Charon's claw tns-3

by R. A. Salvatore

  “You startled it. It attacked out of fear,” Drizzt answered. He was a ranger, and well versed in the ways of the wilds. He moved forward-or started to, until a serpent threw itself through the air at him. Up flashed his arm to block, and he intercepted the snake’s opened maw closing on his forearm, grabbing tight, its body immediately slapping around his torso as it tried to gain a hold and begin its crushing squeeze.

  The strength of the creature surprised the drow, its every muscle working in perfect coordination. Noting movement to the side, he glanced at Entreri, at first thinking that the assassin was rushing to his aid. Not so, he understood, when he realized that Entreri had his own problems.

  On came the strangely aggressive snakes, slithering through the water, sliding along the walls, throwing themselves through the air.

  With a growl, Drizzt lifted his bitten left arm, extending the snake out before his right shoulder, turned and wriggled enough to free his other arm, and brought a quick backhand of Twinkle to cut the creature in half. Immediately, the lower torso loosened around him and dropped with a splash to the floor, but that head held on, stubbornly. Too concerned with drawing his other blade-a bit awkwardly since Icingdeath, which he usually carried in his right hand, was sheathed on his left hip-Drizzt let the half-serpent hang there.

  His focus remained before him, as it had to, slapping, slashing, and kicking to fend off the onslaught.

  Beside him, Entreri worked with equal fury, his dirk swiftly deflecting leaping serpents, his sword scoring kills.

  But behind them, there came a long series of dull raps, and in one of the infrequent moments of pause, Drizzt glanced back, as did Entreri, to see Dahlia straddling the water, her staff presented horizontally before her and she rapidly shifted it up and down, out left and out right, cracking it against the stone walls.

  “Hit the snakes, you idiot!” Entreri yelled at her, and he was nearly toppled at the end of that sentence as one of the serpents slithered through his defenses and wrapped around his legs, tugging him powerfully.

  “Dahlia!” Drizzt implored her.

  But the rapping continued and so did the onslaught of serpents-there seemed to be no end to them! Entreri freed himself only to get hit again, and Drizzt nearly had Icingdeath pulled from his grasp when one snake took hold.

  The corridor began to flash, not from the waving of Drizzt’s glowing scimitar, but with sharp spikes of light, crackles of lightning.

  Entreri kept cursing at Dahlia and growling at the snakes, and swinging and stabbing and kicking. And just when Drizzt thought he had gained some measure of momentum, a serpent appeared on the ceiling before him. He threw himself back and low into a crouch and the snapping jaws rent the air, just missing his left ear. The snake retracted before his blade could decapitate it, then threw itself at him, slamming him hard and nearly knocking him from his feet.

  To fall was to be overwhelmed, Drizzt knew. The water shimmied, alive with serpents.

  “Dahlia!” he cried for help.

  This time she answered him, not with words, but with thunder. She thrust Kozah’s Needle through the water to slam against the floor, and there she released the energy her rapping had imbued within it. The retort jolted all three of them into the air, though all three held their footing as they landed. The water churned and sizzled, a stinky steam lifting from it so thickly that it obscured their vision.

  Drizzt tried to respond, to say something, but found his jaw clenched from the energy pulsing through him.

  Then it was over, as unexpectedly and abruptly as it had happened, and an eerie stillness replaced the fury of the previous moments.

  Snakes dropped from the walls and ceiling, or hung in place, their lengths looped over a natural beam or a jag or jut. Snakes lay on the floor in various poses, like living runes or glyphs. Snakes floated in the water, sliding down to bump against a leg or foot.

  Perhaps dead, perhaps stunned. That latter, very real possibility had Drizzt more than a little alarmed.

  Beside him, Entreri slashed down on one reptile, and its convulsion as his blade struck home told the ranger that it had indeed been alive until cleaved.

  “Be gone, and quickly!” Drizzt cried. “Leave them, there are too many!”

  “Out the way we came!” Dahlia said.

  “Alegni is that way,” Entreri reminded, pointing ahead. “And it’s shorter.”

