Grunts (48 page)

The orc’s heavy brows lowered. He looked to have Agaku stock in him, Ned considered: a magnificent specimen of orc-hood some six feet high, with hulkingly muscled shoulders, and wearing nothing over his leathery green skin but a loincloth.

“He’s war-mongering,” the orc accused. “Your Holy One is. Promoting a war which serves only the interests of the Dark and Light Commands and not those of the orc in the Pit.”

Ned gaped at the orc. The group of five or six other orcs crowded round, some brown- and some grey-skinned, all wearing the odd scrap of mail or plate or nail-studded padded jerkins. Prick-ears flattened, and tusks and talons glinted.

“I’m sure you gentlemen have your point of view,” Ned said, a little breathlessly.

The leader orc loomed over Will Brandiman, reached down, and prodded him between two doublet buttons.

“I’m an official representative, me. I represent the Orc Pacifist Movement.” The orc waved a taloned hand. “Us here, we’re a OPM protest. We’re protesting against your Paladin coming in here and telling us to fight.
He
don’t go out with the foot soldiers, do he?”

The other orcs shook their heads in unison. Their leader continued:

“
He
don’t have to trail a poleaxe over hill and dale, out of this lovely mucky land, and go down south where it’s
green. He
don’t get his balls shot off by some trigger-happy crossbowelf. Not your Paladin!
He
don’t end up hacking
some poor Light sod to shreds just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it’s him or you.”

Behind the large orc, his fellows began a guttural chant of “Dark, no! We won’t go! We won’t fight—”

“GRAZHDNAG!”
an orcish yell interrupted from outside the tower. “Get your filthy, worm-eating scum down here or I’ll flay you alive!”

The leading orc, Grazhdnag, cowered. His followers whimpered. They slunk past the halflings (ignoring Will Brandiman’s outstretched hand, which still contained a string of Mission beads) and shambled out into the courtyard, whence the sound of bone-cracking blows echoed.

“I’ll teach you, you lazy scum—!”

Ned and Will listened briefly to the Agaku’s voice, grinned, and split up, the better to cover more of the Blasted Redoubt’s cellars in the available time.

On his fifth trip back—choosy now, the wagon’s false bottom almost full of the more portable items from the Redoubt’s treasury—Ned Brandiman found himself climbing a narrow, winding stone stair. He climbed until his calf muscles ached. At last he heard, through as-yet-invisible windows, the voice of Amarynth rising to a peroration in that one of the outer courtyards that, by experience, Ned had found to be merely a tiny satellite of the vast atriums, pits, coliseum, and air-shafts that pierced the mass of the Blasted Redoubt.

He reached the top of the steps and started down a corridor. Here there were torches, meaning concealing shadows, and he stayed in them by instinct.

An interior portcullis slammed down behind him. Ned leaped forward, grazing the back of his bare heel. He froze, listening, checked the trap-mechanism and discovered it to be ancient but well oiled, decided that it had only cut him off from cellars already looted, and continued on.

Loud footsteps echoed down the corridor ahead.

An approaching shadow danced on the walls, distorted by the light from the black cressets and growing larger, taller,
much
taller than a halfling—

“Good lord,” Ned Brandiman observed, “the press really do get everywhere.”

A female elf walking in the shadows of the Blasted Redoubt’s black masonry halted, staring.

When Ned had last seen the elf she had been wearing the
same leather bodice and thonged leather trousers, high boots, and cloak; her dark braids had been tied around her brow with a strip of red cloth. A badge pinned on her vest over the upper slope of one breast now read “Warrior of Fortune.”

Perdita del Verro regarded Ned Brandiman with suspicion. “Don’t I know you, mistress?”

Ned himself had been stark naked at the time of their last meeting and not known to be the owner of a Little Sisters of Mortification red habit. He removed his fingers from where they rested, through slit cloth, on a throwing-dagger, and pitched his voice melodiously higher. “I doubt we’ve met, my child, but we are all Sisters in the Light.”

