Free Grunts by Mary Gentle

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.
    “
Hut
-two,
hut
-two!” Lieutenant Barashkukor stood with his hands on his hips, on the seat of his jeep. “Fucking
elves
could move that load faster. You want the major to see you?”
    Three hundred pairs of orc boots pounded down the road away from Nin-Edin in unison, the column raising plumes ofdust. Barashkukor drew a deep breath and bellowed at the passing rank and file of orc grunts. “Are you marines?
Move
!”
    “Sir, yes sir!” Corporal Duranki shouted. His jaw set, he pounded on down the track. Like the others, the albino orc staggered under a backpack of weaponry three times his own height.
    “Then move your fucking asses!” Barashkukor bellowed happily. “At the double, orcs!”
    A metallic clash sounded.
    Harsh, rhythmic; the noise of bells, horns, trumpets, drums, and a saxophone split the air. Nine of the smaller orc marines, stepping smartly, bashed out an impromptu military march. They were singing, Barashkukor noted, something to the effect of
“From the halls of Japh-kanduma to the shores of