Neverwinter (Neverwinter #2)

Neverwinter (Neverwinter #2) Page 2

Drizzt forced his focus in front of him, to the road and the torches down to his right, approaching quickly. He nodded in recognition as a wagon came into view, driven hard by an obviously flummoxed man. His companion crouched beside him, bow drawn, looking behind over the back of the bench seat. Behind the wagon came three other torches, all carried by men running hard to catch up—no, not to catch up, Drizzt realized, but to keep up. These were not the enemies from which the wagon fled. If that had been the case, then surely the archer would have had little trouble in knocking them down.

Barely thirty yards away, one of the trailing torch carriers went down.

“Shoot them! Shoot them!” another of the trailing runners, a woman, shouted desperately.

Drizzt’s hand went to Taulmaril, his bow. He gave a little whistle, one Guenhwyvar knew, and the panther revealed herself on a tree branch across the road from him. Drizzt motioned to the path of the oncoming wagon.

Out leaped the panther to the middle of the road, to face the approaching wagon.

The horse team started to veer.

Guenhwyvar roared, like the rumble of boulders, the sheer strength of that call echoing throughout the forests and hills for a league. The horses skidded to a stop, rearing and neighing and kicking their forelegs in terror.

The jolt almost knocked the archer from the bench seat.

“Shoot it!” the driver yelled, working furiously to control the shuddering wagon. “Shoot it dead! Oh, by the gods!”

The archer managed to swing around, his eyes going wide as he spotted the source of the roar. He brought his bow up, his hands shaking.

A streak of silver, like a small bolt of lightning, cut the air right in front of the two men, startling them further, so much so that the arrow slipped from the bowstring. Oblivious to the disarmament, the archer let fly, and the arrow tumbled harmlessly. The man shrieked and the bow jumped, nearly tumbling from his grasp.

The horses continued to rear and whinny, even after the panther jumped back into the brush, disappearing from sight.

“Bowman to the side!” yelled one of the trailing runners, at last nearing the wagon, and both she and her companion veered Drizzt’s way in a brave charge.

He wasn’t going to shoot them dead, of course, for he still had no idea if these were friends or foes. So he dropped Taulmaril to the ground and drew forth his blades defensively.

He needn’t have bothered.

The nearest attacker, a tall and gangly man still many strides from Drizzt, gave a howl and lifted his sword up over his head. Then a lithe elf form swung down agilely from the branch above, her legs hooked and secure. With the momentum of the movement, Dahlia smacked the charging man on the forehead with her long staff and sent him to the ground, his sword flying away.

Dahlia came forward, letting go with her legs to spin down in a landing so balanced that it seemed somehow casual. Even as she touched down, she gracefully sprang right over the sitting and dazed man. The woman, just a couple of strides ahead, tried to get her spear in line, but Dahlia slipped down low as she swept past her, her staff sweeping in to take the woman’s feet out from under her.

Back on the road, the archer cried for the driver to ride on. But just as the horses began to run, Guenhwyvar leaped into the middle of the road and roared again. The terrified team reared and shrieked in protest.

From the edge of the road, Drizzt noted the third of the trailing runners—the one who had gone down hard—stumbling in the darkness, his torch sputtering in the rain far behind on the road. Drizzt paid him no heed and sprinted for the wagon, which had gone past him to his left. Though it was no longer moving, Drizzt saw the archer come up facing him, bow reset and drawn.

Drizzt dropped to his knees, sliding across the mud as the arrow went harmlessly above him. He came up right behind the wagon bed and leaped high with his momentum, easily clearing the low tailgate. As soon as he set his feet firmly, he leaped again, tucking his legs to clear the bench and the ducking drivers, and turning as he went so he landed at the base of the yoke, facing the two men. The team continued to rear and struggle, but the jostling didn’t bother the agile drow at all. He held his scimitars level in front of the faces of his captives.

“Take it all, but don’t ye kill me, I beg,” the driver desperately pleaded, his open palms waving and shaking up beside his wide, wet face. “Please, good sir.”

The other man dropped his bow, covered his face with his hands, and began to weep.

“Who is chasing you?” Drizzt asked the drivers.

They seemed flummoxed by the unexpected question.

“Who?” Drizzt demanded.

“Highwaymen,” said the archer. “A foul band o’ ne’er-do-wells thinking to steal our goods and cut our throats!”

Drizzt looked at Dahlia, who had come out on the road to face down the third runner, who stood with his hands up in surrender, obviously wanting no part of a fight with her.

“Who are you and where are you from?” Drizzt asked.

“Port Llast,” answered the archer, at the same time the driver said, “Luskan.”

Drizzt eyed them suspiciously.

“Out o’ Luskan, but coming back on our way through Port Llast,” the archer explained.

“Commissioned by the high captains,” the driver quickly added, and he seemed to gain some confidence.

“Carrying?”

“Food, wine, goods,” the driver said, but the archer tried to halt him, putting his hand out across the man’s chest.

