by Mary Gentle
A hand rapped on the door, and Ashnak buried his attention in a sheaf of papers. “Enter!”
His eyes on the difficult print, he did not bother to look up. His ears swivelled slightly, hearing two sets of footsteps; one heavy and one light. His nostrils flared to the scent of halfling. And something familiar…
“Sir, General Ashnak, sir!” Barashkukor’s heeled cowboy boot hit the flagstones. His voice throbbed with military enthusiasm. “Prisoner present, sir! Beg to report that the other prisoner refuses to leave her vehicle, to wit, one mule-drawn covered wagon, on threat of firing charges of dwarven rock-blasting powder that are aboard it. We are unable to establish this as true without—”
Ashnak swivelled his eyes up in their sockets. Major Barashkukor, still wearing his Ray·Bans inside the fort, was addressing his remarks rather to the right of Ashnak’s desk. Beside the small orc, a robed halfling stood with her head bowed. Ashnak’s nostrils flared widely and he frowned.
“Hhhrmmmnnn…surely not.”
The halfling lifted her head.
“YOU?”
Ashnak instantly backhanded piles of paperwork into the air. The whirling files deflected two panic-thrown daggers. Before the halfling could move again Ashnak stood, thrusting the desk bodily back three yards. He sprang, seized the Little Sister of Mortification by her metal-burred belt and yanked her into the air until they were eye to eye. His free hand chopped palm-edge against each of the halfling’s arms in turn.
Shaken off, the pinned wimple fell to the floor, disclosing curly black hair with streaks of white in it.
“It’s a male!” Barashkukor exclaimed. “Sir, I know this halfling, sir!”
“So do I.” Ashnak tightened his claws on the halfling’s belt and stared into Will Brandiman’s wide-eyed face. Both the halfling’s arms hung paralysed or broken. The faded red wool gown pulled up, disclosing enormous booted feet. Ashnak growled, the corner of his lip lifting over one sharp fang.
“Thief,” he snarled, “how is it with you now? Are you rich from betraying us to The Named, the great captain of the Light who is not heard of now? Did she suffer for trusting you and your weasel brother?”
He put one calloused hand over the halfling’s mouth and nostrils as he laid the kicking, struggling body flat on the office desk. Exultant, Ashnak grated, “Did you think I was dead too? Asshole, it ain’t your lucky day!”
With one dextrous claw he slit Will Brandiman’s robe from neck to hem, tore it off, broke the belt and threw it aside, and picked knives, needles, and small weapons from the holding straps on the tiny body. Barashkukor, an expression of distaste on his small features, dropped them into the office wastebasket.
When Will Brandiman lay squirming and naked on his back, Ashnak raised his hand briefly and then closed it again about the halfling’s throat.
“I’ll eat your heart raw,” Ashnak promised, poising a claw over the tiny ribcage, “and you’ll live just long enough to see me doing it.”
“…talismans…”
Ashnak batted the halfling irritably, quarter-strength. The naked body smacked against the stone wall and slid down, bleeding a little, to the floor. Ashnak waited until Will Brandiman collected himself and got unsteadily to his hairy feet.
“You are Magda’s sons.”
“Yes.”
“You have the nullity talismans.”
“Yes.”
“A brief conversation. That pleases me. It argues some respect.” Ashnak chuckled deep in his throat. He sat on one corner of the desk, looking down at the halfling, and slapped his camouflage-trousered thigh, remembering Guthranc. “Ha!”
Will Brandiman wiped his bloody face against his shoulder. Both arms hung useless. His lip and cheek were swelling darkly. The halfling drew himself up to his full three feet six, attempting dignity. “The bargain, Ashnak. I wish to see our mother alive and unharmed. I wish for safe conduct for myself and my brother.”
Major Barashkukor gave a high-pitched giggle. “Son, you have got yourself a whole world of grief…”
Ashnak beamed. His tusks flashed in the winter sun. Without a word he got up, seized the halfling by one leg, and slung the small body across his shoulder. He strode out of his office and through the stone corridors of Nin-Edin. Barashkukor marched smartly at his heels.
“Sir, permission to remove the other halfling from the vehicle, sir?”
