The woman wore a confused expression.
“The elf woman,” Entreri explained, his voice growing more insistent, more frantic. “She carried a metal staff. She was with me in Port Llast. Where is Dahlia?”
“There are others,” the woman answered and swallowed hard, clearly intimidated. She motioned down the tunnel.
“Wait here,” Drizzt bade her, and he and Entreri rushed off. Within a few moments, a bedraggled man limped up to join the woman, then a third miner limped into the room.
Drizzt and Entreri found just a few alcoves in this area, and soon broke out into another wide, descending tunnel, and it seemed as if there were no more work stations to be found, for this place, much like the center tunnel, dived more steeply now.
Drizzt motioned for Entreri to turn back, but the assassin sprinted out ahead anyway, his eyes peering through the gloom. “Dahlia?” he called softly.
Drizzt moved up beside him and put a hand on his shoulder to steady him. “We have to go,” he said. “We cannot pursue a drow army into the deeper Underdark.”
Entreri looked at him, and for a moment Drizzt thought the man might simply lash out.
“We have wounded,” Drizzt reminded.
Entreri’s shoulders slumped and he gave a long and profound sigh, then turned back, but as he did, he caught some movement out of the corner of his eye.
There was, after all, one more slave down here. She wasn’t working, though, when the pair came upon her, but sitting sullenly on a stone, facing the wall, head in her hands.
Entreri went for her shackle and just as she turned, Drizzt put a hand on her shoulder.
How the dwarf’s eyes widened with surprise and joy! She grabbed at Drizzt as if to hug him, and blurted his name—or tried to, but found her mouth filled with that sickly green spew and wound up coughing and spitting the cursed mucus all over the floor.
“Are there any more slaves?” Drizzt asked, pointing farther along the descending corridor.
“Dahlia?” Entreri asked, an edge of desperation growing in his tone.
Amber gave an emphatic shake of her head and pointed to her work area, then down the hallway, and shook her head again.
So they rushed back, gathered up the three humans they had rescued, and headed back to rejoin their friends.
Artemis Entreri glanced back over his shoulder with almost every step.
Dahlia hesitated. Her twitch showed discomfort. Something was wrong, something out of proportion and beyond reality.
Catti-brie.
The name screamed in her thoughts repeatedly. This was the ghost who had haunted Drizzt’s dreams. This was the woman who had ruined Dahlia’s life with Drizzt, who had tainted Dahlia’s love with Drizzt before it could even truly bloom. Were it not for her …
Dahlia found herself very near the altar stone then, facing the pit and Catti-brie, who stood across the block from her.
Dahlia moved to the right, Catti-brie similarly shifted sidelong to keep the stone between them.
“Dahlia?” the woman asked, and to hear this woman, Catti-brie, speaking her name stunned Dahlia as surely as a slap across the face.
“You are Dahlia, yes?” Catti-brie asked. “I have heard of you, from Drizzt.”
The words hardly registered to the elf woman. All she heard was a grating sound, a screeching sound, an annoying cackle at the back of her mind.
The only word that came clear to her was, again, “Catti-brie.”
Only when the woman reacted did Dahlia even realize that she had spoken the name aloud.
Dahlia’s thoughts swirled back to the side of Kelvin’s Cairn in faraway Icewind Dale, where Drizzt had spurned her, had betrayed her, had chosen this … this ghost above her. No strike had ever wounded Dahlia as profoundly as the one she had delivered upon Drizzt, and with the hope of killing him.
She had to kill him.
He was the source of all of her pain, of all of her misery. It was because of him that Dahlia had gone to Port Llast, had been captured by the drow, had been tortured …
She felt the tentacles of the awful illithid wriggling inside of her.
But wait, she thought, and she shook her head, for that mind flayer had told her the truth, at least. Where no one else ever had, the mind flayer had made so much clear to Dahlia.
“No, not Drizzt,” she whispered, and Catti-brie wore a puzzled expression.
“From Drizzt,” the woman reiterated, but Dahlia didn’t hear.
