Homeland (10 page)

T
HE
W
EAPONS
M
ASTER

mpty hours, empty days.

I find that I have few memories of that first period of my life, those first sixteen years when I labored as a servant.

Minutes blended into hours, hours into days, and so on, until the whole of it seemed one long and barren moment. Several times I managed to sneak out onto the balcony of House Do’Urden and look out over the magical lights of Menzoberranzan. On all of those secret journeys, I found myself entranced by the growing, and dissipating, heatlight of Narbondel, the timeclock pillar. Looking back on that now, on those long hours watching the glow of the wizard’s fire slowly walk its way up and down the pillar I am amazed at the emptiness of my early days.

I clearly remember my excitement, tingling excitement, each time I got out of the house and set myself into position to observe the pillar. Such a simple thing it was, yet so fulfilling compared to the rest of my existence.

Whenever I hear the crack of a whip, another memory—more a sensation than a memory actually—sends a shiver through my spine. The shocking jolt and the ensuing numbness from those snake-headed weapons is not something that any person would soon forget. They bite under your skin, sending waves of magical energy through your body, waves that make your muscles snap and pull beyond their limits.

Yet I was luckier than most. My sister Vierna was near to becoming a high priestess when she was assigned the task of rearing me and was at a period of her life where she possessed far more energy than such a job required. Perhaps, then, there was more to those first ten years under her care than I now recall. Vierna never showed the intense wickedness of our mother—or, more particularly, of our oldest sister, Briza. Perhaps there were good times in the solitude of the house chapel; it is possible that Vierna allowed a more gentle side of herself to show through to her baby brother.

Maybe not. Even though I count Vierna as the kindest of my sisters, her words drip in the venom of Lolth as surely as those of any cleric in Menzoberranzan. It seems unlikely that she would risk her aspirations toward high priestesshood for the sake of a mere child, a mere male child.

Whether there were indeed joys in those years, obscured in the unrelenting assault of Menzoberranzan’s wickedness, or whether that earliest period of my life was even more painful than the years that followed—so painful that my mind hides the memories—I cannot be certain. For all my efforts, I cannot remember them.

I have more insight into the next six years, but the most prominent recollection of the days I spent serving the court of Matron Malice—aside from the secret trips outside the house—is the image of my own feet.

A page prince is never allowed to raise his gaze.

—Drizzt Do’Urden

rizzt promptly answered the call to his matron mother’s side, not needing the whip Briza used to hurry him along. How often he had felt the sting of that dreaded weapon! Drizzt held no thoughts of revenge against his vicious oldest sister. With all of the conditioning he had received, he feared the consequences of striking her—or any female—far too much to entertain such notions.

“Do you know what this day marks?” Malice asked him as he arrived at the side of her great throne in the chapel’s darkened anteroom.

“No, Matron Mother,” Drizzt answered, unconsciously keeping his gaze on his toes. A resigned sigh rose in his throat as he noticed the unending view of his own feet. There had to be more to life than blank stone and ten wiggling toes, he thought.

He slipped one foot out of his low boot and began doodling on the stone floor. Body heat left discernible tracings in the infrared spectrum, and Drizzt was quick and agile enough to complete simple drawings before the initial lines had cooled.

“Sixteen years,” Matron Malice said to him. “You have breathed the air of Menzoberranzan for sixteen years. An important period of your life has passed.”

Drizzt did not react, did not see any importance or significance to the declaration. His life was an unending and unchanging routine. One day, sixteen years, what difference did it make? If his mother considered important the things he had been put through since his earliest recollections, Drizzt shuddered to think of what the next decades might hold.

He had nearly completed his picture of a round-shouldered drow—Briza—being bitten on the behind by an enormous viper.

“Look at me,” Matron Malice commanded.

Drizzt felt at a loss. His natural tendency once had been to look upon a person with whom he was talking, but Briza had wasted no time in beating that instinct out of him. The place of a page prince was servitude, and the only eyes a page prince’s were worthy of meeting were those of the creatures that scurried across the stone floor—except the eyes of a spider, of course; Drizzt had to avert his gaze whenever one of the eight-legged things crawled into his vision. Spiders were too good for the likes of a page prince.

