The Last Threshold tns-4 Read online

  The Last Threshold

  ( The Neverwinter Saga - 4 )

  R. A. Salvatore

  R. A. Salvatore

  The Last Threshold

  PROLOGUE

  The Year of the Reborn Hero (1463 DR)

  You cannot presume that this creature is natural, in any sense of the word,” the dark-skinned Shadovar woman known as the Shifter told the old graybeard. “She is perversion incarnate.”

  The old druid Erlindir shuffled his sandal-clad feet and gave a great “harrumph!”

  “Incarnate, I tell you.” The Shifter tapped her finger against the old druid’s temple and ran it delicately down under his eye and across his cheek to touch his crooked nose.

  “So, you’re really in front of me this time,” Erlindir cackled, referring to the fact that when one addressed the Shifter, typically one was actually addressing a projected image, a phantasm, of the most elusive enchantress.

  “I told you that you could trust me, Birdcaller,” she replied, using a nickname she’d given him when she had met him at his grove many months before.

  “If I didn’t believe you, would I have come to this place?” He looked around at the dark images of the Shadowfell, his gaze settling on the twisted keep and tower before him, with its many spires and multiple-likely animated-gargoyles, all leering at him and smiling hungrily. They had just journeyed through a most unpleasant swamp, reeking of death and decay and populated by undead monstrosities. This castle was not much of an improvement.

  “Why, Erlindir, you flatter me so,” the Shifter teased, and she grabbed him by the chin and directed his gaze back to her face. Her spell wouldn’t last forever, she knew, and she didn’t want any of the unnatural images to shake the druid from his stupor. Erlindir was of the old school, after all, a disciple of the nature goddess Mielikki. “But remember why you are here.”

  “Yes, yes,” he replied, “this unnatural cat. You would have me destroy it, then?”

  “Oh, no, not that!” the Shifter exclaimed.

  Erlindir looked at her curiously.

  “My friend Lord Draygo has the panther,” the Shifter explained. “He is a warl-mage of great renown and tremendous power.” She paused to watch the druid’s reaction, fearing that her near slip-up might clue the old one into her ruse. There was a reason that swamp teemed with undead creatures. No druid, charmed or not, would be so eager to help a warlock.

  “Lord Draygo fears that the cat’s master is crafting other … abominations,” she lied. “I would like you to grant him affinity to the cat, that he might see through her eyes when she is summoned home, and cut her bindings to the Astral Plane and anchor her here instead.”

  Erlindir looked at her suspiciously.

  “Only for a short time,” she assured him. “We will destroy the cat when we’re sure that her master is not perverting nature for his ill intent. And destroy him, too, if needed.”

  “I would rather that you bring him to me, that I might learn the damage he has already caused,” Erlindir said.

  “So be it,” the enchantress readily agreed, since lies came so easily to her lips.

  “The gates were harder to maintain,” Draygo Quick whispered through his crystal ball to his peer, Parise Ulfbinder, a fellow high-ranking and powerful warlock who lived in a tower similar to Draygo’s in Shade Enclave, but upon the soil of Toril. “And my understudy told me that the shadowstep back to his home was not as easily accomplished as he had expected.”

  Parise stroked his small black beard-which, to Draygo, seemed curiously exaggerated in the contours of the crystal ball. “They warred with drow, did they not? And with drow spellspinners, no doubt.”

  “Not at that time, I don’t believe.”

  “But there were many drow in the bowels of Gauntlgrym.”

  “Yes, that is what I have been told.”

  “And Glorfathel?” Parise asked, referring to an elf mage of the mercenary group Cavus Dun, who had disappeared quite unexpectedly and quickly in Gauntlgrym right before the important confrontation.

  “No word,” Draygo Quick said. And he added quickly, “Yes, it is possible that Glorfathel created some magical waves to impede our retreat. We do not know that he betrayed us. Only the dwarf priestess.”

  Parise sat back and ran his fingers through his long black hair. “You don’t think it was Glorfathel who hindered the shadowsteps,” he stated.

