Fate of Thorbardin

PARTI
ONE

The horax hissed, its segmented body rearing high above the cavern floor as the arachnoid perched upon six rear legs. An equal number of forelegs thrashed menacingly, striking with hooked talons toward the monster’s tormentors. Two multifaceted eyes bulged from its melon-sized head, cold and dispassionate even as they reflected the light of several flaring torches. A pair of wicked mandibles thrashed before the monster’s mouth, wickedly cutting back and forth, slashing with enough strength to slice a man-or a dwarf-in two.

Three heavily armored dwarves advanced on the horax, shoulder to shoulder, protected by long, steel shields extending from floor to nose. Each fighter was further armored in plate mail, and each wore a simple steel cap that covered his scalp, ears, and forehead, with an additional flap jutting down to guard the nose. Three pairs of cold, calculating eyes studied the monster over the tops of the shields until, in unison, a trio of sharpened spikes thrust forward, piercing the monster at the juncture of its grotesque head and the first segment of its armored body. Thrashing wildly, the horax twisted away, easily sliding free of the unbarbed tips, but by the time it dropped to the cavern floor, it was dead.

“Excellent strike, men,” proclaimed Sergeant Tankard Hacksaw, stepping up behind the trio. His heavy hand came down to clap each of the dwarves, one after the other, on the shoulder, a blow that sent the young soldiers to staggering. Yet each seemed to swell, visibly warmed by the grizzled sergeant’s praise.

“And good drilling, Tank,” said Brandon Bluestone, coming down the narrow cavern behind the small company. “You’ve got them fighting like they’re guided by one brain.”

“They are, Captain,” Hacksaw said with a hearty chuckle. “It’s my brain!”

The two dwarves stood for a moment, catching their breath, studying the broken, bleeding monster before them. Though each was a bearded dwarf girded for war, they were a study in contrasts. Brandon was tall, open-faced, and handsome, with flowing brown hair and a broad, if slightly cruel, smile. He carried a mighty battle-axe in his right hand; his grip was a foot below the head of the weapon for perfect balance.

Tankard, on the other hand, was short, and almost was wide as he was tall. His hair and beard were black, shot through with gray, and he grinned with the sheer joy of a warrior who loves to fight. His captain’s praise only made him smile all the more broadly.

But the jocularity was short-lived as Tankard stared over the shoulders of his men into the unseen depths of the winding tunnel. “How goes it with Morewood and the Second Company?” he asked.

“They’re making good progress too,” Brandon replied. “A little slower than you-they’ve passed a lot of side alcoves, and every one of ’em had a couple of horax lurking. It’s the standard ambush tactic; they don’t seem to realize that we’ve caught on to them. But we’re closing in on the hive from both directions.”

Captain Bluestone’s tone was grim, purposeful. He had stalked those deep tunnels only a few months earlier, alone and terrified, desperate to rescue his beloved Gretchan Pax from the webbing of a horax tangler. He had found her, and more, but with the blessing of Reorx, they had escaped with their lives, pursued by a hissing, clacking horde of the monstrous arachnoids. Now he had returned with a small army of his fellows, and it was his determined intention that it would be the horax who would be fleeing-those that were fortunate enough to survive the onslaught of dwarves.

“What about the Firespitter?” Tankard Hacksaw asked bluntly. The weapon was a new invention, and none of them knew how well it would work. It was large and ungainly, an iron tank that rolled forward on four small wheels, with a furnace under the nozzle and a large, insulated tank of oil forming the main body of the device. It was certainly hard to move it through the underground caverns, but the veteran dwarves knew that the Firespitter might be decisive if it could be brought to bear against their insectoid enemies.

“The crew is having trouble with some of the bottlenecks in the cave; they’re having to do a lot of excavating in order to bring the thing up. So we might have to hold the line for a while before we can really burn the bastards out.”

“And how much farther until we get to the hive?”

Brandon shrugged. “I was running for my life the last time I came up from here, so I wasn’t paying much attention to landmarks. Still, I’d guess we’re within a mile of the queen’s nest.”

“Good. Oh, and Captain, these awlspikes are working just like advertised,” the sergeant noted, gesturing to the long, sharpened steel poles carried by each of the men.

“Good. I thought they would,” Brandon noted. “The barbed heads on a normal pike or spear get caught on the horax armor-too often the weapon gets pulled right out of a dwarf’s hands. But these sharpened tips come out as easy as they go in. Made to order for bug killing.”

“Let’s stop yapping and go kill us some bugs, then,” growled Tank.

