Chapter Text
Enver Flymm has been squandering his talents and intellect working as an enforcer with the Heapside Reavers for years. He’s not the biggest member of the gang by a long shot--Landon the Bug or Emma Threetoes get that honor, depending on whether you measure by weight or height--but he’s got a solid left hook and he can take more hits and keep going than just about any other Reaver. Enver’s problem, if you ask any of his mates except The Bug, is that he’s got a death wish; he goes too hard, he never backs down, and it’s a miracle that he’s still alive. The Bug, on the other hand, would tell you that his problem is that he talks too fancy and it’s a miracle he’s still alive.
He’s on his way to the flat he’s been squatting in most recently and out of the four Reavers exiting the Blushing Mermaid–-The Bug, Skrunkly Clyde, Ash Yee, and himself–-he is the least intoxicated, only because he, as a rule, prefers the second-cheapest rotgut, while the others are happy to settle for sewer water that’s been in the sun too long. His comparative sobriety is not what saves his life.
It’s the kind of foggy where if you hold your hands straight out in front of you, you can only make out the vague silhouette of your fingers, and then you probably fall on your face because you’re very inebriated, seeing double, and can’t walk straight. The sun isn’t up yet, but it’s starting to turn the street from black to gray. If anything, this is what saves his life, but it doesn’t save anyone else.
With a dramatic yelp, Skrunkly Clyde trips over someone lying in the middle of the street. His mates laugh. “Skrunk! What are you doing? Checking their pockets, mate?” The Bug chortles, shuffling forward to offer a hand to his toppled comrade.
Ash Yee has stumbled into the nearby wall and can only make out Enver and The Bug’s vague silhouettes, trying to help Skrunkly Clyde up. As they push off of the wall they notice that it’s extra sticky and, thinking they’ve just put their hand in someone’s vomit, they pull away with a disgusted “ugh.” It is not vomit, in fact; it is fresh blood. They never hear the screams or realize their error, however, because it’s dark and they’re already dead.
In the same moment that Ash Yee is receiving a free laryngectomy, Enver Flymm has discovered that the person Skrunk tripped over isn’t so much a person, as a partially scavenged carcass. “Fuck,” he yelps, because the palm of his hand has slipped off of a slightly-masticated lung and he’s just sliced his wrist open on a shard of exposed ribcage. He hears the screaming.
He stumbles backwards, pulling his wrist up against his stomach with the intention of checking to see how bad it is as soon as he can figure out what in the Hells is happening. But first, he finds Ash Yee, who has also collapsed onto the ground, and is wheezing and gurgling while using both hands, trying futilely to keep their blood on the inside. So not quite dead, but yeah, they’re dead. There’s no coming back from that.
“Bug! Behind you!” Enver yells as someone much smaller than The Bug leaps onto the big man’s back. At first he thinks maybe they’re a Halfling or a Gnome, but it’s just because they’re so fast and The Bug is so big. It doesn’t matter, they’re holding onto the collar of The Bug’s jacket and stabbing him in the neck and shoulders repeatedly with a long, slim blade. He gets one of his big hands over his head and clenches a fist around nothing, but it’s so close; his fingertips brush cloth. Enver watches the attacker let go and fall back to the ground to avoid the grab. The Bug is trying to turn around to face them, and as it seems to take an age for him to get his bulk rotated, their killer looks straight at Enver, yellow eyes cutting thru the fog like a lighthouse, and then they’re gone. Bug is swinging his arms around wildly at what should’ve been their head level.
“Get up,” Enver hisses to himself. “Fucking stand up.” They’re going to finish The Bug and then they’re coming for him.
As Enver stands, The Bug goes down, screaming. His calves have been sliced thru. Enver risks a glance at his wrist. The wound is shallower than it feels and barely bleeding. Alright, forget about that. The Bug is still screaming. Just get ready. They’re coming. Don’t run.
