Servant of the Shard: The Sellswords

by R. A. Salvatore

  “Something is amiss,” Jarlaxle whispered to Entreri. “The beast expected us and anticipates our movements. It should have risen with attacks, not words.”

  Entreri glanced at him, and back at Hephaestus, the great head swaying back and forth, back and forth. He glanced down at the Crystal Shard, wondering if it had betrayed them to the beast.

  Indeed, Crenshinibon was sending forth its plea at that time, to the beast and against Cadderly’s spellcasting, but it had not been the Crystal Shard that had warned Hephaestus of intruders. No, that distinction fell to a certain dark elf wizard-cleric, hiding in a tunnel across the way along with a handful of drow companions. Right before Cadderly and the others had wind-walked into the lair, Rai-guy had sent a magical whisper to Hephaestus, a warning of intruders and a suggestion that these thieves had come with magic designed to use the creature’s own breath against it.

  Now Rai-guy waited for the appearance of the Crystal Shard, for the moment when he and his companions, including Kimmuriel, could strike hard and begone, their prize in hand.

  “Thieves we are, and we’ll have your treasure!” shouted Jarlaxle. He used a language that none of the others, save Hephaestus, understood, a tongue of the red dragons, and one that the great wyrms believed that few others could begin to master. Jarlaxle, using a whistle that he kept on a chain around his neck, spoke it with perfect inflection. Hephaestus’s head snapped down in line with him, the wyrm’s eyes going wide.

  Entreri dived aside in a roll, coming right back to his feet.

  “What did you say?” the assassin asked.

  Jarlaxle’s fingers worked furiously. He thinks that I am another red dragon.

  There seemed a long, long moment of absolute quiet, of a gigantic hush before a more gigantic storm. Then everything exploded into motion, beginning with Cadderly’s leap forward, his arm extended, finger pointing accusingly at the beast.

  “Hephaestus!” the priest roared at the appropriate moment of spellcasting. “Burn me if you can!”

  It was more than a dare, more than a challenge, and more than a threat. It was a magical compulsion, launched through a powerful spell. Though forewarned by some vague suggestions against the action, Hephaestus sucked in its tremendous breath, the force of the intake drawing Cadderly’s curly brown locks forward onto his face.

  Entreri dived ahead and pulled forth Crenshinibon, tossing it to the floor before the priest. Jarlaxle, even as Hephaestus tilted back its head, came forward with the great exhalation and produced his globe of darkness.

  No! Crenshinibon screamed in Entreri’s head, so powerful and angry a call that the assassin grabbed at his ears and stumbled aside, dazed.

  The artifact’s call was abruptly cut off.

  Hephaestus’s head came forward, a great line of fire roaring down, mocking Jarlaxle’s globe, mocking Cadderly and all his spells.

  Even as the globe of darkness came up over the Crystal Shard, Rai-guy grabbed at it with a spell of telekinesis, a sudden and powerful burst of snatching power that sent the item flying fast across the way, past Hephaestus, who was seemingly oblivious to it, and down the corridor to the hiding wizard-cleric’s waiting hand.

  Rai-guy’s red-glowing eyes narrowed as he turned to regard Kimmuriel, for it had been Kimmuriel’s task to so snatch the item— a task the psionicist had apparently neglected.

  I was not fast enough, the psionicist’s fingers waggled at his companion.

  But Rai-guy knew better, and so did Crenshinibon, for the powers of the mind were among the quickest of magic to enact. Still staring hard at his companion, Rai-guy began spellcasting once more, aiming for the great chamber.

  On and on went the fiery maelstrom, and in the middle of it stood Cadderly, his arms out wide, praying to Deneir to see him through.

  Danica, Ivan, and Pikel stared at him intently, praying as well, but Jarlaxle was more concerned with his darkness, and Entreri was looking more to Jarlaxle.

  “I hear not the continuing call of Crenshinibon!” Entreri cried hopefully above the fiery roar.

  Jarlaxle was shaking his head. “The darkness should have been consumed by the artifact’s destruction,” he cried back, sensing that something was terribly, terribly wrong.

