Page 2 of The Orc's Wife

And the humans drawing carts, sweeping the street, or simply walking by? They dropped to their knees, shivering with fear.

Urgan ignored their reactions, not a grunt passing his lips. We rode slowly ahead, towards the Imperator’s palace. I tore my eyes away from the displays of servitude and fealty and looked at the Imperator’s abode.

It towered over the city, built on top of the hill growing in the middle of it.

The outer wall of the palace rose right at the hill’s foot, tall and thick, orc guards strolling on top of it. Inside the wall, the palace’s outer buildings, austere and practical cubes of gray stone, climbed the hill’s slopes. They were similar to the rest of the city’s buildings: built of hewn rock, two or three stories high, their walls unadorned and steep, topped with simple battlements.

“When our ancestors arrived in this world,” Urgan said quietly, “they conquered this city first. Most of it had been built of wood and thatch, and it burned in the war. They rebuilt it to make it look like our cities back home.”

Home. Urgan had been born in our world, sixty years after the conquest, and still he spoke of the orc world as home. His ancestors had been yanked from there by the power of gods or demons or something else entirely, and sent here, with no way to go back.

Now, when only the oldest orcs had vague memories of their home land, it was becoming the stuff of myth and legend. No wonder Urgan spoke of it with longing.

When the orcs had been thrown through the rip between the worlds, a force of a thousand males, females, and cubs, they quickly made this world theirs, killing and enslaving humans, destroying resistance with their superior military skill and unrivaled physical strength. Orcs ruled us now, and the Imperator ruled the orcs.

Urgan was his general, the best strategist and fighter in his army. He was the one who had conquered all orc tribes, previously dispersed and independent, forcing them to become part of the Empire.

There were no more enemies left for Urgan to fight. He had united all orc tribes under the Imperator’s banner. Thus, he deserved rest, glory, and rewards for his victories.

But the Imperator had something else in store for him.

When we had been travelling to the capital, we were attacked by vicious beasts called ragghits. They had come into our world with the orcs. Ragghits were deadly monsters stripped of skin and fur, their bodies covered with pulsing red muscle, their eyes red, their purpose only one: to kill. Any living creature could become a ragghit if it became infected with its saliva.

Urgan’s trusted mount, Brrthak, and his two brothers in arms, Zadran and Kluga, were infected in one such attack. They had to be killed before they turned into ragghits themselves.

It turned out those attacks had been orchestrated by the Imperator.

I hid my clenched fists beneath Urgan’s dark green forearms, raising my head even higher. But no matter how much I strived to make myself look taller, I would always look tiny in comparison to Urgan. A fragile, weak human female in a city full of orcs.

And my mate, the only orc who stood between me and death, had a target on his back.

But the Imperator had not made his intent to get rid of Urgan official. He would lose a large portion of the army that was loyal to Urgan if he did that. His plans had been secret, and so, we had a chance of using the situation to our advantage, Urgan had said.

And the Imperator had weaknesses we could exploit.

The imperial palace on top of the hill was a symbol of one of those weaknesses.

It was one of few human buildings that still remained in Dogar Val, a remnant of the time when the city had been called Numenberg, the Holy Mountain. Before orcs conquered it, it had been the palace of the human king.

The difference between the palace and the orc-built structures was striking. Where orcs built simple, gray buildings with barely slanting roofs, the palace was a complicated edifice with many towers, galleries, and steep roofs. The simple rectangle of the main building was surrounded by towers of various sizes, and smaller structures forming the palace wings.

It housed the Imperator and his family, his most important officials and courtiers, and a multitude of human servants.

Urgan had his own quarters in the palace. We would be living in our enemy’s lair.

I stifled a shiver and focused on the sight before me. I had to admit it was beautiful.

The palace looked like a spiky dragon from a fairy tale, stretched on top of its hoard of jewels. It sprawled lazily over the top of the hill, some of its courtyards on the slope. Its towers glittered with metal ornaments and its glazed windows were shining in the sunlight.

Glass was rare. Only the richest could afford it.

The palace was a monument to humanity’s former glory, its art and architecture at the peak of peaceful times. The Imperator cherished it. For an unfathomable reason, he admired human royal culture and did his best to replicate it at his court.

He kept human scholars who studied books from the times before the Rip and translated them for him. There were protocol books, etiquette guides, memoirs of human generals, old romance tales… The Imperator devoured them all and, from the beginning of his rule, shaped the court and Dogar Val into a replica of the human Golden Age.

Urgan had said it was a caricature. Orcs were a military race. They weren’t suited to the highly polished, boring life the Imperator was forcing them into. Especially because his foolish ideas had been taken from books, and books were not true to life.

Urgan distrusted the written word. It was much too easy to lie on paper, he had said. In the orc world, there had been no books. No reading or writing. Where human poets had wasted time describing flowers and moonlight, orcs had forged weapons and developed their superior art of metallurgy.

---