The eastern sky was just beginning to lighten, but already it was promising to be a lovely and memorable day.
“The sun is soon to rise,” Drizzt remarked from around the corner of the crawl tunnel he had entered. The others could barely hear him, for the sound of the rushing water echoed all around them.
“He will be at his bridge, then,” Entreri said. “He is always at the bridge at sunrise. He faces the sea to the west and casts a long shadow upon the river. It probably makes him feel dominant over the city, or some other foolish symbolism.”
Dahlia didn’t reply, didn’t even look at him, just started up to the tunnel, whose entrance was chest-high to her. To her obvious dismay, she had to back out immediately as Drizzt slid back to them. He came out feet-first, settling on the wider corridor beside them.
“Do you think you can get him through?” the drow asked the three former aboleth slaves.
The two bearing their badly-wounded companion looked doubtfully at each other.
“They don’t need to,” Entreri interjected. “I remember this region now. If they just follow this wider tunnel, they will find an easy exit, farther along and near the city’s northern wall.”
Drizzt looked at the assassin curiously, but Entreri didn’t wait to return that gaze and slipped up into the crawl tunnel.
“We go with them, then,” the drow said. “There are other dangers down here—”
“You go with them if you so choose,” said Entreri, who sat on the lip of the crawl tunnel, looking back. He offered his hand to Dahlia, who took it without a second thought, and sprang up without hesitation as Entreri pulled her into the small entrance beside him, even let her into the crawl tunnel before him.
“This is our chance at Alegni,” he said. “Likely our only chance to find him without a powerful escort.”
“We cannot leave them on their own.”
“I can,” Entreri replied. “Dawn is coming.” He glanced down the tunnel, and indeed, even though he wasn’t around the bend, it was clearly lighter in there. “And coming fast. Alegni will wait for it and then he will leave. We haven’t the time to travel underground all the way to the north wall and double back to catch him, nor could we exit up there and not draw the attention of a dozen Shadovar sentries.”
“They have no weapons,” Drizzt complained.
“Then give them yours,” Entreri growled back, and he started down the crawl tunnel after Dahlia.
Drizzt looked to the three humans.
“Go,” the man bade him. “Do what you must. You have done enough for us already, and know that we are grateful and will not forget.”
“We’ll make it out,” Genevieve added.
The drow rubbed his face and looked deep inside, seeking some alternative. Ultimately, though, he jumped up into the crawl tunnel and rushed along.
Had he known that Entreri was lying, that the assassin had no idea of the layout of this region, including the wider tunnel along which he had just directed the three, Drizzt might have chosen differently.
The crawl tunnel led to an old iron grate, with several of its bars torn out or twisted wide.
“I came through this very grate,” Entreri whispered to the others, but loudly enough so that he was heard over the melodic and continual song of the river beyond, “on my escape from the volcano.” He tapped one of the bars with his long sword, pulled it free at the bottom, and yanked wide out to one side. “My doing.”
“Apparently, the lava did more behind you,” Drizzt noted, for only a pair of the eight bars on the grate remained intact, and the one Entreri had indicated as his handiwork would not now allow the easiest passage. Black stone lay where once had been clear ground, narrowing the vertical height of the opening, and the river channel was tighter now because of that cooling lava rock, like natural levies, forcing the water up nearer the grate than in years past.
Still, it was not hard for Drizzt to slip though, using the grate itself as a hand hold as he came onto the riverbank.
The winged wyvern that marked Alegni’s bridge loomed above him and to his immediate right as he exited, the path to its entrance clear to see. A bit of brush along the bank provided ample cover for him to get to the base of the bridge unseen.
Though she was the most anxious to get on with this confrontation, Dahlia was also the last out of the tunnel and onto the riverbank, and she did not press the others to move more quickly toward the bridge.
This was the fight she had wanted for all of her adult life, the chance to truly repay this rapist and murderer. But now she found herself strangely ill at the mere thought of it, caught somewhere between the bile of hatred and the tears of memory, the longing to exact revenge and her unspoken fear, one she had barely admitted to herself, that the taste might not be sweet.
