Starlight Enclave

by R. A. Salvatore

With a scream that rose above the cheers, Azzudonna put her head down and charged forward for the blue line.

  “She can’t cross that line,” Catti-brie reminded herself and her friends.

  But Azzudonna wasn’t slowing. No, she instead threw herself to her knees in a forward spin, around and around, and right before she reached the blue line, the last spin around, she planted a foot to throw her up to her feet, still turning, her right arm far back behind her turned shoulders, the ball cupped in her bent wrist.

  Around she came powerfully, heaving the ball with all her strength.

  It cleared the approaching Boscaille defender, cleared the other two and Vessi and his companion, and flew on, and the Grande Coliseum fell silent in a communal gasp of anticipation.

  The ball arced down gracefully and hit the inside far rim of the window. It ricocheted back, then back again, disappearing from sight, and still the crowd gasped, for if it stayed in, the point would count, but if it fell out, then no victor seemed certain.

  The ball came out, but not through the window. Somehow, whether from the spin, or a chip of ice on the jamb of the goal, or simple luck, or force of will from Azzudonna under the magical light, the gah made it deep into the goal and fell down the slide, exiting through the hole at the base of the wall.

  “Two!” Emilian, Ilina, and nearly twenty thousand other Scellobel onlookers screamed.

  A Boscaille defender scooped up the ball, but Vessi buried him where he stood, bearing him to the ice, tying him—and the ball—up to kill the time.

  That very dimension seemed to stop on the rink, seconds lasting almost minutes, minutes practically years, all the while Boscaille soldiers grabbing at their hair and Biancorso soldiers leaping and cheering.

  Not Azzudonna, though. The woman moved to the wall directly below where the companions were seated, and held up her arm, her wrist adorned with the strip of cloth torn from Zaknafein’s shirt.

  “Perte miye Zaknafein!” she yelled. “For you, my Zaknafein!”

  And she kept yelling, “Perte miye Zaknafein!” with all her voice, with all her strength, with all her tears for this doomed man whom she had championed this night, this stranger in whose honor she had found the strength to make that throw.

  “Perte miye Zaknafein!” she yelled.

  “Perte miye Zaknafein!” the Biancorso soldiers joined in on the next refrain.

  “Perte miye Zaknafein!” the Biancorso fans joined in on the next refrain.

  And then something happened that somehow seemed more magical still, something that touched Catti-brie and Entreri and Jarlaxle more than anything they had yet witnessed in Scellobel. An arktos orok Boscaille warrior had pulled the ball from Vessi and was sprinting up the rink, but he skidded to a stop and dropped the ball to the ice, stepping upon it with a heavy foot.

  “Perte miye Zaknafein!” the orc cried, and all of the Boscaille soldiers similarly stopped and shouted, in the next refrain.

  And then, “Perte miye Zaknafein,” the fifty thousand Callidaeans chanted in unison and harmony. On and on it went, louder and louder with each refrain, and the Merry Dancer lights above seemed to sway and dart with every syllable. Fifty thousand voices lifted in the chant. Fifty thousand aevendrow, kurit, Ulutiuns, and arktos oroks jabbed their fingers to point at Zaknafein, this stranger they did not know, this poor fellow who had stumbled upon their land and seemed to be in the last hours of his life.

  “Perte miye Zaknafein!”

  Catti-brie sobbed, and then began laughing uncontrollably, she didn’t know why. “What is happening?” she asked those around her, and noted that Entreri, too, was rocking between tears and laughter, and Jarlaxle’s shoulders bobbed with sobs or perhaps with confused joy.

  “What is happening?”

  “Perte miye Zaknafein!”

  “I don’t know,” Ilina yelled back at her. “I don’t know!”

  No one knew.

  But they all felt it.

  And they chanted and they pointed, and almost as if they were directing the Merry Dancers, or maybe it was just a trick of the angle and glow, a green-and-purple ribbon seemed to Catti-brie to reach down from the polar night and touch Zak, and he smiled.

  His huge, stretched, frog-like mouth smiled.