“Skrunk? You still alive?” No answer. Ash Yee has stopped gurgling. The Bug has gone quiet too. He would swear he can still hear screaming coming from somewhere, but there’s no one left. He’s only a block from the squat, but there won’t be anyone there. All of his flatmates just died.
Enver pushes off the wall, but keeps his back to it. This guy is fast, but so is he; at least that’s what he tells himself. He catches a flash of that yellow light to his left and deflects the dagger with his right forearm, punching up at where he hopes their center of mass is. He connects, but they roll away from the blow, springing back up to their feet out of his reach, and then they walk backwards until they disappear into the fog. Absolutely terrifying behavior; this guy should go on tour.
Enver takes a deep breath thru his nose, keeps his arms up, and the screaming fades to the familiar slosh of the river; the creak of wood pilings; the plip plip of his blood falling on cobbles. He noticed a quiver of arrows or bolts on their leg during their last pass, but they must not be able to see thru the fog any better than he can or they’d’ve shot him by now with all the trouble he’s giving them in comparison to their other victims.
“I haven’t actually seen your face, if it makes any difference,” he says, hoping for something, anything he can work with, while trying to predict their next move. “No hard feelings. This lot were arseholes.” Well, Ash Yee had been alright.
“Ira et dolor,” is their response. Shit, they’re casting a spell. The wall and cobbles where he’s standing erupt in spikes. He dives away and they’re waiting for him, so he desperately throws himself into a roll and kicks backwards connecting with something hard. He hears a light thump and hissing intake of breath, which tells him he probably got a shin or knee. He’s pushing himself upright when he hears, “sonuvabitch,” hissed under his attacker’s breath and more sharp inhaling.
“True, but presumptuous,” he says, keeping crouched and wheeling around on the ball of his foot to find the cannibal-murderer sitting practically next to him, both hands clutching their knee. Their hood has fallen down revealing a grimace behind a shock of pale hair. A half-elf, pretty, spattered extensively with blood. “You alright there? Need a break?” Enver looks around for their dagger while he talks, but he doesn’t immediately see it. That’s a shame, this could’ve been over so quick. Their eyes reignite as they glare at him, but then fade away again, revealing pale irises. He’s torn between backing away and not losing sight of them. Unless he broke their kneecap, they’ll be up again in a moment. “How about we call it a draw and go our separate ways.”
They tap two fingers to their thumb, which he recognizes as guild sign. “I just need a minute,” they add thru their teeth.
Enver has no idea what keeps him there, but he sits back down, cross-legged. He checks his arm and finds that it’s mostly scabbed over with what’s left of his sleeve glued to it. “I’m with the Guild too. Heapside Reavers. We’re not enemies.”
“Not guild,” they say, massaging their knee with their fingers; definitely not broken. Their accent sounds not-quite-Baldurian; he can’t place it exactly. Maybe an outer city district, or a foreign parent. They look close to his own age; it’s hard to tell with half-elves, but the fact that they just murdered four people and stopped for a chat suggests a lack of maturity Enver is finding fascinating.
“Are you pledging or something? You’re too sloppy to be a professional.” The words are out of his mouth before he can stop himself.
The corner of his new friend’s mouth twitches up and they brush a hand thru their hair, pushing the damp mop out of their face. “Something like that.” They look him over, their thick brows knitting together. “You’re unarmed.”
“That would be on account of I was drinking with my mates. Knife fights have been a problem. Anyway, I’m not unarmed; I forgot I have knuckles in my pocket.” The half-elf shakes their head incredulously. Alright, not an idiot; worth checking. Enver has mostly sobered up, tho he’s still a little lightheaded; some of that is likely to be blood loss or from coming down off the adrenaline. “Do you wanna get out of the street before someone else wanders by and you have to kill more people? I’ve got a place near here.”
“Yah, alright, I can kill you back at your place.”
Enver snorts quietly at that and shoves to his feet, holding a hand out and to his surprise, they grab him by the wrist and pull themself up. He sees the dagger as they come off the ground, but only as long as it takes for them to pick it up and slide it into a hidden sheathe behind their back. “Enver,” he says.
