Starlight Enclave

by R. A. Salvatore

  “Jarlaxle went out to scout the area,” Entreri answered her unspoken question, then went on to the second. “And no, it never grew darker, and seems to be brightening already. We’ve landed in a land without night. The sun runs in a circle around us, like the spying eye of some giant flame god.”

  Catti-brie wasn’t so sure of any of that, particularly the part about there being no night up here, but she had no answers and so offered no rebuttals. “That’s probably how Jarlaxle figured out that our visitor was no real drow, for what real drow would live in a place without any night?”

  In response, Entreri tapped his face just below his eye, indicating the eyepatch. “Polymorphs and illusions will never fool that one.”

  She turned back to Zak. “Let me prepare some spells and I’ll see if I can do better for you this day.”

  “You should eat first,” Zak replied, his voice weak. He looked at his bowl and held it out toward her. “Here, if you wish. It tastes foul to me.”

  Catti-brie wasn’t really hungry, but she was curious. She took the bowl and ate a spoonful of the porridge. It wasn’t foul at all, and was, in fact, quite tasty.

  She nodded at Zak and rose, then moved back to her bedroll and the small reliquary she kept in her backpack, which contained a piece of a unicorn’s horn. She was certain now that the internal wound was much worse than the external injury had reflected, and so she meant to prepare her strongest healing spells.

  Jarlaxle returned soon after, announcing that he had found a pass that would carry them farther to the north, one sheltered enough so that the snow was not deep about it. “We should make fine progress,” he promised, then went over to Zak and began a private conversation. A short while later, he looked past Zak to Catti-brie, and the woman nodded. She climbed to her feet and went to join the two, a small pouch in her hand.

  She kneeled down beside Zak. “This should help you feel much better,” she said. “If not, I have one stronger, though if I use that today, I’ll never find the energy to recall us home if need be.”

  She closed her eyes and began to chant, calling to Mielikki, feeling the power growing within her, her hands warming, hot.

  Not as hot as she had expected, however. She felt the tingle, she felt the energy, she felt the warmth, but they were all like the polar sun: a paler light by far.

  Still, she placed her fingers on Zak’s torn shoulder, then threw forth the energy, willing it deep inside the man.

  Zaknafein gave a great exhale and slumped in on himself.

  Catti-brie finished with her eyes closed, nose-to-nose with Zak, who was similarly looking inward. They opened their eyes together, the slightest nod of gratitude coming from the weapon master to the priestess. Catti-brie rose up, holding out her hands for Zak to grab as she helped him to his feet. By the time he was upright, it was apparent that he had taken her assistance only out of courtesy, for he didn’t need it.

  “Finally,” he said to Jarlaxle and Entreri. He lifted his arm up over his head and rolled it about, nodding. “The pain is little more than a nuisance now.”

  Catti-brie accepted his hug and reciprocated, and breathed a sigh of relief at her other two friends, who nodded appreciatively. She didn’t tell them the truth of the depth of her relief, though, and tried to dismiss her feeling that her spell was not quite up to the power it should have known.

  “Good choice in bringing that one along,” Artemis Entreri softly said to Jarlaxle.

  “Her magic is wonderful,” Jarlaxle agreed.

  “Her company is better,” Entreri said.

  Catti-brie heard it all. She closed her eyes and pressed her head against Zak’s shoulder, and despite her trepidations, told herself that this would indeed be a great adventure and that she had chosen correctly in agreeing to it.

  “Come, let us be on the move,” Jarlaxle said. “I have found a trail that I believe will lead us nearer our goal.”

  “How do you know where that goal might be?” Catti-brie asked. Because, pointedly, Jarlaxle had not given her Khazid’hea to hold, to see if she could sense the direction of Doum’wielle, as he had told her he would when he had convinced her to come along on this expedition. She had initially dismissed it as being lost in the necessity, first of getting off the mountainside and then in getting away from their assailant and its possible allies. Still, they had moved at least twenty miles from where they had first landed, north-northeast, so they believed, and Jarlaxle didn’t seem concerned at all that they might be going the wrong way.

