Starlight Enclave

by R. A. Salvatore

  “Of course she is. But could you not spend your days instead wandering the alleyways of Luskan and healing the sick and the poor?”

  “This could avert a war.”

  “If Jarlaxle believes that, who am I to disagree? This is his area of expertise, after all.”

  “And there is something else, something personal,” Catti-brie admitted. “Jarlaxle has had the sword’s mysteries studied extensively. He sees the rescue of Doum’wielle as a way to defeat the malice within Khazid’hea.”

  “So it is personal to you?”

  “I can’t deny . . .”

  “Throwing it into the primordial pit seems an easier course.”

  “Jarlaxle wishes the sword for your father.”

  “Jarlaxle has an answer for everything,” Drizzt warned. “He has found a benefit for you, a benefit for Zaknafein, a benefit for Doum’wielle, obviously, and—”

  “And a great benefit for Menzoberranzan, in the hopes that Lolth is at last pushed aside.”

  Drizzt nodded. “Again, I am not one to argue with Jarlaxle about something such as that.”

  “But you don’t seem convinced.”

  Drizzt shrugged and held his hands out helplessly. “Even for all of that, it seems a long and difficult journey. Do you believe that this is the full story of why Jarlaxle would go to such lengths?”

  Catti-brie laughed at that. “I do not, or at least, I would not be surprised if there is more. I’ve been looking about for ulterior reasons. This is, after all, Jarlaxle we are talking about. Is there ever only one reason for him? Or only three reasons, as you have outlined, and particularly when they are so obvious and openly stated by that ever-mysterious rogue? Do you have any thoughts on that?”

  “Who can say? As you said, it is Jarlaxle.”

  “He means to go and find her,” Catti-brie explained. “Tomorrow to Luskan to prepare, and then to the far north a few days hence. And he thinks I am the living rod of divination who can locate her, and so he has begged me to accompany him.”

  “That could be an extended journey. What would we do with Brie?”

  “Not ‘we,’” Catti-brie replied. “He asked me to accompany him.”

  “Ah,” Drizzt said. “Just you two in the wilds of the north, or Zaknafein, too, perhaps?”

  “Your father, yes, and one other.” She paused, then added, “Artemis Entreri.”

  “Another who has wielded Khazid’hea, as have I,” Drizzt remarked. “That’s a formidable group of four. What of Wulfgar, who knows the north as well as any?”

  “I can only magically recall a small group back to the south, should we find Doum’wielle, who is, perhaps, not alone. Jarlaxle prefers to keep the party within those limits.”

  Drizzt nodded. It made sense. “Are you going?”

  “I am here to discuss that very thing, obviously.”

  “The choice is yours.”

  “But how do you feel about it?”

  Drizzt shrugged. “I’ll be terribly lonely, but Brie and I are surrounded by friends.” He gave a little laugh. “You were absent for most of the excitement of the Demon War as you cared for the unborn Brie. Could it be that my dear wife misses the road of adventure? Are you bored, my love?”

  Catti-brie’s smile was so complete that her eyes seemed to be laughing. “You don’t bore me,” she said.

  “But . . .”

  She laughed aloud. “Yes!” she admitted. “I miss the road. I miss the adventure. I miss the danger. Does that make sense? Does that make me a terrible parent?”

  “Haven’t we had this conversation the other way?” Drizzt said, laughing, too. He opened his arms and let Catti-brie fall into them. “And this seems a noble cause for Sinnafein and her daughter and for Menzoberranzan, perhaps. That, I cannot deny. Besides,” he added, pushing her back a bit and giving a wry smile, “Khazid’hea is well-deserving of your revenge.” He pulled her back in tight and kissed the side of her head.

  “Your mood is much improved,” she said, returning the hug.

  “Someone reminded me.”

  “Of what?” Catti-brie asked.

  “Of why,” Drizzt corrected. And he grinned and crushed her in a tighter hug still.

  “Do you have any advice to me regarding my companions?” she whispered in the midst of the great hug.

  “Trust them as you would trust the Companions of the Hall.”

