Boundless

by R. A. Salvatore

  Touch one of those charms and I’ll kill you, Dahlia thought, and meant, but did not say. She wasn’t very fond of halflings in general and had little love for the Companions of the Hall on top of that.

  “We’ll soon return,” Dahlia told the man, retrieving her own cloak, and she grabbed Regis’s arm and pulled him hurriedly out of the room.

  Through the large anteroom and down a side hallway, several smaller rooms had been set up for the party, some as bedrooms, others as conversation sitting rooms, complete with a bartender and tables set apart for private chatter. Dahlia really didn’t trust these second rooms, as Artemis Entreri had come to an earlier ball with another Bregan D’aerthe associate and had dropped some rumors in them, just to see if they had spread—which they had. Those sitting rooms were not secure from curious eavesdroppers.

  The bedrooms, though, likely were—one Waterdeep family had been caught eavesdropping on a dalliance years earlier and was still shunned to this day for their voyeurism and troublemaking. After all, the Waterdeep noble families, indeed noble families everywhere, really weren’t that different from the drow of Menzoberranzan or the Red Wizards of Thay, Dahlia knew: you could do anything you could get away with, but anyone interrupting and gossiping about that secret play would never again be allowed in “polite” company.

  She yanked Regis roughly into one of the bedrooms and pulled the door closed behind them, even as the halfling was crying out, “Lady, you are quite the aggressor!”

  “What are you doing here?” Dahlia demanded when the door was closed.

  “I—”

  “Who told you to come here this night? Are you trying to expose me, you fool?”

  “Lady, no. There is much . . . I mean, I had no choice.”

  “Explain,” Dahlia demanded, crossing her arms and glaring down at the little halfling.

  Regis glanced around nervously.

  “No one can hear,” Dahlia said.

  So Regis did explain. He told her about Thornhold and the demons, about the attack on Bleeding Vines and Gauntlgrym, and of how he and the other Grinning Ponies had decided that they needed to get to Waterdeep to beg intervention, or all might be lost, even Luskan, with an invading fleet sailing north along the Sword Coast.

  Dahlia couldn’t hold her anger at him as he explained, her arms gradually slipping down to her sides.

  “I only came in here because I thought I might find you or Entreri in attendance,” Regis finished. “I don’t know which lords I might trust, and a wrong word would be disastrous.”

  Dahlia nodded. He had done everything correctly, she knew, and indeed, his caution was merited.

  “Tell no one,” Dahlia warned him. “Go back into the ball and play the night away however you might—with no intoxicating drink or smoke!”

  “I have already taken appropriate precautions, lady,” he said with a sly grin, then on impulse, he whispered, “For the love of pink pearls,” the trigger words for his pouch, which was really a pouch of holding with a large extradimensional pocket. He reached in and pulled out a small flask, then a second.

  “This will prevent you from being poisoned, even with alcohol or some other intoxicating thing,” he told Dahlia, handing it over. “And this one . . .” He grinned wickedly and held the flask aloft, swirling it, showing her the pink ovoid floating within the somewhat translucent purple liquid. “This one will let you scan the thoughts of another, preferably one who has had a bit too much to drink.”

  That, too, he handed over.

  “You may find it of some use, though you’d likely not need it to discern the thoughts of any man you might be speaking with.”

  “Playing on my vanity?” Dahlia replied. “Such a charming one.”

  “Speaking simple truth, and don’t pretend you don’t know it, and know how to use it,” said Regis, and when Dahlia cocked an eyebrow, he quickly added, honestly, “Because I do the same thing, as does my lovely wife, Donnola.”

  That brought a chuckle, at least.

  Dahlia glanced around, although they were in a small, enclosed room and there was obviously no one else about, then moved near and whispered an address into Regis’s ear. “South Ward,” she explained. “Tonight, after midnight. And take great care in making your way. It would be better if you were not dead quite yet.”

  Regis nodded, then closed his eyes and silently repeated the address to commit it to memory, exactly as his years at House Topolino in Aglarond—where paper trails meant hanging thieves—had taught him.

