Stan Nicholls: Inferno

She had had the luck to come across a good man.

The following week was a blur.

She had been taken to a farmhouse. It was modest, and needed thatching. There were chickens and pigs in the yard. In the house was the farmer’s wife and her brood; four youngsters, all boys.

The farmer and his wife tended Jennesta. They fed her, bathed her and spoke soothingly to her until she got back her senses.

She feigned memory loss, and let them assume she had been attacked and robbed of everything. They just about accepted that the odd greenish patina of her skin was the result of a childhood malady, and soon seemed to ignore it. And it wasn’t so outlandish, they told her, in a world that had orcs in it.

The reference to that particular race revitalised Jennesta. She interrogated the couple, demanding all sorts of information. Where were these orcs? Were they the only non-human race in this world? What was the humans’ political set-up and where did its power lie? They found her questions baffling, and couldn’t understand why she didn’t know the simplest of facts. Jennesta blamed her contrived amnesia, pretending to recall a blow to the head.

What she learned was that she was in Peczan, the cradle of a great empire. It was incomparably mighty, though it had its enemies. Most of these were barbarian kingdoms, often at each other’s throats, and of little account. Peczan’s only possible rival was the orcs, who occupied a far-off land called Acurial. But even they posed little threat, Jennesta was told, given their aversion to warlike ways. Naturally she couldn’t accept her hosts’ talk of the orcs of Acurial being docile, and felt sure they spoke from ignorance. But she held her tongue on the subject.

What she learned set her planning. Now there was a goal, and she turned her will to achieving it.

She had almost entirely recovered physically. Her magical abilities were another matter. They had started to return, but feebly, though she still felt the land’s amazing fecundity. Her plan could hardly be realised from a decrepit farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. She needed to move on. That meant fully regaining her powers, and the use of people to serve her purpose.

Jennesta applied another kind of power to the oafish farmer. His conquest took just days. Once seduced, he was clay in her hands, and she remade him in her own image. Where there had been humanity, now there was only a dimwitted devotion to her whims. Where there had been tenderness towards his family, now there was callous indifference.

Such was her hold on the man that he willingly conspired in replenishing her powers. In the event, his wife’s contribution was poor fare, mean and stringy. But the hearts of the four boys proved extremely nourishing. Her abilities restored, Jennesta had no further need of the farmer. She dispensed with him by simply removing the cloud from his mind and allowing him to see what had been done. His suicide provided her with a fleeting distraction.

The farmer was her first acolyte. There would be many more.

She had heard of a nearby town, and lost no time getting there, taking the farm’s wagon and what little money she could find. The so-called town turned out to be not much more than a village. But it did have a tailor. Finally rid of the farmer’s wife’s drab hand-me-downs, she made sure her new clothes included a hood and a veil, should her appearance be an issue.

She also learned something she found intriguing, and which the farmer hadn’t bothered mentioning. Unlike the vast majority of humans in Maras-Dantia, in this world they had a command of magic. At least, some did. These adepts belonged to the Order of the Helix, a sect with as much sway in the empire as its political masters.

The Order’s nearest lodge was in the region’s administrative centre, a provincial city a day’s ride away. Compared to the sleepy hamlets and villages she passed on the road, its bustling streets gave her a measure of anonymity. More importantly, it connected her with a strand of the empire’s web.

Jennesta had no trouble finding the Helix lodge; prominently located, it passed for a major temple. She was less lucky trying to penetrate it as anything other than a supplicant. The Order was male dominated. There were females in its ranks but they were few, and hardly any had real power. Rebuffed, she looked for a weak spot.

The Order’s local overseer was an elderly, addle-headed bachelor who had never met anything like Jennesta before. She captivated him with ease. In half a year she had become his indispensable aide, and was grudgingly admitted to the Helix ranks under his patronage. By year’s end she occupied his position, thanks to the judicious administering of poison.

She had a power base.

The ruthless efficiency with which Jennesta ran the lodge, and reports of her outstanding magical abilities, attracted the attention of the Order’s upper echelons, as she intended. The upshot was a summons to the capital, and Helix’s headquarters.

Competition for preferment was much stiffer once she entered the Grand Lodge, and advancement was frustratingly slow. Applying pressure on obstructive officials, swearing oaths she would later break, forming fragile alliances, corrupting the susceptible, bullying the weak and eliminating rivals needed all her guile. It also took time.

Another two years went by before the Order of the Helix was hers.

She immediately turned her attention to infiltrating government. As magic and politics intermingled in Peczan, she had already earned a certain notoriety that opened previously slammed doors. By virtue of her position at the pinnacle of Helix, she was automatically granted access to the citadels of the ruling class and the parlours of the influential, despite their thinly-veiled resentment of a female. Once again, she set about climbing.

A further year of machination and murder passed. She completed it as an upper-ranking official; a position of considerable power, though short of the highest. Any hopes she might have had about reaching the apex of empire were allowed to slip away. It wasn’t that she didn’t have an insatiable appetite for power. It was simply that she had all she needed, and saw no point in wasting more time laying siege to the summit, where she would be too noticeable in any event.

Jennesta never stopped thinking about orcs. She thought of the Wolverines in terms of revenge. And she thought of the orcs of Acurial as an opportunity.

It had long been her ambition to command an unparalleled army, and given their inexhaustible passion for warfare, no race was better suited to fill its ranks than the orcs. In this, Jennesta was perpetuating the dream of her mother, the sorceress Vermegram, who long ago mustered the orcs of Maras-Dantia. With such a force, and armed with the instrumentalities, Jennesta saw no limit to conquest. But like Vermegram, the magical means to totally control the race had eluded her. The orcs who served her in Maras-Dantia were kept in line with iron discipline and brutal punishments; the doctrine of fear Jennesta applied to all her underlings. That had proved insufficient, as the actions of the cursed Wolverines attested. The irony was that she had all but perfected a method of control when her father consigned her to this world. A world whose only orcs inhabited a distant land.

So she was intrigued, during her fourth year, when she started to hear rumours about military action against Acurial. This wasn’t because Acurial posed any kind of threat to the empire or its interests. It was motivated by a desire for expansion, a hunger for natural resources and to bolster Peczan’s influence in the region. But even a dictatorship must occasionally placate the opinion of its subjects, particularly when planning to send their young into combat. The orcs reputed passivity went some way to assure people that an invasion would be a walk-over, but a pretext was needed.