Matrix Dragon
Getting sticky.
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I really need to finish it all the way through. We're into somewhat uncharted territory for me at this point.
YES. She's not even PRETENDING to repent!
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The Once and Future Champion (Baldur's Gate 3/Dragon Age)
- Thread starter cliffc999
- Start date
I really need to finish it all the way through. We're into somewhat uncharted territory for me at this point.
YES. She's not even PRETENDING to repent!
Chapter 34
New
cliffc999
Connoisseur.
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- Feb 16, 2017
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"At last, the hero of the hour arrives." Raphael drawled elaborately. "Even if he apparently forgot which hour he was supposed to turn up at."
"Sorry I'm late." I said - to Kith'rak Voss, not Raphael. I'd intended to show up for the rendezvous at Sharess' Caress a little earlier, but we'd kept getting sidetracked. The unexpected Sharran hostage crisis alone had taken up a good chunk of our morning, and I'd had to leave Shadowheart behind with most of the others to help get her parents settled in and start healing them up while I hurried to take care of this errand. The only people with me right now were Lae'zel and Jaheira.
When I'd arrived at Sharess' Caress I'd been expecting a tavern, or maybe an inn. I hadn't known enough about Faerunian lore to know that Sharess was the goddess of hedonism and sexuality, which was why one of Baldur's Gate's most opulent whorehouses - or 'festhalls' as the Faerunians liked to innocently rename them - had been named that. You could also rent luxurious suites here for non-sensual purposes, if you were willing to pay for them, and this would be perhaps the absolute last place that you'd expect to find a githyanki. They were famously ascetic and militaristic but also clannish and often xenophobic, so I thought that taking up residence here was simply part of Voss' concealing himself.
Until I arrived at the suite that had been 'permanently booked' for an 'illustrious client' to find the kith'rak arguing heatedly with the proverbial bad copper piece himself.
"Hawke!" Voss said relievedly. "Thank heavens you finally arrived. Maybe this insufferable devil will speak more productively with you."
"Oh, he certainly will." Raphael lounged arrogantly at us from a gilded armchair. "Because unlike you, Hawke actually has something that I want."
"When last we met, you said that you were on the trail of the key to unlock the prisoner's chains." I told Voss. "Let me guess - Raphael found it first, and is holding it to ransom."
"Ransom?" Raphael pouted. "Why my good man, you malign me most unfairly! I am the rightful owner of the- ah, but before we get down to the heart of the matter, we should first ensure our privacy." With an arrogant smirk Raphael raised one hand, poised to snap his fingers... and then hesitated in puzzlement. "That's odd. The insufferable illithid isn't monitoring you?"
"If you mean our erstwhile 'Guardian', he came down with a slight case of decapitation," I said as Voss and I both took our seats around the table. "Oh, and thank you very much for the seal you provided. Kith'rak. It proved instrumental in his defeat."
"If the would-be 'Emperor' is dead, then how do-?" Raphael blinked, before his eyes opened wide in realization. "You made it back inside the Prism and awakened Orpheus. And you came to amicable terms with him. That's the only way the Astral Prism would still be working to protect you without that annoying upstart's machinations."
"The Prince of the Comet is awake?" Voss gasped eagerly.
"Yes, and I'll be taking you to an audience with him as soon as we're done here." I glared at Raphael. "You've been building up to this ever since we first met you in that damned swamp. All right, I'm finally sitting down at the gametable. Now you need to convince me to actually touch a piece."
"I must admit, you have very much impressed me Hawke." Raphael said brightly. "Most people wouldn't have made it even this far. Many of those who might have would still be floundering around in the dark at this juncture. But you're not only scheming several moves ahead, you've already figured out at least some of my endgame. You have my most effusive and elaborate congratulations. Feel free to enjoy them."
"Get to the point, devil." Lae'zel growled.
"I like you, Hawke. Well... I respect you. Somewhat. So let me tell you what's going to happen. This way you can... prepare yourself." Raphael said smugly.
"All right." I motioned to him to go ahead.
"Soon you will finish obtaining the other two Netherstones by either fair means or foul, and then set out to confront the elder brain in its lair. You will of course have mustered all your allies, girded your loins, polished your armor, rehearsed your heroic speeches, et cetera, et cetera." Raphael waved a hand dismissively. "With the power of the Astral Prism to prevent you from succumbing to your tadpoles you will fight your way through the brain's last lines of defense and finally come face to tentacles with the Absolute itself." Raphael smiled. "And then it will crush all your minds without a thought, slay the last being in the universe who carries the genes for Gith's unique mutation, re-assimilate the Netherstones back into the crown, and rule all the known spheres as an ascended elder brain. The Grand Design reborn, with all of creation either thralls, food... or more ghaik."
"That will never happen so long as a single child of Mother Gith draws breath!" Voss thundered.
"And the elder brain will gladly accept those terms." Raphael shrugged. "But your failure is inevitable, Hawke. It's not even a question of courage, or willpower, or ability. It is but simple fact. The power of the elder brain, as augmented by the Crown of Karsus, will simply be too powerful for even Orpheus to shield you from once you enter direct mental contact with the brain."
"Unless we unshackle him." I'd already gotten this far once Raphael had given me the start of it - after all, we'd already known that Orpheus could only exert a tithe of his power while he was still restrained.
"And allow him to wield his full power once again." Raphael nodded. "There was a possible alternative of having Orpheus' unique mind and powers assimilated by a illithid devouring his brain... but you foreclosed that option yourself before I could even advise you to do it." He smiled. "It is as I already told you outside the Gauntlet of Shar, Hawke. The more brilliantly you figure out my schemes, the more you deliver yourself right into the palm of my hand." He held out and then elaborately closed said palm. "Your only path to victory now requires the Orphic Hammer, the one artifact in all the planes that can shatter the infernal chains my peers forged to encage Orpheus in the first place. And that hammer lies where it has been ever since the day I originally commissioned its creation - in the most secure vault of the House of Hope." Raphael leaned forward imposingly with a wicked smile. "So you will deal with me and meet my price, Saer Hawke. You simply have no other option."
"A likely story." Jaheira snorted. "But do you think us fools? Orpheus only began to become relevant to whatever your schemes were after the Astral Prism was stolen in the first place, and that was very recently! The key to Orpheus' chains was forged at the same time he was chained, centuries ago!"
"You forget yourself, my good Harper." Raphael said equably. "Why would the first Vlaakith ever commission a key for a prisoner that she never intended to release? When Orpheus' chains were first forged, it was the intent of both pacter and pacted that he remain bound for eternity. The creation of the Orphic Hammer was my idea, and came much, much later."
"What do you want?" I said exasperatedly. Admittedly, I'd already had Gortash tell me this, but the more ignorant Raphael believed I was the better.
"You want to destroy the elder brain, and in so doing make yourself the great hero of Baldur's Gate." Raphael said smoothly. "To save the city, the entire Sword Coast, quite likely the entire world... oh, and your own precious skin and that of your beloved, as well. How fortunate for you that I am opposed to absolutely none of this! Indeed, I'm eager to help you fulfill those dreams... in return for just one little thing that you will no longer need once the elder brain is dead." He let out a long, slow breath of anticipation. "The Crown of Karsus. Swear to give it over to me once the elder brain is defeated - seal yourself to this pact - and I shall give you the Orphic Hammer immediately. I wouldn't even make your soul part of the bargain... except as the penalty for breach of contract, of course."
"Take the deal!" Voss urged me immediately. "Whatever this Crown is, it matters less than the fate of both my people and your world!"
"Giving the Crown to Raphael would be like feeding a barrel of runepowder to a fire elemental." I said. "It's the most powerful artifact in the world, and would very likely let someone elevate himself to the status of an archdevil."
"To the status of the Archdevil." Raphael grinned eagerly. "An Archdevil Supreme, to at long last unify and rule over all the Nine Hells themselves! Oh, when I first saw the Crown of Karsus on the day that ancient Netheril fell, I openly wept to see such beauty! The mad genius of Karsus had forged a Crown imbued with all the power of magic itself, a Crown that would make any who wore it a god. It was as if someone had taken the very concept of ambition itself and crystallized it, forged it, into a perfect jewel." Raphael's face turned thunderous. "And then my insipid father snatched up the Crown before I could, and did nothing with it! The key to such power, such glory, in the palm of his hand... and he filed it away in a box!"
He rose rapidly to his feet and began to pace with vexation as he fumed madly. "That foolish, blind, short-sighted, lethargic archivist! For centuries I schemed and I plotted and I planned, but my every attempt was forestalled before I could even make them! So much power, so much potential, and all rendered inert by his cowardice! He made a miracle into a museum piece!" Raphael suddenly stopped pacing and began to laugh. "Until Gortash of all people dared to commission a heist on the vaults of Mephistopheles himself." He snorted. "And then that young man placed the Crown directly on the head of a being far superior to him and tried to walk that being on a leash like a dog. And now he's trapped by the consequences of his own mad ambitions, with no way out. What a fool. But... a fool whose foolishness has given me a wonderful opportunity to exploit." He turned back and grinned menacingly down at us. "So learn from his example and don't be a fool as well, Hawke. Swear to give me the Crown, and your victory is assured." He shrugged. "Or don't, and march on to your inevitable defeat."
"If we fail, doesn't that mean that you will never obtain your heart's desire either?" Jaheira probed.
"No, it merely means that I have to wait centuries longer." Raphael said. "Frustrating, yes, but hardly an insurmountable task. Even if it wins victory here and now the would-be 'Absolute' will eventually do something that gives me another opportunity. The only people here facing their last chance to salvage their situation are you four."
"I'm not deciding one way or the other until I've had an opportunity to discuss this with my entire team." I said matter-of-factly.
"Fair enough." Raphael nodded back. "Even with the Hammer your victory will still require all your people to be well-organized and on point. And Sharess' Caress is one of my favorite watering holes, so I'll have ample opportunity to amuse myself while I wait here for your reply." He shrugged. "Don't dally too long, though. The elder brain is closer to breaking free than you think, and if you haven't obtained all three Netherstones and the Orphic Hammer by then...?"
"I understand." I said. "Come on, everyone. We've got a tight schedule."
"I... understand your desire to make sure your team is unified behind you." Voss said as we paced away. "I even agree that it's necessary for victory. But to have the key to his freedom within our grasp, and then deny it-?"
"To give such a powerful artifact to such a devil is a horrible idea." Jaheira agreed. "But what else can we do?"
"Hawke has already thought of that something else before he ever decided to leave the room, or I have learned nothing in all my time with him." Lae'zel said smugly.
"I don't want to say anything until we're back with the others." I answered.
We arrived back at the Elfsong and I brought everyone up to date. The Hallowleafs had passed out after their exertions today and Isobel's first healing session with them, and were sleeping quietly in the next room under Nocturne's supervision.
"All right, you said you'd speak freely when we got back. But what makes you think he can't monitor us here?" Jaheira asked.
"Because he was actually surprised to find out that we'd killed the Emperor." I said. "And while we did that inside the Astral Prism, we talked about it later outside... and yet he still didn't know. Which given how closely he'd been monitoring us earlier, and how smug he was about that knowledge in all our earlier conversations with him-"
"Aylin." Lae'zel realized. "Every other conversation we had with Raphael was prior to her joining us. He cannot closely monitor us while we are in the direct presence of the celestial."
"He likely could... but not without my sensing his presence, however he tried to shield himself." Aylin agreed. "Which I do not... wait, a devil approaches!"
With a flash of brimstone a silent, masked merregon devil materialized in the corner. Aylin's drawn greatsword was met with a simple raise of its empty hands, as it clearly signaled 'Not here to fight'. It then reached into its pouch and withdrew a folded note, which it handed to me.
You've had your meeting with him, so now it's time for you to be given this message..
To enter his house without his knowledge, seek out Mammon's Picklock at the Devil's Fee.
Be warned - even if you successfully sneak in, you will have to fight your way out.
As repayment for this advice I want the Hellfire Crossbow, if you ever get a chance to hand it to me.
Good luck and good hunting. Destroy this message.
I tossed the note in the fire and nodded to the merregon, which vanished.
"That was Yurgir." I said. "I wasn't expecting to hear from him, but apparently Raphael's newest disgruntled employee was happy to tell us how to sneak into the House of Hope."
"That was your plan." Lae'zel grinned. "To steal the Hammer without pacting for it."
"Ever since the moment Raphael made the mistake of telling me where the Orphic Hammer was in the middle of all his bragging and boasting." I agreed. "So first we'll need to step inside the Prism again and bring Orpheus up to speed on everything that's happened."
"And then?" Shadowheart asked.
"And then I need to go talk to the only other person we know who's ever been there before." I replied.
"I seem to be spending this entire accursed day telling you how I am not allowed to help you." Aylin fumed, her feathers actually starting to ruffle out of place in the depths of her frustration.
"Yeah, was pretty sure the rules wouldn't allow you to go crusading into Hell without permission from higher up." Karlach agreed. "That would be defying the celestial order and all... and we both knew somebody else who made that mistake and where she ended up."
"Zariel the Fallen." Aylin agreed. "In addition, we have been more than adequately safeguarding our own camp against the servants of Bhaal... but now we have the Hallowleafs and Nocturne to watch over, who are far more vulnerable. For the duration I must concentrate almost entirely on safeguarding our base of operations, and Isobel must remain with me to help care for our invalids."
"You'll also need to watch over the Astral Prism until we get back." I told Aylin. "We won't need it while we're on another plane of existence from the elder brain, and I damn sure don't want to risk losing it down there."
"Certainly not!" Voss agreed emphatically.
"But the rest of are all gearing up for this expedition, right?" Wyll asked.
"That part of the planning I'm still working on." I admitted.
'Mammon's Picklock' turned out to be Helsik, a female dwarf who owned an alchemy shop in the Lower City named 'The Devil's Fee'. She'd cleverly hidden her actual activities as a diabolist and agent of the NIne Hells underneath a pose of merely being an alchemist and trinkets vendor who had a fetish for infernally-themed curios. And for an extremely large fee in gold, that we'd managed to bargain down to a promise to fetch her another artifact from Raphael's vaults instead, she was willing to sell us a route to the Hells by which we could sneak in and burgle the place. Amusingly, she was the same person that Gortash and his fellow Chosen of Bhaal had contracted with for their theft - even if Yurgir hadn't tipped us off, we'd still have been able to come here.
Since Gortash had lived in the House of Hope as a young slave, I had of course consulted him before starting our theft. And while his knowledge of the layout of the House of Hope was several decades old and only limited to those rooms he'd had access to, it was still far better preparation for us than jumping in blind. He'd also been able to explain to us that our only hope of moving around inside would be to disguise ourselves as damned souls or mortal slaves, much like he himself had been at one time. This meant that we couldn't take in the entire group, as a party of eight or more moving around with purpose would be a dead giveaway. After much debate we'd finally pared the entry team down to myself, Karlach, Wyll, and Gale, as the two people in the party who had the most experience dealing with infernal matters as well as our main magical support.
Helsik had given us a set of ritual materials and exact instructions, as well as free access to the elaborate ritual circle she had engraved in the floor of the sanctum she kept above her shop. She'd refused to do any of it herself, though, citing 'plausible deniability'. Fortunately for us, as a servant of Mammon she was anything but friendly with the factions of either Zariel or Mephistopheles. And the House of Hope was located on Avernus, in the domain of Zariel, as well as being owned by one of Mephistopheles' cambion sons.
We stepped through the flaming portal to arrive in an elaborately furnished foyer. Four pillars each set in one corner of the room glowed a pale eldritch green, very unsettlingly.
"Avernus." Karlach said lowly. "Even with all the boudoir atmosphere and perfume Raphael's got spread around here, you still can't miss the brimstone." She gulped. "Boss? Not that I'm going to dip out on you or anything, but I'm scared shitless."
"I'm sorry I felt obligated to ask you." I said. "But we needed you. You've fought more devils than the rest of our group put together."
"Yeah." Karlach agreed. "But- anyway, we need to find some disguises so we look like all the other damned souls stuck down here paying off our debts. But there's none in the room-"
"You came. Such a shame." a soft female voice interrupted us, and we all spun around to stare incredulously at the astral projection of a beautiful redheaded female dwarf in faded clerical robes that hadn't been there a moment ago. "Curiosity killed all the cats, but it won't be so kind to you!" she wailed. There was a distant rattle of chains and she winced in pain. "The jailer will hear us! I shouldn't be talking to you! I need to go... it's not kind to me." she whispered urgently as she started to fade.
"Please don't go!" Karlach insisted. "Maybe we can help you?"
"Help me?" she echoed. "That's ridiculous, you can't even help yourselves. You're mice trying to steal the cat's bells, and soon enough the cat will stop being away..."
"I'm Hawke." I tried to refocus the barely-coherent woman. "Who are you?"
"Who am I?" she begged. "That's my favorite question. I scream it into the dark while I sleep, and whisper it to my memories when I wake. I'm the thing that kills you, and the only reason you stay alive. I'm made by a promise, and unmade by the truth. A handshake, a hug, the first beat of a newborn's heart..."
"You're Hope." Gale said wonderingly. "And this is supposed to be your house, not his."
"Hope." she echoed faintly. "That's what he calls me. That's why I'm kept here. It wasn't even my real name, but it's all I've got left..." Hope visibly tried to refocus herself. "I'm not much of a friend to anyone anymore, but I could use a friend myself. Do you want a friend to help guide you through this madhouse?"
"How can we free you?" I asked.
"The hammer breaks my chains." Hope whispered.
"Where's the vault?" Wyll asked quietly.
"The vault is the archives. The archivist is the vault keeper." Hope chanted. "Sssh-ssh-ssh! If the jailor hears he'll call Raphael and then we'll all be screaming so loud..."
"How can we sneak through the House?" I asked.
"You can't creep, because most everybody here's dead and the dead never sleep!" Hope giggled. "But being dead and damned makes them pretty stupid so I'll provide a glamor. Make you look lost and wretched so nobody raises a clamor." Hope raised her hands and with a flare of magic we were all cloaked in an illusion - instead of our gleaming armor and weapons we now wore chains and rags, as despondent as any other lost souls.
"Now find the key, take the hammer, and smash my chains!" Hope insisted. "Find the KEY, take the HAMMER. smash my CHAINS! And remember, once you touch the hammer the fire will come. He'll know, and he'll come, so you'll have to run run run!" Hope suddenly convulsed in agony. "But don't forget me, please please please!" Hope trailed off in a whisper. "I don't want to burn. Not again."
"We'll come for you, we promise." I urged her. "Now stay safe."
"You seem nice. I really hope you don't stay." Hope smiled weakly, and faded away.
There was only one set of doors leading out of the foyer and it led to a very familiar chamber - the grand dining room in which Raphael had first regaled us, when he'd temporarily taken us into the House of Hope. There was a short stairway leading up to a door at each point of the compass. I noted with grim interest that while the elaborate furnishings and decor were the same, the food heaped upon the table was now rotten filth, covered with maggots and flies.
"Damn, good thing we didn't eat any the first time." Karlach gulped. "I feel sick to my stomach just looking at it."
"Filth and ruin sold underneath an illusion of wealth and beauty." Wyll said. "How typically diabolical."
"If you're going to pose as debtors, you'll need to act better than that." an old man's voice greeted us. We all turned to notice a servant that we'd overlooked in all of our gaping around - a hooded skeleton in a long black robe, still holding the broom he'd been sweeping the floor with.
"Not calling for help?" Gale asked idly, as he prepared to spellcast-
"I sold my soul to Raphael, and in fulfillment of this obligation I helped rebuild this house and now must help maintain it for eternity." the skeleton said. "Nothing in my contract obligates me to either fight or spy for him. And I am not fond of him."
"Was selling your soul really worth it?" Wyll asked. "Sorry, impolite question, I know. But I did the same once, and it wasn't worth it for me."
"My mortal life was already in the thrall of a great and horrible evil even before I pacted or died, young man." the skeleton said amusedly. "I had very little left to lose. And while Raphael has been a cruel master, he has done very little to me that Ketheric Thorm already hadn't."
"Ketheric-?" I startled. "You're the Master Mason of Reithwin! Or what's left of him. You sold yourself so that Raphael would send someone to slay the Dark Justiciars in their barracks."
"You've been to Reithwin?" the Master Mason wondered. "But it was destroyed. The Shadow Curse swallowed everything, and Myrkul eventually raised Thorm from the dead to continue his depredations. Raphael took exquisite pleasure in telling me how even Thorm's defeat did not save my home..."
"Yeah, well, not surprisingly he left out all the good news." Karlach said. "It's been a century and change since all that happened but Ketheric Thorm's finally dead again, for good this time. Moonrise Towers is getting cleaned out. And the druids and the Harpers finally broke the Shadow Curse. Word of honor - we were there!"
"At last." the Master Mason gasped with relief. "Then... we finally won." He exhaled with pure satisfaction. "As damned as I am and forever will be, it still gladdens my heart to hear that.
"If you want to help get one over on Raphael, could you tell us which way is the archives?" Karlach asked.
"Through that door and straight ahead." the Master Mason pointed. "Sadly I lost my key somewhere-" He deliberately pulled a key out of his robe and dropped it right on the floor in front of us as he said this. "But I'm sure you'll find a way to open it on your own."
