The Pirate King

CHAPTER 14

FOLLOW THE SCREAMS
Drizzt? Drizzt?" a nervous Regis asked. With his eyes fixated on the door of the house across the lane, he reached back to tug at his friend's sleeve. "Drizzt?" he asked again, flailing his hand around. He finally caught on to the truth and turned around to see that his friend was gone.
Across the lane, the woman screamed again, and the tone of her shriek, bloodcurdling and full of primal horror, told Regis exactly what was happening there. The halfling summoned his courage and took up his little mace in one hand, his ruby pendant in the other. As he forced himself across the lane, calling softly for Drizzt with every step, he reminded himself of the nature of his enemy and let the useless pendant drop back to the end of its chain.
The screaming was replaced by gasping and whimpering and the shuffling of furniture as Regis neared the house. He saw the woman rush by a window to the right of the door, her arm whipping out behind her - likely upending a chair to slow her pursuer.
Regis darted to that window and saw that her impromptu missile had some effect, tripping up a wretched ghoul.
Regis fought hard trying to breathe at the sight of the hideous thing. It had once been a man, but was hardly recognizable now, with its emaciated appearance, skin stretched tight over bone, lips rotted away to reveal fangs clotted with strips of freshly devoured flesh. The ghoul grabbed the chair in both hands, nails as long as fingers scraping at the wood, and brought it up to its mouth. Snarling and grumbling with rage, needing to bite something, it seemed, the ghoul tore into the chair before flinging it aside.
The woman screamed again.
The ghoul charged, but so intent was it on the woman that it never noticed the small form crouched on the window pane.
As the ghoul rushed past, Regis leaped out. Both hands clutching his mace, he used his flight and all his strength to whip the weapon across the back of the passing ghoul's head. Bone crackled and withered skin tore free. The ghoul stumbled and fell off to the side, crashing down amidst more chairs.
Regis, too, landed hard, overbalanced from his heavy swing. He caught himself quickly, though, and set with a wide stance facing the fallen ghoul, praying that he had hit it hard enough to keep it down.
No such luck - the ghoul pulled itself back up and turned its lipless grin at the halfling.
"Come on, then, and be done with it," Regis heard himself say, and as if in response, the ghoul leaped at him.
The halfling batted aside its flailing arms, knowing that the poison and filth, the essence of undeath in those clawlike fingernails could render a man or halfling immobile. Back and forth he whipped his mace, slapping against the ghoul's arms, defeating the weight of every attack.
But he still got scratched, and felt his knees wobble against the vile poison. And while his swings were stinging the ghoul, perhaps, he wasn't really hurting it.
Desperation drove Regis to new tactics and he dived in between the ghoul's wide swings, repeatedly bashing his mace about the undead monster's face and chest.
He felt the tearing of his shoulders, arms and back, felt the weakness of paralyzation creeping through him like the cold of death. But he stubbornly resisted the urge to fall down, and kept swinging, kept pounding.
Then his strength was gone and he crumbled to the floor.
The ghoul fell in front of him, its head a mass of blasted pulp.
The woman was holding Regis then, though he couldn't feel her touch. He heard her grateful thanks then her renewed scream of terror as she leaped past him and ran for the door.
Regis couldn't turn to follow her movements. He stared helplessly forward, then saw only their legs - four legs, two ghouls. He tried to find comfort in the knowledge that his paralysis likely meant that he wouldn't feel the wretched things eating him.
"Out to the streets!" Deudermont yelled, running along a lane, his forces behind him, and Robillard beside him. "Come out, one and all! There is safety in unity!"
The people of Luskan heard that call and ran to it, though some houses echoed only with screams. Deudermont directed his soldiers into those houses, to battle ghouls and rescue victims.
"Arklem Greeth freed them from Illusk," Robillard said. He'd been grumbling since sunset, since the onslaught of undead. "He seeks to punish the Luskar for allowing us, his enemies, to take the streets."
"He will only turn the whole of the town against him," Deudermont growled.
"I doubt the monster cares," said Robillard. He stopped and turned, and Deudermont paused to regard him then followed his gaze to a balcony across the way. A group of children hustled into view then disappeared into a different door. Behind them came a pair of hungry ghouls, drooling and slavering.
A bolt of lightning reached out from Robillard, forking into two streaks as it neared the balcony, each fork blasting a monster.
The smoking husks, the former ghouls, fell dead on the balcony as the blackened wood behind them smoldered.
Deudermont was glad to have Robillard on his side.
"I will kill that lich," Robillard muttered.
The captain didn't doubt him.
Drizzt ran along the street, searching for his companion. He'd charged into a building, following the screams, but Regis had not followed.
The streets were dangerous. Too dangerous.
Drizzt nodded to Guenhwyvar, who padded along the rooftops, shadowing his movements. "Find him, Guen," he bade, and the panther growled and sprang away.
Across the way, a woman burst out of a house, staggering, bleeding, terrified. Drizzt instinctively charged for her, expecting pursuit.
