Maestro

Epilogue

Gromph and Kimmuriel walked side-by-side through the passageways of Gauntlgrym, a host of dwarf guards directing them. King Bruenor hadn’t been pleased to see them, but at least they had come to see him properly, in accordance with Catti-brie’s wishes.

Gromph hadn’t much noticed or cared. He had only come to this place now because of Kimmuriel’s insistence. Since he had accepted Kimmuriel as the official ambassador of the illithid hive-mind in the rebuilding of the tower, Kimmuriel’s wishes were no small thing.

“It is an amazing insight, perhaps,” Kimmuriel offered as the party descended the long circular stair to the main chamber of the lower levels.

“It is idiocy,” Gromph replied with calm confidence. The only thing preventing him from a complete explosion of outrage here were his most recent memories. Never had he felt such power flowing through him as when the illithid collective had sent the kinetic barrier to the waiting K’yorl. That had felt to Gromph to be the purest and most intense expression of intangible power he had ever experienced. In those moments of flowing perfection, he believed that he had come to know what it was like to be a god.

But now this.

In the few short days Gromph had been away, the infernal human woman had strengthened her hold on the others-and they had wasted not a moment in coming to this place to meet with King Bruenor.

And now the work had apparently already begun.

“One thing I have learned in my years with the illithids, Archmage, is to never underestimate the power of viewing the world through a glass bowed. The truths we know are solid paradigms only in our wider expression of the world as a whole.”

Gromph looked at him curiously for a moment, but then grumbled, “Her glass isn’t bowed. It is painted with pretty flowers.” He stopped as the pair neared the Forge Room, noting some dwarves moving along a corridor off the side, towing carts loaded with stone.

Gromph shook his head and turned to face Kimmuriel directly.

“Only those flowers are dragons, and they will melt us all,” he said.

They went into the Forge Room then, to the incredulous and suspicious stares of the dwarf craftsmen. Over on the far wall were large tables covered with parchments. The dragon sisters were there, along with Caecilia, Lord Parise, and Penelope Harpell, all discussing some image splayed in front of them and pointing and nodding.

Kimmuriel started that way, but paused when he realized that Gromph wasn’t following him.

“You go,” the archmage said. “I’ve another I wish to speak with, and I know where to find her.”

He swept across the room then, veering left and never even looking back where the other architects of the new Hosttower had gathered.

A pair of dwarves stood blocking the door in front of him.

“Get out of my way,” he told them.

“He the one?” one asked the other.

“Aye, the stubborn one,” said the other, and they parted.

At the other end of the tunnel loomed the primordial chamber, and there, as expected, Gromph found Catti-brie. She stood at the edge of the pit, staring across at the area that held, beneath the cooled magma, the antechamber and the key lever.

Beside the woman lay several metal beams and cut stones, the ingredients for constructing a new bridge to the antechamber.

“You have wasted no time,” Gromph said.

“We have little to waste.” She didn’t seem surprised by his entrance, nor did she bother looking over at him as he approached.

“It seems that you have convinced the others.”

“They have decided nothing.”

“Good, then I will …”

Now Catti-brie did turn on him, her eyes narrowed, her face a mask of determination. “I will do this with or without them, and with or without you.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes, indeed.”

Once again, Drizzt awakened deep within himself, settled deeply into darkness. He wasn’t standing this time, he realized when the pain in his stretched joints began to register.

“At last,” he heard, the voice of a drow woman.

“You should have just left him for dead,” said another, whom he recognized as Matron Mother Quenthel.

“Oh shut up,” said the first, Yvonnel.

Drizzt felt something upon his belly then, square and solid. It was jostled about and he felt the bottom pulled out, then small feet and tiny claws moving back and forth excitedly. He opened his eyes, blinking repeatedly as he adjusted to the dim light of the room-of the dungeon, yet again, in House Baenre.

He groaned, in pain. While he wasn’t standing, neither was he actually lying down. He was on a rack, suspended by his ankles and wrists. He worked his shoulders, trying vainly to relieve some of the tension on his elbows, but the ties were simply too tight and his efforts only brought him more pain.

He did manage to lift his head a bit to see Yvonnel, Quenthel standing behind her, and to see the small box Yvonnel had placed upon his naked belly.

The bottomless one that held a rat.

