Warg-pit One Hundred and Thirteen

"What'll Sharkey say if he finds out?"

It's 'when' he finds out, not 'if,' Muzluk thought, but he didn't reply. He was trusting that with the war, and the great march coming up, their Master the White Wizard would be soon turning his attention elsewhere, to concentrate on the far bigger fish he had to fry. Actually, it was more of a hope Muzluk had of getting away with it than a sense of trust, because everyone knew that the Wizard was all-powerful - knowing and seeing everything that went on in his fortress, and beyond. So in fact, it was more of a chance than a hope, or maybe even less than that. Muzluk did feel that there was an outside possibility of their avoiding punishment, but there was no use in making the other fella nervous, not yet at any rate. In silence, they made their way further along the gallery. A lot of the torches were out but that wasn't much of a hindrance for either of them. The two Uruks, like all Orcs, could see very well in the dark.

"In here," Muzluk said at length.

"Warg-pit –"Bur-kesh ran his fingers over the figures that had been incised into the stable door – "Warg- pit - I can't make it out."

"One Hundred and Thirteen," Muzluk said.

"One Hundred and – I don't know," said Bur-kesh, "is that –"

"Yes," Muzluk said shortly, remembering to translate for his companion. "That's the same as: 'lots'."

The pit was empty because Warg-bitch One Hundred and Thirteen was in heat. At not inconsiderable cost to Orcish life and limb, she'd been removed from the pit earlier that day. Muzluk had heard the wranglers, the ones who'd survived intact (more-or-less), talking about it. The Warg was probably up in the stud-kennels right this minute, ripping all manner of heck out of her prospective mates. Warg bitches were much larger than their mates, and several orders of magnitude more aggressive. Not all males survived the mating process, which meant that Warg-breeding could be an extremely time-consuming business. The enormous, wolf-like brutes made usefully intimidating mounts for lesser Orcs to ride into battle, however, which meant that the Wizard was set on extending his Warg-stable as much as possible.

The in-heat reek of the bitch permeated the whole chamber, and Muzluk's nostrils flared as he drank in the blindingly arousing aroma. Most things are blindingly arousing to Uruks; the rub of a leather battle-harness against tough Uruk-hide, a glimpse of a comrade's firmly-muscled behind, the scent of blood on a keen morning breeze – and so on. Saruman the White – Sharkey, as the Uruks called him – had, by bending his wizardly powers to evil intent - perverting the courses of nature in the process - perfected a technique for spawning a man-made army of Uruk-hai, deep in his fortress at Isengard. From their first beginnings, as germ-like sparks of life in the noisome mud, through a period of forced, straining development, they were matured into fully-adult warriors over a matter of months. In this way Sharkey had amassed a fighting force numbering some ten thousand strong, and soon every one of the foot-soldiers would be urgently needed, for the coming war.

In relation to spawned Uruk sexuality, the vastly accelerated growth process used by Saruman might have had some unexpected side-effects: even more so than most Orcs, most of them seemed - quite literally – to be up, for sex, almost all of the time. Possibly, the compression of their adolescence into an unnaturally short period made the fast-tracked Uruks keen to make up for lost time. Isengard Uruks did not have much chance of enjoying an extended lifespan – either in theory or in blood-soaked actuality - and perhaps their lust for life was translated, in acknowledgement of this on some level, into just lust, in general. Their notable excesses of randy behaviour could have resulted from a combination of any, or none of these factors. It might just have been one of the many manifestations of general Uruk hot-bloodedness.

In any case, in relation to Warg-bitches in heat, there had been...incidents. It was unfortunately true that anything that got stuck into a Warg-pit, much less an actual Warg herself, was very likely to get bitten off, chewed up, and occasionally, to add insult to injury, spat out afterwards. Following a series of gruesomely fatal accidents, Sharkey had not needed to impose any access restrictions around the pits; everyone was careful to keep themselves far, far away from the dreadfully vicious beasts. Bur-kesh, for one, had never been anywhere near a Warg-pit, much less an actual Warg, in his life.

"Are you sure it's safe?" Bur-kesh said. Uruks, fearless in combat and on the battlefield, and ignoring of pain as they generally are, did retain at least a few instincts for self-preservation. Bur-kesh's worries were understandable, since the Warg-bitch in the adjoining pen had been flinging herself, bodily, against the dividing wall since the two of them had arrived. Now she lapsed into an uneasy sort of slobbering silence, pausing only now and again to paw and scrabble at the wall that separated them.

