But Drizzt didn’t take the opening to score a hit, and altered his angle just enough so that Beniago could adjust his sword and block that blade, too.
Drizzt came on harder, recklessly it seemed, and he stumbled past and crashed hard against the alleyway wall as Beniago threw himself to the side.
With a growl, apparently thinking victory imminent, Beniago’s other hand stabbed out, but that growl turned to a gasp as Drizzt’s blade came down in a swift backhand slash, intercepting the thrust and gashing Beniago’s forearm.
The assassin cried out and his dagger went flying away.
Beniago turned to his right and leaped away, his left sword hand, slashing back to fend off the drow.
But the drow dropped below the swipe, executing his own cut, and Beniago had to leap up to avoid getting his ankles chopped out from under him. He landed off-balance, trying to throw himself back against the wall enough to catch his balance, but that twisting movement slowed him.
Drizzt tumbled past him with amazing quickness, his magically-enhanced anklets providing a burst of speed. He came to his feet farther along the first alleyway, blocking the escape.
Beniago skidded to a stop, his cut arm tucked under his sword arm, his blade waving defensively in front of him. He began to backstep immediately, and glanced over his shoulder.
“My panther is out there,” Drizzt warned-and lied, for he’d already overtaxed Guenhwyvar and had not dared summon her back to the Prime Material Plane. “If you try to flee, she will destroy you.”
“I’m second to the high captain of Ship Kurth,” Beniago warned. “If you kill me-”
“They will seek to kill me in response?” Drizzt mocked him. “Is that not already the case, Beniago?”
“More so!” the assassin promised, and he seemed to grow more confident then, for a din had begun on the street behind them.
Drizzt heard it, too, and he reached into his innate powers, last remnants of his days in Menzoberranzan, and placed a magical globe of darkness halfway down the alley between himself and the street.
“Ship Kurth will hunt you to the ends of Faerun!”
Drizzt put up his blades. “If I wanted to kill you, you would already be dead,” he said. “You left an opening against my overhand spin. Don’t deny it, for you noted it and tried to correct your block, and only were able to do so because I allowed it.”
Beniago fumbled for a response, but had none.
“Dahlia is poisoned,” Drizzt went on. “I need the antidote to the jeweler’s trap, and I need it now, or she will surely perish. I go now to that shop.” He started to climb the wall, for now a shout went up from the street behind him. “Come to me with the antidote.”
“Why would-?”
“You will be high captain one day,” Drizzt said as he neared the roof. “You’ll want allies.”
“You ask me to trust you and Dahlia?” Beniago asked incredulously, but Drizzt was already gone from his sight.
Not gone from the alleyway, though, as he found another perch and watched Beniago.
A gang of pirates finally prodded through the darkness globe, then came charging down the alley as Beniago moved to retrieve his dagger. The assassin regarded his allies with a disgusted shake of his head and roughly shouldered past them.
A semi-conscious Dahlia thrashed as Ben the Brewer’s hot knife cut deeply into her foot. The farmer woman holding her down nearly got a knee in the face for her efforts.
“Ah, but it’s an ugly thing,” she said as green and white pus flowed from the wound. “Viper juice?”
“Aye, and we’ve all seen the withering o’ that bite.”
“Then she’s a dead one.”
“Should be already, but not a lot went in,” Ben the Brewer replied. He cut again, drawing an X on Dahlia’s foot, and more pus flowed forth. “And she’s a tough one, I’m thinking.”
Dahlia cried out, perhaps in pain, but it wasn’t a response to his knife, they both knew. She was lost in her fevered dreams once more, and obviously, those dreams were not proving to be a pleasant experience.
Ben the Brewer reached up to Dahlia’s thigh and pulled tighter on the slip-knot he’d set there. “I’d take her leg,” he said. “The foot at least. But I’m not thinking she’d live through the cutting.”
“She’s doomed anyway,” the farmer woman replied, and she looked to the wide-bladed axe and the long serrated knife he’d brought.
“If High Captain Kurth learns of this…” Beniago started to say, holding his hand out to Drizzt.
Drizzt took the phial. “He’ll thank you when Dahlia and I offer him our allegiance,” he finished for Beniago. “If Kurth is still high captain when we meet again, I mean,” the drow added, a clear implication that he believed that Beniago might find a way to rise to that seat of power.
As he heard the words leave his mouth, Drizzt had to work hard to hide his own surprise. Though born in Menzoberranzan, Drizzt was hardly a master of subterfuge, hardly a player in the realms of shadow and murder. When before would he have even considered such an interaction with a man like Beniago? When before would he have even considered any alliance with one of the high captains of Luskan? Drizzt wasn’t merely tossing that possibility out in order to garner the antidote, he was actually thinking that he and Dahlia might do well to ally themselves with Kurth, or Beniago. There was, after all, a practical side of the matter: He had the antidote in hand!
A shout came from one of the nearby alleyways.
“Ship Rethnor has awakened to your presence,” Beniago warned.
“And Ship Kurth?”
“Possibly, but I can stand them down,” Beniago replied. “There’s little I can offer you against the rage of Ship Rethnor.”
Drizzt lifted the whistle on the end of the chain and blew into it, and with great running strides, Andahar came to him, leaping through the dimensions. Drizzt motioned for the unicorn to keep running past him.
“Farewell, Beniago,” the drow said, grabbing Andahar’s flowing mane and leaping up atop the steed. “If this is the antidote, know you have made a friend. If not, then know without doubt that my blades will find your heart.”
And with that warning, Drizzt Do’Urden was gone, Andahar galloping across the market square, hooves clap-clapping on the cobblestones. A shout came up from a rooftop and Drizzt turned the unicorn sharply down an alleyway. He dodged a crate, leaped another, and swerved hard at the last instant to avoid some rubble.
In full gallop, Andahar came out onto the next street over, and cries went up and faces appeared in darkened windows. Drizzt heard the shouts along the rooftops, trying to track his progress, no doubt in an attempt to ready some archers or some other ambush up ahead.
So Drizzt turned Andahar again, and again, street by street, alley by alley. Galloping hard, he took out Taulmaril and set an arrow to the magical bowstring.
Movement on the roof ahead and to the left caught his attention, so he put up the bow and drew back. His legs clamped hard around the unicorn, holding him steady as he let fly, again and again, a barrage of lightning arrows streaking for the roof’s facing, blasting holes in the wood and shale, and brightening the night in a shower of multicolored sparks.
On they ran, Drizzt bending low over Andahar’s strong neck, whispering encouragement into the unicorn’s ear. He knew that enemies were all around, intent on stopping him. He knew that if he failed, Dahlia was surely doomed.
But he wasn’t afraid. There wasn’t the slightest fear in him that he wouldn’t get there in time, that these thugs would stop him. He couldn’t believe that, or fear that, not at this moment, not in this…
Exhilaration.
That was the word for it, the only word for it. He was alive, his every sense honed and sharp-edged, relying on his warrior instincts.
Exhilaration. Drizzt had no time for fear or doubt.
Andahar snorted as if sensing the drow’s thoughts, and ran on harder, plowing along the lanes and alleyways in the zigzag maze Drizzt had determined to get them to the gate.