I pocketed the key and nodded to him. The key opened the west door leading out of the feast chamber without any trouble, and directly across the hall from us was the archives.
"Right. According to Gortash, the Archivist was so beaten down by Raphael that he was mindlessly afraid of authority figures." I said. "So all we need now is to convince him that we are one."
"No worries, I got this." Karlach said. "We're in Avernus - Zariel's domain. Her High Inquisitor is called Verillius Receptor. Absolutely terrifying bitch, everybody was scared shitless of her. Not least because she loved to go around in disguise, so you never knew if you were talking to her until it was too late."
"Right." I said, and we formed up and marched boldly into the archives. The Archives were more properly a museum, with several artifacts or particularly treasured contracts each visible on their own podium in an alcove. The Archivist was a middle-aged male tiefling in a robe and hood, who came over to greet us in a polite yet distant manner
"Visitors?" the Archivist said mildly. "I trust you are authorized to be here?"
"I don't know whether to note you down favorably for diligence or unfavorably for insolence." Karlach sneered. "Still, it's a better start to an audit than some I've had. I am Verillius Receptor, High Inquisitor of Zariel, and I am here to inspect this collection as per the agreement."
"A thousand apologies, oh majestic magistrate of the infernal court." the Archivist groveled. "Your tiefling disguise was so exquisite that I found it entirely convincing. I would prostrate myself before you and kiss your scars, but my spine is ruptured in a thousand places. You know Raphael likes to... play." He bowed again. "As always, the Archive is yours to peruse. You'll find everything accounted for, and I can present certificates of procurement if necessary."
"I'm here to verify the Orphic Hammer." Karlach stated arrogantly. "Where is it?"
"Ah, the gem of the special collection." the Archivist said smarmily. "My infinite regrets that I cannot unseal it for you. Raphael alone has the password necessary to unseal its containment barrier." He waved his hand at the far end of the chamber, where an opaque spherical force field surrounded one of the exhibits. "You are of course entirely at liberty to await the master's return in his own private quarters. I shall provide you with a writ of entrance." He withdrew a sealed scroll from his robes and handed it to Karlach.
She turned and swept out of the chamber without a word, and in our pose as loyal retainers we dumbly followed her.
"Shit." Karlach swore as we made it to the hallway outside. The hallway ran around the circumference of the House of Hope in a wide circle, with the feast chamber providing a shortcut across the center. The private quarters were on the north side of this level of the House of Hope, just as the archives were on the west.
A magical barrier across the door to Raphael's quarters dissolved smoothly to let us through into an opulent set of chambers for which the word 'seraglio' was the only adequate description. Decadence of every variety was on display, from the sculptures to the paintings to the furnishings.
"Oh? More visitors?" a very familiar voice greeted us as we froze in terror. Raphael came around the corner from behind an ornamental screen-
"What in Limbo are you wearing?" Gale goggled. Because Raphael was dressed in some leather fetish wear that would have been considered too risque for the Blooming Rose back in Kirkwall, let alone Sharess' Caress.
"Oh gods! I thought I knew all the torments of the hells, but I never imagined! I'd rather bathe my eyes in lava than look at that again!" Karlach winced.
"I am never going to look at Raphael the same way ever again." Wyll was trying not to laugh.
"Laugh all you like." the devil said disgruntledly. "It's not like I chose to wear this. I generally prefer to bring some actual class to my seductions, but no. He insists I wear these incredibly tacky clothes and-" he sighed. "I'm an incubus, darling, so I'm hardly opposed to nudity, let alone skimpy clothing. But bad fashion? Archdevils spare me, I positively loathe this assignment."
"If you're not Raphael, what are you doing in his bedroom wearing his face?" I asked.
"Indulging the carnal appetites of a pathological narcissist." the devil pouted. "Sadly, my patron insists that I remain here to both help keep an eye on his wayward offspring and distract him, and Raphael insists that we play our little bedroom games with me shapeshifted into his body and wearing... this." The incubus pouted. "And he bottoms as well, would you believe that?"
"Too much information!" I cried out. "Can we please change the subject to something more wholesome than Raphael's incredibly sad love life, like, I don't know, murder? And wait, did you say that Mephistopheles placed you here to watch over him? Does Raphael know that?'
"No, he doesn't, and it's a measure of how incredibly frustrated I am at this horrible assignment that I actually said that out loud." the incubus said. "Oh well, I hadn't planned to exert myself today, but-" He flexed his fingers and began to extend his claws-
"Before this devolves to the violence level, would you like to buy some information on Raphael's latest plot against Mephistopheles... and how you could ruin it all before it gets going?" I said. "If it's valuable enough, then it might get you relieved of this assignment."
"I'm all ears." the incubus smarmed. "But I doubt that any word of his latest petty plot would do much to convince my superiors to let me leave."
"He knows where the Crown of Karsus is, and he's trying to blackmail a group of mortal adventurers into giving to him once they've retrieved it by holding an artifact they absolutely need to save their world to ransom for it." I said.
"Oh." the incubus stated hollowly. "Yes, that's decidedly not petty at all. But which adventurers? What artifact?"
"The Orphic Hammer, and the people you're talking to right now." I said. "We came here to steal it so that we wouldn't need to take his deal. And if you help us steal it, then that's Raphael's little plot frustrated. Can you tell us where he stores the password to that section of the archives?"
"Why darling, I know the password." the incubus smirked. "Pillow talk. And... hmmm, yes, I think that this will work. You do know that password or no password, the instant you touch the hammer he'll be alerted and come right back here, yes?"
"We know." Wyll agreed. "But this works out for you either way. If we succeed in stealing the hammer, that's Raphael dead and you'll be free of this assignment. And if we fail, all the witnesses are dead without you having to lift a finger."
"Win-win." the incubus agreed. "My favorite kind of deal. Very well, the password is 'Give me my heart's desire'."
"... was he even trying?" I sighed.
"Sometimes I wonder." the incubus pouted. "At any rate, good luck with your theft. Oh, and if you actually do by some miracle manage to defeat Raphael then could you please pass on a message from me before he departs?" It smirked. "Tell him that Haarlep says that he was absolutely shit in bed, and that I never enjoyed a minute of it."
"Thank you very much for your help." I stated, and we got out of the boudoir as fast as we possibly could.
"Well, that was a giant pile of I really didn't want to know." Karlach sighed as we walked back to the archives.
"Fortunately we're going to be up to our ears in almost everything in this house trying to kill us in several minutes." I said. "When we get to the archives, you get behind the Archivist while I take the Orphic Hammer. As soon as the alarm goes off, cut him down."
"Got it." Wyll nodded.
We arrived back at the Archives and took our places. "Give me my heart's desire." I stated confidently and the force field faded away. The Orphic Hammer was revealed - an artifact warhammer made of pure infernal iron, with a large red crystal of solidifed hellfire for the head. It was sized so that it could be wielded either one or two-handed.
"What's the history on this artifact again?" Karlach asked in her guise as the Inquisitor, leading him over to be in better position for the kill.
"Ah yes." the Archivist said proudly. "My master had that hammer forged not as a weapon, but as an insurance policy. Its core is a metalliferous compound combining the purest essence of all nine of the hells. My master planned ahead, you see - sometimes it is far better to strip away souls from your rival than to harvest your own, and with this hammer any bound soul may be freed of infernal bonds."
I was awestruck with realization - not necessarily at the power of the Orphic Hammer, but at the Archivists' words. I now understood what Withers had meant about the plot of the Dead Three. The fact that illithid conversion destroyed the souls of people was not a consequence they had foolishly overlooked, but their true goal all along. For if the entire souled population of Toril were obliterated save for their own most faithful... then no god would have any worship empowering them any longer except for the Dead Three. Even when reduced only to the status of quasi-deity they would still be able to reign freely on the Prime and have supreme authority among the gods... because if the Absolute converted the souls of all Toril to illithids, then the lack of worship would within a single generation wither away all gods save the Dead Three into nothingness. A cosmic extension of the particular precept of Bane that Gortash had boasted about to me in our first meeting - that you could strengthen your own power as much by denying alliances to your enemy as you could by claiming them for yourself.
No wonder Mystra had demanded that Gale blow himself up to destroy the Absolute. If we failed here, we were facing the end of everything. And if she'd only thought to tell us about that-
-well, then we'd all already be dead when Gale had destroyed himself and everyone in or under Moonrise Towers. So I was still of distinctly mixed feelings on that issue.
Without hesitation I reached out and picked up the hammer, and Wyll stabbed the Archivist in the back before he could react. The lights flickered and went dim, and wailing alarms echoed through every corner of the House of Hope.
Hope's astral projection flickered into view. "Now I've got good news, bad news, and worst news! Good news, you got what you came for! Successful visit, great success, fantastic work!" she gushed while eagerly jumping up and down. "Bad news, so many things are going to be on fire when you step out of this room - you included!" She blinked. "But that's okay, right? I mean, it's Hell. You expected it to be hot."
"Thanks for reminding us." I said, and we each of us - except Karlach, who had it naturally as part of being a tiefling - drank the fire resistance potions that Gale had prepared for this occasion.
"WORST NEWS, RAPHAEL IS ON HIS WAY HOME AND OH BOY IS HE SPITTING MAD!" Hope shrieked. "But you planned for this, I know you did, you have everything under control..." she babbled. "IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT THAT YOU DON'T PANIC EVEN WHEN YOUR EYEBALLS EVAPORATE FROM THE HEAT!" She flinched. "Come to my prison, east side hatch, break my chains, and then we'll exit stage anywhichwaywecan!" She breathed deeply. "Please?"
"We're on our way!" I assured her, and after swiping the gauntlets that Helsik had wanted us to grab for her we all broke into a dead run.
Hope hadn't understated things - as soon as we stepped outside the archives, literally every damned soul we saw was trying to kill us. Raphael's ownership of them forced them to the attack even when they didn't want to, and they had no choice.
But I had the Orphic Hammer, which Raphael had forged specifically to free damned souls from infernal bondage. Its ability to destroy the infernal chains sealing Orpheus was merely a bonus - the name of the hammer must have been a misdirection Raphael had perpetrated to delude his fellow devils about his intended true use of it, a lie that ironically was coming true now. But the hammer could strike the indebted souls free of Raphael's bondage of them, once I wielded it with the intent to do so, and upon seeing what I was doing every damned soul in the place rushed eagerly towards me and fought as ineptly and inaccurately as they could, allowing me to strike them down and banish them from this plane. I made particularly sure to seek out and banish the Master Mason - we owed him that much.
"Oh wow oh wow that's so good!" Hope's astral projection flickered back into view. "Raphael's going to be soooo screwed when he sees this! BUT THE DEVILS GUARDING MY PRISON WON'T DIE THAT EASILY." Hope sniffled. "He doesn't use damned souls for me, you see. I'm too hopeful for them..."
Hope's prison was a cavern underneath the main level of the House of Hope, guarded by five imps and two spectators. Wyll demonstated exactly why the Blade of Frontiers had been a legend of the Sword Coast when he solo'ed one of the spectators, the crazy bastard - his warlock powers let him cast a Darkness spell to render it helpless and blind, his devil-sight let him see through his own darkness, and then he simply impaled each one of its eyes in turn with its rapier while it was unable to use its gaze weapons due to lack of a target. I used my anti-magic to withstand the ray attacks of the other spectator while Karlach and I beat it to pieces, and Gale summoned an air elemental to distract the imps and then froze them all with a Cone of Cold.
Hope herself floated in the center of the chamber, suspended by two beams of red energy from two infernal crystals in the same way Orpheus had been. Two mighty blows with the hammer were all it to to set her free.
"Free!" Hope leapt ecstatically up and town. "Never thought I would be, barely believed I could be, always hoped I might be!" She sighed and continued more fearfully. "But we might address the hollyphant in the room. I see how you all look at me... I must be so terribly, terribly mutilated after all those decades of torture..."
"Hope... you're beautiful." I insisted. Because she really was - Raphael had preserved her entirely intact, and she was a lovely young woman. My heart was entirely elsewhere but even I could still notice that.
"I'd blush if I had any skin left to redden, and I'd kiss you if they hadn't torn off my lips." Hope replied quietly. "Thank you."
"I think you might still be under several of Raphael's illusions." I said. "But we can deal with that later. Right now we've got to get back to the portal chamber."
"Yes!" Hope insisted. "We'll carve our way back to the entrance hell and chop Raphael into messes. That's the hopeful version of course. The likely version is that we'll be the messes and he'll be the chopper!"
"Any advice for fighting him?" Karlach asked quickly before Hope could fugue out again. Raphael must have been working her over for years-
"Make sure he sees me with you." Hope insisted. "He'll be as mad as all get-out when he sees me walking free, and he makes mistakes when he's mad." Hope tried to smile. "I never signed, you see. He wanted me to sign so badly, like my sister had, but no matter what he did to me I told him to just go fuck off! That's why he renamed his house after me, or renamed me after his house, I'm never sure which. It was like I was the embodiment of hope, and hope is everything he wants to crush. Breaking me became a point of pride to him, but joke's on him!" She twitched. "I hope..."
"Let's move." I insisted, and we ran back to the foyer we'd entered through as quickly as we could. We all gasped in relief when we saw the chamber empty and clear, and the portal back to Baldur's Gate and the Devil's Fee still open and humming merrily away. Without breaking stride we all headed towards the portal at a dead run-
-and screeched to a despairing halt as the portal winked out of existence barely five feet in front of us.
Time seemed to slow down as the air became thick enough to drink. A giant red nimbus of energy exploded in mid-air, and solidifed to reveal Raphael.
"You." he snarled, his voice as thick and furred as that of a beast's. He snapped his fingers, and more figures began to materialize in flashes of flame. A female dwarf who looked very much like Hope, only with her expression twisted and sour and her hair done up in elaborate braids instead of Hope's simple coiffure. The towering figure of Yurgir, flanking his employer Raphael like a loyal bodyguard as the orthon loomed imposingly over the entire tableau. Multiple armed cambions, flashing into existence at all corners of the room to surround us.
"There are many things in your world that I loathe." Raphel snarled at us. "Litters of kittens. Chattering children. The noise and the chaos of it all. But in my world - in my house - there is order! And there is decorum!" he roared. "You came here uninvited, and you STOLE from me!" Raphael visibly fought to gather up the remaining scraps of his self-control. "And in doing so, you brought the chaos of your world into mine! I will not abide it!"
"Sister Korrilla!" Hope said to the dwarf. "This is your chance! Come with me and be free!"
"Come with you?" Korrilla sneered at her. "The only place you're going from here, sweet sister, is your grave." she laughed mockingly. "I told you I was the one who'd made the smarter choice! For decades I've lived with everything I could ever want, whlie you suffered in his kennel like the mongrel dog you are! I have no idea why he was ever so obsessed with you! I'd told him all along that you were an ignorant fool who would never give him what he wanted... and here you are." She turned to sneer at us. "And just look at you idiots. You could have taken the deal. You could have been smart and be forever famed as the heroes who'd saved the world. But now you're just going to crumble and burn, and nobody will even remember you existed."
"It is the fatal flaw of mortalkind." Raphael thundered. "Take away their freedom, and they call you a tyrant! Give them their freedom, and they become tyrants! If you'd only dealt fairly with me, then you'd have won! Instead you insist on repeating the folly of Karsus - over-reaching your limits and rebelling against the rightful order of things, and burning your world to ash with your hubris!"
"Wrong wrong wrong!" Hope shouted. "They will save their world and smash you to smithereens!"
"Oh, it's precisely that charming naivete that makes your company such a joy to me, Hope." Raphael laughed mockingly. "I'll even forgive your little rebellion enough to let you live... once you're suitably chastised."
"This isn't a rebellion, it's a revolt! I'm revolting!" Hope shouted back.
"Then Hope dies today!" Raphael screamed, his eyes wild with rage. "And as for you, Hawke, if you have any last words I'd suggest you make them quick. It will only take a moment to finish you." he sneered.
"Funny. That's twice as long as Haarlep said it takes to finish you." I mocked him.
"YOU CONTEMPTIBLE CREATURE!" Raphael shrieked, and leapt forward to strangle me with his bare hands- forgetting his entire battle plan or to give any orders to his troops before starting the brawl. "Resilient Sphere!" Gale cast, just as we'd planned him to, and Raphael was trapped in an impenetrable bubble of force.
"Commander!" one of the cambions asked Yurgir. "What do we do?"
I winked at Yurgir... and he winked back.
"You die." Yurgir replied, and charged into the thick of Raphel's troops with reckless abandon. The broken bodies of cambions began to fly into the walls as the living infernal siege engine vented his rage upon them and Karlach and Wyll began to help. "Hawke! The pillars are full of souls, thousands of them! Raphael draws on them to augment his power! Smash them!" Yurgir cried.
Unfortunately, Raphael had thought ahead enough to shield his own soul containers from his soul-freeing hammer, even if I had found it useful for dealing with individual debtors. I'd barely managed to smash one pillar by main force, and Yurgir another one, before the duration of Gale's spell ended and Raphael was yet again free.
"You think you've defeated me?" Raphael raged. "And you, Yurgir! Your treachery will not go unpunished! I'll have you spend eternity as a lemure for this stunt!"
"That requires you to survive, Raphael." Yurgir replied with quiet menace. "Do you think I'm a fool just because I prefer to fight rather than scheme? I knew that you'd spend my entire term of service here trying to trick me into a more permanent bondage, just as you did with our first 'simple contract'. And I didn't like my odds of surviving that entire time without falling for one of your tricks. So when I saw that you and Hawke were heading towards a possible collision course, I made sure to give him this chance. I knew that if I did then it would end with you and him fighting to the death... and that you'd rely on me to tip the odds in your favor." Yurgir's laughter boomed. "I would never get a better chance to kill you."
"Foolish, foolish Yurgir." Raphael smiled. "You have vastly underestimated my power - especially given that you were only able to destroy half of my soul pillars." he sneered. "So even with your might added to these four adventurers, that won't be sufficient to save you."
"You know, Raphael, I'm almost glad you turned out to have one last hole card to play." I said calmly. "I was almost afraid that we were going to beat you all by ourselves... and then there would be a whole lot of other people who'd be annoyed with me that they didn't get a chance to get their licks in."
"Hawke, has the certainty of your imminent demise damaged your brain?" Raphael laughed. "You're in the depths of Avernus, in my own house! The piddling little portals of Mammon's Picklock can't reach here with my attention focused on blocking them, and your allies have no other way of breaching the planar gulf to get here! And since you had the prudence not to bring the Astral Prism into my domain, you can't even be smuggling them in your pocket."
"For a guy who comes up with what I'll acknowledge are some elegant plan As, you are far worse at coming up plan B than I expected." I said. "It's like you haven't even considered that the entire reason I'm stealing the Orphic Hammer in the first place is because I want to use it to set free the rightful ruler of the githyanki." I paused just long enough to let the realization start to sink in before I dropped the reveal. "And what are they most famous for again?"
And with that I gave a single squeeze to the githyanki device I'd had in my pouch - a githyanki signal beacon, one that was psionically linked to a twin beacon that could be used to track its counterpart down even at interplanar distances. And a dimensional portal opened up in the foyer right on cue, as my distress signal told the rest of the group - as well as Orpheus' Honor Guard - exactly where to have the githyanki planar travel adept open up his portal to send the reinforcements. Kith'rak Voss and Prelate L'ir'ic were the first two out of the portal, his Silver Sword and her ki-charged fists raised proudly high. Lae'zel, Shadowheart, and half a dozen githyanki warrior-monks followed them.
Because the thing that the githyanki were most famed for was, of course, their mastery of planar travel.
Raphael was a very powerful devil, but he was now fighting three times as many people as he'd planned on with far fewer soldiers than he'd intended to have available. With Yurgir and me to help tank his blows while the rest of us surrounded him, Orpheus' honor guard had a free hand to smash all the remaining soul pillars and then provide a bulwark against late-arriving reinforcements. He acquitted himself respectably, and several of us had some noteworthy wounds we'd need Shadowheart or Hope to help us heal later, but at these odds the fight could only have one outcome. After we finally downed him Yurgir imploded his skull with a final spiteful crunch, and then his booming laughter rolled out to shake the very walls.
"FREE!" Yurgir celebrated joyously. "At long last, the trickster is dead - dead forever, as he died in Avernus!" He sighed with ultimate satisfaction. "You have my thanks, all of you, for your aid."
"I believe I owe you this." I handed back his infernal crossbow.
"You fought well. Strength as yours would have excelled in the Blood War." Yurgir complimented us. "And now I can finally return to the frontlines, without Raphael's infernal contract holding me back."
"We've got our own frontlines to return to, in Baldur's Gate." I said. "Good luck with your war."
"Good luck with your own." Yurgir nodded. "And given the size of the foe you hunt... when it comes time for your final battle against the elder brain, I will lend my strength to yours without further obligation. It will be a worthy battle indeed!"
"I never thought I'd be saying this to a devil... but we'll be glad to see you there." Wyll acknowledged him.
"Until we meet again." Yurgir nodded to us, and vanished in a flash of fire.
Author's Note: Hawke's plans are all turning into some variant of 'get the homies together and jump a motherfucker'. On the other hand, it keeps working...
