"Tweren't me, then!" Ivan howled, and he looked back in alarm.
"Bah! Cave-in!" cried Tred, catching on. "Get 'em out! Get 'em all out!"
But it wasn't a cave-in, as the two dwarves and their companions learned a moment later, when the leading edge of the thunder-makers came around the corner behind them, charging up the tunnel with wild abandon.
"Not a collapse!" one dwarf further down the corridor called.
"Gutbusters!" cried another.
"Pwent?" Ivan mouthed at Tred, and both wisely rolled back tighter against their respective wall.
His answer came in one long, droning roar: the cry of sheer outrage, the scraping of metal armor, and the stamp of heavy boots. The column rushed past him, Thibbledorf Pwent in its lead, and bearing before him a great, heavy tower shield. Arrows thunked into that shield, and one skipped past, catching Pwent squarely in the shoulder. That only made him yell louder and run faster, leaning forward eagerly.
Orc bows fired repeatedly, and orc spears arced through the narrow passage, but the Gutbusters, be it from courage or stupidity, did not waver a single step. Several took brutal hits, shots that would have felled an ordinary dwarf, but in their heightened state of emotion, the Gutbuster warriors didn't even seem to feel the sting.
Pwent hit the rock barricade at a dead run, slamming against it, and the dwarves behind him hit him at a dead run too, driving on, forming a dwarven ramp over which their buddies could scramble.
And the wall toppled.
A few orcs remained, some firing their bows, some just swatting with flimsy weapons, others drawing swords.
The Gutbusters responded heart and soul, leaping onto their enemies, thrashing them with wickedly ridged armor, skewering them with head spikes, or slugging them with spiked gauntlets.
By the time Ivan helped the stung Tred hobble down to the toppled barricade, no orcs remained intact, let alone alive.
"Gotta take 'em fast and not let 'em shoot ye more'n a few times," the smelly Thibbledorf Pwent explained.
He seemed oblivious to the fact that a pair of arrows protruded from one of his strong shoulders.
"Get that tend—" Ivan started to say to him, but he was interrupted by a cry from farther along, calling out another barricade.
"Get 'em boys!" howled Pwent. "Yaaaaaaaaaa!"
He kicked the broken stones off of his shield and yanked it up. With a chorus of cheering all around him, Pwent set off again at a dead run.
"Hope we don't get to the wider areas too much afore Torgar," Ivan remarked.
Tred just snorted and shook his head, and Ivan helped him along.
* * *
Far down from the fighting, in the sulfuric chamber beneath the northern floor of Keeper's Dale, Nanfoodle, Pikel, and a host of dwarves had gathered, heavy cloths over their faces, protecting them from the nasty stench.
Pikel crouched in a pit that had been carved on the edge of the yellowish water. He was mumbling the words of a spell, waving his hand and his stump of an arm over the stone. Beside him, one burly dwarf held a long metal tube vertically, its bottom end capped with a spearlike tip. Pikel finished the spell and fell back, nodding, and the dwarf plunged the long tube into the suddenly malleable stone. Burly arms pressed on, sliding the metal down through the mud, until more than half its length had disappeared.
"Hit rock," he explained.
Pikel nodded and smiled as he looked at Nanfoodle, who breathed a sigh of relief. It would be the trickiest part of all, the gnome believed. First, with Pikel's help, they had excavated ten feet of stone, leaving a thin wall of about five feet to the trapped gasses. There was little room for error.
They waited until the enchanted mud turned back to stone, and on a nod from the gnome, a pair of mallet-wielding dwarves stepped forward and began tapping at the top of the tube.
Nanfoodle held his breath—he knew that one spark could prove utterly disastrous, though he hadn't shared that little tidbit with any of the others.
He didn't breathe again properly until one of the hammering dwarves remarked, "We're through."
The other dwarf, again on a nod from the gnome, pulled out a knife and cut the tie that was holding the spear tip tight against the bottom lip, allowing it to fall away, and almost immediately both the dwarves spat and waved their hands before them as a deeper stench came flowing through the tube.
Pikel gave a little squeal of delight and ran forward, capping the end with a gummy substance Nanfoodle had prepared, then falling down and further sealing the tube in place with more stone-turned-to-mud.
"Craziest damned thing I ever seen," one dwarf off to the side remarked.
"Durned gnome," another answered.
Beneath his cloth veil, Nanfoodle merely smiled. He couldn't really even disagree with their assessment. On his word alone, the dwarves had strung a line of metal out of the chamber, along several tunnels, and through another ten feet of stone to the floor of Keeper's Dale. On his word alone, other dwarves had taken that line all the way to the base of the cliff, more than fifty feet farther to the north and twice that to the east. On his word alone, still more dwarves were even then continuing the line up the side of the cliff—two or three hundred feet up—securing the tubes end to end with a series of metal pins so that Pikel could later seal them together with his stone-turned-to-mud.
Pikel went back to work, with all the dwarves in tow, some carrying buckets of mud, others carrying buckets of sealing pitch. While the pit had been carved, the green-bearded dwarf had connected nearly all of the underground tubes, and so within the matter of an hour, the crew was back above ground, crawling their way across Keeper's Dale to the base of the cliff. Pikel had become quite proficient at his work by that time, even perfecting the technique for «elbowing» the stone joint when the tubes had to turn a corner.
Nanfoodle led a second crew all along the joined metal line, painting more pitch on any possible weak areas and propping stones against the metal to further secure it. There was no room for error, the gnome understood, particularly in those stretches underground.
Every so often, the gnome went back to the sulfuric chamber, just to make sure that the critical first tube was still solidly in place.
Just to reassure himself that he wasn't completely out of his mind.
* * *
After Pwent's dramatic victory at the barricade, the battling dwarves had the majority of the tunnels beneath the giant-held ridge secured within another hour, forcing the remaining orcs to the very northern end of the complex. Not wanting to delay much further than that, Torgar ordered the area sealed off (which greatly disappointed Pwent, of course), his engineers dropping a wall of stone before their enemies. Inspecting the cave-in, Torgar declared the complex won.
The work was only beginning, though. The dwarves rushed back out of the tunnel's southern end, back near Keeper's Dale, and replaced weapons on their belts as they took up buckets of dark and sticky pitch. As part of Torgar's troupe went back underground, buckets and brushes in hand, another part began stringing the come-alongs and ropes down to the floor of Keeper's Dale. Within a short expanse of time, a bucket brigade had begun, with tar-filled pails coming up the ropes and empty buckets moving back down for refilling.
Inside, the dwarves worked to seal every crack and crevice they could find, plastering the walls and ceiling with the sticky substance.
Using the designs offered by Nanfoodle, other dwarves secured themselves to the long ropes with harnesses and eased down the cliff face, taking up equidistant positions from the canyon floor all the way to the top. They began hammering in eyelet supports, building a straight line of supporting superstructure from floor to ledge.