Gauntlgrym (Neverwinter #1)(55)

“What have I done?” Athrogate wailed. “Oh, but a cursed creature I am!”

“Fly away!” Jarlaxle yelled at Dahlia. “Become a crow and be gone, you fool.”

Dahlia tugged at her cloak, but not to enact its magic. She pulled it off and threw it into Jarlaxle’s face. “Go!” she yelled at him.

The drow could hardly believe it, but he didn’t don the cloak and flee. He urged Athrogate on instead, and tugged at Dahlia to keep up.

They reached the top of the stair exhausted, but they couldn’t rest. The quaking diminished in violence as they ascended, but arches cracked and tumbled, and jambs tilted, sealing doors, perhaps forever.

But still they ran on, and kept running until they again came to the circular chamber with the jeweled throne, and kept running through the tunnel and out the gates, and kept running to the edge of the underground pool.

Jarlaxle threw the cloak back at Dahlia. “Make your way,” he told her. “And we’ll make ours.”

“How will you cross?” she asked.

Jarlaxle looked at her as if she was mad. “I am Jarlaxle,” he said. “I will find my way.”

Dahlia donned the cloak and became a great bird. She flew away, across the lake and down the tunnels.



A mere two days later, she emerged into the dirty streets of Luskan, surprised to see that the city was still standing, and that life there seemed normal. She looked to the southeast, to the sky above Gauntlgrym.

There was nothing.

Perhaps she had overestimated the power of the trapped primordial. Perhaps they had merely shut down the forge, and had not loosed a cataclysm.



“Say nothing of our adventure,” Jarlaxle bade Athrogate when they, too, made it back to Luskan, later that same day, having ridden their summoned mounts—hell boar and nightmare—all the way from Gauntlgrym. They had crossed the underground pond on the back of a giant, flightless bird, created from the feather on Jarlaxle’s hat, for thankfully, the pond was quite shallow.

“Ye should’ve left me to die there,” the sorely wounded Athrogate replied.

“We’ll find a way to fix it,” Jarlaxle promised. “If it even needs fixing,” he added, for he, too, was somewhat surprised to see the normalcy of life in Luskan.

Soon after, though, the very next dawn, he realized that it would indeed need to be fixed, for in the distant southwest, Athrogate spotted a plume of black smoke rising lazily into the air.

“Elf,” he said, his voice somber.

“I see it.”

“What is it?”

“Catastrophe,” Jarlaxle answered.

“Ye said we’d fix it,” Athrogate reminded him.

“At the very least, we’ll repay those who did this.”

“Was meself!” Athrogate said, but Jarlaxle shook his head, knowing better.

For surely the worldly drow had recognized the distinctive garb of the woman who had arrived in the anteroom to mock Dahlia and steal away with Valindra and Dor’crae. She was Thayan, a disciple of Szass Tam, no doubt.

As he considered that, Jarlaxle looked back at the plume of black smoke, so many miles distant, but still visible in the morning sky. He didn’t know much about the archlich of Thay, but from what he did know, he thought, perhaps, that they might be better off facing the primordial.



From her room at the inn halfway across the city, Dahlia, too, plotted her revenge, and she, too, spotted the plume.

She had done her research well, though, and harbored no hope that the smoke would be the end of it. And no hope of averting the catastrophe.

The primordial would shake off the last remaining elementals—great creatures of water put in place by the ancient wizards of the Hosttower to harness the power of the fiery, godlike being for the benefit of the dwarven forge.

It would have broken free eventually, Dahlia knew, for the fall of the Hosttower had begun the erosion of that harnessing magic.

But not so soon. Not without some warning for the wizards and scribes of the Sword Coast.

Disaster, swift and complete, would come, and nothing she or anyone else could do could stop it, even slow it, now.





WHEN THE WORLD BLEW UP


SHE KNEW SHE WAS BEING FOLLOWED. FOR A LONG WHILE, SHE HAD THOUGHT it her imagination, her very real fear that she had made some powerful enemies down there in Gauntlgrym, who would not so easily allow her to escape their wrath.

But how had they found her? Wouldn’t they have presumed her killed in the ancient dwarven city?

Sylora would have assumed the deaths of the Ashmadai she’d left behind, but then Dahlia reached up and felt the brooch she still wore, the brooch that gave her some power over the undead, the brooch that tied her to Szass Tam. Horrified, she yanked it from her blouse and threw it into the next open sewer hole she passed.

She wound a zigzagging course through the city, taking every available alley, vaulting to a roof at one point, and running on with all speed. But still they followed her, she sensed when weariness slowed her some time later.

Dahlia turned down the next alleyway, determined to double back so that she could get a better look at her pursuers. A wooden fence blocked the far end, but Dahlia knew she could scale it easily enough. A few strides short of it, she picked up her pace to leap but skidded to a quick stop as two large men—tieflings—stepped out from behind some piled crates to block her way.