Maimun wrung his hands on his sword hilt, grimacing in frustration as he turned to regard the Crow, expecting that his world had just ended.
“You have my word,” Kensidan said, surprising him.
“I have nothing with which to barter,” Maimun stated.
The Crow shrugged, a curious movement from the bird, but one that conveyed the precise sentiment clearly enough. “I owe Maimun ofThrice Lucky that much, at least,” said Kensidan. “So we will forget this incident, eh?”
Maimun could only stare at the bird.
“And I look forward to seeing your sails in my harbor again,” Kensidan finished, and he flew away out the window.
Maimun stood there stunned for a few moments then rushed to Deudermont, falling to his knees beside the broken man.
His first attacks after seeing Regis fall were measured, his first defenses almost half-hearted. Drizzt could hardly find his focus, with his friend lying there in the gutter, could hardly muster the energy necessary to stand his ground against the dwarf warrior.
Perhaps sensing that very thing, or perhaps thinking it all a ploy, Athrogate didn’t press in those first few moments of rejoined battle, measuring his own strikes to gain strategic advantage rather than going for the sudden kill.
His mistake.
For Drizzt internalized the shock and the pain, and as he always had before, took it and turned the tumult into a narrowly-focused burst of outrage. His scimitars picked up their pace, the strength of his strikes increasing proportionately. He began to work Athrogate as he had before the fall of Regis, moving side to side and forcing the dwarf to keep up.
But the dwarf did match his pace, fighting Drizzt to a solid draw strike after thrust after slash.
And what a glorious draw it was to any who might have chanced to look on. The combatants spun with abandon, scimitars and morningstars humming through the air. Athrogate hit a wall again, the spiked ball smashing the wood to splinters. He hit the cobblestones before the backward-leaping drow and crushed them to dust.
And there Drizzt scored his second hit, Twinkle nicking Athrogate’s cheek and taking away one of his great beard’s braids.
“Ah, but ye’ll pay for that, elf!” the dwarf roared, and on he came.
To the side, Regis groaned.
He was alive.
He needed help.
Drizzt turned away from Athrogate and fled across the alleyway, the dwarf in close pursuit. The drow leaped to the wall, throwing his shoulders back and planting one foot solidly as if he meant to run right up the side of the structure.
Or, to Athrogate’s discerning and seasoned battle sensibilities, to flip a backward somersault right over him.
The dwarf pulled up short and whirled, shouting “Bwaha! I’m knowin’ that move!”
But Drizzt didn’t fly over him and come down in front of him, and the drow, who had not used his planted foot to push off, and who had not brought his second foot up to further climb, replied, “I know you know.”
From behind the turned dwarf, down the alley, Guenhwyvar roared, like an exclamation point to Drizzt’s victory.
For indeed the win was his; he could only pray that Regis was not beyond his help. Icingdeath slashed down at Athrogate’s defenseless head, surely a blow that would split the dwarf’s head apart. He took little satisfaction in that win as his blade connected against Athrogate’s skull, as he felt the transfer of deadly energy.
But the dwarf didn’t seem to even feel it, no blood erupted, and Drizzt’s blade didn’t bounce aside.
Drizzt had felt that curious sensation before, as if he had landed a blow without consequence.
Still, he didn’t sort it out quickly enough, didn’t understand the source.
Athrogate spun, morningstars flying desperately. One barely clipped Drizzt’s blade, but in that slightest of touches, a great surge of energy exploded out of the dwarf and hurled Drizzt back against the wall with such force that his blades flew from his hands.
Athrogate closed, weapons flying with fury.
Drizzt had no defense. Out of the corner of one eye, he noted the rise of a spiked metal ball, glistening with explosive liquid.
It rushed at his head, the last thing he saw.
EPILOGUE
D on’t you die! Don’t you die on me!” Maimun cried, cradling Deudermont’s head. “Damn you! You can’t die on me!”
Deudermont opened his eyes—or one, at least, for the other was crusted closed by dried blood.
“I failed,” he said.
Maimun hugged him close, shaking his head, choking up.
“I have been…a fool,” Deudermont gasped, no strength left in him.
“No!” Maimun insisted. “No. You tried. For the good of the people, you tried.”
And something strange came over young Maimun in that moment, a revelation, an epiphany. He was speaking on Deudermont’s behalf at that moment, trying to bring some comfort in a devastating moment of ultimate defeat, but as he spoke the words, they resonated within Maimun himself.
For Deudermont had indeed tried, had struck out for the good of those who had for years, in some cases for all their lives, suffered under the horror of Arklem Greeth and the five corrupt high captains. He had tried to be rid of the awful Prisoner’s Carnival, to be rid of the pirates and the lawlessness that had left so many corpses in its bloody wake.
Maimun’s own accusations against Deudermont, his claims that Deudermont’s authoritarian nature was no better for the people he claimed to serve than were the methods of the enemies he tried to defeat, rang hollow to the young pirate in that moment of great pain. He felt unsure of himself, as if the axioms upon which he had built his adult life were neither as resolute nor as morally pure, and as if Deudermont’s imposition of order might not be so absolutely bad, as he had believed.
“You tried, Captain,” he said. “That is all any of us can ever do.”
He ended with a wail, for he realized that the captain had not heard him, that Captain Deudermont, who had been as a father to him in years past, was dead.
Sobbing, Maimun gently stroked the captain’s bloody face. Again he thought of their first meeting, of those early, good years together aboard Sea Sprite.
With a growl of defiance, Maimun cradled Deudermont, shoulders and knees, and gently lifted the man into his arms as he stood straight.
He walked out of Suljack’s palace, onto Luskan’s streets, where the fighting had strangely quieted as news of the captain’s demise began to spread.
Head up, eyes straight ahead, Maimun walked to the dock, and he waited patiently, holding Deudermont all the while, as a small boat fromThrice Lucky was rowed furiously to retrieve him.
“Oh, but what a shot ye took on yer crown, and if yer head’s hurting as much as me own, then suren yer head’s hurtin’ more’n ever ye’ve known! Bwahahaha!”
The dwarf’s rhyming words drew Drizzt out of the darkness, however much he wanted to avoid them. He opened his groggy eyes, to find himself sitting in a comfortably-adorned room—a room in the Red Dragon Inn, he realized, a room in which he and Deudermont had shared several meals and exchanged many words.
And there was the dwarf, Athrogate, his adversary, sitting calmly across from him, weapons tucked into their sheaths across his back.
Drizzt couldn’t sort it out, but then he remembered Regis. He bolted upright, eyes scanning the room, hands going to his belt.
His blades were not there. He didn’t know what to think.