Winds blew out of the archways.
Magda’s nostril’s flared, catching a hundred mingled scents—all strange, all unknown. An orc behind her swore, breathlessly. Magda stared.
Each elaborately carved stone arch opened into a different place.
The light of strange suns striped the cave floor. Yellow, white, amber, cerise…A flood of sunlights—rich with the heat of summer, pale with the chill of winter, none of it the dank mist and fogs that hung in the Nin-Edin pass.
Magda walked forward until she stood on one elaborately carved threshold. The stone was cut in strange geometries. The aura of draconic mathematics breathed from the rock. A yard in front of her bare, hairy feet, the paving stones of some strange summer-hot city wept tar into the gutters.
She stared back over her shoulder.
Other thresholds opened into rich fields, forests, seas, and cities of every kind, from monumental white stone to vast glass and steel towers. She smelled the mingled scent of a hundred worlds. A hundred Otherworlds…
Ugarit shrieked, “Dimensional portals! Wormholes in space! Parallel dimensions!”
“Is he all right, sir?” CIA Chief Lugashaldim swallowed. His bony jaw creaked. “Am I all right, sir?”
Magda with difficulty turned her back on the magnificent threshold and walked to Ashnak. She reached up and took the orc’s hand.
“You found this,” she growled.
Ashnak stood easy. “I knew it had to be here somewhere.”
Magda shook her head. “I know that Dagurashibanipal was a collector. Very powerful, even for a dragon. A collector of militaria. But what—”
Ugarit stopped hopping, dusty and brilliant-eyed and slavering. “Antiquarian militaria!” he sneered. “Very little truly modern stuff. You know how dragons are.”
The bewildered orc officers wandered through the Cavern of Portals, gaping. Varimnak was so far away as to be almost out of sight, and she had not exhausted the number of gateways yet.
Ashnak smiled, showing brass-capped tusks. “I knew that the dragon collected weapons of war from all the Otherworlds that necromancers and wizards see in their visions. She went there, or sent her golem, and she brought materiél back. And then she died, and cursed her hoard, and we’ve had the Dragon’s Curse ever since.”
Major-General Barashkukor, shocked, cried, “You haven’t found a way to get rid of it, sir?”
“Good god, no!” Ashnak scratched deep in the cleft of his buttocks, and hitched up his combats again. “Dagurashibanipal raided the Otherworlds, from these caverns under the Demonfest Mountains. The gateways are still here. They had to be! How else could Sergeant Stryker have got here?”
Ashnak shrugged modestly.
“He arrived here at least a year after Dagurashibanipal was killed.”
Magda shook her head. “And I thought you were skulking up here, planning some noble suicide…”
“I’m an orc, damn it!”
More amazed than seemed tactful, she said, “Don’t tell me you and the tech-colonel came up with this idea on your own?”
Ashnak said smugly, “I’m not just some dumb grunt.”
“I’ve been observing Stryker’s world—that one, over there, Colonel Ma’am, the one you were looking at,” Tech-Colonel Ugarit dribbled. “That’s really weird. And there’s more than one world. There are hundreds!”
Barashkukor clipped the tech-colonel’s ear with his steel hand. Ugarit cackled. The Undead orc and the other officers began to drift back from the gateways, their expressions dazed.
“Slight exaggeration,” Ashnak demurred. “There probably aren’t more than fifty worlds that orcs could survive in. Some with a higher technology level than us, some lower.”
As if hypnotised, Magda padded barefoot back across the sun-warmed stone to the threshold of Stryker’s world. She sniffed the strange air.
“Smells like the mechanised warfare division.” The halfling wrinkled her nose. Carefully, leaning forward, she moved her head across the threshold. There was a faint sensation of give, as if some transparent meniscus had been penetrated. Sound battered her ears. She stared at the vehicles thundering along the city’s paved streets and across a teeming bridge towards her, at the high glass towers beyond and the gothic spires of a building next to the sluggish brown river.
When she turned her head, the cavern behind her had become invisible. She drew back. Rock-chilled air engulfed her, cold after the sudden exhaust-laden summer.
“You know what this means…”
Major-General Barashkukor, cyborg-eye whirring, stared gobstruck at the dirty blue sky and the red vehicles crossing the iron river bridge. Commissar Razitshakra scribbled furiously; Sergeant Varimnak nudged Dakashnit in the ribs, indicated with a nod of her heavy-jawed head where two young females of the Man species broke from the crowd to lean on the bridge rail, and winked. Wing Commander Chahkamnit gaped. Lugashaldim’s red eyeless sockets glowed. Ugarit beamed.
Ashnak regarded Stryker’s world. “I don’t believe we need worry about an occupation for orcs. Dagurashibanipal seems to have been interested only in worlds completely obsessed with war.”
“Good show, sir!” Wing Commander Chahkamnit shaded his eyes against the yellow sunlight and watched a flight of Tornadoes hurtle across the dirty sky.
“I say, sir, what about that!”
Magda took Ashnak’s hand and gazed into the new world’s rising sun.
“I do have an announcement to make.” The great orc looked at his fellow orc officers, and then down at Magda. “There was something I once told you of, my love. When the Dark Lord touched my soul. Never let on to Her, of course, but it did show me what, as an orc, I really am.”
Major-General Barashkukor assumed a military erectness. “Sir, a member of a proud and noble but misunderstood warrior race, sir?”
The great orc thought about it for a second.
“Not really,” Ashnak said. “More like, a mean motherfucker who loves big guns. I don’t want to be World Ruler. All I want is to go on doing what I enjoy. I intend to carry on being an orc marine. And I intend to take the marines on missions to as many of these worlds as I can.”
“Me too,” Magda said unexpectedly.
The black orc Dakashnit grinned and muttered something under her breath about dumbfuck halflings.
“Damn it, my vice president can take over here.” Magda gripped Ashnak’s large hand and grinned. “Hell, orc, I’m an officer in the marines too—this time I’m coming with you!”
“Yo!” Ashnak swung Magda Brandiman up into his arms, waltzed a few bow-legged steps on the cavern floor, kissed her, and stepped back as she kicked him smartly.
“My love,” the big orc said gravely, “I thought I would at least have to ask.”
Barashkukor seized Supreme Commander Ashnak by the taloned hand and shook it vigorously. “Oh, sir!”
Magda tugged her tailored skirt straight.
“Of course…” Her eyes narrowed. “If John Stryker accidentally came through to here—then others can do that too. Accidentally, Or deliberately.”
“They can’t see us! Can they!” Tech-Colonel Ugarit suddenly whimpered and cowered, turning cross-eyed to survey the cave of dragon-sized arches. “We may even now be under scrutiny for attack!”
Commissar Razitshakra snapped her notebook decisively shut. “Then we’ll have to get our retaliation in first! Supreme Commander, sir, I volunteer to accompany you!”
“I thought you might,” Ashnak remarked.
Magda speculated demurely. “I’m sure the Otherworlds will see the point of trading with the Orc Marine Armaments and Leisure Services Company—once we’ve given a smallscale demonstration.”