by Mary Gentle
“Funny you should mention them.” The deep-voiced abbess got to her hairy feet. “For those orcs are once again at the right hand of Darkness. Your Holiness, the news we have is that there is a terrible task to be done, and no one can be found who is humble enough to submit to it.”
The Holy One’s sunken golden eyes brightened. “What is that, my child? And what of the—ssss!—orcs?”
The Reverend Brandiman said smoothly, “Your Holiness has heard of the insidious evil plan of Darkness; how the Dread Lord of the East refuses to go to arms and instead challenges the free world to a contest of votes.”
“Yes, I have heard.” The elf found his slender hand moving as if it would clutch a blade. “That Great Heretic!”
“Just so,” the halfling priest continued. “Now the free world must choose its own candidate—someone who will submit to the utter humiliation of contesting with the Dark Lord on His own terms. That person, whoever they may be, must endure the shame of condoning the actions of Evil by setting themselves up as equal candidate for War Leader in the coming holocaust, and afterwards for the Throne of the World.”
The abbess added, “Holy One, where can such a person be found, who will descend into the mire, and besmirch themselves, so that the Dark Lord will not run uncontested into high office?”
“But the orcs?” the Holy One persisted.
The Reverend Brandiman smoothed his slick hair back from his brow. “Those same orcs of Nin-Edin once again serve their Dark Master, Your Holiness. They are running what they term His ‘election campaign.’”
“Now I see!”
A light burst in the Holy One’s mind. The elf sprang to his feet. He seized the shoulders of his faithful halfling priest and nun and gazed down into their trusting eyes.
“I have had a revelation!”
Laughing, easy tears ran down the elf’s high-boned cheeks.
“In my torment, the Lady speaks to me! She tells me that my disgrace and humiliation were all for her sake, and only for a short time. Nin-Edin was my dark night of the soul, but now, now I may be revenged. Orcs, orcs! Hold your lives cheap, for my time of repentance and scourging is over.”
“It is?” the abbess said.
“I shall bring no sword but the Sword of Righteousness and wear no armour but the Armour of Light!”
The Reverend Brandiman frowned. “Pardon me, Your Holiness, but I don’t quite understand.”
“Ah. You are afraid, because you sense the Lady’s power in me. Do not fear!” cried the elf. “For I, whose name was once Amarynth, called Firehand; Sir Amarynth the Paladin-Mage and Commander of the Army of Light, am myself again.”
He clasped his long fingers across the front of his ragged habit, already planning the new habits that he and his followers would wear: embroidered with a sword, and the silver crescent of the Lady, and perhaps made with integral hair shirts.
Amarynth continued, “To descend to the Dark Lord’s level must be a disgrace. But I hear the Lady of Light speaking through you, her humble mouthpieces. I clearly perceive that it is my duty to offer myself as this sacrifice, to save others from the terrible task—and to bring the sword of vengeance down upon those unclean orcs. It is my duty to stand for election. And, if elected, it is my terrible fate to serve as Ruler of the Free World.”
He threw up his hand.
“The Crusade of Light is beginning!”
The Holy One’s halfling priest and abbess looked at each other for a moment, mouths open, doubtless quite overcome with piety.
The road from Spine Gap travels south, branching once it reaches the north shores of the Inland Sea, but a part of it, at least, runs down the coast through the ochre-coloured farmlands and hunting preserves of the Southern Kingdoms until it becomes the main artery running into Graagryk.
The Duchess Magda Brandiman descended her coach’s steps, extended her parasol, and opened it. Its lace shaded her from the hammering midday sun; mage-spells woven into the fabric cooled her immediately. Two of her bodyguards checked under the coach. Two more melted into the background around the high brick factory walls.
Seeing Cornelius Scroop with the picket line, Magda signalled to him. “Chancellor!”
The mage-wards on the industrial district momentarily lifted. Magda walked forward under a lowering sky of chimneys and black smoke. A stench of oil and coal assailed her flaring nostrils. But all the normal sounds—hammering, beating, shrieking iron, saws, earsplitting whistles—were silent.
Her fat Chancellor-Mage padded forward on large hirsute feet. “Your Grace, the picket line refuses to let me through!”
