The Last Threshold
Page 37

And they were moving closer together, barely swinging now, surrounding her fully, encasing her.
Closing like a coffin.
Effron called his umber hulk back and put the jar on the ground in its path. As it neared, the magic pulled it, instructed it, and shrunk it.
As he scooped that caged pet up, Effron produced the other. The powerful dweomer, the Tartarean Tomb, now locked its plates around Dahlia, pressing in tight, holding her fast, despite her ferocious struggling. Even this great spell wouldn’t cage this fine warrior for long, Effron understood, and had understood during his careful planning, and now his final piece, the death worm, slithered into position.
The tomb was not complete, the elf woman’s feet and lower legs showing beneath the bottom edge of the metal plates, and the necrophidius coiled around one of those legs and climbed up into the tomb with Dahlia.
How she screamed!
In horror at first, and then in pain as the death worm bit into her.
She kept screaming, kept thrashing.
“Just succumb,” Effron begged her in a whisper, for to his surprise, these cries of pain and terror no longer rang sweetly in his ears.
“Just fall, damn you!” he shouted out against them, and as if on cue, the screaming stopped.
Effron froze, barely able to catch his breath. The paralyzing bite of the necrophidius had finally taken hold, he realized.
The coffin swayed and fell over.
Effron whispered a command to his pet, telling it to stay in place, and to bite again if the woman stirred.
“Now?” Effron heard behind him.
“Fetch her,” he instructed his two dockhand henchmen without turning back to regard them. They ran past him, blankets in hand. “And take care!” he called after them. “Else I will surely obliterate you!”
He walked to the street to the waiting cart his henchmen had brought up to the entrance to the alleyway. Some people were watching, but none approached, for in a place like Baldur’s Gate, a person who stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong most often had that nose ripped off.
The gaffer and his comrade half-carried, half-dragged the metal coffin from the alley, and got it up on the cart with great effort, even dropping it once to the street.
They rushed up onto the driver’s bench and urged the mule along.
Effron went off the other way, not wanting to call attention to the cargo. He was several blocks away, circling around toward the docks and the empty boat, in whose hold he would claim his catch, before the weight of what he had done truly struck him.
He had her.
He had the woman who had thrown him from the cliff.
He had her.
He had the mother who had rejected him, and left him to a life of broken misery.
He had her!
Chapter 13: The Patience of a Monk
WELL THEN FIND HER,” CAPTAIN CANNAVARA SAID TO ENTRERI.
“Aye, or we’ll be leavin’ ye here, and won’t that be better for us?” added Mister Sikkal. He stood at Cannavara’s side, bobbing up and down on his bowed legs so that his head bounced stupidly. How Artemis Entreri wanted to put his recovered dagger to good use at that moment!
“I only came to tell you that we cannot find her,” Entreri remarked, addressing the captain directly, but throwing one warning glance at Sikkal as he did to keep the fool’s mouth shut. “Not to be lectured by either of you.”
“Then you four will be aboard when we sail?” the captain asked.
“No,” Entreri replied without the slightest hesitation—and he was surprised at his own certainty, though as he considered it, he couldn’t deny the truth. He would not leave Dahlia behind, would not leave Baldur’s Gate until he learned what had happened to her.
“Minnow Skipper sails on the morning tide,” Cannavara declared.
“Then you will explain to Beniago and High Captain Kurth why my friends and I returned to Luskan before you. You are on to Memnon, are you not?”
The expression on Cannavara’s face, and on Sikkal’s as well, spoke volumes to Entreri before either had uttered a word—if either had been able to speak at that moment. As far as Cannavara knew, clearly, they had told no one of their course change, and from Sikkal’s point of view, likely he had done some whispering that might get him thrown to the sharks.
“You think you know all the strands of the web,” the assassin quietly said. “That is a dangerous belief when dealing with … my associates.”
His tone left little doubt in the two men as to whom he might be referring. Bregan D’aerthe or Ship Kurth, the two men facing him obviously assumed, given the blood then draining from their respective faces.
Entreri used that moment to pull back his cloak and put a hand to the hilt of his fabulous dagger. Cannavara let out a little gasp at that, obviously recognizing it and remembering for the first time where he had seen that particular blade before.
With a dismissive snort, Artemis Entreri turned and walked back down the gangplank.
By the time he stepped onto the wharf, he had put the two men out of his thoughts, focusing again on the missing Dahlia. Half the night and half the day now, and not a sign of her.
This was more than petulance, he knew.
He was afraid.
Ambergris and Afafrenfere walked the wharf slowly, taking their time on their way to Minnow Skipper. Drizzt and Entreri moved separately through the various neighborhoods of the city, checking every inn and tavern, and every alley, but the dwarf had resisted Afafrenfere’s calls to separate and cover more ground.
