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

She waited under the scaffold with Orc and the dwarves. On all sides they were hemmed by risen who bent and peered at them and scraped their dry tongues across dry lips and clacked their teeth which were for some of them the last undecayed part of their former humanity. They stank and the planks of the scaffold smelled of dry rot and the wooden joinings had shrunken with age and now creaked madly in the rising wind. Beneath the trapdoor spread a frozen pool of blood and from this rose a stalagmitic horn quenched by the offerings of other captives brought and gutted and raised up fresh by the queen. This sculpture of blood was incandesced by the sunlight falling through the trapdoor as if it was the tongue of an enormous votive to the god of war.

Beside her she felt Khaz blustering in the shadows and across the grisly spike Uhquah lit his pipe and fumbled with Khaz's keg under his arm. Orc was just crouching there fingering the pommel of his new longsword. She wondered what he was thinking but before she could ask a light tread began to cross the platform overhead. The dwarves' heads snapped up. The sun gapping through the slatlines was starkly cast in oblique panes, its light fragile and effervescent like the pipesmoke that gave it form. One intersected Khaz's eye and another fell across the wrist of the blue dwarf as he tilted the keg's bunghole to his lips. One by one these panes were darkened.

"Te hell with all this," said Uhquah. He drew from his shirt a shortbarreled pistol and waved it at the risen as if to clear a path through them. None of them moved and the blue dwarf pointed the pistol at the closest one and fired into his chest. The dead man gazed passively down at the smoking hole and dug in his middle finger and rolled out the slug and flung it back at Uhquah.

"Motherlode's mercy." The blue dwarf looked at the pistol, at the dead man who now grinned at his fellows and with two fingers plugged the nasal cavity where his nose had been and proceeded to blow horrid noises through the puncture in his chest.

Mym glared at him. "Don't rile the gaolers."

"This ain't no gaol," said Uhquah. He took his pipe out of his mouth and he spat on the frozen font of blood and watched it slither on down. "It's where the queen holds her court and recruits her followers."

"There won't be any recruitin today."

She caught Khaz shaking his head. He looked at her. "The one time I wish yer fireslingin woman was skulkin around and she's gone off te who knows where."

"She's made the palatine grounds by now," said Orc.

She and Khaz turned to where the orc still crouched and seemed to be checking the campwire braced around his wrist.

"What do ye know that ye aren't sayin?" she said.

The orc eyed Uhquah.

The blue dwarf noticed. He dragged off his pipe and said, "No use keepin secrets now. The queen'll be pullin em each out of yer coldforged gullet forthwith."

"But not yours," said Orc.

"She can't make life from stone," he said. He pointed his pipe at Mym and Khaz. "Might be why she's after them who can."

Khaz turned to her. "Ye told em?"

Just then the closest of the dead knuckled their foreheads and that was where the queen appeared. Her face was masked and her cheek was holed and a tarnished silver chain hung from her neck and her body was draped with some pale fabric that clung to her form and hinted at the emaciation beneath. She regarded them from without the cellar and they regarded her back. At her side stooped the longhorn and when she turned to him he bowed his great head like a mendicant awaiting the benediction before receiving his ration of bread.

"What have you brought us, Tallow?" she said with a voice as coarse as a steel file and with these words a hint of steam expelled from her mouth.

The longhorn looked only at the ground. "Truthseekers and penitents," he said.

"Kin of yours."

"As you say."

Uhquah spat and Mym laughed. "Some of us are kin but not te this great bloodless bullman," she said.

The queen's gaze turned to her. The angle of her chin hid her wound and the air stirred her dark hair in its fishbone fine adornment. She must have been quite beautiful in life to be so striking in death.

Mym stared right back. "What do ye want with us?"

"Only that which you want with us."

"Aye then we'll be on our way."

The queen saw the amber glow off Uhquah's pipebowl and the illuminated strand of smoke spiraling off like the unwinding noosethreads. Quick as an adder the longhorn ducked under and slapped the pipe out of his mouth and stomped out its cinders. Uhquah didn't even flinch. He just reached for the snuffed pipe.

The queen uplifted a hand to the beams and joists of the platform's undercarriage. "We allow these gallows to stand in honor of the king who raised them," she said. "He who called the sickness malificence, the work of immigrants and apostates and deviants. He who rounded them off the street and out of homes and sickhouses, who corralled them like orcs and brought them here and finally when his subjects became desperate enough had them hanged one after another, ten, twenty thousand thusly murdered, the queue stretching from here to the sea."

She pointed up through the trapdoor. "See there? Two guards held the rope off that cleat while another cut down the body and a fourth retied the noose. The fifth man was at the door. By midmorning they had exhausted themselves of rope so his majesty roused out the quartermaster to commandeer every length off of every vessel that had not already run the quarantine. By midday they had run out again and the doorman had no strength left in either hand to trigger the door. His majesty directed a block be carried forth. All afternoon came the sound of the axe and the wood. We shut our eyes against the sight but he commanded us to watch."

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

Now her hand swept across the front of her as if to draw a line. "By sundown this entire cellar was filled with the tumbledown heads of the disembodied yet the queue stretched still to the palatine hill. We begged his majesty to have mercy on those remaining, many of whom were already sick and dying. We begged him to end it. To make it stop. He turned to us and said they deserved it. He directed the garrison slay the rest where they stood, where they sat waiting their turn, where they laid in their own filth and vomit and died of plague. By midnight all of them were dead and his majesty had fled south."

She lowered her hand and her sunken eyes fell upon its bluegray palm and she rubbed the skin as if it might brighten back. "We were dead in a week. Of the sickness it was said, though we do not remember. Once free of our grave we returned here. His majesty never cleared the bodies of the hanged and the decapitated thus we took it upon ourself."

