Charon's Claw

The bugbear’s expression never even changed as his head tumbled free of his neck, so swift was the blow.



“Some of them cheered,” Ravel said to Tiago and Jearth.



The warriors smiled and nodded, and started down from the ledge.



Among the prisoners, the game was quite simple: any who told of another who had cheered Tutugnik would be pressed into service. Those pointed to as Tutugnik loyalists were dragged aside and tortured to death, in full view.



“Am I to be beaten, or murdered?” Ravel asked when he answered his sister’s summons to a large cave that she had taken as her own.



Berellip’s many goblin slaves had already cleared the place of bugbear debris and feces, scrubbing it dutifully. The drow priestess had not traveled light, with many pack lizards devoted entirely to her comforts. Though the expedition would remain in the caverns only for a couple of days, as scouts moved around the region to determine their exact position and plot the most likely trails to this sought-after dwarf homeland, Berellip’s well-trained goblins had turned the cave into a room fitting for a drow noble House. Tapestries covered nearly every wall, and plush pillows and blankets adorned every rock or ledge that could serve as bed or chair.



Saribel lounged on one such stone, far to the side of her sister, but watching Ravel quite intently. Beyond the three Xorlarrins and a handful of meaningless goblin slaves, the cave was empty.



“You ask lightheartedly, as if either would not be a distinct possibility, or quite legal, even fitting,” Berellip replied.



“Because I wish to know which path you would take,” Ravel pressed. “If the former. . . .” He shrugged. “But if the latter, then I suppose that I would be wise to defend myself.”



“You miss the third possibility,” Berellip said, her tone suddenly cold, “to join with Yerrininae.”



Ravel laughed, but even though he was quite confident that Berellip was merely taunting him. The thought of becoming a drider was truly too awful for any honest levity.



“Or the fourth,” he said suddenly.



Berellip looked at him curiously, then glanced over at her sister, who shook her head and shrugged, obviously at a loss.



“Do tell.”



“You could accept that all of my actions, even those seeming disrespectful of your superior station—”



“Seeming?”



“They were disrespectful, I accept,” Ravel conceded, and he bowed deeply and slowly, exaggerating the movement. “But they were done with no disrespect intended, and for the benefit of House Xorlarrin.”



“Sit down,” Berellip commanded, and Ravel turned for the nearest cushioned stone chair.



“On the floor,” Berellip clarified.



Ravel looked at her with incredulity, but wiped it from his face almost immediately and plopped down to the floor as quickly as he could manage.



“For the benefit of House Xorlarrin?” the priestess asked.



Ravel took a deep breath and lifted his hand to tap the side of his head, trying to phrase his explanation precisely and carefully. But Berellip stole his thunder.



“For the benefit of Tiago Baenre, you mean,” she remarked.



Ravel had to take another deep breath—and pointedly remind himself that these sisters of his were priestesses of Lolth, and surely loved her more than they cared for him. They had attended Arach-Tinilith, the greatest of the Menzoberranzan academies, and Berellip, in particular, had excelled in that brutal environment. Ravel had to take care in dealing with these two. He fancied himself smarter than almost any drow, perhaps excepting Gromph Baenre, but in a moment like this, he understood that arrogance to be more a matter of determined attitude than a true belief.



“If for Tiago Baenre, then surely for House Xorlarrin,” he answered. “That one might prove important to us.”



“Which is why I will bed him this very night,” Berellip replied.



“And I tomorrow,” Saribel quickly added.



Ravel looked from one to the other, and truly was not surprised. “Tiago is intrigued with our House.”



“He is an upstart male who does not like his place in life,” Berellip explained.



“And so House Xorlarrin interests him,” said Ravel. “For it, above any others, expects achievement from its males, and rewards such achievement with respect.”



“This is an advantage of House Xorlarrin throughout Menzoberranzan,” Berellip agreed. “For in Xorlarrin alone are males allowed some true measure of respect.”



“Then you understand my disrespect,” Ravel said, or started to, for somewhere between the first word and the fifth, a snake-headed whip appeared in Berellip’s hand. She lashed out at him, the three heads of her weapon snapping forth, fangs bared, tearing the flesh of his face.



He threw himself backward and to the floor, but Berellip pursued and struck him again and again. His main robes were enchanted, of course, and offered him some protection, but those wicked snakes found their way around it, tearing his shirt and skin alike.



He felt the agonizing poison coursing through his veins almost, even as new eruptions of fire from fresh bites assailed him.



Saribel was there then, her own whip in hand, adding two more serpent heads to the vicious beating. It went on and on, Ravel’s senses stolen by the sheer agony of it. At last they stopped striking him, but still he writhed, poison assaulting his nerves and muscles, forcing him into spasms of sheer agony.



Sometime later, a bloody Ravel dared to sit up again, to find Berellip sitting comfortably in her chair, with Saribel off to the side as if nothing had happened.



“So ends our advantage with Tiago Baenre,” the mage managed to gasp.