And if that taste did not heal her broken heart, what might be left for Dahlia? It took all the elf warrior’s focus to carefully position herself as she hunched and crawled along the brush. It was not until Entreri tapped her on the shoulder and nodded his chin to direct her gaze that she even noticed the solitary hulking form standing at the center of the winged wyvern’s long expanse.
Dahlia recoiled. Suddenly, she was once more a helpless child so easily pinned beneath the great bulk Herzgo Alegni.
Her mother fell dead again before her mind’s eye.
She held a baby in her arms, the wind in her face as the ravine opened wide before her . . .
She had no idea how many heartbeats passed, then, but knew it to be many, for not only was Entreri prodding her but so was Drizzt, having come back from his lead position.
Dahlia quickly lifted a hand to wipe the tears from her eyes. She could not hide them from these two, sitting so close, their gazes intent, expressions confused and sympathetic.
The elf woman took a deep breath, a small growl escaping her lips. She sublimated her pain to her rage, and with a grim face, motioned for the two to move along.
She had to stay behind them, she told herself, had to use them as a shield against the base outrage that threatened to launch her headlong at Alegni, and no doubt, headlong to her death.
The city was mostly still asleep, most windows still dark and not a soul to be seen, other than the one figure standing at the rail at the center of the gently arcing bridge. The eastern sky glowed, the first rays of dawn soon to reach above the trees of Neverwinter Wood to cast long shadows at the nearby Sword Coast.
Drizzt looked to Entreri, his fingers moving slowly and deliberately in the drow sign language as he silently asked the assassin if this kind of empty early morning was typical in Neverwinter.
Entreri, with only rudimentary understanding of the language, shrugged noncommittally, and then became distracted as Dahlia crept up behind him.
It seemed too easy to the cautious drow ranger, too pat. He regarded Entreri once more, and wondered if perhaps Dahlia’s desire for this fight had clouded both their judgments. Had Entreri led them into a trap?
Drizzt shook the thought away almost as soon as it had come to him. The pain on Entreri’s face was all too real; the man wanted Herzgo Alegni dead almost as surely as Dahlia desired that outcome.
Sometimes, indeed most of the time, things were as they seemed.
The drow stepped out of the brush, standing to his full height, and walked onto the bridge. He drew Icingdeath in his right hand and dropped his left hand into his pouch.
Entreri was beside him in a heartbeat, Dahlia scrambling out behind, and the three started their stalk.
They were only a few steps onto the bridge when the tiefling warlord noticed them. He turned and straightened, staring at them. At that very moment, the first rays of dawn shot the length of the bridge, past the three intruders and shined upon the warlord as if it was intended for him alone. That glow revealed a strange grin on Alegni’s face, visible to them even though they were still thirty strides away.
Alegni had been expecting them.
No matter, Drizzt realized, and he paused and produced the onyx figurine as Entreri stopped beside him.
Not Dahlia, though. She rushed between her two companions, knocking them both aside, her reassembled long staff carried like a javelin. She had left her hesitation and her tears back in the brush, it seemed.
“Guenhwyvar, come to me!” Drizzt commanded, and as soon as that call was heard, he replaced the statue and brought forth his second blade, following Entreri into his charge.
Up ahead, as Dahlia closed in, Herzgo Alegni calmly reached to his hip and drew out his huge red-bladed sword.
But Dahlia didn’t slow, coming in furiously, with a powerful stab at the tiefling’s face.
Across came Charon’s Claw, turning aside the weapon.
Drizzt put his head down and called upon his magical anklets to speed him past Entreri and up to Dahlia. He had to get there, he could tell that his lover was too eager, and too forceful in her assault on the dangerous tiefling.
Alegni would cut her down!
He sprinted around Entreri, or almost did, until the assassin’s sword flashed out to the side, stabbing Drizzt hard in the left shoulder.
The drow threw himself aside, nearly falling from his feet. He tried to turn and set a defense, but his left arm would barely rise and it was all he could do to prevent Twinkle from falling from his failing grasp.
Artemis Entreri, Barrabus the Gray, was on him, sword and dagger flashing.
