by Mary Gentle
“And what—”
Barashkukor sidled along the parapet towards the steps. The rest of the orc band sprawled in the bailey, in the noon heat, around the cooking-pit. Only a few roofless buildings and the outer defences remained of this fort. Barashkukor found it rather homely.
Marukka’s sword-point slammed against the wall an inch in front of his face. He halted and assumed an expression of extreme attentiveness.
“—what do you get,” she demanded, “if you cut the head off an ’armless, low-down bum?”
He considered it in proportion to the nearness of her jagged weapon. “Ya got me. What do you get?”
“A headless chicken.”
Barashkukor said incredulously, “A headless chicken?”
“Well—would you stand and fight, with no arms and legs?”
Marukka slapped her bulging green thigh. Her jaw dropped, and she wheezed. Tears leaked out of the corners of her beetle-browed eyes.
“That’s good! Isn’t that good? I made that one up myself!”
Barashkukor showed all his fangs and tusks in a grin. “Real good, Marukka. You slay ’em.”
“Sure do.” She stroked the sword complacently and tucked it back under her belt. “Shouldn’t be surprised if I was good enough to be paid. Stinkin’ Men get paid for jokes. I seen that once. I was in a city, once, you know—”
I know, Barashkukor thought. “How about a game of Orcball?” he suggested hastily.
“Good idea! Aww…We ain’t got a ball.” Marukka sniffed. She stomped down the steps into the bailey. “’Ere! Whose idea was it to cook the dinner?”
The largest orc, who was (it need hardly be said) the band’s leader, pointed silently at one of the smaller orcs. Marukka advanced, drawing her sword. The small orc backed away.
“I didn’t! It wasn’t my idea! I wasn’t even here—urp!”
Marukka’s jagged blade whistled through the air. There was a whup! and something relatively round bounced and landed at Barashkukor’s feet, still blinking. The orc-band scrambled to their feet with enthusiasm.
“We got a ball,” Marukka announced. “Let’s play!”
A voice through his nightmare said: “What’s that smell?”
Will Brandiman moved his head fractionally and winced. A blaze of pain subsided. It was no nightmare. He tested his wrists and found them cord-bound. His lock-picks, by the feel of it, were still sewn into his cuffs. His ankles throbbed, tied much too tightly.
“Roasting pony?” he guessed thickly.
“One day you’re going to wake up to the smell of roasting brother,” Ned grumbled.
The ground was hard and damp under his face. Will strained to lift his head. The brilliant moon blazed in his eyes, and he flinched. There was no locating the source of the pain as yet, but he had a small bet that it would be a head-wound, and an unprofessional one at that.
“Orcs,” he concluded, sniffing.
A bare foot, hard as the hardest leather boot, kicked him in the ribs. The force of the blow threw him over onto his back. He stared up at a broad-shouldered, squat-legged orc in shining black plate harness. The orc opened its tusked mouth and spat accurately into Will’s eye. The saliva stung.
“Orcs,” Will marvelled. “Well, you can’t be that stupid. You managed to surprise me and my brother, and that isn’t often done—ahh!”
A slightly smaller orc leaned over Will’s face from behind him and shoved the muzzle of its hound-faced bassinet helm open. The fanged and tilt-eyed face was upsidedown from Will’s point of view and (he thought) none the better for it. The orc gave a light contralto growl. “Show respect! Do not speak before Ashnak!”
Will managed to roll himself up into a precarious sitting position. Ned, a bundle of rope, lay a few feet away. A fire burned. The shelter of branches and bracken that had concealed this dip in the ground and the cave-entrance were scattered about; the brass-bound chests were open and their contents looted. One of the heavy crossbows hung at the belt of the armoured orc. Will raised one eyebrow in a rare respect.
“Agaku,” he guessed. “The man-smart Agaku.”
The armoured orc smiled, showing polished yellow fangs. “I have not met many, Man or elf-filth or halfling, who are smart as the Agaku.”
Will managed to wipe his face against his knee, cleaning off the last of the acidic saliva. His eyes still ran, blurring the night sky, so that for a panic-stricken moment he was not sure how many orcs surrounded them.
