《Orc And The Lastborn [Progression, Gunpowder Sword & Sorcery]》


 1. The Pit

    The lords on the rim and the poors in the rafters roared when he hauled back on the [bosun]''s chin and again when the neck snapped. He dropped the body and stepped back. The sawdust flitted over his bare feet. In his torn trousers he stood in the pit''s bottom where he''d labored this past month. Around the rim screamed those men and women whose servitude was plain in their bloodlust and hate and fear but only dimly known to him. He looked down at the body. The letters tattooed across the pale knuckles and the mud under the fingernails from clawing at the walls. He knelt and ran his hand through the damp black hair matted to the scalp. Lastly he palmed the head and lifted it to the crowd, the half lidded eyes and broken nose, the dislocated jaw, the bloodied finery. The whole place erupted.


    Beyond their rapturous faces and the hooded lanterns he saw the sliver of sky was a moonless oblivion. In the cell off the pit a greenskin groaned. He stood with the head in his hand. Its quieted face so near. "I''m sorry," he said.


    The crowd never heard over their clamor. He tossed the body onto the floor and went into the cell and shut the door.


    The others shrank away from him. He walked to his corner and covered his eyes with his hands and imagined he was back in the orchard on the [brigadier]''s estate: paper thin leaves rustling in the breeze, earth-scented olives decaying between the rows, their subtle sour taste, his fingers purple from harvesting. He stood in his corner with his hands over his eyes like an icon against evil. But he was the evil.


    He gripped the cell''s iron bars and waited. From above came the scrape of chairs and tables across the floorboards and the lords catcalling the [barmaiden] and the guffaw of the [sheriff] who''d procured the condemned for whom justice was as loaded as the [bookmaker]''s dice. Finally came the [rage] that pinned his feet to the floor and bored out of his gut like a meteor out of the sky, its pale fire tailing back to that last day in the orchard. Its plasmic line of bodies between then and now seared into his memory one after another like fenceposts along the seaway. Its inevitable explosive end that would be his end rendered in white hot flame and regret. He stood holding the iron rods in his hands as the greenskins huddled and wailed in their corners until his [rage] passed finally to silence.


    He opened his eyes and looked at the greenskins as they wept and gnashed their little fangs. They covered their faces with their hands and they pushed themselves against the bars to get away from him. They were the closest thing to kin he''d ever known. He opened the door and returned to the pit.


    If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    The [bookmaker] looked down from the rim when he entered. She was on her knees sweeping dry vomit off the edge with a straw brush. "Doing better, Orc," she said.


    He walked over the body of the condemned and sat with his legs crossed beneath him like a ropemaker. The sawdust under him was a kind of mud paste from the spit and ale and spilt blood.


    She nodded. "Ya getting a knack for drama now. Don''t pay no attention to them naysayers."


    He looked back at the body.


    "Hey now I seen that look before and ya best not be feelin bad for him. Sheriff says this one was some sorta sailor got caught hitting on his kid and wife up north aways. I got him cheap. But cheap ain''t covering costs unless ya prolongerate it. Ya need to give them marks a reason to keep showing up. Maybe even get one or two to bet against ya. Hell. Last it twice as long and I''ll feed ya twice as much. Here''s an advance."


    She threw down a half eaten lion steak as she walked away. It landed at his knee, sawdust sticking to it as it flopped over. She''d made him kill the lion too. An animal that didn''t do anything but step in a human¡¯s snare. An animal like him.


    "Lion meat," he had heard the marks say. "Killed barehanded by your orc? No fooling?"


    "Plenty of fooling," he had heard her say, "but no tricking."


    They had eaten it during the greenskins'' bout and they ate it still when the [sheriff] paraded in the [bosun]. They started eating faster as the hands were tied together and faster as Orc had taken the life out of the [bosun] as quick as he could and at that moment they stopped eating altogether with their eyes only on his movements and their greasy fingers clenching their plates and their mouths open and salivating around half chewed meat and breaths held until the crack of the vertebrae made them spit up everywhere.


    Afterward the dogman helped him dump the body in the place they always had. At the time he didn''t think it mattered.


    <hr>


    > Name: Orc


    > Race: [Orc]


    > Class: [Pitfighter] You best keep back.


    > Attributes: [Renown], [Rage]


    >


    > +1 [Renown]: Blood trades for blood and boy yew ain''t never seen so much as what this brudder of mine spilt... (1/10).


    > [Renown] Title Gained: [Noname of Nobody] Denotes he who is without legacy.


    >


    > +1 [Rage]: He was only a child then. How was I to know what he would become... (1/10).


    > [Rage] Title Gained: [Raised By Humans] Denotes he who is provoked easily.

 2. Children of Stone

    Three miles up the snow-covered massif a dwarf halted at the horn of her folk and rested her [alpenstock] on the hoar-frosted pavers. The wind swirled the tongue of flame in the brass bowl beneath the horn''s blowpipe and the image of the flame caught in the nickeled steel of the [alpenstock]''s serrated pick. Whenever it blew across the mouthpiece it droned low and hollow like a last breath. Yet it was not quite the last.


    Her fur-lined kit was damp from sweat. A stonecut flume ran in the gutter there and she threw off her hood and dipped her fingers in its cold clear water and splashed it upon her face. She scooped a handful to her mouth. Her legs ached from the long climb so she knelt beside the [hornkeeper] and in her bad knee she felt the bones grind and crunch from an old fall from the top of the world.


    She looked back the way she had come. From the horn''s alcove the endless sky and the granite towers piercing it and the autumnal turn downvalley all seemed to burn in her eyes. She looked from one to the next with one hand steady on the [alpenstock]''s pine shaft and her other palming her knee and both ears full of the [hornkeeper]''s intonations.


    "A touch of wax," he said. "Spread it on wide and slow like, wide and slow," and he smoothed a soft white block across the horn''s surface. "A touch of flame," and he cut a chip off the block and fed it to the flame in the bowl. "Give it an even blow like, an even blow."


    A hunting duo walked past her with their eyes narrowed against the glare off the glaciers and their beards tied up against the wind and their [longarms] slung over heavy furs flayed from wolves long extirpated from the valley. They nodded at her and squeezed her shoulder as they passed then they slowed to whisper thanks to the [hornkeeper] and touch his charge for luck. They cupped the flumewater to their lips and edged out onto the track as it descended around a sharp arete while the flumewater swept straight on and over a thousand yard cliff to freeze yard by yard until it met the ground in a tremendous pillar of ice.


    She shrugged the shoulder they''d squeezed. "Ye ever goin te sound that thing?" she said.


    "Best hope I don''t wee Mym," said the [hornkeeper] as he spun his hand in wider and wider circles over the thirsty wood. "Yer da comin up too?"


    "Aye. We took a doe and a quail this mornin."


    "That smart takin a hind?"


    "It''s past fawnin. We''re damn lucky te take her this late."


    The [hornkeeper] nodded. "Used te be dwarves went out for a day te take meat for a month. Now more and more are out for a month te take meat for a day."


    "Aye but there''s no choice in it. Game''s goin underground."


    "Already?''


    "Already."


    "Well. Maybe next year''ll be better."


    "Aye maybe so."


    For the first time the [hornkeeper] looked up from the horn. "Surprised yer out huntin at all. Don''t ye have better things that need doin? Ye and that lad Khaz?"


    She looked away from his seeking eyes.


    "But who am I te say what a lass ought or ought not te do," he said.


    "I''m busy helpin da."


    "Yer da don''t need helpin. He''s still the sharpest shot under the mountain and will be for another hundred years."


    Just then her da trod around the arete with the hind over both shoulders and his hands wrapping its front and rear hooves and the quail looped over his belt where it slapped his thigh and stained his trousers with specks of gore that froze whenever a cloud passed before the sun and thawed again after. His breath huffed and steam boiled off his scalp. He looked tired.


    At the horn he undid the quail and offered it to the [hornkeeper]. Mym stood up as he came past. He grumbled, "Don''t wait for me," and stumped into the delving.


    She turned from the white outside with the horn and its [hornkeeper] and tortured ice and tumbled rocks and followed her da underground.


    She walked two steps behind him and tracked mud and meltwater along the perfectly leveled and straightened road that ran to the forge in the mountain''s heart. On both sides great houses were carved out of the granite with their square stone facades of square buttresses framing square doorways, some cold and dark, some warm and glowing orange through square windows and downcasting onto lifelike stonecarved dwarves who lined their yards and listened to the delving''s happenings: the tink tink tink of a dwarf somewhere chiseling on something, the long note of the sacred song saved for [stonespeaking], the living rock whispering of creation and fellowship and other things it remembered, the gentle ring of a bronze bowl singing the finger swiping around and around and away and lingering and fading to nothing.


    The forge''s chamber opened into a warm and airy vault. There the tall buttressing and dark windows of the delving''s most ancient houses yawned for hundreds of yards toward a ceiling somewhere beyond the upcast glow off of the forge.


    As Mym''s da entered the chamber a [bonesmith] stopped pulling water from the flume to kneel and lower her eyes. Her hair was pinned like Mym''s in a long spiraling braid and her cheeks were round and her eyes bluer than the mountain''s oldest ice.


    "No cause for kneelin Xaba," said Mym.


    "As ye say Mym," said the dwarf but she stayed down. Once they passed the [bonesmith] dipped her clay pail into the flume and walked it sloshing into a lit house with two stone dwarves in the yard.


    If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    "I hate that," said Mym.


    "Get used te it," said her da. "Yer the mountain''s lastborn daughter now that Lyza''s gone missin. Unless yer ready te finally try sculptin then ye and Khaz are the best hope for our future since the Grizzly Serac set te climb the black heart of the world."


    Her da raised an arm and the hind nearly fell off his shoulders. "Oy Thayne!" he called.


    Fifty paces ahead an old [bellower] sat on a stone hedge running afront a yard with a stone child half formed and long abandoned. When he heard her da he grinned and called back. "What''s now, Waz? Ye even left, yet?"


    "Aye. We got lucky. Mym put one through its eye before I even powdered my pan." He turned the hind''s carcass so the old dwarf could see.


    "Straight shootin Mym."


    "Thanks."


    "I took a cock quail," said her da.


    "Te the keeper?" said the old dwarf.


    "Te the keeper. What''s now?"


    "Million things in the works but none of em workin."


    "Aye. Where''s that lad ye been keepin around?"


    The [bellower] shrugged. "Khaz went out te check somethin or other. Should be back before dusk. It blowin good out there?"


    "Aye, blowin the skin off yer bones."


    "Blowin the spots off a fawn?"


    "Blowin the sun the wrong way around the world."


    Mym shook her head at their banter. ¡°The heat off yer tongues are enough te set our dinner roastin. I''ll just go drop these off and come back with the spit."


    The [bellower] hooted from his hedge. "Mym''s in a mood, aye?"


    "When''s she not? Drink one later?"


    "Drink one later."


    They walked on with her da chuckling to himself. A little farther along he pointed his tremendous beard at an ornate facade on the other side of the chamber. "Smell that?" he said.


    "The Karakos are cookin up a wooly."


    "Think it''s the same one?"


    "Aye. They''ll be eatin on it for years."


    "I could eat the sizzlin trunk off a wooly."


    She patted the hind. "And yer doe?"


    "Four legs, two ears, and I''ll still have that trunk."


    "Well then we better get on."


    "I''m gettin."


    "Aye and if ye get any slower ye''ll give the glacier a crisis of confidence." She smiled when she said it but he didn''t notice because he was studying the Karakos'' facade. There stood an uncut slab beside six stone dwarves posed in their postures, their rough granite beards curled and smooth brows unworried as if sleeping. But that was not sleeping. That was something else.


    Another two dark houses and they came to theirs. It was dark too. Mym went up the walk past three dwarves crafted as skillfully as the Karakos''. Brothers and a sister she''d never meet with the saddest faces she''d ever seen. Sidelit by the forge their expressions were too foreign to give comfort yet too familiar to forget. Waiting for a life that would never come.


    On their porch she set down the arms she carried and unfurled a dry cloth and looked at each. She ran the cloth over the [longarms] with their rifled barrels matted to deaden sunlight and stocks carved from old wood handled so often they shed water without waxing. Her [alpenstock] with its long shaft and short spike for belaying and its curved pick for cutting and climbing and its wide adze for chopping steps in steep ice. Her da''s [alpenstock] with its spike and pick and adze smithed from metal blacker than night and rarer than gold or diamond or any other mineral mined from the deep parts of the world. Dwarves called it shard of the sky though none remembered why. Perhaps because it was as dark and eternal as the firmament between the stars. Perhaps because it had fallen from them.


    When she finished wiping down their arms she wrapped her free hand around the door''s iron ring. "Ye comin?"


    He had stopped near one of her stone siblings and looked down the chamber at the place where the flume left the road and wound into the ancient wynds that tunneled in darkness all the way to the black heart of the world, mountain of all mountains where no stones spoke.


    "Ye seen the Karakos?" he said.


    Mym didn''t answer. She knew what was coming and she had no way to stop it.


    He said, "They''re gettin ready te try again. Ye know Ma Karako was the last ma before yers. Her mind''s as sharp as her adze. If she''s tryin again then maybe ye should too. Maybe ye finally sculpt me that wee granddaughter. Maybe we''ll get lucky for once. We''ve damned well earned it."


    Mym turned from the door and saw him hunched under the weight of the [hind] and his cheeks sagging and his forehead darkening his eyes in shadow so deep only their reflections of the forge showed, as if each was a spark smoldering in the liminality between waning or catching fire.


    "I''m tired," he said. "And I''m tired of the delvin just feelin bigger and emptier and colder. The Grizzly Serac''s dead. Old Zam went in after her boy and the wyndin''s taken dwarves better than them. Yer uncle Barzun''s never comin back from whatever hole ate him up."


    "Ye don''t know all that."


    "Course I do. All the old dwarves are dead or gone. Who knows how many out huntin aren''t comin back neither. It''s up te ye and Khaz now."


    She rubbed her eyes. She was tired of this conversation. "We would if we could."


    "Ye say so but ye never really cared. It''s my fault. I never made ye care. But young dwarves keep dyin and disappearin, and my generation''s hardenin. If ye don''t figure a way to make more, well, I can''t stay much longer te help ye. Someone''s got te step after old Zam te figure a way te keep the forge hot else the delvin will freeze from the inside out, and all dwarves with it."


    "The delvin won''t freeze. Nothin outside''s cold like it used te be."


    He shook his head. "That shouldn''t clear yer conscience. Outside isn''t inside. If it isn''t the cold and it isn''t the huntin then it''ll just be somethin else. We need more dwarves, and if the human way isn''t workin for the two of ye then ye need te do like the Karakos and pick up my shard and have a go with a slab like the first dwarves taught."


    Mym looked at his [alpenstock]. "That''s never worked before. for the Karakos or ye or anyone else livin."


    "Anyone''s not everyone, and everyone''s still waitin for ye te have a go."


    "Da," she started to say but a sudden groan echoed from the delving''s entry like a crack shooting across a loaded slope. It passed on down the road to the forge and rose back again louder and louder and the urgency of it drowned her shame and her da''s sorrow, and the door''s ring rattled against its plank and dust shook from her siblings and her da tossed the [hind] over her stone sister and Mym tossed him his [longarm] and [alpenstock].


    For the first time in her life the horn of their folk called the delving to arms.


    <hr>


    >Name: Mym


    > Race: [Dwarf]


    > Character Class: [Sharpshooter] Steady hands, quick trigger.


    > Attributes: [Belonging]


    > -2 [Belonging]: The first thing you oughta know about her is that she never asked to be some kinda savior. Problem was that''s what her folk needed and it was all her old dad wanted. (8/10)


    > [Belonging] Title Gained: [Lastborn of Her Folk] She who is constrained by tradition.

 3. An Orc Called Orc

    It was the old [brigadier] who''d named him Orc. He a ragged thing torn from the bosom of a dying sow. She a [scholar] and a [farmer] and a [fighter]. For sixteen years she made him in her image as humans do with all things like and unlike them: placing their world in the cosmic center, clearcutting its forests for farms, forcing their god to walk on two feet and eat with two hands and think with one hairy head because that''s what they see in their polished silvers. Then the [armiger]''s soldiers came and the [brigadier] sent him away to pull long furrows in black soil for some [yeoman] brothers. Back then he still believed he''d see her again.


    He pulled all day every day and at the end of each the brothers left him bridled to the plow and he leaned away from its cold iron blade and watched the stars pinwheel. He was too tired to hate the [brigadier] for abandoning him. Too tied up. He hated her in his dreams.


    When the last seed was sown the brothers unbuckled him from the plow and tied his lead around a stout old oak standing at their property boundary. He stood and sat and slept in its shade. To the length of his lead its floor of leaves and acorns and ants became a home he couldn''t leave.


    No rain came that summer or autumn. Dust bronzed the heavy cornstalks and hot wind bent them bobbing over the ground like a routed levy returning in shame. When the brothers checked their corn it was black and dry. It fell lightly from their picking fingers. They were afraid because they didn''t know what had gone wrong. Because they had nothing to sell and nothing to eat. They blamed Orc. They''d have whipped him for it but they were afraid of that too.


    He sat with his bridle tethered to the oak and watched the [bookmaker] come up the brothers'' lane as they scythed the blighted stalks. He didn''t know her yet. She was just another human. She carried a torn bill rolled in her hand and she showed it to the brothers then folded and stuffed it in her pocket. They brought her over to him holding their scythes before them like spears.


    She wore a man''s tunic tied up tight over everything and trousers for riding though she had no horse and a thin [blade] looped to a frayed rope around her waist. Cowskin boots worn flat on their bottoms with stitching knotted in places from breaking and mending. She looked at him and turned and spat and looked again. "What''s a matter with him?" she said.


    "Nothing," said a brother.


    "Ya don''t want him?"


    "No."


    "The armiger knowing about him?"


    "No."


    She slapped the flat of an outheld [scythe]. "And ya didn''t put him down?"


    "It''d be unlawful."


    "Y''all just too scared to try. He''s not costing me a thing?"


    "What''re you offering?" said a brother.


    "Just take him away," said the other.


    "Awright," she said.


    A brother put both hands on his scythe as the other started on the bridle.


    "Take a copper," she said.


    "He''s worth more than that."


    "Naw for him. For the rope."


    They wound a quick noose in the lead and slipped it over his head and unfastened the bridle. The [bookmaker] took the lead and said gleeful well wishes to the brothers as if departing her own wedding. She walked him down the lane to the place where it met the seaway. He looked back past the half empty field and past the brothers to the gracious shadegiving oak. With his eyes and heart he said goodbye to his second home.


    She saw him looking and smiled. "Ya done farming orc. Only the pit now. Only the pit til ya die."


    She acted hard in the same way the brother''s had acted hard but he could smell the sweat blooming under her tunic and trousers. She drove him past the fork to the [brigadier]''s estate with its rusting iron gate and defaced statues and olives shriveling high on old trees and he made sure to look the other way. She drove him through streams and he scooped water into his mouth as he ran and she drove him past a field of sweet smelling watermelons on the vine and she drove him past the old span and when their shadows were smallest they stopped at a wayside inn with a tankard carved on its board.


    Its [barkeep] appeared in the doorway gripping an [iron mace] and he asked why the orc wasn''t in the camps with the other filth. She told him to watch his mouth, that the orc was her filth now and folks shouldn''t talk about other folks'' property. He laughed at her and told her that she was crazy to let him out, that she could come in but the orc couldn''t, that she could tie him up with the horses but not where he could reach them cause everyone knew orcs''ll eat horses, they''d eat just about anything. She said she''d keep an eye on him and asked what a copper would buy.


    "Not much with yon northerly war," said the [barkeep].


    "Don''t need much. Just a pot of boiling water and a fresh loaf."


    The [barkeep] shouldered the [iron mace]. "A cup of well and a day old."


    "Done deal. Bring a basin."


    The [barkeep] delivered the water in a ceramic cup and the loaf in a wooden bowl. More than a day old. More like a month. The [bookmaker] mushed the loaf in the bowl with the water and let it set a while. Orc didn''t much watch her. He listened to the songbirds in a naked old elm and the stillness of its branches. He pretended he could hear the resin inside retract. Readying for winter''s chill. Back at the [brigadier]¡¯s they''d be mending baskets and building ladders for olive picking. But he wouldn''t think about that.


    The [bookmaker] sat on a stair and leaned on the next and kicked her legs out straight with her heels in the dirt. She picked a pinch of the mush out of the bowl with her fingers and thumb and put it in her mouth. She spat it back in the bowl and looked at it and frowned. She passed the bowl to Orc.


    He ate slowly and steadily with both hands. He licked his fingers clean. He grabbed her skin of water and drank deep.


    "Ya gonna make me rich," she said.


    He handed her skin back. "I''m happy for you."


    Her eyes widened when he spoke and she dropped the skin and grabbed the handle of her thin [blade] and glanced up the steps to the tavern''s door as if help might rush out of it.


    She wet her lips with her tongue. "Ya talk mantalk?"


    He tossed the bowl on the step where it wobbled around and around and clattered to a stop. "Some."


    "How much?"


    He looked at her. He didn''t answer.


    She made herself as big as she could which was still two feet shorter than him. "Ya best not look at me like that. I saved y''alls ass."


    "Did you now?"


    "Them farmboys was fixing to put ya down sooner than later."


    "They weren''t fool enough to say so."


    Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    "Hey I didn''t mean nothing by that before. Ya make me rich and ya won''t die in no pit. Hell I''ll even set ya free. What do ya think about that?"


    "I think you shouldn''t make promises you won''t keep.¡±


    "And ya shouldn''t hold no grudges over good fortune."


    He nodded at the empty bowl. "Buy me another of them and I won''t."


    "Shit. I ain''t rich yet."


    She stood him up and drove him along the seaway. His legs were good and his lungs full of the golden air and rich scents of harvest. He could''ve just yanked his lead from her little hands and gone straight into the folded up hills to live off [coyote] and [calf] and whatever bugs made the mounds of dirt under the cropped grass. To shout with clapped lightning and sleep on silent earth and wait for terrified humans to come with hounds and torches and bows to feather the rampant orc. The marauding orc. The free orc.


    But his mind was still shaped like the [brigadier]''s. Full of what humans should be from their books and their songs. Lawful. Doing as they say. He wasn''t orc enough to know better.


    "Those farmboys called ya Orc," she said.


    "They did."


    "What''ll I call ya then?"


    "Orc."


    "That ain''t no kinda name."


    "Tell it to the brigadier."


    "The who?"


    He shook his head. "It''s my name."


    She leered at him like she didn''t believe him. "Y''alls plain easy. Them farmboys didn''t bleed ya did they? Take all the fire outta ya before they took my copper?"


    "Thought you said that was for the rope."


    "Copper''s a copper and there ain''t no way to get rich without pinching every one. I''m called Booky. My pit''s a day along the way. But we don''t got a day so we''re gonna run it. I promised Leeroy a fight tonight. Shithead nicked some pups from one of the camps and he''s been training em up."


    "You want me to fight dogs."


    "They''re orc catchers. Hotter than hellfire and bigger around than y''alls skinny ass." She looked him up and down and shook her head. "Ya''d think coming off a farm ya''d be fat as a cow. Goddamn lying hicks. They even feed ya?"


    "No."


    "Well maybe ya''ll get some dog tonight. Can''t wait to see Leeroy''s face after. We''ll start ya there and work up to bigger stakes. Squeeze more out of the crowd that way. Run on ahead of me now. Show me I didn''t waste that copper."


    ***


    As he waited in the pit he thought about that day and the years that had passed. He looked up at the faces ringing the rim. Their crooked teeth biting and chewing the flesh of a massive [hart]. Their tongues jabbering and their words wavering from drink. He heard their sadness at his imminent demise and their thrill to see a real live ogre.


    The ogre was too large to enter through the cell so ten men lifted the ceiling grate and ten more levered them off the rim with a [hardwood plank] the size of a tree trunk. The ogre was naked and pale from however long in a ship''s hold, tied up against their bonds, loose skin rubbed raw by the cords. The crowd screamed and threw scraps and forks and spoons at them. Booky pushed a [long spear] through the grate to cut their bonds. Their arms tore free and legs kicked and heads turned toward Orc.


    "Big boys," they bellowed.


    Booky lowered the [hardwood plank] through the grate on a [rusting chain].


    The ogre grabbed it and both mouths howled, "Big club for big boys," and fist and plank pounded on the floor and the sawdust jumped and with every strike a little more chain came through the grate and piled behind them.


    Orc went to the spot he always chose where the slanted shadows favored him and the lanterns blinded them and he waited in the dark like a dream of the past and the ogre did just what the [brigadier] had said ogres do. Orc moved as she''d shown him and they went over like the tallest and oldest of trees and he figured a way to wrap two necks with one chain and then wrapped it twice more around his forearm. He tightened it as the ogre''s chest shuddered and their faces purpled and he slackened it when they paled. He heard the crowd thumping the rim and shaking the grate and ale showered down on the back of his neck and splashed the ogre''s pallid faces and wet thighbones bounced off of his shoulders and he heard them shout brute and monster and animal and orc. They chanted it. Orc. Orc. Orc.


    Afterward Booky sat on the rim like always with her feet hanging between gaps in the grate and copper and silver and gold coins stacked beside her. Her big toe stuck through a hole in her boot. The ogre snored where they''d fallen.


    "Ya born with that mercy?" she said.


    "Come on down here and find out."


    She laughed and picked up a coin between her finger and thumb. "Reminds me of when that old huller Fernie threw down his tomcat to see what ya''d do. I won a round silver off y''alls mercy then and I''m grateful for it, but I gots to tell you I make a hell of a lot more off y''alls rage."


    She smiled at him.


    He didn''t smile back. "Aren''t you rich enough?"


    "There ain''t no such thing." She nodded at the ogre. "Plenty more to be made off em fatties, even having to feed two mouths on one body. What a way to live. Almost as bad as getting hitched. Hell, Orc. Maybe killing em would''ve been the mercy."


    "They didn''t deserve it."


    "Didn''t deserve it? They was fixing to beat y''alls face into hamburger."


    "It wouldn''t have been right."


    "And saving em was?"


    "It was to me."


    "Orc there ain''t no right in this world but divine right and thems of property ownership."


    "Says the woman who pitted us."


    "Hey now that wasn''t me this time. The armiger''s who sent them ogres here to stick ya. He was supposed to come and watch."


    She stopped counting and leaned forward and looked at him over her toe.


    "Y''all do something to him I should know about? Naw. Nevermind answering. Best I don''t know nothing. You just stay ahead of the sticking. There''s a right old pool going on when ya gonna get stuck. I''d rather see ya stick than stuck, so ya just stay ahead of what''s coming and stop thinking about what''s deserved and what ain''t. Least in my pit anyway."


    She turned to the ornate chair on the rim she''d dragged out for the [armiger].


    "Sheriff says he done run outta villains, but it''s a damned lie. There''s plenty still flying free as a flock of crooning cuckoos who''ll never be caught by no sheriff. They''re the ones giving sheriffs orders. Ya come face to face with one of them ya best forget y''alls mercy. Ya stick em."


    "Sheriff''s not caught you."


    She laughed. "I just give em what they wanna see, and ya ain''t no different. Don''t get huffy on me now. I knows better than y''all what y''all are and what y''all was born to. Notice ya ain''t hollering after anymore? Ya got used to it now. Ya almost the water in the veins orc ya was born to be. Last thing that needs forgetting is that old lady''s mercy. It''s a lie and it always was."


    "That''s not what I was taught."


    "Tell yaself that. Fine by me. But y''all never needed a whipping to fight and ya better not start. The minute ya stop fighting''s the minute I''d have to sell ya. Recoup my investment."


    "Your copper."


    "That''s right. Y''all would wind up in one of them armiger¡¯s camps. Them orcs are real orcs. They''d stick ya the moment ya showed up smelling of women and talking like that goddamn great lady who reared ya."


    He shrugged. "They could try."


    "Course the folks coming to see y''all night after night why they''d still be coming and they''d still be cruel, just like what Fernie done with that tomcat. Cept now they''d be looking for something else to satisfy their cruelness. Something worse than watching ya. Taking it out on their wives and kids or some shit like that sailor ya done. Remember him? Boy that was a sight. The moment that boy''s neck popped some of them women bout forgot y''all was an orc and I don''t blame em. Guarantee their husbands never brought em back. Guess everybody''s a slave to something."


    She fingered a copper from her take and tossed into the pit. It bounced off the sleeping ogre and landed in the sawdust glinting orange like the sun he rarely saw.


    "For y''alls conscience," she said.


    He didn''t say anything. He looked past the woman and the lanterns. Very high and very small a buzzard crossed the face of the green moon.


    "Y''all act like that coin don''t matter but that''s only cause y''all are down there. Up here that''s all that matters. Y''all will be seeing soon enough. I''ll start a little pile of them for ya. Next year if ya still want to quit then I''ll pay ya out and ya can go try and find that old lady. Three to one ya won''t. There''s a reason she left ya and a reason y''all are here. It''s cause this is where ya belong. Doing what ya was born to do."


    He looked down at the ogre. "That''s what I''m afraid of."


    She didn''t hear him. "This is home now. Has been and will be forever."


    "This isn''t home."


    She nodded. "Ya''ll see."


    She put her take in her bag and stood up and surveyed the pit. "God damn what a mess. Y''all spared em, y''all square em. I expect em to be oriented fore breakfast. Can''t have em tearing apart the goblins cause they can''t tell the difference tween scrapping and performing. I''m off to pay off Ray. Ya best grab that copper fore one of them goblins beats ya to it."


    <hr>


    > +2 [Rage] ...I promised to do what I could for him and that is what I did. We are all doomed to raise our children in our own graven images. It is the priests who say all souls have a common paternity. If that is so then who is to blame for wickedness... (3/10).


    > +1 [Renown] ...me and my brudders seen him barehanded drop a twoheader... (2/10).


    > Gained Item: [Copper Penny] Stamped with the royal personage.

 4. Khazonaz

    One hundred and one dwarves marched down the delving''s road from undermount past their great horn and down through icefalls to the first gnarling bristlecones and down to the silver stream that shepherded the valley''s forest across its floor. The melt from the flume trickled into the stream there to swirl over booted feet and to burble tales of the first colony and the time of ice when water harder than steel towered higher than mountains and sculpted all the world''s forms. Birch and ash crowded the banks and chattered as the autumn wind stole their voices one leaf at a time and cast them to the ground. Atop the thinning canopy a solitary crow scolded the wind for blowing and the sun for hiding, and her cries climbed gray walls of sheer granite whose scraped faces listened to everything below and whose overhanging arches and massive crevices had provoked ancient questions of ancient power from humans both learned and lay: Which were carved by dwarves and which by ice? Which followed which in their long retreat up the mountains'' slopes? If the dwarves knew they never told.


    As the hundred and one splashed through the place where the flume met the stream one hundred began to sing a dirge in voices below human hearing that recounted the one¡¯s true name: not Mym or Waz or Thayne or Khaz, which were mere threads of a tapestry, each a single syllable condensing a thousand eons of stones uplifting and ice receding and dwarves sweating and bleeding and cutting, as a battle''s seen and unseen suffering and known and unknowable heroics are all folded into the name of the field they hallowed. When one song finished their voices fell sharp and severe as a hammer to anvil, and when the next began they rose as a mountain takes an age to rise and sang the next dwarf''s true name. Each lasted an hour or more, its meaning known only to dwarves and perhaps to the valley''s walls that [heard] and remembered.


    At noon on the fifth day their songs ended and it was their turn to [listen] and remember. Lonely boulders beside and within the stream recalled memories of centuries past and the songs of dwarven companies gone before, five hundred strong, five thousand strong, their hands rough and faces chalked from delving and masonry, marching in teams bound by exchanged oaths or exchanged blood to push or pull or haul mechanical engines of timber and metal and mystery along the stream''s narrow banks, the rattling and creaking and crashing over ruts muffling their clanking arms, their black and red beards and red and white banners fluttering in the valley''s forenoon inhalation and evening exhalation, the white mountain at their backs and the sweat down their necks soaking silks and linens and cloth traded from the far side of the world with stories as long as the names of those wearing them.


    The hundred and one [asked] the boulders what had happened to their once great folk. The boulders didn''t tell.


    They passed beyond the granite walls and errant glacial erratics to a stoneless land of diminishing foothills that ushered the stream like two palms side by side lifting cool refreshment to pursed lips. In shadowed folds between the hillcrests tributaries fed by other valleys ran to meet the white mountain''s stream, and it swelled to a black river with fish striking its surface for their dusky meals and making waves of the graying sky and browning land mirrored therein.


    Khaz walked beside Mym as if it was where he belonged. He was tall for a dwarf and his nose uncommonly large and his eyes gray with flecks that sometimes glinted green in sunlight like reeds twisting in a current. As she was the white mountain''s last daughter he was its last son and together they bore its expectations. Over the decades he''d done little things, sweet things, to help her endure their weight whenever he thought she needed it. She never did yet he''d often thought it.


    "Looks like rain," he said.


    She didn''t look. She didn''t need to. She''d seen the clouds readying to break, to spill, to grow good green life from dearth. As if progenesis was as simple as that.


    When she didn''t answer he pitched his thumb back toward her da and Thayne who walked behind them. "What''re they on about?"


    "Don''t know," she said. "Not listenin."


    "They''re always after each other about somethin. Next dwarf born could be named for their arguin. Ye hearin em?"


    "Aye. Somethin about the call te arms."


    "Oy? Half of what they''re sayin I can''t understand, and the half I can is gold plated nak shit."


    She smiled. "They''re old and hardenin. Try makin yer mind more like a stone."


    "And my tongue too? I can''t even tell what words they''re usin."


    "You sound like my ma."


    She [listened] as if the old dwarves were stones already. After a while she said, "Thayne''s just sayin we shouldn''t go any and every time humans come askin. It''s an old argument I''ve slept through more times than I''ve heard. Guaranteed they have too."


    "Aye but he''s got a point. We got ourselves te think of. We go and get te dyin and what? No Naz left te make another Khaz''o''naz. Meanswhile humans go and make more and more like a whole warren of rabbit. Ye ever seen two together?"


    "Aye sure. Last time the armiger came undermount he brought a score of em."


    "Those were all men. I meant a man and a woman."


    "Just the emissary''s girl before they got on."


    "Ye meanin Daraway. Shit, ye didn''t act like she was just a girl whenever ye were together."


    "That was then. Then isn''t now."


    The sky grew heavier. Ready to burst. She could smell it in the breeze.


    "Well ye put a man and a woman together and watch what they get te," he said.


    "Elves used te say that about us."


    "Used te. like ye said, then isn''t now."


    Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.


    "Wonder what they''d say if they were up on that hill watchin our wee company pass."


    "Keep wonderin." He looked up the column. "I''m goin up the line. Walk with me?"


    "No. Go on."


    "I didn''t mean it that way. I just meant for the sake of the argument that maybe yer da should listen to old Thayne for once."


    "I know."


    "I didn''t mean we''d get te dyin."


    She looked at him. "I said I know. I don''t plan on dyin."


    "Me either." He grinned and slapped her back then stepped off the road and jogged ahead.


    From behind she heard her da say, "Braw lad and solid. Ye should run on after him."


    She half turned to him. "You done arguin?"


    "I wasn''t arguin."


    "Say another word bout me and Khaz and ye will be."


    "Too bad." He walked alongside her and she put her arm around his elbow. "Past time ye gave him another whack. He''s a good match for ye, always was always is. Steady head, steady hands, big heart."


    "Leave it."


    "Look I know yer feelin like yer stuck with the spares, but ye can''t ask for diamonds in coal."


    "I said leave it."


    "Heed wean. If ye don''t want te sculpt my granddaughter from stone then ye need te try with Khaz."


    "Da."


    "Just sayin. Everybody''s waitin. I''m tired of bein the last father. Ye got my blood in ye. More important ye got yer ma''s blood in ye."


    "So I need some Khaz in me?"


    He grimaced. ¡°Oy oy oy there. That¡¯s me daughter yer talkin bout. Don''t be lewd."


    ¡°Then don¡¯t give me reason te be.¡±


    "Look. I¡¯m just sayin it worked for yer ma and me, and a hundred other generations of dwarves before wee Mym first told her da no."


    "No."


    The rain started. Big cold drops making wide rings in the river and mud from the road, knocking on iron helms and nak leather and stone pavers like rocks down a sluice. She rolled the lid of her da''s pack to keep his [alpenstock] and [longarm] out of the wet and he rolled hers.


    "I love ye, Mym," he said.


    "I love ye too, da."


    "I just don''t understand why yer mad all the time."


    "Cause I got yer blood in me. I''m done talkin bout this. What were ye and Thayne blowin over?"


    He glowered and she took his arm again. He said, "That old stonefart''s thinkin white mountain shouldn''t hold up our end of the peace. Thinkin we''re too few and too rare now te run out whenever the human king calls."


    "Maybe he''s right."


    "Like hell he is."


    She tilted her head so that she might look him in the eye. "Some might say we''re out of our heads te go warrin when we can''t go birthin," she said.


    "And I say it''s better te die with honor than live in shame. The king holds up his end we hold up ours. He sent his armiger te check on us. Brought us medicines te help our, our difficulty."


    "Ye can say it, da. Isn''t any shame in it."


    "They help us and we help them. Heaps of dwarves and humans gone te crows and worms te make it that way. White mountain isn''t goin te hide from the call te arms. Especially over, what, twenty orcs?"


    "The armiger''s man said thirty."


    "Thirty. Any dwarf''s worth three of the brutes. Hundred and one can handle half a thousand. Maybe a scratch''ll need cleanin and a busted bone settin, maybe a bite or two''ll need cauterizin. Won''t be worse than that. Hell, you and me together''d work the whole thing, but the others would whine bout missin out."


    She smiled. "I''ll try to save one or two for ye."


    "Oy. Yer already on about it. And the armiger''s sendin a company of men too. Thayne''s an idiot. Caution won''t keep orcs from comin right on up our valley, right on up te the delvin. Bluster alone won''t blow em off the mountainside. Humans are doin their part, we got te do ours. They may be young and shortsighted, but they can still teach us good ways te be and ways te be good. Remember that."


    "I''ve known that longer than ye."


    "Hell." He wrung rain out of the tail of his beard. "Get on and find Khaz, aye?"


    "Da."


    "Ye don''t know less ye try."


    "We did. We been tryin for years."


    "Oh,¡± he said. ¡°I''m sorry. I didn''t know."


    She didn''t tell him it was fine because it wasn''t.


    They walked together a while. Side by side when the road was wide enough and single file to cross little streams trickling out of the hills and into the river. Rain cells drifted overhead like molten lead congealing in smelted ore. The sky darkened further.


    "There''s still sculptin," he said. "I got a good block of granite out of the black heart of the world my da''s ma hauled way away back when this started. Never laid a tool te it. It''d make a beautiful granddaughter, maybe."


    "No."


    "Undermount''s dependin on ye."


    "They can depend on someone else awhile."


    Gradually the rain lightened until it quit altogether. The clouds began to break up and glow pink and gold and violet from the setting sun, and marmot and grouse and midges came out for the last slice of red sunlight before the gluttonous world swallowed it.


    Her da swung his pack around and drew his [alpenstock] to check its edges for damp. "If ye ever change yer mind bout sculptin ye don''t hide it like ye hid the other things, aye? I need ye te tell me so ye can use my stock."


    "Mine''s fine."


    He shook his head. "Ye need the shard''s air for it te work. Steel won''t do it right. Steel alone hasn''t never worked."


    "That''s because nothing''ll work."


    "It''s how they made the first dwarf. It''s how we''ll make the last. Ye''ll use my stock for it, and I''ll show ye. Ye''ll change yer mind."


    "I won''t."


    He nodded and said, "Ye will," because the fathers of dwarves and the fathers of women are not so different.


    The clouds turned dark blue and the sky gray, then the clouds turned gray and the sky black, and in dusk''s last gloaming the dwarves came to the edge of a great cliff. The river slipped over its rim as smooth and silent as a knife in the gut and the road turned right to follow the rimrocks toward the old tower span that bridged the lands of dwarves and of humans. The dwarfroad met the seaway there, and there the hundred and one readied to repel orcs said to number thirty.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Stonespeaking] Aye the lass had a knack for a few things. Shootin for starters and ye know already she was a surefooted goat on the side of any mountain tween here and the black heart. One other thing was stonespeakin, though she came late to it. Almost too late if I''m tellin it true but that''s what happens when ye don''t have yer ma around te learn ye... (1/10)


    > [Stonespeaking] Title Gained: [Neophyte] Her ears dead and her tongue sharp.


    > -3 [Belonging]...they was facing the end of their world at the time, though I suppose that ain''t changed none. My point is there''s only so far you can push a girl before she starts pushin back. And when the one you''re pushin is already holdin up the world then you best not push too hard else she''s liable to drop it direct on your head... (5/10)

 5. Revolt

    They called themselves [soldiers of the king]. A lie within a lie. Down from the rising front they came wearing dyed cloth over steel mail over tanned hides over soft skin with blood in their eyes and on their tongues. They crowded around Booky''s pit like swine to the trough. The lords on the rim cleared out but the poors in the rafters stayed to watch what was coming.


    Orc squatted in the pit and waited.


    The soldiers of the king wanted food and drink and death.


    Booky said, "Deathmatches are on Fridays, boys. Tonight''s three goblins and an orc. Last one standing. It''s a real show and I know y''all will enjoy it."


    They offered five gold for a dead greenskin.


    "Y''all don''t understand that these are highly trained assets. Each of em''s worth more than whatever y''all brought."


    They offered ten.


    She looked at Orc through the grate, then at her book, then back at him. She closed her book.


    He saw their [sergeant] appear beside her. Dirty cloak, white once. Leather and mail and a sheathed [shortsword] and a trimmed beard. Orc listened to the man apologize for his men''s drunkenness and he watched him turn to address the soldiers. "Good men, good soldiers of the king, this woman provides an honest service for this province. You would rob her of her livelihood. You would slay her stock knowing where we go and why. Wherever would she find more?"


    The soldiers laughed and jeered.


    "No. You dishonor us."


    The soldiers quieted and cast their eyes down as if in shame but Orc could still see their shifting sidelong glances and the fear and the hate in them.


    The [sergeant] turned to Booky. "Fifty."


    She didn''t even look at Orc. Her book snapped open and the men roared.


    The [sergeant] handed her some coins. "Scrip for the rest."


    "Scrip?"


    "Scrip of the king. Good as gold."


    She shook her head. "Pulp ain''t gold. There''s an ogre down there, a mean one. What good''s scrip if y''all go a dying? King imself gonna wheel on out and pay me?"


    "You can take scrip or you can write your name beside that ogre''s."


    "What? What for?"


    "For harboring the king''s enemies from his justice."


    "Ain''t no justice here. Ain''t no enemies neither."


    The [sergeant] looked at Orc. "I''m looking at one."


    "Just an orc," she said. "Don''t waste y''all''s scrip on him. Ya said ya wanted a goblin. Fine. I got three. But if ya don''t want them then maybe it''s best if y''all go a challenging each other instead. Feats of strength and the like. I even got some rubber swords y''all can thump against each other. Come on, let me fix ya up."


    "Why do you think we''re here?" said the [sergeant]. "The armiger''s orcs gone and killed their bosses. Three thousand of them are bringing up devils from the camps to the sea."


    She snapped her fingers under his nose. "Devils. Fine, that''s fine. But devils or no, that orc''s bought. Y''all don''t want him. Y''all want him go get the magister, but ya don''t. Truth is he''s lame. And thick. No good to anyone. No sport to y''all. Now I''d say take him but I feel bad for him. He''s just my mucker. Mucking the cell and the toilet and hauling thems that go and get killed. He''d stab hisself fore he figured which side of y''alls swords is for holding."


    "Who wants him?" called the [sergeant]. "Hicks, you want him? Take him. First blood for your old man."


    Orc couldn''t see Hicks. He watched Booky. She flapped her arms a little and said, "But he ain''t for killing," but they didn''t care. She''d gone as high as humans let their women go. If she went any higher it would mean taking something from men, so they turned to threats of violence as men do, and they blamed her for it as men do. He''d watched the [brigadier] live that story. Now Booky was having her turn.


    "Go on and make him weep," said the [sergeant]. "Wait. Give me your scrip."


    He saw Hicks, then. A lean fellow holding a flat tipped [longsword] over his shoulder like a nightsoilman with a shovel. Stringy yellow hair tied behind his head. A young man''s mustache to show he wasn''t his father nor was he his father''s boy no more.


    The [sergeant] handed some paper to Booky. "Here. Now give us odds. Six to one against."


    Hicks laughed. "Gonna clean her out all at once?"


    A regular called down from the rafters, "A silver on Orc."


    Hicks laughed again and his comrades jeered and one threw a pewter tankard at the rafters that bounced off and clanged out of sight.


    Booky squinted at the rafters and penciled in her book. "That you Leeroy? A silver on Orc."


    This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    Hicks whipped his sword down and around in a wide arc then tossed it hand to hand and swung it the other way. "That kid even have a silver? Hold it up. Alright. Next round''s on him, boys."


    The [sergeant] sent a serving boy up to the rafters with a handful of coppers as if the bout were already decided, then he gave Booky a bag of gold. "Their scrip and my fifty on Corporal Hicks."


    His men cheered and laughed and rubbed their hands together.


    Booky''s shoulders sagged as she wrote it in. She closed her book and looked down at Orc and pointed her pencil at the door to the cell. He walked through to the dark little room with its bars and the ogre sleeping sitting up with their back against the wall and chins on their chest and fleshy flabby gut on the ground between their legs, and some greenskins and the dogman squatting together drawing crude figures in the sawdust.


    He waited at the bars as she came down the stairs. She drew down to him revolting as ever, [blade] on hip and old trousers and tunic all done up tight like she feared they''d fly off and never come back. She looked up as she took the last stair. "Hey, Orc. Member when we started? Eating mush and straw. If it cost a copper to go round the world then we couldn''t get outta sight. Lookit us now. When''s the last time ya had to eat mush?"


    "This morning."


    She kept on as if she hadn''t heard. "These here soldiers are mad. They''s bored, and they''s mad. They''s gonna kill ya. They''s gonna kill all y''all and nick everything ain''t bolted to my floor. Hell they''ll nick the bolts, too. Fifty down on six to one. Shit. They¡¯ll never fight ya fair. They¡¯s gonna murder ya. All y¡¯all."


    "Hurry up, woman," came from above and laughter came after.


    Booky edged a little closer to the bars and talked a little quieter. "Ya heard em say what''s happening? There''s a rebellion a coming. Orcs and the like. Bunch of the armiger''s workers busted outta the camps and are fighting their way to the sea. They say they''s heading back to where y''all came from. Back to y''alls home."


    "I thought here was home."


    "Bugger you did. Don''t play them games with me now. The armiger posted these men here figuring orcs''ll just go around town if town''s got some swords in it."


    "Or they''ll come and take them," he said.


    "Ya think?"


    He shrugged. "Never known an orc."


    Someone shouted, "Get him out."


    "Just a minute," she yelled. "He won''t go out."


    "Hicks, go on down there and get him out. But don''t do him until you''re down where we can see."


    He heard the scrape of a heavy tread crossing overhead. Booky looked at the wooden ceiling and at the little trails of dust falling from the seams in the floorboards. She stepped even closer. The key to the cell in her hand. "Look, Orc. Haven''t ya ever wanted to go home? To y''alls real one? Y''alls kind are coming this way. They''ll know y''alls talk and stories and such. They''ll know who ya are and maybe who ya matter to. Hell, ya matter to me, but I ain''t no orc. Haven''t ya ever wanted to be with them?"


    He looked at the key. Be with his folk? Such wants were best left for dreams.


    She smiled. Her eyes were wet. "I told ya you wouldn''t die in no pit. Now get off and don''t ya never tell noone I helped ya."


    Her hands shook and as she aimed the key into the lock it rattled. At that moment two sets of footsteps thumped down the stairs and she dropped the key into the sawdust.


    "Shit," she said.


    Hicks and another [corporal] crowded into the chamber behind her with their naked [longswords] before them.


    Booky stepped on the key and turned to the soldiers. "Look he don''t understand what''s happening. I told ya he''s thick."


    "Shit Hicks look at that ogre," said the corporal.


    "Out of the way maam," said Hicks.


    Booky stepped away from Hicks until her back pressed against the bars nearest Orc. She knew better.


    "Look here, sir Hicks," she said. "He''s a cowering. He doesn''t understand."


    Hicks came around her to see. With one hand Orc drew [Booky''s blade] through the bars and with the other he reached through and pulled Hicks close and his [longsword] clattered on the irons and his body and his cheek bulged through the gaps between and his eyeball was wide and white and it followed [Booky''s blade] as it entered his armpit between the ribs. Orc saw the youth behind his mustache and in his eyes. [Booky¡¯s blade] wasn''t but eight inches long yet this was long enough and he pushed it in until his fist jammed the bars.


    Hicks fell.


    The [corporal] shouted and tripped over himself backing away and he went up the stairs on hands and feet.


    Booky dropped to her knees and sifted through the sawdust and pushed her fingers under Hicks. "Shit I think he''s lying on the key."


    Orc turned and kicked the ogre in their fatty stomach. Two heads rose and four eyes opened. The greenskins and dogman moved out of their way as they stood up. Sand and sawdust stuck to their belly and the backs of their legs.


    "Orc," said left, and he smiled.


    "Orc," said right. "What doin?"


    "Get ready to fight," he said.


    "No," said Booky. "Y''all gotta run."


    From upstairs came raised voices and heavy footfalls and the scrape and crash of furniture.


    "Open the cell," said Orc.


    "I can''t find the goddamn key."


    "Ogre," he said.


    "Ogre," said the ogre. They leaned past him and one by one tore the iron bars from their foundations as if picking garden weeds. When two were out the greenskins slipped through and skulked up the stairs. Three was enough for the dogman to go with a bent bar clamped between his jaws. At four Orc stepped through and faced Booky with her [blade] in his bloodied hand. He could have put it in her gut.


    "Hell," she said wide eyed. "Y''all could''ve left whenever ya wanted."


    "There wasn''t anywhere to go." He offered her the [blade]''s handle.


    "Keep it. Y''alls pile''s gotten bigger than what that''s worth and it''ll help ya member where ya come from, if any of it''s worth membering. The whole world''s a shithouse Orc. Y''all make sure and take anything and everything it gives ya. If it don''t give ya nothing then promise me you''ll spark flint against that steel and burn it all down."


    He promised nothing and said no goodbyes. With [Booky¡¯s blade] in his hand and the ogre right behind they took the stairs two at a time and two at a time they cut through the [soldiers of the king].


    <hr>


    > +1 [Rage] ...they also say the beastly are debased of souls altogether and they say their poverty is plain to anyone who has observed them from outside the wire. But I have been inside, and I know the wealth of these creatures who we''ve made to serve and slaughter... (4/10)


    > +2 [Renown] ...one night I seen him bloodlet an entire garrison and after yew''d think that old pit was a wishin well for leeches. He started with this idiot kid and boy once he got started yew''d be thicker than tar to try and stop him. Yew know how he was. He got to draggin the rest of us into it and boy it never felt so good cuttin up them humies after all they did to us... (4/10)


    > Gained Item: [Booky''s Blade] Carbon steel

 6. The First Meeting

    She squatted at a narrow loop cut halfway up the tower of her ancestors, her [longarm] across her knees and her eyes on Khaz as he shaded a rusty iron and glass lantern on an old wooden box. They needed enough light to tempt the orcs onto the span, but not so much that it would drive them away.


    "That good?" he said.


    "Aye." She looked out the loophole into the night.


    A second tower built by humans anchored the far end of the span. Its timbers rotted and its crown crumbled. Beyond its collapsed scaffolding and tumbled blocks the human lands were invisible. Might as well be the black heart of the world.


    The moons soared somewhere behind her vantage. Their light threw a greenish shadow left and a blueish one right, each falling for a thousand yards into the chasm where one great sea crashed into another in a gravid tug of war that reverberated up the walls and shuddered the span''s ancient stonework and unnerved anyone standing upon it. She watched the span and the shadows and imagined what sort of sounds orcs made.


    "Look here," said Khaz. He came to her loop and leaned his [longarm] against the wall. He held two stonewrought cups, a calloused finger in each and a thumb around the neck of a glass bottle of something. He blew dust from the cups and pulled the bottle''s stop with his teeth and put his nose to the pour as it gulped cloudy and thick into one cup then the other. "Whisky older than us. Probably older than yer da."


    "Don''t think that''s a good idea," she said, but she took the offered cup and made ready over it as if the drinking was a kind of prayer which it was for her folk in those days.


    "Stones," he said.


    "Bones." She tossed the whisky against the back of her throat and set her eyes back on the span, but the liquor set them watering.


    "That''ll knock the hair off yer head and onto yer chest." Khaz made a face and hugged the butt of his [longarm]. A great elk was carved into it though neither he nor she had ever seen an elk around the white mountain or anyplace else. He held the bottle up to the lantern as if inspecting how its glass had possibly withstood the liquid.


    "Can''t believe they used te drink this stuff," he said. "Want another?"


    "Save it for the lantern."


    He laughed and took a swig off the bottle. He picked up his rifle and walked back to his loop and squatted before it. The lantern lit half his face yellow and the moonslight fell blue across the other half. They crouched and waited. Inch by inch the tower''s shadows glided across the span to cover it. The lantern hissed steadily. The sea''s violence shivered up through the walls.


    "I heard yer da''s back on about it," he said.


    "Aye."


    "I''m here when yer ready te try again."


    "I never wanted te try in the first place."


    "Too short for ye, eh?"


    "Khaz. Don''t."


    "Well, what''s the matter, then?"


    She shook her head. "Nothin."


    "Ye say nothin but we need te do somethin."


    "Ye seen the ice goin," she said. "Ye seen the way the game''s goin. It don''t matter much what we do or don''t."


    Before he could say anything she said, "Shut up," and put her ear to the loop. "Ye hear that?"


    He leaned into his loop. "I can''t hear nothin through all them years of stonecuttin and sharpshootin. If there''s a racket ye best holler down."


    She put an eye to the loop.


    A ball of fire seared into the sky over the human side of the span. It hung in the air and lit the land like a midnight sun.


    "Shit." Khaz brought the elk to his shoulder and stuck the barrel through the loop. "If Gom''s firin candles then they''ll be on the span."


    As the [flare] drifted toward the seaway the shadows of bare trees and shrubs and rocks and ruts elongated and ran maddeningly in all directions away from its light as if they were runnels of black oil spreading across the rim to recapture it for night as the [flare] dimmed and died away.


    She heard her da call up from his place on the barricades, "Mym, ye eyeballin anythin?"


    "Span''s empty," she said. She should''ve been down there with him and Thayne and the other ninety nine, but he had forbidden it.


    "Far side too?"


    "Far as we can see."


    "Gom''s not firin works for nothin."


    Khaz looked at her. "Maybe it''s king''s men comin."


    A rough voice cried off away somewhere. Then silence.


    "That''s Gom," she said.


    She saw something.


    "Below the tower," she said.


    "I make em," said Khaz.


    Thayne lit and hurled a [flare] and light soaked the barricade with dwarves stood behind and their colossal shadows thrown upon the span and surmounting the ruined human tower. The figure emerging beneath it was man sized with a man''s [longsword] in his claw, but broader across his chest and hunched forward and running lopsided because his other claw held an ornate wooden chair made for a lord.


    "Oy ye orc," she shouted. "Halt and throw down or we''ll be shootin."


    The orc lifted the chair before his body as a shield and he sprinted to the [flare] and kicked it off the span. It sputtered and spiraled as it fell. Thayne hurled another and as it passed over the advancing orc someone said, "Drop him."


    Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.


    A hundred longarms flashed and she saw the chair splinter and the [longsword] drag the ground in a rooster''s tail of orange sparks and the [flare] fell behind the orc and black ribbons of blood flew from his arms and shoulders and legs, yet he rushed onward straight toward her da. Ninety nine dwarves fired again, but not Mym. As the orc crashed forward in a heap and his [longsword] fell and slid across the pavers and pieces of the chair rolled end over end to knock against the barricade she watched the span whence he had come. There she saw a teeming in the dark. Flarelight and moonslight glinted in metal blades and wet eyes and sharpened fangs as if the bridge spanned the distance to the heavens and a vanguard of the firmament itself advanced upon the world. There must''ve been thousands of them.


    "Da!" She didn''t say more. She bent to recharge her [longarm].


    Khaz saw. "First dwarves'' bleedin buttocks that''s wee above thirty."


    Another volley and her ears rang and her cheek burned from where it pressed against the chamber. Orcs stumbled and fell but three thousand others ran on over them. They crashed into the forward positions. Dwarves clubbed longarms against heads and they fired shortarms whose sudden flashes lit open jaws and grasping claws and lunging legs and they buried alpenstocks into bared guts and necks. Orcs smashed hapless stones into helms and into bearded faces and their stampede crushed throats and collapsed lungs and friends she''d known forever died as the host surged against the barricade.


    Flung stones clattered against the loop as Mym fired into the mass. For every orc she slew another picked up their weapon and ran on. Lead covered her fingers in a gray film. Powder burned her nostrils. The muzzleflash blinded her. Yet she fired and loaded and fired and loaded. She could not stop. There were too many. She sighted again and as she squeezed the trigger her rifle jumped and the chamber exploded in sulfurous fire and knocked her backward into the box and lantern. The sound of shattering glass and hissing gas, and night engulfed their alcove. She felt for her [longarm] and when she picked it up again she saw a worried rock jammed in the muzzle and a thumbsized hole rent the chamber from where the powder had blown out.


    "Steady on," called Khaz.


    "Gun''s had it."


    "Fetch another."


    She peered out of the loop. Orcs were mounting the barricade and her friends and family were repulsing them hand to hand and among them her da sang joyously as he pushed his [alpenstock]¡¯s spike through the chin of one and pulled out and swung his pick through the chest of another.


    She tossed her shot and powder to Khaz. "I''m goin down."


    "Ye comin back?" he called after.


    But she was already jumping from landing to landing. She threw open the tower''s gate and she saw orcs running free into dwarfdom or holding their insides inside with bloody claws or snarling wide eyed and clutching their young under an arm or over a shoulder. Against the tower''s founding stones a dwarf sang over his wife whose face was torn away, her head in his lap, his hand rubbing down her forehead and across her cheek as if her loose skin was merely wayward paper that needed smoothing. She saw the Karakos fighting shoulder to shoulder and planting her [alpenstock] then his into a longhorned otaur who bellowed as his ribs cracked and bellowed still as he embraced them to his chest and carried them over the edge of the span to a final silence. A sow stopped before her with blood down her torso and soiled garment and a [dirk] stuck into her flank past its handle. She looked at Mym and reached one foul claw to her braid and opened her jaws and breathed her dying breath hot and wet on her face and slumped over sideways. Mym pulled her pick across the throat to be sure. She heard Khaz''s [longarm] still clapping above the din and orcs roaring and dwarves singing and the roaring swelled to a storm. One by one the songs ceased. From somewhere retreat sounded.


    She ran to the barricade of rubble and rebar and her da defending it. Orcs now climbed their kin''s corpses to come over its top where its barbs cut great gashes in their flesh and they fell on the spike of his alpenstock and were tossed aside as if they were no more than slag separated from ore. Beside him Thayne clubbed a reaching and grasping claw with the butt of his [longarm] then flipped the gun and shot into the wrist and it separated in a gush of black fluid and the orc fell away.


    "Time te go," she yelled.


    Thayne ran past her. His eyes wide against the dark and gore covering his face and matting his beard.


    "We can''t outrun em," her da said. "Stand and fight."


    "Nowhere left te stand."


    Khaz''s firing stopped. No dwarves yet sang. She saw a tall orc look over the barricade. She put her spike at his face and he ducked away.


    "We''ll hole up in te the tower," said her da. "I''m right behind ye."


    A sow rolled over the top and got caught on the barbs and they set their alpenstocks to her but she was already dead. Part of her neck had been shot away.


    "Get on Mym."


    The tall orc''s face peered over again and disappeared again. Another corpse came over the barricade and it bounced off the sow''s with the wet slap of flesh on flesh and landed on Mym''s head. She fell beneath it and it pinned her against the stone pavers. Her da reached toward her. The tall orc vaulted the barricade, one claw on the dead sow and the other holding a thin [blade]. Mym saw his dark eyes on her and then they flicked to her da.


    Her da spun his pick in a great arc. The tall orc deflected it and stepped into the backswing and punched his [blade]¡¯s pommel into her da''s helm with a terrible report. Quick as gunshot the tall orc overhanded his thin [blade] and passed it in and out of the gap between her da''s mail shirt and gorget. It came back wet. Her da slumped onto the corpse that had trapped her. His right hand brushed her cheek. Its halfcurled fingers rested in the blood running off of them and pooling around her face.


    The tall orc stood over them holding his [blade]. She was unprepared for what she beheld. The barbarity of him and the strength in his claws and his eyes aglow with the naked truths revealed by what he had done and what he now could do. She would never be the same and she hated him for it.


    She shrieked in rage and pain and shifted the corpse and her da slid off. The tall orc planted his foot on it and she felt as if the whole of the white mountain crushed her. She couldn''t move, she couldn''t scream, she couldn''t breathe.


    "No fight," he said in human speech.


    Other orcs now came over the undefended barricade one then two then three at a time. Dirty and clothed in rags. Hollow stomachs pulling skin tight over ribs. Bare feet slapping the span as they vaulted and stumbled and ran past. Some stopped to watch the tall orc finish the old dwarf and the young, then kept on when he didn''t. A sow with a cub slung across her chest and a [soldier''s knife] in her hand stooped to take Mym''s [alpenstock] but the tall orc snatched it from her. The sow bent for her da''s and the tall orc snatched that one too. The sow snarled and screamed at the tall orc then slunk on with the few still passing. Then no more passed and the span was silent but for the warring waves below.


    The tall orc swung Mym''s [alpenstock] then her da''s [alpenstock]. He smelled then licked then bit the shard of the sky. Finally he met her eyes. "Little dwarf," he said. "The old one suffers. Best you look away."


    He raised her da''s [alpenstock] to strike.


    "No," she screamed, and she swore her revenge.


    He lowered the [alpenstock] and looked at her. "There''s no good in dying to save the dying. Forget your oaths as I already have and go in peace."


    She [swore] them again in the speech of the stones and the stones were her witness.


    He shook his head and tossed her [alpenstock] on the span beside her da and lifted his foot from the corpse and ran after his folk. At the place where the seaway met the dwarfroad he stopped and looked back.


    She heaved the corpse away and her da slid onto his side and laid unmoving in pools of blood and bile and shit all appearing a dark cyan in the wan moonslight. On hands and knees she slopped through it and she hugged her da around his shoulders. His head rolled back over her arm. She cradled it in the crook of her elbow and pushed her hand against his bleeding wound and wept. Her tears wet his cheek. His breath was quiet in her ear.


    "Mym," he said.


    She still held him when dawn found them. The tall orc was long gone.


    <hr>


    > +5 [Vengefulness] Someone put that brute before her that night and no others, and though he saved their lives she took the oath and set in motion everything that was to be... (5/10)


    > [Vengefulness] Title Gained: [Oathmaker] Denotes she who is compelled to fulfill her oaths.


    > +1 [Stonespeaking] ...she started by askin the stones where they''d been and whither they''re goin and strange stuff like , but quick as gunshot she advanced te communions far more dangerous... (2/10)


    > Lost Item: [Mym''s Longarm]


    > Lost Item: [Da''s Alpenstock]

 7. Ogaz

    Orc laid in the damp and dark press of a ship''s hold overfilled with disease and misery and orcs who remembered nothing of ships or the sea. No sunlight reached his place. No meals marked time''s passage. Just the rhythm of groaning planks and rolling up and down and side to side, and down and up and side to side. Some days passed, or weeks, or months, and these he measured by his forefinger and thumb overlapping around his arm.


    When contagion came only the worst were taken above for fresh air, so he was always below at the tub''s bottom suffocating in filth and vomiting and crawling over orcs to get to the gunwale''s portal and vomiting on them and on his hands and dragging his knees through it to queue standing because there was no room to sit, with elbow over nose and spots in his sight and the deck heaving and him heaving, and finally his turn at the gunwale to vomit but blissfully for the air smelled only of salt and birdshit and it cooled his sweating face and he leaned over the [cannon]''s long throat with his cheek against its blessedly cold iron and he could see the sea marching past tinkling like the [brigadier]''s table glass and he could hear orcs abovedecks shouting words she''d taught him but said in an accent he''d never master. Then a man floated past beneath him, red faced and wet faced but breathing clean air, fingers sliding over the hull and through the dribbling vomit of five hundred orcs, and he became smaller and smaller in the cold clean blue water and he vanished between the waves. Orc felt other orcs lean against him and grasp at his shoulders and arms and he heard them begging for their turn at the gunwale. He envied the man.


    Another [sailor] splashed into the water and passed astern. Orc watched him go. Their eyes met. He saw the man''s fear. He wanted to reassure him. Drowning was terribly slow, yes, many times the sea would fill his lungs and his body would expel it, many times his head would dip and his limbs would surge and resurge to clear it, but eventually exhaustion came. True exhaustion. Nothing left, not even a single stroke. And he would go. Many had gone that way. Even children. It is nothing new, he would say, there is nothing to fear. Oblivion isn''t so bad. We''ve all been there before and we''re all going back. Orc would squeeze through the portal and show him how easy it is to die. Easier than living. Easier than months, years, decades of being sick. Let the sea take him. Slower than a snapped neck perhaps, but faster than thirsting and hungering and vomiting every lifegiving thing in a wretched stink of bitter acid.


    A third [sailor] tumbled overboard and plunged into the bowwave''s foam. The orcs abovedecks who knew nothing of ships or the sea must have figured out how to get where they wanted. Now weak blows on his back replaced the grasping and begging. He vomited again, but it was more the motion of a vomit and nothing was produced. He left the gunwale and crawled back to his place.


    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.


    A long eared three toed tusker called Ogaz laid in his way. Before the sickness Ogaz had sat knee to knee with him to talk or back to back to sleep. After the sickness Ogaz always stood to give Orc enough space to lie down, and sometimes he stood to give Ogaz enough space to lie down.


    Ogaz made space when he heard him coming. Orc laid on the deck and listened to the bilge slosh below. The stench of it was enough to send him back to the gunwale, but he was too sick to move.


    "Orc hearing Glad Nizam today?" said Ogaz.


    He said nothing.


    Ogaz toed his side. "Listening to Ogaz, Orc? Glad Nizam''s making new speech of new beginnings, of big new home with room for all orcs settling, big new city for all orcs. Greenskins and tuskers and longhorns and orcs. All brothers now. Even scaler Orc is brother. Even sows and shorthorns are brothers."


    He said nothing.


    "Is good speech. Big longhorn hears firsthand from Glad Nizam, tells Ogaz. Orc should listen to big longhorn tell."


    "Ogaz should let Orc die in silence."


    Ogaz chuckled. "Orc''s thinking boat''s bad. Orc goes to camps and sees what he misses living with soft women before he talks of dying."


    The deck heaved and Orc saw the tusker''s eyes get big and he saw him put a three fingered hand on his stomach.


    "How''s queue at gun?" said Ogaz.


    "Long." Orc closed his eyes and flung his arm across them. "Getting longer."


    Ogaz exhaled long and loud. "Maybe Ogaz dies too."


    Orc rolled onto his side and reached into the space between the deck and futtock to touch the [alpenstock] hidden there. The old dwarf hadn''t given him much choice. In the pit he''d rendered a dozen such wounds to the skull and chest. Either was enough to slay a man. But dwarves weren''t men. Perhaps the dwarf¡¯s daughter knew something he didn''t. Perhaps her father was already healed. Orc took refuge in that thought. He knew it was a lie.


    The deck pitched suddenly and the bilge sloshed over his hand and the stink of it made him retch. He wiped his hand on his pant leg and he wondered when it''d end.


    <hr>


    > Gained Item: [Da''s Alpenstock].


    > +1 Renown: ...ain''t nobody known then who he''d maimed and what he''d nabbed from them stinking beardlings... (5/10).

 8. Traitor鈥檚 Gate

    Her da convulsed again. His head bucked against her shoulder and his hands flopped against her side and she had to wrap her arm around both his legs to keep from dropping him. She knelt to set him down and he seized and his knee slammed her jaw. Her [alpenstock] and his [longarm] fell into the grass beside the road. Blood filled her mouth. Slowly, gently, she laid him down and held his forehead with her palm and hugged his flailing arms against her chest. She braced her cheek against his.


    "I''ve ye, da," she whispered. "Let it out of ye. All the sick and hurt, just let it out."


    She talked him through the worst of it, holding his head and shoulders firm as he kicked and twisted. As his seizing lessened her voice grew quiet until she was whispering in his ear. She told him stories of adventures they''d had up and down the valley. Maybe it helped him, maybe it didn''t. It helped her, so she didn''t stop.


    "We''re gettin there. In the yellow hills now. Ye see em? Valley''s comin up not too far, and the old mountain after that. Just keep fightin. Not too far now. Someone''ll be comin down."


    She said it like she believed it but she couldn''t figure who might come. Not the Karakos. She saw them go off the edge. Nor Gom who''d been torn to pieces on the human side. "Thayne''ll come. He wouldn''t leave ye. Or the keeper himself. He''ll know what needs doin. Ye''ll mend good as the day ye were cut. How ye goin te teach yer wee granddaughter her what nows less ye mend? Thayne and the keeper are comin. Don''t let worry straighten yer curlin beard."


    She didn''t know if he even could worry. The wound where his neck and shoulder met had scabbed over pink and clean, but his scalp was a horrid purple from where the tall orc had stove in his helm. His eyes were blank as glass whenever she pulled back their lids. He couldn''t eat the scraps she saved for him. She needed them more than he did. Still she saved them. Back on the span as she held his head and her sleeve soaked his blood into a wide brown stain she''d heard him say her name. She was sure of it. So she saved them.


    She wiped the saliva from his lips and beard and checked the bandage around his neck and sat him up to brush the dirt off his backside. With a grunt she raised him bodily over her shoulder and pressed to stand.


    "Yer gettin heavier yet. How''s it yer gettin heavier when ye won''t eat?"


    She stooped to grab her [alpenstock] and his [longarm] from the grass then adjusted his weight on her shoulders and trudged upriver.


    "Somefuckinone better be comin down," she said.


    ***


    She entered the long valley with him on her shoulders. Night dropped like stone between the tall walls and she needed rest but her da was even heavier and his breath weaker. She had to get to the mountain before he was too heavy for her to lift. Before his breath quit altogether. She wedged her cookstuffs and baggage and their arms in the hollow of an old fir beside the stream and pressed on into the night.


    Whenever the track flattened she talked to him. Whenever it steepened she had no breath to spare so she silently sang his name. Deep in the night she saw the delving''s light coming between the trees from high on the eastern wall though it was miles above yet, and days away. Its light fell across the dwarfroad and she felt its warmth on her eyelids as she tried to blink away the apparition. She stopped walking and closed her eyes and swayed on her feet.


    "Get te sleepin, Mym," said her da.


    "I can''t," she whispered. "Ye''ll die."


    "Get te sleepin wee lass. The road will be here tomorrow yet. Yer little friend will be waitin."


    "Don''t make me go."


    "Got te. Forge won''t billow itself. Get on back te ma."


    She opened her eyes. No light fell on the dwarfroad. She''d been sleeping standing up. She could go no further.


    She laid her da in the eave of a wandering boulder and collapsed beside him. She dug for a scrap but the scraps were all gone. She rolled onto her side and tried not to sleep. She just needed a little rest. Not sleep. Never sleep. He''d die if she slept. Just rest. Her little friend would be there in the morning. She wondered whatever happened to her, that girl whose fingertips sparked. She listened to his rasping breath and the river sighing and the forest waking around them. She touched his neck, feeling for his pulse. She slept. She couldn''t sleep. He would die. She slept.


    In her sleep she [heard] tones both deeper than the great sea of fire that makes and moves all stone, and slower than the motion of the plates that floated upon it. And she heard the snapping and crackling and sizzling of meat cooking. She could even smell it.


    "Ye up?" said a familiar voice.


    Her eyes opened. Her da was there beside her, breathing yet. She sat up and saw the fire and the meat spit over it on a stripped fir branch dripping fat, and the orange glow of it on Khaz''s face.


    She jumped to her feet and embraced him and pushed him over all at once. "Where the hell were ye? Where the hell''d ye go?"


    "Oy Mym. Oy. I''m sorry. Hey. I''m sorry. I had te. It was old Thayne."


    "Ol Thayne nothin. Ye left us in the shit."


    "I''m sorry. Thayne messed his arm bad. Goin te lose it looks like. Would''ve lost everythin if I hadn''t put me adze through the neck of one of the little green demons." He looked over to where her da laid. "I''m so glad ye made it. I thought ye were done when ye didn''t come up behind. I thought ye were done."


    "We were done. We shouldn''t be here but for a brute¡¯s mercy. Bastard came up and over the barricade and," she dug through the few things she hadn''t thrown away and found her da''s cloven helm and showed it to Khaz.


    He turned the helm in his hand and ran his finger over the rend. "Shit."


    "Aye. Damned orc shamed him then me. I couldn''t get te him. I couldn''t get te either of em. Now da''s shakin and seizin and gettin heavy. I don''t know what te do so I''m doin the only thing I can."


    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    "Aye yer doin good."


    "Been a few days since he last shook. I don''t know if that''s good or bad."


    He gave her back the helm. "He can''t be comfortable in that needley ditch. Let''s lay him out proper."


    "No time," she said. "I need te get him te the forge."


    He looked at her. He scratched his cheek.


    "Don''t say it," she said.


    "I got te."


    "No ye don''t."


    "Ye know he''s stonin up Mym."


    "Stuff that, digger. I don''t know shit about shit. I''m goin te get him te the forge. Get some heat into his bones. Then we''ll see what''s what."


    Khaz dusted his hands and knees and stood. "Best ye keep yer hopes in yer feet. There isn''t much good up thataway."


    "What''s the keeper''s count?"


    "More might be comin in yet. Others behind ye maybe."


    "There''s no one comin behind us. What''s the keeper''s count, Khaz?"


    "Isn''t no keeper''s count. No keeper neither."


    "Shit."


    "Whole place was empty when we got in except for them who got there before us. Few more came in since. Here."


    He bent over the spit and tore off a hunk of meat.


    "This is just about done."


    She sat at the fire and drew her knees before her and crossed her arms around them and set her chin on them. He still held the hunk out to her between thumb and finger and he eyed the beast on the spit. It was a good take. A bit funny looking. A bit of strange coloring in the coat and in the meat. But he was lucky to find it. Its fur would line a pair of boots or gloves and its horns could be used for something. Maybe a set of chessmen. Thayne would need something to keep him busy if his arm had to come off. He had a nice iron vise. One handing a chess set shouldn''t be nothing. It would keep him busy anyway and that''s the best cure for what was coming and what was already gone.


    Mym took the meat from his outstretched hand. "Keeper wouldn''t just leave the mountain less the others were gone already or he was takin em someplace."


    "Can''t say. None were left te tell. Don''t worry bout them. Worry bout yer own. Keeper and the rest will keep the rest."


    "Worry bout yer own? That what ye said te Thayne when ye left us lyin on the span?"


    He frowned but didn''t say anything.


    She looked at him. The light filtering through the evergreen canopy fell upon his face and she saw the great circles under his eyes and the ragged state of his beard. To have already climbed the mountain and returned he must not have slept at all. She bit into the meat. "Sorry. I didn''t mean it."


    "It''s nothin."


    "Thanks for comin."


    "Wish I had earlier."


    "Me too but don''t fire yer coal dwellin on it. Help me stand him up. Pack the rest of yer take there and catch us on up the road."


    The serpentine forest filling the valley''s floor glowed green and gold under the midday sun. When Khaz caught her he helped her bear her da in turns. They did not talk. They did not need to. They knew what needed doing and they set to do it and anytime something needed communicating they did so in glances and nods. Their burden grew heavier. The air colder and thinner. Whenever she took her da she huffed like a lowland man climbing to the delving. Sometimes her da went so long between breaths she thought he had died on her back. At the place where the flume''s melt met the silver stream she knelt to scoop some water to her mouth. She heard Khaz whisper something to her da.


    He knelt beside her. "He won''t last."


    "He will."


    His eyes searched the road ahead then the wall above then the side canyon that wound to the base of the flume''s falls. "We should take him the other way."


    "What other way?"


    "The wynds."


    "Yer jokin."


    "There''s an entrance behind the lower falls."


    "No."


    "It''ll be faster. Warmer too."


    She looked that way. Sheer granite walls and tall trees and the flume''s silver ribbon flecked by copperback trout. "I don''t know."


    "I do."


    "How much faster?"


    "A day or more."


    "Unless ye get us lost."


    "I won''t."


    She pressed to stand. "Show me."


    He led her up a narrow game track that wound under fallen trees and around standing trees and through drifts of winter''s first snows, and there, where the flume''s pillar of blue ice grew out of the sky thicker than any tree, where its white ice melted to a merry silver creek, where the white mountain''s wall overhung for a thousand yards of granite carved and polished by mile deep monsters since departed drop by drop to the sea, there at the foot of all things sacred to the delving''s dwarves squatted a stone door rendered invisible by their artifice. No human would find it nor any dwarf save one who stumbled on it from its inside or knew where it lay by other means.


    Her da''s hands lay folded on his chest where she''d arranged them and his eyes closed as she''d shut them and his back stiff as a stout branch. Yet like a branch still pliable. Still alive. He''d grown too heavy for her alone or Khaz alone, so they carried him together as they might an anvil or a stonechild or the slab of a tomb. Past the ever freezing and thawing pillar and through a pile of marble and obsidian and other stones found deep within the delving that peeked their slaggy metals from under a sage sheet of creeping lichen.


    At the foot of the overhanging wall they collapsed in a heap. Khaz flexed his hands then ran them along the wall and [spoke] to it in whispers. She looked up and up and up the wall until her unwinding braid touched the ground behind her.


    She yelled, "Oy dwarves holler dwarves of the white mountain!"


    "None there te hear ye," he said. He stopped searching and knelt amid the piled stones. "Look here at these. Tailings from tunnelin, ye think?"


    She came beside him with her hands on her hips. "Don''t know don''t care. Where''s this wynd of yers?"


    "It''s here, just need te find it. Lot''s been lost. What''d yer girlfriend say of dwarves and secrets? Lots of secrets left te stone, lots of stones left alone. Well look at this lot. Holy bones of the earth. Maybe they member the wyindin''s gate. Traitor''s gate it''s called. Guessin these are the traitors."


    He put his foot against a big stone and pushed it over. A dwarf''s face with a beard of stone and blank eyes and lichen covering his chin and cheek looked back at them. His forehead was cleft and his neck too. The rest of him could''ve been anywhere.


    "What tales would he tell?" said Khaz.


    The face was smoothed in places and roughed in others. Eaten by the mosses or washed away by weather and wind. Looking upon it a terror welled up in her and all the pain of the past two weeks welled up in her. She pried her eyes away from the head and stared at Khaz. He needed to find the way inside. He was just standing there.


    "Not a bad way te go," he said. "Back into the world''s shape a grain at a time. Might be nice bein a plant awhile. Grabbin stone with yer roots and movin it this way and that before goin back into stone yerself. Waitin for some lass te come along and speak life back into ye again."


    She kicked at him. "Get up."


    "Sunderin canyon Mym. Watch yer feet."


    She kicked him again. "Da isn''t goin like this. He''s supposed te break the world not whimper into dumb mosses. I''m not goin te drop one bead of sweat gettin ready for yer doom so long as he''s breathin. Not one drop. Now get off yer ass and find your damned wynd or I''ll put ye beside them traitors and ye''ll be gettin yer wish."


    Shaking his head he went back to the wall.


    She kicked the stone head and it rolled over in the dirt. One eye still showed. Looking straight through her.


    <hr>


    > Lost Item: [Mym''s Alpenstock]


    > Lost Item: [Da''s Longarm]

 9. Home

    They debarked down a wooden ramp into the warm sea as it ebbed from a wide yellow shore blanketed in expelled seaweed. Driftwood trunks emerged from the sand like the ribs of ancient leviathans whitened and cured by salt and sun. Amid them amassed orcs of all kinds and ages and tribes. Some sat on their knees with their faces pressed against the sand. Some carried others past the dark line left by the surf and laid them side by side with their feet toward the sea and their toes falling outward and they placed colorful stones over their closed eyes. Some walked inland to the foot of a red sandstone cliff where hoodoos towered and hulked like trolls standing sentinel. From horizon to horizon the cliff stretched with only a single break at a dark and jagged crack taller than the ships'' masts yet no wider, vaguely known to Orc as the maw of the mad.


    He stopped at the bottom of the ramp with Ogaz beside him. A wave swept up the sand and sank into it. White foam swirled around their ankles and sizzled under their toes.


    "Can Orc see Glad Nizam?" said Ogaz.


    "He¡¯s seeing something."


    He watched orcs kiss the ground and rise with tears in their eyes for which he felt no affinity. He studied the dearth of the place. An absolute lack for which he would not weep. He watched those same orcs reaching out to one another holding arm in arm and forehead to forehead in damp embraces as if reunited after lifetimes apart. He would not weep for them either. He wasn¡¯t sure there was anybody alive he could weep for, and when Ogaz caught him watching he said as much.


    "Not even Orc''s military lady?" said Ogaz.


    He shook his head. "She¡¯s who taught me not to drag around my baggage."


    Ogaz watched his face. "Very sad. Orc knowing she loves him yes? Is why she did what she did."


    Orc remembered the day she had abandoned him: the olives high on the branches, the dusty training circle, the blood on the sand. He sniffed. The glare on the sand made it difficult to see. Perhaps he could weep after all. "Sure,¡± he said. ¡°She loved me so much she left me to the damned pit."


    "Better there than camps."


    He squinted at the strand and the hoodoos and the narrow slot, known to him from the myths she had told in the greatroom on long winter nights, their shadows backcast on the floor and on the far wall dancing opposite the firelight. She who recounted stories invented by a folk who''d long forgotten them. She who safeguarded them as a penance for her unspeakable shames, this old woman who loved an orc. Folly.


    Orc nodded at the slot. "There''s your home."


    He saw Ogaz smile so wide his cheeks unfolded from his tusks. "Home."


    Orc didn''t smile. This place was as lean and desolate and alien as his folk. He felt no connection to it. He had hoped to feel something. But there was nothing. Whose fault was that?


    A pretty sow standing in the surf called to him. "Those arms, scaler?"


    He held [Booky''s blade] and the black bladed [alpenstock] for her to see.


    She put her chin toward the slot in the wall. "Get up to Glad Nizam. She wants em all accounted."


    Ogaz slapped his back. "Glad Nizam wanting Orc. And Orc worrying he doesn''t belong. How now?"


    "She just wants the weapons."


    "We will see, we will see."


    As they started up the sow said, "Not you, tusker. Unless you won arms you''ll need to wait til work''s found for you. No work, no food. Understand? No working, no eating." She turned back to her watch.


    The corners of Ogaz''s mouth were white from dried spit and salt water. "Sow talks like Ogaz still in camps, talks like Glad Nizam telling what''s doing. But Glad Nizam says all are brothers at home, and Orc says here is home, yes?"


    "Yes."


    "Then why is sow talking like Ogaz still in camps?"


    "Can''t say."


    Ogaz crouched on the sand and shaded his eyes and regarded the cliff and the slot shot through it. "Ogaz waits here. Hurry Orc. Remember everything Glad Nizam says. Maybe remembering Ogaz back on beach. Hungry and thirsty Ogaz."


    Orc turned toward the slot and again saw the weeping orcs. None of them had ever before seen their home, yet there they were falling over it. And over each other. He looked at Ogaz and then at the orcs, as if he was looking for something he had once possessed and later lost. He pushed the [alpenstock] into Ogaz''s hands and said, "Follow me."


    Ogaz held it away from his body as if it was a rotten fish. "Beardling ax isn''t Ogaz''s."


    "They don''t know that."


    "Ogaz not lying to Glad Nizam."


    "Shut up and come on."


    They climbed the shore. In the shade of the sandstone cliff an orc [captain] waved them over. He wore a dwarven helm pushed back from his face and his skin was as red and as rough as the sandstone. He squatted between two empty crates with human letters branded to their sides. Across their tops laid a plank bearing a cut up boar''s carcass. Tusks and dark organs and masticated bones swimming in a great pool of blood. Swollen black flies buzzed maddened spirals and landed to gorge themselves on the mess and buzzed again to bounce off Orc and meander away.


    A [boarding pike] and a [carpenter''s mallet] and several [harpoon] barbs and plundered dwarven longarms were stacked against a red flake that had detached from the wall. Nearby the slot in the cliff spat hot air like an open stove and Glad Nizam sat between a huge shorthorn whose [spear] came to her shoulder and a little greenskin clutching a [longarm] twice his height. Glad Nizam leaned away in her chair with one arm draped over its back holding a boar''s thigh picked clean and she tapped a man''s riding crop against her bare brown knee. A lion''s head emblemed on its lash. She spoke quietly with a tusker [weird] who knelt beside her in the shadow. The [weird]''s arms and chest were bare but for the sundried blood of men smeared in the forbidden pattern.


    The [captain] said, "Two more''s come."


    Glad Nizam''s head turned. Her face was latticed by scars. One black eye burned the whole world in its globe and the other was white and sightless. Her silvering hair pulled tightly back from her brow and tied in a knot behind her head with a leather thong. She tossed the thigh bone into the orange dust and sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. Her crop''s lash kissed a scar on her cheek.


    "Who you be, eh?" she said.


    "Orc."


    "Yeah? Me too."


    "Maybe, but I''m Orc."


    "As you say, noname. Orc of?"


    He almost said the [brigadier]''s name. "Nobody."


    Ogaz touched his arm. "Much honor if Orc''s mother dies fighting. Some if father dies fighting. Fighting humans, fighting dwarves. Tell now who and how."


    He looked from Ogaz to Glad Nizam. "Nobody," he said again.


    "Noname of nobody. And you?"


    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    "Ogaz."


    "Of?"


    "Nobody," but he looked at the ground when he said it.


    Glad Nizam said, "Plenty of nobodies here. Plenty of orcs, too," and she laughed sharply like the gulls roosting out on the ships'' yards and she took little breaths between each as if her lungs were scarred like her face.


    "You''re called Glad Nizam," he said. "Ogaz tells me you lead orcs, yet you sit in a chair like an old woman."


    "When Orc is always walking ahead and leading thousands and bearing their burdens on back like Glad Nizam will his feet tire too," said Ogaz.


    "Well said, Ogaz," said Glad Nizam.


    Orc frowned. "Your sow down on the beach says you have food," said Orc.


    "Here." Glad Nizam pointed her crop at the boar''s offal. "But it be only for scouts and hunters til more''s brought in. Guessing your nobody didn''t learn you to fish, scaler?" Her good eye flicked to the sea.


    "No."


    "Another thing men took from us. Reckon lotta fish to be had out there."


    "Me and Ogaz don''t need hunters'' meat. We''ll take mush."


    "Mush?" said the [captain]. He laughed and the greenskin and the shorthorn laughed with him. "They fed you mush to keep you weak. Time to be strong," and he flexed at Orc and his dwarven helmet slid down his forehead.


    "You want shit the ships be full of it,¡± said Glad Nizam, ¡°but there be no more mush."


    Orc looked at the ships and the gulls in their tops and the bodies being carried from their holds and the martial figures of women carved into their bows. He saw one bore the [brigadier]''s likeness.


    "You should burn them," he said.


    "We''ll need them," said Glad Nizam.


    "Men will come for them."


    "Maybe they''ll bring you some mush."


    A wiry brown sow with orange dust up her calves edged around Orc to stand by the crates. She had a soldier''s [knife] in her hand and a cub on her hip. She looked hard at the [alpenstock] Ogaz held. The cub looked wide eyed at the boar''s bones and blood and put his hand on his little swollen belly and swung his feet in the air and said, "Mama, mama," and pointed.


    Glad Nizam stood up from her chair. She was tall. Magnificent in her own fashion. "Come now, noname and Ogaz. Folks be waiting on you. Show me what you brought and we''ll get you working."


    Orc lifted [Booky''s blade] so Glad Nizam could see.


    Glad Nizam scraped a finger across its point. "Thin for a slicer. Might work for sticking boars."


    "Does boars fine."


    "You hunt?"


    "No."


    Glad Nizam shook her head slightly. "Looks human made."


    "It is."


    "You kill one for it?"


    "Didn''t kill no one for it. It was given to me."


    "By who?"


    "A woman."


    "And the beardling ax?"


    Ogaz said, "Is Orc''s."


    Glad Nizam reached for the [alpenstock]''s shaft. "I''ll take it and that pigsticker too. We be needing sound and sharp arms to feed this lot."


    Orc grabbed the [alpenstock] by its black head. "They''re mine."


    "Not no more. You don''t fish. You don''t hunt. You be coming up with arms you ain''t won. You be big for a mush eating scaler. Been taking extra shares from the larder. Stealing food outta your brothers'' mouths. Not no more. Let go noname."


    "No."


    "Don''t make me take em off you, cause I will."


    "No you won''t."


    The sow''s cub said, "Mama," and tugged on her hair. Her head twitched a little with each tug. Her eyes stayed on Glad Nizam. Orc saw her start to raise her [knife].


    Glad Nizam squinted her good eye and pulled on the [alpenstock] and dragged Orc forward. She leaned into him with her bad eye and she tapped a finger against her blindside temple. "Now I see who you be."


    She released the [alpenstock] and turned to the sow. "Your boy want a bite of kidney he can have a bite, but only one," she said. She came around the crates and when the [captain] and greenskin and shorthorn started to follow she half turned and said, "You stay and make sure our feast don''t go nowhere."


    She wrapped a hand around Orc''s arm and gestured toward the slot''s narrow aperture. "Walk with me, orc called Orc."


    They entered the slot with him leading her like some picturebook gentleman with his grandmother on his arm. Hot wind blowing out of the slot drove sand into his eyes and dried his sweat and rattled a waxy sage growing at the place where the stone wall met the sandy ground.


    "Feel your mother''s breath?" she said.


    "Is maw of Mad?" said Ogaz.


    She nodded. "We be home, tusker Ogaz."


    "But where is Mad?" said Ogaz. "And his trees and fishes and snakes? His wild fruits for eating and lions for hunting? His sisters and brothers left behind? Where are they?"


    "We be unsure," said Glad Nizam. She turned to Orc. "Where be your ogre?"


    "Only ogre I knew weren''t mine. They went their own way when your lot showed up."


    "But you be the red blooded orc who fought for that pitmistress."


    "My blood''s as black as yours."


    "We''ll be seeing. Orcs here would open their veins before turning a blade where some human bid. They''d kill you if they knew who you be and what you did."


    "Orc''s not like you hear," said Ogaz. "Many kindnesses he shows Ogaz asea. He is good orc, following Glad Nizam like Ogaz."


    She looked at Ogaz. "No tusker. Not like you. This one danced while we broke teeth on the armiger''s rocks. He ate good meat while we starved. Now he prefers mush. Why do you back him, Ogaz of nobody?"


    Ogaz hooked a thumb into his waistband at the small of his back and looked at the ground.


    "Thought so," said Glad Nizam. "You dishonor your nobody''s memory. I know who you be also. Do not hitch your salvation to his. Better to find your own way than follow this orc killing armiger''s plaything."


    Orc said, "I never killed any orc nor met any armiger."


    "Don''t lie to me musheater." Glad Nizam stepped close enough to whisper. "I smell the deaths on your heart. Why you be here? Come to kill more of your folk?"


    "No."


    "Come to spy for your pitmistress?"


    "I''m just trying to find my way home same as you."


    "And you think it be with us." Glad Nizam stood back and looked him up and down. "You be lucky I have need for fighters. Do as I say and we''ll be seeing if you be worth keeping."


    "I''m done doing what others tell."


    "Then go back to your humans. Plenty down the coast in their huts and keeps. Plenty of mush there for you. Go now and see how they welcome you."


    He looked down the strand. Then he looked down at [Booky''s blade].


    "You be thinking violence now?"


    He pulled his eyes from the [blade].


    "You be orc enough to try?"


    He saw a dozen ways to kill the scarred old sow. All of them meant giving up everything he wanted. Perhaps this was how the [brigadier] had felt.


    "Red blooded." She spat at his feet then turned to Ogaz. "You sticking with him Ogaz of nobody?"


    Ogaz nodded.


    "Fine. He be your responsibility. Look here. See that sage? All them dead trees rolled up on the beach? the Mad should be pissing into the sea. You be going to find out why it ain''t. We sent two up already. One came back jabbering bout men, but there ain''t no men here."


    "There are men everywhere," said Orc.


    "You''d know. Will that beardling ax''ll sever a man''s spine? Give me it."


    Ogaz handed her the [alpenstock]. Glad Nizam drew a lump of flesh wrapped in spotted and seeping sailcloth and held it in her open palm. With the [alpenstock]''s black adze she split the lump in two. "This''ll get you where you need to go. Find the other scout, or the Mad, or men''s heads. Come back with one or two or all, or don''t come back."


    "I don''t know nothing about scouting," said Orc.


    Glad Nizam nodded at Ogaz. "He does. Water be rated higher than our lost scouts or starting another war. You find it you come straight back and we''ll worry about the other things once some of your brothers be fit to walk. You find any food you bring that too. We be stuck foraging til the whaler shows with its fat filled hold. Stop standing around." She gave back the [alpenstock] and she slapped her crop once against [Booky''s blade] to make it sing then she strode out of the slot and back to the crates and the sow who stood in the shade holding her cub.


    Orc heard her say, "Give me your eye, sow. Don''t look at him. He is nothing." He watched her put her thumb and finger under the cub''s chin and he saw her wink her bad eye at the cub with a sneer that must''ve been a smile.


    Orc looked down and unwrapped his lump of flesh and saw it was the boar''s halved heart. Sand borne by the wind stuck to its facets. He turned back to the mass of orcs, long lost now found. At those already lain in a row on the beach, unsweating and unhungering and yellowing like the sand with stones for eyes. At the cubs crouching beside them, as still as the corpses, their tiny hands grasping sharp fragments of bone and lengths of calcified driftwood as if to measure their hunger against that of the laughing gulls.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Rage] ...from the very beginning apologists claimed the camps were a necessary evil after what happened to their homeland. Yet from the same mouths come the words: evil begets evil... (5/10)


    > +1 [Renown] ...even old white eye knew him for who he was and she ain''t had no use for no nobodies¡­ (6/10)

 10. Starting to Smell

    Of the wynd Mym said nothing. Its passage was so dark only her probing toes and the [whispering] stones kept her from smashing her head or her da''s on the close walls and cramped ceilings. One wynd joined another and another. Some went down perhaps to the very black heart of the world, but theirs always went up. Her da weighed ever more or maybe the air just thinned and held less of the stuff of life. She could not see him yet she knew how he looked. She hated not seeing and she hated knowing and she hated Khaz for his help and his muttering and his black wynd, and finally after days in the dark she felt the stones warm and saw the forge''s light and vowed to never again enter the wynds.


    They carried him along the flume and past the forge and up their little walk past her stonewrought sister and brothers and the [hind] they took before the [hornkeeper] blew the horn. The carcass rotting across her sister''s shoulders. It was too much for her. It was all too much: the airy, empty delving, her da''s breathing lighter than a moth''s fluttering, her impotence. She could not make a life. She could not save a life. It was too much. She sent Khaz away with undeserved bitterness.


    She sat her da on their porch with his back against the facade and his legs straight out before him. His eyes were closed. If only they''d open he''d see his children. Two beautiful and serene and so close to life, and one holding a corpse starting to smell like he had started to smell.


    She took the [hind] by its four ankles, gripping them hard to keep their hide from sloughing over the hooves like pulled off socks. She dragged it along the delving''s stone floor past empty house after empty house. Coming back she wiped her stinking and slick palms over and over on her trousers. She scrubbed them in the flume and dried them under her arms. Everything was colder than she remembered. Even the forge was dimmer.


    Her da sat as before. A glimmer of drool in one corner of his mouth. She wiped it on her sleeve.


    "Up we go," she said. She put him on her back again and carried him to the forge. Two survivors sat with their hands to its heat. Their dark eyes wide, watching and pitying and mourning for the one who refused to. Mym nodded at them and placed her da on the opposite side of the bellows and hoped its heat would help. She left him there and walked back their dwelling. She looked around at everything that was theirs. Chairs shaped like the founding stones of ornate columns and brushed pelts and mounted trophies and the hickory keg and silver tankards etched with their sigil and her ma''s wax mask. None of it mattered. He was going to die.


    This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it


    Outside she [told] her brothers and sister, "Da''s dyin. If yer te be wakin, now''s the time."


    They didn''t move. They never moved.


    Back at the forge she saw he wasn''t any better. His face and feet and chest were warm to her touch but the heat came from outside, not inside. She kissed his forehead and again said, "Up we go," and carried him back to their dwelling, and sat him again on their porch facing his children.


    He sat there. The light outside darkened and the Karakos'' house across the chamber turned orange from the forge''s light. Its windows black like empty sockets and its door hanging open like a lax jaw. Khaz came by and called for Mym, but Mym didn''t come. Later Khaz came by again with Thayne. Thayne''s arm was all done up in a sling. They stood in the yard while Thayne watched his oldest friend and Khaz watched the ground. Khaz asked him something and Thayne shook his head and wiped his beard to his eyes and said something back. They shuffled away.


    When the outside light came again someone came with it. Backlit with a leather strap over their lowered head and both arms behind bearing a wicker basket against their sacrum that held a slab of rough white granite. Their tendons and their muscles and every other bodily fiber outstanding under the load. They turned away from him and slowly lowered the basket onto the porch. They came around and he saw her face, and she drew an [alpenstock] and [longarm] from the basket and she laid the [longarm] across his thighs. As the first rays of sunlight flooded the delving her eyes glinted and she raised the [alpenstock] and cleft a fragment from the slab''s crown.


    She said, "What''ll we call her?" never expecting a reply.


    A tear welled in his eye. "Mym," he exhaled for only the stones to hear.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Belonging]...but there ain''t nothin like coming home to remind you of what matters and what don''t, and sometimes what don''t is the place and folk you''re coming home to... (6/10)


    > Gained Item: [Mym''s Alpenstock]


    > Gained Item: [Da''s Longarm]

 11. The Slot

    The slot ran too narrow for them to walk side by side. Its overhanging walls undulated in waves carved by vortices of wind and sand and time as if shaped by a god whose hands shook from infirmity. They could never see more than ten yards ahead or above or behind. No sky. No water. No creatures of any kind. Just dry sandstone with darker splotches high on the walls. Perhaps they were ancient glyphs. Perhaps they were something else.


    Orc followed Ogaz who followed three sets of footprints for a mile or five or twenty. Three became one when a set turned back on itself and the other went on alone. Ogaz squatted at the place where they parted and traced them with a finger. "Seeing no men walking here. Just dying brownskins."


    Orc nodded and looked ahead. "Keep on."


    Somewhere above the sun dragged its swollen body toward the horizon and he thanked the slot for its shade. The constant wind polished its sandstone walls into narrow ripples that stretched for miles like marks clawed across the ship''s passing hull or the long contours he''d furrowed in the brothers'' soil or locks of the [brigadier]''s fiery hair. He browsed the few hardy sagebrushes like an animal and with the arch of his thumb and forefinger he scraped sweat off his arms and licked it until he had nothing left to sweat and his tongue dried to a dusty foreign thing and his legs cramped and his heart hammered like he wrestled a lion though he only walked. The last urine he made was brown and fetid.


    What light they had began to fade yet they pressed on. Somewhere above a man called out. Orc drew [Booky''s blade] and turned his head upward. The walls pinched together there and tilted one way then another. The man''s voice came again and the man came after. He plunged suddenly and his skull smacked the slot''s sandstone and his clothes flapped in flight and his chest slammed the walls where they pinched and pushed his breath from his lungs in a grunt that hinted of a voice rough from shouting and harsh from hate and hard from years of forced unfeeling. He jerked suddenly and limply as the pinch caught his waist eight feet up and his waterskin on his hip burst against the unforgiving wall. Its water slid all at once into the sand.


    Orc put the [blade]''s tip against the man''s throat. He was already dead.


    Orc began despoiling what he could reach. The waterskin was torn but a swallow remained below the tear. He gave it to Ogaz.


    "Some dried meat here," he said. "Don''t eat it til we find more drink."


    Ogaz sucked at the tear in the waterskin. He squeezed the waterskin this way and that then let it fall. "Ogaz shares. Only sipping, only nibbling. Please just little sip, little nibble."


    Orc reached his fingers around the man''s skull and felt the rend there from a goring and the place where his neck had broken. His hands came away bloody. He pressed his cheek against the wall and looked upward.


    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    "There''s blood there but I don''t see how he could''ve fallen that way."


    "Not mattering. Drink blood he''s not needing."


    He gently pushed Ogaz away from the man. "May as well drink seawater. Don''t try it."


    Ogaz sat on the sand with his back against the wall. His shirt was bloody from Orc''s handprint. He thrust it in his mouth and sucked on the fabric and slid onto his side.


    Orc pocketed the dried meat. He thought he heard the clash of metal on stone like the strike of the [brigadier]''s chisel against the gravemarkers in the shade of the olive trees. "Someone''s fighting up there. We need to keep on."


    Ogaz had his nose buried in the sand. His breath was too fast and too short. "Ogaz can''t"


    Orc picked him up and set him on his feet. "You''ll be surprised what you can do."


    The tusker slid back to the ground.


    Orc thought he was finished. There was nothing to do. No water. No way out but back. They wouldn''t last long enough to reach the strand and anyhow there was no water fit to drink thataway.


    He set him on his feet again. "That Glad Nizam of yours is counting on you."


    Ogaz nodded. A shaky sad thing. "All for Glad Nizam. All to be free."


    Orc watched him wobble forward. His hands against either side of the slot. Cracked like the brothers'' blighted field. Too busy dying to know he was dying. Chin down and tusks resting on his chest. If only Orc had been raised in the camps he might have such strength of purpose. He might be resting on the strand among old friends and family, waiting for some other cub to find the missing river. He looked at the dusty ground between his feet. It should be here. Right here.


    Ogaz staggered around a bend in the slot ahead and out of sight.


    Orc stuck the dead man with his [blade] just to be sure. "What''re you doing out here?"


    The dead man swung a little when he withdrew the [blade]. The floor of the slot drank up everything that came with it.


    Orc breathed and swayed slightly with his breath. He tried and failed to wet the inside of his mouth. He walked forward. His gaze drifted aloft and he beheld a seamless wall of the smooth gray stone that dwarves cure for their grandest works. It blocked the slot like a dam.


    It was a dam.


    Down where the concrete met the sand was wet and packed and pregnant like a beach between tides. He pushed his palm into it and water squeezed out between his fingers. He fell onto his side and pressed again and licked the sand. It was salty and earthy and it coated his tongue and gritted between his teeth but he dared not spit it out, he dared not spit anything. He pressed and lapped again. He turned to tell Ogaz but Ogaz was gone.


    He looked back the way they had come. Then up the sandstone walls. Then up the concrete. At the ladder of holds cut into its face. At the three toed foot drawing up and out of sight.


    "Ogaz."


    His echo returned from high above.


    And from above he heard, "All for Glad Nizam."


    Orc swallowed a little moisture and a little sand. "Even your life,¡± he muttered.


    Again he pressed the ground and licked water it yielded. Grains of sand caught in his throat made it feel drier than ever. He looked up the ladder of holds.

 12. What Ye Choose

    Half of her da''s face had flattened and stiffened as if its maker had swept a masonry trowel across it. One eyelid sagged and his tongue and mouth hardly moved and most of what he shouted from the sling across their porch came out in jumbles. She sat on a stool beside him with the adze in her hand and all her senses on the slab before her. On the shape of the chin. On the bridge of the nose. On the smooth strip of cheek. On the cuts and chops and scrapes needed to render such things from unforgiving stone. Her da jabbered on but listening meant confronting what he''d become and what he''d never be again. She didn''t listen.


    After a while he calmed down enough to speak sense again. "Isn''t anythin left te do but the thing ye won''t. Best finish what that brute started. Just a little higher than where he struck, right across me neck."


    Her hand slipped. The adze scored below an eye. She wiped a cloth across it as if wiping a tear. "Ye need te stop talkin like that or ye won''t get better."


    "Don''t tell me what I need. Only one thing left I need, and ye won''t do it."


    She turned her head. Spit had started in the corner of his mouth again. Half his face had screwed up and reddened. "Please stop askin," she said.


    "I''ll ask as I damned please. Goin te til ye do like ye should''ve. If it''s too much for ye yer welcome te stand me up out at the horn. Gravity will take care of the rest."


    She shook her head and looked back at the slab. "Help me with yer granddaughter."


    "No helpin that."


    He watched her try and fail to smooth the scratch under the eye.


    "Ye won''t get anywhere with that adze," he said. "Fine work''s pick''s work."


    She flipped the [alpenstock] in a quick easy motion and clasped its head with the soft tissue between her thumb and forefinger. She laid the tip of the pick against the place where rough stone lips met and worked the grain of the stone hoping to shape a smile today. Her da always told her she had her ma''s smile. Maybe she could pass it on.


    She leaned into the pick but it didn''t move. She put more weight into it, and more, and more, and her sweating hand shook then slipped and the pick jumped across the face and scratched a long gash down its cheek. She dropped her hands to her knees and sat away from it.


    "Yer edge is too soft," he said.


    "Aye."


    "Yer goin te need mine for it."


    "I don''t have yers."


    "Don''t I feel it every day. Can''t feel my legs nor arms nor nothin, but I feel it missin. That orc don''t know what he''s got. Probably usin it te pick the poor old Karakos out of his teeth."


    "The Karakos weren''t eaten."


    "Hope he slices his damned tongue off."


    She saw him shift as much as he was able but it wasn''t enough to hide his tears.


    "Get out of here," he said.


    "Ye''ve been askin for a granddaughter for forever and when I finally set to it ye won''t let me stay long enough te make any meaningful headway."


    "Forever''s passed lass. Yer chance is gone. Too bad. Do what needs doin or leave me be. I don''t want me helpless image settin in te shape the memory of yer old da that ye be carryin around long after he''s gone te dust."


    She looked away. It was too late for that.


    ***


    That night she made herself try again with Khaz. He smelled like burnt powder and the oiled up rags they used to chase rust out of their longarms. He held her after and she held him back hoping to feel anything but used. She knew it wasn''t him who was using her. It was something bigger. Something baser. Something worse than the orcs who came across the span in the middle of the night. Something that had dwarves and humans and the rest of them by the neck, pressing them all forward faster than their feet could keep up, pressing them down and forward like they were made to be ridden into the dirt, and the faster they ran the harder it pressed until the whole world below their feet was a blur and they had no eyes for anything but their next step and no thought for anything but going faster and faster and faster until their legs gave out and they were run right over. And in the night she realized that something was what set the orcs against them in the first place.


    You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    She looked at Khaz. Maybe he felt it also.


    He saw her looking. "How''s yer girl comin?"


    "No better than this."


    She felt his hand deaden on her shoulder. He didn''t move it nor did he tell her to go but she rolled away and dressed and left without saying more.


    Next morning she was back before the granite with her da in the sling.


    "Ye shouldn''t have gone yesterday," he said.


    "Ye told me to."


    "Well ye shouldn''t have left me alone. I made a damned mess. Called for ye. Hollered enough te break my face. Made a mess anyway."


    "Oy da." She stood up.


    "Leave it. Thayne fixed me up. Still ye shouldn''t have left."


    "I only went cause ye said."


    "I''m a damned fool and ye shouldn''t heed anythin I say."


    "I forgive ye."  She turned back to the slab spinning her [alpenstock] in her hand. "Now help me with this."


    "No use, Mym."


    "Too soon for givin up da. Thayne''s only just back te billowin. The forge''ll heat right on up and ye''ll soon be movin and flowin again like the black heart of the world."


    "Don''t care bout no billowin forge," he said. "Isn''t goin te change what needs changin."


    Her da watched the rude dwarf coming out of the slab. He said, "If ye cared bout yer daughter half as much as ye care bout yer damned self she''d have been done years ago and already be helpin all the delvin come back te life. But ye don''t care. Ye never have. Any other time, any other mountain, I''d love ye for yer stubbornness. I wouldn''t understand, but I''d love ye. Head harder than an anvil just like yer ma. But this isn''t any other time or mountain. It''s this time, it''s my mountain, and yer my daughter. How can ye still only be thinkin bout yerself? All dwarves are dyin for good and for always but Mym o Waz is only thinkin bout Mym o Waz."


    She lowered the [alpenstock]. "Ye think I''m doin this for me?"


    "Hell no. Yer doin it for me, and that''s half yer problem. Course I can''t go back and change ye. Not sure it''d be right to, but ye never can know what''s right til ye do what''s wrong. Makes ye wonder if anythin''s right if the only way te know it is te do wrong first."


    "What am I doin wrong?"


    "Nothin lass. This isn''t about what yer doin. It''s about what wrongs I''ve done ye."


    She stood up. "What the hell am I supposed te do with that?"


    "Told ye already."


    "No da. So long as yer livin I''m not buryin ye."


    "Suppose ye won''t. That doesn''t matter now. What matters is what ye choose te do. I only have one thing left te do. No choice in it. It''s all there for me, all laid out straight as the delvin''s road and there''s only one way te walk it. Ye got a bigger problem lass. Problem big as this old mountain and gettin bigger every day, with a hundred ways te go about it but only one of em is right, and ye can''t know if what ye choose is right unless ye do all the wrongs too. Hell I don''t envy ye one bit. I got it easy now. Yer the one who''s got it tough, and I don''t know if I did what I was supposed te te get ye ready for it. Hell. Is there ever a way te know?"


    He didn''t eat after that. Not that day nor the next. He just laid wrapped in his sling and watched or turned his head the only way he could and stared at the side of the porch. When he finally slept he snored softly and she attended her rough daughter seeking the kind of mismatched cure children administer to their parents: the damp rag to fix the stains of blood, the favorite blanket to fix the ruined crop, the lighthearted story to fix the stillborn babe. But the slab flaked and crumbled like a hard cheese no matter what she did or how sharp she made her tool. Da was right. Steel wasn''t going to do it. She needed shard of the sky.


    <hr>


    > ...A dwarf denying their revenge is like you or I denying our thirst. The fiercer our resistance the harsher the need... +1 Vengefulness (6/10)


    > -2 [Belonging] ...the way he told it it didn''t take her no time at all to figure that all the things changin around her weren''t changin what was within her. I don''t think he blamed her for wantin to get away. The whole delvin was a pressure cooker and she was like to be the plug. You ever been a plug? It''s harder than it looks... (4/10)

 13. Saand

    He clung to the sheer concrete dam with [Booky''s blade] hanging off his hip into open space. He drove his fingers and toes into holds sized for dwarven digits that were filled with loose sand blown therein over years and decades. He climbed hand over hand and foot over foot with the vast emptiness breathing hot against his neck and his forearms burned and calves ached and fingers twitched of their own fatigue, and there he heard the gulps and gurgles of the water he had smelled and he heard the [brigadier]''s voice walking through his petrified mind as calm and intractable as always, as if the fatal drop beneath was no more than a fever dream. He could almost feel her hand cool against his forehead.


    He topped the dam and rolled onto its sunblasted catwalk and lay for a moment with hands clasped together to stop their shaking. He squinted into the west where wind rippling across the Mad shattered a million red suns from the one standing above it into a blinding pillar of light. Here then was the river. Trapped by men and used for some foul purpose. Like Orc. Like all orcs.


    A metal structure of some dwarven invention rose from the glare like the jagged black spine of an ancient and forgotten monster. He paid it no mind. The sight and sound and smell of water and its promise overpowered him. Ogaz forgotten, Glad Nizam forgotten. Only his thirst mattered. He was a desiccated tongue and a cracked throat.


    He lurched off the catwalk and slithered to the Mad on his belly and reached his tongue toward it and pushed a hand into it to splash it over his open mouth and head and face, and again into his mouth and he closed his eyes and tasted its pregnancy. Slick like oil between his fingers and metallic on his tongue, yet he lowered his mouth with pursed lips to drink from its surface like the orcs he had seen kissing dirt they had never known. He opened his eyes and saw his reflection and the pink and blue and green contamination swirling across its face. He drank again. He drank until he needed breath more than water and he gasped for air and pushed onto his knees like a supplicant and he saw the hard black line dried on the concrete an inch above the Mad''s surface and how it ran onto the red sandstone that was once the slot''s formidable rim, now diminished to a gently lapped shore, and how it continued under his knees and on and across the trunk of a fallen tree like the seared scar of a lightning strike, a tree like those buried in the sand at Glad Nizam''s landing, but halved and carved and waxed with oars protruding, tied to a little wooden dock loaded with wooden casks.


    He wiped his wrist across his mouth and sat up. He looked back along the rim rocks overlooking the slot. At their edge squatted a shack rendered from dried mud and old timber rolled together like a dung beetle''s prize. Flattened as if melted by the sun. The riding shadow of the world blackened its walls and the last bloodred of sunset colored its eaves and reflections off of the Mad rippled across it like dewy red spiderwebs fluttering in a breeze. Before its open door a man lay on his side with his hands on his gut and blood running through his fingers. Above the man struggled Ogaz with tusks rising into the sunset and the [alpenstock] overhead in both hands. A [workman] grappled his waist holding a [knife]. A [soothsayer] reached for the upheld weapon. A [pistoleer] hollered with both feet braced and his [pistol] rising.


    Orc scrambled to his feet and sprinted up the path.


    Ogaz passed his tusks across the [soothsayer]''s shoulder and she cried out. The [workman] plunged his [knife]. Instinct or accident put the [tusker]''s elbow into the oncoming blade. It split his skin and slid along the bone up his forearm. The [workman] shouted and leaned all his weight into it and he shouted again when Ogaz put a tusk in his eyeball. The [knife] clattered on the ground and the [workman] fell away with both hands over his face.


    Orc saw the [pistol]''s hammer fall. The [pistol] flashed and clapped and bucked, orange fire spat from its short snout and blue smoke jetted from its mechanism and Ogaz''s head shot backward as the [soothsayer] fell upon him.


