transition 01 The Orc King

by R . A. Salvatore

  “And the melts bring water, every year,” Cordio added, pointing to the north. “Washing away the mud, bucket by bucket, but leaving the stones behind.”

  “Yer answer’s in the ceiling,” Torgar explained, pointing up. “Can ye get a light up there, priest?”

  Cordio nodded and moved away from Bruenor. He began casting again, gently waving his arms, creating a globe of light up at the cavern’s ceiling, right at the point where it joined in with the top of the great building before them. Some tell-tale signs were revealed with that light, confirming Torgar’s suspicions.

  “Roots,” the Mirabarran dwarf explained. “Can’t be more than a few feet o’ ground between that roof and the surface. And these taller buildings’re acting like supports to keep that ceiling up. The tangle o’ roots and the frozen ground’re doin’ the rest. Whole place sank, I tell ye, for these buildings weren’t built for the Underdark.”

  Bruenor looked at the ceiling, then at Drizzt, but the drow could only nod his agreement.

  “Bah!” Bruenor snorted. “Gauntlgrym was akin to Mirabar, then, and ye’re for knowin’ that. So this must be the top o’ the place, with more below. All we need be looking for is a shaft to take us to the lower levels, akin to that rope and come-along dumbwaiter ye got in Mirabar. Now let’s see what this big place is all about—important building, I’m thinking. Might be a throne room.”

  Torgar nodded and Pwent ran up in front of Bruenor to lead the way up the stairs, with Cordio close on his heels. Torgar, though, lagged behind, something Drizzt didn’t miss.

  “Not akin to Mirabar,” the dwarf whispered to Drizzt and Regis.

  “A dwarf city above ground?” Regis asked.

  Torgar shrugged. “I’m not for knowing.” He reached to his side and pulled an item from his belt, one he had taken from the smithy he had found back across the plaza. “Lots of these and little of anything else,” he said.

  Regis sucked in his breath, and Drizzt nodded his agreement with the dwarf’s assessment of the muddy catastrophe that had hit the place. For in his hand, Torgar held an item all too common on the surface and all too rare in the Underdark: a horseshoe.

  At Drizzt’s insistence, he, and not the noisy Thibble dorf, led the way into the building with Guenhwyvar beside him. The drow and panther filtered out to either side of the massive, decorated doors—doors filled with color and gleaming metal much more indicative of a construction built under the sun. The drow and his cat melted into the shadows of the great hall that awaited them, moving with practiced coordination. They sensed no danger. The place seemed still and long dead.

  It was no audience chamber, though, no palace for a dwarf king. When the others came in and they filled the room with torchlight, it became apparent that the place had been a library and gallery, a place of art and learning.

  Rotted scrolls filled ancient wooden shelves all around the room and along the walls, interspersed with tapestries whose images had long ago faded, and with sculptures grand and small alike.

  Those sculptures set off the first waves of alarm in the companions, particularly in Bruenor, for while some depicted dwarves in their typically heroic battle poses and regalia, others showed orc warriors standing proud. And more than one depicted orcs in other dress, in flowing robes or with pen in hand.

  The most prominent of all stood upon a dais at the far end of the room, directly across from the doors. The image of Moradin, stocky and strong, was quite recognizable to the dwarves.

  So was the image of Gruumsh One-eye, god of the orcs, standing across from him, and while the two were shown eyeing each other with expressions that could be considered suspicious, the simple fact that they were not shown with Moradin standing atop the vanquished Gruumsh’s chest elicited stares of disbelief on the faces of all four dwarves. Thibble dorf Pwent even babbled something undecipherable.

  “What place was this?” Cordio asked, giving sound to the question that was on all their minds. “What hall? What city?”

  “Delzoun,” muttered Bruenor. “Gauntlgrym.”

  “Then she’s no place akin to the tales,” said Cordio, and Bruenor shot a glare his way.

  “Grander, I’m saying,” the priest quickly added.