“Leave that to me!”
Down three levels, where the walls were running with damp and white with nitre, Ashnak paused outside a heavily barred door. He pulled it open, threw the halfling bodily into the unlit cell beyond it, slammed the door, and twisted the key in the lock. He stood for some seconds in the torchlight looking at the key. No rats squeaked in the cells, which was to be regretted. All eaten days ago.
Ashnak dropped the key into the filth-brimming gutter that paralleled the corridor. It glinted and vanished into the excrement. His grin widened.
“Now the other one,” he promised.
Ignoring the surprisingly loud protests from behind the locked and barred cell door, Ashnak strode up from the lower levels of the keep and out into the inner compound. He squinted against the blue sky and bright sunlight. Those platoons on guard lined the parapets, weapons pointed towards the siegeworks of the enemy. Most of the off-duty marines formed a wide circle around a mule-driven cart that stood just inside the broken portcullis.
Seeing their general, the orc marines leaped up and down, banging their weapons on the frozen earth and flagstones, their cheers reverberating from the keep’s walls:
“Ash-nak! Ash-nak!”
“Fighting Agaku!”
“Yo Ashnak!”
“Are we marines?”
“WE ARE MARINES, SIR!”
He elbowed his way to the front rank of marines surrounding the wagon and stood, fists on hips, chewing his unlit cigar. A swift glance found him Ugarit and Razitshakra. The orc technical specialist shivered continuously, his broad, hairy nostrils running with mucus, and his eyes flicked around every corner of the inner keep’s defences. His combats, armour, and flak jacket were smeared with oil and less identifiable substances.
Eyes narrowed to slits in the sun, Razitshakra watched him, her pencil poised eagerly over a small notepad. She scribbled occasional words when Ugarit’s terrified muttering reached clarity: “Ideological instability…Un-orcish sentiments…”
Barashkukor watched her with dewy-eyed admiration. Ashnak growled in his throat. All became silent. He stared at the wagon.
“Yo, halfling! Mistress nun!” He paused a calculated moment. “Ned Brandiman!”
The ragged curtain at the front of the wagon twitched aside. Ashnak looked at the dishevelled figure of a male halfling wearing the red habit of one of the Little Sisters of Mortification. The brown-haired halfling, his skirt hiked up to his knees to disclose hirsute feet, sat astride a wooden barrel. With one hand he rested a cocked heavy crossbow across his lap, finger on the trigger. In the other hand a fuse burned and sputtered, audible over the noise of the orc marines.
The halfling’s face paled. The orc saw the small lips soundlessly form the name Ashnak. He stepped two paces forward of the front rank.
“A bargain!” The halfling’s voice came shrilly across the compound. “My mother and brother for these talismans. Else they’re blown to pieces before your eyes, orc!”
“I remember you and dwarvish blasting powder—if you’d had your way, boy, I’d be buried under half a mountain!” He began to walk towards Ned Brandiman, combat boots loud on the flagstones.
“I wouldn’t put it past you, boy, to come here with nothing more in that wagon than empty boxes, and try and trick your way out again with your mother—if that cutprice whore is your mother.” Ashnak registered the halfling’s snarl and grinned. “What did you expect? Dumbfuck wild orcs, that’s what you expected. What you get is orc marines, boy. What you get is me.”
The heavy crossbow shifted, the point of the bolt following Ashnak. He walked ste
adily forward. The halfling, in a scurry, shoved the sputtering fuse between his teeth, dug into a barrel behind him, and held up a handful of tiny metallic objects. Strung on wire, they clattered together.
Razitshakra loped across the compound, nostrils flaring. “That’s them, General, sir! Nullity talismans. I smell them true! And—I smell dwarven sorcery too.”
Ned Brandiman smiled around the fuse clasped between his teeth. He dropped the handful of talismans, removed the fuse from his mouth, and said, “Better listen to her, big guy.”
The big orc, close enough now to rest one taloned hand on the mule’s neck, stared directly into the eyes of Ned Brandiman as the halfling sat in the front of the wagon. The mule shifted, bothered by orc smell. Ashnak abruptly closed his hand, wrenching a gobbet of living flesh from the beast, put it in his mouth, and chewed bloodily. The orc grunts cheered. The beast sank to its knees and tipped over in the shafts.
