Gauntlgrym (9 page)

She threw the baby from the cliff.

AN OLD DWARF’S LAST ROAD

H
E WAS JUST A BOY … MANY YEARS AGO,” THE WOMAN PROTESTED
. S
HE
rubbed her elderly father’s shoulders, and the man was clearly uncomfortable with the obvious contradictions between his tale and the reality before them.

Drizzt Do’Urden held up his dark hands to reassure the two, to show the older man that he didn’t disbelieve him.

“It was here,” the man, Lathan Obridock, said. “As wondrous a wood as I’ve e’er seen or heard tell of. Full o’ springtime and warmth, and singing, and bells ringing. We all seen it, me and Spragan, and Addadearber and … what was that captain’s name now?”

“Ashelia,” Drizzt answered.

“Aye!” the old man said. “Ashelia Larson, who knew the lake better than any. Great captain, that lady. Just out fishing, you know. And we come across the lake …” He pointed back at the dark waters of Lac Dinneshere, tracing a line from a distance out to the rotted old remnants of what had once been a wharf, the ruins of an old shack just up the shore from it. “We were bringing that ranger … Roundie. Aye, Roundie. He paid Ashelia to get him across the lake, I guess. You should be speaking with him.”

“I did,” Drizzt replied, trying to keep the exasperation out of his voice, for he had told Lathan that bit of information a dozen times at least that day, and twice that number the day before, and even before that. The previous year, Drizzt had met with the ranger, commonly known as Roundabout, or Roundie, to the south of Icewind Dale, at the urging of Jarlaxle.

Roundabout’s description of the wood was exactly the same as Lathan’s: a magical place, inhabited by a beautiful witch with auburn hair, and a halfling caretaker who lived in a hillside cave-home by a small pond. According to
Roundabout, though, only the wizard Addadearber had actually seen the halfling, and only Roundabout himself and a man named Spragan had seen the woman, and they had come away with very different impressions. To the ranger, she had seemed as a goddess dancing on a ladder of stars, but Spragan, according to Roundabout and confirmed by Lathan, had never truly recovered from the horror of that encounter.

Drizzt sighed as he looked around at the sparse trees and stony ground of the sheltered nook at the end of a small cove, cleverly hidden by rocky outcroppings. Up above on the hillside stood scattered small pine trees typical of Icewind Dale.

“Perhaps it was north of here,” Drizzt offered. “There are many sheltered vales along the high ground at the northeastern stretches of Lac Dinneshere.”

The old man shook his head with every word. He pointed to the cabin. “Right behind the lodge,” he insisted. “No other lodge near here. That’s the place.
This
is the place. The forest was here.”

“But there is no forest,” said Drizzt. “And no sign that any forest ever was here, beyond these few trees.”

“Telled you that, too,” said Lathan.

“They came back after their encounter,” his daughter, Tulula, said. “They looked for it. Of course they did, and so did many others. Roundie’d been here many the time before that day, and came back many the time after, and never did he see the same forest again, or the witch or halfling.”

Drizzt put his hand on his hip, his expression doubtful as he continued his scan, seeking something, anything, he could bring back to Bruenor, who, along with Pwent, was visiting with some clan dwarves in the tunnels under the lone mountain of Kelvin’s Cairn, the complex that had housed Clan Battlehammer in the decades before Bruenor had reclaimed Mithral Hall.

Mithral Hall. Four decades had passed since they’d left that wondrous dwarven kingdom, since Bruenor had abdicated his throne in a most extreme and irreversible manner. How many adventures the three of them had shared, along with Nanfoodle the gnome and Jessa the orc. Drizzt couldn’t help but smile as he considered those last two, gone from the band for more than twenty years now.

And once more he’d found himself in Icewind Dale, the land of Drizzt’s first real home, the land of the Companions of the Hall, the land of Catti-brie and Regis and Wulfgar, of a displaced dwarf king and a wayward dark elf searching, forever searching, it seemed, to find a place he could rightly call his home. What a troupe they had been! What adventures they had known!

Drizzt and Bruenor had put those three lost friends far behind them, of course, and had long ago given up any notion of finding the wayward spirits of Catti-brie and Regis, or of rejoining Wulfgar, for a human’s lifetime had passed, more than two-thirds of a century, and none of the three had been young on those fateful days so long ago. With Pwent, Nanfoodle, and Jessa, they had searched the hilly crags east of Luskan and the foothills of the Spine of the World for Gauntlgrym, the elusive ancient homeland of the Delzoun dwarves. A thousand maps had led them down a thousand trails, through a hundred deep caves, their thoughts only of Gauntlgrym, or, on those occasions when Bruenor and Drizzt quietly reminisced about Bruenor’s adopted children and their halfling friend, it was just to share their memories, so dear.

An unexpected meeting with Jarlaxle in Luskan a few years previous had rekindled great hopes and great pains. Immediately after the loss of Catti-brie and Regis, both Drizzt and Bruenor had enlisted the worldly Jarlaxle to find them, at any cost. The passage of seven decades and more hadn’t deterred the clever dark elf, apparently, or perhaps it had just been dumb luck, but Jarlaxle had stumbled upon a legend that was growing in the northwestern corner of Faerûn, the legend of a magical forest inhabited by a beautiful witch who apparently quite strikingly resembled the human daughter of King Bruenor Battlehammer.

The hunt had led Drizzt, Bruenor, and Pwent to Roundabout the ranger, in the small mountain village of Auckney, and he had directed them to Lac Dinneshere, one of the three lakes about which were scattered the communities that gave Ten-Towns its name.

