One of the Knights of Silver, the guardsmen at the post on the Rauvin, led the four travelers to the entrance of the Moonbridge, an arcing, invisible structure that spanned the river before the main gate of the city. The strangers crossed tentatively, uncomfortable for the lack of visible material under their feet. But soon enough they found themselves strolling down the meandering roadways of the magical city. Their pace unconsciously slowed, caught under the infectious laziness, the relaxed, contemplative atmosphere that dissipated even Entreri’s narrow-visioned intensity.
Tall, twisting towers and strangely shaped structures greeted them at every turn. No single architectural style dominated Silverymoon, unless it was the freedom of a builder to exercise his or her personal creativity without fear of judgement or scorn. The result was a city of endless splendors, not rich in counted treasures, as were Waterdeep and Mirabar, its two mightiest neighbors, but unrivaled in aesthetic beauty. A throwback to the earliest days of the Realms, when elves and dwarves and humans had enough room to roam under the sun and stars without fear of crossing some invisible borderline of a hostile kingdom, Silverymoon existed in open defiance of the conquerors and tyrants of the world, a place where no one held claim over another.
People of all the good races walked freely here and without fear, down every road and alleyway on the darkest of nights, and if the travelers passed by someone and were not greeted with a welcoming word, it was only because the person was too profoundly engaged in meditative contemplation.
“The dwarf’s party, is less than a week out of Longsaddle,” Sydney mentioned as they moved through the city. “We may have several days of wait.”
“Where do we go?” Entreri asked, feeling out of place. The values that obviously took precedence in Silverymoon were unlike those of any city he had ever encountered, and were completely foreign to his own perceptions of the greedy, lusting world.
“Countless inns line the streets,” Sydney answered. “Guests are plentiful here, and are welcomed openly.”
“Then our task in finding the companions, once they arrive, shall prove difficult indeed,” Jierdan groaned.
“Not so,” Sydney replied wryly. “The dwarf comes to Silverymoon in search of information. Soon after they arrive, Bruenor and his friends will make their way to the Vault of Sages, the most reknowned library in all the north.”
Entreri squinted his eyes, and said, “And we will be there to greet them.”
12. The Trollmoors
This was a land of blackened earth and misted bogs, where decay and an imposing sensation of peril overruled even the sunniest of skies. The landscape climbed and dropped continually, and the crest of each rise, mounted in hopes of an end to the place by any traveler here, brought only despair and more of the same unchanging scenes.
The brave Riders of Nesme ventured into the moors each spring to set long lines of fires and drive the monsters of the hostile land far from the borders of their town. The season was late and several weeks had passed since the last burning, but even now the low dells lay heavy with smoke and the waves of heat from the great fires still shimmered in the air around the thickest of the charred piles of wood.
Bruenor had led his friends into the Trollmoors in stubborn defiance of the riders, and was determined to pound his way through to Silverymoon. But after only the first day’s travel, even he began to doubt the decision. The place demanded a constant state of alertness, and each copse of burned-out trees they passed made them pause, the black, leafless stumps and fallen logs bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to bog blokes. More than once, the spongy ground beneath their feet suddenly became a deep pit of mud, and only the quick reactions of a nearby companion kept them from finding out how deep any of the pits actually were.
A continual breeze blew across the moors, fueled by the contrasting patches of hot ground and cool bogs, and carrying an odor more foul than the smoke and soot of the fires, a sickly sweet smell disturbingly familiar to Drizzt Do’Urden—the stench of trolls.
This was their domain, and all the rumors about the Evermoors the companions had heard, and had laughed away in the comfort of The Fuzzy Quarterstaff, could not have prepared them for the reality that suddenly descended upon them when they entered the place.
Bruenor had estimated that their party could clear the moors in five days if they kept a strong pace. That first day, they actually covered the necessary distance, but the dwarf had not foreseen the continual backtracking they would have to do to avoid the bogs. While they had marched for more than twenty miles that day, they were less than ten from where they started into the moors.
Still, they encountered no trolls, nor any other kind of fiend, and they set their camp that night under a guise of quiet optimism.
“Ye’ll keep to the guard?” Bruenor asked Drizzt, aware that the Drow alone had the heightened senses they would need to survive the night.
Drizzt nodded. “The night through,” he replied, and Bruenor didn’t argue. The dwarf knew that none of them would get any sleep that night, whether on guard, or not.
Darkness came suddenly and completely. Bruenor, Regis, and Wulfgar couldn’t see their own hands if they held them inches from their faces. With the blackness came the sounds of an awakening nightmare. Sucking, sloshing footsteps closed in all about them. Smoke mixed with the nighttime fog and rolled in around the trunks of the leafless trees. The wind did not increase, but the intensity of its foul stench did, and it carried now the groans of the tormented spirits of the moors’ wretched dwellers.
“Gather your gear,” Drizzt whispered to his friends.
“What do ye see, then?” Bruenor asked softly.
“Nothing directly,” came the reply. “But I feel them about, as do you all. We cannot let them find us sitting. We must move among them to keep them from gathering about us.”
“My legs ache,” complained Regis. “And my feet have swelled. I don’t even know if I can get my boots back on!”
“Help him, boy,” Bruenor told Wulfgar. “The elf’s right. We’ll carry ye if we must, Rumblebelly, but we’re not staying!”
Drizzt took the lead, and at times he had to hold Bruenor’s hand behind him, and so on down the line to Wulfgar in the rear, to keep his companions from stumbling from the path he had picked.
They could all sense the dark shapes moving around them, smell the foulness of the wretched trolls. Clearly viewing the host gathering about them, Drizzt alone understood just how precarious their position was, and he pulled his friends as fast as he could.
Luck was with them, for the moon came up then, transforming the fog into a ghostly silver blanket, and revealing to all the friends the pressing danger. Now with the movement visible on every side, the friends ran.
Lanky, lurching forms loomed up in the mist beside them, clawed fingers stretching out to snag at them as they rushed past. Wulfgar moved up to Drizzt’s side, swatting the trolls aside with great sweeps of Aegis-fang, while the drow concentrated on keeping them going in the right direction.
For hours they ran, and still the trolls came on. Beyond all feelings of exhaustion, past the ache, and then the numbness in their limbs, the friends ran with the knowledge of the certain horrible death that would befall them if they faltered for even a second, their fear overruling their bodies’ cries of defeat. Even Regis, too fat and soft, and with legs too short for the road, matched the pace and pushed those before him to greater speeds.
Drizzt understood the futility of their course. Wulfgar’s hammer invariably slowed, and they all stumbled more and more with each minute that passed. The night had many hours more, and even the dawn did not guarantee an end to the pursuit. How many miles could they run? When would they turn down a path that ended in a bottomless bog, with a hundred trolls at their backs?