Robin D. Laws

MEAT & BONE

Angelika Fleischer #

PILED HIGH, the corpses formed a bloody ridge. Arms and legs, some broken, others twisted, jutted out from the heap. Thickening blood dripped down from the uppermost bodies, running down mud-spattered faces and spreading through the fabric of tunics and leggings. It was early yet, and the stench of rotting had yet to rise up and overcome that of emptied bladders and evacuated bowels. The sky was red from distant fires. Crows cawed. Flies buzzed, ready to lay eggs, which would pop forth as maggots, which would feed, which would grow into flies, which would buzz elsewhere, to find more meat for more maggots.

Angelika crept quickly but carefully forward, watching where each foot fell. It would be no good slipping in the mud, or hearing that awful, telltale slurking noise that informed you you’d just got your boot stuck. The orcs who’d fallen upon these soldiers and slaughtered them would have mostly moved on by now, having sorted through the corpses for weapons and armor pieces, the only varieties of loot they had any use for. But there could always be stragglers. Or her fellow looters. Angelika’s profession was not an elevated one, and you could never trust someone you met out here not to slit your throat for the trinkets you’d mined. You did not want to fall down or get stuck or become in any way distracted.

Angelika Fleischer had blacked the pale skin of her cheeks and forehead with soot, to make herself harder to see from a distance. She was tall and her limbs were long. Raggedly cut locks of hair jutted from the top of her narrow, sharply symmetrical head. The irises of her eyes were dark, so much so that it was hard to distinguish them from the pupils. These unrevealing eyes sat high in her face, above imperious, down-sloping cheekbones. Her lips were thin and precise. A short, thin line of white scar tissue fissured from the right corner of her mouth, marring the icy perfection of her beauty. She wore neither earrings, nor necklace, nor rings on her fingers. Her tunic and leggings were of brown leather that had worn so soft it seemed at first glance like deerskin. They were stained in many places, and crisscrossed with rudely sewn patches and repairs. Both garments were immodestly tight, though she had draped a short skirt of gauzy rags around her waist. In this land, it was hard enough, and you did not want to give men in the taverns any further reason for annoying catcalls, which drew attention. The sleeves of her tunic clung tight to her arms, and ended in frayed cuffs several inches before her wrists. Gloves protected her palms, though she’d snipped away their fingers and thumbs, to leave her own bare and free to work.

Work she did. She knelt down over a stray body, one the orcs had not tossed into the pile. It was hard to make out colours, with all the gore and mud, so she couldn’t guess the man’s origin or regiment. But from the cuff-frills, you could tell he was an officer. The breastplate was already long gone, so it was an easy thing for her to reach down and pluck off each carved ivory, gold-rimmed button, one, then the next, then the next. Angelika tucked the resultant handful of buttons into the soft leather pouch that hung from her belt. She yanked open the tunic to see if the man had a ransom wrapped around his chest -perhaps a money belt, or thin strands of gold. But no. She scuttled backwards to grab the heel of his left boot. For some reason, if it was in the boot, it would nearly always be in the left one. She wiggled the heel and twisted and wriggled and worked it off. In the handful of years Angelika had been making her living as a looter of battlefields, she had become very good at getting boots off. There, wrapped around his ankle, she saw a necklace of pearls and silver. She snatched it up and tightened her fingers around it.

An exhalation of breath, made visible by the air’s increasing chill, rose up from one of the bodies in front of her. Someone was not quite dead. Angelika halted herself in mid-gesture, with the stillness of a hunted animal, her face remaining expressionless. Her eyes methodically scanned the tangle of corpses ahead of her. She saw the man who was still breathing. Heard him groan: a low, weak grunt. It spoke to Angelika of fear and disappointment. His throat was slick with bright-colored blood and, as Angelika studied him further, she saw his tunic was also soaked through with red. He gurgled and his chest jerked slightly upwards.

Angelika looked slowly around and moved towards him, gingerly finding solid footfalls in the few spaces the carpet of corpses offered. She squatted beside the man. His face was wide, his beard bushy and gray. The veins of his face lay close to the surface of his skin, mapping a lifetime of drained ale flagons. His right eye was pale blue. A black leather patch, studded with agates and with an opal in the middle, covered the left. She could easily tell he was a veteran campaigner.

His living eye registered the sight of the woman kneeling over him, and he tried to reach a fleshy arm up at her. But strength had left him, and it sank back into the muck the moment he tried to raise it. He groaned again, making a sound that seemed to Angelika fretful, almost babyish.

‘Not me,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Angelika said, but gently, ‘you.’

She put the fingers of her right hand together and moved them slowly towards his face. She lay them softly against his left cheek. She felt the wet of the blood and the soft tangle of matted beard hair. She felt the coarser stubble on the part of his cheek the dying man usually shaved.

‘Not-‘ the veteran said, but then he deflated, and Angelika saw that his one good eye had gone blank. It wasn’t so unusual to find soldiers who hadn’t finished dying yet, especially against orcs. They were less than thorough with their defeated foes. After a human victory, you found most corpses stripped of obvious valuables, which was bad, but you faced less chance that the man you were searching would suddenly bolt up and clamp bloodied hands around your throat. It was a different set of complications, depending on which side won.

