Robert Salvatore - The Legacy

"Dwarf," Regis commented, surprised.

Pwent groaned and rolled over; Drizzt spotted an amulet, carved with the foaming mug standard of Clan Battlehammer, on a chain about his neck.

Pwent shook his head and leaped suddenly to his feet.

"Ye won that one!" he roared, and he started for Drizzt.

"We are not enemies," the drow ranger tried to explain. Regis cried out again as Pwent came in close, launching a one-two punching combination with his glove nails.

Drizzt easily avoided the short punches and took note of the many sharp ridges on his opponent's armor.

Pwent lashed out again, stepping in behind the blow to give it some range. It was a ruse, Drizzt knew, with no chance of hitting. Already the veteran drow understood Pwent's battle tactics, and he knew the phony punch was designed only to put this fearsome dwarf in line, that he might hurl himself at Drizzt. A scimitar flashed out to intercept the punch. Drizzt surprised the dwarf by twirling his second blade above his head and stepping in closer (exactly the opposite course Pwent had expected him to travel), then launching his high-riding weapon out in a wide, arcing, and smoothly descending course as he stepped to the side, bringing the blade to bear at the back of the dwarf's knee.

Pwent momentarily forgot about his impending leap and instinctively bent the vulnerable leg away from the attack. Drizzt pressed on, putting just enough pressure on the dwarf's knee to keep it moving along. Pwent pitched into the air, landed hard on the floor, flat on his back.

"Stop it!" Regis yelled at the stubborn, fallen dwarf, who was again trying to get up. "Stop it. We are not your enemies!"

"He speaks the truth," Drizzt added.

Pwent, up on one knee, paused and looked curiously from Regis to Drizzt. "We came in here to get the halfling," he said to Drizzt, obviously confused. "To get him and skin him alive, and now ye're telling me to trust him?"

"Different halfling," Drizzt remarked, snapping his blades into their sheaths.

An inadvertent grin showed on the dwarf's face as he considered the advantage his enemy apparently had just given him.

"We are not your enemy," Drizzt said evenly, lavender eyes flashing dangerously, "but I've no more time to play your foolish games."

Pwent leaned forward, muscles twitching, eager to leap ahead and rip the drow apart.

Again the drow's eyes flashed, and Pwent relaxed, understanding that this opponent had just read his thoughts.

"Come ahead if you will," Drizzt warned, "but know that the next time you go down, you will never get back up."

Thibbledorf Pwent, rarely shaken, considered the grim promise and his opponent's easy stance, and he remembered what Catti-brie had told him about this drow-if indeed this was the legendary Drizzt Do'Urden. "Guess we're friends," the unnerved dwarf admitted, and he slowly rose.

With Pwent backtracking and leading the way, I Drizzt was sure he would soon learn the fate of his friends, and would face his evil sister once more. The battlerager couldn't tell him much about Bruenor and the others, only that when he had been separated from them, they were being hard pressed.

The news drove Drizzt on more quickly. Images of Catti-brie, a helpless prisoner being tortured by Vierna, flitted on the edges of his consciousness. He pictured stubborn Bruenor spitting in Vierna's face-and Vierna tearing the dwarf's face off in reply.

Few chambers dotted this region. Long, narrow tunnels dominated, some wholly natural, others worked in places where the goblins apparently had decided that support was needed. The three came into a fully bricked tunnel then, long and straight, angling slightly up and with several side passages running off it. Drizzt didn't see the forms of the dark elves ahead of him, down the long, dark corridor, but when Twinkle flared suddenly, he did not doubt the sword's warning.

The fact was confirmed a moment later when a cross bow quarrel zipped from the darkness and stuck Regis in the arm. The halfling groaned; Drizzt pulled him back and dropped him safely behind the corner of a side passage they had just passed. By the time the drow had turned back to the main corridor, Pwent was in full charge, singing wildly, taking hit after hit from poisoned darts but walking through them without a concern.

Drizzt rushed after him, saw Pwent charge right past the dark hole of another side corridor, and knew instinctively that the dwarf likely had wandered into a trap.

Drizzt lost all track of the battlerager a moment later, when a quarrel shot past the distant dwarf to hit Drizzt. He looked down to it, hanging painfully from his forearm, and felt the burning tingle as Pwent's countering elixir battled the poison. Drizzt thought of slumping where he stood, of inviting his enemies to think that their poison had felled him again, an easy capture.

He couldn't abandon Pwent, though, and he was simply too angry to wait for this encounter any longer. The time had come to end the threat.

He slipped up to the dark hole of the side tunnel, kept Twinkle back a bit so it would not fully give him away. A roar of outrage exploded from up ahead, followed by a steady stream of dwarven curses, which told Drizzt that Pwent's intended victims had slipped away.

Drizzt heard a slight shuffle to the side, knew that the battlerager had piqued the curiosity of whoever was in there. He took one deep breath, mentally counted to three, and leaped around the corner, Twinkle flaring viciously. The closest drow fell back, firing a second crossbow quarrel at Drizzt that nicked his skin through a shoulder crease in his fine armor. He could only hope that Pwent's potion was strong enough to handle a second hit and took some comfort in the fact that Pwent had seemed to be hit repeatedly during his corridor charge.

Drizzt pressed the crossbowman backward in a rush, the evil drow fumbling to draw his melee weapon. He would have had the drow quickly, except that a second drow joined him, this one armed with sword and dirk. — Drizzt had come into a small, roughly circular chamber, a second exit off to his right, probably joining the main corridor somewhere farther along. Drizzt hardly registered the physical features of the room, though, hardly took note of the initial swings of battle, parrying aside his opponents' measured strikes. His eyes remained beyond them, to the back of the room, where stood Vierna and the mercenary Jarlaxle.

"You have caused me great pains, my lost brother," Vierna snarled at him, "but the reward will be worth the cost, now that you have returned to me."

Listening to her every word, the distracted Drizzt nearly let a sword slip past his defenses. He slapped it away at the last moment and came on in a flourish, scimitars swirling in a descending, crisscrossing pattern.

The dark elf soldiers worked well together, though, and they fended off the attack, countering one after the other and forcing Drizzt back on his heels.

"I do so love to watch you fight," Vierna continued, now smiling smugly, "but I cannot take the chance that you will be slain-not yet." She began a series of chants then, and Drizzt knew her impending spell would be aimed his way, probably at his mind. He gritted his teeth and accelerated the course of his battle, conjuring images of a tortured Catti-brie, putting up a wall of sheer anger.

Vierna released her spell with a glorious cry, and waves of energy rolled over Drizzt, assaulted him and told him, mind and body, to stop in place, to simply hold still and be captured.

Inside the drow ranger welled a part of him, a primal and savage alter ego that he had not known since his days in the wild Underdark. He was the hunter again, free of emotions, free of mental vulnerability. He shrugged away the spell; his scimitars banged hard against his enemies' blades, hard-pressing his two opponents.