“Put that fuse down!” Ashnak snapped.
He held the halfling’s gaze, seeing in those brown eyes a concealed desperation. He edged a step forward.
Ned Brandiman cried, “You’ll die with me, orc!”
The halfling’s tensing muscles prepared Ashnak, the speech gave him the second in which to act. The orc grabbed the front of the wagon with both hands, his powerful arms projecting him forwards, and his jaws slammed shut, not on Ned Brandiman’s hand—the halfling was a fraction too fast in drawing back—but on the lit fuse, dowsing it in a mouthful of mucus and orc saliva.
Ashnak spat, sore-mouthed. His taloned hand seized the heavy crossbow in time to send the bolt through the roof of the wagon. He closed his hand, crumpling the metal firing mechanism. With his other hand he batted the halfling bodily out over the tailboard, where it vanished, biting and kicking, under a gang of marines.
“Major, escort my prisoner to the cells. Alive.” Ashnak put his finger in his mouth, wiggled it around, touched a raw-burned spot, and winced.
“Marine Razitshakra, start dishing out these marine-issue anti-thaumaturgy talismans to the grunts! Corporal Ugarit, your tech orcs are going to incorporate nullity talismans into every weapons-casing you can find. Move your asses, marines!”
Ashnak got down from the wagon and walked untouched through the furious, orderly confusion of the inner compound. The sun, just beginning to wester, was a faint warmth on the back of his head.
Wide-winged ravens soared down from the mountains, haunting the churned earth of the outer compound, and he stared across it at the enemy camp, willing them to inactivity, willing them to desire the advantages of a night attack or a dawn attack or any attack at all, so long as it didn’t come within the next few precious hours.
“The only reason we’re alive is that he wants to kill us painfully and slowly.” Ned Brandiman shivered. “What that orc considers a painful death, I don’t want to think about.”
Will Brandiman chuckled, a small sound that slipped into a sob and a hard intake of breath. He looked down at his yellow-and-black-bruised arms, then stared up at the ceiling with wet eyes.
“Why did it have to be that son of a bitch? With anyone else it would have worked. Anyone else would have cared more about damage to the goods than damage to us. Shit!”
The torches in the corridor outside the cells dipped and flared. To Will, the air had the scent of night about it. But no attack on the fort yet. He fumbled tenderly at his bare arms and naked body, fingers feathering the cuts and contusions on his legs. He pressed the taut drum of his stomach and winced.
“Internal bleeding. I need a medic-mage. So do you.”
Ned Brandiman grunted. It was a weak sound. Will squinted at his brother in the yellow light from burning oil torches. The brown-haired halfling’s face was crusted with blood, one eye blue and squeezed shut by swelling and at least three teeth down to jagged stumps. Naked, he still shivered in the chill of the dungeons. Will watched for that shivering to cease: a fatal sign of hypothermia.
“You didn’t…keep lock-picks…?” Ned coughed, hugging his bruised arms across his bare chest to restrain the racking movement. He glimmered white in the dim cell.
Will winced, lying on his side, recalling the penetrating orc fingers that had searched every orifice. “They took them all. We shouldn’t have come without backup.”
“Who could we trust?”
At a question that ingenuous, Will snorted and then grimaced at the pain that followed. Determined, he shifted up onto his knees, onto his feet, and staggered the few steps over to the cell door. The barred grill was two feet above his head.
“I hear something!” Will waved Ned to silence. “One. Maybe two. Make a noise! Get them in here!”
The elder halfling, propped up against the dank wall, raised his glinting eye to Will. “Will…why?”
Will flexed his bruised hands. Breathing evenly, concentrating to ignore the pain, ignore the two broken fingers, the wrist and elbow fractures; think of nothing now except escape, nothing about medic-mages or temple healing; think only that even naked one has teeth, nails, and strength; one is not weaponless—
Ned began wordlessly to howl. The sound made even the hairs on the back of Will’s neck stand up. He poised himself at one side of the cell door.
