Starlight Enclave

by R. A. Salvatore

  “A few of the more clever wizards at the Hosttower have spent great effort in creating obsidian steed figurines,” Braelin explained. “And Jarlaxle has spent quite a fortune in trading for them with Waterdeep’s noble families. He is determined to make of Bregan D’aerthe a cavalry force, I am sure.”

  Somehow, Drizzt wasn’t surprised. “Where is he?”

  “Jarlaxle?”

  “No, the one who brought you out here.” The one who was just in my mind, he thought, but didn’t say.

  Braelin looked back over his shoulder toward a thick stand of trees and a few moments later, Kimmuriel came out of the shadows, riding yet another magical mount, this one translucent, save for flashes and sparkles of light that gave it equine form, more resembling a constellation in a night sky than anything solid. The psionicist waved away the drow flanking Braelin—and likely sent them telepathic instructions—before pacing his celestial mount up before Drizzt.

  Recovered from the shock of it all, Drizzt felt his relief turn to trepidation, for something had to be amiss here, surely.

  “No, nothing like that,” Kimmuriel answered his thoughts.

  “Stop it,” Drizzt warned, and the psionicist bowed respectfully. “What are you doing here?”

  “Archmage Gromph told us of your intended journey. I tried to catch up to you in Gauntlgrym, but you were already gone.”

  “So you followed me through the portals to Adbar?”

  “It was worth the trouble just to see the looks on the faces of the dwarves of Adbar,” Braelin put in. “In Mithral Hall, too, though they were more willing to accept our presence since King Bruenor was with us for that part of the journey.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “Because I have much I’d like to discuss with you,” Kimmuriel explained. “And with Grandmaster Kane, if you would be willing to offer me an introduction.”

  “You couldn’t have just had Gromph teleport you to the monastery and met me there?”

  Kimmuriel shrugged.

  “Jarlaxle,” Drizzt reasoned. “He told you I was coming out here with Brie and bade you to escort me.”

  “These are dangerous lands.”

  “I’ve ridden them before.”

  “With a child?”

  Drizzt didn’t answer.

  “If we caught you, why couldn’t others?”

  “To be fair, you hadn’t exactly caught me. You found me, but I’m not so easily caught. Besides, I don’t know many other bands of highwaymen riding around on magical hellsteeds.”

  Kimmuriel smiled widely—and that seemed to Drizzt the most disconcerting thing of all. “Nor will you, now. I have a score of drow with me, including wizards and priests.”

  “If I had wanted an escort, I would have asked King Bruenor. Or Regis, perhaps, with his band of halfling friends, the Grinning Ponies.”

  “Should we be insulted?” Braelin Janquay said lightheartedly.

  “You won’t even see us, then,” Kimmuriel promised. “Nor any enemies that might come against you. We’ll dispatch them beyond your child’s vision and hearing. Except for me, I hope. I would like to ride with you, for a while at least, that we can converse and I can, perhaps, convince you that I am worthy of an audience with the great Grandmaster Kane.”

  “I’ll introduce you without reservation.”

  “I’m humbled by your trust.”

  “What trust?” Drizzt said. “If you threaten Kane, he will finish you before you know that he has sensed the threat.”

  “As you will,” Kimmuriel replied. “Are my terms acceptable?”

  “As you will,” Drizzt replied.

  Kimmuriel dismissed Braelin then, and Drizzt led the way. Brie was calm again and Andahar wouldn’t tire, so there was no need to pause.

  For a long while, Kimmuriel said nothing, just paced his celestial steed easily beside the unicorn, and true to the psionicist’s promise, Drizzt noted no sign of the escorting drow brigade.

  Not a whisper of noise or a shuffle of leaves.

  He wasn’t surprised.

  Confident that Catti-brie and Entreri had attuned themselves to the rings, the group began to move, though it became immediately apparent that this would be no easy task. The snow was deep and unpacked, and while Jarlaxle and Zak could effortlessly walk atop it, both because they were elves and because of the boots they wore, the two humans could not.

