He scanned the darkened city, eyes roving from firelight to firelight, torch to torch. Nothing seemed amiss or out of the ordinary.
Alegni nodded, satisfied, collected his sword and the boots he had just removed, and went back into his room, hoping to get a half-night’s sleep before the dawn.
The huge serpent, its body as thick as a large man’s chest, lifted its massive head off the floor to stare into the eyes of the three invaders to its sewer realm.
“Fan out,” Drizzt told his companions, Entreri to the right of him, Dahlia to his left. “Widen out. We have to flank that maw.”
He ended with a gasp as the giant snake head snapped at him, lightning fast. His first thought was to block with his blades, but how ridiculous that notion seemed to him in the face of the opened maw, a mouth large enough to swallow him whole, flying at him with the power of a charging horse! Instinct took over and the drow desperately dodged aside, and the air rippled as the snake head snapped past him so powerfully that the shock alone nearly knocked Drizzt from his feet. He held his balance, but the snake recoiled too quickly for the drow to strike it on its retreat.
“We cannot fight that,” Dahlia whispered, and Drizzt caught more than pragmatism in her defeated tone, and when he glanced at the fighter, at this elf who reveled in battle, he saw her arms slipping down helplessly, as if in surrender.
He looked back to the giant snake, to the huge head swerving tantalizingly side to side, to the black eyes looking back at him, looking right through him, mocking him with their power.
Many heartbeats passed. It occurred to Drizzt more than once that Dahlia was correct here, that they couldn’t fight this great creature. The snake was far above them, far too great a foe.
And it didn’t want to kill them.
That truth seemed obvious, and made perfect sense-until Drizzt managed to step back from the obviousness and actually think about it.
Only then did the drow widen his view around the great serpent, to see a half-dozen other people flanking the snake, contentedly.
Contentedly.
There they were, human citizens of Neverwinter, along with a pair of Shadovar, all unarmed and standing beside the serpent as if it was their friend.
Or master.
Drizzt glanced left and right. Dahlia had dropped Kozah’s Needle, and stood shaking her head helplessly, and Entreri, perhaps the most fearless man Drizzt had ever met, a warrior who only got angrier and more ferocious when faced with a seemingly hopeless situation, rolling his sword and dirk nervously and hardly even looking at the giant creature.
Drizzt knew then that there was no need to fight this creature. Indeed, they couldn’t hope to win, or even survive, if they engaged in such a futile battle. Nay, the better course was to simply surrender to its obvious godlike qualities, to accept the reality of their inferiority and live happily beside this living deity.
There would be pleasure and peace.
Drizzt felt his scimitars slipping down by his sides. He was lost. All was lost.
Her thoughts were pried open and flying free.
Dahlia recognized this, but it seemed natural, and the intimacy created in such a shared moment seemed somehow warm and inviting. This creature before her, this god, understood her. It saw her deepest pain and greatest fears. It stripped her naked before it, for it and all to see, and there, open and without secret, she felt… free.
This was no enemy.
This was salvation!
Her pain lay bare before her, the rape, her guilt, her terrifying and evil choice to murder her child, the source of her rage, the multitude of dead lovers-and wouldn’t Drizzt sit atop that pile of corpses?
Or wouldn’t he be strong enough to kill her instead, and free her? That was the point, after all!
But perhaps, she realized now, she didn’t need that extreme, that suicide-bylover approach to ending her pain.
Perhaps the answer was here, before her, within reach, in the dark eyes of this knowing, brilliant creature.
His thoughts were pried open and flying free.
Entreri recognized this, but it seemed natural, and the intimacy created in such a shared moment seemed somehow warm and inviting. This creature before him, this god, understood him. It saw his deepest pain and greatest fears. It stripped him naked before it, for it and all to see, and there, open and without secret, he felt… free.
This was no enemy.
This was salvation!
Entreri, ever guarded, instinctively recoiled, though. How could he not? He, who had lived a life of lies, even from himself, he who had lived in the shadows of fabrication and denial, suddenly found an abrupt reversal-and not just from this creature, as he had with Charon’s Claw, but opened to all within the collective “family” the creature was now offering to him.
His guards went up without a conscious thought to them.
His memories floated before him anyway: the childhood betrayal by his mother, the ultimate betrayal of his uncle and those others, the dirt of Calimport’s streets.
He felt a violation, as he had known as a child, of the most intimate and damaging sort. He faced it again, or tried to, but he realized something… something quite unexpected.
Entreri lost his own contemplations to a moment of surprise, and glanced over at Dahlia, and she at him.
Naked, joined, with no place to hide.
His thoughts were pried open and flying free.
Unlike his companions, though, Drizzt Do’Urden knew this type of intrusion, and recognized almost immediately the subtle trickery, the willing slavery.
During his days wandering the Underdark, after abandoning Menzoberranzan, Drizzt had been seduced in just such a manner-logical promises and wondrous carefree visions of life in Paradise-by the illithids, the wretched mind flayers. Obediently and lovingly, Drizzt and his companions had massaged the hive mind of the illithid community.
He had traveled this same road before, had fallen victim to it, his identity stolen away. Determined never to face such slavery again, Drizzt had trained himself to resist-with a wall of anger. In light of that terrible experience, it wasn’t hard for Drizzt to build that wall once more, almost instantly.
He slowly and subtly reached into his pouch and grasped the onyx figurine, quietly calling for Guenhwyvar, and like his subdued companions, he lowered his blades and began to walk slowly and unthreateningly toward the mesmerizing beast. Every step proved a labor, for the intrusion was strong here, truly powerful. Drizzt had learned painfully how to battle it, and still he doubted he could resist.
Or perhaps even worse, that he could resist without tipping his hand.
He saw the many images floating around him, and had he found a moment free of the demands of discipline, he might have been surprised to glimpse the deep secrets of his companions, particularly those of Dahlia, particularly the one that had him lying dead atop a pile of the corpses of former lovers.
But to go there and take in the view would have meant that his thoughts, too, floated free, and thus, that he, too, would be trapped by the telepathic web.
He stayed behind the wall, strengthened it with every step. He remembered his terrible experience with the illithids. Only one thing had saved him then.
He felt himself beginning to slip, felt the tendrils of another mind, this godlike snake’s mind, reaching into his deepest thoughts.
He thought of Catti-brie and Bruenor, of Belwar and of Clacker, of Zaknafein and of Regis and Wulfgar, of lost friends and those who had given him his identity. This intruder would steal all of his memories, he told himself repeatedly, strengthening the wall of anger.
For without those memories, Drizzt Do’Urden had nothing.
His walk slowed to a halt, his blades dipped because he could not raise them. Out of the periphery of his vision, left and right, he noted that Entreri and Dahlia had begun eyeing him suspiciously, even threateningly.