Catti-brie fell back, taking the bloodied dagger with her. She worked hard to draw breath, gasping in disbelief and eyeing the blade with sheer revulsion.
A roar from Guenhwyvar reminded her that the battle was not ended. She replaced the dagger on her belt and turned, thinking that she had to find her bow. She had gone two running steps before she even realized that her leg was easily supporting her now.
From somewhere in the shadows, a goblin heaved a spear, which skipped off the stone just behind the running woman and stole her train of thought. Catti-brie skidded down in the mud and scooped up her bow as she slid past. She looked down to her quiver, saw its powerful magic already at work replacing the spent arrows.
She saw, too, that no more blood was coming from her wound. Gingerly, the young woman ran a hand over it, felt a thick scab already in place. She shook her head in disbelief, took up her bow, and began firing.
Only one more goblin got dose to Catti-brie. It sneaked around the back side of the thick mound. The young woman started to drop her bow and draw out her weapons for melee, but she stopped (and so did the goblin!) when a great panther's paw slapped down atop the creature's head and long daws dug into the goblin's sloping forehead.
Guenhwyvar snapped the creature backward with sudden, savage force such that one of the monster's shoddy boots remained where it had been standing. Catti-brie looked away, back to the area behind them, as Guenhwyvar's powerful maw closed over the stunned goblin's throat and began to squeeze.
Catti-brie saw no targets, but let fly another arrow to brighten the end of the corridor. Half a dozen goblins were in full flight, and Catti-brie sent a shower of arrows trailing them, chasing them, and cutting them down.
She was still firing a minute later—her enchanted quiver would never run short of arrows—when Guenhwyvar padded over to her and bumped against her, demanding a pat. Catti-brie sighed deeply and dropped a hand to the caf s muscled flank, her eyes falling to the jeweled dagger, sitting impassively on her belt.
She had seen Entreri wield that dagger, had once had its blade against her own throat. The young woman shuddered as she recalled that awful moment, more awful now that she understood the cruel weapon's properties.
Guenhwyvar growled and pushed against her, prodding her to motion. Catti-brie understood the panther's urgency; according to Drizzt's tales, goblins rarely traveled in the Underdark in secluded bands. If there were twenty here, there were likely two hundred somewhere nearby.
Catti-brie looked to the tunnel behind them, the tunnel from which she had come and down which the goblins had fled. She considered, briefly, going that way, fighting through the fleeing few and running back to the surface world, where she belonged.
It was a fleeting thought for her, an excusable instant of weakness. She knew that she must go on, but how? Catti-brie looked down to her belt once more and smiled as she untied the magical mask. She lifted it before her face, unsure of how it even worked.
With a shrug to Guenhwyvar, the young woman pressed the mask against her face.
Nothing happened.
Holding it tight, she thought of Drizzt, imagined herself with ebony skin and the fine chiseled features of a drow.
Biting tingles of magic nipped at her every pore. In a moment, she moved her hand away from her face, the mask holding fast of its own accord. Catti-brie blinked many times, for in the magical starlight afforded her by the Caf s Eye, she saw her receding hand shining perfectly black, her fingers more slender and delicate than she remembered them.
How easy it had been!
Catti-brie wished that she had a mirror so that she could check the disguise, though she felt in her heart that it was true. She considered how perfectly Entreri had mimicked Regis when he had come back to Mithril Hall, right down to the halfling's equipment. With that thought, the young woman looked to her own rather drab garb. She considered Drizzt's tales of his homeland, of the fabulous and evil high priestesses of Lloth.
Catti-brie's worn traveling cloak had become a rich robe, shimmering purple and black. Her boots had blackened, their tips curling up delicately. Her weapons remained the same, though, and it seemed to Catti-brie, in this attire, that Entreri's jeweled dagger was the most fitting.
Again the young woman focused her thoughts on that wicked blade. A part of her wanted to drop it in the mud, to bury it where no one could ever find it. She even went so far as to close her fingers over its hilt.
But she released the dagger immediately, strengthened her resolve, and smoothed her drowlike robes. The blade had helped her; without it she would be crippled and lost, if not dead. It was a weapon, like her bow, and, though its brutal tactics assaulted her sensibilities, Catti-brie came, in that moment, to accept them. She carried the dagger more easily as the days turned into a week, and then two.
Part 3 SHADOWS
There are no shadows in the Underdark.
Only after years on the surface have I come to understand the significance of that seemingly minute fact, the significance of the contrast between lightness and darkness. There are no shadows in the Underdark, no areas of mystery where only the imagination can go. What a marvelous thing is a shadow! I have seen my own silhouette walk under me as the sun rode high; I have seen a gopher grow to the size of a large bear, the light low behind him, spreading his ominous silhouette far across the ground. I have walked through the woods at twilight, my gaze alternating between the lighter areas catching the last rays of day, leafy green slipping to gray, and those darkening patches, those areas where only my mind's eye could go. Might a monster be there? An ore or a goblin? Or might a hidden treasure, as magnificent as a lost, enchanted sword or as simple as a fox's den, lay within the sheltering gloom?
When I walk the woods at twilight, my imagination walks beside me, heightens my senses, opens my mind to any possibilities. But there are no shadows in the Underdark, and there is no room for fanciful imagining. All, everywhere, is gripped in a brooding, continual, predatory hush and a very real, ever present danger.
To imagine a crouched enemy, or a hidden treasure, is an exercise in enjoyment, a conjured state of alertness, of aliveness. But when that enemy is too often real and not imagined, when every jag in the stone, every potential hiding place, becomes a source of tension, then the game is not so much fun.
One cannot walk the corridors of the Underdark with his imagination beside him. To imagine an enemy behind one stone might uxll blind a person to the very real enemy behind another. To slip into a daydream is to lose that edge of readiness, and in the Underdark, to be unwary is to die.
This proved the most difficult transition for me when I went back into those lightless corridors. I had to again become the primal hunter, had to survive, every moment, on that instinctual edge, a state of nervous energy that kept my muscles always taut, always ready to spring. Every step of the way, the present was all that mattered, the search for potential hiding places of potential enemies. I could not afford to imagine those enemies. I had to wait for them and watch for them, react to any movements.
There are no shadows in the Underdark. There is no room for imagination in the Underdark. It is a place for alertness, but not aliveness, a place with no room for hopes and dreams.
Chapter 13 HUNGRY GODDESS
Councilor Firble of Blingdenstone normally enjoyed his journeys out of the deep gnome city, but not this day. The little gnome stood in a small chamber, but its dimensions seemed huge to him, for he felt quite vulnerable. He kicked his hard boots about the rocks on the otherwise smooth floor, twiddled his stubby fingers behind his back, and every so often ran a hand over his almost-bald head, wiping away lines of sweat.
A dozen tunnels ran into this chamber, and Firble took some comfort in the knowledge that two score