“Because of you,” Dahlia said pointedly. “Because of you, ghost!” She watched Catti-brie shaking her head, then bending low to retrieve her dropped bow.
The bow!
Oh, but Dahlia knew that bow! She thought of fighting beside Drizzt, of their brilliant teamwork when she intercepted his lightning arrows and re-directed the magical energy to more pointed ends.
She knew that bow, Drizzt’s bow, and now this woman—this ghost held it, as if mocking her, as if mocking the love Dahlia had known with Drizzt.
A low and feral growl escaped her lips.
“Dahlia?” Catti-brie said, her voice calm and intentionally disarming. “Be at ease, Dahlia, I am not your enemy.”
The altar thrummed to life before her, calling Dahlia to action, telling her to rise and vanquish this ghost, this woman who had caused her so much pain, this disciple of evil Mielikki.
Dahlia barely registered the stream of thoughts, but she surely understood the call and promise of the altar stone before her. She sent her flail into a spin, banging them together, building a charge, then pounded them repeatedly on the altar, and the throbbing black energy pulsed within and lent her weapon more magical power.
“Dahlia!” Catti-brie called to her, and Dahlia noted that the woman had backed from the altar, then had moved toward the tunnel to the Forge.
But she would not escape, Dahlia knew. Not from here.
“Destroy her!” Dahlia heard herself shout to the jade spider beside that tunnel, and surely the elf warrior would have been surprised had she stepped back from her rising emotions enough to decipher her own words, for how could she know the spider as an ally?
Wulfgar brought Aegis-fang up over his shoulder and swung it across with all his strength. With a resounding thud and a reverberation that ran back up the barbarian’s arms, rippling his muscles under the tremendous vibrations, it struck the door dead center, right in the heart of the drider-like image of Lolth the drow craftsmen had constructed of black adamantine.
And bounced off, and neither the door nor the bas relief of Lolth showed as much as a scratch.
“Oh, me girl!” Bruenor yelled, pushing in past Wulfgar, who staggered aside under the weight of his own blow.
Regis, too, rushed for the door.
“Pick it, Rumblebelly!” Bruenor implored him.
Regis glanced all around the portal and the new archway, and ran his fingers over the smooth, cool metal. “Pick what?” he asked, completely at a loss and holding his hands out helplessly, for there was no sign of a lock or even a handle to be found.
“Bah!” Bruenor snorted and he hopped to the side and pulled Aegis-fang from Wulfgar, then leaped back for the door, Regis tumbling aside.
Bruenor noted the inscription on the warhammer’s head, the symbols of his three gods overlaid, and from that reminder, he drew strength.
Great strength, the might of Clangeddin, and he slammed the warhammer into the door with tremendous power, rattling the stones of the Forge.
“Me girl!” he cried, and he hit the door again, as mighty a stroke as Wulfgar had delivered, at least.
“Me girl!”
He felt the power of Clangeddin coursing his veins, growing within him.
Tirelessly he pounded the portal.
But it showed not a scratch.
Catti-brie watched the woman slack-jawed, hardly believing the sudden rage that had come over Dahlia, who stood opposite the altar block, wildly banging her flail against the hard stone, her face a twisted mask of anger.
/> And Dahlia screamed to the spider, a pony-sized beast behind Catti-brie, and with another across the way, and, she then noticed, with thousands of fist-sized arachnids gathering on the wall of webbing.
Catti-brie turned fast, setting an arrow as she went. She called to the primordial, demanding help, as she drew back and let fly.
The lever! the ancient beast replied in her mind.
The spider shrieked horribly as the arrow blasted into it, throwing it back a skittering step.
“I cannot get to it! My way is blocked by enemies!” Catti-brie yelled in her thoughts and aloud, but in a language she could not consciously understand, a crackling, popping, sizzling series of sounds that made little sense to her human sensibilities—or to Dahlia’s elven sensibilities as well, Catti-brie could see from looking at the woman, who paused in her drumming to stare incredulously.
A second arrow followed the first at the nearby jade spider, and a third and fourth went quickly after, and the spider shrieked and ran off down the tunnel.
