The Last Threshold

by R. A. Salvatore

Page 5

 

  “I have some experience in these matters,” Dahlia said. “I know what such wounds look like. ” Indeed, Drizzt suspected the same vampire, Dor’crae, who had attacked Bruenor in the anteroom to the primordial pit had been Dahlia’s lover.

  Drizzt tried hard not to focus on the recollection of Dor’crae. He tried to wash that thought away with the image of the pretty elf walking into the camp, tried to bury it under the sheer attraction the woman elicited in him.

  And when that didn’t work, he fell back on that pervading sense of detachment.

  Drizzt drew out a scimitar and used it to flip the torn tent aside, revealing more goblins, or more accurately, goblin parts, strewn on the ground before him. He studied the garish vision, the jagged tears in the clothing and skin. These were wounds better known to Drizzt, who had traveled beside just such a fighter for so many decades.

  “Battlerager,” he whispered, confused.

  “No,” Dahlia said. “I’ve seen these fang marks before …” Her voice trailed off as she walked over to him, as she noted, no doubt, the very different carnage at this section of the broken camp.

  “Vampire,” she insisted.

  “Battlerager,” Drizzt replied.

  “Must you always argue with me?” She asked the question casually, but Drizzt detected an undercurrent of true anger. How many times had that edge crept into Dahlia’s voice of late?

  “Only when you’re wrong. ” Drizzt tossed her a disarming grin—and he realized it was likely the first lighthearted look he’d offered Dahlia since they’d left the bowels of Gauntlgrym, or more accurately, since he had seen Dahlia and Artemis Entreri share a passionate kiss. “I suppose that might seem like always to you,” Drizzt teased, determined to push past his own negativity and jealousy.

  Dahlia cocked her head. “Are you finished with your pouting at long last?” she asked.

  The question threw Drizzt off balance for a moment, for it seemed to him to be a matter of Dahlia projecting her own foul mood on him. Or perhaps it was a matter of Dahlia admitting that her own pouting—or grieving, or shock, or whatever combination it might be—needed to end.

  But the question teased Drizzt on a much deeper level, and likely more deeply than Dahlia had intended. Drizzt couldn’t deny the truth of her words.

  To Drizzt, Dahlia remained this great contradiction, able to tug his emotions any which way she desired, it seemed, as easily as she changed her hairstyle. But to Entreri … nay, her tricks would not work for her with Entreri. For Artemis Entreri knew her, or knew something of her, that went past the hairstyles, the clear skin or woad, her clothing, seductive or sweet. Before Drizzt, she had stood naked, physically, perhaps, but before Entreri, Dahlia had been naked emotionally, stripped to the core trouble that so haunted her.

  Drizzt had only glimpsed that briefly, in the form of a broken and twisted young tiefling warlock and Dahlia’s reaction to that creature, Effron.

  “What about you?” Drizzt replied. “You have said little in the tendays since we left Gauntlgrym. ”

  “Perhaps I have nothing to say. ” Dahlia clamped her jaw, as if she were afraid of what might come spilling out should she lose the tiniest bit of discipline. “I have the ears,” Dahlia said and began to walk away.

  He followed her out of the camp and into the forest once more, moving slowly and bending low, looking for broken stems or footprints. For a long while she walked, finally coming to rest in a sunny clearing where a single, half-buried stone provided a comfortable seat.

  Dahlia reclined, removed her hat, and ran her fingers through her hair, allowing the sunbeams to splash over her face.

  “Come along,” he bade her. “We must learn who or what killed those goblins. There’s a vampire about, so you claim. ”

  Dahlia shrugged, showing no interest.

  “Or a battlerager,” Drizzt went on stubbornly. “And if it is the latter, then we would do well to find him. A powerful ally. ”

  “So I thought of my vampire lover,” Dahlia said, and she seemed to take some pleasure when Drizzt grimaced at the reference.

  “Will we never speak of what happened in Gauntlgrym?” Drizzt asked suddenly. “The twisted tiefling accused you of murder. ” Dahlia’s expression abruptly changed. She snapped a glare over him.

  Dahlia swallowed hard and did not turn her stare from Drizzt for an instant as he took a seat beside her.

  “He claimed Alegni was his father,” Drizzt pressed.

  “Shut up,” Dahlia warned.

  “He called you his mother. ”

  Her eyes bored through him, and Drizzt expected her to reach out and claw at his face, or to explode into a tirade of shouted curses.

  But she didn’t, and that, perhaps, was more unsettling still. She just sat there, staring. A cloud passed overhead, blocking the sunlight, sending a shadow across Dahlia’s pretty face.

  “Implausible, of course, likely impossible,” Drizzt said quietly, trying to back away.

  Dahlia held perfectly still. He could almost hear her heartbeat, or was it his own? Many moments slipped past. Drizzt lost count of them.

  “It’s true,” she admitted, and now it was Drizzt who looked as if he had been slapped.

  “Cannot be,” he finally managed to reply. “He is a young man, but you’re a young woman—”

  “I was barely more than a child when the shadow of Herzgo Alegni fell over my clan,” Dahlia said, so very softly that Drizzt could hardly hear the words. “Twenty years ago. ”

  Drizzt’s thoughts spun in circles, very easily coming to the dark conclusion of Dahlia’s leading words. He tried to respond, but found himself sputtering helplessly in the face of a horror so far beyond him. He thought back to his own youth, to his graduation at Melee Magthere, when his own sister had advanced upon him so lewdly, forcing him to run away with revulsion.

