There was nothing veiled about that threat, obviously, and more than a few priestesses in the room gasped, and Quenthel looked as if she wanted to do so as well.
“But that is not to my liking,” Yvonnel explained, “and Yiccardaria has accepted my preferred course. For now. I will return to Menzoberranzan when I so choose, and if I so choose, and if you are still, at that time, matron mother, then you and I will find agreement. For the good of House Baenre, for the good of Menzoberranzan, and for the blessing of the Spider Queen. You would be foolhardy, I assure you, to bet on that outcome prematurely.”
She turned, gave a derisive snort to Sos’Umptu, a dismissive glance to Minolin Fey, and turned to leave, but paused just long enough to add, teasingly, “Perhaps you will be fortunate, Matron Mother Quenthel Baenre, my aunt, and I will choose to forever stay away.”
And with those surprising parting words, Yvonnel Baenre walked out of the room.
She took a fine lizard mount from the stables of House Baenre and was soon out of the city, riding the tunnels of the Underdark, making swiftly for the lower halls of Gauntlgrym.
“ALWAYS EAST,” DAHLIA said.
Artemis Entreri, standing at the flap of their tent on the field around the growing Hosttower of the Arcane, glanced over at her with a curious expression.
“You are always staring to the east,” Dahlia clarified.
Entreri shrugged as if he had no idea what she was hinting at.
“And thinking of him,” said Dahlia, and then he understood.
“It concerns me,” the assassin admitted. “I would not see it end this way for him.”
Dahlia shrugged. “I wish better for Drizzt, too, but there is nothing we can do. Catti-brie is a powerful priestess, and she could not cure his malady. Gromph tried, and is there a more powerful wizard to be found? And Kimmuriel, too, and I know first-hand of the beauty of his methods in such things as a broken mind. I sit here healed and clear in my thoughts because of Kimmuriel’s strange magic. And yet Drizzt’s troubles were beyond him.”
“And that is my frustration,” Entreri said. He looked back out, and indeed, back to the east. “That I can do nothing.”
He didn’t even notice Dahlia’s movements and was a bit startled when she draped her arm around him and put her chin on his shoulder.
“He is your friend,” she said.
“He is one to whom I am indebted,” Entreri corrected.
“It’s more than that.”
Entreri didn’t answer, and he knew that spoke volumes. He wasn’t sure if “friend” was the correct word for his complicated relationship with the drow ranger, but there was surely a camaraderie there, a kinship of blood.
And his claim, even if not wholly complete, was true enough: he was indebted to Drizzt Do’Urden both because of Drizzt’s willingness to travel to Menzoberranzan on such a dangerous mission to rescue Dahlia and also because of Drizzt’s raid on the drow in Gauntlgrym to rescue his former companions, including Entreri.
Even more than that, over the course of the events of the last two decades Drizzt, both with intent and simply by example, had shown to Artemis Entreri a different way of seeing the world. Drizzt had dragged Entreri halfway up the Sword Coast, teasing him with tangible rewards—his jeweled dagger—and also with rewards harder for Artemis Entreri to understand, or even appreciate, for a long, long while.
But yes, it had felt good to help the folk of Port Llast, Entreri had been forced to admit, and it was a revelation that he now embraced.
Artemis Entreri could look in the mirror again without loathing—nay, not “again,” but for the first time in his memory.
“Yes, Drizzt,” he whispered to the too-empty air, “saving Port Llast from the sea devils brought me some peace.”
Dahlia hugged him closer.
“DO’NO WHAT YE’RE thinking, drow lass, but ye stop yer hairless horsie now or we’re to splat ye both in the middle o’ the hall!” a dwarven voice boomed down the tunnel.
Yvonnel pulled up short and crossed her arms defiantly, all the while sorting a sequence of spells that would obliterate this lower corridor guard, if need be.
“Well, I have complied,” she called out impatiently after a few moments. “I have come to see your King Bruenor, and you would do well not to make me wait.”
“What business ye got with—?”
“That is none of your business, dwarf,” Yvonnel interrupted to the unseen sentry. “Your king will see me, for I have heard that he is not a fool. Tell him that the daughter of Archmage Gromph has come.”