It had been so easy!
Herzgo Alegni could hardly contain his laughter as he watched this fool elf ’s two companions battling halfway back to the bridge entrance. With a mere thought, his prized sword had once again defeated Barrabus, had turned the man against himself! For truly Alegni could sense that one’s hate toward him, toward the sword.
And truly, Alegni understood, there was nothing Barrabus would ever be able to do about it.
Barrabus already had the drow, this legendary ranger who had attached himself to Dahlia, under control, it seemed, and so Alegni, who of course had other allies lying in wait, was left to focus on this one.
On pretty young Dahlia.
She kept up her barrage of thrusts and wild swings, and Alegni didn’t even try to counter, instead blocking and misdirecting the blows, or dodging aside to prevent any solid strikes. He let her rage play out through many movements, then, as she seemed to be slowing, he added a new twist to the dance.
Dahlia’s staff stabbed in at his midsection and across came Claw to drive it out harmlessly wide. But this time, the red-bladed sword trailed a line of ash, an opaque barrier.
Alegni stepped back and to the side, and when the staff came back into view, predictably stabbing right back through the ash cloud, he took up Claw in both his hands and drove down hard, thinking to ruin the weapon.
Except that the head of the staff dipped too quickly, and at an unexpected angle, and for a heartbeat, Alegni thought that the elf woman must have leaped up impossibly high to clear the ash barrier.
When Dahlia herself exploded through that barrier, though, he understood— understood the unexpected movement of the staff head, if not the manner in which this transformation had occurred, for now the elf held in her hands not a single long staff, but a pair of exotic flails, spinning and crossing at every conceivable angle.
Alegni fell back to regroup, but Dahlia was too close. The tiefling warrior flailed Charon’s Claw wildly side to side and straight ahead, to block, to drive her back, to score some hits, perhaps. He winced as a flying pole cracked hard against his shoulder. Only his thick horns saved his skull as Dahlia’s diagonal downstrike jarred and staggered him.
Back he stumbled and on she came, her jaw locked in a mask of fury. She banged her sticks together as she pursued, sparks flying with every hit.
Alegni saw his chance and thrust his blade out at her, knowing it would be slapped aside. In that parry, a blast of lightning energy shocked Claw, flowing from Dahlia’s weapon to Alegni’s blade and up to his hands.
His left hand surely stung from that magical bite, but his right, gloved in the gauntlet that served as sister to Claw, accepted the blast easily.
Dahlia came on; she thought her clever trick would defeat him, of course.
As he had expected.
Across came Claw in a brutal backhand slash, and Dahlia, obviously surprised that Alegni still gripped the blade with such strength, threw her hips back desperately.
But still Claw tore her shirt and her flesh, a line of blood erupting across her belly, a flash of agony twisting her pretty face. Claw’s bite was more than that of a mere piece of sharpened steel. Claw’s bite was charged with the powers of the netherworld, the essence of death itself.
Alegni continued his swing out wide to the right, even letting the blade turn him as it went.
For he knew that Dahlia’s rage would outdo even that profound agony, knew that she would come right in at him despite the wound.
He continued to turn, and as he went, he lifted his trailing right leg in a perfectly-timed kick. He felt Dahlia’s flails smacking around his hip and thigh, but more than that, he felt the whoosh of breath leaving Dahlia’s body as his heavy boot connected.
He came around in a defensive posture, hardly hurt by the strikes, denying them with his sheer muscle and brawn.
Dahlia wasn’t on him, though. His kick had thrown her back several long strides, where she sat upon the ground, clearly stunned and pained.
“You think I will kill you?” he taunted as he stalked in. “You will soon enough pray for such an outcome, pretty girl. I will hurt you, oh indeed! And then I will tie you down for years to come, and fill you with my seed and tear from your loins my progeny!”
“Fight it!” Drizzt implored Entreri, but he hardly got the words out as he twisted and turned and stumbled aside, dodging the assassin’s flashing blades. He managed to glance back along the bridge, to see the gray mist of Guenhwyvar beginning to take shape. If he could only hold out for a few heartbeats, Guen would free him of the crazed Entreri.
