The Pirate King t-2

by Robert Anthony Salvatore

  Deudermont clapped his dearest friend on the shoulder and moved to the rail beside him, leading Robillard’s gaze back out to the open sea. “I do fear that you may be right,” he conceded. “When we defeat Arklem Greeth and end the pirate scourge, the unintended consequences might include the retirement of Sea Sprite. We’ll have nothing left to hunt, after all.”

  “You know the world better than that. There were pirates before Arklem Greeth, there are pirates in the time of Greeth, and there will be pirates when his name is lost to the ashes of history. Better angels, you say, and on the whole, I believe—or at least I pray—that you are correct. But it’s never the whole that troubles us, is it? It’s but a tiny piece of humanity who sail the Sword Coast as pirates.”

  “A tiny piece magnified by the powers of the Hosttower.”

  “You may well be right,” said Robillard. “And you may well be wrong, and that, my friend, is my fear.”

  Deudermont held fast to the rail and kept his gaze to the horizon, unblinking though the sun had broken through and reflected brilliantly off the rolling waters. It was a good man’s place to act for the cause of justice. It was a brave man’s place to battle those who would oppress and do harm to helpless innocents. It was a leader’s place to act in concert with his principles and trust enough in those principles to believe that they would lead him and those who followed him to a better place.

  Those were the things Deudermont believed, and he recited them in his mind as he stared at the brilliant reflections on the waters he loved so dearly. He had lived his life, had shaped his own code of conduct, through his faith in the dictums of a good and brave leader, and they had served him well as he in turn had served so well the people of Luskan, Waterdeep, and Baldur’s Gate.

  Robillard knew the Hosttower and the ways of the Arcane Brotherhood, and so Deudermont would indeed defer to him on the specifics of their present enemy.

  But Captain Deudermont would not shy from the duty he saw before him, not with the opportunity of having eager Lord Brambleberry and his considerable resources sailing beside him.

  He had to believe that he was right.

  CHAPTER 8

  SMOTHERED BY A SECURITY BLANKET

  P erhaps I’m just getting older and harder to impress,” Regis said to Drizzt as they walked across a wide fields of grass. “She’s not so great a city, not near the beauty of Mithral Hall—and surely not Silverymoon—but I’m glad they let you in through the gates, at least. Folk are stubborn, but it gives me hope that they can learn.”

  “I was no more impressed by Mirabar than you were,” Drizzt replied, tossing a sidelong glance at his halfling friend. “I had long heard of her wonders, but I agree they’re lacking beside Mithral Hall. Or maybe it’s just that I like the folk who live in Mithral Hall better.”

  “It’s a warmer place,” Regis decided. “From the king on down. But still, you must be glad of your acceptance in Mirabar.”

  Drizzt shrugged as though it didn’t matter, and of course, it didn’t. Not to him, anyway; he could not deny his hope that Marchion Elastul would truly make peace with Mithral Hall and his lost dwarves. That development could only bode well for the North, particularly with an orc kingdom settled on Mithral Hall’s northern border.

  “I’m more glad that Bruenor found the courage to go to Obould’s aid for a cause of common good,” the drow remarked. “We’ve seen a great change in the world.”

  “Or a temporary reprieve.”

  Again Drizzt shrugged, but the gesture was accompanied by a look of helpless resignation. “Every day Obould holds the peace is a day of greater security than we could have expected. When his hordes rushed down from the mountains, I believed we would know nothing but war for years on end. When they surrounded Mithral Hall, I feared we would be driven from the place forever more. Even in the first months of stalemate, I, like everyone else, expected that it would surely descend into war and misery.”

  “I still expect it.”

  Drizzt’s smile showed that he didn’t necessarily disagree. “We stay vigilant for good reason. But every passing day makes that future just a bit less certain. And that’s a good thing.”

  “Or is every passing day nothing more than another day Obould prepares to finish his conquest?” Regis asked.

  Drizzt draped his arm over the halfling’s shoulders.

  “Am I too cynical for fearing such?” Regis asked.

