The Grey Bastards: A Novel (The Lot Lands)

by Jonathan French

  Warbler grunted. “You really make a deal with Zirko?”

  The question forced Jackal away from the bemused exploration of his skin. He looked up to find the old thrice frowning at him, waiting upon an answer without demanding one.

  “I went to him,” Jackal admitted. “My arm was shattered and needed mending. It had gone too long. I knew it was going to have to be cut off, unless…”

  “Unless you got some miracle.”

  “I’d heard the rumors about Strava. Hells, you used to tell us stories about it. Oats and Fe—…I was warned against it, but there wasn’t a choice. Zirko said there would be a price. Two, in fact. I agreed to pay them. So yes, I made a deal. But the little fucker’s half-crazy. Thinks his god is going to return and lead an army into Dhar’gest, destroy all the thicks.”

  Warbler gave a scoffing shake of his head. “It would take a god to do it. And even then…”

  A distant, haunted pall melded with the shadows on the older half-orc’s face.

  “You’ve been there,” Jackal realized aloud. “The Dark Lands. You’ve fucking been!”

  Warbler shook his head again, but in distaste, not denial. “Once.”

  Jackal suddenly felt a child, begging for stories at War-boar’s knee, but he could not help himself from asking the question.

  “Why?”

  “Same reason anyone goes into peril,” Warbler responded slowly. “Because some things just have to be faced.”

  Unwilling to press further, lest he start to crave a tit full of milk, Jackal let the matter drop.

  The seventh day of travel brought them to the edge of heavily forested highlands. The road continued on its course, rising to tackle the sloping terrain, but Warbler pulled Mean Old Man away from the cobbles, heading due east cross-country. Creeks and streams became prevalent, and Jackal marveled at the verdant plains splashed between the brown hills. He began to see trees he could not name, their leaves so thick and green they appeared nearly as black as the succoring shade they housed.

  “Is this Tine land?” Jackal queried, turning south to see the distant, hazy peaks of the Umber Mountains.

  “Far from it,” Warbler told him. “This belongs to the Crown. Did you think the nobility would not keep the best lots for themselves?”

  “Are there any castiles? Cavalry? Who keeps watch here?”

  “No one. These are the borderlands, Jackal. There were few settlements here before the Incursion and none have been built since.” Warbler pointed north across the rolling hills. “The Lots end less than half a day’s ride from where we stand. Long before dark, we will be in Hispartha.”

  “And then?”

  “Better seen than said.”

  Warbler did not speak again while they rode, not even to announce their departure from Ul-wundulas.

  Yet Jackal felt it.

  Lands weren’t separated by names alone, they possessed their own natures, their own spirits. The country Hearth now trod was not the badlands of Jackal’s birth. Yes, it was greener, the winds cooler, but the difference was imbued in more than beauty and fairer climes. This land was forgiven and forgiving, resting imperiously above its oft-raped sister. Ul-wundulas had no more tears, for itself or its people; it was used up, and bitter with the knowledge that its hideous, sun-scorched surface would not save it from another assault. Yet noble Hispartha was flush and unspoiled, content to ignore the ravages of time and invasion as long as the dusty thighs of Ul-wundulas lay spread between it and Dhar’gest.

  When Jackal drank from his first Hisparthan stream, the water colder and cleaner than any that had touched his throat, he knew he never wanted to leave. Suddenly, shamefully, he understood why the thicks were so intent to reach this land.

  “This what you wanted me to see?” he asked, standing away from the seductive brook. “The land we protect? The land denied us by the frails we keep safe?”

  Warbler had not dismounted when they stopped. He squinted into the distance and shook his head.

  “You’re here to see that we don’t keep anything safe.”

  They followed the stream as it ran through a sporadically wooded valley and eventually flowed into a sizable lake nestled amongst the hills. Across the calm surface of the water stood a blunt tooth of rock, its denuded hump sulking beneath the afternoon sky. Warbler led them toward it, riding along the western bank of the lake. The trees growing near were young, beginning to lead a charge up the slope to retake the lone peak. Jackal followed Warbler away from the shoreline, and they rode in the shadow of the tooth until the lake was lost from view. Ahead, the trees gave way to a blindingly white swath of dusty ground festooned with tall piles of loose stones.

