Beler could not see, but he could hear it -- all up and down the siege line, the warg-riders hit at various points that the old Eyedrinker had assigned on a map, cutting down sentries, gutting horses, setting fire to encampments, creating a frenzy with their raids. A mingled cacophony of screams of pain and the howled orcish warcries rode up into the night skies with the smoke. There was a terror all across Malish, but it was the besiegers this time, after more than a month of the siege itself. The activity among the besiegers awoke the besieged, and the cries of alarm, the brazen call of horns, the frantically banged-upon bells, added their voices to the cacophony. From 

All Beler saw was the Chosen, the best warriors of Nar Mat Kordh-Ishi laying about this particular encampment thoroughly-- the orcs fought methodically, but bloody and brutally, using their superior strength to pitilessly and messily destroy the defenders. Even as an experienced warrior, Beler found his gut churning just a bit, though there was little time to contemplate the slaughter, and no reason to join it – these warriors were tasked with getting him to Malish, just as his job was not to fight alongside the orcs. He clung to the fur of his warg while Koloch handled anything that got too close to threaten and the others fanned out to kill. It was organized, which was a surprising adjective to apply to a band of orcish warriors, many of them wearing fur and leather in addition to their armor.

The moment of brutality and blood spilled seemed to descend into an eerie silence at where they stood, with nothing living besides the wargs, the orcs and Beler – everything else was dead and dying, piles of wet gore and corpses flickering in the light of the dying, stomped upon campfire, with the cries of other small battles reverberating in the night. 

But it was Koloch, with his eyes reflecting the firelight from behind the blank steel mask of his visor – his armor was human-crafted, and lacked the savagery in design of the others – more like an animal’s than a man’s, that grunted something out in their language that Beler presumed to mean, “Saddle up and move for the city!” Apparently, in contravention of the normal rules of orcish warfare, they wouldn’t be looting, wasting precious time to enrich themselves – Orcs were, after all, supposed to be all base lust and unable to work together. It was the advantage everyone else had over orckind. But it no longer surprised Beler; these were no run of the mill warband of orcs.

There was a wounded beast among them, but the group didn’t put the animal down the way a wounded horse might get it, but there still was a degree of caution in how some, the experienced warg-handlers among the band of orcs, were watching that particular female, and it seemed to Beler that the warg he was mounted on had shifted his own momentum a bit; a rumbling in the gut, and a tension in the muscles. They were pack animals, and a wounded member seemed to anger the beasts. 

There were a couple more skirmishes as the band loped closer to the walls on wargback, though these were fast, moving engagements where the orcish mercenaries did not bother to stop to run down every enemy they could see – if they were running rather than standing and fighting, the warriors didn’t bother to break their movement discipline to engage. The enemy warriors were kept off balance, and their movement was a blinding slash across them, rather than stopping to get stuck in with the foe.

Ahead, the walls of Malish loomed, old, jagged, built , ruined, rebuilt, haphazard. In places, they were not of even height at all times, linked as they were by stairs or rope bridges or other expedients to allow the defenders to move. It was far from ideal, but the cost of creating brand new walls and upgrading them to a standard was never high on the list of priorities for the city rulers. They were high enough to stop barbarian horsemen, and that was considered high enough.

But with a running jump atop roofs nearby to a low spot, the Orcs could get their package, Beler, right over, and there was no real discussion of it—Koloch’s warg started the run, Beler’s followed and the rest of the pack came with them, a running leap to get to the top of the walls, with Beler clinging into that stinking, musky fur for dear life and not caring of that smell anymore, to a momentary running landing atop the wall and a springing into the air onto a rooftop below that made for a good point from which to find the ground. It was over quickly enough, but then there were defenders, pointing down from the wall, from positions improvised of wood as pavises, getting ready to fire crossbows when Beler called out, in the native tongue of the Malish, “Stay your hands,:” with his own held up, “we are on your side!”

---

Meanwhile, there were humans all around, pointing weapons at them, and Gut-Drench was wounded in the eye and the other wargs and orcs were nursing scrapes and miscellaneous small wounds from their running melee past the Achnal positions – Koloch had a bruise where some bastard barbarian’s hammer bounced off his pauldron that he could feel slowing his left arm a bit, but he knew he was fit to fight. Kalshkar was tense beneath him, as the wargs picked up the scent of an enemy they’d just been fighting – humans.

They looked at a bunch of blood-drenched orcs and wargs, heaving with the effort of their exertion, slavering, fanged monstrosities and Koloch knew that the smallest of provocations would start fighting. The humans were tense, wide-eyed and trembling and had weapons leveled at them, and more of them were rushing in, ready for a fight, expecting the Achnal. They’d watched, from the walls, the terror of the sudden attack that disrupted the weary daily routine of their siege, and now were keyed up with their fear. The more of them that pounded boots along their dirt strewn streets, clutching everything from swords and axes to pitchforks and clubs, the more they became confident that they could overwhelm an enemy in a desperate killing battle.

Koloch could feel the uneasiness of the others, the uncertainty. Someone had to head off what was coming.

Koloch called out, “Easy Tuskers, let Beler speak to his bunnies. Lontok, help him, Ygdri, Mutt, help Derthag out,” the wounded warg. He didn’t give Orthag any instructions, but it was obvious; they were left to keep an eye on the humans and discourage the bunnies from attacking them, even while the others scrambled to deal with the wargs…