Drizzt stared at the matron mother, stupefied, and trembling so hard he could barely stand. He could feel the power—of every spell and every arrow—beginning to eat through the strange shield that held it at bay.
Heartbeats, no longer than mere heartbeats, and he would be obliterated, like the woman who had served as a conduit, who had let go of his hand.
He saw the fear in the matron mother’s eyes. She knew she was doomed.
And he didn’t know . . . anything.
He looked down and drew out Icingdeath with his free hand. He fell within himself and became, again, the Hunter.
This was his moment.
He heard the approach behind him—how could he not?
Slowly, Drizzt’s eyes scanned upward. He saw the robes of the unusual young drow. He followed up her shapely body to that pretty neck and rainbow hair, to that beautiful face, staring back at him and smiling knowingly.
So close, but not afraid.
Because she knew.
This was his moment.
Drizzt roared and spun, his blades going high. And he ran—how he ran!—and he leaped with all his strength and all his might, falling, flying from on high at the approaching prince of demons.
And Demogorgon screamed, and all the city screamed, and Drizzt plummeted between the biting ape-heads, too close for the winding tentacles to deflect him, and he drove his blades down together in a singular, magnificent strike, plunging them into the massive chest of the gigantic demon beast.
And the destructive power of every arrow and every spell coursed through him in that strike, and he felt the monster melting beneath him. He continued to fall, right through the giant body of the beast, never slowing until he plunged into the stone floor.
Tons of blood and guts and shattered bone and two giant, orangehaired ape heads, tumbled atop him.
G
romph and Kimmuriel walked side-by-side through the passageways of Gauntlgrym, a host of dwarf guards directing them. King Bruenor hadn’t been pleased to see them, but at least they had come to see him properly, in accordance with Catti-brie’s wishes.
Gromph hadn’t much noticed or cared. He had only come to this place now because of Kimmuriel’s insistence. Since he had accepted Kimmuriel as the official ambassador of the illithid hive-mind in the rebuilding of the tower, Kimmuriel’s wishes were no small thing. “It is an amazing insight, perhaps,” Kimmuriel offered as the party descended the long circular stair to the main chamber of the lower levels.
“It is idiocy,” Gromph replied with calm confidence. The only thing preventing him from a complete explosion of outrage here were his most recent memories. Never had he felt such power flowing through him as when the illithid collective had sent the kinetic barrier to the waiting K’yorl. That had felt to Gromph to be the purest and most intense expression of intangible power he had ever experienced. In those moments of flowing perfection, he believed that he had come to know what it was like to be a god.
But now this.
In the few short days Gromph had been away, the infernal human woman had strengthened her hold on the others—and they had wasted not a moment in coming to this place to meet with King Bruenor.
And now the work had apparently already begun.
“One thing I have learned in my years with the illithids, Archmage, is to never underestimate the power of viewing the world through a glass bowed. The truths we know are solid paradigms only in our wider expression of the world as a whole.”
Gromph looked at him curiously for a moment, but then grumbled, “Her glass isn’t bowed. It is painted with pretty flowers.” He stopped as the pair neared the Forge Room, noting some dwarves moving along a corridor off the side, towing carts loaded with stone.
Gromph shook his head and turned to face Kimmuriel directly. “Only those flowers are dragons, and they will melt us all,” he said. They went into the Forge Room then, to the incredulous and suspicious stares of the dwarf craftsmen. Over on the far wall were large tables covered with parchments. The dragon sisters were there, along with Caecilia, Lord Parise, and Penelope Harpell, all discussing some image splayed in front of them and pointing and nodding.
Kimmuriel started that way, but paused when he realized that Gromph wasn’t following him.
“You go,” the archmage said. “I’ve another I wish to speak with, and I know where to find her.”
He swept across the room then, veering left and never even looking back where the other architects of the new Hosttower had gathered.
A pair of dwarves stood blocking the door in front of him.
“Get out of my way,” he told them.
“He the one?” one asked the other.
“Aye, the stubborn one,” said the other, and they parted.
At the other end of the tunnel loomed the primordial chamber, and there, as expected, Gromph found Catti-brie. She stood at the edge of the pit, staring across at the area that held, beneath the cooled magma, the antechamber and the key lever.
Beside the woman lay several metal beams and cut stones, the ingredients for constructing a new bridge to the antechamber.
“You have wasted no time,” Gromph said.
“We have little to waste.” She didn’t seem surprised by his entrance, nor did she bother looking over at him as he approached.
“It seems that you have convinced the others.”
“They have decided nothing.”
“Good, then I will . . .”
Now Catti-brie did turn on him, her eyes narrowed, her face a mask of determination. “I will do this with or without them, and with or without you.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes, indeed.”
