“Ye got anything for us, elf?” Bruenor called up to Drizzt. His gruff voice, full of irritation, echoed off the frozen snow.
Drizzt came into view atop the drift to the party’s left, the west. He shrugged at Bruenor then stepped forward and began a balanced slide down the glistening white dune. He kept his footing perfectly, and slipped right past the halfling and dwarves to the base of the drift on their other side, where he used its sharp incline to halt his momentum.
“I have snow,” he replied. “As much snow as you could want, extending as far as I can see to the west.”
“We’re goin’ to have to stay here until the melt, ain’t we?” Bruenor grumbled. He put his hands on his hips and kicked his heavy boot through the icy wall of one mound.
“We will find it,” Drizzt replied, but his words were buried by the sudden grumbling of Thibble dorf Pwent.
“Bah!” the battlerager snorted, and he banged his hands together and stomped about, crunching the icy snow beneath his heavy steps. While the others wore mostly furs and layers of various fabrics, Pwent was bedecked in his traditional Gutbuster battle mail, a neck-to-toe suit of overlapping ridged metal plates, spiked at all the appropriate strike zones: fists, elbows, shoulders, and knees. His helmet, too, carried a tall, barbed spike, one that had skewered many an orc in its day.
“Ye got no magic to help me?” Bruenor demanded of Cordio.
The cleric shrugged helplessly. “The riddles of this maze extend beyond the physical, me king,” he tried to explain. “Questions asked in spells’re getting me nothin’ but more questions. I’m knowin’ that we’re close, but more because I’m feeling that rift with me every spellcasting.”
“Bah!” Pwent roared. He lowered his head and rammed through the nearest snow drift, disappearing behind a veil of white that fell behind him as he plowed through to the channel on the other side.
“We’ll find it, then,” said Torgar Hammerstriker. “If it was here when ye came through, then here it is still. And if me king’s thinking it’s Gauntlgrym, then nothin’s stopping meself from seein’ that place.”
“Aye and huzzah!” Cordio agreed.
They all jumped as the snow erupted from up ahead. Drizzt’s scimitars appeared in his hands as if they had been there all along.
From that break in the dune emerged a snow-encrusted Thibbledorf Pwent, roaring still. He didn’t slow, but plowed through the dune across the way, crunching through the icy wall with ease and disappearing from sight.
“Will ye stop it, ye durned fool?” Bruenor chastised, but Pwent was already gone.
“I am certain that we’re near the entrance,” Drizzt assured Bruenor, and the drow slid his blades away. “We are the right distance from the mountains north and south. Of that, I am sure.”
“We are close,” Regis confirmed, still glancing all around as if he expected a ghost to leap out and throttle him at any moment. In that regard, Regis knew more than the others, for he had been the one who had gone into the hole after the wagon those months before, and who had encountered, down in the dark, what he believed to be the ghost of a long-dead dwarf.
“Then we’ll just keep looking,” said Bruenor. “And if it stays in hiding under the snow, its secrets won’t be holding, for the melt’s coming soon.”
“Bah!” they heard Pwent growl from behind the dune to the east and they all scrambled, expecting him to burst through in their midst, and likely with that lethal helmet spike lowered.
The dune shivered as he hit it across the way, and he roared again fiercely. But his pitch changed suddenly, his cry going from defiance to surprise. Then it faded rapidly, as if the dwarf had fallen away.
Bruenor looked at Drizzt. “Gauntlgrym!” the dwarf declared.
Torgar and Cordio dived for the point on the drift behind which they had heard Pwent’s cry. They punched through and flung the snow out behind them, working like a pair of dogs digging for a bone. As they weakened the integrity of that section of the drift, it crumbled down before them, complicating their dig. Still, within moments, they came to the edge of a hole in the ground, and the remaining pile of snow slipped in, but seemed to fill the crevice.
“Pwent?” Torgar called into the snow, thinking his companion buried alive.
He leaned over the edge, Cordio stabilizing his feet, and plunged his hand down into the snow pile. That blockage, though, was neither solid nor thick, and had merely packed in to seal the shaft below. When Torgar’s hand broke the integrity of the pack, the collected snow broke and fell away, leaving the dwarf staring down into a cold and empty shaft.
“Pwent?” he called more urgently, realizing that his companion had fallen quite far.
“That’s it!” Bruenor yelled, rushing up between the kneeling pair. “The wagon went in right there!” As he made the claim, he fell to his knees and brushed aside some more of the snow, revealing a rut that had been made by the wagon wheel those months before. “Gauntlgrym!”
“And Pwent fell in,” Drizzt reminded him.
The three dwarves turned to see the drow and Regis feeding out a line of rope that Drizzt had already tied around his waist.
“Get the line, boys!” Bruenor yelled, but Cordio and Torgar were already moving anyway, rushing to secure the rope and find a place to brace their heavy boots.
Drizzt dropped down beside the ledge and tried to pick a careful route, but a cry came up from far below, followed by a high-pitched, sizzling roar that sounded unlike anything any of them had ever heard, like a cross between the screech of an eagle and the hiss of a gigantic lizard.
Drizzt rolled over the lip, turning and setting his hands, and Bruenor dived to add his strength to the rope brace.
“Quickly!” Drizzt instructed as the dwarves began to let out the line. Trusting in them, the drow let go of the lip and dropped from sight.
“There’s a ledge fifteen feet down,” Regis called, scrambling past the dwarves to the hole. He moved as if he would go right over, but he stopped suddenly, just short of the lip. There he held as the seconds passed, his body frozen by memories of his first journey into the place that Bruenor called Gauntlgrym.
“I’m on the ledge,” Drizzt called up, drawing him from his trance. “I can make my way, but keep ready on the rope.”
Regis peered over and could just make out the form of the drow in the darkness below.
“Ye be guidin’ us, Rumblebelly,” Bruenor instructed, and Regis found the fortitude to nod.
A loud crash from far below startled him again, though, followed by a cry of pain and another otherworldly shriek. More noise arose, metal scraping on stone, hissing snakes and eagle screams, and Dwarvish roars of defiance.
Then a cry of absolute terror, Pwent’s cry, shook them all to their spines, for when had Thibble dorf Pwent ever cried out in terror?
“What do ye see?” Bruenor called out to Regis.
The halfling peered in and squinted. He could just make out Drizzt, inching down the wall below the ledge. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Regis realized it wasn’t really a ledge, or a wall, but rather a stalagmite mound that had grown up beside the side of the cave below. He looked back to Drizzt, and the drow dropped from sight. The dwarves behind him gave a yelp and fell over backward as the rope released.
“Set it!” Bruenor yelled at Torgar and Cordio, and the dwarf king charged for the hole, yelling, “What do ye see, Rumblebelly?”