transition 01 The Orc King

by R . A. Salvatore

  “And have you found those refugees to ask them of Cottie and Colson?” asked Catti-brie. “And are Cottie and Colson among those who remain?”

  “Further inquiries are being made,” Alustriel replied. “I am fairly certain that they will only confirm what we have already discovered. As for Cottie and the child, they left.”

  Wulfgar’s shoulders slumped.

  “For Nesmé,” Alustriel explained. “Soon after those refugees arrived, a general call came out from Nesmé. They are rebuilding, and offering homes to any who would go and join with them. The place is secure once more—many of the Knights in Silver stand watch with the Riders of Nesmé to ensure that all of the trolls were destroyed or chased back into the Trollmoors. The city will thrive this coming season, well defended and well supplied.”

  “You are certain that Cottie and Colson are there?” Wulfgar asked.

  “I am certain that they were on the caravan that left for Nesmé, only days after they arrived here in Silverymoon. That caravan arrived, though whether Cottie and the child remained with it through the entirety of the journey, I cannot promise. They stopped at several way stations and villages along the route. The woman could have left at any of those.”

  Wulfgar nodded and looked to Catti-brie, their road clear before them.

  “I could fly you to Nesmé upon my chariot,” Alustriel offered. “But there is another caravan leaving by midday tomorrow, one that will follow the exact route that Cottie rode, and one in need of more guards. The drivers would be thrilled to have Wulfgar and Catti-brie along for the journey, and Nesmé is only a tenday away.”

  “And there is nowhere for Cottie to have gone beyond Nesmé,” Wulfgar reasoned. “That will do, and well.”

  “Very good,” said Alustriel. “I will inform the lead driver.” She and Tapwell took their leave.

  “Our road is clear, then,” said Wulfgar, and he seemed content with that.

  Catti-brie, though, shook her head.

  “The southern road is secured and Nesmé is not so far,” Wulfgar said to her doubting expression.

  “This is not good news, I fear.”

  “How so?”

  “Cottie,” Catti-brie explained. “I happened upon her a few times after my wound kept me in the lower tunnels. She was a broken thing, in spirit and in mind.”

  “You fear that she would harm Colson?” Wulfgar said, his eyes widening with alarm.

  “Never that,” said Catti-brie. “But I fear that she will clutch the girl too tightly, and will not welcome the reaching hands of Wulfgar.”

  “Colson is not her child.”

  “And for some, truth is no more than an inconvenience,” Catti-brie replied.

  “I will take the child,” Wulfgar stated in a tone that left no room for debate.

  Aside from that undeniable determination, it struck Catti-brie that Wulfgar had named Colson as “the child,” and not as “my child.” She studied her friend carefully for a few moments, seeking a deeper read.

  But it was not to be found.

  CHAPTER

  AT DESTINY’S DOOR

  I don’t like this place.”

  A trick of the wind, blowing down a channel between a pair of towering snow dunes, amplified Regis’s soft-spoken words so that they seemed to fill the space around his four dwarf companions. The words blended with the mourn of the cold breeze, a harmony of fear and lament that seemed so fitting in a place called Fell Pass.

  Bruenor, who was too anxious to be anywhere but up front, turned, and appeared as if he was about to scold the halfling. But he didn’t. He just shook his head and left it at that, for how could he deny the undeniable?

  The region was haunted, palpably so. They had felt it on their journey through the pass the previous spring, moving west to east toward Mithral Hall. That same musty aura remained very much alive in Fell Pass, though the surroundings had been transformed by the season. When they’d first come through, the ground was flat and even, a wide and easily-traversed pass between a pair of distant mountain ranges. Perhaps the winds from both of those ranges continually met here in battle, flattening the ground. Deep snow had since fallen in the teeth of those competing winds, forming a series of drifts that resembled the dunes of the Calim Desert, like a series of gigantic, bright white scallop shells evenly spaced perpendicular to the east-west line that marked the bordering mountain ranges. With the melting and refreezing of the late winter, the top surface of the snow had been crusted with ice, but not enough to bear the weight of a dwarf. Thus they had to make their trudging way along the low points of the still-deep snow, through the channels between the dunes.

