“And, unfortunately, despite the beating that we gave them back in Eberia, they’ve managed to do a good job of pursuing those wars, especially the one against the gronn, based on what Garr has told me,” she said. “But that…is a story in itself and one that isn’t relevant to us right now. What is relevant though, is what came of it, which is an orc warlord named Krol who rose to fill the leadership vacuum that our war left among the orc tribes. It’s because of him that that the orc tribes have been able to reunify themselves so quickly after we broke them, and why we are where we are today.”
“He sounds like someone that we should be especially worried about, then,” I stated, wondering what kind of orc would be capable of dominating so many tribes in such a short timeframe.
“Only if you have a lick of sense about you,” Aryana answered in a grave voice. “Because he is the one that’s responsible for the corruption that you’ve all encountered, both him and his cult, who call themselves the Heralds of Riius. They supposedly serve some sort of dark god or spirit that they’ve all made a pact with.”
“Of course they do,” Caius mused in a soft voice as we all took a second to process the woman’s words, several mutters breaking out in the process. “Every story needs a dark god at some point. Why not have one here where we have to deal with it?”
“Because we’re the special kind of lucky,” Constantine replied with a grunt, prompting a second chorus of grumbling before our voices eventually died down enough to allow Aryana to continue her story.
“All that you’ve encountered so far—the corrupted monsters, the spirits, and more—it’s all because of them,” she said while glancing between each of us. “But his reach doesn’t stop with just the orcs either. He’s also somehow even managed to fold a clan of arakissi into his tribe, something we’ve never seen the orcs do. In either case, they also wield the same corruption and venerate the same entity that his tribe does, giving them a bond no other tribe can match.”
“We’d heard rumors that the orcs had allied with some of the arakissi,” I said slowly, unsure of how much I was able to say before the in-game filters cut me off, “but we weren’t sure if it was actually true.”
“Oh, they’re true, all right,” Aryana confirmed. “The other orc tribes definitely don’t like it, but they can’t argue with the results that Krol’s magic has brought them, nor are they strong enough to defy it, so they stay in line.”
“I suppose it’s a good thing to know the name of your enemy,” I mused, reaching up to scratch my chin as I considered what Aryana had said. “Do you think if we took him out it would cause the orcs to fall apart?”
“Probably, if at least for a time,” the woman replied without missing a beat but also shaking her head as she spoke. “But I’ll cut that train of thought short right now. He’s not here. Never has been as far as I’ve been here. He’s apparently still involved in the war against the gronn as well as calling more of the northern tribes to his banner. Apparently, there are even more of them even farther north that never answered the call to wage war against Eberia.”
“Well, that’s great. More orcs are exactly what we need here,” Constantine grunted as we all absorbed that newest bit of information. “But who’s running the show here then if he isn’t?”
“His two lieutenants, or at least whatever the orc and arakissi equivalents are,” Aryana replied. “The orcs are led by a shaman by the name of Zhul and the arakissi by a necromancer called Sthera. Of the two, Zhul effectively rules Khudazal in terms of directing the various tribes here under Krol’s banner while Sthera spends her efforts on directing the war against her people. I’m afraid I don’t know all the details, but from what I’ve heard, she apparently has half a dozen or more arakissi clans that answer to her beck and call in the swamps to the east. At any rate, attacking and killing either of them might work to throw things into chaos for a time. But unless you’ve brought a score or three more of your people that you haven’t told me about, I doubt that you would be able to even reach them before you are caught, killed, or both.”
“Then what exactly are our options going forward?” I asked, starting to get an unsettling feeling that our desperate idea of raiding Khudazal might have been impossible from the get-go.
“This is,” Aryana replied as she held out the engraved wooden spike that she’d been holding all this time for all of us to better see. “I’m sure you’ve all been wondering what exactly this thing is and why it was so important that Garr not be caught with it. And the answer to that is because it’s a blightspike—one of countless many that we have hiding throughout the gardens here as we prepare ourselves to strike at the orcs the best way we can.”
“By attacking their food supply,” Berwyn stated as we all stared at the spike. “You have all been spreading the blight we heard Garr mention before he was taken.”
“We have,” she confirmed, nodding her head once in response to the monk’s statement. “Or rather both Garr and Senzin have been. They have both spent the last few weeks cultivating and preparing the blight so that it would consume the entirety of the garden’s crops. If we can finish their plan, then it would completely cripple the orcs’ war efforts in this region while allowing us to—”
Aryana stopped speaking as two shrill whistles echoed out in the distance, her head turning to look out in the direction of the garden.
“Someone’s coming,” she said as she stood up, her eyes flicking over towards us as she spoke. “One of ours.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before we all heard hurried movement echoing out through the forest, followed shortly after by a panting Tul’Shar who rounded the edge of the compost pile at a run. Breathing heavily, the man’s eyes promptly went wide with panic the second that he saw all of us, clearly not having expected to run into a group of armed and armored adventurers rising to meet him. Fortunately, however, Aryana was ready for the man’s surprise, her voice speaking out as soon as she saw him.
