Grunts (21 page)

The Northern Kingdoms ravaged, fields unharvested rotting in early winter rain. Men and other races huddle in their villages against famine and death, while in Herethlion and Fourgate songs are sung of heroes’ victories. Vultures avoid the cities of Men. The dead tossed over the walls stink of plague.

The war is over.

The abandoned Dark strongholds, the magical dead of the east, are desolate now beyond even vultures’ picking.

And vultures follow the Last Battle’s soldiers in their company-sized refugee bands, waiting as they take forts and castles, hold them for a time, lose them to their lawful owners or (more often) to larger marauding bands, leaving enough behind to glut the vultures so that they can barely fly.

The war is over. This is peace.

Vultures circle at heights where, like the fields of destruction beneath, the only rules are those of hunger.

The unseasonable November snow whitened the porticos of Fourgate’s mansions and turned to peach-coloured slush in the cobbled streets. Will Brandiman tipped the carriers of his sedan chair, got out, and trod cautiously across the slippery flagstones of the courtyard outside the Visible College.

A small girl with brown pigtails hurled a snowball. It burst against Will’s tricorn hat. He growled, “Cut it out, Ned!”

The girl, slightly taller than Will, stuffed one somewhat coarse hand inside a rabbit-fur muff and picked up the hem
of her gown and cloak together as she skipped across the street. Close at hand, her hair was a little too short for braiding, and her brows too thick, and her mouth had lines about it that eight-year-olds do not commonly have…

The brown-haired halfling shuffled his large, hirsute feet under the scarlet velvet of his dress. He lowered his head demurely. “Greetings, brother Will.”

“Brother Ned.”

They both looked at the Visible College.

“Let’s set fire to the building,” Ned Brandiman said. “Then when everyone comes rushing out, we can rush
in
…”

“Dark damn it, Ned, that’s your answer to everything!”

“It works,” the elder halfling said, miffed. “Well? I’ve watched outside this place for two hours. We’re not going to get in. I’m not surprised orcs didn’t make it. There’s magic oozing out of the very stones.”

Will Brandiman raised his head. Cold wind and flakes of snow brushed his eyes. The monumental walls of the Visible College here gave way to a terraced frontage, lined with Corinthian columns, and a vast set of double doors flanked by stone griffins. Uniformed Wilderness mercenaries patrolled the colonnade in front of the doors.

Ned squatted and began constructing a snowman, singing a child’s game-rhyme in a high-pitched voice. The mercenaries’ gazes slid away. Will stopped pretending to be digging in his purse for coppers.

They casually walked away from the courtyard to one of the hot-chestnut-sellers’ braziers in the street and stood picking the shells off finger-burning nuts and chewing them, then dropping the husks.

Will swallowed thoughtfully. “It’s guarded. Magic and steel. The walls are insurmountable. I don’t fancy coming back tonight to pick the lock on
that
door. It’ll probably turn you into a hippogriff if you don’t have the right magical key.”

“We could set fire—”

“Ned!”

“It was only a suggestion.”

Will stamped his booted feet in the slush. There was no jingle from the mail-shirt under his cloak, nor from the bandoleer of throwing-knives he wore over his doublet, nor the daggers at his belt and in his boots. A thin coil of elven
rope, wound about his waist, made him the image of a fat, possibly dwarfish, merchant (but not his feet). The wind blew through his curly black hair, silver at the temples. He narrowed his eyes.

“But there’s Mother to be thought of…”

“Yes.”

The two halflings exchanged glances.

“If they harm her…” Ned scowled.

Will said viciously, “I’d like to take something else out of the Visible College. Enough experimental magic to make mincemeat out of her kidnappers!”

“No point. Not if we’re stealing magic-null talismans for them. I don’t think we
dare
cheat.”

“Damn it.”

There was a pause, in the deadened silence that comes with snowfall. A coach crept by, cartwheels skidding, Percherons straining to pull it across the icy cobbles. Will nodded absently. He wiped wind-tears from the lined corners of his eyes.

“The Nin-Edin fort,” he asserted, “we already know. Those are the orcs we bemused into giving us an armed escort out of the Wilderness three months ago. Chances are it’s the same orcs there now—”

“No way!” Ned shook his head emphatically. One pink ribbon slipped from his braids. Nimbly, he picked it up and began plaiting his hair again as he watched the frontage of the Visible College. “After the Last Battle? There are stray orcs all
over
the place!”

