This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death

by Неизвестный

  “Y—,” Grun started, but his voice caught in his throat. The man, Lord Restharon, had raised a single finger.

  “Not yet. Orc, I trust you understand how honored you are. Were you to live a thousand years, which you won’t, but were you to, never would you be more honored than you are at this very moment. For the rest of your life, your comrade orcs will gather round to hear the story of the time Lord Restharon blessed you twice in one day, first by gazing upon you, and next by letting you live. Yes, little orc, I intend to let you live. Not that I can’t take that back. But I have no intention of torturing or killing you.”

  The master’s expression hardened. “I was simply down here dealing with a goblin who sent off a message hawk against my wishes. As we passed from one chamber to another, via the holding cells where you were blissfully unconscious, he pointed at you. I wanted to know why. You may speak.”

  Grun felt the invisible pressure on his neck loosen. Even still, it was a strain to speak… he was physically exhausted and more than a little terrified. “Where… where is Kerrek?”

  Lord Restharon lifted one of his thin, immaculate eyebrows. He angled his head almost imperceptibly to the side of the room. Grun looked over and saw another table, much like the one he was strapped to. Next to it were trays covered with instruments, surgical tools, some complicated mechanical devices, and a dagger that glowed faintly blue in the torchlight. All were spattered with blood.

  Strapped to the table was… most of Kerrek.

  Grun had seen allies dead before. He’d killed allies before, the master being capricious about allegiances and whether mercenaries would get paid or slaughtered. He’d seen people tortured far more thoroughly than Kerrek, who, at the end of the day, couldn’t have been in the chair more than a few hours.

  But those were always somebody else’s fault. For all the corpses he’d seen, he’d never actually been the cause of death… there may have been prophecies that read “Lord Restharon’s army” or “the treachery of the Garrean king” or even “split asunder by an orc,” but there wouldn’t have been one that said “Grun.”

  Until now. Kerrek was dead and it was Grun’s fault. His actual, personal fault. The orc felt light-headed.

  “Sending a message hawk without approval,” Restharon explained. “That’s potential treachery.”

  With effort, Grun looked back at his lord and fought down his bile. “It wasn’t. He was sending a message for me.”

  Restharon shrugged. “Yes, well. Regardless of the specific circumstances, I like to ensure that nobody in my castle be accused of treachery twice. Now, by the time he saw you, he was not particularly in speaking condition…”

  “I ate his tongue!” said a ghoul with a cackle. He appeared from somewhere, dressed in a black cloak and hood that couldn’t hide his twisted body and sagging, half-rotten skin.

  “That you did, Warfen; that you did. So, orc, what message did he send for you? By which I suppose I’m asking if you’re to be accused of treachery as well.”

  Grun sagged, yelped as the manacles wrenched his arms, and stood to attention again. “I sent a message to the Deeprun dwarves. With blood. For the artifice of prophecy.”

  Restharon blinked in, Grun thought, genuine surprise. “Really?” he asked, and then once again composed himself. “Well, of course really. After all, if you were to lie in this room you would be sliced across the back.” He smiled at an amusing and certainly bloody memory, then recomposed himself. “Nonetheless, why would you do that? Anyone could tell you the answer.”

  “ ‘In battle, alone and soon forgotten,’ ” Grun said.

  “So you knew it. Why would you do such a stupid thing, orc?”

  “It might be different.”

  “It never is. Stupid, stupid orc.”

  Grun had never met his master before. Orders always trickled down a chain of command through a half dozen links… He knew Lork Restharon was powerful and quick to anger and prone to punishment, but Grun feared him only in the abstract, like a god. Here, in front of him, Grun saw only the human, or the creature very like a human. There was nothing to temper his anger, and so he snarled and strained against his chains, which rattled ominously. “I am not ‘orc’!” he shouted. “I am Grun!”

  “Orcs don’t get names.” Restharon did not shout, but Grun felt himself pressed to the table with the force all the same. He struggled to breathe under the pressure.

  “… I… have… a name…,” he stammered.

  Abruptly, the pressure stopped. Grun tried to sag, but the manacles forced him to stay upright and alert.

