"I do, and though it pains me greatly, I accept it," Shoudra finished with another bow.
"Then why have you come?"
"I beg of your pardon, Steward Regis," Galen Firth interrupted, "but I have not come to witness an argument over the disposition of purposefully misplaced dwarves. My town is besieged, my business urgent." Some of the dwarves at the side of the room began to mutter and shift uneasily as Galen's voice steadily rose in ire. "Could you not continue your discussion with Sceptrana Shoudra at a later time?"
Regis paused and stared at the tall man for a long time.
"I have heard your request," the halfling said, "and deeply regret the situation in Nesmй. I too have some experience with the foul creatures of the Trollmoors, having come through that place in our search to find and reclaim Mithral Hall."
He fixed Galen with a look that told the man in no uncertain terms that he remembered well the shabby treatment the Riders of Nesmй had offered to Bruenor and the Companions of the Hall on that long-ago occasion.
"But you cannot expect me to throw wide the gates of Mithral Hall and empty the place of warriors with a horde of orcs and giants pressing us across the northland," Regis went on, and he gave a glance at the dwarves and took comfort in their assenting nods. "Your situation and request will be discussed at length, and in short order, but before I adjourn this meeting I wish to have all the facts open before me concerning the disposition of all of Mithral Hall's guests, that I might bring all options to the council."
"Decisive action is necessary!" Galen argued.
"And I have not the power to give you that which you desire!" Regis yelled right back. He came forward out of the throne and stood upon the dais, which allowed him to almost look the tall man in the eye. "I am not King Bruenor. I am not the king of anything. I am a steward, an advisor. I will discuss your situation in detail with the dwarves who better understand what Mithral Hall could or could not do to aid Nesmй in her time of need, particularly when we, too, are in a time of need."
"Then my business now, at this meeting, is at its end?" Galen asked, not blinking as he matched Regis's stare.
"It is."
"I will take my leave, then," said Galen. "Am I to presume that Mithral Hall will offer me a place of respite, at least?"
That last "at least" had Regis narrowing his brown eyes.
"Of course," he said, though his jaw hardly moved to let the words escape.
The halfling turned to the side and nodded. A pair of dwarves moved up to flank Galen. The man gave a bow that was more curt than polite and moved off, his heavy boots emphatically thumping against the stone floor.
"He is fearful for the fate of his town, is all," Shoudra remarked when Galen had left.
"True enough," Regis agreed. "And I certainly understand his fears and impatience. But the folk of Clan Battlehammer do not consider Nesmй to be much of a friend, I fear, for Nesmй has never shown much friendship to the folk of Mithral Hall. When we came looking for the Hall those many years ago, we encountered a group of the Riders of Nesmй just outside of the Trollmoors. They were in dire straits, under assault by a band of bog blokes. Bruenor didn't hesitate to go to their rescue—neither did Wulfgar, nor Drizzt. We saved their lives, I believe, and were soundly rebuffed in return."
"Because of the drow elf," Shoudra said.
"True enough," Regis sighed. He gave a little shrug as he settled back in his chair. "That in itself wasn't such a problem. It has happened often and will again."
His obvious reference to the treatment the caravan out of Icewind Dale had received at Mirabar's gate, where Drizzt Do'Urden had not been allowed entrance, had the woman and the gnome looking to each other with a bit of embarrassment.
"After the reclamation of Mithral Hall, Settlestone was rebuilt," the half-ling went on. "By Uthgardt warriors, not dwarves."
"I remember Berkthgar the Bold and his people," said Shoudra.
"The community was promising early on," said Regis. "We were all hopeful that the barbarians from Icewind Dale would flourish here. But while they maintained a close relationship with Mithral Hall, their primary goods—furs— were of little use to the dwarves who lived underground, where the temperature remains nearly constant. If Nesmй, the closest neighbor of Berkthgar's people, had welcomed them with trade, Settlestone might still thrive today. Instead, it is just another abandoned ruin along the mountain pass."
