Drizzt could not be satisfied, though he could not refute the deep gnome’s blunt logic. He moved into the complex’s left-hand chamber, the one he had claimed as his bedroom, and fell into his hammock.
“Alas for you, Drizzt Do’Urden,” Belwar mumbled under his breath as he watched the drow’s heavy movements, laden with sorrow. “And alas for our doomed pech friend.” The burrow-warden went into his own chamber and crawled into his hammock, feeling terrible about the whole situation but determined to remain coldly logical and practical, whatever the pain. For Belwar understood that Drizzt felt a kinship to the unfortunate creature, a potentially fatal bond founded in empathy for Clacker’s loss of self.
Later that night, an excited Drizzt shook the svirfneblin from his slumber. “We must help him,” Drizzt whispered harshly.
Belwar wiped an arm across his face and tried to orient himself. His sleep had been uneasy, filled with dreams in which he had cried ‘Bivrip’ in an impossibly loud voice, then had proceeded to bash the life out of his newest companion.
“We must help him!” Drizzt said again, even more forcefully. Belwar could tell by the drow’s haggard appearance that Drizzt had found no sleep this night.
“I am no wizard,” the burrow-warden said. “Neither are―”
“Then we will find one!” Drizzt growled. “We will find the human who cursed Clacker and force him to reverse the dweomer! We saw him by the stream only a few days ago. He cannot be so far away!”
“A mage capable of such magic will prove no easy foe,” Belwar was quick to reply. “Have you so quickly forgotten the fireball?” Belwar glanced to the wall, to where his scorched leather jack hung on a peg, as if to convince himself. “The wizard is beyond us, I fear,” Belwar mumbled, but Drizzt could see the lack of conviction in the burrow-warden’s expression as he spoke the words.
“Are you so quick to condemn Clacker?” Drizzt asked bluntly. A wide smile began to spread over Drizzt’s face as he saw the svirfneblin weakening. “Is this the same Belwar Dissengulp who took in a lost drow? That most honored burrow-warden who would not give up hope for a dark elf that everyone else considered dangerous and beyond help?”
“Go to sleep, dark elf,” Belwar retorted, pushing Drizzt away with his hammer-hand.
“Wise advice, my friend,” said Drizzt. “And you sleep well. We may have a long road ahead of us.”
“Magga cammara,” huffed the taciturn svirfneblin, stubbornly holding to his facade of gruff practicality. He rolled away from Drizzt and soon was snoring.
Drizzt noted that Belwar’s snores now sounded from the depths of a deep and contented sleep.
Clacker beat against the wall with his clawed hands, taptapping the stone relentlessly.
“Not again,” a flustered Belwar whispered to Drizzt. “Not out here!”
Drizzt sped along the winding corridor, homing in on the monotonous sound. “Clacker!” he called softly when the hook horror was in sight.
The hook horror turned to face the approaching drow, clawed hands wide and ready and a growling hiss slipping through his great beak. A moment later, Clacker realized what he was doing and abruptly stopped.
“Why must you continue that banging?” Drizzt asked him, trying to pretend, even to himself, that he had not seen Clacker’s battle stance. “We are out in the wilds, my friend. Such sounds invite visitors.”
The giant monster’s head drooped. “You should not have c-c-come out with m-me.” Clacker said. “I c-c-cannot-many things will happen that I cannot c-control.”
Drizzt reached up and put a comforting hand on Clacker’s bony elbow. “It was my fault,” the drow said, understanding the hook horror’s meaning. Clacker had apologized for turning dangerously on Drizzt. “We should not have gone off in different directions,” Drizzt continued, “and I should not have approached you so quickly and without warning. We will all stay together now, though our search may prove longer, and Belwar and I will help you to maintain control.”
Clacker’s beaked face brightened. “It does feel so very g-good to tot-tap the stone,” he proclaimed. Clacker banged a claw on the rock as if to jolt his memory. His voice and his gaze trailed away as he thought of his past life, the one that the wizard had stolen from him. All the pech’s days had been spent tapping the stone, shaping the stone, talking to the precious stone.
“You will be pech again,” Drizzt promised.
Belwar, approaching from the tunnel, heard the drow’s words and was not so certain. They had been out in the tunnels for more than a week and had found not a sign of the wizard. The burrow-warden took some comfort in the fact that Clacker seemed to be winning back part of himself from his monstrous state, seemed to be regaining a measure of his pech personality. Belwar had watched the same transformation in Drizzt just a few weeks before, and beneath the survivalistic barriers of the hunter that Drizzt had become, Belwar had discovered his closest friend.
But the burrow-warden took care not to assume the same results with Clacker. The hook horror’s condition was the result of powerful magic, and no amount of friendship could reverse the workings of the wizard’s dweomer. In finding Drizzt and Belwar, Clacker had been granted a temporary―and only temporary―reprieve from a miserable and undeniable fate.
They moved on through the tunnels of the Underdark for several more days without any luck. Clacker’s personality still did not deteriorate, but even Drizzt, who had left the cave complex beside the lake so full of hope, began to feel the weight of increasing reality.
Then, just as Drizzt and Belwar had begun discussing returning to their home, the group came into a fair-sized cavern littered with rubble from a recent collapse of the ceiling.
“He has been here!” Clacker cried, and he offhandedly lifted a huge boulder and tossed it against a distant wall, where it shattered into so much rubble. “He has been here!”
The hook horror rushed about, smashing stone and throwing boulders with growing, explosive rage.
“How can you know?” Belwar demanded, trying to stop his giant friend’s tirade.
Clacker pointed up at the ceiling. “He d-did this. The w-w-w-he did this!”
Drizzt and Belwar exchanged concerned glances. The chamber’s ceiling, which had been about fifteen feet up, was gouged and blasted, and in its center loomed a massive hole that extended up to twice the ceiling’s former height. If magic had caused that devastation, it was powerful magic indeed!
“The wizard did this?” Belwar echoed. He cast that stubbornly practical look he had perfected toward Drizzt one more time.
“His t-t-tower,” Clacker replied, and rushed off about the chamber to see if he could discern which exit the wizard ad taken.
Now Drizzt and Belwar were completely at a loss, and Clacker, when he finally took the time to look at them, realized their confusion.
“The w-w-w―”
“Wizard,” Belwar put in impatiently.
Clacker took no offense, even appreciated the assistance.
“The w-wizard has a t-tower,” the excited hook horror tried to explain. “A g-great iron t-tower that he takes with him, setting it up wherever it is c-c-convenient.” Clacker looked up at the ruined ceiling. “Even if it does not always fit.”
“He carries a tower?” Belwar asked, his long nose crinkling right up over itself.
Clacker nodded excitedly, but then didn’t take the time to explain further, for he had found the wizard’s trail, a clear boot print in a bed of moss leading down another of the corridors.
Drizzt and Belwar had to be satisfied with their friend’s incomplete explanation, for the chase was on. Drizzt took up the lead, using all the skills he had learned in the drow Academy and had heightened during his decade alone in the Underdark. Belwar, with his innate racial understanding of the Underdark and his magically lighted brooch, kept track of their direction, and Clacker, in those instances when he fell more completely back into his former self, asked the stones for guidance. The three of them passed another blasted chamber, and another chamber that showed clear signs of the tower’s presence, though its ceiling was high enough to accommodate the structure.