Ned’s voice, thick with pain, said, “A scouting party, I’d guess, since there’s only two of them. Will—”
“Yes, yes, I know. It’s difficult.”
A spark from the fire drifted through the air and lodged against his cheek, burning. He shook his head violently, and then groaned. The fire had been set in the cave-mouth, not visible from the moorland above, and the charred carcass of the pony appeared to have been extensively chewed.
“You’re getting rid of the evidence,” he marvelled, looking up at the larger orc. “Ashnak, was it, that she called you? Master Ashnak, you and I must talk. I’d find it more convenient if you cut at least my ankles free, since I think that if you don’t, I’ll lose the use of my feet.”
The ground swooped dizzyingly away as a clawed hand grabbed the back of his doublet and swung him up into the air. The female orc’s helmet-covered face grinned into his from a distance of six inches. Her tusks were long, curved, and capped with bronze. Her whiteless eyes gleamed. She hefted a spiked morningstar in her free hand.
“You little halflings, always so tricksy,” she said, in guttural admiration. “Mark me, Ashnak. They’re on some quest for the Light. If we heed their pleas and free ’em, they’ll have some miracle later on, and bring us down in our pride. I’ve heard Man-tales. I know how it goes.”
The spiked pole swung up, poised, swung down—
“Not without my orders, Shazgurim!” The large orc wrenched the morningstar away and belted the other orc with the smooth end, sending her crashing against the earthwall of the dip in the ground. Will tried his best for a tuck-and-roll fall—being tucked reasonably well already by his bonds—but a sharp rock caught him in the gut, and it was a minute and more before he dragged enough air into his lungs to breathe.
He heard Ned say, very reasonably, “A bargain—our equipment, which you can use, for our lives, which you have no use for.”
An owl hooted twice, and then hooted twice again. The owl is not necessarily a moorland bird. Moving almost as silently as halflings, two more armoured orcs slid around the tor and over the side of the dip and brandished their war-axes in salute to Ashnak. Will groaned as he rolled over, the cords at his ankles cutting into him like wire.
“They’re alone,” one of the orcs grunted. “No smell of strangers: Men or wizard-filth or squat dwarves.”
The smallest orc, which in the flickering firelight Will thought might be another female, gave a high-pitched giggle. “No smell of magic, no. None. None!”
He saw Ashnak open his fanged mouth, knew that the orc’s next words would be Kill them! and played his last card. Fortunately, as usual, it was a fifth ace.
“Hold your hand!” he cried. “In the name of the nameless necromancer!”
Ned, at his side, made a noise that might have been a groan or a whimper. “In the name of the nameless?”
“You know what I mean. In the…oh, the hell with it. Orcs!” Will exclaimed, loudly. “Strong though you are, I know your kind fear magic. Do you really wish to risk offending the nameless necromancer?”
The big orc motioned with his hand. The two scout orcs vanished up onto the moorland again. Shazgurim stood, rebuckling the plate-armour on her forearms, and scowled at Ashnak’s back. Will noted it. As Ashnak approached, he flicked the hair back out of his eyes and gazed as fearlessly as he could at the orc.
“Hhrmmm…” The orc squatted down. In the firelight Will could just make out the clan tattoos on his horny cheeks. Polearms slung across his back, black armour thigh- and arm-
defences, engraved breastplate—This is no orc bandit, Will thought. He assumed a dignified confidence.
“And just why,” the orc growled, “would it offend my master the nameless to slice your skins from your bodies, and cook them, and feed them back to you, before we leave you impaled by your arses on our spears for the ravens to rip at?”
“You have a wonderful turn of phrase.” Will paused. “Your master?”
“Yes, little coney. My Master. Whose name you have made filthy in your halfling mouth, so perhaps I will feed you live coals after I feed you your skin.”
Ned Brandiman groaned.
“Bloody hell, Will! We’re not even at the Grey Crag. We’re not inside twenty miles of the place!”
Will sighed. He looked up at the orc’s face, upon which confusion was giving way to comprehension with surprising rapidity.
