“You can thank Lord Kor for that,” Janik said, “and Maija. She told me she wanted you, I told Kor you were essential, and he got you for us.”
“You were fighting in the war?” Captain Avaen asked Dania.
“I enlisted as soon as I was old enough, which was as good a way as any to get out of my father’s house.”
The captain looked surprised. “Yours is a noble family, is it not?”
“Oh yes, the line of ir’Vran goes back to the first nobles of Breland. And my father could easily have kept me from combat duty, if I hadn’t volunteered for it.” Dania was still staring at the polished wood of the tabletop, not looking at the captain.
“So Lord Kor put the four of us on a ship to Xen’drik,” Janik said, trying to steer the conversation away from Dania’s painful memories of the war. “And we trudged through the jungle to a tiny ruin full of baboons, remember?”
“Rabid baboons,” Mathas said, chuckling.
“Corrupted baboons,” Dania said. “That was no disease—there was an evil in that place that made them that way.”
“And that big one nearly ripped my arms off,” Janik said. He turned to Auftane and the captain. “It was holding me right up to its face, my feet dangling above the ground, and tugging on me like a rag doll, screeching like a banshee. Then all of a sudden it got this quizzical look on its big baboon face and started to look behind it, and then it just fell over dead. Dania had neatly cut right through its spine.”
“And did you find what you were looking for?” the captain asked.
“No, but neither did Krael, who was in charge of the Emerald Claw expedition. Eventually we came back to Breland with some good information about the Emerald Claw’s intentions there, and that convinced the king that we were worth what he was paying us.”
“And what were they doing?” Auftane said.
“Mathas, you can explain it better than I can,” Janik demurred.
“They were building some kind of magical device around a manifest zone they had discovered,” the elf began.
“A manifest zone?” the captain asked.
“A place where the boundaries between the planes are thin. In that particular location, the plane of Shavarath, called the Battleground, was somehow close at hand. They were building a device in the hope of bringing some of that plane’s warring inhabitants into our plane to fight on their behalf.”
“It could have been quite devastating,” Dania added, “if they had been successful. Imagine an army of demons marching at Karrnath’s command.”
“Or a swarm of blades flying through the air, unhindered by any defense their opponents could muster,” Mathas said.
“So we snuck in and destroyed their precious device,” Janik said.
“I’m surprised Breland didn’t want it for itself,” the captain said. “Even the best of nations, when at war, can lose sight of the proper perspective on such things—the devastation it could cause.”
“Well,” Janik hesitated, then admitted, “we actually had orders to secure it for Breland, if possible.”
“That turned out not to be possible,” Dania added with a grin.
“In fact,” Mathas added, “it’s not quite fair to say we destroyed it, is it?”
“No, it was that army of archons that destroyed it,” Janik said. “But we helped get it sucked into the Battleground.”
“Right,” Mathas said. “Through our efforts, the boundary between our world and Shavarath disappeared entirely—just for a moment, and in that particular place. The device the Emerald Claw was building passed through the boundary—”
“Taking us with it,” Dania interjected.
“Taking us with it, yes, and it was quickly destroyed by a raiding force of celestial beings.”
Captain Avaen looked somewhat skeptical. “But you escaped,” he said.
“We did,” Janik said. “And Krael did, worse luck. But the Emerald Claw mastermind behind the whole project—what was his name?”
“General Malestra,” Mathas said.
“Right, Malestra emphatically did not escape.” Janik smirked.
“Nor did most of his lackeys,” Dania said grimly.
“How did you get back to this plane?” Auftane asked, his eyes wide with wonder.
“The planar boundary was ruptured when the device passed through,” Mathas explained. “It started to repair itself almost immediately, but we were able to jump through it again, in the opposite direction, before it closed entirely.”
“And Krael?”
“He and a couple of his men made it through ahead of us,” Janik said. “He stuck around on this side of the portal just long enough to swear vengeance on us, and then ran off.”
“And ever since then, it’s always the same with Krael,” Dania said. “He tries to sabotage our work, and we get in his way as much as possible without lowering ourselves to his kind of dirty tricks.”
“Hmm,” Janik grunted. “I’m starting to wonder if maybe we should break into his apartment to steal his books.”
“Count me out,” said Dania.
“I suppose that wouldn’t fit well in your new lifestyle, would it?” Janik said, the merest trace of mockery in his voice.
Dania’s temper flared. “No, and it wouldn’t fit your old way of doing things, either,” she said, her voice rising only slightly. “You used to have some ethics.”
Mathas and the captain looked anywhere but at the other people at the table, while Auftane watched Janik and Dania with morbid fascination.
“Well, look where it got me,” Janik responded hotly. “You can only turn away from evil for so long before it stabs you in the back.”
“That’s why you’ve got to confront it, face to face,” Dania said.
“Like we did with Maija?”
“Janik, that caught us all off guard,” Dania said. “We never knew she held such evil in her heart.”
“Which proves my point. If we couldn’t see the evil in Maija—if I couldn’t see it—then how can we see it anywhere else in order to confront it? Maybe it’s better to strike first, ethics be damned.”
“So you’d betray me, or Mathas, or Auftane here, rather than risk one of us turning on you? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No! Churning chaos, Dania, you’re twisting my words. I meant that maybe we shouldn’t think Krael’s tactics are beneath us. They seem to be working all right for him.”
“Wait until you see Krael, Janik. I think you’ll agree that his tactics, as you say, aren’t working well.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maija turned on him, too,” Dania said, her voice suddenly quiet. “I don’t know if Mathas told you, but I saw them both when I was in Karrnath.”
“Together?”
“Yes, they were still working together,” Dania said. “They were both working with a shifter vampire, looking for the Tablet of Shummarak.”
“The Tablet of Shummarak? Sea of Fire,” Janik muttered.
“Janik,” Dania said. “Krael is a vampire.”
“A va—” Janik’s mouth hung open for a moment. Mathas and Avaen returned their full attention to the conversation, and Auftane’s eyes grew still wider.
Janik gasped. “Is Maija—?”
“As far as I know, she’s still alive. At least she was when I saw her. We destroyed the shifter vampire, and then Krael and Maija disappeared. We couldn’t find them again. But Janik, I don’t have much hope that she can ever be redeemed. She had such a strong aura of evil around her.”
“Was it an aura she didn’t have at Mel-Aqat?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t until I was in Karrnath that I started noticing things like that. Since seeing that, I’ve learned to focus it more—it was part of my training as a paladin. But at the time, it was just a powerful sense, almost like I could smell it on her.”
“So her smell told you she was beyond redemption?” Janik’s voice rose again. “Her smell told you I should give up hope?” He leaned across the table. “I’m not going to forget about her, damn it—I’m not going to give up on her, no matter what your nose or your special paladin sense tells you!”