His face above his wilting lace collar glowed purple. Magda waved him to silence, stepped past the halfling’s rotund bulk, and beckoned to one of the workers on the picket line.
The halfling worker took off his flat brown velvet cap and held it in both hands as he approached her. Sweat soaked the underarms of his collarless shirt, even with his sleeves rolled up, and he wore no stockings under his knee-length velveteen breeches.
“Bring me your shop steward,” Magda directed.
“Yes’m.” The halfling nervously ducked his head. “Bert! ’Ere, Bert! She wants you, Bert.”
Another halfling emerged from the fifty or so who stood clustered round the factory gates, placards drooping in the heat. The curly hair on his feet was grey, and there were lines in his round face.
“Bert van der Klump, Your Grace,” he introduced himself. “Official shop steward of the Graagryk chapel of the Associated Socialist Halfling Workers Unions. Look ’ere, Your Grace. It says ’ere in the ASHWU minutes under section forty-three, sub-section thirty-seven, paragraph twelve, items seven, eight, ten, thirteen, fifteen, and twenty, that—”
The halfling stopped, rubbing his fist across his forehead.
“What does it say?” Magda inquired interestedly.
“I forgets,” Bert van der Klump confessed. He looked from the duchess to the chancellor, back at his duchess, and responded to the crinkling laugh-lines around the female halfing’s eyes. “Honest an’ truthful, ma’am, I fink it says refer to section nine, subsection four, paragraph twelve, point fourteen, above, but I can’t remember exactly. ’Owever, ma’am, the gist of it is as follows. We ’ere—”
He waved his hands at the halflings around the factory gate. They raised their placards and waved them, chanting enthusiastically. Magda read Halflings Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! and Ducal Rule—What Is to Be Done?
“We ’ere,” Bert repeated, “are striking, Your Grace, for a bigger slice of the cake.”
“Outrageous!” Chancellor Scroop, at Magda’s side, wiped his forehead with a soaking hankerchief, his magery gone with his concentration. “The city’s budget is stretched to the utmost! We don’t have gold to pay grasping, traitorous, blackmailing, malingering—”
“Oh, do be quiet,” Magda Brandiman said. “Meister van der Klump, how would it be if I met your demands?”
She busied herself straightening her lace-work elbow gloves and fluffing her silk gown’s petticoats. The halfling in cap and knee breeches snapped his fingers, and he and a dozen of his coworkers went into a huddle. They emerged, sweating.
Van der Klump demanded, “An’ what h’exactly would be the terms of this ’ere settlement, Yer Grace?”
“The ducal treasury will grant you all a further two tea-breaks, every hour, with bakery goods fresh from the city’s finest bakeries,” Magda said. She paused. Bert van der Klump’s boot-button eyes fixed firmly on her face. She added, “And four square meals a day at weekends in the workplace instead of the current three. What do you say, Meister?”
“Bert Klump, you ain’t sellin’ us out to the ducal-orcish consortium,” a worker yelled. “We got our principles! No dealin’ with the class enemy—urk.”
A placard dropped onto the worker’s head from the picket line behind her, and she sat down dazedly on the cobbles. The halfling with bulging muscles who carried the placard remarked gravely, �
�Oops.”
Albert van der Klump hurriedly wiped his hand on the seat of his velveteen breeches and held it out to the halfling duchess. “It’s a deal, ma’am!”
“Congratulations on your shrewd negotiations.” Magda jerked a ducal thumb at the vast brick armaments factories. “Now get back to work.”
Albert van der Klump replaced his flat velvet cap on his greying curls. “Workers of Graagryk! Three cheers for the Duchess Magdelene! Hip, hip—”
“HOORAY!”
Magda Brandiman turned on her heel and strode from the factory gates towards her closed coach, acknowledging applause with a wave of her lace-gloved hand.
Cornelius Scroop stumbled behind her. “Your Grace, are you mad? Those scum know we need the arms factories working night and day! They’re a menace. They’re undermining the fabric of halfling society! They’ll just make further demands until they’ve bled the ducal treasury dry. And,” he added, “the city can’t afford bakery goods. Not for grubby little jumped-up peasants.”
