The Last Threshold (Neverwinter #4)(89)

“Do you even taste them?” the wizard said with a scowl.

“Juicy,” Druzil replied, and he chomped his fangs right through the skin of the melon and began to slurp noisily.

Huervo stared at him hatefully, which only made the imp laugh. For Druzil was clearly confident that the upper hand would not change here.

The imp pointed at the wizard, then motioned to the stairwell and giggled stupidly, melon juices squirting out between its jagged teeth.

How Huervo wanted to cast a spell and obliterate the wretched little creature! This was all Druzil’s fault, after all. Huervo had summoned an imp, a dweomer he had cast a hundred times since his earliest days of practicing the arcane arts, back in the far south two decades earlier. He had gotten his title, the Seeker, because he had always been the most inquisitive of wizards, focusing his efforts on divination and summoning, ever seeking enchantments and answers in books, and when those tomes did not suffice, he asked for answers from the denizens of other planes. Bringing forth a minor demon or devil, or some other inter-planar traveler was nothing out of the usual for the Seeker.

But this imp had come with a plan. Huervo had subsequently—and too late—realized it had been waiting for the summons with the ingredients to facilitate that nefarious chain of events, a tease regarding greater knowledge into the subject Huervo was researching: the name of another imp who held great secrets regarding that subject, and a secret pouch full of ingredients designed to strengthen an inter-planar gate. So Huervo had eagerly summoned the other imp, and Druzil had thrown its enhancements onto the building fires of that gate, and the other imp had not been an imp at all.

There was no escape, the wizard realized. Not now, at least. Perhaps Drizzt and the drow’s friends would inadvertently facilitate Huervo’s freedom—they were rumored to be quite powerful, after all.

But powerful enough?

With a heavy sigh and another determined, steadying breath, Huervo went to the stairs once more, to descend to a place and a conversation he had never in his wildest nightmares envisioned.

To speak to the balor in his cellar.





The companions, now numbering six, sat around a table in a private room in a tavern in Luskan.

“You will not even experience time the same way,” Effron remarked, continuing his primer on the Shadowfell for those of the group who had never ventured there. “The passage of time itself becomes more a measure of how deeply the shadows permeate your mind.”

“Truly,” Afafrenfere said, and he seemed shocked by the revelation, or at least, by the succinct manner in which Effron had described it. “I was there for several years, but it seemed only a few tendays!”

“Because ye was in love,” Ambergris said. “And that kept ye above the Shadowfell’s movements. For me ’twas th’other way. Every tenday felt akin to a year.”

“You went there of your own volition,” Effron said.

“I went as a spy,” Ambergris corrected. “That was me punishment for gettin’ caught doin’ wrong.”

“A criminal?” Effron said. “Do tell.”

“Nah.”

“The Shadowfell,” the impatient Drizzt interjected, forcing the discussion back on track. He had no time for distraction. Effron knew the location of Guenhwyvar’s prison—nothing else mattered to Drizzt, and he would go to this place, the Shadowfell and the castle of this Netherese lord, and he would get the cat back. It was that simple.

“I’m just trying to prepare you,” Effron said.

“I’m more than ready.”

“The others, then. You cannot understand the Shadowfell until you’ve walked her dark ways. The air itself is different, heavy, full of palpable gloom. For those unprepared, the weight of the place—”

“Open the gate,” Drizzt instructed. “You said you could guide me, so do so. Whether the others come along or not is their choice, but I am going, and I am going now.”

“Well, me and me monk friend ain’t a’feared o’ the place,” Ambergris said. “Lived there for years.”

Drizzt listened to the dwarf, but his eyes were on Dahlia, who stared at him with an expression that resonated with hurt, as if the mere implication that she wouldn’t be accompanying him was ludicrous, and hurtful that he would ever think such a thing.

“I owe you this much at least,” Artemis Entreri remarked, the shock of the words breaking the stare between the lovers, and indeed, both Drizzt and Dahlia turned to him with a bit of surprise.

Entreri merely shrugged.





Huervo the Seeker sat in the common room of that very inn, sipping his wine and trying to keep his gaze from too obviously falling upon the stairway that led up a half-flight to the back room where Drizzt and the others had gone for a private discussion.

Occasionally, the mage rose and took a roundabout path to the bar, passing beside the stairs in the hopes of catching some of the conversation. He did hear the sound of voices on those trips, but couldn’t make out more than a word or two. He had heard some mention of the Shadowfell, but given the broken tiefling creature, who was obviously thick with shadowstuff, that didn’t surprise him or alarm him very much.

The night slid deeper, and the gathering at the tavern began to thin, and still the door remained closed at the top of that half-stair.