Vengeance of the Iron Dwarf Read online

Magical drow lightning slashed at the departing ranks. The frenzy of orcs and ogres continued to fight, blindly, in the darkness, as often striking an ally as an enemy.

  Still, too often striking a dwarf.

  The corridor beyond the cavern had not been magically darkened, and there the dwarves reformed into tighter, retreating ranks. For more than a full day, those tunnels south of Adbar became a blood-filled battleground. Hundreds of monsters died, but nearly a hundred of Adbar’s finest dwarves would not make their way back home.

  And back home they went, chased into their citadel, and even as the lower door of Adbar slammed shut, a lightning bolt scored it, the retort echoing within the dwarven halls and within the heart of King Harnoth.

  The noose had tightened, and the larders grew thin.

  And so began a series of battles in the Upperdark that would come to be known about the Silver Marches as the Deep Skirmishes. Stubbornly the dwarves sent their legions forth, trying to break out, and ever were they chased back into their fortress by the horde and the drow, for indeed, the dark elves had learned the region around Adbar well, and every tunnel was well watched, and with monsters ready to flood in and seal off any escapes.

  The dwarves of Adbar took heart two tendays later, when Oretheo Spikes and his boys somehow managed to slip back into Adbar through the monster-filled tunnels, most alive, but many wounded.

  King Harnoth took no heart in that, though. As glad as he was that his dear and trusted friend Spikes had survived, the dwarf’s grim words about their enemy’s position confirmed King Harnoth’s worst fears.

  The big man sat against the wall in the darkness, his right hand clamped tightly around his left forearm as his halfling friend tried to properly wrap the battered limb with a cloth soaked in a healing salve.

  “A potion would be better,” Wulfgar muttered as the tight cloth pressed in on his muscles.

  “I have none to spare,” Regis replied. He knelt in front of Wulfgar, pulling another long strip of soaked cloth from a pot set on the floor beside them. “Just the two potions of healing remaining, and they will be saved for when it becomes a matter of life or death.”

  “We have no time for this,” Wulfgar warned, his voice rolling through an octave shift as Regis pulled hard to secure the bandage. “The drow grow thick about the area—word of us travels to more dangerous enemies.”

  “The drow have been thick about the area from the beginning,” Regis replied, but unconvincingly. He too had noted fewer targets of late, and he and Wulfgar tried hard to stay away from any groups that contained dark elves. Ambushing a few orcs and goblins was one thing, even if the occasional ogre joined in, but the pair wanted no part of any fight with drow.

  “Then we should already be long gone from here,” Wulfgar said.

  Regis leaned back to regard his friend. Wulfgar’s face was more in shadow than light, the scattered glowing lichen in the region barely casting enough of a glow to show the man’s features. Regis knew him well enough to understand the heaviness in his voice, though, and surely the halfling shared that weariness anyway. They had spent a month or perhaps even more—both had long ago lost track of the days—battling and sneaking around the Upperdark, seeking opportunities to get near to Mithral Hall. Their food had run out days ago, and so now they had to add raiding goblin and orc camps to their list of necessary tasks.

  They fought almost every day, and Regis spent every night back in whatever hole they were using as a hiding spot cleaning and dressing the inevitable wounds.

  “We’ll go back to the lower tunnels,” Regis offered. “I’ll find more fungus and brew more healing potions …”

  He stopped, seeing Wulfgar’s shadowy head slowly shaking back and forth.

  “Our friends are in there,” he scolded the barbarian.

  “We hope,” Wulfgar reminded him, for though they had heard snippets of the escape of Drizzt and the others into Mithral Hall, they really couldn’t be sure. Indeed, even if their companions had managed to get in to the hall, that was tendays ago—might they already be back out on the surface at the head of Bruenor’s army?

  “I am out of answers,” Regis admitted with a long and profound sigh.

  “East,” Wulfgar decided.

  “East is the river.”

  “Under the river, and to the east some more,” the barbarian explained. “And let us hope that Citadel Felbarr is not as encircled as Mithral Hall.”

