The mystery of the night has begun, but does Nojheim know now the truth of a greater mystery? I often wonder of those who have gone before me, who have discovered what I cannot until the time of my own death. Is Nojheim better off now than he was as Rico’s slave?
If the afterlife is one of justice, then surely he is.
I must believe this to be true, yet it still wounds me to know that I played a role in the unusual goblin’s death, both in capturing him and in going to him later, going to him with hopes that he could not afford to hold. I cannot forget that I walked away from Nojheim, however well-intentioned I might have been. I rode for Silverymoon and left him vulnerable, left him in wrongful pain.
And so I learn from my mistake.
Forever after, I will not ignore such injustice. If I chance upon one of Nojheim’s spirit and Nojheim’s peril again, then let his wicked master be wary. Let the lawful powers of the region review my actions and exonerate me if that is what they perceive to be the correct course. If not …
It does not matter. I will follow my heart.
rtemis Entreri fascinates me. He started as a foil to Drizzt, an afterthought in the epilogue of The Crystal Shard. As he developed in the second book, I came to see him as a reflection for Drizzt, and one in a dark mirror (with apologies to the title of the previous story). Throughout the early books, I viewed Entreri through Drizzt’s eyes. I wanted Drizzt to come to know the assassin as who he, Drizzt, might have become had he remained in Menzoberranzan. The scenes in Streams of Silver with Drizzt and Entreri fighting side by side in Mithral Hall, and the fights between them in The Half-ling’s Gem, and particularly in The Legacy remain some of my favorite scenes in all the books.
Somewhere along the line, Artemis Entreri stepped out from his role to become something far more important to me, yet another examination of another aspect of what it is to be a rational, mortal being. I think I realized it in 1991, when writing Homeland, a book that didn’t include Entreri (he wasn’t yet born in the timeline of the Realms). At this time, TSR had just moved to AD&D 2nd Edition, a version that purposely excluded assassins. I got a call from Jeff Grubb, the coordinator of the Realms, in which he graciously offered me the opportunity to kill Entreri so that the game designers wouldn’t have to, as all assassins were having their souls sucked out by an evil god—this was the Realms’ way of explaining the changes in the game. After a half-hour argument in which I insisted that I wasn’t killing Entreri, and neither was TSR, I had an epiphany.
“I don’t understand why he has to go,” I argued.
“Because there are no assassins in the Realms in 2nd Edition!” Jeff shot back for the one-hundredth time.
“He’s not an assassin,” I insisted, and when an obviously surprised Jeff didn’t respond, I added, “he’s a fighter-thief who takes money to kill people.”
After another pause, Jeff said, “We can do that!”
As soon as I hung up the phone, I was struck by how forcibly I had defended Entreri. He wasn’t just another villain to me; he had become an important character, far beyond his relationship with Drizzt. It’s no mystery to me why many of the stories in this anthology center on him, and in this one, “The Third Level,” I wanted to find out why. Why had this man failed where Drizzt had succeeded? Why had this man become a victim of his wretched surroundings? In writing this story, I came to see Entreri as amoral, and not immoral, an emotionally shut-down man surviving in a world he knows only as vile. We know that, typically, criminals come from somewhere—somewhere bad. There are thousands of books and millions of therapy hours dedicated to unlocking the dark past that can lead a person to some dark actions. And so it must be for Artemis Entreri.
he young man’s dark eyes shifted from side to side, always moving, always alert. He caught a movement to the left, between two ramshackle wood-and-clay huts.
Just a child at play, wisely taking to the shadows.
Back to the right, he noticed a woman deep in the recesses beyond a window that was just a hole in the wall, for no one in this section of Calimport was wealthy enough to afford glass. The woman stayed back, standing perfectly still, watching him and unaware that he, in turn, watched her.
He felt like a hunting cat crossing the plain, she just another of the many deer, hoping he would take no notice.
