NOT QUITE THE UNDERDARK . . .
Dahlia brought her hand over her face as she splashed down into the shallow water outside the metal grate. “We’re crawling through that?” she asked with disgust.
Before her crouched Artemis Entreri, tugging at one of the bent bars to move it to the side. He had almost created a large enough opening for them to squeeze through.
Beside her, Drizzt understood her reluctance, for the smell was indeed overwhelming, wafting out on visible gases escaping the dark tunnel.
“We need not,” he said to her, and he nodded his chin to the north. “We could take the road to Luskan instead. Or past Luskan to Ten-Towns, though we’d not beat the onset of winter in Icewind Dale.”
“Or the eastern road to Mithral Hall,” Dahlia retorted, clearly not amused.
The bar came free in Entreri’s hand, which seemed to surprise him. He stared at its rusted end, then tossed it aside to splash into the water. He crouched lower and washed his hands in the salty liquid. “Decide now,” he said. “This way lies Alegni.”
Dahlia pushed past him and hopped up into the tunnel on her bare knees, then quickly rose into a standing crouch as she glanced back at the other two. “Light a torch,” she instructed.
“It will blow up in your face,” Entreri replied with a derisive snort.
“We’ll need a light source,” Dahlia argued, because she needed to say something at that point. Artemis Entreri had just gained the upper hand on her, had just diminished her in front of Drizzt. Dahlia could not let that stand.
“I came through without one,” the assassin replied glibly, and Dahlia could only scowl.
She put her hands on her hips and glared at the man, but Drizzt drew forth Twinkle. The magical sword answered his call and glowed a soft blue-white hue. The drow hopped up into the tunnel and squeezed past Dahlia, the blade out before him, dimly lighting the way.
Cut unevenly through the stone, the sewer was sometimes high enough for Drizzt and the others to stand straight, but often they crouched as they moved along. The floor was concave, lower in the center, and a flow of dark water trickled past, sometimes pooling ankle deep or even past their knees, which was quite alarming. Everywhere, just at the edges of their vision, critters slithered or crawled or scurried aside.
At first the sword light seemed meager, but as they got deeper into the tunnel system—a maze of angles, turns, and indistinguishable stones—and the daylight receded behind them, Twinkle’s glow seemed brighter by far. More rats huddled in the shadows at the side of the tunnel, more snakes slithered away into the water, and a multitude of insects, flying and stinging and spidery things hanging on slight webs, looked on.
None of the three spoke the obvious truth: the sword could illuminate a few feet around them, but to someone or something far away, it no doubt shined like a warning beacon.
Drizzt, born and raised in the near lightless Underdark, was most conscious of this, of course. A drow carrying a light source in the corridors around Menzoberranzan would soon enough be murdered and robbed. Holding the glowing blade now was anathema to everything he had learned as a young warrior. With his superior vision, he could navigate these tunnels well enough without the glow.
“I can see in the dark,” Entreri said behind him, surprising him, and he turned on the man.
“You wore a cat’s eye circlet,” Drizzt agreed, and he held up Twinkle, confirming that Entreri was not wearing any such thing at that time.
“Innate now,” the assassin explained. “A gift from Jarlaxle.”
Drizzt nodded and moved to sheathe the sword, but Dahlia caught his arm. He looked at her curiously, and she shook her head, her face a mask of discomfort.
“I don’t like snakes and I don’t like spiders,” she said. “If you sheathe that, then know that you’ll be carrying me.”
That brought a laugh from Entreri, but a brief one, as Dahlia, deadly serious, fixed him with a glare telling him in no uncertain terms that he was crossing a dangerous line.
Drizzt started away, and Dahlia splashed along behind him. “A gentleman would carry me,” she muttered under her breath.
“Because you’re such a lady?” Entreri asked from behind.
Up in front, Drizzt stopped and took a deep breath. An image of the two locked in a passionate embrace flitted through his thoughts and he nearly growled aloud as he dismissed it.
With the light of Twinkle leading the way, the trio moved farther along the main passageway, and soon enough came to a honeycomb network of more impressive and hand-worked side tunnels. They knew that they were underneath the outskirts of the city—the old city, at least. Their choices were limited at first, for these were still much smaller tunnels, almost all impassable and with a couple that they might have traversed by belly-crawling . . . something none of them wanted. But a short while after that, they came to a network of passages larger still, many as navigable as the one they now traveled and a couple even larger than that.
“Do you remember the way?” Drizzt asked Entreri. He whispered the words, for other sounds echoed across the wet and slimy stones.
Entreri moved up beside the drow, who stood at a five-way intersection, and surveyed the area. Hands on hips, he at last shook his head. “It was long ago.”
“Not so long,” Dahlia argued, clearly impatient.
Both Entreri and Drizzt looked at the elf woman.
“When I last came through here, I simply followed the water’s flow,” he explained. “I cared for that which was before me, not behind.”
“You would have been far cleverer had you marked your passing, or at least, had you returned and mapped it after you had escaped,” Dahlia continued.
Entreri stared at her hard. “I didn’t intend on returning through this route. Ever.”
