“We will go after the others,” she said offhandedly, as much trying to enlighten her own thoughts with the statement as to redirect the golem. “Yes, perhaps if we deliver the dwarf and the other companions to Dendybar he will forgive our stupidity in allowing the drow to die.”
She looked to the golem, but of course its expression had not changed to offer any encouragement.
“It should have been you in the alcove,” Sydney muttered, her sarcasm wasted on the thing. “Entreri could at least offer some suggestions. But no matter, I have decided. We shall follow the others and find the time when we might take them. They will tell us what we need to know about the Crystal Shard!”
Bok remained motionless, awaiting her signal. Even with its most basic of thought patterns, the golem understood that Sydney best knew how they could complete their mission.
The companions moved through huge caverns, more natural formations than dwarf-carved stone. High ceilings and walls stretched out into the blackness, beyond the glow of the torches, leaving the friends dreadfully aware of their vulnerability. They kept close together as they marched, imagining a host of gray dwarves watching them from the unlit reaches of the caverns, or expecting some horrid creature to swoop down upon them from the darkness above.
The ever-present sound of dripping water paced them with its rhythm, its “plip, plop” echoing through every hall, accentuating the emptiness of the place.
Bruenor remembered this section of the complex well, and found himself once again deluged by long-forgotten images of his past. These were the Halls of Gathering, where all of Clan Battlehammer would come together to hear the words of King Garumn, or to meet with important visitors. Battle plans were laid here, and strategies set for commerce with the outside world. Even the youngest dwarves were present at the meetings, and Bruenor recalled fondly the many times he had sat beside his father, Bangor, behind his grandfather, King Garumn, with Bangor pointing out the king’s techniques for capturing the audience, and instructing the young Bruenor in the arts of leadership that he would one day need.
The day he became King of Mithral Hall.
The solitude of the caverns weighed heavily on the dwarf, who had heard them ring out in the common cheering and chanting of ten thousand dwarves. Even if he were to return with all of the remaining members of the clan, they would fill only a tiny corner of one chamber.
“Too many gone,” Bruenor said into the emptiness, his soft whisper louder than he had intended in the echoing stillness. Catti-brie and Wulfgar, concerned for the dwarf and scrutinizing his every action, noted the remark and could easily enough guess the memories and emotions that had prompted it. They looked to each other and Catti-brie could see that the edge of Wulfgar’s anger at the dwarf had dissipated in a rush of sympathy.
Hall after great hall loomed up with only short corridors connecting them. Turns and side exits broke off every few feet, but Bruenor felt confident that he knew the way to the gorge. He knew, too, that anyone below would have heard the crashing of the stonework trap and would be coming to investigate. This section of the upper level, unlike the areas they had left behind, had many connecting passages to the lower levels. Wulfgar doused the torch and Bruenor led them on under the protective dimness of the gloom.
Their caution soon proved prudent, for as they entered yet another immense cavern, Regis grabbed Bruenor by the shoulder, stopping him, and motioned for all of them to be silent. Bruenor almost burst out in rage, but saw at once the sincere look of dread on Regis’s face.
His hearing sharpened by years of listening for the click of a lock’s tumblers, the halfling had picked out a sound in the distance other than the dripping of water. A moment later, the others caught it, too, and soon they identified it as the marching steps of many booted feet. Bruenor took them into a dark recess where they watched and waited.
They never saw the passing host clearly enough to count its numbers or identify its members, but they could tell by the number of torches crossing the far end of the cavern that they were outnumbered by at least ten to one, and they could guess the nature of the marchers.
“Gray ones, or me mother’s a friend of orcs,” Bruenor grumbled. He looked at Wulfgar to see if the barbarian had any further complaints about his decision to leave Mithral Hall.
Wulfgar accepted the stare with a conceding nod. “How far to Garumn’s Gorge?” he asked, fast becoming as resigned to leaving as the others. He still felt as though he was deserting Drizzt, but he understood the wisdom of Bruenor’s choice. It grew obvious now that if they remained, Drizzt Do’Urden would not be the only one of them to die in Mithral Hall.
