Gauntlgrym

ANOTHER DROW AND HIS DWARF

BRUENOR STOOD THERE, STARING AT THE WELL, A STONE TAKEN FROM ITS base in his hand.

Drizzt didn’t know what to expect. Would Bruenor throw the stone in rage? Or would he insist that it didn’t matter and that they press on anyway, deeper into the unstable-and not as ancient as they’d first believed-underground complex.

The dwarf heaved a sigh and tossed the stone to the ground, its lettering-a human alphabet-clear to see. The well bore the signature of its all-too-human builder, and the mark of his barbarian clan. Bruenor had found the well before the earthquake had driven them out, and cost them days of digging to get back to the spot.

“Well, elf,” the dwarf remarked, “got us a hunnerd more maps to follow.”

He turned to face Drizzt and Guenhwyvar, hands on his hips, but there was no anger and little disappointment showing on his hairy face.

“What?” Bruenor added, seeing Drizzt’s obvious surprise at his measured reaction.

“You show great patience.”

Bruenor hunched his shoulders and snorted. “Ye remember when we was looking for Mithral Hall? Them months on the road, through Longsaddle, the Trollmoors, Silverymoon, and all?”

“Of course.”

“Ever knowing better months, elf?”

It was Drizzt’s turn to smile, and he conceded his friend’s point with a nod.

“Ye telled me a million times, it’s the journey and not the ending,” said Bruenor. “Might be that I’ve come to believe ye. Come on, then,” the dwarf added, and he walked between the pair, throwing a suspicious glance at the ever-troublesome panther. “I got more journeyin’ in me old legs yet.”

They came out of the cave under a perfect blue sky, with the rolling hillocks of the Crags tightening the horizon around them. It was late summer, almost fall, and the cool winds had been fairly comfortable of late. They figured they had about three more months of easy exploring before them until they had to retreat to a town for the winter-perhaps Port Llast, but Drizzt had suggested a journey out to Longsaddle to visit the Harpells. The strange clan of wizards had been decimated by the Spellplague, but after more than six decades they were finally rebuilding their ranks, their mansion on the hill, and the town beneath it.

That was a decision for another day, though, and the trio went back to their small encampment and Bruenor opened his pack and produced a pile of scroll tubes, parchment, and a mound of skins and tablets, all maps to the many known caves in the Sword Coast North. He also produced several ancient coins minted in the days of Delzoun, a very old smith hammer’s head, and some other suspicious and obviously ancient artifacts tumbled out as well. All had been procured across the North, from barbarian tribesmen or small villages, and the coins had come from Luskan. They were proof of nothing, of course. Luskan could trace her history as a trading port as far back as most dwarf scholars put the time of Gauntlgrym, and if that was the case, then one would expect a few Delzoun coins in the various coffers of the City of Sails.

To Bruenor, though, those artifacts represented confirmation, and a heartening lift to his tired old shoulders, so Drizzt didn’t dissuade him from that.

Not if it would make the journey more interesting, after all.

Bruenor sorted through the scroll tubes, one after another, reading the notes he had scribbled on their sides. He selected two and tossed them aside before stuffing the rest back into his pack. A similar pile of the parchment produced yet another promising map, before the rest of those, too, went into the pack.

“Them three’re closest to us,” the dwarf explained.

To Drizzt’s surprise and amusement, Bruenor finished filling his bag then slung it over his shoulder and started collecting the rest of his items, and breaking their camp.

“What?” the dwarf asked when Drizzt made no move to do likewise. “We got a few more good hours o’ sunlight, elf. No time for wastin’!”

Laughing, Herzgo Alegni walked out from behind the tree and onto the forest path before a pair of surprised tieflings. One had horns similar to Alegni’s, rounded back and down, while the other sported only a pair of nubs on her forehead. Both wore leather vests left open to reveal jagged brands, layered lines combining the symbols of their god and some other devilish patron. Alegni had come to know the symbol well in his time in Neverwinter Wood.

