by Mary Gentle
Magda bit her lip.
“Call that Huey down,” the colonel-duchess ordered. “Whatever it is, I wouldn’t like us to get there too late.”
The Demonfest Mountains rose higher to either side as Wing Commander Chahkamnit swung the Huey up from Sarderis and through the Nin-Edin pass. Fog clung to the peaks. Water spattered the viewscreen. Visibility decreased as they contour-flew the pass up to Nin-Edin. The wind blowing through the helicopter was icy.
“Splendidly bracing, ma’am, what?” Chahkamnit bellowed from under goggles and ear-flapped flying helmet.
“Cold enough to freeze a rock-troll’s ass,” Magda snarled. “Didn’t Ashnak’s message say anything else, Major-General?”
Barashkukor held on his Stetson by main force. “No, Colonel, ma’am. Only that he wants all of us here, right now.”
In the main body of the Huey, CIA Chief Lugashaldim, Master Sergeant Varimnak, and Lieutenant-Colonel Dakashnit sat morosely jammed elbow to elbow. Commissar Razitshakra read a tattered paperback. It was not clear whether she had been summoned or had merely attached herself to keep an eye open for examples of unorcish behaviour.
Crump!
“Nice landing, Wing Commander.” Magda swung herself down from the Huey’s cockpit. The machine stood, less than levelly, on the earth of Nin-Edin’s outer bailey. A gothic mist swirled around the battlements and poured down from the mountains, hiding the inner keep and the outer gate.
“Brings back memories, ma’am,” Barashkukor said, disembarking with the other officers. His eyes shone. “First time I ever handled a marine weapon, it was right here in this compound. Me and Marukka and Duranki and Azarluhi…all dead now, ma’am. Fallen on the field of battle.”
Barashkukor dusted his small snout violently on his sleeve. “Wonder if it wouldn’t have been better, ma’am, if the general could have found an honourable death in a firefight…”
Magda glared at the snivelling orc. “No, it bloody well wouldn’t!”
“Falling in battle is the Way of the Orc, ma’am,” Commissar Razitshakra observed, putting her paperback in her greatcoat pocket and wiping the fog from her dripping peaked ears and round spectacles. “The Way of the Orc doesn’t say anything about reserve lists, pensions, or retired marine officers. Or anything about sulking—”
“As far as I’m concerned, Commissar,” Dakashnit drawled, “you can shove that up your ass and whistle Dixie!”
The halfling and the group of orcs tramped up the hill towards the inner walls and the shattered gate that still stood unrepaired, although now a section of marines guarded it. Magda heard Master Sergeant Varimnak sigh.
“Remember the siege?” The Badgurlz marine elbowed Lugashaldim in his stripped ribs. “Hell, man, that was good! That elf—she could swing a whip like she’d been born to it.”
The Undead orc took off his dark glasses, gazing up at the battle-stained keep now visible through the shifting fog. “I remember the Fourgate commando mission and how brave General Ashnak was. He wouldn’t hear any arguments—he insisted on returning to this besieged fort, no matter what the personal danger…”
Commissar Razitshakra made a note in her book, muttering something about not quite remembering it that way. Lugashaldim ignored her. He patted Magda’s arm with a gloved skeletal hand.
“Ma’am, to think he should come to this. Skulking in a garrison in the middle of nowhere; drinking, I expect, and…”
At her other side, Chahkamnit stuffed his flying goggles in his bomber jacket pocket and crouched down to put his arm around Magda’s shoulders. “I say, ma’am, I wouldn’t give any of that a thought if it was me. The old general’s ticketty-boo, take my word for it. He’d never do anything silly.”
Magda straight-armed the lanky black orc, who sat down hard on the earth.
“You’re getting on my nerves!” she snarled. “Damn it, whose husband is he? I know Ashnak better than any of you.”
A great orc stepped out from under the split masonry arch of the inner gate, into the swirling fog.
The General Officer commanding the orc marines wore a ragged pair of combat trousers and had obviously been wearing them for some time. His boots were scuffed, and his web-belt hung low, pulled down by the weight of his .44 Magnum. Fog pearled and shone on his bald head, peaked ears, and deep brow ridges.
Barashkukor saluted energetically. “Sir, you said you had an announcement to make, sir!”
