Homeland (The Legend of Drizzt #1)(48)

Luck bestowed a measure of justice upon Drizzt that day, for his first opponent, and first victim, in the grand melee was none other than his former partner. Drizzt found Kelnozz in the same corridor they had used as a defensible starting point the previous year and took him down with his very first attack combination. Drizzt somehow managed to hold back on his winning thrust, though he truly wanted to jab his scimitar pole into Kelnozz’s ribs with all his strength.

Then Drizzt was off into the shadows, picking his way carefully until the numbers of surviving students began to dwindle. With his reputation, Drizzt had to be extra wary, for is classmates recognized a common advantage in eliminating one of his prowess early in the competition. Working alone, Drizzt had to fully scope out every battle before he engaged, to ensure that each opponent had no secret companions lurking nearby.

This was Drizzt’s arena, the place where he felt most comfortable, and he was up to the challenge. In two hours, only five competitors remained, and after another two hours of cat and mouse, it came down to only two: Drizzt and Berg’inyon Baenre.

Drizzt moved out into an open stretch of the cavern. “Come out, then, student Baenre!” he called. “Let us settle this challenge openly and with honor!” Watching from the catwalk, Dinin shook his head in disbelief.

“He has relinquished all advantage,” said Master Hatch’net, standing beside the elderboy of House Do’Urden. “As the better swordsman, he had Berg’inyon worried and unsure of his moves. Now your brother stands out in the open, showing his position.”

“Still a fool,” Dinin muttered. Hatch’net spotted Berg’inyon slipping behind a stalagmite mound a few yards behind Drizzt. “It should be settled soon.”

“Are you afraid?” Drizzt yelled into the gloom. “If you truly deserve the top rank, as you freely boast, then come out and face me openly. Prove your words, Berg’inyon Baenre, or never speak them again!”

The expected rush of motion from behind sent Drizzt into a sidelong roll. “Fighting is more than swordplay!” the son of House Baenre cried as he came on, his eyes gleaming at the advantage he now seemed to hold. Berg’inyon stumbled then, tripped up by a wire Drizzt had set out, and fell flat to his face. Drizzt was on him in a flash, scimitar pole tip in at Berg’inyon’s throat.

“So I have learned,” Drizzt replied grimly.

“Thus a Do’Urden becomes the champion,” Hatch’net observed, putting his blue light on the face of House Baenre’s defeated son. Hatch’net then stole Dinin’s widening smile with a prudent reminder: “Elderboys should beware secondboys with such skills.”

While Drizzt took little pride in his victory that second year, he took great satisfaction in the continued growth of his fighting skills. He practiced every waking hour when he was not busy in the many serving duties of a young student. Those duties were reduced as the years passed- the youngest students were worked the hardest-and Drizzt found more and more time in private training. He reveled in the dance of his blades and the harmony of his movements. His scimitars became his only friends, the only things he dared to trust.

He won the grand melee again the third year, and the year after that, despite the conspiracies of many others against him.

To the masters, it became obvious that none in Drizzt’s class would ever defeat him, and the next year they placed him into the grand melee of students three years his senior.

He won that one, too.

The Academy, above anything else in Menzoberranzan, was a structured place, and though Drizzt’s advanced skill defied that structure in terms of battle prowess, his tenure as a student would not be lessened. As a fighter, he would spend ten years in the Academy, not such a long time considering the thirty years of study a wizard endured in Sorcere, or the fifty years a budding priestess would spend in Arach-Tinilith. While fighters began their training at the young age of twenty, wizards could not start until their twenty-fifth birthday, and clerics had to wait until the age of forty.

The first four years in Melee-Magthere were devoted to singular combat, the handling of weapons. In this, the masters could teach Drizzt little that Zaknafein had not already shown him.

After that, though, the lessons became more involved. The young drow warriors spent two full years learning group fighting tactics with other warriors, and the subsequent three years incorporated those tactics into warfare techniques beside, and against, wizards and clerics.

The final year of the Academy rounded out the fighters’ education. The first six months were spent in Sorcere, learning the basics of magic use, and the last six, the prelude to graduation, saw the fighters in tutelage under the priestesses of Arach-Tinilith.

All the while there remained the rhetoric, the hammering in of those precepts that the Spider Queen held so dear, those lies of hatred that held the drow in a state of controllable chaos.

Drizzt, the Academy became a personal challenge, a private classroom within the impenetrable womb of his whirling scimitars.

Inside the adamantite walls he formed with those blades, Drizzt found he could ignore the many injustices he observed all around him, nd could somewhat insulate himself against words that would have poisoned his heart. The Academy was a place of constant ambition and deceit, a breeding ground for the ravenous, consuming hunger for power that marked the life of all the drow. Drizzt would survive it unscathed, he promised himself.

As the years passed, though, as the battles began to take on the edge of brutal reality, Drizzt found himself caught up time and again in the heated throes of situations he could not so easily brush away.