The rider, by this time, had regained his seat and his wits. He stepped his horse to the bank to thank his rescuer.
Then he saw the black skin.
“Drow!” he screamed, and his axeblade cut down.
Drizzt was caught off guard. His keen reflexes got one blade up enough to deflect the edge of the axe, but the flat of the weapon struck his head and sent him reeling. He dived with the momentum of the hit and rolled, trying to put as much ground between himself and the rider as he could, realizing that the man would kill him before he could recover.
“Wulfgar!” Regis screamed from his own concealment a short way back on the bank. The barbarian finished off one of the monsters with a thunderous smack that sent cracks all along its length, and turned just as the rider was bringing his horse about to get at Drizzt.
Wulfgar roared in rage and bolted from his own fight, grabbing the horse’s bridle while it was still in its turn and heaving with all his strength. Horse and rider toppled to the ground. The horse was up again at once, shaking its head and nervously trotting about, but the rider stayed down, his leg crushed under his mount’s weight in the fall.
The remaining five riders worked in unison now, charging into groups of monsters and scattering them. Bruenor’s wicked axe cut away, the dwarf all the while singing a woodchopper’s song that he had learned as a boy.
“Go split the wood for the fire, me son,
“Heat up the kettle and the meal’s begun!” he sang out as he methodically cut down one monster after another.
Wulfgar defensively straddled Drizzt’s form, his mighty hammer shattering, with a single strike, any of the monsters that ventured too near.
The rout was on, and in seconds the few surviving creatures scampered in terror across the bridge over the Surbrin.
Three riders were down and dead, a fourth leaned heavily against his horse, nearly overcome by his wounds, and the one Wulfgar had dropped had fainted away for his agony. But the five remaining astride did not go to their wounded. They formed a semi-circle around Wulfgar and Drizzt, who was just now getting back to his feet, and kept the two pinned against the riverbank with axes ready.
“This is how ye welcome yer rescuers?” Bruenor barked at them, slapping aside one horse so that he could join his friends. “Me bet’s that the same folk don’t come to yer aid twice!”
“Foul company you keep, dwarf!” one of the riders retorted.
“Your friend would be dead if it were not for that foul company!” Wulfgar replied, indicating the rider lying off to the side. “And he repays the drow with a blade!”
“We are the Riders of Nesmé,” the rider explained. “Our lot is to die on the field, protecting our kin. We accept this fate willingly.”
“Step yer horse one more foot and ye’ll get yer wish,” Bruenor warned.
“But you judge us unfairly,” Wulfgar argued. “Nesmé is our destination. We come in peace and friendship.”
“You’ll not get in—not with him!” spat the rider. “The ways of the foul drow elves are known to all. You ask us to welcome him?”
“Bah, yer a fool and so’s yer mother,” Bruenor growled.
“Ware your words, dwarf,” the rider warned. “We are five to three, and mounted.”
“Try yer threat, then,” Bruenor shot back. “The buzzards won’t get much eatin’ with those dancing trees.” He ran his finger along the edge of his axe. “Let’s give ’em something better to peck at.”
Wulfgar swung Aegis-fang easily back and forth at the end of one arm. Drizzt made no move toward his weapons, and his steady calm was perhaps the most unnerving action of all to the riders.
Their speaker seemed less cocksure after the failure of his threat, but he held to a facade of advantage. “But we are not ungrateful for your assistance. We shall allow you to walk away. Be gone and never return to our lands.”
“We go where we choose,” snarled Burenor.
“And we choose not to fight,” Drizzt added. “It is not our purpose, nor our desire, to lay injury to you or to your town, Riders of Nesmé. We shall pass, keeping our own business to ourselves and leaving yours to you.”
“You shan’t go anywhere near my town, black elf!” another rider cried. “You may cut us down on the field, but there are a hundred more behind us, and thrice that behind them! Now be gone!” His companions seemed to regain their courage at his bold words, their horses stepping nervously at the sudden tensing of the bridles.
