This was their domain, and all the rumors about the Evermoors the companions had heard, and had laughed away in the comfort of The Fuzzy Quarterstaff, could not have prepared them for the reality that suddenly descended upon them when they entered the place.
Bruenor had estimated that their party could clear the moors in five days if they kept a strong pace. That first day, they actually covered the necessary distance, but the dwarf had not foreseen the continual backtracking they would have to do to avoid the bogs. While they had marched for more than twenty miles that day, they were less than ten from where they started into the moors.
Still, they encountered no trolls, nor any other kind of fiend, and they set their camp that night under a guise of quiet optimism.
“Ye’ll keep to the guard?” Bruenor asked Drizzt, aware that the Drow alone had the heightened senses they would need to survive the night.
Drizzt nodded. “The night through,” he replied, and Bruenor didn’t argue. The dwarf knew that none of them would get any sleep that night, whether on guard, or not.
Darkness came suddenly and completely. Bruenor, Regis, and Wulfgar couldn’t see their own hands if they held them inches from their faces. With the blackness came the sounds of an awakening nightmare. Sucking, sloshing footsteps closed in all about them. Smoke mixed with the nighttime fog and rolled in around the trunks of the leafless trees. The wind did not increase, but the intensity of its foul stench did, and it carried now the groans of the tormented spirits of the moors’ wretched dwellers.
“Gather your gear,” Drizzt whispered to his friends.
“What do ye see, then?” Bruenor asked softly.
“Nothing directly,” came the reply. “But I feel them about, as do you all. We cannot let them find us sitting. We must move among them to keep them from gathering about us.”
“My legs ache,” complained Regis. “And my feet have swelled. I don’t even know if I can get my boots back on!”
“Help him, boy,” Bruenor told Wulfgar. “The elf’s right. We’ll carry ye if we must, Rumblebelly, but we’re not staying!”
Drizzt took the lead, and at times he had to hold Bruenor’s hand behind him, and so on down the line to Wulfgar in the rear, to keep his companions from stumbling from the path he had picked.
They could all sense the dark shapes moving around them, smell the foulness of the wretched trolls. Clearly viewing the host gathering about them, Drizzt alone understood just how precarious their position was, and he pulled his friends as fast as he could.
Luck was with them, for the moon came up then, transforming the fog into a ghostly silver blanket, and revealing to all the friends the pressing danger. Now with the movement visible on every side, the friends ran.
Lanky, lurching forms loomed up in the mist beside them, clawed fingers stretching out to snag at them as they rushed past. Wulfgar moved up to Drizzt’s side, swatting the trolls aside with great sweeps of Aegis-fang, while the drow concentrated on keeping them going in the right direction.
For hours they ran, and still the trolls came on. Beyond all feelings of exhaustion, past the ache, and then the numbness in their limbs, the friends ran with the knowledge of the certain horrible death that would befall them if they faltered for even a second, their fear overruling their bodies’ cries of defeat. Even Regis, too fat and soft, and with legs too short for the road, matched the pace and pushed those before him to greater speeds.
Drizzt understood the futility of their course. Wulfgar’s hammer invariably slowed, and they all stumbled more and more with each minute that passed. The night had many hours more, and even the dawn did not guarantee an end to the pursuit. How many miles could they run? When would they turn down a path that ended in a bottomless bog, with a hundred trolls at their backs?
Drizzt changed his strategy. No longer seeking only to flee, he began looking for a defensible piece of ground. He spied a small mound, ten feet high perhaps, with a steep, almost sheer, grade on the three sides he could see from his angle. A solitary sapling grew up its face. He pointed the place out to Wulfgar, who understood the plan immediately and veered in. Two trolls loomed up to block their way, but Wulfgar, snarling in rage, charged to meet them. Aegis-fang slammed down in furious succession again and again, and the other three companions were able to slip behind the barbarian and make it to the mound.
Wulfgar spun away and rushed to join them, the stubborn trolls close in pursuit and now joined by a long line of their wretched kin.