The metal covering on the grill slid back. An orc hand was briefly visible. Something metallic clinked against the bars. A small metal ovoid hit the cell floor, rolled across the flagstones, and came to rest a yard from Ned.
Before either halfling could speak or move, there was a flat crack!, frighteningly loud in the enclosed space. White fog billowed up, pouring rapidly into every corner of the cell. Will choked, coughed, ground his fists into his suddenly streaming eyes, bent double, and began to retch helplessly. In pain, through tears and convulsions, he heard Ned whimpering, an ululation of pain broken by racking coughs.
At some point an altercation between orc voices resulted in a silence, after which a key was turned in the lock. The cell door opened, clanged shut; bars and bolts were settled again. The booted footsteps departed.
Three people coughed, retched, lay choking on the damp cell floor.
Some while afterwards, his eyes still swollen shut and his lungs raw, Will Brandiman whispered, “Ned?”
His brother groaned.
A new voice said, “Son, is that you?”
Will Brandiman began to weep, with a sound not too far removed from laughter. At last he crawled across the flagstones until he encountered a soft bulk. A hand rumpled his hair. He seized it. In torchlight through the grill, with the foul mist gone, he made out the calm features of Magda Brandiman.
He wept in her lap for some while, and after that Ned was discovered to have stopped shivering, so between the two of them they chafed feeling back into his body and hypothermia out of it, and Magda wrapped her crimson velvet cloak around her sons’ bodies. They sat huddled together, arms around each other, in the least damp corner of the Nin-Edin cell. Brief mutters and whispers passed information on capture.
“You paid the Visible College…?” Breath failed Magda Brandiman. Will felt her small body tense. “That must have cost—you could have set me up in my own House—a chain of Houses—you told me you were poor!”
Embarrassed, Will murmured, “Mother, you know what you’re like with gold.”
“My sons!” She began to weep, small sounds of surprise and outrage rather than grief.
“Mother, we’ve come to rescue you!” Ned stopped and glanced around the dim, dank cell. “Look, don’t worry, we’ll think of something.”
The halfling raised her head, her dark cropped hair spiked up into cat’s-fur tufts, the lines prominent around her eyes and mouth. Her eyes glittered. “That big orc treats me better than my own boys! And who said I needed a rescue? Who asked you to come here? He and I— Oh, you could be killed!”
She wept again, softly this time, hugging Will and Ned to her prominent bosom, and neither of her sons winced against the pain of their injuries.
The air began to smell
of deep night.
Will broke the long silence.
“I think I see a way. It isn’t easy. All of us will have to do things we don’t like. You most of all, Mother.”
Magda Brandiman’s voice came neutrally. “What must I do?”
Aching, the weakness of internal bleeding filling him with dread, Will schooled his voice to confidence.
“Simple enough, Mother. Come out of hiding, abandon your false name—come forward and be recognized as who you really are.”
Standing on the parapet, Ashnak spared a glance for the winter stars above Nin-Edin. Three hours till daybreak. And is the Light planning a pre-dawn attack too?
His broad, hairy nostrils suddenly flared.
“Sir!”
Ashnak took a salute from a rotting, albinoid figure in black combats that materialised out of the night. “Yes, Corporal?”
“Reports from the scouts, sir. One recon team got back,” Corporal Lugashaldim announced. “They advise that in the last hour dozens of messengers have been coming into the enemy camp.”
Ashnak wiped his hairy nostrils on his sleeve, his eyes watering at the proximity of the SUS marine. “Reinforcements, dammit! They’re getting reinforcements.”
“Nothing else it can be, sir. We think there are more Light forces in the general area.” The Undead marine grinned rather more widely than Ashnak found comfortable. “Guess they didn’t want Amarynth Fartarse to have all the glory of doing for us, sir.”
“Well done, marine. Keep me advised of any further reports. You!” He snapped his fingers at an orc marine aide, whose helmet slipped down over her eyes as she saluted. “Send the halfling prisoners to my quarters for interrogation. Start with the female. While I’m there, see that I receive regular situation reports on military developments.” Ashnak showed his fangs. “You know how involved I get in interrogations.”
“Sir, yes sir!” The orc marine left at the double.