Archmage (36 page)
Bruenor just sat there on the throne, listening to the whispers of Moradin carried in on the song of dwarven cheering, and Catti-brie stood off to the side, staring at her adoptive father, recognizing that Bruenor had turned the corner on his grief and worry.
The woman had worried that Drizzt would not return to her, but so, too, had she worried that Bruenor would not—not in time, at least. But now that latter fear washed away. There was her Da, King Bruenor Battlehammer, his eyes full of fight.
There was no time for moping about, not with an army of drow and demons and goblinkin lying in wait below.
No, now was the time for preparation, and for vengeance.
Catti-brie saw it clearly on Bruenor’s face. He meant to avenge Connerad and the Gutbusters. He meant to make them pay for the injury to Tannabritches Fellhammer.
And he meant to make them all pay dearly for the wounds they had inflicted upon his dearest friend.
“Woe to the drow,” Catti-brie whispered under her breath, and she ended with a knowing smile and a nod.
For King Bruenor Battlehammer was coming for them.
“Seen him like this before,” Emerus whispered to Ragged Dain as they made their way along the upper tunnels of Gauntlgrym, part of a grand procession, four thousand of the dwarves geared for battle. “Ain’t good for his enemies,” the old king said with a snort and a nod.
Ragged Dain couldn’t disagree. Bruenor led the procession, Mallabritches Fellhammer at his side, Athrogate and Ambergris close behind. The solid stride of the red-bearded dwarf bespoke his determination. He was angry—outraged, even—with his dear friends lying gravely wounded. But Bruenor hadn’t let that outrage take him to a place of recklessness by any means—his method for vengeance was clear-sighted and truly inspired. He had devised the plan of attacking the lower levels in careful consultation with King Emerus, Bungalow Thump, Oretheo Spikes, Catti-brie, and the three Harpells.
He had devised the plan while sitting on the Throne of the Dwarf Gods. King Bruenor was purely focused and determined to get his revenge and to claim his prize, but every dwarf marching behind him went with full confidence that Bruenor would lead the army onto the battlefield of his proper choosing, giving them the best chance of a great victory.
The army divided into battle groups as they neared the last corridor, the same corridor that led to the landing where the first battle of the lower levels had gone disastrously wrong. Among all the ranks, clerics ran, casting spells of protection from fire and from cold, spells to mitigate wounds, and spells to bless the ranks.
Bruenor and his battle group, made up mostly of the Mithral Hall dwarves, including the remaining Gutbusters, veered into a side corridor along with the three remaining Harpells and Catti-brie. All along the journey, the spellcasters remained busy creating small stones with enchantments of light. Now they went along the lines of Battlehammer dwarves, handing those light pellets out to every commander and with all the leftovers going to predetermined foot soldiers.
If all went as planned, this battle group would not begin the attack in the lower cavern, but would be the first to reach the floor of that battlefield chamber in any significant numbers.
Oretheo Spikes led the second group, the largest and most prominent force, fronted by the Wilddwarves of Citadel Adbar. They carried long lines of rope as they made for the main corridor and the landing, ready to rappel, six at a time, to the darkness below. Two thousand warriors and clerics formed this force, with more than a thousand ready to hit the floor below and the rest supporting the battle from the landing and the corridors above. If the drow or their demonic allies found a way to get up behind the dwarves in the lower chamber, they’d find nearly a thousand Adbarrim and Mirabarran warriors ready to show them the error of their ways.
King Emerus, Ragged Dain, and the third group held back. They would be the last to the fight, but perhaps the most important, and the most daring.
“There are a lot of them,” Kipper Harpell remarked to Bruenor and the others, looking at the mob of dwarves filling the side corridor and the antechambers that lined it. “How many will get through before the exit is dispelled, I wonder? Is this plan not simply going to trap you in the cavern as just happened with poor King Connerad?”
“Only way down,” Bruenor replied. “Our enemies are below and so we’re going below. We’re counting on yerself and th’ others to make sure it won’t happen.”
“No running from this fight,” Bruenor interrupted, and there was no debate to be found in his tone.
