He pushed the dwarf back, almost over, but the stubborn bearded creature came forward.
G’nurk sidestepped and crashed the pommel of his sword against the back of the dwarf’s shoulder, forcing the dwarf to overbalance forward even more. When he reached up to grab at G’nurk, to use the orc as leverage, G’nurk ducked under that arm, catching it as he went so that when he came up fast behind the arm, he had it twisted such that the dwarf had no choice but to fall headlong.
The dwarf wound up flat on his back, G’nurk standing over him, the sword in tight against his throat.
I have heard parents express their fears of their own mortality soon after the birth of a child. It is a fear that stays with a parent, to a great extent, through the first dozen years of a child’s life. It is not for the child that they fear, should they die—though surely there is that worry, as well—but rather for themselves. What father would accept his death before his child was truly old enough to remember him?
For who better to put a face to the bones among the stones? Who better to remember the sparkle in an eye before the crow comes a’calling?
“Bah, ye murderin’ treacherous dog!” Thibbledorf Pwent yelled. “Ye got no honor, nor did yer daugh—” He bit the word off as G’nurk pressed the blade in tighter.
“Never speak of her,” the orc warned, and he backed off the sword just a bit.
“Ye’re thinking this honorable, are ye?”
G’nurk nodded.
Pwent nearly spat with disbelief. “Ye dog! How can ye?”
G’nurk stepped back, taking the sword with him. “Because now you know that I hold gratitude for your mercy, dwarf,” he explained. “Now you know in your heart that you made the right choice. You carry with you from this field no burden of guilt for your mercy. Do not think this anything more than it is: a good deed repaid. If we meet in the lines, Obould against Bruenor, then know I will serve my king.”
“And meself, me own!” Pwent proclaimed as he pulled himself to his feet.
“But you are not my enemy, dwarf,” the orc added, and he stepped back, bowed, and walked away.
“I ain’t yer durned friend, neither!”
G’nurk turned and smiled, though whether in agreement or in thinking that he knew otherwise, Pwent could not discern.
It had been a strange day.
I wish the crows would circle and the wind would carry them away, and the faces would remain forever to remind us of the pain. When the clarion call to glory sounds, before the armies anew trample the bones among the stones, let the faces of the dead remind us of the cost.
It is a sobering sight before me, the red-splashed stones.
It is a striking warning in my ears, the cawing of the crows.
—Drizzt Do’Urden
It’s highly recommended that you read the novel The Ghost King before you read this story!
hen young writers ask me for advice, I always answer, “If you can quit, then quit. If you can’t quit, you’re a writer.” I’m not being flippant with that response. I mean every word. Writing isn’t a “job” and it certainly isn’t a fast track to fame and fortune! The writing itself has to be the point of it all.
So why am I a writer? Why can’t I quit? Sure, it’s a successful business for me now, but why couldn’t I quit back in 1984–1987, when I had nothing to show for my thousands of hours of work but a handful of rejection letters? And even now, though I’m surely grateful for the career success, I have publicly remarked that if I ever hit the lottery, I’d probably write more than I am now, but publish far less.
Because it’s not about the business, you see. It’s never been about the business. It can’t be about the business of writing. The business of writing serves as the enabler for the actual writing, and the actual writing is the only thing that matters.
Why?
For many years, I thought it was about the readers, and surely there is great incentive and comfort to be found in the many letters and responses to my work. From the soldier in the desert, telling me that my books helped him get through the down times between missions, to the kid with cancer who takes strength in Drizzt, to the high schooler who tells me he has no friends, but it’s okay because he can spend his days with the Companions of the Hall—all of that is satisfying and amazing and how blessed am I to be invited into someone else’s life like that?
But still, it has to be more, and it is, and I don’t think I really appreciated this until fairly recently. Why am I a writer? Because writing is the process I use to make sense of the world, of existence, of life and of death. My writing is my internal dialogue—I wonder, had I realized this before, would I ever have let you all in?
I have often said that Drizzt is who I wish I had the courage to be, but more than that, he and others are the catalyst for my questions and hopefully the path to my answers.
