Relentless

by R. A. Salvatore

  She held that memory close now, a vivid reminder that she and her friends, the Companions of the Hall, had been battling long odds—and winning—for a very, very long time.

  “By the gods,” Regis muttered, lying atop an embankment along with his four companions. Below them, a formation of huge driders, perhaps a hundred strong, crossed a wide field. The friends had been traveling for nearly a tenday, a difficult journey both emotionally and, especially for Artemis Entreri, physically. Yvonnel had done much to aid in their progress, with not just spells of healing and spells to provide nourishment, but also spells to propel them on their way. Though not with teleportation or anything of that sort. She wanted them all to digest the new reality fully, and she also wanted to get a good understand of the disposition of the lands between Thornhold and Gauntlgrym.

  “Lots o’ demons,” said Athrogate.

  “Those aren’t demons,” Yvonnel corrected. “The demons, I suspect, are inside Gauntlgrym. This is the vanguard of the drow force.”

  “I thought driders were rare,” said Dahlia.

  “So did I,” Yvonnel replied. “I have no answers for this.”

  “How about the big answer to the big question?” asked Athrogate. “Like, how’re we meanin’ to get to them doors?”

  He nodded out across the field, but none had to follow that movement to know what he meant. Beyond the field lay some trees, and beyond that wood the ruined, and now clearly occupied, halfling village of Bleeding Vines. To the right, south of the village, stood the empty tram station, the exit and entrance tunnels to Gauntlgrym evident along the side of the rising mountain.

  “Getting to them won’t do us any good if we’re marching down into a horde of demons,” Regis remarked.

  “Not seein’ a better way,” said the dwarf.

  “You have nothing, lady?” the halfling asked Yvonnel.

  “I have something,” she replied, “but I had hoped to gather more information before using it.”

  She rolled onto her back then and began whispering, too low for any of the others to make out the words. They started to understand when her magical scouts, crystal-like birds, began to fly in, perching on her chest and whispering into her ears, one by one. It went on for a long while, when finally an exasperated Yvonnel sat up.

  “The land about us is all lost,” she announced.

  “Yeah, we seen that,” said Athrogate. “Don’t take a bird to know.”

  “All about us,” the drow woman clarified. “Here to Luskan, all of the coast, all of the Crags. Port Llast labors under the crack of gnoll whips.”

  “Gnolls?” Athrogate snorted. “We should go kill ’em all to death, just because they’re gnolls.”

  “Demons are about the village before us, but mostly the major fiends,” Yvonnel went on. “I expect that the lesser monsters are below, likely among the higher levels of Gauntlgrym. King Bruenor is sorely pressed, if not already conquered.”

  “So what do we do?” Regis asked.

  Yvonnel shook her head, mulling it over.

  “We go in,” said Athrogate.

  “And if there is no refuge within?” Dahlia asked. “If it is all demons and drow?”

  “Then we go right through and out the other side,” Yvonnel announced. “Come now, down the hill.” She stood up and paced down the embankment, the others following, Athrogate bolstering Entreri, who was still a bit unsteady on his swollen legs.

  “Join hands,” Yvonnel instructed them. “Artemis Entreri to me.”

  “We goin’ to run again?” Athrogate asked, for the few times they had done this in the last days Yvonnel had cast a dweomer to speed them on their way.

  Artemis Entreri groaned. These speeding travels were draining his limited strength.

  “This is different,” Yvonnel promised, mostly to the battered man. She took up his hand. “Athrogate, take his other hand. Then you, Regis, then Dahlia. No matter what happens, do not let go. Any of you.”

  “Or we trip and fall?” asked the dwarf, who errantly believed he had heard this speech before.

  “Or you will become substantial in the midst of a thousand fiends, and not I, nor even your god, could save you,” said Yvonnel, and as soon as the living chain was formed, she began spellcasting.

  “What’re—” Athrogate started.

  “Just shut up and hold on,” Dahlia told him. “For our sake and your own, hold on.”

  Dahlia’s voice thinned as she spoke, became insubstantial, became as the wind in the ears of her companions.

