The Last Threshold (Neverwinter #4)(90)

Huervo took another trip to the bar. This time he heard nothing. He waited a bit beside the stair.

No sound came forth from above. The thought of returning to the tower to admit to Errtu that he had lost track of the group was not a pleasant one.

Glancing around to ensure that he had not been noticed, the wizard slipped deeper into the shadows behind the stair. He understood the risk, but weighing it against the certainty of what he would face back at the tower, he pressed on.

He completed a spell of clairaudience, aiming it behind that door, and the sounds of the tavern dimmed immediately, as surely as if Huervo was in that very room. He expected a whispered conversation, or maybe even some snoring.

He heard nothing, other than the diminishing din from beyond the room, from back down in the tavern.

Growing concerned, the wizard cast a second divination, this one clairvoyance, and as he had put his ears in the room, so too did he now place his vision. As if he physically passed through the door himself, Huervo looked upon the room.

Upon the empty room.

It wasn’t possible, he thought, for there was no other door, just a window …

Huervo spent a moment considering that, then rushed from the tavern and moved quickly around the side, into an alleyway. He came to the back corner of the building and carefully peeked around to the back alley.

It was empty, but he saw the window in question. He moved to the base of the wall under it, perhaps ten feet below the sill, but couldn’t get too close because of the clutter all around. None of it seemed disturbed. If they had come down from the window, they had done so with great care, even the dwarf.

The riddle made no sense, unless there was a secret door in the private room, perhaps. With that thought in mind, Huervo enacted another spell and levitated from the ground, carefully hand-walking his way up the wall to peek into the room. The fire burned low in the hearth, despite a well-stocked wood bin right beside the fireplace, and the candles set on the table had all been extinguished.

A secret door, then, he thought, and he meant to go back into the tavern and find a way to get into the room to investigate. He noted, though, that the window wasn’t nailed—or wasn’t any longer, at least, for the nails had been removed, quite recently, and lay on the inside of the sill.

Huervo hooked his fingers under the wood and gently slid it open, and from the ease of its lift, despite its obvious age, he understood that it had indeed been opened earlier, and not long ago.

But how had they left without disturbing the clutter in the alleyway below?

He started into the room, but paused, and on a hunch began to float up higher, walking the wall to the roof. He listened cautiously for a few moments, then peered over.

Nothing.

No, not nothing, he realized, for like many rooftops in Luskan, this one was a combination of angles and with only a few small flat areas, like the short expanse before him. And like most of the flat roof areas, this one was covered with small stones, and in that bed, Huervo noted footprints, where boots had recently disturbed the settled rocks.

He looked back down and all around. Had they come up here? Why? And if so, where had they gone?

He pulled himself over the edge and walked around the roof, looking for another doorway or window, or some hint of the path they had taken from here, if they had indeed come up here and moved on along the rooftops of the city.

He cast another spell, to detect any magic at play, and then he froze in place, and his heart stopped beating for a moment. For Huervo recognized this type of emanation above all others, and he knew.

Someone had been up here, within an hour’s time, and had opened a magical gate.

Huervo’s eyes went wide and he looked back down again, to the window, and he inspected the edge of the roof above it, and indeed found a spike angled under the end beam, from which a rope had likely been lowered.

The truth of the scene hit him hard. The drow and his friend had come up here, and from here, they had passed through a magical gate! He had lost them, cold. They could be anywhere in the world; they could be off this very plane of existence … he thought back to the conversation he had overheard, the one word, Shadowfell.

Huervo swallowed hard.

He floated back down the side of the building. He rushed into the tavern, and didn’t bother to ask permission before sprinting up the stairs and through the door of the private room.

The proprietor charged in right behind him, a group of patrons close behind.

“Where are they?” Huervo demanded.

But the man had no answers.

They searched the inn, roof to cellar, but the strange group—drow, elf, human, dwarf, and tiefling—was nowhere to be found.

He had lost them, and to the Shadowfell. Errtu the balor would not be pleased.





PERPETUAL GLOOM



ICAN FEEL HER,” DRIZZT REMARKED, AND HE HELD THE STATUETTE BEFORE his eyes. He looked to the side, to Effron, who nodded soberly.

“Don’t try to summon her,” the tiefling warned, “else you will alert Lord Draygo to our designs. Even here, perhaps especially here, he will see through Guenhwyvar’s eyes.”

Drizzt nodded and slipped the figurine safely away.

Dahlia watched the drow’s every move, recognizing the pragmatism that drove him. If it was pragmatism, she reconsidered, and not some moral code too stringent to ever let his emotions find some freedom. She had teased those emotions from him on occasion, though not recently, of course, and had lured him into places where he had allowed himself to live in the moment and to be free of whatever nagging little voice constantly held him back.