“Acid,” Belwar explained.
Drizzt looked at him curiously. He knew of acid from his days of training under the wizards of Sorcere in the Academy. Wizards often concocted such vile liquids for use their magical experiments, but Drizzt did not figure that acid would appear naturally, or in such quantities.
“Some wizard’s working, I would guess,” said Belwar. “An experiment out of control. It has probably been here for a hundred years, eating away at the floor, sinking down inch by inch.”
“But what remains of the floor seems secure enough,” observed Drizzt, pointing to the walkways. “And we have a score of tunnels to choose from.”
“Then let us begin at once,” said Belwar. “I do not like this place. We are exposed in the light, and I would not care to take quick flight along such narrow bridges―not with a lake of acid below me!”
Drizzt agreed and took a cautious step out on the walkway, but Guenhwyvar quickly moved past him. Drizzt understood the panther’s logic and wholeheartedly agreed.
“Guenhwyvar will lead us,” he explained to Belwar. “The panther is the heaviest and quick enough to spring away if a section begins to fall.”
The burrow-warden was not completely satisfied. “What if Guenhwyvar does not make it to safety?” he asked, truly concerned. “What will the acid do to a magical creature?”
Drizzt wasn’t certain of the answer. “Guenhwyvar should be safe,” he reasoned, pulling the onyx figurine from his pocket. “I hold the gateway to the panther’s home plane.”
Guenhwyvar was a dozen strides away by then―the walkway seemed sturdy enough―and Drizzt set out to follow. “Magga cammara, I pray you are right.” he heard Belwar mumble at his back as he took the first steps out from the ledge.
The chamber was huge, several hundred feet across even to the nearest exit. The companions neared the halfway point―Guenhwyvar had already passed it―when they heard a strange chanting sound. They stopped and glanced about, searching for the source.
A weird-looking creature stepped out from one of the numerous side passages. It was bipedal and black skinned, with a beaked bird’s head and the torso of a man, featherless and wingless. Both of its powerful-looking arms ended in hooked, wicked claws, and its legs ended in three-toed feet. Another creature stepped out from behind it, and another from behind them.
“Relatives?” Belwar asked Drizzt, for the creatures did indeed resemble some weird cross between a dark elf and a bird.
“Hardly.” Drizzt replied. “In all of my life, I have never heard of such creatures.”
“Doom! Doom!” came the continuing chant, and the friends looked around to see more of the bird-men stepping out from other passages. They were dire corbies, an ancient race more common to the southern reaches of the Underdark―though rare even there―and almost unknown in this part of the world. Corbies had never been of much concern to any of the Underdark races, for the bird-men’s methods were crude and their numbers were small. For a passing band of adventurers, however, a flock of savage dire corbies meant trouble indeed.
“Nor have I ever encountered such creatures,” Belwar agreed. “But I do not believe that they are pleased to see us.”
The chant became a series of horrifying shrieks as the corbies began to disperse out onto the walkways, walking at first, but occasionally breaking into quick trots, their anxiety obviously increasing.
“You are wrong, my little friend,” Drizzt remarked. “I believe that they are quite pleased to have their dinner delivered to them.”
Belwar looked around helplessly. Nearly all of their escape routes were already cut off, and they couldn’t hope to get out without a fight. “Dark elf, I can think of a thousand places I would rather do battle,” the burrow-warden said with a resigned shrug and a shudder as he took another look down into the acid lake. Taking a deep breath to calm himself, Belwar began his ritual to enchant his magical hands.
“Move while you chant,” Drizzt instructed him, leading him on. “Let us get as close to an exit as we can before the fighting begins.”
One group of corbies closed rapidly at the party’s side, but Guenhwyvar, with a mighty spring that spanned two of the walkways, cut the bird-men off.
“Bivrip!” Belwar cried, completing his spell, and he turned toward the impending battle.
“Guenhwyvar can take care of that group,” Drizzt assured him, quickening his steps toward the nearest wall. Belwar saw the drow’s reasoning; still another group of enemies had come out of the exit they were making for.
