Lying bunnies
The castle was falling apart. It wasn't defensible, even if it was guarded. But the surprise was that the guards were already dead. Their job was to seize it and hold it, but they were told this was a strong keep.
The Company had been screwed by employers before, but this smelled worse to the bounty hunter. He glanced back to the other scouts as they started to unlimber their weaponry, and even as the wargs crept forward. He'd always had an empathic bond with them, in addition to speaking their language, and they told of the smell of blood in the air. They expected to arrive to a fight, and that's why they came in stealthy to try and take the walls and eliminate the sentries. Lord Vend Arad wanted the place for its strategic value when he contracted the Company to take it, but there was something else afoot.
Then there were the sounds from the distance, further in the keep, past the ruined gates, of something pounding against a splintering wood. The wargs handled signalling that went back to Radush; a rough and ready sort of reporting that didn't count numbers or give much information beyond what a warg could process, but wargs were still intelligent and capable of communication, and to the untrained ear, it didn't sound like something too amiss. And the bunnies were too busy fighting to hear that.
They skulked closer in the darkness, red-shot eyes and hands clutching whatever implements of up-close killing they preferred. There were bigger tuskers than the scouts, but they were hunters, poachers, ambushers and bandits before they came to the Company. Dakgu, a couple other tuskers and the wargs, his pack and family.
One of the bodies had an arrow in it. And it was one of the Tuskers that mouthed, "Tribal arrow." That was suspicious and noteworthy, because they were the only orcs in the area that they knew of.
Closer in, they could hear the clash and clang of combat, of some guardsmen in the Orenth, royal, colors being cut down by other men clad in human armor...but bearing some more tribal orc weaponry. It wasn't easily wielded by them, it was crude in some cases, but they had some rather large bunnies doing the wielding, ones strong enough to use Tusker weapons effectively.
The manor looked like it was in marginally better shape than the walls, where the mortar had crumbled long ago and there weren't even ramparts anyone could get up to. Still, a tusker -could- climb and serve as lookouts, but it wasn't as effective. A scout came forward with orders through the warg relay; pull back and let other tuskers handle the bloody stuff, find outposts and lookout points. Radush was clearly smelling some sort of twist in the wind, an old story familiar to the Company in its four years of bloody existence.
So they started to pull back; Radush needed the eyes facing outward. And anyone they found in their perimeter was, naturally to be taken care of.
--
The bunnies were still banging on the door when a number of the Chosen burst into the place and started to kill -- the Eyedrinker wanted one alive and so the first thing Koloch did was grab one of the bunnies and throw them against the wall. Others did a similar movement, while they had the element of surprise. There were a number of them in the courtyard trying to get into the manor and they had managed to break through the front door and the first floor.
But once the bunnies turned around to pay attention, the tuskers got lethal. They also were using unfamiliar weaponry, a real array of different orcish weapons but no consistency -- it was like someone looted a museum collection or people's trophies to assemble this real hodge-podge. The Company, by contrast, tended to use similar swords and polearms and actually knew what they were doing with the extra heavy (for bunnies) weapons and wore plate mail to the party. The bunnies? Well, they were dressed lightly, like they weren't expecting serious opposition. But someone put up a fight on the inside and now Nar Mat Kordh-Ishi was there.
The chant went up, basso bellowing that set the rhythm. They'd all marched in the Pikes and knew how to time their steps slavishly to the drums and the deep basso horns. And they chanted in tune; "VRAS! VRAS! VRAS!" the word for killing in the Orcish tongue. Theirs was a loose formation of blades and some of the Chosen alongside, expecting close combat slaughter and they fought in knots of Tuskers, overwhelming with muscle and coordination.
The courtyard got bloody and they just moved in a deliberate way, stepping with a certain pace as they pushed forward against their foes. Koloch could feel the sweat coursing down beneath the armor as arrows, the kind that could take a human gorget through, pitted his plates but did not deter his intent. With a halberd in hand, he chopped and skewered with a grim method of a workman at his task, stepping right over moaning bunny wounded and figuring someone behind him would give the death-stroke. To get the bunnies off his blade, he'd fling them aside roughly. Beneath the helmet, he was sneering. Externally, he was sneering. The armor was a gore-spattered gallery of leering skulls, monster faces and runework, along with the obligatory fur and spikes. Koloch the Butcher liked to fight up close, but he did it with a cold aura of inevitability rather than the wildness of many orcs. He preferred economy of motion in his killing. Even the sneer was a set mask and it didn't waver any more than his limbs did. He was well-drilled and methodical in his slaughter.
They pushed inside without that much opposition. They were too lightly armored. They were not expecting a disciplined foe. The dead on the floor were Orenth liveried guards and then someone else's black-clad killers with the orcish weapons. Some had put up a lion's fight on the inside, as there were more bodies on the floor from the battle.
They were protecting something.
All the Orenth guards were dead, and the ones that had been trying to get through a stoutly set up, iron-banded door to some chambers abandoned their effort with axes when the Tuskers burst in. When the last of those died with a scream as his bowels were taken out by one of the Tuskers, Koloch calmly took the huge orcish war-axe that one human was using and swung it mercilessly at the door. Others took up what they could find and do the same.
And that was the first introduction Aedyt Rain Hayne had to the Company, a bunch of grunting, blood-stained, heavily armored orcs grunting curses at Lord Arad that had her trussed and hauled out to the Eye-drinker.
--
Shortly thereafter, the warg signals went up again, alerting the Company to enemies on the march. The castle was useless defensively, as the battle showed, and Radush was quick to deduce that they'd been set up and the people setting them up took orcish weapons to slaughter Stephen's bastard. Her guards put up more of a fight than expected and no one thought that Nar Mat Kordh-Ishi would march so quickly or that the plot would be foiled by these two combined factors.
But the castle was such a wreck that it was better to assemble for a fight in the field, by darkness, than to fight from behind such dubious cover. And so the company, with Radush's new guest, lined up for the battle. It took a few minutes to get the story out of the girl, confirm it from interrogated survivors (along with a debate on just killing the bunnies) and then untie her. There was no time for the niceties, so she got a simple offer from the Warlord: "How much is your life worth to us? How much is Lord Arad's death worth to you?"
There was no time with the horns sounding to get the companies assembled, even as the scouts began their skirmish in the night, warg, arrow and blade against the human scouts. The screams were already echoing in the distance and the darkness.
Mostly human. The bunnies didn't have good dark-sight.
honeysweetestco,
Simple Unicycle,
Izurich,
Pachamac,
Pyrrhic,
Atalanta,
Byrd Man,
Jamesyco,
Sanity43217,
Lord Shaxx