“Look at me,” Malice said again, her tone hinting at volatile impatience. Drizzt had witnessed the explosions before, a wrath so incredibly vile that it swept aside anything and everything in its path. Even Briza, so pompous and cruel, ran for hiding when the matron mother grew angry.

Drizzt forced his gaze up tentatively, scanning his mother’s black robes, using the familiar spider pattern along the garment’s back and sides to judge the angle of his gaze. He fully expected, as every inch passed, a smack on his head, or a lashing on his back—Briza was behind him, always with her snake-headed whip near her anxious hand.

Then he saw her, the mighty Matron Malice Do’Urden, her heat-sensing eyes flashing red and her face cool, not flushed with angry heat. Drizzt kept tense, still expecting a punishing blow.

“Your tenure as page prince is ended,” Malice explained. “You are secondboy of House Do’Urden now and are accorded all the …”

Drizzt’s gaze unconsciously slipped back to the floor.

“Look at me!” his mother screamed in sudden rage.

Terrified, Drizzt snapped his gaze back to her face, which now was glowing a hot red. On the edge of his vision he saw the wavering heat of Malice’s swinging hand, though he was not foolish enough to try to dodge the blow. He was on the floor then, the side of his face bruised.

Even in the fall, though, Drizzt was alert and wise enough to keep his gaze locked on to that of Matron Malice.

“No more a servant!” the matron mother roared. “To continue acting like one would bring disgrace to our family.” She grabbed Drizzt by the throat and dragged him roughly to his feet.

“If you dishonor House Do’Urden,” she promised, her face an inch from his, “I will put needles into your purple eyes.”

Drizzt didn’t blink. In the six years since Vierna had relinquished care of him, putting him into general servitude to all the family, he had come to know Matron Malice well enough to understand all of the subtle connotations of her threats. She was his mother—for whatever that was worth—but Drizzt did not doubt that she would enjoy sticking needles in his eyes.

“This one is different,” Vierna said, “in more than the shade of his eyes.”

“In what way, then?” Zaknafein asked, trying to keep his curiosity at a professional level. Zak had always liked Vierna better than the others, but she recently had been ordained a high priestess, and had since become too eager for her own good.

Vierna slowed the pace of her gait—the door to the chapel’s antechamber was in sight now. “It is hard to say,” she admitted. “Drizzt is as intelligent as any male child I have ever known; he could levitate by the age of five. Yet, after he became the page prince, it took tendays of punishment to teach him the duty of keeping his gaze to the floor, as if such a simple act ran unnaturally counter to his constitution.”

Zaknafein paused and let Vierna move ahead of him. “Unnatural?” he whispered under his breath, considering the implications of Vierna’s observations. Unusual, perhaps, for a drow, but exactly what Zaknafein would expect—and hope for—from a child of his loins.

He moved behind Vierna into the lightless anteroom. Malice, as always, sat in her throne at the head of the spider idol, but all the other chairs in the room had been moved to the walls, even though the entire family was present. This was to be a formal meeting, Zak realized, for only the matron mother was accorded the comfort of a seat.

“Matron Malice,” Vierna began in her most reverent voice, “I present to you Zaknafein, as you requested.”

Zak moved up beside Vierna and exchanged nods with Malice, but he was more intent on the youngest Do’Urden, standing naked to the waist at the matron mother’s side.

Malice held up one hand to silence the others, then motioned for Briza, holding a house
piwafwi
, to continue.

An expression of elation brightened Drizzt’s childish face as Briza, chanting through the appropriate incantations, placed the magical cloak, black and shot with streaks of purple and red, over his shoulders.

“Greetings, Zaknafein Do’Urden,” Drizzt said heartily, drawing stunned looks from all in the room. Matron Malice had not granted him privilege to speak; he hadn’t even asked her permission!

“I am Drizzt, secondboy of House Do’Urden, no more the page prince. I can look at you now—I mean at your eyes and not your boots. Mother told me so.” Drizzt’s smile disappeared when he looked up at the burning scowl of Matron Malice.

Vierna stood as if turned to stone, her jaw hanging open and her eyes wide in disbelief.

