Star of Cursrah (Lost Empires) by Clayton Emery

Author:Clayton Emery [Emery, Clayton]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780786964079
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Publishing
Published: 2012-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

Propped against a broken wall, tied with rawhide hand and foot, Amber moved only her eyes. Her thigh stung like hornets from the spear barb. Her shoulder and arm felt wrenched, and she bit her lip against the throbbing. Hakiim was dragged by one foot like a dead fox and dumped at her feet, then trussed. Amber pricked her ears, heard Hakiim breathe, and relaxed a trifle.

Another giant—here were three—trudged from the ruins with Reiver over one shoulder. The giant bent and straightened his arm. The little thief slid down the arm and thumped on dust like a dropped bracelet, hands and ankles tied with a single thong of rawhide. Unlike Hakiim, the thief was alert but lay unmoving, eyes closed. Amber thought Reiver’s nimble fingers fiddled at his ankle, but perhaps he simply scratched at fleas.

Dawn blazed along the eastern rim of the valley. As the light increased, Amber studied their captors. With daylight came heat, and the three let their robes hang open. Amber’s eyes grew wide.

They were ogres, or rather, half-ogres, for these brutes stood only two heads higher than a man, not tree high like full-blooded ogres. Amber had only seen an ogre once, and it had been dead. A tribe of ogres had one night attacked her parents’ slave train along the Trade Way. Two hired guards, ex-cavalry riders, killed one brute with lances and drove the others off. The mercenaries dragged the ogre all the way to Memnon in hopes of collecting a bounty, or at least selling the skeleton, but the carcass stank so badly they abandoned it outside the city walls to vultures and wild dogs.

These part-ogres had mannish features enlarged and grotesque: huge noses, jutting jaws, round ears like an ape’s, low foreheads with tiny horn buds, and scruffy gray-white hair like a wolf’s mane. Under their desert robes, just ill-stitched gray blankets, the menfolk wore raw horsehides slung over one shoulder and belted. The female wore a luxurious ivory fur with steel-gray spots. Amber identified it as a snow leopard’s hide; very valuable, as that wily cat inhabited only the highest mountains. The giants wore little else, going barefoot on soles tough as camel pads, and wearing human swords—no doubt trophies—as long knives. Their mighty spears had fearsome barbed heads of hammered iron and more trophies.

Amber blanched. The bushy tatters that she’d taken for horsetails were human scalps, dried and laced in place. At least thirty were divided amongst the three ogres. Most scalps were black, but a few were red or blond. The young woman groaned, imagining her own wild curls dangling from drying flesh peeled from her skull.

The half-breed ogres argued in guttering tones like rocks rolling down a hillside, voices curiously alike, with the female’s hardly higher. From their similar features, Amber concluded they were siblings.

Certainly they quarreled like brothers and a sister. The she-ogre had torn the Memnonites’ purses from their belts, and with blunt, black fingernails she laboriously counted their hard-won coins while the others frowned and bitched.

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