“Move out,” Brandon agreed. He watched in satisfaction as Sergeant Hacksaw directed his formation forward. The trio of dwarves who formed the vanguard was trailed by a single file numbering more than two dozen comrades, and as the cavern widened, Tank ordered one after another of the reserves into the front rank. Five dwarves wide, with each soldier bearing a tall shield and long awlspike, the company proceeded deeper into the subterranean darkness underneath the nation of Kayolin.

The horax had long been a threat to that realm of dwarves, for they had dwelled in the deep caverns since the dawn of time. Ever hungry and uncaring of life, they hunted and killed whenever they could. In an age long past, the dwarves had erected walls to keep them from penetrating into Kayolin’s mines and delvings, but recent sabotage-sponsored, Brandon had discovered, by the dwarves’ former ruler himself-had allowed the horrific species to surge anew. It was the mission of their two-pronged offensive, commanded by Brandon and closing in on the horax hive from opposite directions, to end the threat once and for all.

They passed a narrow cavern branching off to one side, and before Brandon could remind him, Hacksaw took note of the danger, posting two dwarves to guard against a sudden flank attack. Several more stood in reserve of that pair while the main shield wall moved on. Brandon hung back momentarily to scan the secondary route.

The giant insects had shown a surprising grasp of tactics, including diversion and ambush, but in the bloody month of the campaign to date, the dwarves had grown versed in the horax style of battle. Thus, Brand was not surprised to see movement in the side cavern, even though the enemy gave off no sound to reveal its presence. He knew that augured a possible sudden attack, but he expected his dwarves would have to face only a few of the bug-monsters in the flank assault.

True to his expectations, four horax materialized quickly but in utter silence, rushing from the twisting cavern with antennae quivering and mandibles spread wide, eager to crush dwarf flesh. Their hooked, taloned feet allowed them to cling to nearly smooth surfaces of stone, and so two of them charged along the walls and one advanced, upside down, clinging to the ceiling of the cave.

But the dwarves were prepared, and the giant insects clashed hard against the shields, jarring one of the dwarves back a step but unable to strike a vulnerable limb. Instead, it was the dwarves who drew blood, each of the two driving his sharpened steel spike into the head of an attacking horax.

The monsters exploded into noise, smashing mandibles in forceful snaps, hissing in the shrill wail that reminded Brandon of crickets-very, very large crickets-on a hot summer’s night. The dwarves grunted and cursed, driving forward, lunging repeatedly with their awlspikes. Their comrades moved up behind, ready to help, but the pair in the first rank prevailed, striking again and again until all four horax were slain, their segmented bodies lying still in spreading pools of dark ichor.

As soon as that threat was neutralized, the dwarves advanced behind the first rank. The two who had just won the skirmish moved to the back of the file, replaced by a pair of well-rested warriors. The whole company continued to push deeper into the cavern.

The corridor expanded into a large, oval chamber, and the lead dwarves stepped to the sides, allowing their trailing comrades to merge into the first line. With drilled precision, the company quickly formed a semicircular front of shields and spikes, a dozen dwarves strong. The right shoulder of the rightmost dwarf touched the chamber wall, a position mirrored by the warrior on the left. From behind the rank, Brandon studied the large space, discerning three passages leading deeper under the mountain on the sides and far wall of the chamber.

Tankard, in the middle of the shield wall, glanced over his shoulder, and Brandon held up a hand with the silent order: Wait. For more than a minute, the dwarves did just that, watchful and alert, making no sound beyond the slight rasp of steady respiration.

The first warning was a faint hiss, like a rush of water in the distance, muffled by foliage. There was no clear source for the sound; it seemed to come from everywhere at once. It swelled gradually, then defined itself into a series of clicks and scrapes and scratches, the individual footfalls of many, many twelve-legged horax.

The creatures spilled into the large chamber from all three tunnels, sweeping forward with eyes bulging and mandibles snapping. The first horax reared upward, striking at the dwarves, punching hard against their heavy shields. The dwarves stabbed away, eliciting hisses and shrieks from the stricken monsters. Several arachnoids tumbled over, oozing ichor from the punctures, but others immediately crowded forward to take the places of the wounded.

“Look left!” shouted Brandon, spotting an unusual, red-colored horax rearing up high behind the first wave. “A tangler!”

Even as he shouted the warning, the crimson horax spit a stream of webbing from the grotesque bulge under its head. The sticky strands spattered across three adjacent shields, and the tangler pulled back. Two of the trio of dwarves stood firm, but the one in the middle, whose shield was almost completely covered by the web, lurched forward, pulled off balance by the monster’s gooey strands.

The fighter let go of his shield but was too late to keep his footing. He tumbled onto his face, and a horax immediately struck at the nape of his neck. One mandible sliced into his flesh while the other bounced off the shoulder plate of his steel armor. Another of the monsters plunged in, seeking to finish the stricken dwarf.

