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  “A boundary?” a confused Gromph asked.

  Kimmuriel shook his head. “The mind flayers have among them a reference to a sickness,” he explained. “They name it demarcation, but they mean it as quite the opposite of the word as we have come to know it—a de-demarcation, if you will. In our tongue, it means a boundary, yes, the marking of a distinction between realms or farmholds or the Houses of Menzoberranzan, but in this sense, the word refers to a specific sickness in which the sufferer loses the lines of distinction between truth and perception.”

  “I know a few matron—” Jarlaxle started to quip, but a very serious Kimmuriel cut him short with a cold look.

  “We all suffer it, to some degree,” the psionicist explained. “And many, like you, seek to inflict it upon others, with speech so persuasive that they lose their grounding and come to believe as you would have them believe.”

  Jarlaxle tipped his wide-brimmed hat at the compliment.

  “Illithids are vulnerable,” Kimmuriel explained.

  “They prey upon others with just such tactics,” Gromph argued.

  “I would expect them to be the least vulnerable,” Jarlaxle agreed. “I would never deign to practice my Art upon a mind flayer.”

  “They are invulnerable to your soothing words, yes,” Kimmuriel replied. “And indeed to most, if not all, external suggestions and persuasions. But for them, the sickness comes from within, where they create reality in the thoughts of others and so can easily lose the proper distinction between that illusion and the truth they try to hide or warp.”

  “Self-deceit?” Gromph asked.

  Kimmuriel nodded.

  “So they come to believe their own lies,” said Jarlaxle. “As I said, I have known many matron mothers so afflicted.”

  “That is different,” Gromph told him.

  “Not so much so,” Kimmuriel corrected, which surprised Gromph and Jarlaxle, who, after all, had only been joking. “In both cases, the sickness is contracted through an overblown sense of pride, the deadliest of faults.”

  “Then Gromph should be dead,” Jarlaxle said.

  “Then Jarlaxle should be dead,” Gromph said at the same time.

  Kimmuriel just paused and tightened his face in disapproval. The brothers looked at each other and scoffed—mirror images, they seemed.

  “I have never known pride to be a fault of Drizzt Do’Urden,” Jarlaxle said at length, bringing the conversation back to the matter at hand. “His wont is humility, often to the point of supreme aggravation.”

  “The sickness in his mind was conceived externally,” Kimmuriel said.

  “The Faerzress,” Gromph reasoned.

  “An Abyssal sickness,” Kimmuriel went on, nodding. “Magically rooted.” He looked at Gromph, a budding and curious psionicist, and added a warning: “Beware your intrusions and explorations upon Drizzt Do’Urden, Archmage, for this malady is infectious. Hence my cry, for even I found myself falling under the Abyssal spell of doom and utter despair. To attempt to draw a clear line of reality against perception in the mind of Drizzt Do’Urden is to erase that same line in your own understanding, and to no benefit to Drizzt.”

  “What are you saying?” Jarlaxle demanded, and now his voice took on a bit of a nervous edge, as if it had never occurred to him that the great Kimmuriel couldn’t fix the swirling confusion in Drizzt’s mind.

  Kimmuriel’s responding shrug, so helpless, was as definitive an answer as Jarlaxle had ever known.

  “You are mending Dahlia!” the mercenary protested. “She is far more lost than Drizzt …”

  “It is different,” Kimmuriel tried to explain, but Jarlaxle spoke right over him.

  “Or are you just afraid that you will be infected?” he accused. “Is that it? Well then take Drizzt to the hive mind! Promise them whatever they need to mend—”

  “No!” Kimmuriel shouted, and the uncharacteristically vehement outburst rocked both Jarlaxle and Gromph back on their heels.

  “No,” Kimmuriel said more calmly. “To do so would invoke a great risk. Would you have a colony of mind flayers lose the distinction between their perceptions and reality? Between their wishes and the truth of the world? The destruction they could wreak …” He stopped and took a deep breath, even patted his hands in the air to physically stabilize himself.

  “They could do nothing to help Drizzt,” he said at length, and calmly.

  “But Dahlia …” Jarlaxle protested.

