Relentless

by R. A. Salvatore

“I want the entry cavern,” Bruenor said with the same conviction as his daughter. “Let’s see ’em fight through it when we know they’re coming.”

  “Then we are agreed?”

  Bruenor looked to Donnola and Regis, then to his queens, Fist and Fury. All nodded their agreement.

  “You’ve no choice, anyway,” Catti-brie said, drawing a scowl from her father. “You’ve felt the rumbling, eh? The ground’s been shaking beneath your feet because the beast is getting restless and the magic is fast fading, the water elementals diminishing and longing for their home. We’ve got to do this or we’ll all be riding a volcano soon enough.”

  “This’ll stop it?” Bruenor asked.

  Catti-brie looked to Yvonnel, and the two of them could only shrug.

  “It’s the best idea we’ve got,” Catti-brie said. “Both against our enemies and to take the urgency from the primordial.”

  “Then it’ll have to work,” Bruenor declared, as if being king meant he could proclaim such a thing and make it so. He stepped back from the huddle and began barking orders to his under-commanders, including his battle-seasoned queens. Word spread fast for final preparations in the assigned tunnels, and for locking down those which would not be used. Blacksmiths took their positions in the forge room, putting on their heavy gloves to man the great valves controlling the forges, particularly the Great Forge itself. Other smiths and engineers collected the many bellow from the forges that would not be needed, gathering them and speeding away to their determined destinations.

  A third group, warriors all, including the Gutbusters, scrambled into the kitchens to collect even more baskets of wood chips, then went out to meet the dwarves carrying the bellows.

  “Bellows? Ye’re sure?” Bruenor asked Catti-brie as the teams went about their work, moving with such precision and discipline that it bolstered the hopes of all defenders. The strength of Gauntlgrym, of Clan Battlehammer, of Delzoun dwarves in general, lay in their dedication to the common good. They each accepted their role and stayed within it, trusting in the dwarves on either side to do the same, to do their job.

  “We’re sure,” Yvonnel answered. She tapped her finger on the determined spots on the map of Gauntlgrym spread before them. “Put a dozen dwarves in a circular pool of water and have them walk the perimeter in the same direction. Then try to reverse your step and you’ll find the current overwhelming. Close these doors, open these, as we planned. Channel our enemies against the hot winds, channel our unexpected allies with the winds at their back and the fuel running before them.”

  “Whoosh,” Catti-brie added with an evil little smile, one Bruenor knew all too well.

  “Ye thinked this all up, did ye?” Bruenor asked Yvonnel.

  The drow pointed to Catti-brie. “She did, all of it.”

  “Whoosh,” Catti-brie said.

  “Aye, whoosh,” the dwarf king echoed, shaking his hairy head.

  A short while later, after word came back from the readied positions, Catti-brie moved before the Great Forge. She felt the ring on her finger, connecting her to the plane of fire. She felt the rush of heat—welcoming heat, this time—as the furnace door was cranked open.

  Catti-brie stared into the hot white-orange flames within, a tendril of Maegera, like one of the primordial’s fiery fingers poking at her. She tore her gaze away and nodded to the dwarves working the main valves behind the furnace, then fell through the power of the ring as they opened them wider.

  The woman called to the primordial, bidding it to come forth.

  Catti-brie heard clearly the song of the fire, the voice of living, sentient beings forming within that heat.

  A gout of flame shot from the furnace, roaring out and roiling in the air.

  On a nod from Catti-brie, then a motion from Yvonnel, the dwarf working the oven shut the door, cutting off the source of fiery energy. The roiling ball of flame already out of the furnace did not wink away, though, but continued to burn, falling to the floor before the forge, taking shape, becoming bipedal, a living being, like a giant, flame-shrouded bear. It was a piece of Maegera, or it had been, for now it was its own entity, as if cutting this tendril from the energy of the primordial had given birth, and now the progeny stood independently.

  Catti-brie heard the new elemental’s name—she couldn’t pronounce it, but she could think it, and that was all she needed to coax control of the fiery beast. She waited for the signal from the opened doorway, then sent the monster along its journey of devastation.

