Exile: The Legend of Drizzt (24 page)

“Be careful,” Belwar said. Drizzt only smiled in reply, touched at the sincerity in his friend’s voice and thinking again how much better it was to have a companion by his side. Then Drizzt dismissed his thoughts and moved away, letting his instincts and experience guide him.

He found the glow to be emanating from a hole in the corridor floor. Beyond it, the corridor continued but bent sharply, nearly doubling back on itself. Drizzt fell to his belly and peered down the hole. Another passage, about ten feet below him, ran perpendicular to the one he was in, opening a short way ahead into what appeared to be a large cavern.

“What is it?” Belwar whispered, coming up behind.

“Another corridor to a chamber,” Drizzt replied. “The glow comes from there.” He lifted his head and looked down into the ensuing darkness of the higher corridor. “Our tunnel continues,” Drizzt reasoned. “We can go right by it.”

Belwar looked down the passageway they had been traveling, noting the turn. “Doubles back,” he reasoned. “And probably comes right out at that side passage we passed an hour ago.” The deep gnome dropped to the dirt and looked into the hole.

“What would make such a glow?” Drizzt asked him, easily guessing that Belwar’s curiosity was as keen as his own. “Another form of moss?”

“None that I know,” Belwar replied.

“Shall we find out?”

Belwar smiled at him, then hooked his pick-hand on the ledge and swung over and in, dropping down to the lower tunnel. Drizzt and Guenhwyvar followed silently, the drow, scimitars in hand, again taking the lead as they moved toward the glow.

They came into a wide and high chamber, its ceiling far
beyond their sight and a lake of green-glowing foul-smelling liquid bubbling and hissing twenty feet below them. Dozens of interconnected narrow stone walkways, varying from one to ten feet wide, crisscrossed the gorge, most ending at exits leading into more side corridors.

“Magga cammara,”
whispered the stunned svirfneblin, and Drizzt shared that thought.

“It appears as though the floor was blasted away,” Drizzt remarked when he again found his voice.

“Melted away,” replied Belwar, guessing the liquid’s nature. He hacked off a chunk of stone at his side and tapping Drizzt to get his attention, dropped it into the green lake. The liquid hissed as if in anger where the rock hit, eating away at the stone before it even sank from sight.

“Acid,” Belwar explained.

Drizzt looked at him curiously. He knew of acid from his days of training under the wizards of Sorcere in the Academy. Wizards often concocted such vile liquids for use in their magical experiments, but Drizzt did not figure that acid would appear naturally, or in such quantities.

“Some wizard’s working, I would guess,” said Belwar. “An experiment out of control. It has probably been here for a hundred years, eating away at the floor, sinking down inch by inch.”

“But what remains of the floor seems secure enough,” observed Drizzt, pointing to the walkways. “And we have a score of tunnels to choose from.”

“Then let us begin at once,” said Belwar. “I do not like this place. We are exposed in the light, and I would not care to take quick flight along such narrow bridges—not with a lake of acid below me!”

Drizzt agreed and took a cautious step out on the walkway, but Guenhwyvar quickly moved past him. Drizzt understood
the panther’s logic and wholeheartedly agreed. “Guenhwyvar will lead us,” he explained to Belwar. “The panther is the heaviest and quick enough to spring away if a section begins to fall.”

The burrow-warden was not completely satisfied. “What if Guenhwyvar does not make it to safety?” he asked, truly concerned. “What will the acid do to a magical creature?”

Drizzt wasn’t certain of the answer. “Guenhwyvar should be safe,” he reasoned, pulling the onyx figurine from his pocket. “I hold the gateway to the panther’s home plane.”

Guenhwyvar was a dozen strides away by then—the walkway seemed sturdy enough—and Drizzt set out to follow.
“Magga cammara
, I pray you are right,” he heard Belwar mumble at his back as he took the first steps out from the ledge.

The chamber was huge, several hundred feet across even to the nearest exit. The companions neared the halfway point— Guenhwyvar had already passed it—when they heard a strange chanting sound. They stopped and glanced about, searching for the source.

A weird-looking creature stepped out from one of the numerous side passages. It was bipedal and black skinned, with a beaked bird’s head and the torso of a man, featherless and wingless. Both of its powerful-looking arms ended in hooked, wicked claws, and its legs ended in three-toed feet. Another creature stepped out from behind it, and another from behind them.

“Relatives?” Belwar asked Drizzt, for the creatures did indeed resemble some weird cross between a dark elf and a bird.

“Hardly,” Drizzt replied. “In all of my life, I have never heard of such creatures.”

“Doom! Doom!” came the continuing chant, and the friends looked around to see more of the bird-men stepping out from other passages. They were dire corbies, an ancient race more common to the southern reaches of the Underdark—though
rare even there—and almost unknown in this part of the world. Corbies had never been of much concern to any of the Underdark races, for the bird-men’s methods were crude and their numbers were small. To a passing band of adventurers, however, a flock of savage dire corbies meant trouble indeed.

“Nor have I ever encountered such creatures,” Belwar agreed. “But I do not believe that they are pleased to see us.”

The chant became a series of horrifying shrieks as the corbies began to disperse out onto the walkways, walking at first, but occasionally breaking into quick trots, their anxiety obviously increasing.

“You are wrong, my little friend,” Drizzt remarked. “I believe that they are quite pleased to have their dinner delivered to them.”

Belwar looked around helplessly. Nearly all of their escape routes were already cut off, and they couldn’t hope to get out without a fight. “Dark elf, I can think of a thousand places I would rather do battle,” the burrow-warden said with a resigned shrug and a shudder as he took another look down into the acid lake. Taking a deep breath to calm himself, Belwar began his ritual to enchant his magical hands.

