Two other Hearainan men, both looking as much like hounds as they did men, closely napped fur lined jowls covering short muzzles, followed close on the heels of the ram horn headed man, who now had the hood of his mantle down. Sparse, silvery white curls of hair sprouted on the deeply sun browned pate between the hard, craggy curls of striated black and bronze horns that had erupted from the man’s temples.

  Rustling and murmurs came from the cage across the corridor that held Klee, Aduna, and Tarhill, and Vac Fadric could see the corporal had stood up, grabbing the bars of his cell.

  “OY! You!” The man yelled at the Hearainan who looked to be the one in charge. “Why have you and your monsters attacked us? What are you doing in the Kingdom! Rhiada has no treaty with your people for passage NOR settlement!” Klee shook the bars with a rhythm to match his angry words.

  The brown robed man turned slowly to Klee, glancing left and right at the two growling young men who flanked the corporal within the cell, and waved his hand in a languid flourish, fingers splaying out in a twirl of motion. “Peace.”

  All three soldiers in the cell slumped to the floor in the boneless heaps of those who now slept deeply, or possibly were just dead. Klee’s forehead made a horrible >CLONK< as it bounced from a bar of the cell onto the hard packed floor. Vac Fadric was worried and startled by the sound, wondering how damaged his Corporal had become in his slump downward.

  A raucous snorting snore came from Tarhill, which made Vac Fadric breathe slightly easier, and worry slightly less. Sleep had been the goal, not death.

  And then he realized. The silence that accompanied the man’s gesture and softly spoken word. There had been no Chime. No Tolling of Power and Talent as the spell had been cast.

  He had felt nothing of the spell the man had cast. No belling tone, no discernable sound resounding in the magickal plane, the magical aether as some would have said, to announce his use of the Talent. In all of his training with his mentor, he had never seen anyone cast a spell nor a charm without that telltale tone left on the magical. His own tutors in the field, experts of the highest renown, all made that noise that could be heard by anyone with Talent. Even the most skilled, made ethereal “noise,” that could be perceived, no matter how muted and muffled by their skill.

  But this Hearainan just dowsed the consciousness of three men without making the slightest of whispers. Vac Fadric knew he was staring, agog even, but was having difficulty pulling in his emotions and schooling his features to placidity. Lord Ashe would scold him for this lapse, had he been here.

  And that did it. The rush of blood to his cheeks, and the burning heat of the feeling of having shamed himself brought the private back to himself and his training. His eyes returned to their semblance of disinterest, and his face slid once again into the familiar form of apathy. It was his default expression by both training and constant effort.

  …they can’t hurt you if they don’t know where your heart lies… his regular refrain went racing through his thoughts. It was a hard lesson for any child to have to learn, but children of the royal courts had to learn it faster than anyone else.

  With a steadying breath he asked, “Was that really necessary? They couldn’t reach you through the bars.”

  The older man, his curled horns glinting in what faint light there was, said simply, “They were rude. I don’t like the rude, I don’t like having to speak over the rude.” HIs accent was subtle, and tugged at Vac Fadric’s memory. The private remembered that the Hearainan usually spoke in a dialect of Aulde, the original language of these lands which had been supplanted centuries ago by Rhiadan Royalty preferring to speak Escanna. It had been the language of the Royal Courts of the kingdom of Escka.

  There were still people who spoke Aulde, but most, sadly, were looked at as bumpkins. They didn’t speak like the “royalty,” and were looked down on even by the city born Commoners, who all spoke the language of those with the money and the power.

  It had been a weird lesson that one of his history tutors had drilled into him: No matter how inane, Court fashion eventually becomes the fashion of the entire country. He had asked the young Private, “What would happen if the king had a lisp?”

  Vac Fadric had stared at the plump, elderly scholar, uncertain of how to answer.

  “Then, I assure you, Master Vac Fadric, the rest of the Court would start to lisp as well. And hearing the Royals lisp as they spoke, the merchants would follow. And soon the entire city around the palace would all be lisping like angry lisks!”

