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  Themerelis was lifted backward by the stinging bolts, once, then again. Neither did any real damage, but Dahlia’s laughter seemed to sting him quite profoundly. He drew his greatsword and hoisted it in both hands, taking a deep breath and setting his feet widely—just as Dahlia charged.

  She leaped in, slapping Kozah’s Needle’s center bar forward and back while the side sticks extended and rotated yet again. She dropped her left foot back suddenly, pulled in her left hand, extended her right, and turned so that the spinning side stick whipped at Themerelis’s head.

  No novice to battle, the fine warrior blocked it with his sword then brought the blade back the other way in time to pick off the other spinning extension as Dahlia reversed her pose and thrust.

  But she rolled the leading edge back and over high, reversing her grip on the center bar as the weapon turned under. She stabbed straight ahead with the leading butt of the center bar, jabbing Themerelis in the chest.

  Again he staggered backward.

  “Pathetic,” she teased, backing a step to allow him to regain his battle posture.

  The warrior came on with sudden fury, slashing his claymore in great swings that hummed powerfully through the air.

  And he hit nothing but air.

  Dahlia leaped sidelong, a full somersault that set her again to her feet, with her back to Themerelis. When the warrior pursued, thrusting his weapon at her, she whirled around and slapped his sword with the left side stick then turned the blade with the angled center bar and struck it again with the spinning, trailing right side stick, and all three sent jolts of electricity into the sword and into Themerelis.

  The man fell back, clamping his jaw against the shocking sensation.

  Dahlia put the staff into a dazzling spin before her again, the side sticks moving too quickly to follow. She feigned a charge but fell back instead, extending her arms fully to leave the center bar horizontal in front of her. She came forward, retracting her arms so that the bar slammed her own chest, and as it did it broke in half.

  Themerelis could hardly follow the movements then as Dahlia put her two smaller weapons, each a pair of two-foot-long metal poles bound end to end by a foot-long length of chain, into a wild dance. She rolled the flails sidelong at her sides, brought one or another, or both or neither, under and around her shoulder—or one around her back to be taken up by the other hand while the other moved across in front to similarly and simultaneously hand off.

  And never with a break, never slowing, she began smacking the twirling sticks together with every pass. Each strike crackled with the power of lightning.

  Above them, the clouds thickened and thunder began to rumble, as if the sky itself answered the hail of Kozah’s Needle.

  Finally, her fury unabated, Dahlia reached out at Themerelis with a wide swing.

  She missed badly.

  She missed on purpose.

  Themerelis came in right behind the strike with a burst and a stab.

  Dahlia never stopped her turn and continued right around, stepping back as she went to stay out of reach of the deadly blade. She came around with a double parry, her weapons smacking the greatsword one after another.

  Neither, though, released a charge into the sword, something Themerelis didn’t register. The effective double block had him slowed anyway, retracting the blade, but as Dahlia broke her momentum and reversed the swing of her left hand, he came right back in.

  Her parries came simultaneously, one metal rod smacking the greatsword on either side, the right lower down the blade than the left, and Dahlia released the building charge of Kozah’s Needle.

  The powerful jolt weakened Themerelis’s grip even as the woman drove through the swings, and the greatsword was lost to him, spinning end over end and falling away.

  He reached for it, but Dahlia and her spinning weapon blocked his way, smacking at him in rapid succession. She hit one arm then the other, again and again, and that was only when he managed to block them. When he didn’t, the stick cracked him about the chest and midsection, and once in the face, fattening his lips.

  She quickly got ahead of his blocks, the weapons coming at him from any and every angle, battering him, cutting him, raising welt after welt. One strike hit his left forearm so forcefully they both heard the crack of bone before he even knew he’d been hit.

  Stunned, off balance, and nearing the end of his strength, the warrior desperately punched out at Dahlia.

  She dropped, turned, and swung her right arm up, looping her weapon under and around his extended shoulder. She continued her turn, throwing the back of her hip into his, bending him over her, and with a sudden yank on the entangling weapon, she flipped Themerelis right over her shoulder.

  He fell flat on his back, his breath blasted from his lungs, his eyes and thoughts unfocused.

  Dahlia didn’t slow, spinning circles, finally squaring up to the fallen man as she brought her hands clapping together in front of her, rejoining the central four-foot length of Kozah’s Needle. She waved the break-staff up one way then reversed, expertly aligning the side sticks and calling upon the weapon to rejoin. The instant she was holding a singular eight-foot staff again she drove one end to the ground and pole-vaulted off it high into the air, turning the weapon as she went and screaming, “Yee-Kozah!” to the dark clouds above.

  She landed right beside Themerelis, driving the break-staff’s forward tip down like a spear into the man’s chest.

  Fingers of lightning crackled out from the impact and the weapon slid through the man, clipping his backbone and pressing down into the ground.

  Dahlia screamed out to the ancient, long-forgotten god of lightning again as she stood victorious, one hand holding the impaled weapon at midpoint, the other arm straight out to the other side, her head thrown back so she was looking up to the sky.

