Drizzt turned to Catti-brie. "Shall we?"
"I was thinkin' ye'd never ask. Ye bringing yer cat?"
"Soon enough," Drizzt promised.
"Regis and I will run liaison between you and Bruenor," Wulfgar added.
Drizzt nodded, and the harmony of the group, with everyone understanding so well their place in the hunt, heightened Bruenor's confidence in his decision.
In truth, Bruenor needed that boost. Deep within him came the nagging worry that he was doing this out of his own selfish needs, that he might be leading his friends and followers into a desperate situation all because he feared, even loathed, the statesmanlike life that awaited him at the end of his road.
But, looking at his skilled and seasoned friends beginning their eager preparations, Bruenor shrugged many of those doubts aside. When they were done with this bit of business, when all the orcs and giants were dead or chased back into their deep holes, he'd go and take his place at Mithral Hall, and he'd use this impending victory as a reminder of who he was and who he wanted to be. There would be the trappings of bureaucratic process, the seemingly endless line of dignitary visitors who had to be entertained, to be sure, but there would also be adventure. Bruenor promised himself that much, thinking again of the secrets of Gauntlgrym. There would be time for the open road and the wind on his wild red beard.
He smiled as he silently made that promise.
He had no idea that getting what you wished for might be the worst thing of all.
"It's all rocks and will be a difficult track, even with so many of them," Drizzt noted when he and Catti-brie entered the rocky slopes north of the destroyed village.
"Or perhaps not," the woman replied, motioning for Drizzt to join her.
As he came beside her, she pointed down at a dark gray stone, at a patch of red marking its smooth surface. Drizzt went down to one knee, removed a leather glove and dipped his finger, then brought it up before his smiling face.
"They have wounded."
"And they're letting them live," Catti-brie remarked. "Civilized group of orcs, it seems."
"To our advantage," Drizzt remarked. He ended short and turned to see a large form coming around the bend.
"The dwarves are readied for the road," Wulfgar announced.
"And we've found them a road to walk," Catti-brie explained, pointing down to the stone.
"Ore blood or a prisoner's?" Wulfgar asked.
The question took the smiles from Drizzt and Catti-brie, for neither of them had even thought of that unpleasant possibility.
"Ore, I would guess," said Drizzt. "I saw no signs of mercy at the village, but let us move, and quickly, in case it is the other."
Wulfgar nodded and headed away, signaling to Regis, who relayed the sign to Bruenor, Dagnabbit, and the others.
"He seems at ease," Catti-brie remarked to Drizzt when Wulfgar had left them, the barbarian fading back to his position ahead of the dwarf contingent.
"His new family pleases him," Drizzt replied. "Enough so that he has forgiven himself his foolishness."
He started ahead, but Catti-brie caught him by the arm, and when he turned to face her, he saw her wearing a serious look.
"His new family pleases him enough that it does not pain him to see us together out here, hunting side by side."
"Then we can only hope to one day share Wulfgar's fate," Drizzt replied with a wry grin. "One day soon."
He started off, then, bounding across the uneven rock surfaces with such ease and grace that Catti-brie didn't even try to pace him. She knew the routine of their hunting. Drizzt would move from vantage point to vantage point all around her while she meticulously followed the trail, the drow serving as her wider eyes while her own were fixed upon the stone before her feet.
"Don't ye be too long in calling up yer cat!" she called to him as he moved away, and he responded with a wave of his hand.
They moved swiftly for several hours, the blood trail easy enough to follow, and by the time they found the source—an orc lying dead along the side of the path, which brought a fair bit of relief—the continuing trail lay obvious before them. There weren't many paths through the mountains, and the ground outside the lone trail stretching before them was nearly impossible to cross, even by long-legged frost giants.
They signaled back through their liaisons and waited for the dwarves then set camp there.
