Firebrand Part 5 Ch 1

Part Five
Chapter One: Family

The wind danced across the tundra with a shrill whistle, whipping flurries of snowflakes across the mossy ground like foam on the sea. Desert dry and deep winter cold, it was a wind that sent most rational creatures seeking shelter. The hearty Taunka stoked their fires and turned to work that could be done within the warmth of their tents; tundra caribou closed their eyes against the bullwhip lash of the wind and lead their herds to the grazing land in the sheltered costal valleys; Gorloc hissed and murmured to themselves in their own strange language and settled into the warm pools of the glacial hot springs. Only two forms cut through the stinging wind and driving ice.

Patches steadied herself on her three good legs to look back at her pack as the sounds of Dekk's labored breath became distant. The icy ground stung her travel-worn pads and frozen snow caked the fine fur in her ears, muffling what little sound made it past the howl of the wind. The world was tinted with the copper smell of the dried blood in her nose, and her ribs ached with her breath. Dekk fared worse than her. She noted his injuries as he struggled to gain the ground he'd lost. He heaved for breath though Patches had not set an unreasonable pace. Blood caked his nose and ear, and both paws on his right side found the ground gingerly. The shattered packs on his back doubtlessly wore on his endurence, as did the cargo he carried carefully in his jaws.

Dragging between Dekk's forepaws was their alpha, brused and bloodied and unresponsive. Patches waited for them to reach her, her body rigid with tension and fear. Dekk whined at her through a mouthfull of furred cloak, and Patched lifted her head and met his eyes. He took the show of dominence gratefully and continued on his slow, plodding path. Patches swung to lead the way once more. They were almost there.
***
The pack had walked among the great tusked, long faced, too big to be food beasts many times without incident. So long as none of them jostled the creatures or approached their young or barked and yipped in their midst, the lumbering monsters chose to ignore them. When Tohbie led the pack between the home of the worg raisers and the flat faced cow people, their path cut through their grazing land on the mossy plains beside the cold blue saltwater lake. Sometimes the tusk beasts were there and sometimes they weren't. Patches rather prefered it when they weren't, as she'd never known grass-eaters to be predictable, and if they weren't food they were only another danger. The day proved her caution to be well placed.

Dekk, ahead and being led by Tohbie's hand on his shoulder, smelled the Not Right first. He stopped in his tracks and turned his great head slowly north, looking at something beyond the earthy crush of tan great tusks. Dekk was a horrible loafer, and both Tohbie and Patches at first thought he was simply stopping to take in a distracting sight. But moments later Patches, too, smelled the Not Right. Rot and stink made her nose hurt and she barked a warning, knowing she was to be quiet in great tusk land. Not Rights were not allowed near the pack. They had to be killed or escaped from, and Patches knew that better than she understood to keep silent near the great tusks. She saw understanding flash in her alpha's red eyes in the moment before the herd broke.

There was no warning as they began to stampede, just a sudden deafening trumpeting as they ran. It was like no stampede Patches had ever witnessed. So blind was their panic, they collided with one another with great meaty crashes, inadvertently spearing one another on their tusks, trampling their own young beneith their feet. Fear stink rolled off them, mixing with the scent of blood and torn flesh, making Patches giddy for the hunt, but she damped the feeling down, dodging through the heedless feet of the great tusks, trying to stay beside her pack. Dekk was thrown. A bull sweeping his head carelessly to fling asside the smaller of his kind from his path caught the worg in the right side and sent him sailing like a rag toy. Tohbie went down next, coliding with the great shaggy chest of a charging cow and rolling benieth her, her body kicked forward by the creature's frantic struggle, then again by the one following behind. Patches tried to regain her side, but the lash of a great tusk's limber nose threw her back, and she screamed once in pain as her body struck the earth and she felt a terrible crunching in her foreleg. She rolled across the ground, tumbling over rocks and low thorny brush, but she weathered these further indignities in silence as she rolled to a stop and regained her feet shakily. Her injured paw would not move and her chest hurt to draw in breath, but she had been thrown free from the stampede.

Dekk rushed to her side. He limped badly, and his bags and crates were torn open, their cargo of leathers catching benieth his feet. He licked her jaw and whimpered fearfully as they could do nothing but watch the stampede pass. It was over in moments. Where once great tusks had milled and grazed contentedly, now was only shattered earth churned with their own blood and the mangled bodies of several of their unlucky young. Only one thing broke the perfect flatness of the tundra.

The Not Right had been a great tusk once, but it was only a Not Right as it stood before her. Patches had known them for a long time, these things that died but did not stay down. They were never afraid, they never backed down, and so she did not challenge it as it stood there stupidly. Shoulder to shoulder with Dekk, she stood and together they watched it, waiting to see if they would fight. It swayed and stumbled once, and greasy locks of fur dripped from it's slimy gray flesh. Lumpy entrails dragged in the dirt benieth it, and only one clouded and puss yellow eye rolled in it's socket.

