“What do you know?” Jarlaxle asked her, helping her to her feet.
Her eyes never left the towering wall of ice.
“The glacier,” she mumbled. “It is alive.”
“Alive?”
“Maegera,” she said. “Like Maegera.”
“I take it that it didn’t like my whip,” Zak said dryly.
“Or my call to the realm of fire,” Catti-brie replied.
They collected themselves and headed off with all speed, moving up out of the valley on the wall opposite the one they had descended to get here. Once they got far enough away, they paused and rested, looking back at the now-distant town and glacier.
“We should be far from that ice,” Entreri remarked.
“But if Doum’wielle is alive, she is in there,” Catti-brie admitted, and she felt the surprised stares of the others upon her.
A long while passed.
“The glacier? Well, how do you propose we get in there?” Entreri asked sourly, at the same time that Jarlaxle asked, “Are you sure?”
Catti-brie pondered that for a few moments, then shook her head. “It is a guess,” she admitted. “But that’s what I felt. And if she is in the glacier, or perhaps beyond the glacier, she is still far away, I believe.”
“Then what do we do?” Entreri asked, his voice growing sharper with frustration with each unanswered question.
Jarlaxle moved to the mountain wall at the side of the trail, cast his levitation, and climbed up the wall.
“The glacier goes a long way,” he called down from his high perch. “Beyond this last line of mountains and out onto the ice pack. Let us get down there and move alongside it. We’ll use Khazid’hea often, and so perhaps we’ll know when we pass Doum’wielle.”
“If we pass Doum’wielle,” Entreri corrected, too quietly for Jarlaxle to hear.
Catti-brie looked at the man and wanted to scold him for his pessimism, but in this instance, she thought that sentiment rather appropriate.
They picked their way along the mountainsides, roughly paralleling the glacier, and the sun still circled them, spying on them, hour after hour, and through the next day, though it seemed to be lower in the sky now than when they had first arrived in the far north, tendays before. During those hours when it went behind the mountains, the air was now dark enough for them to see stars above. Dull, but visible.
That brought a sobering notion to Catti-brie as she considered her years in Icewind Dale. The days there were long in the summer, but very short in the winter.
She didn’t know the precise date, but certainly they were well into the ninth month, Eleint, now, with the autumnal equinox approaching.
Eleint the Fading, it was called.
The sun’s continual stalk of them had been maddening indeed, but the woman wondered if she and her companions would soon miss it sorely.
She shuddered against the thought—or maybe the shudder was against the cold north wind cutting into her bones up here on the open mountain heights. Cold enough to bite through the magical protection she wore, which should have shielded her better than any clothing, any number of fur layers, she could possibly wear.
She shuddered again, and this time knew that shiver’s source to be her fears of what would happen once that sun went below the horizon, once the northern night fell.
They had some cover from the howling wind as they descended along the last rocky trail heading down toward the icy plain. To their left, the mountains continued beyond sight; to their right a cliff, and when the trail bent slightly, they could see, too, beyond the mountain wall, the towering side of the massive glacier, which now seemed to Catti-brie like a sleeping giant white serpent stretched out long upon the ice and using the mountains to rest its head.
They crossed from the stone to the ice pack and continued on. At one point, Jarlaxle used the directional orb, but the mercenary, after several tries, just tossed it back into his pouch. He, it, could not determine which way was north, for some reason. Still, they pressed on, moving along the ice pack, the towering glacial wall barely a few hundred yards to their right. Wind-whipped bits of ice nipped at them with every step.
At one point, Jarlaxle brought forth his nightmare, bidding Entreri to do the same, and the four went up and galloped along.
But only for a short while, before one of the hellsteeds, Jarlaxle’s this time, began to buck and snort and turn in protest, its magic quickly waning.
Jarlaxle dismissed the steed, Entreri following suit.
“We have to get farther away from that thing,” a shivering Entreri said as he replaced the figurine in his belt pouch. He nodded his chin at the towering wall of ice.
