A few heartbeats later, a pair of small flaming orbs sailed across the darkness, arcing over the monstrous horde, and settling in the area where the leaping dwarves were touching down, right in the midst of the dwarven perimeter.
Two fireballs stole the darkness.
“OH, NO, NO!” Kenneally Harpell cried out when she saw the lightning, when she realized that the lightning was not aimed at those dwarves already on the ground.
“Stop! Stop!” she cried at the dwarves on the landing, but these were battleragers, and they weren’t about to listen with a fight so near and their kin being hard-pressed by monsters and magic.
Ten more came rushing through the door. Kenneally leaped up to block them, screaming for them to halt.
And at that moment, they heard the crashes as the first group of unfortunate dwarves passed through the level of the flying Harpells—just three now, with the fourth having been driven off by a lightning stroke—and the now failed Field of Feather Falling.
The second group, the ones Kenneally had futilely tried to stop, hit next, crashing and groaning, and still several of the newcomers to the platform leaped away.
“Oh, no, no,” Kenneally Harpell lamented. She knew that she had to do something here, but had no idea at that moment what it might be.
“Get yer ropes!” the dwarves around her cried down the line through the door, and more than one cast a disparaging glance Kenneally’s way.
“Oh no, no,” she whispered yet again, staring into the darkness. And with a resolute shake of her head, she leaped away.
THE SWORD OF King Connerad felled the first orc to approach the perimeter, a swift and deadly strike right between the creature’s ugly eyes. Not Connerad, nor any of the Gutbusters around him, cried out with worry when the monstrous hordes appeared and charged in at them. Nay, they welcomed the fight, and when they noted the monsters as goblinkin, relished it all the more.
The trio of goblins following that orc met the gauntleted fist of Bungalow Thump, a wild head butt—one that would have made Thibbledorf Pwent himself proud!—by the same, and a twist, kick, trip, and stab movement by Connerad.
All around them Gutbusters fought wildly, and goblins died horribly.
And more dwarves descended, touching down and leaping wildly into the fray. Within heartbeats, though they were outnumbered, the dwarven perimeter widened.
Then came the lightning bolts, and Bungalow Thump laughed at them and chided the enemy wizards for missing the mark.
But a wounded cry from up above warned Connerad that such was not the case, that he and his boys weren’t the targets. With the immediate threat in front of him writhing and dying on the ground, Connerad managed to step back and spin, determined to take command.
Another group of dwarves touched down, several with armor smoking from the lightning bolts—but such a tingle as that would hardly slow a Gutbuster!
Still, Connerad hoped that it had been one of the dwarves on the ground who had cried out.
A heartbeat later, when ten good dwarves crashed down in free-fall to the floor, the young king knew better.
The field of magic had been eliminated.
“No!” Connerad yelled out to a pair of dwarves who turned and rushed to their fallen comrades. The young king grimaced and looked away as the next ten came crashing down, burying those two under them in a tangle of broken bones and spraying blood.
Another dwarf hit the floor, and several more behind him.
“Form and fight!” Connerad shouted to his boys, for what else could he do? More than a hundred were down on the cavern floor, with no way to retreat, and with no further reinforcements coming … at least, he hoped not.
“STOP THEM!” TUCKERNUCK screamed, soaring back up, even as Kenneally came flying down from the landing.
“We have to get them out of there!” the woman shouted, moving in close. Two of the other Harpells came soaring up beside them.
“They hit Toliver!” one exclaimed.
“They broke the ritual!” said the other.
Kenneally looked to Tuckernuck, who could only shake his head, his expression horrified.
“Is Toliver dead?” she started to ask, but the answer came not from one of the three flying about her, but from below, where a lightning bolt split the darkness—one originating in the air above the battle and not the recesses of the cavern.
“Toliver!” Tuckernuck said.
“Fetch him,” said Kenneally. “We have to get the dwarves out of there. Fetch him and fly back up near the landing and prepare to set your feather fall once more.”
