Homeland (The Legend of Drizzt #1)(70)

The cleric of Arach-Tinilith who was traveling with the raiding party walked near to one wall and pressed her face against every crack she encountered. “This one will suffice,” she said a short time later. She cast a spell of seeing and looked into the tiny crack, no more than a finger’s width, a second time.

“How are we to get through that?” one of the patrol memo bers signaled to another. Dinin caught the gestures and ended the silent conversation with a scowl.

“It is daylight above,” the cleric announced. “We shall have to wait here.”

“For how long?” Dinin asked, knowing his patrol to be on the edge of readiness with their long-awaited goal so very near.

“I cannot know,” the cleric replied. “No more than half a cycle of Narbondel. Let us remove our packs and rest while we may.”

Dinin would have preferred to continue, just to keep his troops busy, but he did not dare speak against the priestess.

The break did not prove a long one, though, for a couple of hours later, the cleric checked through the crack once more and announced that the time had come.

“You first.” Dinin said to Drizzt.

Drizzt looked at his brother incredulously, having no idea of how he could pass through such a tiny crack.

“Come,” instructed the cleric, who now held a many-holed orb. “Walk past me and continue through.”

As Drizzt passed the cleric, she spoke the orb’s command word and held it over Drizzt’s head. Black flakes, blacker than Drizzt’s ebony skin, drifted over him, and he felt a tremendous shudder ripple across his spine.

The others looked on in amazement as Drizzt’s body narrowed to the width of a hair and he became a two-dimensional image, a shadow of his former self. Drizzt did not understand what was happening, but the crack suddenly widened before him. He slipped into it, found movement in his present form merely an enactment of will, and, drifted through the twists, turns, and bends of the tiny channel like a shadow on the broken face of a rocky cliff. He then was in a long cave, standing across from its single exit.

A moonless night had fallen, but even this seemed bright to the deep- dwelling drow. Drizzt felt himself pulled toward the exit, toward the surface world’s openness. The other raiders began slipping through the crack and into the cavern then, one by one with the cleric coming in last. Drizzt was the first to feel the shudder as his body resumed its natural state.

In a few moments, they all were eagerly checking their weapons.

“I will remain here,” the cleric told Dinin. “Hunt well. The Spider Queen is watching.”

Dinin warned his troops once again of the dangers of the surface, then he moved to the front of the cave, a small hole on the side of a rocky spur of a tall mountain. “For the Spider Queen,” Dinin proclaimed. He took a steadying breath and led them through the exit, under the open sky.

Under the stars! While the others seemed nervous under those revealing lights, Drizzt found his gaze pulled heavenward to the countless points of mystical twinkling. Bathed in the starlight, he felt his heart lift and didn’t even notice the joyful singing that rode on the night wind, so fitting it seemed.

Dinin heard the song, and he was experienced enough to recognize it as the eldritch calling of the surface elves. He crouched and surveyed the horizon, picking out the light of a single fire down in the distant expanse of a wooded valley. He nudged his troops to action-and pointedly nudged the wonderment from his brother’s eyes and started them off.

Drizzt could see the anxiety on his companions’ faces, so contrasted by his own inexplicable sense of serenity. He suspected at once that something was very wrong with the whole situation. In his heart Drizzt had known from the minute he had stepped out of the tunnel that this was not the vile world the masters at the Academy had taken such pains to describe. He did feel unusual with no stone ceiling above him, but not uncomfortable. If the stars, calling to his heartstrings, were indeed reminders of what the next day might bring, as Master Hatch’net had said, then surely the next day would not be so terrible.

Only confusion dampened the feeling of freedom that Drizzt felt, for either he had somehow fallen into a trap of perception, or his companions, his brother included, viewed their surroundings through tainted eyes.

It fell on Drizzt as another unanswered burden: were his feelings of comfort here weakness or truth of heart?

“They are akin to the mushroom groves of our home,” Dinin assured the others as they tentatively moved under the perimeter boughs of a small forest, “neither sentient nor harmful.”

Still, the younger dark elves flinched and brought their weapons to the ready whenever a squirrel skipped across a branch overheard or an unseen bird called out to the night. The dark elves’ was a silent world, far different from the chattering life of a springtime forest, and in the Underdark, nearly every living thing could, and most certainly would, try to harm anything invading its lair. Even a cricket’s chirp sounded ominous to the alert ears of the drow.

Dinin’s course was true, and soon the faerie song drowned out every other sound and the light of a fire became visible through the boughs. Surface elves were the most alert of the races, and a human-or even a sneaky halfling-would have had little chance of catching them unawares.

The raiders this night were drow, more skilled in stealth than the most proficient alley thief. Their footfalls went unheard, even across beds of dry, fallen leaves, and their crafted armor, shaped perfectly to the contours of their slender bodies, bent with their movements without a rustle. Unnoticed, they lined the perimeter of the small glade, where a score of faeries danced and sang.