  They didn’t have time to think it through. They didn’t have time to consider the unusual behavior of so many ordinary creatures. They simply had to react. Perhaps it was the carrot of Alegni, which Entreri had dangled before Dahlia, but whatever the reason, Drizzt was surprised when the woman splashed up behind him, prodding him and Entreri to move on.

  He noted that Entreri crouched and reached into the water and pulled something forth before scrambling to pace him, but took no further note as the three zigzagged their way through a maze of stunned serpents.

  Fortunately, the magical energy of Kozah’s Needle had reached far enough along the corridor to get most of the snakes, and they passed beyond that point in short order, and even more fortunately, so they presumed, the corridor widened a bit more, and heightened, and they could press on with more urgency.

  Except that they had to wait for a moment as Entreri pulled up to a rock and sat down, and only then did Drizzt understand what the assassin had stopped to retrieve from the water: one of his low boots.

  Dahlia’s jolt had lifted him right out of his shoe.

  With a few muttered curses and a shake of his head, Entreri pulled the smoking boot back on and stood straight. He looked hard at Dahlia and said, “You owe me a new pair.”

  “I saved your life,” she retorted.

  “If you had just bothered to join in the fight, it wouldn’t have needed any saving, would it?”

  Again Drizzt watched the two and their verbal sparring with something less than amusement, but he couldn’t really focus on it at that moment, because something about their encounter with the bed of serpents was now, in retrospect, truly bothering him.

  “Why were all of those snakes exactly the same size?” he asked when they had started on their way again.

  “Why wouldn’t they be?” Dahlia asked.

  “Snakes shed their skins and grow quickly, and continually,” Drizzt explained.

  “So they were all the same age,” the elf woman replied, her tone showing that she hardly saw the point of this conversation.

  Drizzt shook his head. “Snakes don’t herd.”

  “That was a herd of snakes,” Dahlia quickly retorted.

  “A bed of snakes,” the ranger corrected, but half-heartedly, for her point was well taken. Drizzt shook his head, not quite accepting it. Snakes did collect in the winter, of course-the drow had found many such dens in his travels, some containing thousands of the creatures. But he had never seen such a hunting pack as they had just encountered, and had never heard of a coordinated snake attack!

  “Magically conjured?” Dahlia asked, and that sounded right to Drizzt, until Entreri chimed in.

  “Babies.”

  “Babies?” Dahlia echoed doubtfully, stating the obvious, for how could a sixfoot snake be a baby?

  But it was the way Entreri had said it that had both Drizzt, and Dahlia, despite her argument, turning his way, then following his gaze.

  To the mother.

  In a small room lit by a single candle, Brother Anthus sat cross-legged on the bare floor. His eyes were closed, his hands resting on the cool stone beside his legs, palms facing upward. Softly, the monk chanted, moaned even, as he focused on his deep inhalation and exhalation, using that rising and falling movement of his belly to clear his swirling thoughts, to find a place of deep peace and emptiness.

  This was his only refuge, and even it, at first, seemed not a place of serenity.

  Should he travel to Waterdeep and alert the lords that the Netheril Empire was gaining a stronghold just north of them?

  Images of that road, fleeting glimpses of t
he trouble he would have slipping away unnoticed, or of the consequences should Herzgo Alegni’s many soldiers capture him before he got away, assailed him. And if he went, of course, he could not return to Neverwinter unless and until Alegni had been thrown down and the agents of Netheril routed.

  One by one, Brother Anthus patted down those thoughts.

  He felt the rise and fall of his belly.

  And what of Arunika? Where had the woman found such strength as he had witnessed firsthand at her cottage? How could a small woman survive so casually outside the city walls, anyway? The region was full of wild things, and evil things, coordinated like the Thayans, or rogue bandits, goblinkin, or owlbears.

  Brother Anthus saw the image of Arunika and gradually pushed it away.

  He felt the rise and fall of his belly.

  What did Herzgo Alegni think of him? Did the warlord even know who he was? And what of Jelvus Grinch-what of value might Anthus bring to Jelvus Grinch to get the man to properly introduce him to the Netherese warlord?

