Like towering trees toppled into each other, like two mountains falling over to fill a valley, the dwarf king and the pit fiend threw themselves together. Each swung a weapon, mace and axe, but those seemed secondary to the sheer power of their bodies colliding. They grappled and twisted. Beealtimatuche’s tail flipped up over his shoulder to sting the dwarf in the cheek, but if Bruenor even felt it, he didn’t show it.
Instead, the dwarf twisted the fiend hard to the right and drove on harder, down and forward. Just as Beealtimatuche broke the grapple and leaped back, so did Bruenor. Tucking in his left shoulder, he plowed ahead with his shield in a sudden and brutal charge. He collided into the turning devil and sent Beealtimatuche flying backward, almost off the ledge.
Almost, but the fiend spread his leathery wings and came right back in, half leaping, half flying, descending upon Bruenor with a tremendous downward chop of his fiery mace.
Even with his shield in place to block, Bruenor should have been crushed by that blow. His arm should have shattered under the sheer weight of the mighty devil.
But he wasn’t, and it didn’t, and his countering sweep of his axe had Beealtimatuche twisting frantically to avoid being gutted.
On came the dwarf, taking another heavy hit against his indomitable shield, and slashing again and again as he continued to plow forward.
Beealtimatuche slammed him again, but the shield would not yield, and so the devil backed further, took up his weapon in both hands and met the swinging axe with the mighty mace. Sparks and fire exploded from the powerfully enchanted weapons, and Bruenor slipped his shield to his back and took up his axe in both hands to drive on again. The two combatants matched blows, weapon to weapon, to see which would lose his grip first. Like a bell of doom, the many-notched axe and the fiery mace rang out, devil-crafted against god-forged.
Roaring with rage, screaming for the beast to flee the hallowed halls, Bruenor swung mightily again … and missed.
And he was overbalanced, the devil holding his swing. Bruenor’s right foot stepped past to the left, where he planted it powerfully and threw himself back the other way, spinning a reverse turn, throwing his shield up high off his shoulder and onto his arm once more. As he caught the heavy hit from the mace—a stunning, arm-numbing blow—the dwarf kept turning, his right arm going out wide, axe at the very end of his reach to sweep across as he came around.
He felt it connect with devil’s flesh, goring a deep wound on Beealtimatuche’s hip and bringing forth a howl from the pit fiend.
Who was gone, then—simply vanished.
Bruenor threw himself forward, twisting to throw his shield arm behind him, and not an instant too soon. Beealtimatuche had “blinked” behind him. He managed to only partially block the mace as it clipped the edge of his shield, and it caught him down across the back, throwing him forward and face down to the stone.
But up he hopped, whirling to defeat the pursuit with another powerful swipe.
His lifeblood dripped behind him, but so too was Beealtimatuche’s leg red with blood.
To Valindra Shadowmantle, the moment of her freedom was at hand. When she had finished Drizzt and the troublesome Dahlia, and ended the threat to Sylora, her own place among those who served Szass Tam would be secured.
The drow and Dahlia still battled furiously by the side of the main forge, not quite at the side tunnel. But they couldn’t avoid her magic forever, and Valindra was a lich. She had forever to kill them, if need be.
Her eyes glowed with satisfaction. She heard the commotion as the newly-arrived dwarves and their ghostly kin met her Ashmadai legions, but she didn’t care. All she wanted was to be rid of one elf, and one last drow.
When six hundred pounds of furious panther slammed into her, knocking her back, the gathering energies of her spell were taken from her. Guenhwyvar flew aside and landed in a turn, claws screeching on the stone floor. Valindra, barely hurt, began casting again, and as Guenhwyvar managed to turn at last and come at her, waves of anti-magic hit the panther. Her strides seemed to slow, as if she were running in water. Then, despite herself and her loyalty to Drizzt, she felt the compulsion to return to her Astral home. She was unable to ignore the lich’s persuasion, the powerful dispelling of the magic that kept Guenhwyvar at Drizzt’s side. And so she became a gray mist, and with a plaintive wail toward Drizzt to alert him to her failure, the panther dissipated.
Valindra turned back to the task at hand, but too late, for then behind her came a distraction she could not ignore, another force charging into the fray. Salamanders entered through the same tunnel that had brought Valindra and Beealtimatuche and their minions into the Forge. Many were running, some riding large red lizards, and all closed fast on Valindra.
The lich turned and hissed at them, then issued the spell she had planned for the elves. And how the creatures of the fire god, children of fire, recoiled and shriveled and died before the waves of killing ice in Valindra’s cone of cold.
The lich hissed at them, screamed at them in outrage for stealing her moment of glory. Lightning erupted from her fingertips, blasting into the ranks of those trying to enter the room, rebounding with killing force back up the tunnel.
