The Crystal Shard

by R. A. Salvatore

  The vapor wafted up into the air and was gone.

  The last sound Drizzt heard was the clang of the metal scimitar falling to the stone ledge.

  ulfgar leaned back in his chair at the head of the main table in the hastily constructed Mead Hall, his foot tapping nervously at the long delays necessitated by the demands of proper tradition. He felt that his people should already be on the move, but it was the restoration of the traditional ceremonies and celebrations that had immediately separated, and placed him above, the tyrant Heafstaag in the eyes of the skeptical and ever-suspicious barbarians.

  Wulfgar, after all, had walked into their midst after a five-year absence and challenged their long-standing king. One day later, he had won the crown, and the day after that, he had been coronated King Wulfgar of the Tribe of the Elk.

  And he was determined that his reign, short though he intended it to be, would not be marked by the threats and bullying tactics of his predecessor’s. He would ask the warriors of the assembled tribes to follow him into battle, not command them, for he knew that a barbarian warrior was a man driven almost exclusively by fierce pride. Stripped of their dignity, as Heafstaag had done by refusing to honor the sovereignty of each individual king, the tribesmen were no better in battle than ordinary men. Wulfgar knew that they would need to regain their proud edge if they were to have any chance at all against the wizard’s overwhelming numbers.

  Thus Hengorot, the Mead Hall, had been raised and the Challenge of the Song initiated for the first time in nearly five years. It was a short, happy time of good-natured competition between tribes who had been suffocated under Heafstaag’s unrelenting domination.

  The decision to raise the deerskin hall had been difficult for Wulfgar. Assuming that he still had time before Kessell’s army struck, he had weighed the benefits of regaining tradition against the pressing need of haste. He only hoped that in the frenzy of pre-battle preparations, Kessell would overlook the absence of the barbarian king, Heafstaag. If the wizard was at all sharp, it wasn’t likely.

  Now he waited quietly and patiently, watching the fires return to the eyes of the tribesmen.

  “Like old times?” Revjak asked, sitting next to him.

  “Good times,” Wulfgar responded.

  Satisfied, Revjak leaned back against the tent’s deerskin wall, granting the new chief the solitude he obviously desired. And Wulfgar resumed his wait, seeking the best moment to unveil his proposition.

  At the far end of the hall, an axe-throwing competition was beginning. Similar to the tactics Heafstaag and Beorg had used to seal a pact between the tribes at the last Hengorot, the challenge was to hurl an axe from as great a distance as possible and sink it deeply enough into a keg of mead to open a hole. The number of mugs that could be filled from the effort within a specified count determined the success of the throw.

  Wulfgar saw his chance. He leaped from his stool and demanded, by rights of being the host, the first throw. The man who had been selected to judge the challenge acknowledged Wulfgar’s right and invited him to come down to the first selected distance.

  “From here,” Wulfgar said, hoisting Aegis-fang to his shoulder.

  Murmurs of disbelief and excitement arose from all corners of the hall. The use of a warhammer in such a challenge was unprecedented, but none complained or cited rules. Every man who had heard the tales, but not witnessed firsthand the splitting of Heafstaag’s great axe, was anxious to see the weapon in action. A keg of mead was placed upon a stool at the back end of the hall.

  “Another behind it!” Wulfgar demanded. “And another behind that!” His concentration narrowed on the task at hand and he didn’t take the time to sort out the whispers he heard all around him.

  The kegs were readied, and the crowd backed out of the young king’s line of sight. Wulfgar grasped Aegis-fang tightly in his hands and sucked in a great breath, holding it in to keep himself steady. The unbelieving onlookers watched in amazement as the new king exploded into movement, hurling the mighty hammer with a fluid motion and strength unmatched among their ranks.

  Aegis-fang tumbled, head over handle, the length of the long hall, blasting through the first keg, and then the second and beyond, taking out not only the three targets and their stools, but continuing on to tear a hole in the back of the Mead Hall. The closest warriors hurried to the opening to watch the remainder of its flight, but the hammer had disappeared into the night. They started out to retrieve it.

