Starlight Enclave

by R. A. Salvatore

  “It must be difficult keeping such things straight when you spend so much time in the minds of other people. Where you do not belong.”

  “Yes, it is a curse,” came the dry response.

  “For all of us,” Drizzt replied, and Dab’nay chuckled.

  “But Mielikki,” Kimmuriel prompted. “Tell me. You found her and chose her as your deity.”

  “Not really,” Drizzt replied after considering the question for a few moments. “It was more that I found a name to connect with that which I felt in my heart. I didn’t worship her. I didn’t ask her for guidance or divine intervention, or even magical spells. I was comfortable with the goddess Mielikki because to me, it was just a name. I didn’t need her to tell me right from wrong, Kimmuriel. I had seen enough of that overlord game in my younger days in Menzoberranzan.”

  To Drizzt’s surprise, that answer seemed to please both of the people seated before him. Kimmuriel even turned to Dab’nay and smiled and nodded, and she returned the gesture, whispering Drizzt’s words “overlord game” as if they pleased her very much.

  When he turned back, Kimmuriel leaned forward eagerly. “You left this world,” he said. “Tell me. What was there? What do you know?”

  Drizzt stared hard, caught off guard once more.

  “Please?” Kimmuriel begged.

  “Know? Sensations of calm and beauty and harmony, at least then. Regarding the longer-term destination of that journey, I know nothing,” Drizzt answered, and this was a question he had asked of himself a thousand times since he had left this existence. “In the moments of transcendence, or for however long it was, I felt . . . brotherhood. Oneness with everything, and a peace I had never known before or since.”

  “Did you go somewhere?” Dab’nay pressed. “To the Grove of the Unicorns?”

  “I went nowhere and everywhere all at once. I cannot explain it more than that—even to myself, and I assure you, I have tried.

  “Why are you asking this?” Drizzt went on, his tone changing. “And why would you be discussing such things with Zaknafein?”

  “Zaknafein was dead for many decades,” Kimmuriel answered. “I wanted . . . I want, to know where he went and how he found that experience.”

  “Kimmuriel is obsessed with death?”

  Drizzt was surprised that the psionicist didn’t answer or argue.

  “You don’t seem to me to be one who was ever much concerned with Lolth, or any other god, for that matter,” Drizzt said.

  “I am guilty of your accusation.”

  “I always assumed you believed you would just meld into the hive mind of the illithids, and there reside for eternity.”

  “The thought has occurred to me. And perhaps I’m not even curious about such things as this for myself. But you know of the happenings in Menzoberranzan.”

  “Only that there aren’t any.”

  “Yet,” Dab’nay said before Kimmuriel got the word out.

  “The reasoning peoples of Faerun are not monolithic in thought or behavior, even within their own cultures and ways, even within their own religions,” Kimmuriel explained. “Are they choosing their gods because of their family traditions? Are they choosing based on what they will experience when death calls upon them, picking a heaven as one might find a wonderful patch of ground upon which to build a home?”

  “It seems rather shallow when you speak of it that way,” said Drizzt.

  “And it always has seemed rather shallow to Drizzt Do’Urden, is my guess.”

  “Good guess.”

  “Then what?” Dab’nay asked bluntly. “Who is your god? Or are you so proud that you think yourself a god?”

  “Hardly that.”

  “Then who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That is a dangerous admission, don’t you think? If you have no god, then what will you know when you die?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you’re not afraid?” she asked.

  “No. Because whatever god I might name to you, whatever afterlife I would choose as my patch of ground upon which to build my forever-after home, seems irrelevant.”

  “Because that which is in your heart should determine the place and experience, not any outward profession of faith and fealty,” Kimmuriel reasoned. Again, he looked to Dab’nay, and the two smiled and nodded.

  “Why do I get the feeling that you’re merely confirming that which you already knew about me?” Drizzt asked.

  “Or perhaps we’re just happy to have found a kindred soul,” Dab’nay said.

  “I thought you were a priestess of Lolth.”

