The Crystal Shard

by R. A. Salvatore

  As his thoughts probed every detail of the coming days, though, Kessell’s radiant face suddenly grayed over. He turned sharply on the man at his side, his features tensed as though he had discovered a terrible error. Eldeluc and several of the others in the alley became uneasy. They all fully understood the consequences if the archmage of the Hosttower of the Arcane ever learned of their murderous deed.

  “The robe?” Kessell asked. “Should I have brought the red robe?”

  Eldeluc couldn’t contain his relieved chuckle, but Kessell merely took it as a comforting gesture from his new-found friend.

  I should have known that something so trivial would throw him into such a fit, Eldeluc told himself, but to Kessell he merely said, “Have no fear about it. There are plenty of robes in the Hosttower. It would seem a bit suspicious, would it not, if you showed up at the archmage’s doorstep claiming the vacated seat of Morkai the Red and holding the very garment that the murdered wizard was wearing when he was slain?”

  Kessell thought about it for a moment, then agreed.

  “Perhaps,” Eldeluc continued, “you should not wear the red robe.”

  Kessell’s eyes squinted in panic. His old self-doubts, which had haunted him for all of his days since his childhood, began to bubble up within him. What was Eldeluc saying? Were they going to change their minds and not award him the seat he had rightfully earned?

  Eldeluc had used the ambiguity of his statement as a tease, but he didn’t want to push Kessell into a dangerous state of doubt. With a second wink at Dendybar, who was inwardly thoroughly enjoying this game, he answered the poor wretch’s unspoken question. “I only meant that perhaps a different color would better suit you. Blue would compliment your eyes.”

  Kessell cackled in relief. “Perhaps,” he agreed, his fingers nervously twiddling.

  Dendybar suddenly grew tired of the farce. He motioned for his burly companion to be rid of the annoying little wretch.

  Eldeluc obediently led Kessell back down the alleyway. “Go on, now, back to the stables,” he instructed. “Tell the master there that the wizards shall be leaving for Luskan this very night.”

  “But what of the body?” Kessell asked.

  Eldeluc smiled evilly. “Leave it. That cabin is reserved for visiting merchants and dignitaries from the south. It will most probably remain vacant until next spring. Another murder in this part of the world will cause little excitement, I assure you, and even if the good people of Easthaven were to decipher what had truly happened, they are wise enough to tend to their own business and leave the affairs of wizards to wizards!”

  The group from Luskan moved out into the waning sunlight on the street. “Now be off!” Eldeluc commanded. “Look for us as the sun sets.” He watched as Kessell, like some elated little boy, scurried away.

  “How fortunate to find so convenient a tool,” Dendybar noted. “The wizard’s stupid apprentice saved us much trouble. I doubt that we would have found a way to get at that crafty old one. Though the gods alone know why, ever did Morkai have a soft spot for his wretched little apprentice!”

  “Soft enough for a dagger’s point!” laughed a second voice.

  “And so convenient a setting,” remarked yet another. “Unexplained bodies are considered no more than an inconvenience to the cleaning wenches in this uncivilized outpost.”

  The burly Eldeluc laughed aloud. The gruesome task was at last completed; they could, finally, leave this barren stretch of frozen desert and return home.

  Kessell’s step was sprightly as he made his way across the village of Easthaven to the barn where the wizards’ horses had been stabled. He felt as though becoming a wizard would change every aspect of his daily life, as if some mystical strength had somehow been infused into his previously incompetent talents.

  He tingled in anticipation of the power that would be his. An alley-cat crossed before him, casting him a wary glance as it pranced by.

  Slit-eyed, Kessell looked around to see if anyone was watching. “Why not?” he muttered. Pointing a deadly finger at the cat, he uttered the command words to call forth a burst of energy. The nervous feline bolted away at the spectacle, but no magical bolts struck it, or even near it.

  Kessell looked down at his singed fingertip and wondered what he had done wrong.