“Aw, c’mon,” the duchess protested. “Let them eat cake.” Cornelius Scroop sniffled with hayfever that even mage-spells couldn’t cure.
“Chancellor, I’ll leave you here to sort out the practical details.”
Two well-built halflings in baggy breeches and silk doublets that did not disguise the bulge of automatic pistol holsters flanked the duchess to her black-painted coach. She nodded to the one who held the door open and accompanied her inside.
Professor Julia Orrin looked up from where she lay across the seat, chewing her thumbnail and throwing dice left hand against right. The female Man sat up, cracking her head against the roof as the coach set off. She tugged the lace froth back from her wrists and fanned her face vainly against Graagryk’s heat, face as scarlet as her frock coat.
“Damned if it isn’t hot as the Abyss! Not like this in Fourgate.” She peered down at Magda, pushing powdered grey hair back from her wet forehead. “Your Grace, are you quite sure you don’t have relatives there? There was a halfling in the Abbey Park, looked just like you, couldn’t be you, of course, she’s a madam, but I used to frequent the bath-houses—”
“I briefly ran the Gibbet & Spigot tavern and bath-house in the Abbey Park last year, but had to give it up to resume my duties as duchess.”
Julia Orrin’s powdered brows lifted. “Really?”
“The barracks, Fyodor,” Magda ordered, removing her dark glasses. “But go by way of the coaching inn. Professor Orrin will wish to return to the north today.”
“I will?” Julia Orrin narrowed her eyes. “Then, madam, I warn you. We at the Visible College are examining very closely our commercial links with Graagryk. Very closely indeed. We may find it uneconomic to continue trading with you.”
“Uneconomic, or merely embarrassing?”
Midday sun pooled the black coach’s shadow on the street. A form of minor magery polarised the windows against the southern sun, and another mage-spell chilled the air inside. The wheels rattled. Magda gazed out through the darkened window at one halfling outrider, spear at attention, riding his lizard-beast through Graagryk’s deserted streets.
“It isn’t a contract with Graagryk, ma’am. It’s a contract with orcs. Questions are being asked. The college’s board of governors don’t like greenies.”
“That is not a term I care to have used in my presence.” Magda icily regarded the large, magic-scarred hands resting in the Man’s lap. One finger sported a silver and lapis lazuli ring. “I remember you from the Gibbet & Spigot. Rattan canes and mustard, wasn’t it, Professor Orrin?”
At the female Man’s expression, Magda smiled.
“Fortunately my professional discretion still applies. Now. The Visible College sells its nullity talismans to the orc marines, and you must be aware that the immunity to magical attack conferred on marines and their weapons is what makes them unbeatable. Like it or not, what you’re doing is selling armaments to greenies.”
The female Man said stiffly, “My colleagues and I prefer to regard ourselves as being in a defence industry.”
“Where does Graagryk’s money go?”
Julia Orrin frowned at the change of direction. “Don’t see what concern it is of Your Grace, but it goes into funding research. I specialise in pure research, myself. I’m proud to say that I doubt if I have ever created a spell that had any practical use whatsoever. Don’t care to visit manufactuaries. We’re not interested in commerce.”
“As long as you have enough money to purchase the expensive range of magical ingredients necessary for your research programmes.” Magda Brandiman removed a long ivory holder from her purse and inserted a slender roll of pipe-weed. Her attendant bodyguard clinked steel and flint until a spark flared. Magda inhaled deeply and blew out a plume of smoke.
“I used to wonder why you didn’t just create the gold you need,” the duchess said thoughtfully, “since it’s well known that there are more alchemists in the Visible College than there are whores in the Abbey Park. Except, I suppose, that such an influx of gold would devalue the currency, destabilise the entire economy, and bring every mage and king of the south down on your back if you tried it. Even magic is subservient to economics and the Gross National Product…”
“We’re northerners,” Julia Orrin said resentfully. “The north is poor. Fourgate Council keeps us on a tight budget. Always has. No way we could manage without outside funding of some kind.”
Magda Brandiman drew deeply on her pipe-weed holder. “You have a permanent and almost inexhaustible source of revenue in the orc marines. As long as you continue to exclusively sell us magic-null talismans, the orcs will continue to buy. It’s a growing business, armaments.”
