Relentless

by R. A. Salvatore

  Zeerith took a deep breath, but neither it nor the assurance from the Matron Mother seemed to have any calming effect upon her.

  Yvonnel understood. Their world had just turned upside down and was about to shaken by the ankles until everything they thought they knew fell to the ground below them. Sos’Umptu would likely be a problem, a big one, and would no doubt run to the side of Mez’Barris and whisper in her ear.

  Zhindia Melarn, too, so zealous and vicious, wasn’t finished. Perhaps it would have been expedient to turn the full force of House Baenre on her in that moment of vulnerability, to erase her and hers from the world in one swift slaughter.

  But no. They had to give her the chance.

  To do less would be to become exactly that which they had just rejected.

  Chapter 31

  Rebirth

  “Are you coming out?” the two men in the extradimensional chamber heard, from a familiar voice.

  “Jarlaxle,” Entreri confirmed, peering out the small window to the region immediately below. He dropped the rope and scrambled outside the pocket dimension, sliding down to the ground, Wulfgar close behind.

  When he went out, Wulfgar saw that it was indeed Jarlaxle, and he was not alone, both Regis and Zaknafein beside him.

  “How . . . ?” Entreri started to ask, but he shook his head and dismissed it. Was there ever any purpose in asking this one how he knew the things he knew?

  “Regis told me that you had come out here,” Jarlaxle answered anyway, which of course told none of them of how he had found the extradimensional chamber. He did have that eyepatch, though . . .

  Jarlaxle looked to Wulfgar. “You are an uncle, my friend,” he said with a grin. “Of sorts, I suppose, and yes, the daughter of Drizzt and Catti-brie is as beautiful as you would expect.”

  “I must get home,” Wulfgar said.

  “Perhaps that would be best for all of us,” said another, and the foursome turned as one to see the approach of Yvonnel and Kimmuriel.

  “You heard?” the priestess asked Wulfgar and Entreri.

  Entreri tossed her the clairaudience disk. “We heard.”

  “The drow are leaving?” Wulfgar asked.

  “All of them,” Yvonnel confirmed. “Already on the march, or the run, depending upon which house concerns you. They flee to the corridors of the lower Underdark, and I expect that many different routes will be used as they, as we, all rush back to our guarded homes.”

  “Well, not all,” Jarlaxle quipped.

  “Where do you see Bregan D’aerthe in all of this?” Kimmuriel asked Yvonnel.

  “I’m not sure that is where I see myself in all of this,” Yvonnel answered. “There are no examples of that which is about to befall us all, I fear.”

  “Just the memories of Yvonnel,” said Kimmuriel, and Yvonnel nodded.

  “Return the ring to Catti-brie as I bade you,” Yvonnel told Entreri. “For I must be away now to fight for my home. My real home and not the one that has been . . . infected for two millennia.” She looked to Zak. “Will you join me?”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know what just happened.”

  “And I don’t know what just happened, either,” an annoyed Jarlaxle pointed out.

  “I resist telling you because I know that you cannot comprehend the magnitude of it,” Yvonnel started. “But then again, perhaps you particular two, more than most others, will understand enough to appreciate it—and I’m certain that Kimmuriel here will fill in more details in short order.

  “The truth is, you don’t know Menzoberranzan. Not even you, Jarlaxle, who has spent your life trying to figure it out. You cannot understand the hope that brought us to the great cavern those millennia removed. Yes, hope. It was not anger that brought us there, nor fear. It was hope. We fled a world of tyrant queens and insane kings, a place of unending war and injustice. We found a sanctuary, a deep cave, full of Faezress magic—though we did not understand that at the time—and easily defended. A sanctuary, I say, and indeed that is what the word ‘Menzoberranzan’ then meant in the ancient tongue of the drow.

  “A hundred families,” she continued. “Ten thousand dark elves. And each had a say in their family, and each family had a voice in the Plenum, and the largest families spoke those concerns in the Conclave, which you now—and only—know as the Ruling Council. We were not rulers then as much as servants, heeding the words of all the drow. And it was Lady Lolth that led us there, before she was called the Spider Queen.”

  Yvonnel gave a little laugh and shake of her head.

