by John Daulton
But there was no chance that Warlord would gauge the nature of Gromf’s thoughts, for Warlord watched with a great snaggle of teeth. He threw the gnawed-clean rib of a wolf at one of the dancers, striking the youngling in the back of the head. The youngling paid no more attention to the blow than he had any of the others, the rain of bones and soggy greens that fell upon the dance, no more concern than he had for the smoke rising from the fire into the night.
Kazuk-Hal-Mandik, sitting beside Gromf, however, did notice the disgust on the face of his newly chosen apprentice, the victor of the contest for the yellow stone. The old shaman nodded privately to himself, glad that Gromf understood the new ways well enough to despise the old. There were still those who did not. And Gromf was a northern orc. That was good too. An omen, perhaps, of God’s favor.
“I see you find no joy in the ceremony,” he said. “It is a tribute to your glory.”
“There is no glory in the shame of seasons too numerous to count.”
Kazuk-Hal-Mandik nodded, revealing the gaps in his own natural weaponry, the emptiness. He had spent his life in service of the old gods, but it was he who the new god had found and first spoken to. “I am pleased it was you, Gromf,” he said after a time. “The winner needed to be someone like you.”
A youngling fell for the tricks of a woman crawling upon her hands and knees, gnashing her teeth temptingly as she waggled her tattooed buttocks at him. He ran to her, shoving two others down, and made to mount her. When she spun and threw him into the fire, he screamed and howled, and Gromf had to wait for him to roll out of the flames and extinguish himself in the dirt, his cries making it impossible to speak to the elder shaman for a time. The woman’s coarse laughter echoed from the surrounding cliffs, rising on the tide of laughter coming from everyone else around. Gromf had to wait for the wave of that to pass as well.
“Why do you fear it, old one?” he finally asked.
Kazuk-Hal-Mandik leaned back and studied Gromf, his lined green face seeming faded in the firelight. Dancers passed in front of the fire, throwing darkness, fleeting shadows, across the severity of his broad countenance, like the blinking of time. He considered hiding the truth, what little he knew, from today’s victor, but decided he would not. He would trust in God’s judgment in this.
“It is not fear,” he said after a time. “It is caution, which is a thing of Discipline. We do not know how it works. It is God Stone. It will help us take our rightful place on Prosperion. God has said it will be so.”
“Does Warlord know you speak such things?”
“He does.”
“Then he is weak. He should have pulled out your tongue.”
“He should have. But he did not. For he has, at least for now, faith in Discipline. Why else would he hold back an army that is over a hundred thousand strong? How could he have grown such a force?”
Gromf nodded across the heaped food at the scene that continued to unfold around the fire, the dance of beginning. “But he does not believe in the one God. His Discipline will fail. It will fail when we need it most.”
“It is possible,” admitted Kazuk-Hal-Mandik.
“The enemy’s spear is thrown,” insisted Gromf. “Warlord must dodge, duck or lift his shield. He must choose, or we will all be struck the death of his indecision.”
“Your Discipline must include faith in your leaders, Gromf. Warlord did not get his seat by stupidity.”
Gromf nodded. This was true.
Laughter rose again, a guttural rush like the sound of several hundred boars startled all at once. The burned youngling was crabbing backwards on hands and feet, moving away from the approach of the woman who had thrown him into the fire. She slapped at him, punched the flaccidity that pain had brought upon him, as she mocked his impotence. “I see you do not want me anymore,” she taunted over the laughter of the crowd.
“Would you like to speak to God?” Kazuk-Hal-Mandik asked after a time.
Gromf turned to face him, his eyes narrowing as he fixed the ancient shaman with a doubtful stare. “It is not so easy as that.”
“It is,” said the warlock, sipping water from the bowl of an abalone shell. “But there is one thing you must tell me first.”
“And that is?” said Gromf, knowing well what was coming next.
“You must tell me what you learned of the God Stone.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then God will choose another.”
“And what of you? You will simply watch me take the stone away? Leave its power to me? There is no Discipline in that.”
“You underestimate God, Gromf, because you have only seen him in your heart. I have seen him with my eyes. As you might if you choose to walk this path with me. As you will tonight. That is up to you. But do not believe he has no power to get what is his from us. He sees us and knows what we do. You do not take the stone from me. You do not take it from Warlord. You take the stone from him. And that is your choice. I cannot tell you what is right.”
Gromf watched as one of the younglings pinned a woman over a rock. The burly youth wrenched her arms behind her back, her wrists crushed together in one huge, powerful hand. His free hand pressed her head against the rock as he took his victory, his thrusts accompanied by triumphant barks which were echoed by the crowd. Even the subdued woman joined, though the sound was muted by the pressure of his hand upon her jaw and the angle of her face jammed against the rock.
