DRIZZT GUIDED ANDAHAR AS FAST AS HE DARED WHILE TRYING to keep Dahlia steady. He’d slung her over the back of the unicorn, and had stopped no less than three times in the first twenty strides to make sure she was still breathing.
She was, but barely. One of her thighs had turned an ugly blue and spittle flowed from her lips.
Drizzt didn’t dare stop to more closely inspect her wound, though he figured it had to be on her lower leg. He spurred Andahar on, trying to figure out where to turn, or if he was even going in the right direction.
With the delays and indecision, and the futile attempts to ease Dahlia’s suffering, it was long past midday when Drizzt at last arrived at the farmhouse south of Luskan, where the dirty woman eked out a paltry existence with her five children. They weren’t hiding this time. The children and the woman came to the doorway and watched him slip down from Andahar and gently pull Dahlia off the unicorn’s back. He draped her across his shoulders and moved toward the doorway. The woman crossed her arms and wore a profound scowl.
“She dead?” the woman asked. Her expression went from sour to surprised when she looked upon Dahlia … because Dahlia’s hair and facial skin didn’t appear the same as she had when they came through there, Drizzt realized.
“Not dead, not dying,” Drizzt answered defiantly. “But she’s gravely ill—poisoned. I need to leave her here. I need you to watch over her while I return to Luskan.”
He moved to enter the doorway, but the woman didn’t immediately step aside. She stood there staring at him.
“Please, will you tend her?” Drizzt asked.
“I’m not knowing much about poison.”
“Just keep her as comfortable as you …” Drizzt started to explain, but the woman yelled past him suddenly, to her children.
“Go and fetch Ben the Brewer!” she ordered sharply. “And be quick!”
The children ran off down the dirt path.
“Ben the Brewer?” Drizzt asked.
“He has many herbs,” the woman replied.
“He can cure her?” Drizzt asked, and he was surprised by the desperation in his tone.
The farmer woman looked at him and scoffed, but finally stepped aside so he could bring her into the house. He lay Dahlia down gently on a bedroll and moved immediately to her boot, unstrapping it and pulling it off—or trying to, for her leg was thick with poison.
After some time and more than a little grease, Drizzt at last managed to get the boot off. Dahlia’s foot was horribly swollen and discolored, blue and red and yellow.
He winced and brought a hand up to his face to try to compose himself. The farmer woman moved past him and studied the foot. “Looks like the bite of a tundra viper,” she said.
“And Ben the Brewer can cure that?” Drizzt asked.
The woman cast him a pitiful glance and shook her head.
Drizzt took a deep breath. He couldn’t lose Dahlia. Not now. Not with the loss of Bruenor so raw, not with his sudden loneliness, the realization that all of his friends were gone. He fell back from the bed, surprised by that revelation, by how much he needed Dahlia, by how frightened he was that she, too, might leave him.
“This is no snakebite,” the farmer woman said, inspecting the single puncture in the bottom of Dahlia’s foot.
“A poisoned spike.”
“Then you should seek the one who coated the spike,” the woman said. “Few would play with such a mixture if they had no antidote, eh? Or get us a dose, aye, for we … you, will need the poison to counter the poison.”
Drizzt nodded and spent a long moment staring at Dahlia. Other than the angry leg, she looked quite serene, though very pale.
“I’ll return before the next dawn,” the drow pledged.
He started for the door, but even as he reached it the farmer woman cried out. Drizzt spun around to find her backing away from Dahlia, her hand over her open mouth, a look of horror on her face. The dark elf rushed to Dahlia, but found nothing amiss.
“What?” he asked, turning to their host.
“Her face!” the woman cried. “It’s bruising again, like before!”
Drizzt looked back to the elf and he understood. The magical powder Dahlia had applied was wearing off, and her woad was returning. He breathed a sigh of relief and gave a little laugh.
“It’s all right,” he explained, standing back up and moving for the door. “Beware that her hair might change as well.”
“She’s a doppelganger, then?” the woman asked with horror.
“Nay, just a bit of magical disguise.”
The woman, a simple creature, shook her head at such nonsense, and Drizzt managed a smile, then ran out of the house, leaping onto Andahar’s back and setting the unicorn off in a full gallop along the road to the north.
