The True Bastards Read online

  She looked up in time to see the first pounce, leaping over the ditch to barrel into Slivers just as their backward swing began to angle upward. The rope threatened to sever Fetch’s wrist as the added weight struck. Slivers howled as the beast’s jaws clamped down on his arm. Unable to let go of Fetch, unable to fight back, the little nomad could do nothing as the beast savaged him, hanging from its teeth, shaking its head and body furiously until flesh and muscle tore free. The demon-dog dropped into the ditch, a crimson hunk of Slivers clenched between its gory teeth. Tormented wails gushed from the frailing’s lips. His ravaged arm could no longer sustain a grip. Now grasping one-handed, Slivers slipped closer to the ditch and its ravenous occupants.

  Shouts from above signaled the hoof’s arrival. Immediately, Fetch felt her pendulous course arrested as the rope was hauled upward. Pain and dread had fully possessed Slivers, causing him to struggle. His frantic kicks only served to loosen his hold, and Fetch felt him slipping.

  “Slivers! Stop! We have you!” she cried.

  Her voice reached him and he stilled, feeling the rising of the rope. He looked up then, his face molded into a wide mask of relief.

  And then the other beast struck.

  A moment more and they would have been too high to reach, but the devil shot across the expanse, mouth agape, until it closed around the nomad’s ankle. Fetch steeled her fingers around Slivers’s arm, yet he slipped from her as easily as water. The nomad plunged into the waiting mouths. He vanished beneath a roiling mass of filthy, spotted fur, his shrieks all that remained until they too were swallowed.

  Strong hands helped lift Fetching over the stockade, a dozen exclamations of relief issuing from her hoofmates before her feet even touched the boards. She was deaf to their concern, hearing only the sound of the feasting pack, and when that ended, the mocking laughter as it slunk away, dragging a horrid tangle of moist bones.

  SEVEN

  THE ENTIRE HOOF STOOD WATCH for the rest of the night, slops alongside sworn brothers and nomads, every spear, javelin, and thrumbolt brought up from the sad stores of the armory. Fetching walked a steady patrol, never stopping, avoiding the questions she could not answer. What, in all the hells, were those dogs? What if they returned? Fetch had no answers, no matter if the questions came from her brethren or from her own uneasy mind.

  Dawn found the slopheads still manning the wall, and the True Bastards riding out in loaded kit. At full strength they were only six riders, and Fetch was tempted to bring Marrow and Sluggard along. But this was not their problem, so Fetching gave them a reprieve. And a meager meal.

  The gate creaked open. Fetch rode point, Mead and Dumb Door on her left flank, Polecat and Shed Snake on her right. Hoodwink took the rear guard. They ran a tight circuit around Winsome, making sure the pack was truly gone. They saw nothing, heard nothing. Returning to the gate, they set off to get a look at the beasts they had slain.

  And found nothing.

  “I put one down right here!” Polecat declared from astride his hog at the edge of a neglected vineyard. “Right. Fucking! HERE!”

  He stabbed furiously with a finger, pointing at empty ground.

  “Fan out,” Fetching ordered, meeting Cat’s ire with calm. “See if they slunk off before dying.”

  She knew it would be a wasted effort. Her own stockbow had dropped two of the animals, putting a bolt through the heart of the first and the eye of the second. Nothing crawled away with such injuries.

  The hoof came back with only a few recovered thrumbolts.

  “It’s possible they came back for their dead,” Mead offered. “Easy meat.”

  “Anybody see them come back?” Shed Snake asked. “We were all on the walls.”

  Head shakes answered.

  Beneath Fetching, Womb Broom stamped and snorted, displaying the frustration she kept locked behind her jaw. She looked at Hoodwink. “Any sign of that? Drag trails? Blood?”

  “No.”

  “Then we keep looking.”

  In the ditch, it was a gruesome, simple matter to find where Slivers died, the blood obvious and accusing.

  “We got sign, chief,” Shed Snake said.

