by Mary Gentle
Later, back at the Antarctic-warfare bootcamp, the dwarf recruit Balan Orcsbane approached Commissar Razitshakra where she stood, handset to her ear, cursing her Coms officer and her communications equipment. He plucked the sleeve of her greatcoat.
“Please, Commissar, ma’am. The recruits want permission to pack for immediate embarcation.”
“Nonsense!” Razitshakra, spectacles glinting, clapped the dwarf on the back with her free hand. “I’ve just officially renamed this training base ‘Camp Zakkad.’ Zakkad, our first Hero of the Orc Marines! Corporal Barzoi, make a note: recruits’ contributions to the memorial fund will be compulsory.”
The dwarf corporal saluted. The squad orc commissar stood, her hulking shoulders broad as five dwarves.
“Corporal Barzoi, you will proceed with the bootcamp training in my absence. Find a pilot for the cold-drake; I’ll fly back.”
“Absence? You’re deserting us!” recruit Balan Orcsbane gasped. “Retreating!”
Razitshakra slammed the handset of the RT back down, making the centaur Corns officer stagger. The orc glared up at the Endless Sky. Even had there been a night, the communications satellite would not have been visible.
“Orc marines never retreat!” Commissar Razitshakra snarled. “I’m flying back in person because there seems to be a complete communications breakdown with Marine HQ, Graagryk.”
“No military conquest?”
Incredulous, the orc general Ashnak showed all his bronze-capped tusks in a grin of ferocious bonhomie.
“Dread Lord, are You aware of what’s been happening during Your…unavoidable absence?”
Outside, the sluggishness of nightmare drifted through Graagryk’s streets, dimming the shine of cleansing magic on the cobbles, and poisoning the afternoon naps of halfling children and halfling elderly. The whistling of lizard-beasts quietened, barely audible here in this ancient tower room.
Her voice whispered, “My servant the nameless necromancer has informed Me of your new weaponry. I shall not need it.”
Ashnak, orcishly bow-legged, paced down the tapestry-hung hall, about-faced, and paced back towards the mullioned window. Overhead, the strange birds and beasts carved on the beams writhed, making obeisance to the female Man who sat with Her back to the sunlight.
“The south has just spent a year putting down the flood of Horde survivors and their own deserters fleeing the Fields of Destruction. They think it’s over now. They think this is peace.” Ashnak came to attention. “Dread Lord, as You’re the de facto Commander-in-Chief of what remains of the Horde of Darkness, let me officially inform You: my troops have proved magic-resistant to the highest degree. If You were to send the orc marines against these Southern Kingdoms—man, those guys’d have themselves a whole world of shit!”
The nameless necromancer downed another cup of straw-coloured wine, his gaze pitted with crimson.
“Dread Lord, pay no attention to this creature. His battles have all been in the north. Magic,” the Man said, his voice blurring, “is proportional to civitas, and derives therefrom. The north has no proper cities; its magic is therefore rare and weak. The cities of the south are great, and they have great magics like…like dogs have fleas. You would need ten thousand warriors of his sort, and he has not a tenth of that number!”
Ashnak glared, deep-set orc eyes staring into the sea-green, crimson-flecked gaze. His granite bulk loomed over the Man by several inches. The fingers of the nameless necromancer began to move.
The Dark Lord’s voice whispered, “No.”
The necromancer rubbed his fingertips together as if to expunge something barely begun.
Ashnak turned his heavy head to face the window. “Strategically this is the perfect time to attack! We should immediately mobilise—”
The Man straightened Her shoulders. Shadows chased themselves in the ultrafine chainmail of Her garment, and its soft chiming rang like the bells of drowned cities. “I have spoken. There will be no domination of the world by Dark Armies.”
Ashnak scratched at his peaked ears and settled his urban camouflage forage cap more securely on his bald head. “If you say not.”
Strands of yellow hair lay against Her piebald, black-and-grey cheek. Yellow lashes opened, and behind Her eyelids Her eyeballs were orange glass.
“I will travel to Ferenzia, that greatest of southern cities,” the Lord of Night and Silence announced. “You, orc Ashnak, shall choose a number of your marine warriors to form my honour guard.”
