“Quickly, then,” said Drizzt. “Before Kimmuriel loses control of Malagdorl.” He started to lead the way, but Jarlaxle held up his hand to stop him.
“They will lead,” the rogue corrected, and again put the scepter to use.
Now the statues, of spiders and of Lolth, moved to his commands, pushing through the doors at the front of the chapel, into the main house of Barrison Del’Armgo.
“Hold on,” Drizzt heard Jarlaxle telling Kimmuriel as they moved swiftly behind their wall of living stone.
“I . . . I have him,” Kimmuriel said through Malagdorl, a voice shaky at first, but steadying as the psionicist strengthened his mental hold on the warrior.
“Throw him into battle,” a still-shaken, still-mortified Dab’nay suggested. “Let him kill more of them, then let him die by their hands!”
“Keep him!” Jarlaxle quickly countered.
“Just . . . move,” Kimmuriel gritted out.
They were out of the main house, rushing down a wide stairway for the courtyard leading to the primary compound gate. Stone spiders flanked them and protected their rear, while the statue of Lolth led the way, chasing off any Armgo guards that stood before them.
There was no resistance, however, those outside clearly too confused to even attempt to slow the run, and the troupe made it almost all the way across before a voice magnified by magic finally rang out: “It is Drizzt the heretic! Kill them!”
Kaitain, they knew.
Jarlaxle sent the statue of Lolth in full charge at the gate guards. He lifted a wand and sent a ball of sticky goo up to seal the door of the guard tower on one side, then the other.
But now crossbow bolts began to fly at them, chipping the animated spider statues, which Jarlaxle kept closely huddled about them like some monstrous moving battlement.
Drizzt brought out Taulmaril once more and returned fire, arrows sparking with magic flashing around the compound with streaks of lightning.
“Go,” Kimmuriel told them when they reached the gate. “I will fight and let Malagdorl feel the pain and the chill of creeping death.”
“No,” Jarlaxle answered, not in a plaintive and desperate plea, but in the tone of one hatching a scheme. “No, we need him. Hold a bit longer and let us be gone.”
Jarlaxle started through the gate, but stopped fast and jumped back in, looking down at the scepter as if deceived.
“By Lolth’s Skitter!” he cursed.
“What?” Dab’nay asked, stumbling out from the compound.
“Mez’Barris’s scepter won’t work beyond this gate.”
The shadowy arms lifted Entreri up into the air, then slammed him back to the floor. He tried to crawl for his friends, again trying to tell them to run.
Nothing came out, though—it was hard to yell when the air was being knocked out of you—and up he went again, then back down hard, and this time, he just lay there on the floor.
The shadowy arms began to drag him backward. The giant half drow, half spider glared at Catti-brie and Gromph, as if daring them to intervene.
So they did.
Catti-brie reached out with a spell of healing, bringing Entreri back to consciousness, and Gromph did her one better, throwing a line of strange magical energy at Entreri, one that became a twisting swirl about him, bending the shadowy arms, bending the man, bending, it seemed, the very nature of the Material Plane.
Entreri spun and twisted and wrapped in on himself, and then was gone—or not gone, reappearing right beside Catti-brie.
“Kill them,” she heard, or felt in her head—she couldn’t be sure—from the great creature, and the drow arm reached out with a clawed hand, and from that came a bolt of dark energy, crackling across the room at Gromph.
The wizard presented his staff before him, and as with the earlier spells, it caught the witch bolt and trapped it, absorbing the power.
But now all the others in the hall were casting, too, and Catti-brie understood that she and her companions were likely doomed. She launched into her own spell, ignoring the incoming firepower and hoping her wards would hold it back enough.
Even standing a couple of steps from the archmage, she could feel Gromph’s staff vibrating with power!
The flash of fire bit at her, at Gromph, at Entreri, who lay writhing on the ground beside her.