  For soon they were the wind and little more, a cloud of swirling vapors. Curiously, Regis still felt the grip of Dahlia and of Athrogate, though he had no hand that he could determine. But they were joined, locked, and he was glad of it as the cloud began to drift, then move with purpose to Yvonnel’s tug—a pull both physical, somehow, and telepathic. All as one, they swept up over the embankment and down to the field. Regis had to strain to hold focus when Yvonnel took them right across the formation of driders, weaving through the abominations as if they were no more than a cloud, and indeed, they weren’t. Still, more than one drider took note of their passing, though none showed any understanding of what this strange fog might be.

  This is what it’s like when a ghost passes by, the halfling thought. A chill breeze.

  Into Bleeding Vines, they passed among drow, and these enemies seemed more aware than the driders had been, several hopping and turning, calling out to priestesses, and Regis saw one, then another, began casting some spell.

  Yvonnel moved them more swiftly then, because she was afraid, Regis knew. Could these priestesses pull them out of her wind-walk? Oh, the horror, to be dropped into the middle of this ferocious army!

  The halfling relaxed only a bit when they soared into the tunnel, speeding down into the darkness, then, soon after, into the grand entry cavern, the place thick with demons and driders. Regis’s heart sank when they crossed to the small pond, then drifted over the pond and into the complex proper, to find the place also teeming with monstrous denizens of the lower planes.

  Through the rooms, down the stairs, to the great chamber separating the top levels from the main complex, and down there, too, demons roamed.

  The sound of fighting made the halfling’s spirits leap as they passed from that huge chamber into the tighter ways leading to the Great Forge. Soon they crossed the battleground, dwarven side-slinger catapults blasting minor demons to pieces, dwarven soldiers holding their ground, beating back the press of the horde.

  Then it was all dwarves again, clerics tending to the wounded, reinforcements ready for their turn at the front lines. Beyond that, though, Gauntlgrym, King Bruenor’s Gauntlgrym, remained!

  They came to a stop in a tunnel with a pair of dwarven sentries, near to the main chambers of the Gauntlgrym leaders, and there, some distance from the two who guarded an ornate door that Regis knew well, Yvonnel released her spell.

  The five companions became corporeal in a flash, all but Yvonnel stumbling a bit from the stark transition.

  “What ho!” the dwarves yelled, lowering their pikes and readying a charge.

  “Be easy, my friends,” said Yvonnel. “You know me, a friend of Drizzt and of Jarlaxle.”

  “And me!” Regis announced, rushing around to put himself between the dwarves and his companions.

  “Rumblebelly!” the two dwarves cried in unison.

  “Aye,” Regis replied. “You must take us to King Bruenor at once. And to Lady Donnola Topolino—please tell me that my wife is safe.”

  “Aye, Rumblebelly,” one of the dwarves replied. “She’s as well as any of us, which ain’t so well, ye might be guessin’.”

  Regis of course understood that to be true enough, but his relief was profound. He had just lost Drizzt—he couldn’t bear to lose his beloved Donnola, too!

  A knock had Catti-brie leaping up, or rather, rolling carefully from her couch and moving as fast as she could manage for her door. She pulled it open, expecting Penelope with ne
ws from Luskan, but found instead a tall, thin man dressed in simple light-brown robes.

  “Brother Afafrenfere?” she asked, surprised.

  “I am formally named as a master now, but yes, good lady.” He looked at her very swollen abdomen. “I trust that you are well?”

  “I am.”

  He nodded and smiled warmly, his gaze locked on her belly.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, feeling a bit unnerved. “I mean . . . please, do come in.”

  “Thank you, lady. I am looking for Drizzt. And I beg of you, pardon my surprise and intrigue here. I did not mean . . .”

  “Yes, brother, the child is Drizzt’s.”

  Afafrenfere locked eyes with Catti-brie, his jaw hanging open. “He . . . he only mentioned that he could not immediately return with me to the Monastery of the Yellow Rose when last I spoke with him to extend Grandmaster Kane’s invitation. I had thought something amiss.”

  “Well, so it is.”

  “Hardly amiss!” the monk replied, his arms coming forward as if he wanted to hug Catti-brie but couldn’t quite figure out if he should.

