The Orc King

I came from the Underdark, the land of monsters. I lived in Ice-wind Dale, where the wind can freeze a man solid, or a bog can swallow a traveler so quickly that he’ll not likely understand what is happening to him soon enough to let out a cry, unless it is one muffled by loose mud. Through Wulfgar I have glimpsed the horrors of the Abyss, the land of demons, and could there be any place more vile, hate-filled, and tormenting? It is indeed a dangerous existence.

I have surrounded myself with friends who will fearlessly face those monsters, the wind and the bog, and the demons, with a snarl and a growl, a jaw set and a weapon held high. None would face them more fearlessly than Bruenor, of course.

But there is something to shake even that one, to shake us all as surely as if the ground beneath our feet began to tremble and break away.

Change.

In any honest analysis, change is the basis of fear, the idea of something new, of some paradigm that is unfamiliar, that is beyond our experiences so completely that we cannot even truly predict where it will lead us. Change. Uncertainty.

It is the very root of our most primal fear—the fear of death—that one change, that one unknown against which we construct elaborate scenarios and “truisms” that may or may not be true at all. These constructions, I think, are an extension of the routines of our lives. We dig ruts with the sameness of our daily paths, and drone and rail against those routines while we, in fact, take comfort in them. We awake and construct our days of habit, and follow the norms we have built fast, solid, and bending only a bit in our daily existence. Change is the unrolled die, the unused sava piece. It is exciting and frightening only when we hold some power over it, only when there is a potential reversal of course, difficult though it may be, within our control.

Absent that safety line of real choice, absent that sense of some control, change is merely frightening. Terrifying, even.

An army of orcs does not scare Bruenor. Obould Many-Arrows does not scare Bruenor. But what Obould represents, particularly if the orc king halts his march and establishes a kingdom, and more especially if the other kingdoms of the Silver Marches accept this new paradigm, terrifies Bruenor Battlehammer to the heart of his being and to the core tenets of his faith. Obould threatens more than Bruenor’s kin, kingdom, and life. The orc’s designs shake the very belief system that binds Bruenor’s kin, the very purpose of Mithral Hall, the understanding of what it is to be a dwarf, and the dwarven concept of where the orcs fit into that stable continuum. He would not say it openly, but I suspect that Bruenor hopes the orcs will attack, that they will, in the end, behave in accordance with his expectations of orcs and of all goblinkind. The other possibility is too dissonant, too upsetting, too contrary to Bruenor’s very identity for him to entertain the plausibility, indeed the probability, that it would result in less suffering for all involved.

I see before me the battle for the heart of Bruenor Battlehammer, and for the hearts of all the dwarves of the Silver Marches.

Easier by far to lift a weapon and strike dead a known enemy, an orc.

In all the cultures I have known, with all the races I have walked beside, I have observed that when beset by such dissonance, by events that are beyond control and that plod along at their own pace, the frustrated onlookers often seek out a beacon, a focal point—a god, a person, a place, a magical item—which they believe will set all the world aright. Many are the whispers in Mithral Hall that King Bruenor will fix it, all of it, and make everything as it had been before the onslaught of Obould. Bruenor has earned their respect many times over, and wears the mantle of hero among his kin as comfortably and deservedly as has any dwarf in the history of the clan. For most of the dwarves here, then, King Bruenor has become the beacon and focal point of hope itself.

Which only adds to Bruenor’s responsibility, because when a frightened people put their faith in an individual, the ramifications of incompetence, recklessness, or malfeasance are multiplied many times over. And so becoming the focus of hope only adds to Bruenor’s tension. Because he knows that it is not true, and that their expectations may well be beyond him. He cannot convince Lady Alustriel of Silverymoon or any of the other leaders, not even King Emerus Warcrown of Citadel Felbarr, to march in force against Obould. And to go out alone with Mithral Hall’s own forces would lead to the wholesale slaughter of Clan Battlehammer. Bruenor understands that he has to wear the mantle not only of hero, but of savior, and it is for him a terrible burden.

And so Bruenor, too, has engaged in deflection and wild expectation, has found a focal point on which to pin his hopes. The most common phrase he has spoken throughout this winter has been, “Gauntlgrym, elf.”

Gauntlgrym. It is a legend among Clan Battlehammer and all the Delzoun dwarves. It is the name of their common heritage, an immense city of splendor, wealth, and strength that represents to every descendant of the Delzoun tribes the apex of dwarven civilization. It is, perhaps, history wound with myth, a likely unintentional lionizing of that which once was. As heroes of old take on more gigantic proportions with each passing generation, so too does this other focal point of hope and pride expand.

“Gauntlgrym, elf,” Bruenor says with steady determination. All of his answers lie there, he is certain. In Gauntlgrym, Bruenor will find a path to unravel the doings of King Obould. In Gauntlgrym, he will discover how to put the orcs back in their holes, and more importantly, how to realign the races of the Silver Marches into proper position, into places that make sense to an old, immovable dwarf.

He believes that we found this magical kingdom on our journey here from the Sword Coast. He has to believe that this unremarkable sinkhole in a long-dead pass was really the entrance to a place where he can find his answers.

Otherwise he has to become the answer for his anxious people. And Bruenor knows that their faith is misplaced, for at present, he has no answer to the puzzle that is Obould.

Thus, he says, “Gauntlgrym, elf,” with the same conviction that a devout believer will utter the name of his savior god.

We will go to this place, this hole in the ground in a barren pass in the west. We will go and find Gauntlgrym, whatever that may truly mean. Perhaps Bruenor’s instincts are correct—could it be that Moradin told him of this in his days of near death? Perhaps we will find something entirely different, but that will still bring to us, to Bruenor, the clarity he needs to find the answers for Mithral Hall.

Fixated and desperate as he is, and as his people are, Bruenor doesn’t yet understand that the name he has affixed to our savior is not the point. The point is the search itself, for solutions and for the truth, and not the place he has determined as our goal.

“Gauntlgrym, elf.”

Indeed.

— Drizzt Do’Urden

CHAPTER 8 THE FIRST STRIDES HOME

The gates of Silverymoon, shining silver and with bars decorated like leafy vines, were closed, a clear signal that things were amiss in the Silver Marches. Stern-faced guards, elf and human, manned all posts along the city’s wall and around a series of small stone houses that served as checkpoints for approaching visitors.

Catti-brie—limping more profoundly from her days on the road—and Wulfgar noted the tense looks coming their way. The woman merely smiled, though, understanding that her companion, nearly seven feet tall and with shoulders broad and strong, could elicit such trepidation even in normal times. Predictably, those nervous guards relaxed and even offered waves as the pair neared, as they came to recognize the barbarian in his trademark wolf-skin cloak and the woman who had often served as liaison between Mithral Hall and Silverymoon.

There was no call for the pair to stop or even slow as they passed the stone structures, and the gate parted before them without request. Several of the sentries near that gate and atop the wall even began clapping for Wulfgar and Catti-brie and more than a few “huzzahs” were shouted as they passed.

“With official word or for pleasure alone?” the commander of the guard asked the couple inside the city gates. He looked at Catti-brie with obvious concern. “Milady, are you injured?”

Catti-brie replied with a dismissive look, as if it did not matter, but the guard continued, “I will provide a coach for you at once!”

“I have walked from Mithral Hall through snow and mud,” the woman replied. “I would not deny myself the joy of Silverymoon’s meandering ways.”

“But…”

“I will walk,” Catti-brie said. “Do not deny me this pleasure.”

The guard relented with a bow. “Lady Alustriel will be pleased by your arrival.”

“And we will be pleased to see her,” said Wulfgar.

“With official word from King Bruenor?” the commander asked again.

“With word more personal, but equally pressing,” the barbarian answered. “You will announce us?”

“The courier is already on his way to the palace.”

Wulfgar nodded his gratitude. “We will walk the ways of Silvery-moon, a course not direct, and will arrive at Lady Alustriel’s court before the sun has passed its zenith,” he explained. “Pleased we are to be here—truly Silverymoon is a welcomed sight and a welcoming city for road-weary travelers. Our business here might well include you and your men as well, commander….”

“Kenyon,” said Catti-brie, for she had met the man on many occasions, though briefly at each.

“I am honored that you remember me, Lady Catti-brie,” he said with another bow.

“We arrive in search of refugees who have come from Mithral Hall and may have crossed into your fairest of cities,” said Wulfgar.

“Many have come,” Kenyon admitted. “And many have left. But of course, we are at your disposal, son of Bruenor, on word of Lady Alustriel. Go and secure that word, I bid you.”

Wulfgar nodded, and he and Catti-brie moved past the guard station.

With their road-weathered clothes, one with a magical bow as a crutch and the other a giant of a man with a magnificent warhammer strapped across his back, the pair stood out in the city of philosophers and poets, and many a curious look turned their way as they walked the winding, seemingly aimless avenues of the decorated city. As with every visitor to Silverymoon, no matter how many times one traversed the place, their eyes were continually drawn upward, studying the intricate designs and artwork that covered the walls of every building, and upward still, to the tapering spires that topped every structure. Most communities were an expression of utility, with structures built suitable to the elements of their environment and the threats of regional monsters. Cities of commerce were built with wide avenues, port cities with fortified harbors and breakwaters, and frontier towns with thick walls. Silverymoon stood above all of these, for it was an expression of utility, of course, but more than that, an expression of spirit. Security and commerce were facilitated, but they were not paramount to the needs of the soul, where the library was grander than the barracks and the avenues were designed to turn visitors and residents to the most spectacular of views, rather than as efficient straight lines to the marketplace or the rows of houses and mercantiles.

It was hard to arrive in Silverymoon with urgent business, for few could walk swiftly through those streets, and fewer still could focus the mind sufficiently to defeat the intrusions of beauty.

Contrary to Wulfgar’s stated expectations, the sun had passed its zenith before Wulfgar and Catti-brie came in sight of Lady Alustriel’s wondrous palace, but that was all right, for the experienced guards had informed the Lady of Silverymoon that such would be the case.

“The finest humans of Clan Battlehammer,” said the tall woman, coming out from behind the curtains that separated this private section of her palatial audience chamber from the main, public promenade.

There was no overt malice in her humorous remark, though of course the couple standing before her, the adopted son and daughter of King Bruenor, were the only humans of Clan Battlehammer. Wulfgar smiled and chuckled, but Catti-brie didn’t quite find that level of mirth within her.

She stared at the great woman, Lady Alustriel, one of the Seven Sisters and leader of magnificent Silverymoon. She only remembered to offer a bow when Wulfgar dipped beside her, and even then, Catti-brie did not lower her head as she bent, staring intently at Alustriel.

For despite herself, Catti-brie was intimidated. Alustriel was nearly six feet tall and undeniably beautiful, by human standards, by elven standards—by any standards. Even the creatures of the higher planes would be pleased by her presence, Catti-brie knew in her heart, for there was a luminescence and gravity about Alustriel that was somehow beyond mortal existence. Her hair was silver and lustrous, and hung thick to her shoulders, and her eyes could melt a man’s heart or strip him of all courage at her will. Her gown was a simple affair, green with golden stitching, and just a few emeralds sewn for effect. Most kings and queens wore robes far more decorated and elaborate, of course, but Alustriel didn’t need any ornamentation. Any room that she entered was her room to command.

She had never shown Catti-brie anything but kindness and friendship, and the two had been quite warm on occasion. But Catti-brie hadn’t seen Alustriel much of late, and she could not help but feel somewhat smaller in the great woman’s presence. Once she had been jealous of the Lady of Silverymoon, hearing rumors that Alustriel had been Drizzt’s lover, and she had never discerned whether or not that had been the case.

Catti-brie smiled genuinely and laughed at herself, and pushed all of the negative thoughts aside. She couldn’t be jealous where Drizzt was concerned anymore, nor could she feel diminished by anyone when she thought of her relationship with the drow.

What did it matter if the gods themselves bowed to Lady Alustriel? For Drizzt had chosen Catti-brie.

To Catti-brie’s surprise, Alustriel walked right over and embraced her, and kissed her on the cheek.

“Too many months pass between our visits, milady,” Alustriel said, moving Catti-brie back to arms’ length. She reached up and pushed back a thick strand of Catti-brie’s auburn hair. “How you manage to stay so beautiful, as if the dirt of the road cannot touch you, I will never know.”

Catti-brie hardly knew how to reply.

“You could fight a battle with a thousand orcs,” Alustriel went on, “slay them all—of course—and bloody your sword, your fist, and your boots. Not even that stain would diminish your glow.”

Catti-brie gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Milady, you are too kind,” she said. “Too kind for reason, I fear.”

“Of course you do, daughter of Bruenor. You are a woman who grew up among dwarves, who hardly appreciated your charms and your beauty. You have no idea of how tall you would stand among those of your own race.”

Catti-brie’s face twisted a bit in confusion, not quite knowing how to take that.

“And that, too, is part of the charm of Catti-brie,” said Alustriel. “Your humility is not calculated, it is intrinsic.”

Catti-brie looked no less confused, and that drew a bit of laughter from Wulfgar. Catti-brie shot him a frown to silence him.

“The wind whispers that you have taken Drizzt as your husband,” Alustriel said.

Still glancing Wulfgar’s way as Alustriel spoke, Catti-brie noted a slight grimace on the barbarian’s face—or maybe it was just her imagination.

“You are married?” Alustriel asked.

“Yes,” Catti-brie replied. “But we have not celebrated in formal ceremony yet. We will wait for the darkness of Obould to recede.”

Alustriel’s face grew very serious. “That will be a long time, I fear.”

“King Bruenor is determined that it will not.”

“Indeed,” said Alustriel, and she offered a hopeful little smile and a shrug. “I do hope you will celebrate your joining with Drizzt Do’Urden soon, both in Mithral Hall, and here in Silverymoon, as my honored guests. I will gladly open the palace to you, for many of my subjects would wish well the daughter of good King Bruenor and that most unusual dark elf.”

“And many of your court would prefer that Drizzt remain in Mithral Hall,” Catti-brie said, a bit more harshly than she had intended.

But Alustriel only laughed and nodded, for it was true enough, and undeniable. “Well, Fret likes him,” she said, referring to her favored advisor, a most unusual and uniquely tidy dwarf. “And Fret likes you, and so do I—both of you. If I spent my time worrying over the pettiness and posturing of court lords and ladies, I would turn endless circles of appeasement and apology.”

“When you doubt, then trust in Fret,” Catti-brie said. She winked and Alustriel gave a hearty laugh and hugged her again.

As she did, she whispered into Catti-brie’s ear, “Come here more often, I beg of you, with or without your stubborn dark elf companion.”

She stepped up to Wulfgar then and wrapped him in a warm embrace. When she moved back to arms’ length, a curious look came over her. “Son of Beornegar,” she said quietly, respectfully.

Catti-brie’s mouth dropped open in surprise at that, for only recently had Wulfgar been wearing that title more regularly, and it seemed to her as if Alustriel had somehow just discerned that.

“I see contentment in your blue eyes,” Alustriel remarked. “You have not been at peace like this ever before—not even when I first met you, those many years ago.”

“I was young then, and too strong of spirit,” said Wulfgar.

“Can one ever be?”

Wulfgar shrugged. “Too anxious, then,” he corrected.

“You hold your strength deeper now, because you are more secure in it, and in how you wish to use it.”

Wulfgar’s nod seemed to satisfy Alustriel, but Catti-brie just kept looking from the large man to the tall woman. She felt as if they were speaking in code, or half-saying secrets, the other half of which were known only to them.

“You are at peace,” said Alustriel.

“And yet I am not,” Wulfgar replied. “For my daugh—the girl, Colson, is lost to me.”

“She was slain?”

Wulfgar shook his head immediately to calm the gentle woman. “Delly Curtie was lost to the hordes of Obould, but Colson lives. She was sent across the river in the company of refugees from the conquered northern lands.”

“Here to Silverymoon?”

“That is what I would know,” Wulfgar explained.

Alustriel nodded and stepped back, taking them both in with her protective stare.

“We could go from inn to inn,” Catti-brie said. “But Silvery-moon is no small city, nor is Sundabar, and there are many more villages about.”

“You will remain right here as my guests,” Alustriel insisted. “I will call out every soldier of Silverymoon’s garrison, and will speak with the merchant guilds. You will have your answer in short time, I promise.”

“You are too generous,” Wulfgar said with a bow.

“Would King Bruenor, would Wulfgar or Catti-brie, offer any less to me or one of mine if we similarly came to Mithral Hall?”

That simple truth ended any forthcoming arguments from the two grateful travelers.

“We thought that we might travel to some of the common inns and ask around,” Catti-brie said.

“And draw attention to your hunt?” Alustriel replied. “Would this person who has Colson wish to give the child back to you?”

Wulfgar shook his head, but Catti-brie said, “We don’t know, but it is possible that she would not.”

“Then better for you to remain here, as my guests. I have many contacts who frequent the taverns. It is important for a leader to hear the commoners’ concerns. The answers you seek will be easily found—in Silverymoon, at least.” She motioned to her attendants. “Take them and make them comfortable. I do believe that Fret wishes to see Catti-brie.”

“He cannot suffer the dirt of the road upon me,” Catti-brie remarked dryly.

“Only because he cares, of course.”

“Or because he so despises dirt?”

“That too,” Alustriel admitted.

Catti-brie looked to Wulfgar and offered a resigned shrug. She was pleasantly surprised to see him equally at ease with this arrangement. Apparently he understood that their work was better left to Alustriel, and that they could indeed relax and enjoy the respite at the luxurious palace of the Lady of Silverymoon.

“And she came without proper clothing, I’ll wager!” came an obviously annoyed voice, a chant that sounded both melodic and sing-song like an elf, and resonant like the bellow of a dwarf—a most unusual dwarf.

Wulfgar and Catti-brie turned to see the fellow, dressed in a fine white gown with bright green trim, enter the room. He looked at Catti-brie and gave a disapproving sigh and a wag of his meticulously manicured stubby finger. Then he stopped and sighed again, and put his chin in one hand, his fingers stroking the thin line of his well-trimmed silver beard as he considered the task of transforming Catti-brie.

“Well met, Fret,” Alustriel said. “It would seem that you have your work cut out for you. Do try not to break this one’s spirit.”

“You confuse spirit with odor, milady.”

Catti-brie frowned, but it was hard for her to cover her inner smile.

“Fret would put perfume and bells on a tiger, I do believe,” Alustriel said, and her nearby attendants shared a laugh at the dwarf’s expense.

“And colored bows and paint for its nails,” the tidy dwarf proudly replied. He walked up to Catti-brie, gave a “tsk tsk,” and grabbed her by the elbow, pulling her along. “As we appreciate beauty, so it is our divine task to facilitate it. And so I shall. Now come along, child. You’ve a long bath to suffer.”

Catti-brie flashed her smile back at Wulfgar. After their long and arduous journey, she planned to “suffer” it well.

Wulfgar’s returned smile was equally genuine. He turned to Alustriel, saluted, and thanked her.

“What might we do for Wulfgar while my scouts seek word of Colson?” Alustriel asked him.

“A quiet room with a view of your fair city,” he replied, and he added quietly, “One that faces to the west.”