But she kept her concentration and brought forth a globe of protection, a shield against all but the most powerful spells. Even the dark energy aimed at Gromph was halted by it.
She was surprised, then, when Gromph turned an angry scowl upon her.
Jarlaxle exclaimed, “Go, you three! I’ll hold the fight as long as I can.”
“We fight as one,” Drizzt argued, and Dab’nay seconded him.
Jarlaxle started to protest, but Drizzt wouldn’t hear of it. He hadn’t wanted to bring in Guen, as the panther had been used extensively in his time here patrolling the Braeryn and needed rest, but he wasn’t about to let Jarlaxle try to hold the ground alone. He produced the onyx figurine and called to the panther.
“Farewell, then, my oldest friend,” the voice of Malagdorl, the spirit of Kimmuriel, said. “My time runs short.”
“No, hold on!” Jarlaxle implored him. “We will find a way.”
Be quick, Jarlaxle, for I cannot hold much longer, came the telepathic reply to Drizzt, to Jarlaxle, and to Dab’nay, who was then struggling to get out of the huge warrior’s grasp.
A fireball went off nearby, close enough to tell them that their time in the compound was over.
“Get out,” Jarlaxle ordered.
“All of us or none!” Dab’nay demanded.
“I have no intention of dying in here,” Jarlaxle told her, told them all.
Drizzt, bow in hand and arrows now flying out at the closing Armgo forces, looked to his friend.
“I’m touched that you’d think I’d die for you,” Jarlaxle told him. “But get out now!” As he spoke, he was removing his hat. Drizzt knew what was in there and suspected that Jarlaxle had the escape all planned out.
“Go,” he told Dab’nay, rushing past her toward the gates.
“We go together or not at all!” Dab’nay continued to protest to Jarlaxle, but Malagdorl picked her up, tucked her under one arm as if she were no more than a child, and went out of the compound behind Drizzt, carrying both her and Braelin. He and Drizzt paused and turned back to regard Jarlaxle.
Despite the dire situation, despite knowing this might be the last time he looked upon a good friend, Drizzt almost laughed helplessly as he sorted out the moves by Jarlaxle.
“Trust in him,” he told himself, reminded himself, for how many times had he seen Jarlaxle escape what had seemed like certain death?
Of course, the same could have been said about Kimmuriel.
The Lolth-like statue was closing the gates, which opened into the courtyard, while the spiders were huddling and following close behind. Jarlaxle would press them against those gates, then deactivate them and make his escape, leaving the Armgos to figure out how they might get their gates opened again without destroying their own constructs.
A crossbow quarrel from above reminded him that they could not wait. He leveled Taulmaril and returned fire, a line of lightning arrows that put the Armgo defenders back down behind their parapet. Then he turned and fled behind Malagdorl and Dab’nay, down the short entry walkway and out onto the main boulevard of the raised area filled with noble houses. There, at the street know as Highcastle Lane, the fleeing companions were given pause once more, for coming from the north was the retreat of the Baenres and their allies, fleeing for the great house across the way on the eastern end of the Qu’ellarz’orl.
Behind the routed forces came the demon horde and the soldiers of the enemy houses.
“Keep going!” Drizzt heard Jarlaxle’s voice from behind, and he turned to see the rogue coming through the gate of Barrison Del’Armgo, though it was surely still closed. Jarlaxle pulled his portable hole from the barrier and tucked it away, sprinting toward his friend—and still holding the scepter of Matron Mez’Barris, Drizzt noted.
Drizzt laid down cover fire as Jarlaxle caught up to his friend, and they turned as one for House Baenre, which was not far away. It seemed like they could beat the incoming horde to the gates of that last sanctuary. And perhaps even offer help to those retreating under the banner of House Baenre.
Drizzt! the ranger heard in his head, and he knew it to be Kimmuriel. Farewell!
Jarlaxle’s gasp told him that he wasn’t the only one who had heard the dire pronouncement.
