Ironhelm took in his surroundings, the flood of memories still pouring in. Small clumps of pine trees grew once again on either side of the thin road as they approached the gap. Wildflowers lined the side of the path, too. Ironhelm’s eye fell on a blue and yellow butterfly fluttering around and it took him by surprise. What was such a creature doing here this time of year, so high up in the mountains?
On either side ascended lines of metal rungs driven into the side of the cliffs. The crude handholds nailed into the rock during the battle were long gone, replaced by easily-grasped rungs allowing access to the top of the cliffs hundreds of feet above.
“A watchtower sits atop the mountain far above in case of attack,” Hammeredshield said. He’d been talking for some time about the gap’s defenses, but Ironhelm had not noticed.
“On either side of the gap,” he went on. “An avalanche of rock and stone can be brought down upon an attacking enemy with the simple pull of a cord. And the dwarves stationed atop the cliffs are well-protected in guardhouses of their own, secure against a surprise attack.”
Ironhelm nodded, considering the fortifications. A century ago, the Widowing Gap was held without benefit of any built defenses. Now, an attacking enemy would face challenges nearly impossible to overcome.
“Within the guardhouses carved into the sides of the gap is a large network of barracks, kitchens, and supply rooms,” Hammeredshield went on. “It took us fifty years to carve it all out of the mountainside, it did, but in the event of a general attack we can keep a sizeable force supplied and fed indefinitely. Aye, we’ve even got a hospital down beneath.”
“What if an enemy just tunnels under all this?” Jorn wondered. “How do you stop that?”
“Tha’ is solid rock under your feet, Thane Ravenbane,” Hammeredshield said. “It would take an enemy months, years even, to dig so much as a single tiny tunnel. Even so, we’ve driven lines of metal bars deep into the rock both in front of and behind the wall. Aye, it would be near impossible to undermine the gate. But even if an enemy managed the feat…”
He turned around, pointing out some piles of huge granite blocks piled up along each side of the gap about fifty yards back.
“See that?” he said. “Funds have been short but, someday soon, we’ll be building a second wall back from the first. In between, we’ll line the gorge with arrow slits. Let an enemy somehow get between the walls and it’ll be a killing field from four sides all at once. There is talk of building a moat between the walls, too, crossed by a narrow drawbridge. Someday maybe we’ll build a third and then a fourth wall. We’ll never let the gruk scum threaten our families again, not through this gap.”
“It sounds as though you’ve thought of everything,” Willock said, gazing up the cliff sides. He could see battlements looking down upon them from the heights.
“It is invincible,” Hammeredshield said.
They dismounted to eat lunch with their escort before crossing over into the wilderness. It was a fine meal of roast pork and some boiled parsnips, washed down with plenty of ale. The commander of the fortifications at the gap, an elderly dwarf who introduced himself as Trum Redhammer, joined them. He went on during the entire meal about the fortifications.
“Tha’ wall is impregnable!” he declared. “Aye, impregnable! Its thickness is the key to its strength, it is. We buil’ it a full twen’y fee’ thick, all solid grani’e the whole way.”
Jorn was barely listening. The enormity of what lay beyond the wall was heavy on his mind.
_____
The dwarves opened the single door in the wall and the travelers passing through. It was just the six of them, their mounts, and the pair of packhorses loaded down with all manner of supplies. One by one they led the mounts through the little door, barely large enough for Ailric’s huge warhorse to even fit through into the narrow tunnel beyond. Redhammer went ahead to slide aside a pair of thick bolts and unlock the steel door leading to the other side. They passed through, leading their horses on foot one-by-one.
Hammeredshield and Redhammer followed them through the door and stood beneath the imposing wall to see them off.
“Farewell,” Hammeredshield said. “We hope your expedition is fruitful.”
“Aye, so do we,” Ironhelm said.
“These lands are infested with gruks, trolls, and worse,” Hammeredshield warned. “Take all due care. The only non-evil beings you are likely to encounter are a small fellowship of human monks, hermits living about five miles down the pass.”
