Interlude: Gortash
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cliffc999
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I dramatically silhouetted myself against the noonday sun shining through the broad windows behind me and minutely adjusted the position of my cane for the best effect. I drew deep upon my skills at dissimulation to ensure that every detail of my immaculate posture was precisely as it should be to invoke the exact mixture of inspiring confidence and grim determination that I was aiming for. The common herd was childishly easily to manipulate if you knew the proper stimuli and had taken sufficient care in setting the stage, but that did not mean that said stimuli did not still need to be delivered with precision.
"Yes, my lord." the unctuous voice of the hired artist my staff had found reached my ears. "That's it! Please hold that pose for just a bit longer, my lord!" They claimed this fool was the best portrait painter in Baldur's Gate that gold could hire. I was hoping that he'd prove at least mostly adequate to the task - I was wasting enough time posing like a tailor's dummy for my official portrait once, I'd find it even more tedious to have to go through all this again posing for another portrait after we discarded an initial failed effort and the failure who'd painted it.
Still, standing here at least gave me some free time to think without the press of my administrative duties constantly demanding my attention, so I put it to good use. Because the current strategic situation was developing several unpleasant wrinkles that would need to be addressed with dispatch before the situation spiraled into chaos. However, I had yet to formulate a clear plan for doing so. There were still too many variables that I wasn't aware of, and time was running out for me to do much further research into them before new plans would need to be formulated - and executed.
But before I could do that, I first needed to review precisely how we'd gotten this far and why. After all, it wouldn't do to become complacent and overlook something.
Ever since I had been a small child I had known with absolute certainty that I was intellectually and emotionally superior to the common run of humanity by a vast margin, and that one day I would inevitably ascend to the heights of rulership as I deserved. However, I had also known that this blessed state of affairs would not occur simply by vain dreaming and wishing. I would need the sagacity to spot opportunities even in the midst of nothing, the cunning to defeat foes even if they had significant financial or military advantage, and the drive to labor ceaselessly to further my ambitions.
Of course, I had had truly excellent teachers for these lessons. My "loving" parents had been the first to teach me that the real world knew neither mercy nor gratitude and that betrayal could come from even those closest to you. Being sold into slavery before you were fourteen years old would be sufficient to teach that lesson to someone immeasurably duller-witted than I. To this day I could not tell you what galled me more - the betrayal of my own parents selling me simply to clear away loanshark debts their ineptitude and financial mismanagement had unnecessarily led them into, or the insult of having been sold so relatively cheaply.
Most people, if they had suddenly and involuntarily transitioned from being the impoverished son of two impoverished craftspeople in the Lower City to the adolescent slave of a devil in Hell, would have despaired and languished in chains forever. But I had needed only several years to enact my escape from the infernal realms. Despite my 'master's' most exquisitely subtle blandishments I had refused all contracts, all pacts, all offers to 'improve' my situation, and had remained his 'humble' pageboy and naught more. But I had done so simply so that the only chains binding me were those of the body and not the soul - and even the much-vaunted 'House of Hope' had had its weaknesses that I could eventually exploit. Still, I had learned much from observing Raphael - the uses of misdirection and pageantry, the value of ruthlessness, and the wisdom of trusting only those whom you could control. These useful life lessons, my self-taught education in the ways of the infernal, and my own native ability had served me well upon my return to Baldur's Gate, and soon enough I had risen from my humble beginnings to the station of a prosperous entrepreneur in various enterprises. But of course I deserved more - and I never stopped striving towards it.
Selling Karlach to the archdevil Zariel had not been an easy decision to make. Not only was she possessed of a rare physical strength and a tremendous amount of raw ability as a warrior, her personality had been that of the ideal follower. It had been almost sad how pathetically easy it had been to evoke a fanatic loyalty in her with little more than a show of affection, the occasional compliment, a moderately generous stipend, and regular meals. As a bodyguard and enforcer she'd proven much more capable - and even better, much more reliable - than any number of hardened thugs or veteran mercenaries I'd previously employed, even at her relatively young age. But even the most useful individual still only possessed a finite value, and when one of my contacts for devil-forged weapons brought me word that Zariel required mortal test subjects for her new infernal engine technology and would pay exceptionally generously for anyone who could deliver them, I simply could not pass up the opportunity. And since Karlach had been the only person readily available who had the physical fortitude necessary to survive implantation with the original prototype, then it was simply necessary that I give the devil her due in return for what I needed.
With guaranteed easy access to infernal iron straight from Avernus, my blackmarket weapons dealing operations expanded tremendously in scope and profitability. Hell-forged weapons always sold at a great premium, and I could obtain them more cheaply and easily than any other organization in the market. The vast profits from these operations allowed me to expand my investments tremendously, and soon I had sufficient wealth - and legitimacy - to be named a patriar, a noble lord of the city. But of course this was hardly the limit of my ambitions. My noble station meant that I was now eligible to be courted and consulted as a 'strategic advisor' by other patriars, all of them dullards and fools easily brought into my burgeoning network of influence and patronage and then paid off with relatively simple pieces of advice, knowledge, or leverage to help fulfill their simple desires. My influence over the lesser nobility of the city grew, and soon enough even the Council could be indirectly pressured by me in at least some things. But this was not enough - I was determined that I would become at minimum one of the four ruling dukes of the Council, and then from there supplant Grand Duke Ravengard. Baldur's Gate would be mine, and that would just be the beginning!
My parents had been craftsmen and artificers, if in an extremely humble and mundane way, and I had inherited their talents but in vastly greater measure. Part of my bargain with Zariel had been for her to share the technical details of her infernal engine research - a bargain she was happy to make, as it would cost her nothing and she cared not what any mortal did with such technology on the Prime so long as it did not interfere with her efforts to make more powerful engines of destruction for the Blood War. And so I had been able to begin work on my own technological masterpiece - the Steel Watch, a mechanized army of hellfire-powered war golems of unparalleled sophistication. A powerful, unstoppable army where the loss of any individual combatant would be irrelevant so long as new ones could be manufactured. An army that would never tire, never falter, and never, ever disobey. The perfect instrument through which to enforce my will.
