Bruenor’s eyelids drooped heavily and his skin held a ghastly hue of blue, and for the first time in his life, his indomitable spirit had no gumption for the fight. Wulfgar, too, had suffered the icy touch in his pass through the ghost, but he was still more than ready for another round with the thing.
“We can’t fight it!” Bruenor gasped through his chattering teeth. “Here for a strike, it is, but gone when we hit back!”
Wulfgar shook his head defiantly. “There is a way!” he demanded, though he had to concede the dwarf’s point. “But my hammer cannot destroy clouds!”
Guenhwyvar appeared beside its master and crouched low, seeking the nemesis that threatened the drow.
Drizzt understood the cat’s intentions. “No!” he commanded. “Not here.” The drow had recalled something that Guenhwyvar had done several months earlier. To save Regis from the falling stone of a crumbling tower, Guenhwyvar had taken the halfling on a journey through the planes of existence. Drizzt grabbed onto the panther’s thick coat.
“Take me to the land of the ghost,” he instructed. “To its own plane, where my weapons will bite deeply into its substantial being.”
The ghost appeared again as Drizzt and the cat faded into their own cloud.
“Keep swinging!” Bruenor told his companion. “Keep it as smoke so’s it can’t get at ye!”
“Drizzt and the cat have gone!” Wulfgar cried.
“To the land of the ghost,” Bruenor explained.
It took Drizzt a long moment to set his bearings. He had come into a place of different realities, a dimension where everything, even his own skin, assumed the same hue of gray, objects being distinguishable only by a thin waver of black that outlined them. His depth perception was useless, for there were no shadings, and no discernible light sources to use as a guide. And he found no footing, nothing tangible beneath him, nor could he even know which way was up or down. Such concepts didn’t seem to fit here.
He did make out the shifting outlines of the Pegasus as it jumped between planes, never fully in one place or the other. He tried to approach it and found propulsion to be an act of the mind, his body automatically following the instructions of his will. He stopped before the shifting lines, his magical scimitar poised to strike when the target fully appeared.
Then the outline of the Pegasus was complete and Drizzt plunged his blade into the black waver that marked its form. The line shifted and bent, and the outline of the scimitar shivered as well, for here even the properties of the steel blade took on a different composition. But the steel proved the stronger and the scimitar resumed its curved edge and punctured the line of the ghost. There came a sudden tingling in the grayness, as though Drizzt’s cut had disturbed the equilibrium of the plane, and the ghost’s line trembled in a shiver of agony.
Wulfgar saw the smoke cloud puff suddenly, almost reforming into the ghost shape. “Drizzt!” he called out to Bruenor. “He has met the ghost on even terms!”
“Get ye ready, then!” Bruenor replied anxiously, though he knew that his own part in the fight had ended. “The drow might bring it back to ye long enough for a hit!” Bruenor clutched at his sides, trying to hug the deathly cold out of his bones, and stumbled over to the halfling’s unmoving form.
The ghost turned on Drizzt, but the scimitar struck again. And Guenhwyvar jumped into the fray, the cat’s great claws tearing into the black outline of its enemy. The Pegasus reeled away from them, understanding that it held no advantage against foes on its own plane. Its only recourse was a retreat back to the material plane.
Where Wulfgar waited.
As soon as the cloud resumed its shape, Aegis-fang hammered into it. Wulfgar felt a solid strike for just a moment, and knew that he had hit his mark. Then the smoke blew away before him.
The ghost was back with Drizzt and Guenhwyvar, again facing their relentless stabs and rakes. It shifted back again, and Wulfgar struck quickly. Trapped with no retreat, the ghost took hits from both planes. Every time it materialized before Drizzt, the drow noted that its outline came thinner and less resistant to his thrusts. And every time the cloud reformed before Wulfgar, its density had diminished. The friends had won, and Drizzt watched in satisfaction as the essence of the Pegasus slipped free of the material form and floated away through the grayness.
“Take me home,” the weary drow instructed Guenhwyvar. A moment later, he was back on the field beside Bruenor and Regis.
“He’ll live,” Bruenor stated flatly at Drizzt’s inquiring look. “More to faintin’ than to dying’d be me guess.”
A short distance away, Wulfgar, too, was hunched over a form, broken and twisted and caught in a transformation somewhere between man and beast. “Torlin, son of Jerek,” Wulfgar explained. He lifted his gaze back toward the barbarian camp. “Valric is has done this. The blood of Torlin soils his hands!”
“Torlin’s own choice, perhaps?” Drizzt offered.
“Never!” Wulfgar insisted. “When we met in challenge, my eyes looked upon honor. He was a warrior. He would never have allowed this!” He stepped away from the corpse, letting its mutilated remains emphasize the horror of the possession. In the frozen pose of death, Torlin’s face had retained half the features of a man, and half of the equine ghost.
“He was the son of their chieftain,” Wulfgar explained. “He could not refuse the demands of the shaman.”
“He was brave to accept such a fate,” Drizzt remarked.
“Son of their chieftain?” snorted Bruenor. “Seems we’ve put even more enemies on the road behind us! They’ll be looking to settle this score.”
“As will I!” Wulfgar proclaimed. “His blood is yours to carry, Valric High Eye!” he shouted into the distance, his calls echoing around the mounds of the crags. Wulfgar looked back to his friends, rage seething in his features, as he declared grimly, “I shall avenge Torlin’s dishonor.”
Bruenor nodded his approval at the barbarian’s dedication to his principles.
“An honorable task,” Drizzt agreed, holding his blade out to the east, toward Longsaddle, the next stop along their journey. “But one for another day.”
7. Dagger and Staff
Entreri stood on a hill a few miles outside the City of Sails, his campfire burning low behind him. Regis and friends had used this same spot for their last stop before they entered Luskan and, in fact, the assassin’s fire burned in the very same pit. This was no coincidence, though. Entreri had mimicked every move the halfling’s party had made since he had picked up their trail just south of the Spine of the World. He would move as they moved, shadowing their marches in an effort to better understand their actions.
Now, unlike the party before him, Entreri’s eyes were not on the city wall, nor toward Luskan at all. Several campfires had sprung up in the night to the north, on the road back to Ten-Towns. It wasn’t the first time those lights had appeared behind him, and the assassin sensed he, too, was being followed. He had slowed his frantic pace, figuring that he could easily make up the ground while the companions went about their business in Luskan. He wanted to secure his own back from any danger before concentrating on snaring the halfling. Entreri had even left telltale signs of his passing, baiting his pursuers in closer.
He kicked the embers of the fire low and climbed back into the saddle, deciding it better to meet a sword face to face than to take a dagger in the back.
Into the night he rode, confident in the darkness. This was his time, where every shadow added to the advantage of one who lived in shadows.
He tethered his mount before midnight, close enough to the campfires to finish the trek on foot. He realized now that this was a merchant caravan; not an uncommon thing on the road to Luskan at this time of year. But his sense of danger nagged at him. Many years of experience had honed his instinct for survival and he knew better than to ignore it.