Hakuun nodded, and Grguch seemed satisfied with that and turned away, barking orders at the others. Elves were just the sort of cowardly creatures to run away and sneak back for quiet murder, of course, and so the chieftain began setting his defenses and his scouts, leaving Hakuun alone with his thoughts.
Or so Hakuun believed.
He flinched then froze when the foot-long serpent landed on his shoulder, and he held his breath, as he always did on those thankfully rare occasions when he found himself in the company of Jaculi—for that was the name that Jack had given him, the name of the winged serpent that Jack wore as a disguise when venturing out of his private workshops.
“I wish that you had informed me of your departure,” Jack said in Hakuun’s ear.
“I did not want to disturb you,” Hakuun meekly replied, for it was hard for him to hold his steadiness with Jack’s tongue flicking in his ear, close enough to send one of his forked lightning bolts right through the other side of poor Hakuun’s head.
“Clan Karuck disturbs me often,” Jack reminded him. “Sometimes I believe that you have told the others of me.”
“Never that, O Awful One!”
Jack’s laughter came out as a hiss. When he had first begun his domination and deception of the orcs those decades before, pragmatism alone had ruled his actions. But through the years he had come to accept the truth of it: he liked scaring the wits out of those ugly creatures! Truly, that was one of the few pleasures remaining for Jack the Gnome, who lived a life of simplicity and…And what? Boredom, he knew, and it stung him to admit it to himself. In the secret corners of his heart, Jack understood precisely why he had followed Karuck out of the caves: because his fear of danger, even of death, could not surmount his fear of letting everything stay the same.
“Why have you ventured out of the Underdark?” he demanded.
Hakuun shook his head. “If the tidings are true then there is much to be gained here.”
“For Clan Karuck?”
“Yes.”
“For Jaculi?”
Hakuun gulped and swallowed hard, and Jack hiss-laughed again into his ear.
“For Gruumsh,” Hakuun dared whisper.
As weakly as it was said, that still gave Jack pause. For all of his domination of Hakuun’s family, their fanatical service to Gruumsh had never been in question. It had once taken Jack an afternoon of torture to make one of Hakuun’s ancestors—his grandfather, Jack believed, though he couldn’t really remember—utter a single word against Gruumsh, and even then, the priest had soon after passed his duties down to his chosen son and killed himself in Gruumsh’s name.
As he had in the cave, the gnome wizard sighed. With Gruumsh invoked, he wasn’t about to turn Clan Karuck around.
“We shall see,” he whispered into Hakuun’s ear, and said to himself as well, a resigned acceptance that sometimes the stubborn orcs had their own agenda.
Perhaps he could find some amusement and profit out of it, and really, what did he have to lose? He sniffed the air again, and again sensed that something was different.
“There are many orcs about,” he said.
“Tens of thousands,” Hakuun confirmed. “Come to the call of King Obould Many-Arrows.”
Many-Arrows, Jack thought, a name that registered deep in his memories of long ago. He thought of Citadel Fel…Citadel Felb…Fel-something-or-other, a place of dwarves. Jack didn’t much like dwarves. They annoyed him at least as much as did the orcs, with their hammering and stupid chanting that they somehow, beyond all reason, considered song.
“We shall see,” he said again to Hakuun, and noting that the ugly Grguch was fast approaching, Jack slithered down under Hakuun’s collar to nestle in the small of his back. Every now and then, he flicked his forked tongue against Hakuun’s bare flesh just for the fun of hearing the shaman stutter in his discussion with the beastly Grguch.
PART 2
GAUNTLGRYM
I came from the Underdark, the land of monsters. I lived in Ice-wind Dale, where the wind can freeze a man solid, or a bog can swallow a traveler so quickly that he’ll not likely understand what is happening to him soon enough to let out a cry, unless it is one muffled by loose mud. Through Wulfgar I have glimpsed the horrors of the Abyss, the land of demons, and could there be any place more vile, hate-filled, and tormenting? It is indeed a dangerous existence.
I have surrounded myself with friends who will fearlessly face those monsters, the wind and the bog, and the demons, with a snarl and a growl, a jaw set and a weapon held high. None would face them more fearlessly than Bruenor, of course.
But there is something to shake even that one, to shake us all as surely as if the ground beneath our feet began to tremble and break away.
Change.
In any honest analysis, change is the basis of fear, the idea of something new, of some paradigm that is unfamiliar, that is beyond our experiences so completely that we cannot even truly predict where it will lead us. Change. Uncertainty.
It is the very root of our most primal fear—the fear of death—that one change, that one unknown against which we construct elaborate scenarios and “truisms” that may or may not be true at all. These constructions, I think, are an extension of the routines of our lives. We dig ruts with the sameness of our daily paths, and drone and rail against those routines while we, in fact, take comfort in them. We awake and construct our days of habit, and follow the norms we have built fast, solid, and bending only a bit in our daily existence. Change is the unrolled die, the unused sava piece. It is exciting and frightening only when we hold some power over it, only when there is a potential reversal of course, difficult though it may be, within our control.
Absent that safety line of real choice, absent that sense of some control, change is merely frightening. Terrifying, even.
An army of orcs does not scare Bruenor. Obould Many-Arrows does not scare Bruenor. But what Obould represents, particularly if the orc king halts his march and establishes a kingdom, and more especially if the other kingdoms of the Silver Marches accept this new paradigm, terrifies Bruenor Battlehammer to the heart of his being and to the core tenets of his faith. Obould threatens more than Bruenor’s kin, kingdom, and life. The orc’s designs shake the very belief system that binds Bruenor’s kin, the very purpose of Mithral Hall, the understanding of what it is to be a dwarf, and the dwarven concept of where the orcs fit into that stable continuum. He would not say it openly, but I suspect that Bruenor hopes the orcs will attack, that they will, in the end, behave in accordance with his expectations of orcs and of all goblinkind. The other possibility is too dissonant, too upsetting, too contrary to Bruenor’s very identity for him to entertain the plausibility, indeed the probability, that it would result in less suffering for all involved.
I see before me the battle for the heart of Bruenor Battlehammer, and for the hearts of all the dwarves of the Silver Marches.
Easier by far to lift a weapon and strike dead a known enemy, an orc.
In all the cultures I have known, with all the races I have walked beside, I have observed that when beset by such dissonance, by events that are beyond control and that plod along at their own pace, the frustrated onlookers often seek out a beacon, a focal point—a god, a person, a place, a magical item—which they believe will set all the world aright. Many are the whispers in Mithral Hall that King Bruenor will fix it, all of it, and make everything as it had been before the onslaught of Obould. Bruenor has earned their respect many times over, and wears the mantle of hero among his kin as comfortably and deservedly as has any dwarf in the history of the clan. For most of the dwarves here, then, King Bruenor has become the beacon and focal point of hope itself.