Rise of the King

by R. A. Salvatore

  The mob moved off, dragging Wulfgar by the ankles. And the way he bounced, so limply, so lifelessly, made Regis fear that the poor man was already dead.

  The monsters hoisted him onto their shoulders, and cheered and danced as they made their way down the corridor, Wulfgar’s battered body bouncing in tune with their running strides.

  “Oh no,” Regis breathed. He looked back up the tunnel, then shook his head. His potion wouldn’t last long enough for him to get all the way back to the upper corridor, and he had no other elixirs of this type.

  Nor could he leave his fallen friend.

  He crept down, poking his head through the hole and into the tunnel, and knew immediately that he was in the heart of a complex thick with orcs, with several in sight, and a few goblins besides.

  “Oh no,” he whispered again.

  THE GHOST OF DWARF KINGS PAST

  THE TUNNEL SHOOK WITH THE THUNDER OF THE ROLLING JUICER AND the heavy footfalls of the ogres pushing it. Drizzt trailed the others, firing arrows at the contraption, or over the contraption, skipping them off the ceiling to put them in behind the gigantic, crushing wheel to try to slow down the determined charge of the ogres. He had scored a couple of hits, he figured from the yelps and grunts coming from behind the war machine, but he hadn’t slowed it.

  All of the orcs between the companions and the war machine were dead now, shot down by Drizzt or splattered by the rolling contraption—juiced, as Bruenor would put it. But it hardly mattered because the enemy at that moment wasn’t an orc but a cylinder of heavy stone.

  The drow thought of dropping the bow and drawing blades, but the expanse between the top of the rolling war machine and ceiling was too tight for him to hope to get through. He scanned the ceiling ahead, looking for a high spot where he might get over the wheel, or perhaps a slim alcove he might squeeze into, coming out behind the crushing wheel when it rambled past.

  The orcs and ogres had chosen their corridor of death well, it seemed, for Drizzt saw no such opportunities. He looked back to the closing wheel, skipped an arrow off the ceiling above it and considered the size of the opening as the flashing lightning arrow illuminated it more clearly.

  He had to shake his head; there was no way he could get through.

  But the corridor continued, long and straight and with no side passages, and even though the orcs before Bruenor and Athrogate were more interested in running away than in trying to slow the group, the juicer was gaining on them, and too quickly. They couldn’t outrun it, they couldn’t stop it.

  If Drizzt could just buy some time so that Catti-brie could cast some spell, perhaps …

  He shot his next arrow into the ceiling, trying to dislodge a chunk of stone to fall before the rolling crusher. Bits did fall, but the juicer turned them to pebbles as it bounced across.

  “Faster! Faster!” the drow implored his companions, for he couldn’t slow the thing, and surely they were doomed.

  The little goblin shaman roamed the lower complex cautiously, not quite sure where he might fit in, or even if he could fit in. This was just another legion of the Many-Arrows army, he came to understand, camped here outside of the tunnels of Mithral Hall as surely as their orc kin were camped outside the dwarf doors on the surface above.

  He found a large chamber where crude forges were working, hot fires blazing, orc blacksmiths pounding at spear tips and wicked swords. Off to the side, some ogres were being fitted with thick breastplates.

  He could not deny the truth: They were organized, methodical, and determined.

  Dozens of tunnels spider-webbed out of the forge room, and from many, the goblin shaman heard the rhythmic sound of picks hitting stone. The goblins and orcs were mining, and smelting, and fashioning their weapons. Surely they couldn’t match Bruenor’s kin in such endeavors, but orcs were clever creatures when it came to making implements of pain.

  On went the halfling-turned-goblin, through a door and along the complex. He passed many common rooms with scores of beds, rows and rows of weapons set on racks, a dining hall, even a great auditorium or chapel of some sort, filled with benches set in a semicircle around a raised stage, and with a large fire pit breaking the semicircle in half.

  The halfling-turned-goblin swallowed hard when he considered that stage, with a blood-stained table on the lip of it and several large posts set in place behind it, each hung with heavy shackles. He thought of Prisoner’s Carnival in the old city of Luskan, where magistrates brought forth the criminals captured in the city and exacted cruel punishment, torture, and horrible death upon them, to the cheers of hundreds of onlookers.

