transition 01 The Orc King

by R . A. Salvatore

  He knew that Grguch would not cleave him in half, though. The chieftain was angry that the elves had escaped, but the battle could not be called anything but a victory for Clan Karuck. Not only had they stung a few of the elves, but they had sent them running, and had it not been for that troublesome tunnel, the raiding elf band never would have escaped complete and utter ruin.

  The hulking brutes of Clan Karuck could not follow them through that tunnel, however, to Grguch’s ultimate frustration.

  “This will not end here,” he said in Hakuun’s face.

  “Of course not.”

  “I desired a greater statement to be made in our first meeting with these ugly faerie folk.”

  “The fleeing elves wore expressions of terror,” Hakuun replied. “That will spread back to their people.”

  “Right before we fall upon them more decisively.”

  Hakuun paused, expecting the order.

  “Plan it,” said Grguch. “To their very home.”

  Hakuun nodded, and Grguch seemed satisfied with that and turned away, barking orders at the others. Elves were just the sort of cowardly creatures to run away and sneak back for quiet murder, of course, and so the chieftain began setting his defenses and his scouts, leaving Hakuun alone with his thoughts.

  Or so Hakuun believed.

  He flinched then froze when the foot-long serpent landed on his shoulder, and he held his breath, as he always did on those thankfully rare occasions when he found himself in the company of Jaculi—for that was the name that Jack had given him, the name of the winged serpent that Jack wore as a disguise when venturing out of his private workshops.

  “I wish that you had informed me of your departure,” Jack said in Hakuun’s ear.

  “I did not want to disturb you,” Hakuun meekly replied, for it was hard for him to hold his steadiness with Jack’s tongue flicking in his ear, close enough to send one of his forked lightning bolts right through the other side of poor Hakuun’s head.

  “Clan Karuck disturbs me often,” Jack reminded him. “Sometimes I believe that you have told the others of me.”

  “Never that, O Awful One!”

  Jack’s laughter came out as a hiss. When he had first begun his domination and deception of the orcs those decades before, pragmatism alone had ruled his actions. But through the years he had come to accept the truth of it: he liked scaring the wits out of those ugly creatures! Truly, that was one of the few pleasures remaining for Jack the Gnome, who lived a life of simplicity and…And what? Boredom, he knew, and it stung him to admit it to himself. In the secret corners of his heart, Jack understood precisely why he had followed Karuck out of the caves: because his fear of danger, even of death, could not surmount his fear of letting everything stay the same.

  “Why have you ventured out of the Underdark?” he demanded.

  Hakuun shook his head. “If the tidings are true then there is much to be gained here.”

  “For Clan Karuck?”

  “Yes.”

  “For Jaculi?”

  Hakuun gulped and swallowed hard, and Jack hiss-laughed again into his ear.

  “For Gruumsh,” Hakuun dared whisper.

  As weakly as it was said, that still gave Jack pause. For all of his domination of Hakuun’s family, their fanatical service to Gruumsh had never been in question. It had once taken Jack an afternoon of torture to make one of Hakuun’s ancestors—his grandfather, Jack believed, though he couldn’t really remember—utter a single word against Gruumsh, and even then, the priest had soon after passed his duties down to his chosen son and killed himself in Gruumsh’s name.

  As he had in the cave, the gnome wizard sighed. With Gruumsh invoked, he wasn’t about to turn Clan Karuck around.

  “We shall see,” he whispered into Hakuun’s ear, and said to himself as well, a resigned acceptance that sometimes the stubborn orcs had their own agenda.

  Perhaps he could find some amusement and profit out of it, and really, what did he have to lose? He sniffed the air again, and again sensed that something was different.

  “There are many orcs about,” he said.

  “Tens of thousands,” Hakuun confirmed. “Come to the call of King Obould Many-Arrows.”

  Many-Arrows, Jack thought, a name that registered deep in his memories of long ago. He thought of Citadel Fel…Citadel Felb…Fel-something-or-other, a place of dwarves. Jack didn’t much like dwarves. They annoyed him at least as much as did the orcs, with their hammering and stupid chanting that they somehow, beyond all reason, considered song.

