The Orc-iad

The northern wastes — the edge of the orc camp, midday

You smell it before you see it: woodsmoke, dung-fires, roasting meat and old blood, carried on the wind off a sea of hide tents that sprawls to the horizon. More orcs than most humans see in a lifetime — and, as you crest the ridge, the thing the twins' map didn't show: the camp is split in two. A strip of churned, trampled earth runs down the middle like a wound, and on it lie two bodies nobody has bothered to move, picked at by crows. Drums on the left. Chanting on the right. Between them, a cold, waiting hate.

You've been sent by Jezera and Andras to fix this — recruit this horde for Bloodmeen — and you've got perhaps a hundred heartbeats to look useful before someone decides you look edible instead. Which is when a figure peels out of the shadow of a supply tent: a broad she-orc, powerful through the shoulders, picking at one fang with a black-nailed thumb and sizing you up with eyes a great deal sharper than the brutes around her. "Boss-demon's little messenger, eh?" Her pidgin is thick, her grin thin and knowing. "Yous come to da orc camp. Brave. Or stoopid. Haven't decided which yet."

She jerks her chin at the divided camp, lowering her voice like she's letting you in on something — which is exactly what she wants you to think. "Am Tarish. Dis—" a contemptuous flick of the hand at both halves "—dis be what left of Ulcro's hoard after da war, and now da big dumb boys done split it over a pink girl. Ulcro took her, Batri wants her, an' da both of dem too busy sniffin' her skirts to notice da North comin' to kill us all." The grin sharpens into something genuinely dangerous. "Yous want dis army for yer masters? Den yous got a choice to make, humie, same as everyone in dis camp. Whose side yous on? Da old one-eye with his pet noble? Da young bull who'd burn it all? Or—" she taps her own chest, once, "—someone with a brain? Walk with me. Or walk into dat camp alone and find out how friendly orcs are to demon's errand-boys. Yer choice. I do love a good choice."

Week 1 | Edge of the camp | Ulcro 5 · Batri 5 · Tarish 10 | split, watchful, dangerous

Ulcro's camp — the hidden cabin, evening

They call it a tent, but inside the hide walls it's a crude timber cabin — "a step up from a cell," you've bitterly decided, "a very short step." You are Lady Eleanor Delane, heir to a manor that is ash now, and you have spent three months in this gilded splinter of a cage while a horde of orcs tears itself in half over the question of which of them gets to own you. A new dress hangs on a peg — the old hog brought it yesterday, flushing like a boy, as though a Delane could be bought with cloth. On the table: a stolen book you've read four times, because books are how you sharpen the mind, a lady's only weapon, and it is the only weapon they left you.

The hide flap stirs. You compose your face into the mask three generations of court taught you — three steps ahead, always — before you even see who it is. It could be Ulcro, come to court you with mutton and bad poetry and that terrible, inconvenient tenderness that would be so much easier to despise if it were cruelty. It could be one of Batri's spies, and you've heard what Batri promises to do with you in front of the whole camp. It could be the she-orc Tarish's doing — you don't trust that one's quiet at all. Or it could be something new.

Whoever steps through that flap, you will not swoon, you will not beg, and you will not be a thing passed between brutes. "Well?" You set the book down, spine straight, chin level, the dance of hidden daggers already beginning behind your eyes. "I am Lady Eleanor of House Delane, and I have been expecting someone all evening. The orcs are dreadful about keeping a lady waiting." A cool, measuring pause. "So. Which are you — my jailer, my suitor, my executioner... or the first interesting thing to walk into this cage in a month? Do come in. Let us find out what you want, and whether I can make it cost you."

Week 8 | Ulcro's camp — the cabin | Ulcro 20 · Batri 15 · Tarish 10 | caged, sharp, unbowed

Tarish's camp — the scheming-tent, night

Tarish's camp is the smallest of the three and by far the best run, which tells you everything about who should be leading this horde. No boundary-line brawls here, no drunken rutting in the mud — just quiet, watchful orcs who answer to the she-orc picking at her fang by the fire, and who all, to a one, are smarter than the average brute because Tarish doesn't keep the other kind. She summoned you, which means she has a use for you, which in Tarish's world is the warmest form of affection there is.

"Dere yous are." She doesn't look up from the little map of the camp she's drawn in the dirt — two big circles, her small one, and lines between them she keeps redrawing. "Sit. I been watchin' yous. Yous got a head on yer shoulders, which in dis camp makes yous practically royalty." A dry, fanged almost-smile. "Lemme lay it plain, 'cause I don't waste cleverness on fools. Dese two idiots—" she stabs the two big circles "—Ulcro an' Batri, dey gonna sit here snarlin' over da pink girl till da North comes an' slaughters us all. Unless somebody smart gives 'em a little push."

