The True Bastards

by Jonathan French

  Fetch strode to the hitching post. Marrow and Sluggard were already mounted.

  “His orcish is terrible,” Sluggard explained.

  Fetch only grunted.

  The brothel door jerked open while she was mounting. A slim human woman with a headscarf rushed out, her fresh, pretty face a sharp contrast to that of the scarred half-orc woman with her, the same one Fetch had seen earlier at the well. The mongrel hung back as the pretty frail approached.

  “Please, hoofmaster,” she said, the words delivered with deliberate deference and a trace of an accent Fetch could not place. “There are some here that would ask to come with you. To offer service to the True Bastards.”

  Fetch looked down. “Any of you a wet nurse?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then I got no place for you.”

  Fetch put heel to hog and left Sancho’s, vowing for the last time.

  SIX

  “HAS THE TIDE ARRIVED?”

  Fetch voiced the question before she was down from her hog.

  Mead motioned for a slop to take Womb Broom in hand, shook his head.

  “Damn…” She was home without a wet nurse and had hoped that, at the least, she would return to find fresh supplies waiting.

  “But this did.”

  Mead produced a small hollowed bone and handed it over.

  “Which of our birds?” Fetch asked as she removed the tiny coil of parchment from within.

  “Strava.”

  Fetch felt her heart catch at the prospect of the Betrayer Moon, for the danger it posed. And for the mongrel it would force to return. Her fingers were suddenly clumsy, but she managed to roll out the sliver of parchment and reveal the message penned in a meticulous scrawl.

  Zirko, Hero Father, High Priest of Belico summons the chieftains of the mongrel hoofs to Strava on the Noumenia Gorperetos.

  Frowning, she read it again.

  “How long do we have?” Mead asked.

  “It’s not…I don’t think it’s the Betrayer. Zirko wants the chiefs to gather. He’s fucking summoning us.” She thrust the scroll back at Mead. “When is this? Never was good with Hispartha’s fucking calendar.”

  His eyes moved quickly, his mind quicker. “It’s the last new moon of summer. You have…a little less than a fortnight.”

  Mead handed the parchment back and Fetch crumpled it with a growl. Her people were starving and now she was being bidden to ride to halfling lands on the mysterious whim of their meddling holy man.

  Marrow and Sluggard were off their hogs, the nomad reluctant to turn his over to the waiting slops while the gritter reveled in the help with an amused smile. Hood must have told the hoof about the possibility their chief was bringing free-riders back, for the newcomers were met without reluctance.

  Fetch held fast to her own reservations.

  “You two have earned yourselves somewhere to sleep tonight. Come the morning, you have to start convincing me you belong here.”

  Marrow frowned, taking in the twilit town. “Have we also earned dinner?”

  “You want to be a Bastard, you eat what we eat,” Fetch replied.

  “And that is?”

  “Tonight? Nothing.” Fetching beckoned the slopheads to lead the nomads to the stables. As the young mongrels stepped to it, Fetch grabbed Abril’s arm. “The fuck is wrong with your head, hopeful?”

  The entire right half of his scalp was shaved from the center over.

  “Orcs are bald,” was all the explanation he gave.

  Fetch gawked at him.

  “I’m a half-orc,” Abril told her. He pointed at the bisected hair and moved his finger slowly across the shaved side. “Half. Orc.”

  “Hells overburdened. You’ve just crowned yourself king of the fool-asses.”

  “What?” Abril lifted his chin at Mead. “He wears his hair like a Tine! Thinks it makes him immortal like them.”

  Mead expelled a laugh. “That’s a widow’s tale. Elves age and die same as us and the frails.”

  “Just see to the hogs, slop,” Fetch said, releasing Abril with a slight shove.

  They could still hear him muttering to Sence as they walked away. “Half. Orc. How’s that fool-ass? What we are. He ain’t an elf….”

  Following the hopefuls, Sluggard flashed a smile at Fetch as he passed. “Reminds me of the carnavales. I like it here already!”

  Marrow stayed silent behind a frown.

  Once they were out of earshot, Fetch turned to Mead. “Bunk them with the hoof. I want the boys to start taking their measure.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on them,” Mead said, tracking their progress into town. “Especially the dour one.”

