Diaries of a Dwarven Rifleman

The blow was fueled by rage and he felt bone crunch as he struck. The blow knocked the dwarf over backwards and the gun flew from his hand. Engvyr had to struggle to keep his own feet and when the thief tried to rise Engvyr struck him down savagely.

Dropping the wood he staggered back to check on his father. He was dead. He had been shot in the back with a crossbow and his throat was cut. His aunt had suffered before she died. He covered her and suddenly wondered where Berget was. Trying to rise again he found that he could not. He knelt there, gasping from the ebb and flow of the pain until his sight went dark and he felt no more.

PART TWO: THE FORGE Chapter Eleven

“There's a trick to fighting a superior force. You need to hit them hard and fast, keep them off balance. Give them no time to organize their response. Get them to react as individuals, without thinking. Do it right and you can more or less scare them to death.”

From the diaries of Engvyr Gunnarson

Engvyr watched from cover as the goblin raiding party herded along a pair of women and a half-dozen children. All of the captives showed signs of abuse. Most likely their men-folk had been killed, butchered already and their remains divided up among the goblin's packs.

The prisoners were Afmaeltinn, humans that had settled on the edge of dwarven lands as they sometimes did. Engvyr didn't much care about humans one way or the other but he'd be damned if he'd let the goblins take anyone off of Dwarven lands.

The goblins wore broad-brimmed hats and scarfs to shield their eyes and faces from the sunlight, typical when they were out by daylight. Long coats covered their rag-tag armor, with gloves on their hands and hob-nailed boots upon their feet. Three of them carried repeating crossbows, high on rate-of-fire but short on accuracy. The rest were armed with an assortment of hand-axes, spears and short bill-hooks. With just himself and his partner Taarven Redbeard to stop them Engvyr wasn't liking their odds.

Engvyr and Taarven were Rangers of the Mountain Guard, and they patrolled the remote hames and steadings among the high valleys and mountain passes of the Northlands. In the course of making their rounds they were called upon to do everything from dealing with incursions such as this one to putting down a rogue bear or boar, even acting as judges of the King's Law when they needed to. They spent three to four weeks at a time in the saddle and their only home was the Station that they were based out of.

Rangers were issued repeating carbines and they lived or died by them on their long patrols. These were standard spring-piston guns and they carried twenty 36-bore balls in their tubular magazines. A good dwarf could fire as many as ten balls a minute with one, and they were both very good. However with them outnumbered six-to-one even that rate of fire was likely to prove insufficient. Seeing as we're the only ones here, Engvyr reflected, and someone has to do it this is going to get real interesting.

He nodded to Taarven that he'd seen enough. The two dwarves edged back from their vantage-point and quietly crept back to their hobbled ponies. They had two riding-ponies each and a pack-pony between them. They gathered them up while discussing the situation in low voices carefully pitched to not carry in the mountain air.

“This is going to be all kinds of hairy,” Taarven said

Engvyr snorted in agreement and said, “Reckon if we go down along Goren's Creek through the cut we can get ahead of them before the Eyrie. Give 'em a warm welcome home.”

Taarven nodded. The Eyrie was a pass on the northwestern border of Dvargatil Baeg, and once past that the goblins were free and clear. “Reckon that's the best that we can do.”

They didn't discuss the obvious fact that they'd need better than usual luck to come out of this with their skins intact. But even if they failed and died in the attempt they had a point to make to the goblins: you don't come into Dwarven lands to murder, pillage and kidnap people without paying the price. The two Rangers were determined to make sure that price was as high as possible.

They cut over to the creek and began to work their way up the bed. It was early summer and the water was running less than a foot deep over bedrock with pockets of gravel and debris trapped in the bends, so the footing was good enough for their mountain-bred ponies. It did make for rough going and they had to portage the occasional rapids, but the creek cut across land the road went around so they were able to outpace their quarry.