Starlight Enclave

by R. A. Salvatore

  The other three companions, all sitting, made no move, just stared at the unexpected drow.

  The fox family, though, went running at the sight, but not away. Yipping and barking, they rushed for the drow, the adults bounding up before them and skidding to a stop, sitting excitedly, one lifting a paw and patting at the air.

  The figure farthest from the companions turned back to the tunnel and began signaling with his hands.

  Zaknafein, who was closest to the newcomers, began moving his fingers to mimic the strange drow.

  “He is calling to and for others,” Jarlaxle whispered to Catti-brie.

  “We should run,” Entreri whispered.

  “Back out into the cold?” Catti-brie said openly. “We’ll die.”

  The sound of her voice had five handcrossbows coming up at them as one. One of the nearer drow asked, “How did you get here?”

  It took Catti-brie a moment to understand the words. She recognized the language immediately as Drow, but it sounded to her quite different from the language spoken in Menzoberranzan in both dialect and syntax, and with one word she did not recognize at all. Frighteningly, the syntax reminded her of that used by the slaad creature masquerading as a drow in the cave they had taken as their first shelter in the northland.

  “They know the silent hand language,” Jarlaxle whispered so that his nearby companions could hear. “Could a giant frog even do that?”

  “Yet they sound like the other one,” Catti-brie replied in similarly quiet tones.

  “If that monster thought it was fooling actual drow of this land, wouldn’t it?”

  “Tell them nothing of the fight in the cave,” Entreri whispered. “Nothing.”

  “How did you get here?” the drow man asked again, more insistently.

  “Well met,” Jarlaxle answered in the drow tongue, using his most charming and gracious voice, as if they were old friends. “We came in to get out of the cold, nothing more.”

  “Keep talking,” the nearest of the newcomers prompted.

  “We would have died out there. We were surprised to find it warm in here, but without it . . .” Jarlaxle let it hang there with a shrug.

  “That is not what we have asked from you. How did you come to this region in the first place?”

  “We’ve been hiking for tendays, looking for a long-lost associate.”

  “It’s been cold for tendays,” the doubting interrogator replied. Catti-brie noted that his features were perhaps a bit less angular than those of most of the drow she had known. His white hair showed highlights of soft lavender and hung shoulder length, pulled back from his face. His eyes shone red. “You are hardly dressed for the wind and snow.”

  “Their magic failed,” put in another of the group, a woman with long, thick white hair tied up on one side and set with a shining blue pin. The others nodded.

  “You were protected, and now you are not,” the first said to Jarlaxle.

  “Nor could we get to our supplies,” Jarlaxle confirmed, putting a hand into his belt pouch. “This, too, is enchanted.” He looked around. “I am sorry, but yes, we took some of the bounty we found here in this place. We did not know that this land was claimed.”

  “It is of no concern.”

  “We would leave, but we’ll die, surely.”

  The drow questioner looked to his companions and shared nods, and they lowered their handcrossbows. Others came around the corner then, and still more rappelled down the sides of the glacier walls to land at the ready in the exit tunnel.

  “Who are you?” he asked Jarlaxle, then pointed to the mercenary and clarified, “You alone.”

  The rogue stood slowly, showing his hands all the while, then dipped a polite bow. “I am known as Jarlaxle.”

  “I am Emilian,” the drow replied.

  “Well met.”

  He gave a slight nod, nothing more. Unsurprisingly, the five seemed more focused on Catti-brie and Entreri than on their two fellow drow, a trio whispering among themselves.

  “What is she?” Emilian asked, indicating Catti-brie.

  “A woman.”

  “Clearly, but darthirii? Kitrye? And he? Kitrye, yes?”

  “Humans, both,” Catti-brie answered, for she understood Emilian’s references, asking if she and Artemis Entreri were elven or half-elven.

  “Humans?” Emilian remarked, clearly confused. “Never have I seen humans who look like this. His skin is too brown, and she too tall.”

