“Good-hunting!” Tephanis offered, then he was gone, back to Caroak, the great wolf that smelled better than this particular human.
Roddy, his eyes fixed upon the distant scene, hardly noticed the quickling’s departure. “Ye’ll pay for yer lies, ranger,” he muttered under his breath. An evil smile spread over his face as he thought of a way to get at the companions. It would be a delicate feat. But then, dealing with Graul always was.
Montolio’s messenger returned two days later with a note from Dove Falconhand. Hooter tried to recount the ranger’s response, but the excitable owl was completely inept at conveying such long and intricate tales. Flustered and having no other option, Montolio handed the letter to Drizzt and told the drow to read it aloud, and quickly. Not yet a skilled reader, Drizzt was several lines through the creased paper before he realized what it was. The note detailed Dove’s accounts of what had happened in Maldobar and along the subsequent chase. Dove’s version struck near to the truth, vindicating Drizzt and naming the barghest whelps as the murderers.
Drizzt’s relief was so great that he could hardly utter the words as the letter went on to express Dove’s pleasure and gratitude that the “deserving drow” had taken in with the old ranger.
“You get your due in the end, my friend,” was all that Montolio needed to say.
Part 4.
Resolutions
I now view my long road as a search for truth—truth in my own heart, in the world around me, and in the larger questions of purpose and of existence. How does one define good and evil?
I carried an internal code of morals with me on my trek, though whether I was born with it or it was imparted tome by Zaknafein—or whether it simply developed from my perceptions—I cannot ever know. This code forced me to leave Menzoberranzan, for though I was not certain of what those truths might have been, I knew beyond doubt that they would not be found in the domain of Lloth.
After many years in the Underdark outside of Menzoberranzan and after my first awful experiences on the surface, I came to doubt the existence of any universal truth, came to wonder if there was, after all, any purpose to life. In the world of drow, ambition was the only purpose, the seeking of material gains that came with increased rank. Even then, that seemed a little thing to me, hardly a reason to exist.
I thank you, Montolio DeBrouchee, for confirming my suspicions. I have learned that the ambition of those who follow selfish precepts is no more than a chaotic waste, a finite gain that must be followed by infinite loss. For there is indeed a harmony in the universe, a concordant singing of common weal. To join that song, one must find inner harmony, must find the notes that ring true.
There is one other point to be made about that truth: Evil creatures cannot sing.
16. Of Gods and Purpose
The lessons continued to go quite well. The old ranger had lessened the drow’s considerable emotional burden, and Drizzt picked up on the ways of the natural world better than anyone Montolio had ever seen. But Montolio sensed that something still bothered the drow, though he had no idea of what it might be.
“Do all humans possess such fine hearing?” Drizzt asked him suddenly as they dragged a huge fallen branch out of the grove. “Or is yours a blessing, perhaps, to make up for your blindness?”
The bluntness of the question surprised Montolio for just the moment it took him to recognize the drow’s frustration, an uneasiness caused by Drizzt’s failure to understand the man’s abilities.
“Or is your blindness, perhaps, a ruse, a deception you use to gain the advantage?” Drizzt pressed relentlessly.
“If it is?” Montolio replied offhandedly.
“Then it is a good one, Montolio DeBrouchee,” Drizzt replied. “Surely it aids you against enemies… and friends alike.” The words tasted bitter to Drizzt, and he suspected that he was letting his pride get the best of him.
“You have not often been bested in battle,” Montolio replied, recognizing the source of Drizzt’s frustrations as their sparring match. If he could have seen the drow then, Drizzt’s expression would have revealed much.
“You take it too hard,” Montolio continued after an uneasy silence. “I did not truly defeat you.”
“You had me down and helpless.”
“You beat yourself,” Montolio explained. “I am indeed blind, but not as helpless as you seem to think. You underestimated me. I knew that you would, too, though I hardly believed that you could be so blind.”
Drizzt stopped abruptly, and Montolio stopped on cue as the drag on the branch suddenly increased. The old ranger shook his head and cackled. He then pulled out a dagger, spun it high into the air, caught it, and, yelling, “Birch!” heaved it squarely into one of the few birch trees by the evergreen grove.
“Could a blind man do that?” Montolio asked rhetorically.
“Then you can see,” Drizzt stated.
“Of course not,” Montolio retorted sharply. “My eyes have not functioned for five years. But neither am I blind, Drizzt, especially in this place I call my home!
“Yet you thought me blind,” the ranger went on, his voice calm again. “In our sparring, when your spell of darkness expired, you believed that you had gained the edge. Did you think that all of my actions—effective actions, I must say—both in the battle against the orcs and in our fight were simply prepared and rehearsed? If I were as crippled as Drizzt Do’Urden believes me, how should I survive another day in these mountains?”
“I did not… ” Drizzt began, but his embarrassment silenced him. Montolio spoke the truth, and Drizzt knew it. He had, at least on an unconscious level, thought the ranger less than whole since their very first meeting. Drizzt felt he showed his friend no disrespect—indeed, he thought highly of the man—but he had taken Montolio for granted and thought the ranger’s limitations greater than his own.
“You did,” Montolio corrected, “and I forgive you that. To your credit, you treated me more fairly than any who knew me before, even those who had traveled beside me through uncounted campaigns. Sit now,” he bade Drizzt. “It is my turn to tell my tale, as you have told yours.”
“Where to begin?” Montolio mused, scratching at his chin. It all seemed so distant to him now, another life that he had left behind. He retained one link to his past, though: his training as a ranger of the goddess Mielikki. Drizzt, similarly instructed by Montolio, would understand.
“I gave my life to the forest, to the natural order, at a very young age,” Montolio began. “I learned, as I have begun to teach you, the ways of the wild world and decided soon enough that I would defend that perfection, that harmony of cycles too vast and wonderful to be understood. That is why I so enjoy battling orcs and the like. As I have told you before, they are the enemies of natural order, the enemies of trees and animals as much as of men and the goodly races. Wretched things, all in all, and I feel no guilt in cutting them down!”
Montolio then spent many hours recounting some of his campaigns, expeditions in which he acted singly or as a scout for huge armies. He told Drizzt of his own teacher, Dilamon, a ranger so skilled with a bow that he had never seen her miss, not once in ten thousand shots. “She died in battle,” Montolio explained, “defending a farmhouse from a raiding band of giants. Weep not for Mistress Dilamon, though, for not a single farmer was injured and not one of the few giants who crawled away ever showed its ugly face in that region again!”