Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3)(117)

He knew. He heard the thunder of the approaching Shadovar. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He wanted to fight at least, to offer some last and fitting expression of Drizzt Do’Urden. If this was his end, as surely he believed it to be, then it should match the way he lived his life.

He wondered about the afterlife, and hoped there was one, and a just one. One where he would find again his friends lost, find his love, Catti-brie, and he even managed a grin in the magical darkness as the strength left his knees, as the scimitars fell from his grasp, in imagining the meeting between Catti-brie and Dahlia.

The grin was gone before it even began. Catti-brie and Dahlia . . . and Drizzt.

He hoped he would find Catti-brie, for the thought of spending eternity beside Dahlia . . .

He was on the ground then, though he felt nothing. He resisted the drow poison enough to remain awake and somewhat cogent, but his physical abilities were absent, and not to soon return.

“Bregan D’aerthe!” he heard Artemis Entreri cry, and Drizzt hoped that perhaps this was Jarlaxle’s band, that perhaps they might survive.

Entreri clarified, “We’re agents of Bregan D’aerthe!”

Clever, Drizzt thought. Ever was Artemis Entreri clever—that is what made him doubly dangerous.

He sensed forms passing by him, moving over him, but he could not lash out at them, and thought that he should not lash out at them.

The irony of a drow rescue was not lost on the groggy and fast-sinking dark elf ranger, nor was the notion that it would indeed be a very short reprieve.

The room’s door burst open under the weight of ranks of Shadovar pressing forward.

A wall of poisoned crossbow bolts came at them. The room blackened before them. A second magical darkness engulfed their front ranks, and a third magical darkness hit the throng behind that one.

And in that confused frenzy, a fireball erupted, biting flames curling Shadovar skin, blistering Shadovar hands as they tried to hold to metal weapons. Turning and thrashing, disoriented in the darkness, tripping over the bodies of their front ranks lying helpless on the ground under the spell of drow poison, the charge abruptly halted.

“Press on!” Herzgo Alegni screamed from the back when he recognized the stall.

“Drow!” came the responding shouts. “The dark elves have come!”

“Effron!” Herzgo Alegni shouted. He hardly knew what to make of that, and certainly he didn’t want a battle with a drow force. But neither would he let that sword, or his hated enemies, Entreri and the wretched Dahlia, escape! He spotted the twisted warlock by the entrance to the tunnel in the room ahead of him.

“Fill the room with deadly magic!” Alegni yelled at the warlock.

“There are Shadovar in that room, my lord!” a shade lieutenant near to Alegni dared to argue.

Hardly thinking of the movement, hardly even registering his own reaction to the lieutenant’s words, Alegni punched the shade in the jaw, and the shade dropped to the floor in a heap.

“I will have them!” Alegni bellowed, and all around him cowered under the power of his voice and the very real threat behind his demands. “I will have that sword!” He regarded the shade he had hit. Normally, the warlord refrained from such public corporeal punishment of his charges, other than his open torment of Barrabus the Gray, of course. He put a hand out to help hoist the shade back to his feet, but when the lieutenant hesitated, staring at him suspiciously, Alegni retracted the hand and quietly warned, “The next time you so openly oppose my orders, I will answer with my sword.”

He moved forward to find Effron and his magic-wielding forces filling the room at the far end of the corridor with blazing lightning, clouds of acid, balls of fire, and bubbling poisonous ooze. Prodded by a continually yelling Alegni, their barrage of deadly magic went on and on, shaking the stones of Gauntlgrym.

They could see none of it, of course, as the drow darkness lingered, and finally as both barrage and darkness began to thin, the Shadovar forces pressed on.

To find an empty room, with not a body to be seen and the back door closed and sealed once more.

“They could not all have escaped,” Effron remarked when Alegni entered the scarred battlefield. “Some of our enemies were slain here, I am certain.”

“You’re guessing,” Alegni growled back at him.

“Reasoning. None could have withstood our concentrated assault.”

“You know little of the drow, I see.”

Effron shrugged, that curious motion with one of his shoulders always behind him.

“So some were killed,” Alegni mused. “Dahlia, do you think?”

Effron swallowed hard.

“You would not wish such a thing, would you, twisted boy?” Alegni teased. “To think her dead, but gone from you. To think her dead without you being able to witness the last light leaving her blue eyes. That would hurt most of all, wouldn’t it?”

Effron stared at him hatefully, not blinking. “Do you speak for me or for yourself?”

“If she is dead, then so be it,” Alegni said as convincingly as he could manage.

“And Barra—Artemis Entreri?”

“If he is dead, I will take up Charon’s Claw and bring him back, that I might torment him for another decade to repay him for his insolence and treachery.”

“He resisted the sword before. Could you ever trust him, or in your ability to control him, even with Claw back in your grasp?”