The report comes: the last launchers are in position. The blasting bolts are loaded. A hush goes through the dwarven squads arranged around the cave-mouth. What murmurs were continuing turn to absolute silence.
Two dozen launchers throw their bolts simultaneously. Unlike those thrown previously, these ones are heavily runed, hollow and packed with a mixture of incandesite and volatile oil. They impact the stalactite formation from all angles. The rock the stalactites sprout from shatters, and they come down like stone spears. The dragon flaps downward with them, and more steel bolts come at it from three dozen more launchers. They ricochet against the falling rocks, some right away to crash down at the dwarves, but others strike glancing blows and fly into the center of the formation.
The black dragon lets out a roar of flame, lighting the cavern firey yellow like a second sun rising. The heat beats at Guildmaster Wharoth and he shouts a battle cry upward.
“Drazakh shuzth! Shuzth!”
“Fall, dragon! Fall!”
Those members of the Association of Steel around him echo it:
“Shuzth! Shuzth! Shuzth!”
A rumble begins as the stalactites crash onto the ground. One of them impacts a stalagmite head on—both explode from head to foot. Gravel rains down and pings off the dwarves’ armor. A cloud of dust shoots upward to the roof, obscuring the black dragon flapping desperately to stay aloft. Wharoth catches a glance of a bolt stuck in one wing-bone.
So does every other dwarf.
“Shuzth! Shuzth! Shuzth!”
Gerthel, the woman with the bright axe, makes to run for the field of debris. Guildmaster Wharoth grabs her by the shoulder plate and pulls her back.
“Stay here! It’s going to go for the cave, remember?”
The pillar of dust, lit a dim gray-blue from the electrostatic quartz abundant in this area, slowly begins to sink down. Something roils within—the injured dragon. More bolts whistle through the air toward it. The pillar flies apart from top to bottom as the dragon dives down to avoid them.
It vanishes into the debris-field.
“What are we waiting for?” Whelt rasps. “We should go for it!”
“Yes!” shouts another dwarf. “Give the order—”
The black dragon shoots up out of the settling rubble and dust. The dwarves cry out in anger—the bolt stuck in its wing has fallen out. It makes for the rear, then a storm of more bolts from the line of launchers positioned there yesterday whistle out.
One strikes true, jabbing deep into the dragon’s back left leg. It spits a column of fire downward at the launcher that sent it. The launcher explodes—burning dwarfs scream. More bolts come, a horizontal hailstorm of them. One jabs deep in the dragon’s right shoulder.
It drops and swerves, fiery blood leaving a trail of incandescence behind. It ducks behind a stalagmite and flaps to the ground, shouting incoherently in rage.
The dwarves laugh and jeer.
“Now can we go for it?” Gerthel demands.
It’s only about four hundred feet distant. A march and a short charge and they’ll be upon it.
“No,” Wharoth says. “We can’t let our guard down. But we’ll reorganize, and to hell with any orders Vanerak gives. Get a message to the other groups. We’ll form a line between it and the cave.”
The order goes out. The Association of Steel repositions. A few squads from other guilds shout angrily at them for disobeying the plan, but most encourage them, shout them on.
“Get your revenge!”
“Kill the beast, for all of us!”
“Revenge is a dwarf’s right!”
“Death to the dragon!”
It makes Wharoth proud to see his dwarves cheered as they march through the cavern. For so long the Association of Steel has been a joke, the guild that can’t even provide proper accommodation or a forge for each of its members. A run-down hovel of a guild run by a money-grubbing recluse. Now they are the first line between the dragon and its escape, with their legendary guildmaster at the head of it: the first dwarf in three centuries to take on a dragon’s flame and not have his shield and armor melted to slag.
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“Wait,” he orders. “It’ll move for us. It must.”
He can hear the rumble as the rear bolt launchers are dragged forward. If any get a clear horizontal shot from close range, the black dragon is dead.
It knows this. Behind its malevolent green eyes its brain works furiously to find a way out of this situation. Cornered by dwarves! How ridiculous. Yet it has lived in the cavern for a long time, and it has been down to this part before on its wanderings. It listened to a party of the dwarf explorers who were delving for new minerals, new metals, venturing far and wide for ways to make their crafts superior.
Unseen in the blackness, it stole from them their knowledge, and an instant later their lives.
