01 - Honour of the Grave (3 page)

Then the bag went up over his head and the drawstring pulled shut and one of
the biggest orcs seized it by the top and hefted it over his back, so that all
but the cord, dragging in the muck behind him as he walked, disappeared from
Angelika’s view. The other orc legs and orc boots followed, wasting no time in
heading back where they’d come from.

Angelika saw something white and trembling in front of her and at length
realized that it was her own hand. She thought that perhaps it would be
appropriate to vomit but the physical urge to do so was not in fact upon her.
Feeling the cold of the muck she lay in, she wrenched herself up to a sitting
position, even though this meant painfully craning her neck.

She could not believe it. The boy hadn’t given her away.

Angelika would have to wait a good long time to be sure there would be no
more orcs coming.

It had been a certainty to her that the boy would point the finger. She had
it all pictured in her head and everything. She was all prepared for what to do
next.

She leaned her head against the wood of the cart, letting her breathing slow.
She reached up to her face with dirty fingers and felt something wet coming down
from her eyes. She assumed it would be blood, from some wound she hadn’t noticed
getting, but when she looked at her fingers there was no red liquid. So it must
have only been tears.

It was sad, she supposed, that the orcs would torture and mutilate and for
all she knew even eat the boy. He had turned out to be better than the norm. But
there was certainly nothing she could do about it. Or should do. She understood
the world better than he.

She stood on a granite promontory, up in the hills, looking down at the
massed orcs as they moved down south through the pass, back into the border
reaches. The walls of mountain rock on both sides gathered up and magnified the
grunting and chanting of the orcs below. It felt like they were groaning right
into her ear. But she was safe from them; she would look like just a speck, up
here, and they were occupied with their unruly march.

The mud was drying already. She looked at a big cake of it on her outer thigh
and smacked it off. Idly she wondered which side had initiated the battle in the
first place, the patrolling Imperials or the invading orcs. It did not really
matter, but Max, to whom she would sell her catch, maintained an interest in
military matters and liked to know these things. He said he was writing a book,
which he wasn’t, but Angelika could get a slightly better price on her wares by
humouring him. Even so, she did not know what she was waiting for. She could
glean no further information for Max by watching the orcs now. Even though they
held great torches aloft—tree trunks, wrapped in looted cloth and dipped in flammable
pitch, each carried by three or four straining, stumbling orcs—details were
hard to make out. Maybe an expert on orcs could look down and find signs to
interpret, but Angelika had no interest in becoming an expert on orcs.

She turned to go and then stopped. She turned back, to see more clearly what
she had just seen, in the corner of her eye. Emerging from a blind spot behind a
rock outcropping was a huge cart. Angelika had to pause and compare it with the
size of the figures around it to get an accurate sense of its scale. Its wheels—she counted a dozen, then recounted and corrected the figure to ten—were
greater in diameter than the height of any nearby orc. Its surface was a flat
platform of long planks, somewhere between eighty and one hundred feet long. It
boasted neither rails nor sides. Over a hundred sweating, bare-backed orcs,
suffering under the lashes of multiple drivers, pitched forward in a series of
great, uneven lurches, dragging it behind them. In the middle of the cart there
towered an enormous wooden figure. The figure, depicting an orc with gaping
mouth and antlered helmet, terminated at the waist, which was flush with the
planks of the cart. It looked hollow, like it had been knocked together with
nails and scraps of board. The eyes on its squarish face were set on different
levels, and several of its large, triangular teeth had already fallen loose and
were dangling from the round cave of its stupidly open mouth. Angelika could not
tell if the splotches of dark on the figure’s surface were paint or dung or
mildew.

Her knees felt unsteady, and a voice at the back of her head told her to run,
but Angelika kept looking at the thing, confident in the half mile of distance
between them. The big figure had only one arm, and this was a separate, levering
piece, attached with a big wooden pin to its shoulder. This moveable arm
terminated in a great round hammer, its striking surface easily eight, perhaps
even ten, feet in diameter. Chains held it up, in ready position. Angelika,
squinting, thought she could make out a pulley contraption set into the platform
of the cart, to which the chains were fixed.

