The Last Threshold

Chapter 16

" I can feel her,” Drizzt remarked, and he held the statuette before his eyes. He looked to the side, to Effron, who nodded soberly.

“Don’t try to summon her,” the tiefling warned, “else you will alert Lord Draygo to our designs. Even here, perhaps especially here, he will see through Guenhwyvar’s eyes.”

Drizzt nodded and slipped the figurine safely away.

Dahlia watched the drow’s every move, recognizing the pragmatism that drove him. If it was pragmatism, she reconsidered, and not some moral code too stringent to ever let his emotions find some freedom. She had teased those emotions from him on occasion, though not recently, of course, and had lured him into places where he had allowed himself to live in the moment and to be free of whatever nagging little voice constantly held him back.

She wanted that again, she realized, and in her mind, she replayed the conversation with Artemis Entreri, where he had accused her of loving Drizzt.

Dahlia’s face grew tight as she pushed that unsettling thought aside and focused again on the drow’s actions and expressions. He wanted to call Guenhwyvar, she could see that. He knew there might be some chance that in this place, such a summons would break the panther free of the bonds Draygo Quick had enacted upon her.

But he wouldn’t. He would be patient. Too much was at stake for the disciplined Drizzt Do’Urden to let his desperation destroy it all. That was ever his strength, Dahlia knew, and his weakness.

“How far?” he asked.

Effron looked around, shaking his head. “The problem with utilizing a gate is location, for I dared not open one anywhere near to Gloomwrought or Lord Draygo’s castle. The worlds are aligned, but not perfectly.” He pointed to the far horizon. “Lord Draygo’s residence is outside of the city of Gloomwrought, and for that, we should be thankful. I would not walk the ways of Prince Rolan’s domain with this group.”

“We’re not for liking being seen with yerself, either,” said Ambergris, but she offered a playful wink with the retort.

“But nor can we walk the road approaching the city,” Effron went on. “Not with these two.” He pointed to the dwarf and the monk.

“Cavus Dun watches the road,” Afafrenfere agreed, and Effron nodded.

“A powerful troupe are they, and one with a vendetta.”

“Then how?” Drizzt asked.

Effron pointed farther to the south. “Roundabout, and through a swamp. There are lesser, little used roads, but travel will be difficult and dangerous.”

“How long?” Dahlia pressed.

“Three days?” Effron replied hesitantly.

“We have mounts,” Entreri reminded, but Effron shook his head.

“If you summon your nightmare here, you will likely lose control of the beast, and the same for the unicorn you ride. This is not the place for such toys, I warn.”

“So, three days walking,” said Drizzt.

Effron nodded. “That measures the actual time, but I warn you, it may seem a month to you, for you’re not acclimated to the realities of the Shadowfell.”

“Meself’s acclimated, and it’s seemin’ like a month already!” Ambergris said. “By the gods, I hate this place.” She looked at Afafrenfere. “To think that ye chose to be here them years,” she said, shaking her head.

“Now that I have been away, I begin to agree,” Afafrenfere answered, and the dwarf’s eyes popped open wide.

Dahlia regarded the two, and particularly focused on their appearance. When she had first encountered them, she had thought them shades, with dark hair and gray skin, but subtly, both had shifted in that appearance, in almost the reverse manner that a farmer’s skin might darken in the first tendays of spring. Still ruddy, as with most dwarves, it seemed as if a pall had been lifting from Ambergris of late, and even her hair had changed color, showing more reddish tints now. And Dahlia realized that for Afafrenfere, the reversion to something more fully human had been even more dramatic.

Dahlia only noted that now, for the change had been so gradual, but in this place of perpetual gloom, the monk appeared again much as he had when Dahlia had first seen him, and the abrupt reversion so clearly revealed the extent of the change.

“Every journey begins with a step, then,” said Drizzt, and he started off in the direction Effron had indicated.

Effron caught him by the arm quickly, though. “I would have you on the flank,” he explained. “And you,” he added, indicating Entreri, “on the other. This place is the stuff of nightmares, and it earns its name, I assure you.”

“Aye, and tell ’em why,” Ambergris said, and when Effron didn’t immediately respond, other than to look at the dwarf, she added, “The swamp’s full o’ dead things that won’t stay quiet. And they’re always hungry.”