  The furnace door opened and Maegera stabbed forth its fiery power once more, and another tendril was cut off, another elemental birthed. This time, Yvonnel used her magic to compel this one into obedience, to show it the enemies awaiting it and send it sweeping along.

  And so it went, back and forth between the two women. Fire elementals, fiery salamanders, living balls of flame, small but roiling white-hot with their tremendous proportion of energy. All of these creatures of fire, bits of Maegera, rushed along the prescribed path, the only tunnels open to them, hungry, even for living fuel.

  She found her breathing hard to come by, but she knew she couldn’t falter here. With her connection to the creatures of the plane of fire, Catti-brie was sending them along with ease, one after the other, giving them that which they wanted: things to consume, to burn, to spread their fiery wings.

  When the oven door slammed closed for the last time—Yvonnel having reached her limit and Catti-brie agreeing with an upraised hand as she, too, grew weary—the woman fell into different spells alongside the drow and dwarven priestesses and a trio of halfling wizards. Yvonnel led the ritual of her next spell, creating a great wind, combining their magical energies to focus the continuing gust, wind at the backs of the creatures of fire, adding to their strength, speeding their intended catastrophe.

  Howling winds whistled down the corridors, urging and feeding and pushing the living flames along.

  “Reckless does not begin to describe your charge,” Jarlaxle scolded Zaknafein, who sat on a stone table, his wounds being treated by a pair of dwarven clerics.

  “Five major fiends sent home to the Abyss,” Zaknafein replied. “You think that not worth the risk?”

  “I think our friends—your daughter-by-law in particular—have suffered one great loss. I don’t want to pile another atop it.”

  “Do you think they’d see me as such?” Zak replied. “They . . . she hardly knows me, and I’m not so sure she likes what she knows.”

  “Probably not,” Jarlaxle deadpanned. “But let’s not risk it.”

  “Never a risk,” the weapon master answered. “Just some big birds and a six-legged dog.”

  Jarlaxle managed a chuckle at that.

  The door banged open then and a young dwarf poked her head in. “It’s coming,” she said. “Like a wave.”

  Jarlaxle nodded, having felt the warmth as soon as the door was opened.

  “Bear witness?” he asked Zak.

  “Witness? I mean to chase the fire beasts down the hall. They won’t kill everything,” Zak replied. He brushed back the attending dwarves and hopped from the table, pulling on the mithral shirt Catti-brie had given to him, then gathering his sword belt and strapping it on. “At least, I hope they won’t. And this blade is hungrier than I!” he finished, drawing Icingdeath from its sheath.

  Down a short corridor, through a pair of rooms, then down another longer passageway, the pair came to an angled door as the corridor ended, the wall reaching farther on the right-hand side. This selected section of Gauntlgrym had many angled intersections, the side corridors meeting the main hallway like the low-hanging limbs of an evergreen. There the pair paused, for they could feel the intense heat on the other side, could see the flickering brightness of the living flames.

  The door, heavy petrified wood, iron-banded, was smoking.

  “Pull it open and move fast behind me,” Jarlaxle instructed, pulling the giant feather from the band on his hat.

  “Planning to cook some bird?�
� a surprised Zak asked. “The firestorm hasn’t swept past.”

  “You don’t think this feather has only one use, do you?” the rogue replied. “Trust me,” Jarlaxle added, when Zak stood staring.

  “The last words heard by so many of your old friends,” said Zak.

  “The door, please,” Jarlaxle returned.

  Zak stared a bit longer, then wrapped his hand with the edge of his heavy piwafwi and gingerly reached for the bolts holding the portal shut. He threw them open, then grabbed the pull ring and tugged the door open.

  Or tried to, for the rushing wind on the other side was so strong, the living flames eating all the air, that the portal was truly stuck.

  “Bah, but what’re ye about, then, ye bald-headed maker of chaos?” came a voice from behind, and the two turned to see Athrogate rushing up, accompanied by some other dwarves.

  “Get that door opened,” Jarlaxle told him.

  “Not a good idea,” said the black-haired dwarf.

