Drizzt looked to Entreri, his fingers moving slowly and deliberately in the drow sign language as he silently asked the assassin if this kind of empty early morning was typical in Neverwinter.
Entreri, with only rudimentary understanding of the language, shrugged noncommittally, and then became distracted as Dahlia crept up behind him.
It seemed too easy to the cautious drow ranger, too pat. He regarded Entreri once more, and wondered if perhaps Dahlia’s desire for this fight had clouded both their judgments. Had Entreri led them into a trap?
Drizzt shook the thought away almost as soon as it had come to him. The pain on Entreri’s face was all too real; the man wanted Herzgo Alegni dead almost as surely as Dahlia desired that outcome.
Sometimes, indeed most of the time, things were as they seemed.
The drow stepped out of the brush, standing to his full height, and walked onto the bridge. He drew Icingdeath in his right hand and dropped his left hand into his pouch.
Entreri was beside him in a heartbeat, Dahlia scrambling out behind, and the three started their stalk.
They were only a few steps onto the bridge when the tiefling warlord noticed them. He turned and straightened, staring at them. At that very moment, the first rays of dawn shot the length of the bridge, past the three intruders and shined upon the warlord as if it was intended for him alone. That glow revealed a strange grin on Alegni’s face, visible to them even though they were still thirty strides away.
Alegni had been expecting them.
No matter, Drizzt realized, and he paused and produced the onyx figurine as Entreri stopped beside him.
Not Dahlia, though. She rushed between her two companions, knocking them both aside, her reassembled long staff carried like a javelin. She had left her hesitation and her tears back in the brush, it seemed.
“Guenhwyvar, come to me!” Drizzt commanded, and as soon as that call was heard, he replaced the statue and brought forth his second blade, following Entreri into his charge.
Up ahead, as Dahlia closed in, Herzgo Alegni calmly reached to his hip and drew out his huge red-bladed sword.
But Dahlia didn’t slow, coming in furiously, with a powerful stab at the tiefling’s face.
Across came Charon’s Claw, turning aside the weapon.
Drizzt put his head down and called upon his magical anklets to speed him past Entreri and up to Dahlia. He had to get there, he could tell that his lover was too eager, and too forceful in her assault on the dangerous tiefling.
Alegni would cut her down!
He sprinted around Entreri, or almost did, until the assassin’s sword flashed out to the side, stabbing Drizzt hard in the left shoulder.
The drow threw himself aside, nearly falling from his feet. He tried to turn and set a defense, but his left arm would barely rise and it was all he could do to prevent Twinkle from falling from his failing grasp.
Artemis Entreri, Barrabus the Gray, was on him, sword and dagger flashing.
It had been so easy!
Herzgo Alegni could hardly contain his laughter as he watched this fool elf ’s two companions battling halfway back to the bridge entrance. With a mere thought, his prized sword had once again defeated Barrabus, had turned the man against himself! For truly Alegni could sense that one’s hate toward him, toward the sword.
And truly, Alegni understood, there was nothing Barrabus would ever be able to do about it.
Barrabus already had the drow, this legendary ranger who had attached himself to Dahlia, under control, it seemed, and so Alegni, who of course had other allies lying in wait, was left to focus on this one.
On pretty young Dahlia.
She kept up her barrage of thrusts and wild swings, and Alegni didn’t even try to counter, instead blocking and misdirecting the blows, or dodging aside to prevent any solid strikes. He let her rage play out through many movements, then, as she seemed to be slowing, he added a new twist to the dance.
Dahlia’s staff stabbed in at his midsection and across came Claw to drive it out harmlessly wide. But this time, the red-bladed sword trailed a line of ash, an opaque barrier.
Alegni stepped back and to the side, and when the staff came back into view, predictably stabbing right back through the ash cloud, he took up Claw in both his hands and drove down hard, thinking to ruin the weapon.
Except that the head of the staff dipped too quickly, and at an unexpected angle, and for a heartbeat, Alegni thought that the elf woman must have leaped up impossibly high to clear the ash barrier.
When Dahlia herself exploded through that barrier, though, he understood— understood the unexpected movement of the staff head, if not the manner in which this transformation had occurred, for now the elf held in her hands not a single long staff, but a pair of exotic flails, spinning and crossing at every conceivable angle.
Alegni fell back to regroup, but Dahlia was too close. The tiefling warrior flailed Charon’s Claw wildly side to side and straight ahead, to block, to drive her back, to score some hits, perhaps. He winced as a flying pole cracked hard against his shoulder. Only his thick horns saved his skull as Dahlia’s diagonal downstrike jarred and staggered him.
Back he stumbled and on she came, her jaw locked in a mask of fury. She banged her sticks together as she pursued, sparks flying with every hit.
Alegni saw his chance and thrust his blade out at her, knowing it would be slapped aside. In that parry, a blast of lightning energy shocked Claw, flowing from Dahlia’s weapon to Alegni’s blade and up to his hands.
His left hand surely stung from that magical bite, but his right, gloved in the gauntlet that served as sister to Claw, accepted the blast easily.
