“I was there,” Drizzt reminded him, silencing the fool.
The human spat upon the ground. “Once a hero, now gone soft,” he muttered. “On orcs, no less.”
“Perhaps,” Drizzt replied, and in the blink of an astonished eye, he brought his scimitars out in his black-skinned hands. “But I’ve not gone soft on highwaymen and murderers.”
“Murderers?” the human retorted incredulously. “Murderers of orcs?”
Even as he finished speaking, the dwarf at the side of the wagon pushed through his orange-bearded companion’s arm and thrust his hand forward, sending a hand-axe spinning at the drow.
Drizzt easily side-stepped the unsurprising move, but not content to let the missile harmlessly fly past, and seeing a second dwarf charging from over to the left, he snapped out his scimitar Icingdeath into the path of the axe. He drew the blade back as it contacted the missile, absorbing the impact. A twist of his wrist had the scimitar’s blade firmly up under the axe’s head. In a single fluid movement, Drizzt pivoted back the other way and whipped Icingdeath around, launching the axe at the charging dwarf.
The rumbling warrior brought his shield up high to block the awkwardly spinning axe, which clunked against the wooden buckler and bounced aside. But so too fell away that dwarf’s determined growl when he again lowered the shield, to find his intended target nowhere in sight.
For Drizzt, his speed enhanced by a pair of magical anklets, had timed his break perfectly with the rise of the dwarf’s shield. He had taken only a few steps, but enough, he knew, to confuse the determined dwarf. At the last moment, the dwarf noticed him and skidded to a stop, throwing out a weak, backhanded swipe with his warhammer.
But Drizzt was inside the arch of the hammer, and he smacked its handle with one blade, stealing the minimal momentum of the swing. He struck harder with his second blade, finding the crease between the dwarf’s heavy gauntlet and his metal-banded bracer. The hammer went flying, and the dwarf howled and grabbed at his bleeding, broken wrist.