Archmage

CHAPTER 20

Bruenor and Emerus stood beside the outline of the stone door the wizards had identified as the ancient portal connecting dwarf lands. Over and over, the dwarf kings ran their hands along the ancient stonework, nodding as if they could feel the power thrumming within the stone-and likely they could feel it, Cattibrie and the others realized. Ever since they had sat on the throne, these two and Connerad seemed more attuned to this place than any non-dwarf could ever hope to understand.

“Where’d it go?” Emerus asked, his gravelly old voice filled with wonder and awe.

“Another dwarf kingdom, they’re saying. And aye, but I’m thinkin’ that’s the truth of it,” Bruenor replied. Then he added slyly, “If they were thinking o’ what might be the greatest place to go of all, they’d’ve had it set in line with Mithral Hall, eh?”

“Aye,” Emerus said without missing a beat, “that hole’d be a great musterin’ field for them dwarfs heading over to Citadel Felbarr.”

The two kings smirked at each other, both glad for the levity, and Bruenor truly needing it with his dearest friend lying so broken back in the main complex.

Behind them, Ambergris and Athrogate began to laugh, then to howl, drawing curious looks from Ragged Dain and Fist and Fury, and a curious glance back from the two kings.

Shaking her head, Catti-brie walked past the onlooking dwarves, Penelope and Kipper beside her.

“So if we’re to get it working, then how’re we to know where we’re going?” Emerus asked them. “Could be anywhere. I’m not knowing o’ any other dwarf homes as old as Gauntlgrym, and I’m guessing this was put in early on.”

“Right after they got the Great Forge fired, I’d wager,” Catti-brie agreed. “Might be that it opened into Waterdeep-or whatever city was thereabouts back in the day o’ Gauntlgrym’s making. Easy journey for trade.”

“No,” Kipper Harpell insisted. “It opened to another dwarven complex, likely in a mine not far from the other complex, but not readily accessible to the place. Certainly not in any city not of dwarves.”

“Aye,” Bruenor said, and Emerus nodded, coming to agree that his off-the-cuff theory really didn’t hold up. Even to this day, in the Realms dwarves were clannish-Bruenor’s choices in assembling the Companions of the Hall had raised more than a few bushy dwarf eyebrows over the years, and when Bruenor had appointed Regis as Steward of Mithral Hall, even King Emerus had gasped with surprise.

But still, despite that obvious xenophobia, by all accounts and historical text, the dwarves were much more tolerant of the other races now than they had been in the days of Gauntlgrym’s glory.

“If you were given a choice of where to place a complementary gate, good King Emerus, would you choose Waterdeep?” Kipper asked.

“I’d be sticking it up Moradin’s hairy bum afore I’d be doin’ that!” the dwarf said, and the point was made.

Emerus looked to Bruenor, but the red-bearded dwarf was immersed in the contours of the ancient portal once more. Perhaps he was sulking, perhaps deep in thought, but in any case, he had clearly stepped out of the conversation.

“Wait, are ye sayin’ that we might be choosing the location o’ th’ other gate, the exit?” Emerus asked, his thoughts sharpening with the possibilities.

How grand might it be to connect Gauntlgrym to the tunnels under the Silver Marches, a place easily accessible to all three of the dwarf kingdoms of the North? If the dwarves could have easy transport back and forth, all four fortresses would be more secure by far, with combined armies ready to muster at a moment’s notice.

“We do no’ even know if we can power the durned thing,” Catti-brie reminded them all. “She’s an old magic, like the one firing the Forge, like the magic keeping the primordial in its pit.”

“But it is possible!” Kipper jumped in quickly and enthusiastically. “I have been studying this for decades, my friend, and this gate! Oh, but how long have I searched for such an opportunity as-”

The tunnel shook then under the force of something weighty, some resounding thud that rolled through the stone and right up the legs of the ten standing in front of the ancient gate.

“That ain’t sounding good,” Ragged Dain remarked as he moved closer to Emerus and set himself defensively to protect his friend and king.

“I’ll go and have a look,” Athrogate offered and he sprinted back through the secret doorway to the portal room, with Ambergris close behind. They paused in the outer mine tunnel for a moment, glancing left and right, and when another heavy thud resounded, the pair took off to the right.

“We should be getting this place closed, and quickly,” Ragged Dain offered.

“Aye,” Emerus agreed over Kipper’s protestations. “Keepin’ this room secret’s more important than the lives of all.”

The eight started for the doorway, but before they even neared the open portal, Ambergris came rushing back in, Athrogate right behind her.

“Can ye close the door from in here?” Ambergris asked Catti-brie. “Lock us in, then?”

