Barashkukor looked enquiringly down at the mess. “He does, sir.”
“Good. And what does he have to say?”
The cyborg-orc rapped out: “The general didn’t do it, Your Honour!”
“Is that right?” Ashnak asked the witness.
Barashkukor picked up the severed head and nodded it vigorously. “That’s right!”
Ashnak seized up the heavy gavel that lay on the bench and bashed it down. “Not guilty—case dismissed!”
Deep-throated orcish cheers rung out, and the orc marines threw their forage caps and steel helmets up in the air, sometimes even catching them again. The Ferenzi who sat in the gallery huddled down into their seats in blank-eyed bewilderment and terror.
“You can’t do this!” an outraged juror protested from the jury box. The Man’s plum-coloured doublet matched his complexion. “Shedding blood in the house of justice—it’s intolerable!”
His neighbour juror, a blue-eyed elf, pulled the Man’s sleeve. “Sit down! Mother of Trees, it was only a pair of halflings!”
“Cease!”
Simultaneously with the mage-enhanced voice that rang out in the courtroom, the barred doors burst inwards. Orcs tumbled backwards. The slam! of the doors produced instant silence.
“This circus is ended,” the same voice said bitterly.
Oderic, High Wizard of Ferenzia, paced into the courtroom, leaning on his mage-staff. Twenty of the wizards of the Order of the White Mage followed at his heels. The gimlet-eyed old man glared at the rising tiers of seats. The twenty mages in white surcoats faced the rows of hunched orcs festooned with bandoleers, saw-tooth daggers, stick grenades, magazine pouches, pistols, M16s, Kalashnikov rifles, and at least one General Purpose Machinegun. The orc marines stamped, catcalled, whistled, and yowled.
“There will be a trial,” Oderic insisted. His fingers flashed with mage-fire. “Orc, step down from the bench. It shall not be forgotten that you are intimidating the Light’s witness.”
Ashnak bared odourous fangs at the wizard. “There isn’t enough of him left to intimidate!”
He moved the Colt .45 automatic pistol to the small of his back and shuffled down from the judge’s bench, making certain at all times that he faced Oderic, and joined Barashkukor at the defence’s desk.
“Didn’t think we’d get away with that one, Major.”
“Worth a try, sir.” Barashkukor’s long ears straightened. “Don’t want it to come to outright war if we can help it, sir. We’re going to need these lads in the near future.”
Ashnak nodded thoughtfully. He bellowed up at the stands, “TenHUT!” and then, when the two hundred orcs snapped to attention in disciplined silence, added, “At ease! Stand easy!”
“The prisoner will refrain from giving orders!” Oderic snapped as he mounted the judge’s bench. He looked down at the carved seat and wiped it with his robe before he sat. The white wizard glanced at the halfling detail mopping up the floor and sighed. “That violence was ill done, orc. Especially since I am to be your judge. I do not approve of the waste of good halflings. Clerk of the court! Swear the jury in.”
A middle-aged Man began to move along the line of jurors with one of the Sacred Tomes. Ashnak turned in his chair and glared up at the orcs behind him He coughed.
A scuffle among the armed orc marines disclosed a somewhat cramped Duchess of Graagryk. The dark-haired female halfling stood up in the middle of a row of orcs in green DPM, her black leather grown and diamond-ornamented plume holder catching the sun pouring in through the court’s great windows.
“I appeal!” she called.
Oderic said testly. “It is customary, madam, to leave the appeal until after the sentence.”
Uncrushed by his sarcasm, Magdelene Amaryllis Judith Brechie van Nassau of Graagryk spoke with a penetrating clarity.
“I appeal to the highest justice of Ferenzia on behalf of my husband.”
“You have it.”
“No,” she corrected. “We do not. High Wizard, on capital matters Ferenzia has an ancient and honourable tradition. The defendant may apply for, and be granted, the right to be tried by the highest justice in the land. We demand to be tried by the Royal justice. Mage, I demand as judge for my husband—the High King, Magorian himself!”
The High Wizard’s eyes bulged. “But he’s—”
“Yes?” the halfling duchess said sweetly. She fluttered her eyelashes. “You were about to say, he is the High King, and therefore well known to be a great and wise judge?”
“Er…”
“Of course you were. I really don’t need to remind you that this is within our legal rights, do I, Your Mageship?”
The Duchess of Graagryk seated herself again, her dignity somewhat spoiled by six hulking orc marines leaning across to slap her on the back and growl, “Yo!”
Oderic scowled, got to his feet, held a muttered conversation with the captain of the Order of White Mages, and then stomped from the court, his staff crashing down on the tiles and dying in the distance. Ashnak leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head and his bare feet on the table.
“It’ll work, sir, won’t it?” Barashkukor said stoutly.
Ashnak bit off a toe-claw and flicked it. It spanged off the bald head of a middle-aged dwarf, who winced and clapped a handkerchief to the bleeding wound.
“Steady on, sir. That’s counsel for the prosecution.”
“The hell you say.” Contented, Ashnak slid back in his chair and closed his eyes, listening to the orcs in the courtroom chanting, “Yo the marines!” The halfling ushers attempted verbally to restrain them from the floor of the court, unwilling to venture up the steps. The mages of the White Order watched with a dispassionate contempt.
A faint knocking sound impinged on Ashnak’s consciousness. He opened his eyes, turning his head to look out of the courtroom’s open window.
A stark frame of wood rose towards the morning sky.
A gallows.
The gibbet was already complete, and the hammering came from an elderly Man fitting the trapdoor below the noose. Ashnak noted a number of orc marines in off-duty fatigues lounging around the gallows.
“Are you sure you’re getting a long enough drop?” a squat orc marine lieutenant asked, her voice coming up thinly to Ashnak from the square below.
“Tear ’is ’ead off if it’s wrong,” an orc grunt added. “Won’t it, ma’am?”
The elderly Man spat out another nail and hammered it in. “I’m sure you’re right, mum. Don’t ’ee worry none! Begging yur pardon, I’ll have ’un set up a treat by the time the orc hanging’s due. He’s a big ’un, so I’ll be sure and drop a few sandbags through first and check, mum, now’s you’ve been so kind as to mention it.”
A fanfare of trumpets drowned out the noise of hammering. Ashnak lumbered to his feet as the High King Kelyos Magorian entered, holding the arm of a squire, and was escorted by his helmed and mailed guards to the judge’s bench. Ashnak saluted. Barashkukor threw out his chest and sprang to attention, the steel fingers of his right hand touching the peak of his flat cap.
“TenHUT!” the small orc bawled. The orc marines in the court joined the standing citizens of Ferenzia in what Magda Brandiman had demanded as a politic show of respect.
There was, Ashnak noted, no sign of Oderic.
“…mmm, and I hadn’t finished breakfast either,” Magorian grumbled. He irritatedly swatted at his elf squire, who continued to button him into a long black judge’s gown. “Damme, what I am here for, Kalmyrinth?”
The elf straightened the long curled horsehair wig on his sovereign’s head and stepped down from the bench. “You are presiding over the trial of orc general Ashnak for war crimes, sire.”