by A. J. Aalto
The orc had a broad, low, rounded brow with wispy eyebrows that looked more like antennae; a slightly darker color than the driftwood-grey of his skin, they twitched when the flesh of his brow moved, and it often did. His eyes were the color of Dijon mustard, pupils and irises both, generously flecked with streaks of pale brown. His cheeks were splotched and creased; orc skin didn't tan evenly, and their pigmentation, similar to human melanin, was highly reactive to the sun. The orcs who ventured out of their Swedish homeland and voyaged south tended to darken rapidly in the summer, some of them to pitch black.
“Uh, howdy?” I began uncertainly. “Guten morgen? Bienvenidos? God kväll?”
“He understands spoken English well enough,” Wesley explained, picking up the orc’s train of thoughts effortlessly. “Your Swedish is terrible, by the way.” He tucked his chair closer to the table in a scooting motion. “He’s never taken the time to learn to speak English well, so he's not going to cast aspersions.”
Like ogres, orcs had thick tongues that worked around their own language well enough, but couldn’t pull of some of the subtler sounds of a human mouth. I didn’t think remarking on his giant tongue was the best way to make a first impression. “Whereas you, the undead dickbag who failed high school French three times, are going to go right ahead and do it for him. Douche. Or, for your monolinguistic ass, vous c'est un douchenozzle.”
Though he sat patiently enough, the orc was fidgety and unstill, and something – bad nerves, bad luck, or my bad French – had given him facial tics that looked like tectonic plates shifting. He had on a faded XXXXL T-shirt with Bob Marley’s face silk-screened on the front. In lieu of Marley's knit rasta-cap, the orc wore a porkpie hat. I wondered where they made hats to fit a head the size of a pumpkin.
His wide, hunched back was capped with shoulders that reminded me of a certain boggle I’d once played touch football with, kinda-sorta. Despite the size of his upper body, his lower half was stunted, with bow legs and oddly tiny feet strapped into a pair of bright red Chuck Taylors. It was like some mischievous god had stuck the nozzle of an air pump in his belly button and inflated him from the waist up. I wondered if Sheriff Hood would chide the orc about skipping leg day, but figured he was smart enough not to. He saved his annoying smack talk for when he had me in a choke hold during our sparring sessions, so I couldn't get enough air to swear at him the way he deserved. It was very motivating.
I sat, dropping my go-bag on the table. The orc’s nostrils flared. I could have fit a fist up one of them, but I was determined to keep this visit mucous-free. I wondered if my Shalimar perfume and the smoke that was clinging to my clothes blended to make a weird mélange in those big olfactory caves of his. He could probably smell Harry’s scent on my clothes and my hair, too, and Wes was right next to me, adding his mundane and otherworldly notes to the mix. I smiled, showing him my lack of fangs in case he thought I might be undead, and then remembered that smiling was akin to baring teeth as a sign of aggression to other creatures. Wrong signal, Marnie. Duh. My smile faded and I tried instead staring at his chin, dipping my gaze in a submissive display. His shoulders softened and fell slightly. I could almost see the tension draining from him. Better.
“Usually,” Wes continued, “he avoids human beings. Most humans are not comfortable in his presence, and he doesn’t like feeling unwanted.”
Orcs were not known for their temper; they had been living among humans for thousands of years, mostly unseen, and orc-on-human violence was rare. Human-on-orc violence, unfortunately, was well documented and probably the source of his disquiet. He looked like a monster. The textbooks assured me that his kind were docile unless cornered and provoked, but I could tell just by looking at him that my ancestors would have taken one look at his yellow eyes and jutting canines and called for a monster hunt. I felt a twinge of guilt and reminded myself that orcs were very sensitive to the feelings of others; today was not the day to indulge in monster-induced paranoia. Just because he could rip my arm off and beat me to death with it...
Wesley made an impatient noise and said softly, “So could I. Doesn’t mean I would.”
I smiled an apology at my telepathic brother and nodded, getting my lime green Moleskine and No. 2 pencil out. “Right. So, um, I can’t call you Orc Dude all night. What’s your name, sir?”
The orc blinked his yellow eyes at me and then aimed them at my brother, seeming to instinctively understand that Wes would be our conduit.
Wesley said, “BugBelly.”
