Streams Of Silver Read Online Free Page A

blood, flat on her throat.
    And then the teasing scrape of its edge against her soft, vulnerable skin as Entreri slowly turned the blade over in his hand.
    Tantalizing. The promise, the dance of death.
    Then it was gone. Catti-brie opened her eyes just as the small blade went back into its scabbard on the assassin’s hip. He had taken a step back from her.
    “You see,” he offered in simple explanation of his mercy, “I kill only those who stand to oppose me. Perhaps, then, three of your friends on the road to Luskan shall escape the blade. I want only the halfling.”
    Catti-brie refused to yield to the terror he evoked. She held her voice steady and promised coldly, “You underestimate them. They will fight you.”
    With calm confidence, Entreri replied, “Then they, too, shall die.”
    Catti-brie couldn’t win in a contest of nerves with the dispassionate killer. Her only answer to him was her defiance. She spat at him, unafraid of the consequences.
    He retorted with a single stinging backhand, Her eyes blurred in pain and welling tears, and Catti-brie slumped into blackness. But as she fell unconscious, she heard a few seconds longer, the cruel, passionless laughter fading away as the assassin moved from the house.
    Tantalizing. The promise of death.

ell, there she is, lad, the City of Sails,” Bruenor said to Wulfgar as the two looked down upon Luskan from a small knoll a few miles north of the city.
    Wulfgar took in the view with a profound sigh of admiration. Luskan housed more than fifteen thousand small compared to the huge cities in the south and to its nearest neighbor, Waterdeep, a few hundred miles farther down the coast. But to the young barbarian, who had spent all of his eighteen years among nomadic tribes and the small villages of Ten-Towns, the fortified seaport seemed grand indeed. A wall encompassed Luskan, with guard towers strategically spaced at varying intervals. Even from this distance, Wulfgar could make out the dark forms of many soldiers pacing the parapets, their spear tips shining in the new light of the day.
    “Not a promising invitation,” Wulfgar noted.
    “Luskan does not readily welcome visitors,” said Drizzt, who had come up behind his two friends. “They may open their gatesfor merchants, but ordinary travelers are usually turned away.”
    “Our first contact is there,” growled Bruenor. “And I mean to get in!”
    Drizzt nodded and did not press the argument. He had given Luskan a wide berth on his original journey to Ten-Towns. The city’s inhabitants, primarily human, looked upon other faces with disdain. Even surface elves and dwarves were often refused entry. Drizzt suspected that the guards would do more to a drow elf than simply put him out.
    “Get the breakfast fire burning,” Bruenor continued, his angry tones reflecting his determination that nothing would turn him from his course. “We’re to break camp early, an’ make the gates’ fore noon. Where’s that blasted Rumblebelly?”
    Drizzt looked back over his shoulder in the direction of the camp. “Asleep,” he answered, though Bruenor’s question was wholly rhetorical. Regis had been the first to bed and the last to awaken (and never without help) every day since the companions had set out from Ten-Towns.
    “Well, give him a kick!” Bruenor ordered. He turned back to the camp, but Drizzt put a hand on his arm to stay him.
    “Let the halfling sleep,” the drow suggested. “Perhaps it would be better if we came to Luskan’s gate in the less revealing light of dusk.”
    Drizzt’s request confused Bruenor for just a moment—until he looked more closely at the drow’s sullen visage and recognized the trepidation in his eyes. The two had become so close in their years of friendship that Bruenor often forgot that Drizzt was an outcast. The farther they traveled from Ten-Towns, where Drizzt was known, the more he would be judged by the color of his skin and the reputation of his people.
    “Aye, let