Page 1 of The False Shaman (Claimed by the Red Hand #2)

DROKO

The Dead Man’s Cliff loomed above me. It blotted out the noonday sun. Formidable, to say the least, an absolute brute of a climb. And at the crest, the telltale glint of stormsilver beckoned.

It was high—much higher than it had looked from a distance—and I was no climber. But for even a walnut-sized nugget of the precious metal, it would be worth the risk. My mind was made up. I would go back to the Two Swords Clan with the stormsilver in my grasp…or I wouldn’t go back at all.

“Is the Great Droko having second thoughts?”

The lisp of Crespash’s taunts slithered like worms in the rain. Never mind my slave’s thick goblin accent. With his teeth long ago yanked from his skull, he mutilated the common tongue.

But I understood him perfectly well. I’d been ignoring his jibes for years.

He grinned wide, flashing gums the color of stone. “You don’t need to prove yourself, you know. You’re the chieftain’s son—”

“His third son.”

“And just by pissing upright, you command the type of respect most young orcs would die for. Why break your neck over a silly bit of metal?”

For all that Crespash annoyed me, his council was usually sound. It was merely a matter of considering his suggestion…then doing the opposite. I planted myself at the foot of the cliff and shielded my eyes from the sun, searching for the telltale reflective glint of the precious alloy.

Crespash, as usual, was no help at all. He parked himself under the shade of a nearby aspen and said, “I, personally, wouldn’t dream of going through all this trouble to please a woman I hadn’t even met. Not to mention the fact that Farya is promised to you, so it’s a done deal.”

Maybe so, but promises can be broken. Farya’s father had betrothed her to me when I was just a boy—before we lost land to the Red Hand Clan. “If there’s stormsilver to be had, I’m not walking away without it.” In the wake of my clan’s defeat, it was more important than ever to prove myself. I placed my back to the sun and squinted harder.

The goblin followed my gaze. “What makes you think there is any stormsilver to be had, anyway? Did your shaman feed you another prognostication about your path to success? Maybe it came to him in a dream, or he discovered it among some dusty scrolls…or he read the omen in the sound of a cow’s fart. It’s all balderdash. You know the only talent he’s really got is telling people what they want to hear.”

“You wouldn’t dare say that in earshot of his honor guard.”

“Did you notice any fanatics in white paint lurking around all the way out here at the bluffs? I certainly didn’t.”

I grunted. My eldest brother put great stock in our shaman’s pronouncements. Though it had always seemed to me that in retrospect, the prophetic utterances were vague enough to fit anything.

Still, I wasn’t about to agree openly with a heretical goblin slave. Even if there was no one else around to hear it.

Crespash took up a stick and idly shoved a bird’s nest from the tree. It landed with a muffled thump. He plucked an egg from the clump of straw with his stumpy fingers and broke the contents into his mouth, swallowing the glob whole as he eyed the cliffside. “That’s a sheer climb. You could break a leg—or your skull. And for what? You’ve never even laid eyes on this Farya. For all you know, she’s nothing but skin and bones, with the personality of a pot of gruel. I’ll bet she snores like a congested dwarf.”

The goblin was just baiting me. True, I’d never heard any tales of Farya’s beauty, or wit, or strength…but she was a chieftain’s daughter. She’d at least be well-fed.

There—up by the dangling tree roots—was that a glint? A cloud passed in front of the sun before I could know for sure.

“Y’know what your problem is?” No doubt Crespash would take great pleasure in telling me. “I think you’re in love with love. Oh, any orc would swear on the stars, moon and sky that it’s not so—but you’ve got it in your mind that marriage is all about finding that one true mate. You think your life will only start once you move out from the longhouse and establish a household of your own. Pump out a brood of bouncing, green baby orclets, and finally, for once, you’ll be happy. Even though you’re at your apex right now, and you’ll never be anything more than the third son of a failed chieftain—”

“Hold your tongue!”

