Starlight Enclave

by R. A. Salvatore

  “I thought you said the dwarves had their own rules out there,” Jarlaxle noted.

  “Kanaq moved his family out of the boroughs when some new kurit came to us,” Ilina explained. “They are still full citizens of Callidae, and he of Scellobel, but they are often on their own to deal with . . . well, whatever monster wanders in from the ice pack. Because of their heightened patrols and their most important work, we think it prudent to only minimally bother them.

  “Mona Chess is the oldest of the boroughs,” she continued, “and the one most natural in size, but also most resplendent in structures. All of the other boroughs were expanded by great effort and labor as our population expanded. This next avenue follows a parallel road, which runs through the northwest corner of Mona Chess to Ardin.”

  “Garden,” Catti-brie translated.

  “Very good,” Ilina congratulated her. “Yes, the garden, and also the place of the muskox herd. You can visit there now, but I would not advise it anytime around the Conception Verdant, for the muskoxen tend to smell quite terrible when they are chasing mates!”

  “What is a muskox?” Entreri asked.

  “A huge animal,” Ilina said. “Huge and hairy, with great horns and cloven hooves. They are peaceful enough and feast on grasses all the day long, and the kurit make of their milk the most delicious of cheeses.”

  “To put with persimmons,” Jarlaxle said.

  “You make light of it,” Ilina said with a chuckle of her own, “but once you taste it, you will offer me your gratitude, I promise.”

  “I look forward to it, lady,” Jarlaxle said with a grin.

  “Most of the carts you will see along the streets here in Scellobel are full of food from Ardin. Every day, the farmhands load their wagons with the produce from the gardens and walk the miles to the other boroughs, then return with carts laden with goods from each.”

  “And muskox steak?” Entreri asked, and Ilina cast him a puzzled look.

  “Meat,” he explained.

  “Oh, no no no no,” the woman said. “We do not slaughter the muskoxen, or the eider or puffins you see around you who give us fresh eggs.” She pointed to a nearby house, where a group of black-and-white duck-like birds with distinctive circular orange plates above their bills milled about.

  “I know puffins,” Catti-brie said. “There are colonies on the Sea of Moving Ice.”

  “Do they taste like duck?” Entreri quipped. “They look like ducks.”

  “They are tasty,” Ilina said, “but we do not slaughter them.”

  “Then how do you know what they taste like?”

  “We are past that,” the aevendrow explained. “Our priests create food. We do not slaughter any animals.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Catti-brie.

  “Bland bread,” Entreri put in.

  “We have spent centuries perfecting the spells of conjuration,” Ilina said. “Our creations are wondrous, particularly the food.”

  “Take some lessons before we leave, I beg,” Entreri told Catti-brie.

  “B’shett,” Ilina said, pointing to the bottommost signpost, indicating a boulevard that ran to the northwest, along the western hillside of the prow. “A small and narrow forest of tall larch that provides the wood you see in the fences, the doors, the handles of our spears, and even some houses. The passage from Scellobel to B’shett is not long, but I would not bother with the journey at this time of the year if you have other things you wish to see or do. The birdsong is wonderful—sometimes you can hear the melodies echoing all the way into northern Scellobel—but B’shett is the darkest of the boroughs, with little sky above, and the coldest by far, as the narrow channel catches the wind and tightens it. If you do decide to spend some time there, I will take you to the inquisitors to see if they will grant permission for you to visit the tailors and get some clothes like mine.” She tapped the dark gray sleeve of her snug-fitting shirt. “It replicates the skin of the seals, as the fur on the robes you now wear replicates that of the white foxes. It is incredibly warm, and the cold rain or melting snow can’t get through. It would be better, of course, if you were to visit after the Twilight Autunn, because the tailor could make you clothes to fit perfectly. But they have extras on their racks that will do, I am sure.”

  “Replicate?” Jarlaxle and Catti-brie asked together.

  “We don’t hunt the seals or the foxes,” Ilina said. “There is no need. What is magic for, if not comfort and food?”

  Jarlaxle could barely hide his grin, and Catti-brie knew that he was seeing a marvelous economic opportunity here.