  “Whatever it was, it was grand indeed,” said Drizzt. “And beyond my expectations when we set out from Mithral Hall. I had thought we would find a hole in the ground, Bruenor, or perhaps a small, ancient settlement.”

  “I telled ye it was Gauntlgrym,” Bruenor replied.

  “If it is, then it is a place to do your Delzoun heritage proud,” said the drow. “If it is not, then let us discover other accomplishments of which you can be rightly proud.”

  Bruenor’s stubborn expression softened a bit at those words, and he offered Drizzt a nod and moved off deeper into the room, Thibbledorf at his heel. Drizzt looked to Cordio and Torgar, both of whom nodded their appreciation of his handling of the volatile king.

  It was not Gauntlgrym, all three of them knew—at least, it was not the Gauntlgrym of dwarven legend. But what then?

  There wasn’t much to salvage in the library, but they did find a few scrolls that hadn’t fully succumbed to the passage of time. None of them could read the writing on the ancient paper, but there were a few items that could give hints about the craftsmanship of the former residents, and even one tapestry that Regis believed could be cleaned enough to reveal some hints of its former depictions. They gathered their hoard together with great care, rolling and tying the tapestry and softly packing the other items in bags that had held the food they had thus far consumed.

  They were done scouring the hall in less than an afternoon’s time, and finished with a cursory and rather unremarkable examination of the rest of the cavern for just as long after that. Abruptly, and at Bruenor’s insistence, so ended their expedition. Soon after, they climbed back up through the hole that had brought them underground and were greeted by a late winter’s quiet night. At the next break of dawn they began their journey home, where they hoped to find some answers.

  CHAPTER

  POSSIBILITIES

  King Obould normally liked the cheering of the many orcs that surrounded his temporary palace, a heavy tent set within a larger tent, set within a larger tent. All three were reinforced with metal and wood, and their entrances opened at different points for further security. Obould’s most trusted guards, heavily armored and with great gleaming weapons, patrolled the two outer corridors.

  The security measures were relatively new, as the orc king cemented his grip and began to unfold his strategy—a plan, the cheering that day only reminded him, that might not sit well with the warlike instincts of some of his subjects. He had already waged the first rounds of what he knew would be his long struggle among the stones of Keeper’s Dale. His decision to stand down the attack on Mithral Hall had been met with more than a few mutterings of discontent.

  And that had only been the beginning, of course.

  He moved along the outer ring of his tent palace to the opened flap and looked out on the gathering on the plaza of the nomadic orc village. At least two hundred of his minions were out there, cheering wildly, thrusting weapons into the air, and clapping each other on the back. Word had come in of a great orc victory in the Moonwood, tales of elf heads spiked on the riverbank.

  “We should go there and see the heads,” Kna said to Obould as she curled at his side. “It is a sight that would fill me with lust.”

  Obould swiveled his head to regard her, and he offered a smile, knowing that stupid Kna would never understand it to be one of pity.

  Out in the plaza, the cheering grew a backbone chant: “Karuck! Karuck! Karuck!”

  It was not unexpected. Obould, who had received word of the fight in the east the previous night, before the public courier had arrived, motioned to the many loyalists he had set in place, and on his nod, they filtered into the crowd.

  A second chant bubbled up among the first, “Many-Arrows! Many-Arrows! Many-Arrows!” And gradually, t
he call for kingdom overcame the cheer for clan.

  “Take me there and I will love you,” Kna whispered in the orc king’s ear, tightening her hold on his side.

  Obould’s bloodshot eyes narrowed as he turned to regard her again. He brought his hand up to grab the back of her hair and roughly bent her head back so that she could see the intensity on his face. He envisioned those elf heads he’d heard of, set on tall pikes. His smile widened as he considered putting Kna’s head in that very line.

  Misconstruing his intensity as interest, the consort grinned and writhed against him.

  With almost godlike strength, Obould tugged her from his side and tossed her to the ground. He turned back to the plaza and wondered how many of his minions—those not in his immediate presence—would add the chant of Many-Arrows to the praises of Clan Karuck as word of the victory spread throughout the kingdom.