When none came, when he realized the proximity of that house to where he'd left Regis, a sickly feeling churned in the dark elf's gut.
He didn't pause to question the woman, guessing that she wouldn't have been able to answer with any coherence anyway. He didn't pause at all. He sprinted flat out for the door, then veered when he noticed an open window - no ghoul would have paused to open a window, and the air was too cold for any to have simply been left wide.
Drizzt knew as he leaped to the sill what he would find inside, and only prayed that he wasn't too late.
He crashed atop a ghoul bent over a small form. A second ghoul slashed at him as he and the other went tumbling aside, scoring a tear on Drizzt's forearm. He ached from that, but his elf constitution rendered him impervious to the debilitating touch of such a creature, and he gave it no thought as he hit the floor in a roll. He slammed the wall, willingly, using the barrier to redirect his momentum and allow him to squirm back to his feet as the ghoul bore down hard.
Twinkle and Icingdeath went to fast work before him, much as Regis had parried with his little mace. But those blades, in those hands, proved far more effective. The ghoul's arms were deflected then they were slashed to pieces before they went falling to the floor.
Out of the corner of his eye, Drizzt saw Regis, poor Regis, lying in blood, and the image enraged him like none before. He drove into the standing ghoul, blades stabbing, poking into the emaciated creature with wet, sickly sounds. Drizzt hit it a dozen times, thrusting his blades with such force that they burst right through the creature's back.
He retracted as the ghoul fell against a wall. Likely, it was already dead, but that didn't slow the outraged drow. He brought his blades back and sent them into complimentary spins and began slashing at the ghoul instead of stabbing it. Skin ripped in great lines, showing gray bones and dried-up entrails.
He kept beating the creature even when he heard its companion approach from behind.
That ghoul leaped upon him, claws slashing for Drizzt's face.
They never got close, for even as the ghoul leaped atop him, the drow ducked low and the creature flipped right over him to slam against its destroyed friend.
Drizzt held his swing as a dark form flew in through the window, the great panther slamming the animated corpse, driving the ghoul to the floor under a barrage of slashing claws and tearing fangs.
Drizzt ran to Regis, dropping his blades and skidding down to his knees. He cradled Regis's head and stared into his wide-open eyes, hoping to see a flash of life left there. Yet another ghoul charged at him, but Guenhwyvar leaped over him as he crouched with Regis and hit the thing squarely, blasting it back into the other room.
"Get me out of here," Regis, seeming so near to death, whispered breathlessly.
In Luskan, they came to call the next two tendays the Nights of Endless Screams. No matter how many ghouls and other undead monsters Deudermont and his charges destroyed, more appeared as the sun set the next evening.
Terror fast turned to rage for the folk of Luskan, and that rage had a definite focus.
Deudermont's work moved all the faster, despite the nocturnal terrors, and almost every able bodied man and woman of Luskan marched with him as he flushed the Hosttower's wizards out of their safehouses, and soon there were thirty ships, not four, anchored in a line facing Cutlass Island.
"Arklem Greeth stepped too far," Regis said to Drizzt one morning. From his bed where he was slowly and painfully recovering, the halfling could see the harbor and the ships, and from beneath his window he could hear the shouts of outrage against the Hosttower. "He thought to cow them, but he only angered them."
"There is a moment when a man thinks he's going to die when he's terrified," Drizzt replied. "Then there is a moment when a man is sure he's going to die when he's outraged. That moment, upon the Luskar right now, is the time of greatest courage and the time when enemies should quiver in fear."
"Do you think Arklem Greeth is quivering?"
Drizzt, staring out at the distant Hosttower and its ruined and charred southern arm, thought for a moment then shook his head. "He is a wizard, and wizards don't scare easily. Nor do they always see the obvious, for their thoughts are elsewhere, on matters less corporeal."
"Remind me to repeat that notion to Catti-brie," said Regis.
Drizzt turned a sharp stare at him. "There are still hungry ghouls to feed," he reminded, and Regis snickered all the louder, but held his belly in pain from the laughter.
Drizzt turned back to the Hosttower. "And Arklem Greeth is a lich," he added, "immortal, and unconcerned with momentary triumphs or defeats. Win or lose, he assumes he will fight for Luskan again when Captain Deudermont and his ilk are dust in the ground."
"He won't win," said Regis. "Not this time."
"No," Drizzt agreed.
"But he'll flee."
Drizzt shrugged as if it didn't matter, and in many ways, it didn't.
"Robillard says he'll kill the lich," said Regis.
"Then let us pray for Robillard's success."
"What?" Deudermont asked Drizzt when he noticed the drow looking at him curiously from across the breakfast table. Diagonal to both, Robillard, whose mouth was full of food, chuckled and brought a napkin over his lips.
Drizzt shrugged, but didn't hide his smile.
"What do you...what do both of you know that I don't?" the captain demanded.
"I know we spent the night fighting ghouls," Robillard said through his food. "But you know that, too."
"Then what?" asked Deudermont.