  “Southerners, then,” said the drow woman standing beside Emilian.

  “Yes, the south, from here, at least,” Jarlaxle answered, and he shot Catti-brie a look begging her to let him do the talking here. “She is from beyond the Sea of Moving Ice, he from much farther, from the lands of hot sands and high sun.”

  “You are a long way from home,” said the drow woman.

  “A long-lost associate, you said,” Emilian prompted.

  “Yes. Well, an associate,” Jarlaxle corrected. “A woman, half drow, half elf.”

  “Her name?”

  “She was called Doum—”

  “Doum’wielle,” Emilian finished for him. “Little Doe.”

  Catti-brie gasped. “My god, the sword was right. She is alive.”

  “How do you speak our language?” Emilian asked.

  “I speak common Drow,” she said. “It is only slightly different from your . . .”

  “What you call common Drow is polluted with the sounds of the lower planes,” the woman drow told her. “Our distant kin have long lived near to other races in the deep Underdark, and thus, their language has changed.”

  “If you know Little Doe, then you know that we are not enemies,” Jarlaxle said.

  “Doum’wielle was an enemy when first we met,” Emilian replied sharply. “You’ll find no Queen of Spiders here.”

  “Good,” Zak and Entreri both said together, and both blew heavy sighs of relief.

  “I’m not going back into the dungeon of a drow priestess,” Entreri quietly added. “I’ll die here first.”

  “This is Catti-brie,” Jarlaxle explained, and he wagged his hand to silence Entreri. “Perhaps you have heard of her, or of her husband, Drizzt Do’Urden.”

  Emilian looked around, but all of them just shook their heads. “He is aevendrow?” Emilian asked.

  “Aevendrow?” Catti-brie echoed.

  “Evening,” Jarlaxle told her. “Starlight drow, aevendrow.”

  Catti-brie and the others spent a long moment letting that digest, Catti-brie staring at Jarlaxle and measuring him. A lot of the previous puzzles were beginning to make sense to her here, but this wasn’t the place to throw her accusations.

  “I am a priestess, but not of Lolth,” Catti-brie said. “Hardly of Lolth. My goddess is Mielikki.” She took a chance here with the admission, but if these people were living in such obvious harmony with such a brutal environment, there was a chance that they at least knew of the goddess of nature. “The Forest Queen.”

  Their expressions and nods told her that she might have hit on a positive thing here.

  “I’d call to her for you,” she continued, “but she doesn’t seem to hear me right now.”

  “I am Ilina,” the woman said. “Your magic has diminished because of Twilight Autunn. The day is ending, the night begins. In this transition, the air will fill with magic of its own making. There is no room for the whispers of your gods or the enchantments of the ancient Weave of Mystra. Even the dragons will not take wing for the next tenday. After that, your magic will slowly return to you.”

  “Dragons? Lovely,” Entreri muttered.

  “In that case, if we may indulge your patience, we will remain—right here, if you please—until then, when we take our leave,” Jarlaxle said. “And if possible, perhaps we might bring Doum’wielle with us.”

  “No,” said Emilian. “You will not remain here. As to your leaving, that remains a question for others to answer.”

  “And Doum’wielle?” Catti-brie asked.


  “Shed your weapons,” Emilian answered without answering. “All of them, and come along.”

  The companions looked to each other doubtfully, but they really had no choice. Without magic, without Taulmaril and Guenhwyvar and the sun blade and their hellsteeds—without all of Jarlaxle’s toys—they had little chance of fighting their way out of there, and where might they go, in any case?

  In silent accord, they stood up and placed their weapons on the ground. Surrounded by a dozen of the drow, weapons drawn, they started off soon after, deeper into the glacial rift.

  Catti-brie took some hope when they departed, for Ilina and another of the group stayed behind and were feeding and playing with the family of foxes.

  The joy of the play was unlike anything she remembered from her short time in Menzoberranzan.