Both carried red scepters, fashioned with clever facets to look like crystal, though they were in fact made of solid metal. Around three feet in length, they could serve as club, short staff, or spear, with one end tapered to a nasty tip.

“Brother…” the male said, startled by the sudden appearance of the larger tiefling.

“Nay-Shadovar!” the female quickly corrected, even as she leaped back into a defensive posture.

She set her weight back on her right leg, and her left arm extended, palm toward Alegni, her weapon drawn in tight against her right breast, pointing the Shadovar’s way as a sword or spear might.

The male reacted in much the same way, crouching with his legs wide and his scepter up over his right shoulder, as if to swing it as a club.

Herzgo Alegni smiled at them both and didn’t yet draw his magnificent sword, the red blade hanging easily along the side of his left leg.

“Ashmadai, I presume,” he said, referring to the cultists of Asmodeus, a group he had never heard of until recently, when they had begun to trickle into Neverwinter Wood.

“As you should be, devil brother,” said the female. Her eyes, solid silver orbs, widened with lustful excitement.

“Devil brother who has embraced the shade,” the male added, “and the Sharran Empire of Netheril.”

“Who sent you?” Alegni asked. “Whose hand guides this cult of misbegotten zealots?”

“One who is no friend of Netheril!” the female retorted, and she came forward suddenly, thrusting her spear at Alegni’s massive chest.

But Alegni moved first, drawing his sword and lifting the blade up and left to right as it came free of its belt loop-and more, something neither of his opponents could have expected-as the blade rent the air it left an opaque trail of ash.

Through that veil prodded the female’s spear, but behind the wall of ash, Alegni had already dodged off to his right, letting the momentum of the sword carry him.

As the female retracted, he said from just off the path, “Here.” And just before the male leaped forward to swing his club, and both turned their horned heads to regard him, and even started to re-orient their feet, the ash wall exploded. A slender figure leaped through, flipping in mid-air as he passed between the Ashmadai couple, easily avoiding their attempts to align their weapons to the new threat. He landed behind them, though facing them, having twisted around in the air.

“Blow the horn!” the male cried, spinning to meet the challenge, but even as he spoke, the female stumbled a step or two to the side, her free hand slapping against her throat-against a puncture wound inflicted by the newcomer’s dagger. Her silver eyes went wider still, in shock at his precision, perhaps, or in fear that she was mortally wounded.

“Makarielle!” her companion cried, and he leaped at the knife-wielder, leading with a great swing of his club.

The pallid human leaned away from the first cut and ducked the backhand. On the third attempt, he leaped at the weapon, accepting the shortened hit against the side of his chest as he landed. The club hooked under his armpit, and he spun out to the side with such force, confidence, and balance that he took the weapon from his opponent’s hand.

The disarmed tiefling hissed and rushed to follow, more than capable of doing battle with his fists and teeth.

But even as he moved out to the side, Barrabus the Gray drove his right elbow, the arm trapping the scepter, up and out in front of him, flipping the weapon into the air. He caught it mid-shaft with his right hand then stopped and reversed, throwing his right hip back and around. Cupping the back end of the scepter with his left hand for balance and power, he thrust it out behind him.

He felt the heavy impact with his pursuer’s chest and didn’t continue around to his right, but rather stopped and brought the scepter back in front of him, flipping it easily and catching both hands low on one end as he turned to his left, stepping toward the retreating tiefling as he brought the club to bear.

To his credit, the tiefling managed to get his arm up to block the blow-and break his forearm in the process-but before he could even shriek out from the explosion of pain, Barrabus went back around the other way and reversed his hands as if to launch a tremendous blow, up-angled for the tiefling’s head. Even as the tiefling began to react accordingly, Barrabus revealed the feint, dropping and kicking out with his foot instead. He connected solidly with the tiefling’s knee, driving the leg out wide, and again his hands moved quickly along the scepter, so his right hand gripped the middle, his left low on the back end. Barrabus drove the weapon forward and upward from his crouch, and the off-balance tiefling had no defense as the tip slammed hard into his groin.

