Orcs

by Stan Nicholls

  “That’s all we need,” Jup muttered.

  At last they were off the bluff. Haskeer jumped the final few feet and landed hard, grunting at the impact. Soon they were all milling on the level, staying in the lee of the glacier in the forlorn hope it might keep the rising wind off them.

  “Did you see that?” Jup said. “That light over there?” He pointed south towards the edge of the ice tongue.

  “Nothing there now,” Haskeer said. “Maybe you imagined it.”

  The dwarf squared up to him. “I didn’t imagine it. It was there!”

  Before a fight could develop Stryke stepped between them. “Just a reflection, maybe? But it wouldn’t hurt to find out. I’m not too keen on the idea of camping out if we don’t have to. We’ll give it half an hour. I want us to be settled before nightfall.”

  Without warning, the glacier gave a mighty crack. A block of ice the size of a house began to fall away at their heels. The orcs fled out across the tundra, slipping and staggering. At last, safely out of range, they puffed to a halt. Alfray, almost exhausted, was some way behind the rest.

  “We’re safe,” Haskeer panted.

  “No, we’re not,” Alfray contradicted. “Look!”

  They followed his pointing finger. Racing towards them came a pack of creatures the size of lions. With their white coats they were almost invisible in the twilight.

  “Form up!” Stryke yelled and pelted off towards Alfray.

  Seeing Stryke dashing towards him, Alfray turned. The sight was enough to make anybody quail. With fangs like ivory sabres, five beasts were almost upon him.

  Stryke cried out and whirled his sword. The lead snow leopard, startled, missed his spring. He rolled head over heels, his claws giving him purchase as he sprang to his feet.

  Not taking his eyes off the monster, Stryke shouted, “This way!”

  He had no time for more, because two of the leopards were now prowling around him, looking for an opening. The rest had swung round to herd the warband.

  Stryke and Alfray backed away but one of the creatures bounded swiftly behind them. The smaller one feinted. At the same moment the dominant male leaped again. Distracted, Stryke almost fell to the raking claws but he got his sword up just in time. Blood sprayed from the beast’s foreleg and with a savage scream the animal retreated.

  For the moment the snow leopards circled just out of range of the orcs’ blades.

  In the meantime, Coilla was urging the rest of the orcs to shuffle closer in a body. Three of the leopard pack oozed sinuously around the defensive ring. The beasts faced a bristling wall of metal, but they blocked any attempt at rescuing Stryke and Alfray.

  Again the pack leader came in at Alfray. Its claws spiked into his sleeve, knocking the old orc from his feet. But Stryke was there, his sword slashing out. The tip of his blade scored the beast’s flank. A line of crimson darkened the creamy fur and the snow leopard bounded out of reach.

  Stryke risked a glance. The rest of the warband were too far away to do him and Alfray any good. “You all right, old-timer?” he panted.

  “Yeah. But enough of the old-timer! Keep ’em off a moment, will you?”

  Stryke didn’t have time to argue. Again and again the snow leopards darted in, playing a deadly game. One after the other, they feigned attack. He knew he couldn’t hold them off forever, but dared not look away to discover what Alfray was doing.

  Cursing his cold, stiff fingers, Alfray fumbled with the buckles on his healer’s bag. At last, desperate, he managed to find a large stone bottle. Splashing the contents onto the wet snow, he pulled back just in time. Turquoise flames whoomped up, singeing his eyebrows. The cats sprang back, dazzled and disorientated.

  “What’s that?” Stryke gasped.

  Alfray didn’t reply. Instead he hacked through a roll of bandages, spearing the cloth on his sword then dipping it into the pungent blaze. He flicked his wrist and the fireball whisked through the air, landing on the younger leopard’s back. Gouts of fire sizzled through its pelt to the fatty layer beneath.

  Then the whole creature went up in flames. It gave an unearthly scream and hurtled out of sight across the darkling plain. Meantime the strange blue fire dwindled until it went out in a pool of slush at Alfray’s knees.