  “Oh, this is good,” said Lord Restharon. “Oh, this is. By Arengee’s bones, this is hilarious! You think you’re special.”

  “I—”

  “Haven’t you heard the poem? ‘Orcs don’t get to change their fate. Orcs don’t get to wonder why. Orcs don’t get to have a name. Orcs are born to fight and die.’ ”

  Grun spat in Restharon’s direction. The lord was unmoved. “I am not a poem!”

  “No, you’re an orc. A little bit of nothing.”

  “I can be… be… I can be important!”

  “Yes, yes,” the lord said dismissively. “You are a vital cog in the sundial. Ah ha-ha. Born to fight and die.”

  “I can… I…” Grun hemmed, trying to express himself. Thoughts and words flitted in the air before him, just out of reach.

  “You?” said Restharon. “Go on.”

  “I can… I can write my own poem!”

  The master smirked. “You can barely put a sentence together!”

  “I can write a poem for the orcs!”

  “Orc, I’m going to assume you don’t know this because, well, it’s a thing and you’re an orc. Your people did write that poem.”

  “What?”

  “Why do you think you’re mentioned in every stanza? Who else would care enough to say that much? Who would say anything at all?”

  Grun tried to reach out for more words, but there was nothing… Between the red fog of rage and his own exhaustion, language had failed him entirely. So he screamed.

  Grun just screamed and screamed, twisting on the table but getting nowhere. Lord Restharon sat and watched. About two minutes later, Grun’s voice gave out entirely, so he just thrashed on the table. After another minute, he ran out of energy. This time, the pain wasn’t enough to stop him from slouching. He was in agony and could feel the metal cutting into his wrists and his shoulders being pulled out of joint, but he didn’t have the energy to care.

  Lord Restharon stood up, stretching his arms a bit as he did. “Warfen, bring it in, will you?”

  The ghoul capered out of sight.

  “Little orc, you want to be special. That’s noble enough, I suppose,” the lord said. “But you’re not special. Do you know how I know this?”

  Grun shook his head weakly.

  “Because you’re so like an orc… shortsighted and senseless. You don’t seek glory in battle or go round up your kin and revolt against me. That would be an interesting choice and a long time coming. No, you opt to check and see if you’re special. So passive. So unfocused.

  “But better than that,” he continued, stepping close to the orc and sneering. Grun could smell, above the pervasive scent of blood and death in the room, Lord Restharon’s soap, and the strange, metal scent of powerful magic. “Better than that, the way you check? Not by having your aura read, not by asking a diviner to see your future, not through any elementary prognostication, but with this.”

  Restharon gestured at the ghoul, who was pushing in a strange machine on a wheeled cart. It was a box, about three feet on every side, made of unpolished metal dotted with crystals. There was a small slit on the front framed in brass, and on the top some sort of funnel. Grun had never seen anything like it before, but he knew just what it was. “You have…,” he started, but didn’t have the energy to finish the sentence.

  “An artifice of prophecy? I’m not an idiot, orc. Not like a little orc who thinks he’s abo
ve dying in battle, but when it comes time to prove it, only thinks to see if he’ll die some other way. So… so steeped in death, little orc, that you won’t think… no, you can’t think of any other way to prove your merit.”

  “Only one…,” Grun choked out.

  “One artifice? Obviously, there are two. You know why?”

  Grun lolled his head from side to side.

  “You took it for me.”

  Grun raised his head. It felt like someone was pushing it down, but he forced past it. “What?”

  Lord Restharon moved down to the artifice. He walked in graceful, long-legged strides and brushed his hands on the machine. “Well, ‘you’ for a ‘some orc or another’ value of you. Did you ever kidnap a dwarf? About five years ago?”

  Grun nodded weakly. “Bron,” he whispered.

  “Bron Forgefounder! Yes, he was one of them. There were several dwarves involved, of course. You took him?”

  Grun shook his head. “Guard,” he said.

  “Oh good! In which case, I think I owe you a complimentary prophecy. Warfen? Take one of his fingers.”