The Professor-Mage dug in the capacious pockets of her frock coat, extracted a silver box, opened it, and sniffed a pinch of some substance up her right and left nostrils. “That’s—asschuuu!—essentially correct, Your Grace. It would cost us too much time to sell the talismans to individual customers. And in any case, they’re highly experimental technology. Probably unsafe. Civilians wouldn’t use them without far more extensive testing. Asshhuu!”
Julia Orrin wiped her streaming eyes and continued, “Which are all good reasons why this commerce is becoming too risky for the Visible College to continue it. If we’re found to be involved with gr—with orcs, then our reputations…”
Magda removed her pipe-weed stub, dropped it on the floor of the coach, and crushed it under one tiny heel.
“Let me introduce you to some of the facts of life, Madam Orrin. As far as the general public is concerned, dogtag talismans are standard protective devices. It is not known that they nullify magic. If that were known a scandal would ensue, and enquiries would be made about the talismans’ origin.”
“Madam,” Julia Orrin protested.
Magda continued relentlessly. “The Southern Kingdoms can’t damage the Visible College. They would be stupid to try. But in the face of public scandal—for example, proof of your selling proscribed magic to orcs—I think they might decline to sell you any magical ingredients you need for your research programmes. I really think they may do that.”
Professor-Mage Julia Orrin sat sweating and completely silent.
“And if your sources of supply dry up…well, as you say, you’re a pure research institute. You don’t produce a product. Nothing to prevent your bankruptcy, anyway. Madam Professor, the Visible College was lost from the first day, when you took my sons’ money for nullity talismans—and didn’t enquire too carefully to whom they would be sold.”
The Duchess Magdelene Amaryllis Judith Brechie van Nassau leaned forward and put her small hand on the Man’s knee.
“Don’t cancel a deal that’s advantageous to both of our peoples. Don’t worry about selling experimental magic to orcs. Your job is to worry about research. I suggest,” Magda said, “that you return to the city of Fourgate and continue it. I’ll handle the business end in Graagryk. I’m sure we’ll continue to deal usefully together for ma
ny years to come.”
Magda sat back in her seat and smiled at the back of the frock-coated Man, descending to the steps of the coaching inn.
She remained gazing at the summer sky for some moments.
“Why,” she murmured, “couldn’t I get the easy job, gallivanting around the Kingdoms running elections? Orcs!”
* * *
Beyond Graagryk the roads run south away from the Inland Sea, into the heart of the great and ancient Southern Kingdoms.
Ashnak chewed on the butt of an unlit cigar, his head lifting momentarily as he watched a wind-clipper sail over the roofs of the Serpent Temple in Shazmanar. In the great cities and civilisations of the south there are no ox-carts plodding dusty roads. The mage-powered ship’s wooden keel brushed the tops of palms growing on the temple’s roof-garden. The clipper spread more sail to catch the sun. Hull-down, it drove west.
“Very pretty,” the chief Serpent-Priest remarked.
General Ashnak, in full dress uniform of brown tunic, trousers, and flat peaked cap, reassured him, “Orcs don’t mind beauty. We’re broadminded. It doesn’t offend us. Much.”
The orc gazed across the square at the Serpent Temple’s candystick pillars, wide atrium, and snake-pattern mosaics.
“I’m officially requisitioning that building.” Ashnak belched. “In the name of Ferenzia. Lieutenant Chahkamnit, make a note of the marine temporary campaign headquarters. Priest, let the townspeople know that voting will take place this afternoon, after speeches by Her Dark Magnificence, the Lord of the Empire of Evil.”
“Yessss…” The priest, naked but for chainmail groin-covering, hissed agreement and glided off towards the ochre-and-crimson-painted temple. His skin was curiously sheened for one of the Man-race.
The black orc lieutenant at Ashnak’s elbow beamed. “First class accommodation, sir, what? Nothing’s too good for Herself. Shall I see about mobilising the orcs, sir?”
Ashnak growled, “Get this set up at the double, L.t.!”
“Absolutely, sir.” Lieutenant Chahkamnit saluted. “Only too pleased to be of assistance. Over here, if you please, Corporal Hikz!”