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“Ah, Nightwarden.” Gortash sets down his quill and gestures to the chair across from him. “Take a seat.”
Minthara closes his chamber door and sits. “You wished to speak with me, Chosen?”
“I do,” says Gortash. “It concerns the men under your command.”
“Which men?” asks Minthara.
“All of them." Gortash scratches the talon of his gauntleted finger into a knot in the grain of his desk. "I have a mission in mind, and I’d like to appraise the men in your ranks for it.”
“If you require warriors, there are women I could recommend instead,” says Minthara. “The men can fight, but their primary role is that of servants and camp followers.”
“I’m afraid things work differently here on the surface than in the Underdark,” says Gortash. “Some tasks are unsuitable for the fairer sex. You understand.”
His smile is a little boy’s smile—smug and assured of its invulnerability. In another life, she would have leaned across the desk and backhanded that smile from his face, but the moment the defiance rises in her, a soft, cottony mist fills her mind and evaporates it, replacing it with a warmth that reminds her of her mother’s breast—the love of the Absolute. The hunger for violence fades away as if it never was.
“I understand,” says Minthara.
“Good,” says Gortash. “Send your best to my chambers after supper tomorrow. If he suits my needs, he'll receive his assignment. If he does not, then you’ll send me the next one and the next until we find a suitable candidate.”
“Should he bring anything with him to this interview?” she asks.
“Only his devotion to the Absolute,” says Gortash. “That should be more than sufficient.”
Gortash doesn't bother to hide the bland amusement in his voice. They both know what he really wants. There is no special mission for these men. The interviews are a farce for the sake of discretion, but it could not be clearer that she will be sending her soldiers one by one into his lair for the purpose of sex. In another life, she would bury her knife in his chest for even suggesting that she convert her ranks into his private brothel. In another life, she would force his head down between her thighs and command him to service his betters until he suffocated.
But then the mist whispers across her mind, and she is filled to the brim with devotion like a golden chalice.
"As you wish, Chosen," says Minthara.
It occurs to her, as she walks down the dark corridors of Moonrise Towers to her quarters, that the real reason Gortash is bothering with the interviews is because he wishes to hide his sexual appetites from his fellow Chosen.
Why should he bother, though? He is obviously a wealthy man with stables of slaves at his disposal, including bed slaves, so why pretend otherwise?
Unless, of course, it is not his interest in sex that he is attempting to hide, but his interest in drow.
Her people are rare on the surface, and it is entirely possible that even a man as worldly as Enver Gortash has never seen as many drow in one place as there are now camped outside the walls of Moonrise Towers. A veritable feast of flesh for a man with a fetish, if that is in fact what he has.
Minthara realizes she does not care. The men in her service are used to being passed around and can endure whatever perversity he has planned for them. It is what they are for, and as he is Chosen, the use of their bodies is Gortash’s right—though privately the thought of two men copulating together disgusts her, as it always has.
She sends her men to his chambers night after night.
Most of them return to the barracks with little to report about their interviews. Gortash speaks with them briefly and then dismisses them. A few, however, he keeps longer—some deep into the night. Minthara need not ask what he does with them. The dull, glazed expressions on their faces tell her everything there is to know.
There is a commonality between the men he commands to stay with him, however: they are all tall and lean with long hair past their shoulders.
Apparently, he has a preference.
One night, Minthara returns to her quarters to find Orin in her bed.
The changeling woman smiles. "My lamb."
Minthara's hand flies to her sword. She aches to draw it, to slash that face to ribbons, or else to crumple to the ground and beg, "not tonight, please."
In the end, she does none of these things. Instead, she releases her sword against every instinct in her body, then quietly closes the door and begins to remove her armor.
Orin watches her the entire time, smiling that red smile and pressing the tip of her crimson dagger into the palm of her hand. Oh, the thrill and the terror. When was the last time someone made Minthara want to sob like a child out of fear? Had it been her mother? The thought sends electricity to her loins, and her nipples stand out dark and stiff as she lifts her tunic over her head and tosses it to the floor.
