Defending Lonely Mountain

by Calculonius

Many advised Thorin's grandfather Thror not to mine so much gold since it would attract dragons. What if one advised him otherwise? Here we explore some ways to defend Lonely Mountain against a variety of threats. The story begins in TA 2610, 331 years before the events in the book The Hobbit. Thorin and his father have been born early in this universe.

10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

"But why would I Want to talk to a squirrel?"

The elf, who had been presenting on magic at the head of the room, looked perplexed about how to answer the dwarf's question, but before he could answer, the door to the king's council chamber burst open and an out-of-breath messenger gasped, "Spiders are coming!"

King Thror stood up, and demanded, "How soon?"

The messenger inhaled, "Maybe tomorrow."

The king replied, "Ok. Sit down, catch your breath, and then tell us more."

Then he called, "Somebody get me a map! One showing..." he looked down at the messenger. "Mirkwood?" he asked. The out-of-breath messenger nodded, and the king continued, "From Mirkwood to here and all in-between."

By the time they had the map unrolled and ready, the messenger had mostly caught his breath.

Dwarves were known for being hardy.

The king began, "Just nod or shake your head, until you're ready. I assume these are giant spiders?"

Nod.

"From Mirkwood?"

Nod.

"Coming here?"

Nod.

"A lot of them?"

The messenger nodded and added "All of them, I think."

"In one group?"

The messenger responded, "Mostly."

He paused for breath. "They seem to have started all together. But the bigger ones are falling behind in order of size."

"That's right," Durog piped up. "That's due to inertia, and it's..."

"Later," the king cut him off. "We can get to that later, Durog."

He turned back to the messenger. "What do we know?"

The messenger said, "The human rider we sent with a letter to the elves in Mirkwood got partway there and saw the spiders coming. Then he hurried back. He says spiders cover the ground from horizon to horizon, but I think he exaggerates. Mirkwood couldn't hold that many."

The King looked questioningly at Losse Seldo, who spoke "We don't know for sure how many there are, since they like to hide and attack from ambush. But judging from how much of the forest is under their control, and the numbers of spiders we've found in areas we have attacked, I'd estimate that there are at least as many as 400 giant spiders and perhaps up to ten times that number - it's hard to count the smaller ones and the smaller they are the more numerous they are."

King Thror replied, "Thanks, now tell us all you know about fighting giant spiders in their various sizes. Include their strengths and weaknesses. Be thorough."

They began the discussion by measuring the distance on the map from Lonely Mountain's entrance to where the spiders were last seen. They calculated when to expect them at the front gate, given how fast the rider had estimated they were going. Then they checked that by calculating that same speed from where they were seen back to Mirkwood, and got an answer that made sense - the spiders had left Mirkwood about the time that the giant hammer had crushed Shelob.

They would arrive at the front gate of Lonely Mountain late tomorrow, assuming they didn't stop to eat or sleep.

Then, with that timing estimate, they sent off some orders for certain things to be done or built.

As the last few messengers hurried off to go deliver instructions and build-orders, the King turned to Durog and asked, "what was that I heard you muttering about furrowed bricks and ungoverned clocks?"

Durog opened his mouth to speak, but paused in thought, then said "There's too much to try to go over it all right now, and part of it would just confuse folks. So suffice it to say it's an idea and we'll see how well it works."

The king was getting used to Durog, so he just nodded.

Then they got down to the details of how to fight giant spiders.

The resulting discussion took quite a while, during which time they started with how best to kill the smallest spiders, what their advantages and disadvantages were, how dangerous their claws, bite, and poison were, and what to expect from them. Then they covered any differences there were in those same things for the other sizes of giant spiders.

It turned out they got smarter as they got bigger, and the ones about cat-sized and smaller were no smarter than ordinary animals.

After that, they discussed anything that seemed relevant.

When the discussion was winding down after a brief digression into the expected proportions of big to little spiders, King Thror asked, "how many fake practice spiders have we got right now?"

"Well," Durog began, "Before this meeting, we had 6: 2 of the simpler archery targets and 4 'melee specials' with hinged rods for legs, plus springs so they can move suddenly to simulate an attack when the operator pulls the ropes in certain combinations. As soon as we were done looking at the map, I sent the guys a message to make as many more as they could, of both types, and not stop until I say."

"That's great. I want everyone to have had a chance to practice on them before the spiders get here late tomorrow. But I thought there was a problem getting enough of the right wood for the target zones, so the resistance felt realistic as you stabbed them?"

