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This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
- Emily Dickinson
“Gods all be praised,” Caden says with vehement excitement, all but bouncing along the road at the head of the group as they draw near the walls of Athkatla. “I must confess I never thought we'd be coming back here alive. What a beautiful sight.”
Jaheira snorts softly. “It is a city like any other, Caden,” she says sardonically.
He grins over his shoulder at her. “Don't tell me - ‘a blight upon nature's balance,’ even?”
“You took the words straight from my mouth,” Jaheira says gravely, but her lips twitch with amusement.
In truth, she feels her own joy at their safe return from Suldanesselar, but it has little to do with returning to Athkatla's noise and crowds. She was fully prepared to die in their final battles against Irenicus, deep within the Abyss, and part of her might have welcomed the peace that would have followed. But she smells the crisp air of the forest road and knows it would have been wrong to let that darkness swallow her. There is too much of the world left to see, too much work still to do.
There always is.
"It is good to see you smile again," she says gently to Caden. "You and Imoen both. It has been hard, these last weeks, seeing you so hollowed out."
His smile doesn't fade, but it does take on an abrupt tinge of melancholy. "It was like looking at you all from the bottom of a deep well," he says quietly. "I knew that I knew you, I knew what I should feel, but the feelings were at a distance, as if they belonged to a stranger." He rubs absently at his chest. "I didn't know it was possible to feel so empty."
At his side, Aerie wraps her arm tightly around his waist, and at once he relaxes, slowing his pace to rest his cheek against her hair. "But I'm back now," he murmurs - partly to Aerie, partly to Jaheira, partly as if reassuring himself of the fact. "I'm back. And we're alive."
Jaheira smiles, her expression carefully schooled into stillness. "Yes," she murmurs. “We are alive.”
They reach the walls of the city and pass inside with a nod to the guards. Imoen grins from ear to ear, seeing the by-now-familiar cobblestone and milling crowds of Waukeen's Promenade.
"If you ask me, I think we deserve a proper celebration, eh?” she quips. She, like Caden, is buzzing with energy now with the return of her soul, darting here and there at the head of the group to dodge past carts and horses coming the other way. “Don't get me wrong,” she goes on cheerfully. “I'm grateful as anything for those Suldanesselar elves, but they don't exactly know how to throw a fun party. Straight for the tavern, yeah?"
She elbows Rasaad playfully in the ribs as she speaks. The monk grunts, lifting his head at the gesture, and gives her a questioning look, clearly emerging from some preoccupying thought of his own. “What?”
Imoen rolls her eyes. “Never mind. Minsc knows what I'm talking about. Right, Minsc?”
"Yes, yes!" Minsc booms eagerly from the back of the group. "That Minsc and his friends live is worthy of flowing ale and ringing song. Even Boo agrees!"
Jaheira’s smile softens at the banter and she laughs softly. "Go, indeed - you have earned the celebration," she says.
Caden shoots her a look, raising one eyebrow. "You're not coming with?" he asks.
She hesitates, then shakes her head. "I am not for revelry tonight, I think. Besides, there is... something I must do, now we are back in the city, and it is something best not left to time. But do not let me keep you from it," she adds hastily, seeing a troubled line crease between his brows. Her lips twitch, gently teasing, and she flicks a glance at Imoen. "I expect you to get him properly into trouble and indulgence, yes?"
Imoen's grin widens. "Oh, in spades, don't you worry about that."
Caden's face relaxes into a laugh. Perhaps he might have argued more, on some other darker day - but his joy at his returned soul is too strong at present. "Yes, ma'am," he says sheepishly.
Jaheira claps him lightly on the shoulder and gives him a nudge to the northeast, where the tavern waits nestled in a corner of the Promenade. "Go on, then. Take us rooms as well and I will join you later."
He catches her hand, gives it a quick, affectionate squeeze, and then jogs away obediently. Aerie, as always, keeps to his side like a shadow, and Imoen and Minsc fall quickly into step behind him.
To Jaheira's surprise, though, Rasaad stays halted next to her. She raises an eyebrow at him. "Something the matter, monk?" she asks softly.
"I would ask you the same," he says. His voice is calm and placid as ever but he is watching her with a curious, intent expression. "This business you must attend to - it is something that troubles you." A slight pause. "Is it to do with the Harpers?"
"Ah-- no." Jaheira smiles crookedly. "No. It will be many months, I think, before I can trust myself to think of Harper matters again. No, this is... a personal matter."
