The orcs call their homeworld Grôd-Êzhar, "Mighty Iron," and their language Grorzk. They were hunters, herders and smiths on a world full of predators when the builder peoples found them, soldiers for hire for seven thousand years after that, and since the Breaking the masters of a war society that runs on captured machines. The builders call them the savage clans. The orcs call themselves by their own name, and their civilization is older than the insult.
The hunting world
Grôd-Êzhar is a hot world at 1.3 of Earth's gravity, with iron-red soil, long hot seasons, a short cold season when the great herds migrate, and predators everywhere. Orcs evolved as pack hunters on a world that was trying to eat them.
- Frame. Orcs stand about two meters tall, tusked and heavily muscled, with thick bones, broad joints and legs short for their long bodies. They are built for ambush and short, violent pursuit, not distance: their ancestors ran prey into traps and relays of hunters rather than outlasting it.
- Circulation. A tall body in higher gravity needs a strong heart and good valves. Orcs have large hearts, thick-walled arteries and tight skin over the lower legs that works like a pressure garment. The same adaptations make them hard to bleed out.
- Healing and senses. Thick skin and fast healing came from a life of fighting prey and predators; orc wounds close quickly and scar heavily, and scars are admired. Their hearing is sharp, tuned to movement in grass and brush.
- Heat and cold. Orcs shed heat through large vessels near the skin and a high sweat rate, which suits their hot world and makes them lose heat dangerously fast in the cold. Cold is the one environment every orc fears.
- Growth and age. Orc children are born after about eight months, often as twins, and grow fast. Orcs live about seventy years, and what fails first is the heart, worn out by carrying a large body in heavy gravity.
- Appetite. An orc eats three times what a human does, so every army is a food problem and every raid is partly a supply run.
Grôd-Êzhar, closer
Grôd-Êzhar is red because it is rusting. Iron lies so close to the surface that the soil, the dust and the rivers run red with it, and the plains of the hot latitudes are a country of red earth under tough, fire-hardened grass that lightning burns every long season and that grows back from its roots. The seas, which the orcs call Grôd-dron, the great water, are warm and shallow, and the hills rise out of the plains as bare red stone.
Everything on the plains hunts or is hunted. Pack killers run the grass, ambushers wait in the burned ground, and the great herds survive by being too many to finish. The herds move with the seasons: through the long hot season they graze the high plains, and when the short cold season comes they pour down toward the warm lowlands, crossing the rivers at the same few fords every year. Orcs evolved following them, and their whole year still turns on that crossing.
The fords made orc politics. Clans that hunted apart all year met at the crossings when the herds came down, and meeting there without killing each other took rules: who crossed first, whose kill was whose, who could speak. The moot began as the gathering at the fords, and the Great Hunt as the feast after the herds were across.
The orc body, closer
Orcs call themselves Orkok, and an orc child is an Orkok-glâd, a young one. Their skin is thick and dark, from umber and bronze to olive and slate grey, and it flushes ruddy when they are hot, because blood runs close under it to shed heat. Human legends of grey and green brutes seen at the edge of the firelight remember the darker, greener shades.
The lower tusks grow for life. They are the first thing an orc carves, capping them with metal to show deeds, and a broken tusk is not a shame but a story. Orcs hear movement in grass at a great distance and smell blood farther than that. They heal fast and clot hard, and the same thick blood that keeps them alive in a fight wears out their hearts by seventy.
Twins are common, and the code treats twins as one: a word given by one binds both, and a debt owed by one is owed by both. Twin pairs fight together, carve together and are buried in one fire.
Orcs sleep deep and long, often after a feast, the way a pack sleeps after a kill. Goblins, who nap in shifts, have strong opinions about that.
Deep history
The Pack Ages. Orc society began as hunting packs, and the code began as the rules that let a pack survive. A word given in the hunt had to be kept, or the pack failed. A stranger who shared a fire was safe for the night, because a pack that killed its guests found no allies in a bad season. A leader who could not answer a challenge could not lead a hunt. A kill belonged to the one who made it, because that settled arguments before they became fights. None of it was written; all of it was remembered.
The Iron Ages. Grôd-Êzhar's iron lay near the surface in its red soil, and orcs worked it early. Clans built fortified halls of stone and iron around their hearths, herded the grazing beasts they had once only hunted, and fought each other over pastures and hunting grounds. The singers who memorized each clan's history became its keepers of law, and the first Bone Tokens appeared: carved records of a kill, owned by the hunter who made it, traded as proof of deeds and then as wealth. Confederations of clans rose and fell under the strongest warchiefs.
