Help us!
“Eh?” Athrogate replied, not sure what he’d just heard, or if he’d “heard” anything at all.
He opened a swollen eye, just a slit at first, then wider when he saw the dwarf before him—and wider still when he came to realize it wasn’t the proprietor of the tavern he’d busted up, but one of the dwarf ghosts he had met a decade before in a place he longed to forget.
“Ack! But what’d’ye want?” Athrogate cried, digging his heels in and pressing back so forcefully that his back began to creep up the wall.
He’d lived for more than four centuries, and never had anyone ever accused Athrogate of being afraid. He’d battled drow and dragons, giants and hordes of goblins. He’d fought with Drizzt and Bruenor against the dracolich at Spirit Soaring, and he’d fought against Drizzt before that. Faer?n had never known a finer example of a fearless warrior than the battle-toughened, spit-flying Athrogate.
But he was afraid. All the color drained from his face, and every word came forth through chattering teeth and a lump in his throat so pronounced it might have been one of his lost morningstars.
“What’d’ye want o’ me?” he asked, sweat pouring over his bruised brow. “Didn’t mean to do it, I tell ye! Didn’t mean it … never would’ve wrecked Gauntl—oh, by Moradin’s angry arse!”
Help us … he heard in his head.
The beast awakens …
Blood of Delzoun …
They crowded around him, a swarm of ghostly dwarves, reaching for him, begging him, and Athrogate tried to squeeze himself right into the wall, so terrified was he. The voices in his head did not relent, but grew in volume and insistence until Athrogate threw up his arms, yelled, and stumbled out of the alleyway, running along the street, running to escape the ghosts of Gauntlgrym, running from his terrible memories of the great forge and what he’d done.
He stumbled and staggered his way across the city, so many sets of eyes fixing on him and no doubt thinking he’d lost his mind. And maybe he had, the dwarf thought. Maybe the guilt of the last ten years had finally broken him, putting ghosts before his delusional eyes, their words in his head. He finally reached the inn where he rented a room.
A fine inn it was, too, the best in Luskan, and the room had a wide view overlooking the harbor and an exit all its own from the second story balcony. Athrogate rushed up the wooden exterior stairway, so fast that he stumbled and banged his knees. He finally got to the balcony and pulled up short.
There stood Jarlaxle, staring at him with an expression caught somewhere between amusement and disappointment.
The drow held Athrogate’s weapon harness, the morningstars still in place.
“I thought you might be wanting this,” Jarlaxle said, holding it forth.
Athrogate moved to take it, but paused, seeing a blood stain on one of the straps. He looked at Jarlaxle.
“They didn’t feel their finder’s fee was adequate,” the drow explained with a casual shrug. “I had to convince them.”
As Athrogate took the harness, Jarlaxle directed his gaze out to the harbor, where some commotion had broken out on one of the moored ships, which was sitting very low in the water indeed. As he looked on, Athrogate realized that the ship seemed to be sinking, despite the frantic efforts of her scrambling crew.
He looked back at Jarlaxle, who tipped his wide-brimmed, plumed hat in an exaggerated fashion—and Athrogate recalled Jarlaxle’s portable holes. What might one of those do, the dwarf wondered as he looked back at the harbor, if dropped in the hold of a ship?
“Ye didn’t,” the dwarf muttered.
“They are convinced,” Jarlaxle replied.
Help us … Athrogate heard in his head, and the welcomed distraction of his companion’s antics were lost in a rush.
The beast awakens.
Save us!
The dwarf began to pant and look all around.
“What is it?” Jarlaxle asked.
“They’re here, I tell ye,” Athrogate replied, and he ran to the rail and looked down. His eyes widened and he turned and nearly knocked Jarlaxle over as he charged for his room’s door. “The ghosts o’ Gauntlgrym! The beast’s awake and they’re blamin’ meself!”
Athrogate slammed the door behind him and Jarlaxle didn’t move to follow. He waited and watched.
