Grunts

1

In the tower of the nameless necromancer it is always cold.

The big orc’s breath smoked odourously on the air. He pulled the buckles of his breastplate tighter around his muscled body. Frost sparkled on the laminated black armour sheathing his shoulders, arms, and bowed thighs. The sorcerous cold bites into orc-flesh as no ordinary winter can.

“I come,” he rumbled.

He slung the war-axe and warhammer from his broad, hairy shoulders and pulled the winged iron helm with its nasal spike more firmly down on his misshapen skull. Even standing to attention he slouches forward; his knuckles hang down beside his knees.

“Hurry,” the familiar whimpered. “Master calls: hurry-hurry-hurry!”

The orc drew his knobbly foot back, aimed, and kicked the familiar’s lean, hairy buttocks. The familiar shot down the corridor, bouncing off the walls several times.

“Don’t give orders to Ashnak of the fighting Agaku!” The big orc guffawed, striding up the nine hundred and ninety-nine steps to the tower’s top chamber.

Ice congealed on the onyx walls. A sorcerous frost snapped at his clawed fingers. He slapped at dirt and dung on his plate-armor, shook his tusked head, and raised a great fist to hammer on the oaken doors. Before he could, they drifted silently open. Light from the tower’s single high window slanted down.

The nameless necromancer sprawls in a chair made from the bones of his enemies.

His patchwork robes glittered with the silver thread that sewed together their many disquietingly shaped small pieces of leather. At his feet his staff glowed, quiescently, with the light of dark stars. His head was bowed. Ashnak judged him old—as Man-flesh ages, two or more centuries—but still with the disgusting smoothness of human youth.

“Master!” The orc fell to his knees in the darkened tower. His plate harness and weapons clashed loudly in the sorcerous silence.

“Lord Necromancer!” he shouted.

The nameless necromancer started violently. Wine spilled from his bone cup down his black robes. His virulent green eyes opened.

“Um… who…?”

The necromancer rubbed a pale, slender hand across his mouth. The skull wine-cup slipped from his other hand, soaking his robe of skins and bouncing off across the flagstones.

“Wha’…?”

“Ashnak,” the big orc reminded him. “Ashnak of the warriors! Ashnak of the fighting Agaku!”

“Uhnnnn… Ashnash… Now wha’ did I…”

Ashnak, as patiently as is possible for an orc (and a Man-smart Agaku who is facing sorcery can be very patient indeed) said, “You summoned me, master. Ashnak of the—”

“—fighting Agaku, yes, I know. Don’t shout, scum.”

The nameless necromancer leaned his head over the side of the bone chair and was noisily sick. Another of the lean brown familiars shot out from under the dais and began to lap up the vomit.

Something else scurried in the distant shadows. Ashnak stiffened.

“Damnation!” The wizard hiccuped, and pointed an unsteady finger. Golden forked lightning spiked from his hand to the corner of the chamber.

The blast rattled even Ashnak’s eardrums. Stone-chips flew from the black masonry. The offending rat, missed by three yards, scuttled off into the dark.

“I have a task for you, Ashnak.”

As always after the operation of sorcery, the nameless necromancer’s voice sharpened and became alert.

“You may take three other warriors with you. No more than three. You are to go in secrecy to where my agent awaits you. I will give you a talisman for recognition. Then you are to be guards while a task is performed for me. After that, you will be told what to do.”

“Yes, master!”

Ashnak prostrated himself, iron weapons clanging on the flagstones, and banged his forehead three or four times against the stone floor. It was not something that particularly hurt him, and it tended to placate the nameless necromancer.

“At once, master!”

“You give me a headache, Ashnak,” the nameless necromancer said, reaching for a bottle spun from the silicon bones of a foe stranger than is easily comprehended. “Go away.”

Two pairs of eyes surveyed the outside of the tavern from slightly less than three feet six inches above ground-level.

“We’re never going to get our gear out of our room,” Will Brandiman said.

“Not without running into the Assassins’ Guild,” Ned Brandiman concluded. “They’re bound to have got back here before we did, right, Will?”

Will Brandiman picked up his trailing skirts and faded back from the alley entrance. The laced bodice was uncomfortably tight, restricting his access to the throwing knives strapped under his arms. He coiled the child’s skipping-rope and stuffed it into a pocket.

“‘Fraid so, Ned.”

He glanced at his brother. Ned’s pink-frilled frock had become stained with town-dirt, and his brown hair (too short really to plait) was coming out of its braids. He didn’t suppose he looked much better. He rubbed his hand over his chin and reflected on the odd advantages that not having to shave more than twice a month can give.

“I wouldn’t trust this disguise at close quarters,” the halfling said, “though it has served us well enough today. We got the job done. Now let me see…”

“We have to get that crowd out of the tavern room, right?” his brother halfling asked.

“Right. And in such a way that the Assassins’ Guild people have to come out with them. So…”

“So it’s simple.” Ned pointed above his head at the thatched roof. “Set fire to one of the houses over here. Everyone’ll come rushing out—the Guild too, because you can’t refuse firefighting duty. Not publicly. We go in, get our stuff, and leave.”

Will raised his eyebrows, pleasantly surprised. “What would I do without you, brother? Very well. Let’s find some dry thatch. And, for preference, an occupied building.”

“Why—oh.” Ned grinned. “Cries for help’ll bring ’em out running.”

“Exactly.”

The last of a long summer twilight shone in the west. The flint and steel bristled sparks onto tinder. Will carefully set fire to three strips of cloth ripped from his dress and poked them up under the low eaves with a stick.

They retreated into darker alleys opposite the tavern.

“FIRE!”

Raw-throated screaming started.

The tavern emptied a crowd into the winding street.

Shouts filled the air, Men and a few elven-kind and dwarves calling for water, buckets, billhooks, and sand. Invisible in the firelight, the brothers slipped past them into the echoing, empty tavern, sprinting upstairs to their room.

“Let’s move it!”

Will ripped his dress over his head. His short, stocky frame glowed in the light from the burning buildings. Fingers fumbling, he pulled on shirt, trunk-hose, fine mail-shirt, and doublet. He buckled on his sword, checked the placement of throwing-daggers and poison needles, and ran over to join Ned, who was throwing every piece of gear from dark lanterns to heavy-duty crossbows into the brass-bound chests.

“Lower ’em down from the back window with the rope,” Ned said. “We’ll go out and round the tavern—”

Will darted across the room and laid the palm of his small hand on the door. He frowned, opened the door a crack, and looked into roaring flames. All the tavern’s stairs blazed.

Burning thatch floats.

“We’ll jump down after,” he corrected, shutting the door and coughing. “It’s only one floor.”

“One floor in a Man-building!”

“If you’d rather roast, Ned—!”

Grinning at the expression on his brother’s face, Will opened the back window and hefted the first chest up onto the sill. Braced, he lowered it by the rope, then lowered the second chest and scrambled up onto the windowsill. He took careful aim and jumped.

“Arrhhh! You little turd!”

In a tangle of knees and elbows, Will got himself together and found the innyard empty except for the Man he’d landed on. The fat human ostler, still sprawling, opened his mouth to yell again, and Will hit him on the temple with the hilt of his dagger. The Man fell backward.

Ned Brandiman’s feet hit square on the Man’s chest, cushioning his jump also. The Man choked, lips turning blue. The halfling pulled the last pink ribbons from his hair and shook out the braids. He chuckled.

“Fast work, Will.”

“No problem, Ned.”

A Man’s voice bawled, “Oi! You two!”

Will spun round and ran towards the burly Man in working clothes at the yard entrance.

“Help! Sir, help us! The tavern’s on fire, we were only saved by the heroism of this Man—and I think he’s injured; please, help!”

The stranger, a brawling-looking redheaded Man, loped across the innyard and knelt down by the ostler. While he prodded the recumbent form, Will took a swift look around. No sign of Ned, but the stable doors were open…

Will palmed a knife as he came up behind the redheaded Man, and sliced neatly through the jugular vein with the Man facing away from him, so that the gout of blood sprayed across the unconscious ostler. He stared thoughtfully up at the tavern. Smoke coiled out between the eaves. He bent and put the red knife in the ostler’s hand.

“Will! Here!”

Straining to lead a sweating pony, Ned Brandiman staggered out of the stables. Will grabbed a couple of empty boxes and, climbing on them, fixed the brass-bound chests either side of the saddle, and finally leaped up behind Ned as his brother flailed a horse-crop nearly as tall as himself, cracking it against the pony’s flanks.

The hot wind from the fire flew in his face, and Will grinned widely. The poor quarter’s houses and low dives flashed by, lost in the dung kicked up by the pony’s hooves. He shook Ned’s small but muscular shoulder.

“Slow down!”

His brother heaved on the reins. The pony reluctantly fell into a walk. Ned soothed it until the flattened ears relaxed, and Will sat straight-backed in the saddle as they paced with dignity through the merchants’ quarter and the night that here was quiet, towards the sleepy guards on Ruxminster’s city gate.

The orc encampment steamed gently in the sunshine.

Barashkukor, leaning scabby elbows on the parapet of the Nin-Edin fort, gazed down from the mountainside at a wilderness that only the vultures could love. He tilted his dented helm back on his head. “So what do you get if you cut the legs off a warrior?”

Marukka gave a baritone chuckle, waving her jagged sword in the air for emphasis. “A low-down bum!”

Barashkukor groaned, but quietly in case she should hear him. The young female orc towered over him by a twenty inches.

“And what,” she pursued, “do you get if you cut the arms off a low-down bum?”

Barashkukor leaned his poleaxe up against the stone parapet, abandoning all pretence of sentry-duty. He scratched at the scabs on his scaly chest and pulled his scruffy brigandine open—the metal plates sewn into the jacket poked through the worn lining, pinching his tough hide. The hot air sang with emptiness, and the mountain fort glowed like an oven.

“What do you get if you cut the arms off a low-down bum?” he repeated.

“An ’armless low-down bum!”

Barashkukor giggled sycophantically. The female orc planted her bow-legs wide, fists on her hips, and bellowed. Her bright orange hair, caught up into a horse-tail on top of her skull, shook wildly. The rusty mail and plate-armour in which she clad herself jingled, as did the knives and maces hanging from her wide leather belt. Her vast breasts strained the buckles of her brigandine.

“And what—”

Barashkukor sidled along the parapet towards the steps. The rest of the orc band sprawled in the bailey, in the noon heat, around the cooking-pit. Only a few roofless buildings and the outer defences remained of this fort. Barashkukor found it rather homely.

Marukka’s sword-point slammed against the wall an inch in front of his face. He halted and assumed an expression of extreme attentiveness.

“—what do you get,” she demanded, “if you cut the head off an ’armless, low-down bum?”

He considered it in proportion to the nearness of her jagged weapon. “Ya got me. What do you get?”

“A headless chicken.”

Barashkukor said incredulously, “A headless chicken?”

“Well—would you stand and fight, with no arms and legs?”

Marukka slapped her bulging green thigh. Her jaw dropped, and she wheezed. Tears leaked out of the corners of her beetle-browed eyes.

“That’s good! Isn’t that good? I made that one up myself!”

Barashkukor showed all his fangs and tusks in a grin. “Real good, Marukka. You slay ’em.”

“Sure do.” She stroked the sword complacently and tucked it back under her belt. “Shouldn’t be surprised if I was good enough to be paid. Stinkin’ Men get paid for jokes. I seen that once. I was in a city, once, you know—”

I know, Barashkukor thought. “How about a game of Orcball?” he suggested hastily.

“Good idea! Aww… We ain’t got a ball.” Marukka sniffed. She stomped down the steps into the bailey. “’Ere! Whose idea was it to cook the dinner?”

The largest orc, who was (it need hardly be said) the band’s leader, pointed silently at one of the smaller orcs. Marukka advanced, drawing her sword. The small orc backed away.

“I didn’t! It wasn’t my idea! I wasn’t even here—urp!”

Marukka’s jagged blade whistled through the air. There was a whup! and something relatively round bounced and landed at Barashkukor’s feet, still blinking. The orc-band scrambled to their feet with enthusiasm.

“We got a ball,” Marukka announced. “Let’s play!”

A voice through his nightmare said: “What’s that smell?”

Will Brandiman moved his head fractionally and winced. A blaze of pain subsided. It was no nightmare. He tested his wrists and found them cord-bound. His lock-picks, by the feel of it, were still sewn into his cuffs. His ankles throbbed, tied much too tightly.

“Roasting pony?” he guessed thickly.

“One day you’re going to wake up to the smell of roasting brother,” Ned grumbled.

The ground was hard and damp under his face. Will strained to lift his head. The brilliant moon blazed in his eyes, and he flinched. There was no locating the source of the pain as yet, but he had a small bet that it would be a head-wound, and an unprofessional one at that.

“Orcs,” he concluded, sniffing.

A bare foot, hard as the hardest leather boot, kicked him in the ribs. The force of the blow threw him over onto his back. He stared up at a broad-shouldered, squat-legged orc in shining black plate harness. The orc opened its tusked mouth and spat accurately into Will’s eye. The saliva stung.

“Orcs,” Will marvelled. “Well, you can’t be that stupid. You managed to surprise me and my brother, and that isn’t often done—ahh!”

A slightly smaller orc leaned over Will’s face from behind him and shoved the muzzle of its hound-faced bassinet helm open. The fanged and tilt-eyed face was upsidedown from Will’s point of view and (he thought) none the better for it. The orc gave a light contralto growl. “Show respect! Do not speak before Ashnak!”

Will managed to roll himself up into a precarious sitting position. Ned, a bundle of rope, lay a few feet away. A fire burned. The shelter of branches and bracken that had concealed this dip in the ground and the cave-entrance were scattered about; the brass-bound chests were open and their contents looted. One of the heavy crossbows hung at the belt of the armoured orc. Will raised one eyebrow in a rare respect.

“Agaku,” he guessed. “The man-smart Agaku.”

The armoured orc smiled, showing polished yellow fangs. “I have not met many, Man or elf-filth or halfling, who are smart as the Agaku.”

Will managed to wipe his face against his knee, cleaning off the last of the acidic saliva. His eyes still ran, blurring the night sky, so that for a panic-stricken moment he was not sure how many orcs surrounded them.

Ned’s voice, thick with pain, said, “A scouting party, I’d guess, since there’s only two of them. Will—”

“Yes, yes, I know. It’s difficult.”

A spark from the fire drifted through the air and lodged against his cheek, burning. He shook his head violently, and then groaned. The fire had been set in the cave-mouth, not visible from the moorland above, and the charred carcass of the pony appeared to have been extensively chewed.

“You’re getting rid of the evidence,” he marvelled, looking up at the larger orc. “Ashnak, was it, that she called you? Master Ashnak, you and I must talk. I’d find it more convenient if you cut at least my ankles free, since I think that if you don’t, I’ll lose the use of my feet.”

The ground swooped dizzyingly away as a clawed hand grabbed the back of his doublet and swung him up into the air. The female orc’s helmet-covered face grinned into his from a distance of six inches. Her tusks were long, curved, and capped with bronze. Her whiteless eyes gleamed. She hefted a spiked morningstar in her free hand.

“You little halflings, always so tricksy,” she said, in guttural admiration. “Mark me, Ashnak. They’re on some quest for the Light. If we heed their pleas and free ’em, they’ll have some miracle later on, and bring us down in our pride. I’ve heard Man-tales. I know how it goes.”

The spiked pole swung up, poised, swung down—

“Not without my orders, Shazgurim!” The large orc wrenched the morningstar away and belted the other orc with the smooth end, sending her crashing against the earthwall of the dip in the ground. Will tried his best for a tuck-and-roll fall—being tucked reasonably well already by his bonds—but a sharp rock caught him in the gut, and it was a minute and more before he dragged enough air into his lungs to breathe.

