Gauntlgrym (42 page)

It went over the bending drow at the same time his left arm straightened, Twinkle stabbing hard into the man’s gut. As Drizzt rushed past, he retracted and sent the scimitar in a quick spin, slashing the bending man’s leg and sending him howling and thrashing to the floor.

By that time, Drizzt was atop the next table in line, where he leaped and tucked, landed and kicked, and stabbed out repeatedly, scoring hit after hit on the several enemies who had surrounded him. They stabbed and swung with abandon, but the drow was always one leap, one duck, one leg-tucking hop ahead of them. One by one, they fell away, wounded.

But more rushed in to take their places, as they seemed to have the drow trapped.

Seemed.

But Drizzt saw the oncoming explosion, and as Bruenor and Athrogate roared toward the table, Drizzt rushed to the side and leaped away, a somersault that cleared the gathered Ashmadai. All of them watched Drizzt, trying to turn and catch up to him, when the two dwarves plowed through their ranks, shield and axe and twin morningstars working as extensions of the real weapons, the dwarves themselves.

The table flew and the Ashmadai scattered. The dwarves roared and plowed on, burying all enemies beneath the weight of their charge.

And Drizzt was back to his run and his dance, his feet and hands a blur. He slashed both his blades down to the left, batting aside a thrusting scepter. Then back to the right they went, both reaching out in that arc just enough to stick an Ashmadai woman as she departed, sending her, too, falling aside.

Drizzt skidded to a stop, seeing another potential enemy coming toward him: Jarlaxle’s bird. The drow went into a flurry with his blades, more show than effect, and he grinned wickedly as the two Ashmadai in front of him watched that flourish too long to sense the monstrous diatryma coming in at them from behind.

The drow darted away, and the Ashmadai turned to follow. One got pecked on the skull with bone-shattering force, and the other found himself flying in an unintended direction as a three-toed foot slammed him on the hip with tremendous force.

What had been twenty against two, then twenty against four—five with the diatryma—had turned much more even. And with their leader lost in a pile of whatever-that-was, the remaining Ashmadai suddenly seemed more intent on getting away to fight another day than in continuing along a losing course.

And Jarlaxle’s bird chased them right out of the Cutlass and down the street.

“Surrender!” Drizzt demanded of an enemy he cornered opposite the door.

He accentuated his demand with a devastating flurry that knocked her weapon
left, right, and up in the blink of an eye. She was obviously overmatched, and easy to kill, should the drow choose that course.

But she was Ashmadai.

She moved as if to drop her weapon, her other hand held open before her—and she attacked instead.

Or tried to.

She leaped forward with a scream and a mighty thrust, but hit nothing but air, overbalancing and hardly even aware of the fact that the drow had sidestepped. The woman stiffened as a scimitar entered her side. It slid up toward her lung then stopped and twisted. Her scepter fell to the floor. She stood up on her toes, teeth clenched, hands grabbing at empty air.

Drizzt pulled his blade back out. The woman turned to regard him, grasping at her torn side. Her mouth moved as if she meant to curse him, but no sound came forth as she sank to one knee then eased herself down to the floor where she curled and clenched.

Drizzt scanned the room, just in time to see Bruenor and Athrogate slam into each other, shoulder to shoulder, as they tried to exit the tavern. They jostled for a moment before Athrogate demurred, shoving the dwarf king out first and quickly following.

Behind them came Jarlaxle, his expression deadly serious as he looked back at Drizzt.

“What?” Drizzt asked of him.

Jarlaxle’s eyes shifted just a bit to regard the woman who lay crumpled beside the ranger. He shook his head and sighed, but continued on. He didn’t follow the dwarves out of the tavern. Instead, he stood facing the goo planted on the wall just to the side of the door.

“She’s suffocating,” Drizzt said as he walked over. He had once been the victim of that oozing web, himself, and knew well its deadly effect.

“You would prefer to kill her with your blades, I suppose,” Jarlaxle flippantly replied, and Drizzt stared at him hard.

