Chapter Text
It’s dusk when they first discuss it, a desire so deep Valas has never said it aloud.
Were anyone to look up at the quiet manor on a corner in Bloomridge, perhaps on the way home from selling trinkets in the Wide, or as they wander to the nearest tavern, they’d see them there, the pair of them. A half-drow dressed in deepest black and a human with gold on each finger, the plates laid before them picked clean, the glasses in their hands stained with two layers of red, lounging at either end of the settee long past when one of them should have risen to draw the curtains shut.
He should do it now, Valas thinks as he turns his wine, watching the candlelight refract. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t, just as he doesn’t know how they arrived at the subject, his confessing the name of the person he most longs to kill.
He lets his voice trail off, and swallows against the dry in his throat. Tries to find his footing. He’s not one for quick words, the thoughtless flow that pours from so many like blood—he often prefers to listen. For a heartbeat, for an opportunity, for the guiding voice of his god.
And Enver Gortash doesn’t seem one for silence. Not like this, chin in his hand, long gaps between the sound of his own voice—not unless he’s waiting, too, searching for a flaw. Perhaps he understands this weakness for what it is.
Skie. Skie Silvershield. Skie Silvershield the second—not the same young woman said to have died at the hands of the Bhaalspawn who sired him, but Valas yearns for her blood all the same, Torlin’s daughter named for the ancestor plucked too soon.
Sometimes, in Valas’s worst moments, his mind whispers that it would be right. To prove himself better than the one who raised him before he found his true Father’s embrace, who always claimed he hadn’t been the one to kill his Skie. That it would be good, further insult and honour to the man once Chosen by his god—Torlin proved unworthy the moment Valas set in motion his death, but he was a Bhaalist all the same, and there’s nothing more Bhaalist than the slaughter of one’s kin.
But it’s weakness, coveting one death above all others, no matter how he twists his thoughts.
He’s seen such a thing in his acolytes’ eyes, when they come to him soft and raw, his Father’s voice in their heads a mewling thing—they don’t understand, in the throes of those first few tastes of blood, what their work really means. They dwell in emotion, in grudges, in hate, longing to kill an old rival, a scorned lover, someone who did them wrong. The faith shows them: there’s no value in the personal, in passion, if it’s not needed to reach the right holy end.
It’s weakness, then, too, how much he’s come to enjoy this new ally’s company.
Valas turns his gaze to the window, to the motion on the street below—feet catching on cobble, glances cast back over shoulders, plumes of breath climbing the cool evening air—just as Gortash looks away, too. He must be admiring the curves of his own furniture; the works of art in their golden frames, some so new they still sit propped against the wall; the piles of papers and gadgets, their places not yet found, sketches and plans and small, delicate tools. The home he’s building, here in the Lower City’s most fashionable neighbourhood, so different from where he’d last laid his head.
But when Valas turns back his way, he’s looking out into the dark. Toward the wall, just steps to the north, that separates them from the Upper City.
Valas can almost hear him thinking.
“There would be a beautiful kind of symmetry to it,” Gortash says finally, and Valas busies himself with a sip of wine. “One Bhaalspawn filled with remorse, peaceful against his nature, and then all these years later another to do it right. It’s not far from our other discussions of late.”
“This is different.” Valas feels the weight of all the Bhaalists he’s brought to those conversations: Sarevok Anchev’s use of doppelgangers to infiltrate the patriar class, and Torlin Silvershield’s indelicate explosion at High Hall. Remembers, too, all the Banites Gortash has described, thwarted in their grasps for power. “This isn’t about the failures of our predecessors. It’s nothing to do with strengthening our position.”
“True enough, though I thought we’d begun to agree on the root cause of those failures.”
“Working in isolation.” Valas says it slowly, only finding Gortash’s meaning in the expectant silence that follows.
Gortash shifts closer to stack the empty plates, but he doesn’t rise to remove them, and he doesn’t move back—he’s far too close. Valas keeps his eyes trained on his own hands and tries not to feel the shift of the cushion to his side, the soft suggestion of breath against his neck. Tries to force a response to the idea, that they might take this on as a joint project between their faiths, another way to strengthen this nascent alliance—and thinks of how it might please Bhaal as a show of skill, leveraging another to drive his blade into one of the Gate’s most protected. Yes, his instincts sing, gods, yes, but he bites down the desire.
He can’t allow himself the pleasure.
He can’t allow Gortash the leverage.
