effective.
"Ah, but the poison," Drizzt smirked, moving away down the corridor.
Entreri stopped and grinned at the obvious logic. How devious and
merciless the drow must be to command so powerful a reaction to so simple a
threat! It seemed that their deadly reputation was not an exaggeration.
Entreri found that he was beginning to admire these black elves.
The pursuit came faster than they had expected, despite their swift
pace. The stamp of boots sounded loudly and then disappeared, only to
reappear at the next turn even closer than before. Side-passages, Drizzt
and Entreri both understood, cursing every turn in their own twisting
tunnel. Finally, when their pursuers were nearly upon them, Drizzt stopped
the assassin.
"Just a few," he said, picking out each individual footfall.
"The group from the ledge," Entreri surmised. "Let us make a stand. But
be quick, there are more behind them, no doubt!" The excited light that
came into the assassin's eyes seemed dreadfully familiar to Drizzt.
He didn't have time to ponder the unpleasant implications. He shook
them from his head, regaining full concentration for the business at hand,
then pulled the hidden dagger out of his boot - no time for secrets from
Entreri now - and found a shadowed recess on the tunnel wall. Entreri did
likewise, positioning himself a few feet farther down from the drow and
across the corridor.
Seconds passed slowly with only the faint shuffle of boots. Both
companions held their breath and waited patiently, knowing that they had
not been passed by.
Suddenly the sound multiplied as the Duergar came rushing out of a
secret door and into the main tunnel.
"Can't be far now!" Drizzt and Entreri heard one of them say.
"The drake'll be feedin' us well fer this catch!" hooted another.
All clad in shining mail and wielding mithril weapons, they rounded the
last bend and came into sight of the hidden companions.
Drizzt looked at the dull steel of his scimitar and considered how
precise his strikes must be against armor of mithril. A resigned sigh
escaped him as he wished that he now held his magical weapon.
Entreri saw the problem, too, and knew that they had to somehow balance
the odds. Quickly he pulled a pouch of coins from his belt and hurled it
farther down the corridor. It sailed through the gloom and clunked into the
wall where the tunnel twisted again.
The Duergar band straightened as one. "Just ahead!" one of them cried,
and they bent low to the stone and charged for the next bend. Between the
waiting drow and assassin.
The shadows exploded into movement and fell over the stunned gray
dwarves. Drizzt and Entreri struck together, seizing the moment of best
advantage, when the first of the band had reached the assassin and the last
was passing Drizzt.
The Duergar shrieked in surprised horror. Daggers, saber, and scimitar
danced all about them in a flurry of flashing death, poking at the seams of
their armor, seeking an opening through the unyielding metal. When they
found one, they drove the point home with merciless efficiency.
By the time the Duergar recovered from the initial shock of the attack,
two, lay dead at the drow's feet, a third at Entreri's, and yet another
stumbled away, holding his belly in with a blood-soaked hand.
"Back to back!" Entreri shouted, and Drizzt, thinking the same
strategy, had already begun quick-stepping his way through the disorganized
dwarves. Entreri took another one down just as they came together, the
unfortunate Duergar looking over its shoulder at the approaching drow just
long enough for the jeweled dagger to slip through the seam at the base of
its helmet.
Then they were together, back against back, twirling in the wake of
each other's cloak and maneuvering their weapons in blurred movements so
similar that the three remaining Duergar hesitated before their attack to
sort out where one enemy ended and the other began.
With cries to Shimmergloom, their godlike ruler, they came on anyway.
Drizzt scored a series of hits at once that should have felled his
opponent, but the armor was of tougher stuff than the steel scimitar and
his thrusts were turned aside. Entreri, too, had trouble finding an opening
to poke through against the mithril mail and shields.
Drizzt turned one shoulder in and let the other fall away from his
companion. Entreri understood and followed the drow's lead, dipping around
right behind him.