  Part 3

  Callidae

  What a powerful force is this fascination with, this fear of, death. How could it not be so for a reasoning, mortal creature? Mortal in this form, at least.

  We are groomed from childhood, or perhaps it is even innate in any logical being, to prepare for the future, to take actions that will lead us to the place we believe we wish to be. The gods of Faerun have made their positions of power based upon this! For the ultimate future for us all, we know, is not in this short life, but in whatever might come next, if anything (and if nothing, that is perhaps the cruelest possibility).

  Yet, how can we properly prepare other than to give ourselves to a matter of faith? We seek evidence—I have found great hints in my journey of transcendence—and yet that which we can see as such remains hints and little more. This is the ultimate mystery of life, the greatest of all.

  My journey with Kimmuriel has surprised me in a most wonderful way. To see him, the most emotionless person I have ever known, drawn into such discussions of purpose and place, of the point of life and the hopes of what might come next, was more than unexpected. It was shocking, nothing less.

  There is no question of Kimmuriel’s brilliance. He often resides in the vast library of the illithid hive mind, his consciousness flitting effortlessly among the memories and conclusions of that vast repertoire of experience and history. He has mastered a magic very different from that of priestesses like Catti-brie, a spellpower irrelative to the notion of divinity. He has mastered a magic very different from that of Gromph, for Kimmuriel’s is also a spellpower independent of the Weave, the elemental powers, the harnessing of natural energies. His magic is purely intellectual, purely a matter of controlling his own thoughts and emotions and using that intellectual force as a weapon or a thief’s tool.

  Yet here he was beside me, acceding to my demands without questions, revealing his own vulnerabilities in the form of his hopes and fears as he tries to unravel this greatest of mysteries.

  And more than that, I watched him bringing that journey back beyond his personal mind space and to the world around him, including responsibility to community above his responsibility to self—that he is even considering joining in the coming fight for Menzoberranzan for altruistic and moral motivations is something I could never have anticipated. Not from Kimmuriel, whose journey surprises me more than that of Jarlaxle. Jarlaxle’s heart was always hinted at in his actions, whatever other excuse he might make for his consistent generosity and caring. Kimmuriel’s revelations here surprise me more than the journey I have seen in Artemis Entreri, whose path had to lead him through personal darkness, his own inability to look into a mirror and not be horrified by the reflection. For Entreri was as much victim as villain.

  It surprises me even more than the journey of Dab’nay, or that which I am hoping is real within the Matron Mother of Menzoberranzan and the other “true” devotees of the horrid Demon Queen of Spiders. While I suspect, and not without evidence, that much of these doubts regarding the Lolthian clergy is also unintentionally in the service of Lolth, a demonic goddess who values strife and chaos above all else, I am convinced that those who have now seen the awful truth of Lolth will never go back, indeed, will die before reverting.

  Watching the spiritual journeys of all these others, including my own wife, is a powerful reminder to me to ever hold tolerance for those who come to different conclusions than I, and to humble myself in my conclusions.

  For much of my life, I have envied those who have found their answer, their savior, their planned and expected afterlife. I do not say that in any condescending manner, or with any thought at all that because I am not at the same place as those people, I am somehow better or more informed or more correct than they. For what I have understood from the beginning is that this place of faith, this understanding of the multiverse and the continuation of self beyond the mortal coil, is not something one can reach by power of will, or reason. It happens or it does not. It is an epiphany or it is not. I’m not talking about those who follow a religion simply out of tradition, but of those who truly believe.

  Thus, when I say that I envied those who have had their epiphany, I mean it, for I long awaited my own. Now I have found it. At the very least, I have come to understand that there was for me, albeit temporarily, something more, something grander, something freeing—freeing from the fascination and fear of the ultimate conclusion.

  Long ago, I proclaimed my freedom because I knew that I would one day die. That certainty reminded me to grab at every sunrise and sunset, to appreciate the things so many take for granted.

  Now I am freer still, because I have had my epiphany.

