The Ghost King

Where does reason end and magic begin? Where does reason end and faith begin? These are two of the central questions of sentience, so I have been told by a philosopher friend who has gone to the end of his days and back again. It is the ultimate musing, the ultimate search, the ultimate reality of who we are. To live is to die, and to know that you shall, and to wonder, always wonder.

This truth is the foundation of the Spirit Soaring, a cathedral, a library, a place of worship and reason, of debate and philosophy. Her stones were placed by faith and magic, her walls constructed of wonderment and hope, her ceiling held up by reason. There, Cadderly Bonaduce strides in profundity and demands of his many visitors, devout and scholarly, that they do not shy from the larger questions of existence, and do not shield themselves and buffet others with unreasoned dogma.

There is now raging in the wider world a fierce debate—just such a collision between reason and dogma. Are we no more than the whim of the gods or the result of harmonic process? Eternal or mortal, and if the former, then what is the relationship of that which is forever more, the soul, to that which we know will feed the worms? What is the next progression for consciousness and spirit, of self-awareness and—or—the loss of individuality in the state of oneness with all else? What is the relationship between the answerable and the unanswerable, and what does it bode if the former grows at the expense of the latter?

Of course, the act of simply asking these questions raises troubling possibilities for many people, acts of punishable heresy for others, and indeed even Cadderly once confided in me that life would be simpler if he could just accept what is, and exist in the present. The irony of his tale is not lost on me. One of the most prominent priests of Deneir, young Cadderly remained skeptical even of the existence of the god he served. Indeed he was an agnostic priest, but one mighty with powers divine. Had he worshipped any god other than Deneir, whose very tenets encourage inquisition, young Cadderly likely would never have found any of those powers, to heal or to invoke the wrath of his deity.

He is confident now in the evermore, and in the possibility of some Deneirrath heaven, but still he questions, still he seeks. At Spirit Soaring, many truths—laws of the wider world, even of the heavens above—are being unraveled and unrolled for study and inquisition. With humility and courage, the scholars who flock there illuminate details of the scheme of our reality, argue the patterns of the multiverse and the rules that guide it, indeed, realign our very understanding of Toril and its relationship to the moon and the stars above.

For some, that very act bespeaks heresy, a dangerous exploration into the realms of knowledge that should remain solely the domain of the gods, of beings higher than us. Worse, these frantic prophets of doom warn, such ponderings and impolitic explanations diminish the gods themselves and turn away from faith those who need to hear the word. To philosophers like Cadderly, however, the greater intricacy, the greater complexity of the multiverse only elevates his feelings for his god. The harmony of nature, he argues, and the beauty of universal law and process bespeak a brilliance and a notion of infinity beyond that realized in blindness or willful, fearful ignorance.

To Cadderly’s inquisitive mind, the observed system supporting divine law far surpasses the superstitions of the Material Plane.

For many others, though, even some of those who agree with Cadderly’s search, there is an undeniable level of discomfort.

I see the opposite in Catti-brie and her continued learning and understanding of magic. She takes comfort in magic, she has said, because it cannot be explained. Her strength in faith and spirituality climbs beside her magical prowess. To have before you that which simply is, without explanation, without fabrication and replication, is the essence of faith.

I do not know if Mielikki exists. I do not know if any of the gods are real, or if they are actual beings, whether or not they care about the day-to-day existence of one rogue dark elf. The precepts of Mielikki—the morality, the sense of community and service, and the appreciation for life—are real to me, are in my heart. They were there before I found Mielikki, a name to place upon them, and they would remain there even if indisputable proof were given to me that there was no actual being, no physical manifestation of those precepts.

Do we behave out of fear of punishment, or out of the demands of our heart? For me, it is the latter, as I would hope is true for all adults, though I know from bitter experience that such is not often the case. To act in a manner designed to catapult you into one heaven or another would seem transparent to a god, any god, for if one’s heart is not in alignment with the creator of that heaven, then … what is the point?

And so I salute Cadderly and the seekers, who put aside the ethereal, the easy answers, and climb courageously toward the honesty and the beauty of a greater harmony.

As the many peoples of Faerûn scramble through their daily endeavors, march through to the ends of their respective lives, there will be much hesitance at the words that flow from Spirit Soaring, even resentment and attempts at sabotage. Cadderly’s personal journey to explore the cosmos within the bounds of his own considerable intellect will no doubt foster fear, in particular of the most basic and terrifying concept of all, death.

From me, I show only support for my priestly friend. I remember my nights in Icewind Dale, tall upon Bruenor’s Climb, more removed from the tundra below, it seemed, than from the stars above. Were my ponderings there any less heretical than the work of Spirit Soaring? And if the result for Cadderly and those others is anything akin to what I knew on that lonely mountaintop, then I recognize the strength of Cadderly’s armor against the curses of the incurious and the cries of heresy from less enlightened and more dogmatic fools.

My journey to the stars, among the stars, at one with the stars, was a place of absolute contentment and unbridled joy, a moment of the most peaceful existence I have ever known.

And the most powerful, for in that state of oneness with the universe around me, I, Drizzt Do’Urden, stood as a god.

— Drizzt Do’Urden

CHAPTER 1 VISITING A DROW’S DREAMS

I will find you, drow.

The dark elf’s eyes popped open wide, and he quickly attuned his keen senses to his physical surroundings. The voice remained clear in his mind, invading his moment of quiet Reverie.

He knew the voice, for with it came an image of catastrophe all too clear in his memories, from perhaps a decade and a half before.

He adjusted his eye patch and ran a hand over his bald head, trying to make sense of it. It couldn’t be. The dragon had been destroyed, and nothing, not even a great red wyrm like Hephaestus, could have survived the intensity of the blast when Crenshinibon had released its power. Or even if the beast had somehow lived, why hadn’t it arisen then and there, where its enemies would have been helpless before it?

No, Jarlaxle was certain that Hephaestus had been destroyed. But he hadn’t dreamed the intrusion into his Reverie. Of that, too, Jarlaxle was certain.

I will find you, drow.

It had been Hephaestus—the telepathic impartation into Jarlaxle’s Reverie had brought the image of the great dragon to him clearly. He could not have mistaken the weight of that voice. It had startled him from his meditation, and he had instinctively retreated from it and forced himself back into the present, to his physical surroundings.

He regretted that almost immediately, and calmed long enough to hear the contented snoring of his dwarf companion, to ensure that all around him was secure, then he closed his eyes once more and turned his thoughts inward, to a place of meditation and solitude.

Except, he was not alone.

Hephaestus was there waiting for him. He envisioned the dragon’s eyes, twin flickers of angry flame. He could feel the beast’s rage, simmering and promising revenge. A contented growl rumbled through Jarlaxle’s thoughts, the smirk of the predator when the prey was at hand. The dragon had found him telepathically, but did that mean it knew where he was physically?

A moment of panic swept through Jarlaxle, a moment of confusion. He reached up and touched his eye patch, wearing it that day over his left eye. Its magic should have stopped Hephaestus’s intrusion, should have shielded Jarlaxle from all scrying or unwanted telepathic contact. But he was not imagining it. Hephaestus was with him.

I will find you, drow, the dragon assured him once more.

“Will” find him, so therefore had not yet found him …

Jarlaxle threw up his defenses, refusing to consider his current whereabouts in the recognition of why Hephaestus kept repeating his declaration. The dragon wanted him to consider his position so the beast could telepathically take the knowledge of his whereabouts from him.

He filled his thoughts with images of the city of Luskan, of Calimport, of the Underdark. Jarlaxle’s principal lieutenant in his powerful mercenary band was an accomplished psionicist, and had taught Jarlaxle much in the ways of mental trickery and defense. Jarlaxle brought every bit of that knowledge to bear.

Hephaestus’s psionically-imparted growl, turning from satisfaction to frustration, was met by Jarlaxle’s chuckle. You cannot elude me, the dragon insisted. Aren’t you dead? I will find you, drow! Then I will kill you again.

Jarlaxle’s matter-of-fact, casual response elicited a great rage from the beast—as the drow had hoped—and with that emotion came a momentary loss of control by the dragon, which was all Jarlaxle needed.

He met that rage with a wall of denial, forcing Hephaestus from his thoughts. He shifted the eye patch to his right eye, his touch awakening the item, bringing forth its shielding power more acutely.

That was the way with many of his magical trinkets of late. Something was happening to the wider world, to Mystra’s Weave. Kimmuriel had warned him to beware the use of magic, for reports of disastrous results from even simple castings had become all too commonplace.

The eye patch did its job, though, and combined with Jarlaxle’s clever tricks and practiced defenses, Hephaestus was thrown far from the drow’s subconscious.

Eyes open once more, Jarlaxle surveyed his small encampment. He and Athrogate were north of Mirabar. The sun had not yet appeared, but the eastern sky was beginning to leak its pre-dawn glow. The two of them were scheduled to meet, clandestinely, with Marchion Elastul of Mirabar that very morning, to complete a trading agreement between the self-serving ruler and the coastal city of Luskan. Or more specifically, between Elastul and Bregan D’aerthe, Jarlaxle’s mercenary—and increasingly mercantile—band. Bregan D’aerthe used the city of Luskan as a conduit to the World Above, trading goods from the Underdark for artifacts from the surface realms, ferrying valuable and exotic baubles to and from the drow city-state of Menzoberranzan.

The drow scanned their camp, set in a small hollow amid a trio of large oaks. He could see the road, quiet and empty. From one of the trees a cicada crescendoed its whining song, and a bird cawed as if in answer. A rabbit darted through the small grassy lea on the downside of the camp, fleeing with sharp turns and great leaps as if terrified by the weight of Jarlaxle’s gaze.

The drow slipped down from the low crook in the tree, rolling off the heavy limb that had served as his bed. He landed silently on magical boots and wove a careful path out of the copse to get a wider view of the area.

“And where’re ye goin’, I’m wantin’ to be knowin’?” the dwarf called after him.

Jarlaxle turned on Athrogate, who still lay on his back, wrapped in a tangled bedroll. One half-opened eye looked back at him.

“I often ponder which is more annoying, dwarf, your snoring or your rhyming.”

“Meself, too,” said Athrogate. “But since I’m not much hearing me snoring, I’ll be choosing the word-song.”

Jarlaxle just shook his head and turned to walk away. “I’m still asking, elf.”

“I thought it wise to search the grounds before our esteemed visitor arrives,” Jarlaxle replied.

“He’ll be getting here with half the dwarfs o’ Mirabar’s Shield, not for doubting,” said Athrogate.

True enough, Jarlaxle knew. He heard Athrogate shuffle out of his bedroll and scramble to his feet.

“Prudence, my friend,” the drow said over his shoulder, and started away.

“Nah, it’s more’n that,” Athrogate declared.

Jarlaxle laughed helplessly. Few in the world knew him well enough to so easily read through his tactical deflections and assertions, but in the years Athrogate had been at his side, he had indeed let the dwarf get to know something of the true Jarlaxle Baenre. He turned and offered a grin to his dirty, bearded friend.

“Well?” Athrogate asked. “Yer words I’m taking, but what’s got ye shaking?”

“Shaking?”

Athrogate shrugged. “It be what it be, and I see what it be.”

“Enough,” Jarlaxle bade him, holding his hands out in surrender.

“Ye tell me or I’ll rhyme at ye again,” the dwarf warned.

“Hit me with your mighty morningstars instead, I beg you.”

Athrogate planted his hands on his hips and stared at the dark elf hard.

“I do not yet know,” Jarlaxle admitted. “Something …” He reached around and retrieved his enormous, wide-brimmed hat, patted it into shape, and plopped it atop his head.

“Something?”

“Aye,” said the drow. “A visitor, perhaps in my dreams, perhaps not.”

“Tell me she’s a redhead.”

“Red scales, more likely.”

Athrogate’s face crinkled in disgust. “Ye need to dream better, elf.”

“Indeed.”

“My daughter fares well, I trust,” Marchion Elastul remarked. He sat in a great, comfortable chair at the heavy, ornately decorated table his attendants had brought from his palace in Mirabar, surrounded by a dozen grim-faced dwarves of Mirabar’s Shield. Across from him, in lesser thrones, sat Jarlaxle and Athrogate, who stuffed his face with bread, eggs, and all manner of delicacies. Even for a meeting in the wilderness, Elastul had demanded some manner of civilized discourse, which, to the dwarf’s ultimate joy, had included a fine breakfast.

“Arabeth has adapted well to the changes in Luskan, yes,” Jarlaxle answered. “She and Kensidan have grown closer, and her position within the city continues to expand in prominence and power.”

“That miserable Crow,” Elastul whispered with a sigh, referring to High Captain Kensidan, one of the four high captains who ruled the city. He knew well that Kensidan had become the dominant member of that elite group.

“Kensidan won,” Jarlaxle reminded him. “He outwitted Arklem Greeth and the Arcane Brotherhood—no small feat! — and convinced the other high captains that his course was the best.”

“I would have preferred Captain Deudermont.”

Jarlaxle shrugged. “This way is more profitable for us all.”

“To think that I’m sitting here dealing with a drow elf,” Elastul lamented. “Half of my Shield dwarves would prefer that I kill you rather than negotiate with you.”

“That would not be wise.”

“Or profitable?”

“Nor healthy.”

Elastul snorted, but his daughter Arabeth had told him enough about the creature Jarlaxle for him to know that the drow’s quip was only half a joke, and half a deadly serious threat.

“If Kensidan the Crow and the other three high captains learn of our little arrangement here, they will not be pleased,” Elastul said.

“Bregan D’aerthe does not answer to Kensidan and the others.”

“But you do have an arrangement with them to trade your goods through their markets alone.”

“Their wealth grows considerably because of the quiet trade with Menzoberranzan,” Jarlaxle replied. “If I decide it convenient to do some dealing outside the parameters of that arrangement, then … I am a merchant, after all.”

“A dead one, should Kensidan learn of this.”

Jarlaxle laughed at the assertion. “A weary one, more likely, for what shall I do with a surface city to rule?”

It took a moment for the implications of that boast to sink in to Elastul, and the possibility brought him little amusement, for it served as a reminder and a warning that he dealt with dark elves.

Very dangerous dark elves.

“We have a deal, then?” Jarlaxle asked.

“I will open the tunnel to Barkskin’s storehouse,” Elastul replied, referring to a secret marketplace in the Undercity of Mirabar, the dwarf section. “Kimmuriel’s wagons can move in through there alone, and none shall be allowed beyond the entry hall. And I expect the pricing exactly as we discussed, since the cost to me in merely keeping the appropriate guards alert for drow presence will be no small matter.”

“‘Drow presence?’ Surely you do not expect that we will deign to move further into your city, good marchion. We are quite content with the arrangement we have now, I assure you.”

“You are a drow, Jarlaxle. You are never ‘quite content.’”

Jarlaxle simply laughed, unwilling and unable to dispute that point. He had agreed to personally broker the deal for Kimmuriel, who would oversee the set-up of the operation, since Jarlaxle’s wanderlust had returned and he wanted some time away from Luskan. In truth, Jarlaxle had to admit to himself that he wouldn’t really be surprised at all to return to the North after a few months on the road and find Kimmuriel making great inroads in the city of Mirabar, perhaps even becoming the true power in the city, using Elastul or whatever other fool he might prop up to give him cover.

Jarlaxle tipped his great hat, then, and rose to leave, signaling Athrogate to follow. Snorting like a pig on a truffle, the dwarf kept stuffing his mouth, egg yolk and jam splattering his great black beard, a braided and dung-tipped mane.

“It has been a long and hungry road,” Jarlaxle commented to Elastul. The marchion shook his head in disgust. The dwarves of Mirabar’s Shield, however, looked on with pure jealousy.

Jarlaxle and Athrogate had marched more than a mile before the dwarf stopped belching long enough to ask, “So, we’re back for Luskan?”

“No,” Jarlaxle replied. “Kimmuriel will see to the more mundane details now that I have completed the deal.”

“Long way to ride for a short talk and a shorter meal.”

“You ate through half the morning.”

Athrogate rubbed his considerable belly and issued a belch that scared a flock of birds from a nearby tree, and Jarlaxle gave a helpless shake of his head.

“My tummy hurts,” the dwarf explained. He rubbed his belly and burped again, several times in rapid succession. “So we’re not back to Luskan. Where, then?”

That question gave Jarlaxle pause. “I am not sure,” he said honestly.

“I won’t be missing the place,” said Athrogate. He reached over his shoulder and patted the grip of one of his mighty glassteel morningstars, which he kept strapped diagonally on his back, handles up high, their spiked ball heads bouncing behind his shoulders as he bobbed along the trail. “Ain’t used these in months.”

Jarlaxle, staring absently into the distance, simply nodded.

“Well, wherever we’re to go, if even ye’re to know, I’m thinkin’ and talkin’, it’s better ridin’ than walkin’. Bwahaha!” He reached into a belt pouch where he kept a black figurine of a war boar that could summon a magical mount to his side. He started to take it out, but Jarlaxle put a hand over his and stopped him.

“Not today,” the drow explained. “Today, we meander.”

“Bah, but I’m wantin’ a bumpy road to shake a few belches free, ye damned elf.”

“Today we walk,” Jarlaxle said with finality.

Athrogate looked at him with suspicion. “So ye’re not for knowin’ where we’re to be goin’.”

The drow looked around at the rough terrain and rubbed his slender chin. “Soon,” he promised.

“Bah! We could’ve gone back into Mirabar for more food!” Athrogate blanched as he finished, though, a rare expression indeed for the tough dwarf, for Jarlaxle fixed him with a serious and withering glare, one that reminded him in no uncertain terms who was the leader and who the sidekick.

“Good day for a walk!” Athrogate exclaimed, and finished with a great belch.

They set their camp only a few miles northeast of the field where they had met with Marchion Elastul, on a small ridge among a line of scraggly, short trees, many dead, others nearly leafless. Below them to the west loomed the remains of an old farm, or perhaps a small village, beyond a short rocky field splashed with flat, cut stones, most lying but some standing on end, leading Athrogate to mutter that it was probably an old graveyard.

“That or a pavilion,” Jarlaxle replied, hardly caring.

Selûne was up, dancing in and out of the many small clouds that rushed overhead. Under her pale glow, Athrogate was soon snoring contentedly, but for Jarlaxle, the thought of Reverie was not welcomed.

He watched as the shadows under the moon’s pale glow began to shrink, disappear, then stretch toward the east as the moon passed overhead and started its western descent. Weariness crept in upon him, and he resisted it for a long while.

The drow silently berated himself for his foolishness. He couldn’t stay present and alert forever.

He leaned against a dead tree, a twisted silhouette whose shadow looked like the skeleton of a man who reached, pleading, to the gods. Jarlaxle didn’t climb it—the old tree likely wouldn’t have held his weight—but instead remained standing, leaning against the rough trunk.

He let his mind fall away from his surroundings, let it fall inward. Memories blended with sensations in the gentle swirl of Reverie. He felt his own heartbeat, the blood rushing through his veins. He felt the rhythms of the world, like a gentle breathing beneath his feet, and he embraced the sensation of a connection to the earth, as if he had grown roots into the deep rock. At the same time, he experienced a sensation of weightlessness, as if he were floating, as the wonderful relaxation of Reverie swept through his mind and body.

Only there was Jarlaxle free. Reverie was his refuge. I will find you, drow.

Hephaestus was there with him, waiting for him. In his mind, Jarlaxle saw again the fiery eyes of the beast, felt the hot breath and the hotter hatred. Be gone. You have no quarrel with me, the dark elf silently replied. I have not forgotten!

‘Twas your own breath that broke the shard, Jarlaxle reminded the creature. Through your trickery, clever drow. I have not forgotten. You blinded me, you weakened me, you destroyed me!

That last clause struck Jarlaxle as odd, not just because the dragon obviously wasn’t destroyed, but because he still had the distinct feeling that it wasn’t Hephaestus he was communicating with—but it was Hephaestus!

Another image came into Jarlaxle’s thoughts, that of a bulbous-headed creature with tentacles waving menacingly from its face.

I know you. I will find you, the dragon went on. You who stole from me the pleasures of life and the flesh. You who stole from me the sweet taste of food and the pleasure of touch.

So the dragon is dead, Jarlaxle thought.

Not I! Him! the voice that resonated like Hephaestus roared in his mind. I was blind, and slept in darkness! Too intelligent for death! Consider the enemies you have made, drow! Consider that a king will find you—has found you!

That last thought came through with such ferocity and such terrible implications that it startled Jarlaxle from his Reverie. He glanced around frantic, as if expecting a dragon to swoop down upon him and melt his camp into the dirt with an explosion of fiery breath, or an illithid to materialize and blast him with psionic energy that would scramble his mind forever.

But the night was quiet under the moon’s pale glow.

Too quiet, Jarlaxle believed, like the hush of a predator. Where were the frogs, the night birds, the beetles?

Something shifted down to the west, catching Jarlaxle’s attention. He scanned the field, seeking the source—a rodent of some sort, likely.

But he saw nothing, just the uneven grasses dancing in the moonlight on the gentle night breeze.

Something moved again, and Jarlaxle swept his gaze across the abandoned stones littering the field, reached up and lifted his eye patch so he could more distinctly focus. Across the field stood a shadowy, huddled figure, bowing and waving its arms. It occurred to the drow that it was not a living man, but a wraith or a specter or a lich.

In the open ground between them, a flat stone shifted. Another, standing upright, tilted to a greater angle.

Jarlaxle took a step toward the ancient markers.

The moon disappeared behind a dark cloud and the darkness deepened. But Jarlaxle was a creature of the Underdark, blessed with eyes that could see in the most meager light. In the nearly lightless caverns far below the stone, a patch of luminous lichen would glow to his eyes like a high-burning torch. Even in those moments when the moon hid, he saw that standing stone shift again, ever so slightly, as if something scrabbled at its base below the ground.

“A graveyard …” he whispered, finally recognizing the flat stones as markers and understanding Athrogate’s earlier assessment. As he spoke, the moon came clear, brightening the field. Something churned in the dirt beside the shifting stone.

A hand—a skeletal hand.

A greenish blue crackle of strange ground lightning blasted tracers across the field. In that light, Jarlaxle saw many more stones shifting, the ground churning.

I have found you, drow! the beast whispered in Jarlaxle’s thoughts. “Athrogate,” Jarlaxle called softly. “Awaken, good dwarf.” The dwarf snored, coughed, belched, and rolled to his side, his back to the drow.

Jarlaxle slipped a hand crossbow from the holster on his belt, expertly drawing back the string with his thumb as he moved. He focused on a particular type of bolt, blunted and heavy, and the magical pouch beside the holster dispensed it into his hand as he reached for it.

“Awaken, good dwarf,” the drow said again, never taking his gaze from the field. A skeletal arm grasped at the empty air near the low-leaning headstone.

When Athrogate did not reply, Jarlaxle leveled the hand crossbow and pulled the trigger.