If you help him out, or even just win his respect by killing him in the Gauntlet of Shar and then passing a sky-high Persuade check at the end of the House of Hope, then Yurgir is surprisingly chill for a literally baby-eating monster. He's brutal but straightforward, gladly helps you fight Raphael, comes in to ally with you again in the final battle against the Elder Brain, and never asks you for anything except what he's already gotten (his freedom from Raphael) and doesn't screw you. Raphael is one flavor of lawful evil. Yurgir's another flavor entirely.
In-game the Orphic Hammer has no special powers versus anything except Hope's or Orpheus' chains. Boooo-ring! I punched it up a little.
The bit about being able to insult Raphael with how bad he is in bed is entirely canon to the game, even if we used an entirely non-canon way to get it from the incubus. Then again, the canon route would have put this story in the NSFW forum, so...
And honestly, game, why doesn't Voss pitch in with some more help when we're trying to steal the Orphic Hammer? He's the guy we're stealing it for! I grant that in-game Orpheus' honor guard never survives because the Emperor manipulates you into killing them to save his ass and that's scripted with no way around it, but there are other Orpheus loyalists out there man.
And you all have my deepest, most sincerest apologies that I couldn't find any way to work in the single most awesome thing Raphael has ever done. But there was just no remotely in-character way to get Hawke to actually stand around long enough to let Raphael finish singing his own theme song.
"Sorry I'm late." I said - to Kith'rak Voss, not Raphael. I'd intended to show up for the rendezvous at Sharess' Caress a little earlier, but we'd kept getting sidetracked. The unexpected Sharran hostage crisis alone had taken up a good chunk of our morning, and I'd had to leave Shadowheart behind with most of the others to help get her parents settled in and start healing them up while I hurried to take care of this errand. The only people with me right now were Lae'zel and Jaheira.
When I'd arrived at Sharess' Caress I'd been expecting a tavern, or maybe an inn. I hadn't known enough about Faerunian lore to know that Sharess was the goddess of hedonism and sexuality, which was why one of Baldur's Gate's most opulent whorehouses - or 'festhalls' as the Faerunians liked to innocently rename them - had been named that. You could also rent luxurious suites here for non-sensual purposes, if you were willing to pay for them, and this would be perhaps the absolute last place that you'd expect to find a githyanki. They were famously ascetic and militaristic but also clannish and often xenophobic, so I thought that taking up residence here was simply part of Voss' concealing himself.
Until I arrived at the suite that had been 'permanently booked' for an 'illustrious client' to find the kith'rak arguing heatedly with the proverbial bad copper piece himself.
"Hawke!" Voss said relievedly. "Thank heavens you finally arrived. Maybe this insufferable devil will speak more productively with you."
"Oh, he certainly will." Raphael lounged arrogantly at us from a gilded armchair. "Because unlike you, Hawke actually has something that I want."
"When last we met, you said that you were on the trail of the key to unlock the prisoner's chains." I told Voss. "Let me guess - Raphael found it first, and is holding it to ransom."
"Ransom?" Raphael pouted. "Why my good man, you malign me most unfairly! I am the rightful owner of the- ah, but before we get down to the heart of the matter, we should first ensure our privacy." With an arrogant smirk Raphael raised one hand, poised to snap his fingers... and then hesitated in puzzlement. "That's odd. The insufferable illithid isn't monitoring you?"
"If you mean our erstwhile 'Guardian', he came down with a slight case of decapitation," I said as Voss and I both took our seats around the table. "Oh, and thank you very much for the seal you provided. Kith'rak. It proved instrumental in his defeat."
"If the would-be 'Emperor' is dead, then how do-?" Raphael blinked, before his eyes opened wide in realization. "You made it back inside the Prism and awakened Orpheus. And you came to amicable terms with him. That's the only way the Astral Prism would still be working to protect you without that annoying upstart's machinations."
"The Prince of the Comet is awake?" Voss gasped eagerly.
"Yes, and I'll be taking you to an audience with him as soon as we're done here." I glared at Raphael. "You've been building up to this ever since we first met you in that damned swamp. All right, I'm finally sitting down at the gametable. Now you need to convince me to actually touch a piece."
"I must admit, you have very much impressed me Hawke." Raphael said brightly. "Most people wouldn't have made it even this far. Many of those who might have would still be floundering around in the dark at this juncture. But you're not only scheming several moves ahead, you've already figured out at least some of my endgame. You have my most effusive and elaborate congratulations. Feel free to enjoy them."
"Get to the point, devil." Lae'zel growled.
"I like you, Hawke. Well... I respect you. Somewhat. So let me tell you what's going to happen. This way you can... prepare yourself." Raphael said smugly.
"All right." I motioned to him to go ahead.
"Soon you will finish obtaining the other two Netherstones by either fair means or foul, and then set out to confront the elder brain in its lair. You will of course have mustered all your allies, girded your loins, polished your armor, rehearsed your heroic speeches, et cetera, et cetera." Raphael waved a hand dismissively. "With the power of the Astral Prism to prevent you from succumbing to your tadpoles you will fight your way through the brain's last lines of defense and finally come face to tentacles with the Absolute itself." Raphael smiled. "And then it will crush all your minds without a thought, slay the last being in the universe who carries the genes for Gith's unique mutation, re-assimilate the Netherstones back into the crown, and rule all the known spheres as an ascended elder brain. The Grand Design reborn, with all of creation either thralls, food... or more ghaik."
"That will never happen so long as a single child of Mother Gith draws breath!" Voss thundered.
"And the elder brain will gladly accept those terms." Raphael shrugged. "But your failure is inevitable, Hawke. It's not even a question of courage, or willpower, or ability. It is but simple fact. The power of the elder brain, as augmented by the Crown of Karsus, will simply be too powerful for even Orpheus to shield you from once you enter direct mental contact with the brain."
"Unless we unshackle him." I'd already gotten this far once Raphael had given me the start of it - after all, we'd already known that Orpheus could only exert a tithe of his power while he was still restrained.
"And allow him to wield his full power once again." Raphael nodded. "There was a possible alternative of having Orpheus' unique mind and powers assimilated by a illithid devouring his brain... but you foreclosed that option yourself before I could even advise you to do it." He smiled. "It is as I already told you outside the Gauntlet of Shar, Hawke. The more brilliantly you figure out my schemes, the more you deliver yourself right into the palm of my hand." He held out and then elaborately closed said palm. "Your only path to victory now requires the Orphic Hammer, the one artifact in all the planes that can shatter the infernal chains my peers forged to encage Orpheus in the first place. And that hammer lies where it has been ever since the day I originally commissioned its creation - in the most secure vault of the House of Hope." Raphael leaned forward imposingly with a wicked smile. "So you will deal with me and meet my price, Saer Hawke. You simply have no other option."
"A likely story." Jaheira snorted. "But do you think us fools? Orpheus only began to become relevant to whatever your schemes were after the Astral Prism was stolen in the first place, and that was very recently! The key to Orpheus' chains was forged at the same time he was chained, centuries ago!"
"You forget yourself, my good Harper." Raphael said equably. "Why would the first Vlaakith ever commission a key for a prisoner that she never intended to release? When Orpheus' chains were first forged, it was the intent of both pacter and pacted that he remain bound for eternity. The creation of the Orphic Hammer was my idea, and came much, much later."
"What do you want?" I said exasperatedly. Admittedly, I'd already had Gortash tell me this, but the more ignorant Raphael believed I was the better.
"You want to destroy the elder brain, and in so doing make yourself the great hero of Baldur's Gate." Raphael said smoothly. "To save the city, the entire Sword Coast, quite likely the entire world... oh, and your own precious skin and that of your beloved, as well. How fortunate for you that I am opposed to absolutely none of this! Indeed, I'm eager to help you fulfill those dreams... in return for just one little thing that you will no longer need once the elder brain is dead." He let out a long, slow breath of anticipation. "The Crown of Karsus. Swear to give it over to me once the elder brain is defeated - seal yourself to this pact - and I shall give you the Orphic Hammer immediately. I wouldn't even make your soul part of the bargain... except as the penalty for breach of contract, of course."
"Take the deal!" Voss urged me immediately. "Whatever this Crown is, it matters less than the fate of both my people and your world!"
"Giving the Crown to Raphael would be like feeding a barrel of runepowder to a fire elemental." I said. "It's the most powerful artifact in the world, and would very likely let someone elevate himself to the status of an archdevil."
"To the status of the Archdevil." Raphael grinned eagerly. "An Archdevil Supreme, to at long last unify and rule over all the Nine Hells themselves! Oh, when I first saw the Crown of Karsus on the day that ancient Netheril fell, I openly wept to see such beauty! The mad genius of Karsus had forged a Crown imbued with all the power of magic itself, a Crown that would make any who wore it a god. It was as if someone had taken the very concept of ambition itself and crystallized it, forged it, into a perfect jewel." Raphael's face turned thunderous. "And then my insipid father snatched up the Crown before I could, and did nothing with it! The key to such power, such glory, in the palm of his hand... and he filed it away in a box!"
He rose rapidly to his feet and began to pace with vexation as he fumed madly. "That foolish, blind, short-sighted, lethargic archivist! For centuries I schemed and I plotted and I planned, but my every attempt was forestalled before I could even make them! So much power, so much potential, and all rendered inert by his cowardice! He made a miracle into a museum piece!" Raphael suddenly stopped pacing and began to laugh. "Until Gortash of all people dared to commission a heist on the vaults of Mephistopheles himself." He snorted. "And then that young man placed the Crown directly on the head of a being far superior to him and tried to walk that being on a leash like a dog. And now he's trapped by the consequences of his own mad ambitions, with no way out. What a fool. But... a fool whose foolishness has given me a wonderful opportunity to exploit." He turned back and grinned menacingly down at us. "So learn from his example and don't be a fool as well, Hawke. Swear to give me the Crown, and your victory is assured." He shrugged. "Or don't, and march on to your inevitable defeat."
"If we fail, doesn't that mean that you will never obtain your heart's desire either?" Jaheira probed.
"No, it merely means that I have to wait centuries longer." Raphael said. "Frustrating, yes, but hardly an insurmountable task. Even if it wins victory here and now the would-be 'Absolute' will eventually do something that gives me another opportunity. The only people here facing their last chance to salvage their situation are you four."
"I'm not deciding one way or the other until I've had an opportunity to discuss this with my entire team." I said matter-of-factly.
"Fair enough." Raphael nodded back. "Even with the Hammer your victory will still require all your people to be well-organized and on point. And Sharess' Caress is one of my favorite watering holes, so I'll have ample opportunity to amuse myself while I wait here for your reply." He shrugged. "Don't dally too long, though. The elder brain is closer to breaking free than you think, and if you haven't obtained all three Netherstones and the Orphic Hammer by then...?"
"I understand." I said. "Come on, everyone. We've got a tight schedule."
"I... understand your desire to make sure your team is unified behind you." Voss said as we paced away. "I even agree that it's necessary for victory. But to have the key to his freedom within our grasp, and then deny it-?"
"To give such a powerful artifact to such a devil is a horrible idea." Jaheira agreed. "But what else can we do?"
"Hawke has already thought of that something else before he ever decided to leave the room, or I have learned nothing in all my time with him." Lae'zel said smugly.
"I don't want to say anything until we're back with the others." I answered.
We arrived back at the Elfsong and I brought everyone up to date. The Hallowleafs had passed out after their exertions today and Isobel's first healing session with them, and were sleeping quietly in the next room under Nocturne's supervision.
"All right, you said you'd speak freely when we got back. But what makes you think he can't monitor us here?" Jaheira asked.
"Because he was actually surprised to find out that we'd killed the Emperor." I said. "And while we did that inside the Astral Prism, we talked about it later outside... and yet he still didn't know. Which given how closely he'd been monitoring us earlier, and how smug he was about that knowledge in all our earlier conversations with him-"
"Aylin." Lae'zel realized. "Every other conversation we had with Raphael was prior to her joining us. He cannot closely monitor us while we are in the direct presence of the celestial."
"He likely could... but not without my sensing his presence, however he tried to shield himself." Aylin agreed. "Which I do not... wait, a devil approaches!"
With a flash of brimstone a silent, masked merregon devil materialized in the corner. Aylin's drawn greatsword was met with a simple raise of its empty hands, as it clearly signaled 'Not here to fight'. It then reached into its pouch and withdrew a folded note, which it handed to me.
You've had your meeting with him, so now it's time for you to be given this message..
To enter his house without his knowledge, seek out Mammon's Picklock at the Devil's Fee.
Be warned - even if you successfully sneak in, you will have to fight your way out.
As repayment for this advice I want the Hellfire Crossbow, if you ever get a chance to hand it to me.
Good luck and good hunting. Destroy this message.
I tossed the note in the fire and nodded to the merregon, which vanished.
"That was Yurgir." I said. "I wasn't expecting to hear from him, but apparently Raphael's newest disgruntled employee was happy to tell us how to sneak into the House of Hope."
"That was your plan." Lae'zel grinned. "To steal the Hammer without pacting for it."
"Ever since the moment Raphael made the mistake of telling me where the Orphic Hammer was in the middle of all his bragging and boasting." I agreed. "So first we'll need to step inside the Prism again and bring Orpheus up to speed on everything that's happened."
"And then?" Shadowheart asked.
"And then I need to go talk to the only other person we know who's ever been there before." I replied.
"I seem to be spending this entire accursed day telling you how I am not allowed to help you." Aylin fumed, her feathers actually starting to ruffle out of place in the depths of her frustration.
"Yeah, was pretty sure the rules wouldn't allow you to go crusading into Hell without permission from higher up." Karlach agreed. "That would be defying the celestial order and all... and we both knew somebody else who made that mistake and where she ended up."
"Zariel the Fallen." Aylin agreed. "In addition, we have been more than adequately safeguarding our own camp against the servants of Bhaal... but now we have the Hallowleafs and Nocturne to watch over, who are far more vulnerable. For the duration I must concentrate almost entirely on safeguarding our base of operations, and Isobel must remain with me to help care for our invalids."
"You'll also need to watch over the Astral Prism until we get back." I told Aylin. "We won't need it while we're on another plane of existence from the elder brain, and I damn sure don't want to risk losing it down there."
"Certainly not!" Voss agreed emphatically.
"But the rest of are all gearing up for this expedition, right?" Wyll asked.
"That part of the planning I'm still working on." I admitted.
'Mammon's Picklock' turned out to be Helsik, a female dwarf who owned an alchemy shop in the Lower City named 'The Devil's Fee'. She'd cleverly hidden her actual activities as a diabolist and agent of the NIne Hells underneath a pose of merely being an alchemist and trinkets vendor who had a fetish for infernally-themed curios. And for an extremely large fee in gold, that we'd managed to bargain down to a promise to fetch her another artifact from Raphael's vaults instead, she was willing to sell us a route to the Hells by which we could sneak in and burgle the place. Amusingly, she was the same person that Gortash and his fellow Chosen of Bhaal had contracted with for their theft - even if Yurgir hadn't tipped us off, we'd still have been able to come here.
Since Gortash had lived in the House of Hope as a young slave, I had of course consulted him before starting our theft. And while his knowledge of the layout of the House of Hope was several decades old and only limited to those rooms he'd had access to, it was still far better preparation for us than jumping in blind. He'd also been able to explain to us that our only hope of moving around inside would be to disguise ourselves as damned souls or mortal slaves, much like he himself had been at one time. This meant that we couldn't take in the entire group, as a party of eight or more moving around with purpose would be a dead giveaway. After much debate we'd finally pared the entry team down to myself, Karlach, Wyll, and Gale, as the two people in the party who had the most experience dealing with infernal matters as well as our main magical support.
Helsik had given us a set of ritual materials and exact instructions, as well as free access to the elaborate ritual circle she had engraved in the floor of the sanctum she kept above her shop. She'd refused to do any of it herself, though, citing 'plausible deniability'. Fortunately for us, as a servant of Mammon she was anything but friendly with the factions of either Zariel or Mephistopheles. And the House of Hope was located on Avernus, in the domain of Zariel, as well as being owned by one of Mephistopheles' cambion sons.
We stepped through the flaming portal to arrive in an elaborately furnished foyer. Four pillars each set in one corner of the room glowed a pale eldritch green, very unsettlingly.
"Avernus." Karlach said lowly. "Even with all the boudoir atmosphere and perfume Raphael's got spread around here, you still can't miss the brimstone." She gulped. "Boss? Not that I'm going to dip out on you or anything, but I'm scared shitless."
"I'm sorry I felt obligated to ask you." I said. "But we needed you. You've fought more devils than the rest of our group put together."
"Yeah." Karlach agreed. "But- anyway, we need to find some disguises so we look like all the other damned souls stuck down here paying off our debts. But there's none in the room-"
"You came. Such a shame." a soft female voice interrupted us, and we all spun around to stare incredulously at the astral projection of a beautiful redheaded female dwarf in faded clerical robes that hadn't been there a moment ago. "Curiosity killed all the cats, but it won't be so kind to you!" she wailed. There was a distant rattle of chains and she winced in pain. "The jailer will hear us! I shouldn't be talking to you! I need to go... it's not kind to me." she whispered urgently as she started to fade.
"Please don't go!" Karlach insisted. "Maybe we can help you?"
"Help me?" she echoed. "That's ridiculous, you can't even help yourselves. You're mice trying to steal the cat's bells, and soon enough the cat will stop being away..."
"I'm Hawke." I tried to refocus the barely-coherent woman. "Who are you?"
"Who am I?" she begged. "That's my favorite question. I scream it into the dark while I sleep, and whisper it to my memories when I wake. I'm the thing that kills you, and the only reason you stay alive. I'm made by a promise, and unmade by the truth. A handshake, a hug, the first beat of a newborn's heart..."
"You're Hope." Gale said wonderingly. "And this is supposed to be your house, not his."
"Hope." she echoed faintly. "That's what he calls me. That's why I'm kept here. It wasn't even my real name, but it's all I've got left..." Hope visibly tried to refocus herself. "I'm not much of a friend to anyone anymore, but I could use a friend myself. Do you want a friend to help guide you through this madhouse?"
"How can we free you?" I asked.
"The hammer breaks my chains." Hope whispered.
"Where's the vault?" Wyll asked quietly.
"The vault is the archives. The archivist is the vault keeper." Hope chanted. "Sssh-ssh-ssh! If the jailor hears he'll call Raphael and then we'll all be screaming so loud..."
"How can we sneak through the House?" I asked.
"You can't creep, because most everybody here's dead and the dead never sleep!" Hope giggled. "But being dead and damned makes them pretty stupid so I'll provide a glamor. Make you look lost and wretched so nobody raises a clamor." Hope raised her hands and with a flare of magic we were all cloaked in an illusion - instead of our gleaming armor and weapons we now wore chains and rags, as despondent as any other lost souls.
"Now find the key, take the hammer, and smash my chains!" Hope insisted. "Find the KEY, take the HAMMER. smash my CHAINS! And remember, once you touch the hammer the fire will come. He'll know, and he'll come, so you'll have to run run run!" Hope suddenly convulsed in agony. "But don't forget me, please please please!" Hope trailed off in a whisper. "I don't want to burn. Not again."
"We'll come for you, we promise." I urged her. "Now stay safe."
"You seem nice. I really hope you don't stay." Hope smiled weakly, and faded away.
There was only one set of doors leading out of the foyer and it led to a very familiar chamber - the grand dining room in which Raphael had first regaled us, when he'd temporarily taken us into the House of Hope. There was a short stairway leading up to a door at each point of the compass. I noted with grim interest that while the elaborate furnishings and decor were the same, the food heaped upon the table was now rotten filth, covered with maggots and flies.
"Damn, good thing we didn't eat any the first time." Karlach gulped. "I feel sick to my stomach just looking at it."
"Filth and ruin sold underneath an illusion of wealth and beauty." Wyll said. "How typically diabolical."
"If you're going to pose as debtors, you'll need to act better than that." an old man's voice greeted us. We all turned to notice a servant that we'd overlooked in all of our gaping around - a hooded skeleton in a long black robe, still holding the broom he'd been sweeping the floor with.
"Not calling for help?" Gale asked idly, as he prepared to spellcast-
"I sold my soul to Raphael, and in fulfillment of this obligation I helped rebuild this house and now must help maintain it for eternity." the skeleton said. "Nothing in my contract obligates me to either fight or spy for him. And I am not fond of him."
"Was selling your soul really worth it?" Wyll asked. "Sorry, impolite question, I know. But I did the same once, and it wasn't worth it for me."
"My mortal life was already in the thrall of a great and horrible evil even before I pacted or died, young man." the skeleton said amusedly. "I had very little left to lose. And while Raphael has been a cruel master, he has done very little to me that Ketheric Thorm already hadn't."
"Ketheric-?" I startled. "You're the Master Mason of Reithwin! Or what's left of him. You sold yourself so that Raphael would send someone to slay the Dark Justiciars in their barracks."
"You've been to Reithwin?" the Master Mason wondered. "But it was destroyed. The Shadow Curse swallowed everything, and Myrkul eventually raised Thorm from the dead to continue his depredations. Raphael took exquisite pleasure in telling me how even Thorm's defeat did not save my home..."
"Yeah, well, not surprisingly he left out all the good news." Karlach said. "It's been a century and change since all that happened but Ketheric Thorm's finally dead again, for good this time. Moonrise Towers is getting cleaned out. And the druids and the Harpers finally broke the Shadow Curse. Word of honor - we were there!"
