Drizzt slowly doubled over and managed to get I a hand to his ripped boot, where he somehow I stemmed the blood flow. The wound was I clean, at least, and after a few tries, Drizzt found that he still had use of the foot, that it would still support his weight, though painfully.
"Regis?" he called up the cliff face. The dark shape of the halfling's head peered out over the ledge.
"Drizzt?" Regis called back tentatively. "I ... I thought. . ."
"I am all right," the drow assured him. "Entreri is gone." Drizzt couldn't make out Regis's cherubic features from that distance, but he could well imagine the joy the news brought his tormented friend. Entreri had chased Regis for many years, had caught him twice, and neither time had been a pleasant experience for the halfling. Regis feared Artemis Entreri more than anything else in the world, and now, it seemed, the halfling could put that fear to rest.
"I see Twinkle!" the halfling called excitedly, the silhouette of his arm coming over the lip in a downward point. "It's glowing down at the bottom, to your right."
Drizzt peered that way, but he could not see the bottom of the cliff since the stone sloped out directly beneath him. He inched his way to the side, and, as Regis had claimed, the magical scimitar came into sight, its blue glow stark against the dark stone of the valley floor. Drizzt cautiously considered this revelation for a few moments. Why would the scimitar, out of his grasp, flare so? Always he had considered the blade's fire a reflection of himself, a magically empathetic reaction to the fires within him.
He winced at the notion that perhaps Artemis Entreri had retrieved the blade. Drizzt pictured the assassin grinning up at him, holding Twinkle out as ironic bait.
Drizzt dismissed the dark notion immediately. He had seen Entreri fall, down across the face of an inverted slope with nothing to grab on to, the wall moving farther away from him as he plummeted. The best the assassin could have hoped for was a bouncing skid after a thirty-or forty-foot free-fall. Even if he was not dead, he certainly was not standing on the valley floor.
What, then, was Drizzt to do? He thought he should go back immediately to Regis and hunt on, to find out the fate of his friends. He could get back to the valley easily enough from Keeper's Dale when the trouble had passed, and, with any luck, no goblin or mountain troll would have scooped up the blade.
When he considered the possibility of battling Vierna's charges once more, though, Drizzt realized he would feel better with Twinkle in hand. He looked down again, and the scimitar called out to him - he felt its call in his mind and could not be sure if he had imagined it or if Twinkle possessed some abilities that Drizzt did not yet understand. Something else called to Drizzt, too, he had to admit to himself if not to anyone else. His curiosity over Entreri's fate would not be easily sated. Drizzt would rest easier if he found the assassin's broken form at the base of the mountain wall.
"I am going for the blade," the drow yelled up to Regis. "I'll not be gone long. Cry out for any trouble."
He heard a slight whimper from above, but Regis only called, "Hurry!" and did not argue the decision.
Drizzt sheathed his remaining scimitar and picked his way carefully around the inverted region, catching firm handholds and trying as best he could to keep the pressure from his wounded foot. After fifty feet or so, he came to a steeply pitched but not sheer region of loose stone. There were no handholds here, but Drizzt didn't need any. He lay flat against the wall and slid slowly down.
He saw the danger from the corner of his eye, bat-winged and man-sized and cutting sharp angles in its flight along the mountain valley winds. Drizzt braced himself as it veered in, saw the greenish-blue glow of a familiar sword.
Entreri!
The assassin cackled with taunting glee as he soared past, scoring a slight hit on the draw's shoulder. Entreri's cloak had transformed, had sprouted to form bat wings!
Drizzt now understood the true reason the devious assassin had chosen to fight on the ledge.
The assassin made a second pass, closer, smacking the draw with the side of his sword and kicking out with his boot into Drizzt's back.
Drizzt rolled with the hits, then began to slide dangerously, the loose rubble shifting under him. He drew his scimitar and somehow parried the next passing strike.
"Have you a cloak like mine?" Entreri teased, cutting a sharp turn some distance away and seeming to hover in midair. "Poor little drow, with no net to catch him." Another gleeful cackle sounded, and in swooped the assassin, still keeping a respectable distance, knowing he held every advantage and could not let his eagerness betray him.
The sword, carrying the momentum of the assassin's swift flight, slammed hard against Drizzt's scimitar, and while the ranger managed to keep the slender blade clear of his body, the assassin clearly had won the pass.
Drizzt was sliding once more. He turned back to face the stone, clutched at it, put one arm under him, and hooked his fingers, using his weight to dig them deeply enough into the loose gravel to slow the descent. Drizzt seemed helpless at that awful moment, as concerned with holding his precarious perch as in parrying the assassin's strikes.