Chapter 57 – Orc War Flag

At night, in the clearing of the East Valley lumberyard, Grid and Jace practiced against each other with their swords for two hours, finally reaching the point of exhaustion before collapsing into a nearby pile of logs.

The soldiers’ camp on the other side of the main road burned brightly with the light of campfires, and the road from the East Valley lumberyard all the way to the east into the Red Ridge Pass was littered with patrols and sentries.

The kingdom can be said to have gone to great lengths to protect the commercial routes of the three towns.

But then a portion of the Western Springs Fortress and the Western Wilderness would be siphoned off, and it was to be expected that the Jackals there would gradually begin to wreak havoc.

The two men returned to the borrowed tent and Griddles twitched his nose and said, “Do you smell a foul odor. Did some animal pee in our tent?”

At this, Jace felt a surge of nervousness, it couldn’t be that he smelled the sulfur on Saeuno, could it?

He glanced at the warlock’s bag where the brat was hiding, it still lay dry and unmoving, it was logical to say that the scholars and mages of the Sorcerer’s Sanctuary couldn’t detect the wave of darkness energy, how could the Griddles detect it, did the Barbarian Hammer Dwarves have some kind of racial talent for detecting demons?

“I don’t smell it.” Jess said, “Where are the animals here, foxes, meerkats?”

Grid lowered his head and sniffed around, his nose skimming over the warlock’s bag but not lingering before Jace dropped his heart.

The dwarf finally put his hand on the package Marin had handed to Jace and said, “That’s the smell coming from this thing, what do you have in here?”

“That’s what the boss wanted me to send to Stone Castle.” Jace collapsed on the cloth cushion in exhaustion and said, “Better not fiddle with it, he didn’t ask me to open it, what if I open it and he fines me, get some sleep.”

“But this stuff stinks.” Grider said, “Don’t you care?”

“How bad can it smell?” Jace, who couldn’t smell anything at all, moved closer to the package and put his nose close to the tightly tied mouth, and sure enough, he smelled a foul odor.

It was like the smell of something that had been muffled for a long time, but it wasn’t just cloth, it did carry a tawdry odor.

Now, Jess couldn’t sleep with a straight face.

The two men sat here staring at the package, Grid looked at Jace every now and then and said, “Open it up and see how your boss can possibly know if you’ve opened it or not, there’s no lock on it.”

Jace scratched his head and said, “Are you sure a mage needs a lock to know if it’s open or not, that’s not really good, what if there’s some kind of magical trap?”

“Indeed.” Grid froze for a second and suddenly got on, “I’ll open it then.”

“Hey, don’t you.” Before Jace could say anything, Grid had already unraveled the package, and in addition to the letter, a ball of something earthy inside rolled out that looked like some sort of clothing made of animal skins.

“It’s something.”

Grid pulled out a piece and looked at it, realizing that it was not a garment, but simply a piece of treated animal skin fabric.

“Is this an animal skin rug, or something?”

“You put it back ……,” said Jess helplessly.

And the further out Grider pumped it, the more flavorful it got.

Finally when Grid unfolded the whole thing in its entirety, the whole tent smelled like a long-standing tawdry odor, as if it had been on a tiger at the zoo, and Jace could hardly stand it.

But that’s when he realized what this thing was, it wasn’t a dress or a rug, it was a flag, a war seal banner of an orc tribe.

“This is the flag of the orc tribe.”

“Looks like it to me too, can you tell what the emblem on this is?” Grid asked as he fully unfolded the part with the emblem and placed it in front of Jace.

Jace cocked his head, finding the right angle to finally see what was on top of the flag.

“It’s a faucet.”

“A dragon’s head?” Grid asked, “Orc flags would have dragon heads on them? Draenor has dragons too?”

Jace was surprisingly unsure of how to answer that question at once, Draenor was supposed to be free of dragons, but he couldn’t say if there were any more now.

If Talon Blood Demon had returned to the Gate of Darkness, that would mean that Deathwing, the king of the black dragons who had cooperated with the Orc Horde, had followed him through the Gate of Darkness.

He traveled to Draenor to find a safe place to keep his dragon’s egg that was not harassed by other dragons?and intended to build the new Black Dragon’s Nest there.

“There is a clan among the orcs called the Dragonthroat Clan.” Jace said, “The same orcs that fight on red dragons, don’t you associate them with that?”

Grid immediately said, “Of course I …… know about the Red Dragon and the Dragon-Throat Clan. But these orcs simply changed their clan names just because they tamed the red dragon?”

“How should I know, ask their big chief yourself some other time.” Jace said, “My boss probably found this orc flag somewhere, so he thought it would be beneficial to show it to his colleagues at Stone Fortress to track where the red dragons were going, right? I don’t know, I’m just in charge of delivering the message anyway.”

“Tracking where the Red Dragons are going?” Grid said in surprise, “What’s the point of chasing them, they can go wherever they like, it’s better if they disappear from this world forever, why bother with them?”

In the eyes of the vast majority of warriors who had fought in the orc wars, red dragons were evil, brutal beasts, and this was not a good time for any kind of sci-fi worldview, he was stuck until he exploded.

“Mages want to find an eye-catching research topic and then publish some claptrap in Dalaran to gain popularity, ah, promotion. Let’s not get involved in their nonsense, Grid, get some sleep.”

When he had finished, he wrapped the battle flag back into the bag, put the letter back in place, made to block the opening, and then pulled the tent door open for ventilation.

A cool evening breeze blew in as fall set in, and Jess wrapped into her blouse and hid in the corner.

“I should have gone to your house first to get that wolf skin top.” He muttered.

“Too much baggage will be too much for the horses.” Grid laid back down and said, “I’m still a little concerned about the orcs.”

Early in the morning, before dawn, the two men were on their way with a cavalry party going on patrol to the Red Ridge Mountains, and they were accompanied by a number of brigands and traders who rode their own horses to go about their business.

By the time it was about 10 o’clock in the morning they could see a vast lake from a distance.

Jace looked out over the water that seemed like a bay and took a big, hard breath, as if he were trying to draw the scent of the water over there into his nose.

One of the horsemen in front of us shouted, “There’s Lake Stopper up ahead, and soon we’ll be in Lakeside Town, folks!”

A cheer went up from the caravan and the travelers, and Grid shouted along with them.

I don’t know what these people have been through before, is it even luck that there were no attacks on this trip? Maybe it’s also an unwritten tacit agreement, like the people who applaud when an airplane lands.