The Companions

by R. A. Salvatore

  “Oh, but get yer head, boy!” Uween scolded. “Ye don’t go cursin’ Moradin in me house!”

  “Ah, but it’s all a stupid joke, don’t ye see?”

  “What’s all?”

  “All of it!” Bruenor insisted. “All a durned game for them to laugh about. All a puny try for puny glories that none’ll remember or care about. ‘Bones and stones,’ so me friend used to say. Bones n’ stones and nothing more. For all our cries o’ glory, for all our cheers to lost kin … bah, but ain’t it just a game then!” He kicked at some of the wood that rebounded near to his feet, and when he missed it, he scooped up the plank instead and snapped it in half, then threw both pieces, sending them spinning across the room.

  “Stop it!” Uween demanded.

  Bruenor froze, stared her hard in the eye, then calmly walked over and picked up another chair. With a look of supreme defiance at this dwarf who would be his mother, he lifted the chair up high and brought it crashing down on the floor, smashing it to kindling.

  Uween wailed and fled the room.

  Bruenor followed her only far enough to slam the bedchamber door behind her.

  He went back to his original position, though the chair was gone, and picked up his bandage to continue his work. But then he snarled and growled and spat and threw it, too, across the room.

  He glanced back at the door and only then fully realized what he had just done—and done to an undeserving and always supportive dwarf widow!

  The shame overwhelmed him and sent him to his knees, where he threw his face into his hands and wept openly. Shoulders bobbing in sobs, Bruenor lay down on the stone and splintered wood.

  He fell asleep right there, face wet with tears, and troubling dreams began to descend upon him, and flitter up like dark wings all around him. Dreams of Catti-brie lying dead, of Obould’s orcs drinking mead with tankards marked by the foaming mug, the standard of Mithral Hall—and indeed, drinking mead within Mithral Hall, and in a room littered with dwarf corpses!

  The room’s door banged open, startling him awake, but it took him a long while, time he didn’t have, to determine if this was reality or another image in his dream.

  He finally figured it out when King Emerus Warcrown lifted him roughly to his feet and slapped him across the face.

  Behind the king, Parson Glaive stood solemnly, hands intertwined before him in prayer.

  “What’re ye about, then?” the king demanded.

  “Wh-what?” Bruenor stammered, not knowing where to begin.

  “How dare ye dishonor yer Da!” Emerus shouted in his face. “How dare ye treat yer Ma as such?”

  Bruenor shook his head, but could not begin to offer a response. Not verbally. Dishonor? The word screamed in his mind! Could these two even begin to understand the word? He had died a good dwarf’s death—he had earned his place at Moradin’s side, and it had been taken from him through guilt and a foolish choice!

  Dishonor? That was dishonor, not some meaningless argument in a meaningless house in a meaningless citadel!

  His previous existence, his glorious tenure as King of Mithral Hall, had been ripped from relevance! Oh, and not by his own impulsive, foolishly emotional choice, but by the mere fact that he had been given that choice in the first place. What point this—any of it!—if a god’s whim could undo everything?

  “Well, Little Arr … Reginald?” Emerus Warcrown growled in his face. “What do ye got to say?”

  “What playthings we be,” Bruenor replied quietly, calmly.

  The king looked at him curiously, then glanced back at Parson Glaive, who opened his eyes at the young dwarf’s curious words.

  “Self-congratulating,” Bruenor went on undeterred. He gave a helpless chuckle. “And all our great deeds be tiny spots on the altars o’ the laughing gods.”

  “His father,” Parson Glaive explained to the king, who nodded and turned back to Bruenor.

  “Ye don’t know me father,” Bruenor snarled at him. “Nor his father afore him.”

  He was sitting on the floor then, flying down at the end of a fist, with the room swimming around him in uneven turns.

  “Yer time on the training grounds is done, Reginald,” Emerus Warcrown told him. “Ye go out and fight aside them that’s keeping Felbarr free o’ damned orcs, and then ye come back and tell me about yer playthings! If ye live to get back to me, I’m meanin’!”

  They left abruptly, King Emerus first, and Bruenor caught a glimpse of him offering Uween a much-needed hug before Parson Glaive, with a profound and purposely loud sigh, closed the bedroom door.

