“If I have to come get you, then know that Guenhwyvar will be by my side,” Catti-brie said, a clear reference to the last time Drizzt had walked into Menzoberranzan.
“With ten thousand dwarves around you, I hope.”
“Aye,” she replied with a grin.
He offered her his hand and started away, but Catti-brie tugged back hard, halting him.
“One more thing,” she said when Drizzt turned back to regard her curiously.
She paused and he shrugged, confused.
“Taulmaril,” she said.
Drizzt looked at her curiously.
She held up her free hand and beckoned with it. “The bow. It is a hindrance to you as you flee about the tunnels. It was mine. I took it in Mithral Hall and so Bruenor, and so you all, gave it to me then. I would like it now.”
Drizzt stared at her incredulously, but she just smiled calmly and beckoned again.
Drizzt let go of her hand and stepped back. “The bow . . . has been of great help to me . . . in the tunnels,” he stammered.
“And I will have it,” Catti-brie demanded. She motioned to the bow with her hand again. “You said you were with fine allies.”
“And better to keep enemies at bay,” Drizzt argued.
“And so I shall, if it comes to that,” the woman said evenly. “And Jarlaxle will do the same for you, no doubt.”
“You would take . . .” Drizzt stammered and stuttered and shook his head when he found he had no response. He pulled Taulmaril over his shoulder. “I have used this in my adventures against the demons in the lower tunnels off of Mithral Hall,” he explained again.
“Aye, and you used Guenhwyvar, too.”
“Not the same . . .” the confused drow ranger replied. “Are you trying to dissuade . . . ?”
“No!” Catti-brie said with finality, then more gently, “No.”
The woman beckoned again. “Trust me.”
Now Drizzt’s expression turned to one of curiosity, as he caught on that she had something in mind. He handed over Taulmaril then reached around and removed the magical quiver that would afford him an endless supply of arrows to be enchanted and loosed by the magic of the great bow.
Catti-brie nodded and slung the bow and quiver over her shoulder.
They said no more then. There was nothing more to say. She would trust him as he trusted her. That was their unspoken agreement,. They did not inhibit each other’s journey, but rather trusted and encouraged those choices.
But Drizzt knew there remained a loaded weight in that level of trust. It implied that he would make his choices well. And on the surface, this particular choice to travel beside Jarlaxle to Menzoberranzan could not seem a wise decision. Even for the sake of Dahlia.
And still, Drizzt knew that he was walking the right road. There was something more, something nagging at his very soul, some whispering notion that this road would prove an important part of his own journey, a measure of closure that he needed so that he could honestly go on with his life as planned.
This was fated, he felt, though Drizzt had never been one to believe in fate, or in the pre-planning of the gods, or any other such notions. He believed in free will and reason above all—he lived his life by that credo. Even in matters of faith, Drizzt placed his moral compass above any external edicts, and indeed, Mielikki was merely a name to what he knew was in his heart—though he had come to doubt that label of late.
Still, this offer of adventure Jarlaxle had placed before him felt to him more like some road to lasting peace. If he succeeded, he suspected he would finally and forever put Menzoberranzan behind him, or at least lock his awful experiences in that dark cavern into proper perspective.
And yes, it was a great risk.
Perhaps he would be slain, perhaps turned into a drider, perhaps sent into the Abyss to serve as a slave to Lolth forevermore.
But even in the face of those grim possibilities, he had to do this.
He and Catti-brie spent a long time alone then, expressing their love and respect as if it might be the last time.
They went together, and found Jarlaxle to bring along, to tell King Bruenor, whose excited response was, of course, perfectly predictable.
“Call out the boys!” the dwarf proclaimed. “Oh, but we’ll march with ye, elf, all of us, and we’ll tear down every drow House and put a blade up every ugly, skinny drow bum!” He paused in his rant and looked at Jarlaxle. “Well, exceptin’ those ye tell us to let be, and then we’ll be lettin’ ’em be only if they keep them skinny bums out o’ our way!”
“Bruenor, no,” Drizzt was finally able to say, and forcefully enough to halt the dwarf’s momentum. Standing on the Throne of the Dwarven Gods then, King Bruenor looked at Drizzt curiously and said, “Huh?”
“You have your work here,” Drizzt said. “No less important. The tunnels are full of demons, the drow may return to Gauntlgrym, and the Hosttower must be rebuilt or it is all for naught anyway.”
“Bah! But ye think I’m to let ye walk off along to Menzoburysomedrow?”
The play on the name gave Drizzt pause, enough for Jarlaxle to verbally wade into the conversation with, “Yes, that is exactly what we think, and what we demand.”