  The night was dark, but not to the sensitive eyes of Tos’un Armgo, who had known the blackness of the Underdark. He crouched by a rocky jag, looking down at the silvery snake known as the Surbrin River, and more pointedly at the line of poles before it.

  The perpetrators had moved to the south, along with the prodding trio of Dnark, Ung-thol, and the upstart young Toogwik Tuk. They had talked of attacking the Battlehammer dwarves at the Surbrin.

  Obould would not be pleased to see such independence among his ranks. And strangely, the drow wasn’t overly thrilled at the prospect himself. He’d personally led the first orc assault on that dwarven position, infiltrating and silencing the main watchtower before the orc tide swept Clan Battlehammer back into its hole.

  It had been a good day.

  So what had changed, wondered Tos’un. What had left him with such melancholy when battle was afoot, particularly a battle between orcs and dwarves, two of the ugliest and smelliest races he had ever had the displeasure of knowing?

  As he looked down at the river, he came to understand. Tos’un was a drow, had been raised in Menzoberranzan, and held no love for his surface elf cousins. The war between the surface and Underdark elves was among the fiercest rivalries in the world, a long history of dastardly deeds and murderous raids that equaled anything the continually warring demons of the Abyss and devils of the Nine Hells could imagine. Cutting out the throat of a surface elf had never presented Tos’un with a moral dilemma, surely, but there was something about the current situation, about those heads, that unnerved him, that filled him with a sense of dread.

  As much as he hated surface elves, Tos’un despised orcs even more. The idea that orcs could have scored such a victory over elves of any sort left the drow cold. He had grown up in a city of twenty thousand dark elves, and with probably thrice that number of orc, goblin, and kobold slaves. Was there, perhaps, a Clan Karuck in their midst, ready to spike the heads of the nobles of House Barrison Del’Armgo or even of House Baenre?

  He scoffed at the absurd notion, and reminded himself that surface elves were weaker than their drow kin. This group fell to Clan Karuck because they deserved it, because they were weak or stupid, or both.

  Or at least, that’s what Tos’un told himself over and over again, hoping that repetition would provide comfort where reason could not. He looked to the south, where the receding pennants of Clan Karuck had long been lost to the uneven landscape and the darkness. Whatever he might tell himself about the slaughter in the Moonwood, deep inside the true echoes of his heart and soul, Tos’un hoped that Grguch and his minions would all die horribly.

  The sound of dripping water accompanied the wagon rolling east from Nesmé, as the warm day nibbled at winter’s icy grip. Several times the wagon driver grumbled about muddy ruts, even expressing his hope that the night would be cold.

  “If the night’s warm, we’ll be walking!” he warned repeatedly.

  Catti-brie hardly heard him, and hardly noticed the gentle symphony of the melt around her. She sat in the bed of the wagon, with her back up against the driver’s seat, staring out to the west behind them.

  Wulfgar was out there, moving away from her. Away forever, she feared.

  She was full of anger, full of hurt. How could he leave them with an army of orcs encamped around Mithral Hall? Why would he ever want to leave the Companions of the Hall? And how could he go without saying farewell to Bruenor, Drizzt, and Regis?

  Her mind whirled through those questions and more, trying to make sense of it all, trying to come to terms with something she could not control. It wasn’t the way things were supposed to be! She had tried to say that to Wulfgar, but his smile, so sure and serene, had defeated her argument before it could be made.

  She thought back to the day when she and Wulfgar had left Mithral Hall for Silverymoon. She remembered the reactions of Bruenor and Drizzt—too emotional for the former and too stoic for the latter, she realized.

  Wulfgar had told them. He’d said his good-byes before they set out, whether in explicit terms or in hints they could not miss. It hadn’t been an impulsive decision brought about by some epiphany that had come to him on the road.

  Catti-brie grimaced through a sudden flash of anger, at Bruenor and especially at Drizzt. How could they have known and not have told her?

