He looked up at the adjacent roof for Guenhwyvar. An archer was in view, desperately trying to set an arrow as another form, a woman, came running across the rooftop, brandishing a long knife. She barreled into the archer, her leading arm sweeping aside his bow, her knife striking hard.
Drizzt could have shot her down, but was she an enemy or an ally?
He lowered the bow and threw himself into a slide to the railing overlooking the street, overlooking Dahlia, overlooking the thugs closing in on her.
He could only yell out for her. He lifted his bow and tried to decide which one of these killers he would stop.
And, by default, which of the others he would allow to get to Dahlia.
Therfus Handydoer laughed a bit as he watched the scene unfolding in front of him, the female elf tumbling out into the streets, still staggering foolishly from his lightning serpent.
He knew the drow was trapped in his area of icy punishment. He’d defeated the feared Dahlia and her drow companion so easily! He almost pitied warriors.
Almost, but how might he pity one foolish enough to lift a sword when a spell was so much more powerful?
It occurred to him to finish Dahlia then, to take the kill as his own before the surrounding thugs could close in, and so he began to whisper his next spell.
The tip of a deadly dagger came in tight against his throat.
“This is not your time to kill, son of Ship Rethnor,” a quiet voice intoned. “Is it your time to die?”
Therfus’s mind whirled. How could he escape this? For a brief moment, his sneering contempt for those who chose the blade over the spell was shaken.
“You would kill the noble second of a high captain?” he asked, hoping his station would save him where his spells obviously could not.
The man behind him snorted.
“Do you not understand that significance?” a suddenly defiant Therfus said with strength returned to his voice. “I am a noble second!”
“As am I.”
Therfus managed to turn his gaze down to the dagger, along its silvery blade to the beautifully jeweled and distinctive hilt. Suddenly he understood.
“Beniago of Ship Kurth!” he declared. The recognition of his would-be killer brought as much relief as fear, particularly since he knew the reputation of that deadly dagger.
The knife moved away from his throat and the assassin shoved him a step forward. Therfus wheeled around. “This is no business of Closeguard Isle!”
“Obviously, we disagree.”
“You walk on dangerous ground, son of Ship Kurth.”
He meant to finish with an imposing point of his long and crooked finger, but as he reached out, the ground jolted with such force that it was all Therfus could do to hold his footing. Even Beniago, so graceful and feline in his movements, lurched forward.
Anger rose up to bury Dahlia’s fear—anger that her end would come at the hands of such peasants, anger that she couldn’t explore this relationship with a companion who, at long last, might prove worthy of her, anger that Sylora Salm would outlive her.
And anger that Kozah’s Needle, her powerful staff, had eaten the lightning serpent and was apparently multiplying its power and dumping that power back into Dahlia in a debilitating way. She wanted to throw the staff aside, but she couldn’t begin to release her grip on it.
But there was one thing she could do, she realized.
As her attackers closed in, she drove the end of Kozah’s Needle down hard upon the cobblestones and bade the staff to release its energy.
An explosion of lightning lifted her up, the ground itself rolling, turning large stones free of their settings and hurling the pirates into the air.
Drizzt yelled for Dahlia as the porch above her came tumbling down. Dahlia couldn’t turn to look. She felt the energy flowing through her, focusing through her staff, releasing into the ground. Like a great exhale, the lightning energy drained her as it departed, so fully consuming her every thought that she was hardly aware of the devastation around her.
When it had all died away, Dahlia stood calmly, a solitary figure, her eyes closed, holding Kozah’s Needle upright as it continued to throw the occasional spark.
Eventually, she was able to open her eyes. Some of the pirates crawled, others squirmed, one grasped an ankle he’d painfully turned in his fall.
None of them seemed to hold any further interest in Dahlia, unless it was in getting as far away from her as quickly as possible.
To the side lay the ruined porch, a dark form curled under a pile of splintered wood.
“By the gods,” Therfus mumbled, staring dumbfounded below.
“I offer you the chance to flee this place,” Beniago said.
“In the name of Kurth?” the wizard snapped back at him.
“In any name you please.”
“Do you know who this is?” the wizard spat.
“A mercenary of Bregan D’aerthe, I assume,” Beniago replied, and his grin showed that he was well aware that he was taunting Therfus.
“Not him, the female,” Therfus stated flatly.
“We know.”
“Then you know of Dahlia’s history with my Ship. She’s a murderess, and Borlann Rethnor her victim!”
Beniago nodded.
“She murdered my friend! My captain!” Therfus said with a growl. “You would deny me this retribution?”
Beniago brandished that terrible jeweled dagger, and given the reputation of both the blade and the assassin holding it, Therfus understood well the depth of that threat. Beniago could stab him before he could begin to defend, physically or magically, and with that blade, it would only take one wound to kill him.
Therfus glanced all around. He heard the black panther and followed the sound of the roar to the roof, where new warriors—men serving Kurth, no doubt—had taken control.