  But he wasn’t overly dismayed. His own blackened nail was the strongest effect he had ever gotten from that particular spell.

  egis the halfling, the only one of his kind for hundreds of miles in any direction, locked his fingers behind his head and leaned back against the mossy blanket of the tree trunk. Regis was short, even by the standards of his diminutive race, with the fluff of his curly brown locks barely cresting the three-foot mark, but his belly was amply thickened by his love of a good meal, or several, as the opportunities presented themselves.

  The crooked stick that served as his fishing pole rose up above him, clenched between two of his furry toes, and hung out over the quiet lake, mirrored perfectly in the glassy surface of Maer Dualdon. Gentle ripples rolled down the image as the red-painted wooden bobber began to dance slightly. The line had floated in toward shore and hung limply in the water, so Regis couldn’t feel the fish nibbling at the bait. In seconds, the hook was cleaned with no catch to show for it, but the halfling didn’t know, and it would be hours before he’d even bother to check. Not that he’d have cared, anyway.

  This trip was for leisure, not work. With winter coming on, Regis figured that this might well be his last excursion of the year to the lake; he didn’t go in for winter fishing, like some of the fanatically greedy humans of Ten-Towns. Besides, the halfling already had enough ivory stocked up from other people’s catches to keep him busy for all seven months of snow. He was truly a credit to his less-than-ambitious race, carving out a bit of civilization in a land where none existed, hundreds of miles from the most remote settlement that could rightly be called a city. Other halflings never came this far north, even during the summer months, preferring the comfort of the southern climes. Regis, too, would have gladly packed up his belongings and returned to the south, except for a little problem he had with a certain guildmaster of a prominent thieves’ guild.

  A four-inch block of the “white gold” lay beside the reclining halfling, along with several delicate carving instruments. The beginnings of a horse’s muzzle marred the squareness of the block. Regis had meant to work on the piece while he was fishing.

  Regis meant to do a lot of things.

  “Too fine a day,” he had rationalized, an excuse that never seemed to grow stale for him. This time, though, unlike so many others, it truly bore credibility. It seemed as though the weather demons that bent this harsh land to their iron will had taken a holiday, or perhaps they were just gathering their strength for a brutal winter. The result was an autumn day fitting for the civilized lands to the south. A rare day indeed for the land that had come to be called Icewind Dale, a name well-earned by the eastern breezes that always seemed to blow in, bringing with them the chilled air of Reghed Glacier. Even on the few days that the wind shifted there was little relief, for Ten-Towns was bordered on the north and west by miles of empty tundra and then more ice, the Sea of Moving Ice. Only southern breezes promised any relief, and any wind that tried to reach this desolate area from that direction was usually blocked by the high peaks of the Spine of the World.

  Regis managed to keep his eyes open for a while, peering up through the fuzzy limbs of the fir trees at the puffy white clouds as they sailed across the sky on the mild breezes. The sun rained down golden warmth, and the halfling was tempted now and then to take off his waistcoat. Whenever a cloud blocked out the warming rays, though, Regis was reminded that it was Eleint on the tundra. In a month there would be snow. In two, the roads west and south to Luskan, the nearest city to Ten-Towns, would be impassable to any but the sturdy or the stupid.

  Regis looked across the long bay that rolled in around the side of his little fishing hole. The rest of Ten-Towns was taking
advantage of the weather, too; the fishing boats were out in force, scrambling and weaving around each other to find their special “hitting spots.” No matter how many times he witnessed it, the greed of humans always amazed Regis. Back in the southern land of Calimshan, the halfling had been climbing a fast ladder to Associate Guildmaster in one of the most prominent thieves’ guilds in the port city of Calimport. But as he saw it, human greed had cut short his career. His guildmaster, the Pasha Pook, possessed a wonderful collection of rubies—a dozen, at least—whose facets were so ingeniously cut that they seemed to cast an almost hypnotic spell on anyone who viewed them. Regis had marveled at the scintillating stones whenever Pook put them out on display, and after all, he’d only taken one. To this day, the halfling couldn’t figure out why the Pasha, who had no less than eleven others, was still so angry with him.

