R. Salvatore - Night of the Hunter

What he didn’t see, to his great satisfaction, was anger.

“Please,” she finally managed to say.

Entreri laughed callously and turned for the door. He did so while moving his hands close to his weapons, fully expecting an attack.

And indeed, Dahlia came after him, but not with her weapon, throwing herself at him plaintively, crying out for him not to leave. He turned and caught her charge, and twisted around as they moved for the door so that he pushed her up against it, and not the other way around.

“Please,” she said, trembling, and Entreri realized that he was the only thing holding her up.

“I grow tired of hearing of Drizzt,” he said to her, and she was nodding with every word. “If you truly believe that I did you no favor in ending your fight on the mountain, then tell me now.”

It took Dahlia a moment, and then she lowered her eyes and slowly shook her head.

Entreri pushed up against her, pinning her tightly to the closed door, his face a finger’s breadth from hers. “Do you want me to lead you back to him, that together we can finish what you started?” he asked. “Would it please you to kill Drizzt Do’Urden?”

Dahlia’s expression showed her shock at the blunt question.

“Say the word,” he teased.

“No,” she said, but calmly. She shook her head again, but with conviction now as she straightened against the door. “No.”

Entreri smiled once more, and when she pressed in closer to kiss him, he did not resist.

Artemis Entreri understood the power and significance of Dahlia’s epiphany, even though it was something that Dahlia did not yet fully comprehend.

“It took me many years to be able to look into a mirror honestly,” he said quietly, pulling back from her just a bit. “And even still, shadows lurk-”

His sentence was cut short by a sudden explosion that shook Stonecutter’s Solace to its foundation, threw Entreri up against Dahlia, and jolted both of them hard into the door.

Entreri jumped back and pulled Dahlia around behind him. He threw the door open and charged into the hall, cutting left for the stairway, drawing his weapons as he went. The corridor ran twenty feet before turning back to the right around the corner, at the top of the stairs.

The building rocked again, shaking under a tremendous blast, and a burst of flames exploded up from the stairs and into Entreri’s corridor, rolling and dissipating, licking the walls to blackness. Beneath that gout came Afafrenfere, rolling low along the floor, tucked fully under his heavy robes. He came up as the flames disappeared, and glanced to Entreri.

“Drow!” he cried. “Many! Run!”

Darkness engulfed him, blacking out the end of the corridor.

Entreri took a step the monk’s way, before falling back in surprise at a thunderous retort from the end of the hall-a lightning bolt, he knew, burned into the magical darkness.

The assassin skidded and turned around, crashing into Dahlia as she exited the room and shoving her back in before him. He swung the door closed and kept running, across the room to the small window.

“Drow!” he yelled back at Dahlia, who was repeatedly screaming,

“What? What?”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Effron!” she cried.

Entreri kicked the window out. “He left for a walk with the dwarf when I returned to you,” he said. “Be quick!” And out he went, catching hold on the top border of the glass, then standing atop the pane. Stonecutter’s Solace was set up against the eastern cliff wall of the valley city of Port Llast, up high on a foundation of stone. The buildings before it were also below it, and when Entreri looked out this window, he could see over the rooftops of the lesser structures to the west.

Even in the dim light of dusk, Entreri saw that the fighting wasn’t confined to Stonecutter’s Solace. Down the street, a man staggered out of a building and fell face down in the road. On the porch below, patrons of the inn scrambled and ran-or tried to, for Afafrenfere’s call had indeed been accurate, and murderous dark elves caught them and cut them down.

A bit farther along, Entreri noted another enemy, a bigger enemy, half-drow, half-spider. He had spent years in Menzoberranzan; he knew the power and sheer evil of the abomination known as a drider.

He shook his head and finger-crawled away along the side of the building, some ten feet from the window. He turned back to call to Dahlia, and motioned for her to follow, then continued on a bit more and pushed himself out from the wall in a great leap, landing lightly atop the roof of the building just below Stonecutter’s Solace.

He turned back for Dahlia, thinking to catch her if her leap brought her in short, and he just shook his head when he realized that the dangerous elf woman wasn’t following him at all. She came flying out of the window, literally, her magical cloak transforming her into a giant raven. She swept out of the window and circled tightly, climbing fast to land on the inn’s roof.

Entreri glanced down. The building was burning and the sounds from the common room on the first floor told him that the fight was on in full.

Bright blinding light filled all the windows in a sudden and thunderous flash, and splinters of wood went flying off the far side of the building, blown apart by a powerful stroke of some lightning-like magic. And out came a pair of men, staggering, jerking wildly, hair flying crazily.

A drow leaped out behind them, his shield and sword seeming like the essence of the stars themselves, translucent but spotted with bits of stones that sparkled like diamond lights in a night sky. The drow struck once, twice, and both men tumbled down, writhing and dying.

It occurred to Artemis Entreri that he had seen this drow before, though not outfitted so marvelously, surely. Still, watching the movements, watching the deference played toward this one by the other dark elves spilling out behind him, brought a name to Entreri’s lips, one from a dark place in a dark time.

“Tiago Baenre.” He shook his head. “Lovely.”

“Whoa now!” Ambergris said, staggering and trying to hold her balance as the whole street reverberated with the shock of rolling thunder. She grabbed onto Effron for support, and caught his dead arm, which was swaying wildly behind his back.

“Dwarf!” he managed to call out before tumbling over backward.

“Eh, no,” Ambergris answered, standing over him, one hand reaching down to help him up. “No dwarf.”

A shaken and unsettled Effron reached up for the dwarf’s offered hand, but he paused, noting Amber’s face. He followed her gaze across the lane, to the front of a building, and more important, to the gigantic arachnoid creature standing in front of the building.

Its drow face smiling, the beast lifted a huge spear and let fly. The throw came in high, above Amber’s head, but that was the design, for the spear trailed a net, a net that opened behind it.

“Bah!” Ambergris cried, grabbing her mace off her back and sweeping it across, right to left as she dived out to the right. Skullcrusher’s bulbous head hit the side of the net and drove it across and the dwarf rolled free. She called out for Effron, though, certain that her companion was under the net, and when she scrambled around, she managed a glance that way, to confirm that yes, indeed, the twisted young tiefling crouched in the road, covered by the heavy cords of the drider net.

“Bah, ye dog!” the dwarf roared and started forward as the drider lifted another spear and charged off the porch. But another form came first, rushing around the skittering spider legs, out of the spider’s twilight shadow, and Ambergris howled and batted her mace back and forth desperately, in full retreat as she parried the sudden strikes of drow swords.