  And now I feel even more certain in my agnosticism because I find myself joined by Kimmuriel, a drow of great intellect and great scholarship.

  —Drizzt Do’Urden

  Chapter 15

  The Aevendrow

  “This cavern is called Cascatte,” Ilina explained to Catti-brie and the others as they came up over a rise and into a large chamber that was mostly covered by an ice shelf, but with much of the area open to the sky to allow in enough of the meager daylight to convey Cascatte’s size and majesty.

  The cavern was multitiered, full of blue-white ice formations, the most spectacular of which were the frozen waterfalls, some wide and with thin fans of ice, others narrow and matted to stone walls. It seemed to Catti-brie like a mountain cavern in the spring melt, water bursting from the stones but then flash-frozen, locked in time as if the scene were an artist’s rendering.

  It was colder in here than in the previous area, where the hot spring was more central and dominant, but not brutally so. It warmed comfortably as their hosts led them to the wider floor, where one area was not icy and cold at all, but had that stream running, banks lined with growth—flowers, mostly. Wisps of fog lifted off the warm water, creating a blurriness that sharply contrasted with the crispness of the view from the higher vantage point. Peering past the icy formations, glistening pillars of frozen water, stalagmites of dark rock and blue ice, and fans of waterfalls, Catti-brie noted other lights—home fires, and even a structure or two.

  “Just a few families live here,” Ilina explained, and even as she finished speaking some dogs began to bark. Echoes came at them from every direction. Or perhaps it was more dogs answering. Catti-brie could not be sure. The entire chamber seemed to be alive with the calls, the music.

  The group moved around a procession of stalagmites near the chamber’s left-hand wall. It opened abruptly to the right and the four companions from the southlands were treated to yet another strange sight and shocking surprise. Under the roof of a waterfall fan sat a small cottage of wood and stone. It had a front yard, fenced in with spaced wooden pickets, that was stone near the house, but then more soil and then, nearest them, a long and narrow garden.

  “We should have brought Pikel,” Jarlaxle mumbled, and Catti-brie nearly giggled, thinking that yes, the druid dwarf would have loved this sight, particularly the way the garden had been set to perfectly catch reflections of the daylight off of various sheets of sparkling ice.

  She was about to say that to Jarlaxle when she looked up and even b
etter understood why the rogue had thought of the unusual dwarf. For standing before her on the small porch of the house was a family of dwarves more unusual still—if they even were dwarves! At first she thought them all children, for they were diminutive, shorter than Regis, even, and only one of them had a beard, albeit a small one, to go along with a twisting mustache.

  “Dwarves?” she asked, gasped, more than stated.

  “Inugaakalikurit,” Ilina explained.

  “The what?” Zaknafein asked.

  “Or the kurit, if you will, if that longer name ties your tongue.”

  “So dwarves.”

  Paler than a field of fresh snow, with pinched faces and curly white hair, the folk had the muscles and thick limbs of Delzoun dwarves, to be sure, but with their short frames, they seemed as wide as they were tall. And despite all of that strangeness, the prominent features on each of the five standing before them were their huge eyes, so blue—bright blue, almost glowing from within.

  “Yes.”

  “Then why not call them that?”

  “That is what they call themselves,” said Ilina.

  “What do you call them?” Zak asked.

  “I call that one Kanaq,” the drow woman said with a laugh. “Because that’s his name.”

  “A’aha’ile, Ilina,” said the dwarf with the beard and twirling mustache. “Found some more strays, have nyu, what no, eh?”

  Catti-brie looked to Jarlaxle, who just shrugged his shoulders, as perplexed and stunned as she.

  “They found us.”

  “New aevendrow?” Kanaq seemed truly surprised, as did the other dwarves on the porch.

  “So it would seem, amico,” Emilian answered.

  “What no, eh,” Kanaq said, shaking his head, long and curly white hair bouncing about his broad shoulders.

  “Amico?” Zak whispered under his breath.