Alegni winced as Effron launched a spell at the dwarf, but one that met with magical defenses and hardly slowed her charge. Again at the last moment, Effron slipped into a crack in the floor.

But the dwarf skidded to a stop, laughing, so confident. “Ye canno’ get away like that for long, ye little sneaker!” she proclaimed, and truly she seemed to be enjoying herself.

The warlord spun back to the tunnel, where four defending shades had become two, and where the superb skill and coordination of Barrabus the Gray and this drow ranger would soon win out.

And no reinforcements would be coming.

“Damn you,” he whispered at Ambergris, at Barrabus, at Dahlia, at them all, for he had lost again. He yelled out to Effron, who was coming back to his threedimensional form far to the other side of the chamber, back near the corridor to the forge room, “Effron, be gone! To the Shadowfell! Get away!”

He turned back to the tunnel and saw the last of his shade warriors go down before a cut of Barrabus’s deadly sword, saw the drow ranger already coming for him.

Bitterly, Herzgo Alegni had to accept the truth: His side had failed.

“Be gone, Effron!” he called again, and he began to shadowstep, thinking of all the curses he would scream against Draygo Quick and the treacherous Cavus Dun before the Netherese Council.

The world began to fade into shadow.

But an image came to him, then, and it jarred him indeed. Herzgo Alegni saw his beloved red-bladed sword spinning down into the maw of the primordial, to be eaten by the fiery beast.

The sword cried out in his mind, begging him to fight on, promising him that it would help him, that it could control Barrabus.

Promising Herzgo Alegni that he and Claw would win.

The tiefling warlord ended his dimensional step and came back to Toril fully, the shadows around him dissipated.

Drizzt the ranger stood barely ten strides away, holding Claw out before him. This dangerous enemy reached out at Herzgo Alegni through the telepathic power of that sword, promising him, coaxing him, coercing him.

The crow swooped in.

The huge bird rolled over in mid-air and became an elf female, flying down at the distracted Alegni’s back from on high, tingling with arcing bolts of pent-up lightning magic, her face locked in a murderous expression.

“Father!” Effron screamed, seeing it all before him, seeing her drop upon the unsuspecting tiefling from behind, her muscles snapping in perfect coordination and timing to lead with a tremendous chop of her magical staff.

Herzgo Alegni glanced at Effron, his twisted son, his expression revealing a deep lament.

The explosion of Dahlia’s staff, the release of lightning, the momentum of her wild charge as she crashed down upon him, sent horn and bone and smoking hair and flesh flying aside and drove the mighty tiefling to his knees.

“Father!” Effron cried again, tears streaming from his strange eyes, red and blue.

“Get over here, ye little rat!” Ambergris yelled at him, and the ferocious dwarf closed furiously, mace ready to split his skull.

Chapter 25: Idiocy or Hope?

Why Drizzt, how very clever and immoral of you,” Artemis Entreri said, walking up beside the drow, who stood very still with Claw held vertically before him, locked in telepathic combat with the dangerous sentient sword. “I do believe there’s hope for you,” Entreri added.

Those words, from that man, reached right through the drow’s telepathic connection to stab Drizzt in his soul. In an instinctive moment of anger and denial, Drizzt gave in to the demands of the sword then, sending a shot of pain at Entreri.

The instant the man began to lurch, however, the drow fought back against the vile and torturous impulses of the evil sword.

Entreri turned on him hatefully, eyes threatening retribution, and Claw warned Drizzt to press the attack, to lay this dangerous enemy low.

But Drizzt growled and slid the sword away, and he continued to growl in protest as he stared at Entreri.

Entreri wanted to leap at him—he recognized that clearly enough on the angry assassin’s face. But Drizzt didn’t draw his weapons.

A cry from the other direction, beyond the assassin, broke the moment of tension.

It was Dahlia’s cry. After crashing into Alegni and driving him to his knees, she had bounced violently and rolled away, but any injuries or pain from the punishing descent obviously mattered not at all to her, for she went right back at the warlord, who seemed already dead, breaking her staff into flails and launching a tirade, a barrage, upon Alegni. Her spinning poles crashed against his head and face repeatedly, viciously, the woman spitting curses at him with every blow, issuing words and feral sounds that seemed to come from a place far removed from her consciousness.

Artemis Entreri’s sudden expression revealed to Drizzt that he understood that place and those sounds, and the drow had to admit that such recognition from Entreri stung him.

The assassin spun away from Drizzt and charged into the room, falling over Dahlia, hugging her arms in close to her sides as he dragged her away—and even then, in her thrashing, she managed to lift her foot and kick the tiefling warlord in what was left of his face.

Drizzt moved to the edge of the chamber and tried to sort out the curious sights before him. Alegni was dead, of that there could be no doubt. He knelt upright, but only because in the barrage of blows left and right, he simply hadn’t fallen over. His head had been mashed to pulp, there was no life showing in his remaining eye, just the dull haze of death.

