at him curiously for just a moment before joining in. The drow rolled onto his back, staring up at the sky, laughing still at the ridiculous idea that an earthquake had almost done what thousands of enemies had failed to do. What a ridiculous ending for Drizzt Do’Urden and King Bruenor Battlehammer, he thought.
After a while, he lifted his head to regard Bruenor, who had walked to the cave opening and stood staring into the darkness, hands on his hips.
“That’s it, elf,” the dwarf decided. “I’m knowin’ it, and we got a lot o’ digging to do.”
“Roll on, Bruenor Battlehammer,” Drizzt whispered, a litany he had recited for a hundred years and more. “And know to your pleasure that every monster along our trail will mark well your passing and keep its head safely hidden.”
From the corner of a building farther down the avenue, Barrabus the Gray watched a bloodied man stumble out of the tavern, followed closely by four familiar ruffians. The poor victim fell face down on the cobblestones and the group waded past him, alternately kicking him and spitting on him. Two of them hit him with their clubs, newly extracted from the legs of a table. One even reached down with a small knife and stuck the man repeatedly in the buttocks and the backs of his legs. But another stood off to the side, cursing, limping, one hand waving a table-leg club, the other held between his own legs.
Barrabus paid little attention to the details, and heard not the man’s pitiful cries. In his mind, Barrabus still heard the screams of the sentry at Lord Hugo Babris’s house, rockstinger poison coursing through him like sharp-edged fire. He would be well into the second phase of the poison by then, his muscles contracting painfully, his stomach knotted, vomiting still though he had nothing left to discharge. The morning would bring to him a tremendous weariness and a dull ache, both of which would last for days. Whether the sentry deserved such a trial, Barrabus could not know. The man’s only “crime” had been to arrive at Hugo Babris’s door soon after Barrabus had entered the chamber. That, and a bit too much curiosity.…
The assassin sneered and shook the unwelcome notions from his thoughts. He turned back to the foursome, coming his way, though they couldn’t see him in the shadow of the building.
Good sense told Barrabus to fade back into the alleyway, to be gone from that place. Prudence demanded that he attract no unwanted attention in Neverwinter. But he felt dirty at that dark hour, and so he felt the need to be cleansed.
“Well met, again,” he said as the gang of four came up even with him out in the middle of the road. They turned as one to regard him, and he pulled back the cowl of his elven cloak to give them a clear view.
“You!” exclaimed the one he’d earlier pained.
Barrabus smiled and faded back into the alleyway.
The four, three brandishing crude clubs, the fourth with a knife, rushed in after him, roaring in outrage and promising retribution, though one staggered more than rushed. Three of them entered the alley at full speed, not even realizing that Barrabus had only faded in a couple of steps and was in no way trying to get away from them. How the timbre of their obscenities changed when he appeared in their midst, all elbows and fists and flying feet.
Just a few moments later, Barrabus the Gray walked out of the alley onto the dimly lit Neverwinter street, and not a groan followed him forth.
He felt better. He felt cleaner. Those four had deserved it.
THE HOSTTOWER’S SECRET
DARK ELVES,” DAHLIA SAID, SEEMING QUITE AMUSED BY THE PROSPECT.
“So it is true.”
“Truer in the past,” Dor’crae replied. “They’re more rare in the city these days, since Luskan has lost its luster as a trading port. But still they remain, or visit at least, advising the High Captains and offering their wares.”
“Interesting,” Dahlia replied, but she was, in fact, losing interest in her lover’s dissertation of the politics of the City of Sails.
Dor’crae had led her to a most unusual place, a cordoned-off area of ancient ruins overgrown with roots and the hulking remains of dead trees, like a long untended and decrepit garden.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“Illusk,” Dor’crae replied. “The most ancient part of an ancient city. And more than that, Illusk is Luskan’s barrier between the present and the past, between the living and the dead.”
Dahlia