  “This fifth sign, the one you skipped and whose name is crossed out?” Zaknafein asked. “Cattisola?”

  A dark cloud passed over Ilina’s face. “It is gone. Many decades gone. It was wooded, less so than B’shett, and with many tunnels leading deeper into the glacier and even some moving outside through cracks in the ice. It was a place of great conflict—my mother and father fought there for many years. One of my uncles was killed there. But that is a century and more past, and it is quiet now, forevermore, we expect.”

  “In the hands of enemies?” Jarlaxle asked with concern.

  “Devoured by the advance of the glacier,” Ilina said.

  “But enough of that,” she added, clapping her hands together. “Explore as you will, but hear my word that you are in the best of the boroughs. We make the wine.”

  Her eyes lit up with infectious enthusiasm.

  “Here in Scellobel, you hear the calming, chanting songs of the kurit, the drums of the arktos orok, the flutes of the Ulutiuns. Here we have the widest sky, and you will appreciate that when twilight turns to night and the air fills with waves of magic, I promise. And we Scellobelans are the best of fighters. We won cazzcalci last year and will win again! You will see.

  “But I have kept you long enough,” she said. “I can go with you if you insist, but I think it better that you wander as you will. Throw away the weariness of your journey. Enjoy the smells and the sounds, and the food—just ask. There is no cost, though you might be asked to trade a tale. We don’t get many visitors, as you must understand. Indulge in the ice wine, but take care. It is so tasty that you do not realize how much you imbibe until it is too late and your head feels as if it had been stepped on by a fat muskox.”

  She bowed and turned to go.

  “What more will you ask of us?” Jarlaxle said, turning her back.

  “Oh, much, I expect,” Ilina answered. “Stories, I mean. We would like to know of your lands, especially from your human friends. You understand our curiosity? If I walked into your homeland, would your Temporal Convocation not wish the same from me?”

  “Oh, indeed they would,” Jarlaxle said, and he felt his eye twitch at the mere thought of Menzoberranzan’s Ruling Council.

  Ilina smiled and left them.

  “At the end of a serpent scourge,” Zaknafein added when she was gone, now talking in the Common tongue of the surface world, far removed from the Drow language they had thus far heard spoken here. “I hope there are no snakes up here.”

  “I’ll settle for no spiders,” Entreri said.

  “We’ve been invited to explore, so let us do so,” Jarlaxle told them, and Catti-brie saw right through any pretense of seriousness and did not miss his bubbling excitement.

  “They said Doum’wielle is dead, and was lost far from here,” Catti-brie reminded him.

  “We haven’t got Khazid’hea,” Jarlaxle replied. “Nor you your magic.”

  “We can make quiet inquiries,” Zak offered.

  Jarlaxle nodded. “Very quiet, but our quest is on hold if everything we have learned is true. If Doum’wielle is here, why would they have tried to conceal it?”

  “Maybe she’s in a prison,” said Entreri.

  Jarlaxle shrugged, and seemed to Catti-brie to so easily discount that possibility. “And what would you have us do about that? No weapons. No magic.”

  “We can get weapons if we need them,” Entreri assure
d him.

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Jarlaxle. “They may call themselves the aevendrow, but they are drow, and so they are formidable. We are four, only four, and they are what? Fifteen thousand here in this borough alone, to say nothing of the thousands of other peoples? If you had been dropped into Menzoberranzan, would you be quick to make such a suggestion?”

  “Were I dropped into Menzoberranzan, I’d already be fighting my way out, or dead,” the stubborn Entreri answered.

  “But this is not Menzoberranzan,” said Jarlaxle.

  “So you believe.”

  “Indeed,” he answered.

  “Because you want to believe,” Entreri replied, and Catti-brie was glad he had said it so she didn’t have to.

  Because when the remark led to another dismissive shrug and a nod from Jarlaxle, she found her suspicions regarding the too-clever rogue, regarding this entire expedition, more fully confirmed.

  “Come,” Jarlaxle told them. “The best way to learn of a new place is simply to walk the ways and meet the commonfolk. We have already seen so much, yet have barely hinted at the surprises of this place, I am confident.”

