Chapter Three: Of War and Peace. But mostly war.
The wolf riders finally returned. Zag had begun to get impatient.
With Gren dead, the cowards that had run eventually came back and were savagely beaten. Zag ordered them kept alive however. Zag’s reasoning, for an Orc, was that they were more useful alive than dead. As long as they knew who the boss was.
“We’s found ‘em boss,” one of the riders squeaked.
“Good. Okay boys, move out,” Zag shouted to his motley tribe.
They followed the remaining wolf riders for what felt like an age. Zag tried to keep the peace but couldn’t stop the inevitable fights breaking out. They quick marched behind the wolves back, every now and again a wolf would break ranks, its rider holding on for dear life before it came back, mouth slobbering with blood and its riders face the very image of relief. It wasn’t unknown for wolves to eat their riders when they got hungry.
“Lucky Gobbo,” Zag said with a smirk.
They eventually came to a stop outside of a thick forest. Zag wondered if it was the one he had fought the human in. His sense of direction and Orc attention span meant he couldn’t know for sure.
The greenskins set up camp, if a series of hastily put together shanty style tents could be called a camp. The savages had gotten a bit too enthusiastic, chopping at trees on the outskirts of the forest and using the wood to make a shelter. Zag wondered if they were trying to copy the houses of a human settlement but dismissed it.
The wolf riders copied their larger cousins, whether out of respect, fear or boredom, it was unknown. One or two attempted to hack at the trees, only for a bees nest to land on one unfortunate Goblins head. Instead they stole leftover wood from the Orcs and set about making a pen for their wolves.
The wolves made sure to show their disapproval. More than one Goblin limped up to Zag, torn clothes and teeth shaped punctures in their legs.
While the others set about their duties, Zag made a fire stabbing his stolen blade into the dirt next to it and brooding. Ignoring the savage Orcs that had crowded around this miracle as they saw it, Zag attempted to think of a way of finding his hand.
“Boss?” a goblin said coming up to him relunctantly.
Zag stared at him with a burning hatred as if the little runt had stolen the path to his hand. He gathered his sword and stood. A Greenskin, much smaller than a Goblin, ran past him giggling. Since they had set up camp, these snotlings along with the odd Squig had sprung up, appearing as if out of nowhere.
A nearby Squig lay snoozing nearby. Zag gave him a disgruntled kick, venting his anger on the beast. It sailed into the side of a wooden tent. Surprisingly the building stayed upright. The Squig leapt to its feet and snarled. Zag growled in turn.
Charging at him, the Squig, a bouncing ball of sheer muscle and teeth, jumped, gnashing and snarling. In an uncharacteristically graceful move, Zag brought his sword up in an upward arc, pommel first. It struck the creature in its almost nonexistent chin. The Squig’s trajectory quickly changed to a more vertical one. It screamed the only way a fungal orb could, wailing into the sky.
As it returned like a gift from gravity, Zag delivered another kick, hitting it with precision back at the cobbled together tent. This time the building gave up and crashed to the floor.
The Squig emerged from the rubble. Whimpering it ran off, venting its own anger on an unsuspecting snotling. Eventually a dazed Orc emerged from the rubble as well, it staggered a few steps before collapsing. Its snores filled the vacuum of noise Zag’s outburst had created.
Panting, Zag finally turned to the Goblin.
“Yeah? What do you want?”
The Goblin, now physically trembling in a show of sheer cowardice, eventually summoned up the courage to speak.
“The forest Gobbos ‘ave sent an emissl- emissaaly-emissr- a guy to talk fer ‘em.”
Zag nodded. They had come to the forest to recruit the forest Goblins. Hopefully by force, but he would take peaceful surrender, however unlikely that would be. After all that gave him more Goblins to use as cannon fodder.
“Go get Boss Urk,” Zag said. The Goblin took off before he could shove his boot up his arse.
Savage Boss Urk was Zag’s second in command. Not quite tough enough to take Zag on, but more than strong enough to bully the other Orc’s, commanding their respect. Zag decided he might need the Orc to get the forest Goblins on his side. His face paint and tribal manner could be what swayed the spider worshippers. After all, even though they called themselves forest Goblins, they were nothing more than savage Goblins, the Gobbo version of the Orcs under his command.
Dallan watched the Greenskins as they attempted their parlay. He had safely concealed himself in the shadows.
