Boundless

by R. A. Salvatore

  “And what’re ye meanin’ to do, then? Ye got a plan?”

  “Keep safe my possessions” was all that Drizzt was willing to answer. He pulled off his boots and mithral shirt and dropped them on the pile, leaving him with only his breeches and the whistle on the silver chain hanging about his neck. “Get all of this to Bruenor and Catti-brie if I do not return. I go hopeful of victory, and certain, even failing that, this monster will not take me to its master, nor will it remain to wreak destruction upon those I love.”

  The large unicorn came galloping up beside Drizzt, who caught Andahar by the mane and gracefully swung up onto the steed’s back.

  “Trust me,” he said to Athrogate, and he offered a smile and a wink, then galloped away.

  Athrogate stared down the trail where Drizzt and the unicorn had run. “Drizzt’ll find a way,” he muttered.

  Yvonnel could only hope that he was right. She wondered, too, if Bruenor still sat on the throne of Gauntlgrym, or if there even still was a throne of Gauntlgrym.

  Chapter 25

  She Is My Friend

  They probably could have walked right in through the front door, Regis thought as he and Dahlia crept through a darkened, empty sitting room on the lowest level of House Margaster. The mansion was not overtly defended, and why should it be, given that it was a noble house in a city utterly dominated by such houses, and by law. The house was not without its guards, of course. The intruding pair had seen a couple of them resting by the carriage under the awning in a side drive off the semicircular entry road to the mansion.

  Regis moved across the room to the corridor door and listened carefully, then cracked it open just a bit. He fell back inside, softly closing the door and motioning to Dahlia that there was another pair of guards just on the other side, down the hall between this door and a second one.

  Dahlia pointed to him and indicated for him to move quickly, then headed for the second door.

  After a deep breath, Regis took up his hand crossbow and slipped out of the room, trying to plot his hoped-for sequence of events.

  Two guards loomed before him: a thin man animatedly gabbing, waving his hands and dancing about, and a thick woman leaning against the wall, trying to appear interested—but doing a rather lame job of it, Regis thought.

  He crept another step, hoping to get very close, but the man, in his dancing, caught sight of him and whirled.

  The hand crossbow fired, the bolt catching the man in the chest. He grabbed at it and fell back a step, stumbling. He started to yell out but only slurred a garbled word, the sleeping poison already doing its work.

  Regis hadn’t stopped to admire the shot or its effects, though, leaping down the corridor so that as soon as the woman realized what was happening, she turned to find his fine rapier’s tip ready at her throat, the halfling standing with the index finger of his other hand held up across his pursed lips.

  The woman lifted her empty hands in surrender, but it didn’t really matter, for Dahlia, too, was now moving.

  Regis yelped and leaped back when his companion surprisingly struck, her nunchaku exploding into the guard’s skull, spraying Regis with blood, bone, and brain. She crumpled to the floor as if she had been stomped by a tarrasque.

  “Why did you do that?” Regis stuttered.

  “Shh!”

  “She surrendered,” Regis whispered.

  “So?”

  “She might have had information,” the halfling said, but for Dahlia’s sensibilities and not his own. Whether she had information or not, he wouldn’t have so wounded the guard. He looked down at the fallen woman, who was groaning, and thought that perhaps a heavy bandage might save her.

  “Do not even think it,” Dahlia warned him as if reading his mind, which, he realized, wasn’t likely a difficult trick at that time.

  “We cannot let her—”

  “Yes, we can. We’re here for a reason.”

  Regis tried to steady himself.

  “You think she would have shown you quarter if the roles were reversed?”

  “It matters not. We’re supposed to be better, else what’s the point?”

  “The point is that we’re here to rescue Artemis Entreri, who was taken from us by these people, or have you forgotten?”

  “I have not!”

  “Then shut up,” Dahlia told him. “And put aside your mercy or it will get you killed.” She started away.

  “Get us killed,” Regis meekly corrected, at which Dahlia spun on him with a narrowed gaze and a wild-eyed sparkle.

