The bazaar was called the Shantycrowns and appeared to be a daily gathering. Here the chancers flaunted their ill-gotten gains just out f sight of the walls, selling valuable information, trinkets, vestiges, rations and scams. The new arrivals from the city were easy pickings. The lepers offered them tonics, restoratives, cures and pultices galore. Extracts of immortality and immunity from the spell-blight. Lies and pig bone, in other words, sold for cheap.

Tirce watched as one of her people, a tousle-haired adolescent with two horns instead of three, bought a rabbit’s foot that had dipped in the toxic miasma, the leper who sold it claiming that it gave the wearer immunity from the spell-blight. She wanted to scream at them, to tell them that all they needed to survive the trek was a mastery of the gift in their blood. But sarkomancy was a remnant of the past, like the Hatters, and any mention of it would only draw more attention to herself. So she kept silent and watched as her people were swindled on their way to the grave. Most would not survive the journey, she thought. MSome groups did not even have chancers to guide them and huddled together in frightened circles, refusing to talk to strangers. But goods weren’t the only things for sale in the Shantycrowns, and where there was demand the chancers came soon after.

“I am Ubodai, son of Xhanshon!” bellowed an ogrish warrior in the middle of the bazaar. He was dressed in full plate armor with sheets of steel smelted onto the vital areas of his neck and groin, and brandished a huge two-handed cudgel that was as thick as a sapling.

“My word is bond, and my deeds are legend!” he pounded his chest and made a sound like a whole kitchen full of pots and pans clanging together. He brought the cudgel down with an earth-shaking stomp that made Tirce’s teeth rattle from the shock and tremor that it caused.

“You may take shelter in the shadow of my arms,” he told the trembling Shaemish, “I will be your shield in the press of battle, the rock upon which the tides of the dead shall break! For the modest fee of two hundred calors, you may depend on the mighty Ubodai! I shall even outfit you with weapons with which to defend yourselves. What say you, pilgrims?”

The crowd immediately began clamoring for his services. Ubodai’s broad, flat face split into a huge grin when he saw Neisha. He went down on bended knee next to her and spoke:

“How now, little one. What brings you to this desolate place?”

“Mummy says we will live in the Pale Woods with others like me,” Neisha said at once, failing to notice the warning looks her parents were giving her, “We’ll eat almonds and strawberries and drink milk straight from the goat’s udders, which sounds icky at first, but they tell me this is a good thing.”

“Verily,” said Ubodai, looking very amused at the picture, “A land of milk and strawberries awaits you there. Yet not all that grows in the Pale Woods is as sunny and pleasant as yourself. Come, let uncle Ubodai show you the way.”

“But we haven’t any money left.”

“And I ask none from you. Consider yourself bound to me with a debt of the soul, and swear yourself to The One God accordingly.”

“So you’re recruiting babes straight from the cradle now?” Ravelin piped up, “That’s not very lofty of you, Ubodai.”

“Ravelin, son of the Wasting,” Ubodai said politely, “Well met. The child looked to be in need of guidance. But if she has you for a pathfinder, then I may rest easy knowing she is safe.”

“She’d be a lot safer if she steered clear of your holy war.”

Tirce gathered that this was a long-standing argument between the two. Ubodai seemed honest enough compared the Ravelin, despite his face being a map of scars and missing features. Most of his ridged nose was gone, the tip looking as if it’d been chewed off. The size of his far exceeded all the ogrish she’d ever met before, and Tirce realized that she was looking at the genuine article: a full-blooded ogre that was sound of mind and body, a throwback to the days before the League had watered down the stock with human and gnomish bloodlines in an attempt to produce a more malleable race of laborers.

“We are all fighting it, whether you like it or not,” replied the pureblood, “An age of great evil hath descended upon us. It began with the calamity that devoured Utregost—this is to be the first and least of our tally of woes. I have seen it, in the leaves.”

“Another one of your teatime prophecies. Come on, you lot,” Ravelin told his charges, “Let’s be away before he talks us all to death.”

“Go in peace, brother Ravelin. And may The One God grant you sight beyond sight, with which to see the truth.”

The One God, or Mehrathras as he was known in their tongue, was a deity peculiar to the ogres and orcs alone, was as fanciful a notion as Tirce had ever heard. She had never been able to stomach the idea of a single entity toying with the fates of every single person—that sounded a bit too much like the League of Light.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

They left Shantycrowns with their arms full of goods. Kyber and Yleine had just enough change to buy a pair of tiny pistols, while Ravelin had bought a loaf of shaemish pemmican. Tirce put on her surprise but derived little comfort from it. In truth, she felt naked without her colours proudly perched on her head.

“You are going the wrong way, young Ravelin!” the ogrish mercenary yelled to them, “That path leads to the Maw, and certain death.”

“Any road will do if it leads me away from you,” said Ravelin, waving an arm in farewell without looking back, “He’s right though,” he confided in them later, “The Maw is usually a deathtrap. Stahlka keeps a gang of rangers there to watch for threats coming up from the road north. But mostly they just lie in wait to ambush chancer crews and honest folk like yourselves. But today will be different. You’ll see.”