“Hey, now, what’s the price o’ bacon!” the dwarf yelped as the bolt thumped him in the arse. He rolled over and scrambled like a tipped crab, but jumped to his feet. He began circling back and forth with short hops on bent legs, rubbing his wounded bum all the while.

“What do ye know, elf?” he asked at length.

“That you are indeed loud enough to wake the dead,” Jarlaxle replied, motioning over Athrogate’s shoulder toward the stone-strewn field. Athrogate leaped around.

“I see … dark,” he said. As he finished, not only did the moon break free of the clouds, but another strange lightning bolt arced over the field like a net of energy had been cast over it. In the flash, whole skeletons showed themselves, standing free of their graves and shambling toward the tree-lined ridge.

“Coming for us, I’m thinking!” Athrogate bellowed. “And they look a bit hungry. More than a bit! Bwahaha! Starved, I’d wager!”

“Let us be gone from this place, and quickly,” said Jarlaxle. He reached into his belt pouch and produced an obsidian statue of a gaunt horse with twists like fire around its hooves.

Athrogate nodded and did likewise, producing his boar figurine.

They both dropped their items and called forth their steeds together, an equine nightmare for Jarlaxle, snorting smoke and running on hooves of flame, and a demonic boar for Athrogate that radiated heat and belched the fire of the lower planes. Jarlaxle was first up in his seat, turning his mount to charge away, but he looked over his shoulder to see Athrogate take up his twin morningstars, leap upon the boar, and kick it into a squealing charge straight down at the graveyard.

“This way’s faster!” the dwarf howled, and he set the heavy balls of his weapons spinning at the ends of their chains on either side. “Bwahaha!”

“Oh, Lady Lolth,” Jarlaxle groaned. “If you sent this one to torment me, then know that I surrender, and just take him back.”

Athrogate charged straight down onto the field, the boar kicking and bucking. Another green flash lit up the stony meadow before him, showing dozens of walking dead climbing from the torn earth, lifting skeletal hands at the approaching dwarf.

Athrogate bellowed all the louder and clamped his powerful legs tightly on the demon-boar. Seeming no less crazy than its bearded rider, the boar charged straight at the walking horde, and the dwarf sent his morningstars spinning. All around him they worked, heavy glassteel balls smashing against bone, breaking off reaching fingers and arms, shattering ribs with powerful swipes.

The boar beneath him gored, kicked, and plowed through the mindless undead that closed in hungrily. Athrogate drove his heels in hard against the boar’s flanks and it leaped straight up and brought forth the fires of the lower planes, a burst of orange flame blasting out beneath its hooves as it landed, boiling into a radius half again wider than the dwarf was tall and curling up in an eruption of flame. The grass all around Athrogate smoked, licks of flame springing to life on the taller clumps.

While the flames bit at the nearest skeletons, they proved little deterrence to those coming from behind. The creatures closed, showing not the slightest sign of fear.

An overhead swing from Athrogate brought a morningstar down atop a skull, exploding it in a puff of white powder. He swung his other morningstar in a wide sweep, back to front, clipping three separate reaching skeletal arms and taking them off cleanly.

The skeletons seemed not to notice or care, and kept coming. Closing, always closing.

Athrogate roared all the louder against the press, and increased the fury of his swings. He didn’t need to aim. The dwarf couldn’t have missed smashing bones if he tried. Clawing fingers reached out at him, grinning skulls snapped their jaws.

Then the boar shrieked in pain. It hopped and sent out another circle of flames, but the unthinking skeletons seemed not to notice as their legs blackened. Clawing fingers raked the boar, sending it into a bucking frenzy, and Athrogate was thrown wide, clearing the front row of skeletons, but many more rushed at him as he fell.

Jarlaxle hated this kind of fight. Most of his battle repertoire, both magical and physical, was designed to misdirect, to confuse, and to keep his opponent off-balance.

You couldn’t confuse a brainless skeleton or zombie.

With a great sigh, Jarlaxle plucked the huge feather from his hat and threw it to the ground, issuing commands to the magical item in an arcane language. Almost immediately, with a great puff of smoke, the feather became a gigantic flightless bird, a diatryma, ten feet tall and with a neck as thick as a strong man’s chest.

Responding to Jarlaxle’s telepathic commands, the monstrous bird charged onto the field and buffeted the undead with its short wings, pecking them to pieces with its powerful beak. The bird pushed through the throng of undead, kicking and buffeting and pecking with abandon. Every attack rattled a skeleton to pieces or smashed a skull to powder.

But more rose from the torn soil, and they closed and clawed.

On the side of the ridge, Jarlaxle casually slipped a ring onto his finger and drew a thin wand from his pack.

He punched out with the ring and its magic extended and amplified his strike many times over, blowing a path of force through the nearest ranks of skeletons, sending bones flying every which way. A second punch shattered three others as they tried to close from his left flank.

His immediate position secured, the drow lifted the wand, calling upon its powers to bring forth a burst of brilliantly shining light, warm and magical and ultimately devastating to the undead creatures.

Unlike the flames of the magical boar, the wand’s light could not be ignored by the skeletons. Where fire could but blacken their bones, perhaps wound them slightly, the magical light struck at the core of the very magic that gave them animation, countering the negative energy that had lifted them from the grave.

Jarlaxle centered the burst in the area where Athrogate had fallen, and the dwarf’s expected yelp of surprise and pain—pain from stinging eyes—sounded sweet to the drow.

He couldn’t help but laugh when the dwarf finally emerged from the rattle of collapsing skeletons.

The fight, however, remained far from won. More and more skeletons continued to rise and advance.

Athrogate’s boar was gone, slain by the horde. The magic of the figurine could not produce another creature for several hours. Jarlaxle’s bird, too, had fallen victim to slashing digits and was being torn asunder. The drow lifted his fingers to the band on his hat, where the nub of a new feather was beginning to sprout. But several days would pass before another diatryma could be summoned.

Athrogate turned as if he meant to charge into another knot of skeletons, and Jarlaxle yelled, “Get back here!”

Still rubbing his stinging eyes, the dwarf replied, “There be more to hit, elf!”

“I will leave you, then, and they will tear you apart.”

“Ye’re askin’ me to run from a fight!” Athrogate yelled as his morningstars pulverized another skeleton that reached for him with clawing hands.

“Perhaps the magic that raised these creatures will lift you up as a zombie,” Jarlaxle said as he turned his nightmare around, facing up the ridge. Within a few heartbeats, he heard mumbling behind him as Athrogate approached. The dwarf huffed and puffed beside him, holding the onyx boar figurine and muttering.

“You cannot call another one now,” Jarlaxle reminded him, extending a hand that Athrogate grasped.

The dwarf settled behind the drow on the nightmare’s back and Jarlaxle kicked the steed away, leaving the skeletons far, far behind. They rode hard, then more easily, and the dwarf began to giggle.

“What do you know?” the drow asked, but Athrogate only bellowed with wild laughter.

“What?” Jarlaxle demanded, but he couldn’t spare the time to properly look back, and Athrogate sounded too amused to properly answer.

When they finally reached a place where they could safely stop, Jarlaxle pulled up abruptly and turned around.

There sat Athrogate, red-faced with laughter as he held a skeletal hand and forearm, the fingers still clawing in the air before him. Jarlaxle leaped from the nightmare, and when the dwarf didn’t immediately follow, the drow dismissed the steed, sending Athrogate falling to the ground through an insubstantial swirl of black smoke.

But Athrogate still laughed as he thumped to the ground, thoroughly amused by the animated skeletal arm.

“Be rid of that wretched thing!” Jarlaxle said.

Athrogate looked at him incredulously. “Thought ye had more imagination, elf,” he said. He hopped up and unstrapped his heavy breastplate. As soon as it fell aside, the dwarf reached over his shoulder with the still-clawing hand and gave a great sigh of pleasure as the fingers scratched his back. “How long do ye think it’ll live?”

“Longer than you, I hope,” the drow replied, closing his eyes and shaking his head helplessly. “Not very long, I imagine.”

“Bwahaha!” Athrogate bellowed, then, “Aaaaaaaah.”

“The next time we face such creatures, I expect you to follow my lead,” Jarlaxle said to Athrogate the next morning as the dwarf fiddled once more with his skeletal toy.

“Next time? What do ye know, elf?”

“It was not a random event,” the drow admitted. “I have been visited, twice now, in my Reverie by a beast I had thought destroyed, but one that has somehow transcended death.”

“A beast that brought up them skeletons?”

“A great dragon,” Jarlaxle explained, “to the south of here and …” Jarlaxle paused, not really certain where Hephaestus’s lair was. He had gone there, but magically with a teleportation spell. He knew the general features of that distant region, but not the specifics of the lair, though he thought of someone who would surely know the place. “Near to the Snowflake Mountains,” he finished. “A great dragon whose thoughts can reach across hundreds of miles, it seems.”

“Ye thinking we need to run farther?”

Jarlaxle shook his head. “There are great powers I can enlist in defeating this creature.”

“Hmm,” said the dwarf.

“I just have to convince them not to kill us first.”

“Hmm.”

“Indeed,” said the drow. “A mighty priest named Cadderly, a Chosen of his god, who promised me death should I ever return.”

“Hmm.”

“But I will find a way.”

“So ye’re sayin’, and so ye’re prayin’, but I’m hoping I’m not the one what’ll be payin’.”

Jarlaxle glared at the dwarf.

“Well, then ye can’t be going back where ye’re wanting—though I canno’ be thinking why ye’re wanting what ye’re wantin’! To go to a place where the dragons are hauntin’!”

The glare melted into a groan.

“I know, I know,” said Athrogate. “No more word-songin’. But that was a good one, what?”

“Needs work,” said the drow. “Though considerably less so than your usual efforts.”

“Hmm,” said the dwarf, beaming with pride.

CHAPTER 2 THE BROKEN CONTINUUM

Drizzt Do’Urden slipped out of his bedroll and reached his bare arms up high, fingers wide, stretching to the morning sky. It was good to be on the road, out of Mithral Hall after the dark winter. It was invigorating to smell the fresh, crisp air, absent the smoke of the forges, and to feel the wind across his shoulders and through his long, thick white hair. It was good to be alone with his wife.

The dark elf rolled his head in wide circles, stretching his neck. He reached up high again, kneeling on his blankets. The breeze was chill across his naked form, but he didn’t mind. The cool wind invigorated him and made him feel alive with sensation.

He slowly moved to stand, exaggerating every movement to flex away the kinks from the hard ground that had served as his mattress, then paced away from the small encampment and outside the ring of boulders to catch a view of Catti-brie.

Dressed only in her colorful magical blouse, which had once been the enchanted robe of a gnome wizard, she stood on a hillside not far away, her palms together in front of her in a pose of deep concentration. Drizzt marveled at her simple charm. The colorful shift reached only to mid-thigh, and Catti-brie’s natural beauty was neither diminished nor outshone by the finely crafted garment.

They were on the road back to Mithral Hall from the city of Silverymoon, where Catti-brie’s wizard mentor, the great Lady Alustriel, ruled. It had not been a good visit. Something was in the air, something dangerous and frightening, some feeling among the wizards that all was not well with the Weave of magic. Reports and whispers from all over Faerûn spoke of spells gone horribly awry, of magic misfiring or not firing at all, of brilliant spellcasters falling to apparent insanity.

Alustriel had admitted that she feared for the integrity of Mystra’s Weave itself, the very source of arcane energy, and the look on her face, ashen, was something Drizzt had never before witnessed from her, not even when the drow had gone to Mithral Hall those many years ago, not even when King Obould and his great horde had crawled from their mountain holes in murderous frenzy. It was indeed a crestfallen and fearful look that Drizzt would never have thought possible on the face of that renowned champion, one of the Seven Sisters, Chosen of Mystra, beloved ruler of mighty Silverymoon.

Vigilance, observation, and meditation were Alustriel’s orders of the day, as she and all others scrambled to try to discern what in the Nine Hells might be happening, and Catti-brie, less than a decade a wizard but showing great promise, had taken those orders to heart.

That’s why she had risen so early, Drizzt knew, and had moved away from the distractions of the encampment and his presence, to be alone with her meditation.

He smiled as he watched her, her auburn hair still rich in color and thick to her shoulders, blowing in the breeze, her form, a bit thicker with age, perhaps, but still so beautiful and inviting to him, swaying gently with her thoughts.

She slowly spread her hands out wide as if in invitation to magic, the sleeves of her blouse reaching only to her elbows. Drizzt smiled as she rose from the ground, floating upward a few feet in easy levitation. Purple flames of faerie fire flickered to life across her body, appearing as extensions of the violet fabric of the blouse, as if its magic joined with her in a symbiotic completion. A magical gust of wind buffeted her, blowing her auburn mane out wide behind her.

Drizzt could see that she was immersing herself in simple spells, in safe magic, trying to create more intimacy with the Weave as she contemplated the fears Alustriel had relayed.

A flash of lightning in the distance startled Drizzt and he jerked his head toward it as a rumble of thunder followed.

He crinkled his brow in confusion. The dawn was cloudless, but lightning it had been, reaching from high in the sky to the ground, for he saw the crackling blue bolt lingering along the distant terrain.

Drizzt had been on the surface for forty-five years, but he had never seen any natural phenomenon quite like that. He had witnessed terrific storms from the deck of Captain Deudermont’s Sea Sprite, had watched a dust storm engulf the Calim Desert, had seen a squall pile snow knee-deep on the ground in an hour’s time. He had even seen the rare event known as ball lightning once, in Icewind Dale, and he figured the sight before him to be some variant of that peculiar energy.

But this lightning traveled in a straight line, and trailed behind it a curtain of blue-white, shimmering energy. He couldn’t gauge its speed, other than to note that the curtain of blue fire expanded behind it.

It appeared to be crossing the countryside to the north of his position. He glanced up at Catti-brie, floating and glowing on the hilltop to the east, and he wondered whether he should disturb her meditation to point out the phenomenon. He glanced at the line of lightning and his lavender eyes widened in shock. It had accelerated suddenly and had changed course, angling in his direction.

He turned from the lightning to Catti-brie, to realize that it was running straight at her!

“Cat!” Drizzt yelled, and started running. She seemed not to hear.

Magical anklets sped Drizzt on his way, his legs moving in a blur. But the lightning was faster, and he could only cry out again and again as it sizzled past him. He could feel its teeming energy. His hair rose up wildly from the proximity of the powerful charge, white strands floating on all sides.

“Cat!” he yelled to the hovering, glowing woman. “Catti-brie! Run!”

She was deep in her meditation, though she did seem to react, just a bit, turning her head to glance at Drizzt.

But too late. Her eyes widened just as the speeding ground lightning engulfed her. Blue sparks flew from her outstretched arms, her fingers jerking spasmodically, her form jolting with powerful discharges.

The edge of the strange lightning remained for a few heartbeats, then continued onward, leaving the still-floating woman in the shimmering blue curtain of its wake.

“Cat,” Drizzt gasped, scrambling desperately across the stones. By the time he got there, the curtain was moving along, leaving a scarred line crackling with power on the ground.

Catti-brie still floated above it, still trembled and jerked. Drizzt held his breath as he neared her, to see that her eyes had rolled up into her head, showing only white.

He grabbed her hand and felt the sting of electrical discharge. But he didn’t let go and he stubbornly pulled her aside of the scarred line. He hugged her close and tried unsuccessfully to pull her down to the ground.

“Catti-brie,” Drizzt begged. “Don’t you leave me!”

A thousand heartbeats or more passed as Drizzt held her, then the woman finally relaxed and gently sank from her levitation. Drizzt leaned her back to see her face, his heart skipping beats until he saw that he was staring into her beautiful blue eyes once more.

“By the gods, I thought you lost to me,” he said with a great sigh of relief, one that he bit short as he noted that Catti-brie wasn’t blinking. She wasn’t really looking at him at all, but rather looking past him. He glanced over his shoulder to see what might be holding her interest so intently, but there was nothing.

“Cat?” he whispered, staring into her large eyes—eyes that did not gaze back at him nor past him, but into nothingness, he realized.

He gave her a shake. She mumbled something he could not decipher. Drizzt leaned closer.

“What?” he asked, and shook her again.

She lifted off the ground several inches, her arms reaching out wide, her eyes rolling back into her head. The purple flames began anew, as did the crackling energy.

Drizzt moved to hug her and pull her down again, but he fell back in surprise as her entire form shimmered as if emanating waves of energy. Helplessly the drow watched, mesmerized and horrified.

“Catti-brie?” he asked, and as he looked into her white eyes, he realized that something was different, very different! The lines on her face softened and disappeared. Her hair seemed longer and thicker—even her part changed to a style Catti-brie had not worn for years! And she seemed a bit leaner, her skin a bit tighter.

Younger.

“‘Twas a bow that found meself in the halls of a dwarven king,” she said, or something like that—Drizzt could not be certain—and in a distinctly Dwarvish accent, like she’d once had when her time had been spent almost exclusively with Bruenor’s clan in the shadows of Kelvin’s Cairn in faraway Icewind Dale. She still floated off the ground, but the faerie fire and the crackling energy dissipated. Her eyes focused and returned to normal, those rich, deep blue orbs that had so stolen Drizzt’s heart.

“Heartseeker, yes,” Drizzt said. He stepped back and pulled the mighty bow from his shoulder, presenting it to her.

“Can’t be fishing Maer Dualdon with a bow, though, and so it’s Rumblebelly’s line I’m favorin’,” she said, still looking into the distance and not at Drizzt.

Drizzt crinkled his face in confusion.

The woman sighed deeply. Her eyes rolled back into her head, showing only white to Drizzt. The flames and energy reappeared and a gust of wind came up from nowhere, striking only Catti-brie, as if those waves of energy that had come forth from her were returning to her being. Her hair, her skin, her age—all returned, and her colorful garment stopped blowing in the unfelt wind.

The moment passed and she settled to the ground, unconscious once more.

Drizzt shook her again, called to her many times, but she seemed not to notice. He snapped his fingers in front of her eyes, but she didn’t even blink. He started to lift her, to carry her toward the camp so they could hurry on their way to Mithral Hall, but as he extended her arm, he saw a tear in her magical blouse just behind the shoulder. Then he froze as he noticed bruises under the fabric. With a shiver of panic, Drizzt gently slid the ripped section aside.

He sucked in his breath in fear and confusion. He had seen Catti-brie’s bare back a thousand times, had marveled at her unblemished, smooth skin. But it was marked, scarred even, in the distinctive shape of an hourglass as large as Drizzt’s fist. The lower half was almost fully discolored, the top showing only a small sliver of bruising, as if almost all of the counting sand had drained.

With trembling fingers, Drizzt touched it. Catti-brie did not react. “What?” he whispered helplessly.

He carried Catti-brie along briskly, her head lolling as if she were half-asleep.

CHAPTER 3 REASONING THE INDECIPHERABLE

It was a place of soaring towers and sweeping stairways, of flying buttresses and giant, decorated windows, of light and enlightenment, of magic and reason, of faith and science. It was Spirit Soaring, the work of Cadderly Bonaduce, Chosen of Deneir. Cadderly the Questioner, he had been labeled by his brothers of Deneir, the god who demanded such inquiry and continual reason from his devoted.

Cadderly had raised the grand structure from the ruins of the Edificant Library, considered by many to be the most magnificent library in all of Faerûn. Indeed, architects from lands as far and varied as Silverymoon and Calimport had come to the Snowflake Mountains to glimpse this creation, to marvel in the flying buttresses—a recent innovation in the lands of Faerûn, and never before on so grand a scale. The work of magic, of divine inspiration, had formed the stained glass windows, and also rendered the great murals of scholars at work in their endless pursuit of reason.

Spirit Soaring had been raised as a library and a cathedral, a common ground where scholars, mages, sages, and priests might gather to question superstition, to embrace reason. No place on the continent so represented the wondrous joining of faith and science, where one need not fear that logic, observation, and experimentation might take a learner away from edicts of the divine. Spirit Soaring was a place where truth was considered divine, and not the other way around.

Scholars did not fear to pursue their theories there. Philosophers did not fear to question the common understanding of the pantheon and the world. Priests of any and all gods did not fear persecution there, unless the very concept of rational debate represented persecution to a closed and small mind.

Spirit Soaring was a place to explore, to question, to learn—about everything. There, discussions of the various gods of the world of Toril always bordered on heresy. There, the nature of magic was examined, and so there, at a time of fear and uncertainty, at the time of the failing Weave, rushed scholars from far and wide.

And Cadderly greeted them, every one, with open arms and shared concern. He looked like a very young man, much younger than his forty-four years. His gray eyes sparkled with youthful luster and his mop of curly brown hair bounced along his shoulders. He moved like a much younger man, loose and agile, a distinctive spring in his step. He wore a typical Deneirrath outfit, tan-white tunic and trousers, and added his own flair with a light blue cape and a wide-brimmed hat, blue to match the cape, with a red band, plumed on the right side.

The time was unsettling, the magic of the world possibly unraveling, yet Cadderly Bonaduce’s eyes reflected excitement more than dread. Cadderly was forever a student, his mind always inquisitive, and he did not fear what was simply not yet explained.

He just wanted to understand it.

“Welcome, welcome!” He greeted a trio of visitors one bright morning, who were dressed in the green robes of druids.

“Young Bonaduce, I presume,” said one, an old graybeard. “Not so young,” Cadderly admitted.

“I knew your father many years ago,” the druid replied. “Am I right in assuming that we will be welcomed here in this time of confusion?” Cadderly looked at the man curiously. “Cadderly still lives, correct?”

“Well, yes,” Cadderly answered, then grinned and asked, “Cleo?”

“Ah, your father has told you of … me …” the druid answered, but he ended with wide eyes, stuttering, “C–Cadderly? Is that you?”

“I had thought you lost in the advent of the chaos curse, old friend!” Cadderly said.

“How can you be …?” Cleo started to ask, in utter confusion.

“Were you not destroyed?” the youthful-seeming priest asked. “Of course you weren’t—you stand here before me!”

“I wandered in the form of a turtle, for years,” Cleo explained. “Trapped by insanity within the animal coil I most favored. But how can you be Cadderly? I had heard of Cadderly’s children, who should be as old …”

As he spoke, a young man walked up to the priest. He looked very much like Cadderly, but with exotic, almond-shaped eyes.

“And here is one,” Cadderly explained, sweeping his son to him with an outstretched arm. “My oldest son, Temberle.”

“Who looks older than you,” Cleo remarked dryly.

“A long and complicated story,” said the priest. “Connected to this place, Spirit Soaring.”

“You are wanted in the observatory, Father,” Temberle said with a polite salute to the new visitors. “The Gondsmen are declaring supremacy again, as gadget overcomes magic.”

“No doubt, both factions think I side with their cause.”

Temberle shrugged and Cadderly breathed a great sigh.

“My old friend,” Cadderly said to Cleo, “I should like some time with you, to catch up.”