  Perhaps no section of Citadel Felbarr was more revered and less visited than this one, where rows and rows of piled stones stretched into the vast darkness of the huge cavern. The cemetery of Clan Warcrown encompassed many rooms, and a new one was always under construction.

  Bruenor heard the solitary digger’s pick chipping at the stone when he entered the main chamber of the cemetery, the heartbeat-like cadence ringing somewhere far off in the distance to his left. He moved to his right, across the huge main room, the oldest room, and through one low tunnel into the next section. This room, too, he crossed, and another beyond the next tunnel and another beyond that.

  He could no longer hear the lonely tap of the worker, who was digging out a chamber that would not be used for decades. As most of this solemn place was a testament to the past, to the fallen of the clan, so that dwarf excavator was the promise of the future. Citadel Felbarr would go on and she would bury her dead with reverence and tradition.

  The thought nagged at Bruenor as he passed into the last chamber out here on the right flank of the centuries-old graveyard.

  “A testament?” he heard himself muttering, with clear distaste.

  He came to the cairn of Reginald Roundshield, his father.

  He didn’t know what to feel concerning the dwarf. He had never really known him, though so many spoke highly of him. And surely, Uween’s character spoke highly of any dwarf who would take her as a wife.

  He stared at the inscription that bore his father’s name, his name.

  “No!” he said emphatically at the thought. Never his name! He was Bruenor Battlehammer of Clan Battlehammer, the Eighth King of Mithral Hall and the Tenth King of Mithral Hall.

  And what did that mean?

  “Ah, Reginald,” he said, for he felt as if he should say something. He had come out here, after all, to the cairn of a respected warrior. “Arr Arr, they called ye, and with great affection. Might be that yerself was Emerus’s Pwent, eh?”

  The mention of his own trusted guard sent Bruenor’s thoughts spinning back to Gauntlgrym and that last fateful battle. All had been lost, so it had seemed, but then in had come the dwarves of Icewind Dale, led by Stokely Silverstream, and most importantly, with old Thibbledorf Pwent in tow—nay, not in tow, never in tow, but leading the charge!

  As always, Pwent had been there, fighting beside Bruenor, propping Bruenor up, helping Bruenor along. Untiring, without surrender, ever with hope and ever full of the word of Moradin and the loyalty and glory of Clan Battlehammer, Pwent had carried Bruenor to the lever, had placed Bruenor’s hand upon it, and had helped Bruenor pull the lever, ending the threat of the primordial volcanic beast.

  Now Bruenor was crying, but for Pwent and not for Reginald.

  Nay, not for Pwent alone, he came to realize, but for them all. For traditions that seemed quaint to him so suddenly—silly, even. For homage to gods who did not deserve it.

  That last thought slapped back at him profoundly.

  He wanted to curse Moradin, but inevitably wound up cursing himself. “Ah, but what a fool I be,” he muttered through clenched teeth. He shook his head, a stream of curses escaping his lips. “A fool’s choice,” he ended. “I throwed it all away.”

  He nodded as he spoke the words, as if trying to convince himself. For every image he conjured of his just reward at Moradin’s side, he found a complementary one of Catti-brie, or of Drizzt or Regis. Catti-brie, his
adopted daughter … how could he abandon her in this time of her greatest need?

  He would see her again in a few short years, so he hoped.

  “Nay,” he heard himself saying, for those years would not be “short,” but interminable.

  He focused on Drizzt. Had he ever known a better friend? One more loyal to him, including a willingness to tell him when he was wrong? Oh, Bruenor was beloved by many, and counted among his clan hundreds of loyal minions and scores of dear friends, like Thibbledorf Pwent. But Drizzt had known him on a deeper level, he understood, and Drizzt had not treated him with the deference afforded to a king, but rather, with the bluntness often needed from a friend.

  “Them was me thoughts when I chose me path out o’ the forest,” a sitting Bruenor said to the cold cairn. “Me friends were needin’ me, and so to them was I to go.”

  He chuckled helplessly as he considered his audience, for if he was speaking to Reginald, then the Reginald in question was himself. He felt no kinship with this dead dwarf lying entombed before him—how could he?

