Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3)(50)

He got nothing more from the sword, then, and eventually gave up and slid the red blade back into its loop on his belt. He considered going to Effron— surely a necromancer would be more attuned to such mystical energies as he had sensed—but only briefly, for how could Alegni be sure that the source of this energy was not the twisted warlock himself?

In the end, the tiefling simply sighed and let it go. He glanced at the decorated pommel of his wondrous sword, and wondered if he had even really sensed something external to Claw at all. Perhaps it had been Claw’s energies, reaching out in search of Barrabus, that he had inadvertently intercepted. He looked out at the wider city, at the multitude of checkpoints and sentry positions he had enacted about Neverwinter. Barrabus and his new friends, if they were indeed Barrabus’s allies, weren’t getting past that wall without Alegni knowing about it.

He scanned the darkened city, eyes roving from firelight to firelight, torch to torch. Nothing seemed amiss or out of the ordinary.

Alegni nodded, satisfied, collected his sword and the boots he had just removed, and went back into his room, hoping to get a half-night’s sleep before the dawn.





The huge serpent, its body as thick as a large man’s chest, lifted its massive head off the floor to stare into the eyes of the three invaders to its sewer realm.

“Fan out,” Drizzt told his companions, Entreri to the right of him, Dahlia to his left. “Widen out. We have to flank that maw.”

He ended with a gasp as the giant snake head snapped at him, lightning fast. His first thought was to block with his blades, but how ridiculous that notion seemed to him in the face of the opened maw, a mouth large enough to swallow him whole, flying at him with the power of a charging horse! Instinct took over and the drow desperately dodged aside, and the air rippled as the snake head snapped past him so powerfully that the shock alone nearly knocked Drizzt from his feet. He held his balance, but the snake recoiled too quickly for the drow to strike it on its retreat.

“We cannot fight that,” Dahlia whispered, and Drizzt caught more than pragmatism in her defeated tone, and when he glanced at the fighter, at this elf who reveled in battle, he saw her arms slipping down helplessly, as if in surrender.

He looked back to the giant snake, to the huge head swerving tantalizingly side to side, to the black eyes looking back at him, looking right through him, mocking him with their power.

Many heartbeats passed. It occurred to Drizzt more than once that Dahlia was correct here, that they couldn’t fight this great creature. The snake was far above them, far too great a foe.

And it didn’t want to kill them.

That truth seemed obvious, and made perfect sense—until Drizzt managed to step back from the obviousness and actually think about it.

Only then did the drow widen his view around the great serpent, to see a half-dozen other people flanking the snake, contentedly.

Contentedly.

There they were, human citizens of Neverwinter, along with a pair of Shadovar, all unarmed and standing beside the serpent as if it was their friend.

Or master.

Drizzt glanced left and right. Dahlia had dropped Kozah’s Needle, and stood shaking her head helplessly, and Entreri, perhaps the most fearless man Drizzt had ever met, a warrior who only got angrier and more ferocious when faced with a seemingly hopeless situation, rolling his sword and dirk nervously and hardly even looking at the giant creature.

Drizzt knew then that there was no need to fight this creature. Indeed, they couldn’t hope to win, or even survive, if they engaged in such a futile battle. Nay, the better course was to simply surrender to its obvious godlike qualities, to accept the reality of their inferiority and live happily beside this living deity.

There would be pleasure and peace.

Drizzt felt his scimitars slipping down by his sides. He was lost. All was lost.

Her thoughts were pried open and flying free.

Dahlia recognized this, but it seemed natural, and the intimacy created in such a shared moment seemed somehow warm and inviting. This creature before her, this god, understood her. It saw her deepest pain and greatest fears. It stripped her naked before it, for it and all to see, and there, open and without secret, she felt . . . free.

This was no enemy.

This was salvation!

Her pain lay bare before her, the rape, her guilt, her terrifying and evil choice to murder her child, the source of her rage, the multitude of dead lovers—and wouldn’t Drizzt sit atop that pile of corpses?

Or wouldn’t he be strong enough to kill her instead, and free her? That was the point, after all!

But perhaps, she realized now, she didn’t need that extreme, that suicide-bylover approach to ending her pain.

Perhaps the answer was here, before her, within reach, in the dark eyes of this knowing, brilliant creature.

His thoughts were pried open and flying free.

Entreri recognized this, but it seemed natural, and the intimacy created in such a shared moment seemed somehow warm and inviting. This creature before him, this god, understood him. It saw his deepest pain and greatest fears. It stripped him naked before it, for it and all to see, and there, open and without secret, he felt . . . free.

This was no enemy.

This was salvation!

Entreri, ever guarded, instinctively recoiled, though. How could he not? He, who had lived a life of lies, even from himself, he who had lived in the shadows of fabrication and denial, suddenly found an abrupt reversal—and not just from this creature, as he had with Charon’s Claw, but opened to all within the collective “family” the creature was now offering to him.