by Dragon Lance
Every Daergar miner had seen the mighty view hundreds of times, coming and going between the dig-shafts above and the placer camps below. But now the view was somehow different, and the Daergar crowded around Sledge Veinseek in puzzlement.
“There!” One of them pointed northward. “That forested ridge, running east and west … I don’t remember a ridge there.”
“There isn’t any ridge there,” another agreed. “At least, there wasn’t the last time I passed here. There is a little canyon there, not a ridge.”
“You’re right,” Sledge said. “Down there is where the main trace crosses the canyon. At least, it used to. But the main trace just ends now. It runs to that ridge and stops.”
Pyrr Steelpick pushed forward, shouldering others aside. The boss of shafts was a grizzled, time-weathered dwarf with massive forearms and a stubborn streak just as large. Now he stepped up beside Sledge Veinseek and stared out across the near miles. “What’s a ridge doing there?” he rumbled. “There’s nothing like that there, where that is.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Sledge agreed. “But there seems to be a ridge there now.”
Puzzled and wary, the miners trekked on down the winding trail to the placer camps, then turned northward on the main trail to Thorbardin. Here in the little valley of Ice Creek rising slopes blocked their view of the lands northward, but the trail climbed away – as it always had – toward the Promontory and the fortress mountain beyond.
They had gone several miles by the time they came out of Cutpass onto the downward slopes where the trail led – or should have led – across an interval of canyons and gullies where the wide, sloping meadow called the Promontory began. But now the trail led to no canyons or cuts. Instead it ran to the slope of a high forest-capped ridge and stopped.
More puzzled by the moment, the Daergar approached the strange formation, staring at it in bewilderment. Evening had turned to full night, but to Daergar eyes the light of the stars was enough.
At the beginning of the surprising slope, the trail simply ended.
“I don’t believe it,” Pyrr Steelpick growled. “Somebody is playing tricks. There is no ridge here. There never was.”
Sledge Veinseek walked to the end of the trail and took another step. The ground on the slope felt slightly resilient, but it supported him. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll climb it and see what the other side looks like.”
“I don’t intend to climb any ridge that isn’t there,” Pyrr announced. “There is a trail here, crossing a canyon. There has always been a trail and a canyon, and I have always walked the trail and crossed the canyon. I don’t intend to change my ways now.”
With a fierce frown, the shaft boss stepped off the end of the trail, and his foot sank to the knee in the stony slope. He took another step and was waist-deep in what seemed to be solid hillside. “I told you,” he said, glancing up at Sledge, who stood on the slope above him. “There isn’t any ridge here.” With grim determination, the stubborn shaft boss pushed on, disappearing into the hillside which seemed to close behind him as though no one had been there.
Watching him go, Sledge felt his own feet sinking into the yielding surface. Suddenly he was standing on solid ground, and the “hillside” engulfed him to the neck. “Pyrr is right!” he said. “This isn’t a real ridge.”
“Then what is it?” someone asked.
“I don’t know,” Sledge admitted. He stepped forward, and the hillside surrounded him. He felt as though he were immersed in jelly and could barely see his own raised hand. At each movement, the “hill” resisted him, then yielded. But he could breathe freely, and despite the resistance of whatever he was in, he could still move. He backed up until his head and shoulders were in the clear and looked at the exposed parts of himself. Nothing clung to him. Whatever it was, it was not sticky or fluid. He leaned to taste the surface before him. It had no taste. It was as though there were nothing there.
“Come on,” he told those behind him. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”
Several of them hesitated. “That’s one way to put it,” someone commented. But others plunged forward, following their leader. Confusion followed. Some of them walked directly into the slope, as Pyrr and Sledge had, but others found themselves moving upward, climbing a hill.
Below them, Sledge snapped, “You, up there! Come down here!”
“How?” one asked. “This is a hillside.”
“Which are you going to believe, your eyes or me?” Sledge demanded. “This is not a hillside. Now come on!”