This was a good hundred years ago. But the principles it gleaned remain the same. Electrostatic quartz is a handy source of light, and also a handy source of energy. It can only exist up here in the cool places of the cavern, where there is no magma hot enough to ignite the power stored within.
It turns from the line of dwarves. Guildmaster Wharoth sees its tail flick and curl at him in a vaguely insulting gesture.
“It mocks us!” someone shouts.
“Let’s go for it!” Gerthel spits.
“Wait!” Wharoth orders. “Wait! It has to turn back.”
Four hundred yards away, the black dragon hisses in anger. The arrogance of these dwarves! To think they have it trapped. It recognized the one with a shield swirling with runes—that’s the one that stopped its flames. Friend of the little idiot who couldn’t even find a simple little key—the black dragon will show both of them what pain means.
First, however, it must escape. It moves around its stalagmite to face the bolt launchers.
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Calat was furious when Vanerak ordered her to command the rear line of launchers. The bastard! She is a runeknight of the first degree, same as he is, and more than that she was the one who put this plan together. It was her idea to change the trapping corner from the dismal black peninsula Thanerzak had chosen to this ideal location, lit up so the launchers can actually see what they’re shooting at.
If it hadn’t been for her, the black dragon would have long slipped their net and they’d be crawling through the caves being ambushed and melted to charcoal group by group.
Now the dragon’s down on the ground—and facing them! She smiles. Looks like she might get the last laugh after all: the dragon’s decided to give up on slithering down the hidey-hole Vanerak’s sitting in front of. No, it wants its revenge on her, and she’ll give it an opportunity to take it personally.
“Where are you going?” one of her dwarves asks worriedly. “The launcher’s nearly angled down.”
“I want to finish this personally.”
“It’s nearly in our sights!”
She slams down her tungsten visor. It’s mirrored like Vanerak’s, but a bit more advanced than his plain mask. Runes across her vision faintly glow, highlighting the dragon, its wounds, and all its minute scars that might prove to be weak spots for her one-handed trident to penetrate.
“Don’t launch,” she orders.
“We’ll be careful. Don’t you trust us? We know not to hit the dwarves behind!”
“That’s not why. Aren’t you listening? I’m going to finish this personally.”
She breaks into a run, square tungsten shield held out in front to block any flames. The dragon is only two hundred yards away and the strength enhancing runes on her legs carry her fast toward it; each step breaks cracks into the ground. Blue sparks from the electrostatic quartz leap up around her sabatons.
A bolt flies past her. Bastards trying to take the glory for themselves—but it misses. The dragon grows larger in her view. She can see the slit-black pupils in its green eyes. It opens its mouth.
She raises her shield. Heat slams into it and the wind of fire drives against her, slows her. The strength-runes on her legs push her forward. The beam of heat shifts downward. That won't work—she merely shifts her shield down. The beam moves further down, and forward of her.
The black dragon forces its cone of fire burn to hotter and brighter. It lets the idiot dwarf charging feel some of it, just so she won't get suspicious, then brings it forward to the true target: a whorl of thick quartz. The heat sinks into it. The ordinary rock around the quartz turns to orange lava, but the quartz remains solid. The black dragon forces more heat into its breath. It begins to worry that the dwarven explorers from long ago were wrong, and that no amount of heat will—
The quartz explodes into blue fragments. Lightning sparks along adjoining seams for two hundred yards in every angle. Glittering blue dust blasts upward from them. The rock is shattered and, no longer supported, begins to fall.
One second Calat is charging, the next she is plummeting amidst an avalanche of chips of ordinary rock, orange drops of lava, and shards of quartz. Lightning strikes from the latter, impacting her, but tungsten is not so conductive. The runes over her vision flicker, but that is all the damage the lightning does.
Though it doesn’t matter how much damage her armor resists if she becomes entombed in it—yet she can think of no way to stop that happening, no way to resist the fall. She cries out in anger as she spins downward amidst the falling rock, and above her something answers. She catches sight of a massive black shape plummeting after her, not twenty yards distant, with bright green eyes.
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Guildmaster Wharoth looks on in horror as the black dragon disappears down the crackling blue, burning red sinkhole of its own making. Something in the rock has given way, some seam of quartz that reacted with the heat—and he had always been told quartz was stable!
“What do we do?” Whelt rasps. “Guildmaster?”
“We go for it,” Gerthel says. “Don’t we, guildmaster? We can’t let it get away.”
Wharoth shakes his head. “No,” he says. “We can’t.”