“Monks?” Ailric said. “Living out there?”
“Aye, members of the Thugamundian Brothers,” Hammeredshield said. “We’ve warned them what peril they place themselves in, but they seem not to care. For at least ten years now they’ve lived out there, praying to Une in their solitude. They are half-mad, if you ask me.”
“Thank you for your hospitality,” Ironhelm said. “It was a most welcome respite, it was. Aye, tis true.”
“Thank me? No, it is I whom am in debt to all of you for showing up when you did yesterday,” Hammeredshield said.
“Aye. Farewell, laddie.”
Ironhelm turned his pony away from the wall and towards the wilderness. Slowly, the others followed. Jorn allowed himself a last long gaze at the wall before turning away and riding on down the road. The road was far different here than on the dwarven side of the wall. The dwarves had stripped the sides of the pass of all trees and small boulders for hundreds of yards, denying the benefit of cover to any attackers coming up towards the gap. Three rows of arrow slits lined either side of the gap, too, starting about twenty feet up, no doubt part of the underground complex the dwarves had spoken of.
The road in front of the wall was no longer maintained so well, bits of weeds growing tall through the many cracks in the pavement. Every hundred yards in front of the wall the dwarves had driven lines of thick iron spikes across the road. They protruded upwards a few feet from the ground, but one could only guess how far down they were driven.
“That’s smart,” Willock remarked as they passed through the first series of barriers. “There’s no way for an enemy to bring catapults or heavy siege engines in close to the wall so long as the spikes stand.”
“I would think it would also serve to blunt a cavalry charge, as well,” Ailric said, gingerly guiding his horse between the spikes. The horse only barely fit.
“Clever,” Jorn said, glancing up the walls of the gap. Far above, he knew, were vast metal nets holding back thousands of rocks.
“I must say, I’m not terribly religious,” said Flatfoot. “These – what are they called, again? - Thugamundian Brothers? Whatever are they?”
“The Mad Monks, we call them in the North,” Jorn said. “Grang’s teeth, they’re nothing but a bunch of raving fools.”
“Oh, yes,” Flatfoot said. “Not exactly fat and happy monks, if memory serves.”
“That would be the Gormalite Brothers,” Ailric said, grinning. “Now those are fellows who are not shy about their love of good food and drink.”
“The Thugamundians are aesthetics,” Ronias interjected. “They seek a mystic union with the universe by transcending mundane desires. They believe they can best achieve this in isolation from the noise and corruption of civilization.”
“Bah,” Jorn said.
“Theirs is path few would care to follow, to be sure,” Ronias said. “Myself included. They are bound by the strictest codes of self-deprivation and only live in the tiniest of communities, always on the fringes of civilization. They deprive themselves of every worldly comfort, seeking a higher spiritual state.”
“Bloody nonsense!” Flatfoot said. “This denial of the flesh! Are we born merely to suffer? I think not.”
“You’re in no danger of being mistaken for an aesthetic, Sal” Jorn laughed.
“I just don’t know what type of higher bliss they expect to find living an existence I wouldn’t subject a bloody dog to,” Flatfoot said. “I’m not going to worry about questions
which can never be answered.”
Rounding a curve in the road, they came upon the monks. Ten tiny stone huts the shape of beehives stood in a tight cluster, each barely large enough for a man to lie down inside. A slightly-larger structure stood in the middle, a crude little pile of stones without windows. It was an altogether forlorn little encampment.
“Are they still alive?” Ailric wondered as they passed underneath.
“I don’t know,” Willock said. “It looks abandoned.”
As if to answer their question, they suddenly spotted a man standing amidst the trees right next to the cluster of huts. He was tall and pale, standing barefoot and clad in a tattered brown tunic long since reduced to rags. He was filthy, and so gaunt his ribs protruded from underneath his skin. A long, tangled beard and wild hair covered up most of his face. Intense, dark eyes stared out from beneath the grime, watching the strangers passing by.
