The Last Threshold (Neverwinter #4)(124)

“Gate?” Effron asked.

“To Luskan,” Jarlaxle explained, and he pushed Drizzt and Effron along. “Keep beside them,” he instructed Athrogate. “I will be along presently.”

“Only if the elf puts in a good word for meself with that pretty young Ambergris,” Athrogate said, and he tossed an exaggerated wink Drizzt’s way.

Overwhelmed again—or still, actually—Drizzt could only nod stupidly and follow along. He put his hand on his own belt pouch then slipped it inside, needing to feel the contours of the Guenhwyvar figurine and the promise of a true friend recovered.





Most of the drow were gone now, but Jarlaxle wasn’t finished. He kept the magical tower of Caer Gromph in place, and could only hope that Lord Draygo had taken Kimmuriel’s words to heart.

Off Jarlaxle went through a series of small chambers in the back left corner of the grand entry. Kimmuriel had shown him the way and it seemed as if there would be few obstacles or sentries blocking him, but still he was nervous, more so than at any other point in this rescue mission.

It wasn’t Draygo Quick causing the beads of sweat—so rare a sight!—on his forehead. It wasn’t the prospect of guards, or even facing a brutal enemy he knew to be around.

No, it was the prospect of facing the one he hoped to save.

He wound down to the castle’s substructure and moved along a long corridor to a trio of doors. Before them lay four more of Draygo Quick’s sentries, bound and gagged, two awake and the others still under the effects of the drow sleep poison.

Jarlaxle tipped his hat to them as he stepped over them to the center door. He took a deep breath and he pushed through, taking care to softly close the door behind him. He had come into a large cellar full of low archways, connecting the massive stone supports for the castle. Fortunately, Caer Gromph hadn’t sunk its roots into this portion of the castle.

Jarlaxle moved slowly, keeping close to the stone buttresses, trying to get a feel of the dusty and ancient catacombs. The smell of decay hung thick in here, and many crypts lined the walls, open to the main area, their skeletal remains lying in a state of eternal rest, many with arms crossed, others with bones fallen away. Rusty swords and tarnished crowns, tattered and decayed robes and crawly things flitted around the edges of Jarlaxle’s lowlight vision, but the gloom was too complete for him to get an accurate view of the place. He crouched beside one of the low archways and pulled a little ceramic ball out of his belt pouch. He brought it up to his lips and whispered the command, then tossed it deeper into the catacomb.

The ball rolled and bounced and burst into flame as it settled, spitting sparks as it lit the dust around it, and flickering with the intensity of a torch, casting strange shadows all around.

“Come and play, pretty lady,” Jarlaxle said quietly.

He froze in place and listened, and thought something or someone had shuffled behind another low archway not so far from him.

“Do be reasonable,” he said, moving that way, but his words were more of an afterthought, for his concentration surely lay elsewhere.

He came up near that low archway and paused, shadows dancing.

Suddenly, one of those shadows wasn’t a shadow, but the medusa leaping out at him as he spun around to meet the charge, her red eyes wide, her killing gaze falling over him.

Jarlaxle saw her in all of her awful glory, and he knew without doubt that only his eyepatch had saved him in that instance, that without its powerful dweomer, his skin would already be turning to stone. He called upon his innate drow abilities, his affinity to the magical emanations of the Underdark, and brought forth a globe of impenetrable darkness around him and the medusa, stealing her most powerful weapon.

At the same time, his left hand pumped, his bracer feeding him daggers to throw out at his foe, and he caught a dagger in his right hand as well, and snapped his wrist to elongate the weapon into a sword, which he put out before him, hoping to keep the medusa and her hair of living, poisonous snakes back from him.

When he didn’t strike her with his prodding weapon, he thrust out further, and still hit nothing but the empty air, and he knew that his foe had slipped aside.

Totally blind and totally helpless were not the same thing with Jarlaxle. He had committed the area to crystal-clear memory, and now he moved without hesitation, slipping down and around to get under the archway, an opening no higher than his shoulders. He came out of the magical darkness as soon as he crossed under, throwing his back against the buttress stone.

He nearly faltered, however, for from this new vantage, he noted before him the man he had called a friend for decades,

Artemis Entreri stood perfectly still, of course, though he had surely been in the midst of movement when he had looked at the medusa. He was angled and up against Dahlia’s side, as if trying to knock her aside, and it didn’t take much imagination for Jarlaxle to picture the scene that had led to this tragedy.

The distraction almost cost Jarlaxle dearly, for he noted the pursuit of the medusa only at the last instant. He leaped away and spun around to face his nemesis, but not to look at her, instead leveling a wand at the level of her head. He listened intently to the hissing approach of her snakes as she moved into range to strike at him as he spoke the command word, then breathed a sigh of relief when that hissing abruptly ceased and he heard the medusa stumble backward.

Jarlaxle dared open his eye to see the powerful creature struggled and staggering, her head engulfing in a blob of viscous goo, and her hands, too, had become fast stuck as she had tried to scrape the sticky stuff away.