"There was, so, no offense to the elves, we solved it a dwarvish way. We experimented with clay mixed with different proportions of sand and fine gravel, until we found a mix that was just right - stabbing it or shooting it gives the same resistance as actual giant spider flesh and hide. And you don't have to replace it like you do when the wood targets get too chewed up from getting stabbed too much. You just knead it a bit like bread dough, and mold it back into shape. Then it's as good as new." Durog smiled.

"Great," the King responded, then got a glint in his eye. "Now for the big question - can you capture a bunch of spiders for me?"

"What!" The elves were aghast. "why would you want that?"

"Simple," Thror replied. "You said that magic was slowly draining out of the world - that it is as much as the 3 elven Rings of Power can do to maintain small enclaves of magic as it used to be. That's great for Loth Lorien, Rivendell, and the other one - Mirkwood was it? But the rest of the world is still getting progressively less and less magic all the time. Sure it may take centuries, or even millennia, to run out entirely, but I want to capture some - as much as possible in fact - in re-usable forms before it's too late. Giant spiders are one way. They have magic in them, and you already know a couple ways to get it out and put it to good uses. Even if we can't find more ways, it is still worth ranching some to get what we can from them."

"But," replied an elf, "they're intelligent - they'll get out."

"Now that," the king replied, rubbing his hands in anticipation of the challenge, "is a bet I'm willing to take. People - dwarves, humans, elves or whatever - are intelligent too, and yet have been successfully kept in prisons. And when people manage to escape from prison, it almost always requires the use of tools of some kind - hacksaws, lock-picks, keys, whatever. From what you said, even the most intelligent of these spiders do not use tools. Without tools, it doesn't matter how big or strong they can get - I can always use more stone than they can break."

The elves seemed to find the idea distasteful, but they remained silent.

"So," Thror turned to Durog, "Can you do it? Can you capture some spiders - preferably a bunch of them?"

Durog had a faraway look. "I believe so, my lord, but it may require some, forgive the term, 'bait' - a group of valorous fighters to give them a hand-to hand fight while withdrawing to lure them in.

"An epic fight for an epic goal!" the King enthused. "you speak of that as if it is a bad thing - a flaw in the plan. I see it as an advantage. I love this plan and I'm excited to be a part of it!"

-0-0-0-

The next evening, a horde of giant spiders entered the valley between Spur Forts 1 and 2, ignoring the forts entirely as they flowed towards the main entrance to Lonely Mountain, where Shelob's body was still pinned under the enormous hammer, which held her underwater in the temporary pool built around her.

.

The smallest spiders - about the size of rats - had arrived first, and there were enough of them to cover the ground like a carpet as they came.

Durog, in his command center, remarked, "I really wish we'd had time to bury more trenches running up to the clock faces. That would have eliminated the possibility of interference between sets of cables and given us redundancy in case of damage. Those spiders are Sooo inconsiderate!"

That brought a slight chuckle from around the room.

Durog and his crew were nervous. There were a lot of spiders coming. Even the smallest of them could paralyze an adult dwarf. And the dwarves had no direct experience fighting them.

They did have some coaching by the elves, and some practice in fighting the fake spiders that had been built. But it wasn't the same.

So there wasn't as much confidence going into this fight as they were used to.

When Durog was nervous, he liked to review his preparations.

So, while the spiders approached, the group of dwarves there, in Durog's alternate command center, spent the next few minutes reviewing stocks of special gear, when and how to use it, and other plans, including contingencies and what not to do.

Durog didn't want anybody bravely and nobly sacrificing himself, for example. They could get along without this cable, or that sparker igniting successfully, and didn't need anybody charging out to certain death to fix it.

"The spiders are in sight." called Tav, their spotter.

He was peering out of a firing loophole in the cliff face a hundred feet above the main entrance. The thickness of rock between the cliff face, and the command center dug in behind it, varied from 3 to 5 feet, and was at its narrowest by each of the firing loopholes.

In fact this room was normally a guard room - one of many from which dwarves inside the mountain could shoot at attackers outside the mountain.

Durog had taken it over for this fight, so he and his guys could see the action directly, since he expected the action to mostly be outside the mountain.

They had worked to make that true too. The shutters on all firing loopholes and peepholes had been inspected and reinforced where necessary, among other things.

"I estimate this swarm as being 30 feet wide and 100 feet long, with an average of 3 spiders per square foot." Tav calmly remarked.

He had been chosen for this job given his remarkable skill at making such estimates. He was an old dwarf, but his eyesight was still perfect and he had decades of experience working as a merchant in various human cities, where he had honed his ability to estimate things like how many chickens were in a cage, or how many sheep on a field.

He had recently come to Lonely Mountain with one of the groups of immigrants joining them from all over, due to the news of the prosperity and safety enjoyed here.

