Bruenor looked at the horn incredulously, then around at his friends. “It ain’t him?” he asked Catti-brie.
The woman shook her head. “Thibbledorf Pwent has passed on from this world,” she assured him. “Truly. He is at peace.”
“What you summon is the magic of the horn,” Penelope agreed. “It is the embodiment of the fighting spirit of Pwent, fashioned corporally by the magic of the horn. Nothing more.”
Bruenor rolled the horn over in his hands and glanced to Wulfgar. “How many?” he asked.
The barbarian shrugged. “I found as many as ten allies in the notes of that horn.”
“Ten Pwents?” Bruenor asked with a wicked grin.
Kipper laughed. “Just the one, I would presume,” he explained. “Then ten previously expelled were the embodiments of ten different slain barbarians, I believe.”
“Bah,” Bruenor snorted, a wide smile showing under his red beard. “Ye give me ten Pwents and I’ll take down the whole lot o’ Many-Arrows in short order.”
Drizzt laughed aloud, as did the others, as did Bruenor. For the Companions of the Hall, there could not have been a better or more fitting way to end the funeral of Thibbledorf Pwent.
Except, of course, for hoisting a tankard of ale in toast to the fine fellow, and Bruenor very quickly took care of that little detail.
UNDER THE DARKENED SKY
I HAVE LIVED THROUGH TWO CENTURIES, AND MUCH OF THOSE YEARS have known conflict—battle and war, monstrous ambushes and unexpected dangers.
Yet if I add together all of the actual fighting I have done in my life, that total measure of time would pale against the number of practice hours I might devote to my fighting in a single tenday. Indeed, how many hundreds of hours, thousands of days of time, have I spent in turning my weapons against imaginary opponents, training my muscles to bring the blade to bear as fast as I can manage, in perfect balance, at the right angle, at the right moment?
In a single session of training, I might execute a middle thrust more times than in all the fights I have ever known, combined. This is the way of the warrior, the only way, and the way I have come to know as truth, of anyone and everyone who deigns to rise to excellence, the way of anyone and everyone who seeks perfection even while knowing that there is no such thing.
For there is no perfect strike, no perfect defense, no perfect form. The word itself defines a state that cannot be improved, but such is not the case, is never the case with muscle and mind and technique.
So there is no state of perfection, but to seek it is not folly, nay, for it is that very seeking, the relentless journey, which defines the quality of the warrior.
When you see the journey and focus not merely on the goal, you learn humility.
A warrior must be humble.
Too often do people too greatly measure their lives by their goals, and, subsequently, by that which they consider accomplishments. I have reflected on this many times in my life, and so the wisdom of years has taught me to constantly move the goal just beyond my stretching reach. For, is the downside to achievement complacency? I have come to believe that too often do we name a goal and achieve it, then think the journey at its end.
I seek perfection, with my blades, with my body. I know there is no such thing, and that knowledge drives me forward, every day, and never inspires frustration or regret. My goal is unattainable, but the truth is that it is my journey to that goal that is more important.
This is true of every goal of every person, but rarely do we see it. We seek goals as if their achievement will grant magical happiness and unending fulfillment, but is that ever the case? Bruenor would find Mithral Hall, and so he did—and how many years subsequent to that achievement did my dwarf friend seek ways to un-discover the hall? At least, to remove himself from the goal he had set, as he sought new adventures, new roads, and new goals, and ultimately abdicated his throne in Mithral Hall entirely.
As this is true for the king, so it is true for the commoner, so it is true for almost everyone, living their lives in a mad rush for the next “if only,” and in doing so, missing the most important truth of all.
The journey is more important than the goal, for while the goal might be worthwhile, the journey is, in fact, the thread of your life.
And so I set an unreachable goal: perfection of the body, perfection in battle.
That lifelong quest keeps me alive.
