Kelnozz smiled the thought away. “Let Berg’inyon serve as a cook in some lowly house for all I care,” he whispered even more quietly than before—for the son of House Baenre’s bunk was only a few yards away. “He is tenth, yet I, Kelnozz of Kenafin, am third!”
“I am eighth,” said Drizzt, an uncharacteristic edge on his voice, more anger than jealousy,” but I could defeat you with any weapon.”
Kelnozz shrugged, a strangely blurring movement to onlookers seeing in the infrared spectrum. “You did not,” he signaled. “I won our encounter.”
“Encounter?” Drizzt gasped. “You deceived me, that is all!”
“Who was left standing?” Kelnozz pointedly reminded him. “Who wore the blue light of a master’s wand?”
“Honor demands that there be rules of engagement,” growled Drizzt.
“There is a rule,” Kelnozz snapped back at him. “You may do whatever you can get away with. I won our encounter, Drizzt Do’Urden, and I hold the higher rank! That is all that matters!”
In the heat of the argument, their voices had grown too loud. The door to the room swung wide, and a master stepped onto the threshold, his form vividly outlined by the hallway’s blue lights. Both students promptly rolled over and closed their eyes—and their mouths.
The finality of Kelnozz’s last statement rocked Drizzt to some prudent observations. He realized then that his friendship with Kelnozz had come to an end—and, perhaps, that he and Kelnozz had never been friends at all.
“You have seen him?” Alton asked, his fingers tapping anxiously on the small table in the highest chamber of his private quarters. Alton had set the younger students of Sorcere to work repairing the blasted place, but the scorch marks on the stone walls remained, a legacy of Alton’s fireball.
“I have,” replied Masoj. “I have heard of his skill with weapons.”
“Eighth in his class after the grand melee,” said Alton, “a fine achievement.”
“By all accounts, he has the prowess to be first,” said Masoj. “One day he will claim that title. I shall be careful around that one.”
“He will never live to claim it!” Alton promised. “House Do’Urden puts great pride in this purple-eyed youth, and thus I have decided upon Drizzt as my first target for revenge. His death will bring pain to that treacherous Matron Malice!”
Masoj saw a problem here and decided to put it to rest once and for all. “You will not harm him,” he warned Alton. “You will not even go near him.”
Alton’s tone became no less grim. “I have waited two decades—” he began.
“You can wait a few more,” Masoj snapped back. “I remind you that you accepted Matron SiNafay’s invitation into House Hun’ett. Such an alliance requires obedience. Matron SiNafay—our matron mother—has placed upon my shoulders the task of handling Drizzt Do’Urden, and I will execute her will.”
Alton rested back in his seat across the table and put what was left of his acid-torn chin into a slender palm, carefully weighing the words of his secret partner.
“Matron SiNafay has plans that will bring you all the revenge you could possibly desire,” Masoj continued. “I warn you now, Alton DeVir,” he snarled, emphasizing the surname that was not Hun’ett, “that if you begin a war with House Do’Urden, or even put them on the defensive with any act of violence unsanctioned by Matron SiNafay, you will incur the wrath of House Hun’ett. Matron SiNafay will expose you as a murderous imposter and will exact every punishment allowable by the ruling council upon your pitiful bones!”
Alton had no way to refute the threat. He was a rogue, without family beyond the adopted Hun’etts. If SiNafay turned against him, he would find no allies. “What plan does SiNafay … Matron SiNafay … have for House Do’Urden?” he asked calmly. “Tell me of my revenge so that I may survive these torturous years of waiting.”
Masoj knew that he had to act carefully at this point. His mother had not forbidden him to tell Alton of the future course of action, but if she had wanted the volatile DeVir to know, Masoj realized, she would have told him herself.
“Let us just say that House Do’Urden’s power has grown, and continues to grow, to the point where it has become a very real threat to all the great houses,” Masoj purred, loving the intrigue of positioning before a war. “Witness the fall of House DeVir, perfectly executed with no obvious trail. Many of Menzoberranzan’s nobles would rest easier if …” He let it go at that, deciding that he probably had said too much already.