“You’d know about the Last Battle,” Will said sceptically.

“And you’d know too, I suppose?” His brother gave him a look of absolute cynicism. “Having fought impressively on the side of the Light—as you insist on telling all the gamblers and ruffians and whores in Fourgate?”

“That has nothing to do with anything!”

Snow fell faster from a lowering sky, the flakes black against the clouds, white against the masonry of mansions and arcades. Will flexed his fingers inside embroidered gauntlets. It is never wise to let hands become too cold to act. He eyed the lantern light shining through the windowed dome of the Visible College—a dome accessible only by flight, if then.

“It has to be the same orcs! They lost their leaders at Guthranc, but they weren’t all massacred, not by any means.
The question is, Do they know it’s us?” Will shivered in the wind. “I do wish Mother wouldn’t pray to Fortuna. It brings about the most amazing coincidences.”

Ned Brandiman hurled a snowball at the nut-seller. The elderly woman good-naturedly tossed a bag of hot chestnuts back. She turned back to her cash-tray, counted, and began to frown.

Boots stamped and weapon-butts hit the flagstones as the mercenaries changed guard. Will eyed the oiled brilliance of their halberds and the much-worn grips of their swords. Under his breath he murmured, “No, thank you…”

“Perhaps you should have told Mother that we still have all that money,” Ned observed.

Will nodded morosely. “Perhaps I should. But you know what she’s like with gold…I didn’t want to put temptation in her way.”

The snow fell faster, silting up in the creases of Will’s cloak. Ned put both hands inside his rabbit-fur muff.

“So how are we going to get in there?”

“You’re not,” Will said. He surveyed the crimson velvet gown and grinned. “You’re going to freeze your ass off in the snow, waiting to see if I make it, and if I don’t, you’re going to come in and rescue me. Right, brother Ned?”

Ned Brandiman groaned. “Right, brother Will. All right. I’ll try that again. How are
you
going to get into the Visible College?”

Will brushed down his cloak, taking advantage of the movement to unobtrusively check the position of throwing-knives, daggers, concealed poison needles, and blackjacks. There were bulges at his belt. He straightened his shoulders and stared through the falling snow at the steps and colonnade and guards outside the Visible College.

“In cases like these,” he said, “I always find that the judicious application of enormous amounts of money works wonders. Excuse me.”

Careful of the ice, he strode across the road and up the steps towards the mercenaries, taking out from under his fashionable cloak a bag of gold as large as a troll’s fist.

“Here.” He clapped it into the mercenary captain’s hand. About to bellow, she first hefted the bag thoughtfully, opened it, and her eyebrows then attempted to climb through her hairline.

“That’s for you,” Will said, “with another one when I
come out. I wish to speak to the director of the Visible College, with a view to making some purchases—a large quantity, wholesale.”

“I must no longer let myself be distracted by their devilish engines!”

The Paladin-Mage stood silhouetted against the racing black clouds that hid the peaks of the Demonfest Mountains. A fierce cold wind flapped the white surcoat he wore over his armour to signify the purity of his intent, and seared into his dark, aquiline face. Amarynth did not so much as blink.

“Lady,” he prayed, “now send me Grace!”

He stared up the Nin-Edin pass at the squat, dark fortress, silhouetted with old snow, bristling with guns and flags on the keep and inner walls, and (on the outer, lower walls which Amarynth now faced) crowded with jeering orcs.

A brown orc leaned between the crenellations, starting a chant:

Amarynth lifted both his dark hands and spoke a word.

“You c
—”

The orcs ceased to chant. In the sudden silence, a whispering noise sounded. It might have been the wind. It became louder, a rushing roaring and pouring.

Mortar turned to powder and leaked out between the stones of Nin-Edin’s outer wall.

Lichen and iron-rot darted up the dank walls. Nitre spidered across the cracking masonry. Within the space of three heartbeats, the stone
aged.

Aged, crumbled, and fell into ruin.

The outermost of the main gate’s towers slid two yards down the hill, tilted, and the masonry blocks showered out into the air, falling down the slops, and fading, before they hit dirt, into the dust of aeons.

