She lifted her walking stick before her and snapped her wrists expertly to break it in half, into two four-foot lengths, and these she broke in half into flails—“nun’chuks,” Afafrenfere had named them—and sent them into easy spins at her side.
“You do not get to so easily dismiss me,” Dahlia informed him. “I am not a plaything for the whims of Drizzt Do’Urden.”
Drizzt thought better of reminding her that she had just offered to be exactly that, and instead focused on how he might diffuse this strange situation. “I seek only that which is best for us both.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said. “Shut up and draw your blades.”
Drizzt held his hands out unthreateningly, as if that request was absurd.
“Diamonds do not move so easily from one ear to the other,” she said. “And this one, the black diamond, is to be the most difficult of all.” She began circling to Drizzt’s left, moving up the incline near to the edge of the rock. “That is why I chose you, of course. Or do you still not understand?”
“Apparently, I don’t—” he started to answer, his words cut short as he ducked and dodged back, one of Dahlia’s weapons whipping suddenly at his head—and had it connected, it surely would have cracked open his skull.
“Dahlia!”
“Draw your blades!” she shouted back at him. “Do not further disappoint me! You were the one, the lover I could not beat! You were the one to serve me my just reward. You are a failure as a lover, as a man, with your precious witch ever in your foolish heart. Do not doubly disappoint me by failing at the one thing I know you do well!”
On she came in a rush, and despite himself, Drizzt found his scimitars in his hands as he fended the sudden, brutal attacks, the flails spinning in at him from every conceivable angle. Instinct alone had Drizzt parrying and twisting away from the assault, for his brain could not fathom the situation unfolding before him. Instinct alone had him countering Dahlia’s movements, even striking out at her with a reflexive riposte after one clean parry.
Drizzt sucked in his breath and retracted his scimitar at the same time, horrified that he had nearly skewered Dahlia, to the point where blood had begun to stain her torn shirt.
She didn’t seem the least bit bothered, though, and pressed the attack with apparent glee, swinging her right-hand flail back in at Drizzt’s retracting blade. And when the pole struck the scimitar, Dahlia released some lightning energy, which coursed Twinkle and sparked into Drizzt’s left hand and arm.
The drow’s teeth clenched involuntarily, and it was all he could do to hold onto his weapon, the muscles in his forearm clenching and knotting under the tingling and burning sensation.
“Stop!” Drizzt yelled at her between the ring of his blades blocking her swinging poles. “Dahlia!”
His calls only made her attack all the more ferociously, however. She went into a spin, coming around with her flying weapon swinging across for Drizzt’s head. He ducked the blow, then leaped as she turned a second circuit, this time bending as she came around and sweeping a backhand of her other weapon for his legs.
She had left him an opening. With him up high and Dahlia down low, Drizzt could have charged in and put her at a tremendous, likely insurmountable, disadvantage then and there, and indeed he started that way.
But he didn’t lead with his blades. He hadn’t the heart to cut her again, and instead tried to wrap her in a hug as she tried to stand back up, moving in too close for her to strike at him with those deadly flails.
She seemed to lose all strength then, and Drizzt reached out for her, hopeful that this insanity had come to its end.
Dahlia smashed her forehead into his nose and drove a knee up into his groin as he fell back, and before he had even fully straightened again, she lashed out at him once more with her weapons.
He blocked right with Icingdeath, left with Twinkle, then brought Twinkle across to block again to the right, and turned around away from Dahlia, coming around with Icingdeath angled diagonally to lift up her second attack from the left.
He dived under that raising nun’chuk, just ahead of her next trailing strike. He rolled easily to his feet, tasting blood from his smashed nose, and fell into a crouch as Dahlia turned to pursue.
But again, suddenly, she seemed to lose all strength for the fight, and her arms slumped to the side and she looked at Drizzt with a clear sense of helplessness, of anguish and sadness. She offered a shrug and a sniffle.
Then snapped her right hand, her nun’chuk lashing straight ahead like a serpent.
