The American vanished into it.
“Nooooooo……!
Screams, cries, a young man weeping; air sucked as if from a depressurising cockpit; the crunch of metal as parked cars slid across the gravel and into each other; a sharp crack of snapping wood as the pub sign broke and fell across the air—
Her bloodied fingers lost their hold on the wall. Amy screamed and plummeted towards the void.
Pressure vanished. She fell to earth in a sliding curve that raked gravel across her arms and thighs, banging her head against the bumper of a car. The bodies of young men, breath sucked from their lungs, sprawled across the tarmac like the aftermath of a battle.
There were sirens, after that, and a fire engine, and crowds come out from the houses in the village street, and arrests for disorderly behaviour. A police sergeant came and put his coat around Amy while the ambulance men checked her for shock and bandaged her hands.
“It was like a hole!” She looked up, eyes red-rimmed. A coal of fear burned in them that would not go out, but would remain an ember in her for the future. “A hole. In the air. Like a door opening behind him. I saw it—he fell. Into no- where. There wasn’t anywhere to go, but he just vanished. I… I saw what it looked like, where he went. I saw the other side. And it didn’t look like here at all.”
This was before the TV or newspaper reporters or military police arrived. She told her story only once, then, and another quiet, dangerous man in marine uniform ordered her to be silent, to admit it all the product of concussion, a hallucination, female nonsense… and could she please give them any real information as to the whereabouts of the missing man, Sergeant John H. Stryker of the U.S. Marine Corps?
1
The summer sun blazes down on the final of Graagryk’s first annual Orcball League.
Stands full of halfling workers watch the game, cheering, in their shirtsleeves, with knotted hankies on their heads.
“Of course,” Chancellor Cornelius Scroop remarked distastefully, “this game is nothing but a crowd-pleaser.”
“URP!” The great orc Ashnak, granite-skinned, Man-tall, and wide, sprawled in his chair, towering over the halflings in the ducal box. He dug into the hamper next to his seat, snared half a boar, and chomped his steel-strong jaws into it.
“General!” Scroop reproachfully wiped boar-grease from his court dress.
“Master Cornelius, I’m particular about my food these days.” Ashnak belched and threw the stripped bone over his shoulder. “As befits a ducal consort, I refuse to eat anything that hasn’t stopped moving yet.”
Out in the exposed arena, sweating orc marines plunged their heads into water barrels and loped back into the game, shaking sprays of water from their pointed ears. Clouds of dust rose into the still air.
Ashnak lumbered to his combat-booted feet, his bulk shadowing the box, farting with a crack as resonant as a grenade launch. “COME ON, YOU ORCS!”
The stadium hummed. A breeze brought the rank scent of the Inland Sea. In the ducal box, Graagryk’s respectable halflings sweltered in their best finery: baggy silk breeches and bucket-top boots, steel gorgets and rapiers, long barbered curls, and occasional velvet face-masks. Down in the stands, halfling workers bought pies and wine and exchanged betting slips.
“GOAL!”
The dust began to clear. It disclosed a dozen grunts leaping up and down and cheering; and thirteen tall, slender bodies slumped motionless on the worn turf.
Halfling helpers rushed to remove the Dark Elf team’s bodies.
A halfling mother in the ducal box covered her child’s eyes with her hand and tutted furiously, with an expression on her small features as if she were smelling something even more distasteful than sweaty orc.
“That’s better.” The dew had long since burned off the field. Even under the thatched stands, the air seared. Ashnak reached into the hamper for a magnum of champagne and emptied half down his throat and the remainder over his head. Sticky courtiers glared at him.
The halfling cheerleaders on the far side of the arena chanted, “Yaaay, Graagryk! G-R-DOUBLE-A, G-R-Y-KAY: Graaaaaagryk!”
At the near edge of the arena, Sergeant Varimnak lounged on the grass and chewed gum, conducting the orcish cheerleaders. Each of her small, spike-haired orcs wore studded leather boots, and filigreed-steel basques, and juggled maces and morningstars as if they were pompoms. The stand seats behind them were curiously empty.
“Halftime!” the troll referee called from the field. “New players!”
A brawny orc, stripped to the waist and wearing combat trousers and brightly polished boots, marched up and saluted Ashnak in the duchess’s box.
“General Ashnak, sah. Further representatives of the ‘Orde’s orc marines reporting to play Orcball, sah! Permission to pound these ’ere hairy-footed bastards into the turf, sah?”
Ashnak lazily returned the salute. “Permission granted, Sergeant Major Guzrak. Carry on.”
“Sah yes sah!”
Walking away, Sergeant Major Guzrak put his arm around one of the large orc marine’s shoulders and spoke to him in a fatherly fashion. “Soldier, I has some good news and some bad news. The good news is, you’ve made the Orcball team. The bad news is—as the ball…”
Captain Simone Vanderghast slammed a purse of gold down. “That says your marines lose to us, General!”
Ashnak regarded the civilian militia captain’s money. “That’s right, it is the home team next. You’re on!”
He spat on his horny palm and held it out. The halfling looked at it, swallowed, shut her eyes, and shook his hand gingerly. She then wiped her palm repeatedly against the wooden walls of the box.
From the tunnel at the far end of the stadium, twenty halflings rode out into the arena on well-groomed ponies. Bridles and stirrups flashed in the sun.
Ashnak’s eyebrows raised. “They’re mounted!”
Simone Vanderghast, smugly, said, “Nothing in the rules, General, about how one gets around the field of play.”
A pony whinnied.
The halfling leader buckled a black peaked helmet over his curls, brandished his crop, and galloped up to the centre line. Like all his fellow stout, hair-footed riders, he wore white breeches, riding boots, and a bright scarlet doublet and carried over his shoulder a long-handled mallet.
“One is ready to play!” he called.
A rumble went through the stands.
One of Ashnak’s aides, a black orc second lieutenant, leaned back from his seat in front of the general.
“Little fellas really take to this game, sir, don’t they?”
“So it seems,” Ashnak growled.
“I suppose a Kalashnikov is a missile weapon,” the lanky orc lieutenant reflected wistfully. “It’s a pity we’re not allowed to use them, sir. But I suppose it makes it more sportin’. Poleaxes and warhammers, well, it really takes you back, sir, doesn’t it?”
His head with its widely jutting ears and woodland camouflage forage cap bobbed in Ashnak’s field of vision. The tiered seats were hardly orc-sized. Ashnak reached forward, grabbed the lieutenant’s ears, slammed the orc’s head forward onto the guard rail, and resumed watching the field over the orc’s prone body.
“That’s better, Chahkamnit.” Ashnak leaned back comfortably. “I can see the game now.”