He heard Ned say, very reasonably, “A bargain—our equipment, which you can use, for our lives, which you have no use for.”

An owl hooted twice, and then hooted twice again. The owl is not necessarily a moorland bird. Moving almost as silently as halflings, two more armoured orcs slid around the tor and over the side of the dip and brandished their war-axes in salute to Ashnak. Will groaned as he rolled over, the cords at his ankles cutting into him like wire.

“They’re alone,” one of the orcs grunted. “No smell of strangers: Men or wizard-filth or squat dwarves.”

The smallest orc, which in the flickering firelight Will thought might be another female, gave a high-pitched giggle. “No smell of magic, no. None. None!”

He saw Ashnak open his fanged mouth, knew that the orc’s next words would be Kill them! and played his last card. Fortunately, as usual, it was a fifth ace.

“Hold your hand!” he cried. “In the name of the nameless necromancer!”

Ned, at his side, made a noise that might have been a groan or a whimper. “In the name of the nameless?”

“You know what I mean. In the…oh, the hell with it. Orcs!” Will exclaimed, loudly. “Strong though you are, I know your kind fear magic. Do you really wish to risk offending the nameless necromancer?”

The big orc motioned with his hand. The two scout orcs vanished up onto the moorland again. Shazgurim stood, rebuckling the plate-armour on her forearms, and scowled at Ashnak’s back. Will noted it. As Ashnak approached, he flicked the hair back out of his eyes and gazed as fearlessly as he could at the orc.

“Hhrmmm…” The orc squatted down. In the firelight Will could just make out the clan tattoos on his horny cheeks. Polearms slung across his back, black armour thigh- and arm-defences, engraved breastplate—This is no orc bandit, Will thought. He assumed a dignified confidence.

“And just why,” the orc growled, “would it offend my master the nameless to slice your skins from your bodies, and cook them, and feed them back to you, before we leave you impaled by your arses on our spears for the ravens to rip at?”

“You have a wonderful turn of phrase.” Will paused. “Your master?”

“Yes, little coney. My Master. Whose name you have made filthy in your halfling mouth, so perhaps I will feed you live coals after I feed you your skin.”

Ned Brandiman groaned.

“Bloody hell, Will! We’re not even at the Grey Crag. We’re not inside twenty miles of the place!”

Will sighed. He looked up at the orc’s face, upon which confusion was giving way to comprehension with surprising rapidity.

“I have a certain talisman about my person,” he said. “If I were you, I’d cut me free and let me reach it out. There are poison needles in the matter, you see.”

Shazgurim growled, disgusted. “Talisman. By the rotten bowels of the Dark Lord! Ashnak, you mark my words, we shall live to regret this.”

The jagged knife sliced the cords at his wrists and ankles. When they saw how he could not move, the big orc chafed his flesh between horny hands until Will, yelping, managed first to stagger to his feet and then, while they cut Ned free, to reach into the booby-trapped pouch and extract an inert cube of amber.

“Say your word.”

The orc’s brow furrowed. Ashnak at last muttered: “Zerganubaniphal!”

The amber cube pulsed once, warming Will’s hand. He tossed it to the orc, said “Banidukkunishubar,” and watched it glow with as great a light. “I won’t say ‘well met.’ We are twenty miles off the rendezvous and you’ve eaten my pony.”

“Our pony,” Ned Brandiman corrected. The brown-haired halfling stretched his arms and legs in turn and looked up at the orc from about waist-height. “You’re a warrior by the look of you—what’s the nameless doing sending the Horde? We don’t want you clumping around telling the whole world where we’re going. We don’t work that way.”

Shazgurim slouched over, tipping the visor of her steel bassinet back on her head. “Just how do you two work?”

Will and Ned looked at each other.

“Ned and Will Brandiman,” Ned introduced. “Notorious ’alflings. Sir and madam, you are looking at two of the greatest professionals it will ever be your good fortune to meet. As to what we do, we find lost property.”

Shazgurim snorted. “And is it usually lost before you two ‘find’ it?”

“Now that you come to mention it…”

Ashnak nodded his great tusked head. “Thieves. Our master the nameless said there would be thieves.”

“We prefer the term adventurers. It sounds so much more respectable.” Will brushed himself down and strolled across the dip to look at the ransacked chests. “You realise it will be necessary to return the tools of our trade? And, now I come to think about it, we have no transport. I think it would probably be advisable for you to detail one of your warriors to carry these chests for us.”

2

The squat orc warrior Imhullu peered over the weathered edge of the tor.

“Bandit country,” Imhullu opined. “Thick as fleas down there, they’ll be. And we’ve got to get those two little rats through it in one piece?”

Ashnak of the fighting Agaku leaned his back against a sun-hot crag, ripping the flesh from a still-twitching rabbit. The warm blood soothed his throat wonderfully. He wiped the back of his hand across his tusked mouth. “I asked for my war-band with me. The request was not granted.”

“Oh, well…”

No further reference was made to the nameless necromancer. Ashnak crunched the rabbit’s bones and then, careful not to skyline himself, took off his helmet and looked over the edge of the tor. His long peaked ears unkinked. Perfectly still, his hide a weathered brownish-grey, he might have been rock himself.

The high crags of the moorland went down to green dales, and tame rivers, and the chimney-smoke that spoke of Man’s habitation. Ashnak squinted into the wind. To the south, wrinkled bare mountains rose up. Signs of habitation ceased well before the foothills of those crags.

Turning his head, he made out how the moorland went around in a great curve, a hundred miles and more, all of it villaged, and finally became a distant spur of the mountains. Deceptive soft countryside. He could feel the tension of it from here, waiting for the final accounting.

“Quicker to go across than ’round,” Imhullu said. “If I had fifty picked warriors, I wouldn’t think twice about it. By the Dark Lord’s balls, our fighters could do with some raiding! Burn a few homesteads, eat the stinkin’ Men!”

“Not this close to the Final Battle.”

Squinting, he could from time to time make out Shazgurim scouting. The orc shambled from cover to cover, blending into the rocks wherever she stopped, and finally vanished over a concealing hill and—presumably—down towards the cart-track that was the nearest thing to a road that they had seen for days.

There was no sign of Zarkingu. But then, Ashnak thought, passing a hand wearily over his tough-hided brow, there wouldn’t be, would there? Agaku and sorcery don’t mix, and she’s a magic-sniffer, which makes her crazy as a bedbug, right? Right.

“You could send one of us with one of the rats cross-country, Captain, and the other ’round the long way.”

Imhullu’s suggestion clarified his mind. He said, “No. We’ll stick together. We’ll run it. Straight across to the mountains. What is it: fifty miles? We may have to carry the halfling scum, but we can do it in less than a night and a day—or we’re not fit to be called Agaku. We’ll move after sunset.”

Night came cloudy. Ashnak breathed a sigh of relief. He roused the three warriors and set them to running. The halflings, reluctant at first, ran nearly at orc-speed when Shazgurim and Imhullu set about them with whips, and for nearly half the night; then Ashnak picked up the younger of the two halflings and ran with him tucked under one arm, letting Shazgurim carry the other. With the two chests, that made four loads, and they laughed gutturally towards dawn, practising swapping loads by throwing them between each other without stopping. The warriors dropped the halflings only twice, and neither time was an accident, so Ashnak found it unnecessary to discipline them.

Night-vision showed him fewer and fewer villages, and fewer dogs howled as they passed by. In the cold grey before dawn, when Ashnak was particularly alert, he heard the jingle of horse-tack and the shouts of Men.

“It’s the cursed horse-riders,” Imhullu snarled. His feet pounded the earth, beating down the green corn.

Ashnak threw Will Brandiman underarm to Zarkingu, who, to his surprise, caught the halfling. “Race, Agaku! I’ll delay them. You know where we are to meet! Go!”

The dew began to fall on him as he slowed. The noise of their jingling weapons and armour faded, drowned out by the approaching beat of hooves. Ashnak squinted into the grey light, planted his feet firmly in the earth on the far side of a field-ditch, and unslung the poleaxe from his back.

“Hai!”

With a shout and a horse-scream the first rider cleared the ditch. Ashnak swung the poleaxe point first, struck home between the horse’s eyes, and killed it with that blow. The rider—a Man—flew off somewhere to the side and landed hard. Ashnak was already swinging back to hack at the legs of the second horse.

“We have him! Here! He’s standing ground!”

Grey shapes appeared to the left and right. Ashnak impaled the second rider as he fell, put his foot on the Man’s chest and ripped the axe free, and sung up into guard position, grinning.

“Peace!” he bellowed. “I surrender!”

He beamed with what he knew would not be recognised as sheer curiosity. The riders obviously took it for ferocity. When a circle of a dozen surrounded him—and he could have dealt with that number, they were mostly raw levies by the looks of them—he snarled and threw down the axe. It was still a goodly number of minutes before one female Man dismounted and chained his wrists together. After that there were kicks and blows, but orc-hide is thick. He winced, all the same, for the look of the thing.

By the time he had been dragged the mile or so to the nearest village and imprisoned in (of all places) the local church—it being the only stone building, he concluded—his boredom threshold had been reached. The other three should be well away towards the mountains. Still, there was a chance they might run into their share of problems, burdened with two troublesome halflings…

Ashnak spat on his hardened hands and began to bend the iron bars on the church door.

A voice became audible on the other side:

“—have him in here?”

He moved quickly and surprisingly quietly back into the body of the church. There was an altar to one of the smaller gods of Light, which troubled him only a little. There was no sign, he noted, of a stone for sacrifices, or any of the usual religious furniture.

“So!” Surrounded by ten or twenty armed warriors, a female Man entered through the doors. Most of her guard were Men, with a few dwarves, and—Ashnak growled—two or three of the elven filth, with bows.

Then he saw her face, and congratulated himself on his curiosity.

“This is nothing but an orc warrior, Master Mayor. Why have your villagers bothered me with this?”

And the voice too, Ashnak marvelled. So that’s the way of it, is it? Or is it? Can it be possible?

The village’s mayor, a thin and shabbily dressed man, stuttered, “But it’s an orc! An orc! Look at it!”

“I know an orc when I see one.”

Ashnak hunched further forward to disguise his height, being almost as tall as the Men there. He lurched forward a couple of steps, deliberately looked up into her face and flung his hand across his eyes. He dropped to his knees and banged his head against the stone paving. “Master! Nameless! Nameless Master!”

There were gasps, exclamations. When her voice spoke again, it was steely.

“I am not nameless. I am called The Named.”

Ashnak rose up onto hands and knees. It was a handy position from which to assess the arms present—his own weapons having been removed, he would need replacements. Then he looked up at the female Man.

“You are not the nameless?”

The Named said, “He is my twin.”

Ashnak studied The Named. He nodded and got to his feet. “You have his face entirely. There must have been something sorcerous in your birth, to bring you male and female so identical from the same womb.”

The woman’s short hair was the colour of buttercups, or clear fat when it is boiled from living bones. Her pale, tilt-eyed face had an almost orcish beauty. He guessed this might make her shunned among her own kind. He showed his back fangs in a grin.

She raised her hand and struck him across the face.

Not braced for it, Ashnak fell to one knee and then toppled over onto the stone floor. The magic of her augmented strength buzzed in his head. He felt his mouth, cutting the hide of his hand on a broken tusk.

“Lady!” Ashnak cowered.

“Yes!” she said. “I am his twin in power, also, but my power is given to the Light.”

On cue, sunlight slanted down from the church windows, shining back unbearably from the woman’s mirror-finish plate-armour. The gold Sun embroidered on her surcoat, insignia of the Order of White Mages, left afterimages dazzling across his vision. He raised a hand quite genuinely to block the sight.

“You must understand,” Ashnak said painfully, slurring his words a little, “to a warrior, none of this means much. Wars are wars. Power is power.”

“That is the Dark’s heresy!”

“I am a warrior. I am of the fighting Agaku! That is all I know, and all I need to know!”

“And all you need to know of me is…poor creature: I am merciful.” She turned on her heel. The rest of them followed her out—elven filth in their wood green, carrying bows taller than their tall selves; engineer-dwarves with food-stained beards; Man-heroes with the smell of horses about them.

Not looking back as she left, The Named said, “Confine him here for judgement, Master Mayor, until the Final Battle has been fought and won. That will be before this harvest-time, I promise you. Now we must ride. I must be in the city of Sarderis before noon.”

Ashnak suffered the village blacksmith to load him with chains, while he listened with the keen ears of an Agaku for The Named’s party to saddle up and go. The noise of that came as dawn properly lit the sky. Ashnak sighed and breathed out, snapping the chains. He was as tall as a Man, and something on the order of four times as heavyset. A little greenish blood trickled down from his muscular arms.

He reached out and took the blacksmith’s hammer, smashing the Man’s skull with it; and used that weapon to walk through the village to the armoury and collect himself what staff-weapons and projectiles might prove useful. He met no one capable of stopping him, and no one capable of outrunning him to get a message to the absent forces of Light.

The sky above turned blue and pink, clouds shredding away from the rising sun. Gold light fell welcome and warm on his hide. Ashnak trod through the dewy grass of the village green, avoiding the fallen bodies, relaxing in the day’s beauty.

He tightened the carrying-straps on his new war-axe, sniffed the air for direction, and began to jog, picking up speed, due south towards his warriors and their cargo.

Will Brandiman carefully stretched the seams of his shirt over the candleflame. Fleas sizzled and popped. He glanced over at Ned, who was scratching furiously at his crotch.

“I told you she had crabs,” he observed. Ned snarled.

The wind in the high mountains did not penetrate as far down through the cave-system as this cavern. Will could still hear it battering at the living rock. He shuddered. His whip-welts stung, despite copious applications of a salve they possessed far too little of. The grime of sweaty running clung to his skin; his bowels were emptying themselves with dismal irregularity; and suggesting cooked food to the orc warriors seemed the shortest way to an unsung death.

He gave up and shrugged the shirt back over his small, stocky shoulders, then fastened his trunk-hose. Next an arming-doublet, mail pointed to it; then an over-jerkin; and then a furred cloak. The cold of the rock still made him shiver. He cupped his hands over the candle-end.

“Where are the other two?” He nodded at Zarkingu’s back. Orcs do not perform acts of magic; they hate and fear it, and for that reason they are uncommonly good at sniffing it out. The small orc was cuddled into a heap around the shaft of her warhammer, staring listlessly up the passage.

“They’re scouting. Doesn’t it make you feel so bloody secure,” Ned said bitterly, “knowing they’re guarding us? When they said the contract included an armed escort, this isn’t what I had in mind!”

“I can smell magic,” Zarkingu crooned. “I can smell magic…”

“I can smell shit, sweat, and orc,” Ned said with asperity, “but do I complain about it?”

Will pulled his woollen cap down firmly on his black curls. He shuffled over to sit beside Ned. The same greasy pack of playing-cards (three of the major arcana missing) gave them a hand each—and an excuse for sitting together. Completely silently, and therefore not suspiciously.

Will moved his left hand rapidly and unobtrusively in the Thieves’ Guild finger-talk.

—Is the fourth one dead? That leaves them without a leader. That makes them dangerous.

Ned frowned at the cards he held, scratching through three layers of cloth at his lice-infested pubic hair. He used the movement to finger:

—They probably plan to kill us anyway when we complete the contract.

—Is she right about magic?

—I think so.

—So we stick to the original plan?

—Whether the other one comes back or not. I don’t trust him. I don’t trust any of the Agaku, they’re too cunning. Ordinary orcs would be a pushover. We counted on it being Men, remember?

Will musingly agreed: “Mmmm…Your deal.” He added in fingerspeech:

—We don’t have long. Four or five days, maximum. And thanks to these knuckleheads, we’re severely underequipped.

—Courage, brother. We won’t need long. But let’s not tell them that.

“I wonder if it’s dark or daylight?” Will played a deuce he had not been dealt. “It feels like afternoon. We’ll have to do some scouting of our own soon.”

