But the man proved amazingly resilient, and Drizzt only then realized that the sword thrust had been a feint, and that the real danger was coming from the man’s second weapon, a dagger.
He threw his hips out wide to avoid, but still got cut across the side, and then he had to throw himself backwards and again to the side as the third man came in at him.
He followed right through the roll, coming easily back to his feet and reversing his momentum, and indeed, catching both pursuers by surprise.
Suddenly inside the reach of their long swords, Drizzt pumped his fists and sent his blades in a whirl of motion, scoring minor slashing hits and solid smashes into their respective faces. Not waiting to see if they could withstand that barrage, the drow fast-stepped through.
He cut a quick turn, then froze, startled, as did everyone else in the room, as another arrow plowed through the partially boarded window, and then another right behind.
“Masoj of Menzoberranzan!” Thurgood roared, and Drizzt spun on him.
The man stood on the dais, his shield still crackling with dispersing energy from the last two hits, his face locked in an expression of outrage.
Drizzt did a quick scan. The men across the way had escaped his globe of darkness and regrouped. For all his efforts and surprise, Drizzt had only taken three men out of the fighting, and Catti-brie had been ineffective, other than the one arrow that had accidentally clipped a pursuer.
And now that surprise was gone.
There was only one chance, it seemed, and with an accepting grin on his face, the drow took it, charging the dais, knowing he could get there before Thurgood’s men could intercept and hoping that the magical shield wouldn’t stop him.
Barely three running strides away, Drizzt saw Thurgood flash his hands forward, saw a flare of energy from a ring the man was wearing, and got hit by a blast of wind so powerful that it stopped him in his tracks and sent him flying backwards in a wild tumble!
Drizzt somewhat controlled his roll, but still smashed hard into the wall all the way across the room from Thurgood, below and to the side of the window through which Catti-brie’s arrows had flown. He put his feet under him as fast as possible, expecting pursuit from the many pirates, but saw that it was Thurgood again who was most menacing. The man waggled his fingers and darts of energy shot forth, speeding across the room. Drizzt, as nimble as any fighter in Waterdeep, tried to dodge this way and that, but the magical bolts swerved and pursued and burned into him.
He fought through the stinging pain, he dismissed his surprise that this brutish-looking ruffian was, in fact, a wizard, and his senses caught just enough of an indication of spellcasting for him to react.
He dove flat to the floor as a tremendous bolt of lightning scarred the air above him, blowing out a hole in the wall behind him, its thunderous report and brilliant flash sending men all about the room stumbling back in a blinded daze.
“Kill him!” Thurgood demanded, and his crack crew moved in from every angle.
Drizzt knew he was dead, that there was no escape. He leaped back to his feet, prepared to kill several before he died, and then he fell aside again as the remaining wooden planks over the window burst inward and a great black form crashed into the room.
Guenhwyvar!
Silently praising Catti-brie for putting that magical, summoning statuette to such timely use, ready to turn the tide as the pirates fell back in awe and terror before the six-hundred pound black panther, Drizzt set himself for a second charge.
Guenhwyvar hit the ground running, cut fast left and crashed into a pair of men, sending them flying, then cut back to the right and leaped for Thurgood.
A second blast of wind came forth, buffeting the panther and stopping her momentum. But unlike Drizzt, Guenhwyvar was not blown aside, and instead landed before the dais, digging her claws into the wooden planking to resist the continuing, and then the next, blast of wind.
From the look on Thurgood’s face, Drizzt knew that the wizard understood that he was in dire trouble.
So did the rest of the pirates, even more so when one near the stairway lurched forward, his shoulder torn by an arrow that blasted past and slammed hard into the ceiling.
And up the stairs came Catti-brie, her bow thrown aside and Cutter, her sentient and vicious and incredibly sharp sword in hand.
Thurgood turned to flee.
Guenhwyvar buried him where he stood.
Those men near Catti-brie fell over her in a rush, her sword working furiously to fend.
Drizzt leaped at the nearest duo, downward parrying both their swords with his left-hand scimitar, but not following down with the blade, but rather, suddenly releasing his opponents’ weapons as his second scimitar came up under them, using his opponents’ own inclination to help them lift their blades high.