And he felt … a cold sensation, like a short burst of frigid, glacial wind, wash over him. Confused, for he couldn’t see any ghosts—and he had certainly seen them in Gauntlgrym—the drow reached into one of his many magical belt pouches and brought forth something he had not worn often since soon after the Spellplague, his magical eyepatch. With a hesitant sigh, he lifted it to his face and tied it on, keeping both eyes closed for a bit, before finally daring to open them.
He used to wear the eyepatch all the time. Many years before, it had protected him from unwanted magical scrying, and had shown him things, extra-dimensional things, that had proven quite helpful in some desperate situations. But in the seventy-seven years since the Spellplague had raged across Faer?n, the eyepatch’s other-worldly vision had proven confusing, to say the least.
He turned to the door just in time to see a ghostly dwarf form slipping through it, and predictably, Athrogate started yelling again.
Jarlaxle went to the door and cracked it open, glancing in just to confirm that the ghosts weren’t hurting his desperate friend.
They weren’t. They were pleading with him. For some reason, the ghosts of Gauntlgrym had come forth onto the World Above.
The drow mercenary blew a heavy sigh, just as hesitant and filled with even more reluctance and dread. He’d spent considerable time researching the disaster of his journey with the Thayan sorceress, and had spent considerable coin as well, determined to pay them back for that awful deception. Jarlaxle didn’t much like being played for a fool, and while he was not the most compassionate of persons, the carnage that had been wrought on Neverwinter had offended him greatly.
But he’d let it go in the end, even though he’d garnered some good information, and even though he knew Athrogate wanted nothing more than to rectify the great wrong he’d enacted in pulling that lever. Jarlaxle had let it go because the thought of going back to that dark, and surely utterly destroyed place hadn’t set well with him at all, and because he wasn’t even sure how he might ever find Gauntlgrym again. The cataclysm had collapsed the one tunnel he knew of, and his scouts had not found a way around it.
But the ghosts had come forth, claiming, so said Athrogate, that the beast had awakened once more, and indeed, tremors had begun to shake the Sword Coast North.
Perhaps the primordial would take aim at Luskan, a city still at least marginally profitable to Jarlaxle’s Bregan D’aerthe.
A third sigh left the mercenary’s lips. It was time to go home, and he never looked forward to that.
CHAMPIONS
BARRABUS WATCHED THE UNFOLDING BATTLE WITH GREAT INTEREST, HIS first view of the elf woman who was champion of the Ashmadai. He knew the champion’s opponent, a relatively competent warrior by the name of Arklin—but anyone who hadn’t seen Arklin fight before would hardly have called him competent. It seemed as if he was swinging his sword under water, so sluggish were its movements in comparison to the spinning flail of the elf. She hit Arklin repeatedly on the shoulders and arms, every blow painful, but none lethal.
She was toying with him.
Barrabus watched intently, trying to measure the rhythm of her movements. He didn’t like how his fighting style, sword and main-gauche, matched up against her twin weapons and their longer reach. He’d successfully faced off against notable two-handed fighters before, but swords, scimitars, and axes were not the same as those exotic spinning sticks. The angles of attack of more conventional weapons were more predictable, and a solid metal blade was not nearly as able to escape a well-executed block as her weapons.
He winced as the elf finally moved in for the inevitable kill. As Arklin lunged ahead with an awkward thrust, she spun her left-hand weapon around the stabbing blade, yanked it out wide, and moved forward inside it. Her right-hand weapon spun up behind her head, coming forward, but to Barrabus’s surprise and Arklin’s doom, the elf somehow reconnected those tethered poles into a single staff as they came around. As the pole leveled with Arklin’s head, the elf warrior tucked her hand tight against her shoulder and drove forward with her weight behind the strike. The end of her four-foot staff caught Arklin right under the chin and the warrior elf continued forward, driving the doomed Netherese back and to the ground. She ran right over him and yanked hard again with her left hand as she did, taking the sword from the gasping Arklin’s hand and throwing it far aside.