  The chant began to diminish, but then Zak suddenly pulled himself up from the litter, and growled and fought and stood, crooked and broken.

  But he stood.

  And all of Callidae cheered for him.

  Catti-brie looked down to the rink, to Azzudonna and the Boscaille dasher she had flipped, leaning on each other for support, the both of them calling for Zaknafein.

  Zaknafein straightened. No more did he labor for breath. Swollen and twisted, his skin angry red, he wouldn’t surrender, and Catti-brie knew then.

  She just knew.

  He would fight the phage until the magic returned.

  Zaknafein would live.

  “What have we just seen?” Catti-brie managed to ask Jarlaxle.

  “Everything I always dreamed of,” he answered through sniffles and embarrassed little chuckles of joy.

  Part 4

  Choices

  Never had I imagined that Kimmuriel Oblodra could become so obviously emotional over anything. He had watched his house torn down by Matron Mother Baenre, his entire family eliminated in but a few moments. He had watched his mother pulled back from her torment in the Abyss to serve as a connection to the illithid hive, only to be obliterated thereafter.

  He spoke of it often, to me, to Jarlaxle, and never, not one time, did I see anything but a calculated and intellectual approach to the personal tragedies.

  Even now, in our journey together to the east, when he recounted those events, they were offered only as lessons in the potential power that Lolth’s chosen might bring to bear against usurpers and heretics. There was no hint of grief, no mention that he had ever cared for K’yorl and the others. But when he spoke of the coming storm, and more than that, of the history of Menzoberranzan as revealed by the memories given to Yvonnel and Matron Mother Quenthel, there I saw the desperate longing, a clear sparkle, a clear sense of both eagerness and trepidation—a combination of emotions that can be found only when the outcome matters quite a lot to the person speaking.

  As I ponder this seeming inconsistency in the cold-hearted psionicist, the knot of Kimmuriel’s heart unravels. He had been trained to resignation. He had not flinched, or barely so, when his family had been destroyed, when his house and legacy and inheritance of stature and wealth had been so brutally and abruptly stolen from him—all because it was not an unexpected event in the cynicism that had been ingrained into Kimmuriel, into so many of us in Menzoberranzan, from birth.

  A combination of helpless resignation and sheer numbness from the daily assaults and atrocities is a deadly mix to the emotions of any drow.

  But these days, a sparkle in Kimmuriel’s eye.

  Now he comes to ride with me, to speak with me, to hope with me.

  That is the key to his awakening: he dares to hope.

  I cannot hide within myself now, though I truly wish I could. My excuses against that light of hope ring hollow in my own ears, but I cannot deny the resistance to this hope within my own heart.

  What will be my role, I wonder?

  The action of the matron mother and Yvonnel on the field was stark and shocking, I admit, and no doubt many witnessing it felt that same surge of hope.

  Initially.

  When I think back to my days in Menzoberranzan, what I remember most of all is the zealotry of the Lolthian priestesses, of my own mother, Matron Malice. I expect that, had this great event and great heresy occurred back in those times, I would have seen the sparkle in the eyes of Zaknafein, surely, and likely in those of my sister Vierna, perhaps even in the eyes of Maya.

  Those embers of hope would have been quickly extinguished by Malice, I am sure, and even if not, even if Malice had heard the hopes and promises of her children and consort, the idea that she would ha
ve turned from Lolth would derive only from her belief that whichever side she chose would most favorably affect her. Malice loved the fight. In this time, she would side with Matron Mother Quenthel only if she thought Quenthel would win, and that she, Malice, would then be given ample reward.

  But even that would have happened only if Malice had come to believe that Lolth was pleased with the chaos and the carnage, that the Spider Queen, in the end, would reward the victors and forget the vanquished.

  Perhaps that is the unavoidable outcome of this impending fight. How many of Matron Mother Quenthel’s allies will be so only for self-serving purposes? And how many only because they are confused, or afraid? Will mighty House Baenre, leading the revolt against Lolth, even be able to hold tight its own members? Will the driders-turned-drow even prove loyal soldiers to Quenthel, or will we quickly discover that they, too, were no more than a force planted by the Spider Queen, to test her children, to wreak chaos and root out those insufficiently devout?