  “If you are, then so am I, and so is Bruenor—and Alustriel, who has spies working all through the Kingdom of Many-Arrows. Our experience with the orcs is long and bitter, full of treachery and war. To think that all we’ve known to be true is not necessarily an absolute is unsettling and almost incomprehensible, and so to walk the road of acceptance and peace often takes more courage than the way of the warrior.”

  “It always is more complicated than it seems, isn’t it?” Regis asked with a wry grin. “Like you, for example.”

  “Or like a halfling friend of mine who fishes with one foot and flees with the other, fights with a mace in his right hand and pickpockets an unsuspecting fool with his left, and all the while manages to keep his belly full.”

  “I have a reputation to uphold,” Regis answered, and handed Drizzt back the purse he’d just lifted from the drow’s belt.

  “Very good,” Drizzt congratulated. “You almost had it off my belt before I felt your hand.” As he took the purse, he handed Regis back the unicorn-headed mace he’d deftly slid from the halfling’s belt as the rogue was lifting his purse.

  Regis shrugged innocently. “If we steal one-for-one, I will end up with the more valuable items of magic.”

  Drizzt looked across the halfling and out to the north, leading Regis’s gaze to a huge black panther moving their way. Drizzt had summoned Guenhwyvar from her Astral home that afternoon and let her go to run a perimeter around them. He hadn’t brought the panther forth much of late, not needing her in the halls of King Bruenor and not wanting to spark some tragic incident with any of the orcs in Obould’s kingdom, who might react to such a sight as Guenhwyvar with a volley of spears and arrows.

  “It’s good to be on the road again,” Regis declared as Guenhwyvar loped up beside him, opposite Drizzt. He ruffled the fur on the back of the great cat’s neck and Guenhwyvar tilted her head and her eyes narrowed to contented slits of approval.

  “And you are complicated, as I said,” Drizzt remarked, viewing this rarely seen side of his comfort-loving friend.

  “I believe I was the one to say that,” Regis corrected. “You just applied it to me. And it’s not that I’m a complicated sort. It’s just that I ever keep my enemies confused.”

  “And your friends.”

  “I use you for practice,” said the halfling, and as he gave a rather vigorous rub of Guenhwyvar’s neck, the panther let out a low growl of approval that resonated across the dales and widened the eyes of every deer within range.

  The fields of tall grass and wild flowers gave way to cultivated land as the sun neared the horizon before them. In the waning twilight, with farmhouses and barns dotting both sides, the path had become a road. The companions spotted a familiar hill in the distance, one sporting the zigzagging silhouette of a house magnificent and curious, with many towers tall and thin, and many more short and squat. Lights burned in every window.

  “Ah, but what mysteries might the Harpells have in store for us this visit?” Drizzt asked.

  “Mysteries for themselves as well, no doubt,” said Regis. “If they haven’t all killed each other by accident by now.”

  As lighthearted as the quip was meant to be, it held an undeniable ring of truth for them both. They’d known the eccentric family of wizards for many years, and never had visited, or been visited by, any of the clan, particularly one Harkle Harpell, without witnessing some strange occurrence. But the Harpells were good friends of Mithral Hall. They had come to the call of Bruenor when the drow of Menzoberranzan assaulted his kingdom, and had fought valiantly among the dwarven r
anks. Their magic lacked predictability, to be sure, but there was no shortage of power behind it.

  “We should go straight to the Ivy Mansion,” Drizzt said as darkness closed in on the small town of Longsaddle. Even as he finished speaking, almost in response, it seemed, a shout of anger erupted in the stillness, followed by an answering bellow and a cry of pain. Without hesitation, the drow and halfling turned and headed that way, Guenhwyvar trotting beside them. Drizzt’s hands stayed near his sheathed scimitars, but he didn’t draw them.

  Another shout, words too distant to be decipherable, followed by a cheer, followed by a cacophony of shouted protests…

  Drizzt sprinted out ahead of Regis. He scrambled down a long embankment, picking a careful route over fallen branches and between the tightly-packed trees. He broke out of the copse and skidded to a stop, surprised.

  “What is it?” Regis asked, stumbling down past him, and the halfling would have gone headlong into a small pond had Drizzt not caught him by the shoulder and held him back.