  Then the little man launched into ribald peals of laughter. The much younger Vac Fadric had just stared at his tutor, not certain of what to do. Eventually the man regained his control and decorum, and their lesson continued.

  He shook himself, and concentrated on the three Hearainan men who now stood in the cell with him and the young, supposedly Orcish, woman. “Well, my Hearainan host, how may I help you today?”

  The older man’s face wrinkled up in concentration as he looked directly into his young prisoner’s eyes. Finally he broke out in cascades of shrill laughter. The two canid looking men that stood between Vac Fadric and his captor widened their eyes in surprise and obvious discomfort. Either they had never heard their leader laugh before, or this eventuality was so far from the expected path that the two men were uncertain of how to proceed from this very awkward point.

  The Private would not assume they didn’t speak Escanna, and that they listened just as much as the ram horned man did. It would save him time later, he was certain, when it would be revealed that the guards had been listening the entire time, and reported whatever the prisoners had said to one another to their own superiors.

  The old man gestured, still laughing, for Vac Fadric to step out from the cell. As he did, the two guards ordered the young Orc woman to follow him out. They spoke Orcish well, from what he could tell of their accents and meter, but Vac Fadric would admit to anyone who asked that he wasn’t a proper judge of such things.

  Down the dark hallway they went, taking turns that made no sense to the young Private. THe path didn’t feel as though it rose nor that it fell as they moved along, but with the turns and twists they had made in their journey, Vac Fadric though they should have crossed back onto their own trail several times now, and even walked through the block of cells where he had awoken at least twice.

  Finally, the five stood in what felt to Vac Fadric like a giant cavern. The sounds of their own steps fading far off into the murky, unseeable distances that now gaped about them as they came to a halt. In the dim distant recesses of the top of what he assumed to be an immense cavern, distant specks of yellow white brightness struggled against the encompassing murk. What little light there was filtered in from might have been the outside world, or possibly just glow wyrms slumbering on the far surface of the stone above. Pinpricks of weak illumination illuminating nothing more than the unreachable distance above.

  From the farthest walls came a murmuring and muted shuffling.

  …out of sight, not to worry, as they say. I have more than enough here nearby that those things so far off … well, best to just not think of as I can not be bothered with them… he thought grimly.

  Two other tall figures in matching brown robes met them as they came to a halt in the center of the vast, hard packed earthen floor. Vac FAdric and the Orc girl stood between the two guards, facing now three elders in brown robes with hoods.

  The shortest of the three, still taller than he by at least a head in height, pulled down her hood, revealing a face that owed as much to a doe as it did a woman. She spoke directly to Vac Fadric, her soft, furred lips moving oddly to pronounce words with the sing-song meter and accent Vac Fadric associated with merchants from across the seas, from the country of Velspe.

  “You have come to our lands and threatened our people. Why.” It was a question, but her voice made it clear she was not expecting him to answer. “What have we, but the land on which we live, that your people could further take from us?”

  That second sounded more like something she wanted an answer to, however.

  The second new Hearainan spoke up then, as he too lowered his own hood, revealing a very human face with bright green cat-like eyes. His head was cleanly shaven, but his cheeks bore handsome brown mutton chops shot through with grey. It almost looked like a tabby or brindle pattern, though Vac Fadric didn’t want to assume. He wondered if the man enjoyed eating the eyes from leftover fish heads. He might like the chance himself, as he hadn’t eaten in what must have been a day at this point.

  He took a steadying breath so as not to laugh at the alley-cat image his mind had conjured.

  In a deeper voice, rich and eloquent as any of his former oration tutors could have wished, the man asked, “My child of Piincar, Ocre, and even of our own Hearainan lines… why have you come now to our lands?”

  A look of confusion crossed his face, and Vac Fadric looked between the three Hearainan who stood before him. As his eyes began to adjust to the dim conditions of the giant room, the furthest walls rising in steps in the distance could just be made out in the gloom. There were several stone pillars between where he and the Orc girl were held and those far steps. The entrance they had used to get to this spot, he assumed, still stood open behind him. He had not noticed any kind of doors at the entrance.