They should turn their minds back to the city’s politics, to how they might bury themselves further beneath its skin. Better yet, he should leave. Go hunt on his own, perhaps, or find an acolyte at the temple in need of instruction. Return here another day, with his mind clear and his urges quiet, when a haze of wine and company and goaded bloody thoughts isn’t fooling him into wanting to shift closer to the man next to him, too.
Though, there is one way he could see this work.
“Would her death be of use to you, Counsellor Gortash?” He’d meant them as weapons, the title and the tone, a warning to keep this to business, but words have never been among Valas’s best.
“Is that how you think of me?”
Valas takes another sip of wine—it’s too cold, too weak, nothing like the wet, warm iron he longs for instead. He hears his own in his ears, feels it rushing through his veins, and ignores his, so near and so sweet. It would look beautiful, spilled to the carpet at their feet or coated thick on his hands. “You’re a counsellor,” he says. “It’s your name.”
There’s a spark in his eyes, and a rather pleased puff of his chest, at the title he’s now worn for at least a year—but then the spark turns dangerous. “I rather thought I’d be Enver to you by now.”
The two syllables on their own are too much, too intimate, and Valas tries to stop them from sinking deeper. At least Gortash has the decency to stand to refill his wine when he doesn’t respond, leaving the space beside him mercifully empty.
Valas savours the slide of his sleeve against his as he goes.
“But, no,” Gortash continues, studying him with those eyes, almost black, as the sound of his pour lingers, “there’s no political advantage I can see. Though I’m not sure I see the obstacle here—you’re a prolific bringer of death. Give her to your god.”
He holds out his hand for Valas’s glass, and he offers it, rough fingers brushing his as it passes between them.
“Bhaal doesn’t care for whose death he’s brought. There’s no glory in powerful targets, in beauty, in needless risk.” He takes the glass back and stalls with another sip, straightening his posture. “It’s a waste of thought.”
“My dear Bhaalspawn,” Gortash says, sitting back down at his side. He crosses one leg over the other, leaning closer than before. It’s manipulation, it’s malice, it’s an attempt to throw him off guard, though even as he tenses Valas doesn’t know why. “What’s wrong with taking something simply because you want it?”
Valas can’t help but look, twisting toward him with the smallest turn.
There’s so much intention there in his gaze, in how the edge of his mouth curls upward, the way his eyes move across his face.
It’s the echo of another look, one Valas first saw so many months ago when they first worked in concert, in the heart-pounding rush as the museum guards’ lives faded away at his feet.
The blood has long since been scrubbed from the Hall of Wonders’s white tiles, but the message still stains the soul of Baldur’s Gate: the word Bhaal haunts her once again, spread in frightened whispers. The ancestral torture racks are back in the Undercity temple, wood slick and red with new use, an honour to his Father.
And he’d pleased him, this man of ambition and clever word.
Even those who feel the stroke of Bhaal’s whispers at the edge of their minds, who turn to murder’s lord with love in their hearts, often falter at their first kills, before they learn to live up to their faith. Valas has had to coax them, force them, teach them to steady their blades and move without fear.
Enver Gortash had killed before that night, that much had been clear: in the precise control of his breath, in the tension of his forearms, in the ice of his eyes when his bolts lodged in throat after throat. And in the after, when Valas turned back his way—breath heaving, blood in his teeth and up to his elbows and hot across his face—there’d been no sharp intake of breath, no strangled sound of fear. Not even a careful wariness, from what Valas could see, but something like admiration, like understanding, like desire.
Like the way he’s looking at him now.
Back then there had been blood on Gortash’s lips, too, sprayed there sometime during the fight, and Valas had wanted in that moment to kiss it off, to pull him close. It’s sometimes done, after a sacrifice—he’s taken pleasure in the bodies of the fallen, or with other Bhaalists, lost with him in the ecstasy of death, eager to give themselves to a descendant of their god.
But not with an outsider, and never with someone it wouldn’t be wise to risk killing.
They need each other. Breathing, side by side, they can find what it takes to become Chosen. Do better than those who came before, become what their gods need them to be. There’s nothing Valas wants more. He fights the feeling down—this must be what Gortash is testing, his self-control.
When he doesn’t respond, Gortash fills the silence. “Surely you must derive pleasure from something. I’d only thought… Well, that look in your eye when you hold a blade. When blood first touches your tongue. When you’re… Yes, that look right there.”
