The Crystal Shard Read Free Page A

sanctuary. There was wealth here, and for those nimble and talented enough to be a scrimshander, someone who could transform the ivorylike bone of a knucklehead trout into an artistic carving, a comfortable living could be made with a minimum amount of work.
    And with Ten-Towns' scrimshaw fast becoming the rave of the south, the halfling meant to shake off his customary lethargy and turn his new-found trade into a booming business.
    Someday.
    *****
    Drizzt Do'Urden trotted along silently; his soft, low-cut boots barely stirring the dust. He kept the cowl of his brown cloak pulled low over the flowing waves of his stark white hair and moved with such effortless grace that an onlooker might have thought him to be no more than an illusion, an optical trick of the brown sea of tundra.
    The dark elf pulled his cloak tighter about him. He felt as vulnerable in the sunlight as a human would in the dark of night. Two hundred years of living many miles below ground had not been erased by five years on the sunlit surface. To this day, sunlight drained and dizzied him.
    But Drizzt had traveled right through the night and was compelled to continue. Already he was overdue for his meeting with Bruenor in the dwarf's valley, and he had seen the signs.
    The reindeer had begun their autumn migration southwest to the sea, yet no human tracks followed the herd. The caves north of Ten-Towns, always a stop-over for the nomadic barbarians on their way back to the tundra, had not even been stocked to reprovision the tribes on their long trek. Drizzt understood the implications. In normal barbarian life, the survival of the tribes depended on their following the reindeer herd. The apparent abandonment of their traditional ways was more than a little disturbing.
    And Drizzt had heard the battle drums.
    Their subtle rumblings rolled over the empty plain like distant thunder, in patterns usually recognizable only to the other barbarian tribes. But Drizzt knew what they foretold. He was an observer who understood the value of knowledge of friend or foe, and he had often used his stealth prowess to observe the daily routines and traditions of the proud natives of Icewind Dale, the barbarians.
    Drizzt picked up his pace, pushing himself to the limits of his endurance. In five short years, he had come to care for the cluster of villages known as Ten-Towns and for the people who lived there. Like so many of the other outcasts who had finally settled there, the drow had found no welcome anywhere else in the Realms. Even here he was only tolerated by most, but in the unspoken kinship of fellow rogues, few people bothered him. He'd been luckier than most; he'd found a few friends who could look beyond his heritage and see his true character.
    Anxiously, the dark elf squinted at Kelvin's Cairn, the solitary mountain that marked the entrance to the rocky dwarven valley between Maer Dualdon and Lac Dinneshere, but his violet-colored almond eyes, marvelous orbs that could rival an owl's in the night, could not penetrate the blur of daylight enough to gauge the distance.
    Again he ducked his head under the cowl, preferring a blind run to the dizziness of prolonged exposure to the sun, and sank back into the dark dreams of Menzoberranzan, the lightless underworld city of his ancestors. The drow elves had actually once walked on the surface world, dancing beneath the sun and the stars with their fair-skinned cousins. Yet the dark elves were malicious, passionless killers beyond the tolerance of even their normally unjudging kin. And in the inevitable war of the elven nations, the drow were driven into the bowels of the ground. Here they found a world of dark secrets and dark magics and were content to remain. Over the centuries, they had flourished and grown strong once more, attuning themselves to the ways of mysterious magics. They became more powerful than even their surface-dwelling cousins, whose dealings with the arcane arts under the life-giving warmth of the