She broke from her stillness and reached over to snatch the jeweled eye-patch from the dead man’s face. She tucked it into her purse’s wide, waiting mouth. She checked his tunic for buttons but they were nothing special. He’d spent all his vanity coin on the fancy patch, clearly. She half-straightened herself, casting her eyes about for an officer type. They were always the most lucrative.

She heard another groan, behind her, and turned. A long, thin dagger was already in her hand. She saw nothing moving. Just the big ridge of piled bodies. She watched a plume of breath escape from her lips up into the air.

‘Please,’ a voice said. A young voice, male. Speaking the tongue of the Empire. It was not the kind of trick a brutish orc was capable of playing.

Angelika remained still, kept her blade out.

‘Please,’ the voice repeated. ‘Over here,’ it said.

Angelika’s eyes went to where the voice seemed to be coming from, but her feet remained planted in place.

‘Please,’ the voice said. ‘I am stuck under bodies. Whenever I open my mouth, it fills up with blood. Someone else’s, I am pretty sure. Help me get out. Please.’

Angelika knew the Empire, and in a past existence had learned to tell one accent from another. The young man’s voice came from somewhere up in the north-east. A long way from where they stood, close to the Blackfire Pass, between the southern flatlands of the Empire and the lawless reaches of the Border Princes.

She still had not moved.

‘Please help me out,’ the young man said. His voice was getting louder, finding strength. ‘My name is Franziskus.’

‘Franziskus,’ she said, ‘shut up. You’ll bring the greenskins back.’

‘I’m over here,’ he said, much more quietly. ‘Please. Quick. Under all this weight… My lungs - being crushed.’

‘Then don’t use them so much.’

Angelika had pinpointed the location of the voice and began to step towards it. Finally she saw the movement. It was midway up in the stack of corpses, pointing upwards. She saw wriggling. And shoulders. Of his features, all she could make out was a helmetless head, a mop of what was probably blond, possibly curly, hair soaked flat with congealing blood.

‘Please get me out of here. See what part of me you can grab onto and then pull.’

‘No.’

There was quiet for a moment, and in it Angelika could hear faraway drums.

‘No?’ the voice finally said.

‘No. Now shut up before I open your throat, on the risk of your attracting orcs.’ She’d moved closer to him, so she could speak more quietly. She could see his forehead now, and his eyes, though she did not think he could see her. He kept blinking his eyelids as more blood dripped onto his face from above.

‘Please, I promise you, I’ll be absolutely silent,’ Franziskus said, also barely audible. ‘I foxed the orcs into thinking me dead, but I’m not injured. I’ll not be a burden to you. All I need is help out, then I’ll be on my way. Alone, no burden to you.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘Are your ears, too, filled with blood, or are you always hard of hearing?’ Angelika’s voice remained even, its tone flat and unenlightening.

‘But why deny me mercy?’

A moving glint, high and to the left, caught Angelika’s eye. It was a pendant, bearing the holy hammer symbol of Sigmar. It was gold. The pendant hung from a clutching hand, out-thrust from the ridge of bodies. Franziskus’ squirming had set it to swinging, slightly.

‘Why deny me mercy?’ Franziskus repeated.

‘Your throat remains uncut. Is that not mercy?’ She rose up on her toes and plucked the pendant like it was a grape on a vine.

‘Why decline me the help I need?’

Angelika began to look for other riches to pick from the corpse pile. Her eyes fixed on a cufflink, perhaps of silver.

‘Have you laid eyes on me?’ she asked. She reached forward to grab a dead wrist with her off-hand. In the other, her knife sawed at cuff fabric. ‘What do you think I am doing here?’

‘Did I hear you comforting someone, just now?’

‘No.’ She tore the cut fabric of the sleeve away and dropped it, with the cufflink, into her purse.

‘I am sure I heard this.’

‘Hope deceives you. You mistake my nature.’

Franziskus stopped to breathe and Angelika carried on as if she would hear no more of him. She found a boot sticking from the mass of the slain and began to twist and pull at it. It was stuck securely to its master’s leg, and resisted her stoutly.

‘Then what is your nature?’ Franziskus eventually asked.

Angelika pulled some more at the boot. It would not be budged. She wrinkled up her nose at it. It was a flaw of her nature, she admitted to herself, that she was often too stubborn to give up a uselessly difficult task. If she fell into the same old trap, she could easily stand here for half an hour trying to get this one stupid boot off, even though she had no assurance that there was anything good inside it, and even though all around her there were hundreds of other boots on hundreds of other feet.

She realized that Franziskus had said something else to her, but that she had not been paying attention and could not say what it was. She wrinkled her nose again, this time at herself, and then saw a crushed-up hat lying between bodies. It might have a hatpin on it. She yanked at it and, to control the extent of distraction he posed, decided to keep talking to the young man, to answer his previous question.

