[Year 1135 of the Trees. Year 30 of the Avari. Early spring]
[Selas POV]
The runner reached me at the northern workshops before midday.
I could tell by his face, before he said anything at all.
"Chief —" he got out. He was a young Lindar named Thandor. One of my hunters, which meant he was one of the ones with proper training, and he did not come at a dead run unless there was reason.
"What have you found?"
"Dead things. In the forest. North." He was out of breath. I waited. "Not animals. Hunting party saw them. Cálros tried to go forward — one of them came at him. Swinging a club. Screamed and charged."
My stomach went cold.
"Alive?"
"Cálros put a spear through it before it reached him. He's fine. They all are."
"Where?"
"Half a league north of the Long Path. They brought the body."
I went.
They laid the body inside the north gate because I would not let them bring it further in. It lay on the packed earth, on an old blanket, and it was ugly, and it was unmistakable.
I had read about orcs in a life I tried not to speak of. Nothing I had read had fully prepared me for the fact of one.
Thick body. Short legs. A jaw that went forward more than a jaw ought to. Dirty skin, a grey that might once have been another colour before generations of underground breeding got hold of it. Teeth meant for ripping. No armour. No cloth to speak of — a wrap of hide around the middle, another across one shoulder. The club beside it was a length of wood with a knob at the end, still caked with old dark matter I did not want to examine.
It did not have to have fangs. Its mouth was enough.
A crowd had gathered, the front ranks were silent. The back ranks were murmuring. A child had been sent away by its mother.
I circled the body once, slowly.
"It charged you?"
Cálros stepped forward. A Tattyar, one of my older scouts, a man I had trusted for fifteen years.
"Yes, Chief. We had seen tracks we did not know. Strange tracks. We were moving quietly. Then one came out of the brush maybe twenty paces from us. It saw us. It screamed. Like — like nothing I have ever heard. And then it came at us. Without pause. Without measuring us. Without trying to run or to call. Just came."
"How many did you see?"
"Scent and smoke told us there were more. We did not engage. We withdrew. I would guess —" he closed his eyes briefly, counting against memory. "A hundred. Possibly more. They have a camp. Not far from the north stream."
A hundred.
I did not let the number show on my face. I kept my expression steady. There were a hundred pairs of Avari eyes fixed on me, watching to see how I would look, and how I looked would be the first fact they would take home with them tonight.
So I looked calm.
"These creatures are called orcs," I said, loudly enough for the whole yard to hear. I used the Avarin word I had been waiting thirty years to use, Úrkai. "Oromë warned us. The Valar warned us. The Sundering cost us friends and kin because we refused to follow gods on the promise of this darkness. And now the darkness has come and found us. And this one —"
I nudged the body's arm with the side of my boot.
"This one came out of the trees and charged an elf it had never seen. Without asking. Without knowing anything about us except that we were there, and it wanted us dead."
The murmur that ran through the crowd now was different. Harder.
"They are not going away," I said. "They were bred not to go away. They were bred by something to be exactly this." I looked at the faces. I let them see that I knew what I was saying. "What they are and where they come from is a story for another night. What they do is what we must answer today. And we will answer."
I turned to Cálros.
"Take ten scouts. Find their camp. Count them precisely. And do not be seen."
He went.
[Two nights later. The Council hall]
The scouts came back with a picture I had feared.
Not twenty orcs. Not twenty-five, the way I had half-hoped — the small exploratory band I might have disposed of and pretended the problem was over.
Eighty-three, said Cálros. Possibly ninety. They have at least three fires going at any time. They have no walls, no earthworks, no discipline I could see. Some of them are female. They have children.
"Children?"
"Young. Small versions of themselves."
"Then they breed here."
The Council hall was packed that night. Every clan head. Every senior craftsman. Every member of the Advisory Council. The air was thick.
"Eighty-three in one camp," Thoron said, slowly. "What does that mean?"
"It means one of two things," I said. "It means either that there is a band of orcs loose in the country that has grown to the size of a village, by themselves, and we missed it — which I doubt, because the scouts patrol. Or it means they were put here. Sent. Someone somewhere is pushing small groups down into these lands to probe, and this is the first we have caught at it."
"Someone," said Maethor, from his usual seat along the wall.
"Someone in the north."
He held my gaze a long moment. Then inclined his head, very slightly, and did not press.
"What do you propose?" Thoron asked.
"I propose that we kill them."
A short silence.
"All of them?" someone asked. A Lindar elder whose name was Amnion. "The females and the small ones."
"All of them."
The silence got longer.
"Listen to me," I said, and I kept my voice level, and I did not raise it because I did not need to raise it. "These are not people. I do not say this easily. I say it because I have been thinking about it all day, and I have looked at what was brought back to the north gate, and I have looked at the scouts' description of what was bred in that camp. These are not people. They are made. They were made to harm us, and they were made quickly, and if a patrol of them comes on a gatherer from our western fields tomorrow, that gatherer will not come home, and her daughter will not know why, and her son will grow up hating us for failing to keep his mother safe."
I let the image stand.
"If we let this camp alone, it becomes two camps. Those two become four. In a year there will be enough of them in these forests to make taking the gatherers the easy part. In two years, the walls. In five years —" I glanced at Cálros, whose face was stone. "I do not need to finish the sentence."