Catti-brie caught up to Wulfgar early that evening on a high balcony of the main turret—one of a dozen that adorned the palace.

“The dwarf has his talents,” Wulfgar said.

Catti-brie’s freshly washed hair smelled of lilac and springtime. She almost always kept it loose to bounce over her shoulders, but she had one side tied up and the other had a hint of a curl teased into it. She wore a light blue gown that enhanced and highlighted the hue of her eyes, its straps revealing the smooth skin of her delicate shoulders. A white and gold sash was tied around her waist at an angle and a place to accentuate her shapely body. The dress did not go all the way to the floor, and Wulfgar’s surprise showed as a smile when he noted that she wasn’t wearing her doeskin boots, but rather a pair of delicate slippers, all lace and fancy trim.

“I found meself a choice to let him do it to me or punch him in the nose,” Catti-brie remarked, her self-deprecation exaggerated because she allowed just a hint of her Dwarvish accent to come through.

“There is not a part of you that enjoys it?”

Catti-brie scowled at him.

“You would not wish for Drizzt to see you like this?” the barbarian pressed. “You would take no pleasure in the look upon his face?”

“I’ll take me pleasure in killing orcs.”

“Stop it.”

Catti-brie looked at him as if he had slapped her.

“Stop it,” Wulfgar repeated. “You need not your boots or your weapons here in Silverymoon, or your dwarf-bred pragmatism and that long-lost accent. Have you looked in the mirror since Fret worked his magic on you?”

Catti-brie snorted and turned away, or started to, but Wulfgar held her with his gaze and his grin.

“You should,” he said.

“You are talking foolishness,” Catti-brie replied, and her accent was no more.

“Far from that. Is it foolish to enjoy the sights of Silverymoon?” He half-turned and swept his arm out to the deepening gloom in the west, to the twilit structures of the free-form city, with candles burning in many windows. Glowing flames of harmless faerie fire showed on a few of the spires, accenting their inviting forms.

“Did you not allow your mind to wander as we walked through the avenues to this palace?” Wulfgar asked. “Could you help but feel that way with beauty all around you? So why is it any different with your own appearance? Why are you so determined to hide behind mud and simple clothes?”

Catti-brie shook her head. Her lips moved a few times as if she wanted to reply but couldn’t find the words.

“Drizzt would be pleased by the sight before him,” Wulfgar stated. “I am pleased, as your friend. Quit hiding behind the gruff accent and the road-worn clothing. Quit being afraid of who you are, of who you might dare to be, deep inside. You do not care if someone sees you after a hard day of labor, sweating and dirty. You don’t waste your time primping and prettying yourself, and all of that is to your credit. But in times like this, when the opportunity presents itself, do not shy from it, either.”

“I feel…vain.”

“You should simply feel pretty, and be happy with that. If you really are one who cares not what others may think or say, then why would you hide from pleasant thoughts?”

Catti-brie looked at him curiously for a moment, and a smile spread on her face. “Who are you, and what have you done with Wulfgar?”

“The doppelganger is long dead, I assure you,” Wulfgar replied. “He was thrown out with the weight of Errtu.”

“I have never seen you like this.”

“I have never before felt like this. I am content and I know my road. I answer to no one but myself now, and never before have I known such freedom.”

“And so you wish to share that with me?”

“With everyone,” Wulfgar replied with a laugh.

“I did look in a mirror…or two,” Catti-brie said, and Wulfgar laughed harder.

“And were you pleased by what you saw?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“And do you wish that Drizzt was here?”

“Enough,” she bade him, which of course meant “yes.”

Wulfgar took her by the arm and guided her to the railing of the balcony. “So many generations of men and elves have built this place. It is a refuge for Fret and those akin to him, and it is also a place where we all might come from time to time to simply stand and look, and enjoy. That, I think, is the most important time of all. To look inside ourselves honestly and without regret or fear. I could be battling orcs or dragons. I could be digging mithral from the deep mines. I could be leading the hunt in Icewind Dale. But there are times, too few I fear, when this, when standing and looking and just enjoying, is more important than all of that.”

Catti-brie wrapped her arm around Wulfgar’s waist and leaned her head against his strong shoulder, standing side-by-side, two friends enjoying a moment of life, of perception, of simple pleasure.

Wulfgar draped his arm across her shoulders, equally at peace, and both of them sensed, deep inside, that the moment would be one they would remember for all their days, a defining and lasting image of all they had been through since that fateful day in Icewind Dale when Wulfgar the young warrior had foolishly smacked a tough old dwarf named Bruenor on the head.

They lingered for some time, but the moment was lost as Lady Alustriel came out onto the balcony. The two turned at the sound of her voice, to see her standing with a middle-aged man dressed in the apron of a tavernkeeper.

Alustriel paused when she looked upon Catti-brie, her eyes roaming the woman’s form.

“Fret is full of magic, I am told,” Catti-brie said, glancing at Wulfgar.

Alustriel shook her head. “Fret finds the beauty, he does not create it.”

“He finds it as well as Drizzt finds orcs to slay, or Bruenor finds metal to mine, to be sure,” said Wulfgar.

“He has mentioned that he would like to search for the same in Wulfgar, as well.”

Catti-brie laughed as Wulfgar chuckled and shook his head. “I’ve not the time.”

“He will be so disappointed,” said Alustriel.

“Next time we meet, perhaps,” said Wulfgar, and his words elicited a doubting glance from Catti-brie.

She stared at him deeply for a long while, measuring his every expression and movement, and the inflections of his voice. His offer to Fret may or may not have been disingenuous, she knew, but it was moot in any case because Wulfgar had decided that he would never again visit Silverymoon. Catti-brie saw that clearly, and had been feeling it since before they had departed Mithral Hall.

A sense of dread welled up inside her, mingling with that last special moment she had shared with Wulfgar. There was a storm coming. Wulfgar knew it, and though he hadn’t yet openly shared it, the signs were mounting.

“This is Master Tapwell of the Rearing Dragon, a fine establishment in the city’s lower ward,” Alustriel explained. The short, round-bellied man came forward a step, rather sheepishly. “A common respite for visitors to Silverymoon.”

“Well met,” Catti-brie greeted, and Wulfgar nodded his agreement.

“And to yerselves, Prince and Princess of Mithral Hall,” Tapwell replied, dipping a few awkward bows in the process.

“The Rearing Dragon played host to many of the refugees that crossed the Surbrin from Mithral Hall,” Alustriel explained. “Master Tapwell believes that a pair who passed through might be of interest to you.”

Wulfgar was already leaning forward eagerly. Catti-brie put her hand on his forearm to help steady him.

“Yer girl, Colson,” Tapwell said, rubbing his hands nervously over his beer-stained apron. “Skinny thing with straw hair to here?” He indicated a point just below his shoulder, a good approximation of the length of Colson’s hair.

“Go on,” Wulfgar bade, nodding.

“She came in with the last group, but with her mother.”

“Her mother?” Wulfgar looked to Alustriel for an explanation, but the woman deferred to Tapwell.

“Well, she said she was her mother,” the tavernkeeper explained.

“What was her name?” Catti-brie asked.

Tapwell fidgeted as if trying to fathom the answer. “I remember her calling the girl Colson clear enough. Her own name was like that. Same beginning, if ye get my meaning.”

“Please remember,” Wulfgar prompted.

“Cottie?” Catti-brie asked.

“Cottie, yeah. Cottie,” said Tapwell.

“Cottie Cooperson,” Catti-brie said to Wulfgar. “She was with the group Delly tended in the hall. She lost her family to Obould.”

“And Delly gave her a new one,” said Wulfgar, but his tone was not bitter.

“You agree with this assessment?” Alustriel asked.

“It does make sense,” said Catti-brie.

“This was the last group that crossed the Surbrin before the ferry was closed down, and not just the last group to arrive in Silvery-moon,” Alustriel said. “I have confirmed that from the guards of Winter Edge themselves. They escorted the refugees in from the Surbrin—all of them—and they, the guards, remain, along with several of the refugees.”

“And have you found those refugees to ask them of Cottie and Colson?” asked Catti-brie. “And are Cottie and Colson among those who remain?”

“Further inquiries are being made,” Alustriel replied. “I am fairly certain that they will only confirm what we have already discovered. As for Cottie and the child, they left.”

Wulfgar’s shoulders slumped.

“For Nesmé,” Alustriel explained. “Soon after those refugees arrived, a general call came out from Nesmé. They are rebuilding, and offering homes to any who would go and join with them. The place is secure once more—many of the Knights in Silver stand watch with the Riders of Nesmé to ensure that all of the trolls were destroyed or chased back into the Trollmoors. The city will thrive this coming season, well defended and well supplied.”

“You are certain that Cottie and Colson are there?” Wulfgar asked.

“I am certain that they were on the caravan that left for Nesmé, only days after they arrived here in Silverymoon. That caravan arrived, though whether Cottie and the child remained with it through the entirety of the journey, I cannot promise. They stopped at several way stations and villages along the route. The woman could have left at any of those.”

Wulfgar nodded and looked to Catti-brie, their road clear before them.

“I could fly you to Nesmé upon my chariot,” Alustriel offered. “But there is another caravan leaving by midday tomorrow, one that will follow the exact route that Cottie rode, and one in need of more guards. The drivers would be thrilled to have Wulfgar and Catti-brie along for the journey, and Nesmé is only a tenday away.”

“And there is nowhere for Cottie to have gone beyond Nesmé,” Wulfgar reasoned. “That will do, and well.”

“Very good,” said Alustriel. “I will inform the lead driver.” She and Tapwell took their leave.

“Our road is clear, then,” said Wulfgar, and he seemed content with that.

Catti-brie, though, shook her head.

“The southern road is secured and Nesmé is not so far,” Wulfgar said to her doubting expression.

“This is not good news, I fear.”

“How so?”

“Cottie,” Catti-brie explained. “I happened upon her a few times after my wound kept me in the lower tunnels. She was a broken thing, in spirit and in mind.”

“You fear that she would harm Colson?” Wulfgar said, his eyes widening with alarm.

“Never that,” said Catti-brie. “But I fear that she will clutch the girl too tightly, and will not welcome the reaching hands of Wulfgar.”

“Colson is not her child.”

“And for some, truth is no more than an inconvenience,” Catti-brie replied.

“I will take the child,” Wulfgar stated in a tone that left no room for debate.

Aside from that undeniable determination, it struck Catti-brie that Wulfgar had named Colson as “the child,” and not as “my child.” She studied her friend carefully for a few moments, seeking a deeper read.

But it was not to be found.

CHAPTER 9 AT DESTINY’S DOOR

I don’t like this place.”

A trick of the wind, blowing down a channel between a pair of towering snow dunes, amplified Regis’s soft-spoken words so that they seemed to fill the space around his four dwarf companions. The words blended with the mourn of the cold breeze, a harmony of fear and lament that seemed so fitting in a place called Fell Pass.

Bruenor, who was too anxious to be anywhere but up front, turned, and appeared as if he was about to scold the halfling. But he didn’t. He just shook his head and left it at that, for how could he deny the undeniable?

The region was haunted, palpably so. They had felt it on their journey through the pass the previous spring, moving west to east toward Mithral Hall. That same musty aura remained very much alive in Fell Pass, though the surroundings had been transformed by the season. When they’d first come through, the ground was flat and even, a wide and easily-traversed pass between a pair of distant mountain ranges. Perhaps the winds from both of those ranges continually met here in battle, flattening the ground. Deep snow had since fallen in the teeth of those competing winds, forming a series of drifts that resembled the dunes of the Calim Desert, like a series of gigantic, bright white scallop shells evenly spaced perpendicular to the east-west line that marked the bordering mountain ranges. With the melting and refreezing of the late winter, the top surface of the snow had been crusted with ice, but not enough to bear the weight of a dwarf. Thus they had to make their trudging way along the low points of the still-deep snow, through the channels between the dunes.

Drizzt served as their guide. Running lightly, every now and then chopping a ledge into the snow with one of his scimitars, the drow traversed the dunes as a salmon might skip the waves of a slow river. Up one side and down another he went, pausing at the high points to set his bearings.

It had taken the party of six—Bruenor, Regis, Drizzt, Thibbledorf Pwent, Cordio, and Torgar Hammerstriker—four days to get to the eastern entrance of Fell Pass. They’d kept up a fine pace considering the snow and the fact that they had to circumvent many of King Obould’s guard posts and a pair of orc caravans. Once in the pass, even with the scallop drifts, they had continued to make solid progress, with Drizzt scaling the dunes and instructing Pwent where to punch through.

Seven days out, the pace had slowed to a crawl. They were certain they were near to where they’d found the hole that Bruenor believed was the entrance to the legendary dwarven city of Gauntlgrym.

They had mapped the place well on that journey from the west, and had taken note, as Bruenor had ordered, of all the landmarks—the angles to notable mountain peaks north and south, and such. But with the wintry blanket of snow, Fell Pass appeared so different that Drizzt simply could not be certain. The very real possibility that they might walk right past the hole that had swallowed one of their wagons weighed on all of them, particularly Bruenor.

And there was something else there, a feeling hanging in the air that had the hairs on the backs of all their necks tingling. The mournful groan of the wind was full of the laments of the dead. Of that, there was no doubt. The cleric, Cordio, had cast divination spells that told him there was indeed something supernatural about the place, some rift or outsider presence. On the journey to Mithral Hall, Bruenor’s priests had urged Drizzt not to call upon Guenhwyvar, for fear of inciting unwanted attention from other extraplanar sources in the process, and once again Cordio had reiterated that point. The Fell Pass, the dwarf priest had assured his companions, was not stable in a planar sense—though even Cordio admitted that he wasn’t really sure what that meant.

“Ye got anything for us, elf?” Bruenor called up to Drizzt. His gruff voice, full of irritation, echoed off the frozen snow.

Drizzt came into view atop the drift to the party’s left, the west. He shrugged at Bruenor then stepped forward and began a balanced slide down the glistening white dune. He kept his footing perfectly, and slipped right past the halfling and dwarves to the base of the drift on their other side, where he used its sharp incline to halt his momentum.

“I have snow,” he replied. “As much snow as you could want, extending as far as I can see to the west.”

“We’re goin’ to have to stay here until the melt, ain’t we?” Bruenor grumbled. He put his hands on his hips and kicked his heavy boot through the icy wall of one mound.

“We will find it,” Drizzt replied, but his words were buried by the sudden grumbling of Thibble dorf Pwent.

“Bah!” the battlerager snorted, and he banged his hands together and stomped about, crunching the icy snow beneath his heavy steps. While the others wore mostly furs and layers of various fabrics, Pwent was bedecked in his traditional Gutbuster battle mail, a neck-to-toe suit of overlapping ridged metal plates, spiked at all the appropriate strike zones: fists, elbows, shoulders, and knees. His helmet, too, carried a tall, barbed spike, one that had skewered many an orc in its day.

“Ye got no magic to help me?” Bruenor demanded of Cordio.

The cleric shrugged helplessly. “The riddles of this maze extend beyond the physical, me king,” he tried to explain. “Questions asked in spells’re getting me nothin’ but more questions. I’m knowin’ that we’re close, but more because I’m feeling that rift with me every spellcasting.”

“Bah!” Pwent roared. He lowered his head and rammed through the nearest snow drift, disappearing behind a veil of white that fell behind him as he plowed through to the channel on the other side.

“We’ll find it, then,” said Torgar Hammerstriker. “If it was here when ye came through, then here it is still. And if me king’s thinking it’s Gauntlgrym, then nothin’s stopping meself from seein’ that place.”

“Aye and huzzah!” Cordio agreed.

They all jumped as the snow erupted from up ahead. Drizzt’s scimitars appeared in his hands as if they had been there all along.

From that break in the dune emerged a snow-encrusted Thibbledorf Pwent, roaring still. He didn’t slow, but plowed through the dune across the way, crunching through the icy wall with ease and disappearing from sight.

“Will ye stop it, ye durned fool?” Bruenor chastised, but Pwent was already gone.

“I am certain that we’re near the entrance,” Drizzt assured Bruenor, and the drow slid his blades away. “We are the right distance from the mountains north and south. Of that, I am sure.”

“We are close,” Regis confirmed, still glancing all around as if he expected a ghost to leap out and throttle him at any moment. In that regard, Regis knew more than the others, for he had been the one who had gone into the hole after the wagon those months before, and who had encountered, down in the dark, what he believed to be the ghost of a long-dead dwarf.

“Then we’ll just keep looking,” said Bruenor. “And if it stays in hiding under the snow, its secrets won’t be holding, for the melt’s coming soon.”

“Bah!” they heard Pwent growl from behind the dune to the east and they all scrambled, expecting him to burst through in their midst, and likely with that lethal helmet spike lowered.

The dune shivered as he hit it across the way, and he roared again fiercely. But his pitch changed suddenly, his cry going from defiance to surprise. Then it faded rapidly, as if the dwarf had fallen away.

Bruenor looked at Drizzt. “Gauntlgrym!” the dwarf declared.

Torgar and Cordio dived for the point on the drift behind which they had heard Pwent’s cry. They punched through and flung the snow out behind them, working like a pair of dogs digging for a bone. As they weakened the integrity of that section of the drift, it crumbled down before them, complicating their dig. Still, within moments, they came to the edge of a hole in the ground, and the remaining pile of snow slipped in, but seemed to fill the crevice.

“Pwent?” Torgar called into the snow, thinking his companion buried alive.

He leaned over the edge, Cordio stabilizing his feet, and plunged his hand down into the snow pile. That blockage, though, was neither solid nor thick, and had merely packed in to seal the shaft below. When Torgar’s hand broke the integrity of the pack, the collected snow broke and fell away, leaving the dwarf staring down into a cold and empty shaft.

“Pwent?” he called more urgently, realizing that his companion had fallen quite far.

“That’s it!” Bruenor yelled, rushing up between the kneeling pair. “The wagon went in right there!” As he made the claim, he fell to his knees and brushed aside some more of the snow, revealing a rut that had been made by the wagon wheel those months before. “Gauntlgrym!”

“And Pwent fell in,” Drizzt reminded him.

The three dwarves turned to see the drow and Regis feeding out a line of rope that Drizzt had already tied around his waist.

“Get the line, boys!” Bruenor yelled, but Cordio and Torgar were already moving anyway, rushing to secure the rope and find a place to brace their heavy boots.

Drizzt dropped down beside the ledge and tried to pick a careful route, but a cry came up from far below, followed by a high-pitched, sizzling roar that sounded unlike anything any of them had ever heard, like a cross between the screech of an eagle and the hiss of a gigantic lizard.

Drizzt rolled over the lip, turning and setting his hands, and Bruenor dived to add his strength to the rope brace.

“Quickly!” Drizzt instructed as the dwarves began to let out the line. Trusting in them, the drow let go of the lip and dropped from sight.

“There’s a ledge fifteen feet down,” Regis called, scrambling past the dwarves to the hole. He moved as if he would go right over, but he stopped suddenly, just short of the lip. There he held as the seconds passed, his body frozen by memories of his first journey into the place that Bruenor called Gauntlgrym.

“I’m on the ledge,” Drizzt called up, drawing him from his trance. “I can make my way, but keep ready on the rope.”

