please do not be inconsistent i find it infuriating // keep calm, work hard and STOP MIMIMI !!!
Damnable D's by Dogurasu
It was a state of being Jarlaxle had never seen, and thought he would never see, in the likes of disciplined Artemis Entreri.
The dark elf couldn’t believe his crimson eyes as he walked into their room at the inn in Waterdeep; there Entreri sat, penning a scroll at a small table. Next to the assassin’s inkwell was a bottle of spirits, nearly empty as Entreri wrote. His black hair was disheveled and his grayish skin, the fault of an unfortunate incident with a shade’s essence being sucked through the assassin’s vampiric dagger, was a slightly brighter hue.
Jarlaxle chuckled then as he realized that Artemis Entreri was naked, though there was no one else in the room.
“That is a fair sight more of you than I cared to see, khal’abbil,” Jarlaxle said with a disarming grin.
Entreri looked up, focused his dark-eyed gaze on the drow, and pointed directly to him, barely swaying. That he was swaying at all spoke volumes to Jarlaxle; while Entreri was in little danger – the assassin was skilled and aware enough to have his dagger within easy reach, behind the bottle – the drow knew that Entreri never got himself drunk.
In this particular instance, Jarlaxle found the whole idea perfectly amusing.
“Me, Entreri?” he prompted, pointing an ebon finger at himself.
“Drow,” Entreri replied, simply and clearly, writing the word down on the scroll.
“Very good, my friend! Now perhaps we can expand upon your vocabulary. What is this?” Jarlaxle put one hand on the table to indicate it.
Entreri looked up at Jarlaxle. “With you, it could be any sort of disaster. Disaster!” he exclaimed, scribbling the word on the scroll. “Dragons, the dead… Dracoliches!”
“Sometimes a table is just a table.” Jarlaxle couldn’t help but snicker as he watched Entreri write; his crisp, clean lettering was untouched by his intoxication, but the subject matter made him laugh. “And what do we have here? ‘A Death-Dealer’s Declaration of Damnable Ds’? My dear Artemis, have you actually found a sense of humor in drunkenness?”
Entreri glared up at Jarlaxle, paused, and then pointed his dagger at the drow. “Drunkenness,” he added, writing that down with one hand. “D’aerthe.”
“Dagger?” asked Jarlaxle dryly, looking at the vampiric blade.
“I’m calling it a knife from now on.” Entreri continued to write.
Jarlaxle moved behind Entreri, grabbing a cloak and wrapping it around the human’s shoulders. “Certainly demons are damnable; will you add those to your list?”
“Demons!” Entreri cried, scribing the word immediately.
Jarlaxle laughed as he glanced to the side of the room, hearing a thud that Entreri chose to ignore. Entreri stared at the drow for a long moment, just before a black-bearded dwarf, an associate they both knew as Athrogate, threw open the door to their room. He stood still for a time, glowering at the human and receiving an equally withering glare in reply.
“Quiet down with all yer roarin’!” Athrogate demanded. “Can’t ye see this dwarf’s for snorin’?”
“Dwarves!” Entreri yelled, emphatically for Athrogate’s sake, jotting the word down on his list.
“Demanding dwarves of doggerel,” Jarlaxle added; Entreri amended his list accordingly.
“What’re ye two about, then?” Athrogate asked, striding in.
“It seems our friend here is upset with a series of things beginning with the Common letter d,” Jarlaxle explained. “He decided to make a list of it all.”
“What about that other drow ye telled me about?” Athrogate said. “What’s his name, Drizzit Dudden?”
“Drizzt Do’Urden!” Entreri growled, his quill diving into the inkwell and lashing across the page with such ferocity that Jarlaxle thought he might gouge the parchment.
“Certainly that one requires more,” Jarlaxle said, propping his chin in his hand as he thought. “Drizzt Do’Urden, that dervish drow of derring-do…”
Entreri rewrote the entry, then stared up at the rakish dark elf. “You are mocking my list.”
