Orcs were not something Silenos had ever taken the time to study, and he found the practice quite a refreshing one. It had once been the spine of his work, dissection. That and all the other intellectual tools he now employed to the work. It was crucial, after all, for a Fleshcrafted to possess a keen understanding of what exactly he could work with. Nature provided material in bottomless variety, with some of the most formidable weaves of organic tissue coming in the strangest places.
Had he not taken trips to the deep ocean, he’d never have found the blends of keratin that made for the sturdiest armour. Had he not thought to examine the semi-crystalline stones within the body of a clam, he’d never have discovered nacre, or how it might be tweaked into a diamond-hard substance of limitless sharpness.
Knowledge was to a caster as arrows were to an archer, and Silenos’ quiver was deep indeed. He had carefully filled it for half a century of independent research, and near to a full century of apprenticing before that. To repeat the measures he’d used in doing so was…Refreshing.
A return to his roots, and rather enjoyable for it. Silenos had almost forgotten the joy of carving apart flesh, of shaving bone, of scrutinising tissue for its magic and carefully unravelling it to gaze at the merits of its physical biology alone.
He felt a flash of irritation as he indulged himself. Were it not for the idiot calling himself a Dark Lord, he’d have spent the past months doing precious little else, and be doing it now with a brain still optimised for such work. An unacceptable delay that he would simply have to punish.
But later, for now he needed knowledge.
Orcs seemed to be of simian descent, much like humans, for Silenos found several telltale signs. Their brains were the most notable, neuronal size and structure a near-identical match to other great apes. He noted that they had a mere nine or so billion within their cerebral cortex, though did not appear to have any neurological structures which might be expected to emphasise aggression or violence. Could he have been misled in stories of their savagery by a cultural bias on behalf of the New World’s humans? Or, perhaps, orc culture itself was what encouraged such behaviour rather than any natural inclination. He made a note to study further.
Their musculature was considerable, making up some two-thirds of their body mass, which itself was already several times greater than the norm among humans. The individual fibres were nothing particularly special, though Silenos noted far more fast twitch strands, which explained their explosive physical potency. Bone tissue was denser than in humans or apes, but mostly it seemed to derive strength simply from its thickness.
It was the orc’s organs that truly interested Silenos, for he had rarely seen anything like that. They seemed far too small to truly sustain the creatures, far too feeble to power such hulking masses of meat and bone. He soon discovered how they functioned regardless.
Magic, of course, considerable volumes. Less than even a journeyman caster, but enough that it made a marked difference upon their biology. It seemed that arcane forces worked to compensate for the lack of truly developed sustaining organ tissues just as they worked to increase the potency of muscular strength. Silenos pondered that, examining further.
Yes, as he’d suspected. The orcs’ very cellular structures were augmented on such a scale, kept safe and sustained as magic destroyed whatever pathogens threatened their equilibrium and subtly aided the biological processes they carried out. An entire structure of mismade, patchwork tissue sustained only by the supernatural.
No natural cause was behind this, something had made them. He would find out what.
Silenos worked, and worked, and worked some more. Feeling himself slip into the fugue of intellectual dedication, his awareness seeming to leave the body in which it resided to more tightly wrap itself around the task at hand. It was a familiar feeling, a good feeling, and, in the absence of all his preventative measures and self-preservative magics, a dangerous one.
It left Silenos quite unaware of the footsteps behind him until they’d already come to within half a stride of his back. Left him quite slow to act against the sound of scraping steel until its edge had already come down to kiss his neck.
Arms closed around him, hot breath hit the base of his skull. The voice followed but a moment later.
“Your apprentice was quite easy to fool, all things considered. Underestimated a woman, I think. Typical magus stupidity.”
It was the Necromancer, Sphera, but there was no magic to her danger now. Just a simple physical force, concentrated along a few millimetres of steel.
“Then I had to sneak through the keep, but that was barely hard either. Shadows, you know, useful for us Necromancers, aren’t they? Good for hiding. It was smart of you to keep me from knowing what time it was, but I got lucky and picked the evening. After that I just followed the scent of your magic, which wasn’t hard. Like searching for a bonfire in an eclipse.”
She sounded proud of it all, and Silenos supposed she had done an adequate job.
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“Now, if I wanted to, I could kill you. I’m not a warrior, or even a Ranger, but I’m powerful, holding a knife and a damn sight stronger than any normal person you’ll ever meet. I could drag this pretty little edge across so hard and fast that it’d scrape through a gambeson and still open up a normal man’s neck. How do you think it’ll do against you?”
Silenos wasn’t certain. He tried to calculate the most likely eventuality, using what he knew of textile mechanical properties. His skin was resilient, his body too, but in his standard form, and with the blade held so carefully between his armoured plates, there was every chance he’d still be killed. He could feel the strength in her arm as she grabbed him, and it was just as impressive as she’d claimed. Slicing him would ruin the knife, but that meant nothing to Silenos if he died in the ordeal.
The knife’s pressure vanished before he could complete his calculation, weapon drawn back away from him, grip released as the Necromancer stepped away. Silenos turned to her, eying the woman, reassessing her.