Of course, any fool could conceive a grandiose scheme in theory. Far fewer could actually make it work in practice. Simply building an army of golems and then turning them loose to conquer Baldur's Gate would have been an absurd farce of a scheme and doomed to failure. In addition to even my vast wealth being unable to single-handedly fund a project, the authorities would see the construction of such a substantial private military force as a threat to their own positions and respond with every form of official displeasure they could muster, if not an outright assault with the Flaming Fist.
And then Lord Bane came unto me, praising my ambition and acknowledging my superior qualities and aptitudes. The god of tyranny himself acknowledged that I would make a most excellent tyrant of the mortal realms indeed, and so I became his Chosen.
It was at this point that one of the more persistent thorns in my side suddenly became an opportunity instead. Although I had risen to be a significant player in both the blackmarket trade and the webs of political influence in Baldur's Gate, I held a monopoly on neither position. The higher I rose the more and more I became aware of a shadowy figure in the background who was operating using much the same methods I was. But I was quite shocked when my researches eventually revealed that the hidden mastermind known only as 'The Emperor' had been operating continuously in Baldur's Gate almost since the city's founding, and even more shocked when I finally discovered its true nature as a renegade illithid - a mind flayer that had somehow unaccountably broken free of its elder brain. Even though its inhuman nature required it to work entirely through catspaws and at indirect removes and never expose itself to the light of day, its prodigious powers of the mind, inhuman intellect, and enhanced lifespan had still let it weave a very formidable network of hidden influence and power throughout the city, to the point of mentally compromising one of the ruling Dukes into being naught more than its puppet.
Still, now that I finally knew the shape of my enemy it could eventually be run to ground and killed, and I had been hard at work at doing so when Lord Bane put me in touch with the recently-raised Chosen of his two longtime rivals-cum-allies. The Bhaalspawn known only as 'The Dark Urge' had been a powerful sorcerer and as adept at stealth and killing as one would expect any child of the God of Murder to be, and the infamous Ketheric Thorm had been raised from the grave that he'd lain in for a century by Myrkul to yet again be an unstoppable scourge upon the land. Our divine patrons commanded us to ally and conquer as much of Faerun as we could in their name, and we were more than pleased to do so.
The Dark Urge had been of invaluable help in those early days - not only had his assistance in capturing and subduing the insolent 'Emperor' been of great use, but our combined talents had proven sufficient to breach the security of Hell and steal the fabled Crown of Karsus from where it had languished a millenium and more in the vaults of the Archdevil Mephistopheles. I had first learned of its existence during my involuntary sojourn in the House of Hope, and I had formulated many schemes for obtaining its power for myself - schemes that had never quite come to fruition until the alliance of the Dead Three finally brought me the means.
Ketheric meanwhile had begun the reconstruction of a secure base of operations for our efforts at his old home of Moonrise Towers, as well as the process of laboriously raising an army of the undead. But that scheme was abandoned when I realized that we had in our collective grasp the scattered pieces of a puzzle that, when assembled according to my vision and brain, would produce an instrument of power beyond even Karsus' wildest imaginings.
As it turned out 'The Emperor' had in mortal life been - of all people!- the legendary Balduran, the adventurer who founded Baldur's Gate to begin with. He had been captured by a subterranean mind flayer colony when exploring the region where Moonrise Towers would eventually be built, and had managed to escape slavery to its elder brain after several decades. Ketheric's explorations soon produced the news I had hoped for - the colony was still there, buried deep underneath Moonrise. And even more fortituitously it had gone dormant in the interim, its illthids starving and dying for lack of sufficient brains to eat and its elder brain gone into torpor, preserving its life at the cost of being insensate and defenseless and hoping vainly for rescue.
When Karsus' Folly had reached its climax, the power of the crown had been sundered. Three Netherstones had been separated from the crown piece, and the backlash of their separation had induced a vulnerability - the wearer of the Crown would be susceptible to the mental domination of anyone who held all three Netherstones. Presumably this is why Mephistopheles had never dared to claim the power of the Crown for himself. However, this design flaw was to us a feature - it meant that we could use the Crown to dominate the elder brain, one of the most powerful creatures in all existence, and through it raise an army of greater scope than our previous wildest dreams - and one that would be under our absolute control.
And so we created the false god we called 'the Absolute'. Through the delayed ceremorphosis 'sleeper agent' technique originally researched by the mad alhoon Blue Apex, a copy of which we'd also found in the vault of Mephistopheles, we could turn any number of people into our unwitting fanatic slaves. Slaves who didn't even know they were slaves, controlled by their delusion of being 'Chosen' by a deity who did not even exist and rationalizing all the commands and compulsions our enslaved elder brain inflicted on them as either their own free-willed desires or else the commands of a 'god' they were ecstatically eager to obey. This of course let us raise a far greater army than the mere host of undead that had been part of the original scheme, but the potentials were even greater than that. In addition, a tithe of ceremorphosis victims were allowed to fully convert into mind flayers and used to reconstruct the old illithid colony and even several of their nautiloid vessels.
The potentials of Illithid bio-technology were almost limitless, and even though learning the secrets of those technologies was a slow and laborious process even for one of my genius, our pet elder brain meant that we had a unique opportunity to access such knowledge that no one in Faerunian history had ever possessed before. A variation of how the illithids used disembodied brains to create their intellect devourer automatons for tasks that required high intelligence and manual dexterity allowed me to refine my own Steel Watch designs to be orders of magnitude more effective than prior concepts. The tadpoled disembodied brains in jars now used as their primary cogitator units allowed for much more sophisticated and flexible responses than the prototype mechanical designs would have.
