"Well, that's for yerself to decide," said Dagna. "I come here to see how I might be helping, and so me and me boys did. I left six more dead back there. That's eight o' fifty, almost one in six."
"And your efforts saved ten times the number of your dead. Are not ten of Nesme's folk worth a single dwarf's life?"
"Bah, don't ye be putting it like that," Dagna said, and he gave a great snort. "I'm thinking that we're all to be slaughtered in one great fight if we make a single mistake. More than two score o' me boys and closer to a hun-nerd o' yer own folk."
"Then we won't make a mistake," Galen Firth said in a low and even tone.
Dagna snorted again and moved past the man, knowing that he wouldn't be getting anything settled that night. Nor did he have to, for in truth, he had no idea of where the force might even find any tunnels that would take them back to Mithral Hall. Dagna knew, and so did Galen, that this band would be moving out of necessity and not choice over the next hours, and even days, likely, so arguing about courses that might not ever even become an option seemed a rather silly thing to do.
Dagna crossed by the folk of Nesme, accepting their kind words and gratitude, and offering his own praise for their commendable efforts. He also found his own clerics hard at work tending the wounded, and he offered a solid pat on each dwarf shoulder as he passed. Mostly, though, Dagna studied the humans. They were indeed a good and sturdy folk, in the tough general's estimation, if a bit orc-headed.
Well, he supposed, orc-headed only if Galen Firth is an accurate representative of the community.
That notion had Dagna moving more purposefully among the ranks, seeking out a particular man whose actions had stood above the norm back on the battlefield. He found that man at the very back of the shallow cave, reclining on a smooth, rounded stone. As he approached, Dagna noted the man's many wounds, including three fingers on his left hand twisted at an angle that showed them to certainly be broken, and a garish tear on his left ear that looked as if the ear might fall right off.
"Ye might want to be seeing the priests about them fingers and that ear," Dagna said, moving up before the man.
Obviously startled, the warrior quickly sat up and straightened his battered chain and leather tunic.
"Dagna's me name," the dwarf said, extending his calloused hand. "General Dagna o' Mithral Hall, Warcommander to King Bruenor Battle-hammer."
"Well met, General Dagna," the man said. "I am Rannek of Nesme."
"One o' them Riders?"
The man nodded. "I was, at least."
"Bah, ye'll get yer town back soon enough!"
The dwarf noted that his optimism didn't seem to lift the man's expression, though he suspected, given the reception Galen Firth had offered Rannek back at the battlefield, that the dourness wasn't precipitated by the wider prospects for the town.
"Ye done well back there," Dagna offered, eliciting a less-than-resounding shrug.
"We fight for our very existence, good dwarf. Our options are few. If we err, we die."
"Ain't that the way of it?" asked the dwarf. "In me many years, I've come to see the truth in the notion that war's the time for determining the character of a dwarf. Or a man."
"Indeed."
Dagna's eyes narrowed under his bushy and prominent eyebrows. "Ye got nearly a hunnerd o' yer kin in here looking to ye. Ye're knowing that? And here ye be with a face showing defeat, yet ye got most o' yer folk out o' what them trolls suren thought to be the end o' yer road."
"They'll be looking to Galen Firth, now that he has returned," said Rannek.
"Bah, that's not a good enough answer."
"It is the only answer I have," said Rannek.
He slid off the rounded stone, offered a polite and unenthusiastic bow, and moved away.
General Dagna heaved a resigned sigh. He didn't have time for this. Not now. Not with trolls pressing in on them.
"Humans.. .." he muttered under his breath, giving a shake of his hairy head.
* * * * *
"They are helpless and they are scattered," Kaer'lic Suun Wett said to the giant two-headed Proffit soon after the human band had temporarily escaped from the troll and bog bloke pursuit. "The hour of complete domination over all the region is at hand for you. If you strike at them