A scuffle in the passage attracted his attention. Zarkingu lurched upright. The candle sent her spiked shadow dancing in a sudden draught.

“Who goes there?”

“I, Ashnak.” The big orc shambled into the cavern. Four fresh heads dripped from his belt, hung by the hair. He threw down the other male orc, unconscious, laughing deep in his chest. “I found Imhullu unsuspecting—wake up, fool!”

Will huddled unobtrusively into his cloak. The big orc unsnapped the whip from his belt and welted Imhullu across the back and legs until the other orc stirred, muttered something thickly, and then prostrated himself in front of Ashnak, banging his head on the cave-floor.

“Captain!”

“I’ll captain you, you miserable gut-rotted offspring of an elf!” Ashnak threw the severed Man-heads to Zarkingu, who cradled them. He strode over the prostrate Imhullu, towards the halflings. Will got to his feet, dusting himself down, and met the orc’s glare with a civil smile.

“Captain Ashnak. We were afraid you wouldn’t be rejoining us. No trouble, I hope?”

At the passage mouth, Zarkingu whispered, “I smell magic, much-magic, stinking magic, magic of Light…”

Ashnak coughed gutturally. He reached down and picked Will up by the front of his doublet, nails digging in through heavy wool and mail-shirt to cringing flesh. “Now we are in these unchancy mountains, halfling, you tell me—what are you here for?”

The mail-shirt, riding up under his arms, pinched Will’s skin painfully. He wriggled. Ned Brandiman stood up and tapped the orc’s arm, as high as the halfling could reach.

“We’re here for the usual,” Ned said. “To steal a hoard from a dragon.

3

The air had morning’s clarity in the mountains. Barashkukor looked up at the immensity of the rock—the great range of bare crags that ended, to east and west above him, in rockwalls almost vertical. Mountain stone gleamed grey, silver, ochre, and gold in the dawn light. He bared small fangs and snarled at the grandeur.

He shuffled down the parapet above the gate-house, sorting out the straps of his helmet and plated brigandine as he went.

In this sole gap in the mountain range, the isolated crag of Nin-Edin rose up cliff-sided, and the small road through the pass ran around the foot of it, under the walls of its ancient fort.

Barashkukor averted his gaze. He scratched at his balls, missing the sleeping warmth of the fifty bodies in his own orc-nest. He spared a glance back across the ruined motte and bailey of Nin-Edin—the bloody wreckage of the previous day’s Orcball tournament; several dozen orcs around the thinly smoking night’s firepits, sorting out the hunt and rutting in the open air.

“Here, Barashkukor.”

“Thanks, Kusaritku.” He took the wriggling rock-vole the black orc offered, knocked its brains out against his heel, and swallowed it in two gulps without chewing. “What news of the night?”

“Silent as a throat-slit elf.” Kusaritku passed a small bottle of black spirit.

The air had an unwelcome chill. Barashkukor drank. “Who’s the day-watch?”

“Duranki, Tukurash, Ekurzida. I’ll rouse ’em.” The black orc grinned. “Trust me!”

Barashkukor shambled further down the parapet, staring down the long valley of the pass while he pissed a steaming black jet off the wall.

A voice close at hand shouted. “—and I say he will reach it!”

“Never!” Marukka’s baritone bellow.

“You arse-licking elf-lover, he will!”

Barashkukor started, dribbling piss down his leg. Hastily he stuffed himself back in his ripped breeches and came to what might pass for attention. The largest of the black orcs, Azarluhi, strode past him without even a nod, deep in conversation with Marukka. The big female orc held a tiny orc by one leg.

“Watch!” she demanded.

She raised her arm above her head and whirled the small orc like a slingshot. Barashkukor ducked as its hands clipped his helmet. At the point of maximum velocity she let go, and the orc shot away in a low arc. A diminishing wail followed it down.

Barashkukor leaned over the parapet.

A puff of dust showed where the small orc first struck the steep slope, then another, then three more, like a stone skipping across water. The small body bounced and came to rest on the edge of the road, five hundred feet below.

“Aw. It did. But only just,” Marukka grumbled. She leaned over the parapet and yelled at the just visibly stirring figure: “Get back up here, Kazadhuron, you’re on guard duty!”

“That’s five shillings you owe me,” the black orc pointed out.

Marukka’s eye fell on Barashkukor with a gaze speculative as to weight and aerodynamics. She grinned at Azarluhi.

“Wanna make it best two out of three?”

In the timeless dark under the mountains, Ashnak squatted alone in a cavern. The light from the amber cube gleamed on his tusked and prick-eared face, shone from his polished vambraces and the rivets of his black armour.

He prodded the cube’s indentations delicately with one claw. A lightning-fork of black light sparked to the cave-wall. The rough stone turned black with ice, and a searing cold wind began to blow. The blackness became the dark of the tower. The whiteness of the Throne of Bone gleamed, and a shaft of light shot down and illuminated the seated figure.

The nameless necromancer shaded wide-pupilled green eyes with his hand. He glanced up, painfully, and made a magic sign with long, pale fingers. The shaft of light dimmed somewhat.

“What news for me, Ashnak, other than that you are arrived in the mountains?”

Ashnak rumbled, clearing his throat. “I allowed myself to be taken, for a short time, by the cursed horse-riders, and during this time I met one who is called The Named.”

A glacial amusement leaked into the cavern.

“So you have met my sister. That is well. This concerns her also. Now attend well to what I say, Ashnak.”

Ashnak heard the background clink of bottle and glass.

“The dragon Dagurashibanipal is old, and her hoard collected from many strange places and times. I have reason to know that in that hoard there are strange and magical weapons. Hmm.” The voice took on a thoughtful tone. “Halfling bones…too fragile to be truly creative with…no, you need not bring me back the bodies, once you are done. You are to take the weapons to the fortress of Nin-Edin, put them into the hands of the warriors there, and lead them against Guthranc. There you are to kill or take my sister The Named, so that she shall not ride against our Master the Dark Lord on the Last Day. Am I going too fast for you, orc?”

“We are to fight?” Ashnak sprang to his feet, a light in his eyes. Joyously he shook and brandished his warhammer. “I am to lead a war-band! Master, I thank you!”

“Not so loud…There must be servants I might have, of more tact and delicacy than orcs—but there again, you have your uses. Hurry to do my bidding, Ashnak.”

The image on the cave-wall altered. Ashnak saw factories belching out smoke, the siege-engines of war, the companies marching in from every land to a Lord greater even than the nameless necromancer; the Horde of Darkness gathering and its numbers hiding the very earth beneath it.

“Soon, soon, we ride out to the Final Battle. But,” the soft voice said, “my sister The Named must not ride against us. See to it, Ashnak. And be aware that, should you die failing to achieve this, my punishments are not limited by your being dead.”

Will Brandiman walked back out of the carved stone tunnel-entrance, slipping between the silver-inlaid oaken doors. Its roof was only halfling-high. He brushed black char from the front of his doublet. A few curls of hair fell, crisped, to the rock floor.

“All right?”

“Fine.” Ned Brandiman, following, pulled the door to behind him and sheathed a substance-tipped stiletto. “Gets ’em every time. Right. Let’s see what we’ve got…”

Zarkingu, a new skull-ornamented standard-pole over her shoulder, sniffed the air with an ecstatic expression on her tusked face.

“Dragon-magic dies,” she announced.

The biggest orc rumbled something to Imhullu and Shazgurim, who hefted their jagged war-axes in the narrow cavern and flanked the group. Will held up a small hand.

“Better let us go first, Captain Ashnak. There’ll be booby-traps, or I don’t know dragons. Even dead dragons. Ned, bring out the detection equipment.”

The older halfling, avoiding Will’s eye, dug into the brass-bound chest and brought out a wire-spring-and-glass contraption. It might even be a trap-detector, Will thought, for all I know. He took it with nerve-twitching care between his two hands and studied it with deliberation.

Ned rattled his fingers absently on the chest.

—I’ll do the checking for real traps, brother. You just convince them that we’re indispensable because we can work that thing. Whatever it is.

Will took a deep breath and turned back to the carved tunnel-entrance. Ned pushed the doors open. A breeze blew out, heavy with the spice-scents of decaying magic. In the light of Ned’s torch, and with the uncannily silent footsteps of four crouching Agaku behind him, he walked down the short tunnel and out into the great cave.

“Dark Lord’s prick!” Ashnak swore, straightening up.

Blue light blazed into Will’s eyes, brighter now as the great dragon died. He heard the other orcs exclaim behind him.

Dagurashibanipal’s spiky body lay, a glass mountain, in the centre of the cathedral-sized cavern. He stared at the crystal length of her, camouflage-coloured to the vast heap of silver and adamant upon which she sprawled. Even dead, she towered high as fortress walls. The unnatural yellow light died in the slits of her horn-lidded eyes.

One wing twitched.

Horn and bone slid together under torchlight. Metal sinews stretched, gears and cogs whirred, and Dagurashibanipal’s one prosthetic wing unfurled in a last mechanical reflex. It reared up into the cavern’s heights; curled, split, ribboned, shredded; then fell like a collapsing ship’s sail.

“Golem…” Will, eyes wide, stared at flesh and blood, at wire and canvas, and neither moved again. The poisoned dragon’s diamantine corpse stilled. He began a slow circling of the cavern wall beside Ned, paying a deliberate attention to the wire-and-spring device in his hands.

Ned muttered under his breath, “It’s only another dragon. Dammit. It’s only another dragon…”

Ashnak of the Agaku marched across to the hoard, kicking silver crowns and diamonds contemptuously aside. “This isn’t what we came to find! Are you sure this is the right dragon?”

Will, soberly, said, “There is—was—only one Dagurashibanipal, and that is she. Look out!”

Ashnak threw himself flat on the stone floor.

“Elfshit!” A claw ripped Imhullu’s face and the squat orc swore, ignored the blood streaming from his eye-socket, and swung the great jagged poleaxe in both hands. Something clashed, impacting against the stone wall. “Agaku! Agaku!”

Wings hissed through the blue air. Chittering, their metallic claws outstretched, a flock of tiny dragonet-golem fell from where they roosted in the cavern’s ceiling.

“Agaku!” Shazgurim yelled cheerfully, bassinet’s hound-visor down, swinging her axe in a figure-eight blur. Gear-cogs and glass eyes sprayed away from her.

“Last magic! Last magic!” The smaller female orc waved her hands in the air, attempting to snatch one of the dragonet-golem in flight. Ashnak straight-armed her into the wall, face-forwards, spat on his horny hands, and battered the last of the flying machinelets into crumpled horn and hawser.

“Well warned!” he chuckled throatily. “Good exercise for the Agaku, master halfling. Is there more?”

Will shook his head dumbly.

“Here!” Zarkingu hopped from foot to horny foot, wiping the blood from her battered features. “Ashnak! Here!”

Will carried the glass-and-wire device carefully over to the entrance of a side-cavern, hands still shaking. “Madam Zarkingu, best be wary. Let the experts check it out first. Ned, what do you think?”

“Mmm…could be fine…”

“But what is it?”

A vast tunnel stretched out before them, lit by the blue light of dying magic. The sides had been squared off, giving a flat floor and ceiling, and the walls and floor were, for as far as Will could see, lined with metal shelving.

He stared down the ranks of metal shelves. There were stacks of clothing of an odd colour and cut, metal-and-wire devices, chunks of solid but obviously forged metal—and all this piled high out of sight.

Beyond this first one, similar chambers stretched off into the underground distance.

“Different magic…” Zarkingu whimpered. “But not here—not these.”

“What’s this?” The big orc, Ashnak, pushed past her into the first chamber, seizing a big chunk of metal with what looked like a crossbow grip and trigger at one end. He pulled the trigger.

Foom!

“Arrrgggh!” Imhullu roared. Fire and shrapnel ricocheted off the tunnel wall behind him, pitted now with a line of two-inch-deep cavities. The squat orc grabbed at the severed tops of his long, hairless ears.

“Yaayy-ahh!” Ashnak lifted the weapon and pulled the trigger again.

Dakka-dakka-dakka!

Will ducked. A furnace briefly opened beside the left side of his face. The stone floor hit him between the shoulder-blades. The wire-and-glass device went flying. An earsplitting sound cracked his skull. Stunned, he hitched himself up onto his elbows, yelling, deafened, “No! Stop!”

Flame seared across Will’s vision, bright as the sun at midday, jabbing from the weapon’s muzzle. An explosion shook the air. Splinters of diamond flew from the adamantine corpse of the dragon, ricocheting back from the vast cave-walls, whizzing past him with dull whup! sounds.

“Weapons!”

“Ashnak! Ashnak!”

“The nameless was right!”

“Fighting Agaku! Fighting Agaku!”

On knees and elbows, Will Brandiman worked his way rapidly back across the dry stone floor to where his brother lay under the bottom-most metal shelf nearest the entrance. The halfling’s doublet and trunk-hose were thick with dust. He lifted his head slightly as Will pushed in next to him. Orc feet ran past, forward and back, bringing out piles of the metal objects into the main cavern.

“Are those all weapons, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised, Will. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

Horny feet pounded past and then plodded back. Shazgurim swore, dumping what sounded like half a ton of scrap metal in the main cavern.

“But what kind—sorcerous weapons?”

“Their magic-sniffer said not.”

The permanent temperature of the caves, chill but not freezing, began to sink into Will’s bones. He rested his head on his short arms, blocking out the blue-white light. “They’re probably going to kill us as soon as they remember we’re here.”

Ned whispered, “Can I bring three things to your attention, brother? One: as far as we could make out, Dagurashibanipal sealed up every entrance to this place, apart from that one rat-hole. Two: outside in the chests there is a small amount of the dwarven-rock-blasting powder.”

Will lifted his head from his arms. “Enough to bring a reasonable chunk of the roof down in that tunnel…What’s the third thing?”

“And three,” the elder halfling said quietly, “the mad one just said different magic. I don’t believe a dragon as old as Dagurashibanipal would leave this place without a curse on it. And my guess is that it’s probably one that operates better the longer one is actually kept near the hoard.”

“Mmmm…Yes. Let’s go.”

Sneaking out, keeping in the odd shadows that dying magic casts, Will hugged the cavern wall, edging round towards the tunnel. He passed close by Shazgurim as she lifted a thick metal stick with two stems projecting downwards, one short and straight, the other curved. She pulled the crossbow-type trigger.

Dukka-dukka-dukka-dukka-Foom!

The blacksmith-foundry noise ripped at Will’s ears and stomach. He ducked down into shadow. Hot metal sprayed the opposite walls, splinters of stone filled the cavern, and the orcs cheered. Shazgurim threw the weapon down and seized another, which seemed to require the loading of a metal canister into the muzzle.

Will, sneaking past the first abandoned weapon, noted the sigils 7.62 AVTOMAT KALASHNIKOV OBRAZETS 1947G imprinted in the metal.

4

Barashkukor dozed in the warm sun, and woke when his helmet fell over his eyes.

He grunted and snarled. “Marukka, go away!”

Another rock bounced off the parapet wall. This one hit his poleaxe, which he had propped against the crenellations. The weapon slid down with a crash. Barashkukor picked it up, scratching between his long, hairless ears.

“Barashkukor!” The black orc Kusaritku bawled from further down the wall. “What’s all the bleedin’ noise about?”

Barashkukor leaned over the parapet.

Thirty feet below, on the foot-trampled earth outside Nin-Edin’s main gate, two halflings stood looking up at him. Each wore doublet and trunk-hose, very ripped and travel-stained. The halfling with curly black hair wore black and grey garments and a blackened mail-shirt, and he had a short-sword buckled to his side. The brown-haired halfling had a heavy crossbow slung across his back, a mailcoat, and stood with a foot up on one of a pair of heavy, brass-bound chests.