  “I don’t remember this pond,” Drizzt said, and glanced back in the general direction of the Ivy Mansion to try to get his bearings. “I don’t believe it was here the last time I came through, though it was only a couple of years back.”

  “A couple of years is an eternity where the Harpells are concerned,” Regis reminded him. “Had we come here and found a deep hole where the town had once stood, would you have been surprised? Truly?”

  Drizzt was only half listening. He moved to a clear, flat space and noted the dark outline of a forested island and the light of a larger fire showing through breaks in the thick foliage.

  Another ruckus of arguing sounded from the island.

  Cheers came from the right bank, the protests from the left, both groups hidden from Drizzt’s view by thick foliage, with only a few campfire lights twinkling through the leaves.

  “What?” the perplexed Regis asked, a simple question that accurately reflected Drizzt’s confusion as well. The halfling poked Drizzt’s arm and pointed back to the left, to the outline of a boat dock with several craft bobbing nearby.

  “Be gone, Guenhwyvar,” Drizzt commanded his panther companion. “But be ready to return to me.”

  The cat began to pace in a tight circle, moving faster and faster, and dissipating into a thick gray smoke as she returned to her extraplanar home. Drizzt replaced her small onyx likeness in his belt pouch and rushed to join Regis at the dock. The halfling already had a small rowboat unmoored and was readying the oars.

  “A spell gone awry?” Regis asked as yet another yell of pain sounded from the island.

  Drizzt didn’t answer, but for some reason, didn’t think that to be the case. He motioned Regis aside and took up the oars himself, pulling strongly.

  Then they heard more than bickering and screams. Whimpers filled in the gaps between the arguing, along with feral snarls that prompted Regis to ask, “Wolves?”

  It was not a large lake and Regis soon spotted a dock at the island. Drizzt worked to keep the boat in line with it. They glided in unnoticed and scrambled onto the wharf. A path wound up from it between trees, rocks, and thick brush, which rustled almost constantly from some small animals rushing to and fro. Drizzt caught sight of a fluffy white rabbit hopping away.

  He dismissed the animal with a shake of his head and pressed onward, and once over a short rise, he and Regis finally saw the source of the commotion.

  And neither understood a bit of it.

  A man, stripped to the waist, stood in a cage constructed of vertical posts wrapped with horizontal ropes. Three men dressed in blue robes sat behind him and to the left, with three in red robes similarly seated, only behind and to the right. Directly before the caged man stood a beast, half man and half wolf, he seemed, with a canine snout but eyes distinctly human. He jumped about, appearing on the very edge of control, snarling, growling, and chomping his fangs right in front of the wide eyes of the terrified prisoner.

  “Bidderdoo?” Drizzt asked.

  “Has to be,” said Regis, and he stepped forward—or tried to, for Drizzt held him back.

  “No guards,” the drow warned. “The area is likely magically warded.”

  The werewolf roared in the poor prisoner’s face, and the man recoiled and pleaded pathetically.

  “You did!” the werewolf growled.

  “He had to!” shouted one of the blue-robed men.

  “Murderer!” argued one wearing red robes.

  Bidderdoo whirled and howled, ending the conversation abruptly. The Harpell werewolf spun back to the prisoner and began chanting and waving his arms.

  The man cried out in alarm and protest.

  “What…?” Regis asked, but Drizzt had no answer.

  The prisoner’s babbling began to twist into indecipherable grunts and groans, pain interspersed with protest. His body began to shake and quiver, his bones crackling.

  “Bidderdoo!” Drizzt yelled, and all eyes save those of the squirming, tortured man and the concentrating Harpell wizard, snapped the drow’s way.

  “Dark elf!” yelled one of the blue-robed onlookers, and all of them fell back, one right off his seat to land unceremoniously on the ground.

  “Drow! Drow!” they yelled.

  Drizzt hardly heard them, his lavender eyes popping open wide as he watched the prisoner crumble before him, limbs transforming, fur sprouting.

  “No stew will ever be the same,” Regis muttered helplessly, for no man remained in the wood and rope prison.