“An hour to the last passage,” Bruenor answered. “Another hour, no more, from there.”
The host of gray dwarves soon cleared the cavern and the companions started off again, using even more caution and dreading each shuffling footfall that thumped the floor harder than intended.
His memories coming clearer with each passing step, Bruenor knew exactly where they were, and made for the most direct path to the gorge, meaning to be out of the halls as quickly as possible. After many minutes of walking, though, he came across a side passage that he simply could not pass by. Every delay was a risk, he knew, but the temptation emanating from the room at the end of this short corridor was too great for him to ignore. He had to discover how far the despoilment of Mithral Hall had gone; he had to learn if the most treasured room of the upper level had survived.
The friends followed him without question and soon found themselves standing before a tall, ornate metal door inscribed with the hammer of Moradin, the greatest of the dwarven gods, and a series of runes beneath it. Bruenor’s heavy breathing belied his calmness.
“Herein lie the gifts of our friends,” Bruenor read solemnly, “and the craftings of our kin. Know ye as ye enter this hallowed hall that ye look upon the heritage of Clan Battlehammer. Friends be welcome, thieves beware!” Bruenor turned to his companions, beads of nervous sweat on his brow. “The Hall of Dumathoin,” he explained.
“Two hundred years of your enemies in the halls,” Wulfgar reasoned. “Surely it has been pillaged.”
“Not so,” said Bruenor. “The door is magicked and would not open for enemies of the clan. A hundred traps are inside to take the skin from a gray one who was to get through!” He glared at Regis, his gray eyes narrowed in a stern warning. “Watch to yer own hands, Rumblebelly. Mighten be that a trap won’t know ye to be a friendly thief!”
The advice seemed sound enough for Regis to ignore the dwarf’s biting sarcasm. Unconsciously admitting the truth of Bruenor’s words, the halfling slipped his hands into his pockets.
“Fetch a torch from the wall,” Bruenor told Wulfgar. “Me thoughts tell me that no lights burn within.”
Before Wulfgar even returned to them, Bruenor began opening the huge door. It swung easily under the push of the hands of a friend, swinging wide into a short corridor that ended in a heavy black curtain. A pendulum blade hung ominously in the center of the passage, a pile of bones beneath it.
“Thieving dog,” Bruenor chuckled with grim satisfaction. He stepped by the blade and moved to the curtain, waiting for all of his friends to join him before he entered the chamber.
Bruenor paused, mustering the courage to open the last barrier to the hall, sweat glistening on all the friends’ faces now as the dwarf’s anxiety swept through them.
With a determined grunt, Bruenor pulled the curtain aside. “Behold the Hall of Duma—” he began, but the words stuck in his throat as soon as he looked beyond the opening. Of all the destruction they had witnessed in the halls, none was more complete than this. Mounds of stone littered the floor. Pedestals that had once held the finest works of the clan lay broken apart, and others had been trampled into dust.
Bruenor stumbled in blindly, his hands shaking and a great scream of outrage lumped in his throat. He knew before he even looked upon the entirety of the chamber that the destruction was complete.
?
??How?” Bruenor gasped. Even as he asked, though, he saw the huge hole in the wall. Not a tunnel carved around the blocking door, but a gash in the stone, as though some incredible ram had blasted through.
“What power could have done such a thing?” Wulfgar asked, following the line of the dwarf’s stare to the hole.
Bruenor moved over, searching for some clue, Catti-brie and Wulfgar with him. Regis headed the other way, just to see if anything of value remained.
Catti-brie caught a rainbowlike glitter on the floor and moved to what she thought was a puddle of some dark liquid. Bending close, though, she realized that it wasn’t liquid at all, but a scale, blacker than the blackest night and nearly the size of a man. Wulfgar and Bruenor rushed to her side at the sound of her gasp.
“Dragon!” Wulfgar blurted, recognizing the distinctive shape. He grasped the thing by its edge and hoisted it upright to better inspect it. Then he and Catti-brie turned to Bruenor to see if he had any knowledge of such a monster.