Barashkukor stared down at their foreshortened figures, his jaw gaping.

The curly-haired halfling shouted, “Open! Open in the name of the nameless!”

Forty-three miles away, as sunrise touches the towers of Sarderis, The Named suddenly wakes from sleep with an expression that makes her pale features shocking in their ugliness.

Barashkukor stared down the pass again, between the massive raw-ochre slopes of the mountains. A small plume of dust rose from the road.

“That’s not our escort…” He slitted his eyes against the sunlight blasting back from the dry earth. “Marukka! You’re not going to believe this, Marukka…”

The female orc leaned her hairy elbows in the gap in the crenellations. “What am I not going to…Hey! Those aren’t the warriors we sent out as the halflings’ escort. Dark Lord’s arse! More travellers? I don’t believe it. Turn out the guard!”

Barashkukor tumbled down the steps into the guard-room, knocking an ongoing card game aside, grabbed up a helmet (a size too large) and a spiked mace, and bolted out to the main gate. He peered through the portcullis.

The plume of dust was closer.

Just distinguishable, on a Man-skull-ornamented standard, the banner of the nameless fluttered. Barashkukor strained sharp eyes, making out the standard-bearer and what looked like an immense loaded traverse made by lashing together pine-trunks.

“You! Here!”

He scurried to lend his weight to the winch that lifted the portcullis. Groaning and sweating, ten orcs at last got it up. Barashkukor sat down with a thud in the dust.

“They’re coming,” the largest black orc Azarluhi said, “whoever they are.”

Barashkukor heaved himself to his feet, settling the too-large helmet well back on his skull. It crushed his long, hairless ears uncomfortably. He unbuckled his brigandine, sweating in the noon heat and smelling like wet dog, and strolled to the gateway. The party was near enough now to make out detail.

“What…?”

Marukka, beside him, echoed, “What the—?”

Nin-Edin’s war-band leader, a hulking orc named Belitseri, elbowed his way to the front of the crowd. Orcs lined the parapet and massed in the bailey compound, yelling and screaming questions. Belitseri rested an elbow on Barashkukor’s helmet.

“What’s that?” he demanded.

“I dunno!” Barashkukor stared. The wooden traverse trailed dust back down the pass. What could be seen of its load glittered metallically in the sun. Two orcs, a one-eyed male and a hulking female, pulled it by brute force.

Both were wearing odd round helmets, visorless, with painted designs. He saw they also wore long breeches with the same green-and-brown patterns, but—never before seen—worn tucked into Man-boots.

The standard-bearer wore the same loose belted green-and-brown breeches, but with a similar jerkin from which the sleeves had been ripped off. One of the patterned sleeves had been used to tie up her purple hair in a horse-tail. The other sleeve hung from the nameless standard. Bulky metal ornaments hung at her belt and on bandoleers across her breasts. At thirty yards he could see the brightness of her eyes and the flecks of foam around her fangs.

Barashkukor, gaping, fixed his eyes on the largest orc: surely the leader. This one wore black-and-white patterned breeches tucked into heavy black boots that laced halfway up his muscular calves. The breeches had at least a dozen exterior pockets. Metal objects like fruits dangled from his belt and the straps that crossed his chest. Something very bulky and metallic hung across his back. One of his fangs was broken off short, he wore a strip of scarlet cloth tied around his forehead, and he was chewing a thick black roll of halfling pipe-weed, unlit.

“Erm…” Barashkukor stared. “Those are Agaku.”

None of the four Agaku slowed their pace at the gateway. Barashkukor, caught in the crowd of spectating garrison orcs, elbowed back out of the way of the traverse. Leader, standard-bearer, and burden-carriers walked through the gate with a peculiar, rhythmic stride.

By that time the whole garrison crowded the compound and the walls surrounding it, staring and jabbering, calling questions, laughing, throwing small rocks. Barashkukor gripped his mace fervently and used it to make himself a place in the front rank of the crowd.

The largest Agaku held up a horny hand. “Halt!”

Instantly the other three Agaku stopped, slamming their booted feet down onto the earth. Something in Barashkukor began to fizz excitedly. He stood up on his toes to watch.

The big Agaku strolled over to stand beside the standard-bearer. His gaze swept the garrison, the orcs clinging to parapet and ruined buildings. He spat the unlit pipe-weed out onto the ground.

“Now listen up!”

Barashkukor’s ears rang. He shook his head and just managed to grab his helmet as it fell off. The big Agaku surveyed the assembly with an expression of utter disdain.

“Do you know what you are?” His words bounced back from the heat-stricken walls. The orcs—by now several hundred strong—fell silent out of curiosity.

“I’ll tell you what you are. You’re scum! Call yourselves soldiers? You’re the lowest form of life there is—scum who think they’re soldiers. I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong.”

Orcs to either side to Barashkukor began to rumble, tempers rising. Marukka’s eyes flashed yellow.

“Who the hell are you?” a voice bawled from the back of the crowd.

The big Agaku grinned, showing more than one broken fang. “Who am I? Perhaps you’d like us to introduce ourselves?”

“Yeah!” Marukka challenged. “Who are you?”

The big Agaku strolled over until he was looming head-and-shoulders over the orange-haired orc. His voice carrying in the sudden silence, he said, “That, with the standard, is Marine First Class Zarkingu. You, soldier, are not fit to wipe her arse, lowly though she is. Over there is Corporal Shazgurim, and beside her Corporal Imhullu. You are not fit to even think about wiping their arses. And I, soldier, am Gunnery Sergeant Ashnak and you are not fit to even breathe in my presence, do you understand me?”

“Wh’…” The strange words bemused Marukka.

Barashkukor looked up at Ashnak, eyes shining.

Beside him, Marukka shook herself and narrowed her eyes. “Why you shit-faced—”

Ashnak’s fist went up, came down on Marukka’s head, and the orc fell to her knees, poleaxed. A gasp went through the crowd. Growls and snarls sounded in the noon heat. A few dozen of the garrison orcs began to edge forward with drawn knives.

The big Agaku turned his back and strolled across to the makeshift traverse, at which point he barked: “‘TenHUT!”

The two Corporals and the Marine First Class slammed their heels together, bulging arms hanging at their sides, beetle-browed eyes facing ahead, narrowed against the light. Ashnak lifted his head and looked round the garrison again.

“I’m here to make you balls of shit into soldiers,” he announced. “You sure as fuck won’t ever make the rank of Corporal. I doubt I’ll see any MFCs. You’re not the Agaku, but by the time I’m finished, I’ll make you dumb grunts into Orc Marines!”

Jeers and yells echoes off the sides of the mountain pass. The garrison orcs leaped up and down, chanting, foaming at the mouth. Barashkukor fought to keep his balance.

Gunnery Sergeant Ashnak swung the heavy piece of metal off his shoulder, did something to it with his horny hands that made it click and slam, and lifted it to his shoulder. Barashkukor glimpsed something that looked like a crossbow trigger-grip and flung himself face-down on the earth.

A loud explosion split the air, and a whoosh of heat scalded the compound. Barashkukor lifted his head as a loud whumph! sounded. Metal fragments sprayed the crowd of orcs, scything down bodies and slicing limbs from torsos.

The chain of the portcullis flailed, cut cleanly in two. Three masonry blocks fell out of the gate-house wall. The portcullis itself, falling free, buried its spikes eighteen inches deep in the earth under the gateway, impaling three small orcs.

Silence.

Barashkukor slowly dared to breathe.

“I’m here to make you into marines!” Ashnak bawled, “and you’re going to stay here until you are marines! Now get in ranks.”

A minute’s furious shoving put Barashkukor in the front of the war-band as it straggled into an approximation of rank and file. Excitement burned in his breast. He put on his over-large helmet and pushed it down level with his eyes, sloped his mace across his shoulder, and drew himself up as straight as he could. The gunnery sergeant strolled up to one end of the ranks, and then back down, and heaved a deep sigh.

“Standatt—ease!” he barked. The three Agaku relaxed their erect posture slightly. Some of the garrison orcs copied them. Ashnak spun round. “Not you! You’ll stand at attention until I tell you different. Attennn-shun!”

Barashkukor thumped his bare heels down into the dirt. The big Agaku caught his eye for a moment, and Barashkukor straightened still further. Ashnak nodded slightly.

“Now listen up!” Ashnak strolled back to the centre of the compound. “You scum can consider yourselves in training for a mission for the nameless. And since it’s an emergency mission, that means emergency training, and that means it carries on, day and night, night and day, until you get it right. Right, marines?”

“Erm…”

“…well…”

Ashnak shouldered his metal weapon threateningly. “Now listen to me, you…you…halflings! You’re talking to an officer! From now on, the first word and the last word out of your mouths is gonna be sir, you got that?”

Barashkukor led the ragged reply:

“Sir, yes sir!”

Ashnak scowled and bellowed, “Can’t hear you!”

Four hundred orc voices bellowed: “SIR YES SIR!”

“That’s better. That’s better, you halflings, I can almost hear you.” Ashnak fished in his pockets for another roll of pipe-weed and jammed it into the corner of his broken-tusked mouth. “Now let me hear you say what you are. You’re not garrison orcs. You’re not whatever poxy tribe littered you. You’re marines. That flag on the standard is your flag, if you’re ever worthy of it. Marines are the best. Marines are killing machines. What are you?”

Barashkukor straightened his slouching spine until he thought it would crack. The strange words the big Agaku used were becoming instantly familiar, almost part of his own tongue. No magic-sniffer, he nonetheless felt by orc-instinct that presence of sorcery, geas, or curse. But if the Marine First Class (Magic-Disposal) wasn’t complaining…He fixed his gaze directly ahead and sang out: “We are marines!”

His voice was almost lost in the full-throated chorus.

Ashnak, grinning, snarled, “Can’t hear you! What are you?”

“SIR, MARINES, SIR!”

Will put his feet up on the brass-bound chests, rocking to the movement of the ox-cart. He drank deeply from the ale bottle and passed it up to his brother, returning to the chickens, half side of pork, flitch of bacon, and four dozen small loaves that the cart had also been carrying.

The quiet farmland slid past them. The ox lowed from time to time, missing its former mistress, but Ned Brandiman flicked it with a carter’s whip from time to time, ensuring cooperation.

“I tell you one thing I want,” Ned said through a mouthful of bread and bacon. “I want an easier way to carry our equipment!”

Will scratched under the arms of his ripped doublet, by practise avoiding both the mail-shirt and his store of poisoned needles. “I’ll be happy to stick to city thefts.”

“Brother, you’re a fool. Name me a city that isn’t going to be sieged and sacked when the war comes.”

“Ha! Name me one that won’t grow up like a weed, twice as hardy, afterwards. Merchants never fail to fatten on wars. Even on the Last Battle.”

Evening’s golden light shone on the growing fields. No poppies yet to bloody the green corn. Smoke began to curl up from the chimneys of distant towns. Will shifted round, tugging at the crotch of his tattered trunk-hose, and staring whimsically back at the mountains.

“Do you think the orc garrison will have worked it out yet—that we fooled them into giving us an armed escort to the edge of the wilderness?”

“And transporting our baggage too? Call it part payment from our nameless employer.” Ned Brandiman reached back. Will placed a cold partridge in the outstretched small hand. His brother added, “So far all we’ve had for our work is whippings, beatings, poverty, and—”

“—and is it worth attempting to collect payment from an evil wizard, when his guards are dead or worse, and at any rate trapped under a mountain, and what we set out to thieve is still down there with them?” Will paused.

The ox-cart trundled on down roads that became steadily better-paved as they came closer to the city of Sarderis.

Will Brandiman bit into the chicken and ripped a wing free. He answered himself thickly, “Yes. It’s worth it. Not our payment—our revenge. What was it you overheard, brother? The nameless has a sister who is called The Named and who wears the armour of Light? I think we should find her, offer our services, and betray what we know to her.”

The vulture lets the wind feather its wings, rising on a hot thermal. The mountains lie below it like wrinkled grey flesh. Its central vision focuses on the parasites that crawl on that skin. A numerous hive of them, cupped in the fort’s stone claws…

Pickings are good now. The tough-hided beasts are cast out from the walls, bloodied and sometimes dead, in increasing numbers. True, it is commonly the little or the sick ones. And, true, there is a surprising lack of pickable rubbish in the compound.

It wheels, wings fingering the sky. Other vultures flock in from the wilderness’s wide skies.

Below, the orc marine garrison trains.

Midnight chimed from Sarderis’s city bells. Will Brandiman froze until the harsh clangs ceased. He strained his ears to hear movement from the closed doors that presumably—he and Ned had not been able to case more than the lower floor of the clothier’s shop in daylight—led to bedrooms.

His night-vision adjusted. He watched Ned pad along the upper-floor corridor, stop at the first door on the left-hand side, and listen for some moments. Ned signalled:

—No movement.

Ned reached up, tried the latch, and silently opened the door.

—Child’s room. Girl asleep.

Will passed him, treading barefoot and silent to the door on the right. Faint sounds came through the wood. He hesitated, signalled Ned to remain still, and padded down to the end of the corridor. Probably the master bedroom…

The latch of its door clicked, horrifically loud.

Will froze, not even daring to look back at his brother. The beamed and low-ceilinged corridor seemed suddenly airless in the summer night’s heat. A scuffling sound came from the room on the right, behind him—someone turning over in bed. But nothing from the room at whose door he stood.

He opened the door and signalled back, exaggerating the finger-movements in the poor light:

—One man. One woman. Both asleep.

Ned nodded, fading back into the little girl’s bedroom. During the day the clothes shop had seemed to have two girls—one seven or eight, the other sixteen or so, almost grown—and a much older male and female Man: the family living over the shop. In a shop doing reasonably well, but not well enough to afford protective spells.

Will’s nostrils flared. No scent of guard dog. Nothing but the wool-and-herb smell of the clothier’s shop, and the warm odour of sleeping Men. He waited no longer. Eyeing the wooden locker at the foot of the bed, he drew his eight-inch knife and approached the side of the mattress on which the middle-aged Man was sleeping. The man had yellow-tinged grey hair and liver-spotted hands.

Will clamped his hand over the Man’s mouth, pinching the nostrils shut; sliced the razor-edged hunting knife through the Man’s throat, and then stabbed it up under the ribs into the heart. The body heaved and twitched once, going instantly into shock and then death.

The female Man stirred, rolled a little, and reached out her hand towards the man.

Will Brandiman got one knee up onto the mattress, heaved his body up onto the Man-sized bed, and lurched over the bleeding body. His left hand flailed down, striking the woman above the eyes. She grunted. He slid his hand down over her mouth, hooked the knife across her windpipe and pulled it sharply towards him, and still with the same grip lifted the knife and slammed it down between her ribs. The woman’s throat gurgled. Her body relaxed.

Weak and shaking, he slid down off the bed. Blood soaked the sheets and mattress, dripping down to the floor. It would soak through the plaster and drip through the ceiling to the shop, he guessed; but that would only be discovered later. Tonight there would be no nosy neighbours—not unless something disturbed the silence.

Will trod stickily across the bedroom floor and looked down the corridor. Ned stepped out of the small girl’s bedroom. He held his knife, and the front of his doublet and trunk-hose were stained red. He pointed across to the remaining closed bedroom door and cupped his hand to his ears.

—Eldest daughter, Will signalled.

He walked down the corridor. A plank gave under his heel. Caught unprepared, he had shifted his weight before he realised, and the wood groaned. He froze.

Ned pressed his back to the corridor wall, a foot to the side of the right-hand door. Will crossed swiftly to the far side. Inside the room, flint scraped and a lantern sputtered. He heard footsteps move—cross the room—a chair-leg scraped. Nothing more.

Somewhere a city clock chimed a quarter past the hour.