Gromf let his gaze move from the first of the evening’s victors to the assemblage watching, the open mouths, the hoisted fists, the shouts and grunts of primal revelry. How could they ever beat the humans like this? It seemed unachievable. Humans were organized and patient. They thought and thought and thought. They hid their desires carefully. Somehow they all did. Or at least most of them. Enough of them to take and hold everything. Meanwhile, his people were still doing this. The things they had always done. The ways of strength without mind. No Discipline. They would never defeat the humans in this way. If they were going to win, they would need something else. Something like the favor of a god.
“I will tell you what I know,” Gromf said at last. He lifted a leg over the log upon which he sat, riding it in the way humans rode on horses, the way even a few of his people did now—when they could be made not to eat the beasts the moment they were caught. “I will tell you everything. And then you will take me to see God.”
Kazuk-Hal-Mandik nodded. “It is agreed.”
Gromf did not need much time to explain what he knew of the God Stone to Kazuk-Hal-Mandik because, in truth, he knew very little. He explained how the mana became thin and moved easily, like water rather than like honey. That is what Gromf knew. He also knew, or at least gauged by what he had seen from the doh-ruek who had teleported himself into a wall, and from the numbers of orcs who had briefly ascended to the top of the mountain of dead bodies only to explode or vanish or simply fall down dead for reasons that could not be explained, that magic could go very wrong with the stone. These things Kazuk-Hal-Mandik had also seen.
But Gromf’s description was enough. It filled in the missing bits of information the old shaman had gleaned while using the lamp he had stolen from the old human fortress at the base of the great mountain, the fortress with the towers of mismatched stone. The water effect is the changing of mana to a thing more powerful. It was the thing God had hinted of when he told Kazuk-Hal-Mandik of the stones.
Now, Kazuk-Hal-Mandik led Gromf down into the deep and sacred caves of the clan, the dying places where the honored warriors went to the last season. This was the place where the warlords and heroes came never to be seen again. The old ways said the gods came to claim them and take them to a new place where they were reborn in greater bodies, a land of beasts many times larger than those that roamed the vast plains of Kurr, the greatest beasts. There were no humans there. No dwarves. No elves. Only orcs. Orcs and the greatest beasts endlessly seeking to devour one another for all of time.
Gromf no longer believed that
this was true. The new God promised other things. He promised a land where there were humans. And elves. There was justice in this land. Eternal justice and the enslavement of hated humanity. The squeaks and squawking of birds during the day, the howling of wolves at night, all of these were replaced by the weeping sounds of broken men and their sobbing pleas for mercy and forgiveness. Gromf thought those stories seemed too good to be true, but he hoped that they were. He allowed himself to believe in the one God, had faith in his promises, for had not everything he had told them worked thus far? And it was with that faith and hope that he followed Kazuk-Hal-Mandik into the chamber where God was said to speak.
“You are the only orc alive besides me to see this place,” said the ancient warlock as they entered the sacred chamber. “It was here that God found me.”
“Where is he?” Gromf asked. He was in no mood for long histories now. Enough talking had been done. “Call him forth.”
“One does not call forth God,” Kazuk-Hal-Mandik began, but he did not continue for suddenly the chamber filled with light as the pool itself appeared to come to life.
The water filled first with the light of a bright blue sky, so bright Gromf felt as if he stood in broad daylight, and in a way, he did. Into that nearly blinding azure grew hazy shapes which solidified into a formation of rocks and gnarled trees. The trees were low-elbowed things that looked as if growth for them was the pursuit of obsequiousness. They seemed to bow and scrape across the uneven terrain, snaking over the jagged stone and only daring to put the barest spread of greenery up into the air, feeble tufts like trees in miniature, and even those too fretful to be green, favoring instead a groveling yellowed hue.
In the midst of the jumble of stones sat a figure that might once have been an orc, though upon closer examination, even that similarity seemed farfetched beyond merely the count of its head and limbs.
Its head was a vast, craggy thing, colored and textured so as to nearly match the stones upon which it sat, red and brown and black, no pattern, and covered with lichens and the white and gray smears left by the droppings of passing birds. Despite this head, its location relative to the rest of the form, it could not be said to be head-shaped, though it did sit upon a chunky foundation that shaped in its fissures and angles a set of shoulders and a torso. From this grew a pair of arms and legs, though none of them of equal size, and at the ends of each, three of them at least, were things that moved in the way of hands and feet. The left arm of the figure was far longer than the right, longer than the body as a whole, so long its terminal end could not be seen. What served for legs were a bramble of twisted joints, too many joints to be needed, four on one leg, six on another, and none of an orientation that seemed to complement the rest. Gromf couldn’t imagine what it must look like when it moved.
To Gromf’s eyes, it was a thing of unrivaled deformity sitting there, an abortion to be cast off a cliff the moment it arrived. Such misshapenness would never have been allowed to live amongst the clans. It was an abomination to be rid of, nothing more.
“He has come,” muttered Kazuk-Hal-Mandik in a low voice as he threw himself to the ground. “It is the one God.”
Gromf did not fall so easily to the ground. He stood staring into the pool at the hideous thing sitting there. He studied it even as he suspected it studied him. Gromf noticed that the rocks it sat upon were covered with crystals, stones like the yellow stone, hundreds of them, thousands even. The more he scoured the image in the pool, the more of them he saw. It was everywhere. God Stone. A heap of it, a whole place of it. What power must this one God wield?