“Too high,” Tuckernuck argued. “The dwarves will float for a long while, easy targets …”
“Do it!” Kenneally yelled at him. “And allow no more dwarves to come down. Not on their ropes and not with your magic. Be quick!”
She flew off then, diving down to the cavern floor. As she moved lower, she only confirmed her idea—Connerad and his Gutbusters were being sorely pressed by monstrous hordes of goblinkin.
And soon to be joined by demons or devils or some other extraplanar menace, Kenneally saw, noting a band of lumbering four-armed, dogfaced beasts moving through the slave horde, tossing aside the goblinkin with abandon.
The woman stopped and hovered, surveying the area, noting mostly the movements of the two Harpells flying down to retrieve Toliver.
“Hurry,” she whispered under her breath, and then, having no choice in the matter, Kenneally began to cast a powerful spell.
ANOTHER PEA OF flame arced in. Connerad and Bungalow Thump dropped to the floor and covered just in time before the fireball erupted, immolating several goblins they were battling and igniting a dwarf behind them.
“Put ’im out!” Bungalow Thump shouted to the others, but all nearby were too engaged in desperate battle to break off to the aid of their burning friend.
“Go!” Connerad told his friend, and he shoved Bungalow Thump along. The dwarf sprang over the burning fellow, bearing him to the ground and rolling him about, smothering the flames.
Behind them, Connerad met the incoming enemy, bracing himself to the charge of a pair of orcs.
But those creatures never made it, caught suddenly by monstrous pincers, to be so easily hoisted and flipped aside.
In waded the gigantic glabrezu. Connerad got his shield up in front of a snapping pincer. He slashed across with his sword, but the glabrezu’s reach was too great and the blade cut across short of its mark.
In came the second pincer and Connerad had to throw himself backward and to the side, executing a perfect shoulder roll to come back to his feet just in time to spin and duck behind the shield as the pincer came in once more.
A familiar voice sounded then, a magical call from above. “Get to the landing area! Now!”
The dwarves didn’t know what to make of it, and weren’t sure the call was even aimed at them, or from where it had come.
Connerad couldn’t begin to react to the command anyway. The demon pressed him hard, pincers snapping all around him. He got his shield up to block one, but the powerful demon pressed in with the claw anyway, and Connerad winced as the shield cracked ominously under the great weight of the press.
The demon held on and twisted and the young dwarf king found himself easily yanked off balance, and thought his life at its end as the second pincer came across for his midsection.
A living missile intercepted it as Bungalow Thump flew into the glabrezu, knocking aside the arm and driving the beast backward. It let go of Connerad’s shield, and the overbalanced dwarf king tumbled back and to the ground.
Bungalow’s cry of pain had Connerad back up immediately, though, and seeing Bungalow Thump hugged in close, the demon’s maw chewing at the dwarf’s neck, he fearlessly charged in.
Connerad Brawnanvil leaped high, both hands gripping his sword for a mighty two-hand chop aimed at the glabrezu’s neck. At the last moment, the demon stood taller, though, and so the cut came in low, driving just below the shoulder.
/> Not a mortal blow, perhaps, but a vicious one, so much so that the glabrezu’s top left arm fell free, cleanly severed.
The demon’s howl echoed across the cavern, and many combatants—dwarf, goblin, demon, and even drow—paused to consider the sheer horror of that shriek.
The glabrezu threw Bungalow Thump at Connerad, the dwarves colliding and tumbling in a heap.
But Connerad went up and hauled the bleeding Bungalow Thump up beside him. Before the Gutbuster could argue or resist, Connerad shoved him hard and sent him stumbling back to the landing area.
“Ye heared Kenneally Harpell!” Connerad called to all the dwarves. “To the landing area, I say!”
Easier said than done for Connerad, though. The wounded, outraged glabrezu leaped in at him.
“Go! Go!” he roared at Bungalow Thump even as the demon began knocking him back. He knew the Gutbuster wouldn’t leave him. “I am right behind! Form the defenses!”
But Connerad Brawnanvil wasn’t right behind. The glabrezu’s pincer caught him by the shield again, and this time the compromised buckler folded under the tremendous pressure.