  “Dahlia’s sickness was implanted by Methil,” Kimmuriel explained. “The mind flayer inflicted her with a series of tangential and confusing thoughts, luring her with powerful suggestions triggered by a multitude of cues that Methil set in her mind like a rogue’s clever traps. Perhaps a word, perhaps a movement, will break the flow of Dahlia’s present thoughts and wind her down an unrelated side corridor and so she is lost, winding back upon herself. And that supreme frustration, in turn, leads to dismay and sows further confusion. It was quite brilliant of Methil.”

  “But you can fix it?”

  “Yes, though it will prove a painstaking and long process. I must seek out each cue and erase the suggestion Methil attached to it. But what Methil wrought, I can undo.”

  “But Drizzt?”

  “It is a magical erasure and not simple misguiding suggestions,” Gromph answered before Kimmuriel could. Kimmuriel looked at him and nodded approvingly at his comprehension.

  “What your friend is experiencing is a complete break, a complete blurring of the demarcation of the relationship of his perception against the simple truth and reality that plays out before him,” Gromph explained. “His very senses deceive him, so he believes, and there is no truth.”

  “Worse, that perception is rooted in doubt and terror,” Kimmuriel added. “Not fear, but pure terror. Drizzt has come to believe that all that he once held as true, all that he took for granted as reality, was and so is indeed nothing more than a grand deception played upon him by a malignant force, some demon—likely Lolth—as some form of unending torment.”

  “He does think highly of himself after all,” Gromph said with a chuckle, and Jarlaxle’s look showed that he didn’t much appreciate the levity at that grim moment.

  “He has nothing to hold onto,” Kimmuriel explained.

  “And so his beloved Catti-brie is a demon in disguise,” Jarlaxle said quietly, nodding as he finally caught on to the depth of this sickness, why Drizzt had nearly killed Catti-brie, and why he would likely do just that the next time.

  “We cannot redraw the line,” Kimmuriel warned. “Only Drizzt can. Any outside attempt to persuade him will be viewed with the same damning terror, that if it is meant to soothe and reassure him …”

  “Then it is done to strengthen the deception,” Jarlaxle finished.

  Kimmuriel nodded.

  “He is lost, then,” said Gromph, with a tone of finality that stabbed at Jarlaxle’s heart. “And will not be found. And as he is doomed to make tragic and deadly mistakes, he will never find his way.”

  Jarlaxle wanted to argue, wanted to scream into Gromph’s face to silence him. But when he looked at Kimmuriel, whom he did trust, he found the psionicist in full agreement.

  “My eye patch!” he blurted, looking for something, anything.

  “The delusion is not external,” Kimmuriel said. “Your eye patch will not protect him or cure him.”

  A defeated Jarlaxle blew a sigh of resignation.

  “I could kill him painlessly and swiftly,” Gromph offered.

  Jarlaxle almost agreed.

  “I HAVE NEVER seen you so … wobbly.,” Tazmikella teased, sitting on the divan beside Jarlaxle. She wore lace and sheer veils, so beautiful and tempting in her human form, but the mercenary simply couldn’t bring his focus to that matter.

  “This is about the ranger again, isn’t it?” the copper dragon asked.

  Jarlaxle ran his fingers over his bald pate. “It is a horrible descent to witness.”

  “Helplessly,” Tazmikella added, a
nd the drow nodded.

  The dragon shrugged. “If there is nothing you can do, then why waste your thoughts fretting over it? You have so few years of life as it is.”

  Jarlaxle pulled back from her touch and looked at her hard. “Would you say the same if it was your sister so afflicted?”

  “Of course,” came the answer from the door, and in walked Ilnezhara, no less alluring, and no more clad, than Tazmikella.

  “Oh, you think us beasts!” Tazmikella said. “He does, sister!”

  “Should we be insulted?” Ilnezhara asked breathlessly. “I thought Jarlaxle wiser than to insult dragons.”

  “Please,” the drow surrendered, holding up his hands. “I cannot find mirth in your taunts. Not now.”

  “Your friend who loves the mind flayers could do nothing?” Tazmikella asked with just a hint of concern in her voice.

  “It is magical, and nothing he can affect.”

  “Then what of Drizzt’s wife?” Tazmikella asked.

  “Aye,” her sister agreed. “That one is quite powerful with her magic, both arcane and divine.”

