“Just a few,” he said, picking out each individual footfall.
“The group from the ledge,” Entreri surmised. “Let us make a stand. But be quick, there are more behind them, no doubt!” The excited light that came into the assassin’s eyes seemed dreadfully familiar to Drizzt.
He didn’t have time to ponder the unpleasant implications. He shook them from his head, regaining full concentration for the business at hand, then pulled the hidden dagger out of his boot—no time for secrets from Entreri now—and found a shadowed recess on the tunnel wall. Entreri did likewise, positioning himself a few feet farther down from the drow and across the corridor.
Seconds passed slowly with only the faint shuffle of boots. Both companions held their breath and waited patiently, knowing that they had not been passed by.
Suddenly the sound multiplied as the Duergar came rushing out of a secret door and into the main tunnel.
“Can’t be far now!” Drizzt and Entreri heard one of them say.
“The drake’ll be feedin’ us well fer this catch!” hooted another.
All clad in shining mail and wielding mithral weapons, they rounded the last bend and came into sight of the hidden companions.
Drizzt looked at the dull steel of his scimitar and considered how precise his strikes must be against armor of mithral. A resigned sigh escaped him as he wished that he now held his magical weapon.
Entreri saw the problem, too, and knew that they had to somehow balance the odds. Quickly he pulled a pouch of coins from his belt and hurled it farther down the corridor. It sailed through the gloom and clunked into the wall where the tunnel twisted again.
The Duergar band straightened as one. “Just ahead!” one of them cried, and they bent low to the stone and charged for the next bend. Between the waiting drow and assassin.
The shadows exploded into movement and fell over the stunned gray dwarves. Drizzt and Entreri struck together, seizing the moment of best advantage when the first of the band had reached the assassin and the last was passing Drizzt.
The Duergar shrieked in surprised horror. Daggers, saber, and scimitar danced all about them in a flurry of flashing death, poking at the seams of their armor, seeking an opening through the unyielding metal. When they found one, they drove the point home with merciless efficiency.
By the time the Duergar recovered from the initial shock of the attack, two lay dead at the drow’s feet, a third at Entreri’s, and yet another stumbled away, holding his belly in with a blood-soaked hand.
“Back to back!” Entreri shouted, and Drizzt, thinking the same strategy, had already begun quick-stepping his way through the disorganized dwarves. Entreri took another one down just as they came together, the unfortunate Duergar looking over its shoulder at the approaching drow just long enough for the jeweled dagger to slip through the seam at the base of its helmet.
Then they were together, back against back, twirling in the wake of each other’s cloak and maneuvering their weapons in blurred movements so similar that the three remaining Duergar hesitated before their attack to sort out where one enemy ended and the other began.
With cries to Shimmergloom, their godlike ruler, they came on anyway.
Drizzt scored a series of hits at once that should have felled his opponent, but the armor was of tougher stuff than the steel scimitar and his thrusts were turned aside. Entreri, too, had trouble finding an opening to poke through against the mithral mail and shields.
Drizzt turned one shoulder in and let the other fall away from his companion. Entreri understood and followed the drow’s lead, dipping around right behind him.
Gradually their circling gained momentum, as synchronous as practiced dancers, and the Duergar did not even try to keep up. Opponents changed continually, the drow and Entreri coming around to parry away the sword or axe that the other had blocked on the last swing. They let the rhythm hold for a few turns, allowed the Duergar to fall into the patterns of their dance, and then, Drizzt still leading, stuttered their steps, and even reversed the flow.
The three Duergar, evenly spaced about the pair, did not know which direction would bring the next attack.
Entreri, practically reading the drow’s every thought by this point, saw the possibilities. As he moved away from one particularly confused dwarf, he feigned a reversed attack, freezing the Duergar just long enough for Drizzt, coming in from the other side, to find an opening.
“Take him!” the assassin cried in victory.
The scimitar did its work.
Now they were two against two. They stopped the dance and faced off evenly.