“Did I?” An enigmatic expression crossed the orc’s craggy features. He reached down a taloned finger and touched the shoulder of Magda’s suit.
Lugashaldim, Varimnak, Dakashnit, and Chahkamnit exchanged wary glances. Bewildered, they regarded their large, filthy commanding orc. Ashnak stepped out of the gateway, striding past them down the hill.
“Follow me,” he ordered.
The caverns under the mountain echoed to boots, and the hissing arc lights that orc marines had strung up on cables. Although chill, it was still warmer than the fog-shrouded mountainside above.
Colonel-Duchess Magda van Nassau quickened her pace, heels clicking, to keep up with her orc general. The other orc officers followed, muttering asides to each other as Ashnak led them deeper into the dragon’s caves.
“Will spoke to me before he left Ferenzia.” Magda glanced up. “He holds that the orc marines were bound to come to grief eventually in any case—hubris. And Good always winning in the end, as it does.”
Ashnak’s eyes glinted. He chewed on his unlit cigar. “It ain’t like that.”
“Comparative Good,” Magda amended. “I’m the first to admit, my love, that I’m Good compared only to, say, a seriously bored Dark Lord who might take up continental destruction for the fun of it.”
The corner of the orc’s mouth twitched. “True. But it really ain’t like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let me show you.”
With Barashkukor at her heels, and the rest following, Magda entered the central cavern of Dagurashibanipal’s caves. She stared up at the crystal stalactites that were all that remained of the dead dragon. Cables looped across the floor. More arc lights burned, warming the cavern’s chill air.
Ransacked and bare, the halls of the dragon’s hoard stretched out before her.
“I’ve found it, I’ve got it, I’ve—” The voice of Tech-Colonel Ugarit set off crystalline echoes. He hopped from one foot to the other, grinned a sickly grin at Ashnak, and backed away until his skinny frame was flattened against the cave wall.
“I’ll eat you,” the great orc threatened.
“Not yet, my love,” Magda pleaded. “You’ve found something here? What?”
Lieutenant-Colonel Dakashnit eyed the gibbering Ugarit sardonically. “Probably some super-duper new weapons system, man. That right, General? You thinkin’ of blowing the fuck out of people?”
Ashnak sighed. “Don’t encourage him. He’s been wanting to take that ’nuclear’ stuff off the shelves for months and see what it does.”
“Found!” the skinny orc squeaked. His eyes crossed. He went into paroxysms of excited giggles. “Found?!”
Ashnak stepped forward, removed the tech-colonel’s helmet, and dropped his fist on the skinny orc’s skull. Ugarit staggered back against the cave-wall.
“It isn’t a weapon that I’ve discovered. Not exactly…” Ashnak raised his head, momentarily distracted by the line of holes across the cavern roof.
“First time I ever fired an AK,” the great orc remarked in melancholy tones, pointing. “Nearly did for Imhullu! Ah, you wouldn’t remember him, Magda my love. A nest-brother of mine. Fell at Guthranc.”
Magda threw herself forward, embracing the orc’s big, muscular thigh. She fisted one hand and punched him on the painful pressure point of the inner leg. “Don’t you even think about doing anything stupid! I’ll have your ass!”
Ashnak smoothed her chin with a horny finger.
“Is that what you thought?” He shook his head, gazing at the lugubrious faces of his
officers. “Don’t be ridiculous! I’m an orc!”
Barashkukor gazed around the cavern.
“Does take you back, sir, doesn’t it? Remember when I was a scrawny little grunt, sir, and you were training us? And then we marched off to war with Captain Shazgurim, and Captain Zarkingu’s band? Those were the days! But I guess those days are gone, sir. I’m beginning to think we were better off in the bad old days in the necromancer’s tower, with poleaxes. We weren’t redundant then. I guess I miss the Dark Lord, sir. At least we had the Light to fight…”
Ashnak looked, not at Barashkukor, but at the diminutive halfling beside him.
She said, “You’ve got something…”
“Fuckin’ A!” Ashnak grinned.
The orc general turned on his heel and marched off, boots clattering noisily in the cavern. Magda trotted to keep up with him. Ugarit skipped in her wake, digging his fists into the pockets of his white coat. His pierced and studded ears jingled as he hopped from foot to foot, shrieking.