By the hot glimmer in Alton’s eyes, Masoj could tell that the lure had been strong enough to buy Alton’s patience.
The Academy held many disappointments for young Drizzt, particularly in that first year, when so many of the dark realities of drow society, realities that Zaknafein had barely hinted at, remained on the edges of Drizzt’s cognizance with stubborn resilience. He weighed the masters’ lectures of hatred and mistrust in both hands, one side holding the masters’ views in the context of the lectures, the other bending those same words into the very different logic assumed by his old mentor. The truth seemed so ambiguous, so hard to define. Through all of the examination, Drizzt found that he could not escape one pervading fact: In his entire young life, the only treachery he had ever witnessed—and so often!—was at the hands of drow elves.
The physical training of the Academy, hours on end of dueling exercises and stealth techniques, was more to Drizzt’s liking. Here, with his weapons so readily in his hands, he freed himself of the disturbing questions of truth and perceived truth.
Here he excelled. If Drizzt had come into the Academy with a higher level of training and expertise than that of his classmates, the gap grew only wider as the grueling months passed. He learned to look beyond the accepted defense and attack routines put forth by the masters and create his own methods, innovations that almost always at least equaled—and usually outdid—the standard techniques.
At first, Dinin listened with increasing pride as his peers exalted in his younger brother’s fighting prowess. So glowing came the compliments that the eldest son of Matron Malice soon took on a nervous wariness. Dinin was the elderboy of House Do’Urden, a title he had gained by eliminating Nalfein. Drizzt, showing the potential to become one of the finest swordsmen in all of Menzoberranzan, was now the secondboy of the house, eyeing, perhaps, Dinin’s title.
Similarly, Drizzt’s fellow students did not miss the growing brilliance of his fighting dance. Often they viewed it too close for their liking! They looked upon Drizzt with seething jealousy, wondering if they could ever measure up against his whirling scimitars. Pragmatism was ever a strong trait in drow elves. These young students had spent the bulk of their years observing the elders of their families twisting every situation into a favorable light. Every one of them recognized the value of Drizzt Do’Urden as an ally, and thus, when the grand melee came around the next year, Drizzt was inundated with offers of partnership.
The most surprising query came from Kelnozz of House Kenafin, who had downed Drizzt through deceit the previous year. “Do we join again, this time to the very top of the class?” the haughty young fighter asked as he moved beside Drizzt down the tunnel to the prepared cavern. He moved around and stood before Drizzt easily, as if they were the best of friends, his forearms resting across the hilts of his belted weapons and an overly friendly smile spread across his face.
Drizzt could not even answer. He turned and walked away, pointedly keeping his eye over one shoulder as he left.
“Why are you so amazed?” Kelnozz pressed, stepping quickly to keep up.
Drizzt spun on him. “How could I join again with one who so deceived me?” he snarled. “I have not forgotten your trick!”
“That is the point,” Kelnozz argued. “You are more wary this year; certainly I would be a fool to attempt such a move again!”
“How else could you win?” said Drizzt. “You cannot defeat me in open battle.” His words were not a boast, just a fact that Kelnozz accepted as readily as Dri
zzt.
“Second rank is highly honored,” Kelnozz reasoned.
Drizzt glared at him. He knew that Kelnozz would not settle for anything less than ultimate victory. “If we meet in the melee,” he said with cold finality, “it will be as opponents.” He walked off again, and this time Kelnozz did not follow.
Luck bestowed a measure of justice upon Drizzt that day, for his first opponent, and first victim, in the grand melee was none other than his former partner. Drizzt found Kelnozz in the same corridor they had used as a defensible starting point the previous year and took him down with his very first attack combination. Drizzt somehow managed to hold back on his winning thrust, though he truly wanted to jab his scimitar pole into Kelnozz’s ribs with all his strength.
