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.
27. The Clock of Doom
Bremen 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 toward 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 Mithril 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?”