“Certainly not!” Jarlaxle gripped his chest, stumbling back into Athrogate and using the dwarf for support, all in extreme melodrama. “Why, Entreri, you wound me so! After I clothe you and bring you such fine company…”
“Dramatics,” the assassin said coolly, swaying just slightly to his left as he locked his gaze onto Jarlaxle. His pen remained in perfect position on the parchment as he took down the word.
“If it’s a list of durned d’s ye write, ye’ll add in dawn by the end of the night,” Athrogate chimed in.
Entreri took down the word, following it with another. “Death-dealer,” he explained. “You’ll both note I’m an assassin.”
“What’s the difference?” asked the dwarf.
“Intelligence,” Entreri and Jarlaxle stated simultaneously. Both of them laughed, drawing a strange, somewhat worried look from Athrogate.
“The two o’ ye have too much fun,” Athrogate muttered as he walked from the assassin’s room. “I’m gettin’ some sleep afore I see the sun.”
“Why did you bring him along, Jarlaxle?”
“Bwahaha!”
Jarlaxle could only give a little laugh in reply as Athrogate left, but he noticed Entreri’s left-side listing growing more severe. Entreri seemed relatively oblivious to it until the dark elf helped him lean back up to his seat.
“What could have driven you to drinking like this so soon after our paths crossed again, my friend?” Jarlaxle asked, sitting on the bed, still smiling a bit. “Never have I seen you in such a state, from Vaasa and Damara to Calimshan…”
Entreri could only chuckle slightly. Why, indeed, was he so drunk?
“Perhaps because I drank a bit too much.”
Jarlaxle smirked. “Why, then, would you drink so much? I thought you had faced off many of your personal demons back in Calimshan, when we first parted ways.”
“Some demons died back there, mortal and mental,” Entreri said, choosing to be honest with Jarlaxle; after all, the drow had been known to read his very thoughts. “Others reared their ugly heads and require future destruction.” He began to write the word down, but stopped in the middle and pushed his writing aside. “I would prefer to keep those thoughts to my own mind, thank you, if you haven’t already read them.”
“Do you really believe I would do something like that to you?” Jarlaxle asked sarcastically. “It has not crossed my mind to read your thoughts while you’re intoxicated; I’d rather not see things in my mind’s eye through ale-blinded thought transference.”
Entreri gave Jarlaxle a disbelieving look, sending the drow a slightly fuzzy mental image that rocked him back in a fit of giggles.
“Artemis Entreri, certainly an assassin of your level of skill knows enough about anatomy to realize that what you propose is physically impossible!”
“Give it a try sometime.”
“I assume you speak from experience?”
“You’ve always assumed much about me.”
Jarlaxle laughed, far more sincerely. “It is indeed marvelous to have you back, khal’abbil,” he said. “Still, I do wish you would explain why you have returned. It is against your very character to…”
Entreri stood, slightly dizzy, but balanced enough to maintain his footing. The cloak closed around him of its own accord; of course Jarlaxle would have given him no ordinary garment!
“Nothing I have done around you has been in my character,” Entreri said simply. His movements were not threatening, even as he retrieved his dagger. “From stealing Charon’s Claw, to returning to Calimshan to confront Belrigger and the priesthood, and all the trouble with the Zhengyian artifacts from Vaasa to He’ll-Eat-Or-Gobble-Us…”
Jarlaxle bit back his laughter this time; he had to give Entreri a bit of slack for his drinking. “Do you mean, ‘Heliogabalus,’ Entreri?”
Entreri blinked as he caught his error far too late. He decided to ignore it.
“My point is that nothing is as it seems around you,” he went on, “even when they should be. Goblins die from flames you form that never exist. People who should be at each other’s throats manage to keep from killing each other. Things thought destroyed and people thought dead seem to return from nowhere.” He locked gazes with Jarlaxle here, a gesture whose significance was not lost on the drow.
“People find new purpose where, once before, only a void existed.”
Jarlaxle smiled widely at the comment – for a moment. Something clicked in his mind as bits of information fell into place; of course he knew Entreri was headed for Waterdeep long in advance, and Entreri had known to seek him out. He gave no particular reason why, instead relying on the drow’s previous interest in his emotional being – a massive chance on his part! – and allowing himself to be found. To allow himself to get as drunk as this in his presence was no coincidence.