  The feline man looked at him with an uncomfortable intensity, and the young soldier was getting less and less certain of what answer they had wanted from him as each moment rushed awkwardly past.

  With a slight bow to the three, “My lords and lady of the Hearainan People, I am a soldier of the lowest rank, and was only told that my unit was needed to visit a small town to ensure the safety of its people.”

  The ram-horned man laughed again. The other two looked to one another before they turned confused and irritated gazes upon Vac Fadric. The deer looking woman looked angrier than the cat featured man, and he wished suddenly that he knew their names so that he might think of them in easier terms than by describing their looks. It felt… disrespectful.

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  “Apologies, I do not know what I have said to offend,” trying his best to stand on manners. May we begin again? I am Private Vac Fadric of the Rhiadan Army. I wish we were meeting under better circumstances. I don’t know why our two peoples clashed in the forest, nor why I and the remainder of my unit are being held now…”

  There was a hissing screech from the three brown robed Hearainan leaders, and the far off murmuring and muffled voices from the distant, stepped walls now rose in volume with the sudden anger of their audience.

  The deer woman had brought her walking stick from her side to a double handed grip, her slightly hairy knuckles on her four fingered hands going white with their spasmodic tightening and loosening on the knurled brown wood. She looked like she wanted to use her short staff to absolutely beat Vac Fadric into the soil of the arena in which they stood.

  And at that moment, he knew it was an arena of some form in which he stood.

  The cat-faced man held out an arm, blocking the deer-woman from charging Vac Fadric and the Orc girl, though the enraged lady hadn’t taken a step toward them as yet.

  Several soft words in a language he didn’t know were directed at the anger-filled leader from both of her male counterparts, the cat-man’s wide eyes never leaving Vac Fadric’s face. He could see her trying to calm herself, and breathing through the rage the same way Vac Fadric knew he did himself when he barked his shin on an immovable object. She wasn’t just mad, it was fueled by some great pain, if he were to make a guess.

  She gestured at the two prisoners, waving her staff. “An t’aon rud!” she spat at the two.

  “Son of three lines,” the cat-man addressed him now, his voice calm. “Our esteemed Sister is saying that you are the same. All the same, no different.”

  Vac Fadric didn’t quite understand that proclamation. He looked to the Orc girl, who was staring at the ram-horned man. He had spoken to her in her language, slowly she turned her face to look at Vac Fadric. With a wrinkling of her aquiline nose, and a beetling of her delicate brows, her green face scrunched up in disgust and confusion. The long braid of her dark hair that hung over her shoulder i0nto the tattered and dirtied jerkin she wore wiggled slightly in sympathy with the movement of her head which shook in an emphatic no. She said, possibly to the Private, “Det samme…? Ikke det samme. Aldri!”

  Vac Fadric cocked his head at that. He didn’t know the language, as such, but he felt he had just been insulted somehow. And he thought “samme”

  meant some kind of food. A baked fish of some kind, maybe. He also thought “ikke” might be related to the family of “to be” verbs.

  He was wrong, and as he lost himself, if only briefly, in linguistics, letting his mind wander too far left him not paying attention to a set of orders being given to the guards, who immediately forced the two prisoners to kneel.

  …I may be suffering from a lack of food and water… How long since I last ate?... he wondered fruitlessly as he was forced to his knees beside the Orc.

  The hardened earth on which he was forced to kneel had an amazing assortment of small sharp stones that Vac Fadric hadn’t noticed beneath his boots, but painfully felt now that it was just the knees of his pant legs between his skin and the stones. He should have, he knew, cared more about the pain his knees were now feeling, but it was a far away thing. The pain was there, surely. But his ability to care about it was just out of reach to his mind.

  Vac Fadric though he might have cared more about the wool of his pat legs tearing than he did about the actual pain his body was feeling.