Zak, too, was amazed, but in a different manner. He brought a hand up to pinch his lips together, to prevent them from spreading into a smile that would have inevitably erupted into belly-shaking laughter. Zak couldn’t remember the last time he had seen the matron mother’s face so very bright!

Briza, in her customary position behind Malice, fumbled with her whip, too confounded by her young brother’s actions to even know what in the Nine Hells she should do.

That was a first, Zak knew, for Malice’s eldest daughter rarely hesitated when punishment was in order.

At the matron’s side, but now prudently a step farther away, Drizzt quieted and stood perfectly still, biting down on his bottom lip. Zak could see, though, that the smile remained in the young drow’s eyes. Drizzt’s informality and disrespect of station had been more than an unconscious slip of the tongue and more than the innocence of inexperience.

The weapons master took a long step forward to deflect the matron mother’s attention from Drizzt. “Secondboy?” he asked, sounding impressed, both for the sake of Drizzt’s swelling pride and to placate and distract Malice. “Then it is time for you to train.”

Malice let her anger slip away, a rare event. “Only the basics at your hand, Zaknafein. If Drizzt is to replace Nalfein, his place at the Academy will be in Sorcere. Thus the bulk of his preparation will fall upon Rizzen and his knowledge, limited though it may be, of the magical arts.”

“Are you so certain that wizardry is his lot, Matron?” Zak was quick to ask.

“He appears intelligent,” Malice replied. She shot an angry glare at Drizzt. “At least, some of the time. Vierna reported great progress with his command of the innate powers. Our house needs a new wizard.” Malice snarled reflexively, reminded of Matron Baenre’s pride in her wizard son, the Archmage of the city. It had been sixteen years since Malice’s meeting with the First Matron Mother of Menzoberranzan, but she had never forgotten even the tiniest detail of that encounter. “Sorcere seems the natural course.”

Zak took a flat coin from his neck-purse, flipped it into a spin, and snatched it out of the air. “Might we see?” he asked.

“As you will,” Malice agreed, not surprised at Zak’s desire to prove her wrong. Zak placed little value in wizardry, preferring the hilt of a blade to the crystal rod component of a lightning bolt.

Zak moved to stand before Drizzt and handed him the coin. “Flip it.”

Drizzt shrugged, wondering what this vague conversation between his mother and the weapons master was all about. Until now, he had heard nothing of any future profession being planned for him, or of this place called Sorcere. With a consenting shrug of his shoulders, he slid the coin onto his curled index finger and snapped it into the air with his thumb, easily catching it. He then held it back out to Zak and gave the weapons master a confused look, as if to ask what was so important about such an easy task.

Instead of taking the coin, the weapons master pulled another from his neck-purse. “Try both hands,” he said to Drizzt, handing it to him.

Drizzt shrugged again, and in one easy motion, put the coins up and caught them.

Zak turned an eye on Matron Malice. Any drow could have performed that feat, but the ease with which this one executed the catch was a pleasure to observe. Keeping a sly eye on the matron, Zak produced two more coins. “Stack two on each hand and send all four up together,” he instructed Drizzt.

Four coins went up. Four coins were caught. The only parts of Drizzt’s body that had even flinched were his arms.

“Two-hands,” Zak said to Malice. “This one is a fighter. He belongs in Melee-Magthere.”

“I have seen wizards perform such feats,” Malice retorted, not pleased by the look of satisfaction on the troublesome weapons master’s face. Zak once had been Malice’s proclaimed husband, and quite often since that distant time she took him as her lover. His skills and agility were not confined to the use of weapons. But along with the pleasures that Zaknafein gave to Malice, sensual skills that had prompted Malice to spare Zak’s life on more than a dozen occasions, came a multitude of headaches. He was the finest weapons master in Menzoberranzan, another fact that Malice could not ignore, but his disdain, even contempt, for the Spider Queen had often landed House Do’Urden into trouble.

Zak handed two more coins to Drizzt. Now enjoying the game, Drizzt put them into motion. Six went up. Six came down, the correct three landing in each hand.

“Two-hands,” Zak said more emphatically. Matron Malice motioned for him to continue, unable to deny the grace of her youngest son’s display.