The Last Threshold tns-4

by R. A. Salvatore

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “Unicorn lady, Mylickin’ or something-”

  “Mielikki,” Jarlaxle corrected.

  “Aye, that’s me thinking. Heard Drizzt claim as much.”

  Jarlaxle nodded, but remained intrigued by the other theory, that Lolth secretly considered Drizzt her champion of chaos, and indeed, that rogue had lived up to the billing as far as the city of Menzoberranzan was concerned.

  “So ye’re thinkin’ that them shadow lords’re studying the gods and them Chosen such to find some plan o’ attack against us all?”

  Jarlaxle was impressed that Athrogate had gone so quickly to that reasoning, and he reminded himself that this particular dwarf was no fool, despite his nonsensical rhyming and frivolous laughter, particularly in matters of battle strategies.

  “Be interestin’ to see where we might fit into such plans of domination, eh?” the dwarf added, and Jarlaxle nodded.

  Interesting indeed.

  “It seems that many are interested in the rogue Do’Urden of late,” Kimmuriel said to Jarlaxle a couple of days later, when Jarlaxle and Athrogate arrived in Luskan.

  “Tiago?”

  “He’s a persistent one.”

  “Where is Drizzt?” Jarlaxle asked.

  “In or around town, though laying low, I expect,” Kimmuriel replied. “His boat arrived back in port some time ago, and he was aboard, but where he and his friends have gone, we cannot be sure.”

  Jarlaxle nodded. Keeping track of any band that included Artemis Entreri would not be easy, he knew.

  “Do you think that the inquiries of this Parise Ulfbinder are in any way connected to Tiago’s pursuit of Drizzt?” Kimmuriel asked. “Is it possible that the Netherese lords are trying to create a back-channel to the direct markets in Menzoberranzan?”

  Jarlaxle shook his head. “Our agreement is fairly thorough,” he reminded, and Kimmuriel, who had just negotiated that very contract could not disagree. “My sense is that Parise’s interest in Drizzt extends only so far as to use Drizzt as a symbol of something larger.”

  Kimmuriel nodded as Jarlaxle spoke, revealing that he was of like mind. “There have been other inquiries by the Netherese,” he explained.

  “Of Drizzt?”

  “No, none that I know of, but of others who have elevated themselves amongst the ranks of the mortals of Faerun. Elminster, for one. It seems that our Netherese neighbors have taken a special interest in those who have distinguished themselves in the eyes of one god or another.”

  “The Chosen,” Jarlaxle reasoned. “Or perhaps they hold an interest in the gods themselves.”

  “And our duty in any such a conflict?” Kimmuriel asked.

  “Profit.”

  “And Menzoberranzan’s role?”

  “That is more interesting,” Jarlaxle admitted, meaning that he couldn’t begin to figure it out.

  “If you are correct in your assumptions regarding their interest in Drizzt, then likely Menzoberranzan will be able to pick sides as is most convenient, but if you are wrong.…”

  “If Drizzt is their focus, then perhaps their plans are also focused on our people.”

  “And in that regard, what then is our new agreement worth, to us and to the Netherese?”

  “Let us be very cautious in the manner of goods we send to Shade Enclave,” Jarlaxle decided. “And regarding any information we disclose. I do not believe that Parise means to move against Menzoberranzan, or against Bregan D’aerthe-to what end, after all? But let us make sure that we do not help them in whatever they think to accomplish.”

  “You will remain in Luskan for the time being?” Kimmuriel asked.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I will go to the city of the illithids,” the psionicist announced. “Their hive mind will help us find the answers. If something grand is unfolding, then the sooner we understand it, the larger our profit.”

  “How long?”

  “Who can tell with mind flayers?” Kimmuriel responded with a shrug.

  Jarlaxle nodded.

  “Drizzt Do’Urden,” Kimmuriel stated.

  Jarlaxle shrugged.

  “He is here, as is Artemis Entreri,” Kimmuriel clarified. “I trust that any contact you might find will be in the interest of Bregan D’aerthe, and not in the interest of Jarlaxle.”

  “They are one and the same.”

  Kimmuriel stared at him hard.

