They scrambled and they tumbled, and whenever one fell, the others hoisted him up and pulled him along. At one point, a rather wide and seemingly bottomless chasm, Wulfgar grabbed Catti-brie and tossed her across. A protesting Torgar got the treatment next, then Shoudra. With giant-thrown rocks cracking the stone all around him, Wulfgar made the leap himself.
On they ran, too afraid to even look back. Gradually, the bombardment thinned and the yells of outrage behind them diminished to nothingness.
Huffing and puffing, the foursome pulled up behind a wall of stone.
"Nanfoodle?" Catti-brie asked again.
"If we're lucky, the giants never even knew he was there," Shoudra explained. "He has potions that should allow him easy escape."
"And if we're not lucky?" Wulfgar asked.
Shoudra's grim expression was all the answer he needed. Wulfgar had seen enough of giants in his day, and enough of frost giants in particular, to understand the odds Nanfoodle would face if they noticed him.
"I don't know … that we killed any … but there's one. . giantess who is sure to be … wishing we hadn't come," Catti-brie remarked between gasps.
"I am sure that my lightning stung a few," Shoudra added. "But I doubt I did any serious harm to any."
"But that wasn't the point, now was it?" Torgar reminded them. "Come on, let's get off these rocks before the next orc charge. I didn't get no swings at the damned giants, but I mean to have me a few ores' heads!"
He stomped off, and the others followed, all of them nursing more than a few cuts and bruises from their nighttime run, and all of them glancing back repeatedly in hopes of seeing their gnome companion.
They should have been looking ahead instead, for when they arrived back at the main encampment, they found Nanfoodle resting against a stone, an oversized pipe stuffed into his mouth, his smile stretching wide to either side.
"Should be an interesting morning," the gnome remarked, grinning from ear to ear.
Soon after dawn the next day, the first giant barrage began—almost.
All the dwarves watched as in the distance, a pair of great catapults, baskets piled with stones, bent back, giants straining to set them.
From below, the orcs howled and began their charge, thinking to catch the dwarves vulnerable under the giant-sized volley.
Beams creaked … and cracked.
The giants tried to release the missiles, but the catapults simply fell to pieces.
All eyes in the area turned to Nanfoodle, who whistled and pulled a vial out of his belt pouch, holding it up before him and swishing greenish liquid around inside it.
"A simple acid, really," he explained.
"Well, ye bought us some time," Banak Brawnanvil congratulated the five-some, and he looked down the slope at the stubbornly charging orcs. "From them giants, at least."
The dwarf ran off then, barking orders, calling his formations into position.
"They'll need many new logs if they hope to reconstitute their war engines," Nanfoodle assured the others.
Of course, none of them were surprised later that same day, when scouts reported that new logs were already being brought in to that northwestern ridge.
"Stubborn bunch," the little gnome observed.
CHAPTER 21 TWO HELMETS
The diamond edge held his gaze, its glaring image crystallizing his thoughts.
Drizzt sat in his small cave, Icingdeath laid out before him, Bruenor's lost helmet propped on a stick to the side. Outside, the morning shone bright and clear, with a brisk breeze blowing and small clusters of white clouds rushing across the blue sky.
There was a vibrancy in that wind, a sense of being alive.
To Drizzt Do'Urden, it shamed him and angered him all at the same time. For he had gone there to hide, to slide back into the comfort of secluded darkness—to put his feelings behind a wall that effectively denied them.
Tarathiel and Innovindil had assaulted that wall. Their forgiveness and apology, the beauty of their fighting dance, the effectiveness of their actions beside him, all showed Drizzt that he must accept their invitation, both for the sake of the cause against the invading orcs and for his own sake. Only through them, he knew, could he begin to sort out the darkness of Ellifain. Only through them might he come to find some closure on that horrible moment in the pirate hideout.
But seeking those answers and that closure meant moving out from behind the invulnerable wall that was the Hunter.
Drizzt's gaze slipped away from the diamond edge of Icingdeath to the one-homed helmet.
He tried to look away almost immediately, but it didn't matter, for he wasn't really looking at the helmet. He was watching the tower fall. He was watching Ellifain fall. He was watching Clacker fall. He was watching Zaknafein fall.
All that pain, buried within him for all those years, came flooding over Drizzt Do'Urden there, alone in the small cave. Only when the first line of moisture slid down his cheek did he even realize how few tears he had shed over the years. Only when the wetness crystallized his vision did Drizzt truly realize the depth of the pain within him.
He had hidden it away, time and again, beneath the veil of anger in those times when he became the Hunter, when the pain overwhelmed him. And more than that—more subtly but no less destructive, he only then realized— he had hidden it all away beneath the veil of hope, in the logical and determined understanding that sacrifices were acceptable if the principles were upheld.
Dying well.
Drizzt had always hoped that he would die well, battling evil enemies or saving a friend. There was honor in that, and the truest legacy he could ever know. Had anyone died more nobly than Zaknafein?
But that didn't alleviate the pain for those left behind. Only then, sitting there, purposefully tearing down the wall he had built of anger and of hope, could Drizzt Do'Urden begin to realize that he had never really cried for Zaknafein or for any of the others.
And under the weight of that revelation, he felt a coward.
It started as the slightest of movements, a jerk of the drow's slender shoulders. It sounded as a small gasp at first, a mere chortle.
For the first time, Drizzt Do'Urden didn't let it end at that point. For the first time, he did not let the Hunter build a wall of stone around his heart, nor let the justifications of principle and purpose dull the keen edge of pain. For the first time, he did not shy from the emptiness and the helplessness; he did not embrace them, but neither did he run.
He cried for Zaknafein and for Clacker. He cried for Ellifain, the most tragic loss of all. He considered the course of his life—but not with lament, stubbornly throwing aside all the typical regrets that he should have turned his friends from the course into the mountains, that he should have ushered them straight to Mithral Hall. They had walked with eyes wide. All of them, knowing the dangers, expecting the inevitable. Circumstance and bad luck had guided Drizzt's journey to that fallen tower and to the helmet of his lost friend. His journey had taken him to the saddest day of his life, to a moment of the greatest loss he could possibly know. In an instant, he had lost almost everything dear to him: Bruenor, Wulfgar, Catti-brie, and Regis.
But he had not cried.
He had run away from the pain. He had built the wall of the Hunter, the justification being that he would continue the fight—heighten it—and pay back his enemies.
There was truth in that course. There was purpose and there was, undeniably, effectiveness.
But there was a price as well, Drizzt understood on a very basic level, as the wall fell down and the tears flowed. The price of his heart.
For to hide away behind the stone of anger was to deny, as well, the pleasures of being alive. All of that separated him from the orcs he killed. All of that gave true purpose to waging the war, the difference between good and evil, between right and wrong.