Grunts

by Mary Gentle

  A figure sat behind the desk.

  “Shall I blow the mother away, sir?” The orc marine who had been acting as first doorman raised the M16 to his shoulder.

  The temperature in the room plummeted. It grew so cold that the moisture covering Ashnak’s eyeballs froze. He rumbled a deep chuckle down in his chest, threw one camouflage-covered leg up on the corner of his own desk, sat, took out a thick pipe-weed cigar, and shoved it in the corner of his tusked mouth.

  “Out!” he growled. “Lugashaldim, you too. Stay on guard outside. Move it, fuckheads!”

  “Sir, yes sir!”

  The clatter of orc marine boots was punctuated by the slam of the office door. Ashnak shifted his huge bulk to a more comfortable position, struck his talon against the stone desk to create a spark, and sucked deeply on the glowing cigar.

  Rime-frost dripped from window-ledges, the edge of the desk, and the chair in which the seated figure sprawled. Ashnak slitted his long eyes against the window’s sunlight.

  “We were at the Last Battle,” he growled. “Where the fuck were you?”

  The nameless necromancer laughed.

  He lounged in the carved chair, a tall Man with black hair fastened in a silver ring at the nape of his neck. Through the sash of his long robe was stuck a flute, the brown colour of old bone, about the length of a halfling’s thigh. The nameless necromancer fanned himself languidly with a war-fan, the struts of which had the sheen of dragonbone, and the folds the suspicious fineness of tanned Man skin.

  “My creature grows insolent.” His voice set up echoes in the bones of Ashnak’s skull, and his green-eyed gaze bored into the orc’s eyes. “My creature will be punished, unless he submits and pays me the proper respect.”

  His patchwork robe of fine multicoloured leather was sewn with silver thread. The shapes of the patches were not, to anyone with a field-knowledge of anatomy, reassuring.

  Ashnak drew deep on his pipe-weed and blew a plume of smoke towards the nameless necromancer. With his free hand he thumbed back the hammer of the Desert Eagle pistol.

  “Respect my ass!”

  The nameless necromancer’s aquiline features tautened. A red spark burned deep in his black pupils. “You will feel, slave, the wrath of the necromancer. Is that your wish?”

  Ashnak bared his brass-capped fangs. “Whaddaya want me to do, bang my head on the floor and beg for mercy? Things have changed around here.”

  It became obvious that, wherever the nameless necromancer had spent the twelve months since the Last Battle, it had not been far enough away that rumours of the orc marines had not reached him. His chin and his fine-featured face lifted as he brayed a laugh.

  “Oh, very good. Very good! You must forgive me if I attempt to put our relationship back on its old footing. But I think very fondly of old times. Don’t you?”

  “Can’t say as how I do,” Ashnak rumbled. He switched the cigar to the other corner of his heavy-jawed mouth. “Dammit, you deserted the orc marines at the Last Battle!”

  “But my sister The Named did not ride against you.”

  “Thought you’d have robes made out of grey-and-white skin if you ever turned up again—maybe with yellow hair fringes. The Named never stood much chance against you.” Ashnak kept the pistol’s muzzle steadily on the nameless’s chest.

  “You may spare yourself the trouble, Captain—and the ammunition.” The temperature in the office continued to drop. Sun glinted off icicles hanging from the cupboards and from Ashnak’s boots. From the anteroom came the ululating howl of an Undead orc marine officer in pain.

  Across Graagryk, dogs began to wail. The noonday brilliance dimmed, and the smell of fresh frost haunted the streets. The stench of an opened charnel house, sour-sweet and dizzying, crept under the doors of halfling houses, darkness muddying the sun as far away as the arena, where the Duchess Magda looked up at the sky and shivered. Inside the barracks the orc marines stopped their various tasks and stood, ears pricked, heavy jaws hanging open, the seductive flute notes of an old slavery filling their ears.