Too high, and Drizzt went down low, to his knees, the opening clear. Both his blades started for exposed mid-sections, the pirates unable to defend.
“Drizzt Do’Urden!”
The call froze him, froze everyone, and all eyes, even Guenhwyvar’s, even those of Thurgood, who was struggling under the cat, glanced to the side, to see a tall and neatly-groomed middle-aged man stride into the room. He wore a long-tailed surcoat, with large brass buttons, and a cutlass was strapped to one hip.
“Deudermont?” Drizzt asked incredulously, surely recognizing the Captain of Sea Sprite.
“Drizzt Do’Urden,” Captain Deudermont said again, smiling, and he turned to Drizzt’s companion and said, “Catti-brie!”
All weapons lowered. A pair of men, priests obviously, rushed into the room from behind Deudermont, running to tend to the wounded.
“You were using this front to trap pirates?” Catti-brie asked.
“As were you?” the Captain asked back.
“Get this flea-ridden beast off of me,” came a growling demand, and they all turned to see Thurgood, flat on his back, Guenhwyvar straddling him.
Except of course, it wasn’t Thurgood and wasn’t any pirate captain, and as soon as Guenhwyvar stepped aside, the man, looking thin now, and dressed in robes, his magical disguise dismissed, stood up and brushed himself off imperiously.
Drizzt recognized him then as Sea Sprite’s resident wizard.
“Robillard?”
“The same,” said Deudermont, dryly and not without a bit of teasing aimed at the proud wizard.
Robillard scowled, and that made Drizzt recognize and remember the dour man even more acutely.
Drizzt pulled off his eyepatch and brushed his hair back, revealing his tell-tale lavender eyes as all the room about him settled fast, with weapons going back into sheaths. Still, more than a few of the men held wary gazes turned Drizzt’s way, and two of them even kept their weapons in hand.
For Drizzt, a drow making his way on the surface world where his race was feared and hated, there was little surprise in that reaction.
“To what does Waterdeep owe this visit?” Captain Deudermont asked as he came over, Catti-brie moving beside him. “And how fares King Bruenor and Mithral Hall?”
“We came to find Sea Sprite,” Drizzt explained. “To accept Captain Deudermont’s offer to sail with him in the chase for pirates.”
The Captain’s face brightened at that remark, though more than a few of the men at the sides bristled once more.
“It would seem we have much to discuss,” Deudermont said.
“Indeed,” Drizzt replied. “We had hoped to provide a dowery upon our arrival, but it seems as if our dowery was in fact your own crew.”
Deudermont turned slyly to Catti-brie. “Your doing, no doubt.”
The woman shrugged.
“Here now, don’t you be telling us that we’re to sail beside a drow elf,” one of the men still holding a sword dared to remark.
“This is not any drow elf,” Deudermont replied. “You are new to the crew, Mandar, and so you do not remember the times these two sailed with us.”
“That’s not to matter,” said the othe
r man who stood holding a weapon, and he, too, had only joined with Sea Sprite recently. “Drow’s a drow.”
A third voice echoed that sentiment, and several other men by the wall began to nod.
Deudermont offered Drizzt a wink and a shrug, and as Drizzt began to remark that he accepted the judgment without complaint, the tall Captain silenced him with an upraised hand. “I offered Drizzt Do’Urden a place aboard Sea Sprite,” Deudermont said to them all. “A place earned by deed and not dismissed by the reputation of his race.”
“You cannot blame them their concern,” Robillard said.
Deudermont paused and thought on those words for a long moment. He looked to Drizzt, who stood impassively, Guenhwyvar by his side. He looked to Catti-brie, standing on the other side, and seeming far less accepting of the prejudice. She stared hard back at him, and Deudermont realized that her scowl was the only thing holding back tears of frustration.
“Ah, but I can and do blame them, my friend Robillard,” the Captain stated, turning to sweep them all under his wilting gaze. “I say that Drizzt Do’Urden is a worthy shipmate, proven in deed, and not only aboard Sea Sprite. Many here witnessed his work—you yourself among them.”