  If humans were capable of such viciousness, what might these orcs do?

  He moved to the stage, curious, and noted the piles of slop on the dirty stone floor. Entrails, brains, pools of blood …

  Gagging, he rushed out of the chamber, scouting the area, looking for something, anything.

  “Run! Run!” Drizzt implored the others, for the rambling juicer was then barely five strides behind him, and closing fast!

  He heard a horn blow, a note so discordant that he immediately thought that it must be some instrument of the ugly orcs, and indeed sounded more like a belch than a melodic note.

  The cry of “Me king!” jogged his memory, though, and the drow recalled the source of that belching note and what it foretold.

  Drizzt stumbled past the specter of Thibbledorf Pwent, who stood with hands on hips staring at the approaching calamity. Five steps later, the fleeing Drizzt saw the juicer plow into Pwent.

  Or rather, plow through Pwent.

  Or rather, plow through the fog Pwent became.

  The specter trapped in Bruenor’s horn had retained some of his vampiric properties, so it seemed!

  And yes, Pwent became corporal once more on the other side of the rolling calamity, Drizzt knew, and the others knew, and surely, the ogres knew!

  “Keep yer runnin’,” Bruenor shouted. “He’ll not be holdin’ them for long!”

  Drizzt sprinted up beside Catti-brie and caught her by the arm. “A spell,” he bade her, and the pair stopped and turned back.

  “Run on!” Bruenor scolded them.

  “Something, anything,” Drizzt said to the woman.

  Catti-brie searched her memory, counting on her fingers as she considered the enchantments at her disposal this day, and what spells she had available that might help, The fighting behind the juicer wheel sounded intense now, with ogres roaring and grunting and squealing, and the occasional “Me king!” coming forth from the battleraging dwarf specter.

  Catti-brie nodded and turned back to fully face the now-distant juicer.

  She began to cast.

  Behind the wheel, the sound of battle stopped, and almost immediately, the fog of the defeated dwarf specter drifted up and over the juicer wheel, flying back for the magical horn. A heartbeat later, the heavy wheel creaked and began to roll once more, very slowly now as the ogres tried to gain momentum.

  “Quickly,” Drizzt implored her.

  Catti-brie closed her eyes and brought her ruby ring up to her lips, whispering her enchantment into it, asking the Plane of Fire for more strength and clarity.

  Her line of fire began at her feet and rolled back down the hallway the way she had come. She put the fiery source line right near to the right hand wall, the roiling flames reaching out across the corridor from there.

  As soon as the spell roared to life, Drizzt grabbed the woman’s arm and sped her along.

  The corridor trembled again under the weight of the war machine.

  But then came cries of surprise and pain, as the brutes rolled it right into the area of Catti-brie’s conflagration, and the great crushing contraption stopped once more.

  The companions ran on.

  Guenhwyvar rejoined them some time later, when at last they came into an area of side tunnels and side chambers. Before they could decide which way to go, the decision was made for them, for enemies appeared, so many enemies, too many enemies to e
ven think of making a stand.

  Each of the companions in turn cast a forlorn glance back down the main tunnel, back in the direction of where they had lost Wulfgar and Regis.

  There was nothing they could do but run.

  And so they did, through rough-hewn chambers mostly dug by Bruenor’s clan in days long past. They were in the old, lower mines now, they knew, still outside the complex of Mithral Hall, but not far away.

  Other hands had worked these chambers as well, including the gray dwarves, the duergar, who had inhabited the bowels of Mithral Hall in the centuries of Clan Battlehammer’s exile, after the dragon Shimmergloom had chased young Bruenor and his clansdwarves from their home.

  The companions went through doors and around corners, through chambers narrow and wide, and down hallways that split in many directions. But because of pursuit, never was there a choice for them regarding their course, they came to realize. And they quickly came to understand, too, that they were being herded, for orcs and ogres, ogrillon and goblins, were always there, blocking every passage but one.

