“We’ll go around,” he agreed as Bromm started to explain it to him, and he hustled away.
The dwarf army looped along the northern back of the small lake, the Glimmerwood in sight to the north and to the west of them. They had gone more than halfway around the pond when the first cries rang out ahead of the main force.
“Orcs!”
“Bah, bandits,” King Bromm said. “Kill ’em to death one and all.”
“Not bandits,” Chayne Mulish replied somberly, his tone drawing the attention of all nearby, and they followed his gaze across the lake to the southwest, where dark forms gathered around the bank.
Not bandits, indeed, Bromm and all the others understood, when they realized that the force that had come against them was considerably larger than their own.
“What in the name o’ Dumathoin’re them pig-faced rats doin’ here in the Cold Vale?” the dwarf king asked. Those around him nodded. It was a good question, and to a one they wondered more about how such a force might have come to this protected place. The Cold Vale was surrounded north and west by the Glimmerwood, home of the elves, and on the south by the Rauvin Mountains, a land overseen by King Emerus Warcrown and his legions of sturdy dwarves.
King Bromm wondered if Citadel Felbarr still stood, and if not, then what trap might await his brother’s march?
“No good, I’m thinkin’,” said Chayne Mulish, drawing a curious look from King Bromm.
“Ye asked what them pig-faced rats’re doing here,” the dwarf explained.
“Rat-faced pigs, ye mean,” Oretheo remarked.
“Vermin, howe’er ye slice ’em,” Chayne declared.
“Shoulder to hip’s me preferred way,” Oretheo replied, hoisting his axe, and a chorus of cheers went up around him.
“Bah, but I’ll take ’em two to yer one,” Chayne Mulish declared, drawing a few heigh-ho’s of his own.
“Bah, but yer mother’s a bunny,” Oretheo Spikes roared. “Three-to-one for meself.”
They were nose-to-nose now, shouting their challenges back and forth, and each claim brought louder cheers than the previous.
King Bromm nodded his approval and let them continue for a long while. Few could rouse bloodlust in an army in the moments before a battle better than Chayne Mulish and Oretheo Spikes.
“Here they come!” cried a dwarf, and all eyes turned back to the orc force—now charging directly across the frozen lake, without reservation.
“Too stupid to know that lakes ain’t supposed to be frozen in the summertime!” Oretheo cried.
He didn’t add to that, but like most of the others, he hoped that was the case and the ice would shatter under their march and send them floundering in the cold waters. He feared something else, however. Had the orcs tapped into some magic to freeze the lake and aid them in this fight?
And if they were possessed of magic that powerful …
“Battle groups!” King Bromm ordered. “And don’t ye go running out on the damned lake to meet ’em.”
With great precision and the discipline infused through years of practice, the dwarven force settled into their organized brigades and formations, shield dwarves forming a wall in the front ranks of three squares, with crossbowmen behind, diligently cocking their weapons. Behind the middle square, the king’s Wilddwarf Brigade, Citadel Adbar’s version of the Gutbusters, drank their potent liquor and crashed against each other hard, “rising their blood,” as they called it.
“We’re breaking into fives then,” called out the leader of the brigade, known simply—and for most of the Adbar dwarves, known only—as Crunch. “Two for runnin’ and three for flyin’.”
“Flyin’!” every member of the king’s Wilddwarves volunteered, and the crashing began anew with heightened vigor, as each vied for the coveted role. When the orcs met the defensive walls of the shield dwarves, some of the Wilddwarves, the runners, would charge between the squares, but many others would fly over the shield dwarves like living missiles. Indeed, pairs of “dwarf tossers” were already settling into place in the second ranks of the squares, each consisting of two young, strong dwarves holding a sturdy plank low and horizontal between them. A Wilddwarf leaping onto that plank would be “assisted” in his second leap, the one that sent him flying over the front line of shield dwarves.
King Bromm watched the jostling of the fierce brigade with a grin, and nodded with pride as he noted the precision of his superb battle group.
