I thought that Caider and Tikter were about to have a bad day. I was only partially right. I didn’t want to move on and get separated from three of our workers so we just sat at the side of the trail and waited to see how things would play out. Yahg and the fellows were gone for a long time. As a matter of fact, they were gone so long that I started to get pretty nervous. I didn’t like Yahg. He was a buffoon and an ignoramus and those views were me being charitable. We did, however, need every worker and he was not a shirker, especially when his life or his personal profit was on the line.
A couple of hours after they left, Yahg and the other two orcs returned. They were not empty handed. They frog marched Tikter, who looked like he had absorbed a beating, back into view. There was no sign of Caider, though. Whether that meant he was dead by the side of the trail or that he had escaped, I had no idea.
Once they got within earshot, I spoke. “Where’s Caider?” I asked.
“He’s much faster than he looks,” Yahg replied. “He got away. This one was not as fast.”
I turned to Tikter. “Alright, what’s the plan to screw us?” I asked him.
He stared at me sullenly from behind a blackening eye. He didn’t open his mouth to speak, though. He probably thought he could wait me out.
“I need to be honest with you,” I said. “Out of the two of you, I always liked you a lot more than Caider. After all, you did some actual work. Not a lot of work, mind you. But from time to time you would actually pitch in and do something constructive. But here’s the situation. The lives of every single person around you are on the line right now, and that means your life is at risk as well. If the plan was to run to the ship and claim that you all were the sole survivors, since you are now with us that means you get left on the island as well. This place is not real hospitable and its not where I would choose to live out the rest of my days. If the idea was to profit by selling the information about the gold to another company, well that’s another story. When we get ambushed, they won’t be able to leave any survivors. Yes, that means you, too. I like to think I am a patient man and don’t go out of my way to unduly harm others, but I need to know what’s going to happen. That means you are going to tell us. The only question will be what condition you are in when you do.”
I did not like making that threat. I never thought I would be someone who would resort to torture, but there were a whole lot of lives on the line. I wasn’t talking only about the members of the company. There were a bunch of five-fingered humans depending on me also. If anyone was innocent in this situation, it was them and not the folks who had come to this island to try to enslave them.
“Yahg,” I said. “If he doesn’t start talking soon, start breaking his fingers.”
Yahg’s face lit up at the idea of having free reign to inflict pain on another. Once again I wondered what wired him that way. Maybe he was just a sociopath. He probably tortured small, innocent animals in his spare time as a hobby.
Yahg walked over to Tikter and firmly grasped one of his hands. Tikter tried to pull his hand out of the other orc’s grip but Yahg was stronger. Soon, a couple of other members of the company had walked over and helped restrain Tikter. Yahg grabbed one of Tikter’s fingers at random, the index finger of his left hand, and prepared to wrench it backwards.
“Alright, I’ll talk,” Tikter said in a surprisingly high pitched voice. I guess he was someone who squeaked a little under stress.
“Go on,” I said.
“Both,” he said in a shaky voice. “We were going to do both. We were going to leave you here on the island and sell the information about the gold to as many companies as we could before we slipped away.”
“See, that wasn’t so hard,” I said. “Well, that’s just wonderful. If we don’t catch up with Caider, none of us are going to walk away from this.” Turning to Bowen, I continued. “Bowen, can you get them up to the gold and start mining? Aleyda and I need to catch up with that idiot before he sells us out or leaves us stranded here.”
“I can do that,” Bowen said.
“You all follow my friend Bowen,” I told the others. “He will get you where we need to go. We need to go see about exterminating a rat.”
“I want to go with you as well,” Yahg said.
“That’s fine but that will be one less worker and that will mean less profit. And if you were too slow to catch him the first time, what makes you think you can catch up to him now?”
After thinking about it, Yahg sighed to himself. “You are right,” he said. “I will go dig.”
“Come on Aleyda,” I said. Then, we turned and started making our way back down the trail.