  The dust and detritus was the doorstep of a yawning cavity housed low in the base of the promontory. Evidence of wooden scaffolding lay bleaching in the harsh heat.

  Warbler dismounted and left Mean Old Man standing in the shelter of the trees.

  “What was this, a mine?” Jackal asked, following his lead.

  Warbler loosed an affirmative grunt and retrieved a pair of prepared torches from his saddlebag. He doused the wrappings with a stream of oil from a skin and handed one of the staves over before heading off toward the entrance. As Jackal cleared the trees and entered the punishing sun, his nostrils flared.

  The place smelled of home.

  The mouth of the mine was larger than it appeared from a distance. As he walked closer, Jackal saw it was over twice his height and wide enough to admit a dozen men walking abreast. A palpable chill flowed out of the shaft, unpleasant despite the brutal heat of the sun. Drawing his knife and a piece of flint, Warbler struck sparks until both torches were alight. He looked up at the support lintel with a stubborn glare.

  “The Imperium dug up so much silver, it is said they needed elephants to bring it out. Hispartha continued the work, but they used half-orcs…until the lodes gave out.”

  Jackal looked hard at the old thrice’s profile. “You were a slave here?”

  Warbler nodded. “I was born here. Well…I can’t swear to that, but it’s certainly the first cunt I remember crawling out of. Wish I was the worst that came from this womb.”

  “You mean the Claymaster.”

  Warbler’s lips twitched into a sad smile. “No. He left here a hero. Come ahead.”

  Together they stepped into the cold tunnel, holding their torches aloft. The shaft was well shorn with timbers and cut deep into the rock. Jackal suppressed a shudder at the thought of an elephant emerging from the shadows at the edge of the torchlight, mad-eyed and trumpeting. He had seen only one of the immense creatures, when a troupe of entertainers came through the Lots. They had performed in Winsome and moved on, but were cut down by orc raiders before making it to the Skull Sowers’ land. Oats had wept when they found the butchered elephant, though Jackal had pretended not to notice.

  After what seemed an eternity of leading down, the shaft opened upon a shelf of rough-cut stone overlooking a vast sea of shadow that the torches could not hope to penetrate. Jackal sensed a vast openness as the queer subterranean breeze played through his hair. A massive ramp of earthworks rose to meet the shelf, and Warbler descended without pause. Jackal followed, sliding a bit on the loose stones carpeting the hard-packed dirt.

  When they reached level ground, Warbler struck off into the abyss, his torch seeming to illuminate only him. Jackal trudged along behind, waving his own firebrand to coax shapes out of the darkness. The long runnels of deep shadow proved to be trenches, the briefly flaring crosses were revealed as the support beams of watchtowers. All the votives within this vast tomb of industry Warbler passed without a glance. He walked determinedly across the cavern until the darkness before him concentrated into an oculus of black on the far wall, the mouth of another tunnel. This too sloped downward, yet it was much smaller than the entrance shaft, forcing Jackal and Warbler to stoop as they w
ent single file.

  The air became warmer the deeper they went, and increasingly tinged with an acrid edge. By the time the tunnel debouched into a low chamber, Jackal was sweating and loath to take a deep breath, the air was so foul. The light from the torches exposed the source of the stench.

  Heaps of tiny bones rose halfway up the cave walls, nested within the filth of long-moldered flesh and fur. Thousands of fist-sized rib cages stood out sharply from the refuse alongside uncountable pointed, fanged skulls.

  “Rats?” Jackal guessed, his throat thick with stale decay.

  Warbler did not respond. He swept the noxious chamber with his torch, taking in the pair of exit passages before deciding upon one.

  “This way,” he grunted, and led on.