“Or what?” He flashed his gray gums. “You’ll cut it out?”

“First you claim my birthright earns respect, and now it’s the pinnacle of a sorry life. So, which is it?”

“I suppose it’s only the rambling of a lowly goblin whose inferior mind surely can’t comprehend the intricacies of your advanced orcish ways.”

I knew better than to dwell on the slave’s words—the only point of the conversation was to provoke me. What rankled was that he wasn’t entirely wrong. I was itching to get out of the longhouse. To distinguish myself. To be my own man. Things I could only hope to achieve once I’d married. Until then, I would just be another green face in a sea of unproven orcs, living under someone else’s roof and following someone else’s orders.

And until the time came when I finally took Farya as my wife, I’d have to make sure her father had no reason to change his mind.

Which meant scaling the cliff.

It was a daunting challenge. The stone walls were steep, craggy, and slippery with moss. The tree roots provided ample handholds, but they unraveled when I hauled at them with too much force, leaving me hanging precariously in mid-air. My arms burned as I climbed, forcing me to move quickly between handholds. Every foothold threatened to crumble beneath my feet as I scaled the cliff.

At times, it felt like I was making very little progress, as if I’d been stuck in the same spot for hours. But just when my arms and legs were about ready to give out, I found my final handhold and heaved myself up onto the crest, then stood atop the cliffside looking down at Crespash.

He gave me a bored salute.

Chest heaving, I took in the valley below—and the sight of my home village, with its trampled smithy, and the only smoke coming from cooking fires—and fell to my knees to claw at the earth with my bleeding fingers in search of a fitting brideprice for Farya.

I scrabbled at the dirt, digging through tree root and clay, unwilling to concede that maybe I was wrong, and maybe the glint I thought I’d seen was nothing more than a trick of the light. My hope faded as the sun rose higher in the sky. But just when it seemed all was lost, my fingers hit upon something hard and metallic.

I gripped the rounded lump tightly and pulled with all my might. It came free with reluctance, as if the greedy earth itself didn’t want to part with the metal. It was bigger than I’d hoped—the size of a goose egg, maybe larger. As I worked it loose, the ground beneath me began to crackle with electric discharge, and sparks raced up my arms. It was an eerie feeling—like discovering you’ve been sleeping on an anthill. But I could feel in my bones that this hunk of metal held a great power. Not a mystical power. Merely one that would allow me to fulfill my dreams of marrying Farya and establishing my own household.

I tucked the heavy lump away in my belt pouch, descended from the cliff, and headed toward my village with Crespash trailing along behind me, remarking about how the day-long task would have taken little more than an hour, had his claws not been lopped off at the top knuckle years ago, back when he was first captured pilfering from the clan. Maybe so, were it not just as likely he’d have murdered me in my sleep by now. I didn’t argue. I was too eager to get back and clean myself up for Farya’s arrival.

As we neared the village, I spotted the colors of Farya’s clan among our own guard.

“They’re early,” Crespash said.

“Maybe it’s better this way.”

The goblin smirked. “Well, I’ll be. Is that a hint of optimism I detect?”

“Only logic. If their chieftain sees what I went through to capture the stormsilver, it will have more impact than if I just presented it to him polished and pretty. He’ll see that I’m determined and strong. A fit husband for his daughter.”

“Perhaps,” Crespash said as we approached the village perimeter. “But I think your elder brother might be more excited about Farya than about the stormsilver.”

The visitors had congregated in a place of honor inside our gate, flanked by both their guards and ours as the chieftains conferred. My betrothed was just a few paces away. She was a handsome young woman, sturdy and serious, with curling dark hair, skin the fresh green of spring moss, and heavily worked armor befitting a chieftain’s daughter. But by her side, in the spot where I should be…my elder brother stood. Back straight. Chin raised. And plainly pleased with himself.

I stopped in my tracks, searching for some other possible interpretation of what might be happening. But my eyes didn’t lie.