Another few moments passed before a group of dwarf warriors, fully armored and with weapons brandished—and with a pair of battleragers in their spiked armor among them—came out from a cleverly designed side passage.
“Daughter o’ Archmage Gromph, ye say? But how’re we to know?”
“Ask Drizzt, or Jarlaxle if Drizzt is not about.”
Her stated familiarity with that pair did give the dwarves pause, she noted, and she was quite content when they were moving soon after along the tunnels. They came to a stable area, set up with stalls for rothé and some surface creatures—sheep and cows and the like—and Yvonnel was bade to leave her mount.
“Well, what am I to be doing with this?” the dwarf farmer demanded when the lead sentry handed him the reigns of a drow lizard mount.
“Well, don’t eat it and don’t let it eat yerself,” the sentry replied. “Anything else is yer own call.”
A heavy guard, including a trio of dwarf clerics who cast spells all the way, escorted Yvonnel through the complex. Yvonnel laughed at the priests. They were trying to detect magic upon her, and likely with spells of magical silence ready at their lips in case she should try to cast anything of her own.
She almost cast her own silence dweomer first, just to show them she could. But the young drow woman’s impulsiveness was tempered, as always, by the long memories within her, the memories of Yvonnel the Eternal, the greatest matron mother any drow city had ever known.
Those memories told her to be careful around this particular clan of dwarves, and reminded her that a little bit of respect would go a long way in achieving her ends.
So she suffered the constant barrage of divine spells and the smell of a dozen dwarves, and soon, but not soon enough, she was brought into a sizable room in the lower levels of the complex, somewhere near to the legendary Forge Room, she believed, for she could hear the hammers ringing.
A trio of dwarves, two male and one female, stood at the end of a carpeted walkway, a large throne behind them and two smaller thrones flanking that.
“Might that ye tell us yer name?” asked the apparent eldest of the group.
“Might,” Yvonnel replied.
The dwarf clucked and chuckled. “Ah, me manners,” he said. “Ragged Dain o’ Gauntlgrym, at yer service, and I give ye Athrogate and Amber Gristle O’Maul o’ the Adbar O’Mauls,” he added, indicating the pair flanking him.
“We’ve heared ye’re wantin’ to see King Bruenor,” the male, Athrogate, asked.
“Aye, and that ye’re callin’ yerself the daughter o’ Gromph,” Amber added.
“I am Yvonnel Baenre,” she told them. “My business is not with you or your king, but as I am passing through his domain, I thought it polite that I grant him an audience.”
The proud dwarves bristled and snorted.
“And accept his own graciousness in return,” she added coyly.
“Ah, but this one’s a bit filled with her own face, ain’t she?” Amber remarked, but the dwarf on the right, Athrogate, hushed her quickly.
“I been with Jarlaxle a hunnerd years,” Athrogate said. “Been to Menzoberranzan, too, on occasion. Why am I not knowin’ ye?”
“I’m not as old as I look,” Yvonnel replied, but didn’t elaborate.
“But ye’re Gromph’s girl?”
“I am much more than the daughter of Archmage Gromph,” she said. “And I am bored with this discussion. Fetch your king and announce me, or take
me through this rather dowdy place and point me along the road to find my father, or Jarlaxle if that course would prove easier.”
Amber snorted again, Ragged Dain’s eyes opened wider, but Athrogate on the end again calmed the situation.
“No need for announcin’, for I heared ye well enough,” said another, a red-bearded dwarf coming in from a passage hidden by a curtain in the back of the room.
Yvonnel’s eyes narrowed at the sight. She recognized this particular dwarf from the memories of her grandmother.
King Bruenor moved to sit in the grand chair, a pair of young dwarf women moving to sit in the smaller thrones flanking him. Yvonnel hardly looked at them, her unblinking gaze never leaving the king.
“Well met, King Bruenor,” she said, moving past the trio to stand in front of him. “I have heard much about you.”
“And meself nothing about yerself,” Bruenor replied.
“That will change,” Yvonnel promised.
“Ye come on business from Menzoberranzan, have ye?”