    The [pistoleer] whirled to Orc with a second weapon charged and rising. In that instant a shorthorn came around the shack. Her hide was spotted white and her great nose wet and black and her hair gathered in two braids below her curving horns and carved bone and brass trinkets swung from her cropped ears. She reached to palm the [pistoleer]''s skull with a keratin fingertip in each eyesocket and she whipped his head backward. His neck followed and [pistol] discharged toward the sky and his arms wheeled with hands seeking anything to stop his fall. There was nothing. With an honesty rare among men he howled in terror as she threw him in. End over end he fell. He screamed until he didn''t.


    The shorthorn was lifting and tossing the kicking and shrieking [soothsayer] into the slot as Orc came up with [Booky¡¯s blade] drawn. She backed away and spread her palms wide and lowered her bovine nose as if giving the benedictions of her human sacrifices to the hoodoos and the dammed river. Even thusly bowed she stood taller than Orc.


    He ran past her to Ogaz. The pistol ball had shattered his tusk. Its marrow oozed over its broken end and exploded shards were stuck in his cheek and brow and shoulder. His eyes were rolling behind half lids and black blood oozed from his half flayed forearm.


    The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    Orc felt the shorthorn behind him. He heard her say, "Tell me who you are,¡± in a voice deeper than his own.


    "I''m Orc."


    She looked down at Ogaz then back at him. "Does he trick me with such visions?"


    "I''m as you see me."


    "Where did you come from?"


    "Glad Nizam sent us."


    "I do not know this name."


    Orc patted Ogaz¡¯s uninjured cheek. "We''re looking for a brownskin scout."


    She nodded at the mud hut. "They butchered him to read his guts." As she spoke a striped insect flew from somewhere on her person and landed on a vine of thorns that wrapped her horns like a laurel and pushed its chubby abdomen into a blue flower budding there. She said, "I am Saand and this is my country. Its sun is my eye and its rocks my body and its waters my blood. Have you come to free them?"


    "If you''re meaning whether I aim to bust down this dam then yeah that''s what I aim to do."


    She nodded. "Then we serve the same master."


    "I serve no masters."


    "Then you kill for yourself?"


    He looked at the dead left there and at the darkening slot that had consumed the others. "I''d rather not kill at all."


    Saand tilted her head. "Strange thing for an orc to say."


    A stone near Ogaz''s head shattered into pieces that flew into the sky. Orc dove across him. The gunshot''s report passed over and on as if running to the end of the world. Orc looked down toward the lake and saw a barge filled with humans paddling out of the glare. A flash and puff of smoke and the air above him snapped and he felt the heat off of the slug. He slung the [alpenstock] around his neck and rolled Ogaz up to sit and looked for cover. A shot rang short and showered his knees in orange sparks. Saand hefted Ogaz under the armpit and threw his arm over her shoulders and together they bore him toward the casks stacked on the dock. Gunshots slashed the air around them as if the world sought to burst at the seams of its creation. They dumped Ogaz behind the casks. Orc heard the humans laughing and shouting odds as if he was back in the pit. He smelled sulfur coming off the casks. He looked between them and he saw the humans pulling long flat bladed oars and rifle butts and bare hands through the water. A [taskmaster] among them called out. He saw her with a foot on the barge''s prow and hair waving behind and a man crouched beside her with a black mustache and eyes made for murder and another beside him and another and another and a puff of smoke and the air cracked and a chunk of the cask splintered away. Black powder poured from it onto the dock''s slats and slipped through into the water.


    He told Saand, "Wake him up,"


    "He''s been shot."


    Orc gripped the top of the powder keg with both hands. "That¡¯s nothing. He just needs a drink." He heaved over the keg and rolled it to shore as fast as he could and it spilled powder in a long tail that gapped in the places where it fell between the slats. A volley of fire snapped all around him and he felt a surge of hot blood down his cheek and he stood the cask on the dam''s catwalk and sprinted back to the dock and dove behind the others. A gunshot split a cask and black sludge gulped from it and lurched across the planks and poured into the water where it caught fire in low blue flames that swept out over the Mad''s surface and back up onto the dock to lick the other casks. Blood flowed over his cheek but he felt no pain. He knew that would come later.


    He saw the prow of the barge emerge now onto the burning water and he saw the humans rowing and reloading, the sweat shining on their backs and the powder blackening their fingers. Booky had thrown so many into his pit. These came freely. He would do what he did best. For kin who didn''t want him. For a home that was dead already.


    He drew [Booky''s blade] and slid the [alpenstock]''s adze along it. They shrieked harshly and a cone of yellow sparks spilled off and into the gathering dark and landed in the powder and sizzled and smoldered.


    "Why do you wait?" said Saand.


    He looked only at the powder. He struck sparks again into it. Nothing.


    Suddenly Saand slapped [Booky''s blade] out of his hand and she grabbed the [alpenstock] by the shaft and shoved it against his chest. "Free him," she said.


    In that instant a slug struck the [alpenstock]''s pick with a terrible clang that jarred his teeth and the hot lead dropped onto the dock and bounced between the slats and hissed when it hit the water.


    He looked down at the [alpenstock] against his chest and saw what needed doing reflected in its faultless black mirror. He ran onto the catwalk with shots biting his heels. He planted his feet and raised the pick overhead. With all his strength he swung it into the concrete and a firm jolt ran up the shaft and into his hands and arms with the sound of a thunderclap. Cracks shot like lightning down the face of the dam. He twisted the pick free and chunks of the gray stone dropped straight down for fifty feet to ricochet off a ledge in the slot''s wall and out of sight.


    When he rose to swing again they shot him.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Rage] ...up to that point he spent his whole life being told he was too different. We called him Orc of all things. Might as well have named him Other. Suddenly he was among those who constantly reminded him of all the ways he was not orc enough. How do you think he felt? How do you think it would make you feel?... (6/10)


    > [Da''s Alpenstock] Gains [Unbreakable]: The unstoppable force.


    > [Da''s Alpenstock] Identified as the [Skyshard].

 14. Honorable Dwarves

    She hefted her pack and went up the delving. Her head down and her hood drawn so its fur brushed her cheeks. She passed the dark houses and their unlit children proudly posed but never waking. She thought about them as she walked. About the one she cut and chided and cursed. About what it must be like to be a mother.


    She heard raised voices ahead. A band of dwarves gathered at the horn. She''d hoped to slip out without seeing anyone. But here was everyone. Khaz with Thayne leaning on him amid the other survivors of that night, now ungirded with heads and arms and legs still bandaged and bruised. Red rounded eyes shining in the light off the distant forge. All faced a [messenger] and watched him with no expressions whatsoever.


    The [messenger] was human and wrapped in a heavy black cloak. Like a buzzard on a snag he leaned over them with snow dripping from his slickback hair and from the hem of his cloak and it pooled around his feet. He expelled hot vapor with every syllable as if his insides burned. Whatever he was saying she interrupted, "What''s all this, then?"


    The dwarves looked at her when she spoke and the man turned to her with his scavenger''s eyes.


    "Oy Mym," said Khaz. "Ye never seen six feet of nak shit standin?"


    "Aye but not walkin and talkin," she said.


    "Remember when he said there weren''t more than thirty orcs comin down the seaway?"


    "Aye. And I remember him sayin his king''s men would meet us at the span."


    "By the weepin stones yer right."


    "What''s he doin back here?"


    The man stood taller if such a thing was possible and opened his mouth to speak, but Khaz cut him off.


    "Tryin te force himself undermount by spinnin some yarn about ogres and orcs and goblins ambushin those king''s men of his."


    "He''s weeks late."


    "Aye."


    "Maybe we should send him spinnin down the face."


    "Aye, but he says his delay couldn''t be helped."


    "Oh?" She poked the sharp spike of her [alpenstock] at the man''s midsection. "Maybe that ogre took a bite out of him. Open that big black banner of yers and let''s see yer hangin guts so we may forgive yer tardiness."


    The man drew his cloak tighter around his middle and tried to speak again.


    She rolled right over him. "Seems he doesn''t have much te say about it. Ye man, the orcs split yer pink tongue in two te keep ye from warnin us about yer absent king?"


    The man made a little bow and said, "It is an honor to speak with you again, lastborn."


    "Oy, he talks just fine," she said.


    "Finer than ye," said Khaz.


    "Aye. Well if he can walk and he can talk then we''re runnin short on reasons for his dereliction."


    "Maybe he''s been blinded."


    She rubbed a thumb across her chin. "That''d account for his miscountin. Did the orcs take yer sight, human? Bend yer eye stalks on down here so we can see their foggy ends."


    The man looked to do no such thing. He said, "Alas I am no soldier. I wish I was. I wish I had been there to help your folk, as does the king and the armiger and all who remember what the white mountain has done for us. I come with their deepest apologies and condolences and the armiger''s offers for reparation, though he knows nothing can repair your loss."


    She shook her head. "Pity and charity. That''s what''s got ye all graspin his words like they''re starry sapphires? Pity and twice damned charity. We don''t want neither."


    "The armiger insists," said the man. "It was his orcs that escaped and his ill taken message that sent you intervening. It was his failures that left you facing them alone. Now he will send men with food to help you weather the coming winter. He will send women skilled in mending and making and mules for carrying and whatever else is needed."


    "He doesn''t owe us anythin and we don''t want nothin that''ll need repayin."


    "But no payment is required."


    She shook her head at the man. "And that''s why it''ll need repayin someday."


    "He insists you accept his gifts of service and servants."


    "Nobody serves nobody here, human."


    Thayne laughed and said, "He won''t get it lass."


    The man spoke over her head. "Get what?"


    Mym said, "We''ll not take anythin that absolves ye."


    The [messenger] shook his head. "I fail to see why misplaced bitterness and shortsighted pride should preclude our continued fellowship. The orcs are our enemies, not each other."


    "Glacier''s gizzard hear them words," said Thayne. "When yer done with him just point his mouth at the forge te save me the labors of billowin." The old dwarf patted Khaz''s back with his good hand and turned and shuffled down the delving.


    Mym swung her [alpenstock] so its adze rang against her nailed boot and those dwarves still congregating broke and began to follow Thayne.


    The man raised his arms and called, "Honorable dwarves," but not one turned back. After a moment just Mym and Khaz stood before him and there was naught to hear but the flume''s trickle and the man''s drippings and a rising wind beyond the horn.


    "He delivered his message," she said.


    "Aye," said Khaz.


    "Yet there he stands."


    "An everlastin mystery."


    The man dropped his arms to his sides and tilted his face to regard them. His eyes were black and sunken as if he''d not slept in a week.


    "Seems he''s got more te say."


    "Seems so."


    "Maybe the real reason why he''s here."


    "Maybe."


    "I already told you why I am here," said the man.


    "Men don''t give anythin freely," she said.


    "Except disease," said Khaz.


    "Aye."


    "And unasked for advice."


    "That too. Come on man. Out with it. We''re listenin so ye can tell yer lordy lord ye said what he told ye te say. Ye won''t get another chance."


    The man looked past them as if judging the distance to the dwarves who''d left and when he spoke he spoke loud enough for them to hear. "Honorable dwarves," he said, "the orcish revolt took much from many, even you, though you hide it well. Thanks to your aid it has passed these lands, but it is not gone from our body. Like a cancer it emerges elsewhere, and like a cancer it must be excised."


    Mym leaned on her [alpenstock] and raised her palm as if commanding the flume to halt its flow. "I''m goin te stop ye there before ye say what I think yer goin te."


    The man''s face reddened and he took a step deeper into the delving. "We know where they are going. We know some sank already when the whalers scuttled their ship. Five hundred orcs aboard."


    The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    She turned to Khaz. "Five hundred he says."


    "Thought there were only thirty."


    The man spoke even louder. Tendons stood from his neck. "We soon embark to hunt the remainder. The armiger raises an expedition at seaway''s end. Veterans from the rising front and scorpions and mounted skirmishers and his own person and guard. He hopes the great champions of the white mountain might lead his van. Trackers and stonespeakers storied to trace a sparrow''s flight over bare granite and to raise the very ground in their favor. Will they come?"


    "No," they said together.


    "Will you not honor the armistice?"


    "Honor," said Mym.


    "It''s what he said," said Khaz.


    She looked at the man. "If honor and dishonor are things te move the likes of dwarves then this boy''s earned a voyage over the flume as quick as a thunderbolt."


    "Yer talkin sense."


    The man put up his hands and put on a smile but his eyes widened as if she''d grown a third arm and set to beat him with it. "Just wait a moment," he started.


    She said, "And if honor and dishonor aren''t things te move the likes of dwarves then we''ll just say some things happen and some things don''t, and there''s neither honor nor dishonor in their happenins."


    "Aye that makes sense too," said Khaz.


    "Neither honor nor dishonor in trickin allies te come and die."


    "Nay."


    "Just how it is."


    "Aye."


    "No honor or dishonor in a man''s screamin and foulin up good water as he goes over the edge."


    "Such things are just happenins."


    She nodded at him. "Aye, and happenins don''t need accountin."


    Khaz closed his fist around the man''s cloak and yanked him onto his hands and knees and dragged him toward the horn and the precipice beyond.


    She followed watching the man claw at the pavers as they passed under him and she heard his screaming about offenses and indignities and other shit that didn''t matter anymore and never had in her lifetime. Khaz slung him and he slid across the icy road to the precipice of the flume''s thousand yard drop. He tried to scramble away and Khaz cast him back and his head hit the pavers under the horn with a satisfying crack.


    She put her boot on his chest. "We heard yer man''s message. Now it''s time he hears ours."


    The man turned his face and saw the rush of water and the swirling white beginnings of the coming storm and the invisibility of his doom in their murk. "Please. I have a wife and son."


    Khaz looked at her. The wind drove strands of his hair across his face. "What''s he say?"


    "Says he''s got a widow and orphan."


    "Oy he''s a regular dwarf. Just split him in two waistwise and cut out his middle and sling his hangin aortas around his uncapped knees and slap him back together. Go on Mym. Honorably save him the hike out of here. See if he can count past thirty on the way down. See if he lands in more pieces or fewer."


    She looked into the man''s wild eyes. "Should I do what he says?"


    "No. Please." He shook his head from side to side so that it rolled back and forth on the wet stone and spattered wax and his hair stuck to it. His hands fumbled against the sole of her boot but it wasn''t moving.


    She dug her heel into his chest and slid him farther over the edge. His head and shoulders hung over empty space.


    "Please," he screamed. "I only do what I am told. He wants you. Any you can send. Go get the dwarves he said so I came to do it. I only do what I am bid. Only that. Go and get any they can send. They will be vengeful and we must honor them he said."


    Khaz stood away from the man and sneered. "Shiverin bedrock. Put the kid out of his misery."


    Snow was falling upward and sticking against the side of the man''s face. His hands around her foot were red and swollen. His cheeks wet. She stepped off of him.


    "Get up."


    He rolled over slowly and sat on the ground with one leg folded underneath and one outstretched and an elbow planted behind him in a lurid pose. "The armiger mourns with you." His voice shook.


    "Fuck yer armiger," said Khaz.


    "You would honor him by coming to seaway''s end."


    Mym shook her head at him. "Stop usin that word like you understand it."


    The man looked over at the track that traversed the mountain''s face and at the storm building overhead. He didn''t look over the precipice nor did he look at her. "May I burden your hospitality?" he said.


    "No," they said.


    They left him sitting there.


    Halfway down the delving road Khaz said, "We should''ve sent him over."


    "Aye."


    He looked at her. "Ye feelin any better?"


    She shrugged.


    "Tell me what ye need."


    "Tenweight of shard of the sky."


    He sideeyed her. "That why yer all kitted te climb? Got yerself set on the black heart of the world?"


    "Might be."


    "Ye hate it here that much?"


    "It''s not that."


    "I don''t see what else it could be. The black heart bested the Grizzly Serac. He''s the only dwarf to ever climb the frozen flume. Ye think yer goin te succeed where he failed?"


    "No."


    "Hell. Ye remember when we scraped ourselves off the top of white mountain? And ye think ye can get up and down the black heart with tenweight of shard of the sky on yer back."


    "Didn''t say I could. I just don''t see much choice in it. Da says stoneshapin won''t work without shard."


    "It won''t work with it, neither."


    "I need te try."


    "Fer yer da."


    She nodded.


    "Hell, Mym. It''d be easier te cross the sea and cut down that orc who stole his alpenstock than te climb the black heart. Probably safer too."


    "Probably."


    They followed the flume through the cool air pushed in by the storm and into the vortex made by orange heat radiating up in waves from the forge and his beard blew against his chest and her hood snapped off of her head. They kept on, stopping at her home. He looked at her and she looked at him and before he could say anything she turned away. "Need te check on da."


    "Aye, course. I should check on Thayne." He started down the road past her siblings.


    "Oy Khaz?"


    He turned to her. "What''s now, Mym?"


    "Any hint of the keeper and the lot who stayed?"


    He shrugged. "Looks like they went into the wynds. Can''t say for sure. Stones are quieter than water freezin. It''s a damned puzzle and I don''t know anyone with the heart to solve it. All''s afraid of what the answer might be."


    She looked at her daughter''s slab. Stupid sorry thing.


    "Anythin else?" he said.


    "You really think it''d be easier to cross the sea?"


    "What with them humans?"


    "Aye."


    He thought for a moment. "No."


    "Alright."


    "Anythin else?"


    His chin was up and where his cheeks showed above his beard were sunburnt from their last outing. The lines at his eyes'' corners were worn so deep she wondered if he was born with them, and she wondered if all dwarven lads favored their fathers and if lasses favored their mothers. She wondered what sort of father he''d be.


    "Maybe we try again tomorrow," she said.


    "Aye. Tomorrow."


    He left. She walked onto the porch where her da slept in the sling. She placed her [alpenstock] beneath him with its spike leaned against the wall of their home. She bent over him. By the forge''s uniform light his twisted skin and beard and tunic all blended together with the sling and the facade of their home. He appeared at once part of the mountain. As if all was just an oil painting. Contrasting strokes of a single pigment on a flat canvas as tall and wide as the world. His withered and withering body with its hardened and gnarled limbs and old scars on his arms and legs. The deep one at the place the tall orc had thrust his blade. The lighter stain on his scalp where he''d struck its pommel. Her da''s closed eyes and his open mouth were less sour in sleep and his beard curled around and down his neck like creeping moss. She rubbed her strong hands up one forearm then the other, up one leg then the other, feeling the places they''d gone hard as stone and the places they''d cooled like iron in snow, and she pushed her fingers deep into them to loosen and warm them, deep enough to make a healthy dwarf yelp and flinch.


    Without opening his eyes he said, "Too much, ma."


    "Needs doin."


    "Leave me be," but his right hand twitched as if to cover hers. It wasn''t much, but it was more movement than anything since that night on the span and she clasped her hand around it and hope took her. Sweat came up on his forehead in tiny dew droplets and his breath came too fast for how cold he felt, and his brow collapsed downward and he frowned and made frightened noises, but hope had her. Its teeth sunk into her heart and pulled her toward its precipice and she yielded herself to be tossed into its oblivion.


    "I''ve ye," she said for the thousandth time since that night. "Don''t go slippin now." She squeezed his hand and kissed his cheek and grabbed her [alpenstock]. She ran to beg Thayne''s [longarm], and as he fetched it Khaz came out and asked after her, but she wouldn''t trouble him. She was tired of troubling him. She made up something and slung [Thayne''s longarm] across her back beside the [alpenstock] and jogged from the delving into a swirling blizzard that gnashed the horn and blew all things from the narrow track but the sturdiest of dwarves. She pulled down her sleeves and drew up her hood and stomped down the mountain with hope''s hand on her back.


    She would do what needed doing and then she would find that boarfucking orc and make him pay for what he had done.


    <hr>


    > Gained Item: [Thayne''s Longarm] Hickory and blued gunmetal


    > +1 [Vengefulness] ...then he decided to say that word. Truly, what the fuck did he think would happen?... (7/10)


    > -1 [Belonging] ...and even if he weren''t pushin her she had her whole life behind her fixin to do the job. Like one of them automatonic type things they make up there. You just take your hands off and get the hell outta the way... (3/10)

 15. All Be Welcome

    Ogaz sat above him with shoulders and chin and broken tusk silhouetted against the sky. Three pinprick stars drew slow circles around his head like an intermittent halo. Orc heard water rushing somewhere and he watched the stars and felt the fullness of his cheek. Dried blood prickled his neck as he turned his head. Water sloshed. The stars stopped their circles and were motionless and silent and the black earth occluded them as if the world was a creature of night that devoured the heavens at every turn to birth a new sun from their consumed brilliance.


    "He stirs," said a deep voice.


    Ogaz''s head bent slightly. "Resting now, Orc. Sleeping and resting. Ogaz has you."


    He closed his eyes.


    He dreamed of urgent voices and heavy breathing. Of the blue moon and a strip of a thousand thousand stars bright and strong and staring at him from the bottom of the furrow he plowed. Of sweat running up his back and a seedling growing from where the [brigadier] kissed him goodnight and goodmorning. Of the stars rocking back and forth with the white painted crib and its tall thin wooden bars and sweet smelling sheets. But she wasn''t there. Their bond was severed. And him cast into a profiteer''s pit to make murder. "One must be violent," she said, "lest one fall victim to the violent." The seedling withered where it grew. Rotted at the root in his cheek. It splintered when he touched it and its leaves broke in his hand and blew away in the slot''s warm breeze.


    He sat up in the boat.


    "Easy," said Saand. She held an oar over the stern as if for steering.


    "I was shot,¡± he said.


    "You were."


    "Tell me what happened."


    "You saved me and mine, so I saved you and yours."


    "And the Mad?"


    She took a hand from the oar and gestured ahead. "Free."


    He turned forward and saw the maw of the Mad open before them to reveal the eastern sky and its galaxies of red and blue and yellow stars winking as if knowing. The sea''s cool exhalation shattered faint crests of its swells and the empty masts and spars of the human ships waved like the snags and branches of trees ready to fall.


    They passed through the maw. A bonfire far down the strand lit the side of Saand''s face. She smiled at him and said, "Welcome home," as if home was so easily found. This place was hers, not his, and he had no idea how to change that.


    He watched her lean forward intently and look past him at the four tall ships and at the thousands of orcs gathered along the strand. "Horn and hoof," she said. "You brought an army."


    "As Ogaz says," said Ogaz.


    A figure waded from the strand into the Mad and arrested their little boat with a massive hand.


    "You," said the figure. It was Glad Nizam. She was waist deep in the Mad with her shorthorn beside her. "You did this."


    Orc nodded. "Yes."


    She turned to Ogaz. "And you?"


    "Ogaz doing as Glad Nizam asks."


    Glad Nizam dragged the boat to the shore of the new old river. The tusker [weird] knelt there watching with hands on knees and elbows out so the squares between elbow and hip made two black holes to nowhere.


    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    Glad Nizam looked at Saand. "You I don''t know."


    Saand shrugged. "Nor I."


    "She helps Ogaz and Orc," said Ogaz.


    "You be living here then?" said Glad Nizam.


    "Not far from here."


    "There be others?"


    Saand shrugged.


    "Them men who be guarding the camps said all orckin here be wiped out. Yet here you are."


    "I go where the river wills."


    Glad Nizam grinned. "And it has willed you to me."


    Saand nodded at the bonfire down the strand. "How many are you?"


    "Twenty five thousand," said Glad Nizam.


    "There are not so many orcs in the world."


    "You can trust her," said Orc. He turned to Saand. "Twenty five hundred gather here now."


    "There be more yet coming," said Glad Nizam. "Three thousand followed me from camps I freed."


    "Then you are Glad Nizam."


    "Yes I be."


    "Ogaz told me of you and of your promises to they who followed you across the sea. Listen. This land has suffered. It will not sustain twenty five hundred."


    "Such things we shall discuss later."


    "Not later. Men stole what bounty they did not flood. Your twenty five hundred will spoil all that remains. Use your big ships and go down the coast. Give the river a chance to cleanse himself and restore his land."


    "But it be my land, eh? Three generations we starved in the camps. If you think I''ll ask my brothers to leave off some boars for the sake of some boars then you been drinking too deep. No. Stop talking, shorthorn. Orcs be here now and orcs will take care of what be needed. I thank you for whatever aid you gave mine, but now be your time for resting."


    Glad Nizam now turned her gaze to Orc. "I thought you''d be gone for good."


    He didn''t know what to say to that. He was here because they were here. That was the only reason. To be with his folk. But instead of saying those things he said, "There''s nothing out there but desert."


    Glad Nizam reached her huge hand into the boat and placed it against his chest. "And in here?"


    He felt Ogaz and Saand watching. He felt the [weird] and the guard watching. He wanted to say something but he didn''t know what or how. He felt like he was back at the [brigadier]''s on their last day together. He felt like he''d never know how.


    Ogaz said, "Glad Nizam saying new world is for all orcs. No matter their pasts, all are welcome."


    "Yes. All be welcome. Even musheating red blooded woman cubs. But he must be wanting the welcome. He must be orc inside."


    "I am," said Orc.


    She shook her head at him and lifted her hand off of his chest and lightly touched his chin with her thumb and turned his face. "You be shot."


    "It''s nothing."


    She grinned at him. "Save some grit for the rest of us."


    He shrugged. "All I did was swing that beardling ax. Its metal''s what did the work."


    She withdrew her hand. "Did you find my scout?"


    "Dead."


    "Humans?"


    "Humans."


    She spat on the ground.


    "The whaler ever come in?" he said.


    "Not yet, but we will worry about that after we celebrate this." She offered her hand. "I be proud of you musheater."


    Orc clasped her arm about the wrist and she clasped his. She lifted him out of the boat and onto the sand. He felt the power and strength there, and for a moment he thought he felt something like kinship.


    "I never expected it''d be you," she said. In her bad eye the bonfire twinkled. "This be a day of glory for us. The day orcs reclaimed what always be theirs. You want to be part of it musheater?"


    "Yes."


    Glad Nizam nodded and Orc saw her greenskin emerge from the dark and he felt the little claw wrap around his wrist and tug him toward the shore.


    Glad Nizam looked toward the fire. "Then come and be burned."


    <hr>


    > +2 [Rage] ...anyway it was my fault. What happened then and what happened after, and I am pleased to take credit for it... (8/10).


    > +2 [Renown] ...yew couldn''t stop him for makin a name for hisself. He couldn''t help it. Yew ever seen a grizzly get a taste for man? Well I have and so has he and that''s just how he was. Hell Booky made me share a cell with both of em and it weren''t no bigger than yer little stone shitter over there... (8/10)

 16. No Crows In The Storm

    Under the whirling old growth canopy she leaned into the storm as limbs rent in great splitting cracks sudden and sharp and fell heavily under the load of newfallen snow. Sharp crystals drove into her eyes and swept across the surface of drifts interminable amid the bare black trunks and white ground and white sky, and the wild rush of the wind and her nakedness under these dropping widowmakers and their scattered broken leavings across her path reminded her of her kin who fell during that night on the span.


    She needed to get back to the delving before her da woke. He hated waking alone and she hated the thought of him lying there afraid to call out because what if no one came. Wondering where his daughter went. Worrying something happened to her as had happened to her ma. Ashamed he couldn''t do anything about it and afraid to call out. Finally calling her name and weeping and wishing for it all to end.


    She pushed on. In places the snow rose past her waist and she was forced to crawl over it. Her hands were cold and damp and her nose pink and dripping. She threw back her hood to hear better and see better. The wind whipped it from her neck like a banner and she scanned the swaying trees and restless drifts for the vanishing trace of her would be prey. She leaned against [Thayne''s longarm]. Hundreds of notches etched into its blued barrel like little bodies laid one beside another. Each one an orc or a man. Or an elf if you believed his tall tales. She lowered her face and kept on.


    Below a familiar fir the trace ended in six long prints cutting the snow. Three in one direction and a yard opposite three in the other. Two holes between where the talons had stolen her quarry into the storm.


    "Damned and brave te be huntin in this mess," she whispered.


    She trudged to the next tree and the next, her face down and eyes up, the borrowed [longarm] held in both hands by its grip and forestock or held by one hand pressing down around its barrel whenever she plunged past her hip in the snow. With every step she said the short name of someone lost: hunters better than her and smiths and masons much better and leaders and loved ones who''d never return. One hundred and one dwarves had marched to battle. Less than thirty had come back.


    She ran into another track. Partly carried off by wind and partly filled by it. She moved faster. Both hands and [longarm] before her. Forcing through snow as deep as her chest that melted into every seam of her coverings. Whatever she tracked took long steps and sank deep and she wanted it. She squinted against the wind stabbing her eyes. She didn''t slow to raise her hood.


    For an instant the whiteout cleared and she saw the [elk] framed between two black trunks. Snow stuck to its shaggy brown fur and rime formed on its antlers. They shifted slightly as it took her scent. Its wet eye glinted. Frost sticking on long eyelashes. She raised [Thayne''s longarm] and it cracked like an overloaded branch.


    She walked to where it lay. A thin geyser of steam jetted from the hole. She unslung her [alpenstock] and tested the adze against her bare thumb. Too soft for granite yet adequate for this. She set to the work. Would that she could spend her whole life in that moment. The cold pressing in all around and the heat releasing from inside. Dragging her [alpenstock] across this slab that yielded to it. Cutting the fruits of life from the body of one ended. No weeping eyes or open mouths or grabbing fingers. No wiry beard pressed against her chest. No clenched teeth.


    She [spoke] the sacred words of thanks to the buried stones and then she wrapped and bound enough meat for eight weeks. They needed more but she couldn''t carry more. She should''ve let Khaz come. Perhaps another could use the rest. But who was left to? No foxes or buzzards or beetles with the snow in. No crows in the storm. No wolves. She''d never seen or even heard one of them. She''d never seen an elk either. She wasted most of this one. Eight weeks. It wasn¡¯t enough.


    She buried the half butchered carcass in the snow then hefted her load and retraced her track back toward the mountain.


    ***


    The home Khaz shared with Thayne was empty. She found the old [bellower] at the forge and asked after Khaz.


    "He went lookin for ye," he said.


    "Alright."


    She listened to the bellows breathe and watched the coals glow brighter and dimmer and brighter and dimmer. Back and forth like the trees in the wind. Back and forth like her heart.


    "It won''t be easy te leave him," she said.


    "Who?"


    "Khaz."


    "Yer leavin?"


    "Thinkin bout it."


    "Well lass, I''ve been round the sun more times than most. Standin here listenin te the heat gets me rememberin, and when I remember long enough I feel like I can still see the black heart and the first colony. Tell ye the truth I don''t know for sure that I ever saw either of em with my open eyes. Maybe they''re some other dwarf''s memory, or maybe I''ve started livin some other dwarf''s life. Anyway I can tell ye one of the hardest things a dwarf can do is admit that what they''ve got isn''t what they want."


    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    She looked at him. "I need ye te do somethin for me."


    "Aye and if yer leavin then I expect te know what it is. I can''t do it lass."


    "Avoidin him isn''t changin what''s what. He''s still yer best friend, and ye know he''d do the same for ye. Hell he might still someday."


    Thayne''s head sunk between his shoulders.


    "There ye be thinkin only of yerself, not wantin remindin of what''s comin for ye. Thinkin yer goin te live forever. Ye won''t. Ye got a thousand years on me yet ye still haven''t figured a way te face their endin. No time better than now."


    He put up his hands as if she''d stop but she kept on.


    "Ye left him alone on the line. I saw ye goin. Ye left him alone and look what happened. Now yer goin te do what''s right or the guilt of it''ll break yer back. Look at me when I''m talkin te ye, coward."


    She went home after. She didn''t feel good about what she''d done, but still she did it. That''s the dwarven way. She was sick of it.


    Her da slept in the sling with one hairy arm hanging in space. Its loose skin gathered at his elbow and wrist. He didn''t eat much anymore and what he did get down didn''t stay there. Eight weeks of smoked elk might last him to twelve. More if he didn''t get better.


    "Oy ye wizard," she said. She laid her palm across his brow. Colder than it should''ve been.


    "Oy Mym," he whispered, eyes still closed. "Khaz came round for ye."


    "Did he now?"


    "Ye aren''t fixin te climb the sky after old Grizzly Serac, are ye?"


    "I was til stonefall split the path."


    "What''s that then?"


    She told him about the [armiger]''s envoy and the expedition mustering at seaway''s end.


    His eyes opened. "Then it''ll be uncle Barzun''s way. Khaz said somethin of it te me. Said some humans were comin undermount te learn delvin and stonespeech. Outsiders livin in the delvin. Can ye believe it? I thought I dreamt it. "


    "I heard somethin of that."


    "Ye''ll be hearin more now."


    "It won''t be the first time humans lived here. Daraway''s family stayed for years."


    "Don''t I wish they hadn''t."


    "Oy. They were yer friends and mine too."


    "That girl was unnatural. What she did isn''t somethin deserves forgivin, accident or no."


    "Well I forgave her a long time ago."


    "Course ye did."


    He adjusted as best he could in the sling.


    He said, "Barzun never came back Mym. I should''ve gone lookin for him but I never did. Now ye want te go crossin," he gazed down his nose at his pallid feet and wasting legs and collapsed chest and his arm hanging off the sling.


    She tucked it back beside him then placed her hand back on his forehead.


    He said, "Ye should go. Go and get what needs gettin. The delvin''s done, and those orcs need killin. Plenty of honor in it."


    "Te hell with honor. Honor''s what strung ye up here, da. It put yer friends in the ground as much as any orc. Shit like honor''s the last resort for folk who have nothin else te hang onte."


    "Yer wrong there lass."


    "Look at yerself and tell me that."


    She watched his eyes fall again to his legs and she regretted her words.


    "I''m sorry da. It just isn''t for me."


    "Well whatever yer hangin onte it better not be me. I can''t bear my own weight and this stringy hammock''s too cozy for two."


    "Ye''ll get better."


    "Not plannin on it."


    "Ye will, and in the meantime I''ve got vengin te keep me warm."


    "Oy. Careful with that."


    "I''m goin te find yer alpenstock." She bent and grabbed a hunk of elk meat and held it where he could see. "And yer goin te strengthen up."


    "I''m not fit for that. Listen lass. I need ye te end it. I can''t live like this. It isn''t livin."


    "Are ye not seein this? I took an elk today, da. An elk, and in winter no less. Brought up eight weeks of meat, and Thayne''s fetchin more te ye. He''s goin te look after ye, goin te make sure ye build back what ye''ve lost."


    "Build back nothin." He closed his eyes and a tear crept out from under the lid of the good one and pooled in the corner until it found a crease and slipped away into his beard.


    She stacked the slab of meat back on top of the rest.


    He said, "I feel like I''m dyin but I''m afraid I won''t."


    She reached to soothe his forehead as she''d done before. As he''d done countless times when she was just a lass terrified by tales of the [doomstone] haunting the wynds.


    He turned away from her touch. "If yer goin ye better be goin."


    "Da."


    "Go on now."


    "Look at me."


    But he wouldn''t. Nor did he speak again.


    Leaving him was the hardest thing she''d ever done. Staying would''ve been harder.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Vengefulness] ...the difference between revenge and forgiveness is a pound of regret... (8/10)


    > -3 [Belonging]: She grew up hearin a dwarf undersky ain''t no dwarf at all. Then she gets a taste for it. Reckon she liked it. What''s that say about who she is? Go and ask anyone still livin what was wrong with her and they''ll all tell you the same thing and it starts with a woman witch standin six foot tall. It ain''t worth speculating about what coulda gone different. What happened happened and we''re stuck with the consequences. Ain''t no starvin man worried about burnt chicken... (0/10)


    > [Belonging] Title Lost: [Settled]


    > [Belonging] Title Gained: [In Exile] Unsettlement is the beginning of change, not the end.

 17. Trial of Fire

    The bonfire flickered in the cool seabreeze in a pale imitation of the exploding cosmos. As they crossed the strand he saw groups of his folk in its growing light. All made way for Glad Nizam and all bowed their heads as she passed. When they raised their eyes it was Orc who they saw and though they said nothing he felt their judgment in the way they watched him.


    Saand took his arm in her hand and leaned against his side. "Ogaz said much while you slept."


    "Yeah well he lives to talk."


    "He told me of your time growing food. Of the corn you tended for the yeomen, and the herbs and teas and olives for the woman. And of the varied beasts you slew and slaughtered to feed your spectators. You know much of growing and foraging, and something of butchering."


    "Alright."


    "You must tell Glad Nizam what you see here."


    He shook his head. "She doesn''t listen to me."


    "She does. Have you noticed how she looks at you?"


    "She sent me up the maw to die."


    "You are a fool to think thus. Or a liar. You have her respect and more and you must use it. Tell her she must leave."


    "There''s nowhere to leave to that won''t kill her and her folk. Leaving means dying."


    "And you do not wish to be the one who sends them to their deaths." She pulled him close now. "But for them staying also means dying. You entered the maw. You walked the dry path of your folk''s sire. What did you see fit for eating? Look around and tell me, what do you now see? What does this army?"


    "Isn''t an army," he said. He knew armies from the [brigadier]''s tales of drills and parades and wars. Twenty five hundred starving refugees wasn''t it.


    She gestured ahead of them. "Look again."


    By moonlight and firelight he looked. He saw the cubs had won their game with the gulls and shared their feathered spoils with sows who smiled proudly and pretended to eat then gave back the meat. He saw tuskers broiling sea stars over small driftwood fires ringed by sandstone rocks brought down from the wall, and others squatting and cracking open the stars on the rocks and picking the meager flesh with probing fingers. He saw scalers like him gathered in the seafoam and casting wide nets of tarred line into the black water.


    "They''ve got to eat," he said.


    "The reef will not sustain them."


    "It won''t have to. There''s a whaler coming in with enough oil to feed this lot for a year."


    She leaned in. "And if it does not? The one you call Mad cannot bear your weight. Forever he fed the sea, and for a time he fed your forebears. Then men and dwarves carried you away and dammed him and drove him into the unclean well. The sea here starved of his nourishment. No fingerlings descended to it. No adults ascended from it to spawn and yield their bodies to his will. Now he finally flows again, but no seafaring fish recall his scent. Those brave enough to swim up his tainted flow will be clubbed and eaten by your friends gathered here."


    "They aren''t my friends."


    "Yet you wish they were."


    He didn''t say anything to that.


    Her grip tightened on his arm. "You must do something."


    "She won''t listen to me."


    "Then you must make her. He is counting on you."


    He looked at her like she was crazy and perhaps she was.


    She caught him looking. "Yes, he is a river. He knows only what has happened and what happens as it happens. He cannot know what will happen. But I can, and so can you. Look around. Your wouldbe friends will consume all. They will leave nothing. You do not wish to kill but if you do not intervene then your kin will die when the reef fails and this place will die and when it passes so shall he."


    Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    "Everything dies."


    "You would know."


    He tried shrugging her hand off his arm. "You don''t know a damned thing about me."


    She tightened her grip. Each finger pressing so hard they''d mark his underarm for days coming. "Mother sun and moons may never meet yet she recognizes her luminescence in their faces. You must convince Glad Nizam. A hundred thousand others depend on it. Creatures that creep and fly and burrow and sing to the stars. Creatures who cannot so easily sail away to another place."


    "This is our home."


    "Theirs maybe. But you are not them. Not yet."


    Again he tried to shrug off her hand. "It''s my home too."


    "More lies. Lie to them. Lie to me. Do not lie to yourself. Repeated falsehoods are not truth. They are ugly and they conceal your beauty beneath their hideousness."


    She let go of him and he saw her pinch something from a small bag hanging from her belt and crush it between her hard palms and he suddenly smelled the [brigadier]''s morning coffee and wet mud and hops left to rot in the rain. Then the firesmoke overpowered all other scents. The great old trunks roared and cracked and sparks rained skyward to die alongside the other worlds stuck in the sky. Dozens of orcs stood in a ring around it and several sat before it with legs crossed and backs straight and eyes fluttering behind closed lids. Among them he saw the sow from the span. Her cub was elsewhere.


    Glad Nizam''s greenskin shouldered between Saand and Orc and flashed his little sharpened teeth. "Boy I''d enjoy seein how far up this longarm''d go, maybe see its smoke comin out your piggy nose and ears, maybe fire comin out your traitor''s gullet, maybe little bit of that woman what broke yew come out her little toy."


    Orc said, "What''s happening here?"


    "Boy yew ain''t never spent time in no camps."


    Ogaz came up beside them. "Is warrior rite brownskins call trial of fire. Ogaz never partakes. Ogaz only watches. Now Ogaz partakes also. Orc and Ogaz becoming warrior brothers of all brownskins. Of all orcs. Very rare for scalers and tuskers to partake, but Orc''s something special and he makes Ogaz something special too."


    The greenskin scowled at Ogaz. "Care yew don''t lose your last tooth campwalker, else yew''ll be eatin mush with this here woman lover." Then he prodded Orc''s back with the [longarm]. "Sit yew here and ain''t you movin or I''ll stick this down your foulin throat and blow your insides to your outsides and fry em up for breakfast."


    Orc sat. Ogaz sat beside him. Saand stepped between them and the fire while shaking her waterskin like Booky''s [barkeep] mixing a drink. "The ritual is long," she said. "Your new brothers will journey to one place but you must go to another."


    She handed him the skin.


    "This shall send you there."


    He unstoppered it and sniffed. He looked at her as if in question.


    "Do not lie to yourself," she said.


    He drank and tasted the earthy bitterness. He started to pull away but Saand put a massive hand against the back of his head and another over his holding the skin. She squeezed both together and his mouth filled then overfilled with the mixture.


    "Swallow," she said.


    He did.


    She plucked something from his wounded cheek and he heard the sound of broken straw and smelled sage and mint, and the blue moon seemed green and the green moon seemed red. Her waterskin sloshed as she took it from his grasp and she went to Ogaz to plant a seed in the shattered end of his broken tusk. Orc tried to warn Ogaz against drinking but his tongue fell out of his head and he could only watch the waterskin empty into Ogaz''s mouth. Then the other shorthorn nudged Saand''s side with the butt of her [spear] and both vanished.


    Now Glad Nizam''s [weird] held something before them and started saying some words. The [weird]''s face twisted and stretched and when Orc reached out to hold it still he caught a tusk and it broke off in his hand and it crumbled between his fingers like a piece of white chalk.


    The [weird] placed something on Orc''s tongue and closed his mouth with a kiss, and tusks grew out of Orc''s mouth.


    The [weird] said, "Go to the desert."


    Those gathered said, "Return with its gifts."


    A woman was thrown on the fire. She did not scream or writhe as she burned, and her flames were blue like the stilled and swollen Mad and her flesh marched sharp blades outward like armies of spears and charging horse to crash against the driftwood''s reds and oranges and yellows. Back she beat them, back and back until the whole fire was made blue. All the gathered orcs melted into the land and the sea boiled away in thick white steam hot on his face and in his lungs. He closed his eyes against it.


    "Burn," he heard Saand whisper, "and become."


    <hr>


    > +1 [Rage]: ...I do not believe he ever wanted to fit in. Not really. He was still too attached to what he had been given in the life he once had... (9/10).


    > +1 [Renown]: ...there were some other greenskins white eye made warriors. I never knew em. They weren''t my brudders. Not like he was... (9/10).


    > Gains Attribute: [Altered Consciousness] Don''t drink the water.

 18. Seaways End

    As the sun rose Mym rested a moment at the place from which the tall orc had watched her struggle under the corpse of his kin. Right there he had stood with her da''s [alpenstock] clasped in his filthy claw. Right there he had bit its shard of the sky as she clutched her dying da.


    Her hands balled around her pack straps. The ground was dusty there and she dragged her foot across it as if to wipe away his standing. She looked down at the span as he had done. There were the stones who remembered her [oath], and though the debris and barricades and bodies had since been cleared away she knew the exact places each of her kin had fallen because she visited them every night. She wondered whether nightmares haunted the tall orc. She wondered whether orcs dreamed at all.


    She turned away from the memory to follow the seaway down the cliffside. There were few signs of the horde''s passing. A discarded rag flapping from an outstretched crag. A shard of broken bone wedged into a crevice. Crude script defacing a proud cliff where the track switched back on itself. She knew not what it said but she halted an hour to sand it off.


    Two more switchbacks and she saw the falls where meltwaters off of the white mountain and others poured over the cliff and down and down in great cascading sheets that blew themselves to nothing hundreds of feet above the swirling sea. Their spray pelted her face and soaked the track so thoroughly that water trickled out of its gravel and down the path ahead. At the end of the switch a series of wooden trusses and sluices collected the trickle there and elsewhere and redirected them in a heady stream that traversed the cliffside past a broken water wheel on its side with its rusting spindle high in the air. No doubt a portion of the delving''s water went with it: silt from her mountain''s glaciers, her da''s tears, stonedust from her half finished daughter.


    Another switch brought her right out over the channel. Its seas fought high in wild foaming vortices between the continental walls. Writhing and crashing and spitting like living things. Like dying things. She wondered what those stones down at their surface remembered. As the stones of the tallest summits are eldest uplifted so are those at the farthest bottoms eldest restrained, but where high stones know harsh sun and harsher wind, low stones must still remember things of shadow. Their beginnings and the sun''s and the sea''s. If only she could [hear] them over the roar.


    The seaway curved around a vertical rib and she put her pack on her chest and her back to the wall to toe around the narrow place where the rib intersected the track. Between her feet she could see a jumble of fallen rocks and orcs among them. Gray and green and brown. Broken on hard edges with limbs and necks suspended in air or burst into pieces from their tumble so she could not be sure how many there were. Five. Perhaps six. The wind rippled their torn garments and made them seem to move. The wind across the stone crevices and runnels made them seem to howl. They did neither. They were dead.


    "Good," she said. She knew none were her tall orc. She''d recognize him even if he was split into a hundred pieces, as she meant to do.


    Around the next switch she saw the seaway''s end. A town crouched on a tiny tilted sodden seaswept stone shelf too small for its throng of tiny tilted sodden seaswept stone buildings. Weathering centuries with neither room nor soil for cultivation of any kind, nor freshwater save that delivered by the leaky sluice, nor sunlight on the shadowed foot of those great continental cliffs.


    Miles later she stepped onto the town''s pavers between ramshackle homes of oxidized tin atop homes of rotting wood atop homes of crumbling brown brick stacked without forethought or afterthought so that they lolled sideways and leaned together like a throng of drunken harpooners after a first night ashore. Beneath the nodding chins of houses upon houses in rows upon rows snaked alleys of pavers and brown puddles rippling in the wind and littered with filth. Men sleeping behind a seam in a wall or an askew paver or a flattened piece of paper held over a scalp. Knees up and naked feet tucked under with dirty toes curled and threadbare rags clenched against bodies. Wiry and hard worn as if they''d suffered ten years before the mast. Wretched and odiferous as if they were grown from nightsoil. She knelt beside one to make sure he still breathed. Just ahead a door opened and a [dockworker] strode into the street. The wind slammed the door with an empty bang. Above the door a huge woman poured herself out of a window onto a sagging wooden sill and she called down at the [dockworker] and laughed at the incomprehensible and impossible suggestions he called back.


    Mym hurried after the [dockworker] down a street broad enough for one handcart. The layer of brick homes transformed to a layer of brick warehouses that towered over her with their wood and tin additions stuck like barnacles to the backs of leviathans. Laundry blew from crisscrossing lines like seaweed caught by a passing current. Rotting fish and seabird excrement overwhelmed the smell of human filth. Salt crusted windows and paint peeled from their frames and rust covered every scrap of exposed metal. Their strange shaping and unconventional alloying had lessons to share, yet the sea drew her on. She followed the steady sound of gulls and waves and frequent rushes of cool air until her toes hung from the edge of a pier with her pack and [alpenstock] dropped onto the planks beside her. In the lulls between the waves she heard tackle clank and rigging creak from tall wooden ships in long wooden berths that colonized the sea. Fishing buoys bobbed on gentle surges lapping the pillars of the pier and the hulls of the ships and the rough jetty of tumbled stone on the far side of the cove that calmed its enclosed waters. Behind her goods in crates and casks from a hundred places and peoples sat stacked and crammed together so that the whole world fit in a box: human foodstuffs and dwarven whiskys and tusker clayware and orcish artifacts from up and down every coast and every waterway and every overland way fitted and stuffed all together in complementary shapes and sizes. No warring or squabbling between them. Waiting for loading into flatbottomed boats thence to the tall ships where humans knocked wooden mallets against wooden problems and hammered metal rings around timber planks, where black smoke smelling of tar rose from their decks and flitted up through their furled canvas to add their color and odor to the receptive sky, where some made ready for leaving and some made ready for staying awhile before leaving again, and again, and again, as the sea itself sloshes around the world to grind all stone to sand.


    She dropped onto her backside and hung her feet from the pierhead. The tide was too low to dip a toe. She sat back on her hands and watched the ships and their forest of masts and spars and lines hanging like vines. They and their colors and calls and clatters all blended together so that they might''ve numbered three or thirty. There was no way to tell.


    Amid it all she saw no sign of the [armiger]''s expedition. No expedition meant no shard of the sky. No justice for her da. No hope for the white mountain. She wiped her nose and squinted into the wind. She saw a small boat crewed by some men approaching from the tangle of sterns and spars.


    "Child!" called a [pilot] from the boat''s prow. "Child! Belay your lollygag and get to firm shore. Pull after there, man, break it across your chest. Child! You''ll sink like a sounding rod for all the earth coming outta ya. Pull after, I said. That grog stopper your ears? Child! By gods even her eyes are rocks. Pull and belay that turning, keep your jibing head and hands to your oar."


    As the boat came beside the pier Mym hopped to her feet. "Oy! I''m here for the armiger."


    The [pilot] held the pier''s pillar and gawked at her appearance. An [oarsman] jumped from his oar to the deck with a line in his hand. "He sailed on the evening tide," he said.


    "They''ve gone, then?" she said.


    The [oarsman] worked the line quick and fine around a painted iron cleat spiked into a plank. "Aye, gone then, gone there, all aweigh and away and good riddance."


    "Damn," she said and she dropped her chin to her chest. "Ye lose yer aim ye lost yer way."


    Stolen story; please report.


    "Funny thing for a girl to say."


    "I''m not a girl."


    He finished his tie off and stood and got a good look at her. "By gods you ain''t. Look at you. Bet he would''ve stayed if he knew ye were pulling in. Lubbers say he''s a lee eye for right women and a weather one for whales, and after yesterday I''m starting to believe em. Aye, and ye be broad in the beam. No topsails and all castle. He send for ye? Don''t be worrying, anyone good enough for the milky bottoms of his lordy feets is good enough for me. Where''re ye from and what''re ye costing?"


    A [rigger] stepped from an oar to the pier. "Fasten your mainsheet and shift your hold, these casks ain''t loading themselves and I ain''t hauling your share."


    "I''m conversating here," said the [oarsman]. "How many more we gonna get fore weighing?"


    "Conversating?" said the [rigger]. "Best get to your berth. Best to converse with your god if you be feeling the need to converse with a child."


    The [pilot] leapt onto the pier from his place in the prow. His eyes flicked to her as he landed. "Ain''t no child. She''s the dwarf they''re talking about."


    "No she ain''t," said the [oarsman]. "She''s a, oh what do they call em? She''s a she dwarf."


    "Wedwarf," said Mym. "I just got here. Nobody''s talkin bout me. What dwarf ye meanin?"


    The [pilot] ignored her. "Dwarf''s a dwarf. How many you think there be in a rotbottomed wormchewed bilgesoaked port like this? She''s the one, now get lifting, and you, she dwarf, get offa this pier before someone thinks your sniffing around stuff that ain''t yours. Fact that''s quite a load you''re hauling. Lay it around and let me see."


    She brandished the adze of her [alpenstock]. "Step to and I''ll show ye."


    The [pilot] laughed. "What''s a little thing like you going to do with a big tool like that."


    "That''s what we was conversating about," said the [oarsman].


    The [pilot] swatted the [oarsman] on the ear. "I said come about now and work, man!" The [pilot] shook his head at Mym and turned to lambast his fellows lifting cask and crate.


    She frowned at his backside and collected her pack and slowly walked to the pier''s foot. She scanned the buildings lining the harbor. At the corner where the broad seafront avenue met a narrow alley squatted a public house. Offset green bricks framed its damp wooden door and the laughter of early morning or late night flitted out the gap around its edges. If a dwarf was to be found among men, that''s where they''d be.


    She pulled the door and inside was all thighs and waists and elbows and laughter and clatter of tin on earthware and the sweet smells of beer and bacon and a sour tinge of vomit. A place made from the world''s troubles full of people trying to forget them.


    She edged her way to the bar through all manner of men and women. Mariners and fishmongers and servants and landlords all together, each talking louder than the other, some sitting shoulder to shoulder around tables too small to hold their food and festivity so it poured over and onto the stains of thousands who''d come before. A veneer of joviality dressing up a foundation bloated by damp and mold.


    As she passed the table nearest the door she heard a [merchant] there say, "I was worried he''d never leave."


    "May he never return," said a [curator].


    "Drink to it," said a [dockworker], and they all did.


    At the bar Mym waited while those taller and louder asked more of the [barkeep] than she had hands to give. New folk came up and got what they wanted and old folk leaned into the long counter and chased the help around with hawkish eyes and finished what they had and ordered more and spoke to each other out of the sides of their mouths. They talked of ships in and out and of the [armiger]¡¯s chances abroad and of the dwarf come, now two, soon to be a whole army, three armies in three months, never so much excitement since the [cobbler] sent his wife over the fall in a barrel.


    Eventually she caught the [barkeep] sighing over a bearded [drunkard] who leaned on the counter with his head down and snoring.


    "Oy. What ye servin?"


    The [barkeep] heaved a bucket of beer onto the counter and said, "Morn Sal. Oh I thought you was lil Sally collecting for her pa." She heaved the bucket back behind the bar then stuck her thumb at the sleeping man. "You''re one of them dwarves, yes? Can you help me with this one? My man''s gone fetching oil."


    "For brekkie and a pint, sure."


    "Done deal. Bacon today and sweet bread. Here, I got his head, just get him round the hip, yes? Whoa, hey there."


    Mym hooked the [drunkard]''s heel with her toe and toppled him over her shoulders and dashed him out the swinging door as he started to spit up. The whole pub roared in delight.


    As Mym settled back at the bar the [barkeep] nodded and said, "Food''s coming." She pumped a pint of bitter into a tall ceramic cup and set it on the counter where the man''s head had rested just before. Its bottom made a wet ring from its spilling foam.


    With her feet on the bar Mym was just tall enough to wrap her hand around the cup and rest her chin on the counter. The beer was good and bitter and its foam prickled her upper lip. "Seen any dwarves around?" she said.


    "Only you, but I just got here. Are more of you coming? Some say a whole army of you are coming."


    "Who''s sayin?"


    "Nobody particular. Just some wise folk. Is it true?"


    She sipped her beer. "Might be."


    "Yes I see it in your face. Them wise round here think the more they talk the wiser they are. Better to be silent and mistook for a fool, yes?"


    "Yer talkin te the queen of fools and I''ll tell ye why. One of yer wise talkers came up te my mountain and spun a footwide ball of yarn bout armies crossin the sea. Shook me down out of the hills and one of my kin sounds like. Don''t see no armies here though."


    "We''ve seen plenty. More than I''d ever wanted between the armiger''s lot and them orcs before."


    "Surprised the orckin left anythin standin."


    "Strangest thing is they didn''t touch nothing but the ships. Three merchantmen and a whaler and a right man o war they took clean just fore first bell. I was here and had a view there," she nodded at a porthole built into the wall, "and of course we knew they was coming. Everybody here knew a minute fore they came when Sal burst in all adrift and looking for her pa, so we knew and we crowded around the winda holding the legs offa tables and all my cutlery and each other. And with my man Jimmy stacking all my chairs fore the door and about had em scraping the ceiling fore he remembered it opens out not in. God it was quieter than the first day in here, and we was watching and listening, but didn''t hear nothing, didn''t see nothing. Laid in til first light fore I made Jimmy put all the chairs back and I myself peeked out to see what was what. If any old army of orcs went into the harbor I couldn''t tell it save that those ships I said were nowhere to be seen. Thank god your folk took the fight out of them."


    She watched the foam fizz and pop away to nothing. "Doubt that."


    "As you say, but it''s not like a sweet little thing like you was there, and everything here was just as it was, even Joe was sleeping in his gutter, though maybe shaking more under his coat, maybe lying in a bit more piss. And of course them five ships were gone. Biggest ones in. All gone fore dawn with most of their crews ashore. Even had a couple whalers rooming here, say, you gonna need a room?"


    "I''m not sure yet."


    "Well you just let me know. Got the driest rooms in the Cove. So I was saying them whalers was right mad about them orcs stealing their ship. Casks of oil floating in the Cove like apples, and them running to commandeer anything whole bottomed to salvage what they could. Shipped a handcart with the wheels still on they did, and after it sank under em magister Daraway made em pay for it too. Hey where you going? You got food coming."


    But Mym was already running across the pub and kicking open the door and jumping over the [drunkard] who still lay where she had tossed him. Up the alley she flew, boots splashing puddles and pack bouncing in all directions at once like she was riding an avalanche, head swiveling left and right and ahead and back looking for the [harbormaster]''s hall, wondering how many Daraways there could be in the world. Wondering if hers still slung fire.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Vengefulness] ...revenge lives wholly in your mind, feeding off your rotting memory and imagined counterfactuals. Your could have beens and should have beens. At least that''s how it is for us. For dwarves it''s different. Their memories are as inviolable as their stones. There is no rot, and all facets are absolutely certain... (9/10)


    > +1 [Stonespeaking] ...I understand she spoke with some of the eldest stones in creation. What an education that must¡¯ve been. I shudder te think what they told of our legacy... (3/10)

 19. Things That Werent

    A familiar voice woke him. He found himself inside a cave, sitting against cool stone, facing the brilliant golden wastes that shone beyond the entrance. Water dripped from the ceiling and spattered between his knees. The place smelled like the [brigadier]''s wine cellar. Like old things long decayed. He turned toward the voice and he peered down the cave''s root where it sank into the world. The oldest orc he''d ever seen stooped there, wearing no covering except an undyed sheet of wool patched here and there with scraps of colored cloth and other things stitched in. A bat''s wing. A fox''s tail. The leathery face of a creature unknown to Orc, with its eyes empty and its mouth open and its long black incisors clacking together as they swung from threads weaved into the sheet.


    Orc brandished the [Skyshard]. The [elder] didn''t move.


    "What is this place?" said Orc.


    "Whatever you need it to be."


    He vaguely remembered sitting in front of the bonfire on the strand, and the strange things he saw there. Things defying possibility.


    "This isn''t real," said Orc.


    "No more or less than your mind."


    He reached forward to touch the [elder] but the [elder] backed with surprising agility.


    "Why''d you bring me here?" said Orc.


    "I was a fool. Ask your question."


    "What question?"


    "Your question. Your question. The reason you''re here. Ask it so I may go back to dying."


    "You''re dying?"


    "The whole world''s dying, cub. And that''s not your question."


    He studied the [elder]. The mottled sheet. The face in shadow. All familiar and foreign at the same time.


    "Get on with it."


    "Who are you?"


    "That''s not it either."


    Again he reached for the [elder] and again the [elder] backed further into shadow. Not even his eyes were visible, only their glint of twice reflected sunlight.


    "You don''t know me," said the [elder].


    "No."


    "You will. Ask."


    He considered what he needed answered. He thought about the [brigadier].


    "Selfish cub. That''s the answer, not the question."


    "You''re not making sense."


    "It''s your mind. Sense and nonsense alike."


    He thought about what questions the [brigadier] might answer. He thought about that as he watched the twin yellow points glinting in the dark. Suddenly he knew the question he was to ask. He knew he already had the answer. He turned to the mouth of the cave and started walking.


    "Ask your question," the [elder] said.


    But Orc didn''t stop. The very edge of shadow and sun lay before him. The [elder] called after him but he''d already left. Red sandstone blazed in every direction. In places stone spires scraped a sky so white hot only its uppermost vault held any blue. Arches drew curves like the sun''s path from earth to sky to earth and decomposing stone swelled in arid crests like embers and ash to be blown around the world. Cicadas buzzed from sandblasted formations that seemed to stand and kneel and prostrate themselves before the mighty sun. A troupe of little gray birds darted from one to the next and alighted in their shade and hopped maddingly one over the other then whirl up and dart back again and they never made more sound than the shade. These were the Madlands. Dreadful fire and bare sandstone both monstrous like him. Alien in their ambivalence. Ready to turn the best years of his life into the worst, as they had for the [brigadier].


    He walked ahead and never looked back. The wasteland stretched in all directions forever. It roused a base hunger that he never knew yet was always there, like a noon shadow that would inevitably veil the entire world, or the firmament''s emergence from the day''s sky to dominate the night''s. He felt it not as a new garment thrown over old skin but as new skin grown over an old wound. It sought not dominance but [affinity] over all there was to see.


    Booky tapped Orc''s shoulder with the flat of her [blade]. "Now ya getting it."


    "It''s all mine."


    "If ya can hold onto it. But first ya gotta reach out and take it."


    He ran up the nearest ridge. Each blistering footstep sent pebbles rattling down the slope. At its top he stopped under the branch of a tree whose flexible upturned spines made for green leaves and stiff downturned spines made for a dangerous kind of gray bark. In its shade he looked out at the next canyon where orcs of Glad Nizam''s nation shouted and ran along the floor with crushed scorpions hanging from ropes belting their waists and dressed boars sagged over their shoulders. Everywhere he looked he spotted more. Three running along that cliff. Five more stalking a feathered beast that reared and snapped at their [clubs] and [boarding pikes]. A legion more swarmed the Mad as it flowed along the canyon''s deepest reaches.


    "All are brothers," said a lion lying on a branch.


    "Sure." He squinted onto the flats beyond the canyon''s pit and saw only a great mass of orcs turning everything over and sending up clouds of dust from their feet and black smoke from their industry.


    A man with a broken jaw stepped up beside him. He pointed to Orc and to himself and made a sign of brotherhood.


    "Brother," Orc acknowledged.


    The lion closed its eyes and licked its long pink tongue twice along the back of its paw then laid its chin upon it. The man shook his head and his uncoupled jaw wagged in place. He pointed to the foot of the tree where a dwarf sat with a spine of bark in his hands and his shriveled legs collected beneath him.


    Orc looked at the dwarf. "Dwarf, with your eyes so near the ground, do you see Glad Nizam in the canyon below?"


    Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.


    The dwarf turned the bark over in his hands. "Me da used te say humans were our brothers. Course he never wanted it te be true. Yer Glad Nizam''s remindin me a lot of me da. Bit taller of course. And smellier. Human like , if we''re tellin truths."


    "There are no humans here. We slew them all."


    "Then ye done the world a favor. Te the end o humans," and he raised the spine as if it were a tankard and cut his mouth on its blade and turned his head and spat blood.


    Orc saw the bald strip shaved from his skull and the brown and purple discoloration on his scalp.


    "Recognizin yer work?" said the dwarf.


    "What choice did I have?" said Orc.


    "Same as the rest of us I suppose. Die or don''t die. Hell of a world they made for us."


    The dwarf nodded at the wastes back the way Orc had come.


    "And a hell of a home they left for ye."


    Orc looked upon the barren land. "Who do you mean?"


    "Humans of course. Don''t be coy with me. I know one of them made ye into who ye be. Ye can''t stop thinkin about her so I''m stuck thinkin about her too."


    "She didn''t rear me."


    "Sure she didn''t. Sure ye would''ve turned out exactly the same without her." He laughed. "I''d say be yerself but that''s exactly the opposite of what she taught ye. So who made who?"


    Orc frowned at the state of the dwarf and his lameness. "Did you die?"


    The dwarf spat blood again. "May as well have."


    "I''m sorry for what I did."


    "The hell kind of orc gets sorry for winnin a scrap? It''s plain as a nak''s assend that ye don''t know who ye are. I can help ye find yer way."


    The dwarf held out the bark.


    "Share a wee drink te smooth rough beginnins?"


    "No thanks."


    The dwarf nodded at the orcs down in the canyon. "What do ye think of yer brood?"


    "They''re a fine folk."


    "Ye know ye can''t lie te me lad."


    "Then why ask the question?"


    "I''m worried about yer well bein."


    Orc shrugged. "They just aren''t what I imagined."


    "What ye hoped, ye mean."


    "Sure."


    "And yer home?"


    Orc looked out upon the barrens. "It doesn''t feel like it. Though I''m not sure how home is supposed to feel."


    "Another lie."


    Orc frowned.


    "Don''t clam up lad. Those kin of yers can''t help bein who they were made te be. Not anymore than ye can."


    "So we''re born this way."


    "Yer old lady didn''t teach ye te be daft. They weren''t born te suck the life out of the land just like ye weren''t born te wring the life out of crooks. Men stamped out the orcs'' way of bein decades ago. Dragged it into the yard and shot it dead. I''m regretful for our part in it."


    Orc looked at him. Much diminished since they met on the span. He tried to remember what the daughter had called him. Waz.


    "Glad Nizam''s lot only knows how to be what the humans showed em. No different than ye, cept yer old lady wasn''t some racist camp guard drunk on his armslength of power.."


    "I hadn''t thought of it that way."


    "Hell. Of course ye did. These thoughts are all yers. I''m just the one blabbin em. Go ahead and feed me some more. Feels damn good te talk without blubberin for a change. As for your home, or yer folk''s home anyway, take a look now."


    The dwarf nodded at the canyon and Orc followed his gaze. Where once there was naught but orange sand and black water and teeming filthy orcs there now grew rows and rows of good green crops. Cubs swam and splashed in diversion canals. Orcs ducked in and out of stout burrows. From their place high on the rimrock he could hear the laughter and song.


    He understood what needed doing.


    "Aye," said the dwarf.


    "I need to get back."


    The dwarf sighed. He seemed sad as if hallucinations can feel such things. "Aye, course."


    "Do I just go back the way I came?"


    In a flash the dwarf swiped the [Skyshard] out of his hand and swung its pick straight into Orc''s heart. As red blood rushed out of his chest and the world faded he saw the dwarf hold up the tool and regard it lovingly and say, "Ye really don''t know what ye''ve got."


    ***


    He fell forward into the ashen sand. It burned his fingers and the light burned his face, and as he turned back to the dwarf he saw only the bonfire, tremendous in size, forcing sweat from every part of him. He watched it burn and as he watched he [felt] it wasn''t the same and the orcs gathered around it weren''t the same and the sand sticking to his sweating flesh wasn''t the same. The world and all its parts were new, as if their truths which had always been there were finally visible to him. Nothing would be the same.


    He stood and grabbed Ogaz by the shoulder and pulled him upright.


    "We''re leaving."


    The greenskin tried to stop him but Orc shoved him into the sand. Then he pushed past the ring of startled orcs, past Glad Nizam''s staring [weird], past the sleeping cubs and tired sows and midnight fishers. Into the Mad''s cool flow they waded. Saand waited there in the boat made from the tree in a treeless land.


    "You interfered in the rite," said Orc.


    "It was necessary."


    He hefted Ogaz into the boat and climbed in after. As they unshipped the oars Glad Nizam splashed into the river and held the boat fast. Her [weird] stood behind her and her eye was red and wild from the unfinished ritual. Orcs drew near behind her. Some looked tired. Others looked angry.


    "You leave?" she said.


    "We can''t stay."


    "Why?"


    "You overhunt the land and sea like men."


    An orc somewhere snarled and Glad Nizam murmured, "Careful."


    He said, "This shorthorn knows this place better than you who call it home. She says it won''t bear your weight."


    "And I say it will," said Glad Nizam. "It be home. It succored our great nations since the world''s beginning. Ours be but a little finger against those who came before."


    "Perhaps, but humans strangled it."


    "So it be leaner. We know this thing. But we be stronger. We be born of the camps."


    "Then stay and see. Take comfort knowing you''re slaying your home to save yourself."


    Someone said, "Kill him Glad."


    "Yeah finish dis," said another.


    "He ain''t one of us," said another.


    A thrown stone struck the side of the boat. Another sailed past his ear.


    Glad Nizam leaned forward and he thought she would pull him from the boat. The others fell silent. Her great red eye shone overhead like a third moon. She whispered for only him to hear, "Find us food musheater."


    "I''ll do what I can."


    "Do it quickly."


    "It may take a season."


    She nodded.


    "Many may die," he said.


    "Many have already."


    She heaved the boat forward and slapped its hull with her crop. She said, "If you come back empty handed I''ll kill you."


    <hr>


    > Gained Attribute: [Awareness]


    > +1 [Awareness]: It was that otaur that woke him to the wild world and what it''d mean if all them cubs grew up in a future without no trees in it... (1/10).


    > Gained Attribute: [Naturalist] An affinity for things that grow.


    > +1 [Renown]: ...him and old white eye were the only ones who ever started the warrior rite thing and never finished it. They called him somethin new for that. It sounded nice but it weren''t. Sometimes little me thinks it might''ve been best if we''d never left Booky''s maybe... (10/10).


    > [Renown] Title Lost: [Noname of Nobody].


    > [Renown] Title Gained: [Unburned] With self worth comes his self determination.

 20. Daraway

    She burst into the overbuilt door of the [harbormaster]''s hall. Its hush poured out and around her to settle her frantic feet and eyes if not her heaving heart. The hall ran long and tall with windows too high and narrow to show anything of outside. Their light shafted through dust raised by cramped rows of men and women sitting at wooden desks scribbling tiny figures on flattened ledgers, figures cramped like their makers, little sticks stacked carefully together into letters and numbers that filled each page until it too was cramped. They worked without speaking though their pencils whispered furiously. They and their hall felt like a temple to their god before they replaced god with commerce and called it godly.


    "Close the door," said someone.


    She stepped into the hall and the heavy door swung shut behind her. She stood in place as her eyes adjusted to the dim and she felt theirs on her.


    She heard a man''s voice float out of an archway at the hall''s far end. The sign of the [magister] was fixed to its keystone. She hefted her pack and started toward it. After a few paces she could make out his words.


    "It''s said you spent time among them," he said.


    "By people who know less than you," said a woman.


    "So what do you know of them?"


    "Less than nothing."


    "But your family held the seat."


    "When there was still a seat to hold," said a different man.


    "And I was a child," said the woman.


    "So what do you remember?"


    "Some things aren''t worth remembering," said the woman as Mym stepped into the archway''s threshold.


    Mym saw two men sat in wooden chairs dragged in from the adjoining hall. One tilted back on two legs and the other hunched forward with his elbows on his knees. She saw the [magister] standing behind a high desk and leaning on its lectern with both forearms pressed into its surface. She was beautiful. Their eyes met.


    The [magister] said, "But isn''t it funny how circumstance calls things back all at once?"


    "Like what?" said a man.


    "Like the way their mountain pushes all warmth and breath right out of the air. The way its ground freezes even during summer''s doggest of days. The prodigious meltwater dropped off its brow every spring."


    The [magister] held forth a slender finger bearing the hint of a scar on its tip. "It runs here you know. You drink it from your cups there. But up in their valley it''s too restless to irrigate and too silted to drink."


    "Seems a harsh place for a girl."


    "Better than this godforsaken rock. Sure the air''s thin and the warmth and food are too, but the folk live low to the ground." She smiled mischievously at Mym. "And thus living low to the ground they''re naturally humble."


    "Humble folk are godly folk."


    "Grubby, more like." Her big brown eyes twinkled in the dim light. "They clothe themselves in stone. Shaping it. Worshiping it. Doing all they can to become it. Talking of nothing else, to no one else. They say every cut shapes eternity. More precisely, they believe eternity is already shaped. Like a sculpture preexisting in stone, and only through their cutting is it revealed. But the shape cannot be known until it''s cut, and the shape might change from one eternity to the next."


    "What''s that supposed to mean?"


    "Nothing. It''s all nak shit, as they''d say. You can imagine how bored a girl might be in such company. Unless she fell over one in the wrong way. I knew a dwarf once with gemstones for eyes and a heart of gold who could snipe the wings off a dragonfly and carry you two up to the span, one under each arm, faster than you could fall off of it. And she knew so. And she''d say so as often as she liked. And if you didn''t agree she''d throw you over her shoulder and carry you to the tip top of her terrible mountain, which makes the climb out of here look like a mole hill."


    "The white mountain," said a man. "I read about it."


    "You don''t read shit," said the other. "Y''know ma''am, for not remembering much about em you''re remembering quite a lot."


    "Certainly more than I ever will of you." She came around her desk and stepped past the men to kneel and open her arms as wide as the room. "Mym."


    "Daraway," she said as she walked into her embrace. Long arms wrapped her tight. "I can''t believe it."


    The men watched with tea saucer eyes until Daraway snapped her finger and thumb at them fast enough to [throw] a spark. They fled through the archway and their chairs toppled over and neither stopped to right them.


    Daraway said, "I looked for you on the span and for your ma and da. I made myself sick from looking, but I needed to know."


    "Ye saw what happened then?"


    She nodded. "I brought up the local fools who call themselves a militia after the orcs had sailed. I thought more might be coming."


    "If ye''d come a bit quicker ye might''ve caught us."


    "You were there?"


    "Til dawn, aye. Took me a bit te get away."


    "I''m relieved you did."


    "I take it no more came."


    Daraway shook her head. "No. King''s men arrived out of the north and said everything behind them was secure. Their captain wanted us to follow him up to the white mountain. I told him the orcs hadn''t gone that way. I told him to come down to seaway''s end and see for himself, but he would do only what the armiger had commanded and he said that was to go up the dwarfroad. I didn''t stay after that."


    "Well I can tell ye no company of men came upvalley."


    "I know."


    "Yer keepin eyes on em."


    "They are king''s men," she said as if no further explanation was warranted. "Wish I could do it myself, but I''ve duties here." She gestured to the humans at their desks beyond the archway and smiled the exact same way she had done the last time they were together, all those years ago.


    "They aren¡¯t up there anymore," said Mym.


    "No. Yesterday they came down to my little city and embarked on a fleet of the armiger¡¯s. They sailed on the last ebb claiming to be going after the orcs. We''ll see about that."


    "Where are me dead?¡±


    Daraway¡¯s brow knotted in sympathy. "I had them brought down. The folk here gave each a mariner''s burial.¡± She shrugged a little as if excusing some child¡¯s misdemeanor. ¡°Their skulls may be emptier than the delving but red blood flows in their veins."


    Mym shook her head. "Should''ve sent em up te the mountain."


    "I know. I intended to. I haven''t forgotten. But if I''d sent anyone up to the delving that captain would''ve insisted on going along. I''ve never met a king''s man with a straight mouth. I see you know what I mean."


    Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    "Still should''ve sent em."


    Daraway nodded. "Truly I believed the entire delving was lying there amid the orcs. Your da used to say when the mountain fought it fought together. I feared you were there. I looked at every face to be sure."


    She saw Daraway''s hands twist up before her stomach. She brushed her fingers across them. "I''m here now," she said.


    They looked at each other and after a moment she said, "Ye stopped writin," as the woman said, "You stopped writing."


    Daraway said, "I never did."


    "It doesn''t matter. Lettercarriers stopped comin up anyway."


    "That explains some things."


    Mym looked at her dead in the eye. "Da''s dyin, Dara."


    Daraway drew a folding screen across the archway and sat cross legged on the floor. She took both Mym''s hands in hers. "I''m here. Tell me."


    Mym told her of that night on the span and her da''s malady and the granite slab and the shard of the sky and the [armiger]''s expedition and her arriving too late to tag along. The more she said the more there was to say, and the longer she didn''t say anything about her and Khaz the easier it was to not say anything about it, so she never did.


    "I''m worried I made a mistake leavin da."


    "You didn''t. I''ll make sure you didn''t."


    They sat together for a while like they used to. Knees to knees, silent, Daraway''s slender hands around hers. As if the world beyond the screen was suspended in time for however long they needed.


    Finally Daraway smiled and said, "Well what do you think of my city?"


    "It''s fine."


    "Certainly not. It''s horrid. You''ll need to learn to lie better than that if you''re hoping to spend any time with the armiger."


    "I''d have come te see ye if ye had ever said ye were so close te the mountain."


    "I never was. I only arrived this summer. Donnas sent me down from the north after he took Mill Gap."


    "Who''s Donnas?"


    "King Donnas. Third of his name, regent of this and that and the rest."


    "Same king as before?"


    "His son."


    She shrugged. "We don''t have much use for kings."


    "To be a dwarf. What about ladies? Got any use for them?"


    "Ye gone and made yerself a lady?"


    Daraway nodded and smiled a little.


    "Aye, I''ll find a use for ye."


    "I''m sure you will."


    Mym laughed. "So who had te die for that te happen?"


    "My late husband."


    "Yer what now?"


    Now Daraway laughed a song to make nightingales miss spring. "Twenty years is a long time, love. You remember what the old king did to my parents after the he found out about what had happened."


    "Aye I still have the letter."


    "Well after that I had nothing. No title, no mobility, no money. Just a tarnished name."


    "Ye could''ve come back te us."


    "And the keeper would''ve let me in? Your da would''ve?"


    "Well. I mean. They wouldn''t have turned ye out. Not without turnin me out too."


    Daraway drummed her fingers on Mym''s knee and each one sent a little pulse of heat through her gut. "They''d never have let their precious lastborn out of their sight."


    "Aye that¡¯s what I¡¯m gettin at. It doesn¡¯t matter. Tell me about ye. How are yer folks? Ye still allowed te visit?"


    "They''re dead love."


    "Hell. Step out of one pile straight into another."


    "It''s alright. It was a long time ago."


    Mym thought of her da. She looked away.


    Daraway touched her arm. She knew. She always knew. "You did right by him."


    She looked at the hand on her arm and the ring it bore. "So ye got married?"


    "I did. He was too young an earl. He was looking for a name so I lent him mine. Then I told him he could make his own name on the rising front. He went up to Mill Gap and never came back."


    "Damn lifetime of tragedies in two decades."


    "Think nothing of it."


    "Any heirs?"


    "Are you joking? I can never tell."


    "Ye keep sayin it''s been a long time."


    "Not that long."


    Mym smiled. She felt the same way, as if no time had passed since their last day together. "So yer a lady. Do I salute ye now or what?"


    "You better not.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s it entail?¡±


    ¡°Running this shithole for one.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s not that bad.¡±


    Daraway gawked at her. ¡°Have you been down to the harbor?"


    "Aye and I had a pint at a pub and everythin."


    "Which pub?"


    "I never learned its name. It has a porthole beside the door and a frightful woman keepin bar with a face like a whole team of naks went trottin over it."


    Daraway laughed with a brightness that cast shade on the sun. "Glam''s. Down by the docks."


    "Suppose that''s it."


    "Did you eat?"


    "I left my brekkie on the bar."


    ¡°That bad?¡±


    ¡°Not te my knowin. I never had a bite. The barkeep said yer name and I was out the door te come lookin.¡±


    "Well, we better see you to it. Then we will see about booking passage."


    "Don''t need te book no passage, and no human mule would have me besides. Easy enough te walk back as it was te walk here, just more up than down."


    "Is water walking some secret power of the dwarves? Or do you no longer wish to castrate the armiger and slay the orc and recover your da''s alpenstock?"


    "What? Ye mean te send me across the sea?"


    Daraway nodded.


    Mym squeezed her hand. "I don''t think I can go back te missin ye."


    "My little fool. You know I''m coming with you."


    She smiled. "Suppose I did. Can ye stand waitin til after brekkie?"


    Daraway laughed with joy as pure as crystal waters tinkling off a glacier. "Woe to she who stands between this dwarf and her brekkie."


    "Come on. I''ll share it."


    "I very much doubt that."


    They talked all the way back to the pub and talked still as they stepped over the sleeping [drunkard] she''d bounced, and as Mym swung open the door she turned away from Daraway for the first time since she''d seen her at the [harbormaster]¡¯s. Inside the pub she saw bright red blood pooled on the floor beneath the nearest table. Two of its chairs were kicked over. A third was empty. From the fourth Khaz''s grizzled, falling avalanche of a face rose to meet them over a tankard and a plate full of fishbones attached to two broiled heads.


    He nodded. "Mym. Daraway."


    "What''re ye doin here?"


    "I might ask ye the same but we both know the answer. I heard ye had come through and I figure I can do what''s needed for both of us so ye don''t have te. Ye can get on back te yer da and work on yer girl."


    With neither expression nor inflection Daraway said, "Coming to rescue whoever you think needs it?"


    "Aye and proud te do."


    "Next you''ll save the sun from setting."


    "Aye, I can do that too."


    She shook her head. "You haven''t changed an ounce or an inch."


    "Ye have. Yer gettin old."


    "We are not all dwarves, thank god."


    Mym said, "Thanks for thinkin of me Khaz, but I''m still goin."


    "Fine as goathair," he said with an eye on Daraway. "I''m not here te tell ye what ye ought te do. Hell, I''m in a fix just figurin what I ought te do. But I wanted ye te know what I''m aimin te do so ye can decide yer decisions, what with yer da and all."


    "And I just said I''m goin."


    "Fine, fine. But ye need te give me that." He pointed to her pack where the barrel of [Thayne''s longarm] stuck out of it. He swung his pack up from the floor and unrolled its lid and drew her [longarm] in a long and even motion so the porthole''s light caught its metals and shone their silver in a wave across his face.


    He said, "Reckon ye''ll be wantin this one instead. Found it in the tower where ye left it, mended it up just this mornin."


    She took the rifle, but she would not weep again. Not in front of them both.


    He said, "Careful she don''t jump out of yer hands." He could''ve been talking to either of them. "She''s hungrier than a skunk in spring for vengin."


    "Thanks Khaz," said Mym.


    They all three stood by the table causing a stare among the patrons yet they plainly didn''t care.


    "So here we all are," said Daraway. "Together again."


    "I wouldn''t say tegether," said Khaz. "With all the deep water round here I''m surprised yer folk haven''t filled yer pockets with stone and sent ye swimmin."


    "You no more than I."


    "Don''t start," said Mym.


    Daraway smiled at her. "One cannot start what was never finished, love."


    Khaz drew [Thayne''s longarm] from Mym''s pack and rolled it into his. "Ye done hearin it from me," he said.


    "Already?" said Daraway. "You better show more spirit with the orcs."


    "Ye just wait and see."


    Mym shook her head and smiled at them both. It was like no time had passed at all.


    <hr>


    > +2 [Belongong]: ...plenty have said you don''t know what you''ve got til it''s gone, and it ain''t a wonder but that don''t make it untrue. It''s just a lotta times you gots to get gone to find out who you are and who you wanna be... (2/10)


    > Gained Item: [Mym''s Longarm]


    > Lost Item: [Thayne''s Longarm]

 21. Dam Builder

    He squatted in a ruin that had been revealed by the lake''s draining. Orcs had lived in it once. Before humans came and fired its roof. Before the Mad was made to cover it and bury its floors under yards of sediment. It wasn''t much compared to the [brigadier]''s estate, but to him its four walls of hewn and stacked stone were prouder than the brothers'' rope. The floor they squared was palatial next to Booky''s cell.


    He dug through layers of sediment needed downstream but deposited there. Red sand and silt mixed with crumbling locust husks and curled brown barks and flecks of black metal warmer than the rest, warm even in the shadow of the walls on that cold morning, and all of it coated in the oily film that had covered the reservoir before the dam burst. Now blowing into his eyes by the rising wind. Under his fingernails and up his arms and in his lungs. Piled in drifts inside the ruin and in its yard. By turns obscuring and revealing those who had come before. Erasing and revealing their secrets.


    As he shifted the sediment the sand and dust gave way to black ash and his hand struck something hard. He dug around the hardness and there it was. Its hair was black and braided. Its torn dress disintegrating as his fingers brushed it. Its skeleton arm flung across a cub. He reached and undid the scapula and thought to say something over it, but there was nothing to say and no one to hear. He sat up. His eyes burned. He pressed water out of them to keep more dust from getting into them, but they just burned more. He left the ruin.


    On the terrace above the now unsunken village he used the flat and thin bone to scrape at the ground. There must''ve been soil there once. Black soil, alive and good for growing. No other reason to terrace the land.


    As he dug a small tan cicada crawled past his free hand. He pinched its head and set it aside. He dug some more and another cicada emerged from the sediment. He pinched it too. He pinched and dug until he reached a layer of flattened gray wheat grasses that all pointed toward the sea. For generations they''d lain that way. Like autumn growth suddenly slain by an early frost and locked under snow all winter.


    He pulled up a chunk of grass by its brittle roots. The soil caught within them was bad. Dead as dirt. No point in turning it. He wondered what sort of thing could slay soil. Could crack and peel skin from his fingers and tear his eyes and burn his lungs.


    He dropped the grass and sat with his swollen hands in his lap and watched it tumble away in the breeze. Glad Nizam had lost five hundred orcs asea. Orc knew nothing of the sea. He could not help their deaths. But he knew something of the land. He could help those starving ashore. If only the land would help him.


    He wrapped the cicadas in a strip of cloth and put them inside his shirt. He went down to the riverbank and knelt amid a forest of ashen stumps. Flat topped from sawcuts and no taller than his knees. They had harvested them before the dam went up.


    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    He washed his hands and arms and the bone he''d taken. He drank and spat and drank again. He dunked his head in the flow and held it there. The land was dead. Without it, orcs were dead. He needed to get back to Glad Nizam before she hunted the boarlings until there were no more boarlings, before she fished the sea until there were no more fish. "Musheater," she would say, "teach us to fish," but he didn''t know how to fish. If only there were corns to plant or fruits to pick or humans who needed killing. Musheater of nobody. Better off eating mush with the humans than taking meat out of the mouths of cubs. Better off wandering the wastes of the Madlands, taking whatever it gave. And if nothing was given then submitting his body to a land that could use it. His bloodwater for the aloes and flesh for the flies and bones for the buzzards, thence to the boars and fish and lions that eat them, thence to the orcs starving on the strand. If this wasn''t home then why did he care so much about it? Maybe he needed to die in a place to make it home. Perhaps it was better to die for a home than to live without one.


    A shadow darkened the water. He pulled his head from the river. Saand stood above him.


    She said, "Whose bone is that? Nevermind. Set it aside, anywhere, careful. Do not disturb the sediment. But look. It is all over you. You are going to get sick. Wash it away, wash it quick. Flush your eyes."


    She sprayed his face with her waterskin. It splashed off his forehead and dripped down his chin. "You didn''t tell me before," he burbled.


    "I did not know before. Rinse your shirt. No, do not dry your face with it. Rinse it. How did you survive before you met me? Come on now. Do you have your bag? And your water? Bring them. And your blades also, no, not the bone. Leave that. The steel one and the Skyshard."


    He blinked hard yet his eyes felt as if they were on fire. "You found something."


    "Up one of his tributaries."


    "I found something too."


    "Tell me later. We must move quickly."


    "We can''t grow food here."


    "Later. Come on."


    She ran him upriver. The canyon''s walls stepped up like a staircase made for the human god through layers of speckled gray granite then blue limestone then green shale then yellow sandstone then, at its thick and crumbling rimrock, sandstone as red as a sunset. Along its rim sages and sunbleached junipers jutted as old and indomitable as the rocks they handled and broke within their loving embraces. They passed narrow wadis that wound in and out of sight like monstrous snakes. Their walls overhanging and floors filled with the burning dust. Wind forcing it into every crevice.


    "What did you find?" he said.


    "A survivor."


    <hr>


    > +1 [Awareness]: ...she fed him all kinds of shit. I would''ve called it nonsense back before my unlife. But you spend some time sitting in that purgatory and you learn the way of things. Things like how the now reveals secrets of both past and future to those who care to watch and listen... (2/10)

 22. The Far Side of the World

    They came ashore on the far side of the world in the lee of a tall turret of mortared stone. It rose from the rocky peninsula in the way preferred by humans. Like a pronouncement. Like the only way to occupy a place is to show everyone around that its yours and this is how and why. They''d even named it Here First.


    The [armiger]''s fleet waited at anchor a little farther asea than their two masted packet. Daraway paid off its captain. Khaz looked back at the ship.


    "That''ll be the last time I fool with one of those rotten bellied beasts," he said. "Nothin tween you and drownin but toothpicks and tar. How''d yer uncle stand it?"


    Mym was looking up at the tower. "Don''t know. Da only read the happy bits of his letters. Then they stopped comin."


    "Never again."


    As the [captain] took Daraway''s coins he said, "Y''all are gonna have to unless y''all plan on staying here."


    Khaz shook his head. "Said the owl te the mouse. I''ll swim thank ye."


    "Ye can''t even swim from one side of the flume to the other," said Mym.


    "Maybe not, but I''m damned good at sinkin and I can hold my nose just fine. I''ll walk back."


    She laughed, but she too was glad to be off of the packet. Aboard never felt right. Abovedecks she felt like all the crew stared at her and when she went below nothing was ever as she had left it. The heaving and pitching constantly shifted her powderhorn and lead and cartridge paper, and her needle and heavy canvas thread, and the twisted copper pins she wound into her hair each morning. Sometimes she''d find them halfway down the deck. She had lost her pencil and sketchbook altogether.


    And there were no stones asea.


    She knelt and ran her fingers over the stones on which they stood. Smooth and rounded by a hundred thousand years of the sea''s caress, clacking together like rockfall whenever it raked over them. She [whispered] her thanks and [heard] their welcome. Beside her Khaz did the same.


    Afterward Khaz thrust his beard toward the place where the road ran under the turret. "Yer roadway here is crooked. And there. Risin and sinkin like the ground''s subsidin."


    Daraway tied her purse and looped it under her cloak. "That''s what happens when a folk would rather bury the truth than confront it."


    "Aye?" he said. "What do ye mean?"


    "The road rises where they paved over the bodies of ten thousand orcs. It sinks now that their flesh has fallen to dust."


    His brow rose an inch. "Shit."


    "Orcs were here?" said Mym.


    "Of course. They''re endemic here and in other places inland and farther north. When king''s men first landed and built this fortification many of their bands unified to assail it. Others defended it."


    Mym stopped walking. "Wait. Orcs fought for yer king?"


    "Not mine. My great, great, great grandmother''s."


    Mym looked again at the tower''s top where now some king''s men watched them. Their silver helms and silver tipped spears glinted in the sun between the battlements. "I had no idea."


    "Because none speak of it. Yet the history is all around us all the time. It is written on the land as it is here in the road or in the camps back home. But remembering means admitting the great shame. It is easier to hate others than hate yourself, so that is what most people do."


    Khaz knelt and laid his palm against the pavers. "Ye just tossed em down and paved right over em?"


    "They lay where they died. Piled so high the tower''s defenders could walk from the turret to the shore without touching the ground. Only after all their lands had emptied did the orcs cease their assault. It''s said the sky wept for its fallen children for a hundred days and the rain set their bodies rotting. After the sun came out the stink was so thick you could walk on top of it all the way to the old world. The ten thousand were too waterlogged to burn so the soldiers just laid a new road right over them. The dwarves went home, the humans settled and saved the land, the orcs who''d defended them were shipped across the sea for the priests to redeem. And to fight the king''s other wars, of course."


    "Would that they killed em all," said Mym.


    Daraway looked sidelong at her. "They never needed to. The things that make orcs orcs are not multiplying or great works of mind and art, but fatalism and guts and bitter ends. They made good warriors and that got them killed."


    "Not all of em."


    "Maybe not, but those who remain dwindle. They dwindled for generations amid the king''s conscripts and until last month in the armiger''s camps. I''m fairly certain they''ll go right on dwindling once they see what he''s done to their homeland."


    Mym adjusted her pack across her back. "Sounds like justice served te me."


    Daraway started up the uneven road. "Keep up. The armiger won''t be far."


    Khaz looked at Mym. "Ye feelin alright?"


    "Fine."


    He frowned but said no more.


    The woman''s long legs and lighter pack carried her ahead of the dwarves. She stopped once under a sunworn canvas tarp drawn across wooden poles. She bartered with its [proprietor] for wrapped sausages and several bulbous pink fruits Mym''d never seen. Then they left the tower and the clusters of stone houses and careless gardens behind.


    Beyond Here First and its tall tower the land turned rough and the air hot. They crossed under low rolling clouds and around water standing in pools thick with green algae. Their route followed an overgrown double track of ruts cut down to the bedrock that meandered between the pools. Mosquitos circled them and broke their noses against the dwarves so they tried the woman''s softer skin and one by one streaked off her winking like fireflies and falling to the ground like dying sparks. Rubus grew thick along either side and its curling and wrapping branches were all browsed to their thorns by the [armiger]''s stock. Here and there jack holes ran into the hedges but they never saw a rabbit.


    After five miles Khaz stopped for relief. He turned into the foliage and looked out over the pools and back the way they''d come.


    Mym heard him say, "We''re bein followed."


    She said, "Aye. Just one. Been a few turns back for a few turns now. Don''t go lookin, Dara. Just keep on."


    "You should''ve said something," said Daraway.


    Khaz hopped after as he buttoned his trousers then caught up to the others.


    "We didn''t pass him on the road," said Mym. "Nowhere for lyin along but these thickets."


    "Probably comin from the landin."


    "Ye want te wait?"


    "Rather him come on in daytime."


    She halted and dropped her pack. "Aye. Dara let me have a look at one of those sausages."


    The sun crawled overhead. They baked in the muggy heat.


    "Just about feels like the forge," said Khaz.


    "With nobody billowin."


    Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.


    "Aye. Like the inside of me drawers."


    After a sausage and half of a second Khaz said, "He stopped. Just went into some bushes."


    "Probably seen us waitin. Ye want te go back te him?"


    "We''re losin day."


    "That a yes or a no?"


    "I said before that I don''t want him comin up on us in the dark. Isn''t nowhere te step off te get behind him."


    "We can outpace him."


    Daraway said, "Excuse me little friends. If you want to walk all night you can go right ahead, but you''ll be two not three for I do not have soles of stone."


    Khaz eyed her stout shoes. "Ye always were full of shit."


    Daraway smiled at him. "But I feel so faint master Khaz. Won''t you carry me? It must be this air, this heat."


    "Heat? Shit. Ye were born in a crucible."


    Mym turned and hollered, "Come on out of there. We see ye."


    Two hundred yards back a thicket shook.


    "Come on. We got places te be."


    The thicket shook again and a child crawled up onto the road.


    "Hell Mym. It''s just a wee girl."


    The girl had green leaves stuck in her hair and blackberry bits smeared in the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were dark and her hair unkempt and she wore a tattering poncho over holed trousers. She came up slowly at first then took a big breath and came all at once and didn''t stop until she stood an arm''s length from Mym.


    "What''re ye doin followin us? Don''t ye know how that looks? Where''s yer ma?"


    "Don''t got no ma."


    "Well I''m sorry te hear it, but we''re hard pressed te get where we''re goin and don''t have time or patience te be playin whatever game yer at."


    "Y''all don''t seem hard pressed."


    "Well we are."


    "Whatever." The girl stiffened her mouth and turned her face up to theirs though they nearly stood the same height. "Look, I ain''t playing no game. I just wanted to tell y''all that y''all are being followed."


    "Aye, we marked ye miles ago."


    "Not me. There''s a man."


    "There wasn''t anyone between us and ye."


    "There was. I saw him myself. A skinny man, all done up in a suit like he was going to some dance or something."


    "There wasn''t any man."


    "There was."


    "Ye believe this?"


    "No," said Khaz.


    "But there was. His skin was all weird and his hair all growned long like a lady''s."


    "Ye don''t have te worry bout no weird men so long as Khaz o Naz is nearby."


    Mym looked at Khaz then at the girl. "Listen lil girl, ye know where this road goes?"


    "Yeah."


    "Ye saw who came along it yesterday?"


    "Yeah they was hard to miss."


    "We can''t take care of ye. We aren''t yer parents and we aren''t goin anywhere ye want te be."


    "I ain''t askin to be tookin care of."


    "Good."


    Mym turned to Khaz and jerked her head. They started walking. The girl walked with them.


    "What''re y''all called?"


    "Dwarves," said Khaz.


    "I knowed that. I seen dwarves before."


    "Sure ye have," said Mym.


    "All the time."


    "Sure."


    "So what do y''all call each other?"


    "Dwarves," said Khaz.


    Daraway said, "The grumpy one''s Mym and the other one''s Khaz."


    "Both seem pretty grumpy to me lady."


    "I''m Daraway. What''s your name, child?"


    "Cousins."


    "Not much of a name," said Khaz.


    "Khaz ain''t neither."


    "Think it''s time ye went on home," he said.


    "Let her come along," said Mym. "We can do like we did with the last one."


    "Oy that''s an idea. Think she''ll fry up?"


    "Aye."


    "Not much fat on her."


    "We can stretch it out with the lad''s leftovers. She''ll fry up nice for brekkie."


    "Y''all won''t eat me," said the girl.


    "Ye goin te carry her?" said Khaz.


    "I don''t want te," said Mym.


    "Shit, me neither."


    "We could just do her here. Dress her down and cook up her haunches and smoke those stringy lil arms. Less te carry that way."


    "Alright. Ye got the salt?"


    "Sure." Mym swung her pack down and around and slowly started unrolling the lid, making sure the girl got a good look at the blued barrel of her [longarm].


    "Hey lady they wouldn''t eat me right?"


    Daraway watched the dwarves as Khaz drew a flat metal file out of his tool roll and worked it over the adze of his [alpenstock]. "Truly I believe they might."


    The girl put her dirty chin in her dirty hand for a moment. "Nah I don''t think they will. Look, I''m Cousins and I''m gonna show y''all how to get where y''all need to get." She held a tiny hand out for shaking.


    Mym stuck her pinky in a tiny box of salt and licked it off the tip. "We don''t need any help."


    "Y''all are gonna."


    "There''s only one road te follow."


    "For now. But it don''t go alone forever, and neither should y''all. Not with that fancy man tailing y''all."


    Khaz stopped his filing and looked at the sky then at Mym. "If we keep this up and we''ll be here all night," he said.


    Mym threw the salt back into her pack. "When ye fall behind we aren''t waitin for ye."


    Cousins pulled her unshaken hand back into her poncho. "I won''t fall behind."


    They walked on. Daraway then the dwarves then the girl.


    A hundred paces later the girl said, "Y''all really didn''t see that man?"


    "There''s no man," said Mym.


    Khaz shook his head.


    Three feet above the others Daraway cast her eyes back along the track and over the fens on either side.


    ***


    They carried on between the pools and though the sun was hidden its heat sat on everything like the backside of a great fevered glutton. It curled the weeds between the fens and set the dwarves huffing like they worked the bellows. Cousins took off her poncho and carried it wedged under her naked armpit and sweat off her back soaked the top of her trousers. Daraway only seemed to get taller and her legs longer and her gait smoother. She walked like a [dancer] and the way her hips swayed reminded Mym of the fire at the heart of the forge. As if she was an oscillating flame wrapped in a skin of sweet smelling wax.


    Toward sunset whole assemblies of frogs set to arguing. Cousins had fallen a few steps behind. She called up, "Y''all got anything to eat?"


    "Not for ye," said Mym.


    Daraway dug out half a sausage and waited along the track.


    Mym shook her head as she passed and again when she heard Cousins say, "Thanks."


    They stopped there and set a fire out of bramble trimmings and the girl ate and slapped at the mosquitos. By moonsrise Daraway slept next to their fire with Cousins'' head in her lap and Mym and Khaz [talked] in the low tones saved for stones.


    She said, "We don''t want her around. Not where we''re goin and what we have te do. It''d be a cruelty."


    "Bigger cruelty te abandon her out here."


    "Now maybe. Didn''t need te be, and ye know we can''t take her farther. It''ll only get harder."


    "What do ye suggest we do?"


    "Should''ve never let her come."


    "Talkin that way isn''t solvin anythin. How bout I just go on alone. I told ye I can do it for both of us."


    "Don''t start that again."


    "I''m just sayin it''ll fix both problems."


    "It''s what yer sayin that''s the problem. Now and before when ye told her she didn''t have nothin te worry bout."


    "She don''t so long as I''m here."


    She shot him a look. "And the rest of us?


    "What bout ye?"


    "Dara can''t face down her boogeyman?"


    "I don''t know. I don''t know her as well as ye."


    "And me?"


    He laughed. "I see what this''s bout. It''s just a way of speakin."


    "And a way of thinkin. One I don''t care for."


    "Fine."


    "I mean it. Ye say those things and it makes ye think those things. And thinkin those things makes you say shit like I should just stay behind and see bout my da. Or just now sayin I should allow ye go and do what''s mine by rights te do."


    "I said fine." But he couldn''t leave it. "Ye goin te be like this the whole time she''s here?"


    "Who?"


    "That woman."


    "I''ll be how I want te."


    "Ye tell her about us?"


    "Isn''t no us te tell about."


    He threw the rind of his fruit into the fire. "Suppose not." He rolled into his blanket and onto his side and spoke no more.


    She shook her head at his back and laid on hers and looked up hoping to see new stars but she saw only the wisps of clouds moving sideways across the sky''s black bowl. Like a siege cauldron flipped upside down, seething and smoking boiling tar and ready to pour across the blistering land.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Stonespeaking]: ...having gone te the far side of the world she''s spoke with stones who''ve never known a dwarf and ye got te wonder what tales they told... (4/10)


    > +1 [Vengefulness]: ...vengeance is a core tenant of their culture. For humans it''s a passing thing, but for dwarves it''s a foundational way of being. Perhaps they can stand it because they live so long... (9/10)

 23. The Survivor

    Their footsteps echoed off canyonwalls and side chambers that hadn''t heard an orc in half a century. Not since the invaders had come, for these were the hoodoos that had glowered as men paddled up in the dark as silent as clouds occluding the moons and with daggers in their teeth and daggers in their eyes to catch an orc between the houses and pull an edge across his throat. This was the rock that gave no warning when men stole across it toward the sow wrapped in a blanket with her cub beside her, watching the bottoms of the clouds and hoping to share the stories written in the stars. It turned its rough cheek to the sudden wrapping and smothering, the knee against her throat, the cub''s whining in the blanket as thrusting knives wetted it. This was the river whose eternal hymn hid the heavy steps to the houses. It sang when they lit their hissing fuses one, two, three and they rolled their firebombs through doors of hide and of cloth to explode into conflagrations roaring fiercer than any lion, and men and a dwarf roaring also as they ran to the doorways to knife any who survived the blasts, the fires, the smoke. Smoke to stop a heart before the heat boiled it and flame scored it. Smoke that killed as surely as the blasts. It sang as the fires died and the orcs died. Their blood feeding it and succoring the junipers.


    Orc and Saand passed a hollow block of the same kind of concrete that had formed the dam.


    The shorthorn gestured to it. "That is their well. The reason they stopped him up and made him ill. Maybe why your kind were shipped across the sea. I know you would ask, but I have no answers."


    "I wouldn''t ask," he said.


    She looked at him and studied his face. "I suppose not."


    "You have something to say."


    She hesitated. "If you opened up to those around you you would not feel as you do."


    "And how do I feel?"


    "Alone."


    He put his chin down and tried not to wipe the heels of his hands against his burning eyes. "Missing the mark today."


    "You may not share but Ogaz does."


    "Not anymore he won''t."


    "He is only trying to help."


    "Just like you."


    "Yes."


    He saw the hard edges of a slot rending the wall ahead. "Like you helped me through the rite."


    "Yes."


    "Maybe if you hadn''t I''d feel different about being here and about the others back on the beach."


    "You know that is not true."


    "I only know what your tonic told me."


    She shook her head, baubles quivering from her horns. "And you know the land is poisoned. That it now poisons the air also. Glad Nizam stays and slays her home, and her home slays she who stays."


    "It''s your home too."


    She stopped and turned to him. "I am he and he is me. So long as he lives I live. So long as I live he does. Have you accepted such a fate? Are you willing to? Are your kin?"


    He didn''t say anything.


    She nodded up a slot. "This way."


    The slot twisted with a milky creek dribbling along its ramped bottom. They ascended its mud. Hands on either wall. They leapt over frothy pools and crept under huge boulders that hung five or ten or fifty feet up and always looked ready to fall on their heads. He wondered whose heads they awaited. Upon the rimrock ran the perfectly level black highline left by the lake. A gap in the western wall revealed a white dagger of sky that seemed to pierce the rock. It pointed at a hoodoo decorated by a hundred handprints of red and green and brown paints. In places they''d been chipped away with chisel and hammer, sharded and scattered like the rest of orcdom. Whoever had started their defacing never finished.


    As they came around the hoodoo they saw a cave beckoning. They scrambled to the entrance. Its ceiling was wet and its ground sprouted green grasses and a few date palms no higher than Orc''s waist. Ten paces in they ducked through a curtain of vines creeping and roots dropping from holes high in the ceiling. Cool water dripped from them onto his scalp as he crawled beneath. Long yellow rays of sunlight filtered through the holes as keen as blades, and in every place where they lit the floor sprouted masses of greenery that stretched upward bearing white orchids and purple lotuses and orange lilies.


    Somewhere ahead a voice wailed.


    He drew the [Skyshard]. "Lead if you know the way. I''m right behind you."


    He followed her through a fissure so tight they had to wiggle through on their backs while water dripped coldly onto their faces. On the far side black lichen covered the cave''s walls and swallowed daylight''s last gleaming. She grabbed his hand and led him through a low passage to a chamber tall enough for them to stand upright. A carpet of mushrooms the size of fingers grew along the circumference and their caps glowed dimly green to light her legs and hands and chin and the lowest part of the walls. At the chamber''s center Ogaz knelt in a shallow pool that perfectly captured each point of light as if this were the place where all the stars of the night sky hid from day. Orc felt as though his next step would cast him adrift in the heavens.


    He saw a dwarf sat there amid the reflections. The dwarf looked sickly in the dim sheen. His hair flowed into a beard that wrapped twice around his body and curled on the chamber''s floor where a cluster of mushrooms sprouted from each of its strands as if the alchemy of that place transmuted his tissues to others. As if the differences between things living and dying and dead are entirely and merely down to arrangement. This dwarf moved from one to the next and was very close to the last. He clutched to his chest a metal box with dented hinges and panels and a smashed mechanism.


    Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.


    Ogaz said, "Ogaz thinking dwarf''s wanting death, but who can tell?" and he levered the box''s door with the tip of a [javelin] he''d made from driftwood and sea glass.


    The dwarf twisted it away and said something in his guttural stonetalk.


    Ogaz put the [javelin]''s shaft across the dwarf''s neck and pushed him back. "See? Wanting it."


    "Can you speak to him?" said Saand.


    Orc said, "I don''t know dwarf. I can try man talk."


    "Ask him what that is," said Ogaz.


    Orc said to the dwarf. "Show me the box."


    The dwarf glowered at him but didn''t move from the wood pressed against his neck.


    "Give it to me,¡± said Orc.


    "Never." The pool rippled away from the dwarf and sent waves of faint green light shimmering up the walls like aurorae above a boreal winterscape.


    Orc hefted the [Skyshard] where the dwarf could see. "I''ll open it for you."


    The dwarf''s eyes widened and his mouth opened amid his wild beard. He reached toward the tool and drew a trembling finger across the top of its pick. "Ye brought her back te me?"


    Orc smelled the dwarf''s foul breath and he saw the bits of mushroom caught in his beard. The dwarf''s eyes held a kind of wildness made wilder by the spectral glow. Orc didn''t know him, but he knew who he was. [Builder] of the dam. [Builder] of the well. Something was wrong with his face.


    "I''m keeping it for someone," said Orc.


    "Who?"


    "Waz."


    The dwarf nodded. His whole body seemed to move with it. "Explains how an orc got me shard. How''s that old stonekisser?"


    "Unwell."


    "Expected as much. He likes nothin more than gettin in trouble, and that lass of his is a walkin talkin cave in."


    He pointed the [Skyshard] at the box. "What do you have there?"


    "That''s a story we don''t have time for."


    "Waz wants to know."


    "Oy Waz. How I miss him. How''s the old dwarf?"


    He looked at Saand and Ogaz. They looked back with brows furrowed though they couldn''t understand what was being said.


    "Unwell."


    "Aye that''s te be expected. Always was a troublemaker."


    "You don''t seem much better."


    "Me? I''m fine. Never been better. Stouter than a tapped keg of Stour''s stout. Ye didn''t happen te bring any? I''ve been drinkin creek water for as long as I can remember."


    "Tell me how you came by the box."


    "This thing? Workin on me dams. The concrete kept dissolvin after it set. I built two of em te be sure and sure enough they melted like snow in sunshine. I told the armiger it was no good. Somethin in the water made it untamable. Was a relief te tell it true. Never sat right with me what they did to yer kind. Never sat right. The brigadier didn''t like it none either."


    Orc leaned forward. "Who?"


    "Who what?"


    "You were saying something about a brigadier."


    "Is she with ye?"


    He shook his head and muttered, "If only you knew."


    "Oy? What ye meanin?"


    "Tell me what''s in the box."


    The dwarf trembled and started talking faster. "Ye won''t believe it. Ye won''t. It was here in this cave. They must''ve set it up here. Did ye ever see the canyon fore we finished the dam?"


    "No."


    "Aye well it took some doin te get one te finally set and not run out te sea like melted wax. Ye missed quite a sight. This here was infusin the headwaters and yer lot were growin anythin they wanted. Everythin they wanted. Ye never seen such beauty in the color green."


    Orc studied the dwarf¡¯s face for sign of deceit. "It''s all dead now."


    "Aye well that''s what happens when ye plug up a river. I told em not te. I told em no amount of crude was worth a whole nation of folk. One of the four great nations no less. I told em so. The brigadier, she''s a woman of grace. She and me tried to tell the armiger, but there''s no gettin through te him. I can¡¯t tell ye how many of his boys he got killed just divertin water ahead of buildin. Don''t matter now though. I got it. What it did for the orcs it''ll do for us. Waz''ll be thrilled. He''s been goin on bout a granddaughter for as long as I can remember, and I got the longest memory in the delvin."


    "Show me."


    "Show ye what?"


    "What''s in the box."


    "Oh ye got te see it. The way it glows and shifts is like nothin else. Here." The dwarf leaned back and looked down at the box and grunted. His arm and the box it held stayed close to his chest. He grunted again. "Ye may need te help me, dwarf friend."


    He took the dwarf''s hand. It was as cold as the water in which he sat and as tough and useless as a tumor. The fingers didn''t bend. Nor the wrist. He nearly unsocketed the elbow to move it an inch. If the dwarf felt pain he gave no sign.


    The box slid into the dwarf''s lap.


    "The damned armiger made me do it," the dwarf was saying. "He promised it''d be mine after. We need it more than him, more than the shard even. It''ll change everythin. There''ll be lads and lasses again. I tried leavin te take it back te the delvin, but this place. This place."


    He watched the dwarf shudder and cover his face with his good hand.


    The dwarf said, "I can''t walk. Ye must take it, dwarf friend. An orc dwarf friend. I wished I seen Waz''s face when he met ye. Did I tell ye how much trouble he used te get into way back when the glacier was still lickin the nose of the delvin? That old dwarf''s half the reason it''s half melted."


    Orc levered the [Skyshard]''s spike into the mechanism and pressed his weight into it and with a wretched shriek of metal on metal the box snapped open. He reached in, then looked in, then said, "It''s empty."


    Ogaz peered over his shoulder and said, "It''s empty."


    The dwarf never looked. Perhaps his neck no longer bent. "He must''ve taken it. It doesn''t matter. The secret''s here. This place, this water. It''s here."


    The dwarf cupped the cave''s water in his good hand and giggled as it leaked between his fingers and down his wrist then forearm then dripped from his elbow back into the pool.


    "What does he say?" said Saand.


    "He''s mad," said Orc.


    "Yes, but what does he say?"


    To the dwarf Orc said, "Tell me what was in the box."


    "The secret te life."


    "Alright."


    "The bleedin orcstone."


    "The orcstone."


    "Aye. But it doesn''t matter. Orcstone, elfstone, manstone, dwarfstone. They don''t matter. Shard of the sky, stone of the earth. Ye need te make life from death? All ye need''s this." The dwarf ran his tongue along the water''s path down his upraised hand and wrist and forearm


    Ogaz said, "Ogaz learns sticking in human camps. Maybe Ogaz sticks him some? Maybe helps get him talking straight?"


    "Thought you didn''t want to be like them," said Orc.


    "Ogaz doesn''t. They''re dreadful."


    "There are as many sorts of humans as there are orcs."


    Ogaz looked at him. "Funny thing Orc says."


    He frowned. "It was, wasn''t it?"


    Ogaz ran a finger across the end of his broken tusk. "Maybe Orc does the sticking."


    The dwarf suddenly sat up straight and his pupils filled his eyes. "We''re dyin. The decay is killin us. Killin us here, killin us there. Ye see? It''s comin out of the black heart. We can''t get te it this way. It doesn''t go deep enough. I tried already. Ye got te go through the mountain. Got te go te the source. Let''s get goin, Waz. Bring yer stock. Wait. Who''s that there? Oy orc. That ain''t yers. Give it te me."


    The dwarf reached for the [Skyshard].


    Orc laid a palm against the dwarf''s chest to still him. He saw the dwarf shudder as if struck and his head fell forward and he coughed and coughed again. He felt something dark and wet come up all over his hand. The dwarf fell against him and slid off sideways to land facedown in the pool. Water filled his open mouth.


    Saand touched his neck. "He''s dead."


    Ogaz sighed. "Ogaz saying dwarf wanting death, but no one believes."


    "Did any of that make sense to you?" said Saand.


    "Some," said Orc. If he could recover the [orcstone] he could heal the land. His folk could grow the food they needed as their forebears had done. Never seen such beauty in the color green he''d said. He wiped the dwarf''s insides from his soiled hand and he felt sharp grains like tiny stone pebbles scraped his skin there.


    "What did he say?" said Saand.


    "I''ll tell you on the way."


    "On the way where?"


    "Back to Glad Nizam."


    <hr>


    > +1 [Renown]: ...that tusker always hangin on him said he slew a dwarf underground without any help from anyone. Little me said that''s like a snake killin an eagle midflight but I guess that happens too maybe, and if anyone could do it it''d be him... (1/10)

 24. South

    The rising sun bronzed the backs of their necks and stilted their shadows out before them as they walked the rutted track out of the boglands and onto a high plateau. There camped the grand army of the [armiger]. A massive pavilion with opal and blue panels stood at the camp¡¯s center. Thousands of men were thronging it and chanting something while thousands more jogged up from the tents pitched about and thousands more tended to horses and squatted under tarps and stood around dungfires that flared the outskirts of the camp.


    "Wish this lot had come te the span," said Khaz. He cupped a hand to his ear. "What¡¯re they sayin?"


    "North," said Mym.


    "Why''s that?"


    "Can''t tell. What do ye see Dara?"


    "Those are the armiger''s colors, but I don''t see him anywhere. Wait."


    The chanting erupted into a cheer that rose and as it rose Daraway pushed onto her toes and tilted her chin to peer over the crowd.


    "Oh," she said. Her heels dropped.


    "What ye see?" said Mym.


    "Nothing nice."