“I must have seen you with the Holy One.” The elf narrowed her eyes. Her flyaway brows dipped, the frown accentuating the old scar on her left cheek. “I’d like an interview—get to see him close up. Seems to me the Light candidate needs all the good press he can get in this election.”

Ned led her down from the tower and out into the courtyard. He kicked the back of the Mission wagon with his hirsute foot. “Your Holiness, an elf of the press is here to interview you. Is it convenient?”

Amarynth, bent over and clutching the wagon’s wooden frame with both hands, looked up irritatedly and gestured the attendant knight-priest to cease scourging the Holy back.

“Oh…very well.” Pulling up his monk’s habit and slipping his arms into the sleeves, the Holy One looked at the female elf.

“Lord
Amarynth
? Paladin, it
is
you, isn’t it!
By the Light!
” The elf blinked. “Your campaign speech—I was too far away to tell—”

Regally, the dark elf stated, “We were Amarynth, called Firehand, and are now the Son of the Lady on earth.”

“Amarynth the Paladin-Mage! You commanded the forces of the Light at Nin-Edin!”

Ned Brandiman ducked his head. The expected explosion failed to materialise. Ned, who never let a previously friendly meeting dictate the likelihood of a permanent alliance, congratulated himself on his caution when Perdita del Verro scowled and continued:

“Holy One, I’m extremely glad we’ve met. I was badly taken in by those scum of Nin-Edin and their criminal allies.
When I found out what they’d done in the mountains after the siege—”

“After?” Amarynth sounded surprised.

The elf lifted a brow, distorting the brawler’s scar that crossed her cheek. Her voice echoed clearly across the courtyard of the Blasted Redoubt. “You don’t know, Sir Knight? Mother of Trees! While there’s yet time before the election, then—I know something about the orcs of Nin-Edin that
you
ought to know.”

The seventh day before the final election to the Throne of the World dawned bright and clear.

Early summer light chased down the masts of ships moored at Port Mirandus. Long shadows spidered from the beasts, Men, and monstrosities lading craft to catch the morning tide. Shouts and the creaking of ropes echoed back from the warehouse frontages on the quayside, and leather-winged vampire gulls shrieked, soaring down the estuary of the River Faex that here flows into the Western Ocean. Haze, presaging warmth, drifted across the harbour’s lapping, odourous waves.

“The Lord of Darknesh’s orders are perfectly clear,” the nameless necromancer slurred primly, from under the concealment of his cowl. “Send no relieving forces to Thyrion or anywhere else.”

“Damn it, Man, my marines are getting chewed up out there!”

Ashnak, general officer commanding the orc marines, spat over the side of his barge. An unlucky harbour fish rose to the surface, belly-up. “We could send in support troops any time She lets us!”

A gloved hand went up to the hood, came down glistening with saliva. “What an interesting coincidence—since it takshes time to do the logistical planning for moving an army. Ready to move, are you, orc? I wonder what you were planning before She returned?”

Ashnak avoided that issue. “All I know is, there’s a damn good fight going on out there, and She won’t let me—my orcs, I mean—join in!”

“Of coursh not. While the Bugs are advancing on the borders of the Southern Kingdoms, they’re pressure to vote for Her Dark Magnificence…Orc, you will do no fighting until the elecshion’s won, and your foot soldiers must become
used to dying while they wait.” The nameless necromancer whuffled a laugh. “It’sh like old times—orcses to waste.”

The nameless limped off towards the silk canopies at the rear of the barge.

“And fuck
you
, asshole,” Ashnak grated.

Air flattened the water over the great fleet of upriver barges. The
whuck-whuck-whuck
of an approaching Apache helicopter gunship aroused no curiousity. The dockhands of Port Mirandus are used to miracles.

“Steady!”
Ashnak bawled into his headset microphone.

“Oh, I say, sir, do give a chap some credit. I am doing my…best. There! There you are, sir.”

Lieutenant Chahkamnit’s voice fell silent over the radio link as the steel crate the orc pilot was lowering touched the deck of the rivership. The Apache hovered while two deckhands unhooked the load, then rose again, cable winching, nose down, rotors beating the water into circumferences of foam.