Yvonnel shook her head. “Nay, and likely never. I am here of my own accord and for my own reasons. I have come to find my father, or Jarlaxle, and this is the place I know, and so I ask of you only that you show me where to find them.”
“They ain’t here.”
“Drizzt then,” she said.
Bruenor snapped his fingers in the air. “That easy, eh?” he asked. He leaned to the side and threw a leg over one chair arm. “Ye come here, unknown to all, and ye’re thinkin’ I’m to walk ye up to me friend? Might be a prize ye’re lookin’ to claim, I’m thinkin’ ”
“Understand something, good dwarf,” Yvonnel said, “were it not for me, your friend Drizzt would not have returned to you from Menzoberranzan. I am the one who allowed him to rescue Dahlia. I am the one who empowered him to serve as the spear to destroy Demogorgon. I am the one who interceded when he was taken to the dungeons of House Baenre, and there he, Jarlaxle, Dahlia, and the human named Artemis Entreri would have horribly perished were it not for that action. The only reason your friend has returned to your side stands before you, King Bruenor, and if you do not believe me, then perhaps you would do well to go and speak with Jarlaxle before you insult me. You do not want to insult me, King Bruenor.”
“Ye’re the one who let them go?”
“I am.”
“All four?”
“All four.”
“So now we’re to be friends, are we?” Bruenor asked.
“Hardly,” the drow woman replied, her expression purposely souring. “I can live my life fully and with complete satisfaction without ever naming one of your kind as friend.”
“I might’ve once thinked the same about yer kind,” Bruenor replied as the five others bristled—and indeed, it seemed as if Queens Fist and Fury were about to leap up and attack the drow.
Yvonnel conceded the point with a smirk and a slight bow.
“Well, then,” said Bruenor, “might that we’ll be friends soon enough.”
But Yvonnel shook her head and her expression hardened once more. “It is not a future I envision, Dwarf King, for I still remember when your axe split my skull wide open. I claim no friendship with King Bruenor Battlehammer.”
That strange reference had all the dwarves looking around curiously, Athrogate shrugging when Ragged Dain and Amber looked to him for an answer, and Bruenor seeming equally at a loss to the questioning looks of the queens flanking him.
But Bruenor was beginning to sort it out, Yvonnel could tell. He had heard about her, at least tangentially, and her name was surely familiar enough to him, even if it had been held by another when they met that long ago day in Mithral Hall.
“Yer Da’s not here, nor is Jarlaxle,” Bruenor explained rather coldly. “They be in Luskan, a city to the north, and I’m not knowin’ when they’re meanin’ to come back.”
“You will show me the way?”
Bruenor considered it for a while and a host of concerns and arguments flashed across his expression. Yvonnel was wise enough, of course, to anticipate his understandable reservations.
“Aye, we’ll get ye there if ye’re who ye’re sayin’ ye are,” he answered.
“You will send word?” she reasoned.
“Aye. Won’t be takin’ long. We got runners and callers set up all the way to Luskan. We’ll get yerself a room where ye can rest, and none’ll be botherin’ ye if ye’re not botherin’ no one else.”
Yvonnel bowed again, satisfied, and Ragged Dain called in the dozen who had escorted her to this room and led them all off, Yvonnel in tow.
“Split her head?” she heard one of the dwarf queens whisper to Bruenor.
“Might that ye’ll be doin’ it again,” the dwarf named Athrogate added.
Yvonnel took note of it all, thinking that someday she might have to kill more than one of these dwarves.
Her entourage led her to a private, and no doubt very secure, chamber. There she was told to wait, and the hall outside of the room’s only door was lined with dwarf warriors and clerics.
So Yvonnel settled in.
She didn’t have to wait long, however, for before she had even slipped away into her first Reverie, the room’s door opened and a familiar figure walked in.
“Well met again, father,” she greeted.
Archmage Gromph did not appear amused.
SHE WAS SURPRISED to see him, not overly happy about it, and she didn’t hide it. Catti-brie had never been comfortable around Artemis Entreri, despite Drizzt’s more recent assurances. They had met long ago, after all, when the assassin had kidnapped her.
