Maimun’s own accusations against Deudermont, his claims that Deudermont’s authoritarian nature was no better for the people he claimed to serve than were the methods of the enemies he tried to defeat, rang hollow to the young pirate in that moment of great pain. He felt unsure of himself, as if the axioms upon which he had built his adult life were neither as resolute nor as morally pure, and as if Deudermont’s imposition of order might not be so absolutely bad, as he had believed.
“You tried, Captain,” he said. “That is all any of us can ever do.”
He ended with a wail, for he realized that the captain had not heard him, that Captain Deudermont, who had been as a father to him in years past, was dead.
Sobbing, Maimun gently stroked the captain’s bloody face. Again he thought of their first meeting, of those early, good years together aboard Sea Sprite.
With a growl of defiance, Maimun cradled Deudermont, shoulders and knees, and gently lifted the man into his arms as he stood straight.
He walked out of Suljack’s palace, onto Luskan’s streets, where the fighting had strangely quieted as news of the captain’s demise began to spread.
Head up, eyes straight ahead, Maimun walked to the dock, and he waited patiently, holding Deudermont all the while, as a small boat fromThrice Lucky was rowed furiously to retrieve him.
“Oh, but what a shot ye took on yer crown, and if yer head’s hurting as much as me own, then suren yer head’s hurtin’ more’n ever ye’ve known! Bwahahaha!”
The dwarf’s rhyming words drew Drizzt out of the darkness, however much he wanted to avoid them. He opened his groggy eyes, to find himself sitting in a comfortably-adorned room—a room in the Red Dragon Inn, he realized, a room in which he and Deudermont had shared several meals and exchanged many words.
And there was the dwarf, Athrogate, his adversary, sitting calmly across from him, weapons tucked into their sheaths across his back.
Drizzt couldn’t sort it out, but then he remembered Regis. He bolted upright, eyes scanning the room, hands going to his belt.
His blades were not there. He didn’t know what to think.
And his confusion only heightened when Jarlaxle Baenre and Kimmuriel Oblodra walked into the room.
It made sense, of course, given Drizzt’s failed—psionically blocked—strike against Athrogate, and he placed then the moment when he had felt that strange sensation of his energy being absorbed before, in a fight with Artemis Entreri, a fight overseen by this very pair of drow.
Drizzt fell back, a bitter expression clouding his face. “I should have guessed your handiwork,” he grumbled.
“Luskan’s fall?” Jarlaxle asked. “But you give me too much credit—or blame, my friend. What you see around you was not my doing.”
Drizzt eyed the mercenary with clear skepticism.
“Oh, but you wound me with your doubts!” Jarlaxle added, heaving a great sigh. He calmed quickly and moved to Drizzt, taking a chair with him. He flipped it around and sat on it backward, propping his elbows on the high back and staring Drizzt in the eye.
“We didn’t do this,” Jarlaxle insisted.
“My fight with the dwarf?”
“We did intervene in that, of course,” the drow mercenary admitted. “I couldn’t have you destroying so valuable an asset as that one.”
“And yes, you surely could have,” Kimmuriel muttered, speaking in the language of the drow.
“All of it, I mean,” Jarlaxle went on without missing a beat. “This was not our doing, but rather the work of ambitious men.”
“The high captains,” Drizzt reasoned, though he still didn’t believe it.
“And Deudermont,” Jarlaxle added. “Had he not surrendered to his own foolish ambition….”
“Where is he?” Drizzt demanded, sitting up tall once more.
Jarlaxle’s expression grew grim and Drizzt held his breath.
“Alas, he has fallen,” Jarlaxle explained. “And Sea Sprite lays wrecked on rocks in the harbor, though most of her crew have escaped the city aboard another ship.”
Drizzt tried not to sink back, but the weight of Deudermont’s death fell heavily on his shoulders. He had known the man for so many years, had considered him a dear friend, a good man, a great leader.
“This was not my work,” Jarlaxle insisted, forcing Drizzt to look him in the eye. “Nor the work of any of my band. On my word.”
“You lurked around its edges,” Drizzt accused, and Jarlaxle offered a conciliatory shrug.
“We meant to…indeed, we mean to, make the most of the chaos,” Jarlaxle said. “I’ll not deny my attempt to profit, as I would have tried had Deudermont triumphed.”
“He would have rejected you,” Drizzt spat, and again, Jarlaxle shrugged.
“Likely,” he conceded. “Then perhaps it’s best for me that he didn’t win. I didn’t create the end, but I will certainly exploit it.”
Drizzt glared at him.
“But I’m not without some redeeming qualities,” Jarlaxle reminded. “You are alive, after all.”
“I would have won the fight outright, had you not intervened,” Drizzt reminded him.
“That fight, perhaps, but what of the hundred following?”
Drizzt just continued to glare, unrelenting—until the door opened and Regis, battered, but very much alive, and seeming quite well considering his ordeal, stepped into the room.
Robillard stood at the rail of Thrice Lucky, staring back at the distant skyline of Luskan.
“Was Morik the Rogue who plucked you from the waves,” Maimun said to him, walking over to join him.
“Tell him I won’t kill him, then,” Robillard replied. “Today.”
Maimun chuckled, though there remained profound sadness behind his laugh, at the unrelenting sarcasm of the dour wizard. “Do you thinkSea Sprite might be salvaged?” he asked
“Do I care?”
Maimun found himself at a loss to reply to the blunt answer, though he suspected it to be more an expression of anger and grief than anything else.
“Well, if you manage it, I can only hope that you and your crew will be too busy exacting revenge upon Luskan to chase the likes of me across the waves,” the young pirate remarked.
Robillard looked at him, finally, and managed a smirk. “Neither fight seems worth a pile of rotting fish,” he said, and he and Maimun looked at each other deeply then, sharing the moment of painful reality.
“I miss him, too,” Maimun said.
“I know you do, boy,” said Robillard.
Maimun put a hand on Robillard’s shoulder, then walked away, leaving the wizard to his grief. Robillard had guaranteed him safe passage forThrice Lucky through Waterdeep, and he trusted the wizard’s words.
What the young pirate didn’t trust at that moment were his own instincts. Deudermont’s fall had hit him profoundly, had made him think, for the first time in many years, that the world might be more complicated than his idealistic sensibilities had allowed.
“We could not have asked for a better outcome,” Kensidan insisted to the gathering at Ten Oaks. Baram and Taerl exchanged doubtful looks, but Kurth nodded his agreement with the Crow’s assessment.
The streets of Luskan were quiet again, for the first time since Deudermont and Lord Brambleberry had put into the docks. The high captains had retreated to their respective corners; only Suljack’s former domain remained in disarray.
“The city is ours” Kensidan said.
“Aye, and half of it’s dead, and many others have run off,” Baram replied.
“Unwanted and unnecessary fodder,” said Kensidan. “We who remain, control. None who don’t trade for us or fight for us or otherwise work for us belong here. This is no city for families and mundane issues. Nay, my comrades, Luskan is a free port now. A true free port. The only true free port in all the world.”
“Can we survive without the institutions of a real city?” Kurth asked. “What foes might come against us, I wonder?”