Homeland (22 page)

Then, beyond a low archway, the floor suddenly dropped away and they found themselves on a narrow ledge overlooking a wide chasm. Drizzt looked at his sister curiously but held his question when he saw that she was deep in the concentration. She uttered a few simple commands, then tapped herself and Drizzt on the forehead.

“Come,” she instructed, and she and Drizzt stepped off the ledge and levitated down to the chasm floor.

A thin mist, from some unseen hot pool or tar pit, hugged the stone. Drizzt could sense the danger here, and the evil. A brooding wickedness hung in the air as tangibly as the mist.

“Do not fear,” Vierna signaled to him. “I have put a spell of masking upon us. They cannot see us.”

“They?” Drizzt’s hands asked, but even as he motioned in the code, he heard a scuttling off to the side. He followed Vierna’s gaze down to a distant boulder and the wretched thing perched upon it.

At first, Drizzt thought it was a drow elf, and from the waist up, it was indeed, though bloated and pale. Its lower body, though, resembled a spider, with eight arachnid legs to support its frame. The creature held a bow ready in its hands but seemed confused, as though it could not discern what had entered its lair.

Vierna was pleased by the disgust on her brother’s face as he viewed the thing. “Look upon it well, younger brother,” she signaled. “Behold the fate of those who anger the Spider Queen.”

“What is it?” Drizzt signaled back quickly.

“A drider,” Vierna whispered in his ear. Then, back in the silent code, she added, “Lolth is not a merciful deity.”

Drizzt watched, mesmerized, as the drider shifted its position on the boulder, searching for the intruders. Drizzt couldn’t tell if it was a male or female, so bloated was its torso, but he knew that it didn’t matter. The creature was not a natural creation and would leave no descendants behind, whatever its gender. It was a tormented body, nothing more, hating itself, in all probability, more than everything else around it.

“I am merciful,” Vierna continued silently, though she knew her brother’s attention was fully on the drider. She rested back flat against the stone wall.

Drizzt spun on her, suddenly realizing her intent.

Then Vierna sank into the stone. “Goodbye, little brother,” came her final call. “This is a better fate than you deserve.”

“No!” Drizzt growled, and he clawed at the empty wall until an arrow sliced into his leg. The scimitars flashed out in his hands as he spun back to face the danger. The drider took aim for a second shot.

Drizzt meant to dive to the side, to the protection of another boulder, but his wounded leg immediately fell numb and useless. Poison.

Drizzt just got one blade up in time to deflect the second arrow, and he dropped to one knee to clutch at his wound. He could feel the cold poison making its way through his limb, but he stubbornly snapped off the arrow shaft and turned his attention back to the attacker. He would have to worry about the wound later, would have to hope that he could tend to it in time. Right now, his only concern was to get out of the chasm.

He turned to flee, to seek a sheltered spot where he could levitate back up to the ledge, but he found himself face-to-face with another drider.

An axe sliced by his shoulder, barely missing its mark. Drizzt blocked the return blow and launched his second scimitar into a thrust, which the drider stopped with a second axe.

Drizzt was composed now, and was confident that he could defeat this foe, even with one leg limiting his mobility—until an arrow cracked into his back.

Drizzt lurched forward under the weight of the blow, but managed to parry another attack from the drider before him. Drizzt dropped to his knees and fell face-down.

When the axe-wielding drider, thinking Drizzt dead, started toward him, Drizzt kicked into a roll that put him squarely under the creature’s bulbous belly. He plunged his scimitar up with all his strength, then curled back under the deluge of spidery fluids.

The wounded drider tried to scurry away but fell to the side, its insides draining out onto the stone floor. Still, Drizzt had no hope. His arms, too, were numb now, and when the other wretched creature descended upon him, he could not hope to fight it off. He struggled to cling to consciousness, searching for some way out, battling to the bitter end. His eyelids became heavy….

Then Drizzt felt a hand grab his robe, and he was roughly lifted to his feet and slammed against the stone wall.

He opened his eyes to see his sister’s face.

“He lives,” Drizzt heard her say. “We must get him back quickly and tend to his wounds”

Another figure moved in front of him.

“I thought this the best way,” Vierna apologized.

“We cannot afford to lose him,” came an unemotional reply. Drizzt recognized the voice from his past. He fought through the blur and forced his eyes to focus.

“Malice,” he whispered. “Mother.”

Her enraged punch brought him into a clearer mindset.

“Matron Malice!” she growled, her angry scowl only an inch from Drizzt’s face. “Do not ever forget that!”

To Drizzt, her coldness rivaled the poison’s, and his relief at seeing her faded away as quickly as it had flooded through him.

“You must learn your place!” Malice roared, reiterating the command that had haunted Drizzt all of his young life. “Hear my words,” she demanded, and Drizzt heard them keenly. “Vierna brought you to this place to have you killed. She showed you mercy.” Malice cast a disappointed glance at her daughter.

