Night of the Hunter

CHAPTER 22

" We have killed a score and captured a dozen,” Tiago lamented.

“They are not easily taken alive,” Ravel Xorlarrin replied. “Our poison hardly slows them and they will fight even when grievously wounded. Foul dwarves.”

“We came for slaves, but find corpses instead!” Tiago fumed.

“We came for Drizzt,” Ravel reminded him.

“Who is likely long gone now that word has passed ahead.”

The wizard gave a little laugh and Tiago glared at him murderously.

“Drizzt Do’Urden would not flee, by any accounts of his reputation,” Ravel wisely explained, easing the sudden tension a bit. “Nay, he is up there with the dwarf leader, this Stokely creature, whose name is the last word uttered by the dwarves as they fall.”

Ravel wisely left off the rest of his thought: that Drizzt had not been here since long before the attack. He had interrogated a few of the dwarf prisoners and as far as he could tell, they were not lying when they had divulged the news of Drizzt’s departure. But Tiago didn’t need to know that little tidbit, he thought, for without the coveted prize, the impulsive young Baenre would likely call off the attack and head back for Q’Xorlarrin.

That would not be a good choice, Ravel believed. They had lost several drow and a drider, and Matron Zeerith would not be pleased with that price for the gain of a few slaves. Even more important, they had lost Jearth, the Weapons Master of House Xorlarrin, the head of the Xorlarrin garrison, and one of Zeerith’s favored minions.

If they returned now with this meager offering of slaves, Matron Zeerith would be outraged. She couldn’t fault or punish Tiago, of course, given his nobility and protectors. And since Saribel was now to be his wife and had been ordered to return with him to Menzoberranzan by Matron Mother Quenthel herself, Matron Zeerith likely wouldn’t exact any punishment upon Saribel, either. The only other targets upon whom Ravel could deflect the responsibility, Berellip and Yerrininae, had remained in Q’Xorlarrin.

That left Ravel to feel the weight of Matron Zeerith’s anger.

They, indeed he, needed more slaves and a greater victory to present to Matron Zeerith to overcome her inevitable anger over losing Jearth.

“We press on,” Ravel advised. “There is greater treasure to be found among the higher levels of this complex.”

“Treasure and slaves, let us hope,” Tiago started to say, but did not finish, for halfway through his sentence, the corridor began to shake and rumble, dust and stones falling from the ceiling. It became so violent that at one point, Ravel began casting a contingency spell to transport him far away. The shaking stopped before he cast the spell, though, and he and Tiago both understood that some other nearby tunnel had likely collapsed.

Side-by-side, Tiago on his subterranean lizard and Ravel on a created floating disc, the two nobles moved ahead to join up with their defensive line, but they were met after only a few steps by a frantic young drow female.

“The ceiling has fallen upon them!” she cried, pointing frantically to a side tunnel, and one with a cloud of dust and debris billowing out. “Oh, these devil dwarves!”

The noble drow picked up their pace and swept into the side tunnel, crossing just a short distance before coming to the intersection with a tunnel that ran parallel to the one in which they had been standing. Piles of rock blocked their way, and a swarm of dark elves and goblins dug at the stones frantically.

Ravel tapped Tiago on the shoulder and guided his glance across the way, to where a drider leg protruded from the collapsed mound, twitching in the crushed creature’s death throes.

“How many?” Tiago yelled at the dark elves scrambling around the rubble.

“Several at least, Lord Baenre,” one answered.

“A trio of driders,” another added.

“And a host of goblin fodder,” said a third from far across the way.

“Rigged to collapse,” Ravel remarked. “This is a formidable enemy, and they know we’ve come now. We will battle for every room and corridor.”

“No,” Tiago replied. “Find a way. You and your mages. Find a way. We must be done with this, and quickly.”

Ravel started to argue, but remembered his own predicament here and knew that Tiago’s advice was doubly important for his own standing, and perhaps for his own health. He went to confer with the wizards he had brought along on this expedition.

Within an hour, a dozen magical constructs, disembodied giant eyeballs, floated along the corridors of the dwarven complex, as the drow mages took a full reconnoiter of the complex.

They had come in here without proper respect for the dwarves’ resilience and readiness, but they would not make that mistake again.