  Paw prints and drag marks decorated the dust above the ditch, leading away from Winsome. Slivers’s hog was also visible, the body lying at the end of the trench where the digging had not been completed. Fetch was about to lead her hoof away, follow the pack’s trail, when Dumb Door broke formation, yanking his hog around and riding hard until he was above the pitiful lump of Slivers’s barbarian. The big mongrel dismounted and half climbed, half slid down the dusty slope into the ditch. When Fetch and the hoof caught up, Dumb Door was squatting beside the sow’s body, hands and eyes at work.

  “Door?” Fetch asked.

  The mute mongrel looked up and held his fist in front of his chest, fingers splaying and clenching in repetition.

  Fetch was amazed. “She’s still alive?”

  Dumb Door nodded.

  “Can you save her?”

  A pause. Another nod, this one less sure, but the face was hopeful.

  The slopheads along the wall had been watching. Fetch ordered five of them to come out and lend aid.

  “Move her inside if you can,” Fetch told Dumb Door. “But if she’s still out here come sundown, we will have to end her.”

  Another nod, this one grave.

  Fetch signaled Hood and he led the rest of the hoof along the pack’s trail. After a straight path away from the walls it began to meander, running for less than a mile before entering a stretch of scrub. The mean vegetation was not enough to conceal even one of the devil-dogs, much less a pack. The Bastards rode slowly through the sharp bushes and pale grass, searching for spoor. When that yielded nothing, Fetch again ordered them to fan out. Every mongrel came back shaking his head.

  The trail had vanished.

  Polecat raged. “This is fucking hogshit!”

  “Rein it in,” Fetch told him. “You’re bordering on useless.”

  He calmed and nodded, joining his brothers in silence as they gave their chief a moment to think.

  A grouped patrol of the entire lot was impossible before nightfall, and Fetch would not split the hoof. The pack had proven it was capable of taking a lone rider. There was no other course but to scout the more inaccessible places, the myriad slot canyons, gulches, and boulder-choked hills, the most likely spots for the pack to have gone to ground. She gave the order and the True Bastards rode, mongrels and hogs searching tirelessly.

  The day bequeathed one clue on its deathbed, revealed by a flight of circling vultures to the west. The hoof was just south of the Alhundra River, picking through the marshy lowlands that spilled away from the confluence with the River Lucia. By the time they arrived, the carrion birds cavorted upon a sunbaked causeway of cracked mud.

  Fetch had expected to find Slivers’s remains. The truth was far worse.

  The stench struck them before the sight. It was the throat-choking, unmistakable smell of Ul-wundulas’s heat at work upon dead flesh, forcing every rider to tie a kerchief around their lower face. Every rider except Hoodwink. Five dead hogs littered the bleached ground, surrounding an overturned wagon. Casks and crates lay shattered, their contents rotting in the heat along with the mongrels tasked with delivering them. There would be six bodies, though it was difficult to discern individuals among the bestrewn rib cages and viscera. Six half-orc riders reduced to table scraps.

  “Hells fuck my mouth,” Polecat groaned through his kerchief.

  Mead’s eyes were unblinking. “It’s our supplies. From the Tusked Tide.”

  Any other day such an obvious remark would have earned him a cuff across the back of the head, but today the Bastards’ shit luck had to be voiced to be believed.

  “See if anything can be salvaged,” Fetch said.

  They chased off the v
ultures with whoops and rushing hogs, dismounting to pick through the debris. It was a useless effort. There was nothing but corpse flies.

  “No spent bolts,” Hoodwink remarked, returning from a scout of the area. His breeches were wet to the thigh, showing he had gone wading in the marsh.

  “Their quivers were empty long before they got here,” Fetch agreed. “This was a last stand after a long chase. They were herded here.”

  Polecat squatted by the yoke of the overturned cart. “One of the draft pigs broke harness. That’s what flipped them.” He pointed out to the body of the farthest hog, half-submerged in bog water. “Bolted that far before they drug him down. The three mongrels riding wain were probably torn apart before they even picked themselves up.”

  “And the patrol riders made a stand of it,” Mead finished, picking up a fallen tulwar. “With nothing but slicers.”

  The ground was ravaged, but a few discernible paw prints were stamped in the mud. And again, the trail vanished without trace.