She ceased to speak. It might be that She smiled, the yellowing tusks pulled Her lip into such ambiguous shapes that Ashnak could not be sure. The yellow hair swung as She shook Her head. Gently, She added, “You are thinking, quite suddenly, that if I need a guard, I must therefore be vulnerable. You wonder if My defeat at Samhain has weakened Me. You ponder in your mind that I may be a bluff, a pretence, a pale copy of what I was in the heyday of My power.”
“Thought never crossed my mind,” Ashnak said.
“I choose your warriors for the honour of it,” She said. “For I will not go to Ferenzia without the ceremony and attendance that I am properly owed. And it may be that I shall make you one of My major-generals or field marshals—some rank befitting My status. Orc Ashnak, you are thinking now that I will not try conquest by force of arms because I fear certain defeat. You think therefore that I can be tricked, used, and manipulated into a figurehead for your plans.”
Ashnak shot a sideways glance at Her out of his tilted eyes. His gnarled thumbs lodged under his web-belt, pulling the pistol holster closer to his fist. His thin lips drew back from his fangs.
“Nobody fucks over the orc marines,” he growled. “Not even the Dark Lord. If You want the marines for Your protection, there’s a price. We want Your support when we attack Ferenzia and the other Southern Kingdoms. Otherwise, no deal!”
It being a calculated bluff, Ashnak was not completely surprised to find himself, at the flick of Her finger, immobilised. Held at attention, the heels of his combat boots together, staring eyes-front, he could just see the nameless necromancer retrieve from his table a whip braided from some strangely dubious skin.
Ashnak admitted gruffly, “Dread Lord, I erred in thinking You powerless.”
“But you will continue to test Me, I fear.”
Clicks marked the passage of Her bare feet across the flagstones, as if the soles of Her feet were sometimes chitinous. Her swaying blond hair did not come higher than Ashnak’s chin. Ashnak tensed his bull-muscled shoulders. There came a smell of rotten fruit: his skin began to soften, the colours of decay chasing themselves across his leathery hide. As soon as he relaxed it faded.
“Not torture!” Ashnak roughened his bass-baritone voice. “No, Dread Lord! Please, no! I beg you! Not that!”
“I have no intention of resorting to the question.” The Dark Lord lifted Her face. Her orange eyes in the sunlight did, quite visibly, glow. “I well know the amount of physical punishment an orc can take. And I know your general resistance to pain.”
Out of the corner of his long eye Ashnak witnessed the nameless necromancer, with scowling regret, replacing the metal-fanged whip on the table.
“But you must know Me, and My power.” The Lord of Night smiled and wiped a trail of saliva from Her lip. “I can reach into your soul, orc.”
“Illusions!” the orc sneered.
The Dark Lord cried, “I see into you! I know what you once most feared, living through night after night in the hierarchy of the Pits; inflicting and suffering abuse, proving your right to live and become adult. I know what hides, unacknowledged, in your memory; and from it I create soul pictures, pains more powerful than the severing of limbs. Ashnak, I touch your soul!”
The big orc’s body stiffened—ramrod-straight from his combat boots to the tips of his pointed ears. His eyes rolled up in their deep sockets and showed the whites. Stiff as a board, pivoting from the heels, the orc’s body tipped over backwards. His skull impacted on the floor with such force th
at two tiles cracked. As he lay there unconscious, it could be seen that the General of the Orc Marines had wet himself.
The nameless necromancer stepped carefully over the orc’s supine body on his way to pour himself another drink, and stepped back over the body on his return, pausing only to spit in the orc’s face.
“You will not defy Me more than once,” She promised. “Ashnak, you may wake.”
The orc groaned, sat up, opened his mouth, and shut it again. He wiped his face and rubbed the back of his skull, and at last got to his feet. Dusting his filthy fatigues down with his forage cap, he regarded the Lord of Evil with the air of one unfairly tricked.
“My warrior-orc Ashnak, do you like what I have showed you?”
Ashnak said blankly, “What?”
“You do not remember the terror created from your past?”
Ashnak’s leathery brows furrowed. He shook his head. “Negative, ma’am.”