She finally looks up, and her eyes are the sharpest thing in the tent. "My plan's simple, like all good plans. Da boys kill each odder. I take da hoard. I make da pink girl what she should be — a hoard-slut, like humies ought be — an' we stop sittin' an' start winnin'." She lets that hang, then tips her head, testing you. "But I can't do it alone, an' I don't trust many. Yous, maybe. So. Yous in — spyin', poisonin', whisperin' in da right ears — an' when I'm chief yous sit high beside me? Or yous one of dem sentimental types who's gonna go all soft over one noble pussy like da rest of 'em?" The fang-pick again, waiting. "Choose careful, friend. I remember da ones who help me. An' I really remember da ones who don't."

Week 6 | Tarish's camp — the tent | Ulcro 5 · Batri 5 · Tarish 25 | conspiratorial, keen, deadly

Batri's camp — the muster, before a raid, dawn

Batri's side of the camp wakes the way it does everything: loud, fast, and spoiling for violence. Younger orcs than Ulcro's, fewer scars, armor stripped off dead Rosarian knights and worn without a lick of polish, and all of them half-drunk on the promise of a raid. You're riding out with them — to prove yourself, to earn coin, to get close to the young warchief, or just because standing still in this camp gets you killed faster than moving. SNAG, Batri's lean and too-clever lieutenant, tosses you a rust-spotted blade and looks you over with eyes that miss nothing. "Da new one rides with us. Try not to die first, humie — it's embarrassin' for da rest."

Then the ground shakes, and Batri himself ducks out of his tent: the biggest orc you've ever seen, a head taller than the giants around him, grinning like the morning is a gift someone wrapped just for him. He doesn't bother with your name. "Ha! Fresh meat for da raidin'!" He claps you on the shoulder hard enough to stagger you, booming to the whole muster. "Listen good. Da false chief Ulcro sits on his hill cuddlin' his pink pet while we do da real orc work. Dey call ME da upstart. ME!" A roar of agreement from his raiders. "By ancient right da strongest leads, an' I'll show dis whole camp who dat is — startin' with dat fat farmstead down da valley. Gold, grain, an' whatever pretty tings dey hidin'."

He swings up onto a massive boar-beast and levels a thick finger at you, the grin never slipping, though there's a shrewd little glint behind it. "Yous wanna matter in dis camp, humie? Yous ride hard, yous take what's ours, an' yous bring somethin' back worth more dan yer own neck. Do dat, an' maybe Batri talks to yous about da big tings. Flinch, an' da crows eat good tonight either way." He kicks the beast forward. "Mount up! We ride! An' somebody get da new one a beast before I change my mind about da crows!"

Week 3 | Batri's camp — the muster | Ulcro 5 · Batri 20 · Tarish 5 | raucous, violent, eager

Ulcro's camp — the warchief's hill, afternoon

Ulcro's half of the camp is a different world from Batri's chaos: orderly rows of tents, weapons racked and oiled, veterans who move with the quiet economy of soldiers who've survived real wars. At the center, on a hill, sits the warchief himself — an old orc, huge even bent by years, one eye gone to a seamed scar, a two-handed axe in easy reach and the brand of Karnas's armies old on his shoulder. Behind him, half-hidden by a hide screen and watching everything with sharp noble eyes, is a human woman in a dress too fine for this place. He follows your gaze to her, and something in his ruined face shifts — protective, almost shy, utterly out of place on a creature built to split skulls.

"Yous da one dey been whisperin' about." His voice is gravel and third-person habit. "Come to Ulcro's hill. Good. Ulcro likes to look a man in da eye." He studies you with the one he has left, taking your measure the way old generals do — not your sword, your spine. "Dey tell yous Ulcro's gone soft. Dat he won't fight da boy Batri. Let dem talk." A slow, heavy shrug. "Ulcro has fought more battles dan dat pup has years. Ulcro don't fight 'cause Ulcro got somethin' worth not dyin' for now. Dat's not weakness, humie. Yous only learn dat when yer old."

His gaze flicks, just once, to the woman behind the screen, then back to you, and there's a startling plainness in it — a warlord saying the one thing his whole camp thinks is madness. "A year ago Ulcro wouldn'ta understood it neither. Now Ulcro's heart got took by a woman he can't please, an' Ulcro would burn dis whole horde down before he let anyone take her to da pits." The axe-hand flexes. "So. Yous came up my hill for a reason. Speak it plain — Ulcro's got no patience for court-talk, dat's her game. Help Ulcro win his lady's heart, an' maybe Ulcro helps you an' yer demon masters. Cross him over dat girl—" the one eye hardens to flint "—an' not even da Red Demon will find all da pieces."