  “Go,” Jarlaxle said, waving him away. “I am no fool, and I recognize that the events unfolding could well be important. Where is Beniago?”

  “He is around, surely in the city. He was quite useful in getting Drizzt far from Luskan for the last several months.”

  “Tiago again?”

  “He is stubborn,” Kimmuriel admitted. “But then, he is a Baenre, after all.”

  Jarlaxle Baenre grinned and bowed at the clever remark. “Tiago may well be stepping into something larger than he understands, and to his-and to all of our-detriment.”

  “As I said, he is a Baenre.”

  Jarlaxle could only chuckle in response.

  “Well met, again,” Jarlaxle said to Tiago Baenre when he found the young warrior holed up in an abandoned farmhouse just outside of Luskan. As Beniago had informed Jarlaxle, Tiago had several companions with him, including a brother and sister of House Xorlarrin.

  Jarlaxle tipped his great hat, turning as he did in apparent deference to the drow wearing the robes of a priestess-Saribel Xorlarrin, no doubt-but in truth to let his gaze scrutinize the spellspinner standing beside her. Beniago had warned him specifically to beware the spellspinner known as Ravel Xorlarrin.

  “You were not invited,” Tiago said sternly.

  “Nor were you, yet here you are, far from Menzoberranzan, far even from Gauntlgrym,” Jarlaxle returned.

  “I am Baenre. I go where I please.”

  “You’re in Bregan D’aerthe territory, young weapons master. You would have done well to inform us of your intent.”

  “Bregan D’aerthe,” Tiago spat with clear contempt.

  “So you continue your hunt for Drizzt Do’Urden.”

  “This is none of your affair.”

  Jarlaxle grinned.

  “Where is he?” Tiago demanded.

  “I thought you just said it was none of my affair.”

  “You play dangerous games,” said Tiago.

  “I? Why, young weapons master, you are the one hunting a fellow drow, and without the imprimatur of Matron Mother Quenthel.” The mercenary leader made a point to glance the way of the Xorlarrins as he spoke, and judging from their reaction, his words had hit a mark.

  But Tiago remained obstinate, predictably so, given his bloodlines.

  “Where is he?” Tiago demanded.

  “I know not.”

  “He went forth on a boat-Minnow Skipper by name,” Tiago said. “Now that boat has returned, and Drizzt with her, but he seems to have disappeared.”

  “You know more about it than I, apparently,” said Jarlaxle. “I have only very recently returned from unrelated business.”

  “From where?”

  Jarlaxle scoffed at the demand.

  “You should consider my position,” Tiago said to him. “My family and my rank. Matron Mother Quenthel will not be pleased to learn that Jarlaxle of Bregan D’aerthe hindered my pursuit of the rogue.”

  “What Matron Mother Quenthel will or will not say may well surprise you, confident one,” Jarlaxle returned. “You pursue that which you do not understand.”

  “I am to fear him?” Tiago said with dripping sarcasm.

  “Perhaps you are to fear the wrath of Lady Lolth should you succeed in your quest,” Jarlaxle replied, again glancing at the Xorlarrins, and Saribel seemed to sway a bit at that surprising remark.

  “You would do well to step aside and remain aside,” Tiago said threateningly. “Already, I have seen too much of Jarlaxle.”

  “Perhaps I feel that I owed it to Matron Mother Quenthel to proper
ly warn her misguided warrior before he ventures into a darkness he does not understand,” Jarlaxle returned with a wry grin.

  “You owe it?” Tiago asked incredulously. “You owe it to House Baenre?”

  “Our finest client.”

  “And merely that, Jarlaxle?” Tiago asked, not hiding the implication that he knew more than he was letting on, and indeed, his sudden cockiness had Jarlaxle on his guard. “Is that your only interest in House Baenre, Houseless mercenary?”

  Jarlaxle considered the specific wording of this sly young Baenre for a long while. Tiago knew the truth of Jarlaxle? Who else might know, then? His heritage had always been a secret even from most of the family. As far as Jarlaxle knew, only Gromph, who was one of the very few drow older than Jarlaxle, and the matron mother herself knew his heritage, along with Kimmuriel.