  Draygo Quick shook his head.

  “You don’t think it was the work of drow mages, either, or of the priestess,” said Parise.

  “The shadowstep was more difficult,” Draygo argued. “There is change in the air.”

  “The Spellplague was change,” Parise said. “The advent of Shadow was change. The new reality is now simply settling.”

  “Or the old reality is preparing to return?” Draygo Quick asked. At the other end of the crystal ball, Parise Ulfbinder could only sigh and shrug.

  It was just a theory, after all, a belief based on the reading by Parise, Draygo Quick, and some others, of “Cherlrigo’s Darkness,” a cryptic sonnet found in a letter written by the ancient wizard Cherlrigo. Cherlrigo claimed he’d translated the poem from The Leaves of One Grass, a now-lost tome penned nearly a thousand years before, based on prophecies from almost a thousand years before that.

  “The world is full of prophecies,” Parise warned, but there seemed little conviction in his voice. He had been with Draygo when they had retrieved the letter, after all, and the amount of trouble and the power of the curses they had found along with the page seemed to give its words some measure of weight.

  “If we are to take Cherlrigo’s word for it, the tome in which he found this sonnet, was penned in Myth Drannor,” Draygo Quick reminded Parise. “By the Dark Diviners of Windsong Tower. That is no book of rambling delusions by some unknown prognosticator.” “Nay, but it is a book of cryptic messaging,” said Parise.

  Draygo Quick nodded, conceding that unfortunate fact.

  “The proposition of the octave calls it a temporary state,” Parise went on. “Let us not react in fear to that which we do not fully comprehend.”

  “Let us not rest while the world prepares to shift around us,” the old warlock countered.

  “To a temporary state!” Parise replied.

  “Only if the second quatrain is decoded as a measurement of time and not space,” Draygo Quick reminded.

  “The turn of the ninth line is a clear hint, my friend.”

  “There are many interpretations!”

  Draygo Quick sat back, tapped the tips of his withered fingers together before his frown, and inadvertently glanced at the parchment that lay face down at the side of his desk. The words of the sonnet danced before his eyes, and he mumbled, “And enemies that stink of their god’s particular flavor.”

  “And you know of just such a favored one?” Parise asked, but his tone suggested that he already knew the answer.

  “I might,” Draygo Quick admitted.

  “We must watch these chosen mortals.”

  Draygo Quick was nodding before Parise began to utter the expected reminder.

  “Are you to be blamed for the loss of the sword?” Parise asked.

  “It is Herzgo Alegni’s failure!” Draygo Quick protested, a bit too vehemently.

  Parise Ulfbinder pursed his thick lips and furrowed his brow.

  “They will not be pleased with me,” Draygo Quick admitted.

  “Appeal privately to Prince Rolan,” Parise advised, referring to the ruler of Gloomwrought, a powerful Shadowfell city within whose boundaries lay Draygo Quick’s own tower. “He has come to believe in the significance of ‘Cherlrigo’s Darkness.’ ”

  “He fears?”

  “There is a lot
to lose,” Parise admitted, and Draygo Quick found that he couldn’t disagree. At a sound in the corridor outside his door, the old warlock nodded farewell to his associate and dropped a silken cloth atop his scrying device.

  He heard the Shifter’s voice-she spoke with one of his attendants still some distance away-and knew that she had brought the druid, as they had arranged. With still a few moments left to him, Draygo Quick picked up the parchment and held it before his eyes, digesting the sonnet once more.

  Enjoy the play when shadows steal the day …

  All the world is half the world for those who learn to walk.

  To feast on fungus soft and peel the sunlit stalk;

  Tarry not in place, for in their sleep the gods do stay.

  But care be known, be light of foot and soft of voice.

  Dare not stir divine to hasten Sunder’s day!

  A loss profound but a short ways away;

  The inevitable tear shall’t be of, or not of, choice.

  Oh, aye, again the time wandering of lonely world!

