The Last Threshold (Neverwinter #4)(22)

“Enough!” came a cry from the crowd.

“Aye, ye’re to kill him! Enough!” shouted another.

Brother Afafrenfere turned around and put up his hands unthreateningly. He stared into a score of amazed expressions, many shaking their heads in disbelief.

The monk looked at Ambergris and gave a helpless shrug and a crooked grin, and the dwarf, recognizing the intent behind that look, shook her head and grimaced.

Just as Afafrenfere spun a sudden circuit up on his the balls of his feet, coming around with great speed and force, a spinning left hook that chopped the side of the big man’s jaw and sent him flipping and flopping over and down, to land heavily flat on his back on the wooden floor.

The whole room seemed to stand in place and time, cheers and jeers and shouts becoming a sudden frozen silence, all eyes locked on this shocking, wiry man with his thunderous hands.

The big man groaned and shifted, showing that he wasn’t dead at least, breaking the spell, and several patrons near to Ambergris began shoving the dwarf and yelling. Afafrenfere moved quickly to her side.

“What magic, dwarf?” one man asked.

“None,” answered a woman from behind, unexpectedly, and the crowd parted and turned to see a red-haired woman well known in Neverwinter.

Arunika moved up to the dwarf and monk and scrutinized Afafrenfere carefully. She took him by the wrist, and when he didn’t object, she turned his arm over, revealing a tattoo of a yellow rose inside his forearm.

She gave a knowing laugh.

“No magic,” she said to those others around. “A fair win, though I’d not be betting on this one’s opponents.”

“Ah, ye gamed us, ye wretched little dwarf!” a particularly dirty patron grumbled.

“Ah, so’s yer sister,” Ambergris yelled right back at him. “Ye weren’t for givin’ me a bet, and then yer boy looked to be a winner and ye called me on me coin!”

“Ye set it up that way!” the patron declared.

“I set it up to get the life choked out o’ me friend?”

“He’s looking alive to me!”

“Aye, but if we’re to be agreeing with what ye’re sayin’, then yer champion there ain’t much o’ nothin’! Think about it, ye dolt!” As she built momentum, Ambergris moved very near the man and poked her thick finger right in his face, driving him back before her. “Yerself’s arguing that I let me boy get himself choked half to death knowin’ that he could then break out and pound yer boy to the floor. Says nothing good about yer boy, and I’ll be sure to tell him o’ yer confidence and praise”—she looked over at the man lying flat out on the floor “—soon as he’s waking up.”

That had the aggressive man back on his heels.

“Pay her,” Arunika told the patrons. “Coin won fairly. And if you’re to bet, then you’re to pay your losses.”

Much grumbling ensued, but Ambergris and Afafrenfere walked out of the tavern with several small bags of gold.

“We won’t be winning anymore that way,” Afafrenfere remarked. “We should have stopped after two.”

“Bah! They’ll bet again. Can’t help themselves, the dolts.”

“They will bet on me, so where is your win?”

“Ye might be right,” Ambergris said, and she grinned wickedly and winked at him. “Unless ye’re thinkin’ ye can take a pair o’ them.”

Afafrenfere started to respond, but just sighed instead. More likely, he knew, Ambergris would put him in a match against three opponents.





“There is your seer,” Dahlia remarked to Drizzt.

The drow reflexively put a hand to his belt pouch, but he moved it back immediately. He didn’t need Arunika, for Guen was back beside him.

But then another idea came to him, and he smiled at Dahlia and waved to Arunika to join him.

“You look well,” the red-haired woman remarked when she came over and took a seat beside the two.

“He found his panther,” Dahlia explained. “And now we seek—” Drizzt put his hand on her forearm, cutting her short, something Arunika surely noticed.

“Barrabus—Artemis Entreri, is here,” Drizzt said. “He is in the third private room upstairs. Would you go to him for me? I will pay.”

Dahlia’s eyes widened and she turned to stare at Drizzt, her expression full of surprise and anger.

“I am no whore,” Arunika replied with a laugh.

“No,” Drizzt replied with a laugh of his own, “not like that. Entreri has agreed to accompany us to the north, but now has fostered second thoughts. His best course is to the north, I insist, and I would like you to confirm that for him.”

“On your word?” the woman asked skeptically.

“Use your powers then,” Drizzt bade her. “I know where to find something he wishes returned to him.”

“The sword?”

“Is destroyed,” Dahlia interjected.

“Ah,” said Arunika, and she seemed impressed.

“This is something different, but no less important,” Drizzt assured her.

Arunika stared at him for a while, and whispered some words—a spell, he realized—under her breath.

“An item, or an epiphany?” the seer asked slyly.