  Ashnak shook his heavy head and lumbered to his feet, boots apart, both hands gripping the pistol. The marine-issue dogtag talisman on its chain around his bull neck thrummed with its nullification of sorcery. “Fuck you, man! You’re outta here. You’re history!”

  “So it is true.” Abruptly, the level of magic in the room increased. The nameless necromancer added smoothly, “Now we shall be a great presence, the nucleus of a new Horde of Darkness. My creature Ashnak, little orc, little captain; you have been a good steward in my absence. Now—before I snap that silly talisman like a sugar-stick—bow down and make your submission to me!”

  FOOM!

  Ashnak’s knees creaked. He caught himself with one hand against the desk. The Desert Eagle had bucked as it fired, and a shower of wood and plaster sprayed out of the wall behind the nameless necromancer’s head, missing the target by a yard.

  “It’s like this.” Ashnak’s bandy legs shook. He kept a strong grip on the edge of the stone desk. “My orc marines are running the world’s number one arms dealing and marine training business. You make one move against us, and all the kingdoms from the Northern Waste to the Antarctic Icelands will land on your neck, and how do you like that, you lich-humping, skinny little fuck?”

  The sun dimmed. The clamminess of long-buried flesh crept across Ashnak’s leathery hide. The nullity talisman whined. He sighted the pistol again, grip steady.

  The room thawed.

  “Consider yourself lucky,” the nameless necromancer purred, “that I have a sense of humour.”

  The slender Man closed his war-fan and thrust it through his sash, reaching up to free his waist-length, fine black hair, smooth it, and then clasp it again in its silver ring. The summer sun warmed the office. Only the scent of old death remained from the power of moments ago.

  “Riiiight…” The orc general stepped somewhat unsteadily round the desk and sank down into his chair. He rested the heavy pistol across his lap. He looked up at the ancient, youthful sorcerer, and picked meat from behind a cracked orc-fang.

  “Lucky also,” the nameless necromancer added, smoothing the tanned Man-skin robes about his slender body, “that this is nothing to me. A game, merely.”

  “Game.” Ashnak sat back and put his combat boots up on the desk, re-lit his pipe-weed cigar, and tugged the urban-commo forage cap down over his Neanderthal brows. “You came all the way from Dark-knows-where to Graagryk for a game. Suuure you did.”

  Deep in the nameless’s black pupils, fire glinted. The thin-lipped mouth drew back in a smile.

  “No,” the nameless necromancer corrected. “I came all this way to bring you a message from my master—who wishes to see you. Now.”

  Ashnak choked on pipe-weed smoke. “Your master?”

  The nameless necromancer folded his arms. Feet apart, the slender curved eastern blade thrust through his sash, he might have been any young Man warrior fighting on the side of the Dark. Only the face, only the eyes, only the strong stench of carrion gave him away.

  He reached for the door handle.

  “Oh,” the nameless necromancer said. “Haven’t you heard? The Dark Lord’s back. And this time He’s really pissed off.”

  2

  At that same hour, but six thousand miles to the southeast of Graagryk, on the other side of the continent, a black orc crouched in the bush in the Forest of Thyrion.

  Even with his keen elvish eyes it took Gilmuriel several minutes to discover her. When he finally spotted her, the elf strolled across the clearing and stood over her.

  “I’m not at all convinced this is going to work.” Gilmuriel, elf Hunt-Lord and now marine lieutenant, frowned down at his sergeant. “When the Forest-King of the elves bought this equipment from your salespeople, I said he was mistaken. We should never have given up the elven bow.”

  Gilmuriel’s previous dealings with orcs—filthy, brutish creatures scuttling in darkness—had not prepared him for an orc
who tucked sprays of creepers into her mottled uniform through loops sewn on for the purpose. Brown and green paint blotched her fanged orcish features. She had tied a red strip of cloth around her brow. Only the stink of orc was totally familiar. That and the coiled orc-whip hanging off her belt.