Drizzt fell for the ruse because he desperately needed to believe in the ruse. For all his training and all his speed and honed reflexes, Drizzt couldn’t quite catch up to that attack. The nun’chuk’s tip cracked into his forehead, knocking him upright, and Dahlia released the rest of Kozah’s Needle’s magical lightning, throwing him forcefully backward. He flipped off the edge of the rocky outcropping, spinning right over as he fell from the ledge. He slammed down on the sloping ground some ten feet below the rock, and bounced and rolled his way down the slope, crashing through brush, wet snow, and rocks alike.
He finally settled against a rock, his thoughts spinning, burning pain assailing him from many different wounds.
“Fool!” he heard Dahlia shout from above, and he knew she was coming for him. He couldn’t see her, for she had moved to the trail behind the rock, but she continued her verbal tirade, “This is to the death, yours or mine! So fight better or be damned, Drizzt Do’Urden!”
Drizzt climbed to all fours, or to three, at least, for he wound up tucking his right hand in close to his chest. He looked down at the hand, already swelling and bruised around the thumb and index finger. He tried to clench his fist, but could barely move the fingers.
He spotted his dropped scimitar, Icingdeath, on the slope just up above him, and climbed to his feet to retrieve it.
Such waves of pain washed over him that he nearly fell back to the ground. As he recovered, he settled his weight onto his right foot and glanced down at his left leg, noting a bulge against the leather at mid-calf. Drizzt swallowed hard, amazed that he was upright at all, for in the fall, he had surely broken the bone in his shin.
Slowly he put his foot back to the ground and eased some weight onto it. Again the waves of pain assaulted him. He looked around for a splint, but heard Dahlia’s approach and realized that he had no time.
He scrambled for his scimitar, retrieved it, and spun around to watch the woman’s determined approach, her weapons swinging easily at her sides.
“You were supposed to win,” she said through gritted teeth, tears streaming down her angry face. “In so many ways have you disappointed me!”
Her words didn’t make any sense to Drizzt, and he could barely keep his eyes focused on her. He knew that she was coming closer, ever closer. He knew that he couldn’t begin to fight her now. He had no speed and no balance, and the pain …
She was so close.
A dark form rushed by, carrying Dahlia with it off to the side.
“Enough!” Drizzt heard, Artemis Entreri’s voice. He followed the sound to see the two of them, and only then realized that he was sitting once more, and was only looking out of one eye now, as the other was covered with the blood pouring from the wound on his forehead.
Dahlia struggled against the man, but Entreri held her back, talking to her, though Drizzt could not hear the words. But Entreri remained insistent—even in his desperate and dazed state, Drizzt could recognize that—and he pushed Dahlia away, step-by-step.
“Farewell,” Drizzt heard him call back, and then something around them leaving Icewind Dale.
Drizzt couldn’t be sure. His face was in the dirt by that time, and all he heard was his own pulse, pounding in his head, images both real and imagined intertwining in a place far removed from consciousness.
EPILOGUE
THE STARS REACHED DOWN TO HIM, LIKE SO MANY TIMES BEFORE IN THIS enchanted place.
He was on Bruenor’s Climb, tho
ugh he didn’t know how he had arrived there. Guenhwyvar was beside him, leaning against him, supporting his shattered leg, but he didn’t remember calling to her.
Of all the places Drizzt had ever traveled, none had felt more comforting than here. Perhaps it had been the company he had so often found up here, but even without Bruenor beside him, this place, this lone peak rising above the flat, dark tundra, had ever brought a spiritual sustenance to Drizzt Do’Urden. Up here, he felt small and mortal, but at the same time, felt confident that he was part of something much larger, of something eternal.
On Bruenor’s Climb, the stars reached down to him, or he lifted up among them, floating free of his physical restraints, his spirit rising and soaring among the celestial spheres. He could hear the sound of the great clockwork up here, could feel the celestial winds in his face and could melt into the ether.
It was a place of the deepest meditation for Drizzt, a place where he understood the great cycle of life and death.
A place that seemed fitting now, as the blood continued to flow from the wound in his forehead.
Ambergris stood with her hands on her hips, looking this way and that, fully perplexed. She turned to Afafrenfere, who could only shrug.
They saw the blood, the signs of the tumble, the signs of the fight, as Entreri had explained to them when he had returned to the camp, a thoroughly shaken Dahlia in his grasp.
But Drizzt was not here.
