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Yhalen pushed himself up from where he’d sprawled. His shoulder radiated pain, and he wanted very much to crawl back into the shadows where Vorjd had fled. Wanted to escape the malicious stares of the still milling ogre crowd. A young, half-grown male sidled closer, the look in his eyes promising some sort of subtle abuse, but a larger form intervened and Yhalen caught his breath. It was an involuntary sound of fear, escaping him without notice as a towering form moved to stand over him.
The grey-haired warrior who Bloodraven had spoken with. He stood looking down, broad face impassive, then lifted his eyes and spoke softly towards the shadows behind the tents. Tentatively Vorjd crept out. The warrior said a few more words, then turned and strode away, heading towards the steps that led to the warlord’s cave.
Vorjd moved towards Yhalen, and Yhalen flinched when he laid fingers tentatively on his shoulder, urging him up. Yhalen ground his teeth as he tried to move, wincing as the shoulder shifted as though dislocated.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“Council,” Vorjd said shortly.
Vorjd got an arm under his good shoulder and steered Yhalen deeper into the gorge, into crowds of milling ogre clansmen who glared suspiciously at his passing. Angry mutterings followed in his wake, and no few of them spat at him. Both he and Vorjd were trembling badly by the time Vorjd led him to one of many narrow paths leading up into the cliffs. They passed a great many cave mouths until they came to the one that Vorjd led him into. It was relatively shallow—not much longer than an average ogre was tall, and though the ceiling was high enough for Yhalen and Vorjd to walk under comfortably, Bloodraven would have had to stoop a bit.
Vorjd helped him down onto a pile of dusty smelling furs. The cave held little else, other than the furs, but the walls had been decorated here and there with carvings or painted designs. One deeply etched symbol in particular caught his eye. The same symbol that Vorja had branded into her flank and Yhalen had on the small of his back. Bloodraven’s mark.
“This is his—home?” he asked softly, as Vorjd’s fingers gently probed his aching shoulder.
“Unn,” the slave grunted in answer. “Lie down, on your back.”
Yhalen glanced up at him warily and the man pushed on his chest to urge him down. “To pull your shoulder back in place.”
Goddess. It would hurt, but it needed doing if the shoulder was indeed out of joint. He lay back on the stone floor and clenched his teeth as Vorjd put a foot on his chest, then with one solid wrench popped the shoulder into place. Yhalen shut his eyes and let the shower of lights fade along with the brilliant burst of pain before attempting to move.
“You seem—rather good at that,” he commented, as he tentatively rubbed the sore shoulder.
Vorjd shrugged. “They forget sometimes, how strong they are—or perhaps not. A common injury among us.”
Yhalen sat up, staring at the man in dismay. At the casual way he spoke of the abuse of his fellow enslaved humans.
“Why are you here?” he whispered. “Why didn’t you run when you had the chance? They would have sheltered you, the people of the south.”
“Why didn’t you?” Vorjd’s pale eyes bored into him and he flinched, hardly knowing the answer to that himself. “He’s alive, you know. Deathclaw. And he came home with tales of your black magic.”
Yhalen clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from clattering. Goddess, but he’d hoped that that particular misuse of magic had been a fatal one. He’d wished, maliciously, in the deepest part of him that Deathclaw had died from his hand. Bloodraven had hoped for it. The reaction of the crowd began to make sense, if word had spread here of the sorcerous human that Bloodraven had taken as slave.
“What will happen?” he asked softly.
Vorjd eyed him warily, and shrugged. “How should I know? The warlord and the ancients will decide.”
Bloodraven hadn’t expected a kind reception upon his return, not after having failed at his mission and lost half or more of his war party. He expected disdain and punishment. He could deal with that, he could withstand the physical retaliation. He could talk his way around most of the ogres who 222
needed to be talked around, even Wartooth if need be, if the warlord wasn’t in a blind rage. He had not expected to come back and be accused of wielding dark magicks upon his people.