Dahlia waved at him dismissively. “You disappoint me,” she said. “A true warrior always prepares.”
Drizzt studied Entreri closely, expecting the man to explode and to fall over Dahlia in a murderous rage. But he just stood there, staring at her for a bit longer, before turning back to face Drizzt and look to the tunnels once more. “Left, I would guess,” he said. “The river is to our left and I entered the sewers along its bank. It is the source of the running water that flushes these passages, and so . . .”
“Flushes?” Dahlia prodded a thick pile of muck and feces with the half-staff she carried, her face a mask of disgust.
The pile shifted aside and out from under it came a serpent, black and thick and coiled, and easily as long as Dahlia was tall. It flew out from its position, lifting into the air, so fierce was its strike at Dahlia.
Dahlia recoiled and tried to fall away as the snapping toothy maw closed for her face.
A descending line of light flashed before her, but more importantly to her at that time, the bulk of the snake crashed into her. How she screamed and thrashed! All discipline flew from her as she worked purely in reaction to get that horrid thing away from her. And even after it fell aside, it took the woman quite a few heartbeats to sort it all out, to realize that she had not been bitten, to understand that the light marked the descent of Drizzt’s scimitar, and that she had been met by nothing more than the snake’s headless body flying from momentum and thrashing in its death throes.
Drizzt grabbed Dahlia and held her arms by her sides, trying to calm her as Entreri walked by.
“Did it pierce me? Am I poisoned?” she asked over and over again.
“Perhaps, and no,” Entreri answered, and both looked at him, and Dahlia’s face crinkled with disgust. He held the severed snake head, stuck on the end of his sword. “It is a constrictor, not a venomous serpent,” he said. “It won’t kill you with a bite, but would wrap you instead and crush the breath out of you, all the while trying to swallow the top of your head.”
Now it was Drizzt’s turn to flash a glare at Entreri. “It is—was not poisonous,” he said calmly. “And it did not bite you, in any case.”
That seemed to steady Dahlia a bit more. She kicked the thick, strong body of the snake farther away from her, and the body jerked spasmodically once more. Dahlia gasped and hopped away.
“You really don’t like snakes, do you?” Entreri said, and he flicked his blade, launching the snake head far away. He walked back past Drizzt and Dahlia. “Come along, then. The sooner we are out of these smelly sewers, the better.”
Neither Dahlia nor Drizzt was about to argue with that statement and they rushed to catch up, Drizzt again taking the lead—but this time, Dahlia stood right beside him.
Entreri handed her the other half of Kozah’s Needle. Dahlia looked at it doubtfully, not taking it.
“If it serves as we had hoped, then it has shown me no contact by Charon’s Claw in the time I have carried it,” he explained. “If the sword has sought me and found me, then your weapon didn’t notice. Either way, better for you to be armed now.”
“What do you know?” Dahlia asked.
“That,” Drizzt answered, and when Dahlia and Entreri turned to him, he thrust his sword out before him, and in the light farther along the tunnel, more snakes writhed, some taking to the water, some crawling over others, and all looking back at them.
“Let’s leave this place,” Dahlia said.
“We’re trying to do just that,” Entreri reminded.
“Back the way we came,” Dahlia insisted. She joined the ends of Kozah’s Needle back together, forming a singular eight-foot length. It wasn’t very practical for fighting in a narrow tunnel, of course, but when Dahlia stabbed the staff diagonally into the water before her, Drizzt understood that she wanted her weapon to keep these slithering creatures as far from her as possible.
“They’re not poisonous,” Entreri replied. “They know they cannot swallow us and have no means to kill us. They’ll likely retreat.”
“Like the first one?” Dahlia sarcastically replied, and she backed down the corridor a few steps.
“You startled it. It attacked out of fear,” Drizzt answered. He was a ranger, and well versed in the ways of the wilds. He moved forward—or started to, until a serpent threw itself through the air at him. Up flashed his arm to block, and he intercepted the snake’s opened maw closing on his forearm, grabbing tight, its body immediately slapping around his torso as it tried to gain a hold and begin its crushing squeeze.
The strength of the creature surprised the drow, its every muscle working in perfect coordination. Noting movement to the side, he glanced at Entreri, at first thinking that the assassin was rushing to his aid. Not so, he understood, when he realized that Entreri had his own problems.
On came the strangely aggressive snakes, slithering through the water, sliding along the walls, throwing themselves through the air.
With a growl, Drizzt lifted his bitten left arm, extending the snake out before his right shoulder, turned and wriggled enough to free his other arm, and brought a quick backhand of Twinkle to cut the creature in half. Immediately, the lower torso loosened around him and dropped with a splash to the floor, but that head held on, stubbornly. Too concerned with drawing his other blade—a bit awkwardly since Icingdeath, which he usually carried in his right hand, was sheathed on his left hip—Drizzt let the half-serpent hang there.
His focus remained before him, as it had to, slapping, slashing, and kicking to fend off the onslaught.
Beside him, Entreri worked with equal fury, his dirk swiftly deflecting leaping serpents, his sword scoring kills.
