by Nunn, PL
Perhaps it would take more than an army of men to stop them.
Some of the human attackers had fled into the forest and the sound of ogre pursuit could be heard, but for the most part the attack was over. One of the ogres’ human slaves crept out from his hiding place under the cart, staring with dull-eyed acceptance at the slaughter of his fellow man. There was a blur of darkness and the man screamed, arm and shoulder engulfed in the maw of one of the huge dogs.
The hapless slave was shaken like a rabbit in the jaws of a wolf. Blood spurted and bone broke.
Yhalen found a brittle tree limb on the ground and lunged to the extent of his chain, beating the dog across the head and shoulders until the branch shattered, then grabbing the thick leather collar and pulling with all his might to haul the animal off, screaming at it to let go all the while.
It did, with a snarling growl, turning on this new irritation. Yhalen slammed an elbow into its muzzle with every bit of force he could muster and stood there as the dog shook its massive head, refusing to back down or let his gaze waver from its. The ears flattened, the blood-frothed jaws drew back, baring all too impressive teeth. But it didn’t attack.
“Stay,” Yhalen said, trying to exude calm and finding the emotion hard to come by. He slid by the dog, along the edge of the cart and crouched next to the battered slave. The man’s arm hung limply at his side, and blood trailed in copious amounts down his skin. The flesh was torn and mangled where the dog’s teeth had gripped. Yhalen’s mother could have repaired such a wound, but Yhalen had not the skill—and without a healer, this man might never use the arm again, if he even survived the encounter.
“We must clean this and bind it,” he said softly, and the man’s glazed eyes flickered to him, then past him, widening in fear. Yhalen started to turn, and caught the edge of a fist against his head. He sprawled, vision spinning, staring dazedly up at the great form of the ogre that blocked out the afternoon sunlight.
It was Deathclaw. He could tell from all the dangling gold, from the expression of malicious humor on the broad face as the ogre picked up the cringing slave and casually broke his neck. Like a man twisting the head off a chicken. Yhalen gasped, horrified as the corpse was tossed to the ground next to him. The gasp turned to a reflexive whimper of fright as Deathclaw stalked towards him, towering over him and staring down. The ogre spoke and there was anger in his tone. The big hand caught the end of Yhalen’s chain where it was attached to the cart and used it to haul him up and close. Yhalen could smell the stench of the ogre’s sweat, of his breath and he almost gagged.
Deathclaw spoke again, low and furious, punctuating his words by jerking the chain in his hand.
“I can’t understand,” Yhalen cried out. “I don’t know what you want.”
And he didn’t, for as clear as Bloodraven was in his wants, what Deathclaw wished, he couldn’t fathom. Other than his pain, his terror, and his death.
Deathclaw raised his free hand, thick fingers clenched in a fist that would shatter Yhalen’s skull should it connect. It never did.
There was the sound of steel unsheathed and the low growl of a dog. Bloodraven stood behind them, the second of his dogs at his heels, his long sword in hand. There was blood on his armor and on his skin, but none of it appeared to be his own.
Deathclaw’s lips drew back in what might have been a smile. Yhalen found it nothing if not ominous. They exchanged words and Deathclaw removed his hand from Yhalen’s chain, only to replace it on Yhalen’s shoulder.
Bloodraven spoke another soft word and Deathclaw’s sharp nails bit into Yhalen’s flesh. He felt a little trickle of warm blood down his back, then Deathclaw let him go, striding towards Bloodraven, brushing past him so close that the smaller half-ogre was forced a half step to the side. Both dogs were now growling, hackles up, staring at Deathclaw as if they wanted to chase him down and tear out his throat. Yhalen wished they would. But Bloodraven spoke a sharp word and they subsided, more readily obedient now that they’d exorcised the demons that called for blood.
Yhalen stood there, trembling, waiting for Goddess knew what. But Bloodraven didn’t spare him a glance, striding off instead with the dogs at his heels to survey the damage and the dead. Yhalen’s knees gave out and he collapsed down into a squat, leaving one hand on the cart to support himself and bracing the other on the ground. The mangled body of the slave was to his left, glassy eyes staring up at the foliage-obscured sky. It could have been him. If Deathclaw had had his way, he’d be lying there too, beyond care, beyond pain and humiliation.
