Gauntlgrym (5 page)

“Was the only way,” Bruenor explained as he and Pwent started up the bluff. “Only fair way to Banak.”

“Banak didn’t need to be king,” said Pwent.

“Aye, but I couldn’t be king anymore. I’m done with it, me friend.”

That last word gave them both pause, and as the implications of it truly settled on both their shoulders, they each draped an arm across the other’s strong shoulders and walked together up the hill.

“Been too long with me bum in a throne,” Bruenor explained as they made their way past the others and back toward the boulder tumble. “Not for knowing how many years I got left, but there’s things I’m wanting to find, and I won’t be finding ’em in Mithral Hall.”

“Yer girl and the halfling runt?” Pwent reasoned.

“Ah, but don’t ye make me cry,” said Bruenor. “And Moradin willing, I’ll be doing that one day, if not in this life, then in his great halls. But no, there’s more.”

“What more?”

Bruenor put his hands on his hips again and looked out across the wide lands to the west, bordered by the towering mountains in the north and the still-impressive foothills in the south.

“Gauntlgrym’s me hope,” said Bruenor. “But know that just the open road and the wind in me face’ll do.”

“So ye’re going? Ye’re going forever, not to return to the hall?”

“I am,” Bruenor declared. “Know that I am, and not to return. Ever. The hall’s Banak’s now, and I can’t be twisting that. As far as me kin—our kin—are forever to know, as far as all the kings o’ the Silver Marches are forever to know, King Bruenor Battlehammer died on the fifth day of the sixth month of the Year of True Omens. So it be.”

“And ye didn’t tell me,” said Pwent. “Ye telled th’elf, ye telled the gnome, ye telled a stinkin’ orc, but ye didn’t tell me.”

“I telled them that’s going with me,” Bruenor explained. “And none in the hall’re knowing, except Cordio, and I needed him so them priests didn’t figure it out. And he’s known to keep his trap shut, don’t ye doubt.”

“But ye didn’t trust yer Pwent.”

“Ye didn’t need to know. Better for yerself!”

“To see me king, me friend, put under the stones?”

Bruenor sighed and had no answer. “Well I’m trusting ye now, as ye gived me no choice. Ye serve Banak now, but know that telling him is doing no favor to any in the hall.”

Pwent resolutely shook his head through the last half of Bruenor’s words. “I served King Bruenor, me
friend
Bruenor,” he said. “All me life for me king and me friend.”

That caught Bruenor off his guard. He looked to Drizzt, who shrugged and smiled; then to Nanfoodle, who nodded eagerly; then to Jessa, who answered, “Only if ye promise to brawl with each other now and again. I do so love the sight of dwarves beating the beer-sweat out of each other!”

“Bah!” Bruenor snorted.

“Now where, me ki—me friend?” Pwent asked.

“To the west,” said Bruenor. “Far to the west. Forever to the west.”

It is time to let the waters of the past flow away to distant shores. Though never to be forgotten, those friends long gone must not haunt my thoughts all the day and night. They will be there, I take comfort in knowing, ready to smile whenever my mind’s eye seeks that comforting sight, ready to shout a chant to a war god when battle draws near, ready to remind me of my folly when I cannot see that which is right before me, and ready, ever ready, to make me smile, to warm my heart.

But they will ever be there, too, I fear, to remind me of the pain, of the injustice, of the callous gods who took from me my love in just that time when I had at last found peace. I’ll not forgive them.

“Live your life in segments,” a wise elf once told me, for to be a long-lived creature who might see the dawn and dusk of centuries would be a curse indeed if the immediacy and intensity of anticipated age and inevitable death is allowed to be forgotten.

And so now, after more than forty years, I lift my glass in toast to those who have gone before: to Deudermont; to Cadderly; to Regis; perhaps to Wulfgar, for I know not of his fate; and most of all, to Catti-brie, my love, my life—nay, the love of that one segment of my life.

By circumstance, by fate, by the gods …

I’ll never forgive them.

So certain and confident these words of freedom read, yet my hand shakes as I pen them. It has been two-thirds of a century since the catastrophe of the Ghost King, the fall of Spirit Soaring, and the dea—the loss of Catti-brie. But that awful morning seems as if it was only this very morning, and while so many memories of my life with Catti seem so far away now, almost as if I am looking back at the life of another drow, one whose boots I inherited, that morning when the spirits of my love and Regis rode from Mithral Hall on a ghostly unicorn, rode through the stone walls and were lost to me, that morning of the deepest pain I have ever known, remains to me an open, bleeding, and burning wound.

But no more.

That memory I now place on the flowing waters, and look not behind me as it recedes.

I go forward, on the open road with friends old and new. Too long have my blades been still, too clean are my boots and cape. Too restless is Guenhwyvar. Too restless is the heart of Drizzt Do’Urden.

We are off to Gauntlgrym, Bruenor insists, though I think that unlikely. But it matters not, for in truth, he is off to close his life and I am away to seek new shores—clean shores, free of the bonds of the past, a new segment of my life.

It is what it is to be an elf.

It is what it is to be alive, for though this exercise is most poignant and necessary in those races living long, even the short-lived humans divide their lives into segments, though they rarely recognize the transient truth as they move through one or another stage of their existence. Every person I have known tricks himself into thinking that this current way of things will continue on, year after year. It is so easy to speak of expectations, of what will be in a decade, perhaps, and to be convinced that the important aspects of one’s life will remain as they are, or will improve as desired.