“I can tell you of life as a turtle,” Cleo deadpanned, drawing a smile from Cadderly.

“We have many points of view in Spirit Soaring at the time, and little agreement,” Cadderly explained. “They’re all nervous, of course.”

“With reason,” said another of the druids.

“And reason is our only way through this,” said Cadderly. “So welcome, friends, and enter. We have food aplenty, and discussion aplenty more. Add your voices without reserve.”

The three druids looked to each other, the other two nodding approvingly to Cleo. “As I told you it would be,” Cleo said. “Reasonable priests, these Deneirrath.” He turned to Cadderly, who bowed, smiled widely, and took his leave.

“You see?” Cadderly said to Temberle as the druids walked past into Spirit Soaring. “I have told you many times that I am reasonable.” He patted his son on the shoulder and followed after the druids.

“And every time you do, Mother whispers in my ear that your reasonableness is based entirely on what suits your current desires,” Temberle said after him.

Cadderly skipped a step and seemed almost to trip. He didn’t look back, but laughed and continued on his way.

Temberle left the building and walked to the southern wall, to the great garden, where he was to meet with his twin sister, Hanaleisa. The two had planned a trip that morning to Carradoon, the small town on the banks of Impresk Lake, a day’s march from Spirit Soaring. Temberle’s grin widened as he approached the large, fenced garden, catching sight of his sister with his favorite uncle.

The green-bearded dwarf hopped about over a row of newly-planted seeds, whispering words of encouragement and waving his arms—one severed at his elbow—like a bird trying to gain altitude in a gale. This dwarf, Pikel Bouldershoulder, was most unusual for his kind for having embraced the ways of the druids—and for many other reasons, most of which made him Temberle’s favorite uncle.

Hanaleisa Maupoissant Bonaduce, looking so much like a younger version of their mother, Danica, with her strawberry blond hair and rich brown eyes, almond-shaped like Temberle’s own, looked up from the row of new plantings and grinned at her brother, as clearly amused by Pikel’s gyrations as was Temberle.

“Uncle Pikel says he’ll make them grow bigger than ever,” Hanaleisa remarked as Temberle came through the gate.

“Evah!” Pikel roared, and Temberle was impressed that he had apparently learned a new word.

“But I thought that the gods weren’t listening,” Temberle dared say, drawing an “Ooooh” of consternation and a lot of finger-wagging from Pikel.

“Faith, brother,” said Hanaleisa. “Uncle Pikel knows the dirt.”

“Hee hee hee,” said the dwarf.

“Carradoon awaits,” said Temberle.

“Where is Rorey?” Hanaleisa asked, referring to their brother Rorick, at seventeen, five years their junior.

“With a gaggle of mages, arguing the integrity of the magical strands that empower the world. I expect that when this strangeness is ended, Rorey will have a dozen powerful wizards vying to serve as his mentor.”

Hanaleisa nodded at that, for she, like Temberle, knew well their younger brother’s propensity and talent at interjecting himself into any debate. The young woman brushed the dirt from her knees and slapped her hands together to clean them.

“Lead on,” she bade her brother. “Uncle Pikel won’t let my garden die, will you?”

“Doo-dad!” Pikel triumphantly proclaimed and launched into his rain dance … or fertility dance … or dance of the sunshine … or whatever it was that he danced about. As always, the Bonaduce twins left their Uncle Pikel with wide, sincere smiles splayed on their young faces, as it had been since their toddler days.

Her forearms and forehead planted firmly on the rug, the woman eased her feet from the floor, drawing her legs perpendicular to her torso. With great grace, she let her legs swing wide to their respective sides, then pulled them together as she straightened in an easy and secure headstand.

Breathing softly, in perfect balance and harmony, Danica turned her hands flat and pressed up, rising into a complete handstand. She posed as if underwater, or as if gravity itself could not touch her in her deep meditative state. She moved even beyond that grace, seeming as if some wire or force pulled her upward as she rose up from palms to fingers.

She stood inverted, perfectly still and perfectly straight, immune to the passage of time, unstrained. Her muscles did not struggle for balance, but firmly held her in position so her weight pressed down uniformly onto her strong hands. She kept her eyes closed, and her hair, showing gray amidst the strawberry hues, hung to the floor.

She was deep in the moment, deep within herself. Yet she sensed an approach, a movement by the door, and she opened her eyes just as Ivan Bouldershoulder, yellow-bearded brother of Pikel, poked his hairy head through.

Danica opened her eyes to regard the dwarf.

“When all their magic’s gone, yerself and meself’ll take over the world, girl,” he said with an exaggerated wink.

Danica rolled down to her toes and gracefully stood upright, turning as she went so that she still faced the dwarf.

“What do you know, Ivan?” she asked.

“More’n I should and not enough to be sure,” he replied. “Yer older brats went down to Carradoon, me brother’s telling me.”

“Temberle enjoys the availability of some young ladies there, or so I’ve heard.”

“Ah,” the dwarf mused, and a very serious look came over him. “And what o’ Hana?”

Danica laughed at him. “What of her?”

“She got some boy sniffin’ around?”

“She’s twenty-two years old, Ivan. That would be her business.”

“Bah! Not until her Uncle Ivan gets to talk to the fool, it won’t!”

“She can handle herself. She’s trained in the ways of—”

“No, she can’no’!”

“You don’t show the same concern for Temberle, I see.”

“Bah. Boys’ll do what boys’re supposed to be doin’, but they best not be doin’ it to me girl, Hana!”

Danica put a hand up over her mouth in a futile attempt to mask her laughter.

“Bah!” Ivan said, waving his hand at her. “I’m takin’ that girl to Bruenor’s halls, I am!”

“I don’t think she’d agree to that.”

“Who’s askin’? Yer young ones be runnin’ wild, they be!”

He continued to grumble, until the laughing Danica finally managed to catch her breath long enough to inquire, “Was there something you wished to ask me?”

Ivan stared at her blankly for a moment, confused and flustered. “Yeah,” he said, though he seemed uncertain. After another moment of reflection, he added, “Where’s the little one? Me brother was thinkin’ o’ jogging down to Carradoon, and he missed them older brats when they left.”

“I haven’t seen Rorick all day.”

“Well, he didn’t go with Temberle and Hana. Is it good by yerself that he goes with his uncle?”

“I cannot think of a safer place for any of my children to be, good Ivan.”

“Aye, and that’s what’s what,” the dwarf agreed, hooking his thumbs under the suspenders of his breeches.

“I fear that I cannot say the same for my future children-in-law, however….”

“Just the son-in-law,” Ivan corrected with a wink.

“Don’t break anything,” Danica begged. “And don’t leave any marks.”

Ivan nodded, then brought his hands together and cracked his knuckles loudly. With a bow, he took his leave.

Danica knew Ivan was harmless, at least as far as suitors to her daughter were concerned. It occurred to her just then that Hanaleisa would have a hard time indeed maintaining any relationships with Ivan and Pikel hovering over her.

Or maybe, those two would serve as a good test of a young man’s intentions. His heart would surely have to be full for him to stick around once the dwarves started in on him.

Danica giggled and sighed contentedly, reminding herself that, other than the few years they had been away serving King Bruenor in Mithral Hall, Ivan and Pikel Bouldershoulder had been the best guardians any child could ever know.

The shadowy being, once Fetchigrol the archmage of a great and lost civilization, didn’t even recognize himself by that name, having long ago abandoned his identity in the communal joining ritual that had forged the Crystal Shard. He had known life; had known undeath as a lich; had known a state of pure energy as part of the Crystal Shard; had known nothingness, obliteration.

And even from that last state, the creature that was once Fetchigrol had returned, touched by the Weave itself. No more was he a free-willed spirit, but merely an extension, an angry outreach of that curious triumvirate of power that had melded into a singular malevolent force in a fire-blasted cavern many miles to the southeast.

Fetchigrol served the anger of Crenshinibon-Hephaestus-Yharaskrik, of the being they had become, the Ghost King.

And like all seven of the shadowy specters, Fetchigrol searched the night, seeking those who had wronged his masters. In the lower reaches of the Snowflake Mountains, overlooking a large lake shining under the moonlight to the west, and on a trail leading deeper into the mountains and to a great library, he sensed that he was close.

When he heard the voices, a thrill coursed Fetchigrol’s shadowy substance, for above all, the undead specter sought an outlet for his malevolence, a victim of his hatred. He drifted to the deeper shadows behind a tree overlooking the path as a pair of young humans came into view, walking tentatively in the dim light among the roots that crisscrossed the trail.

They passed right before him, not noticing at all—though the young woman did cock her head curiously and shiver.

How the undead creature wanted to leap out and devour them! But Fetchigrol was too far removed from their world, was too much within the Shadowfell, the intruding realm of shadow and darkness that had come to Faerûn. Like his six brothers, he had not the substance to affect material creatures.

Only spirits. Only the diminishing life energies of the dead.

He followed the pair down the mountain until they at last found a place they deemed suitable for an encampment. Confident that they would stay there at least until pre-dawn, the malevolent spirit rushed into the wilds, seeking a vessel.

He found it only a couple of miles from the young humans’ camp, in the form of a dead bear, its half-rotted carcass teeming with maggots and flies.

Fetchigrol bowed before the beast and began to chant, to channel the power of the Ghost King, to call to the spirit of the bear.

The corpse stirred.

His steps slow, his heart heavier than his weary limbs, Drizzt Do’Urden crossed the Surbrin River Bridge. The eastern door of Mithral Hall was in sight, as were members of Clan Battlehammer, scurrying to join him as he bore his burden.

Catti-brie lay listless in his arms, her head lolling with every step, her eyes open but seeing nothing.

And Drizzt’s expression, so full of fear and sadness, only added to that horrifying image.

Calls to “Get Bruenor!” and “Open the doors and clear the road!” led Drizzt through that back door, and before he had gone ten strides into Mithral Hall, a wagon bounced up beside him and a group of dwarves helped get him and the listless Catti-brie into the back.

Only then did Drizzt realize how exhausted he was. He had walked for miles with Catti-brie in his arms, not daring to stop, for she needed help he could not provide. Bruenor’s priests would know what to do, he’d prayed, and so the dwarves who gathered around repeatedly assured him.

The driver pushed the team hard across Garumn’s Gorge and down the long and winding tunnels toward Bruenor’s chambers.

Word had passed ahead, and Bruenor was in the hall waiting for them. Regis and many others stood beside him as he paced anxiously, wringing his strong hands or pulling at his great beard, softened to orange by the gray that dulled its once-fiery red.

“Elf?” Bruenor called. “What d’ye know?”

Drizzt nearly crumbled under the desperate tone in his dear friend’s voice, for he couldn’t offer much in the way of explanation or hope. He summoned as much energy as he could and flipped his legs over the side rail of the wagon, dropping lightly to the floor. He met Bruenor’s gaze and managed a slight and hopeful nod. He struggled to keep up that optimism as he moved around the wagon and dropped the gate, then gathered his beloved Catti-brie in his arms.

Bruenor was at his side as Drizzt hoisted her. The dwarf’s eyes widened and his hands trembled as he tried to reach up and touch his dear daughter.

“Elf?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper, and so shaky that the short word seemed multisyllabic.

Drizzt looked at him, and there he froze, unable to shake his head or offer a smile of hope.

Drizzt had no answers.

Catti-brie had somehow been touched by wild magic, and as far as he could tell, she was lost to them, was lost to the reality around her.

“Elf?” Bruenor asked again, and he managed to run his fingers across his daughter’s soft face.

She stood perfectly still, staring at the jutting limb of the dead tree, her hands up before her, locked in striking form. Hanaleisa, so much her mother’s daughter, found her center of peace and strength.

She could have reached up and grasped the end of the branch, then used her weight and leverage to break it free. But what would have been the fun in that?

So instead, the tree became her opponent, her enemy, her challenge. “Hurry up, the night grows cold!” Temberle called from their camp near the trail.

Hanaleisa allowed no smile to crease her serious visage, and blocked out her brother’s call. Her concentration complete, she struck with suddenness and with sheer power, striking the branch near the trunk with a left jab then a right cross, once, twice, then again with a snapping left before falling back into a defensive lean, lifting her leg for a jolting kick.

She rose up in a spinning leap and snapped out a strike that severed the end of the branch much farther out from the trunk, then again to splinter the limb in the middle. She finished with another leaping spin, bringing her leg up high and wide then dropping it down hard on the place she had already weakened with her jabs.

The limb broke away cleanly, falling to the ground in three neat pieces.

Hanaleisa landed, completely balanced, and brought her hands in close, fingers touching. She bowed to the tree, her defeated opponent, then scooped the broken firewood and started for the camp as her brother called out once more.

She had gone only a few steps before she heard a shuffling in the forest, not far away. The young woman froze in place, making not a sound, her eyes scouring the patches of moonlight in the darkness, seeking movement.

Something ambled through the brush, something heavy, not twenty strides away, and heading, she realized, straight for their camp.

Hanaleisa slowly bent her knees, lowering herself to the ground, where she gently and silently placed the firewood, except for one thick piece. She stood and remained very still for a moment, seeking the sound again to get her bearings. With great agility she brought her feet up one at a time and removed her boots, then padded off, walking lightly on the balls of her bare feet.

She soon saw the light of the fire Temberle had managed to get going, then noted the form moving cumbersomely before her, crossing between her and that firelight, showing itself to be a large creature indeed.

Hanaleisa held her breath, trying to choose her next move, and quickly, for the creature was closing on her brother. She had been trained by her parents to fight and fight well, but never before had she found herself with lethal danger so close at hand.

The sound of her brother’s voice, calling her name, “Hana?” jarred her from her contemplation. Temberle had heard the beast, and indeed, the beast was very close to him, and moving with great speed.

Hanaleisa sprinted ahead and shouted out to catch the creature’s attention, fearing that she had hesitated too long. “Your sword!” she cried to her brother.

Hanaleisa leaped up as she neared the beast—a bear, she realized—and caught a branch overhead, then swung out and let go, soaring high and far, clearing the animal. Only then did Hanaleisa understand the true nature of the monster, that it was not just a bear that might be frightened away. She saw that half of its face had rotted away, the white bone of its skull shining in the moonlight.

She struck down as she passed over it, her open palm smacking hard against the snout as the creature looked up to react. The solid blow jolted the monster, but did not stop its swipe, which clipped Hanaleisa as she flew past, sending her into a spin.

She landed lightly but off balance and stumbled aside, and just in time as Temberle raced past her, greatsword in hand. He charged straight in with a mighty thrust and the sword plunged through the loose skin on the undead creature’s back and cracked off bone.

But the bear kept coming, seeming unbothered by the wound, and walked itself right up the blade to Temberle, its terrible claws out wide, its toothy maw opened in a roar.

Hanaleisa leaped past Temberle, laying flat out in mid-air and double-kicking the beast about the shoulders and chest. Had it been a living bear, several hundred pounds of muscle and tough hide and thick bone, she wouldn’t have moved it much, of course, but its undead condition worked in her favor, for much of the creature’s mass had rotted away or been carried off by scavengers.

The beast stumbled back, sliding down the greatsword’s blade enough for Temberle to yank it free.

“Slash, don’t stab!” Hanaleisa reminded him as she landed on her feet and waded in, laying forth a barrage of kicks and punches. She batted aside a swatting paw and got behind the swipe of deadly claws, then rattled off a series of heavy punches into the beast’s shoulders.

She felt the bone crunching under the weight of those blows, but again, the beast seemed unbothered and launched a backhand that forced the young woman to retreat.

The bear went on the offensive, and it attacked with ferocity, moving to tackle the woman. Hanaleisa scrambled back, nearly tripping over an exposed root, then getting caught against a birch stand.

She cried out in fear as the beast fell over her, or started to, until a mighty sword flashed in the moonlight above and behind it, coming down powerfully across the bear’s right shoulder and driving through.

The undead beast howled and pursued the dodging Hanaleisa, crashing into the birch stand and taking the whole of it down beneath its bulky, tumbling form. It bit and slashed as if it had its enemy secured, but Hanaleisa was gone, out the side, rolling away.

The bear tried to follow, but Temberle moved fast behind it, relentlessly smashing at it with his heavy greatsword. He chopped away chunks of flesh, sending maggots flying and smashing bones to powder.

Still the beast came on, on all fours and down low, closing on Hanaleisa.

She fought away her revulsion and panic. She placed her back against a solid tree and curled her legs, and as the beast neared, jaws open to bite at her, she kicked out repeatedly, her heel smashing the snout again and again.

Still the beast drove in, and still Temberle smashed at it, and Hanaleisa kept on kicking. The top jaw and snout broke away, hanging to the side, but still the animated corpse bore down!

At the last moment, Hanaleisa threw herself to the side and backward into a roll. She came around to her feet, every instinct telling her to run away.

She denied her fear.

The bear turned on Temberle ferociously. His sword crashed down across its collarbone, but the monster swatted it with such strength that it tore the sword from Temberle’s hand and sent it flying away.

Up rose the monster to its full height, its arms raised to the sky, ready to drop down upon the unarmed warrior.

Hanaleisa leaped upon its back and with the momentum of her charge, with every bit of focus and concentration, with all the strength of her years of training as a monk behind her strike, drove her hand—index and middle fingers extended like a blade—at the back of the beast’s head.

She felt her fingers break through the skull. She retracted and punched again and again, pulverizing the bone, driving her fingers into the beast’s brain and tearing pieces out.

The bear swung around and Hanaleisa went flying into the trees, crashing hard through a close pair of young elms, bouncing from one to the other, her momentum pushing her so she fell to the ground right behind them.

But as she slid down the narrowing gap, her ankle caught. Desperate, she looked at the approaching monster.

She saw the sword descend behind it, atop its skull, splitting the head in half and driving down the creature’s neck.

And still it kept coming! Hanaleisa’s eyes widened with horror. She couldn’t free her foot!

But it was only the undead beast’s momentum that propelled it forward, and it crashed into the elms and fell to the side.

Hanaleisa breathed easier. Temberle rushed up and helped her free her foot, then helped her stand. She was sore in a dozen places—her shoulder was surely bruised.

But the beast was dead—again.

“What evil has come to these woods?” the young woman asked.

“I don’t …” Temberle started to answer, but he stopped. Both he and his sister shivered, their eyes going wide in surprise. A sudden coldness filled the air around them.

They heard a hissing sound, perhaps laughter, and jumped back to back into a defensive posture, as they had been trained. The chill passed, and the laughter receded.

In the firelight of their nearby camp, they saw a shadowy figure drift away.

“What was that?” Temberle asked. “We should go back,” Hanaleisa breathlessly replied. “We’re much closer to Carradoon than Spirit Soaring.”

“Then go!” Hanaleisa said, and the pair rushed to the camp and scooped up their gear.

Each took a burning branch to use as a torch, then started along the trail. Cold pockets of air found them repeatedly as they ran, with hissing laughter and patches of shadow darker than the darkest night shifting around them. They heard animals screech in fear and birds flutter from branches.

“Press on,” each urged the other repeatedly, and they whispered more insistently when at last their torches burned away and the darkness closed in tightly.

They didn’t stop running until they reached the outskirts of the town of Carradoon, dark and asleep on the shores of Impresk Lake, still hours before the dawn. They knew the proprietor at Cedar Shakes, a fine inn nearby, and went right to the door, rapping hard and insistently.

“Here, now! What’s the racket at this witching hour?” came a sharp response from a window above. “What and wait, ho! Is that Danica’s kids?”

“Let us in, good Bester Bilge,” Temberle called up. “Please, just let us in.”

They relaxed when the door swung open. Cheery old Bester Bilge pulled them inside, telling Temberle to throw a few logs on the low-burning hearth and promising a strong drink and some warm soup in short order.

Temberle and Hanaleisa looked to each other with great relief, hoping they had left the cold and dark outside.

They couldn’t know that Fetchigrol had followed them to Carradoon and was even then at the old graveyard outside the town walls, planning the carnage to come with the next sunset.

CHAPTER 4 A CLUE IN THE RIFT

A throgate held the skeletal arm aloft. He grumbled at its inactivity, and gave it a little shake. The fingers began to claw once more and the dwarf grinned and reached the bony arm over his shoulder, sighing contentedly as the scraping digits worked at a hard-to-reach spot in the middle of his itchy back.

“How long ye think it’ll last, elf?” he asked.

Jarlaxle, too concerned to even acknowledge the dwarf’s antics, just shrugged and continued on his meandering way. The drow wasn’t sure where he was going. Any who knew Jarlaxle would have read the gravity of the situation clearly in his uncertain expression, for rarely, if ever, had anyone ever witnessed Jarlaxle Baenre perplexed.

The drow realized that he couldn’t wait for Hephaestus to come to him. He didn’t want to encounter such a foe on his own, or with only Athrogate at his side. He considered returning to Luskan—Kimmuriel and Bregan D’aerthe could certainly help—but his instincts argued against that. Once again, he would be allowing Hephaestus the offensive, and would be pitted against a foe that could apparently raise undead minions to his command with ease.

Above all else, Jarlaxle wanted to take the fight to the dragon, and he believed that Cadderly might well prove the solution to his troubles. But how could he enlist the priest, who was surely no willing ally of the dark elves? Except one particular dark elf.

And wouldn’t it be grand to have Drizzt Do’Urden and some of his mighty friends along for the hunt? But how?

So at Jarlaxle’s direction, the pair traveled eastward, meandering across the Silver Marches toward Mithral Hall. It would take them easily a tenday, and Jarlaxle wasn’t sure he had that kind of time to spare. He resisted Reverie that first day, and when night came, he meditated lightly, standing on a precarious perch.

A cold breeze found him, and as he shifted to curl against it, he slipped from the narrow log upon which he stood and the resulting stumble startled him. His hand already in his pocket, Jarlaxle pulled forth a fistful of ceramic pebbles. He spun a quick circle, spreading them around, and as each hit the ground, it broke open and the enchantment within, dweomers of bright light, spewed forth.

“What the—?” Athrogate cried, startled from his sleep by the sudden brightness.

Jarlaxle paid him no heed. He moved fast after a shadowy figure racing away from the magical light, a painful thing to undead creatures. He threw another light bomb ahead of the fleeing, huddled form, then another as it veered toward a shadowy patch.

“Hurry, dwarf!” the drow called, and he soon heard Athrogate huffing and puffing in pursuit. As soon as Athrogate passed him, Jarlaxle drew out a wand and brought forth a burst of brighter and more powerful light, landing it near the shadowy form. The creature shrieked, an awful, preternatural keening that sent a shiver coursing down Jarlaxle’s spine.

That howl didn’t slow Athrogate in the least, and the brave dwarf charged in with abandon, his morningstars spinning in both hands, arms outstretched. Athrogate called upon the enchantment of the morningstar in his right hand and explosive oil oozed over its metallic head. The dwarf leaped at the cowering creature and swung with all his might, thinking to end the fight with a single, explosive smite.

The morningstar hit nothing substantial, just hummed through the empty night.

