The Last Threshold: Neverwinter Saga, Book IV

by R. A. Salvatore

  Nothing.

  No word of Minnow Skipper, and looking out at the vast, dark water rolling before him this rainy day, it was not hard for Effron to imagine that the boat had been lost to this inhospitable environ known as the Sword Coast. In fact, this particularly dreary morning, the warlock was certain of it.

  The ocean had taken her, and all aboard, likely, or some sea devils or a great shark or whale or kraken even, had splintered her hull and pulled her under to feast on the crew.

  If he was right, then his mother was dead, and his purpose in life had run into an abrupt end.

  Or maybe his mood was a result of the weather and not some reasonable conclusion. The air felt heavy this day, though spring fast raced toward summer.

  Effron dismissed that superficial notion. The weather might not be helping, but this was not nearly as abrupt an ending as it seemed. This morning came as a logical conclusion of his building dread. For two tendays now, Effron had been fighting a nagging feeling that they were gone, swallowed by the sea, and that his perspective on life—on his own life—was about to dramatically shift.

  He had wanted her dead. He had wanted to kill her.

  Now he was an orphan. Now his dream had been realized, but the taste, so suddenly, seemed not so sweet.

  “Damn you,” he whispered under his breath as he paced the massive quayside of this impressive port city. Those were the only words he spoke, not even bothering to inquire of the dockhands if any had seen or heard a whisper of Minnow Skipper’s approach.

  There was no point.

  And perhaps, he feared, there was no point to much of anything, any more than asking empty questions of dockhands in Baldur’s Gate.

  He walked slowly, his dead arm a pendulum behind his back. The moisture around his eyes was more than the drizzle of the heavy and humid day.

  For so many years, he had tried to prove himself to his father. He could never become the warrior Herzgo Alegni would have preferred, obviously, with his shoulder and arm useless and a dozen other less obvious or garish infirmities wreaking his fragile form. But still he had tried, every day and in every plausible way. Was there a warlock in the Shadowfell of his power anywhere near his age? He had overheard comments that not even Draygo Quick had been as advanced as Effron was now until he had passed his fortieth birthday, though Effron was barely half that age.

  He had lived his life with daring and discipline, and even the lords of Netheril had taken note of him at times.

  Had any of that made Herzgo Alegni proud?

  Effron honestly didn’t know. If so, his brutish tiefling father had never revealed it, and even on those few occasions when a word or glance from Herzgo Alegni might have been taken as fatherly pride, hard experience had taught Effron to view them more as manipulation than anything else, as if the self-absorbed Herzgo Alegni was boosting Effron’s morale because he wanted to get something more out of him.

  Effron considered the possibility that he had no deeper feelings for Herzgo than he had for Dahlia.

  Ah, Dahlia. For Effron, she was the rub, the ultimate pain, the desperate question, the ever-nagging doubt.

  She had thrown him from a cliff.

  His mother had rejected him, utterly, and had thrown him from a cliff.

  How could she do that?

  How he hated her!

  How he desired to murder her!

  How he needed her.

  He could not wrap his thoughts comfortably around the emotions assailing him from every direction that dreary day. Now, on these docks this morning, he accepted the reality that she was gone, and the waves coming at him from opposite directions rolled and rose, crested and collided in the middle of his consciousness.

  “Ha!” came a cry as he walked past one pair of older men, one with a mop, the other wearing a pair of hand gaffs for unloading sacks of grain.

  “I told ye today’d be the day the ugly one didn’t ask!” continued the gaff-armed gaffer, and he let loose a squeal of laughter.

  “Are you mocking me?” the dour Effron asked.

  “Nah, devil-boy, he’s just laughing at his own prognostication,” the man with the swab replied. “He said yerself wouldn’t ask about Minnow Skipper today.”

  “And pray tell how he would know that?”

  “Because today’s the day word’s come in,” said the gaffer, and he laughed again, though it sounded more like a cackling cough. “She’s out there, north and west. Tide’s bad and wind’s wrong, but her sails might dot the horizon before sun’s to setting. Either way, she’ll slide in tomorrow.”

