The Lone Drow

Chapter 6

"He is sure to get himself killed," Tarathiel whispered to Innovindil as the two lithe and small figures lay on a flat overhang, looking down at the returning Drizzt Do'Urden. The drow was clearly limping and favoring his right hip.
"His determination borders on foolishness," Innovindil replied. She looked at her companion. Their eyes were quite similar in color - rich blue -  but looked very different in their respective faces, for while Innovindil's hair was golden, Tarathiel's was as black as a raven's wing. "Never have I seen one so singularly . . . angry."
The elf pair had been keeping an eye on Drizzt ever since the sacking of Shallows. In that fight, when Drizzt had been across the ravine distracting the giant bombardiers, Tarathiel and Innovindil had flown in to his aid. Up high on their pegasi, Sunset and Sunrise, the elves believed that Drizzt had seen them, though he had made no move to find them subsequent to that one incident.
Not so with the elves. Both were skilled trackers, and Tarathiel had found Drizzt again soon after the fateful fight - mostly by following the trail of dead orcs the drow was leaving in his wake. In the two tendays since Shallows's fall, Drizzt had struck at orc camps and patrols nearly every day. The latest attack, against one of the great tribes that had recently arrived on the scene at Shallows, showed that he was growing bolder - dangerously so.
Still, he was winning, and to Tarathiel and Innovindil, that was an admirable thing.
"He lost friends at Shallows," Tarathiel reminded her. "The orcs claim that Bruenor Battlehammer fell there."
Innovindil looked down at the drow warrior. He had undressed then and was cleaning his latest wound - one of many - in a small brook near to his meager shelter of piled boulders.
"He is not one I would desire as an enemy," she whispered.
Tarathiel turned to her as he considered her words, and the implication they clearly held for another of the clan. As soon as they had heard that Bruenor Battlehammer was returning to Mithral Hall, with Drizzt Do'Urden beside him, Tarathiel and Innovindil had welcomed the chance to meet with Drizzt. For one of their own, poor lost Ellifain, had gone off after the drow, seeking revenge for a dark elf raid that had occurred decades before, when Ellifain had been just an infant. Ellifain's entire family had been slaughtered in that terrible raid, and Drizzt Do'Urden had been among the raiders.
But Drizzt had not partaken of that slaughter, the elves knew, and in fact, had saved Ellifain by splashing her with her own mother's blood and hiding her beneath her mother's corpse. To Tarathiel and Innovindil, and all the other elves of the Moonwood, Drizzt Do'Urden was more hero than villain, but poor Ellifain had never been able to get past her grief, had never been able to view the noble drow ranger as anything more than a lie.
Despite all their efforts to educate and calm Ellifain, she had gone off from the Moonwood a couple of years previous in search of her revenge. Tarathiel and Innovindil had tracked her and chased her, determined to stop her, but the trail had gone stone cold in Silverymoon.
Drizzt was back in the area, though, and very much alive. What might that bode for Ellifain?
Innovindil had thought to go right down and speak with Drizzt about that very thing when first they'd located him, but Tarathiel, after observing the drow for a short while, had advised against that course. From all appearances, Drizzt Do'Urden seemed to Tarathiel to be an unknown entity, a wild card, a creature existing purely within his rage and survival instincts.
He wasn't even wearing boots as he set out each day across the unforgiving stony ground, and on the two occasions in which Tarathiel had witnessed Drizzt in battle, the drow seemed something beyond a conscious and cautious warrior, Tarathiel had seen Drizzt taking hits without a flinch and had seen him lop the heads from enemies without the slightest hesitation or expression of regret.
In many ways, the drow reminded him of that Moonwood friend he had recently lost, that young elf maiden so full of anger that she was blind to anything else in all the world.
"We must speak with him before he is slain," Tarathiel said suddenly.
His callous words, spoken so matter-of-factly, turned Innovindil's surprised look his way. For the tone of Tarathiel's words made it clear that he considered the outcome, that Drizzt would be slain, an inevitability. Tarathiel felt the intensity of her gaze and returned her concern with a simple shrug.
