namshiel attacks artics tor 1

Charity's guess about the portcullis had been bang on. Pieces of it lay Scattered about, mixed among the bones. Where the gate arched beneath the Fortress walls, there were still more bones, waist-deep on me, and slabs of planed dark ice, the remains of the fortress gate, stuck out at odd angles. The walls of Arctis Tor had been pitted with what I could only assume had Deen an acid of some kind. There were larger gouges blown out of the walls mere and there, but against their monolithic volume, they were little more Chan pockmarks.
I pushed ahead to the gate, plowing my way through bones. Once there, I Caught a faint whiff of something familiar. I leaned closer to one of the Craters blown out of the wall and sniffed.
"What is it?" Thomas asked me.
"Sulfur," I said quietly. "Brimstone."
"What does that mean?" he asked.
"No way to tell," I half lied. But my intuition was absolutely certain of what had happened here. Someone had thrown Hellfire against the walls of Arctis Tor. Which meant that the forces of the literal Hell, or their agents, were also playing a part in the ongoing events.

The black ice walls of Arctis Tor were sixty feet thick, and walking through the gateway felt more like walking through a railroad tunnel.

"What killed them, Harry?" Murphy asked.
"Fire. They were burned to death," I said quietly. "Down to the bone."
"Could you do that?" Thomas asked.
I shook my head. "I couldn't make it that hot. Not at the heart of Winter." Not even with Hellfire. The remains of perhaps a thousand creatures lay scattered about. I'd cut loose once in the past and roasted a bunch of vampires and maybe some of their victims with them-but even that inferno hadn't been big enough to catch more than a tithe of the fallen defenders of Arctis Tor.
"Then who did it?" Charity asked quietly.
I didn't have an answer for her. I rose and nudged a smaller skull with my staff. "The littler ones were goblins," I said. "Foot soldiers." I rolled a troll-sized thighbone aside with my staff. An enormous sword, also of that same black ice, lay shattered beneath it. "These trolls were her personal guard." I gestured back at the gate. "Covering her retreat to the tower, maybe. Some of them got taken down along the way. The others made a stand at the tower's base. Died there."