Perhaps it was too rotted to remember it was a Not Right, so rotten it thought it was still a great tusk, for it milled in dumb confusion a moment longer and began it's langid stumbling plod after it's brethren.

Stiff with tension, Patches creapt forward, wary of it's return. She slunk onto the broken ground were everything smelled of blood and fear, and cast about for a more familiar scent. She found Tohbie unmoving in a furrow of earth, torn and bloody, but warm still and breathing. Whining, Patches licked her mouth and nose, but their alpha didn't stir.

Dekk joined them, repeating the process of licking Tohbie's face, but she failed to respond to him either. He lifted his head and licked Patches' muzzle briefly. With Tohbie hurt-asleep, he would listen to her, he assured her. The smaller wolf stopped to think. Tohbie would wake given time, but with Not Rights nearby and both she and Dekk wounded, they could not remain. The day before, they had left the camp of the cow men. They would have food and shelter, but it would take them more than a day and a night to return to them. The pack had traveled the path many times, though, and the people who bred worgs were not far away. They had warm kennels, and worg handlers with handy morsels of meat, and a woman who smelled of good herbs who healed without needles and thread.

Dekk struggled with Tohbie's clothing until he was able to grip the furred hood of her cloak, and Patches led him west. The wind began to howl.
***
Time meant nothing to Patches, and so she had no idea how much of it had passed when the stronghold of the people who bred worgs came into view, but she knew that her paws hurt from taking the weight of her broken leg. Dekk's limp was worse, and he struggled for breath as they made their way up the narrow dirt path that wound into the hills that ringed the place of fire and metal and busy warmth. Tohbie had not woken, and so Patches lead on. They crested the top of the hill and the great building came into view with it's studding of docks for airships, busy with bodies even from such a distance. Wyverns cried out out of sight overhead, and the sharp scent of molten metal filled the air.

Patches had always disliked the approach. The stink of Not Rights filled the air, but the pack had never once encountered them. The people there fought them back from their den, and Patches trusted their home to be safe. At the top of the hill, two guards yelled to the pack, but no one yelled back, and Patches continued on. More sentries began calling out down the path, but no one moved to stop them. Dekk's pace lifted as the cloying scent of the kennels reached them, fellow worgs, clean hay, boiled soup bones, and dried chow. Patches remained ridged and unrelaxed, watching their alpha even as she led them through the narrow path down the rocky hills surrounding the building and into the warm shelter of the kennel entrance to the great structure.

She knew the young stablehands who came to meet them. They looked at the pack in stunned silence until Dekk pulled Tohbie to one of the young boys' feet. Dekk looked up at him pleadingly for some kind of order, but the two cubs remained quiet. It wasn't until the stablemaster arrived, commanding him to drop his burden that the order came. He gratefully set her in the dusty hay and allowed one of the stableboys to feed him salted liver from his pockets as he lead him away. Patches watched him go longingly, thinking of the sweet smell of straw and bowls of ham bones and stale bread, and settled herself on Tohbie's prone body, folding her injured paw benieth her. There she waited, knowing the woman who smelled of good herbs would come. Only then would she let the stable master or his son lure her to a kennel. Many people came, which caused many more people to come, and she did not have long to wait. The smaller than Tohbie woman in light robes who smelled of good herbs pushed through the throng as easily as a tiger through grass and knelt beside them. Even as she was reaching out to touch Tohbie's face, Patches could feel her alpha's breathing ease. The woman reached out to stroke Patches' forehead and extended her other hand to run it along her shoulder. Patches huffed thankfully as the pain faded from her leg and feet and her chest stopped aching.

Only then did she let the stable master lift her up off Tohbie's chest and carry her to the stall where Dekk was already curled happily. Behind her, someone began yelling her alpha's name, and she turned her head to glimpse a tall male troll with pale hair pushing through the crowd, but she was too lulled by the smell of leftover meat stew being ladled into a bowl before her to pay him any notice.
***
Tohbie woke to the familiar sounds of Warsong Hold, envelloped in the comfortable embrace of a hamoc draped in furs. The ring of hammers coming from below told her she was on the second story, over and to the side of the steelworks on the quieter half where most of the bedding was. She blinked and considered that most people did not wake so often in their lives in places they had not been rendered unconscious. She could wake up in worse places than the warmth of the Hold, she supposed. She tried to remember what had happened. She had sold meats at the taunka emcampment, but they had turned down the furs and leathers and so she'd lead Patches and Dekk toward Warsong Hold with the remainder of their cargo. They had been crossing the tundra through a heard of mammoths when Dekk and Patches had started. She didn't remember much after that. There must have been a stampede.