  Regis fell back a bit farther, his head turning to glance over his left shoulder, to the north, they believed, and toward Mithral Hall. The thought of leaving galled him, and the thought of striking out in an entirely new direction, through tunnels they did not know and a place neither of them had been, terrified him.

  “Which way is east?” he asked. “Do we even know?”

  “We came from the south.”

  “And we don’t even know how to get back the way we came!” Regis replied, too loudly, drawing a “shh!” from Wulfgar as he clamped his hand over his own mouth.

  “We can guess,” the large man whispered a few moments later.

  “And so we’ll wander the Underdark aimlessly if we guess wrong.”

  “And so we’ll be caught and killed if we remain in this region, thick with orcs and drow,” said Wulfgar. “That much is certain.”

  Regis didn’t reply. He didn’t have to. They both understood the unsaid part of Wulfgar’s reasoning: that they’d likely be caught and killed in the tunnels they traveled to the east, as well.

  If it was even the east. They could hardly see down here—in many places, Wulfgar was fully blind—let alone determine direction.

  “How deep will we have to travel to get under the Surbrin?” Regis asked.

  “How deep are we now?” Wulfgar replied, and Regis could see the crease of his teasing grin in the dim light as he asked the question, for it was one, both of them knew, that neither of them could begin to answer.

  CHAPTER 3

  RAIDING THE GARDEN

  KRUGER STONESHIELD GAVE A GREAT YAWN AND TRIED TO RUB THE cobwebs of sleep from his weary eyes. He stood on a small ledge in a tiny alcove, peering through a long tube that poked through the side of the mountain called Fourthpeak, which housed his homeland of Mithral Hall.

  A few days before, Kruger had seen the dragon flying around—the huge white wing had flashed right before his startled eyes. It was his report that had explained the sudden troubles with several of the chimneys down in the Undercity.

  Since that time, though, the view had been as settled as the winter snows. Kruger reminded himself to be vigilant. His people were counting on him. King Connerad was counting on him.

  King Bruenor was counting on him!

  “Aye, King Bruenor,” he mumbled, gathering up the end of the spyglass and lifting it to his eye. King Bruenor was back, and wouldn’t them orcs be a sorry lot afore long.

  That thought brought a grin and chuckle to Kruger. He imagined a swarm of orcs in full flight in front of the dwarven brigades. He wanted to be on those front lines, chasing the pig-faced dogs all the way back to their holes in the Spine of the World.

  He got his visual bearings when he noted the southern rim of Keeper’s Dale through the spyglass, the high sun gleaming brilliantly off the long icicles jabbing down from the ledges. Like dragon’s teeth, he thought.

  He stood up taller, lifting the back end of the hanging scope, moving his line of sight down, down, into the bowl and the vast orc encampment therein.

  For a moment, he noted the activity superficially, hardly registering the many movements of the small dark forms around the new-fallen snow. For a moment, he just figured that the orcs were clearing off their tents and weapons racks and such from the foot of snow that had fallen the night before. But as the patterns began to truly register, Kruger’s eye popped open wide, and he even pulled back from the spyglass and rubbed that orb again, trying to make sense out of what he had just seen.

  He went right back to the scope and began moving it methodically
around the vast encampment. And then he knew. There could be no doubt, particularly given the already long train exiting the western side of Keeper’s Dale …

  The orcs were leaving.

  Hands trembling, Kruger slid his field of vision over to the northern end of the dale, then climbed up the north wall. His breath fell away when he saw the partially deconstructed catapults and ballistae.

  The giants, too, were pulling back.

  Had this last snowstorm broken the siege, at long last? Had events in other parts of the Silver Marches, about Felbarr or Silverymoon, perhaps, demanded reinforcements?

  Almost giddy with anticipation, Kruger Stoneshield hooked his boot on the metal pole on the outside of the ladder. Like all of Mithral Hall’s mountain scouts, he wore shoes with a semicircular spur made of strong mithral that he could clip onto the ladder, one side and the other, so he could slide down the thirty feet to the lower chamber—the reporting chamber, as it was called, a chamber designed for messages and set with a desk, inkwell, parchment, and smooth scroll tubes. One wall was fitted with a long pipe that wound down to sentries in deeper caverns still. A scout could write a report, stuff it into a scroll tube, and send it sliding down to the waiting hands below.