"At last." the Master Mason gasped with relief. "Then... we finally won." He exhaled with pure satisfaction. "As damned as I am and forever will be, it still gladdens my heart to hear that.
"If you want to help get one over on Raphael, could you tell us which way is the archives?" Karlach asked.
"Through that door and straight ahead." the Master Mason pointed. "Sadly I lost my key somewhere-" He deliberately pulled a key out of his robe and dropped it right on the floor in front of us as he said this. "But I'm sure you'll find a way to open it on your own."
I pocketed the key and nodded to him. The key opened the west door leading out of the feast chamber without any trouble, and directly across the hall from us was the archives.
"Right. According to Gortash, the Archivist was so beaten down by Raphael that he was mindlessly afraid of authority figures." I said. "So all we need now is to convince him that we are one."
"No worries, I got this." Karlach said. "We're in Avernus - Zariel's domain. Her High Inquisitor is called Verillius Receptor. Absolutely terrifying bitch, everybody was scared shitless of her. Not least because she loved to go around in disguise, so you never knew if you were talking to her until it was too late."
"Right." I said, and we formed up and marched boldly into the archives. The Archives were more properly a museum, with several artifacts or particularly treasured contracts each visible on their own podium in an alcove. The Archivist was a middle-aged male tiefling in a robe and hood, who came over to greet us in a polite yet distant manner
"Visitors?" the Archivist said mildly. "I trust you are authorized to be here?"
"I don't know whether to note you down favorably for diligence or unfavorably for insolence." Karlach sneered. "Still, it's a better start to an audit than some I've had. I am Verillius Receptor, High Inquisitor of Zariel, and I am here to inspect this collection as per the agreement."
"A thousand apologies, oh majestic magistrate of the infernal court." the Archivist groveled. "Your tiefling disguise was so exquisite that I found it entirely convincing. I would prostrate myself before you and kiss your scars, but my spine is ruptured in a thousand places. You know Raphael likes to... play." He bowed again. "As always, the Archive is yours to peruse. You'll find everything accounted for, and I can present certificates of procurement if necessary."
"I'm here to verify the Orphic Hammer." Karlach stated arrogantly. "Where is it?"
"Ah, the gem of the special collection." the Archivist said smarmily. "My infinite regrets that I cannot unseal it for you. Raphael alone has the password necessary to unseal its containment barrier." He waved his hand at the far end of the chamber, where an opaque spherical force field surrounded one of the exhibits. "You are of course entirely at liberty to await the master's return in his own private quarters. I shall provide you with a writ of entrance." He withdrew a sealed scroll from his robes and handed it to Karlach.
She turned and swept out of the chamber without a word, and in our pose as loyal retainers we dumbly followed her.
"Shit." Karlach swore as we made it to the hallway outside. The hallway ran around the circumference of the House of Hope in a wide circle, with the feast chamber providing a shortcut across the center. The private quarters were on the north side of this level of the House of Hope, just as the archives were on the west.
A magical barrier across the door to Raphael's quarters dissolved smoothly to let us through into an opulent set of chambers for which the word 'seraglio' was the only adequate description. Decadence of every variety was on display, from the sculptures to the paintings to the furnishings.
"Oh? More visitors?" a very familiar voice greeted us as we froze in terror. Raphael came around the corner from behind an ornamental screen-
"What in Limbo are you wearing?" Gale goggled. Because Raphael was dressed in some leather fetish wear that would have been considered too risque for the Blooming Rose back in Kirkwall, let alone Sharess' Caress.
"Oh gods! I thought I knew all the torments of the hells, but I never imagined! I'd rather bathe my eyes in lava than look at that again!" Karlach winced.
"I am never going to look at Raphael the same way ever again." Wyll was trying not to laugh.
"Laugh all you like." the devil said disgruntledly. "It's not like I chose to wear this. I generally prefer to bring some actual class to my seductions, but no. He insists I wear these incredibly tacky clothes and-" he sighed. "I'm an incubus, darling, so I'm hardly opposed to nudity, let alone skimpy clothing. But bad fashion? Archdevils spare me, I positively loathe this assignment."
"If you're not Raphael, what are you doing in his bedroom wearing his face?" I asked.
"Indulging the carnal appetites of a pathological narcissist." the devil pouted. "Sadly, my patron insists that I remain here to both help keep an eye on his wayward offspring and distract him, and Raphael insists that we play our little bedroom games with me shapeshifted into his body and wearing... this." The incubus pouted. "And he bottoms as well, would you believe that?"
"Too much information!" I cried out. "Can we please change the subject to something more wholesome than Raphael's incredibly sad love life, like, I don't know, murder? And wait, did you say that Mephistopheles placed you here to watch over him? Does Raphael know that?'
"No, he doesn't, and it's a measure of how incredibly frustrated I am at this horrible assignment that I actually said that out loud." the incubus said. "Oh well, I hadn't planned to exert myself today, but-" He flexed his fingers and began to extend his claws-
"Before this devolves to the violence level, would you like to buy some information on Raphael's latest plot against Mephistopheles... and how you could ruin it all before it gets going?" I said. "If it's valuable enough, then it might get you relieved of this assignment."
"I'm all ears." the incubus smarmed. "But I doubt that any word of his latest petty plot would do much to convince my superiors to let me leave."
"He knows where the Crown of Karsus is, and he's trying to blackmail a group of mortal adventurers into giving to him once they've retrieved it by holding an artifact they absolutely need to save their world to ransom for it." I said.
"Oh." the incubus stated hollowly. "Yes, that's decidedly not petty at all. But which adventurers? What artifact?"
"The Orphic Hammer, and the people you're talking to right now." I said. "We came here to steal it so that we wouldn't need to take his deal. And if you help us steal it, then that's Raphael's little plot frustrated. Can you tell us where he stores the password to that section of the archives?"
"Why darling, I know the password." the incubus smirked. "Pillow talk. And... hmmm, yes, I think that this will work. You do know that password or no password, the instant you touch the hammer he'll be alerted and come right back here, yes?"
"We know." Wyll agreed. "But this works out for you either way. If we succeed in stealing the hammer, that's Raphael dead and you'll be free of this assignment. And if we fail, all the witnesses are dead without you having to lift a finger."
"Win-win." the incubus agreed. "My favorite kind of deal. Very well, the password is 'Give me my heart's desire'."
"... was he even trying?" I sighed.
"Sometimes I wonder." the incubus pouted. "At any rate, good luck with your theft. Oh, and if you actually do by some miracle manage to defeat Raphael then could you please pass on a message from me before he departs?" It smirked. "Tell him that Haarlep says that he was absolutely shit in bed, and that I never enjoyed a minute of it."
"Thank you very much for your help." I stated, and we got out of the boudoir as fast as we possibly could.
"Well, that was a giant pile of I really didn't want to know." Karlach sighed as we walked back to the archives.
"Fortunately we're going to be up to our ears in almost everything in this house trying to kill us in several minutes." I said. "When we get to the archives, you get behind the Archivist while I take the Orphic Hammer. As soon as the alarm goes off, cut him down."
"Got it." Wyll nodded.
We arrived back at the Archives and took our places. "Give me my heart's desire." I stated confidently and the force field faded away. The Orphic Hammer was revealed - an artifact warhammer made of pure infernal iron, with a large red crystal of solidifed hellfire for the head. It was sized so that it could be wielded either one or two-handed.
"What's the history on this artifact again?" Karlach asked in her guise as the Inquisitor, leading him over to be in better position for the kill.
"Ah yes." the Archivist said proudly. "My master had that hammer forged not as a weapon, but as an insurance policy. Its core is a metalliferous compound combining the purest essence of all nine of the hells. My master planned ahead, you see - sometimes it is far better to strip away souls from your rival than to harvest your own, and with this hammer any bound soul may be freed of infernal bonds."
I was awestruck with realization - not necessarily at the power of the Orphic Hammer, but at the Archivists' words. I now understood what Withers had meant about the plot of the Dead Three. The fact that illithid conversion destroyed the souls of people was not a consequence they had foolishly overlooked, but their true goal all along. For if the entire souled population of Toril were obliterated save for their own most faithful... then no god would have any worship empowering them any longer except for the Dead Three. Even when reduced only to the status of quasi-deity they would still be able to reign freely on the Prime and have supreme authority among the gods... because if the Absolute converted the souls of all Toril to illithids, then the lack of worship would within a single generation wither away all gods save the Dead Three into nothingness. A cosmic extension of the particular precept of Bane that Gortash had boasted about to me in our first meeting - that you could strengthen your own power as much by denying alliances to your enemy as you could by claiming them for yourself.
No wonder Mystra had demanded that Gale blow himself up to destroy the Absolute. If we failed here, we were facing the end of everything. And if she'd only thought to tell us about that-
-well, then we'd all already be dead when Gale had destroyed himself and everyone in or under Moonrise Towers. So I was still of distinctly mixed feelings on that issue.
Without hesitation I reached out and picked up the hammer, and Wyll stabbed the Archivist in the back before he could react. The lights flickered and went dim, and wailing alarms echoed through every corner of the House of Hope.
Hope's astral projection flickered into view. "Now I've got good news, bad news, and worst news! Good news, you got what you came for! Successful visit, great success, fantastic work!" she gushed while eagerly jumping up and down. "Bad news, so many things are going to be on fire when you step out of this room - you included!" She blinked. "But that's okay, right? I mean, it's Hell. You expected it to be hot."
"Thanks for reminding us." I said, and we each of us - except Karlach, who had it naturally as part of being a tiefling - drank the fire resistance potions that Gale had prepared for this occasion.
"WORST NEWS, RAPHAEL IS ON HIS WAY HOME AND OH BOY IS HE SPITTING MAD!" Hope shrieked. "But you planned for this, I know you did, you have everything under control..." she babbled. "IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT THAT YOU DON'T PANIC EVEN WHEN YOUR EYEBALLS EVAPORATE FROM THE HEAT!" She flinched. "Come to my prison, east side hatch, break my chains, and then we'll exit stage anywhichwaywecan!" She breathed deeply. "Please?"
"We're on our way!" I assured her, and after swiping the gauntlets that Helsik had wanted us to grab for her we all broke into a dead run.
Hope hadn't understated things - as soon as we stepped outside the archives, literally every damned soul we saw was trying to kill us. Raphael's ownership of them forced them to the attack even when they didn't want to, and they had no choice.
But I had the Orphic Hammer, which Raphael had forged specifically to free damned souls from infernal bondage. Its ability to destroy the infernal chains sealing Orpheus was merely a bonus - the name of the hammer must have been a misdirection Raphael had perpetrated to delude his fellow devils about his intended true use of it, a lie that ironically was coming true now. But the hammer could strike the indebted souls free of Raphael's bondage of them, once I wielded it with the intent to do so, and upon seeing what I was doing every damned soul in the place rushed eagerly towards me and fought as ineptly and inaccurately as they could, allowing me to strike them down and banish them from this plane. I made particularly sure to seek out and banish the Master Mason - we owed him that much.
"Oh wow oh wow that's so good!" Hope's astral projection flickered back into view. "Raphael's going to be soooo screwed when he sees this! BUT THE DEVILS GUARDING MY PRISON WON'T DIE THAT EASILY." Hope sniffled. "He doesn't use damned souls for me, you see. I'm too hopeful for them..."
Hope's prison was a cavern underneath the main level of the House of Hope, guarded by five imps and two spectators. Wyll demonstated exactly why the Blade of Frontiers had been a legend of the Sword Coast when he solo'ed one of the spectators, the crazy bastard - his warlock powers let him cast a Darkness spell to render it helpless and blind, his devil-sight let him see through his own darkness, and then he simply impaled each one of its eyes in turn with its rapier while it was unable to use its gaze weapons due to lack of a target. I used my anti-magic to withstand the ray attacks of the other spectator while Karlach and I beat it to pieces, and Gale summoned an air elemental to distract the imps and then froze them all with a Cone of Cold.
Hope herself floated in the center of the chamber, suspended by two beams of red energy from two infernal crystals in the same way Orpheus had been. Two mighty blows with the hammer were all it to to set her free.
"Free!" Hope leapt ecstatically up and town. "Never thought I would be, barely believed I could be, always hoped I might be!" She sighed and continued more fearfully. "But we might address the hollyphant in the room. I see how you all look at me... I must be so terribly, terribly mutilated after all those decades of torture..."
"Hope... you're beautiful." I insisted. Because she really was - Raphael had preserved her entirely intact, and she was a lovely young woman. My heart was entirely elsewhere but even I could still notice that.
"I'd blush if I had any skin left to redden, and I'd kiss you if they hadn't torn off my lips." Hope replied quietly. "Thank you."
"I think you might still be under several of Raphael's illusions." I said. "But we can deal with that later. Right now we've got to get back to the portal chamber."
"Yes!" Hope insisted. "We'll carve our way back to the entrance hell and chop Raphael into messes. That's the hopeful version of course. The likely version is that we'll be the messes and he'll be the chopper!"
"Any advice for fighting him?" Karlach asked quickly before Hope could fugue out again. Raphael must have been working her over for years-
"Make sure he sees me with you." Hope insisted. "He'll be as mad as all get-out when he sees me walking free, and he makes mistakes when he's mad." Hope tried to smile. "I never signed, you see. He wanted me to sign so badly, like my sister had, but no matter what he did to me I told him to just go fuck off! That's why he renamed his house after me, or renamed me after his house, I'm never sure which. It was like I was the embodiment of hope, and hope is everything he wants to crush. Breaking me became a point of pride to him, but joke's on him!" She twitched. "I hope..."
"Let's move." I insisted, and we ran back to the foyer we'd entered through as quickly as we could. We all gasped in relief when we saw the chamber empty and clear, and the portal back to Baldur's Gate and the Devil's Fee still open and humming merrily away. Without breaking stride we all headed towards the portal at a dead run-
-and screeched to a despairing halt as the portal winked out of existence barely five feet in front of us.
Time seemed to slow down as the air became thick enough to drink. A giant red nimbus of energy exploded in mid-air, and solidifed to reveal Raphael.
"You." he snarled, his voice as thick and furred as that of a beast's. He snapped his fingers, and more figures began to materialize in flashes of flame. A female dwarf who looked very much like Hope, only with her expression twisted and sour and her hair done up in elaborate braids instead of Hope's simple coiffure. The towering figure of Yurgir, flanking his employer Raphael like a loyal bodyguard as the orthon loomed imposingly over the entire tableau. Multiple armed cambions, flashing into existence at all corners of the room to surround us.
"There are many things in your world that I loathe." Raphel snarled at us. "Litters of kittens. Chattering children. The noise and the chaos of it all. But in my world - in my house - there is order! And there is decorum!" he roared. "You came here uninvited, and you STOLE from me!" Raphael visibly fought to gather up the remaining scraps of his self-control. "And in doing so, you brought the chaos of your world into mine! I will not abide it!"
"Sister Korrilla!" Hope said to the dwarf. "This is your chance! Come with me and be free!"
"Come with you?" Korrilla sneered at her. "The only place you're going from here, sweet sister, is your grave." she laughed mockingly. "I told you I was the one who'd made the smarter choice! For decades I've lived with everything I could ever want, whlie you suffered in his kennel like the mongrel dog you are! I have no idea why he was ever so obsessed with you! I'd told him all along that you were an ignorant fool who would never give him what he wanted... and here you are." She turned to sneer at us. "And just look at you idiots. You could have taken the deal. You could have been smart and be forever famed as the heroes who'd saved the world. But now you're just going to crumble and burn, and nobody will even remember you existed."
"It is the fatal flaw of mortalkind." Raphael thundered. "Take away their freedom, and they call you a tyrant! Give them their freedom, and they become tyrants! If you'd only dealt fairly with me, then you'd have won! Instead you insist on repeating the folly of Karsus - over-reaching your limits and rebelling against the rightful order of things, and burning your world to ash with your hubris!"
"Wrong wrong wrong!" Hope shouted. "They will save their world and smash you to smithereens!"
"Oh, it's precisely that charming naivete that makes your company such a joy to me, Hope." Raphael laughed mockingly. "I'll even forgive your little rebellion enough to let you live... once you're suitably chastised."
"This isn't a rebellion, it's a revolt! I'm revolting!" Hope shouted back.
"Then Hope dies today!" Raphael screamed, his eyes wild with rage. "And as for you, Hawke, if you have any last words I'd suggest you make them quick. It will only take a moment to finish you." he sneered.
"Funny. That's twice as long as Haarlep said it takes to finish you." I mocked him.
"YOU CONTEMPTIBLE CREATURE!" Raphael shrieked, and leapt forward to strangle me with his bare hands- forgetting his entire battle plan or to give any orders to his troops before starting the brawl. "Resilient Sphere!" Gale cast, just as we'd planned him to, and Raphael was trapped in an impenetrable bubble of force.
"Commander!" one of the cambions asked Yurgir. "What do we do?"
I winked at Yurgir... and he winked back.
"You die." Yurgir replied, and charged into the thick of Raphel's troops with reckless abandon. The broken bodies of cambions began to fly into the walls as the living infernal siege engine vented his rage upon them and Karlach and Wyll began to help. "Hawke! The pillars are full of souls, thousands of them! Raphael draws on them to augment his power! Smash them!" Yurgir cried.
Unfortunately, Raphael had thought ahead enough to shield his own soul containers from his soul-freeing hammer, even if I had found it useful for dealing with individual debtors. I'd barely managed to smash one pillar by main force, and Yurgir another one, before the duration of Gale's spell ended and Raphael was yet again free.
"You think you've defeated me?" Raphael raged. "And you, Yurgir! Your treachery will not go unpunished! I'll have you spend eternity as a lemure for this stunt!"
"That requires you to survive, Raphael." Yurgir replied with quiet menace. "Do you think I'm a fool just because I prefer to fight rather than scheme? I knew that you'd spend my entire term of service here trying to trick me into a more permanent bondage, just as you did with our first 'simple contract'. And I didn't like my odds of surviving that entire time without falling for one of your tricks. So when I saw that you and Hawke were heading towards a possible collision course, I made sure to give him this chance. I knew that if I did then it would end with you and him fighting to the death... and that you'd rely on me to tip the odds in your favor." Yurgir's laughter boomed. "I would never get a better chance to kill you."
"Foolish, foolish Yurgir." Raphael smiled. "You have vastly underestimated my power - especially given that you were only able to destroy half of my soul pillars." he sneered. "So even with your might added to these four adventurers, that won't be sufficient to save you."
"You know, Raphael, I'm almost glad you turned out to have one last hole card to play." I said calmly. "I was almost afraid that we were going to beat you all by ourselves... and then there would be a whole lot of other people who'd be annoyed with me that they didn't get a chance to get their licks in."
"Hawke, has the certainty of your imminent demise damaged your brain?" Raphael laughed. "You're in the depths of Avernus, in my own house! The piddling little portals of Mammon's Picklock can't reach here with my attention focused on blocking them, and your allies have no other way of breaching the planar gulf to get here! And since you had the prudence not to bring the Astral Prism into my domain, you can't even be smuggling them in your pocket."
"For a guy who comes up with what I'll acknowledge are some elegant plan As, you are far worse at coming up plan B than I expected." I said. "It's like you haven't even considered that the entire reason I'm stealing the Orphic Hammer in the first place is because I want to use it to set free the rightful ruler of the githyanki." I paused just long enough to let the realization start to sink in before I dropped the reveal. "And what are they most famous for again?"
And with that I gave a single squeeze to the githyanki device I'd had in my pouch - a githyanki signal beacon, one that was psionically linked to a twin beacon that could be used to track its counterpart down even at interplanar distances. And a dimensional portal opened up in the foyer right on cue, as my distress signal told the rest of the group - as well as Orpheus' Honor Guard - exactly where to have the githyanki planar travel adept open up his portal to send the reinforcements. Kith'rak Voss and Prelate L'ir'ic were the first two out of the portal, his Silver Sword and her ki-charged fists raised proudly high. Lae'zel, Shadowheart, and half a dozen githyanki warrior-monks followed them.
Because the thing that the githyanki were most famed for was, of course, their mastery of planar travel.
Raphael was a very powerful devil, but he was now fighting three times as many people as he'd planned on with far fewer soldiers than he'd intended to have available. With Yurgir and me to help tank his blows while the rest of us surrounded him, Orpheus' honor guard had a free hand to smash all the remaining soul pillars and then provide a bulwark against late-arriving reinforcements. He acquitted himself respectably, and several of us had some noteworthy wounds we'd need Shadowheart or Hope to help us heal later, but at these odds the fight could only have one outcome. After we finally downed him Yurgir imploded his skull with a final spiteful crunch, and then his booming laughter rolled out to shake the very walls.
"FREE!" Yurgir celebrated joyously. "At long last, the trickster is dead - dead forever, as he died in Avernus!" He sighed with ultimate satisfaction. "You have my thanks, all of you, for your aid."
"I believe I owe you this." I handed back his infernal crossbow.
"You fought well. Strength as yours would have excelled in the Blood War." Yurgir complimented us. "And now I can finally return to the frontlines, without Raphael's infernal contract holding me back."
"We've got our own frontlines to return to, in Baldur's Gate." I said. "Good luck with your war."
