The huge serpent, its body as thick as a large man’s chest, lifted its massive head off the floor to stare into the eyes of the three invaders to its sewer realm.
“Fan out,” Drizzt told his companions, Entreri to the right of him, Dahlia to his left. “Widen out. We have to flank that maw.”
He ended with a gasp as the giant snake head snapped at him, lightning fast. His first thought was to block with his blades, but how ridiculous that notion seemed to him in the face of the opened maw, a mouth large enough to swallow him whole, flying at him with the power of a charging horse! Instinct took over and the drow desperately dodged aside, and the air rippled as the snake head snapped past him so powerfully that the shock alone nearly knocked Drizzt from his feet. He held his balance, but the snake recoiled too quickly for the drow to strike it on its retreat.
“We cannot fight that,” Dahlia whispered, and Drizzt caught more than pragmatism in her defeated tone, and when he glanced at the fighter, at this elf who reveled in battle, he saw her arms slipping down helplessly, as if in surrender.
He looked back to the giant snake, to the huge head swerving tantalizingly side to side, to the black eyes looking back at him, looking right through him, mocking him with their power.
Many heartbeats passed. It occurred to Drizzt more than once that Dahlia was correct here, that they couldn’t fight this great creature. The snake was far above them, far too great a foe.
And it didn’t want to kill them.
That truth seemed obvious, and made perfect sense—until Drizzt managed to step back from the obviousness and actually think about it.
Only then did the drow widen his view around the great serpent, to see a half-dozen other people flanking the snake, contentedly.
Contentedly.
There they were, human citizens of Neverwinter, along with a pair of Shadovar, all unarmed and standing beside the serpent as if it was their friend.
Or master.
Drizzt glanced left and right. Dahlia had dropped Kozah’s Needle, and stood shaking her head helplessly, and Entreri, perhaps the most fearless man Drizzt had ever met, a warrior who only got angrier and more ferocious when faced with a seemingly hopeless situation, rolling his sword and dirk nervously and hardly even looking at the giant creature.
Drizzt knew then that there was no need to fight this creature. Indeed, they couldn’t hope to win, or even survive, if they engaged in such a futile battle. Nay, the better course was to simply surrender to its obvious godlike qualities, to accept the reality of their inferiority and live happily beside this living deity.
There would be pleasure and peace.
Drizzt felt his scimitars slipping down by his sides. He was lost. All was lost.
Her thoughts were pried open and flying free.
Dahlia recognized this, but it seemed natural, and the intimacy created in such a shared moment seemed somehow warm and inviting. This creature before her, this god, understood her. It saw her deepest pain and greatest fears. It stripped her naked before it, for it and all to see, and there, open and without secret, she felt . . . free.
This was no enemy.
This was salvation!
Her pain lay bare before her, the rape, her guilt, her terrifying and evil choice to murder her child, the source of her rage, the multitude of dead lovers—and wouldn’t Drizzt sit atop that pile of corpses?
Or wouldn’t he be strong enough to kill her instead, and free her? That was the point, after all!
But perhaps, she realized now, she didn’t need that extreme, that suicide-bylover approach to ending her pain.
Perhaps the answer was here, before her, within reach, in the dark eyes of this knowing, brilliant creature.
His thoughts were pried open and flying free.
Entreri recognized this, but it seemed natural, and the intimacy created in such a shared moment seemed somehow warm and inviting. This creature before him, this god, understood him. It saw his deepest pain and greatest fears. It stripped him naked before it, for it and all to see, and there, open and without secret, he felt . . . free.
This was no enemy.
This was salvation!
Entreri, ever guarded, instinctively recoiled, though. How could he not? He, who had lived a life of lies, even from himself, he who had lived in the shadows of fabrication and denial, suddenly found an abrupt reversal—and not just from this creature, as he had with Charon’s Claw, but opened to all within the collective “family” the creature was now offering to him.
His guards went up without a conscious thought to them.
His memories floated before him anyway: the childhood betrayal by his mother, the ultimate betrayal of his uncle and those others, the dirt of Calimport’s streets.
He felt a violation, as he had known as a child, of the most intimate and damaging sort. He faced it again, or tried to, but he realized something . . . something quite unexpected.
Entreri lost his own contemplations to a moment of surprise, and glanced over at Dahlia, and she at him.
Naked, joined, with no place to hide.
His thoughts were pried open and flying free.
