The Pirate King t-2

by Robert Anthony Salvatore

  Harkle rolled his eyes and sighed then nearly fell over as one of his orbs kept on rolling, over and over, in its socket. After a few moments, the discombobulated wizard slapped himself hard on the side of the head, and the eye steadied into place.

  “My orbs have never been the same since I went to look in on Bruenor,” he quipped with an exaggerated wink, referring, of course, to the time he’d accidentally teleported just his eyes to Mithral Hall to roll around on Bruenor’s audience chamber floor.

  “Indeed,” said Regis, “and Bruenor bids you to never do so in such a manner ever again.”

  Harkle looked at him curiously for a few moments then burst out laughing. Apparently thinking the tension gone, the wizard moved to wrap Regis in a tight hug.

  The halfling stopped him with an upraised hand. “We make peace with orcs while the Harpells torture humans.”

  “Justice, not torture,” Harkle corrected. “Torture? Hardly that!”

  “I know what I saw,” said the halfling, “And I saw it with both of my eyes in my head and neither of them rolling around in circles.”

  “There are a lot of rabbits on that small island,” Drizzt added.

  “And do you know what you would have seen if we hadn’t dealt harshly with men like that priest Ganibo?”

  “Priest?” both Drizzt and Regis said together.

  “Aren’t they all and aren’t they always?” Bidderdoo answered with obvious disgust.

  “More than our share of them, to be sure,” Harkle agreed. “We’re a tolerant bunch here in Longsaddle, as you know.”

  “As we knew,” said Regis, and it was Bidderdoo who rolled his eyes, though having never botched a teleportation like his bumbling cousin, his eyes didn’t keep rolling.

  “Our acceptance of…strangeness…” Harkle started.

  “Embrace of strangeness, you mean,” said Drizzt.

  “What?” the wizard asked, and looked curiously at Bidderdoo before catching on and giving a burst of laughter. “Indeed, yes!” he said. “We who so play in the extremes of Mystra’s Weave are not so fast to judge others. Which invited trouble to Longsaddle.”

  “You are aware of the disposition of Malarites in general, yes?” Bidderdoo clarified.

  “Malarites?” Drizzt asked.

  “The worshipers of Malar?” asked the more surface-worldly Regis.

  “A battle of gods?” Drizzt asked.

  “Worse,” said Harkle. “A battle of followers.”

  Drizzt and Regis looked at him curiously.

  “Different sects of the same god,” Harkle explained. “Same god with different edicts, depending on which side you ask—and oh, but they’ll kill you if you disagree with their narrow interpretations of their beast god’s will! And how these Malarites always disagree, with each other and with everyone else. One group built a chapel on the eastern bank of Pavlel. The other on the western bank.”

  “Pavlel? The lake?”

  “We named it after him,” said Harkle.

  “In memoriam, no doubt,” Regis said.

  “Well, we don’t really know,” Harkle replied. “Since he and the mountain flew off together.”

  “Of course,” said the halfling who knew he shouldn’t be surprised.

  “The blue-robed and red-robed onlookers at the…punishment,” said Drizzt.

  “Priests of Malar all,” Bidderdoo replied. “One side witnessing justice, the other accepting consequences. It’s important that we make a display of such punishment to deter future acts.”

  “He burned down a house,” Harkle explained. “With a family inside.”

  “And so he was punished,” Bidderdoo added.

  “By being polymorphed into a rabbit?” asked Regis.

  “At least they can’t hurt anyone in that state,” said Bidderdoo.

  “Except for that one,” Harkle corrected. “The one with the big teeth, who could jump so high!”

  “Ah, him,” Bidderdoo agreed. “That rabbit was smokepowder! It seemed as if he was possessed of the edge of a vorpal weapon, that one, giving nasty bites!” He turned to Drizzt. “Can I borrow your cat?”

  “No,” the drow replied.

  Regis growled with frustration. “You turned him into a rabbit!” he shouted, as if there could be no suitable reply.

  Bidderdoo shook his head solemnly. “He remains happy and with bountiful leaves, brush, and flowers on the island.”