  “We shall see,” he said again to Hakuun, and noting that the ugly Grguch was fast approaching, Jack slithered down under Hakuun’s collar to nestle in the small of his back. Every now and then, he flicked his forked tongue against Hakuun’s bare flesh just for the fun of hearing the shaman stutter in his discussion with the beastly Grguch.

  GAUNTLGRYM

  I came from the Underdark, the land of monsters. I lived in Ice-wind Dale, where the wind can freeze a man solid, or a bog can swallow a traveler so quickly that he’ll not likely understand what is happening to him soon enough to let out a cry, unless it is one muffled by loose mud. Through Wulfgar I have glimpsed the horrors of the Abyss, the land of demons, and could there be any place more vile, hate-filled, and tormenting? It is indeed a dangerous existence.

  I have surrounded myself with friends who will fearlessly face those monsters, the wind and the bog, and the demons, with a snarl and a growl, a jaw set and a weapon held high. None would face them more fearlessly than Bruenor, of course.

  But there is something to shake even that one, to shake us all as surely as if the ground beneath our feet began to tremble and break away.

  Change.

  In any honest analysis, change is the basis of fear, the idea of something new, of some paradigm that is unfamiliar, that is beyond our experiences so completely that we cannot even truly predict where it will lead us. Change. Uncertainty.

  It is the very root of our most primal fear—the fear of death—that one change, that one unknown against which we construct elaborate scenarios and “truisms” that may or may not be true at all. These constructions, I think, are an extension of the routines of our lives. We dig ruts with the sameness of our daily paths, and drone and rail against those routines while we, in fact, take comfort in them. We awake and construct our days of habit, and follow the norms we have built fast, solid, and bending only a bit in our daily existence. Change is the unrolled die, the unused sava piece. It is exciting and frightening only when we hold some power over it, only when there is a potential reversal of course, difficult though it may be, within our control.

  Absent that safety line of real choice, absent that sense of some control, change is merely frightening. Terrifying, even.

  An army of orcs does not scare Bruenor. Obould Many-Arrows does not scare Bruenor. But what Obould represents, particularly if the orc king halts his march and establishes a kingdom, and more especially if the other kingdoms of the Silver Marches accept this new paradigm, terrifies Bruenor Battlehammer to the heart of his being and to the core tenets of his faith. Obould threatens more than Bruenor’s kin, kingdom, and life. The orc’s designs shake the very belief system that binds Bruenor’s kin, the very purpose of Mithral Hall, the understanding of what it is to be a dwarf, and the dwarven concept of where the orcs fit into that stable continuum. He would not say it openly, but I suspect that Bruenor hopes the orcs will attack, that they will, in the end, behave in accordance with his expectations of orcs and of all goblinkind. The other possibility is too dissonant, too upsetting, too contrary to Bruenor’s very identity for him to entertain the plausibility, indeed the probability, that it would result in less suffering for all involved.

  I see before me the battle for the heart of Bruenor Battlehammer, and for the hearts of all the dwarves of the Silver Marches.

  Easier by far to lift a weapon and strike dead a known enemy, an orc.

  In all the cultures I have known, wit
h all the races I have walked beside, I have observed that when beset by such dissonance, by events that are beyond control and that plod along at their own pace, the frustrated onlookers often seek out a beacon, a focal point—a god, a person, a place, a magical item—which they believe will set all the world aright. Many are the whispers in Mithral Hall that King Bruenor will fix it, all of it, and make everything as it had been before the onslaught of Obould. Bruenor has earned their respect many times over, and wears the mantle of hero among his kin as comfortably and deservedly as has any dwarf in the history of the clan. For most of the dwarves here, then, King Bruenor has become the beacon and focal point of hope itself.

