The invention of the vine basket changed everything.
Before, a Snotling could carry one rock at a time, drop it, go back for another.
Now, with a crude basket strapped to its back, it could carry twenty.
The Goblins loved them, not because they were efficient, but because they could now steal more mushrooms and hide them in the baskets.
Life in the valley fell into a rhythm for the first time since Marcus was born from the fungus.
He taught the smarter Goblins how to make better stone tools – not farming tools, Orks don’t farm.
He taught them how to make a stone-headed maul for breaking rock, and a crude shovel from a flat stone tied to a stick.
Slash-and-burn was all they knew before; now they could actually dig a proper quarry.
Four fungus fields were now bubbling, green and stinking.
The population was climbing fast.
Too fast for Dwarfs to understand.
What started as 30 Goblins was now almost 200 Goblins and nearly 400 Snotlings in just over a month.
Every week a new batch of Snotlings chewed their way out of the fungal mat, followed days later by Goblins.
The Dwarfs who went with them to build the quarry came back every evening looking like they’d seen a ghost.
“Incredible,” muttered old Brokk, the youngest Ironbreaker.
“Yesterday there were thirty Grobi digging, today there are fifty, and ten of them are new and already know how to swing a pick.
They grow like weeds.”
They didn’t reconsider their view of Greenskins as beasts – Dwarfs never do.
But they started to reconsider their view of *this* Greenskin.
“Your boss is not like other Grobi,” Gram told Iron Egg one evening, as Iron Egg tried to steal Gram’s hammer.
“Other Grobi would be trying to eat his own foot by now.
Your boss…
he thinks.
It is unnatural.
It offends me.”
Marcus, of course, made it worse by bragging.
“I can brew wine, Stunty.
Stronger than your Bugman’s.”
That was the single most offensive thing you can say to a Dwarf.
Dwarfs believe they invented beer and that no one, not even Elves, can brew better than Bugman’s Brewery.
Gram’s face turned the color of his beard and he challenged Marcus to a brew-off, which Marcus had to awkwardly back out of because the only “wine” he could make was fermented mushrooms that smelled like feet.
After a month of climbing the mountains with a dozen Goblins as porters and guards, the Dwarfs had mapped the two ridges of Marcus’s valley.
They found what Marcus had hoped for.
Not everywhere, but enough.
In the eastern ridge, a vein of low-grade iron ore, reddish-brown hematite, exposed by a landslide.
In the western ridge, a small, thin vein of copper, green with verdigris.
And, most importantly, halfway up the southern slope, an open-pit black seam.
Coal.
Marcus almost cried when he saw it.
Coal meant fire.
Fire that could burn hotter than wood.
Fire that could smelt iron.
Without coal, even if he had iron ore, he could only make a campfire that would never be hot enough to make real steel.
With coal, he could become a real tribe.
The bad news was transport.
The iron vein was 800 meters up a steep scree slope.
His Goblins could barely carry rocks down; how would they carry ore?
He needed a path, and sledges, and more baskets.
The Dwarfs said they needed pit props and hammers.
But before they could start mining, the Goblins found something else.
Something that made even the Dwarfs step back and grip their axes.
On the third week, a prospecting team – two Dwarfs and twelve Goblins – crossed the north ridge looking for limestone.
They didn’t return at noon.
When they returned at dusk, only one Dwarf and eight Goblins came back.
One Goblin was dead, hanging from a vine.
They had found a hill covered in thorns.
Marcus went to see it himself the next day, taking Gram and four Dwarfs, Gaptooth and twenty Goblins with spears.
It was halfway up the north slope, in a small, sheltered bowl.
The soil was dark, reddish-brown, almost black, incredibly fertile.
It was fertile because it was full of bones.
Deer skeletons, wolf skeletons, giant rat skeletons, even a Chaos hound, all tangled in thorns.
The thorns themselves were a nightmare.
Each vine was as thick as a man’s arm, covered in thorns over a meter long, brown and smooth as polished wood, growing in a dense, intertwined wall.
At the base of each vine, bright red flowers bloomed, small but vivid, pumping out a sweet, heavy scent like honey and rotting fruit.
The scent was the trap.
Gram stopped Marcus 20 feet away.
“Don’t go closer, Grobi.
That’s not natural.
That’s Warp-touched.
That’s a Bloodbriar.
I’ve seen it in the deep holds.
The flower smells sweet, makes you stupid.
You want to eat it, you walk into the thorns, thorns drink you.”
Marcus saw the proof.
A deer carcass hung suspended, thorns through its neck.
And closer, a Goblin corpse – one of yesterday’s team – a thorn right through its eye socket, hanging like a grotesque ornament.
The other Goblins who had gone in had been cut, their arms bleeding, now whimpering and dizzy.
It was a carnivorous, mildly Chaos-mutated plant.
In Warhammer, this was common where Warpstone dust had seeped into the ground.
Even so, Marcus’s brain, which still had a human’s greed, saw treasure.
He grabbed a Goblin by the scruff.
“You.
Go cut three thorns.
And pick some flowers.
Outer edge only.”
The Goblin shook, nearly pissing itself, but the fear of Marcus was bigger than the fear of the thorns.
He crept forward with a stone axe, holding his breath, hacked off three of the long, straight thorns and grabbed a handful of red flowers, then ran back, bleeding from two shallow scratches.
Marcus looked at the thorns.
He turned one in his hand.
It was perfect.
Light brown, completely smooth, straight as an arrow shaft, hard as hardwood, with a natural needle point that would never need sharpening.
No Goblin could carve something this straight.
“Holy shit…
natural javelins,” he whispered.
He looked at the flowers.
He picked one up, sniffed it, then put just a petal on his tongue.
Sweet, like super-concentrated honey.
He wanted to eat the whole thing.
He chewed it.
Within seconds, the world started to swim.
The mountain swayed.
He pinched his own arm hard – no pain at all.
He spat it out violently.
“Morphine,” he said, his eyes shining.
“Painkiller.
Anesthetic.
In small doses, this is battlefield medicine.
In big doses, poison.”
He finally understood.
This Bloodbriar was a weapon.
He had his Goblins rip off their loincloths – which stank so badly of sweat and fungus that even the sweet flower scent couldn’t get through – and tie them over their mouths and noses.
“Now go.
Cut many thorns.
Don’t eat flowers.
Thorns for spears, flowers in basket, but don’t touch with bare hands.”
With their stinking masks, the Goblins could work at the edge of the briar patch without getting dizzy.
They hacked and hacked.
By evening, they had a pile of over two hundred perfect, meter-long thorn spears, lighter and sharper than any wooden spear they could make, and two baskets full of red flowers, carefully wrapped in leaves.
Gram watched, arms crossed, his hatred mixing with grudging respect.
“You Orks…
you see a man-eating Chaos plant and your first thought is ‘can I stab someone with it?'”
Marcus grinned, holding a thorn spear that was now his new weapon.
It was twice as good as his old wooden one.
“Stunty, in my tribe, if it can’t be used to krump someone, it’s useless.
Now we have spears that don’t need carving, and medicine that can make a Goblin not feel his leg being cut off.
This mountain just paid rent.”
He looked back at the hill of bones, already planning.
With coal for fire, iron for choppas, and now Bloodbriar thorns for spears and anesthetic, his tribe could finally stop being a beggar mob.
Tomorrow, the quarry would start.