With just the briefest hesitation, they reply, “Tav.”
“Sure,” he says. Tav may be the most common name on the Sword Coast.
They’re obviously still favoring one leg, but when he offers a shoulder they decline. Alright, not quite there yet. There is something unspoken going on between the two of them, tho. Tav seems touch-starved in a way that Enver is acutely familiar with, tho it’s been years; he remembers arriving back in Baldur’s Gate and being sick with it; the skin-crawling need and the revulsion in equal measure. The first time he got picked up by an older patriar he panicked and climbed out a window and then hid under a pier neck deep in cold water; very nearly died of hypothermia.
Tav holds up a finger and stiffly moves to the wall. The sun is up over the buildings now, so Enver can almost make out what they’re doing. He steps forward to watch as they dip their fingers in Ash Yee’s throat and finish the mural they’d started before being interrupted. It’s a skull encircled by teardrops. He spots a crossbow slung along their lower back under their cloak, but can’t see where the dagger went. They stop for a moment to appraise their work and then turn back to face him and, he suspects, appraise him as well. He’s careful not to give anything away lest they decide it’d be more sensible not to leave a witness.
He stuffs his hands in his jacket pockets and--son of a bitch, there really are knuckles in there--he cocks his head towards the end of the lane by way of invitation, because there’s no way he’s turning his back on Tav.
Their knee loosens up as they walk and by the time the two of them reach the ladder to the squat a minute or so later, they’re bouncing. From there it’s thru a couple adjoining flats, past a few sleeping squatters he doesn’t know, into the relative privacy of the squat he shared with The Bug and Skrunk. The Bug, being the biggest, got the biggest bed, but Enver decides right then and there to give himself an upgrade. He kicks off his boots and sits down on the edge of the bed to peel his jacket off and--while Tav looks around the small space--stash the knuckles under the mattress.
Enver is wrapping his arm in strips of cloth that used to be one of The Bug’s shirts when Tav says, “Shit, did I kill the guy who made these?”
He looks up and then back down at what he’s doing before saying, “I drew those.” He should’ve tossed those in the firepit ages ago. He wonders if he should just do something right now to get himself killed so he doesn’t embarrass himself.
The papers in Tav’s hand are all crunchy with water damage and tiny shapes chewed out along the edges from insect grazing. It’s not like he could afford parchment and it’s been half a year or more since Enver looked at them. Tav comes over and plops down next to him. “Trigger mechanism on this one looks uncomfortable. This is for a repeating crossbow? Does it work? You’re really interested in--what’s it called--how arrows work?”
Enver looks up again and they're still flipping thru the pages. “Ballistics.”
“Ballistics, right. Is this an arrowhead? What’s going on here?”
“Hmm? That’s a bullet. Turn to the next sheet... It’s for the hand cannon. Right, that one. I took apart a Gondian musket once, years ago. The really good ones have rifling in the barrel; that’s the spiral grooves there. Smoothbore guns require spherical bullets, which can still be used with rifling, but correctly sized conical bullets would be more effective. The Gondians prefer spheres, primarily because they’re a bunch of engineering recidivists. But designing the conical bullet led me to consider breechloading, which is what’s going on there.” He points, then pulls his arm back as he realizes he’s rambling, and becomes self-conscious again. They’re looking at him and their eyes are glowing. Why do they do that? When he looks at them, they’re close enough that the light reflects off of his skin onto theirs, turning them golden, almost glittering; they seem to realize it too, and blink rapidly until the glowing fades away; so they don’t have complete control over when they do it.
“Are they accurate?” they ask.
“No, but that’s one of the things I was attempting to improve upon.”
“With the shape of the bullet?” They look back at the drawing they mistook for an arrowhead with a fascination he’s never seen on another person before. “How’s the range compared to a longbow?”
“At this particular moment it’s abysmal, but it doesn’t have to be. Artificers have barely scratched the surface of the potential of explosive propulsion. Felogyr’s is out there making toys with it.”
