Shadows of Amn

"The drow of Ust Natha have stolen my eggs," Adalon said. "I want them back."

Abdel sighed and took a step back from her. "This is madness. This is all madness."

"Eggs?" Jaheira asked. "You have … eggs?"

"So I could tell you I was a dragon, and you wouldn't believe me, druid?" Adalon asked, a wry smile playing at the sides of her lips. "Come back this way, where there's more room."

With that the girl turned away and slipped behind an outcropping of rock, disappearing from view. Jaheira made to follow her, but Abdel held out a hand to stop her.

"Please tell me you're not going with her," he said. "If this isn't a trap, I'm—"

"Give it a rest, Abdel," Imoen said wearily, passing them both and following the mysterious girl.

Jaheira offered Abdel a defeated smile and slipped past his hand. From around the corner there was a sound like leather being scraped against stone, but the sound was loud enough that it might have been a whole army clad in leather armor crawling across the floor.

"You're going to walk into a dragon's lair," Abdel said to Jaheira's receding back, "at the very least."

"And if I wanted to kill you, Son of Bhaal," Adalon's voice rumbled from around the corner, "you'd be dead already." Her voice was louder, deeper—the same but somehow larger.

Abdel followed Imoen and Jaheira. As he came around the outcropping, he almost ran into Jaheira's back. Before he could say anything, he looked up and saw the reason the half-elf had come to such a complete stop.

To say that the dragon was the biggest living thing Abdel had ever seen would have been a tragic understatement. He'd seen smaller castles.

The thing's body reflected Imoen's torchlight a thousandfold. Her skin was silver, polished to a high sheen, rippling with muscles and tightly woven scales. The palpable sense of power that washed out from the thing effectively paralyzed all three of the tiny little people who stood before her. Adalon was a creature of godlike beauty.

"You will save Suldanessellar," her voice washed through the cavern from a throat eight times as long as Abdel was tall. "I will give you the way into Ust Natha. You will find my eggs and return them to me. You will defeat the plans of Irenicus there and stop the drow army from invading the glens of Tethir. You will return to me, and I will lead you out of this godsforsaken hole in the ground. You will confront Irenicus and regain your soul from him if it leads you to Hell. You know you never had any choice, Abdel Adrian, Son of Bhaal, Pawn of Evil, Tool of Good."

"I know," Abdel whispered. "I know."

The dragon reared up, and all three of them stepped back instinctively.

"You won't get into Ust Natha looking like that," the dragon said.

The massive creature intoned a string of unintelligible syllables, and Abdel's arms twitched with the desire to attack the thing before whatever spell it was casting managed to burn him to cinders. At the end of the string of arcane words, the dragon waved a huge silver-taloned claw over their heads, and Abdel felt his skin crawl. The sensation was more than a little unsettling.

He looked down at himself expecting to see insects covering his skin, but what he saw was actually more disturbing than that. His skin had turned the color of obsidian. He looked over at Jaheira, who was looking at her own arms. She'd turned black too, and her ears, once gently pointed, were now needle-sharp on top. Her hair had turned white and her eyes violet. Imoen was looking down her own shirt, her brow wrinkled and black as night.

"That's.. " Imoen said. "That's just…"

"You'll look like drow, sound like drow, be able to understand the language of the drow," the dragon said confidently (she said everything confidently). "You'll have access to the city… but only for a short time. The spell will wear off in—"

"This is so bad," Abdel said. "This is insane. We all belong back in that madhouse."

"Abdel…" Jaheira said, a warning tone in her voice.

Abdel sighed, thought for a second about being quiet, going along with the whole thing as Jaheira obviously wanted him to do.

"No," he said, turning his back on the dragon, "this is ridiculous. Why would we ever do this? We're going to just stroll into a drow city … a drow city. . because we happen to run into a dragon who tells us we should, so we can defeat the plans of someone who, as far as we're concerned, has already been defeated. We're together. I got what I wanted. So this Irenicus is going to attack some elf town I'm not welcome in anyway. That sounds more like their problem than mine."

"Abdel," Jaheira said, her voice impatient but gentle, "I know you don't really believe that. You can't let Irenicus have his way with i

"And what about all this Bhaal stuff?" Imoen asked. "You think it's all right that we just sort of turn into mindless murdering monsters from time to time?"

"There is very little time for—" the dragon started.

"So you think he's going to just reverse that if we find him?" Abdel asked. "He probably wouldn't even know how to if we could somehow convince him to do it. I'm not even convinced it was any of his doing. My blood has betrayed me in more ways than that, with very little outside help."

Abdel turned on Jaheira and said, "You wanted me to change, so I've changed. Now you want me to go off on a mission of vengeance. We follow Irenicus to this elf town, then what? Kill him? Ask him to reverse that ritual? Beg him to?"

"I'll be more than happy to kill him," Imoen offered, "if you don't want to."

Abdel crouched and put his head in his hands. "So let's kill him, but do we have to—"

He didn't see the dragon pull in a deep, full breath, but he stopped talking when a blast of freezing cold air actually picked him up and blew him off his feet. There was a series of screams from deeper in the cavern. Abdel rolled to his feet, bits of white frost falling off him like snowflakes. He spun in the direction of the screams and saw half a dozen figures quite literally frozen in place, ice hanging from them and pieces of them already snapping off under their own weight. Behind them, another half dozen figures scattered among the stalactites. The torchlight was dim, but it didn't take Abdel more than a second to realize the figures were drow.

Chapter Fifteen

Abdel had seen hundreds of people killed in hundreds of ways, but seeing the silver dragon Adalon rage through the drow was unlike anything he'd ever imagined.

The enormous creature moved forward as fast as a lizard a thousandth its size. She shattered the six frozen drow on her way through, and Abdel could only jump aside and get out of her way.

The sound of crossbows firing echoed through the cavern, and Abdel thought he saw at least one thin quarrel skip off one of Adalon's shining silver scales, but the dragon didn't flinch in the slightest. He heard a number of swords drawn, and that reminded him to draw his own. Seeing the coal black color of his skin as it passed across his face made him pause.

Adalon picked up one drow warrior—a man in glittering chain mail—and squeezed so hard his eyes popped out before he died a bloody, bone-shattered wreck. Adalon tossed him to the floor of the cavern in a splatter of gore that made one of his companions leap aside.

Something like a fireball or some other kind of obviously magical fire exploded near the dragon's head, but she just brushed it off and flicked aside the drow who'd cast the spell. The impotent mage hit the wall of the cavern hard enough to crack his head like an egg.

Abdel looked up into the crowd of quickly scattering drow and saw one of them turn from the dragon. The drow made eye contact with Abdel, and Abdel turned toward the passing foot of the great dragon to make as if to slash at it as it passed him. Something told Abdel he wouldn't have cut through the thing's silver scales anyway, but the illusion seemed to work. When he glanced back at the drow, he was nodding as he turned to run.