“Word’s out to Lonelywood,” a dwarf runner reported to Stokely Silverstream. “Her boats’re out, though, and it’ll be a bit to bring ’em back in.”

“Same with other lake towns,” another dwarf remarked.

“It’s all on Bryn Shander,” Stokely told them, and they nodded their agreement. Bryn Shander wasn’t built on the banks of any of the lakes and so her garrison was always at the ready. Still, it would be many hours before any sizable force of reinforcements could arrive.

“We’ll need to hold stronger, then hold strong some more when them Bryn Shander boys get here,” Stokely explained. “The boys from the lakes’ll be coming in later, and here’s hopin’ that them boys out in Easthaven can find a barbarian tribe or two to tow along for the fight.”

“Heigh-ho to that!” a dwarf cheered.

“Not takin’ much to convince a barbarian to fight, eh?” said another. “That’s why I’m liking them tall boys!”

Many fists began to pump at that proclamation, and Stokely even offered a nod of encouragement. The battle had started as a rout that morning, but the heroic run of Junky and the brave sacrifices of those dwarves who stood behind him and held back the drow line had given the dwarves a fighting chance.

These were Battlehammers, and to a dwarf they had seen years of combat. Construction of the bulk of the tunnels of the complex had been overseen by King Bruenor himself, along with his most trusted and veteran shield dwarves, and so had been built for defense above all else.

The drow had come on quickly, but Stokely’s boys had been ready to meet that charge, and more important, Stokely’s tunnels had been ready to drop in the face of that advance.

“We keep ’em locked down below and we’ll turn ’em back, don’t ye doubt,” he told the dwarves around him.

“Aye, and might that we then chase ’em back, all the way to Gauntlgrym!” said another. “Huzzah!”

“Huzzah!” cheered the others, and Stokely nodded.

And then five of the dwarves near the wall to Stokely’s left fell away suddenly, as the floor beneath their feet simply vanished.

And the wall across the room disappeared and huge javelins came flying into the gathering, and huge driders charged in behind the volley, a horde of goblins close behind.

“Breach!” Stokely and several others all cried out together, and the dwarves began to scramble, forming defensive lines. The room’s conventional doors banged open and more Battlehammers charged into the fray.

The audience chamber’s walls echoed with the cries of battle, the ring of metal on metal.

Stokely ran to the unexpected pit and slid down to his knees beside its edge, other dwarves joining him, including several with ropes and grapnels. The sheer walls-so sheer and smooth it was as if the stone had simply vanished-fell away for more than twenty feet, to a lower tunnel running beneath the audience chamber, and there lay the broken dwarves, two looking dead, two crawling, and one pulling himself back to his feet, having survived the fall.

Stokely started to call down to him, but the poor fellow began to jerk this way and that, and it took a moment for Stokely to register that the dwarf was being hit with missiles, hand crossbow bolts, likely.

A brilliant flash of sizzling light defeated Stokely’s next attempt to call out, as a lightning bolt stole the darkness. And when it passed, only one dwarf was still trying to crawl, and none were standing.

Over went the ropes, dwarves leaping onto them to rappel down to their kin. Stokely, too, took a rope in hand.

“No, no!” cried another dwarf, a priestess named Brimble who was one of Stokely’s most trusted advisers. Stokely paused and looked to her for an explanation, while others began their descent.

“It is a magical passwall!” Brimble cried. “They can dispel-”

Before she even finished, Stokely felt the weight of the rope disappear, and as he stumbled back a step, overbalanced by the suddenly diminished weight. He looked to the pit that wasn’t a pit any longer, but simply the floor, as it had been.

And dwarves had started down there!

Several of those brave dwarves lay on the floor now right near to Stokely, having been ejected from the tunnel that was not a tunnel.

“Where’s McGrits? He was on the rope ahead o’ me!” one cried, leaping up to his feet, and two others expressed similar concerns for dwarves ahead on their respective ropes, as well.

“In the tunnel below, then,” Brimble replied.

Stokely threw down his rope and drew out his battle-axe from over his shoulder. “Plenty to hit here, then!” he cried, and led the charge into the side of the drider-goblin line.

More dwarves poured in from the side tunnels.

But so, too, came the drow, and the dwarves hacking through the goblin ranks soon found more formidable foes, quicker and more deadly, and far more skilled with the blade.