He had said it would help him estimate things if there were large stakes driven into the ground at certain specific distances, with a small grid of smaller stakes around each marking out the distances in feet.

So that had been done.

Somebody whistled, "9000 of them, and this is just the first group. Wow! I'm sure glad we made sure they can't get in."

"As you know, that's not perfect." Durog responded. "Because, to shoot them, we have to open the shutters, at least briefly. And they can climb the cliff as if it was no obstacle at all."

"Still," he continued, "those doing the shooting have reinforced joints on their armor, as well as a small supply of anti-venom the elves were able to make from local plants. And the swarms will get smaller as the spiders get bigger."

"Impact." Tav spoke calmly. "The first set of 4 jars of molten metal from the trebuchets have hit among the swarm. Let's see, that's about 35 square feet of total destruction among the swarm, with as much area again averaging about 50% of spiders hit and killed..." he trailed off into mumbling for a moment, then said, "I estimate just over 200 spiders killed by each shot. Call the total 820."

Durog nodded, but gave no orders. His guys knew what to do and had orders, like the trebuchets did, to start when they felt it was the right time to do so.

Durog was present primarily as a troubleshooter in case of unexpected problems, and for his ability to creatively improvise at need.

The trebuchets continued firing and their kill total was up to about 2300 before the ball reservoir let loose.

It had been modified since being used against the orc army.

In that fight there was just one big reservoir full of spherical rocks about a foot in diameter.

Now there were four smaller sections of the reservoir, which could each release their rocks separately.

But there had not yet been time to completely refill them, so each was only about a quarter full.

Only one of those four released now. The dwarves had judged that more balls than that would just further squish things that had already been pulverized.

They wouldn't let loose from another section of the reservoir until and unless the remaining spiders moved back into the danger zone - the zone where the balls would hit.

Tav's ever-calm voice said "I estimate that got only another 1250. The spiders are nimble and jumped out of the way better than expected. The total is about 3550 so far."

Volleys of crossbow bolts went out next, from dozens of firing loopholes.

Tav was too busy counting to speak before the clock faces started up.

Durog had said it was a simple idea. A clock used a heavy weight suspended from a chain to drive the hour hand, minute hand, and second hand around its face. The most complicated part of a clock, by far, were the gears and mechanisms governing the speeds of those hands, so that it took an hour for the hour hand to go around once for instance.

Without the governors, the hands would spin around the clock face rapidly while the weight descended quickly.

Sharpen those clock hands so they were more like swords, and you had the essence of Durog's idea.

There had been some additions to the basic idea.

Other types of gearing made the hands spin ever faster, and a different order of gearing for the second hand made it spin backwards - going counter-clockwise to better scissor targets in between it and one of the other scything hands.

Ten of these 'clock faces' had been put on the ground in front of Shelob's temporary pool, arranged in a grid to cover as much of the ground as possible.

In the small diamond-shaped 'dead areas' in-between the circular sweeps of the hands on adjacent clocks, they had another surprise prepared.

There, the ground was coated with a layer of dry straw soaked in melted candle wax.

They kept this coating thin enough to not impede the sweep of the clock hands, which were low enough to catch rat-sized spiders.

But still this had used up a 2 month supply of candles.

To ignite the waxed straw, the clock faces had sparkers set up to give off sparks as they started moving.

The spider horde - no more intelligent than animals at this size and intent on getting to Shelob - swarmed right over the clock faces and waxed straw, as if they were just insignificant obstacles.

At an opportune moment, the heavy weights were released, and the clock hands surged into motion, rapidly achieving their top spin speeds.

Some spiders were cut down.

Some leapt clear, only to land on waxed straw which was already burning merrily. They burned too.

Some leapt more successfully - onto straw that was not yet burning - and then tried to leap again to safety. Some of these succeeded, while many others ran into traffic problems - many spiders were also trying to leap through the same space at the same time. A number of them ran into each-other mid-air and fell to their deaths - burned or chopped..

"Bah!" Tav vented his frustration. "Very disorderly. I dunno... call it 3000 more."

The remaining spiders swarmed up the sides of Shelob's temporary stone pool.

In an instant, they covered all 4 walls of it and were doing what they could to pull the bricks down.

They were not smart enough to work together.

But they didn't have time anyway.

The bricks on top had been replaced with new furrowed bricks, with channels and gaps in the right places, and a lip on the inside rim.

So when the dwarves running that trap pulled their levers, and the barrels of lamp oil on tops of the wall emptied their contents into the furrows and channels, the whole wall forming Shelob's pool got covered in highly flammable lamp oil.

