A Sea of Skulls (Arts of Dark and Light Book 2)

by Vox Day

  Lugbol stared at the blackened, dirt-encrusted goblin’s foot. “Nah, I think I’ll save my belly for tomorrow. There will be Man-flesh a-plenty. Zlatagh is going to give the heads of all the prisoners to Gor-Gor, then feast us.”

  “Suit yourself.” Ghurash tore a strip of black flesh from the foot and tossed it on the fire, then dug out a piece of pale yellow meat with a claw and popped it in his mouth. “You said we have to sacrifice something too?”

  “All the gungiyar’ugh are to give up a trophy. I think we’ll have to give him the keg.”

  “The sweet firewater?” Ghurash couldn’t have looked more horrified if Lugbol had announced he was volunteering the galvebel for a diplomatic squagging by a squad of dwarves. “You can’t mean that!”

  “I don’t want the kors getting drunk on it tonight when that kob-squagger Snaghak is after my vank. They think they’re hard now, but you know as well as I do that they may as well be skwaaks for all the real fighting they’ve seen. It’s one thing to burn down a few Man villages with only a few handfuls of agha’ugh to defend them, it’s another to fight real kors with their blood up. And for all that Snaghak is a sack of rank unyi, he’s got more siri-kors than we do.”

  “Squats!” Ghurash said morosely. But he didn’t argue.

  “See that guards are posted on the perimeter. And set a pair on the firewater too. I don’t want any ‘accidents’. Tell them if I find it’s been tapped tomorrow, I’ll skin them. Now I’m going to sleep. Tell the first watch to wake me at the change!”

  Lugbol made his way through the camp to his tent, which was in the center of the area allotted to his gungiyar. Twice the size of the others that surrounded it, it was made from tanned boarskin and featured his prize possession, a bearskin liberated from a Man village the previous moon that now served as his bed. He carefully unwound the bandage, which was already filthy and stained even though he’d washed it only three days prior, and examined his burned arm.

  That little mage-bitch had damn near cooked it for him. The raid on the village had gone smoothly enough, but then he’d lost twelve good kors to a single Man clan living outside it. He’d nearly lost the arm too, but fortunately, one of Zlatagh’s shamans had been raiding with them and promptly cast some sort of ice spell on it that prevented the spellfire from burning the flesh down to the bone. A pair of healing spells had kept the rot demons from eating the burned flesh, and now the angry, twisted scars that ran from his claws to his elbow were growing shiny, indicating that he’d soon be able to use it again.

  Damn the little bitch!

  Recovering the use of his cleaver arm couldn’t happen too soon for Lugbol, because he couldn’t count on his galvebels to keep order in his stead much longer. Fortunately, Ghurash was too old to aspire to kai hari shugaba and Korpaghu only opened his mouth in order to eat. Neither of them had any ambition to replace him, and both of them knew that whoever took Lugbol’s place would want his own galvebels. So, the two of them cracked down hard on any orc who so much as hinted at the idea that Lugbol was unable to lead the gungiyar’s kors into battle with only one arm. Lugbol himself had cracked the pate of one piss-taker who’d called him One-Arm to his face; he might not be clever with his left arm, but it didn’t take a lot of cleverness to swing a wooden club.

  He flexed his fingers slowly and winced as the thick scabs cracked and began to weep. He didn’t have a full range of motion, not yet, but every day he sat, and swore, and sweated as he forced his scarred arm up, then down, then left, then right. Then he would curl and uncurl his fingers, trying to bring the tips of his claws to his palm. Over and over he repeated the exercises, gasping at the pain, but knowing that leaving the arm to uselessly wither and curl would bring about his death almost as quickly as the rot demons would have. There was no place for a one-armed kor in the Maneater’s army, except perhaps in the cookpots.

  “Boil the dwarf, boil the dwarf!” The kors had come to the end of a particularly vulgar verse describing the violent abuse of an unlucky elf in considerable detail and were launching into the chorus again. Lugbol grinned at their good humor, remembering the days of being a young kor with no responsibilities and nothing more to worry about than what to eat, who to kill, and where something to drink might be found.