“You want to negotiate.” He guessed, and she nodded.
“I needed you to know that I was serious, and in my experience the only way to truly see a person’s intentions is to be left completely under their power. I do hope you’ll forgive the impoliteness, but it was really the only practical choice I had.”
Silenos could appreciate that, and so he decided not to melt her. Breezing past onto more important issues.
“Very well then.” He replied. “I accept you as my apprentice. Bow.”
The woman seemed surprised for a moment, blinking. Silenos wondered whether she’d expected more, whether she’d truly been stupid enough to think she might get anything else from him, that he might forget the dynamic of power that existed between them both simply because his life had been endangered for a few measly moments. Then she lowered herself to both knees, a smile flicking across her features as she did.
“Thank you, Master Silenos.” She breathed, and Silenos eyed her as she knelt, taking a moment before he replied.
“Call me Master Silenos, esteemed Fleshcrafter of House Shaiagrazni, keeper of the Auburn Flame, Conductor of Arts most Ancient and Lord of Hara'lguanta.” He instructed.
Unlike Falls, she did not hesitate before repeating him.
“You’ll want to learn more about Necromancy before anything else.” Silenos guessed. She looked up at him, sharply, considering.
“You imply I could…Learn more?”
Silenos allowed himself a smile.
“I imagine you can. It will take a while, perhaps a century, before your magic has matured enough, but you will one day be capable of learning a second discipline just as I myself did.”
He might have told the woman she would live forever and not received a grin so wide or hungry as that.
“I will begin with whatever kind of magic you think to be best, Master.” The woman answered, her natural deference making rather a pleasant change.
“You will begin by obeying me.” Deciding to first strike at that expectation of receiving anything at all from him without earning it. “And my first order is for you to bring my other apprentice here, I would have words with him.”
She seemed downright eager at the idea, nodding and grinning.
“Of course Master Silenos, esteemed Fleshcrafter of House Shaiagrazni, keeper of the Auburn Flame, Conductor of Arts most Ancient and Lord of Hara'lguanta.”
Silenos smiled.
As far as sieges went, Collin was not the most experienced boy. But he was fairly sure this one was going about as well as a plague.
They had enough food stores for maybe two months, three if he got nice and mean with the rationing. Their walls wouldn’t be an issue, in all likelihood, but the incident with the orcs had proven that even intact they wouldn’t be too difficult to scale. And to top it all off, he saw siege towers ahead.
Orcs were dull things, he’d always been told, but here in Kaltan a bit more was known about them. They’d been dealing with orcs before he was even born, before the Dark Lord’s bastards started showing up, and one of the most dangerous and overlooked abilities they had was their knack for metallurgy.
Perhaps it was just strength, sheer muscular power letting them work the stuff harder and easier than humans. Perhaps it was instinctual, perhaps it was something to do with their habitats, because orcs tended to enjoy dark, low places rich in iron veins. Whatever the cause, orcs were better at actually working metal than even humans were. He saw the proof of that poking out at the siege camps now.
Siege towers, big ones. And not just wood. The great structures were all clad in wide sheets of bolted iron almost like armour themselves, glinting dull and grey, nasty and cold in the evening light. Such a weight of metal would be untenable for human-driven structures, that much he knew, but orcs were different. Any of them could do more work to move a thing than most draft horses, Collin reckoned, and they had far more than just a few for each tower.
Footsteps caught his ear to the left, and he turned just in time to see Gyvain hurrying over. He was a tall man, like most Rangers, and as light on his feet as a cat, moving with the same innate grace that all of their training managed. His scarred face was not a pretty sight, more categorically resembling a well-used shield than a normal visage, but Collin only felt a stab of relief at it.
He was among the most veteran from among the Rangers, and the most powerful to boot. Among them only Collin and his father were deadlier in a fight.
Just Collin, now, of course. His mood darkened.
“What have you seen?” He asked the Ranger.
“It’s thick.” Gyvain replied, speaking in that grunting, clipped tone he always did. Hard to make this one string more than five words together, a life of getting stabbed and shot at tended to have that effect. “Half-inch thick, at least. Not sure where they got all the iron but orcs have always been better at finding and refining it than us.”
Collin racked his brains. A half-inch of iron wasn’t as strong as the same thickness of steel, but it was doubtless still plenty tougher than plate armour. Maybe even four layers of it at once. That, and the wooden frame beneath, would make the towers difficult to destroy.
“Shall we sabotage them, Governor?”
He thought about it, then shook his head.
“No, there’s enough men in this city that we won’t be losing to the first wave no matter what. This siege is going to end only when they’ve exhausted our fighting bodies. We’ll test the new weapons on the towers’ approach, if they stop them then it’ll make sabotage pointless, and save us the risk. If they don’t then we’ll weather the first attack and be able to send Rangers out to dismantle the towers in the night, after making sure we have to.”
Gyvain nodded, heading off to give the word. It felt strange to hand such a man orders. Collin looked back out at the siege engines. They, at least, he could understand. They were familiar. An enemy at his front, allies at his back.
Collin couldn’t wait to get his hands on them.