First contact (about 5400 BCE). Dwarven and elven surveys found a world of iron-working clans with sail, wheel and water mill, and no engines. Within a generation the builders were hiring orc fighters, and within a century whole clans were in service.
The Hired Millennia (about 5400 BCE to 1440 CE). For seven thousand years orcs served other peoples as guards, soldiers and boarding crews, and in some regions as labor that was little better than bought. The builders kept industry off Grôd-Êzhar: no yards, no reactors, no ships built on the homeworld, and no orc taught to design what he was taught to run. Orcs learned to operate every machine in the cluster and to build none of them. Clans that served aboard ships for generations became ship-clans, born and raised in the holds of builder hulls, and Grorzk grew out of the dwarven military speech those clans learned in service, ground over centuries into something harsher and more direct, while the old words for kin, hunt, debt and honor survived. At home, clans enriched by service fought the clans that had stayed, and the sagas of those wars are among the oldest orcs still sing. The sagas of service are full of pride in hard work well done and of grievances carefully counted.
The builders' rule never fully worked. Ship-clans that maintained builder hulls for forty generations learned how those hulls were made whether anyone taught them or not. Hold-smiths, the engineers of the ship-clans, passed down repair knowledge from parent to child in songs and carved diagrams, and some understood their employers' machines better than the employers' own crews. Builders who noticed called it theft of knowledge. Orcs called it keeping the ship alive.
The Paying of the Debt (1440 to about 1600). Builders call it the Breaking. In the 1430s the builders imposed the Surety Terms: every clan in service had to deliver kin as hostages, and a clan's contract could be sold to another employer without the clan's word. To orcs, a word given to one employer could not be sold like cargo, and hostages held under a roof were guests. When a dwarven house executed its orc hostages after a mutiny at the Salt Anchor, it created a blood debt under the code against every builder who had signed the Terms. The singers who travelled as crew carried the news and the call from ship to ship, and in a single season the clans aboard builder warships across the cluster rose and took them. Within two generations they held fleets they had never built. They raided deep into dwarven and elven space, took an elven garden world and lost it to elven sterilization, and conquered Bolz-dix, the goblin homeworld, for its foundries and the engineers who could keep their captured ships running.
The Taken Worlds (1600 to now). With the beacons destroyed and the routes into the builder realms dark, the clans turned to ruling what they held: their homeworld, Bolz-dix, and a scatter of taken worlds and stations between. They stocked the taken worlds with game and herds from home so the hunt could go where the clans went. Many goblin clans joined them under the Compact. Wars with the builders came every few generations, raids never stopped, and the lead clan changed whenever a stronger one could pull it down. The last great war, from 2549 to 2556, ended in the Truce of the Yard.
The long memory
The Brother Wars. When the dwarven houses tore themselves apart in the Sundering, around 800, both sides hired orc clans by the tens of thousands and put them aboard their warships. Clans that had hunted the same plains for a thousand years boarded each other's ships for dwarven causes and killed each other by contract. The sagas of the Brother Wars are the bitterest the orcs keep, and they taught the lesson that led to the Breaking: a clan's word given to an employer must never be turned against its own kind.
The Salt Anchor. The saga the orcs sing most often begins with the hostages executed at the Salt Anchor in the 1430s and ends with the first builder warship taken by the clan aboard her, its crew put off in their boats because the code forbids killing the beaten who yield. Every clan claims a share of that ship's crew, and the singers let them.
The far hunting ground. The oldest ship-clan sagas remember orc guards who went with builder surveys down a long road to a blue world where the game was plentiful and the small, loud people fought back with fire and iron. Nobody in the cluster knows where it was. The saga is sung for its hunting, and the singers have never changed a word of it.
The lead clans. Since the Breaking, the lead has passed between clans more than twenty times, always by war, alliance or the fall of a warchief. The Ghorn have held it for a generation, which is long, and every clan is counting.
Taken, kept and forged
Taking a ship is still a greater deed than building one, and the most famous hulls in the clans are the ones taken in the Breaking. But ten centuries of keeping captured machines alive have made orc engineering a tradition of its own. Orc technology in 2587 is captured technology rebuilt, adapted and increasingly replaced by the orcs' own work.