‘You mistake me for some kind of nurse or rescuer. I am here, Franziskus, to loot the bodies of your comrades.’ She jangled her purse in his direction. ‘Medals, gemstones, coins.’ She freed the flattened hat, but found no jewels or pins in its band. Instead, there was a small envelope of brown and waxen paper. She slipped open the flap and looked inside. It contained a darkish powder, one she recognized from the smell. This man had brought with him a little extra surprise for the orcs, and its waxy envelope had even kept it dry. But he had not gotten a chance to use it. Angelika tucked the envelope into the breast pocket of her tunic. The hat she tossed over her shoulder, and it splatted in the muck behind her.

‘Why?’ he said. His voice’s pleading tone was gaining in insistence.

She snorted. ‘Why do you think?’

Franziskus began a greater flurry of wriggling, shifting his shoulders back and forth in the evident hope of sliding himself free. At the end of his struggle, he grunted. It seemed to Angelika that he had succeeded only in settling the bodies above him even more heavily upon his chest and limbs. He huffed whimperingly as Angelika removed a succession of boots, to find only a series of soaked and mildewy socks, each covering a set of toes half eaten by trenchfoot.

‘You think I am shocked,’ Franziskus struggled to say. He stopped to gulp in air. And shocked I am, I’ll admit. I am new to war, you see. This was my first battle.’

‘You should have stayed away.’

‘A man of my station is obli-‘ Franziskus cut off his own thought, as if suddenly aware of the futility of his line of argument. ‘Please, there is no reason not to help me. Please help me.’

‘Once,’ said Angelika, pausing before the pile of corpses to decide where to start next, ‘I came upon a battlefield, and set about doing my business, and found a man, a big barrel of a sergeant, lying with a broken arm, pinned under a big piece of cannon. It had exploded at the seams, gone flying through the air, and flattened him into the soft earth.’

‘I have heard of such things,’ Franziskus said.

She surveyed his reddened face and leaned back against the bodies as if they were a brick wall, to rest up a bit. ‘He just needed it rolled off his arm, and he called to me, and I had not been doing this for long.’ From her new vantage point, she saw a hand with a fat ring on it, and reached forward to work it down over the knuckle. The blood that slicked the hand made it easier work than it otherwise would have been. ‘I was reluctant, because he was a big man, but he pleaded with me as you’re doing now. And I went to him, and helped him, and rolled the cannon off his arm. And then, with his good arm, he grabbed a sabre and tried to spit me with it, cursing me as a looter and the desecrator of his comrades.’

‘But I won’t do that.’

‘So you say.’

‘I am of noble birth; my word means something.’

‘Perhaps you even believe that, in your current straits.’ She moved away from the stacked bodies to the scattered pile of dead opposite it, where it would be easier to systematically search each corpse.

‘Do you believe in nothing?’

‘Yes.’

While he mulled that over, Angelika found a headless artillerist and rolled him over on his back, for better access to buttons and belt buckle.

‘You care for nothing but gold?’

‘What else is there?’

‘I am only a fourth son but still, my family can pay a good reward if you free me.’

‘How great a reward?’

‘Greater than an assemblage of medals and cufflinks.’

Her tongue darted along inside her cheek. She shook her head, moved on to another corpse. ‘I believe only in gold I can place immediately in my hand.’

Franziskus began to breathe quickly in and out, in the manner of a crazed horse or dog. Angelika stood up to survey other areas of the battlefield, to see which might be safely ripe for plucking.

‘Then, in general pity’s name, I implore you. As one child of Sigmar to another.’

Angelika rounded on her heels, towards him, and for the first time spoke with heat in her voice. ‘Your gods and heroes mean nothing to me. They are fairy stories only, tales we tell one another to persuade ourselves that we are more than just meat and bone. All is blood and corruption on this plane, and what lies beyond it is naught. And man - man is nothing more than a finer-looking orc, wrapped up in brocades and finery and books and music but a ravening savage nonetheless. I clean up after what you nobles do, with your never-ending wars of loot and conquest. It’s as close as I’ve found to a worthwhile pursuit in this stinking charnel house of a world. So do not speak to me of pity. It is a word without meaning. It is a lie.’

Franziskus listened as Angelika paused to recover her expended breath. ‘Your words are well-schooled, your accent refined. How did-‘

She heard mud squishing under boots and glottal growling in the orcish tongue. She pushed her arm through the pile of cadavers and clamped a hand over Franziskus’ mouth. She cursed and said, ‘They’re coming back.’

‘I will let go of your mouth now,’ she said, scanning what lay ahead of her, to the left and to the right. She did not let go of Franziskus’ mouth. She had carefully surveyed the scene before approaching, but now it had all gone out of her head. ‘I will let go of your mouth now, but if you so much as cough…’

It was all flat ground, with hills rising up on both sides, up towards the mountains. It was scattered bodies all around, and mud, and - there. A good hundred feet away, an upturned cart, its wheels lopped off its axle, scorch marks up and down its unfinished wood.