“We have our course,” Wulfgar insisted.
“Damn ’em!” Bruenor roared suddenly. “I’ve seen too much of this band already! Damn their town. May the river wash it away!” He turned to his friends. “They do us a favor. A day and more we’ll save by going straight through to Silverymoon, instead of around with the river.”
“Straight through?” questioned Drizzt. “The Evermoors?”
“Can it be worse than the dale?” Bruenor replied. He spun back on the riders. “Keep yer town, and yer heads, for now,” he said. “We’re to cross the bridge here and be rid of yerselves and all of Nesmé!”
“Fouler things than bog blokes roam the Trollmoors, foolish dwarf,” the rider replied with a grin. “We have come to destroy this bridge. It will be burned behind you.”
Bruenor nodded and returned the grin.
“Keep your course to the east,” the rider warned. “Word will go out to all the riders. If you are sighted near Nesmé, you will be killed.”
“Take your vile friend and be gone,” another rider taunted, “before my axe bathes in the blood of a black elf! Though I would then have to throw the tainted weapon away!” All the riders joined in the ensuing laughter.
Drizzt hadn’t even heard it. He was concentrating on a rider in the back of the group, a quiet one who could use his obscurity in the conversation to gain an unnoticed advantage. The rider had slipped a bow off of his shoulder and was inching his hand, ever so slowly, toward his quiver.
Bruenor was done talking. He and Wulfgar turned away from the riders and started to the bridge. “Come on, elf,” he said to Drizzt as he passed. “Me sleep’ll come better when we’re far away from these orc-sired dogs.”
But Drizzt had one more message to send before he would turn his back on the riders. In one blinding movement, he spun the bow from his back, pulled an arrow from his quiver, and sent it whistling through the air. It knocked into the would-be bowman’s leather cap, parting his hair down the middle, and stuck in a tree immediately behind, its shaft quivering a clear warning.
“Your misguided insults, I accept, even expect,” Drizzt explained to the horrified horsemen. “But I’ll brook no attempts to injure my friends, and I will defend myself. Be warned, and only once warned: if you make another move against us, you will die.” He turned abruptly and moved down to the bridge without looking back.
The stunned riders certainly had no intention of hindering the drow’s party any further. The would-be bowman hadn’t even looked for his cap.
Drizzt smiled at the irony of his inability to clear himself of the legends of his heritage. Though he was shunned and threatened on the one hand, the mysterious aura surrounding the black elves also gave him a bluff powerful enough to dissuade most potential enemies.
Regis joined them at the bridge, bouncing a small rock in his hand. “Had them lined up,” he explained of his impromptu weapon. He flicked the stone into the river. “If it began, I would have had the first shot.”
“If it began,” Bruenor corrected, “ye’d have soiled the hole ye hid in!”
Wulfgar considered the rider’s warning of their path. “Trollmoors,” he echoed somberly, looking up the slope across the way to the blasted land before them. Harkle had told them of the place. The burned-out land and bottomless bogs. The trolls and even worse horrors that had no names.
“Save us a day and more!” Bruerior repeated stubbornly.
Wulfgar wasn’t convinced.
“You are dismissed,” Dendybar told the specter.
&
nbsp; As the flames reformed in the brazier, stripping him of his material form, Morkai considered this second meeting. How often would Dendybar be calling upon him? he wondered. The mottled wizard had not yet fully recovered from their last encounter, but had dared to summon him again so soon. Dendybar’s business with the dwarf’s party must be urgent indeed! That assumption only made Morkai despise his role as the mottled wizard’s spy even more.
Alone in the room again, Dendybar stretched out from his meditative position and grinned wickedly as he considered the image Morkai had shown him. The companions had lost their mounts and were marching into the foulest area in all the North. Another day or so would put his own party, flying on the hooves of his magical steeds, even with them, though thirty miles to the north.