Moments later, that was lit and solid walls of flame covered all 4 sides of the wall around Shelob.

Most of the remaining spiders were caught in those flames.

"That got the rest," Tav confirmed. "All but maybe 200 climbing up the cliff to counter-attack our crossbows."

"Well, that was easy!" Somebody sighed. "The elves have been fighting these spiders for how long?"

"Don't get overconfident," Durog cautioned. "These ones aren't even using what little intelligence they have. Normally they'd lurk somewhere hidden and strike from ambush. These are single-mindedly pressing forward, in a group, as if compelled. That brings them out in the open and makes them easy targets. But remember, even though the following swarms will each be significantly smaller, we've used up some of our best tricks. The clock faces have run down, and we're not likely to get a chance to rewind their cables nor attach those to new or re-hoisted weights. And we used all the lamp-oil we had. So this isn't over yet."

"Yes boss."

Durog nodded, and added "we have guys dropping rocks down the cliff face to squish or knock down the spiders climbing there. That will probably take care of them."

But spiders that small were not hurt much by falling down a cliff - the ones not squished just got up and started climbing all over again. They needed direct hits to squish them enough and so that process was still ongoing, when the next wave arrived.

The second wave of spiders were about the size of cats, on average.

Tav's estimate was about 3000 spiders in this swarm.

"Signal the bait squad," Durog hated using that term for the group of valiant fighters including his King, but the term had stuck and he didn't want to confuse anyone by using a different term now. "This is the group we will try to capture."

The main entrance tunnel to Lonely Mountain had been open during the last rush, but no spiders had entered.

The spiders had single-mindedly tried to rescue Shelob, and they had only been distracted from that when they had a clear threat to counterattack.

Apparently some group attacking the spiders and trying to prevent them from rescuing Shelob was reason enough for the spiders to break off and kill, or try to kill, all who opposed them

And that is where the Bait Squad came in.

They were all volunteers from among the Mighty Dwarves Of Valor, or theM DOVs as Durog still thought of them.

But not all of that group were part of the Bait Squad.

Every dwarf has his own fighting style, and the dwarves that depended on speed and agility were usually not the ones who had the most raw strength.

So they had been left out of Bait Squad - though all had volunteered - since Bait Squad needed raw strength to carry the extra armor they would have to wear.

No matter how nimble you are, a swarm of this many spiders was going to get on you, find a weak-spot in your armor, and bite you.

Their answer to that had been to make sure there were no weak-spots. This meant adding armor to the known weak-spots - mainly the joints - and that added extra weight to the whole suit of armor. So a certain minimum strength was necessary to carry it all.

That could have been worse - the bigger the spiders got, the greater the chance that they could pierce right through an armor plate.

The smaller spiders pretty much had to bite where the armor wasn't.

So they were aiming to capture smaller spiders and get by with thinner - though ubiquitous - armor plating.

Discussions had gone long and had been very animated - what kind of armor went best with a certain situation was a favorite topic among dwarves. Asking them that was almost like asking elves what kind of wine went best with a particular meal - they could talk about it for hours.

But the dwarves had settled on plate armor, with a special kind of chainmail covering all the joints and gaps.

Normal chainmail would have been inadequate - the spiders' fangs were small enough to slip through the holes in the rings making up normal chainmail.

But chainmail was the most flexible armor, by far, and there was a reason that the joints were usually left unarmored - it took a lot of custom work and special fittings to get armor coverage for someone's joints that didn't prevent those joints from moving as they needed to.

And they didn't have the kind of time that would require.

But Plumata, as this special chainmail was called, would serve their purposes. With it, each ring in the chainmail went through the usual 4 other rings, but also through a small metal plate about the size of that ring. The end result was a flexible scale-mail that resembled bird plumage. Thus the name Plumata.

They'd had some around because it looked nice, and it was a simple matter to take apart a few shirts of Plumata and use the pieces to cover the joints of several suits of plate armor.

Their armor-smiths - whom many would say were the best in the world - had assured them that the resulting armor could not be penetrated by any set of fangs matching the parameters given them by the elves, for this size of spiders and up to and including spiders about the size of dogs, though past that they could make no guarantees.

They had better be right.

The King, his son, and his grandson were all in the Bait Squad.

Many dwarves thought that was a bad idea. But nobody could order those 3 to do otherwise.

So it was that the heavily armored Bait Squad, including the King and his descendants, was ready to meet the spiders by the front entrance.

They were not in front of the main entrance though.

They kept that clear so the ballistas deep within the tunnel could fire a few times.

They wanted to get the attention of as many spiders as possible, and focus them on the tunnel so they would enter it.

