Decay and rot had won the day, creeping around the stones and boulders of the bloody mountainside. Bloated corpses steamed in the cool morning air, their last wisps of heat flowing away to insubstantiality, life energy lost on the endless mitigating mourn of the uncaring wind.
Drizzt Do'Urden walked among the lower reaches of the killing field, a cloth tied across his black-skinned face to ward the stench. Almost all of the bodies on the lower ground were orcs, many killed in the monumental blast that had upended the mountain ridge to the side of the main area of battle. That explosion had turned night into day, had sent flames leaping a thousand feet into the air, and had launched tons and tons of debris across the swarm of monsters, mowing them flat under its press.
"One less weapon I will have to replace," said Innovindil.
Drizzt turned to regard his surface elf companion. The fair elf had her face covered too, though that did little to diminish her beauty. Above her scarf, bright blue eyes peered out at Drizzt and the same wind that carried the stench of death blew her long golden tresses out wildly behind her. Lithe and graceful, Innovindil's every step seemed like a dance to Drizzt Do'Urden, and even the burden of mourning, for she had lost her partner and lover, Tarathiel, could not hold her feet glumly to the stone.
Drizzt watched as she reached down to a familiar corpse, that of Urlgen, son of Obould Many-Arrows, the orc beast who had started the awful war. Innovindil had killed Urlgen, or rather, he had inadvertently killed himself by slamming his head at hers and impaling it upon a dagger the elf had snapped up before her. Innovindil put a foot on the bloated face of the dead orc leader, grasped the dagger hilt firmly in hand, and yanked it free. With hardly a flinch, she bent further and wiped the blade on the dead orc's shirt, then flipped it over in her hand and replaced it in the sheath belted around her ankle.
"They have not bothered to loot the field, from dead dwarves or from their own," Innovindil remarked.
That much had been obvious to Drizzt and Innovindil before their pegasus, Sunset, had even set them down on the rocky mountain slope. The place was deserted, fully so, even though the orcs were not far away. The couple could hear them in the valley beyond the slope's crest, the region called Keeper's Dale, which marked the western entrance to Mithral Hall. The dwarves had not won there, Drizzt knew, despite the fact that orc bodies outnumbered those of his bearded friends many times over. In the end, the orcs had pushed them from the cliff and into Keeper's Dale, and back into their hole in Mithral Hall. The orcs had paid dearly for that piece of ground, but it was theirs. Given the sheer size of the orc force assembled outside the closed door of Clan Battlehammer's stronghold, Drizzt simply couldn't see how the dwarves might ever win the ground back.
"They have not looted only because the battle is not yet over," Drizzt replied. "There has been no pause until now for the orcs, first in pushing the dwarves back into Mithral Hall, then in preparing the area around the western gates to their liking. They will return here soon enough, I expect."
He glanced over at Innovindil to see her distracted and standing before the remains of a particularly nasty fight, staring down at a clump of bodies. Drizzt understood her surprise before he even went over and confirmed that she was standing where he had watched the battleragers, the famed Gutbuster Brigade, make a valiant stand. He walked up beside the elf, wincing at the gruesome sight of shredded bodies - never had there been anything subtle about Thibbledorf Pwent's boys - and wincing even more when he caught sight of more than a dozen dead dwarves, all tightly packed together. They had died, one and all, protecting each other, a fitting end indeed for the brave warriors.
"Their armor .. ." Innovindil began, shaking her head, her expression caught somewhere between surprise, awe, and disgust.
She didn't have to say anything more for Drizzt to perfectly understand, for the armor of the Gutbusters often elicited such confusion. Ridged and overlapping with sharpened plates, and sprouting an abundance of deadly spikes, Gutbuster armor made a dwarf's body into a devastating weapon. Where other dwarves charged with pickaxes, battle-axes, warhammers, and swords held high, Gutbusters just charged.
Drizzt thought to inspect the area a bit more closely, to see if his old friend Thibbledorf might be among the dead, but he decided against that course. Better for him, he thought, to just continue on his way. Counting the dead was an exercise for after the war.
Of course, that same attitude allowed Drizzt to justify his inability to return to Clan Battlehammer and truly face the realization that his friends were all gone, killed at the town of Shallows.
"Let us get to the ridge," he said. "We should learn the source of that explosion before Obould's minions return here to pick the bodies clean."
Innovindil readily agreed and started toward the blasted line of stone.
Had she and Drizzt moved only twenty more paces up toward the lip of Keeper's Dale, they would have found another telltale formation of bodies: orcs, some lying three in a row, dead and showing only a single burned hole for injuries.
Drizzt Do'Urden knew of a weapon, a bow named Taulmaril, that inflicted such wounds, a bow held by his friend Catti-brie, whom he thought dead at Shallows.