  With a quick last look at the giants and another scan at the departing orcs and goblins along the valley floor, Kruger let go of the spyglass and bent low to grab the ladder, clipping his second boot in place as he did. He almost began his swift descent, but only then did the last image of the frost giants truly register to him. Many of the war machines were already dismantled, or nearly so, but the last group …

  Were they taking apart that huge catapult?

  Or turning it?

  Kruger scrambled back up and grabbed the spyglass, twisting it around until he locked in once more on the group in question.

  “Turnin’ it?” he asked, then added, “Loadin’ it!”

  He licked his dry lips, he stroked his beard, but he didn’t blink or pull back from the spyglass over the next few heartbeats as a large load of burning pitch went into the catapult basket. The great and powerful behemoths began to crank mightily, bending back that arm.

  “What in the Nine Hells’re ye shootin’ at?” the dwarf whispered. There were no targets out there. The dragon, perhaps?

  He couldn’t hear the release immediately from this great distance, and so the spreading load of flaming pitch was speeding toward him by the time the creak and whoosh of the great beam reached his ears.

  Kruger squinted and had to fight hard to resist the urge to duck away as the pitch came flying in.

  He felt the tremor as if hit, higher up on the mountain than his scouting position. Perhaps it was the dragon up there, and wouldn’t it be grand to see the giants get into a tussle with a white wyrm!

  He heard no dragon roar, however, and the giants, standing around the catapult and, along with many of their kin, shielding their eyes from the high sun and staring up at Fourthpeak, did not seem concerned.

  Then the rumble began, deeper and more resonant than the impact. And so it built, and was then a thousand times louder, and the chamber, and the mountain, began to tremble violently.

  Kruger’s vision was stolen by a great darkness, and he could feel the power as tons of snow swept down past him from on high. An avalanche! The giants had set off an avalanche.

  Now he understood. They were indeed leaving, and closing Mithral Hall’s door with a mountain of snow behind them.

  Kruger got a few quick glances as the snow plummeted all around him, and he scrambled up as high as he could go, taking his field of vision back into the dale, all the way down to the east, to the mountain door of Mithral Hall. Or at least, to where he would have expected that door to be had it not been buried under the avalanche.

  Then he could see no more as the snow settled, leaving a thick cap above the hole at the other end of the spyglass.

  Kruger Stoneshield was on the ladder in a heartbeat, sliding down so fast that he was practically falling free, so eager was he to report this startling turn of events.

  “They must’ve needed ’em elsewhere,” Bruenor said when the report filtered down to the throne room, where King Connerad sat with the former king and both sets of their principle advisors.

  Bruenor looked to Drizzt and shrugged.

  “Felbarr breaking out, perhaps?” the drow offered.

  “Scouts in the east perches ain’t reportin’ no movement by the Surbrin bridge,” King Connerad said. “The orcs’d be crossin’ the bridge if they’re meanin’ to get to Felbarr.”

  “Silverymoon, then,” said General Dagnabbet. “Might be that they’re not waitin’ for the spring melt.”

  “Or they are baiting us,” Catti-brie cautioned.

  “Won’t be smart, then,” the fierce Bungalow Thump was quick to interject. “Bah, but if they’re lettin’ us out in the open where we can put into squares and such, we’ll roll ’em into the red snow!”

  “They knocked the mountain over the durned door,” General Dagnabbet reminded him.

  “Bah, but that’s not to stop us from gettin’ out!” Thump replied. “I’ll dig it meself. Or me boys, aye, me boys! We’ll run ’em in one after another, head down and helmet spike leading, and drill a tunnel to Keeper’s Dale afore the hour’s through. Ye just give me the nod, me king!”

  The way he said “me king!” took Bruenor’s breath away, so reminiscent was it of Bruenor’s old friend Pwent, and full of the same passion and loyalty. Looking at Bungalow Thump only reinforced to Bruenor that he had taken the correct course in not challenging Connerad for Mithral Hall’s throne. Connerad had built something here, as fine as Bruenor’s time in the hall.

