Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy and Other Stories (12 page)

It was the Savondese knight-errant, Sir Alwys d’Escard, who was responsible for the fame of the seven-year siege spreading throughout the wider world, Lodi said. He was not, as it was sometimes reported, the only man to have fought for the dwarves during the vast and terrible war that was waged between the armies of the Troll King and the dwarves of Iron Mountain. He was, as a matter of fact, merely a royal ambassador from the king of Savondir to what passed for King Guldur Goblinsbane’s court.

There wasn’t another king in Selenoth so rude or so cruel as to entertain himself by juggling the skulls of courtiers with whom he had grown discontent. Even if there had been, no king would have been capable of doing so with skulls he had personally removed with his bare hands only moments before.

D’Escard’s version of the great siege, written in a dactylic hexameter worthy of the heroism shown there, was long on vivid details that captured men’s imaginations, such as the terrible climb of The Twenty, who braved orc slings and goblin catapults and troll-thrown boulders to trigger a massive avalanche that buried the proud gates of Iron Mountain beneath masses of stone just as Guldur’s rams were about to shatter them.

His rendition of the Breaking of the Elves, which recounted the dashing Prince Everbright’s doomed attempt to drive off the besiegers, was known to have brought even the most hard-bitten men-at-arms to tears. And few would forget D’Escard’s telling of the epic brawl between Bergulmor and Oskrug Orceater that followed the Goblinsbane’s sudden death, a titanic battle that not only broke the siege but divided the newly born kingdom of the trolls in twain as well.

Too bad most of it was hogswallop.

What it lacked, Lodi said, was the greater part of the story, namely the story as seen through the eyes of the dwarves. It was not merely that D’Escard’s
The Siege of Iron Mountain
lacked a true dwarven feel, composed as it was in High Savondese. But as a foreign member at the Troll King’s court, D’Escard had simply never been witness to the ugly, bloody struggles that took place within the dark roots of the mountain, the violent battles deep beneath the surface that comprised the greater and more decisive aspects of the lengthy siege.

And so Lodi made to right that wrong for Marcus and Marcipor.

Lodi was a young dwarf of fifty-two on the day that the first scouts reported that the rumors of an immense troll-led army massing near the foothills of the Volpiscenes were actually true. This was unthinkable for three reasons. First, the orc tribes weren’t in the habit of following the orders of their own grand chieftans, let alone a goblin or troll. Second, trolls didn’t lead armies.

And third, only a fool or a madman would attempt to invade the mountainous Dwarflands, where much of the terrain was impassible and there was virtually nothing of value that was accessible to an invading army. There was great wealth throughout the four dwarven kingdoms of the Underdeep, of course, but that was a vast, uncharted, and lightless series of mazes. It was no place for anyone without a reliable source of light and an unerring sense of direction underground—of the sort possessed by nearly every dwarf and hardly any other sentient creature inhabiting Selenoth.

Lodi had been a miner, he said, a successful one who, despite his youth, owned two silver veins, one of which was possessed of enough promise that he had thought of proposing marriage to a certain dwarva named Geral. Geral’s father owned a shield-factory that supplied King Hammerstone’s Iron Guard.

Lodi was there paying court to Geral, intending to gift her with a small bit of ore from his most recent shaft, when one of the guardsmen, in full armor, entered the factory and told Geral’s father that all of his spare shields were required immediately, even those still lacking the king’s regalia worked in gold that customarily served as the boss.

Furthermore, the guardsman said, the factory was to begin working around the clock so that as many shields as dwarvenly possible would be produced, and Geral’s father was to make a list of the materials he required and they would be delivered at the earliest opportunity. A second list would also be required of him, one consisting of the names of his workers, so they could be spared the forthcoming levy so that they might supply not only the Guard, but the militia, the levy, and any other dwarf who might raise a shield in defense of their mountain.

“You look like a dwarf who knows how to swing a hammer,” the guard told Lodi. “A warhammer is much the same, except it’s easier to crack a skull than a rock.”

“I can swing a hammer,” answered Lodi.