    Mym jumped and she saw over shoulders and through raised fists and spears and swords. Beside the pavilion an orcish sow and her cub were raised on a post and hanging in the morning sun. Their wrists were bound and tied to the post''s head and their heads sagged forward and ribcages bulged over hollow bellies. Someone had driven a [soldier''s knife] through the sow and into the post.


    "Well?" said Khaz.


    Mym watched Cousins skip light footed up the rut ahead and dip for a sprig of prairie fire and tie it up in her hair.


    "Ye''ll see in a minute."


    They pushed through the throng as it decamped. The [armiger]''s retainers loaded the pavilion''s cushions and furniture into hand carts and horse carts. Stakes were pulled and it collapsed and revealed to them the crucified sow and cub.


    Khaz''s hand snapped around the nearest wrist of the nearest [retainer]. "Where''s yer armiger?"


    "At the big tent little man."


    He nodded at the post. "He know yer doin that?"


    The [retainer] laughed and tried shaking his wrist away but Khaz''s fingers were grown swinging hammers and shifting blocks of stone larger than any man.


    "Lemme go."


    "He know?"


    "Course he knows. He''s who strung em up there."


    Khaz looked at the [retainer] with an expression cast from black iron. The man whimpered and wilted onto his knee. His hand purpled and swelled like an eggplant in summer. Passing soldiers bearing pikes and shields and blades slowed to watch. Over their shoulders peered camp followers who kept their wares in bags or on beasts or between their legs.


    "Ye best take us te him," said Khaz.


    "My wrist," the [retainer] gasped.


    Khaz looked into and through the gathering crowd. "Ye show me where he''s at."


    Mym put her hand on Khaz''s shoulder. "Oy Khaz, this big tent''s got te be his, aye? Leave off the poor man fore he melts into the ground."


    Khaz released his hold and the [retainer] rolled onto his back in the dirt and held his hand against his chest and looked at it wide eyed as if it was some alien thing growing out of his arm.


    Khaz shook his head. "They shouldn''t be killin no lads. Lads don''t come easy."


    "They do for us," said Daraway. She had Cousins under her arm.


    "Still no reason for that."


    "There certainly is."


    "I can''t see it."


    "You will the moment this army finds what''s left of theirs."


    "Ye speakin in mysteries woman."


    Daraway shrugged. ¡°There¡¯s no mystery here. Sometimes war is about power or land or politics. Other times it''s just about killing."


    Suddenly a [knight] in silvered armor on a steed too large for the spare land put his shadow across them and removed his visored helm. "I''ll be damned and short two copper for it. He said you were here and here you are. Dwarves. Real as daylight and fitted for fighting. Hail dwarves. Fall out with me. The armiger''ll be coming down to the road forthwith." He nodded at Cousins. "That little one with you?"


    "You bet," said Cousins.


    "Not supposed te be," said Mym.


    "She''s with us," said Daraway.


    The [knight] eyed Cousins then Mym then Daraway. "Take care she don''t get lost ma''am. This here''s a big army in a harsh country with a lotta men, and some of em were made worse than the land."


    Mym looked sideways at Cousins. "And there are orcs."


    The [knight] donned his helm and yanked its base back and forth until he had both eyes centered in its narrow slit. "Them too, but they don''t stand much chance with us here. Not meaning to offend you. I heard about your folk and them on the seaway span. But we''ve been keeping them in their place for generations and dwarves hadn''t seen them since when?"


    "Been a century at least," said Daraway.


    "See? Like I said, not offending, just stating facts. Come take my stirrup and I''ll walk you through this mess."


    They walked beside the [knight]. Mym nodded at the crucified sow as they passed by. "I see ye caught some already. Ye find a tall and gray one? Ugly like, and carryin an ax like mine, but all along here is black metal shined up like obsidian."


    The [knight] shook his head. "No. Only them two so far. She came ranging for food, so we know they ain''t got none. Once the armiger put the knife to her cub she told where they''re at. We''re heading there now."


    "He did it hisself then?" said Khaz.


    "Of course. You don''t leave that sort of thing to your subordinates," said the [knight].


    Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    A group of men and women passed riding big browns and blacks and palominos. Each had a navy band tied around their arm and a plugged skin strung across their leather jackets. All wore long blades with flattened points. The skin of their cheeks and foreheads and hands were pallid and scarred. Some were missing eyebrows. They called to each other and laughed as they jogged their horses past expeditionaries afoot.


    Cousins was all ears and eyes for them. "Veterans from the rising front,¡± she called them. ¡°You can tell by them colors. They got ether in them skins and spread it all down their swords and light em on fire to fight the deaduns."


    "Ye hear that Mym?" said Khaz.


    "Aye. Good way te ruin steel."


    The [knight] said, "Those burning blades keep the risen well away from your mountain. Look smart now. Here comes the armiger."


    She heard the horse behind and would have turned to look but for the pride she carried and the bitterness. His stallion came alongside, big and whiter than snow in sunlight and cantering with high knees and neck arched and eyes ahead as if all other horses and riders were beneath notice. He passed at a yard in knee boots and chaps of dusty black leather and a black mail cuirass whose rings were chalky from time asea and they seemed to match the faint speckling on the stallion''s haunch. He wore a plain [shortsword] at his hip and a dwarven [shortarm] stuck into a holster at his armpit with a grip of curved ivory and across his back a [long spear] with a wooden shaft wrapped in canvas and tipped with a leaf of plain steel. His eyes were blue like her da''s and creased in their corners from past happiness. Mym meant to speak first but his eyes changed her world with a single look so her mouth opened yet she said nothing.


    "Sir," said the [knight].


    The [armiger] slowed his mount. "Malv. This them?"


    "Yes sir."


    "A fighting pair."


    "Trio,¡± Mym managed to say.


    ¡°What¡¯s that?¡±


    ¡°We''re three," she said. She turned to Daraway but Daraway was gone and Cousins also.


    The [armiger] didn''t seem to have heard. "If two is all they could spare then two is enough for us. A dwarf in summer is worth ten men in winter. You two can follow a trace over bare rock?"


    "No such thing as bare rock," said Mym.


    "What does that mean little one?"


    "It means we can follow yer trace."


    "Good." He turned to the [knight]. "Find them a place of honor in the vanguard, then join me for the day. Friends." He nodded and reached back and slapped the stallion''s hindquarter and cantered ahead.


    As they watched him go Khaz said, "That it?"


    "What do ye mean?" she said.


    "Nothin. Where''d Daraway slip off te?"


    "I didn''t see."


    The [knight] held out his gauntleted hand. "Come along. The armiger wants your eyes and ears at the front."


    Mym let go of the stirrup. "Go on ahead. We need te find our friend."


    "As you wish, but it''s a long way to the front of the column. Don''t wait too long or you''ll spend most of the day just catching it." He trotted his mount after the [armiger].


    She stepped off the track and Khaz after her. "Which way ye reckon?" he said.


    She watched a group of youths pass on small burros whose manes were stiff like razors and whose eyelashes were long and sad. They straddled the beasts with their feet nearly dragging the ground and the boys talked loudly of the orc sow and what they would''ve done with her were they the [armiger]. The girls carefully kept their faces blank. She wanted to tell them such a fine man would never do the things they boasted.


    "Oy Mym?"


    "We''ll start at the front and work te the back."


    ***


    All day they searched the mileslong column as it snaked its way north. The setting sun yellowed the west and the shadow of the world darkened the east and the expedition halted and combatted the coming night with ten thousand flickering cookfires across the stretched out landscape. Of the [magistrate] they found no sign.


    Mym unslung her pack and sat on the ground. "Guessin she don''t want te be found."


    Khaz sat beside her. "We can''t find a familiar face among friends but ye intend te find that orc in this wide wild country in how long? Ye left eight weeks of meat for yer da and ye''ve spent two already gettin here, and ye''ll spend two more gettin back."


    "We''ll find him."


    "Don''t know, Mym. Look around. Shit goes on forever and ever. Ye ever seen a sky so big?"


    She looked up. A few stars twinkled in her side vision and vanished when she sought them. "Aye, standin atop the mountain."


    Khaz chuckled. "That was a day. I¡¯ve never been so cold.¡±


    ¡°Me neither.¡±


    ¡°Or knackered.¡±


    ¡°Nope.¡±


    ¡°I about walked straight over the icefall in that whiteout."


    "Ye would''ve if I hadn''t grabbed ye."


    ¡°Aye yer a hell of a ropemate. I don¡¯t think I would¡¯ve known I missed the ground til I became part of it. Can¡¯t say I recollect much sky te be seen up there.¡±


    "Not that day but I''ve been back up on mornins where ye can see clear up te the black heart and down te the span and over te the great southern sea."


    "Aye?"


    "Aye."


    "I didn''t know that."


    "There''s plenty ye don''t know about me."


    He nodded. "That''s so."


    She tore a strip of smoked meat and passed it to him. He thanked her and they watched the sky turn in colors.


    "Look at this place," he said.


    "Can''t miss it."


    "All these big folk in their hundreds and thousands and even with all the shit they lug along they don''t even fill a corner of it."


    "That they don''t."


    "Maybe ye should''ve gone scrapin the black heart for shard after all."


    "Maybe."


    They sat awhile in silence.


    "Remember the tent?" she said.


    He laughed. "I''ll never forget. Yer da and Thayne never should''ve trusted them lowlander beans."


    "They couldn''t get enough of em."


    "Curled my nails right off my toes they did. We were lucky there weren''t no tinder or they''d''ve blown the top right off the mountain."


    "I never told ye I hid da''s matches."


    "Aye?"


    "Aye. Ye know how he gets around fireworks."


    "Him and Thayne both. There was no savin that tent. Ye should''ve just left it up there."


    Now she laughed. "I burned it."


    "Ye didn''t."


    "I did. Those stains weren''t ever comin out and I sure as hell wasn''t goin te sleep in it again."


    He laughed and she laughed and she felt as if they were back in the white mountain''s valley after a long hunt. For a while they set to remembering to forget the now. The now would still be there tomorrow and when tomorrow came they''d forget the remembering.


    After supper she unfurled her bedroll and laid in it. She rolled on her side and watched the western orange and violet explosion over the high desert, where great blackening clouds cruised on a bloodred floe of light chased by the bright and steady evening star. She imagined the colonizers who had come before and she wondered at the arrogance of anyone who thought such a place needed saving, or that people born therein needed redeeming.


    Later Khaz snored loud enough to shake the stars from the sky and between his rumblings she heard Daraway walk up to their camp. Both moons hung behind her and Mym couldn''t see her face.


    "Evenin."


    "Evening."


    "Glad ye found us."


    "Just followed the racket."


    "And earlier? Ye get lost?"


    She didn''t answer.


    "I know ye didn''t. Somethin''s between ye and the armiger. Ye don''t need te say but I wish ye had given some warnin. Where''d ye put the girl?"


    "She sleeps."


    "Come on, there''s room for ye here."


    "I should go back. I just wanted to check on you."


    "Then come on down here and check."


    The dark figure of the woman hung there a moment and then descended to her as if stepping out of the heavens.


    The dying cookfires glowed all across the darkened land. The million stars arced slowly overhead as cold and inexorable as a glacier and the land fell away from their coming as if embarrassed by its dim imitation of their majesty. The whole earth dove and gathered its dark as if to escape their sight and smother its shame. Mym watched the sky and wondered if she would ever see a more beautiful thing, and she hated herself for seeing it while her da had only a wall and a ceiling for looking at.


    By first light Daraway was gone.


    Khaz sat up in the gloaming and unwound from his beard and blanket and shook his head and blinked at the ground. He turned to look at her.


    She jumped up and kicked dust over the place they''d lain and said, "Let''s get on. Da isn''t gettin better while we''re shootin shit."


    <hr>


    > +1 [Belonging]: ...I reckon it''s as much about who you''re with as it is where you are or when. Speaking only for myself I knew I was gettin farther and farther from where I was born but around them dwarves and that right lady I felt more and more at home... (3/10)

 25. A Fighter and a Farmer

    They floated the tree boat toward the sea. He watched the reflection of the sky caught in the river as it slid against the slot''s walls, and the water folding and flattening and stretching the moons there. He thought about the things the dwarf had said about the [brigadier] and the land. He thought about them for a long time.


    The sky began to light and he watched Saand sit on the stern with an oar dipped to keep the boat straightways between the narrows. Her eyes moved from the coloring sky to the twisting cliffs. She had a spot of white that came down from her black nose and looped around the side of her mouth. It looked almost pink and her blue eyes looked gold in the first light. The blossoms along her brow were all closed up. Ready to open again with the coming sun.


    They turned the maw and he turned and squinted against the half sun directly before them, bright and eternal and cresting the charcoal sea to set the sky blazing. The maw''s exit rose crooked and tall and shadowed from the orb''s relentless glare that reddened its rocky tops and moved water and wind to shape its walls.


    He leapt over the side and dragged the boat onto the sand. Thousands of orcs lay here and there in groups. Some stirred with the new light. Many didn''t move at all. Glad Nizam''s [captain] lay near the maw with his head propped up on his dwarven helmet. When he saw them he stood up wrapped in a blanket and walked over. "Red blooded musheater," he said. "What you bring me?"


    "We must see Glad Nizam," said Orc.


    "She''s not here. You didn''t bring nothing?"


    "Tell me where to find her."


    "Look around. You got any food we got need for it. Desperate need. See them over there? They was strong two days ago, gave their helping to some who''s starving. Now thems who ate it are starving, and thems who gave up are starving too."


    "Orcs fishing up many fish before," said Ogaz.


    "Cubs here borned and died of hunger since then. The fish all been pulled up. Sea stars went next, then cucumbers and slugs. All''s left is kelp. Go on and cast a net, musheater. Maybe you got something we don''t, but I tell you nothing else is coming up. Everyone here''s starving and soon to die unless you got something for us. Come on. You brought the water now bring the bounty."


    "I have no food."


    The [captain] clutched his blanket closer about his shoulders. "Come on. I didn''t mean it earlier, calling you red blooded. Come on."


    Orc stared at him. "Glad Nizam abandoned you."


    "She didn''t abandon nobody. She''s scouting for other means, just like you. What''d you find?"


    "Nothing. And there won''t be nothing coming, either. Not from here. The Madlands are dead. Humans killed them with whatever they were pulling out of the ground. It''s blowing all over now. You couldn''t grow debt in its dirt."


    "You a fighter and a farmer now?"


    "I was one before the other."


    The [captain] looked at the maw and the Mad''s lessened flow where it met the sea. His brown skin flaked under his eyes and his breathing came heavily. "I don''t believe you."


    "You all need to bark back asea and find someplace else. Somewhere healthy where humans aren''t, though I know of no such place"


    "You told Glad Nizam to burn her ships."


    "Good thing no one listens to me."


    "Where the hell we gonna go? This is our home."


    "Somewhere you won''t die." Orc looked over at the orcs laying on the strand all shriveled up like beans in summer. He thought he saw someone and he started toward them.


    Ogaz walked beside him. "Orc not telling captain of dwarf and orcstone."


    "No."


    "No trusting."


    "Not him."


    "And Glad Nizam?"


    "I''ll let you know when we find her."


    They came to a group of a dozen orcs and sows and one greenskin. The orcs and sows showed their backs when they saw him. The greenskin just sat in the sand and watched him come. Orc towered over him. "You."


    The greenskin winced and showed his little needle teeth and put his shaking hands before his face. "No Orc. No hurt. No fight here."


    Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    "I know you." He had been one of Booky''s.


    The greenskin shook his head and his long ears waggled. "No, no, yew don''t know little me and little me don''t know yew."


    Without thinking he picked the greenskin up off of the strand in a two armed embrace. The greenskin''s little clawed feet swung free and tears streamed down his face, and everyone from the [captain] to the dozen orcs to Ogaz and Saand watched with mouths open.


    He set him down and knelt beside him. "How''d you get here?"


    The greenskin immediately collapsed on the strand. "Legs don''t work anymore maybe."


    "Your mouth works. Get to talking."


    "Tongue wiggles but everythin below''s all sand. Maybe wet sand. Little me''s grateful for water yew set ragin. Was just like yew to."


    He knelt close and felt sad when the greenskin leaned away.


    "All those times in the pit I never killed you."


    "Yew killed plenty. Just don''t want no more huggin. Orcsies already hatin little me for missin their camps. Hate me more if they see you huggin."


    "You hungry?" He drew the wrapping of cicadas from his breast and gave it to the greenskin.


    The greenskin sniffed it and stuffed it under his flopped over leg.


    "That''s all I have. Now tell me where Glad Nizam went."


    "Away. That way. North maybe. I tried fishin thataway when my legs were workin, but Booky ain''t teach us no fishin. Maybe yew catch somethin and bring us back a snack."


    "I will if I can."


    "Go til you ain''t goin no further on account of a big rock. That''s where yew findin the one eye."


    Orc nodded. "Try to rest. Don''t share that with anyone."


    He stood up to go.


    The greenskin''s little eyes followed him. "Yew seen the others? Seen my brudders?"


    "No."


    "Good. Maybe they ain''t here. Ogre ain''t happy without snackin."


    Orc smiled. "No he isn''t, but I think if he were here he''d make you the snack."


    The greenskin didn''t smile back.


    Orc wondered how long he''d terrified him. Probably since the very beginning. "I''ll bring you back something."


    "Better bring a lotta somethings. Wait. I ask yew something. No. I won''t."


    "Best ask now. I don''t know when I''ll be back."


    "How yew do it? Every night yew went into that awful hole and took it from Booky and took it from them folks watchin and took it from Ogre and that stinky dogman. He told me once yew been there since before the hole was dug maybe. How''d yew stand it? How''d yew stand it over and over?"


    "The same way you did. You were there, now you''re here. There''s no difference between us."


    "Plenty of differences."


    "Not when it matters."


    The greenskin snuck a cicada into his mouth. It popped and crunched between his teeth. "All these angry orcs hatin on little me for missin the camps. Like that was my fault. Like Booky''s was paradise somehow."


    "They hate me for it also."


    "Yew ever wish yew was back there? Back at Booky''s?"


    "No."


    The greenskin ate another cicada. "Yew never did lie very good."


    "I''m not lying."


    "All these orcs blabbin bout yew goin up that river."


    "I just got back."


    "There hope for us?"


    "Yes."


    The greenskin looked down at his useless legs. "Lyin again."


    He knelt and put his face before the greenskin''s. The greenskin shut his eyes up tight. "I''m onto something. Something that''ll green up this whole place."


    The greenskin peeked an eye out. "What sorta thing?"


    "Dwarf magic."


    "Ain''t no such thing."


    "It''s going to take time."


    "Ain''t got no time."


    "Just stay alive. Steal. Lie. Kill if you have to. Do how I showed you."


    "Ain''t got no legs for them things."


    He stood up. "You''ve come through worse."


    The greenskin opened both eyes and fished out another cicada and slipped it into his mouth. "No lie there."


    Orc walked back to the [captain].


    The [captain] said, "Well musheater? Get what you want?"


    He nodded at the treeboat. "Send your two strongest up the river. Tell them to haul out on the right where the slot opens up. Take the old path up to the rim. There''s a shack there. Couple of dead humans outside, bunch of junk inside, some meal too. Enough to feed a couple dozen for a couple months. Might keep you all going for a few days if you stretch it out. Might be long enough."


    "Meal?" said the captain.


    "For mush."


    The [captain] clutched his blanket around his shoulders and stared.


    "Mix it with water out of the Mad and cook it up with fire. Or just eat it cold."


    "Mush."


    "Mush. I''m heading up the coast to find Glad Nizam. I''ll tell her what''s happening here but don''t be surprised if she''s cut you loose. Don''t be surprised if you''re on your own. You best come up with a plan and if you don''t have a mind to then you best find someone who does."


    He gathered Saand and Ogaz and led them across the kneedeep Mad and up the steep sand on its far side. The cliff on the left and the sea on the right and the endless beach ahead.


    He nodded up the beach. "That''s the way we''re headed."


    "North," said Saand.


    "North is problem?" said Ogaz.


    "Depends how far we go. There are folk up there worse than humans. Worse than anyone on this side of the sea."


    The tusker shook his head and his ears waggled. "Nobody worser than humans."


    "You have never met an elf."


    Orc said, "Steady on," and broke into a jog down where the sand was wetted and packed by the surf. He thought about the greenskin as he went. He never looked back.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Awareness]: Knowledge of the land yields knowledge of the self... (3/10)

 26. North

    They walked in the van and watched the landscape unscroll. Mounted dragoons surrounded them wearing quilted cloth coats with brightly colored panels. Clusters of short barbed javelins in leather scabbards at their knees for drawing and throwing at a gallop. In turns pairs sprinted ahead to practice the motion. Swift and precise like a longarm''s sprung hammer. They didn''t speak to the dwarves and the dwarves didn''t speak to them.


    Their last day on the plateau they came on small caravans of migrant families heading south. Humans weathered and coppered like the land with goats and burros strung nose to tail by fraying hardworked lines. The people carried woven baskets filled with sentimental things and burdened their animals with tools and foodstuffs and bedrolls and furry dromedaries of water made from goatskin with spigots of goat horn. Fathers and mothers and children cajoled their animals into the dry sages and junipers as the van came up. The dragoons called out as they passed and the fathers shared rumors of the orcs'' landing in a vast painted desert to the north and wished the expedition luck. Some promised to come and fight after they saw their families to safety.


    She heard Khaz tell a family, "Ye should swap yer loads with yer beasts'' against losin em," and the father scowled and the mother gawked and their children hid their faces behind dirty hands.


    "Maybe they''ll take that girl off our hands," said Mym.


    "Doubt it," he said as the man cursed at him and told him to go back to whatever hole he had crawled out of. "With the number of them headin south I''d say their kin in Here First might start pullin for the orcs."


    "Ye think?"


    "Why not? We''re a long way from their king."


    "Aye but he''s still their king."


    "Not te the shot of ear or sight of eye of them who''s here. Humans have a way of makin new kings whenever they get tired of their old ones."


    Farther along they passed a father and a daughter alone without animals or accompaniment. They held hands as the van passed. Their eyes tracked the dwarves in silence. Just them and their two packs and the big country.


    "How far te this painted desert?" Mym asked a [dragoon].


    "Your little feet gettin tired?" he said.


    "How far?"


    "Hell if I know. I ain''t never been here before."


    A second [dragoon] leaned over. "See them mesas yonder? They''re the highlands that she orc howled about. Sailors were saying the orc ships were anchored off their coast. They won''t have nowhere to run with the elves to their north."


    "I''d heard elves are long gone out of this world."


    The [dragoon] nodded. "They''d like you to think so. I''d rather we didn''t have to deal with them neither, but if we can drive the orcs into their country maybe they''ll take care of each other. Either way it won''t be long now."


    "Thank ye."


    "Sure."


    Khaz looked at her. "Did she say elves?"


    "Aye."


    "What the hell kind of storybook did we fall inte?"


    The mesas grew to span the northwestern horizon and the van hooked right down a winding track of gritty sandstone and along a drainage picked clean of greenery whose walls [spoke] of old water. They walked its bottom and they heard the sea''s sighing and stepped from the drainage onto a long beach stretching north and south whose sand was darkened by surf and by the shadow of a tall sandstone cliff that overhung for as far as they could see.


    The van followed the beach north. At sunset they found sand blackened by fire and they found a long line of orc corpses half buried by the surf''s haphazardry beside a narrow slot in the wall. It spat water into a channel far deeper and wider than what its meager flow suggested.


    Mym didn''t see any ships anchored offshore, but in the middle of the stream lay a chunk of concrete no bigger than her fist. She picked it up and turned it over. Its sharp edge was marked.


    "Look here."


    Khaz fingered the mark then held it to his ear. "Shard of the sky done it."


    "Aye." She saw two empty crates beside the shadowed slot and she saw the rimrock''s red minarets daggering the sky''s clear blue cistern as if hoping water might pour from its fullness.


    She tossed the chunk back into the stream. "He was here."


    ***


    They found the corpse facedown on the slot''s bottom. The shallow river rippled around it. The dragoons walked their horses past while Mym stopped and knelt and looked it over. It was a brownskin. Nude and weaponless. Its emaciated back more scar than skin.


    "No wounds but these old ones, and they looked te be healin up clean," she said.


    "What killed him?" said Khaz.


    Daraway bent at her hips to keep her knees out of the water and touched the body here and there. "Hunger."


    "Hell. That isn''t no way te go."


    "Hunger slew plenty back in the camps. This one won''t be the last. Stay away from that dear."


    Cousins had touched the body like Daraway had. She backed away and put her hands on her hips and looked up the walls and the pictographs they bore as if to demonstrate a profound disinterest in the corpse. "Them look pretty old."


    "Aye," said Mym.


    "How old y''all reckon?"


    She glanced up from the body. "Bout ten thousand years I''d say."


    "Damn."


    "Watch yer mouth."


    "But the world weren''t made but a thousand years ago."


    "Who says?"


    "My ma for one. The churchfather and his sisters. Everybody."


    "Kid yer listenin te the wrong everybody."


    Cousins put her hand on her chin as if considering the wisdom of that. Then she said, "Well I ain''t listening to y''all."


    "No kiddin."


    "Y''all just tell me to get home."


    "Sure as stone. Best follow me now."


    Mym led them further up the canyon and stopped at another body. As she knelt to check it Cousins trotted up beside her to watch. It was gruesome business but the girl didn''t seem to mind. Who knew what she''d already seen in her life.


    "How do y''all know them pictures are so old?"


    "So now yer listenin te me."


    "Maybe. I''m considering my options."


    Mym looked at Khaz.


    "Funny kid," he said.


    "So how do y''all know?"


    Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.


    "Cause I''m the one who made em," said Mym.


    "Y''all are lying again."


    Khaz said, "We know what the stones tell. If they say they were marked that long ago then we believe em."


    "Stones don''t lie?"


    "No miss they don''t."


    "Y''all are kinda stoney."


    "Aye, but we bleed the same as anyone."


    "And we''ve produced a liar or two over the years," said Mym.


    "How old are y''all?"


    "Twenty," said Mym.


    "Aye twenty years ago," said Khaz.


    She stopped at another body. Slumped against the wall with its legs in the water and its chin on its chest. Its eyes were half open and its chest seemed to fall. She squatted back on her heels with her hands on her knees waiting to see if it would happen again. She waited there a long time before it did.


    "Where''re yer friends?" she said.


    The orc''s chest caved in and edged out but otherwise it didn''t move.


    Khaz unslung his pack and sliced a coin of smoked sausage into his hand.


    "What''re ye doin?" said Mym.


    "He needs it."


    "If they''re starvin te death in their own country then I expect we''ll need it ourselves fore too long. "


    "Aye well he needs it now." He held the slice under the orc''s nose.


    The orc didn''t move.


    Daraway bent over him and peeled back his eyelids and touched his neck. "I''m afraid he''s past helping Khaz. Sorry."


    "Save yer sorrys. Ye all get goin. I''ll catch up."


    Mym said, "Let him rot. He''s earned it."


    He wrapped the slice of sausage with the rest of it and put it away and drew his [alpenstock]. "Said I''d catch up."


    Mym didn''t move. "Why ye care about this orc''s sufferin? He did it te himself. Not like they care about ours."


    "I can''t say what orcs care about."


    "Well I can. Da was lyin there and that orc bastard just stood over him and watched him sufferin. He didn''t care one cut." As she said it she relived it. She remembered the tall orc''s offer to end her da''s misery, and she remembered her denial and her sworn revenge. She remembered these things and she realized the reason her da still suffered was because she hadn''t been ready to let him go. The shame of it overwhelmed her.


    "Shit Mym," Khaz was saying, "if ye cared at all about yer da''s sufferin ye''d be back in the delvin."


    She just looked at him.


    He''d gone too far and he knew it. "This isn''t somethin that girl should see and frankly I don''t like what it''s makin ye into."


    "Cause I should make meself into whatever ye like."


    "Shave me slaggy beard wedwarf. I said get on and I meant get on. This isn''t any easier with ye draggin me across the damned coals."


    "Fine."


    She snatched the [alpenstock] out of his hand and walked up the slot. After a hundred yards she dropped it into the water. A hundred more and Daraway caught her with Cousins splashing behind. The girl''s eyes brimmed like the water swirling at their feet. The woman started to say something but the snap and carom of the [longarm]''s shot made her jump.


    Damn this place Mym thought. Damn that orc for livin and damn Khaz for comin and damn da for stayin when he should''ve ran. And for lingering after when he should''ve done anything else.


    Khaz caught them up with his dripping [alpenstock] in one hand and his [longarm] smoking in the other. He came directly before her path and he spat fire like he''d swallowed the forge. "Don''t ye ever do that again."


    "Then don''t tell me who te be or how te feel."


    She turned and walked around him and on around a bend then over and under and around tremendous broken blocks of concrete strewn along the slot''s floor and wedged between its walls. One bore a strikemark that [told] of the shard of the sky. Above it rose a gap both straight and precise where it and the other blocks once stood as a single whole, and where the signs of previous wholes were carved into the walls'' faces. Their stones welcomed her her arrival in [tones] deeper than shale.


    She stopped.


    "Are you alright?" said Daraway just behind. "What is it?"


    Khaz came next and his anger turned to wonder. "Oy Mym. They know ye."


    She looked up one wall and it looked back and [recalled] memories of her youth. A band of smooth red limestone [boasted] of her handiness with a longarm and an orange outcrop shaped like a fist [asked] after her da and a yellow hoodoo [whispered] a lullaby she''d not heard since her ma still had breathing lungs to sing.


    "Ma''s brother," she said.


    "Barzun?"


    "Aye."


    "Ye think? After all these years?"


    She pointed. "I''ll grow my beard if that''s not his stonework."


    "They''re sayin yer name not his."


    "He always liked stonetalkin while workin."


    "Must''ve talked a lot for these te know ye by sight and sound."


    "Aye, well this project''s big as a stair te the sun."


    "What was it?" said Daraway.


    "Looks te be a dam," said Mym.


    "Least til a few days ago."


    "Then this is the Mad," said Daraway.


    "What''s that?" said Cousins.


    "A great river. They say the first orc was born here of smoke from the sky and dust from the earth."


    "Isn''t that a bit of poetry," said Khaz.


    "Who says?" said Cousins.


    "Orcs," said Daraway.


    Mym laid her palm against the stone. "And old uncle Barzun drowned it with a bit of concrete. He always liked understatin things."


    Khaz came beside her. "Strange thinkin he passed this way." Then it just keeps gettin smaller."


    Her eyes drifted down one wall and across the floor of the slot and up the other side. She saw how Barzun had used the wall''s bending and warping to buttress the work. She marveled at the foresight and skill there.


    "Ye see where it failed?" said Khaz.


    "Aye. Two blows by shard."


    "Mighty blows."


    "Aye." They were mighty indeed.


    He looked at her. She saw his eyes and the reflection of the water caught in them. Sliding over the globes slow then fast then slow as if rushing over a stone just beneath its untroubled surface.


    "I''m sorry bout before," he said.


    "Aye and ye should be."


    "I''m worried yer goin off. Ye were quiet as a snowdrift when ye saw that she orc hangin from the post with her wee lad beside her, and just back there ye forgot everythin da taught ye bout sufferin prey."


    "Hell Khaz. Orcs aren''t prey. Prey don''t know what they do. Prey don''t know when there''s lead inside it nor why it''s hurtin nor what that fur faced wrinkled sot is standin over it. Those orcs that came te the span knew what they were about."


    He looked downriver then up the walls then back to her. "I''m not sure they did."


    "Course they did. They made a choice te leave their camps and te stand against us."


    "I don''t remember it that way."


    "What way?"


    "Them standin. They were runnin and we got in their way cause humans asked us te. Not meanin anythin against yers, Dara, but after seein that harbor of yers still standin like it''d never smelled an orc fart I can''t figure why the king came askin for our help. Seems like a whole lot of dwarves died for nothin."


    Mym balked. "It''s only nothin if ye let it be nothin."


    He shook his head. "Was nothin, less ye think this shit desert is worth somethin, or that vengin for vengin''s sake is worth somethin."


    "Thought ye came for vengin."


    "Aye, but good vengin''s got justice te it."


    "Ye just dispensed some justice back there."


    "That I did, but the further we go into this hellhole the more it seems like their armiger isn''t here for anythin less than killin a whole folk. That isn''t vengin. That''s somethin else."


    "Orcs just about killed our whole folk."


    "We made em. And we were dyin already."


    "And they took our best hope for livin when they carried off da''s tool."


    He went back to looking up the slot''s walls as if at any moment they might shift like breaking clouds and show a piece of blue sky. "Ye puttin a lot of stock in the shard when ye don''t much believe in stonecuttin."


    "I got nothin left te pin me hopes on."


    He turned to her. "There''s still the other way."


    Mym felt her cheeks flush. She glanced at Daraway then back to Khaz. "Fire from the mountain, Khaz. Halfway round the big bloody world and ye won''t let off that. It''s the shard or it''s nothin. If I have te pull the belly out of every orc on this side of the sea te get it back then that''s what I''ll do and te hell with their sufferin."


    Cousins put her hands over her ears.


    Mym felt Daraway reach a hand to her shoulder and say her name.


    "That kind of bloodlustin is goin te get someone killed," muttered Khaz.


    "Then maybe its ye who should stay behind and let me do what needs doin."


    "I''m not leavin ye. We''re the last son and daughter, and we owe it te dwarves still delvin te keep tryin til we can''t try no more."


    "Te hell with them and te hell with that and te hell with ye. If ye won''t leave me then I''m leavin ye."


    She spun and strode away through the gap. There the slot opened into a tremendous basin of stone and silt and the foundations of some ruined structures and her eyes started to water from the foul dust in the air. She followed the dragoons up a winding track and jogged through their horses then passed a mud hut with opened casks and torn sacks and loose grains all over the ground then passed the dressed out and halfeaten bodies of two humans and as the sun set in a thin bloody line out west she jogged into the northern wastes of the Madlands. She had left the others behind. She knew it was a mistake, but she wasn''t turning back.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Vengefulness]: ...I couldn''t help myself and neither could he. There''s something gravid about a dwarf consummating a blood oath. Something very real that pulls along everyone in their orbit whether they will it or not... (10/10).


    > [Vengefulness] Title Gained: [Huntress] Denotes she who always finds her quarry.


    > +1 [Stonespeaking]: ...aye she wasn''t the first te go crossin the wide sea. Her own uncle blazed that path. But as far as I know not a single dwarf went after. Gone vengin alone in a faroff land with only stranger stones te guide ye. Can ye imagine?... (5/10).

 27. Enough for All

    They camped at the foot of a tremendous uplift of stone as naked and wet as a newborn cub. The sea surged against it in great explosions of white spray swept inland by the wind. It salted the sand and the rock and the clifftops and it wet their clothes and chilled their bodies.


    He felt Ogaz shivering beside him. Saand lay a little apart. He looked at the tusker and at the shorthorn and he felt as if he knew them from another time, like a clairvoyant who experiences their premonitions as memories and so searches their memory for future happenings. For a brief moment he knew that if he got up and went down the beach he would find the surf filling a fourth set of footprints along the strand. But no, there were only three in their camp. Only Ogaz and Saand and himself.


    He shook his head. He needed food.


    Ogaz cracked a crab taken during their run up the beach. It was the only creature they had seen all day. He handed Orc a share and sat back on his haunches with his share in his hand and his face toward the sea and the world wet and churning in his eyes.


    Orc ate and watched Saand. She laid with eyes closed and hands beside her thighs, one palm down to the earth and one up to the sky.


    "What''s she doing?" said Ogaz.


    "Listening," she said.


    Orc listened too. To the waves crashing and a tongue of surf gurgling into a narrow channel at the uplift''s bottom, and in the lulls between the swells the whispering of foam sinking into the sand.


    "What''s she hearing?" said Ogaz.


    "More of you than I would like." She opened her eyes and sat up with one hand behind her and the other wrapping a bent knee. The vines around her horns wore salty droplets more numerous than their leaves, and their tiny creatures hid from the wind.


    Ogaz gave her a third of the crab but she didn''t eat.


    "You don''t like what you hear," said Orc.


    She shook her head. "The farther away we get the quieter his voice. Far enough and I will not hear anything at all."


    He didn''t say anything to that because he did not yet understand it. He pinched crabmeat out of the broken carapace and put it in his mouth. He licked each finger in turn and as he scraped the shell for whatever was left he watched her eyes pick their way up and over the uplift ahead.


    "They are up there somewhere," she said.


    "Your elves."


    "Yes."


    "What do you know of them?"


    "Only their works. Did your brigadier not teach you of them.¡±


    ¡°No.¡± He tossed the shell away. ¡°She was busy teaching me other things.¡±


    "What works?" said Ogaz.


    "Horrors I¡¯ve seen cast into the river."


    "What kind of horrors?"


    She closed her eyes as if not to see them. "You will know them if you see them. Stay away."


    "Why?"


    "Because I said."


    "Why? Ogaz must know."


    "Do you wish to become a tree? Be silent and do as I say."


    Ogaz turned to Orc. "Ogaz does not always understand shorthorn. Does she say Ogaz becoming tree?"


    "Yeah."


    Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    "Already Orc is mad. Now Ogaz must also nurse shorthorn."


    She began to tend the garden growing on her head. "Joke if it helps you cope. When the time comes do as I say. And if I am not there to say anything then you just stay as far away from them as you can get."


    At dawn they mounted the uplift to the snout of a winding wadi of dead falls and empty pools. An impassable ridge pushed them left. It was spiked by horned pinnacles like the backbone of some slumbering [worldeater]. Then one of the pinnacles was black and gray, not red and orange, and as they came under it they saw it was a tree growing straight out of the rock. Its roots curled around and clasped the red stone as if that dead and dry land might run away from its grip at the first chance. Half a mile on and another tree grew out of the ridge. And another. Then the ridge collapsed on itself in a pile of broken blocks and it revealed a forest thicker and taller than any they''d seen or imagined. It thrust upward in narrow columns of perfectly straight up and down trees, black bark paneling over the silver phloem shining between like the scales of fish charred over driftwood fires. Their trunks naked of leaf and limb for fifty feet or more and their canopy so full no daylight penetrated its skirt. A thick gray mist gathered in their shadows with moist fingers drifting out into the wastes that recoiled wherever they found sunlight.


    The air smelled sweet and earthy from wood freshly cut. Orc heard the voices of orcs and the thick and heavy chunk of an [ax] against timber. At the forest''s edge, nearly invisible in its shadow and immaterial against its mass, a small band scraped and cut at a freshly felled trunk like scavenger birds slashing beak and talon into the flank of a dead leviathan. Dust swirled skyward in a yellow haze like smoke from a pyre for a creature older than any orc or human. A survivor of droughts lasting centuries and dry lightning stabbing at its crown and beetles boring its barks seeking good wet heart to hatch their young, felled finally by a few orcs acting like men.


    A sow stood over the fallen giant with the handle of an [ax] in her hand and its blade against the ground. Her other hand wiped across her brow and she looked around at her fellows and the landscape and when she saw him coming she swung the [ax] onto her shoulder and shouted, "Musheater!"


    Others turned. Some grunted and nodded. Most looked at each other then back to their work. He saw they dug narrow and deep pits like the postholes he helped dig for the [brigadier]''s teagarden. Several rounds wider than he was tall were set side by side to form a kind of platform on the ground. Stout limbs were driven into the earth and fixed to a ship''s tackle of lines and rigging roped over the limbs of the nearest tree.


    Glad Nizam''s [weird] strode out from the operation. "Look brothers, savior musheater coming for saving."


    "Take me to Glad Nizam," he said.


    "Redblood giving orders now? Glad Nizam is too soft. We harden you up."


    Some of the orcs around them laughed. He looked at them. What little sympathy he felt for them evaporated in the desert sun. "Your home is poisoned. Your brothers at the maw starve to death. You left them there."


    The [weird] smiled. "Musheater sees much but not what''s before him." He lifted a hand toward the forest. "Good growing here. Good eating also. Hare and deer and fowl. Enough for all orcs, even those at maw."


    Saand said, "Tell me you have not taken from this forest."


    "Much for taking. Much for sharing. Musheater worrying about poison? No poison here."


    Orc put his hands on his waist and spat on the ground. "What does Glad Nizam plan to do about those she left behind."


    "Musheater is so sad. Maybe he goes and brings them here."


    "Half can''t walk. The half who can would die on the trek."


    "So so sad. Maybe musheater grows food for those starving? Mix up mush. Start camp of his own like woman who reared him."


    "The land is poisoned. Your home."


    "Our home. Or is musheater more woman than orc? Weak die, woman. Weak always die so strong survive. This is brotherhood. Way of the camps. Half who aren''t walking and half who''re dying know this. In beating hearts they know. You want to help? Go bring up others. They who walk still. Good eating here keeps strong strong."


    Saand placed herself between them. "No. We must get away while we can."


    The [weird] laughed. "Get away? Get away? Glad Nizam making new orcdom here. Shorthorn getting what she wants, yes? Orcs leaving Madlands."


    She looked at the trees. "If you bring your followers here they will follow you no farther."


    The [weird] stopped smiling. He whistled short and sharp. Four brownskins came up with boarding axes in their hands.


    "Tell them about turning into trees," said Ogaz.


    "Shut up," she said.


    Ogaz tapped Orc''s shoulder. "Tell about dwarf''s magic orc rock."


    Orc looked around at the desert then along the hard line demarcating it from the verdant forest. The arid red rock and the black loam. The long wind and the gray mist. He looked up the trunks of the tall trees. The water dripping from their boughs. In the venerable arches made by their overlapping limbs he saw a mastery of living and growing unmatched anywhere in the world.


    He told Ogaz, "Don''t leave her."


    "What are you doing?" said Saand.


    He couldn''t make himself care about these orcs. Saving their dying land was beyond his skill. Yet there before him were the lands of those whose acumen for growing life was measured beyond all others. He shoved through the brownskins and walked into the forest said to belong to elves.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Awareness]: ...if that''s so then cutting away one''s land is a kind of selfmaiming... (4/10)


    > +1 [Rage]: They knew what he was and they hated him for it. The only one reared to be what his folk had been, now he embodied the knifeedge they would need to traverse... (10/10)


    > [Rage] Title Gained: [Remnant] They way of the camps is not the way of orcs. True orcs are masters of their hate.

 28. In His Claw

    The western sky flashed throughout the night. Dry lightning flickered up the outlines of pillared thunderheads as if within their dark foundations the first dwarves struck sparks off hot adamantine to mend the world''s rends and repair other imperfections left by the gods they had slain. Surefooted across the twisted stone she pushed through the night. She followed the still star until first light. She walked backward then, but never saw anyone behind her. She''d lost them.


    As the heralding twilight climbed in the east the wind rose with it. She kept her head down. Her face tingled and blistered and the backs of her hands had begun to flake and peel from some corruption of the land. She''d finished her water sometime the day before. She wondered where she was but the stones held no answers. Of dwarves they remembered nothing and their memories of orcs were older than her.


    In the gray predawn a line ran thin above the dark horizon like quicksilver draining from the mold of the sky and settling across the world. As she approached the line grew thicker and its uppermost edge rougher and greener. It was a forest. By midmorning she walked east along its edge and marveled at its height. Deep and damp loam covered the floor between trunks leaving no space for friendly stone. Mist rose from everywhere. She''d never seen a treeline so stark nor heard a canopy so quiet. Even in the breeze it made no sound she could hear until the crack and crash of a falling tree shuddered the ground and rolled across its stolid fellows in a wave that carried on behind her. She hurried ahead.


    Over a gentle rise she saw the orcs and dropped to her belly so they couldn''t sky her. She slithered up to a seam in the ground no taller than a finger and she uptilted her head until everything east was revealed to her. Off toward the distant sea a ruddy haze was coming up as if raised by an army on the march. Closer a dozen or so orcs chopped away at a fallen tree. Closer still she saw seven orckin of different sizes and shapes and she heard them bellowing away in their foul speech. Then she saw the eighth. The tall orc, holding her da''s [alpenstock] in his claw with his head upturned to the forest.


    If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    "There ye are ye fuckin devil."


    She pressed her cheek into the ground and carefully unshouldered her bag and laid it beside her. She drew the strap of her [longarm] off of her shoulder and over her head and rolled onto her back. She checked the chamber and loaded it and bit the cartridge and powdered the pan. She checked the wind with a pinch of dirt and took a deep breath and rolled back into her stomach.


    The tall orc was saying something to the tusker beside him. Mym readied the hammer and sighted him. Her hand steadied between loved stock and silent stone. Her finger threaded the guard and found the trigger''s subtle curve. Warmed by sun. Eager. She drew her last breath and as it peaked she leaned her shoulder into what was coming.


    The tall orc flashed his teeth and slashed about with his claws and she adjusted her aim. He shoved against the others and she adjusted again. In two steps a limb blocked her sight and in two more the forest enveloped him completely.


    She thumbed the hammer and pulled the trigger and lowered it. With the [longarm] in her hands she elbowed back over the rise and down its far slope. She laid the rifle beside her and looked up at the sky. Big and blue with no mountains in sight. She began to wonder what the hell she was doing there anyway.


    <hr>


    > -1 [Belonging] ...The answer to everythin in life is always other folks. And them folks sayin otherwise just haven''t figured it out yet cause they ain''t never been well and truly alone... (2/10)


    > -1 [Vengefulness] ...something changed with their last generation. Something about being last I think, and seeing the end of all things for their folk. They just didn''t bear grudges with the gusto of those who had come before... (9/10)

 29. The Elf

    First the elf came behind him. The light off of her face warmed the back of his neck as if it was sunlight shafting through the thick canopy. To turn would be to show fear. He didn''t turn.


    Then she came above him. Fog whispering from bough to bough obscured her movement but he felt her as he walked beneath. He knew she was testing him. To draw [Booky''s blade] would be to die. He didn''t draw.


    Finally she came before him. Profiled against the black trunk of a great tree. One amber eye and the slope of her nose and her untroubled mouth. The color and form of her slender curves and too long limbs like one of the [brigadier]''s inks spilled into starlit water suddenly expanding in cobweb strands then slowly distilling into the medium, perfectly invisible within it, just an odor and a tint, then nothing.


    He said in human talk, "You honor me."


    "Thus spake fire to tinder." She turned her back to him and he saw her shock of silver hair dropping between her shoulder blades to drag the ground. She glided through the darkening wood and it beckoned him like a wisp. For hours he followed it until in the world beyond the forest night fell like a blade across the sky and he saw her no more, yet every needle of every twig of every tree echoed her voice.


    "Why have you come?" she said.


    "To learn how you''ve grown this wood."


    "Why?"


    "My home''s dead and dying."


    "Your voice speaks of many homes."


    "The one bordering your forest."


    "You are orc. Things to you are slayed and to be slayed, and from your manner and speech raised by men who see things as owned and to be owned, and bearing across your back a tool of dwarves who see things as shaped and to be shaped."


    "I''m not here for those things."


    "Then I say again: why have you come?"


    "To learn healing."


    "Strange thing for a slayer to want. Already the wastes are not as they were when you last trod them. Does that gratify you?"


    "If they were getting better maybe, but they''re only getting worse."


    "Who can say what is worse or unworse without standing at the end of time and space with an unobstructed view of all causes and their effects?"


    "Me."


    He heard her laugh and he felt her trees pressing in but he could not see them. Nor her.


    "Turn a cheek and he speaks again as an orc. All is becoming, cub. You woke at your folk''s dusk but it is the world''s dawn. You think yourself and your places frozen like fish in a winter pond, yet fog boils off this dewy wood and by night the wood will be ash and its smoke will have gathered around tall mountains in swells to clog and choke and destroy, and by evening new mountains will stand where valleys once sank and all creatures that were will be other than they are yet no less magnificent. What makes you smile so?"


    "You remind me of someone."


    "You have met other elves?"


    "A shorthorn friend."


    "I know of this otaur. She hears my wood''s expulsions. This surprises you? Such listening is not forbidden. If more orcs had thought as you and she perhaps we would not have sided with the child king against your forebears."


    "You can side with us now."


    If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    "We cannot climb the waterfall any more than we can stop its coursing. Even you become now, right now, in this very instant you differ from the orc who stands here now and now and now. You farmed once. Your nose close against the pregnant soils, breathing their dusts deep into your lungs."


    "You know more than I¡¯ve told.¡±


    "I do. Your places walk with thee now. Unwitting and unwilling you became them, and now you have brought them here amid mine. Did you drink from the milk of the cow? Thus you became part cow and she is here also."


    "They never let me near her."


    "Of course they didn''t. Yet you bathed in the otaur''s river. The one she calls Mad."


    "What of it?"


    "Thus did you become it, and the river thee. Thence to the ocean who is also now thee. Even now your exhalations are transformed by those gathered here. And when your blood dries in my wood the water it carried will help the wood take up its iron."


    "I''ll not bleed here."


    "There''s the orc again. The moment you crossed my border your time of orc as orc ended. Soon all orcs are ended. Too soon some say, yet I shall not judge thee for it. You like we are only bridges to be crossed, not ends to be celebrated and worshiped until the celestial expansion ceases and motion ceases and thus time ceases also, until there are no more nows to be had in this universe for it rests at the end of all things and thus the end of itself. Only change justifies our existence, for change is the sole source of justice."


    "Show yourself and I''ll show you another."


    "Stay your hand. You have naught to strike. Do you doubt my words? Look upon your back, you carry there a piece of the end of all things. There it is, the end of change, the end of becoming, perfectly just."


    He touched the spike of the [Skyshard] where it hung near his hip. "Your becoming sounds no different than the slaying you say defines my kind. Perhaps we''re more alike than you think."


    She laughed again but this time at him. "That''s the old woman talking. You and she aren''t the first to say so. As for elves, others may now be otherwise. I have not seen them in many of your generations. Recall that all is always becoming."


    "If you won''t help me perhaps they will."


    "They cannot. The power of this wood is here, not there, and it cannot be removed without removing the wood itself."


    "I don''t understand."


    "He who carries the black end of everything knows so little. Lo the arrogance of men who remade your kind in their image. Our very existence is bounded by an endless curve, yet their idiotic pride extends beyond it into all places and all times, into your folk''s home a century ago and into your ignorance now and tomorrow into this very wood."


    "I''m no man."


    "Yet they raised your former self and displaced your kind to their lands and now their foolishness directs your thinking and limits your perception."


    He examined what little of her he could see. "You won''t tell me what I wish to know, but I''ve already figured it. You keep the elfstone."


    She did not answer.


    "Hewn from the stone of the earth."


    Still she said nothing.


    "I met a dwarf who once possessed it."


    "Truly? But no. The progenitor of our world''s awakening is long lost, and such words from an orc are profanity. It was lost before orcs woke. Before humans. Before this wood and the otaur''s river. That which you called the elfstone rests with our mother, but it is a mere echo of the stone of the earth. A gift from the first dwarves who saw it as their natural kin, none of whom now persist as animate flesh."


    He looked at the black bark of the nearest trunk. He reached for it and it seemed the bark reached back for him. "The elfstone powers such growth," he said.


    "One thing of many."


    "Lend it to me."


    "What? Lend?"


    "I will return it."


    "Such gall. Truly you are the strangest orc I have ever known, and I know many. But no. I shall not lend anything to thee because I have nothing to lend. Mother keeps the stone."


    The [brigadier] came unbidden to mind. "What mother?"


    "This world''s oldest living creature. In her presence you shall be closer to the first morning than anyone but the eldest of dwarves. If Mother wishes thee to have the stone then thee shall."


    Finally the elf appeared before him at arm''s length. Her silver hair rested on her shoulder and plunged down her chest and coiled between her bare feet as if poured from the [brigadier]''s crystal carafe. It lit the tree''s gnarl on which his hand rested and he saw that the gnarl itself was twisted around and folded into an orc''s face, finally he saw her fine chin and her upturned nose and her brow and above all a [dagger] overhead clasped in both hands.


    "Approach me," she said.


    He didn''t move. "I bring no quarrel."


    She stepped forward. The [dagger] descended and its point touched his breast. "Thus you are unique among orcs, and have earned this highest honor."


    He said, "I''m no different from any other," as he felt the [dagger] prick his breastbone. The venom shocked his blood and his arms and legs and neck and hands and feet and his eyes blew outward in opposing directions all at once as if a bolt of lightning arced through every vein and vessel. He collapsed onto the duff and all the breath went out of him in a wail and his teeth snapped shut on his tongue and split it in two and his heart stopped.


    Before he died he heard her say, "I do not judge thee."


    <hr>


    > +1 [Awareness]: ...which means if you cut away enough then you''ve got an altogether different person on your hands with a different way of thinking and knowin and bein, and that''s who I found up in them woods... (5/10)

 30. Thunder

    From her perch at the top of the draw she studied the strange cloud that rose up from the coast as if a god of the sea reached forth to wipe away the interlopers. The first crack of thunder fell lightly and rolled over the land like the clatter of a stone bouncing down the white mountain''s face. Behind her faraway thunderheads crowded and silvered the sun. It glared between them as if jealous of their power. In an hour it would set and rush toward dawn to see what they''d wrought.


    A familiar voice said, "Aimin te set there all night?"


    "If I have te."


    "There''s an evil lookin storm whippin up aways west."


    "Aye I know it."


    "Everythin it drops is goin te run straight through the bottom of this draw like an avalanche. Ye thought about that?"


    "Aye."


    "Alright then."


    She watched the stormfront''s shadow creep toward the orcs'' position and listened to its first winds reconnoiter routes for those following and smelled the wet they carried. Her [longarm] rested on the edge of her perch with her powder flask of nak ivory beside it and each waxed and wrapped cartridge of black powder and lead shot carefully lined up about a foot back from the edge as if part of some arcane ritual of the desert.


    "There''s room for ye down here," she said. "Watch yer step and make sure they don''t sky ye comin over the top."


    Khaz crept down beside her and he looked at her things arranged out before her. He unscrewed the lid of his canteen and offered it to her. She drank it dry.


    "When''s the last time ye slept?" he said.


    She gestured at the forest''s edge with the canteen''s mouth. "He was there. Right there."


    "Aye I''m sure he was."


    "He''ll be back. Ye can''t see much of his friends now, but they''re there too."


    "I''m sure they are. What''re they doin?"


    "Buildin somethin. They were millin timber earlier. Dryin the hides of some sort of deer too. I could eat several deer tied together."


    He unwrapped the smoked sausage and handed it to her. "Is that all of em?"


    She bit into the meat and spoke as she chewed. "Not by my count. Should be near twenty five hundred. Between here and those buried back at the landin there can''t be more than a couple hundred."


    "Couple thousand still out here somewhere."


    "Aye."


    "No line on em?"


    "Nope."


    "Maybe they''re off in the trees."


    "Maybe."


    "Why don''t ye get some sleep and let me watch awhile."


    She looked at him then past him. "Where''s Daraway?"


    "With the girl."


    "You left them?"


    "That woman doesn''t need me. Not sayin ye do, but seein as I''m here now why don''t ye get some sleep."


    She nodded. The sausage was gone. Her eyes were already drooping. "Alright. Watch for one taller than the rest. Gray backed with da''s shard slung over him."


    She sat back from the edge and crossed her arms over her chest and closed her eyes. He settled in to her place and he felt the warmth of her body on the stones there.


    "Any sniff of him and ye wake me straightaway," she said.


    She slept and as she slept she dreamt of her da. In her dream he worked his [alpenstock] across a slab of stone in a darkened and emptied delving. She saw his eyes by the light of the forge as it quieted and dimmed and finally died. Cold flowed out of the wynds and cleared the air of grit and froze the flume solid, as if by stillness the world hoped to stay its inevitable and ultimate alteration to dust. Her father''s eyes glinted in the dark as they sought some secret revealed by it, some hopeful secret that might restore movement to the places that''d lost it. Then all was dark and there was only the sound of his breathing.Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.


    ***


    She woke to the sky spitting on her face. She opened her mouth to it then her eyes. The sun had set but there was still some light left deep inside the stormclouds'' overstory. Khaz laid on his belly at the edge of the perch watching below. He had laid a length of oilcloth across her [longarm] and powder horn and cartridges. Drops of rain beaded on it and slid off. She looked at him and wondered if there was a difference between duty and love.


    "It''s gettin too dark te keep watch on em," she said.


    "Ye up already?"


    "We need te get closer."


    "Don''t know about that. Daraway was sayin orcs got eyes for the dark."


    "When did ye start heedin her?"


    "She''s smarter than she looks."


    "Aye and she may be right about their eyes, but dwarves were made tunnelin the black heart of the world while they were grown here on the sun and two moons and all the stars for seein."


    He started to say, "Aye but the rain," but he stopped and hissed and pointed. Mym crawled on her elbows beside him. From somewhere across the open desert an orc sentry ran its ugly lopsided gait to the edge of the forest. Little ribbons tied around his arms flapped in the wind he made. Even from such a distance she could''ve shot him twice and reloaded twice and shot him again before he made the forest. Only when he passed closest to her did she see the [javelin] coming out of his flank and the trail of black blood sliding off of it.


    "Won''t be long," said Khaz.


    She watched the horizon south. The land was dark and the sky was one shade above dark. Figures moved against it.


    "Look."


    Out of the wastes the dragoons rode in a column of mounted pairs. At their [captain]''s signal the pairs split left and right to form a long broad line. Their horses stock still in the thickening rain, their javelins loose in their scabbards, their short and curved blades sheathed atop the quilting over their breasts. Their eyes were invisible under their helms but their chins jutted and dripped rainwater onto gloved hands folded over reins. Behind them Daraway walked up under her hooded cloak. Cousins was half hidden inside, but it was plainly her pale round face blinking against the rain..


    "Shit," said Khaz.


    "I see em."


    "The hell she bring the girl for?"


    "Doesn''t matter now."


    A handful of orcs appeared at the forest''s edge bearing the axes and spikes and workblades of mariners, and the one who''d been javelined leaned among them with the [javelin] now held in his claw. They looked at the humans who''d already once stolen their lives and now came to end them. They seemed small standing beside and between the massive trees. Small and sad and grave. As if they''d already lost.


    She knew better.


    "Ye see yer orc?" said Khaz.


    "Not yet." She looked back to where Daraway stood. The rain fell harder.


    The dragoon [captain] trumpeted and his line rode right. Hooves clopped on the wet sandstone and some of the riders stretched shoulders and necks as if preparing to run a footrace. Another blast and the line started to curve forward into a wide circle of evenly spaced horsemen that rotated like one of her da''s zoetropes. As the first [dragoon] arced closest to the forest he hurled a [javelin] at the gathered orcs. Before it struck the next [dragoon] hurled another and as the first pierced an unarmored chest the next [dragoon] hurled a third and the orcs surged from the trunks with weapons slapping at missiles streaking past their heads and crying in their rage and bending to grab and hurl spent javelins at their harriers. Floodwater rushed over their feet and ran up their ankles as they came and the holes made in the flow by their splashing feet shot away over the sandstone as fast as the javelins that cut through them.


    "Get a bead on," said Khaz.


    "No shot from here unless you''re shootin horse."


    "See yer friend?"


    "Not yet."


    "Not much left for seein."


    The storm threw all its rain all at once and it roared where it struck the stone and struck the water rushing over. Lightning lit snapshots of violence like flashes from a rifle and thunder cracked instantly as if the ground under them split open to swallow those trespassing upon it. In a flash she saw a dragoon''s arm curled to throw. Eyes white and nostrils wide. Orcs mid stride and mid leap and mid death in waters so high and rapid they slid the bodies across the ground. All motionless yet in motion as if in a marble frieze that recounted some other fight in some other time. The whole scene vanished to dark yet it stood in her vision so she was able to examine each form in turn. None of them were the tall orc.


    Now water ran down onto their perch in a constant flow. Khaz threw his oilcloth and canteen in his pack. "We can''t stay here."


    "Let''s get down there."


    "We go down there and we''ll be swimmin. Better te get up top of the ridge."


    "But Daraway''s down there."


    "We can''t stay here."


    Lightning flashed again and she saw again. Riders disjointed in the rising flood. An orc amid them claws on bridle and throat with several javelins standing straight out from his back like the spines of some beast. A horse swept away with head and neck above turbid water roiling in curved and twisted runnels bigger around than the trunks of the trees. Orcs in the flow. Flying above it. Below it. Daraway turning and looking up at their rise for higher ground.


    Mym waved and called her name but could barely hear herself over the roar of water and the vortices made by its falling and the constant cracking and rolling thunder. "We need te get to her."


    "What?"


    She thumped Khaz twice on the pack so he''d look at her face as she shouted, "Follow me!"


    Above them lightning cracked staccatissimo within the clouds as if they hid a company of dwarves firing into the battle. By its pulsing she saw the dragoons'' [captain] pitch a [javelin] into an orc''s open mouth then raise his trumpet to his lips. All at once the hair on her neck and arms rose and she saw a solitary pillar of blinding blue light lance through the [captain] to the sky and she saw the orcs and horses and riders around him collapse writhing to the ground. Finally she saw out of the east an orc donned in a dwarven helm bearing a goblin on his shoulders leading a horde numbering thousands. She looked for Daraway and the girl but all went dark and somehow the rain came even harder.

 31. Fellow Traveler

    The [brigadier] had once told him, "Shot or stabbed or burned or starved, you endure. It''s what you were made for. Look here. You can take a man''s arm off here and here. Do it like this and he''ll pass out from the pain of it. Now if I were to try it on you, like this see, look how it opens your backstroke. Sure you might lose an arm but you''d swipe my neck in two before you felt a thing. You''re more grizzly bear than man, Orc, and you should be proud of it. By god I am." He remembered it then as if he was back in that place. That home.


    A unison of voices chorused in his head, "Welcome fellow traveler. Welcome thine multitudes. They of the mountain that stirs the sky. They of the river that burns sand to glass. They of forests turned to rock and to forests again. They of the rend that birthed thee. They of us who are eldest and tallest and largest on this island. They of other islands under suns older than all those things. We know thee and thine parents also, for they are ours and you are ours. Travel with us for a day or an age. You wish to grow? We shall grow together. You wish for home? You need no other."


    Every inch of his skin screamed at once as if a thousand needles punctured it. He couldn''t move to reach a single one. Not those pressing through his calloused heels or eyelids. Not even those at his fingertips.


    The voices said, "Once thee counted thyself lucky to live as one thing, now count thyself luckier to die, to become the next million things in the great unbroken chain of next things stretching uninterrupted ahead and behind."


    His eyes wouldn''t open and something strange and cold filled his mouth but his jaw was clenched shut as if in a vise. He couldn''t even take a breath.


    "Drink the sun with us. Drink yourselves full of light. Drink until the sun becomes us, but there are many suns left, and we will soon move between them as they move nightly between us."


    He needed air. How desperately he needed it. To smell it, to feel it against his naked skin. To taste in it the fresh herbs and the old hay and the turned over sawdust. He thrashed as if buried alive yet no part of him did move.


    "Drink the starlight also for it too is sunlight. Millions for drinking and millions drinking, fill your body, slake your thirst, burn and become us for every good grain of ours is yours, now yours are ours."


    All the earth tunneled into his ears and nostrils and throat to hold him fast. All creation sat on his chest and thrust its arm down his throat to stop his life. The rush of his pulse, the surge of its drum, louder and louder, pushing and pumping and pulling to shed the bad air building in his lungs and heart and brain. To expel that poison from them.


    "Roots now alive with blessed water. Medium of becoming. Yield your warmth to its cold. It shall take what troubles thee. Taste now its coming eternity."


    He tasted it. With his fingertips he tasted it. Icy cold. Kissing his flesh. Lovingly caressing and running over it. He was going to die again. To match the cold with cold.


    "But here is the end of things. It comes for thee."


    His heart''s drumming slowed but he felt a second beat beside it. Its impact fast and heavy and thick as the blades of orcish axes at the forest''s edge. He couldn''t understand what he felt. He''d become a single, crushed, gasping lung, dying at the bottom of the pit.


    "Witness."


    He looked up through closed lids and he saw suspended in nothing an eternal something, small and opaque and reflecting a light that had long since faded as a forest bent by avalanche demonstrates the passed violence in its permanent bending. He [knew] it was the [orcstone] and he [knew] where it was hid. Somewhere between his heart and his gut on the world''s opposite side.


    He felt the second beating cease.


    "We anticipate your return," said the voices. "Remember what we have said."


    In an instant he fell to the ground as if night itself disgorged him. He lay there panting sweet smelling air and feeling fallen pine needles prickling and snapping under his hands and cheek. He could''ve laid for years in that place just breathing it in but for the mass of cold flesh in his mouth. He turned his head and spat it onto the ground. [Booky''s blade] lay there next to it, and beside the blade a man knelt so still and so quiet he might''ve been dead but for his act of holding the [Skyshard] steadily in one hand. Fibers of living wood stuck to its adze. A silver wetness ran in a runnel from the point of the spike all the way up the shaft to man''s hand and all over his black sleeve and his chest and chin, and Orc recognized the faded tattoos upon the knuckles and the unfastened jaw.


    He looked into the [bosun]''s eyes. They''d been blue before. Now they were so dark they seemed all pupil. He saw himself twice upon them as if they were globes of glass and his reflections carefully painted miniatures across their surfaces so that no matter where the [bosun] cast his eyes he''d always see the image of that orc. No matter what spheres rose above or vistas fell before, he''d always be there.


    The [bosun] offered him the [Skyshard] with a hand blue and thin, perhaps no more than bones held together by ligamenture.


    Orc pushed himself up onto a hip then leaned back against the trunk of a nearby tree so large there was no curvature to it, as if were a sheer wall of wood dividing this forest from some mystery beyond. He took the offered [Skyshard] with one hand and stuck the other in his mouth and felt for his tongue as if unsure he''d find it whole. As he withdrew his hand he tasted the rank decay there. He thought to ask the [bosun]''s name but he already knew the answer. "I know you," he said.If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    The [bosun] didn''t speak. Perhaps he couldn''t after what had happened to his face. He only looked at Orc then at the massive tree then back to Orc.


    "Hearing him?" said a new voice. "Ogaz saying he''ll find and so he does. Shorthorn never believing but Ogaz never misses."


    The [bosun]''s head snapped toward the voice. He leapt up and ran into the forest, bounding away between and around trees until he passed beyond sight.


    Orc watched him go. He pressed himself to stand as his friends came up.


    "See?" said Ogaz with a triumphant smile.


    "Orc," said Saand. "Why did you go so far? This is true madness."


    "Don''t I know it," said Orc.


    "I feared you dead. We must leave the forest at once before the elves that keep it arrive."


    "Too late."


    She watched him run his hand over his shirt where the elf had put her [dagger]. There was the slit it made as it passed.


    "Yet still you live," she breathed.


    "Not so sure about the still part."


    "What do you mean? What happened?"


    "Not sure about that either." He told them about the elf and what she''d said about the [elfstone] and the [stone of the earth] and the [mother] and the vision she shared, of the [dagger] in his chest and the chorus of voices. He told of the [bosun] also, but he did not tell of their shared history.


    After he was done telling stories Saand said, "Do you think it was the orcstone in your vision?"


    "I do."


    "And it was the mother who showed you?"


    "Yes."


    "Why show you and not her caretakers?"


    "She doesn''t want me to cut the elfstone out of her." He tapped the [Skyshard]''s head against the tremendous tree and for a moment the place he struck seemed to shiver.


    "Then why let you go?"


    "Not sure she had a choice in it."


    "Because of the man."


    "Yes."


    Ogaz said, "Who is man?"


    "Just some man," said Orc.


    Ogaz craned to look up the giant tree''s fine and ruddy bark toward the ceilings made by its nearest children. "We cut down tree and take stone."


    "Reckon it''d be easier to cut down the world."


    "We are leaving elfstone to elves?"


    "Yeah."


    Ogaz clucked his tongue. "Foolish."


    Orc looked down. "That may be." He saw the hunk of meat he''d spit out of his mouth lying black and dense amid the duff. He thought it was something he had eaten until he remembered he hadn''t eaten anything since the crab by the sea.


    "Maybe man helps?" said Ogaz.


    "Don''t think he will."


    "Then Ogaz fetches Glad Nizam''s crew. Bringing them up and all cutting together makes fast work."


    Saand said, "What sense is there in destroying one land to save another?"


    "Sense enough when one''s ours and other isn''t," said Ogaz.


    Orc looked at the tree then up it and he saw a drop of water creeping along and between the bark in fits and pauses as if it needed to decide which way was correct before proceeding. He placed his finger in its path and [felt] its cool refreshment. Medium of becoming. What had the dwarf said? You need to make life from death? All you need is this.


    Saand shook her head and the vines wrapping her horns trembled. "This is mad. You are both mad and you have learned nothing."


    "I''ve learned plenty," said Orc. He turned to Ogaz. "She''s right. Land isn''t ours or theirs. It''s everyone''s and no one''s. Felling this tree means felling ourselves."


    "Orc''s mad," said Ogaz. "Everyone''s mad but Ogaz."


    "We''d be no better than the armiger."


    Ogaz frowned and fingered his stubbed tusk. "Then what we doing?"


    "Do you think Glad Nizam will lend us a ship?"


    "Why?"


    He heard Saand''s sharp inhale.


    "You know where the orcstone is," she said.


    "I might."


    "Then let us go to it and quit this place. Immediately. That elf surely went for her kin."


    Orc glanced at the silver wetness now dropping from the alpenstock''s spike. It glimmered strangely as though some unseen light shone upon it. He touched his tongue to his lips and felt it creep along their crevices as the water drop had done. Everything felt different. New somehow.


    Ogaz said, "Yes yes. Ogaz and Orc and Saand becoming trees. All night shorthorn says these things. Orc''s lucky he''s not hearing. Trees. Least trees aren''t needing food. Orc seeing any critters on his walk? Owl maybe? Squirrel? Ogaz loves squirrel."


    "No," said Orc.


    "It is plain you do not tell all. I hope in time you will," said Saand.


    "I''m just trying to figure what''s real and what isn''t."


    "You need not stand still to think."


    He let her take him by the arm and away from the mother. For hours they went and as they did she gently sang softly and mournfully of the last stand of a brave longhorn who took up his mate''s [club] in some war fought before orcs or humans came to their lands. It seemed to have a thousand verses and he wondered whether she had them committed to memory or if she made them up as she went along. Her singing ceased when they came to the forest''s edge.


    They stood between the forest''s last trees and watched dawn break across the Madlands: the thunderheads sparking and towering as high as the setting moons, the great sheets of rain slashing diagonally to wash away every untethered thing, the fragmented defense of orcs, the purposeful movements of humans on horses advancing to swallow them all.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Awareness]: ...I don''t know what that elf said to him. He never told me. I''ve got a fair idea what that tree was sayin... (6/10).


    > +1 [Renown]: ...soon as I seen him comin along the beach I figured we was saved. I figured ain''t nobody stood against him ever before who he didn''t cut down and ain''t nobody gonna stand before him now... (2/10).

 32. Lightning

    They stood in a defilade of wet rock and Mym looked at where her [vengefulness] had led them. Khaz bled from a vertical gash above his eye and its blood stained all down his beard and coat and she couldn''t tell where else he bled because his arms and waist and legs and boots were covered in a thick red mud from the disintegrating sandstone. Daraway stood behind him in her steaming cloak holding Cousins between her blackened hands. The girl clutched the sprig of prairie fire and her eyes had gone hollow as if the horrors of the night had driven all mischief out of them. But there was no getting her away from it. They had tried all night. She had led a kid into the middle of a war. There was no getting away.


    She looked out at the veterans of the rising front who were lining up for another charge and that''s when she saw him.


    "Oy," she shouted and pointed at the trees beyond the floodwater''s flow. The tall orc was there. She had her [longarm] up and readied and sited a sliver of his chest showing between the wetted trunks and her hammer snapped down and threw the needed spark and the powder hissed. A spout of blue smoke fizzled from the pan.


    "Shit," she dropped the weapon from her cheek and felt the sodden cartridge and ejected it and bit another and tasted the damp in its powder and she dipped a finger in her powder horn and all of it was damp. She grabbed Khaz''s [longarm] and raised it and tried and it too misfired. "Shit."


    A tusker and a female otaur appeared beside the tall orc. He was saying something to them and pointing. Mym followed his outstretched claw and saw the place where floodwaters had carried away a tremendous elven tree and lodged it longways across the draw, its massive tangled root ball on the far side and its heavily burdened crown not so far from their defilade. Water rushed over it in places and a host of orcs gathered around the roots gripped its upright branches and they threaded across it with frightful agility. She looked back at the tall orc and for a moment it seemed he was staring at her, then he started running down the treeline toward the fallen tree.


    "Shit," she said again. She tossed Khaz''s [longarm] back to him and hauled her pack around and crammed her horn and her [longarm] into it. She threw her shoulders through its straps and swung it onto her back. She seized her [alpenstock] and dug her feet into the earth and said, "On me."


    The veterans of the rising front galloped across her path with their longswords aflame and shoulders forward for speed and heads low to whisper encouragement to their mounts but she didn''t wait for them to pass, she just ran through and they swore as they steered around her and a man tumbled off his rearing mount and set his jacket blazing with his ether but she didn''t stop or slow or look back to see who came and who didn''t and she punched through their formation and ran between the line of their charge along the bank of the flooded draw with her feet splashing in its endless waters and she leapt over the debris it had ejected. The veterans cried for murder as they crashed into a pocket of starving orcs and she cut around their melee and heard them plunging one after another into the flood and saw their facedown bodies overtake her in its flow, orcs without heads and men burning in orange flames that spiraled in the wind made by the rushing water. The fallen tree caught the dead in its limbs where they piled one on another like timber in a log drive. Behind her she heard the veterans'' war cries turned to screams. On the far side of the flood some orcs moved through the forest and others emerged to despoil the dragoons who had died the night before. One saw her and sprinted to the water''s edge to pitch his stolen missiles across one after another and the first caught her in the legs and as she fell she heard the second sail through the space where her head would''ve been.


    Khaz said, "Got ye," and his hands were under her and lifting her.


    She heard the [armiger]''s voice raised in command. Down by the fallen tree. For a moment she saw his black helm and white horse between the raised spears and plunging mallets and slicing blades and the limbs that moved them and the limbs that they severed. She looked across the flood. The tall orc ran ahead of her. Still amid the forest. Still surging toward the fallen tree.


    "Come on," she said.


    Khaz said to Daraway, "Keep that girl tween us."


    Mym turned to help and saw Cousins put up a hand as if to reach for hers and then her poncho flew out from her side as if caught in a strange red gust and she fell. Mym heard the hiss of the bullet pass her ear then the deadened strike of it off of the wet sandstone then the terrible crack of the gunshot advancing across the draw. It resounded like faraway thunder rolling forth and before it passed she was already kneeling over the girl and gathering her arms onto her stomach and her head in an elbow and the limp backs of her knees and the blood came freely onto her coat and if there was more blood on the ground she couldn''t tell from the rain and the ruddy earth. "Shit," she said. "Shit."Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    Cousins clenched the sprig of prairie fire against her side and cried for a mother she didn''t have.


    The [longarm] cracked again from the forest. Mym put her body between the sound and the girl. A mounted veteran ten yards to her left fell from his horse.


    Khaz took her [alpenstock] in his free hand. "Ye got her? Let''s go."


    The [longarm] cracked again and a roaring of orcs rose from across the water chanting the name of their leader. Daraway urged her on with a flat palm against her shoulder and when she looked back she saw the woman''s hood was cast off and her eyes looked out across the flood and glowed red like branding irons. Another shot snapped past but by then they were sprinting along the floodwaters toward the [armiger]. The girl''s head bouncing and her jaw slack and her feet swinging free and Mym was sure she had already died. Khaz was before her with an [alpenstock] in each fist cutting a path through orcs and men alike. Daraway''s [thrown] heat surged in waves against the back of her neck.


    They overtook a woman holding a flaming [sword] who limped badly from a bite to her calf and a gunshot hip. Her blonde hair was tied up in a tight bun for war and how pretty it must have been when it flowed freely in peace. Her hand pressed into her bleeding side and she wheeled suddenly to cleave an orc from neck to navel then she called to them as they passed. They didn''t stop. The woman tried to keep up but already she fell behind. Mym called back to her and when she faced forward she saw the tall orc now running alongside the biggest sow she had ever seen. Brown and half blind bearing a [longarm] and a riding crop and a whole cadre ran with them hard and fast toward the base of the fallen tree.


    She followed Khaz into the fallen tree''s canopy where a score of men and women crouched in brown water amid a dozen dead orcs and breathed hard under patinated breastplates and through the narrow slits of jousting helms. The [armiger] sat on a branch as big around as his body with his [long spear] in hand and his hip''s scabbard empty and his [shortarm] in its holster about his chest. His horse wasn''t there.


    She held Cousins tighter and called, "Oy. Got a wee girl here needin a surgeon. She''s been shot."


    Those gathered lived for blood and aimed to die in it so none asked what a girl was doing amid a battle in the company of dwarves. The [armiger] nodded to a [knight] and said, "Go Malv," and the [knight] brandished his sword and ran along the fallen tree''s length away from the flood, dipping under some branches and leaping over others until he vanished.


    The [armiger] looked at Cousins. "Help is coming." Then he noticed Daraway. Mym saw the recognition in his eyes.


    Daraway turned to Mym. "Give her to me."


    "Help''s comin."


    "She can''t wait for it to arrive. We must take her to it."


    "I''ll take her."


    "Give her to me."


    She passed the girl to Daraway and wiped the blood off the front of her coat. That on her trousers had gone cold and had started to stiffen.


    "I''ll find you," said Daraway. She went after the [knight] and the fallen tree''s living twigs snagged her hood then sprang back into place.


    Mym took her [alpenstock] from Khaz and he unrolled his pack and drew his powder horn. "Any of ye got dry powder?"


    The [armiger] laughed.


    A [footman] came up through the branches. "We think that''s the last of em sire."


    "You are sure this time?"


    The flat reports of gunfire popped across the desert and the [footman] knelt beside the [armiger] waiting for them to quit.


    "Yes sire. There ain''t any more coming outta them trees. There''s some pockets still on our side but we''ve got em pinned up tight."


    "And their leader?"


    "She''s working across now."


    The [armiger] stood from his seat on the branch. "We shall signal once she is dealt with. Slay the stragglers and signal archers and artillery and pray the foreman was a better chemist than he was a warrior."


    Khaz reached for her. "Ye alright?"


    She shook her head. "I wish they''d shot me instead."


    "Aye I know yer feelin."


    "Quiet there," said the [armiger]. "Make yourselves ready. This is the fight of your life."


    <hr>


    > -1 [Vengefulness]: Her forefathers set the world on fire to retribute one wrong, yet she balked at the suffering of one human child. (8/10)

 33. Glad Nizam, or Their Second Meeting

    With Glad Nizam before him Orc ran toward the uplifted roots of the fallen tree. Across the flood he saw the dwarf from the span and the pain on her face and the girl in her arms and he saw the cluster of orcs clawing down mounted humans who had set their swords on fire and the wall of shields advancing a hundred wide and a dozen deep and the shuddering engines of war with their plumes of black smoke piling skyward and beyond all of it he saw the train of an army twice as large as any that had marched through the [brigadier]''s stories.


    He had brought his friends to a fight they''d never win.


    The fallen tree''s roots still clenched lifegiving soil in their tangle and their sundered ends still reached for good sweet earth and the part of him still raw from the [mother]''s touch reeled at the sight of their clenching and reaching. From their broken ends they seemed to sweep inward in thick living fibers that twisted toward the ancient creature''s dark center, as if its gravity swallowed the very threads of possibility and circumstance into its faceless gullet. Brownskins taking cover beneath and within its tendrilic ball stood less than one fifth its thickness. It looked like some monster of the sea grasping them toward a hidden beak.


    He arrived at the root ball. It overhung above and he touched his fingertips to a rock clutched in its grasp and smelled the wet decay that comes the morning after rain. He closed his eyes and saw the overnight mushrooms in the [brigadier]''s garden and opened them and saw the greenskin perched on the [captain]''s shoulders.


    Orc nodded at him. "You brought them up."


    "Not me," said the [captain] who turned his eyes up toward the greenskin.


    "Yew was right Orc. Ain''t no difference when it matters."


    The [captain] said, "He''s who riled us. Someday you''ll be wishing you were there to hear it. Got your mush off them cliffs and loaded everyone back onto them human ships and straight sailed em up. Cubs and sows and everyone. Thems who can''t fight are up in them trees. Everyone else''s been at it all night cept for you and Glad Nizam''s crew. She got here just before you did."


    "Ain''t no orcsies starving now, but plenty still dyin," said the greenskin.


    "Sorry I wasn''t here to help," said Orc.


    "Yew here now."


    The [captain] said, "And now we stand a chance. All together we do."


    He wouldn''t correct the brownskin. The [brigadier] had taught him how this sort of thing ended.


    Ogaz and Saand worked their way to his side.


    "Ogaz wishing for missing tusk," said Ogaz.


    "Take this." Orc gave him [Booky''s blade]. He looked back to the forest''s boundary. Between the rising steam and needle leaved ferns he saw the hopeful and hot eyes of his folk who were too young or too old or too sick to fight.


    Glad Nizam was walking among those gathered at the tree with words of encouragement and light touches of fellowship and when she came to Orc she laid her riding crop on his wrist. "Musheater. You seen their big engines coming up?"


    "Yes."


    "You take yours and get to burning em before they burn us. Don''t you be waiting for me."


    "They want us to cross. It''s a ruse."


    She grinned at him. "It be one from the start. They opened the damned wire for us and you never wondered why."


    "I wasn''t there."


    "Course you weren''t. But you be here now. I never doubted you."


    She turned to the others.


    "Everyone ready?"


    Saand laid her hand on Orc''s shoulder. "You cannot stay," she said. "You must retrieve the orcstone. It is all that matters."


    "I won''t let you face this alone," said Orc.


    "You must."


    Glad Nizam said, "Quiet down the line. We be going over."


    "Where''s the weird?" said the [captain].


    Glad Nizam smiled. "Dead. Listen. They''ll be firing at me as we cross. Stick in behind and I''ll get us there. Don''t wait for me after. Get on and do what needs be done. It isn''t about us now. It''s about those up in the forest. It''s about those camps that made em. It''s about the land that be theirs, a home for orcs, a home for all orcs. Don''t die here brothers. Make them die."This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Glad Nizam nodded and her brownskin warriors fanned out from behind the fallen tree firing their plundered longarms across the flood and Glad Nizam scrambled onto its trunk and a brownskin pitched her a [longarm] and she caught it one handed and started running across the flood.


    Orc leashed the [Skyshard] to his wrist and started to climb.


    "With you," said Saand and he saw her between his feet and Ogaz coming up after with [Booky''s blade] between his teeth. When Orc made the top he sprinted up the trunk of the giant as if the whole world had tilted sideways and he set to run up its crooked sky. He swung onehanded around the lowest limbs and the flood rushed across his path in an unfurling brown flow that roared and shot away for fifty yards to the place where its channel plunged into the wadi. He saw the first [arrow] strike Glad Nizam as she stepped into the floodwater coming over the trunk. Her leg threw a wake downflow. The [arrow] stuck out of the top of her shoulder like a wayward twig, as if she too was becoming a tree. She roared, "See how they hate us," and shifted the [longarm] to her other hand. The second [arrow] tore through the outside of her thigh and disappeared into the water. She staggered forward.


    Orc threaded through the limbs and arrows fell like rain. The branches fouled many but some drove into the trunk or splashed into the flood or sank into flesh. He heard Saand grunt behind him and he heard Ogaz call out.


    Orc didn''t turn. "Keep moving," he shouted. Move to live, stop to die. Another of the [brigadier]''s lessons. He ducked around a limb with water rushing up to his calves and another flight of arrows dropped all around him and one thocked into the limb between his finger and thumb.


    The [captain] yelled, "Get on musheater!"


    He turned to look and the [captain] and the greenskin sped past and he saw Saand and Ogaz had dropped back. She knelt where the flood came fastest over the trunk and its spray flung off her knees and over her chest while Ogaz crouched beside her with his elbow anchored around a branch and his other hand on her arm. The feathered shaft of an arrow came out of her hip and a bright red spot bloomed into her waistcloth. She looked at Ogaz and motioned for him to go and so he went. Orc turned to move up. The [captain] and greenskin were just ahead and Glad Nizam still advancing a few branches beyond them. The limbs grew thicker and the going slower but no more arrows fell on his head and he was past the heaviest part of the flood. Upstream it eddied with brown foam and spinning debris. The bodies of some humans and orcs were sucked under the trunk and ejected twenty yards downstream. Others were caught in the mess of the tree''s crown. One of the humans was on fire and the branches cradling his corpse smoked and smoldered.


    Orc looked back again but saw only more brownskins coming with axes and knives and the heads of harpoons clenched between teeth. No Saand. No Ogaz. He''d never make it to the ballistae without them. As if he''d make it with them.


    Suddenly there was the crack of gunfire and Glad Nizam''s roar and Orc sprinted toward the noise past the [captain] who now leaned against a standing branch like he waited for something with his dwarven helm sliding off his head. Orc set right the helm as he passed but the [captain] didn''t move except for his head which swayed from the touch as if on a hinge. Glad Nizam roared again and he saw a steelclad [knight] skip off downstream and he watched the opaque water flow over him and his gloved hand thrust out and then nothing but foam rushing away and over the falls. Around another branch and he saw Glad Nizam with a [blade] in her gut. He saw her slash her crop into the eyeslit of a helmed and armored [knight]. The [knight] reached for the deposited blade. The great sow backpedaled. Arrows stuck out of her and the serrated head of one tented the skin between her spine and shoulderblade. She smashed the butt of her [longarm] into the [knight]''s visor then flipped the weapon in a single motion to site it directly into the eyeslit and fired it and the [knight] collapsed under a sheet of blood as a man in black armor rose from beneath the trunk''s far side with a [long spear] before him and a [shortarm] in his gauntlet and the blinding orange flash from its muzzle and the clap of it and Glad Nizam''s head snapped back and Orc saw her snarl and her blind eye was blank and her good eye was blank and he saw the hole in her head between them.


    A brownskin leapt from the trunk into the waiting blades of humans gathered within the boughs of the fallen tree and Orc saw the dwarf there push the spike of her [alpenstock] into the brownskin''s gut as he passed overhead but she never looked at her prey she looked only at Orc and he knew her instantly and his frenzy transformed to dread and grief and regret as if he were back in Booky''s pit.


    Out of nowhere Ogaz lowered his shoulder and smashed him off of the trunk and into the flood. The tusker flew over and into the water. Orc caught him by his whole tusk and reached his other hand toward where a branch might be and found the tiny hand of the greenskin.


    The flood rushed over him and crashed in his ears and forced down his throat and he felt Ogaz slapping against his hold and he saw the greenskin wincing and the little claws rending the branch that held them and he saw the dwarf''s face.


    "Yew pullin me in half," cried the greenskin.


    The dwarf crept out on the limb with the black blood of orcs down her neck and the red blood of humans across her chest and waist and thighs. The greenskin felt her there and turned his head and yelped. His grip gave out but Orc had him by the wrist.


    She yelled over the rush of the water, "Where''s me da''s shard?"


    Orc opened his mouth and water surged into it and down his throat. He felt Ogaz chopping at his hand. The greenskin''s claw slipped. The dwarf hooked her pick around the greenskin''s chin. She leaned over Orc. Her eyes were streaked red like the banner of blood she wore.


    "Ye remember me?"


    He sputtered and gagged and heaved himself forward and he heard the greenskin howl.


    Her face so close. The misery there. The rage. She said, "There''s no good in dyin te save the dyin."


    He let go.


    All at once the flood had him and what had before felt violently defiant was now eager. Foam swept alongside him through rapids and courses with no speed at all yet the banks streaked past and he flipped over to swim against the current and the fallen tree shrank away with the greenskin and the dwarf and he and slapped a score of strong strokes into the current but they made no difference, it took him where it wanted and he flipped over again to face his fate and Ogaz''s head moved left across the flow then disappeared and a stone outcrop rose on his right with a crash of white water sheeting over it but when he reached it had already passed and he was falling in empty space. He didn''t feel the water''s surface break but he was below it and it punched him deeper and thrust him over and forced his limbs apart and him deeper and it felt like he was rising but his head struck the bottom and was dragged along it then off it then his shoulder struck and his skin tore but what did it matter. He opened his eyes in the murk and saw the face of death swimming out of it.


    <hr>


    > -1 [Rage]: Bitterness can only take you so far... (9/10).

 34. Wood and Flesh

    Huge fireballs shot over her head as if the heavens hurled its stars upon the orcs. The thick black smoke of their contrails arced across the evening sky and wherever they struck they exploded and burned. Bare sandstone burned and bodies burned and even pools of floodwater burned, and flames engulfed the forest''s enormous trunks and limbs from roots to tops and from where Mym stood near the fallen tree she could hear the holocaust of the cubs and elders therein and the shouts of the two or three orcs still trying to reach them.


    Khaz watched beside her. "Stone and sky," he whispered.


    Daraway sat cross legged on the drying sandstone. Mud and filth and blood stained the hem of her cloak and its sleeves and all along its front from where she had carried Cousins. She closed her eyes and laid back on her elbows and said, "I warned you. The armiger''s world is a narrow one with room for only one way of being. Stray and suffer the consequence."


    Mym sat down at Daraway''s side and tried not to hear the shrieking. "How''s the girl?"


    "Fighting." Daraway put her hand against her forehead. Its fingertips were charred and cracked. "She lost a lot of blood."


    "Wee thing like that didn''t have much te begin with," said Khaz.


    Mym unscrewed her canteen and handed it to Daraway. "Is there anythin we can do?"


    Daraway shook her head. She took the canteen and drank.


    Mym watched her. "We could go and see her. Maybe raise her spirits like."


    Daraway wiped her mouth. "Not now. She''s resting."


    "Aye that makes sense."


    They watched the flames sweep up and over another tree. The cries and shouts had faded. There was only the hissing and roaring of the wildfire and the turmoil of the subsiding floodwaters.


    "Hate te be the man who has te explain this te the elves," said Khaz.


    "There won''t be any explaining," said Daraway.


    "Aye?"


    She shook her head and muttered, "This, all of this, was intentional."


    "How can ye be sure?"


    "I can''t.¡± She took a drink. ¡°I still know it to be true."


    "That''s not much of a reason."


    "Look around Khaz. Look at the size of this army. At its disposition. Look where it drove the orcs. Look and think on what I''ve told you since we arrived. The armiger and those like him want only one thing. Of course they''ll say elsewise. He''ll tell you one thing and his king another and the veterans who rode headlong to die something else entirely, and they''ll all be a kind of truth, true to whoever is listening, true as it passes their lips, but they all serve a singular purpose and I tell you now it isn''t the good of dwarves or elves or hungry volunteers desperate for a pittance of weal and glory, nor the good of the land nor the king nor even simple peace. We all ought to reflect on our role in it."


    Mym sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand and watched the flood and the fire and the great piles of bodies between them. She shook her head as if clearing it. "It''s not our problem now. Let elves look after elves. We got most of what we were owed."


    "Did you have any luck with da''s shard?" said Daraway.


    "Only the sour kind."


    "What happened?"


    "Angry strokes make for angry scars."


    "If ye don''t tell her I''m goin te," said Khaz.


    She kicked her feet out in front of her and looked up at the sky. "I fouled it up. I came right up on him after their chief fell. He was no more than a yard away in the flood with da''s shard leashed te his wrist and nothin but a goblin''s fingernail keepin him from sweepin away. I should''ve just yanked him right on out of the flow but instead I sat yappin at him and the moment he saw me he bloody well let go of that goblin. Left the bugger te fend for himself and with me pick already wringin his little neck. Too coward te finish us on the span and too coward te fight for his friends."


    Khaz said, "Maybe he drowned. Hell the way it''s flowin he''s like te be out te sea by now."


    She shook her head. "Any other orc maybe. This devil''s too hardy for that. Where ye think these orcs are headed next Dara? Those who aren''t turned te smoke."


    Daraway capped the canteen and gave it back to Mym. "These orcs aren''t heading anywhere next. Not if their leader is dead. She is who united them in the camps and led them here. Without her holding them together they''ll splinter along hatreds and hierarchies far older than their captivity. Those still living will destroy themselves, and the last one standing won''t last a week in the desert."


    Mym looked at the fallen tree. At the way the flood folded under it and rushed over it, the way it split everything apart and how everything flowed back together. An [engineer] was walking along where its crown rested against the itinerant shore carrying a length of rope. He went from limb to limb, measuring them and pulling on their ends and watching them bend.Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    She looked at the sun. Four fingers from setting. She stood up and brushed the blood and mud dried into her clothing as if it would do any good.


    "Where ye gettin te?" said Khaz.


    "Come on."


    She led them past a sour dungfire drying the last [dragoon] and she saw her javelins burning within it, past a few veterans from the rising front sitting in a circle with their horses hobbled and wearing feedbags over their mouths and blinders over their eyes as if to stifle any mutiny of horses after the day''s ruin, past the now stilled ballistae and their congratulatory engineers whose clothes and hair smelled of burning pitch, past the shieldbearers who knelt rolling dice and cursing and cheering and laughing, past the mess with its line of troubled footmen carrying upturned helmets and gossiping servants holding pewter bowls and slingers no more than lads and lasses all waiting for a ladleful of stew. Finally they came to an open space fifty yards across where iron pitons had been staked directly into the sandstone and iron chains had been looped through their eyelets and the filthy and brutalized and bleeding wrists and necks and ankles had been closed in iron manacles. She searched the scores of downturned faces there until she saw a familiar one. She started toward it.


    One of the armiger''s knights saw her coming and strode to meet her until he was directly in her path. "Good dwarf, what do you need?"


    "Need te talk te that goblin."


    "All of you?"


    She looked at Khaz and at Daraway whose hood was pulled so far forward only the tip of her chin caught any of the falling sunlight.


    "Aye, all of us."


    "I''m afraid not."


    "Just me then."


    "Do you speak orcish?"


    "No."


    He nodded at Khaz and Daraway. "What about them?"


    "I don''t talk no damned orcish," said Khaz.


    Daraway said nothing.


    The [knight] held his plans out flat. "Well then you couldn''t talk to him anyway."


    "I''m still aim te try."


    "I''m afraid not." He laid his right hand across his hip to rest on the pommel of his [blade].


    She looked at his hand. "Really?"


    "Really."


    "Then I''ll talk te that otaur there."


    "No."


    "Why not?"


    "Armiger said."


    "What does he care whether we do some roughin and questionin."


    The [knight] smiled. "I''m sure he wouldn''t mind, but I''ve got orders and until I hear otherwise nobody''s allowed in the stockade."


    "I don''t see any stockade here."


    "It''s a figure of speech. Ain''t no wood here to raise one. Just stay out, dwarf."


    She flopped her hand at the guard and turned to Daraway. "Ye don''t speak orc do ye?"


    "No."


    "Let''s go see Cousins."


    "Ye givin up?" said Khaz.


    "Hell no. But if we keep standin around here that knight''ll know it. Go on Dara. Take us to her."


    Daraway led them back past the line of hungry humans and around the tremendous cauldron of boiling mystery meat to an open field hospital with hundreds of tarpaulins flat on the ground and people sleeping or dying atop them. They passed a [surgeon] as she covered the face of a man with a sheet and crouched over him as if in prayer. The girl lay three bodies down the row. Her poncho was rolled up under her head for a pillow and a thin wool blanket with gaily colored stripes covered her torso. It was folded and twisted as if flung across without thought of warmth or comfort. Her legs stuck out of it and her kneeholed trousers were stiff with her own blood.


    Mym knelt beside her and touched her forehead. "Aw hell. She''s awfully wan, Khaz."


    "She''s a fighter."


    She shook her head. "We did this." She shook her head again and covered her mouth with her hand.


    The [surgeon] stood and said, "Who''s that?" and walked quickly up the row of convalescents. She wore an apron that had once been white but was so splotched with yellows and reds she looked like a [butcher] after a week in the slaughterhouse. Her tunic''s sleeves were rolled up and tied tight around her elbows and her fingernails were bitten to nubs yet dark along their edges as if she''d filed them on a hunk of charcoal. She carried a wood handled [bonesaw] and when she saw Daraway she said, "You again? And who''re you? Friends of this poor thing? Not guardians I see. Stand away from her please. She needs fresh air not second hand dwarf stink."


    "Who''re ye?" said Khaz.


    "The surgeon of this here hospital, if you can call it that. I sure as hell wouldn''t." She knelt by Cousins and held her wrist above the girl''s mouth as if checking for breath then she straightened and smoothed the striped blanket. "Can you believe this? She can''t be more than eight, and shot through and through. Can''t believe the armiger allows them along. Children dying for what? It''s folly, it''s all folly, and we''re the fools for living it. Who looks at this and says there''s good reason for it? There isn''t reason behind any of it. Meaningless suffering''s all it is. We''re fools for living it and letting others call it sacred. For doing all we can to keep on living it as if it''ll suddenly surprise us with good reason that it hid all along. Folly and fools."


    "She goin te live?" said Khaz.


    The [surgeon] shrugged. "It''s grave. Very grave. She hasn''t woke since I cleaned her out and sewed her up. Will she live? Who can say? God?" and she laughed meanly.


    Mym stroked Cousin''s cheek. "Ye rest up. Ye wake up."


    She felt Daraway''s hand on her back.


    "That''s enough now," said the [surgeon].


    Mym loosened her canteen and set it where Cousins could reach.


    "Fine, that''s fine, but it''s time for you to go, and you''d best say your goodbyes just in case."


    Afterward, they sat at the place they''d chosen beside the flood and the fallen tree. She watched men with axes separating its limbs and clearing them of brush and needles and hauling them away toward the stockade.


    "This whole thing''s a load of nak shit," she said.


    "If ye mean chasin a whole race of folk te a place te wipe em off of it then I''m not arguin," said Khaz.


    "I mean comin here after da''s damned shard. It''s just meant more folks dyin for the sake of dwarves and I don''t think da''d feel any different bout it. No slip of stone is worth dyin for."


    "Yer talkin bout the girl."


    She looked at him. "No shit."


    "She wanted te come along."


    "She''s too young te be makin such choices."


    "Aye that may be, but it doesn''t mean we''re the ones te make em for her."


    "Just leave me be."


    "Mym."


    "Just leave me be."


    She walked down to the flood''s high line and watched the flow wane by the orange light of the wildfire. The nearest parts of the forest sparkled shockingly bright and the places between the sparks were impossibly black and silent, as if they were the great holes of where life had been, columns absent of mass and light and air yet filled with the forest''s memory of what was missing and by night''s ending even the memory would cease for it was held by wood and flesh and not by stone. Farther north the sky glowed orange under a grievous cloud of smoke and in the east a sharp serrated sliver of blue horizon shone as a moon readied to rise. She thought about her da and wondered if he''d ever seen this part of the world. She''d never asked. From somewhere in the stockade an orc wailed.


    <hr>


    > -2 [Vengefulness]: ...for a heart of stone hers was always tender, and empathy is anathema to malice... (6/10)

 35. Risen

    At the bottom of the wadi''s canyon at the edge of a plunge pool he laid on his side looking at Ogaz. His breath had calmed but his shoulder burned as if it caught fire from the inside out. He hovered his fingers over the opened skin and felt the hot wetness there. He winced and closed his eyes and rolled off of it.


    "I''m tired of dying," he said.


    He turned his head and saw the dead [bosun] kneeling two yards away, clearly not dead. His black garments dripped water and when he saw Orc looking he held up two bony fingers as if to say that''s twice.


    Orc unlooped the [Skyshard]''s leash from his wrist and flung the sodden thong onto the ground. He tried to see the wound on his shoulder but he couldn''t turn his head that far. Ogaz sat up slowly and spat and rubbed his eyes with both hands and saw the [bosun]. He jumped up and away and the dead man made a choking noise from where he knelt as if laughing without the benefit of air.


    "Orc," said Ogaz, and he looked between him and the [bosun] and back again.


    "He''s the one from the forest,¡± said Orc. ¡°He pulled me from the flood. You too by the look of it."


    "It''s risen."


    "Seems so."


    "It''s unclean. Worse than humans. No trusting."


    "You''re welcome to kill him, but I don''t think it''ll do much good."


    Ogaz reached for [Booky''s blade] but his hand came away empty. "Oh. Ogaz loses Orc''s knife."


    "Don''t twist yourself up on it. It''s just a knife."


    "Ogaz knows better. Ogaz knows where Orc gets it."


    "Well. You might''ve thought about that before you threw us into the flood."


    The tusker smiled around his tusk and stub. "Sorry. Saand makes Ogaz promise to help Orc find stone. Says is too important. Says if Orc knowing where it''s found then Orc must go and find. Says he just needs little push, so Ogaz gives. Is mistake."


    "It¡¯s not our first.¡± Orc wiped his face with his hand and slowly rolled his head around and noted where the pain started and how to avoid it. ¡°Seems like living''s just a long line of mistakes and they''ll likely look that way til we get to the end of it. Seems like we won''t know what''s right and what''s mistook til it''s too late to make any difference."This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    The [bosun] watched them speak but gave no indication of understanding or sentiment. He reached behind his back and drew [Booky''s blade] from his waistband and held it handle first toward Orc.


    Orc said in human talk, "You always seem to have what I''ve lost."


    The [bosun] turned away. His eyes were wet though who could say why?


    "Dead can weep?" said Ogaz.


    "That''s all they''re doing," said Orc. He took the blade from the sailor and tried drying it on his damp shirt. He looked at the [bosun]. "Remember Booky?"


    The man turned back to him but said nothing.


    "When she gave me this she said the world''s a shit place that needs a good burning."


    "What''s Orc saying?" said Ogaz.


    He told him.


    Ogaz pointed over Orc''s head. "World''s already burning. Whole elven forest is burning."


    He looked up the wadi and saw the great clay colored smoke covering the west and clumping across the north as if the sun and moons had seen enough disappointment during their billion year stares. Had seen enough of orcs and humans fighting and dying and dropping their warlike implements wherever they fell, in the flood, on the banks, under their slouching bodies. Had seen enough of riderless horses whirling amid the claws and gunshots and broken spears, fleeing across the wastes to wander until the clamor ceased, returning to stand over the bodies as still as memorials of some long ago conquest with their hindquarters in silhouette against the gathering dark and their heads lit in a soft red from the forest''s embers and each of their globular eyes focusing the fire into a single sharp red pillar. Had seen enough of the most wretched of men slinking from body to body to pull precious heirlooms from stiff fingers while passing over folded letters to loved ones. They had seen enough, and so they wheeled behind the smoke to paint the earth in reds and wait for the sky''s next flood to wash away what men had done to it.


    Orc watched the smoke and thought of the mother consumed in the conflagration. Becoming she''d call it. Her long held secret lay bare within the matchstick forest. Glowing from the heat released by her transformation. It felt wrong to enter there. A kind of betrayal. As if trees could be betrayed. Still, it felt wrong. He would not walk from snag to snag in the acrid air searching for her corpse, footfalls swirling pieces of her in narrow circles that curled over the ground like the hair of the dead.


    She''d [shown] him where to find her twin. One of four split from one. He would need to leave the home his people had twice given their lives to defend and go back to the home that had taken his life to leave. A home he hated before and now hated more than before because now he knew there was no other place he felt he had belonged.


    He looked at [Booky''s blade] and flipped it in his grip and offered its handle to the [bosun]. "Take it."


    "What''s Orc doing?" said Ogaz.


    "Making mistakes," he said. Then in human, "You can pilot a boat."


    The [bosun] looked silently from Orc to Ogaz and back again. He nodded slowly and his unhinged jaw opened and closed with the movement.


    "Across the sea."


    The man looked east as if the sea already lay before them. He turned back and shrugged as if to suggest it was no large task.


    Orc pushed to his feet. "Follow me."


    "What we doing?" said Ogaz.


    "Setting the world on fire."


    <hr>


    > -1 [Rage]: ...ultimately I believe he had to accept who he was for who he was, and he had to respect the limitations of natural law and divine order as he was taught to do... (8/10)


    > +1 [Awareness] ...if there''s one thing I know about him it''s that he don''t give a shit about no authority, not what the world gives him nor the priestly kind... (7/10)

 36. Stone and Bone

    Khaz lit the wick of a beeswax candle and set their powder to dry inside their uncapped horns. Mym lay on her back with her head on her pack, the candleflame close to her cheek, her feet on Daraway''s lap. Khaz sat atop his pack and dried a small stringed instrument with a warm cloth. He rolled the cloth in his hand as he ran it in slow circular motions along the polished wooden frame. When he finished with its frame and came to the first string he plucked it and watched the moisture vibrate off of it in two thin parallel lines like phantom strings dissipating in the dry air. He lightly touched the cloth''s surface to check it for damp then held it between thumb and forefinger and wiped it up and down the plucked string. He repeated this for each string. Afterward he flapped the cloth out in the air and guided it to the ground beside Mym''s freshly soaked and scrubbed and wrung coat, then he positioned the candle between them. With the instrument under an armpit and upon a thigh he cleared his throat as if about to sing and he drew his hands across its row of strings and the sounds of home welled up in her and she wondered again why she''d come so far when everything she''d really needed was under the mountain or close enough to come calling.


    "Ye were right about my leavin da," she said.


    "I know it," he said.


    When she didn''t say more he started to play a dirge whose low notes matched her beating heart and whose highs scraped the red stars from the smoky sky. He played it once without voice and a quiet smile crept into his beard and his head moved in time. Then he began again with his throaty stonesong [waking] the ground on which they laid, and though it had nothing to say for it had never known dwarves it nonetheless heeded his [asks] and she felt its surface warm under her back.


    "This is music for dyin te," she said.


    He stopped playing and she regretted saying anything. "What''d ye rather I play?"


    "Nevermind."


    "Well?"


    "Music for livin."


    Daraway said, "They''re the same thing love."


    In the lull they heard the wailing of another orc. A small one by the pitch of him.


    Khaz laid the instrument across his lap. "How long ye think it''ll go on?"


    "Already longer than they''ve earned," she said.


    She felt Daraway gently squeeze her foot and say, "There she is."


    "Aye," said Khaz.


    "Sorry," she said. "I''ve been dealin with some feelins for leavin da. And for the end of dwarves generally and my role in it."


    "It''s easy to turn your back on what¡¯s right when everything around you is wrong," said Daraway.


    Mym looked up at her. ¡°Not everythin,¡± she said.


    The orc wailed again and somewhere a man wailed back and she heard his fellows laugh too loudly and drunkenly as if they''d sought solace from the day¡¯s calamity in their cups yet found only fear.


    Daraway lifted Mym''s feet from her lap and set them on the ground. "I should check on Cousins."


    "Aye we''ll come," she said.


    "Don''t trouble yourselves. I''ll be back shortly and you have things to discuss." She left without saying more.


    "What''d she mean by that?" said Khaz.


    "She means I have somethin I need te tell ye."


    "Aye? Well go on."


    She opened her mouth to speak and the orc wailed again and the men laughed again.


    She said, "I''ve had enough of this. Come on."


    They walked a few yards behind Daraway''s hooded figure but when she turned into the hospital they continued past the stockade where the armiger''s engineers had staked up limbs from the fallen tree for the crucifixions and past the drunks taunting the orc''s cries and past the folded up ballistae and the tents of the shieldbearers until they arrived at the [armiger]''s pavilion. One [knight] told them to wait while the other ducked inside. They heard voices then nothing. The [knight] came back out and told them the [armiger] was indisposed. They''d have to come back in the morning.


    "Now that''s a whole herd of nak shit," she said.


    "Wouldn''t take nothin te string these two up beside the orcs," said Khaz.


    The knights looked at each other.


    "Don''t think I can reach that high. Their feets would be tappin the ground."


    "Well we could shorten em first."


    "How much ye think?"


    He looked them up and down while smoothing his mustache. "Six inches above the knee?"


    She nodded. "Let em think on it. We''ll be back."


    They walked back past the shieldbearers and the ballistae and the passed out drunks and came to the edge of the stockade. They stopped and listened.


    "None watchin but the guards now," she said. "Looks like they''re over on the far side."


    "Still close enough te see us."


    "Only if they''re lookin."


    He nodded. "Ye goin or me?"


    "Ye''ll go. Give em a ruckus but not too much of one and not too quick on it. I don''t know how much time I''ll be needin."


    The orc wailed again.


    "I don''t think needlin will get ye anywhere," he said.


    "I know it."


    "Just remindin ye. These aren''t the brute who done yer da."


    "I said I know it. I''m not here for that."


    He touched her shoulder. "If the guards see or hear ye doin what I think ye''ll be doin they''re like te kill us both."


    "Get on over there."


    "Aye."


    "Oy Khaz."


    He turned back but his face was fully shadowed.


    "Don''t go tunnelin in sand. Things start comin down around ye I want ye te back on out."


    "Aye same te ye."


    He vanished into the dark and she stood in place and waited. In the stillness of the late hour the ground around her woke. Four tiny shoots of some sort of desert flower uncurled from a crevice and tested the rainwashed air. A cricket chirruped once as if tuning his legs then waited a breath to bait his audience then sawed away for what felt like an hour.


    "Someone get the poor lad what he needs," she said.


    Finally from the stockade''s far side the faintest glint of an adze shone in the meager red moonlight. She started forward.


    If the orcs were aware of her none showed it. Most hung from stakes of greenwood that bent under their weight. The otaur was too heavy for any branch. She was facedown with a limb across her back and her wrists lashed to each of its far ends, and her hooves tied behind her by one line looped over the limb so that the tension of it all curved her chest like an archer''s bow. Her head was collapsed forward to rest on the tips of her horns with her short snout pressed into the sandstone and her breath ragged against it.


    "Ye dead yet cowgirl?" said Mym.


    The otaur didn''t move.


    She toed the otaur''s flank and saw the dark bloodstain there. "Oy."


    "She don''t understand yew," said a voice some yards above her.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    She looked up and skylighted a little goblin tied up by his wrists to the end of a stake. His clawed feet clasped it to keep him from sliding down to suffocation.


    "I told em she wouldn''t know their talk. Even if she did she wouldn''t tell em nothin. Won''t tell yew neither."


    She ignored the goblin and spoke to the otaur. "Yer friends with that tall orc, aye? The greyback? Where''d he get off te?"


    "Yew meaning Orc."


    "Orc." She stood tall as she could to get a look at the goblin. "Oy it¡¯s ye. I about sliced yer head off down on the tree."


    "Just little old me."


    "Yer Orc abandoned ye. Left ye te men''s devices and death."


    "Maybe. Orc''s got his own way of seein things done."


    "Then ye know him also."


    "Oh yeah little me knows Orc since forever. Since Booky''s."


    "Booky''s?"


    "Yew don''t know Booky''s? Wasn''t so far from beardling mountains. Saw some on the pit rim once or twice maybe."


    She said, "Tell me," and the goblin did. He told her about the pit and the mush and the executions. About the fighting and the killing. About how Orc saved an [ogre] when he should''ve killed them and about how he protected the goblins from the bettors and the [bookmaker]. About their friend the dogman who didn''t get out. About the goblin''s brudders who he''d not seen since that night.


    She didn''t know how to feel about it, but whatever she was feeling she didn''t like. "So that''s his home then?"


    "Booky''s ain''t nobody''s home cept maybe Booky."


    "Well where''d he get off te? That''s my tool he''s carryin."


    The otaur rumbled. The goblin said something in orc speech. The otaur rumbled again.


    "What''s she sayin?"


    "Hard to hear. Maybe yew help her up so little me can hear proper. Maybe yew cut little me down to better listen."


    She ran her hand along the bowed out limb and felt the tension of the rope tying hoof to hoof. She knelt beside the otaur''s head and heard the wheezing and saw the big black eye and the thoughtfulness there. And the pain.


    "Ye tell me what I want te know and I''ll end yer sufferin."


    The otaur rumbled again and the goblin talked back then said, "We tells yew and yew do what yew promised for all orcs here."


    "Aye and the humans''ll give me a stake of my own." She looked back at the otaur. "I''ll do what I can."


    "Orc went and gone away. Away away across the big sea maybe. I brought big boats up and he uses em to figure a way back."


    "Back where? Ye just said Booky''s isn''t it."


    "Naw. Orc''s gonna go find some rock. Magic maybe. Gonna heal orc home maybe."


    "What rock?"


    "Dunno."


    She knelt and asked the otaur, "What rock."


    The otaur rumbled and tried to turn her head. The point of her horn lifted an inch. Dust caked her damp nostrils. She said something.


    "She says yew know it. Some rock busted off the first rock."


    "Te heal yer home?"


    "Gonna regrow everything that''s dead. Like magic."


    "Earth''s full of rocks and stones, goblin. Not one of em''s magic."


    "Yew never went into elfling forest. Lotsa magics there. Big life growing outta nothing. Tall and big."


    The otaur pinioned her face sideways on the point of a horn and her back twisted and her far hand pinned against the ground and her neck shook from the effort. Her eyes sought Mym''s and in a voice deep enough to make a dwarf shudder she said, "Orcstone."


    Mym pushed off her knees and squatted back on her heels and looked across the dead land to the north. She thought about things for a while before she finally said, "Yer lot must be desperate te be dredgin up dwarf myths for holdin onte. Mighty desperate. Deadmannin an icescrew in a half inch of powder desperate."


    "Not desperate," said the goblin on the stake. "Happy to be hunted across big sea. Happy to see cubs starve. Happy so many humans care so much about best friends orcsies and tuskies and greenies and horners. Happy."


    "Well I''m not here for all that. I just want my tool. Yer lot wanted somethin different from what ye had and ye got it. No fragment off the stone of the earth''s goin te change that. There isn''t no such thing anyhow. It''s just an old story left over from the first dwarves. Like carvin lads and lasses from granite and bringin em te life."


    The otaur''s big eyes sought the goblin. Mym looked directly into them and said, "It''s just a myth."


    The goblin talked then the otaur said something and lowered her face back to the ground and shuddered from the pain of the effort.


    "She says Orc found orcstone''s brudder already. One old beardlings made for elflings."


    "Another myth."


    "She says Orc found it. Says some cave beardling told him where to find other one. One made for orcsies."


    Her brow furrowed. "There are other dwarves here?"


    "Just the one in the cave. Ain''t others but little yew and that little beard followin yew around."


    "Is he called Barzun?"


    "Don''t know no names. He died telling Orc about magic rock. Maybe he knew something yew don''t."


    "Where''s he now?"


    "Dead. Orc tried to save him but he died. Whole world''s dying."


    "Yer lyin."


    "I ain''t."


    "Ye want te die that bad?"


    "Maybe. Maybe better being dead than living in this world of humies."


    She heard harsh voices over where Khaz and the knights should be. "Tell me about the orcstone''s brother."