The remaining spiders of the second swarm - Tav estimated 1850 cat-sized spiders remained after the trebuchets had worked them over - arrived by the front entrance and were met by ballista fire from within the tunnel as planned.

Some spiders headed in to the tunnel. But most climbed the sides of Shelob's temporary pool.

They were opposed by the dwarves of the Bait Squad.

That squad had planned their battle tactics, including fighting in formation so they could keep the spiders off each-other and carry to safety any dwarves that got poisoned.

But this was a very high-spirited group of dwarves.

So it was that, after just a couple minutes of fighting in a careful orderly professional way as they usually did, when they discovered that their armor really did make them invulnerable to spiders of this size, a strange thing happened.

The fighting dwarves of Bait Squad became giddy, and started getting a bit silly.

It started with one dwarf grabbing a spider that was perched on his hip trying to bite his crotch, and throwing it at another spider. Both spiders then attacked that dwarf again, to no effect. His armor, like that of the others, had already stopped dozens of bites successfully.

They had been reminded many times not to try to kill all of these spiders, since the King wanted this group captured.

And throwing spiders turned out to be a good way to make them ignore Shelob's tank and attack the thrower instead.

So pretty soon spiders were being thrown at other spiders by nearly all the dwarves of Bait Squad.

Nearly all - the King had pre-positioned a crate full of slim throwing knives - almost like stilettos - sized perfectly for these spiders, and was carefully grabbing one spider at a time and inserting a knife into each "magic spot" - the spot where you could pierce the poison sac without killing the spider, and thus create a magic weapon when the spider died of its own poison and its magic drained into the embedded weapon.

So the King's only participation in what came to be known as Spider Bowling was to have other dwarves occasionally toss him another spider to stab, while he worked through his crate of knives, and left a nice orderly grid of dying spiders on the ground behind him.

The rest of Bait Squad, though, had great fun inventing the game later called Spider Bowling.

They awarded points for each spider thrown, for each spider hit by a thrown spider, and especially for 'trick shots', like hitting multiple spiders with a single throw, or even throwing one spider into another and knocking that one into a third, or even more, spiders.

So they milked the situation for all it was worth, throwing spiders about with gleeful abandon as they each did their best to try to get written into the dwarf sagas by doing extraordinary things.

Their disappointment was palpable when the King finally ran out of knives and called a halt to this stage of the operation.

But still, the dutiful dwarves marched into the main entrance tunnel of Lonely Mountain, still throwing things - mostly other spiders - at any spiders which appeared as if they may not follow.

They had had enough time to personally attack every spider, so all the remaining spiders - Tav estimated 1470 - followed Bait Squad into the mountain.

After they were well clear of it, Durog closed the Slam Door, sealing the entrance closed.

Bait Squad marched the full length of the tunnel to the fort at the other end. Then they began the process of disengaging from the spiders.

Two dwarves from Bait Squad opened the sally port door in the fort wall, and entered the small room that had been specially built there for this purpose.

They closed the outer door behind them.

That room was sealed closed by an inner door.

While in the 'cleaning room' each dwarf picked up any spiders which had followed them, and carefully stuffed them in thick leather sacks which had been left there for that purpose.

They kept this up until no spiders remained free, outside the sacks.

Then they pulled a lever, which raised the small "all clear" flag outside, opened the inner door, and went through to another small room, where they were inspected before being let in to the underground dwarf city.

Back in the entrance tunnel, when they saw the "all clear" flag, the next two dwarves would wait one minute, to be sure, then open the outer door to the 'cleaning room', toss out the bags full of spiders, close the door and repeat the process.

It took several minutes before this sorting process was done, and all the dwarves inside while all the spiders remained in the main tunnel - some still in sacks, some having already chewed through their sacks, and some loose.

Then it took a few more minutes to wash all the poison off of the dwarves of Bait Squad. But they did so, so that no wound gained during the rest of the battle would have poison already smeared nearby, ready to ooze in and paralyze them.

So it was that Bait Squad missed most of the next stage of the battle, when the 1000 or so spiders about the size of dogs arrived.

It was just as well - their arms were tired and needed a brief rest anyway.

When ready, they headed off into the tunnels so they could emerge on the trebuchet ledge and aid the defense there.

They gave no further thought to the cat-sized spiders trapped in the main entrance tunnel. The plan was to let them sit there a day or so, then trick them into 'escaping' into the backup drowning reservoir when that was opened to drop a couple orc bodies in to feed them.

The backup reservoir had been emptied and altered for this purpose - it would be the new 'spider ranch'. It was assumed the spiders, held imprisoned in the main entrance tunnel for a while, would swarm up the walls and into the reservoir when it opened, supposedly to provide them food.