She hissed again and waved her arms and a great ice storm formed above the corridor entryway, raining sleet and pelting ice down upon any who dared come through.
Valindra spun back to line up a new killing strike at the hated elves. Her red eyes flared with inner fire as she began her casting. But then she was screaming incoherently, caught in a pillar of unexplained light—bright, burning light.
She thrashed and tried to fight through it to launch her spell, but to no avail. Smoke began to rise from her rotted flesh, and much of it began to roll up under the brilliant glow.
The chamber began to shake and roll. The forges vomited angry fires once more as the primordial reacted to the assault on its minions, and all the room began to quake with such force that most were thrown from their feet.
Not Valindra, though, who floated above the tumult.
But the light did not relent, biting at her, burning her, half-blinding her. She managed a half turn and at last spotted her assailant, and despite the sting, her eyes did widen indeed.
And he tipped his wide-brimmed hat and leveled his wand, and a second beam engulfed Valindra.
And she began to smoke, her skin to curl.
With a shriek that seemed to stop all other chaos in the room, Valindra flailed wildly and out of sheer terror managed to spit forth a spell, one that turned her into the form of a wraith. Her wail continued to echo throughout the chamber, but the lich slipped through a crack in the floor and was gone, her wraith form sliding through cracks in the stones and rushing far from the scene, never to return.
After all, Valindra was a lich. She had forever to kill them, if need be. Drizzt, Dahlia … and Jarlaxle would wait.
He tried not to let the sudden chaos in the hall distract him, thrown as it was into wild and heated battle between three distinct forces, each hating the other two. He tried to ignore the room itself, which had become an army of its own, it seemed, with rolling floor and shaking walls, rocks tumbling dangerously from the ceiling and forges spewing forth fire that could melt flesh from bones, and char the bones to ash for good measure.
Drizzt had to put all of that in its proper perspective, with so formidable a foe as a legion devil facing him.
The fighting beyond him was of no interest. And the room he used to his advantage. So swift, so agile, Drizzt accepted the rolling floor rather than try to fight against it. When the floor pitched left, left was the way he went. He rode it, his feet moving back and forth, sideways and sidelong, whichever way was necessary to keep him in perfect balance and speed him along. And if the fight called for him to go opposite the pitch of the floor, he used the roll of stone to grant him lift as he pitched back the other way in a leap or somersault.
His devilish opponent, no stranger to wild battle, did well to hold its footing in the shaking and trembling, but as Drizzt fell into the rhythms of the primordial’s angry gyrations, the legion devil could not keep up.
The drow began not only to react perfectly to the quake, but to anticipate its next movement. Confident that he was quick enough to correct if his guess proved wrong, Drizzt worked his scimitars up high in front of his face, rolling his wrists over each other to create a circle of angled downward slashes. As the fiend brought its shield to block, the drow just angled to the side a bit more, keeping the devil on its heels, forcing it to use both shield and sword defensively.
Further to his left Drizzt turned, bending the fiend, turning the fiend, and when the floor rolled under their feet, left to right, Drizzt used the momentum to step back fast to the right, then used the cresting wave of stone beneath his feet to launch himself. Flipping back to the left, even as the fiend, caught in the flow and expecting the reversal, the drow was fast turning the other way.
Right over the sweeping blade went Drizzt, landing in perfect balance on shaky ground, and with the devil’s side exposed, shield and sword back the other way. He struck deeply, but only once—it was Icingdeath that bit into the creature of fire. It only had to bite once.
Drizzt held his pose for several heartbeats, the devil immobilized by agony on the end of his blade, hot blood bubbling from the wound. The drow gave a few slight twists and tugs to tear at the fiend’s organs, then he yanked the blade out.
The legion devil crumbled to the floor and sizzled away into black smoke and a mist of boiling blood.
Drizzt spun away to help Dahlia, but stopped short and watched in admiration as the elf spun and struck, her advance coming in a series of turns, and through every one and from every angle came a whirling strike from a flail, some spouting lightning, others just smashing with crushing force. The legion devil couldn’t match her speed and precision.
She hit it again and again, and by the time she played out her spinning charge, that devil, too, crumbled to the floor.
She looked at Drizzt, and the two exchanged smiles and nods.
“Me king?” Drizzt heard behind him, and he spun, shaking his head in disbelief. He looked to the small tunnel before turning to the dwarf, and so by the time he did regard his old friend, that dwarf had already picked up on the cue and started away at full, rambling speed.
Drizzt and Dahlia started to follow, but hadn’t gone two steps before a host of Ashmadai descended upon them.
More to kill.
His shield clipped the mace, stealing some of its strength, but still it came across with enough force to take Bruenor’s one-horned helmet from his head, and to gash his scalp in the process.
But the dwarf got the better of that particular trade, his mighty axe crashing against the pit fiend’s ribs, opening a garish wound.
