Charon's Claw (Neverwinter #3)(99)

She kept ranting, and Artemis Entreri kept grinning at her, which, of course, only had Dahlia growing more and more agitated.

“You killed your own excuse,” Entreri said.

Dahlia looked at him with obvious confusion. She tried to reply but sputtered, just staring at him.

“Your excuse for anger,” the assassin explained. “You got your revenge, yet your mood has soured. Because you’re lost now. You’ve lived your life acting out in your anger, and does dear Dahlia have anything to be angry about now?”

She looked away.

“Are you afraid to take responsibility for your actions?”

“Are you truly the assassin-philosopher?” she retorted, turning around to glare at him.

Entreri’s shrug was the only response he would offer, so Dahlia looked away once more.

An uncomfortable silence followed, for a long while.

“What about you?” Dahlia finally asked, her voice startling Entreri from private contemplations.

“What about me?” he echoed.

“What sustains your anger?”

“Who claims that I’m angry?”

“I know of your recent past,” Dahlia argued. “I fought against you. I witnessed your work against the Thayans. Those were not the actions of a contented man.”

“I was a slave,” Entreri replied. “Can you blame me?”

Dahlia tried to argue, but again fell short.

“How did you get past it?” Dahlia asked quietly many heartbeats later. “The anger, the betrayal? How did you find your calm?”

“I helped you kill Herzgo Alegni.”

“Not that betrayal,” Dahlia said bluntly.

Entreri rocked back against the wall. He glanced around, this way and that, and for many heartbeats seemed truly at a loss.

“By caring not a damn,” Entreri replied at length.

“I don’t believe that.”

“Believe it.”

“No,” she said quietly, staring at Entreri until he at last had to return the look.

“It was my uncle,” he admitted for the first time in his life, “and my mother.”

Dahlia’s expression revealed her confusion.

“He . . . he stole from me, and she sold me into slavery—to others who wished to . . . steal from me,” Entreri explained.

“Your mother?” Dahlia clearly seemed at a loss.

“You loved your mother, as I, once, loved mine,” Entreri reasoned.

“She was murdered, beheaded by Herzgo Alegni after . . .” Her voice trailed away and her gaze fell to the floor between her boots.

“After he stole from you,” Entreri said, and Dahlia looked at him sharply.

“You know nothing about it!”

“But you know that I do,” Entreri replied. “And you are the first person to whom I’ve ever admitted any of this.”

Her expression softened at that revelation.

Entreri laughed. “Perhaps I have to kill you now, to keep my secret.”

“Try it,” Dahlia replied, bringing a wider smile to Entreri’s face, for he knew by her tone that his trust in her had lifted a great weight from her shoulders. “I have enough anger left in me to defeat the likes of you.”

Artemis Entreri rolled up to his knees, to the side, so that his face was very near the woman. “Well, do it quickly,” he said, and pointed back down the tunnel Dahlia had climbed to get into this hide-out. “For that way lies Gauntlgrym, not so far, and there resides the beast of fire and the end of Charon’s Claw, and the end of Artemis Entreri.”

Dahlia slapped him across the face, surprising them both.

Entreri laughed at her, so she slapped him again, or tried to, but he caught her by the wrist and held her off.

They stared at each other, their faces barely a finger’s breadth apart. Entreri nodded and managed a smile, while Dahlia shook her head, her eyes moistening.

“It is time,” Entreri said to her. “Trust me in this. It is long past time.”

A thousand questions chased Drizzt Do’Urden back along the corridors, paramount among them the continuing lack of purpose for his present course. Why was he even there?

He had no answers, though, and so he kept pushing the doubts aside, and took care not to revel too deeply in the continuing stream of images of Artemis Entreri dead at his feet, pleasant as they were.

While these surroundings weren’t fresh in his thoughts, they were familiar, and they brought him back to his previous journey here, the good parts. He remembered Bruenor’s face when first they had glanced upon the entrance of Gauntlgrym, the high stone wall, like that of a castle, except that it was tightly encased within a subterranean cavern.

He thought of the throne, just within the great entry hall, and again recalled Bruenor’s beaming face.

“I found it, elf,” Drizzt whispered in the dark corridor, just to hear the sound of those words once more, for they, more than anything Drizzt had ever heard, sounded like sweet victory.

His mood brightened as he moved farther from his encamped companions. How could it not, with the ghost, the memory, of Bruenor Battlehammer so near?

“Is your heart heavy, Drizzt Do’Urden?” an unexpected, unfamiliar voice, a woman’s voice, asked of him from the darkness.

Drizzt immediately fell into a crouch, moving closer to one corridor wall for the cover it provided. He glanced all around, his hands near to his scimitars, which he did not dare draw for fear that Twinkle’s light would more fully expose him.