The Last Threshold tns-4

by R. A. Salvatore

  Curiously, though, even though he considered the possibility of his own cuckolding, such matters seemed trivial to him. Something had happened to Dahlia, and he doubted that she had run off of her own accord. Surely she would have confronted him and told him, or at least, he realized, she would have told Entreri.

  And wasn’t it curious, Drizzt thought, that he wasn’t suspicious of Entreri at all in this mystery? Entreri had been the last of the group to see her, and the man was, after all-or had been, at least-a ruthless killer. And yet, Drizzt was certain that he hadn’t done anything to harm Dahlia, or even that he wasn’t hiding anything about Dahlia’s disappearance at all.

  That notion slowed Drizzt’s steps, as he had to pause to truly consider his feelings here, his gut instinct.

  There were so many dark alleyways he might allow his imagination to float along, notions of Entreri getting rid of Dahlia because the assassin feared Drizzt’s reaction to him taking Dahlia as a lover, perhaps. Or Dahlia, in her visit, discovering something nefarious about the assassin, and threatening to reveal him. It was all too easy to understand how a relationship with Artemis Entreri could go very bad, very fast, and yet, Drizzt knew that he was right in his feelings of Entreri’s innocence.

  As he moved toward Entreri’s inn, Drizzt could hardly believe how little he cared about Dahlia’s relationship with Entreri, whatever it might be. Not now, at least. Now, all that mattered to him was finding out what had happened to her.

  When this was settled, however it turned out, he would have a long time in sorting through this morass of confusing emotions.

  Entreri looked up briefly when Drizzt entered the crowded tavern, but quickly went back to his drink.

  He was having a hard time looking the drow in the eye.

  “Nothing,” Drizzt said, moving up to the table and sitting opposite the man-in the exact seat Dahlia had taken on that first night in port when she had come to him, Entreri realized.

  “I have been in every tavern in Baldur’s Gate,” Drizzt went on. “None have seen her.”

  “Or none admit to seeing her,” Entreri remarked.

  “Would she have left us without notice, on her own?”

  Entreri wanted to say, “Left you, perhaps,” but he bit it back. And when he thought about it, he realized, to his surprise, that he didn’t really want to say something like that to Drizzt. He had cuckolded the drow, and though this ranger had long been his bitterest enemy, Artemis Entreri was not proud of that fact.

  He had not made love to Dahlia out of any ill-regard to Drizzt, or out of any regard to Drizzt at all.

  And that was why he was so bothered, because that reality was the basis of his pain. He had been with Dahlia because of how Dahlia had touched him, how she made him feel, how she understood so much about him due to her own experiences, their parallel history.

  He had been with Dahlia because of his feelings for Dahlia, and now, with her gone, perhaps lost to him, the assassin was being forced into emotions so foreign to him.

  Artemis Entreri had been down this road once before, with a woman named Calihye, and to a horrible end. Artemis Entreri had vowed to never again walk such a road of vulnerability. He would depend upon himself and no one else, a rock and island against these unwanted emotions.

  And yet, here he was, miserable and worried and fearing that Dahlia had been taken from him.

  “Where do we turn?” Drizzt asked.

  And here Entreri was, discussing her with Drizzt Do’Urden, her other lover. He looked up at the drow, and answered, “How would I know?”

  “You know her as well as I do,” Drizzt admitted. “Better, likely.”

  Entreri winced at the words, expecting a barrage of curses to immediately follow, and looked down to his drink once more, lifting it and draining it without making eye contact with his counterpart.

  “Well?” Drizzt prompted.

  There was no judgment in the drow’s tone. None at all that Entreri could detect. He placed his glass down and slowly looked up to return Drizzt’s gaze.

  “Dahlia is a profoundly troubled woman,” he said.

  Drizzt nodded.

  “Complicated,” Entreri went on. “The violations inflicted upon her wounded her in ways you cannot-” He stopped there, not wanting to twist a dagger into Drizzt.

  But Drizzt answered, “I know,” and he let it go at that.

  He knew other things as well, Entreri realized, or at least, Drizzt suspected, and yet Drizzt was putting that all behind him at this dangerous time. Drizzt tiptoed around the obvious issue, unwilling to confront Entreri openly.

