The wounded elf writhed, bulges of flesh pressing out between her slick fingers as she tried to hold her intestines inside her body cavity. Blood soaked her combats sopping wet.
“Shit!” Aradmel Brightblade moaned. “Oh, shit, man, I told her to run through.”
“Brightblade!” Gilmuriel snapped. “On guard, that corridor, now!”
Marine Ravenharp the White knelt down by Byrna’s side, his hand going to touch the dogtags fused into the flesh of her neck by the blast. “I used to be a healer-mage…”
“Magery won’t work for marines.” Gilmuriel dragged another word from his increasing marine vocabulary, appealing back over his shoulder to Dakashnit. “Medic!”
The orc sergeant looked at him blankly. “What’s a ‘medic’?”
“Please!” Byrna Silkentress screamed. “Please!”
Gilmuriel’s hand slipped, wet with the ropes of her spilling intestines. He wiped his fingers on his combat trousers and drew his automatic pistol. With one hand he turned her head away. He placed the muzzle of his automatic pistol on her skull at the base of her neck and squeezed the trigger. A slew of blood and bone punched out her skull from eyes to crown, splattering the corridor wall with red tissue. Byrna’s body relaxed.
“Marine Starharp.” Gilmuriel swallowed bile. “Take over radio duties.”
“Yes, sir.” Removing the rig from Byrna’s body, Belluriel’s long-fingered musician’s hands shook.
“Enemy seen?” Dakashnit questioned the squad harshly. “Come on, assholes! I’m gonna get the rest of you out of here alive if it kills me. Enemy seen?”
“Not seen.”
“Not seen.”
“Not seen!”
Eighteen hours later, Lieutenant Gilmuriel and the elf marine squad patrolled from the lower to the upper levels of the root tunnels. Nerves stretched, ears pricked, hands slick on rifles.
“If it were an ambush we’d have hit the kay-zee by now,” Dakashnit advised. “L.t., I think the Bugs did a sweep through the area and that was it. They haven’t occupied the city at all. They’re gone.”
“Leaving hostile forces behind them?”
“Uh-huh.” The orc looked thoughtfully at Marine Starharp. “See if you can raise HQ now, L.t. Send a despatch.”
“Saying what?” Gilmuriel Hunt-Lord stood aching, weary, and filthy in the city of the Elven Lords. Above him vast ancient canopies reached for the sun; capillary action drank up moisture from the roots; but the whorled chambers and high platforms of the City of the Trees lay deserted, blood-spattered, home only to bodies and the circling carrion eagles. A persistent smell of burning stung his eyes: the slow fires that, once begun, would smoulder for decades before finally burning the city to the ground.
“They’re not holding territory,” Dakashnit said.
“They’re not holding this territory, Gunnery Sergeant…” Without turning, Gilmuriel spoke to Belluriel Starharp. “Raise HQ, marine. Advise them to plot the Bugs’ advance—use satellite observation to find out exactly where they are. Inform them there’s a possibility the Bugs may have a specific objective to which they are advancing.”
9
“Certain irregularities have come to light,” the Dark Lord stated, “about your conduct in the late war. And your administration of My election campaign.”
“Must be some mistake, Ma’am.” Ashnak shifted his massive weight from foot to foot, now bare of combat boots. The chains fettered to his wrists and ankles clinked.
The black canvas walls of the Dark Lord’s Night Pavilion flapped in the night wind. Silver embroidered sigils of Evil glinted in the electric light. The outside generator hummed.
“And I am under no illusion,” the Lord of Nightmare added, “as to the strength of those chains.”
Ashnak was wearing the fetters more from a sense of appropriateness than from coercion. His hand-to-hand fight with the Ferenzi guards had also been in a spirit of play, resulting in no more than their minor maiming.
“Yessir, Ma’am!” He brought his bare heels down on the pelts and carpets that covered the earth six-deep in the night Pavilion. His combat trousers slid an inch or so lower about his hips, his belt and webbing having being confiscated. The electric light gleamed on his bald head. “Not planning to escape, Dread Lord. Nothing to be afraid of. I’m innocent.”
The Dark Lord laughed, a soft sound that killed the night insects buzzing around the lamps. She sat enthroned in a chair of basalt subtly carved with all the creatures that slide, or creep, or sting. Masses of paperwork covered her stone desk. Her face showed violet-shadowed, beautiful, and dire.
“There remain only two days before the final accounting of votes…” She said. “Ah. Brother.”
The tent flap was pulled up by one of the guards outside—not an orc marine, Ashnak noted—and the cowled figure of the nameless necromancer strode in. Oderic, High Wizard of Ferenzia, followed him, trailing a cloud of blue pipe-weed smoke and leaning on his staff.
The wind blew chill across the encampment of Evil that lay outside Ferenzia’s Royal Quarter.
“Orcs!” The High Wizard Oderic stared at Ashnak, knocking his pipe out on the edge of the Dark Lord’s table. Without waiting for permission he eased himself down into one of the plush chairs. “Only goes to prove what I’ve always said about them, M’dear. Orcs are all well and good, I dare say, in their own lands to the east, but would You want Your daughter to marry one?”
There was an eye-contact between the nameless necromancer and the Dark Lord of which the white mage seemed utterly unaware.
Ashnak drew himself up as erect as is consistent with the sloping posture of an orc and bellowed resonantly, “I demand a trial to clear my good name!”
The white-haired wizard guffawed.
“But you see,” the Lord of Darkness said, “orc Ashnak, it is not a matter of your good name, it is a matter of Mine. You were one of My Horde Commanders. I cannot have My reputation soiled by atrocities you may have committed without My orders.”
There was no direct response to make to that which would not result in his head being on a pike before dawn. Ashnak settled for falling to his knees in a multiple rattle of chains. The impact of his weight shook the ink-stand on the stone table. He held up his fettered hands in a suitable attitude of appeal.
“Rather than bring disgrace upon my Mistress I will fall upon my own sword! But,” Ashnak added hastily, catching the gleam in the necromancer’s eye, “that would not clear You, Dread Lord, of the accusations of electoral corruption. That can only be done by bringing me to trial and proving me innocent as soon as possible—Ma’am, you’re going to need the orc marines very shortly, since the last situation report on the Bugs gave their position as being just south of the River Faex.”
“We need not worry about that,” the Lord of Darkness said. “My brother the nameless, you have had some experience with these orc soldiers. I hereby appoint you the authority of My name. Take over command as their general.”
Ashnak came up onto his taloned feet with all the speed and strength of a great orc, rock-sized fists clenched, chain taut between them. His voice hit tenor in outrage. “No!”