Once again, Drizzt awakened deep within himself, settled deeply into darkness. He wasn’t standing this time, he realized when the pain in his stretched joints began to register.
“At last,” he heard, the voice of a drow woman.
“You should have just left him for dead,” said another, whom he recognized as Matron Mother Quenthel.
“Oh shut up,” said the first, Yvonnel.
Drizzt felt something upon his belly then, square and solid. It was jostled about and he felt the bottom pulled out, then small feet and tiny claws moving back and forth excitedly. He opened his eyes, blinking repeatedly as he adjusted to the dim light of the room—of the dungeon, yet again, in House Baenre.
He groaned, in pain. While he wasn’t standing, neither was he actually lying down. He was on a rack, suspended by his ankles and wrists. He worked his shoulders, trying vainly to relieve some of the tension on his elbows, but the ties were simply too tight and his efforts only brought him more pain.
He did manage to lift his head a bit to see Yvonnel, Quenthel standing behind her, and to see the small box Yvonnel had placed upon his naked belly.
The bottomless one that held a rat.
“Ah, good, you have returned to us at last,” Yvonnel said to him and she moved up and leaned on the crank, and the rack pulled a tiny bit more.
Drizzt grimaced against the pain.
“I have your friends here,” she said happily. “Would you like to see?”
Drizzt closed his eyes and tried to send his thoughts far away.
“This is so much like the wheel of history returning to the same place anew, don’t you think?” Yvonnel said, and Drizzt was sure that he had no idea what she was babbling about. “As your actions doomed your father before, so now, one of your friends.”
Drizzt’s eyes popped open wide and he glared at her.
“But I will let you pick,” she said. “Which of your friends will satisfy my sacrifice? The human? He is an angry one, always so full of scowls. You’d be doing him a favor.”
“Damn you.”
“Of course,” she said. “Or the elf. She is quite crazy. She probably won’t even understand. Or shall I kill Jarlaxle? You would at least be repaying me, I expect, since that one is drow, and valuable to me. Do you have that in you, heretic, to turn my request against me?”
“You gave me your word,” Drizzt gasped, and his words came out unevenly—Yvonnel played with the wheel throughout his sentence.
“And so two will leave, and the third . . . I will make it an easy death. A simple beheading.”
“Damn you,” Drizzt said again, and he settled back and closed his eyes.
“Choose,” Yvonnel instructed.
He didn’t answer.
But then she was there, right above him, one knee up on his chest and pressing down, increasing his pain. He opened his eyes to find her face very near his own, and with one hand raised.
“I admire your bravery,” she said, and snapped her fingers. In her palm a small ball of fire flared to life.
Yvonnel kept her smile very close as she reached her hand down lower, and lit the rat box.
“You will choose,” she whispered.
Drizzt felt the creature scrambling within the box, the front claws digging against his flesh.
“Choose!” Yvonnel demanded.
“Take me!” Entreri shouted. “Let him go and take me, you witch.”
Drizzt opened his eyes and strained to see in the direction of the voice, and there was the cage of lightning, Entreri up near the bars, Jarlaxle beside him with a hand on his shoulder.
Yvonnel had turned away to regard them, too, and she began to laugh. “Shut up!” she commanded. When Entreri began to yell at her, she waved her hand and the cage faded away, and so, too, did his protests.
Yvonnel was back at Drizzt’s face, so close. “Choose,” she whispered.
He shook his head, growling and grinding his teeth against the pain of the rack and the claws of the terrified rat.
“It is all a lie anyway, Drizzt Do’Urden, as you know,” she said. “So why does it matter?” She leaned on his chest and his elbows and knees felt as if they would simply explode. “Why does anything matter more than stopping the pain? Pick a friend.”
“No!”
“Pick a friend!” she said more insistently.
The rat bit him hard and began to burrow.
“No!”
“Why? It is all a lie.”
“No.”
“It is! So choose.”
“No!”
“Then tell me, Drizzt Do’Urden,” she said, her voice going softer. “Before you die, tell me why. It is all a lie, so why will you not choose?”
Drizzt opened his eyes and looked into Yvonnel’s colorful amber orbs, fighting to maintain control as the rat burrowed.
“Because I am not a lie,” he insisted through gritted teeth.
Yvonnel fell back from him, the pressure of the rack easing, at least. She stared at him for a long heartbeat, her expression one of confusion, perhaps, or of disbelief.
“Get those three out of here,” she turned and told Quenthel, then spun back to stare at Drizzt, shaking her head with a crooked smile, as if she had just learned something.