Then Athrogate yelped in pain as a sharp touch hit his shoulder, a point of sudden and burning agony. He fell back, swinging with abandon, his morningstars crisscrossing, again hitting nothing.

The dwarf saw the specter’s dark, cold hands reaching toward him, so he tried a different tactic. He swung his morningstars in from opposite sides, aiming the heads to collide directly in the center of the shadowy darkness.

Jarlaxle watched the battle with a curious eye, trying to gauge this foe. The specter was a minion of Hephaestus, obviously, and he knew well the usual qualities of incorporeal undead denizens.

Athrogate’s weapon should have harmed it, at least some—the dwarf’s morningstars were heavily enchanted. Even the most powerful undead creatures, the ones that existed on both the Prime Material Plane and a darker place of negative energy, should not have such complete immunity to his assault.

Jarlaxle winced and looked away when Athrogate’s morningstar heads clanged together, the volatile oil exploding in a blinding flash, a concussive burst that forced the dwarf to stumble backward.

When the drow looked again, the specter seemed wholly unbothered by the burst. Jarlaxle took note of something unusual. Precisely as the morningstar heads collided, the specter seemed to diminish. In the moment of explosion, the creature appeared to vanish or shrink.

As the undead creature approached the dwarf, it grew substantial again, those dark hands reaching forth to inflict more cold agony.

“Elf! I can’t be hitting the damned thing!” The dwarf howled in pain and staggered back.

“More oil!” Jarlaxle yelled, a sudden idea coming to him. “Smash them together again.”

“That hurt, elf! Me arms’re numb!”

“Do it!” Jarlaxle commanded.

He fired off his wand again, and the burst of light caused the specter to recoil, buying Athrogate a few heartbeats. Jarlaxle pulled off his hat and reached inside, and as Athrogate swung mightily with his opposing morningstars, the drow pulled forth a flat circle of cloth, like the black lining of his hat. He threw it out and it spun, elongating as it sailed past the dwarf.

The morningstars collided in another explosion, throwing Athrogate backward again. The specter, as Jarlaxle expected, faded, began to diminish to nothingness—no, not to nothingness, but to some other plane or dimension.

And the fabric circle, the magical extra-dimensional pocket created by the power of Jarlaxle’s enchanted hat, fell over the spot.

The sudden glare caused by waves of energy—purple, blue, and green—rolled forth from the spot, pounding out a hum of sheer power. The fabric of the world tore open.

Jarlaxle and Athrogate floated, weightless, staring at a spot that was once a clearing in the trees but seemed to have been replaced with … starscape.

“What’d’ye do, elf!” the dwarf cried, his voice modulating in volume as if carried on gigantic intermittent winds.

“Stay away from it!” Jarlaxle warned, and he felt a slight push at his back, compelling him toward the starry spot, the rift, he knew, to the Astral Plane.

Athrogate began to flail wildly, suddenly afraid, for he was not far from that dangerous place. He began to spin head over heels and all around, but the gyrations proved irrelevant to his inexorable drift toward the stars.

“Not like that!” Jarlaxle called.

“How, ye stupid elf?”

For Jarlaxle, the solution was easy. His drift carried him beside a tree, still rooted solidly in the firmament. He grabbed on with one hand and held himself easily in place, and knew that an easy push would propel him away from the rift. That was exactly what it was, Jarlaxle knew, a tear in the fabric of the Prime Material Plane, the result of mixing the energies of two extra-dimensional spaces. For Jarlaxle, who carried items of holding that created extra-dimensional pockets larger than their apparent capacity, a pair of belt pouches that did the same, and several other trinkets that could facilitate similar dweomers, the consequences of mingling them was not unknown or unexpected.

What surprised him, though, was that his extra-dimensional hole had reacted in such a way with that shadowy being. All he’d hoped to do was trap the thing within the magical hole when it tried to flow back into the plane of the living.

“Throw something at it!” Jarlaxle cried, and as Athrogate lifted his arm as if to launch one of his morningstars, the drow added, “Something you never need to retrieve!”

Athrogate held his throw at the last moment then pulled his heavy pack off his back. He waited until he spun around, then heaved it at the rift. The opposite reaction sent the dwarf floating backward, away from the tear—far enough for Jarlaxle to take a chance with a rope. He threw an end out toward Athrogate, close enough for the dwarf to grasp, and as soon as Athrogate held on, the drow tugged hard and brought the dwarf sailing toward him, then right past.

Jarlaxle took note that Athrogate drifted only a few feet before exiting the area of weightlessness and falling hard to his rump. His eyes never leaving the curious starscape that loomed barely ten strides away, Jarlaxle pushed himself back and dropped to stand beside Athrogate as the dwarf pulled himself to his feet.

“What’d’ye do?” the dwarf asked in all seriousness.

“I have no idea,” Jarlaxle replied.

“Worked, though,” Athrogate offered.

Jarlaxle, not so certain of that, merely smirked.

They kept watch over the rift for a short while, and gradually the phenomenon dissipated, the wilderness returning to its previous firmament with no discernable damage. All was as it had been, except that the specter was gone.

“Still going east?” Athrogate asked as he and Jarlaxle started out the next day.

“That was the plan.”

“The plan to win.”

“Yes.”

“I’m thinkin’ we won last night,” the dwarf said.

“We defeated a minion,” Jarlaxle explained. “It has always been my experience that defeating a minion of a powerful foe only makes that foe angrier.”

“So we should’ve let the shadow thing win?”

Jarlaxle’s sigh elicited a loud laugh from Athrogate.

On they went through the day, and at camp that night, Jarlaxle dared to allow himself some time in Reverie.

And there, in his own subconscious, Hephaestus found him again.

Clever drow, the dracolich said in his mind. Did you truly believe you could so easily escape me?

Jarlaxle threw up his defenses in the form of images of Menzoberranzan, the great Underdark city. He concentrated on a distinct memory, of a battle his mercenary band had waged on behalf of Matron Mother Baenre. In that fight, a much younger Jarlaxle had engaged two separate weapons masters right in front of the doors of Melee-Magthere, the drow school of martial training. It was perhaps the most desperate struggle Jarlaxle had ever known, and one he would not have survived were it not for the intervention of a third weapons master, one of a lower-ranked House—House Do’Urden, actually, though that battle had been fought many decades before Drizzt drew his first breath.

That memory had long been crystallized in the mind of Jarlaxle Baenre, with images distinct and clear, and a level of tumult enough to keep his thoughts occupied. And with such emotional mental churning, the drow hoped he wouldn’t surrender his current position to the intrusive Hephaestus.

Well done, drow! Hephaestus congratulated him. But it will not matter in the end. Do you truly believe you can so easily hide from me? Do you truly believe your simple, but undeniably clever trick, would destroy one of the Seven?

One of what ‘Seven’? Jarlaxle asked himself.

He put the question to the back of his mind quickly and resumed his mental defense. He understood that his bold stand did little or nothing to shake the confidence of Hephaestus, but he remained certain that the hunting dragon wasn’t making much headway. Then a notion occurred to him and he was jolted from his confrontation with the dragon, and from his Reverie entirely. He stumbled away from the tree upon which he was leaning.

“The Seven,” he said, and swallowed hard, trying to recall all that he had learned about the origins of the Crystal Shard—and the seven liches who had created it.

“The Seven …” Jarlaxle whispered again, and a shiver ran up his spine.

Jarlaxle set the pace even swifter the next day, nightmare and hell boar running hard along the road. When they saw the smoke of an encampment not far ahead, Jarlaxle pulled to a halt.

“Orcs, likely,” he explained to the dwarf. “We are near the border of King Obould’s domain.”

“Let’s kill ‘em, then.”

Jarlaxle shook his head. “You must learn to exploit your enemies, my hairy little friend,” he explained. “If these are Obould’s orcs, they are not enemies of Mithral Hall.”

“Bah!” Athrogate said, and spat on the ground.

“We go to them not as enemies, but as fellow travelers,” Jarlaxle ordered. “Let us see what we might learn.” Noting the disappointment on Athrogate’s face, he added, “But do keep your morningstars near at hand.”

It was indeed a camp of Many Arrow orcs, who served Obould, and though they sprang to readiness, brandishing weapons, at the casual approach of the curious pair—dwarf and drow—they held their arrows.

“We are travelers from Luskan,” Jarlaxle greeted them in perfect command of Orcish, “trade emissaries to King Obould and King Bruenor.” Out of the corner of his mouth, he bade Athrogate to remain calm and to keep his mount’s pace steady and slow. “We have good food to share,” Jarlaxle added. “And better grog.”

“What’d’ye tell ‘em?” Athrogate asked, seeing the porcine soldiers brighten and nod at one another.

“That we’re all going to get drunk together,” Jarlaxle whispered back. “In a pig’s fat rump!” the dwarf protested.

“Wherever you please,” the drow replied. He slid down from his saddle and dismissed his hell-spawned steed. “Come, let us learn what we may.”

It all started rather tentatively, with Jarlaxle producing both food and “grog” aplenty. The drink went over well with the orcs, even more so when the dwarf spat out his first taste of it with disgust. He looked to Jarlaxle as if dumbstruck, as if he never could have imagined anything potent tasting so wretched. Jarlaxle responded with a wink and held out his flask to replenish Athrogate’s mug, but with a different mixture, the dwarf noted.

Gutbuster.

Not another word of complaint came from Athrogate.

“You friends with Drizzt Do’Urden?” one of the orcs asked Jarlaxle, the creature’s tongue loosened by the drink.

“You know of him?” the drow replied, and several of the orcs nodded. “As do I! I have met him many times, and fought beside him on occasion—and woe to those who stand before his scimitars!”

That last bit didn’t go over well with the orcs, and one of them growled threateningly.

“Drizzt is wounded in his heart,” said the orc, and the creature grinned as if that fact pleased him immensely.

Jarlaxle stared hard and tried to decipher that notion. “Catti-brie?” “A fool now,” the orc explained. “Touched by magic. Daft by magic.” A couple of the others chuckled.

The Weave, Jarlaxle realized, for he was not ignorant of the traumatic events unfolding around him. Luskan, too, a city that once housed the Hosttower of the Arcane and still named many of the wizards of that place as citizens—and allies of Bregan D’aerthe—had certainly been touched by the unraveling Weave.

“Where is she?” Jarlaxle asked, and the orc shrugged as if it hardly cared.

But Jarlaxle surely did, for a plan was already formulating. To defeat Hephaestus, he needed Cadderly. To enlist Cadderly, he needed Drizzt. Could it be that Catti-brie, and so Drizzt, needed Cadderly as well?

“Guenhwyvar,” the young girl called. Her eyes leveled in their sockets, showing their rich blue hue.

Drizzt and Bruenor stood dumbfounded in the small chamber, staring at Catti-brie, whose demeanor had suddenly changed to that of her pre-teen self. She had floated off the bed again, rising as her eyes rolled to white, purple flames and crackling energy dancing all around her, her thick hair flowing in a wind neither Drizzt nor Bruenor could feel.

Drizzt had seen this strange event before, and had warned Bruenor, but when his daughter’s posture and demeanor, everything about the way she held herself, had changed so subtly, yet dramatically, Bruenor nearly fell over with weakness. Truly she seemed a different person at that moment, a younger Catti-brie.

Bruenor called to her, his voice thick with desperation and remorse, but she seemed not to notice.

“Guenhwyvar?” she called again.

She seemed to be walking then, slowly and deliberately, though she didn’t actually move. She held out one hand as if toward the cat—the cat who wasn’t there.

Her voice was gentle and quiet when she asked, “Where’s the dark elf, Guenhwyvar? Can ye take me to him?”

“By the gods,” Drizzt muttered.

“What is it, elf?” Bruenor demanded.

The young girl straightened, then slowly turned away from the pair. “Be ye a drow?” she asked. Then she paused, as though she heard a response. “I’ve heard that drow be evil, but ye don’t seem so to me.”

“Elf?” Bruenor begged.

“Her first words to me,” Drizzt whispered.

“Me name’s Catti-brie,” she said, still talking to the wall away from the pair. “Me dad is Bruenor, King o’ Clan Battlehammer.”

“She’s on Kelvin’s Cairn,” said Bruenor.

“The dwarves,” Catti-brie said. “He’s not me real dad. Bruenor took me in when I was just a babe, when me real parents were …” She paused and swallowed hard.

“The first time we met, on Kelvin’s Cairn,” Drizzt breathlessly explained, and indeed he was hearing the woman, then just a girl, exactly as he had that unseasonably warm winter’s day on the side of a faraway mountain.

Catti-brie looked over her shoulder at them—no, not at them, but above them. “She’s a beautiful ca—” she started to say, but she sucked in her breath suddenly and her eyes rolled up into her head and her arms went out to her sides. The unseen magical energy rushed back into her once more, shaking her with its intensity.

And before their astonished eyes, Catti-brie aged once again.

By the time she floated down to the floor, both Drizzt and Bruenor were hugging her, and they gently moved her to her bed and laid her down.

“Elf?” Bruenor asked, his voice thick with desperation.

“I don’t know,” replied the trembling Drizzt. He tried to fight back the tears. The moment Catti-brie had recaptured was so precious to him, so burned into his heart and soul….

They sat beside the woman’s bed for a long while, even after Regis came in to remind Bruenor that he was due in his audience chamber. Emissaries had arrived from Silverymoon and Nesmé, from Obould and from the wider world. It was time for Bruenor Battlehammer to be king of Mithral Hall again.

But leaving his daughter there on her bed was one of the toughest things Bruenor Battlehammer had ever done. To the dwarf’s great relief, after ensuring that the woman was sleeping soundly, Drizzt went out with him, leaving the reliable Regis to watch over her.

The black-bearded dwarf stood in line, third from the front, trying to remember his lines. He was an emissary, a formal representative to a king’s court. It was not a new situation to Athrogate, for he had once lived a life that included daily audiences with regional leaders. Once, long ago.

“Don’t rhyme,” he warned himself quietly, for as Jarlaxle had pointed out, any of his silly word games would likely tip off Drizzt Do’Urden to the truth about the disguised dwarf. He cleared his throat loudly, wishing he had his morningstars with him, or some other weapon that might get him out of there if his true identity were discovered.

The first representative had his audience with the dwarf king and moved out of the way.

Athrogate rehearsed his lines again, telling himself that it was really simple, assuring himself that Jarlaxle had prepared him well. He went through the routine over and over.

“Come forward, then, fellow dwarf,” King Bruenor said, startling Athrogate. “I’ve too much to do to be sittin’ here waitin’!”

Athrogate looked at the seated Bruenor, then at Drizzt Do’Urden, who stood behind the throne. As he locked gazes with Drizzt, he saw a hint of recognition, for they had matched weapons eight years before, during the fall of Deudermont’s Luskan.

If Drizzt saw through his disguise, the drow hid it well.

“Well met, King Bruenor, for all the tales I heared of ye,” Athrogate greeted enthusiastically, coming forward to stand before the throne. “I’m hopin’ that ye’re not put out by me coming to see yerself directly, but if I’m returning to me kinfolk without having had me say to yerself, then suren they’d be chasing me out!”

“And where might home be, good …?”

“Stuttgard,” Athrogate replied. “Stuttgard o’ the Stone Hills Stuttgard Clan.”

Bruenor looked at him curiously and shook his head.

“South o’ the Snowflakes, long south o’ here,” the dwarf bluffed.

“I am afraid that I know not of yer clan, or yer Stone Hills,” said Bruenor. He glanced at Drizzt, who shrugged and shook his head.

“Well, we heared o’ yerself,” Athrogate replied. “Many’re the songs o’ Mithral Hall sung in the Stone Hills!”

“Good to know,” Bruenor replied, then he prompted the emissary with a rolling motion of his hand, obviously in a rush to be done with the formalities. “And ye’re here to offer trade, perhaps? Or to set the grounds for an alliance?”

“Nah,” said Athrogate. “Just a dwarf walkin’ the world and wantin’ to meet King Bruenor Battlehammer.”

The dwarf king nodded. “Very well. And ye’re wishing to remain with us in Mithral Hall for some time?”

Athrogate shrugged. “Was heading east, to Adbar,” he said. “Got some family there. I was hopin’ to come to Mithral Hall on me return back to the west, and not plannin’ to stop through now. But on the road, I heared whispers about yer girl.”

That perked Bruenor up, and the drow behind him as well.

“What of me girl?” Bruenor asked, suspicion thick in his voice.

“Heared on the road that she got touched by the falling Weave o’ magic.”

“Ye heared that, did ye?”

“Aye, King Bruenor, so I thought I should come through as fast as me short legs’d be taking me.”

“Ye’re a priest, then?”

“Nah, just a scrapper.”

“Then why? What? Have ye anything to offer me, Stuttgard o’ the Stone Hills?” Bruenor said, clearly agitated.

“A name, and one I think ye’re knowin’,” said Athrogate. “Human name o’ Cadderly.”

Bruenor and Drizzt exchanged glances, then both stared hard at the visitor.

“His place’s not too far from me home,” Athrogate explained. “I went right through it on me way here, o’ hourse. Oh, but he’s got a hunnerd wizards and priests in there now, all trying to get what’s what, if ye get me meaning.”

“What about him?” Bruenor asked, obviously trying to remain calm but unable to keep the urgency out of his tone—or out of his posture, as he leaned forward in his throne.

“He and his been workin’ on the problems,” Athrogate explained. “I thinked ye should know that more’n a few that been brain-touched by the Weave’ve gone in there, and most’ve come out whole.”

Bruenor leaped up from his seat. “Cadderly is curing those rendered foolish by the troubles?”

Athrogate shrugged. “I thinked ye’d want to be knowin’.”

Bruenor turned fast to Drizzt.

“A month and more of hard travel,” the drow warned.

“Magical items’re working,” Bruenor replied. “We got the wagon me boys’re building for Silverymoon journeys. We got the zephyr shoes …”

Drizzt’s eyes lit up at the reference, for indeed the dwarves of Clan Battlehammer had been working on a solution to their isolation, even before the onset of magical afflictions. Without the magical teleportation of their neighboring cities, or creations of magic like Lady Alustriel’s flying chariots of fire, the dwarves had taken to a more mundane solution, constructing a wagon strong enough to handle the bumps and stones of treacherous terrain. They had sought out magical assistance for teams that might be pulling the vehicle.

The drow was already starting off the dais before Bruenor could finish his sentence. “On my way,” Drizzt said.

“Can I wish ye all me best, King Bruenor?” Athrogate asked.

“Stuttgard o’ the Stone Hills,” Bruenor repeated, and he turned to the court scribe. “Write it down!”

“Aye, me king!”

“And know that if me girl finds peace in Spirit Soaring, that I’ll be visiting yer clan, good friend,” Bruenor said, looking back to Athrogate. “And know that ye’re fore’er a friend o’ Mithral Hall. Ye stay as long as ye’re wantin’, and all costs fall to meself! But beggin’ yer pardon, the time’s for me to be goin’.”

He bowed fast and was running out of the room before Athrogate could even offer his thanks in reply.

Full of energy and enthusiasm for the first time in a few long days, the hope-filled Drizzt and Bruenor charged down the hall toward Catti-brie’s door. They slowed abruptly as they neared, seeing the sizzling purple and blue streaks of energy slipping through the cracks in the door.

“Bah, not again!” Bruenor groaned. He beat Drizzt to the door and shoved it open.

There was Catti-brie, standing in mid air above the bed, her arms out to her sides, her eyes rolled to white, trembling, trembling….

“Me girl …” Bruenor started to say, but he bit back the words when he noted Regis against the far wall, curled up on the floor, his arms over his head.

“Elf!” Bruenor cried, but Drizzt was already running to Catti-brie, grabbing her and pulling her down to the bed. Bruenor grumbled and cursed and rushed over to Regis.

Catti-brie’s stiffness melted as the fit ended, and she fell limp into Drizzt’s arms. He eased her down to a sitting position and hugged her close, and only then did he notice the desperate Regis.

The halfling flailed wildly at Bruenor, slapping the dwarf repeatedly and squirming away from Bruenor’s reaching hands. Clearly terrified, he seemed to be looking not at the dwarf, but at some great monster.

“Rumblebelly, what’re ye about?” Bruenor asked.

Regis screamed into the dwarf’s face in response, a primal explosion of sheer terror. As Bruenor fell back, the halfling scrambled away, rising up to his knees, then to his feet. He ran headlong, face-first, into the opposite wall. He bounced back and fell with a groan.

“Oh, by the gods,” said Bruenor, and he reached down and scooped something up from the floor. He turned to Drizzt and presented the item for the drow to see.

It was the halfling’s ruby pendant, the enchanted gemstone that allowed Regis to cast charms upon unwitting victims.

Regis recovered from his self-inflicted wallop and leaped to his feet. He screamed again and ran past Bruenor, flailing his arms insanely. When Bruenor tried to intercept him, the halfling slapped him and punched him, pinched him and even bit him, and all the while Bruenor called to him, but Regis seemed not to hear a word. The dwarf might as well have been a demon or devil come to eat the little one for dinner.

“Elf!” Bruenor called. Then he yelped and fell back, clutching his bleeding hand.

Regis sprinted for the door. Drizzt beat him there, hitting him with a flying tackle that sent them both into a roll into the hall. In that somersault, Drizzt deftly worked his hands so that when they settled, he was behind Regis, his legs clamped around the halfling’s waist, his arms knifed under Regis’s, turning and twisting expertly to tie the little one in knots.

There was no way for Regis to break out, to hit Drizzt, or to squirm away from him. But that hardly slowed his frantic gyrations, and didn’t stop him from screaming insanely.

The hallway began to fill with curious dwarves.

“Ye got a pin stuck in the little one’s arse, elf?” one asked.

“Help me with him!” Drizzt implored.

The dwarf came over and reached for Regis, then quickly retracted his hand when the halfling tried to bite it. “What in the Nine Hells?”

“Just ye take him!” Bruenor yelled from inside the room. “Ye take him and tie him down—and don’t ye be hurting him!”

“Yes, me king!”

It took a long time, but finally the dwarves dragged the thrashing Regis away from Drizzt.

“I could slug him and put him down quiet,” one offered, but Drizzt’s scowl denied that course of action.

“Take him to his chamber and keep him safe,” the drow said. He went back into the room, closing the door behind him.

“She didn’t even notice,” Bruenor explained as Drizzt sat on the bed beside Catti-brie. “She’s not knowing she world around her.”

“We knew that,” Drizzt reminded.

“Not even a bit! Nor’s the little one now.”

Drizzt shrugged. “Cadderly,” he reminded the dwarf king.

“For both o’ them,” said the dwarf, and he looked at the door. “Rumblebelly used the ruby on her.”

“To try to reach her,” Drizzt agreed.

“But she reached him instead,” the dwarf said.

