Athrogate started to call out his fine throw, but Amber’s sudden intake of breath brought his attention back to the south, to the bridge. And Athrogate, too, sucked in his breath and saw their certain doom. The monsters on the bridge had organized now, with ogres hoisting heavy spiked logs.
“This is gonna hurt,” Athrogate whispered. The lead boats, including their boat, were nearing the shadows of that bridge now.
But Bruenor was still singing, still banging his shield, which was now holding three broken arrows, with his many-notched axe. He didn’t shy away, didn’t flinch. He just sang, now his voice as much a growl as a throaty baritone.
They drifted closer. A pair of particularly ugly ogres lifted a spiked log up high.
“Oh, this is gonna hurt,” Athrogate said.
And he was right, for Catti-brie’s spell was cast then, a line of fire running the length of the bridge, igniting spiked logs, igniting bows and spears, igniting orcs and ogres.
Bruenor stopped banging his shield and grabbed his axe in his shield arm before he lifted a cracked silver horn to his lips and croaked a discordant note. The dwarf reached down with his free arm and lifted a grapnel secured to a thick rope. He let it out a bit and set it spinning, then sent it flying up high for the bridge’s stone rail. Over it went, and into the flames, but Bruenor yanked it back quickly, before the fires could catch, pulling the grapnel tight against the wall.
He was the first out of the boats, slinging his shield and axe and leaping high on the rope, the strength of Clangeddin coursing through his muscled arms. Up he went, hand over hand, climbing with ease and with amazing speed, easily outpacing those dwarves on the other boats who were climbing ropes of their own.
Even as Bruenor went over the stone wall, Catti-brie’s wall of fire came down. But from it had come a monstrous fire elemental, and that magical beast was already into the battle, slamming an ogre with its fiery fist, sending the brute tumbling.
Athrogate was soon up to the bridge rail, pulling himself over quickly, desperate to join Bruenor, who by then was single-handedly holding back a surging swarm of orcs.
No, not single-handedly, Athrogate realized. The berserker specter of Thibbledorf Pwent was there, warp-stepping from one side to the other, swatting orcs aside with impunity. Athrogate couldn’t suppress a laugh as he rolled over the wall, drew his morningstars, and rushed to join Bruenor. An orc flopped atop Thibbledorf Pwent’s head, impaled by the long helmet spike. It wasn’t yet dead, and the dwarf berserker wasn’t doing anything to finish it—except hopping all around, and each jolting movement had the orc writhing and howling in agony.
Up beside Bruenor, Athrogate swatted an ogre, sending it tumbling over the far rail to splash into the river below.
“Bwahaha!” he howled, but he bit it short, seeing the blood pouring from Bruenor’s throat.
Bruenor was still singing, or rather, gurgling, and certainly still fighting, though how he hadn’t fallen over dead, Athrogate did not know, for surely the wound would prove mortal.
Pile heavy the stones
To warm me bones …
Over in the west, dwarven cheering was mitigated only by the pained screams and terror of the orcs. King Connerad and General Dagnabbet and their charges saw their famed Gutbusters and the legendary King Bruenor take and quickly secure the Surbrin Bridge, effectively bottlenecking half the enemy forces across the river.
And the orcs saw it, and saw, too, or heard at least, the rout in the north as King Emerus of Citadel Felbarr made his fierce push southward. They all knew it to be Emerus then, as the pennants of proud Felbarr came into view, inexorably closing on the orc force like the jaws of a great wolf.
“Take it to ’em, boys!” King Connerad cried, running the length of the line. “They got nowhere to run, and just enough ground for fallin’ dead!”
“Huzzah!” a thousand dwarves cheered in reply.
And the orcs began to die.
For all the cheering and the renewed hope, those dwarves who understood the tactical layout of the armies around Mithral Hall expected that the worst was yet to come. The largest Many-Arrows force was yet to show up on the field, they feared.
What King Connerad’s boys didn’t know was that the largest orc force was already engaged in battle, far to the north, around the side of the mountain.