"Is his quest murderous or suicidal?" Tarathiel asked. "Or both, perhaps?"
"Then perhaps we should dissuade him of this course."
Tarathiel gave a little laugh and looked back to the distant Drizzt, who had stopped washing by then and had moved into a slow and steady series of stretching and balancing movements, focusing most of his movements on his wounded right hip. Stretching out the bruise, likely.
"He might know of Ellifain," Innovindil went on.
"And if he has faced Ellifain and defeated her, then what will he make of us two when we walk in upon him?"
"You are not a complete stranger to Drizzt Do'Urden," Innovindil argued. "Did he not convince you of his goodness those years ago when he crossed through the Moonwood? Did not the goddess Mielikki grant him a visit by her unicorn before your very eyes?"
It was all true, of course, but somehow in looking at that angry creature exercising below him, Tarathiel couldn't help but feel that it was not the same Drizzt Do'Urden he had once met.
* * *
His balance held perfectly, with not a tremor of muscle or sudden shift of his planted left foot. Slowly, Drizzt let his horizontally extended right leg flow through its full range of motion, front to back and back to front. He kept it up high, stretching his hamstring and other muscles as he worked through the tightening sensation within his right hip.
It truly surprised him to realize how hard he had been struck in that last fight, and he feared that he might have a broken bone.
Gradually, as the drow worked through his range of motion, his fears lessened. He found no impediment to his movement other than the ache and realized no overly sharp pains.
Drizzt had survived another encounter intact, fortunately so, and if any second-guesses about his decision to go into that large camp flitted through his thoughts, they were quickly dismissed by the drow's imagining of the scene he had left behind. He had delivered a blow to the orcs that would not be soon forgotten.
But it was not enough, the Hunter knew.
Not nearly enough.
Drizzt looked up at the midmorning sky and calculated when he might bring Guenhwyvar back to his side. The panther needed her rest on the Astral Plane, but she would be ready to resume her hunt soon, Drizzt knew, and the thought brought a wicked grin to his ebon-skinned face.
The orcs might be scrambling to find him, and if they were, he and Guenhwyvar would surely find a few wayward creatures to slaughter.
Drizzt's attention shifted quickly from that pleasant thought to consider the two elves who were up on the flat rock watching him.
Yes, the Hunter knew of them, for in that state, Drizzt was too attuned to his environment to miss even that stealthy pair. He didn't know who they might be, but given his last, tragic encounter with a surface elf, he wasn't pleased by the possibilities.
* * *
"It was drow!" the orc protested, as vigorously as he dared. "I seen drow!"
Arganth Snarrl leaped over to stand before the insistent orc, the shaman's huge tooth necklace swinging around wildly, and even slapping across the face of the upstart.
"You seen drow?" the shaman asked.
"I just telled you!" the orc protested.
Arganth ignored the reply and spun around to regard the other shamans, all gathered at the scene of Achtel's demise.
"Did Ad'non Kareese do this?" one of the other shamans asked, his brutish face full of outrage.
Arganth searched about for some answer, not wanting to reduce the drama of the murder - a mystery that the volatile shaman desired to exploit for his own ends. Achtel, after all, had been the sole quiet opposition among the gathered shamans to Arganth's insistence that King Obould should be viewed as one with Gruumsh. Not willing to relinquish the independence of her powerful tribe, Achtel had privately questioned some of the other shamans concerning the wisdom of Arganth's unification desires.
Achtel wasn't just dead, he seemed to have been singled out. For Arganth, the answer was obvious: Achtel's impudence had angered Gruumsh One-Eye, whose vengeance had been swift and uncompromising. Of course, Arganth was also wise enough to recognize that if the other shamans somehow connected Obould's drow friends to the murder of Achtel, then they might come to suspect some nefarious organization, working to persuade through terror - which was, after all, the orc way.
"Not Ad'non," the orc witness dared to put in. "It was the .. . one."