Dahlia came on; she thought her clever trick would defeat him, of course.
As he had expected.
Across came Claw in a brutal backhand slash, and Dahlia, obviously surprised that Alegni still gripped the blade with such strength, threw her hips back desperately.
But still Claw tore her shirt and her flesh, a line of blood erupting across her belly, a flash of agony twisting her pretty face. Claw’s bite was more than that of a mere piece of sharpened steel. Claw’s bite was charged with the powers of the netherworld, the essence of death itself.
Alegni continued his swing out wide to the right, even letting the blade turn him as it went.
For he knew that Dahlia’s rage would outdo even that profound agony, knew that she would come right in at him despite the wound.
He continued to turn, and as he went, he lifted his trailing right leg in a perfectly-timed kick. He felt Dahlia’s flails smacking around his hip and thigh, but more than that, he felt the whoosh of breath leaving Dahlia’s body as his heavy boot connected.
He came around in a defensive posture, hardly hurt by the strikes, denying them with his sheer muscle and brawn.
Dahlia wasn’t on him, though. His kick had thrown her back several long strides, where she sat upon the ground, clearly stunned and pained.
“You think I will kill you?” he taunted as he stalked in. “You will soon enough pray for such an outcome, pretty girl. I will hurt you, oh indeed! And then I will tie you down for years to come, and fill you with my seed and tear from your loins my progeny!”
“Fight it!” Drizzt implored Entreri, but he hardly got the words out as he twisted and turned and stumbled aside, dodging the assassin’s flashing blades. He managed to glance back along the bridge, to see the gray mist of Guenhwyvar beginning to take shape. If he could only hold out for a few heartbeats, Guen would free him of the crazed Entreri.
And none too soon, he realized as he glanced ahead, just in time to see Dahlia flying backward and to the stone, to see the hulking form stalking in at her.
“Guen!” Drizzt cried.
He felt the blood rolling out of his burning shoulder, but he stubbornly tightened his left hand and fought the pain. Down went Icingdeath to pick off Entreri’s low thrust, then up again, swiftly and horizontally to force the assassin to cut short his clever dagger follow-up, thrusting, perhaps even thinking to throw the dirk into Drizzt’s face.
A growl from the end of the bridge brought Drizzt little hope, for in that call of the great panther, he clearly heard pain. He worked around to the side, between Entreri and Dahlia, looking back the way they had come, looking back at Guenhwyvar.
The panther spun and bit furiously as dark bolts filled the air around her. Wafts of smoke still trailed from her black form, though she was fully substantial now, the gray mist completely coagulated.
Those awful bolts burned at her, Drizzt understood, and he followed them to their source: a twisted and malformed tiefling in purple and black robes, flicking a wand her way. As she had become corporeal, this one had intervened, assaulting her before she had even taken in the scene around her, distracting her and paining her greatly, so it seemed.
As Guenhwyvar tried to go to Drizzt’s call, the tiefling warlock filled the area before her with a black, sizzling cloud, and the panther shrieked and snarled.
“Kill your tormentor!” Drizzt ordered the panther.
He couldn’t rely on Guen. Not then.
He batted aside another strike, and slid one foot to the left, circling. He had to get to his fallen scimitar, had to deny the pain and the blood and fight with both hands against Artemis Entreri. There was no other way.
He darted side to side, using his speed to keep the assassin from any straightforward attacks. Icingdeath spun out before him in tight circles, the blade humming as it gained momentum—but never too much momentum for Drizzt to interrupt the flow suddenly and stab it out, ahead or to either side, as he did often.
Now he was facing Dahlia again, and to his relief, she was back to her feet, flails spinning. She leaped and somersaulted out to the side, landing lightly and charging right back in at the hulking figure.
But then she retreated at once as the great red-bladed sword swept across.
Drizzt sucked in his breath, and got stuck in the forearm for his distraction.
This was Artemis Entreri he was facing, and the man had lost nothing of his skill in the decades since last they had battled! Drizzt told himself to focus, reminded himself repeatedly that he could be of no use to Dahlia if he could not first win out here.
He moved Entreri out toward the right-hand rail of the wide bridge, away from the fallen scimitar.
“Resist it,” he implored the assassin between parries. “Alegni will kill Dahlia. Resist the call of Claw.”
In response, Entreri gritted his teeth and let out a cry of pain. His knuckles whitened as he grasped his weapons and he fell back a step.
“Fight it!” Drizzt implored him, and indeed, Entreri seemed locked in some inner battle, some great torment.
That was the moment for Drizzt to leap in and cut him down, a moment when the assassin could not defend. A stride forward, a single stab, and Drizzt could move to help Dahlia.
She focused on the last moments of her mother’s life. That horrible image flitted through Dahlia’s thoughts again and again, alongside all the other painful memories.
The thought of this beast atop her and inside her filled her with fury, but it worked against her, Dahlia realized almost immediately. For amid her rage at that ultimate violation, there remained too much guilt, too much vulnerability. If she let her mind take her back to those awful moments, she would paralyze herself.
But she had no such conflicting emotions concerning the fate of her mother.