“Then I advise you to come with me. Either you can fight with the King’s Own, or you can fight with young dwarves like yourself who don’t know an orc from a goblin on either side of you.”

Lodi decided that his chances of surviving an encounter with the enemy were probably higher if he encountered them in the company of experienced warriors rather than fellow neophytes. And he also wanted to impress Geral. So he did as the guard suggested. First, though, he begged a shield from Geral’s father, who gruffly waved away any offer to pay for it, and for his efforts won a kiss on the cheek from a duly-impressed, wet-eyed Geral.

He found it hard to regret that kiss even now, he said, although he cursed it many a time when the Iron Guard was once more summoned in the dead of the night. Again and again they were called to stand in the gap and cover the retreat of some lesser regiment or sometimes the militia when they’d been beaten back by a mighty troll, an elite force of orcs, or sometimes just the sheer numbers that the Troll King was able to throw at them. More than once he’d marched shoulder to shoulder with his grim-faced companions through a dark tunnel toward the enemy as fleeing dwarves streamed back to safety on either side of them, and he thought that he very well might be among those dwarves—were it not for that kiss.

Usually, it wasn’t long before the Guard found themselves engaged and pressing forward over the bodies of dead dwarves who hadn’t been fortunate enough to fall back in time. Lodi realized that it was just as likely that he would have been numbered among those unfortunates.

His training had consisted of a rudimentary fitting that saw his iron armor welded to fit him, more or less, and the receipt of a helm that neither fit him nor quite matched those of his fellow guards. He also received a hammer that had a heavier, broader head and a lighter shaft than the one to which he was accustomed.

Then he was given a short lecture from a grey-bearded sergeant who informed him that if he ran, he’d better run toward the enemy because they’d treat him a good deal better than the sergeant would. Lodi saw no reason to doubt the dwarf, whose misshapen skull proved that he was very tough indeed. There were few who had survived even a glancing blow from a great orc’s spiked mace, but Sergeant Malvern of the Iron Guard was one of them.

After a meal and a brief swearing-in ceremony, which involved holding an iron chain and kissing an engraved image of King Hammerstone, Lodi found himself enlisted. In the company of twenty other armored dwarves he stood in the midday sunshine on a ridge that jutted out above the huge gates that were the primary means of entry to Iron Mountain.

The gates were not the only means of entry, but they were the only ones that were easily spotted, and certainly the only ones that were large enough to permit entry to even a small portion of the great mass of movement that was pouring through the two passes that lay to the east between Mount Bray, Mount Saelenheil, and Toadfall Mountain like a pair of black rivers swollen by the wintermelt.

The wolf-riders came first: goblin lancers astride the backs of lean, grey killing machines. Lodi stopped counting after he reached five hundred. Then came the boar-riders, foul-tempered orcs on the backs of even fouler-tempered swine. They were about twice the size of the goblins, but they carried swords and maces rather than lances. The stench of them, even from a distance and high above, was incredible, and Lodi found it hard to imagine how unbearable it had to be in their actual vicinity.

The infantries followed, with regiment after regiment of unarmored goblins followed by countless club-dragging orcs. Thousands, tens of thousands of them trudged into what appeared to be predetermined positions. The large gaps they left caused some discussion among the guards for who, or what, would fill them.

They soon learned. First came the elite orc regiments, heavily armored great orcs marching with a discipline and elan that had not been seen in any of the preceding regiments. Then came what Sergeant Malvern had said he feared most: a long series of wagons being drawn by powerful horned auchs containing what had to be the Troll King’s artillery, as well as an amount of supplies that would normally have been considerable had they accompanied an army one-tenth the size.

Finally, there came what had never been seen before on Selenoth—three regiments of giant, granite-hewn monsters, each standing more than fifteen feet tall, most marching out of rhythm but indubitably marching together. Trolls. Three regiments of trolls.

At that point, Guldur Goblinsbane was little more than a name mentioned in passing to Lodi. But already, even to his unsoldierly eyes, it was clear that the Troll King was a creature of truly unusual power and vision. Lodi could not conceive of anything that would have enabled anyone, least of all a rockheaded troll, to assemble an army of this magnitude and keep it together long enough to reach the gates of Iron Mountain.

