Gauntlgrym

He charged into the nearest group of salamanders with abandon, great sweeps of his axe throwing them aside. A trident stabbed at him from the left, but his shield arm was quicker, rushing across to intercept and deflect the blow up high, and as Bruenor followed through, his axe swept across with tremendous power.

The creature fell apart, cut in half at the waist.

As if the gods of the dwarves themselves had settled into King Bruenor, he roared on, cutting a swath of devastation. And he called allies to his side—not Drizzt and the others, but the ghosts of Gauntlgrym.

“By Clangeddin’s hard arse,” Athrogate muttered from back near the throne.

The dwarf fought to keep the snake-men away from Jarlaxle, as the drow mercenary concentrated on Drizzt and Dahlia, looking for openings as they weaved, leaped, and spun back and forth past each other. Whenever he found such an opening, the agile dark elf flung a dagger through it, almost unerringly striking one of the creatures.

The four of them fought well together—much like three of them had back at Spirit Soaring those many years before—yet King Bruenor alone was cutting a wider swath of devastation through the massing salamanders.

Drizzt had begun to swing toward his friend as soon as Bruenor had entered the fray. Dahlia, playing off his every move, followed, but Drizzt had quickly changed his mind. Watching Bruenor at that moment, he held back and focused instead on holding his ground.

The tide of battle turned quickly as more and more dwarf ghosts filtered into the chamber. On the far side of the room, the salamanders tried to surround Bruenor, and seemed to be doing just that. Drizzt cried out for his friend, and second-guessed his earlier decision not to help him. He thought Bruenor doomed, and believed it was his own hesitance that had guaranteed that.

But Bruenor faced his enemies with wild eyes and a wicked grin. He lifted his foot, stomped it down hard, and an explosion of lightning flashed out in a circle around him, throwing salamanders through the air like dry leaves in a strong gale.

“What in the Nine Hells?” Athrogate asked.

“Drizzt?” a clearly befuddled Jarlaxle inquired.

Beside Drizzt, Dahlia, whose own weapon could loose such bursts of lightning, gasped in disbelief.

And Drizzt Do’Urden could only shake his head.

High in the shadows of the great room, another set of eyes watched the battle unfolding with great hope that the primordial’s minions would do his work for him. Perhaps he, Dor’crae, could fly right back out of the chamber and back to the caves to tell Valindra and the Ashmadai to turn back for Neverwinter Wood.

He dearly hoped that would be the case.

But then Dor’crae stared with increasing disbelief at the spectacle of the godly-empowered Bruenor Battlehammer, and he watched the tide of battle quickly turn. He looked back at the throne and was afraid. Events seemed to be moving past him, first with Valindra and the powerful gift Sylora had given her, then the sight of the mighty dwarf.…

He glanced back toward the cavern beyond Gauntlgrym, the approach the Ashmadai and Valindra would soon take, and he considered Sylora’s words of warning, and the power she had entrusted to the lich. The thought of trusting Valindra, and more than that, of trusting the power she had been given, made Dor’crae want to flee back to Thay and take his chances with Szass Tam.

He turned back to the battle, hoping against all reason that the minions of the primordial would somehow find a way to put an end to the threat to his mistress’s plans.

That blast of godlike power proved the end of the assault, with the salamanders rushing for any exit they could find as fast as they could find them, leaving fiery trails in their wakes.

Bruenor chased one group, leaping high and fully thirty feet across the stones to land in their midst, his axe chopping them down viciously, one after another. The dwarf seemed to get stabbed several times in that mad rush, each drawing a cry of pain from Drizzt, who rushed to join him.

And Bruenor seemed not to notice any of the strikes.

By the time the four others arrived by his side, the dwarf king stood amidst half a dozen slain creatures. The rest of the beasts had fled the room, and the dwarf ghosts had given chase.

Bruenor blinked repeatedly as he considered his friends.

“What did you do?” Jarlaxle asked.

Bruenor could only shrug.

Drizzt studied his friend more closely, even pulling aside Bruenor’s collar, but he could find no wound.

“How did you do that?” Dahlia asked. “Stomping your foot as if you were a god of lightning?”

Bruenor shrugged and shook his head. He seemed quite perplexed for a few moments, but then just shook his head again and let it all go, turning to Jarlaxle instead.

“I know where to put yer bowls,” he said to Jarlaxle.

“How could you know?”

Bruenor considered that for a short while. How indeed?

“Gauntlgrym telled me,” he said with a grin.

Chapter 20 - Powers Older, Powers Deeper

THE ASHMADAI CAME INTO THE CIRCULAR CHAMBER WITH TENTATIVE STEPS, though the echoes of battle had long since faded. Valindra Shadowmantle led the way, flanked by two score of Sylora’s best warriors. The lich focused almost immediately on the throne, and she drifted that way, floating, not walking, while her minions spread out to examine the corpses scattered about the floor.