“They are with us,” she stated as she strode forward between our ranks, cutting short his panic before he could do anything rash. “What’s going on? Why are you in such a hurry?”
“Urgent news from the city,” the Tul’Shar replied in a raspy voice as he slowed to a stop a short distance away from us, pausing for a second to take a deep breath. “We’ve received word that Senzin was taken.”
“What?” Aryana demanded, her voice suddenly breaking. “W-why?”
“We don’t know yet,” he answered with a shake of his head. “But they took him and all of the earthspeakers from his garden about an hour or two ago without warning.”
“Fuck!” she hissed in response. “Do they know? Are they rounding up more of us?”
“I don’t know,” the man replied earnestly. “I couldn’t find out because they’ve all begun to move. Not just a handful, but all of them. They are moving out to the west, ready for war.”
“Hold on a second,” I said cutting into the conversation before either of them could say something else, suddenly feeling a cold spike begin to develop in the pit of my stomach. “Who just began to move?”
“The other tribes,” Aryana answered in a stunned tone as she turned back to look at me, her eyes unfocused as she spoke. “I didn’t have a chance to tell you yet, but several new tribes arrived from the north a few days ago and settled in around the city. We thought they were here to join the war on the arakissi, but if they’re heading back out to the west…”
Aryana’s voice trailed off as her eyes slowly regained focus and locked directly onto mine, any further words unnecessary as she saw the realization in my expression.
They were headed to Aldford.
Chapter 40
I watched silently while staring down at all the moving shapes below me, my eyes carefully darting from cluster to cluster as I tried to get a rough count of their numbers.
Twenty-five hundred at least, I thought as I reached the last group of orcs and exhaled a slow breath in an attempt to calm my thu
ndering heart, which had yet to settle despite it having been nearly a half-hour since I’d begun counting. Maybe as many thirty-five depending on how many already left before I got here, though it’s probably closer to assume thirty. Depends on how pessimistic I want to be. Even if I try and stay on the positive side, there’s still that massive construct that we saw in the feed somewhere around here, assuming that the orcs haven’t already sent it on ahead.
I replied as I shifted my attention towards my familiar who was perched slightly above and beside me on his own thick branch of the tree that we were currently hiding in. Stretched out down the length of the limb the way only a cat could manage, Amaranth had balanced himself perfectly to assume a pose of lazy rest, one of his paws dangling loosely in the air beneath him.
My mental voice trailed off as I refused to mention the obvious conclusion to our failure to stand up to the orcs, a stubborn part of me feeling that if I didn’t speak of it, then it wouldn’t come true. Instead, I shifted my grip on the branch that I was holding onto for balance and looked upward, searching for an even higher vantage point.
Trusting that the cat would follow me at his own pace, I bent my legs and leapt straight upwards, triggering Blink Step as my feet left my perch. Watching the world blur for the briefest of instants as I teleported myself straight upwards before snapping back into focus, the next thing I knew I was reaching out to grab hold of the branch I’d spotted. Holding onto it tightly, I carefully pulled myself up and onto it, feeling my stomach flutter in response to the tree’s sway which was much more pronounced this close to its peak.
Whoa, I mentally grunted as I wrapped my legs around the branch, second-guessing my decision to climb even higher up the massive tree. Closing my eyes tightly, I exhaled my best attempt at a calming breath as I tried to settle myself, mentally replaying the last two hours that had ended up with me hiding in a tree some hundred and fifty feet above the ground.
After receiving the warning that both Senzin had been captured and the orc tribes had begun to mobilize, Aryana had been forced to pause the remainder of her briefing in favor of verifying and then spreading the word of what had happened. Ready to help in any way that we could, we found ourselves swept up into the flurry of activity that followed, our group partially splitting up in the process. Wanting to get her own eyes on the orcs’ movement and also attempt to contact other slaves that may have a better idea of what was happening, I found myself assigned to Aryana, along with Constantine as we headed towards Khudazal itself.
Along the way she was able to give me a truncated briefing of what the resistance’s plans originally had been with the blightspikes and how they were designed to work in conjunction with a ritual spell that both Garr and his follow earthspeakers had been crafting. Their goal had been to use the spell to trigger an explosive growth of blight across all three of the druidic gardens that they’d cultivated, rendering it useless for the orcs and denying them their most critical food sources. But in addition to blighting the gardens, Aryana and Senzin had come up with a plan to stage a mass breakout amongst the slaves at the same time that the ritual was taking place. Their hopes being that by timing both two events to occur simultaneously they would be able to cause enough confusion amongst the orcs for at least one of them to succeed, if even only partially.
