Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3)

Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3) Page 57

They passed through a series of chambers, guessing more than knowing which doors to burst through. They turned another corner, and another beyond that, speeding for a heavy, partially ajar metal doorway. Entreri shouldered it, crashing through, Drizzt and Dahlia close behind, and as the large room opened into view before them, all three saw and heard a similar door opposite them slam shut.

Entreri made for it with all speed, Dahlia close behind, as Drizzt slammed the door behind him. He looked for a locking bar, but none was to be found. But some furniture still remained, including a heavy stone chair frame, so he pulled it into place before the door and propped it at an angle to somewhat secure the portal.

Across the room, Entreri tugged at the other door and banged on it, but whoever had exited had already secured it.

“Now where?” Dahlia asked, leaping around and scanning for other doors.

But there were none to be seen.

“Now where?” she asked again, more insistently.

“Now we fight,” Entreri replied. “That was Alegni’s voice,” he added, and spat on the floor.

“Kill him, at least, before we die, then,” Dahlia said, and Entreri nodded grimly.

“Whatever you do, Drizzt, get me to him,” Entreri said. “I will salute you with my final moments of life, for whatever that might be worth to you.”

Drizzt regarded the two, standing so easily beside each other, both seeming perfectly comfortable with their fate—as long as they could get to Herzgo Alegni. He couldn’t imagine the hatred that drove them, and once again he was reminded of their unspoken bond, their sharing of something deeper, something he couldn’t comprehend, let alone partake.

Drizzt did recognize that either of them would die happy if that death came after the killing blow upon Herzgo Alegni. How could someone hate another so much, he wondered? What had happened, what violation, what violent betrayal or continued torture, to facilitate such venom?

A thunderous retort hit the door behind him, and Drizzt scrambled to set the chair frame back in place. He heard the report as a hail of missiles hit the door, and heard too the calls for pursuit and the multitude of footsteps.

He turned to view his friends, equally doomed, but found himself looking behind them, at the other door, which had silently opened.

Dahlia grunted, looked curiously at Drizzt, then collapsed to the ground.

A bolt of lightning hit the door behind Drizzt, crackling as it climbed around the metal and once more throwing the chair aside.

Drizzt started for Dahlia; he turned for the door.

Then he was blinded.

The drow had come.

Chapter 20: "Bregan d'Aerthe!"

Drizzt knew. He felt the sting of a crossbow bolt, and another and a third, and the ensuing, almost immediate burn of drow poison, familiar from so long ago, coursing through his veins.

He knew. He heard the thunder of the approaching Shadovar. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He wanted to fight at least, to offer some last and fitting expression of Drizzt Do’Urden. If this was his end, as surely he believed it to be, then it should match the way he lived his life.

He wondered about the afterlife, and hoped there was one, and a just one. One where he would find again his friends lost, find his love, Catti-brie, and he even managed a grin in the magical darkness as the strength left his knees, as the scimitars fell from his grasp, in imagining the meeting between Catti-brie and Dahlia.

The grin was gone before it even began. Catti-brie and Dahlia . . . and Drizzt.

He hoped he would find Catti-brie, for the thought of spending eternity beside Dahlia . . .

He was on the ground then, though he felt nothing. He resisted the drow poison enough to remain awake and somewhat cogent, but his physical abilities were absent, and not to soon return.

“Bregan D’aerthe!” he heard Artemis Entreri cry, and Drizzt hoped that perhaps this was Jarlaxle’s band, that perhaps they might survive.

Entreri clarified, “We’re agents of Bregan D’aerthe!”

Clever, Drizzt thought. Ever was Artemis Entreri clever—that is what made him doubly dangerous.

He sensed forms passing by him, moving over him, but he could not lash out at them, and thought that he should not lash out at them.

The irony of a drow rescue was not lost on the groggy and fast-sinking dark elf ranger, nor was the notion that it would indeed be a very short reprieve.

The room’s door burst open under the weight of ranks of Shadovar pressing forward.

A wall of poisoned crossbow bolts came at them. The room blackened before them. A second magical darkness engulfed their front ranks, and a third magical darkness hit the throng behind that one.

And in that confused frenzy, a fireball erupted, biting flames curling Shadovar skin, blistering Shadovar hands as they tried to hold to metal weapons. Turning and thrashing, disoriented in the darkness, tripping over the bodies of their front ranks lying helpless on the ground under the spell of drow poison, the charge abruptly halted.

“Press on!” Herzgo Alegni screamed from the back when he recognized the stall.

“Drow!” came the responding shouts. “The dark elves have come!”

“Effron!” Herzgo Alegni shouted. He hardly knew what to make of that, and certainly he didn’t want a battle with a drow force. But neither would he let that sword, or his hated enemies, Entreri and the wretched Dahlia, escape! He spotted the twisted warlock by the entrance to the tunnel in the room ahead of him.

“Fill the room with deadly magic!” Alegni yelled at the warlock.

