Drizzt had done all of that. For Bruenor. For friendship. Selflessly.
Drizzt, who now had paid, at long last, for Bruenor’s dwarven needs.
The red-bearded dwarf winced, feeling again as if this victory might prove hollow after all. In defiance, Bruenor blew his cracked silver horn. Let the wild spirit of Thibbledorf Pwent come forward, he decided, wanting to ultimately punish those who stood against him.
Far from the roar of battle, the explosions of fire and lightning, the whipping ice storms of Penelope Harpell and the latest shield rush led by Bruenor Battlehammer, the drow ranger lay quietly in the darkness.
His first sensations of semiconsciousness came from his fingers, playing over a familiar shape as they shifted across the onyx figurine of the panther.
Somewhere distantly, Drizzt felt the warmth and heard the name of Guenhwyvar echoing in his thoughts.
Memories would not come back to him-nothing specific at least. Just a feeling of companionship and joy. Images of his friends flashed in the recesses of his mind, of Catti-brie and Bruenor, mostly.
And of Guenhwyvar, the panther, the figurine that served as her beacon so tangible in Drizzt’s weak hands.
He could not hear the cries of dying dwarves, and could not know the battle raging far below, a battle then looking like victory to his friends.
Somehow, though, Drizzt knew better. A pair of great demon leaders, Marilith and Nalfeshnee, were waiting in the shadows and would soon come onto the battlefield and rally the demonic forces and the drow to turn back the tide of dwarves.
Where the hopes and expectations of victory in his dearest friends would suddenly turn to dread.
Another image flashed in his mind, but did not flutter aside. Instead it held him and called to him, demanded of Drizzt that he shake off the irresistible darkness, that he wake up.
He saw Jarlaxle in his thoughts, and when he at last did open his weary eyes, Drizzt saw Jarlaxle once more, standing with Kimmuriel beside his bed.
“Welcome back.”
CHAPTER 22
Oretheo Spikes’s a good one,” Bungalow Thump assured Bruenor.
“He’s got ’em in line, aye!” Bruenor replied, glancing down to his left where the large Adbar contingent centered the dwarven line, with Bruenor and Mithral Hall holding strong on the right flank, King Emerus and the Felbarran leapers holding the left.
It would have been easy for Oretheo Spikes and his Wilddwarves to press too far ahead, and surely that would prove oh-so-tempting to the ferocious band. They were nearest the huge structure that housed the circular stair to the upper levels, the centerpiece of this cavern, the symbol of control of the chamber. And they were Wilddwarves, so akin in attitude, indeed patterned after, the Mithral Hall Gutbusters, who never met an enemy they didn’t eagerly punch, leap upon, shake apart, or bite. The enemy was weaker there too, in the middle, with the stair dispersing the demons and what few remained alive of their goblinkin fodder out to the left and right.
But Oretheo was keeping his boys in line, and the long front ranks of the dwarven charge kept rolling in practiced unison. Inexorable, unstoppable, a rolling, swallowing wave. And as they had planned up above, Bruenor’s end of the line initiated the roll of each wave. King Bruenor alone paced the assault, keeping his own formations tight, keeping his cadence solid and straight.
Magical explosions shook the chamber from all around, coming in from dark elf wizards or demons skulking in the shadows, and going out from Catti-brie and the Harpells. The demons, other than the manes and other lesser creatures, didn’t seem overly bothered by the magical barrage, but neither were the tough dwarves, secure behind their armor and shields, as solid as the stone they mined.
Behind the initial line of fighting, Bruenor noticed something else- and he laughed out loud at the sight. Back there, the demons, who couldn’t get into the fight fast enough to satiate their hateful hunger, had turned on the slave fodder, pulling down goblins and orcs and tearing them to shreds.
“Keep it slow and keep it steady, me boys!” Bruenor yelled. “Let ’em eat their own a bit afore they’re tastin’ me axe for dessert!”
And the cheers rolled down the line, and the dwarven wave rolled on across the cavern floor.
But far down to the left, there came a new commotion, and when Bruenor and the others turned that way, it seemed to them as if the dwarven advance, that metaphorical wave, was suddenly breaking against huge rocks.
Or huge demons, to be more precise.
A six-armed female beauty towered three times the height of the unfortunate dwarves facing her, and an even larger beast, much like the one Athrogate and Ambergris had killed in the mines, only bigger, and, given the dwarves flying and dying in front of him, surely meaner.
Bruenor shouted over to Bungalow Thump, who had scurried back to his line of Gutbusters. “Send Adbar reinforcing to the left!”
Even as he called out, though, a wall of fire appeared down that way, far to the left, down by the Felbarrans. One of the demon leaders had done that, Bruenor guessed easily enough, and behind the roiling flames, King Emerus and his charges had no choice but to fall back.
And worse, all around those two demon leaders, the rest of the horde was suddenly rallying and falling into order. From the beginning of the fight, much like in the halls above, the Abyssal creatures had fought as individuals, each taking any opening to leap forward and attack-and so, out there alone, without support, those too-eager demons had been easy prey for the teamwork of the disciplined dwarves.
But now all of that was fast changing, right in front of Bruenor’s surprised and worried gaze. He heard a low buzzing sound, and knew that this, too, was coming from the demon leaders, from the six-armed female behemoth it seemed. Under that drone, the demons all the way down to this farthest end of the line reformed their ranks, suddenly ready to battle in unison.
The leaders had brought discipline, and powerful magic, and now Bruenor wasn’t feeling that the victory might be hollow. He was wondering if he had led three thousand dwarves into a death trap.
“Fight on, boys!” he called to rally those around him. “Hold close to yer fellows! None o’ us’re to move out to get catched and pulled off!”
He turned to Catti-brie and the Harpells. “Them big ones’re controlling it all.”
“Marilith and Nalfeshnee,” Penelope Harpell replied, shaking her head, her face a mask of dread. She knew of demonkind and understood the great power that had unexpectedly come upon them. “They are demonic nobility in all but title. Mighty leaders have joined our enemies!”
“Ye get me down there,” Bruenor told them. “We’ll be cuttin’ the head from the snake or I’m a bearded gnome!”
“Huzzah!” roared all those dwarves who heard the claim.
But the middle of that cheer seemed to carry on for a long while, a great buzzing drone, and now a swarm of chasme, scores of the flying beasts, swept into the cavern in tight formation.
And those chasme carried barrels of oil heated in the nearby forge, so their bombs began to fall, and great blasts of biting flames erupted all around the dwarven lines.
“Them two’re controlling it!” King Emerus yelled to Ragged Dain, both of them coming to the same conclusion as Bruenor. “We got to get to them!”
But the two in question seemed far beyond the reach of the Felbarran leaders. They loomed as ghostly silhouettes behind the great magical wall of flames that licked and bit at the dwarven line and drove them back.
King Emerus spun and called for the priestess Mandarina Dobberbright. “Ye get me through that wall!” he ordered her.