  Because he cared about Dahlia, Entreri understood, and that realization stung him all the more in his guilt.

  “Effron,” Entreri said, and Drizzt perked up.

  “He is the only one I can imagine,” Entreri explained. “His hatred for Dahlia, if it can even be called hatred, permeates his every thought.”

  “We are a long way from Port Llast,” Drizzt said, “and took a roundabout path to get here.”

  “That young tiefling is not without resources,” Entreri replied. “Even Herzgo Alegni showed him great deference, and Herzgo Alegni hated him profoundly.”

  “Herzgo Alegni was his father,” Drizzt reminded him.

  “It mattered not,” Entreri explained. “Or perhaps that was the focus of the hatred. Effron came to us in Neverwinter at the request of a Netherese lord. I had many dealings with these lords in my time as Alegni’s slave. Do not ever underestimate them.”

  “You believe this Netherese lord helped Effron get to Dahlia?” Drizzt asked.

  “I fear it,” Entreri admitted, and he was being quite honest at that moment, “for if that is the case, then Dahlia is lost to us forever.”

  Drizzt slumped back at that, and he and Entreri stared at each other for many heartbeats. But again, and again to Entreri’s surprise, the drow did not broach that most delicate subject.

  “I need another drink,” Entreri said, standing, for what he really needed was to take a break from this unrelenting pressure. The idea that Dahlia was forever lost to him gnawed at his sensibilities in a way that he simply could not process.

  “Get a drink for me,” Drizzt surprised him by saying when Entreri turned for the bar. “A large one.”

  Entreri turned back to him and snickered, seeing the hyperbole for what it was. Still, he returned with a pair of drinks and the bottle of rum, even though he realized that he’d be drinking most of that bottle himself.

  From before dawn until after sunset, Brother Afafrenfere scrubbed the deck of Minnow Skipper, or worked the lines, or patched with tar, or performed whatever other chore he could fashion, or Mister Sikkal assigned him, so long as that work did not move him belowdecks. He wasn’t there to actually work, after all.

  “Get yerself down under and help Cribbins with the patching,” Sikkal ordered him late one afternoon.

  “Down under?”

  “Bottom hold,” Sikkal explained. “We be taking a bit o’ water, and I’m not for that. So get yerself down there and get yerself to work!”

  Afafrenfere looked around, noting several other crewmen sitting here or there on the open deck, done with their work, if any of them had even been assigned any this day. Minnow Skipper was stocked and seaworthy and only sitting here because of the missing Dahlia, though no one aboard seemed to know that Dahlia was missing, or cared to admit to it, anyway.

  “I do not think I will go and do that,” Afafrenfere replied.

  “ ’Ere, what did ye say?” Sikkal demanded.

  “Send another,” the monk replied.

  “If we was at sea, I could have yerself thrown to the sharks for that answer, boy!”

  “If we were at sea, you could try,” the monk replied calmly. He wasn’t looking at Sikkal as he spoke, though. The two dock hands had appeared on the wharf, the old gaffer with a sack over his shoulder. Afafrenfere had seen this play before, the previous twilight.

  Sikkal rambled on and on about somet
hing, but Afafrenfere was no longer listening. The two old dockhands revealed their nervousness as they moved along the wharf, glancing this way and that with every step. Just like the night before.

  Afafrenfere let his gaze shift far to the side, to an old scow, appearing far less than seaworthy, that was strapped up tight to the farthest dock. These two would make their way to that one, the monk believed, for the night before they had gone aboard, carrying a similar sack. Afafrenfere had watched the boat for a long while, but had never seen the pair depart, nor had they gone out the previous morning. The monk hadn’t thought much of it at the time, since many of the dockhands in Baldur’s Gate, as in every port, used the moored boats as personal inns. But earlier this day, Afafrenfere had noted the pair gazing that way more than once, and had expected they would arrive on the docks around dinnertime, bound for the scow.

  And why, after all, had they obviously slipped off the boat in the middle of the night?

  “Hey!” Mister Sikkal shouted and he grabbed Afafrenfere’s arm.