  Drizzt served as their guide. Running lightly, every now and then chopping a ledge into the snow with one of his scimitars, the drow traversed the dunes as a salmon might skip the waves of a slow river. Up one side and down another he went, pausing at the high points to set his bearings.

  It had taken the party of six—Bruenor, Regis, Drizzt, Thibbledorf Pwent, Cordio, and Torgar Hammerstriker—four days to get to the eastern entrance of Fell Pass. They’d kept up a fine pace considering the snow and the fact that they had to circumvent many of King Obould’s guard posts and a pair of orc caravans. Once in the pass, even with the scallop drifts, they had continued to make solid progress, with Drizzt scaling the dunes and instructing Pwent where to punch through.

  Seven days out, the pace had slowed to a crawl. They were certain they were near to where they’d found the hole that Bruenor believed was the entrance to the legendary dwarven city of Gauntlgrym.

  They had mapped the place well on that journey from the west, and had taken note, as Bruenor had ordered, of all the landmarks—the angles to notable mountain peaks north and south, and such. But with the wintry blanket of snow, Fell Pass appeared so different that Drizzt simply could not be certain. The very real possibility that they might walk right past the hole that had swallowed one of their wagons weighed on all of them, particularly Bruenor.

  And there was something else there, a feeling hanging in the air that had the hairs on the backs of all their necks tingling. The mournful groan of the wind was full of the laments of the dead. Of that, there was no doubt. The cleric, Cordio, had cast divination spells that told him there was indeed something supernatural about the place, some rift or outsider presence. On the journey to Mithral Hall, Bruenor’s priests had urged Drizzt not to call upon Guenhwyvar, for fear of inciting unwanted attention from other extraplanar sources in the process, and once again Cordio had reiterated that point. The Fell Pass, the dwarf priest had assured his companions, was not stable in a planar sense—though even Cordio admitted that he wasn’t really sure what that meant.

  “Ye got anything for us, elf?” Bruenor called up to Drizzt. His gruff voice, full of irritation, echoed off the frozen snow.

  Drizzt came into view atop the drift to the party’s left, the west. He shrugged at Bruenor then stepped forward and began a balanced slide down the glistening white dune. He kept his footing perfectly, and slipped right past the halfling and dwarves to the base of the drift on their other side, where he used its sharp incline to halt his momentum.

  “I have snow,” he replied. “As much snow as you could want, extending as far as I can see to the west.”

  “We’re goin’ to have to stay here until the melt, ain’t we?” Bruenor grumbled. He put his hands on his hips and kicked his heavy boot through the icy wall of one mound.

  “We will find it,” Drizzt replied, but his words were buried by the sudden grumbling of Thibble dorf Pwent.

  “Bah!” the battlerager snorted, and he banged his hands together and stomped about, crunching the icy snow beneath his heavy steps. While the others wore mostly furs and layers of various fabrics, Pwent was bedecked in his traditional Gutbuster battle mail, a neck-to-toe suit of overlapping ridged metal plates, spiked at all the appropriate strike zones: fists, elbows, shoulders, and knees. His helmet, too, carried a tall, barbed spike, one that had skewered many an orc in its da
y.

  “Ye got no magic to help me?” Bruenor demanded of Cordio.

  The cleric shrugged helplessly. “The riddles of this maze extend beyond the physical, me king,” he tried to explain. “Questions asked in spells’re getting me nothin’ but more questions. I’m knowin’ that we’re close, but more because I’m feeling that rift with me every spellcasting.”

  “Bah!” Pwent roared. He lowered his head and rammed through the nearest snow drift, disappearing behind a veil of white that fell behind him as he plowed through to the channel on the other side.

  “We’ll find it, then,” said Torgar Hammerstriker. “If it was here when ye came through, then here it is still. And if me king’s thinking it’s Gauntlgrym, then nothin’s stopping meself from seein’ that place.”

  “Aye and huzzah!” Cordio agreed.

  They all jumped as the snow erupted from up ahead. Drizzt’s scimitars appeared in his hands as if they had been there all along.

  From that break in the dune emerged a snow-encrusted Thibbledorf Pwent, roaring still. He didn’t slow, but plowed through the dune across the way, crunching through the icy wall with ease and disappearing from sight.