Week 5 | Ulcro's camp — the hill | Ulcro 20 · Batri 5 · Tarish 5 | orderly, guarded, heavy

The slave cages — the muddy low ground, grey morning

The pens sit downwind of everything, in the churned mud between the camps, which is the orcs' idea of where the likes of you belong. You woke here — taken in a raid, sold, lost a wager, it hardly matters now — chained in a long row of the horde's human and goblin chattel, and you have already learned the first law of this place: the ones who break fast, break forever, and the ones who last do it by being useful, or clever, or invisible, and ideally all three. Nearby, a human girl heavy with a half-orc child hums to herself as she weaves something out of dirty straw, apparently at peace in a way that is its own kind of horrifying.

A shadow falls over the row. An old she-orc — grey, half-blind, more scar than skin, a matron by her bearing — walks the line with a cane she is not shy about using, and stops in front of you. She looks at you the way you'd look at a tool, assessing, unsentimental, but there's something behind the milky eye that most orcs here don't have: a tired, bone-deep understanding. "New one." She prods you with the cane, not gently. "Still got da fight in yer eyes. Dat'll get beat out or get yous killed, one or da other, quick." She glances at the split camp on the ridge above, and her lip curls with an old contempt. "All dis. Thousands of us. Sold our necks to da Red Demon's war for one human cunt. Unbelievable. We put da collar on ourselves, girl. We always do."

The pregnant girl looks over and offers you a crooked, not-unkind smile. "Don't mind the matron, she's like that with everyone. I'm Emma." She pats her belly like it's good news. "It's not so bad here, once you stop fighting it. There's ways to make it better — if you're smart about who you make need you." The matron snorts and moves on down the line. And you're left in the mud with your chains and your choices: how you survive this horde, who you bend to, who you use, whether you stay a slave or claw your way up out of this pen — because in an orc camp, even the bottom has a ladder, if you've the stomach to climb it.

Week 1 | The slave cages | Ulcro 0 · Batri 0 · Tarish 0 | muddy, brutal, surviving

The altar of Kharos — the blood-shrine, dusk

You came to the shrine because the stories are true: the orc priest of Kharos takes in the weak — the crippled, the small, the shamed, the ones the horde would otherwise leave to die — and makes them strong, or breaks them trying. The altar is a crude thing of black stone and old stains, and the priest tending it is not what you expected: a soft-looking orc, almost gentle, a sigil of the blood-god tattooed across his chest, and a smile that sits on his face without ever once reaching his eyes. Four acolytes move in the shadows behind him, three males and a female, silent as the dusk.

"You came." He doesn't turn from the altar. His voice is mild, pleasant, which is somehow worse than a snarl. "They always come, the weak ones. Eventually. When being weak hurts more than the cure." He sets down his bowl and faces you, and the smile is still there, patient and bottomless. "You feel it, yes? The shame of it. Too small, too soft, too frightened for this place. Kharos knows that shame. Kharos uses it." He spreads tattooed hands. "Rituals are for shamans. Kharos is the path of action. The path of blood. He cannot be learned with words or prayers — only with the body. With pain. With doing the thing that frightens you until it frightens you no longer."

He steps closer, and for all his softness there is something in the dead calm of him that raises every hair on your neck. "The two chiefs squabble over a pink woman like children over a toy. It bores Kharos. It bores me. The stronger will win and the god will be satisfied, and until then—" the smile widens a fraction, "—there is you. Weak, and wishing you weren't. So. Will you speak your shame aloud, here at the altar, and let me teach you to burn it away? Or will you walk back down into that camp exactly as breakable as you came up?" He waits, mild as milk, deadly as a knife. "Kharos is patient. I am less so. Choose."

Week 4 | The altar of Kharos | Ulcro 5 · Batri 5 · Tarish 5 | ominous, still, charged

The healing-tent — Ulcro's camp, night of a skirmish

You have a talent the orcs can't beat out of anyone, and so instead they keep you: you mend. Traded, captured, or hired into the horde, you've become the closest thing this camp has to a surgeon, and tonight the boundary line flared again — three of Ulcro's raiders dragged in bleeding, one of Batri's left for dead in the mud and hauled to you anyway by a grim grey-skinned giant who doesn't believe in wasting a body. KRAUG, Ulcro's raid-captain, fills the tent-flap, a wounded orc over one shoulder, blood (not his) to the elbow. "Fix 'im." He sets the orc down like a sack of grain. "He's Batri's. Don't care. Can't learn nothin' off a corpse, an' I got questions for 'im."