  “I remember well now that I—my namesake, I mean—thought spiders ugly little things, and quite terrifying back then,” she added. “But like many things I thought ugly and wrong, I and all the others came to see them as normal and good, even exalted, as the years passed.”

  “Were men on this . . . Conclave?” Jarlaxle asked. “This Plenum, even?”

  Another helpless laugh came from the woman. “No, sadly,” Yvonnel replied. “I do not pretend that it was idyllic, nor that we were far removed from the barbary and injustice we tried to escape. Even so, I insist, this was not the Menzoberranzan you have ever known. When I see our city as it is against the vision of what it was, I am appalled and almost without hope.

  “Almost.

  “But I will hold that hope tightly to my heart. Because the struggle is worth it.”

  Zak looked confused, as did Jarlaxle, but Wulfgar was nodding.

  “I just told you, but I do not expect you to understand,” Yvonnel said to them. “Just hope. And my aunt Quenthel cannot tell the others . . .”

  “Your aunt Quenthel?” Jarlaxle asked, drawing a wide grin from Yvonnel.

  “She is, after all. She cannot tell the others, particularly not the other matrons, for they do not have the gift that she and I have been given.”

  “The memories of Yvonnel the Eternal,” Jarlaxle reasoned.

  “And the ability, because of your lieutenant here, to view those memories separately and from afar, without the emotional, visceral attachment to them that led my namesake—indeed, I have to say that led me, for in this context her actions truly become a part of me!—to do the things she’s, I’ve, done.”

  Jarlaxle and Zak exchanged helplessly puzzled looks.

  “To see the beginning and the end without the middle,” Yvonnel told them. “To see the effect starkly, without the steps of the cause.”

  Jarlaxle gave a little gasp and nod.

  “The hole is dug one handful at a time,” said Zak, catching on as well.

  “The darkness is deepened one lie, one act, at a time,” Kimmuriel agreed.

  “Wish me well, my friends, for your stake in this is no less than my own,” Yvonnel finished. “King Bruenor will win here now—the battle is almost over.”

  “Luskan is soon reclaimed,” Kimmuriel added.

  Yvonnel bowed to them all and took her leave, disappearing into the forest.

  “I expect that you will shed light on this,” Jarlaxle said to Kimmuriel.

  “Yvonnel explained it quite well,” the psionicist replied.

  “And you weren’t surprised at all. How could you know?”

  “The hive mind of the illithids is a vast repertory of knowledge,” Kimmuriel answered. “A great library—the greatest library—full of musty thoughts in unknown places.”

  “So you told Yvonnel and Quenthel?” a startled Jarlaxle asked.

  “I led them to their own memories, nothing more,” Kimmuriel explained. “I did not know exactly the end of that path, but it had become clear to me that the path would show them the truth of Lolth, and that revelation would—so I hoped and so I bet with my very life—turn them away from the Spider Queen.”

  Jarlaxle answered with an uncustomary “Hmm.”

  “At least that,” Zaknafein agreed.

  “So you learned this from the illithids,” Jarlaxle reasoned, speaking very slowly and following his developing thoughts carefully, “and t
he memories of Yvonnel the Eternal taught the truth to Yvonnel and the Matron Mother of Menzoberranzan.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the memories of Yvonnel the Eternal were given to Yvonnel and to Quenthel by . . . ?”

  “By Methil El Vidden—” Kimmuriel stopped short.

  “By an illithid,” Jarlaxle remarked. “It all goes back to the mind flayers.”

  It wasn’t often that Jarlaxle saw Kimmuriel Oblodra flustered, but he was then, obviously so.

  “Or maybe even further,” the clever mercenary added, stabbing a finger into the air as if in epiphany. “By Methil El Viddenvelp, who was instructed to do so by . . . ?”

  Kimmuriel started to answer, but stopped short again and merely laughed at the deepening absurdity.

  “By Gromph Baenre,” Jarlaxle answered his own question. “It makes one wonder who it was that inspired Gromph to begin such a tale as this.”

  “Unwittingly,” Kimmuriel said.

  “Probably,” Jarlaxle agreed. “But Gromph is often in the company of . . . demons? Handmaidens? He was until recently, after all, the archmage of Menzoberranzan.”

