by Vox Day
Finally, there came what had never been seen before on Selenoth—three regiments of giant, granite-hewn monsters, each standing more than fifteen feet tall, most marching out of rhythm but indubitably marching together. Trolls. Three regiments of trolls.
At that point, Guldur Goblinsbane was little more than a name mentioned in passing to Lodi. But already, even to his unsoldierly eyes, it was clear that the Troll King was a creature of truly unusual power and vision. Lodi could not conceive of anything that would have enabled anyone, least of all a rockheaded troll, to assemble an army of this magnitude and keep it together long enough to reach the gates of Iron Mountain.
What riches had he promised them? What spoils did he dangle before them to motivate them to do his will? Why did the orcs and goblins follow him, or rather, march before him, when surely they would just as soon have fought him, as they had always fought his kind?
The Troll King’s cognomen hinted at the answer, of course. But at that time Lodi was simply not capable of comprehending the slaughter that Guldur had wreaked, first upon his own kind in enforcing a crude form of species unity upon his fellow trolls, and then among the orc tribes he’d encountered next.
Goblinsbane was the overlord of less than one-third of the teeming masses of orcdom. None of the most powerful tribes such as the Hagahorn or the orcs of Zoth Ommog had been subdued by him, but the third he commanded still outnumbered the sum total of all the dwarves in all four dwarf kingdoms. And finally, he won the submission of the goblins by an eight-year display of brutality that was unmatched in the memory of all the sentient races of Selenoth.
As for the countless hill, plain, and swamp goblins that made up the greater part of the Goblinsbane’s army, it soon became clear that they were intended to serve as more than mere fodder for the hidden dwarven cannons that were embedded deeply into the mountainside. They had been brought along to feed the army.
Any thought that the mighty army was too large for it to remain long in front of the gates vanished as the guardsmen watched two great orcs, Red Claw Slayers by the look of the black banner that waved over their encampment, grab a young swamp goblin foolish enough to walk too near to their campfire. The goblin shrieked wildly, but his screams didn’t stop the Slayers from rending him limb from limb and popping the pieces into their boiling cauldron.
The guttural laughter that rose from the nearby orc encampments sent chills of fear down Lodi’s spine. How could they possibly hope to drive away an army that was just as willing to slaughter its own warriors as it was to slay its foes? And although Iron Mountain was supplied with limitless water and well stocked with foodstuffs, the indiscriminate palate of their besiegers meant that they couldn’t count on the siege ending until literally every last goblin had been both killed and eaten! How long could sixty thousand dwarves, of whom perhaps a third were males of fighting age, hope to withstand an enemy army that appeared to be beyond count?
Gulder Goblinsbane had the dwarven gates razed to cinder. After the gates were buried, he commanded the removal of the many tons of stone and other debris that covered them. But the work went slowly, as dwarven miners tunneled from inside the mountain to snatch and slay workers by night and lay explosive traps that slew scores of them at a time during the day.
And when the great gates were finally uncovered and the three mighty rams meant to smash them were brought up at last, a terrible crashing noise was heard and the gates seemed to bulge from the inside out. After much repeated bashing proved to be worthless, the chief goblin engineer finally managed to convince a skeptical Troll King that the dwarves had set off a second landslide, this one inside the mountain, sealing the entrance more solidly than before.
Then began the long and terrible War in the Deep, to which D’Escard devotes but a few suggestive stanzas. But for Lodi, that was the siege—the desperate battles fought in narrow passageways and black, unlit tunnels, where often there wasn’t even enough room to lift your arm, let alone raise your weapon.
The first time he found himself crawling through a rathole and sensed, rather than saw, the presence of an enemy immediately before him, he vowed that he’d have a spike welded on top of his warhammer. Fortunately, the goblin miner had been too occupied with digging to realize that he’d broken into a dwarven crawlspace. Lodi managed to get one hand around the goblin’s skinny neck before it could shriek out a warning to its fellows. He killed five diggers that night, and never once did his hammer leave his belt.