- Weights and hulls
- The great Weights that drive the clans' largest hulls were captured, most of them in the Breaking. The dwarven houses keep a record of every stolen Weight by name, and a raid that brings one home is the greatest deed an orc can share in. Captured hulls are repaired, re-armed and renamed, some many times; the oldest still flying carry the names of the orcs who took them, and each ship's history is carved in bone on its bridge. Over the last two centuries the Iron-Horn smith-clans have learned to make Weights of their own: small, crude cores in cages built with goblin help, reaching four or five light-years and failing far more often than dwarven work. Every one that fails takes its ship with it, and every one is sung. They have freed the clans from depending entirely on captured Weights for small ships, and none yet is large enough for a warship.
- Keeping the machines
- Orc hold-smiths and Compact goblins keep the clans' ships alive together and argue constantly about how. Hold-smiths favor heavy, simple repairs an orc can make under fire; goblins favor clever ones only a goblin can maintain. A warchief's flagship is only as good as the crews in its engine rooms, and every orc knows it.
- Heat
- Orc ships run hot, because orcs hate the cold. It costs them radiator margin and makes them easy to see. They do not care, because they mean to close and board anyway.
- Navigation
- With the beacons gone, the clans know their routes from captured records and goblin navigators. Orc anchor crossings are riskier than anyone else's, and the sagas remember the ships lost in them.
- What orcs make
- Since the Breaking, Grôd-Êzhar and the taken worlds have built industry of their own: iron and steel works, foundries running captured fabricators on orc-made patterns, yards that build boarding craft, small hulls and hull sections, and arsenals. Orc weapons are original and recognizably orc: heavy boarding craft built to punch into a hull and hold, breaching rams, grapple guns, short-range cannon designed for fighting inside a ship, and blades and armor of superb steel. Orc engineers rebuild captured hulls to orc taste, with hotter holds, wider corridors, reinforced boarding ramps and reactors run harder than their builders intended. An experienced eye can tell an orc-rebuilt hull at a glance, and can tell which clan rebuilt it.
- News and speech
- Captured communication systems carry orders; singers carry everything that matters. News among the clans travels with the singers who move between ships and halls, and a message that arrives in a song is trusted more than one that arrives on a screen. Ritual speech in challenges and oaths uses formal old sentence forms that every orc recognizes as binding.
- Medicine
- Orcs heal fast, and their own medicine is hunters' medicine: field surgery, bone-setting, cautery and herbal knowledge, very good at wounds and poor at disease. They use captured medicine when they have it and have never had elven medicine at all.
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Boarding, endurance, courage, skill with every kind of machine, and a growing industry of their own. Large Weights they still cannot make, fleets that are old, dependence on goblins for the most delicate work, hot and visible ships, and a food problem that every army and taken world must solve.
Orc ships, closer
An orc hull is a captured ship made into a hall. The holds become the Zhêt-orz, the corridors are widened for orc shoulders, the heaters run hot, the boarding ramps are reinforced, and the engine spaces belong to the Compact goblins, whose hatches an orc knocks on before entering. The ship's history is carved in bone on the bridge: who took her, from whom, and every name she has carried since.
Ships take names that are deeds or threats. The Ghorn flagship, kept alive by biz-qez gruk-surz, is the Zârn-mûgh, the Fear-Maker. Her Weight was taken in the Breaking, and the dwarven Halls of Record still list it under its dwarven name.
The overlord clans
The clans that govern Bolz-dix have done so for more than a thousand years, and they are no longer the clans that took it. They live in fortified halls above the foundry districts, collect the metal and hulls the fleets need, and leave the running of the foundries to goblins, because nobody else can run them. They know goblins better than any other orcs and depend on them more, which is why the homeworld clans call them soft. Every overlord warchief knows that the goblins of Bolz-dix outnumber the clans on the planet many times over, and that the quiet work in the foundries could become loud.
The Iron-Horn works
The Iron-Horn smith-clans build their Weights under a mountain on Grôd-Êzhar, in compression works cut deep into the rock with goblin help and dwarven cage designs taken in raids. Each core takes years. Each cage is built by Compact goblins from Bolz-dix, to orc demands for speed. Five small Weights have come out of the works in two centuries of trying, and two have failed with their ships, and every one of them is sung. The Iron-Horn believe the next one will be large enough for a warship, and so does every other clan, which is why the Ghorn watch the mountain as closely as they watch the dwarves.