She slowly removed her hand from Franziskus’s face, ready to clamp it back again if he made a peep. ‘They’re coming back. Your best hope lies in silence. Be a corpse, Franziskus, or they’ll make you one.’

Then she sprinted towards the cart. During the length of her run, she heard nothing but blood rushing in her ears. Saw the battlefield and the strewn corpses floating past her, slowly, as in one of those dreams where you need to run from something, but your legs can scarcely move. Finally she hit the ground beside the cart, rolling in, skidding through mud, slamming into its singed wooden side. As soon as she stopped she could hear other things again. She heard the crows overhead, then another orcish sound, possibly laughing, though Angelika did not know for sure if orcs were capable of laughter. It was not a cheerful or encouraging sound. She wedged both hands in the tiny space between the top of the cart and the muddy ground. It hurt; the cart was heavy and her angle was all wrong. She heard snorting and throaty barking. She girded herself, got the cart up a few inches and then, on her belly, wriggled under the space she’d made. The cart fell back down onto her neck and shoulders, but she scraped along anyhow and worked herself all the way inside. She turned and there was the dead face of a soldier, burned to the quick and grinning yellow teeth at her.

She winced and wriggled away, up towards the front of the cart. A little diffuse red light was working its way under the cart, which meant that maybe there was a space to peep through. Angelika crawled until her eyes and nose sat right in front of this small space between cart and ground. She saw big boots made from scraps of fur and cloth and leather. She saw legs: some naked, green, and muscled; others greaved in mismatched bits of battered metal armor. Counting them, she decided that there were either five or six orcs. Judging their size from the legs, there wasn’t a single one of them she’d ever want to fight against.

The legs were stepping their way through bodies on the scattered plain. They hadn’t yet reached the big ridge of corpses but they seemed to be poking their way in that direction. Most of the orcish talk seemed to come from one big specimen, possibly the one with the most valuable armour. Angelika wished she could understand them but the orc tongue wasn’t just something you could pick up by sitting about in taverns or going to study at a monastery. It was a good enough guess, though, that the well-armoured one’s grunts and hisses were orders. He stood there barking, and the others, in response, picked their way through the bodies.

One bent down low enough that its head suddenly entered her field of vision. It was big, shaped like a malformed melon, with a face that was mostly jaw, from which well-chipped ochre tusks, each about the size of Angelika’s dagger, jutted unevenly up and down. The orc grabbed at a corpse’s wrist with its massive green hand, and stared at it long enough for a white globule of snot to gather in one of its tiny, triangular nostrils, then slide down to its lip, finally disappearing into its mouth. Then the orc, blinking its red-rimmed eyes in frustration or annoyance, let the body’s wrist flop listlessly back into the mud.

Angelika could not think what it was they were looking for. Not valuables, certainly. Nor weapons - there were a few pieces lying only partially buried in the mud, and these the orcs ignored.

She turned her head slightly to see what was happening to the side, closer to the body pile. She saw another orc, this one with pus-filled buboes, each the size of a copper coin, all over the skin of its squashed and narrow head. It ducked down over the body of the old bearded soldier, the one she’d helped die. The orc sniffed the dead man like a dog would, then rubbed its purulent face over the torso. Then it shook its head and vengefully spat a wad of phlegm into the corpse’s dead eye.

Angelika understood: they were looking for someone who was still alive. This one could tell somehow that the old veteran was still warm. But not warm enough, which is why he was angry. They’d keep going, she realized, until they found Franziskus. And then the boy would take his revenge on her, pointing out the cart. Angelika told herself that she should have slit his throat when she had the opportunity. But the trouble is, you almost never know whose throat you should cut until afterwards.

A round of low shrieks and gravelly gabbling rose up to the left. Angelika could no longer see any orcs and scrambled to adjust her position, to change her field of view. She hit her knee on a rock and nearly cried out. She pushed her body up flush with the front of the cart, and through the crack could now again see orc feet. Some were dancing up and down. Others were firmly planted. They were in front of the corpse pile. Angelika could not really see what was going on, but from the positions of the legs could guess: they’d found Franziskus and were hauling him out.

She turned again, in the confined space under the cart, looking for a better weapon than her dagger. She imagined them suddenly pulling the cart away and tried to think of the best defense. Probably it would be to leap towards them as soon as the cart moved, to scrabble her skinny, mud-slicked body between orcish legs, and keep on going past them. She would run to the right, past the corpse ridge, then up into the hills. Angelika was fast but had never tried to outrun orcs. Her spindly legs might not be a match for the big pillars of muscle underneath those brutes, but that would not stop her from trying. From the sidelines, she’d watched several battles, and knew that often soldiers died because they gave up too soon. Angelika would not die from giving up.

It bothered her that she would not be given the chance to avenge herself against the boy for squealing. Still, he would meet a gruesome end, though at hands other than her own.

She saw Franziskus dangling upside down, then being dropped headfirst into the muck and blood. He rolled over onto his back and reached to his belt for a weapon, but a vast orc boot came crunching down on his wrist. Franziskus bucked and cursed. His face turned red with the effort, but they had him good. His off-hand was still free and Angelika readied herself for what would happen next. The boy would not speak orcish but he could still tell them what they needed to know.

