A Breeze From the East

Journal of Rowana, daughter of Rowetha
20 / 04 / 2120 of the Fourth Age

There are always chores to do on a farm and around a farmhouse. Laundry to wash and hang. Tall grass to mow and haul to the burn pile, and trash to burn. Meals to cook. Dishes to wash. Floors to sweep. The Shire AgriCorp software model of the farm helped establish a routine. Told us when to water the little green sprouts that were just poking up through the dark volcanic earth. Measured weed density and advised picking. Monitored weather and encouraged best days for setting up the pre-fabricated curing shed.

When there was nothing else to do, Azzie carried buckets of mud up onto the house and dumped them out. It would take weeks or months to cover it completely that way, and a good hard rain might wash away most of her work, but we'd want the extra insulation come winter. There weren't any trees to speak of on this part of the plateau, so I made busy with what I did have: a spool of monofilament wire, two dozen shotgun shells, and a posthole digger.

It wouldn't be enough, when they came. I knew it. There wasn't the credits for much else, though.

I think Azzie could tell it weighed on me. Night after night, I'd close my eyes next to her, the Great Eagle and Elf-blade strapped to my web-belt, wondering if it would be this night. Tried to put myself in the shoes of whoever would come after her.

They had lost Azzie during delivery. Circumstances unknown, but assuming they found the bodies, they knew there was foul play. Traced the vehicle back to where it stopped. Wouldn't be hard to find my homestead, my claim was registered in the official databases. If they dug into who I was, they'd hit a blank wall once they got to my military record; most of what rangers do doesn't make it into the official files.

So why come loaded for bear with four goons, one of whom had been good enough to get the drop on me? Did they think this was a rival criminal organization? Or—and this was a new thought—was it because Azzie herself was potentially that dangerous? She was a strong, sure, but she was a glorified sex pet, not a—

Búrzi dropped something on my chest. The kitten had grown and filled out, and her fur had darker stripes, shiny black on black, in the sunlight. With the tiny crescent moon out, she was little more than a shadow with luminescent eyes. I could feel her weight on my stomach, and she was still silent. My free hand went to the wet thing on my chest.

It was a slightly pointed ear.

She leaped off of me as I sat up. I left the pistol in its holster, ready for a fast draw. Azzie sat up, and would have said something, but I put my hand over her mouth. She licked my palm, maybe thinking this was some kind of play, and then I held up the ear. Her eyes went wide. Silently, I gestured. Two fingers over my lips for silence. Held up the ring finger of my left hand. Pointed at her. Azzie nodded, got the message.

Búrzi stood by the door, looked back at me. I stepped toward her, and she moved ahead.

I followed her. Behind me, Azzie had already slipped the ring on her finger, so our bed seemed empty.

There wasn't a cat door in the Hobbit hole, but we'd left the window in the kitchen wide enough for her to slip in and out as she pleased. I checked the outside cameras before I went out the kitchen door, but saw no one waiting for us in the darkness. Búrzi hugged the perimeter of the house as she led me around, not toward the fields but to the shack that covered the stairs down to our root cellar.

The door was ajar. The polite suggestion had been ignored.

What was left of the intruder lay in a bloody heap at the foot of the stairs. I had laid the first line of monofilament a couple inches below the door lintel; Azzie could walk beneath it, I had to remember to duck. The second line of monofilament was laid across the opening of the stairwell, far enough from the steps that Búrzi wouldn't accidentally jump into it.

The intruder—details were tricky in the light—had walked straight into the first line of monofilament, which had sliced through a full head of hair, scalp, and scraped off a sliver of bone. The shock and pain of that caused them to twist and fall down the stairs, through the second monofilament line, which is when their ear had come off. It was the actual impact with the stone at the bottom of the stairwell which had crushed their weakened skull and spilled their brains out into our root cellar.

Búrzi sat at my feet, her slinky black tail swayed back and forth. I knelt down and scratched her behind the ears. Outside, my low-light-augmented eyes scanned the dirt outside the door. The moonlight was low, but I could only make out a single pair of tracks, besides mine and the cat's.

I followed the tracks. Our intruder hadn't made straight for the stairwell. They'd come from the northeast, avoided the cleared fields and the traps I'd set at the edges of the field, circled the house at a distance, out of the range of the door cameras. The curing shed hadn't been locked because I hadn't hung the door yet, and there were dusty footprints on the bare concrete floor. There were tracks around the Pathfinder, and if I had any way to check I'm sure our guest had tried each door handle, on the off chance I'd left it unlocked, like a car thief I'd watched in an Edoras parking lot, one long dark night on leave, drinking beer with Aedre, a lifetime ago. The trail ended at the door to the shack that covered the stairs.

The edge of the Elf-blade didn't glow in the dark of the stairwell, but I slid the blade through the hole at the base of the skull anyway, until I saw the tip poke out the top. Then and only then did I turn our guest over.

The Orc stared dead eyes up at the ceiling. A white hand had been tattooed over the face. The fangs were brown and yellow, badly eroded; I'd seen meth addicts in Rohan and Harad with teeth like that. The lean, lanky body was tall, spare, but not well-muscled; the skin darker and yellower than Azzie's, the sallow color that would have meant jaundice in a Man. The sneakers he wore were old, toes poking out; the t-shirt faded, dirty, the jean-vest adorned with patches for Orc bands I didn't recognize. No dragon's head. The pants, by comparison, were some coarse homespun; I'd seen pants like that in Far Harad, on Orcs and Men.

I wiped the blade clean on his pants and checked him over. Lock picks, in a vest pocket. Slim crowbar. Cheap multitool, Umbar make. A plastic-handled screwdriver that had been sharpened into a shiv. No ID, no electronics, no money.

"Thief," Azzie said, come dawn, as we dropped the naked, nameless Orc into the pit. White bone showed beneath him as I piled grass on him to get a fire started.

"Probably," I agreed. "But out here, on his own? No food, no way to get food? Bands of Orcs still cross Mordor from the mountains to the Morgul Vale. Could be a scout."

Azzie stared at the dead Orc's junk with an interest that made my shoulders itch. Like many male corpses, he'd gone tumescent. I tried not to think about the stories I'd heard, out in the wilds. Corpse candles, Orc funeral rites. Sick tales of perversions that troopers shared around campfires or in tents in the dark. I had seen a lot of strange things out in Far Harad, but nothing like those tales.

"What is it about his dick you find so interesting, anyway?" I said. Maybe it was the lack of sleep that made me agitated, but I heard the weird lilt of jealousy in my voice and felt ashamed of it.

"It's so small," she said, as her dark eyes took in the skinny, broken figure. Which was true. Even at his greatest post-mortem hardness, our guest's prick was smaller and thinner than our dildo.

"Dude's already dead, making fun of his dick size feels like adding insult to injury," I said, as I struck a match to the dry grass.

I thought of the Orc skulls on the lintel at home as the burning grass reached our guest's face. The ancient, morbid trophies of old wars. In the halls of my fathers, my own father could fucking fume at the Uruk in my bed. I wasn't going to repeat his own sins.

"The White Hand. Old sign. Gang, tribe, warband, maybe," Azzie said. "Would the Dwarf know?"

Before I could answer, there came a breeze from the East. Her nostrils flared as she turned her face into the wind and sniffed.

I looked across the grasslands, in the same direction. There was a dust cloud from the direction our guest had come. Couple miles out, but moving westward. That meant people, vehicles, maybe animals.

"Orcs," the Uruk said, confidently. "Lots of Orcs."