Mym looked out at the risen who waited upon their queen, who doted upon her. She saw the darkened skin ringing their necks. She saw the places where heads had been reattached with lattices of twine, of gut, of rawhide sewn through leathery skin. She saw the awareness in their clouded eyes, the ambivalence for all things.

Now the queen looked upon the dwarves, upon Mym. "Tallow tells us the woman hath come for our soldiers yet you are here for our shard. Tell us why."

Mym looked at Khaz and at Uhquah and she tried not to look at Orc.

The risen queen continued to stare at her. "Make haste dewar ere the smoke in thine lungs shall be borne by thy flesh. Speak us your truths now else they will be drawn from you."

"What would you have her say?" said Orc.

She turned to him. "Why they who wield their own people's shards should have need of ours."

"Me folk are sick," said Mym. She nodded at Uhquah. "His too. Look at him already stonenin up yet he's not ten hundred years old. As fer us we can't make lads and lasses. Not in the stonewerkin way nor in the way of yer kind, or rather the kind ye were born te."

The queen just stared at her with those strangely living eyes behind the bonewhite mask.

"We're hopin yer shard of the stone might mend what ours can't seem te."

"Your great shame," said the queen.

"The only shame in holded up socks is leavin em undarned."

The queen stepped under the platform. The longhorn knelt where he stood and unslung his carbine and looped the strap once around his hand and rested it across his knee, ready to raise and fire. Mym watched the queen pass from Uhquah to Khaz to her and look into their eyes and seem to study their faces. She took Mym's hands in hers and the woman's skin was warm to the touch and this seemed odd to her.

The queen leaned forward until her chin nearly rested on Mym's shoulder. "We do not know you," she whispered.

"Aye no shittin. I'm Mym o Waz. Keeper of the horn of the white mountain, lastborn of the delvin dwarves undermount, liberator of orcs and half slayer of he who wouldn't die. If ye are willin ye help us we're willin ye help ye."

The queen listened to this and then cast her eyes at Orc. "You."

Mym watched the woman move on to Orc and reach out as if to touch him. "Our charge has shown us a great many things. So many that they cannot all fit within the time left to the world. Many times he has revealed to us your face."

The queen leaned in so far that he might impale her chin on his lower incisors if he so chose. "Perhaps the mother revealed ours to you?"

He turned his face to hers. "Take off the mask and I'll tell you."

From where she was standing Mym saw the longhorn raise his eyes from his downcast face as if quietly watching a foreordination of his own devising. When he noticed her looking he smiled.

"Remove them," said the queen.

The longhorn handled up his carbine and motioned up the dwarves with the muzzle. Mym followed Uhquah and Khaz out from under the scaffold. The last she saw of Orc his face was cupped by the queen's hands. Then the attending dead walled up again and she saw no more of them.

The longhorn led them beyond the press of the thronged up dead and left them unguarded amid the forum's colonnade. There ninety six columns towered fifty yards up and lichen grew thickly upon their engraved frieze and within the grounds that they squared the squadron had staked out its horse. The soldiers milled about. On a cracked concrete slab sat the brigadier with the bookmaker standing beside her, arms crossed and chin down. A cloaked man conferred with them. On the far side of the slab sat the ogre and as Mym drew closer she saw a second head again topped their great frame. Uhquah detached and walked a crooked path to the brigadier. Mym and Khaz went to the nearest column. They stood looking at the marble giant and its uniform convexing and she held her hand to its base. She felt its granularity and the individual chisel strikes as she circumnavigated it and she cleared her throat and spoke to it and she looked down the row of its fellows and up and then she led Khaz back within the square toward the slab.

A great front of clouds marshaled out of the north and their wind cut through sure as a knife. Men huddled together and no fires were permitted yet there was indeed smoke in the air. The cloaked man standing with the brigadier and the bookmaker was a young earl and he was dead and his holdings had once been along the seaway. The brigadier seemed to know him and they were speaking of some envoying he was to undertake on the queen's behalf. The bookmaker looked up at Mym's coming and asked desperately after Orc and Mym made no reply for she was noticing first that the brigadier didn't seem to share the bookmaker's concerns for Orc and second that the young earl wore on his pinky a signet matching the one belonging to Daraway's parents and third that the risen head newly affixed to the ogre was slightly bloated and blackened and it bore the abuses of the weekslong journey in the bookmaker's knapsack.

The bookmaker now pawed at Mym's arm. "What's happened ta my partner?" she cried.

Mym took her by the arm and half dragged her over to the colonnade. "Who's that earl?" she said.

But the bookmaker was distraught. "Tell me he ain't dead. Ya saw what they did ta ogres? He ain't the same and he'll never be. Hell I can't tell ya what's worse, him one headed or half dead headed. We shoulda never come up heres. That bloody ol bitch weren't never gonna help us, she never done, never would. Left it all up ta me. Goddamn her and goddamn them deaduns what brought us here."

"He's not dead."

"What? Orc?"

She nodded. "Not yet."

The bookmaker wiped a hand across her dirty face. "We gotta get him. Gotta show him this old lady ain't it. She always said she wanted him ta live his own life but with her every act she's done made it hers."

"Aye we'll get him back just ye wait."

"We gotta get him and we gotta split on outta here."

"Aye," she found herself patting the woman's hand. "Aye we'll do that. Oy Booky?"

"Yah?"

She nodded at the brigadier and the earl. "Who's the kid?"

"What ya mean the earl?"

"Aye."

"I figured ya done knowed him already. That's mister Daraway."

"How's that?"

"Her husband. The one that widowed her. That's him."

Inside her she felt something break off and drift away like one of the bergs they saw in the harbor. Seemingly small from above and unfathomably deep below and now melting away to nothing at all.

"Her husband," was all she said.

Snow began to slurry out of the sky.