  With kingdoms lost and treasures past the finger’s tip,

  And enemies that stink of their god’s particular flavor.

  Sundered and whole, across the celestial spheres are hurled,

  Beyond the reach of dweomer and the wind-walker’s ship;

  With baubles left for the ones the gods do favor.

  “Of which god’s particular flavor do you taste, Drizzt Do’Urden?” he whispered. All signs-Drizzt’s affinity to nature, his status as a ranger, the unicorn he rode-pointed to Mielikki, a goddess of nature, but Draygo Quick had heard many other whispers that suggested Drizzt as a favored child of a very different and much darker goddess.

  Either way, the withered old warlock held little doubt that this rogue drow was favored by some god. At this point in his investigation, it hardly mattered which.

  He replaced “Cherlrigo’s Darkness” face down when he heard the knock on the door, and slowly rose and turned as he bade the Shifter and her companion to enter.

  “Welcome, Erlindir of Mielikki,” he said graciously, and he wondered what he might learn of that goddess, and perhaps her “flavors” in addition to the tasks the Shifter had already convinced him to perform for Draygo.

  “Is this your first visit to the Shadowfell?” Draygo Quick asked.

  The druid nodded. “My first crossing to the land of colorless flowers,” he replied.

  Draygo Quick glanced at the Shifter, who nodded confidently to indicate to him that Erlindir was fully under her spell.

  “You understand the task?” Draygo Quick asked the druid. “That we might further investigate this abomination?”

  “It seems easy enough,” Erlindir replied.

  Draygo Quick nodded and waved his hand out toward a side door, bidding Erlindir to lead the way. As the druid moved ahead of him, the old warlock fell in step beside the Shifter. He let Erlindir go into the side chamber before them, and even bade the druid to give him a moment, then shut the door between them.

  “He does not know of Drizzt?” he asked.

  “He is from a faraway land,” the Shifter whispered back.

  “He will make no connection with the panther and the drow, then? The tales of this one are considerable, and far-reaching.”

  “He does not know of Drizzt Do’Urden. I have asked him directly.”

  Draygo Quick glanced at the door. He was glad and a bit disappointed. Certainly if Erlindir knew of Drizzt and Guenhwyvar, this task could be troublesome. He could recognize the panther and such a shock might well defeat the Shifter’s dweomer of enchantment. But the gain could well outweigh the loss of his services, because Erlindir might then have offered, under great duress of course, the information regarding Drizzt’s standing with the goddess Mielikki.

  “He could not have deceived me in his response,” the Shifter added. “For even then, I was in his thoughts, and a lie would have been revealed.”

  “Ah, well,” Draygo Quick sighed.

  The Shifter, who had no idea of the larger discussion taking place between Draygo Quick, Parise Ulfbinder, and several other Netherese Lords looked at him with some measure of surprise.

  The old warlock met that look with an unremarkable and disarming smile. He opened the door and he and the Shifter joined Erlindir in the side chamber, where, under a silken cloth not unlike that covering his crystal ball, paced Guenhwyvar, trapped in a miniaturized magical cage.

  Outside of Draygo Quick’s residence, Effron Alegni watched and waited. He had seen the Shifter go in-her appearance, at least, for one never knew when one might actually be looking at the tireless illusionist. He didn’t know her human companion, but the old man certainly was no shade, didn’t look Netherese, and didn’t look at all at home in the Shadowfell.

  This was about the panther, Effron knew.

  The thought gnawed at him. Draygo Quick had not given the panther back to him, but that cat was perhaps Effron’s greatest tool in seeking his revenge against Dahlia. The Shifter had failed him in her dealings with the drow ranger, trying to trade the panther for the coveted Netherese sword, but Effron would not fail. If he could get the cat, he believed he could remove one of Dahlia’s greatest allies from the playing board.

  But Draygo Quick had forbidden it.

  Draygo Quick.

  Effron’s mentor, so he had thought.

  The withered old warlock’s last words to him rang in his mind: “Idiot boy, I only kept you alive out of respect for your father. Now that he is no more, I am done with you. Be gone. Go and hunt her, young fool, that you might see your father again in the darker lands.”

