Grunts Read Free Page B

filthy in your halfling mouth, so perhaps I will feed you live coals after I feed you your skin.”
    Ned Brandiman groaned.
    “Bloody hell, Will! We’re not even
at
the Grey Crag. We’re not inside twenty miles of the place!”
    Will sighed. He looked up at the orc’s face, upon which confusion was giving way to comprehension with surprising rapidity.
    “I have a certain talisman about my person,” he said. “If I were you, I’d cut me free and let me reach it out. There are poison needles in the matter, you see.”
    Shazgurim growled, disgusted. “Talisman. By the rotten bowels of the Dark Lord! Ashnak, you mark my words, we shall live to regret this.”
    The jagged knife sliced the cords at his wrists and ankles. When they saw how he could not move, the big orc chafedhis flesh between horny hands until Will, yelping, managed first to stagger to his feet and then, while they cut Ned free, to reach into the booby-trapped pouch and extract an inert cube of amber.
    “Say your word.”
    The orc’s brow furrowed. Ashnak at last muttered: “Zerganubaniphal!”
    The amber cube pulsed once, warming Will’s hand. He tossed it to the orc, said “Banidukkunishubar,” and watched it glow with as great a light. “I won’t say ‘well met.’ We are twenty miles off the rendezvous and you’ve eaten my pony.”
    “
Our
pony,” Ned Brandiman corrected. The brown-haired halfling stretched his arms and legs in turn and looked up at the orc from about waist-height. “You’re a warrior by the look of you—what’s the nameless doing sending the Horde? We don’t want you clumping around telling the whole world where we’re going. We don’t work that way.”
    Shazgurim slouched over, tipping the visor of her steel bassinet back on her head. “Just how do you two work?”
    Will and Ned looked at each other.
    “Ned and Will Brandiman,” Ned introduced. “Notorious ’alflings. Sir and madam, you are looking at two of the greatest professionals it will ever be your good fortune to meet. As to what we do, we find lost property.”
    Shazgurim snorted. “And is it usually lost before you two ‘find’ it?”
    “Now that you come to mention it…”
    Ashnak nodded his great tusked head. “Thieves. Our master the nameless said there would be thieves.”
    “We prefer the term
adventurers
. It sounds so much more respectable.” Will brushed himself down and strolled across the dip to look at the ransacked chests. “You realise it will be necessary to return the tools of our trade? And, now I come to think about it, we have no transport. I think it would probably be advisable for you to detail one of your warriors to carry these chests for us.”

2

    The squat orc warrior Imhullu peered over the weathered edge of the tor.
    “Bandit country,” Imhullu opined. “Thick as fleas down there, they’ll be. And we’ve got to get those two little rats through it in one piece?”
    Ashnak of the fighting Agaku leaned his back against a sun-hot crag, ripping the flesh from a still-twitching rabbit. The warm blood soothed his throat wonderfully. He wiped the back of his hand across his tusked mouth. “I asked for my war-band with me. The request was not granted.”
    “Oh, well…”
    No further reference was made to the nameless necromancer. Ashnak crunched the rabbit’s bones and then, careful not to skyline himself, took off his helmet and looked over the edge of the tor. His long peaked ears unkinked. Perfectly still, his hide a weathered brownish-grey, he might have been rock himself.
    The high crags of the moorland went down to green dales, and tame rivers, and the chimney-smoke that spoke of Man’s habitation. Ashnak squinted into the wind. To the south, wrinkled bare mountains rose up. Signs of habitation ceased well before the foothills of those crags.
    Turning his head, he made out how the moorland went around in a great curve, a hundred miles and more, all of it villaged, and finally became a distant spur of the