Regis peered over and could just make out the form of the drow in the darkness below.

“Ye be guidin’ us, Rumblebelly,” Bruenor instructed, and Regis found the fortitude to nod.

A loud crash from far below startled him again, though, followed by a cry of pain and another otherworldly shriek. More noise arose, metal scraping on stone, hissing snakes and eagle screams, and Dwarvish roars of defiance.

Then a cry of absolute terror, Pwent’s cry, shook them all to their spines, for when had Thibble dorf Pwent ever cried out in terror?

“What do ye see?” Bruenor called out to Regis.

The halfling peered in and squinted. He could just make out Drizzt, inching down the wall below the ledge. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Regis realized it wasn’t really a ledge, or a wall, but rather a stalagmite mound that had grown up beside the side of the cave below. He looked back to Drizzt, and the drow dropped from sight. The dwarves behind him gave a yelp and fell over backward as the rope released.

“Set it!” Bruenor yelled at Torgar and Cordio, and the dwarf king charged for the hole, yelling, “What do ye see, Rumblebelly?”

Regis pulled back and turned, shaking his head, but Bruenor wasn’t waiting for an explanation anyway. The dwarf dived to the ground and grabbed up the rope, and without hesitation, flung himself over the lip, rapidly descending into the gloom. Back from the hole, Torgar and Cordio grunted from the strain and tried hard to dig their boots in.

Regis swallowed. He heard a grunt and a shriek from far below. Images of a dwarf ghost haunted him and told him to run far away. But Drizzt was down there, Bruenor was down there, Pwent was down there.

The halfling swallowed again and rushed to the hole. He fell to the ground atop the rope and with a glance back at Torgar and Cordio, he disappeared from sight.

As soon as he hit the ledge, Drizzt recognized it for what it was. The tall stalagmite mound rose up at an angle, melding with the sheerer stone of the wall behind him.

Even though he was only fifteen feet down from the lip, Drizzt’s sensibilities switched to those of the person he used to be, a creature of the Underdark. He started down tentatively, feeding out the rope behind him, for just a couple of steps.

His eyes focused in the gloom, and he saw the contours of the stalagmite and the floor some twenty feet below. On that floor rested the broken remains of the wagon that had been lost in the journey east those months before. Also on that floor, Drizzt saw a familiar boot, hard and wrapped in metal. Below and to the left, he heard a muffled cry, and the sound of metal scraping on stone, as if an armored dwarf was being dragged.

With a flick of his wrist, Drizzt disengaged himself from the rope, and so balanced was he as he ran down the side of the stalagmite that he not only did not bend low and use his hands, but he drew out both his blades as he descended. He hit the floor in a run, thinking to head off down the narrow tunnel he had spotted ahead and to the right. But his left-hand scimitar, Twinkle, glowed with a blue light, and the drow’s keen eyes and ears picked out a whisper of movement and a whisper of sound over by the side wall.

Skidding to a stop, Drizzt whirled to meet the threat, and his eyes went wide indeed when he saw the creature, unlike anything he had ever known, coming out fast for him.

Half again Drizzt’s height from head to tail, it charged on strong back legs, like a bipedal lizard, back hunched low and tail suspended behind it, counterbalancing its large head—if it could even be called a head. It seemed no more than a mouth with three equidistant mandibles stretched out wide. Black tusks as large as Drizzt’s hands curled inward at the tips of those mandibles, and Drizzt could make out rows of long, sharp teeth running back down its throat, a trio of ridged lines.

Even stranger came the glow from the creature’s eyes—three of them—each centered on the flap of mottled skin stretched wide between the respective mandibles. The creature bore down on the drow like some triangular-mouthed snake unhinging its jaw to swallow its prey.

Drizzt started out to the left then reversed fast as the creature swerved to follow. Even with his speed-enhancing anklets, though, the drow could not get far enough back to the right to avoid the turning creature.

The mandibles snapped powerfully, but hit only air as Drizzt leaped and tumbled forward, over the top mandible. He slashed down hard with both hands as he went over, and used the contact to push himself even higher as he executed a twist and brought his feet fast under him. The creature issued a strange roaring, hissing protest—a fitting, otherworldly sound for an otherworldly beast, Drizzt thought.

Tucking and turning, Drizzt planted his feet against the side of the creature’s shoulder and kicked out, but the beast was more solid than he’d thought. His strike did no more than bend it away from him at the shoulder as he went out to the side. And that bend, of course, again turned the terrible jaws his way.

But Drizzt flew backward with perfect balance and awareness. As the beast swung around he cut his scimitars across, one-two, scoring hits on the thick muscle and skin of the jaws’ connecting flap.

The creature howled again and bit down at the passing blades, its three mandible tips not quite aligning as they clicked together. It opened wide its maw again as it turned to face Drizzt.

His blades worked in a flash, the backhand of Icingdeath slicing the opposing skin flap, and a hard strike of Twinkle passing through the muscle and flesh, then turning straight down to slash the base flap that connected the lower two mandible tips. Drizzt turned the blade just a bit as it connected, and leaned forward hard, forcing the jaws to angle down.

The creature snapped its head back up, accepting the cut, and leaped straight up, turning its back end under so that it landed on its outstretched tail with its hind legs free to claw at its opponent. Formidable indeed were the three claws tipping the feet of those powerful legs, and Drizzt barely dodged back in time to avoid the vicious rake.

Somehow the creature hopped forward in pursuit, using just its tail for propulsion. Its tiny front legs waved frantically in the air as its long, powerful rear legs slashed wildly at the drow.

Drizzt worked his scimitars in a blur to defend, connecting repeatedly, but never too solidly for fear of having a blade torn from his grasp. He retracted a blade and the creature’s hind leg flailed free, then he stabbed straight out, piercing its foot.

The creature threw back its head and howled again—from up above there came a crash as a form rolled over the ledge—and Drizzt didn’t miss the opportunity offered by the distraction. Rolling around those flailing legs and slashing across with Icingdeath, then with Twinkle in close pursuit, he scored two hits on the creature’s thin neck. There was a sucking of air and Drizzt saw the bubbling of blood as his blades passed through flesh.

Not even slowing in his turn as the creature fell silent, then just fell over, the drow sprinted down the tunnel. A roar from behind made him glance back, to see Bruenor flying down the last few feet beside the stalagmite, axe over his head. The dwarf timed his landing perfectly with his overhand chop, driving his axe through the already mortally wounded creature’s backbone with a sickening sound.

“Wait here!” Drizzt called to him, and the drow was gone.

Bruenor held on as the creature thrashed in its death throes. It tried to turn around to snap at him, but Drizzt had completely disabled the once-formidable jaws’ ability to inflict any real damage. The mandibles flopped awkwardly and without coordination, most of the supporting muscles severed. Similarly, the creature’s tail and hind legs exhibited only the occasional spasmodic twitch, for Bruenor’s axe had cleaved its spine.

So the dwarf stayed at arms’ length, holding his axe out far from his torso to avoid any incidental contact.

“Hurry, elf!” Bruenor called after Drizzt when he glanced to the side and noted Thibble dorf’s boot lying on the stone floor. No longer willing to wait out the dying beast, Bruenor leaped atop its back and ripped through tendon and bone as he tugged and yanked his axe free. He thought to run off after Drizzt, but before he even had the weapon set in his hands, a movement to the side caught his eye.

The dwarf watched curiously as a darker patch of shadow coalesced near the side wall and the broken wagon, gradually taking shape—the shape of another of the strange beasts.

It came out hard and fast at him, and Bruenor wisely dropped down behind the fallen creature. On came the second beast, jaws snapping furiously, and the dwarf fell to the stone floor and heaved the fallen creature up as a meaty shield. The dwarf finally saw the damage those strange triangular jaws could inflict, for the ravenous newcomer tore through great chunks of flesh and bone in seconds.

Movement behind Bruenor had him half turning to his right.

“Just me!” Regis called to him before he came around, and the dwarf refocused on the beast before him.

Then Bruenor glanced left, to see Drizzt backing frantically out of the tunnel, his scimitars working fast and independently, each slashing quick lines to hold the snapping mouths of two more creatures at bay.

“Rumblebelly, ye help the elf!” Bruenor called, but when he glanced back, Regis was gone.

Bruenor’s foe plowed over its fallen comrade then, and the dwarf king had no time to look for his halfling companion.

Drizzt noticed Regis flattened against the wall as he, and the pair of monsters pursuing him, moved past the halfling.

Regis nodded and waited for a responding nod. As soon as Drizzt offered it, the halfling came out fast and slapped his small mace against the tail of the creature on the left. Predictably, the beast wheeled to snap at this newest foe, but anticipating that, Drizzt moved faster, bringing his right hand blade over and across, cutting a gash across the side of the turning beast’s neck.

With a roar of protest, the creature spun back, and the other, seeing the opening, came on suddenly.

But Drizzt was the quicker, and he managed to backstep fast enough to buy the time to realign his blades. He gave an approving nod to Regis as the halfling slipped down the tunnel.

Regis moved deliberately, but nervously, into the darkness, expecting a monster to spring out at him from every patch of shadow. Soon he heard the scraping of metal, and an occasional grumble and Dwarvish curse, and he could tell from the lack of bluster that Thibble dorf Pwent was in serious trouble.

Propelled by that, Regis moved with more speed, coming up to the edge of a side chamber from which issued the terrible, gnashing, metallic sounds. Regis summoned his courage and peeked around the rim of the opening. There in the room, silhouetted by the glow of lichen along the far wall, stood another creature, one larger than the others and easily more than ten feet from maw to tail tip. It stood perfectly still, except that it thrashed its head back and forth. Looking at it from the back, but on a slight angle, Regis could see why it did so. For out of the side of that mouth hung an armored dwarf leg with a dirty bare foot dangling limply at its end. Regis winced, thinking that his friend was being torn apart by that triangular maw. He could picture the black teeth crunching through Pwent’s armored shell, tearing his flesh with fangs and ripped metal.

And the dwarf wasn’t moving, other than the flailing caused by the limp limbs protruding from the thing’s mouth, and no further protests or groans came forth.

Trembling with anger and terror, Regis charged with abandon, leaping forward and lifting high his small mace. But where could he even hit the murderous beast to hurt it?

He got his answer as the creature noticed him, whipping its head around. It was then that the halfling first came to understand the strange head, with its three equidistant eyes set in the middle of each of the skin flaps that connected the mandibles. Purely on instinct, the halfling swung for the nearest eye, and the creature’s short forelimbs could not reach forward far enough to block.

The mace hit true, and the flap, taut about the knee and upper leg of the trapped dwarf, had no give that it might absorb the blow. With a sickening splat, the eye popped, gushing liquid all over the horrified halfling.

The creature hissed and whipped its head furiously—an attempt to throw the dwarf free.

But Pwent wasn’t dead. He had gone into a defensive curl, a “turtle” maneuver that tightened the set of his magnificent armor, strengthening its integrity and hiding its vulnerable seams. As the creature loosened its death grip on him, the dwarf came out of his curl with a defiant snarl. He had no room to punch, or to maneuver his head spike, so he simply thrashed, shaking like a wide-leafed bush in a gale.

The creature lost interest in Regis, and tried to clamp down on the dwarf instead. But too late, for Pwent was in a frenzy, insane with rage.

Finally the creature managed to open wide its maw and angle down, expelling the dwarf. When Pwent came free, Regis’s eyes widened to see the amount of damage—torn skin, broken teeth, and blood—the dwarf had inflicted on the beast.

And Pwent was far from done. He hit the ground in a turn that put his feet under him, and his little legs bent, then propelled him right back at the creature, head—and helmet spike—leading. He drove into and through the apex of the jaws, and the dwarf bored on, bending the creature backward. The dwarf punched out, both hands at the same time, launching twin roundhouse hooks that pounded the beast on opposite sides of its neck, fist-spikes digging in. Again and again, the dwarf retracted and punched back hard, both hands together, mashing the flesh.

And the dwarf’s legs ground on, pushing the beast backward, up against the side-chamber’s wall, and by the time they got there, the creature was not resisting at all, was not pushing back, and without the barrage it would have likely fallen over.

But Pwent kept hitting it, muttering profanities all the while.

Bruenor thrust his axe out horizontally before him, defeating the first attack. He turned the weapon and used it to angle the charging creature aside as he, too, ran ahead, sprinting by the beast to the remains of the wagon. All of the supply crates and sacks had been destroyed, either from the fall or torn apart thereafter, but Bruenor found what he was looking for in an intact portion of the side of the wagon, angling up to about waist height. Knowing the creature to be in full pursuit, the dwarf dived right over that, falling to the floor at its base and rolling to his back, axe up above his head along the ground.

The creature leaped over the planks, not realizing that Bruenor was so close to them until the dwarf’s axe hit it hard in the side, cutting a long gash just behind its small, twitching foreleg.

Bruenor fell back flat and continued the momentum to roll him right over, coming back up to his feet. He didn’t pause to look over his handiwork, but propelled himself forward, lifting his axe high over one shoulder as he went.

The creature was ready, though, and as the dwarf bore in, it snapped its mouth out at him, and when it had to retract far short of the mark to avoid a swipe of that vicious axe, the creature just fell back on its tail, as the other one had done, and brought up its formidable rear legs.

One blocked Bruenor’s next swing, kicking out and catching the axe below the head, while the other lashed out, scraping deep lines on the dwarf’s armor. Following that, the creature snapped its upper body forward, the triangular maw biting hard at the dwarf, who only managed at the last instant to get back out of range.

And right back came Bruenor, with a yell and a spit and a downward chop.

The creature rocked back and the axe whipped past cleanly. The creature reversed, coming in behind.

Bruenor didn’t stop the axe’s momentum and reverse it to parry. Rather, he let it flow through, turning sidelong as the blade came low, then turning some more, daring to roll his back around before the beast in the belief that he would be the quicker.

And so he was.

Bruenor came around, the axe in both hands and at full extension in a great sidelong slash. The creature scrambled to block. Bruenor shortened his grip, bringing the axe head in closer. When the creature kicked out to block, the axe met it squarely, removing one of the three toes and cleaving the blocking foot in half.

The creature threw itself forward, screaming in pain and anger, coming at Bruenor with blind rage. And the dwarf king backed frantically, his axe working to-and-fro to fend off the snapping assaults.

“Elf! I’m needin’ ye!” the desperate dwarf bellowed.

Drizzt was in no position to answer. The wound he had inflicted on one of the beasts wasn’t quite as serious as he’d hoped, apparently, for that creature showed no signs of relenting. Worse for Drizzt, he had been backed into a wider area, giving the creatures more room to maneuver and spread out before him.

They went wide, left and right, amazingly well coordinated for unthinking beasts—if they were indeed unthinking beasts. Drizzt worked his blades as far to either side as he could, and when that became impractical and awkward, the drow rushed ahead suddenly, back toward the tunnel.

Both creatures turned to chase, but Drizzt reversed even faster, spinning to meet their pursuit with a barrage of blows. He scored a deep gash on the side of one’s mouth, and poked the other in its bottom eye.

Up above he heard a crash, and from the side Bruenor called for him. All he could do was look for options.

His gaze followed the trail of falling rocks, to see Torgar Hammer striker in a wild and overbalanced run down the side of the stalagmite. The dwarf held a heavy crossbow before him, and just before his stumbling sent him into a headlong slide, he let fly a bolt, somehow hitting the creature to Drizzt’s right. The crossbow went flying and so did Torgar, crashing and bouncing the rest of the way down.

The creature he had hit stumbled then spun to meet the dwarf’s charge. But its jaws couldn’t catch up to the bouncing and flailing Torgar, and the dwarf slammed hard against the back and side of the beast, bringing it down in a heap. Dazed beyond sensibility, Torgar couldn’t begin to defend himself in that tumble as the creature moved to strike.

But Drizzt moved around the remaining creature and struck hard at the fallen beast, his scimitars slicing at its flesh in rapid succession, tearing deep lines. Drizzt had to pause to fend off the other, but as soon as that attack was repelled, he went back to the first, ensuring that it was dead.

Then the drow smiled, seeing that the tide had turned, seeing the lowered head spike rushing in hard at the standing creature’s backside.

Even as Pwent connected, skewering the beast from behind, Drizzt broke off and ran toward the wagon. By the time he got there, he found Bruenor and his opponent in a wild back and forth of snapping and slashing.

Drizzt leaped up to the lip of the wagon side, looking for an opening. Noting him, Bruenor rushed out the other way, and the creature turned with the dwarf.

Drizzt leaped astride its back, his scimitars going to quick and deadly work.

“What in the Nine Hells are them things?” Bruenor asked when the vicious thing at last lay still.

“What from the Nine Hells, perhaps,” said Drizzt with a shrug.

The two moved back to the center of the room, where Pwent continued pummeling the already dead beast and Regis tended to the dazed and battered Torgar.

“I can’t be getting down,” came a call from above, and all eyes lifted to see Cordio peering over the entrance, far above. “Ain’t no place to set the rope.”

“I’ll get him,” Drizzt assured Bruenor.

With agility that continued to awe, the drow ran up the side of the stalagmite, sliding his scimitars away. At the top, he searched and found his handholds, and between those and the rope, which Cordio had braced once more, Drizzt soon disappeared back out of the hole.

A few moments later, Cordio came down on the rope, gaining to the top of the mound, then, with Drizzt’s help, he worked his way gingerly down to the ground. Drizzt came back into the cavern soon after, hanging by his fingertips. He fell purposely, landing lightly atop the stalagmite mound. From there, the drow trotted down to join his friends.

“Stupid, smelly lizards,” Pwent muttered as he tried to put his boot back on. The metal bands had been bent, though, crimping the opening in the shoe, and so it was no easy task.

“What were them things?” Bruenor asked any and all.

“Extraplanar creatures,” said Cordio, who was inspecting one of the bodies—one of the bodies that was smoking and dissipating before his very eyes. “I’d be keeping yer cat in its statue, elf.”

Drizzt’s hand went reflexively to his pouch, where he kept the onyx figurine he used to summon Guenhwyvar to the Prime Material Plane. He nodded his agreement with Cordio. If ever he had needed the panther, it would have been in the last fight, and even then, he hadn’t dared call upon her. He could sense it, too, a pervasive aura of strange otherworldliness. The place was either truly haunted or somehow dimensionally unstable.

He slipped his hand in the pouch and felt the contours of the panther replica. He hoped the situation wouldn’t force him to chance a call to Guenhwyvar, but in glancing around at his already battered companions, he had little confidence that it could be avoided for long.

CHAPTER 10 THE WAY OF THE ORC

The orcs of Clan Yellowtusk swept into the forest from the north, attacking trees as if avenging some heinous crime perpetrated upon them by the inanimate plants. Axes chopped and fires flared to life, and the group, as ordered, made as much noise as they could.

On a hillside to the east, Dnark, Toogwik Tuk, and Ung-thol crouched and waited nervously, while Clan Karuck crept along the low ground behind them and to the south.

“This is too brazen,” Ung-thol warned. “The elves will come out in force.”

Dnark knew that his shaman’s words were not without merit, for they’d encroached on the Moonwood, the home of a deadly clan of elves.

