The Dark Paladin Read online

  “No!” Drahgo cried. “Off!”

  “Bested!” Gorsgog proclaimed, beating his chest. “You lose. Small. Food now.”

  Drahgo scooted from under his brother on his elbows, prostrating himself. The scene reminded Bloodhand of a leafless tree. Green trunk, like his son Gorsgog, standing over the brown earth, his flattened son Drahgo, who had his mother’s color.

  Bloodhand clapped in appreciation at his sons. He grabbed his large war axe from the ground and hurled it in a deadly arc at his youngest son, who managed to catch it, just in time. He did not worry about being caught without his axe amongst his people. If they killed him, it was not because he walked without an axe. It was because he was not fit to be chief anymore. If he could not kill someone with his hands, that person deserved the title and respect of his people anyway.

  “Use to hunt,” Bloodhand commanded Drahgo, in reference to his axe. “Heavy. Build strength.”

  He pointed at his son. “Soon, you ready. Soon, you win. Work hard. Bring food.”

  Drahgo gripped his father’s axe and rose from his submissive position. He grunted an assent and snarled at his brother briefly before stomping off toward the base of the Southern Peaks, where brown elk and soft-furred goats wandered.

  Orcs were notoriously dense creatures. They did not have the capacity to think deeply and only understood the natural order of things. The strong survived. The weak served the strong or perished. If a child or a mother survived birth, it was a sign that they had the courage and will to live. Orcs did not understand disease, for they could not fathom something small beating something large. Orcs believed in bravery and strength. A child who exhibited neither was thrown to wolves or worse. Nature demanded it.

  Bloodhand hated humans. He could not possibly understand them. Weak muscles. Small bodies. They mastered horses, which were bigger and stronger, which orcs considered very noble. A small thing mastering a big thing showed power. But humans also fought without honor atop towers and behind strange engines that flung fire and arrows. He hated dark elves too—not because he had seen them fight. He only knew of them by reputation from the orc oral legends. The shamans claimed dark elves flung flame and ice from their hands. This was unnatural and ignoble, and so Bloodhand hated them too.

  Like other orcs, he respected the wood elves, even if they were lithe and nimble, where his people were muscles and brutality. He would never call a wood elf a friend, but he recognized their strength. He also recognized a kinship. Like them, orcs had long, pointed ears. Like them, orcs had skin with shades of green and brown and tan. Like them, orcs respected the earth, even if the elves seemed to cherish the trees to peculiar extent. Bloodhand’s respect for wood elves was such that he might even take one to bed, if he ever captured one. However, wood elves were deadly. Arrows from afar and knives up close. A death to a wood elf was always a good death. Always.

  Bloodhand grinned at his son Gorsgog, as the middle child slammed his fist into an open palm, grunting and roaring with adrenaline that still pumped minutes after his combat with Drahgo. Should Bloodhand’s oldest son Ogdorn die, Gorsgog would be a fitting replacement in the line of succession.

  Bloodhand imagined his green-skinned son Ogdorn with his dark, braided hair and beard leading a raid on Doz Alkhu and extending Bloodhand’s clan holdings beyond Oldrakh and Gelgdaf. In his mind’s eye, he saw Gorsgog beside Ogdorn, both standing atop Bloodhand’s yellow-skinned rival Grimnar the One-Eyed. Then, the vision broke and a dark chill ran through his body.

  Bloodhand and his son Gorsgog grunted in unison. A challenge had been issued from the west. He felt it in his bones. Bloodhand growled as he stared toward Goat Pass.

  “Go,” Bloodhand commanded Gorsgog. “Tell shaman to meet. Bring all. We war.”

  Gorsgog nodded and grunted in acknowledgment. He ran south toward Zobogvug.

  Bloodhand’s brain couldn’t process why. He didn’t care what the mechanism was that drew him and his people toward the west. He knew the shamans would say it was the Great Light, but he felt something very different. He felt a darkness. A threat. A challenge to his leadership and his people. He would find that darkness, and he would kill it. And if he died, his sons would kill it or die trying. That was the orc way.

