Maestro

by R. A. Salvatore

  “We know what we must do,” Penelope said seriously.

  “The Hosttower?”

  “It must be rebuilt, or Gauntlgrym will prove a short-lived victory,” said Catti-brie. “There is no doubt that without the power of the ancient magic delivering the water elementals to the prison, the fiery primordial will soon enough break free. The resulting eruption will ruin Bruenor’s kingdom … and what else? Will Neverwinter again be buried under a mountain of ash? Waterdeep, perhaps?”

  “You know this?”

  “I know this.” Catti-brie held up her hand to display the Ring of Elemental Command that Drizzt had taken from the body of the drow wizard, Brack’thal Xorlarrin, and given to her.

  “How long do we have?”

  “A decade?” She didn’t seem very certain.

  “And how long to rebuild the Hosttower of the Arcane?” Drizzt asked. “Can you even hope to accomplish such a task? Is the magic still understood? Do the spells remain to access? It was built many ages ago, by all that I have heard, and we have since passed the Time of Troubles, the Spellplague, the return of Abeir …”

  “I do not know,” Catti-brie bluntly admitted.

  “We cannot know until we begin,” Penelope added. “But all of the Ivy Mansion will join in as we can. We will open our library and cast our spells as needed.”

  “We cannot know the course until the first stones are reassembled,” Catti-brie agreed.

  “You cannot know that you will know the course even then,” said Drizzt, and the women had no rebuke for that logic. They were in wholly unexplored territory here, dealing with magic that the world had not seen in millennia.

  “We will find assistance from many quarters,” Penelope replied. “Your friend Jarlaxle controls the city, and he understands the urgent need for this. He believes, too, that rebuilding the Hosttower will serve his own needs.”

  “The Harpells will ally with Bregan D’aerthe?”

  “Jarlaxle allied with Bruenor,” Catti-brie reminded him.

  Drizzt started to reply, but bit it back and just heaved a confused sigh instead. What else might be said of Jarlaxle other than a confused sigh, after all? Once again, Jarlaxle had saved Drizzt’s life when Doum’wielle, wielding Khazid’hea, had mortally wounded him. Surely the level of Jarlaxle’s involvement in securing the Forge and the lower levels of Gauntlgrym went well beyond what the friends had witnessed, and could not be understated. Jarlaxle had convinced House Xorlarrin that to wage war against Bruenor’s legions would not serve them well, and had he not done so, how many dwarves would have gone to their graves under the barrage of Xorlarrin magic?

  “I expect that Jarlaxle will provide great insight,” Drizzt had to admit. “He has contacts across Faerûn and beyond. He consorts with dragons! Likely, he will prove to be your greatest resource in this journey.”

  Again the two women exchanged a look, and Drizzt stared at them curiously.

  “He will be valuable, but more so will be the Archmage Gromph Baenre, I expect,” said Catti-brie.

  Drizzt felt as if he would simply slide off Andahar’s side and crumble to the ground. “Gromph Baenre?” he mouthed in reply.

  “He has lived more than eight centuries and has ready access to, and intimate knowledge of, spells that were long forgotten before the Time of Troubles even. Is there anyone in the Realms, save perhaps Elminster himself, wherever he might be, more prepared for such a task as this?”

  “He is Baenre,” Drizzt said evenly, as if that should be enough—and normally, it most certainly would be.

  “He is indebted to Jarlaxle, and cannot return to Menzoberranzan. Or so said Jarlaxle, though I know not why.”

  Drizzt had heard as much. He tried to focus on those truths and set aside his deeper fears—fears of House Baenre that every dark elf who was not Baenre had judiciously whipped into him from his earliest days.

  “You really intend to pursue this?” he asked at length.

  “I have no choice.”

  “You have every choice!” Drizzt insisted. “This is a Baenre, and a wizard beyond the power of all but a very few. Elminster himself would deal carefully with the likes of Archmage Gromph Baenre! He is drow through and through, and he is Baenre through and through, and so not to be trusted.”

  “He needs Jarlaxle.”

  “For now. But that may change, and if it does, what will it concern Gromph to destroy you, all of you, and take the tower for his own?”

  “He can have the tower as his own!” Catti-brie retorted. “As long as the magic is flowing to Gauntlgrym to keep the beast in its pit.”

