Entreri was no more merciful, reminding Drizzt keenly of the true disposition of this man he viewed as a link to his past, shattering any nostalgic notions floated before him by the reappearance of his old nemesis. The drow gasped audibly when Entreri’s sword came right through the torso of one human slave, stabbing out the man’s back. Entreri retracted the blade almost instantly, but fell into a sudden spin that brought it back around and down, across the falling man’s throat.

Even with the threat defeated, the vicious Artemis Entreri could not resist that killing blow.

Too many doubts pressed in on Drizzt then, doubts about his road and his companions, but he pushed them away, even told himself that these were mere implantations by the insidious psychic beast. He turned that disappointment, rage even, into more focused anger on his oppressor, the aboleth.

Down came Twinkle with a smash, crunching bone, and down came a stabbing Icingdeath right behind, plunging through that opening to find the creature’s brain.

Always the brain, the source of the beast’s strength.

Drizzt leaped astride the struggling, flopping creature, alternately plunging his scimitars into the opening, and when one went in deep, the drow turned his wrist and slid it out to the side, left and right, severing the internal connections.

He saw the remaining slave, a Shadovar, rushing at him in a last desperate attempt to save its beloved master.

But too late. Guenhwyvar continued to tear and rend and Drizzt’s blades found their mark.

The aboleth flopped to the stone fully, and lay deathly still.

The approaching Shadovar skidded to a stop and stared at Drizzt in abject confusion, and the drow immediately wondered if he might have found an ally in their quest to get past Alegni’s defenses; he could well understand the profound sense of gratitude anyone in such a state of slavery might feel toward his rescuers.

Before Drizzt could even explore that, though, before he could even further study the Shadovar’s face for hints, he was distracted by a form rushing up from behind the freed slave.

“Dahlia, no!” he shouted, but between his words came the crack of Dahlia’s flail spinning in from the side to cave in the Shadovar’s skull. That powerful strike alone would likely have proven fatal, but Dahlia left little to doubt as she followed with a barrage of heavy blows.

“Did you even pause to consider that he might have supplied us with important information?” Drizzt asked the elf.

Dahlia seemed unimpressed. She looked down at the dead Shadovar and spat on him for effect. “He’s a Netherese dog,” she said, as if that explained everything. “He would have simply lied to us anyway.”

“He might have known Alegni’s defenses,” Drizzt argued. “We do not know how long he was enslaved . . .”

“What’s done is done,” Entreri said. When Drizzt and Dahlia glanced his way, he motioned to two of the humans, the one Drizzt had dropped and one other. They were both alive, though wounded, but neither injury appeared mortal. A third, too, seemed alive, though her wounds looked far more grievous.

Drizzt pulled off his pack and rushed to the wounded woman first. He produced some bandages and a poultice of mixed and mashed herbs and quickly stemmed the blood flow. As soon as he had the bleeding under control, he looked to his companions, both staring at him incredulously.

“Tend to the others!” he scolded.

“They attacked us,” Dahlia reminded.

“The . . . that creature attacked us, through them,” Drizzt retorted. “Tend to them!”

Dahlia glanced at Entreri skeptically, and to Drizzt’s dismay, it seemed that Dahlia was being more stubborn and less merciful than Artemis Entreri.

“Tend to them or we—or I—will remain with them,” Drizzt warned, and that broke the stalemate. He threw his pack to Entreri.

Six individuals started along the tunnels a short while later, the two minimally wounded humans, a man and a woman, half-carrying, half-dragging their other female companion in a makeshift litter Drizzt had constructed from a cloak and the bones of the fishlike creature that had enslaved them. They were citizens of Neverwinter, or had been.

“I was raised outside of Luskan,” the woman, Genevieve by name, explained to Drizzt as they walked. “My family farmed there.”

She went on to describe the fall of that region, but Drizzt already knew the sad tale well.

“Did you know a family Stuyles?” he asked.

“Aye, the name sounds familiar,” Genevieve replied. “But ’twas a long time ago. I been here many years. Before the ruin.”

“But you survived,” Drizzt said, and he looked to Entreri as he did, and the assassin wore an expression of interest, at least.

“We all did,” the man on the other side of the litter replied. “Because of that thing back there.”

“Aye, we been down here for years and years,” Genevieve added. She winced and seemed quite pained as she tried to sort it all out. “A couple of times after the ruin, we went up. To spy, I expect, though I hardly remember it.”

“Seems like you’d make a fine spy, then,” Entreri said sarcastically.

“Was the fish creature looking through us,” she explained. “Oh, but it could do that. It could do almost anything.”

“Killed the great snake and controlled her brood with little trouble,” the man added.

“They were babies, then,” Drizzt remarked, and he shuddered to think that Neverwinter’s sewer might soon be home to a thriving community of gigantic constrictors! He left the trio, then, to rejoin his companions at the lead.