  Hoodwink mounted up next to Fetching, his pale eyes flicking up at the darkening sky. “We need to go.”

  Fetching could only nod in agreement and turn her hog’s head to home.

  The sun had kerchiefed its own face with the horizon by the time they returned to Winsome. Fetch dismounted and sent a slop to find Dumb Door, ordering that the sworn brethren meet. Before that, there were others she wanted words with.

  Mead went with her to the cordwainer’s house. The man and his wife were long gone, lost to the Tide after the Kiln fell, but the woven awning extending from the front remained. Where once the tradesman sat in the shade working leather into shoes, now waited the trio of unwelcome guests, guarded by Abril and Petro. The scarred one was much recovered, standing firm with sinewy arms crossed as if offended by the presence of the armed slopheads. She had at least a dozen years on Fetching, though the damage to her face may have weighted the estimation. The human was seated, still feeble, but conscious. She once again wore the headscarf of undyed linen draped loosely over her head and shoulders. Between mongrel and frail, the thrice-blood leaned against the doorjamb to keep her head from brushing against the awning’s crucks.

  “What can you tell me?” Fetch demanded, striding up.

  “Name’s Dacia,” the scarred one said, stepping out into the fading sun. “We came with a mind to—”

  “I don’t care a fuck about your names or what was on your minds. The beasts. Tell me about the hells-damned dogs! Where did they set upon you?”

  Fetch’s harshness washed over the haggard mongrel. “Didn’t see them until we were almost in sight of these walls. Heard them a ways before that, though.”

  “That queer laughing?”

  A single nod.

  Fetch stepped around her, went beneath the awning to lean down in the human’s face. “You said they weren’t natural.”

  This one didn’t quail at Fetch’s anger either. No surprise. Whores were inured to hostility. The memory, however, turned the woman’s already-wide eyes into lustrous, disturbed seas.

  “They would not die. Slivers put arrows in them, but they stood once more. Kept chasing.”

  Fetch shot Mead a look over her shoulder. He’d gone a bit ashen.

  “There are similar beasts in my homeland,” the frail went numbly on. “Smaller. Dibà, we call them. They are mere animals. Vile scavengers, but animals.”

  “Dibà?” Mead repeated, his gift for tongues able to match the girl’s accent.

  Her eyes shifted to him, managed to focus. “It would come to your tongue from the name given by the Old Imperium. Hyenas. The creatures that attacked us, however, were larger than any I have ever seen. Surely, they were djinn. Devils in animal guise.”

  Fetch didn’t have Mead’s talents, but she knew swaddlehead when she heard it. And she didn’t like the sound.

  “Where’s your home?” she asked.

  “Sardiz.”

  Fetch gave an affirming grunt, narrowed her eyes. “In Tyrkania.”

  “The Empire may have claimed my city,” the frail replied with some fire. “That does not mean I must claim the Empire.”

  Fetch straightened, uncaring, and walked out to Mead. “Time to talk to the brethren.”

  “What about us?” the scarred mongrel called after them.

  “What about you?” Fetch replied, only half turning.

  “We got a purpose here.”

  “It was better served where you were. Soon as it’s safe, my riders will escort you back to the brothel.”

  Again, she turned to go.

  “We’re no whores.”

  Fetch didn’t begin this day with patience and had no desire to go digging deep for an untapped vein. She spun.

  “No, I reckon not. You cleaned. The thrice there, what, cracked skulls when the men got rowdy? Did Rhecia cast her out when she failed to even show her face against those deserters? Because I don’t recall seeing her.” Fetch threw a dismissive hand at the small, seated woman. “As for the frail, fresh as she looks, I’ll wager she just lost nerve. I’m sure Rhecia will help her with that before long. Nothing here for you—any of you—but hunger, believe me. You walked here for nothing.”

  The scarred mongrel’s gaze was steady. “We walked so we could ride.”

  It took Fetch a moment to realize what she had just heard. Even with understanding, she hesitated.

  “You want to join the hoof?”

  Another nod. “We do.”