  “Even Artemis Entreri?”

  Drizzt pushed her back to arm’s length. “You tell me.”

  Catti-brie nodded. “It is strange to me that I know I can trust that man. Strange and . . . hopeful. In the wider sense.”

  “A belief in redemption is the most important spice in hoping to cook a better tomorrow,” Drizzt told her. “Maybe that’s why Jarlaxle really wants to go to the north. Even beyond the hopes for Menzoberranzan, maybe Jarlaxle desires to offer such a chance to Doum’wielle Armgo.”

  “But not just for her,” Catti-brie said, catching on, and Drizzt nodded. “For Jarlaxle, because he wants to see such a thing. He wants to feel such hope.”

  “So, tomorrow?”

  She nodded. “I leave for Luskan tomorrow, but Jarlaxle thinks we will be several days there preparing for our journey.”

  Drizzt spent a moment composing himself, then said, “Go and tell Brie, and take your time saying goodbye. And then, my love, we’ll spend the rest of the night saying farewell to each other.”

  She grabbed Drizzt by the cheeks and stared into his lavender eyes. “I will come back,” she promised.

  “I know.”

  “And you will be here, or at the Monastery of the Yellow Rose?”

  “There, I think. I’m going to leave right after you are gone, through the gates, but to Mithral Hall and then Adbar, and the road to the east. With Brie. I’m not sure I need to speak with Kane now, but I find that I want to.”

  “And you want him and the others to meet Brie.”

  “There is that,” he admitted. “Do we agree?”

  Catti-brie nodded and kissed him, then whispered in his ear, “And when I return, I will take her to magical gardens dedicated to Mielikki.”

  “That was four years ago,” Gromph reminded Jarlaxle and the others.

  “But it was your portal,” Jarlaxle replied.

  “Yes, created only to be rid of that troublesome darthiir!”

  “Half elf, half drow,” Jarlaxle reminded him, for Doum’wielle wasn’t only darthiir, the pejorative the dark elves used for their surface cousins.

  “I don’t care. And I didn’t care then, which is why I cast her out.”

  “To the north?”

  “Yes.”

  “A mile? Ten? A hundred? Have you gathered any thoughts on the matter as I implored you?”

  “She landed on the slopes of the northernmost mountains in the Spine of the World,” the former archmage of Menzoberranzan replied. “That is my best recollection of the scene on the other side of the portal.”

  Jarlaxle looked at his traveling companions. “That will have to do, then,” he said to nods.

  “Four years,” Gromph reiterated. “She is likely dead, but if not, then she could be anywhere. In the Underdark? In Waterdeep? In Calimport in the far south, even.”

  “I don’t believe so,” Jarlaxle said. “My investigations with Khazid’hea make me believe that she’s still up there somewhere.”

  “To what end? Why do you care?”

  “To cleanse the sword.”

  “Enough of your lies,” said Gromph. “Throw the thing into the primordial pit in Gauntlgrym and be done with it, then hire the proper wizards and blacksmiths to make another just like it but without the demonic sentience. There, a far easier course.”

  “But not the one we’ve chosen. Will you replicate the portal for us as you agreed?”

  “Why do you care?” the wizard demanded again.

  Jarlaxle stood with hands on hips, staring at him.

  “Because she is Armgo,” Gromph finally realized. “You thin
k to make her a spy for us in Menzoberranzan.”

  “More than a spy, likely. Doum’wielle will have the ear of the Barrison Del’Armgo nobles, and they will have no idea that she is not who they believe her to be, for it was the sword and not her heart driving her. Through her, we can manipulate the information filtering to Matron Mez’Barris.”

  “If you believe that, you’re a bigger fool than I already suspected, and that is a high hurdle indeed.”

  “You deny that she would be useful?”

  “I doubt that her use would be worth all of this trouble.”

  “Trouble for us, though, and not for Gromph. Not really.”

  Gromph scoffed at him and shook his head, but after a few snorts of derision aimed Jarlaxle’s way, he did begin his spellcasting. A few minutes later, a swirling cloud appeared at the side of the room, framing a distant vista as if it were a picture. A mountainside, thick with snow.

