Here is Chapter One of what is going to be a long story. I hope you enjoy it enough to stick through to the end. I’ve been working on this so long, that I’ve seen other stories with similar themes come and go. Oh well.
I’ve put up a couple of other stories, but this one better reflects my usual writing style, for better or worse. All comments are welcome, especially constructive criticism.
Thank you for reading.
Life During Wartime : Perdita Waits Out the Siege of Saradush
A Baldur’s Gate II : Throne of Bhaal Adventure
Chapter One
“Anomen, honey, wake up. You’re having a nightmare.” I shook him again, harder this time. He was thrashing around in a cold sweat. Suddenly he sat bolt upright and made a warding gesture.
“Away, foul fiend. I’ll not truck with your kind.” Then he fell back down, muttering.
“Hey, I’m supposed to be the drama queen here.”
The room shook as another firebomb hit close by. The bombardment of Saradush by the fire giants had continued all night. Between the strikes and Anomen’s restlessness, I wasn’t getting a wink of sleep.
I couldn’t let him keep me up all night. I needed my beauty rest. I stood next to the bed, trying to come up with a plan. I picked up the ewer of wash water, then realized if I did that I’d have to sleep in a wet bed, too. A spell, maybe.
I put my hands palms together, and slid them across each other, while saying the words of Burning Hands. Just a little warmth would be sure to get him awake.
I leaned over Anomen and put my flaming hands lightly on his shoulder. Unfortunately, I guessed wrong, and got way too much heat. He came awake and leaped away as if—well, as if burned.
“Who attacks me?” His eyes were angry, but at least he was free of the nightmare.
I put my hands behind my back, but since I wasn’t wearing any clothes and my hands touched my own bare skin, that wasn’t a good idea. Then I hid my hands in the bedclothes. Maybe I could bluff my way out of this one.
“Perdita, what is going on?” Anomen had immediately sprung from bed. He grasped the Flail of Ages and the Delryn family shield before putting on a stitch of clothes. It was a delightful picture.
“It’s nothing, honey. Just some shrapnel from the fire giants. Are you hurt?” I would have gone to him, but I didn’t want him to see my hands.
His stance relaxed, and I saw his gaze shift to the bed. “My love, the bed is afire.”
“Ack!” I pulled my hands out of the sheets and jumped back, stumbling over our discarded clothes and one of my harps, and fell hard on my backside. A wisp of smoke curled up from the bed. Anomen tamped the fire out with his shield. Anomen looked at me and my glowing hands, waiting for my explanation. My familiar Bad Kitty stood next to him, also waiting for an explanation, indignation plain in the curve of his back and the switching of his tail.
“It was that piece of shrapnel. I was looking for it. Thank the gods you got the fire out, honey.”
“Have you tired of me so soon, my love, that you seek to incinerate me whilst I sleep?” He reached out a hand and, grasping my arm above the wrist, he helped me to my feet.
“I was just trying to wake you up. You were having that nightmare again.”
He scowled, but I knew he was afraid. “Why must I suffer these phantoms? When will I be released from their importuning?”
“It was a traumatic experience for you, being turned into a vampire. You can’t just brush that aside as if it was nothing.”
“I was not completely transformed.” He always made sure to add that.
He wasn’t going to like what I had to say next, so I used unfair tactics. My hands had cooled. I put my arms around his waist—surprisingly slender for a man so large—and rubbed my cheek against his chest. “Maybe it would help you to talk it out with someone.”
“I talk to you, my love.” His arms were around me and he kissed the top of my head.
“Someone objective, someone who can step aside and see all sides of the problem.”
“Did you have someone in mind?”
His lips were moving down the side of my face. Just as they met my mouth, I said, “Yes, I think it might help if you talked to Edwin—”
He released me and backed away from me. “That, that petty conjurer! He’s—”
“He’s a Necromancer, actually.”
Anomen ignored my interruption. “That pompous windbag. That charlatan. Perdita, why would you suggest such a thing?”
“He’s so intelligent, and well-read. I’m sure if there’s a cure for your, uh, your nightmares, he will have heard of it.” I put my hands on his chest. “Please, Annie sweetie, please at least say you’ll think about it. I hate to see you tortured like this.”
He covered my hands with his and kissed them. “All right, if it is that important to you, I’ll at least think about it. Now, let’s see what damage you’ve done to the bed.”
The bedding was merely scorched. Anomen turned back the sheets and grinned. “Let us try a less destructive method to set the sheets aflame.”
#
Later, I woke up to hear him getting dressed. The flares from the fire giants’ missiles still glared against the night.
“Where are you going, honey?” As if I didn’t know.
“I’m sorry, Perdita, I tried not to wake you. I can’t sleep. I’m going to the Temple. I’ll be more useful there now than I will be tomorrow if I’ve spent a wakeful night tossing and turning.”
He meant that damned Temple of Waukeen, where he was helping the priestess Farielle heal the wounded and care for the war refugees. The beautiful blonde, blue-eyed priestess Farielle with a bust that looked like a mountain range compared to my foothills.
“You’ll exhaust yourself, honey. I could try a Sleep spell.”
“You know how I feel about artificial sleep aids.” He leaned over the bed and kissed me on the forehead. “You get some sleep, my dear. I’ll see you later.” He drew the door closed gently behind him as if I was already asleep.