The advance bogged down, the lines dissipated, and the room became a tumble of confusion, with battles in every corner.

“A blade wins a duel, but magic wins a battle,” Ravel said to Tiago as they neared the battle.

“How long will our tunnel remain?” Tiago asked.

“The better part of the night, unless we choose to remove it,” the confident mage replied.

No sooner had the words left his mouth, though, than the last expanse of that magically created tunnel became stone once more, and in the corridor not far from the two drow nobles, several other drow, ejected by the lapsing magic, pulled themselves to their feet.

Tiago turned a scowl on his companion.

“They have priests,” Ravel explained, and calmly, as if this was a not-unexpected complication. “To more conventional tunnels, then. We have scouted them extensively and will find our way.”

His calm was not persuasive, though, and Tiago continued to scowl as he swung his lizard mount around and waved for the others to follow him, and quickly.

Ravel called ahead to a pair of his fellow wizards, and they ran off, leading the way and motioning for the main drow contingent to follow. Ravel and his magical peers had indeed scouted the tunnels in this part of the dwarven complex and could make their way to the throne room through more conventional routes.

“We will get there,” the brash Xorlarrin wizard told Tiago. What he didn’t add, however, was that it would take some time-likely more time than those forces caught in the throne room could afford.

Tiago’s returning look, however, showed that he saw right through that phony confidence. A dozen drow, a handful of driders, and a few score of goblins had gotten into the throne room, the main dwarf stronghold, before the passwall tunnel had been dispelled. A powerful force by most standards, but they were up against the bulk of the fierce dwarves of the complex, and were without magical aid.

The young Baenre warrior was trained enough and seasoned enough to understand what they’d likely find when they reached that stronghold.

Tiago grimaced and cursed the clever dwarves when the ground rumbled in the distance, as more rigged tunnels collapsed.

The dozen-and-two goblins fleeing the battle, which had become a rout, almost made it out of the room. But as they finally breached the door, they found not an open corridor waiting for them but a quartet of grim-faced dwarves, holding firm in the narrow exit, two abreast and two deep.

The lead goblins hesitated, but their frantic kin pushed them ahead, and even when they were dead, one skull split by a battle-axe, the other crushed by a warhammer, those leading goblins remained upright, pinned between the crush of their desperate kin and the braced shields of the sturdy dwarves.

“Can’t hold ’em!” warned Tregor Hornbruck, a yellow-bearded shield dwarf in the front rank. He lowered his shoulder some more, and managed a weak swing of his heavy hammer, but had to retract it immediately to doubly brace the shield against the press. He was the largest and strongest dwarf under Kelvin’s Cairn, so those words struck an alarm indeed.

The corridor widened just beyond the door, and if the goblins got through that bottleneck, they’d swarm.

His companion beside him grunted, too strained to even articulate his concern.

To the surprise of Tregor and his struggling sidekick, the two in the second rank didn’t press in more tightly, but suddenly ran off.

“Hey, now!” Tregor roared at them, and the other dwarf grunted again.

A goblin spear propped in between the shields then, nicking Tregor’s shoulder, and the sting just made him set himself more firmly and push back with all his considerable strength.

“Back!” came the call behind him, and the two returned, and Tregor understood when black-shafted pole arms prodded out beside him, stabbing past the dead goblins to weaken the press behind.

“Well-thinked!” Tregor congratulated, for just back of their position stood some stone statues, and the artists had completed the sentry sculptures with actual pole arms, albeit of simple iron instead of prized mithral or adamantine.

Despite the desperate situation, Tregor couldn’t help but chuckle when the pole arm stabbed past him again and he noted a stone hand, broken off at the wrist, still grasping the iron shaft.

The goblins came on again, more furiously, and the shield dwarves began to slide once more, and the pair behind them stabbed with abandon, trying to break the press.

They could not, though, despite the goblin blood pooling on the floor, and for a brief moment, the four thought their position surely lost.

But then the press disappeared, and the four soon realized it to be the last desperate move of the fleeing goblins as Stokely and his boys caught up to them inside the room.

“Well fought,” Stokely congratulated when the last of the wretched goblins breathed its last.

