Interlude: North II

“Twenty years will blend friend and foe.”

– Taghreb saying

Hakram Deadhand stood in a shadowed corner of the tent as his allies raucously argued, watching them in silence. The leaders of the dominant clans of the alliance, the Howling Wolves and the Red Shields, were trading the usual insults and boasts with the representatives of their allied clans. Dag Clawtoe and Oghuz the Lame towered above all others in that conversation, as had been the case from the start. Their clans were the largest and wealthiest, their deeds the greatest – in Oghuz’s case, anyway. Juniper’s father had been a famous champion for the Red Shields before his leg wound. Dag instead must rely on lesser deeds and the reputation of the cousin that’d overshadowed him all his life.

He was only the jemmek of the Howling Wolves, the camp-leader, even though Grem One-Eye had not returned to the Steppes in decades.

Adjutant did wade into the talks. He preferred not to. The moment to speak would come when the tent was empty and it was only he and Catherine, when he could complete her vision with what he’d seen and she hadn’t by virtue of not being so close to it all. Detachment had been in Hakram’s blood since he was but a boy but he’d made his peace with the feeling. Found the uses in having blood that rarely went red. Calm was what let you see with clarity and tonight, calmly looking at the alliance in this tent, what Adjutant saw was a losing proposition. The conversation was going through familiar, pointless circles.

It would take more than champions and challenges to cut into Troke Snaketooth’s support. It was attacking the symptom instead of the sickness: Troke was not popular because he had many champions, he had many champions because he was popular. The chieftain of the Blackspears was growing more powerful by the day, and the longer the conversation went on the more Hakram realized that none of them had any idea of what to do about it. It was not that they were fools, or dim, but that they’d never had to deal with being this position before. The Blackspears had a foul reputation, while the Howling Wolves and the Red Shields had been held in high honour for decades.

They were still popular even now, but the ground was shifting under their feet. Hakram thought that under all the boasts and shouts he might be hearing a thread of disquiet. They could feel it too, the wind turning against them.

There was no point in staying here, Adjutant realized. No solution to be found in this tent, only the same conversation had in one of a hundred different ways. Yet he was not discouraged, for Hakram Deadhand had already figured out where he would find his answer. Adjutant was one of the Woe, and so he knew that one could learn from enemies as well as allies. Still silent, he slipped out of the tent and into the muddy grounds of the great camp surrounding the fortress of Chagoro. Not too long ago, Hakram had received an invitation by Sigvin of the Split Tree Clan to begin private talks with the Blackspears in Callow’s name.

He still held no intention of accepting that invitation, but it brought something to mind: the Split Tree Clan itself.

As early as the delegations that’d been sent to Wolof he’d thought that alliance strange. The Blackspears had a reputation as feckless liars, while the Split Tree were known instead as cleaving close to old ways. They were known for their shamans, many of which could use magic, and for being willing to serve as mediators in the disputes of others. They were not a large clan, though, or one known for its warriors. So Hakram had assumed the alliance with the Blackspears to be a marriage of convenience: they were large and powerful but of poor repute and without a speck of magic to call on. The weaknesses of the Blackspears would make the Split Tree influential over them, difficult to dislodge even after Troke Snaketooth took power.

Except something didn’t fit in that story. Adjutant hadn’t noticed it the last time he’d gone to the edge of the territory claimed by the Split Tree Clan, but now that he knew what to look for it was hard to miss. Troke Snaketooth had been showering his allies and servants in wealth so that the display might attract others to his banner, but there was no trace of that wealth in the Split Tree camp. No herds of sheep put to roast, no great barrels of aragh and batak freed to flow, no baskets full of pottery and ivory and furs. No thick rings of gold and jewelled earrings. The Split Tree Clan was the most important ally to a wealthy chief on the rise, but it was not visibly gaining from that position. So what was it getting paid in, power? That was not enough.