Most of those on the slope dropped out of sight, and the company disappeared into the ridge, all except six young Daergar who simply couldn’t seem to sink. They had their leader’s assurance that there was no hill, but the fact was, they were standing on it. With nothing else to do, the six kept climbing, heading for the top, hoping to meet the rest of their party on the other side.
Inside the strange ridge, Sledge groped blindly forward until he came up to Pyrr Steelpick, who had stopped. “What is it, Pyrr?” he asked. His voice sounded muted and soft in the thick gloom.
“Look,” Pyrr said. “Just ahead. Lights.”
Sledge squinted and saw what the shaft boss had first noticed. Ahead, seeming near, a line of yellowish glows swam by one after another, sometimes in groups of five or ten, and sometimes so closely packed that it might have been made up of many small glows or one big one. The glows were all moving from right to left, coming into view from what Sledge assumed was still the east, and fading toward the west.
Pushing past Pyrr, the Daergar mine commander crept closer to the line of passing lights and observed that they became more clearly defined as he approached. They looked like torches. He moved forward again and saw dim figures trotting past – or the heads and shoulders of figures. Like tall people moving along in a trench, only their upper parts were visible. He crept closer still, and gasped. The lights were torches, torches carried by armed humans, passing just ahead of him.
As he took another step, the last torch passed, and darkness descended. Sledge pushed on and suddenly found himself beyond the eerie, heavy murk. He was standing at the rim of a little gully, inside what seemed to be a wide tunnel of solid stone. He looked to his left and saw the last of a large party of armed men trotting away around a bend. Their torches cast eerie shadows on the tunnel’s walls.
Just behind him, Pyrr Steelpick stepped out of what seemed a solid stone wall, and others appeared, crowding around, gaping at the long tunnel that seemed to run through the bottom of a ridge that was not a ridge.
“What is this?” a sapper demanded. “Is this magic?”
“It might be,” Sledge said. “I’ve never seen magic, but this sure looks like it.”
From down the tunnel came the sounds of voices and trotting feet, and torchlight glinted on the stone. Another band of armed humans came around a bend and skidded to a halt as the light of torches fell on the mob of Daergar spreading across the way.
“Dwarves!” a human voice shouted.
An arrow hummed along the corridor and buried itself in the throat of a miner. The dwarf fell, thrashing in death, and two more pitched backward as they were hit, one by an arrow and one by a thrown hand-dart.
Sledge raised his miner’s shield and shouted, “Defend!” In an instant, every standing dwarf had dropped to his knees, with his shield before him. A barrage of arrows, darts, and bolts from the human band whisked over them or clanged against shields.
“Attack!” Sledge ordered. The dwarves came to their feet, closing ranks even as they charged into the ditch, becoming a short, solid wall of raised shields and running feet. The first line of Daergar hit the humans, and men went down, shrieking and tumbling as hammers, picks, and iron chisels smashed at them. Even as they fell, those still standing among them pitched forward as stone-drills flicked from between shields to shatter knees and pierce thighs. Thirty or more humans fell within seconds, and the first line of Daergar washed over them, then par
ted, swinging aside in disciplined lines as a second wave of dwarves flooded through to attack the humans beyond. Here and there a Daergar fell to a lucky blow, but far more humans went down than dwarves.
“The torches!” Sledge ordered.
Lines of dwarves swarmed past the melee, clambering up the sides of the little gully, and ran along the line of humans still pushing forward. Delving axes lashed out, and torches flew from human hands as dwarves scrambled in the confusion to extinguish them with their shields. Within seconds, the entire section of tunnel was dark.
In the darkness, the Daergar went to work with murderous efficiency. A vague glow here and there was all the light their miners’ eyes required.
It was a massacre. Those humans who tried to hold their position were cut down, and those who tried to run were caught and killed. When silence returned, Sledge called, “Regroup!” The Daergar gathered around him, blood-soaked and sweating from exertion. There had been more than a hundred of them. There were still more than eighty, and for each fallen dwarf there were at least ten slaughtered human invaders. With the torches gone, the humans had not stood a chance. What was darkness to human eyes – and to most dwarves – was fighting light to a Daergar.
