Night of the Hunter

CHAPTER 13

I haven’t even asked how you feel,” Catti-Brie said to Drizzt. They sat on some rocks at the edge of their encampment on a starlit night, the southern breeze warm for the season.

“About?”

“All of it,” the woman said. “The turn of events, the return of-”

“How could I be anything but thrilled?” Drizzt asked and he took his wife’s hand.

“But surely it is overwhelming. Have you even come to the point where any of this seems real?”

Drizzt gave a helpless little laugh. “Perhaps I am too busy basking in the joy of it all to care. I admit that there have been some fears-didn’t Wulfgar tell us tales of grand deception along these same lines during his captivity with Errtu?”

“Is it all just a dream, then?” Catti-brie asked. “A grand deception?”

“No,” Drizzt answered without hesitation. “Or if it is, I don’t care!” he looked over at Catti-brie, to see her leaning back from him, her expression curious.

“Perception is reality,” Drizzt explained. “My reality now is joyous. A welcome reprieve.” He laughed again and leaned in to kiss the woman.

“So it is real,” Catti-brie agreed. “But is it truly joyous to you?”

“Do you doubt my love?”

“No, of course not! But how overwhelming this must be. For the rest of us, returning was a choice, and for me and Regis particularly, our lives did not move on from that night in Mithral Hall when Mielikki took us away to heal our broken minds. The movement of time for us has been insignificant compared to the century of life without us that you have known, and even through the last two decades, we walked in our new life with the single purpose of rejoining as the Companions of the Hall. We knew what to expect-indeed, we strove for exactly this-but for you, it is a surprise, a dramatic bend in a road.”

“The most welcomed surprise any person has ever known, no doubt,” said Drizzt.

“Are you sure?”

He put his arm around her and pulled her back in close, side-against-side. “I have spent a century missing-all of you, but you most of all.”

“That pains me,” she said quietly, but Drizzt dismissed it with a determined shake of his head.

“No,” he told her. “No. Your memory was sustenance and surely no burden.” He gave a little chuckle and kissed her on the cheek to preface his next comment. “I tried to forget you.”

“You make me feel so loved,” she teased.

“Truly,” he said in all seriousness. “When I battled orcs beside Innovindil, when I thought you, all of you, were dead, her counsel to me was straightforward. Live your life in the shorter spans of time of human lifetimes, she told me. To be an elf is to know and accept loss. And so I tried, and so, to this day, I failed. I tried to forget you, and yet I could not. You were there with me every day. I blocked you out and denied you. But alas.”

He paused and kissed her again. “I have known another lover, but I have not known love again. Perhaps it was Mielikki, reaching into my heart and whispering to me that you would return to me …”

“You don’t believe that.”

“No, I don’t,” he admitted. “What, then? Perhaps we two were just fortunate to truly find love, and a bond that outlived our mortal bodies?”

“Fortunate, or cursed?” Catti-brie asked with a wry grin. “Were you not lonely?”

“No,” Drizzt answered, again with surety and no hesitation. “I was lonely only when I denied you. I was lonely when I was with Dahlia, who I could not, could never, love. I was never lonely when the ghost of Catti-brie walked beside me, and the smiles I have known over the last century have ever been in connection with you.” He glanced back over his shoulder, to look where Wulfgar, Regis, and Bruenor were exchanging tales of their adventures of the last two decades. Drizzt’s expression grew curious when Wulfgar set a bucket of water down in front of the halfling, who shoved his head into it.

“Or in connection with them,” Drizzt added with a smirk.

Catti-brie squeezed his hand tightly. “There is something strange with Regis,” she said.

“Something that should concern us?”

“No, nothing like that. He had told me that he is as comfortable in the water as in the air, almost. Watch. He will keep his head in the water in the pail for a very long time-longer than the rest of us could hold our breaths if we followed one after the other into a second pail beside him.”

Drizzt did watch. Regis kept his head submerged, but kept snapping his fingers, as if to keep time, perhaps, or just to let the others know that he was all right. Drizzt looked at Bruenor, standing over the halfling with hands on hips. The dwarf glanced back at Drizzt and shook his head in disbelief.