  Warily the other cat circled then sprang at the squatting corporal. Stryke dropped, holding his blade upright. As the beast passed over him he stabbed upwards with all his might. The razor-sharp metal sliced right through the leopard’s belly. Stinking guts spilled out on the orc below. Hastily wiping his eyes on his sleeve, Stryke saw the pack leader collapse just beyond him in a heap of tangled limbs.

  He drew a deep breath and coughed as the stench hit his lungs.

  Alfray got upwind of him and managed to gasp, “Thanks, Stryke.”

  “Can you do that again?”

  Alfray shook the bottle. Liquid sloshed in it. “Once or twice, maybe.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  With no idea that salvation was trotting towards the warband, Coilla snapped, “Give me that!” and grabbed a grunt’s sword.

  She stepped free of the sheltering mass of bodies and pitched it at the nearest leopard. The blade ripped through its spine, leaving the beast running on its front legs for a moment before it realised its hind legs were paralysed. Coilla came up on it from the rear and thrust her sword through the back of its neck. Blood pumped out onto the snow.

  Two to go. With Stryke covering Alfray, the healer mixed his fire-brew again. They took out one of the leopards but the last drops of potion weren’t enough to ignite.

  The remaining beast panicked. It leaped away from the blazing body of its companion and found itself almost on top of Stryke. It had no time to lower its bony skull. Head up, it left its throat exposed.

  It ran straight onto his blade, its momentum driving its body almost up to the hilt. The monstrous teeth were just a hair’s breadth from Stryke’s face. With a look of surprise in its green eyes it keeled over, bloody froth bubbling from its neck.

  Its fall twisted Stryke’s sword from his grasp. Swearing, he drew back, groping for his knife, but all the leopards were dead. He sat on the flank of the one who’d taken his blade and said tiredly, “Butcher the damn things and take the fur. We might need it.”

  The long northern twilight lingered. The snow shower blew itself out, leaving stars shining in the north above the ice sheet. As the moon rose, the band headed back for the lee of the glacier, finding enough light reflected from it to guide their steps.

  Jup, in the lead, suddenly stopped. “See?” he crowed. “Told you I saw a light!”

  Ahead of them stood a gigantic ice palace.

  As they got closer they slowed in awe.

  The palace was immense, its slender spires gleaming in the moonlight, its whiteness making the glacier behind it seem dirty. Flying buttresses cradled the central face in elegant curves. Statues stood in dark niches, impossible to make out beneath their coating of crusted snow.

  It might have been a spectral vision of beauty if it had not been for the lights twinkling in the turret windows. Hardly distinguishable from the stars, the yellow glow of candles gleamed fitfully behind arched casements.

  “If we’d come here in daylight we’d never have seen it at all,” breathed Coilla, gazing raptly upwards.

  “Now that we have, let’s get inside,” Jup suggested. “This wind’s freezing my bollocks off.”

  The Wolverines walked towards it. Jup zigzagged towards it but it didn’t seem as though anybody was guarding the place. The huge gates stood open. Dwarfed by them, the orcs crept into the courtyard.

  In its centre was a frozen fountain. White mounds proved to be trees snapped off by the killing cold.

  “This place must have been wonderful before the ice sheet struck,” Coilla said softly.

  Haskeer wandered by. “Yeah. Before the humans fucked everything up. Anybody found a way in?”

  They hadn’t. Jup and the others scouted around, sticking close
to the walls, but they couldn’t find an entrance.

  Haskeer suddenly bellowed, “Hello? Is anybody there?” His voice echoed back and a small avalanche slithered from a roof. But nothing answered.

  Then a sharp wind slashed snow into their faces. Everything disappeared under a smothering blanket of white.

  They were trapped outside in a blizzard.

  Jennesta cursed and pushed back from the barrel of congealing blood. It didn’t seem to be working. Her thoughts circled like a treadmill, ruining her concentration.

  She suspected that the High Priestess of Ruffetts View had gone tearing off to track down the Wolverines, but she had no idea why. It was just that there was no other reason Krista Galby could have had for absenting herself from the royal audience.

  What did it matter? Let the human wear herself out in sweaty pursuit. But first she needed information.

  If only this vat of gore didn’t keep scabbing over so quickly. All she kept seeing was white.