Kipper, with a glance at a shrugging Penelope, conceded the point. Kipper Harpell was the master of magical gates, dimensional doors, and the like, but Bruenor had several hundred dwarves with him, all trying to negotiate quickly through the tight quarters of this side corridor. Perhaps they should have done this part of the attack from the throne room after all, as had been suggested.
But no, despite his reservations and his very real fears that this fight would end up eerily similar to the one Kenneally and Tuckernuck’s magic had led, Kipper had to admit this tactic offered the best hope. He was close enough to the targeted area to use lesser spells to create his portal, and so he could quickly enact replacements if the initial one failed.
“Once you’re down there, I won’t easily be able to get you out,” he reminded Bruenor.
“Once I’m down there, only ones who’ll be wantin’ me out’re the damned drow,” Bruenor replied without the slightest hesitation.
Kipper took his place at the end of the side corridor and rubbed his hands together, awaiting the signal. Similarly, Catti-brie and Penelope, both readying the same dimensional gate spell as the old Harpell, found appropriate locations nearby, where they could channel supporting lines of dwarves into the cavern.
Toliver Harpell, meanwhile, cast his own spell, and a disembodied wizard eye floated back out of the corridor and into the main passageway, flitting past the lines of Wilddwarves preparing their ropes and harnesses and out to the landing, where Oretheo Spikes and his best fighters stood ready.
The Adbarrim warrior nodded and grinned at the approach of Toliver’s enchanted orb. That wizard eye served as the “go” signal.
“For King Connerad, for Citadel Adbar, for the Silver Marches, for Gauntlgrym, for Delzoun!” Oretheo Spikes whispered, and so it began, with Oretheo and five others taking up their ropes and rolling off the landing, sliding down for the floor.
And six more dwarves went right behind them.
From the landing, the wizard eye went down alongside the dwarves, with Toliver noting the landmarks and locations. Kipper launched into his casting.
The first drow lightning bolt reached out to blast at the dwarves. The first demon howls echoed below as the lower level came awake to the threat.
Oretheo Spikes was the first dwarf to the floor, five others beside him, six more coming fast, and six more right behind them.
But on came the goblinkin and the demon hordes, ready for the expected battle, and surely expecting to overwhelm this puny force in short order.
Toliver called out to the others, “No surprise! Our enemies were waiting for us.”
“Aye, and that’s the way we knew it’d be!” Bruenor roared. “Who’s to stop a dwarf charge, I ask ye?”
And the cheering erupted all along that side corridor, and dwarves began banging their weapons against their shields, and all crowded in on Kipper, who was in the thrall of spellcasting.
Old Kipper prayed that he had the location correct, that Toliver was relaying the information properly, as he at last completed his spell, connecting this corridor to the floor just to the right of Oretheo Spikes.
“Fools,” Jaemas said, shaking his head in disbelief. “We repelled them last time, and now they come down even more slowly? And more vulnerably?”
He looked to his cousin Faelas, who was just completing his next lightning bolt. The spell shot off, and Faelas nodded in satisfaction. The flash of his first bolt had shown him the target, and now this second streak of lightning had hit the mark, the magic slashing through one of the rappelling ropes far up from the floor.
The lowest dwarf on that rope was just jumping the last few feet to the ground. The next tumbled fifteen feet or so, bounced and rolled back to his feet. The third on the rope fell from twice that height. He hit, buckled, and groaned, grabbing at his legs.
The fourth, the fifth, and the sixth crashed hard onto the floor. One of them was moaning, the other two lying silently and very still.
Faelas looked to Jaemas and shrugged, as much at a loss as to why the foolish dwarves would try something so obviously desperate as this after the first catastrophe, and indeed, among the piled remains of their dead kin. Drow would never be so stubborn or stupid as that, after all.
But then the cousins heard a sudden onslaught of cheering and the cavern brightened, a brightly glowing square of light just to the side of the main fighting.
“What is it?” Faelas asked.
“A gate!” Jaemas yelled, and indeed it was.
Through that portal came the Battlehammers, led by Bruenor himself, pouring out into the cavern just to the side of Oretheo Spikes’s position. Many of those dwarves came out bearing a small light stone, and they flung those illuminating orbs as prescribed, scattering them sequentially throughout the reaches of the huge cavern.