All the pieces were coming together. The 'Cult of the Absolute', as publicly led by Ketheric, would assemble an 'army of evil' and march on Baldur's Gate. Meanwhile, I would have spent the prior months using my own network of influence to start pitching my 'Steel Watch' concept to the Council, as an officially government-funded and controlled - or so they'd be led to believe - augmentation to the Baldurian military. Of course this concept would meet resistance and indifference as an expensive and unnecessary boondoggle... until the burgeoning threat of the Absolute, combined with a certain untimely absence of strategic leadership at the top echelon of the Flaming Fist, would leave the Council desperate for new solutions. At which point I would graciously come to their rescue with my army of Steel Watchers, constructed for them in record time by the genius and vision of Lord Gortash. And also by the ruthless exploitation of an expendable supply of highly skilled labor in the form of the worshippers of Gond, god of invention and technology, who I'd have impressed into service by various means - their families held hostage, remotely detonated bomb collars, et cetera.
In due time Ketheric would attack the city, but the battles would be stage-managed so that he would be driven back by my Steel Watch, while Grand Duke Ravengard would be entirely absent at a time his city needed him. The arrangement between Zariel and I had effectively fallen by the wayside once I had become the Chosen of Bane, but I still had enough contacts to have forewarning of the Descent of Elturel and I had been able to manipulate events so that the Grand Duke would be making a diplomatic visit to the city at just the right time. So between the Grand Duke's absence and an 'accident' or two to clear out seats on the Council that would then be filled by more amenable parties, I would be nominated by acclamation as the new Grand Duke - no as Archduke, the first in Baldurian history. For who else should the new leader of our fair city be other than the hero whose genius had saved it from such an implacable threat?
Particularly since the armies of the Absolute would be driven off but not destroyed, and so the city would need to remain vigilant - and remain ruled by the new Archduke's wartime emergency measures - until they could finally be defeated. Which would of course be only after the situation had been usefully exploited for long enough to allow my grasp on the city to be fully consolidated and made inescapable. At this point mass conversion operations would begin and the entire population of Baldur's Gate would be made into the expanded army of the Absolute, and the military conquest of the rest of the Sword Coast - and eventually of Faerun - would progress inexorably from there.
Or so the original plan had been, until things had started going off the rails. First the Dark Urge had been betrayed, lobotomized, and tadpoled by his fellow Bhaalspawn, the much less mentally stable and more obnoxious Orin the Red, and Bhaal yet insisted that she would inherit his Netherstone and his place among our ruling triumvirate. Then my researches into potential githyanki interference with our plans - after all, if it ever came to their attention that an elder brain was conducting a major operation on Faerun then some type of substantial response on their part would be inevitable - turned up obscure references to an ancient githyanki artifact known as the Astral Prism, a relic anti-illithid superweapon of some type that had somehow featured in their original revolution against the illithid Grand Design of old. The existence of such a thing was of course an existential threat to our plans, and we had to take action. Even the unaccountable escape of the city of Elturel from Avernus and the unexpected return of Grand Duke Ravengard was a minor bump in the road compared to the potential threat of the Astral Prism - a simple command to one of our True Souls and a handy goblin war party served to capture the Grand Duke on the road, and my planned political ascension would be made even easier with the Grand Duke as a tadpoled patsy mouthing the right words on cue than it would have been with him as merely an absentee vote.
As for the Astral Prism, we responded by putting together an expendable strike force of illithids and tadpoled adventurers, piloting one of our most powerful nautiloids, to make a raid on Tu'narath and steal the Prism from Vlaakith's vaults. We'd even selected the 'Emperor', now re-enslaved to our pet nether brain, as the captain of the nautiloid along with the now-amnesiac Dark Urge as one of the tadpoled infantry - after all, they were still two of the most formidable and highly skilled of all the illithids or True Souls we had available. Arranging for word of the existence of the Astral Prism to be leaked to the Baldurian temple of Shar along with hints it would be a useful weapon against our rival 'Cult of the Absolute' had been child's play, and had of course produced the entirely predictable response of their sending their own raiding party out to steal the Astral Prism from Vlaakith's vault. Better that they expend their own people and resources doing the hard part than us expend our own, after all. And so our own nautiloid raid team simply followed the Sharrans, prepared to exploit any vulnerability they made in the githyanki defenses or to relieve them of their prize on the way back should they actually succeed.
And that was when things had really started to go wrong.
First the nautiloid reappeared over several cities on the Sword Coast and randomly snatched up mutiple people in an entirely unsubtle daylight slave raid instead of simply returning to Moonrise as they had been supposed to, and then the pursuing githyanki forced it to flee the Prime again. I suppose we were fortunate that it had managed to make it back to Faerun after all, but its crash landing near the Emerald Grove had been on the furthest outskirts of our area of operations and by the time we got sufficient search teams into the area we found no traces of the Astral Prism - or of the 'Emperor'. As near as we could determine the damned thing had somehow broken free yet again and was in the wind with the Prism.
And then the debacle at Moonrise had occurred. One day Ketheric had matters entirely in hand, with that pitiful little scout band of Harpers so contained and being gradually murdered by the Shadow Curse that they weren't even worth expending any troops to kill, and the next day the 'Nightsong' has somehow been broken free of Shar's realm and Moonrise was being sacked. And then Ketheric is routed and sent to flight, and he brings us the appalling news that the Astral Prism's true function was apparently to disrupt an illithid hivemind and free enslaved entities from the control of an elder brain - and that a group of renegade True Souls, protected by the Prism, were now bearing it against us. He didn't even have time to do more than vaguely describe these people - fortunately the arcane eye outside his throne room had gotten a glimpse of them walking past when they'd made their initial infiltration of Moonrise Towers, so my own review of the surveillance records had been able to retrieve at least some of their likenesses. I was honestly surprised to see that Karlach was one of them - apparently at least one of the other planes our careening nautiloid had jumped through as it evaded the githyanki had been Avernus. Honestly, it was about time she'd finally found the gumption to escape. I'd managed to, after all, so what was her excuse?
