Cautiously the orc demanded, “Your name, great lord of this magic beast?”
“I hight Blond Wolf!”
The elephant coiled its trunk around the rider and lowered him to the earth.
The orc stared.
“’Ere,” the orc said, “you’re not a Man.”
“I’m Great Lord Blond Wolf of the Howlfang Mountains!” the rider snarled. “Mightiest barbarian warrior of the Dark; and you pig-swivers can call me ‘Great.’”
“You’re not as big as a Man.” The orc peered down. “You’re not as big as a dwarf. You’re not as big as a halfling, even.”
Narrowed blue eyes fixed on the orc from a point some two feet and seven inches above ground-level. The barbarian snarled, inflating his chest. His helmet, with its attached horns that jutted out a good armspan to either side, slipped down over his nose. He shoved it to the back of his head.
“What did you say?”
The orc guffawed. “You’re pretty short for a barbarian, ain’ tcha?”
The northern barbarian clapped his hands. The war-elephant lowered its trunk from the makeshift howdah on its back and set a small pair of wooden steps in front of its master. Lord Blond Wolf spat on his hands, unfolded the ladder, and set it up in front of the large orc. He drew his axe, plodded up the steps, and swung his weapon.
The blade clanged into the side of the orc’s helmet. The orc, catapulted backwards, knocked three of its nest-brothers into the heather.
“I’m riding to succour Evil, damn it, after our defeat!” The northern barbarian climbed back down his ladder, waving his axe. “Will that teach you not to insult a warrior, you rat’s arseholes?”
The orc looked up hesitantly, rubbing its skull. “Where are you riding to, master?”
The northern barbarian threw back his head, tendons cording his throat, and laughed richly. With the orc on its hands and knees, he looked it squarely in the eye. “What damn business is it of yours anyway, wartface?”
The orcs glanced at each other, rapid consultations going on in lowered voices. Scuffles broke out. The armoured and mailed orcs looked up at the war-elephant, and the trackless foothills of the mountains.
“Noble Lord Blond Wolf.” The orc banged its forehead experimentally on the earth, watching the barbarian from one upturned eye. “We’ll form your Dark honour guard, if you let us ride with you.”
4
The besieging Army of Light set up just in time for the first snow.
Immense and aloof, the monumental rockfaces of the mountains that loomed above the pass silted up with whiteness. Snow blurred the lines of tents on the slopes below Nin-Edin, outside firing range. Snow shrouded the earth siegeworks. Blue and silver banners shone through the falling flakes.
Major Barashkukor, Commander (Part-Time, Acting, Unpaid) of Nin-Edin, stared down from the parapet of the outer walls.
“I don’t like it, Sergeant. It’s too quiet.”
FOOM!
Barashkukor fingered his hairless peaked ear, a pained expression on his features. “Cease fire! Sergeant, what is that?”
Sergeant Varimnak chewed gum noisily. A hulking, trim, and broad-shouldered brown orc, she wore her black combat fatigues ripped, with engineer boots, and a spiked black leather belt in place of her webbing. Her cropped crest had been spiked and bleached white.
The Badgurlz sergeant narrowed her eyes, removed the gum, and stuck it under one of the crenellations. “Looks like they want to parley with us. Fuck knows why.”
Barashkukor waited, vainly. He drew a deep breath, filling his thin chest to capacity. “That’s ‘fuck knows why, sir,’ Sergeant!”
“Yes sir, Major, sir!” The stocky orc grinned.
Varimnak’s squad, composed of the smaller female orcs, seemed almost lost in their large ripped marine-issue black combat fatigues. They leaned into the cover of the crenellations, two of them carrying shoulder-fired grenade-launchers; three, M60 machineguns; and one a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile. Barashkukor surveyed the Badgurlz’s spiked crests, scars, and tattoos, and his chest swelled with pride.
He sprang up to stand in one of the icy stone gaps in the crenellations, ignoring the thirty-foot drop in front of his combat boots. “Yo, down there!”
The approaching party halted.
A knight in full plate harness bent his head and removed his helm. His destrier stamped. In his armoured right hand he carried a white standard of truce. “Orcs of the Horde! I am Amarynth, Commander of the Light, Mage and Warrior both. Listen to my words of wisdom!”
Sergeant Varimnak looked up from where she squatted, bandy legs bent, cradling an AK47.
“Exactly who is that asshole, sir?”
“Some damn hero or other.”
Barashkukor straightened the peak of his green forage cap and settled his web-belt more comfortably around his thin waist.
“You down there! Unauthorized personnel! I give you statutory warning that you are adopting a hostile posture by surrounding Marine Base Nin-Edin, home of the 483rd Airborne, and by the rules of war I am therefore justified in—”
Barashkukor stopped in bewilderment as the elvish knight dismounted from his steed and knelt in the snow outside Nin-Edin’s walls.
“Lady of Light!” the elf prayed loudly. “Hear my vow! Be with me today, as I battle in the name of Good. Grant me the power to speedily end this battle, so that they shall sing of us throughout the generations, and our glory shall be the greater…”
The dark-skinned elven warrior pushed his black hair back behind his pointed ears, frowning.
“…ah, yes. And so that fewer of the Light’s warriors perish. Grant me the strength of steel and magic both, so that I may wipe these orcs, blood and bone, from the earth! Hack their foul heads from their deformed bodies, tear out their intestines! Gouge out their eyes! Rip the fangs from their jaws and the skin from their faces!”
Panting, the elf smoothed down his blue and silver livery, which had two crescent moons woven into it. His fluted plate-armour shone cream-coloured under the snow-leaking sky.
“Carve the blood eagle on their wretched carcasses,” he concluded, standing up, “and put to the fire their still-living remains! In the name of your Mercy, Lady, amen!”
The orcs looked at each other.
“Well, sir,” Varimnak said, “I guess he was the most diplomatic one they could find to talk to us.”
“Orcs of Nin-Edin! Surrender now and we may spare your miserable lives.” The elvish knight remounted and reined in his rearing unicorn. Flakes of snow frosted his pointed ears and high cheekbones. “Throw down your weapons now! You filth will die, like your master the nameless necromancer, unless you make honest reparation for your crimes. There is much work to be done, rebuilding the world after the Dark Lord’s defeat, and it is meet that you should labour in it.”
“Go into slavery, you mean!” Barashkukor turned to speak to Varimnak and found his sergeant missing. He showed small fangs in a scowl.
“‘s pure ungratefulness, sir,” a Badgurlz MFC complained. “After we won the Fields of Destruction for them by fucking off…”
The Badgurlz marine surreptitiously sighted her shoulder-fired missile-launcher.
“No!” the major snarled. “Not yet. Bad orc!”
Ignoring the indignant Light party, Barashkukor climbed down from the crenellation and strode across the parapet. Sergeant Varimnak trotted back up the steps from the bailey.