"Yes," said Muzluk.

Bur-kesh stared at him for a minute. He had never been separated from the rest of the pack for this long before, and Muzluk could tell it was beginning to get to him.

"What d'you think everybody else is doing at the moment Muzluk?" Bur-kesh asked. "Do you think anyone will of noticed we've gone, yet? What d'you think they'll think we're off doing, when they see we're not there?"

Muzluk smiled. There wasn't a lot of good-will or humour in it. "I expect they're doing what they're always doing, about this time," he said. "Chanting and shouting slogans together, for starters. Might of the White Hand, and that. Quaffing themselves silly, drinkin' like fish. And ripping the piss out of some poor bastard, if I know what's what. You know – all the usual stuff. How about you - what do you think?"

"That sounds about right, I reckon," said Bur-kesh, uncertainly. Muzluk was obviously going off on one of his weirdy tangents again. He got some strange ideas sometimes, and no mistake. So much so that Bur-kesh, ordinarily, wouldn't have bothered himself about someone like Muzluk at all, except for that Muzluk was built like a brick, friggin,' shit-house, and his cock, it ran all the way to – right down here. Even aside from that, a lot of the time, it was kind of nice, being around Muzluk. The way he was, sometimes you could even let your guard down around him, a tiny little bit.

"What are we doing down here anyway?" asked Bur-kesh.

"We're going to have it off, of course," Muzluk replied.

That wouldn't do. "But why do we have to do it here?"

"I want to do it with our clothes off," Muzluk said, doggedly. "Take a bit of time about it, for a change."

Bur-kesh eyed him doubtfully. "Is that all?" he said. "Is that it? But we could of done that upstairs."

"No," said Muzluk, "we couldn't. Not with everyone looking on, we couldn't. Cat-calling, and such. We -" he broke off, quite unable to explain himself. Communication was never a very strong suit for Uruks, since they never got very much practice at it.

"You've never minded before," Bur-kesh protested. "I've sucked you off loads of times, like you've done me, and everybody watching. Everyone was watching the other night, when Ghazhack did you –"

"'Course I don't mind that," Muzluk snarled, clenching and unclenching his fists. He might have known he shouldn't have tried asking Bur-kesh. "It's regular enough. I know that. But if it was with the two of us, alone. I just - wondered what that might be like. Just us two. Not to be watched."

"But we're never alone," replied Bur-kesh, off-pat. Couldn't count past the sum total of his fingers and toes, poor bugger, but even he had managed to take a few of Sharkey's teachings to heart. No surprise there, really; religion being such an easy one for folk to latch onto. "Remember the Eye?" Bur-kesh said, reverently. "The Great Eye. He sees everythink we do."

It was never very likely that Muzluk would ever be able to forget about that hated, friggin,' Lidless, Eye. None of them would. An awareness of it was there all the time, in all of their heads. It didn't control them, not exactly. But somehow, when they did things right, when they did the things the Eye wanted, awareness of it would fade, mercifully, until it was the slightest, almost intangible presence. Probably, they would not even have been able to identify it as an Eye, if Sharkey hadn't told them what it was, because try to get a grasp on what it was all about, and it would fade almost entirely. Though even then it was still persistent. Cankering. Maddening. Try to do anything the Eye didn't want, and that was where the trouble started. So on the whole, it was just as well that they liked doing what the Eye wanted. On the whole it was far easier just to not think about it.

"And, Sharkey said, he don't mind what we do, so long as we don't do it alone."

Muzluk sighed to himself. There wasn't much chance of any of them ever getting to properly be alone, either.

From the first, Sharkey's Uruks were trained as a pack. As soon as the inevitable confusion and blood-lust that attended each Uruk's emergence had dissipated, the birth-cohorts were housed together. Each group of between twenty and thirty full-grown adults would be allotted a communal living-space; a roughly circular area, about as wide across as three or four Uruks together were tall. The billets were packed closely together in a vast, subterranean chamber, one of the largest halls in Isengard. Each group's quarters, in addition to the resident Uruks themselves, contained only a central ring of hearth-stones and an open vessel into which all the creatures in the group passed waste. For a few brief weeks, each group would live together as a collective, in conditions of such extreme intimacy that there was never a chance that any one Uruk would experience a single moment of privacy or solitude.

