Page 40 of Astarion

The path through the Undercity was winding and tedious and had nothing much to recommend it, unless you liked the smell of raw sewage. Yousen caught a rat and drained it, then caught a second one and offered it politely to Astarion. Astarion wiped the creature’s neck clean with his pocket handkerchief before biting its throat out.

“Have you ever noticed that the rats have a different flavor depending on where you catch them?” Yousen asked as they scrambled over rubble where ancient walls had collapsed. (Well, Yousen scrambled. Astarion refused to do anything so undignified and preferred to think that he glided lightly over the broken stone.)

“The ones you catch in the Lower City are gamier than the ones in the palace pantry, and the ones in Wyrm’s Rest are sweeter. The ones by the docks have a fishy taste.”

“Terroir,” Astarion said absently, picking his way across a rivulet of sewage.

“Beg pardon?”

“Terroir, my uncultured friend, is a term used in winemaking to denote the flavor imparted by the soil in which the grapes are grown. You are describing the terroir of the rats, based on their diet. The Lower City rats eat garbage, the dock rats eat fish, and the Wyrm’s Rest rats eat from the grainfields.”

“Oh.” Yousen considered this. “So the reason the rats down here in the sewers taste like sh—”

“Fascinating as this discussion is, are we near your tunnel?”

The gnome frowned and peered in both directions, then scrabbled up to the top of the nearest pile of rubble. “This might be it. This rockfall wasn’t here the last time I was. Let me see…” He ducked into the ragged opening and laid his hands on the stone, bowing his head as if in prayer. After a moment, he reached down, selected a rock, examined it from all angles, then licked it.

Astarion gazed at the ceiling and wondered, if he left right this minute, if he had enough time to find a virgin and hunt down a unicorn. Alas, probably not. It’s a nearly impossible quest, the sort of thing that makes or breaks great heroes, and then you’d still have to find the damned unicorn.

“This is it,” Yousen said, dropping the licked rock. “The rubble threw me a bit. I’ve only been here once before.”

“Only once?”

“A few years ago. Dalyria asked me to see if the blood was easily accessible.” The gnome went into the opening, past the scarred remains of the rockfall, then ducked into a narrow, nearly invisible tunnel coming off the remains of the main passage. Astarion had to bend down to follow him.

“And is it easily accessible?”

“Ha.”

“…I see.”

“I didn’t get any farther than your friend at the Guild did. Looking down into a sea of skeletons was enough for me.”

“Lovely.” Astarion felt the back of his head scrape the ceiling and hunched lower. He hated enclosed spaces. He had never been claustrophobic as a boy, but between waking in a coffin and spending a year in the mausoleum…But he certainly wasn’t going to show weakness in front of Yousen, of all people, so he kept his voice deliberately light. “You’re the one who can speak to rocks. Is this ceiling talking about coming down and squashing us into spawn carpaccio?”

“Hrm? No, no.” Ahead of him, the gnome paused for a moment, one hand on the wall. “No, it’s happy where it is. It would find an earthquake very upsetting.”

“You may tell the rock that it is a scholar and a gentlemineral.”

The tunnel ceiling stayed where it was. The floor, however, began to buckle and rise the farther they went, a phenomenon that Yousen cheerfully informed him was called a squeeze. Astarion would have liked to squeeze the gnome’s throat, but his corpse would block the tunnel.

“I don’t suppose this opens up soon? I am in danger of doing irreparable damage to this jacket.”

“Just ahead.”

Just ahead, in this case, was at least another hundred yards, but at last the tunnel opened into a narrow stone corridor that appeared to have been carved from living rock. Astarion leaned against the wall to give his legs and lower back time to recuperate.

“This is old,” he said, his eyes roving over the walls.

Yousen nodded excitedly. “It is! You can tell by the tool marks that they cut it with iron tools, not steel, which dates it to no later than—”

“Maybe you can tell by the tool marks. I’m going by the graffiti over there that says, ‘Sable was here, 691 DR.’ And look, they drew a little penis next to it.”

It was amazing that so much sigh could fit into someone as small as Yousen.

Astarion admired the graffiti for a few more minutes, which covered the last seven hundred years of Baldur’s Gate’s history and a wide range of opinions on whom you could call upon for a good time. Finally, he pushed himself away from the wall. “All right, let’s keep moving.”

For a moment, he thought he heard something back the way they had come, a sound like a rock knocked loose from the rubble pile. Probably just a rat. Probably.