The momentum of Guenhwyvar’s leap carried the panther straight into the pack of corbies, bowling two of them right off the walkway. The bird-men shrieked horribly as they fell to their deaths, but their remaining companions seemed unbothered by the loss. Drooling and chanting, “Doom! Doom!” they tore in at Guenhwyvar with their sharp talons.
The panther had formidable weapons of its own. Each swat of a great claw tore the life from a corby or sent it tumbling from the walkway to the acid lake. But, while the cat continued to slash into the bird-men’s ranks, the fearless corbies continued to fight back, and more rushed in eagerly to join. A second group came from the opposite direction and surrounded Guenhwyvar.
Belwar set himself on a narrow section of the walkway and let the line of corbies come to him. Drizzt, taking a parallel route along a walkway fifteen feet to his friend’s side, did likewise, drawing his scimitars somewhat reluctantly. The drow could feel the savage instincts of the hunter welling up within him as the battle drew near, and he fought back with all of his willpower to sublimate the wild urges. He was Drizzt Do’Urden, no more the hunter, and he would face his foes fully in control of his every movement.
Then the corbies were upon him, flailing away, shrieking their frenzied chants. Drizzt did little more than parry in those first seconds, the flats of his blades working marvelously to deflect each attempted strike. The scimitars spun and whirled, but the drow, refusing to loose the killer within him, made little headway in his fight. After several minutes, he still faced off against the first corby that had come at him.
Belwar was not so reserved. Corby after corby rushed in at the little svirfneblin, only to be pounded to a sudden halt by the burrow-warden’s explosive hammer-hand. The electrical jolt and the sheer force of the blow often killed the corby where it stood, but Belwar never waited long enough to find out. Following each hammer blow, the deep gnome’s pickaxe-hand came across in a roundhouse arc, sweeping the latest victim from the walkway.
The svirfneblin had dropped a half-dozen of the bird-men before he got the chance to look over at Drizzt. He recognized at once the inner struggle the drow was fighting.
“Magga cammara!” Belwar screamed. “Fight them, dark elf, and fight to win! They will show no mercy! There can be no truce! Kill them―cut them down―or surely they shall kill you!”
Drizzt hardly heard Belwar’s words. Tears rimmed his lavender eyes, though even in that blur, the almost magical rhythm of his weaving blades did not slow. He caught his opponent off balance and reversed the motion of a thrust, slamming the bird-man in the head with the pommel of his scimitar. The corby dropped like a stone and rolled. It would have fallen from the ledge, but Drizzt stepped across it and held it in place.
Belwar shook his head and belted another adversary. The corby hopped backward, its chest smoking and charred by the jarring impact of the enchanted hammer-hand. The corby looked at Belwar in blank disbelief, but uttered not a sound, nor made any move at all, as the pickaxe hooked in, catching it in the shoulder and launching it out over the acid lake.
Guenhwyvar flustered the hungry attackers. As the corbies closed in on the panther’s back, thinking the kill at hand, Guenhwyvar crouched and sprang. The panther soared through the green light as though it had taken flight, landing on yet another of the walkways fully thirty feet away. Skidding on the smooth stone, Guenhwyvar just managed to halt before toppling over the ledge into the acid pool.
The corbies glanced around
in stunned amazement for just a moment, then took up their shrieks and wails and set off along the walkways in pursuit.
A single corby, near where Guenhwyvar had landed, ran fearlessly to battle the cat. Guenhwyvar’s teeth found its neck in an instant and squeezed the life from it. But while the panther was so engaged, the corbies’ devilish trap showed another twist. From far above in the high-ceilinged cavern, a corby at last saw a victim in position. The bird-man wrapped its arms around the heavy boulder on the ledge beside it and pushed out, dropping with the stone.
At the last second, Guenhwyvar saw the plummeting monster and scrambled out of its path. The corby, in its suicidal ecstacy, didn’t even care. The bird-man slammed into the walkway, the momentum of the heavy boulder shattering the narrow bridge to pieces.
The great panther tried to spring out again, but the stone underneath Guenhwyvar’s feet disintegrated before they could set and spring. Claws scratching futilely at the crumbling bridge, Guenhwyvar followed the corby and its boulder down into the acid lake.