He turned about just in time to see Malagdorl—and it was indeed Malagdorl once more—drop Dab’nay to the ground, flip the weak Braelin over his shoulder, and draw out Khazid’hea.
Lightning and fire, a storm of pounding sleet and a barrage of magical missiles, pounded the dome covering the three companions. Melarni attackers showed in all four corridors, bolstered, no doubt, by the presence, the overwhelming presence, that had come onto the battlefield.
The yochlols were chanting, the avatar—Catti-brie was certain it was indeed the avatar of Lolth—stood tall and smug, smiling and mocking the trio.
“Go,” Gromph told Catti-brie. “Go now.”
“Come with us.”
Gromph snarled at her, his feral disapproval and his scowl reminding her of their deal, of the promise he made her swear.
He turned back to the wider area, to the avatar and the Melarni nobles and the yochlols. Presenting his staff, he walked out of the globe.
“You cannot beat them!” Catti-brie yelled.
“I will settle for a draw,” came the reply.
Malagdorl turned for the stunned Braelin, lifting the deadly Khazid’hea, but Drizzt was there in an eyeblink, intercepting the stroke with Icingdeath and batting it wide, then driving Malagdorl back with a rolling flurry of his scimitars, one over the other so rapidly that Malagdorl had no chance of picking off every cut and so was forced back, away from Braelin.
“Jarlaxle!” Drizzt called. “Get her to House Baenre.”
“Don’t kill him,” Jarlaxle replied. “We need this one.”
Drizzt wasn’t quite sure that was going to be an option, but he grunted in assent as Jarlaxle gathered Dab’nay up behind the ranger and the two of them went to Braelin. Drizzt heard them shuffling off.
Malagdorl started to Drizzt’s right, moving to cut them off, and Drizzt spun that way, blades spinning and stabbing, trying to force the brutish man back.
But the intercept was a feint, Malagdorl using Drizzt’s compassion against him, and he changed his angle even as Drizzt rolled in front of him, and sidestepped back the way he had come, just a single step, but enough to give Malagdorl a bit of an opening.
So he thought.
Indeed, Drizzt’s blades were farther over, and the drow was leaning that way, but taking that as an indication of Drizzt being overbalanced proved folly, for as Malagdorl stabbed out with his trident, Drizzt leaned farther to his right, bent straight over, and lifted his left leg, driving the tip of his boot up into Malagdorl’s left armpit.
Drizzt got his leg down before Khazid’hea came slashing across, and he turned, now facing up against the man and wasting no time in going after him, after the lowered trident and arm as the man recovered from the shock and sting of the kick.
A lesser warrior would have been finished against the superbly trained and viper-quick Drizzt, but Malagdorl had more than brute strength.
Much more, Drizzt realized.
He threw back his left shoulder, trident going behind him as he half turned, Khazid’hea cutting hard across, then in a backhand the other way. And now Malagdorl kicked high and hard for Drizzt’s chest as Drizzt leaned backward to avoid the cutting sword.
But the kick didn’t hit, for Drizzt just kept going backward, bending at the knees, falling so low that he seemed as if surely to topple over to the ground.
Malagdorl recovered from both his missed kick and the wild backhand and leaped up and ahead to try to stomp the prostrated ranger.
Except Drizzt was not lying flat. His shoulders lightly touched down and in that instant of contact with the stone, he reversed the move, stomach tightening, calves and hamstrings locking, pulling, and he came back upright, ducking to get under the leaping Malagdorl, turning as he did and driving his forearm and shoulder against the back of the big man’s legs, upending him.
Malagdorl crashed down hard and Drizzt went for the cripple, driving Twinkle down hard on the big man’s thigh.
Malagdorl’s black plate mail rejected the blow, wholly.
Now Drizzt was surprised—there wasn’t much that his scimitar could not cut through—and in that instant of shock, Malagdorl rolled and kicked him hard, sending him flying backward, stumbling.