The cold, snow-laden wind blew down the pass. Orcs, running, fell with the dissolving walls, tumbling into shale and earth and a rising cloud of putrefaction, as the entire outer wall of the ancient Nin-Edin fort collapsed within the space of thirty heartbeats.

The clouds broke.

Spiked and cusped armour encased Amarynth, each plate bright with pierced gold borders. As the Powers of the Air bowed to his command, the sun struck down through the pass, and he raised his arm, and his gauntlet took white flame.

“Amarynth Firehand!” one of the elvish warriors cried, and the name was taken up through the massed ranks of the Light encampment. A silver trumpet rang out, high and clear, echoing from rockface to rockface, until it seemed a thousand armies stirred in the mountains. Amarynth vaulted, fully armoured, into the saddle of his caparisoned war-unicorn.

“My part is done!” he cried. “Warriors of the Light, the next glory is yours!”

He walked his horned mount over the broken outer defences, with the charging elves, dwarves, and Men. Evil witch-fires blazed and stuttered from the keep and the inner walls of Nin-Edin. Harsh orcish voices shrieked commands.

The Paladin ignored them, staring down.

Among the rubble lay twitching bundles. He dismounted and knelt by one. The orc soldier dribbled feebly and gazed up with eyes upon which cataracts had already formed. Age withered the bulging muscles, made the palsied claws shake. The mouth drooled, attempting to form words.

“Her Grace did come upon me,” Amarynth said, satisfied.

He remounted and rode on a few paces, picking his way through the rubble and the dozens of orcs dead of old age.

“Die, motherfucker!”

Sword in hand, Amarynth leaned down. An orc lay pinned under a masonry block. Obviously too far from the epicentre of magic to be affected, this orc was yet young. It spat through broken tusks and hurled a rock with its unbroken arm.

“Poor creature!” The elf dismounted and, carefully keeping clear of the orc’s fangs, laid a gauntleted hand on its sweating brow. “Do you repent of your sins?”

The uniformed orc coughed. It stared around at the hundreds of elf, dwarf, and Men warriors tramping up the hill, their bright swords dripping with the blood of the aged orcs caught in the outer walls’ wreckage.

“Hell, yes! I repent, man. I repent! Take me prisoner—”

A great pity welled up in Amarynth’s heart. He thrust his
swordblade deep into the orc’s throat. The creature’s startled eyes dulled as it dribbled green blood.

“I have saved your soul by sending you to a better world while you were in a state of grace. Who knows but that as a prisoner you might have fallen back into evil ways?”

Masonry shards whipped through the air. Amarynth cast a casual fail-weapons spell at the prone, firing orcs farther up the hill. The orcs—he was close enough now to see their snarling, ugly features, their hunched bodies, and vile clothing—cursed and threw down their useless weapons.

An authoritative orc voice shrieked.
“Fall back by fire and movement!”

The odd incantation meant nothing to Amarynth, skilled though he was in arcane lore. He watched the orcs run, led by a smaller orc in black, who limped.

“Now,” he cried. “They run! Now,
for the Light!”

The Man infantry cheered, pounding their green-stained blades against their painted shields. Beams of sun shone on their mail-shirts and cloaks as they swarmed up the slope.

Some orcs hid in cover and fired while other bands of orcs retreated; the retreating orcs would then stop in turn and begin to fire. Incomprehensible. The Paladin-Mage Amarynth cast fail-weapons spells to his left and right as he rode up the hill, head bare to the chill of the day.

A skinny orc danced on the battlements of the inner walls. He frothed at the mouth as Amarynth stared up, the feathers and chains that ornamented him shaking and jangling.

The red-bearded dwarf Kazra appeared suddenly from the rear of Nin-Edin, stomping through the bloody slush. “Lord Commander, they won’t take the bait. They won’t leave the inner walls and come out and fight us!”

A slender elf Captain of Archers stepped forward and smiled. “Impossible, dwarf. Orcs always respond to taunting.”

“They do?” Kazra stared up at the armed, uniformed orcs lining the crenellations. “Orcs!
Cowardly scum!”

A battered and bleeding albino-crested orc muttered, “You called?”

“I believe I begin to comprehend their strange tongue,
Lord Commander,” the engineer-mage said. She pointed up at a large orc. “Your mother wears combat boots, and pisses standing up!”