The most prominent of all stood upon a dais at the far end of the room, directly across from the doors. The image of Moradin, stocky and strong, was quite recognizable to the dwarves.
So was the image of Gruumsh One-eye, god of the orcs, standing across from him, and while the two were shown eyeing each other with expressions that could be considered suspicious, the simple fact that they were not shown with Moradin standing atop the vanquished Gruumsh’s chest elicited stares of disbelief on the faces of all four dwarves. Thibble dorf Pwent even babbled something undecipherable.
“What place was this?” Cordio asked, giving sound to the question that was on all their minds. “What hall? What city?”
“Delzoun,” muttered Bruenor. “Gauntlgrym.”
“Then she’s no place akin to the tales,” said Cordio, and Bruenor shot a glare his way.
“Grander, I’m saying,” the priest quickly added.
“Whatever it was, it was grand indeed,” said Drizzt. “And beyond my expectations when we set out from Mithral Hall. I had thought we would find a hole in the ground, Bruenor, or perhaps a small, ancient settlement.”
“I telled ye it was Gauntlgrym,” Bruenor replied.
“If it is, then it is a place to do your Delzoun heritage proud,” said the drow. “If it is not, then let us discover other accomplishments of which you can be rightly proud.”
Bruenor’s stubborn expression softened a bit at those words, and he offered Drizzt a nod and moved off deeper into the room, Thibbledorf at his heel. Drizzt looked to Cordio and Torgar, both of whom nodded their appreciation of his handling of the volatile king.
It was not Gauntlgrym, all three of them knew—at least, it was not the Gauntlgrym of dwarven legend. But what then?
There wasn’t much to salvage in the library, but they did find a few scrolls that hadn’t fully succumbed to the passage of time. None of them could read the writing on the ancient paper, but there were a few items that could give hints about the craftsmanship of the former residents, and even one tapestry that Regis believed could be cleaned enough to reveal some hints of its former depictions. They gathered their hoard together with great care, rolling and tying the tapestry and softly packing the other items in bags that had held the food they had thus far consumed.
They were done scouring the hall in less than an afternoon’s time, and finished with a cursory and rather unremarkable examination of the rest of the cavern for just as long after that. Abruptly, and at Bruenor’s insistence, so ended their expedition. Soon after, they climbed back up through the hole that had brought them underground and were greeted by a late winter’s quiet night. At the next break of dawn they began their journey home, where they hoped to find some answers.
CHAPTER 14
POSSIBILITIES
King Obould normally liked the cheering of the many orcs that surrounded his temporary palace, a heavy tent set within a larger tent, set within a larger tent. All three were reinforced with metal and wood, and their entrances opened at different points for further security. Obould’s most trusted guards, heavily armored and with great gleaming weapons, patrolled the two outer corridors.
The security measures were relatively new, as the orc king cemented his grip and began to unfold his strategy—a plan, the cheering that day only reminded him, that might not sit well with the warlike instincts of some of his subjects. He had already waged the first rounds of what he knew would be his long struggle among the stones of Keeper’s Dale. His decision to stand down the attack on Mithral Hall had been met with more than a few mutterings of discontent.
And that had only been the beginning, of course.
He moved along the outer ring of his tent palace to the opened flap and looked out on the gathering on the plaza of the nomadic orc village. At least two hundred of his minions were out there, cheering wildly, thrusting weapons into the air, and clapping each other on the back. Word had come in of a great orc victory in the Moonwood, tales of elf heads spiked on the riverbank.
“We should go there and see the heads,” Kna said to Obould as she curled at his side. “It is a sight that would fill me with lust.”
Obould swiveled his head to regard her, and he offered a smile, knowing that stupid Kna would never understand it to be one of pity.
Out in the plaza, the cheering grew a backbone chant: “Karuck! Karuck! Karuck!”
It was not unexpected. Obould, who had received word of the fight in the east the previous night, before the public courier had arrived, motioned to the many loyalists he had set in place, and on his nod, they filtered into the crowd.
A second chant bubbled up among the first, “Many-Arrows! Many-Arrows! Many-Arrows!” And gradually, the call for kingdom overcame the cheer for clan.
“Take me there and I will love you,” Kna whispered in the orc king’s ear, tightening her hold on his side.
Obould’s bloodshot eyes narrowed as he turned to regard her again. He brought his hand up to grab the back of her hair and roughly bent her head back so that she could see the intensity on his face. He envisioned those elf heads he’d heard of, set on tall pikes. His smile widened as he considered putting Kna’s head in that very line.
Misconstruing his intensity as interest, the consort grinned and writhed against him.
With almost godlike strength, Obould tugged her from his side and tossed her to the ground. He turned back to the plaza and wondered how many of his minions—those not in his immediate presence—would add the chant of Many-Arrows to the praises of Clan Karuck as word of the victory spread throughout the kingdom.
The night was dark, but not to the sensitive eyes of Tos’un Armgo, who had known the blackness of the Underdark. He crouched by a rocky jag, looking down at the silvery snake known as the Surbrin River, and more pointedly at the line of poles before it.
The perpetrators had moved to the south, along with the prodding trio of Dnark, Ung-thol, and the upstart young Toogwik Tuk. They had talked of attacking the Battlehammer dwarves at the Surbrin.
Obould would not be pleased to see such independence among his ranks. And strangely, the drow wasn’t overly thrilled at the prospect himself. He’d personally led the first orc assault on that dwarven position, infiltrating and silencing the main watchtower before the orc tide swept Clan Battlehammer back into its hole.
It had been a good day.
So what had changed, wondered Tos’un. What had left him with such melancholy when battle was afoot, particularly a battle between orcs and dwarves, two of the ugliest and smelliest races he had ever had the displeasure of knowing?
As he looked down at the river, he came to understand. Tos’un was a drow, had been raised in Menzoberranzan, and held no love for his surface elf cousins. The war between the surface and Underdark elves was among the fiercest rivalries in the world, a long history of dastardly deeds and murderous raids that equaled anything the continually warring demons of the Abyss and devils of the Nine Hells could imagine. Cutting out the throat of a surface elf had never presented Tos’un with a moral dilemma, surely, but there was something about the current situation, about those heads, that unnerved him, that filled him with a sense of dread.
As much as he hated surface elves, Tos’un despised orcs even more. The idea that orcs could have scored such a victory over elves of any sort left the drow cold. He had grown up in a city of twenty thousand dark elves, and with probably thrice that number of orc, goblin, and kobold slaves. Was there, perhaps, a Clan Karuck in their midst, ready to spike the heads of the nobles of House Barrison Del’Armgo or even of House Baenre?