All around the group, dwarves gasped at the dark elf visitor’s impertinence, especially with King Bruenor standing atop the throne.
“Were you to empty your halls, indeed all the halls of the Silver Marches, you’d not win a fight with Menzoberranzan, good dwarf,” Jarlaxle explained. “Not there, not where all the Houses would unite against you. You’d not get near to our goal.”
“Trust them, me Da,” Catti-brie said. She looked over at Drizzt and nodded. “They will not fail in this.”
Bruenor was clearly unable to come up with any answer that satisfied him or assuaged his all-too-obvious fears. He slowly melted back into the throne and heaved a great sigh.
“We’re almost there, elf,” he said quietly. “Can ye no feel it?”
“I do,” Drizzt said. “And we are. To that place we’ve talked of since our days together on Kelvin’s Cairn. Almost there. The winding road shows the end straightaway.”
“The door to home’s in sight,” Bruenor said.
Many hugs later, Drizzt and Jarlaxle walked together into the Underdark, side-by-side. Oftentimes, Jarlaxle lifted a hand to put it comfortingly on Drizzt’s shoulder, and more than once, the mercenary whispered Bruenor’s last words, “The door to home’s in sight.”
W
ith a thousand dwarves marching behind her, Cattibrie, astride the mighty unicorn Andahar, led the way to the gates of Luskan. Athrogate and Ambergris rode at her side, the two of them assigned by Bruenor to serve as her personal bodyguards. Many threatening looks came at the woman, and particularly at her entourage, from the scalawags serving as gate guards—rogues in the service of one or another of the five competing Captains of Luskan. But Jarlaxle’s hold on the city was so powerful not a single word was spoken, not even a request for the leaders to identify the approaching army.
The gates were pulled open without a word, and Catti-brie led the way into the city.
“Take me to the Hosttower,” she ordered one of the nearby guards, a woman so dark from the sun and dirty from the streets she looked as if she had the shadow of a beard.
Still without a word of response, she escorted them up Reaver’s Run, the main boulevard that led all the way to the city’s main market. Beyond that lay the bridge to Closeguard Island, which housed the Ship of High Captain Kurth, who was of course Jarlaxle’s lieutenant, Beniago.
Indeed, Beniago waited at the far end of the bridge, bidding the newcomers to cross. He took up beside Catti-brie and led the way to the next bridge, from Closeguard to Cutlass Island, where once had stood the Hosttower of the Arcane. Large tents had already been constructed all around the ruins of that once-grand structure.
“Food will be brought to you daily,” Beniago assured Catti-brie.
“Enough to keep me belly fat?” Athrogate demanded.
Beniago, who knew Athrogate well, merely laughed and nodded.
“Aye, better be,” the dwarf grunted.
Catti-brie moved over to the roots of the ruined structure as the dwarves settled in. The devastation had been so complete that she could look down into what had once been the basement of the tower, and even below that broken stone and metal to the deep roots trailing down into the Underdark. These were the roots that ran to Gauntlgrym, delivering seawater to the elementals that held the fire primordial in its pit.
She looked up at the darkening sky. The sun had slipped below the horizon, but only recently. The clouds to the west flared pink and orange in the dying light. The wind was off the water, wet and chill in her face, and Catti-brie pulled her black cloak—the cloak Jarlaxle had given her—tighter about her.
“A daunting task,” Gromph Baenre said and the woman jumped—and nearly transformed into a raven and flew away. The drow was suddenly there, out of nowhere it seemed, standing perfectly calm beside her.
She gave him an incredulous look, and he returned a smile that reminded her of their respective powers. She knew Gromph’s appearance and demeanor was meant to intimidate her so she calmed herself quickly and presented herself more forcefully.
She did a good job of hiding the winding line of terror that continued to twist inside her. Catti-brie trusted in her powers and her relationship with Mielikki. She had returned to this world with clear goals, and that guiding purpose had dominated her existence over the more than two decades of her second life. She had trained with powerful wizards, studied in the extensive library of the Harpells, communed closely with a goddess . . .
But this was Gromph Baenre, recently the Archmage of Menzoberranzan. He had magically appeared right beside her without a hint of warning or a tingle that anything was amiss.
Catti-brie understood that he could very likely destroy her just as easily and unexpectedly.
“I have examined pieces of the fallen tower already,” Gromph explained. “All the materials are available. We have paintings and have uncovered design sketches of the tower in the bowels of Illusk, below this city. The dwarves should have no trouble replicating the physical structure.”
“That is the easy part,” Catti-brie said.
Gromph stared at the hole in the ground and nodded.
