The Thousand Ords

by A. R. Salvatore

  Watching them at their march, Drizzt understood well the kind of determination and long-range thinking that had produced such beautiful and marvelous places as Mithral Hall. It was the same patience that had allowed one such as Bruenor to create Aegis-fang, to deliberately engrave perfect representations of the trio of dwarf gods on the hammer’s head, where one errant scratch would have ruined the whole process.

  Soon after the second day out of Khedrun Pass, with the trees of the Lurkwood so near that the group could hear birds singing in the boughs, a cry from the front confirmed Bruenor’s other fear.

  “Orcs outta the woods!”

  “Form yer battle groups!” Bruenor called.

  “Group One Left, make yer wedge!” Dagnabbit shouted. “One Right, square up!”

  To the left, farthest from the woods, Drizzt and Catti-brie watched the precision of the veteran dwarf warriors and saw the small band of orcs rushing out of the forest, making for the lead wagons.

  The orcs hadn’t scouted their intended target properly, it seemed, for once they cleared the brush and saw the scope of the force allayed before them, they skidded to a stop and fell all over each other in fast retreat.

  How different were their movements from those of the calm, skilled dwarves—well, almost all of the dwarves. Ignoring the calls of Bruenor and Dagnabbit, Thibbledorf Pwent and his Gutbusters assembled into their own formation, unique to their tactics. They called it a charge, but to Drizzt and Catti-brie it more resembled an avalanche. Pwent and his boys whooped, hollered, and scrambled headlong into the darkness of the forest shadows in pursuit of the orcs, leaping through the first line of brush with gleeful abandon.

  “The orcs may have set a trap,” Catti-brie warned, “showing us but a small part o’ their force to drag us into their webs.”

  Cries resounded within the boughs, just south of the caravan, and flora and fauna, and orc body parts, began to fly wildly all about the area the Gutbusters had entered.

  “Stupid orcs, then,” Drizzt replied.

  He started down from the higher ground, Catti-brie in tow, to join Bruenor. When they reached the king, they found him standing on his wagon bench, hands on his hips, and with groups of properly arrayed dwarves in tight formations all around him. One wedge of warriors passed skillfully by the defensive squares two others had assembled.

  “Ain’t ye going to join the fun?” Bruenor asked.

  Drizzt looked back at the forest, at the continuing tumult, a volcano come to life, and shook his head.

  “Too dangerous,” the drow explained.

  “Damn Pwent makes it hard to see the point o’ discipline,” Bruenor grumbled to his friends.

  He winced, and so did Drizzt and Catti-Brie, and Regis who was standing near to Bruenor, when an orc came flying out of the underbrush to land face down on the clearer ground in front of the dwarves. Before any of Bruenor’s boys could react, they heard a wild roar from back within the boughs, up high, and stared in blank amazement as Thibbledorf Pwent, high up in a tree, ran out to the end of one branch and leaped out long and far.

  The orc was just beginning to rise when Pwent landed on its back, blasting it back down to the ground. Likely it was already dead, but the wild battlerager, with broken branches and leaves stuck all about his ridged armor, went into his devastating body shake, turning the orc into a bloody mess.

  Pwent hopped up, then hopped all around.

  “Ye can get ’em moving again, me king!” he yelled back to Bruenor. “We’ll be done here soon enough.”

  “And the Lurkwood will never be the same,” Drizzt mumbled.

  “If I was a squirrel anywhere around here, I’d be thinking of making meself a new home,” Catti-brie concurred.

  “I’d pay a big bird to fly me far away,” Regis added.

  “Should we hold the positions?” Dagnabbit called to Bruenor.

  “Nah, get the wagons moving,” the dwarf king replied with a wave of his hand. “We stay here and we’ll all get splattered.”

  Pwent and his boys, some hurt but hardly caring, rejoined their fellows a short while later, singing songs of victory and battle. Nothing serious emanated from this group. Their songs sounded more like the joyful rhymes of children at play.

  “Watching Pwent makes me wonder if I wasted my youth with all that training,” Drizzt said to Catti-brie later on, the pair patrolling with Guenhwyvar along the northern foothills again.

