Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3)(53)

“Tend to the others!” he scolded.

“They attacked us,” Dahlia reminded.

“The . . . that creature attacked us, through them,” Drizzt retorted. “Tend to them!”

Dahlia glanced at Entreri skeptically, and to Drizzt’s dismay, it seemed that Dahlia was being more stubborn and less merciful than Artemis Entreri.

“Tend to them or we—or I—will remain with them,” Drizzt warned, and that broke the stalemate. He threw his pack to Entreri.

Six individuals started along the tunnels a short while later, the two minimally wounded humans, a man and a woman, half-carrying, half-dragging their other female companion in a makeshift litter Drizzt had constructed from a cloak and the bones of the fishlike creature that had enslaved them. They were citizens of Neverwinter, or had been.

“I was raised outside of Luskan,” the woman, Genevieve by name, explained to Drizzt as they walked. “My family farmed there.”

She went on to describe the fall of that region, but Drizzt already knew the sad tale well.

“Did you know a family Stuyles?” he asked.

“Aye, the name sounds familiar,” Genevieve replied. “But ’twas a long time ago. I been here many years. Before the ruin.”

“But you survived,” Drizzt said, and he looked to Entreri as he did, and the assassin wore an expression of interest, at least.

“We all did,” the man on the other side of the litter replied. “Because of that thing back there.”

“Aye, we been down here for years and years,” Genevieve added. She winced and seemed quite pained as she tried to sort it all out. “A couple of times after the ruin, we went up. To spy, I expect, though I hardly remember it.”

“Seems like you’d make a fine spy, then,” Entreri said sarcastically.

“Was the fish creature looking through us,” she explained. “Oh, but it could do that. It could do almost anything.”

“Killed the great snake and controlled her brood with little trouble,” the man added.

“They were babies, then,” Drizzt remarked, and he shuddered to think that Neverwinter’s sewer might soon be home to a thriving community of gigantic constrictors! He left the trio, then, to rejoin his companions at the lead.

Drizzt wanted to speak with Entreri on that journey, to help him to recognize the intrusion for what it was, to learn from the dominance of the aboleth so that he might use those lessons as he tried to resist any such dominance from his old sword. But the drow found that he couldn’t talk to the man at that time, or to Dahlia, and he quickly fell back, following the three wounded humans, helping them where he could, while Entreri and Dahlia led the way, the assassin once more holding half of Dahlia’s staff to ward against any unwanted intrusions. They didn’t need Twinkle’s glow any longer, for the sun was rising outside, and peeking in at enough junctures—through cracks up above, or grates—to provide enough light for the two, with their lowlight vision, to navigate.

They chatted as they walked, and Drizzt could catch only bits and pieces of their conversation, which frustrated him even more. After only a few twists and turns in the sewer, even those pieces of conversation were lost to him, drowned out by the sound of flowing water, for they were then paralleling the river, very nearby.

Still he watched them, feeling very distant to them, so suddenly.

Feeling very lost.

“Soon,” Entreri whispered to Dahlia, up in front of the others.

Dahlia looked at him curiously, not quite understanding. Was he talking about them getting out of the sewers soon? Perhaps, but she suspected something more, particularly given the strange intermingling of personal secrets.

Entreri nodded, and there was so much in that simple gesture, a recognition of things far deeper than the practical implications of the single word he had spoken.

“Soon,” he was saying, meaning that Dahlia would find a proper resolution “soon.”

“Soon,” he was saying, as if to indicate that some moment of peace was “soon” before her.

“Soon.” He was hinting, Dahlia understood, that the resolution of her greatest tragedy and greatest moment . . .

The elf warrior looked away, not willing to let him see the moisture in her blue eyes, not willing to let this stranger, this former, and perhaps still, adversary, look into her soul yet again.

Or was it just shame?





THE FOOTHOLD





They owned the forge.

That stunning notion hovered around Ravel Xorlarrin’s shoulders as he made his way to his scheduled meeting with his sisters and some of the other leaders of the expedition.

They owned the forge.

The other chambers they had taken since entering the Gauntlgrym complex had offered them hope, both in the joyous shock of realizing their destination in the first place and in coming to know that they could build some measure of security and defense against the stubborn ghostly guardians of the ancient dwarf homeland. But none of that would have mattered one bit without the grand prize.

They owned the forge.

Ravel had to hold back his elation as he entered that very room, the ancient forge of Gauntlgrym, to face the gathering. He met the eyes of each, starting with Berellip, who sat grim-faced, and moving quickly to Saribel, whose clear uneasiness showed the cracks in their meaner sister’s unrelenting glare. Saribel understood the gravity of this moment, and she understood, obviously, that the victory was Ravel’s most of all.