Dragonhammer: Volume II Read Online Free PDF Page A

around.
    “I will get you a place in this army.  I promise you.”
    Slowly the orc turns and looks me in the eye.  His eyes are observant and reveal a quick wit and a sharp mind.  He examines me and my hammer for a moment.  Then he nods.
    He is silent all the way back to his camp, which he has set up just north of the city on the bank of the Juniper River in a small clearing.  Bushes and shrubs line the edges of the clearing, and trees surround that further.  A small trail leads through the bracken to the main road.
    I say nothing.  There is nothing to be said.  What are you getting yourself into? I ask myself.  You’re going alone with someone you don’t know outside of a city in the evening during one of the worst wars we’ve seen in centuries.  And he’s an orc.
    I have to see if the stories are true , I tell myself.
    If they are? I ask myself.
    Let’s hope I am capable of besting him.
    Let’s hope it never comes to that.
    He gathers some small twigs, after which he gathers a larger pile of sizable branches.  He has built a small lean-to out of pine branches on the edge of the clearing, with a bedroll inside, and a fire pit in the middle of the clearing.
    He pulls a long bough from a tangle of branches and speculates it for a moment.  Then, with his bare hands, he breaks it in two.
    I stare in disbelief at the four-inch-thick logs he now holds in either hand.  Let’s really hope it doesn’t come to that.
    He lights a fire and sits on a large rock.  I stand across from him.
    He still wears his sword.  But I do not see a necklace with a human heart.  Nor a dagger carved from a femur.  Or even a belt lined with skulls.  I don’t even spot a single gold coin.
    Various questions come into my head, such as, What is his profession?  Where did he come from?  Why does he want to fight with us?
    I ask none of them and instead stare blankly into the orange flames.  It pops and sparks fly towards the river, rising with the smoke and dying before they can reach the vast cobalt sky.  Stars begin to appear.  My friends will wonder where I am, but I pay the thought no heed.
    The orc turns to his pack, which he had actually hefted down from a tree a few minutes earlier, and pulls out a large slab of meat still on the bone.  It is raw.
    Then he takes a long stick and penetrates the meat parallel to the bone.  He holds it over the fire.
    “ Thiem durash na- ” he catches himself and shakes his head.  “I…”  He searches for the right word.  “…killed boar in morning,” he says.  Slowly the smell of the roasting pork perpetrates the air and eventually my nostrils.  Juice hisses as it hits the hot orange coils, bubbling and quickly evaporating into nothingness.
    I look around for a bow with which he would have had to shoot the animal, but I see none.  The orc enjoys my confusion, and chooses to leave me in the dark.
    He rotates the ham.
    “Why you stand?” he asks.  It takes me a moment to respond and he interrupts, “You scared of me too?”
    I shake my head.  “Don’t like the dirt.  Disagrees with my backside.”
    “Rest your legs,” he commands.  Then he says, “ Sie thiem khroash durak yehr, unkha dur .”
    I recall the same words he had spoken in the city hours earlier.  If I wanted kill him, he’d be dead.
    With an amused smile, I sit down on the dirt across from him.
    “What do you do for a living?” I ask.
    He raises an eyebrow.
    “Job?” I continue.  “Work?”
    His eyes narrow.  “No understand,” he says.
    I shake my head.  “Where are you from?”
    “Arthensgulf,” he says.  I trace a map in my head and find Arthensgulf to be the province in the top left corner of the continent.  It’s the largest province and full of all kinds of cities and villages, but I do not bother to ask him specifically.
    Unable to think of other topics of conversation, I sit quietly, waiting for the pork to finish cooking.  Finally he pulls the pork from the fire, inspects