Connerad grimaced and growled as the pincer came in hard across his forearm, pressing in through his fine mail. He tried to bring his sword to bear, but the demon caught his arm and held him at bay.
In came the biting maw, and Connerad timed his headbutt perfectly to intercept the toothy jaws with the crown of his helmet.
The glabrezu staggered, and Connerad wriggled free his sword arm and stabbed straight ahead. He felt his fine blade sink into demon flesh, and felt the hot Abyssal blood spurting out over his arm.
NOT FAR FROM the floor, Kenneally Harpell watched the dwarves scrambling, trying to get back to the landing area—which was easy to locate with nearly thirty broken dwarves lying in a tangled heap.
The woman forced the gruesome image out of her thoughts and looked up, trying to see if Tuckernuck and the others were in position, and with their spell enacted once more.
But to no avail, for they were in darkness too complete. But Kenneally knew she couldn’t wait. She began casting her spell, a powerful dweomer known to only a few at the Ivy Mansion, aiming it right at the dwarves clustered about their fallen kin.
“NO, YOU HOLD!” Tuckernuck shouted at the dwarves on the landing. He had figured out Kenneally’s desperate plan and knew what would soon be coming his way. “They’re coming back, all of them, and you need to be ready to catch them and pull them to safety! Grapnels, I say! Ropes and grapnels!”
Many dwarves shouted questions back at the flying wizard, and many more shouted curses.
Tuckernuck ignored them. He had to lead the ritual—nothing else mattered. He understood the carnage that would ensue should he fail Kenneally, should he fail the dwarves now.
The other three Harpells returned to him, and he motioned them into place. Clearly injured, Toliver barely managed to get near to his spot diagonally across from the leading wizard, and Tuckernuck wasn’t sure that one could bring forth his part of the ritual.
The dweomer needed four participants.
With no options available, Tuckernuck continued his casting, then reached his arms out left and right, forming his corner of the square. From his fingertips shot tiny filaments of light streaming out to be caught by the casters at those corners, the two of them then redirecting the energy to Toliver.
But Toliver only had one arm up to receive the light. He remained lurched over to his left. There was nothing Tuckernuck could do—he couldn’t even shout out for Toliver or he would ruin his own casting.
But how he wanted to, and even more so when he heard the sudden commotion below him, and glanced down to see the tumbling, spinning charge of a score of dwarves flying up at him.
No, falling up at him, he realized, for they were caught in Kenneally’s spell of inversion, where up was down and down was up.
“Flip!” he did yell at the other wizards when the dweomer reached them, and they did, except for Toliver, righting themselves upside down, which was now upright!
The falling dwarves drew near, but the Field of Feather Fall wasn’t complete, and the ceiling, now the floor, loomed just above.
“Toliver!” Tuckernuck and the other two shouted, for now their spells were complete.
And from the landing, which was not in the area of effect, the dwarves began to scream and curse.
DEAD DWARVES TUMBLED upward beside living dwarves. Pursuing goblins were caught in the spell and went falling upward in the line. More dwarves came in, leaping, then flailing as they were caught in a free fall as surely as if they had leaped off a cliff.
But many other dwarves weren’t going to make it, Kenneally realized. Nearly a hundred and fifty of the sturdy folk had leaped down, the last three groups falling to their deaths almost to a dwarf. But the Harpell wizard realized that of the six-score who were already on the floor, less than half were going to find their way back. Yet another group of several Gutbusters were pulled down by the goblin horde, overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
Kenneally spotted King Connerad of Mithral Hall staggering away from a skewered demon, the beast spouting blood from its gut but still stubbornly pursuing.
And more monsters—like great bipedal vultures—swept in from the sides, cutting off the young dwarf’s retreat.
Connerad fought valiantly, but Kenneally shook her head in despair. She began casting a spell, a fireball, thinking to put it high enough to catch the heads of the tall monsters. She took hope when one of those vulture-like demons screeched and staggered back, its beak shattered by a mighty stroke of Connerad’s sword.
