He moved without a whisper along the lightless tunnels, his eyes glowing lavender, seeking changes in the heat patterns along the floor and walls that would indicate bends, or enemies, in the tunnel. He seemed at home, a creature of the Underdark, moving with typically quiet grace and cautious posture.
Drizzt did not feel at home, though. Already he was deeper than the lowest tunnels of Mithril Hall, and the stagnant air pressed in on him. He had spent nearly two decades on the surface, learning and living by the rules that governed the outer world. Those rules were as different to Underdark precepts as a forest wildflower was to a deep cavern fungus. A human, a goblin, even an alert surface elf, would have taken no note of Drizzt's silent passage, though he might cross just a few feet away, but Drizzt felt clumsy and loud.
The drow ranger cringed with every step, fearing that echoes were resounding along the blank stone walls hundreds of yards away. This was the Underdark, a place negotiated less by sight than by hearing and the sense of smell.
Drizzt had spent nearly two thirds of his life in the Underdark, and a good portion of the last twenty years underground in the cav erns of Clan Battlehammer. He no longer considered himself a crea ture of the Underdark, though. He had left his heart behind on a mountainside, watching the stars and the moon, the sunrise and the sunset.
This was the land of starless nights, no, not nights, just a single, unending starless night, Drizzt decided, of stagnant air, and leering stalactites.
The tunnel's width varied greatly, sometimes as narrow as the breadth of Drizzt's shoulders, sometimes wide enough for a dozen men to walk abreast. The floor sloped slightly, taking Drizzt even deeper, but the ceiling paralleled it well, remaining fairly consistent at about twice the height of the five and a half foot drow. For a long time, Drizzt detected no side caverns or corridors, and he was glad of that, for he didn't want to be forced into any direction decisions yet, and in this simple setup, any potential enemies would have to come at him from straight ahead.
Drizzt honestly believed that he was not prepared for any sur prises, not yet. Even his infravision pained him. His head throbbed as he tried to sort out and interpret the varying heat patterns. In his younger years, Drizzt had gone for weeks, even months, with his eyes tuned exclusively to the infrared spectrum, looking for heat instead of reflected light. But now, with his eyes so used to the sun above and the torches lining the corridors of Mithril Hall, he found the infravision jarring.
Finally, he drew out Twinkle, and the enchanted scimitar glowed with a soft bluish light. Drizzt rested back against the wall and let his eyes revert to the regular spectrum, then used the sword as a guiding light. Soon after, he came to a six way intersection, two crossing horizontal corridors intersected by a vertical shaft.
Drizzt tucked Twinkle away and looked above, up the shaft. He saw no heat sources, but was little comforted. Many of the Under dark's predators could mask their body temperatures, like a surface tiger used its stripes to crawl through thick strands of high grass. Dreaded hook horrors, for example, had developed an exoskeleton; the bony plates shielded the creature's body heat so that they appeared as unremarkable rocks to heat sensing eyes. And many of the Underdark's monsters were reptilian, cold blooded, and hard to see.
Drizzt sniffed the stagnant air several times, then he stood still and closed his eyes, letting his ears provide all the external input. He heard nothing, save the beating of his own heart, so he checked his gear to ensure that all was secure and started to climb down the shaft, taking care amid the dangerously loose rubble.
He nearly made it silently down the sixty feet to the lower corri dor, but a single stone skidded down before him, striking the corri dor's floor with a sharp crack at almost the same instant that Drizzt's soft boots quietly came down from the wall.
Drizzt froze in place, listening to the sound as it echoed from wall to wall. As a drow patrol leader, Drizzt had once been able to follow echoes perfectly, almost instinctively discerning which walls were rebounding the sound, and from which direction. Now, though, he had difficulty sorting through the echo's individual sounds. Again he felt out of place, overmatched by the brooding darkness. And again he felt vulnerable, for many denizens of the dark ways could indeed follow an echo trail, and this particular one led directly to Drizzt.
He swiftly traversed a virtual maze of crisscrossing corridors, some veering sharply and descending to pass beneath others, or climbing along natural stairs to new levels of winding ways.
Drizzt sorely missed Guenhwyvar. The panther could sort through any maze.
He thought of the cat again a short time later, when he came around a bend and stumbled upon a fresh kill. It was some type of subterranean lizard, too mutilated for Drizzt to figure out exactly what. Its tail was gone, as was its lower jaw, and its belly had been gashed open, its innards devoured. Drizzt found long tears in the skin, as though it had been raked by claws, and long and thin bruises, like those made by a whip. Beyond a pooi of blood a few feet from the corpse, the drow found a single track, a paw print, in a shape and size very similar to one Guenhwyvar might make.
But Drizzt's cat was hundreds of miles away, and this kill, by the ranger's estimation, was barely an hour old. Creatures of the Underdark did not roam as did creatures of the surface; the danger ous predator was likely not far away.
Bruenor Battlehammer stormed along the passageway, his grief stolen, for the moment, by undeniably mounting rage. Thibbledorf Pwent bounced along beside the king, his mouth flapping one ques tion after another and his armor squealing annoyingly with every movement.
Bruenor skidded to a stop and turned on the battlerager, put his angry scar and angry scowl in line with Pwent's bushy bearded face. Why don't ye get yerself a bath!" Bruenor roared.
Pwent fell back and began to choke on the command. By his estimation, a dwarf king ordering a subject to go take a bath was roughly the equivalent of a human king telling his knights to go out and kill babies. There were some lines that a ruler simply did not cross.
"Bah!" Bruenor snorted. "Good enough for ye, then. But go and grease that damned armor! How's a king to think with yer squeakin' and squealin'?"