"The people of Nesmй lead a difficult existence," Shoudra remarked. "They suffer on the very edge of the dangerous moors, in nearly constant battle. They have learned through tragic experience that they must rely upon themselves most of all, oftentimes only upon themselves. Not a family in Nesmй has not known the tragedy of loss. Most have witnessed at least one of their loved ones being carried off by horrid trolls."
"It's all true," Regis admitted. "And I do understand. But I could not pledge any help to Galen. Not now. Not with Bruenor lying near death and the orcs pressing us to our gates."
"Offer him a sanctuary, then," Shoudra suggested. "Tell him that if his people are overrun, they should turn to Mithral Hall, where they will find friendship, comfort, and shelter."
Regis was nodding before she ever finished, for that was exactly along the lines he had been thinking.
"Perhaps we might find some spare warriors to return with him to Nesmй, as well," the halfling said. He paused for a moment, then gave a little snort. "Here I am, begging advice from a visitor. A fine steward am I!"
Shoudra started to reply, but Nanfoodle cut in, "The finest leaders are those who listen more than they talk."
That brought a smile to Shoudra and to Regis, but the halfling asked, "Does that show wisdom? Or trepidation?"
"For one whose actions greatly affect others, they are one and the same," Nanfoodle insisted.
Regis pondered that remark, and took some comfort in it. However, the finest leader Regis had ever known was none other than Bruenor Battlehammer, and if the dwarf was ever unsure of a decision, even the boldest of decisions, he surely had never shown it.
CHAPTER 6 THE RECKLESS ONE
"He is sure to get himself killed," Tarathiel whispered to Innovindil as the two lithe and small figures lay on a flat overhang, looking down at the returning Drizzt Do'Urden. The drow was clearly limping and favoring his right hip.
"His determination borders on foolishness," Innovindil replied. She looked at her companion. Their eyes were quite similar in color—rich blue— but looked very different in their respective faces, for while Innovindil's hair was golden, Tarathiel's was as black as a raven's wing. "Never have I seen one so singularly. . angry."
The elf pair had been keeping an eye on Drizzt ever since the sacking of Shallows. In that fight, when Drizzt had been across the ravine distracting the giant bombardiers, Tarathiel and Innovindil had flown in to his aid. Up high on their pegasi, Sunset and Sunrise, the elves believed that Drizzt had seen them, though he had made no move to find them subsequent to that one incident.
Not so with the elves. Both were skilled trackers, and Tarathiel had found Drizzt again soon after the fateful fight—mostly by following the trail of dead orcs the drow was leaving in his wake. In the two tendays since Shallows's fall, Drizzt had struck at orc camps and patrols nearly every day. The latest attack, against one of the great tribes that had recently arrived on the scene at Shallows, showed that he was growing bolder—dangerously so.
Still, he was winning, and to Tarathiel and Innovindil, that was an admirable thing.
"He lost friends at Shallows," Tarathiel reminded her. "The orcs claim that Bruenor Battlehammer fell there."
Innovindil looked down at the drow warrior. He had undressed then and was cleaning his latest wound—one of many—in a small brook near to his meager shelter of piled boulders.
"He is not one I would desire as an enemy," she whispered.
Tarathiel turned to her as he considered her words, and the implication they clearly held for another of the clan. As soon as they had heard t
hat Bruenor Battlehammer was returning to Mithral Hall, with Drizzt Do'Urden beside him, Tarathiel and Innovindil had welcomed the chance to meet with Drizzt. For one of their own, poor lost Ellifain, had gone off after the drow, seeking revenge for a dark elf raid that had occurred decades before, when Ellifain had been just an infant. Ellifain's entire family had been slaughtered in that terrible raid, and Drizzt Do'Urden had been among the raiders.
But Drizzt had not partaken of that slaughter, the elves knew, and in fact, had saved Ellifain by splashing her with her own mother's blood and hiding her beneath her mother's corpse. To Tarathiel and Innovindil, and all the other elves of the Moonwood, Drizzt Do'Urden was more hero than villain, but poor Ellifain had never been able to get past her grief, had never been able to view the noble drow ranger as anything more than a lie.
