I Read What?!

Well, things have now gotten pretty firmly into horror movie territory. So, what can our heroes do about it?



So, we rejoin Cadderly as he's arming himself with crossbow and bandoleer. He feels pretty good, seeing himself in the mirror, but then feels guilty for that, because this isn't a game and his actions have already caused people to die.

Aw. Poor kid. I'm all for guilt complexes, but Cadderly really didn't do anything stupid or wrong. He just got manipulated by an asshole.

He does have another trick up his sleeve though, because in a sealed iron box, carefully locked and even spelled with a globe of darkness, Cadderly has some of a very potent sleep poison used by the drow. (We get a bit of insight as to how he got it in the first place: he'd stumbled on the recipe, obtained the ingredients and even gotten the blessings of poor Dean Thobicus, so it doesn't feel entirely like an ass pull.)

There is a complication - like most drow stuff, there's a good chance that the poison might lose effectiveness in sunlight, so Cadderly has to prep and load the stuff within the globe of darkness. Fortunately, like Zack Morris, Cadderly is good when he wants to be, so he pulls it off.

The dwarves show up at this point, and they look rather impressive:

Cadderly could not immediately find his breath to reply. He just sat and stared at the brothers. Both wore armor of interlocking rings, dusty from decades of idleness and rusted in several spots. Ivan wore a helm fashioned with deer antlers—an eight-pointer—while Pikel wore a cooking pot! For all his armor, Pikel still wore his open-toed sandals.

Most amazing of all, though, was Pikel’s weapon. Looking upon it, Cadderly understood Ivan’s earlier reference. It was indeed a “tree,” the polished trunk of some black and smoothbarked variety that Cadderly didn’t recognize. The club was fully four feet long, nearly as tall as Pikel, a foot in diameter on the wide end, and less than half that on the narrow, gripping end. Looped leather hand-grips were nailed on at various intervals to aid the wielder, but still it seemed an awkward and cumbersome thing.

As if he sensed Cadderly’s doubts, Pikel whipped the club through several attack and defense routines with obvious ease.

And that is, indeed, a tree. Goodness.

Cadderly sends the dwarves off to visit the alchemist, Belago, though he also realizes he hasn't seen the guy for a while. Uh oh. Well, it'll be fine, I'm sure. He also shares a cute moment with Percival the squirrel, who tries to tell him something that Cadderly doesn't have time for. I'm genre savvy enough to realize that whatever Percival has to tell him is exceedingly plot important. Oh well.

But Percival doesn't give up too easy and his frantic actions alert Cadderly to a new arrival. Kierkan Rufo with a knife and a distinct lack of sanity.

“What is it?” Cadderly asked weakly, but he needed no answer to decipher the man’s intent. Rufo’s left eye was still bruised and closed, and his nose pointed as much toward his cheek as straight ahead. His ugly wounds only accentuated the look of sheer hatred in his cold, dark eyes.

“Where is your light now?” the tall man sneered. “But then, it wouldn’t do you much good, would it?” He limped noticeably, but his approach was steady.

Yeah, the curse seems to have hit him hard. He seems to have decided that he intends to bring Cadderly's heart to Danica, and prove which of them is stronger. Cadderly wins some of my affection by thinking about the obvious hole in Rufo's plan, which is that if he brought Danica Cadderly's heart, Danica would pretty much murder him. I've always liked relationships where the lady is tougher and more apt to homicide than the man.

But anyway, Rufo's not apt to listen to reason. And we learn that a downside to spindle-disks as a weapon is that they require a fair bit of work, especially to get the disks back and wind them up again. Rufo's got the advantage.

At least until Percival leaps onto Rufo's face. The distraction gives Cadderly a chance to rearm, and strike. He manages some kind of feint, and then gets Rufo in the kneecap. Nice. Unfortunately, the curse makes Rufo damn near impervious to pain, so the disks aren't going to be all that effective.

But then:

Then the whole building shook suddenly as if it had been hit by lightning. The explosion roiled on for several seconds and Cadderly understood its source when he heard a single word from the corridor. “Oo!”

