In unison, a hundred bows were raised, drawn, and released, and a hundred deadly arrows hurtled upward. But where the silhouettes of heads had been, there were now bright shields. Arrows clattered, shattered, and caromed away. Then the shields dropped from sight, and in their place were pairs of dwarves, drawing aim on those below. Slings whirred and spat, crossbows thudded, and panic erupted among the archers. Dozens fell from their saddles, pierced or brained, and the rest became a melee of stamping, wheeling, bucking horses and men, shouldering one another in their haste to back away. More men and several horses went down under trampling hooves.
Through it all, Tulien Gart held his reins and his ground, his angry eyes locked on the figure above, the one who called himself Hammerhand. That one, he noticed, had not moved either. But now the deep, cold voice came again, and Gart felt the impact of shadowed eyes beneath a glistening helm-eyes that he knew were locked on his own. 'Hear the words of Hammerhand, human!' the voice thundered. 'Hear me well, and tell your master what I have said! At this point, Kal-Thax begins! From this day, Kal-Thax is closed to you and your kind! Kal-Thax belongs to dwarves, not humans!
'If you leave us alone, we will leave you alone! But if you attack-as you have just learned-we will respond! Now go away! Go, and don't come back!'
Reluctantly, Tulien Gart turned his mount and led a retreat, but only for a few hundred yards. Once beyond the range of slings and crossbows, he halted the battalion and dismounted. A few minutes passed, then two squads of humans approached the wall again, this time on foot and carrying no bows. Instead, they carried stretchers. Almost timidly, expecting death at any minute, the men neared the wall and began collecting their wounded and dead. But the dwarves above launched no volleys. They only watched.
On the ramp behind the wall, Tuft Broadland also watched, then turned to Derkin Hammerhand. 'You'd better tell them to take their fallen mounts, too. They're just leaving them.'
'We'll keep the dead horses,' Derkin declared. 'There's enough meat there for two or three days.'
The blood drained from the Cobar's face as he stared at the dwarf, shocked and astonished. 'You… you people eat horses?'
'Meat's meat,' Derkin said, casually. 'We can eat anything that doesn't eat us first. We've learned that in the slave mines and in the wilderness.'
The humans collected their dead and wounded, and returned down the pass to where the battalion waited. But instead of mounting up and moving away, the soldiers seemed to be settling in.
'They aren't leaving,' Calan Silvertoe noted.
'I didn't think they would, yet,' Hammerhand said. 'That commander can't just take my word for it that they aren't welcome here. He has to try a few more tricks.'
Throughout the morning and early afternoon, the dwarves on the wall could see furious activity down the pass, men hurrying here and there, doing things. At first, it was hard to tell what they were doing, then sharp eyes aloft spotted a heavy, freshly hewn log being dragged up the pass from a grove beyond.
'They're making a ram!' old Calan snorted. 'They intend to test our gate.'
'Can the gate withstand a ram?' worried Tuft Broad-land.
'Making a ram is one thing,' Derkin responded. 'Getting it here is another.'
Several hundred yards away, men lined up beside the heavy log, two men on a side. Squatting, they slipped harnesses over their shoulders, then stood, lifting the ram with them. At the wave of Tulien Gart's hand, they started toward the wall at a trot.
The dwarves let them approach to within fifty yards, then all along the battlements, dwarves with slings and crossbows appeared. The ram bearers saw them there and faltered, slowing to a stop. Tulien Gart saw them, too, and shook his head. 'Call them back,' he told a trumpeter. 'They'll never make it.'
At the sound of the trumpet, the relieved rammers turned, sighing visibly, and trotted back the way they had come, carrying their log.
'Next he'll try a shielded ram,' Derkin said.
An hour passed before the rammers tried it again, and this time they came under a cover of shields-dozens of shields laced together to form a solid roof over the men and their ram. From above, the men could not even be seen as they trotted forward toward the gate.