CHAPTER 5 ANGRY DEAD

It will be at Spirit Soaring,” the Ghost King proclaimed. The specter chasing Jarlaxle had worked out the drow’s intentions even before the clever dark elf’s dastardly trick had sent the creature on its extra-planar journey. And anything the specters knew, so knew the dracolich.

The enemies of Hephaestus, Yharaskrik, and mostly of Crenshinibon would congregate there, in the Snowflake Mountains, where a pair of the Ghost King’s specters were already causing mischief.

Then there would be only one more, the human southerner. The Crystal Shard knew he could be found, though not as easily as Jarlaxle. After all, Crenshinibon had shared an intimate bond with the dark elf for many tendays. With Yharaskrik’s psychic powers added to the shard’s, locating the familiar drow had proven as simple as it was necessary. Jarlaxle had become the focus of anger that served to bring the trio of mighty beings together, united in common cause. The human, however tangential, would be revealed soon enough.

Besides, to at least one of the three vengeful entities—the dragon—the coming catastrophe would be enjoyable.

To Yharaskrik, the destruction of its enemies would be practical and informative, a worthy test for the uncomfortable but likely profitable unification.

And Crenshinibon, which served as conduit between the wildly passionate dragon and the ultimately practical mind flayer, would share in all the sensations the destruction of Jarlaxle and the others would bring to both of them.

“Uncle Pikel!” Hanaleisa called when she saw the green-bearded dwarf on a street in Carradoon late the next morning. He was dressed in his traveling gear, which meant that he carried a stick and had a cooking pot strapped on his head as a helmet.

Pikel flashed her a big smile and called into the shop behind him. As the dwarf advanced to give Hanaleisa a great hug, Hanaleisa’s younger brother Rorick exited the shop.

“What are you doing here?” she called over Pikel’s shoulder as her grinning sibling approached.

“I told you I wanted to come along.”

“Then spent the rest of the morning arguing with wizards about the nature of the cosmos,” Hanaleisa replied.

“Doo-dad!” Pikel yelled, pulling back from the young woman, and when both she and Rorick looked at him curiously, he just added, “Hee hee hee.”

“He has it all figured out,” Rorick explained, and Hanaleisa nodded.

“And do the wizards and priests have it all figured out as well?” Hanaleisa asked. “Because of your insights, I mean?”

Rorick looked down.

“They kicked you out,” Hanaleisa reasoned.

“Because they couldn’t stand to be upstaged by our little brother, no doubt!” greeted Temberle, rounding the corner from the blacksmith he’d just visited. His greatsword had taken a nasty nick the previous night when bouncing off the collarbone of the undead bear.

Rorick brightened a bit at that, but when he looked up at his brother and sister, an expression of confusion came over him. “What happened?” he asked, noting that Temberle had his greatsword in hand and was examining the blade.

“You left Spirit Soaring late yesterday?” Temberle asked.

“Midday, yes,” Rorick answered. “Uncle Pikel wanted to use the tree roots to move us down from the mountains, but father overruled that, fearing the unpredictability and instability of magic, even druidic.”

“Doo-dad,” Pikel said with a giggle.

“I wouldn’t be traveling magically either,” said Hanaleisa. “Not now.”

Pikel folded his arm and stump over his chest and glared at her.

“So you camped in the forest last night?” Temberle went on.

Rorick answered with a nod, not really understanding where his brother might be going, but Pikel apparently caught on a bit, and the dwarf issued an “Ooooh.”

“There’s something wrong in those woods,” said Temberle. “Yup, yup,” Pikel agreed.

“What are you talking about?” Rorick asked, looking from one to the other.

“Brr,” Pikel said, and hugged himself tightly.

“I slept right through the night,” said Rorick. “But it wasn’t that cold.”

“We fought a zombie,” Hanaleisa explained. “A zombie bear. And there was something else out there, haunting the forest.”

“Yup, yup,” Pikel agreed.

Rorick looked at the dwarf, curious. “You didn’t say anything was amiss.” Pikel shrugged.

“But you felt it?” Temberle asked. The dwarf gave another, “Yup, yup.”

“So you did battle—real battle?” Rorick asked his siblings, his intrigue obvious. The three had grown up in the shadow of a great library, surrounded by mighty priests and veteran wizards. They had heard stories of great battles, most notably the fight their parents had waged against the dreaded chaos curse and against their own grandfather, but other than the few times when their parents had been called away for battle, or their dwarf uncles had gone to serve King Bruenor of Mithral Hall, the lives of the Bonaduce children had been soft and peaceful. They had trained vigorously in martial arts—hand-fighting and sword-fighting—and in the ways of the priest, the wizard, and the monk. With Cadderly and Danica as their parents, the three had been blessed with as comprehensive and exhaustive an education as any in Faerûn could ever hope for, but in practical applications of their lessons, particularly fighting, the three were neophytes indeed, completely untested until the previous night.

Hanaleisa and Temberle exchanged concerned looks.

“Tell me!” Rorick pressed.

“It was terrifying,” his sister admitted. “I’ve never been so scared in my entire life.”

“But it was exciting,” Temberle added. “And as soon as the fight began, you couldn’t think about being afraid.”

“You couldn’t think about anything,” said Hanaleisa. “Hee hee hee,” Pikel agreed with a nod. “Our training,” said Rorick.

“We are fortunate that our parents, and our uncles,” said Hanaleisa, looking at the beaming Pikel, “didn’t take the peace we’ve known for granted, and taught us—”

“To fight,” Temberle interrupted.

“And to react,” said Hanaleisa, who was always a bit more philosophical about battle and the role that martial training played in a wider world view. She was much more akin to her mother in that matter, and that was why she had foregone extensive training with the sword or the mace in favor of the more disciplined and intimate open-hand techniques employed by Danica’s order. “Even one who knew how to use a sword well would have been killed in the forest last night if his mind didn’t know how to tuck away his fears.”

“So you felt the presence in the forest, too,” Temberle said to Pikel. “Yup.”

“It’s still there.”

“Yup.”

“We have to warn the townsfolk, and get word to Spirit Soaring,” Hanaleisa added.

“Yup, yup.” Pikel lifted his good arm before him and straightened his fingers, pointing forward. He began swaying that hand back and forth, as if gliding like a fish under the waters of Impresk Lake. The others understood that the dwarf was talking about his plant-walking, even before he added with a grin, “Doo-dad.”

“You cannot do that,” Hanaleisa said, and Temberle, too, shook his head.

“We can go out tomorrow, at the break of dawn,” he said. “Whatever it is out there, it’s closer to Carradoon than to Spirit Soaring. We can get horses to take us the first part of the way—I’m certain the stable masters will accompany us along the lower trails.”

“Moving fast, we can arrive before sunset,” Hanaleisa agreed.

“But right now, we’ve got to get the town prepared for whatever might come,” said Temberle. He looked at Hanaleisa and shrugged. “Though we don’t really know what is out there, or even if it’s still there. Maybe it was just that one bear we killed, a wayward malevolent spirit, and now it’s gone.”

“Maybe it wasn’t,” said Rorick, and his tone made it clear that he hoped he was right. In his youthful enthusiasm, he was more than a little jealous of his siblings at that moment—a misplaced desire that would soon enough be corrected.

“Probably wandering around for a hundred years,” muttered one old water-dog—a Carradoon term for the many wrinkled fishermen who lived in town. The man waved his hand as if the story was nothing to fret about.

“Eh, but the world’s gone softer,” another in the tavern lamented.

“Nay, not the world,” yet another explained. “Just our part of it, living in the shadow of them three’s parents. We’ve been civilized, I’m thinking!”

That brought a cheer, half mocking, half in good will, from the many gathered patrons.

“The rest of the world’s grown tougher,” the man continued. “It’ll get to us, and don’t you doubt it.”

“And us older folk remember the fights well,” said the first old water-dog. “But I’m wondering if the younger ones, grown up under the time of Cadderly, will be ready for any fights that might come.”

“His kids did well, eh?” came the reply, and all in the tavern cheered and lifted tankards in honor of the twins, who stood at the bar.

“We survived,” Hanaleisa said loudly, drawing the attention of all. “But likely, some sort of evil is still out there.”

That didn’t foster the feeling of dread the young woman had hoped for, but elicited a rather mixed reaction of clanking mugs and even laughter. Hanaleisa looked at Temberle, and they both glanced back when Pikel bemoaned the lack of seriousness in the crowd with a profound, “Ooooh.”

“Carradoon should post sentries at every gate, and along the walls,” Temberle shouted. “Start patrols through the streets, armed and with torches. Light up the town, I beg you!”

Though his outburst attracted some attention, all eyes turned to the tavern door as it banged open. A man stumbled in, crying out, “Attack! Attack!” More than his shouts jarred them all, though, for filtering in behind the stranger came cries and screams, terrified and agonized.

Tables upended as the water-dogs leaped to their feet.

“Uh-oh,” said Pikel, and he grabbed Temberle’s arm with his hand and tapped Hanaleisa with his stump before they could intervene. They had come to the tavern to warn people and to organize them, but Pikel was astute enough to realize the folly of the latter intention.

Temberle tried to speak anyway, but already the various crews of the many Carradden fishing boats were organizing, calling for groups to go to the docks to retrieve weapons, putting together gangs to head into the streets.

“But, people …” Temberle tried to protest. Pikel tugged at him insistently.

“Shhh!” the dwarf cautioned.

“The four of us, then,” Hanaleisa agreed. “Let’s see where we can be of help.”

They exited alongside a score of patrons, though a few remained behind—fishing boat captains, mostly—to try to formulate some sort of strategy. With a few quick words, Pikel tucked his black oaken cudgel—his magical shillelagh—under his half-arm and waggled his fingers over one end, conjuring a bright light that transformed the weapon into a magical, fire-less torch.

Less than two blocks from the tavern door, back toward the gateway through which they had entered Carradoon, the four learned what all the tumult was about. Rotting corpses and skeletons swarmed the streets. Human and elf, dwarf and halfling, and many animal corpses roamed freely. The dead walked—and attacked.

Spotting a family trying to escape along the side of the wide road, the group veered that way, but Rorick stopped short and cried out, then stumbled and pulled up his pant leg. As Pikel moved his light near, trickles of blood showed clearly, along with something small and thrashing. Rorick kicked out and the attacking creature flew to the side of the road.

It flopped weirdly back at him, a mess of bones, skin, and feathers.

“A bird,” Hanaleisa gasped.

Pikel ran over and swung the bright end of his cudgel down hard, splattering the creature onto the cobblestones. The light proved equally damaging to the undead thing, searing it and leaving it smoldering.

“Sha-la-la!” Pikel proudly proclaimed, lifting his club high. He turned fast, adjusting his cooking pot helmet as he did so, and launched himself into the nearest alleyway. As soon as the light of the cudgel crossed the alley’s threshold, it revealed a host of skeletons swarming at the dwarf.

Temberle threw his arm around his brother’s back and propped him up, hustling him back the way they had come, calling for the fleeing Carradden family to catch up.

“Uncle Pikel!” Hanaleisa cried, running to support him.

She pulled up short as she neared the alleyway, assaulted by the sound of crunching bones and by bits of rib and skull flying by. Pikel’s light danced wildly, as if a flame in a gale, for the doo-dad dwarf danced wildly, too. It was as ferocious a display as Hanaleisa had ever seen, and one she had never imagined possible from her gentle gardener uncle.

She refocused her attention back down the street, to the retreating family, a couple and their trio of young children. Trusting in Pikel to battle the creatures in the alley, though he was outnumbered many times over, the woman sprinted away, crossing close behind the family. Hanaleisa threw herself at two skeletons moving in close pursuit. She hit them hard with a flat-out body block, knocking them back several steps, and she tucked and turned as she fell to land easily on her feet.

Hanaleisa went up on the ball of one foot and launched into a spinning kick that drove her other foot through the ribcage of an attacker. With a spray of bone chips, she tugged her foot out, then, without bringing it down and holding perfect balance, she leaned back to re-angle her kick, and cracked the skeleton in its bony face.

Still balanced on one foot, Hanaleisa expertly turned and kicked again, once, twice, a third time, into the chest of the second skeleton.

She sprang up and sent her back foot into a high circle kick before the skeleton’s face, not to hit it, but as a distraction, for when she landed firmly on both feet, she did so leaning forward, in perfect position to launch a series of devastating punches at her foe.

With both skeletons quickly dispatched, Hanaleisa backed away, pursuing the family. To her relief, Pikel joined her as she passed the alleyway. Side by side, the two grinned, pivoted back, and charged into the pursuing throng of undead, feet, fists, and sha-la-la pounding.

More citizens joined them in short order, as did Temberle, his greatsword shearing down skeletons and zombies with abandon.

But there were so many!

The dead had risen from a cemetery that had been the final resting place for many generations of Carradden. They rose from a thick forest, too, where the cycle of life worked relentlessly to feed the hunger of such a powerful and malignant spell. Even near the shores of Impresk Lake, under the dark waters, skeletons of fish—thousands of them thrown back to the waters after being cleaned on the decks of fishing boats—sprang to unlife and knifed up hard against the undersides of dark hulls, or swam past the boats and flung themselves out of the water and onto the shore and docks, thrashing in desperation to destroy something, anything, alive.

And standing atop the dark waters, Fetchigrol watched. His dead eyes flared to life in reflected orange as a fire grew and consumed several houses. Those eyes flickered with inner satisfaction whenever a cry of horror rang out across the dark, besieged city.

He sensed a shipwreck not far away, many shipwrecks, many long-dead sailors.

“I’m all right!” Rorick insisted, trying to pull his leg away from his fretting Uncle Pikel.

But the dwarf grabbed him hard with one hand, a grip that could hold back a lunging horse, and waggled his stumpy arm at the obstinate youngster.

They were back in the tavern, but nothing outside had calmed. Quite the opposite, it seemed.

Pikel bit down on a piece of cloth and tore off a strip. He dipped it into his upturned cookpot-helmet, into which he’d poured a bit of potent liquor mixed with some herbs he always kept handy.

“We can’t stay here,” Temberle called, coming in the door. “They approach.”

Pikel worked fast, slapping the bandage against Rorick’s bloody shin, pinning one end with his half-arm and expertly working the other until he had it knotted. Then he tightened it down with his teeth on one end, his hand on the other.

“Too tight,” Rorick complained.

“Shh!” scolded the dwarf.

Pikel grabbed his helmet and dropped it on his head, either forgetting or ignoring the contents, which splashed down over his green hair and beard. If that bothered the dwarf, he didn’t show it, though he did lick at the little rivulets streaming down near his mouth. He hopped up, shillelagh tucked securely under his stump, and pulled Rorick up before him.

The young man tried to start away fast, but he nearly fell over with the first step on his torn leg. The wound was deeper than Rorick apparently believed.

Pikel was there to support him, though, and they rushed out behind Temberle. Hanaleisa was outside waiting, shaking her head.

“Too many,” she explained grimly. “There’s no winning ground, just retreat.”

“To the docks?” Temberle asked, looking at the flow of townsfolk in that direction and seeming none too pleased by that prospect. “We’re to put our backs to the water?”

Hanaleisa’s expression showed that she didn’t like that idea any more than he, but they had no choice. They joined the fleeing townsfolk and ran on.

They found some organized defense forming halfway to the docks and eagerly found positions among the ranks. Pikel offered an approving nod as he continued past with Rorick, toward a cluster of large buildings overlooking the boardwalk and wharves. Built on an old fort, it was where the ship captains had decided to make their stand.

“Fight well for mother and father,” Hanaleisa said to Temberle. “We will not dishonor their names.”

Temberle smiled back at her, feeling like a veteran already.

They got their chance soon enough, their line rushing up the street to support the last groups of townsfolk trying hard to get ahead of the monstrous pursuit. Fearlessly, Hanaleisa and Temberle charged among the undead, smashing and slashing with abandon.Their efforts became all the more devastating when Uncle Pikel joined them, his bright cudgel destroying every monster that ventured near.

Despite their combined power, the trio and the rest of the squad fighting beside them were pushed back, moving inexorably in retreat. For every zombie or skeleton they destroyed, it seemed there were three more to take its place. Their own line thinned whenever a man or woman was pulled down under the raking and biting throng.

And those unfortunate victims soon enough stood up, fighting for the other side.

Horrified and weak with revulsion, their morale shattered as friends and family rose up in undeath to turn against them, the townsfolk gave ground.

They found support at the cluster of buildings, where they had no choice but to stand and fight. Eventually, even that defense began to crumble.

Hanaleisa looked to her brother, desperation and sadness in her rich brown eyes. They couldn’t retreat into the water, and the walls of the buildings wouldn’t hold back the horde for long. She was scared, and so was he.

“We have to find Rorick,” Temberle said to his dwarf uncle.

“Eh?” Pikel replied.

He didn’t understand that the twins only wanted to make sure that the three siblings were together when they died.

CHAPTER 6 THE POLITICS OF ENGAGEMENT

It was the last thing Bruenor Battlehammer wanted to hear just then. “Obould’s angry,” Nanfoodle the gnome explained. “He thinks we’re to blame for the strange madness of magic, and the silence of his god.”

“Yeah, we’re always to blame in that one’s rock-head,” Bruenor grumbled back. He looked at the door leading to the corridor to Garumn’s Gorge and the Hall’s eastern exit, hoping to see Drizzt. Morning had done nothing to help Catti-brie or Regis. The halfling had thrashed himself to utter exhaustion and since languished in restless misery.

“Obould’s emissary—” Nanfoodle started to say.

“I got no time for him!” Bruenor shouted.

Across the way, several dwarves observed the uncharacteristic outburst. Among them was General Banak Brawnanvil, who watched from his chair. He’d lost the use of his lower body in the long-ago first battle with Obould’s emerging hordes.

“I got no time!” Bruenor yelled again, though somewhat apologetically. “Me girl’s got to go! And Rumblebelly, too!”

“I will accompany Drizzt,” Nanfoodle offered.

“The Nine Hells and a tenth for luck ye will!” Bruenor roared at him. “I ain’t for leaving me girl!”

“But ye’re the king,” one of the dwarves cried.

“And the whole world is going mad,” Nanfoodle answered.

Bruenor simmered, on the edge of an explosion. “No,” he said finally, and with a nod to the gnome, who had become one of his most trusted and reliable advisors, he walked across the room to stand before Banak.

“No,” Bruenor said again. “I ain’t the king. Not now.”

A couple of dwarves gasped, but Banak Brawnanvil nodded solemnly, accepting the responsibility he knew to be coming.

“Ye’ve ruled the place before,” said Bruenor. “And I’m knowin’ ye can do it again. Been too long since I seen the road.”

“Ye save yer girl,” the old general replied.

“Can’t give ye Rumblebelly to help ye this time,” Bruenor went on, “but the gnome here’s clever enough.” He looked back at Nanfoodle, who couldn’t help but smile at the unexpected compliment and the trust Bruenor showed in him.

“We’ve many good hands,” Banak agreed.

“Now don’t ye be startin’ another war with Obould,” Bruenor instructed. “Not without me here to swat a few o’ his dogs.”

“Never.”

Bruenor clapped his friend on the shoulder, turned, and started to walk away. A large part of him knew that his responsibilities lay there, where Clan Battlehammer looked to him to lead, particularly in that suddenly troubling time. But a larger part of him denied that. He was the king of Mithral Hall, indeed, but he was the father of Catti-brie and the friend of Regis, as well.

And little else seemed to matter at that dark moment.

He found Drizzt at Garumn’s Gorge, along with as smelly and dirty a dwarf as had ever been known.

“Ready to go, me king!” Thibbledorf Pwent greeted him with enthusiasm. The grisly dwarf hopped to attention, his creased battle armor, all sharpened plates and jagged spikes, creaking and squealing with the sudden motion.

Bruenor looked at the drow, who just closed his eyes, long ago having quit arguing with the likes of the battlerager.

“Ready to go?” Bruenor asked. “With war brewing here?”

Pwent’s eyes flared a bit at that hopeful possibility, but he resolutely shook his head. “Me place is with me king!”

“Brawnanvil’s the Steward o’ Mithral Hall while I’m gone.”

A flash of confusion in the dwarf’s eyes couldn’t take hold. “With me King Bruenor!” Pwent argued. “If ye’re for the road, Pwent and his boys’re for the road!”

At that proclamation, a great cheer came up and several nearby doors banged open. The famed Gutbuster Brigade poured into the wide corridor.

“Oh no, no,” Bruenor scolded. “No, ye ain’t!”

“But me king!” twenty Gutbusters cried in unison.

“I ain’t taking the best brigade Faerûn’s e’er known away from Steward Brawnanvil in this troubled time,” said Bruenor. “No, but I can’t.” He looked Pwent straight in the eye. “None o’ ye. Ain’t got room in the wagon, neither.”

“Bah! We’ll run with ye!” Pwent insisted.

“We’re goin’ on magical shoes and we ain’t got no magical boots for the lot of ye to keep up,” Bruenor explained. “I ain’t doubtin’ that ye’d all run till ye drop dead, but that’d be the end of it. No, me friend, yer place is here, in case that Obould thinks it’s time again for war.” He gave a great sigh and looked to Drizzt for support, muttering, “Me own place is here.”

“And you’ll be back here swiftly,” the drow promised. “Your place now is on the road with me, with Catti-brie and Regis. We’ve no time for foolishness, I warn. Our wagon is waiting.”

“Me king!” Pwent cried. He waved his brigade away, but hustled after Drizzt and Bruenor as they quickly moved to the tunnels that would take them to their troubled friends.

In the end, only four of them left Mithral Hall in the wagon pulled by a team of the best mules that could be found. It wasn’t Pwent who stayed behind, but Regis.

The poor halfling wouldn’t stop thrashing, fending off monsters that none of them could see, and with all the fury and desperation of a halfling standing on the edge of the pit of the Abyss itself. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t drink. He wouldn’t stop swinging and kicking and biting for a moment, and no words reached his ears to any effect. Only through the efforts of a number of attendants were the dwarves able to get any nourishment into him at all, something that could never have been done on a bouncing wagon moving through the wilds.

Bruenor argued taking him anyway, to the point of hoarseness, but in the end, it was Drizzt who said, “Enough!” and led the frustrated Bruenor away.

“Even if the magic holds, even if the wagon survives,” Drizzt said, “it will be a tenday and more to Spirit Soaring and an equal time back. He’ll not survive.”

They left Regis in a stupor of exhaustion, a broken thing.

“He may recover with the passage of time,” Drizzt explained as they hustled along the tunnels and across the great gorge. “He was not touched directly by the magic, as was Catti-brie.”

“He’s daft, elf!”

“And as I said, it may not hold. Your priests will reach him—” Drizzt paused and skidded to a stop “—or I will.”

“What do ye know, elf?” Bruenor demanded.

“Go and ready the wagon,” Drizzt instructed, “but wait for me.”

He turned and sprinted back the way they’d come, all the way to Regis’s room, where he burst in and dashed to the small coffer atop the dresser. With trembling hands, Drizzt pulled forth the ruby pendant.

