Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3)(48)

“Be gone, and quickly!” Drizzt cried. “Leave them, there are too many!”

“Out the way we came!” Dahlia said.

“Alegni is that way,” Entreri reminded, pointing ahead. “And it’s shorter.”

They didn’t have time to think it through. They didn’t have time to consider the unusual behavior of so many ordinary creatures. They simply had to react. Perhaps it was the carrot of Alegni, which Entreri had dangled before Dahlia, but whatever the reason, Drizzt was surprised when the woman splashed up behind him, prodding him and Entreri to move on.

He noted that Entreri crouched and reached into the water and pulled something forth before scrambling to pace him, but took no further note as the three zigzagged their way through a maze of stunned serpents.

Fortunately, the magical energy of Kozah’s Needle had reached far enough along the corridor to get most of the snakes, and they passed beyond that point in short order, and even more fortunately, so they presumed, the corridor widened a bit more, and heightened, and they could press on with more urgency.

Except that they had to wait for a moment as Entreri pulled up to a rock and sat down, and only then did Drizzt understand what the assassin had stopped to retrieve from the water: one of his low boots.

Dahlia’s jolt had lifted him right out of his shoe.

With a few muttered curses and a shake of his head, Entreri pulled the smoking boot back on and stood straight. He looked hard at Dahlia and said, “You owe me a new pair.”

“I saved your life,” she retorted.

“If you had just bothered to join in the fight, it wouldn’t have needed any saving, would it?”

Again Drizzt watched the two and their verbal sparring with something less than amusement, but he couldn’t really focus on it at that moment, because something about their encounter with the bed of serpents was now, in retrospect, truly bothering him.

“Why were all of those snakes exactly the same size?” he asked when they had started on their way again.

“Why wouldn’t they be?” Dahlia asked.

“Snakes shed their skins and grow quickly, and continually,” Drizzt explained.

“So they were all the same age,” the elf woman replied, her tone showing that she hardly saw the point of this conversation.

Drizzt shook his head. “Snakes don’t herd.”

“That was a herd of snakes,” Dahlia quickly retorted.

“A bed of snakes,” the ranger corrected, but half-heartedly, for her point was well taken. Drizzt shook his head, not quite accepting it. Snakes did collect in the winter, of course—the drow had found many such dens in his travels, some containing thousands of the creatures. But he had never seen such a hunting pack as they had just encountered, and had never heard of a coordinated snake attack!

“Magically conjured?” Dahlia asked, and that sounded right to Drizzt, until Entreri chimed in.

“Babies.”

“Babies?” Dahlia echoed doubtfully, stating the obvious, for how could a sixfoot snake be a baby?

But it was the way Entreri had said it that had both Drizzt, and Dahlia, despite her argument, turning his way, then following his gaze.

To the mother.





In a small room lit by a single candle, Brother Anthus sat cross-legged on the bare floor. His eyes were closed, his hands resting on the cool stone beside his legs, palms facing upward. Softly, the monk chanted, moaned even, as he focused on his deep inhalation and exhalation, using that rising and falling movement of his belly to clear his swirling thoughts, to find a place of deep peace and emptiness.

This was his only refuge, and even it, at first, seemed not a place of serenity.

Should he travel to Waterdeep and alert the lords that the Netheril Empire was gaining a stronghold just north of them?

Images of that road, fleeting glimpses of the trouble he would have slipping away unnoticed, or of the consequences should Herzgo Alegni’s many soldiers capture him before he got away, assailed him. And if he went, of course, he could not return to Neverwinter unless and until Alegni had been thrown down and the agents of Netheril routed.

One by one, Brother Anthus patted down those thoughts.

He felt the rise and fall of his belly.

And what of Arunika? Where had the woman found such strength as he had witnessed firsthand at her cottage? How could a small woman survive so casually outside the city walls, anyway? The region was full of wild things, and evil things, coordinated like the Thayans, or rogue bandits, goblinkin, or owlbears.

Brother Anthus saw the image of Arunika and gradually pushed it away.

He felt the rise and fall of his belly.

What did Herzgo Alegni think of him? Did the warlord even know who he was? And what of Jelvus Grinch—what of value might Anthus bring to Jelvus Grinch to get the man to properly introduce him to the Netherese warlord?

In his mind, Alegni and Grinch stood side by side, smiling back at him, but not a grin of friendship. More likely, he knew, they were mocking him and would allow him no ascent within the ranks of the city, for what of value might he offer, indeed?

But those two, too, receded, pushed back by the deepening emptiness of Brother Anthus.

He felt the rise and fall of his belly.

And that was all. There was no more. He had chased away the thoughts, the tumult, the uncertainty.

Now he simply was.