And none too soon, he realized as he glanced ahead, just in time to see Dahlia flying backward and to the stone, to see the hulking form stalking in at her.
“Guen!” Drizzt cried.
He felt the blood rolling out of his burning shoulder, but he stubbornly tightened his left hand and fought the pain. Down went Icingdeath to pick off Entreri’s low thrust, then up again, swiftly and horizontally to force the assassin to cut short his clever dagger follow-up, thrusting, perhaps even thinking to throw the dirk into Drizzt’s face.
A growl from the end of the bridge brought Drizzt little hope, for in that call of the great panther, he clearly heard pain. He worked around to the side, between Entreri and Dahlia, looking back the way they had come, looking back at Guenhwyvar.
The panther spun and bit furiously as dark bolts filled the air around her. Wafts of smoke still trailed from her black form, though she was fully substantial now, the gray mist completely coagulated.
Those awful bolts burned at her, Drizzt understood, and he followed them to their source: a twisted and malformed tiefling in purple and black robes, flicking a wand her way. As she had become corporeal, this one had intervened, assaulting her before she had even taken in the scene around her, distracting her and paining her greatly, so it seemed.
As Guenhwyvar tried to go to Drizzt’s call, the tiefling warlock filled the area before her with a black, sizzling cloud, and the panther shrieked and snarled.
“Kill your tormentor!” Drizzt ordered the panther.
He couldn’t rely on Guen. Not then.
He batted aside another strike, and slid one foot to the left, circling. He had to get to his fallen scimitar, had to deny the pain and the blood and fight with both hands against Artemis Entreri. There was no other way.
He darted side to side, using his speed to keep the assassin from any straightforward attacks. Icingdeath spun out before him in tight circles, the blade humming as it gained momentum—but never too much momentum for Drizzt to interrupt the flow suddenly and stab it out, ahead or to either side, as he did often.
Now he was facing Dahlia again, and to his relief, she was back to her feet, flails spinning. She leaped and somersaulted out to the side, landing lightly and charging right back in at the hulking figure.
But then she retreated at once as the great red-bladed sword swept across.
Drizzt sucked in his breath, and got stuck in the forearm for his distraction.
This was Artemis Entreri he was facing, and the man had lost nothing of his skill in the decades since last they had battled! Drizzt told himself to focus, reminded himself repeatedly that he could be of no use to Dahlia if he could not first win out here.
He moved Entreri out toward the right-hand rail of the wide bridge, away from the fallen scimitar.
“Resist it,” he implored the assassin between parries. “Alegni will kill Dahlia. Resist the call of Claw.”
In response, Entreri gritted his teeth and let out a cry of pain. His knuckles whitened as he grasped his weapons and he fell back a step.
“Fight it!” Drizzt implored him, and indeed, Entreri seemed locked in some inner battle, some great torment.
That was the moment for Drizzt to leap in and cut him down, a moment when the assassin could not defend. A stride forward, a single stab, and Drizzt could move to help Dahlia.
She focused on the last moments of her mother’s life. That horrible image flitted through Dahlia’s thoughts again and again, alongside all the other painful memories.
The thought of this beast atop her and inside her filled her with fury, but it worked against her, Dahlia realized almost immediately. For amid her rage at that ultimate violation, there remained too much guilt, too much vulnerability. If she let her mind take her back to those awful moments, she would paralyze herself.
But she had no such conflicting emotions concerning the fate of her mother.
Just rage.
Pure rage.
No guilt, no vulnerability, no fear.
Just rage.
Her belly burned from the poisonous cut of Claw, but Dahlia transformed that profound sting into energy, and yet more rage. She leaped and darted all around, keeping Alegni turning, his blade cutting the air only a finger’s breadth behind her—and yet, always a finger’s breadth behind her.
Her flails always spun in too short to strike Alegni. And his smile showed that he knew it, and knew that Dahlia was expending far more energy than he, since she ran around while he merely turned in tune with her.
She rushed away to the right, diving into a roll, came to her feet, planted her right foot, and turned in at him as he pursued.