"Good luck with your own." Yurgir nodded. "And given the size of the foe you hunt... when it comes time for your final battle against the elder brain, I will lend my strength to yours without further obligation. It will be a worthy battle indeed!"
"I never thought I'd be saying this to a devil... but we'll be glad to see you there." Wyll acknowledged him.
"Until we meet again." Yurgir nodded to us, and vanished in a flash of fire.
Author's Note: Hawke's plans are all turning into some variant of 'get the homies together and jump a motherfucker'. On the other hand, it keeps working...
If you help him out, or even just win his respect by killing him in the Gauntlet of Shar and then passing a sky-high Persuade check at the end of the House of Hope, then Yurgir is surprisingly chill for a literally baby-eating monster. He's brutal but straightforward, gladly helps you fight Raphael, comes in to ally with you again in the final battle against the Elder Brain, and never asks you for anything except what he's already gotten (his freedom from Raphael) and doesn't screw you. Raphael is one flavor of lawful evil. Yurgir's another flavor entirely.
In-game the Orphic Hammer has no special powers versus anything except Hope's or Orpheus' chains. Boooo-ring! I punched it up a little.
The bit about being able to insult Raphael with how bad he is in bed is entirely canon to the game, even if we used an entirely non-canon way to get it from the incubus. Then again, the canon route would have put this story in the NSFW forum, so...
And honestly, game, why doesn't Voss pitch in with some more help when we're trying to steal the Orphic Hammer? He's the guy we're stealing it for! I grant that in-game Orpheus' honor guard never survives because the Emperor manipulates you into killing them to save his ass and that's scripted with no way around it, but there are other Orpheus loyalists out there man.
And you all have my deepest, most sincerest apologies that I couldn't find any way to work in the single most awesome thing Raphael has ever done. But there was just no remotely in-character way to get Hawke to actually stand around long enough to let Raphael finish singing his own theme song.
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Balorak146
They of the Bullshit-Seeing Eye
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Given that as far as I know, Hawke's theme only plays if they die in Inquisition, here's the Battle For Haven theme instead!
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGbxrB71CVM
Mizu
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I was wondering about that, trying to recall if it worked that way in-game. I think your route is more fun overall - doubt anyone there wanted to remain enslaved to Raphael.
So how powerful is the devil, anyway? A lv12 team of 4 can defeat him from memory, so likely not the highest totem pole of DnD monsters?
cliffc999
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People have cheesed him(*), but he's perhaps the toughest boss fight in the game in that way only an optional boss (there are multiple paths to endgame that don't involve fighting Raphael) can be allowed to be. Only the Netherbrain is tougher and that only because the SOB has multiple phases and a literal army worth of adds, while Raphael only has one phase and a squad.
(*) In addition to things like barrelmancy or Celestial Haste Slayer Form cheese, Raphael's Wisdom save is absolutely mediocre... and unlike his Dex save, it's not boosted by the soul pillars. Use the right kind of mind-affecting magic and you can keep him in perpetual stunlock. I didn't have Hawke use this strategy because there's no way to know about it without peeking at his character sheet.
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ZodiacDivine
Know what you're doing yet?
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That's honestly pretty fitting for someone who loses his shit at the first sign of things actually going substantially wrong for him like that. Bastard's a great planner and manipulator, but he fumbles hard once you manage to outfox him.
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Ghost in a Wall
Know what you're doing yet?
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You know, in whatever afterlife Raph is dealing with, or lack thereof, I can't help but enjoy the thought of him bemoaning the fact that Hawk wasn't born a Devil that he could take under his wing. I know it's out of character and more besides that, but it's a thought that stuck and made me chuckle a bit.
RedX
Not too sore, are you?
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I just sort of assumed Voss had to lay low and not do anything too weird because he was prominent enough that Vlaakith was keeping an eye on him. Meetings in bars and sewers, sure, but if he starts bouncing across planes smacking random devils rather than doing his assigned task of hunting for the Prism, she'd have noticed.
cliffc999
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He's already blown his cover by that point in the game.
Lucid Lunacy
Seeking the Threshold
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As someone who hasn't played Baldur's Gate 3, finding out about Raphael's sexual preferences was like being hit with a literary flashbang. >.<
sicksock
Pigs can always find mud.
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Yeah. Another fun fact is that his lover's name is his own name rearranged.
I have to imagine that after centuries of people telling Raphael to 'go fuck himself' he decided to give it a shot, and found he quite liked it.
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Simonbob
Really? You don't say.
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Beholders, I think.
Domino
I trust you know where the happy button is?
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Spectators are a specific subspecies of Beholder
Simonbob
Really? You don't say.
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Huh.
Didn't know they existed.
Well, there's a lot of DnD monsters.....
Matrix Dragon
Getting sticky.
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The rest of the team is going to be so sad they missed his moment of discovery.
Well well, the devil doesn't know something...
Call back to their interaction at the Last Light? Either way, nice phrase.
And I think the devil just fucked up.
I love the faith she has in Hawke by this point. They've achieved so much that there's no doubt in her mind.
This a canon detail, or something you added? Because it does certainly make sense.
Ha, I was right. And it fits. We've seen Hawke notice details in the devils comments the devil wouldn't prefer before, after all.
Poor Aylin. Hopefully a few dopplegangers try something while the others are out so that she can get some quality enrichment.
I love Karlach at moments like this. Being scared out of her mind and admitting it, but damn well going to help her friends.
I rarely feel bad for a devil. But there's something so perfect about the reasons for his job frustrations that I can't help it. He is a PROFESSIONAL, dammit!
Well she's about to have a bad end...
It's like a law of the universe. You HAVE to take that option! It doesn't hurt that it makes him even madder.
This is the kind of moment that, if animated, would have a nice closeup of Raphs face the moment he realizes what's about to happen.
I think it's his priorities and skill set. He's got a war to fight, and Raphs antics are all a distraction from the more important issue for him.
DIT_grue
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This should probably be a comma, not a full stop?
The possessive apostrophe and "that of" are redundant with each other.
here
us
And while
deniability
Its
I think this would read more smoothly if you used something like chosen or used here instead.
Picklock
Also, when I went back to try and see if there had been previous mention of that epithet "the Fallen", I spotted one rough spot in an old chapter:
Probably delete this first one since it's redundant with the elaboration later in the sentence.
cliffc999
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Something I added.
It hasn't been used before. It's not even an official epithet, I made it up. But for obvious reasons Aylin is going to put a greater emphasis on the fact that Zariel is a fallen angel than almost anybody else does.
Particularly since Zariel's fall was... well, it was a whole thing that was a big story arc of its own and was, like Anakin Skywalker's fall from grace, deeply rooted in a lot of things including her own pre-existing personality flaws. But the point of no return was when she defied the orders of her superiors to try leading a crusade into Avernus as a rogue operation... i.e., the exact choice Aylin is being faced with in that scene, if on a much smaller scale than Zariel's. And that was less than two centuries ago, so unless Aylin is really young by celestial standards (there's no canon on her age) she'd have seen that one go down.
More generally, I find that Aylin is seriously underused in Act Three. She's basically just there to hang around your camp and say almost nothing, cuddle with Isobel (who is even less used in Act Three), do her one sidequest regarding the wizard who hired Aradin to go kidnap her in the first place, and then be a summonable ally in the final batle. I know that Larian didn't have infinite time or resources to code in the entire universe, but if you're going to put an immortal warrior angel in the supporting cast list you might want to do something with her. So even if I'm sidelining her from some battles I'm at least trying to include her in scenes and have people actually react like having a literal angel from the heavens riding along with your peeps is a noteworthy event.
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trebuchet
Your first time is always over so quickly, isn't it?
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"I'd tell you to go to hell, but I think you're already there."
cliffc999
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Somebody spotted the reference!
(Specifically, the final scene of 'Lord of War'.)
cliffc999
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Oh, belated new data point.
I got to the elder brain scene again, this time with my evil Tav who was doing an alliance with Gortash, and we got different dialogue from the brain. Specifically, the brain didn't try making the claim that it had originally inspired the Chosen to go after the Crown in the first place. It just claimed that after they'd woken it up and put the Crown on its head it had then subliminally inspired Gortash to go after the Astral Prism and then deliberately released the Emperor from its control once it reached the Prism - knowing that the Emperor would immediately recruit a team of killers to try coming after the Netherstones, and thus in the process waste at least one of the Chosen and give the brain a chance to slip free.
So apparently its claims of being behind everything were at least partly lies - lies the elder brain doesn't bother trying if one of the original Chosen is present to dispute its version of events.
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Frankfawn43
Not too sore, are you?
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I find it much more believable that the Brain subtly encouraged the Chosen to bumble into the artifact that would burn their plan down than some overcomplicated grand plan that involves letting the Dumb 3 have control over it. Shows the danger of the Elder Brain while respecting the other villains and plot points. Good to hear that info.
Zanfib
Not too sore, are you?
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"Mind flayers are so invincibly convinced of their own cleverness that their collective history is just an endless litany of them suffering completely predictable ass-kickings at the hands of their own creations, to the point that they've lost their empire and been forced to live in caves and still can't figure out what they're doing wrong." - David J Prokopetz
Chapter 35
New
cliffc999
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"It is absolutely preposterous that any of us are alive!" Hope laughed hysterically. "Maybe we're not. Pinch yourself and check we're not dreaming the last of our lives as we die screaming!"
I reached up and slowly, deliberately, pinched the back of my hand with the thumb and forefinger of my other hand.
"Ha!" Hope fist-pumped. "We did it!" She trailed off, dazedly. "We actually did it! Now what do we do?"
"We congratulate ourselves on a job well-done, and we go home." Karlach said warmly.
"But I am home." Hope sighed. "This is my house. Raphael named it after me... or me after it. Is Hope really my name, or was it just my game?" Her shoulders slumped in defeat. "Only my sister knew, and now she'll never tell. It isn't right that she's dead. It makes me want to weep an ocean."
"You gave her every chance to turn away." Wyll reassured Hope. "She had far more chances than you did, in fact - and wasted them all. But in the end she just wanted what Raphael was offering her more than she wanted her own family. And none of that is your fault."
"No, it's not." Hope quietly agreed. "But it is my burden to bear. I remember everything she did to me... but that includes the good things as well as the bad. When we were children she always saved the last piece of pastry for me... bloodied the noses of all the bullies who pulled my hair..." Her face twitched. "Got so jealous of me when Raphael wanted me rather than her, even though I didn't want him. I never wanted him! I told him that over and over, but-"
I drew Hope into a comforting hug as she emotionally broke down. "Do you remember where you grew up?"
"No." Hope said, sniffling into my shoulder before she pulled away. "Everything before the House is bits and pieces."
"Come with us." Shadowheart urged her. "I know a little of what you're going through. They stole me away as a young woman as well. They took away my memories and tried to make me into somebody that I wasn't. And while those people weren't devils, they were still evil to the core." She smiled at Hope. "But even if I still can't remember my old life, my new friends are helping me make a new one."
"There aren't any friends in hell." Hope said solemnly. "Or happy houses for them to live in."
"So don't stay in Hell." Karlach urged her. "I got trapped down here for years. The day I got out was one of the happiest days of my life."
"How long were you down here?" Hope asked her.
"Ten years." Karlach replied. "Felt longer."
"I've been longer." Hope shook her head. "A lot, lot longer. I'm not sure I even know how to live anywhere anymore, except here." She gave a tremulous smile as her frantic, erratic mannerisms began to still, as a curious calm overtook her. "Raphael always joked that this would be my house forever once he didn't need it any longer. I'm going to take that as a contract. By the laws of Hell this is now my domain for real and true, and I'm going to make this a safe place where people like you or me can hope to run away to."
"That's a lovely idea, but Zariel's going to send an army and flatten this place as soon as she finds out what you're doing." Karlach urged her.
"Zariel won't send the Inquisitor again for years and years. Especially not since her own mortal contracting business has really hit the skids ever since Mizora died." Hope denied. "I'll have plenty of chances to get this place all spic-and-span without anyone interfering. And if she does show up... well, I know where Raphael kept his portal room, and now that he's dead it won't be locked anymore."
"Wait, Mizora's truly dead? And not just banished back to Hell as I'd feared? When we get back to the Elfsong, the drinks are on me!" Wyll said delightedly.
"All right, Hope, it's your life to live. Just please promise us that you'll actually use that escape route when you need to." I yielded to the inevitable. Hope was clearly so psychologically shattered that she had lost most of her ability to function outside of her confinement, and the only cure for something like that was time. And we couldn't stay here for much longer.
"It'll be okay." she reassured us. "I won't stay here forever. Just until I can find the pieces of my head that fell out and put them back in." Her voice trailed off quietly. "And Korrilla's soul will still be down here... somewhere. I hope that I can find her, and I hope she'll say that she's sorry. And then I'll tell her that she's forgiven."
What kind of response could a person possibly make to that, except...?
"Good luck." I wished her, and then we departed.
We arrived back at the deserted warehouse that our backup team had staged out of. We hadn't wanted to open a githyanki planar portal directly from our quarters at the Elfsong because there was a distinct possibility Vlaakith might pick up on it, and leading her directly to where we were forted up was not in the cards. She had to know that we were in Baldur's Gate by now, and obtaining the Astral Prism at any cost was still her primary obsession.
And it turned out that we'd only just barely been careful enough, because one of Vlaakith's inquisitors and a squad of elite gith ambushed us practically as we arrived from Avernus. Not only had her people been able to track the portal that Orpheus' planar adept had opened, they'd done so quickly enough to already have an ambush in place before we could even finish up at the House of Hope. Only the psionic detector that Voss had gifted me with back at our first meeting gave us enough warning to meet their rush, and even with Orpheus' Honor Guard safely back in the Astral Prism we still had more than enough force to handily defeat their attempt.
Unfortunately...
"Their portal adept escaped before we could kill him." Voss cursed. "And worse yet, he saw me with you."
"Vlaakith's forces are going to flood Baldur's Gate, now that you are no longer in command and able to meddle with their deployments." Lae'zel spat. "And especially now that she knows that you, her very own Jhe'stil Kith'rak, have actually been in league with Orpheus for an indeterminate amount of time. The death of Orpheus is a vital enough objective for her that even the risks of an overt invasion of the Prime would pale in comparision! With that added to the necessity of silencing you, with all of her secrets that you know?"
"Ironically, there we are saved by the fact that the elder brain is already underneath Baldur's Gate and in imminent danger of breaking loose." Voss stated calmly. "I know Vlaakith's habits well - ultimately she is a self-serving coward. Now that her attempt to solve the problem quickly and easily has failed, and especially now that she is less certain of the loyalty of the people assigned to this task, she will almost certainly decide to pull back and allow the elder brain to break loose first. She will know that neither Orpheus nor I would ever abandon our duty in the face of such a challenge. She will allow us to confront the elder brain and muster as many of Orpheus' surviving loyalists as possible to do likewise... and then she will allow the elder brain to kill Orpheus and myself and devastate his supporters before she even begins to muster her own forces to attack the already-weakened elder brain."
"Has she considered that if the elder brain successfully breaks free and masters the power of the Crown then she's not going to be able to stop it later?" I groaned.
"No." Voss said flatly. "As of my last communication with her she did not have even the slightest suspicion that the Crown of Karsus was in play - no more than I did, until after you told me. And she wouldn't believe us if we tried to warn her."
"I still don't think we can risk opening any more planar portals, though." I realized. "If we give Vlaakith an exact location to strike at, she might risk another raid team."
"Likely." Voss agreed. "We will have to be more circumspect with actions that could reveal Orpheus' location for the foreseeable future."
"I'd have thought that you'd want to use the Orphic Hammer to free Orpheus immediately." Karlach said surprisedly. "As in right here and right now."
"The prince and I already discussed this." Voss shook his head. "Vlaakith is already desperate enough simply knowing that we have the Astral Prism. If she also knows that we have the Orphic Hammer - which she will the instant we free Orpheus, as the dissolving of his bonds and the infernal pact linked to them will alert her immediately - then there is too great a risk that she does launch that invading army, elder brain or no elder brain. My Prince has already accepted that we cannot release him until the final confrontation with the elder brain has already begun. For now, I need to reach the loyalist gith that I have with me in Baldur's Gate and warn them to get clear before Vlaakith can broadcast the order for our arrests. I will set up a new safe house for my forces in the subterranean levels of Baldur's Gate - when I have an exact location, I will let you know."
"Orin's people are using the sewers." I reminded him. "Stay on your guard."
"I would almost hope she makes the attempt." Voss grinned wickedly. "If we can take any of them alive - or even dead, thanks to your amulet - then we solve the problem of locating the Temple of Bhaal. Fortune be with you, Hawke. I will be in touch."
"Back to the Elfsong, everybody." I ordered. "We've had a good day's work so far, but we're not done yet."
"How are you doing this?" Aylin cursed as she yet again hit the floor.
After the meeting with Raphael at Sharess' Caress Jaheira and Minsc had split off to go catch up with the intelligence networks we'd been setting up with her remnant Harpers, her family in Rivington, Nine-Fingers' people, and Councilor Florrick's loyalists. They'd been busy with that while we'd been setting up and then executing the heist at the House of Hope, and we'd gotten back to the Elfsong before they had. So I'd decided to kill some of the time waiting for their return by sparring with Aylin. I'd originally intended just to get some practice in and help her blow off some steam after the frustrating day she'd had. But when I'd noticed a distinctive pattern in her fighting style early on I couldn't help but do my best to take advantage of it - and correct it.
As we were sparring up on the roof of the Elfsong Aylin was in her human disguise thanks to the Mask of the Shapeshifter and her wings were retracted. So I wasn't able to take advantage of the same trick with balance that Ketheric had during their duel on the roof of Moonrise Towers, and yet I was still defeating her almost every time. She was as fast as I was, stronger than I was, and essentially impossible to kill by anything even remotely mortal, and was also a veteran warrior who'd had access to some of the best teachers the celestial realms could provide. I should not have been winning anywhere near as easily as I had been. But it was as Ketheric had said - she had weaknesses.
"By taking advantage of the flaws in your fighting style." I lectured her as she rose to her feet and we clashed blades again. I took the initiative this time and she actually parried my first several blows... but then left herself wide open when she went on the counterattack, only to 'die' yet again as I sidestepped her swing and my 'godslaying sword' swung up to 'decapitate' her.
"Ketheric Thorm said the same. But he never condescended to explain what flaws." Aylin said tightly. We reset our positions, but then she lowered her blade when I lowered mine to call for a halt.
"When he first imprisoned you in the soul cage he'd originally subdued you by treachery, yes?" I asked.
"Correct." she nodded. "Some time after Isobel had been killed, he came to me and requested my assistance in dealing with an underground temple of Shar he claimed to have just discovered within his domain. This was before I had known of his fall from grace. When we entered, he struck me from behind after his pet necromancer Balthazar had distracted me with a small horde of his undead."
"So for all of your battle experience, when Shadowheart faced you with the Spear of Night that was the first time - or at least the first time in a long while - that you'd actually faced mortal danger." I continued.
"I presume this is leading somewhere?" she glowered. Aylin was normally relatively even-tempered, but the day she'd had would have tried the patience of a saint. First she'd had divine limitations repeatedly keep her from protecting people precious to her and confronting heinous evils like a congregation of Sharrans or a devil in his own lair. Then she'd consistently lost to me in our sparring sessions-
"Because it shows in how you fight. Except for the all-too-few times you actually remembered what a parry was you left yourself open with every swing. You fight like someone unafraid of harm - and that's exactly what I've been taking advantage of." Her eyes opened wide in realization, and I continued. "You can't die, but your regeneration still only works at a finite rate. I saw how fast you were healing at Moonrise and when we fought Sarevok, and Ketheric had healed notably faster."
"His soul cage had been set up so that it drew upon my life force with reckless abandon, to the point it would temporarily kill me to speed the healing of even his nonlethal wounds." Aylin agreed. "Left to work on its own, my regeneration is somewhat more sedately paced."
"Which means you can still be knocked unconscious by a large enough hit, as we also saw at Moonrise." I nodded. "And that you can still be immobilized for a period of time if your attacker does enough damage to you that you need to regenerate for a while before you can fight again. Plus of course you can still be disarmed, knocked off-balance, all the rest of it. And even if you can't die the people you're trying to protect can, or else the target you're pursuing can get away, or all the rest of it. Death isn't the only way to fail."
"That at least is already more than self-evident." Aylin snorted. "I spent a century in Shar's cage as a consequence of precisely that type of failure."
"But your failure there went deeper than just trusting the wrong person." I agreed. "Take our last exchange - when you actually used some defensive maneuvers you had me almost entirely stalemated. But after just a few parries you went back to just trying to pound me into pulp... and while all-out attacks let you put more power behind a swing, they also telegraph more obviously and leave you wasting that much more energy if you don't connect. You're legitimately skilled with your weapon and are strong and fast enough to beat down most opponents handily, but anybody canny enough to make you come to them and then abuse positioning and feints can take advantage of your linear approach to leave you swinging at air and then hit you back almost anywhere they choose. And even with your regeneration and heavy armor, that simply isn't a winning strategy."
"Then what would you recommend?" Aylin asked.
"To start thinking in different habits. I'm certain you've already been drilled in the maneuvers you'll need, so you simply need to understand why those parts of the warrior's toolkit are necessary and then remember to use them when it counts. So we'll start with a review of how to feint and counter-feint, and then..."
