Forced Hand

“We try to be nice to puppy-men ever since they came, but they nothing but mean.” Soo-gan was not angry when he said it. That was the part that landed. “We okay with them being dumb, they not do much harm.”

Then his hands went still.

“Now they mess with sacred shrines though. Sacred shrines not for messing with. The Great Stones are here from all the way back when the Great Ones made us. We wouldn’t know what to do if the Great Mist Stone were hurt.” He looked north, toward the camp. “Go to their camp… make puppy-men stop and not come back.”

And then, quieter: “They always want fight. We no want fight, but we need to protect sacred stuffs.”

The Great Ones. He meant the titans, or something the gorlocs remembered of them. The same makers whose pillars I had defended for a thirty-foot woman made of bark and light, and whose crystals I had chipped off the base of one to hand to a wolvar shaman, and whose sacred stone I had broken open with my own mace because a wolvar hunter thought it would be funny.

The Spearborn Encampment was full of them. Spearbearers and scavengers who had been on my side of a fire just days ago. Some of them had watched me kill a Hardknuckle Matriarch and cheered.

The first one came at me the way they all do, straight in with the spear leading. Two scavengers tried to take me from either side. I caught the first blade on the haft of my axe, twisted it out of his grip, and put my knee into him hard enough to fold him. The second one’s swing went wide past my shoulder, which left him nothing to do about the backhand that broke his ribs.

After that it was work.

The last one gave ground with his spear shaking. An elbow to the jaw ended our discussion.

I stood in that camp afterward and counted what I had been in nine days. Slave to them, then hunter with them, then this.

“You squash good,” Soo-gan said when I returned. “Thank you for help.”

He had no idea he was thanking the man who broke his stone.

Soo-gan’s verdict was that Vikstone squashed good, which was the closest thing to a commendation the Mistwhispers offered, and it came with a road back south and Home Time!