“What’re ye about?” asked Cordio Muffinhead, a priest of high repute, who stood beside the halfling.

Drizzt held up the pendant, the enchanting ruby spinning enticingly in the torchlight. “I have an idea. Pray, wake the little one, but hold him steady, all of you.”

They looked at the drow curiously, but so many years together had taught them to trust Drizzt Do’Urden, and they did as he bade them.

Regis came awake thrashing, his legs moving as if he were trying to run away from some unseen monster.

Drizzt moved his face very close to the halfling, calling to him, but Regis gave no sign of hearing his old friend.

The drow brought forth the ruby pendant and set it spinning right before Regis’s eyes. The sparkles drew Drizzt inside, so alluring and calming, and a short while later, within the depths of the ruby, he found Regis.

“Drizzt,”the halfling said aloud, and also in Drizzt’s mind. “Help me.”

Drizzt got only the slightest glimpse of the visions tormenting Regis. He found himself in a land of shadow—the very Plane of Shadow, perhaps, or some other lower plane—with dark and ominous creatures coming at him from every side, clawing at him, open maws full of sharpened teeth biting at his face. Clawed hands slashed at him along the periphery of his vision, always just a moment ahead of him. Instinctively, Drizzt’s free hand went to a scimitar belted at his hip and he cried out and began to draw it forth.

Something hit him hard, throwing him aside, right over the bed he couldn’t see. It sent him tumbling to a floor he couldn’t see.

In the distance, Drizzt heard the clatter of something bouncing across the stone floor and knew it to be the ruby pendant. He felt a burning sensation in his forearm and closed his eyes tightly to grimace away the pain. When he opened his eyes again, he was back in the room, Cordio standing over him. He looked at his arm to see a trickle of blood where it had caught against his half-drawn scimitar as he tumbled.

“What—?” he started to ask the dwarf.

“Apologies, elf,” said Cordio, “but I had to ram ye. Ye was seein’ monsters like the little one there, and drawing yer blade …”

“Say no more, good dwarf,” Drizzt replied, pulling himself up to a sitting position and bringing his injured arm in front of him, pressing hard to try to stem the flow of blood.

“Get me a bandage!” Cordio yelled to the others, who were hard at work holding down the thrashing Regis.

“He’s in there,” Drizzt explained as Cordio wrapped his arm. “I found him. He called out for help.”

“Yeah, that we heared.”

“He’s seeing monsters—shadowy things—in a horrible place.”

Another dwarf came over and handed the ruby pendant to Cordio, who presented it to Drizzt, but the drow held up his hand.

“Keep it,” Drizzt explained. “You might find a way to use it to reach him, but do take care.”

“Oh, I’ll be having a team o’ Gutbusters ready to knock me down in that case,” Cordio assured him.

“More than that,” said Drizzt. “Take care that you can escape the place where Regis now resides.” He looked with great sympathy at his poor halfling friend, for the first time truly appreciating the horror Regis felt with every waking moment.

Drizzt caught up to Bruenor in the eastern halls. The king sat on the bench of a fabulous wagon of burnished wood and solid wheels, with a sub-carriage that featured several strong springs of an alloy Nanfoodle had concocted, almost as strong as iron, but not nearly as brittle. The wagon showed true craftsmanship and pride, a fitting representation of the art and skill of Mithral Hall.

The vehicle wasn’t yet finished, though, for the dwarves had planned an enclosed bed and perhaps an extension bed for cargo behind, with a greater harness that would allow a team of six or eight. But upon Bruenor’s call for urgency, they had cut the work short and fitted low wooden walls and a tailgate quickly. They had brought out their finest team of mules, young and strong, fitting them with magical horseshoes that would allow them to move at a swift pace throughout the entirety of a day.

“I found Regis in his nightmares,” Drizzt explained, climbing up beside his friend. “I used the ruby on him, as he did with Catti-brie.”

“Ye durned fool!”

Drizzt shook his head. “With all caution,” he assured his companion.

“I’m seein’ that,” Bruenor said dryly, staring at the drow’s bandaged arm.

“I found him and he saw me, but only briefly. He is living in the realm of nightmares, Bruenor, and though I tried to pull him back with me, I could not begin to gain ground. Instead, he pulled me in with him, a place that would overwhelm me as it has him. But there is hope, I believe.” He sighed and mouthed the name they had attached to that hope, “Cadderly.” That notion made Bruenor drive the team on with more urgency as they rolled out of Mithral Hall’s eastern gate, turning fast for the southwest.

Pwent moved up to ride on the seat with Bruenor. Drizzt ran scout along their flanks, though he often had to climb aboard the wagon and catch his breath, for it rolled along without the need to rest the mules. Through it all, Catti-brie sat quietly in the back, seeing nothing that they could see, hearing nothing that they could hear, lost and alone.

“Ye’re knowin’ them well,” Athrogate congratulated Jarlaxle later that day when the pair, lying on top of a grassy knoll, spied the wagon rambling down the road from the northeast.

Jarlaxle’s expression showed no such confidence, for he had been caught completely by surprise at the quick progress the wagon had already made; he hadn’t expected to see Bruenor’s party until the next morning.

“They’ll drive the mules to exhaustion in a day,” he mumbled, shaking his head.

Off in the distance, a dark figure moved among the shadows, and Jarlaxle knew it to be Drizzt.

“Running hard for their hurt friend,” Athrogate remarked.

“There is no power greater than the bonds they share, my friend,” said the drow. He finished with a cough to clear his throat, and to banish the wistfulness from his tone. But not quickly enough, he realized when he glanced at Athrogate, to keep the dwarf from staring at him incredulously.

“Their sentiments are their weakness,” Jarlaxle said, trying to be convincing. “And I know how to exploit that weakness.”

“Uh-huh,” said Athrogate, then he gave a great “Bwahaha!”

Jarlaxle could only smile.

“We goin’ down there, or we just following?”

Jarlaxle thought about it for a moment, then surprised himself and the dwarf by hopping up from the grass and brushing himself off.

“Stuttgard o’ the Stone Hills?” Bruenor asked when the wagon rolled around a bend in the road to reveal the dwarf standing in their way. “I thought ye was stayin’ in Mithral …” he called as he eased the wagon to a stop before the dwarf. His voice trailed off as he noted the dwarf’s impressive weapons, a pair of glassteel morningstars bobbing behind his sturdy shoulders. Suspicion filled Bruenor’s expression, for Stuttgard had shown no such armament in Mithral Hall. His suspicion only grew as he considered how far along the road he was already—for Stuttgard to have arrived meant that the dwarf must have departed Mithral Hall immediately after meeting with Bruenor.

“Nah, but well met again, King Bruenor,” Athrogate replied.

“What’re ye about, dwarf?” Bruenor asked. Beside Bruenor, Pwent stood flexing his knees, ready to fight.

A growl from the side turned them all to look that way, and up on a branch in the lone tree overlooking the road perched Guenhwyvar, tamping her paws as if she meant to spring down upon the dwarf.

“Peace, good king,” Athrogate said, patting his hands calmly in the air before him. “I ain’t no enemy.”

“Nor are you Stuttgard of the Stone Hills,” came a call from farther along the road, behind Athrogate and ahead of the wagon.

Bruenor and Pwent looked past Stuttgard and nodded, though they couldn’t see their drow companion. Stuttgard glanced over his shoulder, knowing it to be Drizzt, though the drow was too concealed in the brush to be seen.

“I should have recognized you at Bruenor’s court,” Drizzt called.

“It’s me morningstars,” Stuttgard explained. “I’m lookin’ bigger with them, so I’m told. Bwahaha! Been a lot o’ years since we crossed weapons, eh Drizzt Do’Urden?”

“Who is he?” Bruenor called to Drizzt, then he looked straight at the dwarf in the road and said, “Who are ye?”

“Where is he?” Drizzt called out in answer, drawing looks of surprise from both Bruenor and Pwent.

“He’s right in front o’ us, ye blind elf!” Pwent called out.

“Not him,” Drizzt replied. “Not … Stuttgard.”

“Ah, but suren me heart’s to fall, for me worthy drow me name can’t recall,” said the dwarf in the road.

“Where is who?” Bruenor demanded of Drizzt, anger and impatience mounting

“He means me,” another voice answered. On the side of the road opposite Guenhwyvar stood Jarlaxle.

“Oh, by Moradin’s itchy arse,” grumbled Bruenor. “Scratched it, he did, and this one fell out.”

“A pleasure to see you again as well, King Bruenor,” Jarlaxle said with a bow.

Drizzt came out of the brush then, moving toward the group. The drow had no weapons drawn—indeed, he leaned his bow over his shoulder as he went.

“What is it, me king?” Pwent asked, glancing nervously from the dwarf to Jarlaxle. “What?”

“Not a fight,” Bruenor assured him and disappointed him at the same time. “Not yet a fight.”

“Never that,” Jarlaxle added as he moved beside his companion.

“Bah!” Pwent snorted.

“What’s this about?” Bruenor demanded.

Athrogate grumbled as Drizzt walked by, and gave a lamenting shake of his head, his braided beard rattling as its small beads bounced.

“Athrogate,” Drizzt whispered as he passed, and the dwarf howled in laughter.

“Ye’re knowin’ him?” asked Bruenor.

“I told you about him. From Luskan.” He looked at Jarlaxle. “Eight years ago.”

The drow mercenary bowed. “A sad day for many.”

“But not for you and yours.”

“I told you then and I tell you now, Drizzt Do’Urden. The fall of Luskan, and of Captain Deudermont, was not the doing of Bregan D’aerthe. I would have been as happy dealing with him—”

“He never would have dealt with the likes of you and your mercenaries,” Drizzt interrupted.

Jarlaxle didn’t finish his thought, just held his hands out wide, conceding the point.

“And what’s this about?” Bruenor demanded again. “We heard of your plight—of Catti-brie’s,” Jarlaxle explained. “The right road is to Cadderly, so I had my friend here go in—”

“And lie to us,” said Drizzt.

“It seemed prudent in the moment,” Jarlaxle admitted. “But the right road is to Cadderly. You know that.”

“I don’t know anything where Jarlaxle is concerned,” Drizzt shot back, even as Bruenor nodded. “If this is all you claim, then why would you meet us out here on the road?”

“Needin’ a ride, not to doubt,” Pwent said, and his bracers screeched as they slid together when he crossed his burly arms over his chest.

“Hardly that,” the drow replied, “though I would welcome the company.” He paused and looked at the mules then, obviously surprised at how fresh they appeared, given that they had already traveled farther than most teams would go in two days.

“Magical hooves,” Drizzt remarked. “They can cover six days in one.”

Jarlaxle nodded.

“Now he’s wanting a ride,” Pwent remarked, and Jarlaxle did laugh at that, but shook his head.

“Nay, good dwarf, not a ride,” the drow explained. “But there is something I would ask of you.”

“Surprising,” Drizzt said dryly.

“I am in need of Cadderly, too, for an entirely different reason,” Jarlaxle explained. “And he will be in need of me, or will be glad that I am there, when he learns of it. Unfortunately, my last visit with the mighty priest did not fare so well, and he requested that I not return.”

“And ye’re thinking that he’ll let ye in if ye’re with us,” Bruenor reasoned, and Jarlaxle bowed.

“Bah!” snorted the dwarf king. “Ye better have more to say than that.”

“Much more,” Jarlaxle replied, looking more at Drizzt than Bruenor. “And I will tell you all of it. But it is a long tale, and we should not tarry, for the sake of your wife.”

“Don’t ye be pretendin’ that ye care about me girl!” Bruenor shouted, and Jarlaxle retreated a step.

Drizzt saw something then, though Bruenor was too upset to catch it. True pain flashed in Jarlaxle’s dark eyes; he did care. Drizzt thought back to the time Jarlaxle had allowed him, with Catti-brie and Artemis Entreri, to escape from Menzoberranzan, one of the many times Jarlaxle had let him walk away. Drizzt tried to put it all in the context of the current situation, to reveal the possible motives behind Jarlaxle’s actions. Was he lying, or was he speaking the truth?

Drizzt felt it the latter, and that realization surprised him. “What’re ye thinking, elf?” Bruenor asked him.

“I would like to hear the story,” Drizzt replied, his gaze never leaving Jarlaxle. “But hear it as we travel along the road.”

Jarlaxle nudged Athrogate, and the dwarf produced his boar figurine at the same time that Jarlaxle reached into his pouch for the obsidian nightmare. A moment later, their mounts materialized and Bruenor’s mules flattened their ears and backed nervously away.

“What in the Nine Hells?” Bruenor muttered, working hard to control the team.

On a signal from Jarlaxle, Athrogate guided his boar to the side of the wagon, to take up a position in the rear.

“I want one o’ them!” Thibbledorf Pwent said, his eyes wide with adoration as the fiery demon boar trotted past. “Oh, me king!”

Jarlaxle reined his nightmare aside and moved it to walk beside the wagon. Drizzt scrambled over that side to sit on the rail nearest him. Then he called to Guenhwyvar.

The panther knew her place. She leaped down from the tree, took a few running strides past Athrogate, and leaped into the wagon bed, curling up defensively around the seated Catti-brie.

“It is a long road,” Drizzt remarked.

“It is a long tale,” Jarlaxle replied.

“Tell it slowly then, and fully.”

The wagon wasn’t moving, and both Drizzt and Jarlaxle looked at Bruenor, the dwarf staring back at them with dark eyes full of doubt.

“Ye sure about this, elf?” he asked Drizzt.

“No,” Drizzt answered, but then he looked at Jarlaxle, shook his head, and changed his mind. “To Spirit Soaring,” he said.

“With hope,” Jarlaxle added.

Drizzt turned his gaze to Catti-brie, who sat calmly, fully withdrawn from the world around her.

CHAPTER 7 NUMBERING THE STRANDS

This is futile!” cried Wanabrick Prestocovin, a spirited young wizard from Baldur’s Gate. He shoved his palms forward on the table before him, ruffling a pile of parchment.

“Easy, friend,” said Dalebrentia Promise, a fellow traveler from the port city. Older and with a large gray beard that seemed to dwarf his skinny frame, Dalebrentia looked the part of the mage, and even wore stereotypical garb: a blue conical hat and a dark blue robe adorned with golden stars. “We are asked to respect the scrolls and books of Spirit Soaring.”

A few months earlier, Wanabrick’s explosion of frustration would have been met by a sea of contempt in the study of the great library, where indeed, the massive collections of varied knowledge from all across Faerûn, pulled together by Cadderly and his fellows, were revered and treasured. Tellingly, though, as many wizards, sages, and priests in the large study nodded their agreement with Wanabrick as revealed their scorn at his outburst.

That fact was not lost on Cadderly as he sat across the room amidst his own piles of parchment, including one on which he was working mathematical equations to try to inject predictability and an overriding logic into the seeming randomness of the mysterious events.

His own frustrations were mounting, though Cadderly did well to hide them, for that apparent randomness seemed less and less like a veil to be unwound and more and more like an actual collapse of the logic that held Mystra’s Weave aloft. The gods were not all dark, had not all gone silent, unlike the terrible Time of Troubles, but there was a palpable distance involved in any divine communion, and an utter unpredictability to spellcasting, divine or wizardly.

Cadderly rose and started toward the table where the trio of Baldur’s Gate visitors studied, but he purposely put a disarming smile on his face, and walked with calm and measured steps.

“Your pardon, good Brother Bonaduce,” Dalebrentia said as he neared. “My friend is young, and truly worried.”

Wanabrick turned a wary eye at Cadderly. His face remained tense despite Cadderly’s calm nod.

“I don’t blame you, or Spirit Soaring,” Wanabrick said. “My anger, it seems, is as unfocused as my magic.”

“We’re all frustrated and weary,” Cadderly said.

“We left three of our guild in varying states of insanity,” Dalebrentia explained. “And a fourth, a friend of Wanabrick’s, was consumed in his own fireball while trying to help a farmer clear some land. He cast it long—I am certain of it—but it blew up before it ever left his hand.”

“The Weave is eternal,” Wanabrick fumed. “It must be … stable and eternal, else all my life’s work is naught but a cruel joke!”

“The priests do not disagree,” said a gnome, a disciple of Gond.

His support was telling. The Gondsmen, who loved logic and gears, smokepowder and contraptions built with cunning more than magic, had been the least affected by the sudden troubles.

“He is young,” Dalebrentia said to Cadderly. “He doesn’t remember the Time of Troubles.”

“I am not so young,” Cadderly replied.

“In mind!” Dalebrentia cried, and laughed to break the tension. The other two Baldurian wizards, one middle-aged like Cadderly and the other even older than Dalebrentia, laughed as well. “But so many of us who feel the creak of knees on a rainy morning do not much sympathize, good rejuvenated Brother Bonaduce!”

Even Cadderly smiled at that, for his journey through age had been a strange one indeed. He had begun construction of Spirit Soaring after the terrible chaos curse had wrought the destruction of its predecessor, the Edificant Library. Using magic given him by the god Deneir—nay, not given him, but channeled through him—Cadderly had aged greatly, to the point of believing that the construction would culminate with his death as an old, old man. He and Danica had accepted that fate for the sake of Spirit Soaring, the magnificent tribute to reason and enlightenment.

But the cost had proven a temporary thing, perhaps a trial of Deneir to test Cadderly’s loyalty to the cause he professed, the cause of Deneir. After the completion of Spirit Soaring, the man had begun to grow younger physically—much younger, even younger than his actual age. He was forty-four, but appeared as a man in his young twenties, younger even than his twin children. That strange journey to physical youth, too, had subsequently stabilized, Cadderly believed, and he appeared to be aging more normally with the passage of the past several months.

“I have traveled the strangest of journeys,” Cadderly said, putting a comforting hand on Wanabrick’s shoulder. “Change is the only constant, I fear.”

“But surely not like this!” Wanabrick replied. “So we hope,” said Cadderly.

“Have you found any answers, good priest?” Dalebrentia asked.

“Only that Deneir works as I work, writing his logic, seeking reason in the chaos, applying rules to that which seems unruly.”

“And without success,” Wanabrick said, somewhat dismissively.

“Patience,” said Cadderly. “There are answers to be found, and rules that will apply. As we discern them, so too will we understand the extent of their implications, and so too will we adjust our thinking, and our spellcasting.”

The gnome at a nearby table began to clap his hands at that, and the applause spread throughout the great study, dozens of mages and priests joining in, most soon standing. They were not cheering for him, Cadderly knew, but for hope itself in the face of their most frightening trial.

“Thank you,” Dalebrentia quietly said to Cadderly. “We needed to hear that.”

Cadderly looked at Wanabrick, who stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his face tight with anxiety and anger. The wizard did manage a nod to Cadderly, however.

Cadderly patted him on the shoulder again and started away, nodding and smiling to all who silently greeted him as he passed.

Outside the hall, the priest gave a sigh full of deep concern. He hadn’t lied when he’d told Dalebrentia that Deneir was hard at work trying to unravel the unraveling, but he hadn’t relayed the whole truth, either.

Deneir, a god of knowledge and history and reason, had answered Cadderly’s prayers of communion with little more than a sensation of grave trepidation.

“Keep faith, friend,” Cadderly said to Wanabrick later that same night, when the Baldurian contingent departed Spirit Soaring. “It’s a temporary turbulence, I’m sure.”

Wanabrick didn’t agree, but he nodded anyway and headed out the door.

“Let us hope,” Dalebrentia said to Cadderly, approaching him and offering his hand in gratitude.

“Will you not stay the night at least, and leave when the sun is bright?”

“Nay, good brother, we have been away too long as it is,” Dalebrentia replied. “Several of our guild have been touched by the madness of the pure Weave. We must go to them and see if anything we have learned here might be of some assistance. Again, we thank you for the use of your library.”

“It’s not my library, good Dalebrentia. It’s the world’s library. I am merely the steward of the knowledge contained herein, and humbled by the responsibilities the great sages put upon me.”

“A steward, and an author of more than a few of the tomes, I note,” Dalebrentia said. “And truly we are all better off for your stewardship, Brother Bonaduce. In these troubled times, to find a place where great minds might congregate is comforting, even if not overly productive on this particular occasion. But we are dealing with unknowns here, and I am confident that as the unraveling of the Weave, if that is what it is, is understood, you will have many more important works to add to your collection.”

“Any that you and your peers pen would be welcome,” Cadderly assured him.

Dalebrentia nodded. “Our scribes will replicate every word spoken here today for Spirit Soaring, that in times to come when such a trouble as this visits Faerûn again, Tymora forefend, our wisdom will help the worried wizards and priests of the future.”

They held their handshake throughout the conversation, each feeding off the strength of the other, for both Cadderly—so wise, the Chosen of Deneir—and Dalebrentia—an established mage even back in the Time of Troubles some two decades before—suspected that what they’d all experienced of late was no temporary thing, that it might lead to the end of Toril as they knew it, to turmoil beyond anything they could imagine.

“I will read the words of Dalebrentia with great interest,” Cadderly assured the man as they finally broke off their handshake, and Dalebrentia moved out into the night to join his three companions.

They were a somber group as their wagon rolled slowly down Spirit Soaring’s long cobblestone entry road, but not nearly as much so as when they had first arrived. Though they had found nothing solid to help them solve the troubling puzzle that lay before them, it was hard to leave Spirit Soaring without some measure of hope. Truly the library had become as magnificent in content as it was in construction, with thousands of parchments and tomes donated from cities as far away as Waterdeep and Luskan, Silverymoon, and even from great Calimport, far to the south. The place carried an aura of lightness and hope, a measure of greatness and promise, as surely as any other structure in all the lands.

Dalebrentia had climbed into the wagon beside old Resmilitu, while Wanabrick rode the jockey box with Pearson Bluth, who drove the two ponies.

“We will find our answers,” Dalebrentia said, mostly to the fuming Wanabrick, but for the sake of all three.

Hooves clacking and wheels bouncing across the cobblestones were the only sounds that accompanied them down the lane. They reached the packed dirt of the long road that would lead them out of the Snowflakes to Carradoon.

The night grew darker as they moved under the thick canopy of overhanging tree limbs. The woods around them remained nearly silent—strangely so, they would have thought, had they bothered to notice—save for the occasional rustle of the wind through the leaves.

The lights of Spirit Soaring receded behind them, soon lost to the darkness.

“Bring up a flame,” Resmilitu bade the others.

“A light will train enemies upon us,” Wanabrick replied.

“We are four mighty wizards, young one. What enemies shall we fear this dark and chilly night?”

“Not so chilly, eh?” Pearson Bluth said, and glanced over his shoulder.

Though the driver’s statement was accurate, he and the other two noted with surprise that Resmilitu hugged his arms around his chest and shivered mightily.

“Pop a light, then,” Dalebrentia bade Wanabrick.

The younger wizard closed his eyes and waggled his fingers through a quick cantrip, conjuring a magical light atop his oaken staff. It flared to life, and Resmilitu nodded, though it shed no heat.