We'd felt reasonably confident in leaving Ketheric behind to finish up once he managed to re-bind the Nightsong and re-establish his immortality - and it's not as if we'd had much choice. The attack was falling behind schedule as is and I had to get the army moving myself what with Ketheric still pinned in place, and I hadn't wanted to trust Orin an inch out of my sight. But then not an hour later we felt Ketheric's Netherstone lose its link to the Crown, and with that we'd known that our renegade True Souls had against every expectation actually managed to kill him. A later communication from my Lord Bane produced the even more surprising news that these True Souls had then managed to somehow defeat the manifested Avatar of Myrkul along with Ketheric, and that with the avatar's defeat and the loss of both Myrkul's Chosen and the Netherstone he'd borne Myrkul was no longer an effective part of our alliance.
But without Ketheric's Netherstone, we couldn't give any new orders to the elder brain. And that meant that once it finished executing all of the orders we'd previously given it, which were both finite in number and would require only finite time to cmplete, the elder brain would be free to operate independently again. At which point everyone in Baldur's Gate - including us - would be dead if they were fortunate, or converted to illithid slaves for eternity if they weren't. And the rest of the Sword Coast would likely follow in short order.
Obviously this state of affairs could not be allowed to continue. But even allowing for the fact that the Prism-bearers would be coming to us, because they needed to collect our Netherstones to win just as surely as we needed to reclaim theirs, the fact remained that we had to get that Netherstone back quickly. The elder brain was already starting to show a disturbing amount of... restiveness... and our time was rapidly running out.
So how best to-
I irritably broke off my thoughts at the sounds of approaching footsteps - by the brisk cadence of their march and the sound of boot heels upon the stone floor, it was one of the Flaming Fist. Sure enough, a manip - a female elf that I vaguely recognized as the one who had been in charge of the logistics for the upcoming coronation ceremony - was demanding my attention.
"Manip. If you are here, I presume that Wyrm's Rock is secure and preparations for my inauguration are on schedule?" I admonished her mildly.
"No, Lord Gortash." she replied with a servile bow. "We were interrupted - another quake in the Lower City. More severe this time."
"So you came cowering to me?" I sneered irritably. "I'm flattered, but even I cannot command natural phenomena to cease."
"Forgive me, my lord, but there is panic in the streets." she whimpered. "The people are afraid."
Of course they're afraid, you fool, the entire point is to panic the populace to the point they will be frantic and desperate for a strong leader to offer them salvation. I fumed inwardly. Not that I could actually say the quiet part out loud to this unwitting minion, of course. "Perhaps the people would be calm if you kept your nerve. I expect better from the Flaming Fist than to run scared from a slight tremor in the earth. Get back to your duties!"
"Duties, duties, duties! Patrolling and saluting and following and bowing and yes sir, no sir, rip and cut your throat sir!" I was already groaning inwardly less than halfway through her maddened tirade, because the shift of her voice more than gave away that I was not actually talking to the Flaming Fist I thought I was and had never been. Sure enough, her thrown dagger dramatically impaled my half-finished portrait - directly through the throat, I noted in passing - at the dramatic peak of her speech, and Orin's shapeshifted disguise fell away to reveal her own changeling features.
"You do realize that there's a witness standing right there?" I groaned. "Now I have to find a new portrait artist."
Orin's other thrown dagger effortlessly caught the fleeing artist at the base of his skull before he'd even made it more than ten feet towards the door, and she wrenched her first dagger loose from my portrait and held it up to my throat as she stalked menacingly behind me. "Your plan is falling apart, lordling. Give me a reason not to cut you to ribbons."
"Control yourself, Orin!" I snapped curtly, refusing to flinch even a millimeter. "We need to focus on reuniting the stones, or the brain will break free. These quakes are just the start!" I turned away from her and began pacing, and her blade fell away. So, she had come here just to intimidate- "Neither of us expected the Prism-bearers to kill Ketheric. But at least we know they'll be travelling to the city. I'll need you to give them a proper Baldurian welcome. Particularly since Ketheric died before he could give us more than the most fragmentary information about who they were, so my own information-gathering network has very little to work with. It's going to have to be your own operatives that do the heavy lifting on this one!"
"I itch to peel you... to split your skin... to see your skull shine in the light, little tyrant." Orin hissed with rampant madness held back by only the thinnest tissue of self-control. "Lucky for you, I harvested a whole family of living-flesh in Rivington at highsun. They will sate my blade-thirst tonight." She reclaimed her other dagger and began strolling arrogantly away towards the door, as her features, clothes, and voice shifted back into the Flaming Fist NCO that she'd impersonated to get in here. "But tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, my blades will thirst again!" she cackled as she strode out of the room.
By the Black Hand of Bane, I really missed the Dark Urge. The dragonborn sorcerer had been a consumnate professional and a welcome delight to work with. I suppose it made sense for the God of Murder to welcome a murderous backstabbing lunatic as their new Chosen but Bhaal's appallingly poor taste was making life very difficult for me. Orin had been troublesome to work with even at the best of times, and now here she was visibly self-destructing - and lusting to tear our remaining alliance apart and me with it - at the first major obstacle.
Which is why I'd deliberately not told her that I actually did have sufficient information to identify who at least some of the Prism-bearers were, or that I fully intended to make sure that when they arrived in Baldur's Gate I found them first.
After all, they'd already killed one of our triumvirate. So perhaps they could kill two.