"If the trail does not split soon, we will catch up to them within two days," Drizzt promised Bruenor as they ate their evening meal. "The orc has been dead as long as three days, but our enemies are not moving swiftly or with purpose. They may even be closer than we believe, may even have doubled back in the hopes of finding more prey along the lower elevations."
"That's why I doubled the guard, elf," Bruenor replied through a mouth full of food. 'Tin not looking to have a hunnerd orcs and a handful of giants find me in me sleep!"
Which was precisely how Drizzt hoped to find the hundred orcs and the handful of giants.
They hustled along the next day, Drizzt and Catti-brie spying many signs of the recent passing, like the multitude of footprints along one low, muddy dell. In addition to showing the way, the continuing indications led credence to Drizzt's estimate of the size of the enemy force.
The drow and Catti-brie knew that they were gaining, and fast, and that the orcs and giants were making no effort to conceal themselves or watch their backs for any apparent pursuit.
And why should they? Clicking Heels, like all the other villages in the Savage Frontier, was a secluded place, a place where, under normal circumstances, the complete disaster and destruction of the village might not be known by the other inhabitants of the region for tendays or months, even in the summertime when travel was easier. This was not a region of high commerce, except in the markets of places like Mithral Hall, and not a region where many journeyed along the rugged trails. Clicking Heels was not on the main road of commerce. It existed on the fringes, like a dozen or more similar communities, comprised mostly of huntsmen, that rarely if ever even showed up on any map.
These were the wilds, lands untamed. The orcs and giants knew all of this, of course, as Drizzt and Catti-brie understood, and so the couple didn't think it likely that their enemies would have sentries protecting their retreat from a village crushed with no survivors.
When the couple joined the dwarves for dinner that second evening, it was with complete confidence that Drizzt reasserted his prediction to Bruenor.
"Tell your fellows to sleep well," he explained. "Before the setting of tomorrow's sun, we will have first sight of our enemies."
"Then afore the rising o' the sun the next day after that, our enemies'll be dead," Bruenor promised.
As he spoke, he looked over at the dwarf he had invited to dine with him that night.
Tred replied with a grim and appreciative nod then dug into his lamb shank with relish.
The terrain was rocky and broken, with collections of trees, evergreens mostly, set in small protected dells against the backdrop of the increasingly towering mountains. The wind swept down and circled about, rebounding off the many mountainous faces. The winding paths of swift-running streams cascaded down the slopes, silver lines against a background of gray and blue. For the inexperienced, the mountain trails would be quietly deceiving, leading a traveler around, in, up, and down circles that ultimately got him nowhere near where he intended to be or taking him on a wide-ranging path that ended abruptly at a five-hundred foot drop.
Even for Drizzt and his friends, so attuned with the ways of the wild, the mountains presented a huge challenge. They could pursue the orc force readily enough, for the correct trail was clearly marked to the trained eyes of the drow, but finding a way to flank that fleeing force as the trail grew fresher would not be so easy.
On one plateau of a particularly wide mountain, fed by many trails and serving as a sort of hub for them all, Drizzt found a telltale marker. He bent over a patch of mud, its edge depressed by the step of a r
ecent boot.
"The print is fresh," he explained to Catti-brie, Regis, and Wulfgar. He rose up from his crouch, rubbing his muddied fingers together. "Less than an hour."
The friends glanced around, focusing mostly on the higher ridgeline that loomed to the north.
Catti-brie was first to catch sight of the movement up there, a hulking giant form gliding around a line of broken boulders.
"Time for Guenhwyvar," Wulfgar remarked.
Drizzt nodded and pulled the statue from his belt pouch, then placed it on the ground and summoned the magical panther to his side.
"We should pass word to Bruenor as well," the barbarian added.
"Ye do it," Catti-brie replied, speaking to Wulfgar. "Ye can get there quicker than the little one with yer longer legs."
Wulfgar nodded; it made sense.
"We'll better locate and assess the enemy while you fetch the dwarves," Drizzt explained. He glanced off at Regis, who was already
moving—to the west and not the north. "Flanking?"