She fell into a forward roll. Barrabus again had to nod in admiration when she came up, spinning to rush right back at the fallen Netherese. She held not two weapons, not a staff and a flail, but a single eight-foot pole.
Clutching his throat and trying futilely to roll away, Arklin presented an easy target and the elf planted the end of that pole just above the top of Arklin’s collarbone and vaulted up into the air, her weight pressing the pole into the squirming, shrieking Shadovar.
A blast of crackling lightning blurred Barrabus’s vision as it shocked Arklin’s prostrate form. When the elf lightly touched down to her feet on the far side of the fallen warrior, she skipped away, paying his still form no more heed.
Barrabus had seen her, so he had an advantage, he told himself as he started through the forest to intercept her.
The eight-foot full length of Kozah’s Needle made moving through the forest more difficult, so Dahlia folded her staff into a thicker, four-foot walking stick. She needed to remain agile.
He was out there.
The bodies of Ashmadai warriors proved it. Certainly their Netherese opponents had many capable fighters, but the recent kills, so clean, so precise, spoke of the mysterious man who had stepped from the shadows to rain death upon the Ashmadai. The ferocious warrior cultists of Asmodeus, who proclaimed their greatest hope to be dying—even to be raised as undead warriors—for the cause, spoke of the Netherese assassin with a noticeable tremor.
And all of that, of course, had only prompted Dahlia to go out there in hopes of encountering this shade herself.
She let her instincts take over. She didn’t try to pick out any particular movement, sound, or smell, but let the whole of the environment guide her.
He was close, perhaps stalking her.
Even before he had become something other than strictly human, Barrabus could slip from shadow to concealment to shadow with the very best of Faer?n’s rogues. He needed no elven boots to keep his soft footfalls from the ears of a clumsy human, but with their added benefits, not a creature in the world could hear his approach.
He’d moved with all speed once he spotted the Thayan champion, that striking elf woman with her distinctive weapon. He slowed his pace only as he’d neared the spot, and had lost sight of her only once or twice in that rush. He had to be careful, had to keep obstacles—trees, at least—between himself and the woman.
He didn’t want to fight her straight up, not with the stakes so high, and was confident that such would not be the case. Barrabus couldn’t see her at the moment, with his back against twin birch trees, but she was there, he knew it, on the narrow path that wound under the oaks.
Poisoned dagger in hand, Barrabus the Gray didn’t hesitate. He rolled around the trees and leaped for the spot—and skidded to an abrupt halt.
She was gone!
Concerned, he scanned wildly. Only the brief glimpse, hardly registering, of a spot on the soft ground revealed to him the truth, and just in the nick of time. He fell aside as the elf warrior came down out of the tree—the indentation betraying the point where she’d planted her staff and used it to leap straight up to branches that should have been beyond her reach.
The warrior landed, but Barrabus kept rolling. He heard the hum of air behind him as she swept her deadly staff his way.
He came up in a pivot and launched his dagger—an awkward throw that had no real chance of getting through the defenses of a warrior as capable as she, but one that slowed her advance just enough for Barrabus to draw his sword and main-gauche.
She held her tri-staff horizontally in front of her, rotating her hands just enough to send the two-foot lengths at either end spinning vertically out to either side of her.
Barrabus couldn’t help but be drawn to the elf, the cut of her blouse and skirt, the impish smile on her delicate face, the thick braid of red and black hair running down the right side of her head and over the front of her shoulder to lead the eye enticingly to the low V of her partially untied blouse. He was as disciplined a warrior as any, but even he had to fight against the distraction, had to remind himself that even the cut of her clothes was strategic.
She circled slowly to the right, and Barrabus moved to his right as well, keeping square with her.
“I knew you were out here,” she said.
“I knew you were out here,” he replied.