“We will be gone across the river before the main groups arrive,” Toogwik Tuk replied. “Grguch and Hakuun have planned this carefully.”

“We are exposed!” Ung-thol protested. “If we are seen here on open ground…”

“Their eyes will be to the north, to the flames that eat their beloved god-trees,” said Toogwik Tuk.

“It is a gamble,” Dnark interjected, calming both shamans.

“It is the way of the warrior,” said Toogwik Tuk. “The way of the orc. It is something Obould Many-Arrows would have once done, but no more.”

Truth resonated in those words to both Dnark and Ung-thol. The chieftain glanced down at the creeping warriors of Clan Karuck, many shrouded by branches they had attached to their dark armor and clothing. Further to the side, tight around the trees of a small copse, a band of ogre javelin throwers held still and quiet, atlatl throwing sticks in hand.

The day could bring disaster, a ruination of all of their plans to force Obould forward, Dnark knew. Or it could bring glory, which would then only push their plans all the more. In any event, a blow struck here would sound like the shredding of a treaty, and that, the chieftain thought, could only be a good thing.

He crouched back low in the grass and watched the scene unfolding before him. He wouldn’t likely see the approach of the cunning elves, of course, but he would know of their arrival by the screams of Clan Yellowtusk’s sacrificed forward warriors.

A moment later, and not so far to the north, one such cry of orc agony rent the air.

Dnark glanced down at Clan Karuck, who continued their methodical encirclement.

Innovindil could only shake her head in dismay to see the dark lines of smoke rising from the northern end of the Moonwood yet again. The orcs were nothing if not stubborn.

Her bow across her saddle before her, the elf brought Sunset up above the treetops, but kept the pegasus low. The forward scouts would engage the orcs before her arrival, no doubt, but she still hoped to get some shots in from above with the element of surprise working for her.

She banked the pegasus left, toward the river, thinking to come around the back of the orc mob so that she could better direct the battle to her companions on the ground. She went even lower as she broke clear of the thick tree line and eased Sunset’s reins, letting the pegasus fly full out. The wind whipped through the elf’s blond locks, her hair and cape flapping out behind her, her eyes tearing from the refreshingly chilly breeze. Her rhythm held perfect, posting smoothly with the rise and fall of her steed’s powerful shoulders, her balance so centered and complete that she seemed an extension of the pegasus rather than a separate being. She let the fingers of one hand feel the fine design of her bow, while her other hand slipped down to brush the feathered fletching of the arrows set in a quiver on the side of her saddle. She rolled an arrow with her fingers, anticipating when she could let it fly for the face of an orc marauder.

Keeping the river on her left and the trees on her right, Innovindil cruised along. She came up on one hillock and had nearly flown over it by the time she noticed carefully camouflaged forms creeping along.

Orcs. South of the fires and the noise. South of the forward scouts.

The veteran elf warrior recognized an ambush when she saw one. A second group of orcs were set to swing against the rear flank of the Moonwood elves, which meant that the noisemakers and fire-starters in the north were nothing more than a diversion.

Innovindil did a quick scan of the forest beyond and the movement before her, and understood the danger. She took up the reins and banked Sunset hard to the right, flying over a copse of trees that left only a short open expanse to the forest proper. She focused on the greater forest ahead, trying to gauge the fight, the location of the orcs and of her people.

Still, the perceptive elf caught the movements around the trees below her, for she could hardly have missed the brutish behemoths scrambling in the leafless copse. They stood twice her height, with shoulders more than thrice her girth.

She saw them, and they saw her, and they rushed around below her, lifting heavy javelins on notched atlatls.

“Fly on, Sunset!” Innovindil cried, recognizing the danger even before one of the missiles soared her way. She pulled back the reins hard, angling her mount higher, and Sunset, understanding the danger, beat his wings with all his strength and speed.

A javelin cracked the air as it flew past, narrowly missing her, and Innovindil couldn’t believe the power behind that throw.

She banked the pegasus left and right, not wanting to present an easy target or a predictable path. She and Sunset had to be at their best in the next few moments, and Innovindil steeled her gaze, ready to meet that challenge.

She couldn’t know that she had been expected, and she was too busy dodging huge javelins to take note of the small flying serpent soaring along the treetops parallel to her.

Chieftain Grguch watched the darting and swerving pegasus with amusement and grudging respect. It quickly became clear to him that the ogres would not take the flying pair down, as his closest advisor had predicted. He turned to the prescient Hakuun then, his smile wide.

“This is why I keep you beside me,” he said, though he doubted that the shaman, deep in the throes of casting a spell he had prepared precisely for that eventuality, even heard him.

The sight of a ridden pegasus over the previous battle with the elves had greatly angered Grguch, for he had thought on that occasion that his ambush had the raiding group fooled. The flyer had precipitated the elves’ escape, Grguch believed, and so he had feared it would happen again—and worse, feared that an elf on high might discover the vulnerable Clan Karuck as well.

Hakuun had given him his answer, and that answer played out in full as the shaman lifted his arms skyward and shouted the last few words of his spell. The air before Hakuun’s lips shuddered, a wave of shocking energy blaring forth, distorting images like a rolling ball of water or extreme heat rising from hot stone.

Hakuun’s spell exploded around the dodging elf and pegasus, the air itself trembling and quaking in shock waves that buffeted and battered both rider and mount.

Hakuun turned a superior expression his beloved chieftain’s way, as if to report simply, “Problem solved.”

Innovindil didn’t know what hit her, and perhaps more importantly, hit Sunset. They held motionless for a heartbeat, sudden, crackling gusts battering them from all sides. Then they were falling, dazed, but only for a short span before Sunset spread his wings and caught the updrafts.

But they were lower again, too near the ground, and with all momentum stolen. No skill, in rider or in mount, could counter that sudden reversal. Luck alone would get them through.

Sunset whinnied in pain and Innovindil felt a jolt behind her leg. She looked down to see a javelin buried deep in the pegasus’s flank, bright blood dripping out on the great steed’s white coat.

“Fly on!” Innovindil implored, for what choice did they have?

Another spear flew past, and another sent Sunset into a sudden turn as it shot up in front of them.

Innovindil hung on for all her life, knuckles whitening, legs clamping the flying horse’s flanks. She wanted to reach back and pull out the javelin, which clearly dragged at the pegasus, but she couldn’t risk it in that moment of frantic twisting and dodging.

The Moonwood rose up before her, dark and inviting, the place she had known as her home for centuries. If she could just get there, the clerics would tend to Sunset.

She got hit hard on the side and nearly thrown from her perch, unexpectedly buffeted by Sunset’s right wing. It hit her again, and the horse dropped suddenly. A javelin had driven through the poor pegasus’s wing, right at the joint.

Innovindil leaned forward, imploring the horse for his own sake and for hers, to fight through the pain.

She got hit again, harder.

Sunset managed to stop thrashing and extend his wings enough to catch the updraft and keep them moving along.

As they left the copse behind, Innovindil believed that they could make it, that her magnificent pegasus had enough determination and fortitude to get them through. She turned again to see to the javelin in Sunset’s flank—or tried to.

For as Innovindil pivoted in her saddle, a fiery pain shot through her side, nearly taking her from consciousness. The elf somehow settled and turned just her head, and realized then that the last buffet she had taken hadn’t been from Sunset’s wing, for a dart of some unknown origin hung from her hip, and she could feel it pulsing with magical energy, beating like a heart and flushing painful acid into her side. The closer line of blood pouring down Sunset’s flank was her own and not the pegasus’s.

Her right leg had gone completely numb, and patches of blackness flitted about her field of vision.

“Fly on,” she murmured to the pegasus, though she knew that every stroke of wings brought agony to her beloved equine friend. But they had to get over the forward elf line. Nothing else mattered.

Valiant Sunset rose up over the nearest trees of the Moonwood, and brave Innovindil called down to her people, who she knew to be moving through the trees. “Flee to the south and west,” she begged in a voice growing weaker by the syllable. “Ambush! Trap!”

Sunset beat his wings again then whinnied in pain and jerked to the left. They couldn’t hold. Somewhere in the back of her mind, in a place caught between consciousness and blackness, Innovindil knew the pegasus could not go on.

She thought that the way before them was clear, but suddenly a large tree loomed where before there had been only empty space. It made no sense to her. She didn’t even begin to think that a wizard might be nearby, casting illusions to deceive her. She was only dimly aware as she and Sunset plowed into the tangle of the large tree, and she felt no real pain as she and the horse crashed in headlong, tumbling and twisting in a bone-crunching descent through the branches and to the ground. At one point she caught a curious sight indeed, though it hardly registered: a little, aged gnome with only slight tufts of white hair above his considerable ears and dressed in beautiful shimmering robes of purple and red sat on a branch, legs crossed at the ankles and rocking childlike back and forth, staring at her with an amused expression.

Delirium, the presage to death, she briefly thought. It had to be.

Sunset hit the ground first, in a twisted and broken heap, and Innovindil fell atop him, her face close to his.

She heard his last breath.

She died atop him.

Back on the hillside, the three orcs lost sight of the elf and her flying horse long before the crash, but they had witnessed the javelin strikes, and had cheered each.

“Clan Karuck!” Dnark said, punching his fist into the air, and daring to believe in that moment of elation and victory that the arrival of the half-ogres and their behemoth kin would indeed deliver all the promises of optimistic Toogwik Tuk. The elves and their flying horses had been a bane to the orcs since they had come south, but would any more dare glide over the fields of the Kingdom of Many-Arrows?

“Karuck,” Toogwik Tuk agreed, clapping the chieftain on the shoulder, and pointing below.

There, Grguch stood tall, arms upraised. “Take them!” the half-ogre cried to his people. “To the forest!”

With a howl and hoot that brought goosebumps to the chieftain and shamans, the warriors of Clan Karuck leaped up from their concealment and ran howling toward the forest. From the small copse to the south came the lumbering ogres, each with a throw-stick resting on one shoulder, a javelin set in its Y, angled forward and up, ready to launch.

The ground shook beneath their charge, and the wind itself retreated before the force of their vicious howls.

“Clan Karuck!” Ung-thol agreed with his two companions. “And may all the world tremble.”

Innovindil’s warning cry had been heard, and her people trusted her judgment enough not to question the command. As word filtered through the trees, the Moonwood elves let fly one last arrow and turned to the southwest, sprinting along from cover to cover. Whatever their anger, whatever the temptation of turning back to strike at the orcs in the north, they would not ignore Innovindil.

And true to their beliefs, within a matter of moments, they heard the roars from the east, and realized the trap that their companion had spied. With expert coordination, they tightened their ranks and moved toward the most defensible ground they could find.

Those farthest to the east, a group of a dozen forest folk, were the first to see the charge of Clan Karuck. The enormous half-breeds ran through the trees with wild abandon and frightening speed.

“Hold them,” the leader of that patrol told her fellow elves.

Several others looked at her incredulously, but from the majority came nothing but determination. The charge was too ferocious. The other elves moving tree to tree would be overrun.

The group settled behind an ancient, broken, weatherworn wall of piled stones. Exchanging grim nods, they set their arrows and crouched low.

The first huge orcs came into sight, but the elves held their shots. More and more appeared behind the lead runners, but the elves did not break, and did not let fly. The battle wasn’t about them, they understood, but about their kin fleeing behind them.

The nearest Clan Karuck warriors were barely five strides from the rock wall when the elves popped up as one, lowered their bows in unison and launched a volley of death.

Orcs shrieked and fell, and the snow before the wall was splattered with red. More arrows went out, but more and more orcs came on. And leaping out before those orcs came a small flaming sphere, and the elves knew what it portended. As one, they crouched and covered against the fireball—one that, in truth, did more damage to the front rank of the charging orcs than to the covering elves, except that it interrupted the stream of the elves’ defense.

Clan Karuck fed on the cries of its dying members. Fear was not known among the warriors, who wanted only to die in the service of Gruumsh and Grguch. In a frenzy they defied the rain of arrows and the burning branches falling from the continuing conflagration on high. Some even grabbed their skewered companions and tugged them along as shields.

Behind the wall, the elves abandoned their bows and drew out long, slender swords. In shining mail and with windblown cloaks, most still trailing wisps of smoke and a couple still burning, they met the charge with splendor, strength, and courage.

But Grguch and his minions overran them and slaughtered them, and their weapons gleamed red, not silver, and their cloaks, weighted with blood, would not flap in the breeze.

Grguch led the warriors through the forest a short distance farther, but he knew that he was traveling on elven ground, where defensive lines of archers would sting his warriors from the tops of hills and the boughs of trees, and where powerful spells would explode without warning. He pulled up and raised his open hand, a signal to halt the charge, then he motioned to the south, sending a trio of ogres forward.

“Take their heads,” he ordered to his orcs, and nodded back to the stone wall. “We’ll pike them along the western bank of the river to remind the faerie folk of their mistake.”

Up ahead, some distance already, an ogre cried out in pain. Grguch nodded his understanding, knowing that the elves would regroup quickly—that they probably already had. He looked around at his charges and grinned.

“To the river,” he ordered, confident that his point had been made, to Clan Karuck and to the three emissaries who had brought them forth from their tunnels under the Spine of the World.

He didn’t know about the fourth non-Karuck onlooker, of course, who had played a role in it all. Jack was back in his Jaculi form, wrapped around the limb of a tree, watching it all unfold around him with mounting curiosity. He would have to have a long talk with Hakuun, and soon, he realized, and he felt a bit of joy then that he had followed Clan Karuck out of the Underdark.

He had long forgotten about the wide world and the fun of mischief.

Besides, he’d never liked elves.

Toogwik Tuk, Ung-thol, and Dnark beamed with toothy grins as they made their way back to orc-held lands.

“We have brought forth the fury of Gruumsh,” Dnark said when the trio stood on the western bank of the Surbrin, looking back east at the Moonwood. The sun was low behind them, dusk falling, and the forest took on a singular appearance, as if its tree line was the defensive wall of an immense castle.

“It will remind King Obould of our true purpose,” Ung-thol posited.

“Or he will be replaced,” said Toogwik Tuk.

The other two didn’t even wince at those words, spoken openly. Not after seeing the cunning, the ferocity, and the power of Grguch and Clan Karuck. Barely twenty feet north of their position, an elf head staked upon a tall pike swayed in the wind.

Albondiel’s heart sank when he spotted the flash of white against the forest ground. At first he thought it just another patch of snow, but as he came around one thick tree and gained a better vantage point, he realized the truth.

Snow didn’t have feathers.

“Hralien,” he called in a voice breaking on every syllable. Time seemed to freeze for the shocked elf, as if half the day slid by, but in only a few moments, Hralien was at Albondiel’s side.

“Sunset,” Hralien whispered and moved forward.

Albondiel summoned his courage and followed. He knew what they would find.

Innovindil still lay atop the pegasus, her arms wrapped around Sunset’s neck, her face pressed close to his. From Albondiel’s first vantage point when he came around the tree that had abruptly ended Innovindil and Sunset’s flight, the scene was peaceful and serene, almost as if his friend had fallen asleep atop her beloved equine friend. Scanning farther down, though, revealed the truth, revealed the blood and the gigantic javelins, the shattered wings and the magical wound of dissolved flesh behind Innovindil’s hip.

Hralien bent over the dead elf and gently stroked her thick hair, and ran his other hand over the soft and muscled neck of Sunset.

“They were ready for us,” he said.

“Ready?” said Albondiel, shaking his head and wiping the tears from his cheeks. “More than that. They lured us. They anticipated our counterstrike.”

“They are orcs!” Hralien protested, rising fast and turning away.

He brought his arms straight out before him, then slowly moved them out wide to either side then behind him, arching his back and lifting his face to the sky as he went. It was a ritual movement, often used in times of great stress and anguish, and Hralien ended by issuing a high-pitched keen toward the sky, a protest to the gods for the pain visited upon his people that dark day.

He collected himself quickly, his grief thrown out for the moment, and spun back at Albondiel, who still kneeled, stroking Innovindil’s head.

“Orcs,” Hralien said again. “Have they become so sophisticated in their methods?”

“They have always been cunning,” Albondiel replied.

“They know too much of us,” Hralien protested.

“Then we must change our tactics.”

But Hralien was shaking his head. “It is more, I fear. Could it be that they are guided by a dark elf who knows how we fight?”

“We do not know that,” Albondiel cautioned. “This was a simple ambush, perhaps.”

“One ready for Innovindil and Sunset!”

“By design or by coincidence? You assume much.”

Hralien knelt beside his friends, living and dead. “Can we afford not to?”

Albondiel pondered that for a few moments. “We should find Tos’un.”

“We should get word to Mithral Hall,” said Hralien. “To Drizzt Do’Urden, who will grieve for Innovindil and Sunset. He will understand better the methods of Tos’un, and has already vowed to find the drow.”

A shadow passed over them, drawing their attention skyward.

Sunrise circled above them, tossing his head and crying out pitifully for the lost pegasus.

Albondiel looked at Hralien and saw tears streaking his friend’s face. He looked back up at the pegasus, but could hardly make out the flying horse through the glare of his own tears in the morning sunlight.

“Get Drizzt,” he heard himself whisper.

CHAPTER 11 MISDIRECTING CLUES

Pack it up and move it out,” Bruenor grumbled, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. He snatched up his axe, wrapping his hand around the handle just under the well-worn head. He prodded the hard ground with it as if it were a walking stick as he moved away from the group.

Thibble dorf Pwent, wearing much of his lunch in his beard and on his armor, hopped up right behind, eager to be on his way, and Cordio and Torgar similarly rose to Bruenor’s call, though with less enthusiasm, even with a wary glance to each other.

Regis just gave a sigh and looked down at the remainder of his meal, a slab of cold beef wrapped with flattened bread, and with a bowl of thick gravy and a biscuit on the side.

“Always in a hurry,” the halfling said to Drizzt, who helped him rewrap the remaining food.

“Bruenor is nervous,” said Drizzt, “and anxious.”

“Because he fears more monsters?”

“Because these tunnels are not to his expectations or to his liking,” the drow explained, and Regis nodded at the revelation.

They had come into the hole expecting to find a tunnel to the dwarven city of Gauntlgrym, and at first, after their encounter with the strange beasts, things had seemed pretty much as they had anticipated, including a sloping tunnel with a worked wall. The other side seemed more natural stone and dirt, as were the ceiling and floor, but that one wall had left no doubt that it was more than a natural cave, and the craftsmanship evident in the fitted stones made Bruenor and the other dwarves believe that it was indeed the work of their ancestors.

But that tunnel hadn’t held its promise or its course, and though they were deeper underground, and though they still found fragments of old construction, the trail seemed to be growing cold.

Drizzt and Regis moved quickly to close the distance to the others. With the monsters about, appearing suddenly from the shadows as if from nowhere, the group didn’t dare separate. That presented a dilemma a hundred feet along, when Bruenor led them all into a small chamber they quickly recognized to be a hub, with no fewer than six tunnels branching out from it.

“Well, there ye be!” Bruenor cried, hefting his axe and punching it into the air triumphantly. “Ain’t no river or burrowing beast made this plaza.”

Looking around, it was hard for Drizzt to disagree, for other than one side, where dirt had collapsed into the place, the chamber seemed perfectly circular, and the tunnels too equidistant for it to be a random design.

