No one in the tribe knew if it had gotten its name through its traditional battle tactics, or if the succession of chieftains had fashioned the tactics to fit the name. Whatever the cause-effect, their peculiar battle posture had been perfected through generations. Indeed, the leaders of Wolf Jaw selected orcs at a young age based on size and speed to find the appropriate place in the formation each might best fit.
Choosing the enemy and the battleground was more important even than that, if the dangerous maneuver was to work. And no orc in the tribe’s history had been better at such tasks than the present chieftain, Dnark of the Fang. He was descended from a long line of point warriors, the tip of the fangs of the wolf jaw that snapped over its enemies. For years, young Dnark had spearheaded the top line of the V formation, sliding out along the left flank of an intended target, while another orc, often a cousin of Dnark’s, led the right, or bottom, jaw. When the lines stretched to their limit, Dnark would swing his assault group to a sharp right, forming a fang, and he and his counterpart would join forces, sealing the escape route at the rear of the enemy formation.
As chieftain, though, Dnark anchored the apex. His jaws of warriors went out north and south of the small encampment, and when the signals came back to the chieftain, he led the initial assault, moving forward with his main battle group.
They did not charge, and did not holler and hoot. Instead, they approached calmly, as if nothing was amiss—and indeed, why would King Obould’s shaman advisor suspect anything different?
The camp did stir at the approach of so large a contingent, with calls for Nukkels to come forth from his tent.
Ung-thol put his hand on Dnark’s arm, urging restraint. “We do not know his purpose,” the shaman reminded.
Nukkels appeared a few moments later, moving to the eastern end of the small plateau he and his warriors had used for their pause. Beside him, Obould’s powerful guards lifted heavy spears.
How Dnark wanted to call for the charge! How he wanted to lead the way up the rocky incline to smash through those fools!
But Ung-thol was there, reminding him, coaxing him to patience.
“Praise to King Obould!” Dnark called out, and he took his tribe’s banner from an orc to the side and waved it around. “We have word from Chieftain Grguch,” he lied.
Nukkels held up his hand, palm out at Dnark, warning him to hold back.
“We have no business with you,” he called down.
“King Obould does not share that belief,” Dnark replied, and he began his march again, slowly. “He has sent us to accompany you, as more assurance that Clan Karuck will not interfere.”
“Interfere with what?” Nukkels shouted back.
Dnark glanced at Ung-thol, then back up the rise. “We know where you are going,” he bluffed.
It was Nukkels’s turn to look around at his entourage. “Come in alone, Chieftain Dnark,” he called. “That we might plot our next move.”
Dnark kept moving up the slope, calm and unthreatening, and he did not bid his force to lag behind.
“Alone!” Nukkels called more urgently.
Dnark smiled, but otherwise changed not a thing. The orcs beside Nukkels lifted their spears.
It didn’t matter. The bluff had played its part, allowing Dnark’s core force to close nearly half the incline to Nukkels. Dnark held up his hands to Nukkels and the guards then turned to address his group—ostensibly to instruct them to wait there.
“Kill them all—except for Nukkels and the closest guards,” he instructed instead, and when he turned back, he had his sword in hand, and he raised it high.
The warriors of Clan Wolf Jaw swept past him on either side, those nearest swerving to obstruct their enemies’ view of their beloved chieftain. More than one of those shield orcs died in the next moments, as spears flew down upon them.
But the jaws of the wolf closed.
By the time Dnark got up to the plateau, the fighting was heavy all around him and Nukkels was nowhere to be found. Angered by that, Dnark threw himself into the nearest battle, where a pair of his orcs attacked a single guard, wildly and ineffectively.
Obould had chosen his inner circle of warriors well.
One of the Wolf Jaw orcs stabbed in awkwardly with his spear, but the guard’s sword swept across and shattered the hilt, launching it out to confuse the attacker’s companion. With the opening clear, the guard retracted and stepped forward for the easy kill.
Except that Dnark came in fast from the side and hacked the fool’s sword arm off at the elbow.
The guard howled and half-turned, falling to its knees and clutching its stump. Dnark stepped in and grabbed it by the hair, tugging its head back, opening its neck for a killing strike.
And always before, the chieftain of Clan Wolf Jaw would have taken that strike, would have claimed that kill. But he held back his sword and kicked the guard in the throat instead, and as it fell away, he instructed his two warriors to make sure that the fallen enemy didn’t die.
Then he went on to the next fight in a long line of battles.
When the skirmish on the plateau ended, though, Shaman Nukkels was not to be found, either among the seven prisoners or the score of dead. He had gone off the back end at the first sign of trouble, so said witnesses.
Before Dnark could begin to curse that news, however, he found that his selections for the fangs of the formation had done his own legacy proud, for in they marched, Nukkels and a battered guard prodded before them with spears.
“Obould will kill you for this,” Nukkels said when presented before Dnark.
Dnark’s left hook left the shaman squirming on the ground.
“The symbol is correct,” Nanfoodle proudly announced. “The pattern is unmistakable.”
Regis stared at the large copy of the parchment, its runes separated and magnified. On Nanfoodle’s instruction, the halfling had spent the better part of a day transcribing each mark to that larger version then the pair had spent several days cutting out wooden stencils for each—even for those that seemed to hold an obvious correlation to the current Dwarvish writing.
Mistaking that tempting lure, accepting the obvious runes for what they supposed them to be, Dethek runes of an archaic orc tongue called Hulgorkyn, had been their downfall through all of their early translation attempts, and it wasn’t until Nanfoodle had insisted that they treat the writing from the lost city as something wholly unrecognizable that the pair had begun to make any progress at all.
If that was indeed what they were making.
Many other stencils had been crafted, multiple representations of every Dwarvish symbol. Then had come the trial and error—and error, and error, and error—for more than a day of painstaking rearranging and reevaluation. Nanfoodle, no minor illusionist, had cast many spells, and priests had been brought in to offer various auguries and inspired insights.
Thirty-two separate symbols appeared on the parchment, and while a thorough statistical analysis had offered hints of potential correlations to the traditional twenty-six runes of Dethek, the fact that none of those promising hints added up to anything substantial made much of that analysis no more than guesswork.
Gradually, though, patterns had taken shape, and spells seemed to confirm the best guesses time and time again.
More than a tenday into the work, an insight from Nanfoodle—after hearing all of Regis’s stories of the strange city—proved to be the tipping point. Instead of using Dwarvish as his basis for the analysis, he decided upon a double-basis and began incorporating the Orcish tongue—in which, of course, he was fluent. More stencils were cut, more combinations explored.