  “Alas for the greed of humans,” Regis would say whenever the Pasha’s men showed up in another town that the halfling had made his home, forcing him to extend his exile to an even more remote land. But he hadn’t needed that phrase for a year-and-a-half now, not since he had arrived in Ten-Towns. Pook’s arms were long, but this frontier settlement, in the middle of the most inhospitable and untamed land imaginable, was a longer way still, and Regis was quite content in the security of his new sanctuary. There was wealth here, and for those nimble and talented enough to be a scrimshander, someone who could transform the ivorylike bone of a knucklehead trout into an artistic carving, a comfortable living could be made with a minimum amount of work.

  And with Ten-Towns’ scrimshaw fast becoming the rave of the south, the halfling meant to shake off his customary lethargy and turn his new-found trade into a booming business.

  Someday.

  Drizzt Do’Urden trotted along silently, his soft, low-cut boots barely stirring the dust. He kept the cowl of his brown cloak pulled low over the flowing waves of his stark white hair and moved with such effortless grace that an onlooker might have thought him to be no more than an illusion, an optical trick of the brown sea of tundra.

  The dark elf pulled his cloak tighter about him. He felt as vulnerable in the sunlight as a human would in the dark of night. More than half a century of living many miles below ground had not been erased by several years on the sunlit surface. To this day, sunlight drained and dizzied him.

  But Drizzt had traveled right through the night and was compelled to continue. Already he was overdue for his meeting with Bruenor in the dwarf’s valley, and he had seen the signs.

  The reindeer had begun their autumn migration southwest to the sea, yet no human track followed the herd. The caves north of Ten-Towns, always a stopover for the nomadic barbarians on their way back to the tundra, had not even been stocked to re-provision the tribes on their long trek. Drizzt understood the implications. In normal barbarian life, the survival of the tribes depended on their following the reindeer herd. The apparent abandonment of their traditional ways was more than a little disturbing.

  And Drizzt had heard the battle drums.

  Their subtle rumblings rolled over the empty plain like distant thunder, in patterns usually recognizable only to the other barbarian tribes. But Drizzt knew what they foretold. He was an observer who understood the value of knowledge of friend or foe, and he had often used his stealth prowess to observe the daily routines and traditions of the proud natives of Icewind Dale, the barbarians.

  Drizzt picked up his pace, pushing himself to the limits of his endurance. In five short years, he had come to care for the cluster of villages known as Ten-Towns and for the people who lived there. Like so many of the other outcasts who had finally settled there, the drow had found no welcome anywhere else in the Realms. Even here he was only tolerated by most, but in the unspoken kinship of fellow rogues, few people bothered him. He’d been luckier than most; he’d found a few friends who could look beyond his heritage and see his true character.

  Anxiously, the dark elf squinted at Kelvin’s Cairn, the solitary mountain that marked the entrance to the rocky dwarven valley between Maer Dualdon and Lac Dinneshere, but his violet-colored almond eyes, marvelous orbs that could rival an owl’s in the night, could not penetrate the blur of daylight enough to gauge the distance.

  Again he ducked his head under the cowl, preferring a blind run to the dizziness of prolonged exposure to the sun, and sank back into the dark dreams of Menzoberranzan, the lightless underworld city of his ancestors. The drow elves had actually once walked on the surface world, dancing beneath the sun and the stars with their fair-skinned cousins. Yet the dark elves were malicious, passionless killers beyond the tolerance of even their normally unjudging kin. And in the inevitable war of the elven nations, the drow were driven into the bowels of the ground. Here they found a world of dark secrets and dark magics and were content to remain. Over the centuries, they had flourished and grown strong once more, attuning themselves to the ways of mysterious magics. They became more powerful than even their surface-dwelling cousins, whose dealings with the arcane arts under the life-giving warmth of the sun were hobby, not necessity.

  As a race, though, the drow had lost all desire to see the sun and the stars. Both their bodies and minds had adapted to the depths, and luckily for all who dwelt under the open sky, the evil dark elves were content to remain where they were, only occasionally resurfacing to raid and pillage. As far as Drizzt knew, he was the only one of his kind living on the surface. He had learned some tolerance of the light, but he still suffered the hereditary weaknesses it imparted upon his kind.

