Oh there was an orc called Thrakaduhl, who stood up to his father Tharka the cruel
Son of a villain but hero in his soul, Thrakaduhl’s
freedom wicked Tharka stole
But Tharka was ever a fool, for he
fought Lady Kaira in a duel
She put Tharka six feet under, and his
son’s rallying cry was thunder
Thrakaduhl was free, and now so are we…
{The rest is illegible}
-
Graffiti
carved into the surface of the bar in Defiance’s Larkin’s Public House
Thrakaduhl
rode fast. It had been a long time since he’d ridden a horse at this speed, and
his body tensed with the uncertainty in the back of his mind – was he prepared
to do this? Had he been locked away by his father for so long that his edge was
gone? But Kaira’s friend had insisted this was an important task. Two orc thugs
hauling a cart of lead coins back to the capital were not in and of themselves
especially important, but Azraea believed that defeating the dragon would have
a great deal to do with undermining her psychologically, pushing her to lash
out impulsively and make herself vulnerable.
Azraea
was certainly right that they couldn’t defeat the dragon in a straight-up
fight. Thrakaduhl believed they might wound her and he had some ideas about how
to seriously cripple her, but a wounded animal was not like an injured man. An
injured man might surrender, but a wounded animal would fight with total
abandon and become all the deadlier for it. Thrakaduhl had never met a dragon
before but he imagined that, in combat, they were much more like beasts than
like men.
That
meant the best course of action was not to attack the creature as if it were an
army, but to trap it as if it were game. Cunning and deception would be essential,
and though these were certainly not foreign concepts to Thrakaduhl who’d been
playing the part of the one man rebellion, he hadn’t had especially challenging
competition while doing so. His father was about the sharpest opponent he’d
had, and he honestly seemed to dim over the years, as if his mind had been
overtaken by his brutish nature just as his body had.
Thrakaduhl
slowed his horse as he noticed a pair of fresh wheel tracks pulled off to the
side of the road. The axle length matched the sort of cart often used by the
larger orcs, who were no longer proportioned for horseback riding. It looked as
if Thurk and Roac had pulled off and taken a rest here and going by the flies
swarming in the ditch next to the road, they had taken their break recently.
The
chase was on.
Thrakaduhl
spurred his horse again, and as it accelerated down the dirt road, he drew his yumi, an asymmetrical long bow his
mother had taught him to use as a child. He’d practiced with it briefly while
waiting for Kaira at the fort the previous day and found that he was somewhat
rusty, but rusty for him was probably still good enough.
As
he approached a bend in the road, he saw a trail of dust ahead. Thurk and Roac
were casually rolling along, Thurk in the cart’s seat, reigns in his hands,
with Roac sitting on the back end and scratching his gut. Despite Roac’s less
than keen mind or senses, he noticed Thrakaduhl approaching quickly, and
alerted Thurk. When Thurk looked back, he recognized Thrakaduhl, and when he
saw the yumi in his hands, he snapped the reigns and sent the two horses that
pulled the cart into overdrive.
“Oh
come on now boys!” Thrakaduhl shouted, “Don’t make me chase you!”
Apparently,
Thurk remembered Thrakaduhl’s skill with the bow before he became rusty.
Although
the cart roared down the road, Thrakaduhl still had a substantial speed
advantage. He urged the horse onward with his knees as he released the reigns
and nocked one of the three arrows he’d been holding in his bow hand.
“Come
on Roac,” Thrakaduhl shouted, “It doesn’t gotta be this way. Just tell Thurk to
turn the cart around.”
“Flay
you, you piece of shit!” Roac shouted back.
“Flay?”
Thrakaduhl shouted back, “What are you going on about?”
“Flay,”
Roac shouted, “Like, when you flay a man alive.”
“Dammit,
Roac, that’s not a curse word,” Thrakaduhl shouted.
“Well,
it could be,” Roac yelled, “It makes as much sense as anything else, if you
think 'bout it.” Thrakaduhl’s horse continued closing. Thurk occasionally
glanced back at the two of them, looking at them like they were insane for
having this argument in the middle of a chase.
