orcs nearby and simply couldn't relax enough to keep his eyes closed for any length of time.
* * * * *
The dwarves gathered around Bruenor could hear the tentativeness in his every word.
"But will it keep on rolling?" the dwarf king asked the engineers standing beside a modified version of a "juicer," a heavy rolling ram designed to squish the blood out of orcs and the like by pressing them against a wall. Unlike the typical Battlehammer juicers, which were really no more than a cylinder of stone on a thick axle with poles behind so the dwarves could rush it along, the new contraption had been given a distinct personality. Carved wooden likeness of dwarves upon battle boars, the handiwork of Pikel Bouldershoulder, stood out in front of the main body of the one-ton battering ram, and below them was a skirt of metal, fanning out like a ship's prow. An "orc-catcher," Nanfoodle had named it, designed to wedge through the throng of enemies like a spear tip, throwing them aside.
The whole of the thing was set upon well-greased metal wheels, lined in a thin, sharpened ridge that would simply cut through any bodies the catcher missed. Handles had been set for twenty dwarves to push, and as an added bonus, Nanfoodle had geared the boar-riding statues to an offset on the axle, so that the six wooden dwarf "riders" would seem to be charging, leaping over each other in a rolling motion.
"They'll stop it eventually," Nanfoodle reasoned. "More by the pile of their dead, I would guess, than by any concerted effort to halt the thing. Once the dwarves get this contraption rolling, it would take a team of giants to slow it!"
Bruenor nodded and kept moving, studying the device from every conceivable angle.
He had to keep moving, he knew. He had to keep studying and thinking of the present crisis.
His two children had been hurt.
* * * * *
Wincing with every movement, Wulfgar swung his wolf-hide cloak across his shoulders and managed to bring his right arm back far enough to get behind the mantle and wrap it around him, covering his strong chain shirt of interlocking mithral links.
"What're ye doing?" Delly Curtie asked him, coming back into the room after settling Colson in her bed.
Wulfgar looked back at her as if the answer should be obvious.
"Cordio said ye wasn't to be going back today," Delly reminded him. "He said ye're too hurt."
Wulfgar shook his head and clasped the wolf-hide surcoat closed. Before he finished, Delly was at his side, tugging at one arm.
"Don't go," she pleaded.
Wulfgar stared down at her incredulously. "Orcs are in Mithral Hall. That cannot hold."
"Let Bruenor drive them out. Or better, let us thicken the walls before them, and leave them in empty chambers."
Wulfgar's expression did not straighten.
"We can go out the tunnels to Felbarr," Delly went on. "All of the clan. They'll be welcomed there. I heard Jackonray Broadbelt say as much when he was talking to the folk chased down from the northland."
"Perhaps many of those folk would be wise to go," Wulfgar admitted.
"Not one's intending to make Felbarr a home. They're all for Silverymoon and Everlund and Sundabar. Ye've been to Silverymoon?"
"Once."
"Is it as beautiful as they say?" Delly asked, and the sparkle in her eyes betrayed her innermost desire, showing it clearly to Wulfgar, whose own blue eyes widened at the recognition.
"We will visit it," he promised, and he knew, somehow, that "visiting" wasn't what Delly had in mind, and wouldn't be nearly enough to assuage her.
"What are you saying?" he demanded suddenly.
Delly fell back from the blunt statement. "Just want to see it, is all," she said, lowering her gaze to the floor.
"Is something wrong?"
"Orcs're in the hall. Ye said so yerself."
"But if no orcs were in the hall, you would still wish to go to Silverymoon, or Sundabar?"
Delly kicked at the stone, her hesitance seeming so completely out of character that the hair on the back of Wulfgar's strong neck began to bristle.
"What kind of life is a child to get if all she's seeing are her parents and dwarves?" Delly dared to ask.
Wulfgar's eyes flared. "Catti-brie had such an upbringing."
Delly looked up, her expression hardly complimentary.
"I have no time to argue about this," Wulfgar said. "They are bringing the juicer into position, and I will hold my place behind it."
"Cordio said ye shouldn't go."
"Cordio is a priest, and always erring on the side of caution regarding those he tends."