ORCS: Army of Shadows

by Stan Nicholls

“Reinforcements, ma’am?” the first queried. “It’ll be a while before we see any out here on the fringes.”

  “The more reason to stand firm. Now let’s get those wounds seen to. And stay alert!”

  They ripped up bedding for dressings and set to binding their injuries. Their captain got them checking their weapons, and scouring the barracks for more. She had them further reinforce the door. Anything to keep them occupied.

  “Hey,” one of the troopers said, halting the activity. “It’s gone really quiet out there.”

  They listened to the silence.

  “Could be they’ve gone,” a comrade offered, instinctively whispering.

  “Maybe the backup’s arrived,” somebody added hopefully.

  “So why can’t we hear them?”

  “Just the sight of reinforcements coming might’ve scared the creatures off.”

  “Care for a wager on that?”

  “Stow it!” the captain snapped. “Chances are the raiders have pulled out. All we have to do ��”

  A series of heavy thumps shook the door. They scrambled to it and threw their weight against the barricade. The pounding grew stronger, making the pile of furniture blocking it shudder. Fine clouds of dust began falling from the beamed ceiling.

  Something hit the door with a tremendous crash, the shock wave jolting the defenders and sending part of the barricade tumbling. They hardly had time to brace themselves again before there was a second hefty impact. A cabinet toppled. Something made of pottery shattered.

  The blows took on a regular, almost rhythmic pattern, each more jarring than the last. The door started to warp and splinter. The remains of their makeshift fortifications were weakening under the assault.

  “We… can’t hold… this!” a straining trooper warned.

  A battering ram smashed through the door, demolishing what was left of the barricade. Swinging again, the ram destroyed the vestiges of the door and sent debris flying.

  The troopers quickly moved away. Save one, caught in the confined space and entangled by wreckage. There was a high-pitched whistle. An arrow flashed through the gaping entranceway and struck him. Two more instantly followed. He went down.

  His companions retreated, weapons drawn, and backed along the aisle between the lines of camp beds on either side. Shadowy figures were swarming through the ruined entrance. Ugly, grotesque beasts. Monsters.

  The soldiers upended cots and tossed them in their pursuers’ path, hoping to slow their progress. A couple of the troopers had shields and deployed them in fear of more arrows. No arrows came, but the repellent creatures kept up their remorseless advance, leaping the obstacles or simply kicking them aside.

  Soon the fleeing group came to the barracks’ end, an area uncluttered with furnishings, and had no option but to make a stand. They gathered in a knot, backs to the wall, bracing themselves to brave the coming assault as best they could.

  There was no let in the creatures’ progress. They rushed onward, heedless of the bristling swords intended to keep them at bay.

  A frenzy of colliding blades and clashing shields ensued. Soon, screams were added to the cacophony. A trooper collapsed, his skull split by an axe. Another lost an arm to the sweep of a broadsword, then succumbed to multiple stabbing.

  The fight grew yet more feverish. Fuelled by desperation, the two remaining defenders battled with ever greater ferocity. In the blizzard of stinging steel one misjudged the tempo of the battering and left open his guard. A sword found his belly; another stroke sliced cleanly through his neck, sending his head bouncing to one side. The headless corpse stood for a second, gushing crimson, before it fell.

  Only the captain remained. Bloodstained, panting, her blade near slipping from moist fingers, she readied herself for the final act.

  The monsters could have attacked en masse and finished her in an instant. But they held back. Then just one came forward.

  It took the captain a moment to realise that the creature was waiting to engage her. She raised her sword. The being mirrored her and they set to.

  Silence had fallen again, save for the pealing clatter of their blades. She fenced well, for all she had suffered and witnessed. The beast matched her in skill, though its method relied more on power and a boldness that was almost reckless. Their duel ranged back and forth across the cramped barracks, but none of the other creatures impeded her or tried to join in. They merely watched.

  The finale came when the captain suffered a deep gash to her sword arm. A swift follow-through saw her take a further wound to the flank. Staggering, she lost her footing and went down.

  The creature stood over her. She looked up into its eyes. What she saw was something more than brutishness. The bestial was there, but tempered with what she could only think of as a kind of empathy. And, perhaps, even a hint of nobility.

  It was a fantastical notion, and it was the last one she would ever have.

  The monster plunged its blade into the captain’s chest.

  Wrenching her blade from the female’s corpse, Coilla said, “She fought well.”

  “They all did,” Stryke agreed.

  “For humans,” Haskeer sneered.

  More than a dozen other orcs were crowded into the barracks with them. All were Wolverines, with the exception of Brelan, a leader of the Acurial resistance. He elbowed through the throng, barely glancing at the human’s body. “Time we were out of here,” he told them.

  They streamed from the barracks. There were over a hundred orcs in the compound, the majority of them resistance members, along with the rest of the Wolverines and the Vixens, the female warband Coilla led. They were busy scavenging weapons and torching the place. The few humans left alive were mortally injured, and they let them be.

  As Brelan’s order to evacuate spread, the force began to leave, moving out in small groups or singly. They took their own wounded, but by necessity left their dead.

