Gauntlgrym (Neverwinter #1)(106)

The struggle intensified. Flashes of lightning, blue-white and black, shot from the chair, and Dor’crae and the Ashmadai commanders fell back.

The throne of Gauntlgrym was clearly and violently rejecting Valindra, but the lich would not accept that.

But at last, with a rumble that shook the chamber, and indeed reverberated deep into the complex of Gauntlgrym, the throne expelled her, hurling Valindra through the air. She magically caught herself in mid-descent, and came down gently to her normal stance, floating just a few inches above the floor.

“Valindra?” Dor’crae asked, but the lich didn’t hear him.

She swept back in at the throne, hands extended like killing claws. With a wicked hiss, she shot fingers of lightning from her hands. When the bolts merely disappeared into the magical throne, the outraged Valindra summoned instead a pea of fire, which she threw onto the seat.

“Run!” the Ashmadai commander yelled, and the warriors scrambled all over each other to get away from the throne.

Valindra’s fireball engulfed the throne, the dais, and a good portion of the floor around it. The angry flames reached right up to the lich herself, who seemed not to care. None of the Ashmadai were caught in the blast, though one found his weathercloak aflame and had to roll about frantically on the floor to douse it.

When the flames and smoke cleared, there sat the throne, unbothered, unmarred, impervious.

Valindra shrieked and hissed and charged it, again throwing bolts of lightning into it as she rushed in, then clawed at it and punched it.



“She is powerful, no doubt,” the Ashmadai leader whispered as he walked up beside Dor’crae. “But I fear her presence here.”

“Sylora Salm decided that she should come,” Dor’crae reminded him. “That is not without reason, and it is not your place to question.”

“Of course,” the man said, lowering his gaze.

Dor’crae glared at him a bit longer, making sure he knew his place. They couldn’t afford such intemperate and mutinous whispers, not with powerful enemies just ahead. Truthfully, though, when Dor’crae looked back at the throne and the thrashing, insane Valindra, he found it hard to disagree with the zealot’s words.

They couldn’t begin to control the lich, and he knew without a doubt that if she saw a target for a fireball and the entire squad of Ashmadai happened to be in the blast area, she wouldn’t even care.



The tremor grumbled through the stone floor, giving all five a bit of a shake. It seemed nothing too much to Drizzt, but when he looked at Bruenor, the drow had second thoughts.

“What do you know?” Jarlaxle asked Bruenor before Drizzt could.

“Bah, the beast belched, and nothin’ more,” said Athrogate, but Bruenor’s expression told a different story.

“Weren’t the beast,” he said, shaking his head. “Our enemies have entered behind us. They fight the ancient ones.”

“The ancient ones?” Drizzt and Dahlia asked together, and they looked at each other in surprise.

“The dwarves of Gauntlgrym,” Jarlaxle explained.

“The throne,” Bruenor corrected. “They struck at the throne.

“To what end?

Bruenor shook his head, his expression revealing confidence that the throne was in no real danger. He glanced all around then, however, and added, “The ghosts’re gone.”

The others all looked around as well, and sure enough, they saw no ghosts in the wide corridor, though there had been some there only a few moments earlier.

“Gone back to fight for the throne o’ Gauntlgrym,” Bruenor explained.

“And what now for us?” Drizzt asked.

Jarlaxle seemed as if he was about to answer, but like all the others, he deferred to Bruenor.

“We go on,” Bruenor said, and marched ahead, Athrogate hustling to keep beside him.

“He seems very sure of himself,” Dahlia remarked to Drizzt and Jarlaxle as the dwarves stomped off. “With every turn and every side passage.”

It was true enough, and while Drizzt held faith in his friend—and really, what choice did they have?—he was more than a bit concerned. Near to the audience chamber, the passages had been clear and undamaged—or no more so than Jarlaxle, Athrogate, and Dahlia had remembered them—but soon after the five companions had descended the first long stairwell, they had found more ruin and rubble. Corridors had twisted and cracked apart, and the second stair Bruenor had led them to had proven impassable.

But the dwarf remained undaunted and took them off on an alternate route.

Drizzt didn’t know what magic might have been in that throne, but he hoped it truly was a memory of Gauntlgrym, not some deception placed in his mind by their enemies—as had been done to Athrogate.

Jarlaxle moved ahead to watch over the dwarves.

“You fought well in that canyon,” Drizzt remarked quietly.

Dahlia arched her eyebrow at him. “I always fight well. It is why I am alive.”

“You fight often, then,” Drizzt said with a slight smirk.

“When I have to.”

“Perhaps you’re not as charming as you believe.”

“I don’t have to be,” Dahlia replied without missing a beat. “I fight well.”

“The two are not mutually exclusive.”