The suddenly husky tone of his voice as he uttered that peculiar phrase told the others exactly of whom he was speaking. Word had been filtering throughout the ranks of all the orcs and giants who had come out of their mountain holes that a lone drow, an ally of dead King Bruenor, was working behind their lines, and to deadly effect.
"The Drizzit," Arganth said in low and threatening tones. "Gruumsh has used our enemy against our enemy."
"Achtel was our enemy?" asked one of the other shamans.
"Achtel denied the joining of his spirit to King Obould's body," Arganth explained. "It is clear before us. This sign cannot be denied!"
Murmurs erupted all around him as soon as he widened the investigation to encompass his political aspirations, but most of those murmuring orcs were also nodding their agreement.
"Obould is Gruumsh!" Arganth dared to declare.
Not a protesting word came back at him.
* * *
"He wastes little time," Innovindil said to Tarathiel when she caught up to him around the backside of a copse of trees on the mountain slopes overlooking the region where Drizzt Do'Urden had taken up his shelter.
"Is he out again already?" Tarathiel asked, and he looked up at the sky, confirming that it was still a couple of hours to sunset. "I would have thought he would need to rest his hip."
"He brought in the panther," Innovindil explained.
Tarathiel nodded and looked again at the sky, his blue eyes glowing in the light.
"I fear he has erred," said the elf. "His hip is more injured than he realizes -  if the wound upsets his balance...."
Innovindil drew forth her slender sword and shrugged. She turned toward the path that would put them on the trail of the dark elf.
"Perhaps I should follow alone," Tarathiel offered. "On Sunrise, and high above the hunting cat."
Innovindil stared at him hard.
"Sunset is not yet ready to carry you," Tarathiel reasoned. "Soon, perhaps, but not yet."
Innovindil had little to offer in the way of an argument to that. In the fight with the giants north of Shallows, her pegasus had been struck in the wing, causing a deep bruise and laceration. Sunset seemed well on the mend, for pegasi were resilient creatures, but Tarathiel's assessment was correct, she knew, and she would not dare ask the mount to climb into the sky, particularly not with her added weight.
But she had no intention of being excluded.
"What a fine target you will make in the afternoon sky," she said. "Or perhaps you will still be airborne when the sun does set, leaving your steed blind and soaring about the mountain spurs."
"I only fear that we might encounter the panther as it moves about Drizzt," Tarathiel explained. "I have little desire for a battle with that creature!"
"It will not come to that if we are cautious," Innovindil insisted.
She motioned toward the path. Tarathiel was by her side in a moment, and the two rushed off, their footfalls silent, their senses trained. Soon enough, they had the trail of Drizzt and Guenhwyvar.
* * *
The orcs were so thick about the region that Drizzt and Guenhwyvar had already found a band of them with the sun still hanging in the western sky.
"Gerti says," one of the creatures complained, scooping a bucket in the cold waters of a fast-rushing mountain spring. "Gerti says!"
"How do we know what Gerti says, and what them giants says Gerti says?" another bitched, and he too sloshed a bucket through the water.
"Gerti talks too much," a third chimed in.
"Gerti," Drizzt whispered to Guenhwyvar. "A giant?"
The intelligent panther, seeming to understand every word, lowered her ears flat to her head. Thinking it wise to better assess the strength of the group, Drizzt motioned for Guenhwyvar to circle off to the right, while he went left. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes time, the drow found a frost giant, reclining on the river stones around a bend, head back to bask in the late afternoon sun. Her heavy boots sat on the bank, one upright, the other bent over in half, and her huge cleaver rested there as well. Oblivious to all the world she seemed as she splashed her bare feet in the icy water.
Drizzt spotted Guenhwyvar across the river and motioned to her, then to the relaxing giantess.
The Hunter went back over the rocks to the spot around the bend where the handful of orcs were still at work - they seemed to be filling a wide and shallow pit. A fire burned nearby, with rocks piled all around. Every now and then, an orc would kick one of those heated stones into the watery shallow.
"A bathtub?" Drizzt whispered under his breath.