Power might satisfy the chief and his closest circle, but a clan was more than these. They would see their friends and allies growing wealthy while they did not and there would be rumbles of discontent. So what was it that the Split Tree were getting? Hakram’s instincts told him that behind that truth lay the key to the alliance around the Blackspears, the key to understanding his foe. Perhaps even the key to turning this around. Unwilling to simply retreat after having come all this way, Hakram wandered off to the closest marketplace and bought a few skewers of horse before returning to lean against the tall post marking the edge of the Split Tree grounds. He’d been seen from the start, so he was not surprised when someone came out to meet him.

Or who it was that’d been sent. Sigvin wore one of those tunics showing a generous eyeful of her scarred shoulders, which a thick braid only drew attention to, but this time Hakram’s gaze did not stray. The calm was on him, the itch to understand what made something work. The same part of him that’d made a game about stacking stones to see how people would play it.

“If it’s my tent you’re looking for, Hakram, you’ll have to offer me a drink first,” Sigvin said, flashing her fangs flirtatiously. “And maybe tell me about Keter, since tales insist you’ve been there.”

The tall orc did not answer, continuing to look at her clan’s camp as he finished the last bits of his meat and tossed the skewers aside.

“Adjutant, then,” Sigvin mused, tone changing.

Hakram inclined his head to the side in agreement.

“You would have gone into the camp if you meant to accept Troke’s invitation to talk,” she continued, humming in interest. “So what is it that does bring you here, Deadhand?”

He had half a dozen lies ready, but what would be the point? What he wanted here was nothing for them to fear. Nothing they would not want to give him.

“I want to understand what the Split Tree gets from this,” Adjutant said. “Why this alliance, why now? Why are you so tightly bound to a clan you wouldn’t have looked at twice a decade ago?”

Sigvin did not look reluctant or cautious but pleased. He’d thought she might. And why wouldn’t she, when for the first time since Hakram had come to Chagoro he was trying to understand her clan instead of stepping over it?

“The answer is in your question, Hakram Deadhand,” Sigvin said. “A decade ago. Give or take a few years, that’s how long you’ve been gone isn’t it? Since you took to the Legions.”

“Give or take a few years,” Hakram agreed.

“The first of our kind Named in centuries,” Sigvin said. “And you never even came back to the Steppes.”

There’d been a lot of that talk when he first came here, especially as an envoy of Callow, but it’d died out after the first few crushing victories in duels. It wasn’t his people’s way to question strength.

“I wouldn’t be Named if I had,” Adjutant bluntly replied. “I found my path far from here and it did not lead back until now.”

And, for all that it had cost him and might yet, he did not regret it.

“An even more damning answer,” Sigvin replied just as bluntly. “You don’t see it because you were of the Howling Wolves and then a soldier far away, but we are not so blind: the Legions of Terror are eating the Clans, bit by bit.”

Hakram felt like scoffing but restrained himself. It was obvious she believed every word and Adjutant believed Sigvin to be an intelligent woman. She would have a reason to believe this.

“The Legions are making the Clans richer,” he replied instead, “and without the need to fight each other for that wealth. Our people return home with learning and allies. We have more influence in the affairs of the Tower than we’ve had in centuries because of the same ties you condemn.”

She shook her head.

“It’s the wrong sort of wealth, Adjutant,” Sigvin said. “It’s imperial coin, which we use to trade with them instead of each other. Our people come back using the Praesi system of measurement, building forges the goblin way, organizing warriors in companies instead of warbands. It’s hollowed out your own clan without Dag Clawtoe realizing it. The Howling Wolves don’t war for cattle and land anymore, they send their youths south and wait for the gold to return with them. Only gold’s not all that comes back. They began training their youngbloods in Legion drills a few years back, did you know? To give their youths an edge when they send them south to enrol.”

Sigvin paused, strong face twisted in disgust.

“Not if,” she said, “but when.”

There was much he could answer to that. Praesi measurements were superior in almost every regard to those used by learned orcs and them alone – horns and fingers – while goblins were the finest metalworkers on Calernia and warbands were unfit for anything but raiding as a military formation. It would have been easy to dismiss her words as that of someone from the old order, afraid of change even when that change was for the better. Except Sigvin was not a fool. So he looked at the camp of the Split Trees again with fresh eyes. Hide tents, but it was rare for a tent to be made all of the same hides. Different hunting grounds, trade with other clans. And on the people the jewelry was of many styles, be it thick torcs of the eastern steppes, the silver piercings from the headwater clans or the looping earrings of the south.