Tregor looked past him into the throne room to note the carnage. It was hard to visually separate the bodies enough to determine where one torn corpse ended and the next began, so tight had been the fighting. Despite that chaos, the young warrior dwarf noted many of his kin among the piles of dead.

“The drow have gained this level, and own everything below it,” Brimble said, running up to Stokely.

“Where’re they coming up?” Stokely asked.

“East stair, but …” Brimble replied, and she ended there, and with a bit of a sigh, reminding Stokely of the pit that had appeared in the throne room. With their passwall spells and other magic, was there really a line of battle to be drawn?

Stokely looked to Tregor and his three companions, then glanced down the tunnel behind them, which led to the uppermost area of the complex and the outer door. “What word?” he asked hopefully.

“Bryn Shander’s hours away,” Tregor grimly reported. “If the folk’re even comin’, I mean.”

“Three hours o’ sunlight left,” Brimble reminded him, and in looking at her plaintive expression, both Stokely and Tregor understood her intent.

“Nah!” Tregor boomed, and those around him, catching on, began to shake their heads.

But Stokely Silverstream looked back into the throne room, where at least a score of his kin lay dead. And several more had fallen through the vanished floor, surely dead or captured. They had fought terrifically, by any measure, and the goblins lay dead by the dozen, and a few monstrous driders dominated the scene, upturned and with their ugly spider legs curled upward. And drow had died, but Stokely had seen those fights, and indeed had been in one of them.

It took two of his boys to kill every drow, it seemed, and even then, it would not be an easy fight.

“Call in every outpost, gather ’em all!” he called out to all around. “We’ll make for the daylight in the dale, and them damned drow won’t follow!”

Not a dwarf moved, but many sets of disappointed eyes stared back at him. He had just called for them to abandon their home, something no dwarf was ever wont to do.

“We’ll be back!” Stokely promised. “And we’ll have the garrisons of the towns and a horde o’ barbarians aside us! Don’t ye doubt!”

Several dwarves began to nod.

“Now get ye going!” Stokely ordered, and that broke the trance, and all began to scramble.

But then the darkness came, blinding them all, and even the lightning bolts sizzling through the magical blackness and the brilliant, flaming bursts of fireballs could not be seen.

But surely felt.

Stokely Silverstream and Brimble staggered into a side room to catch their breath.

“Junky’s down,” Brimble said. She leaned on a chair by the door off the main corridor, while Stokely raced across the room to a second door. He cracked it open.

“Way’s clear,” he said, turning back to face her. “This’d be a better run to the front door.” Even as he spoke the words, they stung him profoundly. His group had been routed and scattered in and about the throne room, overwhelmed by the dark elven magic and spinning blades in the darkness.

Now it was every dwarf for himself, something no clan leader ever wanted to face.

He knew Brimble’s words to be true. Junky and some others had been catching up, but, alas, they hadn’t made it. Now the best Stokely could hope for was to get out of the complex and round up some reinforcements to try to take it back.

But even that didn’t exactly inspire, for how many of his dwarves would be left to inhabit the place?

Yes, it seemed to Stokely Silverstream in that dark moment that the centuries-long domain of Clan Battlehammer in Icewind Dale had come to its end.

“Come on, then,” he called.

Brimble just stared at him, unblinking.

“Lass?” he asked and took a step toward her.

He stopped fast when a pair of dark elves pushed in through the door behind Brimble, a male and a female, both superbly outfitted, particularly the male, whose sword and shield both glistened, nearly translucent, and seemed as if they had captured the very stars within their depths.

“Where will you run, dwarf?” the male drow asked, stepping past Brimble without a care, and only then did Stokely fully appreciate that his dear cleric friend had fallen victim to a spell she often used, and was magically, fully, held in place.

The drow warrior lifted his sword out to the side, in line with poor Brimble’s throat. “Run, then,” he bade Stokely. “She will feel the pain, I assure you, and she will die slowly.”

“Save yourself-perhaps you will get away,” said the female, moving up to cruelly stroke Brimble’s hair. Her command of the surface language was not so strong, and her accent thick, so that it took Stokely a few heartbeats to decipher her words.

“But you will know that you fled and left your friend to die,” the male added, “until the darkness of death mercifully releases you from your private torment.”

