Wulfgar shook his head. "Not going to Torgar," he corrected. "There is nothing in those tunnels worth this to our enemies," he added, sweeping his arm out to highlight the sheer carnage about the mountain slopes.
Banak nodded his agreement but kept his real fear unspoken. It was coming clearer to him and to the others, he knew, why the orcs had so desperately played for those tunnels.
Giants.
Wulfgar and Catti-brie sprinted away, actually catching and passing by the three dwarves heading to find Torgar.
"We're going up top," Catti-brie explained to them.
"Then take me brother!" Ivan called. "He's more help out of doors than in."
"Me brudder!" shouted Pikel, and he veered from his dwarf companions toward the duo.
Without complaint, having long before learned to not underestimate and to appreciate the dwarf "doo-dad," Catti-brie and Wulfgar continued along. They got to the southern end of the ridge and began to scale, beside the tunnel entrance from which came the line of wounded.
"We're holding!" one badly injured but still-walking dwarf proudly called to them.
"We never doubted that ye would!" Catti-brie yelled back, allowing her Dwarvish accent to strike hard into her inflection. In response, the dwarf punched a fist into the air. The movement had him grimacing with pain, though he tried hard not to let it show.
Wulfgar led the way up the rocky incline, his great strength and long legs allowing him to scale the broken wall easily. At every difficult juncture, he stopped and turned, reaching down and easily hoisting Catti-brie up beside him. A couple of points presented a more difficult challenge concerning short Pikel, though, for even lying flat on the stone, Wulfgar couldn't reach back that low.
Pikel merely smiled and waved him back, then went into a series of gyra-tions and chanting, then stopped and stared at the flat stone incline, giggling all the while. The green-bearded dwarf reached forward, his hand going right into the suddenly malleable stone. He reshaped it into one small step after another. Then, giggling still, the dwarf simply walked up beside the two humans and motioned them to move along.
The top of the ridgeline was broken and uneven but certainly navigable, even with the wind howling across the trio, left to right. Downwind as they were of the western slopes, they actually caught scent of the enemy before ever seeing them.
They fell back behind a high jut and watched as the first frost giant climbed to the ridge top.
Catti-brie put up Taulmaril and took deadly aim, but Pikel grabbed the arrow, shook his hairy head, and waggled the finger of his free hand before her, then pointed out to the north.
Where more giants were coming up.
"One shot," Wulfgar whispered. He grasped Aegis-fang tightly. "Be running as you let fly."
"Ready," Catti-brie assured him, and she motioned for Pikel to let go of her arrow, then for him to be off.
With a porcine squeal, Pikel sprinted out from behind the jut, running full out to the south. The nearest giant howled and pointed and started to give chase.
But then a streaking arrow hit the behemoth in the chest, staggering him backward, and a spinning warhammer followed the shot, striking in almost exactly the same place. The giant staggered more and tumbled off the western side of the ridge.
Wulfgar and Catti-brie heard the roar but didn't see it, for they were already in a dead run. They caught up to Pikel near to the southern descent, and without a word, Wulfgar merely scooped the dwarf up in his powerful grasp and ran on, hopping from ledge to ledge all the way back to the ground. Soon after they came down, boulders began to skip all around them, and the trio worked hard to help those dwarves still in the area back into the shelter of the tunnel.
Not so far in, they rejoined Ivan and Tred, along with Shingles McRuff and a very shaken Torgar Hammerstriker.
"Casters," Shingles explained to them. "Giant witch reached out and nearly crushed me friend's heart!"
As he finished, he patted Torgar on the shoulder, but gently.
"Hurts," Torgar remarked, his voice barely audible. "Hurts a lot."
"Bah, ye're too tough to fall to a simple witch trick," Shingles assured his friend, and he started to slap Torgar again, but Torgar held up a hand to deny the blow.
"Giants up above," Wulfgar explained to the dwarves. "We should move in deeper in case they come down."
"They won't move south," Catti-brie reasoned. "They wanted the high ground, and so they got it."
"And them orcs ain't coming on anymore, neither," said Shingles. "We dropped the roof on them, but they could've gotten to us by now if they'd wanted to."
"They have what they came for," Catti-brie replied.
She glanced back to the southern exit, and all seemed calm again, the rock shower having ended. Still, Wulfgar and the others gave it some time before daring to exit the tunnel again. The long shadows of twilight greeted them, along with an unsettling quiet that had descended over the region.
Catti-brie looked back to the main dwarven force, far to the east.
"Too far for a giant's throw," she said, and she glanced back up at the ridge.
Wulfgar started up immediately, and the woman went right behind. Back on the ridge top, even in the deepening gloom of night, they quickly came to understand what the assault had been all about. Far to the north on the ridge, giants were hauling huge logs up the western slope, while others were assembling those logs into gigantic war engines. Catti-brie looked back to the dwarves' position, with alarm. The distance was too far for a giant's throw, indeed, but was it too far for the throw of a giant-sized catapult?
At that moment, it truly hit the woman just how much trouble they were in. For the orcs to sacrifice so many, for them to allow hundreds of their kin to be slaughtered simply to earn a tactical advantage in the preparation of the battlefield, revealed a level of commitment and cunning far beyond anything the woman had ever seen from the wretched, pig-faced creatures.
"Bruenor's often said that the only reason the orcs and goblins didn't take over the North was that the orcs and goblins were too stupid to fight together," the woman whispered to Wulfgar.
"And now Bruenor is dead, or soon will be," Wulfgar replied.
His grim tone confirmed to Catti-brie that he had come to fathom the situation along similar lines.
They were in trouble.
CHAPTER 13 DEFINING THE BORDER
"By the gods, old William, ye could sleep the day away gettin' ready for yer nighttime rest," said Brusco Brawnanvil, first cousin to Banak, the war leader who was making his amazing reputation across the mountains to the west, on the other side of Mithral Hall.
"Yep," old William—Bill to his friends—HuskenNugget answered, and he let his head slide back to rest against the stone wall of the small tower marking the eastern entrance to the dwarven stronghold. Below their position, the Sur-brin flowed mightily past, sparkling in the afternoon light.
Soon after the first reports had filtered back to Mithral Hall of monsters stirring in the North, a substantial encampment had been constructed just north of their current position, along the high ground of a mountain arm. But with the desperate retreat from Shallows and the advent of the war in the west, that camp had been all but abandoned, with only a few forward scouts left behind. The dwarves simply didn't have any to spare, and the orcs were pressing them hard in the mountains north of Keeper's Dale. Rumors from Nesmй had forced Clan Battlehammer to tighten the defenses of their tunnels as well, fearing an underground assault.
In the east, there was nothing but the dance of the Surbrin and the long hours of boredom, made worse for the veteran dwarves because of their knowledge that their kin were fighting and dying in the west.