Torgar fell to his knees and began digging at the hard-packed dirt, and his progress multiplied many times over when Pwent dropped down beside him and put his spiked gauntlets to work. In a few moments, the battlerager scraped stone, and as he worked his way out to the sides, it became apparent that the stone was flat.

“A paver!” Torgar announced.

“Gauntlgrym,” Bruenor said to Drizzt and Regis with an exaggerated wink. “Never doubt an old dwarf.”

“Another one!” Pwent announced.

“Sure’n the whole place is full o’ them,” said Bruenor. “It’s a trading hub for caravans, or I’m a bearded gnome. Yerself’s knowing that,” he said to Torgar, and the Mirabarran dwarf nodded.

Drizzt looked past the three dwarves to the fourth, Cordio, who had moved to the wall between a pair of the tunnels and was scraping at the wall. The dwarf nodded as his knife sank in deeper along a crease in the stone behind the accumulated dirt and mud, revealing a vertical line.

“What do ye know?” Bruenor asked, leading Torgar and Thibbledorf over to the cleric.

A moment later, as Cordio broke away a larger piece of the covering grime, it became apparent to all that the cleric had found a door. After a few moments, they managed to clear it completely, and to their delight they were able to pry it open, revealing a single-roomed structure behind it. Part of the back left corner had collapsed, taking a series of shelves down with it, but other than that, the place seemed frozen in time.

“Dwarven,” Bruenor was saying as Drizzt moved to the threshold.

The dwarf stood off to the side of the small door, examining a rack holding a few ancient metal artifacts. They were tools or weapons, obviously, and Bruenor upended one to examine its head, which could have been the remnants of a pole arm, or even a hoe, perhaps.

“Might be dwarven,” Torgar agreed, examining the shorter-handled item beside the one Bruenor had lifted, one showing the clear remains of a spade. “Too old to know for sure.”

“Dwarven,” Bruenor insisted. He turned and let his gaze encompass the whole of the small house. “All the place is dwarven.”

The others nodded, more because they couldn’t disprove the theory than because they had reached the same conclusions. The remnants of a table and a pair of chairs might well have been dwarf-made, and seemed about the right size for the bearded folk. Cordio moved around those items to a hearth, and as he began clearing the debris from it and scraping at the stone, that, too, seemed to bolster Bruenor’s argument. For there was no mistaking the craftsmanship evident in the ancient fireplace. The bricks had been so tightly set that the passage of time had done little to diminish the integrity of the structure, and indeed it seemed as if, with a bit of cleaning, the companions could safely light a fire.

Drizzt, too, noted that hearth, and paid particular heed to the shallowness of the fireplace, and the funnel shape of the side walls, widening greatly into the room.

“The plaza’s a forward post for the city,” Bruenor announced as they began moving back out. “So I’m guessing that the city’s opposite the tunnel we just came down.”

“In the lead!” said Pwent, heading that way at once.

“Good guess on the door,” Bruenor said to Cordio, and he patted the cleric on the shoulder before he and Torgar started off after the battlerager.

“It wasn’t a guess,” Drizzt said under his breath, so that only Regis could hear. And Cordio, for the dwarf glanced back at Drizzt—his expression seeming rather sour, Regis thought—then moved off after his king, muttering, “Wouldn’t need pavers this far down.”

Regis looked from him to Drizzt, his expression begging answers.

“It was a free-standing house, and not a reinforced cave dwelling,” Drizzt explained.

Regis glanced around. “You think there are others, separating the exit tunnels?”

“Probably.”

“And what does that mean? There were many free-standing houses in the bowels of Mirabar. Not so uncommon a thing in underground cities.”

“True enough,” Drizzt agreed. “Menzoberranzan is comprised of many similar structures.”

“Cordio’s expression spoke of some significance,” the halfling remarked. “If this type of structure is to be expected, then why did he wear a frown?”

“Did you note the fireplace?” Drizzt asked.

“Dwarven,” Regis replied.

“Perhaps.”

“What’s wrong?”

“The fireplace was not a cooking pit, primarily,” Drizzt explained. “It was designed to throw heat into the room.”

Regis shrugged, not understanding.

“We are far enough underground so that the temperature hardly varies,” Drizzt informed him, and started off after the others.

Regis paused for just a moment, and glanced back at the revealed structure.

“Should we search this area more completely?” the halfling asked.

“Follow Bruenor,” Drizzt replied. “We will have our answers soon enough.”

They kept their questions unspoken as they hurried to join up with the four dwarves, which took some time, for the excited Bruenor led them down the tunnel at a hurried pace.

The tunnel widened considerably soon after, breaking into what seemed to be a series of parallel tracks of varying widths continuing in the same general direction. Bruenor moved without hesitation down the centermost of them, but they found it to be a moot choice anyway, since the tunnels interconnected at many junctures. What they soon discerned was that this wasn’t so much a series of tunnels as a singular pathway, broken up by pillars, columns, and other structures.

At one such interval, they came upon a low entrance, capped diagonally by a structure that had obviously been made by skilled masons, for the bricks could still be seen, and they held fast despite the passage of centuries and the apparent collapse of the building, which had sent it crashing to the side into another wall.

“Could be a shaft, pitched for a fast descent,” Bruenor remarked.

“It’s a building that tipped,” Cordio argued, and Bruenor snorted and waved his hand dismissively.

But Torgar, who had moved closer, said, “Aye, it is.” He paused and looked up. “And one that fell a long way. Or slid.”

“And how’re ye knowin’ that?” Bruenor asked, and there was no mistaking the hint of defiance. He was catching on, obviously, that things weren’t unfolding the way he’d anticipated.

Torgar was already motioning them over, and began pointing out the closest corner of the structure, where the edge of the bricks had been rounded, but not by tools.

“We see this in Mirabar all the time,” Torgar explained, running a fat thumb over the corner. “Wind wore it round. This place was under the sky, not under the rock.”

“There’s wind in some tunnels,” said Bruenor. “Currents and such blowin’ down strong from above.”

Torgar remained unconvinced. “This building was up above,” he said, shaking his head, “for years and years afore it fell under.”

“Bah!” Bruenor snorted. “Ye’re guessin’.”

“Might be that Gauntlgrym had an aboveground market,” Cordio interjected.

Drizzt looked at Regis and rolled his eyes, and as the dwarves moved off, the halfling grabbed Drizzt by the sleeve and held him back.

“You don’t believe that Gauntlgrym had an aboveground market?” he asked.

“Gauntlgrym?” Drizzt echoed skeptically.

“You don’t believe?”

“More than the market of this place was above ground, I fear,” said Drizzt. “Much more. And Cordio and Torgar see it, too.”

“But not Bruenor,” said Regis.

“It will be a blow to him. One he is not ready to accept.”

“You think this whole place was a city above ground?” Regis stated. “A city that sank into the tundra?”

“Let us follow the dwarves. We will learn what we will learn.”

The tunnels continued on for a few hundred more feet, but the group came to a solid blockage, one that sealed off all of the nearby corridors. Torgar tapped on that wall repeatedly with a small hammer, listening for echoes, and after inspecting it at several points in all the tunnels, announced to the troop, “There’s a big open area behind it. I’m knowin’ it.”

“Forges?” Bruenor asked hopefully.

Torgar could only shrug. “Only one way we’re goin’ to find out, me king.”

So they set their camp right there, down the main tunnel at the base of the wall, and while Drizzt and Regis went back up the tunnel some distance to keep watch back near the wider areas, the four dwarves devised their plans for safely excavating. Soon after they had shared their next meal, the sound of hammers rang out against the stone, none more urgent than Bruenor’s own.

CHAPTER 12 NESMÉ’S PRIDE

I had hoped to find the woman before we crossed the last expanse to Nesmé,” Wulfgar remarked to Catti-brie. Their caravan had stopped to re-supply at a nondescript, unnamed cluster of houses still a couple of days’ travel from their destination, and the last such scheduled stop on their journey.

“There are still more settlements,” Catti-brie reminded him, for indeed, the drivers had told them that they would pass more secluded lodges in the next two days.

“The houses of hunters and loners,” Wulfgar replied. “No places appropriate for Cottie to remain with Colson.”

“Unless all the refugees remained together and decided to begin their own community.”

Wulfgar replied with a knowing smile, a reflection of Catti-brie’s own feelings on the subject, to be sure. She knew as Wulfgar knew that they would find Cottie Cooperson and Colson in Nesmé.

“Two days,” Catti-brie said. “In two days, you will have Colson in your arms once more. Where she belongs.”

Wulfgar’s grim expression, even a little wince, caught her by surprise.

“We have heard of no tragedies along the road,” Catti-brie added. “If the caravan bearing Cottie and the others had been attacked, word would have already spread through these outposts. Since we are so close, we can say with confidence that Cottie and Colson reached Nesmé safely.”

“Still, I have no love of the place,” he said, “and no desire to see the likes of Galen Firth or his prideful companions ever again.”

Catti-brie moved closer and put her hand on Wulfgar’s shoulder. “We will collect the child and be gone,” she said. “Quickly and with few words. We come with the backing of Mithral Hall, and to Mithral Hall we will return with your child.”

Wulfgar’s face was unreadable, though that, of course, only reaf-firmed Catti-brie’s suspicions that something was amiss.

The caravan rolled out of the village before the next dawn, wheels creaking against the uneven strain of the perpetually muddy ground. As they continued west, the Trollmoors, the fetid swamp of so many unpleasant beasts, seemed to creep up toward them from the south. But the drivers and those more familiar with the region appeared unconcerned, and were happy to explain, often, that things had quieted since the rout of the trolls by Alustriel’s Knights in Silver and the brave Riders of Nesmé.

“The road’s safer than it’s been in more than a decade,” the lead driver insisted.

“More’s the pity,” one of the regulars from the second wagon answered loudly. “I been hoping a few trolls or bog blokes might show their ugly faces, just so I can watch the work of King Bruenor’s kids!”

That brought a cheer from all around, and a smile did widen on Catti-brie’s face. She looked to Wulfgar. If he had even heard the remarks, he didn’t show it.

Wulfgar and Catti-brie weren’t really sure what they might find when their caravan finally came into view of Nesmé, but they knew at once that it was not the same town through which they had traveled on their long-ago journey to rediscover Mithral Hall. Anticipated images of ruined and burned-out homes and shoddy, temporary shelters did not prepare them for the truth of the place. For Nesmé had risen again already, even through the cold winds of winter.

Most of the debris from the troll rampage had been cleared, and newer buildings, stronger, taller, and with thicker walls, replaced the old structures. The double wall surrounding the whole of the place neared completion, and was particularly fortified along the southern borders, facing the Trollmoors.

Contingents of armed and armored riders patrolled the town, meeting the caravan far out from the new and larger gate.

Nesmé was alive again, a testament to the resiliency and determination, and sheer stubbornness that had marked the frontiers of human advancement throughout Faerûn. For all of their rightful negativity toward the place, given their reception those years before, neither Wulfgar nor Catti-brie could hide their respect.

“So much like Ten-Towns,” Catti-brie quietly remarked as their wagon neared the gate. “They will not bend.”

Wulfgar nodded his agreement, slightly, but he was clearly distracted as he continued to stare at the town.

“They’ve more people now than before the trolls,” Catti-brie said, repeating something the caravan drivers had told the both of them earlier along the road. “Twice the number, say some.”

Wulfgar didn’t blink and didn’t look her way. She sensed his inner turmoil, and knew that it wasn’t about Colson. Not only, at least.

She tried one last time to engage him, saying, “Nesmé might inspire other towns to grow along the road to Silverymoon, and won’t that be a fitting response to the march of the murderous trolls? It may well be that the northern border will grow strong enough to build a militia that can press into the swamp and be rid of the beasts once and for all.”

“It might,” said Wulfgar, in such a tone as to show Catti-brie that he hadn’t even registered that to which he agreed.

The town gates, towering barriers thrice the height of a tall man and built of strong black-barked logs banded together with heavy straps of metal, groaned in protest as the sentries pulled them back to allow the caravan access to the town’s open courtyard. Beyond that defensive wall, Wulfgar and Catti-brie could see that their initial views of Nesmé were no illusion, for indeed the town was larger and more impressive than it had been those years before. It had an official barracks to support the larger militia, a long, two-story building to their left along the defensive southern wall. Before them loomed the tallest structure in town, aside from a singular tower that was under work somewhere in the northwestern quadrant. Two dozen steps led off the main plaza where the wagons parked, directly west of the eastern-facing gates. At the top of those steps ran a pair of parallel, narrow bridges, just a short and defensible expanse, to the impressive front of the new Nesmian Town Hall. Like all the rest of the town, the building was under construction, but like most of the rest, it was ready to stand against any onslaught the Trollmoors in the south, or King Obould in the north, might throw against it.

Wulfgar hopped down from the back of the wagon, then helped Catti-brie to the ground so that she didn’t have to pressure her injured hip. She spent a moment standing there, using his offered arm for support, as she stretched the tightness out of her pained leg.

“The folk ye seek could be anywhere in the town,” their wagon driver said to them, walking over and speaking quietly.

He alone among the caravan had been in on the real reason Wulfgar and Catti-brie were journeying to Nesmé, for fear that someone else might gossip and send word to Cottie and her friends to flee ahead of their arrival. “They’ll not be in any common rooms, as ye saw in Silverymoon, for Nesmé’s being built right around the new arrivals. More than half the folk ye’ll find here just came from other parts, mostly from lands Obould’s darkened with his hordes. Them and some of the Knights in Silver, who remained with the Lady’s blessing so that they could get closer to where the fighting’s likely to be….”

“Surely there are scribes making note of who’s coming in and where they’re settling,” said Catti-brie.

“If so, ye’ll find them in there,” said the driver, motioning toward the impressive town hall. “If not, yer best chance is in frequenting the taverns after work’s done. Most all the workers find their way to those places—and there’re only a few such establishments, and they’re all together on one avenue near the southwestern corner. If any’re knowing of Cottie, there’s the place to find them.”

Word spread fast through Nesmé that the arriving caravan had carried with it a couple of extraordinary guards. When the whispers of Catti-brie and Wulfgar reached the ears of Cottie Cooperson’s fellow refugees, they knew at once that their friend was in jeopardy.

So by the time Wulfgar and Catti-brie had made their way to the tavern avenue, a pair of concerned friends had whisked Cottie and Colson to the barracks area and the separate house of the town’s current leader, Galen Firth.

“He’s come to take the child,” Teegorr Reth explained to Galen, while his friend Romduul kept Cottie and Colson out in the anteroom.

Galen Firth settled back in his chair behind his desk, digesting it all. It had come as a shock to him, and not a pleasant one, that the human prince and princess of Mithral Hall had arrived in his town. He had assumed it to be a diplomatic mission, and given the principals involved, he had suspected that it wouldn’t be a friendly one. Mithral Hall had suffered losses for the sake of Nesmé in the recent battles. Could it be that King Bruenor sought some sort of recompense?

Galen had never been friendly with the dwarves of Mithral Hall or with these two.

“You cannot let him have her,” Teegorr implored the Nesmian leader.

“What is his claim?” Galen asked.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but Cottie’s been seeing to the girl since she left Mithral Hall. She’s taken Colson as her own child, and she’s been hurt.”

“The child?”

“No, Cottie, sir,” Teegorr explained. “She’s lost her own—all her own.”

“And the child is Wulfgar’s?”

“No, not really. He brought the girl to Mithral Hall, with Delly, but then Delly gave her to Cottie.”

“With or without Wulfgar’s agreement?”

“Who’s to say?”

“Wulfgar, I would assume.”

“But…”

“You assume that Wulfgar has come here to take the child, but could it be that he is merely passing through to check up on her?” Galen asked. “Or might it be that he is here for different reasons—would he even know that your friend Cottie decided to settle in Nesmé?”

“I…I…I can’t be saying for sure, sir.”

“So you presume. Very well, then. Let Cottie stay here for now until we can determine why Wulfgar has come.”

“Oh, and I thank you for that!”

“But make no mistake, good Teegorr, if Wulfgar’s claim is true and he wants the child back, I am bound to honor his claim.”

“Your pardon, sir, but Cottie’s got twenty folk with her. Good strong hands, who know the frontier and who know how to fight.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No, sir!” Teegorr was quick to reply. “But if Nesmé’s not to protect our own, then how are our own to stay in Nesmé?”

“What are you asking?” Galen replied, standing up forcefully. “Am I to condone kidnapping? Is Nesmé to become an outpost for criminals?”

“It’s not so simple as that, is all,” said Teegorr. “Delly Curtie gave the girl to Cottie, so she’s no kidnapper, and not without claim.”

That settled Galen Firth back a bit. He couldn’t keep the disdain from his face, for it was not a fight he wanted to entertain just then. Clan Battlehammer and Nesmé were not on good terms, despite the fact that the dwarves had sent warriors down to help the Nesmians. In the subsequent sorting of events, the rebuilding of Nesmé had taken precedence over King Bruenor’s desire to take the war back to Obould, something that had clearly simmered behind the angry eyes of the fiery dwarf.

And there remained that old issue of the treatment Bruenor and his friends, including Wulfgar and the drow elf Drizzt, had met with on their initial pass through Nesmé those years ago, an unpleasant confrontation that had set Galen Firth and the dwarf at odds.

Neither could Galen Firth keep the wry grin from breaking through his otherwise solemn expression on occasion as he pondered the possibilities. He couldn’t deny that there would be a measure of satisfaction in causing grief to Wulfgar, if the opportunity presented itself.

“Who knows that you came here?” Galen asked.

Teegorr looked at him curiously. “To Nesmé?”

“Who knows that you and your friend brought Cottie and the child here to me?”

“Some of the others who crossed the Surbrin beside us.”

“And they will not speak of it?”

“No,” said Teegorr. “Not a one of us wants to see the child taken from Cottie Cooperson. She’s suffered terribly, and now she’s found peace—and one that’s better for the girl than anything Wulfgar might be offering.”

“Wulfgar is a prince of Mithral Hall,” Galen reminded. “A man of great wealth, no doubt.”

“And Mithral Hall is no place for a man, or a girl—particularly a girl!” Teegorr argued. “Good enough for them dwarves, and good for them. But it’s no place for a human girl to grow.”

Galen Firth rose up from his seat. “Keep her here,” he instructed. “I will go and see my old friend Wulfgar. Perhaps he is here for reasons other than the girl.”

“And if he is?”

“Then you and I never had this discussion,” Galen explained.

He set a pair of guards outside the anteroom, with orders that no one should enter, and he gathered up a couple of others in his wake as he headed out across the darkening town to the taverns and the common rooms. As he expected, he found Wulfgar and Catti-brie in short order, sitting at a table near the bar of the largest of the taverns, and listening more than speaking.

“You have come to join our garrison!” Galen said with great exaggeration as he approached. “I always welcome strong arms and a deadly bow.”

Wulfgar and Catti-brie turned to regard him, their faces, particularly the large barbarian’s, hardening upon recognition.

“We have need for a garrison of our own in Mithral Hall,” Catti-brie replied politely.

