“Back to back!” Entreri shouted, and Drizzt, thinking the same strategy, had already begun quick-stepping his way through the disorganized dwarves. Entreri took another one down just as they came together, the unfortunate Duergar looking over its shoulder at the approaching drow just long enough for the jeweled dagger to slip through the seam at the base of its helmet.
Then they were together, back against back, twirling in the wake of each other’s cloak and maneuvering their weapons in blurred movements so similar that the three remaining Duergar hesitated before their attack to sort out where one enemy ended and the other began.
With cries to Shimmergloom, their godlike ruler, they came on anyway.
Drizzt scored a series of hits at once that should have felled his opponent, but the armor was of tougher stuff than the steel scimitar and his thrusts were turned aside. Entreri, too, had trouble finding an opening to poke through against the mithril mail and shields.
Drizzt turned one shoulder in and let the other fall away from his companion. Entreri understood and followed the drow’s lead, dipping around right behind him.
Gradually their circling gained momentum, as synchronous as practiced dancers, and the Duergar did not even try to keep up. Opponents changed continually, the drow and Entreri coming around to parry away the sword or axe that the other had blocked on the last swing. They let the rhythm hold for a few turns, allowed the Duergar to fall into the patterns of their dance, and then, Drizzt still leading, stuttered their steps, and even reversed the flow.
The three Duergar, evenly spaced about the pair, did not know which direction would bring the next attack.
Entreri, practically reading the drow’s every thought by this point, saw the possibilities. As he moved away from one particularly confused dwarf, he feigned a reversed attack, freezing the Duergar just long enough for Drizzt, coming in from the other side, to find an opening.
“Take him!” the assassin cried in victory.
The scimitar did its work.
Now they were two against two. They stopped the dance and faced off evenly.
Drizzt swooped about his smaller foe with a sudden leap and shuffle along the wall. The Duergar, intent on the killing blades of the drow, hadn’t noticed Drizzt’s third weapon join the fray.
The gray dwarf’s surprise was only surmounted by his anticipation of the coming fatal blow when Drizzt’s trailing cloak floated in and fell over him, enshrouding him in a blackness that would only deepen into the void of death.
Contrary to Drizzt’s graceful technique, Entreri worked with sudden fury, tying up his dwarf with undercuts and lightning-fast counters, always aimed at the weapon hand. The gray dwarf understood the tactic as his fingers began to numb under the nicks of several minor hits.
The Duergar overcompensated, turning his shield in to protect the vulnerable hand.
Exactly as Entreri had expected. He rolled around opposite the movement of his opponent, finding the back of the shield, and a seam in the mithril armor just beneath the shoulder. The assassin’s dagger drove in furiously, taking a lung and hurling the Duergar to the stone floor. The gray dwarf lay there, hunched up on one elbow, and gasped out his final breaths.
Drizzt approached the final dwarf, the one who had been wounded in the initial attack, leaning against the wall only a few yards away, torchlight reflecting grotesque red off the pool of blood below him. The dwarf still had fight in him. He raised his broadsword to meet the drow.
It was Mucknuggle, Drizzt saw, and a silent plea of mercy came into the drow’s mind and took the fiery glow from his eyes.
A shiny object, glittering in the hues of a dozen distinct gemstones, spun by Drizzt and ended his internal debate.
Entreri’s dagger buried deep into Mucknuggle’s eye.
The dwarf didn’t even fall, so clean was the blow. He just held his position, leaning against the stone. But now the blood pool was fed from two wounds.
Drizzt stopped himself cold in rage and did not even flinch as the assassin walked coolly by to retrieve the weapon.
Entreri pulled the dagger out roughly then turned to face Drizzt as Mucknuggle tumbled down to splash in the blood.
“Four to four,” the assassin growled. “You did not believe that I would let you get the upper count?”
Drizzt did not reply, nor blink.
Both felt the sweat in their palms as they clutched their weapons, a pull upon them to complete what they had started in the alcove above.
So alike, yet so dramatically different.
The rage at Mucknuggle’s death did not play upon Drizzt at that moment, no more than to further confirm his feelings about his vile companion. The longing he held to kill Entreri went far deeper than the anger he might hold for any of the assassin’s foul deeds. Killing Entreri would mean killing the darker side of himself, Drizzt believed, for he could have been as this man. This was the test of his worth, a confrontation against what he might have become. If he had remained among his kin, and often were the times that he considered his decision to leave their ways and their dark city a feeble attempt to distort the very order of nature, his own dagger would have found Mucknuggle’s eye.
Entreri looked upon Drizzt with equal disdain. What potential he saw in the drow! But tempered by an intolerable weakness. Perhaps in his heart the assassin was actually envious for the capacity for love and compassion that he recognized in Drizzt. So much akin to him, Drizzt only accentuated the reality of his own emotional void.
Even if those feelings were truly within, they would never gain a perch high enough to influence Artemis Entreri. He had spent his life building himself into an instrument for killing, and no shred of light could ever cut through that callous barrier of darkness. He meant to prove, to himself and to the drow, that the true fighter has no place for weakness.
They were closer now, though neither of them knew which one had moved, as if unseen forces were acting upon them. Weapons twitched in anticipation, each waiting for the other to show his hand.
Each wanting the other to be the first to yield to their common desire, the ultimate challenge of the tenets of their existence.
The stamp of booted feet broke the spell.
22. The Dragon of Darkness
At the heart of the lower levels, in an immense cavern of uneven and twisting walls pocketed with deep shadows, and a ceiling too high for the light of the brightest fire to find, rested the present ruler of Mithril Hall, perched upon a solid pedestal of the purest mithril that rose from a high and wide mound of coins and jewelry, goblets and weapons, and countless other items pounded from the rough blocks of mithril by the skilled hands of dwarven craftsmen.
Dark shapes surrounded the beast, huge dogs from its own world, obedient, long-lived, and hungry for the meat of human or elf, or anything else that would give them the pleasure of their gory sport before the kill.
Shimmergloom was not now amused. Rumblings from above foretold of intruders, and a band of Duergar spoke of murdered kin in the tunnels and whispered rumors that a drow elf had been seen.
The dragon was not of this world. It had come from the Plane of Shadows, a dark image of the lighted world, unknown to the dwellers here except in the less substantial stuff of their blackest nightmares. Shimmergloom had been of considerable standing there, old even then, and in high regard among its dragon kin that ruled the plane. But when the foolish and greedy dwarves that once inhabited these mines had delved into deep holes of sufficient darkness to open a gate to its plane, the dragon had been quick to come through. Now possessing a treasure tenfold beyond the greatest of its own plane, Shimmergloom had no intentions of returning.