“Well done,” Alegni congratulated Barrabus, walking up beside the female, who was on one knee then, both hands tight against her punctured throat, her weapon on the ground beside her. “Will she live?” he asked.

“No poison,” the man confirmed. “Not a mortal wound.”

“Good news!” Alegni said, stepping past her toward the stunned but stubborn male, who stood, his face locked in a tight grimace. “Well, not for you,” the Shadovar corrected, and his sword came across suddenly, brutally, nearly cleaving the poor fellow in two.

“I need only one prisoner,” Alegni explained to the already dead Ashmadai cultist. He stepped back and grabbed the kneeling female by her thick black hair and jerked her to her feet with such force that she came right up off the ground.

“Do you believe yourself the fortunate one?” he asked, putting his face right up to hers and staring coldly into her tear-filled eyes. “Take their weapons and anything else worth salvaging,” he instructed his lackey, and he started away, yanking the female from her feet and dragging her off by the hair.

Barrabus the Gray watched him go, but mostly he was looking at the expression of sheer anguish on the female’s face. He didn’t mind the fighting, certainly, and had few pangs of conscience in killing the strange fanatics of a devil god. Any of them would have gladly disemboweled him in one of their sacrificial rituals, after all, as Herzgo Alegni’s soldiers had discovered when three of their own had gone missing in the wood only to be found strapped and gutted on a slab of stone.

Despite that, Barrabus couldn’t help but wince at the sight of the female, knowing that she would soon experience the unbridled cruelty of Herzgo Alegni.

Indomitable.

It was the word that most came to mind when Drizzt considered Bruenor Battlehammer, along with the drow’s own oft-repeated, “Roll on.”

Drizzt stood in the shade of a wide-spreading oak, leaning on the trunk, inadvertently spying on his friend. Below the higher patch of ground with the oak, in a small clearing, sat Bruenor, with a dozen of his maps opened and spread out on a blanket.

Bruenor had kept Drizzt going for years, and the dark elf knew it. When hope of raising Catti-brie and Regis had faded to nothing, when even the best memories of those two, and of Wulfgar-and the barbarian had to be dead, dead or a hundred and twelve years old-had faded, too, only Bruenor’s insistence that the road ahead was worth walking, that there was something grand to be found, had somewhat cooled the anger simmering within the drow.

The anger, and so much more, none of it good.

He watched the dwarf for a long while, shifting from map to map, making little notations on one or another, or in the small book he kept at all times, a journal of his road to Gauntlgrym. That book symbolized Bruenor’s admission that he might never get to the ancient Delzoun homeland, the dwarf had admitted to Drizzt. But if he failed, he meant to leave behind a record, so that the next dwarf taking up the quest would be well on his way before he ever took his first step.

In that action, in the admission that, for Bruenor at least, it might well be all for naught, and the determination that such a possibility, indeed even a probability, was still all right, resonated within Drizzt as a statement of cause, of continuity and of… decency.

It wasn’t until he’d brought his clenched fist out before him that Drizzt even realized he’d broken off a piece of the tree trunk. He opened his black fingers to see the chip, and stared at it for a long while then threw it to the ground, his hands going reflexively to the hilts of his belted scimitars. Drizzt turned away from Bruenor, scanning the rolling hills and forests, looking for smoke, for some sign that others were near-likely goblins, orcs, or gnolls.

It seemed ironic to him that as the world had grown undeniably darker, his battles had come fewer, and farther between. Drizzt found that ironic-and unacceptable.

“Tonight, Guen,” he whispered, though the panther was at home on the Astral Plane and he didn’t take out the onyx figurine to summon her to his side. “Tonight, we hunt.”

With hardly a thought, he drew out Twinkle and Icingdeath, the blades he’d carried for so many decades, and put them into an easy series of practiced movements, simulating parries, counters, and clever ripostes. His pace increased, his movements shifting from defensive and reactive routines to more aggressive, more radical attacks.