Gradually their circling gained momentum, as synchronous as practiced
dancers, and the Duergar did not even try to keep up. Opponents changed
continually, the drow and Entreri coming around to parry away the sword or
axe that the other had blocked on the last swing. They let the rhythm hold
for a few turns, allowed the Duergar to fall into the patterns of their
dance, and then, Drizzt still leading, stuttered their steps, and even
reversed the flow.
The three Duergar, evenly spaced about the pair, did not know which
direction would bring the next attack.
Entreri, practically reading the drow's every thought by this point,
saw the possibilities. As he moved away from one particularly confused
dwarf, he feigned a reversed attack, freezing the Duergar just long enough
for Drizzt, coming in from the other side, to find an opening.
"Take him!" the assassin cried in victory.
The scimitar did its work.
Now they were two against two. They stopped the dance and faced off
evenly.
Drizzt swooped about his smaller foe with a sudden leap and shuffle
along the wall. The Duergar, intent on the killing blades of the drow,
hadn't noticed Drizzt's third weapon join the fray.
The gray dwarf's surprise was only surmounted by his anticipation of
the coming fatal blow when Drizzt's trailing cloak floated in and fell over
him, enshrouding him in a blackness that would only deepen into the void of
death.
Contrary to Drizzt's graceful technique, Entreri worked with sudden
fury, tying up his dwarf with undercuts and lightning-fast counters, always
aimed at the weapon hand. The gray dwarf understood the tactic as his
fingers began to numb under the nicks of several minor hits.
The Duergar overcompensated, turning his shield in to protect the
vulnerable hand.
Exactly as Entreri had expected. He rolled around opposite the movement
of his opponent, finding the back of the shield, and a seam in the mithril
armor just beneath the shoulder. The assassin's dagger drove in furiously,
taking a lung and hurling the Duergar to the stone floor. The gray dwarf
lay there, hunched up on one elbow, and gasped out his final breaths.
Drizzt approached the final dwarf, the one who had been wounded in the
initial attack, leaning against the wall only a few yards away, torchlight
reflecting grotesque red off the pool of blood below him. The dwarf still
had fight in him. He raised his broadsword to meet the drow.
It was Mucknuggle, Drizzt saw, and a silent plea of mercy came into the
drow's mind and took the fiery glow from his eyes.
A shiny object, glittering in the hues of a dozen distinct gemstones,
spun by Drizzt and ended his internal debate.
Entreri's dagger buried deep into Mucknuggle's eye.
The dwarf didn't even fall, so clean was the blow. He just held his
position, leaning against the stone. But now the blood pool was fed from
two wounds.
Drizzt stopped himself cold in rage and did not even flinch as the
assassin walked coolly by to retrieve the weapon.
Entreri pulled the dagger out roughly then turned to face Drizzt as
Mucknuggle tumbled down to splash in the blood.
"Four to four," the assassin growled. "You did not believe that I would
let you get the upper count?"
Drizzt did not reply, nor blink.
Both felt the sweat in their palms as they clutched their weapons, a
pull upon them to complete what they had started in the alcove above.
So alike, yet so dramatically different.
The rage at Mucknuggle's death did not play upon Drizzt at that moment,
no more than to further confirm his feelings about his vile companion. The
longing he held to kill Entreri went far deeper than the anger he might
hold for any of the assassin's foul deeds. Killing Entreri would mean
killing the darker side of himself, Drizzt believed, for he could have been
as this man. This was the test of his worth, a confrontation against what
he might have become. If he had remained among his kin, and often were the
times that he considered his decision to leave their ways and their dark
city a feeble attempt to distort the very order of nature, his own dagger
would have found Mucknuggle's eye.
Entreri looked upon Drizzt with equal disdain. What potential he saw in
the drow! But tempered by an intolerable weakness. Perhaps in his heart the
assassin was actually envious for the capacity for love and compassion that
he recognized in Drizzt. So much akin to him, Drizzt only accentuated the
reality of his own emotional void.