“You think it’s the glacier causing this?” Jarlaxle was also rubbing his hands briskly together. “You think it is attacking us?”
“No,” Catti-brie answered before Entreri could. When the others all looked at her, she continued, “I don’t sense its presence, and I doubt that it could know where we are, even.”
“It threw a wall of ice at us,” Entreri reminded her.
“Not at us,” Catti-brie corrected. “At the tear into the Plane of Fire. It didn’t much like the intrusion. I felt its surprise and anger keenly. I do not feel that malice now when I focus on my ring.”
“So, it’s an ice primordial?” Entreri asked. “Or a god of coldness?”
“I don’t know,” Catti-brie admitted. “I think it is a powerful elemental being of some sort, or that there is one within the glacier. I’ve never heard of an ice primordial, but I had never heard of a fire primordial until we went into Gauntlgrym. What I felt back in the town was a primal reaction to the fire.”
“We had a fire going before that, with no complaints from the glacier,” Jarlaxle pointed out.
“But not a tear into the Plane of Fire,” Zak reasoned, and he pulled the hilt from his belt. “Ready your ring and let us see what we may,” he said to Catti-brie, then he called upon the blade of light.
Zak’s expression showed his surprise when the sword ignited, for it seemed meager indeed, almost like a thinner short sword or a long, narrow dagger than the weapon he had brought forth previously. He rolled it about in his hand and changed it from sword to whip, and again, the weapon seemed a pale reflection of its previous power.
Determinedly, Zak cracked the whip repeatedly, trying to cut a tear.
But no more than a few wispy fingers of flame extended from it. There was no planar rift left behind in the air.
The weapon master looked to Catti-brie, who shook her head. “I felt no connection to the fire plane, and no recourse from the glacier.”
“It broke your weapon?” Entreri asked.
“No, maybe it’s more than that.” Catti-brie was sure of it, though she couldn’t yet articulate her feelings.
“Whatever it is, it’s getting too cold out here even for our magic,” Jarlaxle said. He removed his hat and pulled out the small circular piece of black cloth. “Let’s get some shelter from this wind, warm our toes, and figure out how to proceed.” He tossed the cloth down to the ice pack, thinking to make a hole for them to crawl into, but the cloth just landed and lay there. Not elongating, not creating a portal.
It seemed no more than a piece of unremarkable velvet.
The wind picked it up and started to blow it away, and only Entreri’s quick reaction to snatch it from the air prevented the loss of one of Jarlaxle’s most coveted toys.
“What was that?” Entreri asked, but Jarlaxle stood there, hands on hips, staring dumbfounded at the wall.
“First the directional orb, then the nightmares, then the sun blade, now your portable hole,” Entreri remarked.
“No,” Catti-brie corrected. “First my spells.” She looked at Zak and pointed to his shoulder. “The last healing spell I cast upon you.”
“It worked,” he reminded her.
“It did, but it felt . . . strange. The magic here is somewhat altered—perhaps it is the sun and the cold, the pale light. I don’t k
now. But now I feel it is more than altered, and is, perhaps leaving.” She looked Jarlaxle in the eye. “We should go home.”
His jaw tightened. He shook his head and, very uncharacteristically, seemed ready to cry out in rage.
“And it’s getting colder,” said Zak.
“No,” said Catti-brie. “It’s not getting colder around us. Our magical protection is weakening.”
Jarlaxle reached into his pouch and brought forth a piece of kindling. “We are not yet defeated,” he told them. “Let us find some shelter and start a fire.”
But Catti-brie shook her head. She took a deep breath and put the thumb and forefinger of her right hand over the ring on her left, the ring of elemental protection Jarlaxle had given her.
“If I remove it, will I once again have to acclimate to it?” she asked the rogue.
“What are you doing?” Entreri asked.
“I want to measure how much protection these items are actually offering us,” she explained. “Can I put it right back on and realize the magic of it?”
“Yes,” Jarlaxle said, “you are attuned to its power.”