Entreri continued to drag Dahlia aside, to Drizzt’s left. Beyond them, a familiar female dwarf rushed about, laughing crazily and beating at the stone floor with a large mace. She rushed past another shade, one Drizzt recognized from an earlier fight in the forest. This one just stood perfectly still, magically immobilized.

And another shade, the twisted warlock, appeared not far from Drizzt. The drow grabbed for his scimitars, but the broken tiefling paid him no heed and staggered to fall over Alegni in a desperate hug as he screamed, “Father!”

At the sound of that, Dahlia gave a sudden cry, and Drizzt watched her melt into Entreri’s arms, as if all the strength had just been yanked out from within her. She just went limp, shaking and crying and gasping for breath.

The suddenness of that moment took Drizzt’s breath away, as if a gigantic thunderclap had just stunned them all. Even the crazed dwarf skidded to a stop and simply stared.

“Curse you!” the twisted warlock shouted at Dahlia. “Murderess! Damn you and curse you! Once you tried to kill me and now you killed him!”

If his every word had instead been a punch into Dahlia’s face, she would not have been more staggered or wounded. Drizzt wanted to leap over and silence this broken tiefling forever, but something held him back, some understanding that there was so much more to this story that he did not know.

“I will find you, Mother,” the twisted warlock said, and Drizzt, too, felt as if he had just been slugged. “Oh, I will,” the shade promised, and he began to fade, stepping back to the Shadowfell.

Entreri hugged Dahlia closer.

“Ye’ve got no’ much time,” the dwarf said then, addressing Drizzt. She lowered her mace and paced toward the drow. “I put a spell o’ silence in that hall,” she explained, pointing to the corridor to the forge room, “but they’ll be comin’ along anyway, don’t ye doubt.”

“Who are you?” Drizzt demanded as he tried to sort it out, and indeed, there flickered some recognition. “You were in Neverwinter . . .” He recalled this grinning dwarf indeed, though her skin hadn’t been this particular shade of gray, from the inn where he, Entreri, and Dahlia recovered from their wounds with help from the clerics, including this very dwarf. Drizzt looked past her to the immobilized shade, her companion now, and her companion before, in the forest fight.

“You were there,” he accused.

“Aye, Amber,” the dwarf happily replied. “Castin’ me spells to fix yer wounds.”

“In the forest,” Drizzt clarified. “In a fight.”

The dwarf sobered immediately.

“Ah, so ye seen me then, did ye.”

Drizzt’s hands went to his blades.

“Aye, and I saved yer life, drow, when ye was hangin’ upside down on the side o’ the hill. Was meself that pushed that one”—she nodded toward the immobilized human shade—“aside when he wanted to leap upon ye for killin’ his dearest.”

“As I asked, who are you?”

“Amber Gristle O’Maul, o’ the Adbar O’Mauls, as I telled ye in the town,” the dwarf said with a bow. “Ambergris to me friends. When I heared in the Shadowfell that ye was the target o’ this hunt, I figured any good dwarf ’d owe King Bruenor to see what good I might be doing.”

“You’re a shade,” Entreri said from the side, where he still held the sobbing Dahlia. He had finally managed to get her back to her feet, at least.

“Aye, a bit, and right back to yerself, gray one.” She looked to Drizzt. “I’ll be tellin’ ye all about it if we’re gettin’ out o’ here, and I be thinking that we should be gettin’ out o’ here.”

The other shade stirred a bit, the magical hold lessening its grip.

“What of him?” Drizzt asked as the dwarf walked up to stand right before the dark man.

“Brother Afafrenfere,” Ambergris said to Drizzt, and she focused on the shade fully. “I know ye’re hearin’ me now, me monk friend,” she said, nudging Drizzt aside. “We’re setting out through that burned tunnel. Yerself ’s going through one hole or th’other.” As she said that, she pointed back over her shoulder at the primordial pit. “No other choices for ye.”

Ambergris looked around him to Drizzt and offered an exaggerated wink. “He’s a good enough sort,” she explained. “And not so dumb that he’d be goin’ against us. Come on, then.”

She grabbed the monk and began sliding him along toward the room’s exit.

Drizzt turned back to his companions, just in time to see Artemis Entreri press close to Dahlia and kiss her intensely, passionately. He spun away to face Drizzt, smiling widely.

“You always wanted to kill me, Drizzt Do’Urden,” Entreri said, and he nodded toward the pit. “This is your chance.”

Drizzt eyed Entreri every step as he walked near to the primordial pit. He quickly pulled the sword off his back and tossed it to the stone nearer the pit, for he didn’t want to hold it long enough to have to battle its intrusions again. He was on edge after witnessing that kiss, after all, and he feared that Charon’s Claw might convince him to take a more conventional route to be rid of Artemis Entreri.

“No!” Dahlia cried frantically.

“Yes,” Entreri answered.

Drizzt stared at his lover, but no stabs of jealousy assailed him. He was glad of that realization, glad of the confirmation that his insecurity had been an exploitation of the sword—at least, for the most part. Many other things assailed him at that moment. Dahlia had a child? This twisted tiefling was her offspring? He considered her visceral hatred of Herzgo Alegni then, and so much came clear to him.