  The fires ended, leaving a seething Hephaestus still staring at the unharmed priest of Deneir. The dragon’s eyes narrowed to threatening slits.

  Jarlaxle dispelled his darkness globe, and there remained no sign of Crenshinibon among the bubbling, molten stone.

  “We done it!” Ivan cried.

  “Home!” Pikel pleaded.

  “No,” insisted Jarlaxle.

  Before he could explain, a low humming sound filled the chamber, a noise the dark elf had heard before and one that didn’t strike him as overly pleasant at that dangerous moment.

  “A magical dispel!” the dark elf warned. “Our enchantments are threatened!”

  This left them, they all realized, in a room with an outraged, ancient, huge red dragon without many of their protections in place.

  “What d’ we do?” Ivan growled, slapping the handle of his battle axe across his open palm.

  “Wee!” Pikel answered.

  “Wee?” the perplexed yellow-bearded dwarf echoed, his face screwed up as he stared at his green-haired brother.

  “Wee!” Pikel said again, and to accentuate his point, he grabbed Ivan by the collar and ran him a short distance to the side, to the edge of a crevice, and leaped off, taking Ivan on the dive with him.

  Hephaestus’s great wings beat the air, lifting the huge wyrm’s front half high above the floor. Its hind legs clawed at the floor, digging deep gullies in the stone.

  “Run away!” Cadderly cried, agreeing wholeheartedly with Pikel’s choice. “All of you!”

  Danica rushed forward, as did Jarlaxle, the woman rolling into a ready crouch before the wyrm. Hephaestus wasted not a second in snapping its great maw down at her. She scrambled aside, coming up from her roll in a crouch again, taunting the beast.

  Cadderly couldn’t watch it, reminding himself that he simply had to trust in her. She was buying him precious moments, he knew, that he might launch another magical attack or defensive spell, perhaps, at Hephaestus. He fell into the song of Deneir again and heard its notes more clearly this time, as he sorted through an array of spells to launch.

  He heard a scream, Danica’s scream, and he looked up to see Hephaestus’s fiery breath drive down upon her, striking the stone floor and spraying up in an inverted fan of fires.

  Cadderly, too, cried out, and reached desperately into the song of Deneir for the first spell he could find that would alter that horrible scene, the first enchantment he could think of to stop it.

  He brought forth an earthquake.

  Even as it started—a violent shudder and rumbling, like waves on a pond, lifting and rolling the floor—Jarlaxle drew the dragon’s attention his way by hitting the beast with a stream of stinging daggers.

  Entreri, too, moved—and surprised himself by going ahead instead of back, toward the spot where Hephaestus had just breathed.

  There, too, there was only bubbling stone.

  Cadderly called out for Danica, desperately, but his voice fell away as the floor collapsed beneath him.

  “Let us begone, and quickly,” Kimmuriel remarked, “before the great wyrm recognizes that there were more than those six intruders in its lair this day.”

  He and the other drow had already moved some distance down the tunnel, away from the main chamber. Leaving altogether seemed a prudent suggestion, one that had Berg’inyon Baenre and the other five drow soldiers nodding eagerly, but one that, for some reason, did not seem acceptable to the stern Rai-guy.

  “No,” he said firmly. “They must all die, here and now.”

  “As the dragon will likely kill them,” Berg’inyon agreed, but Rai-guy was shaking his head, indicating that such a probability simply wasn’t good enough for him.

  Rai-guy and Crenshinibon were already fully into their
bonding by then. The Crystal Shard demanded that Cadderly and the others, these infidels who understood the secret to its destruction, be killed immediately. It demanded that nothing concerning the group be left to chance. Besides, it telepathically coaxed Rai-guy, would not a red dragon be an enormous asset to add to Bregan D’aerthe?

  “Find them and kill them, every one!” Rai-guy demanded emphatically.

  Berg’inyon considered the command, and broke his soldiers into two groups and ran off with one group, the other heading a different direction. Kimmuriel spent a longer time staring hard at Rai-guy, seeming less than pleased. He, too, disappeared eventually, seemed simply to fall through the floor.