  He thought about washing the bandage, but decided to leave it for the morning. The shaman had said it was better if he didn’t wear it while he was sleeping anyway. He stood up, removed his boar-hide belt, slid his cleaver’s scabbard off it, and tossed it to the side. He grunted as he awkwardly laid down using only his left arm, then sighed as he stretched out upon the soft fur of the bearskin rug. It still smelled faintly of the smoke from the fire his kors had set, but that didn’t bother him at all. What was smoke, if not the scent of victory?

  The flap at the entrance of his tent rustled and Lugbol woke in an instant. Pain flared in his healing arm as he instinctively tried to use it to push himself up; he cursed under his breath, rolled over on his other side, and used his other arm. It was too dark to see anything and he fumbled about uselessly for his spiked club.

  “Grun-kor?” a voice said uncertainly. It was one of the younger kors, who only two moons ago had been a mere skwaak with the white line of the battle virgin painted over his nose.

  “I’m awake, little brother. Go back to your tent,” Lugbol ordered.

  “Oi, Grun-kor!” The kor slapped his chest and Lugbol heard his footsteps as he withdrew from the tent.

  For a moment, he contemplated lying back down and returning to the dreamless void from whence he’d been summoned. But the thought of the malice in Snaghak’s eyes would allow him no rest, he realized, and it wouldn’t hurt the spirits of the kors on watch to see their shugaba patrolling the perimeter at night. They’d recovered, mostly, from that unlucky assault on the mage-bitch’s house, but being one of the few warbands that had taken heavy losses in an otherwise easy campaign was still a sore spot with many of the more experienced kors. Especially given his bloody burned arm! It was hard to shrug it off as nothing when everyone could see that he could barely hold his cleaver, much less use it.

  Damn the little bitch!

  He snorted as he slid his scabbard onto his belt and secured around his waist. It could have been worse. One warband had been caught in the open by a full troop of cavalry after ravaging a small farm and lost more than one hundred of its one hundred twenty kors. And a large pack of wolfriders had simply disappeared, although it was entirely possible that they hadn’t run into an enemy force but simply wandered off of their own accord. Whenever the orcs got careless about keeping their allies in line, the goblins tended to desert. After the wolfriders didn’t return to the camp, Zlatagh damn near chewed the arse off the grun-kor who’d been too lazy to bother paying attention to them.

  Outside the tent, the night air was cool. The surrounding woods was loud with the constant cry of birds looking for mates; this time of year the feathered little monsters simply never shut up. Give it up and go to bed, he felt like shouting, but there was little sense in being bitter just because there wasn’t a female orc to be found anywhere within a two-week march. Let them have their fun. Someone ought to.

  He found the first group of guards standing around a fire on the south side of their tents. They were young kors and he was pleased to see they were alert. They’d heard him coming and their weapons were in hand as they challenged him.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Lugbol, your bloody captain!” he snarled back at them.

  “Grun-kor!” they said in unison as they put up their studded clubs and stood at attention. “Sir!”

  “Seen anything?”

  “We saw some kors dragging a gobbo past, but they wasn’t ours.”

  Lugbol nodded. A late night squag or a late night snack, either way, it wasn’t his concern. “Look sharp, boys. Just because nothing’s happened yet don’t mean it won’t. And sit with the fire to your backs. Save your night eyes.”

  They saluted and he moved on throu
gh the trees to the second pair. He could see their fire, but he didn’t see either of the guards until he was nearly on top of them. There was a sudden rush of motion and then the tip of a spear was pointing at his throat.

  “Don’t you recognize Lugbol, yez damnable idiots!” he cursed them, although he was secretly pleased they were so keen.

  “Sorry, Grun-kor!” The spear was lowered, and in the flickering light of the flames he could see the chagrin on the tusked face of the young orc who was wielding it. “Galvebel said we was to be on careful guard tonight. Said some of them damn mountain orcs would be looking to grab us if we didn’t look sharp.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past them,” Lugbol said gravely, stifling a chuckle. Zlatagh aside, there were few of the great orcs from the mountains of Zoth Ommog actually serving in the Maneater’s great army of raiders, but they made for a useful bugaboo. “They got nothing but trolls up there. I imagine a couple of sweet young kors would make a right treat for them if they’re tired of eating gobbo. And yez damn sure don’t want a troll’s vank up yez!”