The Split Tree Clan was traditionalist, Hakram had known that, but he’d not truly considered what that would mean.

Their wealth, their gains, were made in the traditional mould of orc clans since the founding of the Empire. To the Split Tree, wealth was something temporary. Won when the clan claimed good riverside land for a season and pottery could be made from clay, when good grazing lands allowed the clan to stay long enough for smithies to be raised and weapons of quality forged. Surplus was traded to other clans to fill needs, and when the clan was in a strong position it went raiding – either other orcs or humans. That stolen wealth was brought back and used to strengthen the clan, sometimes even to absorb smaller neighbours. If things went well for a few years, the clan grew.

Clans too large were unsustainable, so the largest ones would then split into two and head different ways.

It was a rough way of life, but it had worked. The harshness of the Steppes culled the weak but it also ensured that there could never be a kingly clan standing above all others: hunger bit victors just as deep as the vanquished. As a closed circle, the old ways of the Steppes really did work. Only now the circle was no longer closed. The Legions since the Reforms were not the same as the armies of the old tyrants, which had once a reign drafted orcs by the hundreds of thousands for a campaign and then sent them back to the Steppes after the war. The modern Legions kept orcs for decades, taught them Praesi ways and enriched them before sending them home.

And Hakram Deadhand had seen this same machine at work before.

“The Carrion Lord really is a magnificent bastard,” he admitted. “I had little sympathy with the moaning of Callowans when his works were improving so many of their lives, but I understand a little better now.”

Sigvin frowned.

“I don’t follow,” she said.

“You think what you’ve found is a coincidence, then,” Adjutant mused. “That’s understandable, as you never saw the same unfold out west. But this is happening on purpose, Sigvin.”

Because that was the Carrion Lord’s way. The Clans could not truly be a part of a stable Praes as they were, so the man had set to smothering the aspects of orc culture that weren’t compatible with the Dread Empire he envisioned: the raiding, the nomadism, the factionalism. And as was typical of that particular monster, he’d gone about it through a method that the people being changed would not fight because it benefitted them. Because Sigvin was right to see the Clans being made dependent on the south, being bound tighter, but she was missing something: most orcs were better off this way. It was why the Legions and the Carrion Lord remained wildly popular in the Steppes to this day.

The Legions introduced wealth from the outside instead of the same limited wealth being competed over by clans, which meant that the Clans could actually grow now. And the way to bring home that gold was war, which Hakram’s people loved, and it just so happened that it drained the Steppes out of the same youngbloods who’d be pushing for raids and fighting between clans. And it was a form of war that required training, which took time, so why shouldn’t clans move less? They could afford to now that they were wealthier, anyway. Which they would remain, so long as they kept sending warriors to the Legions. Then once those soldiers returned home, having fought side by side with each other and humans, they found that fighting with the Clans and the rest of the Empire lost its allure.

How many of your old army friends would you have to kill so you could steal cattle worth less than a few months of Legion pay?

Hakram sighed. This wasn’t Malicia’s work. It was not the Empress’ way to change a system when she already mastered it. Yet she’d likely recognized the trend and was not against reversing it, because orcs truly integrated into Praes were yet another power block she must handle. One that espoused military virtues she distinctly lacked, to boot. Shortly before the Liesse Rebellion, Malicia had forced the Clans to pay the tributes they’d withheld during the reign of Nefarious, which had had the effect of lowering orc enrolment in the Legions. This now seemed less like an isolated incident and more the like the beginning of a comprehensive policy that had just recently received its crowning jewel.