“Ah, good, you have returned to us at last,” Yvonnel said to him and she moved up and leaned on the crank, and the rack pulled a tiny bit more.

Drizzt grimaced against the pain.

“I have your friends here,” she said happily. “Would you like to see?”

Drizzt closed his eyes and tried to send his thoughts far away.

“This is so much like the wheel of history returning to the same place anew, don’t you think?” Yvonnel said, and Drizzt was sure that he had no idea what she was babbling about. “As your actions doomed your father before, so now, one of your friends.”

Drizzt’s eyes popped open wide and he glared at her.

“But I will let you pick,” she said. “Which of your friends will satisfy my sacrifice? The human? He is an angry one, always so full of scowls. You’d be doing him a favor.”

“Damn you.”

“Of course,” she said. “Or the elf. She is quite crazy. She probably won’t even understand. Or shall I kill Jarlaxle? You would at least be repaying me, I expect, since that one is drow, and valuable to me. Do you have that in you, heretic, to turn my request against me?”

“You gave me your word,” Drizzt gasped, and his words came out unevenly-Yvonnel played with the wheel throughout his sentence.

“And so two will leave, and the third … I will make it an easy death. A simple beheading.”

“Damn you,” Drizzt said again, and he settled back and closed his eyes.

“Choose,” Yvonnel instructed.

He didn’t answer.

But then she was there, right above him, one knee up on his chest and pressing down, increasing his pain. He opened his eyes to find her face very near his own, and with one hand raised.

“I admire your bravery,” she said, and snapped her fingers. In her palm a small ball of fire flared to life.

Yvonnel kept her smile very close as she reached her hand down lower, and lit the rat box.

“You will choose,” she whispered.

Drizzt felt the creature scrambling within the box, the front claws digging against his flesh.

“Choose!” Yvonnel demanded.

“Take me!” Entreri shouted. “Let him go and take me, you witch.”

Drizzt opened his eyes and strained to see in the direction of the voice, and there was the cage of lightning, Entreri up near the bars, Jarlaxle beside him with a hand on his shoulder.

Yvonnel had turned away to regard them, too, and she began to laugh. “Shut up!” she commanded. When Entreri began to yell at her, she waved her hand and the cage faded away, and so, too, did his protests.

Yvonnel was back at Drizzt’s face, so close. “Choose,” she whispered.

He shook his head, growling and grinding his teeth against the pain of the rack and the claws of the terrified rat.

“It is all a lie anyway, Drizzt Do’Urden, as you know,” she said. “So why does it matter?” She leaned on his chest and his elbows and knees felt as if they would simply explode. “Why does anything matter more than stopping the pain? Pick a friend.”

“No!”

“Pick a friend!” she said more insistently.

The rat bit him hard and began to burrow.

“No!”

“Why? It is all a lie.”

“No.”

“It is! So choose.”

“No!”

“Then tell me, Drizzt Do’Urden,” she said, her voice going softer. “Before you die, tell me why. It is all a lie, so why will you not choose?”

Drizzt opened his eyes and looked into Yvonnel’s colorful amber orbs, fighting to maintain control as the rat burrowed.

“Because I am not a lie,” he insisted through gritted teeth.

Yvonnel fell back from him, the pressure of the rack easing, at least. She stared at him for a long heartbeat, her expression one of confusion, perhaps, or of disbelief.

“Get those three out of here,” she turned and told Quenthel, then spun back to stare at Drizzt, shaking her head with a crooked smile, as if she had just learned something.

She slapped the burning box and the rat off of him and cast a spell with a wave of her hand that pulled the locking pin from the rack crank. Drizzt fell heavily to his back, where he lay gasping, too broken to even pull his arms down.

Yvonnel fell over him once again, her face close.

“They are free, all three,” she whispered. She kissed him, and in that kiss was a spell of healing and of slumber. “Sleep well, hero,” she added as Drizzt faded back into welcomed blackness.

“Do what?” Gromph demanded. “Do you mean to clear that chamber and free the primordial?”

Catti-brie didn’t blink.

“You have forgotten Neverwinter?”

Again, no answer.

“You do not understand the power of this creature.”

“But I do.”

“Yet you mean to free it!”

“In a controlled-”

“You cannot control such a beast as this, fool!”

