Charon's claw tns-3

by R. A. Salvatore

  With a nod, he disappeared, and the portal thinned then dissipated behind him. “If we take them and get the sword, we will be hailed as heroes,” Afafrenfere said as soon as they were alone.

  Ambergris put her hands on hips, shook her head, and snorted. “Ye just don’t understand, do ye?” she asked.

  Afafrenfere crossed his strong, slender arms over his chest.

  Ambergris just laughed and started away.

  “To the hunt?” the eager monk asked.

  “To see what we might find o’ worth on the dead shades,” the dwarf corrected.

  “And might be when ye see how many dead shades’re lyin’ about that ye’ll finally understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Understand that I ain’t hoping to be lying dead beside any o’ them anytime soon,” said the dwarf as she stomped away.

  Drizzt, Dahlia, and Entreri came above a ridge line, looking down a long and steep descent to a region of stone and boulders. Drizzt and Dahlia knew the place well-they had charged down that very slope into a battle with the Thayan forces of Sylora Salm.

  “We’re not far,” Drizzt remarked, and pointed down to the left.

  “Not far from the outer tunnels,” Dahlia corrected. “We’ll hike for hours more to get to the entryway of Gauntlgrym, if it even remains.”

  Her tone was combative, and Drizzt gave her an appropriately disconcerting look-one Dahlia returned tenfold.

  “Better to be underground, out of the exposure of the open road,” Drizzt said.

  “Do you fear another fight with the Netherese?” Dahlia shot back.

  “Better to be done with all of this,” Entreri muttered, and started moving, without looking back.

  Drizzt felt like a fool-he could only assume that Dahlia held similar feelings-for Entreri had just diminished their lovers’ spat in all of its ridiculousness. The animosity and argument between Drizzt and Dahlia was obviously the by-product of some other issue between them, and given the gravity of their mission as they neared their goal, Entreri’s poignant mockery had silenced them both. They were near to Gauntlgrym, thus near to the primordial, thus near to destroying Charon’s Claw, an act that would mark the end of Artemis Entreri’s enslavement at the price of his very life.

  Next to that, how petty did Drizzt and Dahlia’s jealousy and quarreling seem?

  Humbled, Drizzt started off after the assassin. He had gone many steps before Dahlia followed, far back in his wake.

  They found the tunnel entrance easily enough and moved deliberately and silently along the darkened pathway toward the grand cavern that housed the entryway to Gauntlgrym. All three marched with practiced steps, not a footfall to be heard among them, and with equal skill and experience, all they needed to guide them through the corridors was the meager light of Drizzt’s scimitar, Twinkle.

  That soft blue-white glow illuminated a very small area before the drow, who took up the lead, and no doubt it marked them, him at least, as a target for any monsters or goblinkin that might be lurking in the area. That proved to be of little concern, though, for all three of the companions itched for a fight, any fight. To Drizzt’s thinking, if they didn’t soon find a common enemy, they would probably be battling each other.

  Once again, images of cutting down Artemis Entreri flitted through his mind, along with the reminder of that intimate conversation between the assassin and Dahlia. They shared something, Drizzt knew, something deeper than the bond between himself and Dahlia. He imagined making a fatal blow-one made, curiously, with a red-bladed sword.

  “How near are we?” Entreri asked a long while later, jarring Drizzt from his thoughts in the quiet of the tunnels, an eerie hush broken only occasionally by the distant sound of dripping water, or the harsh crack of something hard against the stone.

  Drizzt stopped and turned around, waiting as Entreri and Dahlia closed up behind him. He looked to Dahlia for an answer, but the elf shrugged, her memories apparently as hazy as his own.

  “Halfway, I would guess,” Drizzt replied. “Perhaps less.”

  “Then let’s set a guard and rest,” said Entreri.

  “I thought you were eager to die,” Dahlia snapped at him.

  “I’m eager to be rid of the sword,” he answered without hesitation. “But I’m not eager to engage more Shadovar when my legs are weak from the long hike.”

