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The horses’ hooves clipped along the ancient stones. They looked up and saw nothing except scrubby pine trees and hawks riding the updrafts along the faces of the mountains that rose up around them. Occasionally a lizard skipped between rocks. Every motion wore at their nerves a little more. “Bring them,” Lucan repeated every so often. “Bring them. Anything to kill the suspense.”

About an hour after the first sighting, they saw smoke in the sky ahead. An hour later, the road rose next to a tumbling creek until they crested a ridge and discovered the source. There had once been a farmstead there; three or four thatched outbuildings arranged around a central home with stone walls and a beam roof. They could tell it was a beam roof because the charred stumps of some of the beams still angled up from the top edge of the walls. The outbuildings were collapsed into smoking rubble. In the yard just outside the doorway lay a body, facedown. Not far away lay a dog, eviscerated, its limbs cut off and flung away. They approached and Keverel said, “Gnawed the bones. Not just of the dog.”

“Who lives out here?” Kithri said. “Might as well beg the passing orcs to stop for lunch. Until the ogres eat them in turn.”

“A bit of respect for the dead,” Biri-Daar said.

They looked around to see if there were survivors, but found none. “Not a terrible place,” Lucan said. “Fish in the river, deer in the valleys. Enough sun for a garden. I would settle down here. Right at the edge of where the mountains rise up.” Tears stood in the elf’s eyes. “Biri-Daar, I realize that our errand is of terrible import, but if there is an afternoon to spend killing orcs I would consider it a boon.”

Iriani looked out across the clearing, across the road to where the ridge curled and rose farther into a maze of notched canyons. “An afternoon well spent,” he said.

From inside the house, where she had gone to ensure there were no survivors, Biri-Daar emerged. “At times, one must put aside an errand to spend an afternoon in charity.”

The orcs’ track wasn’t hard to follow. It led across the meandering river at a broad ford less than a mile along the road from the sacked homestead. From there it climbed at an angle away from the road, following an old landslide scar up to an overhung ledge where a pair of orcs stood cracking bloody bones in their teeth. Lucan dropped one of them with an arrow and Remy the other with a slung stone. Immediately Kithri appeared from the scrub at the side of the ledge to make sure both were dead. At a hand signal from her, the rest of the party made their way to the ledge. The overhung hollow opened into a cave. Without hesitation they fell into the order of battle that had already become their unspoken habit. Biri-Daar and Keverel led, flanked by Lucan and Remy, with Kithri and Iriani immediately behind. They stormed down the main passage, kicking aside heaps of stinking refuse and making it all the way to the first split before they encountered resistance.

Surging out from the pitch-dark depths of both branches, the orcs swarmed them. As soon as it happened, their order of battle meant nothing. Orcs were everywhere, trampling over their dead to overwhelm the invaders. They were subhuman, savage beasts living in filth, destroying all that was beautiful. All of Remy’s childhood stories came to life; he cut them down as fast as they got within range of his sword, and still there were more. Light blazed along the ceilings of the passages, revealing broken-off stalactites and the teeming forms of the orcs. Keverel had brought the light, and in the sudden illumination Iriani could see where all of his comrades were. Remy saw him step off to one side, putting himself against the wall; Remy went with him, anticipating that the wizard would be planning something magical and would need protection to complete it.

He was right. As soon as he got there, he deflected challenges from a cluster of orcs and then the branch passageway exploded in a crackle of fire that incinerated every orc in sight.