Jarlaxle brought his hands down with a snap, his magical bracers depositing a dagger in each. He looked at Drizzt, again grim-faced, and snapped his wrists again, elongating the daggers into long, narrow-bladed swords. With an uncharacteristic growl, he drove one sword into the goo and through it to hit the wall on the other side. He retracted the sword and studied its blade, still clean save a bit of the greenish substance no bigger than a fingernail.

“No blood,” Jarlaxle said, and shrugged at Drizzt. He lined up the blade again, this time more to the center of the mass, a certain hit. And again, he glanced at Drizzt with an eyebrow raised.

The ranger didn’t blink.

Jarlaxle sighed and lowered the blade. “Who are you?” he asked, staring at Drizzt.

Drizzt met his accusing glare with an impassive look.

“The Drizzt Do’Urden I know would have called for mercy,” Jarlaxle said. He pointed about the room with his sword, to the Ashmadai fallen to the drow’s scimitars. “Shall we call a priest?”

“That they will be healed and attack me once more?”

“Who are you?”

“No one who has ever made a difference,” Drizzt replied.

The apathy, the self-pity, and mostly the callousness hit Jarlaxle like a wall of foul acid. A sneer erupted on his face and he spun back to the glob on the wall and stabbed hard with his sword, then harder with the second, and back and forth in an outraged flurry, over and over, so that anyone caught behind it was surely dead.

“Impressive,” Drizzt said. He flipped his scimitars over in his hands, aligning them perfectly with their sheaths, and slid them away. “And you decry my lack of mercy?”

“Look at them!” an angry Jarlaxle shouted at Drizzt, presenting the bloodless blades before him.

“How did you know?” Drizzt asked.

“I know everything that goes on in Luskan.”

“Then ye’re knowing where me maps might be,” said Bruenor, coming back in through the door.

Jarlaxle acknowledged him with a nod then looked around at the fallen Ashmadai, some of whom were squirming and kneeling, and with more than one watching the trio at the door.

“We have a lot to discuss,” the drow mercenary said. “But not here.”

“I would know the fate of Shivanni Gardpeck before I leave,” Drizzt replied.

“She’s safe,” Jarlaxle assured him. “And will return soon with a host of soldiers.” He paused and eyed Drizzt. “And priests to tend to the wounded.”

“She knew there would be such a battle in her tavern this night?” Drizzt asked, looking around at the devastation.

“And with enough payment for her troubles to put things right, I promise,” said Jarlaxle.

“Put things right?” Drizzt retorted with a snicker to show how ridiculous he found that notion. He led Jarlaxle’s gaze across the room, over the destruction, the carnage, the wounded, and the dead.

The two drow locked stares then, each trying to scrutinize the other, each seemingly trying to make sense out of the nonsensical.

“Can coin unwind time?” Drizzt whispered.

Jarlaxle’s gaze became the more judgmental, a look of frustration and disappointment, even anger on his face—one that only heightened as Drizzt remained so stoic and unblinking.

“Damned bird’s chasin’ ’em right to the docks and into the water!” Athrogate announced then, breaking the moment. The two turned to see the dwarf bobbing up beside Bruenor at the Cutlass’s door.

“Come,” Jarlaxle bade them all. “We have much to discuss.”

He snapped his wrists up instead of down, and his swords became daggers, which he flipped up into the air. They hit the ceiling and stuck fast.

“What about her?” Bruenor asked, motioning to the blob on the wall.

“We shall see,” Jarlaxle replied.

With Athrogate leading, the four rushed away, sprinting down the street and turning into an alley. The shouts and calls of guards soon followed them. Jarlaxle flipped a portable hole from his hat and flattened it against the wall at the alley’s end.

Athrogate jumped through, and when Bruenor hesitated, the other dwarf reached back from the blackness, grabbed him by the shirt, and yanked him through as well. Drizzt jumped nimbly through after his friend, with Jarlaxle following, and from the other side, he pulled the hole from the wall, leaving it impassable, as it had been before.

So ended the pursuit, but the four kept up a swift, though not desperate pace back to Jarlaxle’s apartment.

“Ye give me back me maps!” Bruenor insisted as they came to the door.

Just inside the small but lavishly furnished flat, Jarlaxle reached to a side table and tossed Bruenor his stolen pack.

“All but one are in there,” Jarlaxle explained. “Perhaps they will lead to great treasures and mysterious places—adventures for another day.”