But the four-armed behemoth leaped in, pincers leading, and Kenneally lost the spell in her throat as the beast extracted Connerad from the commotion and lifted him up into the air, both pincers grasping tightly around the poor dwarf’s midsection.
“Bah, ye dog!” she heard Connerad cry, and he lashed out with his blade and managed to clip the huge beast’s canine muzzle.
With a yelp of protest and rage, the demon thrust its arms out wide, and Connerad Brawnanvil, the Twelfth King of Mithral Hall, was ripped in half at the waist.
Kenneally’s fireball spell was lost in her throat then, and all she could do was fly up for the ceiling, her eyes wet with tears, and gasping for breath she could not seem to find.
She took some heart as she rose, though, to see her four kin maintaining their dweomer. Toliver had straightened and completed the square just in time. Upward fell the dwarves, then upward they floated, to land lightly on the ceiling.
And dwarves on the landing threw them ropes, which fell up to them, that they could be hauled to safety.
And upward fell the pursuing monsters, too, then upward they floated, and not one got to the ceiling before a dwarven crossbow launched a bolt into its torso, and the dwarves already up above were ready for them anyway, cutting the disoriented and confused goblinkin apart in short order.
“Hurry, pull them in!” she heard Tuckernuck commanding. “Kenneally’s spell will not last much longer! We will lose any not on the ledge!”
Kenneally nodded agreement and focused on the task at hand. She was more than halfway to the ceiling, the jumble of falling dwarves and monsters just in front of her. Now she concentrated on that tumbling mess, picking out monsters.
A line of magic missiles shot out from her fingertips, striking a goblin, killing it, and taking out the one beside it as well.
Kenneally chanted the spell for a lightning bolt, and when she executed it, she perfectly angled it to blast several enemies, with not a dwarf singed. The power of the bolt jolted one large demon too, sending it spinning out of the area of her reverse gravity, and as soon as the beast went out of the dweomer, it fell back the other way, more than fifty feet to the floor.
And so Kenneally realized a new and deadly tactic, and one executed by a simple spell she could cast quickly and repeatedly. She picked out her targets with gusts of wind, blowing them out of the reverse gravity field,
sending them falling back for the cavern floor, living bombs to drop upon the sprawling horde below.
She would avenge Connerad, she determined, and she narrowed her eyes and sent a dozen goblins flying free of her enchanted area.
TUCKERNUCK HARPELL LOOKED up, or rather down, nodding approvingly of Kenneally’s exploits.
But noting, too, that fewer and fewer dwarves were among the dozens falling upward, and that little fighting continued on the floor.
He glanced the other way to see most of the living dwarves already out of the enchanted area, scrambling on ropes with their crowded brethren grabbing at them and hauling them over the lip of the landing.
He looked back the other way, back to the floor. He saw no dwarves, none living at least, but now more and more monsters were taking the leap.
Tuckernuck could only hope that he wasn’t killing more dwarves then, but he flew backward and dropped his arms, ending the ritual enchantment of the Field of Feather Falling. He flipped back upright, and waved his three fellow Harpells back as monster after monster tumbled past to crash against the ceiling, or, soon, to crash against the bodies of those that had already crashed against the ceiling.
He looked down again to Kenneally, and he gasped and cried out. A pair of ghastly creatures, like giant houseflies with human faces, flew upon her at either side, biting and tearing at her.
“Kenneally!”
He began to dive, but a fireball below stopped him before he ever truly moved.
Kenneally’s fireball dropped right upon herself.
The flames cleared and the chasme demons, their wings burned away, tumbled for the floor, bearing poor Kenneally with them.
Again Tuckernuck began to dive, and again he stopped short, for Kenneally’s powerful dweomer ended then, and a host of monsters and dead dwarves fell from the ceiling, and those falling upward in the field paused, then went tumbling back the other way.
So enthralled by the strange sight was Tuckernuck that he didn’t notice a swarm of chasme demons soaring up at him until it was too late.