Many more heartbeats passed and still Regis remained underwater, snapping his fingers, seemingly without a care. “Ain’t right,” Bruenor said. “Was his father a fish?” Wulfgar asked. “His mother, so he said.”

“A fish?”

“Not a fish, but some ancestor … a gensee or somethin’ like that.”

After what seemed an eternity, Regis finally surfaced, and came up with a smile, hardly gasping or distressed.

“Genasi,” Catti-brie said quietly to Drizzt as they turned back to the open night sky and the rolling terrain of the Crags before them. “He has genasi blood, so he believes.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“Planetouched,” Catti-brie explained. “Genasi are genies of varying elements, and rumored to reproduce with humans. I have never heard of a genasi-halfling offspring, but it is possible.”

“Of the five of us, Regis seems the most profoundly changed, and not just physically,” Drizzt said.

“Perhaps. Not as many years have passed for us as for you, but we have all been touched, profoundly, do not doubt. But doubt neither that he is Regis, the same halfling you once knew and loved.”

“I speak of changes in outlook, and perhaps purpose, but not in character. Not so much.”

“Is that your confidence or your hope?”

“Both!” Drizzt exclaimed and they both laughed.

“We’ve passed through death itself,” said Catti-brie, as if that would explain everything.

Drizzt leaned back and put on a more serious expression. “I would think that such an experience would make you more averse to the possibility.”

“Possibility?”

“Of death again. But yet you, all four, walk willingly into danger. We are chasing a vampire, and in a very dark place.”

“And then to war, it would seem, and yes, willingly.”

“Happily? Happily to your death?”

“No, of course not. Happily to adventure, and to whatever awaits us.”

A cold chill came over them then, as if the wind had shifted to blow down from the snow-capped mountains in the north, and Catti-brie pulled Drizzt closer, and shivered just a bit.

A fog came up before them, and Drizzt looked at it curiously. The weather shift seemed abrupt indeed-how much warmth had simply fled the air? — but there was no snow, and no water that he knew of, so what had brought forth the fog?

The cold fog, he realized as it drifted closer.

The cold, dead fog.

“Always got a tale, don’t ye, Rumblebelly?” Bruenor said with a laugh when the halfling finally resurfaced from the water bucket. “Can’t ever be nothing regular about ye, eh?”

“I live to entertain,” the halfling said with a polite and exaggerated bow, and as he rose, he shook his head vigorously, drying himself as a dog might, and splashing Bruenor in the process.

“Brr,” he said as he did, feeling a bit chilly and attributing it to the bucket of water.

But Wulfgar, too, stood up and rubbed his bare arms and took a deep breath-a breath that showed in the air.

“Getting cold,” Bruenor agreed.

Regis started to answer, but when he looked at the dwarf, or rather, looked past the dwarf, the words caught in his throat.

He saw the fog.

He knew this particular fog.

“What other tales ye got to entertain us then, Rumblebelly?” Bruenor asked with a wide smile. “Part fish, part bird? Can ye fly, too?”

Oh, Regis did indeed have a tale for him, but the halfling wasn’t confident that Bruenor would find it entertaining. And Regis wished he was a bird, truly, that he could fly far, far away!

“Run,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “Oh, run.”

“Eh?” Bruenor asked, not catching on.

Regis continued to look past the dwarf, and he shook his head slowly in denial as the fog behind the dwarf began to coalesce and take the distinctive form of a tall, emaciated man.

“Oh, run!” Regis cried out, falling back a step. “Bruenor! Behind you!”

Wulfgar rushed past the halfling, between Regis and Bruenor, roaring to his god. “Tempus!” he cried and he pulled Aegis-fang over his shoulder and let fly the warhammer in one motion. The missile spun right over the dwarf’s head, for the barbarian had used the horn on one side of Bruenor’s helmet and the horn stub on the other side to line up his throw.

“Hey, now!” Bruenor shouted in surprise, diving down. He came up and looked back just in time to see the hammer slam into the leering humanoid figure moving toward him through a ghostly fog. That fog intensified, as if flying out of the creature itself, when the warhammer hit.

If the creature had felt that hit at all, it didn’t show it. It was as if it had become something less than substantial to accept the blow, the warhammer powering right through it, hardly slowly. The fog coalesced once more, the creature reforming as soon as the threat had passed.