Despite all their efforts to educate and calm Ellifain, she had gone off from the Moonwood a couple of years previous in search of her revenge. Tarathiel and Innovindil had tracked her and chased her, determined to stop her, but the trail had gone stone cold in Silverymoon.
Drizzt was back in the area, though, and very much alive. What might that bode for Ellifain?
Innovindil had thought to go right down and speak with Drizzt about that very thing when first they'd located him, but Tarathiel, after observing the drow for a short while, had advised against that course. From all appearances, Drizzt Do'Urden seemed to Tarathiel to be an unknown entity, a wild card, a creature existing purely within his rage and survival instincts.
He wasn't even wearing boots as he set out each day across the unforgiving stony ground, and on the two occasions in which Tarathiel had witnessed Drizzt in battle, the drow seemed something beyond a conscious and cautious warrior, Tarathiel had seen Drizzt taking hits without a flinch and had seen him lop the heads from enemies without the slightest hesitation or expression of regret.
In many ways, the drow reminded him of that Moonwood friend he had recently lost, that young elf maiden so full of anger that she was blind to anything else in all the world.
"We must speak with him before he is slain," Tarathiel said suddenly.
His callous words, spoken so matter-of-factly, turned Innovindil's surprised look his way. For the tone of Tarathiel's words made it clear that he considered the outcome, that Drizzt would be slain, an inevitability. Tarathiel felt the intensity of her gaze and returned her concern with a simple shrug.
"Is his quest murderous or suicidal?" Tarathiel asked. "Or both, perhaps?"
"Then perhaps we should dissuade him of this course."
Tarathiel gave a little laugh and looked back to the distant Drizzt, who had stopped washing by then and had moved into a slow and steady series of stretching and balancing movements, focusing most of his movements on his wounded right hip. Stretching out the bruise, likely.
"He might know of Ellifain," Innovindil went on.
"And if he has faced Ellifain and defeated her, then what will he make of us two when we walk in upon him?"
"You are not a complete stranger to Drizzt Do'Urden," Innovindil argued. "Did he not convince you of his goodness those years ago when he crossed through the Moonwood? Did not the goddess Mielikki grant him a visit by her unicorn before your very eyes?"
It was all true, of course, but somehow in looking at that angry creature exercising below him, Tarathiel couldn't help but feel that it was not the same Drizzt Do'Urden he had once met.
* * *
His balance held perfectly, with not a tremor of muscle or sudden shift of his planted left foot. Slowly, Drizzt let his horizontally extended right leg flow through its full range of motion, front to back and back to front. He kept it up high, stretching his hamstring and other muscles as he worked through the tightening sensation within his right hip.
It truly surprised him to realize how hard he had been struck in that last fight, and he feared that he might have a broken bone.
Gradually, as the drow worked through his range of motion, his fears lessened. He found no impediment to his movement other than the ache and realized no overly sharp pains.
Drizzt had survived another encounter intact, fortunately so, and if any second-guesses about his decision to go into that large camp flitted through his thoughts, they were quickly dismissed by the drow's imagining of the scene he had left behind. He had delivered a blow to the orcs that would not be soon forgotten.
But it was not enough, the Hunter knew.
Not nearly enough.
Drizzt looked up at the midmorning sky and calculated when he might bring Guenhwyvar back to his side. The panther needed her rest on the Astral Plane, but she would be ready to resume her hunt soon, Drizzt knew, and the thought brought a wicked grin to his ebon-skinned face.
The orcs might be scrambling to find him, and if they were, he and Guenhwyvar would surely find a few wayward creatures to slaughter.
Drizzt's attention shifted quickly from that pleasant thought to consider the two elves who were up on the flat rock watching him.
Yes, the Hunter knew of them, for in that state, Drizzt was too attuned to his environment to miss even that stealthy pair. He didn't know who they might be, but given his last, tragic encounter with a surface elf, he wasn't pleased by the possibilities.
* * *
"It was drow!" the orc protested, as vigorously as he dared. "I seen drow!"
