But Tos’un’s three drow companions were dead. The last to fall, the priestess Kaer’lic, had been slain before Tos’un’s eyes by King Obould himself. Only his speed and sheer luck had saved Tos’un from a similar fate.
So he was alone. No, not alone, he corrected himself as he dropped a hand onto the crafted hilt of Khazid’hea, a sentient sword he had found beneath the devastated site where Obould had battled Drizzt Do’Urden.
Wandering the trails of Obould’s newfound kingdom, with smelly, stupid orcs encamped all around him, Tos’un had reached the conclusion that the time had come for him to leave the World Above, to go back to the deep tunnels of the Underdark, perhaps even to find his way back to Menzoberranzan and his kin. A deep cave had brought him to a tunnel complex, and trails through the upper Underdark led him to familiar ground, back to the old abode he had shared with his three drow compatriots. From there, Tos’un knew his way to the deeper tunnels.
And so he walked, but with every step his doubts grew. Tos’un was no stranger to the Underdark; he had lived the first century of his life as a noble soldier in the ranks of House Barrison del’Armgo of Menzoberranzan. He had led drow scouting parties out into the tunnels, and had even twice guarded caravans bound for the trade city of Ched Nasad.
He knew the Underdark.
He knew, in his heart, that he could not survive those tunnels alone.
Each step came more slowly and deliberately than the previous. Doubts clouded his thoughts, and even the small voice in his head that he knew to be Khazid’hea’s empathetic communication urged him to turn back.
Out of the tunnel, the stars above him, the cold wind blowing in his face, Tos’un stood alone and confused.
We will find our place, Khazid’hea telepathically assured him. We are stronger than our enemies. We are more clever than our enemies.
Tos’un Armgo couldn’t help but wonder if the sentient sword had included Drizzt Do’Urden and King Obould in those estimations.
A campfire flared to life off in the distance, or a cooking fire, and the sight of it reminded the drow that he hadn’t eaten in more than a day.
“Let us go and find some well-supplied orcs,” he said to his growling stomach. “I am hungry.”
Khazid’hea agreed.
Khazid’hea was always hungry.
Sunlight glistened off the white-feathered wings of the equine creature as Drizzt Do’Urden brought the pegasus in a steep bank and turn. Astride her own pegasus to the north of the drow elf, the elf Innovindil caught the view in dramatic fashion, contrasted as it was by the great dark clouds hovering over the Trollmoors to the south. The pair had set out from Mithral Hall three days before, confident that the standoff between the dwarves of Clan Battlehammer and the invading orc army would hold throughout the brutal winter months. Drizzt and Innovindil had to go far to the west, all the way to the Sword Coast, to retrieve the body of Ellifain, a fallen moon elf and kin to Innovindil, slain at the hands of Drizzt in a tragic misunderstanding.
They had started out traveling south and southwest, thinking to pass over the city of Nesmé on the northern banks of the dreaded Trollmoors to see how the rebuilding was commencing after the carnage of the previous summer. They had thought to cross over Nesmé, skirting the Trollmoors so that they could catch a more southerly route to the west and the distant city of Luskan.
It was bitterly cold up in the sky with winter beginning to blow. Sunrise and Sunset, their pegasi mounts, didn’t complain, but Innovindil and Drizzt could only remain in the air for short periods of time, so cold was the wind on their faces. Bruenor had given both of them fine seal coats and cloaks, thick mittens and hoods, but the wind bit too hard at any and all exposed skin for the pair to remain aloft.
As Drizzt came around in his lazy turn, Innovindil began to motion for him to put down on a plateau directly west of his position. But the drow beat her to the movement, motioning west and a bit to the north instead—and not for her to descend, but only to look.
Her expression soured as soon as she turned that way, for she didn’t miss the drow’s target: a line of black specks—orcs, she knew—moving south along a narrow trail.
Sunrise flew under her mount as Drizzt began a slow, circling descent. He put a hand to one of his scimitars and drew it a bit from its sheath, then nodded, silently asking the elf if she was up for a fight.
Innovindil smiled back at him as she guided Sunset into Sunrise’s wake, following Drizzt’s descent.
“They will cross just to the west of us,” Drizzt said to her as she put down on a wide, flat rock a few feet to the side of him. She couldn’t see the drow’s white smile, for he had pulled his scarf up over the bottom half of his face, but his intense lavender eyes were surely smiling at her.
Innovindil loosened her collar and pulled her hood back. She shook free her long golden hair, returned Drizzt’s look, and said, “We have hundreds of miles before us, and winter fast approaching. Would you delay us that we might kill a few orcs?”
Drizzt shrugged, but as he pulled his scarf down, he still grinned with eagerness.
Innovindil could hardly argue against that.
“We should see what they’re about,” the drow explained. “I’m surprised to see any of the orcs moving this far to the south now.”
“With their king dead, you mean?”
“I would have thought that most of the orcs would be turning back to the north and the security of their mountain holes. Do they mean to press forward with their attacks absent the unifying force that was Obould?”
Innovindil glanced to the west, though they had lost sight of the orcs during their descent. “Perhaps some, at least, have grown overconfident. So much of the land came so easily to their overwhelming numbers, perhaps they’ve forgotten the mighty resistance aligned against them.”