  “Yeah, ye could’ve just whiled away the hours banging yer head against a stone wall, like Pwent and his boys did.”

  “Without a helmet?”

  “Aye,” the woman confirmed, keeping a straight face. “Though I’m thinking that Bruenor made him armor the poor wall. Protecting the structural integrity of the realm.”

  “Ah,” said Drizzt, nodding, then just shaking his head helplessly.

  No more orc bands made any appearances against the caravan throughout the rest of that day, nor over the next few. The going was difficult and slow, but still, not a dwarf complained, even when they had to spend the better part of a rainy day moving the remnants of an old rockslide from the trail.

  As the days wore on, though, more and more rumbles began to filter through the line of wagons, for it became obvious to them all that Bruenor wasn’t planning a turn to the south anytime soon.

  “Orcs,” Catti-brie remarked, examining the partial footprint in the dirt of a high trail. The woman looked up and all around, as if gauging the wind and the air. “Few days, maybe.”

  “At least a few,” replied Drizzt, who was a short distance away, leaning on a boulder with his arms crossed over his chest, scrutinizing the woman’s work as if he knew something that she did not.

  “What?” the woman asked, catching the non-verbal cue.

  “Perhaps I have a wider picture of it,” Drizzt answered.

  Catti-brie narrowed her eyes as she stared hard at the drow, matching his mischievous grin with a thin-lipped one of her own. She started to say something less than complimentary, but then caught on that perhaps the drow was speaking literally. She stood up and stepped back, taking in the area of the footprint from a wider viewpoint. Only then did she realize that the orc print was beside the mark of a much larger boot.

  Much larger.

  “Orc was here first,” she stated without hesitation.

  “How do you know that?” Drizzt wasn’t playing the part of instructor here, but rather, he seemed genuinely curious as to how the woman had come to that.

  “Giant might be chasin’ the orc, but I’m doubting that the orc’s chasing the giant.”

  “How do you know they weren’t traveling together?”

  Catti-brie looked back to the tracks. “Not a hill giant,” she explained, for it was well known that hill giants often allied with orcs. “Too big.”

  “Mountain giant, perhaps,” said Drizzt. “Larger version of the same creature.”

  Catti-brie shook her head doubtfully. Most mountain giants typically didn’t even wear boots, covering their feet with skin wraps, if at all. The sharp definitions of the giant heel print made her believe that this particular boot was well made. Even more telling, the foot was narrow, relatively speaking, whereas mountain giants were known to have huge, wide feet.

  “Stone giants might be wearin’ boots,” the woman reasoned, “and frost giants always do.”

  “So you think the giant was chasing the orc?”

  The woman looked over at Drizzt again and shrugged. With it put so plainly—Drizzt apparently wasn’t questioning her—she realized just how shaky that theory truly was.

  “Could be,” she said, “or they might’ve just passed this way independent of each other. Or they might be workin’ together.”

  “A frost giant and an orc?” came the skeptical question.

  “A woman and a drow?” came the snide response, and Drizzt laughed.

  The pair moved on without much concern. The tracks were not fresh, and even if it was an orc or a group of orcs, and a giant or two
besides, they’d think twice before attacking an army of five hundred dwarves.

  It was slow and it was hot and it was dry, but no more monsters showed themselves to the force as the dwarves stubbornly made their way to the east. They climbed up one dusty trail, the sun hot on their backs, but when they crested the ridge and started down the backside, all the world seemed to change.

  A vast, rocky vale loomed before them, with towering mountains both north and south. Shadows dotted the valley, and even in those places where there seemed no obstacle to block the sunlight, the ground appeared dull, dour, and somehow mysterious. Wisps of fog flitted about the valley, though there was no obvious water source, and little dew-catching grass could be seen.

  Bruenor, Regis, Dagnabbit, and Wulfgar and his family led the way down the backside of the ridge to find Drizzt and Catti-brie waiting for their wagon.

  “Ye’re not likin’ what ye’re seein’?” Bruenor asked Drizzt, noticing a disconcerted expression on the face of the normally cool drow.

  Drizzt shook his head, as if he couldn’t put it into words.

  “A strange feeling,” he explained, or tried to.