  “And what blackmail might Gromph demand of King Bruenor when such power as that is in his control?” Drizzt asked.

  The responding expressions, winces of discomfort from both, showed that the two were well aware of that possibility.

  “Jarlaxle will prevent that,” Catti-brie said.

  “Jarlaxle has little power over the Archmage of Menzoberranzan!”

  “What choice do we have?” Catti-brie yelled back at Drizzt. “What choice, my love? Are we to abandon this quest and so abandon Gauntlgrym, and so let the primordial roar forth once more to lay devastation about the Sword Coast?”

  Drizzt didn’t really have an answer to that.

  “Jarlaxle has assured us that Gromph’s position is compromised right now,” Penelope added. “This will be to Gromph’s benefit as well, and he is pragmatic above all else. And Luskan is fully under Jarlaxle’s control—even Gromph does not dispute that. Would the archmage deem it worthwhile to do battle with the whole of Jarlaxle’s band?”

  Drizzt was hardly listening by that point, his stare locked by Catti-brie, the woman silently pleading with him to trust her with these decisions. And Drizzt knew that he should. Catti-brie’s understanding of what needed to be done was much greater than anything he might discern.

  But he feared that she did not as well understand the webs of the drow, how easily she might be caught in those ultimately sticky filaments, and how difficult it would be to ever escape.

  “ANY GUILT YOU might feel is surely misplaced. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else,” Jarlaxle remarked to Gromph when he caught up to the archmage in a suite of rooms Gromph had taken as his own in Illusk, the ancient Undercity buried beneath the common graveyard of Luskan.

  Gromph arched an eyebrow at the mercenary, his expression uncertain, but certainly not appreciative.

  “We have word of other demon lords walking the ways of the Underdark,” Jarlaxle explained. “Zuggtmoy, the Lady of Fungi, is rumored to be holding court among a large gathering of myconids. Orcus is said to be about, as is Graz’zt. The Underdark is less inviting than before, it would seem, and that is no small feat.”

  “Rumors,” Gromph muttered, denying the premise.

  That made sense to Jarlaxle and confirmed many of his suspicions. Gromph knew what he had done. The archmage understood that his mighty spell had wrenched Demogorgon from the Abyss and in doing so, had likely broken the protective planar barrier formed within the magic of the Faerzress.

  “It would seem that your summoning was part of a larger invasion by the Abyssal lords,” Jarlaxle said.

  “Rumors!” Gromph emphatically roared. “Have you considered that perhaps Demogorgon brought them forth?”

  “He would not,” Jarlaxle replied, shaking his head resolutely. “No, there is something bigger afoot.”

  “Concern yourself with the matters of Luskan, Jarlaxle,” Gromph warned, his voice ominous and threatening. “Leave the greater truths to those of greater understanding.”

  Jarlaxle bowed at that, as much to hide his knowing grin as to mollify his volatile brother.

  “Where is that creature you claim as a peer?” Gromph demanded.

  The one you consider your tutor? Jarlaxle thought, but very wisely did not say. “Seeking answers, I would hope.”

  “In the Abyss?”

  Jarlaxle nearly laughed out loud. “Where Kimmuriel always
seeks his answers,” he replied. “At the hive-mind, of course. The illithids know everything in the multiverse, if one is to believe Kimmuriel.”

  “Bring him to me.”

  Jarlaxle’s expression grew doubtful.

  “I wish to speak with him,” Gromph added. “Bring him here, as soon as you can.”

  “Of course,” Jarlaxle replied, though of course he had no intention of doing any such thing. Kimmuriel had gone to the hive-mind of the illithids to search for answers, and that was no place Jarlaxle ever intended to visit. But the psionicist had also gone there, posthaste, to get away from Gromph. Jarlaxle hadn’t pieced it all together yet, but he was quite suspicious that Kimmuriel had played more than a little role in the disaster Gromph had brought about by inadvertently summoning Demogorgon to Menzoberranzan.

  It might prove beneficial to keep Kimmuriel at the hive-mind for the time being in any case, and not just for Kimmuriel’s own sake. If any race in the multiverse could aid in rediscovering the magic that had created the Hosttower of the Arcane, it would be the illithids. Time itself, the passing of millennia even, seemed no barrier to those strange creatures and their vast repository of knowledge.