  Bruenor couldn’t help but smile. That had been his fondest hope when he’d turned his kingdom over to Banak Brawnanvil that century before. This was the constancy of dwarven culture that so aligned with the sense of order and discipline that had kept their kingdoms so strong through the centuries. In dwarven culture, no one was irreplaceable, and so the fall of a king, no matter how beloved, did not incite fears for the future. The replacement had been properly selected and groomed.

  That thought led Bruenor to look to Connerad’s right, to General Dagnabbet, and to wonder if, should Connerad fall in the war, Mithral Hall might be crowning her first queen. And aye, Bruenor thought with an approving nod—though Dagnabbet, who noticed it, could only respond with a curious expression—that would prove to be a fine choice!

  “If they’ve gone to Silverymoon, the sooner we’re out, the better,” King Connerad remarked.

  “Aye,” Bruenor agreed. “Out and around to take the bridge.”

  “So we allow them to assault Silverymoon while we try to free Citadel Felbarr?” Drizzt asked.

  Every dwarf in the room nodded emphatically. When Bruenor ended, though, he realized that the instinctual reaction told him a lot about the state of the alliance known as Luruar.

  Or perhaps he should think of it as the former alliance.

  “Ye never go in through the gate,” Bruenor said to Drizzt and Catti-brie as they crawled along the newly constructed tunnel. “Farmers’re always watchin’ the gate! Plumpest mushrooms’re off to the side.” He gave an exaggerated wink, clearly enjoying King Connerad’s decision to break out of Mithral Hall.

  “Aye, ye send the little one to the gate, but not through, to keep the farmer’s attention, don’t ye know, ye silly drow?” Catti-brie added in her best Bruenor imitation—and that brought a smile to the faces of all three.

  When Connerad made his choice, he’d turned to Bruenor for help, and why wouldn’t he? No dwarf in the Silver Marches had a better battle reputation than Bruenor Battlehammer, and it was one honestly earned.

  “If we’re goin’ out, then get out fast,” Bruenor advised. “But raid the garden and stay away from the gate!”

  That last analogy provided the humor in the small—and new—tunnel that day. By “raiding the garden,” Bruenor referred to a game all young dwarves pla
yed, a cat-and-mouse tradition with the farmers of Mithral Hall, or of Icewind Dale, or anywhere else dwarves of Clan Battlehammer had called home. The thought was to create a subtle diversion, in this case by setting dwarves near the Keeper’s Dale exit from Mithral Hall, with hammers and picks enough to make a bit of noise, a bit of a stir, outside the halls.

  But nothing so compelling or loud as to suggest any immediate breakout. Indeed, other clansdwarves were also creeping out of higher tunnels to the avalanche pack, poking and prodding and freeing boulders to tumble down over the door, in an effort to give any scouts or magical eyes the orcs might have left in place the impression that the avalanche was doing its job and keeping the exit sealed.

  In the meantime, the real garden raiders had dug another way out, one that would put them up on the ridge where the giants had been. The orcs were still camped on the other two main exits, the northern and eastern doors, but if Connerad could get a strong enough force out quietly on the northern edge of Keeper’s Dale, they could swing around and clobber the force in the north. With that wide door cleared, Mithral Hall could overwhelm the orc force by the Surbrin in short order, before orc reinforcements could begin to arrive.

  It was a desperate plan, to be sure, with so many orc armies marching around, but not one of the advisors to King Connerad had argued against it.

  The three companions came into a wide round chamber, a natural cave that had been found along the route, and was now full of busy dwarves. There was a side passage off to their right, curling back into the mountain, but the new tunnel was being dug directly across the way, directly across a frozen underground pond.

  As the trio neared the closest bank, Drizzt looked at the new dig, trying to sort out the somewhat confusing details as the dwarves skated back and forth across the ice, many carrying buckets, others hauling bundles of great shields all strapped together. Also, the tunnel being dug now was not level, not even gently sloping, but rose at a fairly steep angle, perhaps thirty or forty degrees. The drow looked to Catti-brie, who seemed as perplexed as he, and shrugged.