'Now what do you do?' Tuft asked Derkin.
'Just watch,' the dwarf said.
As the ram bearers gathered speed, aiming their juggernaut at the gate, a foot-high hinged panel opened in the bottom of the portal, with crossbows massed behind it. The men under the shields, seeing sudden death only yards away, pointing up at them, faltered. One stumbled, three fell, then they all went down, dragged to the ground by their log ram while lashed shields clattered down atop them. From the deadly portal, a voice called, 'Just get up and back away if you want to live. Leave the log where it is. You won't need it anymore.'
With no choice at all, the men under the fallen shields slipped out of their shoulder straps and struggled to their feet. On the wall above them, a voice said, 'Leave the shields, too. They're fair trade for the bolts we've expended.'
The men hobbled away, bruised and shaken, one being supported by two of the others, apparently the victim of a ' broken leg. Behind them, Derkin called, 'Tell your commander that the reason you're still alive is that no one here has been hurt!'
The gate opened then, and hordes of dwarves spilled through under cover of the weapons on the wall. By the time the rammers had returned to their commander, all of the shields and dead horses had been dragged to the south side of the wall, and the log ram was disappearing through the portal, which slammed shut when it was clear.
In the evening, as shadows deepened in the pass, arrows began to reach the top of the wall. Soldiers had crept along the brushy sides of the pass and taken shelter in a grove of conifers in bow range of the wall.
Crouching behind battlements, Derkin and his defenders studied the grove and waited. Darkness came quickly in the deep pass, and the archers' light was failing. Their arrows had done no damage.
At full dark, the dwarves heard scurrying sounds as the attackers withdrew for the night, and Derkin went down the ramp to find Vin the Shadow. 'You know what to do,' he told the Daergar.
'We could do more than that,' Vin suggested, but Derkin shook his head. 'No,' he said, 'you heard what I told the commander. Those arrows haven't hurt anybody yet.'
With a curt nod, Vin rounded up a dozen more Daergar. They removed their iron masks, revealing the large eyes and foxlike features of their clan. Quickly they gathered torches, tinder, and vials of oil, and filed out through the gate. They were back within minutes, and behind them fires blazed. By morning, the grove of trees that could hide archers would be nothing but smoldering ashes.
For two more days, the standoff in Tharkas Pass continued. Tulien Gart tried everything he could think of to get past the dwarves' wall, but nothing succeeded. Climbers sent in the dark of night, with grapples and rope, were easy targets for dark-seeing Daergar on the wall. An unmanned ram consisting of two whip-stung horses with a log slung between them went afoul when dwarves above dropped flaming straw in their path. The damage the ram horses did to Gart's camp as they fled through it was truly awful.
On the morning when Lord Kane's post patrol showed up in the pass, Gart decided it was time to return to Klanath and report to Lord Kane. Maybe the prince could root out dwarves from Tharkas Pass, but Gart accepted that the Third Battalion, alone, could not.
Before leaving, though, Gart mounted his horse and rode alone to the dwarves' wall. Sitting his saddle straight-backed and haughty, he looked upward. 'Hammerhand!' he called.
Above, the same bright-helmed silhouette appeared. 'I'm here, Commander,' the deep, resonant voice responded.
'I'm leaving to return to Klanath,' Gart said. 'I will give your message to Lord Kane, though they may be the last words I ever utter. But just for my own curiosity, who the blazes are you, anyway?'
'That's pretty obvious,' the voice above said. 'I am Master of Tharkas.'
As the commander rode away, the wall's gate opened and a small crowd of dirty, disheveled humans scurried through it. They were the survivors of the Tharkas outpost who had been held in the mine shaft. Derkin had no further use for them, so he was sending them home. On the wall, dozens of dwarves burst into laughter when the ragged crowd caught up with their commander, who promptly turned his head and backed his horse away from them. Those poor wretches would smell like goblins for weeks, no matter how they scrubbed themselves.