Night after night, the Iron Guard dug tunnels, killed, and then refilled the tunnels to hide their tracks. They planted mines that exploded at random intervals during the day as unlucky orcs and goblins encountered them. They slipped out of hidden exits high up on the mountain and climbed down to launch hellish mortar fire on the camps far below. They slew thousands, tens of thousands, but always there were more goblins, more orcs, more implacable enemies to replace those that fell. The enemy encampment grew to surround the mountain as if it were a pyramid erupting from a field of hateful monsters.
After the initial terror of realizing that they were surrounded by foes, the dwarves of Iron Mountain gradually became accustomed to their peril. Vigilance was required, but as days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months, abject fear changed to morbid nonchalance.
At first, the size of the enemy army dwindled visibly as the ruthless dwarven tactics wreaked lethal havoc on the foe. But the enemies that survived grew more careful and cunning, and soon Lodi noticed that two or three of the Troll King’s elite regiments would disappear, sometimes for a month or more, and return with entire tribes of raging orcs or sad-faced goblins marching before them. Thus did Goblinsbane replenish his forces faster than the dwarves could kill them.And every night, two or three irreplaceable dwarves died.
The first year passed quickly, an unending nightmare of slaughter in the darkness. The second and third years passed more slowly, as the attackers appeared to become almost bored, and the besiegers fought nearly as much amongst themselves as they did with the besieged. In the fourth year, Guldur detached a large body of wolf-riders accompanied by ten regiments of heavy orc infantry and launched a secondary attack on the human kingdom of Savondir. Only a third of those troops returned to IronMountain.
In the fifth year, Goblinsbane increased the pressure on them again, actively digging a series of shafts down from the mountain itself in an attempt to locate the great underground halls in which the dwarves lived.
But in the sixth year, the Troll King finally stumbled upon a tactic that promised eventual success. Though it was unusual for a troll to be an initiate of the Deep Magic, there was one in Goblinsbane’s army. He was pressed into service when, even more unusually for a troll, he had a bright idea. Mastery of the basic elementals was expected of initiates, and this one realized he could use the ability to summon and speak with earth elementals to map out the tunnels used by the dwarves.
Since neither trolls nor elementals tended to be particularly intelligent, and Guldur had only one initiate at his disposal, this development was not as devastating as it might have been in the hands of another besieger. But from that day on, dwarven warriors fell at a faster rate than they had since the siege began.
More families began taking advantage of the Long Passage, the deep emergency tunnel that extended for leagues under the Volpiscenes out to the west, fleeing for the safety of one of the other dwarven kingdoms. After six years of unstinting war, their numbers had dwindled to around eighteen thousand, with only seven thousand effective fighters. Meanwhile the attacking army actually appeared to have swelled in size as more orc tribes were captured, enslaved, and hurled against the unyielding mountain fortress.
Knowing that the collapse of his defenses was rapidly approaching, the dwarven King Hammerstone sent out two delegations of noble dwarves to plead for aid. One went to the Collegium Occludum, and the other traveled to the royal court of Merithaim. Calling for the restoration of the old alliance that had defeated the Witchkings, he offered half the gold and silver o
f his kingdom if only they would come to the assistance of his people.
The wizards of the college ignored the desperate request. It was not their habit to interfere in wars that did not disturb their studies. But Caefall Everbright, the king of the elvish kingdom of Merithaim, was moved by the dwarven pleas and swore to ride to their assistance. The Goblinsbane would fall before a hail of elven arrows, he vowed, and promised that his army would be on the move before the new moon.
Everbright was true to his word, and Lodi was one of the scouts hidden way high near the treeline when the shining helms of the elven lancers first gleamed from the heights of the Saelenheil pass. They were too far away for him to even distinguish individual riders, but he watched as the gleaming column halted at its first sight of the enemy. They beheld a massive, sprawling encampment, more populous than all but the greatest cities of man, spread out below them at the foot of Iron Mountain.