  I cannot escape these thoughts, no matter how clearly I recognize within myself that same cynicism that allowed Kimmuriel Oblodra to shrug at the loss of his family! And this is not who I have striven to be since my first days out of that cursed city. Always, I choose against fear.

  But I cannot deny that my heart has not yet come to accept this glimmer of hope.

  I have too much to lose.

  I have Catti-brie and we have Brie, and the joy of that is more than I could ever have imagined. They would live on, and well I think, were I gone. Brie could not ask for a better mother than Catti-brie, and Catti-brie could not ask for better friends than the companions about us, her father and Wulfgar and Regis most important among them. She would not be alone were I to die in Menzoberranzan, a point made all too clear to me when I returned from my journey to everythingness to find my wife and new daughter surrounded by so much love.

  I neither doubt nor discount the grief Catti-brie would experience were that to happen. Simply thinking that she might now be lost in the north has my gut churning with twisting fears and imagined horrors and the most profound sense of possible emptiness I have ever known. On those occasions when the fears overwhelm me and I come to believe that perhaps she is truly lost to me, I am broken. Even while in the light of Brie’s smile, I am empty.

  I remember that feeling so keenly. I remember that morning in Mithral Hall when I awakened to find Catti-brie lifeless beside me. I remember my horror, my helplessness, in watching her spirit fly away, just out of reach, until it was gone through the solid reality of stone. It is not a feeling I ever want to experience again.

  And it is not a feeling I want to inflict upon Catti-brie.

  Nor do I wish for Brie to grow up wondering about her father who is not there. Will she see drow men walking toward her and think them her da? Will she feel as if I chose to be away from her, that I left her because I cared about something more than I cared about her? Or will she understand that I left because I cared so much about her that I needed to try to make the world better for her?

  And that is the rub. At what point might this greater struggle become someone else’s to pick up and fight? At what point—is there a point?—will it be someone else’s turn, when I am free to bask in the quieter and more personal responsibilities of my life?

  Or am I doomed to be so consumed by future hopes that I would miss out on all the present joys?

  The conflict is clear and jarring between my personal responsibilities and the wider mission, the purposeful road I have walked since I rejected Menzoberranzan, since I vowed that I would fight for that which, in my heart, is just and good. I know that the coming war in Menzoberranzan, as terrible as it will be, is to be waged to break free of the demon Lolth, that it will be fought in the hopes of the ultimate win for my people. For the shattering of crushing dogma that has hurt so many and will hurt so many more.

  For freedom.

  Yet for all that, what is my place?

  If Catti-brie does not return from the north, am I to leave Brie with the monks? With Bruenor? In either instance, am I abandoning my greater responsibility to her, to make sure she will grow in the arms of a parent?

  It is the first time in my life that I have had to ask myself this question.

  It is the first time that I have had so much to lose.

  It is the first time I’ve really had to ask: What is my place?

  —Drizzt Do’Urden

  Chapter 21

  Did You Not Feel It?

  Ibilsitato was so full it seemed as if the walls might bow out and collapse. The ice wine and beer flowed, the conversations collapsed repeatedly as another Biancorso soldier was announced, the murmuring din exploding into a singular roar of approval.

  And none louder than when Azzudonna was hoisted up onto a table, to stand victorious above the gathering.

  Artemis Entreri chuckled when he saw her, but said nothing.

  Catti-brie and Jarlaxle didn’t have to ask why, for they, too, offered little sounds, half in sympathy, half in amazement.

  “She’s got herself a nose like Bruenor,” Entreri said a moment later.

  “My da’s is longer, but only just as wide,” Catti-brie replied.

  Indeed, Azzudonna’s nose had taken the worst of her slide into the wall. It was obviously broken, with a little wad of cloth stuck up each nostril—ones they were likely changing often as they soaked through with blood. The rest of the woman’s face was puffy as well, one eye blackened and nearly closed from the swelling, and her neck, her blue-white shift, her hair, even, were sticky with drying blood.