“Paradigm anomaly! It’s so simple! Paradigm anomaly!”
In a daze, Magda stumbled after Supreme Commander Ashnak and his orc officers, living and Undead, further on into the cave-system. She was aware at one point of Barashkukor taking her arm to help her down scree-slopes that her heeled shoes could not cope with. She kicked off the shoes and walked bare- and hairy-footed. At some point she discarded the veiled hat too.
She passed through ancient and measureless caverns now stark with the raw light of electricity. She stumbled around pillars and down stairways of an underground city of some hapless race the dragon had exterminated. Grunts with AK47s and M16s stood guard at every corner, every corridor. Barashkukor, Lugashaldim, Varimnak, and Dakashnit were too bemused to return their salutes, which Razitshakra made careful note of.
At last, so deep below ground that the knowledge of the mountain’s weight was an immense pressure, she walked through the newly opened entrance to a hall.
Large enough for six dragons, the roof soared vast and high above her head. She walked out into the expanse of cavern floor, tiny in the great space.
Carved masonry archways set into the walls led out of the cavern.
Winds blew out of the archways.
Magda’s nostril’s flared, catching a hundred mingled scents—all strange, all unknown. An orc behind her swore, breathlessly. Magda stared.
Each elaborately carved stone arch opened into a different place.
The light of strange suns striped the cave floor. Yellow, white, amber, cerise…A flood of sunlights—rich with the heat of summer, pale with the chill of winter, none of it the dank mist and fogs that hung in the Nin-Edin pass.
Magda walked forward until she stood on one elaborately carved threshold. The stone was cut in strange geometries. The aura of draconic mathematics breathed from the rock. A yard in front of her bare, hairy feet, the paving stones of some strange summer-hot city wept tar into the gutters.
She stared back over her shoulder.
Other thresholds opened into rich fields, forests, seas, and cities of every kind, from monumental white stone to vast glass and steel towers. She smelled the mingled scent of a hundred worlds. A hundred Otherworlds…
Ugarit shrieked, “Dimensional portals! Wormholes in space! Parallel dimensions!”
“Is he all right, sir?” CIA Chief Lugashaldim swallowed. His bony jaw creaked. “Am I all right, sir?”
Magda with difficulty turned her back on the magnificent threshold and walked to Ashnak. She reached up and took the orc’s hand.
“You found this,” she growled.
Ashnak stood easy. “I knew it had to be here somewhere.”
Magda shook her head. “I know that Dagurashibanipal was a collector. Very powerful, even for a dragon. A collector of militaria. But what—”
Ugarit stopped hopping, dusty and brilliant-eyed and slavering. “Antiquarian militaria!” he sneered. “Very little truly modern stuff. You know how dragons are.”
The bewildered orc officers wandered through the Cavern of Portals, gaping. Varimnak was so far away as to be almost out of sight, and she had not exhausted the number of gateways yet.
Ashnak smiled, showing brass-capped tusks. “I knew that the dragon collected weapons of war from all the Otherworlds that necromancers and wizards see in their visions. She went there, or sent her golem, and she brought materiél back. And then she died, and cursed her hoard, and we’ve had the Dragon’s Curse ever since.”
Major-General Barashkukor, shocked, cried, “You haven’t found a way to get rid of it, sir?”
“Good god, no!” Ashnak scratched deep in the cleft of his buttocks, and hitched up his combats again. “Dagurashibanipal raided the Otherworlds, from these caverns under the Demonfest Mountains. The gateways are still here. They had to be! How else could Sergeant Stryker have got here?”
Ashnak shrugged modestly.
“He arrived here at least a year after Dagurashibanipal was killed.”
Magda shook her head. “And I thought you were skulking up here, planning some noble suicide…”
“I’m an orc, damn it!”
More amazed than seemed tactful, she said, “Don’t tell me you and the tech-colonel came up with this idea on your own?”
Ashnak said smugly, “I’m not just some dumb grunt.”
“I’ve been observing Stryker’s world—that one, over there, Colonel Ma’am, the one you were looking at,” Tech-Colonel Ugarit dribbled. “That’s really weird. And there’s more than one world. There are hundreds!”
