"It does nothing for me. It was not my decision, nor my care!"
"My loving father," came Entreri's sarcastic reply. To his surprise, and outrage, Belrigger laughed at him.
"Even Tosso didn't find such nerve as that," said Entreri, and his mention of Belrigger's dying friend sobered the man.
"What do you want?"
"I want to know of my mother," said Entreri. "Is she alive?"
Belrigger's mocking expression answered before the man ever spoke. "You went to Calimport, yes?"
Entreri nodded.
"Shanali was dead before you arrived there, even if the merchants drove their horses furiously," said Belrigger. "She knew she was dying, you fool. Why do you think she sold off her precious Artemis?"
Entreri's thoughts began spinning. He tried to recall that last meeting, and saw the frailty in his mother in an entirely new light.
"I actually pitied the whore," Belrigger said, and even as the word left his mouth, Entreri came forward with frightening speed and smashed him hard across the face.
Entreri fell back into his own seat, and Belrigger stared at him threateningly, and spat blood on the floor.
"She had no choice," Belrigger went on. "She needed coin to pay the priests to save her miserable life, and they wouldn't even take her diseased body in trade for their spells. So she sold you, and they took her coin. And still she died. I doubt they did anything to try to stop it."
Belrigger fell quiet, and Entreri sat there for a long while, digesting the surprising words, trying to find some way to deny them.
"Have you found what you sought, murderer?" said Belrigger.
"She sold me?" Entreri asked.
"I just told you so."
"And my dear father protected me," Entreri replied.
"Your dear father?" asked Belrigger. "And you know who that is?"
Entreri's face went very tight.
"Are you stupid enough to think me your father?" Belrigger asked with a laugh. "I'm not your father, you fool. If I was, I'd've beaten more sense into you."
"You lie."
"Shanali was fat with you when I met her. Fat in the womb from whoring herself out to those priests. Like all the rest of the girls. Might that you left too young to know the truth of it, but most of the brats you see running the dirty streets come from priest seed." He stopped and snorted, then laughed again. "I just gave her a place to live, and she gave me some pleasures in exchange."
Entreri hardly heard him. He considered again the scenes of his youth, when men came in and paid Belrigger, then went to Shanali's bed. The assassin closed his eyes, almost hoping that Belrigger would move fast in his moment of vulnerability. If Belrigger had come forward and taken Entreri's dagger, he wouldn't stop him, and would invite the blade into his heart.
But the man didn't move, Entreri knew, because he continued to laugh.
Until, that is, Entreri opened his eyes again and gave him that tell-tale stare.
Belrigger cleared his throat, obviously uncomfortable.
Entreri rose and sheathed his sword. One step brought him towering over the seated man. "Get up."
Belrigger stared at him defiantly. "What do you want?"
Entreri's fist crushed his nose. "Get up."
Bleeding, Belrigger rose, with one arm raised defensively before him. "What do you want? I told you everything. I'm not your father!"
Entreri's left hand snapped up and caught Belrigger's blocking hand. With the simplest of moves, the assassin bent Belrigger's hand over backward and wrenched the arm painfully to the side.
"But you beat me," Entreri said.
"You needed it," Belrigger gasped, trying to raise his other arm.
Entreri's free hand snapped out, slamming him in his already-bloody face.
"A tough life!" Belrigger protested. "You needed sense! You needed to know!"
"Say again that my mother was a whore," said Entreri. He twisted the bent arm a bit more, driving Belrigger to one knee.
"What would you have me say?" the man pleaded. "She did what she had to do to survive. It's what we all do. I don't blame her, and never did. I took her in when none would."
"To your own gain."
"Some," Belrigger admitted. "You cannot blame me for the way things are.
"I can blame you for every fist you laid upon me," Entreri calmly replied. "I can blame you for letting that filth" — he nodded his chin at Tosso-posh— "near me. Or did he pay you, too? A bit of coin for your boy, Belrigger?"
Gasping in pain, Belrigger furiously shook his head. "No… I didn't…"
Entreri's knee drove into Belrigger's face, knocking him to the floor on his back. Out came the jeweled dagger, and Entreri moved over the groaning man.
But Entreri shook his head. He put the dagger away, and walked out the door.
The old woman was out there again, having apparently heard the scuffle. Heard that and more, Entreri realized, as, instead of scolding him yet again, she said, "I knew Shanali, and I'm remembering yerself, Artemis."
Entreri stared at her hard.
"Did you kill Belrigger?"
"No," Entreri replied. "You heard our conversation?"
The woman shrank back. "Some," she admitted.
"If he lied to me, I will return and cut him apart."
The woman shook her head, a resigned look coming over her wrinkled old face. She nodded toward the chair set in front of her house, and Entreri followed her there.
"Your mother was a pretty one," she said as soon as she sat down. "I knew her mother, too, just as pretty, and just as young when she bore Shanali as Shanali was when she gave birth to you. Only a girl, doing th'only thing a girl down here can do."
"With the priests?"
"With whoe'er's the coin," the old one said with obvious disgust.
"And she really is dead?"
"Not long after you left," said the woman. "She was dying, and it got all the worse when she let her son go. Like she had no reason to keep fighting, not when them priests took her coins and cast their spells and said they couldn't do anything more for her."
Entreri took a deep, steadying breath, reminding himself that he expected from the beginning that he would not find Shanali alive.
"She's with the rest of them," the old woman said, surprising him, as his expression revealed. "On the hill, behind the rock, where they bury them that got no names worth remembering."
Like everyone who had spent his childhood in that part of Memnon, Entreri knew well the pauper's graveyard, a patch of dirt behind a large rocky outcropping that overlooked the southwestern most point of Memnon Harbor. Despite himself, he looked that way, and without another word to the old woman, and with only a final glance at the shack that had been his home, a place to which he knew he would never return, he walked away.
CHAPTER 24
TO THE SOUL OF THE MATTER
Jarlaxle had his back to Entreri, pretending to look out the shack's front door at the early morning street. Athrogate snored contentedly in the corner of the room, his breathing interrupted at irregular intervals—Jarlaxle amused himself by imagining spiders climbing into the dwarf's open mouth.
Entreri sat at the table, his face tight and angry—the expression he had worn for most of the years he and Jarlaxle had spent together, one that Jarlaxle had hoped to replace forever with the use of Idalia's flute.
So much progress they had made, the drow silently lamented, but then that foolish woman had betrayed Entreri and torn a hole in his opened heart. And worst of all, what the drow knew but Entreri did not was that Calihye hadn't even wanted to attack him. Emotionally torn, confused by her loyalties and frightened of leaving the Bloodstone Lands, the woman had acted purely on impulse. Her strike was not wrought of malice toward Artemis Entreri, as it would have been in the early days of their relationship, but rather, was propelled by terror and grief and an anguish she could not overcome.