    The goblin scrabbled his little feet against the stake. "Orc found it with elflings. He goes in there and finds lotsa magics."


    "He lied."


    "Naw Orc don''t lie like that."


    "Everybody lies."


    "Orc don¡¯t lie any good. And he don¡¯t lie when it matters. Not to his friends."


    "Didn''t know orcs had friends."


    "There''s lotsa things yew don''t know."


    At the edge of the stockade she heard Khaz shout. A man shouted back.


    "Ye tell these humans about the stones?"


    "Sure we tell. We tell yew anythings to get yew outta our home. Humies and beardlings need to go away. Go back to theirs and let us have what''s ours."


    She put her foot on the middle of the otaur''s back and sliced her pick across the line binding her hooves and it snapped as it split. She flipped her grip and swung her adze through the noose at the left wrist and it whispered through the rope and sank into the branch with a loud knock.


    "Ye best hurry. Daylight''s comin."


    The otaur rolled onto her back and sat up and yanked her other arm free and stretched and stood thrice Mym''s height.


    Mym leaned back with her pick before her. "Stone and bone yer a tall one."


    But the otaur didn''t answer. The goblin was speaking fast and quiet to the otaur and his little feet thumped the limb. The otaur''s enormous fingers fumbled over his bindings then she just snapped the limb that held them.


    Mym decided it was time to leave.


    She [stonespoke] deep enough for Khaz to [hear] and ran back to where they''d split. A minute later he was with her and together they hurried out of sight of the stockade. She told him what she''d learned as they went.


    "And ye freed em?" he said.


    "Aye."


    "I thought ye might. And when the humans retake em and learn what ye did?"


    She shrugged. "They come for me they''ll get plenty more than they warrant. This way."


    She led him toward the hospital.


    "So yer tall orc''s headin back across the sea," said Khaz.


    "Seems so."


    "Searchin for the stone of the earth."


    "Aye."


    "Ye told em it''s a lie?"


    She shrugged. "I tried to. They seemed pretty sure of it. Said they found the elfstone."


    "Feel like we got dropped into one of Thayne''s old storybooks."


    "Sure does. At least the orc''ll be easier te find on our shores."


    "But ye don''t know whereabouts he''s headin."


    "No."


    "Then how ye goin te find him?"


    "Just goin te go wherever people are screamin orc."


    They came to the rows of tarps and the humans laying atop them and the dead laying under them.


    He said, "Maybe it''s time we just get back to the mountain. Look in on yer da and Thayne."


    "Maybe. Oy Dara."


    Daraway looked up and watched them come out of the dark. She was kneeling over the girl. The blanket was pulled back and Mym could see the girl¡¯s waist was heavily bandaged.


    "How''s Cousins?" said Mym.


    "Why don''t you ask the true original?" said the girl.


    Mym smiled. "Would ye listen te that. Ye feelin good enough for travelin?"


    "Yeah sure. Y''all just stitch me on a new belly. Plenty of spares around."


    "She''s not traveling anywhere anytime soon," said Daraway. She held Mym''s canteen to the girl''s lips.


    After swallowing Cousins said, "Y''all ain''t my ma. Tellin me what I can''t set to."


    Daraway capped the canteen. "Fine. Get yourself up and show us what you can set to."


    Slowly Cousins drew her hands up either side of her torso and pushed their heels into the ground and her teeth shone in the dark. She raised an inch panting all the time then let herself down. "Y''know it ain''t much fun traveling from one absolute nowhere to the next. Maybe I''ll just fix to lay down while y''all go and get whatever y''all came for."


    Mym brushed her fingers through the girl''s hair. She noticed Daraway looking and the little motion she made with her chin. They stood up and walked a few feet away. Khaz came after.


    "Traveling?" said Daraway.


    "Aye. I found out me orc went back across the sea chasin after a wrongheaded old myth. Got me thinkin about me own damned myth of carvin life out of stone."


    "I thought you believed in that."


    She shook her head and looked at the ground. "It''s da''s belief. I''m just livin it here to avoid the pain of it elsewhere. It¡¯s time I stop chasin it before any more kids get hurt. It''s time I get back te the mountain and check on him. It''s time I give him what he wants.¡±


    She felt Daraway touch her on the cheek.


    She lifted her head. ¡°I get any softer over here and I''ll never be able te do it."


    Daraway stepped into her and wrapped her in her arms in a tight embrace. "You''re not getting soft,¡± she whispered. ¡°You''re just remembering who you are."


    Mym allowed herself a moment there then she let go and took a half step back. "Aye I¡¯ve got soft. Listenin te goblins and otaurs and feelin bad for em. It''s damned time I head back."


    Daraway wiped the heel of her hand against her eyes. "With the armiger?" she said.


    "Oy? No not with the armiger. He leavin already?"


    ¡°He departed at dusk with a company of mariners. He''s after something though I haven¡¯t yet learned just what it is."


    "Got sneaks and spies even among yer own kind eh?" said Khaz.


    Mym looked at Khaz, "He might be chasin the same thing as me orc."


    "Which is?" said Daraway.


    "The orcstone. A goblin says he found the elfstone up in the forest.¡±


    ¡°You got in the stockade¡±


    ¡°Aye. The orckin there think the orcstone¡¯s been found, by Barzun no less, found and carried back around te the other side of the world."


    Daraway nodded. If she was surprised she didn''t show it. ¡°What do the stones say?¡±


    Mym shrugged. ¡°Nothin. Even if the orcstone¡¯s real, and I¡¯m not sayin it is, the stones about wouldn¡¯t know anythin of it. The orcstone and the others were supposed te have been knocked off of the stone of the earth. And that¡¯s supposed te be the eldest of stones. No stones anywhere have a memory of it, at least that¡¯s how the legend goes.¡±


    Daraway nodded. ¡°And now you¡¯re off to chase it.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m off te see me about me da.¡±


    Daraway nodded but said nothing.


    Mym looked at her and she knew the woman wasn¡¯t coming with her. "I don''t want te lose ye again."


    "I know."


    "I have te go."


    Daraway looked at Cousins. "And I have to stay."


    Mym stepped forward again and pushed her arms inside Daraway''s cloak and embraced her around the waist. She felt the woman kiss the top of her head.


    She looked up at her. "Be sure you keep the girl away from any orcs comin through.¡±


    "What do you mean?"


    "She means she did somethin stupid," said Khaz.


    "Wasn''t the first time," said Mym.


    Daraway sighed and shook her head. "Won''t be the last."


    <hr>


    > +2 [Belonging]: ...back when I was laid up is when things started to change. Now I ain''t sayin it''s cause of me but y''know maybe it was. They said I was done. Like hell I was and she weren''t neither. You ain''t never done with the place you''re supposed to be... (4/10)


    > +2 [Stonespeaking]: Over there¡¯s where she learnt there''s more te stonespeech than just talkin and listenin. Those stranger stones learnt her ways of speakin we¡¯d forgot. It¡¯s part of why we¡¯re in this mess of messes now... (7/10)


    > -2 [Vengefulness]: For a time I feared I''d never have her back from that dark place she''d gone. Ask yourself, does it take more courage to make an oath or to break one? To conform to your tribe''s expectations or to defy them? (4/10)

 37. Secondhand Memory

    He hung over the oarlock of the little harpoon boat and looked straight down into mile deep water. The sun was high and it beamed through the rough geometries of the surface and rendered prisms beneath. As if the light compressed the salt and water into a thousand crystalline panes. No matter how he moved his head they angled away as radii from the center of its shadow so that it bore a halo like one of the martyrs in the chapel on the [brigadier]''s estate.


    He looked away. Out where the horizon should be the water seemed to go on forever, merging into the great dome of the sky as if it was just a vast mirror reflecting the spread of ocean. He searched its heights for another harpoon boat carrying another orc and tusker and dead man across its unending surface. Like the twin of the world that human sages say hides always behind the sun. He daydreamed of this and other things until the [bosun] guttered some noises and swung the canvas sail around to block the sun and then crossed the narrow bottom to sit next to Ogaz on the far side of the craft.


    Ogaz crawled away from the risen to sit on the thwart behind Orc. The whole boat shifted and the seawater ran close under Orc''s elbow and he extended his arm to touch it with his fingers. Cold and clean and toxic.


    "Orc thinks maybe now he¡¯s free he pairs someday?"


    He drew serpentine trails in the water. "Don''t know what that is."


    "Playing dumb now. Making pairs. Finding strong sow, making handsome cubs."


    He withdrew his fingers from the water and watched the drops roll off of their tips. "No."


    "Orc lies now."


    Orc shrugged. "Not many sows left to choose from."


    "Plenty left in camps."


    Orc looked from the water to the tusker. "I thought Glad Nizam freed them all."


    "Glad Nizam frees only half maybe." Ogaz watched the [bosun] work the tiller. "Still others north near rising lands. Some far south also."


    "Well their sows aren''t exactly available."


    "Others too. Others living."


    "Don''t think they''re for me."


    "No? Saand maybe?"


    "Saand?" He stopped watching the water and looked at Ogaz and at the way he ran his finger over the point of his good tusk. "Guess you''ve been thinking of it."


    "What?"


    "Pairing."


    Ogaz grinned. "Maybe."


    "You should''ve tried while you had the chance."


    "More chances coming. Always more chances."


    "Til there aren''t."


    Ogaz shrugged. "Then not mattering."


    Orc watched the [bosun] also. His smooth pallid fingers clenched tight around the tiller and tighter around the mainsheet. There was a cleat nearby yet he held onto the line for some reason. Perhaps to better feel a boat he''d just met.


    "They shot her," said Orc.


    "One arrow''s nothing to Saand. She''s strong."


    "They probably took her. They probably took all of them."


    "Then maybe they bring her where we go. Back to camps. Camps we later free."


    "I doubt that."


    "Ogaz likes strong. Strong and big. Ogaz thinks Orc never knows strong sow."


    "Ogaz best stop thinking."


    Ogaz smiled. "Orc only knows weakling womens."


    "Sure didn''t."


    Ogaz laughed. "Old warlady? Pit lady? Which?"


    Orc shook his head. Now the [bosun] watched them and listened with his upper lip turned upward into a grotesque smile as if he understood the tusker''s words and intimations.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    "Old warlady oils old leathers. Suppling for big strong Orc."


    "You''ve given this some thought."


    "Pit lady chains Orc down so he''s not bouncing off ceiling."


    "The pit didn''t have a ceiling."


    Ogaz laughed again.


    The [bosun] made his throaty noises and pushed the tiller away and they ducked as the boom swung across the benches. The [bosun] squatted beneath it and with a hand balanced himself on Ogaz''s knee and sat on their side of the boat.


    Ogaz made a horrified face at his ratty pant leg where the dead man had touched, as if he expected his skin to bloat up and shrivel like something rotting. Again he crawled to the opposite side of the boat.


    The [bosun] wore his little half smile and looked at Orc with a glimmer in his eye. In that moment he looked almost alive but for his hanging jaw. His hands gripped tiller and mainsheet and he lifted the sheet toward his mouth and tried to bite the line as if from habit but his jaw didn''t work so he wrapped the line twice around his neck and reached forward and across the boat to loosen the jibsheet and the jib flapped across the foredeck making the most noise that part of the sea had ever heard. He secured the jibsheet around the cleat and unwound the mainsheet from his neck with a bony hand and gestured his forehead at Orc then at the tiller.


    Orc took the offered tiller and watched the [bosun] make his hand flat and chop it directly ahead then slightly out of the wind then directly into the wind as if he would know what such gestures meant. Then he watched the [bosun] reach his free hand into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and draw out a leatherbound book and pencil of dwarven make.


    "Where''d you dig them up?" he said.


    The sailor set the book on the bench beside him and flipped it open with his thumb and held it open with the heel of his hand. Its first pages were filled with sketches of stones and of carvings and several portraits of a sharp featured woman engulfed in fire. He flipped to a blank page and wrote in a child''s blocky script: your dwarf friend.


    "You know about her."


    I stowed aboard on her voyage over. I listened. She wants the ax back. She hunts you.


    Orc glanced at the [Skyshard] lashed under the forethwart. "She isn''t the only one."


    I''m here for different reasons. To help. Repayment.


    ¡°Repayment.¡±


    The man nodded.


    "I didn''t give you Booky''s blade so you could put it in my gut."


    The [bosun] made a hideous clucking sound that must''ve been laughter and threw his head back but his jaw stayed in place resting against his neck and the sight of it stretched open made Orc feel seasick.


    He said, "You don''t owe me anything. Last I counted I owe you twice."


    The [bosun] shook his head. You saved three lives of mine. I owe one more.


    The [bosun] held up the finger that clasped the pencil to his thumb.


    "I didn''t save any lives of yours. This isn''t some sort of religious thing, is it?"


    No religion. My wife and boys.


    "The ones you were beating on."


    The [bosun] lowered his head and shook it from side to side. His jaw flapped back and forth and Orc had to look away. When he turned back he saw the man writing so fiercely that the paper tore under the pencil''s tip and with one hand he shoved the book against Orc¡¯s chest hard enough that Orc fell over backward into the bottom of the boat. The [bosun] secured the swinging tiller and cleated the mainsheet and swung under the boom to the prow of the boat and sat forward with his forehead thrust into the wind.


    Orc lifted the book off of his chest and saw the spot of sunlight shining through the tear and the word written there. NO.


    He sat up and closed the book and set it back on the bench then found the pencil rolling around the boat''s bottom and slipped it between the pages.


    "Orc upsetting new friend," said Ogaz.


    "Seems so."


    "Maybe Ogaz sends overboard?"


    "Not yet."


    "Please?"


    "No."


    "Hope Orc isn''t trusting. Dead man is still man."


    "I about wrapped his jaw over his scalp trying to wrench his head off. You can''t trust someone you''ve already killed. Not unless they stay that way."


    "Good. Orc and man having old history. Long history. Long time for planning revenge. Long time for getting things just right. He waits. Orc sees soon. He waits. Better to throw overboard now."


    "No."


    "Orc sees what men do to orcs back at battle. In lady¡¯s pit."


    "Not this one."


    "All men are same."


    "That''s what they say about us."


    Ogaz huffed and looked forward toward the [bosun]. "Orc making Ogaz watch two backs."


    "You''ve got two eyes."


    "Fine. Then Orc checks baits."


    "Fine." He turned around on his bench and checked the few rods and lines hanging over the stern of the boat. The [bosun] had shown him how to bend and barb scrap tin into a hook and how to bait it. He had shown him how to sink it to different depths and how to watch for a bite and how to set the hook and bring up the fish, provided there was a fish to bring up. In this fashion he had taught Orc how to fish. Perhaps not in the manner of scalers, yet it still made him feel a little more like one. Perhaps too late to help his folk but not too late to help himself. For a moment he marveled at who he might''ve been had the [brigadier] not done what she did. At who he might still become. Perhaps more than any other reason this was why he trusted the man he had slain once already.


    He sat back and looked at the sky and thought about things. Just a few days ago he had [known] how to find the [orcstone] in the same way he knew how to find his elbow. He had [known] where it was as if it were a part of his body, and for a time after he had emerged from the [mother] he felt like he could almost grab it out of the thin desert air. But the [sensing] had faded like the recounted scent of the [brigadier]''s favorite vintage, or its tannins of cherry and forest floor, or its lightheadedness and free spiritedness. Or the sound of her voice. Now he [felt] as though the [orcstone] was farther away despite his drawing closer to it. He worried he was losing it.


    He reached down to check the rods again and reached out to feel the tension on the lines again, and he watched the wake trail slightly to windward and fade into the blue as if no boat had ever passed that way. He heard Ogaz make a disgusted noise behind him. He saw the dwarven book fly end over end and splash in their wake.


    <hr>


    > -1 [Awareness]: He didn¡¯t understand what I tried tellin him. Maybe he just didn''t care... (6/10).

 38. Goodnights

    They trekked down the drainage and by midday they came to where the floodwaters had carved a channel through the beach to meet the probing sea. They saw twoscore of knights and mariners working at the edge of the new inlet. Their helms piled behind them like a headhunter''s spoils, their boxy steel cuirasses standing together like captured chessmen. They stacked crates and barrels in one of the dozen boats belonging to the distant ship adrift amid the sea haze, or perhaps the nearer ship slowly spinning on its bow anchor, or perhaps the nearest ship aground with its keel splayed out one way and its three masts stiffly reaching parallel to the beach like the legs of a hind''s carcass.


    Mym called out to the gathered humans. "Oy! Ye slippin off on us then?"


    A [knight] looked over at them. "Lend us a hand here."


    When two mariners bent to lift a crate she saw the [armiger] behind them, hips thrust forward and shoulders arched back to counterweight a keg clutched against his naked chest, the strata of his forearms pressing one against the other as if moving across a fault, now compressing, now subducting, now squeezing moisture from their fibers. She stood on her toes as he turned to pass the keg along but he didn''t notice her.


    "Or don''t," said the [knight].


    "Oy Mym," said Khaz.


    "Aye?"


    "Yer eyes still fit in that head of yers?"


    She looked at the [knight]. "Will ye ask yer armiger if he''ll take us with him? We need te get back across the sea."


    "Come on and ask him yourself."


    Khaz leaned close to her. "Ye know Daraway doesn''t trust him."


    "And ye don''t trust her."


    "Me mind might be changin."


    She stared at him.


    "Aye act surprised, but it''s yer own damn fault."


    "If I''d only known te drop the two of ye into a war I might''ve started one twenty years ago."


    The [knight] announced them, but the [armiger] didn''t stop lifting and passing and lifting and passing. "We are pleased to see our honored guests," he said.


    "Surprised yer leavin already,¡± said Mym.


    "We did what we came to do. Much like the two of you."


    "Aye that we did. Can we trouble ye for passage home?"


    "It is no trouble. Do you mind calling at another port along the way?"


    "Yer not goin te seaway''s end?"


    "Not immediately. King''s business takes us elsewhere. He is not a patient man. His priests will tell you he is no man at all, but dwarves do not believe such things."


    "How long''s yer business goin te take?"


    "One hopes it will not take long. But if one needs to hurry then they might consider helping load and stow. Where there''s work to be done one must do it. We can speak further once we are all aboard and underway."


    For the dwarves, aboard and underway meant riding in the belly of a whaler, forward where the casks of the leviathans'' oil were normally stowed. The wooden planks were sodden and slick from it. In an hour it covered their hands and faces and made dark streaks in their clothes wherever they sought to wipe it off their hands, and it was greasy in their hair, and no matter where they went the rancid smell of it followed them.


    That first night aboard it was black as pitch and there was nothing to see beside the colors her eyes made against the backs of their lids. She shifted in the hammock they''d found stuffed under the futtocks. It was long enough for them to lay head to head in. The ship pivoted around where they lay and the stillness of the hammock made the endless pitching bearable. As she fell asleep he said, "Ye awake?"


    "Am now."


    "Sorry."


    "What is it?"


    She felt the hammock wobble as he shifted around. "What do ye think this king''s business is?" he said.


    "Don''t know."


    "Could be anythin."


    "Could be."


    The sea sloshed and gurgled against the hull. She started drifting along its rhythms, but he called her back.


    "Could be the orcstone," he said.


    "There isn''t no orcstone."


    "I know that, but they don''t."


    "Go te sleep."


    "Aye I''m tryin."


    She waited for his breathing to change but it never did. Someone above hailed another vessel. She couldn''t hear the reply.


    "What if there is?" he said.


    "Go te sleep."


    "Think it''d save the delvin?"


    "Probably."


    "Me too."


    "That''s how I know there''s nothin te it."


    "How''s that?"


    "If we had the stone of the earth te begin with or the dwarfstone cut from its whole or any of the others then we''d not be strugglin now."


    His voice was insistent. "Maybe not, but the armiger and his king think there''s somethin te it. That''s why they''re after it."


    "Ye don''t know that''s what they''re after."If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    "Those orcs ye mentioned, that goblin and otaur, ye said they told em about it."


    "Go te sleep."


    "Ye said Barzun himself was after it."


    "We don''t know it was Barzun in that cave."


    "Who else could it''ve been? Hell, maybe it wasn''t the orcstone at all he was after and it was the dwarfstone all along."


    She rolled onto her side. "I''m done listenin."


    "I''m just tryin te figure where it might be. And how that dam figures into it. The one yer da''s stock breached. The one Barzun built."


    He waited for her to say something but she wasn''t going to.


    "Mym?"


    "Shut up."


    "In a minute. How''s the dam figure in?"


    "Hell. Maybe a dam''s a dam. Desert like that''s got folks savin every drop of water they find."


    "Maybe. But did ye see the well cap at the bottom of the lake?"


    "I didn''t see much other than the way out. Bout te start lookin for another."


    "Someone sunk a concrete well with a hinged cap. Never quite seen anythin like it. And the terracin too. Looked like folks were livin there before it all went underwater."


    "Bet they were glad for its raisin. Two days out of there I was lookin for ways to tap a cactus."


    "Lookin te dip a straw in the sky."


    "Lookin te juice a stonefruit. Now go te sleep."


    "Ye''ll think on it?"


    "Aye I promise te dream of nothin else just as soon as ye let me."


    She might''ve slept some before the next "Mym," but she couldn''t be sure.


    "What?"


    "I think they were pullin crude out of the stone."


    "What?"


    "Back at the well. I think Barzun blocked up the river to buoy crude out of the well."


    "Why the hell for?"


    "Ye can smell it."


    "What?"


    "Oil." She heard him sniff. "It''s all up in me beard. I heard those whalers talkin bout it back at seaway''s end. They''ve just about killed the last of em I remember them sayin. Reminded me of the wolves and elk we used te have round the mountain. Before everythin started freezin up."


    "Everythin but yer flappin jaw."


    "Humans don''t have the delvin''s forge te light and warm em. Didn''t ye see the film all over everythin back in the slot canyon? Stuck on te every stone west of the dam and the soles of our boots and all blowin about?"


    "Didn''t see nothin but the way out. Stones find me another."


    "I think it was some sort of crude."


    "The stones didn''t say?"


    "I couldn''t stop te ask. I was runnin after ye like my feet were on fire and carryin that wee lass besides."


    "Sorry about that."


    "Don''t be. Ye had every reason te be gettin away after what I said and how I acted."


    "Thanks for sayin so."


    She felt him shrug. "Anyway if it was crude it''d explain why Barzun was lookin for the stone."


    "I''m sure it would."


    "It''s nasty stuff. Ye never worked with it none. It''s nasty. There''s a whole well of it bout six thousand fathoms under the delvin. Reckon whatever sort of creatures came fore dwarves left it. It won''t speak when ye ask it. Only speaks as it burns and it doesn''t have anythin nice te say. It''s a right bitch te wash off. Like washin off a bitin badger. And if ye get it in yer throat or yer belly, well, it''ll stone ye up sure enough."


    "So yer supposin Barzun needed the orcstone te save himself."


    "He wasn''t so careless as te let crude get him. But what if he''d aimed te bring back the critters and plants the crude took? Not many ways te control a gravity well, aye? Sure anythin comin up out of it just went everywhere, stickin all over everythin like nak shit. Killin it. Can''t think that''d sit well with him, can ye?"


    "Really Khaz, I barely remember him."


    "Well I''m tellin ye it wouldn''t. That''s why he was after the orcstone. That and because of the delvin''s problem."


    She closed her eyes again. He''d run through it all. Maybe he''d sleep.


    "Mym?"


    She wouldn''t answer.


    "Alright ye just sleep then. But think on it. If Barzun thought there was somethin te it then maybe there was. If the orcstone wasn''t near dwarves te begin with then they''d never have had it te lose. If he found it on the far side of the world then the delvin dwarves never could''ve used it te fix our problem. If he''d managed te bring it back te the delvin then he could''ve saved it. Could''ve saved all of it and all the dwarves with it."


    She laid there and thought about it. How could she not? Finally she said, "I suppose we''re leavin knowin less than what we came with."


    She felt his hand snake down her shoulder. She reached up to grab it in hers. They were slick against each other from his sweat and the oil. "I don''t know, Mym. I''d say ye learned some things."


    She squeezed his hand then let go. "I never told her bout us,¡± she said.


    "Ye''ll have a chance."


    "I don''t know."


    "I do."


    "I shouldn''t have left her behind."


    "We all have te choose our own way."


    She turned her face toward him. "Sounds like maybe ye learned somethin too."


    "Somethin. Somethin about missed chances and impotence te lift a pound in this ten ton world. Somethin about seein what''s right in front of ye and learning te love it. And no I don''t mean ye and me. I know ye love me and I know yer limits too. I mean that woman yer worried about leavin.¡±


    She took a breath as if gathering her strength for a tremendous push. ¡°I need te tell ye somethin.¡±


    ¡°Ye don¡¯t,¡± he said.


    ¡°I don¡¯t?¡±


    ¡°Nah. I already know ye love her. I''ve always known. Yer worried ye did the wrong thing leavin her but ye didn''t. Ye couldn''t have. It''s like we told that messenger fore we left. There aren''t right things or wrong things. There are just things. Some things need doin and some things don''t."


    She yawned. "Afraid I''m too tired te follow yer wanderin. If ye want me comin along ye best throw down a line."


    "Well I don''t know how to say it all. Ye carryin yer da all the way back te the delvin to start. What choice did ye have? Seekin out Daraway and draggin her into the mess tween ye and that orc. Letting her dote on that girl. Runnin us all across the desert and straight into some chronicle of yore. Freein those brutes after what they did te the delvin dwarves. Fixin me into another damnable boat. All over a bit of metal and wood. And now the first stone enterin into it all."


    "There''s no stone."


    "Weren''t ye listenin?"


    "Aye and ye gave me so many ifs I could sell em back te ye for a copper apiece and buy the world."


    "Funny sayin."


    "It''s Cousins''. Anyway, there''s no stone of the earth or orcstone or any of it and I''m goin te sleep."


    "Ye say it but I know yer gears are crankin. I can hear the steam whistlin out of yer ears. And now yer feelin this thing out. Is it somethin else that needs doin? Stones and bones can ye ever say no?"


    "I can te ye."


    "But ye aren''t, are ye? I shouldn''t have said anythin."


    "On that we agree."


    "Don''t forget why yer here. It''s not for me or Daraway or the girl or the delvin, and definitely not some myth of a stone."


    "I''m goin back te him," she said.


    "Are ye?"


    "Ye see me swingin beside ye in this horrid tub?"


    She heard him moving around.


    He said, "Can''t see shit. It''s darker than the inside of a nak butt."


    "Darker than a tar blindfold."


    "Darker than the black heart of the world."


    For a moment she thought about that. But before her thought took form he said, "I don''t know about ye, but I''ve already figured what needs doin."


    "Yer finally goin te sleep?"


    "I''m goin te finish my lad."


    She hadn''t expected that. "Da says nothin''ll come of it if ye don''t use shard of the sky."


    "Ye know I don''t think that''d make any difference."


    "Me either. Yer still goin te do it?"


    "Aye."


    "What for?"


    "Cause it''s not bout changin what is. It''s bout grievin what might''ve been."


    "Hard te pin yer hopes te that."


    She felt him shrug. "I''m through hopin," he said. "Been hopin my whole life and all it''s brought is a dragon''s trove of misery. Torturin me every day with could''ves and should''ves. Been chasin them for as long as I remember, and now I''m lookin back and wonderin what joys I missed today by fixin everythin on tomorrow."


    She heard his beard rustle and imagined him shaking his head in the dark.


    He said, "I believed em. Thayne. Yer da. Thought ye and I were the ones te change everythin. Spent the better part of three decades hopin. Hell. If I''d known there wasn''t any hope I would''ve done plenty differently. Wouldn''t have let them twist ye into my bed for starters. Wouldn''t have helped em chase out Daraway''s folks. Wouldn''t have sat around for so long waitin for tomorrow''s promises. Hell I could''ve gone abroad with Barzun. Maybe I''d be comin back in this tub with the orcstone in my pocket right this instant."


    "Kind of sounds like yer just tradin one hope for another."


    "Well it''s a hard habit to quit."


    "There''s no stone."


    "I know."


    "Then I expect ye te quit it."


    "I''ll try."


    She felt him shift onto his side then back onto his back.


    He said, "And ye? What ye plannin?"


    "Te sleep."


    "Aye, and?"


    "Catch up with da."


    "And if he''s no better?"


    "Well. It''s like ye were just sayin. Right or wrong, some things need doin."


    "Aye. I''m sorry."


    "Me too, but yer right."


    "Ye know if Barzun and those orcs and these humans are right, if they''re onte findin the orcstone or any of the others, well they''d heal yer da up like he was fresh cut."


    She''d already thought of it. "Last time I''ll say it."


    "Ye don''t have te."


    "Good. Goodnight."


    "Goodnight."


    <hr>


    > +1 [Belonging]: ...it''s probably just as hard givin up ways of thinking as it is givin up people. I wouldn''t know. I ain''t never been made to try... (5/10)

 39. Debts

    They beached the harpoon boat on humanity''s western shore in the middle of the night. A gibbous moon painted land and sky in blues deeper than any he''d seen asea. He led them east across the scythed fields of an estate whose yellow windows stared out of the ultramarine like the eyes of a jaguar. Dry stalks from the reaping crunched under his feet and the cool night pricked his skin. They cut south to a hedge and followed it to a dry ditch and followed that to a gate with horizontal wooden slats set across it. On the other side of the gate a shallow stream passed with banks of spindly black trees whose bare branches shattered the sky like so many cracks as if all creation was just a glass globe broken and discarded.


    He and Ogaz drank from the stream while the [bosun] squatted and watched. They walked up its flow. Soft mud sucked at their feet. They didn''t stop until the coming sun grayed the sky ahead and made everything behind seem all the darker. Orc turned them into the soft hollow of a fallen tree. It took some convincing for Ogaz to allow the [bosun] inside.


    He looked across scenery the [brigadier] would''ve called idyllic. A heavy gold haze held onto the smell of the year''s last harvests. The columns and rows all chopped down, beheaded, produce taken elsewhere, skeletal fibers laid bare to sunlight''s reduction. Gentle hills rose in all easterly directions as gold as the air that held the remains of their bounty. He closed his eyes and listened for the sea but heard nothing. Not even the movement of the stream for it was flat and dark. He [felt] for the [orcstone]. He couldn¡¯t recall it. He couldn¡¯t even imagine it. How does one imagine what one cannot conceive? It was like imagining the face of someone he had never met. It was blank. Or filled in by the familiar. Both equally false.


    He had lost it. Perhaps he had never had it.


    He opened his eyes. Some miles distant the speck of a [farmer] walked a row. A burro trailed a few paces behind. He closed his eyes again and slept.


    He woke as night fell. Ogaz lay in the hollow with his eyes closed and hands folded over his stomach like the young man laid in marble atop the tomb of the [brigadier]''s husband.


    "Wake up one tusk," he said.


    Ogaz opened an eye. "Nothing to wake from."


    "We''re moving on."


    "Going where?"


    "Inland."


    The [bosun] made one of his little croaks. Orc told him they were moving east. The seaway was that way, and Booky''s and the brothers'' farm and the [brigadier]''s estate and the few other lands he knew. "Unless your folk would have us."


    The [bosun] hissed.


    "Guessing you didn''t spend much time with them."


    The [bosun] shook his head and made a gesture that perhaps meant something to humans or to risen but meant nothing to him, then he crept out of the hollow and slid down the bank to the stream.


    "What''s Orc saying?" said Ogaz.


    He told him.


    Ogaz blinked at him with his mouth half open. "Orc''s mad. Always mad and always getting madder. Ogaz not going to live with dead mens and womens."


    "We aren''t going."


    "Good."


    "We need to find the orcstone."


    Ogaz swept a hand before him as if throwing seed to sow. "Orcstone can be anywhere, yes?"


    "Not anywhere."


    "What sight does elf tree show?"


    "Trees don''t have eyes to see. It showed me in another way."


    Ogaz dropped his hand to his side. "Orc''s not remembering."


    "Not so much a remembering as it is a feeling."


    "Orc''s never much of a feeler."


    "Not now."


    "Not ever."


    Orc listened to the [bosun] splashing in the stream. "It can make life from unlife," he said.


    "Very powerful."


    "Too powerful to believe it''s truly lost."


    "Hidden maybe?"


    "Yeah I think so."


    "Then Orc goes to powerful places. That¡¯s where it¡¯s hid. Maybe big human city?"


    "You mean the new seat."


    "Yes. There."


    "They''d feather us so thick we could fly over the walls. Except we''d be dead."


    The [bosun] returned to the hollow with a flat and smooth stone in his hand. He sat near Orc with [Booky''s blade] across his knees and he began to slide the stone across its edge in long strokes that sounded like paper tearing.


    "Where else?" said Ogaz.


    "The old seat."


    "Ogaz already says no. Only thing worse than humans are dead ones not staying that way."


    The [bosun] looked at Ogaz and spun the blade and worked the stone over its other edge.


    Ogaz sneered at him. "Yes Ogaz meaning you."


    "We know a dwarf had it before," said Orc. "Maybe they have it still."


    "Beardling lands in mountains, yes?"


    "Yes. Across the seaway span."


    "Beardlings fight mean. Orc needs army of orcs if going to mountains. Maybe we go to camps? Free brothers and sisters? Hundreds still needing help. Thousands maybe."Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    He didn''t want an army. Invading and taking and killing in his name. "No."


    It had grown too dark for him to see Ogaz''s expression, but he saw his head turn down then away, and against the indigo sky the black silhouette of his tusk and sloping forehead and long ears and sharp chin.


    "Where else?" said Ogaz.


    He tried to remember her maps. She had had them all over the place. Hanging from the walls and glued onto spheres on stands and spread across the great table in the dining hall with icons and figures arranged here and there as if it was her old command pavilion.


    "Places farther south perhaps. I remember some that she talked about sometimes."


    "Pit lady?"


    "Old warlady."


    "Orc''s a dog."


    The [bosun] flipped the blade and worked the stone over its bottom edges with the regularity of breath taken and released.


    Orc said to the man, "There wasn''t much good metal to it to begin with. You keep that up you''ll be fighting with a sewing needle."


    "Where else?" said Ogaz.


    "Well there''s plenty of life down beyond the mountains in the green vales, and some sort of power blew open the crater of glass. And there''s the black heart of the world, but that''s right north of the dwarves."


    Ogaz said, "Powerful names. Like maw of mad."


    "Yeah."


    "Orc feeling anything from names?"


    "No."


    "And all beyond beardling bridge?"


    "Yeah."


    "Is good that way. Orc and Ogaz know where to go and how. But Orc''s unsure?"


    "Yeah."


    "Then Orc must stay here in goldlands and free brothers."


    "I''m no Glad Nizam."


    "Orc Nizam."


    He stood up. "Not sure about that. Let''s go."


    "No saving home at least saving folk. Then saving home and folk together."


    He left the hollow to start across the fields. "Come on. We need to use the night while we have it."


    They followed certain stars east until a fleet of flat bottomed clouds with heavy tops bore off the sea with blue lightning lancing back and forth across their range and flashing white behind their heads and occluding the stars as they came, and the great black sheet they dragged across the night passed overhead and onward to the eastern horizon. Its underside pulsed white and electric and he watched it as if he stood on the seafloor and watched a great naval battle of cannons roaring and flashing between dueling vessels and men and women dropping from rigging to bounce off the decks like dolls tossed off a roof or plunging into frigid waters that glowed orange from tarfire and red from bloodletting. He rubbed his eyes but it was still there.


    "Seeing strange glow ahead?" said Ogaz.


    "Yeah."


    "What''s Orc thinking?"


    "Might be straw fired for clearing. Might be a town. We should go around."


    "No no. Town meaning food. Ogaz hungry. Long walk to beardling''s bridge." He broke into a long legged lope.


    The [bosun] chortled.


    Orc said, "Don''t act like you understand," and he jogged after.


    They topped a gentle rise and the source of the glow shone out of the dark gulch before them. It looked like the stars and planets were caught in a nighttime lake and arranged into an order beyond what the gods could manage. Pinpoint lights set in a kind of square with flickering yellow torches at its four principal corners and others burning along each edge in regular intervals. Halfway down the northern edge white lamplight was refracted and focused into a single beam like a lighthouse¡¯s and it swept across the grounds as if hunting for something lost. Inside the square perimeter was dark though he was vaguely aware of several structures within because their peaked roofs obstructed his view of the eastern boundary. Directly above the clouds reflected the deep red glare of the place, their bulks glowed in brighter spots as if swollen from past violence and darker spots as if the light of the ground charred the sky.


    "Might be a fort," he said


    "Is camp."


    He looked again. The beam searched. "You seem certain."


    "Ogaz doesn''t forget."


    "Well. You might try it."


    "Because Orc''s done so well trying? No. Sometimes remembering is all Ogaz has."


    Orc looked at his friend. At the dark shape of his head against the red clouds. "Stay left and high. Don''t give that searchlight any chances."


    "Orc wants to leave."


    "Hell yes he does."


    "Ogaz can''t."


    Orc stopped. "We can''t help them."


    Ogaz squatted in the shorn field. "Orc doesn''t know. Orc can''t know. Orc saying Ogaz must go to save folk. Ogaz''s folk are there. Saand saying Ogaz must save homeland. Ogaz''s home is there. Come now with Ogaz and set free."


    Orc stood over the tusker and looked down at the lights. "Say we go to free them and we don''t get cut to pieces by that company of screws down there. We don''t have anyplace to take them. We''ve got a boat fit for six if the tide or some kids haven''t stolen it off somewhere. Humans are crawling all over the Madlands, and there isn''t a thing left to eat there."


    Ogaz didn''t say anything.


    "I just don''t know what we''d do with somehundred orcs starved seven eighths to wormfood."


    Ogaz stood up. "Free them."


    "You tried that once already. We don''t have food for one between us and who knows how many they''ve got fenced in down there. In a week not even the worms will want them."


    "Orc not understanding. Better dying free than living unfree."


    "Boy that sounds good but them who might object to the notion sure can''t say otherwise."


    Ogaz''s eye''s glinted red from the glow. "Ogaz isn''t boy."


    "I didn''t mean it like that. Look. Glad Nizam freed three thousand and only two of them are still around to talk about it. And she had a plan and inside help."


    "What meaning? What help?"


    "Something she said before they shot her. It doesn''t matter."


    "Orc tells."


    He looked back down at the camp. "She said humans opened the fence."


    "Orc lies."


    "Just saying what I heard. But you were there for it. You''d know better than me."


    Ogaz turned back to the camp.


    Orc said, "A lot of orcs died for Glad Nizam''s dream. Humans too, though they sure deserved it. I just don''t want to tally the last two still standing. I''m sick of the killing."


    Still Ogaz said nothing.


    "If you want to go then go." He offered the [Skyshard]''s handle. "Take it and see what you can do."


    Without a word Ogaz walked away from the camp. After a moment Orc lowered the [Skyshard] and walked after. After they had passed by the camp Orc said, "We''ll do what we can when we come back this way."


    "Much suffering between then and now," said Ogaz. "Maybe Orc isn''t orc after all."


    "You aren''t the first to think it."


    Hours later the red-bottomed clouds were hidden behind the tops of the undulating hills and ahead of them splotches of the eastern sky turned a shade above black. They found a place where a narrow stream dropped three yards over the sharp lip of a rocky outcrop. They wedged themselves under the outcrop and watched the day form around them. Water fell to rupture itself and foam and ripple outward to lap the sandy banks where cattlesign came right up to the water''s edge.


    Orc nodded at the prints and patties. "Perhaps breakfast will come to us."


    He took the first watch. The sky went all gray but the sun never showed. Neither did the cattle. Past noon he woke Ogaz and gave him the [Skyshard] and went to sleep. He dreamed of a great river pouring into Booky''s pit with him at its bottom and as the water filled the pit it carried him closer and closer to the metal grate. When he was close enough to reach it he tried prying it apart. It held fast. The water kept coming. He woke as he drowned.


    Night was falling. The [bosun] stood down at the side of the pool watching the water churn and swirl. Ogaz was gone. The [Skyshard] lay where he had sat.


    "You let him go," said Orc.


    The [bosun] looked at him.


    "Least you could''ve given him the ax. Or Booky''s blade."


    The [bosun] shrugged.


    "He''s going to get himself killed."


    The [bosun] shrugged again. He jumped across the stream and started east.


    Orc rushed after him and smashed him onto the close cropped ground. The dead man''s eyes went wide and a cold hand scrabbled for [Booky''s blade] but it had fallen out of reach. Orc plucked it from the earth and threw it across the stream. He grabbed two fistfuls of the [bosun]''s collar and shouted into his face. "Don''t follow me. You want to pay someone off then go and pay off that tusker. He''ll be back at the camp dying to save the ones you sons of bitches locked away. Go and die with him and you best stay dead or pretend to because if I see you again I''ll separate you into a thousand bits and feed you to a fire one piece at a time."


    He threw the [bosun] against the ground and turned and strode upslope to where Ogaz had last sat. He picked up the [Skyshard] and walked away without looking back. He''d lost the [orcstone]. He''d lost his friends. All he had were his debts and he was sick to death of them. He sure wasn''t going to carry another''s.


    <hr>


    > -1 [Awareness]: ...the dead know somethin the livin don''t. You only stop changin when worms start nestin inside your brains. Up until then you got to be prepared for anythin, and not a one thing about yourself is permanent. Hell, even then ain''t nothin is permanent neither... (5/10).


    > +1 [Renown]: That was the first time anyone called him Nizam. He shoulda took the name but that ain''t never was his way... (3/10).


    > -1 [Rage]: An orc who doesn''t fight is like a man who doesn''t lie. You think it makes them safe somehow and in so doing you overlook their abominable nature. How can you ever trust someone whose mere existence is a contradiction... (7/10).

 40. The Slab and the Block

    The landing lay hundreds of miles south of seaway''s end. Its shoddy old pier half sunk in the bright turquoise surf and its new one of rough planks tied to joists made from the long and mostly straight trunks of gray-barked rubber trees that bled white sap like cream from their cuts. It rolled up and down in the gentle swells on hollowed coconut shells that were almost black where the waves broke over them. At the head of the old pier stood a collection of small thatch-roofed huts that looked like they''d fallen over every night for a century only to be put back together every morning. Fibers peeled off of their walls and roofs. Their window frames held neither glass nor screens against the prodigious number of flying insects zigging and zagging at the edge of their tiny clearing. At the head of the new pier a wall of green vegetation as wide as the horizon and taller than the tops of the ship rose from the glittering yellow sand into the flat blue sky. An impenetrable canopy of reaching branches and broad leaves and hanging vines and red birds and purple and orange and white and yellow flowers, some of which turned out to also be birds, and brown and black primates sitting in troops between them. A cacophony of rising whoops and piercing calls and a garish vibrancy that delighted her eyes, all overhanging and overflowing itself onto the clearing where the rude huts waited. It looked like they''d been waiting a long time.


    Khaz climbed out the hatch and walked across the deck and stood beside her at the gangplank.


    "Where we at?" he said.


    "One of the men called it the sea of suns. The armiger just went ashore."


    "What for?"


    "I aim te find out."


    "Ye want me te come?"


    "I want ye te stay and keep an eye on this lot. Don''t let em leave without me."


    "Fine."


    "I don''t see any right stones ashore anyway."


    "Well if ye meet any be sure te tell em Khaz o Naz says hello."


    "I''ll do that."


    She edged down the gangplank then walked up the pier. It kept rising to meet her and falling away. She watched its planks to keep from tripping over her own feet.


    "Oy," he called.


    She turned and saw him pointing away north.


    "Ye can see the massif!"


    She looked where he pointed but saw only treetops.


    Ashore she put her nose into the largest of the huts. Its floorboards had gone to rot and its inside smelled like it. Some barrels in a corner. Some sacks bigger around than Khaz stuffed with moldy flour. An old oil lamp. The sounds of the jungle pressing in.


    As she turned to the next hut she bumped into an elderly woman who''d appeared near the head of the old pier. She was so wizened and bent that she wasn''t much taller than Mym.


    "Oy, sorry."


    "That you Sass?" said the woman.


    Mym looked up at her. Glazed over eyes and wrinkles and brown spots on fair skin from the sun and the reflection of the sun on the sea. White head covered in a faded and fraying bandana. Shirt and long skirt of old sailcloth cut and sewn back together and their patches from the cloths of other sails so that she wore the mode that propelled her kind''s conquest of the world. Her ropey and calloused hands clutched the handle of a bucket of darting silver smallfish and a pair of simple bamboo fishing rods.


    "No maam. I''m Mym."


    "You''re off the ship come in."


    "Aye maam, that I am."


    The woman peered at her then peered out along the old pier and the new one. She squinted against the heat of the sun but she couldn''t see the light of it. "You see my Henry out there?"


    "No maam."


    "One of these days he''ll slow down for me."


    "Aye maam. I best be gettin on."


    "We''ll be married seventy years this solstice."


    "Oy, that''s a long time."


    "It is. Never feels like it in the ways that matter. Never quite feels long enough. How old are you young lady?"


    "I''ll be forty by yer countin."


    "You married?"


    "No maam."


    "It''s never too late. We came down here on a ship like the one standing there. We was fifteen. Him from a family better than mine, but they''d never have me. Spent two weeks just getting here. The captain married us and off they went. Never seen my mama or sisters since. Ain''t used a toilet since. Ain''t had a bite of proper meat neither since you dwarves shut the passes. Just the salt stuff the ships bring in, and the fish of course. They fry up nice in whale lard. Don''t get much of that either nowadays."


    "Aye. I best be gettin on."


    "We were too young to be married. But seventy years is plenty of time to grown up. I thank god every day for him. Never known what I done to deserve him."


    Mym looked down the sandy coast and back down the piers. "You need help findin him?"


    "I''ll manage dear. You get on after whatever you''re chasing."


    "Yes maam."


    "Don''t blink or you''ll lose a decade."


    Mym nodded politely though the woman never saw. She walked to the other huts and put her head in. They were empty, but a dirt path ran between them into the jungle''s interior. Fifty paces on she passed a very old man heading down to the beach with a spool of lines over his forearms and a heavy hemp net over his shoulders. He nodded at her and she felt the embarrassment of knowing a stranger she''d never met.


    The trail opened to a wide clearing around a long wooden hall. Gray smoke rose in a thin column out of its crown. An unfinished mural of jungle and ocean things was carved into its wall: barebacked humans working amid curling banana trees and birds of paradise and a panther sleeping on a limb and a long adder slithering from the jungle into the sea with salmon swimming up its back and flying fish soaring above. A [woodcarver] holding a hammer and a chisel knelt and surveyed a blank space. The [armiger] stood behind her.Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    "Oy," she said.


    The [armiger] turned around. "Good morning."


    "How''s yer king''s business comin?"


    "Always there is more to do than there are reliable men to do it."


    The [woodcarver] raised her chisel and tapped her hammer against its strike plate. Mym watched her technique.


    "Ye expect we''ll be leavin soon?"


    The [armiger] nodded. "We hope to. You are in a hurry."


    "Aye."


    "Then Waz is no better?"


    She looked at him. "Ye know Waz?"


    "No, we have never met. But we know of him. Last father to the last daughter. Brother of Barzun who departed, who we do know. Or did before the Madlands took him."


    "Ye know more than I expected."


    "One must maintain the highest expectations. We know of all the dwarves yet living under the mountain, and a fair amount about those who do not. Always we have admired your achievements. In warfare, in construction, in metallurgy, in memory. Your monuments around the world are unparalleled. Such admiration led to a special interest in your welfare. So we know of Waz and of the Old Serac and Thayne. Of Khaz. And of Mym."


    "That''s more about the delvin than that what leaves it. How do ye come te know so much?"


    "One recalls our men visiting over the years. Just some weeks ago our messenger nearly spent a night there."


    "Aye and I nearly pitched him over the flume."


    He smiled at her and his eyes reminded her of Daraway''s and she suddenly felt things she''d rarely felt for the last two decades.


    He said, "Walk with me Mym so that we might expedite our departure and return you to your father."


    "Alright," she said.


    He led her along a well used path out of the clearing and into the jungle. He raised his [long spear] and used it as a staff to push through huge bright green leaves overgrowing the path and to cut spiderwebs spun across it. Their way sloped upward as it wound around massive smooth barked trees and the higher it climbed the more sunlight filtered onto the floor.


    "What''s up this way?" she said.


    "A project of ours."


    "What sort of project?"


    "Progress." The path flattened then sloped downward so steeply it had to turn back and forth across the slope and the massive roots of diverse flora were visible and twisted over and against themselves and held the slope in place for hundreds of feet, as if the canopy above was mere decoration for a community of beings who held the world in place from its inside out.


    At a switchback he saw her staring into the understory. "There is more wealth herein than under your mountain, if one can believe such wonders persist in the world."


    "Delvin''s not worth as much as ye think. Not te ye and yers anyway."


    "We know of the precious veins running down the great walls of your valley."


    She laughed. "Gold and silver? Ye may like the way they look and shape, but minin and meltin em has a cost."


    "Your kingdom sleeps in the cradle of the largest lodes ever struck, yet you speak of cost."


    "Aye those lodes have memories more valuable than any trinket made from their obliteratin. Yer messenger tell ye all that?"


    "No. He is better used for particulars. Dwarfdom''s lodes are well known among our kind. Ever since men first visited during the great scourge. And, of course, the king''s emissary. You might recall him. He and his wife lived under the mountain for years until they were ejected. They had a daughter about your age."


    "Aye, I know her."


    He nodded. "As do we. Here we are."


    The path opened up suddenly and he stepped up onto a black slab far older than the jungle that had risen around it. She climbed up after him and saw the vastness of it. It was wider than the chamber of the delving''s forge. She followed him toward its center. She saw the artificiality of its flatness and of the way it laid in the bottom of a round and steep walled basin whose tall rainforest made it feel all the deeper and flatter and barer. After twenty paces the sun appeared from behind the rim to beat upon her and its heat rose in waves from the surface, and after another twenty paces the saw the tip of the white mountain''s massif appear like a tooth from behind the treetops. She''d never seen it from this angle. Its color and details were flattened by distance but there was no mistaking it.


    At the center of the black slab lay a white block of granite that had been dragged there long ago and stood like a table or an altar. The marks made by its dragging were still visible northways upon the surface of the slab.


    "Curious, is it not?" said the [armiger] as he walked around it. "Look here."


    She looked where he pointed and saw rustlike round stains varnishing the face of the stone, and the long and thin marks of a blade, or several, thatched over and over into its surface.


    "Do you know what this is?" he said.


    "Can''t say I do."


    "Perhaps the stone remembers."


    "I''m sure it does."


    "Will you ask it?"


    She looked at him, but he still looked at the stains of ancient blood.


    "Don''t think I need te."


    "Please? We are very much interested in listening."


    "Ye won''t hear anythin."


    "Watching then."


    "Why do ye care?"


    "Barzun never showed us. There is power in knowledge of all kinds, especially those we cannot replicate."


    "Well by the look of it it''s a memory I don''t much care to hear and wouldn''t trouble the stone te recall."


    "You act as though it has feelings."


    "Course it does, and I don''t care te trouble em any more than I care te trouble yers."


    "Pity. It shaped the history of the world."


    "Then ye already know it¡¯s history."


    "Yes. This is where your ancestors slew their gods."


    She balked. "What?"


    "We speak truth."


    "Dwarves don''t worship any sort of gods."


    "Not anymore."


    "Not ever," she said.


    "One wonders how the lore of dwarves could lose such a tale." He smiled wistfully at her then turned to the block. "We have tried to imagine it. Tens of thousands of years ago, upon the last conjoined eclipse of sun and moons, in this very spot, dwarves like you bending their gods'' necks upon the stone and hacking them apart. Can you imagine? Laying your female deity there as the sun passes from one black disc to the next, and at the moment it stands between them, the moment its own face is doubly cleft like a twin headed ax of fire ruling all the heavens, icon of the executioner''s triumph over all life in this world, at that very moment dropping your blade through her neck. Then forcing her mate down beside his peer, his beard sopping her blood, his breath rippling it, and as totality begins again and the dark disc transforms into a ring of fire, ending his reign. Can you imagine?"


    Horrified she watched the [armiger] kneel before the granite with both of his palms up to the sky as if placating it, then he leaned forward onto the block and laid his cheek on its weatherworn surface. "Imagine," he said, and he closed his eyes.


    "Yer off yer damned head."


    "Clean off," he said.


    For a moment neither spoke. A light breeze rustled the treetops in a slow moving wave across the northern rim of the basin. The jungle''s calls and songs carried on indifferent to the memories of the world.


    "If this is all ye wanted te show me I''ll be gettin back."


    "A moment," he said. He straightened off the block to stand beside her. "When first we came here no one knew what it was. Two men and two mules couldn''t move it. Over the years we tried other methods, but never could we alter its form or position. We still come down here every time we pass through the sea of suns, but it has never changed."


    "Ye have a question in there?"


    "It is said only a dwarf can move it."


    She didn''t say anything.


    "Will you try?"


    "Don''t think I will."


    "It is just a small thing. An experiment. A way to verify the tale."


    She said, "No," and she turned to retrace their path back to the ship.


    He grabbed her hand in his. His grasp was much stronger than she expected and through a clenched jaw he muttered, "Try," as he forced her hand against the block. The sudden gravity of the stone overwhelmed her and she staggered forward and the [armiger] bore down on the rest of her and she raised her other hand to it to keep from falling and her forearms weighed heavily against it and her chest and stomach and hips and thighs and she felt his hands against the back of her head pushing her cheek against the smooth and weathered surface with the bloodstain all around her and the cleavings from the ax just before her eyes and the fine particles of grit and bone seized in their bottoms.


    She never felt his hands leave her body. Her entire being was pulled and being pulled into the block as if the entire world was pulled and being pulled into it. Her throat formed the question but she never heard it as it too was pulled and being pulled.


    A shadow fell across her face. Out of one eye she saw him blocking the sun and saw his face closing to hers. She heard him say, "One wonders what other art of dwarves have been lost to time and decadence," but the sound of it seemed to accelerate past her face and into the block like the roar of a coming then going avalanche.


    She told him to release her but she never heard the words.


    "We cannot free you. We already told you the block will not move. And it seems you cannot move it either."


    She tried calling to Khaz.


    "Perhaps he could help. He will not, of course. We thank you for your assistance. Goodbye Mym o waz."

 41. An Old Friend

    He arrived at the hole in the ground with the tavern that had been built around it. The glass windows of which she had been so proud were smashed out and now lay shattered in the dirt. A drift of dust gathered against the south facing walls. He walked between the half finished grandstand and onto the ring of wooden planks surrounding the pit. The creak of them under his feet and the rough dust over their smoothworn grains. Someone had carried away the grate. The red and white striped awnings now browned from dust and fluttering in the gentle breeze. Broken chairs and overturned tables lay where the king''s men had jumped from them. He stepped over them to the bar. Its one mirror now a thousand between spiderwebbed cracks, each catching a piece of his body and face and a hundred showing an eye or nose or mouth. The bottles were gone. The counter stove in from where Ogre had used the [sergeant] as a club. Bloodstains across it. More streaked on the floor. A pile of ashes and the dogman''s scorched jawbone.


    He went to the kitchen and its cracked oven. To the trapdoor above the cell. He looked at its little iron handle. He remembered the way it dropped in place with the dull thud of wood on wood. The sound of the bar set across it.


    "Oh shit," said someone behind him.


    He turned. A dirty [beggar] in worn breeches with a scraggly beard and his hand around the neck of an empty bottle of clouded glass stood in shock at the sight of him. He was one of Booky''s regulars. One who liked spitting on Orc from his spot in the rafters. The man lifted the bottle before his body as if it were a club and backed a step and fell over a chair and the holed soles of his shoes shot up toward the awnings. He scrabbled backward across the planks as if Orc was a whole army of orcs come to pillage his bottle.


    Orc took a step toward him and thought to help him up. The man shrieked and grabbed at the left side of his chest and dropped the bottle. He shrieked again and flipped onto his knees and staggered to his feet and lurched away from the pit and through a gap in the windscreen and out to the seaway.


    Orc let him go. He looked around. What was left to see? What was left to feel? He walked on before a posse arrived.Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.


    He paralleled the seaway east, always staying well apart from it, always hiding when he heard or saw folk coming up on their tall horses or wheeled carriages, once nearly strangling an auburn dog who''d tracked off the seaway to growl and bark at his hiding place in the tall weeds. When he neared the [brigadier]''s estate he crossed the seaway to pass it by on the opposite side. In the low sunlight he saw the patina covering the iron rods of its fence and the olives'' unpruned branches and some disfigurement to one of the marble lions that roared beside the gate. But he didn''t look. Not really.


    Late the next day he turned down the track to the brothers'' farm. He walked the edge of the field out to the old oak and knelt in his old place out of the sun between the cradle of two roots. The bark was brittle and dry. The branches were empty of leaves. Any acorns were long since scavenged and buried before the passing winter. He walked to the other side where he used to look out at the rows of yellowing corn and at the distant house, but an enormous limb and its thousand branches had come down, torn away in the wind from dryness or perhaps from the same blight that fouled the corn. He stood and looked at it and [felt] as if he had reunited with an old friend newly widowed by some creeping and consuming disease.


    Something made him look up and he saw the [yeoman] brothers in the distance, each leaning on a [scythe] and watching him. He lifted his arm to them. One touched the broad brim of his hat.


    He left.


    He avoided the track back to the seaway, cutting across country by hacking through thickets and eating berries from between their thorns and sleeping in the clear spaces made by the shade of scraggly blue oaks. Twice he heard the baying of hounds in the night and readied to fight. As a storm whipped up on the third day he came to the outskirts of her olives.


    Ogaz had said he wasn''t orc, but he had been called one all his life and all his life he''d believed it. And for an hour before a bonfire on a faraway beach it had been true. But the rest of the time it hadn''t. Nineteen years he had lived a lie. It was past time he learned why.


    <hr>


    > -1 [Rage]: Sometimes I imagine his return to those places. I hope they brought him some measure of peace... (6/10).


    > +1 [Renown]: I knowed that humie. I''d have plucked out his eyeballs and turned em around so he''d hafta to watch his screamin ugly rat face and thataway he''d have known what it was like for us staring up at him from the pit... (4/10).


    > +1 [Awareness]: That''s about when he started believin there ain''t nothin different between dirt and men besides their arrangement. Hell, maybe he was right about that... (6/10)

 42. Promise

    She shouted for a day and a night and never heard a thing. No answering calls. Not even her own voice. At the beginning of the second day the block still [held] her fast. As if her clothing was a welder''s filler brazing her skin to the granite. One foot still touched the black slab, and she could bend its ankle and wiggle its toes, and she could move her eyes and tongue and lips, and she could breathe. And she could shout. She shouted for Khaz and the old woman and her Henry. She shouted for somebody. For anybody. Her throat gave out from thirst and use but she couldn''t tell because she couldn''t hear her own words so she never stopped trying.


    The second night she watched the stars trace paths as old as the world and wished she could see the white mountain. The blue and green moonslight glowing off its icecap like phosphorescence. She faced the wrong way. There were only the black stains on the block and the black slab and the black jungle and the bluedotted sky. She was going to die there. Alone. No one should die alone. She had left her da alone.


    She closed her eyes and felt the granite. She [heard] its sullen whispers. It hurt more than she, for eons longer than she. She [sang] to bring it comfort, and she [listened] to it tell of what it remembered. Of its growth and settlement over millions of years. Of the soft kiss of the sun and the gentle caress of wind and sand and ice. Of implements blasting its face then cutting it apart. Making one out of everything and everything into one. Of cold shard of the sky planing its roughness and warm dwarven hands worrying its sharp edges. Of its journey from places sounding strangely familiar to her over ice and rock and ice again and over rich soil and living things who left green imprints on its facets and onto the black slab of metal alloyed with matter not of this world. Of further shaping and cursing and danger. Of a great mass placed in its center and the exactness of the joining and its tempered attraction. Of the years spent in the warmth and the pitter patter of rain and sun and rain and sun giving it a new identity. Finally of the conjoining and the events the [armiger] described. She [listened] as they unfolded in its memory. The liberation of the dwarves. The viciousness of them. She wept. How did no dwarf remember such things? Why did no stone in dwarfdom tell of them?


    She shouted again for Khaz. Perhaps shouted. Perhaps only mouthed his name. He should have come and found her. He hadn''t. The [armiger] said he wouldn''t. There was only one reason for that.


    Everything hurt. The sun rose and passed overhead. The moons rose after. The sun set. The moons set. The sun rose again. She watched it go. She remembered the granite''s memory of the eclipse and of the day its gods were slaughtered by children who would not be ruled.


    Where was Khaz? What had the [armiger] done?


    The sun burned her face. She hadn''t sweat in a day or more. She was so thirsty. It would be the end of her.


    Her da came. He waited for her at the edge of the slab in the shade of the jungle. Small and old and out of place. Trees grew up around him and got sick and their dying bequeathed the next generation. He was gone by dusk. The next morning the tall orc came. He laid her da''s [alpenstock] on the block and looked into her eyes and placed his face next to hers and said, "So we might die together." Then Khaz finally came. He pressed his hands against the block to push it into the shade but it wouldn''t budge. The tall orc tried to help him. They pushed together but nothing moved. She told them to use the [alpenstock]. Smash apart the block. Cut out the material that bound her. Cut out its dark heart. They didn''t seem to hear her. Then they moved around to the far side to try pushing it the opposite direction. She never saw them again.


    When Daraway arrived she was ready to die. She looked up at the woman, at the proud way she carried herself, the assurance and confidence of one free from expectations and obligations. At the perfection of her face and neck. At the cloak held up against the sun and its ratty ends and the stains from the flood and the wounded girl. At her black fingers as they disappeared and reappeared with her canteen, removing the cap, drawing close to her face, and the water, blissfully cool as it poured into her mouth and over her cheek and head and neck.


    "Can you hear me love?" said the woman in a voice to lull the sun from the sky.


    She didn''t try talking. She just drank, and when the water stopped coming she wanted to scrape her tongue over the granite to collect the moisture there, but she feared it would seize to the block as the rest of her had. She smelled the ancient iron wetted by the water and radiating off in the tropical sun. The blood of gods.


    "Ask it to release you," said Daraway.


    She tried to say, "Did that," but still heard nothing of her voice. "Water."


    Daraway stood and in a motion she swirled her cloak off of her shoulders and laid it over Mym''s body and face.


    Through a hole in the fabric she watched Daraway run across the slab to the jungle''s edge and disappear in the very spot her da had done. The shadows shifted. The granite dried in the sun, then it dried in the shade of her face. She feared Daraway was as false as the others who''d come. She stared at the place where she had vanished. She would never return.


    Then the foliage shook. Daraway burst from the undergrowth. Mym would''ve wept again but her body spared no water for tears.


    Daraway had to make three more trips to slake her.


    "Where''s Khaz?" said Mym after.


    "I don''t know."


    "How''d ye find me?"


    "Mastering seaway''s end has made me a few friends. The kind with weather eyes and a pound of salt in their veins. One knew you had gone with the armiger. Another that the whaler watered here before heading on to the end."


    "The bastard left?"


    "Yes. My ship''s well gone by now too."


    "How long I been lyin here?"


    "I don''t know, love. I''ve been up and down every path in this jungle and half the trees besides. I thought maybe the armiger threw you overboard and I''d need to boil the ocean away, maybe even started to do it when an old fisherman stopped me. His wife had heard you shouting from the crater. He showed me the path here. I think they would''ve come along if they were twenty years younger."Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    She felt Daraway''s hand run down her back.


    "Your face is badly burnt. We need to get you out of here."


    "I can''t move nothin but my toes. I can''t hear my own voice. I can hear you but I can''t hear myself."


    Daraway looked down at the block and backed away to look at its sides and started to walk around it.


    "Oy. Please stay where I can see ye."


    Daraway laid a hand on hers and said, "Don''t worry love," and kept it there as she made a circuit of the block.


    "Not much for lookin at. Granite from the valley. Couldn''t figure how it got here. Thought it was older than dwarves til I learned otherwise."


    "Tell me what happened."


    She told of the [armiger] and what he said and what he did. The days since. Daraway listened to all of it and apologized because she needed to hear it again, so she told it all again.


    "I am going to touch it."


    "Ye best not."


    "I must measure its attunement."


    "Yer speakin another language now. Listen te me. It''s liable te stick ye like me. Ye won''t be able to get away."


    "That makes no difference. I wouldn''t leave here without you."


    Before she could protest Daraway flattened her palm against the granite. Then she drew it back again. She looked at her hand then at the block. "Strange," she said.


    "What?" said Mym.


    But the woman didn''t answer. She placed both hands on the block. She swept them over its surface. Then down and across its sides. She closed her eyes and did it again.


    "I can feel it. The weight of it. The flow of the weight. The way it warps the rock. The way it warps the air. I can''t explain it. Wait."


    She ran her hands over Mym''s back and traced two fingers along the seam where her body met the block.


    "My goodness."


    "What?"


    "It''s heavy. As though the entire world is contained within the block. All the weight of it, the mass compressed into it. There''s something else inside the granite. A point inside a point. Can you hear it?"


    "Can''t even hear myself."


    "But can you speak to it?"


    "Don''t know what I''m speakin te."


    "Hidden in the granite. Like the crystal inside a geode."


    "Don''t hear anythin there."


    Daraway squatted back on her hams. She reached forward to adjust the edge of her cloak across Mym''s face, then she held her hands out as if in a gesture of welcoming. She closed her eyes. She held the pose for a long time.


    "I''m going to try something,¡± she said.


    "Please do."


    "It might hurt."


    "Fine."


    "It might damage you."


    "Get on with it."


    Daraway tipped onto her knees with her hands still outstretched and eyes still closed. Crowsfeet folded at the edges of her eyes and her brow came forward in effort and concentration. Her lips pinched inward. Sweat beaded on her face. She inhaled sharply and she groaned slightly as if she sought to move the block by the will of her mind alone.


    Mym''s ears popped. She waited for the pain to come.


    "Get up," gasped Daraway. "Hurry."


    Mym pushed away from the block. Her joints screamed from disuse and her muscles felt as if they were ripped from a dusty old corpse and stuffed into her body. She managed to roll off the block. She fell onto the slab and knocked the air out of her lungs. She was free.


    Daraway opened her eyes and all at once lurched backward as if blown over by a sudden gust of wind, but when she looked at Mym she was smiling. "That was fascinating," she said.


    Mym sat up and looked down at her wrinkled coat and the bright red backs of her hands. "Maybe for ye."


    "He was right. This was made by dwarves, but not dwarves alone."


    "What the hell is it then?"


    "I can''t say. Truly. I''ve read of such imbued powers, but nothing like this."


    "Why didn''t it latch onte ye or the armiger?"


    Daraway pulled her cloak from where it''d fallen on the block. "We aren''t you. Whoever made this, whoever engineered this, didn''t care to bind humans."


    "It was dwarves usin it on their makers. I witnessed it."


    ¡°Their makers.¡±


    ¡°Aye.¡±


    "So you''re a believer now?"


    Mym thought about that. About what the block had [told] her and what its power meant. About Daraway''s handling it. "Are ye a goddess?"


    Daraway laughed and the seas swelled to her opposite the sun and moons. "Only to you." She looked at the block and at the stain there. "I don''t know what you saw, but I do know no gods made us. Fact is we made them. They''re our creatures. Crippled by our rigidity and mercilessness. No gods exist apart from us. Those living in our minds have no place else to exist, and they are subject to our influence."


    "Well ours were murdered by dwarven influence."


    "I know some whole sects of priests who deserve some dwarven influence."


    She smiled so wide her sunburnt cheek seared from it. "How''d I go twenty years without ye."


    "I''ve been wondering the same thing.


    "I''m glad ye came back."


    "I always was."


    "I thought ye mightn''t with Cousins and all."


    "Love I cannot guarantee I''ll always be here, but I do know whatever splits us will weigh more than an eight year old girl."


    "Did ye find her folks?"


    "She has none."


    "She was tellin the truth then."


    Daraway nodded. "They died in a mining accident of some kind. No one I talked to could tell me straight."


    "A mining accident."


    Daraway swung her cloak over her shoulders and drew up its hood. "By all accounts."


    "She healin up?"


    "Better than I expected. A benefit of youth."


    "Where is she then?"


    "I put her up with the king''s men."


    "What? At that tower in that first place?"


    Daraway adjusted the dress under her cloak. "Here First, yes. I have pull there, being a lady and all."


    "I''d say."


    "They promised to keep her on in service. Mucking. Working the kitchens."


    "Oy a girl like that''s got more in her than servin."


    "Yes. They all start out having more in them. Sadly they never end up that way. I wish I could do more for her, but our road is no place for a child."


    "Well ye never know. Maybe she''ll be runnin the place next time ye get out that way."


    Daraway smiled a little and it collapsed to a slight frown. "Probably not."


    "No. Suppose not."


    "God I hope I never get out that way again."


    "Aye."


    Mym stood up. Her weight felt strange on her feet. She arched her back and swung her arms and craned her neck this way and that, and she saw the tooth of the white mountain. The thin blue line of a crevasse opening across its face.


    "Can I tell you something?" said Daraway.


    "Aye ye can tell me anythin."


    "I did not stay behind on account of the girl. It was the fighting. You fighting. And Cousins, shot just like that. It could''ve been you just as easily. Then what would I do?"


    "I won''t get shot."


    "I don''t know what I would do. I don''t know."


    She remembered Khaz''s words. "You''d do whatever needed doin."


    "Yes. And I''d burn myself up doing it. There wouldn''t be anything left of the world that wasn''t ash and glass."


    "My turn te tell ye somethin."


    "I am not finished. I need you to promise you''ll not run off without me."


    "Aye I can do that easy."


    "When I say what I have learned you might act without thinking and I don''t want to chase you across another continent."


    "What? What''d ye learn? What''re ye talkin bout?"


    "Promise."


    "Fine. Promise. Now tell me."


    Daraway grabbed her hands as if it might help her keep her promise. "Your folk and the orcs weren''t on the span that night by accident."


    "What do ye mean?"


    "I mean the orcs didn''t escape the camps."


    "Course they did."


    "No." She shook her head but kept her eyes on Mym''s. "The armiger set them free."


    <hr>


    > +1 [Vengefulness]: At that moment everything changed... (5/10)


    > +1 [Stonespeaking]: She didn''t have anyone around te teach her when te listen and when te stop listenin. Ye keep yer stone ears on too long and ye risk not knowin where yer thoughts end and theirs begin... (8/10)

 43. Still Burning

    He squeezed through the old gap in the fence and high stepped through the [brigadier]''s overgrown tea garden as if she might storm out of the side door any moment to scold him and his truancy. Standing in the side yard by the practice circle with the smell of the herbs in the air and the calls of the swifts in the trees it all came back at once and he could see her, short and wiry and eager, eyes bright though her body faded, the high cheekbones and the long gray hair wound up and stacked on top of her head and tied off with a broad kerchief of black lace, holding her [wooden sword] in one hand to show him some trick of attack. He saw her turn to face the approaching king''s men, to face the long wet pikes that had ripped life from her [valet], the pikes lifting him up and up as his guts went out of him in a slurry of red and the smell and sound of his opening bowels as he fell across the circle''s edge, their edges dripping on the ground and their mouths opened and accusing she who''d rejected the [king]. He saw her, the old [brigadier], the downfallen and dishonored, now standing between him and them. She raised her shieldless arm and crossed her [wooden sword] over as if it was edged steel, the grain whispering as it slid across her naked forearm in a kind of salute, its hard fibers marred and marked from ten thousand strikes of wood on wood and wood on boiled leathers. He saw her three paces from the first of the four, her motionless and him drawing up and standing heavily to laugh at the old woman and her orc cub and their play at sticks, and her sighting up the sloping sword at a point Orc couldn''t see because her profile occluded it. She would bury that first [pike] in the dirt with a thrust and a sweep of her sword, but now she put her weight forward and bent her knees and sighted up it and her torso hid the bloodied [pike].


    He stood in the now and heard her thin voice then call clearly above the [pikeman]¡¯s laughter, "Study my demonstration, Orc."


    He heard the voice and saw the dip of her leading knee as she lunged forward and he watched her journey into the [pike] that rose to her sword as the [pikeman] followed her feint, the dainty wrist precise, guiding the [pike] downward as her shieldhand fingered the [knife] concealed in her waistband. He saw it glinting silver and her back foot leaving the dirt as the [pike] stove into a geyser of dust and her lead foot now leaping and the sword rebounding and her arm extending with [knife] two fingered and released. He saw its brightness streaking straight as a line as if the [pikeman]''s neck was the center of its world and his eyes followed until its unwrapped bulwark rested against the soft part of his throat and the man let go of his [pike] and reached both hands to his neck, and the old woman whose eyes had never left the place it entered now landed on her trailing foot at the [pikeman]''s side and drew his steel sidearm in a motion as natural to her as breathing. He saw her standing, [steel sword] in one hand and [wooden sword] in the other, watching the trio ahead as the man beside her collapsed to bleed in the dirt and rattle from the hole in his neck, watching their lowering pikes and shifting feet, her swords raised in a formal salute. And he heard her call to him again. "Come show these men what you have learned."


    In the now he remembered how they had finally fought together, for the first time and for the last.


    And after the last [pikeman] fell he saw her standing soaked in the sweat of it, the relief coming and the vomit, the back of her wrist drawn across her mouth and wiped on her trouser leg, and the greater relief at seeing him still standing, still breathing, still looking to her for what to do, and he saw her walk the practice circle to sink six inches of steel in each of the king''s men who had come that day, just to be sure. He knew she couldn''t run to each, not even if one rose with [pistol] readied could she run to him, and he watched her make the round and stop over her [valet] and wipe her mouth again and close the eyes with her hand. He saw her shake her head and press finger and thumb into her eyes then against the bridge of her nose as if she was making a confession, then stand slowly and drag her body back to him with her sad eyes and red hands and sad smile as if she''d seen the coming end of her life and she had no antidote against it.The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    In the now the storm began to spit rain and he turned from the memory and moved through a gap between the lion topiaries now overgrown into strange and bulbous beasts and into an archway with its hinged door swinging free and into the residence. As the wind raged outside he walked through its empty rooms. The place had been looted. It smelled of fire and damp and black mold spotted the walls and followed cracks in the plaster from the vaulted ceilings down to the plank framing that separated rooms. Quail scurried ahead of him as he moved from one to the next. In the one in which he had learned to read and write the thieves had burned his old hardwood desk to warm themselves. A rough circle of black ash and charred wood ends and loose nails that were rusting on the floor. On the wall they had scrawled their names in ash and used his name in epithets for her, and where they had urinated on her maps the hard lines of provinces were blotted and bled into purplish and yellow blooms defined by the borders of their piss pools, and the great oil portrait of her astride her steed was slashed from her eyes to its hoof with more gashes at the places defining her sex. At the threshold to her study lay a dead thing. Bones, and desiccation stretched across them. Perhaps a dog. Inside books thrown open and about with pages folded against the floor and the mold beginning its work on their bindings. He toed them away and stood at her desk before the window. Broken glass on the sill and the cold outside air swirling in. Her leatherbound journal resting against the frame of the window wrapped in the black lace kerchief she used to tie up her hair. He took it and walked out of the only place he''d ever been that felt like home.


    In the yard between the house and the olives he came. Sun faded laundry littered the ground and fluttering leaves of green grass grew between and over it. Down at the grave markers were four unmarked slabs, each bearing a ruddy stain from where a [pike]''s head had rusted against their surfaces. They had looted those too. Beside them her husband''s image rested atop his upraised sepulcher, and the empty place where hers would go, and a grave marker rendered in the shape of a [skirmisher]''s shield and marked with a cross. It had been defaced. If its ground had ever been disturbed he could not tell. He looked about for a [spade] but saw none.


    He sat with his back against the nearest olive tree and unwrapped the journal. He let the black lace hang from his hand and he touched it with a finger and smelled it but it smelled only of the leather. He opened the pages and turned to the last one that bore her flowing script. It set to move all happenings around her with her at their center so that she was on paper as she was in life:


    Five days ago Donnas made me superintendent of the internment camps. I refused. Yesterday the armiger sent King''s Men to collect me. His ambition runs naked before him like the herald of a false god, and his hunger is greater than whatever sustains Donnas'' realm. Again I refused, and the cub killed the Men. I slew the cub myself and burned his remains. He was my responsibility. I stole him from his folk because I felt guilty for what had happened. But you can''t steal that which by rights belongs to you. Nor should you feel guilt for killing they who are not people. People are civilized. I believed he could be. Now four soldiers and my valet are dead. And the cub. May he find light in his freedom from the burdens of this world. I await my own unburdening. I did as we promised for as long as I could. I am tired.


    He read it once in disbelief and then again and again until he thought he understood the message she had left there for him. He looked up at the branches above him as they surged and swayed in the storm, and down at the places where their olives had fallen. Black and purple spots where the fruit laid and decayed between the rows like constellations of the dead stars she had once said outnumbered those still burning. He stood up and tied the lace around his arm and walked the colonnade that paralleled the drive until he came to the fence. He turned to walk along the fence then passed the gate with its beheaded lions and came to stand in the middle of the seaway. It was midday. He shoved the journal in his waistband and gripped the handle of the [Skyshard] and waited for the next person to come down the road.


    <hr>


    > -1 [Rage]: And if there was no peace for him there then I hope he found understanding... (5/10).

 44. The Pass

    She found the ancient track made by those who had dragged the granite block. With her [alpenstock] before her she slashed a way through the overgrowth, stamping shorn leaves and limbs underfoot, scattering crawling insects and hopping amphibians as macaws above turned their heads broadside to watch and monkeys screeched and pointed. Daraway followed behind saying nothing for Mym asked her nothing. What else was there to ask? The [armiger] had freed the orcs and driven them to dwarfdom. He had lured her folk out of the delving and down the valley and onto the span like stock to slaughter. She did not ask why. She did not ask how Daraway knew. Perhaps such things mattered, but she wouldn''t waste breath on them. She needed it to get back to the delving before the [armiger] could finish what he had started.


    The ground sloped up and the jungle went with it. She pushed until day''s end and might have pushed on into the night but no moonslight or starlight reached the jungle''s floor. It was as dark as the wyndings. She followed the sound of a dribbling stream and with her adze she hacked out a narrow flat place for them to sleep. Daraway threw her cloak over them and they listened to the constant drip of the canopy on the heavy fabric.


    The following noon they surmounted the moraine of a long vanished glacier. There the raucous steam-breathing organism they called a jungle failed and the ground transformed from damp and black and wild with life to a tremendous pile of brown and gray powder. On the moraine''s far side a lake spread itself amid masses of stone and scattered bristlecones with water so clear under that she saw straight to its bottom. The boulders left there by the now vanished glacier gathered and dipped their wide bodies into its edges like old dwarves at a communal bath. They had stories to tell if she would but stop and [ask]. She didn''t stop.


    The slope steepened above the lake into a long couloir filled with last year''s snow. The sharp edge of the snowfield lay just above the reach of the rippling water. Thick clear drops rained off in the sun and spattered the surface. The snowfield appeared to rise in an unbroken track all the way to the top of the couloir. Its suncups rose and fell in miniature analogs to the ranges about and its whiteness was dulled by windblown dust. She stepped onto it. Daraway came up behind her with her cloak gathered around. Was it so cold already? She turned up the couloir and climbed on, kicking the toe of her boots into the snow and stepping upon them. Placing the spike of her [alpenstock] and weighting it to keep it planted. Its steel head chilled her hand to a tingling numbness.


    Hours later it felt like they had climbed to the moons yet the way ahead seemed even taller than before. She looked at the highest point of the couloir. Someone had collapsed a mountaintop into the gap. Rocks too large to scramble and too sheer to climb choked the pass. But she couldn''t turn them around.


    She heard Daraway heaving and coughing behind her. The woman had stopped and leaned from her hips with a hand outstretched against the slope.


    "Steady on," said Mym.


    "Slow down or I swear to god I''ll drop a boulder on your head."


    "Ye can''t do no such thing."


    The bottom of Daraway''s chin emerged from her hood. "Don''t test me," she said. "I learned some things separating you from the block."


    Mym looked up the slope and then looked back. "I''ve got te get back before the armiger does and there''s no way of gettin there than gettin, so we better fuckin get."Stolen story; please report.


    "Eloquently said."


    "Ye need me te carry ye?"


    Daraway took a step. Snow came off the sole of her boot and sped away down the couloir. "Not yet."


    Mym looked up again at the problem ahead of them. She turned back to the woman. "He let em go just te clear us out of the delvin," she said.


    Daraway''s hood bobbed back and forth as she nodded. "I think he assumed the whole delving would turn out to stop them. That you''d annihilate each other."


    "And when we didn''t he sent for the rest of us. Beggin us all te come vengin across the sea."


    Daraway took another step, then another. Mym watched her but her mind was elsewhere. Back at the delving.


    "I''m glad just Khaz and me went."


    "Me too."


    Mym leaned over her [alpenstock] and worried her knee where it pained her. "Wish I knew where the keeper got te."


    Daraway peered up at her. "How many dwarves does it take to hold the delving?"


    "More than it''s got. I need te get back there yesterday."


    She turned and climbed on. She came at the blocked pass from the left but soon had them cliffed out. A boulder as big as the whaler overhung above, the top of some other mountain dropped into the gap of this one. Below it stretched a pitch of ice that fell away to jumbled rocks cleft by centuries of avalanche. With her adze she chopped a catwalk in the ice and they crawled along the base of the blockage. Sheets of ice released by her hacking tumbled downslope to strike the rocks with speed and force to split them into a thousand shards. At the slope''s opposite side they could walk again. There a steep ramp of snow wound up and around the boulder. They climbed it and at its top they tramped up a short and shallow rise to the top of the pass. There she stopped and looked back.


    She saw Daraway trudging the final steps with wind whipping locks of her hair out of her hood as if they were drafting lines made with a right angle. Beyond her the alpine lake now a sapphire reflecting the midday sun: a wild blueberry on the wide gray tongue of earth, the green spots of the bristlecones at its banks, the emerald blanket over all the land beyond, spreading down to the edge of the tremendous graphite slab that held no reflection whatsoever. The executioner''s block was too distant to see.


    She turned to look at the valley ahead. Twin to the white valley of her home with its high sided walls and dense conifer stands and a narrow bending river. Other peaks and passes sawed atop its far side, and in the gap made by a pass she saw the next ridge beyond, and the next, and finally the white mountain itself with the crevasse on its face now so wide it looked as though the mountain was cracking in two. Miles beyond and miles above the white mountain fumed a great front of black clouds laced with silver lightning belched by the black heart of the world.


    Daraway came beside her and leaned against the wind as if she was still climbing the slope.


    Mym pointed the spike of her [alpenstock] at the black heart. "That''s where the armiger thinks te find it?"


    Daraway nodded. "It is."


    She started to tell her it was a lie. A myth. A story told to impress lads and lasses of the once celebrated glory of their dying race.


    But in that moment she looked down and saw the parallel lines etched into the stony shoulder of the pass. Scars whose memory [told] of dwarves long ago dragging a granite block. She kicked snow from the ancient track. "Damned stone of the damned earth. Well. If the dwarfstone''s there te be found then we need te be first te find it."


    Daraway coughed and nodded. She wiped wind tears from her eyes and hid her singed fingertips inside her long sleeves. "I''m ready," she said.


    "Follow me."


    <hr>


    > +1 [Belonging]: I knowed the armiger was a shitter the moment he put that orc lady up on a post. If I''d told em so things might''ve turned out different. I should''ve said somethin... (6/10)

 45. Tribute

    The coming dawn reefed the horizon ahead in the pale blue that was the color of her eyes. He left the seaway and struck south toward the great chasm that separated humanity and dwarfdom. The thickets that filled the defiles and the hedgerows that capped the ridges all thinned as he drew close to its cliffside. For the last quarter mile there was only the caress of soft grass against his ankles and the distant sigh of sea on rocks. First light crested the world and he could distinguish the features of the dwarven side of the chasm: the sharp line between dawnlit surface and dark basalt face, the silver serpent of the river and the white horsetail of its falls, the mountains rising in a washed-out blue haze with their summits obscured by pink clouds going gray.


    He walked along a hollow that terminated at the chasm. He peered over the edge and the sea''s whispering became a roar and he saw its rows of advancing white swells and the crash and crack of them against the cliff as if seeking to dislodge some evil that choked the continent. He turned and walked alongside the edge, climbing out of the hollow and onto a gnoll that was the highest point around. He intended to peer again over the side, but upon the edge stood a stack of mortared stones set with a bronze inlay. The stones were dark and had been rough cut from that land and green oxidation collected in the corners of the bronze and wept down the bevel on either side as if the story it told moved even the elements of the earth:


    In tribute to the ten thousand who gave their lives in the cause of freedom for two worlds, who volunteered from all provinces to defend ours from tyranny and liberate theirs from the great scourge. For those who left and never returned, this peak was their last sight of home.


    He turned and looked out at the dwarven lands with their impenetrable mountains so tall their peaks seemed to graze the crescent moons and with valleys so deep their bottoms were filled with stars. He hung his toes off of the cliff and watched two seas violently thrash and combine into one beneath a span that had sought to do the same for two disparate peoples after that war so long ago. The sea flung spray up the wall to wet the basalt and its smell recalled to him the belly of the ship. The grass under his feet held the thin layer of soil together and in that moment seemed to hold him together. He began to say his goodbyes to a home he never really knew or understood. To the solo [fisherman] piloting a yellow outrigger that bucked from swell to swell and to the skein of white seabirds with their orange legs stretched out behind as they floated up on the morning thermal and to the tiny red and black spotted beetle crawling over his foot and to the memorial and to the memorial makers and to the [bookmaker] and to the [brigadier] and to her poor [valet] whose name he had never learned for she had only ever called him sir.


    As he readied his ends he smelled the dead man come up behind him. He turned away from the edge. "I told you what would happen if I saw you again."


    The [bosun] crossed the open space between the foliage and the cliff and stopped to read the memorial. He traced his bony fingers over the letters and made some gurgling noise. For a mad moment Orc thought he might raise the ten thousand from their graves to liberate their realm from its current tyranny. This feeling passed.


    "I failed," said Orc. "Turns out I''m not who I thought I was and I can''t be who I want to be."


    The [bosun] nodded and placed a hand flat on his chest as if to say he knew the feeling. He gestured to the journal in Orc''s waistband.


    Orc hesitated a moment, then drew the journal and unwrapped the black lace that kept it closed and rewrapped it around his arm and he offered the journal to the [bosun]. The [bosun] pulled the small pencil from where she had shoved it between the headband and spine and he set it on the monument and flipped to an unmarked page and wrote in his child''s letters: We can only be what we are. For that we can''t be ashamed.


    "I''m sure you''d like to believe that."


    The tusker went where he was called. And you. And me. None without a home live long. Specially not you.


    "I''m done arguing about it."


    We''ll see.


    "If you''ve got something to say then say it."


    The [bosun] nodded over the cliffside. Ain''t nothing waiting for you that way.Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    "Nothing left any other way either. Feels like every direction''s the wrong one. Every step''s taken me farther from where I aim to be."


    You''ve got things backward. You feel bounced around like some child''s toy but that ain''t it. No matter how crooked your life might look it''s actually a plum line from your first breath til your last. There ain''t any forks in it, not a single one. Every choice is made up long before you get to it. You feel your course led you here but really you led your course here. Everywhere and everywhen you been your course is only what''s behind you. Look back and it''s all one line. No forks. Like a breadcrumb thrown in a current. Only one direction gone. Mind the geese.


    The [bosun] made his horrendous chortling laugh.


    "It''s been awhile since you''ve talked to anyone."


    The [bosun] wiped the back of his fingers down his slack jaw. Not since you tore my face in two.


    He looked at the man''s face and raised a hand as if to touch it. "They said you deserved it."


    I did for other things. What''s your plan?


    He stood beside the monument and looked a long time over the precipice to the twisting and running seas. When he spoke the [bosun] had to lean in to hear him. "Wish I knew. Wish someone would just tell me what needed doing so I could get it done and get out. I''d walk over those mountains and keep walking right off of her maps past places nobody knows and where nobody knows me til I got so far I didn''t know myself neither."


    When he looked back he saw the [bosun] had written: I''ve been that way.


    "I shouldn''t have come back here."


    The [bosun] turned the page. You was always coming here. Just like me. Hurrying along, studdings and tops and gallants and royals and skys all piling on. Even toe draggers like your tusker friend are stepping to. Along we go, no faster or slower than any other. Kids dying too young, invalids living too long. I might''ve lived fifty days or fifty years. It all feels the same. Our courses only go back as far as our memories, and those ain''t worth shit. Foggy horizons and blank charts with a score of dim spots away in the distance like atolls rising out of the tide. We cross through life by moonslight, only what we can remember is real. Everything else behind ain''t no more, perhaps never was, and everything ahead ain''t any more real than a dream. A reading of guts. Unborn kids who never were.


    The [bosun] put a finger in the page and closed the journal and held it up to Orc''s face as if it was all the proof he needed.


    "You had kids," he said.


    The [bosun] opened the journal and wrote: Still do thanks to you. But they ain''t nothing to me no more. Leastways no more than this here book is to you and to her who writ it. All its words just knots along the logline of your woman savior.


    "I wouldn''t call her that," he said.


    Memories so thin they vanish like a wake across the ocean. Only remembered until the next ship cuts their path. That''s how it is. This is how it is too. You being here after visiting her place and the other places. Places so heavy their weight pulls your course into a great circle drawn ever back to them. Like an anchor thrown over at full sail.


    The [bosun] drew a small circle on the page and another larger one intersecting it, and his lines went straight through his words as if none of them mattered.


    Yes I had two kids. It''s a fateful thing to carry memories as rich as theirs. You have your own like them. Visit them often to keep hold of them, but remember also that every moment you live in your memory is the moment of another memory lost. How much have you lost? Who can say? Not you. Nobody else neither. How much more will we lose by retracing the well worn paths of others? And for what? Comfort?


    The [bosun] retraced the large circle.


    "You''ve thought a lot about this."


    He crossed out the last line and wrote: I''m dead. Memory is all I have. You''re still living, but you and me ain''t so different. Both want a past we can''t get to no more. Both living it in our heads. But we can''t truly revisit the past. Instead we''re mired by our memories and the countless ways time has rotted them.


    The [bosun] scribbled the pencil all across the page and it left tiny pebbles of lead behind.


    Finally he wrote: Heed this thing, Orc. Your course''s destination is hidden from you. It will be thus even as you reach it. Home can be in your past or in your present, but in the end the place you''ll spend the most time is wherever you happen to be when you die.


    The sailor shoved the pencil back into the binding and flipped through the pages as if to make a point, and pages and pages of her script flowed past faster and faster until he let go. The journal lay atop the monument open to a page with a sketch of a faceted and porous stone, hand shaded and with measurements and comments captioned beside it telling of its four fragments and their supposed powers. The [bosun] stared at it as if its sudden appearance was no accident.


    Orc knew it immediately for what it was. She had been searching for it. Perhaps she searched still. And there in the margin was written the answer he sought. The black heart of the world.


    "So much for dying," he said.


    He picked up the journal and wrapped her lace around it and thrust it back in his belt. He looked at the dead man and said, "Come with me and perhaps you''ll live again."


    The [bosun] made a retching noise and nodded. His unhinged chin bobbed in place.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Awareness]: Well it¡¯s all truth ain''t it? (7/10).


    > -1 [Rage]: ...for why I did what I did. Why I had to send him away and why I couldn''t come for him after. Why I never could. The work was more important than any one person. Him, me, we are nothing against the possibility of what could be, of what should be... (4/10)

 46. Avalanche

    She traversed the last pass and saw the sunset firing the western sky and the settling vapors vaulted out of the black heart of the world. Below her the white mountain presided over the vale like an enthroned king over his winter hall. She set her eyes on the black thread of the river weaving back and forth along the floor of the valley and with her next step she finally processed into her homeland. She needed to get back to the delving. To [speak] to the stones along the way. To learn which armies had last passed, and whither they had gone. She needed to get back to her da.


    Going so far and for so long without food left them hardened but weak. Daraway had [fired] their last flour two days ago. Mym kept them along the tracks of prey whenever they intersected their route, but without a [longarm] for shooting or time spared for trapping they hadn¡¯t eaten a damn thing.


    "There''s a right sized hunk of elk waitin at home," she said and not for the first time. "Just keep yer eyes down and feet movin. Heels down on the plunge, aye? Try keepin te my steps."


    The way down was treacherous. She had seen a dozen avalanches rip down this particular aspect in winters past. The trees at its bottom leaned at tortured angles and they missed bark and limbs from their exposed sides. The snowpack was hard and wet over soft and airy over ancient ice. She tried to not think about it.


    The green moon rose above the right side of the valley, and on the slope a thousand feet below she saw a shrub where there shouldn''t be any. A hundred paces later she looked again and saw that it had moved.


    "Be ready te fight," she said.


    Daraway looked up from watching her feet. "What?"


    "Someone''s comin."


    Mym felt the slope unsettle under her next step and she heard the whump and she saw cracks shoot fifty yards in either direction.


    "Shitfuck,¡± she breathed.


    "Oy!" called the figure.


    "Oy!" she called back.


    "Slope''s crackin!"


    "No shit!"


    "What do we do?" said Daraway.


    She said, "Step up," but it was too late. The snowpack underfoot shuddered as if quaking and it slid away as it liquified. She reached for Daraway and with all her strength she drove her [alpenstock]''s spike all the way to its head. It didn''t matter. Everything fell away. Daraway grabbed Mym¡¯s hood but what a stupid thing to do for now Mym was sliding and now spinning end over end like a stone kicked off a cliff now faster and faster and the snow roared and the slide buried her and swirled one way under her and between her legs and another way over her and it forced her head down and her mouth filled with snow and she couldn''t scream or even breathe and shards grated her face and pried the [alpenstock] from her grasp and contorted her arms and legs where it willed and the weight of it grew fuller and fuller as if the white mountain''s entirety lay directly on her chest.


    She jerked her arms but they wouldn''t move. No part of her moved. She couldn''t even turn her head or open her eyes. Freezing water poured down the back of her neck and streamed under her collar and wet down the hollow of her spine and around her hips and down her thighs. More of it came and her hair and clothing were soaked through. The pouring water now warmed until it scalded her neck and she flinched under it and her arms moved and her hands swung free and she rolled over and lifted her forearms against the flow and squinted against the hot air and the great billows of steam rising all around her with Daraway at their center, her palms down against the boiling snowmelt, her eyes glowing orange and focused wholly on Mym.


    Khaz blew out of the frozen spray kicked up by the avalanche. "Oy! I can''t believe it''s ye. By the holy mountain I can''t believe it." He ran to Mym and wrapped her in his arms and was instantly wet besides. "I can''t believe it," he whispered into her ear.


    "Khaz," she said.


    "Ye alright?" He turned to Daraway and put hands on her shoulders, "Ye alright?" He turned back to Mym. "By my brittle bones that¡¯s one way te get down a mountain. The slide had ye both for two thousand feet or more."


    "Guess she couldn''t wait to see you," said Daraway.


    "How''s da,¡± said Mym. ¡°Tell me ye been te him. Tell me he''s alright."


    "Aye, aye, I been te him. Don''t be worryin bout him right now. We need te get off of this slope and get ye out of them soggy clothes. There''s a wind comin up enough te blow the life right out of yer livin bones. Can ye walk? I dropped me pack comin up. It''s got dry woolies in it. Got a blanket ye can wrap in Dara. Come on."


    He helped her up then turned to Daraway and gave her the biggest hug a dwarf can give, right around her middle. He stood back from the woman and looked up at her and nodded and then he looked at Mym and said, "Come on."


    They followed him downslope. His trail through the bottom of the slide was taller than his head and she wondered at the strength of him that he had pushed through so quickly to reach them. They arrived at his discarded pack as the blue moon rose over the right wall of the vale and as an early winter storm came whipping over the left.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    He unrolled a nakwool blanket and cast it around her shoulders, "We need te get down te the trees before that hits us proper. Ye good for it?"


    Her teeth chattered but she nodded.


    "And ye?" he said to Daraway.


    She held out her arm as if for him to feel. He touched her.


    "Dried out already. Take care who knows bout that. Thayne¡¯s smoker just quit on him and if he finds out yer made of burnin coal he''s like te nail yer feet te the ground and hang raw cuts for cookin off yer elbows."


    In the lee of a stand of birch they built a fire. The leafless twigs overhead seemed to shiver out of the dark like wicker fingers stretching out to the warmth. Mym shifted out of her clothes and into those Khaz had packed, and she noticed they were hers too.


    "I was comin te find ye,¡± he said. ¡°Damn armiger did somethin te me aboard the boat. Don''t remember anythin cept wakin up in the hold. Yer pack was sittin there right next te mine. I hollered and pounded thinkin ye''d come but ye never did. Had te break the battens te get out only te find we were docked in one of Dara''s slips down at seaway''s end."


    "Tell me bout da," she said.


    "I''m comin te that. I looked for ye in the town, looked for ye both tellin truth. Checked that tavern but nobody''d seen ye. Plenty saw the armiger though, said he and his went on up the seaway days before. Stones didn''t tell nothin. I set te home hopin ye were in front of me. Made the delvin."


    "And da?"


    He nodded but kept his eyes on the fire. It bent and waved and sawed the rising wind. "Yer da was about the same then as when we set out. Thayne wanted me te stay but I was already headin back te yer fishin town Dara. Learnt ye had come and gone again. Where''d she go I asked, but they wouldn''t tell me. Had te rough up a pair te get it out of em. Sorry bout that."


    "I''m glad you did," said Daraway.


    He nodded. "They said ye''d gone te the sea of suns searchin for us. Knew I needed te get back too, but no way in hell I''m barkin asea again. I knew ye''d be comin back Mym so long as ye had legs te walk on. There isn''t any way te get here cept the old high passes. So I ran on back up te the delvin te repack fer mountaineerin and, well, I''m afraid the world doesn''t care enough te wait for me or ye or her."


    "What do ye mean?"


    "Things had changed."


    "What things?"


    "First, the keeper''s come back."


    "What?"


    "Aye. Came back leadin them we left behind. Said he''d taken em into the wyndin''s after some man came up and told em we were bested at the span and that a whole army of orcs were comin te take the delvin and slaughter anyone in it."


    "He should''ve known better than te trust some man."


    "Aye. Thing is he took em deep. Deeper than I''ve ever been. Deeper than anyone''s been in thousands of years. So deep he says he saw livin signs of the blue dwarves."


    "Nakshit."


    "Blue dwarves?" said Daraway.


    "Another myth," said Mym.


    "Yet there they were," said Khaz.


    "Ye tell him about the orcstone?"


    "Aye I told all of em."


    "What''d they think of it?"


    Khaz poked at the growing fire with a stick. "Well different folk are thinkin differently. Seems like the oldest dwarves believe it least. Folks a bit closer te our age, they really want te believe. And sightins of the blue dwarves just split em down the middle. Some are ready te go seekin em and others are thinkin it¡¯s a sign of the delvin''s endin, of the whole world''s endin."


    "What''s da say?"


    He shook his head. "He''s not good, Mym. He went te sleep like normal before the keeper came back. Thayne says he hasn''t woke up since."


    The wind came down through the trees to cut straight through her wools and leathers. Cold in her wet hair and in her wet eyes like the breath of the dead. She tried to ask but only managed, "Is he?"


    He reached for her hand. "I can''t say. He''s showin some fight yet. He''s, well, he''s howlin yer name and yer ma''s."


    She stood up. "I got te get back."


    "This storm''s like te cut the boot track up the face."


    "Doesn''t matter."


    "I know it, but nobody lucks through two slides in a life."


    "Watch me."


    He sat back from the fire and turned and drew her [longarm] and powder horn and a set of cartridges out of his pack. "Here," he said.


    "They''ll just slow me down."


    He drew his own [longarm] and slung its strap over his shoulder. "We''ll want em. Stones are sayin some strange things. Listen."


    She closed up her coat and slung her [longarm] and horn and pocketed the cartridges. "Ye got anythin te eat?"


    "Sure do, but ye aren''t listenin."


    "No time for it."


    She hurried the others upvalley. The storm overcast the moons and howled off the ridges above. They crossed the stream at a ford made for that purpose. Snow bulged above its far bank, disturbed only by Khaz''s previous coming. His heavy track through the forest ran like crack through a rib of the world. At the place where it joined the dwarfroad they saw other prints in the old snow as the new stuff started to fall. She stopped to read them.


    "What''s all this then?" said Khaz.


    "Humans. A whole troop of em."


    He knelt over a print and traced it with a finger. "And this?"


    "A tall one. And heavy. Maybe one of them longhorned otaurs."


    "They''re hoofed. Like naks. This fellow''s gone barefoot."


    "Hard te see in this dark. Dara?"


    Daraway snapped a candle flame out of her fingertip that danced in the wind.


    Mym studied the prints. "Don''t know what that one is, but altogether they got te be the armiger''s. They''re half a day ahead. Ye must''ve just missed em comin down the road."


    Khaz flicked the snow from his finger and thrust his hand into his waistpocket. "Couldn''t fly a gnat between us."


    "Like as not they''ll be hunkerin in this. We''ll catch em."


    Upvalley the storm ripped through the trees but the prints never diverged from their purpose. Khaz shouted in her ear to be heard over the wind. "They''ll be halfway up the face by the time we make the foot."


    "Then this blow''ll wipe em off."


    "Just as like to wipe us off."


    "We have te go where they go."


    He looked at her and she knew what he wanted.


    She nodded.


    They came to the place in the valley where the dark flumewaters met the wide stream and she saw the prints hooked right into the side draw. The snow whipped sharp bits of ice against her cheeks and lips and nose but she just stood there as if she couldn''t believe her eyes.


    She started to run.


    The prints wound up the side canyon, following the trickling of the stream then passing the frozen foot of the flume''s falls and the mound of snow covering the old jumble of stone dwarves. The prints ran straight into the granite wall of the mountain.


    Khaz came beside her shaking his head. "I can''t believe it. How the hell they know about it?"


    Whoever they were, they had entered the traitor''s gate.


    <hr>


    > Item Gained: [Mym''s longarm]

 47. Fragment

    They crossed the span as night fell. They slunk past the spot where he had nearly slain the father and daughter and he looked at the pavers where they had lain one on top of the other with a dead sow between. He thought of the daughter at the flood and her pick hooked around the greenskin''s neck. Serrations opening a stream of blood from his throat. He shook his head and passed on. Last time he had followed the horde down the seaway to the human port. This time he jogged up the dwarfroad to where it ran beside the river. There were hills on the left and the river on the right and more hills beyond it. The road was paved in the dwarven way and it bent to follow the river into dwarfdom.


    He wasn''t certain where to go next. He knew only what the [brigadier] taught him, only what any human might teach their child about some other people''s myths. The black heart of the world, where the world was made and yet being made, birthplace of all life and unlife. Somehow both below and above the dwarven realm she had said. Both within it and without it.


    He crossed the river.


    At the top of every hill they crouched and studied the country about but they never saw anyone upon the parallel road. Before dawn on the second morning they trotted down to the river and he tried and failed to catch fish. The [bosun] watched a while, then left upstream. By daybreak Orc was soaked and freezing and empty handed. He retreated back into the hills. The [bosun] found him there with a little string of trout hanging from a stick. He held them up to his mouth so they hung like silver teeth below his horrid half smile.


    Two mornings later he woke to the [bosun] gesturing madly at him. The man flattened his hands against either side of his skull and then patted his sunken chest and reached a hand for Orc''s shoulder.


    Orc backed and slapped down the hand.


    The [bosun] pointed to the journal. Orc gave it to him.


    He wrote: I can feel it.


    He looked at Orc expectedly.


    The fragment. Can''t you feel it?


    "No."


    The [bosun] handed him the journal and beckoned him to follow. They left the river behind and struck out across a green backcountry of gray firs and peeling birch and roosting crows that likely hadn''t seen two legged two armed creatures in centuries. He saw bear scat and heard squirrel laughter and wondered why they weren''t hibernating for it was now the deepest part of winter. Rocks as tall as the elven trees seemed to grow out of the earth without accompaniment, and red winged black birds waited on their tops and watched the orc and the dead man walk through their shadows. Frigid streams carried meltwater from higher up though in no place did it appear to him that anywhere higher up might be melting.


    Then he saw the mountain. It dominated the sky, the world, taller and wider than anything he''d ever seen. Its brow was white yet its face was as black as the [Skyshard], as if made of something so abhorrent sunlight dared not shine upon it nor would ice cling to it. Stark white snow covered its shoulders and draped down from those ridges like a cloak, and the rest of it lay hidden behind a set of rugged foothills with rocky crowns climbing higher and higher yet never approaching anything close to the mountain''s immensity.If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    He stopped just to look but the [bosun] waved his hand and wrote in the pine duff with the pommel of [Booky''s blade]: Not safe.


    He looked back the way they''d come. "No one''s following us."


    Not us. The fragment.


    The [bosun] set off at a run and soon they were crossing broad and shallow patches of snow that first stretched only across the open ground between the trees, then deepens and covered the ground under the lowest limbs, then blanketed the treetops in layers that made each enshrouded fir look like a mountain in miniature.


    They ran through the night and the hillsides sparkled first green then teal from the moonslight on the snow as if the land was covered in emeralds. The mountain grew even taller and wider and in that green otherworldliness its snowy flanks looked like the iris of a predator''s eye and its black face the constricted pupil.


    Orc''s feet began to hurt from the cold and the dry air made him thirst. He bent and scooped a handful of snow into his mouth and nearly lost sight of the [bosun] doing it. The snow hurt his teeth as it melted.


    "Not sure I can climb that thing," he called.


    The [bosun] did not slow. Orc ran after him.


    By the time the sun rose on the fourth day his feet were wholly numb and his fingertips hurt. He couldn''t catch enough breath to run. He could only walk. Steam rose from his back and scalp and came out his mouth and nose with every breath. Sunlight gilded his breath and the steam rising from his skin as if his soul burned. He hadn''t seen the [bosun] in hours but the tracks kept on straight as the pole of a compass indifferent to terrain and he followed them with his head down and his eyes squinting against the sunglare. The tracks wrapped around a long aspect and he followed them with the sun at his back and followed them as they passed into blue shadow. The gentle hillside on his right fell away into a deep gulch with water flowing white over rocks at its bottom. The far slope rose so steeply that it bore no trees or perhaps because it bore no trees, and as he continued to come around the aspect he saw blankets of clouds burning off wherever the sun carved into them. Emerging from behind their curtain was earth so rough and steep none would call it a hill. It was the true base of the mountain.


    The [bosun]''s tracks turned slightly down there and traversed toward the gulch''s bottom and the stream flowing therein. Orc could smell the water and his throat cracked as he swallowed in anticipation. Down he went and for the first time in a day he felt like he could breathe fully. He came around a rib in the hillside and he saw the yawning hole whence the water came. The dead man waited at its threshold.


    Orc dipped his hands in the water to drink. It was warmer than he expected and smelled faintly of sulfur. He drank again then he looked at the hole. No light came out of it. Only a steady stream of water descending a smoothed yet porous black rock of the kind ejected from the world by the great burning rifts at its beginning. He listened and he smelled but the interior was dark and inscrutable. As if he stood before the place where night was nightly birthed, and where it daily gathered like a flight of bats to wait out the sun.


    "You brought me somewhere pleasant," he said.


    The [bosun] knelt and in a slough of snow beside the stream he wrote: Hurry.


    "Molten rock made that."


    The [bosun] nodded.


    "If it starts flowing again you know what''ll happen to us."


    The [bosun] waved his hand as if such a thing were of no consequence.


    "Yeah. You''re already dead."


    Orc craned his head and looked into the hole. There was nothing to see and only the faint sulfur smell and the trickle of the water on the rock. He said, "If Ogaz was here he''d tear you to pieces."


    The [bosun] nodded and pointed to what he''d written.


    They entered the hole and started climbing.

 48. The Wynding

    The wynding had been cold and dark last time. Now its ceiling radiated heat and all along the crown of its walls ancient runes shone faintly as if they were rendered from hot iron. They described tales she had never heard in places unknown to her. Khaz kept slowing to read them and she kept dragging him along. Her da wasn''t too far now. Somewhere above he was calling to her. She needed to be there. It never occurred to her that the [armiger] wouldn''t go to the delving until they came to a junction where the wynding split in two. There the stones set in the walls spoke their memories and she [listened] and knew.


    "They went that way," said Khaz.


    "Delvin''s the other," she said.


    "What are ye thinkin?"


    "Ye know what''s down that way?"


    "No. Never been."


    She looked up the corridor to the delving. She needed to get to her da. He was asking for her. She needed to get to him before it was too late.


    She looked down the corridor the [armiger] had gone. Perhaps too late was the lie. Perhaps it always had been. Such was the myth of the stone of the earth and its scattered fragments: the dwarfstone, the elfstone, the orcstone, the manstone. Of imbuement, of vivification, of creation, of life everlasting. She looked up one corridor and down the other. Up to her da and her duty. Down to her hopes and their lies.


    Khaz touched her arm. "I know ye don''t want te hear it and yer sick te death of me askin about it so I won''t ask. I''ll just say that I want ye te know I''m happy te get on after the armiger alone so ye can attend yer da."


    "Thanks," she said. "Stay close."


    She led them down. Deep into the mountain. The faint runes faded and the way darkened. Behind them they saw the small square window of light shrink. The wynding turned sharply and it was gone. She felt as though they had entered the white mountain''s black soul.


    "Got another light?" said Khaz.


    "I''d rather not," said Daraway.


    "Ye seen her hands?" said Mym.


    "Aye."


    "Does it look like that feels good?"


    "Alright, I hear what yer sayin."


    She felt Daraway''s hand on her shoulder. "It''s alright love."


    "Sorry Khaz," said Mym.


    "I get it," he said. "It''s hard walkin away from where ye mean te be."


    "Aye."


    "I''ll make sure te pack flares next time."


    They walked on. Sometimes she heard water dripping and sometimes it sounded as if a whole river poured on the other side of the wynding''s walls. Then the wynding turned upwards and she felt warm air against her face and her searching hands felt gaps in the walls at regular intervals. She smelled the musty odor of ancient things long cold and damp. Now warming. Now waking.


    "What do ye think they are?" said Khaz.


    "Mineshafts," said Mym. "Storerooms."


    "There sure are a lot of em."


    "Aye."


    "Wonder what their old delvers were chasin."


    "Wonder if they ever found it."


    "Stop a moment and look to the right," said Daraway. "Ready?"


    The woman [threw] a flash like sheet lightning and by the flicker Mym saw the storeroom with its latticed stone cabinets full of broken machines and dusty tools and clouded glass and the imprints from where wool had decayed to dust, and ancient stoneworks with half finished heads and broken shoulders and bulbous noses and closed eyes. As if all things were created as humans believed and all the mistakes of that creation had been discarded to this place, and their instantaneous shadows fled long and away like vermin who hate the light. Then all was dark again.


    "What is this place?" said Mym.


    "Myth of a myth," said Khaz.


    They walked on in rule-straight stretches between switchbacks, back and forth and back and forth, until they saw light ahead. There the wynding opened into a chamber as wide as the delving and twice as tall with twin colonnades of stout square pillars each carved to look like dwarves lifting dwarves lifting dwarves all the way to some unseen ceiling. Curious oilless lamps hung two dwarves up on the right hand colonnade. A copper wire ran from lamp to lamp and they dimmed together and brightened together as if the wire bound them to a common purpose. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    Mym had never seen anything like it. Nor had she heard familiar talk rendered so uncouthly as when a nearby woman said, "Go on ahead ya fatass doofs. Ya ain''t gonna do no good back here."


    Nor had she smelled a living creature so foul as the pale skinned two headed monster that ducked into the wynding at the chamber''s far side.


    Nor had she seen a stone carving so large and ornate as the [sentinel] standing at the chamber''s center. It was sculpted in the image of a dwarf but three times the height of a man. Its limbs and body and head and beard made from smooth granite, its eyes and tremendous [hammer] the fuligin black found only in the shard of the sky. The sight of the [sentinel] recalled in her a memory she had never made as if it were a feature passed from mother to daughter, like humor or tenor. Or a memory she had but could never know, like that of her birth.


    "The doomstone," she breathed.


    Khaz nodded beside her. "Aye."


    The [sentinel] appeared to be gazing down at the woman who had spoken as they entered, now sitting against a column on the far side of the chamber.


    Mym called out, "Oy!"


    The [sentinel]''s gargantuan head and shoulders turned soundlessly to face them. Its body shifted after and it set the head of its [hammer] on the floor between its feet and rested both of its huge hands on the pommel.


    "He''s a walkin talkin spittin slab of somethin," said Khaz.


    "Stone given life," said Daraway.


    "Doomstone isn''t any more alive than the forge," said Mym.


    "It looks alive to me."


    "It''s just made te move different."


    "I have never seen anything like it."


    "The art te make em was lost before da was born. Before Thayne even. I thought it was just somethin they made up te keep lads and lasses from wanderin into the wyndins."


    "Aye," said Khaz.


    "Been rethinkin a lot of those thoughts these past hours."


    "Aye."


    The sitting woman whistled at them and waved. She sat against the column with one leg thrust out before her. Its trouser was torn open below the knee and a great pink and purple welt was coming up just there. She grimaced or grinned as they came and it was plain to Mym that the woman was drunk.


    "Y''all come on over. I tried telling em it was only a matter a time before y''all came alooking for em. Tried telling em dwarves don''t take kindly to interloping. Reckon not a single one of em have ever seen a real live one. Course I''ve known plenty. More than most. One or two anyway."


    Mym watched the [sentinel] as she walked past and it didn''t move again though it seemed as though its glinting black eyes followed her.


    "Y''all are here for the moodstone?" said the woman.


    "Doomstone," said Mym.


    "Getting all red when he''s mad and blue when he''s blue."


    "It''s called the doomstone."


    The woman put her hands up and fluttered her fingers as if playing an instrument. "Get the pitch just right and he breaks the world?"


    "Doom. Stone."


    "Y''all live under a rock." She looked at her busted leg and her teeth flashed from the pain of it. She put her hands down and pushed herself a little more upright but she was already about as upright as she was going to get. "But really. Y''all are too easy. Takes all the fun outta it. Listen, if y''all get on up the way and find my biggun ya remind em to do whatever the boss man says. We gots a lotta gold riding on this. Enough for a lady ta retire on."


    "Then yer with the armiger."


    "Sure as shit I ain''t. That goddamn armiger sent orcs through my pit to clear his way here. I''m with myself and mine. I only aim to recover my share. Y''all should think of doing the same."


    "The share yer after is ours."


    "Yeah that''s a puzzler ain''t it. I''d tell ya to ask the armiger directly, but ya can''t twist silver outta a turnip."