  But Tiago’s air of superiority was no false bravado, and it was clearly based on something Tiago knew that he should not.

  “Step carefully,” Jarlaxle said, and he bowed and turned on his heel, taking his abrupt leave, for he could not be away from this brash young upstart and his powerful friends quickly enough for his liking. Rarely had Jarlaxle found himself in a position of such a disadvantage.

  He rushed back to Luskan, and found Beniago in short order.

  But Beniago had no answers for him, for they still had found no sign of Drizzt and his five companions. The group had left Minnow Skipper when she docked, every one, and Beniago had traced them to a specific inn, even to a room they had rented for a private gathering.

  But from there, nothing. It was as if they had simply disappeared.

  The old drow mercenary-and he felt very old at that moment-could only blow a resigned sigh, for this was one of those rare occasions when events were outside of Jarlaxle’s ability to control them.

  Between the Netherese lords, Tiago Baenre and his hunting band, and the mysterious disappearance of Drizzt and his companions, too many wheels were turning in too many different directions for his liking.

  Chapter 20

  THE MENAGERIE

  The moments became an hour, the hours became a day, and Drizzt and Effron had nowhere to go. They broke out their packs in the small square of the magical cell, each side of which was no longer than a tall man’s height.

  In their packs, they had food and water for several more days, but their inability to get anything beyond the magical bars had the cell smelling rank, but soon enough, even that faded into the background of monotony, as did the low humming sound of the lightning magic infusing the bars.

  After one night, or perhaps it was a day, of fitful sleep, Effron awakened to find Drizzt inspecting the bars. Icingdeath in his hand, Drizzt eyed the joints where the bars met the ceiling and the floor, and he even dared prod at one.

  The shock sent him flying backward, to crash into the opposite bars, which sparked angrily and threw him aside. Sitting on the ground, his long white hair dancing wildly with the charge, Drizzt took a series of deep breaths, trying to recover his sensibilities.

  “Not very bright,” said Effron. “Amusing to watch, however.”

  “There must be a way out of here.”

  “Must there be?” the young tiefling asked. “Draygo Quick is a master in matters of imprisonment, I assure you. His menagerie is vast. I know of none who have escaped, humanoid or monster, and that includes your wondrous panther.”

  “We are not in stasis,” Drizzt countered. “Are you so quick to surrender?”

  That statement had Effron narrowing his gaze in anger. “You know nothing of me,” he said in a low and threatening tone. “Were I quick to surrender, I would have done so as soon as I knew who I was-and what I was! Do you know what it is to be an outcast, Drizzt Do’Urden? Do you know what it is to not belong, anywhere?”

  Drizzt broke out in laughter and Effron couldn’t begin to sort out what the drow had found so funny. The tiefling watched as Drizzt crawled over to sit right in front of him.

  “We seem to have time,” Drizzt said. “Likely quite a bit of time, unless your mother and the rest can find us.”

  Effron studied the drow carefully, not sure what to make of him.

  “Perhaps it is time we came to understand each other, for your mother’s sake,” Drizzt explained. “Let me tell you what I know of not belonging in my own home, or, as I thought for so many years, even in my own skin.”

  Drizzt told him a story then, one that began two centuries before in an Underdark city called Menzoberranzan. At first Effron scoffed at the seemingly meager attempt to create a bond-what did he need with this drow, anyway? — but soon, the young tiefling found himself scoffing less and listening more.

  He marveled at the drow’s descriptions of this decadent place, Menzoberranzan, and descriptions of his family in House Do’Urden, which seemed to Effron not so unlike life at Draygo Quick’s castle. Drizzt told of the drow schools of study-martial, divine, and arcane-and the inevitable accompanying indoctrination they entailed. Effron found himself so drawn into the winding ways of Menzoberranzan, his imagination walking those shadowy streets, that it took him a long while to realize that Drizzt had stopped talking.

  He looked up at the drow, staring into those lavender eyes, reflecting back at him in the dim bluish light of the glowing bars.

  Drizzt told him another story, one of a surface raid where his companions had slaughtered an elf clan. He described saving a young elf child by smearing her with her own dead mother’s blood.