Dahlia, Drizzt, and Entreri looked to Effron, who could only shrug. The drow nodded and moved out to the left flank, Entreri similarly moving out to the right. Effron took up the lead, Dahlia beside him, the dwarf and monk some distance behind.

“Why are you doing this?” Dahlia asked quietly when she was alone with her son.

Effron’s face grew very tight. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Is it hatred for this Lord Draygo?”

“No,” Effron answered even before thinking about it. It was true enough, though. “Draygo Quick has shown me more friendship than.…” He let it end there, hanging in the air between them.

“Don’t try to hurt him,” Effron warned. “Do not insinuate me into a fight between you and Lord Draygo.”

“Because you will side with him?”

“I don’t know,” came the answer once more.

Clearly uncomfortable, Effron pressed on faster, and Dahlia, after considering it for a moment, didn’t try to keep up.

She couldn’t begin to imagine the pain and confusion Effron was suffering at that time. His life’s journey was twisting and turning rapidly, and not entirely, if at all, of his own volition. Dahlia considered her own life’s road then, going from Szass Tam to this new horizon. She had faced a crisis in Gauntlgrym, a stark ethical and moral choice that would have broken her had she chosen differently. If she had pulled that lever to release the fire primordial and wreak devastation upon the land, then she would have succumbed wholly to the darkness that had followed her since that day Alegni had ravaged her, and more particularly since that subsequent date when she had thrown her son from the cliff. The dark wings of her own guilt would have enveloped her forever more, making her no better a creature than the loathsome Szass Tam himself.

How different her new road. But, indeed, it was now a journey of her choosing.

Could Effron say the same?

“A copper for yer thoughts,” Ambergris remarked, and Dahlia realized that lost in her internal dialogue, she had slowed her pace.

“They will cost you a bag of gold, a chest of jewels and gems, and a swift journey to a place of sunlight,” she replied.

“A ransom no good dwarf’d e’er pay!” Ambergris replied with a laugh.

Afafrenfere, coming up on the other side of Dahlia, joined in, but Dahlia could only manage a polite chuckle, her gaze remaining straight ahead, at the crooked back of the physically frail creature who led the way.

There was never much of a sun shining in the Shadowfell, but when night fell, the contrast seemed even more dramatic compared to the nightfall on Toril, for in the Shadowfell, sunset awakened more inhabitants than sunrise.

The six companions felt that keenly as they set their encampment amid the muddy ground and bogs. The air hung thick with the smell of decay, the stench seeming more like a tangible and living enemy than the mere result of the flora and fauna. The annoyance of stinging insects buzzed ever-presently in their ears, and the sound of their own slapping became readily apparent and nearly as annoying as the buzzing wings.

“If our campfire doesn’t give us away, then the drumming will,” Entreri said.

“Ye got a better idea?” Ambergris asked, punctuating her question with a resounding smack across her own face. She brought her hand out and held it up, showing a squashed bug the size of her thumbnail, and a palm full of blood. “These sucker bugs’ll drain the juices right out o’ ye!”

Before Entreri could respond, both he and the dwarf turned to regard Afafrenfere, who had gone into what seemed to be a wild dance.

The monk moved swiftly, as if executing a practiced training routine, and so he was, but with a few additions, they came to realize, as his turns brought sweeps and snatches instead of punches, and every ending pose brought an onslaught of well-aimed slaps about his body. He went on for many heartbeats, then turned to his audience, smiling widely, and held forth his open hands, showing the bits and pieces of dozens of insects he had plucked and crushed or swatted flat.

Metallic tapping from the other direction turned all to witness Dahlia across the way. She smiled widely as she worked her flails and looked back at Afafrenfere. “I am better suited,” she explained, and she cracked her spinning flails together repeatedly, each strike causing a slight spark of lightning from the powerfully-enchanted Kozah’s Needle.

“Not unless ye’re squishing bugs with them hits,” Ambergris replied.

“You work the nun’chuks well, “Afafrenfere remarked, and Dahlia looked at him curiously, not quite sure of the reference.

But no matter. Dahlia merely smiled ever more and heightened her movements, the flails spinning around her, up over her shoulder and down and around. Click, click, click, they went, tap-tapping with increasing intensity.