Once I'd finally gotten her to see past the deeply-rooted blind spot in her technique I was amazed at how fast she caught on. Then again, I had no idea how much experience she'd already had before being confined in the Shadowfell for a century - Aylin never hinted at her age, and I had no idea if even Isobel knew exactly how old she really was or how much of that time she'd spent on the Prime. At any rate, our next round of drills rapidly swung to being at least two out of three in her favor and I got a vigorous education in my own martial shortcomings that I hadn't had anyone able to give me for quite some time. By the end of it she was in a much better mood and we'd both gotten some much-needed practice, so we were ready to call it a productive afternoon and go rejoin the others.
"Awww, you guys were having a workout and you didn't invite me?" Karlach said plaintively. "I'd have loved to see how fighting angels differs from fighting devils."
"Hah!" Aylin laughed. "And I should have thought earlier to ask you earlier to share your knowledge of infernal combat with me! I've fought devils before, but never learned from one who had been tutored by them."
"I've created a monster." I faux-bemoaned. "So, has anything significant been happening in the interim?"
"A messenger brought us word from the Harpers in Rivington. There was a ghaik sighting there. A newborn, having just finished undergoing ceremorphosis. They slew it, but not before it had killed several innocents." Lae'zel said grimly.
"Damn." I swore. "Everybody in Baldur's Gate with a tadpole has one of the altered ones the Cult of the Absolute was using. So no one should be undergoing ceremorphosis randomly, but only if the elder brain had deliberately commanded them to. And the Chosen didn't order any conversions - that order would have to have been given before we killed Ketheric at Moonrise, and random illithid attacks in Baldur's Gate were not part of their original strategy of making Gortash look like the hero come to save them."
"The elder brain is either beginning to act erratically or else beginning to act according to purposes not assigned it by the Chosen." Lae'zel agreed grimly. "Either alternative leads to the same conclusion - we are running out of time."
"The problem is that Orin is giving us nothing to work with." I complained. "I'd expected some kind of attack by now. Some sort of spiteful gesture, at least - something by which we could grab one of the doppelgangers and make them talk. As Voss pointed out earlier today, with the Amulet of Lost Voices we'd only need one corpse and one question - where is the Temple of Bhaal?"
"In hindsight, we should have saved one of the doppelganger corpses from those that attacked us underneath the temple of Ilmater in Rivington." Isobel sighed.
"We should have thought to save one from the attack at the Highberry winery." I agreed. "But we'd both thought that this 'Murder Tribunal' we were hot on the trail of at the time was where we'd find Orin, and we didn't find out until too late that we were chasing a false trail."
"Not a false trail, I think." Shadowheart contributed. "If I remember my religious lore correctly, an aspirant of Bhaal would have to face a Murder Tribunal before they would be allowed to even know the location of a true temple of Bhaal. The murder cult is one of the most reviled religious organizations on Faerun, after all - even deities like Shar, Bane, or Lolth have at least some communities in which their worship is openly sanctioned by the authorities. But not even a place like Menzoberranzan can legalize Bhaalite worship, given how murder and chaos are literally sacraments in their religion. The cult needs to safeguard the location of its most sacred sanctums with utmost effort... Jaheira and Minsc could explain what happens the instant the location of one becomes known, if they were here. In addition, unless Orin intended to unseal the sanctum for us herself then we would have been required to go through the Murder Tribunal first regardless of how cleverly we might or might not have tracked down her true location, because we'd still need Sarevok's amulet to enter the temple."
"If Orin wanted us to follow a trail to her, then why was the map that Sarevok was carrying destroyed?" I asked.
"In hindsight?" Gale thought out loud. "I think Sarevok did that himself at the last minute. If it had always been part of Orin's plan for us to get no leads at the Murder Tribunal, then it would have been simpler for him to entirely sanitize the Tribunal of evidence at his leisure. We were intended to find that piece of paper after we searched the place... but I don't think Sarevok knew that Orin was considering him to be expendable or that she actually wanted us to find her."
"He destroyed the map himself as soon as he realized the Tribunal had been penetrated by enemies. It must have been immediately before we entered the room." Shadowheart realized. "He hadn't known that Orin wanted us to go straight to the temple."
"That's... actually not a horrible strategy." I realized. "Gortash had many uncomplimentary things to say about Orin's intelligence, and the glimpse we got of her underneath Moonrise certainly confirms that she's erratic to say the least. But she can't be entirely devoid of cunning or else one of her underlings would already have murdered her by now. So if she doesn't feel confident about setting up some grand intrigue to outwit us with, or successfully infiltrating our own guarded camp, then 'force the inevitable confrontation to occur on my home ground only after I've stacked up everything I possibly can in ambush' is a fairly good plan."
"And the confrontation is inevitable." Wyll agreed. "Gortash, Orin, ourselves... none of the contestants in this race can win without either allying with or taking the Netherstones of the other two. Orin can't avoid us forever any more than we can avoid her - the question is simply how soon, and who comes to who."
"And time does not favor us." Aylin said grimly. "Orin's destruction is as assured as our own if we delay long enough for the elder brain to finish breaking free, but she is a madwoman who delights in the slaughter of innocents while we are virtuous souls trying to save as many people as we can. She is far more likely to - and able to - risk the destruction of Baldur's Gate than we."
"We're back." Jaheira announced as her and Minsc re-entered the room, accompanied by Councilor Florrick. We did our doppelganger checks yet again, and then brought them up to speed on the meeting.
"I managed to infiltrate at least some of the Steel Watch Foundry in wildshape. Your surmise was correct - the Gondian gnomes who build and maintain the Steel Watch are indeed slaves. They are all locked into explosive collars linked to devices that their supervisors carry... and their supervisors are all priests or temple knights of Bane." Jaheira said grimly. "They are being worked at an inhuman pace and under the harshest of conditions."
"Boo was barely able to restrain himself from tearing all the evil slavers apart on the spot." Minsc said furiously. "But that would merely have condemned many innocents to death. In addition to the bomb collars, their families are being held hostage elsewhere. Jaheira overheard this."
"And my own news is scarcely less grave. Wyll, no one has seen your father since Gortash's 'coronation'." Councilor Florrick added. "We are fairly certain that he is still alive, but now that Gortash wields executive power in his own right as Archduke he apparently has no need for a Grand Duke to speak for him."
"They're not keeping him in Wyrm's Rock? Or confined to his own estate?" Wyll asked.
"No." Florrick shook her head. "There are many men still loyal to your father still scattered throughout the Flaming Fist, but few of them remain in sensitive positions. Those positions are now reserved for those Fist that Gortash considers 'reliable' or his own Banites - some secretly, and some openly." She sighed. "So I can tell you where the Grand Duke isn't, but not where he is."
"Gortash hasn't been unsubtle enough to make the threat overtly, but I'm certain that part of his thinking here is to hold my father hostage against us. Or at the very least, against me." Wyll said with a dangerous quietness. "I was present at his first meeting with Hawke, after all - he knows I am working with you."
"We were in Wyrm's Rock prison just the other day." I nodded back at Wyll. "Gortash certainly wasn't holding the Gondian hostages or your father there. He has another prison facility somewhere - a secret one."
"And it must be a very very secure one, given that maintaining control of the Steel Watch is essential to his maintaining control of the city, and his Gondian slaves are essential to maintaining the operations of the Steel Watch." Wyll thought out loud. "It's very doubtful that he has two secret prison facilities with security that he'd trust that deeply. If we can find the Gondian hostages, then we'll find my father there as well."
"And once we find him, Orpheus can break him free of the elder brain's control." I agreed. "He can't do that for everyone we meet, but freeing Minsc was not the limit of his available resources. And with the Grand Duke back in his right mind he'd be in a much better position to regain control of all the un-corrupted Flaming Fist than even Florrick would be."
"Entirely." she agreed. "It's a pity we don't have the faintest idea where this prison might be."
"Worse yet, we may have more problems rescuing anyone from there." Jaheira disagreed. "Another thing that my children turned up in Rivington was a sick and disgusting plot to place smokepowder explosives inside toys being donated to refugee children." She shook her head disgustedly. "Fortunately they discovered this in time in to prevent any casualties. The artificer who was sabotaging the toys was being blackmailed into it under threat of death, so they let him go. But he was able to tell them where he was getting his explosives from - a shop named Felogyr's Fireworks, here in the city."
"Boo and I found many Banite scum lurking there." Minsc grinned. "So we slew them all without mercy and then Jaheira searched the shop for clues."
"I had to set the shop on fire afterwards to cover for him. Gortash isn't supposed to suspect that we're still working against him, after all. Hopefully our dear Archduke will either believe it was an explosives accident or else blame Nine-Fingers' people for it." Jaheira sighed. "The part most relevant to our prison quest was that large shipments of explosives had been manufactured there recently and shipped out on Gortash's direct orders to a secret facility known only by a code-name - for use as a self-destruct system. Now what kind of facility requires a self-destruct system?"
"Normally I'd say one where you're working on something hazardous that you're afraid might break loose - except we already know that Gortash is bold enough to work with infernal engineering and illithid technology right there in the Steel Watch Foundry down on the docks." I said. "So the next most obvious thought is, 'a place full of people that you'd rather be destroyed along with everyone inside rather than risk their recapture'. Such as a secret prison for high-value hostages."
"I agree." Jaheira nodded. "Before we can act against Gortash, we must first disable the Steel Watch. And while that can be done by destroying the control center in the Steel Watch Foundry, unless we are willing to write off a great many innocent lives then before we can do that we must find this secret prison and then find a way to rescue everyone from it - despite Gortash having rigged it to be destroyed on a moment's notice."
"Councilor, we will need you for this. Specifically, we will need your contacts within the Flaming Fist for this." Lae'zel contributed.
"None of them know where this prison facility is. I doubt if even most of Gortash's loyalists do." she replied.
"More military campaigns have failed due to insufficient attention being paid to logistics than have failed due to lack of courage or skill." Lae'zel said firmly. "Unless Gortash has petrified them, the prisoners will still need to eat. Which means that Gortash will need to arrange for regular food shipments out to wherever this place is. But he first has to obtain the food, and where is the easiest place for him to get it from without curious merchants wondering what he is doing with it all?"
"The military supply system." Florrick realized. "The same procurement mechanisms that supply the food to the Flaming Fist garrisons and the prisoners in Wyrm's Rock. And to anticipate your next question, yes, many of the Grand Duke's loyal officers have recently been reassigned from command positions to lower-tier and less well-regarded duties... such as logistics and supply." She grinned. "If there's food shipments being skimmed in sufficient quantities to supply a secret prison, then I'll be able to find out about it and about at least the first step in the chain of deliveries. I'll get started on that right away."
"The next likeliest place for Gortash to have been getting that much food without any obvious backtrail is the gray market - except we just tore the guts out of his 'Stone Lord' organization and the local Zhents, and Nine-Fingers' crew have been gleefully mopping up what's left." Karlach contributed. "So if he had to very recently switch to getting the food out of the Flaming Fist, that'll only make the trail easier for your people to find."
"We can hopefully find the prison that way." Jaheira agreed. "But how do we stop Gortash from blowing it up as soon as we try to rescue anyone?"
"He can't order anything blown up if he's dead." Karlach said emphatically as she mimed drawing the edge of her palm across her neck.
"Have you seen the defenses he's set up around the upper levels of Wyrm's Rock?" I disagreed. "I was in there to see him earlier today. He's got multiple Steel Watchers, clockwork grenade launchers mounted on practically every wall in the place, and multiple layers of his own Banite loyalists. His defenses against Orin slipping in there and murdering him make ours look like an unguarded outhouse, but those same defenses will work equally well against us doing it. The only viable plan I've thought of for taking Gortash requires us to take out Orin first."
"Which requires us to find Orin." Gale observed mildly. "Which project we have been entirely stumped on."
"I think our problem is that we've been planning too well." Shadowheart offered. "We've been so thorough with our precautions to not get the camp attacked or infiltrated by her doppelgangers that Orin is apparently being intimidated from even trying."
"So what you're saying is, we need to start really screwing up to bait her in?" Wyll asked amusedly.
"Why, you got some suggestions?" Karlach teased him.
"I have one." Isobel said. "We need to detach Aylin from guarding our base."
"She's the only one we have who can reliably detect doppelgangers without using spells or potions- of course, that's exactly what you meant." I realized. "Orin's been avoiding making any probes at us here because of our unsleeping, ever-vigilant celestial guardian. So if she's visibly not here?"
"And there is legitimate pastoral work that her and I could be doing." Isobel replied. "Shadowheart told me about her encounter at the Highberry winery. The local Selunite faithful have been scattered, disorganized, and leaderless for far too long. I need to go back to the Outer City and Rivington and make myself available to them, to start organizing them and laying the groundwork to eventually re-establish a temple of the Moonmaiden in Baldur's Gate."
"But what about my parents? And Nocturne?" Shadowheart asked. "Aylin's been the main thing keeping them safe. And you've been helping heal them."
"Your parents have already recovered enough for at least some travel." Isobel reassured her. "And I was thinking that they could come with us. They'll be safer away from the main point of attack and when still with the person that Orin seems to be most afraid of. In addition, your mother and father were experienced lay brethren in the Selunite church in their day and would be of great help to me in community organizing... and it would do Nocturne's rehabilitation much good for her to have a chance to see Selunite worship operate at the grass-roots level for real and not just know the twisted myths and fables Shar's church teaches about us. I'd invite you along as well, except that I know you have even more vital work here."
"But I only just-" Shadowheart began plaintively.
"The earliest I'd imagine us leaving would be tomorrow." Isobel said kindly.
"All right." Shadowheart agreed reluctantly. "I suppose it would be safer for them to not be at the heart of all this."
"While everything Aylin and Isobel said makes sense, I don't think they've entirely thought this through." Wyll disagreed. "Gortash is no true ally, regardless of how affable he is. And we have to force the pace with Orin somehow. Which is why I propose we do this..."
An incredulous sense of shock fell over me as I realized exactly how risky a scheme that Wyll was proposing... as well as how many of my teammates agreed with taking it. While I was of course as aware of the possibility that our alliance with Gortash wasn't going to remain solid for long enough to let us lower the boom on him in the manner we were planning to, that didn't mean I would have chosen this kind of contingency plan to try and head off that possibility.
"You do realize that this idea makes our raid on the House of Hope look sane?" I tried to remonstrate with Wyll. "Even if we've already-"
"Have you forgotten our first meeting with Orpheus?" Wyll came back. "You yourself said that the situation we're in is so desperate that sticking to the prudent approach is simply not going to work. And that's even more true now."
"But that still doesn't mean-" I trailed off. "Nothing I say is going to persuade you otherwise, is it?"
"Given what's at stake? Of course not." Wyll insisted flatly. "The instant Lae'zel's idea about tracing the logistics pans out, we need to start the rescue attempt for my father right away. There's simply no avoiding the necessities of this situation."
"No." I agreed grimly. "There isn't."
Either Gortash had a bit of a blindspot regarding the dangers that humble people serving in obscure positions could potentially pose if you had enough of them, or else Karlach's theory was right that he'd been arranging for food shipments to his secret prison by gray-market means and had only switched to drawing from the Flaming Fist's supply system at the last minute. Once prompted, it only took several hours for Florrick's contacts in the Flaming Fist to turn up the information we needed. The only unaccounted-for shipments of food in sufficient quantities to be supplying a secret prison were all being sent to a waterfront warehouse named Flymm's Cargo. Jaheira's scouting of the building in wildshape late in the afternoon produced the starting revelation that the building was actually a secret docking facility for a gnomish underwater vehicle called a 'submarine'.
She also found a set of schematics in the warehouse's basement that revealed that Gortash's secret prison was in an underwater base called the 'Iron Throne' - which amazingly enough had a century ago been the headquarters of Sarevok. The city of Baldur's Gate had celebrated that victory by having several dozen mages pool their powers to drop his iron tower into the middle of the bay, and a century later Gortash had come along with his technological mastery and resealed at least a portion of the tower, pumped out the water, and turned it into an underwater prison facility. It was more than a bit over-elaborate but it couldn't be denied that such a place would truly deserve the term "escape proof" - nobody was getting out of there unless they could spontaneously grow gills. Not unless they were rescued from the outside - but no such attempt could possibly be made without alerting Gortash and having him immediately trigger the self-destruct systems.
Which set of facts had not deterred Wyll and Karlach from making a dramatic self-assigned stealth run in the dead of night on Flymm's Cargo, determined to steal the submarine and get his father and the Gondian hostages out of the Iron Throne before Gortash could react. To all appearances they were betting everything on the simple assumption that Gortash could not react in time to the theft if he were asleep... as if we hadn't already seen that the Steel Watch had the ability to broadcast alerts across their entire technological network in real time. Which would mean whatever alarms were on the submarine and the Iron Throne facility would have the same capability.
In addition to the other reason that their attempt tonight was doomed to failure.
"Come on." Wyll whispered to Karlach urgently as he broke through the lock on the warehouse door with one of his warlock blasts. Since Captain Flymm was at present getting drunk and frolicsome at the Blushing Mermaid tavern and wouldn't be back for several hours, he apparently didn't feel that he needed stealth. There were several vicious guard dogs in the warehouse - Jaheira had had a hard time sneaking around them earlier - but Wyll and Karlach made short work of them. Everything was going relatively smoothly for them...
... until Shadowheart and I stepped out of Flymm's office to confront them.
"I thought I'd told you not to try this." I glowered at Wyll. "You're ruining the entire alliance I went to so much trouble to negotiate. The one you agreed with!"
"I never agreed to anything." Wyll said evenly. "I just knew when to hold my tongue."
"There's a first." Shadowheart said archedly. "So this is it? This is your entire plan? Force an open break with Gortash so we can be hunted by both sides simultaneously?"
"We gave you your chance." Karlach spat. "But all you've done is sit around and get us nowhere! We're taking matters into our own hands-"
"Oh, Karlach." Gortash's voice boomed out in a broadcast from a nearby speaker. "And here I thought your escape from Avernus meant that you'd finally learned the value of patience."
"GORTASH!" she screamed. "COME ON OUT AND FIGHT, YOU COWARD!"
"That would be difficult to do when I'm not even here." his voice said smarmily... as the Steel Watcher he was broadcasting his voice through, and getting a visual feed through the eyes of, came around the outside corner of the building accompanied by a handpicked team of his Banite servants. "Although I am still able to participate more than well enough via these proxies."
"Give it up, you two!" I begged them. "You put down your weapons and get back in line, Gortash is willing to call this no harm no foul. He understands that people can get a bit... restless... at times. But this is your last chance."
"Restless!" Wyll spat in outrage. "Is that what you call someone who refuses to let his father remain a hostage? Restless?"
"I actually thought I could trust you." Karlach spat at me. "But I guess you're just like everyone else - you want it the easy way, and you'll sell out anyone you have to to get it. Shadowheart, I can't believe you're sticking with him. Hell, I can't believe his paladin oath is surviving intact!"
"I'm keeping my word to our ally, just as I promised." I said firmly.
"And I'm... doing what I have to, for the greater good." Shadowheart said sadly. "Please don't fight. It's still not too late-"
"Go to hell!" Wyll spat... and his eldritch blast struck with repelling force, doing his best to send me flying back into the wall and render me helpless. Karlach drew her sword with lightning speed and charged Shadowheart with a berserker yell, only to be hit with her Hold Person spell before she could even get halfway there. I shrugged off Wyll's attempt to knock me down with a quick invocation of Bulwark stance and stepped forward to engage him in melee-
And the Steel Watcher under Gortash's control immediately escalated the fight to a deathmatch by using its built-in giant crossbow to impale the helpless Karlach with one of its cut-down ballista bolts. Wyll completely lost his head as soon as she died, and while he did some damage the fact remained that I was simply far too heavily armored for him to defeat in close-combat without his magic, and my own templar powers nullified everything he could cast at me except for his first surprise attack. He died with his eyes full of pain at my betrayal, but he did die.
"Well done, Hawke-" Gortash's voice began to congratulate me, only to fall silent as I rounded on the Steel Watcher in a rage.
"Don't!" I spat. "I did not enjoy this, not one damned bit, and I'm not going to pretend that I did! Both of them were friends!"
"It's always distressing to know that one's trust has been so callously violated, I entirely agree." Gortash tried to sympathize. "Still, I must commend your... commitment."
"I didn't make an alliance with you because I thought I had the slightest chance of winning without one." I growled. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to celebrate this."
"I wouldn't expect you to." Gortash agreed. "But now we must concentrate on practical matters. My people can discreetly dispose of their corpses - they'll both be in sealed barrels on the bottom of the bay within the hour. But how do you propose to explain their absence to the others?"
"Isobel and Aylin would never countenance what happened here tonight, but they're too powerful to casually discard. Fortunately, neither of them is the sort of person who'd ever figure this out without a direct prompt. I'll just detach them to go take care of the refugees in Rivington and start building up support among local Selunites - that'll keep them occupied for a couple of days, during which two of our comrades will tragically go missing-presumed-murdered at the hands of the Bhaalites." I reported. "And Jaheira and Minsc are already out and away from our core group out trying to track down Orin's people, they're hardly going to put less effort into that job once we blame Orin for Wyll's and Karlach's disappearances. Gale and Lae'zel are fully onboard with Shadowheart and myself regarding the necessity of what we did tonight. They're both very practical people."
