The sisters called back and forth, and so they were striking at the white dragon, little hits and nothing more, a quick nip or tail slap and off they spun aside, one after another.
“Sparrows on a hawk,” Drizzt whispered, recalling that familiar scene when he watched a pair of smaller and more agile birds chasing some magnificent bird of prey across the sky, away from their nest.
And he would play his role, of course, his bow always ready now, his arrows flying fast whenever he saw the white scales. He shot for the dragon now and not Tiago, not wanting an errant arrow to fly past and knowing that he’d never hit Tiago with that shield anyway.
Patience, Drizzt told himself. He knew that he’d get his chance.
They flew silently then, in darkness, and the hair on the back of the drow’s neck stood on end. The white wyrm had figured out the game, he feared from the sudden total silence.
But Tazmikella didn’t share his worry. Once more, Drizzt lurched forward and banged his face on Tazmikella’s shoulder as the dragon suddenly shot straight up. Out of the Darkening they came, in a sharp bank, and Drizzt turned Taulmaril back, expecting the white dragon to burst out behind them.
The black clouds swirled into a spinning vortex and out came a wyrm, but it was Ilnezhara, not the white, and Drizzt barely held his shot.
Ilnezhara rolled right over and plunged back into the blackness, and now Drizzt did see the white, right at the edge and similarly rolling in pursuit.
And there was the white dragon’s belly—there was Drizzt’s target—and he let fly once and then again, the arrows streaking in, the second shot skipping across unyielding scales to clip through the leather of the girth of Tiago’s saddle.
“Block that,” Drizzt whispered with grim satisfaction.
Despite his agony, despite his pulverized hip and his expectation that he was going to die anyway, Tos’un found a measure of satisfaction as his wounded and angry dragon mount hovered over the doomed human.
The maw opened wide, teeth as long as a tall man’s leg, and the dragon snapped at the monk, who barely leaped back in time to avoid being bitten in half.
Now he was close to Tos’un, so close that the drow could reach out and grab his leg. He moved to do just that as the wyrm closed in again, but this time when the dragon opened his toothy maw, he didn’t bite.
He breathed.
Just before the killing frost descended over Tos’un, ending his misery, he found even his tiny satisfaction stolen from him, for the man in front of him, the man he thought in his grasp and caught by the breath, simply broke apart into floating shards of light, like a thousand tiny flower petals floating down on a gentle breeze.
And the cold settled in, and the drow remained frozen in place, his expression one of abject disbelief.
Fireballs ignited one after the other, half in the Darkening and half below it.
Out came the white dragon, now riderless, roaring in rage. But its movements remained slowed by Ilnezhara’s magical breath, and the dragon sisters had each other fully in sight, and had the battlefield precisely as they wanted it.
Once again Drizzt was reminded of the sparrows chasing off a hawk, as Tazmikella and Ilnezhara spun and rolled, under, over, and all around the great white wyrm, biting at it, breathing at it, hitting it with magical fireballs and lightning bolts and magic missiles, and through it all, Drizzt kept up a steady stream of stinging arrows.
At one point, Drizzt heard Tazmikella laugh at her own cleverness—and what a curious sound that was!—when she conjured a wall of stone right in the white dragon’s speeding path. The monstrous dragon cracked through it easily enough, sending shards of stone flying and falling the miles to the ground, and truly the wyrm seemed more perturbed than injured.
But that only added to the dragon’s mounting frustration, so clearly evident every time it snapped futilely at one sister or the other, invariably behind the flight.
Every breath weapon now came as a cloud of slowing gas, the sisters determined not to let that enchantment fade, determined to keep the superior wyrm unable to catch them. Their bites might sting the white, but its great maw could prove lethal.
Out to the north they flew, over the huge battle raging just beyond the Frost Hills. Suddenly the white dragon simply folded its wings, letting the pull of Toril do what it could not, free-fall, gaining it the speed at last to be away from the nuisance of the copper dragons.
Ilnezhara moved to pursue, but Tazmikella called her back with a shriek.