  Mostly her blood.

  She didn’t seem to care up there on the table. She held her arms out wide, then dipped low and turned her right shoulder back, arm extended, to mimic her victorious throw.

  The roaring resumed, full-throated.

  “Guardreale!” came a cry from outside, from the main avenue of Scellobel, and many more voices echoed the arrival of the army from Mona Chess.

  The gathering squeezed for the door, pushing out onto the lane, the three companions following. There seemed little reason to be inside, they thought when they came out, and realized, too, that the inn of Ibilsitato had merely been a staging area to collect the soldiers of Biancorso.

  Now they were out again under the Merry Dancers of the magical sky, and all the borough was out about them. True to the calls, coming down the lane from Mona Chess marched the soldiers of Guardreale, and what seemed like the whole of that borough flowing behind them.

  So the party expanded, and then again and again as the other two boroughs joined in.

  It became a long celebration of Callidae and of cazzcalci, of the victors and of the vanquished, of the viewers and the Merry Dancers, of the food and wine and beer, of life itself.

  Even Artemis Entreri could not help but get caught up in the dance of Quista Canzay—Catti-brie took note of the man singing at one point, and when he realized she was watching him, he answered her grin with one of his own, rushed out from the line of singers, grabbed her by the hand, and dragged her back to join in the song.

  She didn’t resist. She did note, however, that across from her—on the other side of Entreri, and with his large arm draped across Entreri’s shoulders—was, amazingly, an orc, and one wearing the uniform of a Boscaille soldier.

  Artemis Entreri was allowing an orc to drape his arm across his shoulders. A moment of near-panic came over Catti-brie, a reminder of the surreality all about them, a warning to hold her guard.

  But no, she remembered this particular orc, and it all became more confusing still. Or perhaps, she told herself, it was less confusing. Perhaps it was just as it seemed.

  When the song was over, the line began to disperse into the throngs all about, and the orc slapped Entreri hard on the shoulder and started away.

  Entreri caught him by the arm.

  “Wait, one thing,” Entreri begged. The orc looked at him curiously.

  “At the end, after Azzudonna’s score, weren’t
you the one who got the gah and started the other way with it?”

  “I am,” said the orc. “I am warrior Lurnik of Boscaille.”

  “Why, then?” Entreri asked. “Time was not out.”

  “Yes, why did you stop?” Catti-brie added.

  The orc looked at them both with obvious puzzlement. “Perte miye Zaknafein!” he then roared, lifting a fist. The crowd around him responded in kind, the words reverberating down the street.

  “But you don’t know Zaknafein,” Entreri pressed.

  “Warrior Azzudonna championed him,” the orc said, tapping his wrist where Azzudonna had been wearing the torn strip of Zak’s shirt. “She is honorable and fierce. Would you have me dishonor her?”

  “Of course not,” Catti-brie answered. “Forgive us. We are new here and do not know your customs.”

  “Besides,” the orc added with a grin, “did you not feel it? I have fought in cazzcalci five times. Three sunsets ago, Guardreale became champions. But even on that great night, I felt nothing to match the song for Azzudonna’s Zaknafein. Did you not feel it?”

  “It was among the most incredible things I have ever felt,” Entreri confirmed as Catti-brie nodded her agreement.

  “The magic,” she said quietly.

  “Yes. It will be remembered long after I am gone,” Lurnik said, and he saluted, repeated, “Perte miye Zaknafein,” and melted into the throng.

  Catti-brie sighed, digesting it all, and watched him go, then turned to Entreri.

  “He’s not wrong,” the man said. “I’ve never felt anything quite like the sheer power of that chant in that magical sunset.”

  “I want to feel it again,” Catti-brie agreed.

  Entreri lifted his eyes and one hand upward. “It’s still there.”

  “It’ll be six months before the sunrise, you understand.”

  He looked at her skeptically, but she nodded, certain.

  “Then I guess I shouldn’t feast for the entire night,” Entreri said, and he, too, walked off into the throng.

  “Or at least, not drink the night through!” she called after him.