Chapter 8 – Part 16

“Your headband tell you what this is about?” Delegado asked, his huge biceps straining as he shifted the stone bier. Bartemain’s body lay on it, covered by a linen shroud.

“You are trying to align the bier, which is a quadrilateral with right angles, so that the top and center of your father’s head is aligned with the rising son,” Orphan recited. Delegado recognized the sing-song quality of the warforged’s voice when Orphan was repeating whatever data was built into the artifact he wore on his head. He was also impressed with the fact that the warforged was saying it in orc. Orphan spoke nothing else now, as he was hard bent on mastering the language. “This is a druidic ritual that acknowledges light and heat from the sky as the source for true life. It’s general druidic, but with a flavor of Gatekeeper. The ritual will involve placing a representative of the classical elements on each corner, then casting spells designed to purify the body’s remains. This honors your family, as they strive to keep his body natural, and it honors him, as it is believed to be free whatever vestige of trapped spirit that may remain.”

“Right,” Delegado said, finally setting the bier correctly. He sighed and stretched. “And there will be a eulogy, and I will shed one tear.” The half-orc hadn’t realized that he spoke that aloud until he saw the warforged nod.

“I didn’t get that from the headband,” Orphan stated. “I just figured the war orcs are about showing grief, when they actually do it, it’s tightly controlled.”

“Good guess,” Delegado said. He took a water canteen off of his belt clip and took a swig. “You still have that hag’s magic stone?”

“Baruk said that by law of battle it is mine,” Orphan said. “I figured I’d sell it in the Marches, you’d tell me where. Get myself a snake.”

“A ‘stake,’” Delegado corrected him. “Starting money. Yeah, I’ll help you find a good buyer.” He put the canteen back. “The ship with supplies is here, druid will be by after he disembarks, they’ll do the ceremony within an hour or so.”

“The ship will continue on, so it’s not important,” Orphan said. “But the next one is eastbound, right?”

“Yeah,” Delegado said. He was not looking forward to that part. He found his hand straying to his sword hilt.

A stone and wood hand reached out and clapped itself on Delegado’s shoulder. “I’m the only one who disarms anyone,” the warforged said.

Delegado forced a smile, if a hollow one. The cocky idiot machine had never met Tatyanna.

Chapter 8 – Part 15

Baruk frowned, drumming his fingers on the railing of the east wall. The sun was coming up on the 14th day of Zarantyr, and the guards were changing. The full-blooded orcs were heading below to escape the hard light, and the human members of the House were coming up. Gnolls and half-orcs were parts of both shifts.

He liked to be seen at the changing of the guard. He wanted to remind them all that he set the rules here.

It wasn’t that they weren’t disciplined. It wasn’t that they were likely to slack off at what they were supposed to do. It was that if they felt no one was leading them, the stark, creeping terror that was always present would go a little farther and farther until they would bolt.

He could tell them about magical defenses, and strength of arms, but morale was held together by actions, not words.

A gnoll came trotting up a ramp, and then quickly ascended a ladder. “Boss!” it coughed, in a passable orc that was only marred by an ever-present rasp. The throat wound had never healed right, but Beghk didn’t complain, her was lucky to be alive. “The one called Grullik is back.”

“What the Khyber?” growled Baruk, irritated. “Dancing Orphan kills the hag, so now everyone is going out by themselves?” This was a time for more vigilance, not less. The night hag was a known factor. What would replace her was unknown, and in that way, more dangerous.

Beghk gave a shrug while holding his hands out, palm up, curling and uncurling his fingers. Some one had once told the half-orc commander that gnolls did that to show uncertainty, specifically that they did not know which weapon was appropriate. “Grullik like to search, boss, he’s trying to be like Delegado.”

“He’s going to end up dead,” Baruk snorted. “Find him and send him to my office.” The gnoll nodded and ran off.

“Commander,” came a call from the wharf below. “Ship coming!”

“That’ll be the druid and the gnome, and none to soon,” Baruk said to himself. “Got to get a ceremony done, Grullik, what the Keeper are you playing at?”

Baruk turned around and looked over the compound. Delegado and the warforged were directing people into setting up for the memorial ceremony. Whatever the fiends had done to Bartemain’s body – and it was creepy, touching limbs that felt like a sand doll – the druid was here to give a blessing. And a day or two after that there would be a ship heading east, not west, and it would get Tatyanna’s brother the heck out of here.

