The big orc clapped one hand onto another, creating a tangle of gloves and fingers around the hilt of his sword. He raised it above his head, opting to swing instead of rotating. A wise decision for any orc, given the species’ lack of agility. Wise, but slow. By the time the hilt was at the orc’s chest, Sorrows was moving. Vision obscured by darkness and his own knuckles, the orc went from staring at leather to feeling it slam into his chin. Sorrows drove his palm upward with enough force to lift the orc off his feet. Teeth cracked. Yellow-green eyes flashed in the moonlight and rolled backward. The orc crumpled and lay in the grass, not moving.
Sorrows stepped on the big orc’s chest as he passed and leapt into the air, preparing to strike the pale third of the party. But that orc had already moved. Sorrows spun to see the quiet, yellow-green eyes studying him. Unexpected and unsettling. Orcs didn’t move like that. And Sorrows didn’t like orcs with surprises. He preferred things to behave as they were supposed to and worried when they didn’t. But he couldn’t deal with that problem now. The pale orc had removed itself from the situation momentarily. Sorrows would deal with him later.
He squared himself to the second orc. The smaller, oily skinned one that was fumbling with his sword as he scrambled backward into the third. Expected.
“Have you got my answer yet, gray? Why might the big fella lose his head?” Sorrows stared at the second orc as he addressed the third. The second orc’s eyes went from Sorrows to the big orc sprawled on the grass back to Sorrows.
“She doesn’t speak,” the second orc said. He steadied his grip and his stance. “Found her this past spring, wandering the plains. Was her that led us to this place.”
Gods, Sorrows thought. A female. Orcs were harder to tell apart than dwarves. Nothing about the pale orc seemed feminine. He reached down and pulled the blade from the fallen orc, whipping it in two neat arcs. The steel was notched, and the hilt was cracked, but the sword had good enough balance. He brought the tip to rest against the neck of the big orc.
Some nameless orc an unknown time ago grabbed a small, round rock and found food. Or maybe water. Or maybe the orc didn’t find anything. Maybe a bigger orc was about to club him over the head, but suddenly dropped dead. Something happened that turned coincidence into providence. It didn’t matter now. The details had become irrelevant in the steady flow of time, the rush of the gods-stream. What mattered now was that orcs were a superstitious species. They wove stone beads into their hair to ward against evil and bring good fortune. Three white beads for a calm and protected spirit. Three black beads for good health. Three red beads to grant strength in battle. Then a variety of colors, yellow, violet, blue, brown, and countless others to ward against the various demons that might harass or harm a mortal orc on any given day or night. And the more of these beads, the better. To behead an orc was to separate its beads from its body. Sacrilege. To use an orc’s own blade for the task was blasphemy.
The instant Sorrows rested the tip against the big orc’s neck, the second orc shouted and rushed forward. Expected. The orc’s free hand found the hilt of his sword and he brought the blade to the side and behind him in preparation for a swing that would cut clean through Sorrows, notches or not. A powerful move. An all-or-nothing attack. A mistake. Two mistakes, in fact. The movement of the blade in an arc from front to back and front again takes time. The first mistake. The rotation of the orc’s body to accommodate the backswing of the blade creates a narrow stance with most of the orc’s weight on the back foot, halting the momentum of the rush forward. The second mistake.
The defense against such an attack, if one were not caught by surprise, is to get near early. The power in the attack comes from the shifting of weight forward while rotating. The extension of the arms and wrists increases the speed of the blade passing through air into the target. Longer arms create greater speed. Greater speed creates greater power. The dance of battle. You can’t control the strength of your opponent, nor the heft of his blade. But you can influence, or interrupt, your opponent’s rotation—thus limiting speed, thus limiting power. If you weren’t caught off guard, you would get near and you would disrupt the attack, while the blade is behind the attacker, stopped or still slow. No power. The orc’s first mistake was to preface his attack with a significant backswing. An angry backswing. An unthinking backswing.
And Sorrows was not caught off guard. He rushed forward and locked a hand on the orc’s leading elbow at the point in the backswing when the blade had come to a complete halt and the orc’s weight was primarily on his back foot. Sorrows was a large man
