Shadows of Amn

Abdel held the point of the stake over the last remaining fragment of Bodhi's heart.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

She felt the stake go in, heard something that might have been dry leaves blowing over stone, and there was nothing.

Finally.

Jaheira was about to turn and go back to the lean-to when a blast of hot air blew her off her feet.

She slid to a stop through a bed of dried leaves and came to rest pushed up against the sprawled form of Yoshimo.

"By the long departed," the Kozakuran exclaimed, "she exploded!"

Jaheira got to her feet, ignored her shaking knees, and took one step toward the lean-to before looking up. When she did look up, what she saw made her stop in her tracks.

The shelter was gone—apparently consumed by what looked like a whirlpool of gray, black, and silver smoke. The whirlpool was standing on end, perpendicular to the ground. A man stepped out through the whirling winds still pouring out of the gate as if he was strolling into a friendly tavern for a night of play. He saw Jaheira and smiled.

"Irenicus!" Jaheira sneered.

The necromancer didn't answer, just leaned down, his feet still lost in the whirling magical clouds. He rose with something in his hand—an arm, thin and pale. It was Imoen's arm.

A spell came to Jaheira's mind, and she started her prayer, ru

Irenicus spared her an unconcerned glance before scooping the rest of Imoen's limp form into his arms and simply stepping back.

Jaheira's spell drew to a close the exact moment Irenicus and Imoen faded from sight. A bolt of lightning, easily as big around as Jaheira was tall, crashed into the magical gateway, and Jaheira closed her eyes against the blinding flash. Her hair stood on end, and her skin crawled.

Yoshimo said something in a language Jaheira didn't understand, and she opened her eyes.

The whirlpool was gone, and so were Irenicus and Imoen.

"More than one problem solved," Yoshimo mumbled, "I should say."

Jaheira collapsed to the ground and slammed her fist into the uncaring earth.

Abdel fell more than walked down the stairs into the basement. He was covered in freezing gore and nearly blind with a crushing load of guilt and self-loathing. He found a barrel of water and ripped it open with his bare hands. He spilled it over himself and was immediately drenched. He rubbed the blood off his skin as best he could; his need to be cleaned of Bodhi's gore far outweighing his need to retrieve the pieces of the Ry

She'd told him where it was, and he'd killed her—mission accomplished. Abdel knew that back in Tethir, if they knew, they'd be cheering, reveling in their chance to defeat Irenicus. Abdel still wanted to care, but at this exact moment and in this exact place, he couldn't. All he wanted to do right now was go back—crawl back if he had to—to Candlekeep and just hide himself away. Here was more blood spilled because he was the son of Bhaal. More blood and more and more. He could just stay in Candlekeep, behind the walls, in the monastery. What better place? Who better than the monks to find some way to rip this curse out of him or kill him trying?

He looked at himself, and there was still so much blood on him. He saw the water from the barrel ru

Imoen.

They could go back to Candlekeep together.

Abdel stood and walked purposefully to the trapdoor. He opened it without hesitation. The lanthorn would solve two problems. One more immediate than the other.

He dumped the soil out of Bodhi's casket and heard metal clatter on the wood as the jagged pieces dropped to the dirt floor. Abdel scooped them up in his big, bloodstained hands, and, just as Elhan's mages had promised him they would, the fragments caused a teleport to activate, and the root cellar was gone in a flash of blue light.

Chapter Twenty-Two

"I want to. ." Imoen whispered, her mind a violent haze of fast-approaching hell, "go … home."

She was stretched, magically sedated, across a huge, broken, jagged-edged slab of green-traced marble in the middle of a city elves now long-dead once called Myth Rhy

A ring of elven statues, twice as tall as a real elf, surrounded the slab. The space might once have been a garden or a cemetery. The wind-worn faces of the marble elves looked down at both Imoen and Jon Irenicus with a detached calm no real person of any race could have mustered in that place at that time.

Irenicus himself gagged on his own bile and stepped back. He lost his voice to the shock, revulsion, and twisted, freakish pleasure of the sight of his last desperate hope coming to fruition. He'd chanted himself raw, and his begging with the Weave, with gods whose names no one spoke anymore—to whatever forces would listen—had been answered.

"Yes," he whispered, his voice no more than a painful squeak. "Yes. Change!"

Imoen screamed, and it was the last sound she made as a human. Her face changed first.

There was a loud sound like fabric ripping and the skin of Imoen's pretty, young, smooth-cheeked face fell away in ragged, blood-soaked ribbons. Under it her skull turned the color of old limestone and popped and ground into a different shape with each passing second. Her teeth grew and thi

The thing that had been Imoen grew—in one sudden, undulating roll—into a pale gray monstrosity that sprouted thornlike spikes from its back so fast and with such urgency that it was almost flipped off the marble slab.

"Bhaal. ." Irenicus whispered, his face a twisted rictus of shock and triumph. "It is you…. It is you…."

The bulb on the end of the quivering arm broke open even as a second arm unfurled itself from the growing beast. The hand that bulb had formed had more fingers than Irenicus could easily count. The fingers were set on the long, rectangular palm at angles and with joints placed so that it looked like no hand ever seen on Faerun. The fingers grew long, curved talons, which shone in the dawn's light in a way that revealed their razor sharp edges.

"The Ravager," Irenicus gasped. "The Ravager awakens."

Another arm exploded out of the writhing mass, then a fourth, the bulbs breaking off to reveal three more multifingered, razor-taloned hands. The Ravager screamed out its birth agony, and Irenicus fell to the gravel, pushed back by the sheer force of the thing's concussive wail. The legs that had once been Imoen's exploded outward and with loud, sickening slapping sounds, bent backward then forward again as new joints formed.