  The two young kors laughed, as he intended. But then something in the distance caught his attention and he turned away from them. Lugbol’s warband had been assigned a spot towards the southeastern side of the camp, not far from the perimeter. But there seemed to be more campfires to the south and east than could possibly belong to the Green Talons, the single warband that stood between them and the ditch that had been dug to ring the big encampment. And the campfires were moving!

  “What the hellfire is that?” he wondered aloud. And then he heard the first panicked screams ring out.

  He shoved one guard back in the direction of their tents. “You, go to the camp and wake Ghurash and Korpaghu! Tell them to wake everyone and get them armed, but wait for my return.” He pointed at the other. “You, with the horn, you come with me!”

  He didn’t wait for any protests, but grabbed the young kor and began running through the trees toward the mysterious, moving fires. Thoughts of the shaman’s disavowed augury filled his mind, but he dismissed them with a snort. Iron demons? Fiery wings? It was nonsense. Or so he thought until a burst of fire filled the night sky and exploded in the treetops about one hundred paces in front of him. He ducked instinctively and the kor with him shrieked in terror.

  The first burst was rapidly followed by a second, then a third, and a fourth. Fiery debris could be seen raining down from the trees, and several of the branches overhead caught fire. The Green Talon camp erupted in screams of terror, and in the light of the flames above, he could see the shadowy figures of orcs fleeing in panic towards him.

  “Grun-kor!” shouted the terrified kor, holding up the horn. Lugbol nodded quickly.

  The kor raised the horn to his lips and blew three times, then waited a moment, and blew three times again. The low blasts echoed through the dark forest, over the crackling of the burning trees.

  Lugbol wanted to retreat and join up with his kors, but first he needed to find out what foe was attacking them. They were coming from the wrong direction to be Men; was it possible that the dwarves were coming up from below the ground using one of their infernal tunnels? Or it might be elves, as they were in what was sometimes called the Elvenwood, after all.

  He saw a burst of light growing brighter and threw himself aside. Unnecessarily, as it turned out, as the huge flaming projectile struck the ground about twenty paces in front of him and ten to his left, bounced once, and then buried itself in the trunk of a tree so hard that Lugbol felt a tremor in the ground under his feet. He stared at it in disbelief. It was a giant spear, bigger than a troll’s spear, coated in some sort of pitch and then set alight. The flames burning in the treetops above them weren’t magic, he realized, but artillery!

  And who the hell dragged artillery into a forest? The spear must have been hurled by some sort of massive crossbow! As he picked himself up off the dirt and retrieved the club he’d dropped, a second flaming spear came flying towards him and transfixed a retreating orc though the back. Pinned to the ground and mortally wounded, the orc howled in agony as the fire rose up from both his front and back.

  Crying, shrieking, cursing, and wailing, orcs rushed past him on every side, babbling nonsensically about dragons and demonfire. As Lugbol worked his way through the trees against the tide of retreating kors, most of them naked and with their hands coward-empty, he began to hear the clash of metal on wood, metal, flesh, and bone. He glanced to his side and was a little surprised to see the guard-kor was still with him. The young orc was shaking, and he was gripping his club with knuckles that were pallid with fear, but he nodded at Lugbol all the same. The moving fires were coming closer to them now, and the flaming balls that he assumed were being flung by catapults were now flying over their heads.

  Then he saw caught a glimpse of one of the attackers. It was about the height of an orc, but considerably more slender, and covered from head to toe in metal armor of a sort he’d never seen before. Too short to be an elf, too thin to be a dwarf. A Man, he thought, but different than the sort of men he’d been slaughtering in recent weeks. In one hand it bore a torch, in the other a strange weapon that looked more like a long, thick knife than a proper sword. But the warrior man knew how to use it, as Lugbol saw it stab one orc with the knife, then thrust its torch into the face of a second orc. The orc shrieked, and as it raised its hands to its face, the metal-clad attacker ran the orc through.

  Before long a second iron-covered man joined the first, and then a third. They cut down what little resistance offered itself without taking so much as a scratch. They were wearing their torches affixed to their shoulders.

