The Companions

by R. A. Salvatore

  “Youth?” he asked with a derisive snort. “Healing? Are those the blessings? At what cost?”

  “It is not like that,” Catti-brie assured him.

  Bruenor touched her on the cheek and she turned around.

  “You died in Gauntlgrym,” Catti-brie told him. “Beside Thibbledorf Pwent, yes, but know that you won the day and were buried with honor beside your shield dwarf and beside the gods’ throne in the entry chamber.”

  Bruenor started to reply, but the words caught in his throat. “How could ye know?” he asked instead.

  Catti-brie merely smiled contentedly, erasing all doubt anyone might have had of her claims.

  “I’d be a lyin’ old dwarf if I said that me heart’s not full in seein’ ye, all three of ye!” Bruenor whispered. “But I’d be a liar, too, if I telled ye that any halls but Moradin’s are me place and reward for the life I knowed.”

  Catti-brie nodded and started to reply, but a rustle turned her back again, just in time to see Wulfgar disappearing into the brush, moving from them at great speed.

  “Me boy!” Bruenor yelled after him, but Catti-brie put her hand on the dwarf’s pointing arm to quiet him, then took him by the hand, bade Regis to take her other hand, and led them off in pursuit.

  “Wulfgar, do not!” she called after the man. “You cannot leave. You are not prepared!”

  They caught sight of Wulfgar again a few moments later, crossing a small clearing and running toward a lighter area that seemed to mark the forest’s edge. Bruenor and Regis tried to speed up and heighten their pursuit, but now Catti-brie held them back, and the very grass around their feet seemed to agree with the woman, or answered the woman’s call, the blades rolling up over Bruenor’s boots and Regis’s furry toes to hold them fast in place.

  “Do not!” she warned Wulfgar one last time, but the stubborn barbarian didn’t slow at all and charged to the forest’s edge.

  “Ye stopped us, so stop him!” Bruenor told her, tugging at the unyielding roots, but Catti-brie continued to stare after Wulfgar and shook her head.

  The trees hung thick and dark around him, but Wulfgar saw the light and made for it, hardly aware of his movements. He felt more like he was swimming than running, felt moist and warm, though it was not raining and the forest had seemed dry enough.

  But he was not in the forest, he realized, and the light became a pinpoint and nothing more, and his movements were jumbled and uncoordinated. He felt as if he had been wrapped in thick cloth and thrown into a pond.

  He felt … he didn’t know what he felt as his thoughts jumbled incoherently. He saw the light, though just a speck now, and he made for it, his body twisted and turning, arms trapped, legs moving weirdly, uncontrollably.

  The light grew and he couldn’t breathe. Frantic, Wulfgar pushed on more forcefully, and the wrappings around him seemed to flex and writhe—he could only think of a giant constrictor snake or a purple worm! Yes, it was as if he had leaped into the maw of a purple worm, but its convulsions, whether inadvertent or not, served him in his current course, as the light grew before him.

  He pushed his head through and tried to reach his arm above him, when he was grabbed, suddenly, rudely, powerfully! Oh, so powerfully!

  Yanked forth, he felt as if he was flying, rising up high into the air, one titanic hand wrapping around his head fully, the other grabbing at his body and hoisting him with such ease. For a moment, he feared that he had been thrown among a horde of giants, for they were all around him, but then he realized that they were too large even for giants! He could feel them, he could hear the reverberations of their thunderous voices.

  Not giants! Too large! Titans, the forest had thrown him into a lair of titans!

  Or gods, even, for these creatures were so far beyond him, so much more powerful than he. His hand hooked on one giant finger and he pushed with all his strength, but he might as well have tried to move a boulder the size of a mountain!

  Gurgling through gobs of spittle and some slime he did not understand, he fought and he coughed and finally, finally, Wulfgar cried out for his god, “Tempus!” His voice sounded so thin and indistinct. He struggled, and the titan-beast holding him cried out. Wulfgar cursed it, evoking Tempus’s wrath.

  And then he was flying—nay, not flying.

  He was falling.

  Standing at the edge of the lea in the magical forest, Catti-brie began to sing once more.