  “So did I, for many years,” she replied. “And so, perhaps, I still am. I know that when I call for spells, I receive them, though I am pointedly not calling upon her, or anyone else. I understand your difficulty in explaining your experience, Drizzt. For me it is no less. Have I transcended spiritually, as you did both spiritually and physically? Am I now beyond the call to any particular god and, rather, accessing the divine magics from some being I do not even know, and yet one I seem to understand all the more clearly?”

  “An over-god? A god of gods?” Kimmuriel threw out there.

  “I don’t know about that,” Drizzt admitted again. “I know right from wrong, at least most of the time, and I recognize goodness versus evil, and I follow the path of one and reject the other. Maybe that is the course of divinity. It gives me enough purpose that I don’t worry about the names attached to it, one god or demon or celestial overlord, or whatever they might be.”

  “And that’s the truth of it, of you,” Kimmuriel decided. “Have you ever wondered if these gods promising power or peace or love or freedom to exercise eternal cruelty are nothing more than selfish overlords, greater beings than we, who use us to their ends and not our own?”

  “Yes.” Drizzt didn’t elaborate. He knew that he didn’t have to. He felt calm opening up like this, strangely so considering that the audience was a pair of Bregan D’aerthe associates—the unreadable Kimmuriel and, most of all, a priestess of the Spider Queen! But while it surprised him, he didn’t doubt the truth of his composure.

  “You know that many priestesses and priests of many religions, not just Lolthian, would condemn you, perhaps even cruelly torture you until you recanted or begged for death, for uttering that admission?” Kimmuriel asked.

  “I have witnessed as much, both in Menzoberranzan and in Luskan, where Prisoner’s Carnival holds their cruelest executions for such crimes as questioning an accepted god. Which makes me even more confident that I am right in my convictions.”

  “Because a goodly god should never wish such cruelty,” Kimmuriel said.

  Drizzt nodded. “You surprise me here, Kimmuriel.”

  “Trust me when I tell you that I surprise no one more than I have surprised myself since I went into the memories of Yvonnel the Eternal through the vessels of her daughter and her namesake granddaughter, to the earlies days of Menzoberranzan.”

  “The corruption of Lolth,” Dab’nay added.

  Drizzt tapped his fingers together and grinned widely. It was his turn to lead this discussion, he thought. “Yes, those tales—Zaknafein and Jarlaxle have told me the revelations in detail. But let’s discuss them more, shall we?”

  No sooner had he said that than Brie began to fuss. “I’ll need a few moments,” Drizzt told them, rising.

  “Perhaps that is a good thing,” Kimmuriel replied. “It will give us all a while to consider what I expect will be an important discussion, and so let us enter it with clear purpose.”

  “That sounds more like an argument.”

  Kimmuriel shook his head. “We cannot know what we cannot know, and so an argument over such things would be futile.”

  Drizzt moved across the camp to fetch Brie, staring up at the stars coming to life in a clear sky above, letting his heart and soul lift him to the peaceful heavens.

  Chapter 9

  Lands Unwelcoming and Unkind

  Catti-brie couldn�
��t see anything and she was twisted painfully at the waist. She kept enough of her wits about her to realize that she had landed in soft snow, mostly, but had badly clipped her left hip against rock that wasn’t buried deeply enough to pad her fall.

  Then she felt an impact on her lower back. Dull waves of discomfort swept through her body, and she heard the grunt of Artemis Entreri, who had obviously come over the rocky ridge soon after her.

  She tried to begin a spell of healing, but the ground was shaking more violently by the syllable, and reaching a thunderous crescendo so clearly that Catti-brie wasn’t the least bit surprised when the snow began to drop upon her. More and more, packing her tightly, burying her. Instinctively, she got a hand up in front of her face before such a movement became impossible, and had her fingers working frantically to dig out a bit of an air pocket, at least, to try to keep herself breathing.

  Which would matter little if the snow simply crushed her.

  Terror filled her as she thought of Drizzt and little Brie. She couldn’t manage a spell, but still she prayed for Mielikki to find her and save her. She could not be done with this life, not now! Not with her daughter so young . . .

  When Drizzt returned to the campfire, he found that Braelin Janquay had joined the two guests, bearing with him a fine stew Braelin had thrown together from his foraging, and a loaf of bread Dab’nay had magically conjured, along with a bottle of Feywine.

