“Ye’re not looking so tired, Rumblebelly,” Bruenor greeted accusingly.

“I’m watching a lost world open before my eyes,” he replied. “I’m sure that I will fall down soon enough, but not now.”

Bruenor nodded. “Then ye’re saying that the night showed ye more o’ the old town,” he said.

“Now that we have broken the code of the language, the pace improves greatly,” said Nanfoodle, never turning from the parchment he was studying. “You retrieved some interesting texts on your journey.”

Bruenor stared at him for a few heartbeats, expecting him to elaborate, but soon realized that the gnome was fully engulfed by his work once more. The dwarf turned to Regis instead.

“The town was mostly dwarves at first,” Regis explained. He hopped up from his chair and moved to one of the many side tables, glanced at the parchment spread there, and moved along to the next in line. “This one,” he explained, “talks about how the orcs were growing more numerous. They were coming in from all around, but most of the dwarven ties remained to places like Gauntlgrym, which was of course belowground and more appealing to a dwarf’s sensibilities.”

“So it was an unusual community?” Hralien asked.

Regis shrugged, for he couldn’t be certain.

Bruenor looked to Hralien and nodded smugly in apparent vindication, and certainly the elf and the halfling understood that Bruenor did not want his history intertwined with that of the foul orcs!

“But it was a lasting arrangement,” Nanfoodle intervened, finally looking up from the parchment. “Two centuries at least.”

“Until the orcs betrayed me ancestors,” Bruenor insisted.

“Until something obliterated the town, melting the permafrost and dropping the whole of it underground in a sudden and singular catastrophe,” Nanfoodle corrected. “And not one of orc making. Look at the tapestry on the wall—it remained in place after the fall of Baffenburg, and certainly it would have been removed if that downfall had been precipitated by one side or the other. I don’t believe that there were ‘sides,’ my king.”

“And how’re ye knowing that?” Bruenor demanded. “That scroll tellin’ ye that?”

“There is no indication of treachery on the part of the orcs—at least not near the end of the arrangement,” the gnome explained, hopping down from his bench and moving to yet another parchment across from the table where Regis stood. “And the tapestry…Early on, there were problems. A single orc chieftain held the orcs in place beside the dwarves. He was murdered.”

“By the dwarves?” Hralien asked.

“By his own,” said Nanfoodle, moving to another parchment. “And a time of unrest ensued.”

“Seemin’ to me that the whole time was a time of unrest,” Bruenor said with a snort. “Ye can’t be living with damned orcs!”

“Off and on unrest, from what I can discern,” Nanfoodle agreed. “And it seemed to get better through the years, not worse.”

“Until the orcs brought an end to it,” Bruenor grumbled. “Suddenly, and with orc treachery.”

“I do not believe…” Nanfoodle started to reply.

“But ye’re guessin’, and not a thing more,” said Bruenor. “Ye just admitted that ye don’t know what brought the end.”

“Every indication—”

“Bah! But ye’re guessing.”

Nanfoodle conceded the point with a bow. “I would very much like to go to this city and build a workshop there, in the library. You have uncovered something fascinating, King Bru—”

“When the time’s for it,” Bruenor interrupted. “Right now I’m seeing the call of them words. Get rid of Obould and the orcs’ll fall apart, as we were expecting from the start. This is our battle call, gnome. This is why Moradin sent me back here and told me to go to that hole, Gauntlgrym or not!”

“But that’s not…” Nanfoodle started to argue, but his voice trailed away, for it was obvious that Bruenor paid him no heed.

His head bobbing with excitement and vigor, Bruenor had already turned to Hralien. He swatted the elf on the shoulder and swept Hralien up in his wake as he quick-stepped from the room, pausing only to berate Nanfoodle, “And I’m still thinking it’s Gauntlgrym!”

Nanfoodle looked helplessly at Regis. “The possibilities….” the gnome remarked.

“We’ve all our own way of looking at the world, it would seem,” Regis answered with a shrug that seemed almost embarrassed for Bruenor.

“Is this find not an example?”

“Of what?” asked Regis. “We do not even know how it ended, or why it ended.”

“Drizzt has whispered of the inevitability of Obould’s kingdom,” Nanfoodle reminded him.

“And Bruenor is determined that it will not be. The last time I looked, Bruenor, and not Drizzt, commanded the army of Mithral Hall and the respect of the surrounding kingdoms.”

“A terrible war is about to befall us,” said the gnome.

“One begun by King Obould Many-Arrows,” the halfling replied.

Nanfoodle sighed and looked at the many parchment sheets spread around the room. It took all his willpower to resist the urge to rush from table to table and crumble them to dust.

“His name was Bowug Kr’kri,” Regis explained to Bruenor, presenting more of the deciphered text to the dwarf king.

“An orc?”

“An orc philosopher and wizard,” the halfling replied. “We think the statues we saw in the library were of him, and maybe his disciples.”

“So he’s the one who brought the orcs into the dwarf city?”

“We think.”

“The two of ye do a lot o’ thinking for so little answering,” Bruenor growled.

“We have only a few old texts,” Regis replied. “It’s all a riddle, still.”

“Guesses.”

“Speculation,” said Regis. “But we know that the orcs lived there with the dwarves, and that Bowug Kr’kri was one of the leaders of the community.”

“Any better guesses on how long that town lived? Ye said centuries, but I’m not for believin’ ye.”

Regis shrugged and shook his head. “It had to be over generations. You saw the structures, and the language.”

“And how many o’ them structures were built by the dwarfs afore the orcs came in?” Bruenor asked with a sly smile.

Regis had no answer.

“Might’ve been a dwarf kingdom taken down by trusting the damned orcs,” Bruenor said. “Fool dwarfs who took much o’ the orc tongue to try to be better neighbors to the treacherous dogs.”

“We don’t think—”

“Ye think too much,” Bruenor interrupted. “Yerself and the gnome’re all excited about finding something so different than that which we’re knowin’ to be true. If ye’re just finding more o’ the same, then it’s just more o’ the same. But if ye’re findin’ something to make yer eyes go wide enough to fall out o’ their holes, then that’s something to dance about.”

“We didn’t invent that library, or the statues inside it,” Regis argued, but he was talking into as smug and sure an expression as he had ever seen. And he wasn’t sure, of course, that Bruenor’s reasoning was wrong, for indeed, he and Nanfoodle were doing a lot of guessing. The final puzzle picture was far from complete. They hadn’t even yet assembled the borders of the maze, let alone filled in the interior details.

Hralien walked into the room then, answering a summons Bruenor had sent out for him earlier.

“It’s coming clear, elf,” Bruenor greeted him. “That town’s a warning. If we’re following Alustriel’s plans, we’re to wind up a dead and dust-covered artifact for a future dwarf king to discover.”

“My own people are as guilty as is Alustriel in wanting to find a stable division, King Bruenor,” Hralien admitted. “The idea of crossing the Surbrin to do battle with Obould’s thousands is daunting—it will not be attempted without great sorrow and great loss.”

“And what’s to be found by sitting back?” Bruenor asked.

Hralien, who had just lost a dozen friends in an orc assault on the Moonwood, and had just witnessed first-hand the attack on the dwarven wall, didn’t need to use his imagination to guess the answer to that question.