Grunts

by Mary Gentle

Takka-takka-dukka-dukka-FOOM!

  “Yo, man! I see you, you son of a bitch!”

  The orc reared up, General Purpose Machinegun grasped in her taloned paws, firing from the hip. The noise wrenched all breath from Gilmuriel’s lungs. He refilled them to yell, “Give that orc supporting fire, you miserable pointy-eared bastards, or I’ll shoot you myself!”

  “Way to go, L.t.!” Sergeant Dakashnit fell back into cover beside Gilmuriel. “Listen up, you elves—those are the Bugs that chewed up Baradaka’s squad! Fireteam One, give ’em hell; Fireteam Two, advance under covering fire. Go!”

  Gilmuriel, under cover of a ragged barrage from Silthanis and half the squad, loped at a crouch up to another granite outcrop. One glance over his shoulder showed him a hostile, running left to right, hitting cover—

  The glimpse of black chitinous shell dripping with bodily secretions, the half-humanoid form with its scorpion tail raised high, shining blue-black and silver in the dappled leaf-light; the noise of the firefight—all this conspired to make Gilmuriel’s stomach churn. The elf bent forward and vomited. “We’re fucking dead!”

  “Fight through,” Dakashnit bawled, “or we’ll have our own fucking mortars landing on our heads—what the fuck is that?”

  “Magery! No,” Gilmuriel corrected himself, elvish instincts screaming. “No, it isn’t…”

  Across the leaf-strewn expanse of the Bugs’ killing ground, the sun and shadow-dappled air twisted and somehow opened. A dark silhouette became visible within it. Too stocky for an elf, too tall for an orc. The shape of a Man, outlined in black fire.

  The elf whispered, “It has no smell of Good or Evil about it!”

  Dakashnit hastily changed magazines. “Look at the Bugs, L.t. It’s stopped ’em cold. They ain’t got no fucking idea what it is, either!”

  The air folded, taking into itself green shadows and sunlight, becoming a whirling vortex of golden light. The Man-silhouette suddenly snapped into movement.

  “Mother of Forests protect us!” Gilmuriel gaped, his jaw dropping. The three-dimensional figure of a Man appeared out of the vortex, facing the elf lieutenant, seeming to step backwards from something that was not the Forest of Thyrion.

  “Holy shit!” Dakashnit half-straightened from her crouch.

  The sounds of gunfire fell silent on both sides.

  The orc’s eyes gleamed, and all her tusks showed in a grin. “Do you know what that is?”

  The Man stood quite still, his polished brown combat boots crushing the leaves under his feet with undeniable solidity. He was almost as tall as an elf, but broad across the shoulders and massively muscled. Gilmuriel let his gaze travel up the Man’s body—brown-and-ochre camouflage fatigues; web-belt, pouches, and pistol; commando knife; rubber-edged dogtag shining on a silver chain—until it reached the face. Sunlight-dappled regular, square features, a strong jawline, and crewcut hair glinting blond. The Man’s piercing blue eyes met his.

  “What is that?” the elf mumbled.

  “That’s a real marine!” Gunnery Sergeant Dakashnit brandished her GPMG. “Just feel the aura on that! I ain’t felt nothing like it since I was up in old Dagurashibanipal’s caverns—I don’t know where he’s from, or how the fuck he got here, but that is one genuine marine. The finest killing machine ever devised by Man. The elite. The best.”

  The orc straightened, as much as orcs are able, gripping stock and barrel of the machinegun. She threw the GPMG bodily towards the Man. Smoothly and as if by long training, the Man raised his hands and the GPMG slapped into his grip.

  Dakashnit called, “Yo, m’man! Hostiles thirty metres to your rear! Chaarge!”

  The smartly uniformed Man turned his head slowly. No hurry. No hesitation.

  Ninety feet away, their chitinous heads weaving as if bemused by the vortex’s visitation, the Bugs emerged slowly out of light cover. Thyrion’s green fronds caressed sticky black carapaces, horns, and clawed forelimbs. The slender scorpion tails curved up. Shadow slid across the belts and packs slung across their articulated thoraxes, glinting from the black metal of their weapons. One opened its vast jaws in a sticky, slime-dripping yawn. Gilmuriel shuddered.

  “Hostile targets!” the orc called to the newly appeared Man. “Take ’em out, marine!”

  The Man’s hands opened.

  The machinegun thudded to the jungle floor, ignored.

  The uniformed Man opened his mouth.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargggghhhh!”

