R. Salvatore - The Collected Stories, The Legend of Drizzt

“Urshula the black,” Byphast remarked.

Zhengyi placed the skull against the center of the opened tome and whispered a few arcane words as he pressed down upon it.

The skull sank into the pages, disappearing within the depths of the tome.

Byphast sucked in her breath and stared hard at the Witch-King.

“If I do not win now, I win later,” Zhengyi explained. “With my allies beside me. Some foolish human, elf, or other mortal creature will find this tome and will seek the power contained within. In so doing he will unleash Urshula in his greater form.”

Zhengyi paused and glanced behind him, drawing Byphast’s gaze to a huge bookcase full of similar books.

“His greed, his frailty, his secret desire-nay, desperation-to grasp this great treasure that only I can offer him, will perpetuate my grand schemes, whatever the outcome of the coming battles on the fields of Damara.”

“So confident.…” Byphast said with a shake of her head and a smile that came from pity.

“Do you seek to sever your bond with the phylactery?” Zhengyi asked. “Do you wish to abandon this gift of immortality that I have offered you?”

Byphast’s smile withered.

“I thought not,” said Zhengyi. He closed the great book and lifted it into place on the shelf behind him. “My power is as eternal as a reasoning being’s fear of death, Byphast. Thus, I am eternal.” He glanced back at the newly finished tome. “Urshula was defeated in his lair, slain by the knights of the Bloodstone Army. But that only made him stronger, as King Gareth, or his descendants, will one day learn.”

Byphast stood very still for some time, soaking it all in. “I will not continue the fight,” she decided. “I will return to the Great Glacier and my distant home.”

Zhengyi shrugged as if it did not matter-and at that time, it really did not.

“But you will not sever your bond with the phylactery,” he noted.

Byphast stiffened and squared her jaw. “I will live another thousand years,” she declared.

But Zhengyi only smiled and said, “So be it. I am patient.”

The Year of the Tankard (1370 DR)

An uneasiness accompanied Thibbledorf Pwent out of Mithral Hall that late afternoon. With the hordes of King Obould pressing so closely on the west and north, Bruenor had declared that none could venture out to those reaches. Pragmatism and simple wisdom surely seemed to side with Bruenor.

It wasn’t often that the battlerager, an officer of Bruenor’s court, went against the edicts of his beloved King Bruenor. But this was an extraordinary circumstance, Pwent had told himself-though in language less filled with multi-syllable words: “Needs gettin’ done.”

Still, there remained the weight of going against his beloved king, and the cognitive dissonance of that pressed on him. As if reflecting his pall, the gray sky hung low, thick, and ominous, promising rain.

Rain that would fall upon Gendray Hardhatter, and so every drop would ping painfully against Thibbledorf Pwent’s heart.

It wasn’t that Gendray had been killed in battle-oh no, not that! Such a fate was accepted, even expected by every member of the ferocious Gutbuster Brigade as willingly as it was by their leader, Thibbledorf Pwent. When Gendray had joined only a few short months before, Pwent had told his father, Honcklebart, a dear friend of many decades, that he most certainly could not guarantee the safety of Gendray.

“But me heart’s knowin’ that he’ll die for a good reason,” Honcklebart had said to Pwent, both of them deep in flagons of mead.

“For kin and kind, for king and clan,” Pwent had appropriately toasted, and Honcklebart had tapped his cup with enthusiasm, for indeed, what dwarf could ever ask for more?

And so on a windy day atop the cliffs north of Keeper’s Dale, the western porch of Mithral Hall, against the charge of an orc horde, the expectations for Gendray had come to pass, and for never a better reason had a Battlehammer dwarf fallen.

As he neared that fateful site, Pwent could almost hear the tumult of battle again. Never had he been so proud of his Gutbusters. He had led them into the heart of the orc charge. Outnumbered many times over by King Obould’s most ferocious warriors, the Gutbusters hadn’t flinched, hadn’t hesitated. Many dwarves had fallen that day but had fallen on the bodies of many, many more orcs.

Pwent, too, had expected to die in that seemingly suicidal encounter, but somehow, and with the support of heroic friends and a clever gnome, he and some of the Gutbusters had found their way to the cliffs and down to Mithral Hall’s western doors. It had been a victory bitterly won through honorable and acceptable sacrifice.

Despite that truth, Thibbledorf Pwent had carried with him the echoes of the second part of Honcklebart Hard-hatter’s toast, when he had hoisted his flagon proudly again and declared, “And I’m knowin’ that dead or hurt, Thibbledorf Pwent’d not be leavin’ me boy behind.”

Tapping that flagon in toast had been no hard promise for Pwent. “If a dragon’s eatin’ him, then I’ll cut a hole in its belly and pull out his bones!” he had heartily promised, and had meant every word.

But Gendray, dead Gendray, hadn’t come home that day.

“Ye left me boy,” Honcklebart had said back in the halls after the fight. There was no malice in his voice, no accusation. It was just a statement of fact, by a dwarf whose heart had broken.

Pwent almost wished his old friend had just punched him in the nose, because though Honcklebart was known to have a smashing right cross, it wouldn’t have hurt the battlerager nearly as much as that simple statement of fact.

“Ye left me boy.”

I look upon the hillside, quiet now except for the birds. That’s all there is. The birds, cawing and cackling and poking their beaks into unseeing eyeballs. Crows do not circle before they alight on a field strewn with the dead. They fly as the bee to a flower, straight for their goal, with so great a feast before them. They are the cleaners, along with the crawling insects and the rain and the unending wind .

And the passage of time. There is always that. The turn of the day, of the season, of the year .

G’nurk winced when he came in sight of the torn mountain ridge. How glorious had been the charge! The minions of Obould, proud orc warriors, had swept up the rocky slope against the fortified dwarven position.

G’nurk had been there, in the front lines, one of only a very few who had survived that charge. But despite their losses in the forward ranks, G’nurk and his companions had cleared the path, had taken the orc army to the dwarven camp.

Absolute victory hovered before them, within easy reach, so it had seemed.

Then, somehow, through some dwarven trick or devilish magic, the mountain ridge exploded, and like a field of grain in a strong wind, the orc masses coming in support had been mowed flat. Most of them were still there, lying dead where they had stood proud.

Tinguinguay, G’nurk’s beloved daughter, was still there.

He worked his way around the boulders, the air still thick with dust from the amazing blast that had reformed the entire area. The many ridges and rocks and chunks of blasted stone seemed to G’nurk like a giant carcass, as if that stretch of land, like some sentient behemoth, had itself been killed.

G’nurk paused and leaned on a boulder. He brought his dirty hand up to wipe the moisture from his eyes, took a deep breath, and reminded himself that he served Tinguinguay with honor and pride, or he honored her not at all.

He pushed away from the stone, denied its offer to serve as a crutch, and pressed along. Soon he came past the nearest of his dead companions, or pieces of them, at least. Those in the west, nearest the ridge, had been mutilated by a shock wave full of flying stones.