“Amazing,” the Dark Lord commented. “Finesse is wasted on orcs. Next time I shall merely kill you. Now…”
Her voice, soft from that command-roughened throat, soaked into the summer afternoon air of Graagryk. Nothing stirred in the tower room while She spoke.
“…I have no wish for easy victories. I am weary of war. There are only so many new ways to shed blood. I could take the souls of those fools of the Light and make them Mine. But I am weary of sucking souls: the little races of this world are tedious to the heart. It pleases Me now to do things otherwise.”
Ashnak slurred an orcish curse under his breath, unadmitted shock chilling his ox-body. He raised his voice again to audibility. “Lord…If not armies…or soul-magic…then how will you conquer?”
Her hair like sunlight, Her metal robe hiding all darknesses within its folds, the ugly Man stands against the light. The splotched patchwork of Her skin blends Her into the dazzle. She smells of dead cities that breathe perfumed dust onto the world’s winds.
“This time,” the Dark Lord said, “I think it will please Me to win an election.”
Ashnak could not move, his muscles still shook and trembled. It took him all his strength of will to stay upright. He became aware of the nameless necromancer only as the black-haired Man strode forward to face the Dark Lord.
Simultaneously, both the orc general and the nameless necromancer demanded, “What’s an ‘election’?”
A ducal carriage rattled past the orc marine sentries and into the barracks compound, steel-shod wheels striking sparks from the cobbles under the archway.
As Lieutenant Lugashaldim of the Special Undead Services watched, Magdelene Amaryllis Judith Brechie van Nassau, Duchess of Graagryk, descended from the carriage in a flurry of aides, nursemaids, outriders, and guards. Her young children scurried about her feet, playing with a pack of wolfhounds twice their height, and tame parrots fluttered above her in scarlet and green. Magda snapped her fingers. Her chief lady-in-waiting, Safire, extended a parasol to protect the ducal head both from the late-afternoon sun, Lugashaldim imagined, and from the birds.
“You may let the children play here,” Magda announced to her entourage in a clear, carrying voice. She waved away the orc gate guards clattering across the cobbles towards her. “You! Lugashaldim! You may fetch me my Ashnak. Now.”
Behind the fortified walls that faced Graagryk city, sunlight slanted into the Orc Marine HQ and illuminated brick walls, machinery-cluttered sheds, gutted barracks, and deserted armoured vehicles. The off-duty orc marines sprawled on the grass of the compound, drinking Graagryk’s fine wines, roasting something of worrying dimensions on a spit, and fornicating energetically around the firepit and under the lime trees. Upon sighting an approaching Undead orc lieutenant they made a concerted effort to button uniforms and shuffle the worst of the debris out of sight.
“Ma’am.” Lugashaldim, sun shining through his mummified flesh and bones, looked down and saluted the female halfling. “I’m afraid the present whereabouts of General Ashnak are classified.”
The Duchess Magda stared down her halfling nose and replied in fluent marine. “I’m his wife, you dickhead!”
Her entourage snickered. The rotting orc marine shifted from combat boot to combat boot uneasily. “But, ma’am—”
“He is my ducal consort and I will speak with him now.”
The Undead officer blinked ragged eyelids over curdled eyeballs. The stripped bone of his skill gleamed, and he cast an elongated skeletal shadow on the grass. Magda’s nostrils flared.
“You may as well let the hounds off their leashes,” she remarked. “They need to relieve themselves, I think.”
Her servants obeyed. Five wolfhounds, two parrots, and the duchess’s children ran across the parade ground. Orc marines started to their feet, hauling automatic weapons out of the way of clutching hands and dogpiss. Childish shrieks of glee drowned out an orc sergeant’s order. A wolfhound stole the roast from the spit. Two marines pursued it as it dragged the meat off, snarling.
Lugashaldim wiped a parrot-dropping from his decaying uniform.
“I guess you can wait in his office, ma’am,” the lieutenant conceded weakly.
Calm amid the chaos of children, dogs, and orc marines trying to retrieve their belongings without being caught disposing of any intruders, Magda said, “I do not wish to wait at all. If I do, I shall wait right here.”
