She would find her friends in Luskan and warn them of the danger at their backs, and then together they would take care of Artemis Entreri.
“We make a strong pace,” the lead driver assured her, sympathetic to her desire for haste.
Catti-brie did not look at him; her eyes rooted on the flat horizon before her. “Me heart tells me ‘tisn’t strong enough,” she lamented.
The driver looked at her curiously, but had learned better than to press her on the point. She had made it clear to them from the start that her business was private. And being the adopted daughter of Bruenor Battlehammer, and reputedly a fine fighter in her own right, the merchants had counted themselves lucky to have her along and had respected her desire for privacy. Besides, as one of the drivers had so eloquently argued during their informal meeting before the journey, “The notion of staring at an ox’s ass for near to three-hunnerd miles makes the thought o’ having that girl along for company sit well with me!”
They had even moved up their departure date to accommodate her.
“Do not worry, Catti-brie,” the driver assured her, “we’ll get you there!”
Catti-brie shook her blowing hair out of her face and looked into the sun as it set on the horizon before her. “But can it be in time?” she asked softly and rhetorically, knowing that her whisper would break apart in the wind as soon as it passed her lips.
5. The Crags
Drizzt took the lead as the four companions jogged along the banks of the river Mirar, putting as much ground between themselves and Luskan as possible. Although they hadn’t slept in many hours, their encounters in the City of Sails had sent a burst of adrenaline through their veins and none of them was weary.
Something magical hung in the air that night, a crispy tingling that would have made the most exhausted traveler lament closing his eyes to it. The river, rushing swiftly and high from the spring melt, sparkled in the evening glow, its whitecaps catching the starlight and throwing it back into the air in a spray of bejeweled droplets.
Normally cautious, the friends could not help but let their guard down. They felt no danger lurking near, felt nothing but the sharp, refreshing chill of the spring night and the mysterious pull of the heavens. Bruenor lost himself in dreams of Mithril Hall; Regis in memories of Calimport; even Wulfgar, so despondent about his ill-fated encounter with civilization, felt his spirits soar. He thought of similar nights on the open tundra, when he had dreamed of what lay beyond the horizons of his world. Now, out beyond those horizons, Wulfgar found only one element missing. To his surprise, and against the adventuring instincts that denied such comfortable thoughts, he wished that Catti-brie, the woman he had grown to cherish, was with him now to share the beauty of this night.
If the others had not been so preoccupied with their own enjoyment of the evening, they would have noticed an extra bounce in Drizzt Do’Urden’s graceful step as well. To the drow, these magical nights, when the heavenly dome reached down below the horizon, bolstered his confidence in the most important and difficult decision he had ever made, the choice to forsake his people and his homeland. No stars sparkled above Menzoberranzan, the dark city of the black elves. No unexplainable allure tugged at the heartstrings from the cold stone of the immense cavern’s lightless ceiling.
“How much my people have lost by walking in darkness,” Drizzt whispered into the night. The pull of the mysteries of the endless sky carried the joy of his spirit beyond its normal boundaries and opened his mind to the unanswerable questions of the multiverse. He was an elf, and though his skin was black, there remained in his soul a semblance of the harmonic joy of his surface cousins. He wondered how general these feelings truly ran among his people. Did they remain in the hearts of all drow? Or had eons of sublimation extinguished the spiritual flames? To Drizzt’s reckoning, perhaps the greatest loss that his people had suffered when they retreated to the depths of the world was the loss of the ability to ponder the spirituality of existence simply for the sake of thought.
The crystalline sheen of the Mirar gradually dulled as the lightening dawn dimmed the stars. It came as an unspoken disappointment to the friends as they set their camp in a sheltered spot near the banks of the river.
“Be knowin’ that nights like that are few,” Bruenor observed as the first ray of light crept over the eastern horizon. A glimmer edged his eye, a hint of the wondrous fantasizing that the normally practical dwarf rarely enjoyed.
Drizzt noted the dwarf’s dreamy glow and thought of the nights that he and Bruenor had spent on Bruenor’s Climb, their special meeting place, back in the dwarf’s valley in Ten-Towns. “Too few,” he agreed.
With a resigned sigh, they set to work, Drizzt and Wulfgar starting breakfast while Bruenor and Regis examined the map they had obtained in Luskan.
For all of his grumbling and teasing about the halfling, Bruenor had pressured him to come along for a very definite reason, aside from their friendship, and though the dwarf had masked his emotions well, he was truly overjoyed when Regis had come up huffing and puffing on the road out of Ten-Towns in a last-minute plea to join the quest.
Regis knew the land south of the Spine of the World better than any of them. Bruenor himself hadn’t been out of Icewind Dale in nearly two centuries, and then he had been just an unbearded dwarf-child. Wulfgar had never left the dale, and Drizzt’s only trek across the world’s surface had been a nighttime adventure, skipping from shadow to shadow and avoiding many of the places the companions would need to search out, if they were ever to find Mithril Hall.
Regis ran his fingers across the map, excitedly recalling to Bruenor his experiences in each of the places listed, particularly Mirabar, the mining city of great wealth to the north, and Waterdeep, true to its name as the City of Splendors, down the coast to the south.
Bruenor slipped his finger across the map, studying the physical features of the terrain. “Mirabar’d be more to me liking,” he said at length, tapping the mark of the city tucked within the southern slopes of the Spine of the World. “Mithril Hall’s in mountains, that much I know, and not aside the sea.”
Regis considered the dwarf’s observations for just a moment, then plunked his finger down on yet another spot, by the scale of the map a hundred miles and more inland from Luskan. “Longsaddle,” he said. “Halfway to Silverymoon, and halfway between Mirabar and Waterdeep. A good place to search out our course.”
“A city?” Bruenor asked, for the mark on the map was no more than a small black dot.
“A village,” Regis corrected. “There are not many people there, but a family of wizards, the Harpells, have lived there for many years and know the northland as well as any. They would be happy to help us.”
Bruenor scratched his chin and nodded. “A fair hike. What might we be seeing along the way?”
“The crags,” Regis admitted, a bit disheartened as he remembered the place. “Wild and orc-filled. I wish we had another road, but Longsaddle still seems the best choice.”
“All roads in the north hold danger,” Bruenor reminded him.
They continued their scrutiny of the map, Regis recalling more and more as they went. A series of unusual and unidentified markings—three in particular, running in an almost straight line due east of Luskan to the river network south of Lurkwood—caught Bruenor’s eye.
“Ancestral mounds,” Regis explained. “Holy places of the Uthgardt.”
“Uthgardt?”
“Barbarians,” answered Regis grimly. “Like those in the dale. More wise to the ways of civilization, perhaps, but no less fierce. Their separate tribes are all about the northland, wandering the wilds.