The Companions s-1

by R. A. Salvatore

  “It doesn’t matter,” Regis said again, but more quietly, and contritely, for he recognized the lie.

  Of course it mattered. It had to matter. If it did not, then what claim might a miserable and ungrateful Regis ever have to stand beside the Companions of the Hall?

  But what could he do?

  He glanced to the north, in the general direction of the fine Morada Topolino. Shasta’s warning echoed in his thoughts, and he knew that she wasn’t exaggerating. Pericolo was the Grandfather to all who knew him, and that meant that he was the Grandfather of Assassins. One didn’t easily attain such a title as that.

  Regis entertained a fantasy of returning to Delthuntle from Icewind Dale with Drizzt and the others beside him, to properly repay the Grandfather.

  It was just a fantasy, however, for Eiverbreen couldn’t wait that long, and the Grandfather himself was not a young halfling.

  Regis moved to a different track, wondering if he could indeed stop, or at least slow, the take of oysters. Perhaps if he claimed only a couple each day, Pericolo would see his “gift” to the Parrafins as a losing business proposition.

  Even that seemed a fleeting possibility-for what then would be left for Regis and his father? If he tried it, the Grandfather would monitor them closely. They would have to remain utterly destitute or invoke his wrath.

  Regis sighed. He looked again in the general direction of Morada Topolino, but hopelessly.

  The situation didn’t improve over the next few tendays. With a bottle ever in hand, Eiverbreen stumbled around the tavern and the streets, covered in vomit and a multitude of small wounds, from tumbling into a chair or a wall or onto the street. He had more than a few bruises and cuts from knuckles, as well, as in his drunken stupor, he often insulted others.

  Regis returned to their room one afternoon, his pouch half-filled, to find his father in a very agitated state. Broken glass and a puddle of semi-translucent brown liquid near one wall offered a clue.

  “Ah, good that you’re ’ere,” Eiverbreen slurred. He laughed and nearly fell over from his seated position near the mess. “My legs’re a bit wobbly,” he said, struggling to stand.

  Regis helped him to his feet, though Eiverbreen fell immediately against the wall for better support.

  “Be a good brat and go get me another bottle,” Eiverbreen instructed.

  “No,” Regis replied, and hearing the word escaping his lips only bolstered his resolve. He couldn’t do much about the larger situation around him, but perhaps he could resolve the problem more directly.

  “No?” Eiverbreen stared down at him hard.

  “Too much, Da,” Regis said calmly.

  “Eh?”

  “You are too much in the bottle, Da,” Regis said. “You need to slow down. More food and less drink, yes?”

  He noted that Eiverbreen wasn’t blinking.

  “And you need to get out of this tavern-you hardly ever go outside anymore!” Regis said, trying to sound as cheery as possible. “Oh, but it’s a wonderful season, full of sun and a cool wind;}span.bigI wooden axeon off the sea. Let me get you some food. We’ve time before sunset for a walk to the shore-”

  The last word came out with a yelp attached, for in an explosion Regis had never before witnessed, so sudden and primal in its ferocity, Eiverbreen sprang at him and slapped him hard across the face, sending him sprawling to the floor.

  “Go fetch me a bottle!” Eiverbreen yelled, storming closer and stamping his foot heavily against the wooden floor. “You little rat! Don’t ever tell me what to do!” He reached down and grabbed the stunned Regis by the collar and hoisted him from the floor, lifting him right up off his feet before dropping him back down. Eiverbreen didn’t let go, shaking him violently and howling at him with spittle flying.

  Regis hardly heard the words, he was so stunned by this abrupt transformation. Eiverbreen finally let go, sending Regis spinning back against the room’s door.

  “Go!” Eiverbreen demanded.

  Tears welling in his eyes, Regis scrambled out of the room. He rushed down the stairs, but didn’t go to the bar. Instead, he burst out of the tavern’s door, onto the street.

  Before he had even realized his course, the young halfling found himself in the alleyway beside the fabulous Morada Topolino.

  He waited for the sun to set, waited for the dark of night to fully fall, then Spider began to climb. His love for Eiverbreen drove him upward.

