They passed through a series of chambers, guessing more than knowing which doors to burst through. They turned another corner, and another beyond that, speeding for a heavy, partially ajar metal doorway. Entreri shouldered it, crashing through, Drizzt and Dahlia close behind, and as the large room opened into view before them, all three saw and heard a similar door opposite them slam shut.
Entreri made for it with all speed, Dahlia close behind, as Drizzt slammed the door behind him. He looked for a locking bar, but none was to be found. But some furniture still remained, including a heavy stone chair frame, so he pulled it into place before the door and propped it at an angle to somewhat secure the portal.
Across the room, Entreri tugged at the other door and banged on it, but whoever had exited had already secured it.
“Now where?” Dahlia asked, leaping around and scanning for other doors.
But there were none to be seen.
“Now where?” she asked again, more insistently.
“Now we fight,” Entreri replied. “That was Alegni’s voice,” he added, and spat on the floor.
“Kill him, at least, before we die, then,” Dahlia said, and Entreri nodded grimly.
“Whatever you do, Drizzt, get me to him,” Entreri said. “I will salute you with my final moments of life, for whatever that might be worth to you.”
Drizzt regarded the two, standing so easily beside each other, both seeming perfectly comfortable with their fate—as long as they could get to Herzgo Alegni. He couldn’t imagine the hatred that drove them, and once again he was reminded of their unspoken bond, their sharing of something deeper, something he couldn’t comprehend, let alone partake.
Drizzt did recognize that either of them would die happy if that death came after the killing blow upon Herzgo Alegni. How could someone hate another so much, he wondered? What had happened, what violation, what violent betrayal or continued torture, to facilitate such venom?
A thunderous retort hit the door behind him, and Drizzt scrambled to set the chair frame back in place. He heard the report as a hail of missiles hit the door, and heard too the calls for pursuit and the multitude of footsteps.
He turned to view his friends, equally doomed, but found himself looking behind them, at the other door, which had silently opened.
Dahlia grunted, looked curiously at Drizzt, then collapsed to the ground.
A bolt of lightning hit the door behind Drizzt, crackling as it climbed around the metal and once more throwing the chair aside.
Drizzt started for Dahlia; he turned for the door.
Then he was blinded.
The drow had come.
Chapter 20: "Bregan d'Aerthe!"
Drizzt knew. He felt the sting of a crossbow bolt, and another and a third, and the ensuing, almost immediate burn of drow poison, familiar from so long ago, coursing through his veins.
He knew. He heard the thunder of the approaching Shadovar. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He wanted to fight at least, to offer some last and fitting expression of Drizzt Do’Urden. If this was his end, as surely he believed it to be, then it should match the way he lived his life.
He wondered about the afterlife, and hoped there was one, and a just one. One where he would find again his friends lost, find his love, Catti-brie, and he even managed a grin in the magical darkness as the strength left his knees, as the scimitars fell from his grasp, in imagining the meeting between Catti-brie and Dahlia.
The grin was gone before it even began. Catti-brie and Dahlia . . . and Drizzt.
He hoped he would find Catti-brie, for the thought of spending eternity beside Dahlia . . .
He was on the ground then, though he felt nothing. He resisted the drow poison enough to remain awake and somewhat cogent, but his physical abilities were absent, and not to soon return.
“Bregan D’aerthe!” he heard Artemis Entreri cry, and Drizzt hoped that perhaps this was Jarlaxle’s band, that perhaps they might survive.
Entreri clarified, “We’re agents of Bregan D’aerthe!”
Clever, Drizzt thought. Ever was Artemis Entreri clever—that is what made him doubly dangerous.
He sensed forms passing by him, moving over him, but he could not lash out at them, and thought that he should not lash out at them.
The irony of a drow rescue was not lost on the groggy and fast-sinking dark elf ranger, nor was the notion that it would indeed be a very short reprieve.
The room’s door burst open under the weight of ranks of Shadovar pressing forward.
A wall of poisoned crossbow bolts came at them. The room blackened before them. A second magical darkness engulfed their front ranks, and a third magical darkness hit the throng behind that one.
And in that confused frenzy, a fireball erupted, biting flames curling Shadovar skin, blistering Shadovar hands as they tried to hold to metal weapons. Turning and thrashing, disoriented in the darkness, tripping over the bodies of their front ranks lying helpless on the ground under the spell of drow poison, the charge abruptly halted.
“Press on!” Herzgo Alegni screamed from the back when he recognized the stall.
“Drow!” came the responding shouts. “The dark elves have come!”
“Effron!” Herzgo Alegni shouted. He hardly knew what to make of that, and certainly he didn’t want a battle with a drow force. But neither would he let that sword, or his hated enemies, Entreri and the wretched Dahlia, escape! He spotted the twisted warlock by the entrance to the tunnel in the room ahead of him.