“Aye, and be quick about it!” Athrogate added.

Both looked terribly unraveled, and both were gasping for breath, as if they had come back in a sprint.

“I canno’,” Catti-brie replied.

“Out, then, out!” Athrogate ordered. “Don’t ye get caught in this corner!”

“Caught by. .?” Penelope asked, and she was answered by a bellowing roar. It is not an easy thing to describe a sound as “evil,” but to the ten in the small room this rumbling, raspy, screeching combination of noise, all blended in one discordant note, surely seemed to be just that.

“Out! Out!” they all began shouting together, and they tumbled all over each other to get to the door. Before they had all even come through and out into the tunnel beyond, Catti-brie began her chant to the ancient magic of the fire primordial to close the secret doorway.

“Demons!” she heard Penelope gasp before the door even started coming down, but the woman wouldn’t stop now, determined that their enemies would not get into the special chamber beyond.

She heard the dwarves calling for formations, and was glad to hear Bruenor’s voice lifting above the others. If anything could get Bruenor Battlehammer out of his worrying malaise, it would be a good fight!

Finally, the door began its downward slide, and the woman spun around-and nearly lost all hope.

Demons indeed, she saw and heard, the ravenous beasts coming at the group from both directions in the long tunnel. She noted manes-so many of those disgusting lesser Abyssal creatures-leading the charge left and right, but mostly she noted the leaders of the beasts, a hulking glabrezu to her right, back the way they had come, and an even greater beast, massive and thick, with short wings beating crazily, but with no hope of lifting the tremendously fat demon from the floor. And others, too, scrambled for the fight: vulture-like creatures she knew to be vrocks, and thick and short beasts that looked like a rough carving of human, only with dwarf-like proportions and a huge head set upon broad shoulders that seemed to be conspicuously missing a neck.

“You stay with us,” she heard Penelope tell Emerus and Ragged Dain. Out to the left in front of the Felbarrans stood Athrogate and Ambergris, setting their feet and ready to brawl.

Out to the right, Bruenor and the Fellhammers similarly waited.

The demons came in an organized fashion, the disposable fodder, the manes, filtering to the front.

Catti-brie wasn’t waiting. She stamped her staff upon the ground, shouting “Syafa!” and the silvery wood turned black again, streaked with red, while the blue sapphire became a red sapphire.

“What in the world?” asked the surprised and clearly impressed Kipper, standing by Penelope and readying his own magic.

But Catti-brie wasn’t about to answer. She was deep into her spell then, and the red lines along the black staff began to glow more angrily, as if it was filled with fire that begged for release.

Indeed.

The demons came on in a rush, but Catti-brie struck first. She lifted her staff out to the right, launching a ball of flame out past Bruenor and the twins. Before that fireball had even landed, she swung the staff out the other way and sent a second ball flying off down the tunnel.

The first fireball exploded, and a blast of hot air swept down the tunnel to wash over the companions. The second exploded almost immediately following, and now the hot wind came from the other direction.

When the smoke cleared, far fewer manes were moving, most lying on the ground as smoking husks. The vrocks screeched in protest, the huge nalfeshnee beat its little smoking wings furiously, and the glabrezu drove in harder.

“I see the end of the line!” Penelope said to Kipper, who began tracing an outline in the air. “Keep in the midst of the five dwarves we’re leaving here, Catti-brie,” she instructed.

“And where are you going?” Catti-brie asked.

“Go!” Kipper shouted at Emerus and Ragged Dain, and he pushed them at the magical portal he had just constructed.

“I ain’t leavin’ me friends!” Emerus protested.

“Neither are we!” Penelope shouted. And she had to shout now. The battle had been joined on both ends of the line, Athrogate and Ambergris smashing the leading lesser demons, Bruenor and the Fellhammer sisters battling a pair of vrocks.

Kipper went into the portal and seemed to step into the same tunnel, but far afield, behind the demons to Catti-brie’s left.

“Well, go!” Penelope said emphatically, and Ragged Dain leaped into the gate, Emerus close behind.

“Hold the line and we’ll thin that group in short order,” Penelope said with a wink to Catti-brie. She leaned over and kissed Catti-brie on the cheek then, smiling widely, evidently enjoying it all-and indeed, hadn’t she professed to Wulfgar her adventurous side? With a battle cry that would make a Battlehammer proud, Penelope leaped into the portal and disappeared.

Catti-brie started to call to the five dwarves still around her to tighten up their ranks, but she thought the better of it, realizing that this crew, deep into their fighting now, probably wouldn’t even hear her.