  They passed through more of the charnel caves, all filled with the remains of vermin hordes. Often they were piled against the walls, as if shoveled there, but some were deposited in deep pits cut into the center of the floor. After the first such room, Jackal ceased inspecting the pits and walked carefully around them without a glance. He followed after Warbler numbly, his mind drifting away to keep his body from fleeing back to the surface. Without a guide, such a flight would only fling him deeper into the twisting tunnels. He would be lost until the shadows claimed his torch and then his existence. Warbler moved with the hesitant surety born from memory. Any knowledge of these passages would take months of mapping, or years of imprisonment.

  Jackal tried not to think on what it would have been like, existing entombed from your first memory. Thankfully, he had neither the imagination nor the madness to conjure a clear idea.

  Until they reached the cages.

  Lost in horrid reverie, Jackal was only dimly aware of entering the cavern. It was the smell that brought him around. Rust, tangy, and pungent. It was the stench of old metal, corroding not from water but from piss and sweat, the fearful humors that once leaked out of uncountable slaves, soaking the bars and chains that held them underground.

  Warbler took in his surroundings for the first time since entering the mine. He held his torch high, but the light could not penetrate the upper reaches of the cages, stacked one atop the other until they vanished into the ink. Each was a wrought rectangle, big enough for a single occupant to stand within, as long as they weren’t very tall. The meager light shone on mercifully little, but Jackal could still feel the hulking blocks of cages stretching beyond the darkness. Little avenues ran between the blocks. Warbler strode slowly down one until he reached a junction, where he stopped. The forest of iron bars dwarfed the old thrice.

  “ANY ALIVE?!”

  Jackal jumped, unprepared for Warbler’s sonorous voice to challenge the cavern. The echo died quickly, as if ensnared by the flaking silhouettes of the bars.

  “That’s what they used to call out,” Warbler said, lowering his voice. “After every trial, they would ask if any of us were still alive. Every time after the first, I thought about not answering. But we never saw what they did with the bodies…how they emptied the cages. I was more afraid of their arts than I was of the rats.”

  Jackal was having trouble hearing, but he could not bring his feet to venture forward. The prospect of walking down that aisle, between and beneath that legion of cages, held him paralyzed.

  “Who?” he asked, sending his voice where his steps would not go.

  “The wizards,” Warbler answered. He bowed his head and let out a disgusted blow of air. “I hated the overseers when I was a boy, when this was still a mine. They had whips and loud voices, and used both. I hated them, but I never feared them. They were just men and could be killed…often were. Easy for a mongrel to kill a frail. Hells, they didn’t even execute us for it. Just shattered a knee, made you keep working. Crippled like that, wouldn’t be long before you would beg a fellow slave to cave in your skull. They had us digging down here long after the silver ran out. Once, I asked why, expecting a kicking. But the snapper just laughed and said, ‘For a vein hope.’ I didn’t understand the jest until I was older.

  “Sometime after, the war broke out, though none of us down here knew it. Even the overseers didn’t think much of it, at first. They kept shouting and whipping, we kept digging. And then…the wizard arrived. The first one. He took control of the mine, brought in so many more slaves, I thought we would drown under each other.”

  Warbler pointed a finger upward and revolved it around. He loosed a curious little chuckle. “We cut this out and, fuck-all, we found silver. The wizard ordered it delved…and thrown in the slag pile with all the other rock. That’s when we knew something had changed. That’s when I started to fear. Another wizard arrived, then a third. I don’t know how many there were, at the end, but we hated them more than we ever did the overseers. One of the new boys, one of the slaves brought in from the surface, he tried to kill one. None of us ever tried again.”

  Jackal didn’t expect Warbler to elaborate, nor did he need him to. He had seen what Crafty was capable of, and yet, had never seen him do anything wrathful. It was always calm and calculated. The thought of a wizard driven to anger by an attempt on his life was not pleasant.

  “The Great Orc Incursion,” Warbler went on, “that’s what the wizards called the war. Even down here, we started to get news of the battles. When they ordered us to drag these cages into the new excavation, we figured it was going to be a prison for the thicks. We found ourselves inside instead. I had spent my life as a slave underground. But that was the first time I felt trapped. The slave in the cage above me shat himself when they swung his door closed, dripped all over me. I swore to kill him next chance I got. Then they unleashed the rats, and my bowels ran down my legs too.