Will flexed his shaking hands. The blood dried and flaked off, itching. He pressed his back against the wall, listening until his head felt as though it would burst. The faintest whisking sound might have been pages turning.

—We have to get her out of there.

Will nodded, and signalled back:—Get her to the open door. Then we can take her.

He let his chin rest down on his chest for a moment, and then raised his head. The starlight shone in through the bedroom’s open door opposite, illuminating in that room a bed too small for any Man but a child—a bed full of wet darkness.

Will put out his fist and knocked on the door, low down. “Lizzey, is that you?”

Knock, knock, knock.

“Go back to bed. I’ll get mum and dad up.”

Knock, knock.

“Go back to bed, Lizzey.”

Knock, knock, knock, knock.

“Lizzey, go away. I’ll get mum and dad up, and they’ll give you a hiding.”

Will knocked again, low down on the door. Behind the closed door he heard a chair scrape on floorboards.

“All right, Lizzey, you just wait—”

The latch lifted and the door opened.

“Lizzey?”

The yellow-haired young woman frowned, caught stooping over to the height of a child. Ned brought his hunting knife up double-handed, slashing across her throat, and buried it in the back of her neck as she pitched forward onto her hands and knees and slowly slumped onto her side.

Will stabbed up under the ribs and into the heart. The girl’s throat gurgled. He straightened up.

Less careful of noise now, Will walked through the corridor towards the master bedroom. A faint lamplight streamed out of the older daughter’s room, shining on the sprawled dead body. It gave enough light for to see the lock on the chest.

“Damn.” Ned swapped lock-picks. “Damn.”

“Easy…” Will put a hand on his brother’s arm. “Take it slow. There’s no hurry now. It won’t be light for another three hours.”

The lid gave, opening with a creak that made him flinch by reflex. Will stared into the empty chest. He grunted, smiling slightly; reached down and pulled the false bottom out. The distant lamplight glinted on coin—mostly silver, a few copper bits, and a very few pieces of gold.

“Just that?” Ned complained.

“Sarderis is a city. There are such things as banks. This will be today’s takings, nothing more.” Will sifted the money between his stained palms, taking the heft of the cold metal. “It’s still what we said it would be: the easiest way to replenish our funds. Anything more profitable would be harder and take more planning.”

Ned Brandiman, counting, grunted.

Will padded back to the eldest daughter’s room. The corridor stank of excrement. He stepped over the body. Something about the unintended eroticism of the way her limbs sprawled reminded him of another female Man, a long time ago, also dead. There was a jug and a basin in the room, and he washed his face and hands and sponged down as much of his doublet and trunk-hose as seemed feasible.

“One thousand and seven silver shillings, twelve copper pennies, nine gold pounds,” Ned announced. “Fifty-nine pounds eight shillings total. It’ll buy us new clothes, and a pony and harness, and maybe replace some of the equipment…”

“And make us fitly dressed visitors to The Named,” Will said.

The smell of blood hung heavily in the air, as sweet and rich as a butcher’s slaughterhouse. His gut rumbled. There is nothing a halfing likes so much as a good meal. He had eaten Man, when times were difficult, and found it more or less palatable, but not when raw.

“Mmm.” Will raised his eyebrows. “See if the fire’s banked in, will you, brother? If it is, let’s cook some young flesh; it’ll be the tenderest.”

His brother nodded. “I’ll go look.”

“And—before the blood dries—I’ll write somewhat on the walls.” Will surveyed the stained white plaster. “Let them think, whoever discovers this, that it was a madman’s act, or done by worshippers of the Dark. Anything to stop them looking for two honest thieves.”

Ned chuckled, walking towards the stairs that led down to the shop and the kitchens. “I remember the last time we did this—you hacked off the heads and impaled them on the bedposts to make it look like the work of a maniac, not a thief.”

“It worked, didn’t it? Four copycat killings before the end of that week if I recall. Covered our tracks nicely.”

Will squatted beside the body of the yellow-haired girl, dipping his fingers in the splashes and gouts of blood. After a while he smiled at his own ingenuity. He wrote:

5

The Bell HU-1 Iroquois helicopter lurched nose-downwards over the compound of Nin-Edin, skittered in circles, its tail wagging to and fro, and finally planted its skids in the dirt with a crunching thud. Twelve orc marines staggered out of it and weaved away across the compound.

Wind from the rotors blasted grit into Barashkukor’s face as he leaped from the Huey after them, head down, staggered a few yards away from it, and fell onto his knees on the earth.

“Shit!”

On his hands and knees, eyes streaming tears, he proceeded to vomit copiously. Then, lifting his head slightly, he saw that he had thrown up over the (formerly) gleaming toes of a pair of very large combat boots.

“Corporal Barashkukor!”

“Yessir! Sorrysir!” Barashkukor climbed unsteadily to his feet. Ashnak smiled ferociously.

“What’s the matter with you, Corporal? I’m a reasonable orc. Just tell your old sarge what the matter is…”

“Well, Sarge, it’s—”

“…BEFORE I RIP YOUR LOUSY, SCRAWNY, PUS-RIDDEN SKIN OFF AND NAIL IT TO THE NEAREST WALL!”

Barashkukor, ears drooping, wiped his runny nostrils. His green combat trousers were sagging towards his ankles, and he dragged them up, tightening his web-belt, and shrugged the over-large flak jacket further down his skinny body. He snapped a salute, catching one of his long, hairless ears painfully.

“Sir, sorry, sir. Beg to report, sir,” he said, “I think we’re going to have a problem with the airborne assault, si—Bllleggh!”

Company Sergeant Major Ashnak looked down at the new layer of slime covering the toes of his boots.

“Sarge, I… that is…” Barashkukor squeezed his eyes tightly shut. “I’ll just fetch a hammer and nails, shall I, Sarge?”

“CLEAN THAT UP!”

Barashkukor’s ears flattened in the blast of the big orc’s wrath. “Sir, yes sir!” He fell to his knees and began licking. “Sir, what about the Huey, sir?”

The company sergeant major planted both horny fists on his hips, glaring downwards. He spat an unlit roll of pipe-weed a good three yards. The early sun shone on his grenade-loaded webbing and bullet-bandoleers, and lit up the regimental sigils painted on his tusked face. He tugged the peak of his forage cap further down over his beetle-browed eyes.

“Corporal, get that vomit rocket grounded for good! We’re gonna hafta move out of this position soon. None of you useless bastards can fly the chopper without puking your guts and crashing it—it’s losing me soldiers. Ground it! Frag it! I never want to see the fucking thing again!”

“Sir, yes sir!”

Barashkukor crossed Nin-Edin’s compound on the double from a racing start, avoiding the piles of oily machinery, disassembled jeeps, turds, and occasional orc corpses littering the ground. The air was already hot. The compound steamed. The fort’s rebuilt stone buildings now bristled with skull-pole insignia, gun emplacements, and orcs in combat gear. He slowed, hearing the sound of squads drilling.

“Marine Kusaritku!”

The small black orc turned smartly and saluted. Sixteen of the larger orcs shuffled to attention, drawn up in what they obviously fondly regarded as parade formation. Barashkukor sighed heavily and showed his minute fangs in a smile.

“Call this drill, marine? These squads need more hard work.”

The orcs shuffled into semi-upright stances. The sun glinted on their practise blunderbusses and muskets, held at the slope, and on the occasional broom also held at slope-arms position. At least two of the big orcs wore buckets for helmets.

“Now, you orcs.” Barashkukor planted his feet widely apart and clasped his hands behind his back. “I have a mission of vital importance for you. It may be difficult. It may be dangerous! It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it—and it’s your lucky day.”

Kusaritku ostentatiously looked up at the dawn sky, picking one hairy nostril. The squad of orcs variously scratched bits of their anatomy, hummed, stared off towards the mountains, and—in the rear rank—continued playing cards. Barashkukor filled his lungs with air.

“I didn’t say anything about volunteers!” His voice squeaked. He cleared his throat and resumed. “Assholes and elbows, you halflings! Get some ropes and heave that chunk of useless machinery over the wall. I never want to see a Huey again. Now move!”

The horde of fanged and tusked orcs broke ranks, seizing ropes as they went, and charged towards the helicopter. Kusaritku ran in their wake, shouting unheeded orders.

“Someone’s going to suffer for that,” Barashkukor murmured, turning smartly on one heel. “Lack of discipline. MFC Duranki! See that Marine Kusaritku reports to Sergeant Zarkingu after he’s carried out my orders…”

“Sir, yes sir!” The shaven-skulled orc saluted as he passed.

Barashkukor drew a deep breath and began to walk back across the compound, taking salutes from MFCs and marines even where it was necessary to detour some yards to do it. He buckled the GI helmet firmly down over his long ears. The morning sun shone on one of the stone buildings, now ornamented with a bullet-scarred square of metal upon which someone had painted “Officers Mess.” He could see, through the window, a fistfight in progress—which was not at all impeding the darts game that was also under way. As Barashkukor passed the window, he heard a scream from the orc, nailed to the wall, with concentric target rings painted on her stomach.

“Sergeant Major!”

He intercepted Company Sergeant Major Ashnak as the big orc left the Officers Mess. Ashnak surveyed Barashkukor, and hastily moved his boots out of the way.

“What it is, Corporal?”

“Sir, you said we’d be leaving this position, sir, and that must mean we’re going to fight, and—” Barashkukor heaved in a breath of hot, foetid air. “And you said I could have a real gun, sir; please sir, can I, sir? Now, sir?”

Company Sergeant Major Ashnak examined his talons. “Certainly, Corporal, certainly. In fact, I think we might even issue you an M79. Follow me.”

Barashkukor trotted across the compound beside the large orc, towards the ruined stone building marked out as the armoury. He passed a smoking crater in the earth. A scorched size three pair of combat boots occupied the hole, and the explosively dismembered corpse of an orc. Ashnak strode over a second crater, and spat his cigar into a third. Barashkukor narrowly avoided the fourth crater, where a larger pair of scorched boots rocked gently.

“I see Squad Three’s mine detector is still on the blink,” Ashnak ordered. “Here we are, Corporal. Try this.”

Barashkukor reached up to the armoury issuing-window and grabbed the gun Ashnak offered. He leaned over backwards to counteract the apparent weight and staggered, finding it unexpectedly light.

“The M79 forty-millimetre grenade-launcher,” Company Sergeant Ashnak announced.

Barashkukor strained to grasp the fore-end and stock of the blunderbuss-like weapon, which seemed twice as long as he was tall. He flipped the catch, broke the gun, dropped the positively enormous shell that Ashnak handed him into it, and closed it down. He tucked the stock into his shoulder, muzzle waving wildly as his helmet slipped down over his eyes, and grabbed for the trigger.

“Testing the weapon now, sa—”

FOOM!

The sun shone painfully into his eyes. Barashkukor rubbed a hand across his face and brought it away bloody. Stone dust covered his combat trousers, where he sprawled on his back amongst the rubble of the armoury wall. There was a warm, wet patch at his crotch. His helmet was gone. The M79 grenade-launcher had landed several yards away. Every bone in his body ached, his ears rang, and his nose bled.

“I should watch the recoil on that one…” CSM Ashnak strode away, grinning, and pointed to a scattered orc body on the far side of the compound, the bits still smoking from the grenade impact. “Get that taken over to the cookhouse. Then get your squad on parade, Corporal, I’ve got an announcement to make. Now, marine!”

By the time the ringing concussion had died out of his ears the marine company was drawn up in serried ranks, filling the compound to capacity. Barashkukor snapped his squad to attention, saluting, as Zarkingu walked down the ranks.

“Mmm—yes—hmm?” The sergeant (Magic-Disposal and Administration) lifted her snout out from a sheaf of papers. Her tilted eyes glittered in the sun, and a slight froth trickled down her small porcine jaws. One of her ears twitched arhythmically. “Corporal, your squad needs a colour designation. Call yourself Red Squad, or Blue Squad, or…”

“Yes sir, ma’am!” Barashkukor slammed a salute. “Please, ma’am, permission to designate this squad Black Squad?”

“No!” The female orc glared. She rattled the sheaf of papers under Barashkukor’s pointed nose. “We already have fifteen Black Squads, twelve Dark Squads, four Raven Squads, three Midnight Squads, one Sable Squad, one Ebony Squad, and,” she consulted a sheet of paper, “one Pink Squad. Hmm. Yes. Well…We’re all a little worried about Pink Squad…”

Shaking her head, she moved on past Barashkukor. He watched out of the corners of his long eyes as she halted in front of Marukka’s all-female squad with their black unit-tattoos, whose helmets had “BADGURLZ” stencilled on their camouflage-covers.

The sun beat down on Nin-Edin. The homely stench of ordure and decaying flesh rose up from the compound, comforting Barashkukor. He unobtrusively straightened his cleaned webbing and eased the strap of the M79 grenade-launcher where it cut into his horny shoulder.

“Officer on deck!”

Barashkukor came to attention and slapped his hand against the butt of the M79. The big female Agaku, Shazgurim, paced along the ranks of orcs, grinning nastily. She gave a lazy half-salute.

“At ease, orcs. Sergeant Zarkingu will now read you this week’s promotion list. Zarkingu…”

The smaller female orc marched up to the skull-standard pole, snapped an about-turn, and faced the orc company. Her thin, piercing voice echoed in the noon heat.

“Now listen up! The entrails have been consulted, according to the usual procedure, and the results of the promotion-auspices are as follows. MFC Kusaritku is promoted to corporal. MFC Marukka is promoted to corporal. MFCs Azarluhi, Tukurash, and Ekurzida are made sergeants. Corporal Barashkukor is promoted to first lieutenant.”

Barashkukor drew himself up proudly, ignoring the jealous mutters in the ranks. He grinned his fiercest grin.

The small female orc, eyes gleaming, continued: “Sergeants Imhullu, Shazgurim, and myself are promoted to the rank of captain. CSM Ashnak is promoted to major, in command of this company. That is all.”

A voice behind Barashkukor muttered, “Arse-licker!”

“You!” Barashkukor snarled. “After parade. The whip: fifty strokes!”

“Company, tenHUT!”

Three hundred combat boots hit the packed earth in unison. Barashkukor, facing eyes-front, caught sight of Major Ashnak in his peripheral vision. The big orc walked slowly between the ranks, Sergeant Imhullu behind him, stopping to exchange a word or two here and there.

Noon beat down on ranks of orc grunts, on web-belts hung with grenades, on rocket-launchers, assault rifles, antitank weapons, and machineguns. Orc-fangs glinted; squad insignia painted on hunched shoulders shone. Variously coloured combat fatigue trousers blazed back the light, cleaned and pressed after hard training. Boots shone.

“A good turnout, sergeant.” Ashnak walked from the rank behind Barashkukor, Imhullu at his side. “Very good; I’m impressed. Stand the orcs at ease now.”

“Squaaaads, standat—ease!”

Again, three hundred boots hit the earth together. Barashkukor clasped his hands behind his back, wondering just where a first lieutenant’s insignia should be tattooed.

Ashnak strode to where several ammunition cases had been assembled in a dais, and stepped up onto them. His black-and-white urban camouflage stood out against the blue sky.

“Right, you orcs, listen up!”

The Agaku had a machinegun and bandoleers slung across his back, and a Desert Eagle automatic pistol in the holster on his web-belt. His broken fangs had been capped with silver and polished, and a major’s insignia was painted on his muscular, sloping shoulders. Grenades hung from his belt. He wore a battered urban forage cap.

“You’ve trained hard.” Ashnak surveyed the ranks. Barashkukor straightened his aching shoulders as the big orc’s gaze swept over him.

“And now your training’s over.” The Agaku grinned. “I’m proud of you. You’re marines! You’re hot! You are fucking hot marines!”

Shrieks and cheers split the air. Barashkukor shook his grenade-launcher in the air, taking two hands to do it. The big Agaku held up a hand for silence. He got it.

