The Last Threshold - Page 33/72

He had lived his life with daring and discipline, and even the lords of Netheril had taken note of him at times.

Had any of that made Herzgo Alegni proud?

Effron honestly didn’t know. If so, his brutish tiefling father had never revealed it, and even on those few occasions when a word or glance from Herzgo Alegni might have been taken as fatherly pride, hard experience had taught Effron to view them more as manipulation than anything else, as if the self-absorbed Herzgo Alegni was boosting Effron’s morale because he wanted to get something more out of him.

Effron considered the possibility that he had no deeper feelings for Herzgo than he had for Dahlia.

Ah, Dahlia. For Effron, she was the rub, the ultimate pain, the desperate question, the ever-nagging doubt.

She had thrown him from a cliff.

His mother had rejected him, utterly, and had thrown him from a cliff.

How could she do that?

How he hated her!

How he desired to murder her!

How he needed her.

He could not wrap his thoughts comfortably around the emotions assailing him from every direction that dreary day. Now, on these docks this morning, he accepted the reality that she was gone, and the waves coming at him from opposite directions rolled and rose, crested and collided in the middle of his consciousness.

“Ha!” came a cry as he walked past one pair of older men, one with a mop, the other wearing a pair of hand gaffs for unloading sacks of grain.

“I told ye today’d be the day the ugly one didn’t ask!” continued the gaff-armed gaffer, and he let loose a squeal of laughter.

“Are you mocking me?” the dour Effron asked.

“Nah, devil-boy, he’s just laughing at his own prognostication,” the man with the swab replied. “He said yerself wouldn’t ask about Minnow Skipper today.”

“And pray tell how he would know that?”

“Because today’s the day word’s come in,” said the gaffer, and he laughed again, though it sounded more like a cackling cough. “She’s out there, north and west. Tide’s bad and wind’s wrong, but her sails might dot the horizon before sun’s to setting. Either way, she’ll slide in tomorrow.”

Effron tried to hold steady, but he knew that he was shaking, for he could feel the increasing movement of his dead arm. “How do you know? Tell me. Tell me!”

The other fellow lifted his mop and pointed it at a boat that had just come in, obviously, for her crew was still at work and hadn’t come ashore. “They seen her trailing these last three days. Flying Kurth’s flag. Luskan boat, that one there, and they’re knowing Minnow Skipper.”

Effron looked blankly at the other boat, but inside, his mind cascaded along avenues thought lost. Dahlia. Likely aboard, and almost surely alive.

Dahlia, who had the answers to the questions Effron most feared and most needed to hear.

Only then did it occur to him that his impatience, which had brought him to the docks these last days, might now dearly cost him.

“Listen to me,” he said intently to the pair. “There’s coin in this for you. Gold coin.”

“Keep talking,” said the man with the mop.

“I would know who comes off that boat,” Effron explained. “And I would not have them know that I have asked.”

“Gold coin?” asked the gaffer.

“Gold coins,” Effron assured him. “More coins than the fingers of both your hands and both his hands.

“Look for a dark elf, and a female elf beside him,” Effron explained.

“Female drow?”

“No, just the male.”

“Lots of elves about. How’re we to know it’s her?”

“You’ll know,” Effron promised, his gaze inexorably drifting back to the empty waters to the northwest, as if expecting the sails to appear at any moment. “You’ll know.”

“He said three days,” Drizzt said, referring to the time they would spend in Baldur’s Gate. Walking beside him, Dahlia turned back to regard Entreri, just a few steps behind, wondering if that time frame applied to him.

Entreri had been surprisingly chipper after the initial sail out of Luskan, and had accepted the ridiculously roundabout route and incessant delays at sea with less complaining than any of the band of five, and most of the crew as well. And now he was smiling. He lifted one hand toward Dahlia and waggled three fingers to emphasize the drow’s point, though whether he was reinforcing that remark or mocking her because it applied to her and not to him, she couldn’t tell.

Dahlia realized that she desperately wanted Artemis Entreri aboard for that return journey, and it flashed in her mind that if he wasn’t going back, neither would she.

“Three days?” Ambergris said, she and Afafrenfere walking immediately behind the assassin. “Ah, well, get to it, then. Three days for drinking and twining … here’s hoping Baldur’s Gate got some handsome dwarves wanderin’ about!”

She squealed in laughter, and Afafrenfere helplessly shook his head.

“Hehe, I’m thinkin’ the rockin’ boat’s got me legs a bit bowed!” Ambergris added and she squealed again.

“Well, who’s for knowing what’s to crawl off of Luskan’s docks?” a voice to the side said, turning Dahlia’s attention forward once more, and across Drizzt to a pair of dockhands, one middle-aged and one well past his prime—and in a life spent at sea, judging from his appearance and the way he carried himself.