Malicia made lords of the Steppes, Adjutant thought, which seems like bringing us into the fold but is functionally the opposite. Her lords of the Steppes did not hold land. They collected the orcish tributes on behalf of the Tower, which was an additional layer of separation between Praes and the Clans. Gatekeepers of influence who, by the very limitations of their role – duties that would see them despised by other orcs, authority that derived directly from the Tower – could never rise to be a threat to her reign. Now that elegant little twist, the gift that doubled as clipped wings, had Malicia’s signature over it. And it explained why the forces behind the Blackspears were so willing to cut a deal with the Dread Empress.

“So when Troke makes cause with Malicia, your clan backs him because he’s not just looking to be a lord of the Steppes,” Hakram gravelled. “He wants to be the High Lord of the Steppes.”

Someone in a position to undo Legion influence, who by virtue of their title could stand between the Clans and the Empire and force a heathy distance. Sigvin bared her fangs at him, openly pleased.

“So you do understand,” she said, then slightly bared her neck in a display of vulnerability. “I had feared you might not.”

No wonder the Split Tree were good as sown to Troke’s side, he thought. Both the Red Shields and the Howling Wolves were heavily tied to the Legions and had no intention of changing that policy considering how it’d paid off for them. As far as the Split Tree Clan was concerned, the alliance behind Hakram was perhaps the sole coalition of clans they could not under any circumstances allow to win. Otherwise the Legions would sink their hooks into all the larger clans and the trend would grow irreversible. Adjutant pushed off from the marking post.

“Leaving already?” Sigvin asked.

“I need to think,” Hakram simply said.

About how this could be turned around.

About whether it should.

—

It took time to gather two hundred stones, enough that darkness fell.

At the edge of the great camp that’d risen up around Chagoro, Hakram Deadhand sat alone in the dirt with a bright moon hung high above his head. Before him lay only flatlands of long grass and the distant rising expanse of the Northern Steppes, a horizon of nothingness crowned by cold stars. And just the way he had when he’d been a boy, Hakram stacked stones. Seventy in a pile to the left. A rough estimate of the clans that backed Troke Snaketooth and his Blackspears, the orcs that stood behind the dream of a High Lord of the Steppes. Forty-six in a pile to the right, Dag and Oghuz and old loyalties. The promises of the Conquest, faithfully kept, and hunger for more of the same.

In between the piles stood a sea of undecided clans, smaller alliances that a day’s turn could make or break. Orcs with their ear to the wind, waiting to hear how it would turn.

Through this, Hakram had laid out the bare shape of the taratoplu taking place at the fortress of Chagoro. This was the game he had been playing since he came here, promises and sigils and duels. It was the game Troke Snaketooth had been beating him at, would keep beating him at. Hakram did not know the lay of this land the way the Blackspear chieftain did, the friendships and feuds and shared stories that bound the Clans together as a people. Which meant, in truth, that he had been playing the wrong game. So Hakram leaned forward to trace three symbols in the dirt with a finger of bone: a helmet, a skull and a fang.

The helmet he knew best, what it stood for. The clans that had tied themselves to the Legions, to the Reforms, to the empire promised them by the Carrion Lord. The chiefs who wanted to make some camps permanent, kept through all seasons. Only part of the clan would stay at first, for forges and drilling warriors and trade, but it would grow from there. Southern wealth pouring in, ever-closer ties to the empire, old ways abandoned in favour of more practical ones. Clans that heeded this new path would flourish, those that resisted it would whither and die. That path for the Clans had its roots in the alliance under Dag and Oghuz, a tie strong enough that repeated defeats had not shattered their faction.

The skull he’d only begun to understand today. The clans that saw ahead of them a world where the Steppes were swallowed up by the Empire, where orcs forsook Kharsum for Lower Miezan and began singing of emperors instead of warlords. Where the Steppes grew ugly towns like tumours, imperial colonies of greenskin legionaries in the heartlands of the orcs. Those clans wanted disengagement. Ties with the Legions weakened and a unifying leader – be they warlord or high lord – to keep the Tower at bay so the Clans could become as a nation. Because that was what lay behind Sigvin’s talk of culture: the Steppes as a kingdom within the Dread Empire.