She did yell out anyway, a simple warning of “Light!” and called out “Alfara!” and stamped her staff, which reverted to its silver-gray hue with the blue sapphire. She launched into a quick spell and held the staff aloft, using it as a focus for her magical energies. Once more blue mist wafted out of her sleeves, this time from the right arm, from the spellscar of the unicorn of Mielikki.

And from that magic, Catti-brie brought forth a light, brilliant and warm and full of comfort to her allies, and full of stinging, unwanted pain for the beasts of the lower planes.

Catti-brie stayed halfway between the dwarf lines, looking left and right, ready to cast a spell of healing through the conduit of her magical staff.

The mist from her left sleeve, the symbol of Mystra, began to curl, too, the woman eager to set loose some more destructive arcane magic.

“Trust him,” Penelope told Emerus and Ragged Dain. “Kipper knows this spell better than any alive, I expect!”

The dwarves shook their hairy heads doubtfully. Kipper had asked them to stand five feet back from a wall, a bend in the corridor, and face it, though the demons were back the other way.“They’ve taken notice!” Kipper said. “And here they come!”

Emerus glanced back over his shoulder to see one of the human-height demons, thick as any dwarf, rambling down at them, vulture-like beasts close behind and others pressing in from behind. Emerus’s expression twisted when the hallway seemed to shimmer, and the huge dwarf-like creature disappeared.

And reappeared immediately, stepping through Kipper’s newest gate and exiting right in front of Emerus and Ragged Dain, but not facing them. It was clearly disoriented, stumbling away from them.

“Ho!” Ragged Dain yelped in surprise when the thick-limbed beast appeared right in front of him. He managed to strike out at it and clip it just a bit-and he almost pursued, as did Emerus, but Penelope had told them not to travel farther down the corridor for any reason.

They both came to understand why, as the vulture beast charged through the gate to crash into the turning beast, stopping it short, and now both dwarves got in clean hits. More demons piled through, disoriented, looking the wrong way, crashing into those who had come through before.

The dwarves just kept swinging, their weapons smacking against demon skin and cracking demon bones.

A streak of lightning cut between the dwarves, slicing into the tumbled mob. Behind Penelope, the dwarves heard Kipper laughing.

They just kept swinging.

Hot flames blew back their beards as Penelope’s fireball landed in the midst of the confused and tangled mass of demons, and that only spurred the two Felbarran dwarves on more, their weapons, wet with blood and gore, whacking away with abandon.

Back by the main fight, Athrogate and Ambergris didn’t notice the trailing ranks of the demon mob turning back. Many of the little ones were already dead from Catti-brie’s fireball, but of the ones that remained, many were huge beasts, including one behemoth nalfeshnee that seemed more angry than injured.

“Ah, but I’m saving a fun trick for that one,” Athrogate remarked, and across came a morningstar to intercept, turn aside, and crack open the sharp beak of a vrock. The battered creature tried to fall over him, its leathery wings crowned out wide, but Athrogate’s second weapon was already spinning in and those open wings presented him with a most wonderful target.

The vrock’s screech came out as a breathless gasp as Cracker’s heavy ball crushed its ribs, and as the beast lurched, Ambergris stabbed her huge mace, Skullcracker, straight out, driving back the manes ambling toward her, and whipped it across to smack the vrock in the side of its head just at the same moment that Athrogate’s Whacker came back in on the other side.

The vrock’s thick skull could not resist the press of those two weapons coming together with such force and coordination. The sound of bone snapping echoed off the tunnel walls.

The vrock fell straight down over Athrogate, or would have if the dwarf was not possessed of giant strength. He dropped his weapons and caught the falling creature and sent it flying back into the next demons in line.

The dwarf squatted fast and scooped up his devastating morningstars. He meant to grab them and burst ahead to pummel the demons, but Ambergris tackled him before he ever really started. And a good thing she did. A wall of fire appeared right in front of Athrogate, lining the left-hand wall of the tunnel and running down almost to where Penelope and the others had gone. Flames leaped out from the conflagration, filling the corridor, and terrible shrieks came from within the roiling flames as demon flesh curled.

Athrogate and Ambergris had to fall back a couple of steps, almost to Catti-brie, who stood with her staff upraised, the gem glowing an angry red, reflecting in her eyes. She seemed a part of the weapon and it a part of her, one being bathed in communal magic, controlling the flames, bringing forth the flames, reveling in the cleansing fires.

“Girl,” Athrogate breathed, hardly believing the strength of the wall. Catti-brie didn’t blink, her focus pure. She was drawing straight from the primordial then, her own arcane magical powers enhanced greatly by her kinship with the preternatural godlike creature, and by the powerful weapon it had helped her to fashion.