  “Girl, go get me boy!” Bruenor cried, but his voice sounded distorted.

  “What are you doing?” Regis asked, his words slowing and speeding strangely as the magic of Catti-brie’s song warped time and space itself. Then they three, too, found themselves in a strange tunnel, winding their way quickly along. This wasn’t the same as Wulfgar’s experience, however, for no sooner had Bruenor or Regis even registered the strange effect than they came out of it, rushing out from the root of a willow tree to suddenly find themselves standing with Catti-brie beside the small forest pond once more.

  And there lay Wulfgar, gasping and trying to rise, propping himself up on his elbows and muttering, only to fall back to the grass.

  He managed to turn to face his friends at Bruenor’s call, his face ashen, his arms trembling.

  “Titans,” he rasped. “Gods. The altar of the gods!”

  “What do ye know?” Bruenor demanded, speaking to Wulfgar, but turning as he ended to encompass Catti-brie with the question.

  “Not titans.” Catti-brie walked over to Wulfgar and helped him to his feet. “Nor gods.” She waited until she had the complete attention of all three.

  “Reghed barbarians,” she explained. “Your own people.”

  Wulfgar’s expression denied her claim. “Huge!” he protested.

  “Or you were tiny.” She paused to let that perspective sink in. “A babe. A newborn babe.”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE REBORN HERO

  The Year of the Reborn Hero (1463 DR) Netheril

  Lord Parise Ulfbinder of the Empire of Netheril shifted uncomfortably in his seat, poring over each of a hundred parchments again and again. He kept glancing to the side, to his crystal ball, almost expecting another magical intrusion from his peer and friend, Lord Draygo Quick, who resided outside the city of Gloomwrought in the Shadowfell, the dark sister of the Prime Material Plane.

  Everything Draygo Quick had just told him had only reinforced that which Parise feared. The gates between the Shadowfell and Toril were growing weaker, and the pockets of shadow on Toril seemed to be diminishing.

  Most of Netheril’s scholars, and there were many among the learned Netherese, had viewed the stronger bonds between the worlds as a great change in the multiverse, a new and permanent paradigm, in the lifespan of a shade, at least.

  Parise Ulfbinder was beginning to grow uncertain of that, and the pile of parchments, ancient writings of long dead scholars, Netherese and otherwise, whispered to him of things that seemed to be coming true all around him.

  The gates were … thinning.

  The vibrant young lord shifted the parchments before him, drawing forth his copy of the cornerstone of his theory, an ancient sonnet known as “Cherlrigo’s Darkness.”

  Enjoy the play when shadows steal the day …

  All the world is half the world for those who learn to walk.

  To feast on fungus soft and peel the sunlit stalk;

  Tarry not in place, for in their sleep the gods do stay.

  But care be known, be light of foot and soft of voice.

  Dare not stir divine to hasten Sunder’s day!

  A loss profound but a short ways away;

  The inevitable tear shall’t be of, or not of, choice.

  Oh, aye, again the time wandering of lonely world!

  With kingdoms lost and treasures past the finger’s tip,

  And enemies that stink of their god’s particular flavor.

  Sundered and whole, across the celestial spheres are hurled,

  Beyond the reach of dweomer and the win
d-walker’s ship;

  With baubles left for the ones the gods do favor.

  Parise and Lord Draygo had discussed this sonnet extensively and repeatedly, particularly the poem’s volte, the ninth line: Oh, aye, again the time wandering of lonely world!

  “ ‘Of lonely world,’ ” Parise read aloud. “Of.”

  To him, this resolution seemed a clear enough statement, more than a hint, that the magical proximity of Abeir and Toril was not likely as permanent as many believed.

  “How long?” he wondered aloud and his eyes drifted up to the dual globe and calendar he had placed on the far edge of his desk.

  Parise read the header of the calendar. “ ‘Dalereckoning, 1463.’ ”

  He knew the current year as measured on Toril, of course. He was a mathematician, a scholar, and one quite interested in the movements of the heavenly spheres, which had played no small role in his current investigation regarding the fate of Abeir-Toril. So naming the year should not have come as a revelation to the learned Netherese Lord … and yet, it had.