"Then as distressing as this security breach could have been, I do believe we can deem it satisfactorily contained. You did well to warn me when you suspected that some of your people were going to violate your arrangement. Now I can be certain that you will take your responsibilities seriously." Gortash said professionally. "And that's the only way this is ever going to work."
"I've got to get back and start setting up the cover story for the others. Your clean-up crew can handle everything here. Orin's been laying very uncharacteristically low for the past several days, but she's not going to idle around forever." I said grimly.
"Certainly not." Gortash agreed, and Shadowheart and I departed for Jaheira's house, our faces set in grim expressions and barely holding back our nausea on what we'd been forced to do tonight.
"Come on in." Jaheira said as she ushered us down into the hidden cave underneath her house. "Judging from your expressions, I don't need to ask you how it went."
"Gortash fell for it hook, line, and sinker." Shadowheart said tiredly. "Helping him ambush and kill Wyll and Karlach to preserve the security of his private little torture prison was exactly the sort of moral compromise he was hoping to lead Hawke into. He's gotten everything he wanted out of our alliance except Orin's head - and now that we're committed, he has no misgivings about our willingness to work with him to eventually deliver it."
"Or about helping him take over the world afterwards." I sighed. "Meanwhile, Orin will see that we're scattered and vulnerable, and that we're clearly allying with Gortash. If that doesn't push her, nothing will."
"Now she will feel the time pressure more desperately than we, as opposed to the reverse." Jaheira agreed. "And all it cost was two deaths."
"I still can't believe they volunteered for that." Shadowheart said.
"Well, they were two of the three of us who'd actually been resurrected before." I tried to point out logically.
"And I was the third, and I'd still be terrified to risk it!" Shadowheart demurred. "Oh, and speaking of-"
"Thou need not worry." Withers spoke calmly as his presence was suddenly felt. "Thy comrades will be returned to thee within the hour. We need but wait until Gortash's servants hath finished disposing of their bodies, so that their sudden disappearance doth not reveal your scheme."
"And then they will both be free to work against Gortash from the shadows. And so long as they remain magically disguised, none of their activities will even begin to make Gortash suspect we are setting up his eventual downfall - after all, he knows they're both dead." Jaheira grinned. "So their activities will be blamed on anyone else other than us. And your willingness to turn in several of your own people and help Gortash kill them to enforce discipline-"
"It's like murdering someone for a gang initiation, only thanks to resurrection magic you can undo the murder later." I shook my head. "I still say Wyll's idea was crazy."
"Entirely. But it's the sort of crazy that's going to work." Shadowheart said admiringly. "He's really come a long way from the dashing swordsman who you had to drill in basic formation fighting, hasn't he?"
"All of us have." I agreed with her. "But we've still got a ways to go."
Author's Note: I got stuck on a viable next move for our heroes for ages, hence the delay in getting this chapter out. And Orin still isn't cooperating with me in setting up a satisfying climax, but at least we've gotten a step closer to delivering one.
But yeah, just because Gortash made an alliance doesn't mean he trusts them yet. Of course, given what just happened, he certainly trusts Hawke a lot more now. As the old saying goes, a hungry man thinks all men are hungry, a covetous man thinks all men covet...and a ruthless user thinks all men ruthlessly use. It always helps to show people exactly what they're expecting to see.
Lae'zel got a good moment in this chapter of being the first person to solve the problem by remembering logistics - but then again, she does have the most sophisticated military training out of anyone in the group and has been having it since she was a small child, the githyanki being the highly militaristic society of dimensional Klingon expies that they are. Hawke substantially beats her out in actual field experience, but she's the one who's been in a military academy since she was like six.
But it's Wyll that gets the stroke of genius in this chapter... and I wasn't even originally planning on him doing so, even when I thought up this crazy idea. And then the conversation started flowing all by itself, and voila.
In-game, Hope really does stay behind in the House of Hope and there's no dialogue option to move her off of it. But at least she remains alive and un-reconquered by devils even all the way through the game's epilogue, so that's something.
I reached up and slowly, deliberately, pinched the back of my hand with the thumb and forefinger of my other hand.
"Ha!" Hope fist-pumped. "We did it!" She trailed off, dazedly. "We actually did it! Now what do we do?"
"We congratulate ourselves on a job well-done, and we go home." Karlach said warmly.
"But I am home." Hope sighed. "This is my house. Raphael named it after me... or me after it. Is Hope really my name, or was it just my game?" Her shoulders slumped in defeat. "Only my sister knew, and now she'll never tell. It isn't right that she's dead. It makes me want to weep an ocean."
"You gave her every chance to turn away." Wyll reassured Hope. "She had far more chances than you did, in fact - and wasted them all. But in the end she just wanted what Raphael was offering her more than she wanted her own family. And none of that is your fault."
"No, it's not." Hope quietly agreed. "But it is my burden to bear. I remember everything she did to me... but that includes the good things as well as the bad. When we were children she always saved the last piece of pastry for me... bloodied the noses of all the bullies who pulled my hair..." Her face twitched. "Got so jealous of me when Raphael wanted me rather than her, even though I didn't want him. I never wanted him! I told him that over and over, but-"
I drew Hope into a comforting hug as she emotionally broke down. "Do you remember where you grew up?"
"No." Hope said, sniffling into my shoulder before she pulled away. "Everything before the House is bits and pieces."
"Come with us." Shadowheart urged her. "I know a little of what you're going through. They stole me away as a young woman as well. They took away my memories and tried to make me into somebody that I wasn't. And while those people weren't devils, they were still evil to the core." She smiled at Hope. "But even if I still can't remember my old life, my new friends are helping me make a new one."
"There aren't any friends in hell." Hope said solemnly. "Or happy houses for them to live in."
"So don't stay in Hell." Karlach urged her. "I got trapped down here for years. The day I got out was one of the happiest days of my life."
"How long were you down here?" Hope asked her.
"Ten years." Karlach replied. "Felt longer."
"I've been longer." Hope shook her head. "A lot, lot longer. I'm not sure I even know how to live anywhere anymore, except here." She gave a tremulous smile as her frantic, erratic mannerisms began to still, as a curious calm overtook her. "Raphael always joked that this would be my house forever once he didn't need it any longer. I'm going to take that as a contract. By the laws of Hell this is now my domain for real and true, and I'm going to make this a safe place where people like you or me can hope to run away to."
"That's a lovely idea, but Zariel's going to send an army and flatten this place as soon as she finds out what you're doing." Karlach urged her.
"Zariel won't send the Inquisitor again for years and years. Especially not since her own mortal contracting business has really hit the skids ever since Mizora died." Hope denied. "I'll have plenty of chances to get this place all spic-and-span without anyone interfering. And if she does show up... well, I know where Raphael kept his portal room, and now that he's dead it won't be locked anymore."
"Wait, Mizora's truly dead? And not just banished back to Hell as I'd feared? When we get back to the Elfsong, the drinks are on me!" Wyll said delightedly.
"All right, Hope, it's your life to live. Just please promise us that you'll actually use that escape route when you need to." I yielded to the inevitable. Hope was clearly so psychologically shattered that she had lost most of her ability to function outside of her confinement, and the only cure for something like that was time. And we couldn't stay here for much longer.
"It'll be okay." she reassured us. "I won't stay here forever. Just until I can find the pieces of my head that fell out and put them back in." Her voice trailed off quietly. "And Korrilla's soul will still be down here... somewhere. I hope that I can find her, and I hope she'll say that she's sorry. And then I'll tell her that she's forgiven."
What kind of response could a person possibly make to that, except...?
"Good luck." I wished her, and then we departed.
We arrived back at the deserted warehouse that our backup team had staged out of. We hadn't wanted to open a githyanki planar portal directly from our quarters at the Elfsong because there was a distinct possibility Vlaakith might pick up on it, and leading her directly to where we were forted up was not in the cards. She had to know that we were in Baldur's Gate by now, and obtaining the Astral Prism at any cost was still her primary obsession.
And it turned out that we'd only just barely been careful enough, because one of Vlaakith's inquisitors and a squad of elite gith ambushed us practically as we arrived from Avernus. Not only had her people been able to track the portal that Orpheus' planar adept had opened, they'd done so quickly enough to already have an ambush in place before we could even finish up at the House of Hope. Only the psionic detector that Voss had gifted me with back at our first meeting gave us enough warning to meet their rush, and even with Orpheus' Honor Guard safely back in the Astral Prism we still had more than enough force to handily defeat their attempt.
Unfortunately...
"Their portal adept escaped before we could kill him." Voss cursed. "And worse yet, he saw me with you."
"Vlaakith's forces are going to flood Baldur's Gate, now that you are no longer in command and able to meddle with their deployments." Lae'zel spat. "And especially now that she knows that you, her very own Jhe'stil Kith'rak, have actually been in league with Orpheus for an indeterminate amount of time. The death of Orpheus is a vital enough objective for her that even the risks of an overt invasion of the Prime would pale in comparision! With that added to the necessity of silencing you, with all of her secrets that you know?"
"Ironically, there we are saved by the fact that the elder brain is already underneath Baldur's Gate and in imminent danger of breaking loose." Voss stated calmly. "I know Vlaakith's habits well - ultimately she is a self-serving coward. Now that her attempt to solve the problem quickly and easily has failed, and especially now that she is less certain of the loyalty of the people assigned to this task, she will almost certainly decide to pull back and allow the elder brain to break loose first. She will know that neither Orpheus nor I would ever abandon our duty in the face of such a challenge. She will allow us to confront the elder brain and muster as many of Orpheus' surviving loyalists as possible to do likewise... and then she will allow the elder brain to kill Orpheus and myself and devastate his supporters before she even begins to muster her own forces to attack the already-weakened elder brain."
"Has she considered that if the elder brain successfully breaks free and masters the power of the Crown then she's not going to be able to stop it later?" I groaned.
"No." Voss said flatly. "As of my last communication with her she did not have even the slightest suspicion that the Crown of Karsus was in play - no more than I did, until after you told me. And she wouldn't believe us if we tried to warn her."
"I still don't think we can risk opening any more planar portals, though." I realized. "If we give Vlaakith an exact location to strike at, she might risk another raid team."
"Likely." Voss agreed. "We will have to be more circumspect with actions that could reveal Orpheus' location for the foreseeable future."
"I'd have thought that you'd want to use the Orphic Hammer to free Orpheus immediately." Karlach said surprisedly. "As in right here and right now."
"The prince and I already discussed this." Voss shook his head. "Vlaakith is already desperate enough simply knowing that we have the Astral Prism. If she also knows that we have the Orphic Hammer - which she will the instant we free Orpheus, as the dissolving of his bonds and the infernal pact linked to them will alert her immediately - then there is too great a risk that she does launch that invading army, elder brain or no elder brain. My Prince has already accepted that we cannot release him until the final confrontation with the elder brain has already begun. For now, I need to reach the loyalist gith that I have with me in Baldur's Gate and warn them to get clear before Vlaakith can broadcast the order for our arrests. I will set up a new safe house for my forces in the subterranean levels of Baldur's Gate - when I have an exact location, I will let you know."
"Orin's people are using the sewers." I reminded him. "Stay on your guard."
"I would almost hope she makes the attempt." Voss grinned wickedly. "If we can take any of them alive - or even dead, thanks to your amulet - then we solve the problem of locating the Temple of Bhaal. Fortune be with you, Hawke. I will be in touch."
"Back to the Elfsong, everybody." I ordered. "We've had a good day's work so far, but we're not done yet."
"How are you doing this?" Aylin cursed as she yet again hit the floor.
After the meeting with Raphael at Sharess' Caress Jaheira and Minsc had split off to go catch up with the intelligence networks we'd been setting up with her remnant Harpers, her family in Rivington, Nine-Fingers' people, and Councilor Florrick's loyalists. They'd been busy with that while we'd been setting up and then executing the heist at the House of Hope, and we'd gotten back to the Elfsong before they had. So I'd decided to kill some of the time waiting for their return by sparring with Aylin. I'd originally intended just to get some practice in and help her blow off some steam after the frustrating day she'd had. But when I'd noticed a distinctive pattern in her fighting style early on I couldn't help but do my best to take advantage of it - and correct it.
As we were sparring up on the roof of the Elfsong Aylin was in her human disguise thanks to the Mask of the Shapeshifter and her wings were retracted. So I wasn't able to take advantage of the same trick with balance that Ketheric had during their duel on the roof of Moonrise Towers, and yet I was still defeating her almost every time. She was as fast as I was, stronger than I was, and essentially impossible to kill by anything even remotely mortal, and was also a veteran warrior who'd had access to some of the best teachers the celestial realms could provide. I should not have been winning anywhere near as easily as I had been. But it was as Ketheric had said - she had weaknesses.
"By taking advantage of the flaws in your fighting style." I lectured her as she rose to her feet and we clashed blades again. I took the initiative this time and she actually parried my first several blows... but then left herself wide open when she went on the counterattack, only to 'die' yet again as I sidestepped her swing and my 'godslaying sword' swung up to 'decapitate' her.
"Ketheric Thorm said the same. But he never condescended to explain what flaws." Aylin said tightly. We reset our positions, but then she lowered her blade when I lowered mine to call for a halt.
"When he first imprisoned you in the soul cage he'd originally subdued you by treachery, yes?" I asked.
"Correct." she nodded. "Some time after Isobel had been killed, he came to me and requested my assistance in dealing with an underground temple of Shar he claimed to have just discovered within his domain. This was before I had known of his fall from grace. When we entered, he struck me from behind after his pet necromancer Balthazar had distracted me with a small horde of his undead."
"So for all of your battle experience, when Shadowheart faced you with the Spear of Night that was the first time - or at least the first time in a long while - that you'd actually faced mortal danger." I continued.
"I presume this is leading somewhere?" she glowered. Aylin was normally relatively even-tempered, but the day she'd had would have tried the patience of a saint. First she'd had divine limitations repeatedly keep her from protecting people precious to her and confronting heinous evils like a congregation of Sharrans or a devil in his own lair. Then she'd consistently lost to me in our sparring sessions-
"Because it shows in how you fight. Except for the all-too-few times you actually remembered what a parry was you left yourself open with every swing. You fight like someone unafraid of harm - and that's exactly what I've been taking advantage of." Her eyes opened wide in realization, and I continued. "You can't die, but your regeneration still only works at a finite rate. I saw how fast you were healing at Moonrise and when we fought Sarevok, and Ketheric had healed notably faster."
"His soul cage had been set up so that it drew upon my life force with reckless abandon, to the point it would temporarily kill me to speed the healing of even his nonlethal wounds." Aylin agreed. "Left to work on its own, my regeneration is somewhat more sedately paced."
"Which means you can still be knocked unconscious by a large enough hit, as we also saw at Moonrise." I nodded. "And that you can still be immobilized for a period of time if your attacker does enough damage to you that you need to regenerate for a while before you can fight again. Plus of course you can still be disarmed, knocked off-balance, all the rest of it. And even if you can't die the people you're trying to protect can, or else the target you're pursuing can get away, or all the rest of it. Death isn't the only way to fail."
"That at least is already more than self-evident." Aylin snorted. "I spent a century in Shar's cage as a consequence of precisely that type of failure."
"But your failure there went deeper than just trusting the wrong person." I agreed. "Take our last exchange - when you actually used some defensive maneuvers you had me almost entirely stalemated. But after just a few parries you went back to just trying to pound me into pulp... and while all-out attacks let you put more power behind a swing, they also telegraph more obviously and leave you wasting that much more energy if you don't connect. You're legitimately skilled with your weapon and are strong and fast enough to beat down most opponents handily, but anybody canny enough to make you come to them and then abuse positioning and feints can take advantage of your linear approach to leave you swinging at air and then hit you back almost anywhere they choose. And even with your regeneration and heavy armor, that simply isn't a winning strategy."
"Then what would you recommend?" Aylin asked.
"To start thinking in different habits. I'm certain you've already been drilled in the maneuvers you'll need, so you simply need to understand why those parts of the warrior's toolkit are necessary and then remember to use them when it counts. So we'll start with a review of how to feint and counter-feint, and then..."
Once I'd finally gotten her to see past the deeply-rooted blind spot in her technique I was amazed at how fast she caught on. Then again, I had no idea how much experience she'd already had before being confined in the Shadowfell for a century - Aylin never hinted at her age, and I had no idea if even Isobel knew exactly how old she really was or how much of that time she'd spent on the Prime. At any rate, our next round of drills rapidly swung to being at least two out of three in her favor and I got a vigorous education in my own martial shortcomings that I hadn't had anyone able to give me for quite some time. By the end of it she was in a much better mood and we'd both gotten some much-needed practice, so we were ready to call it a productive afternoon and go rejoin the others.
"Awww, you guys were having a workout and you didn't invite me?" Karlach said plaintively. "I'd have loved to see how fighting angels differs from fighting devils."
"Hah!" Aylin laughed. "And I should have thought earlier to ask you earlier to share your knowledge of infernal combat with me! I've fought devils before, but never learned from one who had been tutored by them."
"I've created a monster." I faux-bemoaned. "So, has anything significant been happening in the interim?"
"A messenger brought us word from the Harpers in Rivington. There was a ghaik sighting there. A newborn, having just finished undergoing ceremorphosis. They slew it, but not before it had killed several innocents." Lae'zel said grimly.
"Damn." I swore. "Everybody in Baldur's Gate with a tadpole has one of the altered ones the Cult of the Absolute was using. So no one should be undergoing ceremorphosis randomly, but only if the elder brain had deliberately commanded them to. And the Chosen didn't order any conversions - that order would have to have been given before we killed Ketheric at Moonrise, and random illithid attacks in Baldur's Gate were not part of their original strategy of making Gortash look like the hero come to save them."
"The elder brain is either beginning to act erratically or else beginning to act according to purposes not assigned it by the Chosen." Lae'zel agreed grimly. "Either alternative leads to the same conclusion - we are running out of time."
"The problem is that Orin is giving us nothing to work with." I complained. "I'd expected some kind of attack by now. Some sort of spiteful gesture, at least - something by which we could grab one of the doppelgangers and make them talk. As Voss pointed out earlier today, with the Amulet of Lost Voices we'd only need one corpse and one question - where is the Temple of Bhaal?"
"In hindsight, we should have saved one of the doppelganger corpses from those that attacked us underneath the temple of Ilmater in Rivington." Isobel sighed.
"We should have thought to save one from the attack at the Highberry winery." I agreed. "But we'd both thought that this 'Murder Tribunal' we were hot on the trail of at the time was where we'd find Orin, and we didn't find out until too late that we were chasing a false trail."
"Not a false trail, I think." Shadowheart contributed. "If I remember my religious lore correctly, an aspirant of Bhaal would have to face a Murder Tribunal before they would be allowed to even know the location of a true temple of Bhaal. The murder cult is one of the most reviled religious organizations on Faerun, after all - even deities like Shar, Bane, or Lolth have at least some communities in which their worship is openly sanctioned by the authorities. But not even a place like Menzoberranzan can legalize Bhaalite worship, given how murder and chaos are literally sacraments in their religion. The cult needs to safeguard the location of its most sacred sanctums with utmost effort... Jaheira and Minsc could explain what happens the instant the location of one becomes known, if they were here. In addition, unless Orin intended to unseal the sanctum for us herself then we would have been required to go through the Murder Tribunal first regardless of how cleverly we might or might not have tracked down her true location, because we'd still need Sarevok's amulet to enter the temple."
"If Orin wanted us to follow a trail to her, then why was the map that Sarevok was carrying destroyed?" I asked.
"In hindsight?" Gale thought out loud. "I think Sarevok did that himself at the last minute. If it had always been part of Orin's plan for us to get no leads at the Murder Tribunal, then it would have been simpler for him to entirely sanitize the Tribunal of evidence at his leisure. We were intended to find that piece of paper after we searched the place... but I don't think Sarevok knew that Orin was considering him to be expendable or that she actually wanted us to find her."
"He destroyed the map himself as soon as he realized the Tribunal had been penetrated by enemies. It must have been immediately before we entered the room." Shadowheart realized. "He hadn't known that Orin wanted us to go straight to the temple."
"That's... actually not a horrible strategy." I realized. "Gortash had many uncomplimentary things to say about Orin's intelligence, and the glimpse we got of her underneath Moonrise certainly confirms that she's erratic to say the least. But she can't be entirely devoid of cunning or else one of her underlings would already have murdered her by now. So if she doesn't feel confident about setting up some grand intrigue to outwit us with, or successfully infiltrating our own guarded camp, then 'force the inevitable confrontation to occur on my home ground only after I've stacked up everything I possibly can in ambush' is a fairly good plan."
"And the confrontation is inevitable." Wyll agreed. "Gortash, Orin, ourselves... none of the contestants in this race can win without either allying with or taking the Netherstones of the other two. Orin can't avoid us forever any more than we can avoid her - the question is simply how soon, and who comes to who."
"And time does not favor us." Aylin said grimly. "Orin's destruction is as assured as our own if we delay long enough for the elder brain to finish breaking free, but she is a madwoman who delights in the slaughter of innocents while we are virtuous souls trying to save as many people as we can. She is far more likely to - and able to - risk the destruction of Baldur's Gate than we."