Nowhere in all of my body of work is this more evident than in “Iruladoon”—and I mean the concept and not just the story. The changes in the Realms, the inevitability that things had to change for the Companions of the Hall, have hit hard in the Salvatore household. These are friends I’ve known for more than twenty years. Might a heroic death or four have sufficed? Perhaps, but if I’ve used these friends to explore the questions of life, why would I not continue with them to ask the bigger questions beyond this existence? This is fantasy, after all, and in a world with active gods and powerful magic.
If I’m going to strip the concept of war bare in “Bones and Stones,” why not strip the concept of the afterlife bare here in “Iruladoon”? I remember when I was a kid, a joking uncle often remarked, “If heaven is a bunch of fat people singing and blowing horns, I’m going to hell!”
Most fun of all, Iruladoon is an evolving concept for me. I don’t have all the answers yet of what’s going on here, although it is becoming increasingly clear in my thoughts. This is yet another side street for me, another journey to a fantastical place where I can ask some important questions of myself and the point of it all, and where I hope I’ll inspire those same questions in readers.
I want to know why Catti-brie is singing. Trust me: I will find out.
Forest of Iruladoon
Spring in the waning years of the Post-Spellplague
e’re not going to get there in time!” shouted a frantic Lathan Obridock.
He turned back from the prow to regard his fellow fishermen, his face wet from spray as Larson’s Boneyard bounced across the considerable swells on the always unpredictable Lac Dinneshere. His teeth chattered, both from fear and from the brutal cold of Icewind Dale waters, lakes that spent more than half the year covered in thick ice.
“Young Lathan, be at ease,” counseled Addadearber of the Lightning, a rather colorful and flamboyant resident of Caer-Dineval, the boat’s home port on the western bank of the great lake, one of three that defined this region about the singular mountain known as Kelvin’s Cairn. “I’d not have sailed with Ashelia Larson there if I thought she’d lead me to a watery grave!”
As he spoke, Addadearber waved his arms dramatically, but the effect was much less so than usual, since he had abandoned his red wizard robes for garments more practical to sailing. Nothing could pull a man to the bottom faster than water-soaked woolen robes, after all. Addadearber still wore his floppy black hat, though. Once conical and pointed, standing tall and straight, the hat was bent over halfway to its apex, its point leaning to Addadearber’s left-hand side, and its once-stiff brim sagging on both sides. It seemed a fitting reflection of the aging wizard, with his gray hair and bushy gray beard, crooked posture, and with his magic, too, rendered unreliable at best and often impotent by the fall of Mystra’s Weave, the great event known throughout the Realms as the Spellplague.
“You’re old and don’t care if you die, then!” accused the youngest member of Boneyard’s crew, Spragan Rubrik, at fifteen almost two years Lathan’s junior. His long curly brown hair dripped water from every lock, but it seemed obvious that his darker brown eyes would have
been wet with moisture anyway, as he had been the first to discover the leak in the fish hold, the cold, dark water of Lac Dinneshere creeping in to claim her prize.
“I’d watch my wagging tongue, were I speaking to Addadearber of the Lightning,” advised Ashelia from the middeck tiller, her tone decidedly less dread-ridden than that of the two young fishermen. Nearing middle age and quite sturdy for her gender, the broad-shouldered Ashelia was still a quite handsome woman, with straight blond hair, sharply parted on the right, hanging to her shoulders, and light gray eyes shining. Her skin retained the texture and look of porcelain, unlike the other veteran fishermen, with just a hint of a tan showing so early after the end of a particularly deep winter.
“He’s hoping the old warlock will turn him into something that can swim, then,” quipped the fifth man from under the low-pulled hood of his forest green cloak.
“A toad is my preference,” Addadearber replied. “And ’tis true that toads can swim. How far is another matter, particularly given the size of the knuckleheads we’ve been pulling in for two days. I would take bets that the poor little laddie wouldn’t paddle ten good kicks before a ten-pounder got him. What’s your guess then, Roundie?”
