Robert Salvatore - Streams of Silver

“Half a day’s walking,” Bruenor replied, as though the answer, perfectly logical to the mindset of a dwarf protecting his treasures, should have been obvious. “The other way.”

“Fretful folk,” Regis said under his breath.

Catching the remark, Bruenor growled and grabbed Regis by the collar, hoisting him from the ground and pressing their faces together. “Me people are a careful lot,” he snarled, his own frustration and confusion boiling out again in his misdirected rage. “We like to keep what’s our own to keep, especially from little thieves with little fingers and big mouths.”

“Suren there’s another way in,” Catti-brie reasoned, quick to diffuse the confrontation.

Bruenor dropped the halfling to the floor. “We can get to that room,” he replied, indicating the lighted area at the base of the stairs.

“Then let’s be quick,” Catti-brie demanded. “If the noise of the cave-in called out alarms, the word might not have reached this far.”

Bruenor led them back down the small tunnel swiftly, and back to the corridor behind the secret door.

Around the next bend in the main corridor, its walls, too, showing the runes and sculpted reliefs of the dwarven craftsmen, Bruenor was again engulfed in the wonder of his heritage and quickly lost all thoughts of anger at Regis. He heard again in his mind the ringing of hammers in Garumn’s day, and the singing of common gatherings. If the foulness that they had found here, and the loss of Drizzt, had tempered his fervent desire to reclaim Mithril Hall, the vivid recollections that assaulted him as he moved along this corridor worked to refuel those fires.

Perhaps he would return with his army, he thought. Perhaps the mithril would again ring out in the smithies of Clan Battlehammer.

Thoughts of regaining his people’s glory suddenly rekindled, Bruenor looked around to his friends, tired, hungry, and grieving for the drow, and reminded himself that the mission before him now was to escape the complex and get them back to safety.

A more intense glow ahead signaled the end of the tunnel. Bruenor slowed their pace and crept along to the exit cautiously. Again the companions found themselves on a stone balcony, overlooking yet another corridor, a huge passageway, nearly a chamber in itself, with a high ceiling and decorated walls. Torches burned every few feet along both sides, running parallel below them.

A lump welled in Bruenor’s throat when he looked upon the carvings lining the opposite wall across the way, great sculpted bas reliefs of Garumn and Bangor, and of all the patriarchs of Clan Battlehammer. He wondered, and not for the first time, if his own bust would ever take its place alongside his ancestors’.

“Half-a-dozen to ten, I make them,” Catti-brie whispered, more intent on the clamor rolling out of a partly opened door down to the left, the room they had seen from their perch in the chamber of the gorge. The companions were fully twenty feet above the floor of the larger corridor. To the right, a stairway descended to the floor, and beyond it the tunnel wound its way back into the great halls.

“Side rooms where others might be hiding?” Wulfgar asked Bruenor.

The dwarf shook his head. “One anteroom there be, and only one,” he answered. “But more rooms lay within the cavern of Garumn’s Gorge. Whether they be filled with gray ones or no, we cannot know. But no mind to them; we’re to get through this room, and through the door across its way to come to the gorge.”

Wulfgar slapped his hammer into a fighting grip. “Then let us go,” he growled, starting for the stair.

“What about the two in the cavern beyond?” asked Regis, staying the anxious warrior with his hand.

“They’ll drop the bridge afore we ever make the gorge,” added Catti-brie.

Bruenor scratched his beard, then looked to his daughter. “How well do ye shoot?” he asked her.

Catti-brie held the magical bow out before her. “Well enough to take the likes of two sentries!” she answered.

“Back to th’ other tunnel with ye,” said Bruenor. “At first sound of battle, take ‘em out. And be fast, girl; the cowardly scum’re likely to drop the bridge at the first signs of trouble!”

With a nod, she was gone. Wulfgar watched her disappear back down the corridor, not so determined to have this fight now, without knowing that Catti-brie would be safe behind him. “What if the gray ones have reinforcements near?” he asked Bruenor. “What of Catti-brie? She will be blocked from returning to us.”

“No whinin’, boy!” Bruenor snapped, also uncomfortable with his decision to separate. “Y’er heart’s for her is me guess, though ye aren’t to admit it to yerself. Keep in yer head that Cat’s a fighter, trained by meself. The other tunnel’s safe enough, still secret from the gray ones by all the signs I could find. The girl’s battle-smart to taking care of herself! So put yer thoughts to the fight before ye. The best ye can do for her is to finish these gray-bearded dogs too quick for their kin to come!”

It took some effort, but Wulfgar tore his eyes away from the corridor and refocused his gaze on the open door below, readying himself for the task at hand.

Alone now, Catti-brie quietly trotted back the short distance down the corridor and disappeared through the secret door.

“Hold!” Sydney commanded Bok, and she, too, froze in her tracks, sensing that someone was just ahead. She crept forward, the golem on her heel, and peeked around the next turn in the tunnel, expecting that she had come up on the companions. There was only empty corridor in front of her.

The secret door had closed.

Wulfgar took a deep breath and measured the odds. If Catti-brie’s estimate was correct, he and Bruenor would be outnumbered several times when they burst through the door. He knew that they had no options open before them. With another breath to steady himself, he started again down the stairs, Bruenor moving on his cue and Regis following tentatively behind.

The barbarian never slowed his long strides, or turned from the straightest path to the door, yet the first sounds that they all heard were not the thumps of Aegis-fang or the barbarian’s customary war cry to Tempos, but the battle song of Bruenor Battlehammer.

This was his homeland and his fight, and the dwarf placed the responsibility for the safety of his companions squarely upon his own shoulders. He dashed by Wulfgar when they reached the bottom of the stairs and crashed through the door, the mithril axe of his heroic namesake raised before him.

“This one’s for me father!” he cried, splitting the shining helm of the closest Duergar with a single stroke. “This one’s for me father’s father!” he yelled, felling the second. “And this one’s for me father’s father’s father!”

Bruenor’s ancestral line was long indeed. The gray dwarves never had a chance.

Wulfgar had started his charge right after he realized Bruenor was rushing by him, but by the time he got into the room, three Duergar lay dead and the furious Bruenor was about to drop the fourth. Six others scrambled around trying to recover from the savage assault, and mostly trying to get out the other door and into the cavern of the gorge where they could regroup. Wulfgar hurled Aegis-fang—and took another, and Bruenor pounced upon his fifth victim before the gray dwarf got through the portal.

Across the gorge, the two sentries heard the start of battle at the same time as Catti-brie, but not understanding what was happening, they hesitated.

Catti-brie didn’t.

A streak of silver flashed across the chasm, exploding into the chest of one of the sentries, its powerful magic blasting through his mithril armor and hurling him back ward into death.