Then Drizzt was off into the shadows, picking his way carefully until the numbers of surviving students began to dwindle. With his reputation, Drizzt had to be extra wary, for his classmates recognized a common advantage in eliminating one of his prowess early in the competition. Working alone, Drizzt had to fully scope out every battle before he engaged, to ensure that each opponent had no secret companions lurking nearby.
This was Drizzt’s arena, the place where he felt most comfortable, and he was up to the challenge. In two hours, only five competitors remained, and after another two hours of cat and mouse, it came down to only two: Drizzt and Berg’inyon Baenre.
Drizzt moved out into an open stretch of the cavern. “Come out, then, student Baenre!” he called. “Let us settle this challenge openly and with honor!”
Watching from the catwalk, Dinin shook his head in disbelief.
“He has relinquished all advantage,” said Master Hatch’net, standing beside the elderboy of House Do’Urden. “As the better swordsman, he had Berg’inyon worried and unsure of his moves. Now your brother stands out in the open, showing his position.”
“Still a fool,” Dinin muttered.
Hatch’net spotted Berg’inyon slipping behind a stalagmite mound a few yards behind Drizzt. “It should be settled soon.”
“Are you afraid?” Drizzt yelled into the gloom. “If you truly deserve the top rank, as you freely boast, then come out and face me openly. Prove your words, Berg’inyon Baenre, or never speak them again!”
The expected rush of motion from behind sent Drizzt into a sidelong roll.
“Fighting is more than swordplay!” the son of House Baenre cried as he came on, his eyes gleaming at the advantage he now seemed to hold.
Berg’inyon stumbled then, tripped up by a wire Drizzt had set out, and fell flat to his face. Drizzt was on him in a flash, scimitar pole tip in at Berg’inyon’s throat.
“So I have learned,” Drizzt replied grimly.
“Thus a Do’Urden becomes the champion,” Hatch’net observed, putting his blue light on the face of House Baenre’s defeated son. Hatch’net then stole Dinin’s widening smile with a prudent reminder: “Elderboys should beware secondboys with such skills.”
While Drizzt took little pride in his victory that second year, he took great satisfaction in the continued growth of his fighting skills. He practiced every waking hour when he was not busy in the many serving duties of a young student. Those duties were reduced as the years passed—the youngest students were worked the hardest—and Drizzt found more and more time in private training. He reveled in the dance of his blades and the harmony of his movements. His scimitars became his only friends, the only things he dared to trust.
He won the grand melee again the third year, and the year after that, despite the conspiracies of many others against him. To the masters, it became obvious that none in Drizzt’s class would ever defeat him, and the next year they placed him into the grand melee of students three years his senior. He won that one, too.
The Academy, above anything else in Menzoberranzan, was a structured place, and though Drizzt’s advanced skill defied that structure in terms of battle prowess, his tenure as a student would not be lessened. As a fighter, he would spend ten years in the Academy, not such a long time considering the thirty years of study a wizard endured in Sorcere, or the fifty years a budding priestess would spend in Arach-Tinilith. While fighters began their training at the young age of twenty, wizards could not start until their twenty-fifth birthday, and clerics had to wait until the age of forty.
The first four years in Melee-Magthere were devoted to singular combat, the handling of weapons. In this, the masters could teach Drizzt little that Zaknafein had not already shown him.
After that, though, the lessons became more involved. The young drow warriors spent two full years learning group fighting tactics with other warriors, and the subsequent three years incorporated those tactics into warfare techniques beside, and against, wizards and clerics.
The final year of the Academy rounded out the fighters’ education. The first six months were spent in Sorcere, learning the basics of magic use, and the last six, the prelude to graduation, saw the fighters in tutelage under the priestesses of Arach-Tinilith.
All the while there remained the rhetoric, the hammering in of those precepts that the Spider Queen held so dear, those lies of hatred that held the drow in a state of controllable chaos.
To Drizzt, the Academy became a personal challenge, a private classroom within the impenetrable womb of his whirling scimitars.