  The orc sergeant looked up from cleaning her mud-splattered M16 assault rifle, lazily surveying the twelve elves who lounged in the bushes at the edges of the clearing, wearing their camouflage fatigues unwillingly. As usual, chores and tasks (such as cleaning weapons) had been abandoned when something more interesting presented itself. Four of the smaller female elves were singing a roundelay. The nominal marine first class was writing what appeared to be poetry on the back of his area map.

  “Marine Belluriel Starharp!” the black orc snarled, wiping the sweat that shimmered in her quarter-inch unnaturally white crest. “Get those elves into cover, dammit!”

  “This is only a—what is your word? An exercise.” Gilmuriel smiled. “We shall do it for as long it amuses us.”

  Dakashnit, he thought, was a strange sergeant even for an orc. In between drilling the Elf King’s reluctant conscripts she had a habit of smoking pipe-weed from her own private store, after which she was prone to develop a several-thousand-yard stare, and declaim, “Don’t bother me, man,” even when there was no representative of the Man race for miles.

  “This exercise is under your command,” Gunnery Sergeant Dakashnit of the orc marines reminded Gilmuriel. “What are your orders, L.t.?”

  “Obviously we shall wait here until the craft returns to fly us back to the City of the Trees.”

  A chugging noise sounded from above the jungle canopy. Gilmuriel stepped out into the clearing. A whirling blur emerged over the edge of the trees. Rotors whipping, pistons chugging, and vapour spurting from every joint, the steam Chinook helicopter hovered above the clearing.

  Gilmuriel’s arched brows curved, dipping into a frown. “I don’t care what you say, Sergeant—that thing will never replace the milk-white elven steed.”

  “Not one of Ugarit’s more sucessful efforts,” the orc admitted.

  The helicopter’s curved windows glittered like the faceted eyes of giant insects. Sun slid down the olive-drab bodywork and shone in through the doors-off cargo bay. Gilmuriel took off his peaked forage cap, disclosing his pointed ears, and waved at the invisible pilot. The sunlight shone on his high cheekbones and the sleek braids decorating his shaggy golden hair.

  Takka-takka-takka-FOOM!

  A line of craters stitched across the clearing, spraying dirt high into the air. Gilmuriel threw himself flat, his arms over his head. He heard the screams of the other elves and the crashing of bushes as they fled into the jungle, all hunt-lore forgotten in panic.

  Engines roaring, the twin-rotored, steam-powered helicopter sank down into the landing zone. It touched, settled, and the motors cut to tickover. Pistons hissed. The smell of hot steam and coal drenched the evening jungle heat.

  “Just orcish high spirits, sir!” Sergeant Dakashnit stepped over Gilmuriel on her way to the helicopter. She swung herself up, exchanged a few inaudible words with the pilot, and began throwing sacks out of the back of the flying machine.

  “See you got the idea of taking cover,” she called. “Works better when you’re behind something, Lieutenant.”

  Gilmuriel stood up and dusted himself down. His high cheekbones burned red. Swearing under his breath, he bawled into the jungle for the return of his squad. They slipped from the shadows and reassembled.

  Dakashnit tossed him one of the sacks, single-handed. He caught it with a whoof of breath. It was a pack, dangling straps, and whatever was inside it was soft.

  “Today,” the orc sergeant said, “you elf marines get to do your first parachute jump. Those of you who survive until tomorrow get to do a second parachute jump. In the unlikely event that there are any of the squad left by the third day, we’ll do a number of jumps into different terrain. And when we have landed, we will conceal ourselves in cover, and we will not stand in the middle of the dropzone where everyone can see us—will we, sir?”

  Gilmuriel put his hand to his hip, wishing for his slender elven knife, but he encountered only his water-bottle. He unscrewed the cap and took a long drink of water. “Any special instructions for us on this drop?”

  Dakashnit nodded her heavy-jawed head. “Sure are, L.t. In the unhappy event that your ’chute fails to open, always remember one thing—take up the proper marine emergency landing position. Stick your elbows out, and cross your right leg over your left leg.”