The changeling woman spreads her long legs wide. The smell of her unwashed cunt beneath her crusted armor rises hot and damp in the air.
“Come close,” she says. “My sweet babe.”
Minthara lays down stiffly, aware of the dagger in Orin's hand as she lowers her head to her breast. The silver chain that hangs between the plates of her crablike cuirass digs into her cheek.
Orin brushes Minthara’s hair from her neck and lays her long fingernails upon her nape. “Tell me, little spider. Have you figured out why Gortash breaks your toys?”
Minthara keeps very still. She knows that there is some nameless source of friction between the three Chosen. Everyone in Moonrise senses it. The three work together gloriously in service to the Absolute, and yet there is something cracked within their alliance. She is not sure what it will cost her to betray the confidences of one Chosen to another, but if she must, she will do so to prolong her life for however long she can.
"He wishes to take them to bed,” says Minthara.
“Of course he does,” giggles Orin. “But do you know why?”
“He has a taste for drow,” says Minthara.
"For one drow," says Orin. "The one who warmed his bed with blood before."
"He had a lover?" asks Minthara.
"A lickspittle," says Orin. "A dreary dullard always pluck-pluck-plucking on his lyre. He spun the gore of the faithless into strings and strummed them to make music for mutilation, but his melodies were mindless, an artless stick to poke and skewer. Do you wish to see his face, sweetling?"
The changeling woman's flesh ripples and darkens. The red armor dissolves, and Minathara finds her cheek pillowed on a slate gray pectoral muscle.
“Well?” asks Orin, her voice deep and rough.
Minthara dares to crane her neck back. The man she lays upon is slender with a long, grim face and silver hair past his shoulders. He is ordinary, no different from any of the thousands of male bed slaves found in Menzoberanzzan.
And yet his eyes are not those of the Underdark.
The eyes of a Lolth-sworn are said to be red, but in truth they are more often a faded pink or garnet. This man’s eyes are pools of blood, red almost to black, soaked through pupil and iris and sclera. Those eyes draw her in like an abyss, threatening to swallow her.
"What happened to him?" asks Minthara.
"My blade," says Orin. "He sought to sever me from what was mine by rights, and so I severed him first."
"If he dared to cross you, then he truly was a fool," says Minthara.
"Oh, a fool and more." Orin brushes her fingers down Minthara's arm, raising goosebumps. "He was bloodkin to me. Big brother dearest who barged into our home when I was but a mewling tugging on my grandfather's scarlet-stained sleeve. I was expected to rut with him, to make little blood lambs to caper through our shared carnage—offer up my gash for his glory and his glory alone. But he refused me. Refused me out of contempt and fear. Never trusted me, never listened, because he knew that I was the rightful inheritor, and he the ill-gained imposter."
Minthara has no idea what to say to this confession. The tale is as sordid as any among the Menzoberranzan elite with regards to family and sex. Vainly, she wonders if Orin's willingness to share such secrets is a sign of trust, or if Minthara simply doesn't matter enough for her to worry about her opinion.
“Tomorrow, you will send me to Gortash,” says Orin. “Tell him I am one of yours, then watch behind the panel in the wall.”
"You will seduce him?" asks Minthara.
"That and more," says Orin. "He thought he could escape me by sampling the flesh of your slaughter yard. And like my dear brother, he will hear too late the pad of my footsteps behind him."
"You are the swift shadow of death," says Minthara. "And you proved yourself mightier than your sibling-"
The world spins. Minthara lands on her back, Orin pinning her by the wrists.
"I was always the mightier," whispers Orin. "And I will do all that he could not."
The dagger lays discarded on the bed beside them. Minathara aches to grab it, to castrate the drow above her, or else kick her off and run naked down the halls and out into the darkness so that the Shadow Curse devours her.
