The protection of what was once a gate was only effective against some villagers or the same orcs who could not even stay a minute in silence. They might have been able to repel the attack, the people on the upper tiers were enough, and the corridors were narrow, but they had almost no chance to stop me from getting inside. In the first few hours of wandering, I managed to bypass all the outer fortifications and protective corridors left by the dwarves and entered the residential neighborhoods.
Traces of desolation were visible everywhere, mountains of garbage, layers of dirt, from under which the floor is often not visible, and ... other wastes from a large number of reasons... relatively reasonable creatures. The smell was appropriate. It's a good thing I had time to put up with it a little bit... However, let's not talk about sadness.
By the way, the orcs themselves differed from people very noticeably; wide shoulders, powerful hands, almost not inferior in thickness and length of legs, hump backness peculiar almost to all, brown-green skin of all shades and, of course, faces varying from rather correct, though predatory profiles, to frankly pig's faces with a heel. With fangs they also had not everything unambiguously, someone was adorned with almost elephant tusks sticking out for a couple of centimeters from under the lower lip, and someone did not see them at all. But the orcas were more like human women, if, however, not to count the faces where all the said about the males remained faithful. The figures were one-to-one; hands were proportional, shoulders narrow, secondary sexual signs on the places due - to put something from above, to close the head and you can distinguish neither from the back nor in the profile.
Not to say that the entrance was not guarded at all, but the guard service, if it existed, then its duties were extremely frivolous. In fact, the orcs just lived here. They did their business, went to eat, eat, sleep, kick slow goblins, sometimes fought, someone even trained, but in all this variety it was not harder to hide and slip than to walk along the busy street, where nobody cares about you.
I'm sure if I'd opened my face, put off my cape and walk openly, they'd have noticed me at once, but who would do that? My cloak, after months in the woods, was different from the rags of the locals, but not so much so that it was evident. I was like an orcanian teenager or a mixture of goblins, and I met them here, too, and it was enough to hang out and smear them with mud. Besides, both of them tried once again not to approach their elders, and that's why my cautious movement in the dark corners did not cause any surprise to random witnesses. Finally, the dwarf architecture, either due to the complexes of the low people or from what else, differed in spaciousness and monumentality, so that any room, except for the very side and secondary corridors, always gave enough space to warm up. And the locals had not so much light. They used bonfires and torches, but the powerful ventilation (even draughts were felt in some places) laid down by builders allowed, but they could not light up all space, and in the darkness, they saw, on all signs, nevertheless worse than me.
My plan was quite unobvious - to collect more data about the Orcish relations, and to get to the "Ravshayev". If the information about these creatures known to me from the old world is at least close to reality, then with a weak and small tribe I have a chance to agree on any mutual services any more than with "big and strong". Only one question remained - how do I find this very tribe? The answer, however, was obvious, the good of the orcs around was more than enough.
I have to say that even though the locals seemed to be short-sighted barbarians and savages, I wouldn't call them idiots at all. Most of all, they resembled a kind of closed society living by its traditions and principles, which, although they were extremely far from the morals of well-fed and "civilized" peoples, had an internal logic that meets the conditions in which they were formed. No one would accuse any tribe of African natives living in gathering and cattle breeding of not being brought up in the conservative traditions of the English aristocracy? Different societies - different cultures. And it is within the limits of one biological kind. In general, even if the "appearance" left much to be desired, it was not worth judging by it strictly.