Blackguards

by J. M. Martin

  The whip. His only heirloom. A cruel black thing with a barbed popper and a gnashing jackal’s head wrought in tarnished silver encasing the knotted handle.

  “Home again, eh, boss?” Redshat said, having noticed Mogarth’s eyes, staring down at the valley waiting to be crushed flat and burned by the Black Army.

  “No home of mine,” Mogarth grumbled.

  In truth, the closest thing he had to home after his mother’s death had been with the Bellygashers, though he’d never admit it to Redshat.

  The people in Crossbow Hollow hadn’t treated him any better than the humans of Glean. No one would hire him, not even the stableyard master. Unable to secure work he’d taken to making money any way he could. Naturally large, he had earned a meager living fighting in the sawdust pits for a time, when a scheming promoter had convinced him it was possible to retire on a brawler’s winnings. But the crowds, most of them missing limbs or loved ones from the frequent ork raids, had hated him, and when it had been suggested he begin losing to please them, he turned to cutpursing and bashing the skulls of drunks late at night.

  When the Hartslayers had brought in the Bellygasher Gang one night and left them locked in the jail wagon out in front of Bintu’s Tavern while they threw themselves a congratulatory celebration, he had gathered with the rest of the drunken crowd and watched them jeer and pitch dog shit and beer at the five little sable skinned goblins gripping the bars and gnashing their black needle teeth within.

  The Bellygashers already had a reputation for waylaying travelers. Their leader, Picknose’s brother Pickscab, had thought it a great joke to tie travelers alive to trees, cut their stomachs open, then fasten their intestines to the saddle horns of their own horses and lash them down the road to town.

  The Hartslayers, unappreciative of his humor but savoring irony, had done the same for Pickscab. They’d slit him open and tied his guts to the back of the prison wagon. They’d made him march behind until he’d died and then dragged his carcass the rest of the way to town. Picknose had tried to cut his brother loose, but his claws couldn’t reach through the bars. He had borne the gray scars of his effort on his skinny arms till his own death.

  Something in the cruelty of the Hartslayers had rankled Mogarth, even though he’d known well it was deserved punishment. The sight of the town dogs tearing Pickscab’s corpse apart as the squealing little pink children fetched up the goblin’s cast off genitals and flung them back and forth at each other had boiled his blood.

  Maybe it was because somewhere back in his own cursed heritage, gobbos were kin to orks. Maybe it was just the ugliness on display that night. He didn’t know.

  He’d set fire to the Hartslayers’ constabulary and, while everybody had gone off with buckets to fight the blaze, he’d picked the lock of the cage and gone running off into the dark with the tumbling, chittering goblins.

  It hadn’t been easy leading that bunch at first. Gobbos weren’t bright, and they were disgusting. A few times that first night he’d woken to find one of them gnawing at his toes, or two of them trying to tie his hands and feet, but after giving them a respectable thrashing, they’d relented to his company. Once he’d made them understand there was more to be gained from robbing travelers of their gold than in simply torturing them, they’d even accepted him as their boss.

  He had maintained his innocuous presence in town, but he used the money from their subsequent robberies to build a cabin in the foothills on the outskirts where he pretended to raise sheep. In actuality, he bred them for the Bellygashers, who exchanged live mutton for gold and jewelry. Picknose still insisted on honoring his late brother’s memory with the occasional disembowelment, but Mogarth was able to keep them informed as to the Hartslayer’s movements. They charted the forest and even the sewer tunnels beneath the town so they always had a place to hide.

  It could not be called happiness. It was never quite a family, but it was contentment.

  Then one night the scouts of the Black Army had come to Mogarth’s cabin, three muttwhelps, like him. He had never seen so many altogether, and one, Bashka, was a female.

  Odius Khan had emerged at the head of the united ork tribes from somewhere past the Broken Tooth Mountains, and allied his people with the Witch Queen and her numerous retainers among the dark folk of Wayphar. The animosity with which the five tribes regarded each other was legendary, and so this alliance under the great Odius was unprecedented. Combined with the might of the Witch Queen, it meant the end for the humans and the dwarves and even the elves and the fairies. It meant a new world for folk like him.

