Dahlia couldn’t let it go without one last stab. “And thinks these killers perhaps even lovers, yes?” She gave a little laugh and limped back up the grassy banking toward the camp.
“This is what I’ve come to know,” Drizzt stated flatly, halting Dahlia in her tracks. “There is right and there is wrong. There is good and there is evil, but rarely are either of these concepts fully embodied in any one person. Life is more complicated than that; people are more complicated than that. Not all allies will prove of similar weal and not all enemies will be so different from me. I wish this weren’t true.” He gave a resigned, almost hopeless smile. He thought of Captain Deudermont, then, his old friend who had placed principle over pragmatism in an untenable situation, the result of which had been the fall of Luskan to the nefarious high captains. Drizzt had not agreed with Deudermont’s designs, had warned against them, to no avail.
“Or perhaps I don’t,” he admitted. “Perhaps it is, after all, that complexity that makes life interesting.”
“The complexity you find in others, which doesn’t exist in the pure heart of Drizzt Do’Urden?” Dahlia teased.
Drizzt laughed and shrugged. A million retorts flitted through his thoughts, but in the end, Drizzt had no response. Dahlia had weighed her words and her tone perfectly, he realized. She knew him, his reputation and his soul, and obviously she had no hesitation in flicking her finger against his heart. He watched her diminish into the shadows, reminded again that this was not Catti-brie beside him, not a rock of conscience, not even a dependable friend. What might Dahlia do to help Drizzt if her own life was on the line? Would she flee and leave him to his fate?
He played through their many battles at each other’s side in Gauntlgrym. Dahlia had fought valiantly, fearlessly. He could count on her in matters of the sword.
“Will you join me tonight by the fire?” Dahlia asked from beyond the bluff.
But could Drizzt count on her in matters of the heart?
Drizzt shook it all away with a little laugh. What did it matter? He pulled himself up and brushed the dust of the road from his pants and cloak, then went to the river and quickly splashed his face.
Then he went to Dahlia’s lair.
With Andahar keeping a swift pace, Drizzt and Dahlia passed Port Llast the very next night, giving the town a wide berth for fear that some of Kurth’s agents might be among the visitors. Not far down the road from there, Drizzt realized that they were not alone.
“In the tree to the left,” Dahlia whispered back when he informed her.
Drizzt pulled Andahar up to a halt and turned the steed sidelong to the road, his eyes focusing on that inhabited tree.
“Must I shoot you from your perch before you admit your presence?” Drizzt called out, bringing Taulmaril across his lap.
“Please, not that, good sir Drizzt,” came the reply from within the shelter of the boughs-the fast-browning boughs, for the summer season was beginning its turn to fall.
“Stuyles’s man,” Dahlia remarked, and Drizzt nodded.
“Would you break bread with us again?” the drow called out. “Entertain us with tales of the north while we repay the bards’ debt?”
“We should just ride past them,” Dahlia said. “Or do you feel the need to tell them of the farmer woman and the brewer?”
“Perhaps many would be interested, including Stuyles.”
“To what end?” Dahlia asked. “Do you hope that they will lay down their knives and swords and return to the plow? Will Drizzt Do’Urden fix the world?”
Ahead of them, the would-be highwayman dropped down from the tree’s lowest branch and waved them on, and Drizzt, not bothering to answer Dahlia, spurred Andahar forward. Dahlia kept her sour expression all the way to the bandits’ encampment.
They were greeted warmly, and offered food and a seat by a warm fire. Stuyles was there, and prodded Drizzt for his latest tales, and the drow obliged by telling him of their meetings with Meg the farmer woman and Ben the Brewer.
They all laughed when Drizzt recounted Dahlia’s defense of her foot at the expense of poor Ben, and indeed, any here knew the man.
Even Dahlia couldn’t resist a bit of a grin.
One by one, the bandits drifted away to their respective cots, until only the tall bandit named Hadencourt remained. “Now you go to Neverwinter Wood to repay Lady Sylora?” Hadencourt asked.
Dahlia, half asleep by that point, perked up immediately and stared at the man.
“We hear much,” Hadencourt explained. “And surely the tale of Dahlia Sin’felle is one of note, as were her two journeys to Gauntlgrym.”
The matter-of-fact manner in which he spoke made Drizzt uneasy. He looked to Dahlia, who seemed on the verge of throttling the man.
“Pray tell us what you’ve heard, good Hadencourt,” Drizzt prompted.
“More than any of the others here, of course,” said the man. “But then, I knew much more about the situation long before I met up with Farmer Stuyles and his band of misguided heroes.”
Dahlia and Drizzt exchanged suspicious looks.
“I’m not a former farmer,” Hadencourt flatly declared. “Nor a peasant, nor a commoner, nor a true member of this ridiculous band, in any manner they would accept.”
“Do tell,” said Dahlia.
Hadencourt stood up-Drizzt and Dahlia were quick to do likewise. “I’d prefer to show you,” Hadencourt said, and started off into the dark night.
Drizzt and Dahlia exchanged glances yet again, and Drizzt recognized the murderous hints on her face. He called forth Guenhwyvar, sent her on a roundabout path, and they set to follow the man.
In a moonlit lea, they caught up to Hadencourt. He stood easy, staring up at the stars and the lunar orb.
“Are you an agent from Waterdeep?” Drizzt asked.
“Or from the high captains of Luskan?” a more suspicious Dahlia added.
Hadencourt laughed and slowly turned to face them. “Hardly,” he said, “to either.”
“You serve Sylora Salm!” Dahlia accused, and she brought her staff in front of her in a powerful and aggressive movement.
Hadencourt laughed all the louder. “Serve?” he echoed, and his voice took on a different timbre, deeper and more resonant, full of something… darker.
Horns wormed out of his head, spiraling up above him. His mouth elongated, widened into a devilish grin of long and pointed teeth. His skin darkened, midnight blue, black perhaps, and he grew in stature, his clothing tearing, his enlarging and cloven feet bursting from his boots as he stood towering over the couple. With fiendish, clawed hands, he ripped the remainder of his clothing aside, his spiked tail waving out behind him.
A great inhalation lifted the fiend’s massive chest and a pair of leathery wings sprouted behind hm.
“By the gods, is the world full of devils?” Drizzt asked.
“It’s a malebranche,” whispered Dahlia, who was quite knowledgeable of the denizens of the lower planes.
As if in answer to Drizzt’s rhetorical question, two more fiends leaped out from the brush to either side. These were smaller than Hadencourt, each wielding a shield and a long sword. While Hadencourt’s skin was cool and dark, like a long dead coal, theirs was fiery red, peeking at Drizzt and Dahlia in stark stripes through the leathery wrapping of hellish armor. Each wore a bronze helm, but the horns showing through those headpieces were surely their own and not ornamental.
“It’s a world more to our liking now,” Hadencourt started to reply to Drizzt, but the drow cut him short by bringing up Taulmaril and shooting an arrow right into Hadencourt’s chest. The enchanted missile slammed in hard, burning and sizzling, and knocked the malebranche back several steps, and before he could even bellow in rage, the other two leaped at the companions, long swords flashing.
Dahlia’s weapon pointed forward like a spear, and out flashed Drizzt’s scimitars, coming up in front of him in an underhand cross that slapped aside the legion devil’s thrusting sword. He followed through hard, left and right, wanting to get past this lesser fiend to get to Hadencourt.