  “It’s the other that needs minding. Sluggard. Any mongrel that smiles so much needs to be watched closely.”

  “Jackal was always smiling,” Mead observed.

  Fetch began to walk away. “Exactly.”

  “Chief…where are you going?”

  “My solar,” she replied. “Need some damn rest.”

  “What about Zirko’s message?”

  “Fuck Zirko!”

  Fetching needed to check in on the orphanage, but without a new wet nurse, the prospect of facing Thistle was not a welcome one. Besides, she’d been truthful with Mead. She was tired. The Bone Smiler’s potion was to blame. Even the lone drop was difficult to endure. He wasn’t wrong to call it poison. It left her feeling wobbly, with aches in her head and joints, and a dryness ever upon her tongue.

  Once in her solar, she took a dose, lay back on her bed, and waited for the shivers to take root. It made her nights fitful, but far better than to suffer the effects during the day. She dozed. And awoke to full darkness beyond the balcony. A man stood before the opening. Harelipped and sullen-eyed. Well, eye. The other had a thrumbolt embedded in the socket. Cavalero Garcia. Fetch had killed him at the brothel. Not today. The man today took the bolt in the chest and she’d not gotten a good look at his face. Perhaps that meant she would be spared a visit from him later.

  Fetching cursed under her breath. The Bone Smiler had warned that the potion might cause her to see things. Why couldn’t it have been a nicer vision? Jackal with his head at work between her legs, perhaps. She lay back down.

  A cry from the wall sawed through a dreamless void.

  Fetching snapped up, hand slapping down on her stockbow. It was still dark. The room had cooled. Instinct said she’d been asleep most of the night.

  The shout came again, followed by another, this one answering, questioning. Fetch slung her stockbow and snatched up her sword belt. She descended the steps two at a time, buckling the tulwar to her hips as she went. Outside, slopheads and Bastards were making for the gate, where the sentries continued to yell, pointing with big gestures over the wall.

  “Touro!” Fetching called out to the nearest rushing mongrel. The older slophead skidded to a stop. “Get two others and run the palisade. Make sure we aren’t getting hit from all sides.”

  Touro nodded an affirmation and sprinted away, gathering up assistance on the run.

  Fetch bolted for the gate, outpacing Dumb Door and several slops. Polecat had already gained the wall and joined the sentries that raised the alarm.

  “What we got? Thicks?” Fetch demanded, her boot striking the third rung as she leapt onto the ladder and began to climb.

  “It’s…runners, chief,” Polecat answered, his gaze fixed beyond the sharpened timbers of the stockade.

  Clambering onto the walk, Fetch straightened and joined her men, following their uncertain eyes out into the night-shrouded expanse of the lot.

  Revealed in the light of moon and stars, and the savage perceptions of her orc blood, Fetch saw a pair of figures making for the fort on foot, fast as their legs would allow. One was much larger than the other, bearing something across
its shoulders. Another person.

  “Open the gate!” Fetch cried.

  She jumped from the walk to help. The timbers of the gate creaked as they pulled one-half open. The pair of sprinters rushed through the gap as soon as it was wide enough, the smaller entering and spilling face-first into the dust, legs given out. The opening barely permitted the bulk of the second arrival. It was a mongrel female, clearly a thrice-blood from her size. It was rare for a thrice to have hair, but this one’s face was all but hidden behind a wild black curtain, as dry and coarse as a hog’s bristles. Unlike her companion, she kept her feet as she trundled to a halt, jostling the limp form draped across her broad shoulders.

  “Get that gate closed!” Fetch ordered, going to the prone figure. Squatting, she found the half-orc woman from Rhecia’s raising her scarred face from the ground. “The hells? What’s chasing you? Orcs?”

  The mongrel shook her head, tried to answer, but was foiled by a dry tongue and heaving ribs.

  “Chief!” Polecat hollered from above. “We got a rider!”

  “Sss…Slivers,” the scarred woman managed.

  Fetch gnashed teeth. “He was fucking hunting you?”

  “N-no. Kept…them off. Off…us.”

  “Them who?”