Catti-brie grinned. “Come,” she bade him.

He looked at her curiously, puzzled.

“I will allow you into my thoughts,” she explained, “where once you were comfortable. I will show you.”

Gromph made no move for a long while, then narrowed his amber eyes and projected his thoughts into the waiting mind of Catti-brie.

And from there, she took him through her ring, to converse with the primordial, to see what she had seen from ancient times, when the volcano had roared through the tendrils and through the stone of Cutlass Island, melting the crystal of the limestone into something stronger, something magical, and pressing it out of the ground to grow. Squeezing it, hollowing it, pushing it farther, more and more crystal. Bubbles became holes became branches, flowing and growing.

A long while later, she cut off the communication and images, then abruptly dismissed Gromph from her thoughts and opened her eyes to stare at him once more.

The archmage licked his lips. He tried to appear nonchalant, but, judging by Catti-brie’s smirk, unsuccessfully.

For the second time in a span of hours, Gromph had witnessed something beyond his understanding, something terrifying and alluring all at once.

He returned her grin.

What else could he do?

She was right. For all the danger, all the chance of complete disaster, to rebuild the Hosttower of the Arcane, she was right.

“We cannot leave him,” Artemis Entreri said out in the tunnels just beyond Menzoberranzan. He was with Jarlaxle and Dahlia, and with all their gear returned.

Jarlaxle laughed. “We surely cannot go and get him!”

“He would have died for us.”

“He is probably already dead,” the mercenary replied with a shrug. “Would you dishonor him and get all of us killed, as well? Or do you not understand the limits of a drow matron mother’s mercy?”

Entreri spat on the ground and spun away, then stood up straight when he noted the approach of two dark elves.

Jarlaxle, too, noted them, and was not as surprised by the appearance of Yvonnel as he was by the other. “It cannot be,” he said.

“Use your magic, then,” Yvonnel answered. “You have the mask back in your possession. Is there another item that could so deceive the clever Jarlaxle?”

Braelin Janquay walked up in front of Jarlaxle and bowed. “Thank you for trying to end my misery,” he said.

“You were a drider,” Jarlaxle said. He looked past Braelin to Yvonnel. “You cannot undo a drider.”

“Of course you can,” she replied. “Or I can. I doubt others would have the courage to try.”

“But Lolth …”

“She is celebrating the fall of Demogorgon,” Yvonnel said. “She will forgive me.”

“But why?” a suspicious Entreri demanded.

Yvonnel looked at him, and even tilted her pretty head to regard him more closely, then began to laugh and waved him aside. She motioned for Jarlaxle to follow, and walked back the way she had come.

“I do this for you,” she said when Jarlaxle caught up to her. “A measure of good faith in expectation that you will serve my purpose.”

“And that purpose is?”

“We will see, in time.”

“Is he dead?” Jarlaxle asked, more seriously.

“Of course not.”

Jarlaxle walked around to face the strange young drow squarely.

“You envy him,” he dared to say.

Yvonnel snorted.

“You do!” Jarlaxle insisted. “You envy him. Because he is content in his heart that there is something more, some better angels and greater reason, and because he so easily finds his rewards, treasures as great as anything I or even you might know, in the contentment of moral clarity and personal honor.”

“I envy him?” Yvonnel scoffed. “And what of Jarlaxle?”

The mercenary assumed a pensive pose, considering the words before finally nodding. “How many times might I have killed Drizzt for easy personal gain?” he asked rhetorically, with a helpless laugh. “And yet he lives, and I find that I would defend this Houseless rogue at the cost of my own life.”

“Why?” Yvonnel asked, and sincerely. “Why you, and why that filth named Entreri?”

“Perhaps because secretly we all want to believe what Drizzt believes,” said Jarlaxle. He waited for Yvonnel to look him in the eye. “You couldn’t break him. You cannot break him.”

She looks annoyed, he thought.

She waved him away. “Go,” she said. “Remember that I gave your underling back to you. Remember that I let you walk away from this place.”

“It will all be forgotten, I assure you, if you kill Drizzt Do’Urden,” Jarlaxle warned.

Yvonnel scowled at him and waved him away.

A tenday later, back in Luskan, Beniago stood with Gromph near the ruins of the old Hosttower.

“Jarlaxle will return on the morrow,” he informed the archmage. “Catti-brie has entered the southern gate.”