But behind them, there came a long series of dull raps, and in one of the infrequent moments of pause, Drizzt glanced back, as did Entreri, to see Dahlia straddling the water, her staff presented horizontally before her and she rapidly shifted it up and down, out left and out right, cracking it against the stone walls.
“Hit the snakes, you idiot!” Entreri yelled at her, and he was nearly toppled at the end of that sentence as one of the serpents slithered through his defenses and wrapped around his legs, tugging him powerfully.
“Dahlia!” Drizzt implored her.
But the rapping continued and so did the onslaught of serpents—there seemed to be no end to them! Entreri freed himself only to get hit again, and Drizzt nearly had Icingdeath pulled from his grasp when one snake took hold.
The corridor began to flash, not from the waving of Drizzt’s glowing scimitar, but with sharp spikes of light, crackles of lightning.
Entreri kept cursing at Dahlia and growling at the snakes, and swinging and stabbing and kicking. And just when Drizzt thought he had gained some measure of momentum, a serpent appeared on the ceiling before him. He threw himself back and low into a crouch and the snapping jaws rent the air, just missing his left ear. The snake retracted before his blade could decapitate it, then threw itself at him, slamming him hard and nearly knocking him from his feet.
To fall was to be overwhelmed, Drizzt knew. The water shimmied, alive with serpents.
“Dahlia!” he cried for help.
This time she answered him, not with words, but with thunder. She thrust Kozah’s Needle through the water to slam against the floor, and there she released the energy her rapping had imbued within it. The retort jolted all three of them into the air, though all three held their footing as they landed. The water churned and sizzled, a stinky steam lifting from it so thickly that it obscured their vision.
Drizzt tried to respond, to say something, but found his jaw clenched from the energy pulsing through him.
Then it was over, as unexpectedly and abruptly as it had happened, and an eerie stillness replaced the fury of the previous moments.
Snakes dropped from the walls and ceiling, or hung in place, their lengths looped over a natural beam or a jag or jut. Snakes lay on the floor in various poses, like living runes or glyphs. Snakes floated in the water, sliding down to bump against a leg or foot.
Perhaps dead, perhaps stunned. That latter, very real possibility had Drizzt more than a little alarmed.
Beside him, Entreri slashed down on one reptile, and its convulsion as his blade struck home told the ranger that it had indeed been alive until cleaved.
“Be gone, and quickly!” Drizzt cried. “Leave them, there are too many!”
“Out the way we came!” Dahlia said.
“Alegni is that way,” Entreri reminded, pointing ahead. “And it’s shorter.”
They didn’t have time to think it through. They didn’t have time to consider the unusual behavior of so many ordinary creatures. They simply had to react. Perhaps it was the carrot of Alegni, which Entreri had dangled before Dahlia, but whatever the reason, Drizzt was surprised when the woman splashed up behind him, prodding him and Entreri to move on.
He noted that Entreri crouched and reached into the water and pulled something forth before scrambling to pace him, but took no further note as the three zigzagged their way through a maze of stunned serpents.
Fortunately, the magical energy of Kozah’s Needle had reached far enough along the corridor to get most of the snakes, and they passed beyond that point in short order, and even more fortunately, so they presumed, the corridor widened a bit more, and heightened, and they could press on with more urgency.
Except that they had to wait for a moment as Entreri pulled up to a rock and sat down, and only then did Drizzt understand what the assassin had stopped to retrieve from the water: one of his low boots.
Dahlia’s jolt had lifted him right out of his shoe.
With a few muttered curses and a shake of his head, Entreri pulled the smoking boot back on and stood straight. He looked hard at Dahlia and said, “You owe me a new pair.”
“I saved your life,” she retorted.
“If you had just bothered to join in the fight, it wouldn’t have needed any saving, would it?”
Again Drizzt watched the two and their verbal sparring with something less than amusement, but he couldn’t really focus on it at that moment, because something about their encounter with the bed of serpents was now, in retrospect, truly bothering him.
“Why were all of those snakes exactly the same size?” he asked when they had started on their way again.
“Why wouldn’t they be?” Dahlia asked.
“Snakes shed their skins and grow quickly, and continually,” Drizzt explained.
“So they were all the same age,” the elf woman replied, her tone showing that she hardly saw the point of this conversation.
Drizzt shook his head. “Snakes don’t herd.”
“That was a herd of snakes,” Dahlia quickly retorted.
“A bed of snakes,” the ranger corrected, but half-heartedly, for her point was well taken. Drizzt shook his head, not quite accepting it. Snakes did collect in the winter, of course—the drow had found many such dens in his travels, some containing thousands of the creatures. But he had never seen such a hunting pack as they had just encountered, and had never heard of a coordinated snake attack!
“Magically conjured?” Dahlia asked, and that sounded right to Drizzt, until Entreri chimed in.
“Babies.”
“Babies?” Dahlia echoed doubtfully, stating the obvious, for how could a sixfoot snake be a baby?
But it was the way Entreri had said it that had both Drizzt, and Dahlia, despite her argument, turning his way, then following his gaze.
To the mother.