And then came the reveal, as Dahlia leaped and spun dramatically, and brought her flails spinning in for a tremendous concussion in which she released all the building energy of her magical weapon.

A great burst of lightning blasted forth, momentarily stealing the night and filling the air with such a charge that the hair of all six companions began dancing wildly. And in that burst, for those who managed to note, came a thousand little pops of insects exploding under the concussion of the charge.

“Why don’t you find a horn to blow, loud and long, to announce our position?” Entreri growled at her, clearly not amused.

But the dwarf laughed and Afafrenfere clapped in approval. “Brilliant work!” he congratulated. “Where did you learn to use the nun’chuks in that manner?”

“Use what?” Dahlia asked, looking at her weapons.

“Nunchaku,” Artemis Entreri interjected. “Nun’chuks.”

“Flails,” Dahlia replied, spinning one at the end of its cord. Entreri shrugged as if he hardly cared about a semantic distinction.

“Nun’chuks,” Afafrenfere corrected. “We train in their use in the Monastery of the Yellow Rose. They distinguish from typical flails because you can move your grip from one of the joined poles to the other.” He moved toward Dahlia and held out a hand. “May I?”

Dahlia looked around at her other companions, who all seemed intrigued, then held both flails out toward Afafrenfere. He took only one, however.

Dahlia stepped back and the monk launched into his disciplined routine, moving the weapon about his torso, over one shoulder and under the other, fluidly and rapidly.

With a grin, Dahlia, too, began such a dance, and the two circled, their respective weapons spinning all around in a blur. Coincidentally, both lunged forward at the same time, letting the free end fly over, and with a twist of the wrist, both put that free end up tight into a lock with their armpit at the very same moment, and stood facing each other, muscles flexed as hand pulled against the hold.

They both began to laugh, and around them, the others applauded their coordination and precision.

All except for Artemis Entreri, who leaped up and moved clearly into the light. He was not looking at Dahlia and Afafrenfere, however, but off into the darkness to the west. “We’ve got company,” he said.

He glanced over at Drizzt, and the drow nodded, and slipped off into the darkness to the north, while Entreri moved out to the south.

“Form around me,” Ambergris ordered the others and she stood before the fire, hoisting her huge mace, Skullbreaker, up onto one shoulder.

“The fire?” Dahlia asked, for surely the light marked their position.

“We’ll be needin’ it,” Ambergris replied.

“The walking dead,” Effron explained to his mother, and Afafrenfere, on the other side of the dwarf, handed the nun’chuk back to Dahlia and nodded his agreement with that assessment.

The passing moments seemed an eternity before they finally heard some movement out in the dark swamp, the rustle of grass and the splash of a running footfall on muddy ground.

“Ghouls,” Effron remarked.

Even as he spoke, a great stench washed over them, overpowering the heavy marsh aroma.

“They’ve likely got a ghast or two among ’em,” said the dwarf. She reached into a pouch and brought forth her holy symbol then, and held it up questioningly before her eyes. She rolled it about in her thick fingers, the silvery image of mountains flashing in the firelight with each turn.

“Will Dumathoin grant you such strength?” Afafrenfere asked, obviously understanding the dwarf’s skeptical expression.

“Me god’s been closer as me skin’s grown lighter,” Ambergris replied, but she could only shrug meekly beyond that assurance.

Artemis Entreri rushed back into the light then, startling them all. “Back to back!” he warned. “A horde of ghouls, and with wights among them!”

The four warriors formed a box around Effron as the warlock prepared his spells.

“Wrap yer hands, monk,” Ambergris told her friend. “Don’t want to be touching them beasties with your open skin!”

Stealth wouldn’t help him much, Drizzt knew, for the undead could smell him, could sense his life-force, and no measure of hiding behind a shrub or a stone would mitigate that. He relied on speed instead, constantly moving, constantly shifting directions.

He noted the approaching hunters, a pack of hunched and emaciated creatures, once human, but now hardly resembling the form they knew in life. Bobbing and scrabbling with every step, their movements seemed that of an animal, and their faces locked in a grimace of perpetual anger, or hunger, with their jaws hanging open, showing teeth that apparently had kept growing in the grave, or perhaps it was that their gums had greatly receded.

