Grunts (35 page)

The nameless necromancer spat, “
You
are the fool!”

Ashnak’s hairy nostrils flared. No corpse-stink here; the nameless necromancer muted his power—one could only suppose, out of assumed respect.

“The orc is here,” the black-haired Man announced, not to Ashnak, his skin robes whipping about his ankles as he strode towards the great arched window. Ashnak had not noticed the figure seated there, against the light, until now.

“So
that’s
it!” Ashnak guffawed. He planted huge fists on his hips, threw his tusked jaw up, and bellowed orcish laughter. “
That’s
what you did with her!”

He prowled closer, outside combat boots making no noise on the flagstones.

A female Man sat on the window seat, head bowed, the light shining on her sleek, bobbed yellow hair. The hands that rested in her lap were smooth, their skin patched black, grey, and fish-belly white. She was not wearing the full plate-armour of her last encounter with him. A dress forged from silver links so fine they ran like water clung to her form, shimmering with black light at every breath lifting her breasts.

“Lost out,” Ashnak commented. “Well, lady, that’s what
you get for having a bastard like the nameless for your brother.”

Her head bowed. The window light illuminated her face. The lashes of her long eyes (that tilted
up
from the outer corners) rested on her piebald cheeks. Small tusks drew her lips up and apart, so that a thin thread of saliva ran down from the exposed corner of her mouth, across her pugnacious jaw.

Ashnak had always thought her orcishly handsome for one of the Man race.

“So you’ve destroyed The Named’s mind. So what? She still isn’t—” Turning his head to speak to the nameless, reaching one talon out to lift the female’s chin, Ashnak froze.

The ugly Man rose to her feet with a grace The Named had never possessed. Light sparked from her metal-mesh robe that chimed with the soft resonance of bells. A heavy perfume moved with her as she moved—throat-filling, musky, and ancient. She lifted her head.

Her eyes were without iris, pupil, or white. As her lashes lifted, her eye-sockets showed featureless orange. And even in full sunlight, they glowed perceptibly.

“
Orc
…”

A cloud lifted from Ashnak’s mind. Previously unnoticed figures of halfling servants in lace and linen became apparent to him, bringing choice ducal food and drink from the fortress’s cellars, their manner that of sleepwalkers. Guards drowsed with their halberds at attention. Graagyrk’s fortress dreamed a daymare, not even able to be restless in its sleep; and the city on the Island Sea, oblivious to the presence which cloaked Itself in their midst, continued with the commerce of a normal life.

The orc’s hide shivered, as if he had looked down to find himself standing on a pressure mine. “
Dark Lord?
”

“Yes.” She reached out and grasped his heavily muscled arm. Her touch made his skin wrinkle like rotten fruit.

The dogtag talisman about his neck burned to a degree that gave an orc pain, and then, with a high note, shattered.

“I am calling you to account for your life.” She paused. “After the defeat of Samhain, none of My Horde Commanders should remain living. But you do. What is your excuse, little orc?”

Ashnak, looking up from under his beetling brows, met that blind, all-seeing gaze.

The nameless necromancer said, “It pains me to admit it, but it was something more useful than cowardice.” Helping himself from a flagon of yellow wine at the table, he downed one tiny cup and then a second. “Great Lord of the Nightmare Dark.”

Ashnak had not previously witnessed the nameless necromancer afraid.

“Lord!” the big orc cried, suddenly falling to his knees on the flagstones before Her. Ashnak threw himself forward, arms outstretched, and banged his forehead on the stone.

“Lord, You live! Darkness be praised!”

A naked foot planted itself on his exposed neck. He controlled a shudder of relief and continued:

“Dread Lord, we nearly
won
the Samhain Battle for You—if I’d had support from the Horde Mages we could have turned the tide of the war. The orc marines are shit-hot! And we’re Your loyal servants. Servants such as no Dark Lord ever had before.”

“That,” Her contralto voice remarked, “I can well believe.”

The foot (small only by orc standards) removed itself from his neck. Ashnak’s eyes rolled up in their sockets while he remained abased before Her. He squinted hopefully in Her direction, seeing the wet-lipped mouth curve into a smile.

