R. Salvatore - The Last Threshold

He couldn’t make anything out, but he heard a second murmuring voice, and recognized it as Effron’s. He slumped back, sorting his thoughts. He looked at his chains and promised himself that he would find a way out of them.

Drizzt wasn’t a victim.

Soon enough he would find his way out of this cell and to Effron’s rescue.

That was his vow.

“You were too confident!” Draygo Quick proclaimed to Effron, whose situation differed from Drizzt’s only in the fact that only one of his arms was chained. “But then, that was ever your failing, was it not?”

Effron stared at him hatefully, but that only seemed to amuse the shade.

“You thought you knew all of my tricks and traps, but of course, I am no fool,” Draygo went on. “Did you really believe that you could walk in here and simply steal away with the panther?”

“It was not my choice.”

“You led them here.”

“I did,” Effron admitted.

“Your loyalty is touching.”

Effron lowered his gaze.

“You have decided to wage war against me, and that is a foolish pursuit.”

“No,” Effron immediately retorted, looking back up, staring Draygo Quick right in the eye. “No. I decided to travel with my mother, and I needed to blind you to our movements, but only by taking the cat. I would not go against you, but I would be done with you.”

“Interesting,” Draygo Quick mumbled a few moments later, after digesting that information. “Let me tell you about your mother.…”

Drizzt pulled hard against the unyielding chains when he heard Effron’s wailing from down the hall. At first he thought his companion was being tortured, but when that initial keening transformed into sobs, he realized it was something else.

It didn’t take him long to figure out the implications of those sobs.

“Where is Dahlia?” Drizzt demanded the next time Draygo Quick appeared in his cell, some days later, he believed, though he couldn’t be certain.

“Ah, you have heard the weeping of your twisted companion,” Draygo Quick replied. “Yes, I am afraid that Dahlia and your other companions have met a most unfortunate end, and now stand as trophies in my hall.”

Drizzt lowered his eyes, unable to even scream out in protest. He was surprised by how profoundly the news had hit him, surprised to realize how deeply he had come to value Dahlia’s companionship. Perhaps he couldn’t love her as he had loved Catti-brie, but she had become, at least, a friend.

And it wasn’t just the loss of Dahlia that brought him pain in that moment, for his tie to his past, too, was gone. “Entreri,” he heard himself whispering, and he couldn’t deny the sense of loss.

And so too with Ambergris, of whom he was quite fond, and Afafrenfere.

“You have walked into something far beyond you, Drizzt Do’Urden of Menzoberranzan,” Draygo Quick said, and it surprised Drizzt to hear a sincere tone of regret in the Netherese lord’s voice. He looked back up, trying to find something in Draygo Quick’s expression to reveal the lie of his concerns, but he found no such thing.

“To the detriment of all,” Draygo Quick continued. “Of course I would defend myself and my home-would you expect anything less?”

“It would need less defending if you were not a thief and kidnapper,” Drizzt retorted.

“Kidnapper? You walked into my home!”

“Of Guenhwyvar,” Drizzt clarified. “You stole from me something which does not belong to you.”

“Ah, yes, of course,” said Draygo. “The cat. As I said, you have stumbled into something apparently quite beyond you, but perhaps there is hope for both of us. I do not think that I will have need of the cat when we are done, so perhaps you will find her companionship again.”

The tantalizing carrot had Drizzt inadvertently leaning forward, before he realized the revealing posture and corrected himself, unwilling to let his thoughts go into the realm of false hope.

The Netherese lord would never let him go, he told himself, over and over again.

He would find himself repeating that silent mantra many times as Draygo Quick came to him each day, always with questions about Drizzt’s past, about the priestesses of Lolth and about his life on the surface while following the tenets of the goddess Mielikki and the ways of the ranger.

Drizzt resisted those questions at first, but his stubbornness couldn’t long hold, and some tendays later, he came to look forward to those visits.

For accompanying Draygo came the servants with his food, and that food greatly improved, and was fed to him far more tenderly and decently by a young shade, a child.

One day Draygo Quick arrived with a trio of burly guards. Two moved to flank Drizzt, reaching up for the chains as they did.

“If you struggle in the least, I will torture Effron to death before your eyes,” was all that Draygo Quick bothered to say, and he took his leave.

The guards put a black hood over Drizzt’s head and carried him from his cell, depositing him in a room somewhere within the castle above. They set him down in a chair, told him to remove the hood, to bathe and to dress.

“Lord Draygo will come to you soon,” one said as they departed.

Drizzt looked around at his new home, a well-furnished, clean, and warm room. His first thoughts went to the notion of escape, but he quickly dismissed that possibility. Draygo Quick had Effron, and Guenhwyvar, and where might he go, in any case?

The Netherese lord had told him that he had walked into something far above him, and Drizzt didn’t doubt the truth of that claim at all in that confusing time and place.