His leg was broken, Entreri had said, and his head bleeding badly, and indeed, the three of them, the dwarf, the monk, and Effron, easily located the spot where Drizzt had last stood against Dahlia simply by the amount of blood on the ground.
But he wasn’t there, and there was no trail leading from that place, not a line of blood nor drag marks one would expect from a person with a shattered leg.
“Someone found him first,” Effron offered.
“Someone flying, then,” Afafrenfere replied, holding up his hands helplessly as he stood near the lone set of tracks in the snow leading from this place, the path of Entreri and Dahlia that had so easily led them out from their camp.
All three looked up, as if expecting a great bird or a dragon to descend upon them.
“Not hurtin’ as bad as Entreri thinked,” Ambergris surmised. “He’s a ranger, then, and with no small skill.”
“But where would he go?” asked Effron.
“To the Battlehammer dwarves,” Afafrenfere said, and the others nodded.
“We’ll go by there and see,” Ambergris declared.
“Entreri said we were to leave directly, and before the dawn,” Effron reminded them, “to the east and south and out of the dale.”
“Entreri’s wrong, then,” the monk said. “Drizzt wouldn’t leave a friend in such a state, nor will I.”
“Aye,” the dwarf agreed.
Effron glanced back toward their camp, where Dahlia and Entreri were packing up the bedrolls, and couldn’t suppress a wince. He was caught in the middle between his mother and the drow, and while he didn’t want to go against Dahlia in these tentative beginnings of their relationship, he couldn’t disagree with the reasoning of the dwarf and monk. Drizzt had been a loyal companion to him, had welcomed him after his “conversion,” and indeed had become more than a mere companion to Effron. In the Shadowfell, in those days when they sat starving side-by-side, Drizzt had been Effron’s friend.
And it wasn’t a self-serving friendship, the likes of which had dominated every aspect of Effron’s previous existence under the suffrage of Draygo Quick and Herzgo Alegni, but rather, an honest compassion, and welcome.
“To Stokely Silverstream and Clan Battlehammer, then,” the tiefling agreed. “We owe Drizzt that much at least.”
“Perhaps we’re not to part with him, then,” Afafrenfere said obstinately, and he, too, looked back toward the encampment, clearly uncomfortable with the report Artemis Entreri had delivered, clearly upset with the breaking of their band.
“Whole world’s out there,” Ambergris was quick to remind them, however. “Meself ain’t one to stay in this place, not with all roads open. And it’s been many years—who might be knowin’ what we’ll find out there?”
Afafrenfere looked to the dwarf, then back at the camp, and reluctantly nodded.
They did convince Entreri to veer northeast around the base of the mountain to the Battlehammer tunnels.
But the five would leave Icewind Dale, crossing through the Spine of the World pass and coming once more to see the skyline of Luskan a tenday later, with no word of Drizzt Do’Urden.
He had melted into the night, and they knew no more.
The warmth of the blood … the stars reaching down … on his knees against Guenhwyvar … floating up to become one with the stars, with eternity, with all …
The disconnected thoughts pulsed through Drizzt’s consciousness.
Dahlia had slain him, because he wouldn’t so kill her … Entreri intercepting, saving him, but not quite, apparently …
How had he come to this place, Bruenor’s Climb, atop the thousand-foot peak of Kelvin’s Cairn? His broken leg hadn’t carried him here, could not have carried him here.
Why didn’t his leg hurt?
He was drifting away then, and hearing once more the song—the same song he had heard in the enchanted forest on the eastern bank of Lac Dinneshere. The song of Mielikki, he knew in his heart and soul.
The song to call him home.
And who might be there?
His vision blurred. He put his head against Guenhwyvar’s muscled flank, feeling the warmth and strength of the dear panther.
“Don’t forget me,” he whispered.
He heard the song, and the low moan of the panther, and a voice … a voice from long ago, from another time and another life.
His vision crystallized around that sound, for one fleeting instant, and he saw her again, his beloved Catti-brie, and a flood of happiness washed through him.
For she was with the song, and the song beckoned him to join.
The strength left him.
Guenhwyvar cried out, long and low into the Icewind Dale night.
And Catti-brie was there beside him, hugging him and holding him, and he knew that it was all right to let go, to let himself fall, because Catti-brie would catch him.
The Last Threshold: Neverwinter Saga, Book IV Page 45
