Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

“What he’s saying in his excruciatingly diplomatic way,” Lucan interrupted, “is exactly what Roji told you back at Crow Fork Market. Every time you make one of us take the box away from you, you endanger all of our lives. By Melora, it is about time you understood that.” He stalked back toward the fire, then stopped halfway there. “We didn’t save your life for you to cost us ours!” he called.

Keverel walked up to Remy and held out the box. “I wouldn’t have put it that way,” the cleric said. “Now that it has been said, however, I do not repudiate what Lucan said. Our lives are not yours to toy with because you’re having second thoughts about accepting your package. Take it.”

Remy did.

“Now hold it. Do not open it. Do not complain about it. Show it to no one else until we arrive at Karga Kul. Understood?”

“I understand,” Remy said. “Sorry.”

“We want no apologies,” Biri-Daar said as she walked by him carrying the waterskins he’d dropped when she grabbed his arms. “We want-we need-to be able to rely on you.”

They broke camp and saddled up to ride without saying anything else. It was a quiet day after that, down into the valley and on along the road as it rose toward the next range of the Serrata… until they saw the first of the orcs.

Remy spotted it first, leaning out from an overlook on the steep slope that broke up from the road to their right. Lucan was riding next to him. Without pointing, he said, “Lucan. Orc on the mountain, up to the right.”

In one smooth move, Lucan unslung his bow, nocked an arrow, and fired. The snap of the bowstring got the rest of the party’s attention; they came ready, hands on hilts. At their last river crossing, Remy had picked up a pouch full of lemon-sized stones. He shook his sling loose and fitted a stone into it, looking up the slopes on either side of the road as Lucan’s arrow found its mark. The orc sentry crumpled out of sight. For a moment none of them said anything; they held still, putting every sense to work finding out whether there were any more.

“Should we go make sure?” Kithri said quietly.

Lucan shook his head. “No need.”

“I believe him,” Biri-Daar said. “We go on, but carefully. There is never only one orc.”

Never only one, Remy thought. That was the first one he had ever seen.

“And where there are orcs, there are usually hobgoblins giving their orders,” Biri-Daar added.

The followers of Gruumsh had been the material of stories to scare the children of Avankil since Remy had been old enough for his elders to want to frighten him. He had always known they were real, but until seeing that one Remy had never expected to see an orc in the flesh. He certainly hadn’t seen it for long.

And now he was learning that they were serving the hobgoblins. It was as if all of the fables Remy had heard as a child were coming to life around him.

“Wouldn’t be surprised to see ogres before it’s all over,” Kithri said.

The horses’ hooves clipped along the ancient stones. They looked up and saw nothing except scrubby pine trees and hawks riding the updrafts along the faces of the mountains that rose up around them. Occasionally a lizard skipped between rocks. Every motion wore at their nerves a little more. “Bring them,” Lucan repeated every so often. “Bring them. Anything to kill the suspense.”

About an hour after the first sighting, they saw smoke in the sky ahead. An hour later, the road rose next to a tumbling creek until they crested a ridge and discovered the source. There had once been a farmstead there; three or four thatched outbuildings arranged around a central home with stone walls and a beam roof. They could tell it was a beam roof because the charred stumps of some of the beams still angled up from the top edge of the walls. The outbuildings were collapsed into smoking rubble. In the yard just outside the doorway lay a body, facedown. Not far away lay a dog, eviscerated, its limbs cut off and flung away. They approached and Keverel said, “Gnawed the bones. Not just of the dog.”

“Who lives out here?” Kithri said. “Might as well beg the passing orcs to stop for lunch. Until the ogres eat them in turn.”

“A bit of respect for the dead,” Biri-Daar said.

They looked around to see if there were survivors, but found none. “Not a terrible place,” Lucan said. “Fish in the river, deer in the valleys. Enough sun for a garden. I would settle down here. Right at the edge of where the mountains rise up.” Tears stood in the elf’s eyes. “Biri-Daar, I realize that our errand is of terrible import, but if there is an afternoon to spend killing orcs I would consider it a boon.”

Iriani looked out across the clearing, across the road to where the ridge curled and rose farther into a maze of notched canyons. “An afternoon well spent,” he said.

From inside the house, where she had gone to ensure there were no survivors, Biri-Daar emerged. “At times, one must put aside an errand to spend an afternoon in charity.”

The orcs’ track wasn’t hard to follow. It led across the meandering river at a broad ford less than a mile along the road from the sacked homestead. From there it climbed at an angle away from the road, following an old landslide scar up to an overhung ledge where a pair of orcs stood cracking bloody bones in their teeth. Lucan dropped one of them with an arrow and Remy the other with a slung stone. Immediately Kithri appeared from the scrub at the side of the ledge to make sure both were dead. At a hand signal from her, the rest of the party made their way to the ledge. The overhung hollow opened into a cave. Without hesitation they fell into the order of battle that had already become their unspoken habit. Biri-Daar and Keverel led, flanked by Lucan and Remy, with Kithri and Iriani immediately behind. They stormed down the main passage, kicking aside heaps of stinking refuse and making it all the way to the first split before they encountered resistance.

Surging out from the pitch-dark depths of both branches, the orcs swarmed them. As soon as it happened, their order of battle meant nothing. Orcs were everywhere, trampling over their dead to overwhelm the invaders. They were subhuman, savage beasts living in filth, destroying all that was beautiful. All of Remy’s childhood stories came to life; he cut them down as fast as they got within range of his sword, and still there were more. Light blazed along the ceilings of the passages, revealing broken-off stalactites and the teeming forms of the orcs. Keverel had brought the light, and in the sudden illumination Iriani could see where all of his comrades were. Remy saw him step off to one side, putting himself against the wall; Remy went with him, anticipating that the wizard would be planning something magical and would need protection to complete it.

He was right. As soon as he got there, he deflected challenges from a cluster of orcs and then the branch passageway exploded in a crackle of fire that incinerated every orc in sight. The fire vanished and the rush of air drew the air from Remy’s lungs.

In the other passage, Biri-Daar and Lucan were hewing their way through the remaining orcs. The rest of the party joined them and together they punched into the chamber at the heart of the orcs’ lair… just as the surviving orcs scattered and a pair of ogres appeared, flanking a larger orc with ritualized scars surrounding the open socket of the eye he had sacrificed to his god. “Eye of Gruumsh,” Lucan said. “You, orc! Elf here!”

As clumsy a ploy as it was, it worked perfectly. The god of the elves, Corellon, had gouged the eye from the orc patron Gruumsh. The orcs who mimicked that wound nurtured a hatred of elves and all things elven.

The Eye of Gruumsh said something in Orcish and the ogres lumbered forward, both to protect it and to destroy the elf interloper. Biri-Daar met one of them head on, stepping inside the looping swing of its morningstar and opening its guts with a hooked thrust. The other ogre swatted Lucan down to his knees and the Eye of Gruumsh sprang closer for the kill, its battle cry nearly drowning out the dying roars of the gutted ogre. It had its spear raised, its mouth open, its one good eye wide in triumph-until Kithri’s thrown knife flashed across the chamber and struck at an angle up through the roof of its mouth.