“The orcs have not been pushed back,” Wulfgar added, his sharp tone reminding Galen Firth that Galen himself, and his insistence on Nesmé taking precedence, had played no minor role in the decision to not dislodge King Obould.

The other folk in the town knew that as well, and didn’t miss the reference, and all in the tavern hushed as Galen stood before the two adopted children of King Bruenor Battlehammer.

“Everything in its time,” Galen replied, after looking around to ensure his support. “The Silver Marches are stronger now that Nesmé has risen from the ruins.” A cheer started around him, and he raised his voice in proclamation, “For never again will the trolls come forth from the mud to threaten the lands west of Silverymoon or the southern reaches of your own Mithral Hall.”

Wulfgar’s jaw tightened even more at the notion that Nesmé was serving as Mithral Hall’s vanguard, particularly since Mithral Hall’s efforts had preserved what little had remained of Nesmé’s population.

Which was exactly the effect Galen Firth had been hoping for, and he grinned knowingly as Catti-brie put her hand on Wulfgar’s enormous forearm in an effort to keep him calm.

“We had no word that we would be so graced,” Galen said. “Is it customary among Clan Battlehammer for emissaries to arrive unannounced?”

“We are not here on the business of Bruenor,” said Catti-brie, and she motioned for Galen Firth to sit down beside her, opposite Wulfgar.

The man did pull out the chair, but he merely turned it and put his foot up on it, which made him tower over the two even more. Until, that is, Wulfgar rose to his feet, his nearly seven foot frame, his giant shoulders, stealing that advantage.

But Galen didn’t back down. He stared hard at Wulfgar, locking the man’s gaze. “Then why?” he asked, his voice lower and more insistent.

“We came in as sentries for a caravan,” Catti-brie said.

Galen glanced down at her. “The children of Bruenor hire out as mercenaries?”

“Volunteers doing our part in the collective effort,” Catti-brie answered.

“It was a way to serve others as we served our own needs,” Wulfgar said.

“To come to Nesmé?” asked Galen.

“Yes.”

“Why, if not for Brue—”

“I have come to find a girl, Colson, who was taken from Mithral Hall,” Wulfgar stated.

“‘Taken’? Wrongly?”

“Yes.”

Behind Wulfgar, several people bustled about. Galen recognized them as friends of Teegorr and Cottie, and expected that there might soon be trouble—which he didn’t think so dire a possibility. In truth, the man was interested in testing his strength against that of the legendary Wulfgar, and besides, he had enough guards nearby to ensure that there would be no real downside to any brawl.

“How is it that a child was abducted from Mithral Hall,” he asked, “and ferried across the river by Bruenor’s own? What dastardly plot turned that result?”

“The girl’s name is Colson,” Catti-brie intervened, as Wulfgar and Galen Firth leaned in closer toward each other. “We have reason to believe that she has come to Nesmé. In fact, that seems most assured.”

“There are children here,” Galen Firth admitted, “brought in with the various groups of displaced people, who have come to find community and shelter.”

“No one can deny that Nesmé has opened her gates to those in need,” Catti-brie replied, and Wulfgar shot a glare her way. “A mutually beneficial arrangement for a town that grows more grand by the day.”

“But there is a child here that does not belong in Nesmé, nor to the woman who brought her here,” Wulfgar insisted. “I have come to retrieve that girl.”

Someone moved fast behind Wulfgar, and he spun, quick as an elf. He brought his right arm across, sweeping aside a two-handed grab by one of Cottie’s friends, then turned the arm down, bringing the fool’s arms with it. Wulfgar’s left hand snapped out and grabbed the man by the front of his tunic. In the blink of an astonished eye, Wulfgar had the man up in the air, fully two feet off the ground, and shook him with just the one hand.

The barbarian turned back on Galen Firth, and with a flick of his arm sent the shaken fool tumbling aside.

“Colson is leaving with me. She was wrongly taken, and though I bear no ill will”—he paused and turned to let his penetrating gaze sweep the room—“to any of those who were with the woman to whom she was entrusted, and no ill will toward the woman herself—surely not! — I will leave with the girl rightfully returned.”

“How did she get out of Mithral Hall, a fortress of dwarves?” an increasingly annoyed Galen Firth asked.

“Delly Curtie,” said Wulfgar.

“Wife of Wulfgar,” Catti-brie explained.

“Was she not then this child’s mother?”

“Adopted mother, as Wulfgar is Colson’s adopted father,” said Catti-brie.

Galen Firth snorted, and many in the room muttered curses under their breath.

“Delly Curtie was under the spell of a powerful and evil weapon,” Catti-brie explained. “She did not surrender the child of her own volition.”

“Then she should be here to swear to that very thing.”

“She is dead,” said Wulfgar.

“Killed by Obould’s orcs,” Catti-brie added. “For after she handed the child to Cottie Cooperson, she ran off to the north, to the orc lines, where she was found, murdered and frozen in the snow.”

Galen Firth did grimace a bit at that, and the look he gave to Wulfgar was almost one tinged with sympathy. Almost.

“The weapon controlled her,” said Catti-brie. “Both in surrendering the child and in running to certain doom. It is a most foul blade. I know well, for I carried it for years.”

That brought more murmurs from around the room and a look of astonishment from Galen. “And what horrors did Catti-brie perpetrate under the influence of such a sentient evil?”

“None, for I controlled the weapon. It did not control me.”

“But Delly Curtie was made of stuff less stern,” said Galen Firth.

“She was no warrior. She was not raised by dwarves.”

Galen Firth didn’t miss the pointed reminder of both facts, of who these two were and what they had behind their claim.

He nodded and pondered the words for a bit, then replied, “It is an interesting tale.”

“It is a demand that will be properly answered,” said Wulfgar, narrowing his blue eyes and leaning even more imposingly toward the leader of Nesmé. “We do not ask you to adjudicate. We tell you the circumstance and expect you to give back the girl.”

“You are not in Mithral Hall, son of Bruenor,” Galen Firth replied through gritted teeth.

“You deny me?” Wulfgar asked, and it seemed to all that the barbarian was on the verge of a terrible explosion. His blue eyes were wide and wild.

Galen didn’t back down, though he surely expected an attack.

And again Catti-brie intervened. “We came to Nesmé as sentries on a caravan from Silverymoon, as a favor to Lady Alustriel,” she explained, turning her shoulder and putting her arm across the table to block Wulfgar, though of course she couldn’t hope to slow his charge, should it come. “For it was Lady Alustriel, friend of King Bruenor Battlehammer, friend of Drizzt Do’Urden, friend of Wulfgar and of Catti-brie, who told us that Colson would be found in Nesmé.”

Galen Firth tried to hold steady, but he knew he was giving ground.

“For she knows Colson well, and well she knows of Colson’s rightful father, Wulfgar,” Catti-brie went on. “When she heard our purpose in traveling to Silverymoon, she put all of her assets at our disposal, and it was she who told us that Cottie Cooperson and Colson had traveled to Nesmé. She wished us well on our travels, and even offered to fly us here on her fiery chariot, but we felt indebted and so we agreed to travel along with the caravan and serve as sentries.”

“Would not a desperate father take the quicker route?” asked Galen Firth, and around him, heads bobbed in agreement.

“We did not know that the caravan bearing Colson made it to Nesmé, or whether perhaps the hearty and good folk accompanying the child decided to debark earlier along the road. And that is not for you to decide in any case, Galen Firth. Do you deny Wulfgar’s rightful claim? Would you have us go back to Lady Alustriel and tell her that the proud folk of Nesmé would not accede to the proper claim of Colson’s own father? Would you have us return at once to Silverymoon and to Mithral Hall with word that Galen Firth refused to give Wulfgar his child?”

“Adopted child,” remarked one of the men across the way.

Galen Firth didn’t register that argument. The man had thrown him some support, but only because he obviously needed it at that moment. That poignant reminder had him squaring his shoulders, but he knew that Catti-brie had delivered a death blow to his obstinacy. For he knew that she spoke the truth, and that he could ill afford to anger the Lady of Silverymoon. Whatever might happen between King Bruenor and Galen would not likely ill affect Nesmé, for the dwarves would not come south to do battle, but for Lady Alustriel to take King Bruenor’s side was another matter entirely. Nesmé needed Silverymoon’s support. No caravan would travel to Nesmé that did not originate in, or at least pass through, the city of Lady Alustriel.

Galen Firth was no fool. He did not doubt the story of Catti-brie and Wulfgar, and he had seen clearly the desperation on Cottie Cooperson’s face when he had left her in the barracks. That type of desperation was borne of knowing that she had no real claim, that the child was not hers.

For of course, Colson was not.

Galen Firth looked over his shoulder to his guards. “Go and fetch Cottie Cooperson and the girl,” he said.

Protests erupted around the room, with men shaking their fists in the air.

“The child is mine!” Wulfgar shouted at them, turning fiercely, and indeed, all of those in front stepped back. “Would any of you demand any less if she was yours?”

“Cottie is our friend,” one man replied, rather meekly. “She means the girl no harm.”

“Fetch your own child, then,” said Wulfgar. “Relinquish her, or him, to me in trade!”

“What foolish words are those?”

“Words to show you your own folly,” said the big man. “However good Cottie Cooperson’s heart, and I do not doubt your claim that she is worthy both as a friend and a mother, I cannot surrender to her a girl that is my own. I have come for Colson, and I will leave with Colson, and any man who stands in my way would do well to have made his peace with his god.”

He snapped his arm in the air before him and called to Aegis-fang, and the mighty warhammer appeared magically in his grasp. With a flick, Wulfgar rapped the hammer atop a nearby table, shattering all four legs and dropping the kindling to the floor.

Galen Firth gasped in protest, and the one guard behind him reached for his sword—and stared down the length of an arrow set on Catti-brie’s Taulmaril.

“Which of you will come forward and deny my claim to Colson?” Wulfgar asked the group, and not surprisingly, his challenge was met with silence.

“You will leave my town,” Galen Firth said.

“We will, on the same caravan that brought us in,” Catti-brie replied, easing her bow back to a rest position as the guard relinquished his grip on the sword and raised his hands before him. “As soon as we have Colson.”

“I intend to protest this to Lady Alustriel,” Galen Firth warned.

“When you do,” said Catti-brie, “be certain to explain to Lady Alustriel how you almost incited a riot and a tragedy by playing the drama out before the hot humors of men and women who came to your town seeking naught but refuge and a new home. Be certain to tell Lady Alustriel of Silverymoon of your discretion, Galen Firth, and we will do likewise with King Bruenor.”

“I grow tired of your threats,” Galen Firth said to her, but Catti-brie only smiled in reply.

“And I long ago tired of you,” Wulfgar said to the man.

Behind Galen Firth, the tavern door opened, and in came Cottie Cooperson holding Colson and pulled along by a guard. Outside the door two men jostled with another pair of guards, who would not let them enter.

The question of Wulfgar’s claim was answered the moment Colson came into the room. “Da!” the toddler cried, verily leaping out of Cottie’s grasp to get to the man she had known as her father for all her life. She squealed and squirmed and reached with both her arms for Wulfgar, calling for her “Da!” over and over again.

He rushed to her, dropping Aegis-fang to the ground, and took her in his arms then gently, but forcefully, removed her from Cottie’s desperate grasp. Colson made no movement back toward the woman at all, but crushed her da in a desperate hug.

Cottie began to tremble, to cry, and her desperation grew by the second. In a few moments, she went down to her knees, wailing.

And Wulfgar responded, dropping to one knee before her. With his free hand, he lifted her chin and brushed back her hair, then quieted her with soft words. “Colson has a mother who loves her as much as you loved your own children, dear woman,” he said.

Behind him, Catti-brie’s eyes widened with surprise.

“I can take care o’ her,” Cottie wailed.

Wulfgar smiled at her, brushed her hair back again, then rose. He called Aegis-fang to his free hand and stalked past Galen Firth, snickering in defiance of the man’s glare. As he went through the door, Cottie’s two companions, for all their verbal protests, parted before him, for few men in all the world would dare stand before Wulfgar, son of Beornegar, a warrior whose legend had been well earned.

“I will speak with our drivers,” Catti-brie informed Wulfgar when they exited the inn, with a chorus of shouts and protests echoing behind them. “We should be on our way as soon as possible.”

“Agreed,” said Wulfgar. “I will wait for the wagons to depart.”

Catti-brie nodded and started for the door of a different tavern, where she knew the lead driver to be. She stopped short, though, as she considered the curious answer, and turned back to regard Wulfgar.

“I will not be returning to Silverymoon,” Wulfgar confirmed.

“You can’t be thinking of going straight to Mithral Hall with the child. The terrain is too rough, and in the hands of orcs for much of the way. The safest road back to Mithral Hall is through Silverymoon.”

“It is, and so you must go to Silverymoon.”

Catti-brie stared at him hard. “Are you planning to stay here, that Cottie Cooperson can help with Colson?” she said with obvious and pointed sarcasm. To her ultimate frustration, she couldn’t read Wulfgar’s expression. “You’ve got family in the hall. I’ll be there for you and for the girl. I’m knowing that it will be difficult for you without Delly, but I won’t be on the road anytime soon, and be sure that the girl will be no burden to me.”

“I will not return to Mithral Hall,” Wulfgar stated bluntly, and a gust of wind would have likely knocked Catti-brie over at that moment. “Her place is with her mother,” Wulfgar went on. “Her real mother. Never should I have taken her, but I will correct that error now, in returning her where she belongs.”

“Auckney?”

Wulfgar nodded.

“That is halfway across the North.”

“A journey I have oft traveled and one not fraught with peril.”

“Colson has a home in Mithral Hall,” Catti-brie argued, and Wulfgar was shaking his head even as the predictable words left her mouth.

“Not one suitable for her.”

Catti-brie licked her lips and looked from the girl to Wulfgar, and she knew that he might as well have been speaking about himself at that moment.

“How long will you be gone from us?” the woman dared to ask.

Wulfgar’s pause spoke volumes.

“Ye cannot,” Catti-brie whispered, seeming very much like a little girl with a Dwarvish accent again.

“I have no choice before me,” Wulfgar replied. “This is not my place. Not now. Look at me!” He paused and swept his free hand dramatically from his head to his feet, encompassing his gigantic frame. “I was not born to crawl through dwarven tunnels. My place is the tundra. Icewind Dale, where my people roam.”

Catti-brie shook her head with every word, in helpless denial. “Bruenor is your father,” she whispered.

“I will love him to the end of my days,” Wulfgar admitted. “His place is there, but mine is not.”

“Drizzt is your friend.”

Wulfgar nodded. “As is Catti-brie,” he said with a wistful smile. “Two dear friends who have found love, at long last.”

Catti-brie mouthed, “I’m sorry,” but she couldn’t bring herself to actually speak the words aloud.

“I am happy for you both,” said Wulfgar. “Truly I am. You complement each other’s every movement, and I have never heard your laughter more full of contentment, nor Drizzt’s. But this was not as I had wanted it. I am happy for you—both, and truly. But I cannot stand around and watch it.”

The admission took the woman’s breath away. “It doesn’t have to be like this,” she said.

“Do not be sad!” Wulfgar roared. “Not for me! I know now where my home is, and where my destiny lies. I long for the song of Icewind Dale’s chill breeze, and for the freedom of my former life. I will hunt caribou along the shores of the Sea of Moving Ice. I will battle goblins and orcs without the restraints of political prudence. I am going home, to be among my own people, to pray at the graves of my ancestors, to find a wife and carry on the line of Beornegar.”

“It is too sudden.”

Again Wulfgar shook his head. “It is as deliberate as I have ever been.”

“You have to go back and talk to Bruenor,” Catti-brie said. “You owe him that.”

Wulfgar reached under his tunic, produced a scroll, and handed it to her. “You will tell him for me. My road is easier west from here than from Mithral Hall.”

“He will be outraged!”

“He will not even be in Mithral Hall,” Wulfgar reminded. “He is out to the west with Drizzt in search of Gauntlgrym.”

“Because he is in dire need of answers,” Catti-brie protested. “Would you desert Bruenor in these desperate days?”

Wulfgar chuckled and shook his head. “He is a dwarf king in a land of orcs. Every day will qualify as you describe. There will be no end to this, and if there is an end to Obould, another threat will rise from the depths of the halls, perhaps, or from Obould’s successor. This is the way of things, ever and always. I leave now or I wait until the situation is settled—and it will only be settled for me when I have crossed to Warrior’s Rest. You know the truth of it,” he said with a disarming grin, one that Catti-brie could not dismiss. “Obould today, the drow yesterday, and something—of course something—tomorrow. That is the way of it.”

“Wulfgar…”

“Bruenor will forgive me,” said the barbarian. “He is surrounded by fine warriors and friends, and the orcs will not likely try again to capture the hall. There is no good time for me to leave, and yet I know that I cannot stay. And every day that Colson is apart from her mother is a tragic day. I understand that now.”

“Meralda gave the girl to you,” Catti-brie reminded him. “She had no choice.”

“She was wrong. I know that now.”

“Because Delly is dead?”

“I am reminded that life is fragile, and often short.”

“It is not as dark as you believe. You have many here who support…”

Wulfgar shook his head emphatically, silencing her. “I loved you,” he said. “I loved you and lost you because I was a fool. It will always be the great regret of my life, the way I treated you before we were to be wed. I accept that we cannot go back, for even if you were able and willing, I know that I am not the same man. My time with Errtu left marks deep in my soul, scars I mean to erase in the winds of Icewind Dale, running beside my tribe, the Tribe of the Elk. I am content. I am at peace. And never have I been more certain of my road.”

Catti-brie shook her head with every word, in helpless and futile denial, and her blue eyes grew wet with tears. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. The five Companions of the Hall were together again, and they were supposed to stay that way for all their days.

“You said that you support me, and so I ask you to now,” said Wulfgar. “Trust in my judgment, in that I know what course I must follow. I take with me my love for you and for Drizzt and for Bruenor and for Regis. That is ever in the heart of Wulfgar. I will never let the image of you and the others fade from my thoughts, and never let the lessons I have learned from all of you escape me as I walk my road.”

“Your road so far away.”

Wulfgar nodded. “In the winds of Icewind Dale.”

CHAPTER 13 A CITY UNDWARVEN

The six companions stood just inside the opening they had carved through the stone, their mouths uniformly agape. They had their backs to the wall of a gigantic cavern that held a magnificent and very ancient city. Huge structures rose up all around them: a trio of stepped pyramids to their right and a beautifully crafted series of towers to their left, all interconnected with flying walkways, and every edge adorned with smaller spires, gargoyles, and minarets. A collection of smaller buildings sat before them, around an ancient pond that still held brackish water and many plants creeping up around its stone perimeter wall. The plants near the pool and scattered throughout the cavern, the common Underdark luminous fungi, provided a minimal light beyond the torches held by Torgar and Thibble dorf, and of course Regis, who would not let his go. The pool and surrounding architecture hardly held their attention at that moment, though, for beyond the buildings loomed the grandest structure of all, a domed building—a castle, cathedral, or palace. Many stone stairs led up to the front of the place, where giant columns stood in a line, supporting a heavy stone porch. In the shadowy recesses, the six could make out gigantic doors.

“Gauntlgrym,” Bruenor mouthed repeatedly, and his eyes were wet with tears.