“There are Shadovar in that room, my lord!” a shade lieutenant near to Alegni dared to argue.

Hardly thinking of the movement, hardly even registering his own reaction to the lieutenant’s words, Alegni punched the shade in the jaw, and the shade dropped to the floor in a heap.

“I will have them!” Alegni bellowed, and all around him cowered under the power of his voice and the very real threat behind his demands. “I will have that sword!” He regarded the shade he had hit. Normally, the warlord refrained from such public corporeal punishment of his charges, other than his open torment of Barrabus the Gray, of course. He put a hand out to help hoist the shade back to his feet, but when the lieutenant hesitated, staring at him suspiciously, Alegni retracted the hand and quietly warned, “The next time you so openly oppose my orders, I will answer with my sword.”

He moved forward to find Effron and his magic-wielding forces filling the room at the far end of the corridor with blazing lightning, clouds of acid, balls of fire, and bubbling poisonous ooze. Prodded by a continually yelling Alegni, their barrage of deadly magic went on and on, shaking the stones of Gauntlgrym.

They could see none of it, of course, as the drow darkness lingered, and finally as both barrage and darkness began to thin, the Shadovar forces pressed on.

To find an empty room, with not a body to be seen and the back door closed and sealed once more.

“They could not all have escaped,” Effron remarked when Alegni entered the scarred battlefield. “Some of our enemies were slain here, I am certain.”

“You’re guessing,” Alegni growled back at him.

“Reasoning. None could have withstood our concentrated assault.”

“You know little of the drow, I see.”

Effron shrugged, that curious motion with one of his shoulders always behind him.

“So some were killed,” Alegni mused. “Dahlia, do you think?”

Effron swallowed hard.

“You would not wish such a thing, would you, twisted boy?” Alegni teased. “To think her dead, but gone from you. To think her dead without you being able to witness the last light leaving her blue eyes. That would hurt most of all, wouldn’t it?”

Effron stared at him hatefully, not blinking. “Do you speak for me or for yourself?”

“If she is dead, then so be it,” Alegni said as convincingly as he could manage.

“And Barra—Artemis Entreri?”

“If he is dead, I will take up Charon’s Claw and bring him back, that I might torment him for another decade to repay him for his insolence and treachery.”

“He resisted the sword before. Could you ever trust him, or in your ability to control him, even with Claw back in your grasp?”

Alegni smiled at that, but didn’t really have an answer. In any case, both Dahlia and Entreri were gone, either still fleeing or dead. Or captured, Alegni mused, and under the control of these dark elves that had so suddenly appeared before his forces.

The tiefling warlord couldn’t hold to his smile, for the arrival of a sizable drow force, if it was indeed that, certainly complicated his quest.

“If they’re alive, and these were their allies, then they continue toward the primordial beast,” Alegni said to Effron and all of those nearby. “That is the worst potential, so continue our march. Fill these tunnels with Shadovar. Find that beast!”

“If they are dead and the drow have taken the sword, they will likely bargain its return,” Effron remarked quietly as the forces organized and set out once more.

Alegni nodded. “But we prepare for the more immediate potential.”

“We have lines of warriors strung out far ahead in the corridors,” Effron assured him. “We have found the main stair to the lower levels.”

“Send word of this new enemy, then,” Alegni ordered.

“We do not know them to be an enemy,” Effron reasoned.

That rang as curious in Alegni’s ears—hadn’t they just fought a vicious and quick exchange, after all?—but as he considered the suddenness with which the two alert and powerful forces had met, perhaps there was some truth to Effron’s claim. Perhaps the drow had inadvertently happened in the way of the Shadovar advance, and had reacted to force with force, as Alegni surely would have done.

Perhaps, but the desperate tiefling wasn’t about to take any chances.

“Get us to the primordial,” he told Effron, “with all haste and without mercy for any who stand in our way.”

Drizzt still had his scimitars and still had his bow, but they wouldn’t do him any good, even though his physical senses and abilities were beginning to return. Magical tentacles had grown out of the stone and grabbed him—and Entreri and Dahlia, who were seated back to back with him—fully immobilizing them all.

He heard Dahlia groan, only then beginning to awaken. Entreri was perfectly conscious, and Drizzt doubted that any of the bolts had even struck him.

“Bregan D’aerthe?” a finely dressed drow warrior standing before Drizzt remarked, his voice clearly full of doubt. “What’s your name?”

He was speaking in the high tongue of Menzoberranzan, a language Drizzt had not heard in a long, long time, but one that he recognized, and one that returned to him with amazing speed and clarity.

“Masoj,” Drizzt answered without hesitation, pulling out a name from his distant past.

The drow, a warrior noble if his dress and fine swords were to be believed, looked at him curiously.

“Masoj?” he asked. “Of what House?”

“Of no House he will admit,” Artemis Entreri put in, also speaking perfect Drow.