    Mym turned to Khaz and Daraway. "Lets go."


    The woman half raised a hand. "Well now bout that. Ya try getting on and that right tall beastie is gonna smack ya flat as a panfried cake. Now maybe y''all can stand it what with ya being halfway there already, but I''d lay gold ya can''t. I sure as hell couldn''t." Her hands began to tremble and her face was losing color.


    Daraway said, "Easy there." She felt the woman''s forehead then looked at Mym. "She''s in some kind of shock."


    "How''d the others get round?" said Khaz.


    The woman''s eyes followed Daraway''s hands. "It weren''t up when they passed. Damn thing was dead as mule''s donger til the armiger started a talking to it. Bastard did it on purpose. Just yesterday he''s bleeding on bout my ogre, saying they''re his since he bought their dying but they never did. Well that ain''t my fault. He had plenty of chances to come and check but did he ever? His head''s got too big for us small folk."


    "Da don''t have time for this," said Mym.


    Khaz turned from the woman to the [sentinel]. "Oy ye lovely lout. We''re the kids of yer makers and we''re needin by."


    The [sentinel] watched but didn''t move or reply.


    He took a step forward and spoke in [tones] to calm the stones.


    "Care there Khaz," she said.


    "Don''t trouble yerself for my foolin. He moves te me ye slip on past."


    He took another step.


    All at once the [sentinel] came with both hands swinging the [hammer] in a great circle around then behind then overhead then straight down at Khaz, and the dwarf braced his feet and raised his [alpenstock] and [Thayne''s longarm] one crossed over the other with his beard flowing behind him and his eyes narrowing above and his jaw flexing and elbows bending to take the blow that would end his life. Daraway thrust Mym forward as it landed with a clang of metal on metal and the snap of bones and the whump of the air coming out of him like the snow compressing before the avalanche, and Mym fell and rolled into the next wynding as the [hammer] struck again the place they''d stood an instant before. She couldn''t see back into the chamber. The [hammer]''s head blocked the entrance.


    "Khaz," she called and she put her palms against the head as if to push it aside.


    She heard the woman''s muffled voice. "Nothing left of him to bother with. Go get yours. I''ll make sure he ain''t never alone. Can''t fucking go anyplace else."


    She felt Daraway''s hands pulling her arms, pulling her away. Pulling her away from what''d happened.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Stonespeaking]: Once she was back where they speak our dialect she didn''t wait te put te use everythin she''d discovered abroad... (9/10)

 49. The Other Orc

    With hands and feet they climbed the tunnel. The higher they climbed the thinner the air in their lungs and the warmer the ground under their probing fingers. There was nothing at all to see and nothing to hear but the incessant susurration of the water curtaining from above and echoing from below. For how long they climbed none could say, and in that long dark they finally understood the true nature of the world. That only the veneer of its skin knows light and then only for the glimmer of its existence, the somebillion-year winking in the impossibly infinite lifetime of everything. That for the great mass of world¡¯s interior, as with the vacuous expanse of creation, there was and is only ever darkness. That beneath the surface there is no light. Like a living thing all its machinations turn in darkness and all their effects are born therein, and for the way humans decry the dark it should be known that nothing made in the world''s black bowels ever ends in murder or maiming or betrayal or oppression. That those things are only and ever made in places known to daylight.


    Orc looked up. Far above in the indefinite dark he saw a narrow crescent of light. As if the zygote of some third moon was gestating there. As if the blade of a [scythe] hot from the forge had been laid across their path. The crescent grew as he climbed and he saw it was a sliver of light caught by the ceiling like yellow lamplight cast from the door to the [brigadier]''s study. When he reached the exit whence came the light he pulled himself through and he turned to hand up the [bosun] behind him. They stood in a sloping chamber through which passed a square cut flume. Its water seemed to flow uphill past his feet and pour into the tunnel they had just climbed. Orc couldn''t make sense of its wrongness. But he [knew] the way ahead was right.


    He turned to the [bosun]. "I can feel it now. Follow me."


    He led them past a metal panel in the ceiling that glowed. He bent and dipped his hand in the flume and he flicked drops of water at the metal. They sizzled instantly to steam. At the end of the chamber stood a dwarfsized archway. Bracing his hand on its keystone he leaned into a seething abyss. From a thousand feet below a crimson radiation assaulted his face like the summer sun. He squinted against it and saw the dark slag in it and the way it slid against itself. The walls rising out of it were of some other mineral. Hardened and resilient. Shaped by some forgotten art. He saw architectures flying from their facets that buttressed hard-angled houses and he saw red banners of anodized metal with geometric sigils hanging from their eaves. From between two houses emerged the bald profile of a massive stonecut dwarf. Its underlit nostrils and angered brow burned red by the magmic light and its flowing mustaches braced its weight to the wall and Orc saw molten rock pouring from its open mouth in sheets and strings that clung together as they fell in a superheated column, as if it expelled the collected anger and rage and hate of all dwarves past. His head began to swim in the swelter and he stepped back from the archway and allowed the [feeling] of the [orcstone] to draw him on. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    They walked a corridor under a hundred more glowing panels past a hundred doorless doorways to a hundred cells. Each was filled with objects of different sizes and shapes and functions. In one he saw a smooth metal crown resting on a concrete pedestal. A modest red ruby glinted in its setting at the brow. He laid his fingertips on it and it seemed to burst into flame yet the metal remained cool. It was too heavy to move and for a maddened moment he believed it must be alloyed somehow with the weight of all its wearers'' decisions and judgements and doubts.


    He looked back the way they had come and up the way they were going. The [bosun] followed his gaze.


    "I''ve read of this place," he said.


    The part of him that [knew] what was ahead was desperate to move on. But in the next cell his eye caught a strange reflection. He stopped and turned to it and stood looking at a vision of himself and of the [bosun] behind him set in the far wall. He took a step toward the vision and saw its fault, for when he stepped with his right foot the Orc caught in the wall stepped with its right. Where he carried the [Skyshard] in his left hand so too did the unmirrored Orc. He held out his right hand toward the other Orc as if to shake it in the human fashion, and as he did so too did the other.


    "What is this?" he said at the same time as his twin, and he heard his own voice from two places at once.


    He saw the other [bosun] peer over the other Orc''s shoulder and knew his [bosun] must also be doing. As he took another step forward to touch the image the unmistakable report of gunfire cracked down the corridor and clapped about the cell. He and his other jumped at the sound and the other Orc turned and pushed his way past the other [bosun] as Orc watched. The other [bosun] stood staring at him with his loose jaw hanging there. Then his [bosun]''s cold and dry hand clasped around his wrist and drug him into the corridor. The gun cracked again, and they sprinted toward a doorway at the corridor''s terminus.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Awareness]: When you die you go all to pieces and some of you winds up in bird bellies and some in the dirt and some in the air. Ain¡¯t nobody sayin otherwise about that. So where do you think all of you came from before you was born? Fowl and turnips and them gasps and wails of birthin--they''s all you now... (8/10)

 50. The Black Heart of the World

    The runes on the wynding''s walls seemed to burn as she ran past. Every twenty yards a lamp shimmered and pulsed in a tin cage shaped like an iron maiden. The copper wire ran from lamp to lamp as if it was a vein carrying blood and their light was somehow made by the animus of life. Her eyes streamed for Khaz but she couldn''t spare a step for him or for what had happened. The lamplights passed her face through every phase of the moons over and over as she sprinted toward a concrete door as wide as the span and as tall as the [sentinel]. It stood ajar and the wire snaked through its gap. She slipped through it also. Daraway came after.


    They arrived in a circular chamber suspended above a river of molten rock. Overhead soared an indefinite void. They saw the stonepaved bridge arching the river and the tremendous anvil chained across its midpoint and the narrow windows like gunloops set in the walls. This was the black heart of the world, lit by the relentless heat upcast by the river that was the lifeblood of the mountain. This was the first holding of the first colony of dwarves.


    "Myths alive," said Mym. "It''s the forge of creation."


    Daraway held up her hands as if against an invisible barrier. "There is something else here."


    Mym noticed it too. She felt it more than saw it. It encompassed the chamber as if the bridge and its anvil lay inside a glass ball held in place by unseen firing tongs and the whole of the forge was its crucible. She [heard] it in the same way she [heard] stones and it [spoke] of one thing only: terrible heat.


    She looked at Daraway. The woman nodded. They stepped through together and whatever it was didn''t obstruct their passage. On the far side there was a tremendous noise and the sickly smoky smell of a carcass thrown on a fire.


    "Halt there!" yelled a man.


    Mym looked again at the bridge and now saw men near the anvil and the [armiger] kneeling over a machine there that clattered and sputtered like an angry nak. Black grease covered his hands to their wrists. He looked up at his man''s call and saw her and Daraway.


    The [armiger] stood up holding a cotton rag. He shouted, "Welcome dwarf! Welcome witch! A moment please!"


    He put his hand inside the machine and its mechanical noise quieted. The dim lamps strewn up the bridge died all at once and at their deaths the red glow of the river seemed to press upward into the cavern for it was the only light therein.


    "There," said the [armiger].


    He turned to face them and wiped his hands on the cotton rag and thrust it into his belt.


    "Just the two of you? One imagines others would come also, but perhaps there are no others left to come."


    She would kill him just for that. She took a step onto the bridge.


    He beckoned her forward. "Did you pass the doomstone? Was it yet animate? This place hosts numerous entrances and exits, some hidden even to their makers'' progeny. Perhaps you didn''t see it. We can show you to it once we finish here."


    "Aye we saw it," said Mym.


    "Marvelous. Come now and look at this. Come, come. We have no quarrel with you. In truth we could use your expertise."


    Daraway looked at her.


    The [armiger] waved a hand. "Come. Look upon the answer to the mystery of your folk''s diminishing."


    "Careful," whispered Daraway.


    "Really you have nothing to fear from us, lady Daraway. We have already obtained that which we came for. The rest are merely curiosities."


    Mym unslung her [longarm] and carried it in her hand. The bridge seemed to vibrate under her feet and she [heard] its making in her bones and she [heard] water running through its substructure. She stopped ten paces from him. A hundred yards below them the river of rock slowly swirled.The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.


    The [armiger] wore his [shortarm] in its holster on his chest. She watched him move his hand and point at something beneath the anvil. "You will not see it from there and we dare not touch it to show you for who knows what might happen. I know you understand. Come and see."


    She drew closer. She saw the wheeled and belted machine beside him and she saw his knights sweating in their armor and she saw another massive door standing slightly ajar at the far end of the chamber. Closer still and she saw the anvil was cast from shard of the sky. She ducked beneath one of the chains and she touched it with her free hand and felt its tension. From there she could see clear meltwater running in a footwide flume under the anvil as if it had once served as a quenchbucket for the first [smith].


    The [armiger] saw her looking. "It collects just below the summit and runs all the way through to your delving. These are the headwaters that nourish all of dwarfdom. See here?"


    A metallic lump of something rested there in the stream of the flume. Beaten and shaped by a [smith], yet unfinished. She drew closer. She could hear the [armiger]''s steady breathing and the water gurgle as it slid past. She saw the lump was a sphere of soft metal folded on itself a hundred times as if it was a sheet of paper full of bad ideas crumpled into a ball and tossed aside.


    "It was to be the masterwork of the first dwarves," said the [armiger]. "A second stone of their own making to match the stone of the earth had from their makers. Curious, isn''t it? What happened then that prevented them from completing it? What happened that caused them to assassinate their makers in the manner you witnessed on the headman¡¯s block?"


    He looked at Mym.


    "We do not have those answers. One wonders if they have something to do with this."


    He unhooked the nearest lamp from the wire and held it just above the lump. The lamp lit brighter than it had when the engine powered it.


    "What is it?" said Daraway.


    The [armiger] shrugged. "Some new corruption. New to us anyway. Clearly not to dwarves for they have been partaking of its imbuement for generations. What say you, lastborn?"


    Mym looked him in the eye. "Did ye set free the orcs?"


    He sat back on his heels and set down the lamp and its light dimmed to nothing. "Come now. You drink of this water. You wash in it. You bathe in it. Here it is. The reason for your race''s infertility."


    "Ye didn''t answer me question."


    He gestured at the lump and smiled not unkindly. "You did it to yourselves."


    At that moment the stones beneath her feet [wailed] with a new anguish as they welcomed home an elder of their kin. She knew in that moment that her da had died, and there before her was the man responsible.


    She shouldered her [longarm] and pointed it at his forehead. "I want te hear ye say it."


    She heard the clank of the knights moving and the ring of their drawing blades and Daraway whispering something but all her focus was on this man kneeling before her, his forearms resting on his knees, his head pressed against her weapon. He kept his eyes on hers.


    "We have nothing to say to you,¡± he whispered.


    "Then ye won''t protest when I blast yer brains out yer head te the ground."


    He watched her. In the dim red light his eyes glinted red as if the only world he saw was one of blood and hot iron.


    "We are only one of many," he said.


    She felt a cold muzzle push into her neck.


    He kept his eyes locked on hers. "Shoot us now and another will rise in our place. But who will come to replace the white mountain''s lastborn daughter of its firstborn father? The woman she loves? The child she suckles? The orc she hunts?"


    Daraway whispered again and there was a plea in it but Mym wouldn''t heed.


    The [armiger] said, "Yes, I freed the orcs."


    She rolled left as she fired and the [armiger] shifted his head and the shot passed across his scalp and the muzzle against her neck discharged as she rolled and she felt the searing fullness of it in her shoulder. She grabbed the hot barrel and flung both it and the [knight] holding it across the top of the anvil and only as he slid and bounced off the bridge and fell into the molten river did she see it was the one called Malv. Daraway shouted and another gunshot rang off the anvil and Mym ducked instinctively and drew her [alpenstock] as she heard somewhere behind her a monster bellowing twice at once and she saw the [armiger] rise on the far side of the anvil with a cascade of blood down his face and his [shortarm] drawn and firing and that ball struck the inside of her leg and just when things couldn''t get any worse the tall orc stepped through the far door with a dead man lurching beside him.


    <hr>


    > +4 [Vengefulness]: Next came the horrors... (10/10).


    > [Vengefulness] Title Gained: [Nemesis] Denotes she whose grudges reshape space and time.


    > +1 [Stonespeaking] They told her the thing she had always known was comin. He went home te them and they sung their blessings... (10/10).


    > [Stonespeaking] Title Gained: [Speaker of the Secret Tongue] Denotes she who has learned a word of command.

 51. Ogre

    He sprinted through the narrow gap in the massive doors and onto the concrete bridge. The anvil was swaying on its chains and the dwarf and a woman were huddled behind it. The [knights] backed away as he came and the [armiger]''s head bled and fist gripped the smoking [pistol], and a monster from his past shook the bridge with their charge.


    "Ogre," he shouted.


    Left roared but Right heard his call and they stopped five paces from the dwarf and the woman.


    "Not them." He pointed to the armiger. "Him."


    Left roared still with their eyes closed and spit dripping down their face but Right looked down at the [armiger] who shouted commands and raised his [long spear] and advanced around the anvil.


    "Dis one?" said Right.


    "That one," said Orc.


    Ogre took a step and balled both fists and raised them above their heads and plunged them onto the [armiger] who crumpled on the pavers in a sharp snap as all his bones broke at once.


    Left stopped roaring to say, "Ow," and they held their hand before their face to study where the spearhead had gone clear through the meaty side of their palm. They looked at the [armiger] flattened on the pavers. "You killed boss man."


    Right said, "Orc says to."


    "Orc?"


    Left looked around and saw him. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    "Orc!"


    Right shook their head. "You dun listen."


    A [captain] of the knights shouted and ran to where the [armiger] lay in a heap of broken limbs and crushed armor. The others drew up spears and swords behind him. The [captain] grabbed the shaft of the [armiger]''s [long spear].


    "Ow!" cried Ogre. And with their skewered hand they plucked the [captain] off his feet and smashed his helmeted head on the anvil with a resounding clang and they reached their other hand to catch his shoulders and Left pulled one way and Right pulled opposite and the [captain] gasped a single brief note and exploded. In the red glow of the forge the blood that burst might''ve been water or spirits but it was neither. It seemed to come from nowhere and it fell all at once with a wet slap against the pavers of the bridge and the man''s upper section bounced off the bridge and fell into the molten rock and his lower section went cartwheeling through the huge doors at the forge''s far end as if his legs ambulated away all on their own.


    Panic took the others after the disembodied legs. They fell over each other and rolled and picked each other up and fled.


    Ogre turned to him and he saw a bloodlust writ across their four eyes that he''d never seen in Booky''s pit. "Orc," they bellowed together.


    Suddenly the woman leapt onto the anvil and her hood fell from her head and she cast both palms before her as if she would bodily push Ogre off the bridge. From her wrists to her fingertips ignited in swirling blue and yellow flames that danced in her eyes and curled the hair of her eyelashes and she closed her eyes against them and closed her hands to fists and she [threw] the flames at Ogre''s faces and they roared and they flailed their arms and wiped their foreheads and cheeks and the backs of their necks as if swiping away a hive of wasps. They roared again and turned as if they might turn away from the pain and they ran from the chamber with their heads on fire.


    Orc called after them and took a step but the cloaked [pyromancer] spun to him. The hems of her sleeves smoked and her eyes glowed and her untroubled forehead sweat and the ash under her eyes ran down her cheeks in two black tears and she raised her palms at him and fire snapped from her fingertips and before he could do anything the [bosun] appeared at her side as if stepping from her shadow, the point of [Booky''s blade] against the artery pulsing in the side of her neck.

 52. No Fight

    The blood on Mym''s hands and in her clothes was her own. It ran through her trousers and onto the pavers to pool and drip into the open flume. Her leg felt numb and there was a fullness in her shoulder but she felt no pain. The tall orc had her da''s [alepnstock] and a hand up before him. He stepped across her outstretched legs toward Daraway and the dead man. Daraway''s eyes flicked to hers, to the red mess she was making. She reached to charge her [longarm] but her fingers didn''t work properly. The tall orc had his hands on the anvil and was saying something to them. She leaned her [longarm] against the anvil and pushed the spike of her [alpenstock] into the pavers and she stood upon her leg and pain seared all up her side and made her catch her breath. The tall orc heard and turned his head.


    "No fight," he said again. As if that night had never ended.


    She choked up on her [alpenstock] and lunged on her good leg and swung the pick at his head. He caught the swing with the side of his hand and she yanked on the shaft and the pick''s serrations grabbed his forearm and they tumbled over together, scrambling hands against limbs and twisting and two quick blows against the side of his head and the scrape of the [alpenstock] against the pavers. She felt his weight come across her and press down into her. She grappled and they writhed together and her coat tore open across her midsection and his knee came across her cheek and he forced the side of her head into the stonework. Her good arm flopped into the flume and the warm water ran over her hand. She breathed hard and she felt him breathing hard and the damp heat of his breath against the skin of her stomach. She and he breathed in rhythm as if in her [hunt] of him she had become a part of him or he a part of her, as if their entwinement receded to times before either was birthed and now extended to the coming end of their lives and into the ways of being for which she had no name except death.Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.


    "I never wanted this," she heard him say.


    "Then release us," said Daraway.


    "Show me," he said, and she knew he wasn''t speaking to her or to Daraway.


    Mym heard the dead man shift his footing and she heard his rags brush over Daraway''s cloak and in that moment the woman acted. Mym felt the sharp heat of it and heard the dead man''s shapeless wail and the clatter of his [knife] on the anvil and she smelled his burning. The tall orc suddenly lightened atop her. She kicked and bucked against him and he staggered with a hand across his smoking eyes and da''s [alpenstock] swinging free from the leash around his wrist. She grabbed it. He reached for the dead man''s [knife]. She swung it with everything she had. He got the [knife] up and her shard of the sky severed its point. She crashed into him and they both went over and now her knee rested on his neck. He pushed both his hands against it. The black centers of his eyes grew as he sputtered under the weight on his throat. His blade was broken. He couldn''t breathe.


    ¡°Ye killed me da,¡± she spat.


    With his last breath he looked at her dead in the eyes and said, "I''m sorry."

 53. Once Then Twice

    The dwarf pinned him as he once had pinned her. Her eyes were wet and so close to his and he had both hands on her but could not move her for she was as heavy as a tomb. Her braid had come all apart around her shoulders and he saw the freckles dotting her nose and cheeks and he managed to wrap a circle of her torn coat in his hand but he still could not move her. She drew the head of the [Skyshard] across his vision and the sharpened point of its pick was black even in the red light as if it shed all energy but its own. He saw the wooden shaft passing with its longways grain from polishing and polishing and he saw the hardness of her weeping eyes like two diamonds made for cutting and he felt the pavers of the bridge pressed into his back and shoulders as if the stones themselves encouraged his neck to her point. His other hand found her booted ankle and he pulled with everything he had and the pavers slid an inch against him but it wasn''t enough. He readied himself for what he''d earned. The heat of her breath. The smell of sweat on sweat. The iron on his tongue. All of it lay behind him and so little before him. He readied himself.


    The pick did not fall.


    "Oy!" she called.


    He watched her eyes cast sideways to where the [armiger] was laying, now stirring, now straightening. Now sitting up and shedding the cuirass with its creases and dents that had just fractured his ribs and contused the flesh beneath them.This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    "Oy Dara!"


    He felt her grip on his neck soften and he slammed his knee into the back of hers and as she stumbled the pick pricked his mandible and he bore down on her coat and bore down on her foot and as she fell over the pick rent his jaw from joint to chin and the black blood of an orc fell onto his neck.


    He saw her roll away keeping the [Skyshard] before her but the [armiger] was already standing and calmly placing the [pistol] against her rising chest and Orc saw it fire once then twice into her and he saw the great red flower bloom across the back of her coat. The [Skyshard] dropped from her grasp and clanged against the anvil and at that noise some mechanism of the forge ungated and thousands of tons of molten rock and molten metal poured from the black heart above them and onto a invisible crystalline orb that seemed to encapsulate the chamber. Yellow and red and orange liquid spread across in a sphere and superheated the interior in which they fought as if the sun now descended from its domain to consume theirs. Orc gasped in the heat and closed his eyes against the blinding light and kicked as hard as he could against where the armiger''s legs should''ve been.


    <hr>


    > -1 [Rage]: Peace was all I ever wanted for him... (3/10).

 54. Skyshard

    She lay on her side with her cheek on her arm. All around her the ground was dark and wet and she wondered that her body had held so much blood. She wondered what would happen when she stoned up. Perhaps all of it would turn to stone also. Perhaps the pavers on which she laid were made from the blood of long dead dwarves. Perhaps all stones had once been dwarves.


    Everything seemed to happen so slowly. The tall orc kicked out at the [armiger]. He missed. The [armiger] stood at his full height. A wild smile on his face. That feeling. She knew that feeling. She tried to reach for da''s [alpenstock]. She looked at it where it lay. She looked at her hand. Her finger twitched.


    What would she do with it? Help the orc? He was a tool of the [armiger]''s. She wouldn''t help him. She couldn''t lift her arm. She could barely lift her eyes.


    Now they wrestled. How she had loved to. The tall orc had the [armiger]''s forearm barred against his torso and the man''s back folded sickeningly over the anvil''s side. Slowly as if pantomiming choreography for some later performance the tall orc spun the arm back and around and used it to maneuver the man where he willed. She found herself feeling admiration for his strength and courage. But then she had also admired the strength of the elk. The courage of the owl. She reached again for the [alpenstock]. Not even her finger moved.You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    She realized she too was a tool of the [armiger]''s. How many scores of orcs had she shot on the span that night? Her da had slain so many he had no place left to stand. Each had been someone''s cub. Some had been fathers and mothers too. Was she so different than them? From the tall orc, the goblin, the otaur?


    She smelled the singed wool of Daraway''s cloak, now laying in a heap on the pavers. She heard her weeping. She turned her chin and saw the top of her head. Her black and clublike hands held stiff as if already rigored. Blood leaked freely from her neck.


    She saw the dead man pull his broken and burned body across Daraway''s and toward where the tall orc struggled. The way his ruined skin folded where it dragged across the stone. He moved too slowly. He would never make it in time. He was unarmed besides.


    She heard another gunshot. It seemed so quiet. She noted how the tall orc started to fall. His claw was mangled and it dropped an orb of black blood from a hole bored straight through it. She watched the [armiger] catch the tall orc by the wrist and pull him close and wrap a free hand around his waist and hold the [shortarm] under his nose as if presenting a rose stem to his lover.


    Everything brightened and darkened together. The heat off the magma could not replace that which had drained out of her chest and back and leg. She reached one last time for the [alpenstock] and as her hand closed around it she swung it with all the might left in her arm and it fell with the speed and force of a blown dandelion''s seed.

 55. Fire

    He pushed the [armiger] away as the [Skyshard] fell toward him. He caught its shaft in his good hand and flipped it overhand and drove its spike into the [armiger]''s chest. The [armiger] dropped the [pistol] and gripped the [Skyshard] with both hands and began to pull the spike from his lung. Orc tore it from his grasp and flipped it again. His hand slipped in the warm gristle as he swung its adze in a three yard circle as if circumscribing the molten sphere around them from floor through zenith through the back of the [armiger]''s neck. The spine severed. The head fell off its cleaved backbone, loose in the skin of the neck. The shoulders and chest followed and the [armiger] collapsed in a disjointed heap on the floor with his face twisted around the wrong way.


    Orc breathed hard. He looked at his maimed hand and the people around him. With her hair still smoking and tears steaming off her eyes the [pyromancer] knelt over the dwarf saying things he wished he couldn''t understand. The [bosun] dragged himself with both arms toward Orc. His skin flaccid and his body trailing fluids across the pavers as if he was made of melted candle wax.


    Orc turned to the woman. She watched him come. Her hands were ruined. Blackened and cracked and bleeding. She held both before her with their heels together like a penitent. Perhaps they had melted together.


    He looked at her then looked into the dwarf''s glassy eyes.


    "I''m sorry," he said.


    The woman nodded at the [Skyshard]. "That''s all she wanted."Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    He laid it in the dwarf''s limp hand. The fingers didn''t close. "It wasn''t worth it."


    "It''s her father''s."


    "I know."


    Behind him the [bosun] made a long and desperate wail.


    "I''m coming mate," he said.


    He turned and he saw the [bosun] covering his head with his hands and he saw the armiger rising to a knee and raising his [pistol] at Orc''s face with his head swinging loose against his chest like a pendant. He heard the woman shout, "Back," and she clubbed her arms across his chest and shrieked as blue fire writhed up her hands and [lanced] outward to the [armiger] and the [pistol] exploded its powder and what was left of the man was enveloped by unnatural flames that consumed his skin then flesh then bones in an instant. Nothing was left but ash on the pavers. Amid them Orc saw a faceted black stone no larger than his fist. The [bosun] saw it also and from his belly he reached for it and closed his hand around it.


    As Orc watched the dead man was transformed. He drew a breath. His skin fattened and pinked. Moisture returned to his dry eyes and mouth and his jaw retracted to its proper place as if drawn upward by a string. The [bosun] rolled onto his back and looked at his hands and laughed a full throated laugh, and from where he lay he said, "Catch," and tossed the stone at the woman.


    She snatched it out of the air as if by instinct and her hands'' cracked skin and their layers of scars on scars and their blisters all smoothed. Her fingers regrew their nails. She dropped the stone to cover her mouth with her hand. It bounced against the pavers and landed on the fallen dwarf.


    <hr>


    > +5 [Renown]: As soon as I first seen him down on the beach I figured we was saved. I figured ain''t nobody stood before him ever and ain''t nobody gonna stand before him now. It''s too bad that armiger never did show up that night at Booky''s. Orc coulda just done him then and there... (9/10).

 56. What Was Missing

    She woke from something that wasn''t sleeping. She could hear before she could see because that is the nature of dwarves. The rough voice of the orc was saying, "There should be three more where that came from and my folk need one of them."


    A man said, "Which one y''all need cause they ain''t all the same."


    Daraway said, "How do you know?"


    "You yourself saw the queen''s shortcomins," said the man. "Reckon hers don''t work quite like this one, or maybe it just ain''t workin right after puttin a hundred thousand stiffs back together. All of them who didn''t get burnt in the king''s war''ll be wantin fixin."


    The orc said, "And I''ve got a hundred thousand acres that need restoring. This one was made for orcs. I''m taking it for orcs."


    Mym opened her eyes and saw Daraway smile down at her and heard her say, "There she is." Over them stood the tall orc and the dead man who wasn''t dead anymore.


    She felt da''s [alpenstock] in her hand and a cold wetness soaking her coat and trousers. She touched the holes in her coat then reached under her shirt and felt the smooth skin. She reached to her shoulder and felt the lead shotball still inside it. She sat up and the [orcstone] fell off of her chest and came to rest between her thighs. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands.


    "How do you feel?" said Daraway.


    Mym looked at the tall orc and pressed the [orcstone] against his mutilated hand and watched it mend.


    His eyes met hers. She saw the pain go out of them. He nodded at her and he did not try to take the [orcstone].


    "Can you stand?" said Daraway.


    She rolled onto her hands and knees and got up. "I need te get this te Khaz and da."


    "What''s Khaz?" said the tall orc.


    "No concern of yers, orc."


    Daraway laid a perfectly smooth hand on her shoulder. "We may need their help with the doomstone."


    Mym checked the breech of her [longarm] and bit a cartridge and charged it. She reached its stock into the flume and fished the lump of metal over to the side. She bent down and grabbed it. The water was warm and the lump was hot against her skin. She set it on the anvil and the water on its manifold surfaces sizzled off.


    "Alright then," she said. "Come on if ye want."


    They returned to the [sentinel]. The drunk woman saw them at the doorway. "Get on in here. It won''t hurt ya. It let all them soldiers by without so much as tickling their toes. Hell Ogre tweaked its nose and it just watched them run past no matter how I hollered. Now I get to spend the next twenny years wandering these tunnels shaking his can of oats and by my good god''s bleeding pearly heart did y''all dig up my old pardner there? Hey Orc!"


    Mym swept past the blabbing drunk and stopped up where Khaz lay. She knelt over his twisted ruin. The bend in the neck and the purple line across the forehead where the shaft of his [alpenstock] had been forced down upon him. [Thayne''s longarm] lay just out of reach. Its barrel bent. Its mechanism broken. She kissed the [orcstone] for luck and pressed it into his outstretched hand.


    "I see y''all got that magic rock off of that goddamn bastard," said the drunk. "Y''all bust him up?"You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.


    "He''s dead," she heard the orc say.


    "That''s my Orc! Ya stick him yourself? And who''s this handsome gent? Shit on a spindle Orc is that not the boatswain ya pulled apart? Man alive I do think I''ve had too much ta drink."


    Air rattled into Khaz''s lungs. Mym closed her eyes and tried not to sob. Not in front of the others.


    "Lookit that," said the drunk. "Ya think it''d fix up my leg?"


    Mym handed the [orcstone] to Daraway who pressed it against the woman''s leg. The woman watched it with a certain hunger in her eyes. "Damn. Just think if we had one of them back at the pit. Ya coulda done more than rough up them greenskins. We coulda sold a body every night. Done two a nights. Set up a matinee. Damn. Ya think folks back home are ready ta pay ta watch ya again?"


    "Your pit''s in pieces," said the orc.


    "Ah so ya been to see it? I knew ya''d miss it. Sure they whacked it good but it ain''t nothing a little spit and sweat can''t fix. I''d love ta have ya come on home. True partner this time. Fifty fifty."


    "I''ve got a new home now."


    "Ain''t what the armiger says."


    The drunk looked from one person to the next as if afraid they''d remember she''d come to that place with the [armiger].


    "Well. Probably ain''t a good idea anyway. After what happened with them busting outta them camps I reckon folks round the pit would rather see ya get got than ya getting others. Might be best if ya don''t come. Damn that itches."


    Khaz sat up and wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. He blinked about and saw Mym there.


    "Did I get him?" he said.


    Then he looked around and saw the standing [sentinel] and the broken longarm.


    "Oy. What happened?"


    The drunk laughed. "Ya died stone dead." She looked at the orc. "Guess that means somethin different for dwarf folk."


    Mym took Khaz''s chin in her hand. "Aye but yer livin now and it''s too late te change any minds bout it cause we''ve got te get up te the delvin. I got te get te da."


    "Alright then." He rolled his head in a circle then his shoulders and slapped his thighs and stood on them with a wobble. "Let''s go."


    "Dara?"


    Daraway handed back the [orcstone]. "I''ll come after. I have business with this orc."


    "Ye be careful. And don''t make any promises."


    Daraway smiled and kissed her forehead. "Go to da. I''ll be there soon."


    As Mym ran out of the chamber she heard the drunk woman say, "Y''all know a way outta here?"


    ***


    Their home was dark. The sling still strung across the porch. Her stonecut daughter half emerged from the slab. Thayne''s little three legged stool stood empty.


    "Ye should go," she said.


    "Ye don''t need to face this alone," said Khaz.


    She turned to him and hesitated. She nodded.


    She leaned her weapons against the stool. She walked through to their great room. She hoped the stones were mistaken but when were they ever? She walked into her da''s room and looked at his bed. Khaz put his hand on her shoulder. She stood that way for a long time. He lay on his back on his bed. Her grandda''s [longarm] was already there with him. On the floor around him lay gifts of woodcraft and stonecraft and gifts of stone growlers and the holiest of dwarven runes carved in nakhorn and little boxes of wood holding fragranced ashes and the hard sweet candies he liked. In the corner opposite one of the [hornkeeper]''s candles burned low with its white wax dripping down onto the table and off the side. There was no other light. She saw how his face had grayed and speckled like quartz in granite. She reached for something to hold and Khaz''s hand found hers. He helped her forward. His skin was stone. She pressed the [orcstone] into it. She pressed it for a long time. She didn''t say anything. She thought of all the things she didn''t know about him. She realized everything she knew was all she would ever know. She would never know what was missing from that account. She turned her back to her da and sat among the gifts and sobbed into Khaz''s shoulder.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Belonging]: ...Lady Daraway told me kids are the flesh and bones of parents'' dreams. It helped me to hear it. I hope she told Mym too. Point is life''s mostly just about who''s next to ya... (7/10).


    > -1 [Vengefulness]: What then is next for the crucible but to cool? (9/10).


    > Gained Item: [Orcstone] Imbued adamantine


    > [Orcstone] Gained Attribute [Lifegiver] But at what cost?

 57. The Bounty

    Within the ruin of the elven forest the snags of the burned out trees stood silently as if waiting. Up and down the slopes of the cemetery that was their nursery they endured, refusing to fall as if refusing to die. Refusing to admit they were already dead. As if they would stand forever, immortally charred to blackness and silence on the gray and black ground and thrusting into the air as if daring the next storm to come. Standing and waiting for an answer to their challenge.


    He knew better. Their [mother] had shown him how the eldest keep their moisture. How their resins are saved in roots too deep and too stolid to be troubled by even the hottest hellfires. Their children might fall to ash and their tops might crack and shiver their bodies to stumps, but those stumps had a clear view in every direction and no thirsty offspring clamoring for water and light. They would eat their young. Drink the bounty of sun and sky. Stretch new arms aloft. It was only a matter of time. Time and water and sunlight were the only magic they needed, and they weren''t magic at all.


    Ogaz laid a hand on him. "Orc''s careful, yes? No dying second time."


    He looked from the corpses of the trees back to the campfire and his friends gathered around it. "Don''t worry," he said.


    Saand took both his hands in her massive ones. "You think it is best to trust her?"


    "You said yourself she freed you."


    The greenskin said, "Maybe. Maybe yew stay and lead instead? Orcsies who''re left''ll follow big orc that killt stupid armiger. Yew new Nizam now."


    He looked into the fire. He didn''t say anything for a long time. The flickering light of the fire dimmed and he let the shorthorn hold his hands. He watched the fire and everything in its ring of light faded into the background. The wide snags of burned trees and the blackened ground and the little smokehouse that smelled of fish and charcoal and whale oil. He thought of the humans to the south and the humans across the sea. About who had what among them and who had nothing. About the [king] at the center of it all.


    He shook his head slowly. "There''s still shit that needs burning."


    "Going south across sea?" said Ogaz. "Other camps for freeing there."


    "Someday perhaps. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow I go to keep a different promise."


    Saand nodded toward the edge of the firelight. "And you''re taking him with you?"


    He half looked at the place where the [bosun] stood alone with his arms crossed over his chest, at the word hold tattooed onto the knuckles of his right hand. "I''m not taking him anywhere. Poor man just won''t let me be and I''d rather not have to kill him again."


    "Should be Ogaz with Orc," said Ogaz.


    "You''re needed here, friend."


    Ogaz looked into the fire with his hands between his knees. No one talked. He covered his eyes with a three fingered hand.


    Orc withdrew a hand from Saand''s and smoothed it across the tusker''s back.


    "Yew coming back here though?"


    "Someone needs to show you how to sow come spring."


    "Good." Ogaz nodded. "Here is home."


    He smiled and looked from the greenskin to Ogaz to Saand. She squeezed his hand and he squeezed hers back.


    She said, "The land will come back. It just needs time."


    "As do we," he said.


    ***


    Some days later he walked into Here First with its tall stone tower and its patrols of king''s men and women in silver armor and its camps of dirty refugees who gathered along the track as he came and who spat on the ground after he had passed. He wore a new pair of old trousers traded from a terrified human family back along the road, and he had rolled into his shirt the dwarf-mended [Booky''s blade] and the [brigadier]''s journal and he carried that bundle in his hand. An envelope sticking out of his waistband held a [letter of marque] with the seal of some great old house of humanity and the signature of its lady.


    Beside him the [bosun] rode a little black and white appaloosa with a dwarven [longarm] in a scabbard at his knee and a [harpoon] slung over his back. The appaloosa bore a wooden tug off its collar to a makeshift travois dragging a yard behind it. The travois dug two parallel gashes along the hard packed track from the weight of its load. Orc hadn''t known the [bosun] could ride until he''d left one morning up north and showed up ahorse that evening. He didn''t ask where he''d found it. It must''ve come with the saddle.This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    They made it all the way to the base of the tower before someone sought to stop them. A helmed woman wearing the blue tabard of the king with a [knife] sheathed on her chest and a bare [sword] in her hand. She whistled up the tower for her comrades then she said to the [bosun], "You found yourself a big one."


    "Yep."


    "Here for the bounty?"


    "What bounty?"


    "For your orc there."


    The [bosun] rubbed his chin with his hand. "Didn''t know there was a bounty."


    "Whole silver piece per head. Most just bring the head."


    The [bosun] side eyed Orc. "Weren''t it a copper last time?"


    "No," said Orc.


    The woman raised her [sword] and took a step backwards. She whistled again.


    The [bosun] dropped his hand and leaned over him. "Thought you said it was."


    "The copper was for the rope."


    "Well? A whole silver this time."


    "I heard."


    "Buy me a new pair of boots."


    "Better some hot water and a bar of soap."


    The [bosun] laughed. "It''s your head."


    "I''m partial to it."


    "Seems like a good value."


    "It might be."


    Two more king''s men came up in their armor beside the woman. "What''s all this then?"


    "We was just bartering," said the [bosun].


    "I''m here for the girl," said Orc.


    "What girl?" said one of the men.


    "The orphan you''ve got mucking and washing."


    "Ain''t no girls here, orc."


    Orc looked up at the turret then leaned to look past the soldiers. One of them spat and said, "Get on back to your burrow, boarfucker."


    Orc nodded at a roofed stable in the tower yard. "There she is."


    The [bosun] saw. "She ain''t more than an eyelash. You''re sure that''s her?"


    "I am."


    "Fine then." The [bosun] urged the horse toward the stable. The soldiers watched him go. He folded his hands over the pommel and started talking to the girl.


    One of the men said, "What about that lady who brought her in?"


    "What about her?" said the other, and he turned to Orc. "You here to cause trouble?"


    "I''m just here for the girl."


    The woman said, "We shouldn''t let him take her. Not without something."


    "Without what?" said a man.


    "I don''t know. Something more than his saying so."


    "Shut up."


    The [bosun] started back, walking the horse by the cheek strap with the girl up in the saddle.


    Orc shook his head at the soldiers. "You won''t even stand up for your kids. Your kind may outlive mine, but the day you bounty the last orc is the day you start laying them for each other."


    The woman pursed her lips and looked at her fellows, but said nothing. The [bosun] and horse and girl came past them.


    "You''re Cousins," said Orc.


    "Damn right," said the girl.


    "Some dwarves and a woman sent me to fetch you."


    "Finally."


    He tried not to smile. "Alright then."


    "You know them?" said the woman.


    "No," said the girl.


    She held her right hand out to Orc.


    "I''m Cousins."


    He took her hand. "I''m Orc."


    "Let''s go. This place sucks."


    The [bosun] turned to the soldiers. "You bark service to seaway''s end here?"


    One of the men pointed to a [harbormaster]''s house built on the oceanfront.


    Orc nodded. "Alright."


    The two king''s men turned to walk back to the tower.


    The [bosun] said, "You coming, Orc?"


    He waved them on. "Right behind you."


    He watched the [bosun] lead the horse and the girl toward the sea. He heard him say something and he heard her giggle.


    "You got what you wanted," said the woman.


    He nodded at the [sword] in her hand. "Your king gave you that so you''d feel strong, but he and those like him keep you weak. They did the same to us once. If they had their way they''d do it still."


    "Yeah and what''d you do about it?"


    "Mostly we died."


    She nodded. "That''s what I''m afraid of."


    "They count on it," he said, and he turned and walked after the horse with the unopened envelope and its [letter of marque] still stuck into his waistband.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Awareness]: ...I heard him say that between every pair of trees is a doorway leading to a new life, and that got me thinkin why not? (9/10).


    > +2 [Renown]: Everybody there big and little woulda followed him. Course he didn''t want no followers, and that''s why we followed him... (10/10).


    > [Renown] Title Gained: [Always a Musheater] Denotes he with the greatest stature of those who survived.


    > -2 [Rage]: Somewhere amid all that violence he learned the way to peace is through harsh justice and radical forgiveness. I wish I could see him again. Just once more... (1/10).

 58. The Anvil

    One morning that spring the [hornkeeper] came to see her as she sipped beer and sat on Thayne''s stool beside the empty sling. The beer was from a certain tavern down in seaway''s end. She had brought two kegs back to the delving after going down to tell the humans their water had been contaminated for hundreds or thousands of years. It was her duty to tell them. The duty of the dwarves. Listening to the [hornkeeper] was her duty also. She offered him a pint.


    "No thanks," he said.


    The foam fizzled on her upper lip. "What ye need?"


    He told her about the missing hunting party. Two dwarves and a man and a hound. She listened and offered advice when he asked. Then he asked for her to help search. He needed his best [sharpshooter] just in case orcs were behind it.


    "They aren''t," she said.


    "Ye willin te stake lives on it?"


    "Aye. But I''ll go if ye aren''t. Just need te finish da''s tomb first."


    "Ye been workin on it for months, child. Those lads need ye now."


    "I''ll be there."


    "Search is leavin at first light."


    "Said I''ll be there."


    After he left she turned to the slab. She used the granite they had started on together. She kept the cuts she had made while he had still watched. How she wished he watched her still. He would have told her to use some other slab. To not give up on her dream. But having a daughter had always been his dream, not hers.


    She set to scraping and shaping with his [Skyshard]. Hers now. She did it on the porch because she didn''t want him suspecting. As she worked she told him lies as if she were a lass again and he a living doting father. She told him she was shaping up a workbench because his was too tall. She told him he would be glad to see what she wrought on it. She would show him once it was finished.


    There''s an old saying that dwarves make their own tombs. She never really understood it until she went inside to gather her father for his. She left soon after and walked down the delving.


    She found Khaz down at Thayne''s working on his son. She nodded at the sculpting. "He''s comin along."


    "Aye he''s shit. Hard carvin with this soft thing."


    "I''ll lend ye da''s."


    "I''d appreciate it."


    She ran a hand down the cheek of the lad coming out of the block. "The keeper come round earlier?"


    "Aye. We''re headin out first light te search."


    "I''ll be there."


    He nodded.


    She said, "He''s awfully heavy now. Thinkin there''s not much reason te put him who''s stone inside a stone box inside a stone mountain."


    "Dwarves make their own tombs."


    She nodded. "Aye."


    "Ye don''t need te rush it if ye aren''t ready."The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    She thought about that for a while. Khaz set to chisel away at his son. The forge was warmer there. Its heat was a kind of balm for everything that had happened.


    She said, "I think I am."


    He set down his hammer and chisel and stood up wiping the dust from his hands and fluffing out his beard. "Let''s go."


    Back at her place a woman leaned on the porch. Her cloak was new and her hair was still chopped short after what had happened in the black heart of the world. It would take years to grow back.


    "Oy, Dara," she said. "Yer a welcome surprise."


    They embraced. Over her head the woman nodded to Khaz. He nodded back.


    "What''s yer king say?" she said.


    "Donnas denies everything."


    "Ye said he would."


    "Forget him a moment."


    Mym stepped back. "Then yer here bout the other thing."


    "Yes. I inquired with the royal chemist. He helped me examine the sample. Rather I helped him. The substance isn''t new, but its concentration in the specimen is much higher than what occurs naturally. I took his findings to the physicians guild. As far as they can tell, the infertility is permanent. Whatever this stuff is, it just builds and builds inside you knocking around your insides and damaging everything it touches until it finds a way out. And the damage is to your tissues and inside your tissues and," she spread her hands before her as if to show an enemy she carried neither arms nor ill will.


    "So much for dwarves," said Mym.


    "There might yet be hope. I couldn''t wait for their final analysis. While they worked I followed the armiger''s trail. Who he talked to, where he went, how he spent, who on. Everyone I questioned denied everything, but I learned plenty. What he did on the rising front. What he did in the camps."


    "And?"


    "Those things are as we suspected. But there''s something else. He found something in the royal archive. A manuscript of dwarven make with sheets of metal that''s likely older than the armistice. It''s filled with stories and myths and images of an ancient art I''ve never seen or heard of. It must be how he learned so much of the delving''s history and customs."


    "Bring us te yer point," said Khaz. "There''s dwarves missin and we need te step after em."


    Daraway nodded. "It''s da, love. Is he," she trailed off.


    She gestured at the facade of her family''s house. "We''re just about te return him te the smelt and I got te say I''m mighty glad yer here for it."


    "Then he''s still in there?"


    "Aye."


    "Thank goodness."


    She looked at the woman as though she had said the exact opposite of what she expected.


    "What do ye mean?" said Khaz.


    "Go and get him. I''ll tell you on the way."


    Together they carried her da up the flume and through the forge and into the wyndings. She couldn''t believe the story Daraway told as they walked, or her wholesale lack of an explanation. Yet even without belief or explanation, with every step toward the molten core in the black heart of the world hope rose in her again. A kind she hadn''t felt since the night before she took the elk. In a world as wide as the one she''d seen, why couldn''t such things be possible?


    At the antechamber of the colossus the doomstone [sentinel] was as still as stone. They entered the first colony with its river of lava and its invisible shell and its bridge and its anvil. Daraway leaned over it then looked under it then placed her hand in the flume and nodded.


    "Place da upon the anvil and the orcstone upon his chest."


    They did as the woman asked.


    "Strike the shard against the anvil and speak the secret word."


    She held the [Skyshard] in her hand with its head down and its spike skyward. She raised it a foot and let its shaft drop through her palm until the head smashed the anvil. The strike resounded within the sphere and she [harmonized] the secret syllable to it in the manner taught to her by the Madlands¡¯ endemics. From a hidden place overhead molten rock emerged and poured over the crystalline shell encasing them, and she watched its hot red edge eclipse the chasm''s walls in all directions and cling to the underside of the unseen globe and drop into the river of fire and it was as if they stood inside a tube of glass as an [artisan] blew it into a fiery ball. The heat made sweat stand from every part of her body and pour down the sides of her face to her chin and it dripped onto the anvil and hissed as if it too were molten rock.


    "Mym," said a voice.


    She looked at her da. Hope became belief.


    <hr>


    > +2 [Belonging]: Anyway that''s how she finally came home. (10/10)


    > [Belonging] Title Gained: [Mother of Her Race] Denotes she who synthesizes the ancient and the novel.

 59. The Feast

    Two figures ascended the long snowfield from the valley floor to the white mountain''s delving. Already they had covered miles of it yet more lay above them. One pulled a sledge with buckles and straps suspending it from his head and shoulders and hips while the other, too light to properly break trail, walked on top of the fresh snow and turned every few paces to watch the sledger. The snow came up to his chest, yet he swung elbows and palms and knees in such ways to plow through the worst of it. She skipped. He swore. The sun passed behind clouds and emerged again.


    As they came around the last arete the [hornkeeper] challenged them.


    "Oy. Who goes?"


    "All y''all are a bunch of grumps," said the leader.


    "Oy lass, who''s that there with ye? Oy. Oy! Ye stand back!"


    The one with the sledge lunged forward to send the [hornkeeper] reeling and with a sweep of [Booky''s blade] he sliced the mouthpiece clean off the [hornkeeper]''s horn. They watched it careen down the slope.


    "Well shit," said the [hornkeeper].


    "Y''all best get the lady of the mountain," said the girl.


    The [hornkeeper]''s beard hid his scowl so he said some words to make his feelings clear.


    The sledger said, "Do what the girl bids."


    "Aye, aye, ye just wait here and we''ll be seein who''s doin who''s biddin."


    After a few minutes the girl couldn''t help herself. She grabbed her companion''s hand and leaned toward the delving as if she''d sledge him along into it. Her feet slipped on the icy pavers.


    "You''re making fine progress," he said.


    "Come on and let''s go in. We don''t have to stand around in the cold."


    "You can go ahead, but I made a promise." Without unbuckling the sledge he bent to drink from the flume where it flowed past and then he sat on the stoneform that was strapped onto the sledge.


    "Isn''t that a sight," said a dwarf from the threshold.


    The girl whooped and shouted, "Mym," and ran to embrace her.


    The dwarf kissed the girl''s forehead and tousled her hair. "Yer gettin te be taller than me."


    "Where''s Daraway?" said the girl.


    "She''ll be comin along any minute, but if ye can''t wait ye can go on in and meet her on the way. Go on. I won''t be long."


    The girl started skipping up the pavers, then stopped, ran back to the sledger, and held out her hand for him to shake in the human way.


    "Thank you kind Orc for all of y''alls services."


    "And?"


    "And for not eatin me."


    "Anytime, miss Cousins."


    The girl disappeared into the mountain.


    "Well?" said the dwarf.


    "She''s a good kid."


    "Ye want te come up and see Dara?"


    "Afraid not. Got some folks waiting on me."


    She came around him and kicked her toe against the sledge. "What''s this then?"


    "Your uncle."


    "Barzun?"


    "If you say so."


    "How''d he go."


    "In my arms. Turned all to stone."Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.


    "Aye that''s how it happens with the older ones."


    The orc nodded.


    "Ye could''ve left him."


    "That''s not how dwarves do things."


    "No it isn''t, but last I checked yer no dwarf."


    "Not much of an orc either."


    "Hell. I don''t know about that. Yer the finest one I know."


    "You don''t know many."


    "Aye but I do know at least one."


    The sledger shook his head and turned to take in the view of the valley and the forest crowding along the nearest mountains. "Not bad up here," he said.


    "Sure ye don''t want te stay?"


    "I made a promise."


    "Aye and I''m the one ye made it te."


    "Dwarves don''t go back on their word."


    "Bones te ye ye damnable orc. Da might want te put a leaden eye tween the two ye got but Khaz and Dara would love te see ye again."


    He shook his head.


    "Fine. Here."


    She tossed the [orcstone] to him. He caught it with one hand and he [felt] as if he held his own beating heart in his palm.


    "Thanks," he said.


    He stowed it next to a thin leather journal inside a elkhide satchel of dwarven make. The journal was bound with a black lace scarf and the satchel was tied off a leash of the kind dwarves use to keep their alpenstocks from flying away down the slopes.


    "Be careful with it. Dara says too much exposure and ye might find yerself starin at a second head like yer old ogre friend."


    "I can barely handle one of me."


    "And now ye can go raise a whole army of ye."


    "Don''t worry. I''m not planning to."


    "I know it." She looked down the delving and back to him. "What''s next for ye then?"


    "Saand says this''ll cure the Madlands. Going to start with that."


    "And?"


    "It''s a big world. That northerly trouble with the necromancer needs troubling. Wouldn''t mind seeing that green vale you keep talking about."


    "Take care ye don''t touch the block."


    "I''m not going for that. Ogaz thinks there may be more camps down there."


    "Yer tusker?"


    "He''s not mine."


    "Don''t be an ass. Ye seen what''s happenin with the moons?"


    "Yes."


    "Know what that''s about?"


    "No."


    "Damned if ye aren''t the best conversationalist I know, Orc."


    The orc smiled. "I''ll try harder."


    "Aye but I was bein serious. Already got enough yappin between Daraway and Khaz, and now that girl''s here too. It''ll be a colony of howlers in here."


    "You''re welcome to come with us."


    "I''ve had enough of yer Madlands for two lifetimes of dwarves."


    "I won''t be there long."


    "No?"


    The orc turned up to watch the green moon and the blue moon, now turning gray, and the thin and soundless wires of lightning lancing from one to the other and back again like two gods hurling thunderbolts one upon the other.


    She walked out of the delving and came beside him and turned her chin to the sky. "What do ye think it means?"


    "It means you''d best sharpen that beardling ax of yours."


    She looked at him. "Yer already aimin te do somethin bout it aren''t ye."


    "I was going to ask you the same thing," he said.


    He looked down at her.


    He said, "If something needs to be done I know you''ll be there to do it. And I''ll be there with you. And you can tell Dara if her folk ever find their backbone, I''ll be there too. Anytime men come around to take what isn''t theirs. Anytime they set a forest to flame. Anytime they open the world to burn up its veins. And if you hear they''ve finally stuck me well you tell Booky not to pray for me. I don''t believe in her god. And if she starts fretting about me roasting in that hell of hers, you tell her the devil''s already dead. I killed him and spitted him up and she''s invited to the feast."


    "I¡¯d say ye¡¯ve never said so much in yer life."


    "I''d say you''re right." He put a hand on her shoulder. "All I''m saying is I think your folk better find a keeper with a stiffer backbone."


    "Oy ye got one in that bag of yers?"


    "No, but I know someone perfect for the post."


    She chuckled. "Don''t think anyone''s ever called her perfect for anythin."


    She felt him squeeze her shoulder. "Well. She is."


    <hr>


    > +1 [Awareness]: So the world rolls on and on and always there''s somewheres gloamin into dawn with dew yet wettin the grass. Eternal sunrises and sunsets. Eternal livin and dyin. (10/10).


    > [Awareness] Title Gained: [Idolator] Denotes he with a second sight for icons of power.


    > -1 [Rage]: If I could see him again I''d tell him I''m proud of him. (0/10).


    > [Rage] Class Gained: [Justiciar] Denotes he who is compelled to administer justice as he sees it.


    <hr>


    > -9 [Vengefulness]: ...she is. (0/10).


    > [Vengefulness] Class Gained: [Keeper of the Horn] Denotes she who is the symbolic leader of the delving whose folk shall follow wherever she leads. Probably.

 End of Book 1 - Character Sheets

    > Name: Orc


    > Race: Orc


    > Class: Pitfighter


    > Ability: Any weapons or none


    > Attributes: [Unburnt] (thinks for himself), [Always A Musheater] (rejects power over others), [Noname of Nobody] (conflicted identity), [Naturalist] (an affinity for growing things), [Remnant] (control over his passions), [Idolator] (can detect the fragments of the stone of the earth), [Justiciar] (must act justly)This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    > Items: Booky''s blade, Orcstone, copper coin


    <hr>


    > Name: Mym


    > Race: Dwarf


    > Class: Sharpshooter


    > Ability: Snipe


    > Attributes: [Oathmaker] (must fulfill oaths), [In Exile] (unbound by tradition), [Lastborn of her Race] (catalyst for change), [Speaker of the Secret Word] (influence over ancient stoneworks), [Huntress] (she always finds who she seeks), [Nemesis] (her quarry can always find her), [Keeper of the Horn] (leader of her folk)


    > Items: Mym''s longarm, Mym''s alpenstock, Skyshard

 60. The Longhorn

    Longhorns shouldn''t be born that way. He was pale and thin and covered in the placental sheen that dimly reflected his original sin. Bawling in the straw for a mother who would never come, a prong at each temple streaked with blood from ripping her apart. Outside spread reaped cornfields and strips of moonlight torn across the night''s veil. Somewhere beyond stood the watchtowers and the wire fencing strung between. His folk were once plains runners and renowned hunters of beasts but his father now pulled plow and shucked corn for men who were his masters. Near to the infant that old bull languished over the dying mother, his temple scars shining like wax seals from the dehorning brand. The longhorn bawled alone.


    Years passed. The father leathered thin and the longhorn calloused up. Around back subsided the mound of the nameless mother who grew inside her the son that gored open her belly. The father never talked about it. The longhorn never asked.


    He was the only longhorn in camp yet wearing his widespread crown. The master men feared him. He worked alongside his father, both suncoppered and filthy. He knew neither letters nor numbers and in him burned a violence as unadulterated as the sun.


    At twenty he escaped. He wouldn¡¯t again see the unbroken soil in the predawn gloaming. The barking dogs, the manacled chains. He fled north as far as Mill Gap, a lone monster haunting that vast farmland. Men picked the rows, reaching and sweating, hands like birds flitting between the fuzzy stonefruits. Those he stole numbed his lips with sweet yielding flesh. Upon the stark horizon the fingers of watchtowers thrusted into an ambivalent sky. Another camp that interned his slowly forgetting and forgotten folk.


    A year later he was beyond the Gap, squatting outside the capital that was. Sixteen days he watched the carrion coming and going. Each dawn countless buzzards spiraled thickly overhead like a living tornado. They made no calls nor singular sounds but together the cut of their wings was like the creeping hush of oblivion come. He lived under his hide and at night he went forth to the city of the dead like a creature of legend to fight with the newly risen. He was bigger than any of them and his horns impaled their flanks and he smelled their unspilling blood therein. His eyes were passive. The pullring through his septum swung opposite his sledgehammer fists. He fought all night. Barehanded and with hooves lashing. Men who died from plague. Men who died from panic. Now ghouls whose pulverization retributed his mother, his father, his folk, his self.


    The seventeenth night he was knifed in the back. Swinging round to deal with the shivver he was stabbed through the heart. He sat down in the moonslit street and the blood flowed out of him. The undead passed him by. He waited for the buzzards.


    Next thing he lied on the platform under the still strung gallows in the city forum. A goosedown pillow beneath his head and the necromancing queen attending him. She a noblewoman with her face masked and hair held up in a silver net. She quickened his mind, she animated his flesh. He was hers or she thought he was. Nightly now he carried others to her for her grisly work and the dead were his education and she showed him the way of things never known to them in the camps. But he owed her nothing and on a certain day he departed the old capital. He aimed for the Gap.


    Now the longhorn was become something else. He was risen. His unlife commenced with the betrayal of another birther, another license to violence. Not since the godkilling and never thereafter would the world retain sufficient rawness and wildness to succor the embitterment cancering his unbeating heart. It grew therein a hell of its own.


    An army of kingsmen garrisoned the Gap. Their terror caged their eyes and shut their ears to his passing. He drifted down the coast in darkness. He watched the moonslit seafoam pile upon itself. Sealions trumpeted. A citylike ship aglow in yellow lanterns that spilled across the surface like liquid gold, slooping over invisible swells from horizon to opposite horizon. He cut inland, intending to return whence he came. To free the father from the wire and from life''s oppression. He studied the camp laid out beside the cornfields. He was not the first to arrive.


    He walked the narrow lanes between the wooden bunkhouses. The night smelled of reaped corn and fear. He stepped over dark forms of men he had known. He dry spat on them. The trace of his kin tracked north and east, he followed its scent, cornmeal and sweat and damp leather. Underhoof trampled earth of thirsty pan. Moss hung from trees overhead like veils of the bereaved. The breeze had an autumnal cutting edge and it shivered the branches and the moss pendulumed in one direction only. He skirted north around farmsteads and villages. He saw another camp lit up in the night and the wire cut and the houses aflame and he saw the fugitives tossing on the bodies of the master men, a holocaust of black shapes boiling in the blaze.


    He stepped into the firelight and he called to him, his father. The old bull backed with revulsion. The longhorn¡¯s hide was cracked and dry. His face was pale. He would¡¯ve wept but he could make no tears.


    A woman stepped before him. She was diminutive, she was old, yet there was might about her. The others heeded her sayings and their eyes tracked her as closely as shadows follow their sunlit makers. She told him she needed him. She called herself the brigadier.


    ***


    Father Horace had been hellfiring brimstone to a packed house for as long as the sleet had been blowing and the sleet had been blowing for a month straight. When Orc stepped into the woodframed tent there was no place left to sit or stand. The stink of unbathed humans and the derelict mad who attend such revivals nearly drove him back out again, but Mym shoved him in and squeezed in after and started wringing the water out of her hair. If it weren''t for the priest drawing the throng forward it might have turned on the newcome foreigners, such was the fear he peddled. There weren''t many free orcs and delving dwarves in those parts and there would have been none, but the risen had lain off Mill Gap and the now-open road into the deadlands and the old capital brought a whole lot of folks from a whole lot of places seeking fortune in land and in salvage and a certain sort of lawlessness that men called freedom.Stolen story; please report.


    "Praise be," said the priest, "there are but two commandments: obey God and obey your king. All ye godly folk newly arrived from the martyred armiger¡¯s holy crusade now sanctify this ground with your good graces. Go and seek thy neighbors in good faith. Spread the word they need to hear. I say to you bring them here! Take their arms and guide them away from the hellwrought north. Let not one of them go to the deadlands for that direction lies fury and violence, and the way of God is the way of peace."


    "I can''t see a damn thing."


    Orc had been listening to the priest. He turned now to Mym. She was up on her toes with her hands pulling at the shoulder straps of her pack as if by lifting it up she might contrive to lift herself an extra inch or yard.


    "You aren''t missing anything," said Orc.


    "Ye seein any dwarves?"


    Orc scanned the crowd. All of them bore arms of some kind as if they¡¯d never heard of any god of peace. A colossal figure hooded in cloth and clad in leather and donned in some barbarous headdress then entered the tent. He wore the horns of the bull capped in gold and he was pale and from his nose hung a massive ring you could string a rope through as if for hitching. He was a foot taller than Orc and he stood chewing a length of straw and he shook out his head and the snowmelt off of his horns wet those gathered nearby and they turned their eyes upward to see whether the roof leaked.


    The priest had stopped speaking. There was no sound but the flapping canvas. All followed the priest''s gaze to the hooded figure. He threw off the hood and they saw he wore no costume at all, that his body was the sole owner of the leather and his skull of the horns.


    The longhorn shoved his way forward to the crateboard stand from which the priest witnessed and he turned to address the mass. His face was as wan as a moon as if no blood flowed through it. He raised his enormous hands.


    "Friends," he said, "your king thanks you for sequestering this man. I know you weren¡¯t abetting his fugivity and I¡¯ll make sure your king knows it too. For the rest of you who, like many others, sought only shelter from the rain in this tent and perhaps solace before continuing on through the Gap to your riches and earthly rewards, I must tell you this man¡¯s a fraud."


    "Oh Lord," cried the priest. "Permit no lies!"


    "He was lately defrocked from the church for handling the boys of his congregation and, you ladies there clapper your ears, and for bending one over the font of his holy water."


    A woman in the front row wailed.


    "The devil is here," cried the priest. "If ye have no faith then believe your eyes!"


    The longhorn turned his enormous head to regard the priest. "Down at the Diggins a mere month ago he murdered the lawful purveyor of this tent in his sleep after having his way with the man''s wife."


    "Strike me down if I don''t clove in the pollycocker," said a prospector sitting close to the makeshift pulpit, and he rose from the pewboard drawing a nailheaded club off his belt.


    "Time te get," said Mym. She sliced the pick of her alpenstock across the canvas and stepped through the part and into the blow. Orc ducked after. With their heads bowed they ran through the sleet toward the stonewalled inn. Behind them they heard the cries and howls of violence and a score of seams were now bursting with folk falling out of them, men shouting, women fleeing, children stampeded over in the freezing mud. Orc and Mym reached the thatched eaves of the inn and turned and watched. The oilcloth of the tent had ignited and flames were spreading swiftly across it and thick smoke billowed opposite the downpour and the redfaced people still coming out of it fell to their hands and knees hacking. The fire ran up the wood framing and the guylines sizzled in the heat and snapped and the cloth of the tent levitated upward, burning still, thirty feet up before sliding off of the convection it had made and settling to the ground in a guttering heap.


    Mym hooted at the spectacle and shook her head. "I¡¯m surprised ye didn''t try and stop that," she said.


    Orc shrugged. "Sounded to me like justice served."


    "Ye believed that otaur?"


    "No."


    She peered at him as if she hadn''t understood him, then she laughed.


    They ducked into the inn and saw the longhorn already leaning over the bar. On the counter at his elbow was the priest''s collection dish and a small heap of coppers. In his hand he held a bottle of potato gin and its cork nowhere to be seen. They came up to the bar and Mym ordered beer. She flicked a copper onto the bar and the barman clamped it down where it bounced and slid it back to her.


    "Drinks are on him," said the barman and he nodded at the longhorn.


    Mym drank til her cup was empty. She looked past Orc''s waist down the bar to the longhorn. Orc looked after her. The longhorn leaned with his elbow against the bar, swirling the gin along the sides of the bottle and studying its viscosity. Men were coming into the tavern, cut up, covered in mud, redeyed from the smoke. They stood there like golems of the earth staring at the longhorn as if waiting for something.


    A teamster said, "What camp you come up from to know about the priest?"


    "I come out of the Gap," said the longhorn.


    The men looked at each other.


    "Didn''t you say you was bountyhuntin for the king?"


    "Did I?"


    "When was you at the Diggins?"


    The longhorn shook his head and his damp mane swept from side to side flitting water onto the floorboards. "Never been there."


    "Then how''d you know all that stuff about father Horace?"


    "The priest?"


    "Yeah."


    The longhorn raised the bottle to his mouth. "Because it all goes without saying.¡±


    Again the men looked at each other. ¡°What¡¯s that supposed to mean?¡±


    ¡°He''s a priest ain''t he?"


    "You said he was defrocked."


    The longhorn swilled the bottle and set it down empty, then he turned to them and with a glimmer in his eye he said, "He is now."


    Inside was quiet. Then Mym snorted. The teamster laughed with her. Then another. By the time the longhorn paid off the barman they were all laughing together.


    The longhorn just smiled at them. "Don''t go peddling no peace round here boys," he said. He looked straight at Orc. "Justice lies in one direction only. Plumb along the warpath."

 61. It Was Sleeting

    It was sleeting still when Orc finally met the longhorn. He was in the bar now spooning mush and he had exhausted all his leads on the brigadier but the one through the Gap. Mym had gone somewhere after a lead of her own: rumors of dwarfsign from the stones about the place.


    Through the window he could see white contrails wherever the weather fell through the lantern light. He finished his bowl and looked around at the empty tables and went out. There were slabs of stone set in the mud one after the other down to the pit toilet and he stepped along the ladder they made. The longhorn was coming the other way. His mane plastered down the sides of his face. ¡°You best get the hell outta my way orc,¡± he said.


    Orc stopped on a paver. He didn¡¯t yield the path and after what he had seen in the tent he wasn''t going to waste his breath in explanation. He balled a fist and slugged the longhorn in the jaw.


    The longhorn staggered back and stood up again grinning. He said, "I''m going to break your skull."


    The longhorn produced the gin bottle and swung it and Orc ducked under and he swung again and Orc stepped back. When Orc hit him on the nose the longhorn smashed the bottom of the bottle against the top of his head. Orc fell off the pavers and into the mud and the longhorn lunged after him with the bottle and tried to shatter it against his cheek. Orc was fencing with his hands and he felt his knuckles break. He kept trying to reach for the blade in his belt.


    "Break your skull," the longhorn said. They rolled around in the pale squares of light coming out of the inn and Orc kicked away, face covered in mud. He had his blade now and they circled each other and when the longhorn lunged and swung Orc slashed his blade. The longhorn threw down the bottle and drew a huge maul from over his shoulder. His mane had fallen out of its bindings and matted locks swung about his collar and the ring in his nose flopped up and down with each feint.


    Men had come out of the inn to watch them. One of them nodded at the longhorn. "He''s cut."


    "Break it. Break it," growled the longhorn with the maul up and its twelve pound ball salvaged from cannonshot. A gash on his belly opened wide as a mouth as he raised his weapon.


    But someone else was coming out of the inn, silent but for the whistle of the wind across the eyeslits of her ivory mask. She had the bottle. She reached Orc first and when she swung he fell facedown in the mud. He would have drowned if she hadn''t turned him over.


    When Orc woke the sleeting had run its paces and the sun was out and he was peering up into Mym''s concerned face. She was saying something.


    "What?" said Orc.


    "Ye alright?"


    Orc looked past the face, past the muzzle of her longarm and the spike of her alpenstock slung crosswise behind her back, beyond to a buzzard wheeling high and small in a cerulean bowl. "Is my back broke?" he said.


    Mym stood to her full height and looked this way and that. "Ye see who done it?"


    "That longhorn from the bar." He drew his elbows alongside his shoulders then pushed up to sit and he looked at his feet and watched them move and his knees articulate.


    "Yer back''s fine," she said. "I wouldn''t say the same about yer head though, pickin fights with otaurs thrice yer size."


    He rolled his neck and looked around. "Where''s my blade?" he said.


    Mym squinted down at him. He saw the mud dried on her legs up to her knees and on her forearms. "Ye lookin te come at him again."


    "You think he took my blade?"


    "He might''ve."


    "Then yeah."


    She nodded back toward the inn. "That it?"


    Orc got up off of the ground and trudged back up the pavers and swept up the blade from where it lay half sunken. With finger and thumb he wiped the mud off of it and thrust it into his belt. He came back to the paver where Mym stood and he dropped onto his backside and they looked out across the yard at where the revival tent had burned to a heap of black ashes and tin grommets.


    "Ye goin te tell me what happened?¡±


    He rubbed the lump on the back of his head. "Just as soon as I figure it out."


    "Ye feelin alright?"


    "Feeling something."


    "Ready te throw down again?"


    He rolled his neck and shrugged the pins and needles out of his shoulders. "Might be nice to."The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    "Come on then. I heard somethin that might interest ye." She walked toward the inn.


    He stood up and scraped the mud off the bottom of his feet. "Heard from who?"


    "Them stones ye were lyin on."


    He caught her up. "What is it?"


    "Not sure yet."


    ¡°Is it about the blue dwarves?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°The brigadier?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°The manstone?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°Then what¡¯s it about?¡±


    She deadeye looked at him. ¡°Vengeance.¡±


    They entered the inn through the stoneframed doorway and he imagined them speaking to her even as they passed. There was a spitoon on the floor and the ceiling was upholstered in brushed red velvet that sagged from age and rotted from mold. There at the bar stood the longhorn, hooves covered in mud. A goose egg over one eye and the cut in his belly unbleeding and unscabbed. He was hunched over a mug of something black and sharply fragranced and he didn''t look at them when they came in. "She tell you what she heard?" he said as if to no one in particular.


    Orc looked from him to her. "Not yet."


    The longhorn nodded at his mug. "He ain''t the only one of them that''s here."


    "Ye know about him?" said Mym.


    "Sure. Him, the folks attending the priest, the priest himself."


    "They were all there?"


    The longhorn nodded again then hooked his finger through the handle of the mug and sipped the liquid.


    "What''s he talking about?" said Orc.


    Before Mym could answer the longhorn set down the mug and said, "Not one of them is worth an ounce of your mercy, orc called Orc. Not a single one."


    The longhorn turned to face them. "Ain¡¯t no light where you''re headed," he said. "The way you''re going there''s naught a thing but decay and misery. You keep on that way and you''ll soon see the limitations of what makes orcs orcs and dwarves dwarves."


    "Whatever ye say," said Mym. "Which room¡¯s he in?"


    "Upstairs. Last on the left."


    Mym went on and Orc followed.


    "Orc," called the longhorn.


    Orc looked back.


    A track of mud spanned from the entrance to the bar and now halfway to the stairs. The longhorn held his mug out to him as if in toast. "You strike me again and I''ll put you in the dirt."


    Orc went on up the stairs.


    The second floor opened onto a narrow landing and a hall with an oilless lamp burning at the far end. Set into the walls on either side were woodpaneled doors and one of them was ajar. Orc looked in as they passed and saw the coilspring mattress and the tin squatpot and the leaded window distorting the ramshackle structures beyond the pane.


    "Who we after?" he said.


    Mym halted outside the last door on the left. "Ye remember the messenger I told ye about?" she whispered.


    "The armiger''s man?"


    "Aye."


    "The one who sent your folk against us that night?"


    "Aye."


    Orc nodded at the door. "He''s in there?"


    "Sure as nakshit."


    He looked at her. "You need me to do it?"


    She shook her head. "I can handle it."


    "I don''t want you getting all roused up."


    "No hope fer that," she said. "You heard what that otaur said."


    "Yeah but I don''t know what he meant by it."


    She tried the knob. It wouldn''t turn. She unshouldered her alpenstock. "There''s a thousand men between here and the Gap and two thousand more already gone through."


    "There are men everywhere."


    "Not these."


    He understood. "They were the armiger''s too."


    "Every last one of em. Shieldmen who covered the engineers as they immolated yer folk up in the forest. The engineers themselves who fired the ballistae and crucified yer survivors. That king of theirs got hold of em and sent em up here te see what sort of trouble they can bring the risen. Put em under command of a baron or duke or some sort of manly lord. I don¡¯t pretend te understand their great chain of bein."


    She tested the pick of her alpenstock on her finger. "Still think we were right leavin that scurvy risen friend of yers behind?"


    "He''s not risen anymore."


    "Exrisen then."


    He frowned at her. ¡°If you wanted more firepower you could¡¯ve brought your witch.¡±


    ¡°Aye but ye know she¡¯s got better things te do.¡±


    ¡°She offered.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s cause she doesn¡¯t trust ye.¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Neither should you.¡±


    She shook her head and hoisted the alpenstock.


    He nodded at the door. "There''s a window in there. As soon as your man hears you kicking in he''s liable to fly right out of it."


    "Cover it off?"


    "That''s what I''m thinking. Slow count to a hundred before you get started."


    He started down the hall and at the top of the stairs he heard her say, "Oy!"


    He turned to her.


    "Be ready to fight."


    "Always."


    "Once the rest of em know what we''re about they''re goin te turn on us."


    "I''ll be ready."


    "I''m not lookin te die here."


    "Then you better start counting."


    He ran down the stairs two at a time and he went through the bar and out the doorway. He noticed the longhorn was gone.


    He ran around and looked up at the window as he came. He had counted up to fifty four when the window shattered and a halfnaked man fell out of it with a pistol in his hand. The man dropped ten feet to the yard and landed in the mud and he rose with the mud wholly covering him as if he was a figure molded from clay. He raised the pistol at Orc''s face and there was the crack of the shot and the whites of the man''s eyes turned red as the capillaries burst and he teetered forward as if the outheld pistol drew him on and he splatted again in the mud.


    Up in the windowframe Orc saw the barrel of a longarm withdraw.


    Men and women were gathering in the street behind him and more were streaming out of the inn with all manner of weapons in their hands. He strode up to the dead man and saw the hole in the back of his head. He reached down and took the singleshot pistol. Short barreled brass and a cherry handle. He tucked it into his belt on the opposite side of his blade.


    "Hey!" called a man at his back.


    Orc looked up at the windowframe and it was empty. Shards of glass hanging out of it with their mated ends stuck in the mud. Behind the inn he saw a crateboard stable with its stalls opening out into the yard.


    "Hey, orc!"


    He ran toward the stable with the mud sucking his feet. He heard others coming behind. Inside the stable he drew his blade and one by one severed the leather straps haltering the dozen horses and mules therein. He brandished the pistol and fired it into the ceiling. The beasts shrieked and bolted in a dozen directions and Orc went out the back. As he jogged down the lane he watched for Mym but saw only the lone figure of the longhorn who had over his shoulder the cannonballed maul. As Orc went past the longhorn turned and watched him. When Orc looked back the longhorn smiled. Orc ducked around a picket fence and stole out of the boomtown along the road to the Gap.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Rage] (1/10) I searched for him, you know. Even before the armiger¡¯s demise, even on the far side of the Gap, we had heard rumblings of his coming¡­


    > Item Gained: [Pistol]

 62. Days of Begging

    Now came days of skulking and of thieving. Days of riding a stolen mule across a frontier hostile to her kind and ravaged by a generation of drought and war. This was the rising front of which she had heard. The boomtown was far behind and she tracked Orc beneath a wintering sun that shone only upon her back. Long nights and boreal winds set the frail grasses to whispering and the ice shorn stones to wallowing. Clear sky so crowded with stars the silhouettes of bats darted plainly across them, and for every bitter point that sank beneath the west two more bullied above the east.


    She kept off the king''s road because Orc had kept off it. The posse had also. With her eyes closed she listened to the fist sized owls screech through the night until she felt dawn peer its lidless eye into the craggy outcrop into which she''d hunkered out of the wind. The mule standing nearby swept his head into the morning glare.


    The coming sun had blazed the sky through all manner of colors: from deep bestarred indigo to the thin blue shell of a robin''s egg, the crimson of glorious battle that accompanied the sun itself to the present alloying of copper evocative of the forge at the heart of her home. Mounted on the mule her shadow fell for miles ahead of her. She wore her hood well over her head and her alpenstock across her back and her longarm scabbarded at her knee and she looked like some child''s misunderstanding of death: silent, dark, mounted, ill-proportioned, feminine.


    That evening she tracked Orc to a hovel of sorts burrowed into a frozen hillside. Its inhabitant a solitary taskmaster peering out from a rude window shaded with a layer of sod peeled back like a torn blister. He was wiry framed and the irises of his eyes were each a desolate island in a bloodred sea, as if behind them stirred the collective rage of his former charges. He seemed to study her as she stepped off of the mule with a hand on the pommel and another on the stock of her longarm. The incessant wind blew and her hood billowed off of her forehead.


    "Oy there," she said. "Ye spare a scoop of water?"


    The filthy man squinted and spat out of his window and dropped the sod flap. The burrow''s slatwood door opened. She went inside.


    It was dark and smelled of smoke. A dungfire burned in a corner and there were no furnishings but an overflowing shitcan and she was thankful for the smell of the firesmoke until she realized what sort of dung he must be burning. He half hid in the gloom, his head bent under the mud ceiling and the hanging roots of the sod roof draping over his shoulders like tendrils of albino worms.


    ¡°Ye got that water?¡± said Mym.


    He nodded to a wood pail set dangerously close to the shitcan. Mym knelt and stirred the ladle floating therein. She dipped and the water smelled of salt and ammonia. She poured the ladle back in the pail.


    "Yer well hereabouts someplace?"


    The taskmaster sneered and spat again into his fire.


    "I''d just like te freshen up what ye got here. Maybe water me mule too."


    "I ain¡¯t drinkin no mule spit.¡±


    ¡°Yer already drinkin worse.¡±


    The taskmaster leaned in. She saw the whip coiled up in his hand. ¡°What you say to me?¡±


    ¡°Where¡¯s yer well?¡±


    ¡°Folla the path round the other side of my hill. Well¡¯s at the end of it.¡±


    She palmed through the door into the wind and a spitting of rain. Far away west lightning forked soundlessly over yellow country. The mule was gone. She cast back her downturned eyes and noted the taskmaster watching her through the window. She carried the pail down the path between shivering grass and she found the mule standing nose down over a snakehole in the hillside with rocks piled about. She heard them tell of water and wind and meanness. She asked about Orc but of him they had nothing to share and she began to wonder if they couldn¡¯t understand her.


    Between the rocks a scrap of uncured hide covered the hole. She didn¡¯t recognize the type. Under the skin an inkblack repository with a cord of the same leather coming out of it and strung around a rock. She pulled the cord and a bucket of water emerged out of the dark. She set it on the ground and watched for the taskmaster while the mule drank its fill. Four buckets worth. She dumped the pail and tipped in the fifth and sloshed it around a bit and washed her hands and face in it. She drank out of the sixth then covered the hole and went back to the burrow with the mule trailing.


    She set the pail at the door. ¡°Thank ye fer the water.¡±


    The taskmaster filled the dark doorway. "Why don''t you just stay in tonight."


    "I thank ye but no."


    "It''s gonna be a wet un in the open. Gonna be one of those nights them dead uns come down outta the north."


    She looked northwards. "Ye think?"


    "Yeah I knows it. Seen it happen aplenty. Them comin under cover of sleet and sadness and carryin away. Carryin away. My little girl carryin away."


    She looked at him. He had the whip uncoiled to the width of his shoulders and he was yanking on its ends as if trying to pull it in two. She saw the sorry state of him, and in that pitiless land she felt pity, and this was her first mistake. "Alright," she said.


    She collected her things and brought them in. It was darker than before and the dungfire was nigh exhausted. The taskmaster watched her come in and when she wasn''t looking he eyed her body and he licked his lips in a furtive manner.


    "Lay out anywheres you like," he said. "Your saddle, where''s your saddle?"


    "On the mule."


    "That how you''re taught to treat mules in your lands?"


    "We don''t have mules in my lands."


    "You best go and get your leathers afore some comes and eats them. Ain''t much for eatin up here and them critters that''s left''ll gnaw through them and never thank you for the feast."If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    She went out and uncinched the saddle. The mule nuzzled her hand.


    "I don''t have anythin fer ye te eat," she said. "Plenty of grasses here fer ye. Can I trust ye te not run off on me?"


    The mule looked at her with one big wet eye. Lashes long and sultry. Raindrops caught in them like morning dew in leaves of grass.


    "The fellow here says there''ll be risen about. I want ye te set te hawin if they come callin."


    "What''d you say?" called the man.


    She drew her hand down the mule''s nose and turned and went back inside.


    "Close that door there fore them nasties come after," said the old man.


    She looked for somewhere to pull on and finally just stuck her fingers between two slats and dragged the planks skidding across the dirt til the door was as closed as it would get.


    "That weather turn you round?" said the taskmaster.


    "I wouldn''t say that."


    "You''re lookin lost to me."


    "I knew where I was goin until it led me here."


    The man nodded. "Ain''t that life then."


    "Is this your land?"


    "Course it''s mine. I ain''t to be nobody''s man but my own. Ain''t to pay nobody''s rent. I seen how that works and I ain''t to be party to it."


    "Are you from here?"


    The taskmaster snorted everything out of his nose into the back of his throat and turned and coughed and spat a green glob of it into the dungfire. "I come up from the Goldlands. Minded work on a corn camp and made aplenty doin it. Did a little tradin myself too fore sheriff caught me off and told me that weren''t allowed no more."


    "Tradin what?"


    "Graybacks and greenskins and them big brown fuckers were my bread and butter til I got caught off. Still had un in irons I never could get rid of. Cost me twenty gold it did. Wait and I''ll show you."


    He shuffled around to a corner and rummaged through a stack of hides and cackled suddenly. He turned back and handed Mym a heavy black thing. She looked at it and turned it over in her hands. The head of an orc, dried up and small. She almost dropped it in the fire. She passed it back and the man cradled it with both hands as if it was a newborn pup.


    ¡°You let them run free and you¡¯ll see the end of man''s civilization,¡± he said. ¡°Them and womens.¡±


    "Have you seen any lately?"


    "Womens?"


    "Graybacks."


    "Naw none of them come round here. They know better than."


    "So nobody came this way in the past three or four days."


    "Like to be nobody''s come this way in three or four years."


    "No orc? No posse of men after him?"


    The taskmaster shook his head and biting a hangnail from his grimy finger he said, "Naw, naw. I''d have known it."


    She studied what she could see of his face as if she didn''t believe him.


    "The end of civilization," he muttered. The smoke was thickening and he went over to the window and drew back the sod flap. Rain slashed outside and the wind spilled in and the smoke poured out. He clutched the head close to his chest. He replaced the window and came back.


    He held the head in his palm as if to address it. "Twenty gold right there."


    "That''s what you paid for it?"


    "That''s what the boarfucker cost that it sat on top of."


    He returned to the corner and squatted over the hides and rummaged until he found a gallon iron cauldron and something inside too covered in the blue fur of mold to tell what it had been.


    "You got anythin for sharin?" he said.


    She peered into the cauldron from where she sat and saw a haunch of something amid the spoiling. "No."


    "Well I''m gonna eat."


    She crumpled her nose and she couldn''t be sure if the odor was out of the cauldron or out of his loins or out of the dungfire. "I''m not hungry," she said.


    "Knew where you was goin." The old man shook his head.


    He ladled water from the pail into the cauldron and set it in the fire. He put his hand in a burlap sack and fed several desiccated chips into the fire.


    "Ain''t an easy thing preservin civilization out here by my lonesome. Cancerous orcs breakin outta them camps and poisonin the blood of men and them deaduns crossin outta the deadlands rapin and infiltratin and you don''t know where theys gonna come out of or when. They''ll be comin down here. They''ll be comin down tonight and you can count on it."


    "Alright."


    "God made this world with men in it for his good reason. Someones gotta stand against the boarfuckers and deaduns. He didn''t make them. Reckon thems the makins of some devil."


    He coughed from the gathering smoke.


    "That''s why I gotta keep the fire goin. There''s the light of civilization. You see it? Right in there."


    "Burnin on yer shit," said Mym.


    He turned to her. "What''d you say?"


    "I said it''s burnin on yer shit."


    He had his hand on the whip again. Her alpenstock and longarm were across the burrow with her saddle.


    "What are you some sorta orcfucker?"


    "I''m just sayin what I''m seein."


    He looked at her. His bloodshot gaze a sheen of firelight in the dimly lit burrow.


    She stood up. "I''m goin te check me mule."


    "You do that."


    She went out and found the mule back around at the well cropping the weeds there. She slapped its flank and looked up at the sky and it wet her face. Rain she could have just waited for and not gone begging for a scoop of water. The sky carried out of the west by the wind flickered with electricity and the blackness between the flashes seemed to swallow the world entire. She would have gone then but she had left her weapons inside.


    The taskmaster knelt at the far end of the room as she shut the door. Her longarm was not in its scabbard. He had it crooked in an elbow as he spooned up his slop. He looked up at her and around a mouthful he said, "I''ll take this for the water and thank you to be leavin now."


    "Ye know how to operate that?"


    He set down the slop and shouldered the longarm and pointed it at her. The hammer cocked.


    "Hate to waste a cartridge but if you don''t go straightaway I''ll hafta."


    Her alpenstock rested two steps away wrapped in the bedroll tied on the saddle.


    "Get on orcfucker. Get on after your grayback and see what they done to him."


    Slowly she took up the saddle by the horn and the bedroll. She turned to face him as if to say something and this man of civilization couldn''t help himself. "Goddamn halfling," he said.


    She threw the saddle at the man''s head as the longarm fired. Gunsmoke filled the burrow. The sulfur of it. She bled from her shoulder and she leaped into the air and hooked her alpenstock around the taskmaster''s neck and slammed both of her knees into his chest. They crashed through the fire. Embers of flaming shit pattered off the wall. She brought the serrations against his throat. The man was trying to get his fingers around the pickhead but he couldn''t. Mym lay on him pressing forward and pulling upward. The smell of burning flesh. The taskmaster started flailing, legs walking in one direction like a pinwheel with the dwarf at its center, kicking over the cauldron, kicking out at the saddle, kicking over the shitcan. Brown liquid raced down the dirt floor. His thumb in her eye socket. Blood across his neck and filling his throat. He gurgled through it as he drowned on it. His kicking slowed and his hands fell limply away. Mym knelt on him, her shoulder dripping on his forehead. He lay half turned in a bed of fiery shit with snuffed embers clung to his back and others strewn across the floor and pulsing in the air she had stolen from him.


    When she got up she retrieved her longarm from where it had fallen. Carefully she took off her shirt and she felt for the exit wound. The cleanest fabric around was her bedroll and she tore a strip from it and wrapped under her armpit and over her shoulder as tightly as she could bear. She searched through the hides then turned to the remains of the fire and set the dried out orc head among them. She waited until it caught and then she pushed open the door and went out into the rain.


    The first pale light in the east found her astride the mule moving north. All day she studied the horizon. It stood motionless there despite her procession. The rain had cleared the ground of orcsign, but she had stopped searching for it and she had stopped asking the frightened stones to tell her what had passed. She had slain two men in as many weeks. Men, not orcs, had reawoken the ancient drive in her. The one her da and Khaz had warned her off of. She recognized it and she recognized there was something different about it since the last time. She knew the way to Orc was through men. So she would hunt men.


    A hundred leagues north and west the longhorn smiled.

 63. On The Tundra

    Noontime and he was alone on the tundra. He shouldered through the endless wind that galed unobstructed across that open land. He clasped a floppy brimmed hat against his head and he carried a sackful of potatoes on his back. He had taken both off the posse some days before. He talked to whatever stones he saw so they might relay his message though he wasn''t sure it worked that way. He reached for the strand that had connected him and the dwarf for so long. It was gone. He wondered what that meant. He wondered if she was dead.


    All afternoon he watched stormclouds sliding over the south and a haze rising northwards and widening as if settling across the edge of the world. He had nowhere to hide so he just kept on. Toward dusk the first of the herd clopped out of the dust they had made. Enormous long haired elk with antlers as wide as his arm span and dreadlocks hanging off their bellies halfway to the ground. By nightfall he knelt in the drivers'' camp and ate potatoes and beans and listened to their stories.


    They were coming down from a place called Arboreal some forty days north and they were headed for the Goldlands meat markets. Wolves and wild dogs and dead things hounded them. The elk trumpeted and stamped in the dark surround.


    Their headman said he had never known an orc. That he had only ever heard of them from forebears who told stories of fighting alongside them. That he had heard of their honor as warriors and companions. His fellow drivers were rangy and ragged. Men all with wild beards and wilder eyes.


    "You want to come on with us you''re welcome to," said the headman. "We lost a man to some corpsewalkers when we came past Hartglen. Lost a fair tonnage of venison too for our trouble. You''d not think the dead would have much appetite but you''d be wrong."


    "I''m looking for somebody," said Orc.


    "Out here?"


    "Yeah."


    "You know where they headed?"


    "No."


    "Well there ain''t much north but more of this til Hartglen. You go in there you ain''t never comin out. Sea comes up some ways west. Three days maybe to Keelboard."


    "It''s further than that," said a driver.


    "And east is as you see it there. Them mountains run to the roof of the world. The other side of em¡¯s the deadlands. If they gone in there they''d have done so back down the way you came. Back down at the Gap."


    "Are you going that way?"


    "Naw. We¡¯ll pick up the goldroad south of the Gap and them towns around. They''s troublesome places with nothin but drinkin and womenin and all that costs money we ain''t yet made. We''ll hit em on our way back."


    "Alright."


    "Who you lookin for anyway?"


    "A woman called the brigadier."


    The headman shrugged. "Can''t say as I know her. Sounds awful fancy though.¡±


    In the morning they ate pancakes made from his potatoes with a sweet sap harvested from the trees found in the drivers'' homeland. The men saddled their horses and drove on. When Orc went to gather his emptied sack he found it stuffed with venison smoked and peppered. The last of the elk followed the herd, its antlers velveting up, black eyes cast backward across the tundra. It half turned and regarded the dark shapes moving there against the endless gray lands.


    He pushed to Keelboard and arrived after four days. He crouched amid the winter straw on a knoll and looked down at the harbor, the windblasted stone houses, the line of mastheads that marked the shoreline like reeds, the townsquare the road ran in and out of with oxcarts covered in waxed canvas and the stonewalled barrack and the thin steeple of a disused chapel and three silos stood up like stiff fingers in the distance. The seabreeze wafted his hatbrim. His eyes moved from one sight to the next and lay longest upon the garrison. Above him hanged two greenskins from the neck. Stoutly rigged from a makeshift gallows. Their gaunt ribs protruding like fishbones. Fugitives from Glad Nizam''s campbreak perhaps, or perhaps two of the brigadier''s. The dusk was gathering in the east and distinct banks of clouds banded above the sea all ablaze as if this ocean was of a kind with that bottoming the black heart of the world. He drew Booky''s blade from his belt and it flashed red as it parted the ropes and the greenskins fell heavily like thunderclaps onto the stirring weeds. He stared at them where they fell to be sure he didn''t know them.Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.


    He went down a rocky path and as he went he saw an outbound cart laden with oysters piled up like gravel. A fishmonger sat on the box luminescent like a freshwater pearl so white he was in the final echo of sunlight. A horse labored between the pulls and the breeze carried to Orc the faint ammoniac of rotting fish. He watched them go. The clattering of the shells tumbling one upon the other.


    After dark he stole into the town. He crossed the empty square and walked the length of the barrack''s wall, stopping at each loophole to peer into the dark interior. Crumbled plaster and skeletal bunks. The air wafting out smelled of mildew and old hay. He went back to the square and came to the well there and drew up the bucket and drank it empty. Water dripped onto his feet and its splatter seemed loud on the stone pavers. He left the bucket on the coping and went on.


    The place seemed abandoned. He went on down to the boardwalk framing the harbor and there he could hear the notes of some instrument and a woman''s voice lifted in song. At the far end of the harbor yellow light shone from the windows of a tavern. He walked alongside the becalmed water past the silos toward the light. He stopped at the edge of its reach.


    Through the open door he saw a troupe of performers sawing away at their instruments and a costumed woman at their fore with her elbows bent and her hands upraised as if to stroke her own neck. He stood watching her sway and sing. Everywhere he could see salty men sat and stood and drank wearing tunics with deep vees and coarse hair that seemed to grow upward out of their chests and onto their chins and onto the crowns of their heads. Their pants buttoned on the right of their hip and they wore soft leather boots and long knives in soft leather sheaths. He saw no other women nor did he see children.


    Although he was of the dark his history compelled him into the light and through the door. He kept his hat low across his face. Those inside barely noticed his entrance. The woman made love to the air. The men sitting and standing and drinking hid their jealousy behind their upheld and upturned cups. He worked his way over to the bar. He set his sack of meat upon it.


    "Evening," he said.


    The barman didn''t look at him.


    "I''ve come up from the Gap. I''m looking for an older lady who calls herself the brigadier."


    "Ain''t no ladies here cept one," said the barman, and he nodded at the singer.


    Orc eyed the gathered men. "Is this the garrison then?"


    "Ain''t no garrison neither. Ain''t a whiff of them since the baron took them south at the armiger¡¯s askin last year, cept for Lonnie over there."


    Orc followed the barman''s gaze to a veteran sitting at the table closest to the performers wearing the colors of the armiger. Him bent forward slightly, feet flat on the floor, hands on kneecaps. He was saying something to the singer. The more he said the more her smile strained.


    Orc kept his eyes on the veteran. "He stayed behind?"


    "Naw he went with em. Just got back few days ago. Come back lookin for folk to go on through the Gap with. Says the baron has need for anybody whole and able."


    "He''s who strung up the greenskins."


    "Yep. Said they had it comin. You lookin for them too?"


    At that moment the song ended and it was quiet for the first time since Orc came in. The barman finally turned to him and saw what he was.


    "Oh shit," muttered in the silence. A clattering of clayware cups and bottles set down. Of chairs skidding back from tables.


    Orc was halfway to the veteran. A string of dried orckin ears hung around his neck and two of them still oozed onto his tunic. His face went white and he stood and immediately drew his longsword. One of the flat tipped kind. Chairs toppled as folk scampered out of the way. The instrument players backed against a wall and filed through a dark doorway there.


    Orc stood in the middle of the room and the veteran lumbered across the boards like a standing bear. He lashed twice at Orc and Orc stepped twice aside. The veteran swung straight down at Orc''s head and Orc stepped backwards. He drew his blade and the uncharged pistol. The veteran froze. Orc flipped the pistol so that he held it by the chamber with the triggerguard resting against his palm. The veteran grinned and raised the longsword. Orc feinted with his blade and the veteran swung and Orc smashed the pistol''s brass frizzen into the man''s head. Blood sprayed and the veteran drooped. Orc had already let go of the pistol and he caught it by the barrel and whipped the grip against the back of the man''s skull. He downturned the blade as the veteran went down and he studied the onlookers as the man¡¯s neck sliced open upon its edge. All were armed but none moved. They watched him. They watched the blood soaking into the boards. He went back to the bar and picked up his sack of meat and walked out the door. As he left the light of the doorframe he felt something and he looked up. There between the silos he could see the knolltop and the gallows stood upon it black against a nearblack sky. For a moment he thought he saw a figure retreating. Its hornspread as wide as an elk''s.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Rage] (2/10)

 64. The Mission

    She woke under the baptismal of an abandoned mission erected to the god of man. Above her sunlight shafted through shattered glass into a spiderweb of prismed rainbows on the far wall. Mosaics adorned the vaulted ceiling in iconic designs she had never seen yet were vaguely familiar. The floor was covered in shit. Bat guano, the little turds of vermin, chattel droppings. Some sort of scat out of something big. Barrel chested white snowbirds flapped over the pews and strutted along their backrests. A wild dog snuffed around the carcass of a goblin down at the nave.


    Her shoulder was a swollen torment. She sat up and pulled down the collar of her shirt and she peeled away the stiff bandage. A seeping of blood. Her head spun. Her throat was dry with thirst. She sat with her eyes shut, sweat beading on her chest. The dog looked at her and stepped away from the bones and trotted off into the transept. She rose and went out with the bandage hanging there.


    Outside she looked for the mule but it was nowhere to be seen. The yard spread about twenty acres enclosed by clay brick. Goats and swine grazed on scraggly vines. Headstones teetered off their mounds. Above the keystone of the arched gate a cracked bronze bell pealed irregularly as its clapper swayed in the wind.


    Places like this preceded the camps. Of places like this they were born.


    Orcs and goblins and otaur dwelled yet within the walls. Lean-tos of stacked rocks mortared with clumps of soil, cottongrass growing from them as if the wild tundra itself had crept into the mission¡¯s grounds and burled up tussocks to decolonize the zealotry of men. Some orckin gathered around a cookfire that flickered thinly in the morning light. They gazed at her when she came out and watched her go round the side of the church and enter the kitchen. Crows stilted through the dust and threadbare burlap once sacking flour and germ. The potbellied stove was overstuffed with handbooks: breviaries, their pages rotting, waiting for a spark. In the hall was a wooden table missing a leg and some broken clay pots and in the abattoir hung the bones and tendons of some retired beast of burden, all its flesh long turned to chaff and fallen away. She went into the transept and turned her eyes up at the teeming and chittering cauldron hung upside down from the domed ceiling. The baptismal overflowing with its hardened eliminations. She rolled up her bed and tied it on the saddle and took it and the scabbard out into the yard.


    The signs of revolt were everywhere. The oaken doors hung off of their hinges with great parallel gouges in their stained wood. Pedestals topping the gate stood empty of their martyrs. Icons taken from alcoves lay strewn across the yard, headless, limbless, disembodied heads with agonistic faces portraying some sacrifice, mouths agape, since made to be urinals by those squatting in the ruin. Winding through these she saw the mule''s trace. Fine hoofprints across the pan and through the gatehouse. With her teeth she pulled up her collar and she hitched the saddle high across her good shoulder and she followed the tracks.


    Six or seven crows sunning themselves in the road hopped over the gutter until she had passed and then hopped back. She followed the road down to where it forded a river. Two sows and an orc were dressing their morning catch on the bank and she came to within a few yards of them and watched.


    "Any of ye seen a grayback?" she said.


    The orc looked up at her as he flung a clawful of rubbery guts into the flow. "What?"


    "Have ye seen a scaler come through this way?"


    "Some."


    "This one''s tall. Taller than any of ye. Would''ve come through in the last week or two."


    "He done something to you?"Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    The two sows were watching her now. Their eyes red and their hot breath billowing clouds in the cold daybreak.


    "Nothin but run away," she said.


    "That''s true for everyone here. It¡¯s no crime to be free, beardling."


    "I don''t want him for anythin like that. He''s a friend."


    The two sows grinned at the orc and the orc guffawed as if he knew something she didn''t. Mym looked upriver. She saw the mule standing there to its knees with its mouth against the glass and the reflection of itself. It and its double watched her come up through the alder shrubs and splash through an eddy and catch their trailing rope snaking away downstream. The reflection rippled away. She tossed down the saddle and tied the rope off its horn and she sat against it with her feet in the water. After a while she leaned forward and bent over her knees and washed the water over her face and drank deeply from it. She drew her hand across her mouth and looked at the mule.


    "Don''t ye be pissin now."


    She bent and drank until she was slaked. Then she took off her shirt and threw away the bandage and splashed the frigid water over the wound. It stung. It was cold. It was a kind of bliss. She took off her boots and her trousers and she waded out nude, feeling her skin tighten in the terrible chill, feeling it all go numb. She waded up to her chin and she closed her eyes and considered what had happened. She considered whether Orc might have gone through the Gap without her. Whether she would have known it if the posse of armiger''s men had caught him. Which he wanted more: the manstone to heal his homeland or the brigadier to heal his heart. She waited until her shoulder was as numb as a stone and she opened her eyes and saw the orcs watching her from the other side of the road.


    She rose from the water. She didn''t cover herself. On the bank the sun and her bodyheat dried her fully. She dressed and collected the mule and she went back up to the mission with it in tow. Outside the gate she pulled her longarm from the scabbard and rested it on her good shoulder which was her bracing shoulder. She went through the gate.


    The orckin by the fire watched her come.


    ¡°Good morn,¡± she said to them.


    They nodded to her then looked back to the fire. The haunch of some beast roasted within. Ash stuck to its blackening skin. A one-armed longhorn who might¡¯ve been their leader reached in and rotated the flesh and swung his massive hand in the air as if to cool it. ¡°You¡¯re a long way from home,¡± he said.


    ¡°Aye and don¡¯t I know it.¡±


    ¡°What brings you here?¡±


    ¡°Just stayin low while I figure where I¡¯m goin next.¡±


    ¡°Can¡¯t go home?¡±


    ¡°Not at the moment.¡±


    ¡°Well this far north there¡¯s not many places for going to. Not unless you¡¯re dead or tryin to get that way.¡±


    ¡°Ye know this country?¡±


    ¡°Some.¡±


    ¡°If ye were an orc all alone up hereaways and had a posse of men tailin ye where would ye go?¡±


    The longhorn looked back at the meat in the fire. The tongue of flame lashed before his eyes. After a while he said, ¡°I¡¯d hope I wound up here.¡±


    She watched the fire. She thought again about why she couldn¡¯t track him the way she used to. She could find just about anyone anywhere. She¡¯d once found him from halfway around the world. Perhaps it was because she no longer hunted him. Not in the vengeful way.


    ¡°Where could a dwarf go te hunt men?¡±


    ¡°Hunt men?¡±


    ¡°Aye.¡±


    The longhorn looked at her and she looked back. The other orcs around the fire kept their eyes low but were listening intently.


    ¡°You stick around here long enough and what you¡¯re looking for is likely to come to you,¡± the longhorn rumbled.


    ¡°I don¡¯t have time te wait.¡±


    ¡°What¡¯s hurrying you?¡±


    ¡°For starters we¡¯re aimin ye fix up yer home before spring.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t call this shithole home.¡±


    ¡°Not here. The home of orcs. The Madlands.¡±


    The longhorn might¡¯ve been impressed by this. ¡°And how do you aim to do that?¡±


    ¡°Ye know of the orcstone?¡±


    The longhorn made no sign either way.


    ¡°I¡¯ll just say it¡¯s got te do with me partner.¡±


    ¡°And the men?¡±


    ¡°They¡¯re goin te lead me te him.¡±


    The longhorn nodded as if he expected this. ¡°Your orc.¡±


    ¡°Aye. My Orc. Have ye seen him come through? He¡¯s a scaler near yer height.¡±


    The longhorn shrugged. ¡°I don¡¯t keep track of who comes and goes.¡±


    She knew he was lying. ¡°Which way would ye suggest I go lookin.¡±


    ¡°Nobody that comes up this way stays long.¡±


    ¡°South then?¡±


    The longhorn reached into the fire again and flipped the meat again. ¡°South.¡±


    She nodded at the fire. ¡°Is that elk?¡±


    ¡°Yep.¡±


    ¡°Smells overcooked.¡±


    The longhorn shrugged his stump.


    She went back to the mule and scabbarded the longarm. After two tries she mounted. Her shoulder white with pain. She left the mission out the north gate and turned the mule east toward the mountains ramparting the deadlands. She watched for mansign. By noon she had found it.

 65. The Marshal

    He lounged on a wash of sand excavated by the river wearing nothing but his hat with his clothes and effects lying on the beach behind him. For the first time in weeks he felt clean. He was idly watching the strange occurrences between the moons when he heard a horse coming up the path.


    He flipped onto his belly. From under the hatbrim he could see the horse''s knees, the rider''s foot. He raised his head. A hussar sat the horse with his hands relaxed before him. A long barrel protruded over one shoulder and the butt of a rifle was visible at the opposite hip. The stub of a cigar hung out of his mouth.


    He reached out and got Booky¡¯s blade.


    ¡°Good day to you,¡± called the hussar.


    He didn¡¯t answer. He pulled over his trousers and flapped the sand out of them. He pulled over his shirt.


    ¡°I just wanna talk to you,¡± said the hussar.


    ¡°Go on then,¡± said Orc.


    He had the trousers on and he thrust the pistol into his waistband so that the handle rested beside his naval. His head came through the shirt collar.


    ¡°You the one that done Lonnie last night?¡±


    He shouldered on the strap of the satchel containing the journal and letter of marque and copper coin. ¡°The man did himself.¡±


    ¡°Ain''t no lie. You knew he was a deserter?¡±


    ¡°The barman mentioned something about it.¡±


    ¡°Well the marshal heard about what you done and he sent me down to sign you on to the relief.¡±


    ¡°The relief.¡±


    ¡°That''s right.¡±


    ¡°What relief?¡±


    ¡°The marshal¡¯s. He¡¯s taking us into the Gap. We¡¯re gonna find the baron. Maybe cut on some other deserters along the way. Maybe torch some of the dead.¡±


    ¡°They withdrew.¡±


    The hussar leaned forward. He wore a leather girdle and it creaked when he moved. ¡°What¡¯s that now?¡±


    ¡°The risen. They withdrew from the Gap.¡±


    ¡°No shit and we aim to see they never come back. Why don''t you come outta there?¡±


    He rose dressed and armed. He looked square at the [hussar].


    When the hussar saw what came out of the wash his eyes widened measurably and he sat back in his saddle. One of his hands migrated to the rifle¡¯s shoulder strap where it crossed his chest. "Holy shit," he said.


    "If you say so."


    "You''re an orc?"


    "Last I checked."


    "The marshal know that?"


    Orc shrugged. "I don''t know. I don''t know who you''re even talking about."


    "Marshal Bartho Wallis."


    He knew the name from the pages of the journal. She''d written about him. Back before he was a marshal.


    With finger and thumb the rider flattened his enormous mustache around his mouth. "Reckon you came outta one of his camps."


    "You''d be wrong."


    "Then where''d you come outta?"


    "Here and there."


    "Well you can explain it to him direct. You ready to go to the deadlands?"


    "To relieve the baron."


    "Now you got it."


    "No other reason?"


    "I don''t know what the hell you''re gettin at son. The marshal said that''s what we''re gonna do so that''s what we''re gonna do. If his sayso ain''t good enough for you then I''d welcome you to turn me down now fore you waste any more of his time and mine."


    "Are there any dwarves in your outfit?"


    "I''d say an orc''s one mascot too many but if you know any I''d kindly provide an introduction with the marshal. You got a horse?"


    "No."


    The hussar took the cigar between two fingers and spat and put it back again. "Do orcs even know what to do with horses?" he said.


    Orc looked at the hussar''s mount. The head haltered in embossed leather and gold thread worked into the saddle. A shock of white daggered thinly up its nose and everywhere else was chestnut brown. Sable and sleek. "Most I''d say just eat them," he said.


    "That what you''re gonna do if we bring you along?"


    He looked at the hussar. "I prefer eating men."


    "Aw hell. You coming or what?"


    "I don''t know anything about campaigning."


    "Ain''t much to it. You shit in a ditch, you eat same as everyone else, you ride all day. Maybe walk in your case. You sure you can''t ride a horse? You ever tried?"


    "No."


    "Anyone you kill is yours to loot. Spoils of war. You''ll come out of it with plenty to sell. Plenty more to keep. Maybe set yourself up with some land. You ever worked land?"


    "Yeah."Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    The hussar nodded. "I knew most of you had." He cast his eyes back over his shoulder. "I gotta be getting back. Come on and meet the marshal. Make sure he knows what you are before we kit you up."


    They moved through Keelboard with the hussar on his horse and Orc following behind him in his ratty clothes and limp hat like some kind of prisoner. They proceeded down dirt lanes between spare houses with hoarfrost melting off their windward faces. Sewage pooled around discarded rags in the gutters and the men of the frozen sea walked about them and somewhere in that depressed country of salt and ice a hornblower warned of bergs and shoals. They turned along the barrack wall and entered the square from the night before and they passed the well where boys and girls and women waited in turns to fill their buckets. Men with buckets of their own stood here and there hawking the fruits of the sea which were purple and spiked. They passed a shack where an empty hearse waited outside with a little oxidized bell hanging from a pole on its rear and inside a woman and a child wailed.


    The hussar nodded at the house as they passed. "That there is Lonnie''s place."


    Orc never turned his head. The wailing kept on and he thought about the greenskins he¡¯d cut from the gallows. The young and the mates they might¡¯ve had.


    The marshal quartered in a household adjoining a fenced yard where twoscore of rusted manacles were slowly disintegrating into the dried mud. The house had been painted white some decades ago and the way it flaked and peeled made it look like some pockmarked leper of a house. Inside the floors were tiled and the walls ornately paneled. The marshal''s squire was a boy of about sixteen and he ran shoeless up the stairs ahead of them and rapped on the glassed door onto the balcony.


    "Enter," said a voice.


    The marshal sat at a writing desk smoking a wicker pipe and reading letters. Orc and the hussar and the squire stood along the wall and waited. Orc looked at him, looked at the yard below the balcony. The rusting chains. The auction block. The marshal nodded and sanded the letter and folded it on itself. He held it down on the desk with his pipe hand and he held a stick of red wax to the pipehead until four bloodred drops pooled in a coin across the fold. He set down the wax and knuckled the signet on his middle finger against the seal. Then he placed the letter on the corner of the desk, taking care to align their right angles. He sat back in his chair and looked at Orc. "Sit," he said.


    The hussar and the squire settled onto a bench of carved wood. They left room for Orc but he didn''t move from the wall. The smell of the place and the manner of the man before him had taken him back to his time with the brigadier. He was a cub again, uncertain of himself and his place in the world.


    The marshal reclined back in his chair for a moment then he hitched one boot then the other on top of the desk. He shifted the repeater he wore dangling from its hip holster to rest between his thighs and he folded his hands upon it. His mustache was blond and his hair was receding and gray and tied up in a bun. He watched Orc. He spoke sidemouthed around the pipestem clasped between his teeth. "Well look at you," he said.


    "Pass me a mirror."


    "None of that cheek, orc," said the squire.


    Orc looked at the boy and at the pair of knives sheathed across his chest.


    The squire looked back at him. "And you''ll address the marshal as sir."


    "Who''s the kid?"


    "Who''s the kid sir."


    Orc smiled, bemused. "Sir."


    The marshal smiled back. "Excuse my nephew. He has little experience with your kind."


    The squire turned a shade of pink and said no more. The marshal picked up a silver letter opener from his desk and touched its point against a finger and spun it lazily there. "You''re not here to sign on," he said.


    "I''m here to see what kind of man is willing to ally himself with an orc."


    With the letter opener resting in his open palm the marshal gestured to himself like an orchestral conductor measuring time. "I am as you see me. And there are others. King Donnas himself would, as his grandfather before him did. As his father should have done once the dead began to rise. But that is not how it went. The second Donnas said keep them in the camps."


    The marshal looked at his letter lying on the desk. He looked back at Orc. "You didn''t come out of my camps did you?" he said.


    "No."


    "I thought not. I knew everyone in them and they knew me. It was not right fencing them in." He nodded down at the auction block in the yard. "Nor selling them off."


    Orc didn''t say anything.


    "Where did you come from?"


    "South a ways."


    "Were you penned in one of the armiger''s camps?"


    "Sure. Maybe."


    "Son if you had come out of one of his you would know it."


    "Alright."


    "Haven''t you heard of him?"


    "I might''ve."


    "If you want to sign on with us you will need to speak plainly and truly. You may have been a fugitive before but with me you will be as any other soldier."


    Orc noticed the squire slouch and study the floor. "Yeah I''ve heard of the armiger," he said.


    "What do you think of him?"


    "Plainly and truly I don''t think of him at all."


    The marshal nodded and leaned forward. "I believe you. Now tell me where you came from before you found yourself here."


    "Down at the boomtown at the foot of the Gap. I don''t know its name."


    "And a posse of the armiger''s ran you out. I already knew that. Where did you come from before then?"


    "Across the sea."


    Now the marshal leaned back. "I see. I see. One of Glad Nizam''s then?"


    Orc shrugged. "She was there."


    "You were not with her at the elven forest were you?"


    "No."


    "Lucky for you. The armiger sold her out. You know he let her out of the camps on purpose."


    "I heard something about that."


    The marshal nodded. "Caged her in squalor and turned the screws and just when things were at their worst he opened the fence and set her loose."


    Orc stood silent.


    "She fought for him without even knowing it. You all did. Unwilling and unasked. Does that seem right to you?"


    "No."


    The marshal nodded. "Well now I am asking you. Sign on with us and let us see if together we can save the king''s men. Are you in?"


    Orc saw the squire was shaking his head. The hussar seemed to have fallen asleep. "You ran some camps?"


    The marshal kicked his feet off the table and rose. He turned and overlooked the yard with the letter opener clasped behind his back. "I did as I was told," he said. "We all did."


    "Not all."


    The marshal half turned. "You speak of Brigadier Kathryn."


    Orc did everything he could to keep his face passive. He didn''t risk speaking.


    The marshal turned the rest of the way and locked eyes with him. "What would an orc know of her?"


    "Nothing," was all he could manage.


    The marshal squinted at him. "You already sign on with her?"


    "No."


    "She run you out here to provoke me?"


    "No sir."