How many times have I narrowly escaped the bite of a monstrous maw, or the murderous edge of an enemy’s blade? How many times have I won out because of the memory within my muscles, their ability to move as I need of them before I register the thought to move them? The relentless practice, the slow dance, the swift dance, the repetition of repetition, ingrains carefully considered movements to the point of mere reflex. When I dance, I see in my mind’s eye the angle of my opponent’s attack, the balance of his feet, the posture of his form. I close my eyes and put the image there in my mind, and react to that image with my body, carefully calculating the proper response, the correct parry or riposte, the advantage and opening.
Many heartbeats will pass in that single imagined movement, and many times will many heartbeats pass as the movement is executed again and again, and altered, perhaps, as better angles present themselves to my practiced imagination. Over and over, I will do this same dance. The pace increases—what took fifty heartbeats will take forty-nine, then forty-eight, and down the line.
And when in real combat my eyes register the situation pictured in my mind’s eye during practice, the response will happen without conscious thought, a flicker of recognition demanding reflexive counters that might be fully played before the time span of a single beat of my heart.
This is the way of the warrior, honing the muscles to act correctly upon the slightest call, and training the mind to trust.
Aye, there’s the rub of it all. Training the body is easy, and it is useless if the mind, too, cannot be properly conditioned.
This is the calm of the hero.
From my experiences and encounters, from speaking to warriors, wizards, priests, from watching incredible courage under incredible duress, I have come to believe that in this regard, there are three kinds of people: those who run from danger, those who freeze when in danger, and those who run into danger. This is no great revelation to anyone, I expect, nor would I expect anyone to believe of himself or herself anything but the latter of those three choices.
But that reaction, to run to danger, to face it forthright and calmly, is the least likely among all the races, even the drow and even the dwarves.
The moment of surprise stuns the sensibilities. Often will a person caught in a sudden emergency spend too long in simply processing the truth of the moment, denying its reality as that very reality overwhelms the onlooker.
“It cannot be!” are among the most common of final words.
Even when the situation is consciously accepted, too many thoughts often blur the reaction. When faced with a grievously wounded companion, for example, a person’s fears of unintentionally doing something harmful can hold back the bandage while the friend’s lifeblood pours forth and stains the ground.
When battle is joined, the situation becomes even more complicated, for there is also the matter of conscience and fear. Archers who can hit a target from a hundred paces often miss an enemy at much closer range, a much easier shot. Perhaps it is conscience, a flicker of a person’s soul telling him that he is not a killer, that he should not kill. Perhaps it is fear, since the consequences of missing the mark could soon thereafter prove fatal to the shooter.
In the drow martial academy of Melee-Magthere, when I began my training, one of our first classes involved an unexpected attack by duergar marauders. The raiders burst through the doors of the training hall and took down the instructors in a matter of eye-blinks, leaving the students, young drow all, to fend or to die.
I witnessed dark elves of noble Houses fleeing out the back of the chamber—some threw down their wea
pons as they went, screaming in terror. Others stood dumbfounded, easy kills for the enemy gray dwarves—had it been an actual ambush.
A few leaped in for the battle. I was among that group. It wasn’t courage that drove my feet forward, but instant calculation—for I understood that my duty, my best chance for doing the greatest good for Menzoberranzan and my fellows at the Academy, and indeed, my best chance for surviving, lay forward, in the fight, ready to do battle. I don’t know how, but in that moment of sudden and overpowering stress, my mind overcame my heart, my fears fell away beneath the call of my duty.
This expression and reaction, the masters of the academy called “the calm of the hero,” and we who faced the duergar properly were acknowledged, if not applauded.
For those who ran or froze, there came angry recriminations, but none were summarily dismissed from the Academy, a clear signal that the masters had expected as much. Nay, those who failed were trained—we were all trained—hour after hour, long day after day, endlessly, relentlessly, brutally.
This test was repeated many months later, in the form of another unexpected battle with a different enemy in a different location.
Now many more of us had been taught what some of us had instinctively known, and relying on that training, few fled and fewer froze in place. Our enemy in that battle in a wide tunnel just outside the city, was a band of goblins, and this time, unlike with the duergar, they had been instructed to actually attack us.