Inside the adamantine walls he formed with those blades, Drizzt found he could ignore the many injustices he observed all around him, and could somewhat insulate himself against words that would have poisoned his heart. The Academy was a place of constant ambition and deceit, a breeding ground for the ravenous, consuming hunger for power that marked the life of all the drow.
Drizzt would survive it unscathed, he promised himself.
As the years passed, though, as the battles began to take on the edge of brutal reality, Drizzt found himself caught up time and again in the heated throes of situations he could not so easily brush away.
hey moved through the winding tunnels as quietly as a whispering breeze, each step measured in stealth and ending in an alert posture. They were ninth-year students working on their last year in Melee-Magthere, and they operated as often outside the cavern of Menzoberranzan as within. No longer did padded poles adorn their belts; adamantine weapons hung there now, finely forged and cruelly edged.
At times, the tunnels closed in around them, barely wide enough for one dark elf to squeeze through. Other times, the students found themselves in huge caverns with walls and ceilings beyond their sight. They were drow warriors, trained to operate in any type of Underdark landscape and learned in the ways of any foe they might encounter.
“Practice patrols,” Master Hatch’net had called these drills, though he had warned the students that “practice patrols” often met monsters quite real and unfriendly.
Drizzt, still rated in the top of his class and in the point position, led this group, with Master Hatch’net and ten other students following in formation behind. Only twenty-two of the original twenty-five in Drizzt’s class remained. One had been dismissed—and subsequently executed—for a foiled assassination attempt on a high-ranking student, a second had been killed in the practice arena, and a third had died in his bunk of natural causes—for a dagger in the heart quite naturally ends one’s life.
In another tunnel a short distance away, Berg’inyon Baenre, holding the class’s second rank, led Master Dinin and the other half of the class in a similar exercise.
Day after day, Drizzt and the others had struggled to keep the fine edge of readiness. In three months of these mock patrols, the group had encountered only one monster, a cave fisher, a nasty crablike denizen of the Underdark. Even that conflict had provided only brief excitement, and no practical experience, for the cave fisher had slipped out along the high ledges before the drow patrol could even get a strike at it.
This day, Drizzt sensed something different. Perhaps it was an unusual edge on Master Hatch’net’s voice or a tingling in the stones of the cavern, a subtle vib
ration that hinted to Drizzt’s subconscious of other creatures in the maze of tunnels. Whatever the reason, Drizzt knew enough to follow his instincts, and he was not surprised when the telltale glow of a heat source flitted down a side passage on the periphery of his vision. He signaled for the rest of the patrol to halt, then quickly climbed to a perch on a tiny ledge above the side passage’s exit.
When the intruder emerged into the main tunnel, he found himself lying back down on the floor with two scimitar blades crossed over his neck. Drizzt backed away immediately when he recognized his victim as another drow student.
“What are you doing down here?” Master Hatch’net demanded of the intruder. “You know that the tunnels outside Menzoberranzan are not to be traveled by any but the patrols!”
“Your pardon, Master,” the student pleaded. “I bring news of an alert.”
All in the patrol crowded around, but Hatch’net backed them off with a glare and ordered Drizzt to set them out in defensive positions.
“A child is missing,” the student went on, “a princess of House Baenre! Monsters have been spotted in the tunnels!”
“What sort of monsters?” Hatch’net asked. A loud clacking noise, like the sound of two stones being chipped together, answered his question.
“Hook horrors!” Hatch’net signaled to Drizzt at his side. Drizzt had never seen such beasts, but he had learned enough about them to understand why Master Hatch’net had suddenly reverted to the silent hand code. Hook horrors hunted through a sense of hearing more acute than that of any other creature in all the Underdark. Drizzt immediately relayed the signal around to the others, and they held absolutely quiet for instructions from the master. This was the situation they had trained to handle for the last nine years of their lives, and only the sweat on their palms belied the calm readiness of these young drow warriors.