Drizzt swooped about his smaller foe with a sudden leap and shuffle along the wall. The Duergar, intent on the killing blades of the drow, hadn’t noticed Drizzt’s third weapon join the fray.
The gray dwarf’s surprise was only surmounted by his anticipation of the coming fatal blow when Drizzt’s trailing cloak floated in and fell over him, enshrouding him in a blackness that would only deepen into the void of death.
Contrary to Drizzt’s graceful technique, Entreri worked with sudden fury, tying up his dwarf with undercuts and lightning-fast counters, always aimed at the weapon hand. The gray dwarf understood the tactic as his fingers began to numb under the nicks of several minor hits.
The Duergar overcompensated, turning his shield in to protect the vulnerable hand.
Exactly as Entreri had expected. He rolled around opposite the movement of his opponent, finding the back of the shield, and a seam in the mithral armor just beneath the shoulder. The assassin’s dagger drove in furiously, taking a lunge and hurling the Duergar to the stone floor. The gray dwarf lay there, hunched up on one elbow, and gasped out his final breaths.
Drizzt approached the final dwarf, the one who had been wounded in the initial attack, leaning against the wall only a few yards away, torchlight reflecting grotesque red off the pool of blood below him. The dwarf still had fight in him. He raised his broadsword to meet the drow.
It was Mucknuggle, Drizzt saw, and a silent plea of mercy came into the drow’s mind and took the fiery glow from his eyes.
A shiny object, glittering in the hues of a dozen distinct gem-stones, spun by Drizzt and ended his internal debate.
Entreri’s dagger buried deep into Mucknuggle’s eye. The dwarf didn’t even fall, so clean was the blow. He just held his position, leaning against the stone. But now the blood pool was fed from two wounds.
Drizzt stopped himself cold in rage and did not even flinch as the assassin walked coolly by to retrieve the weapon.
Entreri pulled the dagger out roughly then turned to face Drizzt as Mucknuggle tumbled down to splash in the blood.
“Four to four,” the assassin growled. “You did not believe that I would let you get the upper count?”
Drizzt did not reply, nor blink.
Both felt the sweat in their palms as they clutched their weapons, a pull upon them to complete what they had started in the alcove above.
So alike, yet so dramatically different.
The rage at Mucknuggle’s death did not play upon Drizzt at that moment, no more than to further confirm his feelings about his vile companion. The longing he held to kill Entreri went far deeper than the anger he might hold for any of the assassin’s foul deeds. Killing Entreri would mean killing the darker side of himself, Drizzt believed, for he could have been as this man. This was the test of his worth, a confrontation against what he might have become. If he had remained among his kin, and often were the times that he considered his decision to leave their ways and their dark city a feeble attempt to distort the very order of nature, his own dagger would have found Mucknuggle’s eye.
Entreri looked upon Drizzt with equal disdain. What potential he saw in the drow! But tempered by an intolerable weakness. Perhaps in his heart the assassin was actually envious for the capacity for love and compassion that he recognized in Drizzt. So much akin to him, Drizzt only accentuated the reality of his own emotional void.
E
ven if those feelings were truly within, they would never gain a perch high enough to influence Artemis Entreri. He had spent his life building himself into an instrument for killing, and no shred of light could ever cut through that callous barrier of darkness. He meant to prove, to himself and to the drow, that the true fighter has no place for weakness.
They were closer now, though neither of them knew which one had moved, as if unseen forces were acting upon them. Weapons twitched in anticipation, each waiting for the other to show his hand.
Each wanting the other to be the first to yield to their common desire, the ultimate challenge of the tenets of their existence.
The stamp of booted feet broke the spell.
t the heart of the lower levels, in an immense cavern of uneven and twisting walls pocketed with deep shadows, and a ceiling too high for the light of the brightest fire to find, rested the present ruler of Mithral Hall, perched upon a solid pedestal of the purest mithral that rose from a high and wide mound of coins and jewelry, goblets and weapons, and countless other items pounded from the rough blocks of mithral by the skilled hands of dwarven craftsmen.