Surprisingly nimble, even despite his belly, Regis scampered up the tree to the top of the mound. Bruenor, though, not built for such climbing, struggled for every inch.
“Help him!” Drizzt, his back to the tree and scimitars readied, cried to Wulfgar. “Then you get up! I shall hold them.”
Wulfgar’s breath came in labored gasps, and a line of bright blood was etched across his forehead. He stumbled into the tree and started up behind the dwarf. Roots pulled away under their combined weight, and they seemed to lose an inch for every one they gained. Finally, Regis was able to clasp Bruenor’s hand and help him over the top, and Wulfgar, with the way clear before him, moved to join them. With their own immediate safety assured, they looked back in concern for their friend.
Drizzt battled three of the monsters, and more piled in behind. Wulfgar considered dropping back from his perch halfway up the tree and dying at the drow’s side, but Drizzt, periodically looking back over his shoulder to check his friends’ progress, noted the barbarian’s hesitation and read his mind. “Go!” he shouted. “Your delay does not help!”
Wulfgar had to pause and consider the source of the command. His trust of, and respect for, Drizzt overcame his instinctive desire to rush back into the fray, and he grudgingly pulled himself up to join Regis and Bruenor on the small plateau.
Trolls moved to flank the drow, their filthy claws reaching out at him from every side. He heard his friends, all three, imploring him to break away and join them, but knew that the monsters had already slipped in behind to cut off his retreat.
A smile widened across his face. The light in his eyes flared.
He rushed into the main host of trolls, away from the unattainable mound and his horrified friends.
The three companions had little time to dwell on the drow’s fortunes, however, for they soon found themselves assailed from every side as the trolls came relentlessly on, scratching to get at them.
Each friend stood to defend his own side. Luckily, the climb up the back of the mound proved even steeper, at some places inverted, and the trolls could not effectively get at them from behind.
Wulfgar was most deadly, knocking a troll from the mound’s side with each smack of his mighty hammer. But before he could even catch his breath, another had taken its place.
Regis, slapping with his little mace, was less effective. He banged with all his strength on fingers, elbows, even heads as the trolls edged in closer, but he could not dislodge the clutching monsters from their perch. Invariably, as each one crested the mound, either Wulfgar or Bruenor had to twist away from his own fight and swat the beast away.
They knew that the first time they failed with a single stroke, they would find a troll up and ready beside them on the top of the mound.
Disaster struck after only a few minutes. Bruenor spun to aid Regis as yet another monster pulled its torso over the top. The dwarf’s axe cut in cleanly.
Too cleanly. It sliced into the troll’s neck and drove right through, beheading the beast. But though the head flew from the mound, the body kept coming. Regis fell back, too horrified to react.
“Wulfgar!” Bruenor cried out.
The barbarian spun, not slowing long enough to gape at the headless foe, and slammed Aegis-fang into the thing’s chest, blasting it from the mound.
Two more hands grabbed at the lip. From Wulfgar’s side, another troll had crawled more than halfway over the crest. And behind them, where Bruenor had been, a third was up and straddling the helpless halfling.
They didn’t know where to start. The mound was lost. Wulfgar even considered leaping down into the throng below to die as a true warrior by killing as many of his enemies as he could, and also so that he would not have to watch as his two friends were torn to pieces.
But suddenly, the troll above the halfling struggled with its balance, as though something was pulling it from behind. One of its legs buckled and then it fell backward into the night.
Drizzt Do’Urden pulled his blade from the thing’s calf as it went over him, then deftly rolled to the top of the mound, regaining his feet right beside the startled halfling. His cloak streamed in tatters, and lines of blood darkened his clothing in many places.
But he still wore his smile, and the fire in his lavender eyes told his friends that he was far from finished. He darted by the gaping dwarf and barbarian and hacked at the next troll, quickly dispatching it from the side.
“How?” Bruenor asked, gawking, though he knew as he rushed back to Regis that no answer would be forth-coming from the busy drow.
