The young drow lifted the rod up to the rift, licked his lips again, and spoke the words of command. The magical implement flared with a brief burst of power that flowed its length and leaped out at the rift.

Back came a profound darkness, a gray mist that rolled through the conduit and surged into the hand of the drow warrior, who wasn’t wise enough or quick enough to drop the rod in time.

He did drop it when his arm fell limp. He looked at Kimmuriel and the others, his face stretching into the most profound expression of terror any of them had ever witnessed as his life-force withered to shadowstuff and his empty husk fell dead to the ground.

No one went to aid him, or even to investigate.

“We cannot close it,” Kimmuriel announced. “We are done here.”

He led them away at a swift pace, Valas recalling his scouts as they went.

As soon as he thought them far enough so that the rift’s continuing fields wouldn’t interfere, Kimmuriel enacted another of his dimensional doorways.

“Back to Luskan?” Mariv asked as the next least of the band was brought forward to ensure the integrity of the gate.

“For now, yes,” answered Kimmuriel, who was thinking that perhaps their road would lead them much farther than Luskan, all the way back into the Underdark and Menzoberranzan, where they would become part of a drow defense comprised of twenty thousand warriors, priestesses, and wizards.

The young drow stepped through and signaled from the other side, from the subterranean home Kimmuriel’s band had constructed under the distant port city on the Sword Coast.

The Bregan D’aerthe force departed the Barony of Impresk as swiftly and silently as they had come.

The human refugees’ eyes, too, stung as they came in sight of the surface world after several long and miserable days of wandering and fighting in the dark tunnels. Squinting against the sunrise reflecting across Impresk Lake, Ivan led the group to the edge of the cave at the back of the small cove.

The rest of the group crowded up beside him, eager to feel the sun on their faces, desperate to be out from under tons of rock and earth. Collectively, they took great comfort in the quiet of the morning, with no sounds other than the songs of birds and the lap of waves against the rocks.

Ivan brought them quickly into the open air. They had found more slaughtered nightwings, nightwalkers, and crawlers. Convinced that the tunnels were infested with dark elves, Ivan and the others were happy indeed to be out of them!

Getting out of the cove took longer than expected. They didn’t dare venture out near the deeper water, having seen too much of the undead fish. Getting up the cliff face, for they had come down with magical help from Pikel, was no easy task for the weary humans or the short-legged dwarves. They tried several routes unsuccessfully and eventually crossed the cove and climbed the lower northern rise. The sun was high in the eastern sky when they at last managed to circle around and come in sight of Carradoon.

For a long, long while, they stood on the high bluff looking down at the ruins, saying not a word, making not a sound other than the occasional sob.

“We got no reason to go in there,” Ivan asserted at length. “We have friends—” a man started to protest.

“Ain’t nothing alive in there,” Ivan interrupted. “Nothing alive ye’re wantin’ to see, at least.”

“Our homes!” a woman wailed. “Are gone,” Ivan replied.

“Then what are we to do?” the first man shouted at him.

“Ye get on the road and get out o’ here,” said Ivan. “Meself and me brother’re for Spirit Soaring …”

“Me brudder!” Pikel cheered, and pumped his stump into the air.

“And Cadderly’s kids with us,” Ivan added.

“Shalane is no farther, and down a safer road,” the man argued.

“Then take it,” Ivan said to him. “And good luck to ye.” It seemed as simple as that to the dwarf, and he started away to the west, a route to circumvent the destroyed Carradoon and pick up the trail that led into the mountains and back to Spirit Soaring.

“What is happening to the world, Uncle Ivan?” Hanaleisa whispered.

“Durned if I know, girl. Durned if I know.”

CHAPTER 27

ELSEWHERE LUCIDITY

Cadderly tapped a finger against his lips as he studied the woman playing out the scene before him. She was talking to Guenhwyvar, he believed, and he couldn’t help but feel like a voyeur as he studied her reenactment of a private moment.

“Oh, but she’s so pretty and fancy, isn’t she?” Catti-brie said, her hand brushing the air as if she were petting the great panther as it curled near her feet. “With her lace and finery, so tall and so straight, and not a silly word to pass those painted lips, no, no.”

She was there, but she wasn’t, Cadderly sensed. Her movements were too complete and too complex to be merely a normal memory. No, she was reliving the moment precisely as it had occurred. Catti-brie’s mind was back in time while her physical form was trapped in the current time and space.

With his unique experience regarding physical aging and regression, Cadderly was struck by the woman’s apparent madness. Was she really mad, he wondered, or was she, perhaps, trapped in a bona fide but unknown series of disjointed bubbles in the vast ocean of time? Cadderly had often pondered the past, had often wondered if each passing moment was a brief observance of an eternal play, or whether the past was truly lost as soon as the next moment was found.

Watching Catti-brie, it seemed to him that the former wasn’t as unrealistic as logic implied.

Was there a way to travel in time? Was there a way to bring foresight to those unanticipated preludes to disaster?

“Do ye think her pretty, Guen?” Catti-brie asked, drawing him from his contemplation.

The door behind Cadderly opened, and he glanced to see Drizzt enter the room, the drow wincing as soon as he recognized that Catti-brie had entered another of her fits. Cadderly begged him to silence with a wave and a finger over pursed lips, and Drizzt, Catti-brie’s dinner tray in hand, stood very still, staring at his beloved wife.

“Drizzt thinks her pretty,” Catti-brie continued, oblivious to them. “He goes to Silverymoon whenever he can, and part o’ that’s because he’s thinking Alustriel pretty.” The woman paused and looked up, though surely not at Cadderly and Drizzt, and wore a smile that was both sweet and pained. “I hope he finds love, I do,” she told the panther they could not see. “But not with her, or one o’ her court, for then he’s sure to leave us. I’m wantin’ him happy, but that I could’no’ take.”

Cadderly looked at Drizzt questioningly.

“When first we retook Mithral Hall,” he said.

“You and Lady Alustriel?” Cadderly asked.

“Friends,” Drizzt replied, never taking his eyes off his wife. “She allowed me passage in Silverymoon, and there I knew I could make great strides toward finding some measure of acceptance in the World Above.” He motioned to Catti-brie. “How long?”

“She has been in this different place for quite a while.”

“And there she is my Catti,” Drizzt lamented. “In this elsewhere of her mind, she finds herself.”

The woman began to shake then, her hands twitching, her head going back, her eyes rolling up to white. The purple glow of faerie fire erupted around her once more and she rose a bit higher from the floor, arms going out wide, her auburn hair blowing in some unfelt wind.

Drizzt put the tray down and adjusted the eye patch. He hesitated only a few moments, at Cadderly’s insistence, as the priest moved closer to Catti-brie, even dared touch her during the dangerous time of transition. Cadderly closed his eyes and opened his mind to the possibilities swirling in the discordant spasms of the tortured woman.