“Who were they?” Pyrr rumbled, wiping gore from his heavy pick. “What are humans doing here, and why did they attack us?”
“Ask this one,” a miner said. Several grim Daergar led forward a battered human, the only survivor. Sledge recognized the appearance and attire of the marauders called Sackmen, nomads from the northern deserts who had sometimes tried to make their way into the dwarven lands. The man was bloody and disarmed, though the odd, curved basket with which the Sackmen threw their deadly hand-darts was still strapped to his right wrist.
“Only one left alive,” a miner growled, prodding the man forward with his pick handle.
“Who are you, and what do you want?” Sledge demanded of the man.
The man sneered, shaking his head. Without hesitation, Pyrr Steelpick stepped forward and crouched in front of the human, loosing his heavy hammer and digging a long rock-spike from his pouch. “I’ll nail his feet to the ground,” he told Sledge. “Humans talk better that way.”
Several dwarves seized the man’s legs, holding him motionless, and the burly shaft boss set the point of his spike atop a large foot and raised his hammer.
“Wait!” the man squealed. “Wait, I’ll tell you. We came … We were hired to fight for some wizards.”
“Fight against whom?” Sledge asked.
“Against …” — the man swallowed — “against dwarves.”
Pyrr raised his hammer again.
“Wait!” the man wailed. “It’s nothing personal! We … They’ve hired a lot of people. It’s just business.”
“Hired you with what?” Sledge asked.
“Coin,” the man said. “In … in my pouch.”
Dwarven hands removed the pouch from the man’s belt and dumped the contents out. A handful of bright coins fell on the ground. A miner picked one of them up, frowned at it, and tasted it. “Rock,” he muttered. “It sort of looks like a coin, but it’s only a little rock.”
“How many of you are there?” Sledge asked, then raised a hand. Human voices sounded somewhere in the tunnel. “Get him out of here,” Sledge ordered.
Without hesitating, Pyrr Steelpick grabbed the man’s arm in powerful fingers. Others grabbed his other arm, and the man was propelled up the bank and toward the wall. The dwarves, running at full speed, hit the stone and disappeared within it. The man screamed, smashed against the stone, and bounced off, flipping and rolling to the edge of the gully. Where he had rebounded, heads popped out of the blood-splattered “stone.”
“Whoops,” Pyrr said.
Sledge squatted beside the man. He was dead. Nearby, a dwarf stooped and picked up a small stone. “Rock,” he said. “Doesn’t even look like a coin now.”
“I think we had better tell Vog Ironface about this,” Sledge decided.
Down the tunnel, more glows indicated that more human invaders were approaching. Turning, Sledge climbed what he hoped was the north side of the little gully and walked directly into the stone wall of the tunnel. “There isn’t any tunnel here,” he reminded himself. He stepped into the stone and disappeared. Behind him, the others followed a few at a time. The last of them were still climbing from the gully when another band of mercenaries rounded the near bend and found themselves wading through, and stumbling over, the bodies of the dead. Those in the lead, holding torches high, spotted the last few Daergar still in the “tunnel” and sprinted toward them, blades drawn.
Chink Deepshaft, a young sapper, was the last Daergar to reach the gully bank, and several big humans were at his heels as he raced full-tilt into the wall. He dived for the apparently solid stone and rolled through it. Behind him, blades clanged against solid rock, and a pair of Sackmen warriors bounced off the stone.
Beyond the ridge, the group of Daergar emerged into normal night and gazed at the Promontory spreading ahead of them with Cloudseeker rising beyond it.
As they emerged, five shamefaced young miners scurried down the slope of the ridge that wasn’t a ridge and joined them, gawking at the blood-smeared apparel and gore-stained tools of those who had gone through and survived.