"They have done us no harm yet —" Amnion began.
"One of them charged one of my scouts with a club last week. If Cálros had stumbled, he would be dead, and I would be speaking to his wife."
Amnion did not reply.
"We go tomorrow night," I said. "Two hundred of our best. Bows to start. Spears to finish. Encirclement. I will lead."
"You will lead?"
That was Celestia. She had been silent until now.
"Yes."
"You have two thousand people whose lives rest on you."
"Which is why I need to know — personally, not from report — whether the training I have put our people through for thirty years actually produces warriors when the blood starts flowing. If I send them without going, I do not know. I have to know."
[Three nights later. The orc camp]
We moved on them in the dark before the silver hour.
Three fires. A rough crescent of low shelters made of branch and hide. No sentries worth the name — two shapes walking the perimeter without rhythm or attention, one of them asleep against a tree when we crept past.
We got within forty paces on three sides before the wind shifted.
It shifted toward them. Their noses were better than I had dared hope they would be worse. One of the fire-side ones lifted its head, snuffled, howled — a sound like a large dog trying to speak a language it had not been given — and then the whole camp was awake.
They came out of their shelters. They grabbed clubs and spears, the few they had.
They charged.
"Draw," I said, without raising my voice. Beside me the runner repeated it and the word ran along our line. "Loose."
The first volley took eleven of them in mid-run.
"Again."
Another volley. This time the air was full of arrows, and the fire-lit bodies of the orcs were lit up as targets. Some went down with arrows in them. Some came on with arrows in them, because pain didn't seem to register in them.
"Again."
Another volley. Now they were close. Maybe eight paces.
"Spears."
Our front rank dropped their bows and came forward with bronze on wood.
The first orc reached us. Two spears went through its belly. The third twisted in and snapped under the weight of the thing falling forward. The team behind closed the gap.
{Image: Orc in the encampment}
It was not elegant. The orcs fought the way dogs fight — furious, unmeasured, unafraid of dying. They just kept coming until they were on the ground.
One got inside a spear-line and hit a young Lindar called Nethrin across the jaw with the bone-cracked head of a club. Nethrin went down. Two other Avari closed on the orc with short blades and finished it before it could lift the club again.
Another got past the second rank and reached me personally. It came in low, screaming, eyes yellow in the firelight.
I put an arrow through its eye at six paces.
It is not a moment I like to think about. It took me years to understand what I felt about first kill, which is to say, I felt almost nothing at the time, and I have felt a great deal since.
The arrow flew true.
The orc went down.
The last of them — perhaps a dozen, perhaps less — realised, all at once, that they were losing. It was the first moment in the fight when anything among them seemed capable of thought. A knot of them broke for the treeline.
"Let them pass," I called, because the encirclement on that side had been thinner, and two of them got through.
My captains did not like it. I did not like it. But three of our warriors going down to chase two orcs into the dark was not a trade I would make.
We finished the rest.
When the last orc fell, the camp was silent. My people were silent.
The camp was full of bodies.
We had fifteen wounded. Most superficial. Nethrin's jaw was broken — the first serious wound.
No Avari was dead.
I stood in the middle of it with my bow in one hand and my breath coming unsteady, and something in my chest that had been held tight for thirty years went a little loose, and I opened my mouth and shouted.
"Avari!"
It was an unshaped sound. A roar. It came out of me without planning.
The warriors around me picked it up. Then the ones beyond. The shout ran through the camp like fire through dry grass, two hundred throats.
We had done it.
We had stood in a line against the dark, and the dark had broken first.
This is the beginning, I thought.
{Image: Avari hunter-warrior}
[Returning. The long path south]
We walked the bodies of the enemy into a pile. I set it on fire myself. I did not want to leave them in the forest.
As the fire caught, Cálros came to me with something in his hand.
"Chief."
It was a scrap of fabric. Faded and torn. Once, it had been the colour of a pale leaf, and it had been woven with a small patterned border along its edge — a zig-zag of tiny blue and silver stitches.
My stomach turned.
It was Quendian weave.
And it had ended up, trampled into the dirt, in an orc camp that was not supposed to have known we existed until this week.
"They have been closer than we thought," Cálros said quietly. "For longer."
I folded the scrap up.
"Do not tell the warriors," I said. "Not tonight. Let them have their triumph. Let them ride home as conquerors. I will tell the Council tomorrow."
[The gate. Late night]
The return was a festival.
Word ran through the walls ahead of us. By the time we reached the gate, every Avari in the settlement was awake, and every Avari lined the inside of the path. Bards had invented a victory song in the time it had taken us to walk home. It was not a good song. They would fix it in the morning.
Families pulled their fighters from the line and wept over them. Nethrin's mother set about his broken jaw like it was personal insult. Morin's sister beat his shoulder lightly for having gotten hit at all.
I let myself be embraced, and congratulated, and pulled into the press.
I let myself smile.
But I had a folded piece of cloth in my pouch that I had not shown anyone, and I would show it tomorrow, in a much quieter room, and the smiles would stop when I did.
[End of Chapter 10]