  So Bashka and the other muttwhelps had told him.

  He didn’t know now quite why he had bought into it so readily. Maybe it was the sight of Bashka. She had been no prize, certainly, with her too-broad hips and pendulous chest, her dripping snout and ornamented tusks, but nevertheless, she’d been female and willing. Maybe it was the thought of not having to live in isolation, or to pay well above the market price for the touch of some pinkskin woman.

  So he and the Bellygashers had joined the Black Army. Orks, goblins, ogres, and trolls, all under the command of Odius Khan and the Ork Lords. They had skulked and scouted, fought and died, and he and Bashka had rolled and bucked to his content for a time.

  But for what?

  The orks treated them no better than the humans had. The muttwhelps were worse than servants in camp, bullied and ordered about like slaves, as hated for their human blood as he had been by the valley dwellers for his father’s. Bashka was expected to present herself to any rank and file ork or ogre in the host, and did so readily, submissively, until the perennially drunken orks raucously encouraged her coupling with an overeager crag troll and she was killed, torn nearly asunder.

  The gobbos fared no better. They were kicked around by the larger soldiers when they were noticed at all, and driven in the forefront of the fighting always, to die by the scores. The trolls dipped them in barrels of pitch and hurtled them over the walls of castles on fire. They were instructed to roll across the thatch roofs or run through the enemy stables for as long as they could, if they landed alive.

  Mogarth and his Bellygashers avoided such treatment after Mogarth himself had set a precedent.

  One day, not long after the death of Bashka, a burly Broken Tooth Clan sergeant had tried to bend him over a cask of bilemead. The Bellygashers had scurried out from nowhere and swarmed the offender, biting, clawing, stabbing, and digging in with their hooked iron ankle and elbow spurs all at once. The sergeant’s shrieking had brought his orks, and Mogarth had taken up his big iron cleaver and stood over the gobbos while they did their bloody work.

  Of the score ork soldiers he faced down, four had tried to come through him to the aid of their superior. One he cut from the top of his head to the middle of his neck. The second he sheared off below the knees. The third he swept both eyes from, and the fourth died in a tug of war over his own innards with one of the ravenous camp wolves.

  After that day the word spread through the orks that the muttwhelp called Mogarth and his goblins were not to be touched.

  As a reminder, he stuck the sergeant’s gaping head on a pole outside their mule hide tents.

  The gobbos had swatted the flies away every morning and picked the meat from the face by increments to chew on the march. It was just a grinning black skull now. Mogarth had carved designs into the tusks in his off time, and he wore them from a necklace, along with the claws of a werebear champion he had slain at the Battle of Kantrivone Grove.

  The Black Army was relentless. They had scoured the eastern half of the continent in a bloody, four month campaign before returning west where Mogarth’s own journey had begun, here at the edge of the Valley of The Golden Lap.

  Though he hated to admit it, Redshat was right. It was like coming home.

  Except now, it was just the two of them.

  Mogarth could see the highways leading north and west from the burning buildings of Crossbow Hollow. They were blocked with i
nching caravans of refugees. The ones to the north were being ridden down by wolfriders, the orks and goblins no doubt raping, slaying, and masticating their way through them. They were being slaughtered on their desperate flight north, to the dwarf stronghold of Stonehewn, a sanctuary that no longer even existed. It had been conquered by Odius Khan himself three days ago.

  The last of the defenders and commoners, perhaps Duke Pastorlak himself, were racing toward Glean, an indefensible little scattering of cottages, silos, and farmhouses that would shortly be their killing ground.

  The only thing that spared them thus far was Odius Khan himself. The great ork leader had sent word to halt the advance after the fall of Crossbow Hollow, so he could ride down from Stonehewn and oversee the fall of the valley personally.

  Dark clouds were the only aid rolling in from the north to help the people of Crossbow Hollow. Maybe soon their homes would burn a little less in the rain.

