Grunts

by Mary Gentle

  Ned led her down from the tower and out into the courtyard. He kicked the back of the Mission wagon with his hirsute foot. “Your Holiness, an elf of the press is here to interview you. Is it convenient?”

  Amarynth, bent over and clutching the wagon’s wooden frame with both hands, looked up irritatedly and gestured the attendant knight-priest to cease scourging the Holy back.

  “Oh…very well.” Pulling up his monk’s habit and slipping his arms into the sleeves, the Holy One looked at the female elf.

  “Lord Amarynth? Paladin, it is you, isn’t it! By the Light!” The elf blinked. “Your campaign speech—I was too far away to tell—”

  Regally, the dark elf stated, “We were Amarynth, called Firehand, and are now the Son of the Lady on earth.”

  “Amarynth the Paladin-Mage! You commanded the forces of the Light at Nin-Edin!”

  Ned Brandiman ducked his head. The expected explosion failed to materialise. Ned, who never let a previously friendly meeting dictate the likelihood of a permanent alliance, congratulated himself on his caution when Perdita del Verro scowled and continued:

  “Holy One, I’m extremely glad we’ve met. I was badly taken in by those scum of Nin-Edin and their criminal allies. When I found out what they’d done in the mountains after the siege—”

  “After?” Amarynth sounded surprised.

  The elf lifted a brow, distorting the brawler’s scar that crossed her cheek. Her voice echoed clearly across the courtyard of the Blasted Redoubt. “You don’t know, Sir Knight? Mother of Trees! While there’s yet time before the election, then—I know something about the orcs of Nin-Edin that you ought to know.”

  7

  The seventh day before the final election to the Throne of the World dawned bright and clear.

  Early summer light chased down the masts of ships moored at Port Mirandus. Long shadows spidered from the beasts, Men, and monstrosities lading craft to catch the morning tide. Shouts and the creaking of ropes echoed back from the warehouse frontages on the quayside, and leather-winged vampire gulls shrieked, soaring down the estuary of the River Faex that here flows into the Western Ocean. Haze, presaging warmth, drifted across the harbour’s lapping, odourous waves.

  “The Lord of Darknesh’s orders are perfectly clear,” the nameless necromancer slurred primly, from under the concealment of his cowl. “Send no relieving forces to Thyrion or anywhere else.”

  “Damn it, Man, my marines are getting chewed up out there!”

  Ashnak, general officer commanding the orc marines, spat over the side of his barge. An unlucky harbour fish rose to the surface, belly-up. “We could send in support troops any time She lets us!”

  A gloved hand went up to the hood, came down glistening with saliva. “What an interesting coincidence—since it takshes time to do the logistical planning for moving an army. Ready to move, are you, orc? I wonder what you were planning before She returned?”

  Ashnak avoided that issue. “All I know is, there’s a damn good fight going on out there, and She won’t let me—my orcs, I mean—join in!”

  “Of coursh not. While the Bugs are advancing on the borders of the Southern Kingdoms, they’re pressure to vote for Her Dark Magnificence…Orc, you will do no fighting until the elecshion’s won, and your foot soldiers must become used to dying while they wait.” The nameless necromancer whuffled a laugh. “It’sh like old times—orcses to waste.”

  The nameless limped off towards the silk canopies at the rear of the barge.

  “And fuck you, asshole,” Ashnak grated.

  Air flattened the water over the great fleet of upriver barges. The whuck-whuck-whuck of an approaching Apache helicopter gunship aroused no curiousity. The dockhands of Port Mirandus are used to miracles.

  “Steady!” Ashnak bawled into his headset microphone.

  “Oh, I say, sir, do give a chap some credit. I am doing my…best. There! There you are, sir.”

  Lieutenant Chahkamnit’s voice fell silent over the radio link as the steel crate the orc pilot was lowering touched the deck of the rivership. The Apache hovered while two deckhands unhooked the load, then rose again, cable winching, nose down, rotors beating the water into circumferences of foam.

  “Park that damn thing on one of the air-support barges,” Ashnak ordered, “and get your ass back here, Chahkamnit! This travelling election circus should have cast off four hours ago!”

  “Absolutely, sir. Just as you say.”

  Ashnak thumbed his headset off. Marine Commissar Razitshakra stood beside him on the rivership’s deck, olive greatcoat hanging open in the southern heat, her peaked cap pulled down to her wire-spectacled nose.