  Dahlia started to respond, to argue, but Drizzt beat her to it. “I agree,” he said, ending the debate, though his siding with Entreri brought him a scowl from Dahlia that likely signaled the start of another debate, he knew. “We must be on our best guard when we enter Gauntlgrym. We don’t know what we’ll encounter in her dark and broken halls.

  “You suggested it,” he said to Entreri. “So I suspect that you’ve discovered a place you think suitable for a camp-or do you propose that we just pause in the middle of the tunnel?”

  Entreri turned to look over his left shoulder and pointed up at the top of the cavern wall, right where it rounded into a ceiling. Following that lead, Drizzt moved over and held Twinkle up high. The scimitar’s glow revealed a small tunnel winding up and to the side of the corridor.

  “There was a second one back a few dozen paces,” Entreri explained, “running up the other way. I expect they join.”

  “If either is even passable,” Dahlia remarked sourly.

  Drizzt sheathed his blade and leaped up, catching the lip of the smaller tunnel. He pulled himself up to peer into it and paused there, allowing his eyes to adjust to the absence of any substantial light. His drow heritage helped him, greatly so, as the shapes within became clearer. The drow wriggled his way in and crawled along, coming to a landing of sorts, a level and open area large enough to hold all three comfortably. He found two other exits from that small chamber, one rising higher and the other winding back down the other way-likely the opening Entreri had noted earlier in the corridor.

  To make certain, the drow went down that way, and soon came to the tunnel exit, just above the corridor he and his friends had already traversed. He rolled himself out of the crawl tunnel, back to the main corridor, and rushed back to rejoin Entreri and Dahlia.

  “Suitable,” he said.

  Dahlia started to argue against breaking their march at that point, but Entreri moved right to the wall and leaped up, catching a hold and disappearing into the crawl tunnel without a glance back.

  “He acts as if it’s his expedition, and we’re just minions to do his bidding,” Dahlia said to Drizzt.

  “He has the largest stake in this journey,” the drow reminded.

  Dahlia snorted and looked away.

  “You wish to turn away, that he will not be killed,” Drizzt whispered.

  “I wish to be done with this and be away from here.”

  “Not true,” Drizzt replied. “You wish to be away, but now, before we confront the primordial, before we destroy the sword, and so, before the sword destroys this man who so intrigues you.”

  Dahlia looked at him for a long while, quietly laughing, and shaking her head slowly, as if in disbelief. She spun around and leaped up along the wall, following Entreri into the crawl tunnel.

  Drizzt leaped up right behind her and caught her by the ankle, forcing her to glance back. “I go to scout, before us and behind,” he whispered. “To ensure that we weren’t followed or seen.”

  He dropped back down and started off, back the way they had come, intending to double back quickly many yards to search for any sign that they had been trailed. A few dozen paces back along the corridor, it occurred to him to climb up into the second tunnel, to crawl in silently that he could spy on these two.

  Then he might know the extent of their bond, after all.

  Then he might know of Dahlia’s deceit and infidelity.

  Then he might kill Entreri, or kill them both, with a clear conscience.

  The line of thinking jarred Drizzt as he hustled past that second opening to the upper chamber. He increased his pace even more, wanting to put th
is area far behind him, wanting to put those angry impulses far behind him.

  Dahlia crawled into the low chamber at the apex of the two entry tunnels. Like the other tunnels and many of the Underdark corridors, this one was quietly lit by various lichens. She could see only half of Entreri, as he was standing up into the third opening, the tunnel climbing up from the chamber. He soon crouched back down and fell into a sitting position beneath the opening.

  “Impassible,” he explained. “The way up is blocked by some rocks.”

  “So if our enemies assemble around the two lower exits, we’re trapped,” Dahlia replied, and with much sarcasm, added, “Wonderful planning.” She made sure to reflect that sarcasm fully in her inflection, for she knew that Entreri couldn’t make out much of her features in this dark place.

  “They won’t find us,” Entreri countered.