In the end, she does none of these things. Instead, she spreads her thighs and welcomes the violation that follows.
In the mirror on the wall, two drow writhe on a bed. The man, perversely, is on top of the woman, and the woman beneath him digs her nails into his back in pain and fear. In Menzoberranzan, she would kill any man who mounted her like this, would kill anyone who dared to defile her like this—
And then the warmth of the Absolute shushes her, and she lets herself be used.
In the eternity that follows, Minthara numbly collates the information she has learned. She has been an interrogator and a torturer for most of her life, and she cannot help but trace the lines of fear and desire that have been laid bare before her.
Orin had a brother who was a threat to her inheritance and so she removed him, as was her right. That he was also Gortash's lover clarifies a great deal: veiled statements among the Chosen that made little sense to her until now. It also clicks into place the reason for Gortash's hunger for her men and his desire to sample them in secret.
Beneath the facts lay murkier waters. Even in death, this brother casts a long shadow over Orin. In sparing her from the horrors of bearing his children, he had also dealt her pride a mortal blow. He had deemed her unworthy of sharing his bed, and once the relief of that mercy had passed, resentment was sure to have set in. Orin had likely been a child, and though she had hated and feared her role as broodmare, some part of her may have desired it as well, not so much out of a maternal instinct, but out of a yearning for closeness with her sibling, who had been older and more favored than herself.
It had also created an unanswerable question in her mind: what would have happened if he had taken her? Would she have found herself on her back as Minthara was now, helpless, desperate for it to end, and yet grateful to the point of tears to be desired by someone, anyone, despite the degradation? Love and hatred were intimate bedfellows, as were desire and disgust. Orin had hated her brother and everything he represented, and yet she chose to wear his skin for domination.
Mysteries within mysteries. None of it truly matters to Minthara. The only thing required of her mind and body this evening is to lie still, until Orin spills her seed deep inside her bruised cunt, and it is over.
She follows the instructions given to her. The next evening, she sends Orin to Gortash’s chambers, then slips behind a panel in an adjoining room and sneaks along a dark passage until she finds a pinhole in the wall.
Within the room, Gortash is seated at his desk, and across from him sits Orin in the same body as last night.
Orin has made minor changes. The saturated red eyes are now the healthy pink of a Lolth-sworn, and she has filled out the body to be less wiry. Different enough not to raise suspicion, but familiar enough to provoke a reaction.
And oh, the reaction it provokes.
Gortash does not look up when Orin first walks in. He commands her to sit and continues to write, but when he at last sets down his quill and lifts his chin—recognition flashes across his features like the shadow of a bird in flight.
This is what he has searched for.
Minthara does not hear the soft order that Gortash gives, but a moment later Orin rises and begins to disrobe. She moves to the bed and lays down on her belly, pillowing her face in her arms and pulling up one leg to give herself a pleasing shape in the sheets.
Gortash does not join her immediately. He instead stands at the end of the bed, gazing at the drow and the long white hair that spills down the dark expanse of his back.
Orin winks at the pinhole in the wall. Wait.
Gortash undresses slowly, then. His body is plump and darkly furred, but though he is soft, Minthara can tell there is muscle beneath his suet. He is built in truth more like a dockworker than a politician, and his hands, unsheathed from their gauntlets, have mounds of scar tissue on their knuckles as thick as any pugilists'. Despite his best attempts to hide behind an effete mask, he is as much a killer as anyone in Moonrise.
He sits naked on the edge of the bed and runs his hand slowly up the drow's back. His face has gone distant and cold, plunged into some deep well of memory.
“Turn over,” he says. “And do not disobey me. This will be your only warning.”
An hour passes, broken only by the soft hissing of sheets. Orin follows his instructions without complaint, using her mouth on him, fondling him, accepting each order with the dull resignation of a male slave long used to being played with by his masters. When Gortash finally hauls her legs up over his shoulders and presses into her hole that he has, charmingly, spat on, she even makes the sort of semi-convincing whimper of pain-pleasure that a man of his station would expect to hear.