She stopped in front of the throne, sensing its great magic. Valindra had spent her life studying the Art, as a wizard in the famed Hosttower of the Arcane. Before the Spellplague, and before she had fallen into death then undeath at the hand of Arklem Greeth, Valindra had been a wizard of great power, impeccable scholarship, and considerable renown.

As a lich, Valindra had survived the Spellplague, though it had surely harmed her mind. But at long last, she was returning to her senses, and gathering her newfound powers in the unfamiliar energies of post-Spellplague arcana.

Its powers having transcended even the dramatic changes that had been visited upon Faerûn, the throne knocked her back to that time before. The magic in it was ancient, and reverberated within Valindra, taking her to a place of familiar comfort she had not known in decades.

She “cooed” and “ahh’d” before the throne, her emaciated, pale hands reaching out but never quite touching the powerful artifact. Lost in her thoughts and memories, in the better times she had known as a living wizard, Valindra failed even to notice when a pair of her Ashmadai commanders came up beside her.

“Lady Valindra,” one, a large male tiefling, said.

When she didn’t respond, he repeated the words much more loudly.

Valindra started and turned on him, her ghostly eyes flickering with threatening red flames.

“The dead are of the Plane of Fire, we believe,” the tiefling explained. “Minions of the primordial?”

Valindra’s perplexed expression conveyed that she hadn’t even really heard the question, let alone digested it.

“Yes,” another voice answered, and the two Ashmadai commanders and Valindra turned just as a bat fluttering up behind the throne seemed to fall over itself and take humanoid form.

“Minions of the primordial—worshipers, really,” Dor’crae explained. “These salamanders, and large red lizards deeper in the complex, even a small red dragon, have come to the call of the volcano.”

“There are more?” the male Ashmadai asked.

“They are many,” Dor’crae replied, walking around the dais to join the trio.

“Perhaps they will do our job for us, then,” said the Ashmadai. “Perhaps they already have.”

Dor’crae laughed at that notion, and waved out his arm, inviting the others to take another look at the result of the battle—a battle he had watched from the shadows of the room’s high ceiling.

“I would not …” he started to say, but he paused as he noticed that Valindra paid him no heed, that she had turned her attention back to the throne.

“I wouldn’t count on the inhabitants of the complex to defeat the likes of Jarlaxle and his mighty dwarf,” Dor’crae told the Ashmadai, “or of Dahlia and Drizzt Do’Urden.” He glanced at Valindra again, watching as she ascended the dais, still staring at the throne as if in a trance. “They are formidable enough, or were, but now are even more so. I watched them in this very room, and the other dwarf with them, a king of the dwarves it would seem, has somehow been magically … enhanced.”

The two Ashmadai scrunched up their faces, glanced at each other, then turned back to Dor’crae with obvious confusion.

“Through the power in that very throne,” Dor’crae explained, turning to Valindra as he spoke.

The lich didn’t seem to hear him.

“There is some ancient magic there that empowered him,” Dor’crae warned them all.

“Magic, yes,” Valindra cooed, her hand waving over the arm of the throne. Then, suddenly, the lich slapped her hand down and grabbed the throne.

Her eyes went wide and she issued a hiss of protest. It was clear that she was struggling mightily to hold onto the throne, as if it was trying to throw her aside. Stubbornly, the lich growled and fought back, then she turned and sat down on the throne, grasping the arms with both hands.

She growled and snarled, thrashing about, hissing, and sputtering a stream of curses. Her back arched as if some unseen force lifted her free, and she growled again and uttered a curse at some dwarf king and forced herself back down. To the onlookers, the three before the throne and many others about the room, she seemed like a halfling trying to hold back the charge of an umber hulk.

The struggle intensified. Flashes of lightning, blue-white and black, shot from the chair, and Dor’crae and the Ashmadai commanders fell back.

The throne of Gauntlgrym was clearly and violently rejecting Valindra, but the lich would not accept that.

But at last, with a rumble that shook the chamber, and indeed reverberated deep into the complex of Gauntlgrym, the throne expelled her, hurling Valindra through the air. She magically caught herself in mid-descent, and came down gently to her normal stance, floating just a few inches above the floor.

“Valindra?” Dor’crae asked, but the lich didn’t hear him.

She swept back in at the throne, hands extended like killing claws. With a wicked hiss, she shot fingers of lightning from her hands. When the bolts merely disappeared into the magical throne, the outraged Valindra summoned instead a pea of fire, which she threw onto the seat.

“Run!” the Ashmadai commander yelled, and the warriors scrambled all over each other to get away from the throne.

Valindra’s fireball engulfed the throne, the dais, and a good portion of the floor around it. The angry flames reached right up to the lich herself, who seemed not to care. None of the Ashmadai were caught in the blast, though one found his weathercloak aflame and had to roll about frantically on the floor to douse it.

When the flames and smoke cleared, there sat the throne, unbothered, unmarred, impervious.

Valindra shrieked and hissed and charged it, again throwing bolts of lightning into it as she rushed in, then clawed at it and punched it.

“She is powerful, no doubt,” the Ashmadai leader whispered as he walked up beside Dor’crae. “But I fear her presence here.”