She slapped the burning box and the rat off of him and cast a spell with a wave of her hand that pulled the locking pin from the rack crank. Drizzt fell heavily to his back, where he lay gasping, too broken to even pull his arms down.
Yvonnel fell over him once again, her face close.
“They are free, all three,” she whispered. She kissed him, and in that kiss was a spell of healing and of slumber. “Sleep well, hero,” she added as Drizzt faded back into welcomed blackness.
“Do what?” Gromph demanded. “Do you mean to clear that chamber and free the primordial?”
Catti-brie didn’t blink.
“You have forgotten Neverwinter?”
Again, no answer.
“You do not understand the power of this creature.”
“But I do.”
“Yet you mean to free it!”
“In a controlled—”
“You cannot control such a beast as this, fool!”
Catti-brie grinned. “Come,” she bade him.
He looked at her curiously, puzzled.
“I will allow you into my thoughts,” she explained, “where once you were comfortable. I will show you.”
Gromph made no move for a long while, then narrowed his amber eyes and projected his thoughts into the waiting mind of Catti-brie.
And from there, she took him through her ring, to converse with the primordial, to see what she had seen from ancient times, when the volcano had roared through the tendrils and through the stone of Cutlass Island, melting the crystal of the limestone into something stronger, something magical, and pressing it out of the ground to grow. Squeezing it, hollowing it, pushing it farther, more and more crystal. Bubbles became holes became branches, flowing and growing.
A long while later, she cut off the communication and images, then abruptly dismissed Gromph from her thoughts and opened her eyes to stare at him once more.
The archmage licked his lips. He tried to appear nonchalant, but, judging by Catti-brie’s smirk, unsuccessfully.
For the second time in a span of hours, Gromph had witnessed something beyond his understanding, something terrifying and alluring all at once.
He returned her grin.
What else could he do?
She was right. For all the danger, all the chance of complete disaster, to rebuild the Hosttower of the Arcane, she was right.
“We cannot leave him,” Artemis Entreri said out in the tunnels just beyond Menzoberranzan. He was with Jarlaxle and Dahlia, and with all their gear returned.
Jarlaxle laughed. “We surely cannot go and get him!”
“He would have died for us.”
“He is probably already dead,” the mercenary replied with a shrug.
“Would you dishonor him and get all of us killed, as well? Or do you not understand the limits of a drow matron mother’s mercy?”
Entreri spat on the ground and spun away, then stood up straight when he noted the approach of two dark elves.
Jarlaxle, too, noted them, and was not as surprised by the appearance of Yvonnel as he was by the other. “It cannot be,” he said.
“Use your magic, then,” Yvonnel answered. “You have the mask back in your possession. Is there another item that could so deceive the clever Jarlaxle?”
Braelin Janquay walked up in front of Jarlaxle and bowed. “Thank you for trying to end my misery,” he said.
“You were a drider,” Jarlaxle said. He looked past Braelin to Yvonnel. “You cannot undo a drider.”
“Of course you can,” she replied. “Or I can. I doubt others would have the courage to try.”
“But Lolth . . .”
“She is celebrating the fall of Demogorgon,” Yvonnel said. “She will forgive me.”
“But why?” a suspicious Entreri demanded.
Yvonnel looked at him, and even tilted her pretty head to regard him more closely, then began to laugh and waved him aside. She motioned for Jarlaxle to follow, and walked back the way she had come.
“I do this for you,” she said when Jarlaxle caught up to her. “A measure of good faith in expectation that you will serve my purpose.”
“And that purpose is?”
“We will see, in time.”
“Is he dead?” Jarlaxle asked, more seriously.
“Of course not.”
Jarlaxle walked around to face the strange young drow squarely.
“You envy him,” he dared to say.
Yvonnel snorted.
“You do!” Jarlaxle insisted. “You envy him. Because he is content in his heart that there is something more, some better angels and greater reason, and because he so easily finds his rewards, treasures as great as anything I or even you might know, in the contentment of moral clarity and personal honor.”
“I envy him?” Yvonnel scoffed. “And what of Jarlaxle?”
The mercenary assumed a pensive pose, considering the words before finally nodding. “How many times might I have killed Drizzt for easy personal gain?” he asked rhetorically, with a helpless laugh. “And yet he lives, and I find that I would defend this Houseless rogue at the cost of my own life.”
“Why?” Yvonnel asked, and sincerely. “Why you, and why that filth named Entreri?”
“Perhaps because secretly we all want to believe what Drizzt believes,” said Jarlaxle. He waited for Yvonnel to look him in the eye. “You couldn’t break him. You cannot break him.”
She looks annoyed, he thought.
She waved him away. “Go,” she said. “Remember that I gave your underling back to you. Remember that I let you walk away from this place.”