  Beside him the young Orc girl struggled against the hands on her shoulders that had forced her to her knees. Seeing her struggle made him realise how calm he felt. It was unnatural, and Vac Fadric thought that he should be more worried about the fact that he was not worried. It felt, if anything, like a paradox.

  …maybe she cares about the pain… or she is mad about her pants ripping at the knees… his fuzzy thoughts rolled lazily about in his cloud filled head.

  He took a steadying breath as he thought about the puzzle. He could smell the clean, open air of the arena, it had direct access to the outside. The fresh, clean smells of the forest were here with him, and hadn’t been when he was in the cell where he had awakened near the Orcish girl. It was cool, and a little crisp in the way that the air in the darkest part of a clear night, cloudless night might smell and taste. It helped him think, if the improvement was only slight.

  There were, he knew, a set of Tertius Form spells that affected the mind. Lord Ashe had spent months trying to teach Vac Fadric how that school of magical theory worked and just how to achieve the proper effects using them. He hadn’t been able to achieve more than the most basic of results, however. Vac Fadric wasn’t as strong a Talent as Lord Ashe, nor did he have the affinity for that school of magic.

  In fact, the two had spent much of their lessons trying to ascertain what affinities Vac Fadric did possess, but came up empty as yet. Lord Ashe never said it, but Vac Fadric knew himself to be a middling Talent, and one without as yet any true affinity for one school of magic or another.

  Beside him, the girl had continued to struggle. Those scuffling sounds once again bringing his thoughts back to himself.

  So much so that another guard, this one a very large, if very feminine, fox faced woman came to help the first guard in restraining the young Orc. Vac Fadric wondered again why he was so calm, almost placid, while the Orc was now becoming frantic.

  Then, looking up at the three brown robed leaders, Vac Fadric saw that the man with ram-horns on his silver haired head was rhythmically breathing, and languidly gesticulating with his right hand. With every circular pass the black nails of his hand made across the space before his right hip, Vac Fadric felt more calm and less like he wanted to stand and fight.

  Watching the old Hearainan man chanting under his breath made the final connection for the Private’s sluggishly moving thought processes. It was a spell. One of the very same Tertius School he had just been trying to recall.

  The Hearainan mage was able to cast without any of the tell-tale Chime sound that all other wizards produced. It may have been this man’s singular Talent, or it may have been a trait of Hearainan wizardry, Vac Fadric didn’t know which it might be; and as he thought about it, realised it just didn’t matter.

  With an effort of Will, he engaged his Talent and began pulling gently on the Galvanic forces in the elderly Hearainan. He did not release the spell, but held it. Slowly, Vac Fadric built up the imbalance in the ram-horned man’s body, making the forces around them in the giant open space yearn to jump into the gap he had created. The Galvanic forces craved balance, and were terrible to try to control as they slipped and danced about in the aether, trying to balance themselves in spite of Vac Fadric’s efforts.

  It was not a spell he was particularly gifted in the use of, but it was something that would be immediate, once he released his grip upon it. The final effect was one of being slammed by a fist of lightning, which would strike so quickly, if he could hold it long enough, to make blocking it or dodging it equally impossible. He just hoped he was able to create a big enough imbalance to make a difference.

  Otherwise he may as well have rubbed his wool stockinged feet on a woven carpet for all the effect it would have.

  The cat faced Hearainan man was talking to him now, but the haze over his thinking and the lassitude that had been cast upon him made him not particularly care what the man had been saying. Concentrating on his spell was taking all of his effort.

  “...and it will be done just as your own people have made Artifacts for centuries now.” The man looked very sad. Meanwhile his very angry, deer-like counterpart spoke in Orcish to the struggling girl, who Vac Fadric doubted was paying any attention. “...Now, We have decided that for your crimes against the Hearaini, you will die by Artifacts our mages have created today. With those you have brought with you when you invaded our lands. May your gods grant you mercy, for Ours will not.”

  At that moment, a wagon drawn by a large horse was led into the arena. The great beast looked like a warhorse that may have gotten away from, or been stolen from a heavy cavalry unit. But, it trudged along in the traces of the wagon, a large Hearainan man with scaly skin, like that of a lizard held the lead as he walked beside the horse which drew the wagon along beside where they were held.