The dwarf’s wide-eyed, terror-stricken stare answered their question before it was asked.
“Blacker than the black,” Bruenor whispered, speaking again the most common words of that fateful day those two hundred years ago. “Me father told me of the thing,” he explained to Wulfgar and Catti-brie. “A demon-spawned dragon, he called it, a darkness blacker than the black. ’Twas not the gray ones that routed us—we would’ve fought them head on to the last. The dragon of darkness took our numbers and drove us from the halls. Not one in ten remained to stand against its foul hordes in the smaller halls at th’ other end.”
A hot draft of air from the hole reminded them that it probably connected to the lower halls, and the dragon’s lair.
“Let’s be leaving,” Catti-brie suggested, “afore the beast gets a notion that we’re here.”
Regis then cried out from the other side of the chamber. The friends rushed to him, not knowing if he had stumbled upon treasure or danger.
They found him crouched beside a pile of stone, peering into a gap in the blocks.
He held up a silver-shafted arrow. “I found it in there,” he explained. “And there’s something more—a bow, I think.”
Wulfgar moved the torch closer to the gap and they all saw clearly the curving arc that could only be the wood of a longbow, and the silvery shine of a bowstring. Wulfgar grasped the wood and tugged lightly, expecting it to break apart in his hands under the enormous weight of the stone.
But it held firmly, even against a pull of all his strength. He looked around at the stones, seeking the best course to free the weapon.
Regis, meanwhile, had found something more, a golden plaque wedged in another crack in the pile. He managed to slip it free and brought it into the torchlight to read its carved runes.
“’Taulmaril the Heartseeker,’” he read.” ’Gift of—’”
“Anariel, Sister of Faerun,” Bruenor finished without even looking at the plaque. He nodded in recognition to Catti-brie’s questioning glance.
“Free the bow, boy,” he told Wulfgar. “Suren it might be put to a better use than this.”
Wulfgar had already discerned the structure of the pile and started lifting away specific blocks at once. Soon Catti-brie was able to wiggle the longbow free, but she saw something else beyond its nook in the pile and asked Wulfgar to keep digging.
While the muscled barbarian pushed aside more stones, the others marveled at the beauty of the bow. Its wood hadn’t even been scratched by the stones and the deep finish of its polish returned with a single brush of the hand. Catti-brie strung it easily and held it up, feeling its solid and even draw.
“Test it,” Regis offered, handing her the silver arrow.
Catti-brie couldn’t resist. She fitted the arrow to the silvery string and drew it back, meaning only to try its fit and not intending to fire.
“A quiver!” Wulfgar called, lifting the last of the stones. “And more of the silver arrows.”
Bruenor pointed into the blackness and nodded. Catti-brie didn’t hesitate.
A streaking tail of silver followed the whistling missile as it soared into the darkness, ending its flight abruptly with a crack. They all rushed after it, sensing something beyond the ordinary. They found the arrow easily, for it was buried halfway to its fletches in the wall!
All about its point of entry, the stone had been scorched, and even tugging with all of his might, Wulfgar couldn’t budge the arrow an inch.
“Not to fret,” said Regis, counting the arrows in the quiver that Wulfgar held. “There are nineteen … twenty more!” He backed away, stunned. The others looked at him in confusion.
“Nineteen, there were,” Regis explained. “My count was true.”
Wulfgar, not understanding, quickly counted the arrows. “’Twenty,” he said.
“Twenty now,” Regis answered. “But nineteen when I first counted.”
“So the quiver holds some magic, too,” Catti-brie surmised. “A mighty gift, indeed, the Lady Anariel gave to the clan!”
“What more might we find in the ruins of this place?” Regis asked, rubbing his hands together.
“No more,” Bruenor answered gruffly. “We’re for leaving, and not a word of arguin’ from ye!”
Regis knew with a look at the other two that he had no support against the dwarf, so he shrugged helplessly and followed them back through the curtain and into the corridor.