The dwarf Nikwillig sat on the east-facing side of a mountain, slumped against the stone and fighting against such desperation and despair that he feared he would be frozen him in place until starvation or some wayward orc took him. He took comfort in knowing that he had done his duty well, and that his expedition to the peaks east of the battlefield had helped to turn the tide of the raging conflict - at least enough so that Banak Brawnanvil had managed to get the great majority of dwarves down the cliff face and safely into Mithral Hall ahead of the advancing orc horde.
That moment of triumph played over and over in the weary dwarf's mind, a litany against the pressing fears of his current predicament. He had climbed the slopes higher than the combatants while the field of battle remained blanketed in pre-dawn darkness, had turned his attention, and the mirror he carried, to the rising sun. He had angled a reflected ray from that mirror back against the slope of the ridge across the way, until he had located the second mirror placed there, brilliantly illuminating the target for Catti-brie and her enchanted bow.
Then Nikwillig had watched darkness turn to sudden light, a flare of fire that had risen a thousand feet over the battlefield. Like a ripple in a pond or a burst of wind bending a field of grass, the waves of hot wind and debris had rolled out from that monumental explosion, sweeping the northern reaches of the battlefield where the majority of orcs were beginning their charge. They had gone down in rows, many never to rise again. Their charge had been all but stopped, exactly as the dwarves had hoped.
So Nikwillig had done his job, but even when he'd left, hoping for exactly that outcome, the Felbarran dwarf had known his chances of returning were not good. Banak and the others certainly couldn't wait for him to scramble back down - even if they had wanted to, how would Nikwillig have ever gotten through the swarm of orcs between him and the dwarves?
Nikwillig had left the dwarven ranks on a suicide mission that day, and he held no regrets, but that didn't dismiss the very real fears that huddled around him as the time of his death seemed near at hand.
He thought of Tred, then, his comrade from Felbarr. They, along with several companions, had started out on a bright day from the Citadel of King Emerus Warcrown not so long ago in a typical merchant caravan. While their route was somewhat different than the norm, as they tried to secure a new trading line for both King Emerus and their own pockets, they hadn't expected any real trouble. Certainly, they never expected to walk into the front scouts of the greatest orc assault the region had seen in memory! Nikwillig wondered what might have happened to Tred. Had he fallen in the vicious fight? Or had he gotten down into Keeper's Dale and into Mithral Hall?
The forlorn dwarf gave a helpless little laugh as he considered that Tred had previously decided to walk out of Mithral Hall and return home with the news to Citadel Felbarr. Toughened, war-hardened, and battle-eager Tred had thought to serve as emissary between the two fortresses and in the ultimate irony, Nikwillig had dissuaded him.
"Ah, ye're such the fool, Nikwillig," the dwarf said into the mournful wind.
He didn't really believe the words even as he spoke them. He had stayed, Tred had stayed, because they had decided they were indebted to King Bruenor and his kin, because they had decided that the war was about the solidarity of the Delzoun dwarves, about standing together, shoulder-to-shoulder, in common cause.
No, he hadn't been a fool for staying, and hadn't been a fool for volunteering, insisting even, that he be the one to go out with the mirror and grab those first rays of dawn. He wasn't a warrior, after all. He had walked willingly and rightly into this predicament, but he knew that the road ahead was likely to come to a fast and vicious ending.
The dwarf pulled himself to his feet. He glanced back over his shoulder toward Keeper's Dale, and again dismissed any thoughts of going that way. Certainly that was the closest entrance to Mithral Hall and safety, but to get to it meant crossing a massive orc encampment. Even if he somehow managed that feat, the dwarves were in their hole and those doors were closed, and weren't likely to open anytime soon.
So east it was, Nikwillig decided. To the River Surbrin and hopefully, against all odds, beyond.
He thought he heard a sound nearby and imagined that an orc patrol was likely watching him even then, ready to spring upon him and batter him to death. He took a deep breath. He put one foot in front of the other.
He started his dark journey.
Drizzt and Innovindil veered to the south as they headed for the blasted ridge, angling their march so that they came in sight of Keeper's Dale right near to the spot where the line of metal tubes had been placed by the dwarves. That line ran up from the ground to the entrance of the tunnels that wound beneath what was once a ridgeline. Of course neither of them understood what that pipeline was all about. Neither had any idea that the dwarves, at the instructions of Nanfoodle the gnome, had brought natural gasses up from their underground entrapment, filling the tunnels beneath the unwitting giants and their catapults.
Perhaps if the pair had been granted more time to ponder the pipeline, to climb down the cliff and inspect it more closely, Drizzt and Innovindil would have begun to decipher the mystery of the gigantic fireball. At that moment, however, the fireball seemed the least of their issues. For below them swarmed the largest army of orcs either had ever seen, a virtual sea of dark forms milling around the obelisks that marked Keeper's Dale. Thousands, tens of thousands, moved down there, their indistinct mass occasionally marked by the larger form of a hulking frost giant.