    The marshal came around the desk gripping the letter opener like a knife. "She has no sense of the law, orc. No sense of justice. She is a deserter herself, like that man you killed. Defying the king as she did. Traipsing about the deadlands murdering folk no matter their culpability. She has fooled plenty of your kind with her talk, but it is all of it fraudulent. You sign on with me and you will see the difference. Land for every irregular in my company. Rich partitions carved out of the deadlands. Good soil for cropping and mountains of ores in copper and tin and gold too. Everything you despoil is yours to keep and dispose of as you please. The dead do not need it son, but I can see from your eyes how you do. Come with me and take it."


    Orc stood silently and tried to read the man for what else he might know of the brigadier.


    "Are you not tired of folks treating you like trash?" the marshal was saying. "As lesser than? You ever wondered what it might be like to be treated like a man? Equal with the ones that enslaved you? Come with me and find out."


    "I can''t ride a horse," said Orc.


    "You oughta learn," said the hussar. "I can teach you what you need to know."


    The marshal shook his head. "He doesn''t need a horse." He tapped the repeater on his hip and pointed at the pistol stuck in Orc''s belt. "You know how to fire that singleshot?"


    "Yeah."


    "And swing that dirk?"


    He looked at Booky''s blade. "Yeah."


    "Nephew," said the marshal, walking back to the balcony''s rail.


    "Yessir?"


    "Sign him on."

 66. The Way They Came

    High in the mountains the last of the posse squatted in his rags beneath an overhang scorched black with the soot of those who had come before. He clutched a striped wool blanket about him yet his whole body shook from the cold. At his feet lay his flint and his sword and a meager pile of damp pine duff. As she approached he tried to take up the sword but it fell from his bloodless hand. What had chased him to such heights she did not know nor did she ask.


    She apologized to the stones after. They spoke in strange dialects foreign to her. She did not understand their meaning although it was plain they had hosted many comers for many centuries: brother bear and lonesome wildcat, packs of curs and slovenly men, a dwarf and a corpse. Unwilling to submit the stones to his decaying she ignited the duff and fed him to it.


    Days later she rode the mule out of the dark and frozen north following the flattened track of a vast herd. It ran ahead of her as a single organism, expanding and contracting across the ranges, breathing them in, beating them down, consuming everything in its path. A million hooves trampling soil too cold to admit a plowblade, prodigious tons of waste nourishing the overturned land. Renewal in violence and desecration. The mule wore a striped blanket now under the saddle and it weathered the chill better for it. She was ready to be free of it. She patted its mane from where she sat and whispered her thanks for its companionship and higher vantage over the wide and flat tundra. She had hoped it would have made a difference. It hadn¡¯t.


    She came into the boomtown the same way she had left it. She passed along its rutted street looking neither left nor right but down as if hoping to spy the track of an orc. Here and there a dog rose from its place in the sunlight and fell in behind the mule and followed to the next intersection where it would halt suddenly while the dog of that place rose from its spot in the sun and took up the escort. In this way she passed from dog to dog until she came to a standing stone marking the town''s founding. She asked the stone for news of orcs but it had nothing new to share. She dismounted onto a fencepost and hopped down to the ground and took up the mule¡¯s catchrope and walked to the stable with the slughole in the roof. She tied the mule there, reaching overhead and scratching its cheeks one last time, rubbing its flank. She left it there and swung into the saloon under the inn. It was midday.


    The room smelled stale. Something had torn up the ceiling or else it had finally molded through and red rags marbled by smoke draped down from it like carcasses hung from a meatlocker''s hooks. The floorplanks were badly trued and their fixing nailheads were rusted away so that their far ends warped upward whenever stepped upon. At a corner table a farrier sipped a cup of milk and gazed out the window into the street. There was no one else there.


    She dragged a stool to the bar and climbed onto it. She just about reached over to pump herself a beer when the barman emerged from the back fisting a rag into a stein.


    "You''re back," he said.


    "Aye."


    "What¡¯ll it be?¡±


    ¡°News.¡±


    He removed the rag and sat the stein on the barback. ¡°Give me an incentive.¡±


    She nodded at the tap. ¡°I¡¯ll take a half pint.¡±


    The tap pumped into the glass more head than draught. He thumped it down before her and foam slipped over the side and slid down to ring the glass bottom. He placed both hands on the bar. ¡°Four coppers,¡± he said.


    She didn¡¯t pay. She took the glass and drank it in one go foam and all. Placing the glass back in the ring she wiped her mouth and looked at him. ¡°Ye remember that orc that was with me?¡± she said.


    He held out a hand ¡°Four coppers,¡± he said.


    ¡°Give me an incentive.¡±


    She saw his hand slip beneath the bar. Her alpenstock flashed under his chin.


    ¡°Hey now. Easy there.¡±


    ¡°Ye rememberin me orc yet?¡±


    ¡°Sure. Not many of them kind around here.¡±


    ¡°Ye seen him come through?¡±


    ¡°Not since y¡¯all busted up my winda.¡±


    ¡°That was the armiger¡¯s man.¡±


    ¡°That may be but y¡¯all drove him to it and y¡¯all knocked him off before he paid up. Now here you are spitting to gill a man over four coppers.¡±


    ¡°Two coppers.¡±Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.


    ¡°What?¡±


    ¡°There weren''t but two coppers of beer in that glass. I¡¯m not payin fer air when I breathe it fer free.¡±


    At this the barman started to protest until he felt Mym¡¯s pick prick the waddle under his jaw.


    ¡°Anyone else who might¡¯ve seen him come through?¡± she said.


    ¡°I woulda said if so. Nobody¡¯s told me nothing about him. If that posse didn¡¯t get him the old lady did.¡±


    ¡°What old lady?¡±


    ¡°The one who¡¯s out for orcs. Don¡¯t know what she calls herself but folks around here call her the belvedere or some such.¡±


    ¡°Brigadier.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s it. Sure as a loaded crapshooter she pinched your friend going in or out of the Gap. Her or one of her graybacks.¡±


    ¡°Where is she now?¡±


    ¡°Get that goddamn pick off me.¡±


    ¡°Answer me.¡±


    ¡°Can¡¯t tell what I don¡¯t know. She¡¯s a long way gone. A long way from here. Not been round in months. Not since she gone up the Gap looking for them camps.¡±


    ¡°What camps?¡±


    ¡°Them ones left for dead when old Donnas cut out.¡±


    She lowered the alpenstock and the barman brought his hand back above the bar. She saw gouges in the palm made by his fingernails. He touched his neck and then looked at the spot of blood on his finger. ¡°Goddamn,¡± he said.


    She knew of Orc¡¯s history with the brigadier. If he knew she was around he would''ve headed straight toward her and to hell with the manstone and everything they had come here to do. ¡°What¡¯s the best way in?¡± she said.


    ¡°Into the deadlands?¡±


    ¡°Aye.¡±


    ¡°Why the hell should I tell you?¡±


    ¡°The sooner ye do the sooner I¡¯ll be goin.¡±


    He considered this. ¡°Ain''t no best way in. They¡¯re all of em shit.¡±


    ¡°Then which is fastest?¡±


    ¡°Reckon going up the Gap alone is fastest. You''ll get there quick and you''ll die there quick.¡±


    "I don''t plan on dyin."


    "Then best you don''t go alone.¡±


    She turned around and saw only the farrier sitting at his table and looking at his milk. Outside the window an empty street.


    ¡°There¡¯s a prospecting caravan heading in tonight.¡±


    ¡°When are they due te go?¡±


    ¡°They just went fore you came in.¡±


    She slapped two coppers on the counter and jumped off the stool and stamped toward the door with her alpenstock balanced over her shoulder.


    ¡°Don¡¯t you ever come back,¡± called the barman.


    ***


    A mile ahead she saw the caravan entering the Gap. The sun low behind her warmly lit their canvas covered wagons and they looked like molars jawing at the maw of the world fronting a gullet bereft of light. She caught the tailing walkers as they passed from the day into the night. They were scavengers pushing three wheeled carts stacked with pry bars and empty sacks, a speculator shouldering a leather folio of musty maps and wiping the lens of her theodolite, a train of settlers wagoning in clutches of pensive wives and dusty-faced children, a company of latent trophy hunters and scalpers riding steeds that were wild but six weeks ago that reeled and snorted as she passed.


    She outpaced these and other strangers and outcasts and a few surly looking folk who she thought must be refugees seeking solace in death for they appeared dead already. At the head of their column rode a cloaked shepherd holding a yew crook across his knees and promising his followers riches and new lives to be found in a country abandoned by the laws of men and of their god. He spoke in the cadence of a sermon and those who rode closest leaned in to hear his words. He didn¡¯t notice her. Her head only came up to his stirrup. She waited for him to stop speaking and when it seemed he never would she reached up and tapped his ankle.


    His head swiveled around and then down. ¡°Warm evenings little one. Have you come to join our family?¡±


    ¡°Depends on whether yer goin where I need te be.¡±


    ¡°And where is that?¡±


    ¡°Do ye know of the brigadier?¡±


    He nodded. ¡°Our paths have crossed.¡±


    ¡°Think they will again?¡±


    ¡°God willing. She''s often in and out of the Thumb."


    "Where''s that?"


    "Why it¡¯s our destination. It¡¯s an outpost but two weeks past the Gap."


    "And folk there will know where te find her?"


    "Likely they will. You aren''t with the baron are you?"


    "I don''t know any baron."


    "Good. I don''t want any of his brand of trouble." He turned in his saddle as if to survey the hodgepodge that followed. "Robinsen''s wife never did show. He''ll have space in his wagon for when your feet tire. He''s six back. Got four lovely children with him. They could use some womanly company."


    "I''m no woman."


    He looked down at her. "That may be but it has little bearing on your femininity."


    "If ye say so."


    He shrugged. "Go only if it suits you. Walk wherever you like. We push to the mill tonight. I expect we''ll arrive toward midnight. We¡¯ll be lighting torches forthwith and you ought not to stray beyond their light."


    She looked up the deep trench through which they rambled. Mountains overhung both sides as if a god had raked their finger across the land. Along their strata were ancient glyphs and runes and pictographs of divinities and magics and orcs and men and animals as well as symbols and wordless expressions that had lost whatever meanings they once held. She listened to the wind blowing across their faces and the voices it lent the stones and the beings drawn upon them. She smelled the decay it brought. As loss and failure cleaves lives forever into the before and the now the shadow of the horizon fell upon the caravan and the dwarf trudging among them.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Stonespeaking] She''d learned new ways of talkin and hearin from the stones about the firelands and she aimed te learn whatever she could from yon northernly rocks. We couldn''t talk her out of it. (1/10)

 67. The Camp

    He had bathed in the harbor and tied up his hair and he wore a set of the sidebutton trousers and the tunic given to him by a quartermaster whose hands shook every time he looked at him. The squire led him out of town riding a painted horse that skittered and shied at the smell of him. Orc fell in behind the animal and it kicked out at him. He came around to fall in ahead and the animal snapped its teeth at his hands. He snapped back.


    A half mile inland at the raw edge of the town spread the relief camp. Low lying tents of waxed canvas draped over wagon yokes, several stone sided huts roofed with sod and between them a circular stonewalled paddock in which a number of gaunt horses nosed the bare ground. Orc watched these.


    ¡°Sargeant,¡± called the squire.


    ¡°He gone off,¡± said a voice from one of the tents.


    The squire dismounted and crossed to the tent and stuck his head under the canopy. Orc stood at armslength from the squire''s horse. Two soldiers were sitting against the paddock''s wall and one punched the other on the arm and nodded at him. He pretended not to notice.


    "Hey," called one. He was rising. "Hey orc!"


    Orc nodded at the man.


    "What are you, why are you," flustered the man.


    "Why am I what?"


    The squire came out of the tent and turned to the soldier. "Where''s the sergeant?"


    "He gone into town sir. Who''s that?"


    "Your new comrade."


    "Ain''t no comrade of mine!" cried the man. "I ain''t ridin with no orc sir."


    "I don''t ride," said Orc.


    The soldier turned to him. "I ain''t talkin to you boarfucker." He turned back to the squire. "I didn''t sign on to be no taskmaster sir. I came on to cut up on orcs not ride beside em."


    "The marshal done already signed him on," said the squire.


    "I ain''t splittin no shares with him sir. I ain''t sharin no tent nor pot neither. Goddamn filthy assed boarfuckers you can''t get away from em. I can smell his stinkin undercarriage from here."


    "I said the marshal done already signed him. You take an issue you go on up and take it to him."


    "So you ain''t defendin him then?"


    The squire looked at Orc. Orc watched to see what he would do.


    The squire spat. "Not on his account."


    Grinning the soldier drew his shortsword. "It''s you or me orc. Walk on outta here while you can."


    "Leave off him Randall," said the second soldier.


    "I ain''t doin. Well boarfucker? You gettin or you gonna make me widen your stinkin bunghole?"


    Ghostly faces appeared under the fly of the tent. The squire rested a hand on the handle of a blade. Orc saw these things and he saw the hate in the soldier''s eyes. He turned and walked the path back to town. At the marshal''s quarters men were shifting and packing gear. Elk milled in the yard on a string. He found the hussar there who had recruited him. Together they went to the quartermaster whose head shook now more than his hands and then they went on into Keelboard. It was a holy day and in the fountain square the band had assembled with their instruments and the woman with her voice and her sultry trembling. The salt of the sea gathered around celebrating the holiday and the departure of the relief. Orc and the hussar turned down a street past the disused barrack and past a shuttered teahouse and came to a plaza where painted signs and figures indicated the little shops of clothiers and cobblers and leatherworkers and metalsmiths and traders and butchers and a gamehouse.


    They tried an armorer''s hut first but no one was there. Next the hussar rapped on a pharmacist''s stall and the pharmacist hustled around wearing an apron chalked with powder and a little peaked hat. He had most of what was needed: tobacco papers, beeswax, black powder, lead slugs. He jimmied the lock on the armorer''s and fetched a smallbore casing. When he asked for payment the hussar suggested Orc give up the dwarven satchel or Booky''s blade. He declined. The three of them stood staring at each other. The music from the square marched on.


    "His tooth," said the pharmacist.


    "His tooth?" said the hussar.


    "He can pay with his tooth. Orctusk''s aphrodisiac effect is well documented. Ground fine and mixed in a tincture of vinegar and rum it will keep a man in the appropriate state for many hours. Many many hours."If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    They just looked at him.


    "If he will submit I have the necessary tools. A quarter ounce shaving should cover the bill."


    "You use my folk''s teeth for medicine?" said Orc.


    "Of course."


    The hussar looked wildly from the pharmacist to Orc. "Hold up a moment," he said.


    "You have the tools for it here?" said Orc.


    "As I said."


    The hussar fished through his pocket and came up with a whole silver coin stamped with the head of the king. He slapped it on the counter between them and the lead slugs hopped. "That''ll cover it. Take all that mess Orc. We''ve gotta get."


    Orc didn''t move. He was looking at the pharmacist and slowly the pharmacist came to understand his peril. His forehead flushed and he took a half step backward and bumped against the wall backing his stall. All the little jars of powder and specimens jangled on their shelves.


    The hussar opened Orc''s satchel and swept the contents of the exchange therein. He tugged Orc by the arm. "Come on. Marshal''s settin off and we don''t wanna get left behind."


    Orc leaned over the counter, his hands placed thereupon as if he was to hoist himself over it. "What do I care if he uses our bones to make your men feel more like men?"


    The hussar had him around the waist. "I''m glad for your enlightened position on it."


    Orc leaned over the quaking, cowering pharmacist. "We use your bones to pick your flesh from our teeth," he said, and he opened his jaw wide as if to show the man or perhaps to swallow his head whole.


    The pharmacist wailed and fled out of the stall on hands and knees and tripped over himself ducking down an alley and out of sight.


    Orc turned to the hussar. "Thanks for the loan."


    The hussar straightened his jacket and wiped his brow and blew through his mustaches. "Against the spoils comin," he said. "And don''t you tell a soul about it."


    ***


    Some days later dusk bestirred the boomtown. Buzzards swooped to their overnight roosts on the roofs of the public buildings standing center. Windowlamps cast upon the streets adjacent the inns and brothels. The dark was full of the smell of cookfires. Youngsters and street dogs patrolled the muddy alleyways and a cat hunted a tree squirrel up the trunk of a leafless alder. Orc and the hussar walked below it. Orc watching the cat leap to a low branch and wondered if it needed a home.


    Plucked strings strummed faintly from the saloon. They passed a lichen-peppered standing stone and they passed a hole in the ground in which an old man stoked an open forge and worked his hammer to bend and flatten horseshoes from iron rods. They passed a woman framed by a window who was applying paint to her lips and chalk to her eyelids. Her eyes tracked them as they went by and her irises were a deep dark color made invisible by the gathering night.


    At last they arrived at the saloon of the inn. Across the street where the revival tent had stood the ground was bare and blackened. The hussar was first into the saloon through the swinging doors where a thousand palms had tarnished the wood, where fools in their hundreds had pushed in brazenly and an equality of drunks had tottered out in song and slipped in vomit. The lamps inside were lit with scores of moths circling and bouncing and they crossed the dusty planks to the high bar.


    A farrier studied them from a low corner table. A thickset man in a sleeved canvas shirt, a thin book of common prayer in the breast pocket, an undereye hollowness that told of sleepless nights or habiting pipe dens or creeping consumption. The hussar ordered a glass of whiskey and drank it down and ordered another. Orc looked from under his brow at each table for anyone he knew or anyone who might remember what he''d done just out in the street a month before. The hussar turned from the barman with his drink in hand and eyed a tableful of whores who were looking him up and down. In a battlefield voice he spoke loudly of the relief force and the mission through the Gap.


    The farrier snorted in his corner. "You ain''t going nowheres," he said.


    ¡°Who you talkin at old man?¡± said the hussar.


    ¡°You ain¡¯t going nowheres. They¡¯s going to stop you fore yon Gap widens up.¡±


    ¡°Who will.¡±


    ¡°She will. The brigadier.¡±


    ¡°The hell she will.¡±


    ¡°You been told. Pray she does.¡±


    The hussar looked at Orc but Orc was staring intently at the farrier. ¡°What¡¯s that supposed to mean old man?¡± said the hussar.


    ¡°If you and that Marshal go acrossing that Gap you ain¡¯t never crossing it back.¡±


    ¡°We don¡¯t aim to settle the deadlands.¡±


    ¡°You will. Settle it with your bones.¡±


    The hussar grabbed his blade and drew far enough for the steel to shine. ¡°Why you wishin ill upon we who ain¡¯t done nothin to you?¡±


    The farrier watched the pale liquid in the cup before him. He sniffed and looked at the ceiling and his mouth made the shape of silent words. The dark rims of his eyes wettened. ¡°God¡¯s awoken. Them dwarves knocked him out ten thousand years before men ever were and made their hallowed oaths he¡¯d stay that way. Now what? See him shivering bones. See him quickening flesh. He¡¯s up now. He¡¯s waiting there for them whose rage and vengefulness bestirred him. You hear me? He¡¯s hungry and his gut ain¡¯t but half full. You enter the deadlands carrying such spite as you have and he¡¯ll repay it on you like for like in hellfire.¡±


    The hussar looked again at Orc and he missed the intensity there and instead he mocked the farrier and the goatmilk he sunk into. He made himself as tall as he could and berated the man with a sly eye on the watching whores. Others of the relief came in and bellied up to the bar and at every swinging of the doors the hussar pointed out the farrier and told the newcomers of his cowardice and ill luck.


    Orc said nothing and heard nothing such were the clamor of his thoughts.


    That was their last night in the lands of the living. Exceptionally proclaimed but remember yours approaches also. Theirs ended as it always shall in confusion and blood and ultimately exhaustion. The recruits drank away their doubts of the windfalls to come and so gladly exchanged their coin in alcohol and gamesmanship. The mud in the streets froze into miniature ranges and the eternal stars blazed through the mortal coil of the world and fell toward land. The morning found Orc and the hussar and the farrier crouching in the street over the form of the soldier called Randall. His lips and eyes were blue and his head lay in a red ice slick, skull split wide open. The hussar sideyed Orc but said nothing about it. Somewhere a rooster called forth the sun.


    ¡°What joy there is in life shan¡¯t be found at its end,¡± said the farrier. He had been holding open his prayer book and now he closed it and placed it back in his shirtpocket and turned and went up the street.

 68. The Caravan

    She followed the shepherd and the wagons away from the ruin of the mill and along the stream that had turned its wheels. They continued upcanyon and they passed the rampart where the kingsmen had halted the risen and they crunched over the bones and ashes of that decisive confrontation. They forded the cold stream and they forded it back as it snaked against one wall then the other. Finally they exited the Gap with outriders posted ahead and the scalpers to the rear. The deadlands howled around them.


    They beat the dawn to the trail and first light saw them strung out in a long line over the tundra, the wagonwheels creaking and snapping around their hubs. A low moan of laboring hardwood and the constant soft percussion of hooves and feet. Save for stands of alpine foxtail and thickets of pendant grass overgrowing the riverbanks the land was an expanse of hairlike sedges and grasses. It grasped at their feet and the road ahead was no more than a subtle flattening of their growth.


    They saw no game those first days, no birds but a solitary grouse sprinting away through the cottongrass. In the distance they saw herds of elk or bison shifting along the horizon shrouded by scarves of snow blowing up off the ground and they ate out of the stores they brought in sealed casks. The speculator carried in her folio a heavy set of binoculars that mounted polished convex glass in copper tubing. With them she watched the herds cross the tundra and later when they began to see the suggestions of faraway forests she would halt in her saddle with the sun at her back and detach one ocular from the other and screw the nearside of one into the farside of the other on threads crafted for that purpose and through the long telescope they formed she would study the dispositions of the trees against the maps she carried. One of the Robinsen girls would stand at her knee and ask her questions of what she could see and the settler men would wait until she had identified the parcel on her map and its owner on her register and their status: living, dead, corporate, otherwise. She must have called two dozen open parcels yet only a single settler advanced a claim on any of them. They watched his solitary wagon rumble south, ironclad wheels jiggering, two children¡¯s faces looking back at them through the hole in the bonnet.


    They rode armed. Each horseman and horsewoman with a bladed weapon and wagoneers with pikes or spears or guns smithed in poor imitation of the dwarven style that shot askew of their aiming. The shepherd carried his crook athwart his saddle and had slung a leather sheath across his back holding a weapon of some kind.


    Mym carried both her longarm and alpenstock across her back in that open land. Those weapons had withstood many years of such journeys and they were well worn from adventures had before her birth whose histories were told by their metals. All she had to do was ask and they would take her to campaigns now ancient yet readily recalled in their gouges and rends and scars.


    Well before dark the wagons made their circle on the open plain. The trophy hunters and scalpers escorted the scavengers pushing their carts to a lone tree naked of bark and colored of bone. The settler families combined grain and water and slapped out the dough on the seats of the jockey boxes. The scavengers returned with cartfuls of wood and brush and commenced to draw armlength branches from their loads and snap them as if they were the skeletal remains of the risen they sought to keep at bay. They sundered the limbs and they boasted of what they would do to the first undead they met. Their teeth flashed in the low light when they laughed. By full night the body of the dead tree leaned in pieces over the glowing coals they had made and in the families¡¯ iron pans roundbreads rose and there was a flow of spirits from clay amphoras and of water from clanking canteens. They slept in their wagonbeds or under them on the near-frozen ground wrapped in thick wool blankets. Overhead the stars were much the same as they had been west of the Gap, and the yowl and yammer of the distant wolves there evoked the same foreboding and exposure, yet they could feel a certain change in the world and in themselves.


    The fourth day they began while it was yet being made. Long exhausted of firewood they ate in the dark. Salt meat and mush mixed with frigid riverwater. Already they were worn of the trail and the smell of the place. By now the speculator had named a hundred parcels available for claiming. The settlers had all stayed on but the one. The scalpers¡¯ erstwhile mustangs trod heavily and their masters kept their eyes always on the horizon and often asked the speculator to turn her glass toward some object or other. The courage of the party was quickly run out in the infinite of that landscape and there was no courage either for the pale rider who pursued them unseen and unheard for his deed is without passion and its effect is inevitability. In countless wells and waterholes across the wide blue world does he swim and beside a thousand cookfires does he slake his patrons for his final fee. A scavenger fell sick first and died in the night. By the noon following two more were puking and shitting every drop of water yet in their bowels. A settler¡¯s family shifted to another wagon and the sick rode aboard among the furniture and foodstuffs and heirlooms of that patrilineage. By the following morning Mym was scraping her adze over the frozen ground and stuffing the bodies of the men into six inch graves. The shepherd held a kind of service and some who gathered turned to Mym for they had lately heard the rumor of a dwarven resurrection. She kept her head down. The shepherd said a few words and they covered the dead with dried grasses and set them on fire.If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    They stirred as the coming dawn flushed the east with pale rays of light that fanned into the colorless abyss. A jagged cut of red spread across mountaintops there like blood seeping out of the world and running into the sky and between two enshadowed summits rose the naked head of the sun. The twin shadows of the peaks reached across the plain ahead of them like fangs engulfing the world and the shadows of the mounted humans and the wagons and the solitary dwarf progressed obliquely ahead like vestiges of the night desperate to escape the day, like filaments of black iron drawn by magnetic forces from one darkness to the next, yoking them forever to fate of night. A fourth man vomited himself to death before midmorning. They shuttled him out of the wagon and ignited him where he landed and pressed on. The black smoke of him a solitary beacon in that lightening land.


    Now beasts had come to follow them, great white wolves with red eyes that loped over the tufts of grass and laid in the dusting of dew ice that sparkled in the winter noon. Trotting on again with their noses in the wagon ruts. Late evening when the caravan made its circle she could see them out there, ears forward, eyes winking, waiting. Next morning as the caravan ambled on she could hear them yipping and snarling over the scraps of the camp and the next dead man still on fire.


    A week out and five men dead. They filled casks with water from the river and they left its course. The grasses now were hidden entirely by a veneer of ice or snowdrifts that wandered across the tundra like dunes of sand.


    "He sure this is the way?" said a trophy hunter.


    "Don''t see nothin for the horses to eat," said a scavenger.


    "Them settler folk have sacks of grainseed.¡±


    ¡°Ain¡¯t that for homesteadin?¡±


    ¡°Probably.¡±


    ¡°So what? You gonna take it off em?¡±


    The trophy hunter spat through his teeth and said no more.


    The following day they began to drive past bones and discarded implements of war. They saw the husk of a covered wagon with its metal bows arched over the coal black bed like the ribs of a cremation and they saw the acres of immolated heaps of which they had heard as far south as seaway¡¯s end and they saw the bodies of an ancient race now emerging from the thawing tundra, mummified shriveled and black and hard as iron from the permafrost. The wolves skittered after, nosing the twisted forms and lifting their snouts to the scent of the caravan. Night over night the wagon circle tightened. The settlers shared their grainseed and the horses ate out of the emptying sacks. Mym laid on the ground among the many hardmen seeking their fortunes and future and she missed the fortune and future she¡¯d left in the delving. She watched the acrimonic moons conjoin and the whitehot flashes upon their darksides. The mysterious lights there seemed to flare from nothing and suck away to nothing. The permafrost glinted blue and green by the moonslight and the iron wagontires shone in crescents that bowed ever toward the moons and their silent violence, and as the embattled rivals wheeled overhead the light caught in the tires followed them in a terrestrial description of their orbits. She listened to the stones somewhere under the ice and she heard the subtle wheezing and whimpering of the horses. She was glad to have spared the mule this journey.


    She woke in the night to a thicker silence. She rose and took up her longarm and crept to the edge of the circle. Away north the land and sky were electric. Lightning fluttered soundlessly in sourceless sheets behind witching thunderheads that throbbed in and out of being. Strange shapes on the sudden skyline emerged black and menacing and were sucked back into oblivion and sprang forth again some other place inches or miles away. She felt the hair on her arms rise and she looked down and saw a strange soft blue fire spreading across them, simmering up the hoops of the tires, snaking along the metal bits of the horses and pooling beneath their ironwrought shoes so that they kicked up a multitude of winking eyes. It perched in the pan of her longarm and she placed this upon the ground and kneeling there she held her hands outstretched above the floor of the tundra as she had seen Daraway and Orc do each in their own fashion. She tried to feel as they might but there was only the cold radiating off the ice. She listened and heard the trembling of the stones and it seemed in that place their geology was ordered not by nature but by fear and perhaps that was what had stoppered them from her gifts. She slept no more that night.


    The tenth day she trudged on at the head of the wagons for the shepherd had vanished in the night. She sought him overland but there was no sign of his going nor of his coming. Either he had never been or what skills she had were foiled by the otherness of that place. She led the caravan along the solitary track crossing the tundra and mile by mile the track diminished to nothing. There were no more wolves. There on the open plain the country extended uniformly in all directions like the universe which is said to be expanding forever so that nowhere and everywhere are in its singular center, equally sealed within the vast cold tomb of creation. By the time she realized they''d all been betrayed it was too late.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Stonespeaking] I don¡¯t think it ever occurred te her that the stones themselves might be servin some higher deception¡­ (2/10)

 69. The Relief

    They followed the sidewinder ruts of a caravan. From his place beside the hussar he saw a cloud of dust rising darkly across the skyline. He stamped on the frozen ground and looked back above the relief''s track and saw only clear blue sky there. He walked on, watching the dust until it was so near he had to tilt his head to see its crown. The marshal signaled to halt and conferred with the squire beside him. The squire trotted his horse back along the column and out of Orc''s sight.


    "You reckon that''s smoke we''re lookin at?" said the hussar.


    "Looks to me like earth thrown skyward," said Orc.


    "Like one of them dust bowls?"


    "Yeah." He stamped the frozen ground again but could make no dust rise from it. He reached for some sense of the wilder community around him but it was as barren and cold as it had been these past ten or twelve days.


    The squire rode back to the van with the relief''s scout riding behind him, collapsed brass telescope in hand. They came up to the marshal and the scout passed over the telescope. The marshal uncoupled it and squinted into its aperture as he glassed the horizon and the cloud and the horizon again. He lowered the telescope and frowned and then he raised it and peered through again.


    "Sir?" said the squire.


    The marshal half turned in the saddle. "Which of you have worked land?" he said.


    Orc watched the soldiers of the relief look at each other and up at the darkening cloud.


    "Orc has," said the hussar.


    The marshal turned to Orc and motioned him forward. He came alongside and the marshal handed him the telescope. "What do you see?"


    Orc shut an eye and scoped up with the other. The cloud seemed to rise directly out of the country ahead. It seemed to boil up out of nothing in strange billows that spiraled skyward and sideways, and in places it seemed to dive back upon itself. He directed the telescope at where the horizon should be and he saw only the opaqueness of it, too thick even for sunlight to slip through, black as an eclipse of the sun.


    Orc handed the telescope back to the marshal. "It¡¯s a plague."


    The marshal nodded. He collapsed the tube against his knee and passed it back to the scout. "There any homesteads out this way?" he said.


    "No sir," said the scout.


    The marshal sat resting his hands on the horn of his saddle and regarded the sky. He nodded again to himself. He raised his hand and the relief went on.


    A mile out and they saw the beastly shapes beneath the now overhanging cloud. They were elk, reindeer, bison. Several thousand of them and they were moving diagonally to cross the caravan''s track. By five hundred yards their drivers were visible to Orc afoot. A handful of pale skinned northmen managing the leeward edges of the herd with tenfoot lances tied up with colorful flags that bannered out in the wind.


    The squire looked back at Orc. "Weren''t no plague after all," he said with a grin.


    Orc watched the marshal. The marshal watched the lancers.


    "How many do you make?" said the squire.


    The scout raised the telescope. "A dozen or two."


    "Think they''ve seen us?"


    "They have," said the marshal.


    "They don''t seem too worried bout us sir."


    "They do not."


    "Is this one of them spoils of war scenarios you were talkin bout?"


    Orc saw the marshal smirk in the same way Booky used to whenever she smelled an easy mark. "I would say so. Ready the men."


    The squire turned to the column and gestured with his arm and from the rear Orc heard orders barked and the column reformed as a double row with the marshal and squire and scout at its center and Orc and the hussar in the second row behind them.


    The swirling and rising cloud now occluded half of the sky and its shadow fell across the double row of the relief. The drone of it came to Orc''s ears and the horses noticed it next and he watched the dread of it spread through them. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.


    "What''s wrong with the stock?" said the hussar.


    The herd had begun to swing past the formed up relief and now they could see the discolorations and malformations of the beasts. Mangy elk with their hides half-flayed and the sinews of their muscles and their yellowish fascia bare to the elements and then keg chested chargers heavily muscled with open puncture wounds speckling their sides like the bosun''s appaloosa and branded with the mark of the king''s cavalry and then several head of bison with no eyes to speak of and finally the first of the herdsmen who themselves had strange bluetones in their hands and faces. They drove the herd between themselves and the relief. Behind them came a mass of several hundred but by then the cloud had begun to descend around the relief and the first grotesquely fattened flies bounced upon the soldiers'' pauldrons and got lost in their hair and fell down their shirts and the marshal and his men had begun to comprehend what was happening, what was about to happen.


    Already Orc could see through the plague and the once dead beasts where the masked device of the queen painted in blood and ichor flapped from the standards of the herders and now he could hear over the pounding of unshod hooves the chittering insectual roar, millions of filmlike wings clapping against carapace, and some among the relief had begun to slap at their own faces and some drew whatever weapons they bore when from the far side of the herd¡¯s screening and out of the rushing swarming living mass of carrionflies there emerged the nightmare horde of recurred men and women bearing lances and shields and bows and maggoty burlap sackfuls of the breathing plague that each expelled ten thousand black bodied horrors against the eyes of their enemies. Her eldest legion numbering in the thousands, clad in tattered funerary clothing or else the garb in which she had found them, motley costumes of shredded uniforms and the boiled skins of animals and spoiled silk fineries still fragranced with the odors of their last rites, mail cuirasses with links seized from blood rust, cloaks of cavalrymen holed by passing arrows, one in a tophat and one with a gentleman''s cane and one in a white child''s bonnet and some wore bison horns affixed to leather straps about their temples and some were horned like bulls and one in steeltoed boots and smelter''s gloves and otherwise naked and one in the spiked armor of an orcish champion, the helmet and breastplate rent open by old blows of halberds done in some bygone era by enemies long vanished from the world and many with their eyes glassed over and with the hair and fur of others woven onto their scalps and the rawhide of beasts sewn over their cleavages in rude patchwork and one whose whole body was burned cinder black and all of their faces were hollow and hungry and teeming with potbellied flies, all sprinting down upon them like a hellspawned horde, soundless beneath the noise of the plague.


    "Oh god," said the hussar.


    A flight of arrows rattled through the double rows and riders toppled from their horses. Mounts sawed back and reared and the risen charged straight into them with all manner of arms.


    The relief was now fighting back and the marshal''s repeater was clanging away and the gray pistolsmoke spurted forth and rolled off through the swarm as a risen staggered and reached for his legs. The hussar cracked his rifle once and tottered and peeled off of his saddle. Orc had already fired his pistol and now he knelt behind the limply lying hussar and grappled with his satchel for the next cartridge. The squire sat near him with scrub jay fletching coming out of his open mouth, hands on his knees, twin knives still in their sheaths across his breast. Orc would have reached for the shaft and pushed through the shaft but then he saw the second arrowpoint emerging between the ribs. All around him horses were down and soldiers were prone and firing and rising and falling again and he saw the marshal parry a lance with his saber and he saw men kneeling on the ground pouring ether from unstoppered bottles onto their blades and he saw a man bleeding from his stomach strike flint to his dripping longsword and the whole of him went up in a great shrieking flame and he saw men still dying lifted up by their hair and scalped and between the murk of the flies he saw the form of a longhorn and then it was gone. Among the dying some called out the names of women and some were silently holding their sides and chests with clenched fingers as if to dam up their flowing blood. The risen now turned the relief''s flanks driving impetuously with knives clenched between gaptoothed jaws and flies scattering off of their pumping arms and on the far side of the double rows the sounding of a horn of bone and a man there being lanced up once twice thrice like the peak of a pavilion and dragged from his saddle with a foot caught in the stirrup and the dry eyes shifting and rigored legs grossly jerking as if on spindles and wires until the risen had encircled the relief and left no shape of blue sky between the omnipresent plague. Out of that darkness they came with tongues hanging out of garrotted throats and fresh gunshot sizzling in their chests, rising up and skewering and clubbing the men and pulling them from their mounts and stripping the weapons and passing hooked knives over the skulls of the dead and over the skulls of the living and pressing the handfuls of hair against their own empty scalps, trading them amongst themselves, making the awful choking noise of the joyful undead. Now their herdsmen circled round and gathered up the relief''s horses and the animals'' eyes were white-rounded and rolling and their haunches feathered. The herdsmen leapt forward to cut through billet straps and tie downs and leapt away again before the animals kicked in their rotting teeth. They drove away their take and the risen moved from man to man covered in drying gore that was itself a kind of paint slathered over cavernous chests and clawlike hands already wearing the blood and viscera of past victims like inksoaked leaves of a chronicle of their conquests bound on their tightwarped skin. They took what had been taken from them and they knew in what was left of their soulless selves that the men they left gibbering and groaning and bleeding to death would some day rise and join their ranks, would some day perpetuate the violence first begun by kingsmen a generation ago of which some of their number yet remembered and of which some of their number were those first offenders.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Awareness] He knew as I did there¡¯s not much difference between the living lands and the dead one. Not when it comes to dying anyhow.

 70. A Survivor

    They had believed it to be a stormcloud. She told them otherwise, but they thirsted desperately and among the desperate prejudice reigns. They turned in its direction two nights back and she stole away by the light of the moons. The ground she crossed was slick with fresh ice of a material that was not water. It reeked and by then the moons had set and in the dim starlight she saw shapes on the ground. She didn''t need to bend to know what they were. She moved on, letting the farflung stones of that place guide her. It was bitterly cold and a wind stirred up out of the north. She walked all night and even with the wind against her she could still smell the stink of what had happened to some company of men back on the plain.


    At dawn she walked drymouthed toward the sole crag standing out of the horizon like a thumb. She hoped it might be the Thumb. She picked her way up the sloped field of broken shale and she heard a voice calling that was not of the stones. Looking she saw no one. She heard the voice again and she turned and saw a man climbing over the fallen boulders and ankledeep scree. He wore the uniform of a soldier and he frequently looked back down to the plain as if worried he was being followed. She could see he was alone.


    The soldier wore sidebuttoned trousers with sweatstains down the crotch and a torn up bloody tunic and he held his left arm close to his body as if it was injured. At twenty yards she put her longarm on him and said, "Oy, that''s far enough til ye tell me who ye are and what yer doin comin at me."


    The soldier stopped and sat down on a rock. "I ain''t nobody," he said. "I thought you was with the marshal¡¯s relief and now I see you ain''t."


    "Yer not from here?"


    "Ain''t nobody''s from here maam. You got any water?"


    "No."


    The soldier spat dryly and kept his head down. She thought she saw him sob.


    "How''s yer arm?" she said.


    The soldier pulled it close to his side with the opposite hand. "Ain''t nothin to worry about."


    "Do ye know where we are?"


    "The deadlands."


    She put her chin at the rock outcrop. "Is this the Thumb?"


    He looked up after her. "I don''t know what the hell that is."


    She lowered her longarm. "It''s where I''m headed. Yer welcome te come on after but I don''t have nothin te share but grit."


    Together they made it to the base of the outcrop and drank from a seep there by pressing their dry lips to the sharp surface. The stones were ancient and they spoke of magmatic ruptures and of a time when the whole of the tundra laid under a sheet of ice a half mile thick. She listened and asked of game or birds but they made no answer and again she wondered if they understood her at all.


    She and the soldier set down the far side of the outcrop and down to the floor of the tundra and they followed their shadows after a great track of beasts and men. They were small against the immensity of the landscape and the late sun had a harshness to it as if its glare might scour the sins from the land.


    As they walked she asked the man, "How''d ye come te be alone?"


    "Deaduns got us."


    She nodded as if expecting this. "I believe they got me companions as well."


    "Were y''all with the baron?"


    "No."


    ¡°The brigadier?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    "Then who were y''all with?"


    "Just some folks. I don''t know much about them save that they were desperate."


    The soldier scanned the horizon for sign of respite. "Ain''t no other reason to come out here."


    "Aye."


    In the evening they came upon a kind of narrowness in the plain. As if the land had once been folded there before being pressed flat again. They moved through it and found a shallow pool in its bottom. She noted the track of other animals in the thawed permafrost, wolves and buzzards. Booted feet. Shod hooves. The water was brackish and it held a greenish tint to it. They drank deeply and continued.


    By and by the land changed forms. The ground subsided in long and wide rifts as if a god had imprinted his knuckles upon the earth. They stuck to the precipices and diverted their eyes now ahead now downcanyon. On one precipice they came upon a hanging.


    They stopped side by side, shivering in the chill. The condemned, five, six of them, wore about their necks leather nooses made from horse tack and were hanged by these from swords hammered to their hilts into the earth. They swayed and turned gently in the breeze with their heads lolling at unnatural angles and their tongues bulged out of their heads from their last gasps. With his good hand the soldier tried a swordhandle but it wouldn''t budge. He stood away from it and wiped his nose on his elbow.


    "Friends of yers?" she said.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    "No. Baron¡¯s men looks like. Hanged by the brigadier or one of hers.¡±


    They moved on.


    In the afternoon they came to a walled village sited high between two rifts. The walls were newly made of frozen mud shaped by bare hands and rude trowels. From a distance it looked like a fortress. They watched and listened from outside the walls for a long time before they went around to the gate. The bar inside made from a wagon tongue, snapped like a twig. They walked through the narrow streets, looked in on the shacks and stalls, on the dead pigs and sheep and cattle, on the murdered and scalped folk. They turned down the widest street of the place and came to the chapel at which it terminated. A priest lay facedown in the yard. Beside him the pages of his open book flipped back and forth in the wind. They heard the bocking of hens and the buzzing of flies coming out of the open door. Blood pooled thickly there but from where they stood they couldn''t see whence it came. The soldier put his head in but Mym had had enough. She sat against the wall of a pit oven and closed her eyes. She opened them again when the soldier returned, gray in the face.


    "What do ye think?" she said.


    "I think I need a drink.¡±


    ¡°There¡¯ll be a well here somewhere.¡±


    ¡°Not that kind.¡±


    The soldier sat down beside her holding his arm.


    ¡°Ye want te head back?¡±


    ¡°Back where?¡±


    ¡°Through the Gap.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s what, two weeks in the open with no food to speak of?¡±


    ¡°I can dress out the hens here and there¡¯ll be other foodstuffs we could take.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯d never make it.¡±


    ¡°Ye got a better plan?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Not dyin to the deaduns. Someone¡¯ll come through here sooner or later. I¡¯ll just wait for them.¡±


    ¡°And if the risen return before then?¡±


    The soldier coughed. Sweat had begun to bead his forehead and he wiped the sleeve of his good arm across it.


    ¡°Ye alright?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m fine.¡±


    ¡°Think ye can collect wood with one arm?¡±


    ¡°What for?¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s good meat back there just needs butcherin. I¡¯d like te roast it up.¡±


    ¡°Well I ain¡¯t hungry.¡±


    She looked at him. He had not eaten once in the days they traveled together.


    ¡°Yer sick.¡±


    ¡°Naw.¡±


    ¡°Show me yer arm.¡±


    ¡°Go to hell.¡±


    Mym rose and went back up the street. The doorways were squat and were covered by wool drapes. Some of them were burned to their rods and some were strewn across the ground. A hovel¡¯s yet hung and she elbowed through its geometric pattern and downstepped into the dugout floor. The ceiling was low and the air was warmer out of the wind. In the wall a hearth had been cut out of the mud and in an alcove above it stood figurines of the human martyrs. Carved wood from somewhere trees grew abundant. Painted faces chipped from long journeys. In the adjoining room there was a cupboard with three bone dice, a glassful of beach sand, an empty tin can smelling of coffee. Strings hung from the ceiling with tiny beads of colored glass tied every few inches and plumbed by fragments of bone. She found a ceramic pot of half raised flour in the hearth and a small box of salt in a ransacked pantry. The salt reminded her of the day she and Khaz first met Cousins. She looked at it in her hand and she questioned again why she had left the delving. Whether it was just the manstone and the blue dwarves and the promise of making her folk whole again, or whether there was something else: the prime mover of dwarvenkind that is neither their slain gods nor their mineral ontology, her vengefulness unslaked, unsated, unabated since she spared Orc. Whether it was the sacred oath she took to destroy him, her forsworn enemy, her nemesis who was yet to die. After she had perished she believed her oath had been fulfilled. Yet there she was, compelled ever after him as if on a string. Perhaps it didn¡¯t matter that she¡¯d forgiven him. Perhaps if the stones still remembered her grudge they might behold her to it. Perhaps that was why the stones of the place made no sense to her. She had made herself alien to them and thus alien to what it meant to be dwarven.


    She stowed the unfinished bread and salt and by the time she returned to the chapel she also had a wheel of cheese sealed in wax and some sort of dried out tubers.


    The soldier was gone. The sun was below the circumscribing wall and everything was in shadow. She placed the food by the oven. She steeled herself and walked into the chapel. The soldier was standing in the antechamber. A solitary crossbeam of sunset through a high window joisted the vaulted ceiling to the eastern wall. Upon the floor were heaped the bodies of those homesteaders who sought to barricade themselves in the house of their god. Whose final hope lay in its forsworn salvation. There they lay, skullshorn, awash in their communal blood now coagulated into a sticky morass. Shattered glass and splintered altar strewn within like fossils found in tar. The icons torn from the tabernacle and desecrated. Trident tracks of yardfowl imprinted upon. The air smelled metallic, of iron. Of death. It hummed with flies.


    ¡°Let¡¯s go,¡± said Mym.


    She led him across the street to the oven. She made a chili of the bread and cheese and tubers. They ate it all.


    By first light they were a mile gone following the warpath of the risen horde. The soldier asked her why that way and at first she couldn¡¯t say, but as dawn broke over the east she halted to examine the flattened land. The thousands of tracks of beasts and of men. The bestilled carcasses of dead flies lay like blue cornseed across the ploughed up dirt. She brushed them aside. Her eyes were drawn to a print half overtrod by an elk¡¯s hoof and by a man¡¯s shamble. It might¡¯ve been an orc¡¯s.


    The soldier¡¯s shadow fell across it. ¡°I don¡¯t much like followin the deaduns.¡±


    ¡°They know this land better than us.¡±


    He spat and turned and looked back the way they had come.


    ¡°Yer arm stinks,¡± she said.


    ¡°What do you want me to do about it?¡±


    ¡°Ye should have washed it back at the well.¡±


    ¡°I did.¡±


    ¡°Ye should have washed it better.¡±


    She shifted and looked at the print again. She was sure it was an orc¡¯s. She closed her eyes and let her old feelings in.


    The soldier held his arm against his side and looked down at it. ¡°What¡¯s wrong with it ain¡¯t washin off.¡±


    ¡°Let me see it.¡±


    ¡°Go to hell.¡±


    She opened her eyes and saw he was silently weeping. She looked back at the print.


    ¡°Maybe we should go back,¡± he said. ¡°Wait for some other folk might be coming through. Maybe a doctor or some like.¡±


    ¡°Yer welcome te.¡±


    ¡°Maybe you can catch some of them chickens. Salt em up and roast em. I¡¯m gettin hungry again I think.¡±


    She traced her finger around the outline of print. ¡°Ye know it¡¯s got te come off.¡±


    He didn¡¯t say anything. She stood up from the track and swung her alpenstock around and tested her thumb against the adze. She nodded to herself and then nodded at a sizable rock with a flat surface suitable for the deed. "Best te do it now before it''s too late."


    The soldier shook his head vigorously, his eyes pressed shut and tears pouring out of them.


    She hoped to bring him some comfort by reaching her hand to his.


    His eyes flew open and a look of horror passed through them and he recoiled and he cried, "Leave them midget hands offa me! Goddamn little shit! Goddamn y¡¯all and goddamn that grayback and goddamn the marshal what signed him on.¡±


    She fought the urge to put a hole in his temple. ¡°What grayback?¡± she said.


    But his tears flowed freely now and he only shook his head and gibbered and cradled his arm. In that bitter chill she could feel the fever coming off of him. She slung up her alpenstock and turned and walked along the warpath. She didn¡¯t look back.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Stonespeaking] They had so little te reveal. Maybe cause their history¡¯s a plain one, maybe cause of some other reason.

 71. Refuge

    "Somebody''s coming," said Orc.


    "Risen?" said the marshal.


    "I can''t tell yet. Could be."


    The marshal sniffed and spat dryly and wiped his mouth and mustaches with the back of his wrist. He unbuttoned his trousers and after much grunting and huffing produced a brief stream of urine upon the rock. A fly buzzed out from someplace and landed its bloated body adjacent to that froth and drank from it with its thorax pulsing. The marshal swung his glove but the fly was already gone and the piss now soaked into the leather.


    They waited for what seemed like hours. Orc climbed down from their craggy perch into the parallel rifts looking for liquid water but he found none. Nothing grew from the frozen wasteland except bare stones and the windswept tor on which they lay. By noon they could see the individual figures leading horses and mules up the stone run of the rift below them. They were some of them orcs and sows. It was the longhorn that led them.


    The marshal was sitting with his head in his hands. "I was worried about my nephew outliving me," he said. ¡°I told his mother it was a certainty.¡±


    He looked at Orc. "Get on out of here."


    They had backed up into the shade of the ledge above them. Orc didn''t move. Soon they could hear the clop of the hooves and the scrabble of sliding rocks and the coughing of one and the gurgle of another. The first one to pass their vantage was a sow leading the marshal''s big destrier by a hackamore, the saddle nowhere to be seen. The marshal bellied out beside Orc to watch them pass. The company looked ragged and half-frozen trudging by in the wind and their heads were down as if they had no hope at all. There were a dozen of them. They wore rawhides and the furs of several beasts stitched together and they carried spears and lances and blades on their persons and in their hands. As they went past the longhorn looked up at the espying refugees and nodded severely to them and walked on.


    The marshal and Orc looked after them. Orc called out and the marshal had begun to clamber down the tor.


    Those of the company turned. The longhorn regarded the marshal''s descent and then called up to Orc in the language of their kinds. "What''s he want?"


    At that moment the marshal slipped and slid down the face of rock and landed hard on his back in the stone run. The sow with his horse strode out to where he had fallen and she chopped rudely at her crotch. The others grasped their bellies and laughed and threw back their heads and their howling was doubled by the echoing rocks. They clapped each other''s backs and turned and regarded the man with fangy grins.


    "Still hunting risen?" said the longhorn.


    With this the orcs guffawed and punched each other and slapped their knees. They bent over the marshal with their mouths hanging open and looked up at Orc as if eagerly waiting for some reply. The longhorn smiled at Orc, his thick teeth flat and white and made for grinding grain and chewing cud.


    "Water," coughed the marshal.


    The longhorn stopped smiling. "Water?" he said in mantalk.


    "Water," echoed his companions, their mouths awkwardly forming the word. They shivered with mirth.


    "Please," said the marshal.


    "Brave of you to travel without water in this place where there ain''t none but what you can suck out of the ground,¡± said the longhorn. "Almost as brave as hunting the dead in their own lands."This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    The longhorn turned his massive head slightly and reached back. Between his furs an orc produced a leather waterskin and handed it to him. He held his ear against it and squeezed. He offered it to the marshal who unplugged it and turned it upward and drank.


    Orc jumped down from the tor and came beside the marshal, waiting a turn. The marshal''s eyes were rolled back and he couldn''t see the longhorn''s frown. The longhorn slung out his arm and knocked the waterskin straight out of the marshal''s hands leaving him there in a frozen stance of kindling an invisible pipe with the waterskin flying and turning and globes of clear and sweet water shining in the daylight like suns in miniature before they splashed upon the rocks. Orc lunged after the waterskin and caught it as it fell and began to drink. The marshal coughed and frowned at the longhorn. Orc sucked and twisted out the last of the water.


    The longhorn stepped forward and drew his enormous maul from its place on his back and leaning forward he ran the cannonball head through the strap of the waterskin and he raised it up. The head passed within a few inches of the marshal''s face and the sow licked her lips. Orc let go of the skin as the longhorn raised the maul and he watched the strap slide down the shaft and onto the longhorn¡¯s wrist. The longhorn studied his face and smiled. He stoppered the skin and without looking he tossed it back to the orc who had produced it.


    "You should have hid," said the longhorn.


    "Would it have mattered?" said Orc.


    The longhorn nodded at the marshal. "For him it would have."


    The marshal seemed not to have heard this exchange. He looked past the longhorn at the sow who had taunted him, at the horse whose lead she held. "That is mine," he said.


    She looked at him then at the longhorn.


    "She understand me?"


    "Yes," said Orc.


    "I am not sure she does. Tell her that horse is mine Orc."


    "She knows it."


    "I want it back."


    "I''m sure she knows that too."


    "Well?"


    "Well what."


    The marshal looked at him with the patience of one used to dealing with incompetence and in the belief that was what he now faced. He held out his palm. "Give me your dirk."


    Orc didn''t move.


    "I said give me your dirk recruit and that is an order."


    Orc crossed his arms over his chest.


    The marshal now turned to him. "How do you think they came by these animals? They''re in league with the risen," he hissed.


    Orc sideyed the longhorn and saw his dusty eyes glimmer and his lip curl with a subdued elation.


    The sow looked back at her peers and then took a half step forward and held out the hackamore as if in offering. When the marshal reached for it she let it fall and it swung from the horse''s head out of the marshal''s reach. He drew himself up as tall as he could and looked at her as cooly as he could and he took another step toward the destrier. His back now to the sow she sidestepped as the longhorn onehanded the maul around and shattered the marshal''s skull. His brains splattered upon the horse and the rocks.


    The longhorn looked at Orc. "Kittens separated from their mother know better than to cry after her. Sometimes the mother comes. Sometimes the cur." He smiled at him and wiped the head of the maul on the marshal''s coat and then he shouldered back the maul. He clucked at the orcs and they turned their horses back up the path. The sow took up the hackamore and regarded Orc for a moment.


    "Sorry for your friend," she said.


    "He was no friend of mine."


    She smiled and she followed the company. Orc watched them go. He looked down at the marshal lying there. He shook his head and fell in after the sow. They did not restrain him nor did they mark his movements. Where else could he have gone in that great alien void?


    They descended the ridge into the next rift. They went down over the stone runs with their arms about them for warmth and their shadows fractured on the jumbled terrain. They were like creatures in the time after the sun¡¯s making yet before the ordering of creation, embracing themselves for some feeling of their form, seeking some common identity. They reached the bottom of the rift and climbed the top of the next and they continued across the top of the world, a westward crack in the dusk hinting at the mountains that delineated the deadlands from the northlands.

 72. Caught

    It was one of the settler families that found them, their oxen lumbering side by side over the tundra, breaths spewing white from their snouts like dragonsmoke. When the husband saw Mym and the soldier in the track before them he hauled up on the beasts and began to turn them around but by then Mym was up and had hold of the yoke and had stopped the wagon in its tracks. The soldier came shambling up to the jockey box. The wife dove into the cabin whence a child peered and she reappeared with an ancient smoothbore and passed it up to the husband. The soldier was already halfway alongside the man and he flopped himself into the cabin and lay unmoving on the wagonbed. The wife was yammering at the husband and she''d drawn her hand around the child. The husband pointed the smallbore at Mym and shouted haltingly at her and she hopped onto the tongue and balanced along it until she stood before him. He shrank back and pulled the trigger and nothing happened.


    Mym hopped up onto the jockey box and put a finger in the muzzle. "Ye fergot te powder yer pan," she said. She dropped down into the wagonbed and wrapped herself in a thick wool blanket there. The wife and child had drawn back into the far corner of the wagon and watched redeyed and pale and pinched like cornered rats. She nodded at them and she felt the wagon start to move again, clattering and creaking its way north to who knows where.


    There was a cask of water stowed on its head beside her and she knocked at its stave and heard the fullness of it. She levered out the bunghole and drank from the stream that poured without and the soldier dragged himself alongside and drank next. She plugged it up and laid back and as the wagonbed jerked up and down and back and forth she closed her eyes and slept as hard as she ever had.


    ***


    The wagon had stopped. It was dark inside and out. The bed was empty of the family and the jockey box abandoned. Through the rear portal she could see a great prominence silhouetted against the stars and forward were the tall and bonehipped hindquarters and hanging tails of the team. She hunkered down and slept again until the bark of a dog woke her. The feeling of a fly walking up her cheek. She sat up. Rising into the sky to the rear of the wagon and framed by the cinched canvas cover was a great spire in the shape of a thumb. She stretched her legs and her back and put her head out the front to see what was. The oxen were gone and she saw the low stone wall of a paddock and a house made of frozen clay with a drift of smoke curling out of a protruding stovepipe.


    She sat back on her heels and looked down at the soldier. He was lying faceup in the bottom of the bed with his arm tucked across his chest and flies crawling in and out of the sleeve. His lips were blistered and his skin was gray. She reached to wake him. The flies scattered and buzzed about. He was hard as stone and cold as the day. The flies settled back.


    She was squatting by the cartwheel when humans came upon her. They seized her as she pulled up her trousers and they seized her alpenstock and longarm and her pack. They bound her hands behind her back. They looked in at the soldier and made rancid faces and they prodded her into the settlement with the butts of their spears.If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    She was marched through the narrow streets of the settlement where she saw the houses built atop the ruins of others, mud adobe emerging from stonewrought foundations that suggested what had once been before that country was given over to the dead. She was herded by men who spake not at all. They passed a circular fountain built over a hot spring that steamed in the crosswise sunlight and the bundled folk with rolled sleeves laundering on its stones. They passed an old mansion that had once been the provincial governor''s and they passed a smoke stained cathedral where white ravens roosted along the sooty buttresses and among the niches of the dwarfcarved frieze between martyrs unknown to her, the birds crouching on the upheld hands of some god and their splattered shit dried all down his face as if he wept white tears.


    They passed refugees sitting on the steps under the church door with their seamed faces downcast and some of them missing hands and eyes and their children asleep in their arms or in their laps. Hunks of hard bread clacked in a tarnished silver offertory, fine scrollwork etched around. A pilgrim crouched on the steps with his travelstained robe gathered around and his book clutched in his hand and his talisman hanging from a chain. They passed into a side street where wolflike dogs nosed at something in the gutter and meat pie merchants and thin urchins with sunburnt faces as bleak as the land crouched in a doorway over a panfire where greasy strips of pork belly sizzled and set Mym''s mouth to watering. Old women teetered opposite their passing as if in their final hours and frontiersmen and fortune seekers lounged in pairs and trios in open doorways. They moved her past the metropolitan meat market and the copper smell where racks of anonymous steaks hung in dark red drapes and whole pigs lay side by side on tables and plucked geese and doves and chickens hung neck downward from lines strung from awning to awning and a tanner heaped damp pelts into a deep wicker basket beside an open pitcher full of brain matter.


    She was driven past these throngs and down a stair and under an archway with a conspicuous granite keystone that whispered to her of faraway places. Along a subterranean hall warmed by the earth about. At the hall''s end she was pushed through a rod iron gate and into a circular dungeon that smelled of urine and of forgotten things into which daylight dimly shone through a solitary sewerhole in the domed ceiling. The gate clanked closed behind her.


    She could make out folk huddled along the circumference of the prison and rags that might''ve been men lying on beds of hide and hay from which there came light breathing. Shadows passed the hole. The calling of vendors from without and the screech of metalworking from somewhere deeper in the underground complex. Mym looked for a place to make her own. An empty bed of hay and mold and a scattering of fleas within. An extinguished candle melted in its own wax. She turned from it.


    In the center of the room stood a tall dark figure shirtless and in sidebuttoned trousers and a floppy hat. Along the wall the others shrunk back from him. He came Mym''s way. He wore his long hair in a dreadlock tied upon itself between his shoulderblades.


    She squinted up at him. "I''d know yer stink in a public shithouse."


    He looked down at her. "About time you showed up."


    "Should''ve known better than te trust some pigheaded orc te count much past the fingers on his claws."


    "Should''ve known better than to trust some firebellied beardling from grabbing her trigger."


    They stood there regarding each other. Then they started laughing.

 73. Jailed

    The sewerhole¡¯s circle of daylight advanced to ovular across the floor. The pale ghosts of men and self proclaimed innocents sat up in their rags and leaned on their elbows studying the new arrivals. Pneumoniatic breathing rasping in their chests, picking at themselves like monkeys, filthy shells of men who existed loosely in their extra skin. He led Mym back to his pallet. A clopping of hooves passed the hole with a sudden shadow. In the momentary dark he pulled a heel of bread out of his hiding place and he put it in her hand.


    "Thanks," she said.


    He nodded at her. She looked awful.


    "Ye look like shit."


    "Speak for yourself."


    She tore off a piece of the bread with her teeth and she talked around it. "I take ye didn''t find yer old lady."


    "That''s a truth."


    "She''s up here somewhere."


    "I''ve heard as much. How about you?"


    "What about me?"


    "Did you find those dwarves you were looking for?"


    She stared at him. "What dwarves?"


    "Whichever ones you''ve been after."


    "I haven''t been after any dwarves since we split."


    "Alright."


    "I haven''t."


    He watched her take another bite. "You were just a long time coming."


    "Maybe think about that fore ye go traipsin off on yer own again."


    "I had a whole township after me."


    "All the more reason te not go alone."


    He nodded and looked up at the other prisoners. They shifted about, watching and listening. "Well, I''m not alone anymore."


    "No but ye ought te be."


    He looked back at her. "I think you''d better tell me what''s troubling you."


    She swallowed dryly. She coughed.


    "You may want to wait on eating that whole. They won''t water us until they work us," he said.


    "How long have ye been here?"


    "Two days."


    She sucked her teeth and swallowed again. "I didn''t come here on purpose."


    "Me neither."


    "I mean te say that I didn''t find ye of my own accordin."


    "I thought you could find anyone anywhere."


    "Aye and I could until we came north. The stones here speak mighty strange and they aren''t understandin me one bit. Nor is the land right. I caught a sniff of ye once or twice but when I followed yer trace it took me places ye''d never been, least if the stones there were tellin true."


    "Can stones lie?"


    "Not any I''ve ever met."


    "Maybe it''s just the deadlands."


    "It wasn''t much better on the other side of the Gap."


    She touched his arm and lowered her voice. "Ye feelin anythin?"


    "A little uncomfortable with how close you''re getting."


    Her eyes menaced. "Ye know what I mean."


    "No. Nothing."


    "Ye sure it''s still up here?"


    "The bosun said as much."


    "Then ye ought te be feelin somethin."


    "Maybe. We may not be close enough."


    "Bones." She dropped her hand. "I can''t imagine wadin any deeper into this shit."


    He shook his head. "Yeah, but we''ll have to."


    "Maybe it doesn''t work like ye think it does."


    "The manstone''s out of the same as the orcstone and the dwarfstone, right?"


    "Aye and that elfstone ye say raised ye up, least that''s how the legend goes."


    "Then I''ll feel it."


    She nodded once. She looked up at the curvature of the dome and down at the wretched in their corners. More than a few of them armiger''s men. "Two days and ye haven''t busted out."


    "I''ve got a way."


    "Then what''s the holdup?"


    "I was waiting on you."


    She chuckled. "Well as ye were."


    He nodded and looked up at the hole in the ceiling. "It''s strange though isn''t it?" He looked back at her. "All the wide leagues in their hundreds up here yet we still wind up side by side."


    "I''d say more like neck and neck."


    "You really didn''t track me here?"


    "Swear te the stones."This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    "Alright."


    ***


    Midmorning guards entered and the prisoners were hobbled like horses and chained together on a string and were half walked half dragged out to the streets. The taskmaster was a balding man elected to it by the cityfolk and he carried Booky''s blade and a ninetails with iron bits looped on to the strands. He routed them down to the gutters and harried them in the collection and separation of refuse. Human filth and pigshit into one bag for fertilizing and everything else into a cartbed for desiccating. They crawled on their hands and knees gathering it up from under the legs of the destitute and under the wheels of wagons and in the penstocks and in the toilet vaults. They were watered as promised and as the shadows grew long in the afternoon they sat together against a butchery and ate their hard bread dinner and ignored the wandering eyes of their fellow inmates.


    He felt her lean against his side. "There''s somethin I didn''t tell ye before," she whispered.


    He kept eating and made no sign that he''d heard.


    "That church facade is dwarfmade. Same with some of these foundations, and the dungeon too. Maybe they''re local."


    "I''ve seen the locals and they aren''t it."


    She looked up at him. At the sweat beading down from the hat he wore. "Where''d ye get that dead thing?"


    "Came off the posse."


    "It''s ridiculous."


    "I was trying to look a bit more human."


    "Like I said."


    The taskmaster strolled past with his hands on his weapons. He spat at Mym''s feet. Orc could feel her spirits rising.


    "I saw him first," said Orc.


    "Who?"


    He nodded at the taskmaster. "You leave old slickskull to me."


    "Oy we finally done playin shit shoveler?"


    "Just about."


    "Ye tell me when."


    He laid a hand on her shoulder. "Not here," he said. "When we get back to the oubliette."


    "The what?"


    "The oubliette."


    "Orc sometimes I swear I don''t know whether yer puttin me on."


    The taskmaster whistled sharply through his teeth and kicked at any prisoner who got up too slowly. Orc and Mym stood against the wall. A squadron of cavalry were dashing up the lane to the old governor¡¯s mansion. The taskmaster¡¯s side man lowered his spear at the prisoners as if they might break their shackles and chains and rise up in general revolt. ¡°Git you back! Git you back!¡± he called. The tattered and broken felons shuffled over to where Orc and Mym stood. The riders came trotting past and Orc had his eyes on the taskmaster and didn''t notice the brigadier until it was too late. She passed five feet away and held her fineboned face aloof of the deplorables. Her blue eyes ever on her destination though perhaps she lowered them slightly to note the downtrodden, just the slightest tilt of her chin. She passed by and her head barely moved on the trot and she rode the horse as if she was born to it. The lace in her hair was the bright pink of a new dawn. Then she was gone.


    "What''s the matter with ye?" he heard Mym say.


    He was standing alone against the wall. Mym waited on the street before him. The other prisoners were moving along the gutter with their hands thrust into the filth piled therein.


    "That was her," he said.


    "That was who?"


    "The brigadier."


    "I couldn''t see anythin over the grubbers." She peered up the lane and then turned down the lane. "She''s not the only one comin in."


    At the end of the street where it bent toward the city wall he now saw a pack of barbarous looking hunters, bearded men and wiry women mounted on warhorses riding half drunk ahead of an infantry of brownskinned orcs and longnailed sows and bawdy little greenskins and a pitchblack tusker with ivory tusks, all of them vicious and clad in the furs of wolves and bears and bearing weapons of all cultures and customs, talonlike sickles and singleshooters of ancient design and onehanded blades the size of bastards and doublebarreled handcannons with bores wider than shotglasses and the bits in their horses'' jaws were of pure gold and silver and their saddleskirts fashioned out of tanned manskin and they bore their teeth like mongrels and their riders'' coats fringed with leathery scalps stitched in with the hair still on and draping down over their knees, the orckin walkers among them halfnaked and great thick ink tattooed across their chests and arms and thighs as if the patterns themselves would ward a blow and their eyes flashed with danger, brutality, hunger, the whole of the company like a flesh and blood nightmare stalking by day their midnight victims.


    At the head of it all, lumbering as if out of a distant memory with his face ashen and eyes in shadow, strode the longhorn. The tips of his horns were painted gold and he was grinning and winking at the street waifs who had gathered to watch the procession. The enormous spread of his horns swept over the heads of those around him like a headsman''s ax rising before the fall. His head turned to where Orc stood and he nodded. Orc nodded back. The longhorn and the rowdy horde around him rambled by the stupefied citizenry and halted before the governor''s mansion where their big man, a stout and bald dwarf whose beard dragged between his feet, stamped at the huge alder door with the bottom of his boot. The door swung open and the dwarf led all of them in, and the door was barred again.


    Orc turned to Mym. "I didn''t expect to see one of your kind up here."


    She was shaking with excitement or rage or some other emotion. "He''s not one of me kind," she said.


    He looked back at the door as if the dwarf might reemerge at any moment. "Could''ve fooled me."


    "That ironsided fellow there is a blue dwarf. They''re nothin like us and if ye couldn''t tell from here just wait til ye meet one."


    "What''s he doing here?"


    "Skulls and stones if I know. Nothin good by the company he''s keepin."


    ¡°You saw the longhorn then?¡±


    ¡°Aye I saw.¡±


    The taskmaster noticed them idling and came at them screeching and shaking his ninetails and pointing to the filth in the gutter. Orc eyed Booky''s blade on the man''s hip. It would have been nothing to simply draw it and run it into the taskmaster''s heart.


    He felt Mym''s hand on his wrist. "Easy there," she said.


    She pulled him down until he found himself on his knees. The taskmaster hovered there fingering the braids of the ninetails until they began to scoop and slop out the gutter. The next time they looked up the taskmaster was gone and the longhorn stood with his shadow across them. He chewed a stalk of cottonweed with dirt still clumped on the roots. He withdrew the sprig from his teeth. "Well well," he said. "Look at the two of you."


    "What do ye want?" said Mym.


    "It ain''t about what I want. It''s about what you want."


    She looked at Orc. He shook his head.


    The longhorn smiled at them, or appeared to smile. "You ready to cut out of this shithole?"


    "You''re who stuck me in it," said Orc.


    "Now now blame for that lies with the last man you took up with. Whom you joined free of coercion or succor. Whose men you abetted in their singular genocide. You ain''t an owned slave anymore scaler. You¡¯re responsible for your decisions. Now pray tell who stuck whom?"


    Orc watched him.


    "You want to meet her?" he said to Orc. "You want to meet him?" he said to Mym.


    They looked at each other under filthstreaked brows. Shit up their arms and under their nails. A pair of reeking indigents.


    Mym turned to the longhorn. "And what are ye askin fer yer intervenin?"


    "Sign on with us."


    "Doin what?"


    The longhorn grinned. "God''s work. Cleansing the land."


    "Of the risen?"


    "Of any who don''t belong."


    Mym squinted at him. "Whose side are ye on?"


    "There ain''t any sides wedwarf. There''s living and there''s dying and down in the shit there it looks like you ain''t doing much of either."


    "Who leads you?" said Orc.


    "The company is Uhquah''s."


    ¡°Who?¡±


    ¡°The dwarf.¡±


    "And what about her?"


    The longhorn smiled coyly. "Who?"


    Orc felt his rage begin to rise like a midsummer sun on the back of his skull. The manacles were heavy on his wrists and there was plenty of slack chain between them to garrot a man, perhaps enough to loop it over six feet of horns.


    The longhorn''s smile deepend. "You mean Kathryn."


    "Fuck off."


    The longhorn threw back his head and laughed deeply from the belly. The stalk flitted up and down from his open mouth. The laughter died away down the street. The longhorn''s eyes had in them the red glaze of alcohol as if fired and sealed under a thinspread enamel of blood. "Thus shall I intervene."


    The taskmaster sauntered up to them. "What''s all this then? Git on otaur else I''ll put you down there with em."


    The longhorn drew Booky''s blade from the man''s hip and slid it in beneath the burnished nickel emblem he''d pinned onto the vest he wore. The taskmaster''s eyes widened and then rolled back and he collapsed into a heap of stacked shit that splattered out from under him in brown globules to land on the wall and in the street. The side man had run up and when he saw the taskmaster''s body sinking into the heap he dropped his spear and fled into an alley.


    Two days later they filed through the streets trailing the longhorn afoot and the blue dwarf on a razorbacked mule and the cavalry of humans and the motley of orcs and their kin. The locals lined the streets smiling and waving at the hunters. Young women hung from windows throwing down kerchiefs and kisses. The street imps scampered alongside the horses shouting and cheering. The hardmen and hardwomen of the city nodded knowingly. Out past the city wall by an ancient stonecairn a wizened wrangler standing among his herd called out his thanks to the fabled company of the brigadier. She had taken her squadron by that road just the day before. So the longhorn had said.

 74. A Bet

    It was said one of this company was too monstrous for the city. They traveled half a day to a talus heap on the plain that Mym recognized as a volcanic remnant though its stones revealed little of their history to her. Always she watched the blue dwarf at the head of the column so she didn''t notice the way Orc steadily shrunk into himself nor did she see the monster sat in the talus nor the woman who handled it until they had passed them by.


    Mym touched Orc''s elbow and nodded at the pair on the roadside. "Oy. Isn¡¯t she yer friend?"


    He had his hand held against the side of his face. "Don''t look at them."


    "Orc!" called the woman.


    His shoulders grew higher yet.


    "Hey Orc!"


    He dropped his hand and straightened. He turned to the woman. "Booky," he grumbled. "Ogre."


    "Look der," said Right.


    "Is dat Orc?" said Left.


    "I saw him first."


    "No you didn''t."


    The ogre¡¯s heads, still sere from Daraway''s fire, swung toward one another and their arms raised and for a maddened moment Mym thought the creature might contrive to fight itself.


    Booky came alongside the company with Ogre lurching after with their heads still snarling and their arms still grappling as if neither noticed where their legs were taking them.


    "Ye made it out of the wynds," said Mym.


    "Sure did and I got y''all ta thank for it. Reckon I''d have never found this lout otherwise. It was a sight squeezing his lardy ass outta some of them dwarfy tunnels."


    Mym glanced over at Orc and saw his discomfort. She smiled at the woman. "I''m sure it was."


    "Hey listen," her voice dropped an octave, "ya still got y''alls magic rock? I''ve got a mighty sore coming up between my thighs from all this walking we done. It''s up there and I sure wouldn''t turn down any relief y''all can offer."


    "Sorry."


    "I mean it''s way up there."


    "We don''t have it."


    "No?"


    Mym shook her head. "No."


    Booky screwed up her mouth and turned and spat. She reached over Mym''s head and poked Orc. "How''s my boy? I heard they was calling you Nizam now."


    Orc shook his head. "Not me."


    "Ain''t he modest. Ya know little dwarfette back when we was still eating buttered mush and sleeping on a board he''d stoke up any and every crowd we got til they was shouting his name so loud they''d heard of him two parishes over. Where''s that Orc now I say?"


    "I didn''t stoke anything."


    "Boy how I miss those days. Hey! Hey dumbshit!"


    Booky had turned to where the ogre was still engaged in its absurd standoff. She slapped the ogre in the gut and a shockwave rolled through the fat and back again.


    "Goddamn they just won''t quit. Maybe ya could talk ta em Orc? Maybe they''d listen to ya."


    "What''s the matter with them?" he said.


    She shook her head. "Bad blood boiling over between em. I couldn''t tell ya why. When I ask they just talk one over the other so bad I could make a meal outta it."


    "Ogre?" said Orc.


    Mym watched their massive heads turn to him and they started jabbering in a language she didn''t understand and their arms gestured wildly and the others of the company made faces and leaned away as they walked and rode past.


    After they''d finished Booky looked at Orc. "Well?"


    "Bad blood," he said.


    "But they gots the same blood!"


    "Yeah, it¡¯s a problem."


    As four they stepped after the column and caught its rear. As they walked the ogre¡¯s right head would lean over and whisper to the left. The left head would twitch suddenly as if shaking off a buzzing pest and push on their gut as if trying to pry themselves in two, as if Right was a violation of Left and had begun some arcane ritual born of the black blood flowing through their common veins that sought to conjoin what was unnaturally separated. Right laughed and sang sweet words to Left that sounded to Mym like the crooning of lovers but she could not be sure of their meaning.


    "Ye know what they''re sayin?" she said.


    "Some of it," said Orc. "Not all."


    "Ye goin te do somethin about it?"


    "Like what?"


    "I don''t know. Reason with em."


    "Have you ever tried to reason with an ogre?"


    "No."


    He shrugged. "You can¡¯t unspoil milk."The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    "What do ye mean by that?"


    He nodded over. "Look at them. The brigadier had a monsterary I¡¯d look through sometimes trying to figure out what the hell I was. Ogres were in there too. It said that each head houses half a brain so they can only have a singular thought between them."


    "I see."


    "No you don''t. The book was full of shit and if you saw the yarns it spun about dwarves you¡¯d know it. I spent all day every day with Ogre for two years. Each of those heads houses a whole squish of brains just as sure as yours or mine. Problem is they''ve only got one heart thumping in that great lardy body they share. Not enough blood to go between."


    She nodded and understood it in her dwarven way. "Yer sayin it''s a problem of mechanics."


    "Sure."


    She slowed her step and watched the ogre to see what would happen between them. The agitation was getting out of hand but it was plain to her that no one of that company had the power to affect the outcome. The monster was too big. Too dangerous.


    Come noon the blue dwarf dismounted and cut off of the road with his ear downturned to the earth as if he heard some advisement in the pulses of its magmic blood. The company followed. An hour later they came to a shack with a sod roof alone on that desolate plain. Another dwarf emerged from within, naked in the chill but for the beard he wore wrapped around his entire body like a hairy toga. Mym crept forward from their place at the column¡¯s rear and stood at the edge of their meeting.


    The blue dwarves went into the broken home and emerged carrying a tarnished metal box riveted together like compound platemail. The runes stenciled on were dwarven though the words they formed were meaningless to her. The naked dwarf took a pickaxe from the one called Uhquah and with it he pried open the box. He pulled out a long flat package tied up in thin white canvas that was so soaked with grease she could see right through it. Uhquah untied the twine and let the canvas breeze away and tumble across the tundra like a lame hare finally freed from the snare. Uhquah lifted the rifle it had wrapped in both hands as if weighing it. It was of dwarven make, but one Mym could not identify. It had neither pan nor hammer apparent, and forward of its trigger a curious orifice gaped on the stock¡¯s underside. The naked dwarf was showing Uhquah the handmolds by which to manufacture the shot and the tools for repair and the flasks of powder and oil and the longhorn was untying another of the parcels. The cavalrymen stepped off of their horses and pressed forward. Uhquah caught the canvas wrapping from the longhorn and used it to wipe down the barrel and bore and the orifice and he pulled a kind of metal ingot from the box.


    "Some sort of repeater," said a cavalier.


    Uhquah seated the ingot into the orifice and pulled a bolt from the top of the chamber and drove home the charge. He looked about. In that empty plain the only living things were the hunters and their mounts. Uhquah sighted the blown away wrapping now three hundred yards off and still running away. He leveled the weapon and tucked it back against his shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The report in that dead silence rang about and on and on over the plain for miles. A great plume of dust kicked up off the ground some ways short of the wrapping.


    Uhquah held up the rifle and looked at his men. "We''ve twelve o these carbines and I''ll be keepin two for meself. Any o you who think you can hole up that runner come and show us and this one''s yours te keep."


    The men looked at each other.


    "And if we miss?" called Booky.


    "I knew it was you who was goin te ask. Miss and you''re guaranteed not a thing out of this here box and you''ll be payin a whole gold piece for the spent shot."


    The canvas now flapped out four hundred yards, snagged up on what must have been the only bush on the plain. The men shook their heads and spat. There were thirty, forty of them. "We gonna draw lots for the ten?" said one.


    Mym stepped forward. The sound of her footfalls soft on the hardpan in the shackyard. Uhquah watched her come. The naked dwarf''s eyes narrowed as if he''d not seen her before and wished he''d never seen her at all.


    She took the offered carbine. She felt its weight. Must have been ten pounds or more. She brushed the muzzle with her fingertip and looked at what it left there. She set her pack on the ground and her longarm and alpenstock atop it. At four hundred yards the white canvas lay broadside on the bush. She backed the bolt and the casing of the last shot ejected from it and she caught it between her fingers by instinct and a sudden hush fell among the company. She pocketed the brass and peered into the chamber and saw the mechanism there and understood its function. She charged the next round and closed the bolt with a clang.


    The carbine at her shoulder. The twitching white target. The wind in her hair at such velocity. She whispered to the metals in the alloying and she was surprised to hear their encouragement. She adjusted her aim and squeezed on the exhale. The weapon exploded with noise and fire and kicked violently as if it held within it the full power of a stormfront. She lowered the weapon as the wind stole off the gunsmoke. Plain as day in the middle of the white banner was a dark hole where none had been before.


    Uhquah nodded at her and handed her another of the ingots. She held it in her hand and then shook it gently next to her ringing ear and she heard the charges rustle therein.


    The naked dwarf made a noise like a growl and he spoke so low only the dwarves could hear. "You didn''t tell there''d be whites comin."


    Uhquah was picking up another of the carbines and set to loading it. "I didn''t know it at the time."


    "She''ll solve it. Look at her. She already has."


    Mym lowered the ingot from her ear and shoved it into her pack. As she turned from the box she nearly ran into the longhorn.


    "Care there wedwarf," he said. He was in a shooter''s stance and the carbine looked like a toy gun in his huge hands. He had rent apart the triggerguard to accommodate his tremendous finger and he aimed and fired. All looked downrange. They saw neither the telltale plume nor heard the shattering of rock. A solitary hole yet in the canvas.


    As the roaring subsided some of the men shook their heads. "How far''s that bullet bound to go?" said one.


    "Beyond the ends of the earth," said the naked dwarf.


    Uhquah turned to the longhorn and held forth his hand.


    "I''ll take that crown off you and another for damagin the metalwork."


    The longhorn put up the weapon and bolted in another charge. "No you won''t."


    Uhquah''s face darkened. "Let''s not start on bad footin. I brought you on account of the brigadier but I''m under no obligation te keep you. You knew the rule of the game. You overshot."


    "I didn''t."


    "You did. Give it here. Who''s next?"


    As this was happening Mym was watching the canvas. She was the first to spot the smoke. Soon the entire bush burned white hot and the canvas went up with it. A pillar of fire and then smoke and then nothing.


    The longhorn held the carbine by the comb. "I guess that means the game''s over."


    "What the hell happened there?" said Booky.


    "Hot lead," said Mym. She turned to the longhorn. "Ye put it straight through me own hole."


    The longhorn shrugged. He was tearing one of the canvas wrappings into strips and braiding them together and feeding this makeshift strap through the loops brazed on the butt and fore. "The gun''s what does the work." He slung the carbine over his shoulder and looked at the sky. "Sun''s advancing."


    Mym trod back to where Orc was standing with the ogre. He had Booky''s blade in his hand and was looking at the open country about as if measuring the equidistance of its reach. "That was quite a shot," he said.


    "Aye." She looked back at the longhorn. "Not so difficult as I took it te be."


    Booky came by. "Y''all see that shooting?"


    Orc sheathed the blade. "Yeah."


    She nodded at it resting there on his hip. "This ain''t the pit no more partner. Y¡¯all are gonna need a longer knife ta contend with folk hereabouts."


    Booky went over to the ogre. Mym turned to Orc. ¡°She¡¯s probably right,¡± she said.


    He shrugged. ¡°The marshal had an arsenal of guns and I don¡¯t recall them making any difference.¡±


    He walked off after Booky. Mym watched him go.


    The carbines were distributed among the cavaliers. Beside the longhorn none of them were given to the orckin. As the column filed away from that place Mym turned a last time. There stood the naked dwarf before the shack, watching back. The blowing wind unfurled his beard from his form and it flagged out in a horizontal line and the hideousness of him was laid bare.


    She turned away. She looked at the carbine in her hands and she wondered what other designs the blue dwarves had contrived, and why.

 75. Two Scalers and a Sow

    As the west reddened he watched the tusker scout return. The humans swung out of their saddles and set their horses to graze on the thin tundra grass while the scout briefed Uhquah. Orc noticed the longhorn standing uninvited close by the conference. Uhquah roused the cavalry again and they journeyed until the day was well past and in a place that felt like the middle of nowhere they made their camp.


    He settled down with Mym a few yards from the brushfires made by the others. Booky and Ogre joined them and Booky told them they had replaced two who had died in a blizzard some weeks before.


    "Alright," he said.


    Booky sat there and just looked at him with a stupid smile. "On the trail with my old partner. I can''t even believe it," she said.


    "Me neither."


    Ogre grumbled something and Booky turned to them and soon they were a few yards away with Ogre clumsily rummaging through their baggage while Booky supervised.


    By the light of the others'' fires Orc saw Mym''s eyes flick to his. "Ye sure ye want te run with this lot?"


    "How''s it going with your speaking?"


    "No better."


    "Then I''d say these are our best chance of finding the brigadier."


    "Yer puttin a lot of stock in someone ye haven''t seen in years by yer own countin. Someone who left yer sorry butt at the mercy of a couple slavers."


    Orc nodded. "Yeah, maybe."


    "Certainly."


    "She knows more about the stoneshards than anyone."


    "So ye say."


    "Not me," he said. He dug through the satchel in his lap and pulled out the lacewrapped journal. "Her."


    She nodded at the little book. "Unless that''s full of lies."


    He flipped it open but it was too dark to read. He knew it held a lie. At least one, written in her own hand. "We''ll just have to ask her."


    "I don''t trust that longhorn."


    "Good."


    "What odds ye think he''s goin te lead us to your old lady?"


    "Two to one against."


    "That''s about what I figured."


    He put the journal back in the satchel and cinched the bag up. "If he doesn''t we''ll be wandering the thousand mile wastes waiting until I feel something."


    She looked over to where Uhquah sat his fire. "Or until I get the stones te understand me asks."


    He saw her looking. "You think he''ll help?"


    "Maybe."


    "His little friend didn''t seem thrilled to have you here."


    "Cause he''s not."


    He sat back on his elbows and was instantly too cold and so he hunched forward again. "There''s safety in numbers."


    "Safety." She sounded doubtful.


    "Yeah. Safety. You weren''t there."


    "Maybe if ye''d waited around fer me I would''ve been."


    "We''ll want as many around us as we can get. I wouldn''t want to run into that band of risen just the two of us out here or anyplace else."


    "As many as we can get."


    "Yeah."


    "Even them who can''t be trusted."


    "You heard the longhorn. There''s living and there''s dying. I trust the living to want to stay that way and I trust the dying to try and force the opposite."


    "That so?" she said. "What about yer sailor friend? The bosun."


    He shook his head. "The risen out here aren''t like him."


    "Well what about the otaur there?"


    "The longhorn?"


    "Aye. He''s risen too."


    He looked at her and saw the seriousness there. He turned to where the longhorn stood, a black mass before the gathering dark. "You sure?" he said.


    "Come on. Half his face is half fallin apart.


    "If that''s so then he should know right where the manstone is."


    "Makes ye wonder why he''s not taken yer old lady te it."


    "Did you ask him?"


    "If there''s a fool sittin here it''s not me."


    Booky and Ogre came back to their fire. Ogre leaned forward and dropped a pile of dry brush the size of Mym.


    "Burn it on up y''all," said Booky. "I''m freezin my tits off."


    ***


    Dawn came early in such open country as this. The cavaliers were about catching and saddling their mounts and the orckin watched while huddled around the poxscars of their extinguished fires. They were all of them departed by the coldest time of morning. A jaggedness of mountains hung blue in the west and the tundra about yellowed to the coming sun and Orc heard the song of birds for the first time in weeks. The sun rose and its light caught a quarter moon at zenith and a full moon at setting so that sun and moons all lay equidistant from each other and the company seemed to form the fourth corner of a square circle within which all things burned in a common fire and beyond which darkness reigned forever. The company came single file down a subsidence and the methane smell and a jostling of tack and a clank of arms. The thawing land steamed in the sunlight. The celestial spheres revolved on.


    Orc had fallen in beside a scaler sow from one of the armiger''s camps. She was called Tulula and she had come north after Glad Nizam''s uprising. She was missing some fingers and some teeth and she wore the splintered bones of men pierced through her eyebrows and had cuffed both forearms in barbed campwire. She invited him to walk with her though he couldn''t say why. Perhaps she saw in him a kinship in their shared lineage. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    "You know that ogre?" she said.


    "I used to."


    "There''s a pool going which head will kill the other."


    Orc glanced back at where Ogre walked. "It won''t go like that," he said.


    "No?"


    "No."


    She spat to one side. "Could be they''ve changed more than you be accounting."


    Orc looked at her. The human hair fringed across her bust looked like dried rivergrass. She was slim and meanlooking and one of her elbows crooked where it had been broken by an overseer''s discipline and she bore arms of every kind, sharp and spiked and blunt. She wore an embroidered leather harness and she carried a fine oaken bow but it was strung with animal gut and she carried its arrows in an old boot slung from the harness at her hip.


    "You''ve not hunted risen before," she said.


    "Not on purpose."


    "I can tell."


    Orc didn''t answer.


    "You be awful different you know that?"


    "I''ve been told"


    "You went over with Glad Nizam?"


    "Yeah."


    "Did you know Grukluk?"


    "I don''t think so."


    "What about Hadoh?"


    "No."


    "Both came out of Geltwald, same as me."


    He shook his head. "I didn''t get to know many of those who went."


    "You heard what happened over there?"


    "Yeah I heard."


    "Too bad."


    "Yeah."


    She reached over and brushed back the brim of his hat. He started at first but allowed her to do it.


    "That skull cover makes you look human," she said. "So which camp did you come out of?"


    "I didn''t."


    She studied his face as if she didn''t believe him. "Didn''t know there be any orcs living outside the camps."


    "There weren''t many."


    "You and that ogre."


    "Yeah. Some greenskins too. A dogman."


    She nodded. "So that be how you know the bookmaker."


    "Yeah."


    "She''s told stories about you."


    "Best you don¡¯t believe them."


    "She said you went off to heal the Madlands with some beardling magic."


    He shrugged.


    She tilted her head in a way that made her seem demure. "Didn''t work?"


    "Not like I''d hoped."


    ¡°So you came here.¡±


    ¡°I came to find the brigadier.¡±


    She smiled. ¡°You came here hoping to steal the necromagic. You be hoping it works where beardling magic didn¡¯t.¡±


    ¡°She tell you that too?¡±


    ¡°No.¡± She fingered the strap of his satchel where it crossed his chest. ¡°It be easy to see.¡± She dropped her hand. ¡°Many others be here for it. Thousands even. The army that burned Glad Nizam. The kingsmen. Many thousands.¡±


    ¡°I haven¡¯t seen any of them.¡±


    ¡°You will,¡± she said. ¡°It be big country. The risen corked the bottle down at the Gap and now they¡¯re gone all be coming in wanting to get rich. Wanting other things too. You will see plenty up here you thought you were done with.¡±


    He looked back at Booky and Ogre. "There¡¯s two right there.¡±


    She nodded. They walked in silence for a while.


    ¡°How long have they been with your company?" he said.


    "Longer than me. She be here already when I came in. Says she knows the brigadier from before. Some of the riders say she sought her out for some reason or other. You want to know more you''d be better off asking her."


    "Alright."


    "But it be best if you wait on that."


    "Why?"


    She took his arm. "Because I want you here for now."


    He looked at her eyes. Her skullcap rode all the way down on her brow and she tugged it back better to see him. The dew of sweat lay across her forehead and there was a flush to her cheeks which Orc would nightly see by pale moonslight and finally when the fire consumed her as she lay dying on their bearskin in the wastes of the old capital the following spring.


    They climbed out of the subsidence through crumbling land held together by brush and smooth round stones and chattering scrub birch losing the last of their yellow leaves, around a prominence of bare rock and down a gentle slope adorned with crowberry bushes whose bunches hung like dried up eyeballs and rattled in the wind. Along the slope were built walls of stones that followed the contours of the land to the ridgelines where they terminated. He walked alongside Tulula and could feel behind him Mym¡¯s rumbling at the stones of the walls and the stones of their path. They skipped lunch and didn¡¯t halt for any occasion and by the time the sun sank behind the southwestern mountains a full moon reemerged above the southeastern horizon and chased them to its apex whereupon it seemed to stop and glare down at them treading the murk in absolute silence as if across a blue seafloor. Orc looked up at it. Its face now appeared cracked like old pottery. That was new.


    They camped in a paddock of stone whose grounds were strewn with sunbleached bones and all night men and orckin traded watches at its four corners. Uhquah ordered a goat out of the string to be slaughtered and so it was done within the paddock walls while the horses trembled and threw their heads. A cookfire was set from brush and chips and by its flaring two men cut out the meat with their knives and roasted it skewered upon a long spear with a leafshaped head. As the steaks finished first men then orckin partook and licked their fingers and slept in turns within the low walls.


    Toward dusk on the thirr day they came into the remnant of a township once called Forge. Its ruins were nestled against the foot of a mountain severely holed with tunnels like a great slab of cheese where earth of a particular kind had been quarried and brought down to smelters whose chimneys fingered up from the rooftops. From there bricks had been made and sent throughout the kingdom of humankind and beyond to such extent that he heard Mym recognize their type and remark upon their renown. They entered through a field of ash settled out of the sky from centuries of smelting and the air was still thick with soot though no smelters had burned for thirty years. The sun shone red and globular through the smoke and in the twin strips of water that filled the ruts along the road. The thrice-cast light made the brick houses glow as if they were themselves set inside the belly of the smelter that was the world¡¯s molten core. The structures of the place did swelter and crumble in that crucible, save for those of the brick. The brick endured as unmarked as the day it was laid.


    The company settled in a square to camp around fires of potash scrounged from the ovens. In the morning as they prepared to move on a family of runaways emerged from an outlying barn and approached them about safe passage upcountry. Uhquah stared down at them from the back of his mule. What was left of their baggage was lashed onto the backs of three ragged oxen and they were a sow weird and her two grown cubs. They were dressed in all of the garments that they owned and their cart had blown a wheel and as her mate repaired it the axle snapped and crushed his skull. She told all this and other things to Uhquah through the longhorn who spoke for her.


    Booky came beside Orc and Tulula as they watched the scene. "I was wondering when y''all would meet," she said.


    Tulula glared at the woman and went to where the other orckin squatted and awaited the day''s journey. Orc watcher her go.


    "She''s just y''alls type. Just a handsome couple of graybacks together. Ya best go and get her fore one of them other orcs does."


    He turned to the woman. "She said there''s a pool going around Left and Right."


    "Oh yeah?"


    "She said folks are betting which is going to kill the other."


    Her eyes shifted. "Folks''ll bet on anything."


    He stood head and shoulders above her and now he leaned over her. "You wouldn''t know anything about it, would you?"


    She put up her palms as if to fend off his question. "Hey now partner I''ve gotta recoup my costs somehow. Losing ya and the pit and then losing that pretty little stone y''all filched offa the armiger. Ya know we was there too helping in our way and y''all didn''t share a penny of it with us."


    "You started the pool."


    "Hell ya know it ain''t cheap feeding two mouths on a two ton body."


    "Are they in on it?"


    "Them ogres? Sure."


    "You''re lying."


    She frowned. "They was ta start with. I don''t know bout no more. They got a bit carried away with it couple of days before ya showed up. Right said some nasty stuff about Left''s mother and they tore a kid in half ta beat the other, one with the ass end and one with the head and horns."


    "They have the same mother."


    "No shit but ya know they never were best at remembering little things. Now I gotta pay a damn goat outta our shares."


    "What did you expect to happen?"


    "I figured this troupe of inbreds would''ve died and undied some three weeks ago and Ogres and me would''ve been halfway back ta the pit by now with their bets in my bags."


    He shook his head. "Call them off it."


    "I tried already." She looked up at him. "Maybe y''all could talk to em?"


    "And tell them what?"


    "For starters not ta kill each other."


    At that moment Uhquah whistled and made a roundup motion with his upraised finger. The weird and her cubs stood by as the company set forth and they fell in behind Ogre at the very rear of the column. They watched wide eyed as Right clapped a forgebrick off the back of Left''s skull.

 76. Fortunes Told

    Around midday they forded the frigid waters of the Fingerling and they marched along the bank above that cold-strangled river past a heap of black bones and ash where kingsmen had slaughtered and burned a risen settlement years before, the bones strewn along the bank for a thousand yards and the small ribcages and fist sized skulls of children made to die again at the place of their immolation and old shards of broken ceramic and torn canvas fluttering in the wind that scraped the scorched earth. They marched on. A riparian corridor of low brush and pigmy conifers followed the Fingerling down out of the tundratic steppe. To the west stood the jagged slate of the dividing mountains and to the northeast the steaming peaks gleaming white and blue.


    Much of the day she walked behind the blue dwarf hoping to hear him stonespeak but she never did. That night she dropped back beside Orc to make camp. They crouched in a land of twisted bristlecones and the dark weighed heavily on their campfire and the wind seethed through the needles and strings of sparks hurtled sideways through the scrub. The weird and her cubs unloaded their oxen and proceeded to tie them off onto the trees. The weird and elder cub tied off two but the third was being held by the younger cub. The ox was branded in arcane figures as if for ritual sacrifice and it snorted and lurched off away from the camp. The cub sat on the ground holding the tieline. He began to drag feet first in the dirt. The weird grabbed the rope and dug in her heels. The elder cub stepped after with his claws on his bony hips. As Mym watched the three of them all clutched to the wandering ox were towed soundlessly from the ring of the firelight and into the roaring wilderness like campinos in the arena of some absurd parochial bullfight.


    When the weird¡¯s family returned they were holding onto each other. The weird left her cubs near one of the campfires and she went out again into the wrathful dark alone. Some of the company watched her. Uhquah watched her also. She returned with a pot and a sack of foraged tubers. The tattoos slashing up and down her arms and across her face held a glassy luminescence in the firelight as if they were of liquid tourmaline. At the fire she set down her things.


    "Sow," said Uhquah.


    The weird looked up. She placed her hand on her chest.


    "Aye," said Uhquah.


    The weird stood from the fire and walked slowly forward. Everyone''s eyes were on her now. Uhquah was smoking a long pipe with a curved stem. He looked up at her.


    "You a fortune teller?"


    The weird shrugged and she said a syllable of her language.


    Uhquah tucked the stem of the pipe between his teeth and pointed at the pot and mimed a reading of leaves with his rough hands. He said something back to her but Mym didn''t understand.


    "He asks if she can read fates," said Orc. He had come beside her without her noticing.


    The weird nodded vigorously and spoke.


    "She says yes and asks him to wait a moment."


    The weird walked into the dark in the direction of her oxen. When she returned she was smiling fiendishly and holding a flask of some liquor. She motioned Uhquah to the fire where her cubs sat.


    "You come here," said the blue dwarf.


    She looked at him, her smooth brow furrowed.


    The longhorn sat upwind from Uhquah''s fire, half naked and half in shadow. He murmured something to the weird. She picked up her pot and tubers and carried them to Uhquah''s fire. Her cubs followed her. She knelt before Uhquah and said some things that were lost in the wind. The longhorn rumbled back. She put her pot in the fire and with the flat of a handknife she crushed the root of something against a stone and rubbed it between her palms. She had the flask in her claw and her eyes were rigid in the firelight. Her elder cub took the handknife and approached Uhquah. Uhquah waved him away.


    "The humans," he said.


    The cub turned. The cavaliers were all of them gathered around six or seven fires. The cub went among them and a woman called Robby rose and came forward.


    The cub looked up at her. He held forth the handknife and the woman sawed off a lock of her hair with it. She gave back the blade and the hair. The cub nodded and smiled his chapped lips. He held aloft the handknife and the lock and he carried them back to his mother with such pageantry. She looked at the cavaliers reclining around their fires. They were watching. Robby was smiling as if proud of herself. The weird smelled the hair and then cast it into the pot with a douse of the flask. The pot hissed loudly and steam flashed out of it and parted around her body as the wind swept it away. She looked around again at those attending her, then she peered into the pot.


    "Belg dowjana," she called.


    Some of the company''s orckin nodded to themselves as if they had expected this determination.


    Mym looked at Orc.


    "Fool to death," he said.


    "What''s it mean?"


    He shrugged. "I''ve never seen this done."Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    Robby called over. "What''s a belg dow whatever? What''s it mean?"


    The cub held up the handknife with his chin solemnly against his chest like a painter contemplating his next stroke.


    "What''s it mean?" she asked Uhquah.


    "It''s just a bit o fun Robby. It don''t mean much o nothin."


    "What''s it mean otaur?"


    The longhorn smiled. He had been grooming himself with a doll''s brush and now he stopped to pull a small creature from its bristles and pitch it into the fire before him. "What''s belg dowjana?"


    "What''s it mean?"


    "It''s a fate shared by all."


    "And what fate''s that?"


    "Are you given to dancing Robby?"


    The woman smiled again as if somewhat relieved. "You mean like a turn and twirl? Sure."


    "I think the weird would have you not dance with the risen. Sage advice, wouldn''t you agree?"


    "That don''t seem like any kinda fortune to me."


    "Because it ain¡¯t. Uhquah is right. It''s just fun. Aren''t you having fun?"


    Robby frowned at the longhorn, her coiffure now lopsided. The longhorn resumed his brushing. He said, "Bear thy frustration away from me, dear woman. Whither what shall cometh shall be known at the last, as the priests say. To you as to all gathered here."


    Of the cavaliers arranged about their fires some seemed to hold a new regard for the longhorn''s words and others looked at the woman. She returned to sit by her fire and the cub again walked from pit to pit with the handknife in his claw as if it would find its fated mark.


    "Kos, kos," he whispered.


    None offered themselves. The cub next came before the longhorn who now worked his brush through his mane. He raised the brush and pointed.


    "Yon mason," he said.


    "Kos?"


    "Bherdeh."


    "Bherdeh," repeated the cub. He turned about until he saw the one identified. He stepped over the outlying legs and feet of the cavaliers until he stood before Mym. He crouched with the blade outheld swaying in a hidden rhythm like a trout languid in a current. His claw was gnarled and misshapen as if in this manner it had been often clubbed and broken, or perhaps malformed in some way by the repeated idolatorious oblation. He said some things to her.


    "He requires your hair," said Orc.


    She looked at the cub and she looked at her companion. "How much?"


    Orc upheld a pinky. "About that."


    The cub nodded. "Heyu, heyu."


    She took the knife and made the cut and turned them back.


    The cub hurried the cut to the weird and she cast it into the pot and the great whoosh of it and the boiled vapor. "Ketwor steyh," she called out.


    The cub''s eyes met Mym''s. The fire uplit his face and his eyes seemed aflame in the voids made by their shadowed sockets like two offering candles flickering in their niches. The weird twisted around to see from whom the sacrifice had come. She smiled and nodded.


    Mym saw the longhorn was laughing. She looked at Orc and at Uhquah and at the company of humans. None of them were laughing. The orckin looked at her plainly and without any expressions whatsoever.


    "Well?" she said.


    "Four of stones," whispered Orc.


    "What''s that one mean?" called Robby.


    The longhorn nodded his great head at Mym. "You''ll have to ask the wedwarf."


    Robby and some of the others turned to her. The lancing fires sawed up sideways the night between them. Uhquah watched her also. She saw Orc make the slightest shake of his head and it was a warning she didn¡¯t require.


    "Must be the number of turds in me shits," she said.


    Some of the cavaliers laughed. The cub was back among the company smiling as if he had understood and shared in their mirth. He began to move through the orckin who seemed at once reverent and disdainful of him. At last he came back before the longhorn. The longhorn pointed his brush at Uhquah. "Old blood and guts there," he said. ¡°Hafudah bherdeh.¡±


    The cub turned his head to the blue dwarf and back to the longhorn. He made a sign as if in doubt or hesitancy.


    ¡°Hafudah bherdeh,¡± snarled the longhorn.


    The cub backed away and sought out Uhquah where he sat alone at his fire. He knelt and offered up the handknife. Whatever he said was lost in the wind. Uhquah regarded the cub with a hint of amusement, his eyes squinting against the blow. He took the knife and sliced a single black whisker from his enormous beard. The cub took it between his finger and thumb and went back to his mother and passed it to her. Perhaps she touched it, perhaps not. Steam surged forth and whipped away. The cub''s head snapped after the cloud. The weird''s face downturned to the pot bottom. She began to gibber but Mym didn''t understand.


    Uhquah rose from his fire. "Shut up," he said.


    "Krsos," she said. "Krsos keklos."


    Mym looked at Orc. "What is it?"


    "A chariot."


    The weird continued, her voice rising. "Krsos keklos hepi. Werskrsos hepi. Gherskrsos. Spenhkeklos."


    Uhquah had come to the weird''s fire and shoved the cub aside. The cavaliers looked at their fires as if they hadn''t heard, for the words held no meaning. The orckin exchanged intense glances.


    The weird never ceased her divinings. "Gherskrsos lewnokts."


    Uhquah had unstopped his canteen and now dumped its contents into the pot and the steam off of it billowed into the weird''s face. She reeled and cried out and flung her arm across her scalded eyes. The cubs both ran to her and Uhquah kicked over the pot with his heavy boot. The elder cub howled and stood from his mother with the handknife gripped fast in his claw.


    Uhquah drew his carbine. "By the stones I said shut her up."


    The weird cried out as she writhed in the dirt. "Gherskrsos lewnokts plhnos skelhs!"


    The longhorn like an elemental of soot stepped through the fire and the flames lashed up to the height of his waist and delivered him to where Uhquah now shouldered his weapon. He wrapped his arms around the blue dwarf who was redfaced in and by the firelight. The cubs half carried their weeping and wailing mother away into the dark. Someone scattered their fire to death.


    Mym turned to Orc. He said, "A deadcart, lost in the dark, filled with bones."


    "I think I know what that means," she said.


    The game curtailed the company now bedded down and their fires burned low yet whispered in the blow as if the spirits of the timber they burned yet communed and conspired. From her bed Mym watched the flames peel off of the top of their fuel and tumble downwind as if sucked away by the void of the night, the absence of being and of meaning, and she listened to the stones that ringed them. Although they did not understand her they told her of the curse of that place and of a doom that was neither by will nor by fortune but was instead manifested by a third mover that was not the prime mover. They whispered these rumors and to their terrors did she fall asleep.


    The company went on in the light of the dawn before the sun had risen. The windstorm had blown past and the prophecies of the night were now away in the past as all fulfilling prophecies must be. The weird with her skin blistered about her eyes padded barefooted up to where Uhquah rode on his mule and fell in beside him while her cubs wrangled their oxen. As Mym watched the column stretch out she felt Orc step up beside her and they went that day side by side without a word until they reached the ruin of Lorderic.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Stonespeaking]: What sort o terrors can scare up the hardy stones? (4/10)

 77. A Killing

    Lorderic had been a frontier fortress when the kingdom was still young. Houses of mud and stone piled one upon another in the shadows of its ancient walls. A campanile to the god of men reached above the parapets, now sloughing like a midnight taper from acidic rains, now melting back into the mud whence it had been raised. The coming of the horses advented by a cackling of lethargic crows that roosted upon the ramparts and bobbed their heads over the decaying walls as if in homage or perhaps subservience.


    Accompanied by Mym and Tulula he stepped through an archway where lay a downcast portcullis splotched green with age. The eyes of children peered out of dark windows and doorways. The streets were silent but for the crows'' laughter and the air had the smell of smoke from dungfires and a beggar began to shuffle forward when he saw them coming and then quickly turned around and shuffled away. Many of the hovels were roofless with their old thatch and timber pillars long since burned for fuel and warmth and these now stood as pens for cattle and pigs and geese.


    In the shortyard before the abandoned keep two of the cavaliers waited with the black tusker scout and a veteran whose face was swollen and purple and whose eyes were all but shut. One of the armiger''s, sitting disarmed, his epaulets hanging like peeling bark from the jacket he wore. He didn''t raise his head when the riders came up nor did he have anything to say.


    Orc watched Uhquah step off his mule. The yard was quiet. There were people about but they weren''t coming out. There was a garrison of sorts here too, somewhere in the heights of the fortress. He thought he saw their heads up on a rampart, shadowed against the sky.


    Tulula called to the scout.


    "Little man here thinking he''s big," said the tusker. "Thinking he''s smart and fast. Not fast enough."


    "Where did you find him?"


    "Half day down old warlady''s path. Nice little place in trees."


    "Were there any more of them?"


    The scout shook his head. One of his tusks had a trinket dangling from its end and it swayed mutely. "Old warlady already taking care of little man''s fellows."


    Orc looked at Tulula. "Does he mean the brigadier?"


    The tusker nodded. "Yes. Her."


    "How far ahead is she?" said Orc.


    The tusker shrugged. "A week. Less maybe, more maybe."


    The veteran didn''t try to rise. The way his legs looked both shins were broken. He tilted his head up some to watch the blue dwarf cross before his mule and loose the carbine in the scabbard at the front of his saddle and gently push back the mule and brandish the weapon.


    The veteran looked up. "Make sure you burn me," was all he said. Uhquah put the muzzle of the carbine to his head and fired.


    The roar clapped about the shortyard. A bellyful of gore vomited out the far side of the man''s head and he fell limply backward and lay in its mess without a soul gone to him. Uhquah already had the carbine pointed skyward and was running his kerchief over the barrel. "Tulula," he said.


    Tulula stepped forward.


    "Take o him what he doesn''t need."


    The sow squatted over him with her scythelike knife. Orc didn''t care to watch. He turned to Mym and saw she had already turned to him. "I don''t know about this," she said.The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    "Not here," was all he said.


    Over his shoulder he saw Booky and Ogre and back at the entrance to the shortyard the longhorn stood leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, chewing his cottongrass sprig.


    "Bones of shale," he heard Mym whisper.


    Orc turned and saw Tulula with the knife in one hand and what appeared to be a wet rag in the other dripping redness across the veteran''s face and shorn skull. The cavaliers stood around her, eyes dead of courage and compassion, watching the scalping as if bored. Uhquah was recharging the carbine and sheathing it back and strapping it in. The weird and her cubs stood far back against the wall. The faces of the citizenry peeked out of the windows and loops in the walls around and as Orc passed his eyes over them they crouched down as if to hide from his monstrousness. He wondered if the brigadier knew what transpired in her wake.


    Uhquah mounted first and rode his mule out the gate. The longhorn and the rest followed. They made camp without the walls in a grove of aspen that toed their roots into the Fingerling and shimmered in the wind and sun. The river trickled through its bed and the rocks along its bottom were pink and gray and spotted like the salmon they hid.


    As dark settled the men and the orckin of the company wandered in clutches through the streets of Lorderic. The weird had laid a badger pelt across an old stall and hung a glowing lantern from its post. Her face was painted up in such a way that exaggerated whichever expression she sought to make. A few children stood with her cubs and all of them were watching her mummer''s performance of some sacred tale of orcs. They laughed and at every interlude she laughed with them. Some of the company were bartering with a stockman and some were sitting and drinking local swill from tin cups beside a castiron stove dragged out of the wreck of a house.


    Orc and Mym watched from a small table. Tulula stood close by.


    "About earlier," said Mym.


    "Yeah," said Orc. "I know."


    "What do ye want te do?"


    "How''s it going with the rocktalk?"


    "Sometimes I think I might be gettin somewhere."


    "But you''re not there yet."


    "No. Not even close. I was hopin I might hear the blue dwarf''s way of speakin with em but he''s not said a damn thing in my hearin."


    Orc took off his hat and set it on the table between them.


    She wrinked her nose. "Might be time ye fed that te the fire."


    "That tusker said we''re a week back from the brigadier."


    "Aye."


    "We''ve lost six days on her already."


    "Aye."


    "Can you track her?"


    "Ye mean without the stones fer helpin? Sure I might be able te. But if we miss we''ll be in the middle of nowhere with none but enemies abroad and I know we''ve been there before but before we had friends too, yers and mine, and now we don''t have neither."


    "Alright."


    She drew her coat more closely about her. "And I don''t think that otaur would take kindly te us walkin off on our commitment. Nor the blue dwarf."


    He shook his head and he leaned half across the table. "I don''t think I can take much more of this company."


    "That shitter back there deserved what he got."


    He sat back. "That may be but it sure doesn''t feel that way. It all feels wrong."


    He looked at her but she just sat there as if waiting for his explanation.


    "The brigadier wouldn''t condone trophy taking. It''s not her way."


    "Ye keep sayin that but this is the same old lady who spent her youth stormin castles and quellin rebellions and hangin folk from their necks stone dead aye? Same one who murdered them boys who came te take ye off te the camps? Same one who knew a pair of slaver brothers te pass ye off te after?"


    He was holding his satchel against his stomach and now he looked down at it and thought about the things he had read in the journal it held. "It''s just not how she is."


    "It''s not how ye want her te be, nor me either. But who are ye te say how she is toward folk who aren''t her kin, adopted or naturally had? I know ye been chasin her a long time. Are ye sure ye haven¡¯t made her into somethin she¡¯s not?¡±


    He frowned. ¡°Yes.¡±


    She shrugged. ¡°I¡¯m just askin on yer behalf. I know ye haven¡¯t had folks of yer own so ye wouldn¡¯t know they often aren¡¯t what ye want or need em te be. But look there now.¡±


    Mym nodded down the street and he turned to where she indicated. Ogre had come to stand behind the weird and had a boy on one shoulder and a young girl on another, their feet dangling, their tiny laughter echoing up the lane. With the sweep of her arm the weird produced a flash of light and now Booky half squatted with both arms upturned as if in some ritual dance and Ogre was laughing and bobbing up and down holding the children''s hands in his gargantuan fists.


    "Looks lek yer old boys there made up," said Mym.


    "Looks like."

 78. In For A Drink

    She reached across the table and touched his wrist. She could feel the sow across the street eyeing that movement. "There''s a tavern of some sort just up the way. Ye want te see what they got?"


    "Alright."


    She turned her eyes to the sow. "Bring along yer lady there."


    "She''s called Tulula."


    "Whatever ye say."


    They hesitated on the step of the tavern. A tobacco smell wafted out. Some chickens made warbling noises in a mud hutch beside. With the back of her claw the sow called Tulula lifted aside the roughspun wool drape that hung for a door and they went into a place of undefined dark and subtle motion. A solitary candle hung in a tin lampcage from a joist in the ceiling and dripped wax freely onto the floor. Figures shadowed in the corners sat with their cups and their pipes. Mym went across the room to a forgebrick bar. The place stunk of smoke and dried sweat. A barman came from one of the corners and stood before them with his hands splayed out on the bricks.


    "Welcome," he said.


    Mym unslung her pack and placed it down between her feet and tiptoed her chin over the bar. "What have ye got fer drinkin that won''t leave us blind or pissin much blood?"


    "What?"


    "Show me yer wall."


    The barman stepped out of the way and looked at the wares with her. He seemed uncertain as to whether any of it was fit for drinking.


    She pointed at a squat copper keg on a sagging shelf with its pump covered in a layer of fine dust. "What''s that?"


    "Ale."


    "Aye what kind?"


    The barman] looked confused. "The drinking kind."


    "That good fer ye?"


    Orc shrugged. He wouldn''t be drinking because he never did. She looked at the sow.


    "Heyu." The sow flipped her thumb at her throat in the motion of upturning a cup.


    "My girl," said Mym. She turned to the barman. "Three of em fellows."


    "None for me," said Orc.