In his own way, Entreri was making an extreme show of trust to the dark elf.
Jarlaxle found himself touched, more deeply than he had expected.
“You sought me out because you were having problems back home that you couldn’t face alone,” the drow guessed, masking all but the most minor signals of his brief emotional rush. “You wanted to face them with me?”
“Yes,” Entreri said. “Mostly because you got me into them in the first place.”
Jarlaxle broke into a laugh. “Ah, Artemis, I was worried that you were feeling more strongly for me than appropriate for a man.”
“Asanque, khal’abbil,” Entreri replied evenly, dipping into one of Jarlaxle’s low bows, right down to pretending to sweep the ground with a wide-brimmed hat.
Jarlaxle’s laugh was barely controlled, just quiet enough to keep from disturbing the other patrons of the inn as Entreri’s bow proved to be a move too dramatic for his inebriation to allow. He fell to the floor before Jarlaxle could catch him, giving the drow double reason to enjoy a bit of mirth at his expense; given Entreri’s limited command of the Drow language, it was likely that the assassin did not know that asanque was a word with a double meaning.
While he knew Entreri meant ‘likewise,’ the word could also mean ‘as you wish!’
“What makes you believe I got you into such a mess as this?” Jarlaxle asked, helping Entreri into his bed. “Certainly I didn’t force you to drink bottles of spirits.”
“Was it not you who proclaimed himself as my muse, Jarlaxle?” Entreri said. “Certainly you gave me that accursed key to the emotions I had so cleverly locked away for, as it turned out, my own protection.”
“Your protection? Do tell.”
“When we assailed the replica of Castle Perilous – forged by the words of the Zhengyian tome and the magic of Arrayan Faylin Maggotsweeper, held together by the power of the black dracolich in the tunnels deep below it – I found myself constantly distracted, at first, by the half-orc wizard,” Entreri explained. “I kept seeing the image of my dearest friend, Dwahvel Tiggerwillies, in her face. When I lost Calihye in Calimport and we parted ways, I went back to her. Feelings that I had kept long buried – until your influence with Idalia’s flute – resurfaced when I saw her again, and when I tried to explain them to her…”
“She ran?”
Entreri nodded, shirking the cloak and returning it to Jarlaxle. “I’ve come to find out that she, of course, never shared similar feelings. I cannot fault her; as I’ve come to realize myself, those of us that can feel emotions keenly cannot easily control them. She did not run so much as she began to distance herself from me, uncomfortable as she was. She wanted to maintain the friendship, but we both knew that everything would be… uneasy… as long as I remained. We parted company as friends, and…”
The assassin’s mouth turned upward into a self-deprecating grin. “Indeed, it was I who ran. And of all people to run to, I ran to find you, Jarlaxle D’aerthe.”
Jarlaxle sat back in a chair, clasping his hands together. “Why run to me, then, if I caused you so much grief with your feelings?” he asked. “Are you not running from those very feelings?”
“I plan to run alongside you to quell those feelings,” Entreri stated. “If there is, perhaps, a road of adventure to follow…”
“I cannot allow you to destroy your emotions yet again, Entreri; I would be running counter to my own work.”
“I will not allow you to destroy my emotions again, Jarlaxle; I run from the pain of my losses in Calimshan, not from the fact that I have truly loved and may find the chance to love again…”
Entreri interrupted himself with a profound yawn. The drink was making him tired now, the energy from before drained. He made himself comfortable in the bed, though his jeweled dagger even now remained in easy reach, tucked under the pillow along with his hand.
Jarlaxle could hardly contain his excitement as he surged from his seat. “We will ride toward the north within the tenday, my friend!” he said. “We should make Luskan within the fortnight, and we should reach our goal soon after…”
His exuberance was suddenly stolen as he realized just what all waited at that future goal. Not quite asleep – never quite asleep, to be perfectly honest – Entreri shifted to look at Jarlaxle with a wary eye.