But this time, unlike with the duergar, the ambushers met a force that had trained under skilled masters, not just physically, but mentally. Hardly a scratch showed on black drow skin when the last goblin fell dead.
Those dark elves who fled or froze, however, would get no more chances in Melee-Magthere. They were not possessed of the mind of a warrior and so they were dismissed, summarily.
Many, I later learned, were also dismissed from their Houses and families in shame.
In the cold and heartless calculations of the Spider Queen and her wicked matron mothers, there is no place in Menzoberranzan for those who cannot learn the way of the warrior.
Watching Regis these last tendays reminded me of those days in Melee-Magthere. My halfling friend returned to mortal life determined that he would rewrite the impulses in his heart and brain, that he would teach himself the way of the warrior. When I consider my own experiences, and the progress of those many dark elves who failed the first encounter with the gray dwarves, but fought well against the goblins, I nod and understand better the truth of this new and formidable companion.
Regis sometimes calls himself Spider Parrafin, the name he found in this new life, but in the end, he is Regis, the same Regis we knew before, but one who through determination and the pursuit of an unattainable goal has found confidence enough in himself to walk the road of the warrior.
He has confided to me that he still has doubts and fears, to which I laughed.
For that, my halfling friend, is a truth universal to all the folk of all the reasoning races.
—Drizzt Do’Urden
TO THE EDGE OF GLOOM
DRIZZT CRESTED A RIDGE ON A HIGH JUT OF ROCK AND LOOKED DOWN to the east, where the snaking waters of a small river, the Shining Creek, wound through the grassy plain. The drow had noted storm clouds in the distant east, or at least he had thought them storm clouds, but now that he was up high and with a wider view, he wasn’t certain at all.
There loomed a darkness there, in the sky beyond the Shining Creek and the Surbrin River, but even from this distance, it appeared like no storm Drizzt had ever seen. The whole of the land beyond the river was dark, as if in a starless night, and not shadowy as if speckled by the daytime clouds. From this high perch, Drizzt could see the late morning sun shining in the sky to the east, but those rays found no way through to the land beyond the rivers, it seemed.
The strangeness of the sight accentuated just a moment later, as the sun continued its travels, moving far enough beyond the blackness of the clouds, or whatever they were, to send its light and warmth to the waters of the creek. Drizzt watched the shadow retreat to the east, then blinked against the sting as the snaking river lived up to its name, a brilliant line of winding silver.
Bruenor charged up to him, huffing and puffing as he hopped from stone to stone. “Ye won’t get away, elf,” he called, for he had foolishly challenged Drizzt to a race over the rocky hill. He came up laughing, ready to leap past, but he skidded to a stop and his grin disappeared when he, too, looked to the unnatural darkness in the east.
“What in the Nine Hells?” Bruenor asked.
Drizzt shook his head. “I guess from your expression that the sky in the east didn’t look like that when last you came west from Mithral Hall.”
“Never seen a sky lookin’ like that,” said Bruenor. “Ye thinkin’ that’s even the sky?” He shook his head, clearly at a loss. “Looks more like someone stole a patch o’ the Underdark and plunked it down o’er me home.”
Somewhere below on the hillside, Wulfgar whistled.
The pair turned back and glanced down, but their friends were not in sight. “He’s thinking we’re bein’ followed,” Bruenor explained.
“Shadowed,” Drizzt corrected. “You remember these hills?”
Bruenor nodded. “Surbrin Hills. Uthgardt land.”
Drizzt pointed to an expanse of taller green grassy hills southeast of their position. Between two rounded tops, a thin line of smoke drifted lazily on the light winds.
“Sky Ponies?” Bruenor asked. He and Drizzt had come this way before, long before. Before the Spellplague, before the Time of Troubles, before Bruenor had reclaimed Mithral Hall for Clan Battlehammer, even. They had left Icewind Dale alongside Wulfgar and Regis, determined to find Bruenor’s ancestral home, and just north of these very hills, they had been taken captive by an Uthgardt Tribe known as the Sky Ponies.