  Fetch cast dagger-eyes at Mead, her ire causing him confusion. Hells, she didn’t know why she was angry. Sparing him the injustice, she returned to the stranger. “What was your name?”

  “Dacia,” the mongrel woman answered. She gestured back beneath the canopy. “The big one is Incus and the slip is—”

  “No frails in a mongrel hoof,” Fetch cut in.

  Dacia gave a thin smile. “Best come out, Ahlamra. Let the chief get a better look.”

  The slender woman moved from beneath the awning, her gait fluid. Like Dacia, she wore breeches and shirt, though far less tattered. She reached up and lowered the scarf to reveal golden curls that fell just past her ears, far from the black hair possessed by most Easterners. She kept her chin lowered as she approached, raising those limpid eyes once she stood before Fetch. Her honey skin matched her hair, though here the gold was infused with a flawless flush of olive. It was this subtle hue that spoke of orc blood, but only a vestige. The girl did not have even a hint of lower fangs. Fetch had been called beautiful and received lustful stares from men in her life, but the creature before her possessed something unrivaled.

  “My grandmother was a frailing,” she offered in response to Fetch’s dubious squint. Her tone was modest yet not meek.

  “It’s a half-orc hoof, waif,” Fetch told her. “My tulwar weighs more than you.”

  “Let this one make up the difference,” Dacia said, and motioned for the thrice-blood to come forward.

  Skin the color of iron emerged from the shadows, encasing gnarled muscles and swollen veins on the exposed flesh of the thrice’s arms. Had Oats been standing here, they would be of equal height.

  “And you’re called Incus?” Fetch asked.

  “Yes.”

  The voice that emerged from the black mane was thick and dull-sounding.

  “She simple?” Fetch asked Dacia.

  “No,” Incus replied. “But I am deaf.”

  Fetch rewarded the jest with a laugh, holding up a contrite hand. “Very well. Pardons for being a cunt.”

  “She’s telling you true,” Dacia said. “Incus can’t hear thunder.”

  Fetch found herself with a slack jaw. “Fucking deaf? How is she answering me?”

  “Your lips shape the words,” came the hollow reply.

  “Dumb Door’s mute, chief,” Mead pointed out.

/>   “Then you best pretend you’re him right now!” Fetch snapped. She looked at the thrice-blood. “You can’t be in a hoof if you can’t hear.”

  Dacia scratched at her close-cropped hair. “My understanding is hogs are loud on the run. Pounding hooves and all. Reason the hoofs use hand signals.”

  “Hand signals don’t do much good standing watch on our walls,” Fetch said. “Need to be able to hear if a cry is raised to warn of thicks or centaurs.”

  “Hope that mute mongrel you got ain’t the one needing to raise the cry, then,” Dacia returned.

  Fetching punched the woman in her clever, cut-up face and knocked her flat.

  She expected Incus to retaliate, but the thrice remained motionless. Ahlamra merely lowered her eyes. Dacia sat up from her back and spit blood in the dust. Fetching paced in front of them, clenched fists itching for further defiance. When none came, she called over her shoulder to Mead.

  “Get these three outside my walls.”

  “Chief?”

  “You fucking heard!”

  Dacia jumped back to her feet, split lip wrinkled with confused alarm.

  “This a jest? Some fucking trial?”

  Fetch shook her head. “No. You’ve no place in my hoof. Any of you.”

  “Why cast us out?” Ahlamra asked. “What offense have we given?”

  “Got my reasons. And the offense is pretending you all don’t know them. Run off and tell your master you failed.”

  “I have no master,” Incus said. The voice was toneless, yet still Fetch detected offense.

  Dacia cast searching looks at the other two. These three didn’t know each other well, Fetch now saw.

  “Sounds like you got enemies,” Dacia said. “We ain’t them. Not serving anyone but ourselves. And you, if you’ll let us.”

  “Can’t risk that,” Fetch replied. “Three mongrels I don’t know, brought by another I didn’t much like, all chased by some queer beasts.” She stepped to Ahlamra and leaned down close. “And one of you has all manner of names for them. Names that are damn tough to say. What were they again?”