The Silent Blade

The Silent Blade is a fantasy novel by R. A. Salvatore, published in 1998. It is the first book of the Paths of Darkness sequence and the eleventh in the Legend of Drizzt, and it belongs to the Forgotten Realms setting.

Drizzt is determined to destroy the Crystal Shard and seeks out the scholar-priest Cadderly to help him. The attempt fails. Crenshinibon instead falls into the hands of Jarlaxle, a dark elf mercenary, and his unlikely ally Artemis Entreri, which puts a weapon Drizzt wanted unmade back into circulation and puts it in the hands of people who have their own uses for it.

The book is the one that brought Drizzt back to the Realms, and it sets him against an enemy who has already survived him once. Because the shard is a thing that argues for itself, the danger is not only who is carrying it but what it will persuade them to want, and the story runs on the distance between Drizzt's intention and the result of his attempt to be rid of it.