Images of Dahlia’s foot haunted him with Andahar’s every running stride.
They stood around her in a circle, bloody and battered. All of them, from Bengarion to Dor’crae, the nine lovers she had killed.
“You cannot escape us,” Dor’crae promised her. Half of his skin was missing, blasted free from the force of the rushing water. “We await you.”
“You think we have forgotten you?” asked another.
“You think we have forgiven you?” asked another.
They began to laugh, all nine, and to pace in unison, circling Dahlia as she spun around every which way. She had nowhere to run. Kozah’s Needle could not help her this time.
A tenth form joined the marching nine; a tiny form; a baby, half elf and half tiefling. He didn’t say anything, but stared at Dahlia hatefully then smiled a wicked smile to show a mouth full of sharpened teeth.
Dahlia cried out and fell away from him, but that only put her closer—too close!—to those on the other side. She cried out again and stumbled back to her original spot.
They taunted her and laughed at her. Desperate, she charged at the line, fists balled, determined to fight to the bitter end.
But she was grabbed by others, by Shadovar, and was thrown down and held.
Her mother cried out for her.
Herzgo Alegni fell over her.
When he finished, he walked away, laughing, along with his guards. To kill her mother, Dahlia knew, but Dahlia was not there anymore, was back in the midst of the circling ten she’d murdered.
She was naked, and she fell to the ground, crying.
They laughed at her all the more.
“We have not forgotten,” they chanted.
“We have not forgiven,” they chanted.
“We await you,” the baby taunted. “The time is near.”
Drizzt went over Luskan’s wall with no more noise or notice than a shadow in the starlight. He knew the city well, and made his way from structure to structure, alley to alley, roof to roof, to the base of the bridge to Closeguard Isle.
He could see the balcony where he and Dahlia had stood beside High Captain Kurth, as Kurth had explained to them the layout of the city. After a short while, watching the movements of the soldiers on Closeguard, Drizzt figured he could get to that balcony unnoticed.
But then what?
Was he to put a scimitar to the throat of a high captain? Would the man then surrender the antidote? Did Kurth even have any information regarding the poisoned traps in the jeweler’s shop?
Frustration almost had Drizzt stomping his boot. His thoughts wrapped in on themselves, leading nowhere. He knew that time was against him, was against Dahlia, but what was he to do?
“Go to Kurth,” he whispered and nodded, for that seemed the only option. He crouched beside the railing and took his first step on the bridge, but slipped back quickly when he saw several forms approaching from the other end.
The men and women walked right past him. He heard their general comments, talk of trouble with Ship Rethnor, and with one woman blaming Beniago for the current state of affairs.
“Beniago was so taken with that murderess,” she said.
“The trouble with Ship Rethnor will pass,” another woman insisted. “None o’ their leaders were killed by Beniago’s group—just a pair o’ hired scalawags. All the rest fell before the elf and the drow.”
“And when Ship Rethnor decides to kill a few of us?” the first woman replied angrily.
“Ye’d do well to temper yer wrath when it’s aimed at Beniago,” a man said.
“Bah, but he’s out drinking and whoring.” The first woman waved her hand.
“He has eyes,” the man said, and the woman glowered at him.
The group moved away and Drizzt let them go, reconsidering his own course. He glanced back at Closeguard Isle and the tower, but went the other way, into the city, heading for the dock section, where ruffians roamed for their “drinking and whoring.”
He knew that he’d need luck on his side, but knew, too, that this was not a section of indoor taverns behind closed doors. Most of the establishments near the docks were open-front bars, with patrons wandering up and down the street.
Drizzt paused again when he neared the area, which was well lit and quite boisterous even at this late hour—particularly at this late hour. Some of the many people on the street would recognize him, and given his recent encounter with both Ship Rethnor and Ship Kurth, that might not be such a good thing. He wouldn’t be the only drow down there, at least, he noted, as he spotted one tattooed dark elf walking with others of his crew.
Drizzt pulled the hood of his forest-green cloak up over his head and pulled the cowl low. He wrapped the cloak around his body, as well, to hide his distinctive blades.
He went down among the crowd, keeping his head low, his eyes constantly scanning.