Baruk had survival to deal with, he didn’t need to be stuck with House politics. The sooner Delegado was gone, the better.

Chapter 8 – Part 14

“And tell me,” hissed the slithering thing. “Tell me exactly, tell me precisely, tell me and tell me why I should do as you say?”

The rakshasa rajah wrinkled his nose, disgusted with the slime that dripped to the cavern floor. “Aside from the fact that I could kill you and cook you until you were edible?” it sneered. Behind him, the three zakya attendants lifted their pikes and licked their fangs in anticipation. “What’s your alternative, staying here and worshipping this tomb?”

The slithering thing uncoiled itself, showing its great length and snapping its many miniscule claws that lined its sides. “Not a tomb. The Great One only sleeps. The fiends will arise.” It drew out the last syllable in a loving way as it rubbed the top of the calcified corpse lovingly. It had been a Balor magician, many millennia ago.

The rajah gritted his teeth. “There was a time the fiends were united, would you cast aside plots worked for so easily?”

The slithering thing turned twice, and focused three red eyes on the tiger-thing. “Your plots have done what? Stirred up lesser races into killing themselves for a few score years? Have you expanded our boundaries?” The fiend’s voice lowered several octaves as it went into a mocking laugh. “You can’t even keep Ashtakala free from intruders.”

“We’ll find those responsible for –”

“Who cares?” boomed the slithering thing. The zakyas readied for an attack, but the slithering thing did not try to breach the rajah’s personal barriers. “You’ll find where the petty races are hiding? Kill a few to get our respect back? Who cares? The larger picture escapes you! You get lost in the little races, and you have become little yourself! The intruders would not have even gotten in without the dragon’s feint!”

The rajah forced himself to regain his composure. “We have no lost sight of the greater issues.”

The slithering thing turned itself upside down in mockery. “Then why are you looking for my subservience? Not three centuries ago you said you didn’t need me.” It leered. “I know what the others have told you. You’re losing this fragile unity. Accept that. We were never meant to be unified.”

The rajah was silent, and then after a long pause he spoke. “Too many think like you, preferring to worship old glories, rather than look ahead. If we don’t keep prodding the little races in their war, they may end it from weariness. And if that happens, the dragons will be far less busy.”

“That you think the dragons care about the little ones shows how out of touch you are,” the slithering thing snorted. “The rakshasa grip slipped long ago. That Ashtakala was violated only proves to us all what we knew. Catch the intruders if you like, if they are indeed still alive. It will have proven nothing except that you act too late.” The slithering thing turned to caress the calcified corpse. “We have nothing further to discuss.”

The rajah considered killing this thing, he could, if he had to. But he might lose one of the zakyas, and he would need every one. Already the rajahs we infighting, no one trusting another since the discovery that one of them had found the place where the coutal’s ghost had been and kept it to himself.

In the past few months, the fragile unity of the fiends had been shattered, thanks to whoever assisted the intruders who escaped on the Crimson Ship. That burned the rajah’s heart. Centuries of planning, ruined!

But what burned more was the knowledge that this lesser one was also correct, in a fashion. Catching the intruders now, if they were indeed alive, would prove nothing. First he had to rebuild his own standing.

And aside from needing all of his zakya, he may one day need this one.

“We will have what to discuss in the future,” the rajah promised. “For now, I leave you.”

He snarled as he teleported away with his retinue, but the slithering thing, if it even noticed, did not care.

Chapter 8 – Part 13

Delegado sat atop of his horse, firing his longbow at the fleeing Carrion Tribesmen who weren’t able to get out of range quickly enough. He’d come on the scene as Orphan was slamming the hag’s head into a boulder that jutted out of the ground. Her infernal strength has made her almost as good of a wrestler as the warforged, and her sharp teeth had done a number on Orphan’s neck and sides almost as fast as he had damaged her, even with that resistance to weapon damage that all the fiends had. Almost, almost, and almost added up to a dead hag and a living, if seriously damaged, warforged.

Foallus using the last bits of his magical strength to repair Orphan during the fight hadn’t hurt either.

“Hey hero, I’m running out of arrows, here,” Delegado chuckled. “You want to hunt some of these guys down?”

“I’m not a hero,” Orphan said quietly. The battered and gouged warforged was helping the survivors and the other Tharashk servants who had arrived on horseback shortly after Delegado clean things up. This generally meant searching the bodies of their slain enemies and putting their corpses in a pile to be burnt. Despite Orphan’s condition, he bore the brunt of this duty for obvious reasons.