That path had its roots in the backers of Snake Troketooth, but would not have great loyalty to the man. It had chosen him as a candidate because he could be influenced and served their purposes, not out of any love for the cheiftain

And the last, the fang, was somehow both the simplest and the most complex of the three. It was everyone else, the chiefs and clans who cared nothing for either sort of talk. Hunger had no philosophy, for all that the Wasteland liked to pretend otherwise. The great majority of the clans would follow who promised the best plunder, the most food, who allowed them to settle grudges to their advantage and earn glory in battle. Some of these had gone Troke’s way already because he looked like the winner and they wanted to be on the winner’s side. There was no vision of the future behind them save a gaping maw biting down on the world, and more orcs thinking this way than the other two put together. It was a path without intent, the Clans remaining as they were and letting Creation pass them by. Walking away from the end of the Age of Wonder, guests in their own world.

These were, Hakram Deadhand thought, the three paths now laid out for the Clans: integration, disengagement, abstention. Only they were all flawed, he thought, and so he turned to address the night.

“You would argue for the helmet, I know,” Hakram said. “Even though you refused your own people that fate and crowned Vivienne so she could reforge the broken shards of the Old Kingdom.”

Catherine would lean the way of the Legions because the Legions were as much her home as the land she’d bled so much for. It would change the orcs, she might argue, but would it be for the worse? Raiding put the Clans at odds with everyone around them, internal wars weakened them as a people and permanent towns would make life better for tens of thousands of orcs. It would be a greater good than evil, she’d argue.

“But there will be a price,” Hakram told the night. “We will become the Duni of the north. Good for fighting and labour but not truly Praesi. We lose everything that we are without becoming equals.”

Perhaps in one or two generations if the Reforms held that would become untrue, but that was a roll of the dice. Would the Reforms hold? Even if the Carrion Lord came to rule, as Catherine wanted, would his successors continue his policies? It was betting the fate Clans on trust in a Tower whose steps dripped with the blood of a thousand coups. Hakram’s gaze drifted to the left, where another ghost waited for him to argue with. There was not a doubt in his mind that Vivienne Dartwick would be on the side of disengagement, of the skull.

“You’d argue that the Split Tree are right,” Hakram said. “That Praes would ruin us and only distance can prevent it. A High Lord of the Steppes would keep away the Tower and let us strengthen ourselves, make our own laws and change on our own terms.”

But that, too, was ignoring some truths. Because even Sigvin, who cursed the Legions with her eyes, had not spoken of ending ties with them entirely. Engaging with Praes enriched the Clans in a way that isolation simply could not. Starvation was no longer decided by the year being good or bad, by a raid or a war having gone one way or the other. Already the Clans traded almost as much with humans as they did with each other, by the estimates of the Eyes, and ending that trend would starve and impoverish half the Steppes. The Clans could live without Praes but to grow, to thrive? The Dread Empire was needed.

As for the Praesi, the land the orcs lived in was a heavy hand on the fate of the people.

“I don’t believe we would hold, without either war or Praes,” Hakram told the night. “We are not Callow, Vivienne. Even at our peak, we were not a nation in the human way of it. We unite against something, someone – or when there is another way to gain aside from eating each other.”

How long would the closed kingdom that Sigvin dreamed of truly last once the war ended? How many clans backing Troke would stay loyal, when their bellies were full and their chests filled with plunder and there was nothing left to do but return home to the same old feuds? It was building a tower on sand. And that left only one path, the fang. Burying one’s head in the sand, failing to make anything of the great gathering at Chagoro. And so the night could only wear one face: golden eyes and dark skin. Akua Sahelian. Another who now sat at crossroads, the threshold of changes only dimly felt.

“I can break it,” the Adjutant said. “The taratoplu. I would only need to raise another two past forty stones to take the wind out of Troke’s sails, and I… know that it can be done.”

The aspect pulsed in him faintly. Find. If he went looking for the hammers that would bring down this house, he would find them. This he knew, sure as dawn. Hakram could prevent anyone from winning, play on greed and fear and hope. Had he not stood at the side of the uncontested mistress of that method for many years? And it was what he was meant to do, as the Adjutant, if he could not secure the help of the Clans for the Grand Alliance. It was better than letting them side with Malicia. And yet he did not rise.