His first thought was that they had heard word of the troll attack that Yhalen had precipitated upon the lower mountain clan—it was hard to tell among all the accusations and mutterings of the gathered clansmen. But then he heard mentions of dark magicks and betrayals and the names of slain ogres that he personally knew, that he personally had led into the southlands not so long ago, and he began to suspect trouble of a different sort.
That Icehand had survived to return home and stood up for his innocence in the face of those accusations was a relief. That someone identified Yhalen as the root at the source of those accusations was not. When they went after him in a blind surge of superstitious rage, Bloodraven had feared the worst. Had fought against the surge of the mob in a vain effort to reach his human before they ripped him apart and had failed, held back by a sea of bodies larger and stronger than his own.
It had been Wartooth who had stopped it, in a rare show of restraint. A word from the wizened old shaman who’d stood at his back, observing the whole affair, had stopped what Bloodraven couldn’t.
Bloodraven didn’t quite know whether to be thankful to Wrathbone or not, the old shaman and himself having never been on particularly friendly terms. Mostly that was due to the fact that Bloodraven had never quaked under the thrall of the old ogre’s superstitious warnings and chilling fireside tales. At least not as much as the other young ogres.
They proceeded up steps hewn out of the cliffs long before the ancestors of this clan had claimed the area as their own. The warlord’s cave was burrowed into the foundation of the cliffs, the largest of all the dens. It was a collection of chambers—some too small for ogre bodies, others large enough to fit twenty. The clan council gathered in the largest of the cavernous dens. It was a room long used for such purpose. As such, its walls were carved and painted with symbols and crude representations of the mountain spirits, of warlords past and present, and of pictorial depictions of legendary ogre conflicts.
Since his people had no written language it was up to the shamans to utilize their artistic talents, as well as their imaginative tale telling, to pass down the history of the clan.
There was a natural chimney in the gathering chamber, a narrow channel that wove through the rock on the wall facing the cliff front. It let in a tiny trickle of light as well as letting smoke from the torches placed in wall-mounted brackets, escape. There was a shallow crater in the center of the floor where the shamans burned ritual herbs for protection or guidance from the spirits. Or more likely, Bloodraven thought, for their own gratification, as no few of the herbs they collected and dried had hallucinatory effects. The clan shamans were often to be found sitting in a cloud of smoke for hours, rocking back in forth in apparent communion with the spirits that they claimed spoke through them.
There were several thick pelts padding the floor to one side of the crater. Wartooth settled on the central one, while Wrathbone—the eldest of the clan shamans—sat down at his side. His movements were slow and stiff, as one might expect of an ogre so ancient. The rest of them sat on the bare stone in the circle around the pit. As the ogre in contention, Bloodraven took the space directly opposite Wartooth.
The ogres here were the most fearsome of the clan, the most respected war leaders under Wartooth’s command. Few of them held sympathy for him, a halfling upstart. Many were blood relations to Deathclaw, springing from Wartooth’s own line. He had an ally in Icehand, who had settled at his side and whose witness of events in the South might or might not work in his favor, depending on the depth of Icehand’s own superstitions. It was all a matter of what Icehand and the other surviving members of his war party had witnessed, and whether or not they’d been present when Yhalen had used his magicks on Deathclaw. And even then, they might not have perceived what the human was about. The ogre shamans’ practice of spirit magic was full of chants of orchestration, and Bloodraven knew very well that whatever power Yhalen summoned, he did quietly and without benefit of theatrics.
The accusations began and he sat and listened quietly. He had led his war party into disaster. He had conspired with humans and human sorcerers against the people. He had lain with the human witch that had cursed his fellows and perhaps that same witch had worked his dark human magicks upon him and twisted his mind. There were a dozen theories, some far-fetched, some hitting closer to home than he felt comfortable with. He silently listened to them all, until Wartooth held up a hand and silenced the council.
“Speak, Bloodraven.”
Bloodraven let his eyes move around the circle, before returning his gaze to Wartooth and inclining his head respectfully. “It was no conspiracy or human magic that led us into ruin in the southland. It 223
was bloodlust and stupidity on the part of warriors too concerned with spilling human blood to practice restraint or stealth.”