  They invited Drizzt to share in the meal, of course, and held off the conversation until Brie had fully settled back down in her bed. Kimmuriel took them right back into the previous discussion, pressing Drizzt yet again on the coming storm in Menzoberranzan and its broader ramifications, and on the point and purpose of it all.

  “I don’t doubt the power of the web Yvonnel and Quenthel spun,” Drizzt answered to Dab’nay’s mention of the great heresy.

  “There could be no greater act of defiance of Lolth,” Dab’nay said.

  “Yet there are some who consider the altering of the driders, the reversion of Lolth’s abominations, to be no more than a devious trick,” Kimmuriel was quick to add. “One done in the hopes of shaking the faith of Matron Zhindia’s zealous followers. Even to this day, the argument over the web, whether it was sacrilege or an inspired and temporary illusion, or merely a temporary transformation even, is a heated and confused topic in many of the houses and along all the streets of Menzoberranzan.”

  “Whether the drider transformation was a trick, I cannot say,” Drizzt conceded. “But I do know that there was power in that web. Great power to remove curses. For Thibbledorf Pwent is very much alive, and the vampire that was Pwent is no more. I have never before heard of a cure for vampirism, nor had any of Bruenor’s clerics, nor the wizards of Longsaddle. But Pwent is cured.”

  “Divine intervention?” Dab’nay offered.

  Drizzt shrugged, having no answer.

  “But you don’t believe in the gods,” Dab’nay returned.

  “I believe in the beings some call gods,” Drizzt corrected. “Of course I do. I have met Lolth face-to-face. I do not doubt for a heartbeat that she could have reduced me to ash in that encounter, or could have made of me a drider, or, were I drider, returned me to my life as a drow.”

  “Maybe it was Lolth who gave the powers to Yvonnel and Matron Mother Quenthel to revert the driders to drow through that web,” Braelin Janquay remarked, and all eyes went to him, all expressions doubtful—but only for a moment.

  “It has long been whispered that Drizzt was no heretic in the eyes of the Spider Queen,” Kimmuriel reminded them. “Would that not be much the same thing?”

  “How so?” asked Dab’nay, as Drizzt nodded his agreement.

  “Because her goal is chaos,” Kimmuriel explained. “Drizzt was chaos in Menzoberranzan, even long after he had left. And so this reordering of the city now, with a war approaching, surely will bring great chaos and confusion, and thus great joy and power to Lady Lolth.”

  “Fleeting power, if House Baenre prevails, though,” said Drizzt.

  “Possibly,” the psionicist admitted.

  “But if Lolth was the one who reverted the driders to drow, could she not just reverse that and re-curse the damned beings?” Dab’nay asked.

  “I do not think it would be that easy, but who can know?” said Kimmuriel.

  “Sometimes I wonder what we can really know, and what we can only think we know,” Braelin Janquay said.

  “Like the true history of Menzoberranzan?” Drizzt asked somewhat slyly, bringing the conversation back to where they had left it earlier. He turned his gaze to Kimmuriel, but the psionicist just shrugged.

  “The history told by Yvonnel and Quenthel, informed by the memories of Yvonnel the Eternal, is not the history taught to us in my youth,” Drizzt reminded. “We were taught that even Yvonnel the Eternal was not nearly old enough, not by millennia, to have witnessed the true founding of the city.”

  Again a noncommittal shrug from the psionicist.

  “There are no witnesses, just legends and lore,” said Drizzt.

  “The ones who told the newer tale have the memories of a witness,” Kimmuriel reminded him. “The actual memories of Yvonnel the Eternal, and not mere stories she or someone else told them.”

  “Perhaps, or perhaps these really are nothing more than stories someone told them, disguised as memories. Have you been around illithids too long, Kimmuriel? Do you really think them reliable and truthful? Without ends of their own? Or is it just that you prefer the story they have told?”

  “The story of the true founding of Menzoberranzan was told by Yvonnel and Matron Mother Quenthel,” Kimmuriel insisted. “They know of it as direct witnesses, for Matron Mother Yvonnel the Eternal was a witness.”