Lodi, long inured to the unspeakable horrors of the huge and stinking hell-city, didn’t understand at first what was happening when the column turned about and retreated back through the pass. He lay in his rocky shelter, uncomprehending, as the silvery figures disappeared, never to return.
It was, of course, absurd to expect the elven king to hurl his meager forces—only five thousand cavalry accompanied by twenty-five thousand archers—against a dug-in army more than ten times its size. King Everbright had been told that the Troll King’s army was enormous, but his imagination was unable to comprehend the reality of what fighting such an army would entail until the moment he laid his eyes upon it. And in that moment, his heart quailed. He issued no order. He commanded no trumpets. He simply turned his horse and began the long ride back to the safe woods of Merithaim. After a moment of stunned surprise, his knights made haste to follow suit.
This was what D’Escard had called Everbright’s valiant attempt to drive off the besiegers, the tale that could bring warriors to tears.
News of the cowardly elven betrayal hit the dwarves of Iron Mountain hard. In truth, there had been little expectation that even the combined forces of elf and dwarf could have defeated the Troll King, but now even that ember of hope was extinguished.
King Hammerstone ordered plans for an evacuation. Only he and the Iron Guard would remain behind to defend the caverns so that his subjects could flee to safety deep under the mountains. After ten days, which was the length of time required for a traversal of the Long Passage, the king himself would light the explosives that would hide the escape route forever from those who might otherwise attempt to follow.
But even as he told the Iron Guard of his intentions, a sulfur-maker turned guardsman named Arkli Powdergrit suggested one last, reckless throw of the dice. An appeal to the goddess Fortune in the hopes that she might favor them with her blessing when all the gods of the dwarves had turned a deaf ear to their unceasing prayers. The king smiled at the young dwarf’s idea, shrugged, and granted his approval. There was little chance the plan would succeed, and even if it did, there was no telling what the consequences would turn out to be. It seemed difficult, however, to imagine that anything could make matters worse at this point.
So it was that in the seventh year of the war, Lodi found himself crawling through a small tunnel, wearing a leather harness and dragging a long, wooden pole longer than he was tall. Somewhere in the darkness ahead of him a pair of dwarves laboriously carved through the hard rocky foundation of Iron Mountain. There were twelve others behind Lodi, most trailing different but equally heavy burdens. Only two of them were armed, and they were the Guards’ most proficient killers, silent assassins who had sent thousands of orcs, goblins, and even trollsto the icy hells over the last seven years.
It took them three days of digging and crawling to reach their destination, where they spent an anxious day waiting for the sun to set and hoping that no emaciated goblins would be searching for sustenance and dig down in just the wrong place.
When darkness fell, the two killers were the first to emerge from the earth. They moved slowly, nearly indistinguishable from boulders as they crept about the vicinity, making sure that no enemies, whether restive, sleeping, or festive, were there to give the alarm. They were already well within the bounds of the enemy encampment, but they had surfaced in the great boneyard that had begun with a few spindly, well-gnawed goblin bones seven years before.
They were surrounded by the sight and smell of death on every side. But strangely, Lodi felt safe inside the jumbled pile of broken skulls, femurs, ribs, and tibias. It was quite literally the only place where they could make their preparations within range of their target. So he worked with the others to clear out a rectangular space free of bones that was large enough for twelve dwarves to lie down side by side. That accomplished, they began assembling the various items they’d been dragging behind them through the tunnel. In less than an hour, they had reassembled a huge scorpion catapult, with its single iron-tipped stinger mounted in the slide.
As the red rays of dawn began to spill down the mountainside, the lead engineer began winching the skeins taut. The wooden pole that Lodi had dragged now served as the shaft of the giant bolt. It was marked with inscriptions and enchantments that supposedly ensured its aim would be true. The catapult was aimed at the large pale-green leather tent that sat nearly a third of a millarium away in the center of the encampment. There, the Goblinsbane slept in a large shelter made of flayed goblinskin.
