Gauntlgrym (Neverwinter #1)(39)

As the female retracted, he said from just off the path, “Here.” And just before the male leaped forward to swing his club, and both turned their horned heads to regard him, and even started to re-orient their feet, the ash wall exploded. A slender figure leaped through, flipping in mid-air as he passed between the Ashmadai couple, easily avoiding their attempts to align their weapons to the new threat. He landed behind them, though facing them, having twisted around in the air.

“Blow the horn!” the male cried, spinning to meet the challenge, but even as he spoke, the female stumbled a step or two to the side, her free hand slapping against her throat—against a puncture wound inflicted by the newcomer’s dagger. Her silver eyes went wider still, in shock at his precision, perhaps, or in fear that she was mortally wounded.

“Makarielle!” her companion cried, and he leaped at the knife-wielder, leading with a great swing of his club.

The pallid human leaned away from the first cut and ducked the backhand. On the third attempt, he leaped at the weapon, accepting the shortened hit against the side of his chest as he landed. The club hooked under his armpit, and he spun out to the side with such force, confidence, and balance that he took the weapon from his opponent’s hand.

The disarmed tiefling hissed and rushed to follow, more than capable of doing battle with his fists and teeth.

But even as he moved out to the side, Barrabus the Gray drove his right elbow, the arm trapping the scepter, up and out in front of him, flipping the weapon into the air. He caught it mid-shaft with his right hand then stopped and reversed, throwing his right hip back and around. Cupping the back end of the scepter with his left hand for balance and power, he thrust it out behind him.

He felt the heavy impact with his pursuer’s chest and didn’t continue around to his right, but rather stopped and brought the scepter back in front of him, flipping it easily and catching both hands low on one end as he turned to his left, stepping toward the retreating tiefling as he brought the club to bear.

To his credit, the tiefling managed to get his arm up to block the blow—and break his forearm in the process—but before he could even shriek out from the explosion of pain, Barrabus went back around the other way and reversed his hands as if to launch a tremendous blow, up-angled for the tiefling’s head. Even as the tiefling began to react accordingly, Barrabus revealed the feint, dropping and kicking out with his foot instead. He connected solidly with the tiefling’s knee, driving the leg out wide, and again his hands moved quickly along the scepter, so his right hand gripped the middle, his left low on the back end. Barrabus drove the weapon forward and upward from his crouch, and the off-balance tiefling had no defense as the tip slammed hard into his groin.

“Well done,” Alegni congratulated Barrabus, walking up beside the female, who was on one knee then, both hands tight against her punctured throat, her weapon on the ground beside her. “Will she live?” he asked.

“No poison,” the man confirmed. “Not a mortal wound.”

“Good news!” Alegni said, stepping past her toward the stunned but stubborn male, who stood, his face locked in a tight grimace. “Well, not for you,” the Shadovar corrected, and his sword came across suddenly, brutally, nearly cleaving the poor fellow in two.

“I need only one prisoner,” Alegni explained to the already dead Ashmadai cultist. He stepped back and grabbed the kneeling female by her thick black hair and jerked her to her feet with such force that she came right up off the ground.

“Do you believe yourself the fortunate one?” he asked, putting his face right up to hers and staring coldly into her tear-filled eyes. “Take their weapons and anything else worth salvaging,” he instructed his lackey, and he started away, yanking the female from her feet and dragging her off by the hair.

Barrabus the Gray watched him go, but mostly he was looking at the expression of sheer anguish on the female’s face. He didn’t mind the fighting, certainly, and had few pangs of conscience in killing the strange fanatics of a devil god. Any of them would have gladly disemboweled him in one of their sacrificial rituals, after all, as Herzgo Alegni’s soldiers had discovered when three of their own had gone missing in the wood only to be found strapped and gutted on a slab of stone.

Despite that, Barrabus couldn’t help but wince at the sight of the female, knowing that she would soon experience the unbridled cruelty of Herzgo Alegni.



Indomitable.

It was the word that most came to mind when Drizzt considered Bruenor Battlehammer, along with the drow’s own oft-repeated, “Roll on.”

Drizzt stood in the shade of a wide-spreading oak, leaning on the trunk, inadvertently spying on his friend. Below the higher patch of ground with the oak, in a small clearing, sat Bruenor, with a dozen of his maps opened and spread out on a blanket.

Bruenor had kept Drizzt going for years, and the dark elf knew it. When hope of raising Catti-brie and Regis had faded to nothing, when even the best memories of those two, and of Wulfgar—and the barbarian had to be dead, dead or a hundred and twelve years old—had faded, too, only Bruenor’s insistence that the road ahead was worth walking, that there was something grand to be found, had somewhat cooled the anger simmering within the drow.

The anger, and so much more, none of it good.

He watched the dwarf for a long while, shifting from map to map, making little notations on one or another, or in the small book he kept at all times, a journal of his road to Gauntlgrym. That book symbolized Bruenor’s admission that he might never get to the ancient Delzoun homeland, the dwarf had admitted to Drizzt. But if he failed, he meant to leave behind a record, so that the next dwarf taking up the quest would be well on his way before he ever took his first step.