Lugashaldim gazed across the compound. Dormitories—long brick barracks that had stood just high enough to house halfling warriors—lay gutted. Marine ponchos had been fixed between their broken walls, and under these were the offal-strewn, refuse-ridden, rubble-buttressed lairs of siblings known as orc-nests. Brown, black, green, and albino limbs stirred frostily as the chaos spread, and he heard the familiar rumble of orc snores.
The Duchess Magda remarked loudly, “How unlike the home life of my own dear Ashnak!”
“Sorry, ma’am—” He paused as young orcs just out of the Pit shrieked and gibbered past Magda’s people, their orcish spawn-herd in close pursuit. Magda’s eyes followed their compact, long-armed bodies, pointed ears, and crimson-glaring eyes under beetling brows. The young orcs were herded back past the planks spiked with broken glass that covered the tops of the brick-lined Pits. Grunts, snuffles, screeches, and wails echoed up from the depths.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry. He didn’t notify us of his departure, destination, or time of return.”
The Duchess Magda swore with a fluency gained in the brothels of two dozen kingdoms. “Then find him! Search!”
The Undead orc stood with his skeletal shoulders hunched, trying not to tower over her. “Ma’am, we don’t know where to look—”
“Magda!” a voice bawled.
Ashnak strode in under the barracks archway, his forage cap tugged well down over his eyes and a pipe-weed cigar jutting from one corner of his tusked mouth. Both he and his uniform looked somewhat the worse for wear, although with orcs it is difficult to tell. He drop-kicked a couple of slow-moving marines out of his path, and acknowledged Lugashaldim’s salute. “Magda, my dear…”
Gallantly, the large orc reached down and took her hand between two of his fingers, lifted it to his lips, and kissed it.
“Husband.” Magda drew herself up to her full three feet two inches. Gloveleather flounces frothed around her. She arranged her sleek petticoats more decorously. “Safire, you and the others may wait for me back at the carriage.”
Reaching up high, she took Ashnak’s muscular arm. Amid the panic of a garrison that has realised it just incurred a snap inspection, she led him to stroll in the dappled shade of the compound’s lime trees.
The big orc lowered his heavy head, gazing down at her. A shadow of Darkness still lingered in his eyes. “You brought the children to the barracks?”
“It’s time they saw where their father works. I don’t wish them to remain in ignorance. I myself,” Magda said, “am often uninformed.”
One corner of his lip lifted over a tusk in unwilling amusement.
“Things you di
d not tell me, for example,” Magda continued levelly, “include just how many offspring orcs spawn at one time. And how quickly they mature. There are six of my little half-orcs running around back there—and one of them is already talking. I can only assume she heard that kind of language from her father!”
Ashnak sidestepped the broken brick hurled by an approaching ducal offspring.
“Really, my sweetheart, the old ways are the best. Ah, the good old days in the Pit,” Ashnak remarked with nostalgia. “The shit-slinging contests…gangbangs…Eat-the-Runt…Finest days of your life, the Pits. Really make an orc out of you.”
Magda glared up at him. “Half-orc though they may be, I am not bringing our children up in any Pit! Although I have to admit, what they’re doing to the other halfling children in nursery school doesn’t bear thinking about.”
She scooped the running toddler up onto her hip. Already the size of a two-year-old, the half-orc halfling infant beamed, showing its first tiny tusks. Magda stroked the thatch of brown hair that fell over its prominent browridge.
“My heart, what have you done with your tutor this time?”
“Burp!”
“You see?” Magda complained. “I’m beginning to have difficulty getting nursing staff. I hear you’re making deals with the Dark Lord.”
“Y—” Ashnak halted, put his huge fists on his hips, and glared down at her. “Where the fuck did you hear that?”
“Be serious. I know you.”
Magda wiped their child’s wide mouth with the silk hem of her farthingale and set it down. It scuttled off to join its brothers and sisters in tormenting the off-duty marines. Rather than damage their general’s offspring—or, rather than explain such damage to him afterwards—the helpless grunts found themselves constrained into allowing the halfling half-breeds to climb over military equipment and personnel irrespective. Magda noted one orc surreptitiously wiping scarlet and green feathers from the corner of his mouth.
“I’ve not seen Wilhelm or Edvard of late,” she remarked inconsequentially. “I think my older sons have fled Graagryk.”