The camp was stirring and there was movement on every side, but the stacks of skeletal remains shielded the motionless dwarves from view. Lodi hardly dared to breathe. It seemed as if many agonizing hours passed as they waited, fearing that discovery and death would arrive at any moment. But in truth it was well before noon when the Troll King emerged from his hideous lodging and stood before it, looking out over his abominable domain.
He was immense, as tall as five dwarves, and he looked almost like a mountain in his own right. His heavy-featured face was crude and craggy, the color of dark granite shot with yellow veins. He wore very little. Only a blue scrap of leather covered his loins, while on his head sat a massive crown of solid gold boasting a circumference to rival a beer barrel’s.
For all his palpable power, it was said that the most frightening thing about Guldur was his eyes. D’Escard wrote of their strange intelligence and intensity that seemed so eerily out of place in such an extraordinarily physical brute. Lodi could not possibly have seen them from so far away, but the alert way in which the Troll King glanced around his surroundings suddenly filled him with terror that they had been spotted, and in moments that huge right arm would rise to point at them and send a thousand orcs to kill them and with them the last hope of Iron Mountain.
It seemed to Lodi that Guldur must be able to hear the creaking of the skeins as they were winched tighter and the rattling of the claw as the engineer secured yet another notch of progress. There were hurried whispers as one of his companions threw his body against the giant weapon at the engineer’s direction to shift it a little to the left, adjusting for the windage.
Then there was a clacking sound followed by a mighty thrum, as if an immense bird had flapped its wings once right over their heads. The scorpion leaped violently backward, not unlike like its living namesake, which sent a rattling cascade of miscellaneous bones down upon their heads. But the cascade wasn’t loud enough to drown out the sound of a sickening thud in the distance, followed by the most glorious sound Lodi had ever heard in his life.
The howls of the Troll King echoed off the stony slopes, howls that sounded more of rage and disbelief than pain as he staggered backward, pierced through the right side of his chest by the huge wooden bolt, then collapsed, crushing the blood-spattered goblinskins of his tent underneath his mighty weight.
“Hammerstone!” a dwarf shouted in ecstatic triumph.
“Hammerstone!” Lodi and the others roared back, barely daring to believe that they had slain Guldur Goblinsbane himself. “Hammerstone!”
Their victorious r
oars were soon drowned out by a rising tide of bestial fury that seemed to surround them on every side. Hearing that, Lodi left everything behind, rushed for the entrance to the tunnel, and dove into it with reckless abandon, heedless of the jagged edges of the broken rock that tore at his skin. He crawled faster than he’d ever crawled before, knowing that it wouldn’t be long before the smaller, faster goblins would find the entrance and follow after them.
But before they’d gone very far, he heard a deep voice chuckling from somewhere in the darkness behind him.
“Relax, dwarrows. You needn’t crawl like white salamanders fleeing a light. They won’t follow. I’ve left them somewhat of a surprise.” It was King Hammerstone himself, there to greet them.
There was another chuckle, and then a deafening crunch. The ground shook and trembled, and for a moment Lodi feared that the tunnel might collapse. It didn’t, though, and after a long three hours of retracing their previous route, they emerged victorious. King Hammerstone shook their hands, embraced every single one of them, and gifted each dwarf who had been part of the assassination team a royal gold vein in perpetuity.
The end of the siege came quickly, much more quickly than Hammerstone and his generals had dared to dream. Before noon of that very day, the Troll King’s two most powerful warleaders—Orzuth Stoneshaker and Mulguth the Mighty—had come to blows over who would succeed Guldur.
The fight was inconclusive, but it was not without consequences. Orzuth and his followers folded their tents, shouldered their packs, and departed for the homeland they had not seen in ten years. Rightly fearing Orzuth’s intentions to declare himself king of the trolls, Mulguth himself quickly followed suit, accompanied by seven regiments of heavy orc infantry and three regiments of boar-riders.
Realizing that the trolls who had enslaved them were no longer paying them even the least bit of attention, hundreds of thousands of goblins slipped away under the cover of darkness that night, with tribe after tribe fleeing desperately for the homes from which they’d been driven. Most of the orc chieftans did so as well, albeit in better order.