“You have bullied My necromancer and grovelled to Me.” Amusement sounded richly in Her voice. “Admirable. You had plans for his return, I think. Perhaps even for Mine. But not together, and not on the same day!”

There was a silence.

Ashnak climbed awkwardly to his feet, brushing dust from the knees of his combat trousers. He picked up his forage cap and jammed it down between his ears. The hypnotised halfling servants walked around his bulk on their way to serve more wine, and he looked down at them, but they showed no awareness of his presence.

“Er,” the orc general said. “Yes. Well. Erm…”

Splinters of the Visible College’s anti-magic talisman stood embedded in the hide of his chest. He brushed them out. At last looking at his Dark Master, he was startled to
recognise green-irised eyes before Her gaze burned again the colour of fire.

“Yes. She lives within Me. I allow The Named to witness what she has become; the paladin of the Light, whom I inhabit.”

The Dark Lord stepped closer to Ashnak.

“It was in a church, was it not? A little temple somewhere in the northern countryside, and you grovelled to the Light’s paladin, and she said,
All you need to know of me is, I am merciful
, and, like a stupid fool, did not kill you. Orc, all you need to know of Me is, I am
not
merciful. Nor am I stupid. I am the Lord of Darkness, and you have failed Me, and you will answer for it here and now!”

Shadows hovered in the corners of the stone tower room, undiminished by sunlight. Not a presence of darkness so much as an absence of everything. The Man walked until She stood facing the window again, looking out over the halfling city to the Inland Sea. Towering thunderheads crept across the sun, lightning cracked and split the sky into jagged pieces, and hail lashed down on the summer streets. Visible only as a silhouette in the dim light. She languidly lifted one piebald finger.

“Great Lord!” Ashnak sensibly kept his hand away from the pistol holstered at his belt. “I have a force almost at brigade strength. I can train raw levies. When the new war against the Light begins, You’ll need the orc marines.”

The nameless necromancer muttered, “Need traitors and cowards!” as he put down the empty wine flagon.

“The loyal and the brave didn’t do so well at the Fields of Destruction,” Ashnak noted drily. He advanced a step, coming to a smart parade rest on the flagstones. “Great Lord of the Ebon Abyss, put no faith in his magic. You need superior firepower. Mages
take
territory, marines
hold
it. You need us for the post-Samhain campaign.”

The Dark Lord turned Her head, looking at him over Her slightly too-wide shoulder. The Named’s tall, raw-framed body carried the metal-mesh robe with a hint of awkwardness not yet tamed by the Dark Lord’s possession of her; she moved sometimes still as if she would rather have carried a sword in her hand than magery. A sooty darkness hovered in the corners of Ashnak’s vision. Recalling the briefing before the Last Battle, in the Dark Lord’s great towering Keep in the far east, a kind of orcish homesickness attacked him.

“I remember,” he said wistfully, “the legions of the Horde marching out of the Dark Land, descending on the west. Our warriors covered the earth, and our Dark beasts the skies, and You rode out to war on the back of a frostdrake, against the outnumbered small companies of the Light…”

The orange glow of Her eyes dimmed.

“The Horde of Darkness,” Ashnak concluded, bass-baritone voice roughening, “got its ass kicked. Great Sable Lord, I don’t want that to happen again. You need us. We’re loyal. And if we failed You once, we won’t fail again.”

Abruptly, the normal summer chill of the tower room returned. There was a strain in the air as if from the working of invisible great engines, familiar to Ashnak from the days when he wore black steel armour in place of combat fatigues, and his weapon was the fighting Agaku’s traditional poleaxe. He came to attention, boots slamming down on the flagstones.

“Awaiting your orders, Lord! When do I muster the troops?”

The nameless necromancer giggled.

Ashnak’s vision of a return to the old days faded with the glare in Her eyes. Her eyeballs shone momentarily like grey glass, and the dust of destroyed aeons whispered past Ashnak on no earthly wind. Death reaching so swiftly made him grab, automatically, for the pistol at his belt, although even without the loss of the talisman he would have doubted an automatic pistol’s validity against the Lord of Night and Silence.