  The reek of death came from the wagon.

  There was no other word for the smell of rotting meat that now surrounded them, and choked off the protests of the Orc girl as she too recognised the charnel house scent.

  Two more Hearaini walked behind the wagon, more of the canine faced men he was beginning to think of as the common guards of their people. When the wagon’s large wheels stopped their turning, the followers stepped forward to grab something from the back of the open cart.

  Each of the dog-faced guards pulled back, and hauled the legs of two dead adult Orcs from the depths of the open wooden box on wheels. With a final heave, the two oversized human-like figures were spilled onto the hard packed earth with muffled thuds.

  Orcish blood was as red as any human’s, despite their skin being hues of greens, browns, and deep blues. And it was splashed liberally about the two corpses. Several deep punctures, and wide lacerations decorated both bodies.

  To his left, the Orc girl silently cried. Her head bowed as her torso heaved with choked off sobbing. She knew them. Though she looked much like a lithe young Ghorma woman to his eyes, it was more obvious to Vac Fadric that she was closer to these two bodies than to the two humans who were now being pulled from the back of the cart.

  And just as these two new bodies fell into his view, and he recognised them as members of his unit, the two dead Orcs, each more than seven feet tall, were not just of her people, they were HER people. Size disparity or no, she was more like them in her looks than like any human he could ever remember seeing. Her mouth was wider, though without the protruding tusk-like lower teeth. And her brow was wider and deeper than that of any teenaged human girl he had ever met.

  The deer-woman had stopped talking to the Orc girl, and now the angry Hearainan woman pointed at the corpses, and chanted loudly in what sounded more like Aulde than the Orcish tongue.

  The feline elder said to Vac Fadric, “As you two, and your Peoples, are the same, you shall share the same fate. Here. Tonight. Away from the light of the Sun. Tomorrow night, the remainder of those who came with you will share your fate, and you shall help administer that fate tomorrow, as these will administer your fate tonight.”

  The three elders had begun to back away as the wagon and its three attendants led it and the giant horse around where the two prisoners were still being held, and then away. Realizing the ram-horned man was no longer casting whatever spell he had been using to keep Vac Fadric calm, but was now chanting along with the deer-woman as they left them in the center of the arena, he mentally stumbled and his mind tripped and stuttered, releasing the spell he had been attempting to build to stop the man.

  As he did, the ram-horned man winked at Vac Fadric with as broad a smile on his face as he had yet seen. The man had known the young Private had been a Talent, and had known he had tried to cast something. And to make it worse, that slimy, shit-eating grin told Vac Fadric that the old fucker knew he had just dropped the spell uncast and impotent in his youthful incompetence.

  With a shove, the two men holding the young prisoners sent the two sprawling into the hard, gravel strewn ground. They then ran after their leaders, leaving the Orc girl and the Private lying on the ground near the four corpses.

  And then Vac Fadric felt and heard the Chime of a large, intricate spell being let loose from the wizard who had cast it. The energies of the spell rolled over him, washing him with the foul feel of an open grave, and making Vac Fadric retch into the stoney soil on which he lay.

  The Orc girl beside him began to stand up, not feeling the eldritch energies that now swirled about them briefly before grounding into the piles of rotting flesh that had once been two Orc soldiers, and two human soldiers.

  Wiping his mouth of the horrid bile taste still on his lips, he attempted to stand as well. Looking to his left, the Orc girl stood shaking, her eyes wide. Turning his own head to follow her gaze, Vac Fadric saw the torn, bloodied, and broken bodies of his former Captain, the slender form of Seema, and the bulky figure of Private Daunan now stood.

  Their vacant gazes locked onto the two prisoners. Their noses scenting the air, as if hunting like hounds.

  Next to the now standing corpses, the equally bloodsoaked forms of the two Orcs began to stir.

  Beside him, the Orc girl said, simply, “...fuck…”