  Effron tried to hold steady, but he knew that he was shaking, for he could feel the increasing movement of his dead arm. “How do you know? Tell me. Tell me!”

  The other fellow lifted his mop and pointed it at a boat that had just come in, obviously, for her crew was still at work and hadn’t come ashore. “They seen her trailing these last three days. Flying Kurth’s flag. Luskan boat, that one there, and they’re knowing Minnow Skipper.”

  Effron looked blankly at the other boat, but inside, his mind cascaded along avenues thought lost. Dahlia. Likely aboard, and almost surely alive.

  Dahlia, who had the answers to the questions Effron most feared and most needed to hear.

  Only then did it occur to him that his impatience, which had brought him to the docks these last days, might now dearly cost him.

  “Listen to me,” he said intently to the pair. “There’s coin in this for you. Gold coin.”

  “Keep talking,” said the man with the mop.

  “I would know who comes off that boat,” Effron explained. “And I would not have them know that I have asked.”

  “Gold coin?” asked the gaffer.

  “Gold coins,” Effron assured him. “More coins than the fingers of both your hands and both his hands.

  “Look for a dark elf, and a female elf beside him,” Effron explained.

  “Female drow?”

  “No, just the male.”

  “Lots of elves about. How’re we to know it’s her?”

  “You’ll know,” Effron promised, his gaze inexorably drifting back to the empty waters to the northwest, as if expecting the sails to appear at any moment. “You’ll know.”

  “He said three days,” Drizzt said, referring to the time they would spend in Baldur’s Gate. Walking beside him, Dahlia turned back to regard Entreri, just a few steps behind, wondering if that time frame applied to him.

  Entreri had been surprisingly chipper after the initial sail out of Luskan, and had accepted the ridiculously roundabout route and incessant delays at sea with less complaining than any of the band of five, and most of the crew as well. And now he was smiling. He lifted one hand toward Dahlia and waggled three fingers to emphasize the drow’s point, though whether he was reinforcing that remark or mocking her because it applied to her and not to him, she couldn’t tell.

  Dahlia realized that she desperately wanted Artemis Entreri aboard for that return journey, and it flashed in her mind that if he wasn’t going back, neither would she.

  “Three days?” Ambergris said, she and Afafrenfere walking immediately behind the assassin. “Ah, well, get to it, then. Three days for drinking and twining … here’s hoping Baldur’s Gate got some handsome dwarves wanderin’ about!”

  She squealed in laughter, and Afafrenfere helplessly shook his head.

  “Hehe, I’m thinkin’ the rockin’ boat’s got me legs a bit bowed!” Ambergris added and she squealed again.

  “Well, who’s for knowing what’s to crawl off of Luskan’s docks?” a voice to the side said, turning Dahlia’s attention forward once more, and across Drizzt to a pair of dockhands, one middle-aged and one well past his prime—and in a life spent at sea, judging from his appearance and the way he carried himself.

  Drizzt stopped, as Dahlia did beside him, and looked the two over.

  “Ah, but not yerself, drow,” the older man said. He looked past Drizzt to Dahlia and winked.

  The other man
leaned his mop up against his shoulder, lifted both hands, waggled his fingers, and said, “More gold coins than fingers.”

  Dahlia didn’t quite know what to make of them, and didn’t really care. She started off again, pulling Drizzt beside her.

  “I do believe he just propositioned you,” Entreri said from behind them when they were far down the dock.

  “Then I should go back and kiss him,” Dahlia replied, and all four of her companions looked at her incredulously. “Then take his coins, cave in his skull, and drop him into the sea.”

  She kept walking, breezily, as if the thought might be half joke, but then again, might not. And these companions, having seen the elf warrior in action, didn’t doubt either possibility. Certainly Drizzt showed as much when he gave her a less-than-accepting stare.

  Dahlia had seen that look far too much from the drow of late, she realized.

