She couldn’t win. She knew that.
“Shoot him again, Drizzt,” she whispered desperately.
She ducked low as the scepter whipped across up high, then cut her counter short as the zealot retracted and stabbed for her belly once more. Then she jumped up high as his real attack swept in, a low cut aimed at Dahlia’s legs.
She’d expected it. If he could but touch her legs with that withering scepter, the resulting cramping muscles would likely render her incapable of escaping.
And that’s exactly what Dahlia was thinking about: escaping. As the scepter passed beneath her tucked legs, she still maintained enough of her balance to spin her weapons up and over, smashing them down atop the zealot’s wrapped head.
He ignored the strikes and brought his scepter sweeping back the other way.
Dahlia moved as if to jump again, but instead stepped back—and it was a good thing she took that second route. The zealot stopped his swing midway through and lifted the scepter straight up. Had Dahlia leaped as before, she would have surely collided with it on her inevitable descent.
Now he faced her again, his eyes shining, his smile peeking out between the tight wrappings.
It occurred to Dahlia then that either of those places, eyes or mouth, might prove to be her best opportunity, but before she could even think through that proposition, she let out a cry of surprise and fell back as a form came leaping down.
She recognized it as Barrabus, as the man Drizzt named Entreri, and for a moment thought he was leaping at her. His hands were up high and wide, one holding his dagger, the other a knife. He crashed onto the zealot’s back, and even that didn’t bring the monstrous Ashmadai to the ground.
But down came those hands, faster than the zealot could react, dagger plunging into one eye, knife into the other.
How the zealot howled and spun around, feet moving every which way, arms waving crazily. The scepter fell from his grasp as his sensibilities fled.
Entreri hung on, riding him like a wild horse.
Around and around the zealot spun, slapping and lurching, and finally throwing the assassin aside.
Out came the knife with Entreri’s tumble, though he’d lost his grip on the dagger.
There it stuck, protruding from the mummified zealot’s left eye.
Entreri hit the ground in a roll and drew his long sword as he came back around to his feet.
“Come along!” he ordered Dahlia, and he rushed right past the still-spinning zealot and into the cave, not even pausing to retrieve his dagger.
Dahlia followed, slowing only long enough to glance back at Drizzt and to smack the zealot one last time across the side of his head. Convulsing weirdly now in his death throes, he fell to the ground as she passed him by.
“Valindra first!” Dahlia cried when she saw Entreri cut to the left, to the base of the tower.
But when she entered the cave, she blinked. It was a shallow cave with no apparent exits or hiding spots, but the lich was nowhere to be found.
Drizzt cheered and almost laughed when Entreri came down upon Dahlia’s foe, and the precision of the assassin’s strike reminded Drizzt all too keenly of how deadly a foe Artemis Entreri could be. The killing blow had to be perfect, and so Entreri had been perfect.
The drow took immense satisfaction in his decision to be merciful, to allow Entreri to travel beside him and Dahlia.
Still, his own situation remained precarious. He was fully thirty paces out from the treelike tower, nearer to the wall than he was to Sylora or his companions, who had disappeared into the cave.
Ashmadai enemies lined the wall, and the continual volley of stones and arrows had Drizzt paying them more heed than Sylora—something he knew would certainly spell his doom.
He had to leave, to move to the side enough, at least, to get out of Sylora’s line of sight. But then what good would he be to his companions?
A familiar roar sent shivers through his spine, and sent the Ashmadai opposing him into a desperate frenzy.
Guenhwyvar—always and ever Guenhwyvar—arrived on the field just opposite the wall from Drizzt, charging at the Ashmadai line with abandon, ignoring the slings and arrows and chasing the zealots from their perches.
With full confidence in his panther companion, confidence built on a century or more of experience, Drizzt turned back to the distant sorceress with full force. As he dismissed those enemies behind him, he navigated the ground to move nearer to the tree. Sylora could fill in the few safe spots, he understood, but he saw, too, that the initial rings of woe were dissipating, leaving behind blackened areas of absolute death, but areas, perhaps, that he might cross.
If he could pick his way carefully and prevent the sorceress from filling in the gaps in the outer areas of agony, he might indeed get to the cave.
His hands worked in a blur then, a solid line of missiles flying forth, nearly every shot true. He could no longer see Sylora, so great was the spark shower. When no further black missiles reached out in response, it occurred to him that she might even have retreated into the tower.
Or dare he hope that one of his arrows had penetrated the strange bubble and struck her?
Drizzt nodded, but didn’t slow the barrage for another few heartbeats.
He started forward tentatively, picking his way across the field.
Even as he entered the short stairwell leading up to the base floor of the tower, Entreri was met by a howling Ashmadai guard, stabbing at him furiously with the sharp end of his scepter.
Such straightforward ferocity was no way to battle Artemis Entreri. He easily deflected the thrust aside with his sword then expertly snapped that sword back out straight, taking the man in the shoulder. And when the Ashmadai overreacted, spinning aside and throwing his weapon up and over—and missing badly as Entreri swiftly retracted the sword ahead of the parry—the assassin calmly stepped forward and drove his dagger under the man’s ribs.