Brandon leaped forward, straddling his felled soldier and driving the Bluestone Axe down in a powerful blow. The keen edge of his beloved blade split the head of the second horax, killing it instantly. Whipping his weapon to the side, Brandon slashed the neck of the next horax. By that time, several of his men had grabbed the fallen dwarf’s ankles and pulled him back behind the safety of the shield wall. The injured warrior groaned, leaving a trail of blood across the floor, and a young cleric immediately knelt to tend to his wound.

The tangler shot a stream of webbing directly at Brandon, but by then his men were set for action. Several held lit torches, standing behind their captain. They waved the sticks in the air, the flames surging, and when the gooey strands came near they touched the brands to the flammable web. Immediately the fire flared along the tangler’s web, and the crimson monster had to recoil-too slowly, as the flames burned up to the horax’s neck and set the segmented creature ablaze. It writhed and shrieked, and its fellow arachnoids quickly skittered away from the dying tangler.

The surviving horax still swarmed in the cavern, climbing up the walls, scrambling across the ceiling. The dwarves stabbed at every clicking head that approached, aiming for the eyes of the creatures. The long awlspikes reached as high as the cavern ceiling, and when a horax tried to approach from above, one or two stabs was usually enough to dislodge it and send it tumbling onto the backs of its fellows down below.

For several long, tense minutes, the terrible fight raged. The horax, as usual, proved to be utterly fearless as they hurled themselves against the wall of steel. Attacking with coordination, employing feints and deception and concentrations of force, they smashed again and again against the dwarf defense. But the Kayolin fighters never wavered, nor did they break ranks or yield to the lure of advancing incautiously when the horax pulled back from the center of the line, presenting an inviting gap that would have quickly exposed charging dwarves to fatal attack from three sides.

Another dwarf fell, his leg badly gashed by a monster’s bite when the shield wall wavered slightly. That gap, too, was plugged immediately and the wounded warrior eased back for treatment that quickly stanched the flow of blood from his severed artery. All the while the dead horax piled up in droves in front of the dwarves, until the mound of segmented, hard-shelled bodies rose higher than the soldiers’ heads.

Finally, the last of the monsters in the cavern was slain. Still Brandon’s men held their formation, watching and listening and waiting to see if another wave of attackers came up. Only when the captain gave the signal to advance did they make their next move, clearing a path through the pile of bodies and cautiously shifting to the far side of the cavern.

“Take the center passage,” Brandon ordered, remembering that place from his earlier ordeal. “It won’t be long now.”

Once again the first rank pressed down the tunnel, which was wide enough for five dwarves to march abreast. A quintet came from the back of the file; they were fresh soldiers ready to take the brunt, giving comrades exhausted from the skirmish a chance to catch their breath in the rear of the formation. They advanced steadily but quickly, with Brandon and all of the others sensing the nearness of their objective.

Then it loomed before them: a widening of the cavern, and a huge, arched entryway leading into a vast, shadowy chamber behind. Perhaps it was the fetid smell or the moist, cloying air, but suddenly Brandon knew that they were looking at the heart of the hive and that, within that cave, the bloated queen sat high upon her mound of white, oval eggs.

“Tighten yer straps, men,” Tankard Hacksaw growled, buckling his own helmet on more securely.

The awlspikes came up, and the line of dwarves headed out. Brandon clapped his sergeant on the shoulder, leaving him in command of the main attack while he jogged back to the nearest connecting corridor, where he had left a team of couriers.

“Any word about the Firespitter? Or anything from Sergeant Morewood?” he asked the first dwarf he met.

“Aye, Captain,” came the reply. “He’s got the machine through the last bottleneck. His men met some bugs, a good nest of them, in the cave, and he’s been busy pushing them out of the way. He hopes to be in position before too long.”

“Good. Send word; tell him the main attack is starting. I need that Firespitter as soon as he can bring it up!”

“Yes, sir!” The courier dwarf, wearing supple leather armor instead of the heavy metal of the combat troops, was off at a sprint even as he finished his salute. As satisfied as he could be, considering that half his troops had yet to reach the battlefield, Brandon turned back toward the hive. The cave widened there, and his nostrils filled with the stink of moist earth and the rancidness of the nearby egg chamber.

Already the infantry was advancing against a seething mass of horax, the bugs hissing and clacking and rearing across the whole of the wide cavern leading into the egg chamber. Some of the bugs were scrambling up the walls, while tanglers in the back spit their sticky strands of webs.