A few days’ past, it’d have been welcome. Now, he found he’d regained his taste for life. He didn’t want to die. He wanted freedom and he wanted vengeance. But, as things were going, there seemed little hope for either in the foreseeable future. Not without help, at any rate, and today had proved that humans were very little match against the strength and ferocity of mountain ogres.
CHAPTER FOUR
The men had come from a small village—a tiny little hamlet nestled in the forest that likely survived on trading furs and mushrooms gleaned from the woods. They’d likely been hunters who’d discovered the band of invaders heading inadvertently towards their home and attacked out of desperation, hoping to drive the ogres away.
Yhalen, tethered to his cart, came to the village only after the ogres had already overrun it. There was smoke in the air and the bitter smell of blood and urine and death. Small favor that he’d not had to witness the slaughter of the innocents there. Bile still rose in his throat, filling his mouth with its vile taste and cramping his stomach so badly that he crumbled to his knees as soon as the cart rolled to a stop to retch up what small breakfast he’d been given.
There were dead in the street. Butchered and left to lie while the ogres pilfered what little there was to steal. The healthy men had tried to stop them outside of the village, the old and the infirm and the young had tried within the boundary of this small settlement. And all of them had failed.
There was a scream that was high-pitched and feminine, and it occurred to Yhalen that the women and the youngest children might have been hidden somewhere while the men tried to defend their homes. He scrambled to his feet, straining to the end of his leash to see beyond the cart and the shifting bodies of the ogres that milled in the blood-soaked street between the rows of cottages.
There. A flash of small, huddled forms through the bodies of ogres. The soft crying of a child, followed by the whimper of a woman. Oh, Goddess, Goddess, not more fodder for the ogre’s malicious humor.
An ogre shifted and stepped back against Yhalen, turned and snarled down at him like a fractious wolf. Yhalen cringed back against the cart, grasping one wooden rail—momentarily forgetting the plight of the women and children of this hamlet in the face of his own. But the ogre, other than growling something incomprehensible at him and showing his sharp-yellowed teeth, didn’t raise a hand towards him.
There were perhaps seven of them. Three women and four children, ranging in age from one or two to about ten. The only survivors. And they were herded into the midst of the milling ogre warriors and poked and shoved and harassed, much like Yhalen had been when he’d first encountered the ogres in the forest—before they’d taken him back to their camp to do worse. These terrified women and children were not so resilient and huddled on the ground where they fell, crying and whimpering. One screamed mindlessly until an ogre tired of the shrill sound and backhanded her hard enough to quiet her for good. A child wailed, scrambling to the still body and clutching at torn clothes desperately, bereft of a mother because she’d not been able to keep her silence. When the child’s wails did not cease, one of the ogres plucked it up by one small arm and shook it. One of the other women lunged forward in an act of desperate, mindless bravery, screaming at the beast to release the child, pounding on the stomach of a creature twice or thrice her size.
They laughed her tenacity and the one threw the child aside and raised a hand towards the girl.
A comman
d was barked forth that made the ogre hesitate. The others shifted, parting warily as first one, then another of the great dogs padded through their number. Bloodraven himself followed, flanked by two of his lieutenants, the three of them adorned with bits of twigs and leaves and forest debris as if they’d been running through thickets. They might have been in pursuit of the last of the village hunters whilst the bulk of their party wrecked havoc in the village.
They spoke, as ogres were wont to speak, in loud voices with a great many hand gestures. Even among themselves, interaction seemed on the verge of violence. Deathclaw said something from the sidelines where he and a few of his followers had gathered to watch the entertainment. Even in an indiscernible tongue, the comment seemed laced with derision. Bloodraven stared hard across the circle of ogres, not flinching from Deathclaw’s stare, and said something softly. Whatever it was, it made the other ogre flinch, just a little.