The zealot howled and lurched over, and was surely doomed, except that neither Entreri nor his companion cared at all about him. The assassin slammed him on the back of the head as he bent, then grabbed his collar and yanked him forward and down the stairs.
Dahlia added a crack with a flail as he tumbled by, but like Entreri, her focus remained in front of her, not behind.
Up they went into the first floor then rushed along the stairway to the second. From there they could see the balcony, now empty, and the spark shower from Drizzt’s continuing barrage as the missiles struck the shield Sylora had left behind.
Despite that explosive assault, Entreri moved toward the balcony, and the small stairway leading to the tower’s third floor. There he fell back, dodging a blast of black ash as Sylora filled the space with a ring of woe.
The assassin tested it, but backed off again as the smoke bit at him painfully.
“The other way,” he told Dahlia, nodding to the stair across the second level.
“She’s up there?” Dahlia asked, not moving other than to reform her singular long staff.
Entreri looked at her curiously, and tried to push her toward the stair.
But Dahlia avoided him and moved toward the balcony instead, though she motioned for him to continue across the room.
The assassin glanced back as he reached the stair, and smiled wide. Dahlia rushed to the edge of the smoking area, planted her staff against the base of the wall opposite the short stair, and leaped forward, twisting and pushing off as she came even with the opening. With great agility and strength, the elf woman hung there, her momentum lost, and as she started to descend, she lifted her legs higher to the side and pushed off with all her strength, lifting herself up the side stair.
Entreri sprinted up the short stairwell and burst through the door, to find himself facing Sylora Salm and her crooked wand.
Dahlia was there, too, having cleared the blackened area.
“All my enemies in one place,” Sylora said. “How convenient.”
Dahlia responded by thrusting the end of her staff at the woman’s mouth. The attack seemed true, but the weapon hit a barrier, a brown semicircle glowing in front of her at the impact.
Sylora laughed and whipped her small wand in front of her, and from that wand came a series of black darts, spinning through the room.
Both Dahlia and Entreri curled defensively, but both got hit. Many darts flew, and those small missiles brought forth painful bites indeed.
“Go!” Entreri demanded of Dahlia. He leaped at Sylora, as did Dahlia, sword, knife, and staff stabbing hard.
And all, weapons and attackers, were easily repelled by the barrier.
Down below, from the balcony, they heard a different cadence of explosive missiles.
“The barrier can be broken!” Dahlia surmised, and though Sylora hit them again with a rain of darts, on they came, their only defense a brutal forward assault.
Indeed, behind the globe, Sylora appeared genuinely concerned, and a bit disoriented by the sheer ferocity of their attacks.
The strikes didn’t diminish until something flew past Dahlia, making her instinctively duck. She called out to Entreri as she did, and he, too, had to dive aside, his dagger not quite catching up to the small fiend as it fluttered past him. The devil’s strike, however, did score, its whiplike tail lashing out at the assassin and cutting him painfully across the shoulder.
Up into the air went the creature, above the next rain of Sylora’s darts—and that barrage had Dahlia and Entreri staggering back under the weight and sting of the assault.
But Arunika’s imp hadn’t been hit. Its skin hanging in burned strands from Sylora’s earlier encasing ash, it understood the sorceress’s defenses more keenly than the others.
Sylora hardly even seemed aware of the creature as it flipped over the top of the bubble and dropped down upon her extended arm. With clawed feet and hands, it grabbed at her forearm and hand, at the wand, and when she pulled back against it and slapped at it with her other hand, the imp bared its fangs and bit down hard on her weapon hand.
It lifted its head, two severed fingers hanging from its mouth, and tore the Dread Ring wand from Sylora’s weakened grasp. Away it leaped, stinging her with its tail as it flew free of her desperate grabs.
Time seemed to stop then, a sudden, shocked pause from the three remaining in the tower room.
“Oh, now you die,” Artemis Entreri promised, rising from his knees against the far wall, Dahlia beside him.
But Sylora Salm wasn’t out of tricks. She threw her cloak up over her head, and as it descended, she transformed into the likeness of a giant raven.
Dahlia yelled in protest and struck at her. Entreri, too, managed a stab.
But neither scored a mortal, or even a serious hit, and the raven dived from the room, down the short stair, and out the tower balcony.
Drizzt leaped high, clearing the last line of still-smoking rings, on his way to the cave.
As he landed, though, he heard a sound from above, a peculiar sound given the circumstance and location: the whinnying of an angry horse.
That noise turned his attention back the other way, where he saw a large crow, a human-sized bird, fly out from the balcony, soaring into the night.
Drizzt leaped back the other way, drawing an arrow in mid-flight, and he landed and dropped to one knee, leveling his bow and letting fly.
The lightning arrow streaked off into the dark night, and sparks flew along with feathers as it struck home. But the crow kept gliding, disappearing over the wall and into the night beyond the strange fortress.