A slender elf Captain of Archers stepped forward and smiled. “Impossible, dwarf. Orcs always respond to taunting.”
“They do?” Kazra stared up at the armed, uniformed orcs lining the crenellations. “Orcs! Cowardly scum!”
A battered and bleeding albino-crested orc muttered, “You called?”
“I believe I begin to comprehend their strange tongue, Lord Commander,” the engineer-mage said. She pointed up at a large orc. “Your mother wears combat boots, and pisses standing up!”
An expression of confusion crossed the orc’s face. “Doesn’t everyone’s?”
The dwarf’s face reddened with more than the icy cold. After a moment’s silence, the elf archer sang out, “All orcs are cowardly filth! You have not one true warrior amongst you!”
Rows of silent, motionless orcs lined Nin-Edin’s inner walls. Amarynth saw no sign now of the strange witch-weaponry. Instead, the orcs swung axes and maces, gripped jagged swords and spears and spiked clubs.
A small orc in black leaned over the battlements and met Amarynth’s gaze.
“We lost a lot of people down there.” Its voice was guttural as it pointed to the demolished outer walls. “If you want us, elf, you’re gonna have to come in and take us!”
“What is the matter with them, my lord?” The elf Captain of Archers squeaked in frustration. “These are orc warriors. They should charge out, tormented to fury by our very presence in front of them! Each tribe should seek to outdo the other by flinging themselves hopelessly into the midst of our fighting elves. Why do they not do this?”
“What does it matter?” Amarynth shrugged. “Take the inner walls.”
The commander of the Man infantry shuffled back, drawing a ragged breath. “Don’t give that order, my lord. I don’t think you’ll be obeyed.”
“But we have them completely at our mercy!”
“These aren’t like other orcs, my lord! They’re…they’re not natural! This isn’t what fighting orcs is like. Orcs run. Orcs are stupid. These orcs…”
The dwarf Kazra, at the head of her halberdiers, grunted. “Maybe they’re right. This is some unnatural evil beyond our comprehension.”
Amarynth Firehand bowed his head for a moment and then lifted it again. The sun, level through the clouds, sparked back in points of fire from his white harness. He drew a breath that sucked cold mountain air deep into his lungs.
“This is mere foolery.”
Casually, Amarynth gestured. A noise that seemed the earth’s own voice shook the world. It avalanched snow down from rockfaces further up the pass.
The inner walls of Nin-Edin, moved by the Powers of Earth, shifted. Orcs howled as stone tottered. The inner gate split in two. The masonry arch cracked from top to bottom, the two halves by some freak happenstance remaining upright, leaving the portcullis jammed at an angle in the dirt, with space to pass on either side.
“Oh, Lady,” Amarynth prayed, “since I may grow weary in the killing that now follows, send me yet more of your Grace—”
FOOM!
The thunderclap noise of the shot startled the war-unicorn. Amarynth reined it in. No pain came to him. He looked down. Unmarked.
“My lord!”
The Captain of Archers’ yell made him look down to where she knelt. The dwarf engineer-mage Kazra lay on the ground. Amarynth dismounted from the unicorn.
“Kazra, fellow-warrior, what do you there?”
The elf archer turned the dwarf over. Most of the dwarf’s face and the side of her head had been blown off. Blood and tissue and bone fragments glistened, matting her fiery hair.
“Yo the snipers!”
Amarynth fell to his knees, ignoring the orcs.
“Lord Commander.” The Man infantry commander squatted down beside him. “A healing mage can—Ah. No.”
Amarynth wiped his mouth, catching his lip painfully on the edge of his gauntlet, and fumbled to strip the armour off. The mountain air felt cold on his skin.
He picked Kazra up. What remained of the dwarf’s head fell back across his arm. She had no mouth or jaw to fall open. Her weight made him stagger. Blood and the last of her sweat cooled on his hands, and the smallness and solidity of her body in her mail-shirt made him open his mouth and bawl like a child.
“My lord!” the archer protested.
Amarynth Firehand turned and picked his way down the hill. He stumbled, his knees giving way under him. The sun shone full in his eyes now. Water dripped down his face, ran off his chin, soaked his surcoat. Although nothing short of a miracle would do, he muttered healing charms constantly.
The dwarf did not move between the time he took her from the wall and the time he laid her down in the rich furnishings of his own bed, in his own tent. He sat by her, bent over, watching for the slightest breath, the slightest motion, to tell him he might be wrong, that Kazra was only wounded.
Some time later, when it became apparent even to him that the dwarf was dead, Amarynth Firehand got stiffly up from the bed and left the tent.
His commanders awaited him outside.
“Bury her in stone,” the elf said. “What was it all for? She was my oldest friend. I shall never say anything more to her. Not even farewell.”
“Lord Commander,” the Captain of Archers ventured, “what of the fort?”
“Leave me.” Amarynth turned back to his tent. “I am going to pray until I can find it in my heart to forgive the orcs for Kazra. Then we shall take Nin-Edin and raze it to the ground.”
7
The ravaged countryside teems not only with deserters but also with the Light.
Driven out of the arctic safety of the Demonfest Mountains, Ashnak hooded his eyes against the winter wind. The stench of corpses made his broad nostrils flare. The SUS marine ahead of him looked back and signalled thumbs-down: enemy seen or suspected.
“That’s two wandering Light war-bands we’ve run into in two days. Still mopping up after the Last Battle. Lugashaldim, tell the orcs to exercise all caution, but to make their best speed.”
“Sir, yes sir!” The Undead marine corporal, black-clad and carrying a hefty commando knife in his rotting hand, doubled over and ran up through the cover of a burned orchard towards the rest of the unit.
“Are you sure we can trust these orcs, sir?”
Ashnak stopped peering through the fallen, burned tree trunks and stared at the female orc beside him. “Of course you can’t trust them, Marine Razitshakra. They’re orcs!”
“No, sir. I mean ideologically, sir.” She wrenched a paperback book from her combats, waving it in an ink-stained hand. “If we’re going to be the vanguard of the proletariat and massacre the oppressing classes—elves and Men, halflings, dwarves; that kind of filth—we have to be sure of everybody, sir, don’t we?”
Razitshakra adjusted her rimless spectacles and gave Ashnak a long, hard stare.
“Vanguard of the what?” Ashnak took the dog-eared paperback. “The what Manifesto? I’ve warned you before about reading, marine. Just take it from me, we’re thoroughly—what is it?—ideologically correct.”
Razitshakra gave him a knowing look, a smile, and a deliberately sharp salute. “Sir, yes sir.”
“And you can take this from me, too.”
Ashnak grabbed the orc marine by the back of her combats, swung her bodily around his head and let go. Razitshakra’s chunky body flew a short distance and whacked into a tree. She slid to the earth.
“You can free all the oppressed masses you like,” Ashnak grinned, “provided you remember orcish political ideology. That is—I’m in charge. I am a big, hard bastard and you take my orders. When I say Jump! you don’t say Yessir and you don’t say How high? You say General, when do I come down? Got that?”