The code and the clans
The code is a handful of unwritten principles, spoken and open to interpretation. A given word binds, and an ungiven one doesn't. A guest under a clan's roof is untouchable, and harming one creates a blood debt. A debt is carried until a deed pays it. A challenge is met face on. A kill belongs to the one who made it. Beyond that, right is whatever the lead clan says it is this year, and the other clans go along until they are strong enough not to.
Clans hold territory, ships and hunting grounds, and inside them families and bloodlines feud almost as bitterly as the clans do. An orc may hate his cousin in the morning and kill an outsider for touching him that afternoon. Warchiefs hold their place by winning and lose it by challenge, alliance or defeat. Clans gather in moots to settle debts, arrange marriages and choose the lead clan's wars, and moots end in feasts or fights. One clan at a time stands as the lead clan, because nobody can currently pull it down.
The challenge. Any proven warrior may challenge a warchief, and a warchief may not refuse. Challenges are fought before the clan, usually with blades, to first blood or to death as the challenger names. A warchief who wins many challenges is thought strong; one who is challenged often is thought weak, whether he wins or not.
Standing. Warchiefs, proven warriors, the young and unproven, the unclanned exiles, the Compact goblins who are guests in service and not quite anything else, and captives, who work.
Clans of many kinds
Orcs share the code, the sagas and the tokens. Almost everything else depends on the kind of clan an orc is born into.
- Homeworld clans
- The herding and hunting clans of Grôd-Êzhar, who never went into service or came home generations ago. They keep the oldest customs and sagas and look down on ship-clans as orcs who have forgotten the ground.
- Ship-clans
- Clans that have lived aboard hulls since the Hired Millennia, some for a hundred generations. They are the orcs' engineers, gunners and pilots, speak a Grorzk thick with technical words, and hold that a clan's true home is its ship.
- Smith-clans
- Industrial clans on the homeworld and the richer taken worlds, led by the Iron-Horn, who run the foundries, yards and arsenals and are building the orcs' own Weights.
- Overlord clans
- The clans that govern Bolz-dix and its industry. They know goblins better than any other orcs and depend on them more, and are despised by homeworld clans as soft and by goblins as masters.
- Frontier clans
- Raiding clans on the taken worlds nearest the builder borders: poor, hungry, and the ones most likely to start a war the lead clan did not want.
- Trading clans
- Clans settled at the Yard and the Old Port, selling game, bone work and fighters for hire to every people. Traditionalists call them half-goblin.
- The unclanned
- Exiles and oath-breakers, who form bands of their own and hire out as mercenaries, and in a few places have founded new clans the old ones refuse to recognize.
The great argument among orcs is between the Takers and the Makers. Takers hold that a ship or a Weight has worth because of the deed that took it, and that a built ship carries no deed. Makers hold that the clans will never be free while they depend on what they can steal and on goblins to keep it running. The Ghorn lead as Takers, the Iron-Horn wait as Makers, and every clan is divided on the question.
The homeworld's countries
Grôd-Êzhar is not one country. The plains clans follow the herds across the red grass and hold the fords, and they are what most outsiders picture when they picture orcs. The Grôd-dron clans of the warm coasts were sailors before any builder came: they built the sail and oar ships the first surveys found, fish the shallow seas, and trade salt inland, and their sagas are about storms rather than hunts. The Klâ-vrek clans of the hill country dig the iron, run the oldest forges and look down on anyone who has never been underground.
The strangest are the highland clans of the cool uplands near the poles, who live where every other orc would freeze. They wear the thickest furs in the cluster, run their halls hotter than anyone, and trade furs and cold-weather craft to every clan that has to fight in the cold. Other orcs call them mad and buy everything they make.
Dwarven Halls of Record, which count their enemies carefully, reckon the orcs at about two hundred million, a third of them on the homeworld.
Kin, twins and halls
A clan is a web of bloodlines, and a bloodline is the families that share a hearth. On a planet the hearth is the long hall of stone and iron; aboard ship it is the Zhêt-orz, the mess hall, which on an orc hull is the hall, the council chamber and the shrine in one, and runs hotter than any other space aboard. A clan's warband is its Blâk-krûn. Its smiths are Êzhar-krûm and its hunters Zhâg-krûm, and a woman who hunts is a Zhâg-frak, with the same standing and the same share of the kill.
Orphans are raised by the hall, and so are the children of captives, whom the code holds were never beaten and so are born free. There are small numbers of hall-raised dwarves and elves among the clans, speaking Grorzk as a first language and belonging to no other people.
