Chapter 3

Firak Skulltaker grinned as he rasped his whetstone along the edge of his hundred folded blade and ignored, rightly, the taunts and sneers of his bunkmate.

“Look at Fir, acting like he invented the act of cutting,” Yorak said, shaking his head, while the only trolloc in their bunk, Tajura, snorted and spat on the ground.

“Next, he’ll be claiming to have invented women...”

“Cocks too.”

“Small minds mock what grand men have made,” Firak said, twirling his sword and then letting the tip of it rest against the dirt floor of the small barracks as he looked over at his mates. “And neither of you, I note, were made blademaster at my age.”

“That’s cause we get laid,” Yorak said, smirking.

“More than once, even.” Tajura added.

The tent flap to their shared home opened and Ildar Wiseblade stuck his head in. The powerfully built orc was as seamed with scars as he was slabbed with muscles, and his short and pale gray beard marked his experience, but it was the skull hanging from a necklace draped about his broad neck that made him the most impressive orc that Firak knew. That skull was from a cattlebeast that Ildar had spotted as worthy of being mentioned to the blood shamans. The greatest pride and honor anyone in the Hoard could have was to add to that great wealth of blood, and Ildar had managed it.

All the young grunts got to their feet, Firak coming to attention. “Wiseblade,” he said.

“Blademaster,” Ildar said, inclining his head. “The Elder has made it known – the Great Enemy is not here.”

“Damn,” Tajura grumbled, while Yorak nodded.

“I figured as much. They don’t even have flamepowder weapons,” he said.

Ildar shot them all a look that made even the more rambunctious members of the band quiet down.

“So, the humans are being brought into the Hoard. Many of them have escaped to the north on their ships, and the Elder wants to make sure they don’t come back to bother us while we prepare. For that case, we need you to set up fortifications and logistic support on the northern shore, near a small town the humans call...” Ildar pulled from his belt pouch a small, furled scroll. He squinted and sounded out the unfamiliar human name – spelled phonetically like as not. “Smith Hill.”

“These humans love their smithery,” Tarjura said, reaching down to snatch his throwing spear off the niche he had left it on. He twirled the weapon around and hefted up the bone tip with a grin. “I’ve never seen a metal blade that can match proper bone.”

“Say it to Fir,” Yorak said, chuckling and punching Firak in the shoulder. Firak snorted, loudly.

“I happen to like weapons that can hold an edge without needing to breed a new cattlebeast each time,” he said, before turning back to look at Ildar. “So, we go to Smith Hill, set up a base, keep an eye out for any human refugees. Anything else?”

“According to the wenches and churls that we’ve been plowin’, there are kingdoms of elves and fairies across the Great Northern Sea,” Ildar said, scratching at his jaw – which provoked a giggling snort from Tarjura.

“Oh wee little fairies? Tiny girls with butterfly wings? Oh, I’m shaking in my loincloth!” he exclaimed, throwing his knees into a playful wobble, while Yorak laughed and slapped his shoulder, his mirth boiling over.

“Oh the elves might make us have to take the wrong kind of tea to their fancy dinners!” he added. “Oh no!”

“You two have never one met an elf in your lives,” Firak said, frowning. “What if they’re terrifying warriors?”

“Sure. Sure.” Tarjura lifted his arm, flexing his bright blue bicep with clear relish. “The Hoard has been undefeated in forty years since leaving the Garden, two generations of victory and triumph, but we’ll be laid low by a wee little fairie knight riding on a big bug.” He guffawed again, while Ildar frowned at the lot of them.

“Well, if you’re so cocksure, grunts, then you will finish the fortification at Smith’s Hill in almost no time at all, eh?” Ildar said, grinning most wickedly, his tusks glinting in the firefly light of the small barracks. “Go on! Get!” He pointed and Firak watched as his two comrades strode from the tent, still filling the air with fanciful stories of what terrifying tree forts the elves might use against the might of the Orcish Hoard. Before he could step out, Ildar put his hand on his shoulder.

“Try and keep those young idiots alive,” he said, quietly. “It is your duty as a blademaster to be sharper than the rest of these grunts.”

“Don’t worry, Wiseblade,” Firak said, grinning. “I think I can keep those two from drowning in a shallow puddle. Maybe not a deep puddle, though. Don’t ask for miracles.”

“Hah!” Ildar slapped his shoulder.