The trebuchet ledge could use the extra defense.

When the dog-sized spiders had arrived, the dwarves had switched tactics and started trying to hit their 'magic spots' with crossbow bolts, fired from loopholes in the walls and on top of the trebuchet ledge.

They used special crossbow bolts, made entirely of the same steel they used for clock-springs because they wanted the durability for any that became magic.

The spiders had mostly counter-attacked, swarming up the cliff to get at the defenders.

Several sets of shutters were slammed on spiders, squishing them as they tried to attack through firing loopholes.

But then those shuttered loopholes had trouble opening again, since, when they tried, spiders were usually waiting to attack.

The dwarves tried opening the shutters just a crack, and thrusting out knives through the cracks to damage and dissuade any waiting spiders. But that was slow going.

So the dwarves above them, on top of trebuchet ledge, started emptying baskets of brick-sized rocks over the edge, so they'd fall down the cliff and hit any spiders climbing it.

That helped, but it made trebuchet ledge another target for swarming spiders.

They had swarmed up and forced the dwarven defenders back, until there was only a tight defensive line of fighting dwarves in a group immediately before the door into the mountain.

There, the dwarves held their ground, not because they really needed to - they could have entered and sealed the door behind them - but because they had not been included in Bait Squad and wanted a chance to prove their own valor.

Dwarves were like that sometimes.

When Bait Squad arrived at the fighting, the dwarves counter-attacked the remaining spiders, and cleared trebuchet ledge.

Then more dwarves came out and they all dropped rocks on spiders, or shot at their 'magic spots' with crossbows, until that wave of spiders were all dealt with.

They had barely any time to rest before the wave of about 300 man-sized spiders arrived.

These were smart.

They could see groups of dead spiders amid splatters of what had been molten metal. So they watched for things coming at them and moved rapidly out of the way.

The pots of molten metal killed none of them.

So the trebuchets switched to baskets of bricks. These scattered early in their flight, so they were much harder to spot and dodge.

Tav estimated that the trebuchets got 20 that way.

The ball reservoir let loose, but the spiders nimbly dodged and leapt to avoid them.

"That got only 11 of them," Tav stated flatly.

They let loose the last two ball reservoirs at once, but got only another 14 spiders.

Then the spiders reached Shelob's enclosure.

Briefly they bunched up behind the far wall which provided shelter from incoming crossbow shots. Some of them climbed the temporary wall and started knocking bricks down starting at the top.

Other spiders climbed the cliff face to get at their attackers on trebuchet ledge.

Most of the firing loopholes were silent now, having been webbed shut by the previous wave of spiders.

Dwarves were trying to clear the webbing, but it was difficult to do from the inside. Knives and such pushed through cracks between the shutters just tended to get stuck in the webbing.

As the spiders climbed, rocks were dropped on them. Some hit. Some were dodged.

As the spiders neared the top, the dwarves dropping rocks withdrew and theM DOVs advanced to their places.

When the spiders reached the top, a hand-to-fang battle commenced.

These spiders were about the size of opponents the dwarves were used to fighting.

There weren't many more spiders than dwarves on trebuchet ledge.

And while the dwarves had not fought giant spiders before today, they had studied under the tutelage of elves who had. And they had practiced with fake spiders that 'moved' and 'attacked' in the most realistic ways their operators could manage.

So the dwarves held their own, fighting conservatively.

They'd brought shields, and so used only one-handed weapons in the front rank, supported by spears in the next rank. They usually preferred the greater offensive power of two-handed weapons, but against poisonous foes they wanted to be more careful.

And shields proved to be a great defense against the spiders.

The shields were too thick for the spiders - at least this size of spiders - to bite through.

And the dwarves quickly verified a trick the elves had told them - that the spiders would reflexively bite at whatever was thrust in their faces.

The telling point proved to be that dwarves were used to working together, and the spiders were not.

The spiders tended to get in each-other's way, jostling for the chance to get at their enemy.

The dwarves coordinated their actions.

Typically the front rank dwarf would use his hand weapon to parry the spiders clawed legs, while jamming his shield in its face.

At the same time the dwarf in the next rank would stab the spider - preferably in the 'magic spot' - with his spear.

The dwarves holding the flanks had it roughest - with spiders climbing around trying to get behind them or at least to their sides. It helped that there were more dwarves available to fight than there was space to fight in, so there were no undefended areas. But still, spiders tried to come at them in unexpected ways - like climbing to the cliff above and descending onto the ledge, or even leaping to cling to the massive frames of the trebuchets to attack from there.