“Are you in need, sir?” Ailric shouted.
“Renounce your ways, knight!” the monk shouted back. His voice boomed and echoed against the mountains. “Seek Une, not battle! Join us now, whilst you still can!”
“Damned fanatics,” Ailric muttered as they rode on by.
Jorn said nothing, recalling the small group of Thugamundians on Glaenavon. They lived on a tiny island not a hundred yards across just within sight of the main island along a particularly empty stretch of rocky coast. Jorn wouldn’t have even described their home as an island. It was more like a barren rock rising from the stormy sea. The miserable little place was forever hammered by waves and buffeted by the northern winds, but it was there the monks decided to build their little huts. The waves would crash all the way up and over the rocks during the worst of winter storms and sometimes even wash an entire beehive hut away, more than once with a brother in it. Despite all that, after every such storm the brothers would re-build their huts and continued to cling to their rough way of life no matter what misfortune befell them.
Fearach pointed them out as they strolled along the coast after Jorn had been on Glaenavon only a few weeks.
“They live only in the smallest groups, never more than twenty and always clinging to the edge of wilderness,” Fearach explained. “Any larger and they fear that they will grow too worldly and hierarchical.”
“Why do they do it?” Jorn asked. “I mean, you’ve explained why they say they do it but why would anyone actually want such a life?”
Fearach shrugged. “Perhaps they are men for whom the answers are more important than just asking the questions,” he said.
One day, they were passing by the rock and saw the brothers ashore foraging. They gathered berries and dug up roots. A few were down on the beach, digging for clams. Jorn was instinctively repulsed by them, starving cockroaches of men shoving unwashed raw onions into their mouths like wild dogs roaming the streets of Glorbinden. One amongst them still looked well-fed, however. His tunic was not yet so ragged and his beard not yet so long and tangled. He must have been a new recruit. For the rest of the day, Jorn though about the man. What, he wondered, had driven the novice monk to such a life?
_____
A few miles after encountering the monks, the road turned sharply south and followed a mountain ridge running parallel to the valley they’d heard so much about. It stretched out before them, running north and south as far as they could see.
To the west, they saw the next ridge of the Great Barrier Mountains looking down upon them from thousands of feet further up. The mountains rose with indescribable grandeur, their lower slopes blanketed by thick carpets of forest and their upper slopes a combination of bare rock and wide expanses of white snow. Many miles to the south, at the very limits of their vision, they saw a pair of particularly tall and jagged mountains looming high above the mountains all around.
“The Teeth of Kaas,” Willock said. “Three or four days ride.”
“What now?” Flatfoot asked. “Do we cross the valley directly?”
“No,” Jorn said. “We take the Old Guardian Road north.”
“I worry about that,” Flatfoot said. “It seems by far the most direct way, which also means it is probably the most traveled way. That would seem to indicate that the enemy would likely use it as their main thoroughfare as well.”
“Aye,” Ironhelm said. “But tha’ valley floor is crawling with monsters of all sorts. Aye, tis true. I wouldn’t cross there if I could avoid it. Besides, Hammeredshield’s scouts have explored the road and found it safe. It should be clear at least as far as the Glammonfore Gap.”
“Then it’s settled,” Jorn said. “We take the road.”
______
They moved south the rest of the day, watching the road ahead carefully. Their hands rarely strayed very far from the hilts of their weapons but they encountered no one, only ibex grazing on the treacherous mountain slopes above them.
Every so often they’d catch glimpses of the valley through gaps in the trees. It reminded Jorn very much of The Westmark. Both were part of the same series of valleys running along the edge of the Great Barrier Mountains, after all. Sollistore, just to the north of where they were now, was yet another such valley.
“Such a pity,” Ailric said. “What excellent country down there given up to the enemy.”
“It must be abundant with game,” Willock observed. “The streams and lakes are probably overfilling with fish and fowl, too.”
“What a grand crusade it would be to drive the evil forces from this valley and establish civilization here yet again,” Ailric said.
