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hands, Drizzt came to an important understanding. Even with Guenhwyvar beside him, huddled beneath a low overhang, Drizzt felt the severe pain growing in his extremities. Dawn was many hours away, and Drizzt seriously wondered if he would survive to see the sunrise.
“Too cold, Guenhwyvar,” he stuttered through his chattering teeth. “Too cold.”
He flexed his muscles and moved vigorously, trying to restore lost circulation. Then he mentally prepared himself, thinking of times past when he was warm, trying to defeat the despair and trick his own body into forgetting the cold. A single thought stood out clearly, a memory of the kitchens in Menzoberranzan’s Academy. In the everwarm Underdark, Drizzt had never even considered fire as a source of warmth. Always before, Drizzt had seen fire as merely a method of cooking, a means of producing light, and an offensive weapon. Now it took on even greater importance for the drow. As the winds continued to blow colder and colder, Drizzt realized, to his horror, that a fire’s heat alone could keep him alive.
He looked about for kindling. In the Underdark, he had burned mushroom stalks, but no mushrooms grew large enough on the surface. There were plants, though, trees that grew even larger than the Underdark’s fungus.
“Get me… limb,” Drizzt stuttered to Guenhwyvar, not knowing any words for wood or tree. The panther regarded him curiously.
“Fire,” Drizzt begged. He tried to rise but found his legs and feet numb.
Then the panther did understand. Guenhwyvar growled once and sprinted out into the night. The great cat nearly tripped over a pile of branches and twigs that had been set–by whom, Guenhwyvar did not know–just outside the doorway. Drizzt, too concerned with his survival at the time, did not even question the cat’s sudden return.
Drizzt tried unsuccessfully to strike a fire for many minutes, smacking his dagger against a stone. Finally he understood that the wind prevented the sparks from catching, so he moved the setup to a more sheltered area. His legs ached now, and his own saliva froze along his lips and chin. hands to prevent the wind from coming in too strongly. Then a spark took hold in the dry pile. Drizzt carefully fanned the tiny flame, cupping his
* * *
“The flames are up,” an elf said to his companion.
Kellindil nodded gravely, still not certain if he and his fellow elves had done right in aiding the drow. Kellindil had come right back out from Maldobar, while Dove and the others had set off for Sundabar, and had met with a small elven family, kinfolk of his, who lived in the mountains near Dead Orc Pass. With their expert aid, the elf had little trouble locating the drow, and together he and his kin had watched, curiously, over the last few weeks.
Drizzt’s innocuous lifestyle had not dispelled all of the wary elf’s doubts, though. Drizzt was a drow, after all, dark-skinned to view and dark-hearted by reputation.
Still, Kellindil’s sigh was one of relief when he, too, noted the slight, distant glow. The drow would not freeze; Kellindil believed that this drow did not deserve such a fate.
* * *
After his meal later that night, Drizzt leaned on Guenhwyvar–and the panther gladly accepting the shared body heat–and looked up at the stars, twinkling brightly in the cold air. “Do you remember Menzoberranzan?” he asked the panther. “Do you remember when we first met?”
If Guenhwyvar understood him, the cat gave no indication. With a yawn, Guenhwyvar rolled against Drizzt and dropped its head between two outstretched paws.
Drizzt smiled and roughly rubbed the panther’s ear. He had met Guenhwyvar in Sorcere, the wizard school of the Academy, when the panther was in the possession of Masoj Hun’ett, the only
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drow that Drizzt had ever killed. Drizzt purposely tried not to think of that incident now; with the fire burning brightly, warming his toes, this was no night for unpleasant memories. Despite the many horrors he had faced in the city of his birth, Drizzt had found some pleasures there and had learned many useful lessons. Even Masoj had taught him things that now aided him more than he ever would have believed. Looking back to the crackling flames, Drizzt mused that if it had not been for his apprenticeship duties of lighting candles, he would not even have known how to build a fire. Undeniably, that knowledge had saved him from a chilling death.
Drizzt’s smile was short-lived as his thoughts continued along those lines. Not so many months after that particularly useful lesson, Drizzt had been forced to kill Masoj.
Drizzt lay back again and sighed. With neither danger nor confusing companionship complexities of his existence so fully overwhelmed him. apparently imminent, this was perhaps the most simple time of his life, but never had the
He was brought from his tranquility a moment later, when a large bird, an owl with tufted, hornlike feathers on its rounded head, rushed suddenly overhead. Drizzt laughed at his own inability to relax; in the second it had taken him to recognize the bird as no threat, he had leaped to his feet and drawn his scimitar and dagger. Guenhwyvar, too, had reacted to the startling bird, but in a far different manner. With Drizzt suddenly up and out of the way, the panther rolled closer to the heat of the fire, stretched languidly, and yawned again.
* * *
The owl drifted silently on unseen breezes, rising with the mist out of the river valley opposite the wall that Drizzt had originally descended. The bird rushed on through the night to a thick grove of evergreens on the side of a mountain, coming to rest on a wood-and-rope bridge constructed across the higher boughs of three of the trees. After a few moments preening itself, the bird rang a little silver bell, attached to the bridge for just such occasions,
A moment later, the bird rang the bell again.