“Your training’s completed, and you’re ready for your first big mission. Your officers will brief you fully in a moment, but I want to say this. We know now that the date for the Final Battle has been set.”

The breath left Barashkukor’s chest as if he had been hit. Fear and adrenaline sparked through his veins, firing him with a fierce joy, and he growled in his throat.

“The Horde of Darkness will march on the night of Samhain. But before that, and to ensure its success, you are first going to perform your mission.”

The company stood quiet now. No noise in the noon of Nin-Edin but the vultures wheeling about the mountain fort and crying. Barashkukor swallowed with a suddenly dry mouth.

“And succeed in it. I know you can do it—I’m proud of every one of you mean motherfuckers! You’re trained marines now.” Ashnak straightened, one taloned hand resting on his pistol. “Trained and armed. Captain Zarkingu will be instructing you personally later, but I will say this now. These guns are not sorcerous weapons. They are not magical. And therefore—therefore the magic of the Light has no defence against them.”

6

The interior of the Great Hall of Sarderis’s city keep shone white in the afternoon sun. Will Brandiman, comfortably replete, advanced towards the dais at the end of the Hall and bowed. Ned, walking beside him, looked wide-eyed and wondering at the company of elves, dwarves, and Men crowding around the dais, and at the female Man sitting on it in the high-backed chair.

“Will and Ned Brandiman.” Will bowed again. “Halfling brothers, my Lady. Very much at your service.”

He tugged his new silver-embroidered black doublet as if he were straightening it, taking advantage of the movement to check with nimble fingers the position of secret poisoned needles. His short-sword and throwing knives he had handed in at the gate-house, keeping the mail-shirt on pretence of personal danger.

Ned bowed, cloddishly, still gazing up wide-eyed. Will trod on his brother’s foot as a warning not to overdo it, unwilling to use the Thieves’ Guild finger-talk where it might be recognised and read.

“You two it was who found the family butchered? How is that so?”

The female Man on the dais leaned forward in her chair. The light from the whitewashed walls shone from her plate-armour and the dazzling surcoat with the golden Sun embroidered on it. As her face came into the light, Will used every effort to keep from flinching.

Her hair shone yellow as any female Man’s, cropped short over pointed grey-white ears. The greyish white of her skin continued across her face, becoming blotched with dark grey and black patches over her jaw and down her neck to where the gorget covered her skin. One misshapen tooth pushed up a corner of her wide, thin-lipped mouth. Thick hairs protruded from her flat nostrils, and her eyes—tilted so that they slanted up from the outer corners towards the bridge of her nose—glinted green.

“Fear me not.” Her soft voice slurred a little, and a drop of saliva ran from under her lip where her tooth lifted it. She wiped her mouth with a gloved hand. “Fear not, halfling. I am called The Named. I wear another’s ugliness of soul upon my body—as he wears the beauty of my virtue, unearned, on his face. But that shall change, also, when we face each other in the final confrontation. For now, believe my heart serves the Light, and speak your answer. You it was who discovered the bodies?”

Will Brandiman spread his hands helplessly. “My Lady, the very sight was… horrific. These were good people of the town with whom we took lodging, and I greatly fear that was their downfall.”

The Named said sharply, “How so?”

“It must be that we were followed, Lady, on our way to you, and whoever sought our lives found those good people, and so…” Will swallowed. “We were about our own business that night, not returning until the morning, when we found their bodies.”

A slender elf in green stepped forward from the crowd. “Some creature of darkness was responsible, Lady. The child’s body had been cooked and partially eaten. It is an infallible sign of the orc-filth. None but orcs could be capable of such wickedness.”

“And the writing? Can orcs write?”

The elf bowed her head. “For that, I know not.”

Ned Brandiman, at Will’s elbow, said, “Our lodging was paid two weeks in advance at the shop. If the Dark has human spies in the city, I suppose they must have found that out and sent for… other creatures to attack us. Perhaps it was spies of the Dark who wrote—but I can’t read, Lady. Brother Will told me what filth they wrote.”

“I did.” Will patted his brother’s arm. With his hand firmly on Ned’s arm he took the opportunity to finger:

—I said act impressed, not half-witted.

Will added, “Lady, there is much that you should know. I fear your brother seeks our life.”

The stunningly ugly face shifted into something that might have been a sad smile. “Say on, little one.”

“It is to our shame,” Will launched into his story, “that we were, in part and as it seems, employed by your brother the nameless…”

He wielded ignorance and innocence in a complex web, his eyes on The Named’s misshapen face, leaving it to Ned to scan the assembly for armed Men, hostile dwarven-kind, and elvish mages.

“…I grew to know something of these orcs. Orcs have no love of magic, Lady—unless it’s the sort that requires much torture and sacrifice and has short and easily pronounced incantations. But their magic-sniffer could tell an absence of magic truly. And so we fled for our lives, concluding that if they should escape, your brother’s orcish army now has weapons that are not magical but are infinitely greater than sword or bow. And these he will put at the disposal of the Dark Lord.”

He paused.

“And so we feared for you, Lady, and for all our sakes, and so came searching for you to tell this tale.”

The green eyes, the only beauty in that face, met his. Her gloved hand beckoned. He walked to the foot of the dais, Ned at his heels, and craned his neck to look her in the face still.

“You have done well to bring this tale to me. What reward would you have?”

Will opened his mouth, but before he could get a word out, Ned said, “We’d paid our two weeks’ lodging at the house—is there any chance we could have that refunded?”

The female Man’s head went back, and her wide, loose mouth opened in a bellow of laughter. Will instantly sized up the distance to the guarded exits. He put his heel down crushingly hard on Ned’s foot.

“We want no reward,” he said emphatically.

Her laughter stopped. “A strange quest you tell of, halfling. It seems by it, although you conceal it, that you are thieves. But even thieves may become the instruments of Light.”

Ned muttered. “‘Adventurers.’”

Will shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, prepared to grab poison needles and flee under the feet of the crowd around the dais. “Thieves it may be—but thieves who hate the Dark as much as you do, Lady.”

“Elinturanbar,” she called. She wiped her mouth again with her soft glove.

A robed elf, taller by a head than any there, walked out of the crowd. Men and dwarves and elven-kind moved aside from the sway of his white robes embroidered with the gold Sun of the Mages. Will stared up into the lean face.

“Elves!” Ned exclaimed. “I never thought I should see Elves, Will.”

Will caught the missed breath in his brother’s ingenuous remark and the imperceptible shift to a combat-stance. Something cold twisted in his gut.

The elf’s face showed the faint fine lines of age.

Not half-elven, having none of the signs, nor yet one of the Long-lived come to the finish of his ages and the readiness to take ship to the Eternal Lands. Elinturanbar’s lean face, webbed with crow’s-feet at the eyes and mouth, shone with a fanatical light—that of those of the elven-kind who, out of the curiosity of the immortal, voluntarily embrace the pain and death that Men and other mortal creatures know.

“Elinturanbar will question you,” The Named said. “He is my inquisitor. The deceptions of evil are many and legendary—forgive me that I choose to test you, as metal is tested in the forge, before I decide if you are tempered to become a sword of the Light.”

Nimble, Will’s hand darted for the needles sewn into his doublet’s tabs. Fast as he moved, the aging elf inquisitor stooped faster and caught his arms, twisting them bonecrackingly hard up behind his back.

Ned Brandiman took his hands out of the loose puffed-and-slashed sleeves of his doublet. Weighed down by the sheer bulk of metal, he nonetheless managed to brace both arms and hold out, muzzle wavering, the 1911 U.S. Army issue Colt .45 autoloading pistol.

The midday sun burned down from a cloudless sky. The orc marines, beetle-browed eyes staring to the front, pounded down the track away from Nin-Edin under four- and five-ton loads of rifles, grenade-launchers, machineguns, machine-pistols, antitank weapons, and innumerable belts of ammunition.

“Hut-two, hut-two!” Lieutenant Barashkukor stood with his hands on his hips, on the seat of his jeep. “Fucking elves could move that load faster. You want the major to see you?”

Three hundred pairs of orc boots pounded down the road away from Nin-Edin in unison, the column raising plumes of dust. Barashkukor drew a deep breath and bellowed at the passing rank and file of orc grunts. “Are you marines? Move!”

“Sir, yes sir!” Corporal Duranki shouted. His jaw set, he pounded on down the track. Like the others, the albino orc staggered under a backpack of weaponry three times his own height.

“Then move your fucking asses!” Barashkukor bellowed happily. “At the double, orcs!”

A metallic clash sounded.

Harsh, rhythmic; the noise of bells, horns, trumpets, drums, and a saxophone split the air. Nine of the smaller orc marines, stepping smartly, bashed out an impromptu military march. They were singing, Barashkukor noted, something to the effect of “From the halls of Japh-kanduma to the shores of Zithan-dri…”

Captain Zarkingu (Magic-Disposal, Administration, and Band Duties) marched past at the head of the band and the second column, skipping from side to side and tossing her skull-standard up in the air, macelike, in time to the music.

“See you at the Tower, L.t.!” Zarkingu yelled.

Barashkukor saluted. He sat down in the jeep’s back seat, tilting the GI pot back on his head and letting his long, hairless ears spring out from under it.

“Lieutenant Barashkukor!”

Barashkukor jumped up and came smartly to attention, snapping a crisp salute. “Sir, Major Ashnak, sir! We removed stores of weapons from the mountains, sir. Everything is being transported with the company, sir, including ammunition. The orcs are moving out as requested, sah!”

“Thank you, Barashkukor.” Ashnak gave a casual salute. “Your unit’s got flying experience with Hueys, Lieutenant.”

“Sir, yes sir!” Barashkukor leapt out of the jeep. “That is…sir, no sir! Incapacitated by illness, sir. The Bell HU-1 Iroquois was disabled according to your orders, sir!”

Major Ashnak took the unlit roll of pipe-weed out of his tusked mouth and threw it down, grinding it under one polished combat boot. He tilted the urban camo forage cap back on his misshapen skull.

“There were at least two Hueys in Dagurashibanipal’s hoard, Lieutenant. Break out another one. Find a pilot and a marine with co-piloting experience and report back to me.”

Ashnak removed his forage cap and buckled on his GI-issue helmet, grinning toothily.

“I have my orders from Dark HQ, Lieutenant. I’ve got no choice.”

“I have no choice!”

The Named swings up into the saddle of the white warhorse, bright armour clashing. Her destrier lays its ears flat back against its skull. She effortlessly controls it.

“It is my fate to go to the Tower of Guthranc at the appointed time and use its power to summon the Army of Light to the Fields of Destruction. The time is now. The signal is mine alone to give!”

The sun colours her ugly grey-white face with the gold of dawn. Her breath curls in the summer’s-ending chill. Somewhere in Sarderis there is the scent of the sea.

“Follow my orders!” She wipes trailing saliva from the corner of her loose mouth. “This was prophecied for me when I was in my cradle, and I cannot avoid my destiny. I go now to Guthranc to sound the first war-summons to the Northern Kingdoms—I ride at dawn!”

A gold Harvest moon rose over the distant mountains. The wind felt cold on Ashnak’s face. He rested his back up against a trampled earth-bank smelling of cow-dung and machine-oil.

A scout orc slipped into the cover beside him. “Sir, nothing, sir.”

The orc’s commando knife dripped. Ashnak peered between the hedge’s thorn bushes towards the village by the river. It showed even to his eyes as blackness against blackness. No lights, no cock-crows, no hammers in the smithy. He smelled the scent of Man-blood on the air.

“Nothing left but the oldest and youngest of Men, and those were in hiding. All the smithies are empty, all the horseflesh gone.” She saluted. “No resistance, sir. We can take the columns through the river valley.”

Ashnak’s hide twitched in the night’s chill.

“This is a land waiting to be at war…Their warriors will be riding away to the great musters of the Light.” The wet earth soaked through his combats at knee and elbow. “Move ’em out, soldier.”

Ashnak rose and walked back from the advance post, radioing for Shazgurim and Zarkingu to move their companies out, and the night became a morass of small noises—muffled boots, the clink of weapons, a snarl, the buzz of a radio transmission. It went on interminably as he walked back, squad after squad of orcs trampling the earth as they passed him. The big Agaku bared his fangs with exhilaration.

The full moon loomed, silver now, patterns of the Dark visibly smirching its face.

Shapes shambled across the fields and resolved themselves into three of the fighting Agaku. The second company of marines began to pass Ashnak, and he saluted the ranking officer at its head. The moonlight cast his shadow heavy and sloping on the wet earth.

Others shadows joined it: squat Imhullu, hulking Shazgurim, and Zarkingu’s shadow skipping from foot to foot.

“The artillery are in position!” Zarkingu unfurled a scroll of paper, spreading it out. Her eyes and fangs gleamed in the moonlight. Ashnak and his sub-commanders squatted to study the map.

“This is the Tower of Guthranc. That’s cultivated land. This is the edge of the forest, here, and this is the main road from Sarderis.” Ashnak pointed.

Imhullu untied the camouflage-neckerchief from his brow, wiped his weeping empty eye-socket, and replaced the cloth. The squat orc punched Ashnak’s bandoleer-covered chest. “Nine platoons—we’re taking three whole companies in. Practically a small battalion. Against what, less than a hundred of the Man-filth? Armed with swords and bows…?”

“Seven to one,” Ashnak said. “Reasonable odds.”

“They’ll have a few spells. Some damned magic-user or other.” Shazgurim squatted, forearms resting on horny knees, her helmet off—watching the third column begin to pass them. “But, bullets baffle bullshit. We’ve got these hard bastards at our backs—no horse-buggering Man is going to kick our asses!”

“Brief your squad leaders. It’s essential we target the mages, if there are any. Take them out.” Ashnak took the map and rolled it up. “We can’t stop them starting to spellcast—but sorcery will be no defence against these weapons. We’ll take a few casualties while we’re wasting the mages, but at acceptable casualty levels.”

Zarkingu rubbed her horny hands together. “No protection! No magic! They’ll be cut to pieces…”

She paused.

“Are we too good? Will the orc marines worry him?”

Above Ashnak the stars are drowned by moonlight. On the horizon, mountains glimmer with early snow.

“The nameless?” Ashnak hawked and spat a gob of phlegm. He felt a laugh building deep in his chest. “He’s like any of the lesser Lords of Evil—jockeying for position among the rest. Hoping that the Dark Lord’s going to notice him. He’ll do anything for that, rot him. As for too good—I tell you exactly what our reward will be for this. We’ll get to stand on the right of the line at the Fields of Destruction, and take the brunt of the battle.”

“Fighting Agaku!” Imhullu shook his crop-eared head. “That’s the war for which we were bred.”

“Poor bastards,” Shazgurim snorted. “I can even be sorry for the Man-filth in the Tower. They don’t know what’s going to hit them.”

Zarkingu giggled hysterically.

Ashnak tightened his web-belt, re-laced one boot, and straightened his shambling bulk. The RT whispered in his helmet. He bared fangs to the cold moonlight.

“Those Men in the Tower?” Ashnak said. “They’re soldiers, the same as we are—except that they’re not marines. Honour them, Agaku. They’re close kin to us, although they deny it. And we’re going to kill them. All warriors are brothers in arms, whether they fight for the Light or the Dark. We are fated always to make war on our own kind.”

7

The Named rides for Guthranc.

With her ride an ill-assorted company. There are Men in it, who seem uneasy in the brigandines and burgonets they wear. Some are slender enough to be of the elven-kind. They carry weapons as if they are not used to them. Some of the smaller breeds are there, too, bouncing along in the saddles behind the taller riders.

The Dark-touched moon sinks over fields left unharvested, among villages deserted, in a countryside breathing out the relief that comes with the promise of a final accounting with evil.