  The rabbit, white and fluffy, yipped and yammered, as if trying to form words that would not come. Then it leaped away, easily passing through the wide ropes as it scurried for the safety of the underbrush.

  Spell completed, the werewolf snarled and howled as it spun on the intruders. But the creature quickly calmed, and in a voice too cultured for such a hairy and wild mein said, “Drizzt Do’Urden! Well met!”

  “I want to go home,” Regis mumbled at Drizzt’s side.

  A warm fire burned in the hearth, and there was no denying the comfort of the overstuffed chair and divan set before it, but Drizzt didn’t recline or even sit, and felt little of the room’s warmth.

  They had been ushered into the Ivy Mansion, accompanied by the almost continual flash of lightning bolts, searing the darkness with hot white light on either side of the pond below. Shouts of protest dissipated under the magical explosions, and the howl of a lone wolf—a lonewerewolf—silenced them even more completely.

  The people of Longsaddle had come to understand the dire implications of that howl, apparently.

  For some time, Drizzt and Regis paced or sat in the room, with only an occasional visit by a maid asking if they wanted more to eat or drink, to which Regis always eagerly nodded.

  “That seemed very un-Harpell-like,” he mentioned to Drizzt between bites. “I knew Bidderdoo was a fierce one—he killed Uthegental of House Barrison Del’Armgo, after all—but that was simply tor—”

  “Justice,” interrupted a voice from the door, and the pair turned to see Bidderdoo Harpell enter from the hallway. He no longer looked the werewolf, but rather like a man who had seen much of life—too much, perhaps. He stood in a lanky pose that made him look taller than his six-foot frame, and his hair, all gray, stood out wildly in every conceivable direction, giving the impression that it had not been combed or even finger-brushed in a long, long time. Strangely, though, he was meticulously clean-shaven.

  Regis seemed to have no answer as he looked at Drizzt.

  “Harsher justice than we would expect to find at the hands of the goodly Harpells,” Drizzt explained for him.

  “The prisoner meant to start a war,” Bidderdoo explained. “I prevented it.”

  Drizzt and Regis exchanged expressions full of doubt.

  “Fanaticism requires extreme measures,” the Harpell werewolf—a curse of his own doing due to a badly botched polymorph experiment—explained.

  “This is not the Longsaddle I have known,” said Dri
zzt.

  “It changed quickly,” Bidderdoo was fast to agree.

  “Longsaddle, or the Harpells?” Regis asked, crossing his arms over his chest and tapping his foot impatiently.

  The answer, “Both,” came from the hallway, and even the outraged halfling couldn’t hold his dour posture and expression at the sound of the familiar voice. “One after the other, of course,” Harkle Harpell explained, bounding in through the door.

  The lanky wizard was dressed all in robes, three shades of blue, ruffled and wrinkled, with sleeves so long they covered his hands. He wore a white beret topped by a blue button that matched the darkest hue of his robes, as did his dyed beard, which had grown—with magical assistance, no doubt—to outrageous proportions. One long braid ran down from Harkle’s chin to his belt, flanked by two short, thick scruffs of wiry hair hanging below each jowl. The hair on his head had gone gray, but his eyes held the same luster and eagerness the friends had seen flash so many times in years gone by—usually right before some Harkle-precipitated disaster had befallen them all.

  “The town changed first,” Regis remarked.

  “Of course!” said Harpell. “You don’t think we enjoy this, do you?” He bounded over to Drizzt and took the drow’s hand in a great shake—or started to before wrapping Drizzt in a powerful embrace that nearly lifted him off the ground.

  “It’s grand to see you, my old pirate-hunting companion!” Harkle boomed.

  “Bidderdoo seemed to enjoy his work,” Regis said, cutting Harkle’s turn toward him short.

  “You come to pass judgment after so short a time?” Bidderdoo replied.

  “I know what I saw,” said the halfling, not backing down an inch.

  “What you saw without context, you mean,” said Bidderdoo.

  Regis glared at him then turned his judgment upon Harkle.

  “You understand, of course,” Harkle said to Drizzt, seeking support. But he found little in the drow’s rigid expression.