Read Online The Bone Orcs by Jonathan Moeller - Free Book Online Page A

started forward.
    As he did, a shape appeared
from behind one of the pine trees.
    Ridmark turned, taking his
staff in both hands.
    The figure was an orcish man,
tall and strong, wearing leather boots and ragged trousers. His
torso, arms, and face had all been smeared with white war paint.
Behind his sharp tusks, his face had been marked with black paint,
stark against his eyes and nose and mouth.
    The war paint gave his face
the appearance of a grinning white skull, while his arms and torso
had a leprous look from the white paint. In his right hand he
carried an axe with an iron blade, and he wore strange amulets of
bones and black feathers and small polished stones.
    The paint and the amulets
marked him as an orc of the Qazaluuskan Forest. Of old the orcs had
worshipped their cruel blood gods, and though many orcs had
converted to the church of the Dominus Christus that Ridmark’s
ancestors had brought with them from Old Earth, many still followed
the old ways and the old gods. The orcs of the Forest worshipped
Qazalask, the blood god of death and the dead, and in his name his
shamans practiced necromancy, summoning shades and animating
corpses.
    Ridmark shifted his grip on
his staff. The orc stared at him without blinking.
    “We needn’t fight,” said
Ridmark in the orcish tongue. “Let me pass and you can live.”
    “The omens were propitious
this day,” said the orc, hefting his axe. “The signs spoke of
victory. A trophy I shall have, in honor to my house.” He spoke the
orcish tongue with the rasping accents of the Qazaluuskan Forest.
“Blood I shall spill, and I shall offer your heart and liver and
lungs as tributes to the shaman, that he may offer them up to the
Lord of Bones.”
    His eyes glimmered crimson as
the battle fury of his orcish blood came upon him, and then the
Qazaluuskan orc charged forward with a howl, his axe snapping back
for a blow.
    Ridmark waited until the last
moment and dodged, sweeping his staff around. He caught the orc
across the shins with a loud crack, and the orc stumbled, but he
recovered his balance and attacked once more. Ridmark dodged again,
staff ready in both hands. In the year since he had been stripped
of his soulblade, he had found that most men, whether human or
orcish or dvargir, were contemptuous of the staff, considering it a
weapon for peasants and farmers. They assumed that wooden stick was
no match for a blade.
    They were wrong. Ridmark had
learned that the hard way himself. It was time to teach this orc
the same lesson.
    The Qazaluuskan orc spun,
roaring as he went on the attack. Ridmark dodged yet again, but
this time he snapped the staff forward, bringing the weapon down
upon the orc’s wrists. The impact staggered the orc, who struggled
to keep his grip upon the axe’s haft. That moment of imbalance gave
Ridmark the time he needed to spin the staff, its end slamming into
the side of the orc’s head.
    The Qazaluuskan stumbled, and
Ridmark hit him three times across the temple in rapid
succession.
    After the third blow, the orc
fell dead to the ground, blood leading from his nostrils and
mouth.
    Ridmark took a step back,
raising his staff to guard position on reflex. Yet no one else
stirred in the pine trees or upon the slopes of the hills. The
Qazaluuskan orc had been alone.
    But for a Qazaluuskan orc to
have been alone near the village of Toricus…
    The smell of wood smoke grew
sharper.
    Ridmark broke into a jog,
leaving the dead orc behind, and soon came to Toricus.
    Or, at least, what was left
of it.
    Toricus was a rough place
inhabited by rough men, and the village stood in a little valley at
the edge of the Forest. The villagers had built a thick wooden
stockade around the village, strengthening their defenses further
with a ditch lined with sharpened stakes, but that hadn’t been
enough to save them. The gate had been torn down, and lay in
shattered pieces across the ditch. Inside the stockade the houses
had been built of fieldstone and thatch, but