Young Artemis Entreri liked that feeling, that power. He had worked this street—if that’s what it could be called, for it was little more than a haphazard cluster of unremarkable shacks dropped across a field of cart-torn mud—for more than five years, since he was but a boy of nine.
He stopped and slowly turned toward the window, and the woman shrank away at the merest hint of a threat.
Entreri smiled and resumed his surveying. This was his street, he told himself, a place he had staked out three months after his arrival in Calimport. The place had no formal name, but now, because of him, it had an identity. It was the area where Artemis Entreri was boss.
How far he had come in five years, hitching a ride all the way from the city of Memnon. Entreri chuckled at the term “all the way.” In truth, Memnon was the closest city to Calimport, but in the barren desert land of Calimshan, even the closest city was a long and difficult ride.
Difficult to be sure, but Entreri had made it, had survived, despite the brutal duties the merchants of that caravan had given him, despite the determined advances of one lecherous old man, a smelly unshaven lout who seemed to think that a nine-year-old boy—
Entreri shook that memory from his head, refusing to follow its inevitable course. He had survived the caravan trek and had stolen away from the merchants on the second day in Calimport, soon after he had learned that they had taken him along ultimately to sell him into slavery.
There was no need to remember anything before that, the teenager told himself, neither the journey from Memnon, nor the horrors before the journey that had sent him running from home. Still, he could smell the breath of that lecherous old man, like the breath of his own father, and his uncle.
The pain pushed him back to his angry edge, made him steel his dark eyes and tighten the honed muscles along his arms. He had made it. That was all that counted. This was his street, a place of safety, where no one threatened him.
Entreri resumed his surveillance of his domain, his eyes scanning left to right, then back across the way. He saw every movement and every shadow—always the hunting cat, looking more for prey than for danger.
He couldn’t help but chuckle self-deprecatingly at the grandeur of his “kingdom.” His street? Only because no other thief would bother to claim it. Entreri could work six days rolling every one of the many drunks who fell down in the mud in this impoverished section and barely scrape enough coins together to eat a decent meal on the seventh.
Still, that was enough for the waif who had fled his home; it had sustained him and given him back his pride over the past five years. Now he was a young man, fourteen years old—or almost fourteen. Entreri didn’t remember his exact birthdate, just that there had been a brief period right before the even briefer season of rain, when times in his house were not so terrible.
Again, the young man shook the unwanted memories from his head. He was fourteen, he decided; as if in confirmation, he looked down at his finely toned, lithe frame, barely a hundred and thirty pounds, but with tightened muscles covering every inch. He was fourteen, and he was rightly proud, because he had survived and he had thrived. He surveyed his street, his domain, and his smallish chest expanded. Even the old drunks were afraid of him, showed him proper respect when they addressed him.
He had earned it, and everybody in this little shanty town within the city of Calimport—a city that was nothing more than a collection of a thousand or more little shanty towns huddled about the white marble and gold-laced structures of the wealthy merchants—respected him, feared him.
Everybody except one.
The new tough, a young man probably three or four years older than Entreri, had arrived earlier in the
tenday. He did not ask permission of Entreri before he began rolling the wretches in the mud, or even walking into homes in broad daylight and terrorizing whoever was inside. The stranger forced Entreri’s subjects into making him a meal, or into offering him whatever other niceties could be found.
That was the part that angered Entreri more than anything. Entreri held no love, no respect, for the common folk of his carved-out kingdom, but he had seen the newcomer’s type before—in both his horrid past and in his troubled nightmares. In truth, there was room on Entreri’s street for two thugs. In the five days that the new tough had been about, he and Entreri hadn’t even seen each other. And certainly none of Entreri’s wretched informants had asked for protection against this new terror. None of them would dare even to speak with Entreri unless he asked them a direct question.
But there remained the not-inconsiderable matter of pride.
Entreri peered around the shack’s corner, down the muddy lane. “Right on schedule,” he whispered as the newcomer strolled onto the other end of this relatively straight section of road. “Predictable.” Entreri curled his lip up, thinking that predictability was indeed a weakness. He would have to remember that.