  Too confident, Catti-brie thought.

  “You know that they are watching us,” Zak said as they started on their way.

  “I’d lose respect for them if they were not, and so would you,” Jarlaxle answered.

  Very soon after they left the signpost, Artemis Entreri’s hope were dashed, for down the far end of the very first avenue they traveled, the companions found a fenced-in field of abandoned old carts, scraggly trees and bushes, and spiders. Huge white spiders, as large as a fist, spinning beautiful webs and long filaments that reached from tree to tree to upturned cart.

  At the end of the fence was a small cottage, and beyond that a waist-high stone wall and some kind of a waterwheel, creaking and sloshing.

  Entreri turned a sly look on Jarlaxle. “Well?”

  “It means nothing,” he replied, but not very convincingly.

  “It means they have spiders,” said Entreri.

  “Luskan has spiders,” Jarlaxle countered. “Gauntlgrym has spiders. Waterdeep has spiders. Calimport has spiders. Everywhere has spiders!”

  “Like that?” Entreri retorted. “If we saw a field like that in Luskan, we’d hire the Hosttower to reduce the whole of it to ash in short order.”

  “Assume nothing,” Jarlaxle told him.

  “I’m not. But you seem to be.”

  The companions moved down the fence line toward the waterwheel on the other side of the cottage for a closer look, and began waving hands before their faces at the smell. They stayed, though, caught by a most curious sight.

  A large yard, perhaps a quarter of an acre, was hemmed in by walls, even one built against the glacial ice, which had been carved into a deep and wide alcove. Both in the alcove and here near the opposite wall were pools of water, and the turning wheel seemed now in the process of transferring the fluid from the nearest pool back under the icy alcove.

  The water nearest them lowered with every turn of the wheel, and they could soon see the pool teeming with writhing eel- or snakelike creatures.

  Catti-brie crinkled her nose and brought her hand up over her face.

  “Not everything here is beautiful, it seems,” Jarlaxle admitted, and he contorted his mouth to get the taste of the stench out.

  “What in the Nine Hells?” asked Zak when one of those creatures came forth—slithering out of the water, seeming more snail than snake. Or maybe it was an eel, or maybe a long and narrow fish. He couldn’t tell, but whatever it was, it began crawling across the stony yard, and also secreting a thick mucus.

  Then came the others, dozens of them, crawling, even somewhat swimming through the viscous liquid that spread about them, covering the ground in a gooey sheen and filling the air with a most disgusting odor.

  “Hags!” came a call from the door of the cottage, and the friends turned to see an aevendrow standing there, hands on hips. “Ah, newcomers! Well, don’t stand there when the hags are crawling. You will taste that smell in your food for a tenday!”

  They started back along the wall, and the drow waved them into his cottage—his boutique, they soon discovered.

  “Hags, you called them,” Catti-brie said as she entered beside the drow.

  “Phlegm fish,” he explained. “Hags, yes, or hagfish.”

  “Why do you let them so near your house?”

  “Oh, I don’t live here. I, we . . .” He waved his hand around at several others, drow and kurit dwarf, working looms or needles, a pair of dwarves wearing full masks over at a long trough at the far end of the room, stirring long paddles. “We create here.”

  “Tailors,” Entreri realized. “That explains the spiders.” The look on the drow’s face clued the others in to the fact that Entreri had spoken in the Common tongue of the surface, not in Drow. Entreri caught it, too, and quickly repeated his words so their host could understand.

  “Ah, yes, wretched eight-legged little beasts,” the aevendrow said. “They eat the bugs, and there are plenty, but sometimes, alas, a baby puffin wanders too near. We are constantly reinforcing the fence to keep wandering chicks out and the spiders in.”

  “They are caged?” Jarlaxle asked, and he cast a hopeful glance at his companions.

  “Caging a spider in Menzoberranzan would get you killed,” Zak told Entreri and Catti-brie in surface Common.

  “They are native to the land and Qadeej,” the aevendrow answered. “Whenever a Scellobelan finds one, if they don’t reflexively stomp it, they call to us and we collect the beast. You see, the white spiders create the very strongest and smoothest threads.”