  He looked back toward the gloomy vale and shook his head again.

  “I’m feelin’ it too,” Catti-brie chimed in. “Like we’re bein’ looked at.”

  “Ye probably are,” Bruenor said.

  He cracked the whip and sent his team, which also seemed more than a little skittish, moving down the trail. The dwarf gave a laugh, but those around him didn’t seem so comfortable, particularly Wulfgar, who kept looking back at Delly and Colson.

  “Your wagon should not be in the front,” Drizzt reminded Bruenor.

  “As I been telling him,” Dagnabbit agreed.

  Bruenor only snorted and drove the team on, calling back to the next wagons in line and to the soldiers flanking them.

  “Bah, they’re all hesitating,” Bruenor complained.

  “Can ye not feel it?” Dagnabbit asked.

  “Feel it? I’m swimmin’ in it, shortbeard! We’ll put up right down there,” he conceded, pointing to a flat, open area just below, about a third of the way down the side of the ridge, “then ye get ’em all about and I’ll give them the tale.”

  “The tale?” Catti-brie asked, the same question that all the others were about to voice.

  “The tale o’ the pass,” Bruenor explained. “The Fell Pass.”

  It was a name that meant little to Bruenor’s Icewind Dale non-dwarf companions, but Dagnabbit blanched at the mention—as much as the others had ever seen a dwarf blanch. Still, Dagnabbit performed as instructed, and with typical efficiency, bringing the wagons in line from the ridge top to the plateau Bruenor had indicated. When the dwarves had finished their bustling and jostling, setting their teams in place and finding acceptable vantage points to hear the words of their leader, Bruenor climbed up on a wagon and called out to them all.

  “Ye’re smellin’ ghosts, and that’s what’s got ye itching,” he explained. “And ye should be smellin’ ghosts, for the valley here is thick with them. Ghosts o’ Delzoun dwarves, long dead, killed in battle by orcs.” He swept his arm out to the east, to the wide pass opening before them. “And what a battle she was! Hunnerds o’ yer ancestors died here, me boys, and thousands and thousands o’ their enemies. But ye keep yerselfs strong in heart. We won the Battle o’ Fell Pass, and so if ye’re seeing any o’ them ghosts down there on our way through, ye taunt it if it’s an orc and ye bow to it if it’s a dwarf!”

  The other friends from Icewind Dale watched Bruenor with sincere admiration, noting how he added just the right inflections to his voice, and emphasis on key words to hold his clan in deep attention. He was acknowledging that there might be supernatural things down in the reputedly haunted valley, yet if there was an ounce of fear in Bruenor Battlehammer, he did not show it.

  “Now we could’ve gone further south,” he went on. “Coulda swung along the northern edge o’ the Trollmoors and into Nesmé.”

  He paused and shook his head, then gave a great, “Bah!”

  Drizzt and the others surveyed the audience, noting that many, many bearded heads were bobbing in agreement with that dismissive sentiment.

  “But I knowed me boys’d have little trouble walking among the dead heroes of old,” Bruenor finished. “Ye won’t embarrass Clan Battle-hammer. Now ye get yer teams moving. We’ll bring the wagons in a tight double line across the pass, and if ye’re seeing a dwarf of old, ye be remembering yer manners!”

  The army swung into precise action, sorting the wagons and moving them along the trail, down to the floor of the wide pass. They tightened their ranks, as Bruenor had instructed, and rolled along two-by-two. Before the last of the wagons had even begun moving, one of the dwarves struck up a marching song, a heroic tale of an ancient battle not unlike the one that had taken place in Fell Pass. In moments, all the line had joined in the song, their voices strong and steady, defeating the chilling atmosphere of the haunted place.

  “Even if there are ghosts about,” Drizzt whispered to Catti-brie, “they’ll be too afraid to come out and bother this group.”

  Just to the side of them, Delly was equally at ease with Wulfgar.

  “And ye keep telling me how ugly the road can be,” she scolded. “And here I was, all afraid.”

  Wulfgar gave her a concerned look.

  “I never known a better place to be,” Delly said to him. “And how ye could e’er have thought o’ giving up this life for one in the miserable city, I’m not for knowing!”