“It had to come down to this, of course,” she said.
He didn’t answer—he hardly heard her. He knew he was at a disadvantage, given the unusual nature of her weapons.
Dahlia kept up her end of the conversation on her own. “It is said among my people that ‘the Gray’ is a formidable warrior.”
He didn’t answer, but she continued circling. He had tuned out her distractions—all of them.
Dahlia came forward, punching out with her right hand then her left then turning the tri-staff vertically before her, its ends spinning furiously. She let go with her left hand and let it loop completely around her right before catching it again, now reversing her right grip and pulling her right arm in while punching out again with her left, sending the left-most section sweeping out at her opponent.
He blocked with the main-gauche, trying to hook that end staff, but Dahlia was smart enough to recognize her own failed attack, and quick enough to retract the weapon. She threw her right arm straight back and let go of the shaft, launching the staff behind her, but caught it by the end piece in both hands held closely together, shifting her feet as she did, turning her hips so that she could quickly reverse the momentum with a snapping, whiplike swing. And a simple strategic call to the staff broke the middle section as well, so that as it came forward, it was four equal lengths, separated by the cords.
It rolled out before her, not quite a whip, not quite a staff, the end snap aimed perfectly for the Gray’s head.
He fell straight back, narrowly avoiding the surprising move, and the end pole cracked against a tree, releasing a lightning charge that ripped a large piece of bark from the trunk.
Barrabus could hardly believe the power generated in the whipping motion of the strange weapon, to say nothing of the added magical devastation wrought by the lightning.
He hadn’t tried any counter to the elf’s first routines, preferring to let her play them out in the hope that he would gain some insight into the angles and speed of her attacks, but suddenly, as he threw himself back in a desperate and barely-successful attempt to get out of her reach, he realized his folly.
She was too quick and too precise, and he realized he would figure out the truth of her movements right before she smashed in his skull. There was no learning curve to be found.
His backward rush ended up against a smaller tree and he rebounded off it with fury, coming forward as the elf grabbed up her staff by the central poles. He thought she’d somehow reconnect them, matching his sword and dagger with that tri-staff she wielded so adroitly.
It took him a heartbeat to realize that she did the opposite, breaking the staff into a pair of flails.
The angle of Barrabus’s intended attack, straightforward and inside the reach of the tri-staff end-poles, was all wrong!
He dived for the ground, a headlong roll, as the flails swatted in at him from left and right, and came up with a strong presentation of his right foot forward, lengthening the reach of his thrusting sword.
The elf dodged desperately, bringing one weapon in at the last instant to smack against the side of the sword as she faded back and to Barrabus’s left.
He pursued. A second stab, a third. He blocked a sweeping strike with his main-gauche and traded parries, sword and flail.
Barrabus rolled his hands in a sudden fury, circles sweeping over and in before him as he pressed forward in a rush. Instead of keeping one foot back, as was typical for his weapons, he had his feet moving side by side, his shoulders squared, daring the elf to find an opening and strike through the blur of spinning metal in front of him.
Indeed she tried, and he had to constantly change the speed of his rotations to block the myriad angles presented by the similarly spinning flails—and worse, on more than one of those blocks, the elf’s weapon presented an electric shock, some quite powerful, one nearly ripping the sword from his hand.
But he held on, and he used that unfortunate sting to make it seem as if he couldn’t, teasingly interrupting his circular flow.
On came the elf—just as Barrabus reversed his momentum and stabbed straight ahead.
He had her awkwardly dodging, and he pressed all the harder, stabbing and slashing with fury, keeping her on her heels, betting that one of his blades would find her flesh before his momentum played out and his weariness from the flurry allowed her an advantage.
Just when he thought he had her she threw herself backward in a perfect tuck and roll and retreated around the trunk of a thick oak.
Barrabus faked a move to the other side to intercept, and instead followed her directly. He smiled, thinking the Thayan had finally guessed wrong.