TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

And now we’ll wrap up the little bit of storyline that wasn’t wrapped up in the last book. Unsurprisingly, this is the last book that’s considered part of the “Legend Of Drizzt” series. If the series had ended here, it would have been acceptable. The later books using these characters (Sellswords, Thousand Orcs) will hearken back to stuff that happened in this series, but these three-thousandish pages gives you one whole story.

At the beginning of the last book, Lolth convinced Errtu that if he protected Menzoberranzan from outside influences while she was otherwised deposed (by deposed I mean “not a god anymore) she would give him a prisoner to torment and whom he could use to end his banishment. When a monster is defeated on the Prime Material Plane, he can not re-enter the prime material plane for 100 years. The only way around this is to have the creature that banished him summon him. It is presumed this prisoner is someone Errtu could use to convince Drizzt to end the banishment. Then, Errtu would be able to re-enter the prime material plane and find the Crystal Shard… the evil artifact that keeps popping up throughout the series.

It’s been six years since the Battle of Mithril Hall. Bruenor and Regis have gone back to Icewind Dale because Bruenor thought he should give control of Mithril Hall back to his great-8x-grandfather. Drizzt and Catti’Brie have decided to help the world by joining back up with Captain Deudermont and the Sea Sprite (introduced WAY back in the Icewind Dale trilogy… one of the first humans to accept Drizzt) to hunt pirates on the Sea of Swords (The Forgotten Realms version of the Atlantic Ocean).

After six relatively peaceful years hunting pirates, Drizzt’s past finally catches up to him as he receives a message that his former nemesis Errtu is holding a captive. To retrieve this prisoner, Drizzt must end Errtu’s banishment. The quest to release Errtu is the first half of the book. The quest to put him back is the second half.

Both halves are pretty good.

I did find it amusing the lengths to which Errtu went to get Drizzt to unbanish him. It’s good to know that demons from the Abyss suffer from bad-guy overplanning as well. Errtu was holding a hostage and wanted Drizzt to unbanish him. Instead of just sending him a message to that effect, he sent a doppleganger to trick his boat into sailing to a deserted island that was full of zombies. On the island was a witch who delivered the team a riddle. The riddle sent them to somewhere else. Now, Drizzt’s the only mortal who can unbanish Errtu. Errtu really wanted to be unbanished. You’d think that he’d, I don’t know, not try to get Drizzt killed before the unbanishing happens. Bad guys, no matter what species, are kinda dumb. Also, in a level of transparency that approached daytime television, we spend 300 pages being told that the hostage is Drizzt’s father Zaknafein while anyone with half a brain in their skull are likely to realize it’s Wulfgar as he was dragged into the Abyss and all.

Long story short, Drizzt and company do manage to summon and unbanish Errtu who immediately retrieves the crystal shard that was buried under an avalanche in book four.

In all, it’s really a satisfying ending for a ten book arc. Very few plot-threads are left dangling other than Wulfgar’s lingering PTSD from six years of torture in hell and whether or not the friends will finally manage to destroy the Crystal Shard. In all, well done.

Complaints with the whole series, if I had any, were mostly with Salvatore’s writing style. He had a terrible tendency to have the friends only be saved by amazing luck and his inability to kill core characters. He also is not particularly good at describing battle scenes. It’s not easy to describe a sword-fight between two characters who are supposedly the best swordsmen in the world and it falls a little short. He also has a tendency to have events happen via a string of coincidences (Matron Baerne just happens to have the soul of an ancestor of one of the people Drizzt happens to meet on the surface). It’s OK to fall on this occasionally… other times it makes the reader roll their eyes. He also ignores his own mythology when it suits him. In the Dark Elf Trilogy, he specifically says that the third son of a drow house is sacrificed to Lolth. In later books, the Baerne clan has three sons (Berg’inyon, Gromph, and Dantrag) and no mention is made of the three son rule. Later still, we find out that there was another third son (who is certainly older than Berg’inyon as he is Drizzt’s age) who was, in fact, sacrificed. There’s also the inexplicable attitude shift of Drizzt’s sister Vierna Do’Urden (and Drizzt’s equally inexplicable reaction) simply to create a bad-guy even though it made no sense and stands out as one of the more stupid moments of the entire series.

There is one more book that’s not really a part of this series but acts as a springboard to split the series in two. One branch follows the good guys. The other branch follows Artemis Entreri who, until this point, was the bad guy. Before that… I need a break.