Drizzt drew back on Taulmaril, leveling the bow at the nearest creature. He glanced around, plotting his escape route, and thinking that his best course would be to draw off as many of these ghouls as possible, to buy his friends more time.

Just before he let fly, he realized that not all of the creatures before him were the same, for among the ghoulish ranks loomed other creatures, standing more upright, appearing less driven by rage and hunger, perhaps, and more measured in their approach toward the firelight. And while the ghouls scrabbled, these few seemed more to float above the muck of the swamp.

Drizzt was not well-versed in the distinctions of undead creatures, but it seemed clear to him that this second version, less visceral and animalistic, was likely more dangerous.

He swiveled the bow around, leveled and let fly, his lightning streak stealing the night in a blinding flash of sharp and crackling energy. It struck the wight in the shoulder, the force of the blow spinning the screeching beast around, spiraling in a full circle, stumbling, before regaining its balance.

Just in time to catch the second arrow right in its emaciated and horrid face. The creature’s head exploded under the weight of that blow, and it flew back and to the ground.

And Drizzt saw another wight, a larger one, an armored one, and holding a greatsword out toward him, and the ghouls, following that direction, swarmed his way.

It was time to run, but Drizzt hesitated, staring at what he thought to be the leader of this horde of monsters. He tried to discern a route to get to the armored wight, for if he could decapitate the band, the fight might fast dissolve.

But then he realized that even this impressive being was not in command of his enemies, for behind the armored wight came a crackling flash of deep blue light, just long enough to illuminate another monstrosity. Part wraith-like, the creature appeared as if someone had placed a second and third skull on the shoulders of an emaciated corpse. It carried a staff that seemed more like bone than wood in the brief instant Drizzt had glimpsed it, and it wore a crown on its central skull.

“What?” Drizzt muttered, and indeed he wondered what he and his friends were up against.

They came in running, fearlessly, ravenous, mostly from the west, but already flanking north and south. The companions stood to face them, most of all Ambergris, who didn’t hoist her huge mace, but stepped forward and presented instead her holy symbol.

“By Dumathoin’s grace, be gone!” she roared, her voice clear and melodic, full of resonance and godly power, which manifested itself in a supernatural glow, a light shining from the dwarf herself.

The press of creatures immediately before Ambergris threw up their spindly arms and clawed hands defensively, a horrid communal shriek filling the air. Some fell to the ground, thrashing, and others, many others, fled, turning back the way they had come, running with all speed from the bared power of the dwarf cleric.

“Redemption!” Afafrenfere congratulated at the dwarf’s side, but that was all he had time to say, for though Ambergris had improved the odds, the numbers still dramatically favored the enemy.

A ghoul leaped in, clawing with its left hand, and the monk stepped forward with his left foot and threw his forearm against the ghoul’s forearm in a solid block, taking care to avoid the filthy, paralyzing claws. Predictably, the ghoul tried to bite at that blocking arm, but Afafrenfere was already into his heavy right crossing punch. He caught the ghoul on the side of its jaw, shattering the bones and snapping the undead monster’s head around viciously.

The monk disengaged his arm quickly and fell back, throwing all of his weight to his trailing right leg and lifting his left and kicking out, catching the ghoul in the throat as it turned back at him, and driving it away.

At the same time, Afafrenfere snapped off a series of overhand and underhand slaps with his right arm, rolling fast to pick off the clawing swipes of a second ghoul. He ducked low and kicked out, cracking the ghoul’s knee, shattering the bones, but undead creatures felt no pain and the ghoul leaped upon him.

Afafrenfere braced and caught the monster, then stood up straight, hoisting the ghoul above his head and launching it back at the next nearest monster. As it flew out, however, the ghoul hooked its claws on the monk’s upper arm, tearing Afafrenfere’s skin as it went. The monk gave the slight wound no heed, already spinning and kicking at the next incoming enemy.

But he soon enough felt the numbness spreading along his arm, the infection of ghoul touch, and the images before him began to swim and float around as he felt the strength leaving his legs.

