The Thousand Ords

by A. R. Salvatore

  “They will be without their giant friends, who were left on the other side of the ravine,” Wulfgar insisted.

  “True enough,” Tred admitted, though his dour expression did not brighten, “but I’m thinking we’ll be finding a tougher fight with them orcs, even with yer boys from Mithral Hall here, when them orcs ain’t so surprised that yer boys from Mithral Hall’re here!”

  There really wasn’t much that Wulfgar could say against such logic. He had seen the orc force, and he knew that those legions, despite being scattered and with many slaughtered outside of Shallows, would still prove overwhelming to this contingent in a level fight. Even as they had begun the run the previous day, they had all known that their only real hope was that the orcs had been too scattered to regroup in time to catch them before they reached the safety of Mithral Hall, or at least before they met up with the dwarven army rolling out of that fortress.

  But already the signs were showing their hopes to be in vain. All through the night—in which the dwarves, utilizing more of Pikel’s wondrous berries, had kept moving—they had heard the calls of worgs, left and right, shadowing them. Earlier the second day, they had caught sight of a dust cloud rising in the north, not so far behind, and they knew that they were being pursued.

  Pwent had proposed a possible scenario to them that morning. The battlerager figured that the orc worg-riders would flank and circle in front of the dwarves, trying to slow their run, thus giving the pursuing main force time to catch up and overwhelm them. The dwarves had decided that if such a blockade had been formed, they would lower their heads and blast straight through it.

  Wulfgar could only hope that it didn’t come to that. They barely had enough to take turns pulling the wagon of wounded, and Pwent and his boys were reaching the end of their tolerance. Pikel’s berries were amazing indeed, but they did not provide magical strength. They merely allowed the body to draw on its deeper resources. After the run to the north, the desperate fight, and the beginning of the run back to the south, Wulfgar could plainly see that those reserves were reaching their end. Even worse, those who had come from the prolonged defense of Shallows, himself included, were all carrying grievous wounds.

  Another fight would likely be the end of all of them and at the least would eliminate any hope Wulfgar had of getting his beloved father back to Mithral Hall alive.

  And so that afternoon, when scouts reported a growing cloud of dust to the west, the barbarian moved to the wagon to join Catti-brie, Regis, and Bruenor.

  “That’ll mark the end of it,” Catti-brie remarked, staring out at the cloud.

  Her demeanor, so removed from the ever-optimistic presence that Wulfgar had always known, caught him off guard and surprised Regis as well.

  “We’ll fight them and beat them!” Regis replied. “And if more catch us, we’ll fight them, too!”

  “Indeed,” Wulfgar agreed. “I would not see Aegis-fang in the hands of an orc, even if that means I must kill every orc in all the North. And I will see Bruenor back to Mithral Hall, where he will find his strength anew and resume the throne that is so rightfully his.”

  The words were empowering to both Regis and Catti-brie, and their appreciative looks to Wulfgar became grins and even laughter when Pikel Bouldershoulder chimed in with an enthusiastic “Oo oi!”

  The dwarves closed ranks around the wagons, though they maintained their swift pace. Pwent began directing his charges, moving his most seasoned fighters to the delicate areas of defense, and calling out to his boys to be ready. At one point, he moved beside the wagon.

  “There’ll be a few hunnerd of ’em, judging by what me scouts’re seeing,” the battlerager explained. He added with an exaggerated wink, “Nothing me and me boys can’t handle.”

  Wulfgar nodded, as did the others, but they all knew the truth of the matter. Being intercepted by several hundred orcs would be bad enough, but even if they could indeed win out against such odds, they would find themselves caught by an equal or larger group from behind because of the inevitable delay.

  “Take up your bow,” Wulfgar bade Catti-brie as he handed her Taulmaril. “Shoot well.”

  “Perhaps I could go out under a flag of truce and speak with them,” Regis offered, pointedly pulling the enchanted ruby pendant over his shirt collar.

  Wulfgar shook his head.

  “They’d have ye dead even if ye managed to snare a few o’ them with yer lies,” Catti-brie remarked.