  Jarlaxle simply answered, “Come,” and he walked out of the shallow cave.

  Some time later, they came to the trailhead of which Jarlaxle had spoken, a rocky affair winding back into the mountains. Catti-brie looked all about, trying to get a fix on where they had first arrived in this frozen land, but it was impossible. The sun’s movement offered no real help, and the high-rising mountain peaks gave her little perspective. That windblown great white plain was still in sight, but to the right and back the other way. If that was north, then the trail seemed to be going more southwest.

  She didn’t argue, though. This was Jarlaxle’s expedition, after all. But neither did the change do anything to alleviate her suspicions that there was more involved in this journey than the hunt for Doum’wielle. More than once as they started on their way, the woman glanced to Zaknafein’s sword belt and the feline-shaped pommel of Cutter, the sword that was supposed to guide them, to guide Catti-brie.

  The sword she had not touched since their arrival.

  When they grew tired, they camped, day after day—or that one long day, as it seemed. The sun became even less help regarding direction when they left behind that one reference point, the white plain. For along the mountain trails, the path bent continually and without consistency of direction. More than once, Catti-brie saw Jarlaxle fiddling with that dull white orb, but whenever he caught her watching him, he just shook his head and shrugged.

  They rested in caves or under overhangs of heavy stone. They ate the rations from Jarlaxle’s supplies, supplemented by some magic by Catti-brie that produced bland loaves of bread and water. Catti-brie also kept tending Zak with spells of healing, just to make sure that he was fully recovered.

  The journey proved uneventful, the only sounds the wind and an occasional rumble of something distant, likely another avalanche. Remarkably, they saw no signs of life. No animals, not even birds in the sky. It was a bit warmer than it had been near the ice pack with that constant freezing wind, and no longer did they feel the bite of cold beyond their magical protections, at least. But neither did they find the respite of a night sky, with the maddening sun circling them throughout their travels like a vulture waiting for them to lie down and die. They knew not how many days had passed, but some twenty or so rests later, so subtly that it went unnoticed by all for a long while, they came to an area on a high ridge, moving around the side of a mountain, where the ground below them was not white with snow, and even bore a few plants, scraggly and small, dotting the mountainside.

  They moved through a narrow gorge, then came out to the mountainside at an angle that afforded them a wide view. Peaks stretched long and far before them, and endlessly off to the left, but to the right, the ground sloped down to a large box canyon, and there, some water, and small trees, far, far below, and huge birds coasting high on warm updrafts.

  Beyond the valley, the mountains continued, but not so far, it seemed.

  It was the lake that held Catti-brie’s gaze. Silver and sparkling, it stretched out to the left below, narrowing to a river that ran deeper into the mountains. The source was not hard to see, for on the right end of that lake, the canyon was sealed by a mountain of ice—no, more than a mountain, a gigantic ice serpent, a frozen river hundreds of feet high and snaking away between the mountain peaks to the right, filling the valleys beyond sight.

  “Are we in Damara?” Artemis Entreri asked.

  “That’s not the Great Glacier,” Jarlaxle assured him. “Though I believe that i
t is a glacier.”

  The mercenary leader stepped off the trail, tentatively moving down the steep slope toward the lake far below. “Come,” he bade them. “And take care in your every step.” As he spoke, he dislodged a couple of small stones, which began rolling and bouncing down like a pair of racers. One stopped in a depression, while the other hit a half-buried rock and bounced up into the air, then disappeared over some distant ledge.

  “Your every step,” Jarlaxle repeated.

  They moved down the slope several hundred feet, then came to a sheer cliff. Undaunted, Zak and Jarlaxle used some ropes and drow levitation to float down from shelf to shelf, hammering pitons to create a ladder for Catti-brie and Entreri.

  The going was painfully slow, straight down the mountain instead of along any winding trails they might have sought.

  Catti-brie kept a couple of arcane spells in the front of her thoughts, primarily one to make a falling person float like a feather, in case of catastrophe. She could only trust that it would work in this strange place.

