and circled about, rebounding off the many mountainous faces. The winding paths of swift-running streams cascaded down the slopes, silver lines against a background of gray and blue. For the inexperienced, the mountain trails would be quietly deceiving, leading a traveler around, in, up, and down circles that ultimately got him nowhere near where he intended to be or taking him on a wide-ranging path that ended abruptly at a five-hundred foot drop.
Even for Drizzt and his friends, so attuned with the ways of the wild, the mountains presented a huge challenge. They could pursue the orc force readily enough, for the correct trail was clearly marked to the trained eyes of the drow, but finding a way to flank that fleeing force as the trail grew fresher would not be so easy.
On one plateau of a particularly wide mountain, fed by many trails and serving as a sort of hub for them all, Drizzt found a telltale marker. He bent over a patch of mud, its edge depressed by the step of a recent boot.
"The print is fresh," he explained to Catti-brie, Regis, and Wulfgar. He rose up from his crouch, rubbing his muddied fingers together. "Less than an hour."
The friends glanced around, focusing mostly on the higher ridgeline that loomed to the north.
Catti-brie was first to catch sight of the movement up there, a hulking giant form gliding around a line of broken boulders.
"Time for Guenhwyvar," Wulfgar remarked.
Drizzt nodded and pulled the statue from his belt pouch, then placed it on the ground and summoned the magical panther to his side.
"We should pass word to Bruenor as well," the barbarian added.
"Ye do it," Catti-brie replied, speaking to Wulfgar. "Ye can get there quicker than the little one with yer longer legs."
Wulfgar nodded; it made sense.
"We'll better locate and assess the enemy while you fetch the dwarves," Drizzt explained. He glanced off at Regis, who was already
moving-to the west and not the north. "Flanking?"
"I go this way, you go north, and she goes east," Regis explained.
His three friends smiled, glad to see a bit of the old Regis returned, for the giant they had spotted had been moving west to east and by going west, Regis was almost assuring that his two hunting friends would find the orc and giant band before he did.
"Guenhwyvar comes with me to the north, in a direct line toward the enemy," Drizzt explained. "She alone can run without inviting suspicion. We four will meet back here right before the sunset."
With final nods and determined looks, they split apart, each moving swiftly along the appointed trail.
It was a strange feeling for Regis, being out alone in the wilderness without Drizzt or any of the others protectively at his side. Back in Ten-Towns, the halfling had often ventured out of Lonelywood by himself, but almost always along familiar trails, particularly the one that would take him to the banks of the great lake Maer Dualdon and his favorite fishing hole.
Being alone in the wilds, with known, dangerous enemies not too far away, felt strangely refreshing. Despite his very real fears, Regis could not deny the surge of energy coursing through his diminutive body. The rush of excitement, the thrill of knowing that a goblin might be hiding behind any rock, or that a giant might even then be taking deadly aim at him with one of its huge boulder missiles. . . .
In truth, this wasn't an experience that Regis planned to make the norm of his existence, but he understood that it was a necessary risk, one leading to the greater good, and one that he had to accept.
Still, he wished he hadn't been the first to encounter the orcs, a group of a dozen stragglers lagging behind their main lines. Caught up in his own thoughts, the distracted halfling almost walked right into their midst before ever realizing that they were there.
Drizzt didn't like what he was seeing. High up on a rocky ledge, the drow lay flat on his belly peering over an encampment of several scores of orcs-what he had expected. Just beyond the camp, though, loomed a quartet of behemoths: huge frost giants, and not the dirty rogues one might expect to find consorting with orcs. These were handsome creatures, clean and richly dressed, adorned with ornamental bracelets and rings, and fine furs that were neither particularly new nor particularly weather-beaten.
The giants were part of a larger, more organized clan-obviously a part of the network the Jarl Grayhand, a name