  Jarlaxle tossed the final payment, a bag of expensive and hard-to-find spell components, to Gromph. With a tip of his hat to the mighty archmage, Jarlaxle then led the way, stepping into that “picture,” passing through the image and onto the mountainside, to find himself standing atop deep snow beneath a crisp blue sky, with a line of fast-streaming dark clouds creating a stark and beautiful contrast.

  He didn’t see an animal, not even a bird in the sky, and not a tree or a plant.

  And didn’t hear a sound, except the threatening whisper of the very cold wind.

  Had Khazid’hea deceived him, he wondered, and wondered, too, if he should ask Catti-brie to immediately cast her magical recall and return them to the south.

  Part 2

  Journeys

  As I have come to understand the greatest gift afforded me by my training with the monks of the Monastery of the Yellow Rose, the realization has both shocked and enlightened me.

  One might think that greatest gift to be the strengthened connection between my mind and my body, a truer understanding of that which I want to perform and the deeper interactions of my physical form required to more easily and more completely execute the movement. I could always jump up in the air, for example, spin about and kick out my trailing foot as I turned. Almost any warrior, certainly any drow warrior, could do such a thing. But now my mind is speaking to the finer parts of my body, coordinating better the turn of my hips, the angle of my foot, the coil of the muscles on the back of my thigh, and the timing of the release of the kick. Where before, I might force back an opponent with such a maneuver, now I can end the fight with that single heavy blow if my opponent has not properly balanced and blocked to defend.

  I do not understate the beauty of this gift. I can even manipulate my muscles to push poison from a wound! But this is not the greatest of the treasures I have gained.

  One might think that greatest gift to be the understanding of ki, of life energy. Of being able to reach within and pull forth power beyond that of muscle and bone. The addition of this inner energy allows me to throw an opponent several strides away when I strike with my open hand. It allows me to find my wounds and turn my blood and muscles and all that is physically within me into some mediation of those injuries. With ki and the understanding of my physical form, I now run faster and jump higher. I make my scimitar strikes follow quicker and in perfect balance.

  I am a finer warrior, but no, this is not the greatest of Grandmaster Kane’s imparted treasures.

  And then there is transcendence. I escaped the retriever with this act, melting my physical body into everythingness, becoming a part of all that was around me, the elemental starstuff that is the one eternal in the multiverse. That of which we and all we see about us is made. The sheer, unspeakable beauty of transcending the limitations of the physical form so fully would have left me forever there, a better place—a truer and fuller existence and understanding—than anything I have ever known or could ever know in this physical life.

  But even this transcendence is not that which I now consider, in this moment of my existence, the greatest gift of all.

  That pinnacle is reserved for the quietest of Grandmaster Kane’s teachings, for meditation, true meditation, has freed me of the most common curse of the reasoning beings, be they drow, human, halfling, dwarf, elf, or perhaps even the goblinkin and giantkind, perhaps even others I do not begin to understand:

  An unconscious bent toward some determined level of tension.

  This is the gift that I am even now most determinedly trying to impart upon my dear little Brie, for it is the remedy to a curse that I have come to believe is imparted in the earliest years of life.

  That curse cannot be understated, and I suspect it a universal affliction determined by degrees, not by its presence or absence.

  We all have within us a level of tumult, a vibration in our hearts, our minds, our very souls, which we are most comfortable with as “normal.” Like a pebble dropped into still water, that tumult is a result of drama, of conflict in mind or body or both. This sense of normalcy is taught very young, and refined as we become fully reasoning beings.

  The curse lies in not understanding it.

  In its most extreme circumstances, I have seen it in myself, or in King Bruenor, surely, when we both grew uneasy, itchy even, as we created about us an environment of peace and comfort.

  “Ah, to the road!” was our common call to action, even when action wasn’t needed.

  Because the vibrations, the inner conflict, was needed for us to feel normal.