Author's Note: Still slooowly chewing my way through Act 3, because I keep having to restart and replay portions of it over and over when I screw choices up. And even with the Cheater's Scroll mod that still takes time. But I can at least drop this chapter to help tide you over - it's a glimpse inside the head of Gortash, where you get an expodump on his backstory and the deep background of how things got this far. It's even 95% canon - there's a lot of obscure readables in the game that give you the pieces of the puzzle, but very few players actually find them all and put them together. Fortunately, the wiki exists.
"Yes, my lord." the unctuous voice of the hired artist my staff had found reached my ears. "That's it! Please hold that pose for just a bit longer, my lord!" They claimed this fool was the best portrait painter in Baldur's Gate that gold could hire. I was hoping that he'd prove at least mostly adequate to the task - I was wasting enough time posing like a tailor's dummy for my official portrait once, I'd find it even more tedious to have to go through all this again posing for another portrait after we discarded an initial failed effort and the failure who'd painted it.
Still, standing here at least gave me some free time to think without the press of my administrative duties constantly demanding my attention, so I put it to good use. Because the current strategic situation was developing several unpleasant wrinkles that would need to be addressed with dispatch before the situation spiraled into chaos. However, I had yet to formulate a clear plan for doing so. There were still too many variables that I wasn't aware of, and time was running out for me to do much further research into them before new plans would need to be formulated - and executed.
But before I could do that, I first needed to review precisely how we'd gotten this far and why. After all, it wouldn't do to become complacent and overlook something.
Ever since I had been a small child I had known with absolute certainty that I was intellectually and emotionally superior to the common run of humanity by a vast margin, and that one day I would inevitably ascend to the heights of rulership as I deserved. However, I had also known that this blessed state of affairs would not occur simply by vain dreaming and wishing. I would need the sagacity to spot opportunities even in the midst of nothing, the cunning to defeat foes even if they had significant financial or military advantage, and the drive to labor ceaselessly to further my ambitions.
Of course, I had had truly excellent teachers for these lessons. My "loving" parents had been the first to teach me that the real world knew neither mercy nor gratitude and that betrayal could come from even those closest to you. Being sold into slavery before you were fourteen years old would be sufficient to teach that lesson to someone immeasurably duller-witted than I. To this day I could not tell you what galled me more - the betrayal of my own parents selling me simply to clear away loanshark debts their ineptitude and financial mismanagement had unnecessarily led them into, or the insult of having been sold so relatively cheaply.
Most people, if they had suddenly and involuntarily transitioned from being the impoverished son of two impoverished craftspeople in the Lower City to the adolescent slave of a devil in Hell, would have despaired and languished in chains forever. But I had needed only several years to enact my escape from the infernal realms. Despite my 'master's' most exquisitely subtle blandishments I had refused all contracts, all pacts, all offers to 'improve' my situation, and had remained his 'humble' pageboy and naught more. But I had done so simply so that the only chains binding me were those of the body and not the soul - and even the much-vaunted 'House of Hope' had had its weaknesses that I could eventually exploit. Still, I had learned much from observing Raphael - the uses of misdirection and pageantry, the value of ruthlessness, and the wisdom of trusting only those whom you could control. These useful life lessons, my self-taught education in the ways of the infernal, and my own native ability had served me well upon my return to Baldur's Gate, and soon enough I had risen from my humble beginnings to the station of a prosperous entrepreneur in various enterprises. But of course I deserved more - and I never stopped striving towards it.
Selling Karlach to the archdevil Zariel had not been an easy decision to make. Not only was she possessed of a rare physical strength and a tremendous amount of raw ability as a warrior, her personality had been that of the ideal follower. It had been almost sad how pathetically easy it had been to evoke a fanatic loyalty in her with little more than a show of affection, the occasional compliment, a moderately generous stipend, and regular meals. As a bodyguard and enforcer she'd proven much more capable - and even better, much more reliable - than any number of hardened thugs or veteran mercenaries I'd previously employed, even at her relatively young age. But even the most useful individual still only possessed a finite value, and when one of my contacts for devil-forged weapons brought me word that Zariel required mortal test subjects for her new infernal engine technology and would pay exceptionally generously for anyone who could deliver them, I simply could not pass up the opportunity. And since Karlach had been the only person readily available who had the physical fortitude necessary to survive implantation with the original prototype, then it was simply necessary that I give the devil her due in return for what I needed.
With guaranteed easy access to infernal iron straight from Avernus, my blackmarket weapons dealing operations expanded tremendously in scope and profitability. Hell-forged weapons always sold at a great premium, and I could obtain them more cheaply and easily than any other organization in the market. The vast profits from these operations allowed me to expand my investments tremendously, and soon I had sufficient wealth - and legitimacy - to be named a patriar, a noble lord of the city. But of course this was hardly the limit of my ambitions. My noble station meant that I was now eligible to be courted and consulted as a 'strategic advisor' by other patriars, all of them dullards and fools easily brought into my burgeoning network of influence and patronage and then paid off with relatively simple pieces of advice, knowledge, or leverage to help fulfill their simple desires. My influence over the lesser nobility of the city grew, and soon enough even the Council could be indirectly pressured by me in at least some things. But this was not enough - I was determined that I would become at minimum one of the four ruling dukes of the Council, and then from there supplant Grand Duke Ravengard. Baldur's Gate would be mine, and that would just be the beginning!
My parents had been craftsmen and artificers, if in an extremely humble and mundane way, and I had inherited their talents but in vastly greater measure. Part of my bargain with Zariel had been for her to share the technical details of her infernal engine research - a bargain she was happy to make, as it would cost her nothing and she cared not what any mortal did with such technology on the Prime so long as it did not interfere with her efforts to make more powerful engines of destruction for the Blood War. And so I had been able to begin work on my own technological masterpiece - the Steel Watch, a mechanized army of hellfire-powered war golems of unparalleled sophistication. A powerful, unstoppable army where the loss of any individual combatant would be irrelevant so long as new ones could be manufactured. An army that would never tire, never falter, and never, ever disobey. The perfect instrument through which to enforce my will.