As he scanned across the throng, Drizzt Do'Urden picked out more and more of those larger monsters, and he sucked in his breath as he came to realize the scope of the army. Hundreds of giants were down there, as if the entire population of behemoths from all the Spine of the World had emptied out to the call of King Obould.
"Have the Silver Marches known a darker day?" Innovindil asked.
Drizzt turned to regard her, though he wasn't sure if she was actually asking him or simply making a remark.
Innovindil swung her head to meet his lavender-eyed gaze. "I remember when Obould managed to rout the dwarves from Citadel Felbarr," she explained. "And what a dark day that was! But still, the orc king seemed to have traded one hole for another. While his conquest had played terribly on King Emerus Warcrown and the other Felbarran dwarves, never was it viewed as any threat to the wider region. The orc king had seized upon an unexpected opportunity, and so he had prevailed in a victory that we all expected would be short-lived, as it was. But now this...." Her voice trailed off and she shook her head helplessly as she looked back to the dale and the massive orc army.
"We can guess that most of the dwarves of Clan Battlehammer managed to get back into their tunnels," Drizzt reasoned. "They'll not be easily routed, I assure you. In their chambers, Clan Battlehammer once repulsed an attack by Menzoberranzan. I doubt there are enough orcs in all the world to take the hall."
"You may be right, but does that even matter?"
Drizzt looked at the elf curiously. He started to ask how it might not matter, but as he came to fully understand Innovindil's fears, he held the question in check.
"No," he agreed, "this force Obould has assembled will not be easily pushed back into their mountain holes. It will take Silverymoon and Everlund, and perhaps even Sundabar... Citadels Felbarr and Adbar, and Mithral Hall. It will take the Moonwood elves and the army of Marchion Elastul of Mirabar. All the north must rally to the call of Mithral Hall in this, their hour of need."
"And even in that case, the cost will prove enormous," Innovindil replied. "Horrific." She glanced back to the bloody, carcass-ridden battlefield. "This fight here on the ridge will seem a minor skirmish and fat will the crows of the Silver Marches be."
Drizzt continued his scan as she spoke, and he noted movement down to the west, quickly discerning it as a force of orcs circling up and out of Keeper's Dale.
"The orc scavengers will soon arrive," he said. "Let us be on our way."
Innovindil stared down at Keeper's Dale a bit longer.
"No sign of Sunrise," she remarked, referring to the pegasus companion of Sunset, and once the mount of Tarathiel, her companion.
"Obould still has him, and alive, I am sure," Drizzt replied. "Even an orc would not destroy so magnificent a creature."
Innovindil continued to stare and managed a little hunch of her shoulders, then turned to face Drizzt directly again. "Let us hope."
Drizzt rose, took her hand, and together they walked down toward the north, along the ridge of blasted and broken stones. The explosion had lifted the roof of the ridge away, leaving a scarred ravine behind. Every now and again, the couple came upon the remains of a charred giant. In one place, they found a burned out catapult, somehow still retaining its shape despite the tremendous blast.
Their discoveries prompted more questions than they answered, however, leaving the pair no clue whatsoever as to what might have caused such a cataclysm.
"When we at last find our way into Mithral Hall, you can ask the dwarves about it," Innovindil said when they were far from the field, on an open plateau awaiting the return of the winged Sunset.
Drizzt didn't respond to the elf's direct implication that he would indeed soon return to the dwarven stronghold - where he would have no choice but to face his fears - other than to offer a quiet nod.
"Some trick of the gods, perhaps," the elf went on.
"Or the Harpells," Drizzt added, referring to a family of eccentric and powerful wizards - too powerful for their own good, or for the good of those around them, in most cases! - from the small community of Longsaddle many miles to the west. The Harpells had come to the aid of Mithral Hall before, and had a long-standing friendship with Bruenor and his kin. Drizzt knew enough about them to realize that if anyone might have inadvertently caused such a catastrophe as befell the ridge, it would be that strange clan of confused humans.
"Harpells?"
"You do not want to know," Drizzt said in all seriousness. "Suffice it to say that Bruenor Battlehammer has made some unconventional friends."
As soon as he had spoken the words, Drizzt recognized the irony of them, and he managed a smile to match Innovindil's own widening grin as he glanced at her.
"We will know soon enough on all counts," she said. "For now, we have duties of our own to attend."
"For Sunrise," Drizzt agreed and he shook Innovindil's offered hand. "And for vengeance. Tarathiel will rest easier when Obould Many-Arrows is dead."
"Dead at the tip of a sword?" Innovindil asked, putting a hand to the hilt of her own weapon. "Or at the curve of a scimitar?"
"A scimitar, I think," Drizzt answered without the slightest hesitation, and he looked back to the south. "I do intend to kill that one."
"For Tarathiel, and for Bruenor, then," said Innovindil. "For those who have died and for the good of the North."
"Or simply because I want to kill him," said Drizzt in a tone so cold and even that it sent a shiver along Innovindil's spine.
She could not find the voice to answer.