Less willing to make such a pronouncement, Drizzt instead continued to survey the area. The ground was broken, but not excessively, and he could see that the entire area had been paved with flat stones, shaped and fitted to define specific avenues winding through the many buildings.

“The dwarves had different sensibilities then,” Regis remarked, and fittingly, Drizzt thought.

Indeed, the place was unlike any dwarven city he had known. No construction under Kelvin’s Cairn in Icewind Dale, or in Mirabar, Felbarr, or Mithral Hall, approached the height of even the smallest of the many grand structures around them, and the main building before them loomed larger even than the individual stalagmite-formed great houses of Menzoberranzan. That building was more suited to Waterdeep, he thought, or to Calimport and the marvelous palaces of the pashas.

As the overwhelming shock and awe faded a bit, the dwarves fanned out and moved away from the wall. Drizzt focused on Torgar, who went down to one knee and began scraping between the edges of two flagstones. He brought up a bit of dirt and tasted it then spat it aside, nodding his head and wearing an expression of concern.

Drizzt looked ahead to Bruenor, who seemed oblivious to his companions, walking zombielike toward the giant structure as if pulled by unseen forces.

And indeed the dwarf king was, Drizzt understood. He was tugged forward by pride and by hope, that it truly was Gauntlgrym, the fabulous city of his ancestors, glorious beyond his expectations, and that he would somehow find answers to the question of how to defeat Obould.

Thibble dorf Pwent walked behind Bruenor, while Cordio moved near to Torgar, the latter two striking up a quiet conversation.

One of doubt, Drizzt suspected.

“Is it Gauntlgrym?” Regis asked the drow.

“We will learn soon enough,” Drizzt replied and started after Bruenor.

But Regis grabbed him by the arm, forcing him to turn back around.

“It doesn’t sound like you believe it is,” the halfling said quietly.

Drizzt scanned the cavern, inviting Regis to follow his gaze. “Have you ever seen such structures as these?”

“Of course not.”

“No?” Drizzt asked. “Or is it that you have never seen such structures as these in such an environment as this?”

“What do you mean?” Regis asked, but his voice trailed away and his eyes widened as he finished, and Drizzt knew that he had caught on.

The pair scurried to catch up to Torgar and Cordio, who were fast gaining on the front two.

“Check the buildings as we pass,” Bruenor instructed, motioning to Pwent and Torgar. “Elf, ye take the flank, and Rumblebelly come close up to me and Cordio.”

As they moved by doorways, Pwent and Torgar alternately kicked them in, or rushed in through those that were already opened, as Bruenor continued his march, but more slowly, toward the huge structure, with Regis seemingly glued to his side. Cordio, though, kept hanging back, close enough to get to any of the other three dwarves in a hurry.

Drizzt, moving out into the shadows on the right flank, watched them all with quick glances while focusing his attention primarily on the deeper shadows. He wanted to unravel the mystery of the place, of course, but his main concern was ensuring that no current monstrous residents of the strange city made a sudden and unexpected appearance. Drizzt had been a creature of the Underdark long enough to know that few places so full of shelter would remain uninhabited for long.

“A forge!” Thibble dorf Pwent called from one building—one that had an open back, Drizzt noted, much like a smithy in the surface communities. “I got me a forge!”

Bruenor paused for just a moment before starting again for the huge building, his grin wide and his pace quicker. The other dwarves and Regis, even the stupidly grinning Pwent, hurried to catch up, and by the time Bruenor put his foot on the bottom step, all five were grouped together.

The stairs were wider than they were tall, and while they rose up a full thirty feet, they extended nearly twice that to Bruenor’s left and right. Over at the very edge to the right, Drizzt moved fast to get up ahead of the others. Silent as a shadow and nearly invisible in the dim light, Drizzt rushed along, and Bruenor had barely taken his tenth step up when Drizzt crested the top, coming under the darker shadows of the pillared canopy.

And in there, the drow saw that they were not alone, and that danger was indeed waiting for his friends, for behind one of the centermost pillars loomed a behemoth unlike any Drizzt had even seen. Tall and sinewy, the hairless humanoid was blacker than a drow, if that was possible. It stood easily thrice Drizzt’s height, perhaps four times, and exuded an aura of tremendous power, the strength of a mountain giant, monstrous and brutish despite its lean form.

And it moved with surprising speed.

Perched in the rafters of the canopy behind and above Drizzt, another beast of darkness studied the approaching group. Batlike in appearance, but huge and perfectly black, the nightwing took note of the movements, particularly those of the drow elf and the behemoth, a fellow denizen of the Plane of Shadow, a fearsome creature known as a nightwalker.

“Bruenor!” Drizzt cried as the giant started moving, and at the sound of his warning the dwarves reacted at once, particularly Thibble dorf Pwent, who leaped defensively before his king.

And when the giant, black-skinned nightwalker appeared, twenty feet of muscle and terror, Thibble dorf Pwent met its paralyzing gaze with a whoop of battlerager delight, and charged.

He got about three strides up the stairs before the nightwalker bent and reached forward, with long arms more akin in proportion to those of a great ape than to a human. Giant black hands clamped about the ferocious dwarf, long fingers fully engulfing him. Kicking and thrashing like a child in his father’s arms, Pwent lifted off the ground.

Behind him, Bruenor could not move quickly enough to stop the hoist, and Cordio fell to spellcasting, and Regis and Torgar didn’t move at all, both of them captured by the magical gaze of the powerful giant, both of them standing and trembling and gasping for breath.

That would have been the sudden end of Thibble dorf Pwent, surely, for the nightwalker could turn solid stone to dust in the crush of its tremendous grasp, but from the stairs above and to the right came Drizzt Do’Urden, leaping high, scimitars drawn. He executed a vicious double slash across the upper left arm of the nightwalker, his magical blades tearing through flesh and muscle.

In its lurch, the nightwalker dropped its left hand away, and so lost half the vice with which to crush the wildly flailing dwarf. So the behemoth took the second best option and instead of crushing Thibble dorf Pwent, it flung him high and far.

Pwent’s cry changed pitch like the screech of a diving hawk, and he slammed hard against the front of the porch’s canopy, some forty feet from the ground. He somehow kept the presence of mind to smash his spiked gauntlets against that facing, and luck was with him as one caught fast in a seam in the stone and left him hanging helplessly, but very much alive.

Down below, Drizzt landed on the stairs, more than a dozen feet below where he had begun his leap, and only his quickness and great agility kept him from serious harm, as he scrambled down the steps to absorb his momentum, even keeping the presence of mind to swat Torgar with the flat of one blade as he rushed past.

Torgar blinked and came back to his senses, just a bit, and turned to regard the running drow.

Drizzt finally stopped his run and swung around, to see Bruenor darting between the nightwalker’s legs, his axe chopping hard against one. The behemoth roared—a strange and otherworldly howl that changed pitch multiple times, as if several different creatures had been given voice through the same horn. Again the nightwalker moved with deceiving speed, twisting and turning, lifting one foot and slamming it down at the dwarf.

But Bruenor saw it coming and threw himself back the other way, and even managed to whack at the other leg as he tumbled past. The nightwalker hit only stone with its stomp, but it cracked and crushed that stone.

Drizzt charged to join his friend, but noted a movement to his right that he could not dismiss. Looking past the thrashing, cursing, hanging Thibble dorf, he saw the gigantic, batlike creature drop from the canopy, spreading black wings fully forty feet across as it commenced its swoop. The air shimmered in front of it before it ever really began, though. It sent forth a wave of devastating magical energy that struck the drow with tremendous force.

Drizzt felt his heart stop as if it had been grabbed by a giant hand. Blood came from his eyes and blackness filled his vision. He staggered and stumbled, and as the nightwing came on, he knew he was helpless. He did see, but didn’t consciously register, Thibble dorf Pwent curling up against the canopy, tucking his feet against the stone.

Torgar Hammerstriker, proud warrior from Mirabar, whose family had served the various Marchions of Mirabar for generations, and who had bravely marched from that city to Mithral Hall, pledging allegiance to King Bruenor, could not believe his fright. Torgar Hammerstriker, who had leaped headlong into an army of orcs, who had battled giants and giant mottled worms, who had once fought a dragon, cursed himself for being held in the paralysis of fear from the black-skinned behemoth.

He saw Drizzt stagger and stumble, and noted the swoop of the giant batlike creature. But he went for Bruenor, only for Bruenor, his king, his great-axe held high.

Beside him as he sped past, Cordio Muffinhead cast the first of his spells, throwing a wave of magic out at Bruenor that infused the dwarf king with added strength so that with his next swing, his many-notched axe bit in a little deeper. Cordio, too, turned to meet the rush of the nightwing, and deduced immediately that it had somehow rendered Drizzt helpless. The dwarf began another spell, but doubted he could cast it in time.

But Thibble dorf Pwent loosed his own type of spell, a battlerager dweomer, indeed. With a roar of defiance, the already battered dwarf shoved off with all his strength, his powerful legs tearing free his embedded hand spikes with a terrible screeching noise. Pwent flew out and up backward from the canopy and executed a half-twist, half-somersault as he went.

He came around as the nightwing glided under him, and he punched out, one fist after another, latching on with forged metal spikes.

The nightwing dipped under the dwarf’s weight as he crashed down on its back, then it shrieked in protest. It finished with a great intake of breath, and Pwent felt it grow cold beneath him—not as if in death, but magically so, as if he had leaped not on a living, giant bat, but upon the Great Glacier itself.

The nightwing started to swing its head, but Pwent moved faster, tucking his chin and snapping every muscle in his body to propel himself forward and down, driving his head spike into the base of the nightwing’s skull. The sheer power of the dwarf’s movement straightened the creature’s head back out and facing forward as the nightwing executed its magic, breathing a cone of freezing air before it.

Unfortunately for the humanoid giant, it stood right in the path of the devastating cone of cold.

The behemoth roared in protest and thrashed its arms to block the blinding and painful breath. White frost appeared all over the black skin of its head, arms, and chest, and strictly on reflex the giant punched out as the frantic night wing fluttered past, scoring a solid slam against the base of its wing that sent both bat and dwarf into a fast-spinning plummet. They soared over the stairs and off toward the towers, skipped off the top of one building and barreled into another, crashing down in a tangled heap.

Thibble dorf Pwent never stopped shouting, cursing, or thrashing.

Drizzt fought through the pain and wiped the blurriness from his bloodied eyes. He had no time to go after Pwent and the giant shadowy bat. None of them did, for the black-skinned giant was far from defeated.

Bruenor and Torgar raced across the stairs, swatting at the tree-like legs with their masterwork weapons, and indeed several gashes showed on those legs, and from them issued grayish ooze that smoked as it dribbled to the ground. But they would have to hit the giant a hundred times to fell it, Drizzt realized, and if the behemoth connected solidly on either of them but once….

Drizzt winced as the nightwalker kicked out, just clipping the dodging Torgar, but still hitting him hard enough to send him bouncing down the stone stairs, his axe flying from his grasp. Knowing that Bruenor couldn’t stand alone against the beast, Drizzt started for him, but stumbled, still weak and wounded, disoriented from the magical attack of the flying creature.

The drow felt another magical intrusion then, a wave of soothing, healing energy, and as he renewed his charge Bruenor’s way, he managed a quick glance, a quick nod of appreciation, to Cordio.

As he did, he noted Regis simply walking away, muttering to himself, as if oblivious to the events unfolding around him.

As with Pwent, though, the drow had no time to concern himself with it, and when he refocused on his giant target, he winced in fear, for the behemoth chopped down its huge hand, leaving a trail of blackness hanging in the air, and more than opaque, that blackness had dimension.

A magical gate. And one with shapes already moving within its inviting swirls.

Drizzt took heart as Bruenor scored a solid hit, nearly tripping up the giant as it lifted a foot to stomp at him. The nightwalker howled and grabbed at its torn foot, giving Bruenor time to move safely aside, and more importantly, giving Torgar time to begin his charge back up the stairs, limping though he was.

Drizzt, though, had stopped his own advance. The warnings of the priests echoing in his thoughts, the drow pulled forth his onyx figurine. He could see the dangers clearly, the instability of the region, the appearance of a gate to the Plane of Shadow. But as the first wraith-like form began to slide through that smoky portal, Drizzt knew they could not win without help.

“Come to me, Guenhwyvar!” he yelled, and dropped the statue to the stone. “I need you.”

“Drizzt, no!” Cordio cried, but it was too late, already the gray mist that would become the panther had begun to form.

Torgar sprinted by the drow, taking the stairs two at a time. He veered from his path to the behemoth to intercept the first floating, shadowy creature to emerge from the gate, which resembled an emaciated human dressed in tattered dark gray robes. Torgar leaped at it with a great two-handed swipe of his axe, and the creature, a dread wraith, met that with a sweep of its arm, trailing tendrils of smoke.

The axe struck home and the creature’s hand slapped across the dwarf’s shoulder, its permeating and numbing touch reaching into Torgar and leaching his life-force. Blanching, weaker, Torgar growled through the sudden weariness and pulled back his axe, spinning a complete circuit the other way and coming around with a second chop that bludgeoned the dread wraith straight back into the smoky portal.

But another was taking its place, and Torgar’s legs shook beneath him. He hadn’t the strength to charge, so he tried to firm himself up to meet the newest wraith’s approach.

Leaving Drizzt with a dilemma, to be sure, for while Torgar obviously needed his help, so did Bruenor up above, where the giant was moving deliberately, cutting off the dwarf’s avenues of escape.

But the choice didn’t materialize, for there came a flash of blackness and time seemed to stand still for many long heartbeats.

Light turned to dark and dark to light, so that the giant seemed to become a brighter gray in hue, as did Drizzt, and the dwarves’ faces darkened. Everything reversed, torches flaring black, and the hush of surprise engulfed the creatures of shadow and the companions alike.

Guenhwyvar’s roar broke the spell.

When Drizzt turned to see his beloved companion, his hope turned to horror, for Guenhwyvar, whiter than Drizzt or the behemoth, seemed only half-formed, and she elongated as she leaped for the second emerging wraith, as if she were somehow dragging her magical gate with her very form. She hit the wraith and went back into the shadow portal with it, and as those two portals merged into a weird weave of conflicting energies, there came another blinding burst of black energy. The wraith hissed in protest, and Guenhwyvar’s roar flooded with pain.

The behemoth howled, too, its agony obvious. The portal stretched, twisted, and reached out to grab at the gigantic creature of shadow, as if to bring it home.

No, Drizzt realized, his eyes straining to make sense through the myriad of free-flowing shapes, not to bring it home but as if to engulf the giant and swallow it, and the behemoth’s howls only confirmed that the assault of the twisting portals was no pleasant embrace.

The giant proved the stronger, though, and the portals winked out, and the light returned to normal torch-and lichen light, and all was as it had been before the giant had enacted its gate and Drizzt had responded with one of his own.

Except that the behemoth was clearly wounded, clearly off-balance and staggering. And not everyone had been frozen by the stunning events of the merging gates and the dizzying reversals of light and dark.

Far up the stairs, King Bruenor Battlehammer seized the moment of opportunity. He came down like a rolling boulder, skipped out to the edge of a stair, and leaped as high and as far as his short legs would carry him.

Drizzt charged at the behemoth, demanding its attention with a wild flurry of his blades and a piercing battle cry, and so the giant was fully focused on him when Bruenor’s axe, clutched in both his hands, cracked into its spine.

The behemoth threw its shoulders back in pain and surprise, its elbows tucked against its ribs, its forearms and long fingers flailing and grabbing at the empty air.

Drizzt’s charge became real, focused, and he went right for the giant’s most obviously injured leg, his scimitars digging many lines as he quick-stepped past.

The behemoth whirled to follow the movements of the drow, and Bruenor could not hold on. His axe remained deep into the giant’s back as the dwarf flew off down the stairs. He crashed in a twisted mess, but Cordio was there at once, infusing him with waves of magical healing.

The giant grimaced and staggered, and Drizzt easily got out of reach. He turned fast, thinking to charge right back in.

But he paused when he saw a tell-tale mist reappearing by the small figurine lying on the stairs.

The giant set itself again. It tried to reach back to extract the dwarf’s axe, but the placement prevented it from getting any grip. Down below, Torgar tried to join in, but his legs gave out and he slumped to the stone. No help would come soon from Bruenor, either, Drizzt could see, nor from Cordio, who attended the dwarf king. And Regis was nowhere to be seen.

Giving up on the axe, the behemoth turned its hateful glare at Drizzt. The drow felt a wave of energy flow forth, and for just an instant, he forgot where he was or what was happening. In that split second, he even thought about leaping down at the dwarves, somehow envisioning them as mortal enemies.

But the spell, a dizzying enchantment of confusion, could not take hold on the veteran dark elf the way it had so debilitated Regis, and Drizzt leaped down to the side, coming to the same level as the giant, surrendering the higher ground to limit the giant’s attack options. Better to force it to reach for him, he thought, and better still for it to try to stomp or kick at him.

The giant did just that, lifting its leg, and Guenhwyvar did just as Drizzt wanted and sprang upon the one planted leg, raking at the back of the behemoth’s knee.

In charged Drizzt, forcing the giant to twist, or try to twist, to keep pace. The drow’s magical anklets allowed him to accelerate suddenly past the stomping foot, and he reversed immediately, spinning and slashing at the back of the leading leg. The giant twisted and tried to kick, but Guenhwyvar clamped powerful jaws on the back of its knee, feline fangs tearing deep into dark muscle.

That leg buckled. Arms flailing, the giant fell over backward down the stairs, landing with a tremendous, stone-crunching crash, and just missing crushing poor unconscious Torgar.

Drizzt sprinted and leaped atop it, running down its length to reach its neck before it could bring its arms in to fend him off. Drizzt found less resistance than he expected, for the giant’s fall had driven Bruenor’s axe in all the deeper, severing its spine.

The behemoth was helpless, and Drizzt showed it no mercy. He crossed its massive chest. Its head was back due to the angle of the stairs, leaving its neck fully exposed.

He leaped from the gurgling, dying behemoth a moment later, landing gracefully on the stairs in full run, angling toward where the batlike creature and Pwent had tumbled. It was quiet there, the fight apparently ended, and Drizzt winced when he saw a leathery wing flop, thinking the monster still alive.

But it was just Pwent, he saw, grumbling as he extracted himself from the broken body.

Drizzt veered back the way they’d come, thinking to go after Regis, but before he could even begin, Regis appeared between the buildings, walking back swiftly toward the group, his mace in hand, his chubby cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

“It took me strength, me king,” Torgar Hammerstriker was saying when Drizzt, Guenhwyvar in tow, moved back to the three dwarves. “Like it pulled me spine right out.”

“A wraith,” explained Cordio, who was still working on the battered Bruenor, bandaging a cut along the dwarf king’s scalp. “Their chilling touch steals yer inner strength—and it can suren kill ye to death if it gets enough o’ the stuff from ye! Take heart, for ye’ll be fine in a short bit.”

“As will me king?” Torgar asked.

“Bah!” Bruenor snorted. “Got me a bigger bounce fallin’ off me throne after a proper blessing to Moradin. A night o’ the holy mead’s hurtin’ me more than that thing e’er could!”