Hearing the elated shouts of the bird-men behind him, Belwar spun about just in time to see Guenhwyvar’s fall. Drizzt, too engaged at the time―for another corby flailed away at him and the one he had dropped was stirring back to consciousness between his feet―did not see. But the drow did not have to see. The figurine in Drizzt’s pocket heated suddenly, wisps of smoke rising ominously from Drizzt’s piwafwi cloak. Drizzt could guess easily enough what had happened to his dear Guenhwyvar. The drow’s eyes narrowed, their sudden fire melting away his tears.
He welcomed the hunter.
Corbies fought with fury. The highest honor of their existence was to die in battle. And those closest to Drizzt Do’Urden soon realized that the moment of their highest honor was upon them.
The drow thrust both his scimitars straight out, each finding an eye of the corby facing him. The hunter pulled out the blades, spun them over in his hands, and plunged them down into the bird-man at his feet. He snapped the scimitars up immediately and plunged them down again, taking grim satisfaction in the sound of their smooth cut.
Then the drow dived headlong into the corbies ahead of him, his blades cutting in from every possible angle hit a dozen times before it ever launched a single swing, the first corby was quite dead before it even fell. Then the second, then the third. Drizzt backed them up to a wider section of the walkway. They came at him three at a time.
They died at his feet three at a time.
“Get them, dark elf.” mumbled Belwar, seeing his friend explode into action. The corby coming to meet the burrow-warden turned its head to see what had caught Belwar’s attention. When it turned back, it was met squarely in the face by the deep gnome’s hammer-hand. Pieces of beak flew in every direction, and that unfortunate corby was the first of its species to take flight in several millennium of evolution. Its short airborne excursion pushed its companions back from the deep gnome, and the corby landed, dead on its back, many feet from Belwar.
The enraged deep gnome wasn’t finished with this one. He raced up, bowling from the walkway the single corby who managed to get back to intercept him. When he arrived at last at his beakless victim, Belwar drove his pickaxe-hand deep into its chest. With that single muscled arm, the burrow-warden hoisted the dead corby high into the air and let out a horrifying shriek of his own.
The other corbies hesitated. Belwar looked to Drizzt and was dismayed. A score of corbies crowded in on the wide section of the walkway where the drow made his stand. Another dozen lay dead at Drizzt feet, their blood running off the ledge and dripping into the acid lake in rhythmic hissing plops. But it wasn’t the odds that Belwar feared; with his precise movements and measured thrusts, Drizzt was undeniably winning. High above the drow, though, another suicidal corby and his pet rock took a dive.
Belwar believed that Drizzt’s life had come to a crashing end.
But the hunter sensed the peril.
A corby reached for Drizzt. With a flash of the drow’s scimitars, both its arms flew free of their respective shoulders. In the same dazzling movement, Drizzt snapped his bloodied scimitars into their sheaths and bolted for the edge of the platform. He reached the lip and leaped out toward Belwar just as the suicidal boulder-riding corby crashed down, taking the platform and a score of its kin with it into the acid pool.
Belwar heaved his beakless trophy into the corbies facing him and dropped to his knees, reaching out with his pickaxe-hand to try to aid his soaring friend. Drizzt caught the burrow-warden’s hand and the ledge at the same time, slamming his face into the stone but finding a hold.
The jolt ripped the drow’s piwafwi, though, and Belwar watched helplessly as the onyx figurine rolled out and dropped toward the acid.
Drizzt caught it between his feet.
Belwar nearly laughed aloud at the futility and hopelessness of it all. He looked over his shoulder to see the corbies resuming their advance.
“Dark elf, surely it has been fun.” the svirfneblin said resignedly to Drizzt, but the drow’s response stole the levity from Belwar as surely as it stole the blood from the deep gnome’s face.
“Swing me!” Drizzt growled so powerfully that Belwar obeyed before he even realized what he was doing. Drizzt rolled out and came swinging back toward the walkway, and when he bounced into the stone, every muscle in his body jerked violently to aid his momentum.
He rolled right around the bottom of the walkway, scrambling and clawing with his arms and legs to gain a footing back up behind the crouching deep gnome. By the time Belwar realized what Drizzt had done and thought to turn around, Drizzt had his scimitars out and slicing across the face of the first approaching corby.
