I am not pleased," Vierna remarked, standing with Jarlaxle in the tunnel near the conjured iron wall, with poor Cobble's squashed body I underneath.
"Did you believe it would be so easy?" the mercenary replied. "We have entered the runnels of a fortified dwarven complex with a contingent of barely fifty soldiers. Fifty against thousands.
"You will recapture your brother," Jarlaxle added, not wanting Vierna to get overly anxious. "My troops are well-trained. Already I have dispatched nearly three dozen, the entire Baenre complement, to the single corridor leading out of Mithril Hall proper. None of Drizzt's allies shall enter that way, and his trapped friends shall not escape." "When the dwarves learn we are about, they will send an army," Vierna reasoned grimly.
"If they learn," Jarlaxle corrected. "The tunnels of Mithril Hall are long. It will take our adversaries some time to muster a significant force - days perhaps. We will be halfway to Menzoberranzan, with Drizzt, before the dwarves are organized."
Vierna paused for a long while, considering her next course of action. There were only two ways up from the bottom level: the chute in the nearby room and winding tunnels some distance to the north. She looked to the room and moved into it to regard the chute, wondering if she had done wrong in sending only three after Drizzt. She considered ordering her entire force - a dozen drow and the drider - down in pursuit.
"The human will get him," Jarlaxle said to her, as though he had read her mind. "Artemis Entreri knows our enemy better than we; he has battled Drizzt across the wide expanses of the surface world. Also, he wears still the earring, that you might track his progress. Up here we have Drizzt's friends, only a handful by my scouts' reckoning, to deal with."
"And if Drizzt eludes Entreri?" Vierna asked.
"There are only two ways up," Jarlaxle reminded her again.
Vierna nodded, her decision made, and walked across to the chute. She took a small wand out of a fold in her ornamental robes and closed her eyes, beginning a soft chant. Slowly and deliberately, Vierna traced precise lines across the opening, the tip of the wand spewing sticky filament. Perfectly, the priestess outlined a spiderweb of thin strands, covering the opening. Vierna stepped back to examine her work. From a pouch she produced a packet of fine dust, and, beginning a second chant, she sprinkled it over the web. Immediately the strands thickened and took on a black and silvery luster. Then the shine faded and the warmth of the enchantment's energy cooled to room temperature, leaving the strands practically invisible.
"Now there is one way up," Vierna announced to Jarlaxle. "No weapon can cut the strands."
"To the north, then," Jarlaxle agreed. "I have sent a handful of runners ahead to guard the lower tunnels."
"Drizzt and his friends must not join," Vierna instructed.
"If Drizzt sees his friends again, they will already be dead," the cocky mercenary replied with all confidence.
* * * * *
"There may be another way into the room," Wulfgar offered. "If we could strike at them from both sides - "
"Drizzt is gone from the place," Bruenor interrupted, the dwarf fingering the magical locket and looking to the floor, sensing that his friend was somewhere below them.
"When we've killed all our enemies, yer friend'll find us," Pwent reasoned.
Wulfgar, still holding the battlerager off the ground by his helmet spike, gave him a little shake.
"I've no heart for fighting drow," Bruenor replied, and he gave both Catti-brie and Wulfgar concerned sidelong glances, "not like this. We're to keep away from them if we can, hit at 'em only when we find the need."
"We could go back and get Dagna," Wulfgar offered, "and sweep the tunnels clean of dark elves."
Bruenor looked to the maze of corridors that would bring him back to the dwarven complex, considering the path. He and his friends could lose perhaps an hour in working their roundabout way to Mithril Hall, and several hours more in rounding up a sizable force. Those were several hours that Drizzt probably didn't have to spare.
"We go for Drizzt," Catti-brie decided firmly. "We got yer locket to point us right, and Guenhwyvar will take us to him."
Bruenor knew Pwent would readily agree to anything that opened the possibility for a fight, and Guenhwyvar's fur was ruffled, the panther anxious, sleek muscles tense. The dwarf looked to Wulfgar and nearly spat at the lad for the worried, condescending expression splayed across his face as he studied Catti-brie.
Without warning, Guenhwyvar froze in place, issuing a low, quiet growl. Catti-brie immediately doused the low-burning torch and crouched low, using the red-glowing dots of dwarven eyes to keep her bearings.
The group came closer together, Bruenor whispering for the others to remain in the side chamber while he went out to see what the cat had sensed.
"Drow," he explained when he returned a moment later, Guenhwyvar at his side, "just a handful, moving fast and to the north."
"Handful o' dead drow," Pwent corrected. The others could hear the battlerager eagerly rubbing his hands together, the shoulder joints of his armor scraping too noisily.
"No fighting!" Bruenor whispered as loudly as he dared, and he grabbed Pwent's arms to stop the motion. "I'm thinking that this group might have an idea of where to find Drizzt, that they're out looking for him, but we got no chance of keeping up with them without light."
