a name that had once struck fear throughout the city of Calimport, throughout most of the southland. The name itself had once offered him great advantage in battle, for the reputation it carried often overwhelmed the sensibilities of his enemies. Employers would throw extra gold his way as much because of their fear of angering him as because they knew he was the best man for the job.

That notion brought a rare smile to Entreri’s face. Angering him? “Anger” implied a heightened level of agitation, a state of personal maddening.

Was Artemis Entreri ever really angry?

Or then again, had he ever been not angry?

As he looked back over the years, Entreri recalled a moment he had been more than angry, when he had been outraged. He still remembered the man’s name, Principal Cleric Yinochek, for it seemed more than a name to him. The title, the man, all of this creature who was Yinochek gave body and soul to the anger that was within Artemis Entreri, and for that one brief moment after he had cut Yinochek down, and after he and his companion had burned the vile man’s church down, Entreri had known a taste of freedom.

In that freedom, on a cliff overlooking the city of Memnon and the burning Protector’s House, Artemis Entreri had at long last looked back at himself, at his life, at his anger, and had managed to cast it aside.

Albeit briefly.

He thought of Gositek, the priest he had spared, the man he had ordered to go out and live according to the principles of his espoused religion, and not to use that religion as a front to cover his own foibles, as was so often the case with priests in Faer?n.