“I did,” the wizard admitted.
Drizzt started to say something, for he saw where this was leading, and never had it been his intent to incite a mutiny of Sea Sprite’s fine crew. But again, Captain Deudermont turned to him and stopped him before he could really begin the remarks, this time with a genuine and unconcerned smile.
“Often do I try to measure the character of my crew,” the Captain said quietly to Drizzt and Catti-brie. “This moment I see as an opportunity to look into a man’s heart.”
He turned back to the crewmen. “Drizzt will sail with Sea Sprite, and glad am I to receive him, and glad will all be when we engage with the pirates to have his curved blades working beside us, and his great panther beside us, and the marvelous Catti-brie beside us!”
The murmurs of protest began, but Deudermont spoke over them.
“Any who cannot accept this are dismissed from the crew,” he said. “Without judgment and without shame, but without recourse.”
“And if ye lose the whole of Sea Sprite’s crew?” one tough-looking leather-faced sailor said from the side.
Deudermont shrugged as if it did not matter, and indeed, Drizzt understood the genuine intentions behind that dismissal. “I will not, for Robillard is too great a man to surrender to such prejudices.”
He looked to the wizard, who turned to scowl at the crew, then walked over to stand beside Drizzt and Catti-brie—opposite of Guenhwyvar, however.
A moment later, another man walked over, and then a pair more. Then came one of the priests, along with the man who had been clipped by Catti-brie’s arrow.
Within a minute, the only two not standing beside Drizzt were the first two who had questioned the decision, both of them still standing, weapons in hand. They looked to each other and one said, “I ain’t for sailing with no drow.”
The other slid his weapon away and held up his hands, then turned to join the others.
“What’re ye doing, Mandar?”
“Deudermont says he’s okay.”
“Bah!” the first snorted, and he spat upon the floor. He stuck his weapon in his belt and stomped toward the group.
But Deudermont stopped him with an upraised hand. “You’ll not accept him. Not truly. And so I do not accept you. Come to Sea Sprite in the morning for your final pay, and then go where you will.”
“But …” he started to protest.
“Your heart is clear to me, and it is not acceptable. Be gone.”
The man spat again, turned and stormed away.
“He was willing to join us,” Mandar protested.
“In body, but not in heart,” explained Deudermont. “When we are out there, on the open waters, we have no one to depend upon but each other. If a pirate’s sword was about to slay Drizzt Do’Urden, would he have rushed to block it?”
“Would any?” Mandar remarked.
“Fare well, Mandar,” Deudermont said without the slightest hesitation. “You, too, may come to Sea Sprite in the morning for your final payment.”
Mandar stuttered and spat, then gave a little laugh and walked away.
Deudermont didn’t watch him go, but turned to his crew and said, “Any others?”
“We did not mean to cause such trouble,” Drizzt remarked when it was apparent that no one else would leave.
“Trouble?” Deudermont echoed. “For Sea Sprite, I judge a man’s worth by his blade. But that is second, for more important is his character, is his willingness to put all aside and serve in absolute unity with the rest of the crew. Any who cannot do that are not welcomed to sail with me.”
“I am drow. This is not a typical situation.”
“Indeed, it is one of those times when I can see more clearly into the heart of a man. Sea Sprite’s crew is stronger this day, and not just for the addition of two …” he looked down at Guenhwyvar and corrected, “of three valuable newcomers.”
Drizzt looked to Catti-brie, who was smiling widely, and he understood that her contentment was justified. This was Captain Deudermont, as they remembered him, and both had silently prayed that their memories had not stilted with the passage of time and their fervent hopes that had taken them across so many miles.
“Welcome aboard, Drizzt Do’Urden, Catti-brie and Guenhwyvar,” Deudermont said, warmly and honestly.
