Regis remained, and he turned a concerned look at Alustriel then at Catti-brie.
“He will calm down,” Regis said unconvincingly.
“Not so sure I’m wantin’ him to,” Catti-brie admitted, and she glanced at Alustriel.
The Lady of Silverymoon had nothing more than helplessly upraised hands in reply, and so Catti-brie limped off after her beloved father.
“It is a dark day, my friend Regis,” Alustriel said when the woman had gone.
Regis’s eyes popped open wide, surprised at being directly addressed by one of Alustriel’s stature.
“This is how great wars begin,” Alustriel explained. “And do not doubt that no matter the outcome, there will be no winners.”
As soon as the priest had gone, Obould was glad of his decision not to call in his entourage. He needed to be alone, to vent, to rant, and to think things through. He knew in his heart that Grguch was no ally, and had not arrived by accident. Ever since the disaster in the western antechamber of Mithral Hall and the pushback of Proffit’s troll army, the orcs and dwarves had settled into a stalemate—and it was one that Obould welcomed. But one that he welcomed privately, for he knew that he was working against the traditions, instincts, and conditioning of his warrior race. No voices of protest came to him directly, of course—he was too feared by those around him for that kind of insolence—but he heard the rumbles of discontent even in the grating background of praises thrown his way. The restless orcs wanted to march on, back into Mithral Hall, across the Surbrin to Silverymoon and Sundabar, and particularly Citadel Felbarr, which they had once, long ago, claimed as their own.
“The cost…” Obould muttered, shaking his head.
He would lose thousands in such an endeavor—even if he only tried to dislodge fierce King Bruenor. He would lose tens of thousands if he went farther, and though he would have loved nothing more than to claim the throne of Silverymoon as his own, Obould understood that if he had gathered all the orcs from all the holes in all the world, he could not likely accomplish such a thing.
Certainly he might find allies—more giants and dark elves, perhaps, or any of the other multitude of races and monsters that lived solely for the pleasure of fighting and destruction. In such an alliance, though, he could never reign, nor could his minions ever gain true freedom and self-determination.
And even if he did manage greater conquests with his orc minions, even if he widened the scope of the Kingdom of Many-Arrows, the lessons of history had taught him definitively that the center of such a kingdom could never hold. His reach was long, his grip iron strong. Long and strong enough to hold the perimeters of the Kingdom of Many-Arrows? Long and strong enough to fend off Grguch and any potential conspirators who had coaxed the fierce chieftain to the surface?
Obould clenched his fist mightily as that last question filtered through his mind, and he issued a long and low growl then licked his lips as if tasting the blood of his enemies.
Were Clan Karuck even his enemies?
The question sobered him. He was getting ahead of the facts, he realized. A ferocious and aggressive orc clan had arrived in Many-Arrows, and had taken up the fight independently, as orc clans often did, and with great and glorious effect.
Obould nodded as he considered the truth of it and realized the limits of his conjecture. In his heart, though, he knew that a rival had come, and a very dangerous one at that.
Reflexively, the orc king looked to the southwest, the direction of General Dukka and his most reliable fighting force. He would need another courier, he realized immediately. As Oktule went to summon Grguch, as Nukkels traveled to King Bruenor’s Court with word of truce, so he would need a third, the fastest of the three, to go and retrieve Dukka and the warriors. For the dwarves might soon counterattack, and likely would be joined by the dangerous and outraged Moonwood elves.
Or more likely, Clan Karuck would need to be taught a lesson.
CHAPTER
ON SQUIGGLES AND EMISSARIES
With but one hand, for the chieftain was no minor warrior, Dnark pushed Oktule to the side and stepped past him to the edge of a mountain-view precipice overlooking King Obould’s encampment. A group of riders exited that camp, moving swiftly to the south, and without the banner of Many-Arrows flying from their midst.
“War pigs, and armored,” the shaman Ung-thol remarked. “Elite warriors. Obould’s own.”
Dnark pointed to a rider in the middle of the pack, and though they were far away and moving farther, his headdress could still be seen.