Drizzt shook his head. “Griffon’s Nest,” he explained, referring to the village of the Uthgardt Griffon tribe. “It is well-known to travelers about the region these days, for unlike the Sky Ponies, the Griffons are traders.”
“Aye,” Bruenor said, and he nodded as the reference incited old memories. Mithral Hall had traded with Griffon’s Nest on a couple of occasions during Bruenor’s reign. “They still know ye?”
Drizzt nodded, but then seemed unsure. “It has been many years since I visited with them. Likely most of those who showed me hospitality are gone now to the halls of their gods.”
“I’m wanting to be home anyway,” Bruenor grumbled. “Straight east to them clouds … to whatever that darkness be.”
“The Uthgardt Griffons will likely know something of it,” Drizzt pointed out.
Bruenor looked to the wafting smoke. “Not like them Sky Ponies?” he asked, as if needing the assurance, for his visit with that other Uthgardt tribe had not been a pleasant one.
Drizzt grinned and glanced down the hillside behind them, where the other three of their troupe had come into sight. With his long legs, Wulfgar easily bounded up to join the pair.
He, too, wore a puzzled look as he glanced to the east, to the darkened skies. Regis, too, when he arrived, but the most profound reaction came from Catti-brie, who stared out that way with a look of clear concern. She didn’t say anything, but neither did she blink.
“Do you know what it is?” Drizzt asked her.
“Mystra’s Weave?” Regis added. “Unwinding again? Or thickening? Or …”
“It has nothing to do with Mystra,” Catti-brie said definitively.
“What’re ye knowing, girl?” Bruenor demanded.
“That it is unnatural,” she replied, and she finally pried her eyes away to turn her look, not to Bruenor, but to Drizzt. “And that it is connected. I can sense it.”
“Connected?” Drizzt asked.
Catti-brie glanced around to their companions one at a time, leading the drow.
“Connected to us,” Regis reasoned. “To us coming back.”
Wulfgar looked
to the east. “Mielikki?” he asked.
“Th’other one, I’m bettin’,” Bruenor said, staring hard at his daughter. “Are ye sure, girl?”
Catti-brie shrugged and shook her head. “The coincidence,” she explained, still helplessly shaking her head.
“To Griffon’s Nest,” Drizzt said. “Let us gather our wagons and mounts and be on our way for that settlement marked by the smoke. The tribe will have answers for us.” He started off even before he finished speaking, the others falling into line behind him. They were a solemn procession, mostly, but Bruenor managed more than a few growls about “whacking orcs” along the way. Every bump along the rough trail that jolted the wagon elicited another curse from the now-surly dwarf. The others couldn’t blame him, as that unnatural darkness hovered right over Bruenor’s beloved homeland.
Near the rounded top of a wide, grass-cloaked hill, the companions found their destination, marked by a high palisade of thick, stout logs. Several farms lay scattered outside the settlement and large humans, male and female, watched the curious procession of a drow on a unicorn, a robed woman on a spectral unicorn, a halfling on a fat pony, and a dwarf and a huge man driving a wagon.
Looking past one trio of onlookers, to the right side of the trail leading up the hillock, the friends caught movement of a more serious matter, for a cavalry patrol, long-legged barbarians looking out of place on short ponies, was shadowing them and beginning to swerve in to intercept along the road, it seemed.
Drizzt and Catti-brie slowed their pace to let the wagon and Regis’s pony catch up.
“Hurl no missiles, verbal, axe, or hammer,” the drow said, then looked at Regis and added, “or hand crossbow quarrel or choking snake.”
“I should speak for our group,” said Wulfgar. “They are Uthgardt, my people.”
Drizzt nodded, and motioned to Catti-brie, and the couple guided their unusual mounts to the back of the wagon, letting Bruenor and Wulfgar take the lead.
Only a short distance later, the pony cavalry came rushing out to block their way on the road, a score of barbarian riders with javelins resting easy on their shoulders, ready to throw.
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