  “1463?” he muttered, and suddenly, he sucked in his breath.

  He rushed from his chair so quickly that he sent it spinning and tumbling out behind him, and just as quickly, he flopped into the chair set before his crystal ball and frantically began reestablishing the connection to the Shadowfell, to Lord Draygo Quick.

  He was greatly relieved to find that his friend was still in his study, and so heard his call.

  “Well met again,” greeted Lord Draygo, a withered old warlock of great influence and magical power.

  “You know a favored hero,” Parise said, “a chosen of one of the old gods, so you believe.”

  “Yes,” Draygo Quick replied, for they had just been over this.

  “Perhaps you err.”

  Inside the crystal ball, the somewhat distorted image of Parise’s counterpart seemed taken aback. “I have never spoken with certainty—”

  “Perhaps we err,” Parise Ulfbinder corrected, “in believing that the heroes of the old gods are out there, preparing.”

  Now Draygo Quick looked simply perplexed.

  “What year is it?” Parise asked.

  “Year?”

  “Yes, what year, in Toril’s calendar? In Dalereckoning?”

  Draygo Quick’s face scrunched up as he considered the question, which Parise expected would take him a few moments to unravel, given that Lord Draygo lived in the Shadowfell, where time itself was measured differently.

  “Too long are you upon the land of light, that you even care,” Draygo Quick remarked, before properly answering, “1463, I believe.”

  “Not the date, the name.”

  “1463 …,” Parise Ulfbinder replied, “the Year of the Reborn Hero.”

  “What is the significance of this?” Draygo Quick asked.

  Parise could only shrug. “Perhaps none,” he admitted. “It is a lead, not a clue. Potentially a lead, I should say. We should not alter our respective courses or investigations.”

  “Regarding Drizzt Do’Urden?”

  “Him or any others who catch our attention,” said Parise. “We will build our network to find and scout these favored mortals, these heroes. But as we go forth, perhaps we should tell our spies to pay particular attention to any seeming as Chosen who happened to be born this very year.”

  “It is a remarkable coincidence,” Draygo Quick admitted, and he began poring through the listings of previous years. “But they may hold clues,” Draygo Quick pointed out.

  Now it was time for Parise to sigh, for he had feared that he would open this very box of troubles. Scholars had spent their entire careers trying to make sense or order of the Roll of Years, the prophecies of Auguthra the Mad.

  “It is work for acolytes,” Lord Parise suggested. “Take a cursory glance and nothing more, I pray you.”

  “The Year of the Singing Skull,” Draygo Quick said, seeming to ignore Parise.

  “What?”

  “1297,” the older lord answered. “The year of Drizzt’s birth, I believe. The Year of the Singing Skull.”

  “Do you see significance in that?”

  “No.”

  “Then why interrupt …?”

  “Why would there be significance?” Draygo Quick asked. “He was just a drow, among tens of thousands.”

  “Then why …?” Parise Ulfbinder let his voice trail off and let the thought dissipate. Indeed this had been his fear when first he had learned of the current year’s formal name. Perhaps it was coincidence—likely it was coincidence, and likely, too, that investigating the name would garner no information worthy of his time and energy.

  “Let our work continue as it was,” he suggested to Draygo Quick. “We have networks to build and spies to recruit.”

  “Like Bregan D’aerthe.”

  Parise nodded. “Like Bregan D’aerthe, practical and helpful in ways they will not even understand.”

  “So you reopened our discussion here for nothing more than a curiosity,” Draygo Quick stated.

  Parise considered the words carefully, then finally nodded. “Indeed,” he agreed, “a curiosity.”

  Draygo Quick replied with a smile, showing his friend that he understood completely. With a corresponding nod, he draped a cloth over his crystal ball, ending the connection.

  Parise Ulfbinder rested back in his chair and touched the tips of his index fingers together against his lips.

  The year’s name could mean many things, of course, and perhaps it was nothing more than a curiosity, a coincidence.

  But Parise Ulfbinder wasn’t one to count something with such cataclysmic potential as a coincidence.