“This will be my life in a year!”

“This will be my life in five years!”

“This will be my life in ten years!”

We all tell ourselves these hopes and dreams and expectations, and with conviction, for the goal is needed to facilitate the journey. But in the end of that span, be it one or five or ten or fifty years hence, it is the journey and not the goal, achieved or lost, that defines who we are. The journey is the story of our life, not the achievement or failure at its end, and so the more important declaration by far, I have come to know, is, “This is my life now.”

I am Drizzt Do’Urden, once of Mithral Hall, once the battered son of a drow matron mother, once the protégé of a wondrous weapons master, once loved in marriage, once friend to a king and to other companions no less wonderful and important. Those are the rivers of my memory, flowing now to distant shores, for I reclaim my course and my heart.

But not my purpose, I am surprised to learn, for the world has moved beyond that which I once knew to be true, for this realm has found a new sense of darkness and dread that mocks he who would deign to set things aright.

Once I would have brought with me light to pierce that darkness. Now I bring my blades, too long unused, and I welcome that darkness.

No more! I am rid of the open wound of profound loss!

I lie.

—Drizzt Do’Urden

THE DAMNED

I
T WAS A CLEVER DEVICE SHE HAD FASHIONED, A THIMBLELIKE, CONICAL PIECE
of smooth cedar with a point like a spear and an opening that allowed her to fit it onto her finger. She slipped it on and gently rotated a knot in the wood, and the mundane became magical as the finger spear diminished and took the form of a beautiful sapphire ring.

The glittering adornment fit the majestic image of Dahlia Sin’felle. Her tall, lithe elf form was topped by a head shaved clean but for a single thin clutch of raven black and cardinal red locks, woven to run down the right side of her shapely head and nestle in the hollow of her deceptively delicate neck. Her long fingers, wrapped with more than that one jeweled ring, were tipped with perfect nails, painted white and set with tiny diamonds. Her icy blue eyes could freeze a man’s heart or melt it with a simple look. Dahlia appeared the artist’s epitome of Thayan aristocracy, a lady great even among the greatest, a young woman who could enter a room and turn all heads in lust, in awe, or in murderous jealousy.

She wore seven diamonds in her left ear, one for each of the lovers she had murdered, and two more small, sparkling studs in her right ear for the lovers she had yet to kill. Like some of the men of the day, but few if any other Thayan women, Dahlia had tattooed her head with the blue dye of the woad plant. Dots blue and purple decorated the right side of her nearly hairless skull and face, a delicate and mesmerizing pattern enchanted by the master artist to impart various shapes to the viewer. As the woman gracefully turned her head to the left, one might see a gazelle in stride among the reeds of blue. When she snapped back angrily to the right, perhaps a great cat would rear up to strike. When her blue eyes flashed with lust, her target, be it man or woman, might fall helplessly into the dizzying patterns of Dahlia’s woad, entrapped and mesmerized, perhaps never to emerge.

She wore a crimson gown, sleeveless and backless, and cut low in the front, the soft round curves of her breasts contrasting starkly with the sharp seam of rich fabric. The gown reached nearly to the floor, but was slit very high up the right side, drawing the eyes of lusting onlookers, man and woman alike, from her glittering red-painted toenails, past the delicate straps of her ruby sandals, and up the porcelain skin of her shapely leg, nearly to her hip. From there, one’s eyes could not help but be drawn to the base of the
V
, and up to the shining tip of the singular black and red braid, the image there framed by a wide, high open collar that presented her slender neck and her perfectly shaped head like a colored glass vase holding a fresh bouquet.

Dahlia Sin’felle knew the power of her form.

The look on Korvin Dor’crae’s face when he entered her private room only confirmed that. He came at her eagerly, wrapping his arms around her. He was not a tall man, not thick with muscle, but his grip was strengthened by his affliction and he pulled her to him roughly, raining kisses along her jaw.

“You will not be long in pleasing yourself, no doubt, but what of me?” she asked, the innocence in her voice only adding to the sarcasm.

Dor’crae moved back enough to look up into her eyes, and smiled widely, revealing his vampire fangs. “I thought you enjoyed my feast, milady,” he said, and he went right back at her, biting her softly on the neck.

“Be easy, my lover,” she whispered, but she moved in a teasing way as she spoke to ensure that Dor’crae could do no such thing.

Her fingers played along his ear and swirled amidst his long, thick black hair. She had been teasing him all night long, after all, and with sunrise nearing he hadn’t much time—not up in the many-windowed tower. He tried to walk her back to the bed, but she held her ground, and so he pressed in more tightly and bit down more forcefully.

“Be easy,” she whispered with a giggle that coaxed him on all the more. “You’ll not make me one of your kind.”

“Play with me through eternity,” Dor’crae replied, and he dared bite harder, his fangs finally puncturing Dahlia’s beautiful skin.

Dahlia lowered her right hand to her side and reached her thumb over the illusionary ring on her index finger, tapping the gem. She slid both of her hands onto Dor’crae’s chest, undoing the leather ties of his shirt and pulling the fabric wide, her fingers fluttering over his skin. He groaned, pressed in closer, and bit down harder.