Drizzt’s daring move down below had gained him an advantage over his enemies. Trolls were twice his size, and those behind the ones he fought had no idea that he was coming through. He knew that he had done little lasting damage to the beasts—the stab wounds he drove in as he passed would quickly heal, and the limbs he severed would grow back—but the daring maneuver gained him the time he needed to clear the rushing horde and circle out into the darkness. Once free in the black night, he had picked his path back to the mound, cutting through the distracted trolls with the same blazing intensity. His agility alone had saved him when he got to the base, for he virtually ran up the mound’s side, even over the back of a climbing troll, too quickly for the surprised monsters to grasp him.
The defense of the mound solidified now. With Bruenor’s wicked axe, Wulfgar’s pounding hammer, and Drizzt’s whirring scimitars each holding a side, the climbing trolls had no easy route to the top. Regis stayed in the middle of the small plateau, alternately darting in to help his friends whenever a troll got too close to gaining a hold.
Still the trolls came on, the throng below growing with every minute. The friends understood clearly the inevitable outcome of this encounter. The only chance lay in breaking the gathering of monsters below to give them a route of escape, but they were too engaged in simply beating back their latest opponents to search for the solution.
Except for Regis.
It happened almost by accident. A writhing arm, severed by one of Drizzt’s blades, crawled into the center of their defenses. Regis, utterly revolted, whacked at the thing wildly with his mace. “It won’t die!” he screamed as the thing kept wriggling and grabbing at the little weapon. “It won’t die! Someone hit it! Someone cut it! Someone burn it!”
The other three were too busy to react to the halfling’s desperate pleas, but Regis’s last statement, cried out in dismay, brought an idea into his own head. He jumped upon the writhing limb, pinning it down for a moment while he fumbled in his pack for his tinderbox and flint.
His shaking hands could hardly strike the stone, but the tiniest spark did its killing work. The troll arm ignited and crackled into a crisp ball. Not about to miss the opportunity before him, Regis scooped up the fiery limb and ran over to Bruenor. He held back the dwarf’s axe, telling Bruenor to let his latest opponent get above the line of the ridge.
When the troll hoisted itself up, Regis put the fire in its face. The head virtually exploded into flame and, screaming in agony, the troll dropped from the mound bringing the killing fire to its own companions.
Trolls did not fear the blade or the hammer. Wounds inflicted by these weapons healed quickly, and even a severed head would soon grow back. Such encounters actually helped propagate the wretched species, for a troll would regrow a severed arm, and a severed arm would regrow another troll! More than one hunting cat or wolf had feasted upon a troll carcass only to bring its own horrible demise when a new monster grew in its belly.
But even trolls were not completely without fear. Fire was their bane, and the trolls of Evermoor were more than familiar with it. Burns could not regenerate and a troll killed by flames was dead forever. Almost as if it were purposely in the gods’ design, fire clung to a troll’s dry skin as readily as to dry kindling.
The monsters on Bruenor’s side of the mound fled away or fell in charred lumps. Bruenor patted the halfling on the back as he observed the welcomed spectacle, hope returning to his weary eyes.
“Wood” reasoned Regis. “We need wood.”
Bruenor slipped his pack off his back. “Ye’ll get yer wood, Rumblebelly,” he laughed, pointing at the sapling running up the side of the mound before him. “And there’s oil in me pouch!” He ran across to Wulfgar. “The tree, boy! Help the halfling,” was the only explanation he gave as he moved in front of the barbarian.
As soon as Wulfgar turned around and saw Regis fumbling with a flask of oil, he understood his part in the plan. No trolls as yet had returned to that side of the mound, and the stench of the burned flesh at the base was nearly overwhelming. With a single heave, the muscled barbarian tore the sapling from its roots and brought it up to Regis. Then he went back and relieved the dwarf, allowing Bruenor to put his axe to use in slicing up the wood.