Jarlaxle’s eyes widened indeed when he came to recognize some of the fleeing Baenre allies.
“Zaknafein,” he breathed.
“Callidaeans,” Dab’nay said at his side.
The group was still far to the north and turning east for House Baenre.
But they, too, were watching the fight of the titans before the entryway of House Barrison Del’Armgo.
“The heretic!” someone cried from the back of one of the pursuing Melarni groups.
“Lolth’s Warrior!” many shouted together.
And then came Zak’s voice: “Drizzt!”
The flight for House Baenre and the pursuit of those retreating forces all seemed to stop then, as this clash of Drizzt and Malagdorl was called all about.
Not the demons, though. The frenzied beasts just kept charging, forcing the Baenre group to take up their run once more.
Jarlaxle looked back at his friend and the weapon master. “Finish the fight fast,” he whispered.
He wondered what effect the defeat of Malagdorl, of Lolth’s Warrior, in front of the Lolthian forces might have.
This was an outcome Jarlaxle began to doubt when a familiar figure appeared on the wall of the Barrison Del’Armgo compound, not so far from the battling warriors.
Kaitain, powerful and deadly, and taking aim for Drizzt.
Malagdorl came on with seeming abandon, Khazid’hea flashing across with wild slashes, the trident following, sometimes a slash, sometimes a stab.
Drizzt kept moving, left, right, and back, looking for openings, confident he could keep ahead of the purely straightforward barrage. He was surprised by the brutish and unsophisticated tactics, but understood that Malagdorl’s sheer power would overwhelm most fighters, after all.
Perhaps the weapon master had abandoned all finesse in his supreme confidence.
Or maybe it was just a feint, a lure to force Drizzt into a more prosaic response, to get him in close. Time was on the hulking man’s side, after all, as the demon hordes and Lolthians were coming fast up to the Qu’ellarz’orl.
In any case, he was overswinging, and even with his great strength allowing him to halt a strike or reverse a sidelong cut, he was offering openings.
Drizzt took them—always alert to any subterfuge—coming in behind the cuts, stabbing with his scimitars, scoring in Malagdorl’s belly, his chest, even a double-low thrust that got the man on the legs and nearly tripped him up.
But didn’t hurt him. None of them hurt him!
The wild flurry continued, Malagdorl bulling ahead, pursuing to the side, blade and trident always in motion, always prodding, cutting, anything to score a hit—and giving up many strikes in return.
Futile strikes.
“Your weapons will not get through,” Malagdorl taunted, skidding to a sudden stop. “But ask yourself: Do you think your meager armor will hold back these?” He presented the trident and Khazid’hea and charged, only to pull up short, looking up and past Drizzt.
That one moment registered clearly in Drizzt’s thoughts and he reacted by simply throwing himself aside—right as a lightning bolt struck the ground where he had been standing with thunderous force, chipping the very stone.
Drizzt spun and rolled, kicking the ground hard, ignoring the burn of the near miss, the tingling numbness in his limbs. He came up to find Malagdorl laughing and stalking in.
But again, Malagdorl paused and glanced to the side, leading Drizzt’s gaze to the wall of House Barrison Del’Armgo and the lone figure up there, the wizard Kaitain, waving his arms for another assault.
“Have you met my protector?” Malagdorl taunted and laughed again—or started to, until a ball of flying blackness rose up behind the wizard, slammed into the wizard, and drove him over the wall and crashing to the ground, six hundred pounds of feline fury landing atop him.
“I have,” Drizzt said. “Have you met mine?”
Malagdorl howled in rage and leaped ahead, as Drizzt had hoped. His strikes were heavy, too powerful to block, and an opponent who tried to do so would have felt the barbed tines of the trident and the fine edge of Khazid’hea blasting through and finishing the fight.
So Drizzt didn’t try to block. His hands, speed magnified by his enchanted bracers, moved his blades expertly enough to redirect the attacks, just a tiny bit, over to his right.
