by G R Fabacher
“Shaya?” He said, walking in line with her.
Outside of her armor she wore the same orange tunic with loose pants they all wore. He couldn’t help but notice that orange seemed to look better against green skin. Her hair was down around her shoulders and seemed to move about on a breeze all its own.
“So, how’d it go with your lawyer?”
“About as well as a dwarf in the sun.”
She winced, “That bad? Well don’t feel to down about it. It never works out for anyone.”
“Gee, thanks… you’re a real hope for beings everywhere.”
She bit her lip, “I mean, we all try it, but somewhere along the way you start thinking that the missions are a saner alternative over the justice system.”
Damon grinned despite himself.
“You were a traitor right?”
“Yeah, though I think I would say I was charged with treason. Just sounds better for some reason.” He said.
“Did you do it?”
“No,I—aw it’s stupid.”
“What?” She asked.
“I went to the wrong party, okay. Just followed the wrong singer into the wrong rich-kid party and was the only one without enough connections so they could bust me. Apparently rich kids like to flirt with radical Union socioeconomic models. Guess that happens when you already have a lot of money.”
“So you thought you could get laid?” Shaya smirked, eyes twinkling mischievously.
Damon held his hands up, “Damn guilty. For that I end up in the Lich Corps. Though I had just been hoping for a date, if you’ll believe that.”
“I don’t believe it.” She said.
“Believe what? That I just wanted a date?”
“No way it’s just the wrong place at the wrong time.” She peered at him and he looked away from her big green eyes.
“Well, how would you know?” He said.
She smirked and tapped her chin, “Nothing specific, but you handled yourself out there pretty well for someone who is not a career criminal or former military. Call it a woman’s intuition.”
“Well you’re going to have to buy me dinner first if you want the full details.” He said.
She gave him a wink.
“Hey,” he called after her, “what about you? What are you in for?”
“A lady never tells; let’s see if you can get me to go for that dinner first.”
♦ ♦ ♦
“Aw, little human didn’t want to give up his ration.” The orc said, his breath was on Damon’s neck, hot and fetid. Damon winced. The orc had his arm wrenched up and was pushing his head into the bench table.
“How else am I going to keep up the strength to plow your mother?” Damon said.
The orc growled and threw Damon over the table. He landed with a solid thunk on the floor.
“You’ve got all the fighting skill of a sickly fae, but your insults are on par with the mightiest of orcs.” Urani said, or at least one version of her said, his vision was swimming a bit.
“Yeah, got him right where I want him. A few more like that and he won’t even get any satisfaction from crushing my skull with his bare hands.”
Urani gestured with a fork, “Now you’re thinking like an orc.” She speared some scrambled egg and ate it.
Damon staggered, planting his feet and putting his hands up. “So, Jurza, it was Jurza right?” Damon said, “As someone who knows her, does your mother like roses or chocolate?”
The orange-clad orc’s eyes narrowed to razor-thin slits, his nostrils flared. Jurza was over six and a half feet tall and at least three-hundred pounds of rock-solid muscle. His brown-green skin with its light scaling common to his race even if his size and musculature were not.
Damon watched as Jurza flexed his claw-like hands open and closed. He watched the pointed narrow tongue flit out. Suddenly, the reptilian convict sprang into action, flinging himself over the bench at Damon.
Damon stepped up onto the bench seat on the opposite side, jumping at Jurza and throwing himself and, more importantly, his elbow at the orc. He felt the solid contact of bone on the bridge of Jurza’s nose. The two males crashed down and Damon kept punching, hammering strike after strike into the orc’s face.
Then slowly he was being lifted up. Jurza flung him back across the table. Several of the corpsmen picked up their trays well before the bard’s flying body could ruin their meal.
“Not bad…” Urani said, her eyes closing slowly in mirth, “I hope you don’t die. You’re fun.” She ran a hand through her thin feather like hair that she only grew out of one side of her head, leaving the left side shaved to show off some tattoos on her head.
“Uh-huh…” Damon said. He was about to get up, but he felt a hand clamp on his ankle and soon he was flying through the air like a thrown pillow. He hit the ground and rolled into the wall. Damon looked up and saw one pissed off orc with dark, purplish-blue blood streaming out of his nose.
Damon put his hands up weakly. Jurza was getting bigger and bigger in his vision. “Okay, okay,” Damon said, holding up a hand, “I promise that I’ll have her home in time for curfew. I’ll be an absolute gentle—“
His words were cut short by a big hand clamping onto his windpipe. His back slid along the wall as he was hoisted into the air. Damon grabbed the hand with both of his and pulled, but the orc’s iron grip wouldn’t budge. He gasped and squawked.
“You talk too much, human.” Jurza said.
“Look… behind… you…” Damon gasped.
“Do you think I’m stupid?” The orc slammed him into the wall.
“Incredibly…” Damon replied.
The orc’s face contorted in a snarl of rage, and then his eyes suddenly went wide. Jurza twitched spasmodically and dropped Damon. Standing behind Jurza was a guard in riot gear holding a stun wand. Damon rubbed his neck and moved to stand.