Across from the monk, Dahlia was better armed against such monsters. She had Kozah’s Needle assembled as a staff once more, and prodded it and swept it around to keep the enemies at bay. She worked toward Entreri as she did, and he to her, and they quickly found a rhythm, with Dahlia using the long weapon and tactical bursts of its magical lightning to create a perimeter free of clawing beasts.

Entreri stayed low and unobtrusive, giving the elf warrior full reign to guide the fight. Her heritage, her elf blood, would protect her from the ghoul paralysis, at least, where his own would not. He focused on the flanks, and whenever one of the monsters slipped past a swing of Dahlia’s staff, it was met full force by the assassin’s sword and dagger, weaving and darting, striking home. But Entreri, too, took great care here, and reminded himself of the nature of his enemies, particularly when his shorter blade found a mark.

Entreri could not let the dagger drink, as it always desired, for the life-force it would bring forth from the undead would hardly nourish him.

Well-versed in the matter of undead creatures, Effron the warlock recognized immediately that this was no simple ghoul hunting pack. Such roving bands were common around the marshes, but too many had come forth, and with wights among them.

And with something more sinister and powerful behind them, he understood, lurking out there in the darkness, waiting for the moment to come forth in all its sinister power.

The tiefling warlock held back his most powerful spells in the early rounds of battle, throwing forth necromantic flames to sting and slow any approaches wherever his companions’ defenses seemed weakest.

Soon enough, he found himself furiously casting, one fiery assault after another, black sweeps of flame reaching out almost continuously at the encroaching horde.

Ambergris had given them a chance, he understood, for if she had not been so powerful in her divine turning, if she had not shattered the center of the undead line with the word of her god, then the five, all fighting furiously now, would surely have been overwhelmed.

As it was, they were barely holding their own, and that standstill became tenuous indeed when Brother Afafrenfere slumped down to the muck, losing his battle against the ghoulish paralysis.

Drizzt came out from behind a tree in a sudden charge.

A ghoul leaped out in front of him, tongue darting wildly, claws raking, but Drizzt had noted it, and the other two, and before the wretched thing got near to hitting him, his scimitars fast descended.

Its head split cleanly in half, the ghoul fell away.

Drizzt bowled through it, threw himself down into a forward roll across the muddy ground and came up in a full sprint, his speed enhanced by his magical anklets, his scimitars working left and right ferociously as he barreled between the other two ghouls, leaving them twisting and torn in his wake.

The armored wight hoisted its greatsword to meet the charge, and worked it deftly to slow the drow’s momentum. This was no simple animated corpse, but the raised remains of one who had been a formidable warrior in life, obviously.

Drizzt didn’t appreciate that in the early encounter, and had to throw himself backward and to the ground to avoid a sudden heavy sweep of that four-foot blade, the air humming with its passage barely a finger’s breadth from his face.

He kept his feet firmly planted as his back touched down to the ground, and every muscle in his frame tightened that he could lift himself right up. He even managed a stab with his left-hand blade before leaping back to avoid the sweeping backhand of the greatsword.

The wight advanced in a rush behind that blade.

Drizzt started out to the right, retreated a step and bent backward, then threw himself back to the left behind the next swing. Then he darted ahead, moving past the turning wight, and struck again, and a third time, as he rushed past.

But the wight was fast in pursuit, pressing Drizzt. It felt no pain. A living opponent would be clutching at its side, where ichor and maggots now poured forth from the deep gouge of Icingdeath.

Drizzt set himself again, anticipating the warrior wight’s next attack, and as the greatsword started moving, so too did Drizzt.

But the muddy ground slipped out under his weight and he stumbled.

Their defensive formation shuddered and seemed to fall apart as the ghoul poison reached deep into Brother Afafrenfere.

He swooned. He would have fallen to the ground all together, but a strong dwarf hand grabbed his shoulder, Ambergris yanking him upright with one arm, sweeping Skullbreaker out before her with the other to keep her own enemies at bay. As if that wasn’t enough to keep the dwarf occupied, she chanted at the same time.

Still, the dwarf’s heroic efforts would not be enough, Effron realized. He waved his hand, sending a swirling line of purplish-black flames past Afafrenfere to burn and drive back the hungry ghouls.

The warlock reached more deeply and powerfully into his repertoire for his next spell, and black tentacles pushed out of the muddy ground and began snapping at the ghouls all along that side of the formation, grabbing and squeezing and burning.