The Great Orcs spent their waking hours together, in training. They ate and slept together, copulated and excreted all in full view of one another, and in clear sight of every other Uruk in the chamber. The crowded dens and the fiery, fighting temperaments of the Uruks themselves, together with the climate of paranoia and suspicion that Saruman deliberately fostered in his troops invariably resulted in regular outbursts of savage violence. And though order of a sort was kept across the hall by teams of lesser Orcs - a well-armed force ranged against the as-yet un-trained, naive Uruks - a certain level of mortality among the trainees was expected or even counted upon: Uruks were highly carnivorous, and supplies of fresh meat to Isengard from outside sources had been dwindling, with the coming war.

"Just as well we're never alone then, isn't it?" said Muzluk, dryly. Then he thought he'd better try and be more encouraging, for Bur-kesh's sake. "I'm here, and you're here, by all accounts the Eye's here with us, and Sharkey knows about it too –"

"Sharkey?"

"Never you mind about Sharkey. He's got bigger fish to fry," Muzluk muttered. "Get your kit off, Bur-kesh," he added, and readily, Bur-kesh began to comply. He unbuckled his sword-belt and shucked off his leather tunic. Standing in his sleeveless undershirt, he removed his wrist-bracers and stooped down to unfasten his shin-plates. Beneath the undershirt, he was wearing – not a great deal, and when he bent over his garment rode up. Muzluk paused in undressing himself, riveted by the sight of Bur-kesh's great, muscular thighs, and his fine, upstanding, naked buttocks.

He could have cracked walnuts between those thighs, Muzluk noted appreciatively, though why anybody would want to crack walnuts open in the first place was quite beyond him, since Uruk-hai had never really embraced the tenets of vegetarianism. Quite apart from all that, there weren't any walnuts to be had anyway, since Sharkey had ripped all the trees near Isengard out during an earlier phase of his building plans.

"Muzluk, could you have a look at, um – "Bur-kesh began. Predictably, he was having trouble with the lacings in his boots. With deftly-moving fingers Muzluk helped him unsnarl the many knots. Bur-kesh had been cutting his laces and tying them together again each time, from the looks of things. Had they been upstairs, in the barracks, Muzluk would have felt obliged to yell and jeer at Bur-kesh at this point, making fun of his ineptitude, but then had they been upstairs, Bur-kesh would never have revealed his weakness to anybody in the first place. Muzluk found himself experiencing an odd, totally unexpected emotion; a quick sort of flickering sensation of warmth and friendliness towards Bur-kesh. Secretly, he was very pleased that Bur-kesh had thought to ask for his assistance, though he couldn't exactly have said why he felt that way at all.

Bur-kesh certainly wasn't one of the sharpest pike-heads in the armoury, which actually was one of the main reasons why Muzluk had asked him along on their current escapade. The other main reason was Bur-kesh's looks; like Muzluk, he was by Uruk standards, a very fine-looking fellow. Tall, well built, with leathery, red-brown skin and his muscles had just the right amount of an oily, sleek, sheen to them. He had a good amount of matted, sooty-black hair. None of his fangs were broken and his lower jaw jutted out nicely. Muzluk was quite aroused just from thinking about him, and he stuck his hand up Bur-kesh's shirt. Then he helped him off with that, too.

Muzluk noted in passing that Bur-kesh was literally plastered all over with White Hands, each of them an Uruk's hand-print, made in indelible paint. The White Hand was the symbol of their Master, the Wizard Saruman. This daubing was also a constant reminder that they were bound to their Master, no better off than Sharkey's slaves, Muzluk sometimes thought, but he kept his mouth firmly shut about that. He had the regulation number of White Hands on his body himself, of course – oh, yes – nobody could get away with not having that, but he certainly didn't go out of his way to try and acquire more.

Muzluk also noticed something new. There was a heavy, iron ring – the metal at least as thick as the tip of Muzluk's little finger - piercing each of Bur-kesh's nipples. The wounds looked new and were seeping a bit and the iron was starting to rust already.

"What the fuck is this?" growled Muzluk, in amazement.