  The monk slowly swiveled his head, first glancing at the other members of the crew, all looking on with more than a passing interest now, then turning down to eye Sikkal’s dirty hand, and then, finally, settling his gaze on Sikkal himself, looking the man straight in the eye with a glare that was more promise than threat.

  Sikkal couldn’t hold that stare, or the arm, and he backed off, but only momentarily, for he seemed to gain a bit of courage when he broke free of Afafrenfere’s glare and considered the crew around him.

  “Get below,” he ordered Afafrenfere.

  In a low voice, so that only Sikkal could hear, Afafrenfere spelled it out more clearly. “Only if that is where I am asked to move your corpse.”

  “Captain’s to hear of this!” Sikkal cried, but Afafrenfere wasn’t looking at him anymore, turning again to the wharves, and to the dockhands, and just in time to see them toss their sack onto the distant scow and slither aboard.

  Sikkal rushed off for Cannavara’s cabin, but he hadn’t gone three steps before the monk leaped over Minnow Skipper’s rail to land lightly on the dock.

  Sikkal called after him, and Afafrenfere resolved to rush back to the ship and crush the idiot’s windpipe if he persisted in raising a ruckus.

  But Sikkal didn’t, and the monk moved in fits and starts, slipping along the wharves from barrel to crate, carefully picking his stealthy way to the old scow. Near to the boat, he nestled behind a stack of kegs and listened intently.

  He heard some murmuring, but nothing definitive. He couldn’t make out any actual words, for the waves lapped loudly against the wharf’s supporting posts and broke with a watery crash just a few steps from his position.

  Patience, Afafrenfere told himself, and he waited for twilight to deepen.

  With practiced stealth, Brother Afafrenfere slipped onto the deck of the scow and into the shadows beside the main cabin. He heard the pair of dock hands within, laughing and wheezing, and he thought then, to his great disappointment, that this boat was nothing more than their nightly retreat. He remained anyway, for he had to be certain. He didn’t know if these two had been involved in Dahlia’s disappearance, but Ambergris’s hunch had resonated with him, and watching them for the last couple of days had done nothing to dissuade Afafrenfere from believing these two to be a nefarious pair, and with something to hide, though whatever it might be, he could not be sure.

  The monk moved quietly around the deck, looking for clues. Everything seemed unremarkable … until he noted a meager light between the deck boards, lamplight coming from the hold and not the cabin.

  Growing up in the Bloodstone Lands, Afafrenfere wasn’t versed in ship design, but he had been on a couple of boats similar to this one, and he didn’t think there was any way for the dockhands to get belowdecks from the cabin. He slipped back to the cabin, and heard the pair still inside, with the younger seadog grumbling about the smell of the older one’s pipe weed.

  Across from the door to that cabin, right in the open on the deck, sat the bulkhead. It wouldn’t be easy to get there unseen, the monk realized, but he started that way, belly-crawling.

  “Get out on the deck, then, ye stinky fool!” he heard from inside the cabin.

  Alarmed, the monk stood and leaped as the cabin door swung open and the old gaffer came forth.

  Puffing his pipe, and indeed the stench was terrible, the wheezing old seadog moved right under Afafrenfere, who had wrapped himself like a snake around the crossbeam of the mainmast. The cabin door was still open, creaking as it swung gently with the rocking boat. Afafrenfere caught glimpses of the other swabby inside, moving around, preparing a meal, it seemed.

  The old gaffer moved to the rail, looking out to sea.

  Afafrenfere slithered along the crossbeam, again right above him. With a quick glance to the other, to ensure that he was distracted, the monk dropped down behind his prey, his right forearm tucking tightly against the gaffer’s throat, his left hand coming across behind the man’s head, grabbing a handful of hair and an ear, and pressing the man forward, tightening the choke. In a matter of a few heartbeats, the gaffer went limp in Afafrenfere’s strong grasp, and the monk eased the unconscious fool down to the deck.

  Afafrenfere didn’t even pause at the cabin door, bursting in quickly, violently, and similarly locking the other man into the incapacitating hold. Soon after, the two were seated in the cabin, tied and gagged back to back, as the monk moved quietly to the entry to the lower hold.

