Stone Cold (Dwarvish Dirty Dozen Book 4) by Aaron D. Schneider & Michael Anderle

Author:Aaron D. Schneider & Michael Anderle [Schneider, Aaron D. & Anderle, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing
Published: 2023-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Where you goin’, lads? Don’t you want to have a try?”

Gromic’s taunts were wasted on the clackers as they shuffled down the tunnel just ahead of the Sablestone Guard. The wight’s withdrawal from the battle had caused the ferocious attacks of his unliving servants to slacken, and Torbjorn relentlessly drove the Guard and the rest of the infantry forward.

In the back of his mind, the ondwan wondered what he was going to do if he provoked the wight to return and attend to his advance, but the interaction with the wight had his stomach twisting. What had it meant? The girl was in Heimgrud, wasn’t she? They’d received word that Utyrvaul and Mabon had arrived with the girl, along with the envoys from the fortress, those two compromised priests.

What was the wheezer talking about?

The question drove the dwarf commander beyond fatigue and good sense, but the advantageous circumstances, combined with growing momentum as they crushed rank after rank of clackers, kept them going. They’d ground so many leathery corpses under their heels that the dead men were retreating. Torbjorn knew better than to think it was fear or even some brute instinct of self-preservation that drove the unliving before him and his dwans.

The wight had called them back after they’d covered his withdrawal.

Still, Torbjorn and Gromic followed the lead of the doughty Guard, breath rasping out of their helmets. Here and there, a time-gnawed foot in fraying sandals would slip and turn on the rough-hewn tunnel floor, or the back of its skull would meet a cwellocs or a magsax and a crushing Sablestone sabaton.

“How long is this damned tunnel?” Gromic wheezed after the ninth time he ground a clacker beneath his boot.

Torbjorn didn’t want to waste the air to reply, but then he saw raw daylight glinting off a cavern wall. It was so unlike the wan alchemical light that had defined their existence during the battle in the cavern that Torbjorn’s eyes stung from so dim a reflection.

“Light up ahead,” he wheezed, then felt the first brush of cold air through the visor of his helm. “And fresh air.”

“Also fresh enemies,” Gromic quipped, hefting his sword to hack down another that had fallen just ahead. “I think these ones are a bit rotten.”

The clacker’s head swung around just before the hard-honed blade bit through its temple and socket. It ripped free through the jaw with a spray of teeth. “A bit,” Torbjorn acknowledged as he stomped on the remains, splintering bone and flattening the desiccated gristle as they pressed forward.

He idly wondered if the remains behind them, trampled not just by the pair of them but by all the other Guard and the lines of marching dwans, were any more than bone dust on sheets of shriveled hide.

The thought faded as they rounded a corner and were forced to slow when sunlight poured into the passage. It was merely the pale winter sun sliding through a seam in the stone above them, but after hours of false twilight, it blinded them.

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