Under a blue sky, the countryside of the Northern Kingdom shone red and gold. Heavy-headed golden grain swayed and fell forward, flattened under the metal tracks of a speeding M113 armoured personnel carrier. Spreading poppies among the overripe, unharvested corn blotched the fields with the colour of Man-blood.

Ashnak leaned hairy elbows on the edge of the APC’s hatch, holding binos to his eyes. He smelled dusty earth, orc-sweat, and Man-fear. The machine bucked and dipped under him as it roared along the length of the first orc marine column. Three columns crossed the fields in echelon. He tasted dust in his tusked mouth.

Somewhere the Army of Light will be mustering for the Final Battle. But that is not here, and Samhain is weeks off yet.

The radio buzzed in Ashnak’s hairless ear. He thumbed the stud under the rim of his helmet. “Ashnak receiving, over.”

“This is Recon 1. Territory is clear, repeat territory is clear. Over.”

“Recon 1, I copy. Out.”

“Major Ashnak, this is Recon 2. No enemy seen or suspected. Over.”

“I copy, Recon 2. Out.”

“Recon 3, this is Recon 3. Targets have entered the Tower, sir. Estimate their garrison strength at seventy, repeat, seven-zero. They have closed the gates and are guarding the walls. Over.”

“Message received, Recon 3. Take no action, repeat, take no action. Out.”

On impulse he had his driver stop the APC at the head of the column. He climbed out of the hatch, careful to avoid catching grenades and bandoleers on the hatch-rim. His boots hit the furrowed earth. He unslung the M60 general-purpose machinegun, carrying it muzzle-skyward, and fell in beside the marching squads of orcs.

“Yo!” Imhullu loped up to join him. Shazgurim shambled up in the one-eyed orc’s wake.

“Like old times, huh, Colonel?” She grinned.

“I smell white magic, Light magic, magic far yonder!” Zarkingu, skulls rattling at her belt and the marine flag rippling from the pole-standard she carried, skipped up to the head of the column. “We’re coming up on them, Colonel Ashnak. Battle before sunset!”

Ashnak heard the word spreading down the columns of marching orcs behind him, and the growls and cheers and yells in its wake.

“Do we kick ass?” he bawled.

“SIR, WE KICK ASS, SIR!”

Ashnak faced front, marching in the long orc-lope that eats up miles and days. It felt for a moment strange to have Man-boots on his feet and not to pound the bare earth. Strange to carry the weight of guns, not poleaxe, sword, and warhammer. He breathed in the stink of oil and metal and cordite, his chest expanding.

The afternoon air had the first and faintest tinge of autumn in it.

He looked across at Major Shazgurim. The big female orc wore her helmet right down, the rim level with her beetle-brows. Her eyes were shining. She loped heavily along, a hand-held rocket-launcher strapped across her shoulders and an M16 in either hand.

“Nest-sisters,” he acknowledged his three commanders. “Nest-brother.”

Imhullu growled. “Nest-brother, this is well.”

Ashnak looked at Zarkingu. “Little sister?”

Major Zarkingu’s tilted eyes gleamed. Bullet-bandoleers clattered as she walked. The sun lit up the dust on her combat trousers and the mud on her boots—she, the only one to march on foot with the companies all the way from Nin-Edin.

“We’ve come far together. I remember other towers, brother, and other campaigns. I remember other masters. Aren’t the Agaku always masters of the battle?” Zarkingu smiled. “What though one of us falls? There are always the Agaku!”

Imhullu stroked the small orc’s horse-tail plume of purple hair. “Little sister feels her death upon her.”

“We are the fighting Agaku.”

Around the horizon, snow-covered mountains rise up to a blue and purple sky. Ashnak tastes the loneliness of those cold heights on his tongue, here in the deserted lowlands. He looks back at the destroyed countryside, the ravaged fields, and the company marching behind him. Dust and the first fallen leaves rise up, concealing their strength from watching eyes. There are always watching eyes in Guthranc.

But what can any spy do, seeing what approaches now?

Trained, prepared, battle-hardened—there is nonetheless a point where one deliberately abandons fear, abandons the knowledge of victory, abandons the wish to survive. He abandons that professionally and without regret. Ashnak, when he fights, fights as one who knows he is already dead. It makes him deadly: it has given him his life.

“Give me your hands,” he says, “sisters and brother.”

On the many-towered ramparts of Guthranc a sentry halloos a warning. Inept with their weapons, the newly arrived company nevertheless stands to arms.

The Named emerges in full plate harness that sears the afternoon sun into watching eyes. Her surcoat blazes gold. She raises her sword to cry an order.

An explosion knocks her from her feet. She sprawls on the parapet, armour scratched and dented. Rocks and shrapnel whistle across the still air. The west tower and half its supporting wall collapse into rubble.

“FIRE!”

The artillery barrage boomed, way behind him. The flattened trajectory of the shells took them over Ashnak’s head, whipping the air. He stood up in the hatch of the APC, helmet pushed back, chewing an unlit roll of pipe-weed.

“FIRE!”

Smoke rolled up black and orange from Guthranc’s walls. Pennants, bright against the blue sky, crisped in flame. Masonry cracked and tumbled, falling slowly outwards, and the whole gate section of the walls slid away, down, and raised gouts of water from the moat. Warriors ran along the parapet like termites. The gate tower collapsed.

“First platoon, go, go, go! Now! GO!”

The deep cough of the guns drowned his voice in his own ears, but the headsets obviously carried it. Moving with complete precision the first orc marine platoon began to advance by fire and movement: one squad going into whatever cover the churned-up cornfields and road offered and blazing away at the Tower, while the next squad moved up past them and went down, ready to offer covering fire and then repeat.

On Guthranc’s walls a Man threw up his arms and fell. The body wheeled through the sunlit air, mouth open. Ashnak watched until it hit the earth, bones fracturing. The squads had advanced to the foot of the slope. He spoke into his headset:

“Artillery, cease fire; say again: cease fire.”

Ashnak looked down from the APC into the bowl of land that held the Tower of Guthranc, nestled in its surroundings of rolling cornfields. The unharvested white grain was mashed down with tyretracks and the marks of marching feet. To the east the Old Forest, massy and green, dreamed under the hot noon. The artillery thudded behind him and stopped firing.

Imhullu’s squads of grunts advanced towards the Tower, weapons blazing. Ashnak put the binos to his eyes and caught an intensified image of the squat black orc, Kusaritku, firing a shoulder-held rocket-launcher. Flame belched. Red and gold fire bloomed from the foot of Guthranc’s east wing.

Gatling-gun fire raked the towers where Men and other filth scrabbled across the fallen rubble. Some threw up their hands and fell. Red drenched the fallen stones, drained into gullies. Ashnak, narrowing his eyes, picked out the cover still remaining, and the tips of longbows raised…

“Major Shazgurim, do you copy? Over.”

“I copy, Colonel. Now. Over?”

“Take ’em in. Advance at will. Go, go, go! Out. Zarkingu, advance your platoon! Keep Imhullu’s platoon out of your arc of fire. Go, you motherfuckers, go!”

He slammed a horny-hided fist down on the APC. Its engine roared. He bawled instructions at the driver, shouldered his M60, and braced himself as the vehicle jolted and rocked over the ploughed earth.

Ahead, fire and smoke blazed up in tall columns. The rear walls of Guthranc fragmented and collapsed. Imhullu’s orcs scrambled up the long slope toward the foot of the fallen towers in extended line. Cordite choked the air. Smoke hung heavy and low.

And from the east, from their concealment in the Old Forest, the two reserve platoons advanced, firing.

“Agaku! Agaku!”

His helmet RT deafened him with war-cries. Ashnak yelled wildly, grinning, shoved his GI helmet down over his beetle-brows, and ordered the APC in a wide curve that took him round the western edge of the diversionary attack line and across the Vordenburn road. He raised the M60 and fired, exulting in recoil and noise, screaming over the firefight:

“Agaku! AGAKU!”

The APC’s nose dipped forward and dug into the soft earth at the moat’s edge. Ashnak scrambled up, over, and out. His boots hit the wet earth. He ran for the pontoons, craning his neck to see the demolished towers above him; raised the M60 and blazed up at the walls. Combat-clad orcs piled past him, tusked mouths grinning, their guns jabbing flame into the noon sunlight. Smoke and stink began to erase the battlefield. Ashnak hit dirt in the cover of a fallen wall and looked back.

Lines of orcs raced up the slope at the charge, screaming and throwing grenades. The crump! of heavy weapons shook the ground. Earth gouted up. It showered Ashnak’s face with the smell of cultivated fields.

The helmet RT blared: “Charge! Chaaaarge!” Shazgurim’s voice, tinny over the small amplifier. Satisfied that the main attack was going in, Ashnak shrugged, hefted the M60, and grinned, knowing there was nothing now but to go in at the head of the reinforcing attack. Any hostiles that survived would have no option but to come out to the north—where they would run into the cut-off squad.

He opened his mouth and bawled “Chaarge!” at Imhullu’s grunts, shoulder-rolled around the fallen masonry, and came up the slope with the M60 juddering and wrenching at his grip. Its muzzle rose, stitching the walls of Guthranc from bottom left to top right in one slow curve. An elf and a dwarf broke to run, and the rounds spattered their blood and intestines across the stones.

“Chaaaarge—”

He scrambled over smoking rubble into the inner courts, firing the M60 one-handed, and a horse reared up in front of him. The smoke cleared enough to let sun blaze from gold surcoat and white harness. The Named reared above him, one bare hand raised.

Ashnak hit the magazine-catch, released one, snicked another loaded magazine flawlessly into place. “Die, motherfucker!”

All in a splintered second:

Dakka-dakka-FOOM!

The rounds track up, beginning to whip through the rainbow shimmer of her protective spell as if it does not exist.

The Named, smiling, sits the white horse’s saddle with grace; in her other armoured hand is a sword. She has no time to strike, but time to speak.

Ashnak reads her wide, loose lips as they move. The Named mouths: “Fail weapons.”

Silence.

Not until then realising how the metallic shriek and roar of the guns has vibrated through him, numbed his eardrums; how the coughing roar of explosion after explosion has deafened him; not realising until now when there suddenly falls—silence.

An invisible hand swatted Ashnak to the grass.

Mouth full of dirt, spitting, he shook his head (helmet dented, the air burning on his face) and rolled and came up with the M60 machinegun tucked into his body. The metal burned his hands with cold blue fire. It seared, cut, sawed at his skin. Ashnak, ignoring the pain, raised the muzzle until he held the armoured female Man in his sights.

“Die, bitch!”

He jerked the trigger—useless.

Witch-fire rippled out and over his body, burning his skin.

Every inch of him blazing, Ashnak rolled on the earth. His combat trousers fused, the material sticking to his skin; and the bandoleers of bullets grew warm to the touch, grew hotter—

Ashnak, ripping the bandoleers off, plunged back down the slope. He hit the moat and rolled in the wet mud, quenching witch-flames. The M60 gone: the final disgrace, to lose a weapon. Pain shook him, his sloping shoulders and long arms burned raw; tough hide seared from his legs and torso. He bolted for cover and crouched shaking and filthy with mud behind a section of the gatehouse wall.

The Men and elves on the ramparts threw down their unaccustomed weapons.

“Yo, marine!” Ashnak pounded across the iron-hard earth towards one of Imhullu’s grunts, the black orc Kusaritku, who knelt and fired the rocket-launcher. Witch-fire licked down from the Tower.

The rocket split in the tube and shrapnelled the air.

Deafened by the explosion, Ashnak hit dirt. Warm, wet meat draped over his hands and arms. He reached over Kusaritku’s body to get the rocket-launcher. The small orc Kusaritku, combats soaked with blood, scooped at the white and green tubes leaking from his belly and then lay back, his eyes on the sky. The camouflage-covered helmet slipped down over his face.

“Rush them!” Ashnak made his voice heard over screams, shouts, and the remnants of firing. “Target the mages! Rush them!”

The ruined walls of the Tower loomed above him, white stone blackened with soot. Men and elves stood up on the walls now, behind shimmering guards of magic. They cast off their helmets and threw down their swords, picking up staffs.

“Charge!” He raised a discarded M16 assault rifle, squeezing the trigger. Nothing. Feverishly he changed magazines, fired again—the firing-pin fell with a dull click. Nothing. Again, and—nothing. He threw down the gun, ripped the pin from a grenade, and hurled it. The green ovoid fell into the rubble with a metallic clink. Nothing more.

Time slipped a gear.

Ashnak became aware that he was running across the inner courtyard of the Tower. He caught his foot and fell. He made to get up and his leg gave way, the bone poking through the flesh. His other leg burned, blistering and pus-filled. Ashnak picked up a dead orc’s Kalashnikov and rested it across his seared forearms and began to crawl, using his arms to pull his useless lower body along.

“Agaku! I smell magic, small-magic, nothing-magic!”

Capering, Zarkingu danced on a section of the parapet above him. Her crest, tied up with a camouflage sleeve, lashed in the hot air and smoke. Ashnak saw her eyes gleaming. Froth spilled out of her mouth. She cocked her Uzi submachine-gun and squeezed the trigger. The gun did not fire. “Colonel, it’s nothing but a simple ’fail weapons’ spell—”

“Incoming! Take over!” Ashnak bawled. “Zarkingu!”

A shimmering sphere sprung into existence around the orc, where she capered with skulls and M16 magazines swinging from her belt. In the space of a heartbeat the magical sphere convulsed closed, opened, and dropped a compressed ruin of orc-flesh and bone dripping onto the parapet.

Ashnak’s bowels let go and he shat himself. He dug his elbows into the rough flagstones, pulling himself up. He detached the Kalashnikov’s bayonet and slid it into its sockets, locked it home, shoulder-slung the assault rifle, and pulled himself by the strength of his arms up to the top of the rubble. His broad nostrils flared at his own stink.

He lay and looked down at the battlefield.

Elven mages and human magic-users crowded the remaining battlements of Guthranc. Sixty or seventy strong. There wasn’t a warrior among them, only those who wielded the staff, or cast witch-fire from between bare hands, or conjured up arcane death with streams of words. Sporadic firing shook the air and died, drowned out now by the conjurations of magic.

Ashnak watched an extended-line formation of marines go down, scythed like wheat. Orc bodies lay in arcs along the grassy slope that rose up to the tower. Their blood soaked the earth.

Ashnak rolled, with an effort, the Kalashnikov held over his head, hitting every spike of rock on the slope down towards the moat. He came to rest against three dead bodies, stinking and corrupt in the noon sun and magic.

Weakness, pain, and fear drained him. The air drummed in his ears.

“Why?” His throat was raw. “How?”

A foot stepped delicately over the marine bodies. Ashnak watched it approach, his teeth bared. He gripped the Kalashnikov in his burned hands, poising the bayonet to thrust up. An elven voice said, “It lives, Lady. Shall I end its miserable existence?”

“You,” a slobbery voice said, marvelling.

Ashnak’s burned leg had some strength, and he flexed it, gathering it beneath him to spring. His shattered leg trailed like a snake. He watched the approach of The Named.

“Bind him. No, you are not strong enough. I will.” The female Man knelt, plate harness clashing. One of her hands darted out and gripped Ashnak’s throat, far too fast for him to avoid, and squeezed.

Breath stopped. His vision went red, black, and then a plain white. He thrust blindly with the bayonet, a belly-cut, and felt her free hand grip the assault rifle’s barrel. She wrenched the Kalashnikov from his hands. His limbs were strengthless. Something hummed in his ears. He felt his gullet surge; and then he was released to vomit, and whimper in blindness, and wait for his sight to clear.

Witch-bonds bit into his burnt wrists and ankles.

Ashnak groaned a protest against the binding of his shattered leg. The female Man nodded to the elven mage at her side.

“I am merciful. This one we will keep. He will know much.”

She hefted the Kalashnikov thoughtfully, testing the weight and length of it in her armoured hand.