Here out beyond the reach of the law, where everyone was half-starved and underpaid, the words 'bandit' and 'soldier' were often synonyms, Tirce knew. But Ravelin had to have a reason for going there and it wasn’t hard to work it out.

The Maw was the outermost layer of defense, a fortress-before-the-fortress that protected the provincial road which led to the city. That road was the fastest way north and west to the Pale Woods. In spring thaw when the plains flooded with rains that stopped entire armies in their muddy tracks. The provincial road and the narrow spit of gravel it rested upon was the only dry path a besieging army could take into and out of the city. The Maw was designed to weather such assaults. It was shaped like a star with bastions jutting out to serve as the points. Between them were demi-lunes just like in the city. These in turn were protected by even larger hornworks shaped like the head of a bull, to trample all over any direct assaults coming up the road. Of course, none of this was visible from the ground level, where all a soldier could see where immensities of stone leaping out at him from odd angles.

Wunther had explained the design of the city’s defenses to her long ago as a swaddling infant. In the place of bedtime stories and hot cocoa she had received a thorough tutoring on the geometry of siegecraft and the art of secret warfare. Walking up to it now in the day she felt a shadow of the cold dread the Axiomites must have faced upon approaching the teeth of the Maw. A thin autumn mist had crept up in the small hours of the morning and blanketed the outworks so that they appeared like the ridges and bony spine of a gargantuan dragon roosting in what had once been swampland. The Iron Axiom had spent the first months pumping the water around it before even daring to probe the defenses, and the deep drainage ditches they had dug on either side of the road kept it dry all year round. A thick coating of dust lay atop the hard pebbles and kicked up at the slightest step.

“Weapons,” Ravelin ordered. The chancer brought his crossbow into play, walking like a man out stalking deer, alert to every sound that came up out of the enshrouded landscape. Yleine and Kyber looked at each other and drew their pistols in unison. To everyone’s surprise Modlin produced a six-barreled beauty of a pepperbox complete with an enameled grip, a weapon that was the exact opposite of his home-made monstrosity. He caught them all staring and blushed, explaining:

“What, this? It’s jest sumthing I found lying around the armorer’s shop.”

“If by ‘lying around’ you mean sitting in a locked strongbox behind his stall, then I believe you,” Ravelin sounded impressed, “You’d be in a lot of trouble right now if Boykan had the courage to follow us here.”

Tirce sniffed sharply, catching a familiar scent in wind.

“At least one person does,” she told Ravelin, “Your friend is tailing us.”

“Who? Ubodai? That lunatic!” Ravelin swore, looking back at the road and seeing nothing, “How can you be sure?”

She tapped her nose at him and peeled off to the flanks, drawing her blades as she hid in a nearby clump of gorse thickets.

“Everybody get out of sight, and don’t come out till I say,” said Ravelin. Neisha, her parents and Modlin didn’t need to be told twice and went scampering into the gorse thickets on the side of the road.

Ravelin went to confront Ubodai as the warrior came into view. He was wearing a pig-snout helm from which his tusks protruded, giving him the appearance of a boar that had learned to walk on two legs. He was not alone. A trio of shaemish youths were at his back, their short tucks drawn and at the ready. These were short, brittle blades good for stabbing and not much else. They were the cheapest swords in the market. Tirce wondered why the ogre had bothered arming them at all.

“Well met, son of the Wasting,” said Ubodai, taking off his helm, “By sheer coincidence, we appear to have crossed paths once again.”

“Why are you following us, Ubodai?” asked Ravelin.

“When last I looked, this road was open to all by common agreement.”

“Yes? Well, I disagree. Get you gone.”

Ubodai harrumphed and crossed his arms, the wrists of which were as thick as battering rams. His tusk chimes jangled as he shook his head ruefully and said: “I could take the road from you and claim it through force. But that it is not my way. We are soldiers, you and I, striving against the corruption that has befouled the land. Can we not make common cause just this once? My new companions here,” he slapped a young satyr on the shoulder with paternal pride, “could use a wily one such as you.”

“Their swords could come in handy,” Tirce said, stepping out from her hiding spot. Ravelin scowled at her, but Ubodai spread his arms wide and without warning wrapped her in a bone-crushing embrace.

“Splendid!” Ubodai guffawed, quickly letting go and allowing her spine to uncurl and her lungs to fill with air, “And now, to business. I know that you know something I don’t. Otherwise, you would not be here. Correct?”

“That’s right,” Ravelin snapped, looking highly displeased, “I’d heard something from high up. The garrison up there has returned to the city. The way ahead should be—”

The side of Ubodai’s cheek came off in a shower of pink mist, and the ogre toppled forward like a felled tree, pinning one of the shaemish youths under his bulk. The other two threw down their swords and ran north. Tirce gaped at the bloody mess of pulped flesh and skull fragments strewn across the ground. Then she remembered where she was and went prone alongside Ravelin. Moments later a second musket ball came hissing through the air and cracked into the ground, sending shards of gravel scattering about.

“—clear,” Ravelin finished with a note of regret, “So much for that idea. Kiss the dirt, sharpish!”