Bromley woke up to the stench of vomit and waste. His stomach convulsed violently he instinctively brought his hands over it as the feeling of sick trailed a path from the pits of his stomach to his mouth. He folded and grabbed at his skin with force while his right fist reached his lips I his attempt to keep them sealed. He remained motionless for some moments breathing through his sleeve slowly and deeply. He kept whatever he had in his stomach without making a mess of his own in the cage. The two other men that he was sharing it with had lost their will for decency two days now, but he couldn’t, it was the last thing that he had left. Decency. He was always a decent man, loyal to friends and employers, polite with women, friendly to Hobbits and other Outsiders. He had to hold on. He had to stay human.
The orcs around the cave were idle, except for the patrols and the guards who were sharp, all the rest were either laying or eating or fighting among themselves. Bromley had never seen orcs before, he had heard of them, but never seen them. They looked stupid, angry and stupid and that made him wonder how they managed to overwhelm the guards and destroy the caravan. It had all happened so fast. Now he was in a cage with his companions scattered around the camp in different cages with other poor souls that travelled the Lone-Lands. He could see the camp briefly in the odd hours of the afternoon when the sun was getting high and some of his rays slipped through the cracks and crevasses of the cave. Torches were burning all the time in order to allow some visibility through the camp. Torches and some lamps that produced a strange green light that he had never seen before, surely it was magic.
A silhouette moved among the torches, tall and proud, walking decisively along the path and everywhere the orcs stayed quiet whenever he approached them. It was that man, their leader. A man leader of orcs. Unbelievable! He was dressed in a crimson cloak over dark clothes with a hood permanently over his head covering his features, but that man was scary. Bromley felt his gaze sometimes when he was choosing people to kill, to sacrifice. He had a voice like a serpent and the one time that Bromley saw him next to a light his eyes terrified him. The white of his eyes had a ting of grey and the skin around them was pale like a dead man, the pupils of his eyes were perfectly round and the palest brown that Bromley had ever seen. He still remembered that first time he had seen him. He couldn’t say when it was, but he remembered it like it was minutes ago. When the man fixed his gaze at him Bromley froze. Usually the others cowered away and that was reason enough to be taken for sacrifice, but he froze and kept staring at those eyes…
“Erenkhand is coming today,” said one of the men that guarded Bromley, while he cleaned the big tent in which the crimson clad man was quartered.
“That means that we will get on the move again. We won’t have to deal with these stupid orcs.”
“I don’t know,” the man looked around just to make sure that they were alone in the tent and clearly they didn’t care about Bromley. “I don’t know about that. One of his men said that they are searching for something. They’re heading East.”
“And we are stuck here. Great. Playing with the Hillmen…” the other man grunted in displeasure.
Bromley did his best to pretend he didn’t hear. For a few days now they were feeding him better than the other prisoners and had him clear the tents of those men. It was their leader’s order. Bromley did his best to avoid him and his strange eyes while on his duty. And while he did that he started to formulate a plan and trying to save food.
On the next day he saw a man and for some reason he tied the name Erenkhand to him. He was dressed in all in black and under his cloak Bromley caught glimpse of armour. The Bree-lander managed to see him without his hood once or twice. He had short cropped black hair that contrasted the sickly white of his skin and he was clean shaven, his eyes were grey and it felt as if he was gazing right through anyone he set his eyes on. He was of the same stock as the crimson clad man and clearly in charge. The two spent hours talking, always out of ear-shot and no one disturbed them, ever. Not even the orcs who didn’t care at all for privacy or good manners. The man, Erenkhand, as Bromley had named him, stayed there for one week before leaving. With him were twenty men similar to the two that he overheard that day in the tent and no one of them seemed human to the man’s eyes.
“The time has come,” the man in crimson said in a low hiss. “In one week we’ll march East and through the Red Pass. It is time to reclaim an ancient artefact that will help with our cause. Once we have it we will be unstoppable!”
The orcs and the men broke out in roars raising their fists and weapons in a complete chaos that sent chills up Bromley’s spine, they were all bloodthirsty killers and they were about to start moving.