He nods, lets the silence stretch for a moment. "In truth, I do not feel prepared for raucous celebration myself tonight," he says carefully when she doesn't elaborate. "I would not intrude on your solitude if that is what you wish, but if company would aid you..."
Jaheira draws a slow breath in, lets it out in a long sigh through her nose. "It is kind of you to offer," she says quietly. "But..."
She hesitates, thinking it over. "Well," she adds, more to herself than to him. "It might be good not to be alone. The place I must go, I am loathe to inflict on anyone but myself. But you... you were not there..." She fidgets her boot heel absently into the roadway. "I would not wish to keep you from resting, if you do not mean to celebrate..." she says doubtfully.
A slight smile tugs at his lips. "I think being alone with my thoughts at present would do no one any service," he says with dark humor, "least of all myself." He cocks his head at her questioningly. "Where is it that you must go?"
She swallows and looks away from him, up towards the northern pathway that leads out of the Promenade, deeper into the city.
"Irenicus is dead," she says quietly. "His lair beneath the city remains, where we were first captured and tortured. I must..." She feels a sudden tightness in her throat and swallows it away, forcing her voice to steadiness. "I must return there and find Khalid's body, and see him properly buried at last."
It's been months now since the battle shattered the north side of Waukeen’s Promenade. The broken ground has been mostly paved over, the walls straightened and their masonry filled in by some enterprising minion of the Council of Five. But all the same, Jaheira can still almost smell the lingering, acrid scent of smokepowder as they enter the darkened alleyway.
She shudders slightly, almost imperceptibly, but Rasaad notices and looks sideways at her. "Are you well?" he asks softly.
She nods. But then after a moment, she mutters, "I will not be well till this business is over. But it does not matter." She straightens, turning away from him and running her hand along the alley’s rough wall. She can see the lines where the mortar transitions from the new-laid stuff, bright white, into the centuries-old brickwork alongside it.
"This is where you emerged?" Rasaad asks, looking around.
"Mm. The Shadow Thieves blew up the entryway into the dungeon, just as we came aboveground," Jaheira says absently. "But the Cowled Wizards interfered before they could finish Irenicus off." Her lips curl in a harsh, humorless smile. "And so that honor was left to us."
Rasaad studies the wall. "It has been well paved over," he says thoughtfully, running his fingers along the masonry. "Does the city have no care for the horrors that lurk beneath it?"
Jaheira snorts softly. "I am sure they cared only so far as the hole in the ground prevented their walk between the bank and the tavern," she says sardonically.
Rasaad purses his lips thoughtfully. "Well, whatever their intention, they have blocked our way thoroughly."
"Not for long," Jaheira says, half to herself. "They will not seal this up as Khalid's tomb. We will find him somewhere that he can see the sky. Keep watch." This last is to Rasaad, who tilts his head questioningly for a moment, then nods, shifting his weight so that his broad frame blocks most of the view from the Promenade’s square.
Jaheira draws a breath, then flexes her fingers in a quick flicking motion that sends a green-gold shimmer of light down her arms. It spirals over her skin, out through her hands, and into the brick where she presses against the alley wall. She reaches for the packed earth beneath the stone, for the place where it dips and recedes, opening downward into darkness.
Then her fists clench. Her magic tugs at the dirt, drawing thick vines to uncoil themselves outward with a pressure that even the Athkatlan brick cannot hold back. The wall cracks, then bursts, sending rubble clattering down onto the pavement, revealing the tunnel that the city tried to seal away.
"There," she says, her voice hoarse with the brief exertion but touched with satisfaction.
Rasaad looks over his shoulder at her, then at the tunnel sloping away into obscurity. "This will lead us to his lair?" he asks. His expression, always serious, has darkened grimly.
"Yes," Jaheira says. She doesn't look at him, but stares into that darkness with the air of a panther facing off with a lion. "It will.”
The earthen tunnel draws them downward, its dirt walls shifting slowly to stone. Iron pipes line the walls in jagged patterns, stained with rust the color of blood. Rasaad watches Jaheira attentively as they step across the uneven, broken floor. "You remember this place?" he asks softly.
"Yes," she says in a low voice. "Yes, I remember. It hummed, then - hummed in a way that made our teeth ache." She eyes the battered equipment with distaste, the pumps and drains and engines left behind from Irenicus's machinations. "It is dead now along with its master. But the stink of the air lingers…"
It's a strange scent, oddly clean, even antiseptic. An odd contrast to the dirty, rotting state of the walls. A laboratory scent.