  Bloodhand sat with his sons and five daughters in the honored positions around the Great Fire Pit of Zobogvug. The Great Fire Pit was the main social hub of the clan. Meals were prepared here. Warriors of great repute were burned here when they died. Great wars were started here.

  Before Bloodhand, across the fire, was an old orc with white hair and hard muscles under loose, brown skin. The shaman’s name was Wovtet. When he had been younger, Wovtet had been a strong warrior, but he had heard the call of the Great Light. She had whispered to him, and he had grown smarter. Bloodhand trusted him as all chiefs trusted shaman. Nature had bestowed insight to the shaman. Chiefs were not capable of thinking big, and they did not hear from the Great Light like shaman did.

  Thousands of warriors had gathered here. Gorsgog had made the horn call, but many had come here without it. All orcs felt the challenge from the west. All they needed was a leader and a direction, and they would leave their homes to whatever death awaited themselves and their loved ones.

  “We go war, yes?” Bloodhand asked.

  “The Great Light has spoken to me,” Wovtet said. “An evil comes from lonely mountain. Humans too weak. The strong must go. We must go.”

  Bloodhand bellowed a mighty war cry. He lifted two axes into the air and a thousand warriors of his clan yelled defiantly toward this new challenge to their might.

  “Oldrakh has heard the call,” Wovtet said sagely. “Velgdaf answers too. They go north, along the trees. The wood elves will not like this. We go our own way, through the mountains.”

  Wovtet spoke strangely, like the humans and elves did, but Bloodhand understood and respected him. He was orc and still strong. There was no reason to not believe the shaman.

  Bloodhand clapped and raised his hand triumphantly. Another war. Another chance to prove his valor.

  “Goat Pass,” Bloodhand commanded. “Cold. Wear furs. Bring weapons. Find evil. Destroy weak.”

  The orc people lifted their weapons and shouted their allegiance and defiance. Some cut their chests with knives to wet their blades in blood. All left the campfire and returned to their tents to grab whatever food, furs, and weapons they could carry. Some carried babies no more than five years old, to dip their children into the blood of vanquished enemies. If the child died in battle, then he or she had not been fit to survive. Nature demanded strength and luck, and so did the orcs.

  Goat Pass took four full days to traverse. Orcs didn’t sleep on a warpath. Stopping during this short of a distance was considered cowardly. Dozens fell from the snowy ledges in the first night, whether from exhaustion or by slipping from the slick rocks. No one stopped to bury or burn them. It was not worth the time or effort. Nature had taken them because they were unfit to go to war.

  Bloodhand led the advanced parties as they left Goat Pass. He knew this land well and had raided most towns along the border. The humans were weak, and his numbers were strong. He knew the soft bodies would retreat like cowards, and so it was no surprise when the guards ran down the streets of Hell’s Edge ahead of his war parties.

  The guards yelled their alarms, and bells rang throughout the town. Strong men came out and engaged with Bloodhand and his sons. None were a match. His axes made caves out of one man and then another. Women fell too. When he encountered an undefended child running down the streets, he roared in frustration at the weakness of these humans. He killed it quickly, so it would never know the shame of its parents.

  Bloodhand roared a challenge to any who dared come out of their homes or shops. Those who did were greeted with a roar of appreciation before being dispatched with quick deaths. Those who shot arrows at him from windows were killed slowly by dismemberment and gut wounds. Coward’s deaths.

  Hundreds of grown men ran do
wn the streets before him, and he despaired.

  “Cowards!” Bloodhand yelled after them. “You don’t deserve the Great Light!”

  14

  The Red Poet

  The wood elf Nessamela drove her knife into a deer in a grassy clearing south of Nylelthalas in the Nomintaur Forest. Most hunters would gut the carcass, strip it of meat and fur, and discard the latter to enrich the forest floor. Perhaps they would say a prayer to the forest and Cronos. But Nessamela, the famed warrior who her people called Liritmear, was not most hunters. She hadn’t killed the deer for food or fur. She had killed it for sport—something to practice her knife work on. It was a ritual she performed every day. When she was done, she would bring it back to the women of the tree villages to serve to others.

  “Heart,” she mumbled as the blade went in.

  “Lungs,” she said with another stab. “Liver. Kidneys.”