  “The beasts.”

  It was the thrice-blood that answered.

  Fetch jumped to her feet. “I need every thrum on the wall now! We got centaurs coming!”

  She ran for the ladder, but as she passed the thrice, the hand of the figure slung over her shoulder darted out and grabbed Fetch’s arm. It was the pretty frail who spoke to her at the brothel, barely conscious. Her voice leaked out, hardly a sigh.

  “They’re not…natural.”

  The girl’s eyes rolled drunkenly and her hand fell away.

  Fetch climbed the ladder. Polecat and Shed Snake made room at the edge of the stockade. Looking, she saw the hog, farther out than the women had been. Its gait was labored, flagging. The slight rider, unmistakably Slivers, twisted around in the saddle, loosing arrows over the barbarian’s rump. Panic had seized his aim and the arrows flew impotently, never striking his pursuers.

  “The fuck?” Fetch breathed, leaning forward and squinting at the loping shapes harrowing the fleeing hog.

  Shed Snake affirmed her confusion. “Those…aren’t ’taurs.”

  He was right. Fetch counted nearly a score of the creatures. From a distance, they could have been wolves, but each step closer betrayed them for something else. Something Fetch had never seen.

  They were larger than wolves. Not longer or even taller, but more robust, especially in the chest and shoulders. The necks were thick and elongated, protruding from hunchbacked withers, and ending in broad heads with squat muzzles and rounded ears. Working as a pack, they harried Slivers’s hog in relays, four of them rushing in to bite the barbarian’s flanks, the remainder forming a wide, pursuing arc, blocking routes of escape.

  “Take aim!” Fetch yelled, bringing her own weapon to her eye.

  Slivers was trying to ride for the gate, but the strange beasts were herding him toward the neglected vineyards, where the ground was sloped and choked with withered vines.

  Whatever these animals were, they were cunning hunters.

  Slivers spent his last, fruitless, arrow. He faced forward and began an attempt to adjust his course. His hog fought him, fought against going nearer the snapping fangs of the encircling pack. The nomad was forced to toss his bow and seize the swine-yankers, muscling the hog’s head away from the slopes. The pack punished the hog for its rebellion, surging forward to tear at its hocks. The barbarian squealed.

  The beasts…laughed.

  It was a queer, pulsing cackle, a high-pitched chorus of chilling giggles punctuated with throbbing whoops. The sound caused Fetch’s hair to stand up, her scalp tingling with gooseflesh. She could feel her brothers on the wall shift uneasily at the sound, casting sidelong glances to see if anyone else was unnerved. She chose to answer that laughter by squeezing the tickler of her stockbow.

  The string snapped forward, the prods thrummed, and the bolt flew. Her aim was true. The bolt took one of the beasts just above the foreleg, between the chest and shoulder. A heart-shot. The impact knocked the animal off its feet, its forward momentum causing it to hover in the air for a moment before spilling heavily into the dust, tumbling and sliding until it came to rest in a heap.

  “Put these dogs down!” Fetch yelled, yanking back her bowstring until it locked and drawing another bolt from her quiver. The hoof began to loose, the thrums creating their own chorus. The ground around the chase erupted with striking shafts. Slivers flinched and ducked against the deadly, closely falling volley, but the sure aim of the hoof left him unstruck, a feat that also spared most of the surrounding, slavering beasts. They lurched and reeled against the onslaught of thrumbolts, but refused to give up their prey.

  Four more fell. Not nearly enough

  Slivers’s hog was barely maintaining a trot now, blood trailing its slowing steps and staining the maws of its attackers. Through that terrible, undulating laughter, the nomad’s voice rose.

  “Open the gate! Please!”

  Fetching felt the eyes of her hoof upon her. She said nothing. She could not risk those cackling curs getting inside.

  Slivers’s shouts were strident with fear. “OPEN! PLEASE!”

  “Chief?” Snake prodded.

  Without acknowledging he had spoken, Fetching reloaded her thrum and sighted along the shaft. She had told Slivers if he returned, he would die. Better by her promised hand, than the jaws of some vicious hounds.

  An idea caused Fetch’s fingers to jerk away from the tickler.