Drizzt stopped, as Dahlia did beside him, and looked the two over.

“Ah, but not yerself, drow,” the older man said. He looked past Drizzt to Dahlia and winked.

The other man leaned his mop up against his shoulder, lifted both hands, waggled his fingers, and said, “More gold coins than fingers.”

Dahlia didn’t quite know what to make of them, and didn’t really care. She started off again, pulling Drizzt beside her.

“I do believe he just propositioned you,” Entreri said from behind them when they were far down the dock.

“Then I should go back and kiss him,” Dahlia replied, and all four of her companions looked at her incredulously. “Then take his coins, cave in his skull, and drop him into the sea.”

She kept walking, breezily, as if the thought might be half joke, but then again, might not. And these companions, having seen the elf warrior in action, didn’t doubt either possibility. Certainly Drizzt showed as much when he gave her a less-than-accepting stare.

Dahlia had seen that look far too much from the drow of late, she realized.

When they got into the city, they split up, Dahlia and Drizzt moving for the finer inns, Ambergris pulling Afafrenfere toward the many seedy taverns just off the docks, and Entreri, with a casual salute, moving away on his own. For many steps, Dahlia watched the man, trying to get a feeling for which section of Baldur’s Gate attracted him the most. The city was fairly well divided along clear demarcations: wealthy merchants, artisans, and the poor. Dahlia figured Entreri would seek out the middle levels, but near to the wilder regions not far from the wharves. His direction seemed to confirm as much.

“Shall we rent one room or two?” Dahlia asked Drizzt, and he turned on her sharply in obvious surprise. “Or perhaps just bunks in a common dormitory, so that we can pretend we’re still aboard ship?”

Drizzt’s stare turned incredulous.

“It will allow you the excuse you seem to need.”

Drizzt stopped and turned to face her directly.

Dahlia took a deep breath and said, “You haven’t touched me in tendays, in months even.”

“That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it? Other than our first day at sea.”

Drizzt swallowed hard and looked around. “Not here,” he said, and he took Dahlia’s arm and headed to the nearest inn, where he purchased the very best room available.

As soon as he had closed the door, Drizzt went at Dahlia aggressively.

She took some satisfaction in that, but still found herself pushing him away. At first, she didn’t quite know why, but it soon dawned on her that Drizzt was making this advance more out of obligation than desire—or if desire, then physical desire and not emotional.

While Dahlia could understand and appreciate it, she wasn’t much interested in conceding to it.

“Why?” she asked into his confused expression—confused, but not wounded, she recognized—and if he was disappointed, he was doing a good job in hiding that fact, too.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Dahlia pulled away from him with a snort, even turned away because she didn’t want to look at him at that moment. “You’re trying to mollify me.”

“You just said—”

She turned around, facing him with her arms crossed over her chest, one foot tapping.

Now it was Drizzt’s turn to sigh. He walked to a chair set against the far wall, like a bar fighter moving to his corner between combat rounds. He pulled the chair around and straddled it, his elbows atop the chair back.

“Have I ever told you about Innovindil?” he asked. “An elf I once knew?”

Dahlia changed neither her stance nor her expression.

“A friend I knew a century ago,” Drizzt explained. “She was older than you, older than me. She came to me in a time of turmoil, with orcs ravaging the countryside and pressing the kingdom of my dearest friend—a friend I thought dead, along with all the others, including—”

“Catti-brie,” Dahlia remarked, for Drizzt had told her of his wife. “So you lost her and filled your days with an elf companion.”

Drizzt shook his head. “I thought I had lost her, lost all of them, but no, this was before that time.”

“Is there a point to your story?”

Drizzt sighed again. “Not an easy one to get to,” he admitted. “You’re barely into your fourth decade of life, but Innovindil’s lessons were an explanation of a life witnessing the birth and death of centuries.”

“Then why would I care?”

“Because it will explain … me,” Drizzt blurted. “My actions, or inactions.”

“Must everything become such an important act to you?” Dahlia said.

Drizzt chuckled. “You’re not the first to say such a thing to me.”

“Then perhaps you should listen.”

“I tried to,” the drow said, and he motioned to the spot before the bed where he had pursued Dahlia.

“Months,” she replied dourly.

“Innovindil told me to live my life in shorter expanses, in human terms, then to start over from there. Particularly, she said, if I meant to befriend, even to fall in love, with the lesser-living races.”

“She told you to get past your grief.”

“I suppose you could phrase it like that.”

“I just did. And so here we are—has it been a century now since you lost this human woman?—and you don’t seem to be taking her advice.” She noted Drizzt’s wince at the way she had pronounced human, clearly marking the word as an insult, and that, she thought, was telling. “And this is the same advice you intend to give to me?” She chortled again. “Shouldn’t you learn to abide by it first?”