Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3)(47)

“If it serves as we had hoped, then it has shown me no contact by Charon’s Claw in the time I have carried it,” he explained. “If the sword has sought me and found me, then your weapon didn’t notice. Either way, better for you to be armed now.”

“What do you know?” Dahlia asked.

“That,” Drizzt answered, and when Dahlia and Entreri turned to him, he thrust his sword out before him, and in the light farther along the tunnel, more snakes writhed, some taking to the water, some crawling over others, and all looking back at them.

“Let’s leave this place,” Dahlia said.

“We’re trying to do just that,” Entreri reminded.

“Back the way we came,” Dahlia insisted. She joined the ends of Kozah’s Needle back together, forming a singular eight-foot length. It wasn’t very practical for fighting in a narrow tunnel, of course, but when Dahlia stabbed the staff diagonally into the water before her, Drizzt understood that she wanted her weapon to keep these slithering creatures as far from her as possible.

“They’re not poisonous,” Entreri replied. “They know they cannot swallow us and have no means to kill us. They’ll likely retreat.”

“Like the first one?” Dahlia sarcastically replied, and she backed down the corridor a few steps.

“You startled it. It attacked out of fear,” Drizzt answered. He was a ranger, and well versed in the ways of the wilds. He moved forward—or started to, until a serpent threw itself through the air at him. Up flashed his arm to block, and he intercepted the snake’s opened maw closing on his forearm, grabbing tight, its body immediately slapping around his torso as it tried to gain a hold and begin its crushing squeeze.

The strength of the creature surprised the drow, its every muscle working in perfect coordination. Noting movement to the side, he glanced at Entreri, at first thinking that the assassin was rushing to his aid. Not so, he understood, when he realized that Entreri had his own problems.

On came the strangely aggressive snakes, slithering through the water, sliding along the walls, throwing themselves through the air.

With a growl, Drizzt lifted his bitten left arm, extending the snake out before his right shoulder, turned and wriggled enough to free his other arm, and brought a quick backhand of Twinkle to cut the creature in half. Immediately, the lower torso loosened around him and dropped with a splash to the floor, but that head held on, stubbornly. Too concerned with drawing his other blade—a bit awkwardly since Icingdeath, which he usually carried in his right hand, was sheathed on his left hip—Drizzt let the half-serpent hang there.

His focus remained before him, as it had to, slapping, slashing, and kicking to fend off the onslaught.

Beside him, Entreri worked with equal fury, his dirk swiftly deflecting leaping serpents, his sword scoring kills.

But behind them, there came a long series of dull raps, and in one of the infrequent moments of pause, Drizzt glanced back, as did Entreri, to see Dahlia straddling the water, her staff presented horizontally before her and she rapidly shifted it up and down, out left and out right, cracking it against the stone walls.

“Hit the snakes, you idiot!” Entreri yelled at her, and he was nearly toppled at the end of that sentence as one of the serpents slithered through his defenses and wrapped around his legs, tugging him powerfully.

“Dahlia!” Drizzt implored her.

But the rapping continued and so did the onslaught of serpents—there seemed to be no end to them! Entreri freed himself only to get hit again, and Drizzt nearly had Icingdeath pulled from his grasp when one snake took hold.

The corridor began to flash, not from the waving of Drizzt’s glowing scimitar, but with sharp spikes of light, crackles of lightning.

Entreri kept cursing at Dahlia and growling at the snakes, and swinging and stabbing and kicking. And just when Drizzt thought he had gained some measure of momentum, a serpent appeared on the ceiling before him. He threw himself back and low into a crouch and the snapping jaws rent the air, just missing his left ear. The snake retracted before his blade could decapitate it, then threw itself at him, slamming him hard and nearly knocking him from his feet.

To fall was to be overwhelmed, Drizzt knew. The water shimmied, alive with serpents.

“Dahlia!” he cried for help.

This time she answered him, not with words, but with thunder. She thrust Kozah’s Needle through the water to slam against the floor, and there she released the energy her rapping had imbued within it. The retort jolted all three of them into the air, though all three held their footing as they landed. The water churned and sizzled, a stinky steam lifting from it so thickly that it obscured their vision.

Drizzt tried to respond, to say something, but found his jaw clenched from the energy pulsing through him.

Then it was over, as unexpectedly and abruptly as it had happened, and an eerie stillness replaced the fury of the previous moments.

Snakes dropped from the walls and ceiling, or hung in place, their lengths looped over a natural beam or a jag or jut. Snakes lay on the floor in various poses, like living runes or glyphs. Snakes floated in the water, sliding down to bump against a leg or foot.

Perhaps dead, perhaps stunned. That latter, very real possibility had Drizzt more than a little alarmed.

Beside him, Entreri slashed down on one reptile, and its convulsion as his blade struck home told the ranger that it had indeed been alive until cleaved.