Rather than please Gortash, however, it only sours his ugly face.
He fucks her slowly at first. Orin keeps her attention on his navel the entire time, her lips parted in an apathetic imitation of desire. She lazily slides her arms above her head, putting herself on display, pushing her long hair back so that it sweeps artfully behind her head. Her cock, untouched by her, remains soft and flaccid in its nest of white pubic hair, all while Gortash’s face darkens with something approaching anger.
The nature of Orin's game dawns on Minthara, then. She has served him up a face almost identical to that of his lost lover, and yet her behavior is the exact opposite of how the real drow would have acted. She is spoiling the fantasy by playing the vapid, disinterested whore, reminding him with every banal gasp that what he wants, what he really wants, is not here. It is not anywhere. It is a pile of ashes and bones, if even that.
Gone, Orin’s dull, half-lidded expression reminds him. He’s gone, and all you have forever is this.
Quick as a snake, Gortash grabs Orin by the throat.
“You,” he hisses.
Orin grins, her disguise melting away. She is naked, legs spread, triumphant with his cock in her ass.
“Oh, poor Enver,” she whispers. "Is the tyrant not pleased?"
"I should have had you lashed the moment you stepped through the door," says Gortash. "This had the stink of your bait all over it."
"And yet you swallowed it," says Orin. "Lingering, lonely and lost, picking through his ashes for shards of skull like a widow. Did you think I would never smell your sorrow-stench...or were hoping that I would?"
"I don't waste my time thinking about you, difficult though that might be for you to fathom," he says.
"Oh, I think you do," she says.
Her form shifts, and she is suddenly her brother, the exact copy, and the difference is striking.
Before, she was a housecat. Now, she is a displacer beast, and she slides to her knees, languid and predatory. She leans close to him, her red eyes drinking all the light.
Gortash gives no reaction. He merely studies her, expression cold.
"You really are just a poor imitation," he says. "All of his appearance and none of his bearing."
"I am him down to every crack and crevasse," says Orin. "All the bearing needed."
"And yet there's always something missing," says Gortash. "Did you know, he never once mentioned you by name? It was always, my useless sister, or my foolish bloodkin, or simply, 'the hole.' The hole meant to squeeze out more of your vile lineage, had you managed to entice him. The hole that only ever represented a lack of potential. Tell me, how does it feel to know that you still manage to prove him right even after-"
She rakes her nails down his chest with a hiss. After a moment, fat beads of blood rise slowly through his chest hair, a single one gaining enough weight to dribble with a soft plip onto the bedsheets between them.
Something shifts in the room. Perhaps it is the violence, or the smell of blood, but it is if a ghost has walked across the stage of this little drama. They have both brushed against the dead man without meaning to.
Orin seizes upon the opportunity. "What if I decided to end you now?" she whispers in a new voice like cold caverns beneath the earth. "I smell the wine in your sweat. I would slide a drain into your vein and drink you as a vintage, then dig out the spiked crystals of uric acid from your joints and sample them like bitter candy. I would hang you like a deer from a gallows tree and join the crows in digging holes in the spongy lard of your back. I would gnaw you to the bone, then fight the wolves for what is left of you, so that I might bring your skull with me back to my nest of carrion to hold at night against my heart."
The line of Gortash's jaw tenses. Orin leans forward and presses her face against his chest, dragging her tongue through the blood there. She rolls her eye up to him, her silvery hair sliding off her neck to brush against his belly.
"Am I still a poor imitation?" she asks.
There is a moment where everything is still. Then, they crash together.
What happens next on the bed barely counts as fucking, in Minthara's opinion. It is more like a mangling or a bloodletting. Gortash wrestles Orin under him, and she claws up his back like a hell-beast, groaning in her dark voice, urging him on, screaming that he's here, right here, and if he just burrows a little deeper, he will find him, like a rancid tumor in her offal, and then she cackles, her laughter leaping around the walls until it is the uninterrupted howling of a beast.