  But Wulfgar stopped them. He sprang onto the table, lifting his arms before him. “Hear me, warriors of the northern plains!” he cried. Their mouths already agape at the unprecedented feat, some fell to their knees when Aegis-fang suddenly reappeared in the young king’s hands.

  “I am Wulfgar, son of Beornegar and King of the Tribe of the Elk! Yet I speak to you now not as your king but as a kindred warrior, horrified at the dishonor Heafstaag tried to place upon us all!” Spurred on by the knowledge that he had gained their attention and respect, and by the confirmation that his assumptions of their true desires had not been in error, Wulfgar seized the moment. These people had cried out for deliverance from the tyrannical reign of the one-eyed king and beaten almost to extinction in their last campaign and now about to fight beside goblins and giants, they longed for a hero to gain them back their lost pride.

  “I am the dragonslayer!” he continued. “And by right of victory I possess the treasures of Icingdeath!”

  Again the private conversations interrupted him, for the now unguarded treasure had become a subject for debate. Wulfgar let them continue their gossip for a long moment to heighten their interest in the dragon’s gold.

  When they finally quieted, he went on. “The tribes of the tundra do not fight in a common cause with goblins and giants!” he decreed to rousing shouts of approval. “We fight against them!”

  The crowd suddenly hushed. A guard rushed into the tent, but did not dare interrupt the new king.

  “I leave with the dawn for Ten-Towns,” Wulfgar stated. “I shall battle against the wizard Kessell and the foul horde he has pulled from the holes of The Spine of the World!”

  The crowd did not respond. They accepted the notion of battle against Kessell eagerly, but the thought of returning to Ten-Towns to help the people who had nearly destroyed them five years before had never occurred to them.

  But the guard now intervened. “I fear that your quest shall be in vain, young king,” he said. Wulfgar turned a distressed eye upon the man, guessing the news he bore. “The smoke clouds from great fires are even now rising above the southern plain.”

  Wulfgar considered the distressing news. He had thought that he would have more time. “Then I shall leave tonight!” he roared at the stunned assembly. “Come with me, my friends, my fellow warriors of the north! I shall show you the path to the lost glories of our past!”

  The crowd seemed torn and uncertain. Wulfgar played his final card.

  “To any man who will go with me, or to his surviving kin if he should fall, I offer an equal share of the dragon’s treasure!”

  He had swept in like a mighty squall off the Sea of Moving Ice. He had captured the imagination and heart of every barbarian warrior and had promised them a return to the wealth and glory of their brightest days.

  That very night, Wulfgar’s mercenary army charged out of their encampment and thundered across the open plain. Not a single man remained behind.

  remen was torched at dawn.

  The people of the small, unwalled village had known better than to stand and fight when the wave of monsters rolled across the Shaengarne River. They put up token resistance at the ford, firing a few bursts of arrows at the lead goblins just to slow the ranks long enough for the heaviest and slowest ships to clear the harbor and reach the safety of Maer Dualdon. The archers then fled back to the docks and followed their fellow townsmen.

  When the goblins finally entered the city, they found it completely deserted. They watched angrily as the sailing ships moved back tow
ard the east to join the flotilla of Targos and Termalaine. Bremen was too far out of the way to be of any use to Akar Kessell, so, unlike the city of Termalaine which had been converted into a camp, this city was burned to the ground.

  The people on the lake, the newest in the long line of homeless victims of Kessell’s wanton destruction, watched helplessly as their homes fell in smoldering splinters.

  From the wall of Bryn Shander, Cassius and Regis watched, too.

  “He has made yet another mistake,” Cassius told the halfling.

  “How so?”

  “Kessell has backed the people of Targos and Termalaine, Caer-Konig and Caer-Dineval, and now Bremen into a corner,” Cassius explained. “They have nowhere to go now; their only hope lies in victory.”

  “Not much of a hope,” Regis remarked. “You have seen what the tower can do. And even without it, Kessell’s army could destroy us all! As he said, he holds every advantage.”

