A heavy foot knocked Bruenor back to the ground, and before he could rise, the whiplike neck snapped down upon him and he was lifted in the dragon’s maw.
Regis fell back again, shaking with fear. “Bruenor!” he cried again, this time his words coming out as no more than a whisper.
The black cloud dissipated around Catti-brie and Wulfgar, but the barbarian had taken the full force of Shimmergloom’s insidious venom. He wanted to flee, even if the only route of escape meant plunging headlong over the side of the gorge. The shadow hounds’ baying, though it was still many minutes behind them, closed in upon him. All of his wounds, the crushing of the golem, the nicks the gray dwarves had put into him, hurt him vividly, making him flinch with every step, though his adrenaline of battle had many times before dismissed far more serious and painful injuries.
The dragon seemed ten times mightier to Wulfgar, and he couldn’t even have brought himself to raise a weapon against it, for he believed in his heart that Shinmergloom could not be defeated.
Despair had stopped him where fire and steel had not. He stumbled back with Catti-brie toward another room, having no strength to resist her pull.
Bruenor felt his breath blasted out, as the terrible maw crunched into him. He stubbornly held onto the axe, and even managed a swing or two.
Catti-brie pushed Wulfgar through the doorway and into the shelter of the small room, then turned back to the fight in the cavern. “Ye bastard son of a demon lizard!” she spat, as she set Taulmaril into motion. Silver-streaking arrows blasted holes into Shimmergloom’s black armor. When Catti-brie understood the measure of the effectiveness of her weapon, she grasped at a desperate plan. Aiming her next shots at the monster’s feet, she sought to drive it from the ledge.
Shimmergloom hopped in pain and confusion as the stinging bolts whistled in. The seething hatred of the dragon’s narrowed eyes bore down upon the brave young woman. It spat Bruenor’s broken form across the floor and roared, “Know fear, foolish girl! Taste of my breath and know you are doomed!” The black lungs expanded, perverting the intaken air into the foul cloud of despair.
Then the stone at the edge of the gorge broke away.
Little joy came to Regis when the dragon fell. He managed to drag Bruenor back into the anteroom, but had no idea of what to do next. Behind him, the relentless pursuit of the shadow hounds drew closer, he was separated from Wulfgar and Catti-brie, and he didn’t dare cross the cavern without knowing if the dragon was truly gone. He looked down at the battered and blood-covered form of his oldest friend, having not the slightest notion of how he might begin to help him, or even if Bruenor was still alive.
Only surprise delayed Regis’s immediate squeals of joy when Bruenor opened his gray eyes and winked.
Drizzt and Entreri flattened themselves against the wall as the rockslide from the broken ledge tumbled dangerously close. It was over in a moment and Drizzt started up at once, desperate to get to his friends.
He had to stop again, though, and wait nervously as the black form of the dragon dropped past him, then recovered quickly and moved back up toward the rim.
“How?” Regis asked, gawking at the dwarf.
Bruenor shifted uncomfortably and struggled to his feet. The mithril mail had held against the dragon’s bite, though Bruenor had been squeezed terribly and bore rows of deep bruises, and probably a host of broken ribs, for the experience. The tough dwarf was still very much alive and alert, though, dismissing his considerable pain for the more important matter before him—the safety of his friends.
“Where’s the boy, and Catti-brie?” he pressed immediately, the background howls of the shadow hounds accentuating the desperation of his tone.
“Another room,” Regis answered, indicating the area to the right beyond the door to the cavern.
“Cat!” Bruenor shouted. “How do ye fare?”
After a stunned pause, for Catti-brie, too, had not expected to hear Bruenor’s voice again, she called back, “Wulfgar’s gone for the fight, I fear! A dragon’s spell, for all I can make it! But for meself, I’m for leaving! The dogs’ll be here sooner than I like!”
“Aye!” agreed Bruenor, clutching at a twinge of pain in his side when he yelled. “But have ye seen the worm?”
“No, nor heared the beast!” came the uncertain reply.
Bruenor looked to Regis.
“It fell, and has been gone since,” the halfling answered the questioning stare, equally unconvinced that Shimmergloom had been defeated so easily.
“Not a choice to us, then!” Bruenor called out. “We’re to make the bridge! Can ye bring the boy?”
“It’s his heart for fightin’ that’s been bruised, no more!” replied Catti-brie. “We’ll be along!”
Bruenor clasped Regis’s shoulder, lending support to his nervous friend. “Let’s be going, then!” he roared in his familiar voice of confidence.
Regis smiled in spite of his dread at the sight of the old Bruenor again. Without further coaxing, he walked beside the dwarf out of the room.
Even as they took the first step toward the gorge, the black cloud that was Shimmergloom again crested the rim.
“Ye see it?” cried Catti-brie.
Bruenor fell back into the room, viewing the dragon all too clearly. Doom closed in all around him, insistent and inescapable. Despair denied his determination, not for himself, for he knew that he had followed the logical course of his fate in coming back to Mithril Hall—a destiny that had been engraved upon the fabric of his very being from the day his kin had been slaughtered—but his friends should not perish this way. Not the halfling, who always before could find an escape from every trap. Not the boy, with so many glorious adventures left before him upon his road.
And not his girl, Catti-brie, his own beloved daughter. The only light that had truly shone in the mines of Clan Battlehammer in Icewind Dale.
The fall of the drow alone, willing companion and dearest friend, had been too high a price for his selfish daring. The loss that faced him now was simply too much for him to bear.
His eyes darted around the small room. There had to be an option. If ever he had been faithful to the gods of the dwarves, he asked them now to grant him this one thing. Give him an option.
There was a small curtain against one of the room’s walls. Bruenor looked curiously at Regis.
The halfling shrugged. “A storage area,” he said. “Nothing of value. Not even a weapon.”
Bruenor wouldn’t accept the answer. He dashed through the curtain and started tearing through the crates and sacks that lay within. Dried food. Pieces of wood. An extra cloak. A skin of water.
A keg of oil.
Shimmergloom swooped back and forth along the length of the gorge, waiting to meet the intruders on its own terms in the open cavern and confident that the shadow hounds would flush them out.
Drizzt had nearly reached the level of the dragon, pressing on in the face of peril with no other concerns than those he felt for his friends.
“Hold!” Entreri called to him from a short distance below. “Are you so determined to get yourself killed?”
“Damn the dragon!” Drizzt hissed back. “I’ll not cower in the shadows and watch my friends be destroyed.”
“There is value in dying with them?” came the sarcastic reply. “You are a fool, drow. Your worth outweighs that of all your pitiful friends!”
“Pitiful?” Drizzt echoed incredulously. “It is you that I pity, assassin.”
The drow’s disapproval stung Entreri more than he would have expected. “Then pity yourself!” he shot back angrily. “For you are more akin to me than you care to believe!”