The code in practice
Guest-right is given with a cup. The host drinks first and hands it over with the toast Ak ghrônk-a ogh îkser Sûkh, "I drink to your victory," and from that moment the guest is untouchable under that roof. Aboard ship the welcome is Grûg, shâ-vor ogh Trulk, the boarding greeting, and it carries the same weight.
Oaths are made in blood. A Blû-vorgh, a blood-oath, is sworn with a cut on the palm and the words every orc child learns: Brêzh-ûn Blû-vorgh hûzk-t Dôgh, "a broken blood-oath means death." Challenges end with the loser yielding or dying, as the challenger named, and a yielded enemy may not be killed. Before a boarding the warband says Grak-zhal vor, Zârn krun: steel forward, fear behind.
Names
A child is called by the name its hall gives it until its first hunt alone, when the hall gives it a deed-name of two roots, such as Grîm-vost, Fierce-Blade. A great deed can earn a second name, and warchiefs often carry three. An orc who breaks a given word loses the deed-name and is called only by bloodline and clan, and everyone who hears it knows why.
Grorzk itself runs in two streams. Ship-clans speak a Grorzk thick with the dwarven technical words their ancestors learned in the holds of builder hulls. The homeworld clans keep more of the old words for kin, hunt, debt and honor, and each side mocks the other's accent.
Law, debt and punishment
There are no courts. A dispute inside a clan goes to its warchief, or to challenge. A dispute between clans goes to a moot, or to war. Breaking a given word makes an orc an outcast whose word nobody will take again. Faking a Bone Token claim poisons the whole system of wealth and history, and is punished by death or exile. Theft inside a clan is settled by challenge. A blood debt is carried by the whole clan and paid by a deed: a life, a great gift, or service. Debts are sung so that nobody can forget them, and some have been sung for a thousand years.
Money and work
Barter for daily trade, and Bone Tokens for anything that matters. A Bone Token is carved from the bone of a recognized kill, from a game animal up to an enemy chief, by the orc entitled to claim it. Its value is the deed, the carving and the history. The carvings record the hunt or battle and when it happened, so a clan's tokens are its written history. An ordinary hunt makes a modest token; the token of a famous warchief can buy a ship.
Bone Tokens behave less like coins than like titles to fame. Their supply is limited by deeds, so no one can issue them at will, and their value rises with the fame of the deed and falls when a clan's history is discredited. After great raids, a flood of tokens from ordinary kills cheapens ordinary tokens while famous ones only gain. Tokens serve as collateral for loans of food, ships and fighters between clans, and a clan that defaults loses the tokens and the history carved on them. For trade with outsiders and the Compact, orcs increasingly use goblin Spark-Tokens and dwarven bars taken in raids, and the smith-clans pay their workers in goods and meals rather than tokens, which traditionalists take as a sign of decline.
Orcs work as hunters, herders, smiths, carvers, singers, pilots, gunners and warriors, and a skilled smith or carver has as much standing as a proven fighter. Captives and hired hands do the labor orcs consider beneath a warrior, and Compact goblins do the machine work.
Growing up, marriage and family
Orc children grow up hunting: games of stalking and wrestling, practice tokens carved from herd bones, and hunting small game with their elders. An orc's first real token comes from a first hunt alone, usually in the teens, and that token is rarely traded however little it is worth. Adulthood comes with the first raid. Every orc fights, daughters beside sons, and standing comes from deeds, not birth.
Courtship is open and competitive: gifts of tokens and meat, boasting, and sometimes contests between rivals. Marriages join families and often clans, and a great marriage is an alliance sealed at a feast. Couples usually keep a household in the clan hall. Children belong to the clan as well as their parents, and orphans are raised by the hall without any shame.
The old and the last hunt
Orcs live about seventy years, and an orc who can no longer fight is not put aside. The old become carvers, singers, smiths and teachers of the young, as Ûzh-ghelm the raider became Ûzh-ghelm the carver. When an old orc's heart begins to fail, the hall holds a last hunt: the old one leads it, the young follow, and the whole hall carves the token of the kill together, so that the old one's last deed is shared by everyone who will carry the name on.
Death, belief and song
Orcs believe deeds have weight and outlive the one who did them, carried in sagas, songs and tokens. The ancestors live in the tokens they made. An orc's funeral is the burning: the dead are burned whole with their weapons, their deeds are sung, and their tokens pass to whoever the dead named or the clan decides. Nobody leaves until the fire is out and the bones are ash, so that no enemy can ever carve a token from them.