Well, at least one of the things keeping me awake was taken care of. Only, now I didn’t want that beauty rest quite so much.
#
The sun woke me later when a chance ray made it through the smoke to enter my bedchamber. We’d been here so long that I was learning to sleep through the bombardment. Too long. It was time to move on, but we had unfinished business before we could cross this burg off our to-do list. Problem was, none of us seemed to know what the unfinished business was.
I dressed and went downstairs to the common room to get some breakfast and/or lunch. Sarevok and Valygar were at a table. Valygar, usually so, well, dull, was talking animatedly to a bored-looking Sarevok. I sat across from the Eyeless One next to Valygar.
“If it takes twenty-four arrows from the Mana Bow kill one giant, and my rate of fire is two arrows a minute, that means I can…”
I tuned him out. Val could go on like this all day. Rate of fire, severity of injury, it all made my head hurt. “Where’s everyone at, guys?”
Sarevok’s deep voice rumbled through my body. “Korgan is playing nine-pins with the locals, and Edwin is trying to convince Lazarus to sell him a few scrolls. I don’t think that I need tell you where Wonder Boy is.”
“Yeah, I can guess.” Oh, that voice. Anomen gave it to me good, no complaint there, but Sarevok made me shiver. Thank the gods he’d never made a move, or I was a goner.
“What’s for breakfast, or lunch?”
“They’ve run out of almost everything, but if you’re lucky, you might get some porridge.”
I finally got the attention of the waitress, and she brought me a pint of ale and a bowl half-filled with a gray gluey substance. I stuck my spoon in it, and the spoon stood straight up. Sarevok’s reverberating laugh filled my ears. “Oh, don’t worry about me. You got something to eat. Why should you care what I have.” I flicked the spoon’s handle with a finger and it barely moved. Sarevok laughed louder. I shoved the bowl away and pulled my pint closer. “We need to get out of here.”
“Say the word, and we are gone. We serve at your command.”
“If it were that easy. There’s something we have to do before we can leave.”
Valygar said, “We can go to your pocket plane at any time.”
My pocket plane was a little space in Hell that I had supposedly created unconsciously as a safe haven by the force of my will. But if it came out of my head, why did it look like a decorator’s nightmare? “But where from there?” I sighed. “We’re trapped between that hell-hole and this gods-forsaken pit.” And there wasn’t a decent place to shop between them.
“What keeps us bound here, my lady?” Sarevok often did that to me, calling me “my lady” in imitation of Anomen. He knew it drove me crazy. I stuck my tongue out at him. “What task remains undone?”
That was the problem, I wasn’t sure. “We have to…” This was ridiculous. I was the leader—I couldn’t afford to sound unsure. “The fire giants must be defeated. We have to do that.”
“We cannot defeat them while they have us pinned behind these walls. Escape is imperative.”
Gods, I wasn’t a general. I wasn’t meant to plan battles, only to write songs about them. The strain of all these decisions was wearing on me. “Well, if you’re so smart, you figure out how to get us out of here.” My voice sounded whiny in my own ears.
“We have to go through Gromnir. He is the one denying egress from the city. If he is brought down, we will at least be able to get out and fight the fire giants hand-to-hand rather than this cowardly shooting from the parapet.”
Valygar looked at Sarevok with something like awe. “That’s an excellent strategy. We’ll assemble the party and charge Gromnir’s castle immediately.” I wasn’t the only one who had a crush on Sarevok. I just hoped that Sarevok didn’t enjoy having a disciple again too much.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said, holding my hands up and trying to put the brakes on their rash plan. “We can’t just storm the castle. All of the soldiers and his other hired guns are inside. We’d be cut down in a hot second.”
Sarevok turned his face toward me. As usual, his blank gaze unsettled me. “You have the right of it, of course, Perdita. We must have a more subtle plan.”
“What—what did you have in mind?” I swallowed past a lump in my throat that wasn’t made by the porridge. I thought I knew where he was going.
“We have heard rumors of secret passages. Entrances through the barracks or the sewers. These rumors are worth investigating. If we could orchestrate a surprise attack—”
“No, that won’t work.”
He looked at me questioningly. “Are you so certain?”
I didn’t want to go through the sewers, that’s all I knew. There was something there that I didn’t want to face, I was sure of it. To go to the sewers was too big a risk. “You don’t know what might be in those sewers. There’s something down there. Mind flayers, beholders, kobolds.”
“I can do the reconnaissance,” Valygar offered. “Then we’ll know what we face.”
I shook my head. “We should try to learn more before we scout. Perhaps from the scroll seller, or others in the town.”
“If we ask too many questions, even as mad as he is, Gromnir will be alerted to our intentions.” Sarevok reached across the table and put his gloved hand over mine. I suppressed a shudder at the touch. His hand was warm—for some reason I had not expected it to be. “This excessive caution is unlike you, Perdita. We have easily defeated such foes in the past. I have followed you out of admiration for your valor in battle. What troubles you?”
“I—I cannot say.” I didn’t know myself. I only knew I wasn’t about to go in that sewer. “There’s no harm in waiting a little longer, is there?”
Sarevok removed his hand from mine and stirred the toxic porridge with the spoon. He lifted the spoon and the porridge glopped back into the bowl. “It depends on how long you want to subsist on this fine provender.”
#