Robert Salvatore - Streams of Silver

The friends followed him without question and soon found themselves standing before a tall, ornate metal door inscribed with the hammer of Moradin, the greatest of the dwarven gods, and a series of runes beneath it. Bruenor’s heavy breathing belied his calmness.

“Herein lie the gifts of our friends,” Bruenor read solemnly, “and the craftings of our kin. Know ye as ye enter this hallowed hall that ye look upon the heritage of Clan Battlehammer. Friends be welcome, thieves beware!” Bruenor turned to his companions, beads of nervous sweat on his brow. “The Hall of Dumathoin,” he explained.

“Two hundred years of your enemies in the halls,” Wulfgar reasoned. “Surely it has been pillaged.”

“Not so,” said Bruenor. “The door is magicked and would not open for enemies of the clan. A hundred traps are inside to take the skin from a gray one who was to get through!” He glared at Regis, his gray eyes narrowed in a stern warning. “Watch to yer own hands, Rumblebelly. Mighten be that a trap won’t know ye to be a friendly thief!”

The advice seemed sound enough for Regis to ignore the dwarf’s biting sarcasm. Unconsciously admitting the truth of Bruenor’s words, the halfling slipped his hands into his pockets.

“Fetch a torch from the wall,” Bruenor told Wulfgar. “Me thoughts tell me that no lights burn within.”

Before Wulfgar even returned to them, Bruenor began opening the huge door. It swung easily under the push of the hands of a friend, swinging wide into a short corridor that ended in a heavy black curtain. A pendulum blade hung ominously in the center of the passage, a pile of bones beneath it.

“Thieving dog,” Bruenor chuckled with grim satisfaction. He stepped by the blade and moved to the curtain, waiting for all of his friends to join him before he entered the chamber.

Bruenor paused, mustering the courage to open the last barrier to the hall, sweat glistening on all the friends’ faces now as the dwarf’s anxiety swept through them.

With a determined grunt, Bruenor pulled the curtain aside. “Behold the Hall of Duma—” he began, but the words stuck in his throat as soon as he looked beyond the opening. Of all the destruction they had witnessed in the halls, none was more complete than this. Mounds of stone littered the floor. Pedestals that had once held the finest works of the clan lay broken apart, and others had been trampled into dust.

Bruenor stumbled in blindly, his hands shaking and a great scream of outrage lumped in his throat. He knew before he even looked upon the entirety of the chamber that the destruction was complete.

“How?” Bruenor gasped. Even as he asked, though, he saw the huge hole in the wall. Not a tunnel carved, around the blocking door, but a gash in the stone, as though some incredible ram had blasted through.

“What power could have done such a thing?” Wulfgar asked, following the line of the dwarf’s stare to the hole.

Bruenor moved over, searching for some clue, Catti-brie and Wulfgar with him. Regis headed the other way, just to see if anything of value remained.

Catti-brie caught a rainbowlike glitter on the floor and moved to what she thought was a puddle of some dark liquid. Bending close, though, she realized that it wasn’t liquid at all, but a scale, blacker than the blackest night and nearly the size of a man. Wulfgar and Bruenor rushed to her side at the sound of her gasp.

“Dragon!” Wulfgar blurted, recognizing the distinctive shape. He grasped the thing by its edge and hoisted it upright to better inspect it. Then he and Catti-brie turned to Bruenor to see if he had any knowledge of such a monster.

The dwarf’s wide-eyed, terror-stricken stare answered their question before it was asked.

“Blacker than the black,” Bruenor whispered, speaking again the most common words of that fateful day those two hundred years ago. “Me father told me of the thing,” he explained to Wulfgar and Catti-brie. “A demon-spawned dragon, he called it, a darkness blacker than the black. ‘Twas not the gray ones that routed us—we would’ve fought them head on to the last. The dragon of darkness took our numbers and drove us from the halls. Not one in ten remained to stand against its foul hordes in the smaller halls at th’ other end.”

A hot draft of air from the hole reminded them that it probably connected to the lower halls, and the dragon’s lair.

“Let’s be leaving,” Catti-brie suggested, “afore the beast gets a notion that we’re here.”

Regis then cried out from the other side of the chamber. The friends rushed to him, not knowing if he had stumbled upon treasure or danger.

They found him crouched beside a pile of stone, peering into a gap in the blocks.

He held up a silver-shafted arrow. “I found it in there,” he explained. “And there’s something more—a bow, I think.”

Wulfgar moved the torch closer to the gap and they all saw clearly the curving arc that could only be the wood of a longbow, and the silvery shine of a bowstring. Wulfgar grasped the wood and tugged lightly, expecting it to break apart in his hands under the enormous weight of the stone.

But it held firmly, even against a pull of all his strength. He looked around at the stones, seeking the best course to free the weapon.

Regis, meanwhile, had found something more, a golden plaque wedged in another crack in the pile. He managed to slip it free and brought it into the torchlight to read its carved runes.

“ ‘Taulmaril the Heartseeker,’ “ he read. “ ‘Gift of—’ “

“Anariel, Sister of Faerun,” Bruenor finished without even looking at the plaque. He nodded in recognition to Catti-brie’s questioning glance.

“Free the bow, boy,” he told Wulfgar. “Suren it might be put to a better use than this.”

Wulfgar had already discerned the structure of the pile and started lifting away specific blocks at once. Soon Catti-brie was able to wiggle the longbow free, but she saw something else beyond its nook in the pile and asked Wulfgar to keep digging.

While the muscled barbarian pushed aside more stones, the others marveled at the beauty of the bow. Its wood hadn’t even been scratched by the stones and the deep finish of its polish returned with a single brush of the hand. Catti-brie strung it easily and held it up, feeling its solid and even draw.

“Test it,” Regis offered, handing her the silver arrow.

Catti-brie couldn’t resist. She fitted the arrow to the silvery string and drew it back, meaning only to try its fit and not intending to fire.

“A quiver!” Wulfgar called, lifting the last of the stones. “And more of the silver arrows.”

Bruenor pointed into the blackness and nodded. Catti-brie didn’t hesitate.

A streaking tail of silver followed the whistling missile as it soared into the darkness, ending its flight abruptly with a crack. They all rushed after it, sensing something beyond the ordinary. They found the arrow easily, for it was buried halfway to its fletches in the wall!

All about its point of entry, the stone had been scorched, and even tugging with all of his might, Wulfgar couldn’t budge the arrow an inch.

“Not to fret,” said Regis, counting the arrows in the quiver that Wulfgar held. “There are nineteen…twenty more!” He backed away, stunned. The others looked at him in confusion.

“Nineteen, there were,” Regis explained. “My count was true.”

Wulfgar, not understanding, quickly counted the arrows. “Twenty,” he said.

“Twenty now,” Regis answered. “But nineteen when I first counted.”

“So the quiver holds some magic, too,” Catti-brie surmised. “A mighty gift, indeed, the Lady Anariel gave to the clan!”

“What more might we find in the ruins of this place?” Regis asked, rubbing his hands together.