  “Will ye stop it, ye durned fool?” Bruenor chastised, but Pwent was already gone.

  “I am certain that we’re near the entrance,” Drizzt assured Bruenor, and the drow slid his blades away. “We are the right distance from the mountains north and south. Of that, I am sure.”

  “We are close,” Regis confirmed, still glancing all around as if he expected a ghost to leap out and throttle him at any moment. In that regard, Regis knew more than the others, for he had been the one who had gone into the hole after the wagon those months before, and who had encountered, down in the dark, what he believed to be the ghost of a long-dead dwarf.

  “Then we’ll just keep looking,” said Bruenor. “And if it stays in hiding under the snow, its secrets won’t be holding, for the melt’s coming soon.”

  “Bah!” they heard Pwent growl from behind the dune to the east and they all scrambled, expecting him to burst through in their midst, and likely with that lethal helmet spike lowered.

  The dune shivered as he hit it across the way, and he roared again fiercely. But his pitch changed suddenly, his cry going from defiance to surprise. Then it faded rapidly, as if the dwarf had fallen away.

  Bruenor looked at Drizzt. “Gauntlgrym!” the dwarf declared.

  Torgar and Cordio dived for the point on the drift behind which they had heard Pwent’s cry. They punched through and flung the snow out behind them, working like a pair of dogs digging for a bone. As they weakened the integrity of that section of the drift, it crumbled down before them, complicating their dig. Still, within moments, they came to the edge of a hole in the ground, and the remaining pile of snow slipped in, but seemed to fill the crevice.

  “Pwent?” Torgar called into the snow, thinking his companion buried alive.

  He leaned over the edge, Cordio stabilizing his feet, and plunged his hand down into the snow pile. That blockage, though, was neither solid nor thick, and had merely packed in to seal the shaft below. When Torgar’s hand broke the integrity of the pack, the collected snow broke and fell away, leaving the dwarf staring down into a cold and empty shaft.

  “Pwent?” he called more urgently, realizing that his companion had fallen quite far.

  “That’s it!” Bruenor yelled, rushing up between the kneeling pair. “The wagon went in right there!” As he made the claim, he fell to his knees and brushed aside some more of the snow, revealing a rut that had been made by the wagon wheel those months before. “Gauntlgrym!”

  “And Pwent fell in,” Drizzt reminded him.

  The three dwarves turned to see the drow and Regis feeding out a line of rope that Drizzt had already tied around his waist.

  “Get the line, boys!” Bruenor yelled, but Cordio and Torgar were already moving anyway, rushing to secure the rope and find a place to brace their heavy boots.

  Drizzt dropped down beside the ledge and tried to pick a careful route, but a cry came up from far below, followed by a high-pitched, sizzling roar that sounded unlike anything any of them had ever heard, like a cross between the screech of an eagle and the hiss of a gigantic lizard.

  Drizzt rolled over the lip, turning and setting his hands, and Bruenor dived to add his strength to the rope brace.

  “Quickly!” Drizzt instructed as the dwarves began to let out the line. Trusting in them, the drow let go of the lip and dropped from sight.

  “There’s a ledge fifteen feet down,” Regis called, scrambling past the dwarves to the hole. He moved as if he would go right over, but he stopped suddenly, just short of the lip. There he held as the seconds passed, his body frozen by memories of his first journey into the place that Bruenor called Gauntlgrym.

  “I’m on the ledge,” Drizzt called up, drawing him from his trance. “I can make my way, but keep ready on the rope.”

  Regis peered over and could just make out the form of the drow in the darkness below.

  “Ye be guidin’ us, Rumblebelly,” Bruenor instructed, and Regis found the fortitude to nod.

  A loud crash from far below startled him again, though, followed by a cry of pain and another otherworldly shriek. More noise arose, metal scraping on stone, hissing snakes and eagle screams, and Dwarvish roars of defiance.

  Then a cry of absolute terror, Pwent’s cry, shook them all to their spines, for when had Thibble dorf Pwent ever cried out in terror?

  “What do ye see?” Bruenor called out to Regis.

