Dahlia walked into the tavern with a sour look on her face, not expecting to find her prey, since she had already visited several of these establishments in this area of Baldur’s Gate. Truly the city overwhelmed the elf’s sensibilities. She had been to Luskan several times, of course, and had grown up in the cities of Thay, and had even visited mighty Waterdeep on one occasion, but now that she was exploring Baldur’s Gate, the energy and commotion of the place overwhelmed her.
She certainly had no idea of just how many taverns and inns and assorted emporiums, often with apartments up above, would line every street. When she and Drizzt had broken away from the others, Dahlia had never imagined that locating Artemis Entreri would prove so trying an ordeal.
So she entered the tavern expecting nothing, her hopes sinking to emptiness.
The crowd parted before her, a coincidental shift in two separate groups of merchant sailors offered her a wider view of the place, and there he was, sitting alone at a small table in the far corner of the room.
Dahlia hesitated—he hadn’t seen her, she believed—and she considered her course. There would be no turning back now, she reminded herself.
She strode across the room. One man popped up in front of her, offered a wicked smile and a hungry expression, but she eased him aside with her walking stick, and when he resisted, she froze him with a look so cold that the blood drained from his face.
No one else intercepted her.
Entreri took note of her and leaned back in his chair.
“Imagine my surprise at seeing you here,” she said, taking the seat across from him.
“Yes, imagine. Where’s Drizzt?”
“I do not know, and I do not care.”
Entreri gave a little laugh. “After a month at sea? And with more months at sea before us? I would have expected you two to … catch up.”
“More months at sea before us?” Dahlia scoffed.
Entreri looked at her as if he didn’t understand.
“You said that Baldur’s Gate would be your last stop,” Dahlia reminded him, “that you would not be returning to Luskan with Minnow Skipper.”
Entreri shrugged as if it didn’t matter. He lifted his glass and took a deep swallow.
“So you are continuing on with us to Luskan?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Dahlia sighed at the man’s ever-cryptic offerings. She glanced around, irritated almost as much as she had been when she left Drizzt back in the room. “Where is that barmaid?”
Entreri laughed, drawing her gaze back to him.
“No server,” he explained, and motioned over to Dahlia’s right. “Bar’s over there.”
“Well, go buy me some feywine.”
“Unlikely.”
Dahlia started to glare at him, but let it go and rushed from her seat, pushing impatiently through the talking patrons. One started to protest, even to threaten her, but he looked past her—to Entreri, she realized—and he bit his words short and fell far back. Indeed, Entreri knew this city well, and it, apparently, knew him.
Soon after, Dahlia returned to the table with two full bottles of feywine and a pair of glasses.
“Planning a late night?” Entreri asked.
“Let’s play a game.”
“Let’s not. Go play with Drizzt.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Of what?”
“Of losing to me?”
“Of losing what?”
“Your superior attitude, perhaps.”
Entreri laughed at her as she poured them both drinks. She lifted her glass in toast, and the assassin reluctantly followed suit and tapped the goblets together. He took just a sip, though, and Dahlia realized that she had put him on his guard, which was most decidedly not what she had in mind.
“We could play for coins,” she said.
“I have few. And I don’t care to seek work ashore.”
“For items, then?”
Entreri looked her over. “I might fancy that strange weapon you carry.”
“And I would fancy your dagger.”
Entreri shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest. “Not for any odds you might offer, Dahlia. I lost this once, but not again.”
“Not that dagger,” she said with a mischievous look and a sparkle in her eye.
Entreri’s expression did not soften—quite the opposite.
“Go back to Drizzt,” he said evenly.
Dahlia realized that she had pushed him too far. Was it a code of honor, she wondered? Was he afraid of Drizzt? That seemed far-fetched to her. Was Entreri, perhaps, really more of a friend to Drizzt than either of them cared to admit?
“I need to talk,” she said, trying a different tact.
“Go talk to Drizzt.”
Dahlia shook her head. “He doesn’t understand.”
