held on, calling upon every bit of Kozah’s Needle’s lightning magic, jolting and burning the beast inside and out.
Finally it lay still.
In the distance, she heard the cry of a great cat, Drizzt’s panther, pitiful and agonized. Dahlia ran toward her.
Guenhwyvar’s wail pierced Drizzt’s heart as surely as the flash of barbed quills pierced his skin. He managed to get his cloak around in time to block some, but this was not a magical garment like his old piwafwi, and as thick as the cloth was, it proved little defense against the insidious spines.
How they burned, the fiendish poison lighting a thousand little fires within!
Drizzt grimaced and stumbled aside, diving behind a tree just as another volley chased after him. He tried to focus, knew he had to focus.
Guenhwyvar cried out again in pain.
The drow dismissed his own discomfort. He charged back out from behind the tree, Taulmaril in hand, and let fly arrow after arrow into the boughs. Leaves flew, wood splintered and cracked, and the whole of that tree shook under the weight of the enchanted missile barrage. As he cleared a patch of the foliage, Drizzt caught quick sight of the devil, scrambling nimbly along a branch.
He couldn’t react quickly enough to get a clear shot, so he took the next best course and aimed his missile at the branch itself. The sizzling bolt blasted in, showering white-blue sparks every which way and splintering the branch.
Out of the corner of his eye, the drow caught another flicker of motion, and he dived aside just in time to avoid the rain of quills from a second devil.
He shouldered Taulmaril and sprinted for the tree, leaped up, and grabbed the lowest branch. He rolled right over that one, coming to his feet and springing up yet again to the next branch in line. He spotted the spined devil and ducked behind the trunk, going for Taulmaril.
A large form passed right by him, nearly dislodging him, and he almost lashed out in surprise before he recognized his treasured companion.
“Guen!” he called after the running cat, and surely Drizzt’s heart sank at the sight. For Guenhwyvar’s flank was stuck full of diabolical quills, and when she turned to angle after the spined devil in this same tree, Drizzt saw more of the barbed and painful darts pinned around her face, including several caught around her mouth, and one that had sunk deeply into her eye.
Drizzt tried to align himself for a shot-he didn’t want the panther fighting another of these porcupine-like devils. But he was too late, and by the time he held forth Taulmaril, Guenhwyvar had made the leap, recklessly burying the devil under her great girth and weight. The branch bent and broke under that momentum, and down went the devil and the panther, tumbling to the ground. But Guenhwvyar, loyal Guenhwyvar, never let go, accepting the vicious sting of so many more quills while finally getting her powerful jaws around the devil’s small head.
The devil thrashed beneath the cat. Another volley of quills sailed forth from the other tree, where the second fiend lurked, and Drizzt winced and gritted his teeth at the sight of Guenhwyvar’s beautiful black coat being so violated.
The panther merely roared and bit down, and the devil’s skull collapsed beneath the weight of that crushing jaw, and the wretched creature suddenly lay very still.
“Guen, be gone!” Drizzt commanded as he began to fire his missiles at the second tree. He felt the panther’s resistance, and despite her pain, Guenhwyvar didn’t want to leave him. But he yelled again, compelling the cat, and he nodded grimly as the corporeal form became an insubstantial gray mist below him. A hundred quills or more dropped to the ground, or atop the lifeless body of the spined devil, as the panther dematerialized.
That sight, all of those spines that had so pained poor Guenhwyvar, enraged Drizzt even more and he let fly more and more arrows, blowing apart branches in the other tree and clearing great swaths of leaves with every shot. A volley of quills came forth in response, but Drizzt avoided the surprisingly accurate missiles by simply dropping from his perch, landing on the ground softly and hardly slowing his withering fire.
He soon had the devil pinned behind the tree trunk, ducking for cover that the mighty bow, Taulmaril the Heartseeker, would not afford it. As he walked past the devil Guenhwyvar had killed, it occurred to him that he’d rarely seen Guenhwyvar so resist his command that she return to her Astral home.
He let fly another arrow, this one blowing right through the trunk and stabbing at the spined devil behind it. Now the beast came forth in a charge, its quills glowing a fierce red in its agony and outrage. It ran along the branch leading nearest to Drizzt, who calmly kept approaching, and leaped out at him.
He took the creature out of mid-air with his next explosive missile, reversing its flight and throwing it to the ground. A second arrow drove hard against the resilient fiend as it tried to stand, though still it managed to get upright.
Drizzt’s expression didn’t change, his movements remaining slow and deliberate as he stalked his prey. He drew back again on Taulmaril, trying to dismiss a nagging discomfort: why had Guenhwyvar resisted his demand that she return home?
Surely this devil, as vicious and cunning as it was, would prove no match for him.
The spined beast howled at him. He put his arrow right into its open mouth.
But then Drizzt understood Guenhwyvar’s reaction. Suddenly, and on instinct, he whirled around and dropped his hands down low on the bow, swinging it around like a club just in time to ward the legion devil rushing in at his back.
Even with his maneuver, though, the drow was at a disadvantage, for the agile devil easily dodged, throwing shield and sword out wide to either side, but then coming right back after the drow.
Drizzt dropped Taulmaril and retreated as fast as he could, desperately reaching for his scimitars as he came up hard against a tree. He saw the devil’s sword rushing quicker, though, and knew he was going to get stabbed, and only hoped that he could bring his blades around enough to minimize the blow.
Time seemed to slow as the sword thrust forward at him, inside his reach as Twinkle and Icingdeath slid free of their scabbards. Drizzt drew in his breath, trying to make himself smaller, trying futilely to keep himself moving ahead of that wicked blade.
He hardly registered the movement as a metal pole came down hard atop that sword, as a second metal pole, joined by a fine but strong line, wrapped down and under the sword, and as a third part of that staff, similarly fastened to the end of the mid-piece, wrapped up and over to smack the surprised devil across the face.
With the tri-staff wrapped around the sword, Dahlia yanked hard, turning the thrust and bringing the devil’s arm out wide. The beast responded with a roar and accepted the turn, twisting its shield horizontally and trying to jam its edge sidelong into Drizzt’s face.
Too late.
The drow dropped low, under the second attack, and both his blades thrust forth in front of him, double- stabbing the legion devil in the chest.
The devil tried to back off those scimitars, but Drizzt dug in his heels and pressed forward, holding faith that Dahlia would keep the sword trapped out wide.
She did, running beside, pacing the drow and his victim for several long strides until at last the devil slammed its back into a tree and Drizzt drove his blades right through the beast. They held that pose for a long while, the devil with its arms out wide, twitching as it tried desperately to hold onto the last moments of its life on the Prime Material Plane.
Then its shield slumped to its side, and Dahlia yanked the sword free of its weakened grasp.
Drizzt held the scimitars in deeply for several more heartbeats, then, with a sudden and fierce growl, he shifted the angle and dragged the dying beast out from the tree, turning as he went to throw the devil aside, and twisting his scimitars to rip open more flesh.
The drow stood tall as the devil spilled face-down into the dirt.
“You didn’t think I would desert you, did you?” Dahlia asked innocently.
Drizzt looked at her, but no smile came to him, and Dahlia’s confused responding expression lasted only the moment it took her to notice his right arm, stuck full of quills and swelling from the poison.
“Where is your cat?” Dahlia asked, coming to his side, for it became obvious that only his adrenalin in the rush of battle had kept the drow upright this long. She steadied him as he swayed.
“Gone,” Drizzt answered in a whisper, and he closed his eyes and fought back against the waves of