Circling up near the Darkening, far above the battlefields, Drizzt chewed his lip nervously. He saw the vast orc force awaken and stretch to the southeast, rolling around the mountain as they rushed to join in the fighting at the Surbrin Bridge, and the fighting now raging north of the bridge, where King Emerus’s force had met the earlier orc arrivals from the north.
And Drizzt saw the dark outline of King Harnoth’s responding charge, the thousands of shield dwarves of Citadel Adbar rolling down upon the unsuspecting horde. Even from this height, Drizzt could make out the initial shape of the battle. The Many-Arrows force turning southeast was being led by the goblins and orcs, mostly, leaving the larger ogres and giants as the rear guard, as was typical of their tactics.
In this instance, however, with King Harnoth’s thousands charging in from the other direction and creating an unexpected second front, that put the behemoths at the front of the battle, and that, Drizzt could see, was not a place they wanted to be.
From this vantage, Harnoth’s charge appeared like a black avalanche, and when it hit the darkness of the enemy line, it looked as if it had picked up huge trees to carry forward through the orc morass, as the giants fled just ahead of the collision.
The Many-Arrows horde stopped its southeastern movement quickly and tried to turn around, but from the dark outline of the battle, Drizzt could see that the dwarves had driven into the sea of enemies before any organized defenses or formations could be put in place. By the inevitable point at which the fierce battle became a chaotic jumble of individual struggles, King Harnoth had clearly gained the upper hand.
Drizzt nodded hopefully—despite the fact that his friends were battling at the bridge in the south, this was the most important fight. With that thought, he turned his eye back the other way, and far to the south, Drizzt saw the magical wall of fire brighten the length of the Surbrin Bridge, and he smiled and was afraid all at once. He knew that Catti-brie had come onto the field in all her glory.
“Trust in her,” he whispered to himself, the words lost in the wind. He had to do that, to trust in Catti-brie and in Bruenor. His focus had to be here, in this moment, in this situation.
And what a moment it was for Drizzt, flying around on the back of a dragon.
He couldn’t wait to get down and into the action, and couldn’t wait to see the power of Tazmikella and her sister unleashed on the Many-Arrows hordes—though at the same time, he surely held great trepidations about such power bared. He had thought that the dragons would strike the first blow on the orcs, before Harnoth’s legions had joined in with them in the confusion of battle. But no, it was not to be, Tazmikella had informed him.
They had other plans.
Watching the unfolding swarms of the armies far below, Drizzt took heart. He couldn’t be sure, but it appeared to him that the flotilla attack on the Surbrin Bridge had been executed well, and that Bruenor’s force was still holding strong. His heart leaped when he saw a fireball fly from near the center of the bridge to erupt amidst the hordes of monsters on the eastern shoreline. And through the darkness, he could clearly see a towering fire elemental wreaking havoc at the eastern end of the bridge. Catti-brie still stood strong.
King Emerus’s force continued its push south, and King Connerad was holding strong in front of the eastern gate of Mithral Hall.
So far, at least, this battle was playing out exactly as they had drawn it up.
Tazmikella banked sharply, then with one turn flew back for the south and climbed into the lower levels of the Darkening, obscuring the view.
“What?” Drizzt called to her, but the dragon paid him no heed. As they came below the roiling blackness fo
r one instant, Drizzt noted Ilnezhara and Afafrenfere similarly rising into the black.
The drow held on tightly, confused, until the dragon dipped again, and it all came clear with the shriek of another dragon, not Tazmikella or her sister.
The far distant Many-Arrows orcs lifted their arms in a cheer as two white monsters soared through the skies to join in the fighting, flying fast from the south.
Tazmikella and Ilnezhara flew swiftly south to intercept. The white dragons were far below, their focus clearly on the battle as they approached—and Drizzt held his breath. It seemed as though one would fly right across the Surbrin Bridge.
Perhaps the white dragons wouldn’t look up until it was too late. The water streamed from his lavender eyes again as Tazmikella gained speed. He had to duck his head low when she began her sudden descent from on high, the wind crackling around her leathery wings. He managed to glance over to see Afafrenfere similarly crouched as Ilnezhara mirrored Tazmikella’s dive.