  With each thrust, she thought of a man. An elf, actually. Dark skin. White hair. Red eyes that glowed slightly in the dark. Beautiful. Foreign. Forbidden.

  “Heart,” she whispered, striking the strung-up deer in the chest once again.

  Crimson dampness coated her tanned leather top and breeches. The blood ran down her shirt, congealing against her breasts and producing a sickening slosh and sticky spread with each new slash and thrust. Her brown hair began to fall from her top knot. Blood congealed everywhere. It ran down her stomach and into her simple cloth undergarments. It matted the hair in her armpits.

  In her mind, he smiled at her with pity in his eyes.

  “Intestines,” she said, surgically piercing and eviscerating the dead animal. “Liver. Kidneys. Groin.”

  She grew bored with the monotony of the gore and began slashing arteries instead.

  “Femoral,” she said as she slashed along the thigh. “Dorsal aorta. Carotid.”

  She had killed thousands of animals this way and used them like this. To her kin, her psychopathy was some form of higher level practicing. For her, it had simply been therapeutic. If it kept men from approaching her because they thought she was training to keep their realm safe, so be it. In truth, she was hiding and dealing with an embarrassment from her past.

  Nessamela had been born the child of a huntress and hunter. In the woodland realm, this was a noble profession, but it was a warrior’s birth with no real wealth or promise. She had no relation to royalty. Five hundred years ago, she had traveled to Phiol to meet him. She had made a fool out of herself, and he had looked at her like a king might look at a foolish teenage peasant girl with a handful of flowers. She was so stupid. He would never stoop to marry the daughter of wood elf hunters.

  But Gods, how she wanted him to.

  “Captain Liritmear,” a low voice hailed her from the edge of the clearing.

  “What is it, Lokwen?” she asked.

  She didn’t have to turn around. He had found her like this in the past. Always the look of apprehension mixed with horror. She didn’t need a mirror to know that she looked like a butcher. She was one. She was a carver of man, beast, and orc. She enjoyed the blood. She enjoyed the look of people who saw her coated in it.

  “An orc party has been sighted,” he said.

  “In the forest?” she asked hopefully.

  “No,” he said. “They hug the edge of the Southern Peaks from Oldrakh. They know what would happen should they set foot in our woods. Perhaps they’ve heard of the Red Poet.”

  She chuckled as she wiped a knife on a patch of skin that offended her by not being coated in crimson. Her adopted name Liritmear meant poem of gore in her native tongue.

  “If they think I only hunt in the forest,” she said, “then I have a surprise for them.”

  Captain Liritmear knew the trees of Western Nomintaur well. They were nothing like the ancient, humongous fae trees of Nylelthalas or Yla Aiqua. And certainly not like the acres-wide fae of the capital Felsari. These trees had sturdier trunks and limbs, more like oak in bark thickness, crackling, and cover. Brown bark. Fresh sap. Leaves darker than the greenest meadow. The forest was so thick with three-hundred-year-old trees that some limbs were hard to gauge their true trunk source.

  On her back in a custom holster was a strung recurve bow made from the strongest fae tree she could find in Nomintaur, with enchanted horse-hair string capable of hundreds of pounds of draw strength. She could only manage about a hundred while in a tree, which was a lot for a six-foot female elf. She could manage it, though. She had the calluses and deformed bone structures to prove it. Under and crisscrossing the bow holster were two arrow canisters, each holding forty tightly-packed, bound-and-bundled arrows.

  She leapt from limb-to-limb with four dozen other rangers, each no more than fifty feet behind and spread in a conical formation with herself at the apex. Each elf wore specialized leather shoes with small, sharp metal cleats under the metatarsals and heel for gripping bark. Their non-dominant hands were covered in a cleated-glove for gripping strong tree limbs. Liritmear also wore cleats on the left side of her leather vest, which she expertly used to anchor herself to trunks while shooting right-handed.

  In truth, after hundreds of years of training, she was completely ambidextrous. She had won many competitions with left-handed holds, though in a real fight, she favored her natural strokes and right-handed holds.

