“I told you he wouldn’t listen, Rend.” Maim said petulantly. “Old man’s forgotten what it’s like to have bloodlust running through him. Let’s go.”
With a final sneer. Rend followed his brother. Orgrim sighed. He had bigger problems than two upstart youngsters right now. He turned his attention back to the negotiations, although he doubted the ogres would have understood the word. The attacks appeared to have stopped. Blackhand, who had fled the battlefield as he had told all his clan to do, now directed his wolf back down to where the ogres were gathered. Orgrim rode to his chieftain’s side, arriving just in time to hear the leader of the guard announce. “We no like gronn. Gronn hurt us.”
He beckoned to one of the other ogres who turned to show his back to Orgrim and Blackhand. Orgrim saw that there were scars crisscrossing the ogre’s back. He felt no twinge of pity for the creature; they had done worse to the orcs for decades. Still, it was useful to know. The captured ogres had also spoken of such things, and now they nodded as if they were terribly wise.
“What you give us if we join you?” demanded the guard.
Blackhand grinned up at the thing. “Well, for one thing, we won’t beat you.” Orgrim thought of Blackhand’s own sons, but said nothing. “We’ll see to it that you’re fed and given appropriate weapons.” Orgrim was relieved that Blackhand hadn’t promised armor; three orcs could be armored out of the materials that would protect a single ogre. And, fortunately, the guard—obviously one of the more intelligent of the ogres—still wasn’t smart enough to think of armor himself.
“You’ll have food, and shelter, and the delight of smashing draenei to small wet stains on the grass.”
The other ogres had been listening intently, and now one of them literally jumped up and down with delight, “Me smash!” it roared gleefully, and several others took up the simple but apparently highly entertaining phrase. Blackhand waited for their enthusiasm to die down before continuing. “So, are we agreed?”
The ogre captain nodded. “No more hurting of ogres,” he growled, and turned to regard those he led. His tiny eyes were shiny with tears, and this time, as he looked upon the ogres whose backs were crawling with scars, Orgrim did feel a little sorry for them. A very little.
“What is your name?” Orgrim asked the captain suddenly. It shifted its gaze to him.
“Krol,” he said.
“Krol, then,” said Blackhand quickly before his second could say more. “When do you think we should lead our combined assault?”
“Now,” Krol said, and before either Orgrim or Blackhand could protest, he bellowed something in his hideous native tongue. The other ogres jumped up and down, and the earth shook as they landed. Then they all turned and purposefully reentered the cave mouth. Blackhand cast a glance over at Orgrim, who shrugged. He suspected it was easier to stop the tide than this flood of stupid, single-minded giants.
“Call them,” Blackhand said. Orgrim produced a clefthoof’s single horn and blew on it. The orcs cried out in delight and began to again descend in response.
There was no time to remind the Blackrock clan of the plan. Orgrim hoped they would remember it, especially the overzealous Maim and Rend. Slaughter of ogres aplenty awaited them, but they had damned well better be killing the right ogres.
Because if they didn’t, if they gave the ogres any reason to question this sudden and very peculiar alliance, then the babes and old males and females who awaited word at the encampment might be all that remained of the Blackrock clan.
Orgrim was not optimistic. The Blackrock clan had ever been fierce in the hunt. Blackhand was little more than a cunning savage, and Orgrim had not failed to observe that recently, a sort of manic fury had begun to creep through all the clans. As he whirled his wolf around to charge into the cave with his fellow clan members, he wondered if perhaps his eyes were playing tricks on him.
Surely the greenish tinge on the skins of the orcs next to him was nothing more than a trick of the light.
17
Home, whatever race you are, it is a word, a concept, that makes the heart swell with longing. Home can be ancient ancestral lands, or a new place that one has made one’s own. Home can even be found in the eyes of the beloved. But we all need it, yearn for it, know that without a home of some sort we are incomplete.
For many years, each clan had its own home. Its own sacred lands, its own spirits of earth, air, water, fire, and spirit of the wilds. The uprooting began and continued, each more shattering than the last, until we came to Kalimdor. Here, I found a home for a wandering people. A place of rest and sanctuary, where we could regroup and rebuild.
Home, for me, is now named for my father: the land of Durotar.
Durotan lifted his head and sniffed the wind. The scent that filled his nostrils was one of dust and desiccation, an acrid sort of odor. Not the smell of something burning, not quite, but similar. Once, Drek’Thar would have been able to catch the scent even better than he, but those days had passed. He was no longer a shaman, but a warlock. The air would not waft to him when asked, bearing information as detailed as if it had been written on a piece of parchment. And worse. Drek’Thar, along with the other warlocks of the Frostwolf clan, did not particularly seem to care.
There had been no rain for some time, and the summer seemed hotter than usual. It was the second summer in a row that rains had come scantily, if at all, and on a whim Durotan knelt and dug his fingers into the soil. Once, it had been fertile loam, dark brown and emitting a rich earthy scent. Now, his fingers plunged easily into the dust. Its crust crumbled beneath his fingers, yielding instantly to dissolve into sand that would not hold grasses or crops, would not hold anything. It sifted through his fingers like water.
He sensed Draka’s approach, but did not turn around. Her arms slipped about his waist from behind and she pressed against him. They stood like that, for a long moment, then with a final squeeze she released him and stepped around to face him. Durotan dusted off his hands.
“We have never relied that much on what we could grow anyway,” he said quietly.
Draka regarded him with her dark, knowing eyes. His heart ached to look at her. In so many ways, she was better than he. But she was the mate of the chieftain, not the chieftain, and she did not have to make the choices he did.
The choices he had.
“We have depended upon what We could hunt, mostly,” Draka said. “But the animals We hunt survive on what the earth provides. We’re all connected. The shaman knew that.”
She fell silent as one of the younger warlocks hurried by, a small capering thing at its heels. As they passed, the little thing turned to look at Draka and smiled, showing a mouth crammed full of pointed teeth. Draka could not suppress a shudder.
Durotan sighed and handed her a scroll. “I just received this. We must all prepare for a long march. We are to leave our lands.”
“What?”
“Blackhand’s orders. He has relocated to this new citadel that has been made for him and he wants his army there. It is no longer enough for us to join together to attack. We must all live together and be ready to follow where Blackhand leads us.”
Draka stared up at him incredulously, then her eyes dropped to the scroll. She read it quickly, then rerolled it and handed it to him.
“We had best prepare,” she said quietly, then turned and strode back to their tent. He watched her go, and wondered exactly what it was that made his heart break at the sight.
The Citadel was incomplete, but the moment it came into Durotan’s sight, he was stopped dead in his tracks. Beside him there were several awed murmurs.