“I understand the will of the Spider Queen better than she,” the matron continued, her spittle spraying Drizzt with every word. “If ever you speak ill of Lolth, our goddess, again, I will take you back to this place myself! But not to kill you; that would be too easy.” She jerked Drizzt’s head to the side so that he could look upon the grotesque remains of the drider he had killed.

“You will come back here,” Malice assured him, “to become a drider.”

G
UENHWYVAR

hat eyes are these that see

    The pain I know in my innermost soul?
What eyes are
these that see
The twisted strides of my kindred,
Led on in the wake of toys unbridled:
Arrow, bolt, and sword tip?

    Yours … aye, yours,
Straight run and muscled spring,
Soft on padded paws, sheathed claws,
Weapons rested for their need,
Stained not by frivolous blood
Or murderous deceit.

    Face to face, my mirror;
Reflection in a still pool by light.
Would that I might keep that image
Upon this face mine own.
Would that I might keep that heart
Within my breast untainted.
Hold tight to the proud honor of your spirit,
Mighty Guenhwyvar,
And hold tight to my side,
My dearest friend.

—Drizzt Do’Urden

rizzt was graduated—formally—on schedule and with the highest honors in his class. Perhaps Matron Malice had whispered into the right ears, smoothing over her son’s indiscretions, but Drizzt suspected that more likely none of those present at the Ceremony of Graduation even remembered that he had left.

He moved through the decorated gate of House Do’Urden, drawing stares from the common soldiery, and over to the cavern floor below the balcony. “So I am home,” he remarked under his breath, “for whatever that means.” After what had happened in the drider lair, Drizzt wondered if he would ever view House Do’Urden as his home again. Matron Malice was expecting him. He didn’t dare arrive late.

“It is good that you are home,” Briza said to him when she saw him rise up over the balcony’s railing.

Drizzt stepped tentatively through the entryway beside his oldest sister, trying to get a firm grasp on his surroundings. Home, Briza called it, but to Drizzt, House Do’Urden seemed as unfamiliar as the Academy had on his first day as a student. Ten years was not such a long time in the centuries of life a drow elf might know, but to Drizzt, more than the decade of absence now separated him from this place.

Maya joined them in the great corridor leading to the chapel anteroom. “Greetings, Prince Drizzt,” she said, and Drizzt couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not. “We have heard of the honors you achieved at Melee-Magthere. Your skill did House Do’Urden proud.” In spite of her words, Maya could not hide a derisive chuckle as she finished the thought. “Glad, I am, that you did not become drider food.”

Drizzt’s glare stole the smile from her face.

Maya and Briza exchanged concerned glances. They knew of the punishment Vierna had put upon their younger brother, and of the vicious scolding he had received at the hands of Matron Malice. They each cautiously rested a hand on their snake whips, not knowing how foolish their dangerous young brother might have become.

It was not Matron Malice or Drizzt’s sisters that now had Drizzt measuring every step before he took it. He knew where he stood with his mother and knew what he had to do to keep her appeased. There was another member of the family, though, that evoked both confusion and anger in Drizzt. Of all his kin, only Zaknafein pretended to be what he was not. As Drizzt made his way to the chapel, he glanced anxiously down every side passage, wondering when Zak would make his appearance.

“How long before you leave for patrol?” Maya asked, pulling Drizzt from his contemplations.

“Two days,” Drizzt replied absently, his eyes still darting from shadow to shadow. Then he was at the anteroom door, with no sign of Zak. Perhaps the weapons master was within, standing beside Malice.

“We know of your indiscretions,” Briza snapped, suddenly cold, as she placed her hand on the latch to the anteroom’s door. Drizzt was not surprised by her outburst. He was beginning to expect such explosions from the high priestesses of the Spider Queen.

“Why could you not just enjoy the pleasures of the ceremony?” Maya added. “We are fortunate that the mistresses and the matron of the Academy were too involved in their own excitement to note your movements. You would have brought shame upon our entire house!”

“You might have placed Matron Malice in Lolth’s disfavor,” Briza was quick to add.

The best thing I could ever do for her, Drizzt thought. He quickly dismissed the notion, remembering Briza’s uncanny proficiency at reading minds.

“Let us hope he did not,” Maya said grimly to her sister. “The tides of war hang thick in the air.”

“I have learned my place,” Drizzt assured them. He bowed low. “Forgive me, my sisters, and know that the truth of the drow world is fast opening before my young eyes. Never will I disappoint House Do’Urden in such a way again.”

So pleased were his sisters at the proclamation that the ambiguity of Drizzt’s words slipped right past them. Then Drizzt, not wanting to push his luck too far, also slipped past them, making his way through the door, noting with relief that Zaknafein was not in attendance.

“All praises to the Spider Queen!” Briza yelled after him.

Drizzt paused and turned to meet her gaze. He bowed low a second time. “As it should be,” he muttered.

Creeping behind the small group, Zak had studied Drizzt’s every move, trying to measure the toll a decade at the Academy had exacted on the young fighter.

Gone now was the customary smile that lit Drizzt’s face. Gone, too, Zak supposed, was the innocence that had kept this one apart from the rest of Menzoberranzan.