Then the pustule-ridden orc bent down over Franziskus’s legs with an oversized cabbage sack. For some reason, its burlap had been dyed a splotchy purple. It had a big drawstring on it, of muck-stained cord. The buboed orc rolled the bag up over the boy’s feet and shins while two others held his legs. The bag went up over Franziskus’s waist. Then to his chest. The orcs roughly jammed his seized arms down over his torso. Then the bag went up past his shoulders.

Franziskus turned his head towards her. He surely couldn’t tell, Angelika knew, that he was meeting her eyes. He directed an imploring expression at her nonetheless. Moving his lips in slow exaggeration, he mouthed the words: Please. Help. Me.

Then the bag went up over his head and the drawstring pulled shut and one of the biggest orcs seized it by the top and hefted it over his back, so that all but the cord, dragging in the muck behind him as he walked, disappeared from Angelika’s view. The other orc legs and orc boots followed, wasting no time in heading back where they’d come from.

Angelika saw something white and trembling in front of her and at length realized that it was her own hand. She thought that perhaps it would be appropriate to vomit but the physical urge to do so was not in fact upon her. Feeling the cold of the muck she lay in, she wrenched herself up to a sitting position, even though this meant painfully craning her neck.

She could not believe it. The boy hadn’t given her away.

Angelika would have to wait a good long time to be sure there would be no more orcs coming.

It had been a certainty to her that the boy would point the finger. She had it all pictured in her head and everything. She was all prepared for what to do next.

She leaned her head against the wood of the cart, letting her breathing slow. She reached up to her face with dirty fingers and felt something wet coming down from her eyes. She assumed it would be blood, from some wound she hadn’t noticed getting, but when she looked at her fingers there was no red liquid. So it must have only been tears.

It was sad, she supposed, that the orcs would torture and mutilate and for all she knew even eat the boy. He had turned out to be better than the norm. But there was certainly nothing she could do about it. Or should do. She understood the world better than he.

*

SHE STOOD ON a granite promontory, up in the hills, looking down at the massed orcs as they moved down south through the pass, back into the border reaches. The walls of mountain rock on both sides gathered up and magnified the grunting and chanting of the orcs below. It felt like they were groaning right into her ear. But she was safe from them; she would look like just a speck, up here, and they were occupied with their unruly march.

The mud was drying already. She looked at a big cake of it on her outer thigh and smacked it off. Idly she wondered which side had initiated the battle in the first place, the patrolling Imperials or the invading orcs. It did not really matter, but Max, to whom she would sell her catch, maintained an interest in military matters and liked to know these things. He said he was writing a book, which he wasn’t, but Angelika could get a slightly better price on her wares by humouring him. Even so, she did not know what she was waiting for. She could glean no further information for Max by watching the orcs now. Even though they held great torches aloft - tree trunks, wrapped in looted cloth and dipped in flammable pitch, each carried by three or four straining, stumbling orcs -details were hard to make out. Maybe an expert on orcs could look down and find signs to interpret, but Angelika had no interest in becoming an expert on orcs.

She turned to go and then stopped. She turned back, to see more clearly what she had just seen, in the corner of her eye. Emerging from a blind spot behind a rock outcropping was a huge cart. Angelika had to pause and compare it with the size of the figures around it to get an accurate sense of its scale. Its wheels - she counted a dozen, then recounted and corrected the figure to ten - were greater in diameter than the height of any nearby orc. Its surface was a flat platform of long planks, somewhere between eighty and one hundred feet long. It boasted neither rails nor sides. Over a hundred sweating, bare-backed orcs, suffering under the lashes of multiple drivers, pitched forward in a series of great, uneven lurches, dragging it behind them. In the middle of the cart there towered an enormous wooden figure. The figure, depicting an orc with gaping mouth and antlered helmet, terminated at the waist, which was flush with the planks of the cart. It looked hollow, like it had been knocked together with nails and scraps of board. The eyes on its squarish face were set on different levels, and several of its large, triangular teeth had already fallen loose and were dangling from the round cave of its stupidly open mouth. Angelika could not tell if the splotches of dark on the figure’s surface were paint or dung or mildew.

Her knees felt unsteady, and a voice at the back of her head told her to run, but Angelika kept looking at the thing, confident in the half mile of distance between them. The big figure had only one arm, and this was a separate, levering piece, attached with a big wooden pin to its shoulder. This moveable arm terminated in a great round hammer, its striking surface easily eight, perhaps even ten, feet in diameter. Chains held it up, in ready position. Angelika, squinting, thought she could make out a pulley contraption set into the platform of the cart, to which the chains were fixed.

Several dozen orcs, all tiny to her eyes, milled around the figure. One in particular seemed larger than the rest, and stood at the cart’s forward edge, fists at hips, watching the slave orcs as they strove to yank his conveyance onward. She saw that his foot stood on something, and that the something was moving.

It was a familiar, squirming sack, dyed purple and splotchy, its drawstring now trailing down over the lip of the cart.