  “Trust me,” Jarlaxle said, and Athrogate snorted loudly.

  “Quite the reputation you’ve crafted,” said Zak.

  “The bellows, the fires, th’embers be flyin’,” Athrogate crooned. “Open the door and ye’re sure to be fryin’!”

  “Just . . .” Jarlaxle sighed and put his face in his hand.

  Athrogate roared at his successful rhyme, then rushed past the mercenary. “Get ye back,” he told Zak, and he grabbed the door ring with a heavily gloved hand.

  “So you trust him, then?” Zak asked the dwarf.

  “He lights like a candle and it’s ’is own doin’,” the dwarf answered.

  Zaknafein ran back to join the other dwarves, noting that one was dragging a large basket full of wood chips.

  Athrogate looked to Jarlaxle and nodded, then tugged on the ring.

  The door didn’t budge.

  The dwarf turned to it, puzzled.

  “The air on the other side,” Jarlaxle started to explain, but then just shook his head and called the dwarf back. Catti-brie and Yvonnel must have cooked up a tremendous storm, he thought, if Athrogate, with his girdle of giant strength, couldn’t open the door!

  Athrogate took up the door in both hands and tugged mightily, but it wouldn’t move. He let go and kicked the heavy portal, grumbling, “Come on, then. I know another way.”

  He rushed back past Jarlaxle, who was removing his hat and shaking his head. When Athrogate was safely behind him, Jarlaxle pulled his portable hole out from the hat and sent it spinning and widening at the portal. It hit flat against the door, immediately creating a wide hole in it, revealing the maelstrom beyond.

  Orange flame light brightened the tunnel. Beyond the door, the windstorm, the firestorm, raged, rushing left to right before the startled onlookers. They noted individual elementals, salamanders of flame, and sweeping waves of burning embers.

  Jarlaxle shook himself from his awe, whispered to his feather implement, and began waving it before him.

  “He think he’s goin’ to fly?” Athrogate asked Zak.

  “A wind fan?” Zak asked, more to himself or to Jarlaxle than to the dwarf. “That’s new.”

  “That one’s always got a trick,” Athrogate said, yelled—because now Jarlaxle, too, was creating a loud wind of his own, billowing out from him and distorting the flames weirdly as it joined the conflagration in the tunnel beyond.

  Athrogate and his dwarf companions hoisted the large basket and rushed up beside the drow, heaving their payload into Jarlaxle’s windstorm. The embers flew forth, blown into the corridor, into the flames, where they ignited immediately and were swept away.

  “Not new,” Jarlaxle replied to Zak’s observation. “Only new to you.”

  Zak could only shake his head, no longer surprised by anything regarding Jarlaxle.

  At the base of the long hallway, a few steps back of the side corridor through which the creatures of the plane of fire were entering, teams of dwarves worked bellows of various sizes, spewing their gusts into the main tunnel to join with Catti-brie and Yvonnel’s maelstrom, fanning the flames as the fire monsters charged into the main hallway, boosting them on their way with powerful tailwinds.

  Far away along the same passage, the demons were coming, large and small, but mostly small, the fodder of this attack force, leading the major fiends in a charge that had already brought them much farther into the complex than they had known before.

  The leading fiends, manes, mostly, felt the rising heat, but it meant nothing to the barely thinking shock troops. Their lead groups rambled around a long bend right as the living permutations of the vomit of the Great Forge swept forward from the other direction.

  More like a flood of water rolling through a forest than stones striking a solid barrier, the fire elementals washed right past the manes, sweeping all about them, igniting them, turning them into animated torches. In the passing wave of fire, those lesser fiends melted and fell, desiccated skin curling and burning. Shrieks of protest filled the corridor, diminishing as the manes fast fell to the hot stone floor into piles of charred bone and ash, blowing about as smoke in the wind of the firestorm.

  The elementals fed and grew and raged and charged on.

  It knew.

  Maegera understood the deception of Catti-brie. She heard it in her mind, for as she had reached into the primordial’s being to coax it forth, the brilliant godlike creature had quietly reached back.