“Rumblebelly, what do ye know?” Bruenor asked, backstepping toward the other two and veering to the side, where his axe rested against a stone.

“Ebonsoul,” Regis stammered. “The lich.”

The horrid creature drifted in, eyes shining with inner, demonic fire. Its emaciated, rotting face twisted and turned, shapeshifting, it seemed.

Wulfgar’s hammer returned to his grasp. Bruenor grabbed up his axe and ran beside the man. Regis inched forward on the other side of Wulfgar, and all three stared, gawking, at Ebonsoul, all three unable to break the trance.

All three horrified and transfixed.

This was the power of the mighty lich. It went beyond the normal, gruesome realm one might expect from an undead monstrosity. Ebonsoul’s terror transcended garishness, and focused to the deepest fears of any mortal creature, to the most primal fear of death. In the lich’s rotting face, an onlooker saw himself. Undeniably so. To gaze upon Ebonsoul was to peer into your own grave, to see your own inevitably rotting corpse, to see the worms burrowing into your eyes, wriggled into your brain.

That was the horror.

Regis could only think of poor Pericolo Topolino, sitting in his chair, scared, quite literally, to death. He recalled how the Grandfather’s hair had turned white from terror. The aging halfling had looked beyond the grave, and like any mortal creature, had not relished the image and the implications.

Regis could truly understand now the formidable weapon of Ebonsoul.

He could understand the power of it, but understood, too, that he was not nearly as susceptible to it as Pericolo had been. Nor were his companions, for like him, Bruenor and Wulfgar had already passed through death. Bruenor had even looked upon his own rotted corpse in a cairn in Gauntlgrym, as Regis knew that his former body lay rotting under rocks in Mithral Hall, and Wulfgar’s bones lay windblown on the tundra of Icewind Dale.

“Come on, then, ye rotten beastie,” Bruenor taunted, and Wulfgar slapped the returned Aegis-fang across his open palm.

Ebonsoul stopped and stood up straight and tall, his thin arms lifting out to his sides, sleeves drooping wide to the ground, and crackles of lightning showing around his skeletal fingers.

“He’s got tricks!” Regis yelled.

Bruenor leaped forward and Wulfgar lifted his warhammer to throw again, but both stopped as a black form flew in from the left side, crashing into the lich. Again the fog exploded from the undead monster, but not enough this time, and Guenhwyvar’s pounce-of course it was Guenhwyvar-drove Ebonsoul hard to the side.

From the darkness behind came Drizzt, weapons in hand, pressing hard on the creature.

But Ebonsoul was gone then, just an intangible fog, and it swept as if driven by a hurricane in a sudden burst that landed the lich right beside Wulfgar. The barbarian and both flanking him cried out in surprise as Ebonsoul instantly reconstituted, his bony hand sweeping in to slap at Wulfgar.

Lightning crackled as the blow connected and the barbarian was flying then, lifted from the ground and thrown over Regis. He landed right at the edge of the encampment and pitched over a log he had earlier placed across two stones as a bench seat.

Across swept Bruenor’s axe in response, but the lich was fog once more, and Bruenor overbalanced and stumbled forward when he hit nothing tangible. And then Bruenor went down hard as Guenhwyvar flew in through the fog and collided with him.

Regis saw the incorporeal lich coming for him. He called upon his ring, warp stepping just as Ebonsoul reformed, and now it was the lich’s swing that hit nothing but air and with the halfling turning around behind him to stab Ebonsoul with his own dagger.

The halfling felt the press for a bit and knew he had stung the creature, at least, but that solidity melted quickly, as did Ebonsoul.

Now the fog blew away to the halfling’s left, across the camp for the charging drow. Regis called out a warning, but Drizzt was already moving in any case. The drow ranger leaped into the air in a great spin, scimitars flashing out left and right, front and back, and repeatedly in a wild blur.

Ebonsoul came back to corporeal form before the drow, and those scimitars dug in, slashing repeatedly at reaching arms and at the robed torso.

But the lich accepted the blows in exchange for his own, an open hand that slammed into Drizzt and staggered him backward, and it was all the clearly dazed drow could do to hang onto his blades. He recovered quickly and fell into a defensive posture as the lich advanced.

