The strength of the creature surprised the drow, its every muscle working in perfect coordination. Noting movement to the side, he glanced at Entreri, at first thinking that the assassin was rushing to his aid. Not so, he understood, when he realized that Entreri had his own problems.
On came the strangely aggressive snakes, slithering through the water, sliding along the walls, throwing themselves through the air.
With a growl, Drizzt lifted his bitten left arm, extending the snake out before his right shoulder, turned and wriggled enough to free his other arm, and brought a quick backhand of Twinkle to cut the creature in half. Immediately, the lower torso loosened around him and dropped with a splash to the floor, but that head held on, stubbornly. Too concerned with drawing his other blade-a bit awkwardly since Icingdeath, which he usually carried in his right hand, was sheathed on his left hip-Drizzt let the half-serpent hang there.
His focus remained before him, as it had to, slapping, slashing, and kicking to fend off the onslaught.
Beside him, Entreri worked with equal fury, his dirk swiftly deflecting leaping serpents, his sword scoring kills.
But behind them, there came a long series of dull raps, and in one of the infrequent moments of pause, Drizzt glanced back, as did Entreri, to see Dahlia straddling the water, her staff presented horizontally before her and she rapidly shifted it up and down, out left and out right, cracking it against the stone walls.
“Hit the snakes, you idiot!” Entreri yelled at her, and he was nearly toppled at the end of that sentence as one of the serpents slithered through his defenses and wrapped around his legs, tugging him powerfully.
“Dahlia!” Drizzt implored her.
But the rapping continued and so did the onslaught of serpents-there seemed to be no end to them! Entreri freed himself only to get hit again, and Drizzt nearly had Icingdeath pulled from his grasp when one snake took hold.
The corridor began to flash, not from the waving of Drizzt’s glowing scimitar, but with sharp spikes of light, crackles of lightning.
Entreri kept cursing at Dahlia and growling at the snakes, and swinging and stabbing and kicking. And just when Drizzt thought he had gained some measure of momentum, a serpent appeared on the ceiling before him. He threw himself back and low into a crouch and the snapping jaws rent the air, just missing his left ear. The snake retracted before his blade could decapitate it, then threw itself at him, slamming him hard and nearly knocking him from his feet.
To fall was to be overwhelmed, Drizzt knew. The water shimmied, alive with serpents.
“Dahlia!” he cried for help.
This time she answered him, not with words, but with thunder. She thrust Kozah’s Needle through the water to slam against the floor, and there she released the energy her rapping had imbued within it. The retort jolted all three of them into the air, though all three held their footing as they landed. The water churned and sizzled, a stinky steam lifting from it so thickly that it obscured their vision.
Drizzt tried to respond, to say something, but found his jaw clenched from the energy pulsing through him.
Then it was over, as unexpectedly and abruptly as it had happened, and an eerie stillness replaced the fury of the previous moments.
Snakes dropped from the walls and ceiling, or hung in place, their lengths looped over a natural beam or a jag or jut. Snakes lay on the floor in various poses, like living runes or glyphs. Snakes floated in the water, sliding down to bump against a leg or foot.
Perhaps dead, perhaps stunned. That latter, very real possibility had Drizzt more than a little alarmed.
Beside him, Entreri slashed down on one reptile, and its convulsion as his blade struck home told the ranger that it had indeed been alive until cleaved.
“Be gone, and quickly!” Drizzt cried. “Leave them, there are too many!”
“Out the way we came!” Dahlia said.
“Alegni is that way,” Entreri reminded, pointing ahead. “And it’s shorter.”
They didn’t have time to think it through. They didn’t have time to consider the unusual behavior of so many ordinary creatures. They simply had to react. Perhaps it was the carrot of Alegni, which Entreri had dangled before Dahlia, but whatever the reason, Drizzt was surprised when the woman splashed up behind him, prodding him and Entreri to move on.
He noted that Entreri crouched and reached into the water and pulled something forth before scrambling to pace him, but took no further note as the three zigzagged their way through a maze of stunned serpents.
Fortunately, the magical energy of Kozah’s Needle had reached far enough along the corridor to get most of the snakes, and they passed beyond that point in short order, and even more fortunately, so they presumed, the corridor widened a bit more, and heightened, and they could press on with more urgency.
Except that they had to wait for a moment as Entreri pulled up to a rock and sat down, and only then did Drizzt understand what the assassin had stopped to retrieve from the water: one of his low boots.
Dahlia’s jolt had lifted him right out of his shoe.
With a few muttered curses and a shake of his head, Entreri pulled the smoking boot back on and stood straight. He looked hard at Dahlia and said, “You owe me a new pair.”
“I saved your life,” she retorted.
“If you had just bothered to join in the fight, it wouldn’t have needed any saving, would it?”
Again Drizzt watched the two and their verbal sparring with something less than amusement, but he couldn’t really focus on it at that moment, because something about their encounter with the bed of serpents was now, in retrospect, truly bothering him.
“Why were all of those snakes exactly the same size?” he asked when they had started on their way again.
“Why wouldn’t they be?” Dahlia asked.
“Snakes shed their skins and grow quickly, and continually,” Drizzt explained.
“So they were all the same age,” the elf woman replied, her tone showing that she hardly saw the point of this conversation.
Drizzt shook his head. “Snakes don’t herd.”
“That was a herd of snakes,” Dahlia quickly retorted.
“A bed of snakes,” the ranger corrected, but half-heartedly, for her point was well taken. Drizzt shook his head, not quite accepting it. Snakes did collect in the winter, of course-the drow had found many such dens in his travels, some containing thousands of the creatures. But he had never seen such a hunting pack as they had just encountered, and had never heard of a coordinated snake attack!
“Magically conjured?” Dahlia asked, and that sounded right to Drizzt, until Entreri chimed in.
“Babies.”
“Babies?” Dahlia echoed doubtfully, stating the obvious, for how could a sixfoot snake be a baby?
But it was the way Entreri had said it that had both Drizzt, and Dahlia, despite her argument, turning his way, then following his gaze.
To the mother.
In a small room lit by a single candle, Brother Anthus sat cross-legged on the bare floor. His eyes were closed, his hands resting on the cool stone beside his legs, palms facing upward. Softly, the monk chanted, moaned even, as he focused on his deep inhalation and exhalation, using that rising and falling movement of his belly to clear his swirling thoughts, to find a place of deep peace and emptiness.
This was his only refuge, and even it, at first, seemed not a place of serenity.
Should he travel to Waterdeep and alert the lords that the Netheril Empire was gaining a stronghold just north of them?
Images of that road, fleeting glimpses of the trouble he would have slipping away unnoticed, or of the consequences should Herzgo Alegni’s many soldiers capture him before he got away, assailed him. And if he went, of course, he could not return to Neverwinter unless and until Alegni had been thrown down and the agents of Netheril routed.