The words rang like music in the ears of the rogue drow elf.
s I wrote about Entreri and Jarlaxle in the short story anthologies while I was writing the next book featuring Drizzt, so I went to Drizzt in this short story while following the road with Entreri and Jarlaxle in the novels. Once again with “Comrades at Odds,” I was tying up some of the loose ends in the Hunter’s Blades Trilogy. I could have put this story into The Lone Drow or The Two Swords as an extra chapter, but in that format, the resolution of Drizzt and Ellifain would have seemed abrupt and the exploration of Tos’un’s reaction to his unexpected opportunity would have forced many more scenes.
By tying up both of those loose ends this way, in a short story, I was able to feature these fairly momentous events under the glare of their own spotlight, rather than bury them in tales already thick with intrigue and a thousand other moving parts.
Regarding Ellifain, what this resolution came down to was the necessity of lifting some of the burden from the shoulders of Drizzt. You can only batter a character so far before breaking him, I fear, and surely the most tragic thing in Drizzt’s life to date, worse even than losing his father, was the death of Ellifain. The tortured elf girl did not deserve her fate, one forced upon her by Drizzt’s kin in a long-ago brutal raid. Her hatred was well rooted, if misplaced in her focus on Drizzt. Even so, Drizzt certainly understood her crazed and blind desire to see him dead. And so, when he killed her, he was struck by the double torment of injustice and guilt.
I lost my father back in 1985. We were close—very close. He was my friend, my coach, my dad. He was a very big part of my daily life, and his death came suddenly and unexpectedly. For all the pain that dark visitor brought that June 1985 day, I was able to quickly move through my grief to acceptance, and to an appreciation of the years we had spent together, mostly, I am sure, because there was nothing left unsaid between us. While I would have longed for a thousand more adventures with Dad, for him to see my kids grow into fine human beings, for him to see me finally get a novel published, for him to ride this adventure with me, there was little sense of things left undone, of things left unsaid. In short, I harbored no guilt regarding my Dad. We professed our love and friendship in everything we did, every day.
In Sojourn, Drizzt speaks of guilt as a two-edged sword, the most burdensome of all emotions, and also as a confirmation of conscience. He is, as are we all, often driven by that particular emotion, and in terms of loss, he comes to understand that grief is a thousand times more p
ainful when it is accompanied by guilt. With Ellifain, he felt this most keenly, and once again Innovindil stepped up to help him through his dilemma, offering her own mortal body as a vessel of resolution. And once Drizzt could get past that guilt, he could come to accept the fate of Ellifain.
For Tos’un, I explored another common theme of these books. Through him and the choices he makes, particularly his defiance of Khazid’hea on the issue of killing Sinnafein, we see Obould on a micro scale, a place where pragmatism defeats evil, where a creature raised in such a distorted view of the world finds a moment of truth, perhaps. Like Obould, who was ironically infused through the cleric ceremony with the wisdom to perhaps escape the trappings of his orc heritage, Tos’un is faced with a decision of instinct versus pragmatism. Is there a better way for the drow elf, even if that better way means suppressing ancient hatred and prejudice? This same choice faces Drizzt and Bruenor in the wider war, of course: Is acceptance of Obould and his kingdom truly for the better good? On the surface, these might seem like easy questions—there is no doubt that Tos’un would be better off joining with the surface elves. There is no doubt that Bruenor’s hand will be forced by an overwhelming orc army and the lack of neighborly support. But there is always the matter of emotion, and these hatreds run deep.
Not unlike many conflicts in our own world, sadly.
Winter, the Year of the Unstrung Harp (1371 DR)
e looked out at the night sky with an expression of complete derision, for the rogue drow, Tos’un Armgo, had hoped he would never again look upon the vast ceiling of the overworld. Years ago, during the drow raid on Mithral Hall, Tos’un had lost his companions and his House, preferring desertion to the continued insanity and deadly war that had gripped Menzoberranzan.
He had found friends, a group of similar dark elf renegades, and together the four had forged a fine life along the upper tunnels of the Underdark, and even among the surface dwellers—notably King Obould of the orcs. The four had played a major role in spurring the invasion that had taken Obould’s army to the gates of Mithral Hall. The drow instigators had covertly formed an alliance between Obould and the frost giants of the northern mountains, and they had goaded the orc king with visions of glory.
The Collected Stories, The Legend of Drizzt Page 17