  But Jarlaxle was shaking his head. “She has tried, of course, as has Gromph. But to no avail. And I have to believe that if Gromph cannot find a countering dweomer, there is no magical answer.”

  “Indeed, there aren’t many mortals more powerful,” said Ilnezhara.

  “Mielikki, then?” Tazmikella asked. “Is Drizzt not a Chosen?”

  “Catti-brie has prayed …” Jarlaxle said, but again ended by shaking his head.

  “Good, truthfully,” Ilnezhara said.

  Tazmikella nodded, and Jarlaxle sat up straight with confusion and anger.

  “The less the gods meddle, the better for all,” said Ilnezhara.

  “They view their mortals as toys,” Tazmikella said, her voice dripping with contempt. “And I loathe to call them gods. More like accomplished wizards playing as gods to soothe their own sense of personal vanity.”

  “Oh indeed, sister.”

  “Except for Bahamut,” Tazmikella was quick to add.

  “Of course,” Ilnezhara replied.

  “Then go to Bahamut!” Jarlaxle shouted.

  The two stared at him incredulously, then laughed at him.

  “Well, what then?” the exasperated drow asked. “What am I to do?”

  “Kill him quickly,” said Tazmikella. “I could—”

  “Stop it!” Jarlaxle demanded. “Is that your only answer to anything? First Gromph, now you …”

  He jumped up from the divan and paced back and forth across the room.

  “If magic neither arcane nor divine can cure it, and if psionicists are helpless, indeed afraid, then how?” he asked. “What is my answer?”

  “What do you know?” Tazmikella prompted. “Kimmuriel went into his mind, you said, so what do you know?”

  “Kimmuriel said that Drizzt must find his own way out of the tangle, that his cure must come from within,” Jarlaxle explained. “That seems unlikely, impossible even.”

  “Drizzt is a disciplined warrior,” Tazmikella offered.

  “Yes, sister,” Ilnezhara agreed, and something in her tone made both Jarlaxle and Tazmikella look to her with intrigue.

  Ilnezhara was smiling.

  “What do you know?” Jarlaxle demanded.

  “Perhaps he is not disciplined enough,” Ilnezhara said with a knowing grin.

  “You would be hard-pressed to find one more so,” Jarlaxle argued. “He is near perfect in his training, as fine a warrior—”

  “Near perfect,” Tazmikella interrupted, her tone and grin showing that she, too, was beginning to catch on to her sister’s thinking.

  “What?” Jarlaxle asked.

  “But he has not ascended,” Ilnezhara explained.

  “Really, sister, has any drow ever?”

  “If a human can …”

  “What are you talking about?” Jarlaxle demanded.

  But the cryptic dragon sisters just smiled.

  PART 2

  The Bloodstone Lands

  I CANNOT WASH THE BLOOD OFF MY HANDS.

  The wound was minimal, the actual bloodletting almost nonexistent, but my blade was there, against Catti-brie’s neck, and my intent was there, undeniably, to slash Vidrinath across and brutally cut out her throat and bathe in her spurting blood. To exact revenge!

  Oh, how I wanted to do that!

  Because she was a demon in disguise, I knew, and know, and do not know, tormenting me by taking the physical appearance and aspect of my lost beloved.

  When did she intend the revelation? In the midst of lovemaking perhaps, when a leering monstrous face would stare down at me, a grotesque and misshapen demon form swaying above me, perhaps taking my seed to conceive a horrid half-breed?

  Or not. Or none of it.

  Or, I put my blade against Catti-brie’s throat—Catti-brie—and came a single breath from murdering her.

  In that case, were I to sail the Sword Coast and drag my hand in the water, then surely I would leave the entire sea red in my wake! So little blood did spill, and yet to me it is all the blood of the world, washing upon me, marking me a great scarlet badge of shame.

  Murderer!

  Because I did kill her, in my mind. I did doubt her, in my heart. My arm failed me. My courage fled.

  Because the demon should have died!

  The imposter should have died, and killing it would give me one last act of defiance against Lolth. One simple act, one clean kill, to tell the Spider Queen that in the end, she did not score her craven victory. She would obliterate me at her whim—I could do nothing to prevent that act if she so desired—but nay, in the end, she would not break me.