A tiny bit was all the fast warrior needed.
To further disorient Malagdorl, Drizzt flipped Icingdeath straight up between the trident and sword.
Looking at the blade, slapping it aside, Malagdorl could not comprehend that Drizzt had ghost-stepped, a single, sudden stride, to put him behind and to the side.
Drizzt turned fast, thinking to strike with Twinkle . . . and he might have gotten his blade far enough around with his left hand to score a hit on the exposed flesh of the back of Malagdorl’s neck.
But he changed his mind and struck out with his bare hand—his closer hand—instead, his open palm clapping hard against the enchanted armor.
And so strong was that strike that it sent Malagdorl stumbling forward. The armor, of course, prevented any serious physical injury.
But it did mean he could do something to the hulking warrior.
With that knowledge, Drizzt calmed . . . and smiled.
Catti-brie moved as near to Gromph as she could without leaving the globe of protection, peering through the splashes of flames and lightning bolts the enemy was raining upon them.
She yelled to the archmage repeatedly, but he paid her no heed, and probably could barely hear her through the din of magical explosions and chanting from every direction. She saw him, though, standing there so very vulnerable, his robes trailing wisps of smoke from the bits of fireballs that got around the wards he and Catti-brie had placed, his hair dancing wildly under the shock of lightning.
But he stood there, staff presented, and he was not casting.
As one shower of lightning sparks flew aside, Catti-brie saw clearly Gromph’s staff, glowing with energy now, absorbing more.
Then it hit her. She knew of such rare staves that could hold great magical power. Overcharged or otherwise broken and they would release it all, all at once, a single, devastating blast.
She thought of Gromph’s other items, the helm and the necklace, which could also be triggered in such a cataclysm.
No, she mouthed.
“Go!” Gromph ordered for the last time, and he was shaking and he was burning, and he took the staff up in both hands, top and bottom, and held it horizontally before him, falling to one knee, the other foot braced before him as he brought the staff down across his knee.
With no further hesitation, Catti-brie grabbed Entreri’s shoulder and voiced her word of recall, but she saw, just for an instant, the flash of the breaking staff, felt, just for an instant, the sudden roll of pure magic released.
Her sight was taken from her in that instant. She felt disembodied, just for a moment, as she was thrown through the blast, through the miles of rock and soil, and she felt some tassels tickling her nose as she lay on the ground.
On the rug in her room in the Ivy Mansion.
Seeming more perturbed than hurt, Malagdorl caught himself a few strides later, straightened, and turned slowly to face Drizzt.
“And now you have but one blade,” he said, looking to the side and the fallen scimitar.
“And now . . .” he started to add, raising his weapons. But he stopped the sentence and the movement, a curious expression coming over his face.
“Do you feel them?” Drizzt asked, reaching out with his free hand. “The vibrations?”
“What?” Malagdorl asked as Drizzt snapped his hand shut, releasing the brutal monk strike, the quivering palm.
Malagdorl’s next attempt to curse came out as a gush of blood, and he wavered and stumbled, trying to orient his weapons as Drizzt charged in.
Malagdorl swung—too high!—as Drizzt fell into a skid past him, then planted one foot to lock himself in place and send him spinning around and up in a circle kick that buckled his leg and dropped him to one knee. Stubbornly, Malagdorl came around with a cut of Khazid’hea, but Drizzt hadn’t stopped moving, continuing his spin like an unwinding coil, rising and kicking Malagdorl again, right in the face—one of the few unarmored parts of his body—laying him low on the ground.
Drizzt started away, motioning to Jarlaxle, but barely had he gone a few steps when he heard a growl from behind. He turned about, blinking in surprise, to see Malagdorl stubbornly rising and growling. Drizzt had exchanged quivering palm strikes with Grandmaster Kane, blows that had left both of them ragged. He had executed this one with clear and full force against Malagdorl, a man who had no knowledge or understanding of it, and to see him fighting through the debilitating effects was truly startling.