“What is that goal, khal’abbil?” The assassin’s voice took a sharp edge.
The drow gave what could have been a sheepish, challenging, or simply disarming, grin. “Ten-Towns, perhaps. I have heard about the corpse of a dragon, of a barbarian tribe that still has dragon treasure hoarded in the mountains…”
“My list,” Entreri moaned. “I knew it was all coming together. Drow, dead dragons, dramatics, dwarves, disaster, daggers, and that one dervish dark elf of derring-do…”
“You believe Drizzt Do’Urden to be alive?”
“You are here, Jarlaxle, and I have come to you; stranger things still have happened.” Entreri buried his face in the pillow; beneath it, he clenched his dagger. “It would not surprise me if your lost wizard-priest Rai-Guy restored him, not five minutes after I left the replica of Crenshinibon…”
Jarlaxle did well enough to hide the sound of his surprised choke; were Entreri looking, the assassin would have seen his face twist into a look of shock that was utterly foreign to the handsome visage of the dark elf.
“Will you still go?” he dared to ask.
Entreri sighed. “There is a Calishite curse spoken by merchants and pashas alike, and more than once it has been uttered to me. I find that it has come true – let the road take me where it will.”
“What is that curse, Artemis?”
Entreri smiled, looking back at Jarlaxle for just a moment.
“May you live in interesting times.”
Jarlaxle laughed and he dipped a sweeping bow, the diatryma feather of his outrageous hat sweeping the floor. Entreri waved him off with his free hand and laid back down, his smirk unhidden as he slowly drifted back to sleep. Jarlaxle straightened and willed himself to silence, then touched the chair he had been sitting in; once a table, it now folded and flattened into a simple, unblemished disc that soon passed for one of the buttons on Jarlaxle’s vest.
Sometimes a table is so much more than a table, he thought, grinning to himself. And sometimes, an adventure past is so much more than what has already been seen.
“May you live in interesting times,” Entreri had said, and as the idea passed once more through Jarlaxle’s mind, he laughed again and went into his room for the remainder of the night.
Interesting times, indeed!
It was a state of being Jarlaxle had never seen, and thought he would never see, in the likes of disciplined Artemis Entreri.
The dark elf couldn’t believe his crimson eyes as he walked into their room at the inn in Waterdeep; there Entreri sat, penning a scroll at a small table. Next to the assassin’s inkwell was a bottle of spirits, nearly empty as Entreri wrote. His black hair was disheveled and his grayish skin, the fault of an unfortunate incident with a shade’s essence being sucked through the assassin’s vampiric dagger, was a slightly brighter hue.
Jarlaxle chuckled then as he realized that Artemis Entreri was naked, though there was no one else in the room.
“That is a fair sight more of you than I cared to see, khal’abbil,” Jarlaxle said with a disarming grin.
Entreri looked up, focused his dark-eyed gaze on the drow, and pointed directly to him, barely swaying. That he was swaying at all spoke volumes to Jarlaxle; while Entreri was in little danger – the assassin was skilled and aware enough to have his dagger within easy reach, behind the bottle – the drow knew that Entreri never got himself drunk.
In this particular instance, Jarlaxle found the whole idea perfectly amusing.
“Me, Entreri?” he prompted, pointing an ebon finger at himself.
“Drow,” Entreri replied, simply and clearly, writing the word down on the scroll.
“Very good, my friend! Now perhaps we can expand upon your vocabulary. What is this?” Jarlaxle put one hand on the table to indicate it.
Entreri looked up at Jarlaxle. “With you, it could be any sort of disaster. Disaster!” he exclaimed, scribbling the word on the scroll. “Dragons, the dead… Dracoliches!”
“Sometimes a table is just a table.” Jarlaxle couldn’t help but snicker as he watched Entreri write; his crisp, clean lettering was untouched by his intoxication, but the subject matter made him laugh. “And what do we have here? ‘A Death-Dealer’s Declaration of Damnable Ds’? My dear Artemis, have you actually found a sense of humor in drunkenness?”
