“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.