"Decorative piercings," said Bur-kesh.

Muzluk stared at him. As if they didn't have enough to contend with ordinarily. "Does it hurt?" he said.

"Hah!" scoffed Bur-kesh.

Muzluk crooked one eyebrow at him, sceptically.

"Well, yes," Bur-kesh muttered, shame-facedly. "It really stings, and burns. It's been getting worse and worse, all morning." He wouldn't have dared admit that to anyone else. But Muzluk didn't seem to set as quite much store on brazen Uruk-ish blustering and empty posturing as everybody else did.

"I'm getting worried about mine, to tell the truth," Bur-kesh continued. "But Ghazhack's had his done. Ghazhack said how good it would be if we all got them too –"

Muzluk went for him properly then, snarling savagely as he barged his shoulder into Bur-kesh's chest, knocking him clean off his feet. Muzluk followed quickly after, his fangs clicking together just a hairsbreadth away from the other Uruk's cheek; he had managed to pull his strike in the end, but only just. Bur-kesh lay back, sighing appreciatively, rather turned-on by the strength of Muzluk's response. He was fully expecting to be ravished now that Muzluk had bested him – and ravished very vigorously, he hoped - but instead Muzluk, wrenching himself away, had clambered to his feet, and turned aside. He leaned, breathlessly, against the Warg-stable wall. Bur-kesh groaned. He should have remembered about that thing between Muzluk and Ghazhack.

The largest, fiercest Uruk in a pack would take up the role of leader, quite rightly and properly. It was the way things had always been. A very strict pecking order of Uruks – based on size and fighting ability - followed, down through the group, and according to that, after Ghazhack, who was the biggest, thuggiest, tough-guy anyone could ever remember seeing, Muzluk, by anybody's reckoning, should have ranked a fairly close second. Except that in their particular group, he didn't. Bur-kesh thought that this could be down to Muzluk's tendency of saying exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time, seemingly a small matter, but a bad habit that was guaranteed to get people's backs up. But whatever the cause, it was certainly true that Ghazhack and Muzluk couldn't abide the sight of one other. Ghazhack, as boss Uruk in the pack, took every opportunity for expressing his dominance over Muzluk – again, as was right, appropriate, and proper - and Muzluk, of late at least, had been submitting to all of it, so quietly and with so few of his usual protests that Bur-kesh had almost forgotten that there had ever been a problem.

Muzluk extended a hand to help him up as Bur-kesh started to pick himself off the floor, and once he was standing, Muzluk pushed him back, insistently, till he was leaning against the Warg-stable wall. Without speaking, Muzluk bent his head and began lapping and licking at Bur-kesh's sore, red nipples, soothing his wounds but also lightly teasing and pulling the metal piercing-rings there between his teeth. At the same time his hands moved down past Bur-kesh's hips and fastened on his groin. Muzluk's right hand fixed itself round Bur-kesh's growing erection, pulling and squeezing him roughly, arousingly, while he reached round Bur-kesh with his left hand, pressing between his buttocks to knead from behind at his dangling bollocks.

Pressed hard up against his body as Muzluk was, there was very little room for Bur-kesh to try to reciprocate by tugging at Muzluk's cock. Instead, he grabbed enthusiastically at Muzluk's behind, but was rewarded only by a strangled roar, as Muzluk slapped him off, telling him to keep his fucking hands to himself.

That fucking pillock Ghazhack had been none too careful about his fucking claws the other night, with the result that Muzluk's arse felt like it had been well and truly shredded, inside and out. The ham-fisted bastard had most probably done it to him on purpose, Muzluk thought, bitterly.

"What the fuck's the matter with you?" Bur-kesh shouted challengingly, shoving Muzluk away, and at that moment Muzluk realised that he if had managed to provoke such a response from level-headed, easy-going old Bur-kesh, then undoubtedly, he had now pushed things much too far.

