Rise of the King

by R. A. Salvatore

  “Terror,” Wulfgar echoed with a laugh. “You are full of surprises, my friend.”

  “The orcs agree,” said Regis. He tugged Wulfgar’s arm as they passed another side passage, and down that one they ran.

  Soon after, they went under an archway, exiting into a wider, sloping and more natural tunnel.

  Wulfgar looked to Regis, but the halfling was beyond the area he had scouted. To the left, the tunnel deepened, a fairly steep decline.

  “Right, then,” Wulfgar reasoned, seeing the halfling’s perplexed expression. “We are quite deep enough. I can barely see as it is.”

  “That direction might bring us right back to the goblins,” Regis warned, but Wulfgar shrugged, willing to take the chance.

  To the right they went, climbing steadily, but barely had they gone a hundred strides and around one long corner when they came upon a mob of monsters, orcs and ogrillon, too many to fight.

  And so the chase was on anew.

  In a few moments, the pair passed the side passage again, and didn’t dare turn back for fear of getting caught between the two groups. Down they ran, and the glowing lichens grew sparser and the tunnel dimmer.

  “I am running blind,” Wulfgar warned, and he was only exaggerating a little bit, Regis feared. The big man was slowing.

  But they couldn’t stop and they couldn’t turn back!

  Regis pulled him down another side tunnel, this one running level at least, and glowing a bit more, comparatively, with illuminating lichen. Perhaps the orcs would run past, perhaps the ogrillons would throw up their fat hands in frustration and turn about.

  They sped along, Regis looking back as much as forward. He turned back at the last instant, and a good thing he did!

  “Wulfgar!” he cried, grabbing the man’s arm and dropping to the stone. Still Wulfgar pulled him along for another stride, skidding to a stop as he started to look down at his friend.

  Started to look down, but did not continue, for even in the nearly nonexistent light, Wulfgar understood Regis’s cry.

  The tunnel ended right at Wulfgar’s toes, and in a deep, deep drop. They stood on the edge of a vast cavern, its floor far below.

  They heard the monstrous pursuit, closing fast.

  Regis glanced all around. “Always an answer,” he whispered, more to himself than to Wulfgar.

  “Aha!” he cried when he looked past Wulfgar, to the left, to a small ledge that went only a few steps along the rim of the chamber.

  “Go,” he bade the man. “Stay against the wall.”

  Wulfgar stared that way doubtfully, barely discerning the ledge, but understanding that it only went a stride or two.

  Not far behind, an orc spotted them and screamed.

  “It won’t work,” Wulfgar insisted. “We are seen!”

  “Go,” Regis told him and shoved him. “Just go!”

  “It only travels a short way,” Wulfgar protested. “Better to fight them …”

  “That’s all we need,” Regis implored him. “Just go!”

  With no options before him, Wulfgar eased his way along the narrow ledge. Barely five feet along it, he had nowhere left to go. He looked back to Regis, to see his friend standing in the larger corridor.

  An orc cried out, and the voice was not far at all!

  Regis growled back at it. “I will kill you!”

  The halfling sidled onto the ledge beside Wulfgar, his back to the wall. “This is how I killed the ogrillon torturer,” he explained to the confused barbarian, and he held up a vial of some sort.

  Regis winked and as the footfalls of the pursuit closed in, the halfling peeked around the corner, came up straight, took a deep breath, then casually tossed the vial back into the main passageway. The glass shattered when it hit the stone floor, and Wulfgar noted a sudden and brief shimmer.

  “What?” he started to ask, but was interrupted by the surprised shout of an orc, followed by the sound of a heavy tumble and more voices calling out in surprise.

  The orc slid right past Regis, pitching from the ledge and over the cliff. And behind it came the others, all in a tangle, clawing futilely at the floor, but unable to break their unexpected slides. One stabbed hard with a dagger, and in the dim illumination, Wulfgar noted a shower of tiny sparkles.