  When he opened his eyes again, Dahlia was already gone, back to the ball.

  With a shrug, the halfling followed. He had hours to kill, so he might as well enjoy himself and learn what he could in the meantime.

  “You are awake.”

  “Aye, ye might be callin’ it that. Wish I weren’t.” The sound of his own voice, shaky and breaking, reminded Athrogate of just how miserable and weak he felt, as if every joint in his body had been driven through with a stake, as if his skin had been taken off and then put back on, but with biting midges lining the inside of it. He was too hot and too cold, all at the same time, and the mere thought of food made him want to vomit.

  “I will soon have more spells to offer to ease your pain,” Yvonnel said.

  With great effort, the dwarf propped himself up on one elbow and looked around. He was still on the magical disk and it was moving, following Yvonnel as she moved slowly along the road, Regis’s pony in tow. North, Athrogate realized, since the water was on the left.

  “Still at the coast?” he asked, sinking back down as he did, for the sensation of motion as the ground rolled past the disk had his belly roiling. It took him a long while to settle himself enough to add, “Thinked we’d be turnin’ inland for the Crags and Gauntlgrym.”

  “There is an army of demons surrounding the place,” Yvonnel replied. “We’ll do no one any good there, particularly with you in such a state.”

  “Bah!” He sensed the disk stopping. Then Yvonnel towered over him, staring down.

  “Good Athrogate, I warn you that you are not yet healed, and far from recovered,” she said. “I am doing all that I can, and will continue to do so, of course, but do not misperceive that your survival is assured.”

  “Good,” he muttered as soon as he had deciphered the highbrow and somewhat obtuse remark.

  Yvonnel grabbed him by the collar and forced him to look at her. “I could let you die,” she said calmly, “if I truly believed that you wanted to die, or that your immediate belief that you would prefer death weren’t solely because of the great pain of losing one you loved.”

  “Bah, what d’ya know?” the dwarf asked.

  “More than you can imagine,” the drow woman replied. “You think me young, but I have memories longer than the oldest person you will ever meet. Older than Jarlaxle by a millennium.”

  Athrogate harrumphed.

  “Look at me, dwarf,” Yvonnel quietly demanded, and he did, though with a scowl he simply could not wipe off his face. “I do understand your pain. It is pain I have known many times.”

  To his surprise, Athrogate found that he believed her.

  “It will ever be there, but it will diminish, and it will diminish more for you, particularly for you, if you know that you dealt with this in a way that honors the memory of your beloved Amber.”

  “Ye think ye know her, then?”

  “I wish I had,” she said with sincerity. “I know of her, though. I know what others say about her. I know what you have said about her. Amber was no coward, and if she were here now and Athrogate were the one who had been killed . . .”

  “If only that!”

  Yvonnel smiled and nodded, conceding the point to him. “She would have said exactly that to my point,” she said.

  The words hit home. Athrogate couldn’t dispute them.

  “And she, I believe, would come forth from the dark shade within her heart to honor the loss of Athrogate. She, if she was all that you and others claim, would acc
ept my help and fight her way back to health, if only so that she could inflict great pain upon those who took you from her.”

  Athrogate had no answer to that. Clever woman, he thought, to so turn the tables on him!

  Yvonnel leaned in very close. “I’m going to get you healthy and strong once more,” she whispered. “If you’re so content with the thought of your own death, then be not afraid of punishing the monsters who took your love from you.”

  “Aye, lass, ye make a good argument.”

  “And I’ll be there right beside you, Athrogate. What say you then? For Amber Gristle O’Maul of the Adbar O’Mauls?”

  The dwarf smiled, widely and warmly, then closed his eyes as Yvonnel began a spell, one that sent waves of warm healing through him and sent him falling, falling, into a deep sleep.

  “We’ve been in this wretched city almost entirely since I returned from the Underdark,” Artemis Entreri told Regis when the halfling joined him and Dahlia at his apartment in Waterdeep’s South Ward much later that night. “And neither of us has any idea of which are friend and which enemy.”

