The Last Threshold (Neverwinter #4)(33)

The second sahuagin stayed with Dahlia, who stumbled as it pressed its attack. Sensing a kill, the sahuagin bore in with the trident, which Dahlia side-stepped with ease.

The sea devil wasn’t as nimble when the elf countered, Kozah’s Needle thrusting into its upper chest and stopping short its advance. Dahlia retracted and struck again, driving it back a step, then struck third time, in the throat, and the creature staggered and continued to backstep.

The fourth strike launched it from the roof, flying down to the street to land hard on its back.

“More,” Entreri called, and led Dahlia’s gaze to the next rooftop in line.

Dahlia broke her staff in half, then into flails, and she and Entreri sprinted at the incoming threat. They leaped the next alleyway side-by-side, landing in a run and charging into the coming monsters.

Dahlia turned sidelong, avoiding a thrust, and her right hand slapped across, her spinning weapon wrapping the handle of a trident. She pulled it back and up, continuing forward under the lifting weapon and snapped her second flail out hard into the sahuagin’s face. The creature wobbled, clearly dazed, and Dahlia turned, bent at the waist, and rolled into it, still tugging with her wrapping flail.

The creature bit at the back of her neck, but Dahlia continued to bear in, pulling the sea devil right over her. It let go of the trident as it tumbled, and Dahlia sent the weapon flying with a snap of her wrist. As the creature tried to turn and rise, she hit it again with her other flail, a heavy blow to its forehead. Stubbornly it stood, just in time for Dahlia to leap into a flying double-kick and send it, too, soaring from the roof.

She landed and bounced back to her feet to meet the charge of another sea devil, this one without a weapon, but hardly unarmed, clawed hands rending the air as it came at her.

Her flails went into a blur before her, slapping at those hands, and banging together repeatedly, as well, building a charge of energy.

Beside her, Entreri battled a second creature, and Dahlia managed to glance his way and flash a smile—which disappeared when she looked behind him, to realize that he had already cut down two others.

Now it was a competition, and one Dahlia planned to win!





Ambergris bumped into Afafrenfere, who had stopped his movement along the western wall of a building halfway down the street. The dwarf almost said something, but wisely held her tongue.

The monk had his left hand up to a boarded window, the tips of his fingers barely touching the wood, almost as if he sensed vibrations within. His eyes were closed and he seemed frozen in place.

Except for his right hand, which slowly lifted up before his breast, fingers bent like an eagle’s claws.

Or a snake’s fangs, Ambergris understood as Afafrenfere struck, his hand snapping out with the speed of a viper, smashing through the wooden boards and against the side of the skull of the sea devil within. The monk managed to grab on to the sahuagin’s piscine ridge as he retracted, pulling the creature’s head through the hole. Afafrenfere turned as he did this, his left arm going up high, and with the sahuagin’s neck planted on the splintered edge of the broken wood, the monk drove his elbow down hard, like the falling blade of a guillotine.

The creature made a strange watery gurgling sound to accompany the sharp crack of its neck bone.

Ambergris rushed past the monk at the sound of stirring within the building, timing her arrival and sweeping two-handed strike of Skullbreaker, her four-foot mace, perfectly as the next sea devil burst out the cottage’s back door. The sahuagin went flying to the side at the end of that powerful stroke and pitched down to the ground, sitting on the cobblestones.

It rose tentatively, lurching and with one arm hanging, and apparently wanted no more of the dwarf, for it turned and ran off.

But a second leaped out of the door onto the distracted dwarf, clawing and biting and bearing her down to the ground under it.

The dwarf’s mace flew from her grip. She struggled and twisted, freeing up one hand enough to pin the sea devil’s arm in tight. But still, the claws on that hand dug painfully into her upper arm.

And worse, the sahuagin managed to get in line, its face hovering right above Ambergris’s. With a hiss, the sea devil opened wide its maw, showing lines of sharpened teeth.

Wide, too, went the dwarf’s brown eyes, and she spat in defiance, right into that opened maw.

More a statement than a defense.





Drizzt noted a sea devil flying from the roof down the street to his right side, but he couldn’t bring Taulmaril to bear to finish the creature. One appeared immediately above him to the left, arm lifted and ready to throw a javelin.

The drow let fly and fell back, his arrow taking the sahuagin in the chest and lifting it into the air. The creature’s aim was not as good, or perhaps too good, for the javelin drove into the ground and stuck there, right where Drizzt had been crouching.

Drizzt had won that duel, but another sea devil took that one’s place, and the drow heard, too, another behind him, on the roof to the right. He planted his foot and dug in his heel, turning around. Two strides and a dive sent him behind the cover of the north wall of that left-hand building, and up close so that the sea devil on the roof would have to lean right over to get a throw at him.

It did, foolishly, and Taulmaril’s arrow blew right through its skull.

As that one fell, so too did another descend from that roof, leaping down at Drizzt, and two came down from the roof across the way as well, both holding javelins.