  The ghoul hissed with glee and leapt upon Grun.

  Lord Restharon didn’t raise his voice, but he infused it with that same power, and Grun could hear and understand it perfectly well over the screaming. “I am the sole ruler of the largest empire on the continent. I maintain this power by acquiring anything and everything that will be of advantage to me. Every secret spell, every lost ritual. I could wear a different magic ring on every digit for a month straight and not repeat a spell. I’ve moved six mage towers into my empire… just moved them right in. I have a room that contains a chest that contains the room the chest is in! Warfen! One finger! Just one!”

  The ghoul slid off Grun reluctantly. He spit Grun’s left forefinger into his hands and presented the bloody mess to his lord. Grun watched in woozy, shocked silence.

  “Pour some drops in the artifice, Warfen. Then you may eat the finger.”

  The ghoul cackled and squeezed Grun’s blood into the funnel, at which point he scampered into the corner and crunched hungrily on the finger. Grun stared at the ghoul, jaw slack. “Not here, Warfen. Out. Send Eamon over.”

  The ghoul ran off, finger still in his mouth. He was shortly replaced by a human guard with a crossbow; Grun thought it looked like the one from the kitchens, but they all looked much the same to him.

  “As I was saying,” Restharon continued. “Prognostication. And not cheap divination—this was made by the dwarves! No vagaries of magic, just technology. Cheap and reliable. Even if the subject matter is a little morbid, and never quite as helpful as one could hope. So I had you get the dwarves, and I had them build me one, and then I, ah, ensured there would only be two such devices. Heh. The last one… Bron Forgefounder himself, as it happens… he admitted it was a relief to finally understand; he was the first to try the device, and his result actually was ‘Artifice of prophecy.’ Funnily enough, that’s how it got the name; before they’d just called it the Machine of Death. One of the many little ironies the device engenders. I intend to get rid of the original within the next few years, but raiding the Deeprunners is no quick task.”

  Grun looked at the machine. Some of the gems had lit up. He got the impression that it was thinking. “Why…?” he asked.

  “Why kill the creators? Obvious. Or did you want to know why I needed one of my own? Lots of reasons, little orc. It’s leverage I have on my lieutenants. When I’m preparing a maneuver, I do some spot checks… If I’m sending a team to the shore, and five samples in a row come back ‘drowning,’ I’m going to reduce the number of men I send to the shore, won’t I? And of course, there are certain advantages to keeping the artifice where we do the torturing. Provides a very real motivating force if properly applied.” Restharon laughed.

  Grun didn’t raise his head, but he glanced up at his master. “Your death?” he asked.

  “Mm. ‘Hubris.’ ” He shook his head in amused disappointment. “The thing can be so charmingly poetic. It’s good advice, though, which is why even though you’re chained up, and I can do this…” He snapped, and the shadows in the corner of the room coalesced into a nightkin. Grun got the impression of tentacles and some sort of beak in shades of darkness, but Restharon waved his hand and the creature dissipated in seconds. “Even though I’ve got that, I’ve still got a guy with a crossbow. Hello, Eamon.”

  “Ah, hello, my lord,” the human said. It was definitely the one from the kitchen.

  “Do you know your ultimate fate, Eamon?”

  “Ah, yes, my lord. Um. ‘In an assassination,’ my lord. Quite proud, my lord.”

  “As you should be.” There was a faint, muffled buzz within the artifice, and a slip of parchment appeared in the slit. “And here we are. Are you ready for the grand reveal? Eamon, release one of its arms so it can read the inevitable ‘In battle, alone and soon forgotten,’ please. The right one; it’s less bloody.”

  Eamon crept nervously up to the orc. With his arm extended as far as possible, he pulled the pin that held Grun’s right manacle closed and then jumped back to Restharon’s side. The lord snatched the parchment without giving it a glance. “Here, little orc. Give it a gander.” He pressed it into Grun’s hand. “Why don’t you let me know what it says?”

  Grun looked at the parchment in his hand. Turned it over. There was writing on it. That he knew. He couldn’t tell what it said because he never learned to read.