Soon flaming missiles lit the sky all about the mound and fell into the troll horde with killing sparks popping all about. Regis ran to the lip of the mound with another flask of oil and sprinkled it down on the closest trolls, sending them into a terrified frenzy. The rout was on, and between the stampede and the quick spread of flames, the area below the mound was cleared in minutes, and not another movement did the friends see for the few remaining hours of the night, save the pitiful writhing of the mass of limbs, and the twitchings of burned torsos. Fascinated, Drizzt wondered how long the things would survive with their cauterized wounds that would not regenerate.
As exhausted as they were, none of the companions managed any sleep that night. With the breaking of dawn, and no sign of trolls around them, though the filthy smoke hung heavily in the air, Drizzt insisted that they move along.
They left their fortress and walked, because they had no other choice, and because they refused to yield where others might have faltered. They encountered nothing immediately, but could sense the eyes of the moors upon them still, a hushed silence that foretold disaster.
Later that morning, as they plodded along on the mossy turf, Wulfgar stopped suddenly and heaved Aegis-fang into a small copse of blackened trees. The bog bloke, for that is what the barbarian’s target truly was, crossed its arms defensively before it, but the magical warhammer hit with enough power to split the monster down the middle. Its frightened companions, nearly a dozen, fled their similar positions and disappeared into the moors.
“How could you know?” Regis asked, for he was certain that the barbarian had barely considered the clump of trees.
Wulfgar shook his head, honestly not knowing what had compelled him. Drizzt and Bruenor both understood, and approved. They were all operating on instinct now, their exhaustion rendering their minds long past the point of consistent, rational thought. Wulfgar’s reflexes remained at their level of fine precision. He might have caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, so minuscule that his conscious mind hadn’t even registered it. But his instinct for survival had reacted. The dwarf and the drow looked to each other for confirmation, not too surprised this time at the barbarian’s continued show of maturity as a warrior.
The day became unbearably hot, adding to their discomfort. All they wanted to do was fall down and let their weariness overcome them.
But Drizzt pulled them onward, searching for another defensible spot, though he doubted that he could find one as well-designed as the last. Still, they had enough oil remaining to get them through another night if they could hold a small line long enough to put the flames to their best advantage. Any hillock, perhaps even a copse of tree, would suffice.
&
nbsp; What they found instead was another bog, this one stretching as far as they could see in every direction, miles perhaps. “We could turn to the north,” Drizzt suggested to Bruenor. “We may have come far enough east by now to break clear of the moors beyond the influence of Nesme.”
“The night’ll catch us along the bank,” Bruenor observed grimly.
“We could cross,” Wulfgar suggested.
“Trolls take to water?” Bruenor asked Drizzt, intrigued by the possibilities. The drow shrugged.
“Worth a try, then!” Bruenor proclaimed.
“Gather some logs,” instructed Drizzt. “Take no time to bind them together—we can do that out on the water, if we must.”
Floating the logs as buoys by their sides, they slipped out into the cold, still waters of the huge bog.
Though they weren’t thrilled with the sucking, muddy sensation that pulled at them with each step, Drizzt and Wulfgar found that they could walk in many places, propelling the makeshift raft steadily along. Regis and Bruenor, too short for the water, lay across the logs. Eventually they grew more comfortable with the eerie hush of the bog, and accepted the water route as a quiet rest.
The return to reality was rude indeed.
The water around them exploded, and three troll-like forms hit them in sudden ambush. Regis, nearly asleep across his log, was thrown off it and into the water. Wulfgar took a hit in the chest before he could ready Aegis-fang, but he was no halfling, and even the considerable strength of the monster could not move him backward. The one that rose before the ever-alert Drow found two scimitars at work on its face before its head even cleared the water.
The battle proved as fast and furious as its abrupt beginning. Enraged by the continued demands of the relentless moors, the friends reacted to the assault with a counterattack of unmatched fury. The drow’s troll was sliced apart before it even stood straight, and Bruenor had enough time to prepare himself to get at the monster that had dropped Regis.
Wulfgar’s troll, though it landed a second blow behind the first, was hit with a savage flurry that it could not have expected. Not an intelligent creature, its limited reasoning and battle experience led it to believe that its foe should not have remained standing and ready to retaliate after it had squarely landed two heavy blows.
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