Drizzt served as their guide. Running lightly, every now and then chopping a ledge into the snow with one of his scimitars, the drow traversed the dunes as a salmon might skip the waves of a slow river. Up one side and down another he went, pausing at the high points to set his bearings.
It had taken the party of six—Bruenor, Regis, Drizzt, Thibbledorf Pwent, Cordio, and Torgar Hammerstriker—four days to get to the eastern entrance of Fell Pass. They’d kept up a fine pace considering the snow and the fact that they had to circumvent many of King Obould’s guard posts and a pair of orc caravans. Once in the pass, even with the scallop drifts, they had continued to make solid progress, with Drizzt scaling the dunes and instructing Pwent where to punch through.
Seven days out, the pace had slowed to a crawl. They were certain they were near to where they’d found the hole that Bruenor believed was the entrance to the legendary dwarven city of Gauntlgrym.
They had mapped the place well on that journey from the west, and had taken note, as Bruenor had ordered, of all the landmarks—the angles to notable mountain peaks north and south, and such. But with the wintry blanket of snow, Fell Pass appeared so different that Drizzt simply could not be certain. The very real possibility that they might walk right past the hole that had swallowed one of their wagons weighed on all of them, particularly Bruenor.
And there was something else there, a feeling hanging in the air that had the hairs on the backs of all their necks tingling. The mournful groan of the wind was full of the laments of the dead. Of that, there was no doubt. The cleric, Cordio, had cast divination spells that told him there was indeed something supernatural about the place, some rift or outsider presence. On the journey to Mithral Hall, Bruenor’s priests had urged Drizzt not to call upon Guenhwyvar, for fear of inciting unwanted attention from other extraplanar sources in the process, and once again Cordio had reiterated that point. The Fell Pass, the dwarf priest had assured his companions, was not stable in a planar sense—though even Cordio admitted that he wasn’t really sure what that meant.
“Ye got anything for us, elf?” Bruenor called up to Drizzt. His gruff voice, full of irritation, echoed off the frozen snow.
Drizzt came into view atop the drift to the party’s left, the west. He shrugged at Bruenor then stepped forward and began a balanced slide down the glistening white dune. He kept his footing perfectly, and slipped right past the halfling and dwarves to the base of the drift on their other side, where he used its sharp incline to halt his momentum.
“I have snow,” he replied. “As much snow as you could want, extending as far as I can see to the west.”
“We’re goin’ to have to stay here until the melt, ain’t we?” Bruenor grumbled. He put his hands on his hips and kicked his heavy boot through the icy wall of one mound.
“We will find it,” Drizzt replied, but his words were buried by the sudden grumbling of Thibble dorf Pwent.
“Bah!” the battlerager snorted, and he banged his hands together and stomped about, crunching the icy snow beneath his heavy steps. While the others wore mostly furs and layers of various fabrics, Pwent was bedecked in his traditional Gutbuster battle mail, a neck-to-toe suit of overlapping ridged metal plates, spiked at all the appropriate strike zones: fists, elbows, shoulders, and knees. His helmet, too, carried a tall, barbed spike, one that had skewered many an orc in its day.
“Ye got no magic to help me?” Bruenor demanded of Cordio.
The cleric shrugged helplessly. “The riddles of this maze extend beyond the physical, me king,” he tried to explain. “Questions asked in spells’re getting me nothin’ but more questions. I’m knowin’ that we’re close, but more because I’m feeling that rift with me every spellcasting.”
“Bah!” Pwent roared. He lowered his head and rammed through the nearest snow drift, disappearing behind a veil of white that fell behind him as he plowed through to the channel on the other side.
“We’ll find it, then,” said Torgar Hammerstriker. “If it was here when ye came through, then here it is still. And if me king’s thinking it’s Gauntlgrym, then nothin’s stopping meself from seein’ that place.”
“Aye and huzzah!” Cordio agreed.
They all jumped as the snow erupted from up ahead. Drizzt’s scimitars appeared in his hands as if they had been there all along.
From that break in the dune emerged a snow-encrusted Thibbledorf Pwent, roaring still. He didn’t slow, but plowed through the dune across the way, crunching through the icy wall with ease and disappearing from sight.
“Will ye stop it, ye durned fool?” Bruenor chastised, but Pwent was already gone.
“I am certain that we’re near the entrance,” Drizzt assured Bruenor, and the drow slid his blades away. “We are the right distance from the mountains north and south. Of that, I am sure.”
“We are close,” Regis confirmed, still glancing all around as if he expected a ghost to leap out and throttle him at any moment. In that regard, Regis knew more than the others, for he had been the one who had gone into the hole after the wagon those months before, and who had encountered, down in the dark, what he believed to be the ghost of a long-dead dwarf.
“Then we’ll just keep looking,” said Bruenor. “And if it stays in hiding under the snow, its secrets won’t be holding, for the melt’s coming soon.”
“Bah!” they heard Pwent growl from behind the dune to the east and they all scrambled, expecting him to burst through in their midst, and likely with that lethal helmet spike lowered.
The dune shivered as he hit it across the way, and he roared again fiercely. But his pitch changed suddenly, his cry going from defiance to surprise. Then it faded rapidly, as if the dwarf had fallen away.
Bruenor looked at Drizzt. “Gauntlgrym!” the dwarf declared.
Torgar and Cordio dived for the point on the drift behind which they had heard Pwent’s cry. They punched through and flung the snow out behind them, working like a pair of dogs digging for a bone. As they weakened the integrity of that section of the drift, it crumbled down before them, complicating their dig. Still, within moments, they came to the edge of a hole in the ground, and the remaining pile of snow slipped in, but seemed to fill the crevice.
“Pwent?” Torgar called into the snow, thinking his companion buried alive.
He leaned over the edge, Cordio stabilizing his feet, and plunged his hand down into the snow pile. That blockage, though, was neither solid nor thick, and had merely packed in to seal the shaft below. When Torgar’s hand broke the integrity of the pack, the collected snow broke and fell away, leaving the dwarf staring down into a cold and empty shaft.
“Pwent?” he called more urgently, realizing that his companion had fallen quite far.
“That’s it!” Bruenor yelled, rushing up between the kneeling pair. “The wagon went in right there!” As he made the claim, he fell to his knees and brushed aside some more of the snow, revealing a rut that had been made by the wagon wheel those months before. “Gauntlgrym!”
“And Pwent fell in,” Drizzt reminded him.
The three dwarves turned to see the drow and Regis feeding out a line of rope that Drizzt had already tied around his waist.
“Get the line, boys!” Bruenor yelled, but Cordio and Torgar were already moving anyway, rushing to secure the rope and find a place to brace their heavy boots.
Drizzt dropped down beside the ledge and tried to pick a careful route, but a cry came up from far below, followed by a high-pitched, sizzling roar that sounded unlike anything any of them had ever heard, like a cross between the screech of an eagle and the hiss of a gigantic lizard.
Drizzt rolled over the lip, turning and setting his hands, and Bruenor dived to add his strength to the rope brace.