He crept in, seeking the easiest way into the circle of wagons. Merchants always lined many sentries around the perimeter of their camps, and even the pull-horses presented a problem, for the merchants kept them tied close beside their harnesses.
Still, the assassin would not waste his ride. He had come this far and meant to find out the purpose of those who followed him. Slithering on his belly, he made his way to the perimeter and began circling the camp underneath the defensive ring. Too silently for even wary ears to hear, he passed two guards playing at bones. Then he went under and between the horses, the beasts lowering their ears in fear, but remaining quiet.
Halfway around the circle, he was nearly convinced that this was an ordinary merchant caravan, and was just about to slip back into the night when he heard a familiar female voice.
“Ye said ye saw a spot o’ light in the distance.”
Entreri stopped, for he knew the speaker.
“Yeah, over there,” a man replied.
Entreri slipped up between the next two wagons and peeked over the side. The speakers stood a short distance from him, behind the next wagon, peering into the night in the direction of his camp. Both were dressed for battle, the woman wearing her sword comfortably.
“I have underestimated you,” Entreri whispered to himself as he viewed Catti-brie. His jeweled dagger was already in his hand. “A mistake I shan’t repeat,” he added, then crouched low and searched for a path to his target.
“Ye been good to me, for bringing me so fast,” Catti-brie said. “I’m owing to ye, as Regis and the others’ll be.”
“Then tell me,” the man urged. “What causes such urgency?”
Catti-brie struggled with the memories of the assassin. She hadn’t yet come to terms with her terror that day in the halfling’s house, and knew that she wouldn’t until she had avenged the deaths of the two dwarven friends and resolved her own humiliation. Her lips tightened and she did not reply.
“As you wish,” the man conceded. “Your reasons justify the run, we do not doubt. If we seem to pry, it only shows our desire to help you however we may.”
Catti-brie turned to him, a smile of sincere appreciation on her face. Enough had been said, and the two stood and stared at the empty horizon in silence.
Silent, too, was the approach of death.
Entreri slipped out from under the wagon and rose suddenly between them, one hand outstretched to each. He grasped Catti-brie’s neck tightly enough to prevent her scream, and he silenced the man forever with his blade.
Looking across the breadth of Entreri’s shoulders, Catti-brie saw the horrific expression locked onto her companion’s face, but she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t cried out, for his mouth was not covered.
Entreri shifted back a bit and she knew. Only the jeweled dagger’s hilt was visible, its crosspiece flat against the underside of the man’s chin. The slender blade had found the man’s brain before he ever realized the danger.
Entreri used the weapon’s handle to guide his victim quietly to the ground, then jerked it free.
Again the woman found herself paralyzed before the horror of Entreri. She felt that she should wrench away and shout out to the camp, even though he would surely kill her. Or draw her sword and at least try to fight back. But she watched helplessly as Entreri slipped her own dagger from her belt and, pulling her low with him, replaced it in the man’s fatal wound.
Then he took her sword and pushed her down under the wagon and out beyond the camp’s perimeter.
Why can’t I call out? she asked herself again and again, for the assassin, confident of the level of terror, didn’t even hold her as they slipped deeper into the night. He knew, and she had to admit to herself, that she would not give up her life so easily.
Finally, when they were a safe distance from the camp, he spun her around to face him—and the dagger. “Follow me?” he asked, laughing at her. “What could you hope to gain?”
She did not answer, but found some of her strength returning.
Entreri sensed it, too. “If you call out, I shall kill you,” he declared flatly. “And then, by my word, I shall return to the merchants and kill them all as well!”
She believed him.
“I often travel with the merchants,” she lied, holding the quiver in her voice. “It is one of the duties of my rank as a soldier of Ten-Towns.”
Entreri laughed at her again. Then he looked into the distance, his features assuming an introspective tilt. “Perhaps this will play to my advantage,” he said rhetorically, the beginnings of a plan formulating in his mind.
Catti-brie studied him, worried that he had found some way to turn her excursion into harm for her friends.
“I’ll not kill you—not yet,” he said to her. “When we find the halfling, his friends will not defend him. Because of you.”
“I’ll do nothing to aid ye!” Catti-brie spat.”Nothing!”
“Precisely,” Entreri hissed. “You shall do nothing. Not with a blade at your neck—” he brought the weapon up to her throat in a morbid tease—”scratching at your smooth skin. When I am done with my business, brave girl, I shall move on, and you shall be left with your shame and your guilt. And your answers to the merchants who believe you murdered their companion!” In truth, Entreri didn’t believe for a moment that his simple trick with Catti-brie’s dagger would fool the merchants. It was merely a psychological weapon aimed at the young woman, designed to instill yet another doubt and worry into her jumble of emotions.
Catti-brie did not reply to the assassin’s statements with any sign of emotion. No, she told herself, it won’t be like that!
But deep inside, she wondered if her determination only masked her fear, her own belief that she would be held again by the horror of Entreri’s presence, and that the scene would unfold exactly as he had predicted.
Jierdan found the campsite with little difficulty. Dendybar had used his magic to track the mysterious rider all the way from the mountains and had pointed the soldier in the right direction.
Tensed and his sword drawn, Jierdan moved in. The place was deserted, but it had not been that way for long. Even from a few feet away, the soldier from Luskan could feel the dying warmth of the campfire. Crouching low to mask his silhouette against the line of the horizon, he crept toward a pack and blanket off to the side of the fire.
Entreri rode his mount back into camp slowly, expecting that what he had left might have drawn some visitors. Catti-brie sat in front of him, securely bound and gagged, though she fully believed, to her own disgust, that her own terror made the bonds unnecessary.
The wary assassin realized that someone had entered the camp, before he had ever gotten near the place. He slid from his saddle, taking his prisoner with him. “A nervous steed,” he explained to Catti-brie, taking obvious pleasure in the grim warning as he tied her to the horse’s rear legs. “If you struggle, he will kick the life from you.”
Then Entreri was gone, blending into the night as though he were an extension of its darkness.
Jierdan dropped the pack back to the ground, frustrated, for its contents were merely standard traveling gear and revealed nothing about the owner. The soldier was a veteran of many campaigns and had bested man and orc alike a hundred times, but he was nervous now, sensing something unusual, and deadly, about the rider. A man with the courage to ride alone on the brutal course from Icewind Dale to Luskan was no novice to the ways of battle.
Jierdan was startled, then, but not too surprised, when the tip of a blade came to rest suddenly in the vulnerable hollow on the back of his neck, just below the base of his skull. He neither moved nor spoke, hoping that the rider would ask for some explanation before driving the weapon home.