Shadows of Amn

When the chanting started, Imoen was more irritated than afraid. It wasn't an entirely pleasant sound. It went on for what seemed like days, was surely hours. They moved her cage, and all she could do was twist in it, trying to stay out of their reach and unbalance the cage at the same time. She wasn't very heavy, so she couldn't unbalance anything. The men who were helping Irenicus were mad—every last one of them just raving lunatics—and they smelled awful. Some of them looked at her with undisguised lust in their eyes, and she couldn't help but be impressed with herself that she managed to keep from vomiting.

They put her close to Abdel—close enough that she knew if he'd just wake up, he'd be able to save them all. She was aware of the first few minutes of the ritual. There was a sound—chanting, mumbling, muttering, and murmuring—and light, heat, and rending, searing pain. Imoen remembered hearing herself cry out, then she burst into laughter, then collapsed into tears.

Irenicus said something like, "It's happening. It's really happening."

Imoen's vision blurred, turned yellow, then became more acute. She saw details in the stone but couldn't understand what she was seeing. It was a crack in one brick in the far corner of the room, or some enormous canyon seen from miles in the sky. Irenicus laughed, and her vision went yellow again. She heard Abdel roar, and her body flushed and turned warm, wet, then tightened.

All sense disappeared all at once, and she was aware of only one thing. She wanted to kill. She lusted for it. Death. Murder. Pain.

She wanted to find the one person most valuable, most beloved to all people, and she wanted to kill it—kill him—kill her. She wanted to make someone cry. She wanted to feel hot meat twist in her fingers while the victim—her victim—screamed and writhed in her grip. She wanted blood to spray into her face, into her mouth, across her breasts and all over her body. She wanted to submerge herself in gore and bathe in screams.

She screamed herself into an impenetrable darkness behind her eyes. It was one word, a word that had never meant anything to her: "Father!"

Her voice was all wrong; her body felt all wrong. She heard something that might have been a lion or a dragon or the God of Murder scream in incoherent rage and agony next to her, and the sound empowered her. Her hands were bigger now—everything was bigger now, and the cage couldn't contain her—she didn't even remember she was in a cage.

A man's voice said,"… too much," then "… too fast, I can't. ." and there was a series of wet popping sounds that made Imoen sigh in twisted, evil pleasure, and she raged out of her cage with speed she knew she couldn't really be capable of.

A tiny voice like a child's coo in the wilderness came to her, and she recognized it as her own.

"What have I become?" she asked herself, and the thing that she had become set that question aside to instead savor the taste of an asylum inmate's head. The brain exploded in her mouth, and it was good.

Through the wild yellow haze, she saw a flash of light, then heard someone say, "He left us! He—" and she was feeding again, and the blood was hot and perfect, and she wanted more, more, more!

Chapter Eleven

Jaheira sat in a corner and tried to stop screaming. It took her nearly an hour.

She had seen things like that before—subtle variations of spells that change the shape, the essence or appearance of a person. She herself had undergone similar transformations, taking on the shape of animals as part of her training as a druid. Spells did not shock her. The u

Gods had walked the very real ground of the world around her. She herself had visited some of those places. Gods were real. She felt Mielikki's power course through her on many occasions and knew how to call upon the will of the goddess to do amazing, beautiful things.

What she witnessed was neither amazing or beautiful. It was simply wrong.

Abdel and Imoen had been turned into monsters.

Jaheira didn't like that word: monsters. It was disrespectful. What made one creature an animal and another a monster? Were monsters animals that were new, threatening, or dangerous to people? Monsters behaved like animals, didn't they? When they were hungry, they ate. Calling something a monster made it easier to kill. She hated calling anything a monster, but that was what Irenicus had created in this underground hell of his. Monsters. These creatures were abominations—things outside nature.

He'd done it on purpose, Irenicus. The ritual was designed to transform them. He'd done it on purpose, but Jaheira could see—even Irenicus's own insane henchmen could see—that he had gone too far somehow. He'd made these things out of Abdel and Imoen, but he couldn't control them.

Animals kill everyday, to eat or to protect themselves or their young. It was part of Mielikki's grace—the natural order of things. This was different. These things killed out of the pure joy of it—an evil sort of pleasure nothing natural could ever experience.

So Irenicus made these things and watched in surprise when they escaped their cages and killed his servants. He'd mumbled a quick spell and disappeared seconds before the thing that had been Abdel could rip him apart.

They killed the madmen, then started to turn back to their normal selves. It didn't happen all at once. The evil force relinquished control slowly and with great reluctance. Jaheira knew she was alive only by sheer luck. She knew Abdel loved her and would never willingly see any harm come to her, but he had been completely transformed, and that love couldn't have protected her—it couldn't have been that. It had to have been luck.

When they came back to normal and got her out of the cage, the first thing they did was get out of the room. They were in a madhouse on an island off the coast of Athkatla—Abdel told them that much—but the place was a seemingly endless maze of passages and rooms, chambers and corridors, and they were lost right away. It was the worst place Jaheira had ever been and even with a restored, normal, though tired and confused Abdel at her side, she was afraid of what she might find around every corner.

The only thing she could think of besides that fear was a simple question: why not me? Irenicus had transformed Abdel and Imoen but why not her too? Maybe she was next, and Irenicus had been scared away before he could get to her. Abdel and Imoen had been turned with the same ritual though, so why not her too? Two at a time? Was that a limitation of the ritual spell? Or was there something else? Abdel had the blood of the dead God of Murder in his veins. It was easy enough to assume that had something to do with it, but what about Imoen?

What was going on, and why was this man doing all this? Why would anyone make some monster even he couldn't control? Why?

"I was hoping you would know," Abdel answered.

Jaheira almost laughed and looked away.

"I just want out of here, all right?" Imoen said, holding her own shaking arms close to her quivering body.

"I don't even want to know what's going on here anymore," Abdel admitted. "I don't want to know what he was supposed to gain from doing whatever he did to us. If we find him, I'll kill him myself. If we don't, that's fine with me as long as we get out of this madhouse and back to Baldur's Gate. I want to live some kind of life eventually, damn it."