But the dwarves defending the flanks fought defensively, playing for time so the front ranks could thin the spider numbers and bring them relief.

It helped that only a part of this swarm had attacked the ledge. The rest of the swarm quickly demolished the temporary stone walls of the 4-sided tank which held Shelob, the 168 ton hammer pinning her flattened body in place, and a whole lot of water.

As the water drained away, the spiders started trying to move the massive stone war-hammer off Shelob's corpse.

They tried pushing, pulling, lifting, dragging with webbing used like ropes, and rocking the huge war-hammer, all to no avail.

About that time a hidden sally port door opened in the cliff face between the right leg of the giant, unfinished statue of Thrain and the left leg of the giant unfinished statue of Thorin by his side.

The dwarves who had wanted to join the fight on trebuchet ledge, but for whom there had been no room, sallied out to engage the spiders still working on freeing Shelob's corpse.

The dwarves didn't sally far. They formed a line of battle, arcing from the cliff face out and back again, around the sally port door.

Then dwarves standing behind the line and armed with crossbows and the last few spring-steel bolts, took careful aim at spiders and fired.

Some hit the 'magic spot', some didn't, but the attack provoked the nearest spiders to attack the dwarves.

These dwarves lived for that.

They relished it.

And they were armed with magic weapons, just like the dwarves defending trebuchet ledge. The King had wanted all their magic weapons in use.

They also all carried spare weapons - more than usual, that is: dwarves always carry spare weapons. This was so that any weapon striking a 'magic spot' could be left there to become magic when that spider died, and yet not leave that dwarf unarmed, even if he had to leave a couple weapons behind like that.

King Thror was optimistic.

The dwarves had almost finished destroying the man-sized spiders when the last two waves of spiders - 91 horse-sized spiders and 25 twice that size - arrived together.

The 116 'horse-plus' spiders ignored the fighting and went straight to Shelob's body. After a brief moment assessing the situation, they tried pulling and pushing the war-hammer off of her.

But they didn't spend long at that.

Then they switched to trying to knock down the statue of Thror, whose arm still held the 168 ton hammer.

They shoved at it from all sides - not working together exactly, but not far from it. It was more like they were all thinking along the same lines, and though they acted individually on those thoughts, they did so at roughly the same times and in the same ways, which approximated working together.

After shoving at the statue from all sides, they climbed the cliff and shoved at the statue's head. This gave them better leverage, but still they could not budge the 50 foot tall stone statue.

Then they attached webbing to the statue's head, descended to ground level, moved a short distance while still attached to the webbing, and started to pull.

The first few made no difference, but they kept pulling.

And more and more joined them, all pulling in the same direction.

They actually had the giant statue rocking a little by the time the dwarves finished with the previous group of spiders and charged the 'horse-plus' group.

The spiders saw them coming, dropped what they were doing and leapt to attack. Even big ones like this were pretty nimble.

Dwarves with Dragon-Forged weapons used their speed and agility to block spider attacks and keep spiders busy, stabbing when they could.

Dwarves with Troll-Forged weapons used their strength to cut right through any part of a spider they could reach.

As spiders lost limbs or got otherwise disabled, they got stabbed in the 'magic spot'.

As dwarves fell, other dwarves carried them away to the healers, who were assisted by elves with special herbal salves and anti-toxins.

Fallen dwarves were replaced by plentiful volunteers.

Even Skinny, now known as Durathror Sword-Shaver, got a turn at the front line and killed a spider before he too, fell wounded. He was not nimble enough to dodge. But others retrieved his sword for him - after it became Spider-Forged - and it would be welcome with him at the hospital, due to its regenerative magic.

Durog joined the queue too, largely for appearances sake. His real part in the extended battle was concluded anyway. Spotters said there were no more spiders oncoming.

He was tremendously surprised, soon thereafter, to find himself in front, fighting a spider twice the size of a horse.

While he had practiced dutifully with his new spike-hammer, he was acutely aware, then, that he was no Mighty Dwarf of Valor.

His weapon was heavy - not much good for blocking or parrying. Rather it was all about offense.

So he resigned himself to his fate, thought of the dozens of lucky charms festooning him under his armor, yelled "ba DUM" - mine code for "attacking", trusted in his teammates, and lunged.

The dwarf to his left distracted the spider with a jab at its eyes.

The dwarf to his right chopped off the clawed leg the spider tried to impale Durog with.

And Durog planted the long spike of his spike-hammer deep in the spider's 'magic spot'.

The other dwarves told him all about it later, when he woke up in the hospital.

They said he'd flown quite far when a spider leg lashed out and hit him in the chest.

The dwarves had won.