  She suppressed that anger quickly, and realized that it had been Wulfgar’s choice. He had waited to tell her until after they’d recovered Colson. Catti-brie nodded as she considered that. He’d waited because he knew that the sight of the girl, the girl who had been taken from her mother and was to be returned, would make things more clear for Catti-brie.

  “My anger isn’t for Wulfgar, or any of them,” she whispered.

  “Eh?” asked the driver, and Catti-brie turned her head and gave him a smile that settled him back to his own business.

  She held that smile as she turned back to stare at the empty west, and squinted, putting on a mask that might counter the tears that welled within. Wulfgar was gone, and if she sat back and considered his reasons, she knew she couldn’t fault him. He was not a young man any longer. His legacy was still to be made, and time was running short. It would not be made in Mithral Hall, and even in the cities surrounding the dwarven stronghold, the people, the humans, were not kin to Wulfgar in appearance or in sensibility. His home was Icewind Dale. His people were in Icewind Dale. In Icewind Dale alone could he truly hope to find a wife.

  Because Catti-brie was lost to him. And though he bore her no ill will, she understood the pain he must have felt when he looked upon her and Drizzt.

  She and Wulfgar had had their moment, but that moment had passed, had been stolen by demons, both within Wulfgar and in the form of the denizens of the Abyss. Their moment had passed, and there seemed no other moments for Wulfgar to find in the court of a dwarf king.

  “Farewell,” Catti-brie silently mouthed to the empty west, and never had she so meant that simple word.

  He bent low to bring Colson close to the flowering snowdrops, their tiny white bells denying the snow along the trail. The first flowers, the sign of coming spring.

  “For Ma, Dell-y,” Colson chattered happily, holding the first syllable of Delly’s name for a long heartbeat, which only tugged all the more at Wulfgar’s heart. “Flowvers,” she giggled, and she pulled one close to her nose.

  Wulfgar didn’t correct her lisp, for she beamed as brightly as any “flowvers” ever could.

  “Ma for flowvers.” Colson rambled, and she mumbled through a dozen further sounds that Wulfgar could not decipher, though it was apparent to him that the girl thought she was speaking in cogent sentences. Wulfgar was sure that Colson made perfect sense to Colson, at least!

  There was a little person in there—Wulfgar only truly realized at that innocent moment. A thinking, rational individual. She wasn’t a baby anymore, wasn’t helpless and unwitting.

  The joy and pride that brought to Wulfgar was tempered, to be sure, by his realization that he would soon turn Colson over to her mother, to a woman the girl had never known in a land she had never called home.

  “So be
it,” he said, and Colson looked at him and giggled, and gradually Wulfgar’s delight overcame his sense of impending dread. He felt the season in his heart, as if his own internal, icy pall had at last been lifted. Nothing could change that overriding sensation. He was free. He was content. He knew in his heart that what he was doing was good, and right.

  As he bent lower to the flower, he noted something else: a fresh print in the mud, right on the edge of the hardened snow. It had come from a shoddily-wrapped foot, and since it was so far from any town, Wulfgar recognized it at once as the print of a goblinkin’s foot. He stood back up and glanced all around.

  He looked to Colson and smiled comfortingly, then hustled along down the broken trail, his direction, fortunately, opposite the one the creature had taken. He wanted no battle that day, or any other day Colson was in his arms.

  All the more reason to get the child back where she belonged.

  Wulfgar hoisted the girl onto his broad shoulder and whistled quietly for her as his long legs carried them swiftly down the road, to the west.

  Home.

  North of Wulfgar’s position, four dwarves, a halfling, and a drow settled around a small fire in a snowy dell. They had stopped their march early, that they could better light a fire to warm some stones that would get them more comfortably through the cold night. After briskly rubbing their hands over the dancing orange flames, Torgar, Cordio, and Thibble dorf set off to find the stones.

  Bruenor hardly noticed their departure, for his gaze had settled on the sack of scrolls and artifacts, and on a tied tapestry lying nearby.

  While Regis began preparing their supper, Drizzt just sat and watched his dwarf friend, for he knew that Bruenor was churning inside, and that he would soon enough need to speak his mind.