It was enough of a reaction to satisfy Bloodraven, for he turned back to the others, barking orders that the ogres scrambled to follow and dispersing the crowd while setting his small army to order. He gestured for Vorjd and the man slunk out hurriedly from the shadows of the carts, nodding as he was given instructions, then calling for the other northern slaves to begin making camp here. Vorjd went to the women, speaking with them, gathering them and the children together and with two of the other human slaves getting them on their feet and moving towards one of the huts.
“Vorjd. Vorjd, what will they do with them?” Yhalen called, desperate to know that they weren’t to be saved now only to be tortured and killed later that night.
The blonde slave paused to look at Yhalen over his shoulder. He didn’t answer, but he frowned, making a sign for silence, as if he feared they’d bring trouble down upon themselves for exchanging conversation.
“Damn you,” Yhalen whispered, wet-eyed, almost as angry at Vorjd as he was at the ogres. He yanked at his chain, frustrated and sorely tired of being leashed like a dog. There was a growl and a dog that wasn’t leashed, but surely ought to have been, padded over. Its ears flicked and its gums pulled back just a little, as if it didn’t know whether to break into a full snarl or not.
“You get away, you ugly beast,” Yhalen spat, waving a fist at it. It lowered its head and growled deep in this throat.
“Go find your master, then, and have him unfasten this cursed chain from my neck.”
He rattled the chain in question and the dog’s ears pricked forward, head cocking. It settled down onto its haunches, watching him. Yhalen stood there, on the verge of embarrassing tears, sickened by the slaughter, by the casual brutality—by the fear for those helpless women and children—and holding a conversation with a dog. He sank down into a crouch, eye to eye with it, trying not to focus on the corpses in the street, trying not to dwell on what would happen when night fell and he had to endure the darkness in the company of the ogres yet one more time. Trying not to think about hearing the screams of women and children under the cover of darkness. He pressed a fist against his mouth, biting down on his knuckles to keep the hand from shaking, to keep the nausea that insisted on rising up his throat, down.
Vorjd came back eventually, wary of the dog that had settled a few feet from Yhalen with its great head upon its front paws, eyes watchful and ears pricked forward. It had inched close enough almost to touch, curious about one who showed no fear of it and subdued in its aggression perhaps by the smell of its master upon him, for surely Bloodraven’s most intimate scents were scoured into Yhalen’s flesh.
For Vorjd though, it lifted its head and snarled, hackles up and slowly rising to its feet. Vorjd did show fear, freezing in his tracks, eyes white rimmed and wide.
“I told you,” Yhalen said softly. “He scents your fear. If you rule it, at the very least he might hesitate before he attacks. Have you come to release me?”
Vorjd nodded, eyes never leaving the dog.
“Then toss me the key, if you don’t wish to pass my guardian.”
It seemed a reasonable suggestion and Vorjd did just that, carefully tossing the crude brass key that unlocked the chain at Yhalen’s collar. The weight of it gone from him was a relief, but the metal of the collar itself still lay upon him.
“Come,” Vorjd said, backing away, and Yhalen did, having no choice. Still, he took some small satisfaction in the widening of Vorjd’s eyes as he purposefully brushed past the dog in his passage, running his hand along its short coat and feeling warmth and the pounding beat of its heart under bone and flesh and muscle. It growled a little, and he felt that too, under the thin flesh. It turned to watch them leave with its square head lowered. He turned his back on it, even if Vorjd would not.
“Make it stay back,” the slave whispered, one hand on Yhalen’s arm.
“It’s not my dog.”
Vorjd’s finger’s tightened, nails biting into his flesh. “They’ve killed more men than I can recall—even an ogre or two—and you touch it without losing a hand.”
“They’ve killed ogres? Good.” He found he detested the dogs a little less.
“It’s following us,” Vorjd hissed.
Yhalen turned his head to see. The big dog was padding slowly in their wake. “Yes. It is. Where is the other one?”
“Killing men in the forest with its master. I don’t know. I don’t know why they aren’t together—they always hunt together.”