As always, it was the front rank of dwarves, the shield wall, that met the enemy in closest, most dangerous combat. There, in the larger space, the Kayolin troops could better expend their full arsenal of tactics. Ranks of archers carried heavy crossbows. They stood behind the shield wall and fired their deadly missiles against the bugs that attempted to climb above the armored attackers. The crossbow quarrels were not as lethal as the awlspikes, but when several of the bolts struck a single horax, the monster twitched and spasmed and lost its grip on the rough stone wall. A strike in the middle of the head was often enough to kill one of the creatures outright.

Other dwarves wielded torches, and the flames surged and flared behind the front line. Whenever a tangler’s web spewed forth, the torch-bearers raced to the spot and quickly burned away the highly flammable strands. Still more Kayolin warriors stood ready with small kegs of water and used the liquid to douse the flames that threatened to sear their comrades’ flesh. The webs, meanwhile, burned furiously, sizzling like fuses as the flames hissed and crackled their way back to the tanglers themselves. Sometimes the red-shelled bugs managed to break free from the webs before the flames ignited their web glands, but in other instances, the tanglers erupted into churning, oily fireballs that incinerated not only the web-spewing horax, but also those of their fellow arachnoids unfortunate enough to be nearby.

Brandon scrambled up to the top of a flat boulder behind the front rank of Kayolin dwarves. From that vantage, he observed the melee and determined that Sergeant Hacksaw was handling his company skillfully. When the horax pressed on the left, pushing a bulge into the shield wall, Tankard dispatched a dozen dwarves from the reserve. They pushed back, stabbing and killing the arachnoids that threatened to break through, then shoved alongside their comrades until the company was once more secure.

They continued to advance steadily until, behind the fight, Brandon saw the mountain of eggs, pale white spheres as big as a dwarf’s torso, the whole pile looming nearly to the top of the massive cavern. At the very summit sat the queen, hideous and bloated, staring about with her massive, multifaceted eyes. She rose up on her thick, segmented legs, though the vast swell of her abdomen still rested atop the pile. She herself was no threat as a fighter, yet when she spread her mandibles and uttered a keening shriek, the teeming horde of her soldiers were spurred to charge with added intensity.

Over the queen’s head was a shadowy hole in the ceiling of the cavern, and Brandon’s eyes kept flashing to that aperture. Up there was the tunnel from which he had rescued Gretchan. He waited for some sign of movement there.

For some time the battle raged without clear advantage. The dwarves pressed, and the horax swarmed, the line moving a few feet forward or back in different places. More of the Kayolin warriors fell, gashed or sliced by a hooked claw or scything mandible, and the wounded were pulled back and, often enough, salved and saved, while more and more reinforcements from the dwindling reserve rushed forth to join the fray.

Finally, Brandon heard an extra-piercing shriek from the queen. She reared up on top of her mound of eggs, forelegs slashing toward the hole in the ceiling over her head. The nozzle of a great iron machine appeared there, as if on cue, and before the queen could strike at it, a stream of liquid shot downward, showering the bloated horax and spilling down the mountain of hideous eggs.

In the next instant, that stream of shimmering liquid-Brandon knew it was lantern oil-erupted into flames. The Firespitter had arrived!

A dazzling blossom of fire surged down the surface of the egg pile, engulfing the queen and spuming in the middle of the cavern into a searing ball of fire. The heat swept outward immediately, followed by a cloud of thick, black smoke.

“Fall back!” shouted Brandon, his voice a bellow that rose above even the thunderous chaos in the big cavern. Oil continued to spill onto and coat the eggs, reaching all the way to the floor and spreading outward in a burning slick. The eggs crackled and sizzled, bursting open as the pile shriveled and contracted. The horax nearest the flames shrieked and fled, propelled by instinctive terror that, as often as not, caused them to impale themselves upon the waiting awlspikes.

Brandon knew that Fister Morewood’s company, the operators of the Firespitter, wore gauze masks as some protection against the choking smoke. Even so, they would be falling back as well, after leaving the machine engaged so it continued to trickle flammable oil onto the inferno raging below. The fire grew hotter and larger, billowing outward, carrying the sickening stench of burned bugs with the soot and the grit of the oil smoke.

Brandon and Tankard’s dwarves, down on the floor, were forced to retreat in the face of the billowing smoke, but even so they coughed and gagged as the air grew thick. Finally they withdrew in a sprint, leaving the depths of the hive to burn, cook, and die. Even in the intense heat, the withdrawal was orderly, however, with each of the wounded aided by a pair of companions and a steadfast rearguard, eyes tearing against the acrid smoke, edging carefully backward, awlspikes raised, shields ready to block any last, desperate attack that might emerge from the egg chamber.

And with the eggs died the queen and her warriors, until the threat of the horax, ever a scourge of Kayolin, became a charred footnote in the history of dwarf war.