“I’m going up tonight,” Drizzt informed Regis over supper.

“To Bruenor’s Climb?”

“To where it was before the collapse, yes. I will stoke the fire well before I go, I promise, and leave Guenhwyvar beside you until I return.”

“Let it burn low, and keep or release the cat as she needs,” Regis answered. “I’m going with you.”

Surprised, but pleasantly so, Drizzt nodded. He kept Guenhwyvar by his side as he and Regis made a silent ascent to the top of Kelvin’s Cairn. It was a difficult climb, with few trails, and those along icy rocks, but less than an hour later, the companions stepped out from behind one overhang to find that they had reached the peak. The tundra spread wide before them, and stars twinkled all around them.

The three of them stood there in communion with Icewind Dale, in harmony with the cycles of life and death, in contemplation of eternity and a oneness of being with all the great universe, for a long time. They took great comfort in feeling so much a part of something larger than themselves.

And somewhere in the north, a campfire flared to life, seeming like another star.

They each wondered silently if Wulfgar might be sitting beside it, rubbing the cold from his strong hands.

A wolf howled from somewhere unseen, and another answered, then still more took up the nighttime song of Icewind Dale.

Guenhwyvar growled softly, not angered, excited, or uneasy, but simply to speak to the heavens and the wind.

Drizzt crouched beside her and looked across her back to meet Regis’s stare. Each knew well what the other was thinking and feeling and remembering, and there was no need at all for words, so none were spoken.

It was a night that they, all three, would remember for the rest of their lives.

CHAPTER 20

THE BETTER NATURES OF MEN

T his was not my intent,” Captain Deudermont told the gathered Luskar, his strong voice reaching out through the driving rain. “My life was the sea, and perhaps will be again, but for now I accept your call to serve as governor of Luskan.”

The cheering overwhelmed the drumbeat of raindrops.

“Marvelous,” Robillard muttered from the back of the stage—the stage built for Prisoner’s Carnival, the brutal face of Luskar justice.

“I have sailed to many lands and seen many ways,” Deudermont went on and many in the crowd demanded quiet of their peers, for they wanted to savor the man’s every word. “I have known Waterdeep and Baldur’s Gate, Memnon and faraway Calimport, and every port in between. I have seen far better leaders than Arklem Greeth—” the mere mention of the name brought a long hiss from the thousands gathered—“but never have I witnessed a people stronger in courage and character than those I see before me now,” the governor went on, and the cheering erupted anew.

“Would that they would shut up that we might be done with this, and out of the miserable rain,” Robillard grumbled.

“Today I make my first decree,” the governor declared, “that this stage, that this abomination known as Prisoner’s Carnival, is now and forever ended!”

The response—some wild cheering, many curious stares, and more than a few sour expressions—reminded Deudermont of the enormity of the task before him. The carnival was among the most barbaric circuses Deudermont had ever witnessed, where men and women, some guilty, some probably not, were publicly tortured, humiliated, even gruesomely murdered. In Luskan, many called it entertainment.

“I will work with the high captains, who will leave our long-ago battles out to sea, I’m sure,” Deudermont moved along. “Together we will forge from Luskan a shining example of what can be, when the greater and common good is the goal, and the voices of the least are heard as strongly as those of the nobility.”

More cheering made Deudermont pause yet again.

“He is an optimistic sort,” muttered Robillard.

“And why not?” asked Suljack, who sat beside him, the lone high captain who had accepted the invitation to sit on the dais behind Deudermont, and had only committed to do so at the insistence of Kensidan. Being out there, listening to Deudermont, and to the cheers coming back at the dais from the throng of Luskar, had Suljack sitting taller and leaning this way and that with some enthusiasm.

Robillard ignored him and leaned forward. “Captain,” he called, getting Deudermont’s attention. “Would you have half your subjects fall ill from the wet and cold?”

Deudermont smiled at the not-so-subtle hint.

“Go to your homes, now, and take heart,” Deudermont bade the crowd. “Be warm, and be filled with hope. The day has turned, and though Talos the Storm Lord has not yet heard, the skies are brighter in Luskan!”

That brought the loudest cheering of all.

“Three times he put me to the bottom,” Baram growled, watching with Taerl from a balcony across the way. “Three times that dog Deudermont and his fancy Sea Sprite, curse her name, dropped me ship out from under me, and one of them times, ’e got me landed in Prisoner’s Carnival.” He pulled up his sleeve, showing a series of burn scars where he’d been prodded with a hot poker. “Cost me more to bribe me way out than it cost for a new ship.”

“Deudermont’s a dog, to be sure,” Taerl agreed. He smiled as he finished, nudged his partner, and pointed down to the back of the square, where most of the city’s magistrates huddled under an awning. “Not a one o’ them’s happy at the call for the end o’ their fun.”

Baram snorted as he considered the grim expressions on the faces of the torturers. They reveled in their duties; they called Prisoner’s Carnival a necessary evil for the administration of justice. But Baram, who had sat in the cells of the limestone holding caves, who had been paraded across that stage, who had paid two of them handsomely to get his reduced sentence—he should have been drawn and quartered for the pirate he was—knew they had all profited from bribes, as well.

“I’m thinking that the rain’s fitting for the day’s events,” Baram remarked. “Lots o’ storm clouds in Luskan’s coming days.”

“Ye’d not be thinking that looking at the fool Suljack, sitting there all a’titter at the dog Deudermont’s every word,” Taerl said, and Baram issued a low growl.

“He’s looking for a way to up himself on Deudermont’s sleeve,” Taerl went on. “He knows he’s the least among us, and now’s thinking himself to be the cleverest.”

“Too clever by half,” Baram said, and there was no missing the threatening tone in his voice.

“Chaos,” Taerl agreed. “Kensidan wanted chaos, and claimed we five would be better for it, eh? So let’s us be better, I say.”

As gently as a father lifting an injured daughter, the lich scooped the weathered body of Valindra Shadowmantle into his arms. He cradled her close, that dark and rainy evening, the same day Deudermont had made his “I am your god” speech to the idiot peasants of Luskan.

He didn’t use the bridge to cross from blasted Cutlass Island to Closeguard, but simply walked into the water. He didn’t need air, nor did Valindra, after all. He moved into an underwater cave beneath the rim of Closeguard then to the sewer system that took him to the mainland, under his new home: Illusk, where he placed Valindra gently in a curtained bed of soft satin and velvet.

When he poured an elixir down her throat a short while later, the woman coughed out the rain, blood, and seawater. Groggily, she sat up and found that her breathing was hard to come by. She forced the air in and out of her lungs, taking in the many unfamiliar and curious smells as she did. She finally settled and glanced through a crack in the canopy.

“The Hosttower…” she rasped, straining with every word. “We survived. I thought the witch had killed…”