But it was not enough, the Hunter knew.
Not nearly enough.
Drizzt looked up at the midmorning sky and calculated when he might bring Guenhwyvar back to his side. The panther needed her rest on the Astral Plane, but she would be ready to resume her hunt soon, Drizzt knew, and the thought brought a wicked grin to his ebon-skinned face.
The orcs might be scrambling to find him, and if they were, he and Guenhwyvar would surely find a few wayward creatures to slaughter.
Drizzt's attention shifted quickly from that pleasant thought to consider the two elves who were up on the flat rock watching him.
Yes, the Hunter knew of them, for in that state, Drizzt was too attuned to his environment to miss even that stealthy pair. He didn't know who they might be, but given his last, tragic encounter with a surface elf, he wasn't pleased by the possibilities.
* * *
"It was drow!" the orc protested, as vigorously as he dared. "I seen drow!"
Arganth Snarrl leaped over to stand before the insistent orc, the shaman's huge tooth necklace swinging around wildly, and even slapping across the face of the upstart.
"You seen drow?" the shaman asked.
"I just telled you!" the orc protested.
Arganth ignored the reply and spun around to regard the other shamans, all gathered at the scene of Achtel's demise.
"Did Ad'non Kareese do this?" one of the other shamans asked, his brutish face full of outrage.
Arganth searched about for some answer, not wanting to reduce the drama of the murder—a mystery that the volatile shaman desired to exploit for his own ends. Achtel, after all, had been the sole quiet opposition among the gathered shamans to Arganth's insistence that King Obould should be viewed as one with Gruumsh. Not willing to relinquish the independence of her powerful tribe, Achtel had privately questioned some of the other shamans concerning the wisdom of Arganth's unification desires.
Achtel wasn't just dead, he seemed to have been singled out. For Arganth, the answer was obvious: Achtel's impudence had angered Gruumsh One-Eye, whose vengeance had been swift and uncompromising. Of course, Arganth was also wise enough to recognize that if the other shamans somehow connected Obould's drow friends to the murder of Achtel, then they might come to suspect some nefarious organization, working to persuade through terror—which was, after all, the orc way.
"Not Ad'non," the orc witness dared to put in. "It was the.. one."
The suddenly husky tone of his voice as he uttered that peculiar phrase told the others exactly of whom he was speaking. Word had been filtering throughout the ranks of all the orcs and giants who had come out of their mountain holes that a lone drow, an ally of dead King Bruenor, was working behind their lines, and to deadly effect.
"The Drizzit," Arganth said in low and threatening tones. "Gruumsh has used our enemy against our enemy."
"Achtel was our enemy?" asked one of the other shamans.
"Achtel denied the joining of his spirit to King Obould's body," Arganth explained. "It is clear before us. This sign cannot be denied!"
Murmurs erupted all around him as soon as he widened the investigation to encompass his political aspirations, but most of those murmuring orcs were also nodding their agreement.
"Obould is Gruumsh!" Arganth dared to declare.
Not a protesting word came back at him.
* * *
"He wastes little time," Innovindil said to Tarathiel when she caught up to him around the backside of a copse of trees on the mountain slopes overlooking the region where Drizzt Do'Urden had taken up his shelter.
"Is he out again already?" Tarathiel asked, and he looked up at the sky, confirming that it was still a couple of hours to sunset. "I would have thought he would need to rest his hip."
"He brought in the panther," Innovindil explained.
Tarathiel nodded and looked again at the sky, his blue eyes glowing in the light.
"I fear he has erred," said the elf. "His hip is more injured than he realizes— if the wound upsets his balance…."
Innovindil drew forth her slender sword and shrugged. She turned toward the path that would put them on the trail of the dark elf.
"Perhaps I should follow alone," Tarathiel offered. "On Sunrise, and high above the hunting cat."
Innovindil stared at him hard.
"Sunset is not yet ready to carry you," Tarathiel reasoned. "Soon, perhaps, but not yet."
Innovindil had little to offer in the way of an argument to that. In the fight with the giants north of Shallows, her pegasus had been struck in the wing, causing a deep bruise and laceration. Sunset seemed well on the mend, for pegasi were resilient creatures, but Tarathiel's assessment was correct, she knew, and she would not dare ask the mount to climb into the sky, particularly not with her added weight.
But she had no intention of being excluded.
"What a fine target you will make in the afternoon sky," she said. "Or perhaps you will still be airborne when the sun does set, leaving your steed blind and soaring about the mountain spurs."
"I only fear that we might encounter the panther as it moves about Drizzt," Tarathiel explained. "I have little desire for a battle with that creature!"
"It will not come to that if we are cautious," Innovindil insisted.
She motioned toward the path. Tarathiel was by her side in a moment, and the two rushed off, their footfalls silent, their senses trained. Soon enough, they had the trail of Drizzt and Guenhwyvar.
* * *
The orcs were so thick about the region that Drizzt and Guenhwyvar had already found a band of them with the sun still hanging in the western sky.
"Gerti says," one of the creatures complained, scooping a bucket in the cold waters of a fast-rushing mountain spring. "Gerti says!"
"How do we know what Gerti says, and what them giants says Gerti says?" another bitched, and he too sloshed a bucket through the water.
"Gerti talks too much," a third chimed in.
"Gerti," Drizzt whispered to Guenhwyvar. "A giant?"
The intelligent panther, seeming to understand every word, lowered her ears flat to her head. Thinking it wise to better assess the strength of the group, Drizzt motioned for Guenhwyvar to circle off to the right, while he went left. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes time, the drow found a frost giant, reclining on the river stones around a bend, head back to bask in the late afternoon sun. Her heavy boots sat on the bank, one upright, the other bent over in half, and her huge cleaver rested there as well. Oblivious to all the world she seemed as she splashed her bare feet in the icy water.
Drizzt spotted Guenhwyvar across the river and motioned to her, then to the relaxing giantess.
The Hunter went back over the rocks to the spot around the bend where the handful of orcs were still at work—they seemed to be filling a wide and shallow pit. A fire burned nearby, with rocks piled all around. Every now and then, an orc would kick one of those heated stones into the watery shallow.
"A bathtub?" Drizzt whispered under his breath.
The drow dismissed the thought as unimportant and narrowed his focus to the task at hand. He subconsciously rubbed his wounded hip as he surveyed the lay of the land, taking note of possible escape routes, for the orcs more than for himself, and searching among the up-and-down terrain to try to guess if other orc bands might be in the immediate area.
A growl from beyond the bend, followed by a scream of surprise, ended that search and sent the Hunter leaping from the stones and sprinting toward the orcs. As one the pig-faced creatures howled, tossing buckets aside.
One sprinted out to the right, along the river, but Drizzt, his feet sped by the enchanted anklets, caught it quickly and sliced it down. He turned fast—and nearly stumbled as a sharp pain rolled out from his hip—and charged back toward the main group.