Stokely Silverstream turned back from the door and banged his axe against his shield. “Come on, then,” he bade the drow warrior as he stepped back toward the middle of the room. “Or are ye too a’feared to fight me alone?”

“I?” the drow asked, moving forward to meet the challenge. “Do you not know who I am, dwarf?”

Stokely leaped ahead, axe swinging as he went for the quick kill-which would be his only chance to save Brimble and hustle her away, obviously.

The drow’s shield seemed to roll around, and each circuit made it larger, and though Stokely had aimed to drop his axe over the top of the blocker, by the time it connected, the shield was large enough to fully defeat the attack.

Stokely fell off to that side, his right, and tucked his own shield in tight to block the stab of the drow’s sword.

The fine magical blade cut right through a wooden plank, but the adamantine bands of the shield held-just barely, Stokely realized as he disengaged and glanced down. One of the bands had been cut halfway across.

“I have killed a balor at the gates of the city,” the drow boasted, just as Stokely began his next advance. “Is the name of Tiago so quickly forgotten?”

That stopped the dwarf in his tracks.

“Yes, dwarf,” the drow went on. “Tiago, friend of Drizzt.”

“No friend of Drizzt!” the dwarf declared. “Drizzt is friend to Clan Bat-nay, Drizzt is of Clan Battlehammer!”

In he charged, axe swinging and chopping wildly as he moved through his best attack routines. At one point, he cut his weapon viciously across, and let himself get pulled in the wake. He came around with his shield angled sidelong to strike at the drow if he tried to advance behind the axe cut, then came all the way around, ready to strike again.

But the drow was gone, and Stokely wisely threw himself forward, barely avoiding the stabbing sword.

“Nay, foolish dwarf,” said the drow who had been quick enough to get out to the side halfway through Stokely’s pirouette. “Drizzt is of House Do’Urden, ever of House Do’Urden, ever of Menzoberranzan!”

And now the drow came on, pressing the attack, his sword stabbing forward in rapid succession as he powerfully advanced.

Stokely could only hope his shield would hold as he blocked the repeated thrusts and stepped back furiously. Finally he caught his balance enough to counter, and out went his axe with all his considerable strength behind it. It creased into the drow’s shield, but to Stokely, it seemed more like he had struck a feather mattress, for the blow did not sound or feel sharp, but muted.

He couldn’t begin to fathom the material of that shield, and his confusion became even more complete when he tried to pull the blade back but found it stuck fast.

He hesitated, staring blankly.

A drow sword slashed against his extended elbow, and Stokely let go of his weapon and retracted the torn arm.

On came the drow and up went Stokely’s shield, and the dwarf’s mind whirled as he considered how he might retrieve his axe, still stuck fast to that curious shield, or wondered where he might flee to gain another weapon-perhaps he could pull Brimble’s mace from her frozen hand.

Or perhaps, he quickly understood, he could do no such thing.

The drow came on with such a fury that Stokely could not dodge left or right, or even retreat after the few steps he took that put his back up against the room’s wall. And there, trapped, he tried to cover, but this one was too proficient, too skilled, and too well-armed.

Stokely blocked a series of sudden, powerful thrusts that cracked and flecked the wood of his shield, and a pair of heavy downward chops that creased the adamantine ring that bound the materials in place. Another thrust got through the breaking blocker and severed one of the arm straps that secured it to Stokely’s forearm, and cut a nice line in the dwarf’s sleeve and skin as well!

The shield fell to pieces. Stokely threw it at the drow, and threw himself at the drow behind it.

He felt the burning explosion of the sword slash across his face in mid-leap, and reached out as he descended, determined to grab hold of the drow.

But Tiago was already off to the side, and Stokely landed and staggered and groped at the empty air.

The next explosion knocked the dwarf’s helm free, and cracked the back of his skull, adding to the angle of his forward lean and to his momentum, and he pitched headlong to the stone floor, pitched headlong into darkness.

And so the Battle of Kelvin’s Cairn did end, and Tiago Baenre could rightfully claim victory.

But it was a hollow cheer, the noble drow knew as his kin began looting and rounding up the new-found slaves, for Drizzt Do’Urden was nowhere to be found.

And Jearth Xorlarrin, Weapons Master of Q’Xorlarrin, remained very much dead.