Unfortunately, however, the resistance had hit a major snag in their preparation of the blighting ritual, in that the blightspikes that they had already placed had prematurely begun to affect the crops that they’d been placed close to. Given the sheer number of them that they’d planted and the presence of suddenly dying crops, it didn’t take long for the orcs to figure out that something was amiss, immediately taking out their anger on the slaves they believed responsible. As a result, this left Garr and the other earthspeakers desperate to buy time and assure the orcs that they were working to control the blight’s spread while working to do the opposite as quickly as they could before they were found out.
Which, based on the initial news so far, seemed that they finally had been as the orcs had begun to round up a sizable number of the druids and shamans that they’d enslaved.
However, given our armed and armored nature, Constantine and I, plus Amaranth once we’d caught up to him, couldn’t easily blend in with the slaves that Aryana needed to talk to in order find out what had happened. Instead, the woman needed us for a pair of other tasks, the first being for someone to watch her back without being noticed as she contacted her people. Given the level of paranoia that she operated under, she couldn’t completely dismiss that someone hadn’t sold her and her people out and that a group of orcs would be looking to round them up in short order. To that end, she elected to take Constantine with her as she did her rounds, the man being more than stealthy enough to trail her without being noticed and help her should she end up in trouble.
And unfortunately we can’t exactly tell Aryana about the feed that we saw back in reality either, I thought as my heart finally started to slow its rapid beat, allowing me to shift my grip in preparation to stand. If there are any Dread Crew here at the city, which there probably are, Carver probably has those he trusts jumping at anything and everything that’s out of place, thinking that it could be someone trying to backstab him. Or worse, he is expecting us to try and take a shot at him and is pre-emptively panicking and getting the orcs to crack down on suspicious behavior.
It was that particular line of thinking that left the second task to both Amaranth and me, which was to confirm the orc tribes’ movement and ensure that they weren’t preparing to do something even more unexpected. Of course, I imagined too that Aryana wanted to give me a chance to see the mobilizing orcs with my own eyes in order to get their measure. After all, if they were really heading towards Aldford, then it was only a matter of time before we would find ourselves standing directly in their way. To that end, Amaranth and I decided to make the most of our magical abilities, specifically Blink Step and Jump, to stealthily approach the city from a somewhat unorthodox angle that few others would be able to manage.
That angle being from above.
Using our abilities to either teleport or leap high into the massive two-hundred-foot-tall trees that made up the Hartwyld, Amaranth and I effortlessly climbed upwards into the thick forest canopy overhead until we were hidden from sight. From there, we moved from tree to tree until we finally reached the sheltered glade that hid the ancient Irovian ruin and the orc tribes that had since moved in to call it home.
Steady. This would be a really bad time to fall, I thought as I slowly rose into a standing position on the branch, reaching out to grab the tree’s trunk in order to find my balance. Just a quick scan and then we can start finding our way back down.
Moving carefully, I took a few tentative steps forward on my newfound perch, timing my movements so that they were in sync with tree’s gentle sway. As I did, I sensed Amaranth appear somewhere to my left, the cat saying nothing as he settled himself once again, waiting for me to finish what we’d come here for. Eventually, I reached a point where I was able to pull a thinner branch out of my line of sight, the slight movement giving me a better view of the sprawling city in the distance.
And there it is, I thought as I looked down at Khudazal, the three dozen or so feet I’d added in height to my vantage point giving me a better view than I had earlier.
Set in the center of a wide oval-like glade, the orc city was a haphazardly sprawling affair and couldn’t possi
bly have stood out more against the forest around it. It spread outwards from around the ancient remains of a large and crumbling Irovian fortress, its construction a patchwork of mismatched and varied building styles. From what I could infer from my vantage point, it seemed that the orcs had purposefully segregated themselves from one another, my guess being along their tribal lines, each of them building their own small pockets of the overall city.
Scanning the settlement carefully as I considered my theory, my eye landed on one end of the city where there was a section of what looked like fairly well-crafted structures, built solidly from wood and lumber. But as I shifted my attention back westward, I saw the buildings abruptly change as I reached a certain point, the sturdy if rough structures being replaced by exceptionally crude ones made from what looked like dirt and mud. Noting the strange difference, I continued to sweep my attention even farther along, the mud huts eventually transitioning to a collection of large tents that stretched onwards for a small portion of the city before changing yet again.
It seems like the differences between the tribes that Aldwin told us about don’t just stop at their fighting styles and tactics, but also extend outward to their way of building and community life, I thought as I finished my initial sweep through the city, noting that it was filled with dozens of bright fires from within its sprawling expanse despite the early hour. The result had several thick plumes of smoke rising from amongst the settlement, billowing upwards until they vanished into the ash-covered canopies of the trees that hung overhead. From the looks of those fires, too, it doesn’t look like every single member of the orc tribes are leaving either. Some of them look to be staying back…though maybe not as many as we’d like.
Glory to the Brave (Ascend Online Book 4) Page 51