Only my mother noticed me standing with my slave at the gate. She uttered something—a diplomatic excuse, no doubt—and strode over to intercept. Though her hair was shot through with gray now and she could no longer heft a double-headed battleaxe, she still commanded great respect. She greeted me not with the ceremonial words the occasion called for, but with a simple jerk of her head, urging me to veer away from the visitors before I was seen.

I followed her to an empty guard tower, and only once we were far from the rest of the orcs did Matra finally speak.

“Droko—” she said with a deep sigh, “you’ll be disappointed by what I have to tell you, but sometimes victory means swallowing your pride. Right now, we’re weakened–and we need to keep Farya’s father happy. He wants your brother as her husband, so that’s exactly what he’ll get.”

“But she was promised to me—”

“And now she’s promised to your brother.” Matra cupped my jaw and thumbed some grit from my cheek. “Listen, my Little Fearless One.” I was glad there was no one else in earshot as she called me by her pet name. And then I heard Crespash snort. “It took a lot of coaxing for them to accept the second son of the Two Swords Clan, let alone the third. If your eldest brother wasn’t already wed with children of his own, they would have demanded him.”

A month ago, our neighbors wouldn’t have dared. They were a small clan, and their hunting grounds were poor. Hardly anyone who could make demands. But that was before the Red Hand pounded through our village like a great fist.

Matra went on. “Even with the alliance of Farya’s clan, we’re still on shaky ground. But there is a way to settle the differences between us and the Red Hand and ensure that if the trolls come clawing at our gates or the ogres raid our stores, the clans will stand together once more, like they did when I was young.”

I was disappointed. But I listened dutifully to my mother as she explained how to help my clan…and not on the battlefield with my two best swords. “The Red Hand has extended a treaty—a generous one—that reinstates all our original boundaries to where they were before that cursed river started shifting.”

“That is generous,” I murmured.

Crespash chimed in. “What’s the catch?”

“Their ancient shaman is finally dead and they need to replace him. The old man was solitary and he had no followers, so we must surrender our shaman’s chief acolyte.”

A shaman that was willing to pass on his ways collected followers like a ripe corpse collects flies. I’d never had much use for these so-called mystics. They’re sorry fighters, useless at following orders, and insufferable in their attitude toward the rest of the clan. A drain on the clan's resources all around, though occasionally—rarely—an acolyte reveals some ability of his own.

If you believe in that sort of thing.

“What’s the holdup?” I asked. “Our temple is overcrowded as it is. Send over the shaman pup and get our lands back.”

Matra shook her head in disgust. “If it were that easy, it would be done. But the acolyte was among the first to fall in the Red Hand’s attack.”

“Then send another. There’s plenty to choose from.”

“Not one of them fits his description. None of them are Two Swords orcs by birth, as he was. None of them have the same out-curved tusks, or the same flecks of gold in the eye.”

“Would it really be so hard for anyone to claim he was a shaman?” Crespash wondered aloud. “Especially if they’re destined for a clan who’s mostly ignorant of their inscrutable ways.”

The goblin was onto something. I said, “There must be at least a dozen other men of the acolyte’s age who’d jump at the chance to take the dead orc’s place and be known as the one who made Two Swords strong again.”

“Oh, there are, my Fearless One. But if this deception were found out, the Red Hand clan wouldn’t just reclaim our lands…they’d crush us. And your father can’t trust any of those men as well as he trusts you.”

I’ve faced many things in my life with courage. A charging boar. An enemy’s blade. Even a raging ogre. But the prospect of marching into a warring clan and declaring myself a shaman filled my belly with unspeakable dread.

My mother thrust a bundle of hides into my hands. I shook it out and revealed a deerskin cloak adorned with cryptic markings and bright feathers. My dread redoubled. She said, “These are your father’s wishes. It’s your duty to do as he commands.”

“It’s either that or stand around watching your brother marry your betrothed,” Crespash added cheerfully. “Hardly much of a choice, now…is it?”