The new thug’s eyes were dark, his hair, like Entreri’s, black as the waters of the Kandad Oasis, so black that every other color seemed to be mixed together in its depths. A native-born Calimshite, Entreri decided, probably a man not unlike himself.
What tortured past had put the invader on this street? he mused. There is no room for that kind of empathy, Entreri scolded himself. Compassion gets you killed.
With a deep, steadying breath, Entreri steeled his gaze once more and watched coldly as the invader threw a staggering old man to the ground and tore open the wretch’s threadbare purse. Apparently unsatisfied with the meager take, the young man yanked a half-rotted board from the uneven edge of the nearest shack and whacked his pitiful victim across the forehead. The old man whined and pleaded, but the tough struck him again, flattening his nose. He was on his knees, face covered in bright blood, begging and crying, but got hit again and again until his sobs were muffled by the mud that half-buried his broken face.
Entreri found that he cared nothing for the old wretch. He did care, though, that the man had begged this newcomer, had pleaded with a master who had come uninvited to Artemis Entreri’s place.
Entreri’s hands went down to his pockets, slipped inside, feeling the only weapons he bothered to carry, two small handfuls of sand and a flat, edged rock. He gave a sigh that reflected both resignation and the tingling excitement of impending battle. He started out from the corner, but paused to consider his own feelings. He was the hunting cat, the master here, so he was rightfully defending his carved-out domain. But there remained a sadness Entreri could not deny, a resignation he could not understand.
Somewhere deep inside him, in a pocket sealed away by the horrors he had known, Entreri knew things should not be like this. Yet the realization did not turn him away from the battle to come. Instead, it made him even angrier.
A feral growl escaped Entreri’s lips as he stepped around the shack, out into the open and right in the path of the approaching thug.
The older boy stopped, likewise regarding his adversary. He knew of Entreri, of course, the same way Entreri knew of him.
“At last you show yourself openly,” the newcomer said confidently. He was bigger than slender Entreri, though there was very little extra weight on his warrior’s frame. His shoulders had been broadened by maturity, by an extra few years of a hard life. His muscles, though not so thick, twitched like strong cords.
“I have been looking for you,” he said, inching closer. His caution tipped observant Entreri that he was more nervous than his bravado revealed.
“I’ve never lived in the shadows,” Entreri replied. “You could have found me any day, any time.”
“Why would I bother?”
Entreri considered the ridiculous question, then gave a little shrug, deciding not to justify the boastful retort with an answer.
“You know why I’m here,” the man said at length, his tone sharper than before—a further indication that his nerves were on edge.
“Funny, I thought I was the one who’d found you,” Entreri replied. He hid well his concern that this thug might be here, might be on Entreri’s street, with more of a purpose than he’d presumed.
“You had no choice but to find me,” the invader asserted firmly.
There it was again, that implication of a deeper purpose. It occurred to Entreri then that this man, for he was indeed a man and no street waif, should already be above staking out a claim to such a squalid area as this. Even if he were new to the trade, this course would not be the course for an adult ruffian. He should be allied with one of the many thieves’ guilds in this city of thieves. Why, then, had he come? And why alone?
Had he been kicked out of a guild, perhaps?
For a brief moment, Entreri feared he might be in over his head. His opponent was an adult, and possibly a veteran rogue. Entreri shook the notion away, saw that his reasoning was not sound. Young upstarts did not get “kicked out” of Calimport’s thieves’ guilds; they merely disappeared—and no one bothered to question their abrupt absence. But this opponent was not, obviously, some child who had been forced out on his own.
“Who are you?” Entreri asked bluntly. He wished he could take the question back as soon as the words had left his mouth, fearing he had just tipped the thug off to his own ignorance. Entreri was ultimately alone in his place. He had no network surrounding him, no spies of any merit, and little understanding of the true power structures of Calimport.