He had done those exercises for almost all of his life, learned while training with his father Zaknafein in the Underdark city of Menzoberranzan, then in the drow academy of Melee-Magthere. They had followed him along the entirety of his life’s journey. The movements were a part of him, a measure of his discipline, a sharpening of his skills, an affirmation of his purpose.

So attuned was Drizzt to his practice that he hadn’t even noticed the subtle internal shifts he’d undergone when executing the routines. The exercises were mostly about muscle memory and balance, of course, and in the routine, blocks and turns, stabs and spins were designed to counter the attacks of imaginary opponents.

But in the last several years, those imagined opponents had become far more vivid to Drizzt. He didn’t even remember that when he’d first begun those routines, and for all his life to the time of the Spellplague, he’d visualized his opponents only as weapons. He would turn and lift Twinkle vertically to block an imagined sword, and whip Icingdeath across down low the other way to deflect a thrusting spear.

Since that dark time, though, and particularly since he, Bruenor, Jessa, Pwent, and Nanfoodle had taken to the road, his imagined opponents became much more than simple weapons. Drizzt saw the face of an orc or the grin of an ogre, or the eyes of a human, drow, elf, dwarf, or halfling-it didn’t matter! As long as some bandit was there, or some monster, ready to scream in pain as Twinkle drove hard for its heart, or gurgle in its own blood as Icingdeath swept across its throat…

Furiously, the drow attacked his demons. He sprinted ahead and leaped, spinning over and coming back to his feet in such a tilt as to propel him farther ahead with sudden fury, legs speeded by magical anklets, scimitars reaching ahead to skewer. Another dart, another leaping somersault, landing unbalanced to the right then throwing himself that way with a devastating spin, a whirlwind of slashing blades.

Ahead again, up and over, and out to the left, whirling fury, abruptly halted in a sudden and brutal reverse-grip, behind-the-back stab.

Drizzt could feel the added weight on his blade as it impaled a pursuing orc. He could imagine the warmth of blood spilling down on his hand.

So deeply was he into the moment, the fantasy, that he actually turned, thinking to wipe the blood from Icingdeath on the fallen opponent’s jerkin.

He stared at Icingdeath, clean and shining, and noted the sweat glistening on his forearm. He looked back toward the oak, scores and scores of running strides away.

Somewhere deep inside, Drizzt Do’Urden knew he used the daily regimen-and actual battles when he could find them-to deny the truth of his loss and pain. He hid in his fighting, and forgot the pain only in those moments of brutal battle, real or imagined. But he did well to keep it inside, to keep it hidden from his conscious thoughts, to bury it under the other truth, after all, that he needed to practice.

And he did well to pretend that all of the many fights he had found on the road those last decades had been unavoidable, after all.

“Two Ashmadai tieflings taken in a matter of a few heartbeats,” Herzgo Alegni congratulated Barrabus that night on the outskirts of Neverwinter, at the edge of the forest with the city in clear sight.

“They were surprised, and focused on you,” Barrabus replied. “They had no idea I was there.”

“Can you not simply accept the compliment?” Herzgo scolded with a little laugh.

From you? Barrabus thought but didn’t say, particularly in the dismissive and sarcastic manner in which it no doubt would have come forth. Still, his sour expression spoke volumes.

“Oh, be not so surprised,” Alegni scolded. “If I saw no value in your skills, do you think I would keep you alive?”

Barrabus didn’t bother to answer, other than to smirk and glance at Alegni’s hip and the red-bladed sword.

“Of course, you believe I would do so simply to torment you,” Alegni reasoned. “No, my small friend. While I’ll not deny that I do take great pleasure in your frustration, it alone would not be worth the trouble. You’re alive because you are of value. The Herzgo Alegni Bridge in Neverwinter is a testament to that, as is your work here in the forest-a complete and competent minion. And such competence is hard to find these dark days, and harder to control when it is found.” He smiled as he said that and gripped the sword hilt as he added, “Though, fortunately, such is not the case with you.”

“It pleasures me greatly to be of such use,” Barrabus said with unrelenting sarcasm.