Berellip smiled and nodded to a nearby goblin, who rushed over with an armful of clothes—clothing to exactly match the now-tattered nonmagical garments.



“The end of this chamber is silenced, and you will look the same. Tiago will know nothing of this,” Berellip assured him. “Dress!”



Ravel grunted repeatedly as he struggled to his feet, his joints still aflame from the wicked whip poison.



“Dear sister,” Berellip teased as Ravel slipped out of his blood-soaked and ripped robes, “we are but a tenday from Menzoberranzan, and have only four more sets of replacement clothing for our dear brother. Whatever shall we do?”



Ravel’s hateful stare might have carried some threat with it had he not been so wobbly, even falling back over to the ground at one point.



Chapter 4: A Collision



He was not a man prone to fits of nostalgia, not a man whose thoughts filled with wistful images of what had gone before, mostly because most of what had gone before wasn’t worth replaying. But the small human assassin with grayish skin found himself in a strange, for him, emotional place one afternoon outside of Neverwinter.



“Artemis Entreri,” he whispered, and not for the first time this day. It was a name that had once struck fear throughout the city of Calimport, throughout most of the southland. The name itself had once offered him great advantage in battle, for the reputation it carried often overwhelmed the sensibilities of his enemies. Employers would throw extra gold his way as much because of their fear of angering him as because they knew he was the best man for the job.



That notion brought a rare smile to Entreri’s face. Angering him? “Anger” implied a heightened level of agitation, a state of personal maddening.



Was Artemis Entreri ever really angry?



Or then again, had he ever been not angry?



As he looked back over the years, Entreri recalled a moment he had been more than angry, when he had been outraged. He still remembered the man’s name, Principal Cleric Yinochek, for it seemed more than a name to him. The title, the man, all of this creature who was Yinochek gave body and soul to the anger that was within Artemis Entreri, and for that one brief moment after he had cut Yinochek down, and after he and his companion had burned the vile man’s church down, Entreri had known a taste of freedom.



In that freedom, on a cliff overlooking the city of Memnon and the burning Protector’s House, Artemis Entreri had at long last looked back at himself, at his life, at his anger, and had managed to cast it aside.



Albeit briefly.



He thought of Gositek, the priest he had spared, the man he had ordered to go out and live according to the principles of his espoused religion, and not to use that religion as a front to cover his own foibles, as was so often the case with priests in Faerûn.



Gositek had followed that command, Entreri had learned in subsequent visits to the rebuilt Protector’s House. Entreri’s uncharacteristic mercy had been paid forward.



How had he lost those moments, those brief few years of freedom, he wondered now, staring at Neverwinter’s battered, but still formidable wall? How fleeting it all seemed to him.



And how enticing.



For what might he find when he was free of Herzgo Alegni?



Entreri cast aside the memories, for he had no time for them now. Drizzt and Dahlia were coming for Alegni. He needed to find a way to get far from this place, physically and emotionally, and far from Alegni, before their arrival, for surely Entreri’s undeniable anticipation would tip off Charon’s Claw—and thus Alegni—to the coming attack.



He urged his nightmare steed toward the city but had gone only a couple of strides before pulling up the reins once more.



He considered then Charon’s Claw and its intrusion into his thoughts—no, not an intrusion, he realized, for his years wielding the diabolical blade had made it more than that. Claw’s scouring of Entreri’s thoughts was more a melding than an intrusion, and so subtle at times that Entreri had no idea the blade was watching.



He couldn’t fool the sword, and thinking otherwise was a delusion as surely as when he deluded himself into thinking he could get at Alegni if he just struck reflexively, without thinking.



That day on the coveted bridge when Alegni had learned that the folk of Neverwinter had named it after Barrabus, Alegni had tortured him severely, laying him low on the stones, writhing in pure agony. Entreri had struck back at the Netherese warlord, without thinking, too fast, he had thought, for Claw to intervene.



He had been wrong. Claw had known. He couldn’t fool the sword.



And now he was about to walk into Neverwinter to face Alegni, to face that sword, and without doubt, to reveal that Drizzt and Dahlia were on their way.



Perhaps he had already done exactly that. Perhaps the distance out in Neverwinter Wood had not protected him from the intrusions of the sword.



Not really knowing—and that was the worst thing of all—Entreri turned his hellish steed around and galloped away from the city.



Drizzt and Dahlia walked quietly through the morning forest, though the occasional crunch of the light snow cover, the crackle of leaves and twigs beneath, sometimes marked their passage. The ground was uneven, brush and deciduous trees dotting the landscape around them in no discernible pattern. They would make the north road by midday, and there they’d bring in Andahar for the swift run to Neverwinter—right through the city’s gate and onto her avenues. As rash as that frontal assault sounded, it might prove their best chance at getting anywhere near Herzgo Alegni.



Still, to Drizzt, the idea seemed preposterous. He and Dahlia hadn’t yet discussed the specifics, other than “kill Herzgo Alegni,” but they’d need to come up with something, he knew. The warlord was on his guard, no doubt, if Entreri had returned to his side.