Each man made a mental note to not anger the Lady Raurym.

Valindra seemed to get the message as well, for she said no more.

Robillard led them up a tumble of boulders to get a view over the wall. The fighting was thick and vicious all around the five-spired tower. The ship’s wizard quickly formulated an approach to best come onto the field, and was about to relay it to his charges when the staff broke.

The world seemed to fall apart.

Maimun saved Robillard that day, the young pirate reacting with amazing agility to pull the older wizard down behind the rocks beside him. Similarly, Arabeth rescued Valindra, albeit inadvertently, for as she, too, dived back, she brushed the captive enough to send her tumbling down as well.

The wave of energy rolled over them. Rocks went flying and several of Robillard’s force fell hard, more than one mortally wounded. They were on the outer edge of the blast and so it passed quickly. Robillard, Maimun, and Arabeth all scrambled to their feet quickly enough to peer over and witness the fall of the Hosttower itself. The largest, central pillar, Greeth’s own, was gone, as if it had either been blown to dust or had simply vanished—and it truth, it was a bit of both. The four armlike spires, the once graceful limbs, tumbled down, crashing in burning heaps and billowing clouds of angry gray dust.

The warriors on the field, man and monster alike, had fallen in neat rows, like cut timber, and though groans and cries told Robillard and the others that some had survived, none of the three believed for a heartbeat that number to be large.

“By the gods, Greeth, what have you done?” Robillard asked into the empty and suddenly still morning air.

Arabeth gave a sudden cry of dismay and fell back, and neither Maimun nor Robillard considered her quickly enough to stop her as she leaped down at the face-down and battered Valindra and drove a dagger deep into the captured wizard’s back.

“No!” Robillard cried at her when he realized her action. “We need…” He stopped and grimaced as Arabeth retracted the blade and struck again, and again, and Valindra’s screams became muffled with blood.

Maimun finally got to Arabeth and pulled her back; Robillard called for a priest.

He waved back the first of the clerics that came forward, though, knowing that it was too late, and that others would need his healing prayers.

“What have you done?” Robillard asked Arabeth, who sobbed, but looked at the devastated field, not at her gruesome handiwork.

“It was better than she deserved,” Arabeth replied.

Glancing over his shoulder at the utter devastation of the Hosttower of the Arcane, and the men and women who had gone against it, Robillard found it hard to disagree.

CHAPTER 17

CONSEQUENCE

T he irony of pulling a battered, but very much alive Deudermont from the ground was not lost on Maimun, who considered how many others—they were all around him on the devastated field—would soon be put into the ground, and because of the decisions of that very same captain.

“Don’t kick a man who’s lying flat, I’ve been told,” Maimun muttered, and Robillard and Arabeth turned to regard him, as well as the half-conscious Deudermont. “But you’re an idiot, good captain.”

“Watch your tongue, young one,” Robillard warned.

“Better to remain silent than speak the truth and offend the powerful, yes Robillard?” Maimun replied with a sour and knowing grin.

“Remind me why Sea Sprite didn’t sink Thrice Lucky on the many occasions we’ve seen you at sea,” the wizard threatened. “I seem to forget.”

“My charm, no doubt.”

“Enough, you two,” Arabeth scolded, her voice trembling with every syllable. “Look around you! Is this travesty all about you? About your petty rivalry? About placing blame?”

“How can it not be about who’s to blame?” Maimun started to argue, but Arabeth cut him short with a vicious scowl.

“It’s about those scattered on this field, nothing more,” she said, her voice even. “Alive and dead…in the Hosttower and without.”

Maimun swallowed hard and glanced at Robillard, who seemed equally out of venom, and indeed, Arabeth’s argument was difficult to counter given the carnage around them. They finished extracting Deudermont at the same time that another rescue team called out that they had located Lord Brambleberry.

The ground covering him had saved him from the explosion, but had smothered him in the process. The young Waterdhavian lord, so full of ambition and vision, and the desire to earn his way, was dead.

There would be no cheering that day, and even if there had been, it would have been drowned out by the cries of anguish and agony.

Work went on through the night and into the next day, separating dead from wounded, tending to those who could be helped. Guided by Robillard, assault teams went into each of the four fallen spires of the destroyed Hosttower, and more than a few of Arklem Greeth’s minions were pulled from the rubble, all surrendering without a struggle, no fight left in them—not after seeing the unbridled evil of the man they’d once called the archmage arcane.

The cost had been horrific—more than a third of the population of the once-teeming city of Luskan was dead.

But the war was over.

Captain Deudermont shook his head solemnly.

“What does that mean?” Regis yelled at him. “You can’t just say he’s gone!”

“Many are just gone, my friend,” Deudermont explained. “The blast that took the Hosttower released all manner of magical power, destructive and altering. Men were burned and blasted, others transformed, and others, many others, banished from this world. Some were utterly destroyed, I’m told, their very souls disintegrated into nothingness.”

“And what happened to Drizzt?” Regis demanded.

“We cannot know. He is not to be found. Like so many. I’m sorry. I feel this loss as keenly as—”

“Shut up!” Regis yelled at him. “You don’t know anything! Robillard tried to warn you—many did! You don’t know anything! You chose this fight and look at what it has gotten you, what it has gotten us all!”

“Enough!” Robillard growled at the halfling, and he moved threateningly at Regis.

Deudermont held him back, though, understanding that Regis’s tirade was wrought of utter grief. How could it not be? Why should it not be? The loss of Drizzt Do’Urden was no small thing, after all, particularly not to the halfling that had spent the better part of the last decades by the dark elf’s side.

“We could not know the desperation of Arklem Greeth, or that he was capable of such wanton devastation,” Deudermont said, his voice quiet and humble. “But the fact that he was capable of it, and willing to do it, only proves that he had to be removed, by whatever means the people of Luskan could muster. He would have rained his devastation upon them sooner or later, and in more malicious forms, no doubt. Whether freeing the undead from the magical bindings of Illusk or using his wizards to slowly bleed the city into submission, he was no man worthy of being the leader of this city.”

“You act as if this city is worthy of having a leader,” Regis said.

“They stood arm in arm to win,” Deudermont scolded, growing excited—so much so that the priest attending him grabbed him by the shoulders to remind him that he had to stay calm. “Every family in Luskan feels grief as keen as your own. Doubt that not at all. The price of their freedom has been high indeed.”

“Their freedom, their fight,” the halfling spat.

“Drizzt marched with me willingly,” Deudermont reminded Regis. That was the last of it, though, as the priest forcibly guided the captain out of the room.

“You throw guilt on the shoulders of a man already bent low by its great weight,” Robillard said.