“Park that damn thing on one of the air-support barges,”
Ashnak ordered, “
and get your ass back here, Chahkamnit! This travelling election circus should have cast off four hours ago!
”

“Absolutely, sir. Just as you say.”

Ashnak thumbed his headset off. Marine Commissar Razitshakra stood beside him on the rivership’s deck, olive greatcoat hanging open in the southern heat, her peaked cap pulled down to her wire-spectacled nose.

“Prepare to interrogate the prisoner!” Ashnak barked, pointing.

“Sir, yes sir!” Commissar Razitshakra enthusiastically snapped the steel crate’s holding pins bare-handed. The front of the crate fell open. “It’s been too long since we’ve had some honest prisoner-torturing just for the fun of it, sir.”

A large body huddled in the close confines of the crate. It wore excrement-stained desert camouflage fatigues. Ashnak chewed more ferociously on his cigar and peered down at the broad-shouldered, big, and solidly built Man, dirty with days of confinement, the stubble on his chin growing out the same blond as his crewcut.

“On your
feet
, marine!” Ashnak snarled.

It rubbed at its streaming eyes. “My name, rank, and number are Sergeant John H. Stryker—
sweet Jesus, it’s still fuckin’ real!
”

“He speaks marine,” Commissar Razitshakra observed.

The Man stared out of the steel crate. “This can
not
be real, man. I promise I won’t ever do that shit again! I’ve got a wife and kids at home.”

“He checks out. Same aura as Dagurashibanipal’s hoard, General.”

Stryker forced his big body to rise, straightening for the first time after six days’ confinement in a metre-square steel crate. Staggering, filthy, on his feet, he felt the warm, stinking breeze of a harbour blow across his face. The skin around his eyes twitched, and his eyelids opened again.

A humanoid
thing
stood in front of him. Eight feet tall, muscled like a mountain; predator’s fangs, leather-skinned, cat-quick, and with the frightening gleam of high intelligence in its piggy eyes. Even with its shoulders humped and long arms dangling, it stared Stryker levelly in the eye.

And there was a cigar jutting from its tusked nightmare of face.

It wore…

Stryker chuckled deeply. In his Stateside Germanic accent, he said, “You guys can’t fool me! Either this is the best shit I ever cut, or you guys are making a summer season movie. But I’m warning you—you shouldn’t have messed with the Corps.”

Ashnak drew deeply, then blew the odd-smelling smoke from his cigar into Stryker’s face. “We
are
the Corps. What are
you
?”

“
Please!”
Stryker’s stubbled chin began to twitch. His face crumpling, his eyes began to leak water. He sat down on the deck as if his hamstrings had been severed. “Don’t hurt me!”

“Show some guts, Man!” Razitshakra growled. “You’re a marine! Don’t disgrace your uniform!”

“What’s the matter with you, son?” Ashnak inquired, nudging the now-sobbing Stryker with the toe of a combat boot. “Anyone would think you’d never seen an orc before.”

The Man raised his stained face. “A
what
?”

Razitshakra’s whip ripped a channel across the back of his ribs, tearing his combat jacket and his flesh. He screamed, a full-blooded man’s scream, hand going up, and a metal-thonged whip coiled around his wrist, bloodying his knuckles. He grabbed the thong.

“
For fuck’s sake, you can’t do that!
”

Razitshakra tugged speculatively on the whip’s butt, with no effort pulling him clear across deck.

“The traditional methods are the best,” she said thoughtfully. “That’s the Way of the Orc. To torture prisoners. I’ll strip the hide from him and then, when he’s flayed, he’ll talk.”

“I’ll talk, I’ll talk
now
!” Stryker scrabbled across the barge deck. “Hey, you just ask me—I’ll tell you whatever you want to know! This is too fuckin’ crazy for me. I’ve never been in combat, never mind under heavy interrogation.”

“Never been in combat?” Ashnak’s ridged brows lifted in astonishment. “But you’re a marine! Ah. I know how it must have been—you’re a newly trained elite soldier, and you accidentally discovered a way through from your world to here, and your superior officers sent you to recce. Happens all the time. Right?”