The Halfling’s Gem (46 page)

“She is gone, my friend,” Drizzt said softly.

“Bah!” Bruenor snorted, though it sounded as more of a sniffle. “Don’t ye be so quick to make such a claim!”

Drizzt looked upon him with sincere sympathy, but refused to relinquish the point or change his course.

“And if she were gone, I’d stay as well,” Bruenor proclaimed, “to find her body and carry it from this eternal hell!”

Drizzt grabbed the dwarf by the shoulders and squared up to face him. “Go, Bruenor, back to where we all belong,” he said. “Do not diminish the sacrifice that Catti-brie has made for us. Do not steal the meaning from her fall.”

“How can ye ask me to leave?” Bruenor said with a sniffle that he did not mask. Wetness glistened the edges of his gray eyes. “How can ye—”

“Think not of what has passed!” Drizzt said sharply. “Beyond that gate is the wizard that sent us here, the wizard that sent Catti-brie here!”

It was all Bruenor Battlehammer needed to hear. Fire
replaced the tears in his eyes, and with a roar of anger he dived through the portal, his axe leading the way.

“Now—” Drizzt began, but Wulfgar cut him short.

“You go, Drizzt,” the barbarian replied. “Avenge Catti-brie and Regis. Finish the quest we undertook together. For myself, there will be no rest. My emptiness will not fade.”

“She is gone,” Drizzt said again.

Wulfgar nodded. “As am I,” he said quietly.

Drizzt searched for some way to refute the argument, but truly Wulfgar’s grief seemed too profound for him to ever recover.

Then Wulfgar’s gaze shot up, and his mouth gaped in horrified—and elated—disbelief. Drizzt spun about, not as surprised, but still overwhelmed, by the sight before him.

Catti-brie fell limply and slowly from the dark sky above them.

It was a circular plane.

Wulfgar and Drizzt leaned together for support. They could not determine if Catti-brie was alive or dead. She was wounded gravely, at the least, and even as they watched, a winged demodand swooped down and grabbed at her leg with its huge talons.

Before a conscious thought had time to register in Wulfgar’s mind, Drizzt had Taulmaril bent and sent a silver arrow into flight. It thundered into the side of the demodand’s head just as the creature took hold of the young woman, blasting the thing from life.

“Go!” Wulfgar yelled at Drizzt, taking one stride. “I see my quest now! I know what I must do!”

Drizzt had other ideas. He slipped a foot through Wulfgar’s legs and dropped in a spin, driving his other leg into the back of the barbarian’s knees and tripping Wulfgar down to the side,
toward the portal. Wulfgar understood the drow’s intentions at once, and he scrambled to regain his balance.

Again Drizzt was the quicker. The point of a scimitar nicked in under Wulfgar’s cheekbone, keeping him moving in the desired direction. As he neared the portal, just when Drizzt expected him to try some desperate maneuver, the drow drove a boot under his shoulder and kicked him hard.

Betrayed, Wulfgar tumbled into Pasha Pook’s central chamber. He ignored his surroundings, grabbed at the Taros Hoop and shook it with all his strength.

“Traitor!” he yelled. “Never will I forget this, cursed drow!”

“Take your place!” Drizzt yelled back at him from across the planes. “Only Wulfgar has the strength to hold the gate open and secure. Only Wulfgar! Hold it, son of Beornegar. If you care for Drizzt Do’Urden, and if ever you loved Catti-brie, hold the gate!”

Drizzt could only pray that he had appealed to the small part of rationale accessible in the enraged barbarian. The drow turned from the portal, tucking the scepter into his belt and slinging Taulmaril over his shoulder. Catti-brie was below him now, still falling, still unmoving.

Drizzt drew out both his scimitars. How long would it take him to pull Catti-brie to a bridge and find his way back to the portal? he wondered. Or would he, too, be caught in an endless, doomed, fall?

And how long could Wulfgar hold the gate open?

He brushed away the questions. He had no time to speculate on their answers.

The fires gleamed in his lavender eyes, Twinkle glowed in one hand, and he felt the urgings of his other blade, pleading for a demodand’s heart to bite.

With all the courage that had marked Drizzt Do’Urden’s
existence coursing through his veins, and with all the fury of his perceptions of injustice focused on the fate of that beautiful and broken woman failing endlessly in a hopeless void, he dived into the gloom.

ruenor had come into Pook’s chambers cursing and swinging, and by the time his initial momentum had worn away, he was far across the room from the Taros Hoop and from the two hill giant eunuchs that Pook had on guard. The guildmaster was closest to the raging dwarf, looking at him more in curiosity than terror.

Bruenor paid Pook no mind whatsoever. He looked beyond the plump man, to a robed form sitting against a wall: the wizard who had banished Catti-brie to Tarterus.

