R. Salvatore - The Last Threshold

Artemis Entreri had been down this road once before, with a woman named Calihye, and to a horrible end. Artemis Entreri had vowed to never again walk such a road of vulnerability. He would depend upon himself and no one else, a rock and island against these unwanted emotions.

And yet, here he was, miserable and worried and fearing that Dahlia had been taken from him.

“Where do we turn?” Drizzt asked.

And here Entreri was, discussing her with Drizzt Do’Urden, her other lover. He looked up at the drow, and answered, “How would I know?”

“You know her as well as I do,” Drizzt admitted. “Better, likely.”

Entreri winced at the words, expecting a barrage of curses to immediately follow, and looked down to his drink once more, lifting it and draining it without making eye contact with his counterpart.

“Well?” Drizzt prompted.

There was no judgment in the drow’s tone. None at all that Entreri could detect. He placed his glass down and slowly looked up to return Drizzt’s gaze.

“Dahlia is a profoundly troubled woman,” he said.

Drizzt nodded.

“Complicated,” Entreri went on. “The violations inflicted upon her wounded her in ways you cannot-” He stopped there, not wanting to twist a dagger into Drizzt.

But Drizzt answered, “I know,” and he let it go at that.

He knew other things as well, Entreri realized, or at least, Drizzt suspected, and yet Drizzt was putting that all behind him at this dangerous time. Drizzt tiptoed around the obvious issue, unwilling to confront Entreri openly.

Because he cared about Dahlia, Entreri understood, and that realization stung him all the more in his guilt.

“Effron,” Entreri said, and Drizzt perked up.

“He is the only one I can imagine,” Entreri explained. “His hatred for Dahlia, if it can even be called hatred, permeates his every thought.”

“We are a long way from Port Llast,” Drizzt said, “and took a roundabout path to get here.”

“That young tiefling is not without resources,” Entreri replied. “Even Herzgo Alegni showed him great deference, and Herzgo Alegni hated him profoundly.”

“Herzgo Alegni was his father,” Drizzt reminded him.

“It mattered not,” Entreri explained. “Or perhaps that was the focus of the hatred. Effron came to us in Neverwinter at the request of a Netherese lord. I had many dealings with these lords in my time as Alegni’s slave. Do not ever underestimate them.”

“You believe this Netherese lord helped Effron get to Dahlia?” Drizzt asked.

“I fear it,” Entreri admitted, and he was being quite honest at that moment, “for if that is the case, then Dahlia is lost to us forever.”

Drizzt slumped back at that, and he and Entreri stared at each other for many heartbeats. But again, and again to Entreri’s surprise, the drow did not broach that most delicate subject.

“I need another drink,” Entreri said, standing, for what he really needed was to take a break from this unrelenting pressure. The idea that Dahlia was forever lost to him gnawed at his sensibilities in a way that he simply could not process.

“Get a drink for me,” Drizzt surprised him by saying when Entreri turned for the bar. “A large one.”

Entreri turned back to him and snickered, seeing the hyperbole for what it was. Still, he returned with a pair of drinks and the bottle of rum, even though he realized that he’d be drinking most of that bottle himself.

From before dawn until after sunset, Brother Afafrenfere scrubbed the deck of Minnow Skipper , or worked the lines, or patched with tar, or performed whatever other chore he could fashion, or Mister Sikkal assigned him, so long as that work did not move him belowdecks. He wasn’t there to actually work, after all.

“Get yerself down under and help Cribbins with the patching,” Sikkal ordered him late one afternoon.

“Down under?”

“Bottom hold,” Sikkal explained. “We be taking a bit o’ water, and I’m not for that. So get yerself down there and get yerself to work!”

Afafrenfere looked around, noting several other crewmen sitting here or there on the open deck, done with their work, if any of them had even been assigned any this day. Minnow Skipper was stocked and seaworthy and only sitting here because of the missing Dahlia, though no one aboard seemed to know that Dahlia was missing, or cared to admit to it, anyway.

“I do not think I will go and do that,” Afafrenfere replied.

“ ’Ere, what did ye say?” Sikkal demanded.

“Send another,” the monk replied.

“If we was at sea, I could have yerself thrown to the sharks for that answer, boy!”

“If we were at sea, you could try,” the monk replied calmly. He wasn’t looking at Sikkal as he spoke, though. The two dock hands had appeared on the wharf, the old gaffer with a sack over his shoulder. Afafrenfere had seen this play before, the previous twilight.

Sikkal rambled on and on about something, but Afafrenfere was no longer listening. The two old dockhands revealed their nervousness as they moved along the wharf, glancing this way and that with every step. Just like the night before.

Afafrenfere let his gaze shift far to the side, to an old scow, appearing far less than seaworthy, that was strapped up tight to the farthest dock. These two would make their way to that one, the monk believed, for the night before they had gone aboard, carrying a similar sack. Afafrenfere had watched the boat for a long while, but had never seen the pair depart, nor had they gone out the previous morning. The monk hadn’t thought much of it at the time, since many of the dockhands in Baldur’s Gate, as in every port, used the moored boats as personal inns. But earlier this day, Afafrenfere had noted the pair gazing that way more than once, and had expected they would arrive on the docks around dinnertime, bound for the scow.

And why, after all, had they obviously slipped off the boat in the middle of the night?

“Hey!” Mister Sikkal shouted and he grabbed Afafrenfere’s arm.

The monk slowly swiveled his head, first glancing at the other members of the crew, all looking on with more than a passing interest now, then turning down to eye Sikkal’s dirty hand, and then, finally, settling his gaze on Sikkal himself, looking the man straight in the eye with a glare that was more promise than threat.

Sikkal couldn’t hold that stare, or the arm, and he backed off, but only momentarily, for he seemed to gain a bit of courage when he broke free of Afafrenfere’s glare and considered the crew around him.

“Get below,” he ordered Afafrenfere.

In a low voice, so that only Sikkal could hear, Afafrenfere spelled it out more clearly. “Only if that is where I am asked to move your corpse.”

“Captain’s to hear of this!” Sikkal cried, but Afafrenfere wasn’t looking at him anymore, turning again to the wharves, and to the dockhands, and just in time to see them toss their sack onto the distant scow and slither aboard.

Sikkal rushed off for Cannavara’s cabin, but he hadn’t gone three steps before the monk leaped over Minnow Skipper ’s rail to land lightly on the dock.

Sikkal called after him, and Afafrenfere resolved to rush back to the ship and crush the idiot’s windpipe if he persisted in raising a ruckus.

But Sikkal didn’t, and the monk moved in fits and starts, slipping along the wharves from barrel to crate, carefully picking his stealthy way to the old scow. Near to the boat, he nestled behind a stack of kegs and listened intently.

He heard some murmuring, but nothing definitive. He couldn’t make out any actual words, for the waves lapped loudly against the wharf’s supporting posts and broke with a watery crash just a few steps from his position.