Gromph looked at the drow in human disguise.

“She will be here presently, I expect.”

The archmage turned back to the ruins.

“You could be rid of her,” Beniago offered, and Gromph arched his eyebrows at that surprising remark.

“Jarlaxle would not like it, but would he ever know?” Beniago asked when Gromph looked back at him again.

Gromph wasn’t angry, of course. Beniago’s words were perfectly consistent with everything about drow society and tradition-even within Bregan D’aerthe. But the archmage chuckled and shook his head. “Go back to your tower, High Captain,” he said, mocking Beniago’s silly station. “Let the artists work.”

Even as Beniago started away, Gromph noted Catti-brie’s approach, the woman riding upon her unicorn across the bridge from Closeguard Island.

In watching her, and now in appreciating the truth of this human woman, Gromph for the first time in his life was surprised to admit that he was jealous of a mere warrior.

She rode Andahar up to him, and slid from the saddle to stand in front of him.

“May I help you, Lady?” he asked, but didn’t look at her.

“I forgive you,” she said, surprising him.

“What?”

“I forgive you,” she repeated. “For your telepathic intrusions. I understand now that you were not even there in my thoughts, and that it was only a suggestion placed for me to find.”

“And to enjoy.”

Catti-brie’s expression went cold.

“Then I am no rapist,” Gromph smugly replied to that look.

“You are a scoundrel and a fraud,” the woman said. “But I expected as much from the outset. I forgive you because now I trust that you will not hold me in lust, in body, in mind, or in hatred.”

“Interesting,” Gromph admitted. “I did not think you cared.”

“For you? No, I care for those you might harm. And I care most of all for those for whom you may do well. Can you do that, Archmage Gromph Baenre of Menzoberranzan? Can you just this once look beyond your own needs and desires and act for the benefit of others?”

“I am here, am I not?”

“Because you have to be, or because you want to be?”

Gromph gave a little laugh. “Good lady, let us finish this and make the new Hosttower of the Arcane more grand than the first.”

“It will be,” Catti-brie said with a nod, and then she offered a returned grin and added, “Just stay out of my thoughts.”

It was merely an off-hand remark, a bit of levity among the continual tension, but to Catti-brie’s obvious surprise, Gromph swung to face her, his expression very serious, and dipped a long, low bow. When he came back up in front of her, he said, in all seriousness, “Good lady. Catti-brie. I am Gromph Baenre of Menzoberranzan. Many times have I bowed to women-to do otherwise was to feel the bite of a snake-headed scourge. I say to you now, in all honesty, in all of my long life, that this is the first time I have offered a bow to a woman because I believe she deserved it.”

Catti-brie fell back a step, for a moment seeming at a loss. “Am I to swoon now?” she asked with an unsettled laugh.

“If I thought you would, I never would have bowed.”

And the great archmage turned back to the ruins and did not watch Catti-brie depart.

Drizzt sat on a comfortable divan. He wore fine, soft robes, and the meal in front of him would have satisfied Athrogate.

He had seen the dungeons of House Baenre, and now he witnessed the luxuries-though surely he felt this equally unnerving and exhausting.

“You could be a king,” said Yvonnel, who sat across from him, her legs up and tucked, the slit in her comfortable gown revealing much of her shapely legs. “Do you even understand the possibilities before you?”

Drizzt looked across the room, where Matron Mother Quenthel, Sos’Umptu Baenre, and another priestess Yvonnel had introduced as her mother, sat staring at him. He could feel their hatred-almost as much for Yvonnel as for himself.

“Your companions are back on the surface now, nearing the city of Luskan,” Yvonnel said. “That should make you happy.”

Drizzt shrugged.

“Do you wish to join them?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“You miss your friends and your home?”

He shrugged again.

Yvonnel laughed at him. “But did you not just come home? Are you not home now, among the drow, where you belong?”

“I came only to rescue Dahlia.”

“Whom you do not even believe is Dahlia, correct? Because it is all a lie?”

Drizzt looked away, because he really did not have any answer to that. He still felt as if he were standing on quicksand, as if perception and reality were twined in terrible ways.

“Did you not come home?” Yvonnel pressed.

“This is not my home.”

“I could make of you a king of Menzoberranzan!”

