The Last Threshold: Neverwinter Saga, Book IV

by R. A. Salvatore

  Across from the door to that cabin, right in the open on the deck, sat the bulkhead. It wouldn’t be easy to get there unseen, the monk realized, but he started that way, belly-crawling.

  “Get out on the deck, then, ye stinky fool!” he heard from inside the cabin.

  Alarmed, the monk stood and leaped as the cabin door swung open and the old gaffer came forth.

  Puffing his pipe, and indeed the stench was terrible, the wheezing old seadog moved right under Afafrenfere, who had wrapped himself like a snake around the crossbeam of the mainmast. The cabin door was still open, creaking as it swung gently with the rocking boat. Afafrenfere caught glimpses of the other swabby inside, moving around, preparing a meal, it seemed.

  The old gaffer moved to the rail, looking out to sea.

  Afafrenfere slithered along the crossbeam, again right above him. With a quick glance to the other, to ensure that he was distracted, the monk dropped down behind his prey, his right forearm tucking tightly against the gaffer’s throat, his left hand coming across behind the man’s head, grabbing a handful of hair and an ear, and pressing the man forward, tightening the choke. In a matter of a few heartbeats, the gaffer went limp in Afafrenfere’s strong grasp, and the monk eased the unconscious fool down to the deck.

  Afafrenfere didn’t even pause at the cabin door, bursting in quickly, violently, and similarly locking the other man into the incapacitating hold. Soon after, the two were seated in the cabin, tied and gagged back to back, as the monk moved quietly to the entry to the lower hold.

  Flat on his belly, Afafrenfere peered through the cracks in the old bulkhead. He did well to stifle his gasp when he did, for there Dahlia was, bound and gagged in a chair across the way. And there sat Effron, off to the side in a chair and staring at her.

  Dahlia couldn’t look the tiefling in the eye, Afafrenfere realized. He tried to remember all that he knew of this dangerous young warlock. So he took his time here—besides, he wanted to know what this was all about. What was really going on between Effron and Dahlia? Why had he taken her, and given that, why was he still here on Toril? He could shadowstep with her back to the Shadowfell, Afafrenfere knew.

  There was much more to this story, and Afafrenfere wanted to know it.

  So he waited as the night deepened around him. Judging from the location of the moon, it was past midnight before Effron finally stirred.

  The young tiefling moved over to Dahlia and pulled down her gag.

  “They are all sleeping now, of course,” Effron said. “No one will hear you if you scream out—”

  “I won’t scream out,” Dahlia replied, and still she did not look at him.

  “I could make you.”

  Dahlia didn’t even lift her eyes. Where was the firebrand Afafrenfere had come to know? If Drizzt or Entreri, or anyone else, had spoken to her like that in Port Llast, bound or not, she would have spat in his face.

  “Do you know how much I hate you?” Effron asked.

  “You should,” Dahlia replied in barely a whisper, and with true humility, it seemed.

  “Then why?” the young warlock demanded, his voice rising and trembling. “If the memory hurts you as much as you claim, then why?”

  “You couldn’t understand.”

  “Try!”

  “Because you looked like him!” Dahlia shouted back, now, at last, raising her teary eyes to look at Effron. “You looked like him, and when I looked upon you, all I saw was him!”

  “Herzgo Alegni?”

  “Don’t speak his name!”

  “He was my father!” Effron retorted. “Herzgo Alegni was my father. And at least he cared enough to bother to raise me! At least he didn’t throw me off a cliff!”

  Again Afafrenfere had to work hard to suppress a gasp, for it seemed clear to him that Effron wasn’t talking figuratively here.

  “You wanted me dead!” he yelled in Dahlia’s face, and she was weeping openly now.

  “I wanted him dead,” she corrected, her voice breaking with every syllable. “And I couldn’t kill him! I was a child, don’t you understand? Just a little orphaned elf hiding in the forest with the few of my clan who had survived the murderous raid. And he was coming back for you.”

  Effron sputtered several indecipherable syllables. “Then why didn’t you just let him take me?” he demanded.

  “He would have killed me.”