So they had not killed the boy yet. It did not take brilliant deduction to realize that the orcs intended to perform some kind of ceremony involving their big crude statue. It would entail placing Franziskus under the hammer’s shadow, then loosing the chains, so it would fall upon him, pounding him to paste.

Angelika turned to go. Now she had an interesting fact to share with Max for his imaginary book. It would not be necessary to stay and watch the ceremony. She could imagine the results with sufficient vividness. She crept quietly along the flattish projection of rock she’d been standing on and down to a trail through the brush and bramble. The trail forked two ways, up towards a mountain switchback, or down the face of the hill to the pass. Up around the mountain lay her route to town, and Max, and her money and a hot drink and a softish bed.

She took the trail’s downward leg. Angelika had never heard of a thing like the statue. Maybe she could make some more money by making a sketch of it, to sell to scholars or something. Max would know of such scholars, perhaps. They were the sorts of people he was always drinking with. Angelika had heard maybe that there was a market for information. It would be especially true, wouldn’t it, when it was information on the Empire’s most dangerous enemies? Yes, she was pretty sure of it. So, the reason she was getting closer was to make a sketch. For the money.

Stunted, leathery-leafed trees lined the trail, and Angelika kept low behind them. It was not hard to match the cart’s slow progress. If anything, Angelika, the thumps of her heart radiating up through her chest, wanted it to go faster.

A dried, weedy branch reached out to caress her, leaving a line of burrs hanging from her leggings.

She would not do anything foolish, she told herself.

She pulled the back of her hand across her forehead, wiping sweat away.

Maybe you could say, in some sense, that the boy deserved rescuing, but she would not allow herself to be tempted towards such stupidity.

Drumming started up, somewhere in the distance, and echoed across the walls of rock.

There were hundreds of orcs around, maybe more, and any one of them could kill you with a single blow.

A rock rolled out from under Angelika’s foot as she put it down on the path, and she windmilled her arms to try to keep her balance. She crashed into one of the low, bushy trees, grabbing a branch for support. Its bark felt greasy.

Especially that biggest of the orcs, up on the cart, standing over Franziskus. That one could kill you with a single dull fingernail.

Up ahead, she saw that her path dead-ended. The pass widened out, and the trail went right down to its flat bottom. She could stay put, clamber back up the incline through sharp rocks and boulders, or continue on to where the orcs were. She stayed put, cursing her folly.

She heard whip cracks and orcish shouts and looked over to see that the cart drivers were trying to get the haulers stopped. Some at the front had halted, while others behind them trudged peevishly onwards. A pileup began, and the haulers began to push and shove at each other. One particularly large specimen, pushed from behind by a humpbacked, dull-eyed orc, turned and opened his maw wide, exposing his tusks and sending a great spray of spittle back towards his tormentor. A third orc, beside the humpback, squinted as spare sputum hit him, then lurched forward to clamp thick, horny fingers over the larger ore’s lower jaw. He pulled downwards, smashing his victim with his spare fist. Haulers all around these two joined in, limbs flying, jaws gnashing, as the drivers up on the cart directed their whips into the brawling mass. A small chunk of something fleshy and greenish sailed out from the tangle of brawling orcs. Angelika guessed it for a finger or possibly an ear.

Her shoulders seized up in warning as she heard something behind her. Twisting backwards, she saw a trio of orcs making their way quickly down the trail, their eyes on the fight. They intended to join it, but unless she went somewhere, they would run right into her. They blocked her route back into the hills. Her only way was forwards, towards the greater mass of orcs. At least they were distracted.

Angelika leapt. She was in mid-air, sailing over the bushes. She hit the gravelly ground at ravine bottom. The wheels of the cart, now motionless, stood in front of her. She could hear screaming and growling, but no ores were looking her way. They’d all be up at the front of the cart, where the fight was. She sprinted in between two of the tall, spoked wheels, rocks and pebbles spraying out behind her. Once under the cart, she looked for the best way to hide. The axles were high and wide enough that she could haul herself up on them, and maybe not be seen when the commotion died down up front. She chose an axle in the middle, which would give her more choices when she had to run. Angelika hefted herself up and laid herself out on her back, across the axle. It was not comfortable, but she could balance herself and was not in immediate danger of falling off. What would happen when the cart started moving again, she could not predict.

The sounds from up ahead were trailing off to yelping and isolated snarls, so Angelika could only guess that the orc leaders had violently snuffed out the brawl. She would be stuck here for a while, until the next distraction. This would probably occur after the cart started up again, and then reached its final destination. She could creep away then. This would teach her forever, she thought. She promised herself that the next time she saw someone being carried off to an awful fate, she would act true to her beliefs, and leave him to his destiny. She made a point of feeling the hardness of the axle as it dug into her spine; she would recall this sensation when next she got an imbecilic temptation to do otherwise.

She thought about possible escape routes. Both the brushy inclines on either side of the pass would be good ways to get out, so long as they remained free of orcs.

The cart stayed stopped. Perhaps this was its final destination.

