Grunts

by Mary Gentle

  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.”

  Ashna
k 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.”

  3

  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!”

  “That is not approved radio procedure. Barzoi! Take over the dwarf squad.” Razitshakra stepped aside, in the shadow of the glossy-coated centaur’s heaving flanks. The rasp of distant gunfire was plainly audible over the radio link. “Bootcamp Base to Squad Alpha—who authorised a live ammo exercise in that area?”

  The reply crackled back:

  “Squad Alpha to Bootcamp, this is not an exercise. Repeat, this is not an exercise.” Orc Corporal Zakkad’s gruff voice shook with urgency. “Ma’am, order all your recruits on full armed alert. There are hostiles coming out of the walls here! Species not seen. Weapons not recognised. Numbers unknown. They’re not stopping to talk, they’re just piling into us!”

  “Zakkad!” Razitshakra barked resonantly into the mouthpiece. “Don’t lose your grip, orc! What weapons are you facing?”

  “Unknown, ma’am. Could be mage-work—but it’s getting through to us! I’m out here with a squad of untrained dickheads, ma’am; it’s all I can do to manage a fighting retreat; we need urgent support—”

  The line hissed. No further voice sounded.

  “Sierra and Foxtrot squads reinforce the perimeter guard,” the orc commissar yelled, shambling through the camp at the double. “Barzoi, get the 483rd and the cold-drake to overfly map reference 098-756! Tango Platoon, gear up, you’re coming out with me. Move, move, move!”

  The cyclopean ruins of an ancient city lay half buried in a glacier two miles to the south, at 098-756, its spires and ramps and towers long gone, leaving only a maze of broken masonry walls. Razitshakra had been in the habit of using it for a training ground for Fighting in Built-Up Areas.

  The 483rd Airborne Division took off to fly air support.

  “Hai-yaaaahh, yo!”

  “Hai-yahhhh, yo!”

  Winged white horses took off and wheeled in the air above the jagged mountain peaks. The brilliant Antarctic sun gleamed through the pinions of the tactical pegasi, shining on the heat-seeker fire-and-forget missiles carried under each wing.

  “Hai-yah, yo!”

  The airborne riders whooped and yelled. Frost sparkled on their mail-shirts, cinched in tight over their swelling breasts with wide leather swordbelts. Their long braids hung down. Fur leggings protected the riders’ shapely limbs; fur wristbands hugged their otherwise bare hands. Their horned steel helms glinted in the Endless Day.

  One valkyrie marine reined her winged horse’s head up. “Missile away!”

  BOOOMM!

  The Hellfire missile zipped into the icefield several miles away, throwing up debris and steam.

  “Damn you!” Razitshakra bawled over the com. “I want reconnaissance, not fire support! There are some of our own out there!”

  The Valkyrie Marines wheeled their winged mounts above the plain, soaring through the sky. Passing close, one rider held out her hand, palm up; the other slapped it with her own palm and gave soprano voice to the marine recognition signal:

  “YO!”

  “No movement visible at map reference 098-756, ma’am,” an advance valkyrie marine radioed back. “Nothing at all…”

  The advance by bounds on Alpha Squad’s last position took time. Commissar Razitshakra cuffed and kicked and bit, when necessary, to spur the raw recruits into battle. Pondering the wisdom of taking a recruit platoon into an attack (and indeed of leaving two-thirds of another recruit platoon to guard the base), the orc commissar cursed volubly.

  “If it’s magery, you’ve got nothing to fear!” she snarled. “If it’s conventional weapons, remember you’re marines now. Are we marines?”

  The dwarf squad, advancing almost tactically towards the cyclopean ruins marking the beginning of the Antarctic’s true Icelands, muttered in their braided beards.

  “I said, Are we marines?, you political subversives!” Razitshakra raised her fist and brought it down on the back of one of the dwarf grunts. The dwarf fell to his knees, staggered up as Razitshakra booted him, and moved reluctantly on under the weight of a seventy-pound infantry pack.

  The platoon determinedly continued to treat the orc commissar’s question as rhetorical.

  “There’ll be an inquiry held after this,” Razitshakra promised. “Now clear the area through. Go! There may be some of our lads still alive in there.”

  The dwarf recruit squads advanced more in a cluster than by fire and
movement. Razitshakra, in the rear with the reserve ursoid squad for command and control, bellowed orders. No shot, no spell, no hostile sound broke the silence.

  “Area clear!” the dwarf recruit Balan Orcsbane called.

  “It had better be, marine. Secure the perimeter!”

  The snow-covered glacier was dotted with prone lumps, leaking fluids. Even in the Antarctic chill, the area stank. Razitshakra’s orcish nostrils flared, identifying the blood and feces and urine of dwarves and orcs; all of it stinking of the fear, rather than the joy, of combat. Alpha Squad being the least trained, and the least exposed to Dagurashibanipal’s geas, she was not surprised to find that most of their weapons had not fired.

  She prowled among the bodies for quite a while, under the Endless Sun’s radiance, tossing aside severed dwarf limbs ragged with blood, and heads from which the eyes had been sucked. A wind began to blow from the Icelands. The cold-drake, patrolling the skies, reported no hostile movement of any kind. The Endless Day wore on.

  When she found him—his dead eyes staring up at her—orc corporal Zakkad of the marine training cadre lay in two parts; his arms, head, and torso in the cover of an ancient masonry wall, and his lower torso, legs, and genitalia in the open ground beyond.

  One gnarled fist still grasped his rifle and exhausted magazine. Rags of his combat fatigues, stained with stiffening green blood, dotted the ground. Pale intestines shrivelled in the sun. Judging by the recruits around him, he had been trying to assault his way out through the enemy’s position. It is not an infallible technique, merely the least worst of options.

  Nullity talismans on body and weapon were intact.

  Squatting over the half-body, Razitshakra prized the powerful, low-slung jaws open. The fangs and tusks of the orc corporal were blackly discoloured. A black, conelike object blocked his throat, with teeth marks where the orc had bitten it off. Razitshakra poked at it with one talon. It echoed with a metallic sound.

  After a while it began to stink.