Douglas Niles - Measure and the Truth

Five hundred dwarves accompanied Dram and his precious cargo. A mixture of hill and mountain dwarves, they had all volunteered to take part in the final battle of what the dwarves had taken to calling the Ankhar Wars. The dozens of wagons in the train were hauling hundreds of casks of black powder, each vehicle separated by some distance from the others to prevent an accident. One mistake with one wagon could turn into a disaster for the entire army.

From his seat on the first wagon, Dram was enjoying the sight of the mountains looming around him. The Garnet range was nice, with its snowy glaciers and vast pine forest, but the stark and rocky cut in the Vingaard Mountains had always appealed to him.

“Reorx knew what he was doing when he carved these grand peaks,” he had remarked to the other dwarves as the saw-toothed ridge came into view. The walls rose up on both sides of the dwarf contingent.

The lone bombard was in front of him, hauled on its great wagon in the midst of the marching legion. Because the steep, uphill road was long and curved, the dwarf had a good view of the massive gun ahead as it lumbered along, hauled by oxen.

Suddenly, even as Dram stared at the bombard, the cliff ahead uttered a groan and gave way, a crack spreading across the near face of the mountain. The section of the road where the bombard had been traveling simply dropped into the chasm, carrying the gun, the wagon, the team of oxen, and more than a hundred marching men of the Palanthian Legion into the depths.

The landslide was so sudden, so pinpoint, that it could have been provoked only by magic, Dram realized at once. The dwarf caught a glimpse of two figures, men high up on the crest of the ridge on the far side of the valley. The hair at the back of his neck prickled, but he could only fume as their sole remaining artillery plummeted into the chasm and shattered into splinters far below.

His eyes shot back to the ridge top, but he was not surprised to see that the two strangers had disappeared.

“It was an earthquake spell, no doubt, and it took us a day to carve out a new road in the gap,” Dram reported to the emperor three days later, when the column of dwarves at last reached the herdsman’s cottage. “But we’re here now. We lost probably a hundred good men. And unfortunately, we don’t have the gun.”

“Hmm, but you still have the powder, right?” Jaymes asked. He seemed surprisingly undismayed by the act of sabotage.

Looking around, Dram had to wonder if the emperor’s stay in the little cottage-he and Coryn had almost set up housekeeping in the place, the dwarf had decided with a single glance through the door-was making Jaymes soft or even apathetic.

“Yep. Plenty of powder-’bout three hundred casks, give or take.”

“Excellent,” said the emperor. “Come with me.”

They went to meet Dayr and Weaver, who were riding at the heads of their respective armies. Jaymes instructed them to put the men into large, comfortable camps on the Wings of Habbakuk, the flat plateaus spreading out a mile or so below the High Clerist’s Tower.

“Tell them to pitch their tents securely. I expect we’ll be here for at least a month or so.”

Then the emperor led Dram, together with Generals Dayr and Weaver, and Captain Franz of the White Riders, up the road. A few hundred paces carried them around the last bend before the pass, where the High Clerist’s Tower rose before them in all its majesty.

“We won’t want to get too close to the walls; the ogres on the battlements keep launching boulders at anyone who comes within range. But I can show you everything you need to see from here.”

He pointed out the great, self-contained fortress that was the south gatehouse, and indicated a wall of mountainside that was below the gatehouse, several hundred yards away and, thus, out of range of the ogre-thrown boulders.

“What about it?” Dram wondered aloud.

“Your dwarves brought picks and shovels, I presume?” the emperor asked.

“Of course. We never go far without them.”

“Then I’d like you to get them started digging-right there. And don’t stop until you have a tunnel extending all the way under the south wall, beneath the courtyard behind that gatehouse.”

“You’re going to try and mount an attack out of a tunnel?” Franz asked when no one else seemed inclined to question the mad plan. “They’ll just drop rocks on us when we try to climb out! The first man out of the hole will have to face a dozen ogres!”

The emperor smiled, taking his objection in stride. “No, the tunnel will be a dead end,” he explained. “There’s no need even to break the surface into the gatehouse. But I want the tunnel big enough and deep enough to hold all three hundred casks of the black powder.”

The dwarves set to digging with a vengeance, working around the clock, each team of miners putting in a twelve-hour shift. The tunnel began as a simple shaft bored straight into the mountainside. Only a dozen or so dwarves could work at a time, but as the hole grew deeper, more and more picks and shovels could be brought to bear. They made steady progress and after a week had progressed more than three hundred yards straight into the rock.

There the diggers began excavating a path breaking away to the right at a perpendicular angle. That tunnel would bore toward a large section of the curtain wall beside the south gatehouse. At the same time, the dwarves continued the original straight shaft, with even more workers chopping away at a time. When the original shaft had grown to six hundred yards long, a second tunnel to the right began to creep toward the tower. Both shafts were extended and widened, the second one pushing through the rock directly underneath the great gates.

In the lightless tunnels, the distinction between day and night was meaningless, but that was no obstacle to the doughty dwarves. Dram was omnipresent, supervising the excavation with a keen eye and curt instructions to “shore up that archway” or “smooth off that knob.” Under his direction the tunnels grew deeper and wider and stronger, with many hidden passages expanded.

The ogres and humans in the High Clerist’s Tower watched the surface work from the walls but made no effort to interfere. All they could see were the periodic shift changes, as two hundred dwarves trooped out of the mountainside while another two hundred trooped in. They took note of the ever-mounting pile of tailings spilling from the mouth of the shaft and wondered at the excavation.

As a deterrent to interference from the garrison in the tower, Jaymes maintained several companies of infantry and cavalry units within a quarter mile of the southern gatehouse. If the enemy made a sortie out to attack the miners, the troops would counterattack immediately. But Ankhar obviously scoffed at dwarves digging holes and decided not to risk his precious troops in a fight outside the lofty walls.

If, in fact, Ankhar were really in charge. Despite the magical obfuscation created by the Thorn Knight and the Nightmaster, Coryn had continued her scrying of the enemy. Sometimes her searching could penetrate through the veils of secrecy, and several times she had reported arguments between du Chagne and Hoarst, or Ankhar and the black-masked cleric. The siege was taking its toll on the enemy, even before the first clash of arms.

Outside, the troops staged competitions and games in plain view of the walls. They marched back and forth in maneuvers, singing martial songs, and generally acting as though they were happy to be there. And the dwarves were truly happy; the diggers were all experienced miners, and the work was very much to their liking. The thought that they would strike a devastating blow against the hated ogres-the same ogres who had destroyed their town-only added to their pleasure and fervor.