And in that clever move, Dahlia wiped the smile off Alegni’s face, for as she executed her roll, her hands worked independently, each contracting the respective flail into a singular four-foot length, and as she rose up, so did she connect those poles together as one, only for the blink of an eye before breaking Kozah’s Needle into two pieces again, this time joined by a length of magical cord.
When Dahlia’s left hand snapped out at the trailing Alegni, it was not with a shortened flail, but with a much longer reach. The first pole snapped into place, the trailing free end whipping around, past the surprised tiefling’s defenses to crack him across the face, and Dahlia, of course, used that moment to let loose the lightning energy.
Herzgo Alegni staggered backward, a black line of charred skin down the left side of his face, just beside his eye socket all the way to his chin.
On came Dahlia, her staff reassembled to one piece, thrusting spearlike before her. She knew that she had stunned the tiefling; she could see it in his eyes.
Those hateful eyes.
Even dazed, even outraged, though, the warlord kept up his defenses, his sword slapping hard against each thrust of Kozah’s Needle.
“Your drow friend is dead,” he remarked at one point, laughing, but even there, Dahlia saw the grimace of pain behind his fake grin.
She hardly registered his words. She hardly cared.
At that moment, all she cared about was her mother, about exacting revenge at long last.
Her belly burned, her arms should have slumped from exhaustion, so furious had been her routines.
But she fought on, ignoring the pain and oblivious to the weariness.
The pain assaulted the panther’s senses, and worse, one of those black bolts had transported creatures within it, and now Guenhwyvar clawed furiously at a line of spiders burrowing under and crawling out of her skin.
Maddened, she spun and rolled, and scratched that shoulder so hard with her rear claw that she tore open her own skin.
“Guen!” she heard, plaintively, from far away. “Guen, I need you!”
That call captured Guenhwyvar. That so familiar voice, that dear voice, brought her through her pain and confusion just enough so that she could see the next magic missile flying her way.
Guenhwyvar charged at it, flew over it with a great and high leap, and descended from on high upon the source of her agony: the twisted necromancer.
She was the essence of the panther, of the hunter, primal and pure, and she knew the look of her prey, the look of life at its end.
This tiefling wore no such expression.
As Guenhwyvar came down upon him, so did he descend, as if his form had become that of a wraith, to slide into the cracks between the cobblestones!
Guenhwyvar landed hard, her great claws scratching on the stones. She spun around furiously to see the necromancer reforming some dozen strides away. How her legs spun on the hard stones, digging for traction as she propelled herself at him once more.
Another stinging bolt came forth, drawing a roar from the panther in mid-air, and again, the wily necromancer slipped down through the stones just ahead of killing claws.
Guenhwyvar’s claws screeched on the cobblestones, and she threw herself all around, seeking her prey. It took her too long to spot him this time, she knew, and she got hit harder, a more substantial dweomer.
Maddened by the pain, the burn and the feeling of crawling things under her skin, the panther leaped away, driving the necromancer underground yet again.
She heard a cry, distant and desperate, and knew it to be Drizzt.
But Guenhwyvar couldn’t turn away from this magical threat. To do so would surely doom her beloved master.
Much of her fur hung ragged now, but off she sprang yet again, landing on stone and scrabbling around, panting heavily, but ready to leap and charge once more. The opportunity was there, but Drizzt didn’t take the kill.
He wasn’t sure why, wasn’t sure what instinct or subconscious plan, perhaps, stayed his hand. Dahlia needed him and all that stood between him and her was this old nemesis, Artemis Entreri, who had betrayed him once again here on this very bridge and in this very moment.
His words had given the assassin pause, a moment to fight back against the intrusions of Claw, and in that pause came a moment of vulnerability.
But Drizzt didn’t take the kill.
He leaped aside instead, rolling low and scooping his fallen scimitar.
He came back to his feet at the ready, but with his left arm hanging low, still burning, still bleeding.
Yet the drow managed to defeat Entreri’s pursuing attack, sword and dirk, for the moment of hope had passed and Entreri had lost his struggle against Charon’s Claw.