  He moved right to the roof and crept to the window of the widow’s walk, his vision following the moonbeams inside.

  “What am I doing here?” he quietly asked. What could he hope to accomplish? What difference might anything he did in Morada Topolino make to the death spiral of Eiverbreen?

  He would steal-a lot-and with that wealth, he would take Eiverbreen away to a better place, and to a situation not dependent upon the whims of a heartless Grandfather and an uncaring barkeep.

  “Yes,” he said and nodded.

  He ran his sensitive young fingers around the window encasement, feeling for trip wires or other potential traps. How he wished he had a glass cutter, and even more so when he realized that the window was locked.

  Regis pulled a small knife from his pouch, one he used to pry up oysters stuck under rocks in the depths of the Sea of Fallen Stars. The window was divided into two panes that could slide past each other to allow the sea breeze to enter. The higher pane was inside the lower, he noted.

  He eased his knife into the tight crease between them.

  Slowly, very slowly, his face pressed against the glass below as he pushed the blade down.

  And there it was: a tripwire.

  Regis nodded, having seen this particular trap design many times in Calimport. The movement of the sliding windows would set it off, one or the other taking the wire with it. Each pane’s frame would have on it a small sharp edge, designed to cut the wire when it pulled tight.

  Regis worked his knife around the top lip of the top pane, and found just such a blade, cleverly embedded. He removed it with ease.

  Back in went the knife, this time tapping the locking mechanism. With a subtle twist, Regis threw the lock.

  Slowly he lowered the top pane. He would have preferred to lift the lower one, obviously, for easier access, but he couldn’t easily get to the embedded blade asked, and Catti-brie nodded.igh wooden axeonon that one, for, as that pane was in front of the other, the blade would be between them. No matter, though. His name was Spider, after all, and it was a moniker he had properly earned.

  The window half down, Regis glanced around to ensure that no one was watching, then up he went, climbing the side of the dormer, then twisting over, inserting himself into the room above the window.

  He clung there, in the room at the top of the window, for some time, inspecting the floor. Likely there was a pressure trap in place, he told himself, and so, still up on the wall, he moved to the side before dropping down lightly.

  The room was sparsely furnished, with just a chair facing out the window, overlooking the vast sea, and a small table beside it-for a dinner tray, perhaps.

  Behind the chair was a trap door, open now, and with a secured ladder leading down into the main house.

  The main house and the Grandfather’s treasures.

  Down went Regis, creeping into the darkness. He padded around on bare feet, getting a lay of the various hallways and doors, stopping and listening at each. Around a corner to the narrow corridor leading to the back of the house, he saw a small light peeking around the edges of a slightly opened door. Every step taken with care, every movement in complete silence, the burglar peeked into the room.

  A single candle burned, and burned low. He could see a grand desk across the way, one too ornate to be that of a minor clerk. Thinking this to be the place of the Grandfather’s business, the halfling dared push the door a bit further and peer in.

  To his great relief, the room was empty.

  To his great delight, the room was full of statues and baubles, a t
rio of chests, and an assortment of other interesting, and likely profitable, articles.

  It had beeand had found

  CHAPTER 12

  MISTRESS

  The Year of the Splendors Burning (1469 DR) Netheril

  It felt to her like a common nightmare, falling helplessly, the deafening wind thundering in her ears. She tumbled and tried to right herself, which only made her twist and spin as she turned head-over-heels.

  Dizzy and disoriented, Catti-brie felt her face flapping from the pressure of her speeding descent. Only then did she realize that she was screaming at the top of her lungs, though she couldn’t really even hear her voice through the drumbeat of the rushing air.

  She noted the spin of colors before her, brown and blue, brown and blue, and used that to get her bearings, up from down.

  She stretched out to her full length and threw her arms out wide, and gradually managed to stop her tumble.

  But then, knowing ground from sky once more, another reality struck her profoundly: the ground was much closer and she was speeding toward it and hadn’t the energy to transform into a bird, or anything else.

