Free Streams Of Silver by R. A. Salvatore

question’s exact wording.
    Dendybar smiled in concession to the specter’s simple logic and clarified the question. “What is the purpose of the visit to Luskan by the four travelers from Icewind Dale?”
    “Varied reasons,” Morkai replied. “One has come in search of the homeland of his father, and his father before him.”
    “The drow?” Dendybar asked, trying to find some way to link his suspicions that Drizzt planned to return to the underworld of his birth with the Crystal Shard. Perhaps an uprising by the dark elves, using the power of the shard? “Is it the drow who seeks his homeland?”
    “Nay,” replied the specter, pleased that Dendybar had fallen off on a tangent, delaying the more specific, and more dangerous line of questioning. The passing minutes would soon begin to dissipate Dendybar’s hold upon the specter, and Morkai hoped that he could find a way to get free of the mottled wizard before revealing too much about Bruenor’s company. “Drizzt Do’Urden has forsaken his homeland altogether. He shall never return to the bowels of the world, and certainly not with his dearest friends in tow!”
    “Then who?”
    “Another of the four flees from danger at his back,” Morkai offered, twisting the line of inquiry.
    “Who seeks his homeland?” Dendybar demanded more emphatically.
    “The dwarf, Bruenor Battlehammer,” replied Morkai, compelled to obey. “He seeks his birthplace, Mithral Hall, and his friends have joined in his quest. Why does this interest you? The companions have no connection to Luskan, and pose no threat to the Hosttower.”
    I did not summon you here to answer your questions!” Dendybar scolded. “Now tell me who is running from danger. And what is the danger?”
    “Behold,” the specter instructed. With a wave of his hand,Morkai imparted an image upon the mind of the mottled wizard, a picture of a black-cloaked rider wildly charging across the tundra. The horse’s bridle was white with lather, but the rider pressed the beast onward relentlessly.
    “The halfling flees from this man,” Morkai explained, “though the rider’s purpose remains a mystery to me.” Telling Dendybar even this much angered the specter, but Morkai could not yet resist the commands of his nemesis. He felt the bonds of the wizard’s will loosening, though, and suspected that the summoning neared its end.
    Dendybar paused to consider the information.
    Nothing of what Morkai had told him gave any direct link to the Crystal Shard, but he had learned, at least, that the four friends did not mean to stay in Luskan for very long. And he had discovered a potential ally, a further source of information. The black-cloaked rider must be mighty indeed to have set the halfling’s formidable troupe fleeing down the road.
    Dendybar was beginning to formulate his next moves, when a sudden insistent pull of Morkai’s stubborn resistance broke his concentration. Enraged, he shot a threatening glare back at the specter and began unrolling the parchment. “Impudent!” he growled, and though he could have stretched out his hold on the specter a bit longer if he had put his energies into a battle of wills, he started reciting the scroll.
    Morkai recoiled, though he had consciously provoked Dendybar to this point. The specter could accept the racking, for it signaled the end of the inquisition. And Morkai was glad that Dendybar hadn’t forced him to reveal the events even farther from Luskan, back in the dale just beyond the borders of Ten-Towns.
    As Dendybar’s recitations twanged discordantly on the harmony of his soul, Morkai removed the focal point of his concentration across hundreds of miles, back to the image ofthe merchant caravan now one day out from Bremen, the closest of the Ten-Towns, and to the image of the brave young woman who had joined up with the traders. The specter took comfort in the knowledge that she had, for a while at least, escaped the probings of the mottled wizard.
    Not that