  Mogarth spat in the dirt.

  Crossbow Hollow had fallen all the quicker because he and Redshat had known the secret ways under the city, and led the orks into the middle of town via the sewers. The orks had bypassed the city defenses and surprised the garrison from within, decimating them almost without resistance.

  He and Redshat returned to camp once they played their part, not engaging in the slaughter. The deaths of the Bellygashers had soured him on army life. He didn’t know if Redshat could be sated in blood, but Mogarth had his fill. He had seen and caused enough bloodshed and mayhem to last him a lifetime. They had waded in dead men, and though the orks and gobbos and even Redshat had used the women harshly in every county and kingdom they had crushed, Mogarth had refrained, thinking always of his own childhood and the scars around his mother’s neck and down her back from his father’s hard attentions. What place would his own bastards have in the world to come? If the treatment of the muttwhelps in camp was any indication, they would fare no better than him. So he fathered none.

  Now he wondered what would become of him and Redshat once they reached the sea. Would they be loaded onto the red-sailed ships with the rest of the army to go and fight the August King and the Sabrelords, or would they be left behind on the coast with nothing but the burning valley behind them?

  This business of burning and razing; while he found enjoyment in the utter destruction of those who had mistreated him in his past, when he thought hard on it, it made little practical sense. The Khan had promised the Black Army’s soldiers a land free for orks once all was said and done. But what kind of land would that be?

  He thought of how he had salted and burned his own home prior to leaving Glean. The Black Army had done the same on a larger scale. It seemed sort of foolish now. What would they have conquered? Nothing but a wasteland of ash and cinder.

  A war horn sounded at the north end of camp, and a wild shout went up.

  Redshat jammed his dog joint in his teeth and shimmied up a nearby fir tree.

  Moments later he jumped down.

  “Looks like Big Khan here,” he announced excitedly.

  “Well,” said Mogarth, getting to his feet. “Let’s go see him.”

  A light rain began falling, cool and steady. The dirt at their feet began to shine.

  They joined an excited rush of loping goblins and clanking, gorilla-like orks striding toward the center of the excitement, which proved to be a group of heavily mailed riders atop immense horned and barded warbulls, the mount of choice for the Five Ork Lords. These were escorted by tall, deadly looking orks in red stained armor. The janissaries; personal guards of the Khan.

  There were four riders in all, and two empty, but saddled, warbulls guided by janissaries, representing the lords of the Boogaht and Kill-Kill tribes who had fallen in battle with the elves.

  The orks nearest the retinue began to clash their weapons to their breastplates and chant;

  “O-di-us! O-di-us! O-di-us!”

  The largest of the four riders was an impressive looking ork masked in the dwarf-forged helm of the Iron King of Stonehewn. He was garbed in piecemeal costume attesting to the peoples he had conquered. His greenweave cape had belonged to an elvish noble, and his filigree breastplate and pauldrons had come from the Master of the Knights of Cendreeve, whom he had personally slain. A necklace of desiccated pixie queens adorned his neck, each one pierced neatly through the temple by a silver chain.

  He stood in his stirrups and wrenched off the helm, revealing a scarred, white haired ork with moss green skin. One tusk was chipped off, the other was gold. He roared deeply, and the orks bellowed their approval.

  Redshat tugged Mogarth’s hand, unable to see, and he let the gobbo clamber up his leg and mount his shoulders like a child.

  Odius Khan opened his mailed fists and the orks ceased their shouting immediately. His command over them was astounding. Even the captains of Mogarth’s regiment had put the scourge to the backs of the unruly soldiers when the fighting was thick to keep them at it. In the presence of the Khan, every savage brute reacted with military discipline.

  Even Mogarth felt an indescribable sense of pride in his commander. Previously, he had only seen the Khan from afar, and never without a helm. Odius had gained a reputation for personally leading attacks and the orks loved him for it. He was the sole reason they had put aside their ceaseless feuds. Never mind the far away Witch Queen to whom the Black Army ostensibly owed its allegiance. The orks fought for Odius Khan and none other.