He had to move fast, he knew, for the tentacles would slow them for only a short period of time.

They could not win. Not with the greater undead monstrosities out there in the darkness.

Even as that troubling thought flitted through the warlock’s mind, he noticed a ghoul rise up once more, brought back to an animated state again after Dahlia had apparently destroyed it with her lightning.

A skull lord!

A skull lord lurked nearby, Effron knew, and it would raise its army repeatedly, until attrition slowed the blades and ghoulish poison broke their ranks. He had to find that particular monster and defeat it, and quickly.

But where?

Drizzt knew that he was going to get hit; there was no way to avoid it, and so he had to choose a glancing blow from the greatsword or the wight’s clawing hand. With great agility, the drow set his feet and scrambled forward past the wight, inside the sweep of the sword.

He felt the icy cold claw dig into his shoulder and he threw himself forward and to the side, desperate to disengage quickly.

He got free and out of range just in time to square up against another ghoul, his spinning blades lopping off clawing fingers, then stabbing the creature under the chin and lifting it up and back. The drow fast retracted, and let the destroyed ghoul fall to the ground.

Again, just in time, as Drizzt spun around and parried the sword of the pursuing wight.

Now he was back to even footing, working furiously, trying to get in close and be done with this undead swordsman.

But this fight had already gone on too long, Drizzt feared when he noted the approach of another, the three-skulled, wraith-like monster.

He batted aside the greatsword and leaped forward to stab at the wraith, but behind it and to the side, the skull lord waved its bone staff across before it, the deep blue energy wafting forth like a living serpent, purple and black crackling flames sweeping at the warrior wight and Drizzt.

The drow leaped back and to the side, falling into another roll, and a second tumble beyond that, and sheathing his scimitars as he went.

When he came up again, he had Taulmaril in hand, already leveled, and he let fly, straight and true, the lightning arrow slamming the three-skulled creature squarely in the chest.

It staggered backward, but did not fall, and responded immediately with another, larger wave of necromantic flames, and by calling to its minions, ghoul and wight, and swarming them at the lone drow.

The silver flash of a lightning-infused arrow showed Effron the way.

“Hold fast!” he told the four fighting around him, and to Ambergris, he added, “Be ready, on my call, to reach for the power of your god once more.”

Even as he addressed the dwarf, Ambergris launched an over-the-shoulder smash with her mace that evoked its name, Skullbreaker. A ghoul’s head exploded under the weight of the blow, brain matter and powdered bone flying all around.

“More fun this way,” she said with a laugh, and she swept two others away as they foolishly charged in behind their destroyed comrade.

Effron couldn’t deny the dwarf’s physical exclamation point, but he turned away from the fierce spectacle and enacted his wraith-form dweomer.

“Hold fast!” he told the four again, his voice as thin as his two-dimensional form, and he slid down into the ground and off in the direction of the flash.

He came up from the ground in the crack of an old, rotted tree, surveying the situation at hand. As he’d hoped, Drizzt had encountered the leader of the undead gang, and Effron’s eyes sparkled indeed when he looked upon the skull lord’s bone staff, crackling with necromantic power.

Drizzt rushed all around, diving and rolling, coming around and letting fly, one missile after another. He obviously wanted to take out the skull lord, but the immediate press of ghouls and other minions, including a warrior wight, forced him to blast back those nearest him time and time again.

And ever was he dodging as the three-skulled monster swept forth its staff, weaving sheets of crackling flames chasing Drizzt from spot to spot. Only the drow’s speed and agility kept him ahead of the attacks, and then only barely.

Effron knew he couldn’t keep it up for long.

The warlock slipped out of the tree and became three-dimensional, and immediately launched an insidious attack, whispering to the distant skull lord in the tongue of the nether world, pitting his willpower against that of the undead monstrosity.

The creature turned on him, three skulls hissing in unified protest, and started to wave its staff his way. But Effron stopped it with a command, exerting his will.

“Clear them!” he shouted to Drizzt, and the skilled drow was already using the distraction of the skull lord to great advantage.

Effron watched a sizzling arrow blast through the warrior wight, then a second, the missiles boring holes right through the creature, and leaving the jagged edges of the exit wounds glowing with crackling lightning.