“Bolts at yer call,” he shouted to Commander Chayne Mulish, who nodded back and began ordering the crossbows into action. Lines of deadly quarrels flew out from the lake’s edge, sailing over the frozen pond. The orcs were still far away, but the powerful weapons showed tremendous range, and while it was difficult for any archer to be accurate at such a range, there were so many orcs charging, it was even harder to miss.
King Bromm nodded again as he watched orc after orc stagger and fall, and grinned wider to see fellow orcs, unable to stop their momentum on the slick surface, go tumbling over those driven down. He held no illusions, though, when looking at the approaching army compared to his own force. His dwarves were clearly outnumbered, by five to one or more, and the fact that such an orc force had somehow arrived in the Cold Vale unbeknownst to the elves of the Glimmerwood …
Or was this orc army, he wondered, the real reason Sinnafein had sent them here?
King Bromm chewed his lip bloody mulling that disturbing possibility, but quickly put it out of his mind. His dwarves would win here. He felt great confidence as he watched still more of the fast-closing orcs fall to a second brutal volley. Better armed, better armored, superbly trained, and battle-hardened, the Adbar legion would cover the lake with orc blood.
But then the first boulder hurtled down from on high.
It crashed down near the front rank of the left-most square, shattering three shields and two of the three dwarves who held them. No sooner had the grunts erupted in response to the unexpected explosion, then so did the cries of “Giants!”
Many dwarf voices raised in that chorus, with screams of warning for other rocks arcing out from the rocky spurs of the mountain. All around those higher trails and slopes loomed the gigantic blue-skinned humanoids, ferocious frost giants, who counted among their most-hated of enemies the dwarves of the Silver Marches.
At the sight of the behemoths and the thunder of the bombardment, the orcs began whooping and charging ahead with renewed energy.
Bromm’s dwarves scrambled, their tight formations falling apart under the rain of stones. It didn’t take long for the young King of Adbar to understand that he was facing utter disaster. Without the squares in place, the sheer numerical advantage of the orc army would overrun them in short order.
“Back! Tight lines and stepping back,” he called out. “Get out o’ the giants’ range, me boys.”
“For the love o’ yer Ma’s hairy back, back and stay tight!” Chayne Mulish added, and it proved to be the last word the dwarf commander ever spoke as a giant-hurled boulder splattered his brains all over his shiny armor.
Despite the confusion and the rain of boulders—and there were many giants up there on the slopes, the dwarves quickly realized—the skilled veterans of Citadel Adbar held tight their formations and held strong their courage. The Wilddwarves darted around, helping the wounded, dragging them back as the squares stepped back, double-timing it to get out of range of the deadly boulder rain.
The lead orcs made the lake’s shore, sliding from the ice into a dead run at the retreating force. Their presence hardly slowed the giants, however, and boulders fell on orc and dwarf alike as the forces came crashing together.
“Keep backing as ye kill ’em!” King Bromm cried and his commanders echoed, up and down the line. With every step, the boulders were more likely to hit the orcs, he knew, and so did the orcs. When Bromm looked up to the slopes, he realized that the giants were catching on as well. Many of them had stopped their barrage to rush down the long, winding trails.
/> King Bromm nodded and glanced over his shoulder to the north, to the Glimmerwood. He was confident that he could get his boys under that canopy before the giants could join in the fight. If a sizable number of elves were about, they just might turn the tide.
But first, the dwarves had to disengage these stubborn orcs and break off in full retreat, and Bromm knew just how to do that. He called for his Wilddwarves, thinking to gather them into a horde of dwarven hammers and send them blasting into the orcs to break the line and drive them back.
As they assembled, though, there came a low rumbling beneath Bromm’s feet. Dwarf and orc alike paused in their slaughter and glanced around, and the ground began to shake more violently.
Bromm recognized the point of origin then, and turned his gaze to the frozen lake, just in time to see the ice breaking apart far out from the bank, a great sheet tilting up, throwing orcs into the sky, sending them sliding and tumbling all over each other, weapons and armor tangling. For a moment, King Bromm’s heart soared, as he believed that some great rescue was upon them. Perhaps his twin brother and the dwarves of Felbarr had devised this trap for the orcs with some cunning machinery or magic.