“All but one?” Bruenor growled.

“All but this one, good dwarf,” the drow explained, reaching into a drawer and producing a tightly rolled and tied parchment. “This one, which will lead to that which you most desire. Yes, King Bruenor, I speak of Gauntlgrym. I have been there, and though I cannot retrace my steps since the explosion collapsed the tunnels, I know where Gauntlgrym lies.” He brought the map up in front of him. “And this is the way.”

Bruenor fumbled for words. He looked to Drizzt, who just returned his shrug with a like movement.

The dwarf king looked back to Jarlaxle, licking his lips, which had gone dry. “I’m not for playin’ yer games on this,” he warned.

“No game,” Jarlaxle replied in all seriousness. “Gauntlgrym.”

“Gauntlgrym,” Athrogate said from the side, and Bruenor turned to regard him. “I been there. I seen the forge. I seen the throne. I seen the ghosts.”

That last proclamation had Bruenor, who had so recently met those very ghosts, sucking in his breath in a futile attempt to steady himself.

Drizzt looked at Bruenor with a look of some satisfaction then, but also an unsettling detachment.

Jarlaxle didn’t miss that last part, and he found to his surprise that it bothered him profoundly.

DESPERATE TIME, DESPERATE PLAN

B
RUENOR ALMOST DISAPPEARED INTO THE OVERSTUFFED CHAIR, HAVING
sunk just a bit deeper with Jarlaxle’s every word. The drow explained his plan to retake Gauntlgrym, and if Bruenor had thought it a daunting task in the abstract, it sounded positively horrifying in plain language.

“So the beast didn’t let the volcano blow,” Bruenor said, his voice barely a whisper. “The beast
is
the volcano?” He looked at Drizzt as he asked that question, remembering their flippant discussions about stopping a volcano.

“A primordial of fire, as old as the gods,” Jarlaxle replied.

“And as strong,” said Bruenor, but Jarlaxle shook his head.

“But without a god’s mind. It is catastrophe, devoid of malice. It is power, without intellect.”

“It won’t raise an army of fanatical cultists,” Drizzt added.

Jarlaxle’s expression on that point was less than reassuring.

Bruenor glanced over at the table that held the magical bowls they were to use to summon the water elementals, bowls they hoped would hold the monsters long enough for them to re-open the tendrils of the Hosttower of the Arcane, thus setting the old cage back in place. Bowls they had to place precisely, though they knew not precisely where.…

“King Bruenor, it is an adventure!” Jarlaxle said, excited, bouncing from foot to foot. “King Bruenor, this is the way to Gauntlgrym! The real Gauntlgrym! Is that not what you sought when you abdicated the throne of Mithral Hall?”

“Bah!” Bruenor snorted and waved the drow away.

Jarlaxle grinned and tossed a wink at Drizzt. “We may have more options, more allies,” he said, taking up his wide-brimmed hat and plopping it on his head. “I will return presently.”

And with that, he was gone, leaving the three of them sitting in the apartment.

“Ye needed me maps,” Bruenor said to Athrogate.

The black-bearded dwarf shrugged and nodded. “The tunnels we walked to Gauntlgrym collapsed. Can’t go back that way.”

Bruenor turned a concerned look to Drizzt.

“Those tunnels carried these … tendrils, of the Hosttower, to the ancient dwarven city,” the drow added.

“Aye, that’s how we found the place.”

“And if those tendrils are damaged?”

Athrogate blew a heavy sigh, then looked directly at Bruenor, his expression very serious. “If ye ain’t for goin’, I ain’t for blamin’ ye. It’s all crazy, and sure that we’re to die—more sure than anything good, I mean. But for meself, there’s no choice to be found.” He sucked in his breath and visibly steadied himself in his chair. “’Twas meself, King Bruenor,” Athrogate admitted. “Jarlaxle didn’t tell ye that, bein’ me friend. But ’twas meself what pulled the lever and shut the tendrils’ flow, shut the tendrils’ magic, and freed the elementals what were holding the beast in its pit o’ lava. It was Athrogate that let the primordial roar. It was Athrogate that wrecked Gauntlgrym, and Athrogate that killed Neverwinter.”