Drizzt shook his head.

“You could remake this city in your image. You are the champion of Lolth-all of the Houses witnessed your leap into the beast Demogorgon. You, Drizzt, destroyed that fiend and so we are saved.”

“I was your arrow, nothing more.”

“But they do not fully appreciate that, do they?”

“But I do. And this is not my home. Menzoberranzan can never be my home.”

Yvonnel relaxed a little more in her chair, her expression one of amusement. “Do you have a home? One that matters? Isn’t it all a lie?”

Drizzt shrugged.

“You are an insufferable one,” Yvonnel said. “And so I have changed my mind.” She motioned to the guards, who rushed out, returning with armloads of equipment, all of which Drizzt surely recognized. He looked on without even trying to hide his interest as Twinkle and Icingdeath fell upon the floor, and the belt Catti-brie had made for him, Taulmaril magically secured in the buckle.

And there, too, were Vidrinath and Orbbcress, along with Tiago’s fabulously enchanted armor.

“To the victor,” Yvonnel remarked.

Drizzt was looking past her, though, to see the profound scowls of Quenthel and Sos’Umptu, with the other, Minolin Fey, looking at the two with great concern. Yvonnel was playing her games as much for their benefit-or annoyance-as for his own.

“Take it, all of it,” Yvonnel said. “And I will have Archmage Tsabrak send you to this place you call home. You are a fool to abandon so much. So much pleasure, and so much power.”

Drizzt stared hard at her.

“If nothing matters, if it is all a wretched and twisted dream, then why not enjoy it?” she said.

When Drizzt didn’t reply, she laughed and said, “Get out.”

And so he did.

“How dare you?” Matron Mother Quenthel found the courage to argue when Drizzt was gone, his gear-and Tiago’s-in hand.

“Should I have killed him, do you suppose?”

“Of course!” Sos’Umptu answered.

“Horribly!” Quenthel added.

“Would that destroy him, do you think?”

“He would be dead, or worse-a drider, as is fitting,” Sos’Umptu replied.

“Better that!” Quenthel agreed. “You should have murdered him, yes, and painfully, over years.”

“You cannot destroy Drizzt Do’Urden by destroying his body,” Yvonnel explained. “He had long since moved beyond his corporeal form to become a creature of the heart and soul and not the flesh. His cries of pain would thrill you more than they would wound him, because he would hold his purpose and his truth. You cannot take that from him by torturing him.”

“Then kill all who are dear to him, before his very eyes!” Matron Mother Baenre declared.

But Yvonnel simply shrugged. “To what end? Even then, we would only affirm the truth in Drizzt’s heart. That heart would break at the sight of his beloved friends murdered, of course, but it would be a temporary victory. Breaking his heart is not the same as breaking his will.”

“So you simply allow him to leave?” asked Sos’Umptu.

Yvonnel laughed, so wickedly, so knowingly, so sinisterly, that it sent a chill through the spines of the older women.

“Drizzt is not the Chosen of Mielikki,” Yvonnel explained. “He is the Chosen only of what is in his heart, which he once accepted as the name of the goddess Mielikki. His faith lies in what he deigns truth, not a specific deity, and if there is a god for him, he believes he will find that god by following what he knows to be right and true. His apathy for the existence of a named truth, a god, will not chase him from his chosen course.”

The two Baenre high priestesses glanced at each other uncertainly.

“His human wife’s faith is less complicated. Catti-brie is a Chosen of Mielikki, willingly so,” Yvonnel continued.

Sos’Umptu and Quenthel looked at each other again and shrugged, neither understanding.

“Trust the lingering curse of Faerzress madness,” Yvonnel explained. “When Drizzt truly believes that he is deceived yet again, when he sees before him the ultimate ruse, he will reject it utterly and with explosive outrage.”

“And?” the matron mother prompted.

Yvonnel turned a most awful grin over the women. “How destroyed do you suppose Drizzt Do’Urden will be when he comes to understand that in killing the lie, he has struck dead his beloved Catti-brie?”

The level of conniving evil had the Baenre sisters standing dumbstruck.

“I would find that more gratifying than merely torturing the fool,” Yvonnel asserted, and she grimaced as she considered Jarlaxle’s assertion that she could not break Drizzt, determined to prove him wrong. “Wouldn’t you?”