The cloaked man just chuckled softly in reply, both from Addadearber’s teasing description and from the use of his nickname. He was known about Ten-Towns as Roundabout, because he always seemed to be exactly that. “Roundabout and never here,” was the phrase often spoken regarding the ranger, whose real name few knew, and which he never seemed willing to share. He was of medium height and muscular, but slender, with long, straight black hair and piercing eyes, one brown, one blue—a trick, it was rumored, of his mixed heritage. His ears were quite long, and poked through his hair. He didn’t try to hide the fact that his veins coursed with elf blood.
Spragan turned his alarmed expression to Lathan, but the older boy just shook his head and brushed the blond locks from in front of his blue eyes.
Addadearber began to whisper something then, something that resembled the incantation of a spell, and both young fishermen turned to regard him with great alarm, which of course turned the corners of the old wizard’s lips up in a satisfied grin.
“Enough o’ that,” Ashelia said to him. “Them boys’re scared enough.” She turned a severe look upon the two of them as she continued, “I’d have thought they’d been out on the waters enough now to know that a little leak isn’t sending Boneyard to the grave, especially me sister’s own Lathan there, sailor blood and all—not that ye’d know he’s got any blood in him in looking at his face just now!”
“We’ve never been this far—” Spragan started to protest, but Ashelia cut him short.
“And enough from yerself!” she scolded. “Four generations o’ Rubriks been sailing Dinneshere, and ye’ve a grandda, an aunt, and two uncles who call the Lac their eternal resting place. I took ye on to train ye, for the wishes o’ yer ma—both of ye! Ye think they’d have trusted me with the lot o’ ye if I didn’t know the waters? And ye think I’d take ye out as full crew if I didn’t think ye ready for it? So don’t ye prove me wrong here. Lathan, ye stay up front and get yer sounding rope ready as we near the eastern shore, and yerself, Spragan, grab a pail and get to the hold.”
“There’s too much—”
“And don’t ye make me tell ye again, or I’m knowing a way to drop a hundred and fifty pounds from our weight real quick.”
With a last look to Lathan, Spragan scurried away. They heard him stumble down the aft ladder then splash about in the watery hold. A trapdoor near the taffrail popped open, and after more splashing, Spragan flung a bucketful of water up and out, to splash into Boneyard’s wake.
“Should I go and help the lad?” Roundabout asked.
Ashelia waved the notion away. “We’ve picked up the eastern current already and we’re not so far. Ye paid me too well for yer transport to the eastern shore for me to make ye work yer way across. Now regarding the old spell-thrower …”
“Bah, but you employ me to find fish, not throw water,” Addadearber replied. “I suffer your pittance of coin that I might glimpse your beauty, but there are limits to even your considerable charms.”
Ashelia’s forced grin and subdued chuckle revealed that the woman knew sarcasm when she heard it—yet another reason the old wizard was so fond of her.
Ashelia’s confidence in Boneyard was not misplaced. The seasoned sailor knew the condition of the boat from the feel of the tiller and the tug of the sails, and though she had to work hard to keep Boneyard moving along her desired course, they made the secret inlet and the quiet lagoon quite comfortably—and would have, even if Ashelia had not kept poor Spragan and Lathan bailing all the way.
Not many people knew about that place—just a few of Caer-Dineval’s fishermen, and Roundabout, of course, who knew the wilderness around the three lakes better than anyone in Ten-Towns. A solitary dock stuck out from the lagoon beach, with a single-roomed cottage behind it, and that in front of a small but thick forest. That alone was a remarkable thing, for most of Lac Dinneshere was bordered by rocky bluffs and barren tundra. But the bluffs both north and south were a bit higher than usual, shielding the wood. The forest, second in size in Icewind Dale only to Lonelywood on the banks of Maer Dualdon far to the west, like the dock and cabin, was a well-kept secret.
Larson’s Boneyard glided in easily under Ashelia’s skilled hand, with Lathan and Spragan stumbling around to secure the ropes.
“Water’s not deep,” Ashelia explained.
“I can see the bottom!” Spragan confirmed.
