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That was a decision for another day, though, and the trio went back to their small encampment and Bruenor opened his pack and produced a pile of scroll tubes, parchment, and a mound of skins and tablets, all maps to the many known caves in the Sword Coast North. He also produced several ancient coins minted in the days of Delzoun, a very old smith hammer’s head, and some other suspicious and obviously ancient artifacts tumbled out as well. All had been procured across the North, from barbarian tribesmen or small villages, and the coins had come from Luskan. They were proof of nothing, of course. Luskan could trace her history as a trading port as far back as most dwarf scholars put the time of Gauntlgrym, and if that was the case, then one would expect a few Delzoun coins in the various coffers of the City of Sails.
To Bruenor, though, those artifacts represented confirmation, and a heartening lift to his tired old shoulders, so Drizzt didn’t dissuade him from that.
Not if it would make the journey more interesting, after all.
Bruenor sorted through the scroll tubes, one after another, reading the notes he had scribbled on their sides. He selected two and tossed them aside before stuffing the rest back into his pack. A similar pile of the parchment produced yet another promising map, before the rest of those, too, went into the pack.
“Them three’re closest to us,” the dwarf explained.
To Drizzt’s surprise and amusement, Bruenor finished filling his bag then slung it over his shoulder and started collecting the rest of his items, and breaking their camp.
“What?” the dwarf asked when Drizzt made no move to do likewise. “We got a few more good hours o’ sunlight, elf. No time for wastin’!”
Laughing, Herzgo Alegni walked out from behind the tree and onto the forest path before a pair of surprised tieflings. One had horns similar to Alegni’s, rounded back and down, while the other sported only a pair of nubs on her forehead. Both wore leather vests left open to reveal jagged brands, layered lines combining the symbols of their god and some other devilish patron. Alegni had come to know the symbol well in his time in Neverwinter Wood.
Both carried red scepters, fashioned with clever facets to look like crystal, though they were in fact made of solid metal. Around three feet in length, they could serve as club, short staff, or spear, with one end tapered to a nasty tip.
“Brother. …” the male said, startled by the sudden appearance of the larger tiefling.
“Nay—Shadovar!” the female quickly corrected, even as she leaped back into a defensive posture.
She set her weight back on her right leg, and her left arm extended, palm toward Alegni, her weapon drawn in tight against her right breast, pointing the Shadovar’s way as a sword or spear might.
The male reacted in much the same way, crouching with his legs wide and his scepter up over his right shoulder, as if to swing it as a club.
Herzgo Alegni smiled at them both and didn’t yet draw his magnificent sword, the red blade hanging easily along the side of his left leg.
“Ashmadai, I presume,” he said, referring to the cultists of Asmodeus, a group he had never heard of until recently, when they had begun to trickle into Neverwinter Wood.
“As you should be, devil brother,” said the female. Her eyes, solid silver orbs, widened with lustful excitement.
“Devil brother who has embraced the shade,” the male added, “and the Sharran Empire of Netheril. ”
“Who sent you?” Alegni asked. “Whose hand guides this cult of misbegotten zealots?”
“One who is no friend of Netheril!” the female retorted, and she came forward suddenly, thrusting her spear at Alegni’s massive chest.
But Alegni moved first, drawing his sword and lifting the blade up and left to right as it came free of its belt loop—and more, something neither of his opponents could have expected—as the blade rent the air it left an opaque trail of ash.
Through that veil prodded the female’s spear, but behind the wall of ash, Alegni had already dodged off to his right, letting the momentum of the sword carry him.
As the female retracted, he said from just off the path, “Here. ” And just before the male leaped forward to swing his club, and both turned their horned heads to regard him, and even started to re-orient their feet, the ash wall exploded. A slender figure leaped through, flipping in mid-air as he passed between the Ashmadai couple, easily avoiding their attempts to align their weapons to the new threat. He landed behind them, though facing them, having twisted around in the air.
“Blow the horn!” the male cried, spinning to meet the challenge, but even as he spoke, the female stumbled a step or two to the side, her free hand slapping against her throat—against a puncture wound inflicted by the newcomer’s dagger. Her silver eyes went wider still, in shock at his precision, perhaps, or in fear that she was mortally wounded.
“Makarielle!” her companion cried, and he leaped at the knife-wielder, leading with a great swing of his club.
The pallid human leaned away from the first cut and ducked the backhand. On the third attempt, he leaped at the weapon, accepting the shortened hit against the side of his chest as he landed. The club hooked under his armpit, and he spun out to the side with such force, confidence, and balance that he took the weapon from his opponent’s hand.
The disarmed tiefling hissed and rushed to follow, more than capable of doing battle with his fists and teeth.
But even as he moved out to the side, Barrabus the Gray drove his right elbow, the arm trapping the scepter, up and out in front of him, flipping the weapon into the air. He caught it mid-shaft with his right hand then stopped and reversed, throwing his right hip back and around. Cupping the back end of the scepter with his left hand for balance and power, he thrust it out behind him.