“Oh thank—“
The guard turned and jabbed the wand into his chest. A blinding pain went through his body and he fell into a pile of twitching, quivering muscles.
“Shite, Dorian, I think you had it set for the orc still.” His partner said.
“Oops…”
“You two,” the one called Dorian pointed to Shaya and Urani, “go toss him in his cell. You know we damn well hate it when you animals fight.”
Damon watched the magilights pass overhead as the two women carried him into his cell and toss him on the bed. He hit the thin mattress bonelessly. Slowly his muscles stopped twitching and he was able to sit up just a bit. He flexed his arms and legs.
“Thanks I guess…” Damon said.
“Why didn’t you just give him your breakfast?” Shaya asked through the open cell door.
“Because I was hungry…” Damon grunted.
“Was it worth it?” She asked, “He could have killed you.”
Damon exhaled, “I could have died yesterday, but I didn’t. Maz did.”
Shaya was quiet for a moment, “So now that you can’t get out you’ve got a death wish? That was quick.”
“No, but this sentence is going to be hard enough, but having some psychopathic orc thinking he can push me around isn’t going to make it any easier.”
“He’s not going to be your friend because you busted his nose in a fight.” She said.
“I know…” he said, “but now he’s going to have to think twice when he comes at me again.”
Urani scoffed from beside Shaya, “Jurza has never thought twice a day in his life.”
Chapter 6
“W
ell, well, well,” the Lieutenant said, “I can’t leave you alone for one hour, can I, Bard?”
Damon looked up. The Lieutenant had a driftwood-like quality about him. Weathered, hard, and nearly indestructible. He was a human, and not an exceptionally tall or strong specimen of the race. He stood a few inches below Damon, but that fact did not fill the bard with confidence.
“I didn’t start it.” Damon started.
The Lieutenant’
s gray eyes grew steely and cold. “I don’t give a warm shite who started it, convict. What I care about is all of you animals act like some facsimile of civil. That’s why we’re going to do some double yard time.”
There was a collective, whispered groan from the corpsmen, and Damon learned exactly how the Lich Corps operated.
Soon he was out in the yard without a shirt doing pushups in the cold and wet morning air. Everyone else was around him doing the same, even Jurza with his barely fixed nose. With the impressive healing rate of an orc, he was no doubt already planning his revenge.
“See that’s the problem with rapid healing,” he told Urani, “you never learn from your mistakes.”
She rolled her eyes and kept with her exercise. Damon took the hint and tried to block out the burning pain in his bandaged arm.
“All of you can thank our brand new bard and Jurza for this punishment detail.” The Lieutenant said, pacing up and down the lines of exercising corpsmen. “Some of you are military criminals, but for the sake of the new guy, we’re going to go over how the corps work.”
He stopped pacing, “What are all of you?”
“Criminals, sir!” Everyone shouted.
“Correct.” Their leader said. “What is the chain of command in the Lich Corps?”
“You are, sir.”
“I don’t think I heard the bard in that.” He walked over to Damon and pushed him down with the help of a boot to the shoulder.
“You are, sir!” They all repeated, with Damon joining in louder.
“That’s right. You are not a military outfit, you are…” He cupped a hand to his ear.
“Criminals, sir!”
“That’s right. So I don’t care what tree, prophet, or gods you worship. While here and on the upward side of this soil I am your whole world.” He paused. “Laps now. Run around the yard until I get bored.”
The corpsmen did not shake out fast enough for the Lieutenant’s liking, “I said move!” Everyone jumped up and began hugging the outer wall of the yard.
The knot of various beings soon thinned out as the natural runners took the lead. Damon was struggling toward the back. He wasn’t what anyone would have called the perfect physical specimen, but he had kept in shape before his incarceration. Sweat ran down his short, freshly shorn head of blond hair. He whipped his forearm across his forehead to try and keep the stinging sweat from his eyes.
He watched as Boudira overtook him. She was fully covered still, but running in a kind of shuffling gate, similar to some kind of great ape from one of the jungles of Duamatt
“So…” he panted, “that’s how dwarves run.” Damon supposed it made sense given that they had squat powerful legs and proportionately longer arms. “I always wondered.”
“Sacreon,” Damon winced, turning to find the Lieutenant jogging with contemptuous ease next to him, “how did you think dwarves should run? Are you a racist?”
“No sir.” Damon replied instantly.
“Good, because I will tolerate thieves, whores, arsonists, rapists, and all manners of degenerates, but I will not tolerate any shite-eating racists. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.” Damon said.
He watched as the Lieutenant jogged off to harass other corpsmen.
“Did the Lieutenant just make a joke?” Damon asked a human man everyone called Joyride.
The man shrugged and kept running.
Damon learned how the command structure of the Lich Corps worked. Despite his assertions that there was only one link in the chain of command. The Lieutenant did have a boss over him, but he was an official army officer and gentleman. Technically this absentia captain was in charge of the whole unit, but he apparently hated the job. So he pawned off everything he could onto the Lieutenant; only showing up when something went wrong. Shaya was considered the Lieutenant’s second-in-command.