  Effron had tried to return to Draygo, to remedy the fallout between them.

  He had been turned away by the old warlock’s student servants, in no uncertain terms.

  And now this-and Effron knew that the Shifter’s visit had been precipitated by the old warlock’s plans for the panther. Plans that did not include Effron. Plans that would not help Effron’s pressing need.

  Indeed, plans that would almost certainly hinder Effron’s pressing need.

  The twisted young tiefling, his dead arm swinging uselessly behind him, crouched in the dark brush outside of Draygo Quick’s residence for much of the day.

  Grimacing.

  “You play dangerous games, old warlock,” the Shifter said later that night, when she was collecting her coins from Draygo Quick.

  “Not if you have done your research and enchantments correctly. Not if this Erlindir creature is half the druid you claim him to be.”

  “He is quite powerful. Which is why I’m surprised that you will let him return to Toril alive.”

  “Am I to kill every powerful wizard and cleric simply because?” Draygo Quick asked.

  “He knows much now,” the Shifter warned.

  “You assured me that he did not know of Drizzt Do’Urden and was nowhere near to him in the vast lands of Faerun.”

  “True, but if he harbors any suspicion, isn’t it possible that he put similar dweomers on himself as he did on you-to allow you to view the world through the panther’s eyes?”

  Draygo Quick’s hand froze in place halfway to the shelf where he kept his Silverymoon brandy. He turned to face his guest. “Should I demand my coin back?”

  The Shifter laughed easily and shook her head.

  “Then why would you suggest such a thing?” Draygo Quick demanded. He let that hang in the air as her smile became coy. He grabbed the bottle and poured a couple of glasses, setting one down on the hutch and taking a sip from the other.

  “Why, tricky lady,” he asked at length, “are you trying to pry motives from me?”

  “You admit that your … tactics would elicit my curiosity, yes?”

  “Why? I have an interest in Lady Dahlia and her companions, of course. They have brought great distress to me, and I would be remiss if I did not repay them.”

  “Effron came to me,” she said.

  “Seeking the panther.”

/>   She nodded, and Draygo Quick noted that she held the brandy he had poured for her, though he hadn’t handed it to her and she hadn’t come to get it-or at least, she hadn’t appeared to come and get it. “I know that Effron desperately wishes this Dahlia creature killed.”

  “More strength to him, then!” Draygo Quick replied with exuberance.

  But the Shifter wasn’t buying his feigned emotion, as she stood shaking her head.

  “Yes, she is his mother,” Draygo Quick answered her unspoken question. “From the loins of Herzgo Alegni. Dahlia threw him from a cliff immediately after his birth, the fiery elf. A pity the fall did not show mercy and kill him, but he landed amongst some pines. The trees broke his fall and broke his spine, but alas, he did not succumb to death.”

  “His injuries-”

  “Aye, Effron was, and remains, fairly broken,” the warlock explained. “But Herzgo Alegni would not let him go. Not physically, and not even emotionally, for many years, until it became clear what little Effron would be.”

  “Twisted. Infirm.”

  “And by that time-”

  “He was an understudy, a promising young warlock under the watchful eye of the great Draygo Quick,” the Shifter reasoned. “And more than that, he became your bludgeon to crumble the stubborn will of the ever-troublesome Herzgo Alegni. He became valuable to you.”

  “It’s a difficult world,” Draygo Quick lamented. “One must find whatever tools one can to properly navigate the swirling seas.”

  He raised his glass in toast and took another drink. The Shifter did likewise.

  “And what tools do you seek now, through the panther?” she asked.

  Draygo Quick shrugged as if it were not important. “How well do you know this Erlindir now?”

  It was the Shifter’s turn to shrug.

  “He would welcome you to his grove?”

  She nodded.

  “He is a disciple of Mielikki,” Draygo Quick remarked. “Do you know his standing?”

  “He is a powerful druid, though his mind has dulled with age.”