    "Two?" said the barman.


    "Three," said Mym.


    The barman measured the pours into three thinworn pewter tankards with handles riveted on and pushed them across the bar.


    "How much?"


    The barman hesitated. "Nine?" he said.


    "Nine what?"


    "Cypriote," said Tulula. "Pennies."


    Mym counted out the pieces and placed them on the bar and she drank her cup and Orc''s cup and paid nine more. She pointed at all three cups. Tulula took up hers and drained it and set it down for the second round. The ale tasted sour and flat and faintly skunky as if overfermented. Mym turned her back to the bar and surveyed the room. At a table near the entrance two men sat with pipes in their mouths and a coal pulsing in the dark on a tray laid between them, a set of tongs beside it. Along the far wall sat a row of figures too dark to make out and she wasn''t sure they were all of them alive. From her low vantage she could see a number of them clutching weapons under their tables. She drained her cup again and felt the liquor begin to ease the doubts she harbored, the ones festering her hope and subalternating her aim to find and take the manstone by whatever means necessary.If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    A prospector rose and shambled toward them. He carried a glass bottle of opaque spirit by the neck and he set it on the bricks and his cup beside it. He conferred with the barman in slurred speech and he uncorked his bottle and stood the cork carefully on its head. He looked at Mym. He was old and he wore a straw hat with a narrow crown of the type made in the Goldlands. He was dressed in heavy cloth pantaloons and a shirt buttoned down to his bellybutton. The way his pantaloons bloused over his boots made them look like some sort of seacucumbers ingesting him from the feet up.


    "Y''all are brigadier''s?" he said.


    Mym looked at Orc.


    "Y''all are," said the old man. "I rode with the kingsmen four years." He held up his four fingers and she saw one was missing as if he meant to show her what had happened in those four years. He clasped his bottle with that hand and it shook slightly as he poured its liquid into the cup. He drank the contents and set the cup down and turned back to Mym. He wiped his sunburnt lips on his sleeve.


    "Y''all are here for warring. Different kinda prospecting."


    Mym didn''t answer. Covered in grime from the road and with her empty tankard in her hand she resembled a street brat orphaned by consumption.


    The old man drew a sword he didn''t have and raised the ghost of it overhead. He looked down at her and at the orcs. "Y''all cutting on them of the armiger''s, yeah?"


    Mym looked at Orc. "What do ye think he''s after?"


    Orc looked at the man and then at Tulula. The sow drank down her ale and looked at the old man and spat on the floor.


    Out of the dim far side of the room a man moaned. Someone moved along the back wall and crouched down. The moan came again and the old man shook his head and lowered his arms. His eyes were pink from the smoke or the drink or perhaps some other thing.


    "What''s she paying y''all?" he said.


    None of them answered.


    "Y''all find the queen and put her down for good and they''ll pay you a mountain of gold. Who can ride against the brigadier? No heroes here, no heroes here. She''s got orcs and risen and living men. Go finish the queen and y''all will ride home dukes and duchesses. Good young Donnas will pardon the lot of you and pay double that worth in land and gold. But you best get to her before the baron does."


    Mym looked at Orc. She tilted her head toward the door.


    The old man looked up. "Blood," he said. "These are the deadlands now. Awash in blood. Thirsting for more. The blood of a hundred martyrs, of a thousand babes. For what purpose?"


    He gestured his bottle toward the door and the darkness beyond where all the world lay hard and black and flat like a great headsman''s block. He upturned the bottle to his mouth and drank.


    Mym watched him. There was something about him that reminded her of her da as he had hung in the hammock. When the man had finished swallowing he held his hands wide as if to address an audience.


    "God don''t have enough blood to give for what''s needed here so he spills the blood of others. The fathers say it''s his too to give. What''s he left for us? If even our blood is his then what''s left of us that could be said to be ours? Nothin."


    He spat and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He pointed the neck of his bottle at Mym. "Y''all may be fine warriors. Y''all go on and get them armiger''s men. Spill God''s blood from their bellies. But don''t y''all forget there''s another warrior in these here parts and ain''t a soul who escapes him. I was like y''all before. I remember. I remember everything and it ain''t nothing I want to. The remembering don''t stop til god''s given y''alls blood up for slaking the deadlands too."


    The old man drank the last dregs from his bottle and shuffled softly away in his boots over to where the moaning came. He crouched down. The moaning recommenced.


    Mym turned back to the bar. The barman leaned over the bricks and nodded to where the old man had gone. "It''s his son," he said.


    "Who is?"


    "The one cut up over there."


    "Aye I hear him hurtin."


    "They got him good five, six days ago. The armiger''s chaps. Well used to be. The baron''s chaps now. I tried telling him so but he''s drunker''n shit and ain''t nothing sticking."


    "He''s been dyin fer four days?"


    The barman nodded.


    "Why don''t they go for help?" said Orc.


    The barman looked evenly at him. "Go where?"


    "Somewhere that isn''t here."


    "There''s nowhere to go that''ll keep him breathing."


    The barman took up their tankards and set them behind the bar. He lifted a dirty linen cloth from there and wiped it across the wornsmooth counter. He nodded at the far wall.


    "Now afterwards you might see him cartin that boy up to the capital for her to raise him on up." He looked at them each in turn. "She''ll be after you too you keep chasing the baron''s chaps."


    They didn''t stay to drink a third round. They stepped out of the tavern and made their way down the guttered street. The gate ahead of them, the camp beyond. Ogre and Booky had gone and the weird too. The moons passed one by the other and mutely pummeled each other in the sky.

 79. A Second Killing

    No light but starlight yet shone upon that country and the sounds about him heralded the day to come. The splish of steelhead breaking through the Fingerling and the exploratory chirrup of a jay up in the aspen and the whispered cropping and shortened step of the horses blanketed and hobbled amid the grass. The Lorderic roosters began. The glen smelled of horse droppings and extinguished fires. Orc sat up. Starlight and skylight conclaved around. In their gloom he saw children following the horses and piling the droppings in burlap sacks stained from that purpose. Men and orckin began to stir.


    When the company went back through town he peered into the keep''s shortyard. The dead veteran was gone. The ground stained red. Upstreet the weird''s badger pelt was rolled up against the frost and the lanternwick slumped black in its housing. One of the cubs who had been collecting brush straightened up and waved as they passed.


    They marched through the veteran''s camp at morning''s end, the tents guyed out and their flaps swaying in the breeze. Raw wolf pelts were draped over branches or bushes with flies attending their undersides. The firepit an ashen crater filled with bones. Orc nodded at the dead in the places they had fallen.


    "Kingsmen," he said.


    "Aye," said Mym.


    "Still wearing their hair."


    As they passed by Tulula draw her knife.


    "Not fer long."


    At the first rasping scrape Mym winced. ¡°I never heard of yer kind doin that before,¡± she said.


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°Ye didn¡¯t on the span and ye didn¡¯t in the Madlands.¡±


    He looked at his hands, turned them over, looked at them as if they weren¡¯t his own. ¡°No we did not.¡±


    ¡°Is it some sort of orcy thing I should know about?¡±


    ¡°Not that I¡¯ve heard of.¡±


    "Do ye know what it¡¯s about?"


    ¡°Well,¡± he began. He reached up and doffed his hat and punched out the crown and donned it back. ¡°You know that hussar?¡±


    ¡°Aye I remember ye tellin me about him.¡±


    ¡°He said something about marking the fallen so as to tell between those killed during the war and those killed before the rising began."


    "Ye buy that?"


    "No."


    She drummed her fingers on the stock of her longarm where it slung low at her hip. ¡°Maybe there¡¯s a bounty on em.¡±


    ¡°On the dead?¡±


    ¡°Aye, on the risen dead.¡±


    There came another grating scrape.


    ¡°Course these kingsmen aren¡¯t risen,¡± she said.


    He shrugged. ¡°Whoever¡¯s paying the bounty doesn¡¯t know that.¡±


    "Didn''t ye say the risen were doin it too?"


    "Yeah."


    "I¡¯d not think they¡¯re lookin fer a payout."


    He shook his head. "No. They hang the pieces of others on themselves like they''re trying to replace what was taken from them."


    Mym nodded in contemplation. ¡°Aren¡¯t we all.¡±


    He looked at her as if she knew that was the exact reason he had come. She watched him back a moment.


    She looked down at the nearest corpse and toed it. "Surprised yer brigadier didn''t burn em.¡±


    "That''d be a mercy against what''s coming."


    "She isn''t one fer mercy?"


    He remembered that day at the estate when the kingsmen had come for him. What she had done to them. What she had him do. "Not when mercy would be wrong," he said.If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    That evening there was some question of where Booky and Ogre had got to as they weren''t at camp. The longhorn hunted through the smoke of the cookfires and came up to Orc and Mym.


    "Where''s that woman and monster?" he said.


    "Maybe they left off," said Orc.


    "Left off."


    "Maybe."


    "Did they accompany you this morning?"


    "No."


    "It was my understanding you had some history."


    Orc shrugged. "We''ve all got some history."


    "When did you last see them?"


    "Last night with the weird in that tumbleweed of a town."


    "And this morning?"


    "I never saw them this morning."


    The longhorn regarded him. "Never saw them," he said.


    Mym blew a nostril into the dirt. "Quite a feat losin twelve feet of meat with two yappers stuck onte it."


    The longhorn turned to her. "There''s a pool going."


    "Aye we heard."


    "The bookmaker is carrying a small fortune in bets laid."


    "Sounds like someone ye would want te keep track of."


    The longhorn looked at her. He looked at Orc again. Then he stood and went back up the camp.


    Next morning the tusker scout was gone and two cavaliers with him. The rest went on. By midmorning they had crossed a great salt pan and started up a plateau on its far side. They walked up through purple glory-of-the-snow and saxifraga under the igneous rimrocks. The sudden crash of rockfall from a horned chamois that had bounded away from the vanguard resounded downslope and Orc and Mym looked out to track its wild descent of the jumbled crag. They climbed up through sedges and clear running streams and they surmounted the plateau through a notch in the rim and walked north along the mileslong promontory.


    Orc watched the low country to the west unfurl. The sun stood above it in an explosion of color where a miasma of steam transpired from the thawing land and at the northern perimeter of the world smoke was blowing down the tundra like the dust of an approaching army. The shattered glass mountains arranged in sharp distinctions across the half globe of the sky and between the plateau''s edge and the world''s a multitude of buffalo was pounding south like an outburst flood, chased over the plain by the great white wolves of that country who were but specks upon it.


    He stopped in place and looked out upon this scene. Against his thighs the lupin rattled in the wind as if the earth remembered the clashing banners and spears and lances of old. The harrying chase moved silently into the growing shadow of the mountains. A plume of bats sojourned blindly from some overhang or cave below him and scurried across the darkening sky after the setting sun. Mym stopped a few yards ahead and turned to watch him through the dry weeds about her eyes. The company turned right and rode away from the cliff''s edge and toward a darkness without definition. Into this they vanished.


    They camped on the open plain. Their fires flared and their smallness and brightness made an infinity of the night around them. From the murk the scout emerged and thrust Booky into the camp. She was covered in dust from the road. Ogre loomed just beyond the firelight. The scout faded away again.


    "Did you get lost?" said Orc.


    She looked at him red-eyed and disheveled. She shook her head. "I can''t stop im. I tried Orc. Ya know I tried."


    Ogre stumbled forward as if each of their limbs were in disagreement as to their direction and purpose. One leg and arm moved to sit and the others stiffened up and from these motions they tipped over sideways and onto the ground in a disunity of frustrated grunts. They pushed off of their side to sit, half covered in broken grass and dust, half in dark, their knees splayed wide and their gut sagging on the ground between their thighs. Left was blinking at the fire, face wet with his tears and now streaked with mud. Right was in darkness.


    "Stop doin," said Left.


    Orc heard the whispered slurs from Right.


    Left covered his ear with their hand and closed his eyes. "Said stop doin," he said.


    Right''s grin reflected the firelight. A sudden orange crescent in the dark now vanishing to form new torments.


    Left opened his eyes again. From where Orc sat they didn''t reflect the fire. They were blacker than the night, black as the oblivion said to lie beyond creation, black as the tunnels through which the souls of men and women are ferried naked to their eternal rest.


    "Naw, naw it¡¯s not like that," said Left.


    Ogre reached forward and plucked a carbine from where it lay among a cavalier''s effects. Booky had her head buried in her hands but Orc and Mym clambered up to their feet.


    Orc heard Right say, "Dis fire''s mine. Now you go find your own."


    "You goin shoot me?" said Left.


    "Goin shoot you dead."


    Left looked to where Booky sat weeping. She had gathered her hair into fists and she rocked back and forth.


    "You make us do things I dun want," said Left.


    "You die then you dun want nothin no more. Maybe best I shoot you dead."


    Left looked once more at Booky then Ogre set their hand down and scooched themself around until Right was closest to the campfire. They placed the carbine across their lap. Mym sat back at the fire. Right grinned at her, hand lying across his belly. When the other hand came out of the darkness clawlike and rigid as if disembodied Mym started to rise. Right peered up as if its appearance was a skygod¡¯s revelation and the hand palmed Right''s head and with a single movement yanked it off.


    A column of wet fascia and a half dozen vertebrae clacked upward after the decapitation and thick ropes of blood spurted from the stump of the neck and sputtered the fire. The hand let go of the head and it bounced and rolled against a cavalier''s foot with the grin intact. The cavalier hollered and kicked out and scrambled away. The fire hissed steam like a boiling kettle and black blood pooled at the base of the skull and began to evaporate into the bitter air. Ogre sat as before as the others looked on aghast. Then the great arms moved and pivoted the fatty body around until Left''s face came back into the firelight. His dark eyes found Orc''s and he winked. Booky sobbed on.


    In the morning the bettors came for their payouts but Booky was too distraught. Orc took the book and read the figures and doled out the coinage from the sack Ogre carried. Afterward the sack was empty but for Booky''s percentage. She made him keep the money meanwhile she rolled Right''s head into the sack and tied it off to a loop of the pack she wore. There she carried it when they set out, penduluming like a bullsack as she walked beside Ogre at the rear as they had always done. His singular head offset, his shoulders now too wide. They had not gone an hour from that site before the risen found them.

 80. Ambush

    They were strung out along the edge of a muskeg when Mym saw Uhquah haul up on his mule. She watched him rest his palm on the smoothworn saddlehorn and look east where the new sun pressed off of the jagged horizon. The floor of the muskeg lay broken and mossy and the mountains in the distance seemed to stand out of its surface like stone ziggurats, their enshadowed summits like ritual altars to gods dead and forgotten.


    She regarded that waste with Orc and the others. Out in the muskeg sunlight cast upon the ground and permafrost frozen these thousand years boiled off in silver steam.


    "Ye hear that?" she said.


    "A pack of dogs. Wolves maybe."


    "Sounds more lek a pack of yer folk te me."


    Suddenly Tulula and the tusker scout turned and ran up the line of the company and called out to Uhquah. The cavaliers jumped from their horses and pulled them down to the muskeg and the soggy ground that marked its perimeter and tied them off along the low lying shore pines. They threw themselves under the shrubby trees and readied their weapons. Far out in the muskeg a furrow detached from the horizon into a thin party of riders that evanesced and coalesced between the rising vapors. They crossed through the blinding sunrays and reappeared one by one in lesser light and they were black against the land and they rode off of that thawing icecap as if newly freed from its glacial tombs with the hooves of their animals splashing up slurries of snow that were not real and they were lost in the steam and lost in the sun and they faded in and out and clotted together and melted apart and their numbers were doubled by avatars reflecting out of the soddenness an antarctic inversion of their rows charging and rippling and the antihorses'' legs upraising the very earth with their pounding as if they sought to breach the roof of the underworld what birthed them and constrained them evermore.


    "They''ll cut across our left," called Uhquah and as soon as he said so they did to favor the tactics they had learned when their minds were still pliable.


    From where she lay on her belly with the carbine resting on her bag Mym saw them each raise an arm and loose their bows. The arrows slung soundlessly aloft into the white morning with the steam vorticing behind their fletching, now arcing, now gaining speed and plummeting with a faint whistle then hushed by the crack of a carbine.


    Up and down the line the roar of the long rifles and hers among them. The risen passed within thirty yards, sixty or seventy of them, and rode on to the edge of the muskeg and began to dissolve in the vertical sheets of steam and to be lost in dazzling rainbowed mist and to vanish completely.


    The cavaliers prone under the shrub pines recharged their carbines. Their horses stood over them bearing arrowshafts from their backs like pincushions. A goblin medicine crawled from one to the next, clawing through his pouches. The rest of the company lay watching and listening.


    She watched Uhquah and Orc and the longhorn walk to where the muskeg had been trampled and turned up by so many hooves. Each divot holding a sun in its glassy pool. She saw Orc bend down and pick up a canvas wrapped shortbow studded about the lower limb with the teeth of men. A hand yet clung to its grip. The longhorn turned north and regarded the vapors of the earth into which the risen had disappeared. They went that way and after a moment she rose and went after them.


    The fallen man lay on the marshy earth. He was naked to the waist. His leggings were the chainmail of the kingsmen and they were bunched about his knees. His boots were ancient leather and their soles were holed and the pale skin showed through. The moss of the muskeg was flattened where he had tumbled across it. His horse was nowhere to be seen. They stood there in the cold morning with the frigid meltwater pooling around their feet and Uhquah toed over the corpse with his boot. The contorted face came up, disanimate of the queen''s necromancy, slack jaw full of mud. Mym wondered whether this was the expression he had worn in his first death. She could see the hole from where the slug of her carbine had penetrated the eyeball and exploded the top of the skull. What was left of the man''s scalp was adorned with a rancid black resin upon which was stuck the hair of another, red and wavy and trembling in the breeze. There were putrid hollows in the cheeks and there was a woman''s gold locket hanging from the neck. He had been old when he died and his gut bore a half healed slash and his chest was perforated in a half dozen places from gunshot received, each one a pucker big enough she could stick a thumb in.


    The longhorn bent down and severed the string of the bag he carried over shoulder and under armpit and he drew its contents forth one by one and pitched them into the mud and moss. In this manner he populated the man''s deathbed with the icons he had ferried throughout his wild hunt: one of the human martyrs carved from tusker ivory, a lock of the selfsame red hair tied up in a ribbon, a handful of loose feathers for fletching, a few flint arrowheads. It also held a penny of the kind human heretics gave as payment for the final voyage and this the longhorn studied and swept his thumb across and pocketed. The other castoffs he left where they lay. Lastly he pulled the second scalp off of the man''s head and carried it hanging by its hair back to where the company waited.


    As Uhquah turned to follow Mym placed herself before him.


    "What do you want?" he said.


    "I have an ask."


    Uhquah regarded her and spat. "What sort o answer do you think te have a right te?"


    She showed him the emblem of her station. "I hornkeep the delvin of the white mountain."This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.


    He lifted his hand slightly as if to reach for the emblem, then he let it drop. "So you say shit and they all get to squattin."


    She frowned.


    "We ain''t in your mountain and I don''t owe you nothin."


    "I ask fer me folk."


    "Fine for you."


    "Who answers fer yers?"


    "Me folk?"


    "Aye."


    The blue dwarf glanced to where Orc lingered over the body. He spat again. "Isn''t none of me folk left te answer. That settle you?"


    "I don''t believe ye."


    "And I don''t care what you believe."


    He tried to walk around her but she blocked his way.


    "The last Keeper said he found sign of yer kind delvin about in the wynds of time."


    Again his eyes drifted to Orc. "You whites and your myths o myths. The world eater gnawin at your boots too?¡±


    She turned to Orc and tilted her head. "Go on."


    Orc hesitated. His eyes shifted from her to the blue dwarf and back.


    "I''ll be right behind ye," she said.


    He nodded and trod after where the longhorn had gone.


    Uhquah sneered at his backside. "You yap so much it''s no wonder the armiger went after you like a moth te flame. Keep on yappin and you''ll have a lot o pigfuckin marauders on your doorstep and they¡¯ll be the ones rootin about in your godsdamn wynds."


    She nodded after Orc. "He''s shown himself te be worth trustin."


    "Leave it te a white wedwarf o the lofty ol mountain te fall in with a bloody pigfucker."


    "Says the one standin neckdeep in nakshit."


    He spat. "Aye, that ain''t but true. I''d like te step to fore I sink any further so tell me your damn ask."


    "I''m hopin you can teach me somethin," she said.


    The corners of his lips upturned as if in a smile. "Ain''t that a turnabout."


    She didn''t understand his meaning and not for the first time she wished she had learned more of the divergent histories of their folk. "I''ve a need te learn yer ways of communin with these deadland stones," she said. "They don''t seem te understand anythin I''m sayin."


    He studied her face. "And you think they listen te me?"


    "I''ve seen em open up te ye like rock jasmine in the sun."


    He nodded then appeared to catch himself nodding and he replaced his assent with a glower. "I can''t teach you nothin about it."


    In that moment she saw his sickness and she knew it came to inhabit him the same way it had afflicted her kind. "Ye heard what happened te my delvin?" she said.


    ¡°I heard you''ve not produced a dwarflin goin forty years."


    She nodded. ¡°It¡¯s true.¡±


    He regarded her face, the unerasable lines creased therein by worry and by regret. "That''d make you lastborn then."


    "Aye."


    ¡°Tell me lastborn, did your forebears blast out all o the wizened veins o the vale?"


    "No."


    "Did you smelt their ores and slag their memories?"


    "Hell no. They lay as yer kind left em, as they always have and always will so long as the delvin''s warmed by the fire of dwarves.¡±


    He looked over her shoulder at the orc disappearing in the mists. ¡°At least you¡¯ve got some sense left. I regret your troubles with childbearin but they don¡¯t have nothin te do with me and mine and I''ve got no answer for it."


    "Yer wrong," she said.


    He shrugged.


    "I''ve sung the sacred tone."


    His lips parted and his jaw hung open. "The dwarfstone."


    She nodded.


    "You''ve found it."


    "Aye."


    "Where was it?"


    "Fashioned around the black heart."


    "About? It ain''t no bigger than this."


    He held up his fist.


    "Aye but the first dwarves smelted it so fine ye can''t see it at all." She cupped her hands before her and as she spoke she circled them about as if sliding them around a globe. "Thin as air and clear as glass it enspheres the black heart and when a certain tone is struck a chamber opens and the blood of the mountain flows and the heart itself is made inte a crucible fer shapin and animatin and by the stones ye''ll just have te come see it fer yerself. Used it meself te raise up me da right as a mason''s level. Well right as he ever was anyhow."


    The blue dwarf had followed the motions of her hands with his eyes and now he screwed up his mouth as if he had an ask of his own, then he shook his head. "Good for you. Doesn''t sound like you need me for nothin after all."


    She shook her head. "It''s somethin but it''s not enough. We''ve about recovered every dwarf we can. Those who''d stoned up and stayed whole anyway. But we still can''t figure a way past our troubles. The human way of procreatin still isn''t workin. I''m hopin te learn what''s needed te imbue our stonechildren."


    "You''ve got everythin you need. The sacred tone, the dwarfstone. That¡¯s enough should do it."


    "It''s not."


    "Then you''re singin it wrong."


    She gestured at the ground. "That''s why I''m here. The dwarfstone answers differently te different tones and different songs, but I''ve gone as far with it as I know how. A learned friend of mine says there are ways of speakin and singin and listenin known te the first dwarves but fergotten by the delvin, but she can''t speak or sing or hear em herself as she''s a woman. I wasn''t sure at first but after bein here and seein me shortcomins with the stones about, and seein how ye''ve managed te commune with em, I think the answer''s there. Hell yer folk''s way of speakin alone might be enough te cure the troubles afflictin me folk. And yers too."


    He glowered at that. "And if it ain''t?"


    Now she turned to look at where Orc had gone. "We''ve got some other notions."


    "He means te nick the manstone doesn''t he?"


    She turned back to him. "I can''t speak fer him."


    ¡°Pickin that fight''s one way te die and not stay that way. He''ll wind up turned like that fellow.¡± He nodded at the twice dead man at their feet.


    "He''s here of his own accord fer his own reasons. I''d not try te bring him anywhere he wasn''t already headin."


    "He clearly ain''t here for scalps and gold."


    She didn''t answer.


    "You come with an ask yet you''re holdin back on me. About yon pigfucker and about the dwarfstone. What''re you hidin?"


    Away from the mists the longhorn called for Uhquah. The blue dwarf started forward again and for the last time she stayed him with a hand against his chest, and she could hear the affliction roiling beneath her palm, as if his heart had already gone to stone, as if his lungs were lead and gravel sluiced through his veins.


    He slapped her hand away.


    She looked him dead in the eye. "As Keeper I swear te the stones that the dwarves of the white mountain will share the boons of the forge of creation with the blues of the vale," she said.


    "I ain''t got no need," was all he said, and he walked away.


    She let him pass. She looked down at the dead man and his things strewn about. She picked up an arrowhead and studied its flint as if it might finally yield answers of the strange land, yet it was silent. She let it drop back into the muck.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Stonespeaking] Aye I remember the blues livin in the vale and I remember the day they left it. All trained out and carryin all their effects I don¡¯t think any of us knew there were so many of em. I can¡¯t tell ye why they went as matters between dwarves stay between dwarves. I can tell ye I wasn¡¯t sad te see their recedin backsides. (5/10)

 81. The Price of Copper

    Orc returned to the company as they milled about the muskeg''s shore tightening cinchropes and scabbarding carbines and scrutinizing the medicine going horse to horse with his chalky powder and pungent smear. The longhorn stood in the shadow of a scrub pine as if loathe of the advancing sun. When he saw Orc coming he beckoned. Orc looked over to where Tulula squatted with the other orckin grinning together in the lee of their bloodlust and taking stock of the spent arrows they had collected. She didn¡¯t notice him. He went to the shade.


    The longhorn watched him come and nodded at the orckin. "You who were cast out by Glad Nizam''s campdwellers think these hardy folk will take to you."


    "Perhaps."


    The longhorn smiled. "You¡¯re too rough for them."


    "Don¡¯t act like you know me."


    "But I do. I know who you seek and why. I feel the mark the mother left upon you. You know of whom I speak."


    Orc studied the longhorn and the glint in his eye. He said nothing.


    The longhorn held out his hands, one empty and one full of the muskeg''s moss upon which he chewed. "To be brought back by the elfmother. How fortunate for you."


    The longhorn leaned closer.


    "Is that her brother''s smoke upon your flesh, or is it merely your cookfire''s exhalation? No, no. There he is, father to the madlands. Curious to note him here. Curious also that he should reveal himself to you but days after the elfmother, and that an agent of the queen''s should lead you to the first dwarves'' mysteries circumscribing their accursed forge."


    The longhorn smiled and his great flat teeth were stained green by the moss.


    "Did the elfmother teach you of intention, Orc? Of the grand machine who ordered all creation, who now finds its machinations undermined by the will it bestowed them? Did she teach you of these things? No. I see she spoke of other things. An alternative education. Had I only gone to her and not my queen. Alas I knew so little then."


    The longhorn leaned even closer. Close enough Orc could smell the putridity of his decaying lungs on their breath.


    "Yet here you are. You feel it all the same, don''t you? You and the wedwarf. The urgency inside you. The germ of power growing therein. Taken root. Seeking sunlight. Shall it shoot from your mouth and nostrils and ears and anus? Shall you become a tree as I have become a coffin, as the wedwarf becomes a mountain? We have no choice, scaler. First dwarves and martyrs and thee and me, spoken of and hurrying forth in this nonsensical revue. Know thy lines and speak them well, else another will spake them with thy lungs. Draw your breath on their unheard command. Go forth, slay, die. You see it. You feel it. Now you know the wedwarf forsakes you. Not by her volition. Did the insect now buzzing inside the pitcher plant choose to crawl inside? Watch as she returns to who she always was. You cannot stop it anymore than you could set it in motion."


    Orc held up his hand and gently pushed the longhorn back until he stood upright and peering down upon him.


    "She will betray you to those who neither see nor comprehend. The pyromancer. The blue dwarf. Where is she now? Wait and see."


    The longhorn turned and spat his cud to the ground. He called out to the blue dwarf and then said no more. The cavaliers now were mounted and waiting. The orckin standing and listening. There came Uhquah from the rising mists, and Mym thereafter. Her eyes found his and she fell in beside him.


    "Took you long enough," he said.


    She looked sideways at him as if he''d struck some unknown nerve. "What''s yer meanin?"


    "Nothing."


    They circumvented the muskeg and walked all day across an ancient spread formerly ruined by an application of seawater and now undergrown with clumps of cordgrass and pickleweed. In the afternoon they entered another subsidence that descended to the bare bedrock. The clop of the ironshod hooves rang off the bowl about and the beasts shook their heads and craned to find their phantom fellows. That night as they bedded down around their glowing embers a sharp clattering came out of the dark followed by a dull thunder of some other subsidence toward the geocentric origin of everything whereupon all possible radii intersect.


    To the dark Orc said, "You hear that?"


    "Aye," said Mym. "Sounded te me lek a cave in. Even the good earth''s witherin up here."


    Orc thought about that and about what she had told him about her talk with the blue dwarf. "The longhorn knows we''ve got the orcstone."The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    "Aye?"


    "He knows you found the dwarfstone and he knows I found the elfstone."


    ¡°You told him?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°Then how¡¯s he know it?¡±


    ¡°The same way I¡¯ll know when we¡¯re getting close.¡±


    ¡°Well shit.¡± He heard her shift in her bed. "While we''re talkin about it I may as well tell ye Uhquah knows we¡¯re aimin fer the manstone."


    "Great."


    "I don''t think he''s figured why."


    "Does he know about the others?"


    "I told him about the dwarfstone."


    "And the orcstone?"


    "That''s not me secret te tell."


    He nodded to himself. "That it''s not."


    ¡°Fair chance the longhorn¡¯s already given ye away.¡±


    ¡°Perhaps.¡±


    ¡°He say anythin more?¡±


    ¡°Yeah. He said a few things.¡±


    ¡°Lek?¡±


    ¡°Nothing useful.¡±


    ¡°Nothin bout bringin the shards tegether?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°Nothin bout meltin em inte one and usin it te animate me carvins?¡±


    ¡°I didn¡¯t ask.¡±


    ¡°Aye. Probably good ye didn¡¯t.¡±


    ¡°You still believe it¡¯ll work?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t believe nothin of the sort.¡±


    A meteor streaked silently across the southern sky. They stopped talking to watch it wink away to nothing.


    ¡°Oy there¡¯s somethin te wish on.¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ve been thinkin the blue dwarf could help.¡±


    He watched the stars and waited for what was next and tried to not think about what the longhorn had said about forsaking and betraying.


    ¡°He¡¯s got somethin afflictin him. Might be in his interest te help us if it¡¯ll help him.¡±


    ¡°Might be.¡±


    ¡°I know if I can learn his way of speakin it¡¯ll get us where we need te be, if not with the sacred tone than with findin the manstone.¡±


    ¡°You know or you hope?¡±


    ¡°Suppose yer right. Still nothin but a hope.¡±


    They didn''t speak for a while. The night grew cold about. He wrapped up in his blankets and he must have made some indication of the chill for Mym said, ¡°If ye were a wee bit smaller I¡¯d loan ye me coat.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m fine.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m sure ye are.¡±


    He sat up and stoked the embers and tossed on the last bit of brush. The fire flared suddenly and he saw the figures of others all asleep and the distant twinkle of it caught in the eyes of the tusker on watch. The light faded and the heat with it. He hunkered back into his bed and it was colder than before.


    ¡°I don¡¯t like it,¡± he said.


    ¡°What¡¯s that?¡±


    ¡°Dreaming of what could be when I could be out there making it.¡±


    ¡°We are makin it.¡±


    ¡°Sure doesn¡¯t feel like it.¡±


    ¡°No?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°What do ye call what we¡¯ve been doin this past week.¡±


    ¡°Following someone else¡¯s lead.¡±


    He brought his blanket over his head as if to hide from the determinate stars and the fate writ across them.


    ¡°Making it for someone else¡¯s dreams.¡±


    ***


    On the next day they crossed a dried salt marsh and by no intention of his own Orc found himself beside Booky for the duration. The cavaliers wore masks over their noses like bandits and the orckin had smeared animal fat across their faces and both groups blackened their eyes and the eyes of the beasts against the awful glare. Sunlight hammered down from a turquoise vault and up from the endless pan and burned the underside of Orc¡¯s chin and nose. Out on that plain their eyes tracked a bonewhite dust devil creeping and shambling some hundred yards tall. Booky rotely repeated tall tales she¡¯d heard of pioneers sucked into such dervishes and lifted aloft to their very tops and dropped back to the earth at their dissipation, left broken and bloodied and exposed to the elements that murdered them: relentless heat, desiccated earth, shrieking wind. As she told it he heard a kind of longing in her voice.


    He looked sidelong at her after she finished. ¡°You alright?¡±


    ¡°No I ain¡¯t. I ain¡¯t one bit.¡±


    He shouldn¡¯t have asked. But it was too late.


    ¡°Y¡¯all were everything to me Orc. Them ogres and ya and the pit. I can¡¯t leave im like that. Ya know I can¡¯t. Tell me truly y¡¯all didn¡¯t bring y¡¯alls magic rock?¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s back at the dwarf¡¯s mountain.¡±


    ¡°Goddamn.¡± Her eyes started to glisten but the incessant salt wicked her tears away. ¡°Goddamn it all I don¡¯t know what else ta do. I gotta make im right again. I got im inta this fix and I gotta make im right. Hell we can go right now. Y¡¯all can take us there right? It ain¡¯t so far as that. We can pack up Right in the salt here and he¡¯ll keep just fine all the way back there and y¡¯all will just touch im with y¡¯alls rock and he¡¯ll be whole as the day he came ta us.¡±


    He looked at the damp sack swaying off of her back and thudding slightly against her thigh. He didn¡¯t say anything.


    ¡°Hell that¡¯s too far ain¡¯t it. I¡¯m gonna have ta go ta the queen ain¡¯t I? She¡¯ll put im back of a kind. I seen her creations and they ain¡¯t pretty but at least they¡¯re living of sorts.¡±


    ¡°You go to her and she¡¯ll kill you,¡± he said.


    ¡°Ya think I don¡¯t goddamn know it? What else am I gonna do? I gots nothing left. Them ogres was all I had. I lost the rest. All y¡¯all, the greenskins, the old dogman. Y¡¯all were everything ta me Orc. We was best friends all of us. Goddamn Donnas and goddamn his armiger for what they done ta us. Goddamn. Goddamn.¡±


    He saw her hands were trembling and she reached one to her forehead to brush back a trace of her hair, and he saw the black blood dried under her fingernails from when she had collected the head into the sack.


    ¡°I ain¡¯t nothing. No place of my own. No friends but that one-headed freak. Ain¡¯t got nothing, ain¡¯t ta be nothing. Momma ya was right all along.¡±


    He watched her there, the woman who had enslaved him, who had forced him to fight and to maim and to kill. All for her to get ahead of the poverty that had chased her all her life, to get ahead of herself.


    He snatched her wrist. Bony and fragile. Her eyes widened. Her mouth half opened. He saw the fear there, and something else he wasn¡¯t prepared to admit.


    With his free hand he reached to his satchel and untied it. His fingers fished for the copper penny, the one she had thrown down to him on the day he slew the bosun those years ago. He placed it in her waiting hand. He closed her fingers over it, her fist wholly engulfed in his.


    Her tears ran freely now despite the salt. She tried to speak but she couldn¡¯t manage a word.


    From behind them Ogre said, ¡°Orc loves us."


    Perhaps he did.


    <hr>


    > +1 [Awareness] Sometime around then he learnt there¡¯s more to attunin to the world than lovin dirt. There¡¯s somethin in fellowship you can¡¯t find in bloody nature but without which you ain¡¯t to understand what¡¯s natural. (2/10)


    > Lost item: [Copper penny]

 82. Bidwell

    Sometimes she looked at Orc and the bookmaker behind but mostly she watched the blue dwarf ahead. The salt pan was a day behind them and now they walked through hills and downs and the longhorn said they were halfway to the old capital. A large black raven hovered about them as if counting their number and then it cawed and flapped up and away east over a hilltop on its oilslick wings. They carried on after it and in the evening they passed through orchards of leafless husks in their orderly rows and columns, past the ruins of adobe villas and stone keeps whose mortar crumbled under their fingertips. They marched between granite tors and through straths with frozen bottoms where fluffed up ptarmigans warbled like the stones about. Finally they came through a stand of trees far older than the risen or the humans preceding them and they camped upon a cliff above a glacial cirque lost of its maker in which lay the ruin of a town called Bidwell.


    The cavaliers hobbled their horses and began moving through the trees for kindling until the longhorn stopped them. There would be no fires that night. Mym watched through lidded eyes as the sow who had taken to Orc descended to the fort with the tusker scout and Uhquah sat on the cliff with his feet dangling over an iron darkness gathering in the cirque''s cauldron. Mym set to sharpening the adze of her alpenstock and waited. When the scout and the sow returned at last light she sauntered closer and overheard their report. No light shown in the bowl below.


    Of the town and the man for which it was named Mym knew nothing. When they entered it the next day they passed single file on cobbled streets between rows of long narrow barracks where the orckin slaves had been interred.


    "Captives of Glad Nizam''s rebellion," she heard a cavalier say. "Brought here last year by kingsmen aimin to make a new life in the old way."


    "Where''d they go?" asked another.


    The cavalier shrugged. "Maybe they heard we was comin."


    Uhquah spat from his mount and wiped his mouth with the tail of his beard. "The brigadier scared em off."


    Mym was eyeing the wire strung across the grounds. ¡°Looks lek she freed the orcs while she was at it.¡±


    They walked past a pit of refuse and a pile of rubble with a canvas tarp lashed across, past a cart of bonewhite mortar with the trowel seized straight up and down in it like the old story of the sword in the stone, past the dark inner gatehouse of the town¡¯s keep. They crossed the remnant of a ditch and held up outside the tall square structure of stone and adobe with its battlements and towered corners. There was a lowered portcullis with a vertical rend in its crossjoinings large enough for a mounted rider to pass through, as if a titan had pulled the iron rods asunder.


    Uhquah knocked the butt of his carbine against the portcullis like a hungry inmate with a soup mug. A reddish light pinked the rim of the cirque above and everything below stood in a blue shadow. The clang of his pounding reported off of the keep and off of the gutted ground. The cavaliers sat their horses. Uhquah leaned toward the portal.


    Mym drew close thinking he might speak to the stones.


    He threw back his head. "Come to if you ain''t dead," he called.


    "Who''s that?" called a rough voice.


    Uhquah gripped up his carbine and levered a round.


    "Who''s there?" they called again.


    "Your goddamn savior," said Uhquah.


    Mym heard the metallic ring of a chain loosely drawn followed by the crunch of it spooling under load. The portcullis shrieked as it rose to three feet. Its spiked rods dusty and dulled. A dirty man leaned out from behind the gate with a pistol ready and a dagger in his opposite hand. Uhquah cast his gaze backward at Booky and she sidemouthed something to the ogre. The monster waddled up to the portcullis and pressed it up another ten feet and the entire company processed through.


    Within the bailey the cavaliers dismounted. In the murk rested the wagons of colonizers and off in a dark corner a row of five or six shallow graves, the ground turned up and over them. There was smoke wisping up from the chimney of the greathouse and some men stood in the shadow of its doorway. They nodded at Uhquah as he crossed to them and then they blanched when they saw the company''s orckin enter the bailey.


    "We pegged you for risen," said one. His gaze drifted to Orc, who had come alongside Mym as if interested to hear what these wretched men might say.


    They were a half dozen out of twoscore men that had come through the Gap the year before to live after the way of their slavetrading forefathers. They had left their families in the boomtowns on the far side of the Gap and they intended to send for them the next spring. They came for the unclaimed parcels and for the lawlessness, and they drove their slaves before them: stragglers from Glad Nizam''s revolt who had never made it to the ships, fugitives caught and secreted north and into the deadlands where no armiger might kill them and no sheriff might cause their return to internment. The men had hid themselves in the keep and bailey for the last eight days, having fled there from the outer fort when the brigadier stole their property. One of the them was arrowed in the belly and he sat against the bricks of the hearth in the great hall. The goblin medicine looked in on him with his bowl of smear clutched between his claws.


    "What''ve you done for him?" said Uhquah.


    "We ain''t got no doctors or nothing," said a slaver.


    There was a raised voice and the slavers in the bailey and the cavaliers turned toward the door of the greathouse. The medicine emerged thence.


    "Well?" said Uhquah.


    If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    The goblin was tucking the bowl back into his pack. "He said he didn''t want no shiteater''s healin."


    "So?"


    The goblin shrugged his little shoulders. "So now he don''t need it no more."


    The slavers clustered about the door and pushed inside and one hollered murder. The medicine shrugged again and returned to his place among the orckin. The longhorn laughed and excused himself to go explore the old mine of the place. Uhquah spat on the ground and glowered.


    "Who you with?" called one of the slavers.


    Uhquah ignored him.


    One of the cavaliers, the woman Robby, said, "The baron," and grinned at her mates.


    "Awright. How much you askin?¡±


    ¡°Hey?¡±


    ¡°For your stock. How much per head?¡±


    ¡°Which ones you eyein?¡±


    The slaver turned and regarded the orckin. He licked his lips. ¡°We¡¯ll need one for the each of us and two for Matray there. That sow will do for me. She¡¯s got a raw look about her as I like.¡±


    Mym heard the sow gnash her jaws and say something in their speech that made her fellows laugh.


    Robby was doing everything she could to keep her mouth flat. ¡°How¡¯ll you be payin?¡±


    The slaver came over and took her stirrup. ¡°We got silver, and minin rights open for licensin. We can settle any arrears out of the haul.¡±


    ¡°Enough of that,¡± called Uhquah.


    The slaver turned. ¡°How¡¯s that?¡±


    Uhquah spat from the back of his mule and said no more.


    ¡°Goddamn chode,¡± said the slaver.


    Mym started to walk over to the man to knock him flat but at that moment Orc grabbed her arm and gently turned her away. He looked up at the towers of the keep. "Wretched bunch," was all she heard him say through the roar of blood in her ears.


    She dragged her eyes from where the slaver was chafing by Robby who now hooted unabashedly. She breathed, she calmed. ¡°Aye,¡± she said. ¡°I met one lek them on me northerly way lookin fer ye."


    "On the road to Keelboard."


    "Aye."


    ¡°Living in a sodgrass hovel.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s him.¡±


    "I met him too."


    "I know ye did seein as I tracked ye there. I''m surprised ye didn''t gut him."


    Orc regarded her. "I''m surprised you didn''t."


    "Well," she said. "I might''ve done."


    He nodded as if he already knew. "This won''t end much different."


    They watched the slavers and the slavers watched the ground. Presently the sunlight began creeping across the bailey toward the greathouse. Two of the men went in and dragged the dead man out into the open and over to the corner hosting the other plots. A third asked Uhquah if he had anything to eat. Anything to drink. The blue dwarf continued to ignore him. Mym saw this and began to wonder just why the company had come to that place.


    She walked the grounds with Orc beside her. There was a stinking halfeaten ox in the corner opposite the makeshift cemetery. The sun lit its hacked upon haunch and swarms of flies teemed in and out of its open mouth and sunken eyes and nostrils, gathering and feasting and mating on the bared muscle and fat that was to be the slavers'' next meal. A cow was tethered nearby and it faced the wall as far away as it could get on its leash. Its flanks heaved and its breath wheezed as they approached. It stood heavily on three legs and gingerly on a forehoof. The skin had split open at the ankle and the broken bone shown through yellowish white and jagged.


    Orc nodded at it. "Poor girl."


    "Aye."


    "They ought to end her misery."


    "Aye." Mym looked back at the great hall where the slavers were now clustered in the doorway. "I expect they''re keepin her alive te keep her fresh."


    Orc looked at her and looked back at the cow. "For eating." It wasn''t a question.


    "Aye."


    Suddenly he stepped to the side of the animal and she watched him draw his slender blade and thrust upward through the furrow of the neck and in a single motion sever the carotid and the jugular and withdraw. The animal sank forward onto its knees and then collapsed completely in the dirt. Blood poured from the narrow wound and pooled red in the pale morning light.


    Mym heard an uproar behind her and she turned to meet it. The five slavers rushed them, gibbering and screaming in their rags about property and justice and other ethics for which they had no reckoning, brandishing their weapons at Orc who stood motionless with the dripping blade in his hand. One raised a pistol and fired point blank and she saw the slug pit the wall behind Orc''s head and carom away with the gunshot''s report. By the time the man realized he had missed Orc was on him. She sprung after. Ten seconds later three were dead and one was drowning in his own blood from a hole in his throat and one had disappeared back into the great hall. She could feel the rage radiating off Orc. She wiped the blood off her hands.


    Uhquah spat from the back of his mule. "Fall you in," he said. "We''re headin on."


    The cavaliers mounted and turned their horses toward the gatehouse portcullis which the ogre had propped open with a fallen timber. As they rode through the surviving slaver ran out to where his companions lay in their rigors and knelt by the last one to die. The head drooped backward as the man lifted the shoulders and a second smile yawned wide across the neck and drooled what blood had been left in the brain. The ridges of the cirque beyond the keep walls shone brightly in the ascendant sun and the wavering hum of the insectual orgy unfailing. As the orckin filed past the dead they spat upon them. Finally Tulula shoved over the last living slaver and mounted him and scalped him alive. Then she scalped the others.


    All this Mym saw. She turned to Orc as they passed under the portcullis and back into the wide deadlands. ¡°They deserved it.¡±


    He frowned. ¡°You keep saying that.¡±


    ¡°Cause it keeps bein true.¡±


    ¡°Yeah. Maybe.¡±


    He turned from the path and went into the gatehouse. She stopped to wait. The ogre stood nearby, his exhalations whistling through the stump of the decapitation. Orc emerged with the bookmaker half over his shoulder and her sack dangling from his fist. She looked ill. When the sow trotted past with the fresh trophies swinging from her harness the bookmaker wheeled around and bent over and was sick.


    Orc patted the woman¡¯s back and looked at Mym. She nodded after the company. "We better get goin fore they leave us behind," she said.


    ¡°On to the next camp of folks to kill,¡± he said.


    Now Mym frowned. ¡°Ye adverse te killin slaver men?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    Booky wiped her mouth. ¡°It¡¯s that mercy of his gifted on im by that brigadier. I warned im bout it for years didn¡¯t I? Told im it¡¯d get im stuck by some villain someday.¡±


    The woman looked sideways at the orc. ¡°Course he never did listen to me. Now he¡¯s all on about goddamn justice. Getting close enough ta smell his old lady and forgetting what I learned him.¡±


    He looked back. ¡°That I ought to kill slavers?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s right.¡±


    ¡°All of them?¡±


    ¡°Well,¡± she hesitated. ¡°Leastways those of em who ain¡¯t reformed.¡±


    He shook his head at her. Mym saw the hint of a smile about his mouth.


    The woman looked at Mym. ¡°What he needs is ta spend some time with y¡¯all up in y¡¯alls mountain yonder. Learn something of vengeance and grudgery and all that squat dwarfy shit. Maybe y¡¯all could fix im up with a heart of stone. Just slot it straight in for the gold one he¡¯s carrying around.¡± She stood straight and coughed. ¡°No cause for waiting, hey?¡±


    She grabbed the sack from Orc.


    ¡°Let¡¯s get on back thataway presently. Ain''t take us but a month ta get there. Ain''t no deaduns worth fearing with my old partners between us. Aw hell. Speaking of villains.¡±


    Mym turned to where the woman was looking. There the longhorn stood in the cold sunlight of the abandoned fort: naked to the waist, sweat steaming off his hide, a hundredweight of stones in a stout leather bag over his enormous shoulder. He was watching Mym. She felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck.


    ¡°Wedwarf,¡± he said, ¡°now you come and learn the speech of secrets.¡±

 83. An Oration

    Orc walked that day through the low hills and scrub pines in the wake of the company. Mym was somewhere ahead with the longhorn and his newfound rocks. Perhaps she was learning something of the stones about. Perhaps enough that they might leave this loathful retinue. Though it differed in kind their decadence outstripped anything endemic to the deadlands. He yearned to be rid of them. To find the brigadier and whatever powers here might repair his home and the dwarf¡¯s. To return across the sea to his friends.


    Occasionally in that high country mule deer would scatter from the company''s antitail and he would hear the pop of a carbine and the ragged cheer of the cavaliers. He would pass by the site of the massacre and the butchering and after a while an orc or two would overtake him carrying the gutted and packed carcass of some shaggy hind or hart. Over his shoulder he could often see the cadre of highland wolves now following them: a dozen or so amid the trees, patched gray and tan, bushy with their winter coats on, their alpha a tall and lean female who allowed no argument among her troop.


    He came on their camp at sunset. They had halted and spitted the deer to roast over a cookfire that snapped and flared in the wind. As darkness turned the glare of the fire occluded any stars and planets and even the moons were hidden by the orange light. He walked off a ways and placed his palms upon the ground, feeling for something familiar, reaching for whatever connected him to the relic he sought and the eternal change from which the earth was manifested. To the south he could see other lights winking with menace as if the wolves that dogged them were invested with the souls of demons and devils. But no, these were distant campfires, and there were figures moving around them. He strode back to the company.


    He searched for Mym and then for the longhorn but found neither. He came to Uhquah who sat on the ground against his saddle and who frowned at his approach.


    "What?" said the blue dwarf.


    "Tell me where Mym''s gone."


    "Damned if I know or care te."


    "Did she leave the camp?"


    "Might''ve."


    "There''s a party away south."


    Uhquah leaned over and spat. "A party of what?"


    "Whoever else is out here."


    "How do you know it?"


    "I saw their fires."


    Uhquah settled back against his saddle and kicked out a foot. "They ain''t risen then."


    "The brigadier?"


    "Not lek te be."


    "Kingsmen?"


    He looked up annoyed. "If you got a bug up your bunghole about it why don''t you go on and find out."


    Orc turned to leave.


    "Maybe it''s your wedwarf keeper," called the dwarf.


    Orc looked around until he saw the monstrous pale form of Ogre and Booky diminutive beside them. They were readying to bed down. He whistled low to her and she looked up and saw. He circled his finger in the air and subtly shook his head. She nodded and set about packing up her bedroll.


    He walked out south again. There again were the antipodal fires glowing like teardrops of a dragon scattered upon the pitch. As he watched they seemed untethered to their locations, to shift themselves to here, to there, suddenly near and impossibly distant. Whether this was some trick of his mind or of some other means he could not tell, but deceptions are known to lie within flames burning in the dark and by their very luminescence do they draw men and dwarves and orckin away from their foreordinations and toward fates unaccounted.


    Mym came alongside him. ¡°What¡¯s all that then?¡± she said.


    ¡°Trouble.¡± He turned to her. ¡°Where''d you get off to?¡±


    ¡°The otaur wanted to show me somethin.¡±


    ¡°Anything worth sharing?¡±


    ¡°Nothin ye have an ear fer.¡±


    ¡°Alright.¡±


    He adjusted his hat as if its placement mattered on that darkened plain.


    She nodded out at the constellation of fires. "So who are they?"


    "I don''t know and I don''t plan on waiting around to find out.¡±


    ¡°They might be friendly.¡±


    He gave her a look. ¡°Friendly. Like this lot.¡±


    She shrugged. ¡°Friendly like they won''t try te skewer ye the moment ye open that fangy jaw of yers.¡±


    He turned toward the company¡¯s camp. ¡°We¡¯re going.¡±


    ¡°And what about yer old lady?¡±


    He stopped and he regarded her. The firelight unevenly lit his face. "You¡¯re going to find her."


    The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    "I can''t."


    "You once found me from across the sea."


    "Aye that was different."


    "How?"


    "I was different."


    "You still are."


    She looked up at him. She didn''t say anything.


    "I know you can manage it," he said.


    She shook her head and her eyes flicked out to the strange fires abroad. "Not yet."


    "The longhorn didn''t teach you what you needed to know?"


    "Otaurs can''t stonetalk."


    "Yet you went with him."


    "Aye well there was still plenty te be learned."


    "About hearing rocks."


    "Aye and about other things."


    "What sort of things?"


    They stood in the wavering. After a while she looked up at the dimly twinkling stars.


    "Ye know I''m the same dwarf ye came north with."


    "Yeah."


    "I''m the same dwarf that helped ye finish off the armiger."


    "It only took us three tries.


    "And I helped free yer folk from his menacin."


    "I know it."


    "Ye know we dwarves a stubborn bunch but that''s how we are and its how I am and all I know te do is stick te me words and fulfill me oaths."


    "Alright."


    "I never promised ye answers up here. Never asked yer word on them either."


    "Whatever''s got you jigging about like Cousins just say it."


    She held up a hand as if she wasn''t finished. "I don''t believe in makin oaths just te break em. They aren''t geodes and there''s nothin pretty in their comin apart."


    "Alright."


    Finally she turned her eyes back to him. "Ye plannin on betrayin me?"


    He looked at her.


    "That¡¯s what the otaur said."


    "Yeah well he said the same thing to me."


    "That¡¯s no answer."


    He spat. Something he had picked up from the other orckin. "It might be all the one we need."


    She looked out at the fires again. "Aye," she nodded. "It just might be that."


    "Why would I betray you?"


    "There¡¯s only one manstone."


    "The same as the orcstone and I didn''t sink eight inches in your heart over that."


    "That may be but we¡¯ve got it locked away in the delvin."


    "So?"


    "So I know that doesn¡¯t sit right with ye."


    ¡°So long as it¡¯s back where it belongs come spring we¡¯ll have no quarrel."


    "And after that?"


    "Ask me then."


    She tilted her head toward him. He couldn¡¯t see her eyes against the glare of the company¡¯s fires. ¡°So ye aren¡¯t quittin me?¡±


    ¡°We came up here together for a reason. I don''t see that''s changed."


    "Aye."


    He jutted his chin at the company''s camp. "I¡¯m not sure how much longer I can stand it."


    "Stand what?"


    He opened his mouth to answer her as Booky stumbled on them with tears streaming down her face. "You comin back or what cause y''all need to put a stop to it."


    "Put a stop to what?"


    "Come on and see."


    Back in the camp amid the warmth and yellow light of the fires the longhorn sat breaking rock samples with Right''s brow. He wielded the head with both hands as if it was an oversized mortar on the pestle of the frozen ground. The twice baked metamorphics crushed upon the earth in which he read the world''s histories like the weird crouched over her tealeaves. The origins in the layers of twisted sediment now hardened, the notches and striations of supposed fossils, the cavaliers standing around nodding between drinks of whisky and spitting tobacco into the nearest campfire. One, a preacher from the midlands called Sterling, stood by and recited canonical passages to repudiate the longhorn''s genesis of all created things from accidental causes.


    The longhorn smashed the next stone with the ogre''s forehead. "Your church lies."


    "God doesn''t lie."


    "No," said the longhorn. He looked up at Orc''s approach. "She don''t."


    "God ain''t no she you fuckin cow."


    The longhorn ignored the preacher and looked straight at Orc. He held up sheet of broken shale. "She don''t lie and here are her words, spake in the laying of stones and the growing of trees and in the ordering of predator and prey."


    The cavaliers nodded and muttered to each other of the sense made by this apostate among them. The preacher spat. Orc forced his way through them until he stood before the longhorn. He picked up the foul canvas sack and opened it.


    "Put him back," he said.


    The longhorn stood up smiling. He lifted Right''s head and for a moment it appeared as if he would clobber the orc with it. Instead he let it tip and roll from his hands into the sack.


    Orc smelled the decay of the head as it fell in. He wouldn''t retch. He cinched the sack and tied it off and handed it back to Booky.


    "You wish to be going?" said the longhorn.


    Orc turned back to him. He said nothing.


    "Go on and tell them what you''ve seen."


    Orc looked to where Uhquah loitered by his fire with a wineskin laying unstoppered in his lap and his eyes red as fire. Still he said nothing.


    The longhorn nodded over his shoulder. "There''s another company afield."


    "Hey?" called one of the cavaliers. "What''d he say?"


    The longhorn continued. "It would be better if they met us ahorse than sleeping in our bags."


    The cavaliers now turned to Uhquah. The blue dwarf watched them through skulking eyes. His beard damp, his forehead sweating.


    The longhorn nodded at the others, never once looking at the dwarf who was their captain. "Time to go."


    ***


    They broke camp and rode into the night leaving their fires burning for no one. A mile into those uplands Orc saw a company much like their own tracking opposite their path. The otherworldly violence one moon visited upon the other lighted this terrestrial conjunction. Uhquah pulled up on his mule and the cavaliers and orckin halted behind him. The other party kept on. When they came within fifty yards they too stopped and waited stock still in the strange celestial flaring that pulsed soundlessly across the landscape and all waited for the other to speak.


    "Who ye be?" called Uhquah.


    "Friends, living friends."


    They each counted the number of the other. How many rode, how many afoot. There were orckin among both companies.


    "Where are you comin from?" called the others.


    "Where you''re headed," called the longhorn.


    Their leader approached and the others came after. They were a band of hunters out of the north, their animals pulling wagons filled with smoked meat and clay amphoras of fat sealed in congealed grease and pelts and furs of every kind. They were outfitted in cured hides mended with the tendons of the beasts they had slayed and they bore their weapons with the familiarity of men seldom without them. Those weapons were longbored muskets of human make and a kind of steelhead lance for hurling and with the latter they hunted the great herds of bison and the seaborn mammals native to that region and its icebound coast. Their weapons and their saddles were decorated with the tailfeathers of great raptors and garish tassels now muted by the night. From horseback and with these arms in hand they conversed with the blue dwarf and matches flared behind upheld hands as two or three of their company lit short stemmed pipes of tobacco. Their leader told that they were headed to the Thumb with their take. Uhquah''s scalphunters might have bartered for a share of the meat but with what? Not their carbines nor other weapons, not with the scalps of the dead, not with food or whisky for the hunters had no need of these things. They were more likely to take the meat by force and they might have but for the weapons held by the hunters. And so each company went their own way on that midnight highland, each bound whence the other had come.


    Orc was last of the company and was last to pass the shorthorn guarding the hunters'' rear. He held a hand up to her in greeting and farewell and she nodded in return.


    "Have you seen the brigadier?" he said.


    She shrugged as if ignorant of such titles and their meaning.


    "And the risen?"


    Her eyes widened. In them he could see the glimmering of the plasma lancing from moon to moon. "You''ll come to them shortly," she said.

 84. Well Met

    She expected the dead any day now as the company pushed deeper into the craggy highlands south and west of the old capital. There were no further signs of the living save the days-old traces and tracks of the brigadier''s cohort. By brush and tumbleweed fires they lunched in silence and the pale flames sent wisps of smoke ascending to the sun that grew their fuel. Mym rested with her hands back and her legs straight out and her boots undone while the woman Booky sat on the bagged head of the ogre as if it was a wayside stone and fed brush to the fire they shared.


    "Ya been campaigning before," said Booky.


    Mym opened her eyes and wiped them with a calloused hand. "Aye sure."


    "I knows it. Ya got a gift for it. More than me and I''d say more than old Orc there. And a gift for other things too I hear. I swear god surely don''t dispense justice in equal shares."


    Mym looked at her and then closed her eyes again.


    "It''s true," said the woman. "Look at these rascals here. Look at that risen otaur."


    "I''ve seen him plenty."


    "Y''all don''t think much of him. Ya don''t and I can tell Orc don''t neither. Can''t say he''s my favorite cow but he''s damn good at everything asked of him. Ya saw him with that carbine same as me."


    "Anyone with digits te pull a trigger can fire a rifle."


    "Not like that. And he talks to stones too."


    "No he doesn''t."


    "He sure does, same as y''all."


    Mym shook her head and didn''t open her eyes.


    "He does as I''ve heard him do it."


    "Ye don''t have the ears for hearin stonespeech."


    "That may be but I sure as shit saw what I saw. Last time, time before last, we was back with that crazy dwarf up near Thumb why that beardclad fellow hummed right up at the otaur like we was all of us up at y''alls mountain havin a parley and the otaur just hummed right back at him. Uhquah just bout fell right over. He didn''t know he could talk it and neither did the rest of us. I heard Uhquah ask him where he''d learned it and you know what that otaur said?"


    Mym had an eye open now. "Well?"


    "Said he learned it offa stone."


    Booky shook her head and leaned back from the fire. She wiped her brow. "That how y''all learn it too? Offa stones?"


    Mym looked at the fire and didn''t answer.


    "I thought not. As I was saying god don''t dispense justice any better than any man I''ve met and ain''t that a wonder since he''s a man like any other no matter what the otaur says. Ya could put it to im plain and he''d not falter of it."


    "Falter of what?"


    "Admitting what''s supposed to have been fair is crooked as a shepherd''s cane. Sometimes a woman wonders if she shouldn''t appeal the devil to set fire to it all."


    Booky looked over to where Orc had gone. "Lord knows I tried already."


    Mym now opened both eyes and turned her head. She saw not Orc but the longhorn sitting nearby.


    "Ya didn''t call him a shooter til he showed it,¡± said Booky. ¡°Would ya know he''s the best goddamn singer I''ve ever heard. The stars''ll come falling out of the sky for attending his piping. I''ve never heard a voice such as his. He can lead a fair step too. Call a dance, track an eel under ice, dowse a well in a desert, coo a lady to a certain heat enough to catch fire in a blizzard. Hell he''s been all over this continent. The night the brigadier found him they sat up til the coals burned black talking politics and warfare and the metaphysicality of womanhood. I ain''t heard anything like it."


    Booky reached back and tossed another tumbleweed into the snapping and popping firering. "I ain''t one for lordyness but there''s something afoot about these parts that ain''t familiar to any subject of the king except as a certain kind of providence whose realm is that of raising dead and black horsemen and a day of judgment."


    Mym thought about a certain block some thousands of miles away, sweltering in a tropical sun. About her head upon it. About the secrets that marred its very stone. "The only gods that ever were are dead," she said.


    "Gods of dwarves maybe. They ain''t the same as him the priests kneel to. Him and his are alive even in death, and they''re speaking to ya just as they''re speaking to all of us, day and night."


    Mym closed her eyes again. "No gods speak te me lass.¡±


    ¡°Oh and what do ya hear right now?¡±


    ¡°Just a sad woman who made a life from slavin."


    Booky smiled. "Ya¡¯ll know he¡¯s speaking to ya the moment he stops doing and when he does ya¡¯ll know he''s never stopped speaking to ya all y''alls life."


    "And what do ye expect yer god of men says te the likes of Uhquah and the otaur?"


    "The otaur," said Booky.


    Mym heard the woman pile another tumbleweed on. She opened her eyes for no sleep was to be had with the bookmaker in attendance. "We met him once before. Down in that rathole boomtown on the right side of the Gap."


    Booky nodded. "Just about every man woman and orckin among us says they seen him someplace or other before joining the company. I met him myself as he went about saving us all. Ya know that? Just after me and ogres signed on with the brigadier. Well let¡¯s see that was about a month after y''all burned the poor old armiger alive."


    "He wasn''t alive."


    "Oh so he was dead then? Yeah I thought not. So I was saying me and ogres were hooked up with the brigadier and we was going camp to camp in the goldlands busting out them orckin what didn''t break out when Glad Nizam gone off. We''d just set alight a warden''s office with the man and his staff all inside and they''d just stopped howling when out of the dark walks that otaur. Just shambles up like a bull coming home to the barn after a fine day among the heifers. Uhquah thought him one of the queen''s slaves. Might have put a hole in his head if he''d had any powder left for shooting."


    "Ye didn''t have any powder?"


    "Nah they''d fired it all up at the kingsmen the baron sent out after us. Spent a week barricaded in a storehouse down at Seaway''s End. We was fifty eight when they smoked us out and we was twelve fit to walk and fight when the otaur found us. Ya know Seaway¡¯s End?"


    Mym shrugged.


    "Down and up again we was looking for the magistrate of said place. The brigadier had it on authority that she''s a witch of some kind or other and that''s just the type of folks she''s always looking for recruiting to the cause."


    Mym turned her eyes to the fire and said nothing.


    "So there we was on the run, fatally pursued, a wholesale regiment come after us. The brigadier pressing us on, stopping and freeing what orckin we could. Looting whatever powder there was to be had and shooting it up straightaway at the next camp we freed. The cavaliers kept going on about which hilltop or canyon or homestead we''d wind up in for our last stand. They were slathering for it. Then out of the dark walks the otaur. Fire gleaming in his eyes like the devil hisself."


    Mym pulled her knees up with the palms of her hands. She watched the bookmaker.


    "We''d been running all day and well into that night. Uhquah kept hurrying us from rock to rock and dropping from his mule to have themselves a conversation. He led us upon the camp and we was hoping for a quick action and that''s what we got but there weren''t no powder there to be had. He and the brigadier and them cavaliers was empty horned and ogres was bellowing on about dinner. They wanted to stand and wait for the regiment. Make a meal outta em I''m guessing. At any rate that sacking looked to be our last. We was all watching the night, back the way we''d come. Watching for torches, scouts, whatever. Listening to the camp''s powder go a pop pop popping in that conflagration and cursing that man that''d set it.


    "Then about the witching hour the otaur come out of the midnight by his lonesome. And at his coming set the blue moon. Parson Kelly said it¡¯s cause he''d not appear in any light but firelight but I think it was the darkness that birthed him. He came with naught weapons but his spread of horn just as you see em now. Dipped in gold and etched with them words there: remember you must die. Who they''re for hisself or them he skewers I can''t say. There he walked. Ain¡¯t a shirt or jacket against the cold. Everyone but the brigadier shirking back and him just grinning at us like some death''s head, like he knew every one of us. Knew where we''d come from and where we were going and knew the exact moment of doom for each of our bleeding hearts. He''d a gunny sack tied off with who knows what inside it. Said he''d come out of the north but you certainly couldn''t tell it. No food nor water in hand. Said that he''d come to free his pa.


    "She watched him standing there the brigadier. Hell only knows what she made of the bullman. I ain¡¯t  know even to this day and I''ve spent weeks and months since then studying both of them together. They share something. Some terrible purpose. One of them awful pacts made in wet blood exchanged hand to hand. Beware it I say. Y''all will see soon as we catch up with her. The otaur bent her ear and before long he was calling for the wagons to be brought round. The wounded occupying em were flopped onto the ground and the otaur set to loading them wagons with all the shit he could find. Manure and horse piss and filth from the camp latrine. All manner of dungwater. A cesspool on wheels. The brigadier had words with them invalids to be left behind and Uhquah had the rest of us hauling shit barehanded wither the otaur willed. Off we went with the otaur looking about greatly satisfied as if the pa he''d set out to save was there amid the nightsoil. As if it was a fine night for a march, and marched we did.


    "A mile outside the camp he done set us upon a new northerly course. When the sun came up it cast on those lonesome mountains standing some forty miles distant and we were made to reach them before the day was out. Ya ever walked forty goddamn miles in a day? Those of us unhorsed were made to follow the beasts with our canteens and pails and catch everything felled out of their assends. All that piss and shit was tossed onto the foul mixture of the wagons and if god had struck that regiment blind then and there they''d have had no trouble finding us just following their noses. At the head of the wagons pulled the otaur and I tell ya there weren''t an ounce of sweat off of him, no worry whatsoever despite the eight hundred sumbitches riding down on us.


    "Did noone ask the otaur what was in them mountains? Of that I can''t say. I sure as hell didn''t. He scared me then as he scares me now."


    Booky seemed to shudder and she edged closer to the fire. "We came upon the hills barren as they were of fuel or food and up a drainage we went til the brigadier called the halt. The soles of my feet still praise her name. Next sunrise we were short three men who''d deserted in the night. We looked up and down for them but never found them. Down on the Goldlands spread below us we could see the regiment. Away south in a grand column five miles or less. Throwing up a dust storm that just sort of hung there and they ain''t looking like they was in any kind of hurry for there weren''t anyplace left for us to go.


    A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    "The otaur hadn''t ever slept that night and when I woke up there he was holding a tremendous cedar branch. Who the hell knows where he found it in that desolate place of rock and sun. He had it and he was standing up on the toe board of the wagon and the little two inch braces were quivering under him. He had it and he was stirring that lake of shit like he was cooking a harvest stew. Stirring it over and over on itself. Not even the horses came near to it. I tell ya wedwarf, whatever god''s saying to him there ain''t nothing holy about it.


    "Now I told ya I saw what I saw and here''s where I saw it. We got on at first light up a rough black land. A broken land. We was going up the south slope and there was all manner of lava rocks setting out along the ground. Basalts and andesites and obsidian all glassed up, stuff blown off the mountaintop in some past age. The otaur would hold up and squat with each of them awhile. Swear to god. Just setting there with the stones in his hands grunting at them like some sort of enormous buffoon. And all the while the regiment coming on in plain sight. Eight hundred of them. My eyes about fell out of my head every time the old beef stopped but the brigadier never said nothing about it.


    "By and by we couldn''t see the regiment as it had gone under the slope we climbed. They was down there somewheres and they was coming up of that there was no doubt. We rode and walked all day, ever upward. We came within a day''s climb of the summits of that place but we ran outta sun. Nightfall come and the otaur and the brigadier and Uhquah gathered up. There was only ten of us then on account of the three gone missing. I woulda gone too but ogres wouldn''t have it."


    Booky affectively patted the enwrapped head upon which she sat. "We left him there. The otaur. Left him and his stinking sloshing tub in a little drainage off the snowcap. He told us to ride a lap of the mountain and to return after a day. We turned on to traverse the slope and last I looked he was pulling his wagon up the drainage. As certain as I''ve got ten fingers and toes I knew I''d never see him again."


    Booky looked at Mym. "Leastways not before I find myself in hell. I reckoned the brigadier would quit of him. She led us on acting always like there weren''t no trouble. Uhquah out front grubbing and sniffing the way across the busted flint. There weren''t much to it as we were running without regard to anything but not getting caught. Next morning we found the deserters hanging off their crosses. Three of em up on a little ridge of the mountain. They''d been gutted and it was the sinews of their knotted off intestines that were strapping their wrists to the crossbars and I can tell ya that was a smell worse than the otaur''s soup. Stacked at their feet were their empty powderhorns. The kingsmen knew we was out of it.


    "The cavaliers dismounted and led their animals over the ground. It took every trick I knew to keep ogres from clobbering and eating the beasts. After a day we came back to the drainage and in that time the otaur had diverted the trickle to filter and leach the filth and he fashioned a kiln in the interior of a lavatube and he broke down the wagon and fired its wheels and cart and the rest of it to boil off the shit and reduce it like he was making some kind of turdy bouillon. He doused the fire and set it alight again off and on til there weren''t nothing left of the wagon but charcoal. When we came on him he was lying in the brown creekwater like it was a baptismal of the very elements of his creation. Fire and ice. The regiment was nigh upon us and there he lay. He got up and shook hisself off when he saw us coming and he picked up two sacks lying by and in one was powdered charcoals black as ink and in the other was crystalline potash white as snow. He tossed em up to Uhquah and pulled on his trousers and I was relieved for it as he''s a tonne of rotten hamburger if he''s a pound of flesh.


    "We continued up the mountain now short of the wagon. No pickets out, nothing. Just up. Dead tired and falled asleep walking. Come dusk the sky''d gone bloodred west and the otaur took up his position at the head of we ragged survivors. Every step his tail swishing and his hands pushing off his knees and as the sun touched the plain below he turned to us and began some sort of oratory and whatever he was saying I ain''t understanding as I hungered for sleep and for food of any kind. The things he said I can''t repeat save that in its bottom the world treasured everything good and that we may partake of them treasures only by passing into hell. Then he turned on with those sacks sagging off his shoulders and he led us up that slope of porous slag and splintered glass, and we followed his wake like the mourners of a martyr marching to a communal suicide."


    The bookmaker ceased her story. Mym peered over at her and caught her looking across the fire at where the otaur sat facing away from the flames as she had seen him do before. The bookmaker turned back to Mym.


    "That cindercone went up for miles. My boots were shredded. Ogres feet were cut up and bleeding. Scrambling up that violated terrain ya could tell what happens so close to the sun. Stones all melted together and hardened that way, two in one like old ogres used to be. The devil hisself might''ve walked ahead of us over that fiery vomit, might''ve been disgorged with the molten rock to set about his mischief in our world. Hell for all we knew we might''ve been following him back to the place of his origin right then and there. A sacrifice of flesh to some eldritch god what made our god. Men and women cast into the gullet of the world like they done in the olden days before folk learned something of civilized ways.


    "The otaur never looked elsewhere than ahead. The lip of the caldera like his lover''s embrasure. Why we ascended there none of us knew. May to make a last stand. May to leap into the fire than be taken by kingsmen as traitors and crucified by our own bellies. Up we went. The regiment now plain below us. What breath we found was hard fought to have. I ain''t breathed so hard fighting that doomstone automaton as I did bearing down to take a shit upon the heights of that mountain. We topped out around sunrise. We were finished. The regiment not a mile downslope.


    "As we fell about the place in exhaustion the otaur stood tall. Like he''d climbed up just for the sightseeing. Then he knelt and began kicking the rock about with those cloven feet of his. Smashing it to pieces and ya should''ve seen the horrors expressed by Uhquah, bless his sentimental heart. But it was brimstone ya see. Sulfur. Bright yella and stinking. We knelt beside him and set to scaling it off and the otaur crushing it to a powder. When we''d harvested enough to his liking he found a crevice of the place and poured in that slit the sacks of charcoal and potash and with one arm he mixed these together and called for the brimstone. I myself brought it to him in handfuls and poured it in.


    "What was next for us to do? There weren''t no water about for binding and I feared the otaur might gore one of the horses for the blood of her, but that he didn''t do. He stood over the mixture and whipped out his little chuck and set to pissing directly into the crevice. And when he''d done he waved over to the next man and called at him to piss in. Piss in he said, piss in like y''all are god hisself carving out the canyons of the world. That we did, even ogres whose piss went splashing all over. And while we did there the otaur was, kneeling over the mixture, molding it, pressing it, squeezing it together like flour for baking, piss and powder all up his arms. Everything therin turned all black and fetid and he had a madness in his eyes and the next thing I say is true though I wouldn''t blame ya for doubting it. He took up the clumps of the mass in his bare hands and spread it thin across the rim of the crater, trowling it on with his fingers like he was setting to bricklay a wall upon it or a dome of sorts to cap the very volcano whose brimstone we took. After all it was spread on thin he did this thing.


    "Now I said before ya didn''t have to believe me and I know ya won''t for ya said the otaur ain''t got the ears for stonetalking but it¡¯s what happened I swear to god and his merry martyrs. There he was watching the maw of the cone with one eye and with the other eye closed and he laid his palms on the tortured mountainside and sucked in a breath for the ages. What he done with that breath I can''t exactly say as I couldn''t hear, maybe ya''ll find fault with my accounting, but I felt the staunch stone upon which we stood start to tremble. Trembled like a little girl before her mama''s wrath. Came up through the holes in my boots like I was standing on a whole hive of bees droning mad and fixing to kill. The otaur went red in his bloodless face. The ground got warm like the summer sun had beat a full day upon it. Ya could fry an egg and what patches of snow there were melted thin to nothing. I fetched the empty sacks and socked em over ogres'' feet to keep their toes from blistering up such was the heat of the earth. The piss started steaming off the mixture. Meanwhile ya could see down in the throat of the mountain what had been dark was fixing to glow. It weren''t much but there it was. As if the earth herself gestated a second sun for birthing forthwith.


    "Now the regiment hadn''t never stopped coming. They was hungry for vengeance and if that ain''t a lesson to all y''all dwarves then I don''t know what is. Those soldiers of the king were ascending over every bare escarpment, rising and falling over the clattering screefields and clambering over the talus that the otaur''s ministrations had set to teetering. They were but minutes away from gun range and we had not a solitary piece of cover on that bald summit.


    "Right then the otaur took a whiff off of the muck he''d made and stuck a finger in it like he was taking its temperature. Then he unswung his gunny sack and laid out its effects of which I''ll tell ya another time for they''re the strangest things I''ve seen any man or monster carry. He took the empty sack and began to gather that dark crumbling paste of his in it. I pulled my knife to help trowel it up and he put up his hand and shook his head as he was afraid of any spark that might strike off the flint on which it all lay. The heat off the funnel was mighty and the wind of it had started to raise his mane off his back and neck like he was hanging upside down. With all the freshmade powder away in his sack he nodded at the brigadier who had been sitting by all the time writing in her little book. She strode on up and dipped her horn and quick as a butterfly flapping her wings she licked and folded up two new cartridges and one then two into her doublebarrel they went with the lead balls to match.


    "He tells her to go on and she lowered herself to sit on the ground and make a study of the wind and the slope as if she ain¡¯t never shot nothing in her life."


    "It''s a difficult thing firin down a steep," said Mym.


    "Yeah well I''ll defer to y''alls expertise. So she''s sitting there and we''re all waiting unsure whether the otaur''s apothecating will amount to anything. She cocks both the hammers of her piece and she pointed and fired em both together. I ain''t never heard a roar like it in my life. Gives me chills just recollecting it. The powdersmoke wept off and as we watched one of them soldiers among soldiers slumped over and never stood again. His fellows took notice and fell down beside him. The brigadier just looked over at the otaur and he just smiled back at her. He was busy grinding out the powder in the bag and one by one he called us over to fill our horns and one by one we did as he behested. When I came up to him ya know what he said to me? Borrowed time, he said. Against what, I said. He grinned his chappy black lips at me and wouldn''t say no more. It didn''t take long to learn what he meant.


    "That regiment was but crawling now. They was only five hundred yards downslope and even with full horns we afforded neither the shot nor the powder to fell the seven hundred and ninety nine yet breathing. At any second they''d reckon it and come all at once and we''d be jumping into that hellish chimney. But right then they had a pause, and that gave us time to load up and draw arms and commence to kill them fuckers. Ya know some of them was who came to my pit that night? They was who split us up? Well we laid into em there. Butchered em. At the first volley I myself saw ten of em drop like women¡¯s favors thrown down on old Orc there. They was at two hundred yards when my balls ran out and I swear on my god and your stones about that they were but half the number that set out that day from their fort. But now they was firing back, and even one at a time four hundred guns blazing makes for a heady stream of gunshot."


    She laid a hand on her makeshift stool. "Ogres was hit in the arm what with his size and I was on my hands and knees casting about for a place we could hole up when the otaur touches my arm and nods to the far side of the rim. Now to pay what''s owed, he says. Some of the others were already scampering around and we ran after. The otaur followed us. And the brigadier. She covered the withdrawal, popping away with her double shot. You never seen a woman''s hands move so fast. Like all she done all day every day was charge and fire and recharge and fire. At that rate she shot herself dry and soon came after. The regiment saw her get and they bellied up a shout and their bugler sounded a charge and they stood and ran crabwise right on up the smoothest draw of the place.


    "I hadn''t noticed, none of us had, the prodigious belching of smoke billowing out of the spout. The rocks on which we hunkered had begun to tumble down and clap one another in a kind of congratulation for what was coming. What had come. Higher than the sun itself a geyser of red hot slag rose and fell darkly about us and every bare ass stone upon which it landed burst into flame as if it were one of these tumbleweeds. What pieces of the regiment we could see were then scattering. It was as if, as if a dragon stretched out of the belly of the world and laid ruin about the land. Then that side of the cone we¡¯d climbed up just burst right asunder. We weren''t in a place to see it directly, but we saw it after. The whole goddamn slope of the mountain done caved on itself and then blew outward with such violence as hasn''t been seen since the world was made and heaven and hell erupted the sky warring over its dominion. About a million rocks spewed off and you could see the uniformed kingsmen among them. Rotating and revolving like they was dancing underwater and they flew on and on until you just couldn''t see them anymore. Like they never hit the ground. Like they''s still flying out there somewheres."


    The bookmaker paused a moment and Mym wondered what else she knew that she hadn¡¯t said. Finally she turned and looked at Mym. "And that''s how the otaur fell in with us."


    "Sounds te me more like you fell in with him."


    "We fell in with him?"


    "Aye."


    Booky''s eyes flashed across the fire. "Quiet there wedwarf. If he''s got ears to hear the silent stones then he''s bound to hear y''all jabbering away there."


    Mym looked at where the longhorn sat. She cast her eyes about the camp and at its very edge she saw Orc coming in. She raised her hand to him but either he didn''t see or he didn''t care for he went to where the sow called Tulula knelt among her kin. He sat down on the ground beside her.


    Mym laced her boots and rose from the fire shouldering her kit. She crossed the camp to Orc.


    "We need te talk."


    He looked up at her. "Alright."


    She kept her eyes on him though she felt the gaze of the orckin upon her. "Not here."


    "Alright."


    He started to get up and walk with her.


    "Bring yer shit."


    <hr>


    > +1 [Stonespeaking] It¡¯s only after old ways o thinkin stop makin sense that new ways are allowed te emerge.

 85. A Beast Among Monsters

    He picked up his satchel and blade. Dusting his legs with his hands he followed the dwarf past the sentry and they edged into the open country. The sentry shouted lewd suggestions to their backs but they kept on. After a hundred yards they stopped at an outcrop of rock and he watched the dwarf lay her palms on the stone. Her mouth moved but he was deaf to whatever may have passed between them.


    She straightened up from the rock and cupped her hands together and blew hot breath into them and then jammed them into her pockets. She nodded back at the camp. "Ye still lookin te be free of this lot?"


    "It¡¯s that or some folks are going to get killed and I can¡¯t guarantee it won¡¯t be us."


    "Aye then. Let''s get."


    "Now?"


    "Now."


    He looked at her. "Something''s changed."


    She regarded the stone. "Yer pitmistress was just tellin stories and I heard one I wish I hadn''t."


    He turned back to the camp and saw Booky hunched over a fire with her head in her hands. Ogre sat apart as they were made to do. "We shouldn''t leave her."


    "Ye go back te her as ye stand and they''ll know we''re quittin. Uhquah and that otaur. They''ll know."


    ¡°So?¡±


    ¡°No need for the bravado lad. Ye don¡¯t want them chasin after us any more than I.¡±


    She unslung her carbine and checked its charges. ¡°Ye ready?¡±


    He looked once more at Booky, at Ogre. ¡°You got your stone scent or whatever?¡±


    She shrugged. ¡°As much as I can.¡±


    ¡°Alright. Let¡¯s go.¡±


    They cut out into the upland mountains. Into a country of dark pines and the howl of the boreal wind shredding itself across their tops. He felt the fallen needles snap under his feet, the sap stick to his fingers where he brushed the trunks. There were scabs of dirty old snow in the sumps between the trees. Needles and now birch leaves like fallen shingles lying on the crust. She led him through a grove of the bone white trees and he saw how their reaching branches never intersected nor touched. The perfection of their leafless canopy wasn''t lost on him. He felt something of kinship there. Something he''d not felt since he was last in the ruin of the elven forest. He closed his eyes to try to reach for it and in that moment of darkness he heard the longhorn''s voice boom up the hillside.


    "Not far now lads," he was calling. "There they are between the trees. See them there? Hot on the trail as I said they''d be."


    Orc was sweating now despite the wind and the cold. Steam whipped away off of his back. The dwarf stepped lightly uphill and he couldn¡¯t have gone any faster yet the longhorn''s urging seemed to grow ever closer.


    "Stay with them now. They''re on the scent of something. Stay with them."


    He saw her turn to check on him. He put his hand flat on her back and urged her forward. "Don''t stop.¡±


    They climbed a dry gulch and they passed trunks whose barks were rimed with great columns of ice as if the gale had driven a million shards of glass into their heartwood. They crossed through a col as the sun set. Swifts came up and over from the far side and plunged past their heads with their wings tucked in, shooting between the trunks and over a cliffside to the pan far below like flights of arrows volleyed off the roof of the world. Down the col¡¯s far side they ran and into what seemed to them to be a forest of coal black trees naked of leaves or needles or any sign of life. They could hear the horses sucking air behind them, the longhorn haranguing all after them, all after as if they were bloodhounds and he their huntmaster and Orc and Mym on the trace of the last wild wolf in the world of men. The murk under the limbless posts closed about them as the first of the cavaliers caught them and his horse was slaloming around a trunk when a whisper of feathers and a slash of talons descended from overhead as a winged woman beat down upon the cavalier with her raptor¡¯s eyes sharp on her prey.


    The cavalier''s horse reared and the cavalier flattened himself along its neck and reached for the carbine scabbarded at his knee. The greenskin medicine was loping behind him and the frightened horse bowled him over and he was trying to find his balance, lank arms out as if walking a rail, and the harpy''s fangs opened toward him, wide beyond belief, screeching rough through its gizzard and her incisors ruddily stained from blood. The cavalier fired. The shot winged the harpy and the harpy cried again and grasped the medicine with her clawed feet and lifted him from the ground. The cavalier fired again into the thick plumage of her shoulder as she punched her wings downward and the medicine hanging from the talons bore his teeth with one hand hard about her ankles as if it was he hanging onto her. In the forest behind them came a clamor of men and women and the rebellious cries of horses. The cavalier levered his weapon once more as the harpy launched upward with the medicine writhing in her grasp like a defiant serpent coiling around an eagle''s embrace and together harpy and greenskin passed over the cavalier in a rush of suncolored feathers splattering blood from their tips and rank death in the wind of her passing. The gunshot pierced up through the open canopy of that place and the report of it rang down around Orc''s head. More rifles roared as did the orckin who had come up just in time to see their fellow disappear into the night sky like some kind of tribute to the night clutched by terror herself.


    The longhorn was the first to speak. "As I said they were onto something.¡±


    The cavaliers were still calming their horses yet Orc saw the orckin passing weapons and food among themselves, the tusker scout shouldering the straps of two waterskins and tossing away a powderhorn and counting a clutch of javelins, taking three, leaving three, and here came Tulula to where he and Mym stood catching their breath.


    Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    ¡°You¡¯re going after him,¡± said Orc.


    Tulula nodded. ¡°He¡¯s been with us since Geltwald."


    He looked over at Uhquah. "They''ll let you go?"


    "Let? What be let? We go where we will and you be coming with us."


    She looked past him and nodded at Mym. "Bring your beardling. It''s said they can track a wren over bare rock." She looked at the blank sky above, too dark for color yet too light for stars, thick with the tops of the forest lost therein. "We be needing that now. Come."


    "What of Uhquah and the longhorn?"


    "What of them? They be nothing to us against our own kind."


    "Will they come also?"


    The tusker passed her a water skin and she took a pull off of it. As she drank he nodded somberly at Orc. No words between them.


    She passed back the skin and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. "No they be going on to the brigadier. They don''t trouble themselves for matters of honor and we don''t trouble them for it. Come now. Bring your beardling."


    "Where is the brigadier?"


    "She be not far now, but she be not the matter before us. We have business with that harpy. Come."


    Mym stood idly watching this conversation and when Orc turned to her she listened carefully to what he relayed. "It''s a matter of honor then?" she said.


    "For the orcs it is."


    She sniffed. He watched her. She looked up at where the cavaliers now reformed, the clank and rustle of their harness and arms came down through the rows of trunks out of the dark. She looked up at Uhquah, silently sat upon his mule with his own carbine across his lap.


    "And the rest of em aren''t comin with?"


    "They don''t seem to be."


    "Well. Here''s te honor."


    "Can you track the harpy?"


    "I think what ye should be askin is whether I can track square angles away from wherever that otaur''s headin, and I do believe I can."


    "Alright."


    Uphill a torch flared. By its meager light Orc could see the orckin now gathering around him, the whites of their eyes glinting. He turned to the light. The pith of the flame was white and its pulsing limb seemed to hover down the slope as if carried by the night itself. He watched it come and Mym turned to follow its descent also. The gilded ells of the longhorn''s crown now shimmered on its either side as if they bent toward its warmth.


    ¡°Here he comes,¡± whispered Mym.


    "Go on.¡±


    Mym looked at him.


    "Lead them away. I''ll come right after."


    "We should go together.¡±


    "Go."


    ¡°I¡¯ll strike a point east of the still star,¡± she murmured. ¡°Don¡¯t take too long.¡±


    He felt her hand on his arm and he heard her say something to Tulula. They were gone by the time the longhorn stood before him.


    The longhorn smiled at him, his tremendous flat teeth pearlescent in the torchlight. "I knew you wouldn''t lead us astray," he said.


    "Tell it to the greenskin."


    "Ain¡¯t that perfectly timed? A matter of honor they said, thereby spoken to a wedwarf."


    The longhorn tilted his head as if he was half deaf and sought to better hear his own words. "Did you know what effect that would have upon her? No. What knows the slave of honor? The scion of the arena, the son of the brigadier, for whom death is a trade plied in exchange for cold gruel. Are you hungry now, Orc? Come now and share my supper."


    "I''m going with them."


    "Are you? They go only away from us. Away from me."


    "That may be."


    "And so away from the brigadier."


    Orc began to turn.


    "The mother you never had."


    He stopped. His rage now a hot knot in his belly like the burning torch. A blinding ball amid the bitter black of his soul.


    The torch was lowered toward his chest as if like recognized like. "All your life you''ve borne upon your back the icon of that woman, perfect and perfectly beyond your reach."


    The longhorn nodded at the satchel now resting on Orc''s chest. "You carry it now in that scarfwrapped book. Her honor unattainable, beyond reproach, and so buried in your heart, excluding what she owes you. For it was by her very absence that she denied you, her adopted cub, your inheritance. More than her crumbling estate or her parched orchard. More than lessons in manhood or orchood that were never had. You who slew at her behest were banished to the solitary act of murder and were fooled into believing it honorable trial by combat. This she did so you could not see her follies, her shortcomings, the meanness of her actions that might diminish her by your witnessing, the errors of her own devising in which she now struggles. A fly in the web she spun. The world she left for you is false and now you hold yourself up against a greatness of her that never was. It paralyzes you. It makes you a slave to her false idol. Holding it up wherever you go you shan¡¯t find your own way."


    The longhorn now raised the torch and by its light Orc saw the trees were not trees but were a colonnade, the forest was not of wood but of black marble. Upon that hillside they stood in a ruin of the civilization that was before the deadlands earned their name.


    The longhorn nodded after the vanished orckin. "What''s true of you is true of them," he said. "It''s true of all who grow old and die in this world. A world that belongs not to us but to they who came before. Look about you now. At the great height of these pillars. Their artifice yet standing as if in judgment of those who come after, who wonder at their making and see only an impossibility of remaking, who see only their present shortcomings."


    Others of the company now padded around them. Cavaliers and one or two of the orckin who had stayed behind with the effects of the hunting party. The blue dwarf. The longhorn turned to the last of these. "Ask this descendant of the greatest of peoples. Where are his fathers? Now phantoms and stones fragmented across the land. Only their glories left behind and they untouchable. Unreproachable. They left you, dwarf, to wander their leavings without ever understanding how they came to be. As if it is beyond your comprehension. As if in the advancement of the world you have become less than what you once were. A seacliff diminished by the surf. Ain¡¯t that a thing? The orc, his folk built with mud and fronds but yours raised the mountains and so sought to alter the teleios of the universe. Even you seek some reparation of them, some restoration, ever ignorant of how their ambition brought about their downfall and imminent extinction."


    The cavaliers now found stones, actually crumbled and fallen segments of the entablature, a weathered frieze here, a blunted cornice there, and sat upon them as if attending a sermon. The longhorn turned back to Orc.


    "The mother¡¯s revelation yet echoes in your skull. All is change in this world. Soil shoots to flowers and falls into soil. Again and again. Your affairs of honor and justice ain¡¯t any different. If justice ain¡¯t met through violence then by what other means? You must set to your work as you were made to do, as you were said to be born to do, and allow the woman you chase define you. For you there ain¡¯t no other way. Thus you remain a slave."


    Now the longhorn spread his hands wide, one holding the torch outstretched and the other with palm raised as if feeling for sign of rain. "For the living are all enslaved. For the living there is no other way. Rise to the pinnacle of your achievements and fall into dust. Only your achievements shall persist and they to remind your sons and daughters of their inadequacies, the shortness of being, the meanness of it."


    The longhorn lowered his hands. Those gathered about him said nothing a while. Orc stood among them and thought only of the brigadier.


    Like the colonnade, his ethic began to crack. The rage in which it had been cast now sweltered.

 86. The Harpy

    By moonslight Mym led the orckin through the leavings of the ancient outpost. When they learned of her lie they would kill her and scalp her yet this didn¡¯t concern her. Often she halted and feigned to consult the stones and listened to the orckin grunt among themselves. She felt the sow Tulula watching her in earnest. Their blind trust in her misdirection weighed heavily upon her. She had little skill in deception and no stomach for it. She found it intolerable. Despite the risk and despite what she had told Orc, she resolved to find the goblin. It was a matter of honor.


    That''s when Orc skulked upon them.


    "What took ye so long?" she said.


    He didn¡¯t answer.


    She meant to tell him of her change of heart but the orckin had grown restive and crowded behind them. She moved them on.


    For three days they tracked the beast and its hostage. The first morning she followed splatters of blood miles apart and these brought her to where the harpy had descended to rest and to lick its wounds and in that place it may have also made its kill for there were feathers scattered about downwind. The next day they came to a rockstrewn steppe and here the trace was more visible to her, for a harpy is a large beast and from the longhorn she''d learned that the cast of a shadow can mar bare stone for days. She followed all day and at day''s end the trace ended at the edge of a thousand foot cliff. She ranged back and forth along the rimrock and found no sign and no way down. They all of them slept in the lee of the escarpment and when the sun rose they looked out across the bare and frozen land spread along its bottom. Tule fog rose from thawing fens. The harpy and the goblin were nowhere to be seen. It was as if the wild country had devoured them whole beyond any amnesty or abatement. The orckin made a small sacrifice as was their custom and then turned back and cut away through the wilderness. She and Orc watched them recede down the steppe until nothing moved but the dead grass fluttering in the wind.


    After they were gone Orc turned to her. "She flew him down the cliff then?"


    "Aye I''d say she did."


    He regarded her as if in disbelief. "Then you didn''t lead them astray."


    "That I didn''t. Didn''t seem right te me. I know I was eggin ye on about gettin as far from that company as we could but I just didn''t set well with who I am and who I aim te be."


    "At least you have that straight."


    "What''s that supposed te mean?"


    "Nothing."


    She looked at him. He was awful close to the edge. "Grow yerself a pair of wings and fly us down and we''ll keep on after em."


    "Probably better off going that way than back the way we came."


    "Aye that longhorn''s waitin."


    "Yeah."


    She looked after where the orckin had gone.


    "They''re quite a folk," she said.


    He took off his hat and punched out the crown and tugged it back onto his head. "Yeah."


    "Seem different te me than yer friends. That Ogaz and Saand and the greenskin ye knew from the bookmaker''s."


    "Yeah."


    "Yer lookin forward te getting back to em."


    He shrugged. Said nothing.


    "What about these orckin. Are ye goin te miss them?"


    Still he didn''t say anything. He stood looking out at the tundra spanning beyond the cliff. When he spoke it wasn''t in reply yet she found his answer therein. "They''re folk of another time. Glad Nizam said the camps stole orcish ways of thinking and of acting and of being, but that cohort there, them coming out of Geltwald, it doesn''t seem to me they''ve lost anything. They learned warring from their sires who learnt it by doing. They talk about Here First where their great grandsires sided with humans against rivals they''ve forgotten, and about their journey to this continent where their grandsires resisted a different sort of violence practiced by church fathers and school headmasters, and about the bloodletting begun a generation ago by the queen and continuing to this day."


    Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    Mym nodded. "Dara once said what makes orcs orcs is their way of lookin at the world and their courage and the bitter endins in their hearts."


    He half turned his head toward her. "What could she know of our hearts?"


    "I think it''s just a sayin."


    He faced her now with his hand on his breast. "No child of man can know what''s in here. We don''t even know what''s in here. It''s been taken from us by men."


    She watched him and knew better than to say anything.


    "Monsters are here. Beasts and villains. Spite. Those aren''t ends. They''re beginnings."


    He took the hand from his chest and with it he drew Booky''s blade. She could see her reflection within it. "The only folk who''s ever spoken sense to me is the woman who harnessed the monster. You know what she said?"


    Mym shook her head, her eyes never leaving his.


    Suddenly the blade sliced downward to strike a flint and a shower of sparks were thrown over the cliff. He followed them with his eyes as they fell and receded to nothing. "If the world doesn''t give what''s deserved then it deserves to burn," he said.


    She frowned at that. "It sounds te me like we need te get ye back te yer folk back in the Madlands. Don''t forget why ye came up this way, aye? Te heal the world. Te heal yerself."


    "Do you know how to clear last season''s crop ahead of sowing the next?"


    She scratched her chin. "Can''t say I do."


    He looked back at her. "You burn it."


    He turned from her and walked after where the orckin had gone. She followed, wondering what the longhorn had told him.


    ***


    The pair of them retreated down through the razor ridges and enfilades of the steppe, over a furrowed ground where the stones lay flat and wide like plates of armor and solitary trees stood defiantly in the seams between them. They walked by sunlight and by starlight through high grass and in the morning they again found themselves at the edge of the escarpment now miles east and south of the harpy''s course. Below them in the growing light thawed the tundra of the old capital yawing away north and east, the horizon seeming to slough off from the plain above fleeces of vapor from the permafrost thawing there a hundred years.


    They turned and walked down through the solitary valley descending to the plain where the frigid wind would freeze your fingers black and where other than wind nothing was. They walked along a narrow road broken from freezing and thawing and they walked with their hands in their armpits and their faces hid from the gale and the glacial flurries it impelled, the spare shadows of them rising and falling over the jagged edges in a dynamism ill defined by their makers, as if no law of creation, of concordance of light and dark, did hold them. As if they were as autonomous as the doomstone sentinel and might at any moment leap from the earth and suffocate the lonesome figures who cast them.


    Toward the bottom of this gorge the road was joined by a cascade, flash frozen in otherworldly forms like the bones of corals found about the maw of the mad, a winter skeleton of its course in white and silver. Along the roadside lay old rags and broken wagons and sculpted from the stone above them the enormous frieze telling of some emperor''s reign: figures of varied folk unified before a man with the sun blazing behind his head, a long archway with depictions of fish leaping from aqueduct it bore, men and women bent over in rows and standing amid cornstalks, finally horsemen and charioteers with spears and swords charging and slashing and skewering a horned and hoofed folk Mym had never seen before. The stonework itself was too high for her to judge its quality and in places it had been shorn by weather and everywhere it had been defaced by vandals who etched their names in the smoothworn spaces and decapitated or delimbed or made crude additions in the mouths and between the legs of their hapless forebears.


    They left behind the gorge and the escarpment it bisected and they entered the lowland plain upon which the old capital was said to be sited. In the days to follow they began to see fire rings on the ground where others had passed before. Refugees who''d fled south decades ago, pilgrims and fortune seekers and scavengers now on the northern track. They came upon standing stones of the same black marble, some rising fifty feet into the cold blue sky and others strewn across the road as they had fallen. After a time Mym noticed they were spaced a mile apart. The demarcation was so precise it could only have been done by dwarves.


    Each morning as they tied up their bedrolls they watched the diminishing escarpment to the south and the northern road for any strings of smoke. There were none. Never did Mym see any trace of Uhquah''s company. No horseshit, no recent fires, no complaint of rock. No gunshot echoing across the open land. Perhaps they were free of them at last. Each evening when they made their camp they sparked no fires. They ate the raw meat of rabbit or groundhog or quail caught during the day''s walk. They settled down between the grasses and the swells with little camaraderie. She felt like she was losing him to the orc he had been before. She didn''t know how to stop it.


    Come one midday out east they saw a black figure stenciled against the ivory horizon. They couldn''t tell if it was coming or going and after a minute it diminished into the earth and they didn''t see it again. They looked at each other and without a word they set off. They pushed as far as they could into the evening and at a place like any other they struck out west of the road for a half mile and there they sat up and waited. Conjoining moons rose over the fold of the mountains blacking out the eastern firmament and the static between them seemed lessened. They watched west.


    Guided out of the night by forgotten arcanities came the company. Uhquah in the fore, the cavaliers leading their horses, the orckin and Booky and the ogre fanned out behind. Mym turned to Orc to see what he would do and in that moment she saw beyond the edge of their camp, there against pale stone, reclined the longhorn. How long he had been there neither could say.


    It was about this time she began to question whether some unknowable force of that land worked against them.

 87. Ruses

    They marched by night. They made no fires. Those afoot were made to walk in a single line and the horsemen rode through the track they made. Like an immense crepuscular serpent they uncoiled at twilight and the shadows hobbled to their feet and extended eastward to the edge of the world whereupon they became one with the coming night, only to reform out west as the first moon ascended the sky. Ere these second shadows shrank out of the country the other moon rose and a new shade sprang forth from their soles as if a third identity reared out of the gap between their selves and their anti-selves to discomfit them with an unseen alternative to who they were and who they sought to be. The moons fled away southward on their wintertime trajectories and the double shadows of each orckin and human and dwarf yawed out and cast together in a column parallel to their makers'' and it seemed to Orc as if they walked a narrow path between the twilight of creation and the utter void of oblivion.


    Next morning they saw smoke standing out north like dust devils crawling the horizon. Uhquah sent the tusker scout and Tulula went with him. One by one the stars burned themselves out of the paling sky. When the scout and Tulula returned they stood by Uhquah''s stirrup with the longhorn. Orc watched them converse while the longhorn interpreted. Uhquah nodded once and the orckin fell in and all went on.


    They came to the source of the smoke. A pile of black cremains fumigating on the tundra floor. The cavaliers swung off of their mounts and walked around the ring of glowing embers with the scorched hoops of ribs and bowls of pelvis and domes of skulls scattered among them. One of the victims was unburnt and they hung naked from a spear driven hard into the frozen ground. From his beard he must''ve been a man yet there was no other way of telling. Below the neck all of the front of him was gore. Shredded flaps of skin that swayed like tassels in the light airs. Chambers emptied of their organs. Viscera exploded out of him. His backside was a pincushion of entrance wounds. All of the things that had made him a man had been shot away. Dried blood where his hair had been, fallen down around his shoulders. Flies crawling about him in every place. Eyelids relaxed half shut, mouth relaxed half open, tongue hanging half out.


    Orc looked at him. Mym came to stand beside. Together they studied the ragged corpse.


    "He''s missin his crook," she said.


    "You know him."


    "Aye I followed him nine days out of the Gap. Him suggestin he was a shepherd of souls, happy te help settler families navigate the deadlands. He''s who led that caravan of newcomers te the middle of nowhere and left em in the night te fend against whatever was rangin about."


    He looked back at the shepherd.


    "He got what he deserved," she said. "I figured he was in league with the risen. Bringin em fresh meat, so te speak."


    "This isn''t their work."


    "Aye I know it. They''d raise em up or set em aside te be done later."


    He nodded.


    "Ye know who did it?"


    There was a cub¡¯s skull at his feet. He booted it in with the others. "Kingsmen," he said.


    Some orckin sidled up to the smoking cremation and set a pot of water to boil on its smoldering. The cavaliers took issue with this and turned away their horses and made a short camp of their own on the other side of the massacre. The orckin watched them go, redeyed from the smoke. One pulled a mortar and pestle from her kit and set to grinding a coarse powder from a handful of oily black beans. She poured the powder into a wide-mouthed waterskin and when the pot boiled over she removed it barehanded and tipped its water in with the powder and folded over the flap of the skin. After a few minutes they uncapped the spout and squirted the black mixture into small tin cups with metal handles that steamed profusely in the cold dry air. From these they drank and Orc saw a curious bliss settle across their faces. Afterward Tulula crossed to the shepherd with a smoking brand and set him on fire.


    That evening Uhquah directed them up the north road. Again the scout and Tulula went on ahead. From time to time Orc paused as Mym stopped to stare at a roadside stone or dropped to her belly to press her ear against a particular paver. She never took long in doing. Perhaps her skill hadn¡¯t improved. Perhaps the stones just had nothing to say.


    They moved like an army stealing a march upon its enemy and the dead truth of their northerly reckoning reflected their urgent purpose. To the east the tundra ran unopposed forever and the moons were again at their conjoining and for once the fireworks between them appeared meager against the diamondheaded reaches of the galaxies that hung all around them, curtained in pinks and greens of an aurora unlike anything Orc had ever witnessed. He watched it all night.


    Next morning the scout and Tulula returned from their reconnaissance and Orc came forward to greet her and to overhear her report. She said the kingsmen were camped along the bank of a river where it bent against the road near the fiftieth milestone. They had with them their spoils and a tail of sutlers and they numbered in the hundreds. After hearing this Uhquah stepped off his mule and walked up the road and squatted for a long time with his eyes closed and head cocked and lips soundlessly muttering.


    This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    Orc saw to Booky¡¯s blade, drawing a whetstone along its length and wiping an oilcloth after. Around him the cavaliers checked their pieces and talked excitedly among themselves. The orckin said nothing. The horses were fed from bags and taken out to the river for watering. Uhquah and the scout detached up the road and didn¡¯t return. Darkness fell.


    Come midnight the longhorn roused the company and pressed them north with a knowing smile as if all that had happened and was to happen accorded with his designs. They reached a long bar of the river by first light. The water was frozen black along the banks and they could hear bergs crunching against the gravel on their way downstream. The pinpoint glows of the kingsmens¡¯ fires lay before them, curved along the riverbend like the aligned stars of the Hunter¡¯s bow.


    Out of the murk rose a solitairy figure. It was the tusker scout and he turned without a word and led the company to a stand of reeds coming out of the ice a quarter mile from the encampment. Uhquah waited there. Blinders clapped about the eyes of his mule.


    ¡°They¡¯ve one picket between us and them,¡± he said. ¡°When we ride in swing left te pin em against the watercourse. Once you¡¯re in it¡¯s every dwarf for his own, and don¡¯t take no prisoners.¡±


    ¡°How many are there?¡± said a cavalier.


    ¡°Lower your goddamn voice.¡±


    ¡°Two centuries or more,¡± said the longhorn.


    "They the baron''s?"


    "Looks like."


    "He there with em?"


    "He fucking better be."


    Orc looked about until he saw Booky. She was watching the ground. The familiar sight of her counting odds. She saw him looking. She held up four fingers on one hand and her thumb on the other, slowly shaking her head. He was thinking the same thing.


    ¡°We¡¯ll have caught em out,¡± said Uhquah, ¡°but there¡¯ll be plenty o fight in em. Shoot what shoots back. Leave the hand te handing te the orc choppers. Truth fer telling if we don¡¯t drop every one of em we ought te turn in our guns.¡±


    No more was said. They waited in silence for the span of an hour. Uhquah unclappered his mule like an executioner unhooding the condemned. The mule raised its head and sniffed the air. The cavaliers mounted. The orckin placed their effects in piles on the firm shore. Somewhere toward the river a snow goose called. Carbines and rifles were drawn. Javelins and handaxes counted, kept in hand. Uhquah glanced back once and kicked forth his mule.


    The beasts trotted up the gravel and onto the tundra. As they passed into the bend of the river they caught the sentry sleeping under rosewood shrubs and a cavalier cut him down with a sabre. His dogs began to yammer and follow on about the legs of the horses and bolt ahead of them. The cavaliers rode each with a hand wrapped in reins and an arm out wide holding whichever weapon they¡¯d chose for the slaughter to come. The din of the dogs and the now galloping horsemen and the loping orckin behind all together looked like some wild hunt erupting forth from the jowls of hell, fifty two marauding souls hammering down on kingsmen numbering two hundred.


    The longhorn stampeded completely through the first row of tents trapping the occupants in the canvas and trampling them underhoof. Men emerged from others in their long johns and with charged pistols and glass bottles held by the neck. The cavaliers rode through them all and at the camp¡¯s edge they wheeled and returned. A captain dove out of their path and rose with a pistol and Uhquah shot him through the forehead. Three more men stumbled out of a tent and the dwarf shot them dead as they emerged, each falling on the last so that they laid one upon another.


    The orckin leapt from soldier to soldier hacking and stabbing and clubbing the newly roused. Orc moved among them. Silent, intent, his blade piercing and sliding through unarmored skin. Men were shouting and the dogs bayed unceasingly and a lieutenant wandered into the melee holding a white kerchief in one hand and a bleeding belly in the other. Orc left him untouched and he heard behind the crack of the skull as the longhorn clobbered him with his cannonball. Another soldier came at Orc with sword and knife and as the swordblade passed before him he hollowed his back like a dancer and watched it slice open his shirt. The knife came after in a downward plunge at his groin and he just got Booky¡¯s blade before it and it deflected down the inside of his knee and flayed open his calf. The soldier was overbalanced and Orc flipped his blade and thrust it into the same place he had the old dwarf on the span. The man slumped forward and didn¡¯t move again.


    In a corner of the camp Orc saw two or three orckin manacled to stakes pounded into the frozen ground. A tusker and a brownskin and a greenskin. Behind them the latrine was on fire and the camp was becoming a stinking dusk of shitsmoke. The crimson sun glared through. He cut his way toward the captives, his leg a white hot agony.


    Already a cavalier rode from tent to tent with a torch lowered then raised then lowered again. Smoke billowed everywhere. Screams from the burning tents. Filthy women with hands bound and feet hobbled did shuffle and worm out of a fired pavilion and throw themselves on the ground before the horsemen. Someone had cut the tie ropes of the king¡¯s horses and they raced off oblique to the massacre as if aflame themselves and their manes and tails whipped behind. The panicked kingsmen began to rally around an officer on the far side of the camp and from there they fired their arms at the disarray without discernment for their beset comrades.


    The air about Orc¡¯s head snapped like wildfire as he arrived at the stockade. The orckin there were covered in welts and their shoulders and necks were heavily scabbed and scarred from whatever burdens they¡¯d been made to bear. Orc went from one to the next jamming the handle of his blade into the manacles and levering apart the links. As he freed each the tusker slunk from a pistolball passed through his naked chest and the brownskin charged immediately into the fight with his hair smoldering like some sort of berserker and the greenskin slunk backward and stared up at him.


    ¡°Orc,¡± he said. ¡°Is that yew?¡±

 88. Levered Out

    She followed Orc to the stockade and covered him as he began to free the orckin held there. Two of the magazines she¡¯d already shot through and she loaded in her last and drew a bead on a sergeant rallying his men in a wash of the river. A hundred yards out and with a crossbreeze she shot him clean through the neck.


    When she turned back to Orc he was hugging on a goblin.


    She levered out the empty and drove home the next charge and she slapped him on the back. ¡°No time for that,¡± she called.


    His head swiveled to her as if he hadn¡¯t even known she was there. Counterfire cracked all around them. He was bleeding badly from his leg and the goblin was squirming in his grasp. She grabbed Orc¡¯s waistband and pulled him along to the side of a wagon laden with cloth sacks of flour that poured forth in white streams from the holes shot through. On the far side she saw orckin moving on foot from tent to tent, hauling out maimed and broken men covered in blood, decapitating them. One of the sows strode from the smoke dragging a naked woman by her hair, a camp follower come too far and hard used by the look of her who now shrieked for mercy with her bare feet on fire. The sow dropped her in the open and tossed a fallen horse blanket at her and moved on as the woman snuffed the flames.


    By now some ranks of the king¡¯s men had reformed in their underwear and helms and they advanced upon the destroyed camp and fired volleys at the marauders among the burning tents. Horses cried out and fell in clouds of dust, their cavaliers trapped under their kicking and flailing. Mym peered over the wagon and squeezed two shots off so close together they sounded as one and in the distance two soldiers fell. Orc made to charge and she snatched his waistband again and pulled him back again as shots splintered the wagon and slashed through the air where he¡¯d just been.


    He stared at her and she could feel the unrealized rage boiling off of him.


    ¡°This isn¡¯t a fight for blades,¡± she said. She rose over the side and sighted and fired and ducked as gunshot peppered the burlap and boards. Suddenly the wagon exploded in a great cloud of flour and shattered wood and it threw her to the ground and the percussion of a cannon roared after.


    Mym rolled over. She saw the dead on the river ice and awash in the current. The bodies drifting downstream as if they were timber harvested and floated for milling. Between tendrils of smoke the field cannon rested on its carriage and the crew scrambled around it. Its number one was passing the wet sponge down the smoothbore and its number two worming the barrel and muzzle and in a daze she watched the gunner direct the turnabout, the lowered declination, the falling brand. A full-throated explosion of noise and fire and smoke and a cavalier and his horse disappeared in a red mist of entrails and body parts and the ball skipped on across the tundra.


    Mym reached for her carbine where it had fallen. On her hands and knees she brought it before her. The cannoneers and their piece were a hundred, hundred ten yards. She bellied against the frigid earth and laid the barrel across her outstretched fist and her face against the cheekpiece. She felt the breeze in the flyaways coming out of her braid and she noted the red glint of the sun on the blued foresight. The gunner was now aiming at where the longhorn was laying into a rank with his enormous maul. The number four raised his smoldering brand, the filament of smoke streaming out sideways in the breeze. Mym touched off her trigger. The shot rang flat and mute in her deafness. The brand faltered on its downward path and the number four crumpled to the earth.


    Again she levered a round. The ejected casing hissed on the morning frost. Downrange the number three picked up the brand and the gunner repositioned the piece toward her. The left wheel backing and the right wheel rotating forth. The brand began to fall.


    A shape flitted in and out of the whipping smoke on gunner¡¯s left and she saw Orc sprinting full tilt and carrying some burden in both arms as she had once carried her da. The number seven saw and dropped the next ball. Orc pitched his burden at the cannon and as it flew through the air it unlimbered and Mym saw it was the goblin, four limbs stretched, claws flashing, fangs beared, falling upon the number three and ripping the brand from his grasp and putting it through his eye. As the number seven raised a dagger Mym shot him. Then Orc was among the crew roving to and fro and she dared not fire again for the speed of him and he thrashed the men and brained their skulls upon the ironsides of the six-pounder and he ducked their blows with a certain grace and he swept over the neck of the artillery and smashed the gunner''s face upon his knee and passed his blade through the man''s heart. Mym elbowed up off the ground, both eyes open and watching the harmony of the orc and the goblin as they tore the crew to pieces and it was plain they had worked in this manner before.


    The gun now silenced she heard Uhquah whoop and she saw him surge forward. The cavaliers and orckin followed. The kingsmen on the riverbank had formed a double row and were fixing bayonets to the ends of their arms. Uhquah discharged his carbine a last time at the officer stood to their side and he turned in his saddle to holster his rifle never taking his eyes off of the humans. From his scabbard he drew a smith''s hammer with an adamantine head. The kingsmen lifted their eyes and their weapons with guttural cries. Uhquah leaned forward whispering as if to his mule. Each fell upon the other.


