Exile (The Dark Elf Trilogy #2)(59)

Clacker’s beaked face brightened. “It does feel so very g-good to tot-tap the stone,” he proclaimed. Clacker banged a claw on the rock as if to jolt his memory. His voice and his gaze trailed away as he thought of his past life, the one that the wizard had stolen from him. All the pech’s days had been spent tapping the stone, shaping the stone, talking to the precious stone.

“You will be pech again,” Drizzt promised.

Belwar, approaching from the tunnel, heard the drow’s words and was not so certain. They had been out in the tunnels for more than a week and had found not a sign of the wizard. The burrow-warden took some comfort in the fact that Clacker seemed to be winning back part of himself from his monstrous state, seemed to be regaining a measure of his pech personality. Belwar had watched the same transformation in Drizzt just a few weeks before, and beneath the survivalistic barriers of the hunter that Drizzt had become, Belwar had discovered his closest friend.

But the burrow-warden took care not to assume the same results with Clacker. The hook horror’s condition was the result of powerful magic, and no amount of friendship could reverse the workings of the wizard’s dweomer. In finding Drizzt and Belwar, Clacker had been granted a temporary- and only temporary-reprieve from a miserable and undeniable fate.

They moved on through the tunnels of the Underdark for several more days without any luck. Clacker’s personality still did not deteriorate, but even Drizzt, who had left the cave complex beside the lake so full of hope, began to feel the weight of increasing reality.

Then, just as Drizzt and Belwar had begun discussing returning to their home, the group came into a fair-sized cavern littered with rubble from a recent collapse of the ceiling.

“He has been here!” Clacker cried, and he offhandedly lifted a huge boulder and tossed it against a distant wall, where it shattered into so much rubble. “He has been here!”

The hook horror rushed about, smashing stone and throwing boulders with growing, explosive rage.

“How can you know?” Belwar demanded, trying to stop his giant friend’s tirade.

Clacker pointed up at the ceiling. “He d-did this. The w-w-w-he did this!”

Drizzt and Belwar exchanged concerned glances. The chamber’s ceiling, which had been about fifteen feet up, was gouged and blasted, and in its center loomed a massive hole that extended up to twice the ceiling’s former height. If magic had caused that devastation, it was powerful magic indeed!

“The wizard did this?” Belwar echoed. He cast that stubbornly practical look he had perfected toward Drizzt one more time.

“His t-t-tower,” Clacker replied, and rushed off about the chamber to see if he could discern which exit the wizard ad taken.

Now Drizzt and Belwar were completely at a loss, and Clacker, when he finally took the time to look at them, realized their confusion.

“The w-w-w-“

“Wizard,” Belwar put in impatiently.

Clacker took no offense, even appreciated the assistance.

“The w-wizard has a t-tower,” the excited hook horror tried o explain. “A g-great iron t-tower that he takes with him, setting it up wherever it is c-c-convenient,” Clacker looked up at the ruined ceiling. “Even if it does not always fit.”

“He carries a tower?” Belwar asked, his long nose crinkling right up over itself.

Clacker nodded excitedly, but then didn’t take the time to explain further, for he had found the wizard’s trail, a clear boot print in a bed of moss leading down another of the corridors.

Drizzt and Belwar had to be satisfied with their friend’s incomplete explanation, for the chase was on. Drizzt took up the lead, using all the skills he had learned in the drow Academy and had heightened during his decade alone in the Underdark. Belwar, with his innate racial understanding of the Underdark and his magically lighted brooch, kept track of their direction, and Clacker, in those instances when he fell more completely back into his former self, asked the stones for guidance. The three of them passed another blasted chamber, and another chamber that showed clear signs of the tower’s presence, though its ceiling was high enough to accommodate the structure.

A few days later, the three companions turned into a wide and high cavern, and far back from them, beside a rushing stream, loomed the wizard’s home. Again Drizzt and Belwar looked at each other helplessly, for the tower stood fully thirty feet high and twenty across, its smooth metallic walls mocking their plans. They took separate and cautious routes to the structure and were even more amazed, for the tower’s walls were pure adamantite, the hardest metal in all the world.

They found only a single door, small and barely showing its outline in the perfection of the tower’s craftsmanship. They didn’t have to test it to know that it was secure against unwelcome visitors.

“The w-w-w-he is in there,” Clacker snarled, running his claws over the door in desperation.

“Then he will have to come out,” Drizzt reasoned. “And when he does, we will be waiting for him.”

The plan did not satisfy the pech. With a rumbling roar that echoed throughout the region, Clacker threw his huge body against the tower door, then jumped back and slammed it again. The door didn’t even shudder under the pounding, and it quickly became obvious to the deep gnome and the drow that Clacker’s body would certainly lose the battle.

Drizzt tried vainly to calm his giant friend, while Belwar moved off to the side and began a familiar chant.