Arganth Snarrl leaped over to stand before the insistent orc, the shaman's huge tooth necklace swinging around wildly, and even slapping across the face of the upstart.
"You seen drow?" the shaman asked.
"I just telled you!" the orc protested.
Arganth ignored the reply and spun around to regard the other shamans, all gathered at the scene of Achtel's demise.
"Did Ad'non Kareese do this?" one of the other shamans asked, his brutish face full of outrage.
Arganth searched about for some answer, not wanting to reduce the drama of the murder—a mystery that the volatile shaman desired to exploit for his own ends. Achtel, after all, had been the sole quiet opposition among the gathered shamans to Arganth's insistence that King Obould should be viewed as one with Gruumsh. Not willing to relinquish the independence of her powerful tribe, Achtel had privately questioned some of the other shamans concerning the wisdom of Arganth's unification desires.
Achtel wasn't just dead, he seemed to have been singled out. For Arganth, the answer was obvious: Achtel's impudence had angered Gruumsh One-Eye, whose vengeance had been swift and uncompromising. Of course, Arganth was also wise enough to recognize that if the other shamans somehow connected Obould's drow friends to the murder of Achtel, then they might come to suspect some nefarious organization, working to persuade through terror—which was, after all, the orc way.
"Not Ad'non," the orc witness dared to put in. "It was the.. one."
The suddenly husky tone of his voice as he uttered that peculiar phrase told the others exactly of whom he was speaking. Word had been filtering throughout the ranks of all the orcs and giants who had come out of their mountain holes that a lone drow, an ally of dead King Bruenor, was working behind their lines, and to deadly effect.
"The Drizzit," Arganth said in low and threatening tones. "Gruumsh has used our enemy against our enemy."
"Achtel was our enemy?" asked one of the other shamans.
"Achtel denied the joining of his spirit to King Obould's body," Arganth explained. "It is clear before us. This sign cannot be denied!"
Murmurs erupted all around him as soon as he widened the investigation to encompass his political aspirations, but most of those murmuring orcs were also nodding their agreement.
"Obould is Gruumsh!" Arganth dared to declare.
Not a protesting word came back at him.
* * *
"He wastes little time," Innovindil said to Tarathiel when she caught up to him around the backside of a copse of trees on the mountain slopes overlooking the region where Drizzt Do'Urden had taken up his shelter.
"Is he out
again already?" Tarathiel asked, and he looked up at the sky, confirming that it was still a couple of hours to sunset. "I would have thought he would need to rest his hip."
"He brought in the panther," Innovindil explained.
Tarathiel nodded and looked again at the sky, his blue eyes glowing in the light.
"I fear he has erred," said the elf. "His hip is more injured than he realizes— if the wound upsets his balance…."
Innovindil drew forth her slender sword and shrugged. She turned toward the path that would put them on the trail of the dark elf.
"Perhaps I should follow alone," Tarathiel offered. "On Sunrise, and high above the hunting cat."
Innovindil stared at him hard.
"Sunset is not yet ready to carry you," Tarathiel reasoned. "Soon, perhaps, but not yet."
Innovindil had little to offer in the way of an argument to that. In the fight with the giants north of Shallows, her pegasus had been struck in the wing, causing a deep bruise and laceration. Sunset seemed well on the mend, for pegasi were resilient creatures, but Tarathiel's assessment was correct, she knew, and she would not dare ask the mount to climb into the sky, particularly not with her added weight.
But she had no intention of being excluded.
"What a fine target you will make in the afternoon sky," she said. "Or perhaps you will still be airborne when the sun does set, leaving your steed blind and soaring about the mountain spurs."
"I only fear that we might encounter the panther as it moves about Drizzt," Tarathiel explained. "I have little desire for a battle with that creature!"
"It will not come to that if we are cautious," Innovindil insisted.
She motioned toward the path. Tarathiel was by her side in a moment, and the two rushed off, their footfalls silent, their senses trained. Soon enough, they had the trail of Drizzt and Guenhwyvar.
* * *
The orcs were so thick about the region that Drizzt and Guenhwyvar had already found a band of them with the sun still hanging in the western sky.
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