got his arm up to block-and how that stung!-and continued forward as well, wanting to get inside the weight of that swing. He drove his shoulder into the man’s waist, grappling with the swinging club arm with one hand and locking his adversary in place with the other.
But the man managed to wriggle free enough to change from a swing to a straight downward stroke, repeatedly jamming the butt end of the table leg against the top of the dwarf’s head.
So Athrogate stopped even trying to block and brought his second arm around the man as well. He stood up straight, lifting the man from the floor, and he squeezed with all his might.
The man kept pumping his arm, and blood soon caked the dwarf’s black hair. But the blows grew weaker. The man was off balance, and Athrogate growled and crushed him tighter and tighter, stealing his breath and twisting his spine.
Athrogate began to whip him back and forth and his victim yelled out for help. The dwarf bit him on the stomach, shaking his head like a guard dog might, and the pirate howled out in pain.
Athrogate never saw the next strike coming and didn’t even know that it was from one of his own morningstars. All he knew was a sudden explosion of pain, a sudden sensation of weakness as he went over sideways, dragging his bitten victim with him to the floor. Then several others were on him, punching him and kicking him, blocking out the light while all the folk in the room around him shouted and screamed.
“Kill him dead!” cried some.
“Let the poor fellow go!” yelled others.
Then he was up to his feet again, though he knew not how. It took him a few moments to note, through swollen eyes, a tiefling holding him by one arm and a dwarf holding him by the other.
“Ye go sleep it off!” the dwarf yelled in his ear. “Ye don’t come back here unless ye’re in a better mood!”
Athrogate wanted to argue, and wanted to call for the return of his weapons, but he saw the door approaching-at least, that’s what it seemed like, and it took him a few heartbeats to realize that he was approaching the door, and swiftly. He crashed through and went tumbling out into the street.
Stubbornly, he climbed back to his feet and staggered around to regard the posse that stood on the tavern’s porch, staring at him.
“And know that ye’re paying for the door and the tables, and all that’s broken and all that’s spilled, Athrogate!” the dwarf yelled at him.
Athrogate brought a hand up to wipe the blood from his lips. “Get me me ’stars,” he said. He looked down at his shoulder, bloody and torn from one of those very weapons. “I dropped ’em out o’ good manners.”
“Get ’em,” the dwarf, who was one of the proprietors of the establishment, told the group behind him.
A couple disappeared into the tavern, but only to come back and report that the morningstars and their harness were nowhere to be found.
Thoroughly dejected, dazed, busted, and broken, Athrogate wandered down the streets of Luskan. That hadn’t been his first fight, of course, not even his first one that tenday, nor was it the first time he’d ended up face down in the street. Always he took comfort in knowing that he’d given out better than he had taken, but without the glassteel morningstars that had served him so well for all those decades, he found little comfort indeed. And he was hurt worse than any of the other times.
He thought to get back to his own bed, but he wasn’t even sure where he was. He looked around, confused, his brain not connecting with his vision or his footsteps. He kept staggering for some time before finally stumbling into an alleyway, where he slumped against a wall and slid to the ground.
“Oh, but we’ll get us some fine coin for these beauties,” one dirty pirate said to the other, alone in the hold of their docked ship. He held up the harness, holding one of Athrogate’s morningstars, the second weapon in his other hand. “What good luck for the dwarf to be so noble as to drop them, eh?”
“Eh!” his friend agreed. “I’m thinking we might be buying us our own boat. I’d like to be a captain.”
“What? Yerself the captain? Was myself that took the things!”
“And myself that whacked the dwarf good with one in the fight,” the other protested. “Bah, but let’s sell them first and see the coin, and see what we might be buying two boats!”
The first started to nod and laugh at that grand proposition. “What good luck!” he said again.
“You really think so?” came a third voice, from the bottom of the ladder, and both men looked that way. And both men blanched, turning as pale as the stranger was dark.
“W-we found ’em,” the second stuttered.
“Indeed, and here’s your finder’s fee,” the drow said.
He flipped a copper piece onto the floor between them.
Help us!
“Eh?” Athrogate replied, not sure what he’d just heard, or if he’d “heard” anything at all.
He opened a swollen eye, just a slit at first, then wider when he saw the dwarf before him-and wider still when he came to realize it wasn’t the proprietor of the tavern he’d busted up, but one of the dwarf ghosts he had met a decade before in a place he longed to forget.
“Ack! But what’d’ye want?” Athrogate cried, digging his heels in and pressing back so forcefully that his back began to creep up the wall.
He’d lived for more than four centuries, and never had anyone ever accused Athrogate of being afraid. He’d battled drow and dragons, giants and hordes of goblins. He’d fought with Drizzt and Bruenor against the dracolich at Spirit Soaring, and he’d fought against Drizzt before that. Faerun had never known a finer example of a fearless warrior than the battle-toughened, spit-flying Athrogate.
But he was afraid. All the color drained from his face, and every word came forth through chattering teeth and a lump in his throat so pronounced it might have been one of his lost morningstars.
“What’d’ye want o’ me?” he asked, sweat pouring over his bruised brow. “Didn’t mean to do it, I tell ye! Didn’t mean it… never would’ve wrecked Gauntl-oh, by Moradin’s angry arse!”
Help us… he heard in his head.
The beast awakens…
Blood of Delzoun…
They crowded around him, a swarm of ghostly dwarves, reaching for him, begging him, and Athrogate tried to squeeze himself right into the wall, so terrified was he. The voices in his head did not relent, but grew in volume and insistence until Athrogate threw up his arms, yelled, and stumbled out of the alleyway, running along the street, running to escape the ghosts of Gauntlgrym, running from his terrible memories of the great forge and what he’d done.
He stumbled and staggered his way across the city, so many sets of eyes fixing on him and no doubt thinking he’d lost his mind. And maybe he had, the dwarf thought. Maybe the guilt of the last ten years had finally broken him, putting ghosts before his delusional eyes, their words in his head. He finally reached the inn where he rented a room.
A fine inn it was, too, the best in Luskan, and the room had a wide view overlooking the harbor and an exit all its own from the second story balcony. Athrogate rushed up the wooden exterior stairway, so fast that he stumbled and banged his knees. He finally got to the balcony and pulled up short.
There stood Jarlaxle, staring at him with an expression caught somewhere between amusement and disappointment.
The drow held Athrogate’s weapon harness, the morningstars still in place.
“I thought you might be wanting this,” Jarlaxle said, holding it forth.
Athrogate moved to take it, but paused, seeing a blood stain on one of the straps. He looked at Jarlaxle.
“They didn’t feel their finder’s fee was adequate,” the drow explained with a casual shrug. “I had to convince them.”
As Athrogate took the harness, Jarlaxle directed his gaze out to the harbor, where some commotion had broken out on one of the moored ships, which was sitting very low in the water indeed. As he looked on, Athrogate realized that the ship seemed to be sinking, despite the frantic efforts of her scrambling crew.
He looked back at Jarlaxle, who tipped his wide-brimmed, plumed hat in an exaggerated fashion-and Athrogate recalled Jarlaxle’s portable holes. What might one of those do, the dwarf wondered as he looked back at the harbor, if dropped in the hold of a ship?