  “They came like a flood. Chittering, chewing, biting. The screams from the cages as they crawled through the bars…”

  Warbler paused, his deep voice faltering for a moment.

  “I screamed too. But I stomped and grabbed and crushed and bit and chewed and choked. ‘Any alive?’ I awoke to that first call, chin-deep in dead rats. There was an answer, somewhere in another block, then another. Not sure how many before I cried out and they opened my cage. Not the one above. The rats had done for him what I swore to do. Perhaps a couple hundred of us had survived out of thousands. They took us away and chained us in another cavern. I slept. We all did. Still, no one had the strength to fight when they came to take us to the cages again. The dead were gone, rats and slaves both, but the cages were filled with more half-orcs from the surface. They didn’t know what was coming.

  “And the rats came again. I don’t know how. Seemed they had unleashed every living one in the world the first time, but there it was again, that loathsome, deadly tide. Curse my luck, I survived again. And again. I don’t know how many trials there were, only that fewer of us lived each time. Most that did got sick. Weeping sores, pustules all over, fingers black and swollen. They usually didn’t survive the next trial, or died in the times between. I never got sick, don’t know why, but there were a few dozen of us that never did. Fewer still were the ones who did, but wouldn’t die. There were nine of them. And one tougher than the others.”

  Jackal swallowed hard and waited. Warbler cocked his head and looked back down the aisle, directly at him.

  “He was already called the Claymaster, then. Had already thrown off the shackles of slavery and joined the war, leading his fellow potters on charges against the thicks on hogback. It was the frails that first called them the Grey Bastards, and the chief embraced the name as he won battles for his captors. Hispartha used him as a slave, then a soldier, now an experiment.”

  “The half-orc riders turned the tide,” Jackal insisted, confused and growing agitated. “They were the reason the thicks were pushed back.”

  “Lies, son,” Warbler told him. “Some of the slaves fought and were effective, for a time. Perhaps if Hispartha had allowed them to stay in the field, the history you believe would h
ave been true. But the frails panicked and rounded up the mongrel troops, brought them down here as fodder for the wizards and their creation.”

  “What creation?”

  “The plague. The damn thing wasn’t natural. The wizards made it, down here, and used us to do it. I reckon they wanted to perfect it before unleashing it on the orcs, but they never had the chance.”

  “You escaped,” Jackal said.

  Warbler nodded. “We did. Led by the Claymaster. I don’t recall him before the plague did its work. He was just another face in the herd. But I knew his voice. It was always the first to answer when they asked who was alive. No hesitation. ‘Any alive?’ And then there it was, his voice, strong and defiant. Every time I thought about staying silent, allowing them to dispose of me with the dead, I would hear that voice and it gave me the courage to live one more time. Hells, my suffering was nothing compared to his, all twisted up and ravaged like he was. But he just wouldn’t die, so neither could I.

  “One hundred and thirty-four of us made it out of this mine alive. We would never survive in Hispartha. So at the Claymaster’s command we went south, into Ul-wundulas, where the war was still being waged. The conflict gave us room to move and we scavenged weapons and hogs, freed other half-orcs to swell our ranks. We fought everyone, man and orc, whoever we came across. We killed hundreds. The plague carried by the chief and the other eight did the rest. They were mongrels, human and orc, and the sorcerous sickness in their blood took hold in both armies. Within one summer, the war was done because there were none left to fight. In our hunger for vengeance, we brought peace. What orcs remained skulked back to Dhar’gest and the frails withdrew to glorious Hispartha.”

  “And we got the Lots,” Jackal said.

  “That was the price the Claymaster demanded. Otherwise, he threatened to ride north and bring the plague right to the king’s throne room.”

  Jackal shook his head. “Why the lies? The Lots weren’t given to you, they were taken. That should make us proud. Why hide it?”