He caught more than one man staring at him curiously, and knew that his time here would be short indeed when one such fellow then turned to a companion and whispered something, and the companion rushed away. To gather allies, no doubt.
Drizzt shook the notion away and focused on Dahlia, reminding himself that she needed him here and needed him to be quick. He picked up his pace, moving along, studying the faces.
Beniago.
The man seemed to be alone, walking with a mug of ale in one hand, a half-eaten loaf of bread in the other. Drizzt surveyed the area then moved fast. He cut across Beniago’s path, perhaps ten strides ahead of the man, and only briefly glanced at him, making sure that Beniago noticed him as well.
But only for that fleeting instant.
He didn’t want the assassin to be sure that it was him. The hint was his tease.
He crossed the narrow street and moved between a pair of taverns and down a shadowy alley, picking up his speed as soon as he was out of sight. The drow skidded to a stop and picked his way up the side of a building to a rooftop. He crept along the alleyway, and he watched.
Beniago turned into that alleyway a few heartbeats later, drink and bread gone, weapons drawn. The assassin of Ship Kurth moved down cautiously, twenty steps into the alley, then around a corner at the backside of the building into a shorter alley that exited onto a far less bustling street.
The man stayed near to a wall, his gaze darting all around. He was out of sight of the street now.
Drizzt dropped into the alley behind him, his cloak open, his hood back.
Beniago spun to face him, gave a gasp, and thrust his sword at the drow’s midsection.
A scimitar picked it off cleanly, and even as Beniago brought his long weapon back to bear, the drow came on fiercely, both of his blades out and high in front of him, his wrists rolling over each other in a devastating and straightforward assault.
Beniago fell back and repeatedly batted his sword up horizontally in front of him. He kept his other arm, holding his prized dagger, cocked at his side.
Drizzt noted it, of course, and so he pressed all the harder, his scimitars beating a steady rhythm against Beniago’s sword. He found an opening, Twinkle hitting the sword at just the right angle to move it aside, and Icingdeath coming in right behind, with an open path to Beniago’s shoulder.
But Drizzt didn’t take the opening to score a hit, and altered his angle just enough so that Beniago could adjust his sword and block that blade, too.
Drizzt came on harder, recklessly it seemed, and he stumbled past and crashed hard against the alleyway wall as Beniago threw himself to the side.
With a growl, apparently thinking victory imminent, Beniago’s other hand stabbed out, but that growl turned to a gasp as Drizzt’s blade came down in a swift backhand slash, intercepting the thrust and gashing Beniago’s forearm.
The assassin cried out and his dagger went flying away.
Beniago turned to his right and leaped away, his left sword hand, slashing back to fend off the drow.
But the drow dropped below the swipe, executing his own cut, and Beniago had to leap up to avoid getting his ankles chopped out from under him. He landed off-balance, trying to throw himself back against the wall enough to catch his balance, but that twisting movement slowed him.
Drizzt tumbled past him with amazing quickness, his magically-enhanced anklets providing a burst of speed. He came to his feet farther along the first alleyway, blocking the escape.
Beniago skidded to a stop, his cut arm tucked under his sword arm, his blade waving defensively in front of him. He began to backstep immediately, and glanced over his shoulder.
“My panther is out there,” Drizzt warned—and lied, for he’d already overtaxed Guenhwyvar and had not dared summon her back to the Prime Material Plane. “If you try to flee, she will destroy you.”
“I’m second to the high captain of Ship Kurth,” Beniago warned. “If you kill me—”
“They will seek to kill me in response?” Drizzt mocked him. “Is that not already the case, Beniago?”
“More so!” the assassin promised, and he seemed to grow more confident then, for a din had begun on the street behind them.
Drizzt heard it, too, and he reached into his innate powers, last remnants of his days in Menzoberranzan, and placed a magical globe of darkness halfway down the alley between himself and the street.
“Ship Kurth will hunt you to the ends of Faerûn!”
Drizzt put up his blades. “If I wanted to kill you, you would already be dead,” he said. “You left an opening against my overhand spin. Don’t deny it, for you noted it and tried to correct your block, and only were able to do so because I allowed it.”
