Chapter 60
I arrived at Damascus Airport and headed for the long-stay motel that held the Damascus gate point. After unpacking, I took out the Biological Containment Bag, pulled the ISIS slaves from it, and drove them ahead of me into the market. There was something I needed to buy.
I spent the whole day walking alleys lined with old workshops, and at a weathered factory that sold disinfectant and fumigation equipment I finally found it. I picked a gasoline-powered model and paid on the spot. It was cash, so the owner loaded the gear onto a truck without a word of fuss.
I hauled the equipment back to the motel, gathered it up, and stepped through the gate. Beyond it lay the familiar outskirts of Baldur Fortress. Once I was across, I drew a Toyota pickup from the high-capacity bag and drove west.
A little over two hours later the sea came into view. I pushed on and reached the port of Sorbon, where Marco and the caravan party had already arrived.
"You've come, Guild Master?"
"Long wait?"
"We got in yesterday and rested well for a day."
"Good. Then we move."
Argon came out after Marco to greet me, and I traded a few words with the mercenary captain who had come along. With the courtesies done, we collected the trucks, the Humvee, and the wagons set down at the pier and slipped out past the edge of Sorbon.
The mercenaries, worn from the long journey, wanted to lodge inside the port, but I had no reason to sleep in an inn crawling with fleas and vermin. We spent the night at a camp pitched on the grassland outside Sorbon.
The next day the ISIS slaves split the driving of the trucks, the Humvee, and the pickup, while Marco took the wagon. The mercenaries followed on horseback, each on his own mount.
We were bound for the prairie where the orc tribe had ambushed us before. This time we had come looking for them in earnest, but the grassland lay vast and still. Most orcs of the steppe lived as nomads. They didn't stay in one stretch of country, and they didn't strike every caravan that passed. If they had, the knights and soldiers of Baldur Fortress would already have ridden out and crushed them. Catching orcs to sell them was a fine idea, but first I had to find the orcs.
Among the mercenaries, Hans was running his mouth with his friends.
"How the hell are we supposed to know where the orcs are on a prairie this big? Unless we fly around like eagles looking for them. Oh—the baron does magic, doesn't he? So he can fly, right?"
Of course I could fly. But a levitation-magic item wouldn't hold me up for long, and since it was no high-circle flight spell, the speed was nothing remarkable either. On every count, spotting a wandering orc band across land this wide would be hard. I didn't have to be the one in the air, though.
I climbed out, went around to the back of the Humvee, and dragged out the hard case lashed there.
"Open it."
Two slaves worked the case open. Inside, fixed in the packing, an object waited. I reached in, lifted it free, and set it on the ground, then drew out the controller with its built-in monitor from the same box.
What I had taken out was a latest-model drone. The airframe was a customized version of an already cutting-edge design: six powerful motors, and four cameras with thirty-two-times zoom slung underneath. A separate long-range transmitter had been fitted as well, so the craft could send live aerial footage to the monitor on the controller.
The mercenaries stared at the unfamiliar thing, wonder plain on their faces. Marco and Argon were no less interested in something they had never seen.
"What is this?"
"Think of it as a kind of flying scout item."
"A flying scout item?"
"Watch. You'll see."
I switched the drone on, took up the controller, and started the motors. Vrrrr—ddrrrrrrrr. The six motors howled, and almost before the racket could peak, the drone wobbled up into the empty air.
"Oh! It's up. Whoa—"
"Strange thing. I don't feel any mana moving at all."
"Of course you don't. And it can do this, too."
The feed coming through the transmitter appeared on the controller's monitor. Marco stared at it, fascinated.
"Is that picture being sent by the item?"
"That's right. Those things hanging under it show the image on this flat crystal plate. Something, isn't it?"
I explained the smart pad to Marco as little more than a crystal plate. Mages were used to crystal balls when they wanted to see a picture, so that made it easier to swallow.
"Now, if I send this one up like so—"
"Whoa, it's climbing."
