Homeland (The Legend of Drizzt #1)(24)

“Or are you unique, Drizzt Do’Urden?” he continued a s she fell onto the cushioned bed. “And if you are so different, what, then, is the cause? The blood, my blood, that courses through your veins? Or the years you spent with your wean-mother?”

Zak threw an arm across his eyes and considered the many questions. Drizzt was different from the norm, he decided at length, but he didn’t know whether he should thank Vierna-or himself.

After a while, sleep took him. But it brought the weapon master little comfort. A familiar dream visited him; a vivid memory that would never fade.

Zaknafein heard again the screams of the children of House DeVir as the Do’Urden soldiers soldiers he himself had trained slashed at them.

“This one is different!” Zak cried, leaping up from his bed. He wiped the cold sweat from his face. “This one is different.” He had to believe that.





Chapter 7

Dark Secrets


“Do you truly mean to try?” Masoj asked, his voice condescending and filled with disbelief. Alton turned his hideous glare on the student.

“Direct your anger elsewhere, Faceless One,” Masoj said, averting his gaze from his mentor’s scarred visage. “I am not the cause of your frustration. The question was valid.”

“For more than a decade, you have been a student of the magical arts,” Alton replied. “Still you fear explore the nether world at the side of a master of Sorcere.”

“I would have no fear beside a true master,” Masoj dared to whisper. Alton ignored the comment, as he had with so many others he had accepted from the apprenticing Hun’ett over the last sixteenyears. Masoj was Alton’s only tie to the outside world, and while Masoj had a powerful family, Alton had only Masoj.

They moved through the door into the uppermost chamber of Alton’s four-room complex. A single candle burned there, its light diminished by an abundance of dark-colored tapestries and the black hue of the room’s stone and rugs. Alton slid onto his stool at the back of the small, circular table, and placed a heavy book down before him.

“It is a spell better left for clerics,” Masoj protested, sitting down across from the faceless master. “Wizards command the lower planes; the dead are for the clerics alone.”

Alton looked around curiously, then turned a frown up at Masoj, the master’s grotesque features enhanced by the dancing candlelight. “It seems that I have no cleric at my call,” the Faceless One explained sarcastically. “Would you rather I try for another denizen of the Nine Hells?”

Masoj rocked back in his chair and shook his head helplessly and emphatically. Alton had a point. A year before, he Faceless One had sought answers to his questions by enlisting the aid of an ice devil. The volatile thing froze the room until it shone black in the infrared spectrum and smashed a matron mother’s treasure horde worth of alchemical equipment. If Masoj h adn’t summoned his magical cat to distract the ice devil, neither he nor Alton would have gotten out of the room alive.

“Very well, then,” Masoj said unconvincingly, crossing his arms in front of him on the table. “Conjure your spirit and find your answers.”

Alton did not miss the involuntary shudder belied by the ripple in Masoj’s robes. He glared at the student for a moment, then went back to his preparations.

As Alton neared the time of casting/ Masoj’s hand instinctively went into his pocket, to the onyx figurine of the hunting cat he had acquired on the day Alton had assumed the Faceless One’s identity. The little statue was enchanted with a powerful dweomer that enabled its possessor to summon a mighty panther to his side. Masoj had used the cat sparingly, not yet fully understanding the dweomer’s limitations and potential dangers. “Only in times of need,” Masoj reminded himself quietly when he felt the item in his hand. Why was it that those times kept occurring when he was with Alton? the apprentice wondered.

Despite his bravado, this time Alton privately shared Masoj’s trepidation. Spirits of the dead were not as destructive as denizens of the lower planes, but they could be equally cruel and subtler in their torments.

Alton needed his answer, though. For more than a decade and a half he had sought his information through conventional channels, enquiring of masters and students-in a roundabout manner, of course-of the details concerning the fall of House DeVir. Many knew the rumors of that eventful night; some even detailed the battle methods used by the victorious house.

None, though, would name that perpetrating house. In Menzoberranzan, one did not utter anything resembling an accusation, even if the belief was commonly shared, without enough undeniable proof to spur the ruling council into a unified action against the accused. If a house botched a raid and was discovered, the wrath of all Menzoberranzan would descend upon it until the family name had been extinguished. But in the case of a successfully executed attack, such as the one that felled House DeVir, an accuser was the one most likely to wind up at the wrong end of a snakeheaded whip.

Public embarrassment, perhaps more than any guidelines of honor, turned the wheels of justice in the city of drow.

Alton now sought other means for the solution to his quest. First he had tried the lower planes, the ice devil, to disastrous effect. Now Alton had in his possession an item that could end his frustrations: a tome penned by a wizard of the surface world. In the drow hierarchy, only the clerics of Lloth dealt with the realm of the dead, but in other societies, wizards also dabbled into the spirit world. Alton had found the book in the library of Sorcere and had managed to translate enough of it, he believed, to make a spiritual contact.