A ghoul went flying away, then a second, and the drow swung back and drove another missile, point blank, into the warrior wight, and it staggered backward. Its head exploded under the next point blank shot, and the drow crashed through it, knocking it aside, and fell to one knee, bow leveled and readied immediately, taking a bead on the prime enemy.

“The skulls!” Effron explained.

But the bone staff wave and a ripple of necromantic fire rolled out at the young tiefling. He growled and steeled himself against the onslaught, negative energies biting at him and stinging him profoundly, and tried through chattering teeth to issue the words of his next spell.

The undead creature’s right-most skull exploded in the flash of a silver arrow.

The skull lord staggered and swung back at Drizzt, just in time catch the next arrow in the chest. Still, it managed to send forth another powerful burst.

Effron found the mystic energies of the Feywild, weaving them into a white flame, and used his telepathic connection to the skull lord to insert that fire inside the undead creature’s mind. Immediately the four remaining eye sockets of the now two-headed monstrosity began to glow with that white fire, and rivulets of argent fire streamed from every orifice of those skulls, lifting into the night air and framing the skull lord in a fiery halo.

Which only aided Drizzt’s aim.

Arrows flew at the creature in rapid succession. A second skull exploded, the monster’s crown falling to the swampy ground.

Effron shifted his magical attack, cold starlight lancing down from above to bite at the staggering creature.

“Now, Ambergris!” he managed to yell between assaults. Back at the camp, he heard the dwarf invoke again the name of Dumathoin, and now, with the countervailing force of the skull lord destroyed, to even greater effect. So powerful was the dwarf’s call that several ghouls before her were reduced to dust, and even the wights could not stand in the face of her divine call.

Before Effron, the skull lord crumbled to the muck.

More explosions turned him to see Drizzt fending a group of ravenous ghouls. Only then did Effron truly see the beauty of Drizzt’s dance, for the drow dropped his bow and drew his blades so quickly that Effron could barely follow the movement.

Drizzt leaped forward, double-stabbing the ghoul before him, then tore his blades out to the side, reversed momentum, and brought them scissoring across to decapitate the creature. Hardly slowing, the drow flipped his grip on the hilts and stabbed out to either side with devastating backhanded thrusts, skewering a pair of ghouls simultaneously. He retracted almost as fast as he had stabbed, and back-flipped into a fast retreat, but landed leaning forward and in a sudden rush that brought him in against the wounded ghouls for a devastating finishing barrage.

Hardly slowing, the drow leaped upon the felled warrior wight, blades pounding away, ensuring that it would not rise again.

Seeing the battle ended, the warlock rushed to claim his prizes, lifting the crown in trembling hands. He wouldn’t dare wield it, or wear it, until further study, of course, but he took no such precautions with the staff, eagerly scooping it into his grasp. It was as tall as he, fashioned of three leg bones fused as one, and with a tiny humanoid skull up near its tip. The blue lightning was gone now, but the young warlock easily recovered it, finding a magical communion with the powerful item, and by the time Drizzt joined him, bluish-black flashes had begun anew, flickering from the eyes of the staff’s skull-headed top.

Drizzt looked at him suspiciously.

“Magic is neither good nor evil,” Effron explained in response to that curious expression. “It merely is.”

Drizzt’s expression didn’t shift much, retaining his edge of skepticism, but he said nothing and followed Effron back to the others. The fight there had ended as well, bodies piled before the four companions. Afafrenfere was the worst off, obviously, and Ambergris tended to his wounded shoulder and bloodied hands.

“Well fought,” Drizzt said.

“Better if one of us hadn’t run off,” Dahlia scolded, staring at him, “and another hadn’t followed.”

Drizzt laughed and shook his head, owing no apologies, and even Artemis Entreri chuckled at the absurdity of Dahlia’s remarks.

“Were these enemies directed against us?” Entreri asked. “By Draygo Quick?”

Effron shook his head. “Such roving bands are not uncommon in the marshes around Gloomwrought,” he explained. “Though this one was particularly powerful.” He looked at his new weapon as he spoke, and smiled, feeling the powers contained within the bone staff.

If undead monsters came at them again the next day, he knew, more than a few of them would be fighting on his side.