"We're back." Jaheira announced as her and Minsc re-entered the room, accompanied by Councilor Florrick. We did our doppelganger checks yet again, and then brought them up to speed on the meeting.
"I managed to infiltrate at least some of the Steel Watch Foundry in wildshape. Your surmise was correct - the Gondian gnomes who build and maintain the Steel Watch are indeed slaves. They are all locked into explosive collars linked to devices that their supervisors carry... and their supervisors are all priests or temple knights of Bane." Jaheira said grimly. "They are being worked at an inhuman pace and under the harshest of conditions."
"Boo was barely able to restrain himself from tearing all the evil slavers apart on the spot." Minsc said furiously. "But that would merely have condemned many innocents to death. In addition to the bomb collars, their families are being held hostage elsewhere. Jaheira overheard this."
"And my own news is scarcely less grave. Wyll, no one has seen your father since Gortash's 'coronation'." Councilor Florrick added. "We are fairly certain that he is still alive, but now that Gortash wields executive power in his own right as Archduke he apparently has no need for a Grand Duke to speak for him."
"They're not keeping him in Wyrm's Rock? Or confined to his own estate?" Wyll asked.
"No." Florrick shook her head. "There are many men still loyal to your father still scattered throughout the Flaming Fist, but few of them remain in sensitive positions. Those positions are now reserved for those Fist that Gortash considers 'reliable' or his own Banites - some secretly, and some openly." She sighed. "So I can tell you where the Grand Duke isn't, but not where he is."
"Gortash hasn't been unsubtle enough to make the threat overtly, but I'm certain that part of his thinking here is to hold my father hostage against us. Or at the very least, against me." Wyll said with a dangerous quietness. "I was present at his first meeting with Hawke, after all - he knows I am working with you."
"We were in Wyrm's Rock prison just the other day." I nodded back at Wyll. "Gortash certainly wasn't holding the Gondian hostages or your father there. He has another prison facility somewhere - a secret one."
"And it must be a very very secure one, given that maintaining control of the Steel Watch is essential to his maintaining control of the city, and his Gondian slaves are essential to maintaining the operations of the Steel Watch." Wyll thought out loud. "It's very doubtful that he has two secret prison facilities with security that he'd trust that deeply. If we can find the Gondian hostages, then we'll find my father there as well."
"And once we find him, Orpheus can break him free of the elder brain's control." I agreed. "He can't do that for everyone we meet, but freeing Minsc was not the limit of his available resources. And with the Grand Duke back in his right mind he'd be in a much better position to regain control of all the un-corrupted Flaming Fist than even Florrick would be."
"Entirely." she agreed. "It's a pity we don't have the faintest idea where this prison might be."
"Worse yet, we may have more problems rescuing anyone from there." Jaheira disagreed. "Another thing that my children turned up in Rivington was a sick and disgusting plot to place smokepowder explosives inside toys being donated to refugee children." She shook her head disgustedly. "Fortunately they discovered this in time in to prevent any casualties. The artificer who was sabotaging the toys was being blackmailed into it under threat of death, so they let him go. But he was able to tell them where he was getting his explosives from - a shop named Felogyr's Fireworks, here in the city."
"Boo and I found many Banite scum lurking there." Minsc grinned. "So we slew them all without mercy and then Jaheira searched the shop for clues."
"I had to set the shop on fire afterwards to cover for him. Gortash isn't supposed to suspect that we're still working against him, after all. Hopefully our dear Archduke will either believe it was an explosives accident or else blame Nine-Fingers' people for it." Jaheira sighed. "The part most relevant to our prison quest was that large shipments of explosives had been manufactured there recently and shipped out on Gortash's direct orders to a secret facility known only by a code-name - for use as a self-destruct system. Now what kind of facility requires a self-destruct system?"
"Normally I'd say one where you're working on something hazardous that you're afraid might break loose - except we already know that Gortash is bold enough to work with infernal engineering and illithid technology right there in the Steel Watch Foundry down on the docks." I said. "So the next most obvious thought is, 'a place full of people that you'd rather be destroyed along with everyone inside rather than risk their recapture'. Such as a secret prison for high-value hostages."
"I agree." Jaheira nodded. "Before we can act against Gortash, we must first disable the Steel Watch. And while that can be done by destroying the control center in the Steel Watch Foundry, unless we are willing to write off a great many innocent lives then before we can do that we must find this secret prison and then find a way to rescue everyone from it - despite Gortash having rigged it to be destroyed on a moment's notice."
"Councilor, we will need you for this. Specifically, we will need your contacts within the Flaming Fist for this." Lae'zel contributed.
"None of them know where this prison facility is. I doubt if even most of Gortash's loyalists do." she replied.
"More military campaigns have failed due to insufficient attention being paid to logistics than have failed due to lack of courage or skill." Lae'zel said firmly. "Unless Gortash has petrified them, the prisoners will still need to eat. Which means that Gortash will need to arrange for regular food shipments out to wherever this place is. But he first has to obtain the food, and where is the easiest place for him to get it from without curious merchants wondering what he is doing with it all?"
"The military supply system." Florrick realized. "The same procurement mechanisms that supply the food to the Flaming Fist garrisons and the prisoners in Wyrm's Rock. And to anticipate your next question, yes, many of the Grand Duke's loyal officers have recently been reassigned from command positions to lower-tier and less well-regarded duties... such as logistics and supply." She grinned. "If there's food shipments being skimmed in sufficient quantities to supply a secret prison, then I'll be able to find out about it and about at least the first step in the chain of deliveries. I'll get started on that right away."
"The next likeliest place for Gortash to have been getting that much food without any obvious backtrail is the gray market - except we just tore the guts out of his 'Stone Lord' organization and the local Zhents, and Nine-Fingers' crew have been gleefully mopping up what's left." Karlach contributed. "So if he had to very recently switch to getting the food out of the Flaming Fist, that'll only make the trail easier for your people to find."
"We can hopefully find the prison that way." Jaheira agreed. "But how do we stop Gortash from blowing it up as soon as we try to rescue anyone?"
"He can't order anything blown up if he's dead." Karlach said emphatically as she mimed drawing the edge of her palm across her neck.
"Have you seen the defenses he's set up around the upper levels of Wyrm's Rock?" I disagreed. "I was in there to see him earlier today. He's got multiple Steel Watchers, clockwork grenade launchers mounted on practically every wall in the place, and multiple layers of his own Banite loyalists. His defenses against Orin slipping in there and murdering him make ours look like an unguarded outhouse, but those same defenses will work equally well against us doing it. The only viable plan I've thought of for taking Gortash requires us to take out Orin first."
"Which requires us to find Orin." Gale observed mildly. "Which project we have been entirely stumped on."
"I think our problem is that we've been planning too well." Shadowheart offered. "We've been so thorough with our precautions to not get the camp attacked or infiltrated by her doppelgangers that Orin is apparently being intimidated from even trying."
"So what you're saying is, we need to start really screwing up to bait her in?" Wyll asked amusedly.
"Why, you got some suggestions?" Karlach teased him.
"I have one." Isobel said. "We need to detach Aylin from guarding our base."
"She's the only one we have who can reliably detect doppelgangers without using spells or potions- of course, that's exactly what you meant." I realized. "Orin's been avoiding making any probes at us here because of our unsleeping, ever-vigilant celestial guardian. So if she's visibly not here?"
"And there is legitimate pastoral work that her and I could be doing." Isobel replied. "Shadowheart told me about her encounter at the Highberry winery. The local Selunite faithful have been scattered, disorganized, and leaderless for far too long. I need to go back to the Outer City and Rivington and make myself available to them, to start organizing them and laying the groundwork to eventually re-establish a temple of the Moonmaiden in Baldur's Gate."
"But what about my parents? And Nocturne?" Shadowheart asked. "Aylin's been the main thing keeping them safe. And you've been helping heal them."
"Your parents have already recovered enough for at least some travel." Isobel reassured her. "And I was thinking that they could come with us. They'll be safer away from the main point of attack and when still with the person that Orin seems to be most afraid of. In addition, your mother and father were experienced lay brethren in the Selunite church in their day and would be of great help to me in community organizing... and it would do Nocturne's rehabilitation much good for her to have a chance to see Selunite worship operate at the grass-roots level for real and not just know the twisted myths and fables Shar's church teaches about us. I'd invite you along as well, except that I know you have even more vital work here."
"But I only just-" Shadowheart began plaintively.
"The earliest I'd imagine us leaving would be tomorrow." Isobel said kindly.
"All right." Shadowheart agreed reluctantly. "I suppose it would be safer for them to not be at the heart of all this."
"While everything Aylin and Isobel said makes sense, I don't think they've entirely thought this through." Wyll disagreed. "Gortash is no true ally, regardless of how affable he is. And we have to force the pace with Orin somehow. Which is why I propose we do this..."
An incredulous sense of shock fell over me as I realized exactly how risky a scheme that Wyll was proposing... as well as how many of my teammates agreed with taking it. While I was of course as aware of the possibility that our alliance with Gortash wasn't going to remain solid for long enough to let us lower the boom on him in the manner we were planning to, that didn't mean I would have chosen this kind of contingency plan to try and head off that possibility.
"You do realize that this idea makes our raid on the House of Hope look sane?" I tried to remonstrate with Wyll. "Even if we've already-"
"Have you forgotten our first meeting with Orpheus?" Wyll came back. "You yourself said that the situation we're in is so desperate that sticking to the prudent approach is simply not going to work. And that's even more true now."
"But that still doesn't mean-" I trailed off. "Nothing I say is going to persuade you otherwise, is it?"
"Given what's at stake? Of course not." Wyll insisted flatly. "The instant Lae'zel's idea about tracing the logistics pans out, we need to start the rescue attempt for my father right away. There's simply no avoiding the necessities of this situation."
"No." I agreed grimly. "There isn't."
Either Gortash had a bit of a blindspot regarding the dangers that humble people serving in obscure positions could potentially pose if you had enough of them, or else Karlach's theory was right that he'd been arranging for food shipments to his secret prison by gray-market means and had only switched to drawing from the Flaming Fist's supply system at the last minute. Once prompted, it only took several hours for Florrick's contacts in the Flaming Fist to turn up the information we needed. The only unaccounted-for shipments of food in sufficient quantities to be supplying a secret prison were all being sent to a waterfront warehouse named Flymm's Cargo. Jaheira's scouting of the building in wildshape late in the afternoon produced the starting revelation that the building was actually a secret docking facility for a gnomish underwater vehicle called a 'submarine'.
She also found a set of schematics in the warehouse's basement that revealed that Gortash's secret prison was in an underwater base called the 'Iron Throne' - which amazingly enough had a century ago been the headquarters of Sarevok. The city of Baldur's Gate had celebrated that victory by having several dozen mages pool their powers to drop his iron tower into the middle of the bay, and a century later Gortash had come along with his technological mastery and resealed at least a portion of the tower, pumped out the water, and turned it into an underwater prison facility. It was more than a bit over-elaborate but it couldn't be denied that such a place would truly deserve the term "escape proof" - nobody was getting out of there unless they could spontaneously grow gills. Not unless they were rescued from the outside - but no such attempt could possibly be made without alerting Gortash and having him immediately trigger the self-destruct systems.
Which set of facts had not deterred Wyll and Karlach from making a dramatic self-assigned stealth run in the dead of night on Flymm's Cargo, determined to steal the submarine and get his father and the Gondian hostages out of the Iron Throne before Gortash could react. To all appearances they were betting everything on the simple assumption that Gortash could not react in time to the theft if he were asleep... as if we hadn't already seen that the Steel Watch had the ability to broadcast alerts across their entire technological network in real time. Which would mean whatever alarms were on the submarine and the Iron Throne facility would have the same capability.
In addition to the other reason that their attempt tonight was doomed to failure.
"Come on." Wyll whispered to Karlach urgently as he broke through the lock on the warehouse door with one of his warlock blasts. Since Captain Flymm was at present getting drunk and frolicsome at the Blushing Mermaid tavern and wouldn't be back for several hours, he apparently didn't feel that he needed stealth. There were several vicious guard dogs in the warehouse - Jaheira had had a hard time sneaking around them earlier - but Wyll and Karlach made short work of them. Everything was going relatively smoothly for them...
... until Shadowheart and I stepped out of Flymm's office to confront them.
"I thought I'd told you not to try this." I glowered at Wyll. "You're ruining the entire alliance I went to so much trouble to negotiate. The one you agreed with!"
"I never agreed to anything." Wyll said evenly. "I just knew when to hold my tongue."
"There's a first." Shadowheart said archedly. "So this is it? This is your entire plan? Force an open break with Gortash so we can be hunted by both sides simultaneously?"
"We gave you your chance." Karlach spat. "But all you've done is sit around and get us nowhere! We're taking matters into our own hands-"
"Oh, Karlach." Gortash's voice boomed out in a broadcast from a nearby speaker. "And here I thought your escape from Avernus meant that you'd finally learned the value of patience."
"GORTASH!" she screamed. "COME ON OUT AND FIGHT, YOU COWARD!"
"That would be difficult to do when I'm not even here." his voice said smarmily... as the Steel Watcher he was broadcasting his voice through, and getting a visual feed through the eyes of, came around the outside corner of the building accompanied by a handpicked team of his Banite servants. "Although I am still able to participate more than well enough via these proxies."
"Give it up, you two!" I begged them. "You put down your weapons and get back in line, Gortash is willing to call this no harm no foul. He understands that people can get a bit... restless... at times. But this is your last chance."
"Restless!" Wyll spat in outrage. "Is that what you call someone who refuses to let his father remain a hostage? Restless?"
"I actually thought I could trust you." Karlach spat at me. "But I guess you're just like everyone else - you want it the easy way, and you'll sell out anyone you have to to get it. Shadowheart, I can't believe you're sticking with him. Hell, I can't believe his paladin oath is surviving intact!"
"I'm keeping my word to our ally, just as I promised." I said firmly.
"And I'm... doing what I have to, for the greater good." Shadowheart said sadly. "Please don't fight. It's still not too late-"
"Go to hell!" Wyll spat... and his eldritch blast struck with repelling force, doing his best to send me flying back into the wall and render me helpless. Karlach drew her sword with lightning speed and charged Shadowheart with a berserker yell, only to be hit with her Hold Person spell before she could even get halfway there. I shrugged off Wyll's attempt to knock me down with a quick invocation of Bulwark stance and stepped forward to engage him in melee-
And the Steel Watcher under Gortash's control immediately escalated the fight to a deathmatch by using its built-in giant crossbow to impale the helpless Karlach with one of its cut-down ballista bolts. Wyll completely lost his head as soon as she died, and while he did some damage the fact remained that I was simply far too heavily armored for him to defeat in close-combat without his magic, and my own templar powers nullified everything he could cast at me except for his first surprise attack. He died with his eyes full of pain at my betrayal, but he did die.
"Well done, Hawke-" Gortash's voice began to congratulate me, only to fall silent as I rounded on the Steel Watcher in a rage.
"Don't!" I spat. "I did not enjoy this, not one damned bit, and I'm not going to pretend that I did! Both of them were friends!"
"It's always distressing to know that one's trust has been so callously violated, I entirely agree." Gortash tried to sympathize. "Still, I must commend your... commitment."
"I didn't make an alliance with you because I thought I had the slightest chance of winning without one." I growled. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to celebrate this."
"I wouldn't expect you to." Gortash agreed. "But now we must concentrate on practical matters. My people can discreetly dispose of their corpses - they'll both be in sealed barrels on the bottom of the bay within the hour. But how do you propose to explain their absence to the others?"
"Isobel and Aylin would never countenance what happened here tonight, but they're too powerful to casually discard. Fortunately, neither of them is the sort of person who'd ever figure this out without a direct prompt. I'll just detach them to go take care of the refugees in Rivington and start building up support among local Selunites - that'll keep them occupied for a couple of days, during which two of our comrades will tragically go missing-presumed-murdered at the hands of the Bhaalites." I reported. "And Jaheira and Minsc are already out and away from our core group out trying to track down Orin's people, they're hardly going to put less effort into that job once we blame Orin for Wyll's and Karlach's disappearances. Gale and Lae'zel are fully onboard with Shadowheart and myself regarding the necessity of what we did tonight. They're both very practical people."
"Then as distressing as this security breach could have been, I do believe we can deem it satisfactorily contained. You did well to warn me when you suspected that some of your people were going to violate your arrangement. Now I can be certain that you will take your responsibilities seriously." Gortash said professionally. "And that's the only way this is ever going to work."
"I've got to get back and start setting up the cover story for the others. Your clean-up crew can handle everything here. Orin's been laying very uncharacteristically low for the past several days, but she's not going to idle around forever." I said grimly.
"Certainly not." Gortash agreed, and Shadowheart and I departed for Jaheira's house, our faces set in grim expressions and barely holding back our nausea on what we'd been forced to do tonight.
"Come on in." Jaheira said as she ushered us down into the hidden cave underneath her house. "Judging from your expressions, I don't need to ask you how it went."
"Gortash fell for it hook, line, and sinker." Shadowheart said tiredly. "Helping him ambush and kill Wyll and Karlach to preserve the security of his private little torture prison was exactly the sort of moral compromise he was hoping to lead Hawke into. He's gotten everything he wanted out of our alliance except Orin's head - and now that we're committed, he has no misgivings about our willingness to work with him to eventually deliver it."
"Or about helping him take over the world afterwards." I sighed. "Meanwhile, Orin will see that we're scattered and vulnerable, and that we're clearly allying with Gortash. If that doesn't push her, nothing will."
"Now she will feel the time pressure more desperately than we, as opposed to the reverse." Jaheira agreed. "And all it cost was two deaths."
"I still can't believe they volunteered for that." Shadowheart said.
"Well, they were two of the three of us who'd actually been resurrected before." I tried to point out logically.
"And I was the third, and I'd still be terrified to risk it!" Shadowheart demurred. "Oh, and speaking of-"
"Thou need not worry." Withers spoke calmly as his presence was suddenly felt. "Thy comrades will be returned to thee within the hour. We need but wait until Gortash's servants hath finished disposing of their bodies, so that their sudden disappearance doth not reveal your scheme."
"And then they will both be free to work against Gortash from the shadows. And so long as they remain magically disguised, none of their activities will even begin to make Gortash suspect we are setting up his eventual downfall - after all, he knows they're both dead." Jaheira grinned. "So their activities will be blamed on anyone else other than us. And your willingness to turn in several of your own people and help Gortash kill them to enforce discipline-"
"It's like murdering someone for a gang initiation, only thanks to resurrection magic you can undo the murder later." I shook my head. "I still say Wyll's idea was crazy."
"Entirely. But it's the sort of crazy that's going to work." Shadowheart said admiringly. "He's really come a long way from the dashing swordsman who you had to drill in basic formation fighting, hasn't he?"
"All of us have." I agreed with her. "But we've still got a ways to go."
Author's Note: I got stuck on a viable next move for our heroes for ages, hence the delay in getting this chapter out. And Orin still isn't cooperating with me in setting up a satisfying climax, but at least we've gotten a step closer to delivering one.
But yeah, just because Gortash made an alliance doesn't mean he trusts them yet. Of course, given what just happened, he certainly trusts Hawke a lot more now. As the old saying goes, a hungry man thinks all men are hungry, a covetous man thinks all men covet...and a ruthless user thinks all men ruthlessly use. It always helps to show people exactly what they're expecting to see.
Lae'zel got a good moment in this chapter of being the first person to solve the problem by remembering logistics - but then again, she does have the most sophisticated military training out of anyone in the group and has been having it since she was a small child, the githyanki being the highly militaristic society of dimensional Klingon expies that they are. Hawke substantially beats her out in actual field experience, but she's the one who's been in a military academy since she was like six.
But it's Wyll that gets the stroke of genius in this chapter... and I wasn't even originally planning on him doing so, even when I thought up this crazy idea. And then the conversation started flowing all by itself, and voila.
In-game, Hope really does stay behind in the House of Hope and there's no dialogue option to move her off of it. But at least she remains alive and un-reconquered by devils even all the way through the game's epilogue, so that's something.
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lancelot
Grand High Poobah
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I've only gotten a little into the teen chapters, mostly a combination of a lack of time, and wanting to do a full play through as I've been waiting for the last major patches before doing my run. I've got too much of a back log to reply even BG3 multiple times. Even then I've liked what I've read and I'm glad you fully gotten back into the swing of writing.
One thing I am shocked by is that with damn near ever character thirsty as fuck, this isn't in NSFW. I mean sure without the vampy manslut that's like 80% less fuck anything that moves in the story. But that 20% still covers a lot when there are several combinations that are willing to share Tav in order to get dicked down, at least if I've heard correctly they ask you to choose between towards the end for a more serious relationship.
cliffc999
Connoisseur.
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When I started this I had a vague long-range plan of mirroring it to SB once I finished it, so this is the PG version.
Matrix Dragon
Getting sticky.
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Flamboyant, reckless, crazy... Yeah, that's Wyll.
Mizu
Software Developer
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That's a sneaky way to break into the underwater base. Just use people who Gortash believes are solidly dead already, and he "knows" you don't have resurrection magic to pull this ploy on him.
Dunno how they'll deal with the bombs, admittedly.
Dunno how they'll deal with the bombs, admittedly.