“I got me an idea,” she announced to her partner, with one of her exaggerated winks, and she led him directly to these docks, where more than a score of ships were moored, some out on the water, others pulled up tight against the wharves.
“You think she’s on one of these boats?” Afafrenfere asked when Ambergris’s destination became apparent.
“She ain’t been out through any o’ Baldur’s Gate’s gates, from what them sentries’re saying.”
“Dahlia could have easily gotten past them unnoticed.”
“Aye, but to what end?” Ambergris asked. “Long roads to walk alone, and why would she, when there’s better ways to be long gone from Baldur’s Gate, eh?”
“So you think she left of her own accord?”
Ambergris stopped and turned to face him, hands on hips. “Well, say it out loud, then,” she remarked when Afafrenfere made no move as if to answer her look.
“I think she was kidnapped, or murdered,” the monk said.
“Things ain’t been so good between herself and Drizzt,” Ambergris said, an observation she and Afafrenfere had noted for the last few days, and even before that, out on the seas.
“She wouldn’t leave like that,” Afafrenfere argued, shaking his head. “Not that one. Lady Dahlia does not run from a fight.”
“Even from a lover’s quarrel?”
That gave Afafrenfere pause, but only for a moment before he shook his head. He didn’t know Dahlia all that well, but in the months he’d spent with her, he believed that he had a fairly solid understanding of the elf’s motivations.
“I’m only arguin’ with ye because I’m fearing that ye’re right,” Ambergris admitted.
“Then why have you led me to the docks?”
“If ye was to kidnap someone, to sell to slavers or to force to serve yerself, would ye be wanting to keep her in Baldur’s Gate with us friends o’ hers walking about?”
“And if you murdered her, what better place to dump the body?” Afafrenfere came right back.
“Aye, and let’s hope it’s not that.”
Afafrenfere wholeheartedly agreed with that sentiment. He hadn’t known much camaraderie in his life, other than his long relationship with Parbid. He hadn’t thought it possible when first they had left Gauntlgrym, when he had walked out of that complex under great duress and in the company of those who had killed his dear companion, but Afafrenfere had come to think of these four, even the drow who had slain Parbid, as more than mere companions. He enjoyed fighting beside them—to deny it would be a terrible lie.
As he walked with his dwarf friend along those docks, he thought of a starry night far out at sea on Minnow Skipper. Unable to sleep, Afafrenfere had gone up to the deck. Drizzt was up there, distracted, standing at the prow and staring off at the sea and sky.
Afafrenfere had moved up, quietly as was his nature, but before he addressed Drizzt, he realized that the drow was already engaged in a quiet conversation—with himself.
Drizzt, this most curious drow rogue, was talking to himself, was using the serenity of the nighttime sea to sort through his thoughts and fears. And judging from his tone, the drow had already gone far around with his current subject and had found his answer, his words clearly reinforcing that which was in his heart.
“So now I say again, I am free, and say it with conviction,” Drizzt had declared to no one but himself. “Because I accept that which is in my heart, and understand those tenets to be the truest guidepost along this road. The world may be shadowed in various shades of gray, but the concept of right and wrong is not so subtle for me, and has never been. And when that concept collides against the stated law, then the stated law be damned.”
Drizzt had continued, but Afafrenfere had moved away, shocked, and not by the words, but by the exercise itself. Afafrenfere had learned similar techniques at the Monastery of the Yellow Rose. He had learned to fall deeply into meditation, an empty state, and then to subtly shift that bottomless trance, to use that ultimate peace, into a quiet personal conversation to sort out his innermost turmoil. Not with spoken words, but certainly in a similar soliloquy to that which Drizzt was doing at the front of that boat on that dark night.
That dark night had proven enlightening, for the monk had realized that this experience with these companions was very different than that which he had known in Cavus Dun. He had nothing as intense here as his relationship with Parbid, certainly, but there was another matter that he could not deny: unlike Ratsis, Bol, and the others of Cavus Dun—indeed, unlike Parbid, though Afafrenfere was afraid to admit that to himself—these companions would not leave him behind. Even Entreri, the surliest and most violent of the bunch, would not abandon him should they find themselves in a difficult place.
Ambergris’s elbow drew the monk from his contemplations.
“Remember them two?” the dwarf asked, barely moving her lips and so quietly that no one else could hear.
Without being obvious about studying the pair, Afafrenfere tried to place them.
“When we was first off the boat,” Ambergris prodded, and then he did indeed remember.
And Afafrenfere also noted that the pair, an old gaffer and a middle-aged man, watched him and the dwarf with more than a passing curiosity yet again. He made a mental note of them, and looked at Minnow Skipper tied up not so far aside.
“Yerself thinking what I’m thinkin’?” the dwarf asked.
“I believe I am,” Afafrenfere whispered back, then in a louder voice, added, “And now I am without coin. I hope that Captain Cannavara will give me work until we put to sea once more.”