“What is it like, Sahelian, where you sit?” he asked the night. “It is cold away from the fire, cold enough madness earns the ring of sense and certainties turn to sand between your fingers?”

Hakram had gotten a taste of what it would be like, losing Catherine. Losing the Woe. Becoming just another of those left behind, buried or forgotten. And while the shard of fear at the heart of that had been put to rest by the Grey Pilgrim as a city died around them, there could be no return to the way things had been afterwards. It was different now because he was different and she was different. Pretending otherwise did neither of them any favours. Now they both knew they could hurt each other in ways they could not, would not forgive.

There was no unlearning that.

“I don’t want to ruin them,” he admitted. “To give them a nothing-future, to rob them of the pivot everyone else was allowed.”

And this was something he wanted for himself. What a small, terrifying truth that was to be echoing so large in his mind. Because Hakram knew that, as much as he would like to blame the ghosts and the night, he was the only one here. And already he knew, deep down, that if he was not satisfied by any of the paths others would lay out for the Clans then there was only one answer left.

He just didn’t want to look that truth in the eye.

Instead he looked back at the camp, the torches lighting up the night around the tall Soninke fortress. What did he owe these people, anyway? Hakram had left for the War College and never looked back. Life in the Steppes had left him adrift, a leaf in the wind. It had been a long way from here, from this land of gnawing, that he had found a home. What did ten thousand miles of snow and the poor fools in it matter to him, that he should sacrifice for them? And it would be a sacrifice, he would not delude himself otherwise. He and Catherine had been bound by an oath under moonlight, and it would be the end of that oath. Even if it was taken again, it would not be the same.

So Hakram turned his gaze ahead, finding… nothing. Empty plains as far as the eye could see, bathed in white. The same kind of emptiness he had glimpsed in Scribe after she was cut adrift. He’d wondered, sometimes, if she had been like him from the start. If becoming one of the Calamities had been like someone blew colours into a world of grey, like finally she could taste and hate and want to be someone. Only it’d not been about the Calamities, had it? It’d been about the Carrion Lord, and the Carrion Lord had set her free of his service in an act of loving cruelty. Cat still thought Eudokia would turn on them, but Hakram knew better. No one would risk being scalded like that twice.

And had Hakram not, this very day, boasted in the privacy of his own mind that he knew how to learn from enemies and allies both? The Webweaver had been one and the other, at different times, and ever a warning since they encountered each other in Salia.

“A temple built on a single pillar will fall,” Hakram said, quoting an old Miezan proverb.

And he still did not want to ruin his kind. To make them less than they could be. There was a path to chart, he thought. One he could dimly make out in the gloom of the night. A way to take from the empire without being taken, to stand without standing alone. It would be dangerous and delicate, play great powers against each other and raise a banner that could not be easily lowered. But it could be done. Hakram just wished that someone else could do it in his stead. Yet the stones did not lie, he thought, looking down. They never did. In a game of diminishing returns there could be no winner, only shades of defeat.

And if not Hakram, then who?

Moonlight painted the empty plains pale, and the stones at his feet too. Adjutant – no, not that anymore he thought. Perhaps never again. He was not making the choice of that path. Hakram Deadhand rose to his feet, bathed in moonlight, with no one to pull him up. A western breeze rustled across tall grass, a shiver, and old words came to him. The Old Boast, which orcs had once sung blade in hand when the hands and blades were still theirs.

“I made an empire out of nothing

So,

Warring under the summer sun

Rivers ran red, the sky did weep

As I raised a city of clay

To rule men from far away.

But as my glory fades to gray

And rides to me my own red day

Now I know clay does not keep,

And that rivers, both ways they run:

So,

I made an empire out of nothing.”

Stillness reigned in his wake. Warlord, the wind whispered against the grass. The poem was an old boast, an old warning. Kingdoms came, kingdoms went and so much for their petty kings. People were never as important as they thought they were.

But if not Hakram, then who?

So he went back to the torches, to the camp.

To the work that needed doing.