  More and more shrubs appeared around them. They heard the cawing of the great birds riding the updrafts, and the air was becoming comfortably warm. They touched down on a plateau full of blueberry bushes, hundreds of feet below the high trail. The air buzzed with gnats and flies and bees, so many small bees. Squirrels and other small animals darted about the underbrush, while one white squirrel climbed up on a scraggly little tree and stared at the intruders with obvious curiosity.

  They couldn’t see the lake from here at the back end of the plateau, but the top layers of the glacier that sealed it in to the right were visible above their level, showing them that they were well more than halfway to the valley floor.

  A quick spell by Catti-brie assured them that the berries were safe to eat—that they were indeed blueberries and quite delicious—so they picked and picked and stuffed handfuls into their mouths as they made their way to the other side of the wide plateau.

  There, they looked down to the tops of small trees, and on the lake, and, to their surprise (and Jarlaxle’s delight) upon structures, houses of stone and thatch.

  “All right, I have had enough of the climbing,” Jarlaxle said. “Come, Entreri, bring forth your mount!”

  “Why didn’t we just do that at the top of the damned cliff?” a frustrated Zaknafein asked.

  “Adventure,” replied a smiling Jarlaxle, and he dropped his obsidian figurine, summoning the nightmare. He went up on its back, offering his hand to Zak. “Besides, would you have us plucked from the sky by one of those oversized vultures?”

  “You really think it wise to swoop down on villagers on these beasts?” Catti-brie asked.

  “I’m tired of crawling across the cliffs like a spider,” Jarlaxle answered, “and I always do so prefer a grand entrance.” And over he and Zak went, the hellsteed floating, gliding down toward the lake.

  With a shake of her head and a sigh, Catti-brie accepted Entreri’s hand and took a seat behind him on his mount. He trotted to the edge and simply kept going, out into the air and flying down for the silvery lake, the nightmare moving its hooves as if it were running across solid ground.

  “The villagers will probably shoot us out of the sky,” Entreri said, but Catti-brie wasn’t really listening, her attention fixed on a bird sitting on a ledge far to the right—a blue-black bird with a black beak, like a raven, except that it seemed nearly as large as the nightmare and its riders combined.

  “Are those rocs?” she asked Entreri.

  “Babies, if so,” he replied, and Catti-brie was sure that he felt her shudder.

  She grew quite relieved as they descended and the bird hardly seemed to care, and when she turned her attention to the small settlement below, a different level of curiosity came over her.

  The village seemed empty of life. It was on the lake’s far bank, the stone houses stretching all the way to the towering glacier—no, right into the glacier, she realized.

  Jarlaxle’s hellsteeds touched down, he and Zak hopping off. Entreri’s mount fell more than flew the last few feet, landing hard, snorting and turning. Catti-brie leaped from its back, Entreri quickly following.

  “Dismiss it!” Jarlaxle warned, though his command was hardly necessary, for Entreri was already doing so.

  The hellsteed became an obsidian figurine once more, Jarlaxle’s fast following suit.

  “Did it try to shake you with the landing?” Zak asked. “To throw you?”

  Entreri shook his head, and Catti-brie agreed. “The glide down from above exhausted it,” she said.

  “Our sense of time passing is all confused,” Entreri agreed. “The item wasn’t ready for that much exertion and use.”

  Jarlaxle didn’t appear to agree, but he just shrugged, and the friends went to searching the town. Jarlaxle called out a couple of times, Entreri and Zak moved into the shadows, and Catti-brie followed Jarlaxle, her hand on her belt buckle, ready to bring Taulmaril to her grasp.

  The more she looked around, the less she thought she’d need the bow. Little things told her that no one was about, and no one had been for a long while. She noted several of the rails of a wooden corral were down, lying on the ground. A bucket sitting beside a well wasn’t empty, but the little water left was green with algae. The doors on some houses were open, others closed, the splotchy clumps of grasses overgrown, the gardens untended—for many seasons, it seemed. There was a dock on the lake, but the boat beside it was submerged in shallow water.

  “What happened here?” she asked Jarlaxle.

