Perhaps it was Entreri, though, who didn’t truly understand his enemy, or how completely Rassiter and his wretched minions had come to dominate the streets over the last three years. Less than five minutes after Entreri had gone, Dondon’s door swung open again.
And Rassiter stepped through.
“What did he want?” the swaggering fighter asked, plopping comfortably into a chair at the table.
Dondon moved away uneasily, noticing two more of Rassiter’s cronies standing guard in the hall. After more than a year, the halfling still felt uncomfortable around Rassiter.
“Come, come now,” Rassiter prompted. He asked again, his tone more grim, “What did he want?”
The last thing Dondon wanted was to get caught in a crossfire between the wererats and the assassin, but he had little choice but to answer Rassiter. If Entreri ever learned of the double-cross, Dondon knew that his days swiftly end.
Yet, if he didn’t spill out to Rassiter, his demise would be no less certain, and the method less swift.
He sighed at the lack of options and spilled his story, detail by detail, to Rassiter.
Rassiter gave no countermands to Entreri’s instructions. He would let Dondon play out the scenario exactly as Entreri had devised it. Apparently, the wererat believed he could twist it into his own gains. He sat quietly for a long moment, scratching his hairless chin and savoring the anticipation of the easy victory, his broken teeth gleaming even a deeper yellow in the lamplight.
“You will run with us this night?” he asked the halfling, satisfied that the assassin business was completed. “The moon will be bright.” He squeezed one of Dondon’s cherublike cheeks. “The fur will be thick, eh?”
Dondon pulled away from the grasp. “Not this night,” he replied, a bit too sharply.
Rassiter cocked his head, studying Dondon curiously. He always had suspected that the halfling was not comfortable with his new station. Might this defiance be linked to the return of his old boss? Rassiter wondered.
“Tease him and die,” Dondon replied, drawing an even more curious look from the wererat.
“You have not begun to understand this man you face,” Dondon continued, unshaken. “Artemis Entreri is not to be toyed with—not by the wise. He knows everything. If a half-sized rat is seen running with the pack, then my life is forfeit and your plans are ruined.” He moved right up, in spite of his revulsion for the man, and set a grave visage barely an inch from Rassiter’s nose.
“Forfeit,” he reiterated, “at the least.”
Rassiter spun out of the chair, sending it bouncing across the room. He had heard too much about Artemis Entreri in a single day for his liking. Everywhere he turned, trembling lips uttered the assassin’s name.
Don’t they know? he told himself once again as he strode angrily to the door. It is Rassiter they should fear!
He felt the telltale itching on his chin, then the crawling sensation of tingling growth swept through his body. Dondon backed away and averted his eyes, never comfortable with the spectacle.
Rassiter kicked off his boots and loosened his shirt and pants. The hair was visible now, rushing out of his skin in scraggly patches and clumps. He fell back against the wall as the fever took him completely. His skin bubbled and bulged, particularly around his face. He sublimated his scream as his snout elongated, though the wash of agony was no less intense this time—perhaps the thousandth time—than it had been during his very first transformation.
He stood then before Dondon on two legs, as a man, but whiskered and furred and with a long pink tail that ran out the back of his trousers, as a rodent.
“Join me?” he asked the halfling.
Hiding his revulsion, Dondon quickly declined. Looking at the ratman, the halfling wondered how he had ever allowed Rassiter to bite him, infecting him with his lycanthropic nightmare. “It will bring you power!” Rassiter had promised.
But at what cost? Dondon thought. To look and smell like a rat? No blessing this, but a disease.
Rassiter guessed at the halfling’s distaste, and he curled his rat snout back in a threatening hiss, then turned for the door.
He spun back on Dondon before exiting the room. “Keep away from this!” he warned the halfling. “Do as you were bid and hide away!”
“No doubt to that,” Dondon whispered as the door slammed shut.
The aura that distinguished Calimport as home to so very many Calishites came across as foul to the strangers from the North. Truly, Drizzt, Wulfgar, Bruenor, and Catti-brie were weary of the Calim Desert when their five-day trek came to an end, but looking down on the city of Calimport made them want to turn around and take to the sands once again.
It was wretched Memnon on a grander scale, with the divisions of wealth so blatantly obvious that Calimport cried out as ultimately perverted to the four friends. Elaborate houses, monuments to excess and hinting at wealth beyond imagination, dotted the cityscape. Yet, right beside those palaces loomed lane after lane of decrepit shanties of crumbling clay or ragged skins. The friends couldn’t guess how many people roamed the place—certainly more than Waterdeep and Memnon combined!—and they knew at once that in Calimport, as in Memnon, no one had ever bothered to count.
Sali Dalib dismounted, bidding the others do likewise, and led them down a final hill and into the unwalled city. The friends found the sights of Calimport no better up close. Naked children, their bellies bloated from lack of food, scrambled out of the way or were simply trampled as gilded, slave-drawn carts rushed through the streets. Worse still were the sides of those avenues, ditches mostly, serving as open sewers in the city’s poorest sections. There were thrown the bodies of the impoverished, who had fallen to the roadside at the end of their miserable days.
“Suren Rumblebelly never told of such sights when he spoke of home,” Bruenor grumbled, pulling his cloak over his face to deflect the awful stench. “Past me guessing why he’d long for this place!”
“De greatest city in de world, dis be!” Sali Dalib spouted, lifting his arms to enhance his praise.
Wulfgar, Bruenor and Catti-brie shot him incredulous stares. Hordes of people begging and starving was not their idea of greatness. Drizzt paid the merchant no heed, though. He was busy making the inevitable comparison between Calimport and another city he had known, Menzoberranzan. Truly there were similarities, and death was no less common in Menzoberranzan, but Calimport somehow seemed fouler than the city of the drow. Even the weakest of the dark elves had the means to protect himself, with strong family ties and deadly innate abilities. The pitiful peasants of Calimport, though, and more so their children, seemed helpless and hopeless indeed.
In Menzoberranzan, those on the lowest rungs of the power ladder could fight their way to a better standing. For the majority of Calimport’s multitude, though, there would only be poverty, a day-to-day squalid existence until they landed on the piles of buzzard-pecked bodies in the ditches.
“Take us to the guildhouse of Pasha Pook,” Drizzt said, getting to the point, wanting to be done with his business and out of Calimport, “then you are dismissed.”
Sali Dalib paled at the request. “Pasha Poop?” he stammered. “Who is dis?”
“Bah!” Bruenor snorted, moving dangerously close to the merchant. “He knows him.”
“Suren he does,” Catti-brie observed, “and fears him.”
“Sali Dalib not—” the merchant began.
Twinkle came out of its sheath and slipped to a stop under the merchant’s chin, silencing the man instantly. Drizzt let his mask slip a bit, reminding Sali Dalib of the drow’s heritage. Once again, his suddenly grim demeanor unnerved even his own friends. “I think of my friend,” Drizzt said in a calm, low tone, his lavender eyes absently staring into the city, “tortured even as we delay.”