Pools of Darkness - James M Brown [8]
"Like the way I look now," Ren muttered. His hair and beard were shaggy and plastered to his head by the rain. His elven chain mail was caked with mud, as were his dragonskin boots and gauntlets. Grass and pine needles clung to the mud and stuck to his wet leggings. Even the huge war-horse looked bedraggled. "Well, maybe the enemy will underestimate my fighting abilities," he said half-heartedly. Stolen trotted through the trees.
Ren had been pushing the war-horse as hard as he dared in the darkness. He had scouted the land carefully earlier that day and knew where the orcs were gathering. Leaving Stolen in a circle of trees, the ranger crawled to a rise high above the encampment.
Slowly the ranger peered over the hillock. A ring of watchfires illuminated the valley. What had been a small brook flowing into the lowland was enlarged by the rain into a wide stream, but the marshy conditions didn't seem to bother the orcs. They were beginning to arise from soggy tents, gathering about a central bonfire.
"Ren, you sorry thief, what have you gotten yourself into now?" He groaned as he tried to hold his grip in the mud and keep his face out of the water. He tried to console himself by thinking that the mud covering him would serve as a useful camouflage.
As he watched, more and more orcs joined the circle around the fire. As the surveillance wore on, Ren's mind wandered to his recurrent nightmare. The ranger hadn't thought about Shal and Tarl for months. The three of them were good friends, but their paths had diverged after they'd killed the evilly charmed bronze dragon controlling an army of orcs and ogres that were menacing Phlan. When Shal and Tarl became lovers, Ren felt out of place. They had parted friends and sent messages back and forth, but ten years had passed in the meantime. Ren hadn't seen his friends in three years.
The images from the nightmare lingered. He could see Shal and Tarl looking a little older than the last time he'd seen them. The two were in Denlor's Tower, in their bed. An enormous, gut-wrenching earth tremor and a crash of thunder was shaking the place. Shal leaped out of bed, naked, and ran to a grab a purple cloak filled with pouches. Tarl followed, pulled on his clothes, and reached for his shield and warhammer. The nightmare shifted to reveal Shal casting streams of violet energy at an unseen enemy and Tarl fighting something dark and horrible. Ren's own screams always awakened him before he could learn what terrors his friends faced.
The first time he had dreamed about Shal and Tarl the ranger was disturbed, but this third nightmare left him truly shaken. Ren wasn't one to have visions of any kind, so he was terribly afraid for his two friends.
Now he cursed the charter to which he had agreed. Ren was forced to devote all his energy to clearing out the orcs until the job was done. If he hadn't given his sworn and signed word to terms made clear on the vellum he carried, he would have dumped the responsibility, forsaken his quest to settle the valley, and sought his friends to make sure they were safe.
After the second dream, Ren had begun taking risks he normally wouldn't have taken. Any skilled ranger could battle five or ten orcs without fear. An average warrior orc stood about five feet tall and was usually armored in anything it could steal from its victims. Orcs liked using arrows and slings rather than getting close to the enemy to battle with swords or axes, so at close range most of them were lousy fighters.
But the ranger knew from experience that orcs liked to travel in packs, and the larger the pack, the bolder the orcs. Because Ren was worried about his friends, he'd started attacking packs of ten to thirty