“I am sorry this happened to Drizzt,” Entreri told her.
“I haven’t said that I blame you,” the woman replied, but not in a comforting tone.
“You don’t have to. I know why Drizzt was in the Underdark, and part of that reason was me.”
“You didn’t know about the Abyssal mind plague sweeping the tunnels,” Catti-brie replied, but again, there was no softness in her tone. “In his life, Drizzt has traveled on scores of adventures that could have been the end of him, in many ways. If you wish to wallow in guilt, then do so about the innocents—”
“Enough!” Entreri snapped, but he caught himself and closed his eyes and held up a hand as if wanting to retract everything. “I did not come here to fight with you, quite the opposite.”
“You have no business here, either way.”
“But I do,” the assassin insisted. “Because I have business with Drizzt. I owe him my life …”
“Many times,” Catti-brie interrupted. “And yet that never stopped you from your mischief before.”
Entreri accepted the barb with a resigned chuckle. “I owe him more than my life,” he added. “You cannot begin to know the world through my eyes, and I don’t expect you to try. I only came to tell you that if there were anything at all that I could do, even give my own life, to bring him back to you whole, I would.”
Catti-brie’s eyes narrowed and she seemed about to lash out, but she held back and instead just nodded.
“I hope that he returns to us—to you,” Entreri finished. “And I hope that you both find that which you desire.”
He gave a slight nod and departed, leaving Catti-brie flummoxed.
She tried to dismiss this surprising visit. She had too much to worry about with Drizzt to let the surprising words of Artemis Entreri concern her, and had too much responsibility with the reconstruction of the Hosttower of the Arcane to be sidetracked by the surprising humility of the assassin. If she failed in her task of making anew the magic of the Hosttower, then Gauntlgrym and more would be lost and many hundreds, even thousands, might perish.
What did she care for the conscience of a killer?
But she did.
“UNBELIEVABLE,” JARLAXLE MUTTERED when Yvonnel walked into his room in Illusk, where he was meeting with Gromph and Kimmuriel on some matters unrelated to the Hosttower.
“Ah, Jarlaxle, you seem as if you missed me
dearly,” Yvonnel replied.
“She simply walked in?” a surprised Kimmuriel asked. Bregan D’aerthe’s defenses in the ancient Undercity were undeniably formidable and redundant. The psionicist was clearly at a loss, for he was quite sure that Yvonnel held no love for him and might well destroy him then and there.
“Should I expect the lackeys of House Baenre to turn me away?” Yvonnel replied. “That is the role of Bregan D’aerthe, is it not? And the reason why House Baenre affords you such freedom and protection.”
“I am not surprised,” Jarlaxle said, speaking to Kimmuriel more than to the visitor. “Or perhaps I should say that I am surprised that the rumors from House Baenre are proven true. In any case, our guards were alerted to the possibility that we would have a visitor from House Baenre.”
“Then they were alerted wrongly,” said Yvonnel. “For I have forsaken House Baenre.”
That had the three drow looking at each other curiously, and with great concern. It pleased Yvonnel to learn how much her mere presence had unnerved these three formidable characters.
“I was not told of this,” Gromph said—rather imperiously, Yvonnel thought.
“Why would you be?” came her smart answer. “Do you still fancy yourself to be the Archmage of Menzoberranzan? Why, Tsabrak Xorlarrin has settled in nicely—more so now that his Matron Mother Zeerith is reestablished on the Ruling Council as Matron Mother of House Do’Urden, though it will soon be renamed appropriately to her family. Why would Matron Mother Baenre inform you of anything more than you need to know, when the mere reminder of you brings her concern about the lessened stability of her rule?”
“Then she is a fool,” Gromph replied.
“We already knew that,” Yvonnel said.
“So, I was told that you had left, and you have left,” Jarlaxle interrupted. “And now you have come here. Is there any reason in particular?”
“Do I make you uncomfortable, my uncle?”
“Truthfully?” Jarlaxle replied. “Yes.”
“That brought a laugh from the woman. “Good. It will keep you from becoming too complacent, then—to your benefit as well as my own.”