Drizzt wanted to speak with Entreri on that journey, to help him to recognize the intrusion for what it was, to learn from the dominance of the aboleth so that he might use those lessons as he tried to resist any such dominance from his old sword. But the drow found that he couldn’t talk to the man at that time, or to Dahlia, and he quickly fell back, following the three wounded humans, helping them where he could, while Entreri and Dahlia led the way, the assassin once more holding half of Dahlia’s staff to ward against any unwanted intrusions. They didn’t need Twinkle’s glow any longer, for the sun was rising outside, and peeking in at enough junctures—through cracks up above, or grates—to provide enough light for the two, with their lowlight vision, to navigate.

They chatted as they walked, and Drizzt could catch only bits and pieces of their conversation, which frustrated him even more. After only a few twists and turns in the sewer, even those pieces of conversation were lost to him, drowned out by the sound of flowing water, for they were then paralleling the river, very nearby.

Still he watched them, feeling very distant to them, so suddenly.

Feeling very lost.

“Soon,” Entreri whispered to Dahlia, up in front of the others.

Dahlia looked at him curiously, not quite understanding. Was he talking about them getting out of the sewers soon? Perhaps, but she suspected something more, particularly given the strange intermingling of personal secrets.

Entreri nodded, and there was so much in that simple gesture, a recognition of things far deeper than the practical implications of the single word he had spoken.

“Soon,” he was saying, meaning that Dahlia would find a proper resolution “soon.”

“Soon,” he was saying, as if to indicate that some moment of peace was “soon” before her.

“Soon.” He was hinting, Dahlia understood, that the resolution of her greatest tragedy and greatest moment . . .

The elf warrior looked away, not willing to let him see the moisture in her blue eyes, not willing to let this stranger, this former, and perhaps still, adversary, look into her soul yet again.

Or was it just shame?

Chapter 9: The Foothold

They owned the forge.

That stunning notion hovered around Ravel Xorlarrin’s shoulders as he made his way to his scheduled meeting with his sisters and some of the other leaders of the expedition.

They owned the forge.

The other chambers they had taken since entering the Gauntlgrym complex had offered them hope, both in the joyous shock of realizing their destination in the first place and in coming to know that they could build some measure of security and defense against the stubborn ghostly guardians of the ancient dwarf homeland. But none of that would have mattered one bit without the grand prize.

They owned the forge.

Ravel had to hold back his elation as he entered that very room, the ancient forge of Gauntlgrym, to face the gathering. He met the eyes of each, starting with Berellip, who sat grim-faced, and moving quickly to Saribel, whose clear uneasiness showed the cracks in their meaner sister’s unrelenting glare. Saribel understood the gravity of this moment, and she understood, obviously, that the victory was Ravel’s most of all.

The poor priestess didn’t seem to know how to react, and she was simply not as skilled as Berellip in covering everything up with anger.

Emboldened by Saribel’s quandary, Ravel glanced at Tiago, who sat beside Jearth, and there he found allies. Tiago even nodded and smiled.

If his sisters’ unease had bolstered him, the salute from House Baenre had him standing even taller.

Behind the two weapons masters, the drider Yerrininae squatted on eight bent legs, and he, too, seemed eager—and why wouldn’t he be, for this was the promise to an existence with dignity and possibility.

They owned the forge.

Ravel paced slowly past the group, including the other House wizards and a few of the more important melee squad leaders, on his way to the nearest in the line of actual forges, a large firebrick oven, taller than Ravel. To the drow warrior, it looked like any other forge, but he had been told differently, and he understood now as he examined the oven.

There was no place to load fuel to burn.

Behind the forge loomed what seemed like a chimney, stretching floor to ceiling, of thick bricks, mortared with workmanship so amazing that the centuries seemed to not have touched them. After a cursory glance at the loading and cooling trays, Ravel found himself drawn to this chimney. He ran his hands along the stone, feeling the integrity.

He looked down the length of the large chamber, the row of similar forges, the line of similar chimneys.

“Untouched by the millennia,” he said, coming around to face the group once more.

“They will need minor repairs, likely,” Yerrininae replied. “But yes.”

“Where is Brack’thal?” Berellip interjected, her tone sharp, unyielding and prideful, as always.

Ravel smiled, the look of a displacer beast as it closed in on its prey, and moved toward the group, looking to his fellow wizards.

“Have you figured out the workings?” he asked.

“We’ve found the source,” the spellspinner started to reply, but was cut short by Berellip.

“Where is Brack’thal?” she demanded.

“He is doing his job,” Ravel curtly replied.

“He should be among us.”

“The perimeter chambers must be secured before our work begins in earnest,” Ravel countered. “That is no small task.”

“It is a task for that one,” Berellip replied, pointing to Jearth. “And his Baenre friend. And the driders—why are they even here?”