It goes on for far too long, then ends abruptly. Gortash comes inside her with a disgusted sound. Even before he is done, Orin slips out from under him and rises, her body shifting back to its natural form as she crosses the room barefooted with her heavy braid swinging behind her.
She pauses at the door and clicks her nails along its frame, her smile as red and wet as carrion left in the rain.
“Until next time,” she whispers. "Lover."
She leaves then. Gortash continues to kneel in the bed. He runs a hand through his hair, and from the expression on his face, Minthara knows that Orin has won the round of whatever game this is between them.
Minthara leaves the pinhole and steals back down the corridor. The entire encounter has left her tired. Why did Orin want her to watch this petty exchange? To humiliate Gortash further? To excite herself with the knowledge that a spy lurked nearby? Or perhaps there was no thought in the decision at all, and Minthara was simply another toy for her to play with and discard.
What she does know is that she understands both of them better than she did before. Gortash, a man who embodies gluttony, cannot have the only man he wants. The one person who can give him the closest approximation is Orin, the same woman who murdered his lover in the first place. This tension has likely existed between the two of them for months. Gortash tried to circumvent it, though, as Orin pointed out, he might have only intended to spare his pride by luring her close with an obvious trap.
And Orin...she bears two scars. Gortash held primacy of place in her brother's heart. What did he have that she did not? What did the two of them together have that she was unworthy of receiving? Perhaps, her logic seems to follow, if she beds Gortash enough, she might find out for herself, or at the very least punish him for having it in the first place.
A torturous knot. Minthara wonders, sardonically, whether Ketheric ever found himself tangled in its brambles, then decides she would rather not know.
The only question she has any real curiosity for is this: who was this drow truly that managed to sink his claws so deeply into the Chosen of her god?
She finds out months later.
He is a broken, feral thing. Not the predatory man that Orin mimicked, but a twitching, muttering creature with short, bristly hair and an ugly scar on the back of his head that gives him fits and makes him piss himself. He speaks sometimes with the soft, fretful voice of a child, then other times with a voice older and more dread than any demon of the pit. He shyly presents his friend Shadowheart with a flower he found in the darkness, then minutes later turns around and tears a goblin limb from limb with foam pouring from his mouth like a rabid dog.
And at night around the campfire, he plucks the lyre he stole from her, playing music like rain and singing in a voice as sweet as a nightingale.
“I am called Nameless,” he tells her at their first meeting in the dungeon beneath Moonrise.
It suits him.
Despite having been enemies, he saves her from the cult of the Absolute and brings her back to his camp. The others do not want her there, but he advocates for her, and she finds she owes him everything.
“Do you recall much of your past life?” she asks him one evening at the water’s edge on the far side of camp.
“Flashes,” he says, then, “horrors.”
She is about to reply, when yellow bile streaks up her throat and she vomits in the reeds.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
“No,” she says, when she can finally breathe again and has spat the taste from her mouth. "I am with child.”
He rocks back, surprised. For an entire minute, he manages to restrain himself, then asks, “Who is the father?”
You are, she thinks, remembering Orin in his body, moving inside her. Only that is not true. This man is not who Orin remembers, or Gortash for that matter. He is a sliver cut from a dead branch and seeded in infertile ground, struggling to grow. She has never spared a living soul the truth in her life, and yet here, she finds the truth slipping between her fingers like smoke. She was certain that she was only one woman, and yet there are two of her now, split forever between Before and After. So it is with him. His memory stalks the halls of Moonrise still, in Ketheric’s mockery, in Orin’s cruelty, in Gortash’s bitter, hateful loneliness. He is alive and dead, the one who brought together the Chosen of the false Absolute, and the one she hopes will end them.
“A ghost,” she answers. “Leave it at that.”