  “Maybe you could swap boots for rings,” Entreri grumbled after only a few plowing steps. “You skinny elves won’t sink in as far, even without them.”

  “That would mean another long delay,” Jarlaxle said, “for such items have to be acclimated to a new host.”

  “Of course,” Entreri grumbled back. “And then you’d have to pay Caecelia more for the second attunement on the rings.”

  “You see?” Jarlaxle returned. “I will teach you yet what it is to be a proper merchant.”

  “I haven’t the spells to protect us all while we wait for that,” Catti-brie put in. She looked from the man to Jarlaxle, who was nodding solemnly—too much so, she thought. She knew that he almost certainly had scrolls that could be read to protect them all from the cold, or other wondrous items that could move them easily down the hill.

  But Jarlaxle never showed his hand. And never used up his magical items when he didn’t have to.

  One trudging step at a time, Catti-brie pressed on, thousands of feet of snow-blanketed mountain before them. Entreri came past her suddenly, driving hard and spitting curses. When he finally ran out of momentum, he stopped very abruptly—at least, his lower half did. He lurched forward at the waist, getting a face full of snow.

  Jarlaxle tried to ask if he was all right, but all Catti-brie heard through the howling wind was a snicker.

  But then something else. Something lower-pitched. Something beneath her.

  Entreri straightened and didn’t even bother to wipe the snow from his head and shoulders, just grumbled and started forward.

  “Wait,” Catti-brie bade him, quietly but insistently.

  Entreri kept going as if not hearing her.

  “Wait!” she said louder and with urgency. “Hold, all of you.”

  “What do you know?” Jarlaxle asked.

  Catti-brie shook her head and held up her hand to keep them quiet. She was no stranger to this type of terrain, having grown up in the frozen wastes of Icewind Dale. That barely perceptible rumble below her foreboded great danger, she realized, and she could only hope that it was just a warning and not the beginning of the inevitable catastrophe.

  “Well?” Entreri demanded, quite loudly.

  “Shh!” she insisted. “Quietly. The snowpack is loose. The top levels, at least.”

  “Top levels?” asked Zaknafein, who had no experience with anything like this environment.

  “The snow grows deeper with every storm, and what was there before melts under the sun, hardens to ice, and thus grows more slippery,” she explained. “This deep snowpack is not stable, layer to layer, and if we cause too much tumult, the entire side of this mountain covering will break free and slide down.”

  “Avalanche,” Entreri said. “Are you sure?”

  “I feel it,” Catti-brie said.

  “Wonderful.”

  “What do you suggest?” Jarlaxle asked.

  “Going home,” said Entreri.

  “I don’t think we can get down like this,” Catti-brie replied. “Especially where it gets steeper just ahead.”

  “Then we move laterally, perhaps? And find a different route.”

  “Every step could bring half the mountain down on top of us.”

  “Give them our boots and we can levitate much of the way,” Zak offered, a suggestion that didn’t seem to sit well with Jarlaxle.

  “Wait,” Catti-brie said.

  “Please don’t recall us to Luskan,” Jarlaxle begged. “I have gone to such trouble—this is too important.”

  Catti-brie looked at him curiously, for his sudden intens
ity seemed too great for the stated mission. She heard Drizzt’s words in her head again—Do you believe that this is the full story of why Jarlaxle would go to such lengths?—and couldn’t deny her agreement.

  But no, she wasn’t planning to send them home. Not yet. She had a different idea. She wasn’t sure it would work, but thought herself quite clever as she began spellcasting. Moments later, a wide ball of flame appeared on the snow immediately before her. It seemed to sink in, and rivulets of water shed from its base, weaving paths downward but freezing again almost immediately when they got past the heat of the moving flaming sphere.

  Catti-brie willed her creation forward, straight down the mountainside. A semicircular depression appeared in its wake, almost as wide as Catti-brie was tall, and glistening more spectacularly than the shining snow.

  Catti-brie pressed forward to the upper lip of the newly formed ice chute and bent over it, pulling herself up. She took an arrow from her quiver and jabbed it against the ice as she sat up, then used it to control the speed of her sliding descent. As she went, she kept the ball of flame moving far before her.