"I go this way, you go north, and she goes east," Regis explained.
His three friends smiled, glad to see a bit of the old Regis returned, for the giant they had spotted had been moving west to east and by going west, Regis was almost assuring that his two hunting friends would find the orc and giant band before he did.
"Guenhwyvar comes with me to the north, in a direct line toward the enemy," Drizzt explained. "She alone can run without inviting suspicion. We four will meet back here right before the sunset."
With final nods and determined looks, they split apart, each moving swiftly along the appointed trail.
It was a strange feeling for Regis, being out alone in the wilderness without Drizzt or any of the others protectively at his side. Back in Ten-Towns, the halfling had often ventured out of Lonelywood by himself, but almost always along familiar trails, particularly the one that would take him to the banks of the great lake Maer Dualdon and his favorite fishing hole.
Being alone in the wilds, with known, dangerous enemies not too far away, felt strangely refreshing. Despite his very real fears, Regis could not deny the surge of energy coursing through his diminutive body. The rush of excitement, the thrill of knowing that a goblin might be hiding behind any rock, or that a giant might even then be taking deadly aim at him with one of its huge boulder missiles. .
In truth, this wasn't an experience that Regis planned to make the norm of his existence, but he understood that it was a necessary risk, one leading to the greater good, and one that he had to accept.
Still, he wished he hadn't been the first to encounter the orcs, a group of a dozen stragglers lagging behind their main lines. Caught up in his own thoughts, the distracted halfling almost walked right into their midst before ever realizing that they were there.
Drizzt didn't like what he was seeing. High up on a rocky ledge, the drow lay flat on his belly peering over an encampment of several scores of orcs—what he had expected. Just beyond the camp, though, loomed a quartet of behemoths: huge frost giants, and not the dirty rogues one might expect to find consorting with orcs. These were handsome creatures, clean and richly dressed, adorned with ornamental bracelets and rings, and fine furs that were neither particularly new nor particularly weather-beaten.
The giants were part of a larger, more organized clan—obviously a part of the network the Jarl Grayhand, a name not unknown to Drizzt and the dwarves of Mithral Hall, had formed in this part of the Spine of the World.
If the old Grayhand was loaning some of his mighty warriors out to an orc clan, the implications might prove darker than one flattened village and an ambush on a band of dwarves.
Drizzt looked all around, wondering if there was a way for him to get closer to the giants, to try to overhear their conversation. He could only hope they'd be speaking in a language that he could comprehend.
The cover between him and the orc camp was not promising, though, nor was the climb down the almost sheer cliff facing. Beyond that, the sun was already hanging low in the sky, and he didn't have much time if he hoped to rejoin his friends in the appointed place at the appointed hour.
He lingered for many more minutes, watching from afar the limited interaction between the giants and orcs. His attention piqued when one large and powerful orc, wearing the finest garments of all the filthy band, and with a huge, decorated axe strapped across its back, approached the giant quartet. The orc didn't go in the hesitating manner of some of the others, who had been either bringing food to the behemoths or simply trying to navigate past them in as unobtrusive a manner as possible. This orc — and Drizzt understood that it had to the leader, or at least one of the leaders—strode up to the giants purposefully and without any apparent trepidation and began conversing in what seemed to be a jovial manner.
Engaged, straining to hear whatever tidbit he might, even if only a burst of laughter, Drizzt was hardly aware of the approach of an orc sentry until it was too late.
From one high vantage point, Catti-brie noted where the orcs and giants had stopped to set their camp, far to the west of where she had entered the higher, northern ridgeline. She realized that Drizzt was likely already surveying their encampment, and she could get there, but her estimate told her that she'd probably arrive on the spot just in time to accompany Drizzt, if they found each other, back to their assigned meeting spot. Thus, the woman spent her time running past the east end of the enemy encampment, checking the ground over which the orcs and giants would likely traverse in the morning—unless, of course, they decided to break camp early and march on through the night, which would favor the orcs, no doubt, though probably not be to the liking of" the giants.