  In his mind, Alegni and Grinch stood side by side, smiling back at him, but not a grin of friendship. More likely, he knew, they were mocking him and would allow him no ascent within the ranks of the city, for what of value might he offer, indeed?

  But those two, too, receded, pushed back by the deepening emptiness of Brother Anthus.

  He felt the rise and fall of his belly.

  And that was all. There was no more. He had chased away the thoughts, the tumult, the uncertainty.

  Now he simply was.

  An empty vessel, at peace and contented, and the outside world didn’t matter. Time didn’t matter, and didn’t register to him.

  Just the rise and fall of his belly, the cool emptiness.

  Then he felt the twinge.

  It was not a memory, not an internal thought, not a question needing to be answered.

  His belly rose softly, and the cool darkness of his mediation saw a flash, a flicker, an intrusion.

  Brother Anthus had seen this before, of course, and now he fought hard to maintain his detachment, to mute the noise. This was a state of reception, with his involuntary filters and noise shut down. But it wasn’t that easy, for he had felt this type of twinge before and he knew what it meant, and knew its source, generally, at least.

  He had to stay in his purely receptive state to keep hearing it, he knew, but how could he, given the implications that he had heard it at all?

  And if he followed that line of reasoning on those implications, and the potential, he would lose it all.

  You are deceiving yourself, his thoughts scolded. You want it too badly. But no, it was there, one more time, and he knew what it was. The Sovereignty.

  An aboleth!

  Brother Anthus’s belly rose and fell more quickly, then, as he began to gasp for breath. His eyes opened wide and he unwound his legs and quickly scrambled to his knees, hands coming before him in a motion of supplication.

  Give me this, he silently prayed to his god, for he wanted the Sovereignty back, needed it back.

  Mentally he reached out for the signal, but now his thoughts were spinning again, full of implications and possibilities.

  Many heartbeats passed, and so desperate was Brother Anthus to hear the creature’s telepathic music once more that he couldn’t even register the pain the stones of the floor were causing to his bony knees.

  “Please,” he whispered aloud, then more insistently and loudly, “Please!”

  He shook his head vigorously in denial against his growing fear that he had wanted this to happen so badly, he had tricked himself into hearing it. He struggled to his feet, his knees popping, and he staggered stiff-legged for the doorway to exit the small chamber.

  He burst out into the temple’s main chapel, holding the door jamb for support, his gaze wildly darting around the dimly candlelit room as if expecting a visitor to be waiting for him.

  But it was just him in the chapel. And now, too, it was just him, alone in his thoughts.

  Denying that obvious reality, with his eyes wet with tears, Anthus rushed for the outer door. “Please!” he said over and over again, and he stumbled out onto the street, wearing nothing but his loincloth, in the cold air and sparkling stars of a late autumn Neverwinter night.

  Brother Anthus wandered the streets aimlessly, begging and pleading, crying and wailing, shaking his fist and shouting of betrayal, and whether out of fear that the man had gone mad, or simply through lack of care, not a shade or a citizen went to retrieve him.

  More than once, he thought he heard the sweet sound of an aboleth’s voice again, though it seemed to be about him and not directed at him, and Anthus folded up and fell to his knees once more, right in the middle of a wide, four-way intersection.

  Apparently oblivious of his surroundings, of the many curious gazes that came his way, Brother Anthus began to chant.

  He felt the rise and fall of his belly.

  “I need more,” Herzgo Alegni implored the red blade. He had felt a sensation, a flicker, a feeling that his assassin was somewhere around, not too far. Claw’s hold on the man known as Barrabus was, in truth, limited, and was curtailed even more by distance. Fortunately for Alegni, the dangerous little man had never caught on to this truth.

  In those situations that truly mattered, where Barrabus wanted to strike out against Alegni, Claw was quite effective. It could warn of, and react to, Barrabus the Gray’s strikes before Barrabus the Gray ever made them. The span of time between thinking of a strike and executing it was exceedingly small to an outside observer. But Claw observed from the inside, and those fleeting fractions of a heartbeat were much longer within the universe of thought in which Claw resided.