“The priest, Nukkels,” Ung-thol said with a nod.
“What does this mean?” Oktule asked, his tone concurring with his body posture to relate his discomfort. Young Oktule had been chosen as a courier from the east because of his speed and stamina, but he had not the experience or the wisdom to fathom all that was going on around him.
The chieftain and his shaman turned as one to regard the orc. “It means that you should tell Grguch to proceed with all caution,” Dnark said.
“I do not understand.”
“King Obould might not welcome him with the warmth promised in the invitation,” Dnark explained.
“Or might greet him with more warmth than promised,” Ungthol quipped.
Oktule stared at them, his jaw hanging open. “King Obould is angry?”
That brought a laugh from the two older and more worldly orcs.
“You know Toogwik Tuk?” Ung-thol asked.
Oktule nodded. “The preacher orc. His words showed me to the glory of Grguch. He proclaimed the power of Chieftain Grguch and the call of Gruumsh to bring war to the dwarves.”
Dnark chuckled and patted the air with his hand, trying to calm the fool. “Deliver your words to Chieftain Grguch as your king demanded,” he said. “But seek out Toogwik Tuk first and inform him that a second courier went out from Obould’s”—then he quickly corrected himself—“King Obould’s camp, this one riding to the south.”
“What does it mean?” Oktule asked again.
“It means that King Obould expects trouble,” Ung-thol interrupted, stopping Dnark before he could respond. “Toogwik Tuk will know what to do.”
“Trouble?” asked Oktule.
“The dwarves will likely counterattack, and more furious will they become when they learn that both King Obould and Chieftain Grguch are in the same place.”
Oktule began to nod stupidly, catching on.
“Be off at once,” Dnark told him, and the young orc spun on his heel and rushed away. A signal from Dnark sent a couple of guards off with him, to escort him on his important journey.
As soon as they were gone, the chieftain and the shaman turned back to the distant riders.
“Do you really believe that Obould would send an emissary to the Battlehammer dwarves?” Ung-thol asked. “Has he become so cowardly as that?”
Dnark nodded through every word, and when Ung-thol glanced over at him, he replied, “We should find out.”
“Ye tell Emerus that we’ll be lookin’ for all he’s to bring,” Bruenor said to Jackonray Broadbelt and Nikwillig, the emissaries from Citadel Felbarr.
“The bridge’ll be ready soon, I’m told,” Jackonray replied.
“Forget the durned bridge!” Bruenor snapped, startling everyone in the room with his unexpected outburst. “Alustriel’s wizards’ll be working more on the wall for the next days. I’m wanting an army here afore the work’s even begun on the bridge again. I’m wanting Alustriel to see Felbarr side-by-side with Mithral Hall, that when we’re walking out that gate, she’ll know the time for talkin’s over and the time for fightin’s come.”
“Ah,” Jackonray replied, nodding, a smile spreading on his hairy and toothy face. “So I’m seeing why Bruenor’s the king. Ye’ve got me respect, good King Bruenor, and ye’ve got me word that I’ll shove King Emerus out the durned tunnel door meself if it’s needin’ to be!”
“Ye’re a good dwarf. Ye do yer kin proud.”
Jackonray bo
wed so low that his beard brushed the ground, and he and Nikwillig left in a rush—or started to, until Bruenor’s call turned them fast around.
“Go out through the eastern gate, under the open sky,” Bruenor instructed with a wry grin.
“Quicker through the tunnels,” Nikwillig dared to argue.
“Nah, ye go out and tell Alustriel that I’m wantin’ the two o’ ye put outside o’ Felbarr in a blink,” Bruenor explained, and snapped his stubby fingers in the air to accentuate his point. All around Bruenor, dwarves began to chuckle.
“Never let it be said that a Battlehammer don’t know a good joke when he’s seein’ one,” Bruenor remarked, and the chuckles turned to laughter.
Jackonray and Nikwillig left in a rush, giggling.