  The halfling peered in and squinted. He could just make out Drizzt, inching down the wall below the ledge. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Regis realized it wasn’t really a ledge, or a wall, but rather a stalagmite mound that had grown up beside the side of the cave below. He looked back to Drizzt, and the drow dropped from sight. The dwarves behind him gave a yelp and fell over backward as the rope released.

  “Set it!” Bruenor yelled at Torgar and Cordio, and the dwarf king charged for the hole, yelling, “What do ye see, Rumblebelly?”

  Regis pulled back and turned, shaking his head, but Bruenor wasn’t waiting for an explanation anyway. The dwarf dived to the ground and grabbed up the rope, and without hesitation, flung himself over the lip, rapidly descending into the gloom. Back from the hole, Torgar and Cordio grunted from the strain and tried hard to dig their boots in.

  Regis swallowed. He heard a grunt and a shriek from far below. Images of a dwarf ghost haunted him and told him to run far away. But Drizzt was down there, Bruenor was down there, Pwent was down there.

  The halfling swallowed again and rushed to the hole. He fell to the ground atop the rope and with a glance back at Torgar and Cordio, he disappeared from sight.

  As soon as he hit the ledge, Drizzt recognized it for what it was. The tall stalagmite mound rose up at an angle, melding with the sheerer stone of the wall behind him.

  Even though he was only fifteen feet down from the lip, Drizzt’s sensibilities switched to those of the person he used to be, a creature of the Underdark. He started down tentatively, feeding out the rope behind him, for just a couple of steps.

  His eyes focused in the gloom, and he saw the contours of the stalagmite and the floor some twenty feet below. On that floor rested the broken remains of the wagon that had been lost in the journey east those months before. Also on that floor, Drizzt saw a familiar boot, hard and wrapped in metal. Below and to the left, he heard a muffled cry, and the sound of metal scraping on stone, as if an armored dwarf was being dragged.

  With a flick of his wrist, Drizzt disengaged himself from the rope, and so balanced was he as he ran down the side of the stalagmite that he not only did not bend low and use his hands, but he drew out both his blades as he descended. He hit the floor in a run, thinking to head off down the narrow tunnel he had spotted ahead and to the right. But his left-hand scimitar, Twinkle, glowed with a blue light, and the drow’s keen eyes and ears picked out a whisper of m
ovement and a whisper of sound over by the side wall.

  Skidding to a stop, Drizzt whirled to meet the threat, and his eyes went wide indeed when he saw the creature, unlike anything he had ever known, coming out fast for him.

  Half again Drizzt’s height from head to tail, it charged on strong back legs, like a bipedal lizard, back hunched low and tail suspended behind it, counterbalancing its large head—if it could even be called a head. It seemed no more than a mouth with three equidistant mandibles stretched out wide. Black tusks as large as Drizzt’s hands curled inward at the tips of those mandibles, and Drizzt could make out rows of long, sharp teeth running back down its throat, a trio of ridged lines.

  Even stranger came the glow from the creature’s eyes—three of them—each centered on the flap of mottled skin stretched wide between the respective mandibles. The creature bore down on the drow like some triangular-mouthed snake unhinging its jaw to swallow its prey.

  Drizzt started out to the left then reversed fast as the creature swerved to follow. Even with his speed-enhancing anklets, though, the drow could not get far enough back to the right to avoid the turning creature.

  The mandibles snapped powerfully, but hit only air as Drizzt leaped and tumbled forward, over the top mandible. He slashed down hard with both hands as he went over, and used the contact to push himself even higher as he executed a twist and brought his feet fast under him. The creature issued a strange roaring, hissing protest—a fitting, otherworldly sound for an otherworldly beast, Drizzt thought.

  Tucking and turning, Drizzt planted his feet against the side of the creature’s shoulder and kicked out, but the beast was more solid than he’d thought. His strike did no more than bend it away from him at the shoulder as he went out to the side. And that bend, of course, again turned the terrible jaws his way.

  But Drizzt flew backward with perfect balance and awareness. As the beast swung around he cut his scimitars across, one-two, scoring hits on the thick muscle and skin of the jaws’ connecting flap.