“It only shows how weak a halfling is, that he couldn’t control the warriors under his command,” a thick, scarred war leader snarled.
“He controlled well enough the warriors who knew their purpose and recognized the authority our Warlord granted him,” Icehand said in Bloodraven’s defense. “It was only that he hesitated to kill your blood-brethren out of respect for you, Warlord, that the insubordination grew.”
“You blame Deathclaw?” Grugnail, Wartooth’s brother and Deathclaw’s sire, almost rose in indignation over the insult. “He who was most wronged by the plague this half-breed bastard brought among us?”
Icehand met Grugnail’s gaze head on, saying what Bloodraven had hoped he might. What Bloodraven dared not, in fear of turning the tide of opinion entirely against him.
“You put Deathclaw under Bloodraven’s command, I didn’t. I wouldn’t have, knowing the disharmony between them, knowing very well that Deathclaw would balk at following the order of a halfling. Which one were you hoping would kill the other, Grugnail?”
Grugnail snarled, half rising in fury before Wartooth put a hand on his arm and barked at him to sit down.
“What say you, halfling?” Wartooth asked.
“I say Icehand speaks truth. That Deathclaw worked harder to destroy what authority I held with the war party than he did to further the gathering of slaves.”
“Easy to say when only Icehand gives witness. Let us hear another voice.”
There was a shuffling at the mouth of the chamber, and an old ogre entered. Bloodraven had to look again before he realized that it was no aged ogre after all, but an emaciated, stoop-shouldered wreck of a young one. Deathclaw, alive and depleted of the vitality he had shown only months earlier. His hair had gone prematurely grey and his muscle bulk had withered away so that his bones seemed to show through under his skin. It was a horrifying sight, this robbery of life and strength, even practiced upon a dire enemy. A clean death would have been more merciful by far than leaving Deathclaw in this condition.
Deathclaw’s red-rimmed yellow eyes fixed on him, narrowing in hatred. Bloodraven stared back at him, unflinching. No matter what fiction he spun to explain away the state of Deathclaw’s condition, it had been a deserved fate.
“Taint-blood,” Deathclaw cried, stabbing a trembling arm at him. “Did you hope that I’d died and could not spread the tale of your treachery?”
“Honestly,” Bloodraven shrugged. “Live or die, your fate concerned me little. And what treachery?
It was you and yours leaving human corpses scattered in your wake that raised alarm.”
“Human corpses? What care we for pitiful, weak human lives? You only do because some human dog spewed seed in your mama’s womb—and because you’ve got a taste for sticking your cock in their holes.”
“One, maybe two settlements and we could have had enough slaves to bring back to do the work no
full-blooded
ogres care to do.”
“Old men and women! No use to us. But old men and women did not do this to me. Your human witch did—under your command.”
Bloodraven looked around the circle of rapt faces, as if amused. “Human witches follow the commands of ogres, do they? I have never heard such a tale from the mouths of shamans, and they would know.”
He glanced at Wrathbone, who sat frowning, his heavily tattooed brow puckered in thought.
“No,” Wrathbone admitted. “Witches and sorcerers of any breed don’t take command other than from dark spirits. More likely, you were commanded by him.”
Bloodraven drew himself up, in righteous ogre indignation, which was what they would expect of an honest warrior. “I take no command from slaves of mine, and this one is nothing but. Broken by my hand and thoroughly so.”
“Liar,” Deathclaw screeched. “This slave he has brought within our own midst is a witch. I saw it with my own eyes.”
“Who else did?” Bloodraven asked, hoping against hope that none of the small group of warriors 224
that had captured Yhalen along with Deathclaw and seen his miraculous recovery from near death had survived to return and tell the tale to the clan.
Deathclaw opened his mouth, then shut it, prevented from the telling of that tale himself by the very fact that he’d known what it was he was gifting Bloodraven with.
“Look at me. Look at what he did,” Deathclaw finally shrilled, holding out bony arms.