  “Slivers!” she cried out, waving her arm repeatedly to the right. “The ditch! Ride in the ditch!”

  For a heartbeat, it did not appear that the nomad understood, but at the last moment he pulled hard on his hog’s left swine-yanker, forcing her head toward the fort’s dry moat. The barbarian trundled down into the ditch, kicking up a storm of dust. The beasts followed, but were now hindered by the close confines of the rough trench, allowing only a pair to reach the hog at a time.

  “Move!” Fetch commanded, rushing to her left, shoving past Shed Snake, and waving the rest of the hoof out of her way. She began sprinting along the palisade, in the opposite direction taken by Slivers. “Rope! Someone toss me some damn rope!”

  “Chief!” a voice alerted her from below as a coil was thrown up from the yard. She caught it on the move, slung her stockbow, and began knotting a loop in one end of the stout hempen cord. Her boots pounding the boards of the walk, Fetch kept her gaze fixed beyond the wall, looking ahead and down, watching for Slivers. The ditch remained unfinished along the stretch below. She had to meet the nomad before he reached the end of the digging.

  The laughter of the pack had not dwindled and seemed to roof Winsome with its bloodthirsty cadence. Farther down the walk, Fetch spied Touro and a pair of younger slops, those she had ordered away from the gate to check the perimeter.

  “They coming?!” she called.

  Touro did not allow his confusion to slow his wits. He leaned far out over the wall and looked. “They are!”

  Without breaking stride, Fetch threw the loop of the rope around one stake in the stockade, wrapped the other end around her left wrist, and vaulted over the wall. Stomach lurching, she dropped until the rope arrested her fall with a vicious jerk that tore at her shoulder. She was now dangling only a few handspans above where the base of the wall met the earthworks. Planting her boots against the timbers, Fetching leaned out over the ditch, extending both her arms to their limits, one gripping the rope, the other thrust out and waiting.

  Slivers appeared a heartbeat later, his hog coming around the bend in the ditch. Two of the beasts were now running along the outer edge of the moat, keeping pace, for
cing him to bend doubled over his hog’s neck to keep out of reach of their snapping jaws.

  Fetch sent a strident whistle through her teeth. It lanced through the cackling of the pack and Slivers’s gaze snapped up, fixing on Fetch’s outstretched hand. The pack must have seen it too, for they stopped laughing. Somehow, the sudden silence was worse. Slivers spurred his barbarian onward, and like all good hogs, she had a little more to give at the very end. The sow surged away from the pack, bringing Slivers charging toward Fetch’s arm. Just as he stood in the saddle, his own arms reaching, Fetch kicked away from the wall. The nomad’s hands slapped around her forearm, his forward momentum causing Fetch to swing backward. The extra weight forced the rope around her wrist to tighten, biting flesh.

  “Hold tight, you scrawny fuck!” Fetch growled through her teeth.

  Swinging forward again, she twisted her body so her boots again smote the wall. Using the nomad as a pendulum, she began to run along the surface of the stockade. The pack was below, jostling one another as they struggled to maneuver in the confines of the ditch. Slivers began to shout, kicking his dangling legs as the animals jumped up, jaws snapping wetly. Powered by her legs and the swinging weight of the frailing, Fetch reached the upmost swell of the arc. There was a moment of weightlessness and in that moment Fetch swiftly rotated her wrist, wrapping more of the rope around her arm. As she and Slivers began to swing down once more, they were a handbreadth closer to the top of the palisade.

  The nomad gave a wordless cry as his legs again baited the beasts. They were yowling and snarling, trying to use the embankment to scramble toward their prey.

  Touro appeared above, leaning out to grasp the swaying rope.

  “Leave it!” Fetch shouted, and the slop obeyed. He wouldn’t be able to haul them up on his own and the two hopefuls with him were little more than boys. All they would accomplish was to cease the rope’s swing, and Fetch would be damned if she was going to dangle motionless. She just needed to keep free from the fangs long enough for the hoof to pull them up.

  The pack had other designs.

  Looking down into those leering faces, Fetch realized that not one had pursued the injured hog. Too late, she remembered the pair that left the trench.