  For a moment, he thought to tell that tale to Dahlia, to try to claim some kinship to her pain, but then realized that his own experience surely paled beside her trauma.

  And so he sputtered, and finally he reached out a hand to her to pull her close.

  She resisted, but she was trembling. The tears that rolled from her blue eyes were formed in profound sadness, he knew, even as she issued a low growl to cover her weakness.

  But denial couldn’t hold, and anger couldn’t cover the scar.

  Drizzt tried to pull her close, but she spun away and scrambled to her feet, walking off a few steps, her back to him.

  “So now you know,” she said, her voice as cold as winter’s deepest ice.

  “Dahlia,” he pleaded, rising and taking a step her way. Should he go to her and grab her, and crush her close against him, and whisper to her that she might let the pain flow freely? Did she want that? She didn’t seem to, and yet, she had let Entreri kiss …

  With a growl of his own, Drizzt dismissed that ridiculous jealousy. This wasn’t about him, wasn’t about his relationship with Dahlia, and surely wasn’t about her moments with Entreri. This was about Dahlia, and her pain so profound.

  He didn’t know what to say, or what to do. He felt like a child. He had grown up in a place of deceit and murder and treachery as a way of life, perhaps the vilest city in all the world, and so he thought that he had fully inoculated himself against the scars of depravity and inhumanity. He was Drizzt Do’Urden, the hero of Icewind Dale, the hero of Mithral Hall, who had fought a thousand battles and killed a thousand enemies, who had watched dear friends die, who had loved and lost. Ever level-headed, hardened to the dark realities of life …

  So he had thought.

  So he had lied to himself.

  This combination of emotions roiling within Dahlia was quite beyond him at that strange moment. This was darkness compounded in darkness, irredeemable and outside any comfort zones Drizzt might have constructed through his own less-complicated experiences. Dahlia had suffered something to her core, a violation beyond even an enemy’s sword
, with which Drizzt could not empathize and of which Drizzt couldn’t even understand.

  “Come,” Dahlia bade him, her voice even and strong. “Let us find this killer. ” She walked off into the forest.

  Drizzt watched her with surprise, until he recognized that she was now eager for the hunt for no better reason than to find an enemy to battle. The emotions Drizzt had stirred went too deep and Dahlia couldn’t find comfort in Drizzt’s hesitant embrace and awkward words, and so she needed to find someone, something, to destroy.

  He had missed his moment, Drizzt understood. He had failed her.

  The monk stood in the main square of Neverwinter, staring at his hands as he turned them around before his eyes.

  “That a fightin’ practice?” Ambergris asked.

  “I’m looking for hints of shadowstuff,” Brother Afafrenfere replied curtly. “What have you done to me, dwarf?”

  “I telled ye,” said Ambergris. “Can’t have ye lookin’ the part of a shade if ye’re to walk the lands o’ Toril, now can I?”

  “This is not illusion,” Afafrenfere protested. “My skin is lightening. ”

  “Is yer heart, then?” the female dwarf asked.

  Afafrenfere glared at her.

  “How long was ye a shade?”

  “I gave myself to the Shadowfell,” Afafrenfere protested.

  “Bah, but ye fell in love an’ nothin’ more,” the dwarf chided. “How long?”

  “You cannot—”

  “How long?”

  “Three years,” Afafrenfere admitted.

  “So ye spent the better part of a quarter-century here, and living where, I might be askin’, except that I’m already knowin’. ”

  “Oh, are you?”

  “Aye, ye got yer training in the mountains aside Damara. ”

  Afafrenfere stepped back as if she had just slugged him. “How could you—?”

  “Ye got a yellow rose painted inside yer forearm, ye dolt. Ye think I’m for missin’ a clue like that? And I telled ye true back there in Gauntlgrym. Meself’s from Citadel Adbar, and Adbar’s knowing o’ the Monastery o’ the Yellow Rose. ”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Afafrenfere insisted. “I gave myself willingly to Cavus Dun. ”

  “To Parbid, ye mean. ”

  “To Cavus Dun and the Shadowfell,” Afafrenfere growled at her. “And now you would take the shadowstuff from me. ”

  “Ye ain’t no damned shade,” Ambergris insisted. “No more’n meself. Ye’re a human, as ye was afore ye ran to darkness. Ye’re actin’ like I’m stealin’ from ye, but know that I’m savin’ ye, from yerself, so it’d be seemin’. Ain’t nothin’ there in the darkness for ye, boy. Ye ain’t a born shade, and so ye ain’t to get yer desserts there among them grayskins. ”

  “And you were just a spy,” Afafrenfere said. “A traitorous spy. ”

  “Might be,” said Ambergris, though it was surely more complicated than that. She didn’t feel much like explaining herself to the young monk at this time, however. Amber Gristle O’Maul hadn’t chosen to go to the Shadowfell to serve as a spy for Citadel Adbar. The adjudicators of Citadel Adbar had sentenced her to that mission for serious indiscretions—it was that or a ball and chain, a mining pick, and twenty years of breaking stone in the lowest mines of the dwarven complex.