She reached back to rub her head and blinked. Sitting up, she cast a look around the room. It was night, she thought, if only by the relative amount of light that poured upward from the grated floor than came in from overhead. It was never truely still, quiet, or dark there. The light of the cookfires and forges below cast an earie light through the second floor, illuminating the orcs who came and went strangley, making them seem weightless as they passed. No one paid her any mind as she moved, so she crawled out from under the furs and slipped to the floor. The air was shockingly cold in comparison, and she rubbed her arms. Patches and Dekk were nowhere to be seen, and a note of worry struck her. Had whoever picked her up brought them to the Hold as well? Had they survived the stampede to be taken along?

Tohbie worked her toes on the cool metal grate below her feet and got her barings. The ghostly red illumination slowed her progress as she crossed across the  open floor to the great metal pillar from which all the rooms of the Hold spun outward from. She placed one hand on the pillar and cast her gaze about in search of the stairway down when a terrible crash rung through the metal beneith her fingers. Her hands flew to her ears and she ducked as the riotous tolling continued, striking two, three, four, times. Sleepers in the hamocs behind her were yelling. A fifth chime shook the Hold.

"It's too loud!" an orc was bellowing somewhere beyond the pillar. "You made it too loud, damnit!"

"You think I can't see that?!" a goblin shrieked over the sixth toll. "Get out of my way!"

The bell rang a seventh time, a grating, shrieking squeal cutting it off abruptly and a kind of suprised silence fell over everyone. Tohbie rubbed her ringing ears and shook her head.

"Too loud and broken," the orc growled. "Idiot."

"At least it went off at midnight tonight," the goblin muttered darkly.

Tohbie stopped midstride, and looked back over her shoulder. For a second she couldn't remember why what she heard seemed so important. Four years had almost erased the words from her mind. "Listen for de clock dat strike seven at midnight." She blinked back at the two engineers who continued arguing over the exposed guts of the clocktower within the pillar. She supposed she was bound to encounter a broken clock at some point in time in her life, and she had no reason to believe she'd heard anything significant, but she stopped and listened in any case, wondering what kind of redemption it might herrald.

More immediate conscerns were at hand. She took the stairs two at a time ignoring the rust that flaked off on her scarred soles as she bounded down toward the stables, dodging broad shouldered orcs making their way up and down the narrow staircase and leaving the clock behind her. Relief flooded her with the sound of Patches' bark coming from below as the wolf recognised her approach. The troll was grinning as she lept the side of the stall, becoming instantly burried in the wriggling mass of fur contained therein as both Patches and Dekk leaped into her. She couldn't bring herself to calm the excited frenzy, and so let it wear down on its own, leaving both wolves happily panting and curled about her.

"You're awake!"

Tohbie looked up at the young orc boy leaning into the stable, one of the stablemaster's sons.

"Ai. Do you know who bring us here, boy?" she asked, pushing away Dekk's muzzle as he began grooming her ear. "We was just east of de lake."

"They must have pulled you the whole way," he said. "The big one carried you in by your jacket yesterday afternoon."

Tohbie couldn't quite stop her jaw from dropping. The thought was unbelievable. "No, dat is miles!"

"You were all tore up pretty bad. The sentries saw them dragging you all the way from the bottom of the ridge at least. We didn't really believe them until they walked right into the stable with you."

Tohbie couldn't respond to that. She could only wind her fingers in the two dogs' fur and look down at them mutely.

"Oh, there was someone who wanted to see you when you woke up," the boy went on. Tohbie didn't hear him, and barely noticed him leaving.

Patches rasied sleepy amber eyes to her and her jaws dropped open into a contented lupine smile. Dekk rolled slightly at her back, kicking straw into the air and huffing a humid breath of air into her ear. Neither seemed to be thinking as much of what they had done as Tohbie. Greatful tears filled her eyes and spilled over her cheeks, rolling off the guardhairs off Patches' shoulder.

"Bad time?"

Tohbie's breath caught and as abruptly as the tears had come, they dried. She had not heard the voice in over six years. She looked up slowly at the figgure standing in the isleway between the kennels. The man would be tall when he wasn't crouched, with striking features cut in pale blue and cornsilk green hair. He was older, and the years had left lines near his nose and eyes that suggested laughter. Sunrise yellow irises danced as she met them.

"Tukal," Tohbie gasped.

"It has been a long time. I begin to t'ink I will nevah have de chance to see your face."

Tohbie looked away with a scowl. "I am not in de mood, Tukal. What happen between us is over long ago."

Tukal snorted in amusement and Tohbie gave the lifelong troublemaker an annoyed look out of the corner of her eye.

"You are not so cute I can moon over you for so many years." This didn't make Tohbie any less irritated with him. His next sentance, however, did. "I mean I would not want to miss your face when I tell you I find your son."