  She snapped her fingers and a cowering flunkey handed her a goblet of spring water. Then, sighing, the Queen went back to her labours.

  At first she thought it still wasn’t functioning. Then she heard something. Someone. It was a woman’s voice, pitched high, droning monotonously.

  Sanara was talking to herself again.

  Bending closer, Jennesta saw the vision expanding.

  Sanara stood up, partially blocking a window. Now Jennesta realised what had happened. Her focus had been a little too high. All she had seen was the icy waste beyond. She realised she’d been seeing snow all along. Something—a distortion in the aether, perhaps—had been pulling her out of alignment. Now she shifted her viewpoint lower to see her sister’s face.

  On the point of speaking, Jennesta stopped. Ignoring Sanara completely, she stared past her and out into the night. Something was moving out there, something that exerted a strange pull on her.

  Through the swirling flakes she saw the Wolverines huddled in the corner of a frozen courtyard. Some of them seemed to be covered in blood. Just the sight of it made her mouth water but she controlled her appetite. It wouldn’t do to lose her concentration now.

  Jennesta sent her essence floating among the spinning whiteness. “How the hell did they get there?” she asked herself. “It must be —”

  She broke off. It didn’t matter. The important thing was that she knew where they were.

  Not a mile from the silken tent where Jennesta plied her necromancy with the blood of the Uni slain, Krista Galby and her weary troops rode in through the gates of Ruffetts View. Night was falling and the flickering torches were haloed by the rain.

  The High Priestess cast a glance up at the pearly geyser of magic, feeling a pang of guilt, but there would be time enough to renew the invocations in the morning. Right now she just wanted to see Aidan, have a hot bath and go to bed.

  She bade goodnight to Rellston and made her way home. Jarno, the leader of the temple guard, accompanied her, but peeled off at her gate for his own house. She stepped inside her walled garden.

  Then she paused, a sick feeling hollowing her stomach. At this time of evening there should have been lights inside, smoke from the chimney and cooking smells as Merrilis made dinner. She should have been able to hear Aidan’s piping voice, perhaps raised in song or arguing with his motherly nurse.

  She could hear nothing. And the house was dark.

  “When I catch up with Merrilis I’ll give her a piece of my mind,” she told herself. “What does she mean by letting the fire go out?”

  Forcing herself to face the worst, Krista Galby walked up to the door of her home. She didn’t feel at all like the High Priestess now, more like a frightened mother.

  The door swung open at her touch. The house seemed very empty now that its function as a hospital had ended, the patients moved elsewhere or dead.

  She moved from room to room, searching the place, calling, “Aidan? Merrilis?”

  But only echoes answered her. The hearth was cold and her home was deserted.

  What could have happened? Surely if Merrilis had stepped out for a minute, Aidan should still be there? But what if something had happened to him? If his illness had come back? If he was . . . dead? Instantly the picture formed in her mind of his lifeless body laid out in the old wooden temple that was still used. There’d be candles around his waxen corpse, their yellow light burnishing his ebony hair.

  Past rational thought she ran out into the street, pounding on her neighbour’s door. The house was empty.

  Tears burning hot tracks down her cheeks, Krista drove herself onwards, asking every passerby, “Have you seen my son? Have you seen Aidan?”

  But nobody had.

  22

  The orcs huddled together under a heap of blankets and bloody snow leopard skins.

  In the corner of the courtyard, the wind found it harder to get at them. To either side deep drifts were beginning to form against the walls and snow whirled down around them. It was difficult to see more than a couple of feet.

  There came a lull in the blizzard. Cautiously Stryke poked his nose up. A rift in the clouds showed a dark scatter of stars.

  “Jup,” he said. “Take a couple of grunts and find us a way in. If we have to stay here all night, we’ll freeze to death.”

  Haskeer grinned blearily. “Yeah, earn your keep.”

  “For that, Haskeer, you get to go with him. Now shut up and get a move on before it really starts snowing again.”