Catti-brie pivoted, turning the bow upon Dahlia, who now stood on the altar, flail swinging easily.
“I don’t want to kill you,” she started to say, but the floor rumbled and rolled, a great roar from the primordial below, and Catti-brie was knocked to one knee as Dahlia leaped off the side of the altar, away from the pit.
Hissing and steam came from the pit and a burst of fiery magma leaped up over the ledge to crash down in a pile behind Dahlia and the altar, between the elf woman and the second of her spiders.
And not just normal, insentient lava rock—she heard its throaty grumble. She reached out to it through her ring, and it heard her call and rose up on two rocky legs. The jade spider nearby reared on its back legs and shrieked in angry protest and the magma elemental came on, unafraid.
“Brilliant,” Dahlia congratulated, but seemed hardly concerned. Again she put her flail into a spin and now began advancing slowly on the woman with the bow.
“Drizzt is with me,” Catti-brie said. “He is here, in Gauntlgrym—”
“Q’Xorlarrin,” Dahlia corrected, and kept coming.
“You don’t have to do this,” Catti-brie pleaded with her. Looking past her, Catti-brie saw the jade spider go up into the air, its eight legs slapping and kicking at the elemental, mandibles biting in and breaking stone.
“Dahlia, I am not your enemy.”
The elf woman laughed at her and continued her advance, now only a few short steps away. And from behind, Catti-brie heard the first spider’s return along the small tunnel behind her to the right.
Dahlia charged and Catti-brie let fly, the arrow aimed for the woman’s belly, center mass. Catti-brie winced, thinking she had surely slain this poor elf, yet the arrow did not strike home but simply disappeared.
And Dahlia’s flail sparked with crawling, arcing sparks of energy all the more.
Catti-brie turned Taulmaril out defensively, like a staff, parrying the first strike. But Dahlia came in at her in a blur, spinning left and right, one flying weapon going out left, the other right. Desperately, Catti-brie worked her bow in a circle, creating a spinning wall to block, but it could not hold, and she was not surprised when a flail slipped through her defenses and smacked her painfully across the thigh, nearly laying her low.
And then she was surprised when Dahlia released the lightning energy collected by her weapon, the jarring bolt throwing Catti-brie back through the air, to crash in hard against the wall—and only the wall was holding her up.
Her mind spun as the elf stalked in for the kill. She tried to sort out her remaining spells, but they were few indeed, and none to lash out quickly or to properly defend.
“A ghost once more!” Dahlia cried triumphantly and rushed in, and Catti-brie dropped her bow and brought her hands up, at first defensively, but hardly thinking, she touched her thumbs together in a familiar pose and met the elf woman’s charge with another fan of flame from burning hands.
Dahlia screamed and fell back, batting her arms at the biting fires, and Catti-brie looked at her hands, confused. She had no such spells remaining in her repertoire that day.
“The ring,” she breathed, but before she could consider it, she saw movement from the side, from a charging, rearing spider, its mandibles dripping with deadly poison, and she fell to the floor desperately.
The rumbling belch of the primordial reverberated in the stone foundations of Gauntlgrym and into the Underdark tunnels below.
Drizzt, Entreri, Ambergris, and the three rescued humans felt it keenly, the tunnel around them growling with vibrations.
Drizzt and Entreri exchanged concerned looks, understanding the implications both for their companions back in the Forge and, for Entreri, the possibility that he would never get out of this dark place alive. They started ahead more swiftly, but Drizzt paused and turned to Ambergris.
“Turn left at the end of this passage and follow the right-hand wall of the next into the Forge,” he instructed and the dwarf nodded.
And Drizzt and Entreri sprinted ahead, the assassin still laboring a bit on his wounded knee.
The companions in the Forge felt the growling, too, and knowing that Catti-brie had gone into that primordial chamber—and with Bruenor knowing exactly what was in that place—they pressed on furiously with their work on the door. Bruenor in particular threw himself against it, trying to wedge his fingers in between the door and the jamb that he might tug it open.
“Girl!” he cried. “Oh, me girl!” and he fought furiously with the metal portal. And he yelled for Clangeddin to give him strength, and sought the god in his thoughts and memories of the throne above.