He looked back to Beniago and his knife.
“Closeguard Isle will pay for this outrage,” Therfus promised as he took several quick steps away from the assassin. “This is a grave betrayal, I warn!”
Beniago merely shrugged.
Dahlia heard Guenhwyvar land behind her as she charged to the porch rubble. She batted aside one loose board before Drizzt began to pull himself up from the wreckage.
He glanced behind her and suddenly stopped moving.
“Stand easy, Guen,” he whispered.
The panther issued a low growl in response.
Dahlia slowly turned around.
A group of men stood in front of her, all holding bows, save one who leveled a wand in Dahlia’s direction.
“Keep your cat at bay,” the warlock with the wand warned.
“Yes, do,” added a tall man in a dark cloak, walking out of the alleyway directly across from the fallen porch. “I am Beniago,” he explained with a low bow. “Your presence is requested at Ship Kurth, forthwith.”
“And I suppose I would have no choice in the matter?” Drizzt asked.
“It would seem not,” Beniago replied.
“Better than Ship Rethnor,” Dahlia said to Drizzt.
Drizzt stared at her hard, his scowl placing blame for this turn of events on Dahlia’s pretty shoulders. But his anger couldn’t withstand Beniago’s next remark.
“You’re both wanted,” he said.
Drizzt studied Beniago carefully. He’d never met this one, but the man’s easy posture warned him that he was no novice with the blade. He and Dahlia were certainly and undeniably caught.
Still, Drizzt looked for weakness, for some seam in the leather armor, for some option should the need arise.
His scan ended at the man’s belt, at the hilt of that distinctive blade. Memories of a distant past flooded Drizzt’s thoughts.
It couldn’t be the same blade, the drow told himself.
But the enemy he’d known who had carried such a dagger had likely been in Luskan, with Jarlaxle, perhaps even at the time of his death.
It was possible.
“Forthwith,” Beniago repeated, forcefully drawing Drizzt from his contemplation. The drow looked up at the tall man, almost expecting to see an old enemy standing in front of him. But this man was taller, lighter skinned, with curly red hair … and a hundred years too young!
Beniago motioned to Drizzt to follow Dahlia, who had moved several steps away. He did so, with a grin on his face.
Perhaps one of the problems of living so long a life, he mused, was the jumble of memories—too many memories!—which inevitably found their way to his consciousness at the slightest provocation. He glanced again at the dagger and laughed at himself, certain now that it was a different blade.
But only because it had to be. The world had moved on.
Chapter 5: The Monsters We Keep
HADENCOURT PAUSED OUTSIDE OF ASHENGLADE TO ADMIRE ITS construction, and though he knew it had been created magically, it still seemed impossible to him that so much had been built in so short a time. Hadencourt wasn’t quite as committed to Szass Tam, and by extension Sylora Salm, as he was to the Ashmadai zealots, but he had to give credit where credit was due.
Ashenglade was not the work of Asmodeus or any other denizen of the Nine Hells. It was the work of the Thayan Dread Ring.
As he approached the gates of the fortress, he faced a phalanx of grim-faced Ashmadai guards and a host of zombie minions, but all he had to do was flash his smile—his real smile and not the façade he wore for the peasant bandits in the north. The resistance melted away, and the gates were thrown wide.
“Dahlia and the drow were heading north, to Luskan, they said,” Hadencourt reported when he stood beside Sylora Salm on the second floor of her treelike tower.
“Greeth! Ark-lem!” Valindra shrieked from the corner.
Hadencourt stared at her incredulously.
“Ignore her,” Sylora told him.
That was no easy thing to do, though, and Hadencourt’s gaze lingered over the lich for some time. Valindra stared back at him with a crooked grin.
“The farther they go from here, the better, though I’d love to burn Dahlia to ashes,” Sylora Salm replied to the original point.
Valindra’s expression disappeared and she cocked her head as she studied Hadencourt. She’d noted the great deference in Sylora’s tone, Hadencourt realized, and that, he deduced, was something rarely heard.
“You may get your opportunity,” he replied, turning back to the sorceress. “Dahlia made a point to mention Neverwinter Wood as her intended destination, though her immediate road headed the opposite way. She said there was adventure to be found here. I assume she was referring to you.”
“And her companion?”
“Tried to deflect her from revealing their future path.”
“He was wary of you?” Sylora asked suspiciously, and she turned around to view the hollowed tree trunk she’d excavated and hauled into the back of the chamber. Years before, Sylora had created of the trunk a scrying pool.
Hadencourt shook his head doubtfully. “He was more reserved than she, I would expect. But then, who isn’t?”
Sylora turned back to regard Hadencourt directly, her look as suspicious as her previous question. Hadencourt was a newcomer to Neverwinter Wood, one of the more recent Ashmadai reinforcements. He wouldn’t have known Dahlia from his time there, as she was long gone by the time he’d arrived—that was why Sylora had chosen him to serve as a scout on the northern road.