Of course, any fool could conceive a grandiose scheme in theory. Far fewer could actually make it work in practice. Simply building an army of golems and then turning them loose to conquer Baldur's Gate would have been an absurd farce of a scheme and doomed to failure. In addition to even my vast wealth being unable to single-handedly fund a project, the authorities would see the construction of such a substantial private military force as a threat to their own positions and respond with every form of official displeasure they could muster, if not an outright assault with the Flaming Fist.
And then Lord Bane came unto me, praising my ambition and acknowledging my superior qualities and aptitudes. The god of tyranny himself acknowledged that I would make a most excellent tyrant of the mortal realms indeed, and so I became his Chosen.
It was at this point that one of the more persistent thorns in my side suddenly became an opportunity instead. Although I had risen to be a significant player in both the blackmarket trade and the webs of political influence in Baldur's Gate, I held a monopoly on neither position. The higher I rose the more and more I became aware of a shadowy figure in the background who was operating using much the same methods I was. But I was quite shocked when my researches eventually revealed that the hidden mastermind known only as 'The Emperor' had been operating continuously in Baldur's Gate almost since the city's founding, and even more shocked when I finally discovered its true nature as a renegade illithid - a mind flayer that had somehow unaccountably broken free of its elder brain. Even though its inhuman nature required it to work entirely through catspaws and at indirect removes and never expose itself to the light of day, its prodigious powers of the mind, inhuman intellect, and enhanced lifespan had still let it weave a very formidable network of hidden influence and power throughout the city, to the point of mentally compromising one of the ruling Dukes into being naught more than its puppet.
Still, now that I finally knew the shape of my enemy it could eventually be run to ground and killed, and I had been hard at work at doing so when Lord Bane put me in touch with the recently-raised Chosen of his two longtime rivals-cum-allies. The Bhaalspawn known only as 'The Dark Urge' had been a powerful sorcerer and as adept at stealth and killing as one would expect any child of the God of Murder to be, and the infamous Ketheric Thorm had been raised from the grave that he'd lain in for a century by Myrkul to yet again be an unstoppable scourge upon the land. Our divine patrons commanded us to ally and conquer as much of Faerun as we could in their name, and we were more than pleased to do so.
The Dark Urge had been of invaluable help in those early days - not only had his assistance in capturing and subduing the insolent 'Emperor' been of great use, but our combined talents had proven sufficient to breach the security of Hell and steal the fabled Crown of Karsus from where it had languished a millenium and more in the vaults of the Archdevil Mephistopheles. I had first learned of its existence during my involuntary sojourn in the House of Hope, and I had formulated many schemes for obtaining its power for myself - schemes that had never quite come to fruition until the alliance of the Dead Three finally brought me the means.
Ketheric meanwhile had begun the reconstruction of a secure base of operations for our efforts at his old home of Moonrise Towers, as well as the process of laboriously raising an army of the undead. But that scheme was abandoned when I realized that we had in our collective grasp the scattered pieces of a puzzle that, when assembled according to my vision and brain, would produce an instrument of power beyond even Karsus' wildest imaginings.
As it turned out 'The Emperor' had in mortal life been - of all people!- the legendary Balduran, the adventurer who founded Baldur's Gate to begin with. He had been captured by a subterranean mind flayer colony when exploring the region where Moonrise Towers would eventually be built, and had managed to escape slavery to its elder brain after several decades. Ketheric's explorations soon produced the news I had hoped for - the colony was still there, buried deep underneath Moonrise. And even more fortituitously it had gone dormant in the interim, its illthids starving and dying for lack of sufficient brains to eat and its elder brain gone into torpor, preserving its life at the cost of being insensate and defenseless and hoping vainly for rescue.
When Karsus' Folly had reached its climax, the power of the crown had been sundered. Three Netherstones had been separated from the crown piece, and the backlash of their separation had induced a vulnerability - the wearer of the Crown would be susceptible to the mental domination of anyone who held all three Netherstones. Presumably this is why Mephistopheles had never dared to claim the power of the Crown for himself. However, this design flaw was to us a feature - it meant that we could use the Crown to dominate the elder brain, one of the most powerful creatures in all existence, and through it raise an army of greater scope than our previous wildest dreams - and one that would be under our absolute control.
And so we created the false god we called 'the Absolute'. Through the delayed ceremorphosis 'sleeper agent' technique originally researched by the mad alhoon Blue Apex, a copy of which we'd also found in the vault of Mephistopheles, we could turn any number of people into our unwitting fanatic slaves. Slaves who didn't even know they were slaves, controlled by their delusion of being 'Chosen' by a deity who did not even exist and rationalizing all the commands and compulsions our enslaved elder brain inflicted on them as either their own free-willed desires or else the commands of a 'god' they were ecstatically eager to obey. This of course let us raise a far greater army than the mere host of undead that had been part of the original scheme, but the potentials were even greater than that. In addition, a tithe of ceremorphosis victims were allowed to fully convert into mind flayers and used to reconstruct the old illithid colony and even several of their nautiloid vessels.
The potentials of Illithid bio-technology were almost limitless, and even though learning the secrets of those technologies was a slow and laborious process even for one of my genius, our pet elder brain meant that we had a unique opportunity to access such knowledge that no one in Faerunian history had ever possessed before. A variation of how the illithids used disembodied brains to create their intellect devourer automatons for tasks that required high intelligence and manual dexterity allowed me to refine my own Steel Watch designs to be orders of magnitude more effective than prior concepts. The tadpoled disembodied brains in jars now used as their primary cogitator units allowed for much more sophisticated and flexible responses than the prototype mechanical designs would have.