  “Promises, not lies,” Regis corrected.

  He shrugged helplessly and looked down at the ruby then tucked it away.

  The dwarven ranks tightened. It was obvious that they had been spotted by the intercepting force, and their choices were few. A turn to the east would likely put them into another group of orcs, and to stop and try to form some semblance of defense might bring the pursuing orcs upon them as well.

  They plowed ahead, gripping weapons in one hand, wagon yokes in the other.

  “We gotta make that ridge afore ’em!” Thibbledorf Pwent cried to his fellows, pointing ahead to some higher ground.

  The dwarves responded by lowering their aching shoulders even more and charging on. They reached the base of the ridge and started up the slope, hardly slowing.

  But they didn’t get there first.

  “The wing is not broken, but it is bruised badly and will not carry Sunset for any distance,” Innovindil told Tarathiel when he and Sunrise returned to her in the mountain cave, some miles north east of the place where they had battled the giants.

  Even with the glancing hit by the thrown rock, they had managed to outdistance the pursuing giants and had been fortunate to find a cave where they could put up for the time being.

  “The giants have given up the chase, I believe,” Tarathiel replied. “They will not find us.”

  “But neither will we get back to the Moonwood anytime soon,” Innovindil reasoned, “or at least, not both of us.”

  Her expression as she finished was as clear a signal to Tarathiel that she wanted him to climb onto Sunrise and fly off for home as if she had spoken the words directly.

  “I am not certain that our report to our people would be complete enough to properly prepare them for what is to come,” he replied somberly.

  “What have you seen?”

  Tarathiel’s expression held a grim edge.

  “They are crawling out of their holes,” he told her, “all to the north and the west. The orcs and goblins are rising as one, and we have seen that the giants, too, are with them. I fear that the force that sacked the town of Shallows is but a small portion of what we will discover.”

  “Then all the more reason for you to fly to our people.”

  Tarathiel looked to his mount and seemed, for just a moment, to be leaning that way, but then he looked back at his companion and stood resolute.

  “I’ll not leave you,” he said. “The elves of the Moonwood will not be caught off their guard, whether I fly there or not.”

  Innovindil started to argue but changed her mind almost immediately. She did not want to be left out there alone, however brave she might sound. She did not know the region as did Tarathiel, and she truly feared for Sunrise. Though the pegasus would survive the wound, it had been so valiant in holding its position above the giants through the pain and shock that the elf had no intention of allowing Sunrise to do anything but heal, even if protecting the pegasus was at the cost of her own life. She knew that Tarathiel felt the same way.

  “And we have something else to learn, and now may be our only chance to do so,” Tarathiel added after a short pause.

  “You believe that the dark elf escaped the fight with the giants,” Innovindil reasoned.

  “It is possible that Ellifain is out there, as well.”

  “It is probable that Ellifain is dead,” said Innovindil, and Tarathiel could only nod.

  Initial shock, the adrenaline of an approaching, desperate battle, fast shifted to confusion among the ranks of the battleragers and the others i
n the fleeing caravan, for there, on the ridge before them, stood dwarves—a host of dwarves—and arrayed with the colors not of Mithral Hall, but with the axe symbol of Mirabar.

  “Who are ye, and what’re ye about?” the lead dwarf cried, and he lifted his helm back off his face.

  “Torgar!” Regis cried, surely recognizing the dwarf.

  A perplexed expression came over the dwarf’s face, and he motioned to his fellows to spread wide, left and right. He, along with several others, came down to the ragtag group.

  “Well, yer King Bruenor’s got our weapons, and so’s Mithral Hall, whatever his fate,” Torgar proclaimed when Wulfgar and the others filled him in on the desperate battle and the retreat to Mithral Hall. “We come out to ask King Bruenor for his friendship, and now I’m thinking we can prove our own to him and his. Ye just keep on yer run and me and mine’ll follow ye close.”

  “Ye let me and me own run with ye, Torgar o’ Mirabar,” Thibbledorf Pwent cut in as he stepped forward, showing his ridged, bloodstained armor in all its gory glory. “We give them orcs a reason to run!”