  I am not her plaything!

  Unless it was really Catti-brie who felt the edge of my scimitar against her soft neck—how am I to know?

  And that is the conundrum, that is the deeper curse, that is why I have already lost.

  I rouse from my Reverie every morning and declare to myself that this day, I will be happy, that this day, I will look upon the sunrise and know hope. Perhaps it is all a ruse, all a great deception by a demon queen to inflict the ultimate torment.

  So be it, I say each morn. So be it!

  And each morning, I ask myself, “What choice have I?”

  What other course? What other road might I walk? If it is all perception, then at what point must perception, even delusion, simply be accepted as reality? And if that reality is pleasant, then should I not find happiness in it, for whatever time the illusion, or delusion, remains? Is it worthwhile or even sensible to refuse to enjoy years of perceived calm among friends and loved ones, to not simply be happy, out of fear for what may or may not come?

  Is the sunrise any less beautiful? Is Catti-brie’s smile any less enchanting? Is Bruenor’s laughter any less infectious? Is Guenhwyvar’s purr any less comforting?

  Every day, I tell myself that. Every day, I initially reason my way to a state of happiness and contentedness. Every day, I repeat this litany against madness, this armor against ultimate despair.

  Every day.

  And every day, I fail.

  I cannot create meaning in the midst of a dream. I cannot create purpose when I am alone in a fancy design of my own creation. I cannot create freedom to smile with the ever-present thought that my enemies await the deepest smile they can elicit before tearing the pretty facade away.

  And worse, now I am stained with the blood of Catti-brie or of an imposter demonic creature, and if the former, then I struck out at the woman I love, and so wallow in shame and blood. And if the latter, then I had not the courage to complete the kill, and so there, too, I have failed.

  They have taken my weapons, and for that I am glad. Would that they would take my life and end this misery.

  They pretend to care. They feign spells and mind intrusions to heal my malady, but I see the sinister eyes and smell the Abyssal fog and hear the quiet cackles behind the sighs of their supposed concern.

&
nbsp; Let me rot with the blood of Catti-brie on my hands or let me rot in the shame of my cowardice.

  Either way, it is a fate I surely deserve.

  —Drizzt Do’Urden

  CHAPTER 9

  The Client

  REGIS WAS GLAD TO ACCOMPANY DONNOLA TO THE BALL THAT FINE summer evening in Delthuntle, and gladder still when she came down the stairs in her lavender silk gown, trimmed in white lace and cut low, offering a generous glimpse of her curvaceous bosom. She wore a brilliant set of pink deepwater oyster pearls, perhaps collected by Regis himself.

  And more than a few of those were likely magical. Donnola, though no true wizard, did have a bit of training in the Art.

  Regis could hardly draw breath as she glided down the main stairs of Morada Topolino, her smile outshining both the pearls and the silver and gold tiara that shaped her thick hair.

  “I have your approval, good sir Spider?” she asked when she swept up before him.

  “Madam, there is nothing you could ever do to evoke my disapproval,” Regis replied. He performed a low bow, gracefully sweeping off his blue beret as he dipped. He, too, was dressed in finery, with a new gray waistcoat, gold stitched, and a wonderful black cape with a high, stiff collar to complement both his fabulous beret and the brilliant basket of the precious rapier that hung at his hip. His boots, too, were new, black and shiny, high and hard-soled so he could click them imperiously when making a dramatic entrance.

  “Are you ready, my charming suitor?” Donnola asked.

  “Milady, in seeing you … let us stay here …” He ended with a wicked smile and an exaggerated wink, and Donnola tittered appropriately—they were playing the part of the empty-headed courtiers, of course, all batting eyelashes and moustache-twirling.

  “Let’s make it an early evening,” Regis said in all seriousness, turning and offering his arm for his lady.

  “It will take as long as it takes,” Donnola replied, reminding him that this wasn’t pleasure—though they might find some entertainment, or amusement at least—but rather business. These social gatherings allowed Donnola to keep in touch with her secret contacts and to cultivate new business suitors. Her product was, among other things, information. And with the Zzar and Rashemi firewine flowing, there was no better place than a court ball to gather her wares.