"Your mood," Drizzt replied. "You're full of morning sunshine."
"Our struggles go well," Deudermont replied, as if that should have been obvious. "Thousands have rallied behind us."
"There is a reason for that," said Robillard.
"And that's why you're in such a fine mood - the reason, not the reinforcements," said Drizzt.
Deudermont looked at them both in complete puzzlement.
"Arklem Greeth has erased the shades of gray - or has colored them more darkly, to be precise," said Drizzt. "Any doubts you harbored regarding this action in Luskan have been cast away because of the lich's actions at Illusk. As Arklem Greeth stripped the magical boundary that held the monsters at bay, so too did he peel away the heavy pall of doubt from Captain Deudermont's shoulders."
Deudermont turned his stare upon Robillard, but the wizard's expression only supported Drizzt's words.
The good captain slid his chair back from the table and stared out across the battered city. Several fires still burned in parts of Luskan, their smoke feeding the perpetual gloom. Wide, flat carts moved along the streets, their drivers solemnly clanging bells as a call for the removal of bodies. Those carts, some moving below Deudermont's window, carried the bodies of many dead.
"I knew Lord Brambleberry's plan would exact a heavy price from the city, yes," the captain admitted. "I see it - I smell it!  -  every day, as do you. And you speak truly. It has weighed heavily upon me." He kept looking out as he spoke, and the others followed his gaze across the dark roads and buildings.
"This is much harder than sailing a ship," Deudermont said, and Drizzt glanced at Robillard and smiled knowingly, for he knew that Deudermont was going down the same philosophical path as had the wizard those tendays ago when the revolt against the Hosttower had first begun. "When you're hunting pirates, you know your actions are for the greater good. There's little debate to be had beyond the argument of sink them and let them drown out there in the emptiness, or return them to Luskan or Waterdeep for trial. There are no hidden designs behind the actions of pirates - none that would change my actions toward them, at least. Whether they serve the greed of a master or of their own black hearts, my fight with them remains grounded in absolute morality."
"To the joys of political expediency," Robillard said, lifting a mug of breakfast tea in toast. "Here, I mean, in an arena far more complicated and full of half-truths and hidden designs."
"I watch Prisoner's Carnival with utter revulsion," said Deudermont. "More than once I fought the urge to charge the stage and cut down the torturing magistrate, and all the while I knew that he acted under the command of the lawmakers of Luskan. High Captain Taerl and I once nearly came to blows over that whole grotesque scene."
"He argued that the viciousness was necessary to maintain order, of course," said Robillard.
"And not without conviction," Deudermont replied.
"He was wrong," said Drizzt, and both turned to him with surprise.
"I had thought you skeptical of our mission here," said Deudermont.
"You know that I am," Drizzt replied. "But that doesn't mean I disagree that some things, at least, needed to change. But that is not my place to decide in all of this, as you and many others are far more familiar with the nature and character of Luskan than I. My blade is for Captain Deudermont, but my fears remain."
"As do mine," said Robillard. "There are hatreds here, and designs, plots, and rivalries that run deeper than a distaste for Arklem Greeth's callous ways."
Deudermont held up his hand for Robillard to stop, and shifted his open palm toward Drizzt when the drow started to cut in.
"I'm not without consternation," he said, "but I will not surrender my faith that right action makes right result. I cannot surrender that faith, else who am I, and what has my life been worth?"
"A rather simple and unfair reduction," the always-sarcastic wizard replied.
"Unfair?"
"To you," Drizzt answered for Robillard. "You and I have not walked so different a road, though we started from vastly different places. Meddlers, both, we be, and always with the hope that our meddling will leave in our wake a more beautiful tapestry than that we first encountered." Drizzt heard the irony in his own words as he spoke them, a painful reminder that he had chosen not to meddle in Longsaddle, where his meddling might have been needed.
"Me with pirates and you with monsters, eh?" the captain said with a grin, and it was his turn to lift a cup of tea in toast. "Easier to kill pirates, and easier still to kill orcs, I suppose."
Given the recent events in the North, Drizzt nearly snorted his tea out of his nose at that, and it took him a long moment to catch his breath and clear his throat. He held up his hand to deflect the curious looks coming at him from both his companions, not wanting to muddy the conversation even more with tales of the improbable treaty between Kings Bruenor and Obould, dwarf and orc. The drow's expectations of absolutism had been thoroughly flattened of late, and so he was both heartened by and fearful of his friend's unwavering faith.
"Beware the unintended consequences," Robillard said.
But Captain Deudermont looked back out over the city and shrugged that away. A bell clanged below the window, followed by a call for the dead. The course had been set. The captain's gaze drifted to Cutlass Island and the tree-like structure of the Hosttower, the masts of so many ships behind it across the harbor and the river.
The threat of the ghouls had diminished. Robillard's wizard friends were on the verge of recreating the seal around Illusk, and most of the creatures had been utterly destroyed.
It was time to take the fight to the source, and that, Deudermont feared, would exact the greatest cost of all.