  “Because there are so many places for us to hide in these few narrow tunnels?” Dahlia asked, her sarcasm unrelenting. And quite boring, she had to admit, even to herself.

  Artemis Entreri shook his head and turned his gaze away from her. “Where’s Drizzt?”

  “He backtracked to ensure that we weren’t followed,” she replied, and Entreri nodded his agreement with that course. “Perhaps he’s already been captured by the Shadovar and tortured into revealing our position, if it would take even that.”

  Entreri swung his head back to regard the woman. She met his stare with a glower, but he didn’t give in to that apparent challenge, and merely continued to look at her, as if measuring her emotions.

  “Have you hated for so long that you don’t know how to not hate?” he asked with a wry grin.

  Dahlia stared at him, at first angrily, but then with a bit of confusion.

  “You got your revenge on Herzgo Alegni,” Entreri pointed out. “Yet your mood is fouler now than before we met him on that Neverwinter bridge.”

  Dahlia didn’t blink.

  “Might it be that revenge tasted not as sweet as you expected?” Entreri posed. “Was the anticipation of revenge a more calming meal, perhaps?”

  “And you’re the assassin-philosopher?” Dahlia asked.

  “You’ve been running from it for all of your life,” he said.

  “From it?”

  “From whatever it was that Alegni did to you.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “I know that my words have you shifting in your seat.”

  “Because it is a stupid seat in a stupid hold-out,” she spat back. “Were we to be found here, how would we even defend ourselves? You can’t even stand up in this hole unless you stick your head into the chimney! I thought I was traveling beside capable warriors, and I find myself put in this compromised position?”

  She kept ranting, and Artemis Entreri kept grinning at her, which, of course, only had Dahlia growing more and more agitated.

  “You killed your own excuse,” Entreri said.

  Dahlia looked at him with obvious confusion. She tried to reply but sputtered, just staring at him.

  “Your excuse for anger,” the assassin explained. “You got your revenge, yet your mood has soured. Because you’re lost now. You’ve lived your life acting out in your anger, and does dear Dahlia have anything to be angry about now?”

  She looked away.

  “Are you afraid to take responsibility for your actions?”

  “Are you truly the assassin-philosopher?” she retorted, turning around to glare at him.

  Entreri’s shrug was the only response he would offer, so Dahlia looked away once more.

  An uncomfortable silence followed, for a long while.

  “What about you?” Dahlia finally asked, her voice startling Entreri from private contemplations.

  “What about me?” he echoed.

  “What sustains your anger?”

  “Who claims that I’m angry?”

  “I know of your recent past,” Dahlia argued. “I fought against you. I witnessed your work against the Thayans. Those were not the actions of a contented man.”

  “I was a slave,” Entreri replied. “Can you blame me?”

  Dahlia tried to argue, but again fell short.

  “How did you get past it?” Dahlia asked quietly many heartbeats later. “The anger, the betrayal? How did you find your calm?”

  “I helped you kill Herzgo Alegni.”

  “Not that betrayal,” Dahlia said bluntly.

  Entreri rocked back against the wall. He glanced around, this way and that, and for many heartbeats seemed truly at a loss.

  “By caring not a damn,” Entreri replied at length.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Believe it.”

  “No,” she said quietly, staring at Entreri until he at last had to return the look.

  “It was my uncle,” he admitted for the first time in his life, “and my mother.”

  Dahlia’s expression revealed her confusion.

  “He… he stole from me, and she sold me into slavery-to others who wished to… steal from me,” Entreri explained.

  “Your mother?” Dahlia clearly seemed at a loss.

  “You loved your mother, as I, once, loved mine,” Entreri reasoned.

  “She was murdered, beheaded by Herzgo Alegni after…” Her voice trailed away and her gaze fell to the floor between her boots.

  “After he stole from you,” Entreri said, and Dahlia looked at him sharply.

  “You know nothing about it!”

  “But you know that I do,” Entreri replied. “And you are the first person to whom I’ve ever admitted any of this.”

  Her expression softened at that revelation.

  Entreri laughed. “Perhaps I have to kill you now, to keep my secret.”