“
Be still.
”

The orc, after some minutes, opened his eyes. Finding himself corporeal, and undamaged, he looked to the Dark Lord where She sat, now, on the window seat, Her bare feet swinging.

“Be still and attend to Me,” the Dark Lord said. “Did I have you brought here to Me to play games? Orc, your thuggery is of no use to Me. Domination by force of arms in this world is useless.”

The nameless necromancer’s finely chiselled lips curved into a patrician smile.

The Dark Lord added, “So is magic.”

Ashnak looked at the nameless necromancer. The nameless necromancer, his pale-lipped mouth falling slightly open, stared at Ashnak.

“What?” the orc general said.

The nameless necromancer added, “I beg your pardon?”

The Dark Lord sat, to all appearances a female Man of startling ugliness, the sun spotlighting Her piebald grey-and-white skin, shining back from Her burnished hair, but not dismissing the darknesses that hung in the folds of Her clinging robe. She lifted Her wrist and wiped saliva from the corners of Her mouth.

“I have returned. My ambition is undimmed. I
will
rule.” Her inhuman eyes glowed orange.

Ashnak for the second time in the space of half an hour took his life in his talons. He interrupted Her. “But you said—”

“There will be no military conquest,” She stated. “I have decided that conquering with Dark Armies is…outmoded. Old-fashioned.
Passé.
”

And at that very hour, twelve thousand miles to the south of the Inland Sea, in the fabled Antarctic Icelands, Razitshakra strode between the rows of huts that made up the tundra bootcamp. Snow crusted the squat female orc’s heavy military greatcoat as she stomped, bandy-legged, across the icefield. She rebuckled her webbing, pistol-holsters, and stick-grenades over her coat, looking up to check that the marine striped-and-starred Raven flag still proudly flew. It did.

The ideology class waited, drawn up to attention outside her command hut, in front of the wooden table that stood out in the snow. The orc seated herself at the table, placed her elbows on the wood, and rested her pugnacious chin on her talons.

“Recruit Balan Orcsbane,” she purred, eyes gleaming. “You of the unfortunate surname—perhaps you would be kind enough to state basic orc marine ideology.”

The dwarf drew himself stiffly to attention, his forked orange beard jutting horizontally. Like the rest of the twelve-dwarf recruit squad, he wore olive-drab fatigues rolled up at the ankles and to the elbows. His orange braids had been shaved down to a bare fuzz of hair on his scalp. He carried a much-abused Kalashnikov assault rifle and a steel helmet from which the sharp horns had been forcibly removed.

“Ma’am, politically correct orcish ideology is as follows.” Balan Orcsbane pointed at his fellow bootcamp trainees. “‘If you’re smaller than me, I’m in charge here. If you’re bigger than me—you’re in charge. And if something’s gone wrong,
he’s
in charge!’”

“Very good!” The Endless Sun glinted from Razitshakra’s round wire-rimmed spectacles and from the peaked brim of her cap. Her lateral-pointing ears twitched. She removed a
small notepad from her greatcoat pocket and scribbled a few words. “Tell me more about command responsibility.”

The dwarf rapped out, “The commander is always right!”

“And?”

“The commander is
always
right,” Balan Orcsbane added smartly. “Even when he’s wrong.”

“Well done.” Razitshakra pointed at the next dwarf in the line. “You. Owaine Elfhunter. Name a test to determine whether a recruit is fit to become a marine.”

The dwarf scratched her trimmed beard. “The recruit is tied—” she hastily corrected herself “—the recruit
volunteers
to be tied to a sabre-toothed tiger and shut up in its cave. If the recruit comes out, she passed. If the tiger comes out, she failed. If she comes out riding the sabre-toothed tiger, make her a corporal.”

“Excellent.” Razitshakra’s unorcishly golden eyes gleamed. “Now—”

“Commissar, ma’am!” The centaur Coms officer galloped up, ice and snow spraying from his hooves, and thrust the radio handset towards Razitshakra. “It’s Alpha Squad. Commissar, you have to hear this!”