R. Salvatore: Night of the Hunter

Oh, if only she could break free!

But she could not, for Lady Lolth had sanctioned this most painful and profound lesson, and Gromph stood confident that by the time Quenthel was released, she’d more likely thank him than punish him.

For now, though, there was violation at a most intimate level, an outrage at the most primal depth, and pain of the most excruciating sort.

How she screamed! In terror and in the purest and most exquisite pain as the illithid did its work. Quenthel’s agonized wails echoed through the corridors of the Underdark.

"Their decision doesn’t interest you?” Wulfgar asked Regis. The two sat on the porch of Regis’s small house late in the afternoon the day after their return from Kelvin’s Cairn, and indeed it proved to be a wonderful spring day. They stared out across the waters of the great lake known as Maer Dualdon, the glistening line of the lowering sun cutting the waters. They each had a pipe full of fine leaf Regis had procured on his last ride through the Boareskyr Bridge.

Regis shrugged and blew a smoke ring, then watched as it drifted lazily into the air on the southern breeze. Any course Drizzt, Bruenor, and Catti-brie decided upon would be acceptable to him, for he was hardly considering the road ahead. His thoughts remained on the road behind, to his days with the Grinning Ponies and, more so, his remarkable days with Donnola and the others of Morada Topolino.

“Why did you change your mind?” he asked, cutting short Wulfgar’s next remark even as the huge barbarian started to speak. He looked up at his big friend, and realized that he had broached a delicate subject, so he didn’t press the point.

“You really enjoy this?” Wulfgar asked, holding up the pipe and staring at its smoking bowl incredulously.

The halfling laughed, took a draw and blew another ring, then puffed a second, smaller one right through the first. “It is a way to pass the time in thought. It helps me to find a place of peace of mind, where I can remember all that has come before, or remember nothing at all as I so choose, and just enjoy the moment.” He pointed out across the lake, where a thin line of clouds lying low in the western sky wore a kilt of brilliant orange above the rays of the setting sun.

“Just here,” Regis explained. “Just now.”

Wulfgar nodded and again looked distastefully at the pipe, though he tried once more, slipping the end between his lips and hesitantly inhaling, just a bit.

“You could use that fine silver horn you carry to hold the leaf,” the halfling said. “I could fashion you a stopper and a cover for the openings.”

Wulfgar offered a wry grin in response and lifted the item. “No,” he said solemnly. This one I will use as it is.”

“You like to be loud,” Regis remarked.

“It is more than a horn.”

“Do tell.”

“Three years ago, I traveled back to the lair of Icingdeath,” Wulfgar replied, and Regis sucked in his breath hard and nearly choked on the smoke.

“There remain many treasures to be found in the place,” Wulfgar added, “and many enemies to battle, so I discovered.”

“The dragon?” Regis coughed. “You went back to the dragon’s lair?”

“The long-dead dragon, but yes.”

“And you found that?” the halfling asked, pointing to the horn.

Wulfgar held it up and turned it a bit, and only then did Regis note its true beauty. It was a simple horn, similar in shape to one that could be procured from a common bull, but was made of silver, shining in the morning light, and with a thin gray-brown band encircling it halfway along its length. That band, actual horn, Regis thought, sparkled in the light even more intensely than the shining silver, for it was set with several white diamonds. Clearly this instrument had not been crafted by a workman’s hands alone, and certainly it was no work of the tundra barbarians. Elves, perhaps, or dwarves, or both, Regis thought.

“It found me,” Wulfgar corrected. “And in a time of great need, with ice trolls pressing in all about.”

“You called to your allies with it?”

“I blew the horn in hopes of giving my enemies pause, or simply because it was louder than a scream of frustration, for truly, I thought my quest at its end, and that I would not live to see my friends atop Kelvin’s Cairn. But yes, allies did come, from Warrior’s Rest.”

Regis stared at him incredulously. He had never heard of such a thing. “Ghosts?”

“Warriors,” Wulfgar said. “Fearless and wild. They appeared from a mist and went back to nothingness when they were struck down. All but one, who survived the fight. He would not speak to me, not a word did any of them utter, and then he, too, disappeared.”

“Have you blown it since?” Regis asked breathlessly.

“The magic is limited. It is a horn, nothing more, save once every seven days, it seems.”

“And then it brings in your allies?”

Wulfgar nodded and tried another draw on the pipe.

“How many?”

The barbarian shrugged. “Sometimes just a few; once there were ten. Perhaps one day I will summon an army, but then I will have but an hour to put it into action!”

Regis dropped his hand to his own dagger, with its living serpents, and understood.

“So why did you change your mind?” he decided to ask once more, changing the subject back. “You were determined to enter the pond in Iruladoon when last I saw you, rejecting the idea of living as a mortal man once more.”

“Do you recall the time I first happened upon Bruenor?” Wulfgar asked, pausing every word or two to cough out some smoke.

Regis nodded-how could he forget the Battle of Kelvin’s Cairn, after all?

“I was barely a man, little more than a boy, really,” Wulfgar explained. “My people had come to wage war on the towns and on the dwarves. It was not a fight Bruenor and his people had asked for, yet one they had to endure. So when I, proud and fierce, and carrying the battle standard of my tribe, saw before me this red-bearded dwarf, I did as any Elk warrior might do, as is required of any true disciple of Tempus.”

“You attacked him,” Regis said, then laughed and added in his best dwarf imitation, “Aye, ye hit ’im in the noggin, silly boy! Ain’t no one ever telled ye not to hit a dwarf on the head?”

“A difficult lesson,” Wulfgar admitted. “Had I been swinging a wet blanket, my strike would have had no lesser effect against the thick skull of Bruenor Battlehammer. How easily did he lay me low. He swept my feet out from under me. That should have been the end of Wulfgar.”

“Bruenor didn’t kill you, of course. That is why you chose to leave the forest edge instead of the pond?” Regis knew that he didn’t sound convincing, because in truth, he wasn’t convinced.

“Bruenor didn’t kill me,” Wulfgar echoed. “But more than that, Bruenor didn’t let any of the other dwarves kill me! They were within their rights to do so-I had brought my fate upon myself. Not a magistrate of any town in all Faerûn would have found fault with Bruenor or his kin had my life been forfeited on that field. Nor was there any gain to them in keeping me alive.”

Regis held his pipe in his hand, then, making no move to return it to his lips as he stared up at his huge friend. The tone of Wulfgar’s voice, one of reverence-but more than that, one of warmth and profound joy-had caught him by surprise here, he realized. As did the serene look on Wulfgar’s face. The big man was staring out over the lake now, as calmly as Regis had just been, and the pipe was in his mouth, and was settled there quite nicely, Regis thought.

“He didn’t kill me,” Wulfgar went on, and he seemed to be speaking more to himself than to Regis-and likely giving voice to the internal conversation that had found him in the waters of the pond in Iruladoon. “He took me in. He gave me life and gave me home, and gave me, with all of you and with the dwarves of Clan Battlehammer, family. All that I became after that battle, I owe to Bruenor. My return to my people and the woman I came to love and the children I came to know …” He paused and flashed Regis an ear-to-ear smile, his white teeth shining within the frame of his yellow beard. “And the grandchildren!” he said with great enthusiasm.