Unlike his companions, though, Drizzt Do’Urden knew this type of intrusion, and recognized almost immediately the subtle trickery, the willing slavery.
During his days wandering the Underdark, after abandoning Menzoberranzan, Drizzt had been seduced in just such a manner—logical promises and wondrous carefree visions of life in Paradise—by the illithids, the wretched mind flayers. Obediently and lovingly, Drizzt and his companions had massaged the hive mind of the illithid community.
He had traveled this same road before, had fallen victim to it, his identity stolen away. Determined never to face such slavery again, Drizzt had trained himself to resist—with a wall of anger. In light of that terrible experience, it wasn’t hard for Drizzt to build that wall once more, almost instantly.
He slowly and subtly reached into his pouch and grasped the onyx figurine, quietly calling for Guenhwyvar, and like his subdued companions, he lowered his blades and began to walk slowly and unthreateningly toward the mesmerizing beast. Every step proved a labor, for the intrusion was strong here, truly powerful. Drizzt had learned painfully how to battle it, and still he doubted he could resist.
Or perhaps even worse, that he could resist without tipping his hand.
He saw the many images floating around him, and had he found a moment free of the demands of discipline, he might have been surprised to glimpse the deep secrets of his companions, particularly those of Dahlia, particularly the one that had him lying dead atop a pile of the corpses of former lovers.
But to go there and take in the view would have meant that his thoughts, too, floated free, and thus, that he, too, would be trapped by the telepathic web.
He stayed behind the wall, strengthened it with every step. He remembered his terrible experience with the illithids. Only one thing had saved him then.
He felt himself beginning to slip, felt the tendrils of another mind, this godlike snake’s mind, reaching into his deepest thoughts.
He thought of Catti-brie and Bruenor, of Belwar and of Clacker, of Zaknafein and of Regis and Wulfgar, of lost friends and those who had given him his identity. This intruder would steal all of his memories, he told himself repeatedly, strengthening the wall of anger.
For without those memories, Drizzt Do’Urden had nothing.
His walk slowed to a halt, his blades dipped because he could not raise them. Out of the periphery of his vision, left and right, he noted that Entreri and Dahlia had begun eyeing him suspiciously, even threateningly.
This deity had recognized his resistance and his deception, he knew, and would turn his own companions upon him.
“No!” Drizzt yelled, one last act of defiance, and he fell back and forced his blades to the ready. Both Dahlia and Entreri turned on him, weapons moving as if to strike, and Drizzt had to face the possibility of killing his lover, and of killing Entreri, this one tie to a past he desperately missed. It all happened so quickly, though, that those thoughts barely registered as anything more than fleeting regrets, and purely on instinct, the drow struck hard, Twinkle backhanding away a stab of Kozah’s Needle, Icingdeath keeping Entreri at bay.
He could win, for they were not fighting as Entreri and Dahlia, but as controlled shells of those magnificent warriors, as mere pawns to the god-snake.
He could not win, he realized immediately after, for in addition to these two, there remained the other slaves, and worse, the giant snake itself, a foe he doubted he could beat.
A foe he knew he could not beat.
A foe so far beyond him that it mocked him for even thinking he could defeat it, or even resist it!
The subtle web closed in as Entreri and Dahlia backed off, and Drizzt lost again, and would be lost, fully so, as he had been to the illithids as a young rogue, a century before.
All the discipline, all the rage, could not win.
Not against a god.
Besides, Drizzt then realized, life would be good in the service of this allknowing creature. Life would be peace and calm and satisfaction in seeing to his master’s needs.
He sighed and let down his guard before the great snake . . .
He was the first of the slaves to cry out a warning as the black form of Guenhwyvar leaped atop that huge creature. Drizzt shrieked first in outrage and then again in surprise as he saw that the snake wasn’t a snake at all, but a fishlike, horrid looking thing, and how it screamed, both in an audible watery voice and in Drizzt’s mind—so brutally in his mind that it knocked him from his feet, to join Dahlia, Entreri, and the others on the wet floor.
There was a giant snake, lying dead to the side, and this strange creature had taken its identity and place and image. But no more. Guenhwyvar’s attack had stripped away that illusion, leaving a creature that appeared far less formidable.
Drizzt leaped up immediately and charged, pausing only long enough to knock Entreri aside and kick the staff from Dahlia’s hands, for he knew then that he was free, but did not know if the others had broken from their bonds.