Sydney would get to Silverymoon long before the drow.
he ride from Luskan was swift indeed. Entreri and his cohorts appeared to any curious onlookers as no more than a shimmering blur in the night wind. The magical mounts left no trail of their passing, and no living creature could have overtaken them. The golem, as always, lumbered tirelessly behind with great stiff-legged strides.
So smooth and easy were the seats atop Dendybar’s conjured steeds that the party was able to keep up its run past the dawn and throughout the entire next day with only short rests for food. Thus, when they set their camp after the sunset of the first full day on the road, they had already put the crags behind them.
Catti-brie fought an inner battle that first day. She had no doubt that Entreri and the new alliance would overtake Bruenor. As the situation stood now, Catti-brie would be only a detriment to her friends, a pawn for Entreri to play at his convenience.
She could do little to remedy the problem, unless she found some way to diminish, if not overcome, the grip of terror that the assassin held on her. That first day she spent in concentration, blocking out her surroundings as much as she could and searching her inner spirit for the strength and courage she would need.
Bruenor had given her many tools over the years to wage such a battle, skills of discipline and self-confidence that had seen her through many difficult situations. On the second day of the ride, then, more confident and comfortable with her situation, Catti-brie was able to focus on her captors. Most interesting were the glares that Jierdan and Entreri shot each other. The proud soldier had obviously not forgotten the humiliation he had suffered the night of their first meeting on the field outside of Luskan. Entreri, keenly aware of the grudge, even fueling it in his willingness to bring the issue to confrontation, kept an untrusting eye on the man.
This growing rivalry may prove to be her most promising— perhaps her only—hope of escaping, Catti-brie thought. She conceded that Bok was an indestructible, mindless destroying machine, beyond any manipulation she might try to lay upon it, and she learned quickly that Sydney offered nothing.
Catti-brie had tried to engage the young mage in conversation that second day, but Sydney’s focus was too narrow for any diversions. She would be neither side-tracked nor persuaded from her obsession in any way. She didn’t even acknowledge Catti-brie’s greeting when they sat down for their midday meal. And when Catti-brie pestered her further, Sydney instructed Entreri to “keep the whore away.”
Even in the failed attempt, though, the aloof mage had aided Catti-brie in a way that neither of them could foresee. Sydney’s open contempt and insults came as a slap in Catti-brie’s face and instilled in her another tool that would help to overcome the paralysis of her terror: anger.
They passed the halfway point of their journey on the second day, the landscape rolling surrealistically by them as they sped along, and camped in the small hills northeast of Nesmé, with the city of Luskan now fully two hundred miles behind them.
Campfires twinkled in the distance, a patrol from Nesmé, Sydney theorized.
“We should go there and learn what we may,” Entreri suggested, anxious for news of his target.
“You and I,” Sydney agreed. “We can get there and back before half the night is through.”
Entreri looked at Catti-brie. “What of her?” he asked the mage. “I would not leave her with Jierdan.”
“You think that the soldier would take advantage of the girl?” Sydney replied. “I assure you that he is honorable.”
“That is not my concern,” Entreri smirked. “I fear not for the daughter of Bruenor Battlehammer. She would dispose of your honorable soldier and be gone into the night before we ever returned.”
Catti-brie didn’t welcome the compliment. She understood that Entreri’s comment was more of an insult to Jierdan, who was off gathering firewood, than any recognition of her own prowess, but the assassin’s unexpected respect for her would make her task doubly difficult. She didn’t want Entreri thinking of her as dangerous, even resourceful, for that would keep him too alert for her to move.
Sydney looked to Bok. “I go,” she told the golem, purposely loud enough for Catti-brie to easily hear. “If the prisoner tries to flee, run her down and kill her!” She shot Entreri an evil grin. “Are you content?”
He returned her smile and swung his arm out in the direction of the distant camp.