“We should remind them,” said Drizzt. He lifted one leg over the pegasus so that he sat sideways on the beast, facing Innovindil, then threw himself backward in a roll over the mount’s back, flipping as he went to land lightly on his feet on the other side. He moved around under Sunrise’s neck, patting the muscled creature as he went. “Let us see what they’re about,” he said to the elf, “then send them running.”
“Those we do not kill outright,” Innovindil agreed. She slid down from her saddle and unfastened her great bow from the straps behind the seat.
Trusting that the intelligent pegasi would remain calm and safe, the pair moved off with all speed, stealthy and nimble across the uneven stones. They headed northwest initially, thinking to approach the long ravine a bit ahead of the orcs, but the sound of metal against stone stopped them and turned them back to the southwest.
A short while later, Drizzt crawled out onto a high outcropping of stone, and while he understood then the source of the hammering, he grew even more confused. For there below him, at a bottleneck along the trail, he saw a group of orcs hard at work in building a wall of cut stones.
“A gate,” Innovindil remarked, creeping up beside him.
The pair watched as several orcs came up the trail from the south, carrying rocks.
“We need a better look,” Innovindil remarked.
“The sun is fast setting,” said Drizzt, pulling himself up and starting back to the east and the pegasi.
They had less than half an hour of daylight remaining, but in that time they found much more than they had anticipated. Just a few hundred yards from the as-yet-unfinished gate sat a blockade of piled stones, and a second had been thrown together a hundred yards ahead of that one. Sentries manned both posts, while workers disassembled the one closest to the gate, carrying the stones for cutting and placement on the more formidable wall.
The coordination and tactics could not be denied.
“The fall of Obould has not yet corroded their unity and precision,” Innovindil remarked.
“They wear uniforms,” Drizzt said. He seemed as if he could hardly draw breath—and from more than the cold wind, Innovindil could plainl
y see.
His words rang true enough to the elf, for the sentries at all three points wore similar skull-shaped helms of white bone and nearly identical black tabards.
“Their tactics are perfect,” the drow went on, for he had seen many similar scenes during his time in Menzoberranzan among his warrior people. “They hastily set blockades to slow down any attackers so that they won’t be caught vulnerable at their more permanent construction site.”
“Orcs have always been clever, if not cohesive,” the elf reminded him.
“It would seem that Obould has remedied the weakness of the latter point more completely than we had thought.” The drow looked around, his gaze drifting in the direction of Mithral Hall. “We have to investigate this more fully and go back to Bruenor,” he said as he looked back at his elf companion.
Innovindil held his stare for a short while, then shook her head. “We have already decided our course.”
“We could not know.”
“We still do not know,” the elf replied. “These southern orc scouts and laborers may not even yet know of Obould’s demise. We cannot measure what we see here as what we can expect a month from now, or after the winter season. In any case, the stalemate will hold with the coming snow and cold, and nothing we can tell King Bruenor now will alter his preparations for the winter.”
“You would still recover the body of Ellifain,” said Drizzt.
Innovindil nodded and replied, “It is important—for my people, and for our acceptance of you.”
“Is this a journey to recover a lost soul? Or is it to determine the veracity of a potential friend?”
“It is both.”
Drizzt leaned back as if stung. Innovindil reached out for him.
“Not for me,” she assured him. “You have nothing to prove to Innovindil, Drizzt Do’Urden. Our friendship is sincere. But I would have no doubts lingering among my sorely wounded and angry people. The People of the Moonwood are not many in number. Forgive us our caution.”
“They bade you do this?”
“There was no need. I understand the importance of it, and do not doubt that I, that all of my people, owe this to the lost one. Ellifain’s fall marks a great failing in the Moonwood, that we could not convince her of the error of her ways. Her heart was scarred beyond reason, but in offering her no remedy, we of the Moonwood can only see Ellifain’s fall as our failing.”
“How will retrieving her body remedy that?”
Innovindil shrugged and said, “Let us learn.”
Drizzt had no answer for that, nor did he think it was his place to question further. He had agreed to fly beside Innovindil to the Sword Coast and so he would. He owed her that, at least. But more importantly, he owed it to Ellifain, the lost elf he had slain.
They returned to their mounts and moved higher up on the trails as darkness fell and the cold closed in, accepting the less accommodating climate so that they could try to get a better understanding of what the orcs around them were up to. They found an overhang to block the biting northeastern wind and huddled close.
As they had expected, campfires came up. A line of lights ran off from the gate construction to the north. More curiously, every few minutes a flaming arrow soared into the night sky. For more than an hour, Drizzt measured the signal flares against the movements of the moon and the small star that chased it, and it wasn’t long before he was nodding in admiration.
“Not random,” he informed Innovindil. “They have devised a coded system of signaling.”
For a long while, the elf didn’t respond. Then she asked, “Is this how kingdoms are born?”