Certainly the six slaves who had accompanied this strange creature had not thrown aside their allegiance. A pair of humans scrambled and leaped for Guenhwyvar, who kicked out with a rear claw, driving them both away, cutting one grotesquely, chin to shoulder.
The other four charged past to intercept Drizzt, who spun to his right, coming around to plant the pommel of a scimitar right on the nose of one pursuing man, dropping him in a heap. He didn’t want to kill this group, understanding that they did not act of their own will, but when a shade following that human leaped in with a deadly sword thrust, Drizzt’s instincts had him parrying and responding before he had even realized the instinctive riposte. He did shorten his strike, taking the shade under the ribs but not driving the blade home, but when that didn’t even slow the attacker, who apparently felt no pain in his possessed state, Drizzt had no choice but to strike again, harder and repeatedly.
He had no time to dawdle, and down went the shade, and when the human stubbornly rose against him once more, the drow laid him low by cutting his legs out from under him with a great swipe of his scimitars. He tried not to dig in the blades too deeply, and winced with a bit of regret, but could do little more than that when he saw the blood spilling.
Hoping that he had inflicted no permanent damage, Drizzt joined Guenhwyvar at the aboleth—for indeed, this was one of those strange and little-understood creatures, a young aboleth left behind by the Sovereignty as a sentry and scout for a place they had not abandoned forever.
Drizzt struck hard and he struck fast, and even more so when he rolled around the fishlike beast and caught a glimpse back at his friends. Guenhwyvar’s attack had freed them, and the two of them worked brilliantly and ferociously against the remaining slaves. Drizzt tried to keep his focus on the creature before him. It was physically weak, true, but with the potential to fell him, or paralyze him at least, with one suggestion. He had to keep his mental guards up and had to drive his blades home quickly.
He couldn’t help but grimace when Dahlia, flails spinning in perfect coordination, came face to face with one of the Shadovar slaves. He knew what was coming, and could only look away, renew his focus on the aboleth, as Dahlia’s deadly weapons cracked repeatedly against the slave’s skull, tearing skin and cracking bone, and bashing the shade’s brains to pulp.
Entreri was no more merciful, reminding Drizzt keenly of the true disposition of this man he viewed as a link to his past, shattering any nostalgic notions floated before him by the reappearance of his old nemesis. The drow gasped audibly when Entreri’s sword came right through the torso of one human slave, stabbing out the man’s back. Entreri retracted the blade almost instantly, but fell into a sudden spin that brought it back around and down, across the falling man’s throat.
Even with the threat defeated, the vicious Artemis Entreri could not resist that killing blow.
Too many doubts pressed in on Drizzt then, doubts about his road and his companions, but he pushed them away, even told himself that these were mere implantations by the insidious psychic beast. He turned that disappointment, rage even, into more focused anger on his oppressor, the aboleth.
Down came Twinkle with a smash, crunching bone, and down came a stabbing Icingdeath right behind, plunging through that opening to find the creature’s brain.
Always the brain, the source of the beast’s strength.
Drizzt leaped astride the struggling, flopping creature, alternately plunging his scimitars into the opening, and when one went in deep, the drow turned his wrist and slid it out to the side, left and right, severing the internal connections.
He saw the remaining slave, a Shadovar, rushing at him in a last desperate attempt to save its beloved master.
But too late. Guenhwyvar continued to tear and rend and Drizzt’s blades found their mark.
The aboleth flopped to the stone fully, and lay deathly still.
The approaching Shadovar skidded to a stop and stared at Drizzt in abject confusion, and the drow immediately wondered if he might have found an ally in their quest to get past Alegni’s defenses; he could well understand the profound sense of gratitude anyone in such a state of slavery might feel toward his rescuers.
Before Drizzt could even explore that, though, before he could even further study the Shadovar’s face for hints, he was distracted by a form rushing up from behind the freed slave.
“Dahlia, no!” he shouted, but between his words came the crack of Dahlia’s flail spinning in from the side to cave in the Shadovar’s skull. That powerful strike alone would likely have proven fatal, but Dahlia left little to doubt as she followed with a barrage of heavy blows.
“Did you even pause to consider that he might have supplied us with important information?” Drizzt asked the elf.
Dahlia seemed unimpressed. She looked down at the dead Shadovar and spat on him for effect. “He’s a Netherese dog,” she said, as if that explained everything. “He would have simply lied to us anyway.”