Pretty much all their magic weapons were "Double-Forged" now: adding Spider-Forged to whatever they had been before.

Thror and Thorin had Triple-Forged primary weapons.

And that wasn't counting the growing effects from the Accelerator Runes all their weapons had.

King Thror had had work parties 'harvesting' the dead spiders for all the parts that were, or might be, magically useful.

Elves had gone back to Mirkwood with messages, and had returned with more elves and herbal salves to heal the wounded.

The cat-sized spiders trapped in the main entrance tunnel had even been successfully baited to move into the former reserve drowning reservoir, now renamed the Spider Ranch.

They had even been successfully fed a couple formerly-frozen orc bodies while there, using the hollow-cylinder-and-piston system Durog had built there before they arrived.

And with all that activity, nobody had done anything about Shelob's corpse.

Durog nearly freaked out.

"All those spiders were focused on freeing Shelob's body, and you didn't wonder why?" he demanded of Skinny, who had come to bring him up to date.

"She's dead." Skinny replied simply.

"And she worked for Sauron, also known as The Necromancer - a field of magic focused on making dead things act alive again, in various horrible ways. We don't want a legendary monster like her brought back again - even in some kind of horrible undeath."

"Ooh, good point." Skinny allowed.

Durog took a breath. "Ok, here's what we'll do. First, get the guys to rebuild the wall around her and fill that tank with water again. Send to the humans of Lake Town for more of those shellfish that drill through shells and even stone to eat what's beneath. But while we're waiting for them, get some of the solid iron trebuchet shot up to red-hot and drop them in the tank with Shelob's corpse. Drop in enough to get it boiling, and keep it boiling for, oh, say an hour. That ought to help decompose the corpse nicely. We will wait until it cools again before adding the shellfish. And see what other carnivorous fish the humans may be able to get. I was worried about that corpse even before this attack. Now I want to be as sure as possible that nothing can bring her back."

"Will do, boss," Skinny replied. "But you know, that reminds me of another thing that happened while you were 'out', so to speak."

Skinny trailed off in thought.

Durog gave him a moment before asking "and what was that?"

Skinny blinked as he brought his focus back to the here-and-now. "Maybe what you say about the necromancer explains why a ring-wraith showed up here yesterday."

"What!?" Durog gasped.

"The event was not as dramatic as you'd think. The Nazgul walked right in, straight towards Shelob's corpse, supremely confident of it's own invulnerability. King Thror and his heroes went out to intercept it. The ring-wraith bragged, threatened and postured a bit before King Thror just stabbed it and it died."

"Hun."

"Yah. The elves are still debating whether King Thror's Ring of Power more or less equalled and canceled out the effect of the Ring of Power worn by the Nazgul, thus leaving the contest at a 'dwarf versus wraith' level, which the dwarf won by having a magic weapon and striking first. Or whether King Thror's spear is just that magic now - strong enough to just kill a ring-wraith by itself. They're studying the Nazgul's ring too, of course."

"Yes, they like studying things," Durog replied.

"Come to think of it," he continued, "boil the corpse of Shelob for 6 hours. Half that time would have even the toughest stringiest potroast falling off its bones and disintegrating in your mouth. So 6 hours should go a long way to getting her corpse to decompose and be unusable to the necromancer. We don't know all that he can do, but he does, and if he is sending minions here, it suggests he thinks he can salvage her in some way. They seem focused on her corpse, so lets do our best to deny that to them. Even magic axes haven't done much damage to it, but decomposition might."

"We'll get right on that boss," Skinny said, and hurried off.

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Author's Note

This special chainmail, with each ring running through a small metal plate, is real. The Romans called it Lorica Plumata when they used it about 2000 years ago. Some re-enactors have made sets, and you can find pictures online. It is beautiful (or maybe that's just my inner dwarf talking).

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Omake

In later years, Spider Bowling would be formalized into something like billiards played in 3D, with more points awarded for the trickier shots.

There had been some debate about whether to make the ball round or leave it spider-shaped. In the end, dwarf cantankerousness prevailed, and it was agreed that round balls would make it too easy.

They experimented with several materials - wood, hollow metal, ceramic, horn, and others - before finally settling on a resin the elves produced from tree sap. It was as hard as ceramic, making for great rebound shots, but as resilient as wood, meaning 'spiders' didn't have to get replaced as often.

The elves also knew of another kind of sap that was great for sticking 'spiders' up high on walls, ceilings, and tree limbs, so games could be nice and complicated.

This helped heal racial relations between the elves and dwarves - though the two still compete vigorously for the annual Shelob Trophy, which goes to the best Spider Bowling team among all the leagues.