Robert Salvatore - The Spine of the World

"If it were just me and you, wizard, would you have anything left with which to stop me?" the stubborn barbarian growled.

"I would have killed you out in the mountains," snapped the mage, obviously embarrassed by the failure of his magic.

Wulfgar launched a ball of spit that struck the man in the face. "How many can you take?" he asked.

The enraged wizard began waggling his fingers, but before he could get far Wulfgar plowed through the ring of soldiers and shoulder-slammed the man, sending him flying away. The barbarian was subdued again almost immediately, but the shaken wizard climbed up from the floor and skittered out of the room.

"Impressive display," Lord Feringal said sarcastically, scowling. "Am I to applaud you before I castrate you?"

That got Wulfgar's attention. He started to respond, but a guard slugged him to keep him quiet.

Lord Feringal looked to the young woman seated beside him. "Is this the man?" he asked, venom in every word.

Wulfgar stared hard at the woman, at the woman he had stopped Morik from harming on the road, at the woman he had released unscathed. He saw something there in her rich, green eyes, some emotion he could not quite fathom. Sorrow, perhaps? Certainly not anger.

"I … don't think so," the woman said and looked away.

Lord Feringal's eyes widened, indeed. The old man standing beside him gasped openly, as did the other woman.

"Look again, Meralda," Feringal commanded sharply. "Is it him?"

No answer, and Wulfgar could clearly see the pain in the woman's eyes.

"Answer me!" the lord of Auckney demanded.

"No!" the woman cried, refusing to meet any gaze.

"Fetch Liam," Lord Feringal yelled. Behind Wulfgar, a soldier rushed out of the room, returning a moment later with an old gnome.

"Oh, be sure it is," the gnome said, coming around to stare Wulfgar right in the eye. "You thinking I won't know you?" he asked. "You got me good, with your little rat friend distracting my eyes and you swinging down. I know you, thieving dog, for I seen you afore you hit me!" He turned to Lord Feringal. "Aye," he said. "He's the one."

Feringal eyed the woman beside him for a long, long time. "You are certain?" he asked Liam, his eyes still on the woman.

"I've not been bested often, my lord," Liam replied. "You've named me as the finest fighter in Auckney, which's why you entrusted me with your lady. I failed you, and I'm not taking that lightly. He's the one, I say, and oh, but what I'd pay you to let me fight him fairly."

He turned back and glared into Wulfgar's eyes. Wulfgar matched that stare, and though he had no doubt he could snap this gnome in half with hardly an effort, he said nothing. Wulfgar couldn't escape the fact that he had wronged the diminutive fellow.

"Have you anything to say for yourself?" Lord Feringal asked Wulfgar. Before the barbarian could begin to reply, the young lord rushed forward, brushing Liam aside to stand very close. "I have a dungeon for you," he whispered harshly. "A dark place, filled with the waste and bones of the previous occupants. Filled with rats and biting spiders. Yes, fool, I have a place for you to fill until I decide the time has come to kill you most horribly."

Wulfgar knew the procedure well by this point in his life and merely heaved a heavy sigh. He was promptly dragged away.

*****

In the corner of the audience hall, Steward Temigast watched it all very carefully, shifting his gaze from Wulfgar to Meralda and back again. He noted Priscilla, sitting quietly, no doubt taking it all in, as well.

He noted the venom on Priscilla's face as she regarded Meralda. She was thinking that the woman had enjoyed being ravished by the barbarian, Temigast realized. She was thinking that, perhaps, it hadn't really been a rape.

Given the size of the man, Temigast couldn't agree with that assessment.

*****

The cell was everything Lord Feringal had promised, a wretched, dark and damp place filled with the awful stench of death. Wulfgar couldn't see a thing, not his own hand if he held it an inch in front of his face. He scrabbled around in the mud and worse, pushing past sharp bones in a futile attempt to find some piece of dry ground upon which he might sit. And all the while he slapped at the spiders and other crawling things that scurried in to learn what new meal had been delivered to them.

To most, this dungeon would have seemed worse than Luskan's prison tunnels, mostly because of its purest sense of emptiness and solitude, but Wulfgar feared neither rats nor spiders. His terrors ran much deeper than that. Here in the dark he found he was somewhat able to fend off those horrors.

And so the day passed. Sometime during the next one, the barbarian awoke to torchlight and the sound of a guard slipping a plate of rotten food through the small slit in the half-barred, half-metal hatch that sealed the filthy burrow cell from the wet tunnels beyond. Wulfgar started to eat but spat it out, thinking he might be better off trying to catch and skin a rat.

That second day a turmoil of emotions found the barbarian. Mostly he was angry at all the world. Perhaps he deserved punishment for his highwayman activities-he could accept responsibility for that-but this went beyond justice concerning his actions on the road with Lord Feringal's coach.

Also, Wulfgar was angry at himself. Perhaps Morik had been right all along. Perhaps he did not have the heart for this life. A true highwayman would have let the gnome die or at least finished him quickly. A true highwayman would have taken his pleasures with the woman, then dragged her along either to be sold as a slave or kept as a slave of his own.

Wulfgar laughed aloud. Yes, indeed, Morik had been right. Wulfgar hadn't the heart for any of it. Now here he was, the wretch of wretches, a failure at the lowest level of civilized society, a fool too incompetent to even be a proper highwayman.

He spent the next hour not in his cell, but back in the Spine of the World, that great dividing line between who he once was and what he had become, that physical barrier that seemed such an appropriate symbol of the mental barrier within him, the wall he had thrown up like an emotional mountain range to hold back the painful memories of Errtu.

In his mind's eye he was there now, sitting on the Spine of the World, staring out over Icewind Dale and the life he once knew, then turning around to face south and the miserable existence he now suffered. He kept his eyes closed, though he wouldn't have seen much in the dark anyway, ignored the many crawling things assaulting him, and got more than a few painful spider bites for his inattentiveness.

Sometime later that day, a noise brought him from his trance. He opened his eyes to see the flickers of another torch in the tunnel beyond his door.

"Living still?" came a question from the voice of an old man.

Wulfgar shifted to his knees and crawled to the door, blinking repeatedly as his eyes adjusted to the light. After a few moments he recognized the man holding the torch as the advisor Wulfgar had seen in the audience hall, a man who physically reminded him of Magistrate Jharkheld of Luskan.

Wulfgar snorted and squeezed one hand through the bars. "Burn it with your torch," he offered. "Take your perverted pleasures where you will find them."

"Angry that you were caught, I suppose," the man called Temigast replied.

"Twice imprisoned wrongly," Wulfgar replied.

"Are not all prisoners imprisoned wrongly by their own recounting?" the steward asked.

"The woman said that it wasn't me."

"The woman suffered greatly," Temigast countered. "Perhaps she cannot face the truth."

"Or perhaps she spoke correctly."

"No," Temigast said immediately, shaking his head. "Liam remembered you clearly and would not be mistaken." Wulfgar snorted again. "You deny that you were the thief who knocked over the carriage?" Temigast asked bluntly.