  “Wait here,” she told the others.

  A minute later, the flame winked out, but Catti-brie cast another one right at that spot and sent this one, too, straight down the mountainside. She was hundreds of feet below her friends now, and held up her hand to beg for a bit more patience.

  A third ball of flame replaced the second, then a fourth, and by the time its magic expired, the icy slide extended over a thousand feet from where they had begun. Catti-brie paused there and surveyed the mountain, looking for a path. One seemed promising, off to her left and down to a ridge of black rock protruding from the snow. It was also risky, for she couldn’t see beyond that jutting stone and she had the energy to cast only one more ball of flame for the day.

  She heard Zaknafein shout out to her from far above. She just held her hand up in response and continued to consider the rocky ridge.

  She was still pondering the possibility when she felt another, more insistent rumble beneath her.

  One that didn’t stop, like a vibration deep inside, a yawn and a growl from a waking mountain beast.

  Catti-brie cast her spell and sent the ball rolling away for the stone ridge. She looked back and waved to her friends frantically, and saw that they needed no prompt from her.

  For above them, the avalanche had begun, a great wave of snow sliding down the empty mountainside.

  Entreri dove onto the slide, Jarlaxle right behind, and Zaknafein right behind him.

  Catti-brie tossed her arrow brake aside and sped away down the last run, angling straight for the jutting stone ridge. It would have been exhilarating if not for the terror driving her. She dismissed her ball of flame short of it, and a good thing that was, for she plowed headlong and hard, but into the remaining snow and not the stone. She pulled herself out and scrambled to the ridge, then to the top.

  She heard Entreri’s approach and turned to see him, the other two sliding fast close behind, and the avalanche wall of snow gathering speed and nearly overtaking them.

  Catti-brie peeked over. A substantial drop loomed, but at least the bottom showed snow and not rock, though she knew not how deep. The ground began to shake wildly.

  She didn’t have a choice, and so she rolled over the crest and fell.

  She landed hard, twisted, and everything went dark, and the ground about her shook with the violence of a wounded dragon.

  Chapter 8

  Probing, Probing

  May we join you?

  Do come in, Drizzt responded in his thoughts, knowing they would be heard. Quietly, please. Do not wake my daughter.

  Drizzt chuckled as he considered that last request. When had he ever thought his biggest concern in communicating telepathically with Kimmuriel Oblodra would be that the drow might wake up his daughter?

  A few moments later, Kimmuriel came out of the thick tree line to the left of the hilltop clearing Drizzt had decided upon for his camp. He had not seen the psionicist or any of the other accompanying drow more than once or twice over the four days since he had first met them in the forest not far from Citadel Adbar. True to their word, Kimmuriel and Braelin had kept the Bregan D’aerthe escort far afield from Drizzt and his daughter, affording them their privacy and quiet moments.

  Quieter moments, Drizzt thought, and was appreciative, for he did indeed feel more secure with Brie out here in the wild knowing that those drow soldiers were looking out for him, and mostly, for Brie.

  A second form exited the copse of trees behind Kimmuriel. At first, Drizzt thought it to be Braelin, but no, it was a woman.

  Kimmuriel walked right past Brie as he approached, giving her just a quick, expressionless sidelong glance, but the woman behind him stopped to admire the child, her smile spreading wide. Her face was beaming as she turned back to Drizzt, approaching near enough to the fire for him to recognize her.

  “She’s beautiful,” the priestess Dab’nay said. “So innocent.”

  “How often did you think that about drow children in Menzoberranzan?” Drizzt asked, despite his desire to be gracious here.

  “Always,” Dab’nay answered, seemingly taking no offense. “Although, by the time they were your darling Brie’s age, many had already lost that aura.” She moved to the side and sat down on the ground, as did Kimmuriel, right before Drizzt.

  “You know priestess Dab’nay?” the psionicist asked, and Drizzt nodded. “I trust that we have not ruined the time for you and your daughter. We would not steal these moments from you.”

  “I’m grateful for that, and, in retrospect, for the escort.”