  When they got into the city, they split up, Dahlia and Drizzt moving for the finer inns, Ambergris pulling Afafrenfere toward the many seedy taverns just off the docks, and Entreri, with a casual salute, moving away on his own. For many steps, Dahlia watched the man, trying to get a feeling for which section of Baldur’s Gate attracted him the most. The city was fairly well divided along clear demarcations: wealthy merchants, artisans, and the poor. Dahlia figured Entreri would seek out the middle levels, but near to the wilder regions not far from the wharves. His direction seemed to confirm as much.

  “Shall we rent one room or two?” Dahlia asked Drizzt, and he turned on her sharply in obvious surprise. “Or perhaps just bunks in a common dormitory, so that we can pretend we’re still aboard ship?”

  Drizzt’s stare turned incredulous.

  “It will allow you the excuse you seem to need.”

  Drizzt stopped and turned to face her directly.

  Dahlia took a deep breath and said, “You haven’t touched me in tendays, in months even.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it? Other than our first day at sea.”

  Drizzt swallowed hard and looked around. “Not here,” he said, and he took Dahlia’s arm and headed to the nearest inn, where he purchased the very best room available.

  As soon as he had closed the door, Drizzt went at Dahlia aggressively.

  She took some satisfaction in that, but still found herself pushing him away. At first, she didn’t quite know why, but it soon dawned on her that Drizzt was making this advance more out of obligation than desire—or if desire, then physical desire and not emotional.

  While Dahlia could understand and appreciate it, she wasn’t much interested in conceding to it.

  “Why?” she asked into his confused expression—confused, but not wounded, she recognized—and if he was disappointed, he was doing a good job in hiding that fact, too.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  Dahlia pulled away from him with a snort, even turned away because she didn’t want to look at him at that moment. “You’re trying to mollify me.”

  “You just said—”

  She turned around, facing him with her arms crossed over her chest, one foot tapping.

  Now it was Drizzt’s turn to sigh. He walked to a chair set against the far wall, like a bar fighter moving to his corner between combat rounds. He pulled the chair around and straddled it, his elbows atop the chair back.

  “Have I ever told you about Innovindil?” he asked. “An elf I once knew?”

  Dahlia changed neither her stance nor her expression.

  “A friend I knew a century ago,” Drizzt explained. “She was older than you, older than me. She came to me in a time of turmoil, with orcs ravaging the countryside and pressing the kingdom of my dearest friend—a friend I thought dead, along with all the others, including—”

  “Catti-brie,” Dahlia remarked, for Drizzt had told her of his wife. “So you lost her and filled your days with an elf companion.”

  Drizzt shook his head. “I thought I had lost her, lost all of them, but no, this was before that time.”

  “Is there a point to your story?”

  Drizzt sighed again. “Not an easy one to get to,” he admitted. “You’re barely into your fourth decade of life, but Innovindil’s lessons were an explanation of a life witnessing the birth and death of centuries.”

  “Then why would I care?”

  “Because it will explain … me,” Drizzt blurted. “My actions, or inactions.”

  “Must everything become such an important act to you?” Dahlia said.

  Drizzt chuckled. “You’re not the first to say such a thing to me.”

  “Then perhaps you should listen.”

  “I tried to,” the drow said, and he motioned to the spot before the bed where he had pursued Dahlia.

  “Months,” she replied dourly.

  “Innovindil told me to live my life in shorter expanses, in human terms, then to start over from there. Particularly, she said, if I meant to befriend, even to fall in love, with the lesser-living races.”

  “She told you to get past your grief.”

  “I suppose you could phrase it like that.”

  “I just did. And so here we are—has it been a century now since you lost this human woman?—and you don’t seem to be taking her advice.” She noted Drizzt’s wince at the way she had pronounced human, clearly marking the word as an insult, and that, she thought, was telling. “And this is the same advice you intend to give to me?” She chortled again. “Shouldn’t you learn to abide by it first?”

  “I’m trying!” he retorted, and sharply, much more so than Dahlia had expected. Well, she thought, at least she had gotten some emotion out of the fool.