Pwent's head bobbed his agreement with the compromise, and he bounded away, almost afraid to stay, afraid that the tyrant King Bruenor would again demand the bath.
Bruenor just wanted the battlerager away from him, he didn't really care how he accomplished that task. It had been a difficult afternoon. The dwarf had just met with Berkthgar the Bold, an emis sary from Settlestone, and had learned that Catti-brie had never arrived in the barbarian settlement, even though she had been out of Mithril Hall for nearly a week.
Bruenor 's mind raced over the events of his last meeting with his daughter. He recalled images of the young woman, tried to scrutinize them and remember every word she had said for some clue as to what might be happening. But Bruenor had been too absorbed on that occasion. If Catti-brie had hinted at anything other than her intentions to go to Settlestone, the dwarf had simply missed ut.
His first thoughts, when talking with Berkthgar, were that his daughter had met some trouble on the mountainside. He had almost called out a dwarven contingent to scour the area, but, on an impulse, had paused long enough to ask the emissary about the cairn being erected for Wulfgar.
"What cairn?" Berkthgar had replied.
Bruenor knew then that he had been deceived, and if Catti-brie had not been alone in that deception, then Bruenor could easily guess the identity of her coconspirator.
He nearly took the wooden, iron bound door of Buster Bracer, a highly regarded armorer, off its hinges as he burst in, catching the blue bearded dwarf and his halfling subject by surprise. Regis stood atop a small platform, being measured so that his armor could be let out to fit his widening girth.
Bruenor bounded up beside the pedestal (and Buster was wise enough to fall back from it), grabbed the halfling by the front of his tunic, and hoisted him into the air with one arm.
"Where's me girl?" the dwarf roared.
"Settle.. ." Regis started to lie, but Bruenor began shaking him violently, whipping him back and forth through the air like some rag doll.
"Where's me girl?" the dwarf said again, more quietly, his words a threatening snarl. "And don't ye play games with me, Rumblebelly."
Regis was getting more than a little tired of being assaulted by his supposed friends. The quick thinking halfling immediately con cocted a ruse about Catti-brie having run off to Silverymoon in search of Drizzt. It wouldn't be a complete lie, after all.
Looking at Bruenor 's scarred face, twisted in rage, but so obvi ously filled with pain, the halfling could not bring himself to fib.
"Put me down, " he said quietly, and apparently Bruenor under stood the halfling's empathy, for the dwarf gently lowered Regis to the ground.
Regis brushed his tunic straight, then waggled a fist before the dwarf king. "How dare you?" he roared.
Bruenor went back on his heels at the unexpected and unchar acteristic outburst, but the halfling did.not relent.
"First Drizzt comes to me and forces me to hold a secret, " Regis expounded, "then Catti-brie comes in and pushes me around until I tell her. Now you... . What fine friends I have surrounded myself with!"
The stinging words calmed the volatile dwarf, but only a little. What secret might Regis be hinting at?
Thibbledorf Pwent bounded into the room then, his armor squeaking no less, though his face, beard, and hands were certainly smeared with grease. He stopped beside Bruenor, surveying the unexpected situation for just a moment.
Pwent rubbed his hands eagerly in front of him, then ran them down the front of his cruelly ridged armor. "Should I hug him?" he asked his king hopefully.
Bruenor slapped a hand out to hold the eager battlerager at bay. "Where's me girl?" the dwarf king asked a third time, this time quietly and calmly, as though he was asking a friend.
Regis firmed his jaw, then nodded and began. He told Bruenor everything, even his role in aiding Catti-brie, in handing her the assassin's dagger and the magical mask.
Bruenor 's face began to twist in rage again, but Regis stood tall (relatively speaking) and dispelled the rising ire.
"Am I to trust in Catti-brie any less than you would?" Regis asked simply, reminding the dwarf that his human daughter was no child, and no novice to the perils of the road.
Bruenor didn't know how to take it all. A small part of him wanted to throttle Regis, but he understood that he would simply be playing out his frustration, and that the halfling was really not to blame. Where else could he turn, though? Both Drizzt and Catti-brie were long gone, well on their way, and Bruenor had no idea of how he could get to them!
Neither did the scarred dwarf, at that moment, have any strength to try. He dropped his gaze to the stone floor, his anger played out and his grief returned, and, without another word, he walked from the room. He had to think, and for the sake of his dearest friend and his beloved daughter, he had to think fast.
Pwent looked to Regis and Buster for answers, but they simply shook their heads.
A slight shuffle, the padded footsteps of a hunting cat, perhaps, was all that Drizzt could discern. The drow ranger stood perfectly still, all his senses attuned to his surroundings. If it was the cat, Drizzt knew that it was close enough to have caught his scent, that it undoubtedly knew that something had wandered into its territory~
Drizzt spent a moment scrutinizing the area. The tunnel contin ued haphazardly, sometimes wide, sometimes narrow, and this entire section was broken and uneven, the floor full of bumps and holes and the walls lined by natural alcoves and deep nooks. The ceiling, too, was no longer constant, sometimes low and sometimes high. Drizzt could see the varied gradations of heat on the high walls ahead and knew that those walls were lined by ledges in many places.
A great cat could jump up there, watching its intended prey from above.
The thought was not a settling one, but Drizzt had to press on. To backtrack, he would have to go all the way to the chute and climb to a higher level, then wander about in the hopes that he would find another way down. Drizzt didn't have time to spare; neither did his friends.
He put his back against the wall as he continued, stalking in a crouch, one scimitar drawn and the other, Twinkle, ready in its sheath. Drizzt did not want the magical blade's glow to further reveal his position, though he knew that hunting cats in the Under dark needed no light.