GRINDLEGUTS

Dude is a heinous little devil. But don't trust me:

"You are a fine specimen of orcanity, with touselled grey hair, close-set blood-shot eyes beneath joined, bushy eyebrows, a pock-marked nose with flaring nostrills, filed teeth in a wide, thin-lipped mouth and a generous supply of chins. You are clad in clotted furs and spattered punk-skin. You are completely uninjured."

C'mon ladies -- was your last date *really* better looking than our boy here?

 

"In a hole in a mound there lived an orc. Not a clear, dry sandy hole with only spiders to catch and eat, nor yet a comfortable hobbit-hole. It was an orc-hole and that means a dirty, clammy, wet hole filled with bits of worms and putrid smell.

It had a perfectly round garbage heap, blocking the doorway, with a slimy yellow blob in the exact middle for spitting practice. The doorway opened ontot a sewer-shaped hall -- a deeply unpleasant tunnel filled with smoke, with secret panels, and floors snared and pitted, provided with treacherous chairs and lots and lots of booby traps -- the orc was fond of visitors.

But what is an orc? Orcs are not seen much nowadays, since they are shy of human beings. They are a pungent people, little bigger than overweight elves, with the charisma of blow flies and the appetite of gannets. Orcs have little or no magic, except a rudimentary skill with knives and strangling cords and, in short, they are evil little pits.

This orc was unusually ugly even for an orc. His name was Grindleguts.

Grindleguts had lived in the neighbourhood of The Mountain for about a year and most people considered him two steps lower than a tapeworm, not only because of the smell and the plague, but beacause he kept eating theiert household pets.

Knight Orc follows on from the events described in The Sign of the Orc. Grindleguts hads been volunteered as their champion by the other orcs, while in a drunken stupor, and tied to a horse so that he won't escape, or fall off, before the joust. Your first task, as the orc in question, is to live long enough to escape over the viaduct to Orc Mountain.

Good luck, Grindleguts. You're going to need it."