  Bruenor hates being king when all the world about him is settled. It bores him profoundly (though now, with his wives, perhaps he finds suitable replacements of excitement and conflict!). He needs that sense of normalcy, and so he will achieve the needed tension no matter the situation around him. He will grump and moan about one thing or another, often minute, but never would he say a word or care about the small details of the more mundane issues flitting about him when threatened by a horde of demons. In that event, the tension is real and pressing, and thus the little problems no longer matter.

  The curse, I now see, is that those littler problems do matter without that demon horde, and so they are unconsciously elevated to a place of distraction.

  I have often wondered if this peace I seek in the world around me isn’t really a lie I tell myself, given my own desire for adventure, and yes, even danger.

  But those are extreme examples of the inner vibrations. Extreme and rare and of urges more easily defeated because they are so obvious, and possibly, so destructive or self-destructive. The lesser examples, the smaller pebbles, are ever-present in all of us and all about us. They manifest in gossip, in senseless arguments over unimportant actions or debates, in unreasonable fears about things over which we have no control, in silly worries about inadequacies or perceptions that have no place beyond the present in terms of importance . . . yet they are magnified within each of us into vibrations and tumult.

  Of the mind, of the heart, of the very soul.

  And thus, the greatest gift I have been granted by my time in the Monastery of the Yellow Rose is the true stilling of all three, of making the pond that is Drizzt Do’Urden so glassy and calm that the reflection of the world around me becomes an accurate representation of that which is, instead of that which is perceived through the ripples of inner tumult and inner vibration.

  I am free of the itch. I am content in the present, every present, any present.

  That does not mean that I have surrendered the love of adventure—far from it!

  Nay, the gift is that now I can choose the adventure, now I can diffuse the drama, now I can throw away the fears and the worries to see the picture most clearly and to embrace the best course to repaint that picture or enjoy it without the unsummoned urge.

  And conversely, what I know now is that I can bring forth that itch more perfectly when it is needed.

  This blessing of clarity is indeed freedom.

  All people have long periods of true trial, but their times of true ease seem less so. T
hese moments of peace are often sabotaged, so I now believe, by our own insistence on worrying about things that aren’t worth the worry.

  To create ripples in the stillness creates for them the proper normal.

  To one who has learned the way of Kane, those ripples are external alone, and when they come, they are seen with perfect clarity.

  —Drizzt Do’Urden

  Chapter 7

  Mutual Benefit

  “Drizzy daddy,” Brie said happily, bouncing along in front of Drizzt on Andahar’s broad back as they rode the trail southwest out of Citadel Adbar. In a couple of hours, moving through the magical gates from Gauntlgrym, where they had said farewell to Catti-brie, to the common portal shared by the three dwarven kingdoms of the Silver Marches, and then to Citadel Adbar, the father and daughter had covered nearly eight hundred miles. But they had a thousand more to go now, and without the help of magic.

  Except, of course, for the magic of Andahar, the wonderful unicorn companion summoned from Drizzt’s whistle, who could run tirelessly throughout the day.

  Even with the unicorn’s long strides, Drizzt figured it would take them a month to get to the Galena Mountains and the Monastery of the Yellow Rose. Alone he could do it in a tenday, but with Brie along, the breaks would come often, perhaps quite often, and the day’s rides would surely be much shorter.

  He could have chosen a magical journey, of course. He could have ridden a portal to Longsaddle and had Penelope arrange for a teleportation to Grandmaster Kane’s front door. But he wanted to undertake this journey, just him and his Brie, to see the wide world and enjoy the vistas and the many peoples and cultures they would find along the way. Still, it was not without a sizable amount of trepidation that Drizzt had ridden out of Citadel Adbar’s gates that afternoon. The world was not always a welcoming place; the lands they would cross were not without monsters of all shapes and sizes. He could take care of himself as well as anyone, he knew.

  But could he take care of Brie?

  He set Andahar at an easy but determined canter through the forest, and the land rolled up and down about them, one tree-covered ridge after another, the shadows protecting them from the summer sun, the sun-speckled ground before them giving Brie endless entertainment.