  Gilmuriel frowned. A number of the elf marines on the ready line were vaguely crossing their legs and lifting their elbows in a puzzled manner.

  “And why should we do that, Gunnery Sergeant?”

  Dakashnit showed all her fangs and tusks in a grin. “So that we can unscrew you out of the ground after you land…”

  The orc uncoiled her whip and cracked it.

  “Right, you elves, into the chopper, on the double, move it! Go, go, go!”

  Once seated in the cockpit of the helicopter, Lieutenant Gilmuriel eased the unaccustomed headphones down over his pointed elven ears and stared at the jungle canopy receding beneath his feet. Pistons sliding with smooth precision, the steam helicopter wheeled around and chugged into a vast orange sunset.

  “Plenty of time for a first drop.” Dakashnit’s voice came crackling over the headset. The uniformed orc gave him a gnarled thumbs-up and grinned toothily from under her mirror-visored flying helmet. “Don’t know how elves and parachutes will get along, L.t. You may not all make it. But hey, there’s always dropouts from every course…”

  “You don’t like elves, do you, orc—I mean, Gunnery Sergeant?”

  “Me?” The orc grinned and shrugged, massive shoulders rising almost to her pricked ears. “Man, I just love elf! You can’t beat roast and basted elf-haunch. Unless it’s breast-of-elf with chile peppers.”

  Gilmuriel stared at the slavering creature, appalled. “This is impossible! Elves cannot serve with orcs! I shall inform the Lord of the Forest Elves of my resignation this very night!”

  A fluting chorus of support came from the main body of the helicopter.

  Dakashnit’s voice came back over the RT: “Fine by me. Let’s just say I’ve seen better marines than you lot, L.t.”

  A third voice crackled in the headset, faint and breaking up. Gilmuriel frowned. The orc pilot fiddled with the receiver. Suddenly Dakashnit’s arm reached over his shoulder and tuned the signal in.

  “—to any unit! Sergeant Moondream to any unit! We are taking hostile fire in Sector Seven Bravo, repeat, Sector Seven Bravo. This is not an exercise! We are coming under hostile fire, targets not visible. Sergeant Moondream to any unit—”

  “Signal’s breaking up.” Dakashnit tried unsuccessfully for several moments. “Pilot, contact base! Tell them we’re altering course for Seven Bravo—if that’s all right with you, sir.”

  She shoved the mirrored sunvisor up. Her deep-set piggy eyes glinted in a way that disturbed Gilmuriel. “I guess your Forest-King wouldn’t need trained troops if he wasn’t expecting battle, huh?”

  “Well, I…Sergeant, perhaps we shouldn’t…”

  “Who else is there, man? L.t., ask yourself how I feel about going into combat with this lot? We’re talking last-ditch emergency here!”

  The lieutenant looked over his shoulder into the body of the steam helicopter and surveyed the rows of reluctant uniformed elves. Pointed ears darkened with camouflage cream, long-fingered musical hands stained with the green of jungle plants, slender bodies web-belted into uniforms that hung on them like sacks…Their ascetic, high-boned faces stared back at him sullenly.

  “On the whole,” Gilmuriel agreed, “I’d rather be singing.”

  In Graagryk, in the fortress of Graagryk’s ancient nobility, the stonework shows old. Unicorn tapestries cover the rough walls. Bear-pelts from the fabulous Antarctic Icelands are flung down on the flagstones
. A fire burns in the great hearth, despite the summer, to take the edge off the room’s chill.

  Ashnak strode across to the fireplace and stood, bowed legs planted widely apart, and pissed into the flames. He sighed with pleasure and re-buttoned his trousers; web-belt and bandoliers of 7.62-calibre ammunition shifting on his brawny frame.

  “Anyone can see why you need the authority of a Dark Lord.” The big orc clasped his taloned hands behind him. “But the Dark Lord died at Samhain, at the Fields of Destruction, and some impersonator won’t fool anyone.”

  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.