The sword's red line flared again in intensity and reflected in Dantrag's amber eyes. Kill Uthegental, and her task will become easier, Khazid'hea reasoned.
Dantrag laughed aloud at the notion, and Khazid'hea's fiendish eyes flared again. 'Kill him?' Dantrag echoed. 'Kill one that Matron Baenre has deemed important for the mission ahead? She would flay the skin from my bones!'
But you could kill him?
Dantrag laughed again, for the question was simply to mock him, to urge him on to the fight that Khazid'hea had desired for so very long. The sword was proud, at least as proud as either Dantrag or Uthegental, and it wanted desperately to be in the hands of the indisputably finest weapon master of Menzoberranzan, whichever of the two that might be.
'You must pray that I could,' Dantrag replied, turning the tables on the impetuous sword. 'Uthegental favors his trident, and no sword. If he proved the victor, then Khazid'hea might end up in the scabbard of a lesser fighter.'
He would wield me.
Dantrag slid the sword away, thinking the preposterous claim not even worth answering. Also tired of this useless banter, Khazid'hea went silent, brooding.
The sword had opened some concerns for Dantrag. He knew the importance of this upcoming assault. If he could strike down the young Do'Urden, then all glory would be his, but if Uthegental got there first, then Dantrag would be considered second best in the city, a rank he could never shake unless he found and killed Uthegental. His mother would not be pleased by such events, Dantrag knew. Dantrag's life had been miserable when Zak'nafein Do'Urden had been alive, with Matron Baenre constantly urging him to find and slay the legendary weapon master.
This time, Matron Baenre probably wouldn't even allow him that option. With Berg'inyon coming into excellence as a fighter, Matron Baenre might simply sacrifice Dantrag and turn the coveted position of weapon master over to her younger son. If she could claim that the move was made because Berg'inyon was the better fighter, that would again spread doubt among the populace as to which house had the finest weapon master.
Chapter 8 OUT OF PLACE
He moved without a whisper along the lightless tunnels, his eyes glowing lavender, seeking changes in the heat patterns along the floor and walls that would indicate bends, or enemies, in the runnel. He seemed at home, a creature of the Underdark, moving with typically quiet grace and cautious posture.
Drizzt did not feel at home, though. Already he was deeper than the lowest tunnels of Mithril Hall, and the stagnant air pressed in on him. He had spent nearly two decades on the surface, learning and living by the rules that governed the outer world. Those rules were as different to Underdark precepts as a forest wildflower was to a deep cavern fungus. A human, a goblin, even an alert surface elf, would have taken no note of Drizzt's silent passage, though he might cross just a few feet away, but Drizzt felt clumsy and loud.
The drow ranger cringed with every step, fearing that echoes were resounding along the blank stone walls hundreds of yards away. This was the Underdark, a place negotiated less by sight than by hearing and the sense of smell.
Drizzt had spent nearly two-thirds of his life in the Underdark, and a good portion of the last twenty years underground in the caverns of Clan Battlehammer. He no longer considered himself a creature of the Underdark, though. He had left his heart behind on a mountainside, watching the stars and the moon, the sunrise and the sunset.
This was the land of starless nights—no, not nights, just a single, unending starless night, Drizzt decided—of stagnant air, and leering stalactites.
The tunnel's width varied greatly, sometimes as narrow as the breadth of Drizzt's shoulders, sometimes wide enough for a dozen men to walk abreast. The floor sloped slightly, taking Drizzt even deeper, but the ceiling paralleled it well, remaining fairly consistent at about twice the height of the five-and-a-half-foot drow. For a long time, Drizzt detected no side caverns or corridors, and he was glad of that, for he didn't want to be forced into any direction decisions yet, and in this simple setup, any potential enemies would have to come at him from straight ahead.
Drizzt honestly believed that he was not prepared for any surprises, not yet. Even his infravision pained him. His head throbbed as he tried to sort out and interpret the varying heat patterns. In his younger years, Drizzt had gone for weeks, even months, with his eyes tuned exclusively to the infrared spectrum, looking for heat instead of reflected light. But now, with his eyes so used to the sun above and the torches lining the corridors of Mithril Hall, he found the infravision jarring.
Finally, he drew out Twinkle, and the enchanted scimitar glowed with a soft bluish light. Drizzt rested back against the wall and let his eyes revert to the regular spectrum, then used the sword as a guiding light. Soon after, he came to a six-way intersection, two crossing horizontal corridors intersected by a vertical shaft.
Drizzt tucked Twinkle away and looked above, up the shaft. He saw no heat sources, but was little comforted. Many of the Underdark's predators could mask their body temperatures, like a surface tiger used its stripes to crawl through thick strands of high grass. Dreaded hook horrors, for example, had developed an exoskeleton; the bony plates shielded the creature's body heat so that they appeared as unremarkable rocks to heat-sensing eyes. And many of the Underdark's monsters were reptilian, cold-blooded, and hard to see.
Drizzt sniffed the stagnant air several times, then he stood still and closed his eyes, letting his ears provide all the external input. He heard nothing, save the beating of his own heart, so he checked his gear to ensure that all was secure and started to climb down the shaft, taking care amid the dangerously loose rubble.
He nearly made it silently down the sixty feet to the lower corridor, but a single stone skidded down before him, striking the corridor's floor with a sharp crack at almost the same instant that Drizzt's soft boots quietly came down from the wall.
Drizzt froze in place, listening to the sound as it echoed from wall to wall. As a drow patrol leader, Drizzt had once been able to follow echoes perfectly, almost instinctively discerning which wails were rebounding the sound, and from which direction. Now, though, he had difficulty sorting through the echo's individual sounds. Again he felt out of place, overmatched by the brooding darkness. And again he felt vulnerable, for many denizens of the dark ways could indeed follow an echo trail, and this particular one led directly to Drizzt.
He swiftly traversed a virtual maze of crisscrossing corridors, some veering sharply and descending to pass beneath others, or climbing along natural stairs to new levels of winding ways.
Drizzt sorely missed Guenhwyvar. The panther could sort through any maze.
He thought of the cat again a short time later, when he came around a bend and stumbled upon a fresh kill. It was some type of subterranean lizard, too mutilated for Drizzt to figure out exactly what. Its tail was gone, as was its lower jaw, and its belly had been gashed open, its innards devoured— Drizzt found long tears in the skin, as though it had been raked by claws, and long and thin bruises, like those made by a whip. Beyond a pool of blood a few feet from the corpse, the drow found a single track, a paw print, in a shape and size very similar to one Guenhwyvar might make.
But Drizzt's cat was hundreds of miles away, and this kill, by the ranger's estimation, was barely an hour old. Creatures of the Underdark did not roam as did creatures of the surface; the dangerous predator was likely not far away.
Bruenor Battlehammer stormed along the passageway, his grief stolen, for the moment, by undeniably mounting rage. Thibbledorf Pwent bounced along beside the king, his mouth flapping one question after another and his armor squealing annoyingly with every movement.
Bruenor skidded to a stop and turned on the battlerager, put his angry scar and angry scowl in line with Pwent's bushy-bearded face. 'Why don't ye get yerself a bath!' Bruenor roared.
Pwent fell back and began to choke on the command. By his estimation, a dwarf king ordering a subject to go take a bath was roughly the equivalent of a human king telling his knights to go out and kill babies. There were some lines that a ruler simply did not cross.
'Bah!' Bruenor snorted. 'Good enough for ye, then. But go and grease that damned armor! How's a king to