With the eye of a trained tactician, which she, as the adopted daughter of Bruenor Battlehammer, most certainly was, she looked for advantageous assault points. Bottlenecks in the trail, high ground where dwarves could send rocks and hammers spinning down at their enemies. .
Despite her many duties, the woman was the first of the four to return to the rendezvous point. Wulfgar returned soon after her with Bruenor, Dagnabbit, and Tred McKnuckles at his side.
"They have encamped almost directly north of this point," the woman explained.
"How many?" Bruenor asked.
Catti-brie gave a shrug. "Drizzt will know. I was searching the ground ahead to see where and how we might strike tomorrow."
"Ye find any good killin' spots?"
Catti-brie answered with a wicked smile, and Bruenor eagerly rubbed his hands together, then looked over at Tred and offered a nudge and a wink.
"Ye'll get yer payback, friend," the dwarf king promised.
As so often in the past, luck alone saved Regis. He skittered behind a convenient rock without notice from the group of orcs, who were engaged in an argument over some loot they had pilfered, probably from the sacked village.
They argued, pushed and shouted at each other, and deciding to divide the loot up privately amongst themselves, they suddenly quieted. Instead of continuing along the trail to join up with the larger band, they plopped themselves down right there, sending a couple ahead to fetch some food.
That afforded Regis a lovely eavesdropping position while they rambled on about all sorts of things, answering many questions for the halfling and leading him to ask many, many more.
Drizzt could not have been in a more disadvantageous situation, lying face down between a rise of stone and a boulder, peering over a ledge and with someone, something—likely an orc—moving up behind him. He ducked his head and shrugged the cowl of his cloak up a bit higher, hoping the creature would miss him in the dim light, but when the footsteps closed, the drow knew that he had to take a different course.
He shoved up to his knees and gracefully leaped to his feet from there, spinning around and drawing his scimitars, moving them as quickly as possible into a defensive position, trying to anticipate the attacker's thrust. If the creature had come straight on, Drizzt would have been caught back on his heels from the ou
tset.
But the orc, and it was an orc, hadn't charged, and didn't charge. It stood back, hands upraised and waving frantically, having dropped its weapon to the ground at its feet.
It said something that Drizzt didn't completely comprehend, though the language was close enough to the goblin tongue, which the drow did know, for him to understand that there was some recognition there, spoken in an almost apologetic tone. It seemed as if the orc, recognizing a drow elf, feared that it was intruding.
The obvious fear didn't surprise Drizzt, for the goblinkin were usually terrified of the drow—as were most reasoning races — but this went beyond that, he sensed. The orc wasn't surprised, as if the appearance of a drow elf near to this force was not unexpected.
He wanted to question the creature further but saw a black flash to the side of the orc and knew his opportunity had passed.
Guenhwyvar came across hard and fast, in a great leap that put the panther about chest level with the orc.
"Guen, no!" Drizzt cried as the cat flew past.
The orc's throat erupted in blood and the creature went flying down to the stone. Drizzt rushed to it, turning it over, thinking to stem the flow of blood from its throat.
Then he realized that the orc had no throat left at all.
Frustrated that an opportunity had flitted away, but grateful that Guenhwyvar had seen the danger from afar and come rushing in to rescue him, Drizzt could only shake his head.
He hid the dead orc as well as possible in a crevice, and with Guenhwyvar at his side, he started back to the rendezvous, having discovered more questions than answers.
"Plenty of ground to shape to our liking," Catti-brie assured them all when they had reassembled on the plateau below the enemy's position. "We'll get the fight we want."
None disagreed, but Bruenor wore a concerned expression.
'Too many giants," he explained when all the others had focused on him. "Four'd make a good enough fight by themselves. I'm thinking we got to hit them afore the morning. Trim the numbers."
"Not an easy thing to do, if we're still wanting surprise tomorrow," Catti-brie added.
The Thousand Orcs th-1 Page 13