  Stryke, Haskeer and Coilla watched them go. Dallog, the Wolverines’ eldest member, and one of the newest, joined them.

  “We bloodied their nose good ’n’ proper,” he remarked.

  Stryke nodded. “We did, Corporal.”

  Haskeer shot Dallog a hard look and said nothing.

  “The tyros are shaping up well,” Coilla offered by way of compensation.

  “Seem to be,” Dallog replied. “I’m heading off with some of them now.”

  “Don’t let us keep you,” Haskeer muttered.

  Dallog stared at him for a second, then turned and left.

  “See you back at HQ!” Coilla called after him.

  “Go easy on him, Haskeer,” Stryke said. “I know he’s not Alfray but —”

  “Yeah, he’s not Alfray. More’s the pity.”

  Stryke would have had something further to say to his sergeant, and in harsher terms, had Brelan not returned.

  “Most have gone. You get going too. Hide your weapons, and remember the curfew starts soon, so don’t linger.” He jogged away.

  Their target had been well chosen. Being comparatively small, the garrison was a mite easier to overcome than some of its better manned counterparts would have been. And its location, just beyond the outskirts of Taress city, meant it was conveniently isolated. Not that they could afford to ignore caution. There were likely to be patrols in the area, and reinforcements could be quickly summoned.

  Outside the fort’s broken gates the last of the raiders were scattering. Donning various disguises, they left in wagons, on horses and, mostly, by foot. The majority would head for Taress, taking different routes, and melt into the capital’s labyrinthine back streets.

  Haskeer grumpily declared that he wanted to make his way back alone. Stryke was happy to let him. “But mind what Brelan said about the curfew. And stay out of trouble!”

  Haskeer grunted and stomped off.

  “So, which way for us, Stryke?” Coilla asked.

  “Haskeer’s going that way, so…”

  She pointed in the opposite direction
.

  “Right.”

  The course they chose took them through a couple of open meadows and into a wooded area. They moved at a fast clip, anxious to put some distance behind them. At their backs the fort burned, belching pillars of black, pungent smoke. Ahead, they could just make out Taress’ loftier towers, wine-red in the flaxen light of a summer’s evening.

  Not for the first time it struck Coilla how much Acurial’s rustic landscape differed from that of Maras-Dantia, the ravaged land of their birth; and how it so resembled their adoptive world of Ceragan.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Stryke was puzzled. “About what?”

  “Losing the star you trusted me with, probably to Jennesta. I feel such a fool.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it. I lost the other four to her too, remember. Who’s the bigger fool?”

  “Maybe we all are. We were betrayed, Stryke. It must have been somebody in the resistance who took the star I had.”

  “Could have been. Then again…”

  “You can’t mean somebody in our band.”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps an outsider took it.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know. But from now on we keep things close to our chests.”

  She sighed. “Whatever. Fact is we’re still stuck here.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I aim to get the stars back.”

  “From Jennesta? From the whole damn Peczan empire?”

  “There’ll be a way. Meantime we’ve got our work cut out riling the humans.”

  “Well, we struck a blow today.”

  “Yeah, and the orcs of this world are waking up. Some of ’em anyway.”

  “Wish I had as much faith in them as you do. The resistance’s gaining a few new recruits, true. But enough for an uprising?”

  “The more the screw tightens, the more we’ll see joining the rebels. We just have to keep goading the humans.”

  It was nearly dusk and shadows were lengthening. With the curfew looming they upped their pace some more. The edge of the city was in sight now and lights were coming on. Patrols were a real possibility as they got nearer, and they had to move with stealth. They crossed a stream and began skirting a field of chest-high corn that waved in a clement breeze.

  Neither spoke for some time, until Coilla said, “Suppose… suppose we don’t get the stars back. If we’re stuck in this world, and whether it has its revolution or not… well, what’s here for us? What place would we have?”

  It was a thought that plagued Stryke too, although he was careful not to voice it to those under his command. His mind turned to what he would lose if they really were trapped in Acurial. He pictured his mate, Thirzarr, and their hatchlings, kept from him by the unbridgeable gulf that separated the worlds.

  “We’ll endure,” he replied. “Somehow.”

  They turned their eyes skyward.

  There was a light in the firmament, bigger than any star. It had an ethereal quality, as though it were a burning orb seen through many fathoms of water.

  Stryke and Coilla knew it to be an omen. They wondered whom it bode ill for.

  2

  On the other side of the city, beyond its periphery, the terrain was less fitted to growing crops. There were moorlands here, and large stretches of bog, where not much more than scrub and heather grew.

  It was a place with a reputation. This was partly due to its poor fertility compared to the verdant land thereabouts. Although poor was not quite the right way of describing it. Perverse would have been a better word. There was something less than wholesome about the flora that bred here, and the animals that roamed were chiefly carrion eaters. The magical energy that coursed through the world had become corrupted in this spot.

  The area also had a bad name because of certain artefacts it housed. These were scattered about the moor in an apparently senseless jumble, though there were those who thought they saw a pattern. The ruins were called monuments, temples, shrines and moot-places, but nobody really knew their true function. Certainly none could guess at the purpose of some of the more perplexing and bizarre structures.

