He scanned the ground for the sword, but the Slayer was coming in too fast. Without ever having thought to do something like this before, he plunged his hand into the beast's wide, spike-covered chest. Abdel's hand sank into the Slayer's body up to the elbow, and the thing screamed in rage.
Abdel knew on some level that was either beyond or not yet at the point of words that if he turned his wrist just so—there! He closed his hand around something warm, soft, and fleshy, and pulled.
The Slayer screamed again when Abdel's hand burst out of its chest. Abdel was holding a length of pink flesh. At the end of it was a hand. A hand with five fingers, no claws, no spikes, no chitin. Green blood followed Abdel's hand out. He was holding a human arm.
"She's mine!" the Slayer shrieked.
Abdel let go of the arm and ignored its groping fingers. He grabbed the Slayer by the sides of its head with both hands and twisted.
"She's no one's," he growled into the Slayer's bulging, incredulous eyes. "She's coming out!"
"No!" it screamed, then tried to scream again, but the sound was cut short in a throat now closed.
Abdel strained with all his considerable strength to turn the thing's head down and to the side. The Slayer answered by grabbing Abdel's head in one huge, misshapen hand. The grip was crushing, and Abdel's jaw clenched tight enough that his teeth started to shatter—each one cracking in turn with a spike of pain worse than the amputation. Blood dribbled down from his scalp. His skull cracked sharply at his temple and flashes of blue-violet light colored his vision.
There was a loud, grinding crack, and Abdel thought he might be dead, but it was the Slayer who went limp. The sudden weight pulled Abdel to the ground on top of it. The human arm still protruding from its chest blindly groped for anything. The hand found Abdel's gore-soaked chain mail and hung on.
The sellsword did nothing to get away from the human hand's grip. He started to claw at the Slayer's lifeless head and another one of the elf mages had to turn around and vomit at the sound it made. He ripped the thing's head open as if he was peeling an orange. Beneath the chitin, slime, blood, and the withering flesh of the avatar was a human face, a girl's face.
She gasped and took in a single, chest-filling breath.
"Imoen," Abdel said, his eyes filling with tears.
"Abdel," Imoen gasped, her eyes not yet able to focus, but she recognized his voice. "Abdel. . wh-where are we?"
Abdel smiled weakly and was about to reply when Ellesime screamed, "The tree!"
Abdel turned but couldn't see her. A blaze of hot yellow light filled his vision and burned his eyes. He grunted and something tensed in his chest, and his head exploded in pain.
"Oh, no, Abdel!" Imoen shrieked. "No!"
Abdel felt something pull him downward but couldn't tell where it was holding him. It wasn't his leg—it might have been holding him around the waist. He slipped into the ground and could smell dirt fill his nostrils. His arms tensed, and he could feel them grow. A wave of rage blew his mind away.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jaheira came awake with a gasp, her head snapping back, and her mouth gaping wide to draw in the unseasonably cool air of Suldanessellar. Her body, suspended in a mass of weblike strands, shook and rocked forward, then back, and came to a vibrating stop over the course of a long, painful minute.
Her eyelids were stuck closed with something, and when she finally forced one open, she realized the other just wasn't going to cooperate. A terrible pain throbbed all up the left side of her body. Her right foot was twisted painfully in the web, and she could feel it swelling.
Her one eye was blurred, but she saw Irenicus kneeling in front of the Tree of Life. She couldn't tell if it was a trick of her fuzzy vision or an actual phenomenon, but she was sure she could see Irenicus's skeleton outlined in bright light that turned his skin and muscles translucent.
The Tree of Life was on fire.
That thought didn't sink in at first. It took the space of two heartbeats, but when it did occur to her what she was seeing and the magnitude of the disaster that meant for not only the people of Suldanessellar, the elves of the forest of Tethir, but everyone and everything in Faerun, all of Abeir-toril…
Jaheira screamed.
She heard the sound echo across the burning ruins of Suldanessellar. Irenicus didn't react at all. He just kneeled there, chanting.
She screamed again, then struggled in the web, which succeeded only in getting her more firmly caught.
"Abdel!" she screamed, between two body-racking sobs.
This made Irenicus turn. His face was as translucent as the rest of his body, and she could see his wildly grinning, mad skull. His eyes blazed a bright yellow she was all too familiar with.
"Abdel," Irenicus said, his voice like the wind rumbling across the Shaar—the voice of a god. "Yes. . Abdel."
Jaheira screamed again and tried to look away, but her head was stuck, and she couldn't.
Irenicus smiled a toothy, leering, evil grin, and sank into the ground. His body just collapsed into a hole that wasn't really there. The Tree of Life blazed into wild orange flames hundreds of feet high that scalded Jaheira's face, and she screamed again. The webs started to unravel from the heat, and Jaheira's foot shifted painfully, then her head fell sideways.
She screamed, "Abdel, where are you?" in a dry throat with air from burned lungs and fell out of the web into a crumpled pile on the ground.
Abdel was blasted with heat, and it brought his consciousness back from the brink. Physically, he couldn't tell if he was a human or a monster, but his mind came back. Unfortunately, it came back just in time to be burned to death.
Though he wasn't sure it was a really good idea, he went ahead and opened his eyes even though he was afraid they'd be burned from his skull. Oddly enough, they weren't.
At first all they registered was a mass of slowly undulating orange, and it occurred to Abdel that he was submerged in molten lava, but how could that be?
Shadows coalesced in the orange and became figures, then those figures drifted into larger, more solid masses. The shadows were ledges and outcroppings of rock.
Abdel inhaled sharply and felt his jaw open. His mouth opened wrong, sideways, like the monster that Imoen had been before. Against all odds, he'd saved her life. Abdel remembered that clearly. It had happened a minute or so before he'd been pulled down into Hell.
So that was it. He was in Hell, and he was in the body—or his body had become the body—of a hideous, demonic monster. Abdel supposed that made him pretty much right at—
He shook his big giant monster head, not believing that he could be floating in a river of lava in some living Hell just casually thinking about—
Had he come home, then?
He asked himself that question.
Have I come home?
Is this the place I was supposed to be all along?
Do I rule here, then, like my father did?
Is that what I was meant to do?
Did Irenicus in his passionate, blind greed push me toward the destiny that has been mine, has run through my veins, my whole life?
Am I even Abdel now?
Am I Bhaal?
Am I anything? Just the will of murder and death and evil…
Am I home?
Is this home?
Abdel opened his mouth, sucked in a breath of hot, brimstone-reeking air, and called, "Father!"
"Bhaal!"
Abdel snapped his eyes shut and waited for an answer.,
Jaheira knew she had to just lay there and breathe for a while. She also knew she had to do something. The Tree was still on fire.
She let her tears wet the brittle grass and crawled away from the fire, sweat washing away the rest of the webbing.
She'd come to Suldanessellar to look for Irenicus, and she found him faster and easier than she ever imagined she would. There he was, kneeling in front of the Tree of Life. Jaheira remembered feeling grateful that she hadn't been able to understand the words he was chanting. Of course she wouldn't know this hideous ritual, designed to destroy everything she held sacred.