  Side-by-side and at a full run, Athrogate and Bruenor shouldered a door, crashing through into what seemed to be a storeroom. Ancient mining implements sat on a rusted old rack against one wall, and pegs lined the other wall. Three doors were in the room, each heavily reinforced with rusted metal beams.

  “A safe room,” Bruenor said to no one in particular. In days long past when these mines were in use, the dwarves would come here to sleep and take their breaks—Bruenor could well imagine the wall to his left thick with cloaks and miner’s aprons. In the event of a cave-in, this room would likely stand strong, a sanctuary.

  But it was no sanctuary for the friends at that time, with monsters so close on their heels.

  On they went, through the door directly across from the one they had broken in. They came into a mine, then, a long and worked tunnel, sloping gradually upward before them.

  “Run! Run, we’re there!” Bruenor cried, picking up his pace.

  There were no side-passages to be seen now, just a single metal door at the top of the tunnel ahead. Bruenor burst through it and roared in apparent victory. All four and Guenhwyvar scrambled in and Drizzt slammed the door shut, and good luck was with them, for while the door had not been barred before them, there was indeed a locking bar leaning against the wall beside it.

  Athrogate already had the bar in hand, and he and Drizzt were quick to secure the door.

  Old iron carts, ore carts, sat scattered about this chamber, a pair sitting on rails that ran under the room’s other, higher door.

  “Ah, me hall and me boys,” Bruenor said, moving for that closed door. “We’ll be back, ye dog orcs, and we’ll find me boy and Rumblebelly.”

  Through the second door was a short passage, sloping up steeply. On the far wall hung crank winches, come-alongs, with piles of heavy, rusted chain on the floor beneath them. The rails continued up the expanse, to what once had been the portal to the main complex of Mithral Halls mines.

  But now those rails ran into a solid wall, an iron wall.

  “They sealed it,” Bruenor mumbled, hiking up the incline to the blocked exit. He put his hand up against the metal. “By Moradin’s hairy arse, they shut them orcs out, and so shut us out.”

  He turned back to his friends, his crestfallen expression aptly reflecting the mood, and at that very moment, came the first resounding crash as a heavy hammer slammed the barred metal door in the room behind them.

  “We got nowhere to run, elf,” Bruenor said.

  “Aye, and no supplies,” said Catti-brie, and she mouthed “Regis” when Bruenor shifted his gaze to regard her.

  A thunderous slam shook the floor beneath their feet and sent streams of dust dropping down around them.

  “They’ve got a ram,” Athrogate said, and he gave a little laugh, seeming quite amused at how easily they had been herded, cornered, and caught.

  The click of a shackle brought Wulfgar back to consciousness, somewhat at least. His shoulder throbbed—something in there was torn, surely. One shin was broken and would not support him, and the other leg, too, was battered, so much so that he really couldn’t support his weight.

  And so he hung to the limit of the chains, the metal shackles tearing at his wrists. Eventually they would eat right through and one of his hands would fall off, he suspected, and then he’d hang for a bit from the remaining hand, until that one, too, was sawed away.

  Then he’d fall in a heap to the floor, and who could guess what tortures would be exacted upon him.

  He couldn’t see out of one eye, so swollen was the side of his face, and it took him a long, long while to finally manage to crack the other blood-crusted eyelid open. And then he winced, though it hurt him greatly to even move his face.

  He was in a large and shadowy area, about mid way along one of the longer walls in the rectangular chamber. Torches were set about the walls haphazardly, leaving vast swaths of the place in darkness. It was a two-tiered chamber, with a higher floor running the length of the longer side walls, and the main middle swath of the room down lower. Far down to the left, in the middle of the shorter wall, loomed a dark tunnel opening.

  Tables and shackling posts and racks of unpleasant-looking implements were scattered about, some with the rotted remains of some unfortunate still strapped in place. Only in noting those rotting corpses did Wulfgar become aware of the awful stench hanging about the room.

  There was a pit in the middle of the lower area, fairly large, and Wulfgar marked some movement within it, far below, though he couldn’t make out what horrid creatures might be in there.