  So he had come here to speak to himself, and to speak to all who had gone before and to the gods who awaited them. He felt the need to explain his decision, but even as he spoke the justifications for walking out of Iruladoon instead of going into the pond to the promise of Dwarfhome, he realized how thin his words must sound to Moradin, and especially to Clangeddin, whose edict was to die a glorious death, which King Bruenor Battlehammer had certainly done.

  And then he had nullified it! He had abandoned tradition, abandoned all that was dwarf—all for friends who were not of Delzoun blood. The energy of that moment in Iruladoon had propelled him along to an impetuous choice, he felt, for now, more than halfway to the appointed meeting time, the passing of years did not make him feel as if he was moving toward his heartfelt goal, but rather the years were moving him, ultimately, further and further from it.

  For every passing day this abomination named Reginald Roundshield drew breath served as an insult to Moradin, and for the sake of a goddess more aligned with elves.

  Guilt bowed his head. Guilt brought tears streaming from his eyes.

  When faced with that crystalline moment, that ultimate decision, Bruenor had betrayed tradition, betrayed the dwarf gods, and stolen all meaning from his previous, glorious life.

  The troubled dwarf wandered away, back through the tunnels, but haunting thoughts followed him, as tangible as if the spirits of the thousands of dwarf dead had risen to poke at him with their cold bone fingers.

  Everything felt off-balance to Bruenor. He could blame Mielikki, but that seemed insufficient. He could blame himself, but not without feeling the pangs of his own disloyalty to those who had loved him in his previous life.

  And he could blame the dwarf gods, as he had done when King Emerus had screamed in his face, “How dare ye dishonor yer Da!”

  “Ah, what playthings we be,” he muttered again, a pervasive sense of emptiness freezing his heart. He stopped and turned back in the general direction of Reginald’s grave, shaking his head.

  “Nah,” he decided, “I could’no have throwed it all away, for nothin’ was there to throw. Nothin’!”

  Once again, Bruenor found himself circling around from blaming others to blaming himself, to the ultimate place of despair: It was not the choice that had stolen all that he had held dear, but the mere fact that he had been offered the choice in the first place!

  “Damn ye, Mielikki, and yer Iruladoon,” he said. He growled, and he stamped his foot upon the stone floor. “Damn ye, Moradin! Ye didn’t come and get me. I earned me place and ye didn’t come and get me!”

  The reason for that seemed obvious enough: because Moradin didn’t care.

  CHAPTER 11

  MENTOR

  The Year of the Third Circle (1472 DR) Delthuntle

  SHASTA FURFOOT, PROPRIETOR OF THE LAZY FISHERMAN, THE DELTHUNTLE inn closest to the water, paused in her glass-washing and looked past the one patron currently at her bar, nodding knowingly.

  That patron, Eiverbreen Parrafin, gawked at her for a few moments, not really knowing what to do. She had warned him that folks had been inquiring about him of late—one powerful character in particular, and her expression now told him in no uncertain terms that the person in question had caught up to him.

  Eiverbreen lifted his glass and swallowed its contents in one courage-inducing gulp. At least he had hoped it would have such an effect, though with or without the brandy, the stubble-faced halfling couldn’t quite summon the fortitude to turn around. He heard the hard boots tapping on the floor, coming nearer.

  Sweating now, he glanced around, moving only his eyes, for he daren’t move his head.

  He felt a tap on his shoulder and looked down to see an ivory cane. He slightly turned, keeping his eyes defensively down, to see a pair of beautiful, shining black boots, neat trousers tucked firmly inside, and a sash of golden thread holding a slender rapier whose elaborate hand cage left no doubt of this one’s identity.

  Eiverbreen swallowed hard and managed through sheer determination to turn around farther to square up to this most famous and dangerous halfling. He noted Grandfather Pericolo’s neatly trimmed goatee, and the fabulous beret he wore, a tight headband with an octagonal flare up above, fashionably tilted higher on the left and with a golden clasp buttoning down the front flap. It was made of some shiny blue material, some exotic fabric which Eiverbreen didn’t know, and stitched in small squares angled to give it a flecked look as it captured and reflected the light.