  She was just a human girl, whose bones would shatter to mush when she slammed into the ground.

  Lady Avelyere gasped and threw her hand over her mouth as she watched the scene unfolding in the waters of her scrying pool. She looked to the east, but the child was too far away for Avelyere to spot her with the naked eye.

  “Go! Go! Help her!” Lady Avelyere yelled to a pair of her students who lingered nearby. The young women-Diamone and Sha’qua Bin-glanced into the scrying pool, yelped, and rushed away.

  “No, no, no,” Lady Avelyere said to the child who could not hear her. She didn’t want it to end like this! There was something here with this young one, something magnificent and intriguing.

  And now it was ending before her very eyes. She scoured her brain, seeking some spell she might throw through the scrying pool-was it even possible?

  She heard a gasp from behind her and turned to look over her shoulder to see Rhyalle and Eerika, both wide-eyed and horrified. Eerika began to weep in sympathy.

  Lady Avelyere didn’t even want to turn back, for tearing her eyes from the horrifying scene had broken her fixation. There was nothing she could do, she told herself, and so too told herself not to watch the morbid, unfolding catastrophe.

  But she couldn’t resist, and bit her lip as she turned her gaze once more to the plummeting Ruqiah.

  She began to cast a dweomer of levitation. It was probably useless.

  But she had to try.

  She didn’t even feel as if she was falling anymore. It seemed as if she were standing in a strong wind, her arms out wide to catch as much of the breeze as she could.

  But the ground loomed ever nearer, by the heartbeat.

  The young girl began to recite a spell she had learned only a couple of tendays previously. Only because of that had Catti-brie dared to fly so high, for she was, of course, well aware that the magic of her shapechanging ability was a finite thing each day, and could leave her abruptly.

  She began to whisper. She fought the tug of the wind and reached into her

  How Lady Avelyere’s eyes widened when the girl in the scrying pool suddenly slowed her descent, drifting down, floating down, so gently!

  “Mistress!” cried Eerika. “You saved her!”

  But Lady Avelyere knew that she had done no such thing. In her desperation, she had fumbled her spellcasting and had started over, and was no where near completing the levitation spell. In any case, she knew it wouldn’t have worked through a simple scrying device.

  Lady Avelyere’s thoughts whirled with possibilities-Diamone, one of the two students she had sent running, was quite proficient in the levitation spell. Indeed, Avelyere had tasked Diamone with cleaning the high windows of their keep in Shade Enclave for just that reason.

  Had Diamone gotten close enough and saved the girl?

  But Lady Avelyere could only shake her head as she considered the floating Ruqiah’s current position. Even if Diamone had been on the ground directly below her, Ruqiah would be long out of range of such a dweomer.

  There could be only one answer.

  “She cast the spell,” Lady Avelyere told the two behind her. “Our little Ruqiah has learned a new trick, apparently.”

  “More powerful than any arcane magic we have yet seen from her,” Rhyalle remarked.

  “But not more powerful than the druidic magic, surely,” Eerika countered. “Is there such a spell as that in a druid’s repertoire?”

  Not knowing the answer, Lady Avelyere quickly cast a detection spell aimed at the scrying pool, sensing the emanations around the floating child. “Arcane,” she announced.

  “We have watched her for many tendays,” Eerika said. “How could we have missed this ability, this level of arcane power? And to execute an intricate spell in the middle of such a fall!”

  “We haven’t witnessed it because it is new,” Lady Avelyere decided, and she turned and nodded to drive home the point to her two confused students. “Our little Ruqiah is being trained.”

  She was still several hundred feet above the ground, but now floating down, drifting on the winds as she sank gently, as if in deep water. She did a quick estimation of her height and her descent and came to the comforting conclusion that the spell’s duration would more than suffice to put her safely back to the ground.

  She had another spell on her lips to control her movement, but she changed her mind and shook her head. She didn’t want to be in control now.

  She wanted to fly, or to float at least, and let the wide winds take her where they may.

  Catti-brie noted the landmarks below her, and as the ground grew larger, she began to pick out movements here and there. She noted some wolves lying around in the sunlight, and some grazing deer far to the side.