And Drizzt dived, rolling as far aside as he could as a ball of fire appeared in the air above the undead beast, erupting into a line of fire that raced down hungrily upon the lich. Again Ebonsoul became a fog cloud, reforming almost immediately just to the side, and spinning around. Wisps of smoke rose from the creature’s robes as it turned toward Regis and Bruenor, and toward Wulfgar, who was coming back into the firelight, staggering somewhat but ready once more for battle.

A forked lightning bolt reached out at the trio, and they scrambled and dived, cried out in stinging pain, and spun down to the ground.

Through the blinding flash came Guenhwyvar once again. From the side came another barrage of magic, arcane this time, as magical missiles swarmed into the firelight and stung at Ebonsoul. Only then did the lich seem to realize the presence of a sixth companion, a robed woman standing off in the darkness to the side of the encampment.

Ebonsoul melted to fog and rushed away from the springing panther, and Guenhwyvar burst through the insubstantial curtain and landed far beyond the spot, digging in her claws and chewing up the ground as she tried to quickly turn around.

“Me girl!” Bruenor yelled in warning.

Catti-brie knew Ebonsoul was coming.

She called to her goddess and brought forth a brilliant light all around her, then saw the incoming rush of fog and lifted her hands to meet it, thumbs touching, fingers fanned horizontally, greeting the reforming Ebonsoul with a fan of flames.

But the lich hissed through the magical fire and swatted Catti-brie aside, sending her into a roll. She came around with a spell on her lips, but was relieved when Wulfgar’s hammer took Ebonsoul on the side of the head, staggering him. The huge barbarian charged in behind the throw, Bruenor and Regis close behind. And on came Drizzt from across the camp, blades rolling eagerly.

Ebonsoul was fog, then reformed, and Wulfgar went flying even as he caught his returned hammer.

Then to fog again went the lich, in a frenzy now, becoming corporeal in front of Regis, and dematerializing almost immediately as the halfling dived away and Bruenor turned in.

Lightning crackled around Catti-brie’s fingers, but she didn’t dare let loose the stroke of magic, for the lich was all around, near one companion, then another.

She thought she had a shot, but Ebonsoul swirled into fog once more and swept around a startled Bruenor, becoming solid behind the dwarf.

Bruenor grunted and rushed at Catti-brie as a clawed hand raked his back, and a thrust open hand crunched into the back of his neck and sent him flying forward and to the ground.

Catti-brie dismissed her spell, the crackling lightning dissipating around her. She searched her thoughts and recounted her spells and focused her attention at last upon a ring on her finger.

Drizzt came at the lich, blades whirling. But faster still was Ebonsoul, just a fog again, then reforming out to the side.

Drizzt turned to pursue, but found a stroke of black lightning instead, slamming him in the chest and throwing him backward, eating at his very life force. He still watched Ebonsoul, the lich becoming fog, the fog exploding all around as Guenhwyvar leaped through harmlessly.

Back and forth went the fog, darting all around the encampment, the lich reforming and striking, going away once more to strike again at a different target.

The four friends and Guenhwyvar tried to formulate some defensive posture, but Regis went flying, and then Wulfgar grunted and was driven to his knees, and Guenhwyvar roared in frustration again and again, always a heartbeat too late to the spot to rake at the undead monster.

And the companions were taking serious hits now, bruised and battered and bloody, and their occasional hits on the frenzied lich seemed to show little effect.

“Elf, take me left!” Bruenor ordered, right as Ebonsoul appeared behind him and whacked him across the head as he tried to turn, staggering him to the side.

Drizzt rushed in, magical anklets speeding him, but he had to turn aside, indeed dive aside, to avoid getting swatted by an outraged Wulfgar, who swung mightily at the lich. But alas, Ebonsoul was already gone.

They couldn’t match the speed and power of this one, Drizzt knew. They all knew it, and it seemed more likely that they’d inadvertently kill each other before ever landing any solid blows on the monster. Out in the darkness, Drizzt heard Catti-brie chanting in an arcane language he did not know.

“Scatter!” Regis ordered. “We cannot beat him!”

But Drizzt didn’t run, and he went at the fog, meeting Ebonsoul as the lich became corporeal, attacking furiously if futilely, but determined to keep the creature occupied, determined to give Catti-brie the time she needed.