  “Most mothers would die for their children. A real mother would have died—”

  “He would have violated me again, more likely,” Dahlia said, and she wasn’t looking at Effron any longer, and her tone made it seem to Afafrenfere as if she were speaking more to herself than to him at that point, trying to sort through her own painful recollections. “He would have filled me with another child, that I could serve him like a brood mare, like chattel.

  “And you,” she said, now looking up at him, and seeming to find some measure of strength once more. “You would have been taught to hate me in any case.”

  “No.”

  “Yes!” Dahlia snapped back. “He would have trained you from your youngest days. He would have made you just like him, ready to go forth and murder and rape—”

  “No!” Effron said and he slapped Dahlia across the face, but then fell back a step, seeming as wounded as she, and she melted into sobs once more.

  Afafrenfere had seen enough. He slithered back from the hold and climbed a guide rope, setting himself into position.

  He played this through in his thoughts repeatedly, recalling all that he knew of Effron, recognizing the tiefling’s deadly arsenal.

  He heard another slap from below.

  Afafrenfere leaped down, double-kicking below as he descended on the bulkhead, his weight, momentum and powerful kicks exploding the old wood beneath him. He landed in the hold in perfect balance and sprang immediately for the surprised Effron, diving into a forward roll.

  Dahlia screamed, Effron threw his good arm up defensively, and Afafrenfere came up to his feet with a barrage of blows. The warlock had magical defenses in place, of course, but still the monk’s relentless barrage got through, slamming Effron about the face once and again.

  Effron fell back and Afafrenfere pursued, kicking, punching, launching a full-out offensive volley to keep the warlock off balance, to keep him from casting a spell. His best chance, he knew, was to simply overwhelm the young tiefling, to bury him before the dangerous Effron ever found his balance.

  A sharp left jab sped past the warlock’s uplifted arm, snapping his head back. A right cross followed, but much of its weight was blocked, inadvertently, by the rising arm of the staggering Effron. It hardly mattered, though, for Afafrenfere threw the right simply to half-turn Effron and open a hole in his defenses, and to get Afafrenfere’s own right foot forward. Now came the real attack, a sweeping left hook that flew around the warlock’s uplifted arm and cracked him across the side of the jaw, snapping his head to the side.

  Afafrenfere spun a tight circuit, lifting his trailing right leg up high, nearly clipping the beams of the low hold’s ceiling, and he brought that leg down and across, chopping the warlock across the collarbone, dropping him to his knees.

  The monk didn’t dare relent, understanding that a single spell from Effron could quickly reverse his fortunes. For some reason, though, Effron didn’t seem to be fighting back. Perhaps it had been the speed and brutality of the attack, but there seemed something more to Afafrenfere, some deeper resignation.

  If he had paused to consider that, Afafrenfere would have sorted it out, of course: the tiefling had been as overwhelmed by the confrontation with his mother as was Dahlia.

  Afafrenfere wasn’t about to take the chance that such apparent surrender would hold. He waded in, slapping away the meager attempt to block, then backhanded Effron in the forehead, driving the tiefling’s head back, opening a clear strike at the exposed neck. In the same movement, Afafrenfere set himself powerfully and lifted his right hand up behind him, fingers locked claw-like for the killing blow
.

  Effron couldn’t stop it.

  Effron didn’t appear as if he wanted to stop it.

  SHADOWS OF TRUTH

  THE GENTLE CURVATURE OF THE WATERY HORIZON GREETED EVERY VIEW from Minnow Skipper’s crow’s nest. Three days out of Baldur’s Gate, the ship found fair winds and following seas, and no land in sight and none wanted.

  None that Drizzt wanted, at least. He sat far above the deck, losing himself in the rolling waters, letting them take him gently into his own thoughts.

  He wanted to help Dahlia. He wanted to comfort her, to guide her through these days, but in truth, he had no idea what to say that would make any difference to the emotionally battered woman, particularly not with Effron tied to a chair in a sectioned-off part of the hold.

  Dahlia seemed a different person to Drizzt after Afafrenfere’s gallant rescue, and Effron seemed a different enemy. Neither showed much sign of life, the young warlock not offering anything in terms of resistance, the elf warrior not offering much of anything at all. Dahlia’s capture by her son and their long meetings had drained both of all energy, it seemed.