"Something's going up. What is that?"
"They say it's a magic item the baron brought. Fast as hell. It's already way up there."
"That noble's full of strange toys. The horseless wagon was one thing..."
I let their talk slide past my ears and fixed on the image in front of me. Once we cleared two hundred meters, a radius of several dozen kilometers began to fall inside visual range. These weren't one or two orcs. With this, I could find them.
Start from the north, then.
"Marco."
"Yes, Guild Master."
"We begin with the country east of that mountain."
"Yes. Everyone, mount up! We move!"
With Marco's wagon at the head, the party set off.
In the Humvee's rear seat I left the wheel to IS-One and flew the drone off the monitor in my hands. The screen on the controller laid out, at a glance, the land as seen from three hundred meters up. With this I could sweep a radius of dozens of kilometers in a single pass.
"All right. Where are you, you orc bastards."
The orc tribe led by High Warrior Red Fang had, not long before, ambushed a caravan on the imperial road and come away with a heavy haul of supplies. Goods in hand, they shifted deeper into the grassland to slip the pursuit of the human kingdom.
In the orc village they were raising cups to a successful raid. Here and there they roasted stolen horses whole and tore into the meat; some hacked the flesh raw and flung it to the wolves. They also dragged out the humans they had taken and made sport of them.
"S-spare me. Please, spare me!"
"Please, let us live—"
They seized the begging humans, hacked off arms and legs with knives, and held contests to see who could flay a hide. The dead, of course, went into orc bellies all the same. Off behind that, several orcs had fallen on the captured women and were raping them in a pack.
While the rest chewed human flesh and drank their victory, Red Fang, Sand Wind, and the other warriors of officer rank gathered apart, passing cups and speaking of what came next.
"This hunt was a success, Chieftain Red Fang."
"Sand Wind's merit was great."
"It was Red Fang's valor."
"No. It was the plan Sand Wind laid that worked. If we'd simply closed in from every side the way we always do, the prey might have broken out in some direction we didn't expect, same as last time. Because we left a flight path open beforehand, as Sand Wind said, and made them run where we wanted them to run, we didn't lose a single one."
Sand Wind was pleased by the praise.
"I'll help the High Warrior become master of this steppe. Grow our strength only a little more, and we won't need to fear even if the knights and cavalry of Baldur Fortress come. And then we can raise what we've aimed at all along—an Orc Kingdom."
Every warrior nodded, satisfaction on their faces. The tribe of Red Fang was swelling its power through the rhythm of raid and flight. Their aim was to gather the orcs of the region under them and, in the end, take Baldur Fortress, seize the trade road that ran through it, and found an Orc Kingdom.
Among orcs a female's pregnancy lasted a bare four months, and she bore five or six young at a birth. Their span of years was far shorter than a human's, but at five they already had the strength of a human youth, at eight they were grown, and past ten they outmatched an adult man in muscle. If they went on building their numbers like this for only a few years, raising the village to four or five times its present size would be no difficult thing.
Worked up by Sand Wind's words, Red Fang lifted a drinking horn cut from ox horn and roared.
"A toast! Come! To the Orc Kingdom!"
"To the Orc Kingdom!"
"To the Orc Kingdom!"
"Waaaa!!"
"Hraaa—!!"
Drink and meat overflowed; slaughter and rape ran through the village. Set against the grassland spread vast around it, the whole of that scene was nothing but a small dot. Finding them on a prairie so wide was close to impossible.
But the thirty-two-times camera of the drone flying four hundred meters overhead caught the orc village settled on one side of the steppe with exact clarity.
And then—
A little more than thirty kilometers southwest of the village, inside the Humvee at the center of a column that had been running and had now stopped, I watched the monitor on the controller in my hand, and a triumphant smile pulled at my mouth of its own accord.
"Found you at last. You bastards."
Once I was sure the small dot on the screen was the orc village, I called Marco.
"Tell the mercenary company we found the orcs. The hunt starts tomorrow, so have them get ready."