“Guessin’ our work is done,” Ambergris said, shaking her head with similar disbelief.

Even as she spoke, though, the giant nalfeshnee strode out of the flames and roared.

“Guessin’ not,” Athrogate said, and with a wink at his girl, he launched himself at the behemoth.

He swatted the giant demon with a swinging morningstar, and it grunted as it swatted him with its own club, a black, metallic, evil-looking thing. The weight of the blow threw Athrogate against the right-hand wall.

Right behind the departing Athrogate came Ambergris, though, Skullcracker smashing against the nalfeshnee’s forearm before it could pull back.

Another grunt escaped the beast and it charged forward, kicking out, and Ambergris had to throw herself backward so that she wasn’t launched halfway up the tunnel.

The demon paid Athrogate no more heed as it continued for the woman, apparently figuring Athrogate to be crumbling against the stone.

It wasn’t the first monstrous enemy to underestimate this particular dwarf.

Athrogate came out from the wall swinging, and now with one of his weapon heads coated in liquid. He struck with his other flail once and again, forcing the behemoth to turn toward him, and as soon as it did, around came the coated ball, squarely into the demon’s knee.

The oil of impact exploded on contact.

The nalfeshnee’s knee exploded on contact.

How the demon howled!

And now the dwarves struck wildly, in perfect harmony, Ambergris cracking the beast on the other hip, Athrogate’s morningstars spinning in a blur and whacking the demon wherever the furious dwarf found an opening.

At one point, the demon bent over and swept its heavy club around in a wide and low sidelong sweep, cleverly trying to drive Athrogate farther down the corridor and into the still-burning wall of fire.

But Athrogate, recognizing the deadly aim, caught the club with a great “Oof!” and held it at bay, stubbornly, mightily, holding his ground.

The behemoth pressed on, and the dwarf, for all his strength, found his feet sliding on the blood- and brain-slickened floor.

“Girl!” he cried.

He needn’t have bothered. The demon was so focused on Athrogate that it remained in its crouch, bent low and over, hands engaged.

Whether or not Athrogate had called out, Ambergris wasn’t about to let that beautifully presented target go to waste. She ran back up the hall several steps, turned, and charged, leaping high, Skullcracker up and over her head. The huge mace came over as she descended.

The demon looked back just in time to see the weapon’s descent.

That blow would have shattered the skull of a hill giant. It did drive the demon to one knee, staggering it, but only temporarily.

Long enough for Athrogate to press back against the shoving weapon, though, even to wrench it from the demon’s grasp.

The nalfeshnee started to rise, but Skullcracker hit it on the head again. Stubbornly, the beast growled through the blow and tried again, but now came Athrogate’s morningstars, one after another.

And the nalfeshnee was dazed again, and now the dwarves were climbing all over it, striking and leaping, climbing and striking again and again, battering the beast with an incessant rain of heavy blows, any of which would have felled an ogre.

Soon enough, the demon spent less time trying to stand up to its full height than in trying to grasp at the troublesome dwarves.

But it couldn’t catch up to them, in their coordinated fury, and anytime the beast got near to grabbing Athrogate, Ambergris changed its mind with a crushing blow from Skullcracker. And anytime it got near to grabbing Ambergris, Athrogate introduced its ugly face to Cracker and Whacker yet again.

Demon blood and ichor splattered the floor all about the hunched creature, and that only spurred on the ferocious dwarves.

By the time they had finished-and that only when Catti-brie cried out in horror-the creature hardly resembled a nalfeshnee demon, seeming more like a mound of boneless jelly.

“Break!” Bruenor yelled and the Fellhammer sisters caught each other by the wrists and whipped about left and right, each flinging the other aside. And through that gap leaped Bruenor, and through the vrock’s outstretched arms, as well, as the confused creature grabbed at the two fleeing dwarves it had been fighting.

Inside its defenses, Bruenor had one clear attack, and he struck true and struck hard, his powerful axe burying deeply into the vulture demon’s chest.

Its screech came out as a blood-filled gasp, and the destroyed vrock fell away. Another took its place, coming at Bruenor but catching a faceful of Mallabritches instead, the furious dwarf leaping high and battering it with her fine sword.

Across the way, Tannabritches dispatched a manes with a stab and a twist, then flung herself across in front of Bruenor just as Mallabritches landed on her feet and leaped at the vrock again. The creature was more ready for her this time-or would have been, except that Tannabritches barreled into the back of its legs just as Mallabritches hit.

Over went the demon and over went Mallabritches atop it, living up to her nickname of Fury as she continued her assault, using an offense of pure fury to keep the demon from beginning to counter.