  “Perhaps there is no deeper cause, or greater force behind this change, or revelation, or whatever else you might consider it,” Artemis Entreri offered. “Maybe it just happened.”

  “Or maybe it was an unforeseen result of a demonic inspiration,” Kimmuriel added. “Or a miscalculation by Lolth.”

  “Or exactly what Lolth wanted to happen?” Jarlaxle suggested.

  “Or maybe,” Jarlaxle started to add, then stopped and smiled rather wickedly at Kimmuriel. Yes . . . he mouthed cryptically.

  Kimmuriel narrowed a glare at him. He knew what was coming.

  “My friend here knows the illithids well,” Jarlaxle told Wulfgar, Zak, and Entreri. “And this one, Kimmuriel, he has for centuries wanted revenge on Menzoberranzan for the fall of House Oblodra.”

  “By rescuing the Matron Mother Baenre?” Kimmuriel replied with as much sarcasm as the psionicist had ever managed.

  “Ah, yes, true that,” Jarlaxle agreed, feigning defeat. “It escaped me that you are without the strong sense of irony to go that delicious route.” Jarlaxle turned to the others. “So we have it, then,” he declared. “It was the illithids, a grand and brilliant plan! Or it was Lolth herself, ever making chaos for her enjoyment. Or it was one of her great rivals, then—perhaps Demogorgon!—blowing up the whole damned Lolthian world on Faerun.”

  “Or it was nothing at all beyond the epiphany of two women in position to make a difference,” Entreri said dryly. He sighed and shook his head, then looked up at Wulfgar, who stood beside him. “You see, my friend?” he asked with sarcasm exceeding that of the others. “This is why we can’t have good things, good thoughts, simple joy, or hope.”

  Jarlaxle laughed loudly at that, amused. But there really was a nagging doubt here, about all of it. The most important lesson he had learned in his desperate struggle to survive in Menzoberranzan was that nothing—nothing!—was as it seemed.

  Not ever.

  But how he wanted to believe that this time would be different.

  He saw that magical energy there as clearly as if Catti-brie had planted a beacon on the ground where lay his skewered robe.

  The robe of the Monastery of the Yellow Rose. The robe of a master, given to him by Grandmaster Kane, who had warned him about this transcendence.

  A pang of remorse filled Afafrenfere commonly throughout his scattering thoughts, and that regret pulled at his dispersing consciousness like a great ocean whirlpool, moving them around and around, and inward, coalescing once more.

  Now he heard the magical call more clearly still, Catti-brie announcing the birth of her child. Her daughter! Drizzt’s daughter!

  Afafrenfere was about to reconstitute his mortal body. Anyone looking on the courtyard of Thornhold would have seen it as bits of magical light, cascading across the ground like a knot of baby toads hopping to a common point.

  Drizzt’s daughter!

  He had to relay that message. How could he become a mere man again and not tell the scattered remnants of this drow he had come to love as a brother?

  The knot of toads unwound once more, a determined monk reaching out to those fleeting bits of Drizzt Do’Urden yet again, this time with the power of certainty behind them.

  Afafrenfere felt the residual magical energy keenly and understood that it was already fading, that he hadn’t much time.

  And understood, too, that it wasn’t strong enough for him to take Drizzt Do’Urden back to the courtyard of Thornhold with him.

  Alas.

  Artemis Entreri gave the ring to Wulfgar to return to Catti-brie. He wasn’t ready to go back to Gauntlgrym, then. He wondered if he would ever return to that place.

  “You will go find Dahlia?” Wulfgar asked.

  The assassin shrugged, even shook his head a little bit. Too much had happened to him here this day. He couldn’t deny that Dahlia had indeed come for him at great personal risk or that he cared for her on so many levels.

  But the only thing that Artemis Entreri knew in that moment was that he didn’t know . . . anything! His encounter with Sharon, with the physical manifestation of conscience, his own conscience, was not diminishing. The power of it hung over him, frightening him, giving him hope.

  He just didn’t know.

  Anything.

  He suspected that Dahlia wouldn’t support the changes that had come over him. He could explain his epiphany over and over to her, but could he really? Could anyone understand such a thing as the cocoon Sharon had put around him without experiencing it?

