“Hostile targets!” the orc called to the newly appeared Man. “Take ’em out, marine!”
The Man’s hands opened.
The machinegun thudded to the jungle floor, ignored.
The uniformed Man opened his mouth.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargggghhhh!”
One large combat boot caught Gilmuriel and bowled the elf over as the Man barrelled past him. The Man sprinted at top speed, bawling, eyes glazed and wide with shock, mouth a square of fear.
“Wha’—?” Dakashnit mouthed. “What?”
“Fuck it!” Gilmuriel fluted, scrambling back onto his feet and signalling to his squad, ignoring the flabbergasted orc sergeant. He pointed after the running Man. “You elves—don’t ask questions—follow that marine!”
There are no roads to the east.
The Blasted Redoubt kills the land about its bastions. The dead shadows of those grim towers, those windowless high walls and courtyards where sun never shines, devastate the crop-yield for leagues around. The Redoubt itself is vast enough to create its own rain-shadow, so that one approaches from the west through a landscape of cracked earth, shrivelled moss, and cold desolation; and approaches from the east—but who knows what mud and storms lurk to the east of the Blasted Redoubt? Only the slaves of the Dark Lord ever travel there, and they are, for the most part, singularly reticent.
“All I can say,” Ned Brandiman remarked grumpily, “is that it’s frightening the manticore.”
The wagon’s draught-beast fluffed up its lion pelt, docked scorpion tail twitching, its Man’s features showing distress. Ned threw it a tidbit of fried toad.
“Have no fear!” Amarynth Firehand called, striding beside the wagon, his ragged white habit tangling in briars. Thorns lacerated the elf’s dark skin. His eyes glowing, the Holy One exclaimed, “This is the ideal place to begin the Light’s Crusade!”
Ned muttered, “Ideal, my hairy left foot!”
“Mother Edwina!” Will Brandiman reproved. “The Holy One is guided by the Lady of Light. If he says that we begin the Light’s election campaign in the middle of desolation, in the Dark Lord’s own fortress Redoubt—we, a company of barely two dozen, on a perilous journey from the rich, comfortable south and its plentiful supplies of food, for example—then that’s exactly what we do.”
“Amen!” the good Abbess Edwina snarled.
The Holy Paladin Amarynth strode unmoved through the black land, his shaggy mass of dark hair flowing back from his pointed ears, in his hand a staff that glowed as white as his ragged monk’s robes. The elf turned to look back at the wagons of the Mission of Light, his slender form silhouetted against the bastions, flying buttresses, walls, balconies, spires, towers, pinnacles, and sheer masonry bulk of the Blasted Redoubt.
“On!” the elf cried. “Onward!”
Tiny figures began to scurry along the Redoubt’s parapets and into the shadow of the great West Gate. Ned’s long sight detected orcs, their smaller cousins the kobolds, the giant wolf-steeds orcs use in battle, and the leathery fanged steeds-of-the-air unnamed in the west.
“Wonderful!” Ned looked back over his shoulder.
Behind the Mission of Light’s wagon a dozen of the Holy Order of Flagellant Knights plodded along the desolate track. Each raised a metal-thonged whip and cracked it down on the back of the male or female elf in front. Periodically the leaders of the columns would swap with the back markers. The Mission wagon had been dogged for forty miles by vultures following the scent of the blood.
“Know what I think?” Ned observed, scratching under the hem of his nun’s habit at his hairy bare feet. “I think we should’ve gone back and burned the Inn of the Sixteen Varied Delights, and that laundry, and then we should have left Graagryk for good.”
His brother whipped out an ebony comb, slicking his spell-dyed hair back from his brows.
“You can always burn down taverns that have thrown us out. How often does a halfling get a chance to enter the Blasted Redoubt?”
It crossed Ned’s mind to ask, “How often does a halfling want a chance to enter the Blasted Redoubt?” But the thought of ebony carvings, jet stones, sable furs, and black diamonds—doubtless with no special guard on them, other than being in the orc-haunted, evil magic-spelled, heart-of-desolation fortress of the Dark Lord—made his eyes gleam in his chubby face.
“Take the reins,” Ned directed, handing the manticore’s tack to his brother, and proceeded to freshen up his lip- and eye-paint. By the time the Mission wagon rolled into one of the Redoubt’s outer courtyards he had repaired the worst ravages of travel and brushed the mud from his red habit.
Kobolds shambled from the shadows in increasing numbers, their eyes catching the light redly. The larger orcs herded them back with poleaxes and jagged black swords. Ned snapped his fingers at a wolf that stood several hand-spans higher at the shoulder than any halfling.
“Good doggie!”
“HRRRAAAGGGH…”
“Edwina, stop teasing that poor animal.” His brother, teeth gleaming whitely in the courtyard’s gloom, stepped past Ned to address a hulking orc in a studded leather jerkin and black steel helm—obviously one of the fighting Agaku. “Good afternoon, sir. Allow me to introduce myself: I am the campaign manager for the Holy Paladin-Mage Amarynth, your Light candidate in the forthcoming election to the Throne of the World.”
The black-clad orc shuffled from foot to taloned foot and scratched at his pointed, hairless ears with the spike of his poleaxe. “Um…we’ve been supporters of the Dark here for generations. Don’t want to be rude, but, well, isn’t much point in you coming here, is there?”
Ned raised his chin. Familiar with Man architecture as well as the townships of halflings, he was not unused to walls that towered like cliffs, but the soaring masonry of the Redoubt courtyard lost itself in mist far too far above his head. It dripped with moisture; and the stench of excrement and the shrieks of the incarcerated echoed down from barred slit windows.
“My son.” Ned unclipped the whip from his spiked belt and cracked it. The noise echoed across the gathered heads of the Dark masses. Orcs twitched by reflex. He beamed at the Agaku. “I know you won’t disappoint a poor old woman—a poor old woman trained in the mage-craft of the Little Sisters of Mortification—and not hear our candidate. Will you?”
The orc shambled around, clawed feet kicking bones across the black cobbles. “Silence! If anyone so much as breathes, I’ll send his miserable carcass to the Pit! Dire-wolves, you have free rein to harry any who speaks but the elf, be it bat, kobold, goblin, or orc!”
Edwina smiled sweetly. “Thank you.”
“Well done, our good and faithful servants!” the Holy One exclaimed, resting long-fingered hands on the heads of his halfling priest and abbess. In the abrupt silence, the Holy One paced across the courtyard and took his place on the cyclopean-size steps of the nearest tower entrance, looking out across the beady eyes, red pupils, snouts, and twitching claws of his audience.
“Scum of the Blasted Redoubt!” the elf sang melodiously. “Do you wonder why we have no fear, standing before you as we do in the heart of Dark’s citadel? That is because you do not yet know who we are. We are Amarynth, who was a mortal elven paladin, but who you may now know as the Holy One, the Most Holy. We are the Son of the Lady herself!”
Ned abandoned the Mission wagon—there being no interrupting Amarynth once he had begun using we—and rejoined his brother on the other side of a locked postern door, inside the Blasted Redoubt. Black torches burned in wall cressets, nitre spidered the masonry, and the bronchial coughing of an orc guard echoed down from the upper reaches.