“It will remind King Obould of our true purpose,” Ung-thol posited.

“Or he will be replaced,” said Toogwik Tuk.

The other two didn’t even wince at those words, spoken openly. Not after seeing the cunning, the ferocity, and the power of Grguch and Clan Karuck. Barely twenty feet north of their position, an elf head staked upon a tall pike swayed in the wind.

Albondiel’s heart sank when he spotted the flash of white against the forest ground. At first he thought it just another patch of snow, but as he came around one thick tree and gained a better vantage point, he realized the truth.

Snow didn’t have feathers.

“Hralien,” he called in a voice breaking on every syllable. Time seemed to freeze for the shocked elf, as if half the day slid by, but in only a few moments, Hralien was at Albondiel’s side.

“Sunset,” Hralien whispered and moved forward.

Albondiel summoned his courage and followed. He knew what they would find.

Innovindil still lay atop the pegasus, her arms wrapped around Sunset’s neck, her face pressed close to his. From Albondiel’s first vantage point when he came around the tree that had abruptly ended Innovindil and Sunset’s flight, the scene was peaceful and serene, almost as if his friend had fallen asleep atop her beloved equine friend. Scanning farther down, though, revealed the truth, revealed the blood and the gigantic javelins, the shattered wings and the magical wound of dissolved flesh behind Innovindil’s hip.

Hralien bent over the dead elf and gently stroked her thick hair, and ran his other hand over the soft and muscled neck of Sunset.

“They were ready for us,” he said.

“Ready?” said Albondiel, shaking his head and wiping the tears from his cheeks. “More than that. They lured us. They anticipated our counterstrike.”

“They are orcs!” Hralien protested, rising fast and turning away.

He brought his arms straight out before him, then slowly moved them out wide to either side then behind him, arching his back and lifting his face to the sky as he went. It was a ritual movement, often used in times of great stress and anguish, and Hralien ended by issuing a high-pitched keen toward the sky, a protest to the gods for the pain visited upon his people that dark day.

He collected himself quickly, his grief thrown out for the moment, and spun back at Albondiel, who still kneeled, stroking Innovindil’s head.

“Orcs,” Hralien said again. “Have they become so sophisticated in their methods?”

“They have always been cunning,” Albondiel replied.

“They know too much of us,” Hralien protested.

“Then we must change our tactics.”

But Hralien was shaking his head. “It is more, I fear. Could it be that they are guided by a dark elf who knows how we fight?”

“We do not know that,” Albondiel cautioned. “This was a simple ambush, perhaps.”

“One ready for Innovindil and Sunset!”

“By design or by coincidence? You assume much.”

Hralien knelt beside his friends, living and dead. “Can we afford not to?”

Albondiel pondered that for a few moments. “We should find Tos’un.”

“We should get word to Mithral Hall,” said Hralien. “To Drizzt Do’Urden, who will grieve for Innovindil and Sunset. He will understand better the methods of Tos’un, and has already vowed to find the drow.”

A shadow passed over them, drawing their attention skyward.

Sunrise circled above them, tossing his head and crying out pitifully for the lost pegasus.

Albondiel looked at Hralien and saw tears streaking his friend’s face. He looked back up at the pegasus, but could hardly make out the flying horse through the glare of his own tears in the morning sunlight.

“Get Drizzt,” he heard himself whisper.

Pack it up and move it out,” Bruenor grumbled, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. He snatched up his axe, wrapping his hand around the handle just under the well-worn head. He prodded the hard ground with it as if it were a walking stick as he moved away from the group.

Thibble dorf Pwent, wearing much of his lunch in his beard and on his armor, hopped up right behind, eager to be on his way, and Cordio and Torgar similarly rose to Bruenor’s call, though with less enthusiasm, even with a wary glance to each other.

Regis just gave a sigh and looked down at the remainder of his meal, a slab of cold beef wrapped with flattened bread, and with a bowl of thick gravy and a biscuit on the side.

“Always in a hurry,” the halfling said to Drizzt, who helped him rewrap the remaining food.

“Bruenor is nervous,” said Drizzt, “and anxious.”

“Because he fears more monsters?”

“Because these tunnels are not to his expectations or to his liking,” the drow explained, and Regis nodded at the revelation.

They had come into the hole expecting to find a tunnel to the dwarven city of Gauntlgrym, and at first, after their encounter with the strange beasts, things had seemed pretty much as they had anticipated, including a sloping tunnel with a worked wall. The other side seemed more natural stone and dirt, as were the ceiling and floor, but that one wall had left no doubt that it was more than a natural cave, and the craftsmanship evident in the fitted stones made Bruenor and the other dwarves believe that it was indeed the work of their ancestors.

But that tunnel hadn’t held its promise or its course, and though they were deeper underground, and though they still found fragments of old construction, the trail seemed to be growing cold.

Drizzt and Regis moved quickly to close the distance to the others. With the monsters about, appearing suddenly from the shadows as if from nowhere, the group didn’t dare separate. That presented a dilemma a hundred feet along, when Bruenor led them all into a small chamber they quickly recognized to be a hub, with no fewer than six tunnels branching out from it.

“Well, there ye be!” Bruenor cried, hefting his axe and punching it into the air triumphantly. “Ain’t no river or burrowing beast made this plaza.”

Looking around, it was hard for Drizzt to disagree, for other than one side, where dirt had collapsed into the place, the chamber seemed perfectly circular, and the tunnels too equidistant for it to be a random design.

Torgar fell to his knees and began digging at the hard-packed dirt, and his progress multiplied many times over when Pwent dropped down beside him and put his spiked gauntlets to work. In a few moments, the battlerager scraped stone, and as he worked his way out to the sides, it became apparent that the stone was flat.

“A paver!” Torgar announced.

“Gauntlgrym,” Bruenor said to Drizzt and Regis with an exaggerated wink. “Never doubt an old dwarf.”

“Another one!” Pwent announced.

“Sure’n the whole place is full o’ them,” said Bruenor. “It’s a trading hub for caravans, or I’m a bearded gnome. Yerself’s knowing that,” he said to Torgar, and the Mirabarran dwarf nodded.

Drizzt looked past the three dwarves to the fourth, Cordio, who had moved to the wall between a pair of the tunnels and was scraping at the wall. The dwarf nodded as his knife sank in deeper along a crease in the stone behind the accumulated dirt and mud, revealing a vertical line.

“What do ye know?” Bruenor asked, leading Torgar and Thibbledorf over to the cleric.

A moment later, as Cordio broke away a larger piece of the covering grime, it became apparent to all that the cleric had found a door. After a few moments, they managed to clear it completely, and to their delight they were able to pry it open, revealing a single-roomed structure behind it. Part of the back left corner had collapsed, taking a series of shelves down with it, but other than that, the place seemed frozen in time.

“Dwarven,” Bruenor was saying as Drizzt moved to the threshold.