Even if those feelings were truly within, they would never gain a perch
high enough to influence Artemis Entreri. He had spent his life building
himself into an instrument for killing, and no shred of light could ever
cut through that callous barrier of darkness. He meant to prove, to himself
and to the drow, that the true fighter has no place for weakness.
They were closer now, though neither of them knew which one had moved,
as if unseen forces were acting upon them. Weapons twitched in
anticipation, each waiting for the other to show his hand.
Each wanting the other to be the first to yield to their common desire,
the ultimate challenge of the tenets of their existence.
The stamp of booted feet broke the spell.
22
The Dragon of Darkness
At the heart of the lower levels, in an immense cavern of uneven and
twisting walls pocketed with deep shadows, and a ceiling too high for the
light of the brightest fire to find, rested the present ruler of Mithril
Hall, perched upon a solid pedestal of the purest mithril that rose from a
high and wide mound of coins and jewelry, goblets and weapons, and
countless other items pounded from the rough blocks of mithril by the
skilled hands of dwarven craftsmen.
Dark shapes surrounded the beast, huge dogs from its own world,
obedient, long-lived, and hungry for the meat of human or elf, or anything
else that would give them the pleasure of their gory sport before the kill.
Shimmergloom was not now amused. Rumblings from above foretold of
intruders, and a band of Duergar spoke of murdered kin in the tunnels and
whispered rumors that a drow elf had been seen.
The dragon was not of this world. It had come from the Plane of
Shadows, a dark image of the lighted world, unknown to the dwellers here
except in the less substantial stuff of their blackest nightmares.
Shimmergloom had been of considerable standing there, old even then, and in
high regard among its dragon kin that ruled the plane. But when the foolish
and greedy dwarves that once inhabited these mines had delved into deep
holes of sufficient darkness to open a gate to its plane, the dragon had
been quick to come through. Now possessing a treasure tenfold beyond the
greatest of its own plane, Shimmergloom had no intentions of returning.
It would deal with the intruders.
For the first time since the routing of Clan Battlehammer, the baying
of the shadow hounds filled the tunnels, striking dread even into the
hearts of their gray dwarf handlers. The dragon sent them west on their
mission, up toward the tunnels around the entry hall in Keeper's Dale,
where the companions had first entered the complex. With their powerful
maws and incredible stealth, the hounds were indeed a deadly force, but
their mission now was not to catch and kill - only to herd.
In the first fight for Mithril Hall, Shimmergloom alone had routed the
miners in the lower caverns and in some of the huge chambers on the eastern
end of the upper level. But final victory had escaped the dragon, for the
end had come in the western corridors, too tight for its scaly bulk.
The beast would not miss the glory again. It set its minions in motion,
to drive whoever or whatever had come into the halls toward the only
entrance that it had to the upper levels: Garumn's Gorge.
Shimmergloom stretched to the limit of its height and unfolded its
leathery wings for the first time in nearly two hundred years, blackness
flowing out under them as they extended to the sides. Those Duergar who had
remained in the throne room fell to their knees at the sight of their
rising lord, partly in respect, but mostly in fear.
The dragon was gone, gliding down a secret tunnel at the back of the
chamber, to where it had once known glory, the place its minions had named
Shimmergloom's Run in praise of their lord.
A blur of indistinguishable darkness, it moved as silently as the cloud
of blackness that followed.
Wulfgar worried just how low he would be crouching by the time they
reached Garumn's Gorge, for the tunnels became dwarven sized as they neared
the eastern end of the upper level. Bruenor knew this as a good sign, the
only tunnels in the complex with ceilings below the six foot mark were
those of the deepest mines and those crafted for defense of the gorge.
Faster than Bruenor had hoped, they came upon the secret door to a
smaller tunnel breaking off to the left, a spot familiar to the dwarf even
after his two-century absence. He ran his hand across the unremarkable wall
beneath the torch and its telltale red sconce, searching for the brailed
pattern that would lead his fingers to the precise spot. He found one
triangle, then another, and followed their lines to the central point, the
