Entreri leaped into pursuit, but pulled up short, his attention drawn across the room, where the three priests escorted the blessed voice proper out a back door.
"No!" Entreri yelled charging that way, though he knew he'd never get there in time to stop the escape. It couldn't happen like this! Not after all his effort, not after all the memories of Shanali had assaulted him.
Devout Tyre, in the lead, pulled open the door; Entreri did the only thing he could and launched his sword like a great spear.
"Ah, but ye're a good pig," Athrogate said to Snort. He leaned heavily on the boar, nearly collapsing from loss of blood, and directed the creature to the extra-dimensional pocket. As he neared the black hole, the dwarf noted a man crawling out.
Devout Gositek turned to him pitifully.
Athrogate slugged him hard, knocking him out, so that he was hanging by the waist over the lip of the hole, the fingers of his extended arms just brushing the floor.
On a word from the dwarf, Snort leaped back into the hole. Athrogate looked to Jarlaxle and saluted, though the drow hardly seemed to notice. Then the dwarf hopped into a sitting position on the rim of the dimensional pocket, grabbed Gositek by the scruff of his neck, and rolled back out of sight, taking the battered priest with him.
Out of the corner of his eye, Devout Tyre saw the missile coming. He fell back with a yelp, knocking his fellows into a stumble, with Blessed Voice Proper Yinochek, still gasping for breath, falling back against the wall. The red-bladed sword rushed past Tyre and hit the wood, the weight of the missile closing the door hard, and leaving the sword stuck there, quivering.
"Get him out!" Tyre commanded the other two, turning toward the charging Entreri. "I will finish this one."
With a snarl of defiance, the priest grabbed Charon's Claw and yanked it from the door.
Everything seemed to move in slow motion for Devout Tyre. He stumbled away from the door as one of his companions, Devout Premmy, tugged the portal back open. He saw the man Entreri, screaming in protest, still thirty feet or more away. He watched the man change hands with his remaining weapon, saw him leap high and far, planting his left foot as he came down.
Entreri's hips rotated to square with the door. His left arm swung out wide as he rolled his right shoulder forward, arm coming up and over in a mighty throw.
Tyre hardly registered the movement, the silver flickers of the missile, but he knew somehow exactly where it was heading. He tried to scream a warning, but his voice came out as a high-pitched shriek.
He hardly heard that, but instead heard Entreri's seemingly elongated cry of "Shanali!"
And as though with the snap of some unseen wizard's fingers, time sped up and the silver missile flashed past him. Devout Tyre turned and saw his Blessed Voice Proper, the Principal Cleric of the Protector's House, with his arms out before him, quivering, his face a mask of exquisite pain, the jeweled hilt of a dagger protruding from his chest.
And Tyre saw… white. Just hot white, as his sensibilities finally registered the excruciating pain that burned throughout his body and soul. He screamed again—or tried to, but his lips curled up over his teeth, and rolled back even farther as if melting away. Somewhere deep inside him, Tyre knew that he should drop the evil sword.
But his sensibilities were long gone by then, his thoughts no longer connecting to his body. Pain controlled him, and nothing more, as he felt a million stinging needles, a million burning bites, a fire within him as profound and devastating as the one that had exploded in the corridor across the way.
He fell to the floor but never knew it. He lay there trembling, his skin smoldering and crackling into charred bits as Charon's Claw ate him.
The throw—both of them—had come from somewhere so deep inside of him that Artemis Entreri had hardly even realized his actions. He had seen nothing but Shanali, frail and dying in the dust. He had felt nothing but his rage, his absolute fury that the vile priest would escape him.
The moment his dagger thudded into Principal Cleric Yinochek's heart, the spell was broken, and Entreri, running at the four priests, felt a flood of angry satisfaction.
He slowed his pace, noting movement from the side, then watched as two of the priests deserted Yinochek and rushed out the door, Jarlaxle's diatryma in close pursuit. There were soldiers coming toward the room down the hall beyond, he saw, but how they changed their attitude and their direction when that giant bird crashed out through the doorway.
Entreri rushed up and pushed the door closed. He glanced at the dying Tyre but paid him no more heed than that, moving instead to stand before the principal cleric.
"Do you know how many lives you have ruined?" he asked the man.
Trembling, sputtering, his eyes wide with horror, Yinochek's lips moved but no words came forth.
"Yes," Entreri noted. "You know. You understand it all. You know the wretchedness of your actions as you steal the coin of the peasants and the innocence of the girls. You know, and so you are afraid." He reached up and grabbed the dagger hilt, and Yinochek stiffened.
Entreri thought to obliterate the man's soul with his magical weapon, but he shook his head and dismissed the notion.
"Selûne is a goodly god, so I've heard," he said, "and thus will have nothing to do with the likes of you. I call you a fraud, and there is nowhere left for you to hide."
The man's eyes rolled back into his head, and he slumped to the floor.
"A better way to go than that one," Jarlaxle said, and only then did Entreri realize that the drow had come to his side. Jarlaxle's gaze led Entreri's to what remained of Devout Tyre, who lay on his back shaking wildly, his robes smoking and his face showing more bone than flesh.
With a growl, Entreri stomped hard on the man's forearm, crushing the burnt skin and bone, and the recoil lifted Charon's Claw into the air, where Entreri easily caught it.
He looked back at Jarlaxle as the drow settled the fabric patch back into his great hat.
The building shook violently, and across the room, a gout of flames rushed in.
"Come," Jarlaxle bade him, putting on his magical mask. "We must be away."
Entreri looked back at the blessed voice proper, sitting against the wall, his chest covered in blood, his eyes white.
He thought of Shanali one last time. He took a brief moment to consider the long and dirty road of his miserable life, which had ultimately brought him to that awful place.
EPILOGUE
The commotion behind him did little to take Entreri's gaze from the city below him. He stood on the jag of rock at the paupers' graveyard, staring down at the plume of smoke that hung lazily over the ruins of the Protector's House.
His vengeance had been sated, obviously so, but there was little left in the man. Finally he turned back to Jarlaxle, who had opened his portable hole against another stone, and stood with Athrogate beside him, staring into the darkness.
"Well, ye might as well be coming here," the dwarf recited. "Afore I find me way in there. In that case, yerself should fear, me pulling ye out by the tip o' yer ears!"