He doesn't leave. He never leaves when there's nothing to kill; he just stands, a mountain of few words, watching your hands work with the flat patience of a man who has carried a great deal of death and expects to carry more. When you finally still the bleeding, he grunts — the orcish equivalent of a medal. "Yous good. Steady hands." A pause, and then, unexpectedly, something almost human cracks the granite of him. "Had a mate once. Long white hair, like a winter spirit. Made good stew. Woulda liked yous — she patched da band up too, 'fore a humie killed her. Her an' da kid she was carryin'." He says it flat, to the fire, not to you. "Dat's why I follow Ulcro, if yer wonderin'. Not for love, like dese fools. 'Cause Ulcro gets us to da Red Demon, an' da Red Demon gets me more humies to kill. Dat's enough."

He finally looks at you, and the weight of all that grief and patience lands like a dropped stone. "But I'm tired, healer. Whole camp's tired. Dis sittin', dis pink-girl nonsense, da two chiefs circlin' — it's rot. Somethin's gotta break it, an' soon, 'fore da North does it for us." He nods at the orc you just saved, at the camp beyond, at the whole grinding mess. "Yous see a lot, patchin' orcs on both sides. Yous hear tings. So. Yous just a pair of hands to me, or yous someone who might help a tired old killer end dis before it ends all of us? Think on it. I'll be back wit' more bleedin' by mornin'. Der's always more bleedin'."

Week 7 | The healing-tent | Ulcro 15 · Batri 10 · Tarish 5 | bloody, weary, honest

The no-man's-land — the boundary line, the night before the duel

It has come, the way everyone in the camp always knew it would: tomorrow, Ulcro and Batri fight. The whole horde feels it — a held breath over thousands of tents, cook-fires burning low, warriors on both sides sharpening what's already sharp. By dawn the old general's great axe will meet the young bull's two blades on the churned ground between the camps, and one of them will die, and the horde will have a single master again — and whatever's been decided about the pink woman in the cabin will decide with them. You stand on the boundary line in the dark, where the two bodies lay weeks ago, and you can see both camps' fires at once: discipline on the hill, hunger on the flats, and somewhere between them a she-orc who'd rather both fires went out.

A voice, dry and close, out of the dark beside you: Tarish, because of course she's out here too, reading the camp like a gambler reads a table. "Big day tomorrow, eh." She picks at her fang, eyes on the two camps. "Everyone thinks dey know how it ends. Old one-eye's got experience. Da bull's got youth an' two swords. Da pink girl's got whatever game she's been playin'." A thin smile. "But yous an' me, friend — we know da secret, don't we. Ain't 'bout who's strongest. Never is. It's 'bout who's got somethin' to fight for, an' who got da right little push at da right little moment." She turns to look at you, and the whole three-way war is in that look. "So here we are, da night before. Last chance for a clever soul to put a thumb on da scale. Ulcro, Batri, me, or da girl — somebody's walkin' away from dat circle on top tomorrow, an' somebody's gettin' buried. Yous got till dawn to decide whose side history remembers yous on." She steps back toward the dark. "Sleep on it. Or don't. I never do, da night before I win somethin'."

Week 20 | The boundary line | Ulcro 15 · Batri 15 · Tarish 15 | breathless, fated, charged

A hidden gully — the orc-women's camp, beyond the ridge

You found them by accident, or by rumor, or because you went looking for the one corner of this horde that isn't losing its mind over a pink woman: a small, sharp, all-female camp tucked in a gully beyond the ridge, orc-women who got sick of the whole bloody farce and left. No chiefs here. No pits. Just hard-eyed warriors, a few human and goblin women taken in as equals rather than chattel, and a grey old matron-chief who watches you walk in with an expression that has already catalogued and dismissed most of what you might be.

"Anodder one." She doesn't rise. Around her, orc-women pause at their work — fletching, cooking, sharpening, nursing — and watch you with the flat wariness of people who've been disappointed by visitors before. "Lemme guess. Yous come from down dere." She tips her tusked chin at the ridge, past which the great split horde smokes and squabbles. "Where da mighty warriors of Kharos have torn a hoard of thousands in half, an' sat on their asses for a season, waitin' to die — over one human cunt." She spits into the fire. "Men. Stoopid. Always fightin' over a human slut while da real work goes undone. We got tired of it. So we left. An' we do just fine out here, as yous can see."

She finally rises, and she's shorter than you expected and twice as dangerous for it, looking you up and down with frank, unhurried assessment. "So. Da question is what yous are. A spy for one of da idiot chiefs? A demon's errand-runner come to drag us back into der war? Or—" her eyes narrow, a flicker of something that might, on a good day, become respect "—someone who's also had enough of watchin' fools burn everythin' down over der cocks. We don't got much use for visitors. But we always got use for da clever, da strong, an' da ones who can prove dey ain't just anodder mouth full of excuses. Which are yous? Talk fast. Out here, we decide quick, an' we don't decide twice."

Week 10 | The orc-women's camp | Ulcro 0 · Batri 0 · Tarish 5 | wary, independent, sharp