  “Perhaps Kimmuriel will garner some information as to how we might be rid of the demon lords,” Jarlaxle offered, and that, too, was an honest hope.

  “Demon lord,” Gromph corrected. “We know of one, Demogorgon. The rest is speculation.”

  “Even if it is just one …” Jarlaxle conceded with a shrug

  And that one alone was catastrophe on a monumental scale. Who was going to remove Demogorgon, the Prince of Demons, from the Underdark? Not Gromph, who had fled the scene screaming and tearing at his own eyes. Not Jarlaxle, who had no intention of doing battle with any demon lord. Jarlaxle was quite enamored of his current life.

  “You will tell me everything Kimmuriel learns,” the archmage said at length. “And when he returns, you will deliver him to me immediately.”

  “Deliver him?” Jarlaxle shrugged and offered a meek smile.

  “What?” Gromph demanded.

  “Kimmuriel is a leader of Bregan D’aerthe, dear Gromph, and as such, he is free to make his own choices,” Jarlaxle explained. “I will inform him of your desire to speak with him, but …”

  Gromph’s nostrils flared and for a heartbeat, Jarlaxle feared that he might have gone a bit too far in his overt backtracking. But Gromph quickly calmed—no doubt he reminded himself that he needed Bregan D’aerthe right now more than they needed, or feared, him. Jarlaxle could get word of Gromph’s whereabouts to Matron Mother Baenre very quickly, after all, and the mercenary leader had a good idea that Quenthel and Gromph were not on particularly good terms at this time.

  “I wish to speak with him,” Gromph said calmly.

  “Perhaps it would help if you would tell me why,” Jarlaxle offered.

  “Perhaps I might burn my explanation onto your naked back and leave you face down and dead on the floor for Kimmuriel to read.”

  “A simple no would have sufficed.”

  “Jarlaxle doesn’t take no for an answer.”

  “Hmm,” the mercenary leader snorted, and he shrugged, tipped his hat in concession, and walked away, muttering as he made his way through the haunted corridors of Illusk.

  Now he knew, without doubt, that Gromph blamed Kimmuriel for Demogorgon. “Ah, my tentacle-loving friend, what have you done?” Jarlaxle asked himself, but the question carried back no answers in its echoes.

  THE PRIMORDIAL CHAMBER had been fully redone in the time Drizzt and Catti-brie had been away from Gauntlgrym. The altar block used by Matron Mother Zeerith had been efficiently removed by a team of dwarves, Bruenor centering them, who had merely pushed it into the pit to be devoured by the primordial beast. The webs were gone, the giant jade spiders rudely dismantled, and jade jewelry was all the rage in Gauntlgrym.

  Another table, more a bathtub, rested where the drow altar had been, this one bound in mithral as if it were some altar for Bruenor’s homeland—though, of course, any altar shaped like a bathtub seemed out of place in a dwarven chapel. Still, in a sense, it was just that. The metal tub had been placed there for the most reverent and somber of circumstances: to commit the dead to their unique coffins.

  Below the tub, the dwarves had dug a narrow tunnel. Using a mithral drill and crank, they had driven the channel deep into the stone, angling it toward the primordial pit, where it had broken out just below the swirl of the water elementals. Heavy plugs had been bolted into place—the primordial would not get up through this shaft unless called upon.

  They laid Thibbledorf Pwent out to rest in that bowl and Catti-brie began her work, covering Pwent in the special shroud, one heavy with metals that would strengthen the lava. Her assistant dwarves removed the tunnel plug and the priestess reached through her ring to coax the beast forth.

  The process would take a full day of labor, bringing forth a bit of lava, magically easing it into place, and then summoning the next molten spurt. It was painstaking and heavy work, but Catti-brie did not tire and paid attention to every last detail. This was Pwent, once her friend, and dear to her Da, and she considered this work to be as much a piece of art as a sarcophagus.

  “Have you told him yet?” a voice asked late in the day, startling her when she thought she was alone.

  She spun to see Jarlaxle standing in front of her.

  “I apologize for surprising you,” the mercenary leader said, bowing low. He walked over and peered into the tub. “It is beautiful, a fitting tribute to a most heroic dwarf.”

