Free The Crystal Shard by R. A. Salvatore Page A

one looking down, but the spokesman from Targos seemed on the verge of exploding into laughter.
    Regis had to act quickly. He bent down slightly and raised his hand to his chin, by appearance to scratch an itch though in truth to set the ruby pendant spinning, tapping it with his arm as it passed. He then held the silence of the moment patiently and counted as Drizzt had instructed. Ten seconds passed and Kemp had not blinked. Drizzt had said that this would be enough, but Regis, surprised and apprehensive at the ease with which he had accomplished the task, let another ten go by before he dared begin testing the drow’s beliefs.
    “Surely you can see the wisdom of preparing for an attack,” Regis suggested calmly. Then in a whisper that only Kemp could hear he added, “These people look to you for guidance, great Kemp. A military alliance would only enhance your stature and influence.”
    The effect was dazzling.
    “Perhaps there is more to the halfling’s words than we first believed,” Kemp said mechanically, his glazed eyes never leaving the ruby.
    Stunned, Regis straightened up and quickly slipped the stone back under his waistcoat. Kemp shook his head as though clearinga confusing dream from his thoughts, and he rubbed his dried eyes. The spokesman from Targos couldn’t seem to recall the last few moments, but the halfling’s suggestion was planted deeply into his mind. Kemp found, to his own amazement, that his attitudes had changed.
    “We should hear well the words of Regis,” he declared loudly. “For we shall be none the worse from forming such an alliance, yet the consequences of doing nothing may prove to be grave, indeed!”
    Quick to seize an advantage, Jensin Brent leaped up from his chair. “Spokesman Kemp speaks wisely,” he said. “Number the people of Caer-Dineval, ever proponents of the united efforts of Ten-Towns, among the army that shall repel the horde!”
    The rest of the spokesmen lined up behind Kemp as Drizzt had expected, with Dorim Lugar making an even bigger show of loyalty than Brent’s.
    Regis had much to be proud of when he left the council hall later that day, and his hopes for the survival of Ten-Towns had returned. Yet the halfling found his thoughts consumed by the implications of the power he had discovered in his ruby. He worked to figure the most fail-safe way in which he could turn this new-found power of inducing cooperation into profit and comfort.
    “So nice of the Pasha Pook to give me this one!” he told himself as he walked through the front gate of Bryn Shander and headed for the appointed spot where he would meet with Drizzt and Bruenor.

hey started at dawn, charging across the tundra like an angry whirlwind. Animals and monsters alike, even the ferocious yetis, fled before them in terror. The frozen ground cracked beneath the stamp of their heavy boots, and the murmur of the endless tundra wind was buried under the strength of their song, the song to the God of Battle.
    They marched long into the night and were off again before the first rays of dawn, more than two thousand barbarian warriors hungry for blood and victory.

    Drizzt Do’Urden sat nearly halfway up on the northern face of Kelvin’s Cairn, his cloak pulled tight against the bitter wind that howled through the boulders of the mountain. The drow had spent every night up here since the council in Bryn Shander, his violet eyes scanning the blackness of the plain for the first signs of the coming storm. At Drizzt’s request, Bruenor had arranged for Regis to sitbeside him. With the wind nipping at him like an invisible animal, the halfling squeezed in between two boulders as further protection from the unwelcoming elements.
    Given a choice, Regis would have been tucked away into the warmth of his own soft bed in Lonelywood, listening to the quiet moan of the swaying tree branches beyond his warm walls. But he understood that as a spokesman everyone expected him to help carry out the course of