“Let Alustriel play a part in her own trap,” Bruenor said to Cordio, Thibble dorf, and Banak Brawnanvil, who had a specially designed throne right beside Bruenor’s own, a place of honor for the heroic leader who had been crippled in the orc assault.
“Suren she’s to be scrunching up her pretty face,” Banak said.
“When Mithral Hall and Citadel Adbar march right past her working wizards, to be sure,” Bruenor agreed. “But she’ll be seeing, too, that the time’s past hiding from Obould’s dogs. He’s wantin’ a fight and we’re for givin’ him one—one that’ll take him all the way back where he came from, and beyond.”
The room erupted in cheering, and Banak reached out to grab Bruenor’s offered hand, clasping tight in a shake of mutual respect and determination.
“Ye stay here and take the rest o’ the audiences,” Bruenor instructed Banak. “I’m for seeing Rumblebelly and the littler one. There’s clues in them scrolls we brought back, or I’m a bearded gnome, and I’m wantin’ all the tricks and truths we can muster afore we strike out against Obould.”
He hopped down from his throne and from the dais, motioning for Cordio to follow and for Thibble dorf to stand as Banak’s second.
“Nanfoodle telled me that the runes on them scrolls weren’t nothing he’d e’er seen,” Cordio said to Bruenor as they started out of the audience chamber. “Squiggles in places squiggles shouldn’t be.”
“The littler one’ll straighten ’em out, don’t ye doubt. As clever as any I’ve ever seen, and a good friend o’ the clan. Mirabar’s lost a lot when Torgar and his boys come our way, and they lost a lot when Nanfoodle and Shoudra come looking for Torgar and his boys.”
Cordio nodded his agreement and left it at that, following Bruenor down the corridors and stairwells to a small cluster of secluded rooms where Nanfoodle had set up his alchemy lab and library.
No one in the tribe knew if it had gotten its name through its traditional battle tactics, or if the succession of chieftains had fashioned the tactics to fit the name. Whatever the cause-effect, their peculiar battle posture had been perfected through generations. Indeed, the leaders of Wolf Jaw selected orcs at a young age based on size and speed to find the appropriate place in the formation each might best fit.
Choosing the enemy and the battleground was more important even than that, if the dangerous maneuver was to work. And no orc in the tribe’s history had been better at such tasks than the present chieftain, Dnark of the Fang. He was descended from a long line of point warriors, the tip of the fangs of the wolf jaw that snapped over its enemies. For years, young Dnark had spearheaded the top line of the V formation, sliding out along the left flank of an intended target, while another orc, often a cousin of Dnark’s, led the right, or bottom, jaw. When the lines stretched to their limit, Dnark would swing his assault group to a sharp right, forming a fang, and he and his counterpart would join forces, sealing the escape route at the rear of the enemy formation.
As chieftain, though, Dnark anchored the apex. His jaws of warriors went out north and south of the small encampment, and when the signals came back to the chieftain, he led the initial assault, moving forward with his main battle group.
They did not charge, and did not holler and hoot. Instead, they approached calmly, as if nothing was amiss—and indeed, why would King Obould’s shaman advisor suspect anything different?
The camp did stir at the approach of so large a contingent, with calls for Nukkels to come forth from his tent.
Ung-thol put his hand on Dnark’s arm, urging restraint. “We do not know his purpose,” the shaman reminded.
Nukkels appeared a few moments later, moving to the eastern end of the small plateau he and his warriors had used for their pause. Beside him, Obould’s powerful guards lifted heavy spears.
How Dnark wanted to call for the charge! How he wanted to lead the way up the rocky incline to smash through those fools!
But Ung-thol was there, reminding him, coaxing him to patience.
“Praise to King Obould!” Dnark called out, and he took his tribe’s banner from an orc to the side and waved it around. “We have word from Chieftain Grguch,” he lied.
Nukkels held up his hand, palm out at Dnark, warning him to hold back.
“We have no business with you,” he called down.
“King Obould does not share that belief,” Dnark replied, and he began his march again, slowly. “He has sent us to accompany you, as more assurance that Clan Karuck will not interfere.”
