Chapter 3
Kof
If Ul-Rott could’ve come up with any excuse to turn away the Lost Clan, they’d still be outside our wall. But an orc would no more refuse them hospitality than spit on their chieftain’s pyre.
The Lost Clan had been lounging on their packs as they waited, and now they crept through the gates slower than a hungover recruit. Clearly, no warriors among them. No capable fighter would dream of sprawling out in the middle of the road with their belly exposed.
Droko caught me by the bracer and said, “Warn the quartermaster. Those freeloaders will demand a feast. And if we’re short on game, he’ll need to be ready.”
Even within our walls, I was reluctant to leave the shaman’s side—especially with strangers filtering in. But a glance at his blood-crusted staff and armor reassured me that he was not old Taruut. He would make it back to the caves without me. Besides, he had an important choad to attend.
I hurried to the larders.
The stout wooden structure cast a long shadow across the courtyard. Only one guard by the entrance. Her eyes narrowed as she watched the Lost Clan trickle in through the gates.
“What’s all this?” she demanded, gesturing toward the ragged orcs with her sword.
“The Lost Clan,” I said simply.
She sighed in resignation, as if she’d suspected as much, but was hoping I’d come up with some other explanation.
I said, “Trawg will need to be ready. Where is he?”
“Where he always is. Down in the cellar, counting the supplies.”
I ducked through the low doorway. The main floor of the larder was an obstacle course of dangling herbs and drying meats.
Sacks of grain from traders sagged on the shelves, half-empty.
I wove through a maze of tables and descended the wooden steps into the cool, earthen darkness of the cellar.
Casks and barrels lined the dugout, hugging the walls where the earth kept them cool.
I’d always presumed they were full. But what if they weren’t?
I found Trawg busy with his ledger. His brow furrowed as he scratched notes on the page. The pale light from a guttering torch flickered across the book to reveal meticulous notes of figures and tallies. He could account for every last nut, grain and grub.
Gnomes are known for fixating on their numbers.
Dwarves, too. But it’s rare to find an orc with such a mind for figures.
It made Trawg the right man for the job—but uneasy to be around, with the feeling of him always watching me with a critical eye as I took the shaman’s due share of the food.
I’m not sure if he was such a nit-picker before, or if he’d gone that way once childbirth took his wife and he decided to live alone among the stores.
He claimed he enjoyed the order and routine. Hard to fault him for that.
I cleared my throat and said, “We’ll have more mouths to feed. At least fifty.”
“So. The Lost Clan is back.” The quartermaster hadn’t even glanced up from his ledger. “You were just a pup last time they came. Do you remember?”
“No.” Most of my childhood was a blur. Mainly, I remembered the panic I’d felt, waking in the dark caves to the haze of incense and the dressing over my eye socket. But the shaman was always having to fill me in on the rest.
Trawg said, “Tore through the larders like a pack of starving wolves, they did. But it was summertime, with plenty of good hunting. And once they were gone, we had time to recover. Not like now.”
I asked Trawg if he had enough game for the newcomers, and he brushed me off, insulted that I’d dare question his ledgers. If he were the one to suggest some extra hunting parties, the chieftain might listen, I told him. And he went about his business as if I hadn’t said a word.
Still ignoring me, Trawg headed up the ladder as footfalls scuffed the floorboards upstairs and announced another visitor.
A chieftain’s guard in a red armband idled among the food, casually peeking into a barrel—though he quickly dropped the lid when Trawg spotted him.
“The chieftain felled a stag—praise Ul-Rott—just in time for the welcome feast. But he wants to make sure you save him the head.”
Trawg did a double-take. “What? Does he want to start an incident?”
I, too, couldn’t see how serving the kill without its crowning glory would be taken as anything but an insult.
The guard’s eyes flicked around the larder. “He said you should, erm, swap out another head and keep the fresh one for him.” He held up his hands. “Look…I know how it sounds, but I’m just the messenger. The chieftain was clear. It’s a lucky head, and no one will eat it but him.”