  “Try it,” Dahlia replied, bringing a wider smile to Entreri’s face, for he knew by her tone that his trust in her had lifted a great weight from her shoulders. “I have enough anger left in me to defeat the likes of you.”

  Artemis Entreri rolled up to his knees, to the side, so that his face was very near the woman. “Well, do it quickly,” he said, and pointed back down the tunnel Dahlia had climbed to get into this hide-out. “For that way lies Gauntlgrym, not so far, and there resides the beast of fire and the end of Charon’s Claw, and the end of Artemis Entreri.”

  Dahlia slapped him across the face, surprising them both.

  Entreri laughed at her, so she slapped him again, or tried to, but he caught her by the wrist and held her off.

  They stared at each other, their faces barely a finger’s breadth apart. Entreri nodded and managed a smile, while Dahlia shook her head, her eyes moistening.

  “It is time,” Entreri said to her. “Trust me in this. It is long past time.”

  A thousand questions chased Drizzt Do’Urden back along the corridors, paramount among them the continuing lack of purpose for his present course. Why was he even there?

  He had no answers, though, and so he kept pushing the doubts aside, and took care not to revel too deeply in the continuing stream of images of Artemis Entreri dead at his feet, pleasant as they were.

  While these surroundings weren’t fresh in his thoughts, they were familiar, and they brought him back to his previous journey here, the good parts. He remembered Bruenor’s face when first they had glanced upon the entrance of Gauntlgrym, the high stone wall, like that of a castle, except that it was tightly encased within a subterranean cavern.

  He thought of the throne, just within the great entry hall, and again recalled Bruenor’s beaming face.

  “I found it, elf,” Drizzt whispered in the dark corridor, just to hear the sound of those words once more, for they, more than anything Drizzt had ever heard, sounded like sweet victory.

  His mood brightened as he moved farther from his encamped companions. How could it not, with the ghost, the memory, of Bruenor Battlehammer so near?

  “Is your heart heavy, Drizzt Do’Urden?” an unexpected, unfamiliar voice, a woman’s voice, asked of him from the darkness.


  Drizzt immediately fell into a crouch, moving closer to one corridor wall for the cover it provided. He glanced all around, his hands near to his scimitars, which he did not dare draw for fear that Twinkle’s light would more fully expose him.

  “I knew I would find you alone,” the woman continued, her accent strong, biting off her consonants so abruptly that it jarred the drow. He did not know her. He did not even know of her possible origins. “It is not hard to find Drizzt Do’Urden alone in these times, is it?”

  Thinking he had located the source, the direction at least, Drizzt edged out a bit, putting himself in line for a charge if necessary.

  “Be at ease,” the woman said, as if reading his mind. The voice came from a completely different area of the darkened corridor than the previous remarks, and there was no way anyone could have moved between those particular points without him hearing or seeing it.

  Perhaps it was a matter of cloaking spells, like invisibility, but more likely, she was utilizing magical ventriloquism.

  A sorceress, then, Drizzt thought, and he knew that he needed to be doubly careful.

  “I have not come to do battle,” she explained. “Nor to harm you in any way.”

  “Who are you, then? Thayan or Shadovar?”

  Her laughter started behind him, but quickly came from the original spot, before him. “Need it be one or the other?”

  “Those seem to be the people most interested in me of late,” he said.

  She laughed again. “I am from the Shadowfell,” she admitted. “Sent by one who is not your enemy, though you have something he wants.”

  Drizzt straightened. Given Arunika’s warning, he knew where this was leading. “The sword,” he stated.

  “It is a Netherese blade.”

  “A vile one.”

  “That is not my judgment to offer. We would like it back.”

  “You cannot have it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The question struck him curiously and put him a bit off balance.

  “Does it mean so much to you?” the woman asked, and she was behind him again, and given his last response, he was fast to turn and set himself defensively. Could she move quickly enough to steal Charon’s Claw from its scabbard on his back? “Do you have such loyalty to the man you call Artemis Entreri?”