  “A spider can crawl over a fence,” Entreri reminded him.

  “Ah, but they won’t cross the hag phlegm,” the tailor replied.

  “So that’s why the hags?” Catti-brie asked. “But still, that smell!”

  “The smell doesn’t last when the mucus is treated and dried,” the aevendrow told her. “But no, the hags are not just for the spiders—we could cage them in other ways. That mucus helps us make the finest armor in the world, and it will keep you warm, too. You won’t even know you’re wearing a glove of it when you put it over your hand. Let me show you.”

  “Magnificent,” Jarlaxle said as they walked away from the small cottage a short while later. He flexed the fingers of his left hand, stretching and bending as he admired the silk-and-mucus gloves he had been given by the tailor. They were mostly white, but shot with lines of bright orange in the delicate design of a calendula, the stitching so fine and intricate that it made the glove appear almost as if it were lace instead of solid cloth.

  “You’re welcome,” said Zaknafein, whose rousing tale of Jarlaxle’s hair loss had paid for the gloves.

  “They are beautiful,” Catti-brie admitted.

  “They are more than that,” Jarlaxle explained. He pulled off the glove and handed it to her. “It feels as if I am wearing nothing at all, as if my skin is simply smoother and softer. And yet, there is something of weight stitched into it—there is some mucus in there, I am sure.”

  Catti-brie slipped it on, considered it for a moment, then nodded her agreement.

  “Armor, he said,” Jarlaxle said. “And perhaps a weapon, like the metal knuckles the thugs in Luskan often quietly put on before a brawl.”

  Entreri snorted and shook his head, looking positively disgusted.

  “What is it?” Jarlaxle asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “There is no ‘nothing’ here,” Catti-brie scolded him. “We are guests or we are prisoners in this strange land. No feeling, intuition, or fear should be kept silent.”

  “Look around us,” Entreri said, and he directed the attention of the others to a wide stair leading up to a grand building one block over, where several aevendrow were engaged in what seemed to be a dancing contest while a crowd at the base of the steps clapped out a rhythm. “They show a gaiety, a zest, a soft edge. Like
that glove. Are they, too, lined with weighted mucus?”

  “It’s their time of celebration,” Catti-brie reminded. “They survive up here in as difficult a terrain as any we’ve known. Perhaps they just set aside some days to enjoy life? Is that such a bad thing? They take pleasure in beauty, clearly,” she added, pointing out a group of younger drow moving along the road, dressed in revealing and seductive clothing in bright colors.

  “You think it all a ruse?” Jarlaxle asked Entreri.

  He seemed to be contemplating the question, so Catti-brie said, “Even the people who fear and loathe the drow of Menzoberranzan could not deny the beauty of a high priestess’s robes, or even the garb of a houseless rogue, for that matter. It seems that we’ve stumbled upon an enclave of drow who collectively favor Jarlaxle’s flamboyant style.”

  “They are pale shadows of Jarlaxle,” Jarlaxle assured her with a grin.

  “Maybe that’s why Artemis Entreri is uncomfortable,” Zak remarked.

  “They’re not coaxing us into vulnerability,” Catti-brie stated flatly. “This is not a show before us. What would justify such an elaborate ruse to four weary travelers who are without weapons or power?”

  “Or it’s all an illusion,” Entreri said. “Such things are not unknown.”

  “Magic isn’t functioning,” said Catti-brie.

  “Our magic isn’t working,” Entreri corrected.

  Jarlaxle looked to Zak. “And I thought you the most cynical,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Have you forgotten the story of Wulfgar’s torment in the Abyss?” asked Entreri. “The worst of the torture was showing him that which he most desired, then tearing it from him. It’s not cynicism on my part, just proper caution.”

  “Or perhaps we’ve all just gone mad from a circling sun,” Jarlaxle scoffed. “It is what we see. It is only our fear that makes it more.”

  “You seem very certain of that,” Catti-brie accused.

  Before Jarlaxle could answer, Entreri reminded them, “They have spiders.”

  “And keep them in a manner highly illegal in Menzoberranzan,” said Zak.