Thayans. Those were not the actions of a contented man.”
“I was a slave,” Entreri replied. “Can you blame me?”
Dahlia tried to argue, but again fell short.
“How did you get past it?” Dahlia asked quietly many heartbeats later. “The anger, the betrayal? How did you find your calm?”
“I helped you kill Herzgo Alegni.”
“Not that betrayal,” Dahlia said bluntly.
Entreri rocked back against the wall. He glanced around, this way and that, and for many heartbeats seemed truly at a loss.
“By caring not a damn,” Entreri replied at length.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Believe it.”
“No,” she said quietly, staring at Entreri until he at last had to return the look.
“It was my uncle,” he admitted for the first time in his life, “and my mother.”
Dahlia’s expression revealed her confusion.
“He… he stole from me, and she sold me into slavery-to others who wished to… steal from me,” Entreri explained.
“Your mother?” Dahlia clearly seemed at a loss.
“You loved your mother, as I, once, loved mine,” Entreri reasoned.
“She was murdered, beheaded by Herzgo Alegni after…” Her voice trailed away and her gaze fell to the floor between her boots.
“After he stole from you,” Entreri said, and Dahlia looked at him sharply.
“You know nothing about it!”
“But you know that I do,” Entreri replied. “And you are the first person to whom I’ve ever admitted any of this.”
Her expression softened at that revelation.
Entreri laughed. “Perhaps I have to kill you now, to keep my secret.”
“Try it,” Dahlia replied, bringing a wider smile to Entreri’s face, for he knew by her tone that his trust in her had lifted a great weight from her shoulders. “I have enough anger left in me to defeat the likes of you.”
Artemis Entreri rolled up to his knees, to the side, so that his face was very near the woman. “Well, do it quickly,” he said, and pointed back down the tunnel Dahlia had climbed to get into this hide-out. “For that way lies Gauntlgrym, not so far, and there resides the beast of fire and the end of Charon’s Claw, and the end of Artemis Entreri.”
Dahlia slapped him across the face, surprising them both.
Entreri laughed at her, so she slapped him again, or tried to, but he caught her by the wrist and held her off.
They stared at each other, their faces barely a finger’s breadth apart. Entreri nodded and managed a smile, while Dahlia shook her head, her eyes moistening.
“It is time,” Entreri said to her. “Trust me in this. It is long past time.”
A thousand questions chased Drizzt Do’Urden back along the corridors, paramount among them the continuing lack of purpose for his present course. Why was he even there?
He had no answers, though, and so he kept pushing the doubts aside, and took care not to revel too deeply in the continuing stream of images of Artemis Entreri dead at his feet, pleasant as they were.
While these surroundings weren’t fresh in his thoughts, they were familiar, and they brought him back to his previous journey here, the good parts. He remembered Bruenor’s face when first they had glanced upon the entrance of Gauntlgrym, the high stone wall, like that of a castle, except that it was tightly encased within a subterranean cavern.
He thought of the throne, just within the great entry hall, and again recalled Bruenor’s beaming face.
“I found it, elf,” Drizzt whispered in the dark corridor, just to hear the sound of those words once more, for they, more than anything Drizzt had ever heard, sounded like sweet victory.
His mood brightened as he moved farther from his encamped companions. How could it not, with the ghost, the memory, of Bruenor Battlehammer so near?
“Is your heart heavy, Drizzt Do’Urden?” an unexpected, unfamiliar voice, a woman’s voice, asked of him from the darkness.
Drizzt immediately fell into a crouch, moving closer to one corridor wall for the cover it provided. He glanced all around, his hands near to his scimitars, which he did not dare draw for fear that Twinkle’s light would more fully expose him.
“I knew I would find you alone,” the woman continued, her accent strong, biting off her consonants so abruptly that it jarred the drow. He did not know her. He did not even know of her possible origins. “It is not hard to find Drizzt Do’Urden alone in these times, is it?”
Thinking he had located the source, the direction at least, Drizzt edged out a bit, putting himself in line for a charge if necessary.
“Be at ease,” the woman said, as if reading his mind. The voice came from a completely different area of the darkened corridor than the previous remarks, and there was no way anyone could have moved between those particular points without him hearing or seeing it.
Perhaps it was a matter of cloaking spells, like invisibility, but more likely, she was utilizing magical ventriloquism.
A sorceress, then, Drizzt thought, and he knew that he needed to be doubly careful.
“I have not come to do battle,” she explained. “Nor to harm you in any way.”
“Who are you, then? Thayan or Shadovar?”
Her laughter started behind him, but quickly came from the original spot, before him. “Need it be one or the other?”
“Those seem to be the people most interested in me of late,” he said.
She laughed again. “I am from the Shadowfell,” she admitted. “Sent by one who is not your enemy, though you have something he wants.”
Drizzt straightened. Given Arunika’s warning, he knew where this was leading. “The sword,” he stated.
“It is a Netherese blade.”
“A vile one.”
“That is not my judgment to offer. We would like it back.”
“You cannot have it.”
“Are you sure?”
The question struck him curiously and put him a bit off balance.
“Does it mean so much to you?” the woman asked, and she was behind him again, and given his last response, he was fast to turn and set himself defensively. Could she move quickly enough to steal Charon’s Claw from its scabbard on his back? “Do you have such loyalty to the man you call Artemis Entreri?”
“Do you ask me to return a sword, or a slave?” Drizzt retorted.
“Does it matter?”
“Of course.”
“This is your friend, then, this Artemis Entreri?” the woman asked, and her voice came from an entirely different place then, farther along the corridor back the other way. “A loyal companion, like a brother to you?”
Her tone, even more than her curious words, made it clear that she was mocking him, or at least mocking the notion that he and Artemis Entreri might be the best of friends.
“Would he have to be any such thing for me to know what is right and what is wrong?” Drizzt countered, fighting hard to suppress his antagonism toward Entreri.
“Right and wrong?” she asked, her voice going from behind him to back in front of him between the words. “Black and white? Are you so simplistic as to believe that there is only one answer to such a question?”
“Which question?” Drizzt shot back. “That seems to be all you offer: questions.”
“Nay, my friend,” she replied immediately. “Had I nothing to offer, I would not be here.” As she finished, she came out of the shadows-or simply materialized in the corridor, Drizzt could not be sure-and slowly approached