But no, he realized a heartbeat later, and then his heart skipped more than a few beats as he came to understand the true source of the icy upheaval, and of the ice itself, as the gigantic head of a white dragon appeared above the tilted and broken sheet.
Two hundred dwarves cried out at once, and a thousand orcs cheered—despite their brethren trapped out on the lake, many dead and many wounded, and many floundering amid the now-shattered ice sheet, they cheered.
Up into the air went the great white wyrm, ice and water falling from its shining leathery wings.
“Me king!” more than one dwarf called, and Bromm only had one answer in that awful moment.
“Run away!” he cried at the top of his lungs. “Run away! To the forest. Oh, run!”
The dwarves broke ranks and sprinted to the north, except for the king’s Wilddwarves, huddled together and nodding grimly. They knew their place, and willingly accepted their fate. “Crunch!” they cheered in unison, and while the main force retreated, they charged, throwing themselves with abandon into the orc ranks, thrashing and biting and kicking and punching, and a hundred stabs couldn’t stop any of them.
King Bromm didn’t want to flee. Indeed, for a long while, he stood his ground, yanking those retreating dwarves past him and shoving them along to the north.
“Ye got to go, me king,” Oretheo Spikes said to him, rushing up and grabbing him by the arm.
“Fifty boys dead, and fifty more to fall, if we’re lucky,” Bromm lamented.
“And if one o’ them fifty’s King Bromm, then Adbar’s knowin’ a darker day,” the commander insisted, pulling him along.
Bromm resisted only a bit, then finally nodded in resignation, turned, and began his sprint.
Just a few strides later, though, a shadow came over the pair, a darker spot in the dull darkness of the near-blotted sunlight, and that shadow grew, reaching wide to either side as the dragon descended.
“Right and left,” Oretheo yelled to Bromm, and he pushed off the king and scrambled out to his right while Bromm broke left. Oretheo turned as he went and began hurling insults at the dragon, wanting it to swerve at him that his King Bromm might escape.
But the beast did not, locking onto the other form and swooping in with such speed that the air thrummed around it.
“Ah, ye nasty, wormy fish bait!” Oretheo Spikes cried desperately as the beast bore down on King Bromm, but the last word caught in his throat indeed when he realized that the dragon wasn’t alone.
There was a rider.
A drow rider.
The dwarf’s mouth gaped as the dragon’s maw opened and a cone of white frost blew forth, a cone strong enough and cold enough to freeze a lake in summertime, a cone powerful enough to blow poor King Bromm to the ground and freeze him there.
The dragon soared past, but its rider dropped from it and gently and magically floated down to the ground. The great wyrm issued a mighty shrieking roar that had all around, dwarf and orc and giant alike, covering their ears in terror.
Oretheo Spikes stumbled and cried out for his king, running, scrambling, crawling even, until he could get his feet back under him. Across the way, the drow, too, approached, but with no apparent urgency.
“Ah, ye dog!” Oretheo cried, leaping over Bromm, axe high.
The drow smiled and easily side-stepped cleanly. He never even bothered to lift his strange, translucent shield, and the overbalanced Oretheo went sprawling. The dwarf jumped up and spun around, and his heart sank even more. The orc horde closed in now, with most of the fighting to the south finished, and the drow stood calmly waiting, very close to King Bromm, who lay quiet under a coating of icy crystals.
“Run away, dwarf,” the drow said. “Run away and tell your kin that the drow have come, that Many-Arrows has come, and that the land is ours.”
Oretheo Spikes replied with an unintelligible, growling sound, and threw himself at the drow once more.
This time, the dark elf did not sidestep. Up came his shield, its edge magically rolling as he raised his arm, the shield growing with each turn. Oretheo’s axe slammed in hard, but the impact was dulled somehow by the magic of that shield. And when the dwarf tried to retract, he found his blade sluggish and stuck as if he had driven it into a vat of heavy syrup.
His surprise and delay cost him. The drow’s weapon, a sword that seemed as if it had captured the nighttime stars within its translucent glassteel confines, cut across and up perfectly, taking the dwarf in the wrist and hand, and forcing him to let go of his trapped axe.