  The sword didn’t answer Alegni’s call just then, and that brought a frown to the hulking tiefling’s red-skinned and devilish face.

  “Where is he?” the warlord asked directly. “Where is your slave?”

  In reply, the tiefling was given the impression that Barrabus was near, but he felt something else, then, something more.

  In the distance, Alegni heard screaming, a desperate plea of “Please!” shouted over and over again in the Neverwinter night. He dismissed it as unimportant- likely one of the new shade soldiers had encountered one of the pathetic citizens, to bad end for the citizen. He focused once more on the red-bladed sword and this other sensation.

  There was energy in the air, he understood. Telepathic energy.

  Herzgo Alegni leaned back in the chair on his balcony, suddenly concerned. The idea of Barrabus-Artemis Entreri-coming back into the city didn’t bother him at all, even if the man was accompanied by Dahlia and that drow ranger who had joined by her side. To Alegni, they might prove an inconvenience, but more likely an opportunity. Not Dahlia, of course. She would have to be captured and tortured, and likely killed, but as long as he held this sword, Barrabus couldn’t hurt him. Of that Alegni was sure.

  But what of this other power? He was sensing it now because Claw was sensing it. What might it be? Who or what was coming to threaten his hold on Neverwinter?

  He got nothing more from the sword, then, and eventually gave up and slid the red blade back into its loop on his belt. He considered going to Effron- surely a necromancer would be more attuned to such mystical energies as he had sensed-but only briefly, for how could Alegni be sure that the source of this energy was not the twisted warlock himself?

  In the end, the tiefling simply sighed and let it go. He glanced at the decorated pommel of his wondrous sword, and wondered if he had even really sensed something external to Claw at all. Perhaps it had been Claw’s energies, reaching out in search of Barrabus, that he had inadvertently intercepted. He looked out at the wider city, at the multitude of checkpoints and sentry positions he had enacted about Neverwinter. Barrabus and his new friends, if they were indeed Barrabus’s allies, weren’t getting past that wall without Alegni knowing about it.

  He scanned the darkened city, eyes roving from firelight to firelight, tor
ch to torch. Nothing seemed amiss or out of the ordinary.

  Alegni nodded, satisfied, collected his sword and the boots he had just removed, and went back into his room, hoping to get a half-night’s sleep before the dawn.

  The huge serpent, its body as thick as a large man’s chest, lifted its massive head off the floor to stare into the eyes of the three invaders to its sewer realm.

  “Fan out,” Drizzt told his companions, Entreri to the right of him, Dahlia to his left. “Widen out. We have to flank that maw.”

  He ended with a gasp as the giant snake head snapped at him, lightning fast. His first thought was to block with his blades, but how ridiculous that notion seemed to him in the face of the opened maw, a mouth large enough to swallow him whole, flying at him with the power of a charging horse! Instinct took over and the drow desperately dodged aside, and the air rippled as the snake head snapped past him so powerfully that the shock alone nearly knocked Drizzt from his feet. He held his balance, but the snake recoiled too quickly for the drow to strike it on its retreat.

  “We cannot fight that,” Dahlia whispered, and Drizzt caught more than pragmatism in her defeated tone, and when he glanced at the fighter, at this elf who reveled in battle, he saw her arms slipping down helplessly, as if in surrender.

  He looked back to the giant snake, to the huge head swerving tantalizingly side to side, to the black eyes looking back at him, looking right through him, mocking him with their power.

  Many heartbeats passed. It occurred to Drizzt more than once that Dahlia was correct here, that they couldn’t fight this great creature. The snake was far above them, far too great a foe.

  And it didn’t want to kill them.

  That truth seemed obvious, and made perfect sense-until Drizzt managed to step back from the obviousness and actually think about it.

  Only then did the drow widen his view around the great serpent, to see a half-dozen other people flanking the snake, contentedly.

  Contentedly.

  There they were, human citizens of Neverwinter, along with a pair of Shadovar, all unarmed and standing beside the serpent as if it was their friend.