What riches had he promised them? What spoils did he dangle before them to motivate them to do his will? Why did the orcs and goblins follow him, or rather, march before him, when surely they would just as soon have fought him, as they had always fought his kind?

The Troll King’s cognomen hinted at the answer, of course. But at that time Lodi was simply not capable of comprehending the slaughter that Guldur had wreaked, first upon his own kind in enforcing a crude form of species unity upon his fellow trolls, and then among the orc tribes he’d encountered next.

Goblinsbane was the overlord of less than one-third of the teeming masses of orcdom. None of the most powerful tribes such as the Hagahorn or the orcs of Zoth Ommog had been subdued by him, but the third he commanded still outnumbered the sum total of all the dwarves in all four dwarf kingdoms. And finally, he won the submission of the goblins by an eight-year display of brutality that was unmatched in the memory of all the sentient races of Selenoth.

As for the countless hill, plain, and swamp goblins that made up the greater part of the Goblinsbane’s army, it soon became clear that they were intended to serve as more than mere fodder for the hidden dwarven cannons that were embedded deeply into the mountainside. They had been brought along to feed the army.

Any thought that the mighty army was too large for it to remain long in front of the gates vanished as the guardsmen watched two great orcs, Red Claw Slayers by the look of the black banner that waved over their encampment, grab a young swamp goblin foolish enough to walk too near to their campfire. The goblin shrieked wildly, but his screams didn’t stop the Slayers from rending him limb from limb and popping the pieces into their boiling cauldron.

The guttural laughter that rose from the nearby orc encampments sent chills of fear down Lodi’s spine. How could they possibly hope to drive away an army that was just as willing to slaughter its own warriors as it was to slay its foes? And although Iron Mountain was supplied with limitless water and well stocked with foodstuffs, the indiscriminate palate of their besiegers meant that they couldn’t count on the siege ending until literally every last goblin had been both killed and eaten! How long could sixty thousand dwarves, of whom perhaps a third were males of fighting age, hope to withstand an enemy army that appeared to be beyond count?

Gulder Goblinsbane had the dwarven gates razed to cinder. After the gates were buried, he commanded the removal of the many tons of stone and other debris that covered them. But the work went slowly, as dwarven miners tunneled from inside the mountain to snatch and slay workers by night and lay explosive traps that slew scores of them at a time during the day.

And when the great gates were finally uncovered and the three mighty rams meant to smash them were brought up at last, a terrible crashing noise was heard and the gates seemed to bulge from the inside out. After much repeated bashing proved to be worthless, the chief goblin engineer finally managed to convince a skeptical Troll King that the dwarves had set off a second landslide, this one inside the mountain, sealing the entrance more solidly than before.

Then began the long and terrible War in the Deep, to which D’Escard devotes but a few suggestive stanzas. But for Lodi, that was the siege—the desperate battles fought in narrow passageways and black, unlit tunnels, where often there wasn’t even enough room to lift your arm, let alone raise your weapon.

The first time he found himself crawling through a rathole and sensed, rather than saw, the presence of an enemy immediately before him, he vowed that he’d have a spike welded on top of his warhammer. Fortunately, the goblin miner had been too occupied with digging to realize that he’d broken into a dwarven crawlspace. Lodi managed to get one hand around the goblin’s skinny neck before it could shriek out a warning to its fellows. He killed five diggers that night, and never once did his hammer leave his belt.

Night after night, the Iron Guard dug tunnels, killed, and then refilled the tunnels to hide their tracks. They planted mines that exploded at random intervals during the day as unlucky orcs and goblins encountered them. They slipped out of hidden exits high up on the mountain and climbed down to launch hellish mortar fire on the camps far below. They slew thousands, tens of thousands, but always there were more goblins, more orcs, more implacable enemies to replace those that fell. The enemy encampment grew to surround the mountain as if it were a pyramid erupting from a field of hateful monsters.

After the initial terror of realizing that they were surrounded by foes, the dwarves of Iron Mountain gradually became accustomed to their peril. Vigilance was required, but as days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months, abject fear changed to morbid nonchalance.