  “Is my lesson over?” she asked with equal sharpness.

  “Perhaps mine has just begun,” Drizzt said with clear lament. “This is more complicated than you understand. When you are older—”

  “Drizzt Do’Urden,” she interrupted, coming forward with a finger poking his way, “hear me well. You have known seven years for my every one, but in so many ways, I am older than you, likely more than you will ever be. In matters of”—she paused and glanced around, looking for the right word, and wound up just motioning dramatically for the room’s bed “—I am more experienced and more rational.”

  “Your ear studs speak differently,” he said quietly.

  “I may have demons to chase, but at least I don’t make love to ghosts,” she replied, and she stormed to the door, slamming it hard behind her.

  She fingered the black diamond stud in her right ear, the last stud in that lobe, and realized that she might soon find her mortal battle with the drow she had just left behind.

  That was why she had chosen him, after all. Finally, mercifully, at long last, Dahlia had found a lover who would almost surely defeat her, who would give her peace.

  Strangely, though, Dahlia felt little comfort in that notion. Drizzt had pulled away from her. Drizzt was rejecting her, without even meaning to. When he told her that he didn’t want to hurt her, he spoke sincerely, she knew.

  But still …

  Dahlia’s striking blue eyes were moist when she left the inn, and more than one tear had streaked her delicate cheeks.

  Dahlia walked into the tavern with a sour look on her face, not expecting to find her prey, since she had already visited several of these establishments in this area of Baldur’s Gate. Truly the city overwhelmed the elf’s sensibilities. She had been to Luskan several times, of course, and had grown up in the cities of Thay, and had even visited mighty Waterdeep on one occasion, but now that she was exploring Baldur’s Gate, the energy and commotion of the place overwhelmed her.

  She certainly had no idea of just how many taverns and inns and assorted emporiums, often with apartments up above, would line every street. When she and Drizzt had broken away from the others, Dahlia had never imagined that locating Artemis Entreri would prove so trying an ordeal.

  So she entered the tavern expecting nothing, her hopes sinking to emptiness.

&nbs
p; The crowd parted before her, a coincidental shift in two separate groups of merchant sailors offered her a wider view of the place, and there he was, sitting alone at a small table in the far corner of the room.

  Dahlia hesitated—he hadn’t seen her, she believed—and she considered her course. There would be no turning back now, she reminded herself.

  She strode across the room. One man popped up in front of her, offered a wicked smile and a hungry expression, but she eased him aside with her walking stick, and when he resisted, she froze him with a look so cold that the blood drained from his face.

  No one else intercepted her.

  Entreri took note of her and leaned back in his chair.

  “Imagine my surprise at seeing you here,” she said, taking the seat across from him.

  “Yes, imagine. Where’s Drizzt?”

  “I do not know, and I do not care.”

  Entreri gave a little laugh. “After a month at sea? And with more months at sea before us? I would have expected you two to … catch up.”

  “More months at sea before us?” Dahlia scoffed.

  Entreri looked at her as if he didn’t understand.

  “You said that Baldur’s Gate would be your last stop,” Dahlia reminded him, “that you would not be returning to Luskan with Minnow Skipper.”

  Entreri shrugged as if it didn’t matter. He lifted his glass and took a deep swallow.

  “So you are continuing on with us to Luskan?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Dahlia sighed at the man’s ever-cryptic offerings. She glanced around, irritated almost as much as she had been when she left Drizzt back in the room. “Where is that barmaid?”

  Entreri laughed, drawing her gaze back to him.

  “No server,” he explained, and motioned over to Dahlia’s right. “Bar’s over there.”

  “Well, go buy me some feywine.”

  “Unlikely.”

  Dahlia started to glare at him, but let it go and rushed from her seat, pushing impatiently through the talking patrons. One started to protest, even to threaten her, but he looked past her—to Entreri, she realized—and he bit his words short and fell far back. Indeed, Entreri knew this city well, and it, apparently, knew him.