Entreri glared up at Jarlaxle, paused, and then pointed his dagger at the drow. “Drunkenness,” he added, writing that down with one hand. “D’aerthe.”
“Dagger?” asked Jarlaxle dryly, looking at the vampiric blade.
“I’m calling it a knife from now on.” Entreri continued to write.
Jarlaxle moved behind Entreri, grabbing a cloak and wrapping it around the human’s shoulders. “Certainly demons are damnable; will you add those to your list?”
“Demons!” Entreri cried, scribing the word immediately.
Jarlaxle laughed as he glanced to the side of the room, hearing a thud that Entreri chose to ignore. Entreri stared at the drow for a long moment, just before a black-bearded dwarf, an associate they both knew as Athrogate, threw open the door to their room. He stood still for a time, glowering at the human and receiving an equally withering glare in reply.
“Quiet down with all yer roarin’!” Athrogate demanded. “Can’t ye see this dwarf’s for snorin’?”
“Dwarves!” Entreri yelled, emphatically for Athrogate’s sake, jotting the word down on his list.
“Demanding dwarves of doggerel,” Jarlaxle added; Entreri amended his list accordingly.
“What’re ye two about, then?” Athrogate asked, striding in.
“It seems our friend here is upset with a series of things beginning with the Common letter d,” Jarlaxle explained. “He decided to make a list of it all.”
“What about that other drow ye telled me about?” Athrogate said. “What’s his name, Drizzit Dudden?”
“Drizzt Do’Urden!” Entreri growled, his quill diving into the inkwell and lashing across the page with such ferocity that Jarlaxle thought he might gouge the parchment.
“Certainly that one requires more,” Jarlaxle said, propping his chin in his hand as he thought. “Drizzt Do’Urden, that dervish drow of derring-do…”
Entreri rewrote the entry, then stared up at the rakish dark elf. “You are mocking my list.”
“Certainly not!” Jarlaxle gripped his chest, stumbling back into Athrogate and using the dwarf for support, all in extreme melodrama. “Why, Entreri, you wound me so! After I clothe you and bring you such fine company…”
“Dramatics,” the assassin said coolly, swaying just slightly to his left as he locked his gaze onto Jarlaxle. His pen remained in perfect position on the parchment as he took down the word.
“If it’s a list of durned d’s ye write, ye’ll add in dawn by the end of the night,” Athrogate chimed in.
Entreri took down the word, following it with another. “Death-dealer,” he explained. “You’ll both note I’m an assassin.”
“What’s the difference?” asked the dwarf.
“Intelligence,” Entreri and Jarlaxle stated simultaneously. Both of them laughed, drawing a strange, somewhat worried look from Athrogate.
“The two o’ ye have too much fun,” Athrogate muttered as he walked from the assassin’s room. “I’m gettin’ some sleep afore I see the sun.”
“Why did you bring him along, Jarlaxle?”
“Bwahaha!”
Jarlaxle could only give a little laugh in reply as Athrogate left, but he noticed Entreri’s left-side listing growing more severe. Entreri seemed relatively oblivious to it until the dark elf helped him lean back up to his seat.
“What could have driven you to drinking like this so soon after our paths crossed again, my friend?” Jarlaxle asked, sitting on the bed, still smiling a bit. “Never have I seen you in such a state, from Vaasa and Damara to Calimshan…”
Entreri could only chuckle slightly. Why, indeed, was he so drunk?
“Perhaps because I drank a bit too much.”
Jarlaxle smirked. “Why, then, would you drink so much? I thought you had faced off many of your personal demons back in Calimshan, when we first parted ways.”
“Some demons died back there, mortal and mental,” Entreri said, choosing to be honest with Jarlaxle; after all, the drow had been known to read his very thoughts. “Others reared their ugly heads and require future destruction.” He began to write the word down, but stopped in the middle and pushed his writing aside. “I would prefer to keep those thoughts to my own mind, thank you, if you haven’t already read them.”
“Do you really believe I would do something like that to you?” Jarlaxle asked sarcastically. “It has not crossed my mind to read your thoughts while you’re intoxicated; I’d rather not see things in my mind’s eye through ale-blinded thought transference.”