His master had been most annoyed and unimpressed with his loss of the sword. He had threatened Dallan, not with death, but with unlife. And not the good kind. How Dallan craved his master’s kiss, to become immortal, but if he failed to retrieve the sword or something just as worthy, he would indeed become immortal, albeit with an eternity of suffering as a shambling stinking zombie.
Dallan shuddered at the thought.
He watched as the thief, the one armed Orc who had come so close to ending his life, stood, good hand clasped to the blade. The other Orc, a backwards creature daubed in paint was busying himself by throttling one of the Goblins they were trying to speak with.
He had to admit the Orcs had a way with brokering allegiance amongst their own kind. Not for them was the politics of mankind. The filling of pockets or the blackmail of a would-be ally wasn’t something that came to an Orc. They didn’t know greed. For that Dallan envied the simpletons.
For a moment he wondered how long an Orc would live if it was never killed on the battlefield. Did they age? Did they understand the concept of mortality? Probably not. It was unheard of for an Orc to accept the blood kiss or seek out objects that could prolong their life. No, the only thing an Orc understood was strength. If one found the elixir of life, he wouldn’t drink it.
“No, he’d beat the closest living thing over the head with it,” Dallan muttered to himself.
Suddenly the green skin truce meeting took a new turn. One of the Goblins stood pointing at the backward Orc’s head. The others saw what he pointed at and quickly began to bow, arms outstretched in front of them and their noses scraping the ground. It was as if they had just seen their God made form.
Dallan strained his eyes to see what the fuss was about.
On the Orcs head, Dallan made out some markings in blue paint, they looked fresh as it was dribbling down his forehead. If he was someone who took stock in the ink blot test he would have said the symbol looked like a spider, the dribbles forming the legs.
The Goblins rose and beckoned for the Orcs to follow. The savage one shrugged and did so immediately but Dallan could have sworn the sword stealer, the bandit as it were, was thinking. Could he realise why the Goblins had such reverence for his ally? He stomped slowly after the rest, his bodyguard of Orcs following in his wake.
It wasn’t hard for Dallan to follow them. Even when he momentarily became caught up in a bit of stray webbing, he soon caught up. The Orcs constantly stopped to bicker loudly, every now and again a punch was thrown, but their bandit leader soon stopped it before anyone was killed.
Eventually they came to a clearing under an opening in the trees. The twin moons glared at the gathering from on high. Looking around the clearing, Dallan made out various holes covered in webbing. Obviously the burrows of the spiders these Goblins kept. However his heart did jump when he saw a massive crater of a burrow, hidden partially by the undergrowth.
Off to one side of the clearing stood a very large fungus encrusted structure. It looked ancient and well made. Dallan suspected it had been made long ago by great craftsmen and the Goblins had merely taken it over. Possibly Dwarfs had done it, but then he had second thoughts. It didn’t have the same practicality in its architecture as normal Dwarf makes had. Elven then? An outpost they had created from long ago. No, it didn’t have the required elegance. If anything it looked like an altar, a massive one though, that by all appearances looked like a prototype of the pyramids he had seen in one of his master’s bokks on Khemri.
He did wonder if the long dead Kings of Nehekhara had ever come this far north though. Perhaps a race older than them had done it then. Which meant there could be ancient treasures in there, left undisturbed by the fools of the Empire. Instead of garnering a dusty museum, the powerful treasures of that temple could win him his immortality; the good kind of immortality where he was his own master.
He rubbed his hands in anticipation. But how to do it?
A rather fat Goblin appeared at the top of the temple, a veritable chicken-full of feathers adorned his head dress and he rode atop some form of stone chair strapped to a giant spider. A throne perhaps?
He twirled a makeshift sceptre with a glowing orb at its end. The orb shined with a venomous green colour and fixed in such a crude way to the sceptre made Dallan think that this could be the type of treasure he was looking for.
The Goblins obviously found it and finding no other use for it tied it to a stick, no doubt intending to bludgeon another of their kind with it.
He knew exactly what to do.
The words fell from his lips like a storm as all around his little hiding place, small hands shot out of the ground, rotting green flesh still hanging from their bones. Their groans and creaking limbs all that was needed for Dallan to know they would do his bidding without hesitation.
There was a subtle irony here. Dallan did to these deceased Goblins, what he feared his master would do to him if he failed.
His smile dispelled the thought.
“As if I would fail.”
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