“Interfere with what?” Nukkels shouted back.
Dnark glanced at Ung-thol, then back up the rise. “We know where you are going,” he bluffed.
It was Nukkels’s turn to look around at his entourage. “Come in alone, Chieftain Dnark,” he called. “That we might plot our next move.”
Dnark kept moving up the slope, calm and unthreatening, and he did not bid his force to lag behind.
“Alone!” Nukkels called more urgently.
Dnark smiled, but otherwise changed not a thing. The orcs beside Nukkels lifted their spears.
It didn’t matter. The bluff had played its part, allowing Dnark’s core force to close nearly half the incline to Nukkels. Dnark held up his hands to Nukkels and the guards then turned to address his group—ostensibly to instruct them to wait there.
“Kill them all—except for Nukkels and the closest guards,” he instructed instead, and when he turned back, he had his sword in hand, and he raised it high.
The warriors of Clan Wolf Jaw swept past him on either side, those nearest swerving to obstruct their enemies’ view of their beloved chieftain. More than one of those shield orcs died in the next moments, as spears flew down upon them.
But the jaws of the wolf closed.
By the time Dnark got up to the plateau, the fighting was heavy all around him and Nukkels was nowhere to be found. Angered by that, Dnark threw himself into the nearest battle, where a pair of his orcs attacked a single guard, wildly and ineffectively.
Obould had chosen his inner circle of warriors well.
One of the Wolf Jaw orcs stabbed in awkwardly with his spear, but the guard’s sword swept across and shattered the hilt, launching it out to confuse the attacker’s companion. With the opening clear, the guard retracted and stepped forward for the easy kill.
Except that Dnark came in fast from the side and hacked the fool’s sword arm off at the elbow.
The guard howled and half-turned, falling to its knees and clutching its stump. Dnark stepped in and grabbed it by the hair, tugging its head back, opening its neck for a killing strike.
And always before, the chieftain of Clan Wolf Jaw would have taken that strike, would have claimed that kill. But he held back his sword and kicked the guard in the throat instead, and as it fell away, he instructed his two warriors to make sure that the fallen enemy didn’t die.
Then he went on to the next fight in a long line of battles.
When the skirmish on the plateau ended, though, Shaman Nukkels was not to be found, either among the seven prisoners or the score of dead. He had gone off the back end at the first sign of trouble, so said witnesses.
Before Dnark could begin to curse that news, however, he found that his selections for the fangs
of the formation had done his own legacy proud, for in they marched, Nukkels and a battered guard prodded before them with spears.
“Obould will kill you for this,” Nukkels said when presented before Dnark.
Dnark’s left hook left the shaman squirming on the ground.
“The symbol is correct,” Nanfoodle proudly announced. “The pattern is unmistakable.”
Regis stared at the large copy of the parchment, its runes separated and magnified. On Nanfoodle’s instruction, the halfling had spent the better part of a day transcribing each mark to that larger version then the pair had spent several days cutting out wooden stencils for each—even for those that seemed to hold an obvious correlation to the current Dwarvish writing.
Mistaking that tempting lure, accepting the obvious runes for what they supposed them to be, Dethek runes of an archaic orc tongue called Hulgorkyn, had been their downfall through all of their early translation attempts, and it wasn’t until Nanfoodle had insisted that they treat the writing from the lost city as something wholly unrecognizable that the pair had begun to make any progress at all.
If that was indeed what they were making.
Many other stencils had been crafted, multiple representations of every Dwarvish symbol. Then had come the trial and error—and error, and error, and error—for more than a day of painstaking rearranging and reevaluation. Nanfoodle, no minor illusionist, had cast many spells, and priests had been brought in to offer various auguries and inspired insights.
Thirty-two separate symbols appeared on the parchment, and while a thorough statistical analysis had offered hints of potential correlations to the traditional twenty-six runes of Dethek, the fact that none of those promising hints added up to anything substantial made much of that analysis no more than guesswork.
Gradually, though, patterns had taken shape, and spells seemed to confirm the best guesses time and time again.
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