One of my biggest fears was that he would try to embed himself in that military unit. If he did that, there was no way that the two of us were going to be able to do anything to him. The soldiers were numerous and likely well-trained.
All our work before we got to the island and all the hiking back and forth over its unforgiving topography had gotten us into pretty damn fine shape. Certainly, we had to be in better shape than an orc who was older and had spent most of his time lazing around and shouting orders out to others. He did have a pretty substantial head start, though.
“Do you think he will go straight to town or will him stop off somewhere first?” I asked Aleyda.
“I don’t think he will make it back to town today,” Aleyda replied. “It’s already getting fairly late and he has never been this far up the mountain. Also, he can’t be sure that Yahg and the others are not hot on his trail. I am surprised that they stopped chasing him so soon, but Yahg never did seem to have much common sense.”
“Do you think he’ll try to hole up somewhere once it gets dark?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” she said as we ran down the trail.
I was amazed at how much better shape I was in this world than I was in my own. There, a twelve hour day in a warehouse without climate control left me exhausted, but here I felt like I could run for hours. I wondered how much of that was gradual conditioning and how much was the effect of the essence crystals I had absorbed. Unfortunately, I never would know the answer.
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After about an hour’s running, we caught up with the tail end of the army column. As we trotted past them hugging the side of the trail, I carefully looked for Caider. I didn’t see him. Near the head of the column, I noticed the major that we had encountered previously. I jogged up beside him.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Have you seen Caider, the orc that you talked with from our company previously? Unfortunately, we had a disagreement higher on the trail and he took all of our company’s profit and made a run for it. A lot of orcs worked hard to earn that money and he was not one of them. I need to catch up with him before he does something that he will regret and ruins all of his friends.”
“That’s a story as old as time,” the major said. “Greed can make people do some truly stupid things. He ran through our column a little while ago. He asked if he could travel with us but he was acting nervous and shifty so I sent him on his way. As fresh as you two look, you should have no trouble catching up to him. By the way, if you ever want to try something different, we are always recruiting.”
“Thanks to you, sir,” I replied. “I think if we catch up to him we can talk some sense into him. He had an accomplice but that orc couldn’t run nearly as well.”
“I hope he sees reason,” the major replied. Then, we picked up our pace again, exiting the military column and heading down towards town.
I was happy that we were closing the distance between us. Unfortunately, we were much too close to town for my comfort. At the rate we were running, we would be into the company compounds just outside of town within the hour. We were winning the race but were handicapped by the huge head start that he had been granted.
We didn’t talk much. We just put our heads down and ran as fast as we possibly could. Aleyda clearly knew we were almost out of time. Every little bit of speed helped. There is a huge difference between running at a comfortable pace and picking up that pace to one that isn’t quite so welcoming. Before long, we were both breathing hard, gasping for breath. As we were approaching the turnoff to our company’s former compound, Aleyda reached out and grabbed my arm.
“Careful,” she said. “I can hear something happening on the trail ahead.”
I hadn’t heard anything except for my own breathing, but I had become used to the fact that Aleyda could hear better than I could. That was probably a result of her world not having amplified or recorded music. I had been to far too many concerts that had left my ears ringing for days after and I liked to listen to music with headphones set pretty loudly. I wondered why my hearing hadn’t been healed when I got Juma’s gift. Maybe my baseline condition was set at the time I received it. Who knows?
We slowed down and crept closer as I tried to get my breathing under control. After a couple of minutes, I heard vague snatches of what sounded like an argument on the trail ahead. As we got even closer, I identified one of the voices as Caider’s. If I could hear them it was likely they could hear us, if they were paying attention, so I grabbed Aleyda’s arm and we waited there until our breathing had calmed down a little, listening all the while.
“You can’t have my pack,” I heard Caider state loudly.
“You need to be reasonable,” said another, unidentified, voice. “You are outnumbered. Whether you are alive or dead when we get what we want, that doesn’t truly matter to us. I am a generous soul, however, and would prefer not to have to kill you for it. Things can be replaced. Your life cannot.”