  One large combat boot caught Gilmuriel and bowled the elf over as the Man barrelled past him. The Man sprinted at top speed, bawling, eyes glazed and wide with shock, mouth a square of fear.

  “Wha’—?” Dakashnit mouthed. “What?”

  “Fuck it!” Gilmuriel fluted, scrambling back onto his feet and signalling to his squad, ignoring the flabbergasted orc sergeant. He pointed after the running Man. “You elves—don’t ask questions—follow that marine!”

  There are no roads to the east.

  The Blasted Redoubt kills the land about its bastions. The dead shadows of those grim towers, those windowless high walls and courtyards where sun never shines, devastate the crop-yield for leagues around. The Redoubt itself is vast enough to create its own rain-shadow, so that one approaches from the west through a landscape of cracked earth, shrivelled moss, and cold desolation; and approaches from the east—but who knows what mud and storms lurk to the east of the Blasted Redoubt? Only the slaves of the Dark Lord ever travel there, and they are, for the most part, singularly reticent.

  “All I can say,” Ned Brandiman remarked grumpily, “is that it’s frightening the manticore.”

  The wagon’s draught-beast fluffed up its lion pelt, docked scorpion tail twitching, its Man’s features showing distress. Ned threw it a tidbit of fried toad.

  “Have no fear!” Amarynth Firehand called, striding beside the wagon, his ragged white habit tangling in briars. Thorns lacerated the elf’s dark skin. His eyes glowing, the Holy One exclaimed, “This is the ideal place to begin the Light’s Crusade!”

  Ned muttered, “Ideal, my hairy left foot!”

  “Mother Edwina!” Will Brandiman reproved. “The Holy One is guided by the Lady of Light. If he says that we begin the Light’s election campaign in the middle of desolation, in the Dark Lord’s own fortress Redoubt—we, a company of barely two dozen, on a perilous journey from the rich, comfortable south and its plentiful supplies of food, for example—then that’s exactly what we do.”

  “Amen!” the good Abbess Edwina snarled.

  The Holy Paladin Amarynth strode unmoved through the black land, his shaggy mass of dark hair flowing back from his pointed ears, in his hand a staff that glowed as white as his ragged monk’s robes. The elf turned to look back at the wagons of the Mission of Light, his slender form silhouetted against the bastions, flying buttresses, walls, balconies, spires, towers, pinnacles, and sheer masonry bulk of the Blasted Redoubt.

  “On!” the elf cried. “Onward!”

  Tiny figures began to scurry along the Redoubt’s parapets and into the shadow of the great West Gate. Ned’s long sight detected orcs, their smaller cousins the kobolds, the giant wolf-steeds orcs use in battle, and the leathery fanged steeds-of-the-air unnamed in the west.

  “Wonderful!” Ned looked back over his shoulder.

  Behind the Mission of Light’s wagon a dozen of the Holy Order of Flagellant Knights plodded along the desolate track. Each raised a metal-thonged whip and cracked it down on the back of the male or female elf in front. Periodically the leaders of the columns would swap with the back markers. The Mission wagon had been dogged for forty miles by vultures following the scent of the blood.

  “Know what I think?” Ned observed, scratching under the hem of his nun’s habit at his hairy bare feet. “I think we should’ve gone back and burned the Inn of the Sixteen Varied Delights, and that laundry, and then we should have left Graagryk for good.”

  His brother whipped out an ebony comb, slicking his spell-dyed hair back
from his brows.

  “You can always burn down taverns that have thrown us out. How often does a halfling get a chance to enter the Blasted Redoubt?”

  It crossed Ned’s mind to ask, “How often does a halfling want a chance to enter the Blasted Redoubt?” But the thought of ebony carvings, jet stones, sable furs, and black diamonds—doubtless with no special guard on them, other than being in the orc-haunted, evil magic-spelled, heart-of-desolation fortress of the Dark Lord—made his eyes gleam in his chubby face.

  “Take the reins,” Ned directed, handing the manticore’s tack to his brother, and proceeded to freshen up his lip- and eye-paint. By the time the Mission wagon rolled into one of the Redoubt’s outer courtyards he had repaired the worst ravages of travel and brushed the mud from his red habit.

  Kobolds shambled from the shadows in increasing numbers, their eyes catching the light redly. The larger orcs herded them back with poleaxes and jagged black swords. Ned snapped his fingers at a wolf that stood several hand-spans higher at the shoulder than any halfling.

  “Good doggie!”

