The female patted her blocking male on the shoulder and her fingers motioned for him to go.
Am I to be off this miserable duty? he responded silently with his hands, a hopeful expression on his face.
'The bol will take your place this day,' the female purred, labeling Drizzt with the drow word that described something mysterious or intriguing.
The male smiled widely and moved to put his hand-crossbow away. Noticing that it was cocked and ready, and looking up to take note that a whole herd of goblins stood nearby, he widened his smile instead and lifted the weapon to fire.
Drizzt offered no reaction, though it pained him to see even goblins treated so miserably.
'No,' the female said, putting her hand over the male's wrist. She reached up and removed the dart from the hand-crossbow, then replaced it with another. 'Yours would put the creature to sleep,' she explained, and she cackled in laughter.
The male considered her for just a moment, then apparently caught on. He took aim at a goblin loitering near the water's edge and fired. The goblin jerked as the small dart jabbed into its back. It started to turn about, but toppled instead, into the pool.
Drizzt gnawed at his lips, understanding, by the goblin's futile flopping, that the dart the female had supplied was coated with a paralyzing potion, one that left the doomed creature fully conscious. The goblin had little control of its limbs and would surely drown, and, worse, it would know its cruel fate. It managed to arch its back enough so that its face came above the water level, but Drizzt knew that it would tire long before the wicked potion expired.
The male laughed heartily, replaced the hand-crossbow in its small holster, which lay diagonally across his lower chest, and walked off down the tunnel to Drizzt's left. Before he had gone even a dozen steps, the female began cracking her whip and called for the few drow guards to get the caravan moving, down the runnel to the right.
After a moment, she turned a cold glare on Drizzt.
'Why are you standing there?' she demanded.
Drizzt pointed to the goblin in the pool, floundering badly now, barely able to keep its mouth out of the water. He managed a laugh, as if he was enjoying the macabre spectacle, but he seriously considered rushing over and cutting the evil female down at that moment.
All the way out of the small cavern, Drizzt looked for opportunities to get over to the goblin, to pull the creature out of the water so that it would have a chance to get away. The female drow never stopped eyeing him, though, not for an instant, and Drizzt understood that she had more on her mind than simply including him in the slave caravan. After all, why hadn't she taken the break when the new slaver unexpectedly arrived?
The dying goblin's last splashes followed Drizzt out of that place. The renegade drow swallowed hard and fought away his revulsion. No matter how many times he witnessed it, he would never get used to the brutality of his kin.
Chapter 15 MASKS
Catti-brie had never seen such creatures. They somewhat resembled gnomes, at least in stature, being about three feet tall, but they had no hair on their lumpy, ruddy heads, and their skin, in the starlight afforded her by the magical circlet, showed grayish. They were quite stout, nearly as muscular as dwarves, and judging from the fine tools they carried and the well-fitting metal armor they wore, they were, like dwarves, adept at mining and crafting.
Drizzt had told Catti-brie of the svirfnebli, the deep gnomes, and that is what she presumed she was looking upon. She couldn't be sure, though, and was afraid that this might be some offshoot of the evil duergar, gray dwarves.
She crouched amid a cluster of tall, thin stalagmites in an area of many crisscrossing corridors. The deep gnomes, if that's what they were, had come down the opposite way, and were now milling about one wide, flat section of corridor, talking among themselves and paying little heed of the stalagmite cluster twenty feet away.
Catti-brie was not sure of how she should proceed. If these were svirfnebli, and she was fairly sure of that, they could prove to be valuable allies, but how might she approach them? They certainly did not speak the same language and probably were as unfamiliar with humans as she was with them.
She decided that her best course would be simply to sit tight and let the creatures pass. Catti-brie had never experienced the strangeness of infravision, though, and she did not hilly appreciate that, sitting among the cool stalagmites, her body temperature fully thirty degrees warmer than the stone, she was practically glowing to the svirfnebli's heat-seeing eyes.
Even as the young woman crouched and waited, deep gnomes fanned out in the tunnels around her, trying to discern if this drow (for Catti-brie still wore the magical mask) was alone or part of a larger band. A few minutes slipped by; Catti-brie looked down to her hand, thinking that she felt something in the stone, a slight vibration, perhaps. The young woman continued to stare at her tingling hand curiously. She did not know that deep gnomes communicated in a method that was part telepathy and part psychokinesis, sending their thought patterns to each other through the stone, and that a sensitive hand could sense the vibrations.
She did not know that the minute tingling was the confirmation from the deep gnome scouts that this drow crouching in the stalagmite cluster was indeed alone.
One of the svirfnebli ahead suddenly burst into motion, chanting a few words that Catti-brie did not understand and hurling a rock her way. She dipped lower behind the stones for cover and tried to decide whether to call out a surrender or take out her bow and try to frighten the creatures away.
The stone bounced harmlessly short and shattered, its flecks spreading in a small area before the stalagmite cluster. Those flecks began to smoke and sizzle, and the ground began to tremble.
Before Catti-brie knew what was happening, the stones before her rose up like a gigantic bubble, then took on the shape of a giant fifteen-foot-tall humanoid, its girth practically filling the corridor. The creature had huge, rocky arms that could smash a building to pieces. Two of the front stalagmites had been caught up in the monstrous formation and now served as dangerous spikes protruding from the front of the monster's massive chest.
Down the passage, the deep gnomes let out battle cries—calls that echoed in corridors all about the frightened woman.
Catti-brie scrambled backward as a gigantic hand swooped in and took the top from one stalagmite. She dropped the onyx figuring and called frantically for Guenhwyvar, all the while fitting an arrow to her bowstring.
The earth elemental shifted forward, its bulky legs melding with, slipping right through, the stony stalagmites in its way. It moved again to grab the woman, but a silver-streaking arrow ripped through its rock face, blowing a clean crevice between the monster's eyes.
The elemental straightened and reeled, then used its hands to push its halved head back into one piece. It looked back to the cluster and saw not the female drow, but a huge cat, tamping down its hind legs.
Catti-brie came out the back of the cluster, thinking to flee, but found deep gnomes coming down every side passage. She ran along the main corridor, cutting from mound to mound for cover, not daring to glance back at Guenhwy-var and the elemental. Then something hard banged against her shin, tripping her, and she sprawled headlong. She squirmed about to see another of the svirfnebli rising from behind one mound, a pickaxe still angled out as it had been placed to trip her.
Catti-brie pulled her bow around and shifted into a sitting position, but the weapon was batted away. She instinctively rolled to the side, but heard shuffling feet as three gnomes kept pace with her, heavy mauls lifted high to squash her.
Guenhwyvar snarled and soared, thinking to fly right past the behemoth and turn it about. The elemental was faster than the panther suspected, though, and a great rocky hand shot out, catching the cat in midflight and pulling it to its massive chest. Guenhwyvar shrieked as a stalagmite spike dug into a shoulder, and the deep gnomes, running up beside their champion, shrieked as well, in glee that the drow and her unexpected ally were