  “No,” she said with a calm that raised the hairs on the back of the troubled halfling’s neck. “Get you killed.”

  Regis swallowed hard and followed Dahlia down the hall, fumbling to reload his hand crossbow, which was not typically lethal, at least.

  Dahlia fell back against the corridor wall before entering the next open room, and Regis followed suit, both watching as another house member, a small girl with curly red hair, crossed that room before them.

  They held their breath, even more when the child turned to look at them directly and flashed a strangely unnerving smile. Regis gasped, noting her eyes: pure white, only white.

  The child kept walking across the room, out of sight, and Regis caught his breath and turned fast to Dahlia, fearing that even a small child would not be spared her violent wrath.

  He found her against the wall, trembling, wholly unnerved.

  “Dahlia?”

  The woman began to pant. She shook her head—to clear it, he figured—then motioned for him to move off, and quickly.

  Regis poked his head into the room to see the child exiting through another door, and to see, more importantly, a pair of house guards standing stiffly and breathlessly to either side of her as she passed.

  And as she passed, the two large and well-armed guards took deep breaths indeed, their terror clear to see before one reached back and gently closed the door.

  “I have an idea,” Regis told Dahlia. He closed his eyes and concentrated for a bit, then tapped his beret and before Dahlia’s eyes, became a close replica of the young girl he had just seen.

  Dahlia looked as if she would fall over backward.

  “I’ll clear the way,” Regis happily informed her.

  “Just go,” she said, waving her hands at him, trying to usher him away quickly. Regis stared at her in disbelief. He had never seen Dahlia so obviously discomfited.

  “It was just a child,” he said, but Dahlia was shaking her head emphatically.

  “Just go. Just go. Just go.”

  Regis tried to figure out what was bothering her so. The little girl had seen them, if she even could see through those pupil-less eyes. Certainly it seemed as if she had seen them. But still, Regis had felt only a sense of warmth and comfort when he had looked upon the child, and that image of her lingered in his thoughts so completely that he had used his beret more powerfully than ever before.

  How had that happened?

  And why had the two guards, and now Dahlia, been so clearly flummoxed and upset, even terrified, by the sight of the child?

  The reactions truly perplexed the halfling, who felt only good things—of course, that led him to wonder why he was feeling anything at all positive toward anyone wandering about a house of enemies and demons.

  He didn’t have time to play out his thoughts now, though, so he pushed along, moving through the rooms and along the corridors, and fortunately, as he went deeper into the house, he heard fewer and fewer people, and saw no one at all.

  The lecherous drunk stumbled out of the alleyway, his wife in tow. Still scratching at the many wounds on his face from those nasty wasps, the man nodded toward a tavern at the end of the road. He fished in his one remaining pocket and pulled forth a piece of silver, then used it to scratch at his face and started along.

  “We no’ got enough for me to drink,” the woman complained.

  The man turned and lifted the back of his hand to her, and she ducked, turning away. The drunk n
odded and started back around, but noted the look of confusion suddenly coming over his wife. He followed her gaze behind him and upward to the eaves of a building and a large ball of earthen material, and more alarmingly, to the wasplike creatures buzzing about it.

  “Eh, be quick away!” he told his wife.

  But he wasn’t quick enough.

  The large ball dropped from the eaves right behind him and began to unroll all about him and then over him, muffling his screams when it snapped shut around him, a cocoon of biting insects, relentless and vicious.

  The woman shrieked and wailed. Others came to look.

  But none approached, and so the old lecher lay there, writhing under a living, punishing blanket, screaming in torment until he expired from sheer agony, leaving him to scream eternally in the nether realms under the damning judgment of the little girl.

  Regis pushed open a door just a bit, revealing the second floor drawing room, a large, comfortably decorated chamber. To his left, the fireplace burned brightly, the light dancing upon the strange item hanging from the ceiling before it.

  Entreri’s cocoon.