“Why are you doing this?” Catti-brie asked bluntly, and he looked up to match her blue eyes with his amber orbs, the two locking stares intently.
“If I wished you to know—”
“Amuse me,” she heard herself saying, and couldn’t believe the words as they came forth.
Gromph was the one who seemed amused, and he looked back to the hole.
“You intend to inhabit the tower when it is rebuilt,” Catti-brie said in a voice that sounded far too accusatory.
“If it suits me,” Gromph answered. “I intend to live wherever I desire to live. Would you wish to try to stop me?”
“In this city, run by drow?”
Gromph looked up at her again and flashed a wicked smile. “Here or anywhere,” he clarified.
Catti-brie swallowed hard, but she did not allow herself to blink and did not look away.
“You fear for the dwarves,” Gromph surmised. “You fear that if I am in control of the new Hosttower, I might use that position against the magic that preserves Gauntlgrym.”
Catti-brie saw no need to answer.
“It is a reasonable fear, of course,” said Gromph. “Or it would be, except for two important matters. First, the magic of the Hosttower isn’t enacted like that of a wand. I will not call upon the tower to fuel the elementals enslaving the primordial any more than I can tell the tower not to do so. I expect you will understand this as we go through the process. Surely no instrument of such power would have ever been left to the whims of whomever happened to be serving as the leader of the Hosttower at any particular time in its millennia of existence, particularly not since the dwarves helped build the original tower, from all that I can tell.
“And second, I am not a simple and capricious murderer. What reason would I have to destroy Gauntlgrym, even if that was within my power?”
“Why did the drow attack Mithral Hall? Why does Tiago pursue Drizzt? Why—?”
“Gauntlgrym in the hands of a dwarf king serves me well at this time,” Gromph stated.
“And if that changes?”
“I assure you, human woman, I am not one you wish to anger. And I do not need a Hosttower beneath my feet to rain destruction, wherever I choose.”
“You say such things and expect me to trust you in this most important endeavor?”
“I speak the simple truth, and know that you have no choice in the matter. If you believe that you can reconstruct the Hosttower of the Arcane without my aid, then you prove the drow matron mothers correct when they proclaim the stupidity of humans.”
Catti-brie was very relieved at that moment when Beniago walked up to stand beside her. Jarlaxle and his many henchmen would protect them all from the wrath of Gromph.
“Braelin Janquay has returned to serve in House Do’Urden?”
Gromph asked in the drow tongue, and Catti-brie was glad to learn that she could still understand the language well enough to keep up with the fast-speaking wizard.
A mixed blessing, she realized, when Beniago answered in perfect drow,
“Yes, uncle.”
Uncle.
The web around her was daunting. Catti-brie walked away, to a tent she had taken as her own. As she neared the closed flap, she shut her eyes and pictured again the hole in the ground that had been the grand and wondrous Hosttower of the Arcane. She tried again to picture that magnificent structure with its branching tendrils—it seemed as much a living thing as something built by elves and dwarves.
The image proved fleeting, replaced by something else, something that surprised Catti-brie: the amber eyes of Gromph Baenre, staring at her, measuring her, devouring her.
She glanced back to find Gromph looking back at her from the base of the Hosttower.
Shaken, the woman retired to her tent.
“Ignore the ghosts,” Jarlaxle told Drizzt as they wound their way through ancient, cobweb-filled halls and corridors, many with stone statues and bas reliefs so covered by the dust of centuries that they had become unrecognizable.
Still, Drizzt understood the design of the place and the architecture and statues enough to suspect that he and Jarlaxle had come into Illusk in their underground meandering.
“The spirits have been rendered benign by my associates,” Jarlaxle explained. “At least, benign to those strong enough of mind and will to ignore them—I would expect you are among that group. Such creatures feed and strengthen on fear.”
Several of the specters appeared, their faces stretched and elongated as if frozen in some exaggerated, truly horrified scream. The long-dead of Illusk floated about the sides of the wide hall Drizzt and Jarlaxle traversed. They leered at them from every shadow, it seemed. And they whispered in Drizzt’s mind, telling him to flee, offering him images of some gruesome impending feast upon his warm flesh.
Drizzt looked at his companion, then steeled himself against his budding terror. Trust Jarlaxle, he silently reminded himself. The drow mercenary’s casual gait comforted him, reminding him that he was traveling with one of the most capable people Faerûn had ever known.
So Drizzt found his center and his heart, and in his fortified emotional state, the ghosts became no more to him than moving decorations, like a rolling animation of Illusk’s ancient secrets and history.
They came to an area less dusty and forlorn, and with other dark elves of Bregan D’aerthe moving about, all pausing to tip a nod to their leader, and to Drizzt. At one door, Jarlaxle paused and held his hand up to halt Drizzt. “Pray wait here,” the mercenary instructed. “I will return in a moment.”