She heard something to the left, and strained to see it, through wheel-spokes. Four orcish pallbearers carried a wooden pallet past the cart’s far side. Angelika could not fully see the honored corpse they bore, but he was at least as big an orc as the one she’d seen atop the cart, lording it over Franziskus’s sack.

The pallbearers halted when they reached the front of the cart, and Angelika saw the pallet being hauled up onto it. It looked for a moment as if the corpse would fall off, but then she saw it was bound to the pallet with knotted lengths of cloth.

Angelika sifted her memory for what little she knew of orcs and their ways. The big dead orc must be the previous leader, killed in the battle. The big live orc must be taking over. The ceremony in which Franziskus was about to be sacrificed was to celebrate the live one’s ascendance, or to mourn the dead one’s loss, or both.

There was a thumping up top, and the planks of the cart rattled and vibrated just inches from the top of Angelika’s head. She could tell that all of the hopping up and down was taking place near the cart’s forward edge. She heard the exultant howling of an army of gore-mad orcs. Horns blew and the throng silenced itself somewhat. A deep, bellowing voice boomed out over them.

This would be it. That would be the big orc giving its speech. Things were reaching a head. It was time to go. She dropped down from the axle and back under the cart, pointing herself towards the trail she’d come from. Then, up by the front-most wheel, she saw it: the dangling drawstring. It bobbled up and down, so she knew the boy was still inside the bag. He would be right within reach. She edged forward, towards it. She reached, stretching her fingers out, nearly brushing the drawstring with their tips. Then she pulled them back. What was she thinking? You couldn’t stop at a time like this. Pulling on the drawstring would accomplish nothing anyway. She’d have to reveal herself to the orcs to get up on top, then get him out of the bag, then… There was no chance. She bolted from under the cart back towards the trail, her head swiveling to see if any orcs spotted her.

She made it to the start of the incline, then scrabbled upwards, grabbing dirt and rocks as handholds, then got up to the line of bushy trees, and dove for the ground behind them. She flattened herself to the earth and thanked the nonexistent gods for her good fortune. She poked her head up watchfully.

She saw the cart. The new leader had freed the old, dead one from his pallet and held him by the scruff of the neck. Below him, orcs capered and banged drums and shook fists and screeched on dissonant bugles. Grabbing the massive corpse by clapping both hands around its head, the new boss drew it close to him and kissed its cruel, upcurving lips. Then he turned and hurled the body into the waiting mob, which seized it and bore it aloft, passing it backwards. The orc army threw their old leader’s body up into the air, then caught it, then threw it up, each time letting loose with an animal cheer. Sometimes the body would sink below the level of the crowd, to resurface moments later with a tusk or digit missing: they were taking souvenirs of their slain hero. Gradually the body turned from venerated item to punching sack, resurfacing bloodier each time before finally disappearing forever near the back of the throng. The new boss orc threw his heavy arms up into the air and screamed something that could not have been articulate even in orcish. Angelika could not help shuddering.

She looked at the bag, in which Franziskus squirmed. The big orc was shouting some more, but an orcish oration could not last long. The next step would be the boy’s demise.

Angelika leapt from the bushes and ran down towards the cart again, letting the slope of the incline propel her downwards and forwards. A couple of stray orcs stepped from behind the front wheels of the cart, to intercept her. They were squat and shovel-faced, runts by the standards of the others she’d seen today. Maintaining her momentum, blade in hand, she flew towards them. She felt her knife find purchase in flesh, ducked low to evade a swiping hand, and felt wet warm blood spackle her face and arms. The closest orc lurched over, clutching its windpipe. The other, behind her, was in the midst of a backswing with a huge, well-notched battleaxe. She jumped into the air, landing on the back of the hunched-over orc, and used him as the springboard for a second leap, which took her up onto the edge of the cart. As her arms and chest impacted painfully with the cart’s planks, she saw the second ore’s axe come down on the other’s spine, where her legs had been a moment before. The axe head sunk deep into the first ore and out through the belly side; its owner struggled to free it.

Angelika pulled her dangling legs up onto the cart. She saw Franziskus, freed of the bag, the boss orc towering over him, dragging him by the hair. The orc was pulling him towards a set of shackles under the hammer’s shadow. Angelika saw the boss’s head turn towards her, its red eyes fury-filled. It howled. It reached down and punched Franziskus savagely in the stomach. Franziskus curled up, gasping, hugging knees to chin. A sling stone whistled in from the crowd below; it went far wide of Angelika and plunked against the wooden statue. The boss ore looked at it and growled something at his men. He’d be telling them not to fire any missiles his way, and also that he could take care of one scrawny human woman himself. Then he advanced on her. There were other ores on the platform, four of them near the back, all in good armour. They stepped up, but the boss waved them back, too.

He did not deign to pull a weapon, merely drawing his massive hands into claws and loudly cracking their joints. He stepped ponderously forward. He cocked his head to one side and seemed to grin, shaking big wattles of loose skin that trailed from his bony jaw.

