R. Salvatore: Luthien's Gamble

He couldn’t see even a remote possibility. After a few frustrating moments, he considered just letting go of the rope and getting the inevitable over with.

A spear plummeted past, and the pair looked up to see a group of brutes grinning down at them.

“You could be wrong,” Luthien offered before Oliver could say it.

“Three tugs will free the grapnel,” Oliver reasoned, for that indeed was the only way to release the enchanted device once it had been set. “If I was quick enough—and always I am—I might reset it many feet below.”

Luthien stared at him with blank amazement. Even the boastful Oliver had to admit that his plan wasn’t a plan at all, that if he pulled free the grapnel, he and Luthien, and the wounded man as well, would be darker spots on a dark street, two hundred feet below.

Oliver said no more, and neither did Luthien, for there was nothing more to say. It seemed as though the legend that was the Crimson Shadow would not have a happy ending.

Brind’Amour’s grapnel was a marvelous thing. The puckered ball could stick to any wall, no matter how sheer. It was stuck now sidelong, the eye-loop straight out to the side and the weighted rope hanging down.

Luthien and Oliver felt a sudden jerk as their weight finally made the ball half-turn on the wall and straighten out, shifting so that it was in line above the hanging rope. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the pair found themselves descending, the ball sliding along the icy surface.

Luthien cried out. So did Oliver, but the halfling kept the presence of mind to jab at the stone with his main gauche. The dagger’s tip bit into the ice, threw tiny flecks all about, drawing a fine line as the descent continued.

Up above they heard cyclopian curses, and another spear would have taken Oliver had he not thrust his main gauche above his head, knocking it away. Down below, they heard cries of “Catch them!”

Luthien kicked at the wall, tried to scratch at the ice with his boot heels, anything to maintain some control along the sliding descent. He couldn’t tell how high he was, how far he had to go. Every so often, the puckered ball came to a spot that was not so thick with ice and the momentum of the slide was lessened. But not completely stopped. Down went the friends, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, screaming all the way. Luthien noted the secret door forty feet to the side and an instant later he felt hands reaching up to grab his legs, heard groans all about him as comrades cushioned the fall and the ground rushed up to swallow him.

Then he was down, in a tumble, and Oliver was above him, the halfling’s fall padded by Luthien’s broad chest.

Oliver leaped up and snapped his fingers. “I told you I have been in worse places,” he said, and three tugs freed his enchanted grapnel.

A moment later, thunderous pounding began at the closed drawbridge, the cyclopians outraged that they had lost their prize. Blocks split apart and fell outward, the brutes using one of the many statues within the cathedral as a battering ram.

Luthien was helped to his feet; the wounded man was scooped up and carried away.

“Time to go,” said Katerin O’Hale, standing at the stunned young Bedwyr’s side, propping him by the elbow.

Luthien looked at her, and at Siobhan standing beside her, and let them pull him away.

In the blink of a cyclopian eye, the Eriadorans disappeared into the streets of Montfort’s lower section, and the cyclopians, standing helplessly as they finally breached the wall, didn’t dare to follow.

Some distance away, Oliver pulled up short and bade his companions to wait. They all looked back, following the halfling’s gaze up the side of the Ministry’s tower. The ice-covered eastern wall shone brilliantly in the morning light, and the image the halfling had spotted was unmistakable, and so fitting.

Two hundred feet up the wall loomed a red silhouette, a crimson shadow. Luthien’s wondrous cape had worked another aspect of its magic, leaving its tell-tale image emblazoned on the stones, a fitting message from the Crimson Shadow to the common folk of Montfort.

“You should not be up here,” Oliver remarked, his frosty breath filling the air before him. He grabbed the edge of the flat roof and pulled himself over, then hopped up to his feet and clapped his hands hard to get the blood flowing in them.

Across the way, Luthien didn’t reply, other than to nod in the direction of the Ministry. Oliver walked up beside his friend and noted the intensity in Luthien’s striking cinnamon-colored eyes. The halfling followed that gaze to the southwest, toward the massive structure that dominated the Montfort skyline. He could see the body of Duke Morkney still frozen against the cathedral wall, the spear still stuck in the dead man’s head. The rope around his neck, however, now angled out from the building, its end pushed away from the buttress where it had been tied.

“They cut the rope,” the halfling howled, thinking the garish scene perfectly outrageous. “But still the dead duke stays!” Indeed the cyclopians had cut the rope free from the tower top, hoping to dislodge Morkney. Farther down the tower side, though, the rope remained frozen and so the cyclopians had done nothing more than create what looked like a ghastly antenna, sticking up from Morkney’s head as if he were some giant bug.

Luthien jutted his chin upward, toward the top of the tower, and shifting his gaze, Oliver saw cyclopians bumbling about up there, cursing and pushing each other. Just below the lip, the tower glistened with wetness and some of the ice had broken away. The halfling realized what was happening a moment later when the cyclopians hoisted a huge, steaming cauldron and tipped it over the edge. Boiling water ran down the side of the tower.

One of the cyclopians slipped, then roared in pain and whirled away, and the hot cauldron toppled down behind the water. It spun along its descent, but stayed close to the wall, and slammed into the butt of the spear that was embedded in Morkney’s head. On bounced the cauldron, bending the spear out with it, and the soldiers on the roof winced as Morkney’s head jerked forward violently, nearly torn from his torso. The spear did come free, and it and the cauldron fell to the courtyard below, to the terrified screams of scrambling cyclopians and the derisive hoots from the many common Eriadorans watching the spectacle from the city’s lower section.

The pushing atop the tower became an open fight and the offending cyclopian, still clutching the hand he had burned on the cauldron, was heaved over the battlement. His was the only scream from that side of the dividing wall, but the hoots from the lower section came louder than ever.

“Oh, I do like how they bury their dead!” Oliver remarked.

Luthien didn’t share the halfling’s mirth. The Ministry had been lost to Aubrey, and it was Luthien’s decision to let the viscount keep it, at least for the time being. The cost of taking the building back, if they could indeed roust the cyclopians from the place, would not be worth the many lives that would be lost.

Still, Luthien had to wonder about the wisdom of that decision. Not because he needed the cathedral for strategic purposes—the huge building could be defended, but the open courtyards surrounding it made it useless as a base of offensive operations—but because of its symbolic ramifications. The Ministry, that gigantic, imposing temple of God, the largest and greatest structure in all of Eriador, belonged to the common folk who had built it, not to the ugly one-eyes and the unlawful Avon king. The soul of Montfort, of all of Eriador, was epitomized by that cathedral; every village, no matter how small or how remote, boasted at least one family member who had helped to build the Ministry.