“You do not fear me,” said the figure in the water. A crack in the craggy rock-heap of its head moved as it spoke. Gromf thought the voice was in his head, not his ears, though its timing matched the motions of its mouth. The pond remained still.
Kazuk-Hal-Mandik was groveling at the edge of the pool, hissing at Gromf to get down before he got them both killed.
“No, I do not fear you,” Gromf said. “Are you a god, or do you have the power of so much yellow stone to pretend it?”
The figure in the pool laughed, and there was fluidity to the movement that convinced Gromf it could not be a creature of solid stone. It had a body like an orc beneath all that, or in spite of it.
“There is no difference,” said the one God. “I am God. Your God. I have vanquished the others, and now have come to help you destroy the children of those gods that I have slain.”
“What children?”
“The humans and the elves. Just as I destroyed the dwarves before them. When it is done, I will set an orc upon the throne of humanity and another in the elven vale.”
“Why?”
“Because it is just.”
Gromf stared into the pool, tried once more to count the bits and pieces of all that yellow stone. He knew little of the dwarves or the elves. But he knew enough of power to recognize the promise of what he saw.
“What must we do?”
“You begin,” said the one God, “by killing that one. He is weak. Break his neck, and you may take his stone as well.”
Gromf glowered down at the horrified expression that briefly crossed Kazuk-Hal-Mandik’s face. In that instant the old shaman knew fear, but he put it quickly away. He was as ashamed by it as Gromf was at having seen it. He recovered in an instant, then nodded, solemn and calm. “It is true,” he said. “My part has been done.”
Gromf felt better then, and forgave the old warlock for his fear, though he would not break his neck. He turned back to the one God. “I am not done with him,” he said. “He will die when he is no longer of use to the All Clans. That is the way of Discipline. You demand waste.”
The one God laughed, the sound of stones rolling down into a hole. He turned away then and spoke to someone Gromf could not see. “There is hope after all,” he said. “Finally.” There came from behind him, somewhere far below, a great caterwauling, raucousness formed in throats that Gromf could not picture the creatures for. Nothing he’d seen in his life made such sounds.
Gromf looked down at Kazuk-Hal-Mandik still on his hands and knees. “Get up,” he said. “The time for groveling is done.”
Chapter 11
Doctor Leopold came out of the divination spell seven hours after he began. As unspectacular as it was to watch, him sitting there mumbling with his eyes closed and doing nothing else to entertain the eye, his masterful inquiry into the location of Ensign Orli Pewter was high-level magic coming from a diviner of his rank. He leaned back, causing a ruckus of protests from the rickety chair in which he sat, and pulled a handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket. He dabbed at the beads of sweat that had formed on the expanse of his hairless brow and then did the same across his thick forearms which also showed a sheen of sweat by the light of the candles burning low nearby.
“Well, my boy,” he said at length, “you are correct in assuming she is on that planet. I need parchment.”
Altin rifled through the heap of items he’d dumped on the floor and found a basket in which had once been stacked a pile of blank parchment sheets. He fished around until he found a piece that wasn’t too wrinkled and then sought for a quill and the inkpot he knew had to be down there as well. Fortunately, there was still enough ink in the ink pot for the doctor’s use.
The doctor set to work making a sketch of planet Earth, upon which he drew the shape of one of its significant landmasses, and upon that he drew a small circle to which he pointed as he handed his map to Altin. “She is in that area somewhere.”
Altin took the parchment to the window and looked out, the vantage he had on the distant planet good enough that he could just make out the landform described by the doctor’s picture. The continent he’d drawn occupied the upper portion of the globe from the angle of Altin’s view, though with some portion of it out of sight around the left side. He spent a few moments looking back and forth between parchment version and the actual landmass, then turned back to the doctor with a frown. “Surely you have m
ore than this. If this world is remotely similar in size to Prosperion, that is at least two or three hundred measures you’ve marked there.” He poked at the map as he spoke. “You can’t expect me to find her in time in all of that.”
“If it helps,” said the doctor, “I get the feeling she’s in a fortress of some kind. Possibly in the dungeon.”
Altin’s eyes bulged and the doctor knew immediately that Altin only barely kept his temper in check. “Are you telling me we just wasted seven hours to narrow it down to … to that?”
“Well, I’m not sure it’s entirely a waste,” the doctor replied, his cheeks billowing with his indignity. “That is a large and completely foreign world, you know. I’ve gotten you quite close.”
Altin spun and stared back down into the bright light of planet Earth, his jaw working as furiously as his mind.
He turned back and strode to the table where the doctor sat, taking a chair from nearby and setting it across from him. He fished into his robes and pulled out the tablet he’d taken from the Aspect’s sick bay. He stared at it for a moment, could see his reflection in the shiny black surface of its rectangular face. He wished it worked like the mirror he’d made for her, even though he knew that, in some ways, it could.