“I am coming,” came a voice from below. “Patience, Hooter. Let a blind man move at a pace that best suits him!” As if it understood, and enjoyed, the game, the owl rang the bell a third time.
An old man with a huge and bristling gray mustache and white eyes appeared on the bridge. He hopped and skipped his way toward the bird. Montolio was formerly a ranger of great renown, who now lived out his final years–by his own choice–secluded in the mountains and surrounded by the creatures he loved best (and he did not consider humans, elves, dwarves, or any of the other intelligent races among them). Despite his considerable age, Montolio remained tall and straight, though the years had taken their toll on the hermit, crinkling one hand up so that it resembled the claw of the bird he now approached.
“Patience, Hooter,” he mumbled over and over. Anyone watching him nimbly pick his way across the somewhat treacherous bridge never would have guessed that he was blind, and those who knew Montolio certainly would not describe him that way. Rather, they might have said that his eyes did not function, but they quickly would have added that he did not need them to function. With his skills and knowledge, and with his many animal friends, the old ranger “saw” more of the world around him than most of those with normal sight.
Montolio held out his arm, and the great owl promptly hopped onto it, carefully finding its footing on the man’s heavy leather sleeve. “You have seen the drow?” Montolio asked.
The owl responded with a whoo, then went off into a complicated series of chattering hoots and whoos. Montolio took it all in, weighing every detail. With the help of his friends, particularly this rather talkative owl, the ranger had monitored the drow for several days, curious as to why a dark elf had wandered into the valley. At first, Montolio had assumed that the drow was somehow connected to Graul, the chief orc of the region, but as time went on, the ranger began to suspect differently.
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“A good sign,” Montolio remarked when the owl had assured him that the drow had not yet made contact with the orc tribes. Graul was bad enough without having any allies as powerful as dark elves!
Still, the ranger could not figure out why the orcs had not sought out the drow. Possibly they had not caught sight of him; the drow had gone out of his way to remain inconspicuous, setting no fires (before this very night) and only coming out after sunset. More likely, Montolio mused as he gave the matter more thought, the orcs had seen the drow but had not yet found the courage to make contact.
Either way, the whole episode was proving a welcome diversion for the ranger as he went about the daily routines of setting up his house for the coming winter. He did not fear the drow’s the resulting conflict might well be worth the watching. appearance–Montolio did not fear much of anything–and if the drow and the orcs were not allies,
“By my leave,” the ranger said to placate the complaining owl. “Go and hunt some mice!” The owl swooped off immediately, circled once under then back over the bridge, and headed out into the night.
“Just take care not to eat any of the mice I have set to watching the drow!” Montolio called after the bird, and then he chuckled, shook his wild-grown gray locks, and turned back toward the ladder at the end of the bridge. He vowed, as he descended, that he would soon strap on his sword and find out what business this particular dark elf might have in the region.
The old ranger made many such vows.
* * *
Autumn’s warning blasts gave way quickly to the onslaught of winter. It hadn’t taken Drizzt long to figure out the significance of gray clouds, but when the storm broke this time, in the form of snow instead of rain, the drow was truly amazed. He had seen the whiteness along the tops of the mountains but had never gone high enough to inspect it and had merely assumed that it was a coloration of the rocks. Now Drizzt watched the white flakes descend on the valley; they disappeared in the rush of the river but gathered on the rocks. As the snow began to mount and the clouds hung ever lower in the sky, Drizzt came to a dreadful realization. Quickly he summoned Guenhwyvar to his side.
“We must find better shelter,” he explained to the weary panther. Guenhwyvar had only been released to its astral home the previous day. “And we must stock it with wood for our fires.”
Several caves dotted the valley wall on this side of the river. Drizzt found one, not only deep and dark but sheltered from the blowing wind by a high stone ridge. He entered, pausing just inside to let his eyes adapt from the snow’s glaring brightness.
The cave floor was uneven and its ceiling was not high. Large boulders were scattered randomly about, and off to the side, near one of these, Drizzt noticed a darker gloom, indicating a second chamber. He placed his armful of kindling down and started toward it, then halted suddenly, both he and Guenhwyvar sensing another presence.
Drizzt drew his scimitar, slipped to the boulder, and peered around it. With his infravision, the cave’s other inhabitant, a warm-glowing ball considerably larger than the drow, was not hard to spot. Drizzt knew at once what it was, though he had no name for it. He had seen this creature from fish from the river. afar several times, watching it as it deftly–and with amazing speed, considering its bulk–snatched
Whatever it might be called, Drizzt had no desire to fight with it over the cave; there were other holes in the area, more easily attainable.
The great brown bear, though, seemed to have different ideas. The creature stirred suddenly and came up to its rear legs, its avalanche growl echoing throughout the cave and its claws and teeth all too noticeable.
Guenhwyvar, the astral entity of the panther, knew the bear as an ancient rival, and one that