All the pieces were coming together. The 'Cult of the Absolute', as publicly led by Ketheric, would assemble an 'army of evil' and march on Baldur's Gate. Meanwhile, I would have spent the prior months using my own network of influence to start pitching my 'Steel Watch' concept to the Council, as an officially government-funded and controlled - or so they'd be led to believe - augmentation to the Baldurian military. Of course this concept would meet resistance and indifference as an expensive and unnecessary boondoggle... until the burgeoning threat of the Absolute, combined with a certain untimely absence of strategic leadership at the top echelon of the Flaming Fist, would leave the Council desperate for new solutions. At which point I would graciously come to their rescue with my army of Steel Watchers, constructed for them in record time by the genius and vision of Lord Gortash. And also by the ruthless exploitation of an expendable supply of highly skilled labor in the form of the worshippers of Gond, god of invention and technology, who I'd have impressed into service by various means - their families held hostage, remotely detonated bomb collars, et cetera.
In due time Ketheric would attack the city, but the battles would be stage-managed so that he would be driven back by my Steel Watch, while Grand Duke Ravengard would be entirely absent at a time his city needed him. The arrangement between Zariel and I had effectively fallen by the wayside once I had become the Chosen of Bane, but I still had enough contacts to have forewarning of the Descent of Elturel and I had been able to manipulate events so that the Grand Duke would be making a diplomatic visit to the city at just the right time. So between the Grand Duke's absence and an 'accident' or two to clear out seats on the Council that would then be filled by more amenable parties, I would be nominated by acclamation as the new Grand Duke - no as Archduke, the first in Baldurian history. For who else should the new leader of our fair city be other than the hero whose genius had saved it from such an implacable threat?
Particularly since the armies of the Absolute would be driven off but not destroyed, and so the city would need to remain vigilant - and remain ruled by the new Archduke's wartime emergency measures - until they could finally be defeated. Which would of course be only after the situation had been usefully exploited for long enough to allow my grasp on the city to be fully consolidated and made inescapable. At this point mass conversion operations would begin and the entire population of Baldur's Gate would be made into the expanded army of the Absolute, and the military conquest of the rest of the Sword Coast - and eventually of Faerun - would progress inexorably from there.
Or so the original plan had been, until things had started going off the rails. First the Dark Urge had been betrayed, lobotomized, and tadpoled by his fellow Bhaalspawn, the much less mentally stable and more obnoxious Orin the Red, and Bhaal yet insisted that she would inherit his Netherstone and his place among our ruling triumvirate. Then my researches into potential githyanki interference with our plans - after all, if it ever came to their attention that an elder brain was conducting a major operation on Faerun then some type of substantial response on their part would be inevitable - turned up obscure references to an ancient githyanki artifact known as the Astral Prism, a relic anti-illithid superweapon of some type that had somehow featured in their original revolution against the illithid Grand Design of old. The existence of such a thing was of course an existential threat to our plans, and we had to take action. Even the unaccountable escape of the city of Elturel from Avernus and the unexpected return of Grand Duke Ravengard was a minor bump in the road compared to the potential threat of the Astral Prism - a simple command to one of our True Souls and a handy goblin war party served to capture the Grand Duke on the road, and my planned political ascension would be made even easier with the Grand Duke as a tadpoled patsy mouthing the right words on cue than it would have been with him as merely an absentee vote.
As for the Astral Prism, we responded by putting together an expendable strike force of illithids and tadpoled adventurers, piloting one of our most powerful nautiloids, to make a raid on Tu'narath and steal the Prism from Vlaakith's vaults. We'd even selected the 'Emperor', now re-enslaved to our pet nether brain, as the captain of the nautiloid along with the now-amnesiac Dark Urge as one of the tadpoled infantry - after all, they were still two of the most formidable and highly skilled of all the illithids or True Souls we had available. Arranging for word of the existence of the Astral Prism to be leaked to the Baldurian temple of Shar along with hints it would be a useful weapon against our rival 'Cult of the Absolute' had been child's play, and had of course produced the entirely predictable response of their sending their own raiding party out to steal the Astral Prism from Vlaakith's vault. Better that they expend their own people and resources doing the hard part than us expend our own, after all. And so our own nautiloid raid team simply followed the Sharrans, prepared to exploit any vulnerability they made in the githyanki defenses or to relieve them of their prize on the way back should they actually succeed.
And that was when things had really started to go wrong.
First the nautiloid reappeared over several cities on the Sword Coast and randomly snatched up mutiple people in an entirely unsubtle daylight slave raid instead of simply returning to Moonrise as they had been supposed to, and then the pursuing githyanki forced it to flee the Prime again. I suppose we were fortunate that it had managed to make it back to Faerun after all, but its crash landing near the Emerald Grove had been on the furthest outskirts of our area of operations and by the time we got sufficient search teams into the area we found no traces of the Astral Prism - or of the 'Emperor'. As near as we could determine the damned thing had somehow broken free yet again and was in the wind with the Prism.
And then the debacle at Moonrise had occurred. One day Ketheric had matters entirely in hand, with that pitiful little scout band of Harpers so contained and being gradually murdered by the Shadow Curse that they weren't even worth expending any troops to kill, and the next day the 'Nightsong' has somehow been broken free of Shar's realm and Moonrise was being sacked. And then Ketheric is routed and sent to flight, and he brings us the appalling news that the Astral Prism's true function was apparently to disrupt an illithid hivemind and free enslaved entities from the control of an elder brain - and that a group of renegade True Souls, protected by the Prism, were now bearing it against us. He didn't even have time to do more than vaguely describe these people - fortunately the arcane eye outside his throne room had gotten a glimpse of them walking past when they'd made their initial infiltration of Moonrise Towers, so my own review of the surveillance records had been able to retrieve at least some of their likenesses. I was honestly surprised to see that Karlach was one of them - apparently at least one of the other planes our careening nautiloid had jumped through as it evaded the githyanki had been Avernus. Honestly, it was about time she'd finally found the gumption to escape. I'd managed to, after all, so what was her excuse?