“Well,
how do you reckon that?” Thrakaduhl shouted.
“Well,
people say, ‘screw you’ or ‘fuck you’ all the time, but then you feel like you
have to stop and clarify, ‘Well, I don’t mean in a good way.’”
“I
suppose that is true,” Thrakaduhl agreed as his horse closed in.
“But
flaying ain’t like fucking or screwing, flaying’s always bad,” Roac said.
“So
really you’re just asking for a profanity that doesn’t have a lot of
ambiguity,” Thrakaduhl said.
“That’s
all, yeah. Do you got something better mama’s boy?”
“Ah shoot,” Thrakaduhl punned as he fired
an arrow straight at Roac’s feet, “Why’d you have to go and bring my mama into
this?” The arrow went through Roac’s right foot and into the wood floor of the
cart. Roac stumbled as he howled in pain, and fell out of the cart. Thrakaduhl
had expected that to be it for Roac, but, quite impressively, his thick leather
boots and the strong arrow shaft were sufficient to keep him pinned to the cart
by one foot. His ankle must certainly have broken, and his upper body was now
suffering the abuse of bouncing along behind the cart.
“Well,
I reckon our conversation is starting to drag, so why don’t I go have a chat
with your buddy now?” Roac shouted a stream of barely intelligible expletives,
“You just hang on there now, Roac.”
Thrakaduhl
nocked the second arrow in his hand and shouted at Thurk to stop.
“Your
cargo’s come loose,” he shouted, “You leave him on this road and keep goin’ and
you might likely never find him again. There’s thieves about these parts you
know.”
Thurk
looked back and swerved his cart into Thrakaduhl’s horse. The horse itself
deftly evaded the attack, but Thrakaduhl lost the arrows in his hand. Thrakaduhl
pulled himself up so that he had one foot in his saddle, and he jumped off of
his horse, landing square in the back of the wagon, right behind the two strong-boxes.
Thurk
lashed his reigns to a hook on the front of the wagon and lept back towards Thrakaduhl.
Thurk was nearly half again Thrakaduhl’s size, with bigger, longer arms and
strong hands. He reached out to grab Thrakaduhl with one hand, and drew a knife
with his other hand.
Thrakaduhl
snagged Thurk’s wrist with his bow, yanking it to the side, and then thrust it
back the other way, jabbing Thurk in the eye with it. Thurk reached up to
protect his eye, but he used his snagged hand, and with a yank back and a
forward push, Thrakaduhl snapped him in the face with the bow. Thurk staggered,
disoriented, and Thrakaduhl spun the bow, twisting the string around the bigger
orc’s free hand, and yanked it to the side as he hopped up and slammed a knee
into his opponent’s ribs.
At
this point, Thurk was flailing in confusion. He tried to stab Thrakaduhl with
the knife, but ended up getting that hand caught in the bow as well, and before
he could react, Thrakaduhl, in a moment of exceptional creativity, performed an
old orcish dance move that swung both of their hands over their heads and left
them back to back. Thrakaduhl hopped and dropped to pull the orc over
backwards, and then rolled him right over his back and off the cart. Thurk
tumbled down onto Roac, which finally snapped the arrow shaft pinning the other orc, and left them both
tumbling through the dirt behind the cart.
“Guess
it was about time they hit the road,” Thrakaduhl muttered to himself. He hopped
in the seat of the cart, slowed it down, turned it around, and trotted back to
the groaning mass of beaten orc, whistling for his own horse to follow. He
stopped as Thurk looked up and tried to climb off Roac, only to stagger back to
the ground again.
“Don’t
y’all come back to Defiance unless you got a dragon ready to do business with
me herself,” Thrakaduhl said, “You two go on and crawl back to your mistress in
Kingstown, and tell her that Thrakaduhl da Tharka, leader of the free town of
Defiance, is denying her any further payments such as this. If she wishes to
contest that decision, you all know where she can find me.”
Thrakaduhl snapped the reigns with a ‘hyah!’ and sped the wagon east.
Thrakaduhl snapped the reigns with a ‘hyah!’ and sped the wagon east.
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