“Hold yer hearts, boys, and hold yer ground!” Bruenor yelled from the eastern end of the bridge, a call that was carried back to the other side, where Bungalow Thump led half the force in defending the western edge. Indeed it was an important call at that moment, for every dwarf on the bridge, and all the monsters on either end, saw the approach of the speeding white dragon and its drow rider, aiming right for the heart of those dwarves that had cut the orc forces in half.
“Girl!’ Bruenor yelled to Catti-brie, who was not on the bridge, but rather levitated up beside it, holding one of the ropes that had been thrown over the stone railing. “We’re needin’ ye, girl!”
Up above the railing, her eyes fixed on the south, Catti-brie was too engaged with her spellcasting to even hear Bruenor’s call. She saw the wyrm—it couldn’t be missed!—and she knew what she needed to do. All around the bridge in front of her, dwarf priests and priestesses rushed around, casting protection spells on the greatest dwarven fighters, or on any who were close enough. But it wouldn’t be enough.
The dragon closed, orc cheers rising. They clearly expected the dwarves to be swept from the bridge. The wyrm soared in low, dwarves dropping to the stone below the railings, and it breathed its frosty, killing breath.
And at that moment, a fireball erupted in the air right in front of the wyrm, and the frosty breath burst through it as a wash of rain and nothing more, and the dragon burst through it, coming out the other side steaming and smoking, its white face red and angry as if it had flown too close to the sun.
The disoriented wyrm didn’t even drop its claws to rake free a few dwarves as it flashed over the structure, and instead banked sharply to the northwest, wings beating furiously to gain height.
She had caught it by surprise, Catti-brie knew, much as she had done to the other, much larger white dragon by the cliff wall on the ledge above Keeper’s Dale. She had surprised it and she had stung it and she had defeated its pass.
But she hadn’t defeated the wyrm—not at all. And now it was aware of her. The woman searched her magical repertoire for some trick that might fend off the inevitable next attack, but her options seemed painfully thin.
“Hold faith and fight on!” Bruenor roared, and the Gutbusters roared in echo. And then they all began to sing:
We speak with hammer, axe, and maul
We call to gods in Mor’din’s Hall
We stand our ground, await our fall
For then we’ll know the grandest feast!
But the song didn’t hold, broken apart by shrieks and shouts that alarmed the woman, until she turned her expectant gaze to the northwest.
And there she, the dwarves, and the orcs all saw the white dragon turning desperately, trying to be out of the way of a pair of diving copper wyrms.
Catti-brie’s heart soared when she saw the silver line of a magical arrow reach ahead of one of those copper-colored dragons, an arrow shot from a bow she had carried for many years.
So excited was she that her next spell came screaming to her lips and tingling from her fingertips, a lightning bolt that crackled to the eastern riverbank beside the bridge buttress, laying low a host of orcs and ogres.
Drizzt fought with all his strength, his body muscles and his legs straining to hold him in place as he leveled Taulmaril at the white dragon, and particularly at its drow rider. He got one shot off, and another, but then threw himself flat and held on for all his life as Tazmikella soared into the white wyrm, breathing forth a magical cloud as she clipped the vulnerable wyrm with bone-shattering force.
Tazmikella spun away, rolling from the impact, and Drizzt held on all the tighter, stunned by the sheer speed of the pass and by the sheer violence of the impact. He felt small indeed in that moment, small and mortal, and caught in the battle between two beings infinitely more powerful than he.
He did manage to turn his head back in time to see Ilnezhara’s even more brutal collision. The white dragon, overbalanced by Tazmikella’s pass, couldn’t properly align itself to mitigate the blow.
Or the acidic breath that preceded it.
Drizzt thought he heard the crunch of bone with the white’s wing bent up awkwardly, or perhaps he had just mentally filled in the sound that surely emanated from that crash. Ilnezhara shot by, the white spinning wildly in her wake.