“The spell of breath is wearing thin,” Tazmikella warned her sister as they flew side by side.
“Then stay up high, near the blackness,” Ilnezhara agreed.
The three of them, the sisters and Drizzt, watched the great wyrm, a brilliant white speck far below. It came out of its drop, and indeed seemed to be moving with all speed again.
But to the north, speeding for the Spine of the World, where, the sisters knew, the Old White Death made his home.
“So it ends,” Tazmikella said.
“You killed his son!” Drizzt said in warning, expecting the white dragon to return with fury.
“Not yet,” Tazmikella corrected.
“Arauthator is chromatic,” Ilnezhara scoffed at Drizzt, swiveling her huge head so that she was quite—and unnervingly—near to him. “He cares nothing for his son.”
“More treasure for him to hoard now, likely,” Tazmikella agreed. “Fear not, Drizzt. The wyrm has fled.”
“Let us go and finish this,” Ilnezhara said, and she banked immediately, swerving back the other way, toward Fourthpeak and the wounded Aurbangras.
He understood the tendrils of murderous coldness filling the air around him, but the sensation was distant and did not hurt him. He understood then the true relationship between his spirit and his corporeal form, just a brief glimpse at the seam between thought and reality, between the physical and the spiritual, between the higher planes and Faerûn.
Brother Afafrenfere hadn’t willed himself to such a lightness of being—certainly that had been Grandmaster Kane’s doing—nor could he fully understand it or appreciate it. Somehow, some way, he was extraplanar, simply removed from the battlefield and from certain death from the white dragon’s breath.
He felt the wounded drow expire—felt and didn’t see. He wasn’t seeing anything at that time, not in any sense of sight that he had known as a corporeal creature. Still, the reality was as clear to him as if he had watched the drow’s spirit exiting the corpse.
He felt light. He felt … joined. Joined with everything. No object seemed solid to him, as if he was nothing more than a beam of light through water, where everything, living or inanimate, was simply translucent, and so, incorporeal.
He knew that he was on another level of perception here, and he didn’t dare try to sort it out, keenly aware—perhaps it was some mental nudging from Kane—that all of this was quite beyond his understanding, and that trying to sort it out might indeed drive him to madness. Even the beauty in this state, and it was all beauty to Afafrenfere, overwhelmed him to the edge of his sensibilities and threatened to drive him over that edge.
He was guided back to the event at hand by Grandmaster Kane. He sensed the mighty life energy of the wounded white dragon, and stronger still came the emanations from the returning copper dragons.
He felt the violence, as if all of time-space was trembling under the power of three dragons entangled on the mountain slope. He couldn’t hear the battle, but its vibrations resonated within and all around him.
Sound began to return, distantly at first, but growing louder, the shrieks of pain and rage, and Brother Afafrenfere knew that he was reconstituting.
His eyes blinked open, the sensation of sight confusing him for a moment until he sorted it out.
In front of him lay the battered white dragon, Ilnezhara perched upon its stretched neck, holding it down. Behind her, Tazmikella chewed into the white’s belly, tearing out giant entrails. On her back, Drizzt held on and kept trying to look away.
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A long while later, it was over, the white dragon quite dead, and Afafrenfere glanced back to see the drow who had been riding the wyrm all twisted and crushed, encased in the ice from his own mount’s killing breath.
“Now, let us finish this,” Tazmikella said, her maw and face all bloody and with a long strand of the white dragon’s intestine hanging garishly from one tooth.
Afafrenfere shuddered as he recalled the dragon’s elf form, so pretty and attractive. This other side of Tazmikella, a level of viciousness beyond human sensibilities, shook him.
He heard her call though and could not ignore her, so he went to Ilnezhara and took his seat. Off they flew, leaping from the mountain with victorious cries that echoed down to King Connerad’s forces below, to Bruenor and the Gutbusters on the Surbrin Bridge, and to King Emerus and his charges now pressing the orc force to the field just north of the Surbrin Bridge battle.
Ilnezhara and Afafrenfere soared off to the north to join in the larger battle just beyond the Frost Hills, but Tazmikella and Drizzt headed straight for the bridge. They flew low over the field and low over the dwarves holding strong on the structure.