  Wings of fire! Iron demons! Lugbol couldn’t prevent the dreadful thought from entering his mind. He turned to the guard.

  “I’ve seen enough. Let’s get back to the others.”

  The young kor didn’t need any further encouragement. He fled, and Lugbol, with his one arm bound to his side, found it hard to keep the pace. He was panting hard and his side was burning by the time they reached their camp and found Ghurash haranguing several kors who were too drunk to stand in formation while Korpaghu was waving his cleaver and threatening to split the skull of any kor who joined the growing number of orcs in loud and frightened retreat. It was a sight to make a shugaba proud. The warband was standing fast, it appeared to be mostly present, and every single kor there had his weapon out and at the ready.

  “Grun-kor!” The cry went up as soon as he staggered into view. The two galvebels whirled around, their relief plain to see.

  “What in the name of Gor-Gor’s giant balls is going on?” Ghurash demanded.

  “Man attack. Not szavon’ugh like we’ve seen before. Iron men. They have artillery that throws fire.”

  “Didn’t think it was squaggin’ dragons,” Korpaghu rumbled.

  “Do we fall back? Or do we try to hold them?”

  Lugbol thought quickly before answering Ghurash. His kors were too lightly armored to stand before the iron men and the clubs most of them carried were more likely to splinter on those strange metal helms than do any harm. And there was something else, too. The iron men had attacked at night, and yet they hadn’t sought to conceal their assault. They could have infiltrated the Green Talons’ tents and killed dozens of kors before the alarm went up, instead, they attacked in the loudest, most conspicuous manner possible. Were they stupid or was it possible that they were just that overconfident?

  Comprehension dawned. It was neither.

  “They’re trying to drive us,” he hissed, more to himself than to his galvebels. The szavon’ugh army had been camped outside the forest, only a full day’s march away, waiting for Zlatagh to emerge and give them the battle they were seeking. Unlike the iron men, the szavon’ugh feared the forests and seldom did more than send mounted patrols into them to chase down raiding parties. But the iron men did not fear the Korokhurmagh, and with their fire and their metal, they were seeking to drive Zlatagh out of the safety of the trees, where the s
zavon’ugh would slaughter his lightly armed raiders.

  He needed to warn Zlatagh! But already he could hear that the gungiyar’ugh to the north of them were in retreat. By the time he and his kors reached Zlatagh’s tent, Zlatagh might be long gone. Lugbol could try to stand and buy Zlatagh enough time to stop what appeared to be a rout in the making, but he could not imagine Zlatagh would be able to get the panic-stricken orcs, to say nothing of the easily frightened goblins, under control before dawn. And by dawn, he and every last kor in his warband would be dead.

  To hell with the Maneater, he decided. He didn’t owe Zlatagh a damned thing. And to hell with the rest of the shugaba’ugh. His only concern was to protect his kors, and the best way to do that was to get out of the trap that the iron men had set. He looked to the southeast. In the darkness, it was not hard to see the fiery focus of the iron men’s attack as well as the extent to which their line was spread out. The southeast was blocked, but due south was dark and altogether devoid of fire. He came to a decision and raised his voice as he addressed all one hundred of his kors.

  “Stay close! Stay close! And I mean close enough to bugger the kor in front of you if he stops! We’re going to run past them. No torches; use yez nose and ears to follow each other. Keep yez damn mouths shut, keep clear of the fires, and keep yez clubs ready in case we run into trouble!”

  “Grun-kor!” they shouted. They didn’t really care what the orders were. All they wanted was for someone was to give them something to do that would keep their minds off the dark and noise and fire and fear.

  “Bring up the rear and keep them moving,” he told Korpaghu. “If anyone falls behind, leave them.”

  “Oi, grun-kor!”

  He looked at Ghurash. “If Zlatagh stands, we hit them from behind. If he runs, we fall back to rejoin Azzakhar and the main army.”

  “We’re right behind you, Lugbol.”

  “Good!” Lugbol took a deep breath and took another look at the advancing fires to the southeast. He thought he could see firelight glinting off the armor of the approaching iron men. Before he could second-guess himself, he waved his arm and broke into a loping stride, leading the gungiyar towards the waiting safety of the darkness.