  “Prepare to interrogate the prisoner!” Ashnak barked, pointing.

  “Sir, yes sir!” Commissar Razitshakra enthusiastically snapped the steel crate’s holding pins bare-handed. The front of the crate fell open. “It’s been too long since we’ve had some honest prisoner-torturing just for the fun of it, sir.”

  A large body huddled in the close confines of the crate. It wore excrement-stained desert camouflage fatigues. Ashnak chewed more ferociously on his cigar and peered down at the broad-shouldered, big, and solidly built Man, dirty with days of confinement, the stubble on his chin growing out the same blond as his crewcut.

  “On your feet, marine!” Ashnak snarled.

  It rubbed at its streaming eyes. “My name, rank, and number are Sergeant John H. Stryker—sweet Jesus, it’s still fuckin’ real!”

  “He speaks marine,” Commissar Razitshakra observed.

  The Man stared out of the steel crate. “This cannot be real, man. I promise I won’t ever do that shit again! I’ve got a wife and kids at home.”

  “He checks out. Same aura as Dagurashibanipal’s hoard, General.”

  Stryker forced his big body to rise, straightening for the first time after six days’ confinement in a metre-square steel crate. Staggering, filthy, on his feet, he felt the warm, stinking breeze of a harbour blow across his face. The skin around his eyes twitched, and his eyelids opened again.

  A humanoid thing stood in front of him. Eight feet tall, muscled like a mountain; predator’s fangs, leather-skinned, cat-quick, and with the frightening gleam of high intelligence in its piggy eyes. Even with its shoulders humped and long arms dangling, it stared Stryker levelly in the eye.

  And there was a cigar jutting from its tusked nightmare of face.

  It wore…

  Stryker chuckled deeply. In his Stateside Germanic accent, he said, “You guys can’t fool me! Either this is the best shit I ever cut, or you guys are making a summer season movie. But I’m warning you—you shouldn’t have messed with the Corps.”

  Ashnak drew deeply, then blew the odd-smelling smoke from his cigar into Stryker’s face. “We are the Corps. What are you?”

  “Please!” Stryker’s stubbled chin began to twitch. His face crumpling, his eyes began to leak water. He sat down on the deck as if his hamstrings had been severed. “Don’t hurt me!”

  “Show some guts, Man!” Razitshakra growled. “You’re a marine! Don’t disgrace your uniform!”

  “What’s the matter with you, son?” Ashnak inquired, nudging the now-sobbing Stryker with the toe of a combat boot. “Anyone would think you’d never seen an orc before.”

  The Man raised his stained face. “A what?”

  Razitshakra’s whip ripped a channel across the back of his ribs, tearing his combat jacket and his flesh. He screamed, a full-blooded man’s scream, hand going up, and a metal-thonged whip coiled around his wrist, bloodying his knuckles. He grabbed the thong.

  “For fuck’s sake, you can’t do that!”

  Razitshakra tugged speculatively on the whip’s butt, with no effort pulling him clear across deck.

  “The traditional methods are the best,” she said thoughtfully. “That’s the Way of the Orc. To torture prisoners. I’ll strip the hide from him and then, when he’s flayed, he’ll talk.”

  “I’ll talk, I’ll talk now!” S
tryker scrabbled across the barge deck. “Hey, you just ask me—I’ll tell you whatever you want to know! This is too fuckin’ crazy for me. I’ve never been in combat, never mind under heavy interrogation.”

  “Never been in combat?” Ashnak’s ridged brows lifted in astonishment. “But you’re a marine! Ah. I know how it must have been—you’re a newly trained elite soldier, and you accidentally discovered a way through from your world to here, and your superior officers sent you to recce. Happens all the time. Right?”

  “Hell, no!” Sergeant John H. Stryker wiped the sweat pouring down his strong, regular features, sprawled on his backside on the deck. “I haven’t had my hands on a gun in twenty years, and that was in basic training. I’m a clerk. I shift army gear and personnel. This gang of asshole kids jumped me. They totalled my jeep and they were gonna total me. I was gonna get the hell out, and then something happened—”

  “You ran away from a brawl?” The orc commissar shuddered.