Drizzt stared at him, shaking his head in disbelief, and forcing from himself a new and higher level of respect for this hulking weapon master’s sheer toughness.
He watched to see if Malagdorl would sway as he straightened, and he did seem off-balance for just a moment. But then he steadied, and, amazingly, he charged, roaring and stabbing and slashing with unbridled ferocity.
Drizzt wanted no part of that weapon-leading bull rush, and he started right, then darted left, spinning out of Khazid’hea’s reach just barely, and snapping off a backhand to slap the sword farther ahead of Malagdorl, to keep the big man moving forward and thus, farther past him.
Drizzt didn’t pursue, though he might have been able to land some hit or another. Nothing that would finish Malagdorl, he knew, and he decided that such inconsequential strikes weren’t the way at this point.
He was there when Malagdorl turned about, though, meeting the big man’s next flurry with the deft and perfectly angled parries of Twinkle.
Ahead stabbed the adamantine trident, and a quick down-and-out block moved it harmlessly wide.
Across came Khazid’hea, brutally, right behind, but Drizzt ducked, got his blade up fast enough to intercept Malagdorl’s sudden attempt to reverse the sword’s route, then down again fast enough to block the trident as the weapon master tried to slash it across.
Drizzt sprang into a backflip, landing farther from the big man, breaking the flow.
He had learned something on the deflection of Khazid’hea. He had felt the residual weakness within Malagdorl from the quivering palm. His opponent was running on pure determination now, Drizzt understood, simply denying the damage.
On Malagdorl came, stabbing with the trident, slashing the sword, once and again, then reversing and stabbing Khazid’hea while locking the trident under his arm, then leaping forward to close the gap and swinging about violently to send that three-tined killer sweeping for the side of Drizzt’s chest.
Drizzt had seen the arm lock, though, a commitment to that very strike, and as Malagdorl began his turn, Drizzt knew that it was one he could not reverse, could not stop.
Up went Drizzt, high into the air, the trident cutting below him, and as he rose, Drizzt twisted and inverted, coming back down from on high, twisting and turning again to take full advantage of the weight of his descent, lying almost flat out so that his full force gathered in that single downward punch against the side of Malagdorl’s face, violently snapping the man’s head to the side.
Drizzt landed almost flat, but lightly, springing right back up, ready to retreat or strike again.
He needed to do neither, though. Malagdorl’s head came back around so that he was facing Drizzt, though whether he was staring incredulously at Drizzt or off into nothingness, Drizzt could not tell.
“I am Lolth’s Warrior!” Malagdorl roared in denial.
Then he simply fell over to the side.
“That should tell you something about Lolth,” Drizzt replied. He sheathed Twinkle and took a step for Icingdeath.
Gromph felt the power growing beyond the limits of his powerful stave. The tingling energy rolled up his arm as surely as the licking flames from fireballs that could not be caught by the implement.
He knew that just letting it swallow a few more spells would cause it to burst, but that didn’t seem satisfying enough to him in this moment of ultimate defiance.
He didn’t know if Catti-brie and Entreri had left—but if not, it was their own fault, and so he didn’t care.
He only cared about this moment before him, when he could punch Lolth—her avatar, at least—in the face.
He brought the staff down across his knee knowing that it would be the end of his physical body, that the released energies of the retributive strike would turn him to ash. Sometimes such a fate could be avoided, so said the old texts he had read when researching the item, but Gromph didn’t even try.
He watched the staff crack over his knee, saw the blinding burst of brilliance, felt the concussive heat wave roll out, roll through him.
And then he felt out of body, as if the very consciousness and being of the udadrow known as Gromph Baenre had simply ceased to exist, and nothing mattered, past or future, because there was no present—just this thought, his seemingly last experience and expression of . . . nothingness.
Blackness. So deep he no longer knew it was blackness.
Quiet. So quiet he no longer knew it was silent.
He just no longer knew.