Beniago fumbled for a response, but had none.
“Dahlia is poisoned,” Drizzt went on. “I need the antidote to the jeweler’s trap, and I need it now, or she will surely perish. I go now to that shop.” He started to climb the wall, for now a shout went up from the street behind him. “Come to me with the antidote.”
“Why would—?”
“You will be high captain one day,” Drizzt said as he neared the roof. “You’ll want allies.”
“You ask me to trust you and Dahlia?” Beniago asked incredulously, but Drizzt was already gone from his sight.
Not gone from the alleyway, though, as he found another perch and watched Beniago.
A gang of pirates finally prodded through the darkness globe, then came charging down the alley as Beniago moved to retrieve his dagger. The assassin regarded his allies with a disgusted shake of his head and roughly shouldered past them.
A semi-conscious Dahlia thrashed as Ben the Brewer’s hot knife cut deeply into her foot. The farmer woman holding her down nearly got a knee in the face for her efforts.
“Ah, but it’s an ugly thing,” she said as green and white pus flowed from the wound. “Viper juice?”
“Aye, and we’ve all seen the withering o’ that bite.”
“Then she’s a dead one.”
“Should be already, but not a lot went in,” Ben the Brewer replied. He cut again, drawing an X on Dahlia’s foot, and more pus flowed forth. “And she’s a tough one, I’m thinking.”
Dahlia cried out, perhaps in pain, but it wasn’t a response to his knife, they both knew. She was lost in her fevered dreams once more, and obviously, those dreams were not proving to be a pleasant experience.
Ben the Brewer reached up to Dahlia’s thigh and pulled tighter on the slip-knot he’d set there. “I’d take her leg,” he said. “The foot at least. But I’m not thinking she’d live through the cutting.”
“She’s doomed anyway,” the farmer woman replied, and she looked to the wide-bladed axe and the long serrated knife he’d brought.
“If High Captain Kurth learns of this …” Beniago started to say, holding his hand out to Drizzt.
Drizzt took the phial. “He’ll thank you when Dahlia and I offer him our allegiance,” he finished for Beniago. “If Kurth is still high captain when we meet again, I mean,” the drow added, a clear implication that he believed that Beniago might find a way to rise to that seat of power.
As he heard the words leave his mouth, Drizzt had to work hard to hide his own surprise. Though born in Menzoberranzan, Drizzt was hardly a master of subterfuge, hardly a player in the realms of shadow and murder. When before would he have even considered such an interaction with a man like Beniago? When before would he have even considered any alliance with one of the high captains of Luskan? Drizzt wasn’t merely tossing that possibility out in order to garner the antidote, he was actually thinking that he and Dahlia might do well to ally themselves with Kurth, or Beniago. There was, after all, a practical side of the matter: He had the antidote in hand!
A shout came from one of the nearby alleyways.
“Ship Rethnor has awakened to your presence,” Beniago warned.
“And Ship Kurth?”
“Possibly, but I can stand them down,” Beniago replied. “There’s little I can offer you against the rage of Ship Rethnor.”
Drizzt lifted the whistle on the end of the chain and blew into it, and with great running strides, Andahar came to him, leaping through the dimensions. Drizzt motioned for the unicorn to keep running past him.
“Farewell, Beniago,” the drow said, grabbing Andahar’s flowing mane and leaping up atop the steed. “If this is the antidote, know you have made a friend. If not, then know without doubt that my blades will find your heart.”
And with that warning, Drizzt Do’Urden was gone, Andahar galloping across the market square, hooves clap-clapping on the cobblestones. A shout came up from a rooftop and Drizzt turned the unicorn sharply down an alleyway. He dodged a crate, leaped another, and swerved hard at the last instant to avoid some rubble.
In full gallop, Andahar came out onto the next street over, and cries went up and faces appeared in darkened windows. Drizzt heard the shouts along the rooftops, trying to track his progress, no doubt in an attempt to ready some archers or some other ambush up ahead.
So Drizzt turned Andahar again, and again, street by street, alley by alley. Galloping hard, he took out Taulmaril and set an arrow to the magical bowstring.