“Drizzt, no!” he heard Regis cry out, and the words distorted in Drizzt’s ears as he pitched through the air, swatted hard by Ebonsoul.

The fog pursued.

The lich returned right in front of the flight of Wulfgar’s hammer, a desperate throw that would only narrowly miss Drizzt. Guenhwyvar soared in beside Aegis-fang, but again Ebonsoul became fog, hammer and panther flying through, and the fog rushed for Regis then, and the blood drained from the halfling’s face as Ebonsoul came up fearlessly before him, and surely the halfling saw his doom in the monster’s fiery eyes.

He stabbed out with his rapier desperately and repeatedly, and knew he was doing little damage, his pointed blade barely digging in. Ebonsoul ignored it, not even bothering to dematerialize, but instead determinedly reaching his clawed hands for the halfling thief.

“Come to me, little pirate,” the lich said in a vocal tremor that shivered Regis’s bones, and Regis nearly fainted away, and Drizzt cried out from far behind, and Bruenor, still on his knees to the halfling’s left, called out for his doomed halfling friend.

As he swooned, Regis barely registered the distortion that came into Ebonsoul’s watery voice, and it took him heartbeats to realize the visual weirdness as well, as the lich’s face seemed to elongate as if it was being pulled backward like soft dough or Sword Coast taffy.

Ebonsoul reached for him, but the moving hands seemed to be getting no nearer.

And the lich was pulled back and stretched. Ebonsoul’s expression became one of puzzlement, and the lich became a fog, as if trying to escape.

But the fog offered no escape, not this time, and it was pulled fast back the way it had come, rushing past the charging Wulfgar, past Drizzt, and out into the darkness.

Silence fell over the camp.

Guenhwyvar paced warily, turning tight circles. The four friends looked to each other, at a loss.

“Me girl,” Bruenor at last breathed.

And as if on cue, into the firelight walked Catti-brie, one hand clenched in a fist and held tight against her breast, her other hand up and out before her, holding aloft a large gemstone.

“What did you do?” Drizzt asked.

“We could not beat it,” Catti-brie answered in a whisper. “I had to.”

“She caught it!” Bruenor howled, and he scrambled to his feet. “In the gem! Oh, good girl!”

“Catti?” Drizzt asked.

She looked up at him, and seemed as if waking from a trance. She guided his gaze to the phylactery and nodded.

“That was the spell for Pwent,” Wulfgar interjected. “The spell the Harpells put in the ring.”

“What’d’ye do, girl?” Bruenor asked, suddenly near panic.

“Saved us, likely,” Drizzt answered. He turned to Catti-brie. “But what now? Back to Longsaddle?”

The woman considered the words for a long while, then shook her head. “On our way,” she answered. “The lich is caught, his soul trapped within the phylactery. Ebonsoul will bother us no more.”

“But you used the spell stored in the ring,” Bruenor and Regis said in unison.

“And I have a scroll from the Harpells replicating the magic,” Catti-brie answered.

“Ain’t yer prison full?” asked Bruenor.

“That spell is beyond you, so you said,” Drizzt added.

“I have performed it once, through the ring,” Catti-brie answered. “I will find the power again. And the phylactery … we will find another. Or we can go back, if you choose, but didn’t you say when we set the camp that we are close to Gauntlgrym’s entrance?”

“Aye, we’ll make the rocky dell soon after sunrise,” the dwarf confirmed.

Catti-brie shrugged and looked to Drizzt, and the drow took the cue to glance at each of his companions.

“To Gauntlgrym, then?” he said. “Though I fear we’ll have to destroy our old friend Thibbledorf Pwent where he resides instead of bringing him forth to accept the resurrection and true and clean death dealt by a high priest.”

By the time he had finished talking, Catti-brie stood before him, blue mist snaking out of her wide sleeves, and she reached out to him with healing magic, soothing the bruises and cuts inflicted by Ebonsoul. She made her way around the four, casting warmth and healing.

It was a night of uneasy sleep for all of them, after that horrifying encounter, but they were out before the dawn anyway, and into the rocky dell soon after, as Bruenor had predicted. With the sun still high in the sky, they entered the tunnels and began their descent into Gauntlgrym.