Archmage (34 page)

“Clear the closest,” he told the spear-wielders, and as soon as they began to drive the most immediate monsters off, he yelled, “Shields!”

The shield wall parted and out leaped Oretheo Spikes, chopping and twirling, and sprinting for the bridge. Others wanted to follow, of course, but the shield dwarves knew their place and immediately sealed the line once more, leaving Oretheo Spikes out there alone.

“Cover him! Oretheo!” dwarves yelled and from above came a volley of crossbow bolts, ballista spears, and a pair of beautifully placed catapult throws that blew free the ground in front of the running Wilddwarf leader.

Oretheo Spikes made the base of the bridge, but monsters rushed around the large buttresses in close pursuit.

And so many more hulking monsters loomed in the shadows across the way.

“Clangeddin’s strength to ye,” more than one of the dwarves at the wall muttered, and there was little more to say.

“Nothing clear to hit!” Ogden Nugget cried, leaning out the long window and looking down from their position.

Carrinda and Nigel shared his frustration, for they could hear the raucous battle not far from their tower, where a large square of dwarves, a brigade or more, had begun a sweep toward the pond. But demons had come from the shadows in a coordinated manner, and the square found itself surrounded on all four sides, with nearly two hundred battle dwarves fighting for their lives.

But the line was too tight and too mingled for ballistae and catapults to help.

Ogden pounded his fist on the stone sill and turned back.

“Let it go, friend,” Nigel offered. “Take what we can . . .” He stopped short as Ogden’s eyes popped open wide in shock. Nigel figured it out and spun to see the ugly, bloated human face of a chasme only a hand’s breadth away as the monster landed on the sill.

Nigel cried out and threw his hands up and threw himself back, thinking he was surely doomed.

But even as he retreated, a spear flew past him and drove right into that ugly demon’s face.

“Bah! But who’s needin’ a ballista, what?” Carrinda Castleduck proclaimed, shaking a fist at the chasme as it fell away.

“Well flung!” a relieved Nigel congratulated her. “Now, ye find me something big to skewer!”

“I’m seein’ naught but the little ones,” Ogden replied, collecting his wits and spinning about. “Big ones’re all skippin’ about the shadows.”

“Bah!” Nigel roared. “Then shoot for the pond!”

He set another spear and Carrinda began to turn the swiveling ballista once more.

That frustration was exactly what Oretheo Spikes understood and expected. They weren’t going to win this fight by battling the coordinated efforts of the small demons. There were simply too many of the ugly things. And the big ones, the smart ones who were coordinating it all, weren’t about to make targets of themselves until most of the stalagmite and stalactite batteries had been shut down.

Those artillery batteries needed a spotter.

The Wilddwarf sprinted across the bridge and threw himself into a horde of manes that had clustered there at the far end, his wild sweeps with his vicious axe driving them back or gutting them where they stood. The dwarf leaped and spun sidelong, a downward swing splattering a manes’s misshapen head.

He tore his axe free and used the momentum of the pull to sweep it across again, gutting another, then brought the weapon up and into a tight spin and let its weight carry him around to take the face from the nearest manes that had pursued him across the bridge.

Pure fury drove him—shield bashing, shield rushing, axe sweeping— and that same fury nearly got him killed, for only at the last moment did he note another horrible demon, a pile of goo slithering across the floor. With a desperate yelp, Oretheo threw himself over the monster, landing with a thud. He rolled frantically, not daring to stop, and as he came around and looked back, he blanched with horror.

A few of the manes had chased him but had not leaped, and now they tried to wade through the jelly-like demonic creature, and smoke wafted up from their dissolving legs.

“Oh, but lovely,” Oretheo said with a sigh, and he hopped up and ran off to the base of the nearest guard tower. All of them had been stocked for exactly this purpose, with torches and with a pile of burning embers glowing under a stone hood.

He drove the torch into the orange-glowing pile and pulled it back, the end igniting and flaring to life. He took it in his shield hand, hoisted his axe once more, and ran off, waving the flaming torch to gather attention.

“We got ourselves a marker!” Ogden Nugget called, pointing to the running dwarf with the waving torch.

“Aye, and it’s Oretheo Spikes hisself!” Carrinda said. She punched her fist into the air again. “Just stay at the window and guide me turns!” she instructed Ogden even as she leaped back to the ballista and grabbed the handles.

“Just stay with him,” she added, as Nigel pointed left and up, then down and back to the right, accurately following the movements of Oretheo Spikes. Powerful Carrinda and Nigel turned the ballista in line.