By the time he tore his gaze from that spectacle, Drizzt noted that they were much lower, near the ground, and Tazmikella turned her long neck upward, twisting her spine against the plummet, her great leathery wings catching the updraft and leveling her out. Over the bridge they soared, to cheering dwarves and to a sight—Catti-brie and Bruenor—that warmed Drizzt’s heart.
The site brought him back to the present situation.
He took up his bow and strafed the eastern riverbank as Tazmikella soared along. He saw one orc tumble and one giant lurch, but he had no idea how many of his uncounted shots might have scored a hit. It didn’t matter anyway. One or two or even ten enemies wouldn’t make a difference, but the mere appearance of a death-dealing dragon with a drow rider fighting against Many-Arrows had great effect indeed, on both sides of the battle.
Tazmikella banked west and climbed once more, and Drizzt steadied himself, trying to reorient his thinking to this new and higher level of speed and violence.
Far ahead but closing rapidly loomed the white dragon, somehow still aloft and screeching, perhaps in pain, perhaps in rage. Its movements seemed slower, though, and Drizzt recalled Tazmikella’s breath cloud, one not of acid.
Tazmikella climbed northwest, Ilnezhara southwest, flanking their enemy. Both turned sharply in unison, soaring in from opposite directions.
The white met Ilnezhara’s charge with a breath of frost, and Drizzt winced for Afafrenfere, but both Tazmikella and Ilnezhara responded with acid spits, burning and biting at their enemy, and at the unfortunate drow riding the white.
For a heartbeat, Drizzt thought the copper dragons were going to crash together against the opposite sides of the white, and the drow cried out in terror, for neither slowed!
But these sisters were well-practiced, and at the same time, they flopped into barrel rolls, Tazmikella going over, Ilnezhara under, and so close that Drizzt nearly bumped heads with the white dragon’s rider—a drow he recognized as Tos’un Armgo.
Drizzt had just managed to catch the rhythm of that sudden roll when Tazmikella broke out of it, the momentum so suddenly reversed that the drow ranger slammed his face down on the dragon’s shoulders and nearly swooned.
Back to the north, flying level, came Tazmikella, to engage the battered white again. Drizzt tried to shake his dizziness away, tried to put up his bow, but a shriek from behind had him turning back to the south to see another white dragon, far away but flying fast. This one was much larger—bigger than Tazmikella by far, bigger than Ilnezhara by far, bigger than both together, it seemed.
Drizzt forced himself to turn away, to look ahead, where the other white wyrm fluttered on ragged, burned wings, trying to turn aside. It flew at Tazmikella
, but Drizzt noted her course and believed she was but a distraction now, diverting the white’s attention.
The ranger got off a shot with Taulmaril, the arrow streaking past the wyrm and its rider.
As Drizzt expected, Tazmikella veered back to the east. But then she caught the white dragon, its rider, and Drizzt by surprise as she suddenly reversed direction and leaped more than flew against the white. They became a tangle of raking claws and biting maws, beating wings and slapping tails, turning and rolling and ultimately tumbling.
In the frenzy, Drizzt didn’t know if he should draw his scimitars or simply hold on. He saw Tos’un on one turn, the drow burned by acid, his cloak trailing smoke, but with sword in hand.
Drizzt fired off an arrow. He missed his target, Tos’un, but the magical arrow stabbed at the white dragon’s flank, though if it even noticed in the frenzy of greater weapons and wounds, Drizzt did not know.
On it went, and now Drizzt could only hold on desperately. Then the wyrms broke the clench, both together kicking out with their hind legs, throwing each other aside.
Tazmikella straightened almost immediately and climbed furiously. Looking back at the new wyrm, much closer now, Drizzt could certainly understand why. He lifted his bow for one last shot, but pulled it back in shock as a much larger missile slammed into the first foe. Ilnezhara drove down upon it from above, full force.
The white dragon went spinning away, Ilnezhara in determined pursuit.
Tazmikella didn’t join in, though. The much larger white continued to close in on her.
“Aurbangras!” Arauthator growled. Tiago felt the rumble in his legs as much as he heard the dragon’s call. That was Arauthator’s son, the drow knew, spinning out with gruesome wounds and with a copper dragon close behind.