“That’s not really his name,” I said.
“That’s what he’s showing me,” Wesley objected. “Technically, they look like cockroaches and ants.” He squinted at the orc’s forehead as though he could see right through the comically large hat and straight into his brain. “Yeah, bugs. All kinds. On a big, hairy stomach. BugBelly.”
I lowered my voice. “If I call him BugBelly and he reaches across this table and thwaps me dead, I’m going to haunt your ass for centuries.” Then I cast a close-lipped smile at the orc. “Nice to meet you, BugBelly. You’re the first orc I’ve ever spoken to, so please forgive me if I accidentally say something you find rude. I don’t wish to offend. I’m eager for this opportunity.”
He nodded.
I continued, “The Orc Quarter has emptied, and someone set it on fire. When orcs leave to make a new home, they raze the old one. It’s your custom, yes?”
BugBelly gave another vigorous nod.
“Let’s talk about the reason behind your fleeing,” I said. “What makes an entire orc community up and run away? The police officers said you might have something important to tell me about that.”
He leaned forward, and that giant, crease-covered forehead got alarmingly close to mine. A waft of his scent came to me, sun-warmed fur and copper. I did my best not to flinch despite an instinctual urge to keep distance between us. Self-preservation alarm bells were clanging in my head.
Wesley said, “Angels.”
I considered my brother. From where I sat, I could only see the right side of his face, the side untouched by holy water scars. His focus was entirely on the orc, his expression one of wonderment; his pupil shrank to a pinprick in that Husky dog blue that was wilting rapidly to pale violet. Fascinated by whatever it was he was hearing in the orc’s head, Wesley forgot I was there, though his lips moved constantly to report what he was picking up whenever it was clear enough.
“Angels,” he said. “No, one angel. Dark angel. Wings of false feathers. He has visions. Marnie?”
“I’m here,” I said quietly.
“Marnie, he’s a mystic. A prophet for his tribe. He’s not interested in what’s happening in the Orc Quarter. He stayed because he has a message for you. A prophecy.”
“Of doom?”
“What?” Wesley blinked rapidly and jerked out of his telepathic daze.
“Is it a prophecy of doom?” I drummed my pencil on the table. “Generally, those are the worst.”
I thought I made a fair point, but BugBelly and Wesley glared at me in unison.
“Okay, can we focus on what happened in the Orc Quarter first and then discuss the prophecy, doom-y or otherwise?” I asked, glancing at the round, black eye of the video equipment in the upper corner of the room. “The police need to understand why the orcs vacated so suddenly. Is something wrong?”
“They’re connected,” Wesley said. “Also, he needs to warn you that the mummy’s honey pot smells like ass.”
I did a double-take. “Wait, where? What mummy? Honey pot? What the—”
“I don’t know,” Wes said with a surprised laugh. “That can’t be right. I’m seeing a pot.”
Canopic jars. They held the deceased’s organs. Lacking the exact nature of the pot, Wes’s telekinetic vision must be showing him the closest thing in its available catalog of images.
He continued, “BugBelly thinks you should prepare for it. Brace yourself. Prepare your nose. But don’t hesitate, don’t linger, be quick about it. Something abo
ut the full moon. Honey moon? No, that’s not right.”
Prepare your nose? I’d worn a gas mask for cases before, in a mine in Colorado, where a necromancer was experimenting with hybrid zombies. The stink down there had been pretty powerful. A mummy’s tomb, I imagined, would be fairly dry, and logically less funky. This was moot, since I had no plans to venture into a mummy’s tomb to begin with. My luck, I’d get the curse. My old chemistry partner from McGill University got a mummy’s curse once. It wasn’t pretty. The best way to avoid the mummy’s curse is to avoid mummies. Q.E.D.
“Something is coming,” Wes reported, sinking back into BugBelly’s willing, open mind. “A ship. First a scout ship. Then a fleet. Hordes of the enemy. Ancient drums. Made of manflesh. Songs of the Devourer.”
“We have an enemy?” Dammit, I knew it was a prophecy of doom. Why can’t it ever be a prophecy of cupcakes?
“The orcs do. A natural enemy. Something that once preyed upon them as a food source.”