The drow dismissed the thought as unimportant and narrowed his focus to the task at hand. He subconsciously rubbed his wounded hip as he surveyed the lay of the land, taking note of possible escape routes, for the orcs more than for himself, and searching among the up-and-down terrain to try to guess if other orc bands might be in the immediate area.
A growl from beyond the bend, followed by a scream of surprise, ended that search and sent the Hunter leaping from the stones and sprinting toward the orcs. As one the pig-faced creatures howled, tossing buckets aside.
One sprinted out to the right, along the river, but Drizzt, his feet sped by the enchanted anklets, caught it quickly and sliced it down. He turned fast - and nearly stumbled as a sharp pain rolled out from his hip - and charged back toward the main group.
The closest pair lifted spears to slow his charge, but he skidded down to his knees before them, then came up fast as they adjusted the angle of their weapons. Two fast strides had Drizzt rushing out to the left, and a pair of spears came slashing across that way to fend.
Except that the Hunter had already reversed his direction back to the right and had started down low for just an instant, just long enough to bring the two spears into a second dip as the orcs tried to reverse their momentum.
Drizzt leaped up and forward, double-kicking left and right, hitting one orc squarely in the face and clipping the other's forearm as it let go of its spear and moved to block. The Hunter came down lightly on one pointed foot - and again came a wave of pain from that hip. He turned immediately into a spin, scimitars flying out wide.
Both orcs fell away, lines of bright red appearing on each.
The Hunter ran past, into the next orc in line. A twist, a turn, a feint, then a second, had the orc turning every which way as the drow ran right past it. A flip of the wrist and reversed stab took the confused creature in the spine. On Drizzt went, not even slowing as a tremendous roar came from around the bend, followed by the splashing of the running giantess.
She came around the bend, stumbling across the many large, slick river stones, her hands up by her face, trying to pull the stubborn panther free.
The Hunter dispatched another orc with a double-thrust low that had the creature leaping back, then stumbling forward in the inevitable overbalance. The drow followed with a pair of twisting uppercuts, one right behind the other, that took the creature about the face and neck. Before the dying orc even fell, the Hunter had turned, focusing on the giantess.
He saw Guenhwyvar finally come away from the behemoth's torn face, go up in the air over the staggering giantess's head, then go flying away. He heard the plaintive, wounded roar and felt, for just a moment, the panther's agony.
But he was the Hunter, not Drizzt, and he didn't move immediately for the figurine to dismiss the pained cat back to the Astral Plane and her peace. Instead, scimitars high, he took the opening on the horribly wounded and obviously blinded giantess, rushing in and stabbing her hard about the belly and back, running around to keep her turning. Always one step ahead of her, the Hunter scored again and again, and when the stubborn giantess finally went down to her knees in the river, he took up the attacks even more ferociously, finding her neck with every strike.
Blood flew wildly, inciting nothing but an even deeper rage within the Hunter. He bashed and slashed with abandon, even as the giantess fell face down into the water. His surroundings didn't matter to him. He saw the fall of Elli-fain at the end of one scimitar, saw Bruenor ride that burning tower down to the ground. And he fought those images with all his heart and soul, battered them away by cracking one blade after another against the giantess's thick skull. She became the focus of all that rage; for those few seconds of pure intensity, Drizzt Do'Urden broke free of his turmoil.
The wail of broken Guenhwyvar brought him from his frenzy, though, and shot through his heart with a stab of profound guilt. The panther lay on the river's far bank, struggling to get clear of the water's incessant pull with her shaking front paws, while her rear haunches lay limp and twisted, her pelvic area shattered by the giantess's strong grip.
Behind her came another group of orcs, spears raised and some already throwing for the panther.
"Go home, Guen," Drizzt called softly, lifting the onyx figurine from his belt pouch. He knew that she would heal well on the Astral Plane, knew that no injuries Guenhwyvar received on this plane of existence could ever truly harm her.
Still, she felt pain, a searing agony that rode her wail to Drizzt's heart.
A spear soared in for her, the shot true.
But it passed through as the panther faded and became a swirling gray mist drifting away and dissipating to nothingness.