  “Happy? Is he man or rabbit? Where is his mind?”

  “Somewhere in between, at this point, I would expect,” Bidderdoo admitted.

  “That’s ghastly!” Regis protested.

  “Time’s passage will align his thoughts with his new body.”

  “To live as a rabbit,” said Regis.

  Bidderdoo and Harkle exchanged concerned, and guilty, glances.

  “You killed him!” Regis shouted.

  “He is very much alive!” Harkle protested.

  “How can you say that?”

  Drizzt put a hand on the halfling’s shoulder, and when he looked up to meet the drow’s gaze, Drizzt shook his head slowly, backing him down.

  “Would that we could simply obliterate them all, that Longsaddle would know her days of old,” Bidderdoo mumbled and left the room.

  “The task that has befallen us is not a pleasant one,” Harkle said. “But you don’t understand…”

  Drizzt motioned for him to stop, needing no further elaboration, for indeed, the drow did understand the untenable situation that had descended upon his friends, the Harpells. A foul taste filled his throat and he wanted to scream in protest of it all, but he didn’t. Truly there was nothing to say, and nothing left for him to see in Longsaddle.

  He informed Harkle, “We’re traveling down the road to Luskan and from there to Icewind Dale.”

  “Ah, Luskan!” said Harkle. “I was to apprentice there once, long ago, but for some reason, they wouldn’t let me into the famed Hosttower. A pity.” He sighed profoundly and shook his head, but brightened immediately, as Harkle always did. “I can get you there in an instant,” he said, snapping his fingers in such dramatic fashion, waving his hand with such zest, that he knocked over a lamp.

  Or would have, except that Drizzt, his speed enhanced by magical anklets, darted forward in a blur, caught the lamp, and righted it.

  “We prefer to walk,” the drow said. “It’s not so far and the weather is clear and kind. It’s not the destination that matters most, after all, but the journey.”

  “True, I suppose,” Harkle muttered, seeming disappointed for just a moment before again brightening. “But then, we could not have draggedSea Sprite across the miles to Carradoon, could we?”

  “Fog of fate?” Regis asked Drizzt, recalling the tale of how Drizzt and Catti-brie wound up in a landlocked lake with Captain Deudermont and his oceangoing pirate hunter. Harkle Harpell had created a new enchantment, which, as expected, had gone terribly awry, transporting the ship and all aboard her to a landlocked lake in the Snowflake Mountains.

  “I have a new one!” Harkle squealed. Regis blanched and fell back, and Drizzt waved his hands to shut down the wizard before he could fully launch into spellcasting.

  “We will walk,” the drow said again. He looked down at Regis and added, “At once,” which brought a curious expression from the halfling.

  They were out of Longsaddle soon after, hustling down the road to the west, and despite Drizzt’s determined stride, Regis kept pausing and glancing left and right, as if expecting the drow to turn.

  “What is it?” Drizzt finally asked him.

  “Are we really leaving?”

  “That was our plan.”

  “I thought you meant to come out of town then circle back in to better view the situation.”

  Drizzt gave a helpless little chuckle. “To what end?”

  “We could go to the island.”

  “And rescue rabbits?” came the drow’s sarcastic reply. “Do not underestimate Harpell magic—their silliness belies the stren
gth of their enchantments. For all the folly of Fog of Fate, not many wizards in the world could have so warped Mystra’s Weave to teleport an entire ship and crew. We go and collect the rabbits, but then what? Seek audience of Elminster, who perhaps alone might undue the dweomer?”

  Regis stammered, logically cornered.

  “And to what end?” Drizzt asked. “Should we, new to the scene, interject ourselves in the Longsaddle’s justice?” Regis started to argue, but Drizzt cut him short. “What might Bruenor do to one who burned a family inside a house?” the drow asked. “Do you think his justice would be less harsh than the polymorph? I think it might come at the end of a many-notched axe!”

  “This is different,” Regis said, shaking his head in obvious frustration. Clearly the sight of a man violently transformed into a rabbit had unnerved the halfling profoundly. “You cannot…that’s not what the Harpells…Longsaddle shouldn’t…” Regis stammered, looking for a focus for his frustration.