  “HRRRAAAGGGH…”

  “Edwina, stop teasing that poor animal.” His brother, teeth gleaming whitely in the courtyard’s gloom, stepped past Ned to address a hulking orc in a studded leather jerkin and black steel helm—obviously one of the fighting Agaku. “Good afternoon, sir. Allow me to introduce myself: I am the campaign manager for the Holy Paladin-Mage Amarynth, your Light candidate in the forthcoming election to the Throne of the World.”

  The black-clad orc shuffled from foot to taloned foot and scratched at his pointed, hairless ears with the spike of his poleaxe. “Um…we’ve been supporters of the Dark here for generations. Don’t want to be rude, but, well, isn’t much point in you coming here, is there?”

  Ned raised his chin. Familiar with Man architecture as well as the townships of halflings, he was not unused to walls that towered like cliffs, but the soaring masonry of the Redoubt courtyard lost itself in mist far too far above his head. It dripped with moisture; and the stench of excrement and the shrieks of the incarcerated echoed down from barred slit windows.

  “My son.” Ned unclipped the whip from his spiked belt and cracked it. The noise echoed across the gathered heads of the Dark masses. Orcs twitched by reflex. He beamed at the Agaku. “I know you won’t disappoint a poor old woman—a poor old woman trained in the mage-craft of the Little Sisters of Mortification—and not hear our candidate. Will you?”

  The orc shambled around, clawed feet kicking bones across the black cobbles. “Silence! If anyone so much as breathes, I’ll send his miserable carcass to the Pit! Dire-wolves, you have free rein to harry any who speaks but the elf, be it bat, kobold, goblin, or orc!”

  Edwina smiled sweetly. “Thank you.”

  “Well done, our good and faithful servants!” the Holy One exclaimed, resting long-fingered hands on the heads of his halfling priest and abbess. In the abrupt silence, the Holy One paced across the courtyard and took his place on the cyclopean-size steps of the nearest tower entrance, looking out across the beady eyes, red pupils, snouts, and twitching claws of his audience.

  “Scum of the Blasted Redoubt!” the elf sang melodiously. “Do you wonder why we have no fear, standing before you as we do in the heart of Dark’s citadel? That is because you do not yet know who we are. We are Amarynth, who was a mortal elven paladin, but who you may now know as the Holy One, the Most Holy. We are the Son of the Lady herself!”

  Ned abandoned the Mission wagon—there being no interrupting Amarynth once he had begun using we—and rejoined his brother on the other side of a locked postern door, inside the Blasted Redoubt. Black torches burned in wall cressets, nitre spidered the masonry, and the bronchial coughing of an orc guard echoed down from the upper reaches.

  “Cellars, is my guess,” Ned said.

  His brother nodded. “If it was Men, I’d say tops of the towers. But orcs and Dark Lords, they think subterranean. Got your stuff?”

  Ned guffawed. The nun’s robe made packing throwing-daggers, poison needles, fine mail gauntlets (for trying traps) and lock-picks easier than doublet and hose. Slits cut in the cloth under the arms aided easy access to them.

  “Let’s hit the shadows,” Ned said.

  A sudden clatter of feet interrupted. Bare, hard feet. Torchlight glimmered first from the passage at their left, then from the passage on their right. Six or seven orcs piled into the tower entrance’s narrow antichamber.

  “Ah,” Ned exclaimed. “Good brother priest William, here are more souls who have yet to hear the word of our Mission.”

  The orc in the lead growled, “Oh, we’ve heard him. Promising the great last crusade against the Forces of Evil, your elf is. Says he’ll field another Army of Light against the Horde of Darkness.”

  Ned saw his brother momentarily squeeze his eyes shut, then open them, smiling a wide smile.

  “Perhaps I can interest you gentlemen,” Will Brandiman said, “in contributing to the Holy Prayer Wheel Fund of the Mission of Light? Now, you’re fighting orcs, I can see that, and the object of the Prayer Wheel is to heal all wounds caused in battle—no matter upon which side the fighter fought.”

  “‘S not right,” the leading orc protested.

  The Reverend Brandiman and the good Abbess Edwina exchanged glances. Neither benefited.

  “Of course, if you don’t wish to make a contribution to the Holy One’s prayer wheel,” Will oozed. “Should you be so poor that you cannot afford a copper piece, a button, a shred, a bone…why then, you may take these—ah—these prayer-beads, for free. But search your heart, brother orc, and see if you can afford to deprive the world (for it will be you doing the depriving) of the benefits of the Son of Light’s Holy Prayer Wheel.”

  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 avail
able 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.”