Charon's Claw
Page 14

The couple had gone only a few hundred yards, though, before the hairs on the back of the drow’s neck began to tingle and all of his warrior sensibilities had him measuring his strides.
The forest was quiet—too quiet to the trained ear of Drizzt Do’Urden. Dahlia sensed it, too, and so said nothing as she looked curiously to Drizzt.
The drow motioned her to the side and slowly slid Taulmaril the Heartseeker off his shoulder. Likely it was just a hunting cat, or a bear, perhaps, he expected, but enemies were ever near in this dangerous land and so he wanted to take no chances.
A soft clicking sound had him glancing at Dahlia, as she carefully broke her staff down into twin poles and then into flails, which she casually sent into slow spins to either side.
The drow crouched lower, narrowing his gaze to focus on the space between underbrush and canopy. Something had caught his attention, he wasn’t quite sure yet what it might be.
Slowly he brought his bow around, his free hand moving almost imperceptibly over his shoulder toward the quiver strapped to his back.
A tall strand of a bush was moving, but not in concert with the flutters of the morning breeze. Something, someone, had jostled it.
Drizzt froze, every muscle in his body preparing for the next moment, only his eyes shifting left and right, scanning, waiting.
He was not one to be caught by surprise, but when the ground beside him, the ground between him and Dahlia, lifted and lurched, a wave of energy rolling out through the brush and new-fallen snow in every direction like the ripples on a pond, neither Drizzt nor Dahlia had any response except to go with the inevitable push.
Suddenly they were twenty paces apart, rolling and dodging trees and stones, Drizzt trying to hold the Heartseeker free of any tangle. And as the magical energy dissipated, the enemy came on with brutal abandon.
Two lightly armored shade warriors, human and tiefling, leaped from a spot very near to where Drizzt had landed. Clearly, this ambush was carefully planned, and the earth-shaking spell meticulously aimed. They came in for a quick kill with their spears, planting the weapons in the ground and vaulting high to kick out, spinning and stabbing as they flew at their prey.
Drizzt could have taken one down with his bow, perhaps, but he drew blades instead, meeting the furious attacks with circling parries and defensive counter thrusts. Within the first heartbeats of the encounter, he knew that these were not mere highwaymen, nor even mere warriors of Shadowfell, for these two worked in brilliant concert, much as he had done with Entreri or with Dahlia.
The monks started to widen their approach, as if intending to flank Drizzt to either side, but when Drizzt turned his shoulders and came with a roundhouse left-hand slash, the human monk blocked it with his spear, but fell with the weight of the blow back in toward the center. Down he went in a sidelong roll, while his tiefling companion leaped up high and back the other way, clearing him, so that now the tiefling stood on Drizzt’s left and the human, rolling right back to his feet, came in from the right.
The tiefling’s spear thrust almost got through, picked off at the last second by a desperate backhand of that same scimitar.
Drizzt used his enchanted anklets as well—not in a sudden rush, but in a wise retreat.
With her melee weapons already in hand, Dahlia was more prepared for the close-quarters ambush than Drizzt had been, but still found herself nearly overwhelmed by the power and coordination of the two opponents who burst from the nearby brush.
On came an enormously fat tiefling male, heavily armored and whipping a flail that seemed sized for a giant in wild circles above his head as he charged. He hardly cared for the branches as he rushed for Dahlia, barreling through, his weapon not slowing in its spin, but just snapping the obstacles into flying splinters.
From the other side came a woman, tall and strong and working a hand-anda-half broadsword with practiced ease.
Dahlia glanced back and forth, trying to determine her best course. She knew immediately that she couldn’t begin to parry or block the tiefling's gigantic flail, so she had to use her speed to avoid any thunderous swings. A single staff would give her that mobility, but she didn’t prefer that weapon against a long-bladed sword, where her tactics were typically to get inside the arc of any swing to strike fast with the flails.
Her thought process got no further, though, for Dahlia had no choice but to trust in her improvisation and hope it would sort out. She darted for the woman, flails spinning, but cut back the other way as the woman pulled up short. Dahlia dived into a forward roll, gathering momentum, and went in at the huge tiefling hard, falling low as she closed in to avoid a high swing of his flail.
Strangely high, she thought briefly, but she didn’t question her luck and unloaded a flurry of sharp cracks against the belly and legs of the shade.
She still didn’t understand why the tiefling had put the flail across above her head—and it likely would have missed her skull even if she hadn’t easily ducked— until she started back the other way, to find a pair of thin but strong filaments stretching along before her, then catching on her hip and shin.
She spotted the spiders, huge, pony-sized, and hairy, to her left and right, completing the box around her.
She had to duck again as the tiefling swung even more furiously, and this time just a bit lower, forcing Dahlia down.
In a move of sheer stubborn defiance, the elf slapped up with one flail, cracking it against the massive flail, which didn’t veer in the least from its determined course.
Dahlia hadn’t expected it to, and was already turning as her flail spun free from the huge weapon. She worked her left hand fast, cracking her spinning pole against the warrior-woman’s broad sword repeatedly. It took Dahlia three such strikes to realize that she wasn’t parrying the woman’s blade, for her opponent wasn’t actually trying to hit her.