Barashkukor clipped the tech-colonel’s ear with his steel hand. Ugarit cackled. The Undead orc and the other officers began to drift back from the gateways, their expressions dazed.
“Slight exaggeration,” Ashnak demurred. “There probably aren’t more than fifty worlds that orcs could survive in. Some with a higher technology level than us, some lower.”
As if hypnotised, Magda padded barefoot back across the sun-warmed stone to the threshold of Stryker’s world. She sniffed the strange air.
“Smells like the mechanised warfare division.” The halfling wrinkled her nose. Carefully, leaning forward, she moved her head across the threshold. There was a faint sensation of give, as if some transparent meniscus had been penetrated. Sound battered her ears. She stared at the vehicles thundering along the city’s paved streets and across a teeming bridge towards her, at the high glass towers beyond and the gothic spires of a building next to the sluggish brown river.
When she turned her head, the cavern behind her had become invisible. She drew back. Rock-chilled air engulfed her, cold after the sudden exhaust-laden summer.
“You know what this means…”
Major-General Barashkukor, cyborg-eye whirring, stared gobstruck at the dirty blue sky and the red vehicles crossing the iron river bridge. Commissar Razitshakra scribbled furiously; Sergeant Varimnak nudged Dakashnit in the ribs, indicated with a nod of her heavy-jawed head where two young females of the Man species broke from the crowd to lean on the bridge rail, and winked. Wing Commander Chahkamnit gaped. Lugashaldim’s red eyeless sockets glowed. Ugarit beamed.
Ashnak regarded Stryker’s world. “I don’t believe we need worry about an occupation for orcs. Dagurashibanipal seems to have been interested only in worlds completely obsessed with war.”
“Good show, sir!” Wing Commander Chahkamnit shaded his eyes against the yellow sunlight and watched a flight of Tornadoes hurtle across the dirty sky.
“I say, sir, what about that!”
Magda took Ashnak’s hand and gazed into the new world’s rising sun.
“I do have an announcement to make.” The great orc looked at his fellow orc officers, and then down at Magda. “There was something I once told you of, my love. When the Dark Lord touched my soul. Never let on to Her, of course, but it did show me what, as an orc, I really am.”
Major-General Barashkukor assumed a military erectness. “Sir, a member of a proud and noble but misunderstood wa
rrior race, sir?”
The great orc thought about it for a second.
“Not really,” Ashnak said. “More like, a mean motherfucker who loves big guns. I don’t want to be World Ruler. All I want is to go on doing what I enjoy. I intend to carry on being an orc marine. And I intend to take the marines on missions to as many of these worlds as I can.”
“Me too,” Magda said unexpectedly.
The black orc Dakashnit grinned and muttered something under her breath about dumbfuck halflings.
“Damn it, my vice president can take over here.” Magda gripped Ashnak’s large hand and grinned. “Hell, orc, I’m an officer in the marines too—this time I’m coming with you!”
“Yo!” Ashnak swung Magda Brandiman up into his arms, waltzed a few bow-legged steps on the cavern floor, kissed her, and stepped back as she kicked him smartly.
“My love,” the big orc said gravely, “I thought I would at least have to ask.”
Barashkukor seized Supreme Commander Ashnak by the taloned hand and shook it vigorously. “Oh, sir!”
Magda tugged her tailored skirt straight.
“Of course…” Her eyes narrowed. “If John Stryker accidentally came through to here—then others can do that too. Accidentally, Or deliberately.”
“They can’t see us! Can they!” Tech-Colonel Ugarit suddenly whimpered and cowered, turning cross-eyed to survey the cave of dragon-sized arches. “We may even now be under scrutiny for attack!”
Commissar Razitshakra snapped her notebook decisively shut. “Then we’ll have to get our retaliation in first! Supreme Commander, sir, I volunteer to accompany you!”
“I thought you might,” Ashnak remarked.
Magda speculated demurely. “I’m sure the Otherworlds will see the point of trading with the Orc Marine Armaments and Leisure Services Company—once we’ve given a smallscale demonstration.”
“If they don’t,” Barashkukor offered, “we can always give a large-scale demonstration…”
“Congratulations!” Ashnak walloped Major-General Barashkukor’s shoulder. “You just volunteered for the first mission, too. And I will see there’s a medal for you in this.”