Now Artemis Entreri fought with fury, and so Drizzt growled and ignored the pain and returned the barrage, and heard again a song they both expected long lost: the continual ring of metal on metal as these two ferocious warriors played through their turning, twisting dance, as they had so many times before.
She rotated her arms violently, and with both hands down low on Kozah’s Needle, the top few feet of length began to spin over and over. She wanted to lure Alegni into trying to keep up, and every so often stabbed out, the angle changed by the staff’s bend instead of by re-aligning her arms. Despite Alegni’s size advantage and the large sword he carried, Dahlia had a substantial reach and her remarkable quickness, and she needed to use both, she knew, to have any chance at all.
Such tactics did not come easily to her at this time, not against this opponent. All she wanted to do was throw herself at him and tear him apart. She sated some of that hunger when one of her thrusts slipped past Alegni’s late block and jabbed him hard under the ribs, and the grimace on his face was a good thing, she thought.
But then he responded, and no more did he even try to parry her staff, instead coming on wildly, that deadly sword flashing down and around like a pendulum to drive her weapon away, and every stride bringing him a bit closer to Dahlia, who was now frantically backing.
She might hit him fifty times, she realized, and get hit in return but once. And still she would lose.
Again the elf warrior suppressed her rage in lieu of tactics. Alegni was almost on her, his sword slashing across powerfully.
Dahlia spun back just out of reach and darted ahead and to her left, and Alegni, of course, whipped Claw back the other way with a mighty backhand, either to cut her in half or at least to drive her back yet again.
But Dahlia did not run out of reach, nor did she try to block the blow. As soon as she had passed Alegni’s flank, the elf planted her staff and threw herself up high in the air atop it, and as Alegni turned, his blade whipping through the air just short of her carefully planted pole, she came down from on high with a double kick, perfectly timed and perfectly aimed.
She felt her foot crunch into the tiefling’s face, felt his nose crumble under the weight of that blow.
Dahlia landed lightly, a wild and elated look coming upon her as she noted the splatter of blood on Alegni’s face. Hunger overtook her and she broke her staff in two, and two into four as she threw herself at the hulking tiefling, flails spinning with fury.
But so too was Alegni full of fury and he countered with short, heavy cuts, more than willing to trade several hits of Dahlia’s weapon against one of his own.
And Dahlia couldn’t accept that trade. Instinct alone overruled her rage, and she deftly turned aside right before they came together in the middle of the great expanse.
She started to spring, felt the close pursuit, and daringly skidded to a fast stop, turning hard and throwing her elbow up high.
If Alegni had been able to put his sword in line, Dahlia would have been skewered then and there—and she knew it—but her guess paid off, and instead of feeling the tip of that awful sword, she instead felt Alegni’s broken face once more, this time with her elbow.
She expected that the tiefling had staggered back under the weight of that blow, and it was indeed a heavy strike, and so she turned, setting her weapons to spinning.
Or started to.
Herzgo Alegni, so powerful, had held his ground, and he swatted Dahlia with a backhanded slap, his free hand catching her under the shoulder as she started her turn.
She was flying then, across the bridge and to the stones, and she rolled in hard against the metal railing.
He was too strong, too powerful.
She could not beat him. Not with pure rage and brute force, and not with tactics.
So suddenly, Dahlia felt once more like a helpless little girl.
Her mother’s lost voice cried out to her.
It became a battle of guessing, and much like the one with Dahlia and Alegni, one had to guess correctly simply to survive, while the other, guessing wrongly, would merely be stung. Thus, the twisted tiefling necromancer held the temporary advantage, but Guenhwyvar understood the deeper matter.
She was wearing his spell power down. She had taken the worst he could give and had survived it. He could continue to sting her, all day and longer, but if she managed to get to him just once, she would tear his head from his skinny neck.
And so whenever Guenhwyvar landed from one futile leaping attack, she sprang away again, in a different direction. The necromancer couldn’t see such a leap from his underground travel, of course, and so only luck alone could keep him from reappearing right under her leap. Only luck alone could keep him alive and from her tearing claws.