will have brought a new ally to the guild."
"How can I thank-" LaValle began, but he stopped as he realized that he had
already been told the price of the panther. "Why trouble Pook with details that
do not concern him?" The wizard laughed, tossing a cloth over his crystal ball.
Entreri clapped LaValle on the shoulder as he passed toward the door. Three
years had done nothing to diminish the understanding the two men had shared.
But with Drizzt and his friends approaching, Entreri had more pressing
business. He had to go to the Cells of Nine and pay a visit to Regis.
The assassin needed another gift.
Book 3:
Desert Empires
16
Never a Fouler Place
Entreri slipped through the shadows of Calimport's bowels as quietly as an
owl glided through a forest at twilight. This was his home, the place he knew
best, and all the street people of the city would mark the day when Artemis
Entreri again walked beside them or behind them.
Entreri couldn't help but smile slightly whenever the hushed whispers
commenced in his wake - the more experienced rogues telling the newcomers that
the king had returned. Entreri never let the legend of his reputation - no
matter how well earned - interfere with the constant state of readiness that had
kept him alive through the years. In the streets, a reputation of power only
marked a man as a target for ambitious second-rates seeking reputations of their
own.
Thus, Entreri's first task in the city, outside of his responsibilities to
Pasha Pook, was to re-establish the network of informants and associates that
entrenched him in his station. He already had an important job for one of them,
with Drizzt and company fast approaching, and he knew which one.
"I had heard you were back," squeaked a diminutive chap appearing as a human
boy not yet into adolescence when Entreri ducked and entered his abode. "I guess
most have."
Entreri took the compliment with a nod. "What has changed, my halfling
friend?"
"Little," replied Dondon, "and lots." He moved to the table in the darkest
corner of his small quarters, the side room, facing the ally, in a cheap inn
called the Coiled Snake. "The rules of the street do not change, but the players
do." Dondon looked up from the table's unlit lamp to catch Entreri's eyes with
his own.
"Artemis Entreri was gone, after all," the halfling explained, wanting to
make sure that Entreri fully understood his previous statement. "The royal suite
had a vacancy."
Entreri nodded his accord, causing the halfling to relax and sigh audibly.
"Pook still controls the merchants and the docks," said Entreri. "Who owns
the streets?"
"Pook, still," replied Dondon, "at least in name. He found another agent in
your stead. A whole horde of agents." Dondon paused for a moment to think. Again
he had to be careful to weigh every word before he spoke it. "Perhaps it would
be more accurate to say that Pasha Pook does not control the streets, but rather
that he still has the streets controlled."
Entreri knew, even before asking, what the little halfling was leading to.
"Rassiter," he said grimly.
"There is much to be said about that one and his crew," Dondon chuckled,
resuming his efforts to light the lantern.
"Pook loosens his reins on the wererats, and the ruffians of the street take
care to stay out of the guild's way," Entreri reasoned.
"Rassiter and his kind play hard."
"And fall hard."
The chill of Entreri's tone brought Dondon's eyes back up from the lantern,
and for the first time, the halfling truly recognized the old Artemis Entreri,
the human street fighter who had built his shadowy empire one ally at a time. An
involuntary shudder rippled up Dondon's spine, and he shifted uncomfortably on
his feet.
Entreri saw the effect and quickly switched the subject. "Enough of this,"
he said. "Let it not concern you, little one. I have a job for you that is more
in line with your talents."
Dondon finally got the lantern's wick to take, and he pulled up a chair,
eager to please his old boss.
They talked for more than an hour, until the lantern became a solitary
defense against the insistent blackness of the night. Then Entreri took his
leave, through the window and into the ally. He didn't believe that Rassiter
would be so foolish as to strike before taking full measure of the assassin,
before the wererat could even begin to understand the dimensions of his enemy.
Then again, Entreri didn't mark Rassiter high on any intelligence scale.
Perhaps it was Entreri, though, who didn't truly understand his enemy, or
how completely Rassiter and his wretched minions had come to dominate the
streets over the last three years. Less than five minutes after Entreri had
gone, Dondon's door swung open again.
And Rassiter stepped through.
"What did he want?" the swaggering fighter asked, plopping comfortably into
a chair at the table.
Dondon moved away uneasily, noticing two more of Rassiter's cronies standing
guard in the hall. After more than a year, the halfling still felt uncomfortable
around Rassiter.
"Come, come now," Rassiter prompted. He asked again, his tone more grim,
"What did he want?"
The last thing Dondon wanted was to get caught in a crossfire between the
wererats and the assassin, but he had little choice but to answer Rassiter. If
Entreri ever learned of the double-cross, Dondon knew that his days swiftly end.
Yet, if he didn't spill out to Rassiter, his demise would be no less
certain, and the method less swift.
He sighed at the lack of options and spilled his story, detail by detail, to
Rassiter.
Rassiter gave no countermands to Entreri's instructions. He would let Dondon
play out the scenario exactly as Entreri had devised it. Apparently, the wererat
believed he could twist it into his own gains. He sat quietly for a long moment,
scratching his hairless chin and savoring the anticipation of the easy victory,
his broken teeth gleaming even a deeper yellow in the lamplight.
"You will run with us this night?" he asked the halfling, satisfied that the
assassin business was completed. "The moon will be bright." He squeezed one of
Dondon's cherublike cheeks. "The fur will be thick, eh?"
Dondon pulled away from the grasp. "Not this night," he replied, a bit too
sharply.
Rassiter cocked his head, studying Dondon curiously. He always had suspected
that the halfling was not comfortable with his new station. Might this defiance
be linked to the return of his old boss? Rassiter wondered.
"Tease him and die," Dondon replied, drawing an even more curious look from
the wererat.
