“Now that I have completed my lecture upon the perfidious and treacherous Druchii, I shall move onto the true target of my contempt. They are known by many names, including Urk within the Dwarfen tongue, and the 'Green Scourge' to those in the north...to most of us here, they would be known simply as 'Orcs'; there are many in our glorious Empire, many even here among you now, that would consider them far more comical than terrifying! This is something that many a former soldier would find laughable in itself, and that those who died facing them may well have believed, at least until they found themselves covered in six feet of earth.”
Professor Raffael Kayetan, head lecturer in Non-human and Inhuman Studies at the University of Altdorf, gestured for the labourers at the side of the stage to wheel on the sheet-covered trolley. Upon the shining surface lay something large, very large in fact, and as Raffael pulled an extendable pointer from within the pocket of his jacket he also motioned for the sheet to be withdrawn.
There was an audible gasp from the semi-circular gallery and seating within the lecture theatre, as well as more than a couple of hisses and thrown curses, the veteran scholar moving his hands with the well oiled practise of many years doing much the same thing.
“Behold!” He yelled with as flourish of pointer and cloth, “the corpse laying before us is that of a young Orc – though in truth it looks to be a lot older – it is what the enemy call a 'Boy', and is the same age as an adolescent human believe it or not.”
Large, green fleshed, and almost simian in its bodily build, the Orc body had half of the skull missing – as was correctly pointed out by the Professor – and revealed to have been killed only by a direct cannon blast. Indeed, it seemed scarcely plausible that the creature was dead, everything about the eight-foot monstrosity so much larger than life.
For the next hour-and-a-half the Professor went on to speak of the Greenskins in terms of a plague, a blight upon Mankind and all sentient races of the world, finally placing his pointer down and preparing to take questions; it was the hand of a young Middenlander that shot up first, and Raffael was only too happy to receive his query.
“Professor, please indulge me for a moment, but what about Black Orcs. What do we know of them?”
“Black Orcs, Mister Schiss? As postulated by Waldemarr of Nuln, a known and disgraced scholar?” A sigh followed the statement along with a look of annoyance, “fairy tales and poppycock, his theory long disproved by more lucid minds; Orcs of discipline, he says! Created by Dwarfs who have turned to the worship of blasphemous Gods?! Pfft, these are the ramblings of one best put behind the walls of a mad house, and not on a university stage.”
Oh how they laughed, now while they could, but would soon find that even the sharpest minds are of no use unless well travelled and honed through experiences of the world. What did this Professor know of Orcs? Of harsh societies where only the strongest survived? A tribal order without laws, morals and everything that makes one 'civilised'? Before his life cycle was done, he would know all he ever wanted to know, and so much more that he did not.
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Gorfang Rotgut, former master and ruler of the Orc stronghold known as 'Black Crag', itself a former Dwarfish Karak – maybe even one of the largest of the Dwarf 'Golden Age' – now found himself fighting for his own survival against one the only Greenskins left in the Badlands that could challenge him...Grimgor Ironhide. Rumours of this Black Orc Warboss had filtered down even into the southern reaches of the World's Edge Mountains, and it had been Rotgut, thinking himself safe from retribution due to distance between himself and Ironhide, who had began spreading lies and fallacies!
He had thought himself safe, but he could not have been more wrong.
Upon hearing of these falsehoods, the name of Gorfang not entirely unknown in the northern part of the mountain chain either, a new fire had kindled itself within the hulking frame of the Warboss and set him on a path that would see Gorfang and his Red Fang Tribe either bend the knee utterly, or perish by his bloodied hand.
Already he had broken the back of the Broken Tooth tribe, an Orc host that was lorded over by Black Orcs – and the only tribe to have stood up to Gorbad Ironclaw, and paid the consequences for it; this had weakened the tribe for years to come, and Grimgor finished what Gorbad had began, accepting those of his cousins into his own tribe while massacring the weaker Greenskins without mercy or hesitation.
With his 'Immortulz' by his side, his personal guard of the largest and most ferocious of his Black Orc followers – many of them having personally emerged from the Blasted Wastes alongside this champion of Gork (or Mork) decades ago – Grimgor now seeks to subdue the Badlands and all those that dwell there. Greenskin or stuntie, it makes no difference to him, but first Gorfang would pay for his insults.
************
The banner fluttered over the half-scorched remains of 'Valaya's Sorrow', an Orc stomping ground for many tens of years but originally – as with many places that Orcs squatted in this time and place – a Dwarfish sacred place dedicated to their goddess Valaya; half-totem and half war-flag, the banner was crudely stitched together from different types of flesh and then marked with Orcish glyphs.
Red, green, white and blue they were, the flesh of other Greenskins, humans, Dwarfs and even the furred skin of Skaven rat-men submerged beneath the branded markings and daubed paints that now caught the fading evening light.
To the Orc who squinted at the banner of Da Immortulz with his pig-like eyes, the shink of a whetstone running over the blade of his great axe, it held more than mere symbolic significance; to Gazrak Blackeye, so-called because of the mass of puckered but faded scar tissue around one of his eyes, it held everything.
He had hefted the banner into battle when it was first conceived of, deep within the choking desert of the Black Wastes, when its first incarnation was no more than a metal wheel-spoke topped by the fluttering shape of a flayed child of Hashut – an accursed Chaos Dwarf. Even now, so many years on from that torturous past, the very thought of the Dark Lands and those tusked stunties made him burning hot with anger...no, not anger...a deep and fervent fury.
Giving a snort of irritation and a grunt he eyed the latest notch on the blade of his weapon, caused by the impact of a Red Fang Warbosses own hefty cleaver, the satisfying decapitation of the now headless fool who had called himself 'Gnash' going some way to soothing the fire that was always there inside him.
Already his Boss had defeated four of the enemies hosts, thousands of Orcs laying dead and rotting in the Badlands or else now fighting for Grimgor and his reformed 'Broken Tooth tribe' instead, this old stuntie dung-heap the second encampment to be overrun in as many weeks; soon they would carry on further into the Eastern Badlands, to the overrun hold of Karak Azgal, and there they would find Rotgut and finish him for good.
Gazrak liked the thought of that. |