  “Shit, there were dozens of the little bastards! For all I know they were carrying knives; of course I’m outta there! Look,” the Man’s tenor voice protested plaintively, “so far I’ve been kidnapped and dumped in the fucking jungle, for God’s sake, seeing things I never thought to see outside of a trip. If I don’t get back to base I’m AWOL and they’re gonna have my ass. And there’s a load of Tornado spares that I got to get shipped through.”

  “Support services,” Razitshakra remarked. “Rear echelon.”

  Ashnak snarled. “We have the first real proof that there’s a world where Dagurashibanipal’s marines exist! Where you can get the weapons systems we only dream about. A heroes’ world! And what do we get? We get this.”

  Leather-winged birds gibbered and yawped over the estuary. Razitshakra unholstered a Desert Eagle automatic pistol, thumbed back the hammer, and placed the cold metal muzzle in Stryker’s ear. “I say we waste him, General, right now. He’s useless.”

  “Aw, why not—fuck.”

  A cloaked figure with bodyguards paced up the gangplank.

  Ashnak came smartly to attention and performed a parade-perfect salute. The Man chewed his large-knuckled fist, smothering a high-pitched giggle.

  Razitshakra kept the muzzle of the Desert Eagle automatic pistol pointed at his head. The Man flinched each time the circle of darkness lined up on him.

  “Yes, indeed,” Ashnak rumbled, “I’m attempting to ascertain that very thing myself, your Dark Magnificence, how perspicacious of you to mention it. I believe this to be a marine from Dagurashibanipal’s collection. One of my NCOs in Thyrion found it. Said it cracked up at the first sight of the enemy.”

  Razitshakra muttered, “Definitely ideologically unsound!”

  The hooded figure lifted pale hands and put the cowl back from its face. At this point Sergeant John H. Stryker of the U.S. Marine Corps understood that he really should have read the $4.95 fantasy hack-and-slay paperbacks that turned up in the mess. Or at least watched more of the videos. Thriller, beaver, and private eye don’t teach you rules for survival where orcs carry M16s. Or where women have glowing neon-orange eyes.

  The air dirtied as if a cloud had passed across the dawn. Only She shone. Her gaunt face had shadows of the palest blue lining hollow cheeks and eye-sockets. A great starburst of white-blonde hair cascaded back from Her smooth forehead. Smothered in heavy black robes, fragile, She gazed down at Stryker where he sprawled on the barge’s deck.

  Her voice like bells said, “Curious and interesting.”

  “Yes, Dread Lord.” Ashnak pointed at the barge fleet, the grunts crewing it, and the confusion apparent on most of the vessels. “It appears to be a logistics expert, Ma’am. I thought we might see what it can do. Or we could try eating it.”

  “No!” Sergeant Stryker added, as a confused afterthought, “Sir!”

  The Dark Lord said, “You may accompany Me below, My Ashnak. Bring that with you.”

  Ashnak saluted, gestured to the commissar, and set off down into the bowels of the Faex River barge. Under the prow cables hummed, strung up through beams and hooks to a portable generator. An acrid smell hung in the air. Ashnak moved forward to the laboratory benches.

  “What have you got here, Technician?”

  Behind Ashnak, the Man whimpered. He shot a glare at Razitshakra, who put her taloned hand firmly over the Man’s mouth. Blue eyes bugged, staring—so far as Ashnak could make out—at Tech-Captain Ugarit.

  “Sir, General Ashnak, sir! Look at these babies!” Green spittle trailed down Ugarit’s chin. The skinny orc’s white laboratory coat pockets clinked with scalpels as he danced in place, head bobbing between Ashnak and the silent figure of the Dark Lord.

  Ashnak supposed that, if you weren’t used to it, Ugarit’s habit of piercing his pointed ears with feathers and studs might be a little startling. The tall, skinny orc wiped his hands down his bloodstained coat, eyes and fangs glinting in the light of naked bulbs, giggling and saluting. As he moved aside, Ashnak saw the dissected carapace of a Bug resting on the makeshift laboratory table. Sticky fluids flowed down onto the deck.

  The Man whimpered, even through Razitshakra’s muffling hand.

  “Acid blood!” Ugarit enthused. “Regeneration of parts! Tiny brains! They’re perfect killing machines, your Dark Magnificence, perfect. Oh I do envy them so…”

  The skinny orc dribbled again. Ashnak momentarily debated the wisdom of having moved Captain Ugarit from technical development to biological research.