“Fourth north pocket!” Ogden called out, and that same shout was echoed in a score of similar towers all across the cavern, and on the lower floor of this one as well. The call was more than a description of a place, it was one of the common marks to which all of the weapons on this side of the cavern had been sighted, and it told every artillery dwarf exactly where to align his weapon.

“Bugs!” Carrinda shouted then, and all three turned and gasped to see a swarm of chasme flying in at them.

But just below them on the balcony, their brethren saw it, too, and they were well prepared. Even as the three in the ballista room braced for the incoming fight, the catapult below let fly, a basket full of small caltrops that tumbled and spread wide as they flew off.

“Bird shot,” the dwarves called it, for such a load could take a flock of geese from the sky.

Or a swarm of chasme, the ugly things sent spinning and tumbling all in a rush.

Carrinda, Nigel, and Ogden went right back to work.

“Fourth north pocket again!” cried Ogden, seeming somewhat surprised that Oretheo Spikes had apparently backtracked.

“Ah, but he found somethin’!” Carrinda said, eyes gleaming in anticipation. “Something big!”

Oh, Oretheo Spikes had indeed!

The dwarf ran faster than he ever had before in his entire life. Only twice in his years had Oretheo Spikes truly known fear: first near a frozen lake when the source of that unseasonable ice, a great white dragon, had exploded through the pack to join in the battle, and now, when in his run, he had nearly tumbled into a pack—a pack!—of gigantic glabrezu.

He just lowered his head and ran for all his life, a dozen of the beasts close behind, and with a flock of giant vrocks right behind them.

“Third pocket!” came the cry from every tower, and as Oretheo Spikes passed that mark, he skidded to a stop and spun, pointing back with his torch. A signal the disciplined Adbar dwarves knew well.

Oretheo saw the demons rushing for him, towering over him. And he heard the creak and whoosh of the great weapons of war.

“Bah, but yer mother’s a bunny!” the Wilddwarf roared, certain that he was doomed, seeing great pincers already coming his way.

A score of ballista spears crashed just in front of him. A score of catapult loads and twice that number of side-slingers—bird shot, larger rocks, burning pitch, and one with a pile of stones soaked in oil of impact—let fly for that sighted area just in front of Oretheo Spikes, the place the dwarves had named “third pocket north.”

The cavern shook under the weight of the barrage, and trembled with the explosion of the magical oil.

Oretheo Spikes was barely aware that he was in the air, but he felt the hard stone when he crashed down.

He felt it because he was, somehow, alive!

Looking back, he saw the jumble of demons and spears and rocks large and small, and the smoking husks of fallen fiends and the cracked wall of the cavern.

Another catapult load smashed in, throwing a vulture beast into the wall.

And more followed, relentless and punishing.

“Bah, but yer mother’s a bunny!” Oretheo Spikes roared once more, pulling himself from the floor. And off he ran, torch waving.

And now, he noted, he wasn’t the only marker, as other dwarves on this end of the large cavern had taken up torches. Far across the cavern, he heard “Second pocket south!” and a few heartbeats later, a similar devastating barrage went out from the southern guard towers.

“Well done, King Connerad,” Oretheo Spikes mumbled under his breath, truly glad that the young dwarf had so brilliantly organized this defense, and blissfully unaware that at that very moment, King Connerad Brawnanvil was being torn in half by the powerful pincers of a glabrezu very much like the beasts Oretheo’s gallant efforts had just destroyed.

He began his run anew, but blowing horns gave him pause.

He looked back to the pond and took heart, for the rest of Adbar’s force had come forth from the throne room, and now more than a thousand battle dwarves had pushed to the far bank of the pond, and no more beasts would get free of that water.

And the Adbarrim were coming across the bridge as well, a great wedge of dwarven fury and dwarven muscle and dwarven metal.

And on the near side, the boys of Mirabar had poured into the chamber from the outer caverns. Dwarven squares had used the support artillery to join up in stronger formations and had begun an irresistible march back toward the pond. Nearly three hundred Mirabarran and Adbarrim would die this day in the entry cavern of Gauntlgrym, but so be it.

When the pond’s water stilled once more, Oretheo Spikes, Nigel Thunderstorm, and all the remaining dwarves looked about at the carnage and knew that
Comragh na fo Aster,
the Battle of the Cavern, had come to a glorious and victorious end.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I canno’,” Catti-brie replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dwarves shook their hairy heads doubtfully. Kipper had asked them to stand five feet back from a wall, a bend in the corridor, and face it, though the demons were back the other way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They just kept swinging.

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

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

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

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

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

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