  Wulfgar saw that his weren’t the only shackles set into the stone along the wall he was chained to, and he wasn’t the only prisoner. In fact, he was one of many. He noted several dwarves, hanging from the ground, battered and wretched, too short to put their feet on the floor, and a few humans as well, all sprinkled in between many shackled goblins, also too short for the shackles, and so hanging like the dwarves.

  It seemed to Wulfgar that many of the prisoners were long dead.

  An ugly brute roamed the room, a pair of sniveling goblins following its every move. Too short to be an ogre, too wide to be an orc, Wulfgar recognized it as an ogrillon. He had battled a few of those brutes in his day, and thought them to be the stupidest and most vicious of creatures, a most horrible blend of the worst traits of the orc and ogre parents, with the viciousness of the former and the intelligence of the latter.

  The ogrillon grabbed something under a tarp on a cart far down to Wulfgar’s left, near the tunnel opening. Hardly considering its cargo—which it was holding by the ankle, Wulfgar soon realized, the brute lumbered down the middle of the room. A torn and battered orc carcass came out from under the tarp, to fall with a splat onto the stone floor. It dragged behind the ogrillon, and led a long line of entrails behind it, smearing the floor with blood and bile.

  The brutal torturer walked right up to the edge of the pit in the center of the floor and swung the goblin in. Barely had it crashed down when Wulfgar heard the ravenous sounds of monstrous beasts, biting and gnawing and slurping.

  The goblins trailing their torturer boss seemed especially pleased with this, hopping and laughing excitedly. One grabbed up the trailing entrails and began dancing about—then almost went flying into the pit as one of the monsters within gave a great tug, or perhaps it was slurping the stringy thing into its mouth.

  The goblin let go at the last moment, flopping to the floor, and its ugly little companion laughed crazily.

  Wulfgar didn’t know what to make of any of this. He felt as if he had been thrown into the middle of a caricature of evil, some gruesome collection of monsters a child might imagine hiding under his bed. He recalled his long slide and the beasts waiting for him, and knew that all was lost. He could only hope that his friends had escaped.

  And that he would die quickly.

  He started to nod off again—perhaps he did indeed, for he co
uld not be sure of how much time had passed—when he was brought back to alertness by the sound of the brutish ogrillon leaping up to the raised floor right beside him. The brute sniffed at him and growled, then moved down the other way, past a dwarf, then a goblin.

  It stopped before another dwarf, and poked at the poor bearded fellow.

  The dwarf kicked out with a dirty and bare foot, hitting the ogrillon, but to little if any effect.

  Down snapped the ogrillon’s hand, grabbing the dwarf by the ankle and lifting the foot once more. How the poor fellow squirmed and tried to kick out with his other foot, but the ogrillon turned into the dwarf, moving too close for the poor fellow to have any real effect.

  With the strength of its ogre heritage, the jailor yanked the leg up and up, and the dwarf squirmed and groaned in pain.

  The jailer looked the poor prisoner in the face, then bit off the dwarf’s toes.

  And how the poor fellow screamed, and the ogrillon, chewing away, giggled with amusement and moved along the line.

  Two goblins and a dwarf were selected, their chains lifted over the hooks above with a long pole that looked much like a fireplace poker. The ogrillon tugged them along, the goblins trailing with whips cracking.

  One of the goblin prisoners, whining, resisted, and with frightful strength, the ogrillon jailer lifted its arm and snapped it down, and the chain rolled with tremendous force, cracking up and jerking the goblin wildly as it snapped like a heavy whip.

  The ogrillon gave a sudden tug, and the goblin, off-balance from the snap, went flying face-first to the floor.

  The goblin jailers leaped atop it, kicking and biting and punching until the boss ogrillon ordered them back.

  Then it started along once more, tugging the three chains, dragging the battered goblin along with ease, to the cart, where the prisoners were roughly piled. Into the tunnel they all went.

  Wulfgar slumped down. He almost envied the three prisoners who were being taken, no doubt, to a horrid and torturous death.

  His turn at whatever macabre carnival lay at the other end of that tunnel would come sooner or later, and the sooner the better, he figured.