Angelika felt the leaden weight of her feet, planted on the planks of the cart. She felt the puniness of the tiny knife in her hand. She gulped and sprinted forwards. The orc swung prematurely, and she slipped under his blow to jab her knife up at his throat. But she could not reach, and the knife hit his blackened breastplate, bending like a blade of grass. She rolled, trying to make it through his trunk-like legs, but he closed them on her, and squeezed. She felt wrenching pain as he grabbed one of her legs and twisted it. She wriggled herself forwards and somehow out of his grip. She turned and rolled and hit the planks. Air bolted from her lungs as her opponent kicked her in the side with metal-toed boots. She rolled again and up to her feet and staggered forwards. In blurred peripheral vision, she saw that Franziskus had crawled his way back, most of the way past the wooden figure. The orc lieutenants stood watch over him; one seemed ready to smash him with a hammer if he got too far away.

Vibrations of the boards she stood on warned her to turn back to see her foe. He was charging. She stood her ground. At the last moment, she ducked and kept on going, grabbing onto a hilt poking out from a scabbard at his belt. She stumbled gracelessly past him, a huge hacking sabre now in her hands. A throat-scraping cheer went up behind her. The orcs were happy for the added attraction. She was an addition to the ceremony. They wanted her to put up a colourful fight before their leader finally dispatched her.

She struggled to heft the immense weapon. She grabbed it with both hands, held it overhead, and charged the orc boss, who now stood with feet spread complacently apart, awaiting her charge. Angelika rushed towards him, then her head was ringing and she was flying backwards through the air. She landed on her behind. What echoed around her was definitely the laughter of orcs. The boss had reversed her charge merely by clipping her on the forehead with the heel of his hand, which he still held out to her in mocking display. She struggled to her feet, picked up the heavy sword again, and once more charged. This wrung another crash of laughter from the open-throated throng.

As she ran, she looked to Franziskus, still lying sprawled, and saw that she had caught his eye. She thought she saw him nod. She ran at the orc, whose grinning mouth widened. She held the sword aloft, as she had before. But at the point of impact, she swayed low, instead sticking the weapon between the orc’s legs, and pushing him. Tripping on the sword, he fell backwards, landing flat and spread-eagled, near the shackles.

Franziskus kicked forward, loosing the chain. It went slack. It rang and jangled through the pulley. The hammer dropped. The figure rocked. The orc boss’s eyes widened. He slid himself forward. The hammer landed. It caught only the boss’s skull, squashing it flat and sending a jet of gray matter squirting down the length of the cart, to stop short of the feet of his lieutenants.

Angelika staggered back upright and felt terror’s power fill her bones. She saw one of the lieutenants reach down to seize Franziskus, but then a second stopped his hand, following up with a sudden butt to the forehead.

Of course. Now they will fight to see who becomes boss, ignoring distractions. She stumbled towards the lad and grabbed him by the collar of his tunic. A tumult arose behind her and she spun to see a mass of orcs clambering up on the cart to get them. She fumbled in her breast pocket, for the envelope she’d found back on the battlefield. The flash powder. She scooped into the envelope with her fingers, and threw the contents at the swarming orcs. She closed her eyes in advance of the flash, then opened them to see gobbets of thick smoke filling the air, and blinded orcs stumbling into one another.

Yanking Franziskus’s collar, she half-dove from the cart. They landed badly, in a tangle together, but extricated themselves and dashed for the bushes, ignoring their pain. Angelika, in the lead, seized the lad when they reached the low trees. She pulled him down and they watched the writhing frenzy as partisans of the various battling lieutenants cheered on their candidates, or brawled viciously amongst themselves. They waited for vengeful outriders to come beating the bushes for them, but none bothered. As one tottering lieutenant seemed to win out, rivals’ pulped bodies quivering at his feet, they slipped away.

*

THEY DID NOT start talking until they were well clear of the orcs, on a down-sloping road around on the mountain’s other side. The adrenalin had left them, and now their bones ached and bruises throbbed.

‘I knew I could count on you,’ Franziskus said to her.

‘Nonsense.’

‘Despite what you said, basic human goodness won out.’

She snorted derisively.

‘Your basic, human goodness.’

‘You mean idiotic, suicidal foolishness.’

‘You say this, but it is merely to assuage your pride.’

‘Shut up.’

‘I will prove my gratitude to you. You saved my life and I owe you everything.’

‘You’ll do whatever I ask?’

Franziskus fervently nodded.

‘Then sod off,’ she said.

He stopped, looking surprised.

‘I mean it. Go away. And if you tell anyone of the weakness I showed today, I’ll creep after you and gut you while you snore. Do you understand?’ She stopped, too, looking up at the sky. Dark clouds were coming in, hiding the stars. She looked at Franziskus, who turned his gaze from her and kept going.

‘I have sworn to repay you, and repay you I shall,’ he said, eyes closed, nose upturned.

‘Cretin,’ she said.

‘Basic human goodness,’ he said.

‘Everything I said to you was the truth, and everything I did was a lie,’ she said.

The two continued down the stony roadway, disappearing from view.