Dark shapes surrounded the beast, huge dogs from its own world, obedient, long-lived, and hungry for the meat of human or elf, or anything else that would give them the pleasure of their gory sport before the kill.
Shimmergloom was not now amused. Rumblings from above foretold of intruders, and a band of Duergar spoke of murdered kin in the tunnels and whispered rumors that a drow elf had been seen.
The dragon was not of this world. It had come from the Plane of Shadows, a dark image of the lighted world, unknown to the dwellers here except in the less substantial stuff of their blackest nightmares. Shimmergloom had been of considerable standing there, old even then, and in high regard among its dragon kin that ruled the plane. But when the foolish and greedy dwarves that once inhabited these mines had delved into deep holes of sufficient darkness to open a gate to its plane, the dragon had been quick to come through. Now possessing a treasure tenfold beyond the greatest of its own plane, Shimmergloom had no intentions of returning. It would deal with the intruders.
For the first time since the routing of Clan Battlehammer, the baying of the shadow hounds filled the tunnels, striking dread even into the hearts of their gray dwarf handlers. The dragon sent them west on their mission, up toward the tunnels around the entry hall in Keeper’s Dale, where the companions had first entered the complex. With their powerful maws and incredible stealth, the hounds were indeed a deadly force, but their mission now was not to catch and kill—only to herd.
In the first fight for Mithral Hall, Shimmergloom alone had routed the miners in the lower caverns and in some of the huge chambers on the eastern end of the upper level. But final victory had escaped the dragon, for the end had come in the western corridors, too tight for its scaly bulk.
The beast would not miss the glory again. It set its minions in motion, to drive whoever or whatever had come into the halls toward the only entrance that it had to the upper levels: Garumn’s Gorge.
Shimmergloom stretched to the limit of its height and unfolded its leathery wings for the first time in nearly two hundred years, blackness flowing out under them as they extended to the sides. Those Duergar who had remained in the throne room fell to their knees at the sight of their rising lord, partly in respect, but mostly in fear.
The dragon was gone, gliding down a secret tunnel at the back of the chamber, to where it had once known glory, the place its minions had named Shimmergloom’s Run in praise of their lord.
A blur of indistinguishable darkness, it moved as silently as the cloud of blackness that followed.
Wulfgar worried just how low he would be crouching by the time they reached Garumn’s Gorge, for the tunnels became dwarven sized as they neared the eastern end of the upper level. Bruenor knew this as a good sign, the only tunnels in the complex with ceilings below the six foot mark were those of the deepest mines and those crafted for defense of the gorge.
Faster than Bruenor had hoped, they came upon the secret door to a smaller tunnel breaking off to the left, a spot familiar to the dwarf even after his two-century absence. He ran his hand across the unremarkable wall beneath the torch and its telltale red sconce, searching for the brailed pattern that would lead his fingers to the precise spot. He found one triangle, then another, and followed their lines to the central point, the bottommost point in the valley between the peaks of the twin mountains that they signified, the symbol of Dumathoin, the Keeper of Secrets Under the Mountain. Bruenor pushed with a single finger, and the wall fell away, opening yet another low tunnel. No light came from this one, but a hollow sound, like the wind across a rock face, greeted them.
Bruenor winked at them knowingly and started right in, but slowed when he saw the runes and sculpted reliefs carved into the walls. All along the passage, on every surface, dwarven artisans had left their mark. Bruenor swelled with pride, despite his depression, when he saw the admiring expressions upon his friends’ faces.
A few turns later they came upon a portcullis, lowered and rusted, and beyond it saw the wideness of another huge cavern.
“Garumn’s Gorge,” Bruenor proclaimed, moving up to the iron bars. “’Tis said ye can throw a torch off the rim and it’ll burn out afore ever it hits.”
