Holy Opposites 44

	Suivi squinted as Axio loomed over him.  “This cache in Undermountain.  How do you know where it is?”

	“I didn’t know it was Undermountain at the time.  It could have been anywhere.”  Suivi thought back to his first visit to the little satellite temple.  “It’s behind a false wall.”

	“And I suppose I’ll need to bring you with me to find it?” Axio asked sarcastically.

	“You didn’t find it yet.”

	“I wasn’t looking,” Axio pointed out.

	“You’ll waste time.  I can find it right now.  And, for the record, I promise you won’t find the other portal and sending locations without somebody like me helping you.”

	Solen slowly sat back in his chair.  “Axio, bring him with you.”

	Axio responded at once.  “Yes, sir.”  His military training drilled obedience in the presence of the enemy into his reflexes.  Years of self-imposed social training hid his shock.  Even Suivi looked surprised, though he didn’t say anything.

	Axio reached down and cut the rope that had bound the spy to his chair.  “On your feet.”

	Suivi stood, rubbing his wrists to get the circulation going again, and, more discreetly, to hide the tiny file he had been using to loosen his bonds.  “Right now?”

	Axio met his eyes.  Suivi flinched when he saw the gemstones.  What was this man?  “Right now,” Axio said.


	Suivi stood awkwardly in the back of the temple’s main chamber while Axio pulled his grandfather aside.  “Sir, what is this?” he asked urgently.  “You can’t trust him.”

	“No, Axio, I trust him about as much as I trust Loviatar,” Solen said, “but he’s right.  If he’s having a crisis of conscience, or just realized what’s going on, or doesn’t wish to be here if we lose, or what have you, we can deal with it, but if Toller has some resources we haven’t taken away, we’re in greater danger.  That…” he said, and his voice drifted off.  “I think there’s something in him.  A parallel.  Something stirring conscious discomfort in him.  Perhaps he has some limits to his behavior he’s never seen before.  He spoke truth in that spell zone he did not intend to speak.”

	“You think he’s guilty over what he’s done?  It’s not just survival?” Axio asked.

	“Yes.”

	Axio considered that.  “I’ll keep an eye on his reaction to the cells and the torture devices,” he said.  “His reaction may be telling.”


	Outside, Axio and two Watchmen followed Suivi through the streets of the city.  More than a few citizens tried to stop the easily recognized paladin and thank him, but he shook them off with a heavy heart.  He was working.

	Suivi led them through the city to the bookstore.  Two Watch were downstairs interrogating the owner, who was furiously protesting any insinuation of wrongdoing.  Suivi led the others past him to the stairs and walked into the apartment.

	The privy’s back wall swung open at the password.  “I thought this was Undermountain before I heard it from the criers,” Suivi explained.  “The air feels different here.”

	Axio shut the door behind them.  “The pressure plates have been disarmed, I suppose?” he asked the Watch.

	“They have,” one Watch officer said.  He looked a bit queasy.  “Gods above, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

	The bodies of the children who had died in the place and not been selectively picked over by the bone golem as food were laid out on the floor in rows that lined the outer walls.  At some point, the Watch had run out of cloth to put over them, so they had started using handkerchiefs to cover their faces.  It didn’t do anything to hide the unnatural gashes and pressure-cuts in their bodies where the Baneites had put them on the altar and fed them to the Golem, nor did it hide where the majority had withered flesh.  The same ritual puncture tools the Baneite Halfling had used in the farm outside Rassalantar had clearly found use here, too.

	“It’s atrocious,” Axio whispered.  He felt his heart break as a priest of Kelemvor laid his fingers over one girl’s desiccated face and begin whispering a prayer.  He shook himself.  “Embersson, the money.”

	Suivi snapped out of his own sense of disquiet and looked around.  “Right.  Uh, right.  Here.”  He closed the door to the apartment on the other side.  “Now, open it again,” he said, doing so.  “The privy in here, it’s connected to the offal pits like everything else in Undermountain, but if you grab this bar and turn it…” he said, grabbing a random length of pipe in the corner, “then this happens.”

	The Watch murmured in surprise as a false panel opened behind the pipe.  Axio slowly scanned the pile, looking for any signs of magic.  “Is it trapped?”

	“Not that I ever saw,” Suivi said.

	Axio reached in and cast light on his glove.  The shining rays scattered over a vast pile of gemstones.  There were more than Axio had ever seen in his life.

	Behind the gems, a pile of gold and platinum coins shone brightly, beside what looked like a heap of magical trinkets.  The alcove was only about a foot to each side and two feet deep, but it was packed full of valuables.

	“This is… heady stuff,” Axio finally said.  “How do you close it?”

	Suivi demonstrated.  “Just reset the pipe,” he said.

	The alcove swung shut again.  “All right, then,” he said.  “I believe you now.  We’ll send somebody in for the goods.”

	“Good.  I knew you’d come around,” the spy said in satisfaction.

	His smile faded when Axio turned his sapphire gaze on him.  “So now we talk, a bit, Suivi Embersson.  You say you want us to aid you in your escape.”

	“I do.  I need to get out of Waterdhavian territory, fast.”

	Axio steered the other three men out of the privy and shut the door behind him.  “And this survival is all that motivates you.”

	“Can’t spend money when I’m dead,” Suivi sniffed.

	“And what else will happen when you’re dead?”

	The spy frowned.  “What?”

	“What else will happen when you’re dead?” Axio pressed.  “Will Bane come for you?”

	Suivi grimaced.  “Who cares?  I don’t.”

	Axio held his gaze.  “Follow me.”

	The paladin walked out of the privy and through the trap room, past the rows of bodies.  He walked through the altar chamber where an Oghmite priest was gingerly disassembling the mechanism.  He led the Watch and the spy through the door to the stairwell and stopped.  “Embersson.  Did Toller ever show you what was down here?” he asked.

	“No.”

	Axio’s shoulders sagged.  “Then you need to see.”  He resumed walking down the steps.

	Suivi paused.  The smell from below was beyond horrible.  “Follow me,” Axio said coldly.  “Do it now.”