  Now as the spellcasters about her continued their wind ritual, Catti-brie faltered, stumbling in the cacophony of thoughts and protests from the beast. She understood the true power of Maegera then, brilliant and horrifying. And the anger. If her time in the pit had shown her the physical strength of the primordial, this new event revealed to her something even more terrifying. This was no circus bear performing.

  No, Catti-brie realized then that she was the performing animal against the likes of Maegera.

  Compulsions came swirling about her—to open the oven fully, to close the levers in the adjoining chasm room and dismiss the water elementals, to side with Maegera, only Maegera, and share in the beauty of fiery destruction and thus, fiery creation. In only a brief moment, Catti-brie saw the multiverse through the eyes and desires of Maegera and that mere instant wobbled her knees and sent her determined spellcasting to gibberish.

  She was just a human, after all, a mortal being who could not begin to comprehend the truth of Maegera.

  In her failure, she revealed her limitations, and those limitations brought new sensations from the primordial.

  It was disappointed in her.

  It had no use for her.

  It was angry at her for teasing forth its tendrils for her own use.

  Now Maegera promised retribution.

  Catti-brie had taken a piece from it, and so it would take a piece from her.

  Catti-brie had stolen Maegera’s children, the birthed elementals, and so Maegera . . .

  She grew hot and began to shiver. She knew that her face was turning red . . . the heat within.

  The woman felt a sting in her mind, in her heart, in her womb. She heard a splatter below, and looked down, her head spinning, to see blood between her feet.

  Curiously, she never lost focus on that blood as she went down hard onto the stone floor, all strength flying from her, all hope flying with it.

  The whirling fire swept along the corridors, melting the lesser fiends, wounding the greater demons, and behind the maelstrom came a second, this one of muscle and mithral, of mortal flesh and singing voices.

  With the wind at their backs and King Bruenor in the lead, the sweating dwarves charged down tunnels still glowing with residual heat. Soles melting on their heavy boots, the dwarves nevertheless kept up their run. They fought for their home, for their kin, for their king.

  Few demons remained alive in the wake of the firestorm, and under heavy boots, the dwarves stamped into smoke those fiends still clinging to their tethers to the material plane.

  But as they moved
farther along, the corridors grew cooler. The numbers of charred demons diminished, with more living fiends remaining to take up the fight.

  Bruenor, or more accurately, Bruenor’s many-notched axe, led the way willingly, cracking the skull of a glabrezu, shearing the bill from a vrock.

  When they came to intersections or forks, the dwarven force tidily separated, predetermined strike teams running their routes in corridors Clan Battlehammer called home.

  They were fighting, every step, but they were climbing higher in the complex, blasting through demons half killed by the living primordial vomit.

  “Grabbers!” Bruenor yelled when his lead team came to the middle of a large, high-ceilinged room whose ladders were all up or missing altogether. Teams of dwarves with grappling hooks let fly, catching their barbs on the circular stairwell some twenty feet up.

  Bruenor was the first to a rope, tugging himself skyward powerfully, hand over hand. When he got to the ladder and stair platform high above, he was surprised—even as he was not—to see Jarlaxle and Zaknafein already looking down at him from on high, urging him and his fellows on.

  More dead demons, several major fiends among them, greeted Bruenor when he arrived in the corridor of the next level. The walls and floor here were cool. If the fire elementals had made it this far, they had little left to offer, for the skin of the fallen fiends was not burned.

  Slashed and stabbed, but not burned.

  “How long ye been up here?” the dwarf king asked Jarlaxle.

  “Fine plan,” the drow answered. “The living flame stole the fodder from our enemy.”

  “Ye didn’t answer my question.”

  “Not long,” Jarlaxle replied.

  “That one fights like his son,” Athrogate explained, coming out of a room, a large and misshapen husk of a melting demon on the floor of the side chamber behind him.

  Bruenor looked across the wide room and down the hallway beyond, all of it strewn with dead demons, the air filling with smoke as their corpses melted away to nothingness, Jarlaxle’s huge diatryma bird walking among the dissipating corpses, pecking at them.