"You have not begun to understand this man you face," Dondon continued,
unshaken. "Artemis Entreri is not to be toyed with - not by the wise. He knows
everything. If a half-sized rat is seen running with the pack, then my life is
forfeit and your plans are ruined." He moved right up, in spite of his revulsion
for the man, and set a grave visage barely an inch from Rassiter's nose.
"Forfeit," he reiterated, "at the least."
Rassiter spun out of the chair, sending it bouncing across the room. He had
heard too much about Artemis Entreri in a single day for his liking. Everywhere
he turned, trembling lips uttered the assassin's name.
Don't they know? he told himself once again as he strode angrily to the
door. It is Rassiter they should fear!
He felt the telltale itching on his chin, then the crawling sensation of
tingling growth swept through his body. Dondon backed away and averted his eyes,
never comfortable with the spectacle.
Rassiter kicked off his boots and loosened his shirt and pants. The hair was
visible now, rushing out of his skin in scraggly patches and clumps. He fell
back against the wall as the fever took him completely. His skin bubbled and
bulged, particularly around his face. He sublimated his scream as his snout
elongated, though the wash of agony was no less intense this time - perhaps the
thousandth time - than it had been during his very first transformation.
He stood then before Dondon on two legs, as a man, but whiskered and furred
and with a long pink tail that ran out the back of his trousers, as a rodent.
"Join me?" he asked the halfling.
Hiding his revulsion, Dondon quickly declined. Looking at the ratman, the
halfling wondered how he had ever allowed Rassiter to bite him, infecting him
with his lycanthropic nightmare. "It will bring you power!" Rassiter had
promised.
But at what cost? Dondon thought. To look and smell like a rat? No blessing
this, but a disease.
Rassiter guessed at the halfling's distaste, and he curled his rat snout
back in a threatening hiss, then turned for the door.
He spun back on Dondon before exiting the room. "Keep away from this!" he
warned the halfling. "Do as you were bid and hide away!"
"No doubt to that," Dondon whispered as the door slammed shut.
* * *
The aura that distinguished Calimport as home to so very many Calishites
came across as foul to the strangers from the North. Truly, Drizzt, Wulfgar,
Bruenor, and Catti-brie were weary of the Calim Desert when their five-day trek
came to an end, but looking down on the city of Calimport made them want to turn
around and take to the sands once again.
It was wretched Memnon on a grander scale, with the divisions of wealth so
blatantly obvious that Calimport cried out as ultimately perverted to the four
friends. Elaborate houses, monuments to excess and hinting at wealth beyond
imagination, dotted the cityscape. Yet, right beside those palaces loomed lane
after lane of decrepit shanties of crumbling clay or ragged skins. The friends
couldn't guess how many people roamed the place - certainly more than Waterdeep
and Memnon combined! - and they knew at once that in Calimport, as in Memnon, no
one had ever bothered to count.
Sali Dalib dismounted, bidding the others do likewise, and led them down a
final hill and into the unwalled city. The friends found the sights of Calimport
no better up close. Naked children, their bellies bloated from lack of food,
scrambled out of the way or were simply trampled as gilded, slave-drawn carts
rushed through the streets. Worse still were the sides of those avenues, ditches
mostly, serving as open sewers in the city's poorest sections. There were thrown
the bodies of the impoverished, who had fallen to the roadside at the end of
their miserable days.
"Suren Rumblebelly never told of such sights when he spoke of home," Bruenor
grumbled, pulling his cloak over his face to deflect the awful stench. "Past me
guessing why he'd long for this place!"
"De greatest city in de world, dis be!" Sali Dalib spouted, lifting his arms
to enhance his praise.
Wulfgar, Bruenor and Catti-brie shot him incredulous stares. Hordes of
people begging and starving was not their idea of greatness. Drizzt paid the
merchant no heed, though. He was busy making the inevitable comparison between
Calimport and another city he had known, Menzoberranzan. Truly there were
similarities, and death was no less common in Menzoberranzan, but Calimport
somehow seemed fouler than the city of the drow. Even the weakest of the dark
elves had the means to protect himself, with strong family ties and deadly
innate abilities. The pitiful peasants of Calimport, though, and more so their
children, seemed helpless and hopeless indeed.
In Menzoberranzan, those on the lowest rungs of the power ladder could fight
their way to a better standing. For the majority of Calimport's multitude,
though, there would only be poverty, a day-to-day squalid existence until they
landed on the piles of buzzard-pecked bodies in the ditches.
"Take us to the guildhouse of Pasha Pook," Drizzt said, getting to the
point, wanting to be done with his business and out of Calimport, "then you are
dismissed."
Sali Dalib paled at the request. "Pasha Poop?" he stammered. "Who is dis?"
"Bah!" Bruenor snorted, moving dangerously close to the merchant. "He knows
him."
"Suren he does," Catti-brie observed, "and fears him."
"Sali Dalib not-" the merchant began.
Twinkle came out of its sheath and slipped to a stop under the merchant's
chin, silencing the man instantly. Drizzt let his mask slip a bit, reminding
Sali Dalib of the drow's heritage. Once again, his suddenly grim demeanor
unnerved even his own friends. "I think of my friend," Drizzt said in a calm,
low tone, his lavender eyes absently staring into the city, "tortured even as we
delay."
He snapped his scowl at Sali Dalib. "As you delay! You will take us to the
guildhouse of Pasha Pook," he reiterated, more insistently, "and then you are
dismissed."
"Pook? Oh, Pook," the merchant beamed. "Sali Dalib know dis man, yes, yes.
Everybody know Pook. Yes, yes, I take you dere, den I go."
Drizzt replaced the mask but kept the stern visage. "If you or your little
companion try to flee," he promised so calmly that neither the merchant nor his