“Praise Ul-Rott,” Trawk muttered, then flipped through his ledger. “I don’t have another one that’ll work. Not unless he thinks the Lost Clan would believe our local deer have the heads of rabbits. Or maybe he brought a hobgoblin noggin back from the skirmish. It’s stew or nothing.”
As the quartermaster spoke, another of Ul-Rott’s men sauntered in.
His human man—the horseman called Quinn.
“Then it should be nothing.” For such a puny, tusk-less thing, he was awfully sure of himself.
He stood straight and tall (for a human) and spoke like he was accustomed to being obeyed.
I supposed, in the chieftain’s stables, he was.
Trawg scoffed. “You don’t speak for Ul-Rott. Why does he not speak for himself?”
“He’s with the shaman.”
“Even so. I don’t take orders from you.”
But Quinn didn’t back down. “No way should that stag have been close enough to a bunch of battling orcs to be taken down with an axe.”
“That’s why it was a lucky stag,” the guard said impatiently.
“Lucky?” Quinn asked. “Or diseased? A healthy deer would have run off as soon as the fighting got started.”
Trawg chortled. “You humans and your delicate stomachs—everything gives you the trots. It’s a wonder you haven’t all died of starvation. Come, show me this stag. I’ll be the one to say whether the meat is fit or not.”
The chieftain’s guard leaned out the door and motioned, and one of his men dragged in the carcass. It was covered in dust where the dried blood had gone sticky, and a few hopeful flies buzzed around the wound.
“Well, horseman?” Trawg said.
Quinn crouched and looked more closely at the dirt-caked mouth. He didn’t touch it, I noticed. “Was the spittle foamy? Did any of you see?”
The chieftain’s men shrugged.
“That won’t tell you a damn thing,” Trawg said.
“Animals spit when they die. They shit and piss and scream. Everything that’s in them strains to get out as they take their last breath.
If the meat’s gone wormy, it’s bad. If it’s not the right color, it’s bad.
But most of all, if it smells wrong, it’s bad. ”
Trawg drew a small curved blade from his belt. It was a whittled-down stump of a thing, but sharp enough to shave the hairs off the flies’ backs. He swung it in a strong arc and the stag’s belly opened, spilling entrails.
Quinn took a quick step backward. “You could have field-dressed it in the woods.”
Trawg guffawed. “And leave all the good bits behind? Like a human?”
I had been living with Archie for the turning of a season—human ways didn’t baffle me nearly as much anymore. I said, “Forget about all that. How else can we tell if the meat is bad?”
Quinn shook his head. “You can’t. If this malady is what I think it is—the Wrack—it takes a while to set in. It might be weeks before anyone starts shaking, or twitching, or slurring their words. And by then, it’ll be too late.”
Maybe for a human. But orcs were made of stronger stuff. Trawg gave a mocking snort and said, “Humans have pathetic constitutions, and an even worse sense of smell. No wonder they need to find signs and omens among the spittle, even where there are none.”
“I know animals,” Quinn insisted. “Its behavior was not normal.”
Trawg treated the gutted stag to a long sniff. “This meat is fine, but I’ll lay it on salt for later, anyhow. If Ul-Rott won’t let me serve the head, I might as well break out the fish. Our nets were full this morning. The meal will prove that even the river bows to the Red Hand Clan.”
“At least avoid the spinal cord and brain,” Quinn said.
Even the guards smirked at that.
Quinn gave a toss of his long dark hair and strode out the door, arrogant as you please. Trawg and the guards chuckled in amusement. I didn’t join in. Obviously, an orc wouldn’t fall ill from bad meat…but if they did, they’d end up in the shaman’s caves. And then it would be our problem.
“I’ve never been eager to have the Lost Clan at the table,” Trawg said. “But if they decide to claim a new member when they go…maybe they’ll take that annoying human.”
One of the guards said, “He charms the horses. Ul-Rott would never allow it.”
And then we all fell silent. Because though he might complain, or curse, or try to find some way out of it, even mighty Ul-Rott would eventually give in to the demands of the Lost Clan.