Orsk

One of the three of the Order of the Broken Chain who came west with Yara, and one of the two the gnolls of the Valley of Doom killed. Their trainer had not used names, only numbers: Grishka was the One and Yara was the Three. Orsk was a man, not tall, and stout through the shoulders. Nothing else of his face or his years was ever written down, and nobody set down a word he said.

He carved. Yara said he would work at things like that, and what he was working at when he died is an idol of Vroga Waruk cut out of a chunk of Mól ruin-stone he had picked up by coincidence, with metal veined through it that he had worked into the line of the broken chain because it was there. The carving is cruder where the metal runs, a blade being no use against it. He also made the band’s healing draughts: no water of the Vite required, only time he was willing to spend and the three of them praying over it together, and they come out stronger in the hands of anyone who holds the god close. Yara’s regret, standing in the camp the hyenas had been through, was that they had left them behind when they ran.

Yara alone could say how he died. The gnolls found the band a second time, a while after the first, and she and Orsk were fighting them off when she went up a rockface, slipped, and took a bad fall. They took him while he was pulling her out of it. By the time she reached him she had spent everything she carried and his injuries were past anything she had left. He had the comfort of her hand in his, she said, and it did not take him long. She likes to believe he hunts with Vroga now, his soul gone into the god’s realm and the eternal battle.

They carried him down out of the valley and off the Goat Trail, five days of winter marching with a dead man, to a cave the party knew well enough to have given directions to it. Yara piled rocks over him, looked at the pile, said it was good to go, and walked out without a prayer over it. Mikhail asked whether that was how Vroga’s people did things and was told it was not, that it was more her own choice than anyone’s rule, and that they had done more for Grishka than they did for Orsk. Koa stayed behind and said a few words. The idol went to him and is still unfinished.