Robert Salvatore: Exile

Briza huffed and turned away at the sight of the mercenary’s dipping head. Drow elves wore their thick white hair as a mantle of their station, each cut designed to reveal rank and house affiliation. Jarlaxle the rogue wore no hair at all, and from Briza’s angle, his clean-shaven head appeared as a ball of pressed onyx.

Jarlaxle laughed quietly at the continuing disapproval of the eldest Do’Urden daughter and turned back toward Matron Malice, his ample jewelry tinkling and his hard and shiny boots clumping with every step. Briza took note of this as well, for she knew that those boots, and that jewelry, only seemed to make noise when Jarlaxle wished them to do so.

“It is done?” Matron Malice asked before the mercenary could even begin to offer a proper greeting.

“My dear Matron Malice,” Jarlaxle replied with a pained sigh, knowing that he could get away with the informalities in light of his grand news. “Did you doubt me? Surely I am wounded to my heart.”

Malice leaped from her throne, her fist clenched in victory. “Dipree Hun’ett is dead!” she proclaimed. “The first noble victim of the war!”

“You forget Masoj Hun’ett,” remarked Briza, “slain by Drizzt ten years ago. And Zaknafein Do’Urden,” Briza had to add, against her better judgment, “killed by your own hand.”

“Zaknafein was not noble by birth.” Malice sneered at her impertinent daughter. Briza’s words stung Malice nonetheless. Malice had decided to sacrifice Zaknafein in Drizzt’s stead against Briza’s recommendations.

Jarlaxle cleared his throat to deflect the growing tension. The mercenary knew that he had to finish his business and be out of House Do’Urden as quickly as possible. Already he knew―though the Do’Urdens did not―that the appointed hour drew near. “There is the matter of my payment,” he reminded Malice.

“Dinin will see to it,” Malice replied with a wave of her hand, not turning her eyes from her daughter’s pernicious stare.

“I will take my leave,” Jarlaxle said, nodding to the elder boy.

Before the mercenary had taken his first step toward the door, Vierna, Malice’s second daughter, burst into the room, her face glowing brightly in the infrared spectrum, heated with obvious excitement.

“Damn,” Jarlaxle whispered under his breath.

“What is it?” Matron Malice demanded.

“House Hun’ett,” Vierna cried. “Soldiers in the compound! We are under attack!”

Out in the courtyard, beyond the cavern complex, nearly five hundred soldiers of House Hun’ett―fully a hundred more than the house reportedly possessed―followed the blast of a lightning bolt through House Do’Urden’s adamantite gates. The three hundred fifty soldiers of the Do’Urden household swarmed out of the shaped stalagmite mounds that served as their quarters to meet the attack.

Outnumbered but trained by Zaknafein, the Do’Urden troops formed into proper defensive positions, shielding their wizards and clerics so that they might cast their spells. An entire contingent of Hun’ett soldiers, empowered with enchantments of flying, swooped down the cavern wall that housed the royal chambers of House Do’Urden. Tiny hand-held crossbows clicked and thinned the ranks of the aerial force with deadly, poison-tipped darts. The aerial invaders’ surprise had been achieved, though, and the Do’Urden troops were quickly put into a precarious position.

“Hun’ett has not the favor of Lloth!” Malice screamed. “It would not dare to openly attack!” She flinched at the refuting, thunderous sounds of another, and then still another, bolt of lightning.

“Oh?” Briza snapped.

Malice cast her daughter a threatening glare but didn’t have time to continue the argument. The normal method of attack by a drow house would involve the rush of soldiers combined with a mental barrage by the house’s highest-ranking clerics. Malice, though, felt no mental attack, which told her beyond any doubt that it was indeed House Hun’ett that had come to her gates. The clerics of Hun’ett, out of the Spider Queen’s favor, apparently could not use their Lloth-given powers to launch the mental assault. If they had, Malice and her daughters, also out of the Spider Queen’s favor, could not have hoped to counter.

“Why would they dare to attack?” Malice wondered aloud.

Briza understood her mother’s reasoning. “They are bold indeed,” she said, “to hope that their soldiers alone can eliminate every member of our house.” Everyone in the room, every drow in Menzoberranzan, understood the brutal, absolute punishments exacted upon any house that failed to eradicate another house. Such attacks were not frowned upon, but getting caught at the deed most certainly was.

Rizzen, the present patron of House Do’Urden, came into the anteroom then, his face grim. “We are outnumbered and outpositioned,” he said. “Our defeat will be swift, I fear.”

Malice would not accept the news. She struck Rizzen with a blow that knocked the patron halfway across the floor, then she spun on Jarlaxle. “You must summon your band!”

Malice cried at the mercenary. “Quickly!”

“Matron,” Jarlaxle stuttered, obviously at a loss. “Bregan D’aerthe is a secretive group. We do not engage in open warfare. To do so could invoke the wrath of the ruling council.”

“I will pay you whatever you desire,” the desperate matron mother promised.

“But the cost―”

“Whatever you desire!” Malice snarled again.

“Such action―” Jarlaxle began.

Again, Malice did not let him finish his argument. “Save my house, mercenary,” she growled. “Your profits will be great, but, I warn you, the cost of your failure will be far greater!”

Jarlaxle did not appreciate being threatened, especially by a lame matron mother whose entire world was fast crumbling around her. But in the mercenary’s ears the sweet ring of the word “profits” outweighed the threat a thousand times over. After ten straight years of exorbitant rewards in the Do’Urden-Hun’ett conflict, Jarlaxle did not doubt Malice’s willingness or ability to pay as promised, nor did he doubt that this deal would prove even more lucrative than the agreement he had struck with Matron SiNafay Hun’ett earlier that same week.

“As you wish,” he said to Matron Malice with a bow and a sweep of his garish hat. “I will see what I can do.” A wink at Dinin set the elderboy on his heels as he exited the room.

When the two got out on the balcony overlooking the Do’Urden compound, they saw that the situation was even more desperate than Rizzen had described. The soldiers of House Do’Urden―those still alive―were trapped in and around one of the huge stalagmite mounds anchoring the front gate.

One of Hun’ett’s flying soldiers dropped onto the balcony at the sight of a Do’Urden noble, but Dinin dispatched the intruder with a single, blurring attack routine.

“Well done,” Jarlaxle commented, giving Dinin an approving nod. He moved to pat the elderboy Do’Urden on the shoulder, but Dinin slipped out of reach.

“We have other business,” he pointedly reminded Jarlaxle.

“Call your troops, and quickly, else I fear that House Hun’ett will win the day.”

“Be at ease, my friend Dinin,” Jarlaxle laughed. He pulled a small whistle from around his neck and blew into it. Dinin heard not a sound, for the instrument was magically tuned exclusively for the ears of members of Bregan D’aerthe.

The elderboy Do’Urden watched in amazement as Jarlaxle calmly puffed out a specific cadence, then he watched in even greater amazement as more than a hundred of House Hun’ett’s soldiers turned against their comrades.

Bregan D’aerthe owed allegiance only to Bregan D’aerthe.