  “Good. I can tell you that your wife and our acquaintances have stepped through Gromph’s portal, wherever it might have landed them.”

  “Are you in contact with them with your mind magic?”

  “No, Gromph informed me.”

  Drizzt nodded and took a deep breath. The realization that Catti-brie was now out on the wild road hit him harder than he expected, which surprised him since he had known it was coming.

  “I have much I would like to discuss with you, if you would oblige me,” Kimmuriel requested.

  Drizzt shrugged. “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Why have you come out here?”

  “I was about to tell you that,” Kimmuriel replied.

  “No, not what do you wish to discuss with me, but why have you come out here at all?” Drizzt clarified, and in his thoughts, he didn’t try to hide his suspicions here, or confusion at least, about the seemingly sudden turn from this one and so many others. “And why did you stand with Yvonnel and House Baenre—you hate House Baenre above all others!—on the field outside of Gauntlgrym?”

  “I do admit resentment for the fate that befell my house,” said Kimmuriel. “I hold no love for Quenthel Baenre, of course, or any of the others.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because I saw the other side. Behind their curtains, I saw the other side of this war, and only then did I realize that this was the fight that so many of us have been hoping for over the course of many centuries. Firsthand, under the guise of imprisonment, I saw Matron Zhindia in her house plotting the demise of . . . well, you, and your father, and of Bregan D’aerthe.”

  “So it is simply self-serving.”

  “No, no, not at all,” said Kimmuriel. “Zhindia Melarn wasn’t determined to be rid of Bregan D’aerthe simply to advance her own fortunes. She was doing so because we were daring to change the paradigm that Zhindia, and so perhaps Lolth, demanded. One of arrogance and isolation, of pure, foolish racism, and of endless cruelty. I saw her, Drizzt Do’Urden, her feelings unguarded, her words flowing free, for she believed at the time that I was fully caught, enslaved to her at the end of an illithid’s tentacles.”

  “Illithids. Always with you, the mind flayers are somehow involved,” Drizzt mumbled.

  “They are to me a vast library,” Kimmuriel said. “A guiding repository of n
ear-limitless knowledge.”

  Drizzt eyed him carefully. He had heard from Jarlaxle that long ago Kimmuriel had been missing for a bit, but really, Drizzt knew nothing more than what Kimmuriel had just told him. Was that even true? Or was this all an elaborate ruse?

  “Tell me, Drizzt Do’Urden, what do you think of the gods?” Kimmuriel asked.

  Drizzt rocked back, taken off his guard by the blunt, personal, and surprising inquiry.

  “I am no priest,” he replied after a moment of collecting himself. “Shouldn’t you be asking Dab’nay about that?”

  “Oh, we’ve spoken about it at length, for years now,” said Kimmuriel. “I assure you, she is as curious about your answer as I am.”

  “The broadness of your question makes me wonder what answers you’re seeking.”

  “About the gods,” Kimmuriel explained. “You rejected Lolth, obviously.”

  “Rejected her? She never had me, not a bit. I ignored the lessons she taught more than I rejected her in those early years in Menzoberranzan. I always thought of her as more of a demon than a goddess. And yes, when she came to me in that corridor and demanded my fealty, I did reject her offer, whatever the cost.”

  “But it would have been easier to acquiesce,” Dab’nay said.

  “Easier? To just give her my loyalty? My soul? How could I? How can anyone? A person’s beliefs might change, but you cannot change something that fundamental to your heart and soul upon request. I could profess fealty to Lolth superficially, but she could never hold my faith and loyalty truly, and if she were actually a god, she would know that.”

  “But you did find a god. Mielikki, yes?” asked Kimmuriel, and again Drizzt shrugged. “I have heard from your father that she has become a matter of debate between you and your wife, who worships her.”

  “Maybe Zaknafein should speak less,” Drizzt answered.

  “Oh, I assure you that it was quite pertinent to our discussions of late in Luskan, which is why, I am sure, the information came to him in his mind. And though I can’t properly recall the conversation, I’m not sure the words ever found their way to his lips.”