  She stepped forward and initiated a full hug.

  “Oh, but a child of two such heroes will be the grandest . . .” Afafrenfere stuttered, his voice breaking just a bit. “A human and a drow?”

  “Half elves are not so uncommon,” Catti-brie reminded him.

  “But half drow? I have never heard . . .” Afafrenfere said. He shook his head suddenly and quite emphatically, waving his hands as if trying to take back the words, and Catti-brie knew that he had recognized the growing scowl on her face.

  “I can only imagine the beauty of this child,” Afafrenfere cried, and he surely seemed sincere.

  “Fear not, brother, I understand your surprise, and your hesitance,” she said generously.

  “No, lady, if you think it hesitance, then I have misrepresented that which is in my heart,” the monk replied. “This is glorious news, and the child will be wonderful. And beautiful.”

  “And shunned?”

  The monk’s eyes widened. “Never!”

  Catti-brie smiled to relieve the tension, and in truth, she was just teasing the exuberant Afafrenfere. She knew, certainly so, the trials her half-human, half-drow child would face, and knew, too, that no child born to any Waterdhavian lady or Damaran queen would come into the world with a larger and more wonderful group of supporters to chase away any who could not see past the unusual combination of its heritage.

  “May your claim prove true,” she said.

  “Oh, it shall.”

  “So, if you’ve come to entice Drizzt to your monastery, know that I’ll not hear of it. And I fear he could not, anyway, for a darkness has come again—or perhaps it is the same darkness, over and over, relentless and destructive.”

  “No, of course he could not, and word of the growing turmoil in the region has reached us in Damara. But that is not why I’ve journeyed this far west. I must speak with Drizzt at once.”

  “He isn’t here,” Catti-brie admitted. “He is in Gauntlgrym, fighting beside King Bruenor.”

  She noted the blood draining from Afafrenfere’s face.

  “What do you know, brother?”

  “Perhaps nothing.”

  “Tell me! Has Gauntlgrym fallen?”

  “I have no knowledge of Gauntlgrym, lady, on my word.”

  “Then what? Why have you come?”

  Afafrenfere swallowed hard. “Grandmaster Kane . . .” He paused and seemed to be searching for the proper words. “Grandmaster Kane sensed something. I know not how to describe it. A transcendence of the mortal body. Like death, but not so.”

  Catti-brie’s face screwed up in obvious confusion. As a powerful priestess, she knew of things like plane-walking and astral projection, where a powerful spellcaster could transfer herself to another plane of existence, but she was fairly certain that Afafrenfere was speaking of something else.

  “It is almost certainly nothing of concern,” the monk said. “I only mention it because it is something that would likely interest Drizzt after his long hours of training with the Grandmaster of Flowers.”

  “Perhaps Grandmaster Kane thought that the discovery of this sensation of his would tempt Drizzt back to the monastery,” Catti-brie offered.

  “I am sure that’s it,” said Afafrenfere.

  Catti-brie started to press for more of an explanation, but Penelope Harpell appeared at the opened door, hustling inside. She glanced at Afafrenfere only briefly, with just a slight nod to acknowledge his presence.

  “I would speak with you alone,” she told Catti-brie.

  “Master Afafrenfere has come here in search of Drizzt,” Catt-brie replied. “I suspect his road beside us is only now just begun.”

  Penelope looked at him and offered another nod, then said, her expression grim, “Gromph would not permit me entrance.”

  “The Hosttower of the Arcane?” Afafrenfere asked.

  “His extravagant quarters,” she clarified. “His door was closed to me.” She turned to Catti-brie. “Your old acquaintances, Lady Avelyere and Lord Parise Ulfbinder, answered my call and took me into Avelyere’s chambers to parlay. We spoke only briefly, because Archmage Gromph was not pleased that I had even been allowed into the Hosttower. Not at all. The Hosttower is neutral in this war, by his command.”

  “Neutral?”

  “Yes—it was Gromph who crippled the magical flow of energy and thus shut down the magical portals.”

  “Then he sides with the invaders,” Catti-brie said.