  “This,” the Dark Lord pointed, “this is not flesh…”

  Ugarit reached a heavily gloved hand into the mess on the bench and extracted what looked to Ashnak like a steel mechanism.

  “They secrete me-muhh-uhn-uhn-uhn—!”

  Ashnak stepped forward and punched Ugarit firmly in the face. The orc’s head bounced off one of the barge’s beams. A daffy grin spread itself across his thin green features.

  “They secrete metal,” he repeated, slightly more in control. “They replace parts of their bodies with it. O Great Mistress, I think they can grow their own weapons. I think they can grow our weapons, now they’ve captured some to copy. Mistress, imagine if I could harness their growth mechanism, we could grow our own armaments!”

  Ugarit reached back and rested fond gloved claws on the Bug’s sticky shell.

  “I always wanted to do cybernetic research,” the skinny orc murmured dreamily. “Grafting parts. Inserting bits. This organic mechanism is so much simpler. Cyber-mech. That’s it. Cyber-mech weapons systems…”

  Ashnak looked at the Dark Lord. The Dark Lord’s cowl turned in the general direction of Ashnak. She rested Her hand on Ugarit’s bowed head. The sound of Her soft voice brought small rodents scurrying from the hold, spiders crawling from the beams, and Darknesses to scurry about the orcs’ feet:

  “He is most ingenious, My Ugarit, is he not? Perhaps We should let him dismantle your captive marine. We might learn much from that.”

  Ashnak ignored the snivelling from the Man behind him.

  “Good idea, Dread Lord,” he said brightly. “Thing’s a disgrace to the marines anyway.”

  “Look,” Sergeant John H. Stryker protested, “I’ve seen a few videos, I remember how this is supposed to work! I come here, you train me, you make me into a warrior, I beat the shit out of your enemies; all that crap. Sir, I’ve seen those things fight. Never happen, sir.”

  “Damn right,” Ashnak sniffed. “Fancy you with a garlic sauce, myself. Very tasty, Man and garlic. Dread Lord, it’s a pure waste of good meat to let the captain here have him.” He brightened. “Unless we could have what’s left over afterwards?”

  Darkness hung and dripped from the underside of the barge deck, the electric bulbs spawned sepia and blue shadows, and a constant rustling of invisible homage sounded around the Dark Lord’s bare robed feet.

  Stryker gabbled, “You’re the ranking officer here, right, Ma’am?”

  Her narrow lips twitched up at the corners.

  The Man st
umbled on. “And You’ve got a conflict situation here? And a presidential election? That takes planning. I can plan! I’m shit hot, Ma’am. What I can do is make sure You and every other unit gets where they’re meant to be, when they’re meant to be there. Really, Ma’am.”

  “It is intelligent enough to eavesdrop. Well.” The Lord of Darkness wrapped Her thick black robes closer about Her body. The hold’s smell of spices was overlain with a thicker scent. “One might delay dissection, I suppose…”

  “Yes, Dread Lord.” Ashnak resentfully ignored his rumbling gut.

  The Heart of Evil shook back the pale hair from Her face, that seemed childlike amongst the heavy robes, and She smiled, holding out one of Her long-boned hands in front of Her and turning it from side to side in examination.

  “It is strange,” She said, “to inhabit a female body, after so many aeons.”

  The arcing electric bulbs in the hold illuminated Her gull-wing brows, delicate tiny ears, and shapely mouth.

  “There must be many things One can do with a female body,” the Dark Lord said. Her speculative gaze lingered on General Ashnak, who came to attention and a terrified eyes-front, then passed to Biotech-Captain Ugarit, who giggled, Razitshakra (obliviously reciting cantos from the Way of the Orc to herself), and finally fixed on John H. Stryker. She smiled.

  “Have that boy washed,” She ordered, “and sent to My cabin.”

  “Yes, Dread Lord!” Ashnak remained with his head bowed until She had departed for Her quarters. “Commissar Razitshakra, you heard the Dark Lord. While you’re doing that, interrogate the Man carefully. You may cause it pain, but don’t damage it. Dismiss!”

  Biotech-Captain Ugarit followed Ashnak back up onto the deck. Ashnak’s despairing gaze travelled across the orc marine barge fleet, still not ready to cast off and direct their prows up the River Faex—up the river, through all the townships and cities and the capitals of the Southern Kingdoms, on the last and heaviest stages of the Dark Lord’s election campaign. And only seven more days…