' Are you two insane? ' Stryke bellowed. 'There's no time for this shit!'
Jup glowered. 'He said — '
'Do I look like I care? You're sergeants in this band. SERGEANTS. But you're going the right way to getting yourselves broken to the ranks. Understand?'
'Yeah,' Jup muttered, and Pepperdyne let him go.
Haskeer didn't respond.
'Haskeer?' Stryke said. He and Dallog still had hold of him. Stryke applied a little less-than-gentle pressure.
' Yes! ' Haskeer replied. 'Yes, damn it!'
They released him. He was enraged, and gave Dallog a particularly poisonous look, but curbed himself.
'Spurral's one of our band.' Stryke directed the statement at Haskeer, suggesting he had heard what was said. 'And this band sticks together. If any of us is in a fix, all of us get them out of it. Whoever they are,' he added pointedly. 'Now get this job finished.'
They went back to work. Some with better grace than others.
When he'd moved away from the rest, Coilla went to Pepperdyne. 'Don't take it too personal. Haskeer can be a swine, but he comes through when it counts.'
'What's his beef?'
'It's a thing between him and Jup. It goes way back.'
'He wants to watch his mouth. I thought Jup was going to kill him.'
'Nah. Cripple him maybe.'
Pepperdyne had to grin.
'Seriously,' Coilla asked, 'when do you think we're going to get these things launched?'
'They might be finished tonight. But no way should we put to sea in the dark. So first light, I guess.' He glanced Haskeer's way. 'Let's hope we all hold together that long.'
'Yeah, and we need to. These islanders don't say much, but from what I've picked up we could run into anything out there.'
They gazed at the vast expanse of water and the disappearing rim of the sinking Sun.
Pelli Madayar stood on the peak of a hummock and watched as day began slowly turning to night.
Her second-in-command, Weevan-Jirst, was by her side. He was a member of the goblin race, who were known to be nimble and tough. He had a gaunt build, almost sinewy, and the texture of his knotty, jade-coloured flesh resembled taut leather. His elliptical head had no hair. His ears were tiny and half enclosed by flaps of rough tissue. His mouth was little more than a slit, and his compressed nose had nostrils like slashes. His eyes were disproportionately large, with inky black orbs and sallow surrounds.
The forbidding appearance of goblins often led other species to assume they were hostile — an impression not always without foundation, though unjust in Weevan-Jirst's case. He had devoted his life to the Gateway Corps, and met the high standards of probity the Corps demanded. Which was not to say that he was incapable of performing acts of violence in pursuit of their cause.
'I communicated with Karrell Revers again,' Pelli revealed, 'shortly after we got here.'
'And what did the leader have to say?' The goblin's inflection was sibilant, containing traces of the throaty hiss that formed the greater part of his native tongue.
'More or less what I expected. He was unhappy with the outcome of our first encounter with the orcs.'
'It would be difficult to count that as a triumph.'
'I know. But Karrell gave me a free hand on this mission, and he knew I wanted to try dialogue before force.'
'No one could argue against that being the ideal. But I've yet to see a world where ideal is the norm.' He grew reflective. 'It occurred to me that it could have been the goblin presence in our party that enraged them.'
'How so?'
'Traditionally, goblins and orcs haven't seen eye to eye, shall we say. And not always without good reason.'
'I don't think it was that. The fact is I handled it badly.'
'You're too hard on yourself.'
'No harder than our cause demands. This is my first real mission; I'd hoped to have made a better start.'
'There are few precedents to guide us, Pelli. Instrumentalities being so rare, these assignments are very uncommon. Some go their whole lives without having to do what the Corps has asked of you.'
'That's hardly an excuse.'
'Perhaps not. But it serves as a reason. What conclusion did Karrell reach?'
'He's still content to leave it to my discretion. Just. But he warns that, given the nature of the race holding the artefacts, force is probably the only option.'
'He could well be right. Can anybody negotiate with orcs?'
'I'm starting to think not.'
'Then what choice do we have?'
'There's something else. Karrell warned me earlier that another force had entered this game. Some individual or group with command of the portals. Their presence was detected in Acurial. And if they were there — '
'I take your point. Do we know more than that about them?'
'No. Which is worrying. To have one set of instrumentalities in irresponsible hands is bad enough. To have two — '
'Must surely be unprecedented.'
She nodded. 'This is a dangerous enough world as it is without another variable being thrown in.'
'All the more reason for us to bow to the leader's wisdom in the matter of the orcs.'
'Yes, I suppose it is.'
'Do we have any idea where they might be?'
'We do now. Or at least we do roughly. Karrell gave me coordinates.'
'So your orders are…?'
'We go after them at dawn. And when we find them, we hit them hard this time.'
They watched the last fragment of the sun vanishing below the horizon.
The patchwork of islands spread out before them fell into night.
17
It wasn't long before Spurral witnessed the nature of Salloss Vant's justice.
The captives had immediately been given various onboard chores, most of them mindless and all of them hard work. Spurral was put with five other dwarfs in an ill-lit, dank area belowdecks containing enormous lengths of unyielding rope thick as her arm. They had to roll it into coils on great wooden cylinders that took two to turn. Spurral's job was to guide the rope onto the drum so that it wound neatly. In no time they all had bleeding, blistered hands.
There was a single crewman overseeing their labours. After an initial bout of shouting and threats he deposited himself on a heap of filthy sacking and promptly dozed off. Spurral took the opportunity to try to engage the others in whispered conversation. Most were too frightened to respond, but two answered, and they got a conversation going, of sorts.
One was male and a bit older than the majority of prisoners. He seemed to be called Kalgeck, and Spurral thought he had spirit. The female was in some ways his opposite. Her name was something like Dweega. She was among the youngest on board, and timorous, yet found the guts to reply, which Spurral had to give her credit for. It was only later that Spurral discovered Dweega had spoken not out of courage, but desperation.
Several hours of hard labour passed before a bell sounded somewhere. The guard woke up, ran a quick eye over what they'd done and ordered them out. As they shuffled forward, Spurral saw that the girl was having trouble