There were also no ranks in the corps. Everyone was a corpsman. The higher magistrates and consuls didn’t want to lend a penal battalion any kind of legitimacy. There were no medals or accolades. There were only missions, missions where they survived or they all died. The only rank seemed to be how long one served in the corps, which made Damon the low man on the totem tree. None of this made the Lieutenant ease upon his military-style training.
Damon grunted as he pulled up on the bar. “Two…” he grunted
“Sacreon, I might actually die of old age before you get to five.” The Lieutenant said.
Damon panted and let his body drop before pulling up once again, his sore muscles screaming in protest. “Three…”
“Enlighten me, Bard, how did you manage to survive your first mission?”
“Luck and dashing good looks, sir.” He said.
A punishing body shot knocked him from the bar and he sprawled out on the grass, gasping and flailing in an impromptu impersonation of a fish.
“Get up and do five more from the beginning.” The Lieutenant said.
Damon rolled onto his knees and staggered to his feet. He jumped up and grabbed the bar, straining to haul his body upward.
After four hours of hard exercise the corpsmen funneled back into the mess hall of their prison barracks to eat the midday meal. Damon took his ration pack and dropped into the seat between Joyride and a moody looking human woman in shackles. Boudira and Shaya were nearby, gingerly working food into their mouths.
“I’m sorry, guys,” Damon said, “if I knew that we would be put through hell for not letting Jurza eat my food, I’d have let him have it.”
“Don’t.” Shaya said, “You’re the new blood, it was going to happen eventually. We’ve all done it in some way or form. When I got here, I broke Urani’s jaw for the top bunk. At the point its tradition. Good job.”
Damon felt a swell of pride, but mostly he felt burning muscles and bruises. “So, Jurza really wouldn’t have killed me?”
“Oh no, that orc’s a stone-cold killer, he’d have ripped your arm off a beat you to death with it.” Shaya said, putting a bite of food in her mouth and chewing it.
Chapter 7
Damon stepped up onto the foot-sized platforms housed within the armor’s lower legs. He slid his arms in and the armor booted up automatically, sensing a wearer it began to close. Those small platforms sliding down and taking his legs into the armor’s boots. Freshly refurbished by Boudira’s skilled hands, the armor worked on its own without need for the manual overrides. The armor sealed itself, and there was a moment of total blackness before the faceplate came to life. Most of the systems were locked down of course.
He was currently inside the Lich Corps armory. A small outbuilding in the yard that held the suits for service.
An unarmored Shaya was setting up a small stepladder. “Hold still.” she said.
“Don’t think I could move if I wanted to.”
“Believe it or not, you could actually tip over if you try hard enough.”
“Sounds like there’s a story in there.”
Shaya rolled her eyes.
Damon watched her step up, and he couldn’t help but notice how curvy she was. Her skin was starting to get spots of yellow with the changing seasons. She blinked her eyes and he noticed that the small knots and bumps of wood that half-elves accrued when they melded with trees. Unlike their full-blooded cousins half-elves tended to polish the nodules like body jewelry.
“You survived your Hanging, Bard.” She said, “So it’s time to get your skull.” She took a paper stencil and a can of paint. “It’s best if you turn off your faceplate so that it doesn’t burn off the paper.
Damon took a minute to coordinate with the runes on his display, but soon the world was black. He could still hear though. “It’s not like I can move anything else.” He started, “Wait, won’t the paint just burn off?”
“Nah,” she said, “this is the same stuff they paint the armor with, but in white, it’s designed to be magically resistant to the effects of the attuning in the crystal face plates.” He heard the shaking of the ca
n and the intermit hiss of expelling paint.
“So, who did my skull, you?” Damon asked.
“Pffft! No, I can’t draw stick figures. This was Sparky.”
“Who?”
“Hellaina, she’s that twiggy little human holarna. The one in the shackles from lunch.” She said.
“Ho-what now?”
“Redforest Elvish for witch. She does all the skulls, she’s really good.”
“Wait, the one in the shackles, holy shite, she’s an actual mage?”
“Yep, natural-born magic user, hence the bracelets. And there… all done.”
Damon flicked on his screen again and a white-fingered Shaya reached for a hand mirror. He saw a human skull with an open mouth where his would have been. It was angular and aggressive in its stylization. A real war face. The black tint of the mask providing a great background.
“Wow that looks great.” Damon said.
“Well Sparky’s probably out in the yard right now. So thank her yourself.” Shaya hopped down and sashayed away, her hair moving slightly of its own accord.
♦ ♦ ♦
Damon looked in on the visitor center. He could see both sides of the partition that completely bisected the room. Each booth had a privacy projector. The occupants of both sides could hear one another, even through the crystal security screen. Privacy was important to those who ran the Republic penal system; that’s why they kept recordings of every conversation after all. He hadn’t been back since his call with his advocate weeks ago, and no one had come to visit him.
Damon looked in on Shaya and Urani, Germaine, and others meet with significant others or parents, he didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.
“No one special for you either?”
Damon turned around, he saw Hellaina walking up and sitting down. The heavy shackles on her wrists and the chain between them clinked and jangled softly. Shaya was right. She was a wiry little whipcord, but now that she was close he could see that she was hardly a day over sixteen.