"Giants!" they cried before Torgar could even ask them why they had abandoned the organized retreat that would have had them bypassing that chamber altogether. "Giants in the tunnels!"
"Giants?" Shingles echoed. "Too low for giants!"
The dwarves charged across and launched themselves into the fray, slaughtering the orcs that stood between them and Torgar's group.
"Giants!" one insisted when he came up before the leader.
Torgar didn't question him, for in looking over his shoulder, the dwarf leader saw the truth of the words in the form of a giant, a giantess actually, crouching, even crawling in places, to arrive at the entrance of the western corridor.
"Get that one!" Torgar demanded, eager to claim that greater prize.
His boys rushed past him, and past those who had just entered, lifting warhammers to throw and ignoring the warning cries of their newly arrived companions to stay back.
A dozen hammers went spinning across the expanse, and every throw seemed true—until the missile neared the pale, bluish-skinned creature and simply veered away.
"Magic?" Torgar whispered.
Almost as if she had heard him, almost as if she was mocking him, the giantess smiled wickedly and waggled her fingers.
Torgar's boys began their charge.
Then they were stumbling, slipping, and blinded, as a sudden burst of sleet filled the room, slicking up the floor.
"Close ranks!" Torgar shouted above the din of the magical storm.
A bright burst of fire appeared, reaching down from the chamber's ceiling and immolating a trio of dwarves who were trying to do just that.
"Run away!" yelled Shingles.
"No," Torgar muttered, and with rage burning in his eyes almost as brightly as the magical fire of the giantess, the refugee from Mirabar stalked through the sleet at the kneeling behemoth.
She looked at him, her eyes blazing with hatred, and she began to mutter yet another spell.
Torgar increased his stride into a run and lifted his axe. He roared above the din, denying the storm, denying his fear, denying all the magic.
Two strides away, he threw himself forward.
And he was hit by wracking pains, by a sudden, inexplicable magical grasp that closed upon his heart and stiffened him in midflight. He tried to bring his arms forward to strike with his axe, but they wouldn't move to his call. He could not get past that burst of agony, that grasp of ultimate pain.
Torgar smashed into the giantess, who didn't move an inch, and he bounced away. He tried to hold his balance for just a moment, but his legs were as useless as his arms. Torgar fell back several stumbling steps. He stared at the giantess curiously, incredulously.
Then he fell over.
Behind him, dwarves swarmed into the room, crying for their leader, bend-ing their backs against the continuing sleet, and Gerti (for it was indeed Gerti herself who had entered the fray), her most powerful enchantments spent, wisely retreated, covering her departure by launching a host of orcs into the fray behind her.
* * *
Ignoring the pain in his rump, ignoring the fresh flow of blood down the back of his leg and the new wounds, Shingles scrambled to Torgar's side. He slapped Torgar hard across the face and shouted for him to wake up.
Gasping, Torgar did manage to look at his friend.
"Hurts," he whispered. "By Moradin, she's crushed me heart!"
"Bah, but yer heart's stone," Shingles growled at him. "So quit yer whinin'!"
And with that, Shingles hoisted Torgar over his shoulder and started back the other way, determinedly and carefully putting one foot in front of the other as he struggled up the icy slope with his dear friend.
They did get out of the room and out of many more, and while the fighting raged outside, the dwarves from Mirabar battled and battled for every inch of ground.
But stubborn indeed were the orcs, and willing to lose ten-to-one against their enemies. By the sheer weight of numbers, they gained ground, corridor to corridor and room to room.
Back near the southern end of the tunnel complex, Shingles reluctantly ordered the last and most definitive ceiling drops.
He told all his boys, even the wounded, "Ye dig in and be ready to die for the honor o' Mithral Hall. They took us in as brothers, and we'll not fail them Battlehammers now."
A cheer went up around him, but he could hear the shallowness of it. For nearly a third of their four hundred were down, including Torgar, their heart and soul.
But the dwarves did as Shingles ordered, without a word of complaint. The last ground in the tunnels, the first ground they had claimed in entering the complex, was the best prepared of all, and if the orcs meant to push them back out the exits near to the cliff overlooking Keeper's Dale, they were going to lose hundreds in the process.
The dwarves dug in and waited.
They propped those with torn legs against secure backing and gave them lighter weapons to swing, and waited.
They wrapped their more garish wounds without complaint, some even tying weapons to broken hands, and waited.
They kissed their dead good-bye and waited.
But the orcs, with three quarters of the ridge complex conquered, did not come on.
* * *
"The most stubborn they been yet," Banak observed when the orcs and goblins finally turned and retreated down the slope. For more than an hour they had come on, throwing themselves into the fray with abandon, and the last battle piled more orc and goblin bodies on the blood-slicked slope than all the previous fights combined. And through it all, the dwarves had held tight to their formations and tight to their defensible positions, and never once had the orcs seemed on the verge of victory.
But still they had come on
"Stubborn? Or stupid?" Tred McKnuckles replied.
"Stupid," Ivan Bouldershoulder decided.
His brother added, "Hee hee h—"
Pikel's laugh was cut short, and Banak's response did not get past his lips, for only then did they see the very telling movement in the west of Torgar's retreat, only then did they see the lines of wounded dwarves streaming out of the tunnels, those able enough carrying dead kin.
"By Moradin," Banak breathed, realizing then that the huge battle on the open slopes had been nothing more than a ruse designed to prevent reinforcements from flocking to Torgar's ranks.
Banak squinted, a prolonged wince, as the lines of limping wounded and borne dead continued to stream out from the southern entrance of the complex. Those dwarves had just joined Mithral Hall—most of them had never even seen the place that had drawn them from the safety of their Mirabar homes.
"The retreat's organized," Ivan Bouldershoulder observed. "They didn't get routed, just pushed back, I'm guessin'."
"Go find Torgar," Banak instructed. "Or whoever it is that's in charge. See if he's needing our help!"
With an "Oo oi!" from Pikel, the Bouldershoulders rushed off.
Tred offered a nod to Banak and ran right behind.
Two others came up to the dwarf leader at just that moment, grim-faced and covered in orc blood.
"What's the point of it?" Catti-brie asked, observing the lines. "They gave so many dead to take the tunnels, but what good are those tunnels to them anyway? None connect to Mithral Hall proper—not even close."
"But they don't know that," said Banak.
Catti-brie didn't buy it. Something else was going on, she believed, and when she looked at Wulfgar, she could see that he was thinking the same way.
"Let's go," Wulfgar offered.
"I got them Bouldershoulders and Tied going to Torgar now," Banak told him.