  “Grandfather Pericolo,” he said quietly, and he caught himself and quickly looked back down.

  “A bit early for the drink, eh?” Pericolo replied. “But, ah well, it is a fine day! Might I join you, then?”

  So nervous was he that Eiverbreen hardly registered the words, and it took him a long while to digest them enough to nod and stutter out, “At your pleasure.”

  Pericolo Topolino sat on the stool next to him. “Yes, one for me,” he said to Shasta, motioning to Eiverbreen’s empty glass, “and another for my friend here.”

  “We’ve better libations than that,” Shasta replied.

  “And I’ve spent nights nursing my head from far worse,” Pericolo replied with a hearty laugh. “If it is good enough for my friend Eiverbreen, then so it is for me!”

  Shasta’s eyes went wide, as indeed did Eiverbreen’s, at that proclamation.

  “To Jolee,” Pericolo said, hoisting his glass in toast. “A pity that she was lost in childbirth.”

  Now Eiverbreen did look at him, curiously and skeptically. “You didn’t know my wife,” he dared to say.

  “But I knew indeed her important work,” Pericolo explained. “I am a connoisseur of the finer things, my halfling friend.”

  His use of that word, “halfling,” settled Eiverbreen in his seat more than a little, a clear reminder that they were, after all, of the same race—a race often denigrated by those of greater physical stature. Naming another little person as such was, in the end, a salute of brotherhood.

  Eiverbreen lifted his glass and tapped it against Pericolo’s and they shared a drink.

  “And I count the deep-sea oysters among those delicacies,” Pericolo went on. “I admit that I have not known for very long the specifics of how those came to the fishmonger, but I did indeed notice their absence, or perhaps their rarity would be a better way to put it, a decade ago. Now I know why. So, to Jolee Parrafin.” He toasted and took another sip.

  “You must be devastated by her loss,” Pericolo said.

  Eiverbreen hunched over his glass. He had indeed been devastated, but not for any reason of love that he would admit, even if it was there, in the back of his darkened heart. The loss of Jolee had financially devastated him—what little wealth they’d had.

  Without oysters to sell, he had become a beggar, and only now, as his boy began to realize his potential as a deep diver, had Eiverbreen’s purse—and his choice of whiskey—begun to recover.

>   “And now the oysters have returned, and I am pointed once more in your direction as the source,” Pericolo said. “Your boy, I believe.”

  Eiverbreen didn’t look up, fearful of where this might be going.

  “Spider? Is that his name?”

  “Heard him called that.”

  “Did you ever even bother to give him a name?” Pericolo asked, and Eiverbreen’s wince answered that seemingly ridiculous question quite clearly. “We just call him Eiverbreen, after his Da,” Shasta offered. “Spider,” Pericolo corrected, and the woman nodded. “He’s a promising diver, so say my sources,” Pericolo said to Eiverbreen. The other halfling grunted his agreement.

  “And yet, for all that talent at your fingertips, you have never managed to do more than merely, barely, survive,” said Pericolo. “Do you even understand the value of the treasures you possess?”

  Eiverbreen’s thoughts swirled around the words, winding over and under. He feared them to be a threat—was Pericolo going to kill him and “adopt” his boy? He looked up at the other halfling—he had to—trying to get some read of that smiling, disarming face.

  “Of course you don’t,” said Pericolo. “The oysters are merely a means to an end to you.” He lifted his expensive cane and tapped Eiverbreen’s glass. “This end. The only end for Eiverbreen. The all-encompassing purpose of his existence, eh?”

  “Have you come to taunt me, then?” Eiverbreen said before he could find the good sense to hold back the words. He even half-turned on his stool, as if to square into position to strike at Pericolo.

  Any thoughts of that disappeared almost immediately, though, as he looked into the smiling, so-confident cherubic face of the wealthy halfling who was known to all on the street as Grandfather Pericolo.

  Grandfather of Assassins.

  His bravado gone in the flash of that recognition, Eiverbreen’s eyes lowered and focused once more on that slender blade, the fabulous rapier of Pericolo. He wondered how badly it would hurt when the tip plunged through his skinny ribs and poked at his racing heart.