  Drizzt figured that if pirates boarded Minnow Skipper, both would simply surrender without lifting a hand to fight, and he could well imagine the shrug either might offer on the last steps off the plank.

  That notion had the drow glancing down at the deck. Dahlia was there among the crew, by the starboard rail, ostensibly stitching a torn sail, though at the rate she was going, a finger’s length tear might occupy her for the rest of the journey to Memnon.

  Drizzt’s gaze drifted farther aft, to the open bulkhead, where Ambergris had just appeared. The dwarf reached back and bent low, grabbing hold on Effron and helping him up into the open air, with Afafrenfere closely following.

  Amidships, Dahlia glanced back to look at the young tiefling, but she quickly looked down and went back to her task.

  Making busy work, Drizzt could see, trying to pretend that Effron wasn’t on the deck, or that he wasn’t on the boat at all.

  But Drizzt could see even that wouldn’t prove enough emotional insulation for Dahlia. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, then gathered up her things and moved to the forward bulkhead, never looking back.

  Never looking back at Effron.

  “Effron,” Drizzt whispered from on high, and then it hit him, the simplest answer to the questions and doubts that had been pounding him for these many days. This wasn’t about the relationship he had with Dahlia, whatever that might be. This wasn’t about him at all. It was about that twisted tiefling leaning over the taffrail of Minnow Skipper.

  Drizzt couldn’t begin to decipher the many emotions that must be running through Effron and Dahlia, wrenched from hidden corners of their hearts by circumstance and the abrupt turn of events. But in this moment, finally, the drow came to realize that it was all right that he couldn’t understand.

  Because this wasn’t about him.

  Drizzt hopped out from his seat, catching a handhold and wrapping his ankles around the guide rope, then half sliding, half hand-walking his way quickly to the deck. With a last glance at the bulkhead through which Dahlia had gone—and brushing away his certainty that she was belowdecks speaking with, or at least sitting with, Artemis Entreri—Drizzt moved aft along the deck.

  “Hey now!” Mister Sikkal yelled at him. “Get yerself back at the lookout!”

  Drizzt didn’t even turn to regard the old first mate. He moved easily around the captain’s quarters and to the back, where the dwarf called a greeting to him.

  “Take my place at the crow’s nest,” he said to Afafrenfere when the monk also turned to greet him. “I won’t be long.”

  Afafrenfere glanced at Effron, who hadn’t even turned away from the sizzling foam in Minnow Skipper’s wake, who hadn’t even shown the slightest interest in anything other than the empty dark water. With a nod, the monk moved past Drizzt.

  “You can go with him,” the drow said to Ambergris.

  “I ain’t for climbin’ no durned dead tree pole!” the dwarf insisted.

  “Stay at the mast’s base, then.”

  Ambergris offered him a little grin. “Our deal with Cannavara says two’re to be with this Effron boy at all times, including meself and me silencing spells.”

  Drizzt motioned with his head in the direction Afafrenfere had gone.

  “I’ll be just around the corner, then,” the stubborn dwarf replied, and she walked past Drizzt and around the edge of the captain’s cabin, but there plopped down noisily and made a point of beginning a song, an old dwarf ballad of deep mines, thick silver veins, and a host of goblins in need of a bit of dwarf-style relocation.

  Drizzt moved up to Effron, but faced back at the captain’s cabin as he leaned against the taffrail.

  “Where will this go?” Drizzt asked Effron—asked his back, actually, since the tiefling was still leaning out over the taffrail, staring at the empty sea.

  “Do you know or do you care?” Drizzt pressed when Effron didn’t respond.

  “Why do you care?” came the curt reply.

  “Because I care for Dah … I care for your mother,” Drizzt replied, deciding to go there with Effron, straight to the relationship that was obviously causing him so much pain.

  The young tiefling’s response came as a derisive snort, which was not quite what Drizzt had expected.

  “Why would you doubt that?” Drizzt asked, still trying to remain calm and reasonable, trying honestly to coax Effron from his defensive shell. “Dahlia and I have been traveling together for many months now.”

  “Traveling and coupling, you mean,” Effron said, still not turning around.

  “That is our business.”

  “Is it Artemis Entreri’s?” the young tiefling asked, and now he did turn around, an unsettling grin spreading wickedly across his face.