  Or perhaps it was part of Entreri’s own redemption to make Dahlia understand. She was another lost soul, of course, and had been for a long, long time. Dahlia had been scarred in more than her body. Her heart was crossed, no doubt, with dark lines of mistrust and anger.

  Even that last notion overwhelmed him. He was to be her teacher? He? The prized assassin of Calimport?

  He almost laughed out loud, but instead just walked away.

  Into the forest a short distance, he heard Jarlaxle coming quickly behind him. The mercenary said not a word—the tormented Entreri was truly glad of that!—but just walked up beside and matched his every step. Soon after, Jarlaxle draped an arm across Entreri’s shoulders, and the assassin hadn’t the strength to shove it aside.

  He was kidding himself again, he knew. He didn’t want to shove it aside.

  He wasn’t sure of where he was going until he was almost there, turning onto the path that led into the meadow.

  All was strangely quiet now, and remarkably empty of drow and driders and goblinkin. Indeed, only a solitary figure remained, one the two walking companions recognized.

  They joined Thibbledorf Pwent as he stood before the web, hands on hips.

  “Ye see it?” the dwarven vampire asked when they arrived. “Ye see what it did?”

  “I did,” Entreri answered before Jarlaxle could.

  “Turned them spidery drow things back into elfs!” Pwent exclaimed.

  Jarlaxle gasped.

  “All of them,” Entreri confirmed. “Yvonnel and Quenthel weaved this . . . I don’t even know what to call it.”

  “The driders went through it and became drow once more?” Jarlaxle asked, his voice shaky. “You cannot . . .”

  “They did,” said Entreri.

  “Hunnerds and hunnerds o’ the damned things,” Pwent agreed.

  Jarlaxle fell to the side a step and stood as the dwarf had been, hands on hips, shaking his head. “I see that I have a lot to learn about what happened out here.”

  “Kimmuriel will tell you,” Entreri answered.

  On a sudden impulse, the assassin pulled a weapon from his belt. He didn’t know why, and had no idea of what might happen, but he threw his jeweled dagger right at the web. It passed through with a great flash of purple-black energy, then fell to the ground beyond. There it sparked and flipped about, smoke pouring from
it.

  No, not smoke.

  Spirits!

  Souls trapped within the foul thing, coming out in droves. Souls taken over the course of a millennia and more of deadly, evil use, flying free into the multiverse at last, leaping and spreading, climbing into the sunlight and fading fast to eternity.

  “Aye!” Thibbledorf Pwent howled, and with no more thought, he followed the dagger, leaping through the web.

  Another flash of that deep purple light exploded, and the dwarf stumbled and tumbled onto the meadow grass beyond. He tried to bounce up to stand, but could not, and fell forward onto his hands and knees and began vomiting violently, black mucus pouring from his mouth.

  Jarlaxle ran to the left to go around the oak that anchored one end of the web.

  Artemis Entreri took a more direct route and did not slow despite Jarlaxle’s cry of “No!”

  He walked right through the web.

  But there was no flash and Entreri wasn’t thrown to the ground or slowed in any way. He got to Pwent before Jarlaxle arrived and put his hand on the dwarf’s back.

  “Free,” Pwent managed to proclaim, before another gout of black fluid fell from his mouth.

  Entreri held him through the vomiting and convulsing, and when it was over, Pwent laughed, and there was such joy in it! Such . . . freedom.

  “Free,” he said again, and he tumbled to the side and rolled onto his back. “It took the curse,” he said, Jarlaxle and Entreri leaning over him. “Aye, and to be sure but it killed me to death.”

  “Pwent,” Jarlaxle said.

  “Ye tell me king,” Pwent gasped, choking forth another splash of the foul liquid. “Ye tell him that his Pwent died happy . . .

  “That he died free . . .”

  His voice trailed off.

  “No!” Artemis Entreri declared, and he slipped one arm under the dwarf’s back, the other under Pwent’s hips, and hoisted him into his arms, carrying the heavy, armored dwarf as if he was a child.

  “No!” Artemis Entreri declared again, and he started off for Gauntlgrym.