“Why’d you give up?”
A sharpness goes thru Enver’s chest, as if the question was a bullet. What makes you think I gave up? he wants to say defiantly, but the words catch in his throat. They’ve already clocked him; the paper, the squat, the embarrassment. He lets himself fall back onto the bed. “What does it matter? You’re going to kill me anyway.” He needs capital; a lot of capital. A workshop, equipment to fabricate prototypes, materials for testing. Starting from absolute scratch.
They don’t respond. He can hear them fussing about and there’s a thunk as they drop their crossbow on the floor and fall back next to him, scooting up the bed until they can pillow their head on his arm. “I’m gonna rest my eyes for a minute,” they say nonchalantly, pushing their hair back out of their face and closing their eyes.
Enver watches them like that for a while before noticing the tail and claws of a scorpion on their neck, peeking out from their collar. He reaches over, unsure if they’re asleep or not, and lifts the collar to get a look at the rest of the arachnid. Glancing back up at their face, they’re looking at him again, and it’s bright enough now that he can see they’ve got green eyes, like pale jade.
“The smaller their pincers, the more potent the venom in their sting,” they offer softly by way of an explanation. He wonders if they have any other tattoos. He wonders if they’d have an opinion about his.
He puts his thumb down on the scorpion’s stinger and feels their pulse, fast and shallow. They grab his hand by the wrist and bring it up to cover their own mouth and he can feel the slight suction on his palm as they breathe in, and hot air as they breathe out, and they start licking his palm. Blood and sweat and dirt and gravel from the road; they don’t seem to care. He watches them suck on his fingers, and they keep their eyes on his face until they suddenly reach out and grab him by the jaw, not at all gently, turning his head so they can roll into his neck and continue lathing him roughly there.
There isn’t a lot he can do. One of his arms is pinned under them and they’ve still got the other one by the wrist. They’ve slid a knee up between his legs which seems to him like a declaration of intent, but something in his chest is still stinging from the casual dismissal. Why’d you give up? Small pincers, indeed. They sit up, leaving him on his back, tacky with saliva and head spinning, like they could read his mind.
“Your name isn’t really Tav,” he says, rather than say what he’s really thinking about. Anything but that. They’re pushing their hair back as they look around at him, then they shrug and crouch to pick their gear up off the floor. “I’ll call you Chance.”
“To who? If I find out you’ve been telling people about me I’ll kill them and then I’ll shoot you in the throat from across a crowded plaza so you can’t charm me again with your whole…” They gesture at him comprehensively. He smirks and they snort like he just proved their point. Whatever they got from manhandling him, they seem to be in a much better mood now, tho he watches their hands flexing and grabbing at the hem of their cloak.
“You know where to find me.”
“Shame for you then that you don’t have anything I need,” Chance says unconvincingly, but with a gritty undercurrent of determination and anxiety. He wonders if their next stop will be under a pier, up to their neck in cold river water. At least it’s summer.
Yet, Enver thinks, but he keeps it to himself.
*
Enver Flymm died that morning. Enver Gortash swears to himself that he’s going to own this city. It takes him three years to get his hands on something Chance needs.
It went like this. First, he taught himself everything there was to know about Bhaal and the Bhaalist cult, or what’s left of it after the defeat of Sarevok Anchev over a century ago by the Gate’s own Duke Abdel Adrian. That led him serendipitously to the Iron Throne--not the building, which is at the bottom of the Chionthar--the guild from which it took its name. They’d been hanging on by a thread since Sarevok’s time and he was more than happy to bully his way into the organization. That got him the contacts, capital, and some of the materials he needed to get started. He also looked into the other cults of the Dead Three; Bane and Myrkul, but as far as he could tell they’d been driven out of the city. There is an active crew of Zhentarim stationed in Baldur’s Gate, but the status of their current allegiance to the Lord of Tyranny, or lack thereof, is unclear. They represent direct competition to his Iron Throne business, so he’ll have to deal with the Black Network eventually, just not until he needs to expand beyond the Gate.