  Which only adds to Bruenor’s responsibility, because when a frightened people put their faith in an individual, the ramifications of incompetence, recklessness, or malfeasance are multiplied many times over. And so becoming the focus of hope only adds to Bruenor’s tension. Because he knows that it is not true, and that their expectations may well be beyond him. He cannot convince Lady Alustriel of Silverymoon or any of the other leaders, not even King Emerus Warcrown of Citadel Felbarr, to march in force against Obould. And to go out alone with Mithral Hall’s own forces would lead to the wholesale slaughter of Clan Battlehammer. Bruenor understands that he has to wear the mantle not only of hero, but of savior, and it is for him a terrible burden.

  And so Bruenor, too, has engaged in deflection and wild expectation, has found a focal point on which to pin his hopes. The most common phrase he has spoken throughout this winter has been, “Gauntlgrym, elf.”

  Gauntlgrym. It is a legend among Clan Battlehammer and all the Delzoun dwarves. It is the name of their common heritage, an immense city of splendor, wealth, and strength that represents to every descendant of the Delzoun tribes the apex of dwarven civilization. It is, perhaps, history wound with myth, a likely unintentional lionizing of that which once was. As heroes of old take on more gigantic proportions with each passing generation, so too does this other focal point of hope and pride expand.

  “Gauntlgrym, elf,” Bruenor says with steady determination. All of his answers lie there, he is certain. In Gauntlgrym, Bruenor will find a path to unravel the doings of King Obould. In Gauntlgrym, he will discover how to put the orcs back in their holes, and more importantly, how to realign the races of the Silver Marches into proper position, into places that make sense to an old, immovable dwarf.

  He believes that we found this magical kingdom on our journey here from the Sword Coast. He has to believe that this unremarkable sinkhole in a long-dead pass was really the entrance to a place where he can find his answers.

  Otherwise he has to become the answer for his anxious people. And Bruenor knows that their faith is misplaced, for at present, he has no answer to the puzzle that is Obould.

  Thus, he says, “Gauntlgrym, elf,” with the same conviction that a devout believer will utter the name of his savior god.

  We will go to this place, this hole in the ground in a barren pass in the west. We will go and find Gauntlgrym, whatever that may truly mean. Perhaps Bruenor’s instincts are correct—could it be that Moradin told him of this in his days of near death? Perhaps we will find something entirely different, but that will still bring to us, to Bruenor, the clarity he needs to find the answers for Mithral Hall.

  Fixated and desperate as he is, and as his people are, Bruenor doesn’t yet understand that the name he has affixed to our savior is not the point. The point is the search itself, for solutions and for the truth, and not the place he has determined as our goal.

  “Gauntlgrym, elf.”

  Indeed.

  —Drizzt Do’Urden

  CHAPTER

  THE FIRST STRIDES HOME

  The gates of Silverymoon, shining silver and with bars decorated like leafy vines, were closed, a clear signal that things were amiss in the Silver Marches. Stern-faced guards, elf and human, manned all posts along the city’s wall and around a series of small stone houses that served as checkpoints for approaching visitors.

  Catti-brie—limping more profoundly from her days on the road—and Wulfgar noted the tense looks coming their way. The woman merely smiled, though, understanding that her companion, nearly seven feet tall and with shoulders broad and strong, could elicit such trepidation even in normal times. Predictably, those nervous guards relaxed and even offered waves as the pair neared, as they came to recognize the barbarian in his trademark wolf-skin cloak and the woman who had often served as liaison between Mithral Hall and Silverymoon.

  There was no call for the pair to stop or even slow as they passed the stone structures, and the gate parted before them without request. Several of the sentries near that gate and atop the wall even began clapping for Wulfgar and Catti-brie and more than a few “huzzahs” were shouted as they passed.

  “With official word or for pleasure alone?” the commander of the guard asked the couple inside the city gates. He looked at Catti-brie with obvious concern. “Milady, are you injured?”

  Catti-brie replied with a dismissive look, as if it did not matter, but the guard continued, “I will provide a coach for you at once!”

  “I have walked from Mithral Hall through snow and mud,” the woman replied. “I would not deny myself the joy of Silverymoon’s meandering ways.”

  “But…”

  “I will walk,” Catti-brie said. “Do not deny me this pleasure.”