  Flat on his belly, Afafrenfere peered through the cracks in the old bulkhead. He did well to stifle his gasp when he did, for there Dahlia was, bound and gagged in a chair across the way. And there sat Effron, off to the side in a chair and staring at her.

  Dahlia couldn’t look the tiefling in the eye, Afafrenfere realized. He tried to remember all that he knew of this dangerous young warlock. So he took his time here-besides, he wanted to know what this was all about. What was really going on between Effron and Dahlia? Why had he taken her, and given that, why was he still here on Toril? He could shadowstep with her back to the Shadowfell, Afafrenfere knew.

  There was much more to this story, and Afafrenfere wanted to know it.

  So he waited as the night deepened around him. Judging from the location of the moon, it was past midnight before Effron finally stirred.

  The young tiefling moved over to Dahlia and pulled down her gag.

  “They are all sleeping now, of course,” Effron said. “No one will hear you if you scream out-”

  “I won’t scream out,” Dahlia replied, and still she did not look at him.

  “I could make you.”

  Dahlia didn’t even lift her eyes. Where was the firebrand Afafrenfere had come to know? If Drizzt or Entreri, or anyone else, had spoken to her like that in Port Llast, bound or not, she would have spat in his face.

  “Do you know how much I hate you?” Effron asked.

  “You should,” Dahlia replied in barely a whisper, and with true humility, it seemed.

  “Then why?” the young warlock demanded, his voice rising and trembling. “If the memory hurts you as much as you claim, then why?”

  “You couldn’t understand.”

  “Try!”

  “Because you looked like him!” Dahlia shouted back, now, at last, raising her teary eyes to look at Effron. “You looked like him, and when I looked upon you, all I saw was him!”

  “Herzgo Alegni?”

  “Don’t speak his name!”

  “He was my father!” Effron retorted. “Herzgo Alegni was my father. And at least he cared enough to bother to raise me! At least he didn’t throw me off a cliff!”

  Again Afafrenfere had to work hard to suppress a gasp, for it seemed clear to him that Effron wasn’t talking figuratively here.

  “You wanted me dead!” he yelled in Dahlia’s face, and she was weeping openly now.

  “I wanted him dead,” she corrected, her voice breaking with every syllable. “And I couldn’t kill him! I
was a child, don’t you understand? Just a little orphaned elf hiding in the forest with the few of my clan who had survived the murderous raid. And he was coming back for you.”

  Effron sputtered several indecipherable syllables. “Then why didn’t you just let him take me?” he demanded.

  “He would have killed me.”

  “Most mothers would die for their children. A real mother would have died-”

  “He would have violated me again, more likely,” Dahlia said, and she wasn’t looking at Effron any longer, and her tone made it seem to Afafrenfere as if she were speaking more to herself than to him at that point, trying to sort through her own painful recollections. “He would have filled me with another child, that I could serve him like a brood mare, like chattel.

  “And you,” she said, now looking up at him, and seeming to find some measure of strength once more. “You would have been taught to hate me in any case.”

  “No.”

  “Yes!” Dahlia snapped back. “He would have trained you from your youngest days. He would have made you just like him, ready to go forth and murder and rape-”

  “No!” Effron said and he slapped Dahlia across the face, but then fell back a step, seeming as wounded as she, and she melted into sobs once more.

  Afafrenfere had seen enough. He slithered back from the hold and climbed a guide rope, setting himself into position.

  He played this through in his thoughts repeatedly, recalling all that he knew of Effron, recognizing the tiefling’s deadly arsenal.

  He heard another slap from below.

  Afafrenfere leaped down, double-kicking below as he descended on the bulkhead, his weight, momentum and powerful kicks exploding the old wood beneath him. He landed in the hold in perfect balance and sprang immediately for the surprised Effron, diving into a forward roll.

  Dahlia screamed, Effron threw his good arm up defensively, and Afafrenfere came up to his feet with a barrage of blows. The warlock had magical defenses in place, of course, but still the monk’s relentless barrage got through, slamming Effron about the face once and again.

  Effron fell back and Afafrenfere pursued, kicking, punching, launching a full-out offensive volley to keep the warlock off balance, to keep him from casting a spell. His best chance, he knew, was to simply overwhelm the young tiefling, to bury him before the dangerous Effron ever found his balance.