He heard the orcs howling; the dragon screeched again.
The drow, so quick, had moved behind him somehow, Oretheo realized. Only the blink of an eye before he felt the pain as that fabulous sword slashed across the back of his legs.
He found himself kneeling. He didn’t know how. He didn’t know why.
“But Hartusk didn’t get the kill,” Doum’wielle reasoned to her father and Ravel as they watched the gruesome scene unfolding from the edge of the Glimmerwood. Out in the field, halfway to the lake, the orc army chanted Hartusk’s name and the legion of giants laughed as the burly war chief bent over the fallen form of King Bromm.
“Perhaps he will,” Ravel interjected, pointing out to the scene. When Hartusk kicked at the prone dwarf, the thawing diminutive fellow seemed to move a bit in reaction.
War Chief Hartusk seemed quite pleased by that development. He eagerly bent low over the form, slapping Bromm’s helmet off to the side. He took the dwarf’s thick hair in hand and tugged his head back hard, exposing the neck below. Around went Hartusk’s other hand and he worked his serrated long knife savagely, tearing out the king’s throat to the howls of approval from his legions. The ferocious orc didn’t stop there, digging and ripping the blade back and forth, unrelenting until he took the head from the dwarf king’s shoulders.
Hartusk sprang to his feet, holding the severed head up high, blood falling from the torn neck, so all could see and all could cheer.
Above the throng, the dragon, Arauthator, roared again and dipped into another air-shaking swoop, and the white hair of Tiago Baenre flew wildly in the rushing dive.
“He does enjoy his pets,” Ravel Xorlarrin remarked.
“Tiago or Arauthator?” Tos’un Armgo asked.
“Yes,” Ravel replied with a laugh.
Hartusk carried the head over to the prisoners, including the dwarf commander, and even from this distance, the trio of elves could hear the war chief’s shouted demands.
“Go tell the dwarves of Adbar to stay in their hole!” Hartusk yelled in the dwarf’s face. “If you come out, you are in the domain of Many-Arrows, and you will die!” He pushed the dead king’s severed head right into the face of Oretheo, then swung around and roared triumphantly. Other orcs gathered up the wounded Oretheo, stripped him naked, bound h
is hands behind him tightly, and shoved him off to the north.
He staggered and fell more than once, and Doum’wielle could see that he was crying, and could see him wince, time and again, as another of the captured dwarves was horribly executed behind him.
She shook her head in disgust, but in her mind, Khazid’hea told her that it was all for the best.
So lost was she that she knew she had to believe the sword, and so she clutched desperately at the thoughts it imparted. To do otherwise was to step back and widen her view, to see her role in this, from the murder of her brother Tierflin to her journey to the Underdark and back, and that, her conscience could not survive.
She swallowed hard.
She felt the gaze of Ravel upon her and knew she was being judged, and knew that if she showed weakness that she and her father would surely suffer.
“Idiot dwarves,” she said, and she spat upon the ground and walked deeper into the Glimmerwood.
The heavy picket gates of Dark Arrow Keep groaned and creaked as they swung wide for the approaching legion, a dozen strong orcs bending their backs on each. No word came down from the wooden watchtowers above; the whole of the gathering remained strangely quiet at this unexpected approach.
Tensions had run high in Dark Arrow Keep since the murder of King Obould. The fighting had begun almost immediately among his many sons, including among those who claimed without evidence to be of his lineage, bastard children of unnamed mothers. Through it all, many of the orcs had looked to Lorgru for guidance, as the named successor to the throne, but of course, many others had looked the other way.
In whispers, Lorgru was spoken of as the murderer. That in itself wouldn’t have necessarily disqualified him from the throne, but adding to those whispers were reminders of Lorgru’s recent show of mercy—to an elf!
Now the war drums were beating, and against the people of Sinnafein, whom Lorgru had released back to the Moonwood. And Lorgru opposed those war drums, but in the heightened tensions, their cadence had grown in strength and volume, aided by the stamp of thousands of heavy orc boots.
Rise of the King Page 6