They came together, titans wrestling once more, head-butting, biting, and thrashing.
But the fiend had more weapons. Its tail, as if acting of its own volition, whipped about and banged repeatedly against the back of Bruenor’s armor, seeking a seam. Its bony, ridged arms ground in painfully against the dwarf, tearing the skin of his arms. And its mouth, so wide, so full of long teeth …
Bruenor looked up and into its open mouth and up farther to those wild eyes, as the fiend bit down at him. Instead of dodging, though, the dwarf responded with his own charge, his powerful legs driving him upward, his forehead snapping forward to meet the grasping jaws.
Blood poured over his face—his own blood, Bruenor realized, but he knew, too, that he had put a solid smack into the face of his enemy.
Arms wrapped around the devil, the dwarf handed his axe to his shield hand. Then he brought his free hand back into his chest and pushed up, over the devil’s chest and under the stunned creature’s chin. Bruenor drove on with all his might. The old kings and ancient gods within him drove on with all their might.
He threw Beealtimatuche away. Half blinded by the gush of his own blood, Bruenor could barely make out the staggering devil, or the smaller form that rushed in suddenly at the fiend’s side, leaping upon the beast with abandon. But he did hear a comforting call, a declaration of friendship he had known for so many decades.…
“Me king!”
Bruenor staggered backward and shook his head, wiping the blood from his eyes. It was Thibbledorf Pwent!
Of course it was Pwent.
It didn’t occur to Bruenor at that moment how odd it was that the battlerager should suddenly appear. Indeed, to him the better question seemed to be, how could Pwent not be there, when Bruenor most needed him, when Gauntlgrym herself most needed him?
And so it made perfect sense to Bruenor, watching the thrashing Pwent tearing at the devil’s skin, head spike buried deeply, fist spikes, knee spikes, toe spikes stabbing and jabbing and kicking, ridged armor thrashing lines of red skin wide open.
Bruenor took up his axe, and for a moment it seemed as if he wouldn’t even be needed to finish the job.
But Beealtimatuche was a pit fiend, a duke of the Nine Hells, a devil of extraordinary power.
Pwent jerked when a poisoned tail barb popped into the back of his head. He stopped thrashing and Beealtimatuche pushed him away, the devil hissing and roaring as the long helmet spike slid out of his torso. Pwent stood staring at him, obviously working hard just to hold his balance.
A backhand from the devil launched the battlerager flying away, to slam hard into the wall beside the blasted door.
Bruenor watched Thibbledorf Pwent slump to the floor.
And with rage climbing atop everything else churning within the dwarf king—the history of Gauntlgrym, the glory of the gods of Dwarfhome, the essence of what it was to be a dwarf, a Delzoun dwarf, a Battlehammer dwarf—Bruenor charged in once more.
His fury heightened with every swing. He took brutal hits from the fiery mace, but he shrugged them off and unleashed his rage through the blade of his mighty axe. The chamber reverberated with the sound of weapons clashing—not with other weapons or with shields, but with flesh. They traded blows, each staggering after every hit, neither giving ground.
Across came Beealtimatuche’s mace, but Bruenor brought his shield up and he ducked away, back and to his right, the mace clipping the shield, but not enough to send him flying—just enough to add to his spin and send him leaping.
Up high soared King Bruenor as he came around, both hands again taking up his axe, lifting it up above his head. And he came down from on high, his whole body snapping in one great moment of complete exertion, muscles screaming in protest, senses jarred.
Right between the turned-in horns went Bruenor’s descending axe, the power of Gauntlgrym’s forge, the power of the old kings and ancient gods, reaching through King Bruenor and through that blade.
With a terrible crunch, the blade split Beealtimatuche’s skull, driving down, halving the devil’s face. And driving down more as Bruenor descended, crushing the devil down to its knees.
Head lolling uncontrollably, the pit fiend still tried to stand.
But Bruenor’s rage was not sated, and he threw down his axe and shield and fell over the fiend, one hand grabbing its throat, the other slapping in against its crotch. As Bruenor stood his full height, up into the air went Beealtimatuche. And though he seemed merely a dwarf again—the power of the throne and the potion, the kings and the gods, no more—still he stood tall and still he pressed Beealtimatuche straight up over his head to arm’s length.
Bruenor stalked to the ledge. He looked down into the fire pit of the primordial and witnessed the beast, like a fiery eye staring back at him.
He threw the devil into the pit.
Then Bruenor fell to his knees, his strength leaving him, his lifeblood pouring from a dozen wicked wounds. He went to his chest, flat on the ground, his head hanging over the edge to watch the descent of the devil.
He noted instead a dwarf’s form, on a ledge some thirty feet down, broken awkwardly but not dead, and reaching one hand up toward him plaintively, even calling out his name.
But it was a distant call to the dying Bruenor. Far distant.
“The bridge! The lever!”