Recognizing the murderous hate in the red-bearded dwarf’s eyes, LaValle rolled to his feet and scrambled through the door to his own room. His racing heart calmed when he heard the click of the door behind him, for it was a magic doorway with several holding and warding spells in place. He was safe—or so he thought.

Often wizards were blinded by their own considerable
strength to other—less sophisticated, perhaps, but equally strong—forms of power. LaValle could not know the boiling cauldron that was Bruenor Battlehammer, and could not anticipate the brutality of the dwarf’s rage.

His surprise was complete when a mithral axe, like a bolt of his own lightning, sundered his magically barred door to kindling and the wild dwarf stormed in.

Wulfgar, oblivious to the surroundings and wanting only to return to Tarterus and Catti-brie, came through the Taros Hoop just as Bruenor exited the room. Drizzt’s call from across the planes, though, begging him to hold the portal open, could not be ignored. However the barbarian felt at that moment, for Catti-brie or Drizzt, he could not deny that his place was in guarding the mirror.

Still, the image of Catti-brie falling through the eternal gloom of that horrid place burned at his heart, and he wanted to spring right back through the Taros Hoop to rush to her aid.

Before the barbarian could decide whether to follow his heart or his thoughts, a huge fist slammed into the side of his head, dropping him to the floor. He flopped facedown between the tree trunk legs of two of Pook’s hill giants. It was a difficult way to enter a fight, but Wulfgar’s rage was every bit as intense as Bruenor’s.

The giants tried to drop their heavy feet on Wulfgar, but he was too agile for such a clumsy maneuver. He sprang up between them and slammed one square in the face with a huge fist. The giant stared blankly at Wulfgar for a long moment, disbelieving that a human could deliver such a punch, then it hopped backward weirdly and dropped limply to the floor.

Wulfgar spun on the other, shattering its nose with the butt end of Aegis-fang. The giant clutched its face in both hands and reeled. For it, the fight was already over.

Wulfgar couldn’t take the time to ask. He kicked the giant in the chest, launching it halfway across the room.

“Now, there is only me,” came a voice. Wulfgar looked across the room to the huge chair that served as the guildmaster’s throne, and to Pasha Pook, standing behind it.

Pook reached down behind the chair and pulled out a neatly concealed heavy crossbow, loaded and ready. “And I may be fat like those two,” Pook chuckled, “but I am not stupid.” He leveled the crossbow on the back of the chair.

Wulfgar glanced around. He was caught, fully, with no chance to dodge away.

But maybe he didn’t have to.

Wulfgar firmed his jaw and puffed out his chest. “Right here, then,” he said without flinching, tapping his finger over his heart. “Shoot me down.” He cast a glance over his shoulder, to where the image in the Taros Hoop now showed the shadows of gathering demodands. “And you defend the entrance to the plane of Tarterus.”

Pook eased his finger off the trigger.

If Wulfgar’s point had made an impression, it was driven home a second later when the clawed hand of a demodand reached through the portal and latched onto Wulfgar’s shoulder.

Drizzt moved as if swimming in his descent through the gloom, the pumping actions gaining him ground on Catti-brie. He was vulnerable, though, and he knew it.

So did a winged demodand watching him fall by.

The wretched creature hopped off its perch as soon as Drizzt had passed, flapping its wings at an awkward angle to gain momentum in its dive. Soon it was overtaking the drow, and it reached out its razor-sharp claws to tear at him as it passed.

Drizzt noticed the beast at the last moment. He twisted over wildly and spun about, trying to get out of the diving thing’s path and struggling to ready his scimitars.

He should have had no chance. It was the demodand’s environment, and it was a winged creature, more at home in flight than on the ground.

But Drizzt Do’Urden never played the odds.

The demodand strafed past, its wicked talons ripping yet another tear in Drizzt’s fine cloak. Twinkle, as steady as ever even in midfall, lopped off one of the creature’s wings. The demodand fluttered helplessly to the side and continued down in a tumble. It had no heart left for battle against the drow elf, and no wing left to catch him anyway.

Drizzt paid it no heed. His goal was in reach.

He caught Catti-brie in his arms, locking her tightly against his chest. She was cold, he noted grimly, but he knew that he had too far to go to even think about that. He wasn’t certain if the planar gate was still open, and he had no idea of how he could stop his eternal fall.

A solution came to him in the form of another winged demodand, one that cut an intercepting path at him and Catti-brie. The creature did not mean to attack yet, Drizzt could see; its route seemed more of a flyby, where it would pass under them to better inspect its foe.

Drizzt didn’t let the chance go. As the creature passed under, the dark elf snapped himself downward, extending to his limit with one blade-wielding hand. Not aimed to kill, the scimitar
found its mark, digging into the creature’s backside. The demodand shrieked and dived away, pulling free of the blade.