“Beat me! Slash me!” one of the friars cried suddenly, and he ran over toward the barrel, stumbling into Drizzt. Drizzt caught him and steadied him, but only for a moment.
“Loosh your dwow whickedniss on me head!” the dirty, unshaven friar sputtered, and his lanky frame tumbled down in an angular heap.
Drizzt turned away, shook his head, and unconsciously dropped a hand into his pouch to feel the onyx figurine, needing the touch to remind him that he was not truly alone. He was surviving, fighting an endless and lonely battle, but was far from contented. He had found a place, perhaps, but not a home.
“Like the grove without Montolio,” the drow mused. “Never a home.”
“Did you say something?” asked a portly friar, Brother Mateus, coming over to collect his drunken companion. “Please excuse Brother Jankin, friend. He has imbibed too much, I fear.”
Drizzt’s helpless smile told that he had taken no offense, but his next words caught Brother Mateus, the leader and most rational member—if not the most honest—of the group, off guard.
“I will complete the trip to Mirabar with you,” Drizzt explained, “then I will leave.”
“Leave?” asked Mateus, concerned.
“This is not my place,” Drizzt explained.
“Ten-Towns ish the place!” Jankin blurted.
“If anyone has offended you… ” Mateus said to Drizzt, taking no heed of the drunken man.
“No one,” Drizzt said and smiled again. “There is more for me in this life, Brother Mateus. Do not be angry, I beg, but I am leaving. It was not a decision I came to lightly.”
Mateus took a moment to consider the words. “As you choose,” he said, “but might you at least escort us through the tunnel into Mirabar?”
“Ten-Towns!” Jankin insisted. “Thast the place fer’ suf-ferin’! Vou’d like it, too, drow. Land o’ rogues, where a rogue might find hish place!”
“Often there are rakes in the shadows who would prey on unarmed friars,” Mateus interrupted, giving Jankin a rough shake.
Drizzt paused a moment, transfixed on Jankin’s words. Jankin had collapsed, though, and the drow looked up to Mateus. “Is that not why you take the tunnel route into the city?” Drizzt asked the portly friar. The tunnel was normally reserved for mine carts, rolling down from the Spine of the World, but the friars always went through it, even in situations such as this, when they had to make a complete circuit of the city just to get to the long route’s entrance. “To fall victim and suffer?” Drizzt continued. “Surely the road is clear and more convenient with winter still months away.” Drizzt did not like the tunnel to Mirabar. Any wanderers they met on that road would be too close for the drow to hide his identity. Drizzt had been accosted there on both his previous trips through.
“The others insist that we go through the tunnel, though it is many miles out of our way,” replied Mateus, a sharp edge to his tone. “But I prefer more personal forms of suffering and would appreciate your company through to Mirabar.”
Drizzt wanted to scream at the phony friar. Mateus considered missing a single meal a harsh suffering and only used his facade because many gullible people handed coins to the cloaked fanatics, more often than not just to be rid of the smelly men.
Drizzt nodded and watched as Mateus hauled Jankin away. “Then I leave,” he whispered under his breath. He could tell himself over and over that he was serving his goddess and his heart by protecting the seemingly helpless band, but their behavior often flew in the face of those words.
“Dwow! Dwow!” Brother Jankin slobbered as Mateus dragged him back to the others.
21. Hephaestus
Tephanis watched the party of six—the five friars and Drizzt—make their slow way toward the tunnel on the western approach to Mirabar. Roddy had sent the quickling ahead to scout out the region, telling Tephanis to turn the drow, if he found the drow, back toward Roddy. “Bleeder’ll be taking care of that one,” Roddy had snarled, slapping his formidable axe across his palm.
Tephanis wasn’t so sure. The sprite had watched Ulgulu, a master arguably more powerful than Roddy McGristle, dispatched by the drow, and another mighty master, Caroak, had been torn apart by the drow’s black panther. If Roddy got his wish and met the drow in battle, Tephanis might soon be searching for yet another master.
“Not-this-time, drow,” the sprite whispered suddenly, an idea coming to mind. “This-time-I-get-you!” Tephanis knew the tunnel to Mirabar—he and Roddy had used it the winter before last, when snow had buried the western road—and had learned many of its secrets, including one that the sprite now planned to use to his advantage.
He made a wide circuit around the group, not wanting to alert the sharp-eared drow, and still made the tunnel entrance long before the others. A few minutes later, the sprite was more than a mile in, picking at an intricate lock, one that seemed clumsy to the skilled quickling, on a portcullis crank.
Brother Mateus led the way into the tunnel, with another friar at his side and the remaining three completing a shielding circle around Drizzt. Drizzt had requested this so that he could remain inconspicuous if anyone happened by. He kept his cloak pulled up tightly and his shoulders hunched. He stayed low in the middle of the group.
They met no other travelers and moved along the torch-lit passage at a steady pace. They came to an intersection and Mateus stopped abruptly, seeing the raised portcullis to a passage on the right side. A dozen steps in, an iron door swung wide, and the passage beyond that was pitch black, not torch-lit like the main tunnel.
“How curious,” Mateus remarked.
“Careless,” another corrected. “Let us pray that no other travelers, who might not know the way as well as we, happen by here and take the wrong path!”
“Perhaps we should close the door,” still another offered.
“No,” Mateus quickly interjected. “There may be some down there, merchants perhaps, who would not be so pleased if we followed that plan.”
“No!” Brother Jankin cried suddenly and ran to the front of the group. “It is a sign! A sign from God! We are beckoned, my brethren, to Phaestus, the ultimate suffering!”
Jankin turned to charge down the tunnel, but Mateus and one other, hardly surprised by Jankin’s customarily wild outburst, immediately sprang upon him and bore him to the ground.
“Phaestus!” Jankin cried wildly, his long and shaggy black hair flying all about his face. “I am coming!”
“What is it?” Drizzt had to ask, having no idea of what the friars were talking about, though he thought he recognized the reference. “Who, or what, is Phaestus?”
“Hephaestus,” Brother Mateus corrected.
Drizzt did know the name. One of the books he had taken from Mooshie’s Grove was of dragon lore, and Hephaestus, a venerable red dragon living in the mountains northwest of Mirabar, had an entry.
“That is not the dragon’s real name, of course,” Mateus went on between grunts as he struggled with Jankin. “I do not know that, nor does anyone else anymore.” Jankin twisted suddenly, throwing the other monk aside, and promptly stomped down on Mateus’s sandal.
“Hephaestus is an old red dragon who has lived in the caves west of Mirabar for as long as anyone, even the dwarves, can remember,” explained another friar, Brother Herschel, one less engaged than Mateus. “The city tolerates him because he is a lazy one and a stupid one, though I would not tell him so. Most cities, I presume, would choose to tolerate a red if it meant not fighting the thing! But Hephaestus is not much for pillaging—none can recall the last time he even came out of his hole—and he even does some ore-melting for hire, though the fee is steep.”