“Hold this,” Drizzt bade his friend, flicking the onyx figurine to Belwar with his toe. Belwar caught the item between his arms and fumbled it into a pocket. Then the deep gnome stood back and watched, taking up a rear guard, as Drizzt cut a devastating path to the nearest exit.
Five minutes later, to Belwar’s absolute amazement, they were running free down a darkened tunnel, the frustrated shrieks of “Doom! Doom!” fast fading behind them.
Chapter 13.
A Little Place to Call Home
“Enough. Enough!” the winded burrow-warden gasped at Drizzt, trying to slow his companion. “Magga cammara, dark elf. We have left them far behind.”
Drizzt spun on the burrow-warden, scimitars ready in hand and angry fires burning still in his lavender eyes. Belwar backed away quickly and cautiously.
“Calm, my friend,” the svirfneblin said quietly, but despite the reassurance, the burrow-warden’s mithril hands came defensively in front of him. “The threat to us is ended.”
Drizzt breathed deeply to steady himself, then, realizing that he had not put his scimitars away, promptly slipped them into their sheaths.
“Are you all right?” Belwar asked, moving back to Drizzt’s side. Blood smeared the drow’s face from where he had slammed into the side of the walkway.
Drizzt nodded. “It was the fight,” he tried vainly to explain. “The excitement. I had to let go of―”
“You need not explain,” Belwar cut him short. “You did fine, dark elf. Better than fine. Had it not been for your actions, we, all three, surely would have fallen.”
“It came back to me,” Drizzt groaned, searching for the words that could explain. “That darker part of me. I had thought it gone.”
“It is,” the burrow-warden said.
“No,” argued Drizzt. “That cruel beast that I have become possessed me fully against those bird-men. It guided my blades, savagely and without mercy.”
“You guided your own blades,” Belwar assured him.
“But the rage,” replied Drizzt. “The unthinking rage. All I wanted to do was kill them and hack them down.”
“If that was the truth, we would be there still,” reasoned the svirfneblin. “By your actions, we escaped. There are many more of the bird-men back there to be killed, yet you led the way from the chamber. Rage
? Perhaps, but surely not unthinking rage. You did as you had to do, and you did it well, dark elf. Better than anyone I have ever seen. Do not apologize, to me or to yourself!”
Drizzt leaned back against the wall to consider the words. He was comforted by the deep gnome’s reasoning and appreciated Belwar’s efforts. Still, though, the burning fires of rage he had felt when Guenhwyvar fell into the acid lake haunted him, an emotion so overwhelming that Drizzt had not yet come to terms with it. He wondered if he ever would.
In spite of his uneasiness, though, Drizzt felt comforted by the presence of his svirfneblin friend. He remembered other encounters of the last years, battles he had been forced to fight alone. Then, like now, the hunter had welled within him, had come to the fore and guided the deadly strikes of his blades. But there was a difference this time that Drizzt could not deny. Before, when he was alone, the hunter did not so readily depart. Now, with Belwar by his side, Drizzt was fully back in control.
Drizzt shook his thick white mane, trying to dismiss any last remnants of the hunter. He thought himself foolish now for the way he had begun the battle against the bird-men, slapping with the flat of his blades. He and Belwar might be in the cavern still if Drizzt’s instinctive side had not emerged, if he had not learned of Guenhwyvar’s fall.
He looked at Belwar suddenly, remembering the inspiration of his anger. “The statuette!” he cried. “You have it.”
Belwar scooped the item out of his pocket. “Magga cammara!” Belwar exclaimed, his round-toned voice edged with panic. “Might the panther be wounded? What effect would the acid have against Guenhwyvar? Might the panther have escaped to the Astral Plane?”
Drizzt took the figurine and examined it in trembling hands, taking comfort in the fact that it was not marred in any way. Drizzt believed that he should wait before calling Guenhwyvar; if the panther was injured, it surely would heal better at rest in its own plane of existence. But Drizzt could not wait to learn of Guenhwyvar’s fate. He placed the figurine down on the ground at his feet and called out softly.