Drizzt looked at Lathan, whose story verified what the old ranger in Auckney had said, but where was the forest? Icewind Dale had changed little in the last century. Ten-Towns had not grown—in fact, it seemed to Drizzt that there were less people in each of the towns than had been there when he’d called the place home.

“Are ye even listening to me, then?” Tulula scolded, her tone telling the daydreaming Drizzt that she had asked that question several times already.

“Just thinking,” he apologized. “So they and others searched for the forest, but nothing was ever found? Not a trace, nor a hint?”

Tulula shrugged. “Rumors,” she said. “And when I was a young girl, one boat came in with the crew all atwitter. Do ye remember that, Da?”

“Barley Farhook’s boat,” Lathan said, nodding. “Aye, and Spragan wanted to put right out, he did, after all them years where folk snickered at our own tale.
Aye, and we did go out, a few boats, but there was nothing to be found here, and they laughed at us again.”

“Where are your crewmates now?” Drizzt asked.

“Bah, all dead,” Lathan replied. “Addadearber taken in the Spellplague, Ashelia’s boat taken by the lake with Spragan aboard her, too. All gone, many years ago.”

Drizzt scanned the ruined cottage and the vale behind it, trying to figure out if there was anything left to do. He hadn’t expected to find anything, of course—the world was full of wild tales of the most unusual sort, especially in the sixty-six years since the Spellplague had descended upon Faerûn, since the death of Mystra and the great turmoil and tribulations that had shaken the foundation of civilization itself.

Then again, the world was full of actual surprises, as well.

“You got enough?” Tulula asked, glancing back across the lake. “We’ve a long ride home and you promised we’d be back in Caer-Dineval tomorrow.”

Drizzt hesitated a bit, helplessly scanning the horizon, then he nodded. “Help your father back into the wagon,” he told her. “We’ll be away soon.”

The drow trotted off to the cottage and poked about it for a bit, then moved up into the scraggly wood, hardly a forest, crunching through the dried pine needles of seasons past. He looked for clues, any clue: the hint of a door on a hillside, a patch of ground that once might have been a pond, the hint of music in the windy air.…

From the side of one hillock, he looked back to see Tulula in the open wagon, her father beside her. She waved to Drizzt, ready to depart.

He moved about a bit more, hoping against all reason that he would find something, anything, to give him hope that this place—Iruladoon, Roundie had called it—had once been the forest as described to him, that the caretaker had been Regis and the marvelous witch, Catti-brie. He thought of his return to Kelvin’s Cairn, and dreaded telling Bruenor that their journey to Icewind Dale had been for naught.

Where might they go now? Did old Bruenor have any more roads left in him?

“Come along then!” Tulula called from the wagon, and reluctantly the drow started down, his keen eyes still scanning the ground and trees for some sign, any sign.

Drizzt’s eyes were keen, but not sharp enough to see all. In his passing, he brushed by some trees and old branches, and dislodged something that fell
behind him. He didn’t notice, and went on his way to the wagon. The trio started off on the long road that would take them around the lake and back to Caer-Dineval.

As the sun dipped lower over the lake, the light flashed white on bone—a fish bone, a piece of scrimshaw carved into the likeness of a woman holding a magical bow.

The same bow Drizzt Do’Urden carried on his back.

The air was unseasonably chilly, and storm clouds had gathered off in the northwest on the morning Drizzt walked back out of Caer-Dineval, a reminder that the season was soon to turn. He looked to the distant peak of Kelvin’s Cairn and thought that perhaps he should spend another day in town and let the storm pass.

Drizzt laughed at himself, at his cowardice, and not for anything to do with the weather. He didn’t want to tell Bruenor that he’d found not a sign, not a tease. He knew he shouldn’t tarry, of course. Autumn was falling, and in a matter of tendays, the first snows would come sweeping down upon Icewind Dale, sealing the one pass through the mountains to the south.

On the rocky cliff between the town’s welcoming inn and the old castle of the Dinev family, the drow lifted his unicorn pendant to his lips and blew into the horn. He spotted Andahar, a tiny flash of white before him, approaching fast.

The steed seemed no bigger than his closed hand at first, but each stride along the rift between dimensions doubled its size, and in moments, the powerful equine beast trotted to a stop in front of Drizzt. Andahar pawed the ground and shook his thick neck, white mane flying wildly.

Drizzt heard the excited chatter of the guards at the caer’s gate, but he didn’t even look back to acknowledge them, nor was he surprised by their reaction. Who would not be awe-stricken at the first glimpse of Andahar, tacked and with barding that glittered in the daylight with rows of bells and jewels?

Drizzt grabbed the steed’s mane and agilely leaped into the saddle. Then he did salute the gawking folk at the gate before turning the magnificent unicorn to the north and thundering off toward Kelvin’s Cairn.

What a wonderful gift Andahar had been, the drow thought, and certainly not for the first time. The ruling council of Silverymoon had commissioned the
mount for Drizzt, in gratitude for his work, both with the blade and diplomacy, in the Third Orc War.

The wind whistled past his ears as Andahar galloped across the miles. The drow wasn’t cold, though, not with the warmth generated by the unicorn’s great muscles. His hair and cloak flew wide behind him. He called forth the bells to sing with the ride, and they answered to his will. Trusting in Andahar, Drizzt let his thoughts slip back to pleasant memories of his old friends. He was disappointed, of course, in not finding any sign of the mysterious witch of the wood, or the curious halfling caretaker, disappointed at the reaffirmation of that which he already knew to be true.

He still had his memories, though, and on occasions like this, alone and on the trail, he looked for them and found them, and couldn’t help but smile as he thought of that previous life he had known.