  “Perhaps,” Cassius conceded. “The wizard believes that he is invincible, that much is certain. And that is his mistake, my friend. The meekest of animals will fight bravely when it is backed against a wall, for it has nothing left to lose. A poor man is more deadly than a rich man because he puts less value on his own life. And a man stranded homeless on the frozen steppes with the first winds of winter already beginning to blow is a formidable enemy indeed!

  “Fear not, little friend,” Cassius continued. “At our council this morning, we shall find a way to exploit the wizard’s weaknesses.”

  Regis nodded, unable to dispute the spokesman’s simple logic and unwilling to refute his optimism. Still, as he scanned the deep ranks of goblins and orcs that surrounded the city, the halfling held out little hope.

  He looked northward, where the dust had finally settled on the dwarven valley. Bruenor’s Climb was no more, having toppled with the rest of the cliff face when the dwarves closed up their caverns.

  “Open a door for me, Bruenor,” Regis whispered absently. “Please let me in.”

  Coincidentally, Bruenor and his clan were, at that very moment, discussing the feasibility of opening a door in their tunnels. But not to let anyone in. Soon after their smashing success against the ogres and goblins on the ledges outside their mines, the fighting longbeards had realized that they could not sit idly by while orcs and goblins and even worse monsters destroyed the world around them. They were eager to take a second shot at Kessell. In their underground womb, they had no idea if Bryn Shander was still standing, or if Kessell’s army had already rolled over all of Ten-Towns, but they could hear the sounds of an encampment above the southernmost sections of their huge complex.

  Bruenor was the one who had proposed the idea of a second battle, mainly because of his own anger at the imminent loss of his closest non-dwarven friends. Shortly after the goblins that had escaped the tunnel collapse had been cut down, the leader of the clan from Mithral Hall gathered the whole of his people around him.

  “Send someone to the farthest ends o’ the tunnels,” he instructed. “Find out where the dogs’ll do their sleepin’.”

  That night, the sounds of the marching monsters became obvious far in the south, under the field surrounding Bryn Shander. The industrious dwarves immediately set about reconditioning the little-used tunnels that ran in that direction. And when they had gotten under the army, they dug ten separate upward shafts, stopping just shy of the surface.

  A special gleam had returned to their eyes: the sparkle of a dwarf who knows that he’s about to chop off a few goblin heads. Bruenor’s devious plan had endless potential for revenge with minimal risk. With five minutes’ notice, they could complete their new exits. Less than a minute beyond that, their entire force would be up in the middle of Kessell’s sleeping army.

  The meeting that Cassius had labeled a council was truly more of a forum where the spokesman from Bryn Shander could unveil his first retaliatory strategies. Yet none of the gathered leaders, even Glensather, the only other spokesman in attendance, protested in the least. Cassius had studied every aspect of the entrenched goblin army and the wizard with meticulous attention to detail. The spokesman had outlined a layout of the entire force, detailing the most potentially explosive rivalries among the goblin and orc ranks and his best estimates about the length of time it would take for the inner fighting to sufficiently weaken the army.

  Everyone in attendance was agreed, though, that the cornerstone holding the siege together was Cryshal-Tirith. The awesome power of the crystalline structure would cow even the most disruptive orcs into unquestioning obedience. Yet the limits of that power, as Cassius saw it, were the real issue.

  “Why was Kessell so insistent on an immediate surrender?” the spokesman reasoned. “He could let us sit under the stress of a siege for a few days to soften our resistance!”

  The others agreed with the logic of Cassius’s line of thinking but had no answers for him.

  “Perhaps Kessell does not command as strong a hold over his charges as we believe,” Cassius himself proposed. “Might it be that the wizard fears his army will disintegrate around him if stalled for any length of time?”

  “It might,” replied Glensather of Easthaven. “Or maybe Akar Kessell simply perceives the strength of his advantage and knows that we have no choice but to comply. Do you, perhaps, confuse confidence with concern?”