  “Nor are we,” Catti-brie agreed, drawing a surprised look from the barbarian. She returned Wulfgar’s stare with a disarming smile. “Nor are we.”

  The wind moaned—perhaps it was the wind, perhaps something else—but the sound seemed like a fitting accompaniment to the continuing song. Many white stones covered the area—or at least, the dwarves thought they were stones at first, until one of them looked closer and realized that they were bones. Orc bones and dwarf bones, skulls and femurs, some laying out in the open, others half-buried. Scattered about them were pieces of rusted metal, broken swords, and rotted armor. It seemed like the former owners, of both bones and armor, might still be about as well, for sometimes the wisps of strange fog seemed to take on definitive shapes—that of a dwarf, perhaps, or an orc.

  Clan Battlehammer, lost in the rousing song and following their unshakable leader, merely saluted the former and sang all the louder, growled away the latter and sang all the louder.

  They set their camp that night, wagons circled, nervous horses brought right into the center, with a ring of torches all around the tight perimeter. Still the dwarves sang, to ward off the ghosts that might be lurking nearby.

  “Ye don’t go out this night,” Bruenor instructed Drizzt and Catti-brie, “and don’t bring up yer stupid cat, elf.”

  That brought him a couple of puzzled expressions.

  “No plane-shifting around here,” Bruenor explained. “And that’s what yer cat does.”

  “You fear that Guenhwyvar will open a portal that unwelcome visitors might also use?”

  “Talked to me priests and we’re all agreein’ it’s better not to find out.”

  Drizzt nodded and settled back.

  “All the more reason for me and Drizzt to go out and keep a scouting perimeter,” Catti-brie reasoned.

  “I ain’t suggesting that.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you know, Bruenor?” Drizzt prompted.

  He moved in closer, and so did Catti-brie, and so did Regis, who was nearby and eavesdropping.

  “She’s a haunted pass, to be sure,” Bruenor confided, after taking a moment to look all around.

  “Full o’ yer ancestors,” said Catti-brie.

  “Full o’ worse than that,” said Bruenor. “We’re to be fine—too many of us for even them ghosts to be playing with, I’m guessing.”

  “Guessing?” Regis echoed skeptically.

  Bruenor only shrugged
and turned back to Drizzt.

  “We’re needin’ to get an idea o’ all the land about,” he explained.

  “You think that Gauntlgrym is near?”

  Another shrug. “Doubtin’ that—it’d be more toward Mirabar—but we’re likely to find some clues here. That fight them centuries ago was going the orcs’ way—a bad time for me ancestors—but then the dwarves outsmarted them … not a tough thing to do! There’s tunnels all about this pass, and deep caves, some natural, others cut by the Delzoun. Me ancient kin interlocked them all and used them to supply, to bind their wounds, and to fix their weapons—and for surprise, for the dwarfs lured them stupid orcs in on what looked like a small group, and when them ugly beasts came charging, their tongues flapping outside their ugly mouths, the Delzoun popped up from trapdoors all about them, within their ranks.

  ‘Was still a fierce fight. Them orcs can hit hard, no one’s doubting, and many, many o’ me ancestors died here, but me kin won out. Killed most o’ them orcs and sent the others running back to their holes in the deeper mountains. Them caves are likely still down there, holding secrets I mean to learn.”

  “And holding nasties of many shapes and sizes,” Catti-brie added.

  “Someone’s gotta clear them nasties away,” Bruenor agreed. “Might as well be me.”

  “You mean us,” Regis corrected.

  Bruenor gave him a sly smile.

  “You plan to find a way down there and take the army underground?” Drizzt asked.

  “Nah. I’m plannin’ on passing through, as I said. We’ll go back to Mithral Hall and get through with the formalities, then we’ll decide how many we should be bringing back out after the next winter blows past. We’ll see what we can find.”

  “Then why go through here now?”

  “Think about it, elf,” Bruenor answered, looking around at the encampment, which seemed fairly calm and at ease, despite their location. “Ye look danger right in the face, at its worst—or what ye’re thinking to be its worst—right up front, and ye’re not to be caught off yer guard by fear no more.”