He felt the heavy impact with his pursuer’s chest and didn’t continue around to his right, but rather stopped and brought the scepter back in front of him, flipping it easily and catching both hands low on one end as he turned to his left, stepping toward the retreating tiefling as he brought the club to bear.
To his credit, the tiefling managed to get his arm up to block the blow—and break his forearm in the process—but before he could even shriek out from the explosion of pain, Barrabus went back around the other way and reversed his hands as if to launch a tremendous blow, up-angled for the tiefling’s head. Even as the tiefling began to react accordingly, Barrabus revealed the feint, dropping and kicking out with his foot instead. He connected solidly with the tiefling’s knee, driving the leg out wide, and again his hands moved quickly along the scepter, so his right hand gripped the middle, his left low on the back end. Barrabus drove the weapon forward and upward from his crouch, and the off-balance tiefling had no defense as the tip slammed hard into his groin.
“Well done,” Alegni congratulated Barrabus, walking up beside the female, who was on one knee then, both hands tight against her punctured throat, her weapon on the ground beside her. “Will she live?” he asked.
“No poison,” the man confirmed. “Not a mortal wound. ”
“Good news!” Alegni said, stepping past her toward the stunned but stubborn male, who stood, his face locked in a tight grimace. “Well, not for you,” the Shadovar corrected, and his sword came across suddenly, brutally, nearly cleaving the poor fellow in two.
“I need only one prisoner,” Alegni explained to the already dead Ashmadai cultist. He stepped back and grabbed the kneeling female by her thick black hair and jerked her to her feet with such force that she came right up off the ground.
“Do you believe yourself the fortunate one?” he asked, putting his face right up to hers and staring coldly into her tear-filled eyes. “Take their weapons and anything else worth salvaging,” he instructed his lackey, and he started away, yanking the female from her feet and dragging her off by the hair.
Barrabus the Gray watched him go, but mostly he was looking at the expression of sheer anguish on the female’s face. He
didn’t mind the fighting, certainly, and had few pangs of conscience in killing the strange fanatics of a devil god. Any of them would have gladly disemboweled him in one of their sacrificial rituals, after all, as Herzgo Alegni’s soldiers had discovered when three of their own had gone missing in the wood only to be found strapped and gutted on a slab of stone.
Despite that, Barrabus couldn’t help but wince at the sight of the female, knowing that she would soon experience the unbridled cruelty of Herzgo Alegni.
Indomitable.
It was the word that most came to mind when Drizzt considered Bruenor Battlehammer, along with the drow’s own oft-repeated, “Roll on. ”
Drizzt stood in the shade of a wide-spreading oak, leaning on the trunk, inadvertently spying on his friend. Below the higher patch of ground with the oak, in a small clearing, sat Bruenor, with a dozen of his maps opened and spread out on a blanket.
Bruenor had kept Drizzt going for years, and the dark elf knew it. When hope of raising Catti-brie and Regis had faded to nothing, when even the best memories of those two, and of Wulfgar—and the barbarian had to be dead, dead or a hundred and twelve years old—had faded, too, only Bruenor’s insistence that the road ahead was worth walking, that there was something grand to be found, had somewhat cooled the anger simmering within the drow.
The anger, and so much more, none of it good.
He watched the dwarf for a long while, shifting from map to map, making little notations on one or another, or in the small book he kept at all times, a journal of his road to Gauntlgrym. That book symbolized Bruenor’s admission that he might never get to the ancient Delzoun homeland, the dwarf had admitted to Drizzt. But if he failed, he meant to leave behind a record, so that the next dwarf taking up the quest would be well on his way before he ever took his first step.
In that action, in the admission that, for Bruenor at least, it might well be all for naught, and the determination that such a possibility, indeed even a probability, was still all right, resonated within Drizzt as a statement of cause, of continuity and of … decency.
It wasn’t until he’d brought his clenched fist out before him that Drizzt even realized he’d broken off a piece of the tree trunk. He opened his black fingers to see the chip, and stared at it for a long while then threw it to the ground, his hands going reflexively to the hilts of his belted scimitars. Drizzt turned away from Bruenor, scanning the rolling hills and forests, looking for smoke, for some sign that others were near—likely goblins, orcs, or gnolls.
It seemed ironic to him that as the world had grown undeniably darker, his battles had come fewer, and farther between. Drizzt found that ironic—and unacceptable.
“Tonight, Guen,” he whispered, though the panther was at home on the Astral Plane and he didn’t take out the onyx figurine to summon her to his side. “Tonight, we hunt. ”
With hardly a thought, he drew out Twinkle and Icingdeath, the blades he’d carried for so many decades, and put them into an easy series of practiced movements, simulating parries, counters, and clever ripostes. His pace increased, his movements shifting from defensive and reactive routines to more aggressive, more radical attacks.