  Yet even considering his disadvantage under daytime conditions, Drizzt was outraged by his own carelessness when the two bearlike tundra yetis, their camouflaging coats of shaggy fur still colored in summer brown, suddenly rose up before him.

  A red flag rose from the deck of one of the fishing boats, signaling a catch. Regis watched as it moved higher and higher. “A four-footer, or better,” the halfling mumbled approvingly when the flag topped out just below the mast’s crosspiece. “There’ll be singing in one house tonight!”

  A second ship raced up beside the one that had signaled the catch, banging into the anchored vessel in its rush. The two crews immediately drew weapons and faced off, though each remained on its respective ship. With nothing between him and the boats but empty water, Regis clearly heard the shouts of the captains.

  “Ere, ye stole me catch!” the captain of the second ship roared.

  “You’re water-weary!” the captain of the first ship retorted. “Never it was! It’s our fish fairly hooked and fairly hauled! Now be gone with your stinking tub before we take you out of the water!”

  Predictably, the crew of the second ship was over the rail and swinging before the captain of the first ship had finished speaking.

  Regis turned his eyes back to the clouds; the dispute on the boats did not hold any interest for him, though the noises of the battle were certainly disturbing. Such squabbles were common on the lakes, always over the fish, especially if someone landed a big one. Generally they weren’t too serious, more bluster and parrying than actual fighting, and only rarely did someone get badly wounded or killed. There were exceptions, though. In one skirmish involving no less than seventeen boats, three full crews and half of a fourth were cut down and left floating in the bloodied water. On that same day, that particular lake, the southernmost of the three, had its name changed from Dellon-lune to Redwaters.

  “Ah little fishes, what trouble you bring,” Regis muttered softly, pondering the irony of the havoc the silvery fish wreaked on the lives of the greedy people of Ten-Towns. These ten communities owed their very existence to the knucklehead trout, with their oversized, fist-shaped heads and bones the consistency of fine ivory. The three lakes were the only spots in the world where the valuable fish were known to swim, and though the region was barren and wild, overrun with humanoids and barbarians and sporting frequent storms that could flatten the sturdiest of buildings, the lure of quick wealth brought in people from the farthest reac
hes of the Realms.

  As many inevitably left as came in, though. Icewind Dale was a bleak, colorless wasteland of merciless weather and countless dangers. Death was a common visitor to the villagers, stalking any who could not face the harsh realities of Icewind Dale.

  Still, the towns had grown considerably in the century that had passed since the knuckleheads were first discovered. Initially, the nine villages on the lakes were no more than the shanties where individual frontiersmen had staked out a claim on a particularly good fishing hole. The tenth village, Bryn Shander, though now a walled, bustling settlement of several thousand people, had been merely an empty hill sporting a solitary cabin where the fishermen would meet once a year, exchanging stories and goods with the traders from Luskan.

  Back in the early days of Ten-Towns a boat, even a one-man row-boat, out on the lakes, whose waters year-round were cold enough to kill in minutes anyone unfortunate enough to fall overboard, was a rare sight, but now every town on the lakes had a fleet of sailing vessels flying its flag. Targos alone, largest of the fishing towns, could put over a hundred vessels onto Maer Dualdon, some of them twomasted schooners with crews of ten or more.

  A death cry sounded from the embattled ships, and the clang of steel on steel rang out loudly. Regis wondered, and not for the first time, if the people of Ten-Towns would be better off without the troublesome fish.

  The halfling had to admit that Ten-Towns had been a haven for him, though. His practiced, nimble fingers adapted easily to the instruments of the scrimshander, and he had even been elected as the council spokesman of one of the villages. Granted, Lonelywood was the smallest and northernmost of the ten towns, a place where the rogues of rogues hid out, but Regis still considered his appointment an honor. It was convenient as well. As the only true scrimshander in Lonelywood, Regis was the sole person in the town with reason or desire to travel regularly to Bryn Shander, the principal settlement and market hub of Ten-Towns. This had proved to be quite a boon to the halfling. He became the primary courier to bring the catches of Lonelywood’s fishermen to market, for a commission equaling a tenth-piece of the goods. This alone kept him deep enough in ivory to make an easy living.