stepmother share the tasty morsels from the stream. That they did with remarkable patience, as the rest of the army continued to slowly make its way over the high saddle.
The procession continued far into the night, and several hobgoblins fell to their deaths as cooling temperatures turned the slushy snow to ice. But the rest of the troops made it before dawn, and Ankhar woke well rested and ready to lead his army to lower elevations.
“Move out!” he ordered cheerfully after a repast of leftover trout. He ignored the grumbles and complaints of those warriors who had just finished the previous day’s march an hour or two before.
“Easy walk today,” he encouraged. “This is a wild place-deer and trout for all, if you keep eyes open. We go through woods all the way down to the plains, and there we can make war. No people until we come to the cities on the plains-and then we kill, and we feast, and we drink!”
Heartened by that prospect, the army marched along easily, emerging into a larger valley, where the half- giant was startled to discover a smooth, paved road-a feature that had not been there in his childhood, nor when he had campaigned through there some four years earlier.
Still, the road made for good walking, and the army fell into a semblance of a military formation, advancing three or four ogres abreast, lumbering freely down toward the plains. The half-giant did not waste any brain power wondering why anyone would build a paved highway through the wild valley…
Until they came to a curve in the road and Ankhar stopped, utterly astounded by what he saw lying before him.
“Huh?” he said to Laka. “Someone put a town here.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The town of New Compound occupied the flat shore of a long lake resting in a steep-sided valley. Geography had defined how the town was designed. The precipitous mountain ridge to the west, which plummeted directly into the deep, clear lake, was too steep for building. The stream flowing out of the lake was deep and rapid, and curled back and forth through the valley leading from the town down to the plains. The stream cut across the entire valley, surging up against the cliffs on the east side of the valley. Consequently, the dwarves had built a sturdy bridge across the stream right at the edge of town. That bridge allowed easy travel from the town down to the plains, along a smooth, paved road.
The bridge also provided easy access to the town for any invader coming from the plains, so it had to be defended. Dram’s dwarves had built two towers within the town that overlooked the bridge, while preparing trenches and a palisade on the far side of the span. As a last resort, the mountain dwarf had mined the bridge with many kegs of black power, rigged to fuses that could be ignited from either tower. If dwarves had to retreat across the bridge, then the stone structure would be exploded-they hoped while a hundred ogres were trying to cross!
It was a good plan, except it didn’t take into account one variable.
“You mean they’re coming down the valley? From the high mountains?” Dram asked Rogard Smashfinger in disbelief. The dwarf from Kayolin had just arrived with several hundred doughty warriors and bore that sobering piece of news.
“ ’Fraid so,” grunted the forger-turned-steel-merchant. “We had to move out on the double just to get here before them.”
Dram looked up the valley in dismay. They had erected no defensive positions in that direction. The stream flowing into the lake meandered there, but it was shallow and broad, with a gravel bottom. A four-foot-tall dwarf could ford it in any one of a hundred places; it certainly wouldn’t deter a charging band of ogres.
Dram turned to his father-in-law as Swig Frostmead came up to the pair of mountain dwarves.
“How many fighters do you have on the other side of the bridge?” he asked Swig.
Dram was trying hard to remain calm, summoning the steadiness that had preserved him through dozens of battles in his life. But in those days, there wasn’t any threat to Sally or little Mikey-and worrying about them was making all the difference in the world. Dram Feldspar was shocked to realize his knees were shaking.
“Steady there, son,” said the hill dwarf. “We need you now.”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” Dram snapped, drawing a deep breath. “Now-answer my question!” he demanded with his customary bravado.
“That’s more like it,” Swig declared, clapping him on the shoulder. “And we got about four hundred, to answer your question. What do we know about them brutes up the valley?”
“One of our scouts spotted them yesterday, watched them come over the crest of the range,” Rogard explained. “He couldn’t get a count, but there’s thousands of ’em. Mainly ogres, it looked like.”
“Great Reorx’s nose!” cursed Swig. “That’s a fair lot of muscle against our little town.”
“And they’re coming down the valley,” Dram muttered grimly. He looked at the towers, the hastily erected wall, and the mined bridge ready to be demolished. Ankhar had stolen more than a march on him; he had rendered Dram’s entire defensive strategy obsolete.
“Curse that stubborn daughter of mine!” Swig muttered grimly. “And what kind of husband are you-that you didn’t make her leave?”
Dram snorted. “I was in the next room when you told her she had to go, remember? It was me that brought the ice pack for your eye.”
“Aye,” Swig said, more than a little proud. “You’ve got yerself a prize in that girl, you do.”
“I know,” Dram said, trying hard not to think about Sally, not right then.
He, Rogard, and Swig stood on the town’s broad central plaza, a partially paved field overlooking the lake. The dwarves of New Compound were gathering around them, streaming from their houses and shops, coming down from the mines and forests where they had been working. Soon virtually every resident of the town, male and female, had answered the emergency summons.
“All right, then,” the mountain dwarf said gruffly. “Let’s get to work.”
He stepped up onto an empty barrel that had been rolled into the middle of the square, turning slowly through a full circle, meeting the eyes of as many townsfolk as he could. Their voices stilled. With a full-throated shout, he broke the news.
“Here’s how we stand: eight hundred hill dwarves, two hundred and fifty mountain dwarves, and a hundred humans who’ve decided to stick around and fight on our side. We don’t know how big a force is coming against us, but a good reckon is that it will be twice our number in ogres alone. And they’ve got hobs along with ’em too. They’re just around the bend, up the valley, and will reach the town limits in an hour or two.
“So the question is this: Do we pack up and skedaddle, getting out of here fast with whatever we can carry, and hope that these brutes don’t chase us down the valley faster than we can run? Or do we stay here and fight for this place, our town and our factories? Our bridge and our houses?”
“Fight!”
Dram didn’t see the female dwarf who shouted first, though she sounded an awful lot like Sally. That first cry was echoed almost immediately from a score-a hundred-throats, until the whole town was shouting its determination to give battle, to hold the ground they had claimed for themselves only a few short years before.
And so the issue was decided.
“Swig Frostmead, take three hundred hill dwarves down to the shore. You’ll stop ’em if they try to come along the edge of the lake. Rogard Smashfinger will take the mountain dwarves and hold the logging sheds and powder factory at the south edge of town. I’ll watch from here with the rest of us, as a reserve force, and we’ll counterattack where we can do the most good. Any questions?”
“How do we make sure they save some ogres for us in the reserves?” quipped one burly lumberjack, a man who had taken well to life in a dwarf town.
That provoked a laugh, and the meeting broke up, each fighter grabbing his favorite weapon and heading to his assigned position. Sally stayed behind with Dram; Mikey went with the other children, who were being taken by
