It was a good plan, except it didn’t take into account one variable.
“You mean they’re coming down the valley? From the high mountains?” Dram asked Rogard Smashfinger in disbelief. The dwarf from Kayolin had just arrived with several hundred doughty warriors and bore that sobering piece of news.
“ ’Fraid so,” grunted the forger-turned-steel-merchant. “We had to move out on the double just to get here before them.”
Dram looked up the valley in dismay. They had erected no defensive positions in that direction. The stream flowing into the lake meandered there, but it was shallow and broad, with a gravel bottom. A four-foot-tall dwarf could ford it in any one of a hundred places; it certainly wouldn’t deter a charging band of ogres.
Dram turned to his father-in-law as Swig Frostmead came up to the pair of mountain dwarves.
“How many fighters do you have on the other side of the bridge?” he asked Swig.
Dram was trying hard to remain calm, summoning the steadiness that had preserved him through dozens of battles in his life. But in those days, there wasn’t any threat to Sally or little Mikey-and worrying about them was making all the difference in the world. Dram Feldspar was shocked to realize his knees were shaking.
“Steady there, son,” said the hill dwarf. “We need you now.”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” Dram snapped, drawing a deep breath. “Now-answer my question!” he demanded with his customary bravado.
“That’s more like it,” Swig declared, clapping him on the shoulder. “And we got about four hundred, to answer your question. What do we know about them brutes up the valley?”
“One of our scouts spotted them yesterday, watched them come over the crest of the range,” Rogard explained. “He couldn’t get a count, but there’s thousands of ’em. Mainly ogres, it looked like.”
“Great Reorx’s nose!” cursed Swig. “That’s a fair lot of muscle against our little town.”
“And they’re coming down the valley,” Dram muttered grimly. He looked at the towers, the hastily erected wall, and the mined bridge ready to be demolished. Ankhar had stolen more than a march on him; he had rendered Dram’s entire defensive strategy obsolete.
“Curse that stubborn daughter of mine!” Swig muttered grimly. “And what kind of husband are you-that you didn’t make her leave?”
Dram snorted. “I was in the next room when you told her she had to go, remember? It was me that brought the ice pack for your eye.”
“Aye,” Swig said, more than a little proud. “You’ve got yerself a prize in that girl, you do.”
“I know,” Dram said, trying hard not to think about Sally, not right then.
He, Rogard, and Swig stood on the town’s broad central plaza, a partially paved field overlooking the lake. The dwarves of New Compound were gathering around them, streaming from their houses and shops, coming down from the mines and forests where they had been working. Soon virtually every resident of the town, male and female, had answered the emergency summons.
“All right, then,” the mountain dwarf said gruffly. “Let’s get to work.”
He stepped up onto an empty barrel that had been rolled into the middle of the square, turning slowly through a full circle, meeting the eyes of as many townsfolk as he could. Their voices stilled. With a full-throated shout, he broke the news.
“Here’s how we stand: eight hundred hill dwarves, two hundred and fifty mountain dwarves, and a hundred humans who’ve decided to stick around and fight on our side. We don’t know how big a force is coming against us, but a good reckon is that it will be twice our number in ogres alone. And they’ve got hobs along with ’em too. They’re just around the bend, up the valley, and will reach the town limits in an hour or two.
“So the question is this: Do we pack up and skedaddle, getting out of here fast with whatever we can carry, and hope that these brutes don’t chase us down the valley faster than we can run? Or do we stay here and fight for this place, our town and our factories? Our bridge and our houses?”
“Fight!”
Dram didn’t see the female dwarf who shouted first, though she sounded an awful lot like Sally. That first cry was echoed almost immediately from a score-a hundred-throats, until the whole town was shouting its determination to give battle, to hold the ground they had claimed for themselves only a few short years before.
And so the issue was decided.
“Swig Frostmead, take three hundred hill dwarves down to the shore. You’ll stop ’em if they try to come along the edge of the lake. Rogard Smashfinger will take the mountain dwarves and hold the logging sheds and powder factory at the south edge of town. I’ll watch from here with the rest of us, as a reserve force, and we’ll counterattack where we can do the most good. Any questions?”
“How do we make sure they save some ogres for us in the reserves?” quipped one burly lumberjack, a man who had taken well to life in a dwarf town.
That provoked a laugh, and the meeting broke up, each fighter grabbing his favorite weapon and heading to his assigned position. Sally stayed behind with Dram; Mikey went with the other children, who were being taken by some of the elders up a narrow side valley, the only other easy route away from New Compound. It was a dead end, leading to a box canyon where a number of mines had been excavated, but they should be safe there.
The children would take shelter in one of the deepest mines. If the dwarves were driven from the field, the survivors would seal off the entrances and hide in the mines along with the young ones. Enough food had been stored there for a month or more of siege.
By the time they had spent a month in the mines, Dram firmly believed, the emperor’s armies would have arrived to free New Compound, and Mikey-and all the other kids of the town-could come out to play under the sun and breathe the air of freedom.
Either that or by that time, they would all be dead.
The Nightmaster moved invisibly through the streets of Palanthas. He departed from his temple, a secret shrine beneath the ground near the center of the city, and rose up through a grate in the street. As stealthy as the wind, he flowed above the ground, unseen, unheard, not even sensed. The gate in the city wall was nothing to him; he simply drifted up and over the wall as a cloud of gas and continued toward his destination beyond the old city.
Approaching the palace of the lord regent, the high priest of Hiddukel disdained the gates and stairways and courtyards. He rose through the air like a bird-or a bat-coming to rest on a lofty balcony. Though the night was warm, the doors leading into the palace were closed and barred. No matter: the Nightmaster dissolved into a pool of vapor on the paving stones of the balcony.
Still soundless and unseen, he flowed through the narrow gap underneath the door. Within the chamber, he took a moment to coalesce, watching the man who was poring over a scroll, working sums and subtractions with a scritch scritch scritch of pen on parchment.
Lord Regent Bakkard du Chagne had not weathered his change in status very well, reflected the Nightmaster. The lord, who had been the unchallenged master of Palanthas until the emperor had come to power, had grown overweight and round-shouldered. His hair, always thin, was nearly gone, the few remaining strands were pale and pathetically stringy. Though three bright lanterns were arrayed on his table, he still leaned low, his face near his writing, squinting as he studied his figures.
Abruptly he looked up at the place where the Nightmaster was hovering invisibly. “I thought I felt you!” he snapped. “What do you want?”
The high priest of Hiddukel sighed and materialized to stand on the floor, his features-as ever-concealed by his black mask.
“Trying to squeeze the last drop of blood out of each coin?” he asked drolly, enjoying du Chagne’s flash of anger as the regent stiffened and turned his face toward his visitor.
“How dare you speak to me like that!” he spat.
“A mere joke between old friends,” replied the cleric. “I meant no disrespect.”