  She smelled the orcs before she could hear them. Perhaps somewhere, far away, in some distant land, there was a civilized orc with a fancy top knot who washed himself with soap or lye. Her knives had never met one. Their body odors were so concentrated and rank that they almost caused her to wretch. If it weren’t for the thrill of the hunt and the natural breeze and speed from her rapid movements across the tree tops, she might have thrown up just to show her disapproval.

  If she had stopped long enough, she would have felt the vibrations of the orcs in the trees themselves, but she didn’t have time to stop. She could hear the war cries of the orcs as they stampeded towards Dragonpaw. Their yells attracted her like a female’s scent to a buck.

  She had to stop the orcs. Not because she liked humans, but because if the orcs moved on, she wouldn’t be able to kill them.

  The smell became stronger. The war cries grew louder. The light of the sun became brighter as the forest thinned, and she at last came to the edge of the forest. Not three hundred yards away, hundreds of orcs kicked up dirt as they stampeded along the edge of the Southern Peaks. The ground rattled and shook with the impact of their stomps. The air stank with their caked sweat and bodily neglect.

  With her left arm, she dug into the bark of the last tree and used her cleats to cut an arc down the trunk until she hit the forest floor. Her bow was unfastened and in her hand before she touched the ground. She counted forty-five males in range, moving fast along the plain, and most in practically no armor—not even leather. Their green and brown muscles glistened in the sun. She wouldn’t even need to use the piercing arrows designed for armor in her right holster.

  She grabbed a handful of arrows from her left holster. She slammed five of the tips into the ground, pulled back the draw string with deadly aim, lifted up, and let go within a few seconds. She fluidly picked up the closest arrow from the ground without looking at it, pulled it back, aimed upward and let go. Then the third, fourth and fifth. All six arrows were gone within twenty seconds. Not her best, but better than any human would dare brag about at over three hundred yards.

  Especially when all six arrows found purchase in the largest males she could see along the edge of the herd. Five of the males fell dead with protrusions from their heads. A sixth orc lucked out. The arrow had only pierced both of his legs, in stride, through his thigh and calf. She might not even kill him this time.

  “Naurun dhaeraowin!” she cursed. “U’Raanu lobuura!”

  A group of thirty orc men and women broke from the pack and roared in defiance.

  Liritmear ran her fingers down her cheeks, still bloody from butchering a deer, and then ran her finger across her throat. She ram
med more arrows from her left pouch into the ground as the orcs began to sprint at her at full speed.

  The soft thuds of cleats digging into packed earth and grass behind her told her that her men had arrived.

  “These are mine!” she declared.

  “Captain Liritmear,” an elf named Belegcam protested. “You’re not the only one who has waited years for a party this big.”

  Belegcam frequently beat her in distance competitions, as he could pull his bow back with over two hundred pounds of force. But he was nowhere near as accurate at close range. He spent much of his time courting women and composing poetry, rather than practicing ten to sixteen hours a day like she did. In her quest to kill, she had developed an artistry—a grim poetry where verses dripped with the blood of orc warriors.

  Belegcam planted arrows like she had done and began firing. More orcs broke from the hundreds who still mindlessly charged toward Dragonpaw. Belegcam began engaging the same targets, wasting her arrows. She swore at him.

  “Utaa?” he asked. “Really?”

  She threw one of her arrows at him, bouncing harmlessly off his brown-haired head. The rest of her regiment began storing arrows in the earth and firing too.

  Her arrows missed more frequently as orcs fell to the earth from her regiment’s fire after she had already aimed and let loose her deadliest arcs. She cursed at her whole regiment now.

  “Mine!” she declared.

  Belegcam chuckled behind her as another one of his arrows felled an orc that she had been aiming at.

  “Fine!” she screamed.

  She pulled two brown-handled steel daggers from her belt and sprinted toward the advancing orcs. She aimed for the biggest, baddest one she could find. Her eyes widened, and she grinned widely as the distance closed and her stride lengthened. The green orc lifted his heavy club and set his feet to strike. In her mind, she saw the spot on the ground she would plant and side step his overhead smash. She planned the slash to his femoral and imagined the arc she would paint from his shoulder down his back, all the way down his calves and into his ankles.