Clan history lives in sagas, sung at feasts and burnings by singers who learn them word for word. The sagas remember deeds, debts and insults with equal care. Some are a thousand years old, some remember the Hired Millennia, and some are about places nobody alive has seen, including a far hunting ground beyond the dead routes.
Iron and blood
Orcs live on a world whose soil is red with iron and in bodies whose blood is red with it, and their oldest belief joins the two: iron is the world's blood and blood is the body's iron. That is why a new blade is salted with blood before its first use, why smiths are half priests, and why the homeworld is called Grôd-Êzhar, Mighty Iron. An orc's weapons go into the fire with him because they carry his blood as surely as his body does.
There are no orc gods. There is the weight of deeds, the ancestors in the tokens, and the world's iron in everything, and most orcs need nothing more. The smith-clans hold that making iron live in a blade is as great a deed as spilling it, which is one root of the argument between Makers and Takers.
Singers
Singers are the orcs' newsmen, lawkeepers and historians. They learn the sagas word for word from childhood, carry news from ship to ship and hall to hall, and keep the count of every debt and every term of the Compact. A singer may pass between feuding clans unharmed, because a clan that kills a singer loses the history and the debts that singer carried, and no clan will risk forgetting who owes it.
A message sung is trusted more than a message written, and a singer who changes a word of a saga, or a debt, is an oath-breaker. Some singers become more powerful than warchiefs, because every warchief needs his deeds sung right.
The opening of the Salt Anchor saga, as singers render it for outsiders:
They sold our word like salt in a sack.
They held our kin under their roof
and the roof was not a roof.
The fire we kept for them we took for ourselves.
Steel forward. Fear behind.
The debt is paid; the song is owed.
Daily life
Orc settlements are hall-towns: long halls of stone and iron around central hearths, with herding pastures and hunting grounds beyond. Aboard ship, clans build halls into the holds, and the hearth is a heater run hotter than any builder would allow. Clothing is leather, hide and iron, minimal in the heat and heavy in the cold; tusks are carved and capped with metal to show deeds. Food is broad and unashamed: game, herd animals, fish, roots, fungi, blood dishes, anything that can be cooked, washed down with strong fermented drink. Feasts follow hunts, victories, marriages, alliances and settled debts. Orcs have eaten goblins, elves and dwarves, and the Compact exists partly to stop them eating goblins.
The great season of the year is the Great Hunt, when the herds move and every clan that can hunts together; on the taken worlds it is kept with the herds brought from home. Orc pleasures are wrestling, hunting, drinking, drum music, boasting contests in which the best boast is a true one, and the carving of bone, which is the orcs' highest art.
Bone and steel
Bone carving is the orcs' highest art and steel their finest craft. A master carver can read a clan's history off its tokens the way a dwarf reads a record, and the carving schools of the homeworld argue over style as fiercely as any guild. The Êzhar-krûm of the smith-clans make blades and armor of steel no other people matches, marking each with the smith's sign and the clan's, and an orc's weapons are buried with him in the fire so that nobody else can carry his deeds.
Old habits
Orcs will not sleep with their heads toward a door, a habit from the pack ages that ship-clans keep even in bunks where it makes no sense. They salt a new blade with blood before its first use, their own if no enemy's is handy. Every moot keeps a seat empty for a clan that no longer exists, and nobody agrees which clan it was. A lead clan in the 2100s had the code carved in stone so that it could not be reinterpreted; the other clans burned the stone, and "carving the code" is still an insult meaning to claim more authority than anyone has.
War
War is part of adulthood. Raids, clan wars, boarding actions learned as hired fighters on other peoples' ships, and extermination campaigns when they decide on them. Orc fighting is close, fast and brutal, and every orc warrior would rather board a ship than shoot at one. A raid is also a supply run, because every army is a food problem.
How orcs fight
Orcs fight to close. Their old hulls run hot and show on every sensor, so they cannot win long-range fights and do not try. A clan fleet comes in behind a screen of Compact goblin jammers and decoys, takes the fire it must, and puts boarding craft into the enemy's hull: rams that punch through and hold, grapple guns that bind two ships together, and warbands that fight compartment by compartment with short cannon, blades and steel armor. A ship taken whole is worth more than a ship destroyed, in deeds and in parts.