Second, a little extortion and strategic philandering and he’s able to obtain a waterfront warehouse and the names of a few patriars interested in risky business ventures. From there he manages to prototype a compound crossbow with acceptable results and talk his way into enough investment money to reinvest in lobbying the Watch and Flaming Fist for armament contracts. He’s now got passive income enough to secure himself a townhouse in the Lower City and other luxuries that he’s expected to flaunt in order to impress certain families into giving him the time of day.
Third, it’s time to set his sights on bigger fish. There’s no way in Hell he’s demeaning himself to begging for access to the High House of Wonders, so he recruits an orphan who’s too smart to be grifting for Fetcher. He sets Yanthus up with a tailor-made sob story and almost enough tuition money and sends them into the belly of the beast.
The entire time he’s clawing his path out of obscurity he’s keeping his eye out for the opportunities he’ll need to accomplish two impossible tasks--find something that Chance needs, and subsequently find a way to contact Chance about it. The interest they expressed in firearms could be a start, but he’s too far off from having developed a weapon worth their time. He’s had no luck so far in bypassing Felogyr’s smokepowder monopoly, tho it’s only a matter of time. He needs to get direct access to the Gondians designs so as not to spend the rest of his life reinventing the wheel. Thanks to young Yanthus’s excellent eye for details, he’s progressing towards a plan that could get him into the Gondian’s rumored vaults, but he’s going to need to recruit a crew and he’s loath to involve the Guild. Nine-Fingers is as like as not to direct him against shaking that tree, but where it’s the only tree worth shaking, he’s going to keep his own council.
As Tymora would have it, both of his impossible tasks resolve themselves within a tenday of each other. In the Summer of the Year of the Purloined Statue an article in the Baldur’s Mouth Gazette about a series of seemingly unrelated murders in the Lower City catches his eye; when the only thing he really knows about the person he’s trying to locate is that they’re a member of a murder cult it’s just sensible to watch the papers. The reporter, Zilbarr Whistlepocket, believes there’s a connection. Chance had painted Bhaal’s holy symbol on the wall in blood and Gortash had read about a number of other examples of the same in the ensuing months, but there had been nothing he could do about them at the time, and eventually even those sightings dried up. Nobody wants to take a dead god’s symbol seriously. For a while he was concerned that Chance had left the city.
The other crucial opportunity came in the form of an off-handed comment by Yanthus. “Heard some acolytes talking about the High Seeker buying a bundle of torture racks and a mummy off adventurers out of Calimshan. They said they’re for display in the Hall of Wonders. Dunno why Gond gives a crap about a mummy even if it is supposed to be a Bhaalspawn. Suppose torture racks are a kind of invention at least. A stupid invention.”
Gortash laughs in response and says to the 12-year old, “Tell me your learned opinions about efficacious torture, small child.”
“You don’t need a whole fancy thing to make someone crazy. Just tie ‘em to whatever you’ve got lying around. Loud noises day and night, no escape. That’s how you drive someone nutters.”
They made a good point, but Gortash wasn’t going to admit it aloud. “When will the display be available for public viewing?” he asked. “See if you can get an advance copy of the announcement. I may have a use for it.”
In order to determine whether the hypothetical serial killer working their way thru the Lower City was his, Gortash would have to put in the legwork himself. The reporter’s source turned out to be an amateur detective and in early Flamerule they themself became a murder suspect. As he started seeing the shape of the killer’s work, he rather started to hope it was Chance. The cleverness on display was much more impressive than the kill-of-opportunity they’d exhibited in their first meeting. Here, they seem to be laying a trail of false leads and motives wherever they go. The killings are each brazen in their own way, theatrical even; an elf killed with a boat anchor in a public square; a butcher strung up like a carcass and left to bleed out; the butcher’s supplier frozen to death while being held for questioning in the Seatower. There were more, if he had to guess, sixteen in all; it was enough to justify taking action. He just needs to figure out how to do it without becoming one of their victims.