“True, I suppose,” Harkle muttered, seeming disappointed for just a moment before again brightening. “But then, we could not have draggedSea Sprite across the miles to Carradoon, could we?”
“Fog of fate?” Regis asked Drizzt, recalling the tale of how Drizzt and Catti-brie wound up in a landlocked lake with Captain Deudermont and his oceangoing pirate hunter. Harkle Harpell had created a new enchantment, which, as expected, had gone terribly awry, transporting the ship and all aboard her to a landlocked lake in the Snowflake Mountains.
“I have a new one!” Harkle squealed. Regis blanched and fell back, and Drizzt waved his hands to shut down the wizard before he could fully launch into spellcasting.
“We will walk,” the drow said again. He looked down at Regis and added, “At once,” which brought a curious expression from the halfling.
They were out of Longsaddle soon after, hustling down the road to the west, and despite Drizzt’s determined stride, Regis kept pausing and glancing left and right, as if expecting the drow to turn.
“What is it?” Drizzt finally asked him.
“Are we really leaving?”
“That was our plan.”
“I thought you meant to come out of town then circle back in to better view the situation.”
Drizzt gave a helpless little chuckle. “To what end?”
“We could go to the island.”
“And rescue rabbits?” came the drow’s sarcastic reply. “Do not underestimate Harpell magic—their silliness belies the strength of their enchantments. For all the folly of Fog of Fate, not many wizards in the world could have so warped Mystra’s Weave to teleport an entire ship and crew. We go and collect the rabbits, but then what? Seek audience of Elminster, who perhaps alone might undue the dweomer?”
Regis stammered, logically cornered.
“And to what end?” Drizzt asked. “Should we, new to the scene, interject ourselves in the Longsaddle’s justice?” Regis started to argue, but Drizzt cut him short. “What might Bruenor do to one who burned a family inside a house?” the drow asked. “Do you think his justice would be less harsh than the polymorph? I think it might come at the end of a many-notched axe!”
“This is different,” Regis said, shaking his head in obvious frustration. Clearly the sight of a man violently transformed into a rabbit had unnerved the halfling profoundly. “You cannot…that’s not what the Harpells…Longsaddle shouldn’t…” Regis stammered, looking for a focus for his frustration.
“It’s not what I expected, and no, I’m not pleased by it.”
“But you will accept it?”
“It’s not my choice to make.”
“The people of Longsaddle call out to you,” Regis said.
The drow stopped walking and moved to a boulder resting on the side of the trail, where he sat down, gazing back the way they’d come.
“These situations are more complicated than they appear,” he said. “You grew up among the pashas of Calimport, with their personal armies and thuggish ways.”
“Of course, but that doesn’t mean I accept the same thing from the Harpells.”
Drizzt shook his head. “That’s not my point. In their respective neighborhoods, how were the pashas viewed?”
“As heroes,” Regis said.
“Why?”
Regis leaned back against a stone, a perplexed look on his face.
“In the lawless streets of Calimport, why were thugs like Pasha Pook seen as heroes?”
“Because without them, it would have been worse,” Regis said, and caught on.
“The Harpells have no answer to the fanaticism of the battling priests, and so they respond with a heavy hand.”
“You agree with that?”
“It’s not my place to agree or disagree,” said Drizzt. “The Harpells are the lid on a boiling cauldron. I don’t know if their choice of justice is the correct one, but I suspect from what we were told that without that lid, Longsaddle would know strife beyond anything you or I can imagine. Sects of opposing gods battling for supremacy can be terrifying indeed, but when the fight is between two interpretations of the same god, the misery can reach new proportions. I saw this intimately in my youth, my friend. You cannot imagine the fury of opposing matron mothers, each convinced that she, and not her enemy, spoke the will of Lolth!
“You would have me descend upon Longsaddle and use my influence, even my blades, to somehow alter the situation. But what would that, even if I could accomplish anything, which I strongly doubt, loose upon the common folk of Longsaddle?”
“Better to let Bidderdoo continue his brutality?” Regis asked.
“Better to let the people with a stake in the outcome determine their own fate,” Drizzt answered. “We’ve not the standing or the forces to better the situation in Longsaddle.”
“We don’t even know what that situation really is.”
Drizzt took a deep, steadying breath, and said, “I know enough to recognize that if the problems in Longsaddle are not as profound as I—as we—fear, then the Harpells will find their way out of it. And if it is as dangerous then there’s nothing we can do to help. However we intervene, one or even both sides will see us as meddling. Better that we go on our way. I think we are both unnerved by the unusual nature of the Harpells’ justice, but I have to say that there is a temperate manner to it.”
“Drizzt!”
“It is not a permanent punishment, for Bidderdoo can undo that which he has enacted,” the drow explained. “He is neutering the warring offenders by rendering them harmless—unless, of course, he is turning the other side into carrots.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I know,” Drizzt admitted with an upraised hand and a smirk. “But who are we to intervene, and haven’t the Harpells earned our trust?”
“You trust in what you saw?”
“I trust that if the situation alters and calls for a recanting of the justice delivered, the Harpells will undo the transformations and return the no-doubt shaken and hopefully repentant men to their respective places. Easier that than the dwarves of Mithral Hall sewing a head back on a criminal there.”
Regis sighed and seemed to let it all go. “Can we stop back here on our return to Mithral Hall?”
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know,” Regis answered honestly, and he too looked back toward the distant town, profound disappointment on his normally cheery face. “It’s like Obould Many-Arrows,” Regis mumbled.
Drizzt looked at him curiously.
“Everything is like Obould lately,” the halfling went on. “Always the best of a bad choice.”
“I will be certain to relay your feelings to Bruenor.”
Regis stared blankly for just a moment then a grin widened and widened until it was followed by a belly-laugh, both heartfelt and sadly resigned.
“Come along,” Drizzt bade him. “Let us go and see if we can save the rest of the world.”
And so the two friends lightened their steps and headed down the western trail, oblivious to the prophecy embedded in Drizzt Do’Urden’s joke.
CHAPTER 9
THE CITY OF SAILS
P ymian Loodran burst out the tavern door, arms flailing with terror. He fell as he turned, tearing the skin on one knee, but he hardly slowed. Scrambling, rolling, and finally getting back to his feet, he sprinted down the way. Behind him, out of the tavern, came a pair of men dressed in the familiar robes of the Hosttower of the Arcane, white with broad red trim, talking as if nothing was amiss.
“You don’t believe he’s fool enough to enter his own house,” one said.