“No, dwarf,” came a call from the side, the weak voice of Afafrenfere. All the others turned to regard the monk, who was sitting up now, and even that with great effort, obviously.
“Not that god,” Afafrenfere advised. “You’ll not muscle the door.”
“Eh?” a confused Bruenor asked.
“Three gods for the dwarves, yes?” the monk asked.
Bruenor started to argue, but stopped short and looked at Afafrenfere curiously, hands on his hips.
“Eh?” he asked again, but this time he was speaking more to himself than to the monk.
The snapping mandibles were barely a hand’s breadth from her face when Catti-brie leveled Taulmaril and fired an arrow into the face of the jade monstrosity. The spider’s shrill screech echoed off the walls of the chamber and it staggered back a shuffle of steps.
Catti-brie shot it again.
She turned to Dahlia and let fly another arrow, but low, to slam into the ground before the elf woman, the force and jolt sending Dahlia scrambling backward.
Catti-brie spun back on the spider and charged, drawing closer, and shot it again, and again. It tried to run away, but the woman pursued, pouring a line of lightning arrows into it, breaking it apart. One leg fell free, then a second and finally, with a great shriek, the spider rolled over and shuddered in its death throes.
And Catti-brie whirled back and shot the ground at Dahlia’s feet as the stubborn woman came on. The elf warrior was holding a staff now, though, and not her flail, and she drove it down to the stone, and though she shuddered, it seemed to Catti-brie that her magical weapon had eaten the brunt of the blow. Indeed, it crackled once more with lightning energy, and Dahlia strained, it seemed, to hold on.
Catti-brie had no choice, and so she let fly another stream of lightning missiles, at the ground before the woman and at the woman, an explosive barrage that sent sparks flying wildly all around the center of the chamber. Catti-brie advanced, arrows flying, and Dahlia staggered under every blow, grunting and growling.
Sparks flew off and dived into the primordial pit. Sparks showered the webbing, burning into the flammable material and sending spiders scurrying all around.
Beyond Dahlia, through the crackling volley, Catti-brie noted the magma elemental standing tall, holding the thrashing jade spider up over its head as it stomped for the pit. She
entertained the notion of bringing the elemental in against Dahlia, to catch her, perhaps, and hold her, for she did not want to kill this elf woman.
The elemental threw the spider into the pit and swung around to Catti-brie’s call. It took a long stride at Dahlia, heading to Catti-brie’s defense, but before it put its foot down to the stone, it hesitated weirdly, and seemed as if stuck in place, struggling mightily.
And Catti-brie understood and winced.
For in its dying fall, the jade spider had spat its webbing back at the elemental, the filaments grabbing hold well enough to tug it suddenly and violently.
The elemental pitched backward over the ledge, tumbling from sight and from the battle.
And Catti-brie shot Dahlia again, and the elf trembled violently as the energy of the staff crackled and jerked her around.
But Dahlia settled and screamed and charged, planting the pole and vaulting high just as Catti-brie shot the stone beneath her.
And Catti-brie also charged, fortunately so, for she slid down and crossed under the leaping Dahlia, and skidded up to her feet and ran off the other way, calling to the primordial, calling to her ring.
She leaped atop the altar and sprang away.
And felt very sickly immediately from simply contacting the foul stone.
She landed and she staggered, and she cried out against a demonic voice laughing in her mind.
She feared that Dahlia was coming in fast behind her, and with a staff bristling with mighty energy.
She knew she had to turn around and drive the woman back with more arrows, to overload the staff if that was possible, or at least to force it from Dahlia’s grasp with the sheer strength of the teeming magical energy.
But she couldn’t turn and she couldn’t shoot, and it was all she could do to hold onto Taulmaril. Then she stumbled down to the floor.
And the demon in her thoughts, the Demon Queen of Spiders, laughed.
It was too much power—she should not have been able to hold it.
But she was, her hands tightly clenched on the staff, crackling lightning rolling up and down it, rolling up and down her, as well. The braid atop her head danced weirdly.