DARK ROOM, DARK SECRET
EFFRON PACED THE VAST DOCKS OF BALDUR’S GATE AS HE HAD EVERY morning for more than a month now. He found himself at a loss—the boat should have been in to port soon after his arrival. Every day he came down here; every day he asked every dockhand he could find who would take a few moments to speak with him.
Nothing.
No word of Minnow Skipper, and looking out at the vast, dark water rolling before him this rainy day, it was not hard for Effron to imagine that the boat had been lost to this inhospitable environ known as the Sword Coast. In fact, this particularly dreary morning, the warlock was certain of it.
The ocean had taken her, and all aboard, likely, or some sea devils or a great shark or whale or kraken even, had splintered her hull and pulled her under to feast on the crew.
If he was right, then his mother was dead, and his purpose in life had run into an abrupt end.
Or maybe his mood was a result of the weather and not some reasonable conclusion. The air felt heavy this day, though spring fast raced toward summer.
Effron dismissed that superficial notion. The weather might not be helping, but this was not nearly as abrupt an ending as it seemed. This morning came as a logical conclusion of his building dread. For two tendays now, Effron had been fighting a nagging feeling that they were gone, swallowed by the sea, and that his perspective on life—on his own life—was about to dramatically shift.
He had wanted her dead. He had wanted to kill her.
Now he was an orphan. Now his dream had been realized, but the taste, so suddenly, seemed not so sweet.
“Damn you,” he whispered under his breath as he paced the massive quayside of this impressive port city. Those were the only words he spoke, not even bothering to inquire of the dockhands if any had seen or heard a whisper of Minnow Skipper’s approach.
There was no point.
And perhaps, he feared, there was no point to much of anything, any more than asking empty questions of dockhands in Baldur’s Gate.
He walked slowly, his dead arm a pendulum behind his back. The moisture around his eyes was more than the drizzle of the heavy and humid day.
For so many years, he had tried to prove himself to his father. He could never become the warrior Herzgo Alegni would have preferred, obviously, with his shoulder and arm useless and a dozen other less obvious or garish infirmities wreaking his fragile form. But still he had tried, every day and in every plausible way. Was there a warlock in the Shadowfell of his power anywhere near his age? He had overheard comments that not even Draygo Quick had been as advanced as Effron was now until he had passed his fortieth birthday, though Effron was barely half that age.
He had lived his life with daring and discipline, and even the lords of Netheril had taken note of him at times.
Had any of that made Herzgo Alegni proud?
Effron honestly didn’t know. If so, his brutish tiefling father had never revealed it, and even on those few occasions when a word or glance from Herzgo Alegni might have been taken as fatherly pride, hard experience had taught Effron to view them more as manipulation than anything else, as if the self-absorbed Herzgo Alegni was boosting Effron’s morale because he wanted to get something more out of him.
Effron considered the possibility that he had no deeper feelings for Herzgo than he had for Dahlia.
Ah, Dahlia. For Effron, she was the rub, the ultimate pain, the desperate question, the ever-nagging doubt.
She had thrown him from a cliff.
His mother had rejected him, utterly, and had thrown him from a cliff.
How could she do that?
How he hated her!
How he desired to murder her!
How he needed her.
He could not wrap his thoughts comfortably around the emotions assailing him from every direction that dreary day. Now, on these docks this morning, he accepted the reality that she was gone, and the waves coming at him from opposite directions rolled and rose, crested and collided in the middle of his consciousness.
“Ha!” came a cry as he walked past one pair of older men, one with a mop, the other wearing a pair of hand gaffs for unloading sacks of grain.
“I told ye today’d be the day the ugly one didn’t ask!” continued the gaff-armed gaffer, and he let loose a squeal of laughter.
“Are you mocking me?” the dour Effron asked.
“Nah, devil-boy, he’s just laughing at his own prognostication,” the man with the swab replied. “He said yerself wouldn’t ask about Minnow Skipper today.”
“And pray tell how he would know that?”
“Because today’s the day word’s come in,” said the gaffer, and he laughed again, though it sounded more like a cackling cough. “She’s out there, north and west. Tide’s bad and wind’s wrong, but her sails might dot the horizon before sun’s to setting. Either way, she’ll slide in tomorrow.”
Effron tried to hold steady, but he knew that he was shaking, for he could feel the increasing movement of his dead arm. “How do you know? Tell me. Tell me!”
The other fellow lifted his mop and pointed it at a boat that had just come in, obviously, for her crew was still at work and hadn’t come ashore. “They seen her trailing these last three days. Flying Kurth’s flag. Luskan boat, that one there, and they’re knowing Minnow Skipper.”
Effron looked blankly at the other boat, but inside, his mind cascaded along avenues thought lost. Dahlia. Likely aboard, and almost surely alive.
Dahlia, who had the answers to the questions Effron most feared and most needed to hear.
Only then did it occur to him that his impatience, which had brought him to the docks these last days, might now dearly cost him.
“Listen to me,” he said intently to the pair. “There’s coin in this for you. Gold coin.”
“Keep talking,” said the man with the mop.
“I would know who comes off that boat,” Effron explained. “And I would not have them know that I have asked.”
“Gold coin?” asked the gaffer.
“Gold coins,” Effron assured him. “More coins than the fingers of both your hands and both his hands.
“Look for a dark elf, and a female elf beside him,” Effron explained.
“Female drow?”
“No, just the male.”
“Lots of elves about. How’re we to know it’s her?”
“You’ll know,” Effron promised, his gaze inexorably drifting back to the empty waters to the northwest, as if expecting the sails to appear at any moment. “You’ll know.”