Catti-brie took a deep breath, then slipped the ring off. Her eyes widened and she gasped, then slid it right back on.
“Shelter and fire won’t be nearly enough to sustain us if this magic fails completely. We have to be out of here right now,” she said. “The ring is functioning, but not as before.”
“We have come so far to abandon it all,” Jarlaxle argued.
“We haven’t gone anywhere,” Entreri noted.
“You come with me or I leave you behind,” Catti-brie warned, her tone offering no room for debate. She held out her hands and stared down the other three, Entreri and Zak looking to Jarlaxle for leadership here.
Catti-brie didn’t flinch, didn’t blink, and didn’t lower her hands. “We have failed,” she said. “And this is no death I want.”
Zak broke ranks first, grabbing her hand and holding his other out to Jarlaxle, who hesitated. But when Entreri took her other hand, the frustrated drow had no choice but to concede. He took the offered hands, completing the ring, and Catti-brie cast her most powerful spell, one she had prepared extensively and fastidiously before they began their journey. This was the true escape, a dweomer to put them back in Longsaddle.
A word of recall.
Nothing happened.
Catti-brie stared blankly ahead. She knew the magic was weakening, but for this spell to have failed completely . . .
“Gods,” Entreri breathed.
“We need to find shelter,” Jarlaxle said. “Now.”
They moved as quickly as they could manage, angling toward the glacial wall to see if perhaps there were any caves or crevices to be found.
After some time, Entreri spotted one. He directed them straight toward the massive glacier and a huge rift along its side.
“Doesn’t seem like the best idea,” Zak remarked.
“Do we have a choice?” Entreri countered.
“Go,” Catti-brie told them, trying to lift fast-sagging spirits. “We’ll be all right. Perhaps it was the cold that caused me to stutter or somehow else defeated my spell. Out of the wind will be better.”
Off they went, moving faster across the ice pack now that they had a destination in sight, the glacier looming higher, higher. They slowed as they neared, with the giant river of ice towering hundreds of feet above them, the rift some thirty feet across and running from the base all the way to the top, open to the sky.
They went in tentatively, and felt some relief immediately as the wind diminished around them. But not enough for them to make a fire, and not enough for them to survive for much longer. They had no choice but to go in deeper, a hundred strides, two hundred.
“It’s getting warmer,” a surprised Zaknafein observed.
“The walls of ice are acting as a blanket for us,” Entreri offered.
“No,” came Catti-brie’s correction from behind, and when the other three turned, they found the woman holding her protective ring in her hand, having removed it yet again. “This is more than that.”
“How cold are you?” a surprised Zaknafein asked.
“Chilly, not cold,” Entreri answered for her, for he, too, had removed his ring. He looked to Jarlaxle. “What is this place?”
“I know not. Is the beast warm on the inside?”
They went on and found a second surprise when the floor of the rift became a shallow puddle, then turned from ice to soil, hard at first like the tundra, but even that changing as they continued.
They heard the water running before they came upon it, a small stream flowing before them at a T-shaped intersection in the rift. The tunnel widened considerably in both directions, with enough solid and dry ground for them to walk along either side of the small stream, which was about as wide as a drow was tall. Steam wafted off the flowing water.
Entreri was the first to bend, gingerly tapping and then dipping his hand into the water. “Warm,” he told them, pulling his hand back out. “Hot, even.”
Catti-brie, Jarlaxle, and Entreri stopped there for a bit to take in the unexpected channel, while Zaknafein ran off to the left, deeper into the glacier, to scout.
“We should eat,” Jarlaxle said, and reached into his belt pouch. His hand went in only a very short way, hitting the bottom. Jarlaxle’s eyes widened in shock.
“What?” Entreri asked.
“The pouch, the food. I cannot access it.”
Catti-brie began to cast a spell, a quick one, and when she finished with nothing to show for it, she shook her head grimly at the others. “I cannot summon any food. I hear no magic, no words of Mielikki, no songs of Mystra’s Weave.”