My years in a preternatural biology lab came rushing back to me far more easily than usual; I had visions of preserved bodies dredged up from bogs kept in massive glass cases for study. Carnivores with a particular taste for human and orc meat, their gangly, branch-like arms and dark, mottled skin perfectly camouflaged with the primeval forests of the Taiga. “There are no more Ninespine Stickleback trolls. They went extinct in the eleventh century.”
“No,” Wes reported, studying the orc’s gleaming brow. “They were hunted almost to extinction and the survivors were… encouraged to relocate north, beyond the portal.”
I had so many questions about that that I didn’t know where to begin. “Hunted by whom? Where? How? Why? What portal?”
“But they’re returning,” he continued. “The portal is failing. The portal is slipping away. Away into madness and chaos. All is lost… lost in sea foam and frost fog and the cries of war. Vengeance. The illusion of dominance must not waver.”
“How can a portal go mad?” I asked. “I mean, other than GlaDOS. She's a stone-cold bitch.”
Wesley shook his head and BugBelly made a frustrated noise from the back of his throat.
My brother moaned. “The scout. Bathing in man-blood. Shaking his face in it.”
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” was all I could think to say.
“Roasted, eaten. Flesh chewed from bones,” Wesley reported, and his pale hands became shaking fists against the table. I reached over and covered his hands with my gloved ones in an attempt to soothe the dismay radiating off him.
“Sooooo, a handful of trolls sailing back through a portal that may fail, so they can chew on some humans…” I said. “What, like fifteen, twenty trolls? If we need to, Batten and I could put together a team to hunt them.”
“Not a handful,” Wesley said through parched lips. “Hundreds of thousands. They’ve been reproducing for centuries in preparation for their chance to reclaim their homeland and avenge their ancestors.”
I looked to BugBelly for validation of this; under the tilt of his giant pork pie hat, the sober certainty in his yellow eyes was not reassuring. I tried to repeat “hundreds of thousands” but all that came out of my mouth was a dismayed, whistling exhale. Dark Lady, be merciful. “Where?”
“Norway. North of Hammerfest.”
I scribbled that down. “When?”
“Soon.”
“What does ‘soon’ mean?” I cried, throwing my pencil down in frustration. It clattered to the table then rolled off the edge and along the floor. “Today? Next month? Do I have time to reorder my favorite espresso from Italy before the whole planet goes tits-up and I’m hiding in my bunker from the Trollpocalypse?”
Wesley shook his head slowly. “You have to go, Marnie.”
“I do,” I said, and found myself pointing in question at my chest for the second time in two days. “I have to go to Hammerfest. Because I’m the Lumpin’-Spelunkin’-Whosawhatsit? I can’t make portals or scare trolls. Unless they’re miniature. Are they mini-trolls?”
“BugBelly sees you there. With Folkenflik. He sees you in Norway. The trolls want to chew the flesh off our bones, and sing songs of bloodshed and the destruction of mankind. BugBelly sees you at the portal, putting up a brave front to scare off the troll scout, and reviving the portal itself.”
“Oh. Right. Because that’s a thing I do.” I retrieved my pencil, reigned in my temper, and noted the Folkenflik bit in my Moleskine for later use. The tip of my pencil was broken but it still made fairly decent, smoky smears on the paper. “So what you’re saying is: legions upon legions of exiled Ninespine Stickleback trolls are returning via a portal north of Hammerfest, Norway.”
“Yes,” Wesley answered for him.
“And that the portal standing between us and the trolls is failing—“
“Will fail,” Wesley corrected. “Will. Soon.”
The orc thumped the table and tried to speak. It sounded like he said “taboo” with a mouth full of gravel. I did my best not to flinch, and nodded at him.
“And if the troll scout comes, and we don’t put up a good front,” I continued, “they will ravage humankind and bathe in our blood.”
The orc mystic nodded solemnly.
Wesley corrected again, “When the trolls come. Not if. When.”
“And that the trolls have songs about said bloodbath,” I added. “Happy, cheerful, campfire bloodbath songs.”
The orc mystic gave another silent nod.
“Did I miss anything?” I asked, drawing smudgy swirls in my notebook.
“The bone chewing,” Wesley supplied helpfully.