  The wind was not so strong in her ears now in the gentle descent, but there wasn’t much to hear from this high perch. The absence of sound served to increase Catti-brie’s sense of freedom, and she came to see this wind-inspired ride, like the bird-flight before it, as a spiritual journey as much as a physical one. She could learn from the tickling wind. On the ground, the world seemed so static and firm, but up here, drifting and floating around on the gusts, it occurred to her that the world was ever in flux, ever in movement.

  She closed her eyes and let the sensations wash over her.

  Soon after, she touched down, and fell into a short trot. She looked back up at the brilliant sky and reflected on the feelings of freedom, of flight, of falling, of drifting on the breezes.

  This, then, was the beauty of her communion with Mielikki, she realized. Everything she experienced had the power to widen her vision, her thoughts, her possibilities.

  Truly, she felt blessed.

  Lady Avelyere was awakened from a nap a few days later by Rhyalle, with word that little Ruqiah was on the move.

  “Eerika a long while to realize become Lord Ulfbinderon, Diamone, and Sha’qua Bin have been dispatched to track her,” Rhyalle assured her.

  Still, Lady Avelyere was fast to her scrying pool, gathering more information from Rhyalle as she went. Soon enough, she had conjured up the image of the girl. Ruqiah, it seemed, was now a wolf, loping along in the general direction of the Desai encampment. Lady Avelyere nodded, not surprised.

  “She will go to look in on her tribe and her parents when night has fallen,” the diviner predicted, and she, Avelyere, would be there to watch. She had already inconspicuously visited the Desai several times, invisibly, and knew the layout of the camp and the location of Ruqiah’s parents.

  “How long shall we play this game, Mistress?” Rhyalle asked, and Avelyere turned to regard her curiously.

  “She is being trained,” Rhyalle explained. “She grows more powerful by the day, it seems. She will become harder to catch, and harder to control.”

  The words hit Lady Avelyere with the power of truth, and she found h
erself nodding in agreement.

  “And we grow weary of this brown plain,” Rhyalle admitted.

  “We?”

  “All of us,” said the student. “And yourself as well, I would guess?”

  Lady Avelyere found herself smiling at the accusation. She had not trained her students to be mindless pets, after all, cowed into telling her what they thought she would most like to hear. No, far from it. To join the Coven of Avelyere was to pronounce opinions without fear of retribution.

  And Lady Avelyere had to admit, in this instance, Rhyalle was right.

  “Go to her secret garden,” she instructed the younger woman. “Gather the rest of your peers, even those in pursuit of Ruqiah, and set the traps, as we discussed. It is time for us to bring little Ruqiah into our net. I have seen enough. We know her strengths and her weaknesses.”

  Rhyalle bowed and turned to the other two acolytes.

  Lady Avelyere went back to her scrying pool and watched the wolf’s progress. Soon enough, as the sun began to set, she saw through the pool the waving white and brown tents of the Desai.

  She dismissed the enchantment and prepared her next spell, a teleport, which put her very near to the Desai and very near to Ruqiah. A simple dweomer of invisibility, another to prevent magical detection, and into the camp walked the diviner, cuite pleased with herself.

  “What is it?” Rhyalle asked when Lady Avelyere joined her near the Desai child’s secret garden.

  Lady Avelyere shook her head and sighed. “Wizards, both,” she replied.

  “Both? Ruqiah and …?”

  “And both of her parents,” Lady Avelyere explained with a wide grin. She had watched Ruqiah in the tent with her parents. She had expected a quiet night of hugs and kisses, perhaps a comforting story or two. What she had seen instead was a training session in the magical arts as regimented and trying as anything she would inflict on her own, much older students. Ruqiah’s parents, particularly Kavita, the mother, had been instructing the child on “the glory of At’ar the Merciless, the Yellow Goddess, the bringer of light and fire.” Ruqiah could conju;}span.bigI Lord Ulfbinderonre a fan of flames with ease, and the power of her spell was substantial! Clearly this little child of only a few living years was on the verge of casting fireballs.