  He shook his head, leading through the deserted settlement, moving toward the glacier. A large house at the end of the lane seemed half inside the glacier, half out. As its door was open, the two curious explorers entered. They found wooden plates, rotted bedding, metal utensils and tools—all of the things one would expect in a frontier town.

  What did surprise her and Jarlaxle was the opposite door of the house, for it, too, was open, and led into a hollow within the glacier.

  Catti-brie cast a spell of light on the tip of an arrow, and in that glow reflecting off the ice all around them, the two realized that the town was much larger than they had thought, with a line of structures that had apparently been claimed by the ice.

  “What is this place?” Jarlaxle asked her. “What people live north of Icewind Dale?”

  “There was one tribe rumored to be just north of the Sea of Moving Ice—a family of folk in the Ten Towns settlement of Lonelywood claimed heritage from there—but I never met anyone directly from the place; nor had anyone else that I know of, and most believed that it might be more myth than truth.”

  “Barbarian tribes? Like Wulfgar’s?”

  “No, no, very different. Smaller men and women.” She put her hand at her chin height. “With round and flat faces. At least, the northern folk who had settled in Lonelywood had that appearance. I can tell you that I’ve seen houses like this before.”

  “I’ve seen houses, too,” he said skeptically.

  “Yes, but the design of these houses is specific. See where the hearth is? It’s to let the heat from a single fire warm all corners, and to let the smoke easily escape.”

  “So maybe those people in Lonelywood came from here?”

  “Maybe.” But she was still dubious.

  A loud creak and shudder reminded them that they were under tons of ice, and so they made their way back through the first house and out from under the glacier.

  Entreri and Zaknafein were waiting for them, standing near an open door to a house near the lake. The weapon master waved for Jarlaxle to come to him, then pointed inside the doorway when they arrived.

  Catti-brie led the way in, the glowing arrow up before her. Barely across the threshold, she understood why Zak had guided them here, for they had found their first villagers.

  The remains of some villagers, at least.

  The skeletons were small and humanoid, likely short humans, as Caiti-brie had noted earlier. Three distinct and nearl
y complete skeletons littered the floor, all lying on their backs and all with the fronts of their rib cages shattered.

  Catti-brie kneeled down beside the largest, studying the breaks in the rib bones.

  “These bones were broken from the inside out,” she said.

  “Or from the back through the front?” Zak asked.

  The woman pulled her sleeve over her hand and rolled the skeletal torso to the side, shaking her head before she even looked more closely. “I see no wounds from the back, no wounds at all on the back ribs or the spine.”

  “Then maybe some beast stabbed him and tore out his heart, breaking the bones on the way out,” Jarlaxle offered. “One of those giant birds, maybe.”

  Catti-brie didn’t argue the point, but neither did she believe it. The killing wound seemed clear here, and seemed to have come from within the dead person. She moved to the second body, then the third, and found the same curious pattern.

  She turned to Jarlaxle, her doubts clear on her face, she knew, when the mercenary assured her, “It was a long time ago.”

  Catti-brie couldn’t argue that point.

  They found a couple of other similarly situated and broken skeletons about the village, and a graveyard in the foothills across from the lake—which seemed unremarkable enough, except that two of the graves had been dug up.

  Or dug out of. That was the first thought that came to Catti-brie, but she let it go when they inspected more closely, even digging at the remaining dirt, and discovered that bones remained in those graves, broken and twisted.

  The four settled into one of the houses farthest from the lake. Catti-brie repaired the door hinges with minor spells of mending, while Entreri and Zak set traps about the outside, and clever barriers and deadfalls for anyone, or anything, thinking to pay them a visit. Jarlaxle, meanwhile, started a fire and cooked a fine dinner.

  They sat around a table inside soon after, sharing that meal.

  “Savor it,” Jarlaxle warned. “The strangeness of this place’s effect on our magic, as with the hellsteeds, is beginning to concern me, and so I’ll save my stores until we find ourselves truly in need of them. After this dinner, we’ll be reduced to the conjured food Catti-brie can create for us.”