Four sets of eyes looked through the gate in wonder. If the journey through Mithral Hall had been a disappointment to them, for they had not yet seen the grander sights Bruenor had often told them of, the sight before them now made up for it. They had reached Garumn’s Gorge, though it seemed more a full-sized canyon than a gorge, spanning hundreds of feet across and stretching beyond the limits of their sight. They were above the floor of the chamber, with a stairway running down to the right on the other side of the portcullis. Straining to poke as much of their heads as they could through the bars, they could see the light of another room at the base of the stairs, and hear clearly the ruckus of several Duergar.
To the left, the wall arced around to the edge, though the chasm continued on beyond the bordering wall of the cavern. A single bridge spanned the break, an ancient work of stone fitted so perfectly that its slight arch could still support an army of the hugest mountain giants.
Bruenor studied the bridge carefully, noting that something about its understructure did not seem quite right. He followed the line of a cable across the chasm, figuring it to continue under the stone flooring and connect to a large lever sticking up from a more recently constructed platform across the way. Two Duergar sentries milled about the lever, though their lax attitude spoke of countless days of boredom.
“They’ve rigged the thing to fall!” Bruenor snorted.
The others immediately understood what he was talking about. “Is there another way across, then?” Catti-brie asked.
“Aye,” replied the dwarf. “A ledge to the south end of the gorge. But hours o’ walking, and the only way to it is through this cavern!”
Wulfgar grasped the iron bars of the portcullis and tested them. They held fast, as he suspected. “We could not get through these bars, anyway,” he put in “Unless you know where we might find their crank.”
“Half a day’s walking,” Bruenor replied, as though the answer, perfectly logical to the mindset of a dwarf protecting his treasures, should have been obvious. “The other way.”
“Fretful folk,” Regis said under his breath.
Catching the remark, Bruenor growled and grabbed Regis by the collar, hoisting him from the ground and pressing their faces together. “Me people are a careful lot,” he snarled, his own frustration and confusion boiling out again in his misdirected rage. “We like to keep what’s our own to keep, especially from little thieves with little fingers and big mouths.”
“Suren there’s another way in,” Catti-brie reasoned, quick to diffuse the confrontation.
Bruenor dropped the halfling to the floor. “We can get to that room,” he replied, indicating the lighted area at the base of t
he stairs.
“Then let’s be quick,” Catti-brie demanded. “If the noise of the cave-in called out alarms, the word might not have reached this far.”
Bruenor led them back down the small tunnel swiftly, and back to the corridor behind the secret door.
Around the next bend in the main corridor, its walls, too, showing the runes and sculpted reliefs of the dwarven craftsmen, Bruenor was again engulfed in the wonder of his heritage and quickly lost all thoughts of anger at Regis. He heard again in his mind the ringing of hammers in Garumn’s day, and the singing of common gatherings. If the foulness that they had found here, and the loss of Drizzt, had tempered his fervent desire to reclaim Mithral Hall, the vivid recollections that assaulted him as he moved along this corridor worked to refuel those fires.
Perhaps he would return with his army, he thought. Perhaps the mithral would again ring out in the smithies of Clan Battlehammer.
Thoughts of regaining his people’s glory suddenly rekindled, Bruenor looked around to his friends, tired, hungry, and grieving for the drow, and reminded himself that the mission before him now was to escape the complex and get them back to safety.
A more intense glow ahead signaled the end of the tunnel. Bruenor slowed their pace and crept along to the exit cautiously. Again the companions found themselves on a stone balcony, overlooking yet another corridor, a huge passageway, nearly a chamber in itself, with a high ceiling and decorated walls. Torches burned every few feet along both sides, running parallel below them.
A lump welled in Bruenor’s throat when he looked upon the carvings lining the opposite wall across the way, great sculpted basreliefs of Garumn and Bangor, and of all the patriarchs of Clan Battlehammer. He wondered, and not for the first time, if his own bust would ever take its place alongside his ancestors’.
“Half-a-dozen to ten, I make them,” Catti-brie whispered, more intent on the clamor rolling out of a partly opened door down to the left, the room they had seen from their perch in the chamber of the gorge. The companions were fully twenty feet above the floor of the larger corridor. To the right, a stairway descended to the floor, and beyond it the tunnel wound its way back into the great halls.