“Then tell him.”
Dahlia sighed and slumped at the man’s barrage of short, closed answers. “He knows, but he doesn’t understand,” she said, letting more emotion into her voice. “How can he? How could anyone who has not lived through the darkness?”
Entreri seemed to have run out of snappy answers. He just sat there, arms still crossed, though he did mutter, “Menzoberranzan?” in answer to Dahlia’s assertion.
Dahlia lifted her glass in a toast again, and to her surprise, he actually responded in kind. He took a deeper draw of the wine, so much so that she lifted the bottle and refilled both their glasses.
Her subtle reminder of their shared trauma had touched him somewhere deep inside, she knew.
“Have you ever found love?” she asked, and her tone reflected more sadness than anger.
“I don’t know,” he replied.
“The truth!” Dahlia spouted, coming forward. She slipped out of her chair to take a seat in one right beside Entreri. “The truth,” she said again more quietly. “You don’t know because you cannot be sure, because you are not sure what the word even means.”
“Do you love Drizzt?” he asked.
The question surprised her, and she blurted out, “No” before she really even considered it.
Because Dahlia wasn’t here to consider such things. They didn’t matter. Dahlia was here to begin a string of events that would lead to the place she truly wished to be. And Artemis Entreri would carry her to that place like a fine steed.
“It is a matter of convenience,” she explained.
Entreri’s smile widened at that, and he drained his glass again, and this time refilled it of his own accord. “Does Drizzt know that?” he asked while pouring.
“If I spent my days worrying about what that one knows or does not know about love, I would think of nothing else, I am sure. But it hardly concerns me. He cannot understand the truth of who I am, or of the place from where I came, so how deep might any love run with him.”
She shifted closer to Entreri, put her face near to his and bade him, “Tell me about your early years.”
He resisted, but his arms were no longer crossed.
Dahlia would be patient. She could see the truth: The man was wracked by memories he had never shared, and his warrior’s stubbornness hadn’t put those dark days as far behind him as he would have liked.
Dahlia saw him as vulnerable, and because of her own background, and because she had long seen the truth about herself, she knew how to wrestle free that vulnerability and take advantage of it.
“Do you know why I wear such baubles on my ears?” she asked. Entreri looked at her curiously, studying her diamonds, the many clear ones on her left ear, the single black diamond stud on her right.
“Former lovers,” she said, tapping her left ear.
“Current on your right,” Entreri said, and he chuckled. “Black diamond for a drow, I see.”
“I hope it doesn’t look awkward when I move it to my left lobe with the others,” she said.
Entreri laughed at her.
She poured more wine.
“Will you listen to my tale?” Dahlia whispered.
“I think I know most of it.”
Dahlia looked around. “Not here,” she said. “I cannot.” She slid her chair back and stood up, drained her drink in one gulp, then similarly drained Entreri’s. She collected the bottles and glasses and looked at the man plaintively.
“I need to tell it,” she said. “In full. I have never done that. I fear I’ll not be free until I do.”
She looked across the room to the stairs leading to the rooms above, then back at Entreri, who, to her pleasant surprise, was rising from his seat. He stopped at the bar on their way, and collected two more bottles of the wine.
Dahlia had been caught by her own net, she realized once they’d arrived in his room, and realized, too, that she didn’t care. So she told him all of it, of her trip that morning long ago to the river to fetch some water, of returning to her clan’s small village to find it full of Shadovar.
With tears in her eyes, she told him of the rape, of watching her mother’s murder.
They drank and they talked, and she began to pry at Entreri, and Entreri began to talk. He told Dahlia of his own mother’s betrayal, of being sold as a slave and taken to Calimport—and he nearly spat as he spoke that city’s name. He started to tell of his rise on the streets, but suddenly he stopped, and he looked at her with a puzzled expression.
She swallowed hard.
“Tell me about those other diamonds,” Entreri said. “The ones in your left ear.”