Dalebrentia moved to collect a blanket from the bags in the wagon bed.

Then it was dark again.

“Ah, Mystra, you tease,” said Pearson Bluth, as Wanabrick offered stronger curses to the failure.

A moment later, Pearson’s good nature turned to alarm. The darkness grew more intense than the night around them, as if Wanabrick’s dweomer had not only failed, but had transformed somehow into an opposing spell of darkness. The man pulled the team to a stop. He couldn’t see the ponies, and couldn’t even see Wanabrick sitting beside him. He had no way of knowing if they, too, were engulfed in the pitch blackness.

“Damn this madness!” Wanabrick cried.

“Oh, but you’ve erased the stars themselves,” said Dalebrentia in as light-hearted a tone as he could manage, confirming that the back of the wagon, too, had fallen victim to the apparent reversal of the dweomer.

Resmilitu cried out then through chattering teeth, “So chill!” and before the others could react to his call, they felt it too, a sudden, unnatural coldness, profound and to the bone.

“What?” Pearson Bluth blurted, for he knew as the others knew that the chill was no natural phenomenon, and he felt as the others felt a malevolence in that coldness, a sense of death itself.

Resmilitu was the first to scream out in pain as some unseen creature came over the side of the wagon, its raking hands clawing at the old mage.

“Light! Light!” cried Dalebrentia.

Pearson Bluth moved to heed that call, but the ponies began to buck and kick and whinny terribly. The poor driver couldn’t hold the frantic animals in check. Beside him, Wanabrick waved his arms, daring to dive into the suddenly unpredictable realm of magic for an even greater enchantment. He brought forth a bright light, but it lasted only a heartbeat—enough to reveal the hunched and shadowy form assailing Resmilitu.

The thing was short and squat, a misshapen torso of black flesh and wide shoulders, with a head that looked more like a lump without a neck. Its legs were no more than flaps of skin tucked under it, but its arms were long and sinewy, with long-fingered, clawing hands. As Resmilitu rolled away, the creature followed by propelling itself with those front limbs, like a legless man dragging himself.

“Be gone!” cried Dalebrentia, brandishing a thin wand of burnished wood tipped in metal. He sent forth its sparkling bolts of pure energy just as Wanabrick’s magical light winked out.

The creature wailed in pain, but so too did poor Resmilitu, and the others heard the tearing of the old wizard’s robes.

“Be gone!” Dalebrentia cried again—the trigger phrase for his wand—and they heard the release of the missiles even though they couldn’t see any flash in the magical darkness.

“More light!” Dalebrentia cried.

Resmilitu cried out again, and so did the creature, though it sounded more like a shriek of murderous pleasure than of pain.

Wanabrick threw himself over the seat atop the fleshy beast and began thrashing and pounding away with his staff to try to dislodge it from poor Resmilitu.

The monster was not so strong, and the wizard managed to pry one arm free, but then Pearson Bluth screamed out from in front, and the wagon lurched to the side. It rolled out of the magical darkness at that moment, and the light atop Wanabrick’s oaken staff brightened the air around them. But the wizards took little solace in that, for the terrified team dragged the wagon right off the road, to go bouncing down a steep embankment. They all tried to hold on, but the front wheels turned sharply and dug into a rut, lifting the wagon end over end.

Wood splintered and the mages screamed. Loudest of all came the shriek of a mule as its legs shattered in the roll.

Dalebrentia landed hard in some moss at the base of a tree, and he was certain he’d broken his arm. He fought through the pain, however, forcing himself to his knees. He glanced around quickly for his lost wand but found instead poor Resmilitu, the fleshy beast still atop him, tearing at his broken frame in a frenzy.

Dalebrentia started for him, but fell back as a blast of lightning blazed from the other side, lifting the shadowy beast right off his old friend and throwing it far into the night. Dalebrentia looked to Wanabrick to nod his approval.

But he never managed that nod. Looking at the man, the magically-lit staff lying near him, Dalebrentia saw the shadowy beasts crawling in behind the younger mage, huddled, fleshy beasts coming on ravenously.

To the side, Pearson Bluth stumbled into view, a beast upon his back, one of its arms wrapped around his neck, its other hand clawing at his face.

Dalebrentia fell into his spellcasting and brought forth a fiery pea, thinking to hurl it past Wanabrick, far enough so its explosion would catch the approaching horde but not engulf his friend.

But the collapsing Weave deceived the old mage. The pea had barely left his hand when it exploded. Waves of intense heat assailed Dalebrentia and he fell back, clutching at his seared eyes. He rolled around wildly on the ground, trying to extinguish the flames, too far lost to agony to even hear the cries of his friends, and those of the fleshy beasts, likewise shrieking in burning pain.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, old Dalebrentia could only hope that his fireball had eliminated the monsters and had not killed his companions.

His hopes for the former were dashed a heartbeat later when a clawed hand came down hard against the side of his neck, the force of the blow driving a dirty talon through his skin. Hooked like a fish, blinded and burned by his own fire and battered from the fall, Dalebrentia could do little to resist as the shadowy beast tugged at him.

Had he remained at the door where he’d sent the wizards off more than an hour before, Cadderly might have seen the sudden burst of fire far down the mountain trail, with one tall pine going up in flames like the fireworks the priest had often used to entertain his children in their younger days. But Cadderly had gone back inside as soon as the four from Baldur’s Gate had departed.

Their inability to discover anything pertinent had spurred the priest to his meditation, to try again to commune with Deneir, the god who might, above all others in the pantheon, offer some clues to the source of the unpredictable and troubling events.

He sat in a small room lit only by a pair of tall candles, one to either side of the blanket he had spread on the floor. He sat cross-legged on that blanket, hands on his knees, palms facing up. For a long while, he focused only on his breathing, making his inhalations and exhalations the same length, using the count to clear his mind of all worry and trials. He was alone in his cadence, moving away from the Prime Material Plane and into the realm of pure thought, the realm of Deneir.

He’d done the same many times since the advent of the troubles, but never to great effect. Once or twice, he thought he had reached Deneir, but the god had flitted out of his thoughts before any clear pictures might emerge.

This time, though, Cadderly felt Deneir’s presence keenly. He pressed on, letting himself fall far from consciousness. He saw the starscape all around him, as if he floated among the heavens, and he saw the image of Deneir, the old scribe, sitting in the night sky, long scroll spread before him, chanting, though Cadderly could not at first make out the words.

The priest willed himself toward his god, knowing that good fortune was on his side, that he had entered that particular region of concentration and reason in conjunction with the Lord of All Glyphs and Images.

He heard the chant.

Numbers. Deneir was working the Metatext, the binding logic of the multiverse.

Gradually, Cadderly began to discern the slightly-glowing strands forming a net in the sky above him and Deneir, the blanket of magic that gave enchantment to Toril. The Weave. Cadderly paused and considered the implications. Was it possible that the Metatext and the Weave were connected in ways more than philosophical? And if that were true, since the Weave was obviously flawed and failing, could not the Metatext also be flawed? No, that could not be, he told himself, and he moved his focus back to Deneir.

Deneir was numbering the strands, Cadderly realized, was giving them order and recording the patterns on his scroll. Was he somehow trying to infuse the failing Weave with the perfect logic and consistency of the Metatext? The thought thrilled the priest. Would his god, above all others, be the one to repair the rents in the fabric of magic?

He wanted to implore his god, to garner some divine inspiration and instruction, but Cadderly realized, to his surprise, that Deneir was not there to answer his call to commune, that Deneir had not brought him to that place. No, he had arrived at that place and time as Deneir had, by coincidence, not design.

He drifted closer—close enough to look over Deneir’s shoulder as the god sat there, suspended in emptiness, recording his observations.

The parchment held patterns of numbers, Cadderly noted, like a great puzzle. Deneir was trying to decode the Weave itself, each strand by type and form. Was it possible that the Weave, like a spider’s web, was comprised of various parts that sustained it? Was it possible that the unraveling, if that’s what the time of turbulence truly was, resulted from a missing supporting strand?

Or a flaw in the design? Surely not that!

Cadderly continued to silently watch over Deneir’s shoulder. He committed to memory a few sequences of the numbers, so he could record them later when he was back in his study. Though certainly no god, Cadderly still hoped he might discern something in those sequences that he could then communicate back to Deneir, to aid the Scribe of Oghma in his contemplations.

When at last Cadderly opened his physical eyes again, he found the candles still burning beside him. Looking at them, he deduced that he had been journeying the realm of concentration for perhaps two hours. He rose and moved to his desk, to transcribe the numbers he had seen, the representation of the Weave.

The collapsing Weave.

Where were the missing or errant strands? he wondered.

Cadderly hadn’t seen the firelight down the mountain trail, but Ivan Bouldershoulder, out collecting wood for his forge, surely had.

“Well, what mischief’s about?” the dwarf asked. He thought of his brother, then, and realized that Pikel would be angry indeed to see so majestic a pine go up in a pillar of flame.

Ivan moved to a rocky outcropping to gain a better vantage. He still couldn’t make out much down the dark trails, but his new position put the wind in his face, and that breeze carried with it screams.

The dwarf dropped his pack beside the hand-sled on which rested the firewood, adjusted his helmet, which was adorned with great deer antlers, and hoisted Splitter, his double-bladed battle-axe, so named—by Ivan, after Cadderly had enchanted it with a powerfully keen edge—for its work on logs and goblin skulls alike. Without so much as a glance back at Spirit Soaring, the yellow-bearded dwarf ran down the dark trails, his short legs propelling him at a tremendous pace.

Fleshy beasts of shadow were feeding on the bodies of the Baldurian wizards by the time he arrived.

Ivan skidded to an abrupt halt, and the nearest creatures noticed him and came on, dragging themselves with their long forelimbs.

Ivan thought to retreat, but only until he heard a groan from one of the wizards.

“Well, all righty then!” the dwarf decided, and he charged at the beasts, Splitter humming as he slashed it back and forth with seeming abandon. The keen axe sheared through black skin with ease, spilling goo from the shrieking crawlers. They were too slow to get ahead of those powerful swipes, and too stupid to resist their insatiable hunger and simply flee.

One after another fell to Ivan, splattering with sickly sounds as Splitter eviscerated them. The dwarf’s arms did not tire and his swings did not slow, though the beasts did not stop coming for a long, long while.

When finally there seemed nothing left to hit, Ivan rushed to the nearest mage, the oldest of the group.

“No helpin’ that one,” he muttered when he rolled Resmilitu over to find his neck torn out.

Only one of them wasn’t quite dead. Poor Dalebrentia lay shivering, his skin all blistered, his eyes tightly closed.

“I got ye,” Ivan whispered to him. “Ye hold that bit o’ life and I’ll get ye back to Cadderly.”

With that and a quick glance around, the dwarf set Splitter in place across his back and bent low to slide one hand under Dalebrentia’s knees, the other under his upper back. Before he lifted the man, though, Ivan felt such a sensation of coldness—not the cold of winter, but something more profound, as if death itself stood behind him.

He turned, slowly at first, as he reached around to grasp his weapon.

A shadowy form stood nearby, staring at him. Unlike the fleshy beasts that lay dead all around him—indeed, the four mages had also killed quite a few—it appeared more like a man, old and hunched over.

Such a cold chill went through Ivan then that his teeth began to chatter. He wanted to call out to the man, or shadow, or specter, or whatever it was, but found that he could not.

And found that he didn’t have to.

Images of a long-ago time swirled in Ivan’s mind, of dancing with his six mighty friends around an artifact of great power.

Images of a red dragon came clear to him, so clear that he began to duck as if the beast circled right above his head.

An image of another creature erased the others, an octopus-headed monstrosity with tentacles waggling under its chin like the braided strands of an old dwarf’s beard.

A name was whispered into his ear, carried on unseen breezes. “Yharaskrik.”

Ivan stood up straight, lifting Dalebrentia in his arms.

Then he dropped the man to the ground before him, lifted his heavy boot, and pressed it down on Dalebrentia’s throat until the wheezing and the squirming stopped.

With a satisfied grin, Ivan, who was not Ivan, looked all around. He held out his hand toward each of the Baldurian wizards in turn, and each rose up to his call.

Throats torn, arms half-eaten, great holes in their bellies, it did not matter. For Ivan’s call was the echo of the Ghost King, and the Ghost King’s call beckoned souls from the land of the dead with ease.

His four gruesome bodyguards behind him, Ivan Bouldershoulder started off along the trails, moving farther away from Spirit Soaring.

He didn’t reach his intended location that night. Instead, he found a cave nearby where he and his bodyguards could spend the daylight hours.

There would be plenty of time to kill when the darkness fell once more.

CHAPTER 8 BATTLE OF THE BLADE AND OF THE MIND

Hanaleisa snap-kicked to the side, breaking the tibia of a skeleton that had gotten inside the reach of Temberle’s greatsword. The young woman leaned low to her left, raising her right leg higher, and kicked again, knocking the skull off the animated skeleton as it turned toward her.

At the same time, she punched out straight at a second target, her flying fist making a grotesque splattering sound as it smashed through the rotting chest of a zombie.

The blow would have knocked the breath from any man, but zombies have no need for breath. The creature continued its lumbering swing, its heavy arm slamming against Hanaleisa’s blocking left arm and shoulder, driving her a step to her right, closer to her brother.

Exhausted after a long night of fighting, Hanaleisa found a burst of energy yet again, stepping forward and rocking the zombie with a barrage of punches, kicks, and driving knees. She ignored the gory results of every blow, almost all of them punching through rotting skin and breaking brittle bones, leaving holes through which fell rotted organs and clusters of maggots. Again and again the woman pounded the zombie until at last it fell away.

Another lumbered up—an inexhaustible line of enemies, it seemed. Temberle’s greatsword cut across in front of Hanaleisa just before she advanced to meet the newest foe. Temberle hit the creature just below the shoulder, taking its arm, and the sword plowed through ribs with ease, throwing the zombie aside.

“You looked like you needed to catch your breath,” Hanaleisa’s brother explained. Then he yelped, his move to defend Hanaleisa costing him a parry against the next beast closing with him. His right arm bloody from a long, deep wound, he stepped back fast and punched out with the pommel of his sword, slamming and jolting the skeleton.

Then Hanaleisa was there. She leaped up and ahead, rising between the skeleton closing on her and the one battling Temberle. Hanaleisa kicked out to the sides, both feet flying wide. With a jolting rattle of bones, the two skeletons flew apart.

Hanaleisa landed lightly, rising up on the ball of her left foot and spinning a powerful circle-kick into the gut of the next approaching zombie.

Her foot went right through it, and when she tried to retract, she discovered herself hooked on the monster’s spine. She pulled back again, having little choice, and found herself even more entangled as the zombie, not quite destroyed by the mighty blow, reached and clawed at her.

Temberle’s sword stabbed in hard from the side, taking the monster in the face and skewering it.

Hanaleisa stumbled back, still locked with the corpse. “Protect me!” she yelled to her brother, but she bit the words back sharply as she noted Temberle’s arm covered in blood, and with more streaming from the wound. As he clenched his sword to swing again, his forearm muscles tightening, blood sprayed into the air.

Hanaleisa knew he couldn’t go on for long. None of them could. Exhausted and horrified, and with their backs almost against the wall of the wharf’s storehouse, they needed a break from the relentless assault, needed something to give them time to regroup and bandage themselves—or Temberle would surely bleed to death.

Finally pulling free and leaping to both feet, Hanaleisa glanced around for Pikel, or for an escape route, or for anything that might give her hope. All she saw was yet another defender being pulled down by the undead horde, and a sea of monsters all around them.

In the distance, just a few blocks away, more fires leaped to angry life as Carradoon burned.

With a sigh of regret, a grunt of determination, and a sniffle to hold back her tears, the young woman went back into the fray ferociously, pounding the monster nearest her and the one battling Temberle with blow after blow. She leaped and spun, kicked and punched, and her brother tried to match her.

But his swings were slowing as his blood continued to drain.

The end was coming fast.

“They’re too heavy!” a young girl complained, straining to lift a keg with little success. Suddenly, though, it grew lighter and rose up through the trapdoor as easily as if it were empty. Indeed, when she saw that no one was pushing from below, the girl did glance underneath at the bottom of the keg, thinking its whiskey must have all drained out.

On the roof nearby, Rorick kept his focus, commanding an invisible servant to hold fast to the keg and help the little one. It wasn’t much of a spell, but Rorick wasn’t yet much of a wizard, and in times of unpredictable and often backfiring magic, he dared not attempt more difficult tricks.

He found satisfaction in his efforts, though, reminding himself that leaders needed to be clever and thoughtful, not just strong of arm or Art. His father had never been the greatest of fighters, and it wasn’t until near the end of the troubles that had come to Edificant Library that Cadderly had truly come into his own Deneir-granted power. Still, Rorick wished he’d trained more the way his sister and brother had. Leaning heavily on a walking stick, his ankle swollen and pus oozing from the dirty wound, he was reminded with every pained step that he really wasn’t much of a warrior.

I’m not much of a wizard, either, he thought, and he winced as his unseen servant dissipated. The girl, overbalanced with the keg, tumbled down. The side of the container broke open and whiskey spilled over the corner of the storehouse roof.

“What now, then?” a sailor asked, and it took Rorick a moment to realize that the man, far older and more seasoned than he, was speaking to him, was looking to him for direction.

“Be a leader,” Rorick mumbled under his breath, and he pointed toward the front of the storehouse, to the edge of the low roof, where below the battle was on in full.

“Doo-dad!” came a familiar cry from far to Hanaleisa’s right, much beyond Temberle. She started to glance that way, but saw movement up above and fell back, startled.

Out over the heads of the defenders came the whiskey kegs—by the dozen! They sailed out and crashed down, some atop zombies and other wretched creatures, others smashing hard on the cobblestones.

“What in the—?” more than one surprised defender cried out, Temberle included.

“Doo-dad!” came the emphatic answer.

All the defenders looked that way to see Pikel charging at them. His right arm was stretched out to the side, shillelagh pointed at the horde. The club threw sparks, and at first the bright light alone kept the undead back from Pikel, clearing the way as he continued his run. But more importantly, those sparks sizzled out to the spilled alcohol, and nothing burned brighter than Carradden whiskey.

The dwarf ran on, the enchanted cudgel spitting its flares, and flames roared up in response.

Despite her pain, despite her fear for her brothers, Hanaleisa couldn’t help but giggle as the dwarf passed, his stumpy arm flapping like the wing of a wounded duck. He was not running, Hanaleisa saw—he was skipping.

An image of a five-year-old Rorick skipping around her mother’s garden outside Spirit Soaring, sparkler in hand, flashed in Hanaleisa’s mind, and a sudden contentment washed over her, as if she was certain that Uncle Pikel would make everything all right.She shook the notion away quickly, though, and finished off a nearby monster that was caught on their side of the fire wall. Then she ran to Temberle, who was already calling out to organize the retreat. Hanaleisa reached into her pouch and pulled forth some clean cloth, quickly tying off Temberle’s torn arm.

And not a moment too soon. Her brother nodded appreciatively, then swooned. Hanaleisa caught him and called for help, directing a woman to retrieve Temberle’s greatsword, for she knew—they all knew—he would surely need it again, and very soon.

Into the storehouse they went, a line of weary and battered defenders—battered emotionally as much as physically, perhaps even more so, for they knew to a man and woman that their beloved Carradoon was unlikely to survive the surprise onslaught.

“You saved us all,” Hanaleisa said to Rorick a short while later, when they were all together once more.

“Uncle Pikel did the dangerous work,” Rorick said, nodding his chin toward the dwarf.

“Doo-dad, hee hee hee,” said the dwarf. He presented his shillelagh and added, “Boom!” with a shake of his hairy head.

“We’re not saved yet,” Temberle said from a small window overlooking the carnage on the street. Conscious again, but still weakened, the young man’s voice sounded grim indeed. “Those fires won’t last for long.”

It was true, but the whiskey-fueled conflagration had turned the battle and saved their cause. The stupid undead knew no fear and had kept coming on, their rotting clothes and skin adding fuel to the flames as they crumpled and burned atop their fellows.

But a few stragglers were getting through, scratching at the storehouse walls, battering the planks, and the fires outside were burning low.

One zombie walked right through the fires and came out ablaze. Still it advanced, right to the storehouse door, and managed to pound its fists a few times before succumbing to the flames. And as bad luck would have it, those flames licked at the wood. They wouldn’t have been of consequence, except from the roof above, one of the kegs had overturned, spilling its volatile contents across the roof and down the side.

Several people screamed as the corner of the storehouse flared up. Some went to try to battle the flames, but to no avail. Worse, the keg throwers hadn’t emptied about a third of the whiskey stocks from the storehouse. Whiskey was one of Carradoon’s largest exports—boats sailed out with kegs of the stuff almost every tenday.

More than a hundred people were in that storehouse, and panic spread quickly as the flames licked up over their heads to the roof, fanning across the ceiling.

“We’ve got to get out!” one man called.

“To the docks!” others yelled in agreement, and the stampede for the back door began in full.

“Uh oh,” said Pikel.

Temberle hooked Rorick’s arm over his shoulder and the brothers leaned heavily on each other for support as they moved toward the exit, both calling for Hanaleisa and Pikel to follow.

Pikel started to move, but Hanaleisa grabbed him by the arm and held him back.

“Eh?”

Hanaleisa pointed to a nearby keg and rushed for it. She popped the top and hoisted it, then ran to the front door, where skeletons and zombies pounded furiously. With a look back at Pikel, Hanaleisa began splashing the keg’s contents all along the wall.

“Hee hee hee,” Pikel agreed, coming up beside her with a keg of his own. First he lifted it to his lips for a good long swallow, but then he ran along the wall, splashing whiskey all over the floor and the base of the planks.

Hanaleisa looked across the storehouse. The brave townsfolk had regained a measure of calm and were moving swiftly and orderly out onto the docks.

The heat grew quickly. A beam fell from the roof, dropping a line of fire across the floor.

“Hana!” Rorick cried from the back of the storehouse.

“Get out!” she screamed at him. “Uncle Pikel, come along!”

The dwarf charged toward her and hopped the fallen beam alongside her, both heading fast for the door.

More fiery debris tumbled from the ceiling, and the whiskey-soaked side wall began to burn furiously. The flames spread up the walls behind them.

But the undead hadn’t broken through, Hanaleisa realized when she reached the exit. “Go!” she ordered Pikel, and pushed him through the door. To the dwarf’s horror, to the horror of her brothers, and to the horror of everyone watching, Hanaleisa turned and sprinted back into the burning building.

Smoke filled her nostrils and stung her eyes. She could barely see, but she knew her way. She leaped the beam burning in the middle of the floor, then ducked and rolled under another that tumbled down from above.

