“A pity,” Entreri replied. “Such a pretty face…”
“Please,” Catti-brie said as calmly as she could with the dagger moving toward her. “Not a one knows! Not even Bruenor! To find it is his quest.”
The blade stopped suddenly and Entreri turned his head to the side, eyes narrowed and all of his muscles taut and alert.
Catti-brie hadn’t heard the turn of the door handle, but the deep voice of Fender Mallot echoing down the hallway explained the assassin’s actions.
“‘Ere, where are ye, girl?”
Catti-brie tried to yell, “Run!” and her own life be damned, but Entreri’s quick backhand dazed her and drove the word out as an indecipherable grunt.
Her head lolling to the side, she just managed to focus her vision as Fender and Grollo, battle-axes in hand, burst into the room. Entreri stood ready to meet them, jeweled dagger in one hand and a saber in the other.
For an instant, Catti-brie was filled with elation. The dwarves of Ten-Towns were an iron-fisted battalion of hardened warriors, with Fender’s prowess in battle among the clan second only to Bruenor’s.
Then she remembered who they faced, and despite their apparent advantage, her hopes were washed away by a wave of undeniable conclusions. She had witnessed the blur of the assassin’s movements, the uncanny precision of his cuts.
Revulsion welling in her throat, she couldn’t even gasp for the dwarves to flee.
Even had they known the depths of the horror in the man standing before them, Fender and Grollo would not have turned away. Outrage blinds a dwarven fighter from any regard for personal safety, and when these two saw their beloved Catti-brie bound to the chair, their charge at Entreri came by instinct.
Fueled by unbridled rage, their first attacks roared in with every ounce of strength they could call upon. Conversely, Entreri started slowly, finding a rhythm and allowing the sheer fluidity of his motions to build his momentum. At times he seemed barely able to parry or dodge the ferocious swipes. Some missed their mark by barely an inch, and the near hits spurred Fender and Grollo on even further.
But even with her friends pressing the attack, Catti-brie understood that they were in trouble. Entreri’s hands seemed to talk to each other, so perfect was the complement of their movements as they positioned the jeweled dagger and saber. The synchronous shufflings of his feet kept him in complete balance throughout the melee. His was a dance of dodges, parries, and counterslashes.
His was a dance of death.
Catti-brie had seen this before, the telltale methods of the finest swordsman in all of Icewind Dale. The comparison to Drizzt Do’Urden was inescapable; their grace and movements were so alike, with every part of their bodies working in harmony.
But they remained strikingly different, a polarity of morals that subtly altered the aura of the dance.
The drow ranger in battle was an instrument of beauty to behold, a perfect athlete pursuing his chosen course of righteousness with unsurpassed fervor. But Entreri was merely horrifying, a passionless murderer callously disposing of obstacles in his path.
The initial momentum of the dwarves’ attack began to diminish now, and both Fender and Grollo wore a look of amazement that the floor was not yet red with their opponent’s blood. But while their attacks were slowing, Entreri’s momentum continued to build. His blades were a blur, each thrust followed by two others that left the dwarves rocking back on their heels.
Effortless, his movements. Endless, his energy.
Fender and Grollo maintained a solely defensive posture, but even with all of their efforts devoted to blocking, everyone in the room knew that it was only a matter of time before a killing blade slipped through.
Catti-brie didn’t see the fatal cut, but she saw vividly the bright line of blood that appeared across Grollo’s throat. The dwarf continued fighting for a few moments, oblivious to the cause of his inability to find his breath. Then, startled, Grollo dropped to his knees, grasping his throat, and gurgled into the blackness of death.
Fury spurred Fender beyond his exhaustion. His axe chopped and cut wildly, screaming for revenge.
Entreri toyed with him, actually carrying the charade so, far as to slap him on the side of the head with the flat of the saber.
Outraged, insulted, and fully aware that he was overmatched, Fender launched himself into a final, suicidal, charge, hoping to bring the assassin down with him.
Entreri sidestepped the desperate lunge with an amused laugh, and ended the fight, driving the jeweled dagger deep into Fender’s chest, and following through with a skull-splitting slash of the saber as the dwarf stumbled by.
Too horrified to cry, too horrified to scream, Catti-brie watched blankly as Entreri retrieved the dagger from Fender’s chest. Certain of her own impending death, she closed her eyes as the dagger came toward her, felt its metal, hot from the dwarf’s blood, flat on her throat.
And then the teasing scrape of its edge against her soft, vulnerable skin as Entreri slowly turned the blade over in his hand.
Tantalizing. The promise, the dance of death.
Then it was gone. Catti-brie opened her eyes just as the small blade went back into its scabbard on the assassin’s hip. He had taken a step back from her.
“You see,” he offered in simple explanation of his mercy, “I kill only those who stand to oppose me. Perhaps, then, three of your friends on the road to Luskan shall escape the blade. I want only the halfling.”
Catti-brie refused to yield to the terror he evoked. She held her voice steady and promised coldly, “You underestimate them. They will fight you.”
With calm confidence, Entreri replied, “Then they, too, shall die.”
Catti-brie couldn’t win in a contest of nerves with the dispassionate killer. Her only answer to him was her defiance. She spat at him, unafraid of the consequences.
He retorted with a single stinging backhand. Her eyes blurred in pain and welling tears, and Catti-brie slumped into blackness. But as she fell unconscious, she heard a few seconds longer, the cruel, passionless laughter fading away as the assassin moved from the house.
Tantalizing. The promise of death.
2. City of Sails
“Well, there she is, lad, the City of Sails,” Bruenor said to Wulfgar as the two looked down upon Luskan from a small knoll a few miles north of the city.
Wulfgar took in the view with a profound sigh of admiration. Luskan housed more than fifteen thousand—small compared to the huge cities in the south and to its nearest neighbor, Waterdeep, a few hundred miles farther down the coast. But to the young barbarian, who had spent all of his eighteen years among nomadic tribes and the small villages of Ten-Towns, the fortified seaport seemed grand indeed.
A wall encompassed Luskan, with guard towers strategically spaced at varying intervals. Even from this distance, Wulfgar could make out the dark forms of many soldiers pacing the parapets, their spear tips shining in the new light of the day.
“Not a promising invitation,” Wulfgar noted.
“Luskan does not readily welcome visitors,” said Drizzt, who had come up behind his two friends. “They may open their gates for merchants, but ordinary travelers are usually turned away.”
“Our first contact is there,” growled Bruenor. “And I mean to get in!”
Drizzt nodded and did not press the argument. He had given Luskan a wide berth on his original journey to Ten-Towns. The city’s inhabitants, primarily human, looked upon other races with disdain. Even surface elves and dwarves were often refused entry. Drizzt suspected that the guards would do more to a drow elf than simply put him out.