As they neared the eastern end, Drizzt fired off his arrows. Low came Tazmikella, barely above Bruenor’s head, but to the dwarf’s laughter and cheering. Her great claws closed around the head and shoulders of the frost giant trying to press through Bruenor’s stubborn block.
That frost giant went up into the air and made a most impressive bomb when Tazmikella hurled it into the throng of orcs pressing in from the east.
The minions of Many-Arrows began to break ranks, fleeing from the battle, some running back to the east, others to the north and the cover of the Glimmerwood.
Around came Tazmikella, and she hurried the fleeing monsters along with a blast of acid. Drizzt’s arrows nipped at them and cut them down.
“Secured!” Drizzt shouted when they turned back to the bridge to see Bruenor taking most of his force back across to the western edge, leaving only a handful to guard the now-empty eastern ramp.
Catti-brie smiled and waved at the drow and his dragon mount, then turned over the bridge rail and dropped a fireball on the field just to the north, in the midst of the back ranks of orcs battling King Emerus.
“I go to join my sister,” Tazmikella said to Drizzt. “Will you stay or come with me?”
“The bridge,” Drizzt asked. He wanted to be with Catti-brie and Bruenor then, in this moment of victory.
Tazmikella set him down and sped away, and Drizzt moved up beside his wife and matched her magic with his silver arrows.
The orcs were caught between three forces now, between the Surbrin Bridge and Mithral Hall’s eastern door. They had nowhere to run. Many jumped into the River Surbrin and were swept away on icy currents. Much later, rumors came back to Mithral Hall that a handful of the orc swimmers actually managed to crawl out of the river on the other bank.
That handful and the giants of Shining White were the only monsters who got off that field alive.
CHAPTER 21
THE WISDOM OF MORADIN
FIRST THERE WAS THE FRANTIC SCRAMBLE AS HE TRIED FUTILELY TO hold his seat, but the cinch had been cleanly severed, and there was nothing to hold on to.
Then there was anger as he tumbled away, falling out of the Darkening, and watching the copper dragon and that wretched Drizzt Do’Urden flying up into it.
The wind slapping at him fiercely, Tiago still managed to unfasten himself from the ruined saddle, and he shoved it far aside. He even managed to sheathe his sword, and shrank his buckler to its smallest diameter as he held it strapped upon his forearm.
And then a great sense of calm washed over Tiago as he fell from the sky, so removed from the violence of the dragons and the sounds of the armies clashing below. He heard nothing but the wind, its vibrations stealing his every sensibility.
He was simply existing, falling free, his thoughts drawn blank as he took in this grand experience—one grander even than flying around on a great white dragon. He didn’t even have the sensation of falling any longer, felt almost as if he was floating, weightless and serene.
He had no sense of time passing, and only when he noted some movement up above by the roiling blackness as the dragons continued their dance, or when he happened to glance below to see the ground much nearer, did such thoughts enter his mind.
The sound from below began to reach his ears, the clash of armies. He was to the west of the fighting, he noted with a glance, far afield of the northernmost, and by far the greatest, of the battles raging.
“Ah, Drizzt Do’Urden,” the noble son of House Baenre, the weapons master of House Do’Urden, said, though he couldn’t even hear his own voice, really, “so you have won.”
Tiago tapped the enchanted Baenre emblem he wore on his cloak, its magic immediately putting him into a state of levitation.
“This time,” he finished.
He was still falling from the sheer momentum of his plummet, but slowly, and now the swirling southern spring wind caught him and sent him drifting even farther afield, leaving the battles many miles away, to the north and west, and the empty hilly region in front of the foothills of the Spine of the World known as the Lands Against the Wall.
He could only sigh and hope that Drizzt would survive the fight with Arauthator and the greater battle raging, that he might pay the clever archer back when next they met.
“Soon,” he promised himself, at last touching down.