Rasaad grunts. "Mm. Did I not know better, by the smell I would have thought myself in a place of study."
"And so it was, I suppose," Jaheira says bitterly. "Blasphemous, mad, cruel study, but study nonetheless. This way." She points at a heavy iron door set into the wall. "I remember we came that way." Her lips make an attempt at a smile, but it flickers and fades almost at once. "Caden tripped over the lip of it. Be mindful of your feet."
They both step carefully over the high threshold of the door - and she comes up short in the next room, a long, dark chamber whose braziers have long since burned out. As her eyes adjust, she can make out the patterning of a tile floor strewn with desiccated skeletons. For a moment she doesn't move, just breathing, taking in the shadowy vision of the place, studying the doors that line the room on all sides.
"What is it?" Rasaad asks. His voice is still low, the tone of a man trying not to awaken the lingering ghosts. "Where do we go next?"
But she shakes her head. "I do not know," she whispers. There is a frightening blank place in her memory where this room should reside. Surely no one has been here since they made their escape, and this patterned, textured tilework... she should recall it. But she does not. Just the darkness, and that horrible, cloying smell. "I do not... I do not remember passing this way."
Her heart is thundering suddenly in her ears, her breath coming in quick, frantic gasps. She sways, her fists clenching at her sides as she struggles for balance.
Rasaad's hand closes on her shoulder, firm, steadying. "Jaheira," he says softly. "This way. Come. There is a light further on."
Unresisting, she lets him guide her into the next corridor, which is better lit by some powerful enchantment still lingering after its master's death. There, she slumps against the wall, at which point Rasaad loosens his grip on her shoulder and steps back. He doesn't say anything, just watches her as she gulps for breath, as her heartbeat slows and her eyes clear.
"I do not remember it," she says at last. Her voice is lower, hoarse with sudden strain. "After we left-- after we left Khalid... it is all a blank. As if I had passed out. It is as if some part of me was left behind with him, straining to find him again where he could not be found."
She stares at the floor, at a place where mold is stubbornly climbing its way through a crack in the mortar. "I do not think I truly came back to myself until... days later. I failed Caden, in that moment. He was lost and frantic, terrified for Imoen, and I could not-- could not think..."
"You are not to blame," Rasaad murmurs. "It was enough, to survive, to do all that you did after. No one could have asked more. And Caden would say the same."
"I know." The words emerge mechanically, and then she falls silent again for a long time. Rasaad, to his credit, does not push her, does not in fact move at all, just stands there in the dim, flickering magelight with his dark eyes fixed on her, waiting.
"Do you know," she says at last with a hollow, empty laugh. "It was Minsc who comforted me the most, in those terrible hours, in some strange way. I had never thought of him as one to confide in before, but… with Dynaheir’s death, he too had had a heart torn out of him. And he did not try to staunch the wound, did not try to say that all would be well. He simply knew what must be done, as I did, and that there would be no peace until the job was done..."
Rasaad's eyes flick away from her. "There are some things, I think, that cannot be understood until they have been experienced," he says, his voice a low rumble in the silent corridor. "Only those who have lost can know what it is to lose."
"Yes." Her head lifts, and she looks at him with sudden regret. "And you have as much cause to know it as I," she says softly. "Your brother--"
"Let us not speak of him," Rasaad says gently, with a sad smile that is fathoms deep. "It is your path we tread here, not mine. Lead on when you are ready, and I will follow."
She is not ready. She knows she will never truly be ready. Nevertheless, she draws an unsteady breath and turns without a word to walk on through the corridor, backwards into the past, until they reach an iron door with its locks shattered open. Rasaad reaches out and pulls it open, and it creaks like a choked scream on its rusted hinges.
He looks at her questioningly, but she avoids his gaze. All of her attention is suddenly on the monumental effort needed to make her feet cross this threshold. Finally she takes a step forward, then another, and another, mechanically, until she runs up against the edge of the stone table where Khalid's body lies.
"Moonmaiden's grace..." she hears Rasaad mumble in Alzhedo behind her, sounding aghast.
There is something horribly unreal about the moment that she sees her fallen husband, for he is just as she left him. Khalid lies stretched upon the table, his head rolled back, neck cocked impossibly to one side. His eyes are open in an expression of defiant terror, a last moment frozen in place upon his features like cut glass. She stares at his wide, blank eyes so as to avoid looking at the rest of him, the image that has haunted her nightmares - his torso with its uncountable number of cuts and bruises, in some places sliced open to reveal glistening organs beneath.