    Mym had advanced to the cannon. To where Orc sat against a wheel bandaging his tore up calf with a strip made from wadding. The goblin watched holding the dagger that had been meant for him with needle teeth bared and eager eyes narrowed.


    She looked at Orc. "Ye good?"


    Orc nodded.


    The goblin uttered something in its harsh language and gestured urgently at her and at the melee at the river''s edge whence came a clamor of shouts and gunshots and the shrill cries of horses and the peal of steel on iron and the acrid smoke of shot powder.


    "What''s he sayin?" she said.


    Orc made another turn of the cloth around his calf. "He wants to know if you''re coming."


    "Comin where?"


    "To finish the fight."


    If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    She regarded the goblin. The ochre eyes and the face halfburnt around them. The once pointed ears now cropped. The rags he wore and the blood of men soaking their front. The hunger with which he looked back.


    She nodded at him. "Lead on."


    The goblin grinned and loped off. Mym offered Orc her hand and up he came. She slung the carbine over her shoulder and drew her alpenstock.


    By the time they reached the riverbank Uhquah had driven the kingsmen out onto the river ice. There they slid and scrambled and aimed to make a stand. A wounded officer directed ten or twelve men already panicked, their eyes seeking refuge in the black water beyond the ice that held no promise but death. Uhquah pulled his carbine from the scabbard and held his mule steady between his knees and the reins clenched between his teeth and he sighted down the barrel. Mym jogged up beside the blue dwarf and saw the officer borne up between a bugler and a teamster. This was an occasion for quarter but being dwarves neither she nor Uhquah offered it.


    The first shot grazed the bugler. With the second shot the teamster teetered over and into the river. The officer lay upon the ice. His men turned to aid him but the goblin was already there menacing them with his dagger. The bugler turned and jumped into the water and the rest jumped in after. Mym watched their heads recede silently downstream until one by one they slipped under.


    The goblin knelt with the officer''s head between his thighs like some priest of men administering last rites. Uhquah came gingerly across the ice and warned off the goblin with his hammer. He sucked on his pipe and eyed the dying man. Blood bubbled from his chest and onto the ice where it froze in a sheet that would seize the body in place. The officer turned his eyes to Uhquah¡¯s, the hate fading, the pupils dilating. In their blacks each swam a cold red sun.


    ¡°Who do you have there?¡± called the longhorn from the bank.


    ¡°Come and see,¡± said Uhquah. He drew a huge knife from his boot and began to make the cut.


    Mym had seen enough. She withdrew to a place on the shore where no dead lay. There she watched the river, the sky. The orckin dispersed to take trophies and the cavaliers plundered the wreckage and the goblin squatted with Uhquah. Orc limped up to where she sat. He stood over her with the wind in his hair and his own blood blackening his hands and a splatter of it dried across his face. He sat down beside her. She heard the pain hissing in his breath.


    ¡°You ought te clean that,¡± she said.


    He looked out over the river and said nothing.


    She stood up. ¡°Come on.¡±


    She led him to where the river ice was thin and she chopped it up with her alpenstock until water burbled over. She made him sit on the shore with his leg straight out and she took water in her hands and soaked the bandage he¡¯d made. From her kit she dug out a keeper¡¯s candle and a pinch of wool lint and a flint. She struck the adze of her alpenstock across the flint and caught a spark in the wool. She cupped her hand around it and blew flame into it. With this she lit the candle and then she laid the spike of her alpenstock above the wick.


    She turned back to the dampened bandage and peeled it away. Orc watched and winced. They got a good look at the wound. It had begun to seep again.


    ¡°Seems te be a clean cut.¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    "Three, four inches deep."


    "Yeah."


    She looked at him. His face was a shade lighter than usual.


    ¡°I figured ye¡¯d done this sort of thing plenty back in yer pitfightin days.¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    ¡°Figured ye¡¯d be used te it.¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡± He tore his eyes from the wound and looked into hers. ¡°Doesn¡¯t mean I enjoy it.¡±


    She squeezed his thigh at the knee. ¡°Yer goin te be fine.¡±


    He nodded. His eyes were on the spike. It had begun to glow orange.


    ¡°Shift yerself on down.¡±


    She helped him scoot to the hole she¡¯d made in the ice and she submerged his leg in the frigid water and when it ran over the wound he sucked in his breath.


    ¡°Hold it there.¡±


    ¡°How long?¡±


    ¡°As long as ye can bare it.¡±


    She stood up and walked along the bank with her eyes on the round river stones in the wash of sediment. Whispering as she went and listening for any answer her eyes followed her ears until she stood over a glimmer half buried in gray sand. She picked it up and returned to where Orc sat.


    Through a clenched jaw he said, "What''s that?"


    "Malachite."


    She rinsed the stone upstream of his leg. She withdrew it and ran her thumb across its surface, feeling its coarseness. It was as black as obsidian in the ruddy sunlight. She rinsed it again in waters that had flowed through the wound, withdrew it again, and asked its permission in a tone similar to that spoken by Uhquah that very morning. The stone assented. In a deep thrum that made the blue dwarf pause a moment in his grisly task she called forth its metals. The stone warmed in her hand until it steamed as if it was a burning coal.


    She nodded at Orc. He lifted his leg from the water and she took it by the ankle and held it on her lap and began to pass the stone back and forth through the wound as if sanding down a rough cut of wood. He laid on his elbows and let his head hang back between his shoulders and he looked at the sky without seeing.


    She felt him shudder. "This works?" he said.


    "Aye fer dwarves." She wet her lips with her tongue. "Don''t see why it shouldn''t work fer ye too."


    "I''m not made of stone."


    She laughed. "Ye''ve seen me bleed enough te know that¡¯s a bigotry. There''s copper in the malachite that makes it green and it''ll cull any sick out of yer flesh fore it gets goin."


    She made another pass from achilles to knee and she saw the muscles in his thigh bunch. She glanced up to where his head hung. The ties in his neck all standing out. The mandible pulsing under his cheek and the rasp of his teeth grinding one set against the other. She thought he might pass out.


    ¡°Next time yer down my way ye should come te the delvin. Actually come inside and see the vault and the forge and the billows for yerself. Ye know as tall as ye are ye''d make a good billower. Come meet Thayne properly and my brothers and sister we hope te be freein from the stone. Come see me lass. She''s all shaped up now. Khaz has one too ye ought te meet. Maybe ye can come back with me once we''ve got this manstone and ye can be there for their birthin, so te speak. For when we imbue animus inte them. Course Daraway''ll be there too and she''d love te see ye. And Cousins. She keeps askin about ye and ye don''t give me anythin new te tell her. Come and stay. I''ve got a spare bed ye can bunk in so long as ye don''t mind stone. Hell, we''ve got so many empty homes undermount I''d be happy te set ye up with one of yer own. The two next te ours are empty. What do ye think about that?"


    He grunted. "We''d be neighbors."


    "Aye."


    She peered up at his hanging head but he said no more. "Who''s the goblin?" she said.


    "What?"


    "Ye seemed te know him."


    He picked up his head and saw her begin the next pass. He shut his eyes. "He was at Booky''s."


    She nodded. "I could tell ye''ve fought together."


    "More times than I can recall."


    "Now yer back together again."


    "Yeah"


    "Like some family reunion.¡± As the words tumbled forth she regretted them. As if a collection of servile creatures forced to injure one another could be family with the woman who tortured them. She felt awful and she looked up at him and saw him smile a little through the pain he now endured.


    "Yeah," he said. "Something like that."


    She felt suddenly very far away from her own family. She looked down at the leg of this orc, like yet unlike her own. This alien thing, gray, barbarous. Cold to the touch. She looked away downstream, saw where the one-headed ogre now embraced the goblin and where the woman Booky openly wept.


    "Everything alright?" said Orc.


    He had opened his eyes, was watching her. She realized she had stopped scrubbing.


    "Aye, sure.¡±


    She pocketed the stone and picked up her alpenstock. The steel spike white hot. ¡°Ye might want te hold onto somethin fer this next part.¡±

 89. Sewn Up

    He''d not bellowed like that since his first days in the pit.


    When the world stopped spinning he opened his eyes and saw some nearby cavaliers staring at him. He looked down and there was Mym now passing a sewing needle back and forth through the flaps of his skin, lacing some sort of dried gut up his leg as if it was a boot. When she reached the back of his knee she tied it off and sat back. Her fingers were black with his blood. She twisted where she sat and she rinsed them in the river never taking her eyes off of the stitch.


    "Can ye stand on it."


    "I''d rather not."


    "Well I need ye te try. We need te see if it''s goin te hold or burst."


    "Alright."


    With her help he tottered up. The pain was a revelation to walk upon yet he was able. She escorted him in a twenty foot circle back to the river whereupon he sat again on the bank and she carefully washed away the blood dried at the seam. She was beginning to put away her tools when Booky and the greenskin walked up. Ogre loomed behind like a thunderhead in sunshine.


    "Hey Orc would ya look who I found," said Booky.


    The greenskin grinned at Orc and he nodded back. In their talk he said, "Yew wanna pull out her guts or maybe yew gonna let little me do it."


    "You''re welcome to it."


    The greenskin furrowed his shallow brow. "Yew don''t wanna?"


    He shook his head. "Not anymore."


    "Why the hell not?"


    "She let us go."


    "So?"


    "So she could''ve helped those kingsmen murder us."


    "So?"


    "So." He shrugged. "Hell. I don''t know. I just don''t think she''s worth it."


    The greenskin touched a claw to his chin as if in deep contemplation and turned his head to regard the bookmaker.


    "Your brother''s alive," said Orc.


    His head snapped back. "Chim?"


    "Jazza."


    "My Jazza''s alive?"


    Orc nodded.


    The greenskin began to weep. Shudders wracking his skinny scarred up nakedness.


    Orc bent forward to pick up a discarded horseblanket and held it wide to drape it around the greenskin. "He''s across the sea with some friends of mine."


    As he said it the greenskin stepped into the space between Orc''s hands and bawled into his chest, balling up pieces of his tattered shirt and wiping them across his tearing eyes and runny nose. Orc looked down at him. Placed the blanket around him. Put a hand on his back.


    Orc caught Mym looking. There was something in her eyes between envy and sadness and he didn''t understand what it was or how it came to be there nor was he given a chance to.


    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    Booky clapped her hand on his shoulder. "We''re bringing the crew back together ain''t we. Y''all and me and hell we could even find a place for y''alls dwarfy friend there. Ya ever done much in the way of performing miss Mym?"


    Orc watched Mym. Whatever she''d been feeling was now buried behind the deepest frown he''d ever seen.


    Booky studied the dwarf. "It ain¡¯t like that. Hell my old marks would pay a fortune ta see a dwarf in the pit. That''s a thing they''ve always wanted they just ain''t imagined it yet and they won''t know it til ya show em so. We''ll pit ya against Orc. Or with him since y''all are chummy nowadays. Two of ya against my ogres once we get Right stuck back on. Orc can toss ya into the fight like he was just doing with Gobgob there."


    "Toss me?"


    "Didn''t ya see it? Imagine him doing it with ya holding yall¡¯s mountain ax up there. Fly some streamers from it and ya''ll be a regular carnival berserker."


    "This ax?"


    "Ya. Holding it overhead. Streamers and such. Maybe some smokers too."


    Mym looked at Orc and he saw how her face had darkened. He began the precaution of disentangling himself from the greenskin.


    "Come on little wedwarfy. Put it on up and let''s see how it looks."


    "Lady the only place I''m goin te put this ax is up yer¡ª"


    Orc hobbled up between them and put a restraining hand on Mym''s shoulder. At that moment the longhorn bellowed, "Show us what you''ve got there."


    They all turned and saw Uhquah leading his mule from the ice with the officer''s head hanging off the saddlehorn. He unwound the hair from which it hung and tossed it to where the longhorn stood. He caught it and held it in both hands and guffawed. He palmed it and held it up for all to see.


    "That ain''t him," whispered Booky.


    "What''d ye say?" said Mym.


    Booky nodded at the head. "That ain''t the baron."


    The longhorn bent and swept up a soldier''s rifle and bayoneted through the underjaw and into the soft palate. He stood holding up the rifle by the stock and slowly spinning in place and the glazed blue eyes stared down from this new station as if impassively surveying the land for sign of a salvation that never came.


    "That ain''t the baron," called Booky.


    Uhquah and the longhorn turned to her and the longhorn rotated the head as if to regard her also. Its eyes had begun to freeze in their sockets.


    "You sure?" called Uhquah.


    Booky nodded. "The baron came twice to the pit and that ain''t him."


    The longhorn lowered the rifle and the long dark hair of the thing curtained downward and drifted slightly alee. He looked at the blue dwarf.


    Uhquah swung onto his mule and walked it over to where Orc recuperated with the others. The blue dwarf looked first at Booky. "Who is he then?"


    "Hell if I know. Some other lordy liege of the armiger''s."


    Uhquah leaned over and spat. He looked at Orc. "Has she met him before?"


    "Has who met who?


    "The brigadier. Has she met the baron?"


    "I don''t know. Probably."


    "Never when you were around?"


    Orc shrugged. "I never met any of her callers but the ones I killed."


    "She''ll know," called the longhorn. He''d unstuck the head from the bayonet and was now plucking off its eyelashes one by one.


    Uhquah frowned. He clucked at his mule and kicked on into the sacked encampment. The orckin stood by with their flayed leathers all strung together like frontiersmen posing beside a rack of pelts and they watched the cavaliers move from clutch to clutch of the fallen and douse them with flagons of looted ether. The kind the kingsmen used to set their swords blazing. The cavaliers doused the grounds around the bodies and they poured a trail back to the quartermaster''s storecart. The remains had begun to darken in the morning sun. A cavalier drove an iron piton into the wetted earth and he struck his sabre once upon it. The flash of sparks set a whoosh of creeping blue flame that swept across the killing grounds and sprung up in a hush upon the dead. As the flesh ignited it cooked off smoke colored like tallow. Uhquah drew his neck kerchief over his nose and into this he disappeared.


    Orc limped to where Mym stood at the camp''s northmost border. He passed where the camp women were jabbering at the cavaliers who''d freed them. He passed the captive brownskin, now dead, a leg blown off by cannonfire. He came up beside Mym and together they watched the soldiers'' horses and ponies race to and fro across the tundra, zigging one way then the other as a loose pack of loping wolves edged them back toward the river and the massacre. Long snouts raised to the blood and the smoke. Wet black noses working as they scented that attraction and repulsion as ancient as predator and prey.


    When Uhquah returned he rode to the orckin and he tossed the scalp of the sentry at their feet. They nodded at him. He whistled and set out north, never looking back. The longhorn punted the officer¡¯s head into the burnings. The cavaliers fanned out to collect up and drive the king''s horses. Orc and Mym fell in with the orckin. As they followed the river''s course they passed through the shadow of the great column of smoke. There was no sound on the tundra save the whistles and calls of the stockdrivers, the wails and weeping of the women left behind.


    It was that night that the risen finally caught them.

 90. Skirmishers

    Across the cookfire Orc and the orckin drank from an amphora of pig fat that they had left to bake in the coals. Southward in the night the embers of the slaughter glowed dimly under the eaves of inferred highlands. She thought little about what she had done that day. She looked at Orc''s calf and at the stitches there now taut from the swelling. The stretched out skin now shining like wax in the firelight. His rough laughter rasping, his dark eyes vanishing behind his joyful cheeks, his old goblin pal slapping his knee. Tulula was there also, her claw touching his hair, her eyes on his face. Booky brought round a pot of boiled potatoes plundered from the kingsmen. She was laughing too. Behind all the ogre loomed.


    Mym sat alone. She was a thousand miles from the mountain. Months away from her da and Daraway and Khaz and still heading in the opposite direction. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the sound of their laughter. All she heard was Orc¡¯s.


    She opened her eyes and drew the malachite out of her pocket. The firelight coppered it. She thought to make an ask. She put it away.


    Orc was standing and now limping around the firering to where she sat. With palms against the ground and wounded leg held straight he lowered himself beside her. She leaned away slightly yet his knee bumped hers. It was warm from inflammation. From sitting too close to the fire.


    ¡°What do you think?" he said. "Good venging today?¡±


    She looked at the flames. ¡°Are ye a dwarf now?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m just trying to find the sense of it.¡±


    ¡°That orcy rage of yers isn''t cuttin it?¡±


    He shrugged.


    She looked at him. ¡°That lot of men back there helped te genocide the followers of yer Glad Nizam.¡±


    He turned his head as if taking in the other campfires. ¡°And we killed them and scalped them and left their sutlers and servants to fend for themselves in the middle of the deadlands.¡±


    ¡°Yer fellows don¡¯t seem te mind it.¡±


    ¡°Maybe they¡¯re more orc than me.¡±


    ¡°More orc than Orc?¡± She shook her head with the hint of a smile. ¡°I can¡¯t see how that could be.¡±


    He took off his filthy rag of a hat and used it to wipe his brow.


    "Ye sweatin?"


    "No."


    She reached the back of her hand to his cheek. "Yer feelin hot."


    "It''s the fire."


    She withdrew her hand. "Ye feel a fever comin on out of that leg ye better tell me."


    "Fine."


    He placed the hat back on his head. They sat in silence and watched the orckin count their scalps. When he spoke again it was a rumble just above a whisper. ¡°I don¡¯t understand why the brigadier tolerates it."


    ¡°Ye keep sayin that sort of thing yet I don''t see why she''d be any different than the rest of her kind.¡±


    She watched him stare into the fire. From her kit she drew her canteen and loosened the cap and drank. She offered it to Orc and he took it and he held it in his lap as if he had already forgotten about it.


    ¡°When I was a cub she taught me how to be,¡± he said. ¡°Be considerate of others and courteous even to your enemies. Especially to your enemies she said, for they¡¯d be everywhere and plentiful. Most of all I was to show compassion to those weaker than me. The young, the small, the elderly and infirm. They might not have my strength but that didn¡¯t mean they were inferior. Maybe they¡¯d be smarter or have more courage in deed and in thought. Maybe they¡¯d be more honest. Or treat others better. They deserved respect. Even if they despised me for what I am. I was to obey the legitimate authority of the wise and the courageous and the honest. I was to defy what she called any rule of mere strength. Mere power. The day she sent me away she said it''s better to be a slave than to die, but it''s better to die than to be a slave who doesn''t resist his enslavement."


    He looked at her. "Above everything I was to keep my word and to pay my debts."


    She drew herself up and regarded the fire. "Well I don''t know about all that obeyin nakshit, but that last bit''s awful dwarflike."


    "She said it''s how orcs used to be and it''s how men ought to be. It''s how men imagine themselves to be. How they say they are but they aren''t."


    She nodded. "Aye I''ve found that te be mostly true."


    "And that''s how she prepared me to be chattel. To enter the pit, where compassion is weakness, honesty gets you killed, and cruelty is entertainment."


    "Ye think that''s what she had in mind for ye?"


    He drank from the canteen and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. He passed it back. "Did you mean what you said about giving me a home under your mountain?"


    She turned to him in surprise with her mouth hanging open as if to speak. From across the fire Tulula growled and a rank odor suddenly overpowered even the firesmoke.


    Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.


    Orc grabbed for his blade. "Someone''s coming."


    The tusker scout stumbled into the firelight from out of the dark. A black fletching protruded from his chest. He fell before the fire gurgling and Mym saw the arrowhead coming out of his back. Tulula crouched beside him and then turned to where Uhquah tended his own fire and called, "Undaud."


    Mym looked at Orc and he looked back. "Risen," he said.


    The orckin were readying to fight, the cavaliers catching up their mounts. Uhquah had come to the tusker''s side and holding onto a tusk he put his ear to the scout''s lips. The longhorn went from fire to fire barehanding burning fuel and pitching it south onto the plain to make a kind of picket of fire against the night. Mym stood and helped Orc to his feet.


    "Can ye fight?"


    "Yeah."


    "Can ye run?"


    "That I''m not sure of."


    She handed up his satchel and he shouldered it.


    "Shit goes sideways we stick together."


    "So long as I can keep up."


    "Even if ye can''t."


    He shook his head. "You leave me if it comes to that."


    "No chance. If anyone''s te kill ye it''s me. The stones haven''t forgotten me oath."


    He smiled some. "Alright."


    Uhquah whistled and whirled an upheld finger in the air as he strode back to his mule. The longhorn passed brands from the fires to mounted cavaliers. Several orckin bore the tusker between them. The others lit torches from the fire.


    "Maybe they can carry ye too."


    "Maybe."


    "We could stick ye on one of the horses."


    "Fuck that."


    They rode and ran from that place sometime before moonsrise. They rode true north with the flames of their torches flailing against the emptiness ahead and advancing a meager light upon the tundric grasses and frozen soils. Their shadows danced madly in every direction, themselves projections of the darkness held within each man and dwarf and orc that would persist until all of the land and the creatures upon it were enveloped by night.


    The wolves that haunted them were ranged out across the tundra and as the company swept past they gathered behind according to their primal ordering. The fires of their abandoned camp flickered out of the abyss as those who were once dead passed before them and when Mym looked back she could see their grayish shapes circumventing the firelight like nightmares lurking at the edge of consciousness.


    As dawn broached the coming day Mym looked over her shoulder and saw they had made some ground upon the enemy. When she said so to Orc the bookmaker overheard and just shook her head. "Y''all don''t take no comfort in that," she said.


    "Aye?"


    "It''s six days marching to The Last Fort."


    "So?"


    "So I''ve rid with halfpint there long enough yet to know why he''s on a mule and not a horse."


    "Because he''s short."


    "That ain''t it miss."


    Mym looked from the bookmaker to Orc. "Ye want te tell me what she''s tryin te say?"


    Orc winced every time he stepped onto his bad leg. "The dead don''t need to rest."


    "Even the stones must rest."


    "The dead ain''t stones,¡± said Booky. ¡°That mule will go twice as far with half again the weight as any of them horses, and it won''t stop until its heart explodes."


    She looked at the mule, at the horsemen, at the orckin still bearing the tusker, at the bookmaker afoot. Finally she looked back at Orc. "It''s like walkin in bear country."


    "What''s that mean?"


    "Make sure ye take someone slower than ye."


    He looked at her. She looked at his bum leg.


    "Well then off you go you little maggoteer."


    Just then two cavaliers fell out of the column and dismounted. One held out a flagon of ether and she shook it along the ground and the other waited for the rearguard to pass and then set the fire. Quickly it spread across the short dry grasses of the place. The cavaliers mounted and rode back onto the column. Every few miles they repeated this ritual. Soon the risen had fallen further behind and the great cloud that accompanied them broadened across the horizon and blended in with the smoke.


    At dusk the two cavaliers hazed two unladen horses out of those rustled from the kingsmen. They saddled them and struck out east to build fires far out on the horizon. The others lay down in the dark. No fires were permitted, no cooking. They buried their refuse in the frozen ground like cats. The wolves prowled in close and no one shied them off. It had been nigh forty hours since they last slept. The tusker died in the night. They could not burn the body so the orckin dismembered it and piece by piece they tossed it to the wolves.


    They broke camp before sunup and in that golden hour the runragged horses blew great clouds of sunlit vapor. The dustcloud of the risen rose no longer behind them but alongside them. By noon the firebuilders had rejoined from the east and by evening the black haze of the dead had begun to fill the southeastern sky. They set more fires the following day and for four days straight they rode their mounts into the ground and fired each new carcass until the ether ran dry.


    Early on the sixth day as the sun issued from paperthin mountains Mym saw a gray cloud scudding up the northern sky. The risen were now less than two miles behind them and the ether was long gone. No beast but the mule could manage more than a hurried walk. By noon she could see the tumbledown walls of The Last Fort quivering in a sourceless heat and the treetops rising out of its courtyard and the men stood on its stone parapets. The risen teemed now a scant five hundred yards and the cavaliers occasioned to twist in their saddles and fire their rifles at their harrying. An hour later the company was turning along the smoke-venting rends that ringed The Last Fort and up a trail through a gap in the chasms. A sentry strode out of the gatehouse as far as the second ring of vents and he hollered at them. Uhquah hollered back. The sentry looked down along the vents where laborers tied off to stakes in coal-stained smocks stood working long poles up and down into the chasms as if stoking the earth''s inner fire. The sentry looked back south. The risen outrunners, one or two hundred of them, were just coming to the first ring of the vents and threading through the safe path and into the second ring.


    The sentry called back to the laborers who left their poles where they stood and cut their ropes and began to run toward the gatehouse. He looked at Uhquah and said something to him. The cavaliers urged the last from their fainting horses as the first of the flies buzzed about them. The last Mym saw of the sentry he had pulled a flask of ether from his neck and had begun to douse his longsword.


    Mym followed Uhquah through the gatehouse''s archway and beyond as if parading in a kind of triumph. A wall of raised voices chorused beyond the threshold. Ash fell from the sky like white rose petals. Children ran alongside the horses. Their procession was like a coronation. Men and women thronged them and others ran to the ramparts'' defenses and ever did Mym look among them for sign of the brigadier. She saw only the device of the baron and the colors of kingsmen, and she knew within those walls they would find no solace for they''d arrived at the last bastion of the armiger''s army.

 91. The Siege of the Last Fort of Flame Eternal

    Above him the portcullis began to rumble shut. Through the gatehouse the cavaliers and their blown horses seemed to float upon a sea of upturned faces. They held flasks given to them by the crowd of townsfolk and they shouted bawdy solidarities at the defenders now manning the parapets against the coming horde.


    Orc and his kind were received somberly and without mirth. The multitudes stepped back from them, regarded them, sneered at them, would not touch them in their bloody clothes and sundried scalps and fangy smiles. Tulula raised an awful song. An outcry of deliverance. Relieved at the end of their dayslong flight Orc smiled down at Mym. She looked back and shook her head.


    "What?" he said.


    She nodded at the ramparts. "They''re all kingsmen."


    He looked about. The portcullis was closed. Atop the walls archers lit arrows from braziers and aimed and fired them down at the unseen enemy. Counterfired bolts and arrows overshot in a flurry like spray off broken surf or else clacked off of the battlements and fell back to earth. Within the grounds a trebuchet groaned as it hurled burning pitch into the sky to the precise calls of a spotter up on the gatehouse. Its engineers sweated over its crankarms as they ratcheted up the counterweight of netted stones. There was a composed ease among their number, as if the current action was as regular an occurrence in their daily lives as whetting a blade or farriering a horse. Aware of the lethality present, practiced as to its handling.


    He turned back to the dwarf.


    "They''re the armiger''s," he said.


    "Aye. The selfsame who debarked at Here First to slay Glad Nizam and set her lads and lasses afire."


    He raised his eyes to the hero''s welcome. Someone had taken up piping a horn and beating a drum. "Seems they''re our allies now."


    She huffed. "If yer plannin te live in the delvin then ye need te learn how te keep a hardy grudge for vengin."


    It was the first time she''d mentioned that in a week. He found himself studying her, searching her hardlined face for sign of jest or joviality. There was none that he could see. Perhaps she had meant it after all.


    The tattered cavaliers had dismounted and were all of them being led to a squat bathhouse more ancient than the fort built around it. It was masoned of forgebricks and tiles and when its oaken door swung open steam flooded out of it. A dispatch of stable boys grabbed up the reins of their horses and led them along the broadside of the bathhouse to a corral where they were to be fed and watered from the stores of the fort, courtesy of the captain who garrisoned it. Men and women of the company leaned their arms against the walls and disrobed from their filthy rags and piled them at the door. Naked but for the dust and ash on their faces they ducked inside.


    Orc could feel Mym drawn after them. "Go get cleaned up," he said.


    She looked back at him. "I think it''s best we stick together."


    "They won''t let me in there."


    Over by the trebuchet Ogre carried an enormous iron cauldron with water splashing over the sides and once at the brazier he dropped it into the coals. The loaders gathered around the monster flapping their arms and yelling like angry ducks but what could they do about it. Ogre stood with his bare hands held to the heat and an oafish smile on his solitary head. Soon the water began to steam. The orckin gathered by and waited as Ogre plunged his head into the cauldron and withdrew it immense and gleaming, water sheeting down his face and streaming from his chin like an alpine cascade, his eyes blissfully closed, his pallid skin flushed and seeming to smoke from an inner fire.


    Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    Ordered by a hierarchy unknown to Orc the orckin then bathed in the now seething water. They dashed it over their reeking bodies and into their armpits and down their loins. Orc and Mym went last. The water scalded their hands. He found himself turning away from her when she undressed although she was unashamed of her figure and form. Still he turned as the brigadier had taught him to do.


    Now the cauldron boiled. The cold air drove them wet and naked to the very edge of the brazier. All of them threw their raggedy garb into the pot and with a stout pikeshaft Tulula agitated the foul brew. A brownish opacity thickened the water so that it appeared now to be a pot of boiling clay. After some minutes of this she nodded and two other orcs came to her side of the brazier and together they levered the cauldron onto its side and all of the water spilled out hissing over the frozen ground. The orckin collected their sopping articles from the hot maw of the iron.


    In nothing but his boots Orc wrung the water out of his clothes. Tulula and the others now levered the empty cauldron back onto the coals and, again according to a particular order, the orckin each draped their rags over the rim of the pot where they steamed and hissed. Again Orc and Mym were last. He had begun to shiver. She wrapped her arm around him and pressed her side against his, the wing of her hip against his thigh. Tulula, now clad, came to his other side and threw her cloak over him. His leg throbbed maddingly. Ten minutes later he pulled on his trousers and shirts, hot and stiff as if they had laid all day in the Madlands sun and their heat radiated back into him.


    All the while the cavaliers had begun to reemerge from the bathhouse. In the yard before it pilferers and spoilers had spread tarps of their salvage. Some of it was plundered from risen warriors, most of it they said was looted from the old capital: a breastplate gouged through the sternum with the seal of the monarch engraved on, cutlery and dishwares of tarnished silver and bronze and massive pewter steins carved and enameled with hunting scenes, countless rings alloyed from copper and tin with purported imbuements that would turn their wearers invisible or immortal or immaterial, painted portraits held open with stones at their curled up corners and tapestries pictographing the histories of families long dead and perhaps risen again. Some of their engines and arcanities made no sense to Orc and he doubted their value. One, a glass orb of some sort, he watched Mym hold against the sunlight and examine the colors it splayed on the ground. She bought it for half a silver. Beside them the orckin paid for their trinkets with scalps.


    As they waited without the bathhouse for the cavaliers to dress Mym palmed the orb like a fortune teller and studied the stones about while he sat beside her and looked at the string of stitches thatched up his leg.


    ¡°The bath¡¯s older than the fort,¡± she said.


    He turned to her.


    She one handed the orb and pointed to the place where the brickworks met the ground. ¡°The foundation¡¯s older yet. Dwarven made by the look of it.¡±


    He looked where she was pointing. "I can''t tell."


    "Look at those cuts there. See how straight they go? And if ye listen just right ye can hear the sound of the chisel that made em still ringin away."


    He cocked his head as if to hear but of course he could not.


    "Not much left of it," she said, "but it''s there. By the pitch I''d say those slabs were hewn two or three thousand years ago."


    He looked up at the wall of the bathhouse. "It doesn''t look that old."


    "Well that isn''t, but the foundation is. These bricks aren''t older than six hundred. Looks te me like men threw em up over whatever stood here before."


    "So what stood here before."


    She appeared to think about that. "A temple maybe. A forge. Hell it could''ve just been another bath."


    "Doubtful."


    "Dwarves like te be clean just as well as yer kind."


    "You wouldn''t know by the smell of them."


    "Har har."


    He bent over and looked at the founding stones. Through generations of caked ash and dirt he thought he could tell the difference in the material and workmanship. "So who built the temple or whatever?"


    "Not us. Blues maybe. Maybe others."


    Now she held the sphere to her chest and bent beside him to draw her finger across the seam of the mortar. "Dwarves aren''t supposed te have lived this far north. Not now nor ever."


    ¡°Yet here they were.¡±


    ¡°Aye.¡±


    "What''s it mean?" he said.


    "I don''t know yet." She stood up. "Maybe nothin."

 92. The Baron

    This man who captained the garrison at The Last Fort of Flame Eternal had come up through the ranks of the kingsmen and had earned his barony by his battlefield prowess and not by birth. He was narrowly read and was a student of war and of human exceptionalism. It was he who seconded the armiger during Glad Nizam''s uprising, and it was he who was left in command when the armiger embarked for the sea of suns and the black heart of the world and the forge of creation.


    When the baron approached Uhquah¡¯s company outside the bathhouse he had with him a corked jug of wine and only one bodyman and it would have been nothing at all for any one of the company to sweep off his head at a stroke. As the kingsmen on the walls repelled the risen with fire the cavaliers drank the jug empty and the baron sent the bodyman off for another. With his own cup the baron toasted the men and pointedly ignored the gathered orckin. That was when Mym noticed the longhorn wasn¡¯t there. She looked about the yard of the fort and saw no sign of him.


    She leaned over to Orc. "The otaur''s gone."


    "Good eye."


    "Did ye see where he got te?"


    ¡°No.¡± He looked at her. "I''ve not seen him since before we got inside."


    "He wasn¡¯t at the wash?"


    "No."


    She considered this. "Maybe he fell into one of the vents."


    "You mean the smokers outside?"


    "Aye."


    He nodded. "Back down to the hell he came from."


    "There''s coal deposits down there, been burnin ten thousand years and will keep burnin for ten thousand more yet."


    "The stones tell you that?"


    "Aye."


    He nodded. "They''re heeding you."


    "Not all of em. Some though." She gestured at his calf. "Like the malachite."


    "Can they lead us to her?"


    "If we find the right ones te ask."


    He took off his hat and looked up at the walls and over at the gatehouse. "Well. Let''s figure out a way to get going."


    "Yer leg could use a rest."


    He shook his head. "I¡¯d like to be gone before the longhorn shows up."


    As they spoke the cavaliers had begun to gather around Uhquah and the baron for a third jug of wine. After it was empty the baron, now red-faced, invited them to dine with his officers. Not the orckin though. They were directed toward the soldiers'' mess. As the others departed Mym saw Orc lag behind and look back as if he wanted to tell her something. With a look she indicated he better get going.


    The baron''s eyes drifted to Orc. He looked at the sidebutton trousers and the tunic, now rinsed of the caked on grime and dust and blood. He turned to Uhquah and with his outstretched arm gathered them toward the great hall. Mym followed close.


    "Is that grayback with the marshal?" said the baron.


    Uhquah spat. "Aye we all were."


    "But not anymore."


    "Not since the risen offed him." The dwarf waved in the direction of the besieged gatehouse. "He''s lek te be out there among em now."


    "Where was that?"


    "Makin the crossin. Some six days south of the Thumb."


    "I see," said the baron in a tone that suggested he didn''t. "Orcs and dwarves riding with the marshal. I suppose in this fight of living against the dead we''re all allies."


    "Aye sure."


    "Excepting the brigadier."


    Uhquah drew out his long-stemmed pipe. "Aye that''s what the marshal said."


    "You know she''s who freed the orcs that follow you."


    Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.


    The dwarf kept his eyes on his pipe as he packed it. "Is she?"


    "I took a great risk allowing you all within the fort. She''s in league with the risen queen."


    "Well we¡¯re grateful fer yer hospitalities."


    The baron nodded back at where the orckin had gone. "You''re certain none of them are hers?"


    Now Uhquah licked his fingers and plucked a burning coal from a brazier they passed and he pressed it to the bowl. His cheeks sunk and his beard wagged as he pulled air through the stem. The herb in the bowl began to smolder and he tossed the coal back where he''d found it and he shook out his hand. In a great cloud of exhaled smoke he said, "You want te go and ask em?"


    The baron''s step slowed somewhat. Mym saw his hand resting on the pommel of his longsword. "Did you come across any sign of her on your way north?" said the man.


    Uhquah blew his second draw directly in the baron''s face. "Not as I can recall."


    The baron frowned deeply like a man entering a well used latrine. "Direct that elsewhere."


    Uhquah withdrew the stem as if to say something and then replaced it.


    "You didn''t hear anything from the rocks."


    Uhquah shrugged.


    "Can''t your kind commune with rock?"


    "Some can."


    "Can you?"


    Uhquah shrugged again.


    The baron half turned and indicated Mym with his chin. "Can she?"


    "Why don''t you ask her."


    The baron looked down his nose at her and she looked right back. To Uhquah he said, "We heard a mixed company set out from the Thumb three weeks ago."


    "That''s news te us. We left longer than that and haven''t let up since."


    ¡°Under whose command?¡±


    ¡°Lek I said before the marshal''s who took us south of the Thumb. Those who survived answer te me now. I reckon them that died and were raised are still answerin the marshal.¡±


    ¡°The marshal had a boy who seconded him.¡±


    ¡°Aye and I saw the risen gobble him up with my own eyes.¡±


    The baron studied the blue dwarf''s face like a delver weighing a stone in their mind.


    "A mixed company of what?" said Mym.


    Uhquah glowered at her for talking but the baron half turned again. "Another of your kind traveling with a woman."


    She sniffed, said nothing.


    "The deadlands are no place for an unaccompanied woman."


    "Ye just said a dwarf was with her."


    "A dwarf''s not a man."


    "There''s one thing the gods got right."


    The baron frowned again. "Do you know them?"


    "The gods?"


    "The dwarf and the woman."


    She shook her head. Uhquah spat.


    "I dispatched a patrol two weeks ago to collect them."


    "We didn''t see them neither," said Uhquah.


    The baron turned back to him. "They ferried with them a six pound gun and they were headed by a man called Wayland."


    ¡°Could¡¯ve been headed by Donnas hisself we still wouldn¡¯t have seen em.¡±


    As Uhquah spoke they arrived at the heavy doors of the great hall. These were of the black walnut once grown about that place in vast orchards. The baron pushed through and the dwarves and cavaliers followed. Inside was a single room, poorly lit by a solitary hearth halfway down the wall that hissed and spit like an angry viper. A long table and benches of walnut stretched into darkness. Chipped and mismatched porcelain was laid out in settings. The baron¡¯s staff already sat around the head and his place empty, his meal half finished. At center table a garland of pine boughs collected from the grove arranged around a roast of reindeer, potatoes, drippings. As the cavaliers filed in behind Mym she heard their excited murmurs at the smell of rosemary and venison.


    The men and women of the company began to take their seats. Soldiers emerged from another entrance to wait upon them.


    ¡°You eat while your men fight,¡± said Uhquah.


    ¡°A soldier must eat or else he won¡¯t be fighting long,¡± said the baron. ¡°Sit here, you sit there. The men will bring you what you need.¡±


    Uhquah and Mym sat. The baron¡¯s staff who had ceased eating when the doors opened now recommenced with a general chatter and clank of utensils. A great silver platter was brought forth whereupon some sort of pudding quivered in the firelight. The rough cavaliers needed no further invitation. They tucked into their meat with two pronged forks and bone handled knives looted from the old capital like most everything else in that place.


    ¡°Aren¡¯t you besieged?¡± called Uhquah to the far end of the hall.


    The baron looked up from his food. ¡°Oh that? That¡¯s nothing. They come every fortnight. Reliving some old battle no doubt.¡±


    ¡°And losing it,¡± said a lieutenant.


    The baron¡¯s men laughed. Some of the cavaliers joined them.


    The baron held up a spoonful of the pudding. ¡°We do our best not to drive them away too quickly. If they¡¯re attacking us here then they''re not harrying his majesty¡¯s subjects elsewhere.¡±


    Just then Mym heard the door open behind her. She watched a kingsman stride past and down the hall and bend to whisper something in the baron¡¯s ear. She glanced at the blue dwarf who still puffed on his pipe, the spread untouched before him. As the door closed she slid off the end of the bench and snuck out.


    There seemed to be a commotion down where the company¡¯s horses were corralled. Mym strode across the yard toward the soldiers'' mess. Coming up from the corral a sergeant and six or seven soldiers and a stable boy leading a horse. It was one of the palominos spoiled off of Wayland¡¯s patrol. The soldiers drew their swords as they passed her and they continued on to the great hall.


    She began to jog.


    The southwestern battlement suddenly exploded in dust and debris and bodies spinning through the air and there was the thunderous crash of stone splitting and the heavy thud of cannonfire rolled after. Men wailed and held their bloody faces and their sopping bellies and those ejected from the wall down onto the grounds moved not at all. Within the grounds the engineers wheeled around the trebuchet. The spotter screamed. The cannon roared again and from the soldiers'' mess there came the clap of gunfire and the bellowing of orckin.


    She began to run.

 93. The Mess

    Inside the mess the orckin had no more than sat down before a kingsman said, "Look at all them pigfuckers."


    Orc sprang from the bench setting his stitches on fire. Before he could pick out which of the soldiers had uttered it the first concussions of cannonfire shivered the walls. This brought his kin to their feet and they shambled back outside. A footman rose with his dinner knife held low beside him and followed after. His comrades stopped eating and watched him go. Under the tables some of them reached for pistols and sabers.


    Tulula and the greenskin were the first through the door. Orc came after them and he heard the high pitched whistle of another shot tunneling through the air and he stepped back slightly when it slammed the parapet and shattered mortar and avulsed limbs which rained forth from the instantaneous cloud of dust and smoke.


    "We should''ve spiked the gun," he said.


    Tulula turned to him and he noticed her look past and her eyes widen. He saw the footman and he saw the blade pass into the back of a brownskin called Bok standing in the threshold. Bok reeled forward. Tulula drew her handax and swung it overhand and sank its head through the middle of the footman''s face. He fell dead through the door with blood draining out his ears. When Bok faded to sit on the kickboard Orc could see the ivory handle of the knife sticking straight out between his shoulderblades.


    Inside the soldiers had already advanced upon the orckin and there raised a constant roar of gunfire. The greenskin was clawing at a fusilier and Tulula had shoved her way back inside and had drawn her second ax and she severed a kingsman''s wrist with it so that the hand fell to the floor still grasping a pistol. Stark red blood spouted from the wound and the man held it up to his face in horror. Orc lifted Bok to stand and they stepped over the corpse of a pistoleer. Inside the mess an uninterrupted calamity of flashing smoke and discharged arms and guttural howls and somedozen kinsgmen were sprawled about in every manner, cut up and into pieces among the splintered tables and broken chairs with the orckin panting and bleeding yet still standing. Gouges had been shot out of the ceiling joists. A haze thickened as if boiled up out of their aggregate rage. Out of the murk a saber and a man attached took a pass at Orc but he ducked under the swing and like a coiled spring he flew upward into the man''s chin with the point of his blade leading the way. With such power the blade passed through the man''s jaw and out his mouth and through a nostril and it sunk into a pinewood crossbeam with the man hanging there from the hilt of the blade. Tulula stepped forward and placed the barrel of a pistol against the man''s chest and fired. Orc freed the blade and let the man fall.


    What soldiers were left now legged toward the door but the way was littered with bodies and slick with blood. One by one they exited hollering and one by one their screams were cut short. As Orc got back to the door with a discharged pistol in hand he came face to face with Mym on her way in, her alpenstock bare and grisly.


    "Oy," she called, "The rest are comin!"


    "Ours or theirs?" said Orc.


    "Theirs."


    The orckin slid about the bloodslicked floor stopping to scalp a man or two on their way out. A west wind was galing up and black coalsmoke out of the vents buffeted through the battlements on the western wall where kingsmen now repelled upraised ladders cobbled together out of bone and sinew with risen riding their tops and from the great hall rose the unmistakable report of the carbines at work. Mym took off toward the gatehouse and Orc chased after.


    A cadre of mounted knights trotted out of the pine grove along the eastern wall and turned toward the gatehouse as if for a forthcoming sally. They each wore a steel cuirass fastened with leather straps and silver buckles and they wore closefaced helms with horsehair plumes and they carried lances in the stirrups twice the height of a man and pistols holstered upon their breastplates and their horses were well fed and brushed down and they highstepped across the yard at a canter, all of them formerly the armiger''s bodyguard, now the shock cavalry of the baron. Mym slowed and looked back at Orc. The tribune of the knights had sawed up on his reins at the sight of the bloody orckin. An instant later the orcs and greenskin and dwarf were among them. Men discarded their lances or else died holding them. The horses shrieked and reared and a number of the knights were tossed from their mounts and were clubbed in the head or stabbed in the gap between helm and cuirass. Those still ahorse pulled back and drew their pistols. The orckin came at them again.


    If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    The tribune rose from where he''d fallen and he brandished his pistol in his gauntlet. Orc kicked him in the face and stabbed him in the eyeslit as the pistol fired skyward. A sentry on the walls who had witnessed the mutiny was running to the gatehouse and Mym dropped to a knee and shot him through the head. In a sunbeam coming through the battlements the men lay about the yard and the valorous knights who had been cut off of their horses in their lustrous metal skins were cudgeled to death or else had their helms torn from their heads and were scalped alive.


    Some risen now surmounted the west wall and vaulted through the battlements and a panic spread among the salvagers and the pilferers about the yard. With their bundles in their arms they spun this way and that as if searching for some escape. Elsewhere soldiers mustered and climbed the stairs to the beset defenders. Figures poured out of the great hall and an uproar bawled after them and Orc looked thither and then toward the gatehouse and its closed portcullis.


    "Let''s go," called Mym.


    "It''s shut."


    "Aye and its us who¡¯ve got te open it."


    Orc ran after the dwarf and the orckin followed. As they came to the archway rifleshot pocked the stone and geysered the ground. Bok was shot clean through his center back and he fell forward with the knife handle still sticking out of him. They came to the bottom of the gatehouse stair. Spearman bristled at its top. Bowman loosed down upon them from the roof and from the loops in the gatehouse towers. An arrow gashed down Tulula¡¯s back and she screamed. The orckin fell back from the stair and flattened themselves against the gatehouse. At any moment the soldiers on the western wall would clear away the assaulting risen and turn around and see the stranded orckin and they would shoot them to pieces. Through the sulphuric smoke that hung across the grounds Orc saw the baron and his staff emerging from the great hall.


    ¡°What doin Orc?¡± called Ogre.


    Orc turned and saw the pale monster skipping along the southern wall with Booky cradled in their arms and the bouncing headsack in her lap.


    ¡°About time,¡± said Orc.


    ¡°Sorry,¡± said Booky. ¡°We got caught up dicing with the locals.¡± She cackled. ¡°Looks like y¡¯all was too.¡±


    ¡°Ogre,¡± said Orc.


    Ogre placed Booky upon the ground and then reached up and grabbed a spearman off of the wall and casually smashed him against the stoneworks and pitched him away.


    ¡°Ogre!¡±


    ¡°Yah?¡±


    ¡°Open the portcullis.¡±


    ¡°Open wut?¡±


    ¡°The gate. Open the gate.¡±


    ¡°Okee dokee.¡±


    Ogre waddled around the leering orckin and into the archway.


    Mym nodded at the baron and the ten, twelve men flanking him each wielding a carbine. ¡°Here comes the dipshit.¡±


    ¡°Cover them.¡±


    Mym lowered herself to sit with her back against the gatehouse wall and monopodded the barrel of her carbine upon a bent knee. As she set to work Orc ducked over to Ogre. They¡¯d slung their hands under the portcullis grate and their hamstrings and calves and back all bunched as they sought to lift it. Counterfire sprayed around them with several of the slugs passing into Ogre¡¯s fatty hide.


    ¡°Owww,¡± they groaned.


    ¡°Keep on,¡± shouted Orc. He ran up beside them and gripped a crossbar and heaved with everything he had. The portcullis trembled and clanked in its track but it did not rise. Other of the orckin came up and together they broke their backs upon the gate. The greenskin tried levering it up with the haft of a discarded spear and this shattered under the load. Ogre was hit again and it must have gone into his lungs for the wound bubbled and wheezed with the rapidity of his breath as he heaved and hurled himself upon the portcullis.


    ¡°Get that dwarf up here,¡± called Tulula.


    Orc couldn¡¯t see Mym but he could hear her potted shots and the scattered replies from the great hall. ¡°Mym!¡± he called.


    The gunfire kept on.


    ¡°Mym!¡±


    The slug of a carbine clanged off of a crossbar and the ricochet severed the strap of his satchel. Spearmen were now cutting into the battered orckin and he saw Tulula fall. There was no way out. He turned to fight and he drew his blade and over its resonance he heard a familiar laughter.


    On the other side of the portcullis stood the longhorn with his gilded horntips and his flattoothed smile. Arms crossed and one hoof propped against the side of the archway as if he¡¯d been waiting there all along. He uncrossed his arms and one hand gripped the grate like a prisoner in his cell and the other held the sunbleached skull of a man. ¡°Again you wish to be free of your prison,¡± he said.


    ¡°Open it,¡± said Orc.


    The longhorn clanged the crown of the skull against the grate. ¡°Accompany me to the queen.¡±


    Orc heard Ogre cry out again. He heard the greenskin snarling and Booky had begun to jabber with fear. He deadeye looked at the longhorn and nodded.


    With one hand the longhorn hoisted the portcullis. As he stretched upward the cut Orc had slashed across his belly all those weeks ago grinned open. There was a clacking from the gatehouse as the barrier ran up over the stepped pawls. Ogre held it overhead and the longhorn wedged the skull into its track with a clap from his maul and then he gestured toward the tundra with both hands as if inviting the rest of them out for a walk. Booky and the greenskin and the orckin passed under. Tulula was there emptyhanded and bleeding everywhere. Mym too with the carbine smoking from the chamber. Finally Orc was through and as Ogre let go the pursuing spearmen dug in their heels and slipped and skidded under the archway as if the portcullis would slam down in an instant. Yet the skull held it in place, gaped open. The ragged band of orckin fled south and east and were lost among the billowing vents. The horde of the risen saw the opening and they swarmed toward it.

 94. Flight

    When she turned them north again the sun hung away west half hidden by the bluish coalsmoke out of the vents. A new plume was rising from the faint shadow of the fort walls. Upcountry thunderheads sagged over rocky uplands and dragged a blanket of snow behind them. The orckin blindly followed her reckoning and the longhorn brought up their rear. She led them until dusk and as soon as the sun was hid the orcs pitched their weapons upon the ground and collapsed beside them. They made no fire. Mym came to Tulula with the candle and the malachite but the sow was already asleep and Mym saw her wound was not so deep. She trudged back to where Orc lay and she unrolled her bed and slept beside him. No watch was kept.


    Midnight lightning flashed out of the upcountry steeps and the shadow of the peaks seemed to dance about in the flickering and flaring. Mym woke and watched the blue fire shimmer and saw figures of jackrabbits moving darkly upon the plain. She heard a snort and a nicker and she sat up and there Uhquah sat on his mule covered in blood and bile, the stem of his dead pipe yet clenched in his teeth. Behind him a pale horse snuffed the tundra with its catchrope trailing. The blue dwarf nodded at her with a wan liquidity in his eyes. She nodded back.


    Come sunup she saw the cavaliers Robby and Sterling curled up on the ground who had ridden double on the solitary horse. Orc stirred, checked his stitches, blinked toward dawn.


    "You got any food?" she said.


    "No."


    ¡°None of that smoked jerky?¡±


    He shook his head. ¡°It was in my bag.¡±


    ¡°Well we can stitch ye another when we get back te the delvin.¡±


    ¡°Her book was in there too.¡±


    She frowned. ¡°I¡¯m sorry te hear it.¡±


    He didn¡¯t say anything.


    She looked north toward the mountains. "She came this way."


    ¡°You think so?¡±


    ¡°I know it. Six days past accordin te the stones¡¯ tellin.¡±


    He turned to her. ¡°You¡¯re getting through to them.¡±


    ¡°Aye and it¡¯s about time.¡±


    He looked at her. She looked back. ¡°We can depart anytime ye want,¡± she said.


    ¡°Alright.¡±


    Stiffly he got to his feet. He put out a hand as if for balance and his face lost some of its color.


    She eyeballed his calf. Some fluid had seeped out of it overnight. ¡°How¡¯s the leg.¡±


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t matter one way or another. Let¡¯s get going.¡±


    As Mym stood she heard the sharp whistle of the longhorn. The cavaliers started awake and Uhquah turned and pissed steam out of the frosted ground and then made his way to the mule.


    Orc looked at her. She looked back. ¡°We¡¯ll never be free of em,¡± she said.


    ¡°Yeah,¡± said Orc.


    They trod for days through the snow and sleet and snow again. In a frozen fog they took turns leading the mule and the horse up a subalpine snowfield. Those who followed bent forward over the slope and sank to their knees in the hoofprints. Looking up all apparent summits turned false. They passed out of the drifts and onto a facet blown clean of snowcover and through a hanging meadow of edelweiss and pygmy rhododendrons that trembled in the wind and waited for spring. Before they crossed back into the snow the bookmaker bought several longshanked scalps from the orckin and she tied these by their hair to the bottoms of the ogre¡¯s unshod feet.


    That night they bivouacked at the top of a pass in an improbable refuge of stacked rocks assembled by some shepherd of yesteryear. The ogre couldn''t fit through the doorway and was forced to huddle outside in the lee of the structure. The wind howled as it raked across the conicalled dome and it daggered through the gaps between the unhewn stones to swirl about the floor. Leaking snowmelt dripped from the ceiling and those of the diminished company sat helter skelter against the walls and listened to the tempest without.


    Mym hunkered down deep in the hood of her furs and tucked her hands under her arms and closed her eyes. For the first time in weeks she felt a kind of peace: the sound of the storm and labored breathing and murmuring stones, the sweet smell of sweat already dried and the ozone smell of cold woolens warming, the swollen fullness of her fingertips and cheeks and toes as they flushed out of numbness, all evoking a feeling in her of overnighting high on the white mountain. She almost felt she was home.


    "Goddamn this place," said the bookmaker.


    Mym felt Orc stir beside her. "Go to sleep," he said.


    "Goddamn the dark,¡± she said and Mym could hear the fear in her voice. ¡°Goddamn the stink. And god fucking damn wondering every day if tomorrow''s when I''m gonna get killed."


    "Welcome to the bottom of your pit," said Orc.


    The greenskin cackled.


    "Yeah well goddamn the pit too," said the bookmaker.


    No one said anything awhile. Mym listened to the regular patter of water dripping onto the sandy floor, to buffets of wind rising and falling.


    "We ought to check on Ogre," said Orc.


    "Be my guest," said the bookmaker.


    Mym felt Orc move. She tunneled halfway out of her hood and opened her eyes. He was kneeling beside her touching at the stitches.


    ¡°Ye goin out?¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    "Ye want some company?"


    He looked up. "No."


    She watched as he stared about the hut. At the meanness of it and the shambles of its once proud occupants.


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    "You still have that candle?"


    "Aye and I see where yer headed with the thought."


    He nodded and then he ducked through the doorway and into the night.


    She dug in her things and leaned forward to place the candle in the center of the hut. She lit the wick.


    "Let there be light," said the longhorn.


    A steady flickering blossomed around her and she could see the men and women and orckin all lock their eyes on the solitary tongue of flame. All except the longhorn. He held in his enormous hands a small black book. He licked his fingers with a dry tongue and turned a page and held the book toward the light of the candle.


    "That''s Orc''s," said Mym.


    The longhorn quit his reading. He looked at her. Then he continued to read.


    Orc blew back in out of the storm with the reins of the horse and the mule wrapped in his hand and the animals trailing after. As they stumped dripping and snorting inside Robby spat. "I ain''t sleepin with no goddamn mule," she said.


    Orc had turned to the beasts and was wiping newfallen snow from their backs. "They''ll die in that blow. I about lost my fingers taking a piss."


    The cavalier made to stand. "Said I ain''t sleepin with no goddamn mule."


    "There''s plenty of room outside." Orc turned and stared down at her. "You¡¯re welcome to sleep with Ogre."


    "Ogre likes a cuddle," said the greenskin with a needle-toothed grin. "A cuddle and a snack."


    Robby sat back down and angled away from the animals that now filled the interior of the hut. The horse raised its tail.


    ¡°Aw goddammit,¡± she cried.


    The greenskin cackled again.


    Orc returned to his spot beside Mym and now he noticed the book in the longhorn''s possession. She watched his jaw set when the longhorn withdrew the pencil from the binding and made an annotation in a margin. His fists clenched as the longhorn said, ¡°Wrong again,¡± and wrote another mark upon the paper. When the longhorn drew out the kerchief and held it to the candlelight Orc began to rise.


    She caught his wrist and pulled him down. He glared at her with his eyes on fire and she subtly shook her head.


    The longhorn sniffed at the kerchief and Orc tried to rise again but she held him fast with that iron grip. Flourishing the kerchief like a conductor the longhorn gestured with both hands to those beside him and to those on the far side who watched him through the legs of the animals as if they had all gathered in that place just to hear his good news.


    ¡°All things in this world were designed to be as they are through opposition and strife,¡± he said. ¡°You, this hovel, the mountain beneath you. All busted up in accord with the violence that drives creation. You ain''t got to trouble yourselves with why things are how they are, or just what it is you¡¯re supposed to do or who you¡¯re supposed to be. The board¡¯s all set. Each of you¡¯s a piece. The rest of it¡¯ll work out in the scrumming.¡±


    He held up the journal and he flipped from page to page where various flora and fauna had been sketched by a practiced hand and extensive notes written in a flowing script. He turned each sheet to face his audience like a schoolteacher reading a picturebook to illiterates.


    He flipped to an illustration of a muroid, belly up, incisors prominent. ¡°Look at this little shit. Rats ain¡¯t worrying about what it means to be vermin. Sooner or later you¡¯ll die in the dark and they¡¯ll gnaw what¡¯s left of you. Your flesh is their meat and mead and from your raw ingredient they brew their milk to suckle their young.¡±


    The longhorn closed the book and wrapped the kerchief around it and tied it off. He held it up to his witnesses. ¡°This here¡¯s the folly of one obsessed with purpose and place. Of one who thinks absolution resides in knowledge of the momentary. Collecting, prodding, cataloging things as they were when she chanced on them.¡±


    He looked at Orc, ¡°And discarding them after. As if they¡¯ll stay as she found them forever. No regard for the wider view. Like a blind man groping a mammoth¡¯s trunk and thinking he knows the serpent. Like a mother cradling an infant and thinking she knows the man he¡¯ll become.¡±


    He feigned to place the book within the candleflame and Orc tore free of Mym¡¯s grip and stood up. The longhorn looked at him with a cruel smile. ¡°It¡¯s all bullshit scalerboy. Better for wiping your ass with. You think knowing her¡¯s going to give you some greater mastery over your fate. But it¡¯s lies. All lies. I tried telling you once already that the only path to certainty is this.¡±


    The longhorn now held forth his iron maul. Its cannonball¡¯s black iron sphere underlit in the dark like a moon made of coal. Like an antimoon to those warring orbs that then lanterned the storming overstory.


    ¡°The priests say only man can enslave man. Ain¡¯t that the greatest lie ever told. The god of men enslaved man, for it was that god that gave them reasoning and regret. In a single stroke he made them the most vicious of nature¡¯s creatures and the most furtive.¡±


    He held up the book again as if to swear upon it. ¡°See the woman, your brigadier. In her reasoning originates all of her guilt. She voyages yon and hither jotting and scribbling. Ever chasing justice and truth in creation. Ever forgetting the one truth that all others must obey. The one that bends creation and creator to its will. Now see the vermin. It knows nothing of itself or its place in the world. It chews the flesh. It broods. It dies. It ain''t creation but destruction that''s the final cause of our world.¡±


    ¡°Sounds like nakshit te me,¡± said Mym.


    The longhorn¡¯s head swung to her. ¡°Tell us what joy your creating has wrought, wedwarf. Deeper into this hollowland it drags you. Away from your kin, away from your home. You think by learning the secrets of life that you might dictate its terms. That you might defeat death. Ain¡¯t that a folly.¡±


    He looked at the candle. Frowned at it. Gestured to it. ¡°There¡¯s your end. All into heat. All conflagorating toward universal tepidity.¡±


    Now he turned back to Orc. ¡°Your brigadier looks for truth by knowing of the world. You seek it by knowing of her. Thus you¡¯ve made her your world.¡±


    He tossed the book and the satchel to Orc¡¯s feet. ¡°See your error?¡±


    Orc squatted down and gathered the effects. The others watched until it was clear there¡¯d be no fighting that night. They turned in and with their heads against the stone walls they tried to sleep.


    Mym sat up with Orc. She watched him pass through each of the book¡¯s pages as if counting them, as if their ordering ought to conform to his memory of them and not the other way around.


    ¡°Ye alright?¡± she said.


    He made no sign that he''d heard her. He just continued turning pages. Toward the end he found the leaf bearing the longhorn¡¯s corrections. Mym had seen it before: the ancient sketch of the orcstone, traced from an illumination found in a particular tome held in the royal archive, densely annotated in old human script and accompanied by the brigadier¡¯s own speculations. The longhorn¡¯s additions were not to these.


    Above the orcstone were several dwarven runes engraved on the original plate, copied from an earlier source by the human illuminators, copied again by the brigadier into her journal. To these the longhorn had made several crudely figured emendations.


    ¡°You can read it,¡± said Orc.


    ¡°Aye.¡±


    He looked from the page to her. ¡°Tell me what it says.¡±


    She yawned and blinked in the dim light. ¡°Well these here are runes of the first dwarves and they appear te be talkin of the orcstone¡¯s origin and fate. The part the otaur marked on reads ¡®the shard of The First lost among the firespawn.¡¯ Now he¡¯s struck the symbol they used for The First, which is what they called the stone of the earth and what we know now is the first stone of the world, and he¡¯s written in the rune for creator. Then down here he¡¯s struck the rune for lost and put in one for hidden.¡±


    ¡°The shard of the creator hidden among the firespawn,¡± said Orc.


    ¡°Aye.¡±


    ¡°And the firespawn are us.¡±


    ¡°Aye it was their word for orckin.¡±


    He looked back at the page. ¡°Hidden from whom?¡±


    She yawned again. ¡°That I can¡¯t tell ye. Nor how an otaur raised in a camp came te learn the runes of the first dwarves.¡±


    ¡°Uhquah taught him.¡±


    She nodded at that. ¡°Aye it¡¯s likely. I can¡¯t see any other way, but I can¡¯t figure why he¡¯d do such a thing.¡±


    She pulled up her hood and settled back into her furs.


    ¡°Get some sleep,¡± he said.


    ¡°Aye I plan te.¡±


    As she drifted off she could feel him still hunched over the book. Still worrying over the meanings of things millennia past their importance. ¡°Oy Orc,¡± she said, ¡°Don¡¯t stay up over it. That otaur¡¯s full of shit.¡±


    Some time later she felt him lean forward and she heard him blow out the candle.


    Next morning she was first to stir. She packed up her candle and ducked under the horse and strode out into the predawn. Moonslight cast the snowscape in a cerulean gloom and the thick silence and the ultramarine glint of the sky and the glittering snow made her feel as though she walked across the bottom of the ocean. Around the far side of the hut a huge drift of snow snored. She untied her trousers to relieve herself and as she squatted she could see the country they had crossed the day before. She could see the mass darkening the slope they''d climbed. She watched it creep ever closer. She tied up and poked the mound awake and went back inside to gather the others.

 95. The Pass

    Numbering two and fifty when it set out from the Thumb the company was now a ragged dozen worming down the eastern slope of the mountains toward the outskirts of the old capital. Orc watched this band descend ahead of him: Uhquah out front aboard his mule and Mym walking behind with her hood thrown back as if better to hear his mutterings, Robby and Sterling the erstwhile cavaliers and the one horse between them, Ogre who hefted Booky in the crook of their arm and the greenskin who kept cackling as if at the absurdity of this the first freedom he''d ever known, Tulula and two big brownskins who were the last living orckin tribulated by Geltwald. Orc watched them stumble and stutter over the ice and snow and jutting rocks. He watched them but all of his attention was saved for the longhorn who now trailed behind him like the confessor who attends the condemned to the executioner''s block. He turned then, hand wrapped in the brigadier''s kerchief, opened his mouth to speak.


    "Not now grayback," said the longhorn. He nodded ahead.


    Downtrail processed a rag of twenty four colts hauling scrap and salvage out of the old capital. Orc could smell the sweat off them and off the six or seven scrounges who whipped them up the narrow cliffside. The colts scrambled across a screefield up an old mining track and the humans who harangued them wore the faded colors of the armiger. When the first of the scavengers spotted the company he held up his mount and draped his leather cat over his shoulder and touched the longarm at his knee. He half turned his head and called back to the others interspersed between the horses. His rag was strung together nose to tail and it wound down out of view behind one sheer arete and back into view around a second. This column of wouldbe studs were fleabitten and dappled and blue roan and they smoked in the cold morning and you could almost hear the vapor sizzling off of them, and each of them bore canvas panniers overstuffed with junk had out of a palace of some sort. The nearest carried a cracked vanity and six down pillows bundled together and a hickory cask of some grape vintage and a bride''s mannequin with the mothballed dress still on and the lace veil falling over the hindquarters and dragging along the ground. The horses were bonily hipped and the track they climbed was no wider than a handcart there and the man at their head was plainly surprised to see another party sharing it. Already Uhquah was upon him. The stockman leered at the dwarf and tried to see past at who else was coming. Uhquah spat into the thin air as he passed and he nosed his mule into an imagined gap between the stockman and the rock of the mountain. The stockman''s mount sidled precariously to the cliff''s edge. The man reeled and for a desperate moment the mule and the colt became entangled. The man reached for Uhquah''s reins but the dwarf had already kicked forward and as he passed he swept his hand knife along the colt''s face and belly and the bridle began to unravel and the cinch strap split. The saddle and the man sat in it teetered and from where Orc stood there was a sudden dip of the horse''s head and it reappeared free of its bridle. The man had vanished over the escarpment.


    Orc peered over. There he saw in open space the man soundlessly racing away still stirruped to his saddle and gripping the untethered and flapping reins and rotating slowly in the air and exploding on a rock, the blood of him spraying out into a sheet and separating into globules that glistened and wobbled as they spun and shed smaller forms of themselves in a kind of crimson mitosis and dropped yet farther into ravines unseen like the liquified result of some shamanistic ritual, the quickened essence of life separated from flesh and fleeing down down down into the chasms of the world to consecrate ground untrod and unseen by any living thing, to coagulate and clot and harden the earth with the base elementaries of violence: salt and iron.


    Orc reached for his blade.


    ¡°Hold there,¡± said the longhorn. ¡°Ain¡¯t no cause for that yet.¡±


    He looked up and indeed the other drovers whipped on and whistled at the colts as if none had seen their leader fall or had heard the horrible smack of his body against the stone that sundered it to pieces. Their eyes were on their charges and on Uhquah who now disappeared around the first arete.


    ¡°Those are armiger¡¯s men,¡± said Orc.


    ¡°Every one of em. Now I know you¡¯re hungering for revenge like yon wedwarf, but there¡¯s a truer path to it than those eight inches.¡±


    This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.


    The longhorn nodded back up toward the high pass whence they¡¯d fled that very morning. ¡°A fair thousand of their putrefied folk are come to welcome them. What say we let these go and meet them.¡±


    The riderless colt now passed where Orc stood. Its eyes downturned it wheezed and snorted and never stopped its forward progress. The first of the string close behind with its beggar¡¯s spoils widening its load. Orc flattened his back to the rock and sucked in his gut as it passed by. He looked ahead to where Ogre stood twice as wide as the trail. As he watched they bodily picked up the next downhill horse and swung around and placed it on the trail above them, laughing all the while the colt looked like it couldn¡¯t conceive of any equine reply to the violation.


    The lead horses had already climbed out of sight in that severe terrain when the next of the riders came by. Her eyes were hugely white by the nearness of the orckin and by her encounter with the ogre. Orc tipped his hat to her as she passed and she did the same so stiffly she might¡¯ve already been dead and risen again. In this manner did he and the longhorn allow the rest of the humans past and once past all went on as before.


    ***


    They came out of the mountains in the cold darkness of the predawn gloaming and with the risen¡¯s plague droning overhead. They ran ragged and hungry down the talus of an alluvial fan and through the crumbling adobe structures of an old mining settlement. The streets were pitted and silent. They never ceased their flight and as the sky tented up with the light of the coming sun they cut out of the town and onto the plain.


    Orc and the others dashed into the open tundra without regard for stealth or subterfuge. The terrible mercy of the risen impelled them to recklessness. Ahead of them the hazy shapes of the old capital laid out on the horizon. Away left were arranged the forward elements of the baron¡¯s army, come to finish the queen¡¯s horde once and for all. With little cover on that frozen waste the baron¡¯s outriders easily pursued them on horses once belonging to the company and headed them off and rode all of them to a standstill. There was but a minute where Uhquah¡¯s gang and the outriders might have retreated together to the safety of the baron¡¯s camp. This they wasted in a faceoff. In the face of the coming risen the kingsmen were too timid to start a fight and the fugitives too exhausted to finish one.


    Orc found his way to Mym¡¯s side. She shouldered up her carbine at the outriders. There were twenty or thirty of them. She drew her bead on their captain and she offered for Orc to take her longarm out of her pack.


    ¡°I don¡¯t know how to use it,¡± he said.


    ¡°We ought te have taught ye.¡±


    "It''s too late now."


    "Pull it out. It''s charged up. Ye can get at least one shot off if it comes te that."


    "That''s alright."


    "What if they start shootin?"


    "What if the world breaks in two?" he said. "Consider it."


    "I have plenty."


    The first of the carrion flies now buzzed about his face and landed upon his arm. The outrider captain, a man with a dragoon pistol pointed at Uhquah, called for them to lay down their weapons. That they would not be harmed.


    ¡°How close are those risen?¡± said Mym.


    He looked across her. The cloud of the plague now occluded the mountains. ¡°Quarter mile.¡±


    ¡°They see the army here?¡±


    ¡°I can¡¯t tell.¡±


    ¡°Are they turnin?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°Slowin?¡±


    ¡°No.¡±


    ¡°Well,¡± she said, ¡°I guess that doesn''t mean anythin either way.¡±


    ¡°No it doesn''t.¡±


    Perhaps because the scouts were human or perhaps because she recalled the weird¡¯s prophecy the woman Robby now threw down her rifle and crossed over to the line of kingsmen. From the company¡¯s only horse Sterling half lowered his bird gun and swore after her. She gestured rudely back. He kneed his mount around to present a narrower target to the outriders. Then he looked to Uhquah.


    Orc looked also and saw the blue dwarf sagging in his saddle. Even the mule seemed finished, its back bowed, its head down, its nostrils flared wide and wheezing. Uhquah aimed his depleted carbine one handed and with his other hand he waved off the flies and wiped his eyes.


    ¡°What say you?¡± called the captain.


    Orc watched Uhquah. The dwarf seemed to be fumbling at his belt.


    ¡°How close now?¡± said Mym.


    His eyes flicked south and he saw the motion of their arms. ¡°Bowshot.¡±


    ¡°You ready?¡±


    ¡°Just waiting on you.¡±


    Uhquah¡¯s fist now rose and as all watched he placed the stem of his pipe into his mouth. ¡°Alright then,¡± he called to the captain.


    A horn pealed flatly as the sun breached the rim of the world. Orc noticed Mym¡¯s barrel lower slightly and he heard the whistle of the arrows overhead. He felt the sweat bead down his underarm as he choked up on Booky¡¯s blade. He watched the captain turn his head from the dwarf to the risen to the picket whence he¡¯d come. The man stood in his stirrups to give some order and his head jerked oddly and his hand reached to the knife now sticking out of his throat. Robby was at his stirrup grasping at his thigh and all at once Orc charged and Mym fired and the glass tipped raven fletched arrows began to fall among them all.

 96. The Ragged End

    Her first shot killed a man who was already dying. She levered the action and dropped to her knee and a pistolball snapped the air where her head had been. As the dead man slid from his horse she aimed and fired again through the bottle of ether at his hip. The bottle shattered and there was an ephemera of flame twenty feet across as if the air itself had ignited before it was sucked back to a singularity that fell to the earth and burned upon the ground. Outriders threw up their elbows against the flash and the heat and their blinded horses spooked and four or five of them threw their riders who fell heavily and rolled heels over heads and scrambled to stand and get up their swords as if the onset of orcs would pursue them, but the orcs cared not for them.


    She levered home her next shot and saw Robby now hanging two handed off the saddlehorn of the dead man''s horse with her outside foot stirruped and her hair on fire, blazing away like a comet as the horse raced off from the bannering ardency that pursued it. Already the orckin were grabbing at the reins of the riderless horses and hazing them out between themselves and the kingsmen. Outriders circled with their clothes singed and smoking and their pistols outheld but they found no clear shot past the horses. One of them kicked to flank around and Mym shot him in the chest. Another was thrown as arrows pincushioned his bay¡¯s hindquarters and shoulder. This was the horse to which Booky ran.


    Blue bodied flies spiraled down from the sky in dense clouds. Zigging about the living, bouncing from the rustled horses, crawling about and probing the wounds of the dead and the dying. The baron¡¯s horn blared again and the outriders held up their pistols and dragged their eyes from the company to stare at the charge of risen. Mym stood and advanced, screening with bookmaker and horse she leaned around the forequarter and shot another kingsman dead from ten yards.


    A clattering of arrows fell again and sunk into the tundra and thudded into saddles and men. Booky was now climbing onto the bay and Mym poked out and shot another man in the back as he wheeled his horse around. He slumped forward but rode on and some of his fellows galloped after him and some others frantically pulled their unhorsed comrades athwart their pommels. One among them had worked a blue fire over his long sword and he alone held it forth at the coming black fester as if lightning might lance from its tip and arc from corpse to corpse to rob them of their dark animus. She could have shot him but to what end? The risen had come. There was nowhere left to run.


    Like tendrils of rot they spread outward and invested themselves into the baron¡¯s camp. A detachment of withered and pallid reavers tumbled out of the mass and surged toward the company. From Orc¡¯s telling she believed she had known what to expect. The gagging fetor wafting ahead of them. The casual brutality of their actions. The disinterestedness in self preservation and all other things except taking that which had been taken from them. There were twoscore of them shambling at a frightened pace across the plain. The outriders rode oblique to them but the dead were faster. The man with the flaming sword did lop the head of one corpsewalker before he was pulled from his horse and his skull stove in. The reavers seemed to roil as they undid the kingsmen and their horses and then continued on to the company.


    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Uhquah was already pressing his mule north. Some of the orckin had clambered onto stolen horses whose eyes rolled at the smell of them. The greenskin was up and away. A brownskin, the cavalier Sterling. The bookmaker now yelled at Mym from the bay. She was bent over the dwarf with the reins wrapped twice around her left hand and her right held out.


    ¡°Leg on up,¡± she yelled.


    ¡°Where¡¯s Orc?¡±


    Booky twisted around at the coming risen and her eyes widened. ¡°Ogre,¡± she shouted. She turned the other way. ¡°Ogre get yourself off and ain¡¯t you wait up for nothing.¡±


    Mym slapped the bookmaker¡¯s leg. ¡°Where¡¯s Orc?¡±


    Booky goggled at her. ¡°Gone off. Him and that sow.¡± The woman grasped her by her hair and began to pull her up.


    She swatted at the arm, the bay. The bookmaker bridged the reins and leaned forward and the horse took off. The ground fell out from under Mym¡¯s feet and she was dragged fifty yards before she caught onto the billet and the cantle and she held on for her life with the strap of the carbine hanging off her elbow. She looked back and saw the reavers amble over the dead outriders without slowing and in the distance behind them arose a wall of flame so hot it warped the air around and threw no smoke aloft. A great battle was happening there.


    The horse slowed slightly. ¡°Get yourself up here,¡± called the bookmaker.


    She clambered up and straddled the back of the beast and wedged herself into the seat behind the woman. The horse sped up again and she threw her hands back on the cantle and housing and she about bounced right off.


    ¡°Put your arms around me.¡±


    She grasped the bookmaker¡¯s coat and pulled herself forward and bearhugged her hands around and clasped them at the woman¡¯s waist.


    ¡°Now just hold you on.¡±


    She pressed her cheek into the small of Booky¡¯s back as the bookmaker pushed that bay. She pushed it hard and Mym heard its wheezing and she saw the ogre running alongside and then falling behind. Next they came up on a great cloud of dust with the longhorn at its source, him being shuttled upon the chest of a slain outrider lost of all clothes but his boots and whose each ankle was shortroped to the saddlehorn of a quarterhorse. The longhorn stood upright upon the corpse as if it was a chariot parading through a triumph in his honor and he held his head high and his eyes locked on the horizon. Finally they drew even with a grayback hunched over the neck of a galloping paint. It was the sow Tulula and there was blood all down her back and a dark and shining stain upon the horse¡¯s coat. Her eyes were half closed and the paint was bracing hard against her weight on its neck and had begun to flag.


    ¡°That¡¯s not Orc,¡± said Mym.


    ¡°No it ain¡¯t,¡± said the bookmaker.


    She tried to look around the woman but she couldn¡¯t without loosening her grip.


    ¡°Can ye see him?¡± she said.


    ¡°That I can¡¯t.¡±


    ¡°Did we leave him?¡±


    She felt the bookmaker twist to survey the land behind.


    ¡°Goddamn,¡± she heard her say. ¡°Goddamn.¡±


    From there came the bellow of an ogre.

 97. Between Two Armies

    The setting sun left him crawling out from under a dead horse. He knelt low with a hand on its belly and he studied the land south in the failing daylight. The grassfire set by the baron paled his face. He watched the shapes of risen scalp through the dead outriders and move on. Til dark he stayed there then he rose and limped his way north.


    He walked all night across the moonslit tundra, wetting his lips from his emptying skin as he went. He kept the stillstar ahead of him as its kith drew around counterclockwise as if magnetically impelled. In the morning he could see the five spires of the old capital that roughly defined its extent and he followed a northerly trail of hoofprints scalloped out of the soft ground before the nightly freeze. Their upturned soil crunched underfoot and the dawn sky burned blood red where a tempest was boiling up. He turned his face to the warmth of the sun and like that distant fervid globe he never stopped his unidirectional procession and he dragged with him all of the ardor of what had been and all of the hope for what could be, though none yet knew this. The sun that had returned feeling to his numbed extremities now bestirred a wind upon the plain and the leaves of cottongrass swayed before it until each clump froze again in a westward reach like so many skeletal hands grasping toward respite or redemption. Then the coming storm inveiled the sun and all became dark and cold.


    He never stopped moving. The stormfront advanced to cover the ruined city and he watched two armies beset one another in its shade. The dark mass of one slicked thinly across the horizon like spilled oil and the other responded with a great outpouring of gray smoke. He could not tell which harried the other and together they receded into the violet shadow of the thunderheads leaving behind them wildfires spotted up as if from lightning strikes. When he arrived at the place of their skirmishing the air smelled like a damp firepit and he walked between the bodies of the dead and through the brittle charred grasses that disintegrated to ash wherever his feet brushed against them. After a time he noticed they¡¯d tied kerchiefs of a certain lace and color around their right arms. He knelt by one and waved away the flies crawling upon its flayed skull. He pulled around his satchel and opened it and withdrew her book and her kerchief. He held it near the corpse¡¯s. They were the same. He crouched there for a long time.


    Over the length of that hard day he lost count of the times the brigadier and her foe had apparently collided upon the wasted tundra. The eastern dark enveloped the west and in the last light of the day the city spires now stood to the height of his outheld thumb.


    He walked all night. He clasped his arms around his body. He blew into his hands. He stamped his feet. He sang silently to himself, a lullabye learned from her when he was just a cub. When he still believed she''d be around forever. When he still believed she loved him, still knew what it meant to love. The stars gathered around him, winking out when lightning laddered up a thunderhead as if all of their fire had been channeled into that electric furcation, as if to briefly illuminate this hateful country carried the cost of all of the light in all of creation. He was stumbling along a causeway that ran between two lakebeds and the stars returned to their fixed places and seemed to grow nearer and to double and treble in their amassing. They began to dimmer up under the stark line of the horizon and crowd around his feet. Blue will o wisps unlidded and unmovable. He proceeded under them and above them without remark as all his attention turned inward to his memories of the woman he''d crossed the world to find. Who had perhaps already perished upon the open plain in sight of her goal. A meteor blazed up the northern sky.


    ***


    He came on the bone collectors mere miles from the city. The spires rose deceptively close and all the land between him and his destination was seared inkblack. Croaking crows and knifejacketed buzzards camouflaged in the charcoaled soil scrounged for unfrozen spoils. The brigadier had lost many. More than he believed possible for she had departed the Thumb with no more than a century of riders and orckin. Over them a team of the risen dead drove a handcart whose wheels creaked parallel lines of white across the ashland. Into this wagon they tossed the freshly fallen. From where Orc approached he saw so many feet sticking out the wagon bed like stacked firewood: shod and unshod, blue and black, contorted and swole. The inanimate remains jostled in the cart as it rumbled over the chalked bones of the first war, the last war, the war that named the deadlands. He watched them draw closer. Eyesockets empty, noses shorn off. How they located the objects of their harvesting he could not say. They passed within ten yards of him and trundled off the way he had come with their load shuddering and teetering this way and that. Tiny against the spires of the old capital he could see other teams working the grounds, some driving oxcarts, some strapping their take directly onto the backs of undead beasts. He would need to pass through them.


    At the very outskirts of the city he came upon an adobe shack with its tile roof caved in. Inside the floor and hearth were forgebrick and the latter was stuffed with trash: rotten wood, broken glass and clay pots, rags, old leather. The whole place smelled of mold. There was a three legged table propped up against a wall and an empty cask for a seat. He went to the fireplace and rifled through for the leather scraps. The first one he tried was the size of a coin, stiff and dirty, and tasted of old tin. It did nothing to sate him. He bit on another.


    Toward evening he smelled then heard a group of humans approach the hut.


    ¡°Shit somebuck¡¯s in there,¡± said one.


    ¡°Well rouse em out.¡±


    ¡°I ain¡¯t to. What if he¡¯s a deadun?¡±


    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    ¡°What if your mom¡¯s your sister?¡±


    ¡°Come on.¡±


    ¡°You come on.¡±


    He heard them creep closer.


    ¡°Who¡¯s in there?¡± one called.


    ¡°Nobody,¡± he said.


    ¡°Sounds like a livin man to me.¡±


    ¡°Yeah and he¡¯s in our spot.¡±


    ¡°Let him. There ain¡¯t nothin in there.¡±


    ¡°He¡¯s in there.¡±


    ¡°There¡¯s other spots.¡±


    ¡°This one¡¯s ours. I ain¡¯t overnightin anywhere new with that deadun army abroad.¡±


    "You can always join up with the baron."


    "Fuck the baron."


    He drew his blade and laid it on the table. ¡°You can come in,¡± he said.


    There was a rustling as they came on up to the doorframe, two wretched men and a woman. They dragged gusseted sacks full of junk and they wore coats stitched from wolf pelts and reindeer hide and the men each bore axes and the woman had a kingsman''s sword, the sere blade broken a foot past the hilt. "That ain''t no man,¡± she said.


    He regarded them. Made a gesture suggesting their entry. "Come in."


    They edged inside. They stayed close against the wall with the hearth.


    "Who you with?" said a man.


    "He ain''t here for scavengin."


    "You got anythin to eat?"


    He pointed to the old leathers.


    "Nothin to drink either I bet."


    "You ever knowed an orc to drink?"


    "I never knowed an orc at all."


    "Don''t think they drink."


    "Some do," he said.


    "What brings you up this way?"


    "Bet it''s a woman."


    "He''s an orc dumbshit. What''s he going to do with a woman?"


    "Same as me I reckon."


    Both of the men turned to look at the woman. She spat on the floor between them and they all set to laughing.


    "You''re right," he said.


    "What''s that now?"


    "I''m here for a woman."


    That shut them up.


    "Where she at?"


    "I hope to find her in the city," he said.


    "You been there before?"


    "No."


    "She alive or dead?"


    "I don''t know."


    "Well if she''s alive then she ain''t down in the city. Now if she''s dead you might find her there."


    "He might."


    "I said he might. That burg is full of deaduns. Overflowin with em."


    "They been diggin up all the old churchyards, all the cemeteries. Don''t matter how old they are."


    "So long as there''s an inch of gristle what''s stringin the bones together."


    "Yeah they got to have somethin there to move em along. Bit of muscle. But of gut."


    "They''d have dug up the crematoriums otherwise. Dug up the butcher''s yards."


    "You got somethin for your nose?"


    He shook his head.


    "You''re gonna want somethin for it."


    "Yeah you''ll be gaggin up your leathers there elsewise."


    "They''s everywhere. Settin up in them old houses. Settin on the balconies and porches. Just settin there like they was watchin the day turn."


    "Like they was sharin sips off a kettle of tea."


    "All them folks goin back to their old homes, ten, twenty generations of deaduns altogether in a single house, each one thinkin its theirs and ever one of em right in that assessment."


    "Makes scavengin lousy. Turn a corner there''s another stiff to fry."


    "Don''t run out of ether.


    "He don''t have none."


    "That he don''t."


    He shrugged. "I''ve had no need of it."


    "Have no need? Brother it''s your sacred duty to kill and burn ever deadun you meet."


    "He ain''t no brother of ours Karl."


    The one called Karl spat. "Nary a notion of sacredness nor duty neither."


    He looked at them. The other man shaking his head and Karl with his hands on his hips and the woman looking at the brick floor, wiping her nose with her hand. "You like killing?" he said.


    "You can''t kill what''s dead already," said Karl and he nodded at Booky''s blade. "Looks you done your share."


    His hand moved toward the grip and stopped short of it. "Some."


    "What do you call that sort of thing?" said one.


    "Ain''t no sword," said Karl "Too short for usefulness in a line fight. Too thin to be much good. Hell. First fight you''re in it''s like to snap like Jilly''s done."


    Now he touched the grip. "It''s held up."


    "Only cause you ain''t fought nothin worth fightin back."


    "Don''t call him a liar Karl."


    Karl leaned in and got a look at the metal. "Looks like it''s broke once already."


    He shrugged. "It''s done fine by me."


    Karl choked down his ax as if to swing it and flipped it once in the palm of his hand. "Hold it on out and I''ll show you."


    The woman''s eyes widened and she looked at him uneasily. "I think we should go."


    "Hold it out there fellow."


    He sat motionless. Only his eyes moved from the blade to the axehead, held down and out as if frozen in the moment of contact.


    "You knows it won''t hold. Sloppy mendin job. Sloppy old pigfucker settin in my spot. Hold it out now boy."


    The other man hissed at Karl. The woman had backed to the door.


    "Done fine by you. Cuttin on your pigs. You eat em after you finish fuckin em?"


    "Shut up," said the woman.


    His eyes held low. "I''d heed the lady."


    "I bet you would." Karl laughed. "Lady bullshit. Lady thinks she knows somethin. You come up here after some woman like you pigfuckers got somethin on offer we don''t. Our womens ain''t for you shiteater. Hold it on out now and I''ll remember you what happens to piggies that lie."


    Karl took a half step forward and placed his free hand on the table. It shifted on its three legs and Booky''s blade rolled over and laid wobbling and the sound of it back and forthing over its fulcrum was the only noise in the place.


    "Your woman''s dead piggy. Hold it out."


    The other man and the woman saw something Karl didn''t or else Karl saw something they couldn''t. The woman was out the door, the other man''s head through the doorway and both of his hands dragging on its frame as if ready to shove off.


    Orc watched the rocking blade. "Your friends are waiting on you," he said.


    Karl leaned forward over the orc and said something the others couldn''t hear and whatever it was they saw the orc flinch and as the ax began to fall they saw the orc was faster than the man and his claw swept upward and caught the haft of the ax and he leapt from the keg holding the man by his neck and tore the ax from his grasp and the man''s fist became an open palm as if beseeching, as if lamenting, and as the axehead passed through the wrist and the skull the hand and the melon slice fell side by side. Upon the table the blade rested of its rocking.


    He allowed them to take the body. They dragged it out beside their sacks and they burned it there with the woodscrap out of the hearth. He left them standing by the rude bier. Under one moon he walked with the blade tied on his hip and the ax thrust through the strap of the satchel. If the brigadier was dead he would never know why she abandoned him. She would never be able to tell him she had no choice, to tell him it was for some reason, any reason, besides that he was an orc.

 98. A Reunion

    It had been a day and a half and now the horse was failing. They¡¯d dismounted, the bookmaker first and her tumbling down after, to rest the bay and it stepped three times away and sank down to its knees and onto its side. She watched the bookmaker approach it holding a pistol, barrel down. She watched and she tried not to think about what had happened the night before.


    They had come at her from all sides. There was no room to aim a rifle, no time for clean strokes. She¡¯d swung her alpenstock in great circles and called upon the stones¡¯ memories and her speaking and the adze¡¯s singing did fill the night with a resonance above the crunch of the bones and the ragged whisper of the dead flesh parting. She had seen the ogre make a club of a man, had heard the legs dislocate and the neck pop out from its sockets, had seen the skull swung about like a misshapen flail with the eyes yet bulging and the mouth yet slathering though it could make no words through its torn windpipe.


    The shape of the bay now went past. She didn¡¯t see the bookmaker. She turned her head to follow it. It held up and circled back. There was the bookmaker, putting something in the waistband of her trousers, speaking to the bay. It¡¯s breathing rasped like a pneumoniatic. She could hear it breathing out there in the dark. The shape of it went by again, occluding the milky haze of the firmament. A shape, black upon the sky, upon the tundra. A nightmare.


    The memory took her again and she couldn¡¯t stop it. She like one of Thayne¡¯s wooden boats and it like the flume, it had her and she went where it willed. Her eyes wide open, growing larger. Unseeable horrors visiting in the dark where they would always await until the end of her days.


    The smell of horse brought her back. Booky was now following the bay about. Walking after it, cooing at it. How much time had passed she couldn¡¯t say but a solitary gibbous moon had risen. She watched the bay shy away from the woman. She had it by the cheekstrap and she mounted it and it trembled beneath her with its muzzle down and knees just about knocking together. She never stopped talking to it and she stroked its neck and she leaned back and stroked its hindquarters. Soon it quit its shivering and the woman was offering out her hand and her stirrup to Mym.


    ¡°Didn¡¯t know ye had a thing fer horses,¡± said Mym.


    Booky was patting the bay along the withers as if her palm was a brush. ¡°I wasn¡¯t always a bookmaker.¡±


    The woman twisted the reins in her fist and sat forward against the pommel. The dwarf¡¯s feet hung in space. The bay ferried them on.


    Mym watched the night. ¡°They¡¯re still out there.¡±


    ¡°Us or them?¡±


    ¡°Both.¡±


    She adjusted herself in the seat so that she carried the carbine with the butt propped against her thigh and the barrel toward the sky. ¡°It¡¯s them I¡¯m worried about.¡±


    The woman made a clicking sound with her tongue and cooed again. The bay responded with a snort. They rode on.


    Some hours before dawn another horse joined them off of the plain. Mym had a bead on until she saw that it was the paint bearing the sow asleep in the saddle. The bookmaker dismounted and took the paint¡¯s reins and tied them off on the rear D ring of the bay. She climbed back aboard and they set off. The slack went out of the reins and the paint followed at a walk.


    The bookmaker steered to Mym¡¯s guidance. Often she spoke to the stones and they offered what indications they could in their strange vernacular. With dawn she leaned over with her hands around the bookmaker¡¯s waist and she studied the passing tracks and traces that came from and went toward the capital as if soothsaying fallen leaves for some hope of the future: the cloven hooves of game, the shoed prints of a big destrier, a wolfpack padding perpendicular to the track of a mule. They rode on.


    The sow came into wakefulness and severed the tie off with her jaw and urged the paint off a distance. From there she mirrored them. A hesitancy in her eye. A paleness to her color. She trotted ahead a ways. The bookmaker urged the bay to close the gap but the animal was fading. There was a nervousness to its gait. As if its ankles were jointed with glass.


    ¡°She ain¡¯t lasting much longer,¡± said Booky.


    ¡°I can walk.¡±


    ¡°Best if we run her to the ragged end.¡±


    ¡°Best fer ye and me but not fer the horse.¡±


    ¡°Say there.¡± Booky held up the bay and pulled her right. ¡°What do you make of that?¡±


    Mym looked northwards and saw the riders there. ¡°I see em.¡±


    ¡°Shit and there¡¯s more behind us.¡±


    ¡°Aye.¡±


    ¡°How long they been there?¡±


    ¡°Since last night.¡±


    ¡°Why didn¡¯t you say something?¡±


    The bookmaker dug her heels into the ribs of the bay. The horse quavered and pushed into a trot with its head nodding in time. They could see the riders ahead were waiting up for them beside a row of old fenceposts lacking a fence. The ruins of the city out of a haze beyond like old bones in a shallow grave. The bookmaker spoke sweetly to the horse making promises she¡¯d never keep. When they came up the remains of the company were sitting and laying on the ground watching their approach. Uhquah smoking his pipe. The longhorn reclined on his back with his feet crossed and his head cradled in his hands.


    The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    Booky dismounted and ran to the ogre. The greenskin helped the sow off the paint. No one came to Mym. The two brownskins and the cavalier Sterling were dead. Of Orc there was no sign.


    Mym nodded once to herself as if in answer to an unasked question. She unstraddled the bay and slid off its back and landed squarely on both feet.


    ¡°No grayback,¡± said Uhquah.


    ¡°No.¡±


    Uhquah withdrew his pipe and spat.


    ¡°He¡¯ll turn up,¡± said the longhorn.


    ¡°You keep sayin so.¡±


    The longhorn closed his eyes. ¡°He always does.¡±


    ***


    They were running as fast as any of them could. The plague of the risen stained up the southern sky as if some god of scribes had smashed his inkpot upon its globe. Just west of it stood a blonde dust cloud, and occasionally the pop of gunshot reached them across the open plain.


    The company¡¯s bitter ends rode and ran together but verily it was everybody for themselves. They had begun to string out a little. The mule out front then the horses and the longhorn and the ogre. Every time Mym looked at the monster she remembered the hollow crack of the dead man¡¯s head as they¡¯d clobbered it about. The gray fluid seeping out from the many fissures crisscrossing its excoriated skull. She regarded the memory as if from a distance. How different was she from the risen? How different her da or Khaz or Orc? They who¡¯d been made whole again through some cousin of the occult power that moved the horde now chasing them. Were they not all of them undead? Was not every living thing remade from things once living and now dead? How different were they?


    The daylight now failed and she knew she¡¯d been lost in her own head for hours. She cast her eyes back. The longhorn grinned at her, his lightless eyes almost level with hers. Beyond him she saw the coming armies and she saw distinct figures moving against this backdrop. Two of them. They rode quickly in the company¡¯s traces as if their mounts were fresh or perhaps untiring in death.


    ¡°We got outriders comin,¡± she said.


    Booky turned her head. ¡°If we push this girl any harder her heart¡¯s liable to explode,¡± she said. ¡°Like to be we¡¯ve run her to death already.¡±


    She looked back again and tracked the figures¡¯ movement. One hooded and cloaked and the other grotesquely malproportioned on their steed. She called up the line. Uhquah turned his mule and waited and the greenskin halted next and he put out his claw and persuaded the paint to stop and the sow nearly teetered off its back. The bay came alongside where Uhquah waited and the blue dwarf dismounted the mule and checked the breech of one carbine and scabbarded it. He shouldered up the other and stood beside the mule and laid the barrel across the saddle while the animal bent down to forage the late winter greening of the cottongrass.


    Mym climbed down beside him and swung down her pack and unrolled her longarm. The bookmaker watched her, watched the outriders. One of them rode one handed with hand held out to the side and the other rode low in the saddle or else was a small child.


    ¡°They mightn¡¯t have seen us,¡± said the woman.


    ¡°They¡¯ve seen us,¡± said Mym.


    Mym checked her carbine and saw it had but two rounds left. Beside her the blue dwarf offered an extra of the carbines¡¯ ingots but she declined. There were only two targets in the wide open and she had plenty of space for discharging and recharging even at the rate of their gallop. She laid the carbine on her pack. She checked her longarm.


    Uhquah was watching her. There was something of avarice in his eyes. When she noticed he nodded at her homegrown rifle. ¡°I haven¡¯t seen one o them in a long time.¡±


    ¡°Come up to the delvin and ye¡¯ll see plenty.¡±


    ¡°I figured you whites had engineered up somethin better by now.¡±


    ¡°Nothin¡¯s better than this.¡±


    ¡°You like that carbine plenty.¡±


    She didn¡¯t reply. She was counting out her cartridges.


    ¡°That thing still fire?¡±


    She gestured away south. ¡°Run on out there and ye¡¯ll find out.¡±


    He smiled. Withdrew his pipe as if to say something, placed it back.


    She knelt and then slithered out on her belly. She lined her cartridges up at her left elbow. The stock of the longarm rested out ahead of her on her powderhorn. The muzzle slightly skyward. The ground was freezing and she felt its cold spread into her gut. She was a creature of the cold, of its numbing power. She settled into it. She welcomed it.


    Uhquah spat. ¡°One of them might be your grayback,¡± he said.


    She peered through the cottongrass and out over the tundra. They weren¡¯t so far now. Five hundred yards. The light had faded and it was impossible to tell anything about them from the shadows that approached other than they were in a rush and they had little regard for their bodily safety.


    ¡°He¡¯s not out there,¡± she said.


    ¡°You sure?¡±


    She ungloved her right hand and she pressed her cheek into the weapon and eyed down the sight. It was cold and it smelled of oil and honey, of sulfur, of home.


    ¡°He can¡¯t ride a horse,¡± she said.


    She chose her target. The small one in the back. Dropping them out of sight so the other wouldn¡¯t know until it was too late. She brought the butt to her shoulder and waited. Three or four breaths was all she¡¯d need.


    The oncomers held up suddenly at two hundred yards. The trailing one leaned from their saddle as if vomiting off the side.


    ¡°They¡¯re makin it easy on you,¡± said Uhquah.


    ¡°Aye.¡±


    She lined up her shot.


    ¡°Don¡¯t hit them horses.¡±


    ¡°I won¡¯t,¡± she said. ¡°Ye doublin me up?¡±


    He leaned into his carbine with the second one at hand in the scabbard. The sound of the mule cropping away beneath.


    ¡°Which one?¡±


    ¡°The tail.¡±


    ¡°I got him.¡±


    She hesitated a moment. There was something about the way he sat his horse. Then she felt something.


    ¡±I said ready,¡± said the blue dwarf.


    There it was again. A slight tremoring of the earth. Of the stones. Just above the octave of her heart.


    Uhquah¡¯s head snapped sharply down as if struck from behind. She half rolled and looked up at him. Without word they stared at each other and they listened to the thrumming of the stones about, and she knew the tenor in their voice.


    She placed her bare palm on the ground. ¡°Khaz,¡± she intoned, ¡°is that you?¡±

 99. A Tree

    There was a fire seething against the dark. He crouched watching it for a long time but he saw nothing move within its lit perimeter. He continued toward it yet it seemed to retreat ahead of him. He wiped his eyes. Dark shapes crossed between him and its flaring. And again. Risen perhaps. Or kingsmen. He carried on.


    As he got closer he saw it was a tree. Last of a great forest that had once encircled the boreal latitudes. The flames runged up its laddered branches and spiraled off into a sky devoid of stars as if each had turned its back in condemnation of this terrestrial offense. He sunk to his knees before it and accepted its last gifts of light and of warmth in this land devoid of both. He would like to have asked what excited it, what winds had blown and waved and jubilantly swirled it about, to have touched it and felt its every fiber thrum and surge, to smell its sweet freshness shaken from its needles and resin. But it had no voice left to answer but with the roar, the crackle, no wood that did not burn, no odor but that of smoke and ruin.


    He knelt there with his arms spread wide and his eyes shut against the glare and there were no stars above yet pairs of orbs now glinted from the land surround. Like a beacon of the summers that used to be did this midnight sun call forth long legged plovers that tottered to and fro and soft furred pikas and lemmings and marmots with noses wiggling and their nemesis the arctic fox who sat upon his heels as if in the passing truce that accompanies calamities and slow blinking snowy owls no bigger than his fist who squatted upon the tundra like a cub¡¯s snowballs. His eyes shut he saw none of these creatures and his mind dwelled upon the shorthorn Saand and the mother tree who had once saved him but not saved herself and he lamented the loss of this great northern forest that once held down the very earth. He opened his eyes and now saw his fellow witnesses, they who¡¯d once depended upon the forest for everything, who were now arranged around him attending this final pyre, watching their last home burn down with nowhere left to go, and with nowhere left to go what could they do but die?


    ***


    The sun found him alone under the black snag of the tree. Ash covered his face and burned in his eyes. He wiped it away and the thin mud it made from his tears. The sky was blue and as wide as the land. He saw no sign of the risen horde or the baron¡¯s army. No sign of the birds and game who had held vigil with him during the forest¡¯s wake. Standing north, nearer now, towered the tremendous spires of the capital whose morning shadows must have run to the western rim of the world.


    He rose and the world swung around. He was weak from his long fast. Reaching a last time for the shell of the tree he turned north and set off. He aimed for the tallest of the spires and he passed open country, fenced country, country trampled down and turned up by the passing of armies. At a slow moving river that mirrored the sky he knelt in the sandy mud and drank. He watched for fish or for fowl but saw neither. He watched for people too but he was alone.


    Around noon he began to follow the course of the river seeking some ford or bar or bridge. His gut felt as if it was eating itself. The sun was halfway to the western horizon when he intersected a pounding of horse tracks out of the south. He saw where they¡¯d gone down to the water and how they too followed the river as if searching for a crossing. He walked in the mud they¡¯d made by their passing and after some time he noticed one set of prints was a mule¡¯s. And there was a different sort of hoof walking in a different sort of pattern. And there the monstrous clubfoot he¡¯d seen in sawdust a hundred times. He was no Ogaz but he could tell these all passed together and from their wandering they were as tired as he. He could also tell no others had passed their way. He tried to count the different horses and came up with more than five and fewer than ten, plus the mule. He wished for his old tusker friend, or for Mym. He stood with his hand against the sun and looked back the way they¡¯d come. Turning he looked downcountry to the stark line of the city wall now edging above the horizon. As if a parallel world was uncoupling from this one to ascend some refuge in the sky.


    He walked on. He passed an incineration in the middle of the trail and he picked something stiff and charred from its waste. He ate it. A mile later he retched it back and a pint of river water with it. He stayed bent with his hands on his knees and his feet spread on either side of his vomit. He swayed slightly.


    Toward dark his feet felt like someone else¡¯s feet and he swore he was being followed by the bosun back when he was still risen or before the orcstone had brought life back into him. He kept hearing his gagged laughter but whenever he turned around there was nobody there. Just the silent river and the mud and the frozen pan.


    He overnighted in a stand of reeds. Emerald headed waterfowl flew out at his stumbling in but he was too slow to catch them. He slept dreaming of mush and woke with the sun under a newspun spiderweb. He followed the dewy strands with his eyes until he spotted their maker. He plucked it from its perch and put it in his mouth. Then he went on.


    He found their camp at day¡¯s end. They were laid up in a wooden boathouse a hundred yards from an estate that had burned to the ground long before. The horses and mule staked out near the river. When he came up no one was keeping watch. Ogre was asleep in his bloodstained rags with the greenskin¡¯s head propped on his belly and Booky tucked in under one arm. The blue dwarf was sitting on the edge of the dock sucking on his pipe.


    Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    The longhorn saw him first, nodded at him. His eyes were darkly ringed and his horntips were crusted with blood and he now endured a pair of arrows in his left shoulder, their shafts broken off an inch above his hide.


    He saw Orc looking. He grinned. ¡°Hooked under the clavicle,¡± he said. ¡°Need to find a surgeon.¡±


    ¡°Or a butcher.¡±


    The longhorn laughed. ¡°About time you came back.¡±


    The greenskin was sitting up. Orc turned to him.


    ¡°We thought yew was dead.¡±


    ¡°Not yet.¡±


    ¡°Me neither.¡±


    ¡°You have any food?¡±


    ¡°Naw.¡±


    ¡°Are the others inside?¡±


    ¡°Yeah.¡±


    He put his hand on the greenskin¡¯s shoulder and they nodded at each other and he went into the boathouse.


    Rusted tackle and frayed ropes hung from the walls. The dock ran through an open wall in the far end and it piered out over the river. Down at its foot Uhquah sat with his legs hanging over the cold and flat current and a tendril of gray smoke wisped away from his pipe. From the toe of his boot a string hung obliquely to the water¡¯s surface. Catching the sunset like a line of molten iron. Mym now stood beside the dwarf and gestured emphatically about something. At the pierhead a rotbottomed canoe had been flipped upside down. All manner of blades and long guns leaned against it and around these a quiet council was being held by a bunch of worn out folk he hardly recognized and some he didn¡¯t.


    ¡°You look like shit,¡± he said.


    The parlay turned and a dwarf he knew yet never expected to see again said, ¡°Ain¡¯t he just a goddamn hog.¡±


    It was Khaz, haggard about the face and with his beard half singed away. Across the canoe Daraway¡¯s eyes glinted out from under her hood like a lingering wolf stalking your dinner scraps. They and the others stared at him woefully as if he had walked in with death as his shadow for their hope had been hard used in their struggle to get there. They looked at him as if he¡¯d been caught in a lie though he could think of no wrong he¡¯d done them. Khaz opened his mouth to speak but in that moment Mym came running up the dock and hugged Orc around the waist and said, ¡°Ye slag brained man eatin rust sucker. Why¡¯d ye go and get yerself gone like that?¡±


    Arms held awkwardly up and out he looked down at her as if uncertain what to do. He saw Khaz grab at his missing beard and Daraway furrow up her brow.


    She stepped back from him and slugged him in the thigh. ¡°Where in the black heart have ye been? And how¡¯re the sutures holdin?¡±


    She knelt down with her hands on her knees and got a look at his leg.


    ¡°Yer lucky they didn¡¯t infect on ye. What would ye¡¯ve done then?¡±


    ¡°Chop it off.¡±


    She rose. ¡°Aye and it looks like ye''ve found the ax te do it.¡±


    He now nodded at Khaz and Daraway. ¡°What brings you all up this way?¡±


    ¡°Ye of course,¡± said Khaz.


    ¡°Did something happen.¡±


    ¡°Nothing like that,¡± said Daraway. ¡°We thought you might need help.¡±


    ¡°We should tell em,¡± said Khaz.


    ¡°It can wait.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know it can.¡±


    The woman''s eyes darted down the dock to where Uhquah still sat with his pipe and his string. ¡°It must.¡±


    Khaz sniffed and scratched his beard. He turned to Orc. "How¡¯d ye find us?¡±


    ¡°There were tracks and I followed them."


    "They might''ve run ye inte the baron or the risen," said Mym.


    "No. I knew what I was doing."


    "Did ye now?¡±


    He nodded. "All this wandering we''ve been doing I''ve had ample occasion to learn some things from your nosing about."


    "I knew ye were watchin."


    "Yeah."


    Mym was smiling. Khaz was glowering. Suddenly she turned to him. ¡°What about ye ye old snaretripper?¡±


    "What''s that now?" said Khaz.


    "How''d ye find me?"


    ¡°The stones of this country never stopped rumblin bout the sharp tongued wedwarf stompin up their faces. I couldn¡¯t get them te listen te anythin out of me mouth but they still had plenty te say.¡±


    "They weren''t talkin about me."


    "By me beard they were, or what''s left of it."


    Orc saw her smile at that too. He was too worn out to smile. Too beat up. "You have any food?" he said.


    "Nothin we didn''t already eat," said Khaz.


    "Alright." He wanted to lie down and sleep. He looked about the boathouse. ¡°Where are the others?¡±


    He turned to Mym.


    ¡°Where¡¯s Tulula?¡±

 100. What Now

    When she left the boathouse the sun had set and a cold wind had begun to rise off of the river. She didn¡¯t turn to see if he followed. She walked around to the north side of the thinboarded structure, the candlelight wavering out the knotholes, her footfalls crunching in the gathering frost. There were few other sounds: the water rippling, the slosh of trout striking, the rasping of the reeds shivering together. Below it all the frantic wheeze of the sow''s breath.


    She was lying down in a wallowing of the riverbank. Mym could see where she had crawled out to the very edge of the water and back. Now she lay on her half unrolled bearskin, uncovered against the falling chill except for the shaggy motley of yellow and red and brown and black human hair that fringed her harness. Once she had carried all manner of weapons and a bootful of arrows but now she had only a knife and this she gripped in her rigid fist as though she might slay what was coming, as if it was something that could be repelled with fang and claw and raw violence, as if it was something could be killed.


    Mym heard Orc''s sudden drawn breath.


    "Who did it?" he said.


    "Kingsmen."


    "The baron."


    "Aye."


    He went to her. He walked around her and her eyes tracked him. Watching the knife he knelt at her shoulder and said some things too quiet for Mym to hear but she could see the tears welling in the sow''s eyes. The sow said nothing. Still watching the knife he reached across her body and unrolled the rest of the bearskin and then blanketed it back over her. He covered her legs and her torso up to her neck and he left the fist and the knife free of the covering. He bent forward again and pressed his lips against her forehead and the tears were now leaking in two streams and falling into the wash of sand. He cupped the side of her face. She snarled away from it.


    He rose and came back to where Mym pretended to study the northern horizon. ¡°There¡¯s nothing you can do for her?¡± he said.


    She shook her head. "It''s got in her lungs. Like te be gettin inte her heart now."


    "Do something with that rock of yours."


    "It doesn''t work like that."


    "Did you try?"


    ¡°I offered. She about put that gutsticker in me.¡±


    ¡°You should¡¯ve tried.¡±


    ¡°It''s her body, Orc. It''s her life. Whatever she wants te do with em is her choice.¡±


    He looked at the sow and then back to her. "Give me the rock."


    "Ye can''t very well cut out her heart te scrape off the sick and then stick it back in."


    "Give me the rock."


    She threw up her hands and left him there to retrieve her pack. As she went around the boathouse she nearly ran into the longhorn going the other way.


    "Care there wedwarf," he said.


    "The sow''s dyin."


    The longhorn nodded as if he already knew, as if he had known all along. "It was good of her to wait."


    She looked at him. He sidestepped her and walked on and said no more.


    In the boathouse she got into her pack. At the end of the dock Uhquah had a second string cast into the current and Khaz was returning thence. Daraway sat on the overturned canoe with her cloak gathered about her. She cleared her throat. "You''ve gotten close," she said.


    "What''s that now?"


    "You and Orc."


    This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author''s work.


    "Aye, I suppose we have."


    She found the malachite. Held it up in the failing light as if examining it.


    "I hoped you''d be happy to see us," said the woman.


    She pocketed the stone and turned to her. "There''s not much of either up here."


    Daraway met her eyes. "Don''t shut us out, love."


    "I don''t mean te. I just," she began. She didn''t know what to say.


    The woman smiled a little and a part of Mym that had frozen these last few months began to thaw.


    At that moment Khaz arrived. He looked at Daraway and then at Mym. He jutted his chin at the doorway and all of them went outside.


    "We can''t let that blue out of our sight," he said. "His company''s all te shambles and he''s like te bolt on that razorback of his."


    "He won''t go anywhere," said Mym.


    "I''d rather not chance it."


    "It''s yer ore te haul."


    "Aye and I''m happy te. Ye ask him why his kind were faffin about in the wynds of time?"


    "Aye."


    "He tell ye?"


    "No."


    "Well I aim te find out." He nodded at Daraway. "Ye see him anywhere near that mule ye come find me."


    "It''s like te be their affliction," said Mym. "They''re sick. Like us. "


    "That so?"


    "Aye. They were drinkin off the same poison as us datin from the first dwarves te when they left the vale. It''s not square but it''s close. Parts of em seem te harden and parts of em don''t. So when they go they go like a waterbagged human."


    Khaz looked horrified.


    "Aye and they''re feelin just like that too. Uhquah''d not admit it but he''s lookin te undo what''s been done te them the same way we''re lookin te undo it."


    "He knows about us?" said Khaz.


    "Aye. Knew before I found him. He knows we''ve found the dwarfstone and he''s up te somethin with the brigadier."


    "We''ve heard she''s up here," said Daraway.


    "Do ye think they''re after the manstone?" said Khaz.


    "Aye it''s a likelihood."


    Daraway looked furtively at Khaz.


    Mym frowned. ¡°I got te get back te Orc,¡± she said.


    She saw them exchange looks again.


    "Did you tell him what caused the illness," said Daraway.


    "He''s not given me much chance te. He''s a nak headed mold bearded tosser and if ye haven''t figured that out yet ye will fore this time tomorrow. I''ve got te get."


    She turned and began to walk away. She paused and came back and wrapped them both in a warm embrace. "I''m glad yer here," she said.


    Before they could say anything she left around the corner of the boathouse and down to the water''s edge where Orc squatted by the sow with wet sand stuck to his knees. The longhorn leaned against the side of the house with a wad of cottongrass in his cheek. She handed Orc the malachite.


    The longhorn turned his head and spat some cud. "It ain''t no use."


    "Shut up," said Mym.


    Orc ignored them. He held the stone in his hand and the sow''s forehead in his other. "You''ve been dead longhorn," he said.


    "As you see me."


    "How was it for you before the queen brought you back?"


    "You''ve been there grayback. There''s nothing to it."


    Mym saw Orc''s mouth screw up. "Ye know humans don''t think that way," she said. "For them there''re whole realms of livin after dyin."


    "It doesn''t matter what humans think of death," said the longhorn. "Death is oblivion. You might as well ask their speculations on the dark. Death is always. Before humans came to be death was and awaited them. The unceasing ceasing awaiting every beginning. Life, not death, is the exception. That was the way the world was made and that is the way it will be. Now and forever."


    Mym saw Orc look down at Tulula. "I don''t know what she believed," he said.


    The longhorn spat again. "What she believed," he began, "was there ain''t no beliefs divorced from action. This is the legacy stolen from you by your beloved unmother, grayback. This scaler sow and her kin were complete the day they were made. She a god born of the earth and long apostated of other obligations. Sparked off the iron void of creation she devoured it would that she might encompass its every experience. Dominate every orgasmic delight, every spiteful meanness. And though her extinguishment lay all around her on her foreshortened path from the toolshed to the riverbed she proclaimed her sovereignty by following a woman, following a dwarf, bedding a redblooded infidel. To be the last of her kind. All fuel for her consumption, now departing heartful of all the sun''s rage and bitterness and leaving none for your license."


    As the longhorn had been delivering this eulogy Orc began to loosen and pry boards off of the boathouse and split them with his bare hands and snap them over his knee and pile the timber beside the bearskin. Mym offered him her flint. He struck it off of his blade and with the wind and the bonedry wood a little fire jumped up and sawed back and forth and the sparks lept and fell and lept and fell like the breath of some elemental that lay dying upon the wash of sand and she watched the pale flame which itself had something of the first dwarves within it inasmuch as all of their triumphs were rendered from it and within its pulsing embers she might understand her origins.