Movement on the roof ahead and to the left caught his attention, so he put up the bow and drew back. His legs clamped hard around the unicorn, holding him steady as he let fly, again and again, a barrage of lightning arrows streaking for the roof’s facing, blasting holes in the wood and shale, and brightening the night in a shower of multicolored sparks.
On they ran, Drizzt bending low over Andahar’s strong neck, whispering encouragement into the unicorn’s ear. He knew that enemies were all around, intent on stopping him. He knew that if he failed, Dahlia was surely doomed.
But he wasn’t afraid. There wasn’t the slightest fear in him that he wouldn’t get there in time, that these thugs would stop him. He couldn’t believe that, or fear that, not at this moment, not in this …
Exhilaration.
That was the word for it, the only word for it. He was alive, his every sense honed and sharp-edged, relying on his warrior instincts.
Exhilaration. Drizzt had no time for fear or doubt.
Andahar snorted as if sensing the drow’s thoughts, and ran on harder, plowing along the lanes and alleyways in the zigzag maze Drizzt had determined to get them to the gate.
An arrow reached out from the side, grazing Andahar. Drizzt responded with a lightning missile that revealed the archer, who promptly ran away.
To the other side, a large pirate rushed out of a doorway, spear in hand, and aimed for the approaching unicorn.
Drizzt’s arrow threw the fool back through the door before he’d even cocked his arm.
Unicorn and rider thundered down a decline and turned a sharp corner, heading up another street, this one leading straight to the opened west gate. Arrow after arrow reached out from Taulmaril, streaking the night with silver, slamming against the walls of the guard tower or slashing into the cobblestones at the feet of the wide-eyed guards. They shouted warnings and they called to each other for help.
And Drizzt kept shooting, arrows slamming into stone and wood, showering sparks and lighting beams with licks of flame. He scored no further hits on the scrambling guards—he wasn’t trying to cut any of them down—but he kept them running and diving and shouting for help, too confused and surprised to organize a valid counter, or even to shut the gates.
Andahar never slowed, thundering up the road, and finally, a sentry found his wits enough to rush to one of the gates.
Drizzt’s arrow splintered the wood barely a finger’s breadth from the sentry’s face, and he shrieked and fell away.
Out into the night leaped Andahar, charging down the road.
And off they went, the wind blowing in Drizzt’s white hair, and he felt free and alive. He knew that Dahlia would survive—he simply knew it in every corner of his soul. He couldn’t be wounded again, body or heart, so close to his most recent, brutal loss. Nay! He denied the possibility. He was free and he was running through the chill night on his mighty, magical steed. He was alive, the warrior, the thief, who had slipped into the heart of hostile Luskan and pulled from their foes the answer to Dahlia’s dilemma.
“On, Andahar!” he cried, and he fired an arrow high into the night sky, a sizzling silver streak, an expression of his leaping heart.
He set the bells of the barding to ringing.
Exhilaration.
They never slowed, running hard for hours, all the way back to the distant farmstead. Drizzt noted a single candle glowing from within as the structure at last came in sight, and he took that as a hopeful sign that Dahlia was still alive. He skidded Andahar to a stop and flung himself over the unicorn’s back as if it was all a dance.
Just then, a murderous scream came from the farmhouse.
He froze in place, his world collapsing, his mood, his feeling of invincibility, seeming so suddenly, a cruel joke. He was invincible or he was doomed, and the choice didn’t feel like his own, not that night, not then, not with Dahlia beside him.
The scream—it had to be Dahlia’s scream—reminded him all too clearly of his own cry those many years ago when he’d awakened to find his wife lying cold beside him, his friend screaming, too, in the hallway for another lost to the mists of time.
Drizzt crashed through the door, drawing his blades.
The farmer woman huddled in the corner, her hand still muffling the last gasps of her scream.
Dahlia half-sat, half-knelt on the bed, sweating and swaying side to side as if she would fall to the floor at any moment. She held Kozah’s Needle in tri-staff form, one end out in front of her and swinging back and forth like a pendulum.
Drizzt stared at the floor in front of Dahlia, where a serrated knife lay, then kept turning to see a man sprawled upon the floor, face-down.
“She killed him!” the farmer woman cried.
“He tried to cut off my foot!” Dahlia yelled back, in a voice surprisingly strong.