“Move while you chant,” Drizzt instructed him, leading him on. “Let us get as close to an exit as we can before the fighting begins.”

One group of corbies closed rapidly at the party’s side, but Guenhwyvar, with a mighty spring that spanned two of the walkways, cut the bird-men off.

“Bivrip!”
Belwar cried, completing his spell, and he turned toward the impending battle.

“Guenhwyvar can take care of that group,” Drizzt assured him, quickening his steps toward the nearest wall. Belwar saw the drow’s reasoning; still another group of enemies had come out of the exit they were making for.

The momentum of Guenhwyvar’s leap carried the panther straight into the pack of corbies, bowling two of them right off the walkway. The bird men shrieked horribly as they fell to their deaths, but their remaining companions seemed unbothered by the loss. Drooling and chanting, “Doom! Doom!” they tore in at Guenhwyvar with their sharp talons.

The panther had formidable weapons of its own. Each swat of a great claw tore the life from a corby or sent it tumbling from the walkway to the acid lake. But while the cat continued to slash into the birdmen’s ranks, the fearless corbies continued to fight back, and more rushed in eagerly to join. A second group came from the opposite direction and surrounded Guenhwyvar.

Belwar set himself on a narrow section of the walkway and let the line of corbies come to him. Drizzt, taking a parallel route along a walkway fifteen feet to his friend’s side, did likewise, drawing his scimitars somewhat reluctantly. The drow could feel the savage instincts of the hunter welling up within him as the battle drew near, and he fought back with all of his willpower to sublimate the wild urges. He was Drizzt Do’Urden, no more the hunter, and he would face his foes fully in control of his every movement.

Then the corbies were upon him, flailing away, shrieking their frenzied chants. Drizzt did little more than parry in those first seconds, the flats of his blades working marvelously to deflect each attempted strike. The scimitars spun and whirled, but the drow, refusing to loose the killer within him, made little headway in his fight. After several minutes, he still faced off against the first corby that had come at him.

Belwar was not so reserved. Corby after corby rushed in at
the little svirfneblin, only to be pounded to a sudden halt by the burrow-warden’s explosive hammer-hand. The electrical jolt and the sheer force of the blow often killed the corby where it stood, but Belwar never waited long enough to find out. Following each hammer blow, the deep gnome’s pickaxe-hand came across in a roundhouse arc, sweeping the latest victim from the walkway.

The svirfneblin had dropped a half-dozen of the bird-men before he got the chance to look over at Drizzt. He recognized at once the inner struggle the drow was fighting.

“Magga cammara
!” Belwar screamed. “Fight them, dark elf, and fight to win! They will show no mercy! There can be no truce! Kill them—cut them down—or surely they shall kill you!”

Drizzt hardly heard Belwar’s words. Tears rimmed his lavender eyes, though even in that blur, the almost magical rhythm of his weaving blades did not slow. He caught his opponent off balance and reversed the motion of a thrust, slamming the bird-man in the head with the pommel of his scimitar. The corby dropped like a stone and rolled. It would have fallen from the ledge, but Drizzt stepped across it and held it in place.

Belwar shook his head and belted another adversary. The corby hopped backward, its chest smoking and charred by the jarring impact of the enchanted hammer-hand. The corby looked at Belwar in blank disbelief, but uttered not a sound, nor made any move at all, as the pickaxe hooked in, catching it in the shoulder and launching it out over the acid lake.

Guenhwyvar flustered the hungry attackers. As the corbies closed in on the panther’s back, thinking the kill at hand, Guenhwyvar crouched and sprang. The panther soared through the green light as though it had taken flight, landing on yet another
of the walkways fully thirty feet away. Skidding on the smooth stone, Guenhwyvar just managed to halt before toppling over the ledge into the acid pool.

The corbies glanced around in stunned amazement for just a moment, then took up their shrieks and wails and set off along the walkways in pursuit.

A single corby, near where Guenhwyvar had landed, ran fearlessly to battle the cat. Guenhwyvar’s teeth found its neck in an instant and squeezed the life from it.

But while the panther was so engaged, the corbies’ devilish trap showed another twist. From far above in the high-ceilinged cavern, a corby at last saw a victim in position. The bird-man wrapped its arms around the heavy boulder on the ledge beside it and pushed out, dropping with the stone.

At the last second, Guenhwyvar saw the plummeting monster and scrambled out of its path. The corby, in its suicidal ecstacy, didn’t even care. The bird-man slammed into the walkway, the momentum of the heavy boulder shattering the narrow bridge to pieces.

The great panther tried to spring out again, but the stone underneath Guenhwyvar’s feet disintegrated before they could set and spring. Claws scratching futilely at the crumbling bridge, Guenhwyvar followed the corby and its boulder down into the acid lake.

Hearing the elated shouts of the bird-men behind him, Belwar spun about just in time to see Guenhwyvar’s fall. Drizzt, too engaged at the time—for another corby flailed away at him and the one he had dropped was stirring back to consciousness between his feet—did not see. But the drow did not have to see. The figurine in Drizzt’s pocket heated suddenly, wisps of smoke rising ominously from Drizzt’s
piwafwi
cloak. Drizzt could guess easily enough what had happened to his dear Guenhwyvar. The
drow’s eyes narrowed, their sudden fire melting away his tears. He welcomed the hunter.

Corbies fought with fury. The highest honor of their existence was to die in battle. And those closest to Drizzt Do’Urden soon realized that the moment of their highest honor was upon them.