The pain of third-degree burns over most of his body loosened his tongue. Ashnak yelled, “What use can magic be against us? Ours aren’t witch-weapons! Why are you using magic?”

The firefight rattled and died to the east, in the Old Forest, where (too far for him to see) the remnants of the orc marine platoons were fighting to a standstill. The helmet RT whispered tinnily in Ashnak’s ear:

“—fall back! Fix bayonets! Use your weapons as clubs! Fall back and regroup at—”

Shazgurim’s voice shrieked and terminated. The distinctive hiss of witch-fire filled the channel, burning it out. Ashnak’s head bowed to his chest. He made no movement even when The Named removed his helmet.

“Elinturanbar, this one was my brother’s plaything and must be questioned.”

The lisping, wet voice ceased. Ashnak raised his head. The Named and the elven mage stared east, to forested cliffs and gorges, and the palls from burning trees.

A Bell HU-1 Iroquois helicopter slanted down across the hill slope.

Flying with unprecedented skill, the Huey feathered between the trees, using them as cover, close enough for the heavy rotors to chop branches. Leaves sprayed up. The shadows of its guns fell on the sunlit trees. Ashnak opened his mouth and hoarsely cheered.

A fork of blue lightning lanced up from the hands of the elvish mage Elinturanbar. Treetops disintegrated. The Huey flared, darted down, and pulled around in a tight circle; shot up, and the blue spike intersected its flightpath again with neat economy. One landing-skid fractured and fell.

The Huey lurched in the air, slanting downwards, made a right turn to gain power, and limped the hundred yards of open air between the Old Forest and the foot of the tower, barely above ground.

The Named’s bare hand moved. She whispered, “Fail-flight…”

Ashnak buried his face against the turf. The helicopter dropped, slammed down, bounced up, and hit the earth again no more than thirty feet away from him. He felt the impact through his burned and broken body. Shrapnel sprayed the ground and hummed through the air.

The doors cracked open. Two ores bailed out, vomiting, and dived into cover amongst the rubble.

A third figure got a slender hand to the hatchway, weaved slightly, and stepped down onto the earth.

A shadow seemed to pass across the sun. Frost fractured the grass and coated the prone bodies with ice. The earth bit into Ashnak’s shattered leg and burned hide. It was so cold that his eyeballs hurt.

The nameless necromancer reached back into the body of the Huey and recovered a spun-silicon bottle. Intact. He shook his midnight-leather robes loose from torn metal, dusted himself down with a flick of spell-fingers, and sauntered across towards the group at the foot of the Tower of Guthranc.

Ashnak stared at the slim, approaching figure. He strained at his bonds. The spell-fraught wires burned into his raw skin and cold-tender wounds. The nameless necromancer raised his head and squinted painfully at the sky.

The pale Man dimmed the sunlight with a gesture. “Ashnak. How pleasant.”

The orc coughed, blood in his throat. “Sir, beg to report, sir…”

The nameless necromancer stepped delicately over Ashnak’s body and walked on, the pale hand that was not holding a bottle outstretched.

“Sister,” he said. “Hail. Well met!”

Ashnak stared in disbelief.

The nameless necromancer let his hand fall, unclasped. He smiled. Somewhere in the curve of his lips, and the shine of his green eyes over high cheekbones, were implied features not his own. “Sister, you have the victory here, I think.”

The orc-faced woman stepped to one side as others of the company walked out of Guthranc’s ruins. Elves, Dwarves, Men—and halflings. “Yes, brother. And I have your thieves to thank for it.”

Ashnak, unshockable now, recognised the two halflings.

The younger had black curls, expensively cut and pomaded. He wore an etched and gold-inlaid breastplate over rich, three-piled velvet doublet and breeches; his ruff was of the finest cloth; and gold and silver rings decorated every one of his ten fingers. Neither his armour nor his expensive silk half-cloak had battle-dirt on them. He smiled.

His brother, standing beside him, wore rich brown velvet; his hair was tied back in a tiny horse-tail, fixed with a golden ring. He wore no armour, and a heavy gold S-linked chain showed under his silver-embroidered cloak. He appeared rather more plump than when Ashnak had seen him in the wild.

Both halflings wore new swords.

The Named rested a gloved hand on the shoulder of each halfling. “You see I have rewarded them for their sufferings incurred in coming to me. Though I cannot reward them as they truly deserve.”

“No,” Ashnak growled under his breath.

A kind of exaltation filled The Named’s misshapen features. Saliva trailed down unnoticed where a tusk distorted her mouth.

“These two halflings it was who brought me a weapon from Dagurashibanipal’s hoard. You did not expect that, brother nameless, but even thieves may turn to the Light.”

Her face shone.

“Master Will Brandiman told me that you had weapons not sorcerous, but more powerful than sword or bow, against which magic was no protection. And Master Ned Brandiman it was who, demonstrating such a weapon, proved that, not being magical weapons, they have no protection against magic.”

The Named smiled wetly.

“No protection against magic at all. Not even against the simplest ’fail weapons’ spell.”

Ashnak nuzzled his protruding jaw and beetle-browed eyes against the freezing earth. Then he lifted his head, looking down the length of his body—charred webbing and combat trousers fused into open wounds, bloodstained boots—to where his helmet lay on the grass, the RT unreachable. Orc berserker instincts contending with marine training, he muttered under his breath: “Bug out! Fall back. Fall back.”

Ashnak strained the muscles of his hunched shoulders until he thought they would crack. Pain hissed into his skin. The magical bonds bit deep. Green blood trickled down over his webbing, staining combat boots, slow in the cold air. He raised his head, staring at the nameless necromancer.

“Master…” the orc whispered.

“See the recalcitrance of evil,” the brown-haired halfling announced. “Lady Named, you see what comes of serving the Dark Lord. His creatures are unable to hear your words of virtue.”

Ashnak with difficulty turned his head. “And I suppose taking payment for the Dark Lord’s most loyal servant, the nameless, enables you to be virtuous?”

Ned and Will Brandiman looked at each other with extremely pained expressions.

“Such calumny.” The Named shook her head, tutting. “Never fear, my halflings. Evil cannot trick me. I know your hearts, and they are pure.”

The black-haired halfling squatted, just out of reach of Ashnak’s fangs, his round, apple-cheeked face smiling.

“The dragon’s curse was powerful indeed, Master Ashnak. The Order of White Mages have detected the curse that Dagurashibanipal laid—it is ‘You will become what you steal.’ As the dragon collected the terrible weapons of evil, so you have become their user, and one of them. It’s tragic, truly tragic. For I am not one to believe even an orc beyond salvation.”

Ashnak spat. The halfling avoided his acidic saliva. Ashnak wrestled himself around, freezing pain searing through his wrecked body. “Shazgurim was right. Dark Lord, yes! Tricksy halflings. She said you’d do for us in the end. And I do regret stopping her killing you! Master!”

The nameless necromancer ignored him.

A breath of warm wind blew, smelling of dead leaves, summer’s end, cornstalks, and the sea. Frost melted.

“Sister…”

On thawing, blood-wet grass, in late-afternoon sunlight grown suddenly strong, the nameless necromancer fell to his knees. His dark head bowed, and his back bent. He touched his pale forehead to the turf.

His voice came plainly audible:

“Sister, even the darkest may turn towards the Light.”

Disgust and anguish brought a roar from Ashnak. “Master!”

“These orcish scum are nothing.” The nameless necromancer spread his pale hands, still kneeling. One hand grasped the neck of the silicon bottle. He drank, waving the bottle in the general direction of the last fighting. “A few less to battle on the Dark Lord’s side when Samhain comes. But if you will have me, sister, the Army of Light shall be increased by one, and my power is not small.”

Silence breathed over the field. Ashnak heard it, despite the screams and shouts of the massacre, the hoarse sound of his own protest, the crack of thawing ice. The silence of destiny.

“I have waited long for this, brother.”

The female Man stripped off her remaining plate gauntlet, dropping it on the turf. She stood in the hot sun, among bodies of fallen orcs and Men, with the miasma of corruption rising from corpses in the moat. Her golden hair blazed.

“Duel me,” she challenged. “Single combat, brother. Your Dark power against my power of light. Come—combat, hand against bare hand. Fight me!”

“She’s stronger—” Ashnak’s fierce warning cut off as an elven hand clamped across his mouth. Witch-fires singed the horn hide of his face. He opened his mouth to bite.

“I will not.” The nameless necromancer rose gracefully to his feet. There were patches of orc blood on his silver-thread-and-skin robe where he had knelt on it. He flicked a spell-finger and was again spotless. “I have surrendered to you. To your mercy and honour.”

“I don’t trust—”

“And if you will it,” the pale Man said, “I shall wear my own shape again, sister, and you shall wear yours.”

The Named stared for a moment as if into bright light.

“Yes.” Her blotched fingers fumbled at her wet lips. She dragged the back of her grey-and-white-skinned hand across her mouth.

The elven mage demanded, “Lady, how can you trust him!”

“Has he not humbled himself before us? Knelt, in the humiliation of his defeat? And come defenceless amongst us? You do not know me,” the female Man said, and her surcoat shot back the crimson of the setting sun. “I am always merciful to those who serve the Light. Brother, be welcome.”

In his last pain, blood soaking into the hot earth, Ashnak made the effort to cry out: “Master, no! You betray us!”

The nameless necromancer did not even turn his head. “Be silent, scum!”

The tall elven-mage with the much-lined face stepped out from where he stood behind Ashnak, and bowed, and smiled.

“No,” The Named said. “Elinturanbar, the nameless shall not be subject to the inquisition. I say he shall not. He has proven himself our friend here today. Brother, come.”

One of the tall Men said, “Lady, you must use Guthranc’s power first, to send out the war-summons to the Northern Kingdoms—”

“Later.” Her green, luminous eyes on his beautiful face, The Named held out her hand. “Come, brother. I would speak with you of the changing of shapes.”

“Let me first instruct this scum.”

Ashnak, the edges of his vision foggy now, watched the pale bare feet of the nameless necromancer treading the grass towards him. He coughed thickly. Pale fingers touched his skull, between his peaked ears.

A blackly warm and resurrecting touch.

He coughed again, more strongly, and showed all his fangs. In the tongue of the Agaku, which is private between themselves and their masters, and in the idiom of Dagurashibanipal’s hoard, he said, “Fuck, man. Even when I’m dead I can’t get out of this chickenshit outfit.”

“You,” the nameless necromancer said, “my creature Ashnak. Give orders for the fighting to cease. Now, do you hear me!”

His bonds parted. Ashnak studiously failed to catch the eye of any of the company standing near him. He rose to his feet, healed, and looked at the nameless.

“She is merciful,” the nameless explains.

Recalling a village and a church, of which the nameless necromancer has been told, Ashnak searches his pale features. One of the nameless necromancer’s eyelids flickers. Ashnak glimpses, very briefly, a hidden laughter.

The nameless necromancer says in that unknown tongue, “May not I submit myself as you did? Exactly as you did—and do—my Ashnak.”

In rueful acknowledgement, and for the last time, Ashnak fell to his knees and prostrated himself, banging his forehead on the trampled grass. Frost-blighted poppies bloomed scarlet in the corners of his vision.

“Yes, master! At once, master!”

Cowering in a practised fashion, head still bent, Ashnak swivelled his eyes up to watch the Men, Elves, and Dwarves depart. The nameless necromancer bowed gracefully, gesturing for his sister to precede him.

In the nameless necromancer’s eyes Ashnak sees the look of one who is sizing up yellow hair, grey-white skin, and fresh bones for domestic utility.

A last whistle of incoming fire brought him to his belly, rolling into concealment behind a section of broken wall and reaching for his helmet RT. “CEASE FIRE, MARINES! Fall back! Emergency rendezvous at Nin-Edin—bug out! NOW!”

“Acknowledged—”

“—I copy—”

The few voices cease.

Craters steamed in the westering sun. Smoke, cordite, and the sparkling fog of magic began to clear. Vapours drifted over slumped bodies, charred DPM combats, abandoned heavy weapons, and minced flesh. The dead lay in clumps and rows.

Because it is our flesh, it seems it should be different. Ashnak shook his head at the thought. Knobs of bone, shining joints, slick muscle tissue; all no different from a shambles or abattoir.

Even looking at the nearest area of the battlefield he can see recognisable corpses. Three companies: practically a battalion. The orc marines of Nin-Edin…Kusaritku and Azarluhi together, and several with them burned beyond identification. Duranki, Tukurash, Kazadhuron. And, ahead of the rest, as always leading the charge as a commander should, lies Captain Imhullu. The sun shines down on his blind face.

But The Named will not ride at Samhain. Ashnak will bet on it. For whatever her absence is worth.

Not much, as ever, to the dead.

Ashnak stood, the black fire of the necromancer’s rough and ready healing coursing through him. He wiped pus and blood from his remaining burns and straightened, sniffing, pulling deep breaths down into his broad chest. The air stank of shit and blood.

He took out his forage cap and put it on, pulling down the peak. The charred remnants of his uniform pocket yielded, amazingly, fresh pipe-weed. He stuck a cigar in his mouth and strolled across to the wreck of the helicopter.

A heap of masonry some yards from the Huey collapsed and disclosed the two orcs who had gone to cover. The larger, a female with her orange hair tied up in a horse-tail, shook herself. The smaller, who appeared to have been attempting to hide under his own GI helmet, sat up beside her.

“So what does an orc call a halfling?” the small orc inquired.

“Lunch.” The large female orc slapped her DPM-camouflaged thigh. “Lunch!”

“Damn right,” Ashnak growled.

The smaller orc sprang to his feet and saluted. “Sir, General Ashnak, sir!”

“At ease, Lieutenant… Captain Barashkukor,” Ashnak corrected himself.

Marukka saluted. “The firefight’s over.” The orange-haired orc hefted a shoulder-fired missile-launcher in one hand. “I guess we won’t be using these anymore, will we, sir? I want my poleaxe back.”

Barashkukor folded his small arms over his flak jacket. “But I like the armour.”

Ashnak bent down, recovering water bottles and knives from corpses, slinging them from his webbing. He left the guns. He grinned toothily and began to laugh, deep belly laughs that shook him until his tilted eyes watered.

“It’s not important.” Ashnak put his horny arms around the two orcs’ shoulders. “Fuck, man, the weapons aren’t important!”

In the Old Forest, now, or in the Man-countryside, there will be orc survivors heading back to Nin-Edin. They’ve been taught how to fall back and regroup. They’ll obey. They’re marines. They’re grunts.

Ashnak of the fighting Agaku grinned an orc grin, and stared into the red light of the setting sun.

“So the hostiles have magic. So what! Think about what happened down there, marines. We were disciplined. We fought as units. We were tactical. Orcs fought as a team.”

“Yeah,” Marukka said slowly. “It wasn’t just warriors charging off into the fight on their own, or killing each other instead of the enemy. Different orc-tribes fought side by side! My squad kicked ass! If we hadn’t had to stop when we did…”

Ashnak looked away from the sunset, black dots swimming in his vision. He rubbed the wet corners of his tilted eyes. Beside him, Barashkukor brought one small booted foot down hard, coming smartly to attention.

“Sir, we are marines, sir!”

“That’s right…”

Ashnak tugged his forage cap down over his hairless skull, between his peaked ears. He shifted the unlit cigar to the corner of his tusked mouth and thumped Barashkukor between his skinny shoulder-blades. The small orc staggered and sat down hard on the turf.

“That’s right.” Ashnak grinned ferociously. “There can be more of us. I promise you. There’s always the Last Battle. There’s always after the Last Battle…”

“Sir, yes sir!”

The crimson sun shines on the three of them, casting their shadows long across the carnage of the battlefield around Guthranc. The forces of Light, badly mauled, limp away from the scene of their victory. Below the Tower, the orc marines are already lighting fires and roasting the wounded.