Cadderly realizes his advantage is a bit unfair, but well, he is about to be murdered. So he gets Rufo right between the eyes. Rufo goes down. And Cadderly gets a moment to realize that this shit is real.

When Cadderly finally reached down to wind his weapon, his stomach turned over. The spindle-disks were covered in blood and one had a piece of Rufo’s eyebrow glued onto it by the thick red fluid. Cadderly slipped down to the bed and let the disks fall to the floor. He felt betrayed, by himself and by his toy.

All the priests train with weapons, but Cadderly had never really been comfortable with them. He got the design for the spindle-disks from a halfling treatise, and while some of the priests thought it was a toy, it still met the textbook definition of a weapon. But to Cadderly, it clearly was a toy, and he played with it more than he ever used it as a weapon. Now, covered in blood, it's definitely a weapon. And not so fun anymore.

The dwarves return, blackened with soot. They had fun at the alchemists indeed. They ask if Rufo's dead in a casual way that makes poor Cadderly shudder. They notice and Ivan advises him to get the belly for it after all. Cadderly never intended to be an adventurer, and Ivan never intended to be a cook. But they've got jobs to do now.

Cadderly just says that Rufo's not dead and asks them to tie him up on the bed. They exchange glances but they do.

He goes to check on Danica and Newander. Newander confirms that Danica is meditating. He offers to reverse his spell and let Cadderly in, but Cadderly refuses, acknowledging that it's better to preserve Newander's magic. He wants Newander to stay with Danica while the dwarves go with him.

There's a pretty amusing transition here:

But men were dying all around him. How many more Kierkan Rufos lurked in the shadows, murder in their hearts?

“Dear Cadderly,” came a purring voice that only reinforced the young scholar’s determination. Histra stood behind her chamber’s door, opened just a crack, but that was enough to show Cadderly and the dwarves that she wore no more than a filmy, transparent negligee. “Do come in and sit with me.”

Well, there's more than one kind of "death" after all. Hah.

Ivan and Pikel are admiring, but Cadderly just runs past her. She attempts to use magic to force him to come back, but the dwarves are bros first, and Pikel just tosses her back into her room. Apparently a dozen exhausted young men are already inside. Histra asks if the dwarf boys are sure they want to leave.

They're blushing when they catch up to Cadderly. Aw. For his part, Cadderly is filling a water skin with holy water and doing some more mischievous looking shit to it. He says the dwarves (and we) will understand in time.

They get to the kitchen, which is filled with gluttonous priests trying to cook and eat at the same time. The dwarves start getting territorial, but they are able to resist the compulsion after all. They get to the wine cellar, where they bolt the door - just in case the priests get thirsty.

There is a drunk priest already there, but Pikel makes quick work of knocking him out. They proceed, with Cadderly between his experienced adventurer friends.

Some exploration and investigation explains why Cadderly couldn't find the door again, after the first time: the casks had been moved around, disorienting him. They do find the door behind another cask, instead.

This time it's locked. Ivan explains that Pikel is good at unlocking doors, and Pikel is about to demonstrate by aiming his tree like a battering ram, but Cadderly's got a better idea: using a boobytrapped crossbow bolt that explodes the lock.

Ivan and Pikel decide they definitely want one of those.

But on the other side of the door, they hit a brick wall. Hm. This time, Pikel gets to show his stuff. He makes quick work of the flimsy wall and then finds the stairs after all. Thump!

The chapter ends with Cadderly wincing and Ivan running after him.

This chapter has a lot of comic farce elements, but I actually really like the way Salvatore is weaving in some of the coming of age, "oh shit, this is real" elements for Cadderly. He's a very different lead from Drizzt, who was clearly primed for main character status from the beginning, and grew up in a society where it was "be formidable or die". Cadderly is just a normal kid, clever and precocious, but without any real expectation that he'd have to engage in this kind of life or death situation. He's adapting pretty well, but it's a learning experience. And I'm enjoying getting to see hints of the dwarves' more competent sides. Hopefully, we'll get more of that.