“Carryin’ what we’re carryin’ and what business is it o’ yer own?” the archer asked.

Drizzt grinned at him wickedly and the man seemed to deflate, perhaps reminded that the high captains wouldn’t offer him much of a defense against a simple thrust of the scimitar that hovered barely a hand’s-breadth from his face.

A ruckus farther down the road indicated that the pursuit was nearing.

“If I find you’re lying to me then know we will meet again long before you see the lights of Port Llast.” Drizzt withdrew his blades and flipped them over before neatly sliding them back into their scabbards. “Now be gone!”

He tipped a salute and leaped between the men, over the back of the bench. He helped the three stragglers up into the wagon then watched as it sped on its way.

“Letting them go?” Dahlia came up beside him. “How noble of you.” She handed him Taulmaril and the quiver Drizzt had dropped before his charge at the wagon.

“Would you have me steal their goods and slay them?”

“The first, at least.”

Drizzt stared at her. “They’re simple merchants.”

“Yes, from Luskan, I heard. Simple men in the employ of the high captains—pirates one and all, and they who destroyed that city.”

Drizzt tried to hold steady against that truth—a truth that he, who had been in the City of Sails during the fall of his dear friend Captain Deudermont, knew all too well, and all too painfully.

“So what they’re carrying is ill-gotten from the start, then, and which highwayman is which, Drizzt Do’Urden?” said Dahlia.

“You twist everything to suit your conclusions.”

“Or everything is twisted to begin with, and few are what they seem, and a good man does evil and a beggar is a thief.”

More noise sounded from down the road.

“We will finish this discussion later,” Drizzt said, and he motioned for Guenhwyvar to take a position in the brush.

“To no conclusion that will satisfy the idealist drow,” Dahlia assured him, and she too sprinted off into the brush at the side of the road.

Drizzt thought to follow, but the sound of galloping horses, and Dahlia’s words stabbing at his thoughts, changed his mind. He lifted his bow, setting an arrow and leveling it.

A quartet of riders came into view a moment later, tightly grouped and leaning low against the driving rain.

Drizzt drew back, thinking he could strike down two with a single shot, for it would take more than a man’s girth to halt a bolt from Taulmaril.

“Beggar man or thief?” he whispered.

The riders neared, and one held a sword up high.

Drizzt dipped the angle of the bow and let fly. A sizzling blue-white flash rent the air, momentarily stealing the night, and the arrow burrowed into the road in front of the riders, blasting through cobblestone and dirt with a thunderous report.

The horses reared and bucked. One rider went tumbling, and hung desperately from the side of the saddle. The other two fared better, until Dahlia came soaring out of the trees to the side. Her staff clipped one hard as she stretched out and double-kicked the other.

And then came Guenhwyvar, and the horses spun and bucked and reared in terror.

Dahlia hit the ground with a twist and roll, came right back to her feet, and swung around. She planted her staff to vault up high once more, this time kicking the female rider she had struck with her staff. To the woman’s credit, she still held her seat, but Dahlia wasn’t done with her. As she landed, the elf whipped her staff out to strike the rider again, and this time sent a burst of magical lightning through the metal pole. Shaking uncontrollably, her hair dancing, her limbs waving wildly, the woman had no chance of remaining on her turning, terrified horse, and down she tumbled.

Three of the horses rushed away, riderless. Guenhwyvar kept the fourth turning and turning, the poor rider hanging on to the side.

“More are coming,” Dahlia called to Drizzt when he joined her above the three prone highwaymen, his scimitars informing two that they would be wise to lie still.

“But don’t ye kill me, Master Do’Urden!” one middle-aged man whimpered. “Be sure that I ain’t no enemy o’ yers!”

Drizzt looked at him with puzzlement, not recognizing the man at all.

“You know him?” Dahlia asked.

Drizzt shook his head and demanded of the man, “How do you know my name?”

“Just a guess, good sir!” the man cried. “The cat, the lightning bow, the blades ye carry …”

“Guen!” Drizzt called.

Off to the side, the panther was getting a bit carried away with her game, and had the poor horse spinning furiously. As the panther backed off and the horse stopped its spinning, only then did the dizzy highwayman fall to the ground.

“Ye’re Drizzt?” the fallen woman asked, her teeth still chattering from the residual lightning.

“That a highwayman would find that a comforting possibility perplexes me,” the drow replied.

The woman gave a snort and shook her head.

“They have friends approaching,” Dahlia warned. “Finish them or let’s be on our way.”

Drizzt considered the ragtag group for a few heartbeats then flipped his scimitars into their scabbards. He even offered the man who’d recognized him his hand and hoisted him up to his feet.

“I’ve no love for the high captains of Luskan,” Drizzt explained to the highwaymen. “Only that fact spares you the blade this day. But know that I will be watching you, and any assault upon an innocent will be viewed as an attack upon my own body.”

“And that’s it, then?” asked the woman, looking miserable and beaten. “We’re to forage and starve so as not to offend the sensibilities of the great Drizzt Do’Urden?”