“Indeed, you serve as diplomat with Hugo Babris, as warrior against the Ashmadai, as assassin against the agents of our enemies, and as spy when called upon.”

Barrabus put his hands on his hips and waited, knowing then that some new mission was about to be presented.

“The arrival of these Ashmadai fanatics is not coincidence, I am sure,” Alegni said on cue. “There is word of Thayan agents in the North, likely in Luskan.”

Barrabus winced at the mention of the City of Sails, having no desire to go anywhere near it.

“I wish to know who they are, why they’ve come, and what further trouble they will attempt against our work here,” Alegni finished.

“Luskan…” the assassin said, as if repeating the name might remind Alegni that sending Barrabus the Gray to Luskan might not be such a good idea.

“You are a master of stealth, are you not?”

“And Luskan is thick with those who mock the supposed stealth of humans, even Shadovar. Is it not?”

“Few drow have been seen in the city of late.”

“Few?” Barrabus echoed, as if that fact should hardly matter.

“I’m willing to risk it.”

“How big of you.”

“Indeed. I am willing to risk the loss of one of my… of you,” the tiefling remarked. “It would be a pity, but my options are few, for you are one of the few of my band who can still pass for human. I trust you will take care to garner little notice, and that there are few enough dark elves in the City of Sails to trouble you.”

“You have secured my passage?”

“Not by sea. You will accompany a caravan to Port Llast. Begin your investigation there. Then, when you have learned what you may, you’re on your own to Luskan.”

“That will take longer.”

“The road, too, is worth study.”

“And the road will close behind me, perhaps not to open again until next spring.”

Herzgo Alegni laughed at that. “I know Barrabus the Gray better than to think a bit of snow could stop his travels. Your time in Port Llast will be short, I’m sure. There are few people there of interest to us, so you’ll be in Luskan before the autumn equinox. Be quick about your duties and return to me before the snows block the passes.”

“I haven’t been in Luskan in… forty years,” Barrabus protested. “I have no contacts there, no network.”

“Most of the city has remained intact since the fall of the Hosttower. Five High Captains rule from their various-”

“And they are ruled by the mercenary dark elves,” Barrabus finished. “And if the talk is of fewer of them seen in the city now, you can bet those accounts were sent forth by the dark elves themselves, so that people like you, and the lords of Waterdeep, can nod and turn their eyes elsewhere.”

“Well, you will find out the truth for me, then.”

“If the reports you claim are not true, I won’t likely be coming back. Do not underestimate the memory of a dark elf.”

“Why, dear Barrabus, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you scared before.”

Barrabus straightened at that and glowered at the tiefling.

“Before winter,” Herzgo Alegni told him. He glanced toward Neverwinter and motioned with his chin. “The caravan leaves in the morning.”

His thoughts spinning in a hundred different directions, and none of them leading to a pleasant conclusion, Barrabus the Gray walked toward the city. He’d made a point of staying far afield of Luskan for years-one did not double-cross a character like Jarlaxle Baenre without consequences, after all.

He thought back to that fight in Memnon those decades before, when agents of Bregan D’aerthe had paraded his lover before him, taunting him and warning him of the consequences should he reject their offer to rejoin with them. He saw again the three dead drow, but he dismissed the image, focusing instead on the few tendays he had subsequently known with his lover.

Those had been among the best days of his life, but alas, she had run off, or disappeared-had the dark elves taken her again? Had they killed her as payback for his violence?

Or was it that infernal sword? He almost glanced back at Herzgo Alegni as that unsettling thought bubbled up. Very soon after his loss, the Shadovar had come into his life, had taken his freedom.

Had taken everything.

That last thought brought a self-deprecating smile to the lips of Barrabus the Gray. “Had taken everything?” he whispered aloud. “And what was there to take?”

By the time he reached Neverwinter’s gate, Barrabus had let all those memories fly away. He had to look ahead, his focus tight and complete. If any drow remained in Luskan, the slightest error would likely cost him his life.