Eye of Darkness (Part Twenty-Three)

In the murky hallways, the Morgs, even with their people’s excellent dark-sight, would still have been almost invisible to each other even without the Ivran cloak. But it was unnerving to be missing even the little sounds and hints that let one know one was not alone in the crushing darkness. The only lights were flickering torches placed at long intervals when another tunnel crossed theirs. These were tended by a squat lesser Ogre, armed with a pike, at each intersection, and they passed these with extra care. Sometimes, on this level, they passed other open doors.

     Belmok saw vast eating halls, refectories full of steam and quarreling and noisy gorging, and kitchens full of squealing beasts and iron implements little different from torture chambers. They went by places piled with weapons, armories of black and battered arms hoarded in ominous piles and racks, ready for use. Thron studied them with a calculating eye, as they moved by. Every now and then the Morgs would have to press themselves against the wall as some thrall went hurrying past on some inscrutable errand. Each time Belmok held his breath with the thought that any chance contact might lead to their discovery.

     The shafts had been hewn to Great Ogre dimensions, which gave the Morgs at least an illusion of freedom to move in. This contracted a little when they descended to the next level below. There were fewer chambers along the tunnels there, many of them shut by iron doors, their uses unguessable to the curious Belmok. He had to bite his tongue and focus his mind on their mission, to keep from distracting Leren with questions. There did not seem to be much traffic through this level, and torches were few and far between.

     This changed when they again went farther down. When they entered this level Belmok almost lost hold of Thron in surprise.

     The gate they had passed through had opened into an enormous cavern, the road they were on into an elevated path raised at least forty feet from the cave floor, without rail or curb. The entire chamber was dimly lit by dirty greenish phosphorescent moss growing along the walls and roof. Below them, segregated into separate craters by low stone walls, were the Ogre hatching pits.

     Belmok watched in fascination as they walked along, not least because each stone nest was tended by a female Ogre, the first such he had ever seen. They were exactly as the Ivra had described, if slightly better dressed than Belmok had expected, with crude jewelry hanging from their tattered crests and jangling bracelets on their withered arms. There were clutches of eggs like melons huddled together in piles, warty and rough. There were pits of newly hatched Ogres, naked and mewling angrily. Off by themselves, isolated by a particularly high wall, were young Ogres of various heights, all walking, gabbling, in a jangling mass. Every pit was watched over by an Ogress who surveyed her wards with an indifferent eye.

     As they were leaving the room, the big Morg’s attention was drawn to some squealing from a pit where a new batch of younglings were just hatching. He looked down and was in time to see one Ogre-spawn tucking hungrily down into the flesh of its weaker sibling. Though Leren had told them of such things, he paused in horror, tugging Thron to a stop as well. The nurse came scrambling out of a corner, squawking, responding to the disturbance with flailing limbs.

     She separated the two with some difficulty, but not before the bigger had devoured most of an arm and a leg and dug into the other’s bowels. The Ogress held the dying thing in her arms almost tenderly, watching its final throes with unblinking, wrinkled eyes. Then she bared her fangs, bent down, and began feeding hungrily herself.

     Belmok hurried them out of the chamber, and Thron was not slow to follow.

    Notes:

    After years of not thinking about female Ogres I suddenly found myself face to face with the question. My earliest conception, drawn about the same as we began writing Goldfire, definitely had more mammalian features:

To make the Ogres more distinctive and remote from the aesthetics of the other races of Ortha, they became more cold-blooded in nature, including their reptilian crests.

The hatching pits were, in retrospect, no doubt influenced by the Alien movies and the 1972 TV movie Gargoyles. By I tried to make the Ogre life-cycle as distinctively horrible and as ecologically plausible as possible. It was just a coincidence that I found a picture from Disney's Gargoyles of a 'rookery' that looked pretty damn close to my conception.