  But he had learned his name. Bron taught him how, with a piece of charcoal he used to write on the wall, just days before… before Grun was sent somewhere else and never saw the dwarf again. Bron taught Grun how to read and write his own name.

  And whenever a wizard tried to invade the castle grounds, which was about once a month, he’d have a quill and ink and blank scrolls that Grun could take off his corpse, and Grun would write his name over and over and know that it was his.

  Whatever was written on the parchment that the artifice had spit out was one word long. It was a long word, and it started with a G, just like Grun’s name.

  “So what’s it say, little orc?”

  Grun looked Restharon in the eye. “ ‘In battle, alone and soon forgotten,’ ” he said. He smiled weakly. He felt a pulse of magic sliding up his back, slicing into his skin, but his orcish hide was thick and resistant… it hurt, but it didn’t break his flesh. Restharon’s spell detected the lie, but there was no alarm, no light, nothing but a wound that nobody could see.

  “Of course,” said the lord. “And now I am going to let you go, little orc. And remember, until that prophesied day comes and goes, that I let you go. Not because I am merciful, but because you aren’t worth my time to torture. Come, Eamon. We’ll send Gor and Slithes in to release the orc.” He turned and began striding off.

  With his right arm free, Grun had considerably more freedom of movement. He could stand flat-footed without his left arm being wrenched. His left hand hurt like the abyss, but everything hurt right now, and with a missing finger, it was slightly smaller than it was when the manacles were put on. Grun silently leveraged himself forward and tugged.

  And at the exact moment Restharon asked himself how it was the orc had learned to read, he heard the pop of Grun’s hand slipping free. He and Eamon turned and saw Grun charging… they had time for one blow, just one, before he would be upon them. But orcs were hardy.

  Grun came back to the barracks and fell asleep for almost thirty-six hours. He had lost quite a lot of blood getting out of the castle, and nobody woke him because the entire empire was in a panic. Eventually, to his own surprise, he awoke in his bloody little bunk.

  Orcs drifted in and out of the barracks, directionless. Grun ignored them. He went in search of food, which brought him back to the castle kitchens, where dozens of orcs had gathered. Other species were there too, but there were more orcs than anyone else, eating and talking and experiencing the illicit thrill of being in the castle. As he ate, he listened. Neighboring kin
gdoms were on the move. There was talk of defending the empire, or abandoning it and seeing if someone else needed a force, or just finding a place out of the way and waiting to see who won.

  Grun still had the parchment. He hadn’t let go if it during the fight, and it was crumpled and bloodstained and singed by the arcane blast Restharon had thrown. Rather like Grun. Even if he could read, it was well past legibility now, but he knew that it was a word that started with G. And it was his word.

  “We could make our own empire,” he said. The conversation died down a bit.

  “Orcs can’t run empires,” one orc said. Others agreed. “Orcs fight.” “Orcs work for other people.” “Orcs aren’t bosses!” “Orcs are born to—”

  “No!” said Grun. “Orcs are born to do anything! Orcs are born to have a name! Orcs are born to be themselves! And… and not all orcs will die the same!”

  It wasn’t a very good poem, but it was his. And soon, it would be everyone’s.

  * * *

  Story by Ed Turner

  Illustration by Tony Cliff

  LAKE TITICACA

  ON THE LAST DAY OF FIFTH GRADE, Alfred and his two best friends swore that they would all go together to find out how they were going to die. “We’re going to start middle school now,” said Alfred. “We should do this and promise to stay friends forever.”

  Alfred’s friends both agreed with him. The year before, on the last day of fourth grade, the three of them had gathered in front of the mirror in the school bathroom and chanted “Bloody Mary” over and over again with the lights out. They had been scared at the time, but it seemed childish now. Getting their predictions from the machine was completely different—it was a grown-up thing to do, and not childish at all.

  So after lunch, they sneaked off away from the schoolyard and started walking downtown. They passed by the diner and the post office and the little Easy-Peasy supermarket on the corner. Mrs. Dratmoor was standing in the door of the Easy-Peasy fanning herself with a magazine, trying to get some relief from the heavy heat of the day.