  “And we haven’t the time to figure it out,” Regis replied. He tried to hold his voice steady, tried to remind himself that everything was at stake here, and that the very reason he had decided on this second chance at life was to succeed in exactly this position. Still, he couldn’t deny the intimidation of Artemis Entreri. Regis knew everything that was said about the man, of how he had grown and become a better person, an ally.

  But Regis kept nervously fidgeting with the remaining stub of his left pinkie finger, lost in this life, the result coincidentally mimicking almost exactly the stub he had worn for most of his first life, after this same Artemis Entreri had cut off that finger to send it as a message to Drizzt.

  Was there any amount of time and any number of deeds that could fully erase that? Regis wondered.

  “So you decided to openly proclaim your presence?” Entreri asked, barely containing a sneer. “Yes, I know all about your play at Neverember’s palace, and of Spider Parrafin’s drinks with a pair of Waterdhavian nobles in the Driftwood Tavern in Neverwinter City.”

  “How could—”

  “And if I know, do you not believe that half of Waterdeep knows? Or at least, half of those who would wish to know? What were you thinking walking into that tavern openly? Are you fool enough to believe that the names Spider Parrafin and Regis are not realized to be one and the same?”

  “I . . . I had no reason to disguise myself at that time,” the halfling tried to explain. “I was not known to be in the city, and since my purpose there was to legitimately sell wine from Bleeding Vines, there seemed no reason for any cover. We had no idea at that time how deep—nay, how demonic this conspiracy lay.”

  “But now you do,” Entreri retorted, “and you still walked into the ball tonight openly as Regis Topolino, or Spider Parrafin, or whatever you fancy to call yourself at this time.”

  Regis felt sick to his stomach, but he fought it away. “Strong words from Barrabus the Gray,” he said back, drawing a snort from Entreri.

  “Do not even pretend you understand that,” Entreri warned, holding fast his aggressive upper hand and not wanting to discuss that long-past time in his life, when he had been enslaved. “I’ll ask again: why would you enter that ball this night?”

  “Because I expected I would find you,” Regis replied, “or her, or another of our operatives in attendance. There was no ball in Delthuntle that did not include a member of House Topolino in my years there.”

  “But openly?” Dahlia interjected.

  Regis shrugged at her. “How else might I have gotten an invitation if not as Regis of Bleeding Vines, friend of King Bruenor Battlehammer?” He turned determinedly back to Artemis Entreri. “None mentioned the battles in the north. None blinked an eye when they learned of my identity, even though Bleeding Vines is likely under siege as we speak.”

  “Bleeding Vines has been wholly sacked,” the assassin replied.

  Regis was beginning to reply before Entreri had even finished the sentence, but the weight of that statement stole the breath from the halfling.

  “Lady Donnola is alive and well,” Entreri quickly added, and there seemed to be something unusual in his voice. Sympathy? “Almost all of the town got down the tram to Gauntlgrym, and so survived, but Gauntlgrym now is under attack itself.”

  Regis fought frantically and futilely to find his voice.

  “The lords of Waterdeep surely know what is happening in the Crags,” Entreri went on. “But they don’t want anyone, particularly one like you, to know that they know.”

  “But why?”

  “Because then they would have to do something about it,” Dahlia said, and Entreri nodded.

  “You poor little fool,” Entreri added. “You still hold out hope for the valiance and altruism of the ruling nobles of Faerun.”

  “That would include King Bruenor,” Regis reminded.

  “Bruenor is not typical of the class,” said Entreri. “Understand that first and foremost.”

  “I am no inexperienced waif.”

  “Then quit acting like one.”

  “You seem to believe that I had many options before me!”

  “That is a reasonable point,” said Dahlia.

  Entreri thought on that for a moment, then nodded. “So you came to inform and mobilize Waterdeep.”

  “I had hoped to discern ally from enemy first, through your information.”

  Entreri nodded. “Would that it might be so simple. We know the main enemy.”

  “Margasters, and likely Neverember himself.”

  “Lord Dagult remains in Neverwinter, from all that I can tell. But yes, the Margasters are deep in this. Do not underestimate them.”