“I have a certain talisman about my person,” he said. “If I were you, I’d cut me free and let me reach it out. There are poison needles in the matter, you see.”
Shazgurim growled, disgusted. “Talisman. By the rotten bowels of the Dark Lord! Ashnak, you mark my words, we shall live to regret this.”
The jagged knife sliced the cords at his wrists and ankles. When they saw how he could not move, the big orc chafed his flesh between horny hands until Will, yelping, managed first to stagger to his feet and then, while they cut Ned free, to reach into the booby-trapped pouch and extract an inert cube of amber.
“Say your word.”
The orc’s brow furrowed. Ashnak at last muttered: “Zerganubaniphal!”
The amber cube pulsed once, warming Will’s hand. He tossed it to the orc, said “Banidukkunishubar,” and watched it glow with as great a light. “I won’t say ‘well met.’ We are twenty miles off the rendezvous and you’ve eaten my pony.”
“Our pony,” Ned Brandiman corrected. The brown-haired halfling stretched his arms and legs in turn and looked up at the orc from about waist-height. “You’re a warrior by the look of you—what’s the nameless doing sending the Horde? We don’t want you clumping around telling the whole world where we’re going. We don’t work that way.”
Shazgurim slouched over, tipping the visor of her steel bassinet back on her head. “Just how do you two work?”
Will and Ned looked at each other.
“Ned and Will Brandiman,” Ned introduced. “Notorious ’alflings. Sir and madam, you are looking at two of the greatest professionals it will ever be your good fortune to meet. As to what we do, we find lost property.”
Shazgurim snorted. “And is it usually lost before you two ‘find’ it?”
“Now that you come to mention it…”
Ashnak nodded his great tusked head. “Thieves. Our master the nameless said there would be thieves.”
“We prefer the term adventurers. It sounds so much more respectable.” Will brushed himself down and strolled across the dip to look at the ransacked chests. “You realise it will be necessary to return the tools of our trade? And, now I come to think about it, we have no transport. I think it would probably be advisable for you to detail one of your warriors to carry these chests for us.”
2
The squat orc warrior Imhullu peered over the weathered edge of the tor.
“Bandit country,” Imhullu opined. “Thick as fleas down there, they’ll be. And we’ve got to get those two little rats through it in one piece?”
Ashnak of the fighting Agaku leaned his back against a sun-hot crag, ripping the flesh from a still-twitching rabbit. The warm blood soothed his throat wonderfully. He wiped the back of his hand across his tusked mouth. “I asked for my war-band with me. The request was not granted.”
“Oh, well…”
No further reference was made to the nameless necromancer. Ashnak crunched the rabbit’s bones and then, careful not to skyline himself, took off his helmet and looked over the edge of the tor. His long peaked ears unkinked. Perfectly still, his hide a weathered brownish-grey, he might have been rock himself.
The high crags of the moorland went down to green dales, and tame rivers, and the chimney-smoke that spoke of Man’s habitation. Ashnak squinted into the wind. To the south, wrinkled bare mountains rose up. Signs of habitation ceased well before the foothills of those crags.
Turning his head, he made out how the moorland went around in a great curve, a hundred miles and more, all of it villaged, and finally became a distant spur of the mountains. Deceptive soft countryside. He could feel the tension of it from here, waiting for the final accounting.
“Quicker to go across than ’round,” Imhullu said. “If I had fifty picked warriors, I wouldn’t think twice about it. By the Dark Lord’s balls, our fighters could do with some raiding! Burn a few homesteads, eat the stinkin’ Men!”
“Not this close to the Final Battle.”
Squinting, he could from time to time make out Shazgurim scouting. The orc shambled from cover to cover, blending into the rocks wherever she stopped, and finally vanished over a concealing hill and—presumably—down towards the cart-track that was the nearest thing to a road that they had seen for days.
There was no sign of Zarkingu. But then, Ashnak thought, passing a hand wearily over his tough-hided brow, there wouldn’t be, would there? Agaku and sorcery don’t mix, and she’s a magic-sniffer, which makes her crazy as a bedbug, right? Right.