"And if we put up the torch, we'll find ourselves fighting soon enough," Catti-brie reasoned.
"Then light the damned torch!" Pwent said hopefully.
"Shut yer mouth," Bruenor answered. "We're going out slow and easy - and ye keep the torch, make it two torches, ready for lighting at the first signs of a fight," he told Wulfgar. Then he motioned to Guenhwyvar to lead them, bidding the cat to keep the pace slow.
Pwent shoved his large flask into Catti-brie's hand as soon as they exited the tunnel. "Take a hit o' this," he instructed, "axvdpaa?. \t about."
Catti-brie blindly moved her hands about the item, finally discerning it to be a flask. She gingerly sniffed the foul-smelling liquid and started to hand it back.
"Ye'll think the better of it when a drow elf puts a poisoned dart into yer backside," the crude battlerager explained, patting Catti-brie on the rump. "With this stuff flowing about yer blood, no poison's got a chance!"
Reminding herself that Drizzt was in trouble, the young woman took a deep draw on the flask, then coughed and stumbled to the side. For a moment, she saw eight dwarf eyes and four cat eyes staring at her, but the double vision soon went away and she passed the flask on to Bruenor.
Bruenor handled it easily, offering a sigh and a profound, though quiet, belch when he had finished. "Warms yer toes," he explained to Wulfgar when he passed it along.
After Wulfgar had recovered, the group set off, Guenhwyvar's padded paws quietly marking the way, and Pwent's armor squealing noisily with every eager stride.
* * * * *
Forty battle-ready dwarves followed the stomping boots of General Dagna through the lower mines of Mithril Hall to the final guardroom.
"We'll make right for the goblin hall," the general explained to his charges, "and branch out from there." He went on to instruct the door guards, setting up a series of tapping signals and leaving directions for any subsequent troops that came in, explicitly commanding that no dwarves in groups less than a dozen were to be allowed into the new sections.
Then stern Dagna put his soldiers in line, placed himself bravely and proudly at their lead, and moved through the opened door. Dagna really didn't believe that Bruenor was in peril, figured that perhaps a pocket of goblin resistance or some other minor inconvenience remained to be cleared. But the general was a conservative commander, preferring overkill to even odds, and he would take no chances where Bruenor's safety was concerned.
The heavy footsteps of hard boots, clanking armor, and even a grumbling war chant now and then heralded the approach of the force, and every third dwarf held a torch. Dagna had no reason to believe that this formidable force would need stealth, and hoped that Bruenor and any other allies who might be wandering about down here would be able to find the boisterous troupe.
Dagna didn't know about the dark elves.
The dwarves' rolling pace soon got them near the first intersection, in sight of the piled ettin bones from Bruenor's long-ago kill. Dagna called for "side watchers" and started forward, meaning to continue straight ahead, straight for the main chamber of the goblin battle. Before he even reached the side passage, Dagna slowed his troops and called for a measure of quiet.
The general glanced all about curiously, nervously, as he began to cross through the wider intersection. His warrior instincts, honed over three centuries of fighting, told him that something wasn't right; the thick layers of hair on the back of his neck tingled weirdly.
Then the lights went out.
At first, the dwarf general thought something had extinguished the torches, but he quickly realized, from the clamor arising behind him and from the fact that his infravision, when he was able to refocus his eyes, was utterly useless, that something more ominous had occurred.
"Darkness!" cried one dwarf.
"Wizards!" howled another.
Dagna heard his companions jostle about, heard something whistle by his ear, followed by the grunt of one of his undercommanders standing immediately behind him. Instinctively, the general began to backtrack, and, only a few short strides later, he emerged from the globe of conjured darkness to find his charges rushing all around. A second globe of darkness had split the dwarven force almost exactly in half, and those in front of the spell were calling out to those caught within it and to those behind, trying to muster some organization.
"Wedge up!" Dagna cried above the tumult, demanding the most basic of dwarven battle formations. "It's a spell of darkness, nothing more!" Beside the genera!, a dwarf clutched at his chest, pulled out some small type of dart that Dagna did not recognize, and tumbled to the ground, snoring before he ever hit the stone.
Something nicked at Dagna's shin, but he ignored it and continued his commands, trying to orient the group into a single and unified fighting unit. He sent five dwarves rushing out to the right flank, around the darkness globe and into the beginning of the intersecting passage.
"Find me that damned wizard!" he ordered them. "And find out what in the Nine Hells we're fighting against!"
Dagna's frustration only fueled his ire, and soon he had the remaining dwarven force in a tight wedge formation, ready to punch through the initial darkness globe.