  The artefacts were fashioned in stone brought somehow from a distant quarry, and they were immensely ancient. No one knew who had built them.

  One particular stone formation, by no means the most extraordinary, stood at the bleak heart of the moor. It was an arrangement of columns and lintels, standing stones and ramparts, that made a whole yet seemed strangely at odds with geometry. Not in a way that could be seen, so much as it could be felt. Through design or decay sections of the edifice were open to the elements —notably a ring of stone pillars the colour of decaying teeth.

  Inside the circle, a light burned.

  A block of polished stone, chest-high and weighing several tons, was set in the centre. It was worn smooth by age, but the smothering of arcane symbols it bore were carved deeply enough that they were still visible. And now a copious quantity of blood, seeping from a pair of eviscerated corpses, made the markings even more distinct. The sacrifices, one male, one female, were human, opportunely provided by a summary judgement of felony.

  A lone figure stood by the altar. Those who favour the night and the creatures that walk it would have called her beautiful. She had waist-length, jet-black hair framing a face dominated by dark, unpitying eyes. The face was a mite too wide, particularly at the temples, and the chin tapered almost to a point. Her well-formed mouth was marred only by being more than usually broad. But her skin was perhaps the most startling feature. It had a faint silver-green sheen resembling that of tiny fish scales.

  In short, her beauty was confounding, yet undeniable.

  As dusk slipped into full night she undertook a profane ritual.

  On the altar before her, alongside the gutted bodies, lay the five instrumentalities stolen from the Wolverines, and which the warband had coined stars. They were small spheres, each of a different colour: sandy, green, dark blue, grey and red. All sprouted radiating spikes of varying numbers and lengths. For the sandy sphere they numbered seven; the dark blue had four, the green five, the grey two, and the red nine.

  The instrumentalities were made from an unknown material —unknown to all but a sorcerer elite, that is —and the Wolverines had found them indestructible.

  Next to the instrumentalities stood a small, unembellished silver casket, with its lid open. It contained a quantity of material that was, impossibly, both organic and inert. The substance’s texture was part waxy, part old leather, part lichen. It was unpleasant to the touch, but had a sweet aroma. In the parlance of wizards it was known as Receptive Matter. Sorcerers using it for benign purposes sometimes called it Friendly. But never Safe.

  The sorceress recited invocations of tongue-tying complexity, and performed certain other rites both intricate and dreadful. Beads of sweat stood out on her brow. She briefly wondered if such a spell might be too taxing even for her.

  Then, at the ritual’s climax, she thought she heard the instrumentalities sing.

  She had a moment of fusion with them. There was a kind of symbiotic connection, a melding, and brushed by their energy she glimpsed a fragment of their power. What she felt, and saw, was terrifying. Or would have been to any except those who lived by terror. She found it heady.

  The Receptive Matter accepted the transfer. It divided and began transmuting into the required shapes. Not long after, exhausted, she gazed at the fruits of her toil and reckoned herself satisfied.

  It was not entirely true to say that she was alone in the stone circle. Several others were present, standing at a respectful distance. But as they were technically dead the question of their presence in the normal sense was debatable. They were her personal guardians and fetch-its, the select few nearest to her, whose loyalty was unflinching because they had no other option.

  Outside the circle, far enough away for privacy, stood a ring of
more conventional protectors in the form of a detachment of imperial guards. Farther back still there was a road, or more accurately a rough track, on which a fleet of carriages were parked. In one of them, two men conferred in whispered tones.

  To the conquered orcs of Acurial, Kapple Hacher was known as Iron Hand. He was Peczan’s highest representative in the province. Or had been until the empire sent the female they had been waiting for. But for all her hints and threats he remained, at least in name, governor; and commander of the occupying army, with the rank of general.

  He was entering his years of later maturity. There were lines on his face and hands, but he was as fit as many a younger man, and had seen action before climbing to his present position. His hair, close-cropped, was silver; and he went against tradition somewhat in being clean-shaven. He was a meticulous individual, ramrod-backed and always clad in a pristine uniform. His rivals, and every official had critics in the mire of imperial politics, saw him as being too much in thrall to bureaucracy.

  Where Hacher represented the civil and military authority in the province, his companion embodied the spiritual. Brother Grentor was something like half the general’s age. It was a measure of his ability that he had risen to become prominent in the Order of the Helix in so short a time. Unlike the general he sported a beard, albeit close-trimmed, and an ample shock of blond hair. The expression he wore was invariably solemn; and as dictated by his title of elder, he always dressed in the simple brown robes of his order. Grentor had his own detractors, and they held that he too jealously guarded the Order’s secrets and privileges.

  The soldier and the holy man personified the twin pillars on which rested the Peczan empire. Inevitably, there were tensions between these factions, and a continuous tussle over power and influence, making Grentor and Hacher’s relationship occasionally fraught.

  Grentor had a lace kerchief pressed to his nose and mouth. He said something, but the words were muffled.

  “For the gods’ sake speak clearly, man,” Hacher told him.

  The elder gingerly removed the cloth and made a face. “I said, how you can stand this vile smell of rotting vegetation?”