“You would leave me destitute?” Caider asked.
“We most certainly would,” the other voice replied.
By this time, both Aleyda and I had gotten our breathing mostly under control. We started to make our way closer to the argument, which sounded like it was just beyond a bend in the trail. When we reached the bend, instead of following the trail we slipped off into the trees trying to make as little noise as possible. Apparently, we shouldn’t have worried, though as the loud back and forth conversation between Caider and the unidentified speaker must have been occupying everyone’s attention. We finally made are way far enough through the copse to get a look at the speakers.
Caider stood in the middle of the trail surrounded by five other orcs. The other orcs, although not visibly wounded, looked like a returning expedition from one of the other companies. Their disheveled and dirty appearance and the small amount of loot that they were carrying helped me reach that conclusion. None of them had drawn their weapons, but each of them rested their hands against them, ready to draw them at a moment’s notice.
“You are out of time to decide,” said one of the orcs whose voice identified him as the other speaker. He was only medium sized for an orc but he looked like a scrapper. One of his tusks was broken off and a series of battle scars were raised on the visible portions of his skin. Glancing at the rest of his companions, most of them looked like they were pretty tough as well. From the loot they carried, it was clear that they had tussled with some of the local wildlife. Given that I couldn’t see any visible wounds, that spoke volumes about their competence.
“You are nothing more than criminals,” Caider said, drawing his sword. “And I will defend myself. I have been fighting against your kind my entire adult life.”
Yeah, you have, I thought. But back in Shroud Hallow I imagine that you engineered things so that you had numbers on your side. Here, the roles were reversed.
As soon as Caider drew his sword, everyone else drew steel as well. There were a couple of swords, a pair of battle axes, and one guy who fought with a mace. I leaned over to whisper in Aleyda’s ear.
“He is carrying a lot that is valuable. After he is done getting slaughtered, we need to take these guys. We can use their weapons to arm Segerick’s people and extra wealth never hurts. When they are occupied, we need to take out a couple from behind to even the odds up a little.”
She placed her mouth up next to my ear and whispered back. “That’s a good plan.” Then, before she withdrew her mouth she gently nibbled on my earlobe. I was so on edge, I very nearly cried out in surprise. What in the hell was that, I wondered? Did they greet each other like that on her world?
Caider was frantically spinning and waving his sword about, looking for an opening to get away, I assumed. The other were far too competent to leave him one. They shifted around him, taunting him and chiding him. Finally, he had enough and with an explosive leap forward, he buried his sword in the gut of one of the other orcs, the one with the mace. I was amazed. At least at one point, he obviously had developed some sword skills. That was, however, the only blow he struck during the fight. As one of their number cried out in pain, the others moved in to attack. The orc he had been speaking to scythed a vicious chopping cut into his left knee and Caider crumbled to the ground. Facing a litany of of strikes from the other orcs that surrounded him, he did not rise again.
I tapped Aleyda on her arm and we bounded forward. The other orcs were too occupied by Caider and what he carried to immediately detect our approach although one of the orcs facing us must have caught movement out of the corner of his eye because his head started coming up and he opened his mouth like he was about to call out a warning.
The distance was not far, though, and before he could finish his reaction we were at the backs of the two who were facing away from us. Aleyda, having been tested in many battles, leapt forward and after grabbing the hair of the orc closest to her, she promptly slit his throat.
I, on the other hand, didn’t have nearly as well developed of a plan. Why was it in times like these I never really knew what I was going to do until I did it? I swept my sword forward in a drawing cut across both hamstrings of the orc in front of me. After he fell to the ground, my return strike plowed into the side of his head. The sickening crunch told me that he was likely down for the count.
Then, we stood and squared off against the two remaining orcs. One was their presumed leader, or at least the one who had done all of the talking. The other was an overly brawny fellow wielding a battle axe.
“You take the leader,” I told Aleyda.
“Ah, we have more guests at the party,” the leader responded. “And more profit for the two of us.”