Entreri gave Jarlaxle a disbelieving look, sending the drow a slightly fuzzy mental image that rocked him back in a fit of giggles.
“Artemis Entreri, certainly an assassin of your level of skill knows enough about anatomy to realize that what you propose is physically impossible!”
“Give it a try sometime.”
“I assume you speak from experience?”
“You’ve always assumed much about me.”
Jarlaxle laughed, far more sincerely. “It is indeed marvelous to have you back, khal’abbil,” he said. “Still, I do wish you would explain why you have returned. It is against your very character to…”
Entreri stood, slightly dizzy, but balanced enough to maintain his footing. The cloak closed around him of its own accord; of course Jarlaxle would have given him no ordinary garment!
“Nothing I have done around you has been in my character,” Entreri said simply. His movements were not threatening, even as he retrieved his dagger. “From stealing Charon’s Claw, to returning to Calimshan to confront Belrigger and the priesthood, and all the trouble with the Zhengyian artifacts from Vaasa to He’ll-Eat-Or-Gobble-Us…”
Jarlaxle bit back his laughter this time; he had to give Entreri a bit of slack for his drinking. “Do you mean, ‘Heliogabalus,’ Entreri?”
Entreri blinked as he caught his error far too late. He decided to ignore it.
“My point is that nothing is as it seems around you,” he went on, “even when they should be. Goblins die from flames you form that never exist. People who should be at each other’s throats manage to keep from killing each other. Things thought destroyed and people thought dead seem to return from nowhere.” He locked gazes with Jarlaxle here, a gesture whose significance was not lost on the drow.
“People find new purpose where, once before, only a void existed.”
Jarlaxle smiled widely at the comment – for a moment. Something clicked in his mind as bits of information fell into place; of course he knew Entreri was headed for Waterdeep long in advance, and Entreri had known to seek him out. He gave no particular reason why, instead relying on the drow’s previous interest in his emotional being – a massive chance on his part! – and allowing himself to be found. To allow himself to get as drunk as this in his presence was no coincidence.
In his own way, Entreri was making an extreme show of trust to the dark elf.
Jarlaxle found himself touched, more deeply than he had expected.
“You sought me out because you were having problems back home that you couldn’t face alone,” the drow guessed, masking all but the most minor signals of his brief emotional rush. “You wanted to face them with me?”
“Yes,” Entreri said. “Mostly because you got me into them in the first place.”
Jarlaxle broke into a laugh. “Ah, Artemis, I was worried that you were feeling more strongly for me than appropriate for a man.”
“Asanque, khal’abbil,” Entreri replied evenly, dipping into one of Jarlaxle’s low bows, right down to pretending to sweep the ground with a wide-brimmed hat.
Jarlaxle’s laugh was barely controlled, just quiet enough to keep from disturbing the other patrons of the inn as Entreri’s bow proved to be a move too dramatic for his inebriation to allow. He fell to the floor before Jarlaxle could catch him, giving the drow double reason to enjoy a bit of mirth at his expense; given Entreri’s limited command of the Drow language, it was likely that the assassin did not know that asanque was a word with a double meaning.
While he knew Entreri meant ‘likewise,’ the word could also mean ‘as you wish!’
“What makes you believe I got you into such a mess as this?” Jarlaxle asked, helping Entreri into his bed. “Certainly I didn’t force you to drink bottles of spirits.”
“Was it not you who proclaimed himself as my muse, Jarlaxle?” Entreri said. “Certainly you gave me that accursed key to the emotions I had so cleverly locked away for, as it turned out, my own protection.”
“Your protection? Do tell.”
“When we assailed the replica of Castle Perilous – forged by the words of the Zhengyian tome and the magic of Arrayan Faylin Maggotsweeper, held together by the power of the black dracolich in the tunnels deep below it – I found myself constantly distracted, at first, by the half-orc wizard,” Entreri explained. “I kept seeing the image of my dearest friend, Dwahvel Tiggerwillies, in her face. When I lost Calihye in Calimport and we parted ways, I went back to her. Feelings that I had kept long buried – until your influence with Idalia’s flute – resurfaced when I saw her again, and when I tried to explain them to her…”
“She ran?”