  Leaving Rai-guy alone with his newest and most beloved ally.

  In an alcove off to the side of the tunnel where Rai-guy stood, Yharaskrik’s less-than-corporeal form slid through the stone and materialized, the illithid’s Crenshinibon-defeating lantern in its hand.

  CHAPTER

  CHAOS

  24

  With skills honed to absolute perfection, Danica had avoided the flames by a short distance, close enough so that her skin was bright red on the left side of her face. No magic would aid Danica now, she knew, only her thousands and thousands of hours of difficult training, those many years she had spent perfecting her style of fighting and, more importantly, dodging. Danica had no intention of battling the great wyrm, of striking out in any offensive manner against a beast she doubted she could even hurt, let alone slay. All her abilities, all her energy and concentration, was solely on the defensive now, her posture a balanced crouch that would allow her to skitter out to either side, ahead, or back.

  Hephaestus’s fang-filled jaws snapped down at her with a tremendous clapping noise, but the dragon hit only air as the monk dived out to the right. A claw followed, a swipe that surely would have cut Danica into pieces, except that she altered the momentum of her roll to go straight back in a sudden retreat.

  Then came the breath, another burst of fire that seemed to go on and on forever.

  Danica had to dive and roll a couple of times to put out the flames on the back side of her clothing. Sensing that Hephaestus had noted her escape and would adjust the line of fiery breath, she cut a fast corner around a jag in the wall, throwing herself flat against the stone behind the protective rock.

  She noted two figures then. Artemis Entreri was running her way, but leaping short of her position into a wide crevice that had opened with Cadderly’s earthquake. The strange dark elf, Jarlaxle, skittered behind the dragon, and to Danica’s astonishment, launched a spell Hephaestus’s way. A sudden arc of lightning caught the dragon’s attention and gave Danica a moment of freedom. She didn’t waste it.

  Danica ran flat out, leaping even as the spinning Hephaestus swept its great tail around to squash her. She disappeared into the same crevice as had Artemis Entreri.

  She knew as soon as she crossed the lip of the crack that she was in trouble—but still far less trouble, she supposed, than she would have found back in the dragon’s lair. The descent twisted and turned, lined with broken and often sharp-edged, stone. Again Danica’s training came into play, her hands and legs working furiously to buffer the blows and slow her descent. Some distance down, the crack opened into a chamber, and Danica had nothing to hold onto for the last twenty feet of her drop. Still, she coordinated her movements so that she landed feet first, but with her legs turned slightly, propelling her into a sidelong somersault. She tumbled over and over again, her roll absorbing the momentum of the fall.

  She came up to her feet a few moments later, and there before her, leaning on a wall looking bruised but hardly battered, stood Artemis Entreri. He was staring at her intently and held a lit torch in his hand but tossed it aside as soon as Danica took note of him.

  “I had thought you consumed by the first of Hephaestus’s fires,” the assassin remarked, coming away from the wall and drawing both sword and dagger, the smaller blade glowing with a white, fiery light.

  “One cannot always get what one most wants,” the woman answered coldly.

  “You have hated me since the moment you saw me,” the assassin remarked, ending with a chuckle to show that he hardly cared.

  “Long before that, Artemis Entreri,” Danica replied coldly, and she advanced a step, eyeing the assassin’s weapons intently.

  “We know not what enemies we will find down here,” Entreri explained, but he knew even as he said the words, as he looked upon Danica’s mask of hatred, that no explanation would suffice, that anything short of his surrender to her would invite her wrath. Artemis Entreri had little desire to battle the woman, to do any unnecessary fighting down here, but neither would he shy from any fight.

  “Indeed,” was all that Danica answered. She continued coming forward.

  This had been coming for some time, both knew, and despite the fact that they were both separated from their respective companions, despite the fact that an angry dragon was barely fifty feet above their heads, and all of it in a cavern that seemed on the verge of complete collapse, Danica saw this encounter as more than an opportunity but a necessity.

  For all his logic and common sense, Artemis Entreri really wasn’t disappointed by her feelings.