“We say you are hero, Dancing Orphan!” called out a beefy half-orc who was using a silvered saw to remove the dead hag’s head.

“Don’t argue with orcs, Orphan, you could lose an arm,” chuckled Delegado. He sent another arrow into the back of a fleeing Carrion Tribesman.

“I couldn’t get here faster, Delegado,” Orphan said.

“No,” Foallus said, hobbling over. Aside from various minor bruises and cuts, the human had lost a couple of teeth, and his left arm was broken in two places. He’d barely been breathing when the druid had showed up and put some magical healing energy into rebuilding Foallus’ lungs and ribcage. “You couldn’t. So stop blaming yourself. You’ve slain our greatest opponent here.” The sorcerer looked at Delegado, then a the warforged. “Word is that Del is going to Yrlag. I’m guessing that you two will want to stay together, but if you’re not, or you swing by again, we could use you here. Good pay.”

“I go where Delegado goes,” Orphan said.

“Figured I’d ask, no offense to either of you,” Foallus said.

“None taken,” Delegado grinned. “Where do you sleep again?” To his credit, the human sorcerer laughed.

The Tharashk people hurried in their task. It would be dark soon, and it was cold enough as it was when the sun was out.

Chapter 8 – Part 12

The Carrion Tribe that followed the hag who had Blood Crescent in her sights was greater in numbers than anyone had suspected. The hag had carefully recruited members of other tribes who were defeated in battle, choosing to keep some of them rather than slaughtering them all.

She was a clever being, really. It had helped her survive all of her sisters’ assassination attempts.

Fifty of the most expendable had been sacrificed just to gauge Blood Crescent’s defenses. She was not pleased that their loss had taught her nothing other than the fact that Tharashk had acquired an incredibly quick warforged. She had plans of getting the Tharashk wealth and weaponry and using it to assimilate a group called the Moon Reavers. Thus strengthened, she would turn to a careful consolidation of power in the southern Wastes.

Only now she had lost an additional three hundred followers in the attack on the Tharask expedition. The human sorcerer had blasted them with magicks that she hadn’t credited to him. He apparently had a significant number of Tharashk scrolls on him that boosted his natural powers.

And a wand that cast spells that shielded the soldiers from the hag’s magic missiles, confound it.

Her forces were down to barely four score, and they had again surrounded the remains of the Tharashk forces. Six men total, including the human sorcerer, whose remaining spells were weak, pitiful things. Six men, desperately using the carcasses of their dead mounts as makeshift walls against her worshippers.

She hung back, waiting to see the last of it rather than participating in the hand-to-hand combat. If not for those disgusting shield spells, she would be firing her bolts of energy – out of boredom if nothing else – but melee combat was for the lesser creatures.

Annoyingly, she was running out of lesser creatures. She’d thrown away the work of a decade, apparently. It had taken her that long to get to nearly five hundred warriors, and now she had less than a fifth of that. Likely her soldiers would finish off these few rabble in minutes, but it hadn’t been worth it. This whole thing would injure the Tharashk outpost, but not fatally. They’d replace the magic-user with another in weeks, and whatever the artifice was that kept her from entering Blood Crescent ethereally would still be functioning.

A waste.

And thanks to this mysterious warforged, a waste that had produced no serious intelligence.

Something about the warforged made her think she should investigate him more. Perhaps even open up channels to the other fiends. There had been some attempt to contact her a few weeks back, but she had ignored it. She’d gone a century without direct contact with the rajahs and their servants, and she could easily go another century more. Their arrogance was disgusting. Everyone with sense knew that the hags were formed from Khyber’s first drops of blood, not the tiger-men who came later.

She watched as a Tharashk soldier fell, finally succumbing to multiple club blows. Her tribesmen began to pour into the space that the half-orc had been slashing at with the greataxe.

And then everything was spoiled.

She screeched with rage as the warforged jumped high in the air, tackling a whole knot of her worshippers. They screamed with rage and fear, and the Tharashk soldiers hooted with relief and delight. The warforged did not stop moving, dodging blows, kicking stone clubs away from her followers’ hands.