Several dozen orcs, all tiny to her eyes, milled around the figure. One in
particular seemed larger than the rest, and stood at the cart’s forward edge,
fists at hips, watching the slave orcs as they strove to yank his conveyance
onward. She saw that his foot stood on something, and that the something was
moving.

It was a familiar, squirming sack, dyed purple and splotchy, its drawstring
now trailing down over the lip of the cart.

So they had not killed the boy yet. It did not take brilliant deduction to
realize that the orcs intended to perform some kind of ceremony involving their
big crude statue. It would entail placing Franziskus under the hammer’s shadow,
then loosing the chains, so it would fall upon him, pounding him to paste.

Angelika turned to go. Now she had an interesting fact to share with Max for
his imaginary book. It would not be necessary to stay and watch the ceremony.
She could imagine the results with sufficient vividness. She crept quietly along
the flattish projection of rock she’d been standing on and down to a trail
through the brush and bramble. The trail forked two ways, up towards a mountain
switchback, or down the face of the hill to the pass. Up around the mountain lay
her route to town, and Max, and her money and a hot drink and a softish bed.

She took the trail’s downward leg. Angelika had never heard of a thing like
the statue. Maybe she could make some more money by making a sketch of it, to
sell to scholars or something. Max would know of such scholars, perhaps. They
were the sorts of people he was always drinking with. Angelika had heard maybe
that there was a market for information. It would be especially true, wouldn’t
it, when it was information on the Empire’s most dangerous enemies? Yes, she was
pretty sure of it. So, the reason she was getting closer was to make a sketch.
For the money.

Stunted, leathery-leafed trees lined the trail, and Angelika kept low behind
them. It was not hard to match the cart’s slow progress. If anything, Angelika,
the thumps of her heart radiating up through her chest, wanted it to go faster.

A dried, weedy branch reached out to caress her, leaving a line of burrs
hanging from her leggings.

She would not do anything foolish, she told herself.

She pulled the back of her hand across her forehead, wiping sweat away.

Maybe you could say, in some sense, that the boy deserved rescuing, but she
would not allow herself to be tempted towards such stupidity.

Drumming started up, somewhere in the distance, and echoed across the walls
of rock.

There were hundreds of orcs around, maybe more, and any one of them could
kill you with a single blow.

A rock rolled out from under Angelika’s foot as she put it down on the path,
and she windmilled her arms to try to keep her balance. She crashed into one of
the low, bushy trees, grabbing a branch for support. Its bark felt greasy.

Especially that biggest of the orcs, up on the cart, standing over
Franziskus. That one could kill you with a single dull fingernail.

Up ahead, she saw that her path dead-ended. The pass widened out, and the
trail went right down to its flat bottom. She could stay put, clamber back up
the incline through sharp rocks and boulders, or continue on to where the orcs
were. She stayed put, cursing her folly.

She heard whip cracks and orcish shouts and looked over to see that the cart
drivers were trying to get the haulers stopped. Some at the front had halted,
while others behind them trudged peevishly onwards. A pileup began, and the
haulers began to push and shove at each other. One particularly large specimen,
pushed from behind by a humpbacked, dull-eyed orc, turned and opened his maw
wide, exposing his tusks and sending a great spray of spittle back towards his
tormentor. A third orc, beside the humpback, squinted as spare sputum hit him,
then lurched forward to clamp thick, horny fingers over the larger orc’s lower
jaw. He pulled downwards, smashing his victim with his spare fist. Haulers all
around these two joined in, limbs flying, jaws gnashing, as the drivers up on
the cart directed their whips into the brawling mass. A small chunk of something
fleshy and greenish sailed out from the tangle of brawling orcs. Angelika
guessed it for a finger or possibly an ear.