The five flanking dwarves rambled into the side passage. Once convinced that no enemies lurked down that way, they quickly looped about the blackness globe, heading for the narrow opening between the sphere and the entryway farther along the main corridor.
Two dark forms emerged from the shadows, dropping to one knee before the dwarves and leveling small crossbows.
The leading dwarf, hit twice, stumbled but still managed to call for the charge. He and his four companions launched themselves at their enemy in full flight, taking no notice until it was too late that other enemies, other dark elves, were levitating above and dropping down all about them.
"What the..." a dwarf gasped as a drow nimbly landed beside him, smashing in the side of his skull with a powerfully enchanted mace.
"Hey, yerself ain't Drizzt!" another dwarf managed to remark a split second before a drow sword sliced his throat.
The group leader wanted to call for a retreat, but even as he started to yell, the floor rushed up and swallowed him. It was a fine bed for a sleeping dwarf, but from this slumber, the vulnerable soldier would never awaken.
In the span of five seconds, only two dwarves remained. "Drow! Drow!" they cried out in warning.
One went down heavily, three arrows in his back. He struggled to get back to his knees, but two dark elves fell over him, hacking with their swords.
The remaining dwarf, rushing back to rejoin Dagna, found himself facing only a single opponent. The drow poked forward with his slender sword; the dwarf accepted the hit and returned it with a vicious axe chop to the side, blasting the drow's arm and rending his fine suit of chain mail.
Past the falling drow and into the darkness the terrified dwarf ran, bursting out the other side of the enchanted globe, right into the front ranks of Dagna's slow-moving wedge.
"Drow!" the frightened dwarf cried once more.
A third globe of darkness came up, connecting the other two. A volley of handcrossbow bolts whipped through, and behind it came the dark elves, skilled at fighting without the use of their eyes.
Dagna realized that clerics would be needed to battle this dark elven magic, but when he tried to call for a retreat, it came out instead as a most profound yawn.
Something hard hit him on the side of the head, and he felt himself falling.
Amidst the chaos and the impenetrable darkness, the wedge could not be maintained, and the surprised dwarves had little chance against a nearly even number of skilled and prepared dark elves. The dwarves wisely broke ranks, many keeping the presence of mind to reach down and grab a fallen kin, and rushed back the way they had come.
The rout was on, but the dwarves were not novices to battle, and there was not a coward among them. As soon as they got out of the darkened areas of tunnel, several took it upon themselves to reorganize the band. Pursuit was hot - there could be no thoughts of turning back to do full battle - but burdened by nearly ten snoozing dwarves, Dagna among them, the slower force could not hope to outrun the quicker drow.
A call went up for blockers and there came no shortage of volunteers. When it sorted out a moment later, the dwarves ran on, leaving six brave soldiers standing shield to shield in the corridor to cover the retreat.
"Run on or those who've fallen will have died in vain!" cried one of the new commanders.
"Run on for the sake of our missing king!" cried another.
Those in the back ranks of the fleeing troupe looked often over their stocky shoulders to view their blocking comrades - until a globe of darkness enveloped the defensive line.
"Run on!" came a common cry, from those fleeing and from the brave blockers alike.
The fleeing dwarves heard the joining of battle as the dark elves hit their stubborn, blocking comrades. They heard the clang of steel against steel, heard the grunts of solid hits and glancing blows. They heard the shriek of a wounded drow and smiled grimly.
They did not look back, but bowed their heads forward and ran on, each vowing silently to toast the lost companions. The blockers would not break ranks and join them in their flight; they would hold the line, hold the enemy back until their lifeless bodies fell to the stone. It was all done in loyalty to their fleeing kin, an act of supreme, valiant sacrifice, dwarf for dwarf.
On ran the dwarves, and if one tripped on the stone, four others paused to help him get back up again. If one's burden of a sleeping kinsman became too cumbersome, another willingly took over the load.
One younger dwarf sprinted ahead of the main host and began tap-tapping his hammer against the stone walls in the appointed signal for the door guards. By the time he arrived at the tunnel's end, the great barrier was already cracked open, and it spread wide when the truth of the rout became apparent.
The dwarven force piled into the guardroom, some remaining just inside the doorway to coax on any possible stragglers. They kept the door open until the last minute, until a globe of darkness blocked the very end of the tunnel and a handcrossbow quarrel cut through it and took down another soldier.
The tunnel was shut and sealed, and the count showed that twenty-seven of the original forty-one had escaped, with more than a third of them sleeping soundly.
"Get the whole damned army!" one of the dwarves suggested.
"And the clerics," added another, lifting Dagna's limp head to accentuate his point. "We're needing clerics to stop the poisons and to keep the damned lights on!"
The resourceful dwarves soon determined a pecking order and an order of business. Half the force stayed with the sleepers and the guards; the other half ran to the far corners of Mithril Hall, shouting the call to arms.
