'But he is a convenient excuse,' Matron Baenre went on, fiddling with a wide dwarven tooth, fashioned into a ring and hanging on a chain about her neck. Baenre reached up and undid the clasp on the necklace, then held the item aloft in the palm of her hand and chanted softly, using the ancient Dwarvish tongue.
For all the dwarves in all the Realms
Heavy shields and shining helms,
Swinging hammers, hear them ring,
Come forth my prize, tormented King!
A swirl of bluish smoke appeared at the tip of the dwarf tooth. The mist gained speed and size as the seconds slipped past. Soon a small twister stood up from Matron Baenre's hand. It leaned away from her at her mental bidding, intensifying in speed and in light, growing as it stretched outward. After a few moments, it broke free of the tooth altogether and swirled in the middle of the room, where it glowed a fierce blue light.
Gradually an image formed in the middle of that swirl: an old, gray-bearded dwarf standing very still in the vortex, upraised hands clenched tightly.
The wind, the blue light, died away, leaving the specter of the ancient dwarf. It was not a solid image, merely translucent, but the ghost's distinctive details-the red— tinged gray beard and steel-gray eyes-showed clearly.
'Gandalug Battlehammer,' Matron Baenre said immediately, utilizing the binding power of the dwarf's true name to keep the spirit fully under her command. Before her stood the First King of Mithril Hall, the patron of Clan Battlehammer.
The old dwarf looked at his ancient nemesis, his eyes narrowed in hatred.
'It has been too long,' Baenre teased.
'I'd walk an eternity o' torment as long as I'd the guarantee that yerself'd not be there, drow witch!' the ghost replied in its gravelly voice. 'I'd…'
A wave of Matron Baenre's hand silenced the angry spirit. 'I did not recall you to hear your complaints,' she replied. 'I thought to offer you some information that you might find entertaining.'
The spirit turned sideways and cocked his hairy head to stare over his shoulder, pointedly looking away from Baenre. Gandalug was trying to appear indifferent, removed, but like most dwarves, the old king was not so good at hiding his true feelings.
'Come now, dear Gandalug,' Baenre teased. 'How boring the waiting must be for you! Centuries have passed as you have sat in your prison. Surely you care how your descendants fare.'
Gandalug turned a pensive pose over the other shoulder, back toward Matron Baenre. How he hated the withered old drow! Her talk of his descendants alarmed him, though, that much he could not deny. Heritage was the most important thing to any respectable dwarf, even above gems and jewels, and Gandalug, as the patron of his clan, considered every dwarf who allied himself with Clan Battlehammer as one of his own children.
He could not hide his worry.
'Did you hope that I would forget Mithril Hall?' Baenre asked teasingly. 'It has been only two thousand years, old king.'
'Two thousand years,' Gandalug spat back disgustedly. 'Why don't ye just lay down and die, old witch?'
'Soon,' Baenre answered and nodded at the truth of her own statement, 'but not before I complete what I began two thousand years ago.
'Do you remember that fateful day, old king?' she went on, and Gandalug winced, understanding that she meant to replay it again, to open old wounds and leave the dwarf in perfect despair.
When the halls were new, when the veins ran thick,
Gleaming walls, with silver slick,
When the king was young, the adventure fresh,
And your kinfolk sang as one
When Gandalug ruled from the mithril throne
Clan Battlehammer had begun.
Compelled by the magic within Matron Baenre's continuing chant, Gandalug Battlehammer found his thoughts cascading back along the corridors of the distant past, back to the time of the founding of Mithril Hall, back to when he looked ahead with hope for his children, and their children after them.
Back to the time right before he had met Yvonnel Baenre.
Gandalug stood watching the cutting as the busy dwarves of Clan Battlehammer chipped away at the sloping walls of the great cavern, cutting the steps that would become the Undercity of Mithril Hall. This was the vision of Bruenor, Gandalug's third son, the clan's greatest hero, who had led the procession that had brought the thousand dwarves to this place.
'Ye did well in givin' it to Bruenor,' the dirty dwarf beside the aged king remarked, referring to Gandalug's decision to award his throne to Bruenor, and not to Bruenor's older brothers. Unlike many of the races, dwarves did not automatically award their inheritance or titles to the eldest of their children, taking the more pragmatic approach of choosing which they thought most fitting.
Gandalug nodded and was content. He was old, well past four centuries, and tired. The quest of his life had been to establish his own clan, the Battlehammer clan, and he had spent the better part of two centuries seeking the location of a fitting kingdom. Soon after Clan Battlehammer had tamed and settled Mithril Hall, Gandalug had begun to see the truth, had begun to realize that his time and his duty had passed. His ambitions had been met, and, thus contented, Gandalug found that he could not muster the energy to match the plans his sons and the younger dwarves laid out before him, plans for the great Undercity, for a bridge spanning the huge chasm at the complex's eastern end, for a city above the ground, south of the mountains, to serve as a trading link with the surrounding kingdoms.
It all sounded wonderful to Gandalug, of course, but he hadn't the yearning to see it through.
The old graybeard, his hair and whiskers still showing hints of their previous fiery red, turned an appreciative look upon his dear companion. Through those two centuries, Gandalug could not have asked for a better traveling companion than Crommower Pwent,
and now, with one more journey before him, the king who had stepped down from the throne was glad for the company.
Unlike the regal Gandalug, Crommower was dirty. He wore a beard, black still, and kept his head shaved so that his huge, pointed helm would hold a tight fit. 'Can't be runnin' into things with me helm turnin' aside, now can I?' Crommower was fond of saying. And in all truth, Crommower Pwent loved to run into things. He was a battlerager, a dwarf with a singular view of the world. If it threatened his king or insulted his gods, he'd kill it, plain and simple. He'd duck his head and skewer the enemy, slam the enemy with his glove nails, with his elbow spikes, with his knee spikes. He'd bite an enemy's ear off, or his tongue out, or his head off if he could. He'd scratch and claw and kick and spit, but most of all, he'd win.
Gandalug, whose life had been hard in the untamed world, valued Crommower above all others in his clan, even above his precious and loyal children. That view was not shared among the clan. Some of the dwarves, sturdy as they were, could hardly tolerate Crommower's odor, and the squealing of the battlerager's ridged armor grated as sourly as fingernails scratching a piece of slate.
Two centuries of traveling beside someone, of fighting beside someone, often in desperate straits, tends to make such facts diminish.
'Come, me friend,' old Gandalug bade. He had already said his farewells to his children, to Bruenor, the new King of Mithril Hall, and to all his clan. Now was the time for traveling again, with Crommower beside him, as it had been for so many years. 'I go to expand the boundaries of Mithril Hall,' Gandalug had proclaimed, 'to seek greater riches for me clan.' And so the dwarves had cheered, but more than one eye had been teary that day, for all the dwarves understood that Gandalug would not be coming home.
'Think we'll get a good fight or two outta this?' Crommower eagerly asked as he skittered along beside his beloved king, his armor squealing noisily every step of the way.
The old graybeard only laughed.
The two spent many days searching the tunnels directly below and west of the Mithril Hall complex. They found little in the way of the precious silvery mithril, though-certainly no hints of any veins to match the huge deposits back in the complex proper. Undaunted, the two wanderers then went lower, into caverns that seemed foreign even to their dwarven sensibilities, into corridors where the sheer pressure of thousands of tons of rock
