Robert Salvatore - Road of the Patriarch

Jarlaxle knew it beyond any doubt: Artemis Entreri, as he stood there, was helpless. A novice assassin could have walked up behind him and dispatched him easily.

That unsettling thought made Jarlaxle glance around, though he had no reason to suspect that any killers might be nearby.

He silently laughed at himself and his irrational fit of nerves, and when he looked back at Entreri, he only then fathomed the absolute strangeness of it all. He rolled over the edge of the roof, dropped lightly to his feet and walked over to stand beside Entreri—who didn't notice him until the very last moment.

Even then, Entreri never bothered to cast a glance Jarlaxle's way. His eyes remained fixed on a shack down the way, an unremarkable structure of clay and wood, and with the skeleton of a long-rotted awning jutting out in front. Beneath that, a ruined wicker chair was nestled against the shack, beside the open entrance.

"You know this place?"

Entreri didn't look at him and didn't answer. His breathing became more labored, however, telling Jarlaxle the truth of it.

This had been Entreri's home, the place of his earliest days.

If I am to help you, then I need to know," Jarlaxle argued, but Entreri's expression alone showed that the drow's logic was falling on deaf ears. They were back at the house with Athrogate, and Entreri had said not a word in the hour since they had rejoined their hairy companion.

"I'm getting the feelin' that he's not wanting yer help, elf," Athrogate said.

"He allowed us to come along on his adventure."

"I did not stop you from following me," Entreri clarified. "My business here is my own."

"And what, then, am I to do?" asked the drow with exaggerated drama.

"Live here in luxury, o' course!" said Athrogate, and he accentuated his point by slamming his hand down on the table, crushing a beetle beneath it. "Good huntin' and good food," he said, lifting the crushed bug before his face as if he meant to eat it. "Who could be asking for anything more? Bwahaha!" To Jarlaxle's relief, though Entreri hardly cared either way, the dwarf flicked the crushed beetle across the room instead of depositing it in his mouth.

"I care not at all," Entreri answered. "Go and find more comfortable lodgings. Leave Memnon all together."

"Why have you come here?" Jarlaxle asked, and Entreri showed the slightest wince. "And how long will you stay?"

"I don't know."

"To which."

Entreri didn't answer. He turned on his heel and stalked out of the house into the early morning sun.

"He's an angry one, ain't he?" Athrogate asked.

"With good reason, I presume."

"Well, ye said he growed up here," said the dwarf. "That'd put a pinch in me own butt, to be sure."

Jarlaxle looked from the open door to the dwarf, and gave a little laugh, and for the first time he realized that he was truly glad Athrogate had decided to come along. He considered his own role in this ordeal, as well, and he began to doubt the wisdom of entangling Entreri with Idalia's flute. Kimmuriel had warned him against that very thing, explaining to him that prying open a person's heart could bring many unexpected consequences.

No, Jarlaxle decided after some reflection. He was correct in giving Entreri the flute. In the end, it would be a good thing for his friend.

If it didn't kill him.

The compulsion that took him back to the sandy avenue that morning was so overpowering that Entreri didn't even realize he was returning to stand before the shack until he was there. The street was far from deserted, with many people sitting in the meager shade of the other buildings, and all of them eyeing the unusual stranger, with his high black leather boots, so finely stitched, and two weapons of great value strapped at his waist.

Clearly, Entreri didn't belong there, and the trepidation he saw in the gazes that came his way, and the background sensation of pure disgust, brought recognition and recollection indeed.

Artemis Entreri had seen those same stares during his days in Calimport serving Pasha Basadoni. The peasants of Memnon thought him a mercenary, sent by one of the more prosperous lords to collect a debt or settle a score, no doubt.

He relegated them to the back of his mind, reminding himself that if they all charged him together, he would leave them all dead in the dirt, then reminding himself further that those peasants would never find the courage to attack him in the first place. It wasn't in their humor—anyone with such gumption and willpower would have long ago left such a place.

It was even easier to dismiss them—in fact, it wasn't even a choice—when Entreri looked back to the ill-fitting door on the shack that had been his home for the first twelve years of his life. As soon as he focused on that place again, nothing else seemed to matter, as he fell into the same state of reflection that had allowed Jarlaxle to walk up right beside him unnoticed the night before.

Hardly aware of his movements, Entreri found himself approaching the door. He paused when he got there and lifted his fist to knock. He held it there, however, and reminded himself of who he was and of who these inconsequential, pathetic peasants were, and he just pushed through the door.

The room was quiet and still cool, as the morning sun hadn't yet come high enough over the hill to chase away the nighttime chill. No candles burned within, and no one was home, but a piece of stale bread on the table and a ruffled and tattered blanket in the corner told Entreri that someone had indeed been in the house recently. The bread wasn't covered in hungry beetles, even, and to Entreri, who knew the climate and the ways of Memnon, that was as telling as a warm campfire.

Someone lived in the house that had been his. His mother? Was it possible? She would be in her early sixties now, he knew. Was it possible that she still lived in the same place where she and his father, Belrigger, had made their home?

The smell told him otherwise, for whoever was living there took no care whatsoever in hygiene. He saw no chamber pot, but it wasn't hard for him to tell that one should have been in use.

That wasn't how he remembered his mother. She had barely a copper to her name, but she had always worked hard to keep herself, and her child, clean.

The thought came over him that the years might have broken that relic of pride from her. He grimaced, and hoped that it was not Shanali's home. But if that were the case, then she must have died. She could not have found her way out, he knew, for she was past twenty when he left. No one got out of that neighborhood past the age of twenty.

And if she was still there, then it must still have been her house.

The walls began to close in on him suddenly. The stench of feces assailed his nostrils and drove him back. He shoved through the door more forcefully than he'd entered, and staggered out into the street.

He found his breath coming in gasps. He looked around, as near to panic as he had been throughout his adult life. He saw the faces leering at him, glaring at him, hating him, and felt in that moment of uncertainty that the most frail among the onlookers could easily run up and dispatch him.

He tried to steady himself, but couldn't help but glance back over his shoulder at the swaying door. Memories of his childhood flooded his thoughts, of cold nights huddled on that very floor, brushing away the biting insects. He thought of his mother and her near-constant pain, and of his surly father and the pain he too often inflicted. He remembered those years in a way he hadn't in decades, and even thought of the few friends he had run the streets with.

There was a measure of freedom in poverty, he figured, and found some composure in that ridiculous irony.