The angle of the warrior woman’s strikes seemed more an effort to contain than to kill.
Dahlia understood that, and was not surprised to see the spiders spinning their webbing her way, filling the air around her with filaments. She felt the profound tug on her leg from one as she tried to scamper aside, then had to dive low once more as the heavy flail spun low to high to block her escape.
Dahlia worked her flails quickly, spinning them so their flying poles collided repeatedly, and she called out for help from her companion, who suddenly seemed so very far away.
From the nearby brush, Ratsis watched the encounter, Jermander and the Shifter beside him, Ambergris hidden before them in reserve to either of the two fighting groups. As soon as the Shifter had separated the couple with the initial, earth-rolling dweomer, Ratsis had called forth his pets.
Convinced that he had Dahlia tied up enough for Bol and Horrible to control her movements, Ratsis telepathically ordered his spiders to shift their angles of attack. The next filaments that came forth fired out to anchor on trees some distance behind Bol, and thus between Dahlia’s fight and Drizzt’s.
“You need not do that,” the Shifter remarked.
Ratsis studied the fight between the three to the other side. He knew that Parbid and Afafrenfere were quite skilled, despite their almost buffoonish pride, and their companionship and coordinated movements were the stuff of legend and jokes in certain circles. Each was formidable on his own, but together, they were better than any three of equal skill.
Yet, this drow ranger’s reputation, so formidable indeed, seemed to pale against his movements now. He leaped and spun, turning every which way as the situation demanded, but always did his curved blades dart out at precise angles, and with adequate power to not only repel an attack, but to send one or the other monks diving aside.
“The monks will not hold him,” Ratsis started to protest to the Shifter. “I never thought they would, but contingencies are in place,” the Shifter assured him. As Ratsis turned to look at the shade, the Shifter motioned back the other way, directing the gaze.
Dahlia was doing much better than Ratsis had expected. Every spin of her flail produced a solid strike—as often as not on the other flail—and despite the webbing grabbing at her legs, she retained enough mobility to sting Bol and his mate repeatedly—and if they backed off at all from keeping her occupied, the stubborn elf managed to wriggle looser from the few webs binding her. Neither of the warrior shades were taking it well, Ratsis recognized, given Bol’s ferocious reputation and propensity to kill people as a matter of first resort.
Ratsis turned his spiders back to the main prey, needing to properly tie up the troublesome Dahlia, for her own sake.
Despite the frenetic movements of his very active opponents, Drizzt was not oblivious to the plight of his companion. He noted the spiders and caught the sunlit reflection of the few filaments between himself and Dahlia’s battle, obstacles he expected he could slice with little trouble.
A spear thrust in from his right, and at the same moment, front and left, the human monk went up into the air and double-kicked.
Drizzt threw his hip out to the left, barely avoiding the stab, and twisted to lurch back and right. He heard the snap of air just before his face as the leaping monk’s fast-kicking feet missed by less than a finger’s breadth.
The drow straightened, turning both his scimitars against the thrusting spear, even though the kicking monk leaped once again, and this time with his weapon planted in the ground nearer to Drizzt so he could extend his attack.
Drizzt let him. He had to break this dance quickly and get to Dahlia. He drove his blades down in a cross, catching the thrust with Twinkle in his left hand, driving through with Icingdeath, and as he expected and hoped, the fine diamond-edged blade sheared through the edge of the wooden spear.
Drizzt threw his left arm up and finally started his lurch to the right, albeit far too late. He was surprised by the weight of the monk’s blow. For one so slight, this trained fighter could hit like an ogre!
But Drizzt was also already surrendering the ground when the monk connected, intending to fly away to the right, and so he did, throwing himself as far as he could, tumbling and rolling, deftly tucking his right shoulder and reaching back with his left hand as he did.
He came out of the roll without his scimitars and facing back to his previous position and on his knees, but far from helpless as the tiefling with the broken spear charged in close pursuit.
Drizzt had left those scimitars on purpose, instead retrieving his bow and an arrow, and with the precision wrought by hundreds of hours of practice, of endless repetition and measurement, of pure muscle memory, he came to his knees, facing back with the Heartseeker leveled crosswise before him, an arrow nocked and ready.
The tiefling monk leaped, but not soon enough, and a lightning arrow lived up to the bow’s name, blasting into the monk’s chest and hurling him back the way he had come, with his feet leading as the arrow’s mighty momentum laid him out. He landed flat on his face, without so much as a groan.
The second monk was in the air, though, right over his falling companion. Perhaps Drizzt, so fast and so skilled, could get another arrow in place, perhaps not. He didn’t try. He scrambled forward and dived under the leaping monk, and as the small human extended his legs to touch down more quickly, Drizzt slapped Taulmaril up over the flying monk’s feet, hooking him between bow shaft and string. The drow dug in and planted firmly, and tugged with all his strength, sending the monk tumbling away, though Taulmaril was torn from his grasp and went flying with his enemy.