  Clearly affected by the memory, Drizzt’s voice grew very low, so he was obviously startled, straightening quickly, when Effron angrily interjected, “Would that you had been there before Dahlia threw me from the cliff!”

  An uncomfortable silence followed.

  “You have not made peace with her,” Drizzt said. “I had thought-”

  “More so than my comment and tone would indicate,” Effron replied, and he meant it. He lowered his gaze and shook his head and admitted, “It is hard.”

  “She’s a difficult person sometimes, I know,” said Drizzt.

  “She loves you.”

  Effron noted Drizzt’s wince, and came to think that perhaps the feeling wasn’t mutual-which explained a lot regarding Drizzt’s acceptance of Dahlia’s dalliance with Artemis Entreri, after all.

  “I was much like you when I left Menzoberranzan,” Drizzt said, quickly regaining Effron’s attention. “It took me many years to learn to trust, and some time after that to recognize the beauty and love such trust can bring.”

  He launched back into his story then, completing the tale of Menzoberranzan and completing, too, the tale of his own father and Zaknafein’s ultimate victory over the miserable priestesses of Lolth. He detailed his journey through the Underdark, the road that led him, at last, to the surface world.

  By that time, growling stomachs interrupted the tales, and the two went to their stocks. But Effron bade Drizzt to continue his tale through the meal, and all the way until they lay down once more for sleep-where Drizzt left Effron’s imagination on the side of a cold mountain known as Kelvin’s Cairn, with a promise to tell him of the greatest friends anyone could ever hope to know.

  And they had plenty of time for Drizzt to finish his stories, as the days drifted past and no one, not Draygo Quick or his minions, nor Dahlia and the others, came to see them.

  Then it was a tenday, and Effron, too, had shared his own tales of growing up in the shadow of Herzgo Alegni, and under the harsh tutelage of Lord Draygo Quick.

  And they ran out of food and water, and still they sat, in their own waste, and both came to wonder if Draygo had just sent them to this place to be forgotten and to die in the near darkness and the monotonous hum.

  “Our friends were likely victorious, but they haven’t found us yet,” Effron posited at one point, his voice barely a whisper, for he had no strength for anything louder. “Lord Draygo would not just leave me here to die.”

  Drizzt, lying on his back, wore his skepticism on his face.
<
br />   “You were too important to him,” Effron explained, echoing what he had told Drizzt on Minnow Skipper’s return journey to Luskan. “He wouldn’t …”

  Those were the last words Effron spoke to Drizzt in that cell, or at least, the last Drizzt heard.

  When Drizzt awakened, he found himself in a different place, in a more typical dungeon cell with a dirt floor and stone walls. He was sitting against the wall, opposite the bars of the cell door, his arms chained up above his head, the other end of the chain spiked into the wall far above him.

  It took Drizzt a while to sort out the changes in his situation, but one of the first things he came to recognize was not an encouraging thought: given his predicament and the change of venue, his friends had certainly not won out.

  It was darker in here than in the other cell, the only light coming from the distant flicker of a torch set in a sconce on a wall many twists and turns from Drizzt’s location. Before him on the floor, Drizzt noted a plate of food, that sight reminding him of how desperately hungry he was.

  A pair of rats poked around the plate, which Drizzt could not begin to reach with his chained hands. Instinctively, a feral movement even, Drizzt kicked out at the rodents, chasing them away-and looking at his own legs and feet made him aware that he was naked now. His thoughts could hardly register the implications of that, or of anything, though, as he hooked his feet and toes and dragged the plate in closer.

  Still he could not reach it with his hands or his face, for he could not lower his hands below his shoulders. He tugged futilely against the chains for a few moments, but then, driven almost mad by his hunger, he merely scooped the meal with his dirty foot and used his great agility to bring it to his mouth.

  He managed to force the dry and foul-tasting stuff down his parched throat, barely, but after a single swallow, he had tasted more than enough, and so he just slumped back and thought of the world beyond the grave.

  He forced himself to fill his mind with notions of Catti-brie …

  “It is humbling, is it not?” came a voice, from very far away it seemed.

  Drizzt cracked open one eye, and flinched away in the brighter light. The torch was right outside his dungeon cell, in the hands of an old and wrinkled shade.