“Yet not with ten thousand men could such a thing be done,” Willock said. “There are more dangers down there than you know.”
A flock of birds flew overhead, a flying-v heading south.
“A couple of those fat ducks would make for a good meal tonight,” Flatfoot said. “Better than the salt pork we’ve got.”
“True enough, gnome. Leave it to me,” Ronias said.
A few minutes later another flock flew by. Ronias raised his arm above him and shouted one of his magical phrases.
A pair of bright balls of light each the size of a man’s fist fired upward from the end of Ronias’s hands. The balls struck a pair of ducks, sending the two birds crashing to the ground by the side of the path. Willock leapt from his saddle and walked over to the fallen birds, picking them up. He grinned and held them up for the others to see.
“Fine shooting, Ronias!” Flatfoot said. “Oh, I can’t wait to eat them for dinner! Bloody excellent shooting indeed!”
“It is nothing,” the elf explained. “The spell targets the life force of the creature I aim it at. It cannot miss. Of course, the energy of that particular blast was rather minimal, but more than sufficient to kill a mere duck.”
A few hours later they made camp near a trickling brook which crossed their path. Following it upstream away from the path for several hundred yards to get out-of-sight from the road, they found a flat clearing next to the stream and near a pair of massive boulders the size of small houses among the towering aspens and beech. They worked quickly, tending to the horses and then setting up camp as Ronias and Flatfoot set about preparing the dinner.
Gathering a pile of stones in the center of the campsite, Ronias cast his spell upon them and soon they were glowing white-hot and throwing off a tremendous amount of heat. Flatfoot next set up his portable spit above the glowing-hot rocks. Then, taking the plucked and cleaned ducks, he speared them carefully. He patted them with some dried herbs he kept in a little tin container and laid them over the fire. Bits of fat dripped off the birds as they cooked, sizzling on the stones below.
The others finished their tasks and, one by one, sat around the spits and began sipping wine or ale as Flatfoot sat and turned the birds as he felt was necessary. After an hour or so, Flatfoot pronounced the ducks done. Everyone savored the tender meat, along with some boiled turnips and a bit of ale. When dinner was over Flatfoot took the leftovers, including the remaining duck carcasses, and threw it all in
to one of the pots with some water from the spring, a few carrots, plenty of salt and herbs, and some potatoes he sliced into cubes. He hung the pot on the spit still hanging over the fire.
“We’ll leave that to stew overnight slowly,” he said. “It should make for a nice hot breakfast.”
“You know well the art of cooking,” Willock observed.
“What gnome doesn’t?” Flatfoot said. “I’ve spent too many years living on the trail and I love comfort too dearly not to learn how to make life a bit more bearable when sleeping outdoors.”
“Well, that settles it,” Jorn said. “You’re on permanent duty as camp cook.”
“Agreed,” Flatfoot said.
Ironhelm rose and began a thorough inspection of the camp perimeter. From fifty feet away the gently glowing hot stones were invisible through the thick trees and boulders of the mountainside.
Willock and Jorn were absent when Ironhelm returned, having climbed one of the large boulders nearby. Flatfoot, meanwhile, sat by the fire and enjoyed a smoke from his long pipe as he chatted with Ailric about the various means of preparing roast duck. Ronias sat silently staring at the fire.
Ironhelm shrugged and went to join Jorn and Willock atop the boulder. He found them standing staring off into the west. The top of the boulder peeked out above most of the trees and afforded an unobstructed view of the valley below. All was a great mass of darkness, except for one patch. Far off in the distance, somewhat to the southwest, was a patch of glowing light on the valley floor.
“Wha’ in damnation is tha’?” Ironhelm muttered.
Willock handed the dwarf the spyscope. Ironhelm raised it to his eye and pointed it towards the valley floor. What looked like a strange, indeterminate glow from a distance was actually hundreds of flickering lights.
“Ach! Campfires!”
“Hundreds of campfires,” Jorn said. “An entire army’s worth.”
Child Of Storms (Volume 1) Page 37