  Drizzt couldn’t quite find the words to respond, not sure where Effron was going with this, yet afraid of where that might be.

  “The night I caught Dahlia, she had just left him,” Effron explained.

  Drizzt shrugged and wanted nothing more than to turn this conversation back to the more important topic, that of Effron and Dahlia.

  “She had just left his bed,” Effron pressed, and he seemed quite pleased with himself. “She stank of him.”

  It took all the self-control he could muster for Drizzt not to simply reach out and push the nasty young warlock over that taffrail and be done with him. Effron’s every word hit him like a dagger, and more pointedly so because he had known this truth already, though he hadn’t been able to admit it to himself.

  “I don’t understand why you and Entreri bothered to rent two rooms,” Effron continued. “You would save coin and time renting just one, don’t you think, with Dahlia lying between you?”

  He bit off his last word, and quite nearly a piece of his tongue, when Drizzt lost control for just the blink of an eye—long enough for Drizzt to deliver a stinging slap across Effron’s face.

  “Concern yourself more with your own predicament,” the drow advised. “Where will this all go? How will it end?”

  “Badly,” Effron spat back.

  “That is one choice, but only that, a choice.”

  “I’ll see her dead.”

  “Then you’re a fool.”

  “You don’t know—” Effron started, but Drizzt cut him short.

  “It won’t free you of your burden,” Drizzt calmly assured him. “Your satisfaction will prove short-lived, and ever longer will your misery grow. This I know. Whatever else, whatever other details you think yourself privy to that I am not, matter not at all. Because this I know.”

  Effron stared at him hard.

  “Where will this all go?” Drizzt asked again, and he started off. And he knew that Ambergris has been listening to every word when she came around the corner before Drizzt had reached it.

  And he knew it by the look on the dwarf’s face, an expression of sympathy aimed at him.

 
“Ask yerself the same,” the dwarf advised in a whisper as Drizzt walked by.

  Up above the deck in the crow’s nest, Drizzt was the first to spot land, a jutting mountain to the south east. Memnon was closer than that natural mound, Drizzt knew, though it was not yet visible, as Minnow Skipper neared the end of the second leg of her journey.

  He called down to Captain Cannavara, who looked up at him and nodded, as if expecting the call. “So keep your eyes to the horizons for pirate sails, drow!” he yelled back. “Here’s the channel they haunt!”

  Drizzt nodded, but thought little of it. There were no sails to be seen, and in truth, that irked Drizzt. He scanned as the captain had asked, and he hoped to see something, and was dismayed that he did not.

  Drizzt wanted a fight.

  He had spent the last two tendays wanting a fight. Since his confrontation with Effron, the drow had subconsciously wrung the blood out of his knuckles on many occasions, most often whenever Artemis Entreri was in view.

  He looked down at the deck now, forward, where Entreri was sitting and eating some bread. Dahlia wasn’t far from him, working the lines as the pilot tried to keep the sails full of wind.

  The two of them in the same frame stung him, and his imagination took him to dark places indeed. He shook it away and tried to rationalize, tried to find a distinction where Drizzt left off and Dahlia began. He didn’t focus on the claim he held on the woman as much as on the notion that any such claim was preposterous.

  Still, the drow found himself gnashing his teeth. The intersection of emotion and rational thought was not bordered by well-marked corners after all.

  “Memnon?” Dahlia asked Captain Cannavara after Drizzt’s call.

  “With the morning tide,” the captain replied.

  Dahlia glanced over at Entreri, and with alarm. It wasn’t just the notion of him leaving, as he had hinted, but more the coming conclusion to the situation with Effron. One way or another, something had to be resolved. Dahlia had hardly seen her son, willingly relinquishing control of him to Afafrenfere and Ambergris, though she doubted that much attention was even needed, given Effron’s obvious distress. The young warlock appeared as broken inside as out, now, and showed no signs of trying to lash out, or escape. Indeed, Ambergris had assured them all that Effron could have gotten away on several occasions, for he knew how to shadowstep. If he tried to execute such a maneuver to return to the Shadowfell, only immediate and overwhelming intervention could stop him, and surely over the course of tendays, there had been many such opportunities for Effron to escape.