  The guard relented with a bow. “Lady Alustriel will be pleased by your arrival.”

  “And we will be pleased to see her,” said Wulfgar.

  “With official word from King Bruenor?” the commander asked again.

  “With word more personal, but equally pressing,” the barbarian answered. “You will announce us?”

  “The courier is already on his way to the palace.”

  Wulfgar nodded his gratitude. “We will walk the ways of Silvery-moon, a course not direct, and will arrive at Lady Alustriel’s court before the sun has passed its zenith,” he explained. “Pleased we are to be here—truly Silverymoon is a welcomed sight and a welcoming city for road-weary travelers. Our business here might well include you and your men as well, commander….”

  “Kenyon,” said Catti-brie, for she had met the man on many occasions, though briefly at each.

  “I am honored that you remember me, Lady Catti-brie,” he said with another bow.

  “We arrive in search of refugees who have come from Mithral Hall and may have crossed into your fairest of cities,” said Wulfgar.

  “Many have come,” Kenyon admitted. “And many have left. But of course, we are at your disposal, son of Bruenor, on word of Lady Alustriel. Go and secure that word, I bid you.”

  Wulfgar nodded, and he and Catti-brie moved past the guard station.

  With their road-weathered clothes, one with a magical bow as a crutch and the other a giant of a man with a magnificent warhammer strapped across his back, the pair stood out in the city of philosophers and poets, and many a curious look turned their way as they walked the winding, seemingly aimless avenues of the decorated city. As with every visitor to Silverymoon, no matter how many times one traversed the place, their eyes were continually drawn upward, studying the intricate designs and artwork that covered the walls of every building, and upward still, to the tapering spires that topped every structure. Most communities were an expression of utility, with structures built suitable to the elements of their environment and the threats of regional monsters. Cities of commerce were built with wide avenues, port cities with fortified harbors and breakwaters, and frontier towns with thick walls. Silverymoon stood above all of these, for it was an expression of utility, of course, but more than that, an expression of spirit. Security and commerce were facilitated, but they were not paramount to the needs of the soul, where the library was grander than the barracks and the avenues were designed to turn visitors and residents to the most spectacular of views, rather than as efficient straight lines to the marketplace or the rows of houses and mercantiles.
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br />   It was hard to arrive in Silverymoon with urgent business, for few could walk swiftly through those streets, and fewer still could focus the mind sufficiently to defeat the intrusions of beauty.

  Contrary to Wulfgar’s stated expectations, the sun had passed its zenith before Wulfgar and Catti-brie came in sight of Lady Alustriel’s wondrous palace, but that was all right, for the experienced guards had informed the Lady of Silverymoon that such would be the case.

  “The finest humans of Clan Battlehammer,” said the tall woman, coming out from behind the curtains that separated this private section of her palatial audience chamber from the main, public promenade.

  There was no overt malice in her humorous remark, though of course the couple standing before her, the adopted son and daughter of King Bruenor, were the only humans of Clan Battlehammer. Wulfgar smiled and chuckled, but Catti-brie didn’t quite find that level of mirth within her.

  She stared at the great woman, Lady Alustriel, one of the Seven Sisters and leader of magnificent Silverymoon. She only remembered to offer a bow when Wulfgar dipped beside her, and even then, Catti-brie did not lower her head as she bent, staring intently at Alustriel.

  For despite herself, Catti-brie was intimidated. Alustriel was nearly six feet tall and undeniably beautiful, by human standards, by elven standards—by any standards. Even the creatures of the higher planes would be pleased by her presence, Catti-brie knew in her heart, for there was a luminescence and gravity about Alustriel that was somehow beyond mortal existence. Her hair was silver and lustrous, and hung thick to her shoulders, and her eyes could melt a man’s heart or strip him of all courage at her will. Her gown was a simple affair, green with golden stitching, and just a few emeralds sewn for effect. Most kings and queens wore robes far more decorated and elaborate, of course, but Alustriel didn’t need any ornamentation. Any room that she entered was her room to command.