  “According to Lord Parise, he claims not to. But the drow who have come to the lands and taken the demon army, and also the fleet that Lord Brevindon Margaster of Waterdeep sailed to Luskan, are very powerful. Gromph made it clear to all the mages within the Hosttower that he—and they if they wanted to remain alive and in their new home—would not go against the invaders. Nor would he allow me to stay, since my presence alone could forfeit his neutral status.”

  “They court disaster,” Catti-brie said. “Woe to them all . . .”

  “The invaders are keeping far from the tower. They will not challenge the powers assembled there. They tried once only, and the evidence of the slaughter was thick about the fields surrounding the tower.”

  “If the drow win across the north, it will only be a matter of time before they fully claim the Hosttower.”

  Penelope nodded.

  “Where is Luskan now, then?” Afafrenfere asked.

  “Luskan is under the command of High Captain Brevindon Margaster, it would seem. Fully so, with only the Hosttower allowed some autonomy.”

  “He took the city that quickly?”

  “Luskan’s hodgepodge fleet and almost all of her captains are pirates,” Penelope explained. “There was fighting for only a bloody night and a day following, but the loyalties of such self-interested people as those in power in Luskan are as changeable as the wind. It would seem that they decided it was better to join with the invaders than to fight them.”

  “So they simply bent their knees to a new invader?” the monk asked.

  “I’d hardly say they bent the knee. But one lord or another . . .” Penelope replied.

  “This lord is backed by drow, so it seems, and with demons?”

  “And gnolls,” Penelope agreed. “The fleet was thick with the wild beasts, and now so are the streets of Luskan. But recognize, too, that the power of Luskan before the attack was also held by drow.”

  “Jarlaxle and Bregan D’aerthe,” Catti-brie explained to the monk.

  “Thus, they traded one high captain for another,” Penelope said, “and one more wretched, it seems, and so, one who will allow them their piracy and murderous ways with even less restraint. Make no mistake, the largest complaint Parise and Avelyere had heard of Jarlaxle’s agent, High Captain Beniago Kurth, was that he was bringing a measure of civility and community to the City of Sails.”

  Catti-brie nodded and chuckled helplessly, and Afafrenfer
e looked at her curiously.

  “Jarlaxle is no evil person,” she explained. “Even King Bruenor approved of Bregan D’aerthe’s secret power behind the dark veil of Luskan. Jarlaxle is fierce, but only when he needs to be, and only against those who deserve it. His goal was to use the best interests of the people of Luskan against their traditional behavior.”

  “To show them a better way,” the monk said.

  Catti-brie nodded. “Slowly. And with their consent, as they found the ways of trade more lucrative and less . . . mortal than their piracy.”

  “They think they traded the drow for a Waterdhavian lord, and one wretched enough to accept their lifestyles,” said Penelope. “Gromph knows the truth, though. The city will be enslaved soon enough, serving merciless masters—or should I say, Matrons?”

  “Damn him,” Catti-brie muttered. “Treacherous fool.”

  “More fearful than malignant, I believe,” Penelope said. “From all I could garner from Avelyere and Parise, Gromph is truly afraid of the storm that has come to his front door. Remember, he was once archmage of Menzoberranzan. He understands the power Menzoberranzan has brought to bear. And he feels it most keenly, because he was finding a life he had never been brave enough to even imagine in the grand multidimensional corridors and mansions of the Hosttower of the Arcane.”

  Catti-brie sighed and waddled wearily to take a seat in a soft chair. “Whatever his reasons, whatever his feelings, we must open those gates,” she said.

  “We cannot.”

  “Not from here, perhaps.”

  “Not from the Hosttower, either. You are in no position to challenge the likes of Gromph Baenre, and we could not begin to bring enough power to bear to convince any within to go against him.”

  “From Gauntlgrym,” Catti-brie explained. “There may be a way to open the portals whether the Hosttower is involved or not. You must get me to Gauntlgrym, posthaste.”

  Penelope wore a doubtful expression.

  “You just teleported to Luskan and back with ease,” Catti-brie argued.

  “The Hosttower is a prepared destination for such spells,” Penelope said. “Both Kipper and I are attuned to the room created for this exact purpose. Neither of us have any real knowledge of Gauntlgrym.”