We'd felt reasonably confident in leaving Ketheric behind to finish up once he managed to re-bind the Nightsong and re-establish his immortality - and it's not as if we'd had much choice. The attack was falling behind schedule as is and I had to get the army moving myself what with Ketheric still pinned in place, and I hadn't wanted to trust Orin an inch out of my sight. But then not an hour later we felt Ketheric's Netherstone lose its link to the Crown, and with that we'd known that our renegade True Souls had against every expectation actually managed to kill him. A later communication from my Lord Bane produced the even more surprising news that these True Souls had then managed to somehow defeat the manifested Avatar of Myrkul along with Ketheric, and that with the avatar's defeat and the loss of both Myrkul's Chosen and the Netherstone he'd borne Myrkul was no longer an effective part of our alliance.
But without Ketheric's Netherstone, we couldn't give any new orders to the elder brain. And that meant that once it finished executing all of the orders we'd previously given it, which were both finite in number and would require only finite time to cmplete, the elder brain would be free to operate independently again. At which point everyone in Baldur's Gate - including us - would be dead if they were fortunate, or converted to illithid slaves for eternity if they weren't. And the rest of the Sword Coast would likely follow in short order.
Obviously this state of affairs could not be allowed to continue. But even allowing for the fact that the Prism-bearers would be coming to us, because they needed to collect our Netherstones to win just as surely as we needed to reclaim theirs, the fact remained that we had to get that Netherstone back quickly. The elder brain was already starting to show a disturbing amount of... restiveness... and our time was rapidly running out.
So how best to-
I irritably broke off my thoughts at the sounds of approaching footsteps - by the brisk cadence of their march and the sound of boot heels upon the stone floor, it was one of the Flaming Fist. Sure enough, a manip - a female elf that I vaguely recognized as the one who had been in charge of the logistics for the upcoming coronation ceremony - was demanding my attention.
"Manip. If you are here, I presume that Wyrm's Rock is secure and preparations for my inauguration are on schedule?" I admonished her mildly.
"No, Lord Gortash." she replied with a servile bow. "We were interrupted - another quake in the Lower City. More severe this time."
"So you came cowering to me?" I sneered irritably. "I'm flattered, but even I cannot command natural phenomena to cease."
"Forgive me, my lord, but there is panic in the streets." she whimpered. "The people are afraid."
Of course they're afraid, you fool, the entire point is to panic the populace to the point they will be frantic and desperate for a strong leader to offer them salvation. I fumed inwardly. Not that I could actually say the quiet part out loud to this unwitting minion, of course. "Perhaps the people would be calm if you kept your nerve. I expect better from the Flaming Fist than to run scared from a slight tremor in the earth. Get back to your duties!"
"Duties, duties, duties! Patrolling and saluting and following and bowing and yes sir, no sir, rip and cut your throat sir!" I was already groaning inwardly less than halfway through her maddened tirade, because the shift of her voice more than gave away that I was not actually talking to the Flaming Fist I thought I was and had never been. Sure enough, her thrown dagger dramatically impaled my half-finished portrait - directly through the throat, I noted in passing - at the dramatic peak of her speech, and Orin's shapeshifted disguise fell away to reveal her own changeling features.
"You do realize that there's a witness standing right there?" I groaned. "Now I have to find a new portrait artist."
Orin's other thrown dagger effortlessly caught the fleeing artist at the base of his skull before he'd even made it more than ten feet towards the door, and she wrenched her first dagger loose from my portrait and held it up to my throat as she stalked menacingly behind me. "Your plan is falling apart, lordling. Give me a reason not to cut you to ribbons."
"Control yourself, Orin!" I snapped curtly, refusing to flinch even a millimeter. "We need to focus on reuniting the stones, or the brain will break free. These quakes are just the start!" I turned away from her and began pacing, and her blade fell away. So, she had come here just to intimidate- "Neither of us expected the Prism-bearers to kill Ketheric. But at least we know they'll be travelling to the city. I'll need you to give them a proper Baldurian welcome. Particularly since Ketheric died before he could give us more than the most fragmentary information about who they were, so my own information-gathering network has very little to work with. It's going to have to be your own operatives that do the heavy lifting on this one!"
"I itch to peel you... to split your skin... to see your skull shine in the light, little tyrant." Orin hissed with rampant madness held back by only the thinnest tissue of self-control. "Lucky for you, I harvested a whole family of living-flesh in Rivington at highsun. They will sate my blade-thirst tonight." She reclaimed her other dagger and began strolling arrogantly away towards the door, as her features, clothes, and voice shifted back into the Flaming Fist NCO that she'd impersonated to get in here. "But tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, my blades will thirst again!" she cackled as she strode out of the room.
By the Black Hand of Bane, I really missed the Dark Urge. The dragonborn sorcerer had been a consumnate professional and a welcome delight to work with. I suppose it made sense for the God of Murder to welcome a murderous backstabbing lunatic as their new Chosen but Bhaal's appallingly poor taste was making life very difficult for me. Orin had been troublesome to work with even at the best of times, and now here she was visibly self-destructing - and lusting to tear our remaining alliance apart and me with it - at the first major obstacle.
Which is why I'd deliberately not told her that I actually did have sufficient information to identify who at least some of the Prism-bearers were, or that I fully intended to make sure that when they arrived in Baldur's Gate I found them first.
After all, they'd already killed one of our triumvirate. So perhaps they could kill two.
Author's Note: Still slooowly chewing my way through Act 3, because I keep having to restart and replay portions of it over and over when I screw choices up. And even with the Cheater's Scroll mod that still takes time. But I can at least drop this chapter to help tide you over - it's a glimpse inside the head of Gortash, where you get an expodump on his backstory and the deep background of how things got this far. It's even 95% canon - there's a lot of obscure readables in the game that give you the pieces of the puzzle, but very few players actually find them all and put them together. Fortunately, the wiki exists.
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