“Here!” they heard Zak’s voice, and turned to see him at the beginning of a bend in the corridor, waving them to him.
Around that corner, the open-air passage became a high-ceilinged tunnel, but only for a short distance before it opened again to the sky, and to a wider chamber, the stream flowing along its right-hand side, and the rest of it, perhaps a quarter acre of land, covered in grass and flowers, and bushes full of berries.
And bees, buzzing happily and noticing the newcomers not at all.
“By the gods,” Catti-brie whispered.
“What is this place?” Artemis Entreri asked again, but no one could find the breath, let alone the words, to answer him.
When she awakened after a long and comfortable sleep, Catti-brie had to spend a few moments to remind herself yet again that this was real. The flowers were real, the insects were real, and the blueberries and raspberries and strawberries were real.
And the warmth was real, here, in this place, hemmed in by mountainous walls of ice! And with a howling wind just beyond that would freeze her solid in short moments.
As her thoughts and senses came fully into the present, the first thing she noticed, looking straight up to the open sky high above, was how much dimmer the light seemed. She nodded, understanding. The long winter nights were coming. Would there even be a daytime?
“Shh,” Jarlaxle said, sitting nearby, and she turned her head to glance at him. He motioned for her to sit up and look across the way.
She went up on her elbows, then, taken by the sight, and sat up slowly, making no sudden movements. A family of white foxes was over at the widest part of the flowing water. One adult sat watching, the other drinking, while three kits rolled in the grass and dirt along the bank.
“They’ve seen us and seem not to care,” Jarlaxle whispered.
“They probably have no experience with people,” Catti-brie whispered back. The canids were no more than twenty strides away. She thought to prepare some spells of animal friendship or communication, that she might use these intelligent little predators to get a sense of the area, but she didn’t need those spells to understand that the foxes seemed perfectly at ease in here, and that they were familiar with this chamber.
Besides, she was pretty sure the magic wouldn’t work, despite the
obviously enchanted nature of this place.
Two of the kits continued to tumble about, but the third noticed them then, and began to approach curiously, though not cautiously. It halved the distance quickly, and the watching adult seemed to take note, but merely yawned.
Catti-brie felt the eyes of her companions upon her but could only offer a shrug in response. The kit kept coming, and began yipping. The adult foxes seemed not to care. The other two kits began rambling toward the unexpected visitors.
The first kit went right up to Catti-brie’s feet and sniffed, then jumped upon one foot and began wrestling and gnawing.
“Domesticated?” Jarlaxle asked.
“By whom?” Entreri asked.
“By them,” answered Catti-brie, who was at the end of the line, nearest the tunnel from which they had entered this chamber, and so looking past her friends and deeper into the rift. She sucked in her breath, her eyes unblinking.
The others slowly turned about.
Five figures stood at the far entrance of the chamber, strangely dressed in shiny black skintight suits that seemed to be a single piece of clothing, feet to collar, and with a cloak lined in thick white fur, very much like that of the fox family who had come into the chamber.
Each of the newcomers carried a handcrossbow at the ready, and that clue led Catti-brie to look more closely, to confirm what her eyes had shown right away but her mind had pushed aside due to the sheer strangeness, the alien nature, of their outfits.
They were drow.
Chapter 14
Where the Hot Springs Flow
“We have no magic, few weapons,” Catti-brie whispered to her friends, lifting her hands in surrender. She stared in disbelief, for these were indeed drow, without doubt, in hair color and the varying hues of skin color, all with that dusky gray base. A patrol from Menzoberranzan would have appeared no different, except for the outfits they wore and the swords and short spears they carried. The material of these blades was not familiar to Catti-brie, for they were white, or bluish white, and one even shone fully blue. She couldn’t really tell from this distance, but they looked more like ice than metal, somewhat translucent—or perhaps, she thought, it was some type of glassteel. She started slowly toward the newcomers, her hands raised and empty.
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