"Irenicus did this?" Rasaad asks. She can hear the anger rumbling in his low voice.
She nods, but it takes another moment before she can trust herself to speak. "Yes," she answers hoarsely. "After he was dead, or so Imoen said. I have never been able to decide if I believed her..." Her voice sounds like it belongs to someone else, someone speaking from a distance. "This was the only kindness I could do for him... a spell to preserve his body long enough to-- to--"
Her voice cracks. "Oh, my love, Khalid of my heart..." she whispers. She grips the edge of the table, feels the gritty texture of years-dried blood flaking under her palms. "I am sorry... I am sorry it has taken me so long to return. But I am here. I am here, and I will take you out of this place."
She sinks to her knees, feeling the straining ache of tears threatening to fall. Her hands ball in her lap and her shoulders hunch over, as if shielding her against some external blow. All this time, she has cherished the lingering feeling that Khalid was still with her, just out of view, as if she could turn her head and find him smiling at her if she could just figure out how to look.
But there is no escaping it in this cold room far below Athkatla, where his body sits preserved in its moment of final horror. She is here with her husband's corpse.
She isn't sure how long she has been sitting there when she registers Rasaad's footsteps nearby. He has moved to the other side of the table and removed his cloak, and when she looks up, he is in the process of methodically tucking it around Khalid's body, sealing away the rent muscle and shattered bone behind soft, warm cloth.
"What are you doing?" she asks. Her voice is thick with the tears unshed; her throat aches with it.
"We will not walk with a body through the city unquestioned," he murmurs. "We will have to wait until dark, and carry him out shrouded." A pause. His lips pull into a tight line. "And until then... it will keep him warm."
His voice is so soft. In moments like this, in matters of the spirit, the edges of him made jagged by anger and vengeance become smoother, and he speaks gently, like a priest carrying ritual calm. That gentleness unsteadies her, threatening to crack her tenuous control over herself.
She looks sharply away from him, back towards Khalid's rigid expression. "Yes." To her horror, she realizes that the tears are starting, despite all her efforts to hold them back. They bead on her eyelashes, drip unheeded down her face. "He was of the desert... he did not like the cold."
"I know." Rasaad looks away from her, averting his eyes from the moment of weakness, focusing back on Khalid's body. "We often spoke of it, in those early mornings on the road," he murmurs. "Wondering how we had found ourselves so far from the sands." A slight pause. "Jaheira--"
"Do not say it, Rasaad." Her voice is sharper than it needs to be, far too sharp, a futile attempt to cover the tears with rage. "Do not tell me that you are sorry for my loss, do not tell me that he was a good man and will be missed. And for the love of all the gods do not tell me that time heals all. I have heard too many such words. They mean nothing."
There's a long silence. Rasaad's eyes stay deliberately fixed on Khalid. "I was going to say," he says, and his voice, though still soft, has a darker edge to it now, "that at least the man who did this is dead."
She laughs, a bitter, humorless sound. "Ah, Rasaad... what good has vengeance done either of us? My husband is still dead, and so is your brother."
"I know," he mutters. "It is not much. But it is something." He frowns, looking around the room, then turns so that his back is to the wall, staring out at the laboratory around them, with its stains of rust and blood. "It will be some hours before nightfall yet," he adds quietly. "Take what time you need. I will keep watch."
How long has she been sitting there, when she begins to speak again? Long enough that her knees, pressed into the dirty stone, have begun to ache, and the tears have left tracks down her cheeks as she has lost the will to hold them back.
She is conscious of Rasaad nearby, standing vigil, silent and still, giving her the moment of grief without comment. The only sound in the room is the slow, steady rhythm of his breath, the hitched gasping of hers.
"He was brave..." She whispers the words, and yet they feel startlingly loud in the sepulchral stillness. "Imoen has told me-- not all, I think, but some. Irenicus forced her to watch all that he did to Khalid... and Khalid defied him to the last, even as he died..."
"I have no doubt of it," Rasaad says softly. "I admired him greatly, from the moment we met. How strongly you both held the front line, side by side, to push us through the wilderness. I was new to the life of the road; we all were, in those first weeks. He never failed to answer my questions when I had them, or guard me in a moment of uncertainty."