King Emerus Warcrown, King Connerad Brawnanvil, and King Bruenor Battlehammer shared a victorious hug. The fields around them lay littered with dead, and most of those dead were orcs. Copper dragons, allies, flew overhead, returning from the north, their appearance and calls informing the dwarves of the impending arrival of victorious King Harnoth of Citadel Adbar and his legions.
The siege around Mithral Hall had been shattered, the monsters of Many-Arrows sent running, and the dwarven armies were out and free, all three, soon to be joined in a mighty force and singular cause.
At the western end of the Surbrin Bridge, Catti-brie’s work had only just begun, as she and the dwarven clerics went to the task of healing the wounded. Drizzt stayed beside her, occasionally running to the eastern end of the bridge, where Bungalow Thump and his Gutbusters were keeping a solid and stoic guard.
But no enemies were coming from that direction, Drizzt believed. The white dragons were gone, but the copper wyrms remained, and would the ferocious dwarves even need that unmistakable advantage?
“It is a good day,” Drizzt said to Catti-brie when he returned to her after one such jaunt to the eastern edge of the bridge.
The woman looked around at the carnage, fields littered with bodies, river red with blood, the bridge scarred by flames and burned flesh, the mountain of Fourthpeak showing a gaping hole from the dwarven breakout, and a scar up higher where the white dragon had gone crashing in.
“It was a necessary day,” she quietly corrected.
Drizzt nodded and smiled, catching her meaning.
“It is good that we won, and that the white dragons who served our enemies are gone,” Catti-brie offered. She looked past Drizzt and pointed with her chin. The drow turned to see the dragon sisters gliding down to them.
“Come, Drizzt,” Afafrenfere called from Ilnezhara’s back. “There has been another battle this day in the south, where the Rauvin meets the Surbrin. Let us go and learn what we may.”
Drizzt turned to Catti-brie.
“Wulfgar and Regis,” she whispered, hopefully and fearfully all at once.
Tazmikella set down near the bridge and Drizzt climbed upon her back, and with her permission, pulled Catti-brie up behind him.
“Eh now, where ye goin’, elf?” demanded Bruenor, running over to see what the commotion was about.
Drizzt motioned to Afafrenfere, who reached his hand down to the dwarf.
“Ah, but ye’re daft if ye think …” Bruenor started to grumble.
“A
fight in the south!” Drizzt explained, and Tazmikella lifted away. Ilnezhara came close behind, and yes, Bruenor was indeed upon her back, sitting behind Afafrenfere and holding on for all his life.
They climbed high into the sky, the line of the river below them snaking to the south, and soon they came in sight of the fork where the Rauvin River joined the Surbrin. As the dragons drifted down, side by side, the riders came to note the scores of bodies darkening the field north of the Rauvin’s rocky ford.
Ilnezhara remained up high, while Tazmikella dived low and sped across, scouting the region. She and her riders saw bows lifted their way from the trees, but before the dragon even veered aside, those bows were pulled down and a huge man came running from the shadows, waving his arms.
“Back! Back!” Drizzt yelled to the dragon, who apparently didn’t like his tone, for Tazmikella lifted suddenly, and once more Drizzt went facedown on her shoulders, and poor Catti-brie nearly flipped right over him.
Momentum stolen, the dragon flopped a tight turn and drifted back to settle lightly on the field beside the large human.
Drizzt and Catti-brie were there to give Wulfgar a great hug, and soon, so too was Bruenor, who leaped with joy from Ilnezhara’s back before the dragon had even stopped her running landing. The dwarf hit the ground hard, tumbling and bouncing, but came up to his feet without a care in the world as he rushed to leap upon his adopted son.
At the same time, from the trees came Regis, battered but smiling. They were together once more, the Companions of the Hall.
Catti-brie looked to Drizzt. “It is a good day,” she said.
Her clothes had dried, but her eyes had not. Overwhelmed, Doum’wielle wandered the fields just south of the Rauvin. At one point, she noted movement to the east, rushing fast to the south.
The drow, fleeing the disaster at the Rauvin ford. They had fled—Ravel’s mount had knocked her into the river, and not one had paused to try to help her.