“The gorge!” Bruenor declared, starting them off again.
“Hold, Bok,” Sydney whispered when the companions’ torchlight re-entered the corridor a short distance ahead of them.
“Not yet,” she said, an anticipating smile widening across her dust-streaked face. “We shall find a better time!”
uddenly, he found a focus in the blur of gray haze, something tangible amid the swirl of nothingness. It hovered before him and turned over slowly.
Its edges doubled and rolled apart, then rushed together again. He fought the dull ache in his head, the inner blackness that had consumed him and now fought to keep him in its hold. Gradually, he became aware of his arms and legs, who he was, and how he had come to be here.
In his startled awareness, the image sharpened to a crystalline focus. The tip of a jeweled dagger.
Entreri loomed above him, a dark silhouette against the backdrop of a single torch set into the wall a few yards beyond, his blade poised to strike at the first sign of resistance. Drizzt could see that the assassin, too, had been hurt in the fall, though he had obviously been the quicker to recover.
“Can you walk?” Entreri asked, and Drizzt was smart enough to know what would happen if he could not.
He nodded and moved to rise, but the dagger shot in closer.
“Not yet,” Entreri snarled. “We must first determine where we are, and where we are to go.”
Drizzt turned his concentration away from the assassin then and studied their surroundings, confident that Entreri would have already killed him if that was the assassin’s intent. They were in the mines, that much was apparent, for the walls were roughly carved stone supported by wooden columns every twenty feet or so.
“How far did we fall?” he asked the assassin, his senses telling him that they were much deeper than the room they had fought in.
Entreri shrugged. “I remember landing on hard stone after a short drop, and then sliding down a steep and twisting chute. It seemed like many moments before we finally dropped in here.” He pointed to an opening at the corner of the ceiling, where they had fallen through. “But the flow of time is different for a man thinking he is about to die, and the whole thing may have been over much more quickly than I remember.”
“Trust in your first reaction,” Drizzt suggested, “for my own perceptions tell me that we have descended a long way indeed.”
“How can we get out?”
Drizzt studied the slight grade in the floor and pointed to his right. “The slope is up to that direction,” he said.
“Then on your feet,” E
ntreri said, extending a hand to help the drow.
Drizzt accepted the assistance and rose cautiously and without giving any sign of a threat. He knew that Entreri’s dagger would cut him open long before he could strike a blow of his own.
Entreri knew it, too, but didn’t expect any trouble from Drizzt in their present predicament. They had shared more than an exchange of swordplay up in the alcove, and both looked upon tile other with grudging respect.
“I need your eyes,” Entreri explained, though Drizzt had already figured as much. “I have found but one torch, and that will not last long enough to get me out of here. Your eyes, black elf, can find their way in the darkness. I will be close enough to feel your every move, close enough to kill you with a single thrust!” He turned the dagger over again to emphasize his point, but Drizzt understood him well enough without the visual aid.
When he got to his feet, Drizzt found that he wasn’t as badly injured as he had feared. He had twisted his ankle and knee on one leg and knew as soon as he put any weight upon it that every step would be painful. He couldn’t let on to Entreri, though. He wouldn’t be much of an asset to the assassin if he couldn’t keep up.
Entreri turned to retrieve the torch and Drizzt took a quick look at his equipment. He had seen one of his scimitars tucked into Entreri’s belt, but the other, the magical blade, was nowhere around. He felt one of his daggers still tucked into a hidden sheath in his boot, though he wasn’t sure how much it would help him against the saber and dagger of his skilled enemy. Facing Entreri with any kind of a disadvantage was a prospect reserved only for the most desperate situation.
Then, in sudden shock, Drizzt grabbed at his belt pouch, his fear intensifying when he saw that its ties were undone. Even before he had slipped his hand inside, he knew that Guenhwyvar was gone. He looked about frantically, and saw only the fallen rubble.
Noting his distress, Entreri smirked evilly under the cowl of his cloak. “We go,” he told the drow.