Jaheira tries weakly to smile. "He was so glad to have another Calishite to travel with," she murmurs. "He had not seen another of his countrymen in many years..."
"Mm. And now perhaps neither of us will return." Rasaad turns slightly to look over his shoulder at Khalid's still body. "I was so proud to travel at his side," he adds after a long pause. "I would call him my brother… if that is not disagreeable to you."
She shakes her head slightly, a single quick jerk. And her smile is a little steadier now, even as the ache in her heart deepens. "He felt the same of you," she answers. "And of Caden and Minsc. His own family had proved not worth him, so he was pleased to find another."
"We share that, then," Rasaad says. "And I shall never forget him."
She looks up and sees the bright glitter of his eyes in the weak, dying magelight. "Thank you, Rasaad," she whispers.
He nods, retreats against the wall again so that his face falls half in shadow. "I judge it is nearly time to move him," he says after a while. "Are you ready?"
She draws a long breath, lets it out, hearing how it trembles in the silence. "Yes."
She feels something loosen in her when they slip into the open air, through the shadowy alleyways and past the walls of the city. Athkatla is not so terrible as some cities she has been in, but it is crowded and cacophonous, and its massive oil lamps line the streets and throw a blinding glow to cover the sky. Out beyond its edge, she can feel herself again, and see the stars above them, the clear night that she has been allowed for Khalid's burial.
At her side, Rasaad moves silently, carrying Khalid’s cloak-draped body cradled in his arms. In the darkness of the dungeon, the monk’s eyes were black pits, holes in his face, but now they glint with the shaft of moonlight that strikes them as they emerge from the limits of the city.
By some unspoken accord, they move south in the direction of a hilltop a little distance from the wall, a spreading oak tree atop it silhouetted against the night sky. There, Rasaad lays Khalid out on the grass, and Jaheira kneels beside him, looking down at her husband's blank, staring gaze.
Something seems to have eased in Khalid’s face, now that he is out of that place, as if his muscles are drawn now with only exhaustion, rather than terror. She rests her palm against his cheek, her thumb moving in a restless rhythm along the cold curve of his cheekbone, the lines left by his smiles...
"It is a good place," Rasaad says in a low voice after a while. "I do not think he will be disturbed, and there is a view of the sky, and of the sea." He jerks his head towards the west, where the water glimmers in the distance with silver moonlight.
"Yes," she agrees hoarsely. "It... it is perfect. Thank you."
She doesn't want to move. When she does, when she makes a hole in the ground and puts him in it, then it will all be over. Khalid will be gone from her forever, and she will never see his face again.
She presses her hand against the damp, sweet-smelling earth, and sends her magic down through the roots of the grass and then further still. The ground opens up in front of her with a slow, dragging rumble, pulling itself aside for her like welcoming arms drawing apart, leaving a hole six feet deep and half as wide.
Her hand lifts, and with it comes a mass of vines writhing upwards, dripping with the soft, broken dirt. Slowly they surround Khalid’s body, directed by her gentle motions to embrace him, lowering him slowly down, down into that empty, waiting pit.
When he is settled, the vines withdraw, and the magic shifts, drawing the dirt to close over him. She watches it crumble through the curls of his hair, mask the wounds of his body, and finally swallow up her last sight of his face, leaving a smooth and unbroken patch of earth, with no sign to mark the man that lies beneath or expose him to further torment.
"Moonmaiden," Rasaad murmurs from behind her. Though his tone is steady and reverent, she can hear the grief underneath it. "Watch over the soul of this man, who meant so much to this world. Guide my friend through the night to a waking more pleasant, and grant us your light to find a path without him."
The tears are rolling down her cheeks again, but this time she doesn't bother to try and stay them. Rasaad has already seen her break into pieces; she has nothing left to hide from him tonight.
Her palm presses again to the freshly laid dirt, as if to reach through it to where Khalid's heart lies at rest. Farewell, my love, my dearest... Sleep softly... feel the wind and the rain and the sun, and be at peace...
She draws her hands back into her lap, clasps them tightly together, her whole body rigidly still. Then she stands, one foot and then the other.
"Rasaad," she murmurs. She doesn't look at him, her eyes still fixed on the ground. "Thank you. For your words. For your help."
He lets out a heavy breath at her side. "It was my honor," he says softly. "Truly."
He looks up, but if he wishes to say anything further, it is lost. His eyes track upward, following the form of the hawk as she swoops away into the dark.