  “It’s not what I expected, and no, I’m not pleased by it.”

  “But you will accept it?”

  “It’s not my choice to make.”

  “The people of Longsaddle call out to you,” Regis said.

  The drow stopped walking and moved to a boulder resting on the side of the trail, where he sat down, gazing back the way they’d come.

  “These situations are more complicated than they appear,” he said. “You grew up among the pashas of Calimport, with their personal armies and thuggish ways.”

  “Of course, but that doesn’t mean I accept the same thing from the Harpells.”

  Drizzt shook his head. “That’s not my point. In their respective neighborhoods, how were the pashas viewed?”

  “As heroes,” Regis said.

  “Why?”

  Regis leaned back against a stone, a perplexed look on his face.

  “In the lawless streets of Calimport, why were thugs like Pasha Pook seen as heroes?”

  “Because without them, it would have been worse,” Regis said, and caught on.

  “The Harpells have no answer to the fanaticism of the battling priests, and so they respond with a heavy hand.”

  “You agree with that?”

  “It’s not my place to agree or disagree,” said Drizzt. “The Harpells are the lid on a boiling cauldron. I don’t know if their choice of justice is the correct one, but I suspect from what we were told that without that lid, Longsaddle would know strife beyond anything you or I can imagine. Sects of opposing gods battling for supremacy can be terrifying indeed, but when the fight is between two interpretations of the same god, the misery can reach new proportions. I saw this intimately in my youth, my friend. You cannot imagine the fury of opposing matron mothers, each convinced that she, and not her enemy, spoke the will of Lolth!

  “You would have me descend upon Longsaddle and use my influence, even my blades, to somehow alter the situation. But what would that, even if I could accomplish anything, which I strongly doubt, loose upon the common folk of Longsaddle?”

  “Better to let Bidderdoo continue his brutality?” Regis asked.

  “Better to let the people with a stake in the outcome determine their own fate,” Drizzt answered. “We’ve not the standing or the forces to better the situation in Longsaddle.”

  “We don’t even know what that situation really is.”

  Drizzt took a deep, steadying breath, and said, “I know enough to recognize that if the problems in Longsaddle are not as profound as I—as we—fear, then the Harpells will find their way out of it. And if it is as dangerous then there’s nothing we can do to help. However we intervene, one or even both sides will see us as meddling. Better that we go on our way. I think we are both unnerved by the unusual nature of the Harpells’ justice, but I have to say that there is a temperate manner to it.”

  “Drizzt!”

  “It is not a permanent punishment, for Bidderdoo can undo that which he has enacted,” the drow explained. “He is neutering the warring offenders by rendering them harmless—unless, of course, he is turning the other side into carrots.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I know,” Drizzt admitted with an upraised hand and a smirk. “But who are we to intervene, and haven’t the Harpells earned our trust?”

  “You trust in what you saw?”

  “I trust that if the situation alters and calls for a recanting of the justice delivered, the Harpells will undo the transformations and return the no-doubt shaken and hopefully repentant men to their respective places. Easier that than the dwarves of Mithral Hall sewing a head back on a criminal there.”

  Regis sighed and seemed to let it all go. “Can we stop back here on our return to Mithral Hall?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “I don’t know,” Regis answered honestly, and he too looked back toward the distant town, profound disappointment on his normally cheery face. “It’s like Obould Many-Arrows,” Regis mumbled.

  Drizzt looked at him curiously.

  “Everything is like Obould lately,” the halfling went on. “Always the best of a bad choice.”

  “I will be certain to relay your feelings to Bruenor.”

  Regis stared blankly for just a moment then a grin widened and widened until it was followed by a belly-laugh, both heartfelt and sadly resigned.

  “Come along,” Drizzt bade him. “Let us go and see if we can save the rest of the world.”