  “I don’t. I have seen their treasury.”

  “And that is but a part. As far as I can tell, they have bought the acquiescence, if not alliance, of several other noble houses, and half the city guards.”

  “We don’t know that,” Dahlia said.

  “I prefer to assume it,” Entreri replied. “We know it to be true of some, at least, and I do not believe they’d leave things to half measures.”

  When Dahlia didn’t dispute that, there followed an uncomfortable silence, the weight of dread palpable in the room, until Regis broke it with a meek “What do we do?”

  “We know the serpent’s head,” Artemis Entreri quietly replied, and he gave that look, that awful look—awful to Regis even though he knew he wasn’t the target of it!—that had become so synonymous with his reputation through the decades.

  “I see no reason to appeal to the good nature of the proper authorities, then,” the halfling agreed, mimicking the assassin’s deathly even tone so completely that it drew an arched eyebrow from Entreri.

  Regis took that as a compliment.

  But he found his moment of pride short-lived when the room’s door burst open and what looked like a rolling ball of abyssal sludge rambled into the room.

  Chapter 11

  Skitterwombles in the Sarcophobulous

  “Yeah, but ye don’t understand,” Ivan Bouldershoulder told Queen Mallabritches Battlehammer. “This is the sarcophagus of Thibbledorf Pwent. The Pwent.”

  “Sarcophobulous!” giggled Pikel, who was standing on the ladder opposite. “Hee-hee-hee.”

  “Oh, but we’re understandin’ well enough,” Queen Tannabritches replied. “We’re understandin’ a pair o’ dwarfs standin’ on ladders in our husband’s throne room, not twenty steps from the Throne o’ the Dwarven Gods, tryin’ to tear down a monument King Bruenor put there. What’s not for understandin’, ye durned Bouldershoulder skitterwombles?”

  “Why we’re doing it,” said Ivan.

  “Skitterwombles in da sarcophobulous, hee-hee-hee,” Pikel proclaimed.

  The other three sighed in unison.

  “Because ye’re hopin’ Bruenor’ll put his fist in yer eye?” Mallabritches guessed.

  “Bah!” Iva
n snorted.

  “Ye’re bats!” Mallabritches declared.

  “Nah, but we’re thinking Pwent might be,” Ivan replied, and the Gauntlgrym queens looked at each other curiously. Before either could respond, the throne room, which was just inside the wall before the entry cavern’s dark pond, shook under the weight of an explosion out in that vast cavern, and a sentry dwarf kicked open the outer door.

  “Fightin’!” he yelled. “Demons come chargin’ back! To arms!”

  “Bruenor’s out there with Jarlaxle and Drizzt’s da,” Tannabritches told her sister, and the two rushed to gather their weapons and armor.

  “Well, let’s go smack some demons,” Ivan said to Pikel, but Pikel shook his head and waggled a finger back at his brother.

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Ye heared ’em!”

  Pikel didn’t seem to be listening, instead working at one of the latches at the back of the sarcophagus, which they had loosened from the wall.

  “Ye really think it?” Ivan asked.

  “Ayup-yup.”

  The fastened sarcophagus shifted just a bit as Pikel wedged his hand in behind. Ivan crinkled his face, thinking his brother was about to grasp the butt end of a rotting body.

  “Nope,” Pikel said.

  “Nope? What? He ain’t in there?”

  “Nope,” the dwarf repeated, wagging his green-haired head.

  “Well, where?” Ivan demanded.

  In response, Pikel gave a great open-mouthed hiss, bringing his one hand to his mouth, two fingers pointing down to mimic vampire fangs.

  “Stop with that!”

  “Hee-hee-hee. Nope.”

  Ivan sighed. “Ah, ye dumb Pwent, what’re ye about?” he whispered. He grasped the outer supports of the ladder and slid quickly down the fifteen feet to the floor, while Pikel relatched and reset the sarcophagus. Old Ivan Bouldershoulder scratched his yellow beard, not really knowing how he was going to tell his friend Bruenor that they might have yet another problem.

  Another explosion shook the room. Ivan gathered up his axe.