“What will they do with those women and children?” He ignored Vorjd’s worries over the dog and asked the question that he’d gotten no answer for before.
The slave frowned, mouth going hard and thin. “North,” he finally said. “Those who survive will be sent north to the slave markets.”
Yhalen bit his lip, shuddering a little at the notion of ogre cities in the cold northern mountains. Of humans in pens, waiting to be sold to towering, cruel masters—of what horrid fate awaited them.
“Is that why they’ve come? To capture slaves? Have they run out of victims in the north?”
Vorjd glared at him, actual pain and anger in his eyes. The first real emotion that Yhalen had seen from the man. “They’d hunt us to extinction, if they could—but my people—we’ve grown elusive—we hide in burrows like rabbits and they grow frustrated and seek easier game. Here. In here.”
Vorjd stopped before the largest building in the small village. Most of the huts were too small for ogres to even enter, but this one was apparently the town meeting place, for it boasted a tall roof and a few charred emblems no doubt denoting the name of the town and the name of the lord under whose rule they lived. If that lord had known of this attack, or even known of the presence of this raiding party, he might have gathered armed and armored forces better able to deal with the invaders. A knight on a war-horse with a lance or a great sword, might have stood a better chance than a hunter with a bow and skinning knife.
It made him think of Grandfather in Nakhanor City meeting with the lords of the realm. How many men were there that Bloodraven’s forces had escaped the notice of? If only word could be gotten to them. But he supposed word would filter through sooner or later, when the ruins of the villages the ogres passed were eventually discovered.
The door had been ripped off its hinges, and lay on the floor inside. There was a central hearth, the embers of which were scattered, and a long table with benches, which had also been swept aside. There was a spatter of blood on the wall, but no bodies. Yes, very certainly this had been the hall of meeting, where these folk had gathered to socialize and celebrate, or to decide local law. It was all plunder now.
It would house Bloodraven this night and Bloodraven’s possessions. They brought in his pallet, since there were none here that could accommodate his height, and a few of the things that had graced his tent. The dog lay outside the door, growling at passersby, but not attacking. Yhalen sat on the stone ledge before the hearth, refusing to play the part of docile slave and help with the organization of his master’s quarters. He wouldn’t admit that he was that conquered. At least
not now, out of Bloodraven’s presence. He supposed he’d grovel if the ogr’ron made him, but not willingly.
They cast him dark looks, those tame northern slaves, and he glanced away from them, not sure enough of himself to blithely accept their censure, though he scorned them for their lack of resistance.
But Vorjd repaid him for his petulance by approaching with a length of chain and latch and raising a fist in threat when Yhalen glared, wet-eyed and angry, as he rose to avoid the indignity.
“Shall I call one of them to come and do it, then?” Vorjd spat, angry at him for more than his unwillingness to be leashed, Yhalen thought.
“No,” Yhalen said quickly enough. “No.”
And he turned his head to allow human hands to fasten the latch to the ring in his collar, then the other end of the chain to one of the thick support beams. It was close enough to where they’d placed the ogr’ron’s pallet that Bloodraven need not even release him to take his pleasure, if he so wished.
Vorjd was ever practical.
It began to rain soon after. The sound of it became a rhythmic patter on the roof. The human slaves rushed out to help in the setting up of the canvas tents that would shelter the majority of Bloodraven’s company. Which left Yhalen alone with the great dog, who lay just outside the door, not seeming to mind the rain at all, save for the occasional twitching of one ear or the other as a particularly large droplet hit.
Yhalen sat finally on the edge of the pallet, knees giving way suddenly, a preamble to the wash of weakness that ran through his entire body. He leaned over his knees, shaking, as he tried to chase away all the death he’d seen today. Tried not to see blood and hear screams and feel mind-numbing terror all over again.
The dog’s excitement tingled in the air. Yhalen looked up, even as the dog rose, ears pricked, tail wagging and a moment later a large shape appeared out of the rain, stooping to enter through the door and pausing to bark some order over his shoulder into the storm heavy dusk, before stepping inside.