Drizzt moved to put his back up against the wall, and tried to appear relaxed, though he surely didn’t want to be in this place without an escort. But no sooner had Jarlaxle gone through the door than he came back out, shook his head, and apparently reconsidered,. He motioned to Drizzt to follow.
It was a small chamber with a single bed, a single desk, and a single chair, now filled by a lone man, a human, sitting back with his soft boots up on the table.
A man Drizzt knew well.
“Drizzt has agreed to join our quest,” Jarlaxle explained, and Artemis Entreri nodded.
“You will risk the ways of Menzoberranzan for the sake of Dahlia?”
Drizzt asked the assassin.
“You will?” Entreri returned with equal skepticism. “Will not Catti-brie burn with jealousy?”
“She knows I have no interest in Dahlia in any way that is threatening to her,” Drizzt replied. “I seek to aid an old companion, nothing more.” He paused and stared hard at Entreri, beginning to decipher more regarding this unexpected valor from the assassin. “Do you understand that?” After a pause, Entreri offered a slight nod and said convincingly, “I am pleased to have you along.”
Jarlaxle dropped a mask on the table beside the assassin’s legs, and Drizzt recognized that magical item. Jarlaxle had gotten it from him after he had taken it from a banshee named Agatha. It appeared as a simple white stage mask with a tie to hold it in place, but it was so much more. “You will walk as a drow,” Jarlaxle told Entreri. “Every step of the way from this place to Menzoberranzan and back again. We do not know what eyes will be upon us when we leave the wards my friends have enacted as protection around Illusk.”
Entreri picked up the mask, rolled it over several times with his fingers, and at last managed a nod, one clearly of great reluctance. “We can afford no mistakes,” Jarlaxle explained. “So we will take no chances.”
“Would not a simple spell of illusion suffice?”
“Ah, but that is the beauty of Agatha’s Mask,” Jarlaxle explained.
“Neither it nor the changes its wearer enacts can be detected with magic.” As he explained things to Entreri, Jarlaxle turned sidelong, his gaze sweeping out to include Drizzt in his warning. Drizzt was looking past Jarlaxle, though, to this enigma he knew as Entreri. He noted the assassin’s eyes widening with clear shock, a profound scowl coming over him.
Drizzt didn’t even have to follow Entreri’s gaze to realize he had noted the red blade Jarlaxle wore at his hip.
Entreri seemed as if he would melt there and then. His lips moved as if he wanted to say something, but no sound came forth.
“It was not destroyed,” Jarlaxle said, obviously noting the same thing as Drizzt.
“Throw it back in the pit!” Entreri demanded.
“You still do not know if your longevity is tied to the blade.” “It is,” Entreri stated flatly. He spat both words, and spat before and after for good measure.
“Well, so be it, then,” Jarlaxle told him. He drew the blade, laid it on the table, then pulled off the magical gauntlet and put it down beside the sword. Entreri shied away, sliding his chair back. “Throw it back into the pit,”
he whispered again, seeming on the edge of abject desperation. “No one will hold Charon’s Claw over you now,” Jarlaxle assured him.
“I give it to you. The Netherese are a fading memory—they’ll not hunt the blade now.”
“I do not want it,” Entreri said with a sneer. “Destroy it.” “I am sure I have no idea how that might be done,” said Jarlaxle. “Nor would I deign to do so if I did. You have long demanded of me that I help you retrieve Dahlia from Matron Mother Baenre, and so I . . . so
we
shall.” “Not with that,” Entreri insisted, his hateful stare never leaving the bone-hilted, red-bladed, diabolical sword. “It’s not possible.” Drizzt could feel the pain emanating from Entreri’s every word. This sword, Charon’s Claw, had enslaved him. And with it, the Shadovar Lord Herzgo Alegni had tortured the man for decades. All of those awful memories resounded clearly now in Entreri’s tone. This was not a man used to being submissive, but the obvious level of his fear now truly touched Drizzt. Entreri really had expected to die when he threw Charon’s Claw into the primordial pit, and yet he had demanded that the sword go in. He, Drizzt, and Dahlia had ventured through danger to the bowels of Gauntlgrym for exactly that reason: to destroy Charon’s Claw, and with it, to destroy Artemis Entreri. It would seem that Entreri hated Charon’s Claw more than he valued his own life. The question, then, Drizzt knew, was whether or not Entreri hated the sword more than he cared for Dahlia—and that, Drizzt now suspected from Entreri’s hesitance and twisting expression, was a different matter entirely.