Mary Gentle - Grunts

The interior of the Great Hall of Sarderis’s city keep shone white in the afternoon sun. Will Brandiman, comfortably replete, advanced towards the dais at the end of the Hall and bowed. Ned, walking beside him, looked wide-eyed and wondering at the company of elves, dwarves, and Men crowding around the dais, and at the female Man sitting on it in the high-backed chair.

“Will and Ned Brandiman.” Will bowed again. “Halfling brothers, my Lady. Very much at your service.”

He tugged his new silver-embroidered black doublet as if he were straightening it, taking advantage of the movement to check with nimble fingers the position of secret poisoned needles. His short-sword and throwing knives he had handed in at the gate-house, keeping the mail-shirt on pretence of personal danger.

Ned bowed, cloddishly, still gazing up wide-eyed. Will trod on his brother’s foot as a warning not to overdo it, unwilling to use the Thieves’ Guild finger-talk where it might be recognised and read.

“You two it was who found the family butchered? How is that so?”

The female Man on the dais leaned forward in her chair. The light from the whitewashed walls shone from her plate-armour and the dazzling surcoat with the golden Sun embroidered on it. As her face came into the light, Will used every effort to keep from flinching.

Her hair shone yellow as any female Man’s, cropped short over pointed grey-white ears. The greyish white of her skin continued across her face, becoming blotched with dark grey and black patches over her jaw and down her neck to where the gorget covered her skin. One misshapen tooth pushed up a corner of her wide, thin-lipped mouth. Thick hairs protruded from her flat nostrils, and her eyes—tilted so that they slanted up from the outer corners towards the bridge of her nose—glinted green.

“Fear me not.” Her soft voice slurred a little, and a drop of saliva ran from under her lip where her tooth lifted it. She wiped her mouth with a gloved hand. “Fear not, halfling. I am called The Named. I wear another’s ugliness of soul upon my body—as he wears the beauty of my virtue, unearned, on his face. But that shall change, also, when we face each other in the final confrontation. For now, believe my heart serves the Light, and speak your answer. You it was who discovered the bodies?”

Will Brandiman spread his hands helplessly. “My Lady, the very sight was… horrific. These were good people of the town with whom we took lodging, and I greatly fear that was their downfall.”

The Named said sharply, “How so?”

“It must be that we were followed, Lady, on our way to you, and whoever sought our lives found those good people, and so…” Will swallowed. “We were about our own business that night, not returning until the morning, when we found their bodies.”

A slender elf in green stepped forward from the crowd. “Some creature of darkness was responsible, Lady. The child’s body had been cooked and partially eaten. It is an infallible sign of the orc-filth. None but orcs could be capable of such wickedness.”

“And the writing? Can orcs write?”

The elf bowed her head. “For that, I know not.”

Ned Brandiman, at Will’s elbow, said, “Our lodging was paid two weeks in advance at the shop. If the Dark has human spies in the city, I suppose they must have found that out and sent for… other creatures to attack us. Perhaps it was spies of the Dark who wrote—but I can’t read, Lady. Brother Will told me what filth they wrote.”

“I did.” Will patted his brother’s arm. With his hand firmly on Ned’s arm he took the opportunity to finger:

— I said act impressed, not half-witted .

Will added, “Lady, there is much that you should know. I fear your brother seeks our life.”

The stunningly ugly face shifted into something that might have been a sad smile. “Say on, little one.”

“It is to our shame,” Will launched into his story, “that we were, in part and as it seems, employed by your brother the nameless…”

He wielded ignorance and innocence in a complex web, his eyes on The Named’s misshapen face, leaving it to Ned to scan the assembly for armed Men, hostile dwarven-kind, and elvish mages.

“…I grew to know something of these orcs. Orcs have no love of magic, Lady—unless it’s the sort that requires much torture and sacrifice and has short and easily pronounced incantations. But their magic-sniffer could tell an absence of magic truly. And so we fled for our lives, concluding that if they should escape, your brother’s orcish army now has weapons that are not magical but are infinitely greater than sword or bow. And these he will put at the disposal of the Dark Lord.”

He paused.

“And so we feared for you, Lady, and for all our sakes, and so came searching for you to tell this tale.”

The green eyes, the only beauty in that face, met his. Her gloved hand beckoned. He walked to the foot of the dais, Ned at his heels, and craned his neck to look her in the face still.

“You have done well to bring this tale to me. What reward would you have?”

Will opened his mouth, but before he could get a word out, Ned said, “We’d paid our two weeks’ lodging at the house—is there any chance we could have that refunded?”

The female Man’s head went back, and her wide, loose mouth opened in a bellow of laughter. Will instantly sized up the distance to the guarded exits. He put his heel down crushingly hard on Ned’s foot.

“We want no reward,” he said emphatically.

Her laughter stopped. “A strange quest you tell of, halfling. It seems by it, although you conceal it, that you are thieves. But even thieves may become the instruments of Light.”

Ned muttered. “‘Adventurers.’”

Will shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, prepared to grab poison needles and flee under the feet of the crowd around the dais. “Thieves it may be—but thieves who hate the Dark as much as you do, Lady.”

“Elinturanbar,” she called. She wiped her mouth again with her soft glove.

A robed elf, taller by a head than any there, walked out of the crowd. Men and dwarves and elven-kind moved aside from the sway of his white robes embroidered with the gold Sun of the Mages. Will stared up into the lean face.

“Elves!” Ned exclaimed. “I never thought I should see Elves, Will.”

Will caught the missed breath in his brother’s ingenuous remark and the imperceptible shift to a combat-stance. Something cold twisted in his gut.

The elf’s face showed the faint fine lines of age.

Not half-elven, having none of the signs, nor yet one of the Long-lived come to the finish of his ages and the readiness to take ship to the Eternal Lands. Elinturanbar’s lean face, webbed with crow’s-feet at the eyes and mouth, shone with a fanatical light—that of those of the elven-kind who, out of the curiosity of the immortal, voluntarily embrace the pain and death that Men and other mortal creatures know.

“Elinturanbar will question you,” The Named said. “He is my inquisitor. The deceptions of evil are many and legendary—forgive me that I choose to test you, as metal is tested in the forge, before I decide if you are tempered to become a sword of the Light.”

Nimble, Will’s hand darted for the needles sewn into his doublet’s tabs. Fast as he moved, the aging elf inquisitor stooped faster and caught his arms, twisting them bonecrackingly hard up behind his back.

Ned Brandiman took his hands out of the loose puffed-and-slashed sleeves of his doublet. Weighed down by the sheer bulk of metal, he nonetheless managed to brace both arms and hold out, muzzle wavering, the 1911 U.S. Army issue Colt .45 autoloading pistol.

The midday sun burned down from a cloudless sky. The orc marines, beetle-browed eyes staring to the front, pounded down the track away from Nin-Edin under four- and five-ton loads of rifles, grenade-launchers, machineguns, machine-pistols, antitank weapons, and innumerable belts of ammunition.