  But even that scrape didn’t slow the creature enough to prevent it from pitching over the ledge.

  Over they went, first the orc, then another, and a third wrestling with an ogrillon. And more behind and more behind them, slipping and falling, sliding and flying out into the open cavern.

  The chamber before them echoed with screams, and the sickening sounds of flesh and bone crashing down to unyielding stone.

  Then all was quiet, so quickly, save a single whimpered cry far down in the cavern, for one of the creatures, at least, had apparently survived the fall.

  “Come along,” Regis said. “Dive back the other way.” Around the corner went the halfling, bending low and pushing off into a headfirst slide away from the ledge.

  Wulfgar came to the edge tentatively and bent low, touching the ground.

  Ice.

  With a glance back at the drop, the barbarian similarly dived and slid to safety, to Regis, waiting for him on the other side of the slippery trap.

  “The ogrillon jailer?” Wulfgar asked.

  “I was one of the goblins, of course,” Regis explained. “I shot the other with a crossbow dart, and the ogrillon took exception.”

  “He charged at you,” Wulfgar reasoned, trying to remember what little he had seen of that scene, back in the prison when he had been on the cart under a near-dead goblin.

  “I was standing back by the middle of the room.”

  “Before the pit,” said Wulfgar, catching on. “And so you created your … ice.” He looked back at the trap behind them. “And the ogrillon torturer slipped and fell and was carried into the pit.”

  “With his pet umber hulks,” the halfling added, and he started back along the corridor, Wulfgar at his side.

  “Umber hulks?” Wulfgar asked incredulously.

  “Small ones,” Regis explained. “Stuck in a metal-floored and metal-walled pit, and quite out of their minds with rage. Their reaction to the ogrillon flying in at them made me believe that he had not treated his pets very well.”

  Wulfgar digested it all with his head shaking and a grin set upon his face. “You fed them the other goblin, too?”

  “Of course,” Regis replied dryly. “I treat my pets well.”

  “Grave robbing?” Bungalow Thump asked as soon as the foursome were brought before King Connerad, before they had even been formally announced and King Connerad had greeted them. “What’re ye thinking, Little Arr Arr?”

  “Well met once more, Drizzt Do’Urden,” Connerad said. “And yerself—mayhap—Reginald Roundshield, though it seems ye’ve a bit o’ explaining to do.”

  “Nothing for me, good king?” asked the woman standing beside the drow, and Athrogate chuckled.

  Connerad looked at her curiously, not quite knowing what to make of her.

  “Ye’ll get yer say,” promised the female dwarf flanking the king on the right, who wore the garb of a high-ranking officer in the Mithral Hall garrison.

  “Ye sneaked into King Bruenor’s own grave when ye were here as our guest?” Bungalow Thump asked incredulously.

  “Ah, but King Emerus is sure to be disappointed in ye,” said the woman, General Dagnabbet.

  “King Bruenor’s grave in Mithral Hall is empty,” the dwarf they knew as Reginald Roundshield sternly replied, and he stared right at Bungalow Thump as he declared, “King Bruenor’s grave in Mithral Hall has never been anything but empty.”

  The battlerager stared back at him hard, and seemed on the edge of a tirade, clearly taking the claim as some sort of an insult.

  But that didn’t stop Bruenor. “Ain’t that the truth, King Connerad?” he asked.

  Connerad looked to Drizzt, who of course, had been in on the ruse when Bruenor had secretl
y abdicated the throne to Connerad’s father, Banak Brawnanvil, those many years before.

  The drow nodded slightly in reply.

  “Bruenor fell in Gauntlgrym,” Bruenor declared. “Aye, ye’ve heared the whispers, and know ’em to be true. Yer King Bruenor found Gauntlgrym, and there he fell and there he was buried.”

  The trio—and more than a few dwarf guards about—looked to each other in confusion and excitement.

  “So ye went out from here to Gauntlgrym,” King Connerad said to the dwarf. “And there you robbed the grave o’ King Bruenor?”