A raid is small and fast: a few ships, a station or a convoy, food and parts and captives, and home before the builders can answer. A war is a moot's decision, fought by the lead clan and whoever it can bring. And an extermination campaign, which the clans have waged against rival clans and against builder settlements in their worst years, is the thing every other people remembers about the orcs first. The orcs remember it too, and sing those sagas more quietly.
Worthy enemies and old debts
Orcs honor the dwarves as enemies. Singers keep the sagas of dwarven heroes beside their own, and when a famous dwarven commander dies the clans that fought her carve a token for her death. The dwarves do not return the courtesy, and the orcs think less of them for it.
Toward the elves there is only the debt. The sterilized garden is sung at every Great Hunt, and no clan has ever accepted an elven cup. The debt-singers hold that the day the elves acknowledge it, the clans will name its price, and nobody, orc or elf, can say what that price would be.
Strangers and other peoples
A guest under an orc roof is safer than anywhere else in the cluster, and orcs are fiercely proud of it. A stranger outside that roof is fair game until someone gives a word. Orcs regard the elves as the people who owe them an eternal blood debt for the sterilized world; the dwarves as their old masters and their worthiest enemies; and goblins as a people they cannot run their fleets without and cannot stop despising, whom they protect under the Compact and insult to their faces. Orc humor is loud, mocking and physical. The worst insults are coward, oath-breaker, and unclanned. Honor is a kept word, a paid debt, and a deed worth singing.
Hunger
An orc eats three times what a human does, and the orcs' whole politics can be read as a food problem. The homeworld feeds itself. The taken worlds were never meant to feed orcs, their imported herds do badly, and every warband is a supply train. Raids take food as often as anything else, and grain bought at the Yard feeds more of the frontier than any clan admits.
Makers want pastures fenced, herds bred for the taken worlds and fisheries built on their seas. Many Takers answer that farming is what captives do. Both sides eat the same bread, and both know where it comes from.
Orc movements
Besides Takers and Makers, the clans divide in other ways. The debt-singers keep the blood debt against the elves alive in every hall and oppose any peace that does not pay it. The homeworld traditionalists hold that the ship-clans have forgotten the ground. The unclanned warbands hire out to anyone, the builders included, and are hated for it by clans that did the same for seven thousand years. And the young, grown up under the Truce of the Yard with too few raids to earn their first deeds, are restless in a way every warchief can hear.
The clans in 2587
The Ghorn clan leads under Êzhar-vost, and the Iron-Horn clan waits for him to lose a war. The clans are feeding more mouths than taken worlds that were never meant to feed orcs can support. Their captured fleets grow older every year and their goblin crews grow more expensive. The blood debt against the elves remains unpaid.
- Êzhar-vost vozk Ghorn
- 44, "Iron-Blade of the Ghorn clan," warchief of the lead clan, who took his seat by challenge and holds it by winning.
- Grîm-vost vozk Êzhar-ghorn
- 39, "Fierce-Blade of the Iron-Horn clan," his rival.
- Ûzh-ghelm vozk Blûkh
- 66, "Ice-Helm of the Blûkh clan," an old raider turned master token carver, through whose hands half the lead clan's history has passed.
- Krak-vost vozk Dôgh
- 29, "Quick-Blade of the Dôgh clan," warchief of a frontier clan named for death, whose raids on dwarven border stations the Ghorn cannot stop and the young cannot stop singing about.
Good, bad, ugly and grey
- Good
- A guest under an orc roof is the safest person in the cluster, and a given word is kept.
- Bad
- Right is whatever the strongest clan says this year, and hunger is answered with raids.
- Ugly
- Captives worked on the taken worlds, and a history of eating their neighbors.
- Grey
- Takers and Makers are both loyal to the clans and both right about something. The clans cannot keep their honor and their freedom from goblin engineers without choosing between them.
- The clans take captives and put them to work. The builders call it slavery; the orcs call it the fate of the beaten; the captives' families call it what it is.
- The Brother Wars taught the clans never to sell their word against their own kind. The same lesson made the Breaking, which the builders remember as betrayal and the orcs as a debt paid.
- Singers keep the law, the history and the debts, which makes the orcs' only record of the truth a group of people whose standing depends on singing the powerful well.
- The overlord clans rule Bolz-dix and cannot run it, and the goblins run it and cannot rule it. Neither can leave, and each is the other's cage.
