Drizzt pulled his gaze from Druzil to regard Cadderly, the old priest standing perfectly calm and collected.
'I pity any who so invokes the rage of a balor,' Druzil went on, giving a wicked little laugh.
Cadderly saw that the imp's attitude was difficult for Drizzt, who was under such intense stress from this all. 'The balor's name!' the priest demanded.
'Errtu!' Druzil barked. 'Mark it well, Drizzt Do'Urden!'
Fires simmered behind Drizzt's lavender eyes, and Druzil could not bear their scrutiny.
The imp snapped his evil gaze over Cadderly instead. 'A year of peace, you promised,' he rasped.
'Years are measured in different ways,' Cadderly growled back at him.
'What treachery-' Druzil started to say, but Cadderly slapped his hands together, uttering a single word, and two black lines, rifts in the fabric of the planes, appeared, one on either side of the imp, and came together as forcefully as Cadderly's hands
came together. With a boom of thunder and a waft of smoke, Druzil was gone.
Cadderly immediately brightened the light in the room, and remained quiet for some time, regarding Drizzt, who stood with his head bowed, digesting the confirmation.
'You should utterly destroy that one,' the drow said at length.
Cadderly smiled widely. 'Not so easy a task,' he admitted. 'Druzil is a manifestation of evil, a type more than an actual being. I could tear apart his corporeal body, but that merely sends him back to the Abyss. Only there, in his smoking home, could I truly destroy Druzil, and I have little desire to visit the Abyss!' Cadderly shrugged, as if it really mattered very little. 'Druzil is harmless enough,' the priest explained, 'because I know him, know of him, know where to find him, and know how to make his miserable life more miserable still if the need arises.'
'And now we know that it is truly Errtu,' Drizzt said.
'A balor,' Cadderly replied. 'A mighty foe.'
'A foe in the Abyss,' said Drizzt. 'A place where I also have no desire to ever go.'
'We still need answers,' Cadderly reminded. 'Answers that Druzil would not be able to provide.'
'Who, then?'
'You know,' Cadderly answered quietly.
Drizzt did know, but the thought of summoning in the fiend Errtu was not a pleasant one to Drizzt.
'The circle will hold the balor,' Cadderly assured him. 'You do not have to be here when I call to Errtu.'
Drizzt waved that notion away before Cadderly ever finished the sentence. He would be there to face the one who hated him most, and who apparently held captive a friend.
Drizzt gave a deep sigh. 'I believe that the prisoner the hag spoke of is Zaknafein, my father,' he confided to the priest, for he found that he truly trusted Cadderly. 'I am not yet certain of how I feel about that.'
'Surely it torments you to think your father in such foul hands,' Cadderly replied. 'And surely it thrills you to think that you might meet with Zaknafein once more.'
Drizzt nodded. 'It is more than that,' he said.
'Are you ambivalent?' Cadderly asked, and Drizzt, caught off his guard by the direct question, cocked his head and studied the
old priest. 'Did you close that part of your life, Drizzt Do'Urden? And now are you afraid because it might again be opened?'
Drizzt shook his head without hesitation, but it was an unconvincing movement. He paused a long while, then sighed deeply. 'I am disappointed,' the drow admitted. 'In myself, for my selfishness. I want to see Zaknafein again, to stand beside him and learn from him and listen to his words.' Drizzt looked up at Cadderly, his expression truly serene. 'But I remember the last time I saw him,' he said, and he told Cadderly then of that final meeting.
Zaknafein's corpse had been animated by Matron Malice, Drizzt's mother, and then imbued with the dead drow's spirit. Bound in servitude to evil Malice, working as her assassin, Zaknafein had then gone out into the Underdark in search of Drizzt. At the critical moment, the true Zaknafein had broken through the evil matron mother's will for a fleeting moment, had shone forth once again and spoken to his beloved son. In that moment of victory, Zaknafein's spirit had proclaimed its peace, and Zaknafein had destroyed his own animated corpse instead, freeing Drizzt and freeing himself from the grasp of evil Malice Do'Urden.
'When I heard the blind hag's words and spent the time to consider them, I was truly sorry,' Drizzt finished. 'I believed that Zaknafein was free of them now, free of Lloth and all the evil, and sitting in a place of just rewards for the truth that was always in his soul.'
Cadderly put a hand on Drizzt's shoulder.
'To think that they had captured him once again …'
'But that may not be the case,' Cadderly said. 'And if it is true, then hope is not lost. Your father needs your help.'
Drizzt set his jaw firmly and nodded. 'And Catti-brie's help,' he replied. 'She will be here when we call to Errtu.'
Chapter 15 DARKNESS INCARNATE
His smoking bulk nearly filled the circle. His great leathery wings could not extend to their fullest, else they would have crossed the boundary line where the fiend could not pass. Errtu clawed at the stone and issued a guttural growl, threw back his huge and ugly head and laughed maniacally. Then the balor suddenly calmed, and looked forward, his knowing eyes boring into the gaze of Drizzt Do'Urden. Many years had passed since Drizzt had looked upon mighty Errtu, but the ranger surely recognized the fiend. His ugly face seemed a cross between a dog and an ape, and his eyes-especially those eyes-were black pits of evil, sometimes wide with outrage and red with flame, sometimes narrowed, slanted, intense slits promising hellish tortures. Yes, Drizzt remembered Errtu well, remembered their desperate fight on the side of Kelvin's Cairn those years before.
The ranger's scimitar, the one he had taken from the white dragon's lair, seemed to remember the fiend, too, for Drizzt felt it calling to him, urging him to draw it forth and strike at the balor again that it might feed upon Errtu's fiery heart. That blade had
been forged to battle creatures of fire, and seemed particularly eager for the smoking flesh of a fiend.
Catti-brie had never seen such a beast, darkness incarnate, evil embodied, the most foul of the foul. She wanted to take up Taulmaril and shoot an arrow into the beast's ugly face, and yet she feared that to do so would loose wicked Errtu upon them, something the young woman most certainly did not desire.
Errtu continued to chuckle, then with terrifying speed, the great fiend lashed out toward Drizzt with its many-thonged whip. The weapon snapped forward, then stopped fast in midair, as though it had hit a wall, and indeed it had.
'You cannot send your weapons, your flesh, or your magic through the barrier, Errtu,' Cadderly said calmly-the old priest seemed not shaken in the least by the true tanar'ri.
Errtu's eyes narrowed wickedly as the balor dropped his gaze over Cadderly, knowing that it was the priest who had dared to summon the balor. Again came that rumbling chuckle and flames erupted at Errtu's huge, clawed feet, burning white and hot, blazing so high that they nearly blocked the companions' view of the balor. The three friends squinted against the intense, stinging heat. At last, Catti-brie fell away with a shout of warning, and Drizzt heeded that call, went with her. Cadderly remained in place, though, standing impassively, confident that the rune-etched circles would stop the fires. Sweat beaded on his face, droplets falling from his nose.
'Desist!' Cadderly yelled above the crackle. Then he recited a string of words in a language that neither Drizzt nor Catti-brie had ever heard before, an arcane phrase that ended with the name of Errtu, spoken emphatically.
The balor roared as if in pain, and the fire walls fell away to nothingness.
'I will remember you, old man,' the great balor promised. 'When I walk again on the plane that is your world.'
'Do pay me a visit,' Cadderly replied evenly. 'It would be my pleasure to banish you back to the filth where you truly belong.'