The next day dawned warmer and with less of a wind, so Drizzt and Innovindil wasted no time in getting their flying horses up into the air. They set down soon after, moving into position on the bluffs above the gate construction, and soon realized that their suppositions were right on the mark. The orcs continued to coordinate the deconstruction of the protective barriers to the south with the construction of the more sophisticated gate. The caravan they’d first spotted arrived soon after, laden with supplies for the workers, and that, too, seemed quite extraordinary to the two onlookers.
No typically-orc squabbling came from below regarding the food and drink; it was passed out in an orderly fashion, with enough set aside to feed those orcs still working in the south upon their return.
Even more curiously, the guards rotated, with several caravan guards replacing those at the wall, who set out on the return journey to the north. The new guards, too, were dressed in the skull helmets and black tabards that seemed to be the uniform of Obould’s minions.
Intrigued by the surprising orderliness of the orcs, the two elves, moon and drow, moved back from the ledges and put their mounts to the sky once again. They veered along a more northerly route, wanting to more fully explore the continuing organization of the orc army. They noted wooden pyres set on many hilltops—signal fires. They saw other well-guarded caravans moving out along the various trails like the tentacles of a gigantic octopus. The center of that creature, a huge encampment, was not hard to find.
They flew beyond it, continuing more north than west, and found new construction everywhere. Clusters of stone houses and incomplete walls showed across every snow-covered lea, and every other hilltop, it seemed, was set with the base stones of a new, fortified keep.
“Word does not spread quickly among the orcs, it would seem,” Innovindil said when they landed in a secluded vale.
Drizzt didn’t reply, but his doubting expression spoke volumes. All those orcs couldn’t still be ignorant of an event as momentous as the fall of Obould Many-Arrows. Could it be that the cohesion Obould had spawned among his people would outlast him?
That possibility rattled Drizzt to his bones. The decapitation of the orc army, the death of Obould, was supposed to work like a cancer on the stupid beasts. Surely infighting and selfishness would destroy the integrity of their enemies; the nature of orcs would accomplish what Bruenor’s army had not been able to.
“The tale is early in the telling,” Innovindil said, and Drizzt realized that his fears were playing out on his face.
“Not so early.”
“Our enemies have not been tested since Obould’s fall,” Innovindil said. “Neither by sword nor winter’s fury.”
“They are preparing for both, it would seem.”
Innovindil touched her hand to the drow’s shoulder, and he looked into her blue eyes. “Do not abandon hope,” she reminded him. “Nor make judgments on things we cannot yet know. How will these remainders of the orc army fare when winter comes on in full? How will they manage when some tribe or another decides that it is time to return to the safety of its mountain hole? Will the others try to stop the retreat, and if they do, if orcs begin to battle orcs, how long will it take for the entire mass to feed upon itself?”
Drizzt glanced back to the distant trails and the working orcs and let his gaze linger there for some time. “It is too early to make a judgment,” he finally agreed. “Let us go to the west and finish our task. Perhaps the day will shine brighter upon our return.”
Innovindil took his hand and walked him back to the waiting pegasi, and soon they were on their way again, flying due west, the miles to Luskan rolling out below them. They set their course and held true, and they each tried to hold on to their reasoning that the events about them were not likely indicative of what they would find upon their return.
But they each glanced to the sides, and watched the continuing progress and cohesion of an orc force that was supposed to be disintegrating.
The sights of that day, the signal fires and coordinated flares of that night, and the sights of the next day, until they broke clear of the orcs in the Haunted Pass to the west, did not bolster their confidence.
As a minor noble in a major House of Menzoberranzan, Tos’un Armgo had done many years of battle training at Melee-Magthere, the school of warriors. He had served under the brutal and legendary weapons master, Utheg
ental, who had distinguished himself among drow warriors with his fearsome, offensive style of battle. Never known for his subtlety, what Uthegental lacked in finesse he made up for in sheer strength and ferocity, and the Barrison del’Armgo warriors he commanded learned to strike hard and strike fast.
Tos’un was no exception. So when he descended upon a caravan of orcs, Khazid’hea in his right hand and a second sword in his left, he did not hesitate. He came down from on high in a great leap, stabbed out with his left as he landed beside the lead orc, then spun across with Khazid’hea and cut the foolish creature shoulder to hip. A sudden reversal and backhand sent Khazid’hea slashing at the next orc in line, who lifted a sack of supplies to block.
The blade, with an edge as fine as any in all the world, slid in and out of the bag, through the orc’s raised arm, and into its surprised face with such ease Tos’un wasn’t even sure he had hit the creature.
Until, that is, it fell in a blood-spraying heap.
Tos’un planted his foot on the fallen orc as he leaped forward, scoring another kill by stabbing Khazid’hea through the planks of the caravan’s lead cart and into the chest of the orc that had leaped behind it for cover.
More! the sentient sword screamed in his head. It sent waves of rage at the drow, telepathic impartations that agitated him and drove him on with fury.
A pair of orcs moved to intercept, their swords out level to hinder him.
Out went Tos’un’s second sword, tapping across left to right under the blade of the orc on his right. He rolled it under and tapped the underside of the other orc blade, then back again to the right and back to the left in a series of light parries. The orcs didn’t resist, for the hits were not strong, but neither did they realize that the drow was walking their blades up ever so slightly.
The Collected Stories, The Legend of Drizzt Page 18
