Planescape: Blood Wars, Book 02 - Abyssal Warriors by J. Robert King

Author:J. Robert King [King, J. Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7869-0501-0
Publisher: Fanversion Publishing
Published: 2020-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Part II

Found

Seventeen

Angels Coughing

“This here, my friend,” said Aereas, holding aloft a glass filled with mordant amber liquid, “this is the totality of mortality.”

The truth of his words struck him with the force of a hurled rock. He must have had too much, already. In that prismatic glass, he glimpsed not only the narrowed golden dubiousness of Phaeton’s face, but also the whole of the dark, filthy tavern, and of smoky Sigil, telescoped inward in lurid compaction. But this vision paled in comparison with the brief, bold, stinging colors that came when the whiskey struck the back of his throat and produced the inevitable exhalation, smoke from the fire below.

Phaeton watched Aereas. The young man’s all-too-accustomed hand pounded on the lacquered bar top. Then the flat-bottomed glass come down hammerlike beside his hand. The angel lifted his small glass to his lips, sniffed once effetely, and sipped the smallest portion. He tasted it on his lips and tongue, and swallowed, his expression not changing.

“So, how does it taste? How does it feel?” Aereas asked.

“Poisonous, and poisonous.”

Aereas nodded. A much too large smile spread across his features. “My point exactly. Poison. Distilled regret. Decanted loss. Sour-mashed misery. And yet why do we want it, why do we drink it? Perhaps because it is the strongest taste of mortal life we can get. It’s poison, yes, and we know that it works more quickly and stunningly than our sips of the great universal poison, which in the end makes us numb and then sick and then dead. It’s like swallowing a lifetime of dread in one moment and then exhaling through the awfulness of it and living anyway.”

Phaeton nodded. He clearly neither understood nor cared to understand. His own glass settled now upon the counter, the liquor sagging in oily lines where his lips had been.

“Another,” Aereas said to the barkeep, an ettin, whose two heads apparently were less-than-happy business partners in this hole-in-the-wall. As the creature lifted a bottle toward Aereas’s empty glass, the young man flipped two silvers across the bar and said, “One for each of you.” The heads grimaced at that. They’d heard the comment every previous business day and would likely hear it every day for the rest of their lives.

Aereas didn’t seem to notice. He lifted the glass and finished it off again. He was becoming drunk, becoming a drunk. Perhaps he should have been too young for this, chronologically speaking, since by his best reckoning he was only now nearing his twentieth birthday. But he felt thirty-five, if not forty.

Nina was dead, as far as he and Artus were concerned. Their last two attempts to find her had ended as emptily as their march with the wildmen, and with as much cost in lives and hopes and innocence. Their repeated entreaties for an audience with the Lady had met with a different kind of failure, a silence so profound that it seemed their petitions had left their lips only to be drawn immediately and violently downward

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