Her shoulders seized up in warning as she heard something behind her.
Twisting backwards, she saw a trio of orcs making their way quickly down the
trail, their eyes on the fight. They intended to join it, but unless she went
somewhere, they would run right into her. They blocked her route back into the
hills. Her only way was forwards, towards the greater mass of orcs. At least
they were distracted.

Angelika leapt. She was in mid-air, sailing over the bushes. She hit the
gravelly ground at ravine bottom. The wheels of the cart, now motionless, stood
in front of her. She could hear screaming and growling, but no orcs were looking
her way. They’d all be up at the front of the cart, where the fight was. She
sprinted in between two of the tall, spoked wheels, rocks and pebbles spraying
out behind her. Once under the cart, she looked for the best way to hide. The
axles were high and wide enough that she could haul herself up on them, and
maybe not be seen when the commotion died down up front. She chose an axle in
the middle, which would give her more choices when she had to run. Angelika
hefted herself up and laid herself out on her back, across the axle. It was not
comfortable, but she could balance herself and was not in immediate danger of
falling off. What would happen when the cart started moving again, she could not
predict.

The sounds from up ahead were trailing off to yelping and isolated snarls, so
Angelika could only guess that the orc leaders had violently snuffed out the
brawl. She would be stuck here for a while, until the next distraction. This
would probably occur after the cart started up again, and then reached its final
destination. She could creep away then. This would teach her forever, she
thought. She promised herself that the next time she saw someone being carried
off to an awful fate, she would act true to her beliefs, and leave him to his
destiny. She made a point of feeling the hardness of the axle as it dug into her
spine; she would recall this sensation when next she got an imbecilic temptation
to do otherwise.

She thought about possible escape routes. Both the brushy inclines on either
side of the pass would be good ways to get out, so long as they remained free of
orcs.

The cart stayed stopped. Perhaps this was its final destination.

She heard something to the left, and strained to see it, through
wheel-spokes. Four orcish pallbearers carried a wooden pallet past the cart’s
far side. Angelika could not fully see the honoured corpse they bore, but he was
at least as big an orc as the one she’d seen atop the cart, lording it over
Franziskus’ sack.

The pallbearers halted when they reached the front of the cart, and Angelika
saw the pallet being hauled up onto it. It looked for a moment as if the corpse
would fall off, but then she saw it was bound to the pallet with knotted lengths
of cloth.

Angelika sifted her memory for what little she knew of orcs and their ways.
The big dead orc must be the previous leader, killed in the battle. The big live
orc must be taking over. The ceremony in which Franziskus was about to be
sacrificed was to celebrate the live one’s ascendance, or to mourn the dead
one’s loss, or both.

There was a thumping up top, and the planks of the cart rattled and vibrated
just inches from the top of Angelika’s head. She could tell that all of the
hopping up and down was taking place near the cart’s forward edge. She heard the
exultant howling of an army of gore-mad orcs. Horns blew and the throng silenced
itself somewhat. A deep, bellowing voice boomed out over them.

This would be it. That would be the big orc giving its speech. Things were
reaching a head. It was time to go. She dropped down from the axle and back
under the cart, pointing herself towards the trail she’d come from. Then, up by
the front-most wheel, she saw it: the dangling drawstring. It bob-bled up and
down, so she knew the boy was still inside the bag. He would be right within
reach. She edged forward, towards it. She reached, stretching her fingers out,
nearly brushing the drawstring with their tips. Then she pulled them back. What
was she thinking? You couldn’t stop at a time like this. Pulling on the
drawstring would accomplish nothing anyway. She’d have to reveal herself to the
orcs to get up on top, then get him out of the bag, then… There was no chance.
She bolted from under the cart back towards the trail, her head swivelling to
see if any orcs spotted her.

She made it to the start of the incline, then scrabbled upwards, grabbing
dirt and rocks as handholds, then got up to the line of bushy trees, and dove
for the ground behind them. She flattened herself to the earth and thanked the
nonexistent gods for her good fortune. She poked her head up watchfully.