Drizzt ran to the fallen man. He groaned as soon as the drow touched his shoulder. “He’s alive.” Drizzt gently rolled Ben the Brewer over onto his back.
“Give me a moment to find my balance and I’ll rectify that,” Dahlia said.
Drizzt shot her an angry glare and motioned for the farmer woman to join him. She ran a wide circuit around Dahlia and fell down to the floor beside her wounded friend.
Ben the Brewer opened his eyes and shook his head.
“Now, that’ll leave a mark,” he said, rubbing the lump on his skull.
Dahlia swooned and fell back on the bed, banging her head on the wall as she tumbled.
Drizzt and the farmer woman helped Ben the Brewer to his feet.
“Thought she was near dead,” Ben explained. “And she might well be. We’ll need to take that foot, but I’m not going near to that one unless she’s tied well!”
In reply, Drizzt held up the phial. He rushed to Dahlia and cradled her head.
“Kill him,” Dahlia whispered, opening one eye.
“Drink,” Drizzt said. He knew that Beniago might have double-crossed him, might have given him nothing other than more of the same poison.
But it was too late for him to change his mind.
Dahlia began to cough and tremble almost immediately. She pulled herself away from Drizzt with a sudden convulsion and rolled to her side, where she vomited over the edge of the bed.
Drizzt fell over her and tried to hold her still.
“What did you do?” the farmer woman asked.
“The antidote,” Drizzt tried to explain. His thoughts were whirling as he wondered if he’d just finished off his lover.
“Aye, that’s what I’d expect,” said Ben the Brewer. “It’ll clean ‘er out, but won’t be a pretty sight.”
He staggered over and picked up his knife, but when he stood straight, he found Drizzt staring back at him hard.
Ben the Brewer dropped the blade back to the floor.
“I just realized that I don’t even know your name,” Drizzt said to the farmer woman a couple of mornings later. They stood outside the house. It was his first time away from Dahlia since administering the antidote. The elf rested easily, at last, her fever broken, the swelling in her foot and leg at last receding.
“Meg,” she answered.
“Meg?”
“Just Meg. I had more of a name once, when it mattered. Now I’m Meg, just Meg, and Ma to my kids. Nothing more.”
“We owe you much,” Drizzt said.
“You owe me a clean floor, to be sure!” Meg said with a sad laugh.
Drizzt smiled at her. “Your generosity …”
“I did what any person would do, or ought to do, or once upon a time outside Luskan would do,” Meg replied, her voice sharp.
“Still, I would like to show my appreciation, to you and to Ben the Brewer.”
“I want nothing from you, other than that you’ll be long gone from my house, not to return.”
The chill in the woman’s voice surprised Drizzt. He thought perhaps their time there had forged a bond. He thought wrong, apparently.
“Firewood, at least,” said Drizzt. “Or perhaps I can hunt a boar for your table.” She involuntarily licked her lips, and he smiled, thinking he’d tempted her.
Her face turned stone cold. “You get your lady elf and be gone,” Meg said flatly. “She’ll be fine to travel this day, so you’re going, both of you, and don’t you come back.”
“Because people will talk and the high captains will hear,” came Dahlia’s voice from the doorway. She walked out on surprisingly steady legs.
Drizzt looked at Meg, but her expression didn’t change.
“Call your steed,” Meg said. “You’ve a road worth riding.” She turned away and walked past Dahlia, and shut the door behind her.
Drizzt stared after her, even started after her, but Dahlia grabbed him by the arm and held him back.
“Summon Andahar,” she said quietly. “It will be best.”
“They saved you.”
“You saved me.”
“They did—they helped us greatly!”
“They tried to cut my foot off.”
“Only to save you.”
“Better to die, then.”
The way she said it struck Drizzt profoundly, because he knew she meant it. He wanted to chastise her, wanted to tell her to never speak like that.
But then he thought of his midnight ride, of his exhilaration, of his sense of control, of confidence, of his sense of sheer joy in the adventure, whatever the stakes. It was a feeling Drizzt Do’Urden had not known in a long, long time.
He blew the whistle for Andahar, and he set the bells of the barding to ringing as they charged away, down the southern road.