Valas tries to smooth the tension from his brow, and drop the glare he’s lapsed into. It’s the kind of thing he often feels on his face at the beginning of a hunt, when fire starts to burn through his blood, when his fingers start to long for a neck.
He breathes.
“You enjoy your work.”
“As you enjoy penning your little threats,” he spits back. “Long talk with your patriars, and bringing them back to your bed.” There’s a bitterness there, and he doesn’t want to sit in it, to ponder its source, so he grasps instead for the other image in his mind. One of the man bent before a wooden table, shirtsleeves rolled back, as much black grease as bared skin. A look of calm focus as he fits small gears together with his hands, then a glance his way as he explains the mechanism. Do you see it, too? says the bright in his eyes. “You enjoy your machines.”
“Which brings us back to my point,” Gortash says, a light in him not unlike those memories, like discovery shared. “There’s pleasure to be found in brilliance. You, my dear friend, are brilliant. It can only benefit us both for you to exercise your talents.”
Valas tries to fall back into silence, but Gortash isn’t having it.
“How would you do it?” he asks. “How would you kill Skie Silvershield?”
“Not at the family’s estate.” The words come quickly, and then it’s too late to pretend he hasn’t given it thought. “There’s much security, and they know my face. She doesn’t stray far from the Upper City, and rarely leaves after dark, which presents some challenges. An ambush at a revel would be the surest bet, I expect. Something outdoors. Plenty of distractions and dark corners…”
His voice trails off at the feeling of Gortash’s rings, smooth and sharp where they brush against his arm. It’s idle, the way he’s started stroking him, and Valas has to remind himself to breathe.
“No. I mean, how would you do it? Once you have her alone.”
Under other circumstances, Valas would have an answer. He’d have one imagined in intricate depth, chosen for its elegance, its novelty, for its impressive feats of skill, and he could improvise on top of it, adding new layers to its depravity. He could invent a new one on the spot, just as clever.
It’s agony, where his mind goes instead.
To grasping Gortash’s wrist and ending this gentle touch, taking one of those sharp rings and using it to carve him, to make blood run down his chest to his expensive carpet, then stroking his veins and sliding his fingers between his ribs. Worse, he imagines taking that wrist as he climbs onto his lap, then exploring his skin with his mouth. Not even his teeth, tearing at flesh, but his lips, his tongue, kissing a line down his neck as he rocks his hips against him.
Bhaal should tear blades through him where he sits for even thinking it.
His response, when he finds the words, is much more brief than he would have liked. “I often like to extract the heart,” he says softly. “Carve it from the chest.”
Gortash makes a small hum, one Valas can’t find meaning in, and leans back against the settee’s side.
It’s a relief, the regained distance, until Gortash swings his legs up and over Valas’s lap. The Banite isn’t as relaxed as he seems, Valas can sense it in his pulse, can see the rise and fall of slight fear where his shirt’s laces hang open, but there’s a challenge in his smirk, and in the casual way he’s holding his glass.
Valas should shove him away. Pull the dagger from his belt and make it clear just how wrong he is to take such liberties.
He doesn’t move.
“I have one idea,” Gortash says, turning the glass in his hand. His glance up is coy, an affectation, but it pierces Valas’s chest all the same. “She is rather sweet on me, I think. That’s one way she might choose to slip past the eyes of the Watch, right into your hands. Well, into my hands. But you’re welcome to lie in wait.”
Valas swallows. “I’d wait here?”
“Naturally, unless you’d prefer to do the seducing. You do have the features for it, but we may have to work on the charm.”
A violent tension grows in him, and he considers debating the point—he’s convinced plenty of sacrifices to follow to an alley’s depths under such pretenses, in fact—but for all the times he’s been at the Silvershield Estate, consulting or conspiring with Torlin, or at the party where he first met Gortash in the flesh, watching her, she’s never shown a spark of interest. She finds him unnerving, if she’s ever given him thought at all. A wise instinct, but an obstacle here.
At least, it had been, when he’d been working in isolation.
“You’ll want something in return.”
He waves a hand, rings glittering against the candles’ light. “We’ll just waive the payment for the next assassination, hmm?”
It’s only later, after he’s walked back to his temple through foggy night air, after he consults with Sceleritas on the day’s administration and with Orin on new prayers, that Valas realizes he never said yes. It’s a given, a wordless pact between them. He can’t recall the exact moment he gave in.
They’ll do this, Banite and Bhaalist, and they’ll do it together.