Entreri nodded, shirking the cloak and returning it to Jarlaxle. “I’ve come to find out that she, of course, never shared similar feelings. I cannot fault her; as I’ve come to realize myself, those of us that can feel emotions keenly cannot easily control them. She did not run so much as she began to distance herself from me, uncomfortable as she was. She wanted to maintain the friendship, but we both knew that everything would be… uneasy… as long as I remained. We parted company as friends, and…”
The assassin’s mouth turned upward into a self-deprecating grin. “Indeed, it was I who ran. And of all people to run to, I ran to find you, Jarlaxle D’aerthe.”
Jarlaxle sat back in a chair, clasping his hands together. “Why run to me, then, if I caused you so much grief with your feelings?” he asked. “Are you not running from those very feelings?”
“I plan to run alongside you to quell those feelings,” Entreri stated. “If there is, perhaps, a road of adventure to follow…”
“I cannot allow you to destroy your emotions yet again, Entreri; I would be running counter to my own work.”
“I will not allow you to destroy my emotions again, Jarlaxle; I run from the pain of my losses in Calimshan, not from the fact that I have truly loved and may find the chance to love again…”
Entreri interrupted himself with a profound yawn. The drink was making him tired now, the energy from before drained. He made himself comfortable in the bed, though his jeweled dagger even now remained in easy reach, tucked under the pillow along with his hand.
Jarlaxle could hardly contain his excitement as he surged from his seat. “We will ride toward the north within the tenday, my friend!” he said. “We should make Luskan within the fortnight, and we should reach our goal soon after…”
His exuberance was suddenly stolen as he realized just what all waited at that future goal. Not quite asleep – never quite asleep, to be perfectly honest – Entreri shifted to look at Jarlaxle with a wary eye.
“What is that goal, khal’abbil?” The assassin’s voice took a sharp edge.
The drow gave what could have been a sheepish, challenging, or simply disarming, grin. “Ten-Towns, perhaps. I have heard about the corpse of a dragon, of a barbarian tribe that still has dragon treasure hoarded in the mountains…”
“My list,” Entreri moaned. “I knew it was all coming together. Drow, dead dragons, dramatics, dwarves, disaster, daggers, and that one dervish dark elf of derring-do…”
“You believe Drizzt Do’Urden to be alive?”
“You are here, Jarlaxle, and I have come to you; stranger things still have happened.” Entreri buried his face in the pillow; beneath it, he clenched his dagger. “It would not surprise me if your lost wizard-priest Rai-Guy restored him, not five minutes after I left the replica of Crenshinibon…”
Jarlaxle did well enough to hide the sound of his surprised choke; were Entreri looking, the assassin would have seen his face twist into a look of shock that was utterly foreign to the handsome visage of the dark elf.
“Will you still go?” he dared to ask.
Entreri sighed. “There is a Calishite curse spoken by merchants and pashas alike, and more than once it has been uttered to me. I find that it has come true – let the road take me where it will.”
“What is that curse, Artemis?”
Entreri smiled, looking back at Jarlaxle for just a moment.
“May you live in interesting times.”
Jarlaxle laughed and he dipped a sweeping bow, the diatryma feather of his outrageous hat sweeping the floor. Entreri waved him off with his free hand and laid back down, his smirk unhidden as he slowly drifted back to sleep. Jarlaxle straightened and willed himself to silence, then touched the chair he had been sitting in; once a table, it now folded and flattened into a simple, unblemished disc that soon passed for one of the buttons on Jarlaxle’s vest.
Sometimes a table is so much more than a table, he thought, grinning to himself. And sometimes, an adventure past is so much more than what has already been seen.
“May you live in interesting times,” Entreri had said, and as the idea passed once more through Jarlaxle’s mind, he laughed again and went into his room for the remainder of the night.
Interesting times, indeed!