“He might have known Alegni’s defenses,” Drizzt argued. “We do not know how long he was enslaved . . .”
“What’s done is done,” Entreri said. When Drizzt and Dahlia glanced his way, he motioned to two of the humans, the one Drizzt had dropped and one other. They were both alive, though wounded, but neither injury appeared mortal. A third, too, seemed alive, though her wounds looked far more grievous.
Drizzt pulled off his pack and rushed to the wounded woman first. He produced some bandages and a poultice of mixed and mashed herbs and quickly stemmed the blood flow. As soon as he had the bleeding under control, he looked to his companions, both staring at him incredulously.
“Tend to the others!” he scolded.
“They attacked us,” Dahlia reminded.
“The . . . that creature attacked us, through them,” Drizzt retorted. “Tend to them!”
Dahlia glanced at Entreri skeptically, and to Drizzt’s dismay, it seemed that Dahlia was being more stubborn and less merciful than Artemis Entreri.
“Tend to them or we—or I—will remain with them,” Drizzt warned, and that broke the stalemate. He threw his pack to Entreri.
Six individuals started along the tunnels a short while later, the two minimally wounded humans, a man and a woman, half-carrying, half-dragging their other female companion in a makeshift litter Drizzt had constructed from a cloak and the bones of the fishlike creature that had enslaved them. They were citizens of Neverwinter, or had been.
“I was raised outside of Luskan,” the woman, Genevieve by name, explained to Drizzt as they walked. “My family farmed there.”
She went on to describe the fall of that region, but Drizzt already knew the sad tale well.
“Did you know a family Stuyles?” he asked.
“Aye, the name sounds familiar,” Genevieve replied. “But ’twas a long time ago. I been here many years. Before the ruin.”
“But you survived,” Drizzt said, and he looked to Entreri as he did, and the assassin wore an expression of interest, at least.
“We all did,” the man on the other side of the litter replied. “Because of that thing back there.”
“Aye, we been down here for years and years,” Genevieve added. She winced and seemed quite pained as she tried to sort it all out. “A couple of times after the ruin, we went up. To spy, I expect, though I hardly remember it.”
“Seems like you’d make a fine spy, then,” Entreri said sarcastically.
“Was the fish creature looking through us,” she explained. “Oh, but it could do that. It could do almost anything.”
“Killed the great snake and controlled her brood with little trouble,” the man added.
“They were babies, then,” Drizzt remarked, and he shuddered to think that Neverwinter’s sewer might soon be home to a thriving community of gigantic constrictors! He left the trio, then, to rejoin his companions at the lead.
Drizzt wanted to speak with Entreri on that journey, to help him to recognize the intrusion for what it was, to learn from the dominance of the aboleth so that he might use those lessons as he tried to resist any such dominance from his old sword. But the drow found that he couldn’t talk to the man at that time, or to Dahlia, and he quickly fell back, following the three wounded humans, helping them where he could, while Entreri and Dahlia led the way, the assassin once more holding half of Dahlia’s staff to ward against any unwanted intrusions. They didn’t need Twinkle’s glow any longer, for the sun was rising outside, and peeking in at enough junctures—through cracks up above, or grates—to provide enough light for the two, with their lowlight vision, to navigate.
They chatted as they walked, and Drizzt could catch only bits and pieces of their conversation, which frustrated him even more. After only a few twists and turns in the sewer, even those pieces of conversation were lost to him, drowned out by the sound of flowing water, for they were then paralleling the river, very nearby.
Still he watched them, feeling very distant to them, so suddenly.
Feeling very lost.
“Soon,” Entreri whispered to Dahlia, up in front of the others.
Dahlia looked at him curiously, not quite understanding. Was he talking about them getting out of the sewers soon? Perhaps, but she suspected something more, particularly given the strange intermingling of personal secrets.
Entreri nodded, and there was so much in that simple gesture, a recognition of things far deeper than the practical implications of the single word he had spoken.
“Soon,” he was saying, meaning that Dahlia would find a proper resolution “soon.”
“Soon,” he was saying, as if to indicate that some moment of peace was “soon” before her.
“Soon.” He was hinting, Dahlia understood, that the resolution of her greatest tragedy and greatest moment . . .
The elf warrior looked away, not willing to let him see the moisture in her blue eyes, not willing to let this stranger, this former, and perhaps still, adversary, look into her soul yet again.
Or was it just shame?