Back to back, the Dwarf and the highlander fought as if they had gone mad. Men lay dead and dying all about them. Both were wounded in a dozen places, but they didn’t feel the pain. Twice Menion had slipped on the bloodied floor and gone down, and each time Hendel had driven off the attackers while the highlander scrambled back to his feet. Only five of the enemy were still standing, but Hendel and Menion Leah were nearly finished. They fought like mechanical creatures now, their bodies soaked in blood and sweat, their limbs leaden and nerveless. As if suddenly regaining his wits, the terrified Stenmin raced to the edge of the pit and began screaming for help. The Prince of Leah responded instantly. With a final burst of strength, he crashed into two of his attackers, knocking both sprawling. A third rushed to stop him, but the charging highlander put his sword into the man up to the hilt and left it there. Grasping a fallen lance, he pounced upon the cringing mystic and stunned him with a sweeping blow from the great weapon. As the lean frame crumpled to the stone floor, Menion Leah gripped the edges of the heavy trapdoor and heaved upward with the last of his fading strength.

It was as if the stone had been chained in open position to the cellar floor. It did not move. From far below, the sounds of metal on stone ceased, replaced by the thudding of booted feet as men raced toward the trapdoor. Only seconds remained. If they reached the stairs, Menion was a dead man. Bracing himself, the wounded man again threw all of his weight into lifting the massive piece of stone, and this time it rose. Groaning with the terrible strain, the highlander raised upward against the great trapdoor until at last it carne over and fell with a great booming thud into place in the ancient floor. With numb, sweating hands he bound the chain through the sealing rings and fastened it with an iron bar. The passageway was closed. If the Northland army sought entrance here, they would have to cut their way through several feet of stone and iron.

“Menion.”

The sound of his name broke the sudden silence in a cracked whisper. The highlander had fallen to his hands and knees, but his groping hand found a discarded sword, and he raised his battered face. Across a floor littered with a tangled mass of fallen enemy guards, their twisted bodies either lifeless or in their final death throes, the eyes of the Prince of Leah found his friend. The Dwarf stood with his back to the wall near the bottom of the cellar stairway, the great mace still gripped tightly in one hand. There were dead bodies all about him. He had killed them all. No one had escaped. The hardened eyes met Menion’s for just an instant, and it was as if they were again meeting for the first time in the lowlands beyond the Black Oaks. He was the old Hendel-taciturn, grim-faced, ever resourceful. Then the mace slipped from his hard, his eyes glazed over; with a long sigh, his body slid slowly, lifelessly to the death that had finally claimed him.