Jierdan returned then, and Sydney told him of their plans. The soldier didn’t seem overjoyed to have Sydney and Entreri running off together, though he said nothing to dissuade the mage. Catti-brie watched him closely and knew the truth. Being left alone with her and the golem didn’t bother him, she surmised, but he feared any budding friendship between his two road-mates. Catti-brie understood and even expected this, for Jierdan was in the weakest position of the three—subservient to Sydney and afraid of Entreri. An alliance between those two, perhaps even a pact excluding Dendybar and the Hosttower altogether, would at the least put him out, and more probably spell his end.
“Suren the nature of their dark business works against them,” Catti-brie whispered as Sydney and Entreri left the camp, speaking the words aloud to reinforce her growing confidence.
“I could help ye with that,” she offered to Jierdan as he worked to complete the campsite.
The soldier glared at her. “Help?” he scoffed. “I should make you do all of it by yourself.”
“Yer anger is known to me,” Catti-brie countered sympathetically. “I meself have suffered at Entreri’s foul hands.”
Her pity enraged the proud soldier. He rushed at her threateningly, but she held her composure and did not flinch. “This work is below yer station.”
Jierdan stopped suddenly, his anger diffused by his intrigue at the compliment. An obvious ploy, but to Jierdan’s wounded ego, the young woman’s respect came as too welcome to be ignored.
“What could you know of my station?” he asked.
“I know ye are a soldier of Luskan,” Catti-brie replied. “Of a group that’s feared throughout all the northland. Ye should not do the grovel work while the mage and the shadow-chaser are off playing in the night.”
“You’re making trouble!” Jierdan growled, but he paused to consider the point. “You set the camp,” he ordered at length, regaining a measure of his own self-respect by displaying his superiority over her. Catti-brie didn’t mind, though. She went about the work at once, playing her subservient role without complaint. A plan began to take definite shape in her mind now, and this phase demanded that she make an ally among her enemies, or at least put herself in a position to plant the seeds of jealousy in Jierdan’s mind.
She listened, satisfied, as the soldier moved away, muttering under his breath.
Before Entreri and Sydney even got close enough for a good view of the encampment, ritualistic chanting told them that this was no caravan from Nesmé. They inched in more cautiously to confirm their suspicions.
Long-haired barbarians, dark and tall, and dressed in ceremonial feathered garb, danced a circle around a wooden griffon totem.
“Uthgardt,” Sydney explained. “The Griffon tribe. We are near to Shining White, their ancestral mound.” She edged away from the glow o
f the camp. “Come,” she whispered. “We will learn nothing of value here.”
Entreri followed her back toward their own campsite. “Should we ride now?” he asked when they were safely away. “Gain more distance from the barbarians?”
“Unnecessary,” Sydney replied. “The Uthgardt will dance the night through. All the tribe partakes of the ritual; I doubt that they even have sentries posted.”
“You know much about them,” the assassin remarked in an accusing tone, a hint to his sudden suspicions that there might be some ulterior plot controlling the events around them.
“I prepared myself for this journey,” Sydney countered. “The Uthgardt keep few secrets; their ways are generally known and documented. Travelers in the northland would do well to understand these people.”
“I am fortunate to have such a learned road companion,” Entreri said, bowing in sarcastic apology.
Sydney, her eyes straight ahead, did not respond.
But Entreri would not let the conversation die so easily. There was method in his leading line of suspicions. He had consciously chosen this time to play out his hand and reveal his distrust even before they had learned the nature of the encampment. For the first time the two were alone, without Catti-brie or Jierdan to complicate the confrontation, and Entreri meant to put an end to his concerns, or put an end to the mage.
“When am I to die?” he asked bluntly.
Sydney didn’t miss a step. “When the fates decree it, as with us all.”
“Let me ask the question a different way,” Entreri continued, grabbing her by the arm and turning her to face him. “When are you instructed to try to kill me?
“Why else would Dendybar have sent the golem?” Entreri reasoned. “The wizard puts no store in pacts and honor. He does what he must to accomplish his goals in the most expedient way, and then eliminates those he no longer needs. When my value to you is ended, I am to be slain. A task you may find more difficult than you presume.”