“That’s what you get for doubting your own logic,” Pyrr Steelpick snapped at them. “You knew there wasn’t a ridge here, but you believed there was, so you missed all the fun.”
“Let that be a lesson to you,” Sledge added. “If you know a thing is so, it’s so. If you know it’s not, it’s not. Otherwise you’re no better than humans.”
*
When the first wave of human mercenaries came down the long meadows from the west, making for the ways below Southgate, drums sang the warning and dwarves were ready to meet them. Twelve “hundreds” of fighting Holgar – four mounted companies and eight foot companies – emerged from the mountain fortress at Southgate and marched with parade precision down the twin, slanting ramparts of the gate approaches to take up positions at intervals above the north swales of the Promontory.
Some of the fighting units were tribal – three of the four mounted units were almost entirely Hylar, two foot units were Theiwar, and one, the legendary Golden Hammer assault force, was entirely Daewar. The rest, though, were mixed companies of Hylar, Daewar, Theiwar, Daergar, and even a few Klar.
With quick precision, the companies moved into assigned positions: along the exposed flank of Cloudseeker’s south face, in the rock formations near the Valley of the Thanes, in the broken-cliff canyons of the old Theiwar raiding grounds, behind the bastions at the foot of each gateway road, on the forested slope overlooking the Daergar ore pits, and out on the Promontory itself. The line of defense was a bowed, reinforced arc of foot troops, with fast-moving attack squadrons at each end, and armored cavalry at the wings and point.
Barek Stone, placing the units, made no attempt to conceal their strength. A veteran of many battles, the captain general knew that just the sight of armed dwarves, ready to fight in formation, was enough to awe most human warriors.
So Barek let the humans see what they were up against – or, at least, the first line of defense. What they didn’t see was the special equipment carried by some of the defenders and what lay behind the first line. Within many of the shields carried by defenders were mirrors. Hidden along most of the trails and paths leading from the Promontory to the slopes were companies of ambushers with nets and cables, deadfalls and pendulums, spring-spikes and brush-balls. In the rocks above each wing of the defense line were companies of slingers, with woven leather slings and supplies of iron balls.
And along each walled way leading up to Southgate, hidden by the guard towers which stood at intervals there, were the engines of defense from the crafteries within Thorbardin: huge, winch-drawn bows that could hurl a thick, ten-foot spear three hundred yards and batteries of drawn catapults armed with everything from stones and dagger blades to brass co
ntainers full of Pack Lodestone’s awful concoctions. And behind the highest outposts were two huge towering engines that humans had never seen because the dwarves had never shown or used them. They were a recent development of the crafteries – side-arm discobels that could sling saw-edged iron disks with enough force to knock down large trees.
These were the outer defenses of Thorbardin – those that were in plain view and those that were not.
The first sightings had been of a thousand or more human marauders coming across the Promontory from somewhere near its head to the southwest. But now, as the sun of Krynn rose high, the drums spoke of other thousands coming into view. The line of grim, marching warriors seemed to double and double again as it came into sight, spreading across the high meadow. The men had been bunched, but now as they spread and formed into separate groups, they seemed to fill half the Promontory. Atop the sentinel peaks, sharp eyes estimated counts and drums spoke. Seven thousand, they said. Ten companies, spreading and approaching, each company averaging seven hundred armed and battle-hardened human warriors.
On the walled ledge outside Southgate, Willen Ironmaul stood, backed by the Ten. He heard the count and frowned. The outside defenders, the field companies, numbered one thousand, two hundred dwarves. “Six to one,” the chief of chiefs muttered. “Well, we have some surprises to help offset that.”
But then, abruptly, the drums on the mountains sang a new song, and every dwarven eye turned to the meadowlands.
There was not one human army, but two! No, three! Coming onto the Promontory from the south and east were more masses of humans, marching hordes spreading and forming into fighting companies. And each army was the equal of the first.
Three assaults! The drums sang of it. Not seven thousand invaders, but three sevens of thousands!