  “Luck has shone upon us,” Wulfgar whispered to Catti-brie a moment later, as the five hundred reinforcements found positions around the retreating caravan.

  They both looked to Bruenor and to Pikel, still tirelessly tending the dwarf king and the other wounded. Apparently sensing their looks, Pikel turned to regard them and offered a wink and a hopeful nod.

  Catti-brie couldn’t help but smile but then couldn’t help but look back to the north.

  “You’re thinking of Drizzt,” Wulfgar observed.

  “As soon as we get Bruenor back to Mithral Hall, we’ll head out to find him,” Regis said, joining in on the conversation.

  Catti-brie shook her head with even greater resolve. “He will see to himself and trust that we will see to our safety and the security of Mithral Hall. When his job is done out there, he will come home.”

  Both Wulfgar and Regis looked at her with surprise, but both inevitably agreed. Without information to the contrary, they knew they had to trust in Drizzt, and in truth, who in all the world was better suited to survive in the hostile environment of the orc-infested North? More practically, none of them were really fit to head back out. Certainly Regis was in no shape to be walking a dangerous road anytime soon.

  Catti-brie continued to stare to the north, and without even realizing it, she began chewing nervously on her bottom lip.

  Wulfgar grabbed her forearm and gave a gentle, comforting squeeze.

  “Elastul told you?” Nanfoodle asked Shoudra when the two met up in the corridor of their building a few nights later.

  “He instructed me to go with you,” Shoudra replied, her tone making it clear that she was none too pleased with the order.

  “He has erred and continues to do so,” the little gnome said. “First he chases Bruenor off, then imprisons Torgar, and now …”

  “This is hardly the same thing,” said Shoudra.

  “Is it so different? Will the remaining dwarves in Mirabar be pleased when they learn of our antics in Mithral Hall? Do we even have a hope of succeeding there, given that more than four hundred of Mirabar’s dwarves will precede our arrival?”

  “Elastul is counting on just that fact to gain us the confidence of Bruenor and his kin.”

  “To what end? Treachery?” asked the glum gnome.

  Shoudra started to respond, but just shrugged. “We will see what we find when we arrive in Mithral Hall,” she said after a moment’s reflection.

  Nanfoodle considered her words and her demeanor for a moment, then his face brightened.

  “I plan to follow your lead in the cavern of Clan Battlehammer,” he said, “even if that lead diverges from the edicts of Marchion Elastul.”

  Shoudra looked around cautiously, her expression bidding the gnome to speak no more of such foolishness.

  In her own heart, though, the Sceptrana did not disagree. Elastul’s edict had been direct and simple: Go to Mithral Hall and check on the traitor dwarves, and while they’re there, do some serious damage to their rival’s operations.

  Better, Shoudra thought, that they go to Mithral Hall to reach out to King Bruenor through Torgar Hammerstriker and the others. After the disaster that had befallen Mirabar, they might find a new and stronger alliance with their fellow mining city, one that would benefit them all.

  She could only sigh and wish things were different, though, for she knew Elastul well enough to understand the absurdity of even hoping that she could realize such an outcome.

  With every stone he turned, Drizzt Do’Urden held his breath, expecting to find one of his friends buried beneath it. The destruction of Shallows had been complete by his estimation. He had no idea what the pile of shaped wood on the field just south of the town might be, but he supposed that the orcs had brought great siege engines with them in the final assault.

  Not that they had needed any, given the damage the giants had wrought upon the town.

  He took heart at the many dead orcs and worgs littered about the scene, but the fact that many had died right at the entrance to the substructure tunnels, logically the last line of defense, told him that the end had surely been bitter.

  He found no bodies in those tunnels, at least, lending him some hope that his friends had been captured and not killed.

  And he found a familiar one-horned helmet.

  Hardly finding the strength to bend without falling over, the drow touched the crown of Bruenor Battlehammer and gently lifted it, turning it over in his hands. He had hoped that his eyes had deceived him from across the ravine that terrible night, when the flaming tower had fallen. He had hoped that Bruenor had somehow been able to leap away and escape the catastrophe.