  Cassius paused for a moment to reflect on the question. “A point well taken,” he said at length. “Yet immaterial to our plans.” Glensather and several others cocked a curious eye at the spokesman.

  “We must assume the latter,” Cassius explained. “If the wizard is truly in absolute control of the gathered army, then anything we might attempt shall prove futile in any case. Therefore, we must act on the assumption that Kessell’s impatience reveals well-founded concern.

  “I do not perceive the wizard as an exceptional strategist. He has embarked on a path of destruction that he assumed would cow us into submission, yet which, in reality, has actually strengthened the resolve of many of our people to fight to the last. Long-standing rivalries between several of the towns, bitterness that a wise leader of an invading force would surely have twisted into an excellent advantage, have been mended by Kessell’s blatant disregard of finesse and his displays of outrageous brutality.”

  Cassius knew by the attentive looks he was receiving that he was gaining support from every corner. He was trying to accomplish two things in this meeting: to convince the others to go along with the gamble he was about to unveil, and to lift their outlook and give them back some shred of hope.

  “Our people are out there,” he said, sweeping his arm in a wide arc. “On Maer Dualdon and Lac Dinneshere, the fleets have gathered, awaiting some sign from Bryn Shander that we shall support them. The people of Good Mead and Dougan’s Hole do likewise on the southern lake, fully armed and knowing full well that in this struggle there is nothing left at all for any survivors if we are not victorious!” He leaned forward over the table, alternately catching and holding the gaze of each man seated before him and concluded grimly, “No homes. No hope for our wives. No hope for our children. Nowhere left to run.”

  Cassius continued to rally the others around him and was soon backed by Glensather, who had guessed at the spokesman’s goal of increasing morale and recognized the value of it. Cassius searched for the most opportune moment. When the majority of the assembled leaders had replaced their frowns of despair with the determined grimace of survival, he put forth his daring plan.

  “Kessell has demanded an emissary,” he said, “and so we must deliver one.”

  “You or I would seem the most obvious choice,” Glensather intervened. “Which shall it be?”

  A wry smile spread across Cassius’s face. “Neither,” he replied. “One of us would be the obvious choice if we intended to go along with Kessell’s demands. But we have one other option.” He turned his gaze squarely upon Regis. The halfling squirmed uncomfortably, half-guessing what the spokesman had in mind. �
�There is one among us who has attained an almost legendary reputation for his considerable abilities of persuasion. Perhaps his charismatic appeal shall win us some valuable time in our dealings with the wizard.”

  Regis felt ill. He had often wondered when the ruby pendant was going to get him into trouble too deep to climb out of.

  Several other people eyed Regis now, apparently intrigued by the potential of Cassius’s suggestion. The stories of the halfling’s charm and persuasive ability, and the accusation that Kemp had made at the council a few tendays earlier, had been told and retold a thousand times in every one of the towns, each storyteller typically enhancing and exaggerating the tales to increase his own importance. Though Regis hadn’t been thrilled with losing the power of his secret—people seldom looked him straight in the eye anymore—he had come to enjoy a certain degree of fame. He hadn’t considered the possible negative side effects of having so many people looking up to him.

  “Let the halfling, the former spokesman from Lonelywood, represent us in Akar Kessell’s court,” Cassius declared to the nearly unanimous approval of the assembly. “Perhaps our small friend will be able to convince the wizard of the error of his evil ways!”

  “You are mistaken!” Regis protested. “They are only rumors …”

  “Humility,” Cassius interrupted, “is a fine trait, good halfling. And all gathered here appreciate the sincerity of your self-doubts and appreciate even moreso your willingness to pit your talents against Kessell in the face of those self-doubts!”

  Regis closed his eyes and did not reply, knowing that the motion would surely pass whether he approved or not.

  It did, without a single dissenting vote. The cornered people were quite willing to grab at any sliver of hope they could find.

  Cassius moved quickly to wrap up the council, for he believed that all other matters—problems of overcrowding and food hoarding—were of little importance at a time like this. If Regis failed, every other inconvenience would become immaterial.