The foot (small only by orc standards) removed itself from his neck. Ashnak’s eyes rolled up in their sockets while he remained abased before Her. He squinted hopefully in Her direction, seeing the wet-lipped mouth curve into a smile.
“You have bullied My necromancer and grovelled to Me.” Amusement sounded richly in Her voice. “Admirable. You had plans for his return, I think. Perhaps even for Mine. But not together, and not on the same day!”
There was a silence.
Ashnak climbed awkwardly to his feet, brushing dust from the knees of his combat trousers. He picked up his forage cap and jammed it down between his ears. The hypnotised halfling servants walked around his bulk on their way to serve more wine, and he looked down at them, but they showed no awareness of his presence.
“Er,” the orc general said. “Yes. Well. Erm…”
Splinters of the Visible College’s anti-magic talisman stood embedded in the hide of his chest. He brushed them out. At last looking at his Dark Master, he was startled to recognise green-irised eyes before Her gaze burned again the colour of fire.
“Yes. She lives within Me. I allow The Named to witness what she has become; the paladin of the Light, whom I inhabit.”
The Dark Lord stepped closer to Ashnak.
“It was in a church, was it not? A little temple somewhere in the northern countryside, and you grovelled to the Light’s paladin, and she said, All you need to know of me is, I am merciful, and, like a stupid fool, did not kill you. Orc, all you need to know of Me is, I am not merciful. Nor am I stupid. I am the Lord of Darkness, and you have failed Me, and you will answer for it here and now!”
Shadows hovered in the corners of the stone tower room, undiminished by sunlight. Not a presence of darkness so much as an absence of everything. The Man walked until She stood facing the window again, looking out over the halfling city to the Inland Sea. Towering thunderheads crept across the sun, lightning cracked and split the sky into jagged pieces, and hail lashed down on the summer streets. Visible only as a silhouette in the dim light. She languidly lifted one piebald finger.
“Great Lord!” Ashnak sensibly kept his hand away from the pistol holstered at his belt. “I have a force almost at brigade strength. I can train raw levies. When the new war against the Light begins, You’ll need the orc marines.”
The nameless necromancer muttered, “Need traitors and cowards!” as he put down the empty wine flagon.
“The loyal and the brave didn’t do so well at the Fields of Destruction,” Ashnak noted drily. He advanced a step, coming to a smart parade rest on the flagstones. “Great Lord of the Ebon Abyss, put no faith in his magic. You need superior firepower. Mages take territory, marines hold it. You need us for the post-Samhain campaign.”
The Dark Lord turned Her head, looking at him over Her slightly too-wide shoulder. The Named’s tall, raw-framed body carried the metal-mesh robe with a hint of awkwardness not yet tamed by the Dark Lord’s possession of her; she moved sometimes still as if she would rather have carried a sword in her hand than magery. A sooty darkness hovered in the corners of Ashnak’s vision. Recalling the briefing before the Last Battle, in the Dark Lord’s great towering Keep in the far east, a kind of orcish homesickness attacked him.
“I remember,” he said wistfully, “the legions of the Horde marching out of the Dark Land, descending on the west. Our warriors covered the earth, and our Dark beasts the skies, and You rode out to war on the back of a frostdrake, against the outnumbered small companies of the Light…”
The orange glow of Her eyes dimmed.
“The Horde of Darkness,” Ashnak concluded, bass-baritone voice roughening, “got its ass kicked. Great Sable Lord, I don’t want that to happen again. You need us. We’re loyal. And if we failed You once, we won’t fail again.”
Abruptly, the normal summer chill of the tower room returned. There was a strain in the air as if from the working of invisible great engines, familiar to Ashnak from the days when he wore black steel armour in place of combat fatigues, and his weapon was the fighting Agaku’s traditional poleaxe. He came to attention, boots slamming down on the flagstones.
“Awaiting your orders, Lord! When do I muster the troops?”
The nameless necromancer giggled.
Ashnak’s vision of a return to the old days faded with the glare in Her eyes. Her eyeballs shone momentarily like grey glass, and the dust of destroyed aeons whispered past Ashnak on no earthly wind. Death reaching so swiftly made him grab, automatically, for the pistol at his belt, although even without the loss of the talisman he would have doubted an automatic pistol’s validity against the Lord of Night and Silence.
“Be still.”
The orc, after some minutes, opened his eyes. Finding himself corporeal, and undamaged, he looked to the Dark Lord where She sat, now, on the window seat, Her bare feet swinging.
“Be still and attend to Me,” the Dark Lord said. “Did I have you brought here to Me to play games? Orc, your thuggery is of no use to Me. Domination by force of arms in this world is useless.”
The nameless necromancer’s finely chiselled lips curved into a patrician smile.
The Dark Lord added, “So is magic.”
Ashnak looked at the nameless necromancer. The nameless necromancer, his pale-lipped mouth falling slightly open, stared at Ashnak.
“What?” the orc general said.
The nameless necromancer added, “I beg your pardon?”
The Dark Lord sat, to all appearances a female Man of startling ugliness, the sun spotlighting Her piebald grey-and-white skin, shining back from Her burnished hair, but not dismissing the darknesses that hung in the folds of Her clinging robe. She lifted Her wrist and wiped saliva from the corners of Her mouth.
“I have returned. My ambition is undimmed. I will rule.” Her inhuman eyes glowed orange.
Ashnak for the second time in the space of half an hour took his life in his talons. He interrupted Her. “But you said—”
“There will be no military conquest,” She stated. “I have decided that conquering with Dark Armies is… outmoded. Old-fashioned. Passé.”
3
And at that very hour, twelve thousand miles to the south of the Inland Sea, in the fabled Antarctic Icelands, Razitshakra strode between the rows of huts that made up the tundra bootcamp. Snow crusted the squat female orc’s heavy military greatcoat as she stomped, bandy-legged, across the icefield. She rebuckled her webbing, pistol-holsters, and stick-grenades over her coat, looking up to check that the marine striped-and-starred Raven flag still proudly flew. It did.
The ideology class waited, drawn up to attention outside her command hut, in front of the wooden table that stood out in the snow. The orc seated herself at the table, placed her elbows on the wood, and rested her pugnacious chin on her talons.
“Recruit Balan Orcsbane,” she purred, eyes gleaming. “You of the unfortunate surname—perhaps you would be kind enough to state basic orc marine ideology.”
The dwarf drew himself stiffly to attention, his forked orange beard jutting horizontally. Like the rest of the twelve-dwarf recruit squad, he wore olive-drab fatigues rolled up at the ankles and to the elbows. His orange braids had been shaved down to a bare fuzz of hair on his scalp. He carried a much-abused Kalashnikov assault rifle and a steel helmet from which the sharp horns had been forcibly removed.
“Ma’am, politically correct orcish ideology is as follows.” Balan Orcsbane pointed at his fellow bootcamp trainees. “‘If you’re smaller than me, I’m in charge here. If you’re bigger than me—you’re in charge. And if something’s gone wrong, he’s in charge!’”