“You could send one of us with one of the rats cross-country, Captain, and the other ’round the long way.”
Imhullu’s suggestion clarified his mind. He said, “No. We’ll stick together. We’ll run it. Straight across to the mountains. What is it: fifty miles? We may have to carry the halfling scum, but we can do it in less than a night and a day—or we’re not fit to be called Agaku. We’ll move after sunset.”
Night came cloudy. Ashnak breathed a sigh of relief. He roused the three warriors and set them to running. The halflings, reluctant at first, ran nearly at orc-speed when Shazgurim and Imhullu set about them with whips, and for nearly half the night; then Ashnak picked up the younger of the two halflings and ran with him tucked under one arm, letting Shazgurim carry the other. With the two chests, that made four loads, and they laughed gutturally towards dawn, practising swapping loads by throwing them between each other without stopping. The warriors dropped the halflings only twice, and neither time was an accident, so Ashnak found it unnecessary to discipline them.
Night-vision showed him fewer and fewer villages, and fewer dogs howled as they passed by. In the cold grey before dawn, when Ashnak was particularly alert, he heard the jingle of horse-tack and the shouts of Men.
“It’s the cursed horse-riders,” Imhullu snarled. His feet pounded the earth, beating down the green corn.
Ashnak threw Will Brandiman underarm to Zarkingu, who, to his surprise, caught the halfling. “Race, Agaku! I’ll delay them. You know where we are to meet! Go!”
The dew began to fall on him as he slowed. The noise of their jingling weapons and armour faded, drowned out by the approaching beat of hooves. Ashnak squinted into the grey light, planted his feet firmly in the earth on the far side of a field-ditch, and unslung the poleaxe from his back.
“Hai!”
With a shout and a horse-scream the first rider cleared the ditch. Ashnak swung the poleaxe point first, struck home between the horse’s eyes, and killed it with that blow. The rider—a Man—flew off somewhere to the side and landed hard. Ashnak was already swinging back to hack at the legs of the second horse.
“We have him! Here! He’s standing ground!”
Grey shapes appeared to the left and right. Ashnak impaled the second rider as he fell, put his foot on the Man’s chest and ripped the axe free, and sung up into guard position, grinning.
“Peace!” he bellowed. “I surrender!”
He beamed with what he knew would not be recognised as sheer curiosity. The riders obviously took it for ferocity. When a circle of a dozen surrounded him—and he could have dealt with that number, they were mostly raw levies by
the looks of them—he snarled and threw down the axe. It was still a goodly number of minutes before one female Man dismounted and chained his wrists together. After that there were kicks and blows, but orc-hide is thick. He winced, all the same, for the look of the thing.
By the time he had been dragged the mile or so to the nearest village and imprisoned in (of all places) the local church—it being the only stone building, he concluded—his boredom threshold had been reached. The other three should be well away towards the mountains. Still, there was a chance they might run into their share of problems, burdened with two troublesome halflings…
Ashnak spat on his hardened hands and began to bend the iron bars on the church door.
A voice became audible on the other side:
“—have him in here?”
He moved quickly and surprisingly quietly back into the body of the church. There was an altar to one of the smaller gods of Light, which troubled him only a little. There was no sign, he noted, of a stone for sacrifices, or any of the usual religious furniture.
“So!” Surrounded by ten or twenty armed warriors, a female Man entered through the doors. Most of her guard were Men, with a few dwarves, and—Ashnak growled—two or three of the elven filth, with bows.
Then he saw her face, and congratulated himself on his curiosity.
“This is nothing but an orc warrior, Master Mayor. Why have your villagers bothered me with this?”
And the voice too, Ashnak marvelled. So that’s the way of it, is it? Or is it? Can it be possible?
The village’s mayor, a thin and shabbily dressed man, stuttered, “But it’s an orc! An orc! Look at it!”
“I know an orc when I see one.”
Ashnak hunched further forward to disguise his height, being almost as tall as the Men there. He lurched forward a couple of steps, deliberately looked up into her face and flung his hand across his eyes. He dropped to his knees and banged his head against the stone paving. “Master! Nameless! Nameless Master!”