  Catti-brie’s first instinct was to snap at the uninvited drow—what would he know of Thibbledorf Pwent’s true heroism, after all? But she bit it back and reminded herself that Jarlaxle had been a major player in the fight in Gauntlgrym those decades ago when Pwent had fallen to his state of undeath. The mercenary drow and his dwarf companion Athrogate had come into Gauntlgrym with Bruenor and Drizzt to put the primordial back in its pit. Jarlaxle had witnessed the fight when Pwent and Bruenor had defeated not only a pit fiend, but the vampire that had ultimately infected Pwent.

  Jarlaxle had been a hero to Bruenor that day, no doubt.

  “How did you find me? How did you get in here?” Catti-brie asked, but not sharply. She glanced about, her gaze settling on the lava-filled antechamber across the way, where Archmage Gromph had set up his teleportation room.

  “I have a friend who told me where to find you,” Jarlaxle replied. “He let me in.”

  “Drizzt?”

  “Shorter,” the drow replied, winking the eye that was not covered by a patch.

  “Athrogate,” Catti-brie said, shaking her head. “Athrogate was supposed to be putting Bruenor ahead of you. So it’s not to be, then? Me Da will be interested in that bit of news, now won’t he?”

  “Pray don’t tell him. Athrogate understood my purpose and so he thought allowing me in here to be the best course in serving King Bruenor’s interests, given the current situation.”

  Catti-brie nodded for him to continue.

  “You haven’t told King Bruenor?”

  The woman sighed. “It is not so easy a thing, to tell a dwarf king that his newly reclaimed kingdom will soon be destroyed.”

  “Then perhaps we should not allow that to happen.”

  “It is daunting,” the woman admitted.

  “You have Gromph Baenre.”

  “Archmage Gromph, the Harpells, my own powers … will any of it, will all of it, be nearly enough? The Hosttower was physically obliterated, and its magic is older than any living memory.”

  “That is not necessarily true,” Jarlaxle replied. “And I have a few more avenues we may search to find greater clues. Life is daunting, my dear girl, but it is also wondrous, is it not?”

  Catti-brie looked at him incredulously.

  “Yes, I am in a fine mood,” Jarlaxle added. “And believe me, your course is not the most daunting before me right now, nor the most dangerous.”

  “Pe
rhaps you should find a place to rest.”

  “Perhaps I love the adventure.”

  “And the danger?”

  Jarlaxle smiled.

  “Do you mean to be beside me when I tell King Bruenor?” Catti-brie asked.

  “If you would allow it.”

  “I would welcome it.”

  Jarlaxle’s smile was genuine. In that moment it occurred to them both that there was nothing out of place with Jarlaxle being allowed unescorted into this room. He was indeed a friend of the king—and of them all.

  “Let me gather the dwarves so they can bring Pwent to his resting place in the audience chamber,” Catti-brie said. “They have to place him and properly pose him before the stone hardens fully.”

  “First, though, I believe our black-bearded friend awaits you beside the Great Forge,” Jarlaxle said. “He said that he has something for you, and more importantly, that you have something for him.”

  Catti-brie nodded and grinned and moved over to her pack, producing a heavy leather girdle that Jarlaxle had seen before—and with recognition, the mercenary drow’s eyes widened indeed.

  “His belt?”

  “Athrogate let me borrow it these last tendays,” the woman explained.

  “You had something heavy to lift?” Jarlaxle quipped. He understood the magic of that belt, which offered great physical strength to the wearer.

  “To study it in Luskan,” Catti-brie replied with a laugh.

  Jarlaxle shook his head, hardly believing the sight in front of his eyes.

  “He said he was a friend of King Bruenor’s, loyal to the last,” Catti-brie reminded. “He took the oath of kith’n kin more solemnly than any, so the whispers say.”

  “You mean to make such a girdle for Bruenor?” the mercenary asked. “You are capable of making such a girdle?” Clear excitement filled Jarlaxle’s voice with that second question, as if he were seeing some real possibilities.

  But Catti-brie laughed those away. “Someday, perhaps,” she said. “But no, a girdle of this quality is rare and filled with an older magic I fear broken by the Spellplague.”

  “The Spellplague is gone.”