“Even if she fills, she’s not for sinking here, so we can patch her and bail her, and get back out in short order,” said Ashelia. “Tools, tar, and planks in the cabin.”
“A resourceful lot, you fisherfolk,” Addadearber congratulated her.
“Not all,” Ashelia replied. “But them that ain’t are dead, or soon to be. Lac Dinneshere’s not forgivin’ to fools.”
With Addadearber’s magical assistance heating some tar and blowing aside water in the hold so that Ashelia could set the patch plank in place, it didn’t take long to make the minor repair, but since the sun was low in the west, they decided to stay the rest of the day and that night ashore.
“Pick some good ones for our supper,” the captain told her young crewmembers. “Then bail her down below the patch so we can see if she’s holding and go out and get us firewood for the night.”
She left the two young men to their tasks and moved to the dock and the shore, to find the wizard and the ranger staring into the forest, perplexed.
“What do ye know, then?” she asked.
“It’s a good season,” Roundabout replied, indicating the forest. As she followed his gaze, Ashelia understood what he meant. The wood looked thicker and more vibrant than she remembered, and the air was full of the scent of flowering plants and the sounds of forest life.
Ashelia wore the most puzzled look of all. “Was here in the autumn,” she explained. “Something’s different. It’s bigger.”
“A trick of the Spellplague?” Addadearber posited. “Some magic gone awry, perhaps.”
“Everything is about magic with you, wizard,” Roundabout said, drawing an arc of one of Addadearber’s bushy eyebrows. “It was a good winter, full of snow, and the melt has been consistent,” the ranger added. “Even here in the dale, life finds a way to flourish.”
“Because we’re a resourceful lot,” Ashelia added and started for the cabin, the other two moving in her wake.
And none of them were convinced by Roundabout’s argument that nothing unusual was going on, the ranger least of all. They could feel it, like a heartbeat in the ground beneath their feet. They could smell it and could hear it, a vibrancy in the air.
They did a bit of cleaning—the ranger scooped out the fire pit—and organized the cabin’s small table and chairs, and claimed a piece of the floor for their respective beds. Lathan and Spragan joined them shortly, arms laden with fish,
knucklehead trout mostly, but with an assortment of blues and spotted bass for variety.
“Seems to be holding,” Lathan reported.
Roundabout tossed him an axe he had found leaning against one wall.
“Enough for cooking and for keeping us warm through the night,” Ashelia instructed, and the two young sailors set out.
“I should get me a couple of those,” Addadearber remarked as they left.
“They can be helpful,” Ashelia agreed.
“More trouble than they’re worth,” the ranger said, and when the other two gave him amused looks, he added, “And no, I am not letting them ruin my meal with their no doubt impressive cooking skills.” He scooped up the largest of the fish, pulled a knife from his belt, and went outside to clean the thing.
With a waggle of his fingers, Addadearber animated a second fish and danced it out the door behind the ranger.
“Ye’re holding faith in yer magic, then,” said Ashelia. “Not many others’re doing the same.”
“Minor dweomers,” the wizard explained. “We cannot simply cease with our spellcasting, else we’ll never retrieve our skills when the Weave repairs.”
“If,” Ashelia corrected.
Addadearber conceded the point with a shrug. “And if it does not, we must adapt to whatever magic remains, or evolves. I employ my spells every day, and often. As magic shifts, I will watch and I will learn, while my less courageous colleagues will find themselves far behind me.”
“And Addadearber will take over the world!” Ashelia said, grinning widely. “Or Icewind Dale, at the least. Are ye worthy o’ that kingdom, wizard?”
“What ill have I done to deserve it?” Addadearber replied.
“My fingers are freezing. I can barely hold the thing!” Lathan complained, swinging the axe at the end of one arm.
“I’ll take it,” Spragan was quick to reply, but all he received in answer was a scowl.
“I’m older. You just collect the kindli—” Lathan stopped short, confused when he glanced to his left to see that Spragan was no longer beside him on the trail, that the trail itself was no longer the same as he remembered. He stood beside a stand of birch, but didn’t remember passing it. “Spragan?”
The Collected Stories, The Legend of Drizzt Page 28