  He shrugged closer through the crowd.

  “Look at you!” Odius bellowed. “Five tribes, five fingers on the hands of the ork people. Together,” he said, throwing one fist forward. “The fist of the Black Army!”

  The orks roared again, and struck each other in their enthusiasm.

  “How you have fought! What glory you have achieved! You have torn down castles and dragged forth kings weeping! You have picked your teeth with the bones of heroes! Now, of those so-called bright folk, who in the past have driven you to drink bitter waters in black lands and to hide in cold, dark places, only old men and women remain to quiver and clutch mewling children to their wrinkled breasts, for their champions and their kings even now are lapped by the thirsty fires of hell!”

  He thrust his finger down at the valley.

  “Smell the smoke of ruin! The delectable aroma of man-flesh slow-roasting in the stone rubble of their homes! This is the holy incense of our struggle, the sweet fragrance of our victory feast! May the Witch Queen bless us as we prepare this table in her name! All that remains is to smear the spineless pinkskins that remain beneath our heels!”

  Redshat clapped his hands excitedly, giggling.

  Mogarth watched the splendid figure of Odius as he gesticulated. He was a leader born, as far above the undisciplined savages that made up his army as was a lord from the beasts that tilled his fields. Perhaps there was a hope for this new world. Surely the great Odius would not deliver his people to blight and starvation. Maybe the bountiful lands around Rentellevaire would be their promised country.

  “Tonight, the Golden Lap will be the Black Lap! And in the morning, we will sail north, to pluck the August King’s head from his shoulders!”

  The orks erupted in furious cheers and chest thumping.

  Redshat yelped as the ork behind Mogarth plucked him from his neck and began to excitedly whirl him around overhead by the ankle.

  Mogarth turned and drove his elbow into the ork’s face, feeling a tusk snap off. The ork fell flat and did not move, and Redshat scurried back up his arm like a monkey and resumed his place.

  “Look! Look!” Redshat cackled, as if nothing had happened. He swatted the top of Mogarth’s close shaved pate repeatedly and pointed to the Khan. “See? See? It‘s like yours, Boss!”

  Mogarth ignored the goblin’s ravings.

  He saw a few unfortunate goblins tossed into the air, laughing stupidly as they were passed over the crowded ork soldiers, then squealing as they were flung to the muddy ground and vigorously stomped without warning.


  He gripped Redshat’s ankle.

  “Like yours! Like yours!” the goblin was still yelling.

  “All right! All right! Enough!” Mogarth hissed, reaching up and cuffing him upside the head.

  “And now!” Odius said, raising his hands again to the gray sky for silence. “Let us kneel and give thanks to our mistress, the Witch Queen, from whom all dark blessings flow!”

  “And to Odius!” one of the captains shouted.

  Odius grinned as the soldiers nearest him prostrated themselves.

  Mogarth was caught up in the feeling. His earlier doubts were almost gone. He pulled Redshat from his shoulders and let him drop to the ground.

  The goblin tugged at the whip hanging from his belt.

  Mogarth pushed him away and dropped to one knee in the mud, bowing his head.

  Redshat came back, pulling insistently on the coiled leather.

  Mogarth glared at him. All around them was the clatter of steel and iron and the creak of leather as the orks genuflected in ecstatic worship.

  He did not know this Witch Queen, but now that he had laid eyes on Odius Khan, now that he had heard his voice, his ork blood sang in his veins as it never had before. He was of a people. And the future now belonged to them. There would be a place for him.

  Redshat, peering up at him, held up the silver handle of his whip and pointed again.

  “It’s like yours!”

  Mogarth followed the goblin’s black finger, uncomprehending.

  And then the spell was broken.

  For a spell it had been, surely, a spell to cloak his mind, to ignite him, like good wine before a battle.

  Some glamor, a boon of this Witch Queen.

  It took no arcane counterhex, no mystic pass or ancient ward or light of the autumn moon to break it.

  It took only a glance at the silver handled whip on Odius Khan’s belt.