Varimnak put her muscular arm around the female elf’s sweating shoulders. “You do it your way, General. We’ll do it ours.”
Ashnak opened his mouth, and after some thought he closed it again and shut the guard-room door behind him as he left. Shaking his head, he strode back up through the tower towards the command post. He gathered himself together enough to order further preparations for the pre-dawn attack, speak with his sub-commanders, and set basic strategy and tactics before entering his inner office.
The female halfling sat waiting for him in a torn robe.
“Now, my prisoner…”
Ashnak reached down and took Magda Brandiman’s hand, drawing her through into the inner chamber. He closed the door. Starlight illuminated the bare room and his camp bed.
Her hand, tiny in his, felt hot and dry. Ashnak seated himself on the edge of the camp bed and drew her to him between his thighs. She freed her hand. The starlight profiled her sharp face, easing the lines of age, gleaming from her short hair.
She cupped the orc’s face in her hands, drawing her fingers across his rough, horny cheeks; catching the lobes of his pointed ears between fingers and thumbs and nipping. She drew his head forward, kissing the corner of his mouth, darting her tongue between his wide, thin lips.
Ashnak made a sound, half groan and half sigh, and fell back on the bed. It creaked. Magda Brandiman sprawled across his chest and body, small legs straddling him, muttering under her breath as she winced, bruising her hands against webbing, water bottle, and flak jacket. She stripped him impatiently until they lay in a bed full of military equipment, bruising knees and elbows.
He put his hands around her body, so small that he could encompass her waist with ease. Her skin like finest chamois leather rippled under his fingers, and the soft hair on her feet tickled his thighs. She grunted, at first sitting up, and then easing herself down on his erection, gradually taking more than seemed possible and rocking in the starlight, silver-limned, her eyes half shut, her face smiling.
This time he worked until she arched her back and cried out—a sound sufficiently like pain to satisfy any orc who might be listening. Ashnak groaned, his hands clamping her hips tightly down, his body jackhammering up; and when the world came back to him he sprawled on his back, grinning so that all his tusks showed.
The female halfling ferreted in his combats pocket and brought out a thin roll of pipe-weed.
Magda struck flint against Nin-Edin’s walls, lit the pipe-weed, and drew deeply. The flare of light illuminated her lined face.
“I’ve been thinking about retiring.”
Ashnak made a small, querulous noise of protest.
“Going into management.” She blew out a plume of pipe-weed smoke and wriggled further up into the odorous crook of Ashnak’s armpit. Her feet brushed his hip. “You could set me up in a nice little business. Some girls, some boys—some fabulous beasts.”
Ashnak unkinked the tips of his hairless ears and leered. “I got other things on my mind right now…”
Magda ignored him. “I said I had been thinking about retiring. But now I can see only one way to ensure the safety of my sons.”
“No way! They’re dogmeat!”
The halfling leaned back in the rough marine-issue blankets, the red eye of the pipe-weed roll swelling and dying. The night sky gloomed outside the window, stars covered in cloud. She said nothing more.
Cooling sweat slicked Ashnak’s hide. “Halfling, you expect me to—”
Magda exhaled, utter confidence in her voice. “You’re going to win the battle tomorrow.”
“I am? I mean: I am!”
“But what happens after that, my orc?”
There was a very long silence.
“So what,” Ashnak rumbled, “are you suggesting?”
Magda Brandiman rolled over, feline, and drew a finger down the centre of the orc’s broad, hairless chest.
“I’ll tell you later.”
“You’ll what?”
Ashnak glared, watching her with orcish night-vision. The female halfling rummaged in the tumbled bed. One of her hands seized his wrist; not able to encompass it with her fingers, she swiftly knotted his trouser-belt about it and then tied it to the bed’s post.
“Oi!”
Searching among miscellaneous military equipment for another leather belt, the female halfling looked up directly into Ashnak’s eyes.
“I don’t believe in instant gratification. Let me show you. In a while I’ll tell you about my plan.”
Her tongue darted out to lick her lower lip. She smiled.
“You’ll like it. Trust me, you’ll like it.”
9
Major Barashkukor squinted through the pre-dawn darkness.
With some reluctance he folded his Ray·Bans and put them carefully in a pouch on his web-belt. “All right, you orcs. Check your weapons.”
Foom!
A red-crested orc in desert combats looked down the smoking muzzle of her Kalashnikov. “I think mine was loaded, sir.”
“Quiet!” Barashkukor snarled.
Chill slid down from the heights of the mountains on just-stirring breezes. Orc-vision alone could glimpse the east’s growing light. Stars still clustered in the arch of the sky; no birds sang. Barashkukor lifted his head and squinted up at Nin-Edin’s magic-blackened and battered inner walls. Hundreds of orcs lined the parapets, scaling ladders ready; orcs clustered in dozens of squads in the inner compound, receiving their last briefings.
Barashkukor shook out and re-tied a white silk scarf around his thin neck. The small orc’s long, hairless ears whivvered in the dawn wind, and he crammed his Stetson down over them. Drawing his Desert Eagle pistol from its belt holster, muzzle skyward, he tucked one black-gloved thumb under his web-belt and leaned into the cover of the broken gateway.
Nothing stirred in the enemy siegeworks, a scant thirty yards away.
“We must be alert, orcs,” Barashkukor whispered. “We must think on our feet—Not you, Corporal.”
Corporal Lugashaldim of the SUS looked up briefly from his marine-issue survival sewing-kit, murmured “Yezzer!”, and went back to threading a needle and more securely sewing on the toes of his left foot.
“Any minute now—”
“Sir!”
“What is it?” Barashkukor took his gaze off the enemy siegeworks. Sergeant Varimnak saluted him lazily. She nodded at the nearest squad of orcs: newcomer refugees in plate-armour, carrying axes.
“We got a problem, sir.”
“Not now, Sergeant!”
“Sorry ’bout that. It’s those refugees we took in. Dumb motherfuckers say they ain’t going in on no front wave, Major.” Varimnak shrugged leather-clad shoulders. She shifted her chewing gum to the other side of her heavy jaws. “Guess we haven’t had ’em in here long enough. Funny thing, Major, they don’t seem to be able to work the weapons when they first get ’em—have to drill the dumb shits into the ground, make real marines out of ’em, then the guns start firing. Guess that’s the Dragon’s Curse. But they say they’re not going in with inferior weapons.”
Barashkukor fumed, tapping the toe of one tooled cowboy boot on the cold earth. “Don’t worry, Sergeant, I’ll handle this.”
The small orc marched smartly up to the band of orc warriors who, in the growing half-light, leaned disconsolately on a selection of obsolete polearms.
“New recruits, Ten-HUT! We gave you refuge in here—so you can damn well fight for us.”