What the Whelp Chewed

Levels 3–5

The whelps were the first to notice him.

They were small for troggs, which is not the same thing as small, and they had been chewing on something in a pocket of snow under the valley wall. Tovrik came around the rock with the borrowed axe low, because his shoulder still remembered yesterday, and the nearest whelp squealed and ran. The other one did not. It clutched a hatchet to its chest as if the weapon were a meal it had not finished. The haft was a map of tooth marks. The head was ugly, thick, and better than what Tovrik was holding.

He took the fight the way he had taken the others. Step in. The whelp bit his bracer and found iron instead of dwarf. He struck once, poorly, and once well. When it was over he stood with both weapons and the valley looking at him, and he chose.

The borrowed axe he set against the rock, edge in, where a later recruit might find it or the snow might keep it. He did not feel noble about this. He felt the new hatchet’s balance, which was ruder and truer, and he felt his hands close on a haft that had already been worried by something that wanted to live. So did he.

He went up the wall, because the whelps had come from somewhere, and somewhere always has a larger owner. The path was a scrape in the stone with ice in the cracks. His boots argued with it. He won, barely, and came onto a shelf where three troggs had a fire that barely deserved the name. One of them wore a vest of hide stiff with frost, pale along the seams, as if the valley had tried to glaze the wearer and given up halfway.

Tovrik thought about going back. The thought was sane, brief, and late. They had already seen him.