  The drow forced himself to look around, to poke at the rubble near to the helmet. There, under tons of stone, he found the end of a crushed hand, a gnarled, dwarf’s hand.

  So, he believed, he had found Bruenor’s grave.

  And were Wulfgar and Regis buried there too? And what of Catti-brie?

  The images that flitted about in his whirling thoughts weighed heavily on Drizzt Do’Urden. He remembered thinking it would be better to adventure on the open road—even if it were to cost him his life, even if it were to cost Catti-brie’s life—than to live a life in one secure place.

  How hollow those thoughts felt to him in that terrible moment.

  Strangely, he thought of Zaknafein then, of his family and his days in Menzoberranzan, of the tragedies that had marked his early life. He thought of Ellifain too, of all that he had tried to do for her that fateful night under the stars, and of her ultimate end.

  He thought of his friends, some surely lost, and likely all dead, and was stabbed by the futility of it all. For all his life since his days with Zaknafein, his departure from Menzoberranzan, his days with Montolio and with the friends he had come to love above all others in Icewind Dale, Drizzt Do’Urden had followed a line of precepts based upon discipline and ultimate optimism. He fought for a better world because he believed that a better world could and would be made. He had never held any illusions that he would change the whole world, of course, or even a substantial portion of it, but he had always held strongly that fighting to better just his own little pocket of the world was a worthwhile course.

  And there was Ellifain. And there was Bruenor.

  He looked down at the helmet and rolled it over in his hands.

  In all likelihood he had lost every close friend he had ever known.

  Except for one, the drow realized when Guenhwyvar stirred beside him.

  Three days later, Drizzt Do’Urden sat on the rocky slopes of a mountain, listening to the cacophony of horns around him and watching the progression of lines of torches moving along nearly every mountain trail. All that had happened had been but a prelude, he understood then. The orcs were massing, bringing a fair number of goblins along with them, and even worse, they had allied with the frost giants in greater numbers than any
could have anticipated.

  What had gone from a raid on a caravan from Citadel Felbarr had escalated to the sacking of two towns and to a threat to every life in the North. In just watching the progression, Drizzt could see that Mithral Hall itself would soon be threatened.

  And, he believed, Mithral Hall was a leaderless place.

  In truth, though, none of that realization sank very deeply into the thoughts and heart of Drizzt Do’Urden that dark night on a mountain slope, and when he saw the campfire of a small off-shoot of the massing humanoid force not too far away, all thoughts of anything but the immediate situation flew from him.

  The drow produced his onyx figurine and called forth Guenhwyvar, then drew out his scimitars and started his slow walk toward the encampment. He didn’t blink; his face showed no emotion at all.

  It was time to go to work.

  Drizzt didn’t like to think of it as a shrine. Propped on a forked stick, the one-horned helmet of Bruenor Battlehammer dominated the small hollow that the dark elf had taken as his home. The propped helm was set right before the cliff face that served as the hollow’s rear wall, in the only place within the natural shelter that got any sunlight.

  Drizzt wanted it that way. He wanted to see the helmet. He wanted to never forget. And it wasn’t just Bruenor he was determined to remember, and not just his other friends.

  Most of all, Drizzt wanted to remember who had done this horrible thing to him and to his world.

  He had to fall to his belly to crawl between the two fallen boulders and into the hollow, and even then the going was slow and tight. Drizzt didn’t care; he actually preferred it that way. The total lack of comforts, the almost animalistic nature of his existence, was good for him, was cathartic, and even more than that, was yet another reminder to him of what he had to become, of who he had to be if he wanted to survive out there. No more was he Drizzt Do’Urden of Icewind Dale, friend to Bruenor and Catti-brie, Wulfgar and Regis. No more was he Drizzt Do’Urden, the ranger trained by Montolio deBrouchee in the ways of nature and the spirit of Mielikki. No, now he was that lone drow who had wandered out of Menzoberranzan. Now he was that refugee from the city of dark elves, who had forsaken the ways of the priestesses who had so wronged him and who had murdered his father.