Seeing their general, the orc marines leaped up and down, banging their weapons on the frozen earth and flagstones, their cheers reverberating from the keep’s walls:
“Ash-nak! Ash-nak!”
“Fighting Agaku!”
“Yo Ashnak!”
“Are we marines?”
“WE ARE MARINES, SIR!”
He elbowed his way to the front rank of marines surrounding the wagon and stood, fists on hips, chewing his unlit cigar. A swift glance found him Ugarit and Razitshakra. The orc technical specialist shivered continuously, his broad, hairy nostrils running with mucus, and his eyes flicked around every corner of the inner keep’s defences. His combats, armour, and flak jacket were smeared with oil and less identifiable substances.
Eyes narrowed to slits in the sun, Razitshakra watched him, her pencil poised eagerly over a small notepad. She scribbled occasional words when Ugarit’s terrified muttering reached clarity: “Ideological instability…Un-orcish sentiments…”
Barashkukor watched her with dewy-eyed admiration. Ashnak growled in his throat. All became silent. He stared at the wagon.
“Yo, halfling! Mistress nun!” He paused a calculated moment. “Ned Brandiman!”
The ragged curtain at the front of the wagon twitched aside. Ashnak looked at the dishevelled figure of a male halfling wearing the red habit of one of the Little Sisters of Mortification. The brown-haired halfling, his skirt hiked up to his knees to disclose hirsute feet, sat astride a wooden barrel. With one hand he rested a cocked heavy crossbow across his lap, finger on the trigger. In the other hand a fuse burned and sputtered, audible over the noise of the orc marines.
The halfling’s face paled. The orc saw the small lips soundlessly form the name Ashnak. He stepped two paces forward of the front rank.
“A bargain!” The halfling’s voice came shrilly across the compound. “My mother and brother for these talismans. Else they’re blown to pieces before your eyes, orc!”
“I remember you and dwarvish blasting powder—if you’d had your way, boy, I’d be buried under half a mountain!” He began to walk towards Ned Brandiman, combat boots loud on the flagstones.
“I wouldn’t put it past you, boy, to come here with nothing more in that wagon than empty boxes, and try and trick your way out again with your mother—if that cutprice whore is your mother.” Ashnak registered the halfling’s snarl and grinned. “What did you expect? Dumbfuck wild orcs, that’s what you expected. What you get is orc marines, boy. What you get is me.”
The heavy crossbow shifted, the point of the bolt following Ashnak. He walked steadily forward. The halfling, in a scurry, shoved the sputtering fuse between his teeth, dug into a barrel behind him, and held up a handful of tiny metallic objects. Strung on wire, they clattered together.
Razitshakra loped across the compound, nostrils flaring. “That’s them, General, sir! Nullity talismans. I smell them true! And—I smell dwarven sorcery too.”
Ned Brandiman smiled around the fuse clasped between his teeth. He dropped the handful of talismans, removed the fuse from his mouth, and said, “Better listen to her, big guy.”
The big orc, close enough now to rest one taloned hand on the mule’s neck, stared directly into the eyes of Ned Brandiman as the halfling sat in the front of the wagon. The mule shifted, bothered by orc smell. Ashnak abruptly closed his hand, wrenching a gobbet of living flesh from the beast, put it in his mouth, and chewed bloodily. The orc grunts cheered. The beast sank to its knees and tipped over in the shafts.
“Put that fuse down!” Ashnak snapped.
He held the halfling’s gaze, seeing in those brown eyes a concealed desperation. He edged a step forward.
Ned Brandiman cried, “You’ll die with me, orc!”
The halfling’s tensing muscles prepared Ashnak, the speech gave him the second in which to act. The orc grabbed the front of the wagon with both hands, his powerful arms projecting him forwards, and his jaws slammed shut, not on Ned Brandiman’s hand—the halfling was a fraction too fast in drawing back—but on the lit fuse, dowsing it in a mouthful of mucus and orc saliva.
Ashnak spat, sore-mouthed. His taloned hand seized the heavy crossbow in time to send the bolt through the roof of the wagon. He closed his hand, crumpling the metal firing mechanism. With his other hand he batted the halfling bodily out over the tailboard, where it vanished, biting and kicking, under a gang of marines.
“Major, escort my prisoner to the cells. Alive.” Ashnak put his finger in his mouth, wiggled it around, touched a raw-burned spot, and winced.
“Marine Razitshakra, start dishing out these marine-issue anti-thaumaturgy talismans to the grunts! Corporal Ugarit, your tech orcs are going to incorporate nullity talismans into every weapons-casing you can find. Move your asses, marines!”
Ashnak got down from the wagon and walked untouched through the furious, orderly confusion of the inner compound. The sun, just beginning to wester, was a faint warmth on the back of his head.
Wide-winged ravens soared down from the mountains, haunting the churned earth of the outer compound, and he stared across it at the enemy camp, willing them to inactivity, willing them to desire the advantages of a night attack or a dawn attack or any attack at all, so long as it didn’t come within the next few precious hours.
“The only reason we’re alive is that he wants to kill us painfully and slowly.” Ned Brandiman shivered. “What that orc considers a painful death, I don’t want to think about.”
Will Brandiman chuckled, a small sound that slipped into a sob and a hard intake of breath. He looked down at his yellow-and-black-bruised arms, then stared up at the ceiling with wet eyes.
“Why did it have to be that son of a bitch? With anyone else it would have worked. Anyone else would have cared more about damage to the goods than damage to us. Shit!”
The torches in the corridor outside the cells dipped and flared. To Will, the air had the scent of night about it. But no attack on the fort yet. He fumbled tenderly at his bare arms and naked body, fingers feathering the cuts and contusions on his legs. He pressed the taut drum of his stomach and winced.
“Internal bleeding. I need a medic-mage. So do you.”
Ned Brandiman grunted. It was a weak sound. Will squinted at his brother in the yellow light from burning oil torches. The brown-haired halfling’s face was crusted with blood, one eye blue and squeezed shut by swelling and at least three teeth down to jagged stumps. Naked, he still shivered in the chill of the dungeons. Will watched for that shivering to cease: a fatal sign of hypothermia.
“You didn’t…keep lock-picks…?” Ned coughed, hugging his bruised arms across his bare chest to restrain the racking movement. He glimmered white in the dim cell.
Will winced, lying on his side, recalling the penetrating orc fingers that had searched every orifice. “They took them all. We shouldn’t have come without backup.”
“Who could we trust?”
At a question that ingenuous, Will snorted and then grimaced at the pain that followed. Determined, he shifted up onto his knees, onto his feet, and staggered the few steps over to the cell door. The barred grill was two feet above his head.
“I hear something!” Will waved Ned to silence. “One. Maybe two. Make a noise! Get them in here!”
The elder halfling, propped up against the dank wall, raised his glinting eye to Will. “Will…why?”