  Picking two of the taller grunts, Jup and Haskeer set off through the thigh-deep whiteness. The rest of the Wolverines burrowed down again, their breath mingling under the furs. All things considered, it was a pretty chastened band who speculated idly on who, or what, had built this vast castle in the middle of nowhere. Coilla concluded that anybody who could design such breathtaking beauty must possess a gentle soul. The males were derisive of that.

  Eventually they heard muttered curses above the hiss of windblown snow. Taking another peek, Stryke said, “Good. They’re back.” He called, “Did you find anything?”

  Haskeer answered. “Yeah! There’s a doorway round the back. We’d never have found it if there hadn’t been a light inside. I’ve left the grunts trying to get it open. If nothing else, it’s more sheltered than this.”

  In a welter of elbows and trampling feet, the warband hauled themselves upright, the lucky ones slinging the furs and blankets around their shoulders. The strange, muffled procession set off, retracing the footprints in the deep snow. All around them eerie silence held sway.

  Keeping to the flat part above the steep bank of the palace’s moat, they came to where the towering glacier gripped the structure. But Jup turned the angle of the wall and there was a deep crack in the ice. It was lit from within by a soft golden glow.

  “You sure this is safe?” Alfray said, remembering his terror as he tried to outrun the avalanche.

  “Safe as houses,” Haskeer replied gruffly. “You think you can do any better, help yourself.”

  Going deeper into the cleft, they heard hammering and swearing. Sure enough, as they clambered round a bend, there were Gant and Liffin, using their swords to hack at the ice sheathing an arched doorway. Soon a dozen orcs were at it. In the confined space the noise was appalling. Icicles and chunks of compacted snow began to patter down on them.

  “Stop!” Stryke cried as a dagger of ice narrowly missed his head. “This is stupid. We’re going to kill ourselves before we get in.” He summoned Alfray through the crowd. “Have you got enough of that potion to set fire to something?”

  “Maybe.” He dug in his medicine bag. “It’s just liniment that Keppatawn’s healer gave me. He warned me against it mixing with water.”

  “Now we know why. Everybody! Get out anything you’ve got that’s dry and might burn.”

  The Wolverines began pillaging their knapsacks. Stryke set a couple of them to shredding ancient shirts and some of Alfray’s precious bandages. Combined with the tinder from everyone
’s tinder boxes, it soon turned into a heap that stretched across the centre of the massive doors.

  Alfray upended his flask of liniment and Stryke melted some snow in his hands. As it dripped down onto the makeshift kindling, peacock flames flew up. Soon a blaze was going, billowing thick smoke. Those at the front fell back to keep from choking. The grunts at the rear rushed forward to soak up some of the priceless heat. A chaos of pushing and shoving ensued.

  All at once a massive slab of ice began to lean out over them. The Wolverines fled back past the corner of the crevasse.

  With a great grinding roar the ice fell away, smashing onto the floor of the archway and filling the air with frozen missiles. At last the noise died. The orcs crept forward.

  And stopped.

  The great upswept leaves of the doors were exquisite. Made of some substance like frosted glass, they were inlaid with golden vines. The warm yellow light shone brightly through them. They were so cunningly wrought that the fruit and flowers seemed to stand out, though when Stryke dared to touch them they were smooth and flat.

  As his fingers caressed the silken surface the doors opened on noiseless hinges. Almost reverently the orcs stepped over the sodden ashes and crossed the threshold.

  In a hushed group they looked about them wonderingly. They were inside a vast hall whose vaulted ceiling rose so high it dwindled in the distance. Darkened doorways opened off it, and curving staircases of pure white marble. Every inch of the place was carved, but thick shadows stopped them making sense of the shapes. The air held a sad scent of autumn.

  Jup moved forward cautiously. Even his soft footfalls were enough to set off echoes that came back to them, weirdly distorted.

  “I don’t like this place,” Coilla whispered.

  Her words reverberated startlingly.

  Stryke whipped around, feeling as though some unseen presence was creeping towards him. But there was nothing there. As he turned back to lead them deeper into the hall, he saw something halfway up the sweeping stairs.

  It was a white-robed woman.

  Poised tensely on a landing, her black hair flowing around her like a cloak, she seemed dwarfed by the chamber’s immensity.