“How could I forget that tasty morsel?” I chided myself, scribbling it down in the Moleskine, reading aloud as I spelled it out. “Bone…chew…ing. Got it. Um, anything else? Anything with less doom? Maybe some victorious booty-shaking on my part?”
I glanced at Wesley as he focused his wilted-violet gaze on the orc’s glistening, rheumy eyes. The Blue Sense tickled under my palms and I felt a swell of unhappiness, though I could tell it wasn’t Wesley’s; it came coated in that orcish smell, pennies and pelt. “He’s certain this will come to pass. The scout will come, and the trolls will threaten the future of all mankind.”
Fuckanut. I sat back and studied the unhappy orc before me. “And what of your people, BugBelly? What will Orc-kind do?”
Wesley answered immediately, “The orc society is small now, and it is not ruled by a single overlord, but there are a bunch of tribal leaders. Each tribe will do as their leader prescribes; most will probably flee deep underground. Trolls won't follow them down that far; they have bad eyesight and need the light. Abandoned mines, old cellars, caves. Orc-kind will be safe there.”
“The orcs will not stand with mankind against the trolls?” I asked.
BugBelly sighed like a cement mixer grinding to a halt, the corners of his mouth turning down.
“They have no good reason to. Mankind hasn't exactly won any points with the orcs in the last few centuries. Orcs keep score and have long memories. Orcs owe allegiance to no other race. Orcs will look after their own.”
“And who will help mankind, BugBelly? This Folkenflik fellow? You said we needed to put up a good front, to maintain the illusion of dominance. How do we do this?”
The mystic’s eyes rolled back in his head until only the whites showed, but even those were sickly yellow. He twitched, and his hand quivered against the table. He swallowed back some froth from the corner of his mouth. Human seers gave the rest of us the serious heebie-jeebies; the orc mystic was only slightly less eerie, and I thought it might have something to do with the heat he was putting out. I felt enveloped by his power as it radiated off his broad form and waited for his next pronouncement.
Wesley said, “Seek the worm forge.”
Worm forge? “Like, earthworms? What kind of forge? In a blacksmith’s place? A steel plant? A jeweler? A silversmith, perhaps?”
The mystic shot to his feet, shaking his head. An explosion of words ca
me out of his mouth, then, but I’d be damned if I could understand any of it. Wesley rocketed out of his chair backward, clamping both hands to his forehead, cramming the scar-puckered flesh together in a gruesome mask. The violet of his good revenant eye flashed brightly and a guttural noise issued from his throat. I reached out for him with both hands, but my brother hissed and stumbled back into the corner of the room as though he couldn’t bear to be touched. He curled into a ball to rock, moaning. Helpless to fix it, I turned to the orc, showing him my empty palms in supplication.
“Please, whatever you’re saying, whatever you’re showing him, please slow down, please stop.” I made shushing noises to soothe him, but the mystic raised both arms to the sky like he could call down the rain; he shook them, shook them, groaning. His chin was juddering, his under-bite collecting spittle.
“The worm forge!” I said, nodding rapidly. “Yes, the worm forge.”
“Litenvecht Späckkenhuggar!” the orc howled.
“Right! Yes! That’s me. The Licking-Viking Snapple-Humper!” I thumped my chest. “Me, yes. Here. I’m on it. I’m all over this shit. I’ve got this.”
Apparently, I’d said the magic words.
He settled, letting his arms fall down to his sides. Those massive shoulders moved up and down as he panted and watched me expectantly. I watched him, too, not knowing what to do next. The smell of fur was stronger in the small room, overpowering, though BugBelly hadn’t become visibly hairier in his excitement. He tucked his big jaw up to close his panting mouth and his nostrils flared to bring in all the air he needed to catch his breath. For a moment, his chin warbled, and I thought my mystic might cry.
I repeated, “I’ve got this. I promise. The troll scout? He’s not getting by me.” I have to scare a troll? I can scare a troll. “The portal? I’m gonna revive that shit.” I don’t know how to do that, but I’ll figure it out.
Wesley groaned and un-crumpled until he was sitting splay-legged on the floor. “Something about collecting wrath and bones. Gold. Golden honey. And the mummy. Feathers. Nails. And the worm forge, whatever that is. And a warning. The full moon. Honey moon. Wrath. Old bones.”