Bruenor turned to follow the tumbling duo, but stopped short and set himself in a defensive crouch. The glabrezu rushed in, pincers leading. Bruenor called to Tannabritches, but too late-she was well on her way to leaping upon the downed vrock. Into the air she flew, and from the air she was plucked by the powerful glabrezu.

“No!” Bruenor roared, leaping forward, axe swinging for the pincer arm that had caught his dear friend Fist. He scored a clean and deep hit, but on the demon’s chest and not its arm.

He brought his shield up as the demon’s left hook pounded home, the balled fist hitting Bruenor’s buckler with the force he would expect from a mountain giant.

The blow sent him skidding, his feet churning to send him back the other way.

His progress halted when the demon’s free pincer caught him by the shield and began to tug him all around, his feet flying off the floor. He was in trouble, off-balance and seemingly overmatched.

Then Tannabritches cried out in pain as the pincer closed around her waist.

“No!”

Bruenor’s roar came from somewhere inside of him, came from a place of utter denial and utter outrage. He felt the dwarf gods then, as he had on the ledge on that long-ago day when he had battled a pit fiend in the primordial chamber.

The pincer yanked Bruenor’s shield arm out to the left, opening his defenses, and a heavy punch came in right behind it, hitting him squarely in the face. His head snapped back from the devastating blow.

But he accepted it and countered cleanly, turning, his axe chopping across his body to hit the forearm of the pincer limb grasping his shield.

The shield was freed, the pincer fell free to the floor.

Tannabritches screamed in pain, the remaining pincer arm digging at her waist.

A lightning bolt from Catti-brie flashed above Bruenor, striking the glabrezu and sending it staggering back-not fast enough to evade the howling Bruenor, though, the dwarf charging in.

Again the glabrezu punched at him, this time striking the shield once more. But this time, the weight of the blow did not halt the dwarf or move him backward. The strength of Clangeddin flowed through him now as he swelled with rage and terror for poor Tannabritches.

The demon threw Tannabritches at him and he instinctively ducked, then winced as he realized the truth of the missile. With a roar of denial, he crashed into the glabrezu and sent his axe spinning forward and up, then right back over his shoulder.

The pincer snapped down at him, catching only shield, and the axe came around and up, right between the demon’s legs and into its crotch, driving the beast up high on its clawed toes.

Bruenor bore in, cursing it, bashing it. He stopped and sent his axe across, chopping the inside of the glabrezu’s right knee. He reversed his swing, spinning the axe in his hand as he went and bringing the weapon back across to strike at the left knee, but now with the weapon’s head farther back, behind the leg.

The glabrezu was still backing, but Bruenor went the other way, tugging powerfully, the axe-head catching behind the demon’s knee and twisting it off balance.

Bruenor came back in again, behind a second lightning bolt cast by Catti-brie, crashing into the demon and sending it tumbling backward to the floor.

Bruenor also fell, face first, and fell hard. His nose bleeding and broken, Bruenor just kept on charging, using his axe as an ice-climber might use a pick, repeatedly chopping it into the demon and tugging himself forward.

By the time the axe descended into the demon’s chest, the glabrezu was no longer defending, and by the time the next swing came down on the creature’s canine face, the husk was already beginning to smoke and disintegrate, the destroyed thing melting back to the Abyss.

Hot winds buffeted Bruenor as he tore his axe free, scrambled up to his knees, and lifted the axe in both hands up above his head to hit the thing again. For a moment, the dwarf thought another demon had come.

But no, it was instead another devastating fireball from Catti-brie, filling the corridor farther along, melting the next group of demons and opening the way to where the tunnel wall neared the inner complex, the place where Kipper’s passwall had brought them through: the way home.

But Bruenor couldn’t think of that then. He drove his axe down on the already destroyed demon, and used the leverage of the embedded weapon to help him hop back up to his feet. He ripped the axe free with a sickening sound as he leaped around, calling out to Catti-brie to call the goddess to Tannabritches’s side.

His words stuck in his throat as the scene in front of him took shape.

Mallabritches cradled her fallen sister in her arms tenderly. The blue mist already swirled around Catti-brie’s right arm as she reached for healing spells for the fallen dwarf. Farther along the corridor, Athrogate and Ambergris had turned sidelong, waving at Emerus, Ragged Dain, and the Harpells to hurry along.

Other than the footfalls and Mallabritches’s sobs, the tunnel was silent once more, and Bruenor knew that Comragh na Tochlahd, the Battle of the Mines, had ended.

Looking at Tannabritches, though, at sweet Fury, a teary-eyed Bruenor couldn’t rightly declare victory.