"Where d'you think you're going?" Muzluk said. He was not feeling too sure of himself at all by this time, and it showed in his voice, but Bur-kesh, who was hurriedly getting dressed, didn't reply. Perhaps he didn't hear, because when they'd started yelling, the Wargs all around them had begun to set up a dreadful din, but there was not really much comfort in that. Bur-kesh was going upstairs, back to the pack, of course he was, and once he was there he might not mean to, but he'd tell them everything. About Muzluk bringing him down here, and trying to be alone, and undressing him, and wanting them to take their time over sex. And when that happened, Muzluk would be for it. It had been made quite clear to him, by Ghazhack and his lieutenants, that any more non-standard behaviour on Muzluk's part would absolutely, positively, not be tolerated. Muzluk's mouth went dry from fright. They'd do for him this time, and they'd take their own sweet time about it before they finally finished him off, too.

The main thing was to stop Bur-kesh from leaving, at all costs. Before Muzluk properly realised what he was doing, he had jumped Bur-kesh, and tackled him from behind, grappling him to the ground. He found that he had snagged a piece of Warg-tack from the stable wall on his way down, and he used the thick, leather strap to bind Bur-kesh's hands tightly behind his back.

"Get off me – you bastard –"

Absently, Muzluk noted that the bit of Warg-tack had a long, trailing end, which could probably go once round Bur-kesh's neck. Like so. That had shut him up. Nicely done! Now, if we get his wrists up between his shoulder-blades – like that – there'll be enough slack to get it through both his nipple-rings – you didn't like those, did you Muzluk? Then run the end back up to his neck, tuck it in – that's right - and there's still a piece for you to hold on to. Look how he jerks about when you pull on his leash! Keep doing that. Keep doing that. Good, Muzluk. You can keep pulling on it when you fuck him. You can fuck him now, Muzluk. Get those claws out, and get yourself in him.

Muzluk shoved his knee between Bur-kesh's legs, forcing them apart, and pushed his index and middle fingers into Bur-kesh's body. He used them to probe and thrust, viciously. The voice in Muzluk's head told Muzluk to go deeper, harder, faster, and rip -

"Muzluk," muttered Bur-kesh into the Warg-stable floor, "Muzluk, go easy, all right? You're hurting me."

- the voice in his head told Muzluk that hurting Bur-kesh was a very good thing and that he should keep right on doing it. It had never instructed him quite so explicitly before, and the shock of registering that brought Muzluk – somewhat – back to himself. Appalled, he managed to pull away. This was not what he had intended at all. The voice said –

The voice in my head, Muzluk thought, wretchedly. He wasn't even properly sure there was a voice in his head. He couldn't tell where his own self ended and the voice began, if it began at all, if they weren't just different aspects of one dreadful, horrid, twisted whole, an entity that walked around and ate and drank and slept and shat and called itself 'Muzluk,' and got ideas above its station. He slumped down dejectedly, where he was, on the floor.

"Muzluk, why did you stop?" Bur-kesh called after a little while, plaintively.

Muzluk hadn't properly understood what he'd wanted from Bur-kesh when he brought him to the Warg-pit – he still didn't, in fact - but he did know that now, what they were doing was very, very far from whatever it was he'd been longing for. He'd have to finish it now they'd started though. He'd have to follow it through, for appearances sake. He was anything but sexually aroused, but mechanically, he used his hand to tug himself into an erection. There was some Warg saddle-grease in a pot on one of tack-shelves, and he used it liberally, to slick himself and Bur-kesh both. He paused for a moment on the brink, and took a deep breath, steadying himself. And then -

Muzluk fucked Bur-kesh ferociously, fucked him mercilessly, while the pulse of blood pounded harder and harder in his ears, throbbing so fiercely that after a time Muzluk couldn't be sure whether it was the noises around them in the Warg-pit or the marching squeeze of his own heartbeat that sounded so deafeningly loud. Finally he was done; finally he was able to finish, and even if Muzluk had not taken any particular pleasure in it, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bur-kesh wouldn't have realised, would not have noticed that anything was amiss.

Wincing, he eased himself out and rested alongside Bur-kesh for a moment. Muzluk felt drained of all energy - quite empty - and very, very tired. The other Uruk however was chuckling to himself, still groaning ecstatically, quite replete from sexual excess.

"This was what you wanted all along, wasn't it?" Bur-kesh whispered. "You dirty bugger," he added salaciously. "You should of said."

"Yes," Muzluk replied tonelessly, untying Bur-kesh's wrists, not looking at him. "Yes," he repeated, carefully keeping his voice level. "You're right. I suppose you guessed it."

(Continued in "The Leader of the Pack")