“Kill him you idiots!” she cried, first in her infernal tongue, them in their own, primitive language. But they could not. Oh they occasionally struck the warforged, but only with glancing blows, mere scratches. The warforged hit every time his feet and fists flurried around, or so it seemed. Soon the Tharashk soldiers were merely giving the warforged breathing room, rather than fighting for their lives. Soon thereafter her followers began running, declaring that the stone-and-wood thing could not be killed.

She swore she’d make a paste from their livers. While they watched.

“Stand and fight!” she howled, walking forward. She fired one of her magical missiles at the warforged, and she had the satisfaction of seeing it raise a small, smoking pit on the thing’s back.

The warforged turned around, and from over a hundred feet away she could swear she saw glee in its eyes.

“The hag is mine!” the warforged yelled, somersaulting under the legs of her troops. She hit him with another magical missile, raising another insignificant pit on the thing’s leg. She panicked as he grew closer, firing an enfeebling ray that went wide of its target.

She was pulling out her heartstone to flee into etherealness when he knocked it from her hand.

Chapter 8 – Part 11

Orphan maintained the best speed possible over the broken ground. The trail wasn’t the smoothest, but it was better than the pockmarked and cracked earth to the sides. For the first four or five hundred feet outside of the walls of Blood Crescent the ground had been more or less flattened. Beyond that point only the trails beaten down by many Tharashk feet were paths on which he wasn’t likely to crack an ankle pinion when moving at more than a hustle.

And he was running at a far faster clip than a hustle. His trip from the gate to the edge of the flattened perimeter took maybe ten seconds. Now he was ten minutes and almost five miles out, and he could see flashes over horizon, just past a ridge that poked up from the broken ground. Foallus still had some magical energy left to throw around, apparently.

Orphan slowed as the trail got rougher. He’d passed excavated areas, old pits that Tharashk had long before cleared out. The area that he was entering was less-traveled territory. If he made one misstep, he could seriously injure himself.

And if he didn’t hurry, more people would die. Small battles were things that were over quickly.

He stumbled over a sinkhole that he had barely noticed, but righted himself with a somersault. Gritting his hinged jaw, he muttered a prayer to whatever power might have been listening.

He couldn’t let anyone else from Tahrashk die.

Chapter 8 – Part 10

The attack came about an hour before sunset.

A group of a dozen prospectors, accompanied by twenty soldiers, including the spellcaster Foallus, had gone out shortly before dawn. They’d left to collect a rich deposit of Khyber shards that a dragonmarked human had detected. The reason for the large accompaniment was that the shards were a good twenty miles from Blood Crescent.

Twenty miles through the Wastes. Delegado and Orphan had traveled through far more than that, but the fiends and the Carrion Tribes watched Blood Crescent with a wary hatred. What ventured too far from it was subject to attack.

But, each Khyber shard that was brought back was worth thousands of gold galifars, so Tharashk went.

Around noon, Foallus cast a message spell to Baruk. The hag’s forces had encircled them, and they’d lost half their number. They had finally broken through, and they were fleeing back to Blood Crescent.

Baruk summoned all hands, and called forth riders to meet the hag’s forces halfway. When he was still explaining what had happened in his booming voice, Orphan had bolted out of the gates.

“What is the Dancing Orphan doing?” demanded Baruk in orcish to Delegado, who was mounting a horse while sending Feather ahead to scout.

“Dancing Orphan can run faster than any horse!” Delegado bellowed back. “I will follow him now to use my mark to find the survivors! Come after our trail!” And with that Delegado’s horse bolted for the gate as well. Behind him the hooting cheers of orcs, half-orcs, gnolls, and humans could be heard.

The wind felt good on Delegado’s face as he bolted across the cold, bleak landscape of the Wastes, but once his visage could not be seen by the defenders of Blood Crescent, his mien grew more troubled. Orphan, do you realize that you’re trying to take on a hag single-handedly?

Forgive the delay, again, sorry

I fell behind due to a variety of reasons, mostly an increase of work, so that's a good thing. I plan to resume on April 20 with extra postings that week.

Some previews:

Iron Orphan and Delegado fight off a small army alongside the defenders of Blood Crescent, and Orphan goes toe-to-toe with a night hag.

An elder water elemental wants the Branch of Air and Water back - NOW.

The Gatekeepers plan to infuse Orphan's body with Byeshk particles so that he can fight aberrations.

Aruunis (a 7th level druid) vs. Pienna (I think she's currently 13th level) in a fight. Place your bets, but don't bet you know the answer.