The thug smiled and spent a long moment studying his opponent. Entreri was small, and probably as quick and sure in a fight as the guild’s reports had indicated. He stood easily, his hands still in the pockets of his ragged breeches, his bare, brown-tanned arms small, but sculpted with finely honed muscles. The thug knew Entreri had no allies, had been told that before he had been sent out here. Yet this boy—and in the older thief’s eyes, Entreri was indeed a boy—stood easily and seemed composed far beyond his years. One other thing bothered the man.
“You have no weapon?” he asked suspiciously.
Again, Entreri offered only a little shrug in reply.
“Very well, then,” the thug said, his tone firm, as if he had just made a decision. To accentuate that very point, he took up the board, still dripping with the blood of the old man. Decisively he brought it up to his shoulder, brought it up, Entreri realized, to a more accessible position. The thug was barely twenty feet away when he began his approach.
So much more was going on here, Entreri knew, and he wanted answers.
Ten feet away.
Entreri held his steady and calm pose, but his muscles tightened in preparation.
The man was barely five feet from him. Entreri’s right hand whipped out of his pocket, hurling a spray of fine sand.
Up came the club, and the man turned his head away. He was laughing when he looked back. “Trying to blind me with a handful of sand?” he asked incredulously, sarcastically. “How clever of a desert fighter to think of using sand!”
Of course it was the proverbial “oldest trick” in sneaky Calimshan’s thick book of underhanded street fighting techniques. And the next oldest trick followed when Entreri thrust his hand back into his pocket, and whipped a second handful of sand.
The thug was laughing even as he closed his eyes, defeating the attack. He blinked quickly, just for an instant, a split second. But that instant was long enough for ambidextrous Entreri to withdraw his left hand from his pocket and fling the edged stone. He had just one window of opportunity, an instant of time, a square inch of target. He had to be perfect—but that was the way it had been for Entreri since he was a child, since he went out into the desert, a land that did not forgive the smallest of mistakes.
The sharp stone whistled past the upraised club and hit the thug in the throat, ju
st to one side of center. It nicked into his windpipe and deflected to the left, cutting the wall of an artery before rebounding free into the air.
“Wh—?” the thug began, and he stopped, apparently surprised by the curious whistle that had suddenly come into his voice. A shower of blood erupted from his neck, spraying up across his cheek. He slapped his free hand to it, fingers grasping, trying to stem the flow. He kept his cool enough to hold his makeshift club at the ready the whole time, keeping Entreri at bay, though the younger man had put his hands back in his pockets and made no move.
He was good, Entreri decided, honestly applauding the man’s calm and continued defense. He was good, but Entreri was perfect. You had to be perfect.
The outward flow of blood was nearly stemmed, but the artery was severed and the windpipe open beside it.
The thug growled and advanced. Entreri didn’t blink.
The thug stopped suddenly, dark eyes wide. He tried to speak out, but only sputtered forth a bright gout of blood. He tried to draw breath, but gurgled again pitifully, his lungs fast-filling with blood, and sank to his knees.
It took him a long time to die. Calimport was an unforgiving place. You had to be perfect.
“Well done,” came a voice from the left.
Entreri turned to see two men casually stroll out of a narrow alley. He knew at once that they were thieves, probably guildsmen, for confident Entreri believed only the most practiced rogues could get so close to him without him knowing it.
Entreri looked back to the corpse at his feet, and a hundred questions danced about his thoughts. He knew then with cold certainty that this had been no random meeting. The thug he had killed had been sent to him.
Entreri chuckled, more a derisive snort than a laugh, and kicked a bit of dirt into the dead man’s face.
Less than perfect got you killed. Perfect, as Entreri soon found out, got you invited into the local thieves’ guild.
Entreri could hardly fathom the notion that all the food he wanted was available to him with a snap of his fingers. He had been offered a soft bed, too, but feared that such luxury would weaken him. He slept on his floor at night.
The Collected Stories, The Legend of Drizzt Page 6