  As soon as Hephaestus began its stunningly fast spin, Jarlaxle had to question the wisdom of his distracting lightning bolt. Still, the drow had reacted as any ally would, taking the beast’s attention so that both Entreri and the woman might escape.

  In truth, after the initial shock of seeing an outraged red dragon turning at him, Jarlaxle wasn’t overly worried. Despite the powerful dispel that had saturated the room—too powerful a spell for any dragon to cast, the mercenary leader recognized—Jarlaxle remained confident that he possessed enough tricks to get away from this one.

  Hephaestus’s great jaws snapped down at the drow, who was standing perfectly still and seemed an easy target. The magic of Jarlaxle’s cloak forced the wyrm to miss, and Hephaestus roared all the louder when its head slammed into a solid wall.

  Next, predictably, came the fiery breath, but even as Hephaestus began its great exhale, Jarlaxle waggled a ringed finger, opening a dimension door that brought him behind the dragon. He could have simply skittered away then, but he wanted to hold the beast at bay a little bit longer. Out came a wand, one of several the drow carried, and it spewed a gob of greenish semiliquid at the very tip of Hephaestus’s twitching tail.

  “Now you are caught!” Jarlaxle proclaimed loudly as the fiery breath at last ceased.

  Hephaestus spun around again, and indeed, the wyrm’s tail looped about, its end stuck fast by the temporary but incredibly effective goo.

  Jarlaxle let fly another wad from the wand, this one smacking the dragon in the face.

  Of course, then Jarlaxle remembered why he had never wanted to face such a beast as this again, for Hephaestus went into a terrific frenzy, issuing growls through its clamped mouth that resonated through the very stones of the cavern. It thrashed about so wildly its tail tore the stone from the floor.

  With a tip of his wide-brimmed hat, the mercenary drow called upon his magical ring again, one of the last portal-enacting enchantments it could offer, and disappeared back behind the wyrm, a bit further along the wall than he had been before his first dimension door. There was another exit from the room back there, one that Jarlaxle suspected would bring him to some old friends.

  Some old friends who likely had the Crystal Shard, he knew, for certainly it had not been destroyed by Hephaestus’s first breath, certainly it had been magically stolen away right before the powerful magic-defeating spell had filled the room.

  The last thing Jarlaxle wanted was for Rai-guy and Kimmuriel to get their hands on the Crystal Shard and, undoubtedly, come looking for him once more.

  He was out of the cavern a moment later, the thunderous sounds of Hephaestus’s thrashing thankfully left behind. He reached up into his marvelous hat and brought forth a piece of black cloth in the shape of a small bat
. He whispered a few magical words and tossed it into the air. The cloth swatch transformed into a living, breathing creature, a servant of its creator that fluttered back to Jarlaxle’s shoulder. The drow whispered some instructions into its ear and tossed it up before him again, and his little scout flew off into the gloom.

  “We will take Hephaestus as our own,” Rai-guy whispered to the Crystal Shard, the drow considering all the great gains that might be made this day. Logically, the dark elf knew he should be well on his way out of the place, for could Kimmuriel and the others really defeat Jarlaxle and the powerful companions he had brought to the dragon’s lair?

  Rai-guy smiled, hardly afraid, for how could he be fearful with Crenshinibon in his possession? Soon, very soon, he knew, he would be allied with a great wyrm. He turned and started down the wide tunnel toward the main chamber of Hephaestus’s lair.

  He noticed some movement off to the side, in an alcove, and Crenshinibon screamed a warning in his head.

  Yharaskrik stepped out, not ten paces away. The tentacles around the illithid’s mouth were waving menacingly.

  “Kimmuriel’s friend, no doubt,” the dark elf remarked, “who betrayed Kohrin Soulez.”

  Betrayal implies alliance, Yharaskrik telepathically answered. There was no betrayal.

  “If you were to venture here with us, then why not do so openly?” the drow asked.

  I came for you, not with you, the ever-confident illithid answered.

  Rai-guy understood well what was going on, for the Crystal Shard was making its abject hatred of the creature quite apparent in his thoughts.