  “The Year of the Reborn Hero …,” he whispered.

  CHAPTER 3

  MIELIKKI’S IRULADOON

  The Year of the Reborn Hero (1463 DR) Iruladoon

  WULFGAR KNEELED BY THE POND, TRYING TO ABSORB WHAT CATTI-BRIE had just told him, trying to get past the shock of his rebirth experience. It could not be—somewhere deep in his heart, he simply could not grasp the truth of the woman’s statement.

  “But I knew,” he whispered, and though he spoke quietly, his words abruptly silenced the conversation behind him, where Bruenor and Regis babbled about this same mystery, seeking some explanation.

  “You remembered everything,” Catti-brie said to Wulfgar, and he turned to regard the three.

  “I knew,” he replied. “I knew who I had been, who I was, and where I had come from. Not a newborn …,”

  “Not a newborn in heart, nor in mind,” she explained. “In body alone.”

  “Girl, what do ye know?” Bruenor asked.

  “Regis and I have been in this place, Iruladoon, for several tendays,” she started.

  “For a hunnerd years, ye mean,” Bruenor interrupted, but Catti-brie shook her head immediately, as if anticipating that exact response.

  “A century in the lands beyond Iruladoon, but only a matter of tendays within,” she replied. “This is the gift of Mielikki.”

  “Or the curse,” muttered Wulfgar.

  “Nay, the gift,” Catti-brie said. “And not a gift to us, but to Drizzt. The goddess has done this for our friend.”

  “Eh?” Bruenor and Regis asked together.

  “The old gods knew,” Catti-brie said. “With the advent of Shadow, the connection to the Shadowfell, this collision with this other world known as Abeir and our world of Toril … the old gods anticipated the chaos. Not all of it, to be sure, like the falling of the Weave and the Spellplague, but they understood indeed the greater truth of the worlds coming together.”

  “Might be why they’re gods,” Bruenor muttered.

  “And they know, too, that it is a temporary arrangement of the spheres,” said Catti-brie. “The advent will meet its sundering, and that time, the Sundering, is soon upon us.”

  “And here I be, thinking we were dead,” Bruenor muttered sarcastically, mostly to Regis, but Catti-brie wasn’t listening, and didn’t slow in her story. She
took on the role of a skald then, even beginning a bit of a dance as she continued, much like the dancing she had done around the flowery boughs of Iruladoon through the hours of the previous tendays.

  “It will be a time of great despair and tumult, of chaos and realignment, both worldly and among the pantheon,” she proclaimed. “The gods will claim their realms and their followers—they will seek their champions among some, and make champions of others. They will find prizes among the mortal leaders of Faerûn, among the Lords of Waterdeep and the Archwizards of Thay, among the chieftains of the great tribes and the heroes of the North, among the kings, dwarf and orc alike.

  “Most will be as it ever has been,” she explained. “Moradin and Gruumsh will hold their tribes fast, but around the edges, there will be chaos. Who will lead the thieves, and to whom will the wizards credit their arcane blasts? And who will mortals, grieving and lost, choose to serve as the roadways of their journey winding ever wider?”

  “What?” Regis asked in obvious exasperation.

  “More riddles?” Wulfgar grumbled.

  But Bruenor caught a bit of her meaning more clearly. “Drizzt,” he whispered. “Grieving and lost, ye say? Aye, but I left him with that Dahlia girl, and trouble’s sure to be brewin’ with that fiery child!”

  “Grieving, and so, perhaps, easy prey,” said Catti-brie.

  “He loves ye,” Bruenor was quick to answer, comfortingly. “He still loves ye, girl! Always has!”

  Catti-brie’s laugh almost mocked the notion of carnal jealousy. “I speak of his heart, of his soul, and not of his physical desires.”

  “In that, Drizzt is for Mielikki,” said Regis, but Catti-brie merely shrugged to dispel his certainty.

  “He will choose, in the end,” she said. “And I hold faith in him that he will choose wisely. But more likely, his choice will cost him—everything. That is the warning of Mielikki, and so this is her gift.”