The three set forth from the former human capital on dire wolves, whose massive frames bore them across the land at a mighty speed – their paws flinging up dirt along the poorly paved roads of the former human kingdom. As they rode, Firak kept his gaze peeled for any human partisans, but near to the Hoard’s primary settlement, there seemed to be little in the way of human resistance – the farms and villages surrounding the capital of Khazgad were flying Hoard flags, and as they rode along, he saw at least one farmwife being bent happily over a fence, her dress hiked up while an minoc thrust into her from behind, the lewd slapping noise of flesh meeting flesh. The fact that the farms were, even now, being replaced by properly run cattlebeast ranches was part of why the woman was so clearly enjoying herself: The beasts were munching on the backbreakingly difficult to raise crops that the humans had spent so much of their life toiling over and tending to themselves, liberating the farmers from their woeful tasks to find ... new entertainments.

Tarjuna slowed his dire wolf down with a gentle squeeze of his knees, and called to the minorc. “Yo! Spare her for a ride?”

“We have work to do, you horny trolloc bastard,” Firak said, laughing as he slowed his dire wolf down.

“Yes, but she’s quite fine,” Tarjuna said – but he did little but kiss his palm to the moaning housewife.

“How do you think that the humans will be taken into the hoard, once the blood shaman get them down with?” Yorak asked as they rode on past the cattlebeast ranches and into the thickly wooded areas that, as shortly as a few months before, had been the site of many a furious calvary battles. There, the orcish and trolloc size had made up for the fact that human knights were tough customers, no matter what the grunts liked to say now that they had won. A dire wolf had claws and teeth, but a horse’s hoof – when shod by steel and driven with the furious frenzy of a well trained warbeast – could cave in skulls and chests better than even a mace or hammer blow.

“I bet they’re going to be made into something real fuckable,” Tarjuna said, nodding. “Their might isn’t in the field. Look at everything they needed to match us: Plate mail, swords, pikes. Meanwhile, oooh, their women.”

“Has there been a land or breed that you did not say had the finest women?” Yorak asked, shaking his head.

Firak snorted. “Lets see, we took the human kingdom at the coast, the one near that desert. You went on for days about those djini.”

“And the lake with the frog women,” Yorak said. “They didn’t even speak a civilized language.”

“They had sign language,” Tarjuna said, with a mock severity.

“Then there were those hyena women – I think their cocks were bigger than yours!” Yorak laughed.

“That’s what made them so fetching!” Tarjuna laughed.

“Wait...” Firak said, holding up his hand. His senses suddenly seemed to be honed to a razor edge, his ears twitching up, his broad nostrils flaring even wider. He scented blood and flame and smoke and a faint, tainted scent that reminded him alarmingly of a goblinoid experiment gone wrong. His voice grew sharp and fierce. “Grunts, at attention. There’s something amiss up ahead.” He kneed his dire wolf forward, using the reigns to guide the black furred beast off the road and into the thickly overgrown forest. While a horse might be swifter and more enduring and able to carry more weight, a dire wolf had the advantage when it came to slipping silently through the woods – and thus, they came unnoticed to the break in the line, his grunts crouched low and focused.

They had come to Smith’s Hill, it seemed.

But they had come after someone else. The thatched roofs of the human farms were burning, and dozens of humans lay in the field – all of them struck down by razor sharp sword strokes, riddled with arrows. One, a withered old man in the robes of the human’s temple-church, was blasted literally in half by some great force, as if an ogroc had taken hold of him and wrenched his upper torso away from his bottom. The village temple was desecrated in a way no Hoard war party would – the statue had been cast down and smashed and, from the buzzing flies, smeared in excrement and flies.

Firak waved his grunts to remain low, swinging himself off his dire wolf mount. He padded forward, his sword jouncing against his hip – he had planned to move up to one of the unburned buildings and peek past, but a soft, wheezing groan jerked his attention down. He knelt and was shocked to see the human’s priest yet lived. The goddess seemed to have a strange, twisted kindness upon humans. She had made them so very tough – even if sometimes, Firak thought, they would prefer she not.

“Elves...” the priest wheezed. “E-Elves ... f-from the coast...”

His head lasped back to the ground, his breath stilling out. Firak gently closed the man’s eyes. “Sleep well with your Goddess, brave priest,” he whispered, then drew his sword with a soft rasp. He glanced back and waved his hand at his grunts in specific code, who advanced in good order on foot, weapons drawn. The wolves waited in the darkness, gold eyes glittering in the reflected sunlight, despite the smoke.

Firak peeked around the corner and saw that there was one human still alive – a woman on her knees, her eyes wide while a robed figure stood before her, speaking in a strange, muscial tongue. The hand grasping the sword was elegant and pale as a human’s might have been, but the blade itself was oddly shaped and glittered a pale blue in the ruddy sunlight that peeked through the roiling smoke. The hood of the elf’s robes had holes cut for their long ears, which came to points that rivaled even a trolloc’s.