  The halfling-turned-little-girl gasped and turned back, motioning for Dahlia to hurry and join him. He entered the room, moving tentatively toward the strange wrapping. It didn’t seem alive anymore, at least on the outside, and had taken on a crust more like that of a giant wasp’s nest than the sod-like aspect it had originally worn.

  “It might be him,” Regis whispered when Dahlia hustled up beside him.

  “It’s him,” the elven woman said definitively. “Help me cut it down.”

  Regis reverted to his normal form and pulled forth his dirk. He paused for a heartbeat and studied the weapon, noting that the side prongs, the snake-shaped swordcatchers, hadn’t yet fully regrown. If they found a fight, he wouldn’t yet have his garroting specter allies.

  Before he could say anything, Dahlia grabbed him and hoisted him up high. He tried to avoid touching the demonic cocoon, but had to lean against it to gain enough leverage to finally cut the rope from which it hung.

  Down it crashed, flopping over, but it did not fall open, and neither Dahlia nor Regis could find any seam.

  “Cut it,” the woman told him.

  Regis carefully set the tip of his magical dirk against the strange substance. Trying hard to govern his movement, for he certainly didn’t want to cut the man inside, he pressed and slid the weapon.

  Its edge was fine, but it didn’t even leave a mark on the unusual material.

  Regis looked up at Dahlia and shrugged helplessly.

  She took the dirk from his hand and fell over the cocoon, cutting, and when that utterly failed, she began stabbing the thing furiously, desperate to free the man she loved.

  She couldn’t make a mark in it.

  “Well, isn’t this convenient,” Regis heard from the door, and he and Dahlia spun about to see a pair of Margaster women, Inkeri and Alvilda, enter the room.

  Falling? Rolling.

  Whydothestingsstillhurt? Somanybutnotnumb!

  Paindiminishes . . . whynot?

  I can’t move . . . can’t. Why still alive?

  Alive?

  Waspsupmynose . . . crawling biting . . . Mouth . . . Can’t close my mouth.

  No sound, no moving, no anything, nothingnothingnothing. Pain. Just pain. Stingsandbites. Crawling little legs and stings.

  Calmcalmcalm . . . calm . . . relax.

  Whydothestingsstillhurt?

  Calmcalm . . . calm. Think.

  Pain!

  Justicedeath?

  Sharon strolled up to the fallen cocoon on the cobblestones outside the alleyway and nodded. She was neither pleased nor distressed by her work.

  For it wasn’t really her work.

  It was the man’s own doing, after all, and now he had come to face the truth of himself, in a most brutal and painful manner.

  Sharon heard the woman sobbing behind her, at the edge of the alley, so she turned and offered a smile, then skipped away, back to House Margaster.

  “I do love when my dinner is delivered without my even asking,” Inkeri Margaster purred.

  “Get him out of there!” Dahlia demanded, stamping her staff on the floor, deftly working its mechanical-magical controls to break it into three sections, a tri-staff. She grabbed the middle piece and brought it up before her.

  Inkeri laughed at her.

  Regis licked his lips nervously. He thought he knew what to expect from Inkeri, for he had watched her turn into a glabrezu demon in the caves beneath Lord Neverember’s palace in Neverwinter City. He pulled out the hand crossbow chained to his vest and raised it, first at Inkeri.

  He swung his arm, though, doubting he could affect the glabrezu, hoping that he and Dahlia could defeat it, and instead let fly at Alvilda, a woman he had left unconscious once before.

  She gasped when the dart struck her, and fell back. At the same time, Dahlia sent the two end sections of her tri-staff spinning, and she flipped the center section back and forth so that the outer two would occasionally collide, for that was how Kozah’s Needle built its powerful lightning energy.

  But at the same time, Inkeri shifted, so suddenly, and not into a four-armed glabrezu demon, as Regis had expected. Instead, the woman thickened, a carpet of orange hair sprouting all about her, her facial features turning apelike. Before Regis and Dahlia could even digest that transformation, the demon that was Inkeri leaped, easily clearing the twenty feet to crash between the two intruders, sending both Regis and Dahlia tumbling aside.