“About those other lovers, you mean,” Dahlia said, and she let a hint of wickedness slip into her tone. But any hopes that Entreri was looking for a voyeuristic thrill were quickly dashed by the stern-faced assassin.
“Which one represents Herzgo Alegni?” Entreri asked.
Dahlia tried unsuccessfully to keep the startled look off her face. Why would he say such a thing? Particularly now?
“I notice that you did not move any upon Alegni’s death,” Entreri said, and Dahlia realized that a long while had passed while she had chewed over Entreri’s previous comment. “You didn’t remove any, or shift any from one ear to the other. Why is that?”
“You do not wish to hear,” Dahlia replied.
“Should I be jealous? Or afraid?”
“You do not seem to me to be the jealous type.”
Entreri grinned back at her, a look that made her think that he knew a lot more about her macabre game with the diamond studs than he was letting on.
“Herzgo Alegni was my rapist, never a lover,” she said evenly, and Entreri nodded and didn’t seem intimidated by her threatening tone, and seemed rather as if he’d expected that very answer and was glad of it.
“And when will you move the black diamond?”
Dahlia stared at him sternly, but didn’t reply.
“The old swordsman’s rule, yes?” Entreri teased, and he took a drink, lifting a full glass with his right hand and draining it. He wiped his mouth with his left sleeve and said, “Dispatch with your right hand, dispose with your left.”
Again Dahlia sat silent, digesting the assassin’s cutting insights. Of course, none of the diamonds represented the beast Alegni, but it was also true that all of them represented Herzgo Alegni. Those diamonds, this whole game, had been put in place because of him, after all. Taking her lovers was because of him, murdering her lovers was because of him, and because those lovers were not strong enough to win the necessary fight and end her own pain.
And thus all of them served to satiate the woman, all of those lovers, one by one, getting Alegni’s just reward …
But what about Drizzt, then, she wondered?
They drank some more, and Dahlia made sure to get very close to Entreri as they sat on his bed, and made sure to turn just so, that she could afford him some tantalizing views of her blouse, unbuttoned low. And she made sure to touch him just so, to comfort him at first, then to tantalize him.
And she realized that she was indeed having that very effect.
“You deny it, but you love Drizzt,” Entreri said unexpectedly, throwing her back, but just a bit.
“I am not with Drizzt,” she protested.
“Because you love him, and he has pushed you away. Dahlia cannot accept that, can she?”
“Do you really want to talk about Drizzt?” she said, determined not to get sidetracked.
“Or are you, perhaps, jealous of him?” Entreri posed. “Jealousy, or simple admiration?”
Dahlia sat back and stared at him incredulously.
“Because he was stronger than you,” Entreri explained. “Because of his choices. I can assure you, from first-hand experience, that Drizzt’s homeland of Menzoberranzan is as bad as anything you have ever known—even the violation by Alegni.”
“I do not think you can make such a claim.” Dahlia tried hard not to get angry.
“A vile place. Horrid in every regard.”
“And worse than anything I have known?”
Entreri paused for a moment and seemed to be considering the question deeply, but then he nodded. “Or at least as bad. And Drizzt grew up there, betrayed always by his family.
“As bad?” Dahlia said and she pointedly snorted. “Do you speak of my feelings for Drizzt? Jealousy? Admiration? Or of your own?”
“No, it really is love for you, I think,” Entreri said, dodging. “I don’t blame you. Drizzt survived. Drizzt has thrived, where you have not.”
“Where we have not,” Dahlia insisted.
Entreri had no answer.
They drank some more, and their talk turned to their current situation, but Dahlia would hear no further discussion regarding Drizzt, and indeed, when Entreri tried to bring up the subject of the drow, Dahlia fell over him, burying his words in a passionate, hungry kiss.
And though she had intended to feign exactly this to reach her more important goal, that goal was nowhere in Dahlia’s mind, and her hunger wasn’t faked.
She grabbed at his shirt and began unbuttoning it. He tried to protest, but half-heartedly, his objections no match for the feelings Dahlia stirred in him.