Zak leaned back heavily against the wall in a side passage. He had caught only portions of the conversation at the anteroom door. Most clearly he had heard Drizzt’s heartfelt accord with Briza’s honoring of Lolth.

“What have I done?” the weapons master asked himself. He looked back around the bend in the main corridor, but the door to the anteroom had already closed.

“Truly, when I look upon the drow—the drow warrior!—that was my most treasured, I shame for my cowardice,” Zak lamented. “What has Drizzt lost that I might have saved?”

He drew his smooth sword from its scabbard, his sensitive fingers running the length of the razor edge. “A finer blade you would be had you tasted the blood of Drizzt Do’Urden, to deny this world, our world, another soul for its taking, to free that one from the unending torments of life!” He lowered the weapon’s tip to the floor.

“But I am a coward,” he said. “I have failed in the one act that could have brought meaning to my pitiful existence. The secondboy of House Do’Urden lives, it would appear, but Drizzt Do’Urden, my Two-hands, is long dead.” Zak looked back to the emptiness where Drizzt had been standing, the weapons master’s expression suddenly a grimace. “Yet this pretender lives.

“A drow warrior.”

Zak’s weapon clanged to the stone floor and his head slumped down to be caught by the embrace of his open palms, the only shield Zaknafein Do’Urden had ever found.

Drizzt spent the next day at rest, mostly in his room, trying to keep out of the way of the other members of his immediate family. Malice had dismissed him without a word in their initial meeting, but Drizzt did not want to confront her again. Likewise, he had little to say to Briza and Maya, fearing that sooner or later they would begin to understand the true connotations of his continuing stream of blasphemous responses. Most of all, though, Drizzt did not want to see Zaknafein, the mentor he had once thought of as his salvation against the realities around him, the one glowing light in the darkness that was Menzoberranzan.

That, too, Drizzt believed, had been only a lie.

On his second day home, when Narbondel, the timeclock of the city, had just begun its cycle of light, the door to Drizzt’s small chamber swung open and Briza walked in. “An audience with Matron Malice,” she said grimly.

A thousand thoughts rushed through Drizzt’s mind as he grabbed his boots and followed his oldest sister down the passageways to the house chapel. Had Malice and the others discovered his true feelings toward their evil deity? What punishments did they now have waiting for him? Unconsciously, Drizzt eyed the spider carvings on the chapel’s arched entrance.

“You should be more familiar and more at ease with this place,” Briza scolded, noting his discomfort. “It is the place of our people’s highest glories.”

Drizzt lowered his gaze and did not respond—and was careful not to even think of the many stinging retorts he felt in his heart.

His confusion doubled when they entered the chapel, for Rizzen, Maya, and Zaknafein stood before the matron mother, as expected. Beside them, though, stood Dinin and Vierna.

“We are all present,” Briza said, taking her place at her mother’s side.

“Kneel,” Malice commanded, and the whole family fell to its knees. The matron mother paced slowly around them all, each pointedly dropping his or her eyes in reverence, or just in common sense, as the great lady walked by.

Malice stopped beside Drizzt. “You are confused by the presence of Dinin and Vierna,” she said. Drizzt looked up at her. “Do you not yet understand the subtle methods of our survival?”

“I had thought that my brother and sister were to continue on at the Academy,” Drizzt explained.

“That would not be to our advantage,” Malice replied.

“Does it not bring a house strength to have mistresses and masters seated at the Academy?” Drizzt dared to ask.

“It does,” replied Malice, “but it separates the power. You have heard tidings of war?”

“I have heard hinting of trouble,” said Drizzt, looking over at Vierna, “though nothing more tangible.”

“Hinting?” Malice huffed, angered that her son could not understand the importance. “They are more than most houses ever hear before the blade falls!” She spun away from Drizzt and addressed the whole group. “The rumors hold truth,” she declared.

“Who?” asked Briza. “What house conspires against House Do’Urden?”

“None behind us in rank,” Dinin replied, though the question had not been asked to him and it was not his place to speak unbidden.

“How do you know this?” Malice asked, letting the oversight pass. Malice understood Dinin’s value and knew that his contributions to this discussion would be important.

“We are the ninth house of the city,” Dinin reasoned, “but among our ranks we claim four high priestesses, two of them former mistresses of Arach-Tinilith.” He looked at Zak. “We have, as well, two former masters of Melee-Magthere, and Drizzt was awarded the highest laurels from the school of fighters. Our soldiers number nearly four hundred, all skilled and battle-tested. Only a few houses claim more.”

“What is your point?” Briza asked sharply.

“We are the ninth house,” Dinin laughed, “but few above us could defeat us….”

“And none behind,” Matron Malice finished for him. “You show good judgment, Elderboy. I have come to the same conclusions.”

“One of the great houses fears House Do’Urden,” Vierna concluded. “It needs us gone to protect its own position.”

“That is my belief,” Malice answered. “An uncommon practice, for family wars usually are initiated by the lower-ranking house, desiring a better position within the city hierarchy.”

“Then we must take great care,” Briza said.