She neared the front door, and just as she leaped for it, a nearby keg burst in a ball of fire, causing another to explode beside it. Hanaleisa kicked out at the heavy bar sealing the door, all her focus and strength behind the blow. She heard the wood crack beneath her foot, and a good thing that was, for she had no time to follow the move. At that moment, the fires reached the whiskey she and Pikel had poured out, and Hanaleisa had to sprint away to avoid immolation.

But the door was open, and the undead streamed in hungrily, stupidly.

More kegs exploded and half the roof caved in beside her, but Hanaleisa maintained her focus and kept her legs moving. She could hardly see in the heavy smoke, and tripped over a burning beam, painfully smashing her toes in the process.

She scrambled along, quickly regaining her footing.

More kegs exploded, and fiery debris flew all around her. The smoke grew so thick that she couldn’t get her bearings. She couldn’t see the doorway. Hanaleisa skidded to a halt, but she couldn’t afford to stop. She sprinted ahead once more, crashing into some piled crates and overturning them.

She couldn’t see, she couldn’t breathe, she had no idea which way was out, and she knew that any other direction led to certain death.

She spun left and right, started one way, then fell back in dismay. She called out, but her voice was lost in the roar of the flames.

In that moment, horror turned to resignation. She knew she was doomed, that her daring stunt had succeeded at the cost of her life.

So be it.

The young woman dropped down onto all fours and thought of her brothers. She hoped she had bought them the time they needed to escape. Uncle Pikel would lead them to safety, she told herself, and she nodded her acceptance.

To his credit, Bruenor didn’t say anything. But it was hard for Thibbledorf Pwent and Drizzt not to notice his continual and obviously uncomfortable glances to either side, where Jarlaxle and Athrogate weaved in and out of the trees on their magical mounts.

“He’s the makings of a Gutbuster,” remarked Pwent, who sat beside Bruenor on the wagon’s jockey box, while Drizzt walked along beside them. The Gutbuster nodded his hairy chin toward Athrogate. “Bit too clean, me’s thinkin’, but I’m likin’ that pig o’ his. And them morningstars!”

“Gutbusters play with drow, do they?” Bruenor replied, but before the sting of that remark could sink in to Pwent, Drizzt beat him to the reply with, “Sometimes.”

“Bah, elf, ye ain’t no drow, and ain’t been one, ever,” Bruenor protested. “Ye know what I’m meaning.”

“I do,” Drizzt admitted. “No offense intended, so no offense taken. But neither do I believe that Jarlaxle is what you’ve come to expect from my people.”

“Bah, but he ain’t no Drizzt.”

“Nor was Zaknafein, in the manner you imply,” Drizzt responded. “But King Bruenor would have welcomed my father into Mithral Hall. Of that, I’m sure.”

“And this strange one’s akin to yer father, is he?”

Drizzt looked through the trees to see Jarlaxle guiding his hellish steed along, and he shrugged, honestly at a loss. “They were friends, I’ve been told.”

Bruenor paused for a bit and similarly considered the strange creature that was Jarlaxle, with his outrageously plumed hat. Everything about Jarlaxle seemed unfamiliar to the parochial Bruenor, everything spoke of the proverbial “other” to the dwarf.

“I just ain’t sure o’ that one,” the dwarf king muttered. “Me girl’s in trouble here, and ye’re asking me to trust the likes o’ Jarlaxle and his pet dwarf.”

“True enough,” Drizzt admitted. “And I don’t deny that I have concerns of my own.” Drizzt hopped up and grabbed the rail behind the seat so he could ride along for a bit. He looked directly at Bruenor, demanding the dwarf’s complete attention. “But I also know that if Jarlaxle had wanted us dead, we would likely already be walking the Fugue Plain. Regis and I would not have gotten out of Luskan without his help. Catti-brie and I would not have been able to escape his many warriors outside of Menzoberranzan those years ago, had he not allowed it. I have no doubt that there’s more to his offer to help us than his concern for us, or for Catti-brie.”

“He’s got some trouble o’ his own,” said Bruenor, “or I’m a bearded gnome! And bigger trouble than that tale he telled about needing to make sure the Crystal Shard was gone.”

Drizzt nodded. “That may well be. But even if that is true, I like our chances better with Jarlaxle beside us. We wouldn’t even have turned toward Spirit Soaring and Cadderly, had not Jarlaxle sent his dwarf companion to Mithral Hall to suggest it.”

“To lure us out!” Bruenor snapped back, rather loudly.

Drizzt patted one hand in the air to calm the dwarf. “Again, my friend, if that was only to make us vulnerable, Jarlaxle would have ambushed us on the road right outside your door, and there we would remain, pecked by the crows.”

“Unless he’s looking for something from ye,” Bruenor argued. “Might still be a pretty ransom on Drizzt Do’Urden’s head, thanks to the matron mothers of Menzoberranzan.”

That was possible, Drizzt had to admit to himself, and he glanced over his shoulder at Jarlaxle once more, but eventually shook his head. If Jarlaxle had wanted anything like that, he would have hit the wagon with overwhelming force outside of Mithral Hall, and easily enough captured all four, or whichever of them might have proven valuable to his nefarious schemes. Even beyond that simple logic, however, there was within Drizzt something else: an understanding of Jarlaxle and his motives that surprised Drizzt every time he paused to consider it.

“I do not believe that,” Drizzt replied to Bruenor. “Not any of it.”

“Bah!” Bruenor snorted, hardly seeming convinced, and he snapped the reins to coax the team along more swiftly, though they had already put more than fifty miles behind them that day, with half-a-day’s riding yet before them. The wagon bounced along comfortably, the dwarven craftsmanship more than equal to the task of the long rides. “So ye’re thinking he’s just wanting us for a proper introduction to Cadderly? Ye’re buying his tale, are ye? Bah!”

It was hard to find a proper response to one of Bruenor’s “bahs,” let alone two. But before Drizzt could even try, a scream from the back of the wagon ended the discussion.

The three turned to see Catti-brie floating in the air, her eyes rolled back to show only white. She hadn’t risen high enough to escape the tailgate of the wagon, and was being towed along in her weightless state. One of her arms rose to the side, floating in the air as if in water, as they had seen before during her fits, but her other arm was forward, her hand turned and grasping as if she were presenting a sword before her.

Bruenor pulled hard on the reins and flipped them to Pwent, heading over the back of the seat before the Gutbuster even caught them. Drizzt beat the dwarf to the wagon bed, the agile drow leaping over the side in a rush to grab Catti-brie’s left arm before she slipped over the back of the rail. The drow raised his other hand toward Bruenor to stop him, and stared intently at Catti-brie as she played out what she saw in her mind’s eye.

Her eyes rolled back to show their deep blue once more.

Her right arm twitched, and she winced. Her focus seemed to be straight ahead, though given her distant stare, it was hard to be certain. Her extended hand slowly turned, as if her imaginary sword was being forced into a downward angle. Then it popped back up a bit, as if someone or something had slid off the end of the blade. Catti-brie’s breath came in short gasps. A single tear rolled down one cheek, and she quietly mouthed, “I killed her.”

“What’s she about, then?” Bruenor asked.

Drizzt held his hand up to silence the dwarf, letting it play out. Catti-brie’s chin tipped down, as if she were looking at the ground, then lifted again as she raised her imaginary sword.

“Suren she’s looking at the blood,” Bruenor whispered. He heard Jarlaxle’s mount galloping to the side, and Athrogate’s as well, but he didn’t take his eyes off his beloved daughter.

Catti-brie sniffled hard and tried to catch her breath as more tears streamed down her face.

“Is she looking into the future, or the past?” Jarlaxle asked.

Drizzt shook his head, uncertain, but in truth, he was pretty sure he recognized the scene playing out before him.

“But she’s floated up and almost o’er the aft. I ain’t for sayin’, but that one’s daft,” said Athrogate.

Bruenor did turn to the side then, throwing a hateful look at the dwarf.

“Beggin’ yer pardon, good King Bruenor,” Athrogate apologized. “But that’s what I’m thinking.”

Catti-brie began to sob and shake violently. Drizzt had seen enough. He pulled the woman close, hugging her and whispering into her ear.

And the world darkened for the drow. For just an instant, he saw Catti-brie’s victim, a woman wearing the robes of the Hosttower of the Arcane, a mage named Sydney, he knew, and he knew then without doubt the incident his beloved had just replayed.

Before he could fully understand that he saw the body of the first real kill Catti-brie had ever known, the first time she had felt her victim’s blood splash on her own skin, the image faded from his mind and he moved deeper, as if through the realm of death and into …

Drizzt did not know. He glanced around in alarm, looking not at the wagon and Bruenor, but at a strange plain of dim light and dark shadows, and dark gray—almost black—fog wafting on unfelt breezes.

They came at him there, in that other place, dark, fleshy beasts like legless, misshapen trolls, pulling themselves along with gangly, sinewy arms, snarling through long, pointed teeth.

Drizzt turned fast to put his back to Catti-brie and went for his scimitars as the first of the beasts reached out to claw at him. Even the glow of Twinkle seemed dark to his eyes as he brought the blade slashing down. But it did its work, taking the thing’s arm at the elbow. Drizzt slipped forward behind the cut, driving Icingdeath into the torso of the wretched creature.

He came back fast the other way and spun around. To his horror, Catti-brie was not there. He sprinted out, bumping hard into someone, then tripped and went rolling forward. Or he tried to roll, but discovered that the ground was several feet lower than he’d anticipated, and he landed hard on his lower back and rump, rattling his teeth.

Drizzt stabbed and slashed furiously as the dark beasts swarmed over him. He managed to get his feet under him and came up with a high leap, simply trying to avoid the many slashing clawed hands.

He landed in a flurry and a fury, blades rolling over each other with powerful and devastating strokes and stabs, and wild slashes that sent the beasts falling away with terrible shrieks and screeches, three at a time.

“Catti-brie!” he cried, for he could not see her, and he knew that they had taken her!

He tried to go forward, but heard a call from his right, and just as he spun, something hit him hard, as if one of the beasts had leaped up and slammed him with incredible force.

He lost a scimitar as he flew backward a dozen feet and more, and came down hard against some solid object, a tree perhaps, where he found himself stuck fast—completely stuck, as if the fleshy beast or whatever it was that had hit him had just turned to goo as it had engulfed him. He could move only one hand and couldn’t see, could hardly breathe.

Drizzt tried to struggle free, thinking of Catti-brie, and he knew the fleshy black beasts were closing in on him.

CHAPTER 9 A TIME FOR HEROES

A light appeared, a bright beacon cutting through the smoke, beckoning her. Hanaleisa felt its inviting warmth, so different from the bite of the fire’s heat. It called to her, almost as if it were enchanted. When she at last burst out the door, past the thick smoke, rolling out onto the wharves, Hanaleisa was not surprised to see a grinning Uncle Pikel standing there, holding aloft his brilliantly glowing shillelagh. She tried to thank him, but coughed and gagged on the smoke. Nearly overcome, she managed to reach Pikel and wrap him in a great hug, her brothers coming in to flank her, patting her back to help her dislodge the persistent smoke.

After a long while, Hanaleisa finally managed to stop coughing and stand straight. Pikel quickly ushered them all away from the storehouse, as more explosions wracked it, kegs of Carradden whiskey still left to explode.

“Why did you go in there?” Rorick scolded her once the immediate danger was past. “That was foolish!”

“Tut tut,” Pikel said to him, waggling a finger in the air to silence him. A portion of the roof caved in with a great roar, taking down part of the wall with it. Through the hole, the four saw the continuing onslaught of the undead, the unthinking monsters willingly walking in the door after Hanaleisa had opened it. They were fast falling, consumed by the flames.

“She invited them in,” Temberle said to his little brother. “Hana bought us the time we’ll need.”

“What are they doing?” Hanaleisa asked, looking past her brothers toward the wharves, her question punctuated by coughs. The question was more of surprise than to elicit a response, for the answer was obvious. People swarmed aboard the two small fishing vessels docked nearby.

“They mean to ferry us across the lake to the north, to Byernadine,” Temberle explained, referring to the lakeside hamlet nearest to Carradoon.

“We haven’t the time,” Hanaleisa replied.

“We haven’t a choice,” Temberle said. “They have good crews here. They’ll get more boats in fast.”

Shouting erupted on the docks. It escalated into pushing and fighting as desperate townsfolk scrambled to get aboard the first two boats.

“Sailors only!” a man shouted above the rest, for the plan had been to fill those two boats with experienced fishermen, who could then retrieve the rest of the fleet.

But the operation wasn’t going as planned.

“Cast her off!” many people aboard one of the boats shouted, while others still tried to jump on board.

“Too many,” Hanaleisa whispered to her companions, for indeed the small fishing vessel, barely twenty feet long, had not near the capacity to carry the throng that had packed aboard her. Still, they threw out the lines and pushed her away from the wharf. Several people went into the water as she drifted off, swimming hard to catch her and clinging desperately to her rail, which was barely above the cold waters of Impresk Lake.

The second boat went out as well, not quite as laden, and the square sails soon opened as they drifted out from shore. So packed was the first boat that the crewmen aboard couldn’t even reach the rigging, let alone raise sail. Listing badly, weaving erratically, her movements made all on shore gasp and whisper nervously, while the shouting and arguing on the boat only increased in desperation.

Already, many were shaking their heads in dismay and expecting catastrophe when the situation fast deteriorated. The people in the water suddenly began to scream and thrash about. Skeletal fish knifed up to stab hard into them like thrown knives.

The fishing boat rocked as the many hangers-on let go, and people shrieked as the waters churned and turned red with blood.

Then came the undead sailors, rising up to some unseen command. Bony hands gripped the rails of both low-riding ships, and people aboard and on shore cried out in horror as the skeletons of long-dead fishermen began to pull themselves up from the dark waters.

The panic on the first boat sent several people splashing overboard. The boat rocked and veered with the shifting weight, turning uncontrollably—and disastrously. Similarly panicked, the sailors on the second boat couldn’t react quickly enough as the first boat turned toward her. They crashed together with the crackle of splintering wood and the screams of scores of townsfolk realizing their doom. Many went into the water, and as the skeletons scrambled aboard, many others had no choice but to leap into Impresk Lake and try to swim to shore.

Long had men plied the waters of Impresk Lake. Its depths had known a thousand thousand turns of the circle of life. Her deep bed churned with the rising dead, and her waters roiled as more skeletal fish swarmed the splashing Carradden.

And those on the wharves, Hanaleisa, her bothers, and Uncle Pikel as well, could only watch in horror, for not one of the eighty-some people who had boarded those two boats made it back to shore alive.

“Now what?” Rorick cried, his face streaked with tears, his words escaping through such profound gasps that he could hardly get them out.

Indeed, everyone on the wharves shared that horrible question. Then the storehouse collapsed with a great fiery roar. Many of the undead horde were destroyed in that conflagration, thanks to the daring of Hanaleisa, but many, many more remained. And the townsfolk were trapped with their backs to the water, a lake they dared not enter.

Rag-tag groups ran to the north and south as all semblance of order broke down. A few boat crews managed to band together along the shore, and many townsfolk followed in their protective wake.

Many more looked to the children of Cadderly and Danica, those two so long the heroes of the barony. In turn, the three siblings looked to the only hope they could find: Uncle Pikel.

Pikel Bouldershoulder accepted the responsibility with typical gusto, punching his stump into the air. He tucked his cudgel under that shortened arm and began to hop around, tapping his lips with one finger and mumbling, “umm” over and over again.

“Well, what then?” a fishing boat captain cried. Many people closed in on the foursome, looking for answers.

“We find a spot to defend, and we order our line,” Temberle said after looking to Pikel for answers that did not seem to be forthcoming. “Find a narrow alleyway. We cannot remain down here.”

“Uh-uh,” Pikel disagreed, even as the group began to organize its retreat.

“We can’t stay here, Uncle Pikel!” Rorick said to the dwarf, but the indomitable Pikel just smiled back at him.

Then the green-bearded dwarf closed his eyes and tapped his shillelagh against the boardwalk, as if calling to the ground beneath. He turned left, to the north, then hesitated and turned back before spinning to the north again and dashing off at a swift pace.

“What’s he doing?” the captain and several others asked.

“I don’t know,” Temberle answered, but he and Rorick hooked arms again and started after.

“We ain’t following the fool dwarf blindly!” the captain protested.

“Then you’re sure to die,” Hanaleisa answered without hesitation.

Her words had an effect, for all of them swarmed together in Pikel’s wake. He led them off the docks and onto the north beach, moving fast toward the dark rocks that sheltered Carradoon’s harbor from the northern winds.

“We can’t get over those cliffs!” one man complained.

“We’re too near the water!” another woman cried, and indeed, a trio of undead sailors came splashing at them, forcing Temberle and Hanaleisa and other warriors to protect their right flank all the way.

All the way to an apparent dead end, where the rocky path rose up a long slope, then ended at a drop to the stone-filled lake.

“Brilliant,” the captain complained, moving near Pikel. “Ye’ve killed us all, ye fool dwarf!”

It surely seemed as if he spoke the truth, for the undead were in pursuit and the group had nowhere left to run.

But Pikel was unbothered. He stood on the edge of the drop, beside a swaying pine, and closed his eyes, chanting his druidic magic. The tree responded by lowering a branch down before him.

“Hee hee hee,” said Pikel, opening his eyes and handing the branch to Rorick, who stood beside him.

“What?” the young man asked.

Pikel nodded to the drop, and directed Rorick’s gaze to a cave at the back of the inlet.

“You want me to jump down there?” Rorick asked, incredulous. “You want me to swing down?”

Pikel nodded, and pushed him off the ledge.

The screaming Rorick, guided by the obedient tree, was set down—as gently as a mother lays her infant in its crib—on a narrow strip of stone beside the watery inlet. He waited there for the captain and two others, who came down on the next swing, before heading toward the cave.

Pikel was the last one off the ledge, with a host of zombies and skeletons closing in as he leaped. Several of the monsters jumped after him, only to fall and shatter on the stones below.

His cudgel glowing brightly, Pikel moved past the huddled group and led the way into the cave, which at first glance seemed a wide, high, and shallow chamber, ankle deep with water. But Pikel’s instincts and his magical call to the earth had guided him well. On the back wall of that shallow cave was a sidelong corridor leading deeper into the cliffs, and deeper still into the Snowflake Mountains.

Into that darkness went two score of Carradoon’s survivors, half of them capable fighters, the other half frightened citizens, some elderly, some too young to wield a weapon. Just a short while into the retreat, they came to a defensible spot where the corridor ended at a narrow chimney, and through that chimney was another chamber.

There they decided to make their first camp, a circle of guards standing at the cave entrance, which they covered with a heavy stone, and more guarding the two corridors that led out of the chamber, deeper into the mountains.

No more complaints were shouted Uncle Pikel’s way.

Jarlaxle slid his wand away, shouting to Athrogate, “Just his face!”

The drow leaped from his mount to the back of the wagon, charging right past Bruenor, who was down on one knee, his right hand grasping his left shoulder in an attempt to stem the flow of spraying blood.

Twinkle had cut right through the dwarf’s fine armor and dug deeply into the flesh beneath.

Jarlaxle seized Catti-brie just as she floated over the back of the wagon, having been jostled hard by the thrashing and running Drizzt. Jarlaxle pulled her in and hugged her closely, as Drizzt had done, and started that same journey to insanity.

Jarlaxle knew the distortions for what they were, the magic of his eye patch fighting back the deception. So he held Catti-brie and whispered softly to her as she sobbed. Gradually, he was able to ease her down to the floorboards of the wagon, moving her to a sitting position against the side wall.

He turned away, shaking his head, to find Thibbledorf Pwent hard at work tearing off Bruenor’s blood-soaked sleeve.

“Ah, me king,” the battlerager lamented.

“He’s breathing,” Athrogate called from the side of the trail, where Drizzt remained stuck fast by the viscous glob Jarlaxle’s wand had launched at him. “And seethin’, thrashing and slashin’, not moving at all but wantin’ to be bashin’!”

“Don’t ask,” Jarlaxle said as both Bruenor and Pwent looked Athrogate’s way, then questioningly back at Jarlaxle.

“What just happened?” Bruenor demanded.

“To your daughter, I do not know,” Jarlaxle admitted. “But when I went to her, I was drawn through her into a dark place.” He glanced furtively at Drizzt. “A place where our friend remains, I fear.”

“Regis,” Bruenor muttered. He looked at Jarlaxle, but the drow was staring into the distance, lost in thought. “What d’ya know?” Bruenor demanded, but Jarlaxle just shook his head.

The drow mercenary looked at Catti-brie again and thought of the sudden journey he had taken when he’d touched her. It was more than an illusion, he believed. It was almost as if his mind had walked into another plane of existence. The Plane of Shadow, perhaps, or some other dark region he hoped never to visit again.

But even on that short journey, Jarlaxle hadn’t really gone away, as if that plane and the Prime Material Plane had overlapped, joined in some sort of curious and dangerous rift.

He thought about the specter he’d encountered when Hephaestus had come looking for him, of the dimensional hole he had thrown over the creature, and of the rift to the Astral Plane that he’d inadvertently created.

Had that specter, that huddled creature, been physically passing back and forth from Toril to that shadowy dimension?

“It’s real,” he said quietly.

“What?” Bruenor and Pwent demanded together.

Jarlaxle looked at them and shook his head, not sure how he could explain what he feared had come to pass.

“He’s calming down,” Athrogate called from the tree. “Asking for the girl, and talking to me.”

With Pwent’s help, Bruenor pulled himself to his feet and went with the drow and the dwarf to Drizzt’s side.

“What’re ye about, elf?” Bruenor asked when he got to Drizzt, who was perfectly helpless, stuck fast against the tree.

“What happened?” the drow ranger replied, his gaze fixed on Bruenor’s arm.

“Just a scratch,” Bruenor assured him.

“Bah, but two fingers higher and ye’d have taken his head!” Athrogate cut in, and both Bruenor and Jarlaxle glared at the brash dwarf.

“I did—?” Drizzt started to ask, but he stopped and scowled with a perplexed look.

“Just like back at Mithral Hall,” muttered Bruenor.

“I know where Regis is,” Drizzt said, looking up with alarm. He was sure the others could tell that he was even more afraid for his little friend at that dark moment. And his face twisted with more fear and pain when he glanced over at Catti-brie. If Regis’s mind had inadvertently entered and been trapped in that dark place, then Catti-brie was surely caught between the two worlds.

“Yerself came back, elf, and so’ll the little one,” Bruenor assured him.

Drizzt wasn’t so confident of that. He had barely set his toes in that umbral dimension, but with the ruby, Regis had entered the very depths of Catti-brie’s mind.

Jarlaxle flicked his wrist, and a dagger appeared in his hand. He motioned for Athrogate to move aside, and stepped forward, bending low, carefully cutting Drizzt free.

“If you mean to go mad again, do warn me,” Jarlaxle said to Drizzt with a wink.

Drizzt neither replied nor smiled. His expression became darker still when Athrogate walked over, holding the drow’s lost scimitar, red with the blood of his dearest friend.