side of the main area of battle. That explosion had turned night into day, had sent flames leaping a thousand feet into the air, and had launched tons and tons of debris across the swarm of monsters, mowing them flat under its press.
"One less weapon I will have to replace," said Innovindil.
Drizzt turned to regard his surface elf companion. The fair elf had her face covered too, though that did little to diminish her beauty. Above her scarf, bright blue eyes peered out at Drizzt and the same wind that carried the stench of death blew her long golden tresses out wildly behind her. Lithe and graceful, Innovindil's every step seemed like a dance to Drizzt Do'Urden, and even the burden of mourning, for she had lost her partner and lover, Tarathiel, could not hold her feet glumly to the stone.
Drizzt watched as she reached down to a familiar corpse, that of Urlgen, son of Obould Many-Arrows, the orc beast who had started the awful war. Innovindil had killed Urlgen, or rather, he had inadvertently killed himself by slamming his head at hers and impaling it upon a dagger the elf had snapped up before her. Innovindil put a foot on the bloated face of the dead orc leader, grasped the dagger hilt firmly in hand, and yanked it free. With hardly a flinch, she bent further and wiped the blade on the dead orc's shirt, then flipped it over in her hand and replaced it in the sheath belted around her ankle.
"They have not bothered to loot the field, from dead dwarves or from their own," Innovindil remarked.
That much had been obvious to Drizzt and Innovindil before their pegasus, Sunset, had even set them down on the rocky mountain slope. The place was deserted, fully so, even though the orcs were not far away. The couple could hear them in the valley beyond the slope's crest, the region called Keeper's Dale, which marked the western entrance to Mithral Hall. The dwarves had not won there, Drizzt knew, despite the fact that orc bodies outnumbered those of his bearded friends many times over. In the end, the orcs had pushed them from the cliff and into Keeper's Dale, and back into their hole in Mithral Hall. The orcs had paid dearly for that piece of ground, but it was theirs. Given the sheer size of the orc force assembled outside the closed door of Clan Battlehammer's stronghold, Drizzt simply couldn't see how the dwarves might ever win the ground back.
"They have not looted only because the battle is not yet over," Drizzt replied. "There has been no pause until now for the orcs, first in pushing the dwarves back into Mithral Hall, then in preparing the area around the western gates to their liking. They will return here soon enough, I expect."
He glanced over at Innovindil to see her distracted and standing before the remains of a particularly nasty fight, staring down at a clump of bodies. Drizzt understood her surprise before he even went over and confirmed that she was standing where he had watched the battleragers, the famed Gutbuster Brigade, make a valiant stand. He walked up beside the elf, wincing at the gruesome sight of shredded bodies - never had there been anything subtle about Thibbledorf Pwent's boys - and wincing even more when he caught sight of more than a dozen dead dwarves, all tightly packed together. They had died, one and all, protecting each other, a fitting end indeed for the brave warriors.
"Their armor .. ." Innovindil began, shaking her head, her expression caught somewhere between surprise, awe, and disgust.
She didn't have to say anything more for Drizzt to perfectly understand, for the armor of the Gutbusters often elicited such confusion. Ridged and overlapping with sharpened plates, and sprouting an abundance of deadly spikes, Gutbuster armor made a dwarf's body into a devastating weapon. Where other dwarves charged with pickaxes, battle-axes, warhammers, and swords held high, Gutbusters just charged.
Drizzt thought to inspect the area a bit more closely, to see if his old friend Thibbledorf might be among the dead, but he decided against that course. Better for him, he thought, to just continue on his way. Counting the dead was an exercise for after the war.
Of course, that same attitude allowed Drizzt to justify his inability to return to Clan Battlehammer and truly face the realization that his friends were all gone, killed at the town of Shallows.