The drow shied in pain and surprise. The cavern became as bright as daylight, brutal to Underdark eyes.
Demons and goblinkin hunched away and shielded their eyes, and the wall of Battlehammers crashed into them like a stampede of crazed rothé, stomping over them, smashing and slashing at them, burying them.
Bruenor ran right up the side of one vrock, his axe whacking away with wild abandon, driving into the demon, pounding it down bit by bit.
Standing atop the broken, destroyed thing, Bruenor glanced back at Oretheo Spikes, the two sharing a knowing nod.
“Vengeance,” Bruenor Battlehammer muttered quietly, but loud enough for Fury Fellhammer, Athrogate, and Ambergris to hear and echo the sentiment.
“Be quick!” Kipper Harpell implored the dwarves still pouring through his portal, and to the other wizards who were only then enacting their spells. “They are trying to dispel the gate!”
Across the way, Catti-brie and Penelope focused on the sight through Kipper’s gate, using that to aid in the placement of their own dimensional doorways. Neither was prolific enough with these types of spells to safely do as Kipper had done, locating and opening a gate merely on the words of Toliver, but now with the target area clearly in their view, both had their spells successfully away.
At that very moment, Kipper’s gate went away, but it didn’t matter. Two portals were in place now, and soon enough three, as the old mage opened yet another to replace the first.
Several hundred Battlehammers would be in that cavern before the drow or their demon allies could hope to close the gates.
“Go! Go!” Catti-brie yelled to the other wizards, and all three rushed around the charging dwarves and back out into the main corridor, pausing to cast as they went.
“You remember the ritual?” Penelope asked, and both Cattie-brie and Kipper nodded.
The Adbar dwarves, still rappelling along the ropes—five now, but with a new sixth line soon to be in place—moved aside for the magicusers, and for the royal procession, King Emerus and Ragged Dain and a host of elite Felbarran warriors close behind them.
As soon as they passed through the last door, Catti-brie and the three Harpells flew away, Toliver leading them down to the correct position near to the floor.
Up on the landing, King Emerus, Ragged Dain, and the others chanted out a battle song, using the cadence to count as instructed.
And when the second verse ended, fully confident in the wizards and their timing, the Felbarrans leaped out into the open cavern, plummeting to within ten feet of the floor before passing through the newly enacted Field of Feather Falling, then floating down to begin solidifying Oretheo Spikes’s left flank.
The shield walls were formed in the blink of a trained dwarf’s eye, the dwarf ranks thickening precisely in the well-lit cavern. Drow darkness spells took some of that light away, but there weren’t many Xorlarrins in this cavern and it was a feeble attempt indeed against the overwhelming number of lighted stones the dwarves had brought to bear.
And now they were the tide, breaking waves made of rolling dwarves, following the leads of Bruenor Battlehammer, Oretheo Spikes, and Emerus Warcrown.
Goblins, orcs, and demons died by the score, and the shield line would not be broken.
Drow lightning and fire came at them, but so quick had the Felbarran assault filled the cavern that Catti-brie and the Harpells, too, began to focus on more offensive spells.
Thick ran the blood. Goblins and orcs piled deep in death, scores of manes lay smoking and melting on the floor, and many dwarves went to Moradin’s Hall in those early moments of wild battle.
But the line held, frustratingly so for those hungry demons who could not get to their bearded enemies, and so began attacking the other living creatures, the allied goblinkin, to satisfy their undeniable hunger.
They were winning. Bruenor understood that as again the dwarven line rolled forward and engulfed their enemies, curling up and down the length of the cavern like a breaking wave on a long beach, as inexorable and undeniable as the tide itself.
They were winning, and it seemed to Bruenor that the fight was quickly turning into a rout. Once they had this hold on the lower levels, with easy resupply from above, they could not be denied. The Forge and the adjoining primordial chamber, the heart of Gauntlgrym, would be theirs for the taking. Gauntlgrym would be Delzoun once more, as Moradin had demanded.
But something was off-kilter, Bruenor felt, some emptiness within him that muted his joy at the moment of supreme victory.
Drizzt was not beside him now to share in his greatest triumph. For all their decades together, in this, the culmination of Bruenor’s achievements, Drizzt Do’Urden was not there, and perhaps would never again be.