  “Because it was given to them by an illithid, an intermediary, if you will, between the physical remains of the brain of Matron Mother Baenre and that which it imparted to Baenre’s daughter and granddaughter.”

  “Ah, yes,” Kimmuriel replied. “I see that you’ve been speaking with Jarlaxle.”

  “Often.”

  Jarlaxle came to the end of the slide, the avalanche roaring close behind, and quickly scrambled to the top of the ridge. There, like the two humans before him, he jumped, but unlike Catti-brie and Entreri, he didn’t plummet down into the snow some twenty to thirty feet below, but instead continued upward, propelled by his momentum in the weightlessness of drow levitation.

  Zaknafein floated beside him as the avalanche overran the rocky ridge below them, tons and tons of snow swirling up like a great white wave and rushing over the peak to tumble below and continue to pour down the mountainside.

  Clouds of powder flew up into the air, obscuring the vision of the two drow for some time, until the tumult finally subsided.

  Jarlaxle looked down and found his breath taken away. The bulk of the avalanche had rolled past the ridge and was far down the mountain, still moving, but it had left nothing but a blanket of white behind it. How deep, he wasn’t sure, but the front of the rocky ridge was gone now, and the drop on the other side had been reduced at least in half. As the mercenary leader tried to digest that dramatic and terrible change, he saw Zak fall beside him, dropping down to the snow. The weapon master pulled the hilt from his belt and called upon the magic, enacting a flaming blade of bright light.

  Zak plunged it into the snow, where it hissed, and he frantically began scraping and plowing it all about, a cloud of steam rising around him.

  Jarlaxle, too, dropped down, and began digging and clawing with his hands, throwing the snow aside. When it seemed like he had worked himself wildly and barely made any progress, he took a different tack and summoned his hellsteed. He moved to the side, trying to stay clear of where Catti-brie and Entreri had fallen—or, at least, where he thought they’d fallen—and urged the mount to begin pawing furiously, its fiery hooves melting and spraying snow and steam with every movement.

  “Don’t stab them!” he called to Zak.

  “Don’t tra
mple them!” came the response.

  Furiously, the two dug for their buried friends, but every handful came harder, for the melted snow was already freezing atop the remaining mound, and their progress proved painfully slow.

  “You truly don’t believe that the illithids could be manipulating this?” Drizzt said. “That the memories given to Yvonnel and Quenthel might be fabrications for the designs of the fabricators?”

  “Matron Mother Quenthel,” Dab’nay corrected.

  Drizzt laughed at her. “Quenthel,” he said again. “You do not believe, Kimmuriel, that those memories could be faulty, even purposefully fraudulent, or not the entire story, or just a piece of the story of the founding of Menzoberranzan?”

  “Even Jarlaxle doesn’t believe that,” Kimmuriel replied. “He feared it, at first, but he has—”

  “Jarlaxle doesn’t want to believe it,” Drizzt reminded him.

  Kimmuriel gave Drizzt a perfectly somber look, and fully flummoxed the ranger when he simply replied, “Does it matter?”

  “Of course!” Drizzt reflexively began, but the words stuck in his throat.

  “Drizzt Do’Urden,” Kimmuriel said evenly, “history is told by the victors, and is related from person to person, and the tellers change the story to exaggerate their own role or own selfish hopes with every retelling.”

  “There is no objective truth, then?” Drizzt said doubtfully.

  “Of course there is . . . somewhere.”

  “We have writings . . .”

  “No, we have copies of writings, and in lost languages that were transcribed from other, more fully lost languages. The tales we were taught in the Academy of the founding of Menzoberranzan go back more than five thousand years. Do you realize how long that is?”

  “Drow live a long time,” Drizzt reminded him.

  “Longer than they remember,” Kimmuriel countered, drawing a curious look from Drizzt. “Think of yourself,” the psionicist prodded. “You are not a young drow anymore, but likely not halfway to a natural death. How much do you truly recall of your younger days? How much do you truly recall of the early edicts of the Ruling Council or of your studies at the Academy unrelated to the fighting training which you have continued for all of your life?”