  A blast of lightning coupled with a tremendous thunderstroke hit the upper tip of the staff and channeled down. Some of its burning force entered Dahlia, bathing her in crawling lines of blue-white energy, but most of it jolted into Themerelis with devastating effect. His arms and legs extended out wide, to their limits and beyond, kneecaps and elbows popping in protest. His eyes bulged as if they would fly from their sockets, and his hair, all of his hair, stood out straight, dancing wildly. A great hole was blown right through the man along the length of the metal staff that impaled him.

  And Dahlia held on, basking in the power as it flowed through her lithe form.

  She looked down at the gathered barbarians.

  Finally she spotted Herzgo Alegni among them, moving forward through their ranks.

  “Herzgo Alegni, this is your son!” she cried.

  She threw the baby from the cliff.

  Chapter 2 - An Old Dwarf’s Last Road

  HE WAS JUST A BOY … MANY YEARS AGO,” THE WOMAN PROTESTED. SHE rubbed her elderly father’s shoulders, and the man was clearly uncomfortable with the obvious contradictions between his tale and the reality before them.

  Drizzt Do’Urden held up his dark hands to reassure the two, to show the older man that he didn’t disbelieve him.

  “It was here,” the man, Lathan Obridock, said. “As wondrous a wood as I’ve e’er seen or heard tell of. Full o’ springtime and warmth, and singing, and bells ringing. We all seen it, me and Spragan, and Addadearber and … what was that captain’s name now?”

  “Ashelia,” Drizzt answered.

  “Aye!” the old man said. “Ashelia Larson, who knew the lake better than any. Great captain, that lady. Just out fishing, you know. And we come across the lake …” He pointed back at the dark waters of Lac Dinneshere, tracing a line from a distance out to the rotted old remnants of what had once been a wharf, the ruins of an old shack just up the shore from it. “We were bringing that ranger … Roundie. Aye, Roundie. He paid Ashelia to get him across the lake, I guess. You should be speaking with him. ”

  “I did,” Drizzt replied, trying to keep th
e exasperation out of his voice, for he had told Lathan that bit of information a dozen times at least that day, and twice that number the day before, and even before that. The previous year, Drizzt had met with the ranger, commonly known as Roundabout, or Roundie, to the south of Icewind Dale, at the urging of Jarlaxle.

  Roundabout’s description of the wood was exactly the same as Lathan’s: a magical place, inhabited by a beautiful witch with auburn hair, and a halfling caretaker who lived in a hillside cave-home by a small pond. According to Roundabout, though, only the wizard Addadearber had actually seen the halfling, and only Roundabout himself and a man named Spragan had seen the woman, and they had come away with very different impressions. To the ranger, she had seemed as a goddess dancing on a ladder of stars, but Spragan, according to Roundabout and confirmed by Lathan, had never truly recovered from the horror of that encounter.

  Drizzt sighed as he looked around at the sparse trees and stony ground of the sheltered nook at the end of a small cove, cleverly hidden by rocky outcroppings. Up above on the hillside stood scattered small pine trees typical of Icewind Dale.

  “Perhaps it was north of here,” Drizzt offered. “There are many sheltered vales along the high ground at the northeastern stretches of Lac Dinneshere. ”

  The old man shook his head with every word. He pointed to the cabin. “Right behind the lodge,” he insisted. “No other lodge near here. That’s the place. This is the place. The forest was here. ”

  “But there is no forest,” said Drizzt. “And no sign that any forest ever was here, beyond these few trees. ”

  “Telled you that, too,” said Lathan.

  “They came back after their encounter,” his daughter, Tulula, said. “They looked for it. Of course they did, and so did many others. Roundie’d been here many the time before that day, and came back many the time after, and never did he see the same forest again, or the witch or halfling. ”

  Drizzt put his hand on his hip, his expression doubtful as he continued his scan, seeking something, anything, he could bring back to Bruenor, who, along with Pwent, was visiting with some clan dwarves in the tunnels under the lone mountain of Kelvin’s Cairn, the complex that had housed Clan Battlehammer in the decades before Bruenor had reclaimed Mithral Hall.

  Mithral Hall. Four decades had passed since they’d left that wondrous dwarven kingdom, since Bruenor had abdicated his throne in a most extreme and irreversible manner. How many adventures the three of them had shared, along with Nanfoodle the gnome and Jessa the orc. Drizzt couldn’t help but smile as he considered those last two, gone from the band for more than twenty years now.

  And once more he’d found himself in Icewind Dale, the land of Drizzt’s first real home, the land of the Companions of the Hall, the land of Catti-brie and Regis and Wulfgar, of a displaced dwarf king and a wayward dark elf searching, forever searching, it seemed, to find a place he could rightly call his home. What a troupe they had been! What adventures they had known!

  Drizzt and Bruenor had put those three lost friends far behind them, of course, and had long ago given up any notion of finding the wayward spirits of Catti-brie and Regis, or of rejoining Wulfgar, for a human’s lifetime had passed, more than two-thirds of a century, and none of the three had been young on those fateful days so long ago. With Pwent, Nanfoodle, and Jessa, they had searched the hilly crags east of Luskan and the foothills of the Spine of the World for Gauntlgrym, the elusive ancient homeland of the Delzoun dwarves. A thousand maps had led them down a thousand trails, through a hundred deep caves, their thoughts only of Gauntlgrym, or, on those occasions when Bruenor and Drizzt quietly reminisced about Bruenor’s adopted children and their halfling friend, it was just to share their memories, so dear.