  “I didn’t rob anything,” the dwarf replied.

  “Surely the helm you wear, and the shield and axe—aye, I’d know that axe as well as if it was me own …” Connerad said.

  “Aye, and that’s Bruenor’s helm or I’m a bearded gnome,” said Bungalow Thump, using one of his old king’s favorite lines for effect.

  “I didn’t rob anything,” Bruenor insisted, and he came forward slowly, shaking his head. He put his hands on the arms of Connerad’s throne, drawing a gasp from both dwarves flanking the king. But they didn’t intervene as Bruenor said again, “I didn’t rob anything.” He moved closer to Connerad, staring the king in the eye, moving so close that their long noses almost touched.

  Very deliberately, Bruenor went on. “I … taked … what … was … me … own.”

  King Connerad tried to digest that for a long while, as did the others, and gradually, Bruenor backed off.

  Connerad looked to Drizzt, his expression showing the poor dwarf to be fully at a loss.

  The drow nodded again, slowly and deliberately.

  “Ye’ve seen it before,” Bruenor insisted. “When I gived me throne to Gandalug.”

  King Connerad clearly didn’t know what to make of any of this. He looked to Bruenor, then to Drizzt, and back to the dwarf.

  “Bwahaha!” Athrogate roared at the show.

  Clarity finally came to the dwarf king when he settled his gaze once more on the woman. He had looked into Bruenor’s eyes, and yes that had sparked some recognition, but now, in that context, looking at the woman, King Connerad knew.

  In his heart, he knew the truth.

  “Catti-brie,” he mouthed, barely able to push the words past the lump in his throat.

  The woman smiled.

  “By the gods’ hairy arses,” the stupefied Bungalow Thump muttered, and General Dagnabbet gasped.

  Exhausted, Wulfgar and Regis sat against some corridor wall in some area they did not know, and with tons and tons of rock hanging over their heads, for they had traveled much lower in the unending maze of the Underdark. Soon after the halfling’s deadly trap at the ledge, they had encountered yet another band of stubborn enemies, and had run on for what seemed like hours.

  Finally, in a mossy cavern, they had found a reprieve, but it would not last long, they knew, and determined enemies were not far away.

  “I pray that you have many more tricks,” Wulfgar said.

  “So do I,” the halfling answered.

  “And many more potions.”

  “Few,” Regis answered. “So few. If we find a safe spot, I will try to brew some more, perhaps.”

  “Is there a safe spot to be found in any of these dark places?”

  The halfling didn’t answer, but he did tap the barbarian’s arm, and handed over a large piece of salted meat. They had rations, at least, and enough for a party much larger, for Regis had carried almost all of them for the group in his magical, weightless pouch.

  “Do you think the others escaped?”

  Wulfgar smiled as he recalled the ranting of the orc shaman who had come to him before he had been dragged out to the carnival.

  “Of course,” he answered. “There are not enough orc-kind in the world to defeat our friends.”

  “Or us,” Regis answered hopefully, but all that came back at him was a long silence.

  And indeed, sitting in a tunnel, lost in the Underdark and with hordes of monsters hunting them, his optimism seemed quite out of place.

  “We’ll not get out of this alive, you know,” Wulfgar told him a long while later.

  “You seem content with that.” Regis didn’t mean it as an accusation, but it surely sounded like one.

  “Borrowed time,” the barbarian explained with a resigned shrug. “I was, and should be, long dead.”

  Regis managed a smile—there was truth to Wulfgar’s words, of course, but the halfling wasn’t sure he could agree with the sentiment. He thought of his second life, of Doregardo of the Grinning Ponies and mostly of Donnola Topolino. He imagined the potential adventures, the grand love, he had yet ahead of him, the life he might have known.

  “Maybe we’ll find our way,” he said, his voice thick with lament.

  Wulfgar dropped a comforting hand on his shoulder.