Torgar moved over to the dead giant and tried to lift its shoulder. He looked back at the others, shaking his head. “Gonna be a chore for ten in gettin’ back yer axe,” he said.

“Then take yer own and cut yer way through the durned thing,” Bruenor ordered.

Torgar considered the giant, then looked to his great-axe. He gave a “hmm” and a shrug, spat in both his hands, and hoisted the weapon. “Won’t take long,” he promised. “But take care with yer axe when I get it for ye, for the handle’s sure to be slick.”

“Nah, it crusts when it dries,” came a voice from the side, and the group turned to regard Thibble dorf Pwent, who certainly knew of what he spoke. For Pwent was covered in blood and gore from the thrashing he had given the batlike monster, and a piece of the creature’s skull was still stuck to his great head spike, with gobs of bloody brain sliding slowly down the spike’s stem. To emphasize his point, Pwent held up his hand and clenched and unclenched his fist, making sounds both sloppy wet and crunchy.

“And what happened to yerself?” Pwent demanded of Regis as the halfling approached. “Ye find something to hit back there, did ye?”

“I don’t know,” the halfling honestly answered.

“Bah, let off the little one,” Bruenor told Pwent, and he included all the others as he swept his gaze around. “Ain’t nothing chasing Rumblebelly off.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Regis said to Bruenor, and he looked at the dead giant and shrugged. “For any of it.”

“Magic,” said Drizzt. “The creatures were possessed of more than physical prowess, as is typical of extraplanar beings. One of those spells attacked the mind. A disorienting dweomer.”

“True enough, elf,” Cordio agreed. “It delayed me spellcasting.”

“Bah, but I didn’t feel nothing,” said Pwent.

“Attacked the mind,” Bruenor remarked. “Yerself was well defended.”

Pwent paused and pondered that for a few moments before bursting into laughter.

“What is this place?” Torgar asked at length, finding the strength to rise and walk, taking in the sights, the sculpture, the strange designs.

“Gauntlgrym,” Bruenor declared, his dark eyes gleaming with intensity.

“Then yer Gauntlgrym was a town above the ground,” said Torgar, and Bruenor glared at him.

“This place was above ground, me king,” Torgar answered that look. “All of it. This building and those, too. This plaza, set with stones to protect from the mud o’ the spring melt….” He looked at Cordio, then Drizzt, who nodded his agreement. “Something must’ve melted the tundra beneath the whole of it. Turned it all to mud and sank this place from sight.”

“And the melts bring water, every year,” Cordio added, pointing to the north. “Washing away the mud, bucket by bucket, but leaving the stones behind.”

“Yer answer’s in the ceiling,” Torgar explained, pointing up. “Can ye get a light up there, priest?”

Cordio nodded and moved away from Bruenor. He began casting again, gently waving his arms, creating a globe of light up at the cavern’s ceiling, right at the point where it joined in with the top of the great building before them. Some tell-tale signs were revealed with that light, confirming Torgar’s suspicions.

“Roots,” the Mirabarran dwarf explained. “Can’t be more than a few feet o’ ground between that roof and the surface. And these taller buildings’re acting like supports to keep that ceiling up. The tangle o’ roots and the frozen ground’re doin’ the rest. Whole place sank, I tell ye, for these buildings weren’t built for the Underdark.”

Bruenor looked at the ceiling, then at Drizzt, but the drow could only nod his agreement.

“Bah!” Bruenor snorted. “Gauntlgrym was akin to Mirabar, then, and ye’re for knowin’ that. So this must be the top o’ the place, with more below. All we need be looking for is a shaft to take us to the lower levels, akin to that rope and come-along dumbwaiter ye got in Mirabar. Now let’s see what this big place is all about—important building, I’m thinking. Might be a throne room.”

Torgar nodded and Pwent ran up in front of Bruenor to lead the way up the stairs, with Cordio close on his heels. Torgar, though, lagged behind, something Drizzt didn’t miss.

“Not akin to Mirabar,” the dwarf whispered to Drizzt and Regis.

“A dwarf city above ground?” Regis asked.

Torgar shrugged. “I’m not for knowing.” He reached to his side and pulled an item from his belt, one he had taken from the smithy he had found back across the plaza. “Lots of these and little of anything else,” he said.

Regis sucked in his breath, and Drizzt nodded his agreement with the dwarf’s assessment of the muddy catastrophe that had hit the place. For in his hand, Torgar held an item all too common on the surface and all too rare in the Underdark: a horseshoe.

At Drizzt’s insistence, he, and not the noisy Thibble dorf, led the way into the building with Guenhwyvar beside him. The drow and panther filtered out to either side of the massive, decorated doors—doors filled with color and gleaming metal much more indicative of a construction built under the sun. The drow and his cat melted into the shadows of the great hall that awaited them, moving with practiced coordination. They sensed no danger. The place seemed still and long dead.

It was no audience chamber, though, no palace for a dwarf king. When the others came in and they filled the room with torchlight, it became apparent that the place had been a library and gallery, a place of art and learning.

Rotted scrolls filled ancient wooden shelves all around the room and along the walls, interspersed with tapestries whose images had long ago faded, and with sculptures grand and small alike.

Those sculptures set off the first waves of alarm in the companions, particularly in Bruenor, for while some depicted dwarves in their typically heroic battle poses and regalia, others showed orc warriors standing proud. And more than one depicted orcs in other dress, in flowing robes or with pen in hand.

The most prominent of all stood upon a dais at the far end of the room, directly across from the doors. The image of Moradin, stocky and strong, was quite recognizable to the dwarves.

So was the image of Gruumsh One-eye, god of the orcs, standing across from him, and while the two were shown eyeing each other with expressions that could be considered suspicious, the simple fact that they were not shown with Moradin standing atop the vanquished Gruumsh’s chest elicited stares of disbelief on the faces of all four dwarves. Thibble dorf Pwent even babbled something undecipherable.

“What place was this?” Cordio asked, giving sound to the question that was on all their minds. “What hall? What city?”

“Delzoun,” muttered Bruenor. “Gauntlgrym.”

“Then she’s no place akin to the tales,” said Cordio, and Bruenor shot a glare his way.

“Grander, I’m saying,” the priest quickly added.

“Whatever it was, it was grand indeed,” said Drizzt. “And beyond my expectations when we set out from Mithral Hall. I had thought we would find a hole in the ground, Bruenor, or perhaps a small, ancient settlement.”

“I telled ye it was Gauntlgrym,” Bruenor replied.

“If it is, then it is a place to do your Delzoun heritage proud,” said the drow. “If it is not, then let us discover other accomplishments of which you can be rightly proud.”

Bruenor’s stubborn expression softened a bit at those words, and he offered Drizzt a nod and moved off deeper into the room, Thibbledorf at his heel. Drizzt looked to Cordio and Torgar, both of whom nodded their appreciation of his handling of the volatile king.

It was not Gauntlgrym, all three of them knew—at least, it was not the Gauntlgrym of dwarven legend. But what then?

There wasn’t much to salvage in the library, but they did find a few scrolls that hadn’t fully succumbed to the passage of time. None of them could read the writing on the ancient paper, but there were a few items that could give hints about the craftsmanship of the former residents, and even one tapestry that Regis believed could be cleaned enough to reveal some hints of its former depictions. They gathered their hoard together with great care, rolling and tying the tapestry and softly packing the other items in bags that had held the food they had thus far consumed.

They were done scouring the hall in less than an afternoon’s time, and finished with a cursory and rather unremarkable examination of the rest of the cavern for just as long after that. Abruptly, and at Bruenor’s insistence, so ended their expedition. Soon after, they climbed back up through the hole that had brought them underground and were greeted by a late winter’s quiet night. At the next break of dawn they began their journey home, where they hoped to find some answers.

CHAPTER 14 POSSIBILITIES

King Obould normally liked the cheering of the many orcs that surrounded his temporary palace, a heavy tent set within a larger tent, set within a larger tent. All three were reinforced with metal and wood, and their entrances opened at different points for further security. Obould’s most trusted guards, heavily armored and with great gleaming weapons, patrolled the two outer corridors.

The security measures were relatively new, as the orc king cemented his grip and began to unfold his strategy—a plan, the cheering that day only reminded him, that might not sit well with the warlike instincts of some of his subjects. He had already waged the first rounds of what he knew would be his long struggle among the stones of Keeper’s Dale. His decision to stand down the attack on Mithral Hall had been met with more than a few mutterings of discontent.

And that had only been the beginning, of course.

He moved along the outer ring of his tent palace to the opened flap and looked out on the gathering on the plaza of the nomadic orc village. At least two hundred of his minions were out there, cheering wildly, thrusting weapons into the air, and clapping each other on the back. Word had come in of a great orc victory in the Moonwood, tales of elf heads spiked on the riverbank.

“We should go there and see the heads,” Kna said to Obould as she curled at his side. “It is a sight that would fill me with lust.”

Obould swiveled his head to regard her, and he offered a smile, knowing that stupid Kna would never understand it to be one of pity.

Out in the plaza, the cheering grew a backbone chant: “Karuck! Karuck! Karuck!”

It was not unexpected. Obould, who had received word of the fight in the east the previous night, before the public courier had arrived, motioned to the many loyalists he had set in place, and on his nod, they filtered into the crowd.

A second chant bubbled up among the first, “Many-Arrows! Many-Arrows! Many-Arrows!” And gradually, the call for kingdom overcame the cheer for clan.

“Take me there and I will love you,” Kna whispered in the orc king’s ear, tightening her hold on his side.

Obould’s bloodshot eyes narrowed as he turned to regard her again. He brought his hand up to grab the back of her hair and roughly bent her head back so that she could see the intensity on his face. He envisioned those elf heads he’d heard of, set on tall pikes. His smile widened as he considered putting Kna’s head in that very line.

Misconstruing his intensity as interest, the consort grinned and writhed against him.

With almost godlike strength, Obould tugged her from his side and tossed her to the ground. He turned back to the plaza and wondered how many of his minions—those not in his immediate presence—would add the chant of Many-Arrows to the praises of Clan Karuck as word of the victory spread throughout the kingdom.

The night was dark, but not to the sensitive eyes of Tos’un Armgo, who had known the blackness of the Underdark. He crouched by a rocky jag, looking down at the silvery snake known as the Surbrin River, and more pointedly at the line of poles before it.

The perpetrators had moved to the south, along with the prodding trio of Dnark, Ung-thol, and the upstart young Toogwik Tuk. They had talked of attacking the Battlehammer dwarves at the Surbrin.

Obould would not be pleased to see such independence among his ranks. And strangely, the drow wasn’t overly thrilled at the prospect himself. He’d personally led the first orc assault on that dwarven position, infiltrating and silencing the main watchtower before the orc tide swept Clan Battlehammer back into its hole.

It had been a good day.

So what had changed, wondered Tos’un. What had left him with such melancholy when battle was afoot, particularly a battle between orcs and dwarves, two of the ugliest and smelliest races he had ever had the displeasure of knowing?

As he looked down at the river, he came to understand. Tos’un was a drow, had been raised in Menzoberranzan, and held no love for his surface elf cousins. The war between the surface and Underdark elves was among the fiercest rivalries in the world, a long history of dastardly deeds and murderous raids that equaled anything the continually warring demons of the Abyss and devils of the Nine Hells could imagine. Cutting out the throat of a surface elf had never presented Tos’un with a moral dilemma, surely, but there was something about the current situation, about those heads, that unnerved him, that filled him with a sense of dread.

As much as he hated surface elves, Tos’un despised orcs even more. The idea that orcs could have scored such a victory over elves of any sort left the drow cold. He had grown up in a city of twenty thousand dark elves, and with probably thrice that number of orc, goblin, and kobold slaves. Was there, perhaps, a Clan Karuck in their midst, ready to spike the heads of the nobles of House Barrison Del’Armgo or even of House Baenre?

He scoffed at the absurd notion, and reminded himself that surface elves were weaker than their drow kin. This group fell to Clan Karuck because they deserved it, because they were weak or stupid, or both.

Or at least, that’s what Tos’un told himself over and over again, hoping that repetition would provide comfort where reason could not. He looked to the south, where the receding pennants of Clan Karuck had long been lost to the uneven landscape and the darkness. Whatever he might tell himself about the slaughter in the Moonwood, deep inside the true echoes of his heart and soul, Tos’un hoped that Grguch and his minions would all die horribly.

The sound of dripping water accompanied the wagon rolling east from Nesmé, as the warm day nibbled at winter’s icy grip. Several times the wagon driver grumbled about muddy ruts, even expressing his hope that the night would be cold.

“If the night’s warm, we’ll be walking!” he warned repeatedly.

Catti-brie hardly heard him, and hardly noticed the gentle symphony of the melt around her. She sat in the bed of the wagon, with her back up against the driver’s seat, staring out to the west behind them.

Wulfgar was out there, moving away from her. Away forever, she feared.

She was full of anger, full of hurt. How could he leave them with an army of orcs encamped around Mithral Hall? Why would he ever want to leave the Companions of the Hall? And how could he go without saying farewell to Bruenor, Drizzt, and Regis?

Her mind whirled through those questions and more, trying to make sense of it all, trying to come to terms with something she could not control. It wasn’t the way things were supposed to be! She had tried to say that to Wulfgar, but his smile, so sure and serene, had defeated her argument before it could be made.

She thought back to the day when she and Wulfgar had left Mithral Hall for Silverymoon. She remembered the reactions of Bruenor and Drizzt—too emotional for the former and too stoic for the latter, she realized.

Wulfgar had told them. He’d said his good-byes before they set out, whether in explicit terms or in hints they could not miss. It hadn’t been an impulsive decision brought about by some epiphany that had come to him on the road.

Catti-brie grimaced through a sudden flash of anger, at Bruenor and especially at Drizzt. How could they have known and not have told her?

She suppressed that anger quickly, and realized that it had been Wulfgar’s choice. He had waited to tell her until after they’d recovered Colson. Catti-brie nodded as she considered that. He’d waited because he knew that the sight of the girl, the girl who had been taken from her mother and was to be returned, would make things more clear for Catti-brie.

“My anger isn’t for Wulfgar, or any of them,” she whispered.

“Eh?” asked the driver, and Catti-brie turned her head and gave him a smile that settled him back to his own business.

She held that smile as she turned back to stare at the empty west, and squinted, putting on a mask that might counter the tears that welled within. Wulfgar was gone, and if she sat back and considered his reasons, she knew she couldn’t fault him. He was not a young man any longer. His legacy was still to be made, and time was running short. It would not be made in Mithral Hall, and even in the cities surrounding the dwarven stronghold, the people, the humans, were not kin to Wulfgar in appearance or in sensibility. His home was Icewind Dale. His people were in Icewind Dale. In Icewind Dale alone could he truly hope to find a wife.

Because Catti-brie was lost to him. And though he bore her no ill will, she understood the pain he must have felt when he looked upon her and Drizzt.

She and Wulfgar had had their moment, but that moment had passed, had been stolen by demons, both within Wulfgar and in the form of the denizens of the Abyss. Their moment had passed, and there seemed no other moments for Wulfgar to find in the court of a dwarf king.

“Farewell,” Catti-brie silently mouthed to the empty west, and never had she so meant that simple word.

He bent low to bring Colson close to the flowering snowdrops, their tiny white bells denying the snow along the trail. The first flowers, the sign of coming spring.

“For Ma, Dell-y,” Colson chattered happily, holding the first syllable of Delly’s name for a long heartbeat, which only tugged all the more at Wulfgar’s heart. “Flowvers,” she giggled, and she pulled one close to her nose.

Wulfgar didn’t correct her lisp, for she beamed as brightly as any “flowvers” ever could.

“Ma for flowvers.” Colson rambled, and she mumbled through a dozen further sounds that Wulfgar could not decipher, though it was apparent to him that the girl thought she was speaking in cogent sentences. Wulfgar was sure that Colson made perfect sense to Colson, at least!

There was a little person in there—Wulfgar only truly realized at that innocent moment. A thinking, rational individual. She wasn’t a baby anymore, wasn’t helpless and unwitting.

The joy and pride that brought to Wulfgar was tempered, to be sure, by his realization that he would soon turn Colson over to her mother, to a woman the girl had never known in a land she had never called home.

“So be it,” he said, and Colson looked at him and giggled, and gradually Wulfgar’s delight overcame his sense of impending dread. He felt the season in his heart, as if his own internal, icy pall had at last been lifted. Nothing could change that overriding sensation. He was free. He was content. He knew in his heart that what he was doing was good, and right.

As he bent lower to the flower, he noted something else: a fresh print in the mud, right on the edge of the hardened snow. It had come from a shoddily-wrapped foot, and since it was so far from any town, Wulfgar recognized it at once as the print of a goblinkin’s foot. He stood back up and glanced all around.

He looked to Colson and smiled comfortingly, then hustled along down the broken trail, his direction, fortunately, opposite the one the creature had taken. He wanted no battle that day, or any other day Colson was in his arms.

All the more reason to get the child back where she belonged.

Wulfgar hoisted the girl onto his broad shoulder and whistled quietly for her as his long legs carried them swiftly down the road, to the west.

Home.

North of Wulfgar’s position, four dwarves, a halfling, and a drow settled around a small fire in a snowy dell. They had stopped their march early, that they could better light a fire to warm some stones that would get them more comfortably through the cold night. After briskly rubbing their hands over the dancing orange flames, Torgar, Cordio, and Thibble dorf set off to find the stones.

Bruenor hardly noticed their departure, for his gaze had settled on the sack of scrolls and artifacts, and on a tied tapestry lying nearby.

While Regis began preparing their supper, Drizzt just sat and watched his dwarf friend, for he knew that Bruenor was churning inside, and that he would soon enough need to speak his mind.

As if on cue, Bruenor turned to the drow. “Thought I’d find Gauntlgrym and find me answers,” he said.

“You don’t know whether you’ve found them or not,” Drizzt reminded.

Bruenor grunted. “Weren’t Gauntlgrym, elf. Not by any o’ the legends o’ the place. Not by any stories I e’er heard.”

“Likely not,” the drow agreed.

“Weren’t no place I ever heared of.”

“Which might prove even more important,” said Drizzt.

“Bah,” Bruenor snorted half-heartedly. “A place of riddles, and none that I’m wanting answered.”

“They are what they are.”

“And that be?”

“Hopefully revealed in the writings we took.”

“Bah!” Bruenor snorted more loudly, and he waved his hands at Drizzt and at the sack of scrolls. “Gonna get me a stone to warm me bed,” he muttered, and started away. “And one I can bang me head against.”

The last remark brought a grin to Drizzt’s face, reminding him that Bruenor would follow the clues wherever they led, whatever the implications. He held great faith in his friend.

“He’s afraid,” Regis remarked as soon as the dwarf was out of sight.

“He should be,” Drizzt replied. “At stake are the very foundations of his world.”

“What do you think is on the scrolls?” Regis asked, and Drizzt shrugged.

“And those statues!” the halfling went on undeterred. “Orcs and dwarves, and not in battle. What does it mean? Answers for us? Or just more questions?”

Drizzt thought about it for just a moment, and was nodding as he replied, “Possibilities.”