  And so the two friends lightened their steps and headed down the western trail, oblivious to the prophecy embedded in Drizzt Do’Urden’s joke.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE CITY OF SAILS

  P ymian Loodran burst out the tavern door, arms flailing with terror. He fell as he turned, tearing the skin on one knee, but he hardly slowed. Scrambling, rolling, and finally getting back to his feet, he sprinted down the way. Behind him, out of the tavern, came a pair of men dressed in the familiar robes of the Hosttower of the Arcane, white with broad red trim, talking as if nothing was amiss.

  “You don’t believe he’s fool enough to enter his own house,” one said.

  “You accepted the bet,” the other reminded.

  “He will flee for the gate and the wider road beyond,” the first insisted, but even as he finished the other pointed down the road to a three-story building. The terrified man ascended an outside stairway on all fours, grabbing and pulling at the steps.

  The first wizard, defeated, handed over the wand. “May I open the door, at least?” he asked.

  “I would be an unappreciative victor to deny you at least some enjoyment,” his friend replied.

  They made their way without rushing, even though the stairway moved back along an alleyway and away from the main road, so the hunted man had passed out of sight.

  “He resides on the second floor?” the first wizard asked.

  “Does it matter?” said the second, to which the first nodded and smiled.

  As they reached the alleyway, they came in sight of the second story door. The first wizard pulled out a tiny metal rod and began to mutter the first words of a spell.

  “High Captain Kurth’s man,” his companion interrupted. He motioned with his chin across to the other side of the street where a large-framed thug had exited a building and taken a particular interest in the two wizards.

  “Very fortunate,” the first replied. “It’s always good to give a reminder to the high captains.” And he went right back to his spellcasting.

  A few heartbeats later, a sizzling lightning bolt rent the air between the wizard and the door, blasting the flimsy wooden portal from its hinges and sending splinters flying into the flat.

  The second wizard, already deep in chanting to activate the wand, took careful aim and sent a small globe of orange fire leaping up to the opening. It disappeared into the flat and a blood-curdling, delicious scream told both wizards that the fool knew it for what it was.

  A fireball.

  A moment later, one that no doubt seemed like an eternit
y to the fugitive in the flat—and his wife and children, too, judging from the chorus of screams coming forth from the building—the spell burst to life. Flames roared out the open door, and out every window and every unsealed crack in the wall as well. Though not a concussive blast, the magical fire did its work hungrily, biting at the dry wood of the old building, engulfing the entire second floor and roaring upward to quickly engulf the third.

  As the wizards admired their handiwork, a young boy appeared on the third story balcony, his back and hair burning. Out of his mind with pain and terror, he leaped without hesitation, thumping down with bone-cracking force against the alleyway cobblestones.

  He lay moaning, broken, and probably dying.

  “A pity,” said the first wizard.

  “It’s the fault of Pymian Loodran,” the second replied, referring to the fugitive who had had the audacity to steal the purse of a lower-ranking acolyte from the Hosttower. The young mage had indulged too liberally of potent drink, making him easy prey, and the rogue Loodran had apparently been unable to resist.

  Normally, Loodran’s offense would have gotten him arrested and dragged to Prisoner’s Carnival, where he likely would have survived, though probably without all of his fingers. But Arklem Greeth had decided that it was time for a show of force in the streets. The peasants were becoming a bit more bold of late, and worse, the high captains seemed to be thinking of themselves as the true rulers of the city.

  The two wizards turned back to regard Kurth’s scout, but he had already melted into the shadows, no doubt to run screaming to his master.

  Arklem Greeth would be pleased.

  “This work invigorates and wearies me at the same time,” the second said to the first, handing him back his wand. “I do love putting all of my practice into true action.” He glanced down the alley, where the boy lay unmoving, though still quietly groaning. “But…”

  “Take heart, brother,” the other said, leading him away. “The greater purpose is served and Luskan is at peace.”

  The fire burned through the night, engulfing three other structures before the area residents finally contained it. In the morning, they dug out eleven bodies, including that of Pymian Loodran, who had been so proud the day before when he had brought a chicken and fresh fruit home to his hungry family. A real chicken! A real meal, their first that was not just moldy bread and old vegetables in more than a year.