The orcs shifted direction, coming fast for the drow standing midstream. He hardly registered them at first, still hearing Guenhwyvar's cry, still feeling the weight of her pain.
He glanced up at the closing orcs and tried to use that pain to shift back to his rage, to let free the Hunter once more. Behind him, he heard more of the brutes.
He raised his scimitars; in glancing around, he understood just how badly he was outnumbered. Too badly, likely.
The Hunter merely smiled -
- then charged through a rain of flying spears, his scimitars slashing before him to take the missiles from the sky. He dodged and turned, his senses falling so keenly into the sounds around him that he knew without looking when one of the spears from behind would catch him and he was able to react, a quick turn in perfect balance, to parry it aside.
He went out of the river along a run of five slick stones, his bare feet not slipping an inch on any of the sure-footed strides. He hit the rocky and sandy bank in a dead run, then threw himself aside into a sudden roll, and back up and forward, and to the side once more.
Through the orc ranks he went, scimitars cutting the way. His hands worked in a blur as his feet stepped forward and sideways, toes ahead, toes turned, every step sure and fast, his weight shifting effortlessly to stay over his pumping legs.
His momentum only gradually began to falter; he kept up the run for a long, long while. But at every turn, the orcs were there, pressing back at him, swinging clubs and swords, stabbing spears. Twinkle and Icingdeath rang repeatedly against metal and wood, taking blades high or low, or pushing them out wide so that Drizzt could step through.
But the orcs weren't stupid creatures, nor were they cowardly. They took their losses but kept their formations, groups working in concert to lock down every possible escape route the rogue drow might find.
Finally, the exhausted drow found himself in a shallow dell, over a sandy bluff twenty feet away from the river. Ringed by orcs, but with not a one within striking distance, he fell into a defensive stance, scimitars ready to intercept any forthcoming missile.
One of the orcs barked a command at him, a word that he thought meant "surrender." That one would die first, the Hunter decided. His feet shifted under him. Orcs all around feigned a charge or a throw but held back to their tight ranks.
The Hunter wanted them to move first, to present him an opening.
They would not.
The Hunter dashed out to the side, against the orc line, weapons working in a blaze. But the orcs held firm, their defenses tight and coordinated.
Again he went at them and again was repulsed.
They were gaining confidence, he realized from their wide, toothy smiles, and he knew, too, that their confidence was well founded. There were too many. His rage had carried him to a place beyond his abilities.
If only they would break the circle!
A commotion to the side had him spinning, weapons coming up to block. The orcs weren't coming his way, though, and many from that side weren't even looking at him any longer. He watched in shared confusion with them as their back ranks scrambled and fell, as orcs shoved orcs aside frantically.
The wave cut right through the perimeter, and a pair of slender forms emerged into the dell before the Hunter. Dressed in white tunics and tan breeches, with forest green cloaks flying behind them, the two were joined, forearm to forearm as they came in, and each used the other to heighten his or her balance as they moved in a whirlwind of a sword dance. Long and thick hair, black and yellow, flew out behind as they crossed around each other repeatedly, always maintaining the slightest contact, each altering the attack angles inde-pendently but in perfect harmony with the movements and choices of the other.
One went around and down low, and the orcs closest responded accordingly - except that the leading elf (and they were indeed surface elves, Drizzt recognized) simply rotated along past them, while his partner came in hard and high, above the set defenses. Orcs screamed and orcs fell, and more orcs tried to press in.
They fell, too.
The Hunter forced himself free of the amazing spectacle, a dance as graceful and perfect as anything he had ever before witnessed. He purposely put his back to the spinning pair, refusing to be distracted, and he charged into the nearest orcs, who suddenly and quite understandably seemed more intent upon running away.
He caught a few and slew them, and many more went howling in flight across the trails. The threat gone, and the battle won. He turned to face his unknown allies, offering a salute to them with one scimitar.
The male of the group, breathing heavily but wearing an easy smile, similarly saluted with his bloody sword.
And he nearly knocked the drow over with a simple statement, "Well met again, Drizzt Do'Urden."