  “Finish the other!” Dahlia yelled at Regis. The skilled warrior woman landed in a controlled roll, coming right back to her feet, her tri-staff working defensively as the massive Barlgura moved in for the kill. Her hands worked furiously, over and under, the end poles cracking at the demon’s reaching claws, every strike eliciting a howl from the pained demon.

  But she wasn’t going to beat it, Regis believed, and he rushed at Alvilda, looking down desperately at his dirk once more to see if the snakes had regrown.

  Regis didn’t want to kill Alvilda. He had met her, dined with her, drank with her, conversed with her, and though he had never had any intention of actually sleeping with her, and his meeting with her was strictly for information gathering, he had come to like, or at least to genuinely not dislike, the funny and boisterous woman.

  So he hoped that the drow sleeping poison would put her down before he arrived with his rapier.

  But no, two other things happened instead. The room’s door opened and the little white-eyed girl walked in, smiling still.

  And Alvilda became human no more, her bones cracking and body reshaping, her shoulders widening and climbing higher, her nose and mouth coming forward into a snout, fangs growing, giant pincer claws tearing through her clothing as two lower arms sprouted.

  Regis nearly fainted. He tried to call out to Dahlia, but only a squeak came forth. He looked to his rapier, so pitiful a weapon now, and he knew he could not possibly defeat this hulking monster.

  Dahlia pressed, her tri-staff biting at the hulking Barlgura, lightning arcs burning its orange hair and keeping it on its heels. She wasn’t doing much real damage, but she pressed on, trying to find some opening, some way.

  The demon leaped into the air, up and over her, and as she tracked it, she took up Kozah’s Needle in one hand by the end and snapped it, whiplike, the other end piece delivering another shock.

  Barlgura disappeared, turning invisible so suddenly that Dahlia had to remember what she was doing for a second. But she quickly regained her composure and rushed to keep up with the leap, trying to guess where it would land. She heard the thud as it came down a few strides ahead, only to hear that it had leaped again. And this time she wasn’t able to track it.

  She spun a circuit, working her staff to try to hold it at bay, and she did connect as she came around, scoring a hit, but too close! For the demon reappeared right near her, one massive fist coming in to slam her.

  She p
ut her arm up to block, felt the bone in her forearm snap, and found herself flying backward. Somehow she managed to align her body correctly to absorb the impact of her landing, but she still rolled about, grimacing in pain, trying to get up and get set.

  For the demon stalked in.

  Groggy from the poison, Alvilda felt the demon rising within her, taking control. It felt different this time, for she found herself in a strange fugue, as if she was perpetrating the actions but was not, a weird duality that sparked in her the thought that the demon was not a separate being.

  That she was the demon.

  She looked at the advancing halfling, whom she knew by the name of Regis Topolino of Bleeding Vines—such a pitiful thing indeed. But then the door opened, and Alvilda could not ignore the child who entered.

  Her child.

  Her beloved little Sharon.

  Sharon looked at the halfling and smiled, and despite his obviously desperate situation, Regis, Alvilda sensed, calmed quite profoundly at the presentation of the little girl’s judgment.

  Sharon’s pleasant judgment.

  Alvilda didn’t understand, but she fought back suddenly to stay the demon’s killing pincers.

  She heard the growl of the glabrezu. It reverberated through every bit of her body and mind. The most profound rage, murderous, wicked, demanding.

  “It’s okay, Mummy,” Sharon said, and the words hit Alvilda like a bolt.

  And she woke as if from a dream.

  The glabrezu growled.

  Alvilda Margaster, the mother of the child in the doorway who had been so corrupted, growled louder.

  The hulking glabrezu demon leaped.

  The blood drained from the halfling’s face.

  But the demon went over Regis, landing in a barreling charge, pincers clamping about the waist and neck of Barlgura!

  The room shook, the house shook as the powerful demons grappled, the glabrezu’s pincers cutting deep lines, Barlgura’s fists pounding at the dog-faced fiend.