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

As the dwarves were leaving he saw Mym turn but she couldn't see his eyes in the shade of the scaffold. Then she was gone and he was alone among the dead with their queen's face an inch from his and her eyes intent upon him.

"What all did you see?" he said.

"Only what was shown. Histories never written and others already forgotten."

"In which of those was I?"

She drew even closer. Her knee was now pressed into his waist and her wrist rested on his collarbone. "That which we have seen cannot be altered or helped," she said. "The good and the ill shall all be revealed in the course of your life and unlife."

She tilted her head as if listening for an unasked question. Something he must ask if only he knew what it was and was quick enough to know this moment from all others for the asking. He felt like he was back before Glad Nizam's fire hallucinating on the weird's concoction. If he was to ask his question the moment for it was passing.

"What am I to you?" he said.

She let go of his jaw. "There was no accident in our meeting. The destinies in our stars just as often betray as they befriend and even god is beholden to their blind will. But the ungod who moves between them may choose his own hour and we who he seeks must contain within us some wickedness of our own to arouse his interest. This is our common sin, yours and ours, and beyond this you are nothing to us and we are nothing to you."

He sniffed and would have adjusted his hat but his hand found his hair instead and he remembered he'd thrown it away. "If I'm nothing to you then you wouldn't have stood between the longhorn and me that night."

She tossed her head and the fabric shifted across her chest. She now sat slightly away from him.

"It was you who intervened," he said.

Still she didn't reply.

"You going to tell me why?"

She looked at him and she shook her head and her eyes never left his. "We believed you would be ready," she said. "But you are not."

"For what?"

"The truth. Go to the mother. Return to us only after you have seen her."

"You know of her?"

"And of your encounter with her. You think yon warmistress raised you but it is the mother who bestowed your life. Her mark is upon you. Would that it was also upon us, that the first dewar had left her heart with my kin and not this loathsome shard."

She hooked her thumb under the chain around her neck from which hung a roughcut medallion.

"You'd likely be a tree," he said.

"Better that than what we were made to become."

He might have told her to cross the sea and visit the husk of the forest and find the elfstone among the new growth and take back that which had been stolen from her at the height of her mortal power. He might have told her to accompany him beyond the Gap. To reclaim her lost vitality. He said nothing.

She let her hand fall and the medallion dropped back upon her chest. "What did the mother show you?" she said.

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

She looked at him as if she didn't believe him. "She did not send you here?"

"No. I came for my own reasons and of my own volition."

She smiled ruefully. "Orcs have no more of that than the rest of us."

"I'm not here for your shard."

"No. You who gave away the orcstone shall not be remembered for avarice. You have come for the woman."

"And for the dwarf."

"Yes. We have learned of your oath. The late ontogeny of the lesser races would tremble our king, if only their numbers were greater."

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"Your king is long dead."

"Yet his baron is within our walls."

"Sent by a different king."

She shook her head. "It is always the same king."

Above their heads the planks now rattled in the boreal wind and for a moment he thought he heard among them the pop and the crack of distant gunfire.

Suddenly the queen began to sing. Balladic lines in an unfamiliar melody and her voice was high and soft and the way it guttered upon itself lent it a bleak unworldliness and he found this moved him. She sang in the language of humanity and then in that of orcs.

"You know orc talk?" he said.

Her lip seemed to curl but she didn't stop her singing. The song was a lament for a warrior come out of the west seeking justice and he had been beset in his errantsy by horrors not of this world and no longer extant within it. They had haunted his heels and whenever he turned to face them they vanished into the dark. This was the repeated chorus and there were many verses and he listened to all of them that she sang.

"Who were you?" he said.

"A girl," she said, "ere a queen."

She sang no more and undoubtedly now an exchange of gunshots was clattering away somewhere. He looked at the risen pressed together at the platform's edge and understood for the first time they were not her courtesans. They were her bodyguard.

"How did you meet the dwarf?" she said.

"I about killed her and her father."

"Yet you did not?"

"She asked me not to."

Now he heard the distinct shouts of living men. A clang of sword against sword. "I should go," he said.

She began to sing of the warrior again. Of others compelled to heroism by his example and of their catalysis of armageddon. She nodded at Orc as if he was one such paladin for his life had been as was sung but the deeds in the song were of a quality beyond his power: traveling between worlds to depose a king and thwarting the ungod's manifestations and forestalling the firmament's return to earth. They were all of them however awash in blood and this was familiar to him and it seemed to him that all injustices can only be righted with blood.

In cadence with the ballad came the steady report of a practiced gunslinger and by its regularity and its tenor he intuited its author. He tried to stand and he hit his head on the rafters and snowmelt showered through their slats and fell coldly upon his shoulders and ran down his back.

He rubbed the crown of his skull. "There's a fight on out there."

"There is."

He turned to the wall of the risen and all sides they had begun to roil. A sourness of discharged powder and of firesmoke swept through the cellar. "I ought to be a part of it."

The queen closed her eyes and said, "What do you think happens when we die, orc?" and a buffet of vapor escaped her mouth with each syllable.

He crossed to the nearest of the risen. Like the others this animate corpse now faced outward and he could see the dents and rends marring its ancient breastplate. He placed his hands upon its shoulders and heaved. Wedged as it was it didn't move. He kicked hard against the back of its knee and it was like smashing his heel on a pillar of stone.

He turned back to the queen. "Let me go."

She didn't answer. Her eyes were still closed. The exchange of gunfire had ceased and he heard the unmistakable roar of an ogre and the shriek of horses. He heard a deep rumbling as if the dwarves had set the land to waking and he heard the brigadier shouting commands and he heard men dying. He smashed his shoulder against the wall of bodies and he ran his hands across the wooden ceiling and he pounded the planks with his fist and cinders fell through them and winked out like glowbugs. He looked up through the slats and saw a canopy of smoke behind naked flames. The scaffold was on fire. He moved toward the trapdoor but the closer he came the more oppressive the heat. It was too much.

He tried to wipe the smoke from his eyes and hack it from his lungs. "Move your skinthieves aside," he said.

"For what purpose?"

"I need to get out there."

"To help your friends."

"Yeah."

Now she turned to him. Her shift was now soaked through from the meltwater or sweat or some other source and the macabre femininity of her form seemed to smoke in the rising temperature. "You cannot save them both."

He squinted at her through the smoke.

"The woman or the dwarf. You must decide."

From outside came a sizzling of flesh and the snap and pop of the burning scaffold. The flames licked down through the trapdoor and under it the font of frozen blood had begun to sweat in long crimson rivulets that spiderwebbed down its facets and pooled upon the ground.

"Only one," she said.

He stooped from her back to the wall of the dead. They seemed to press themselves about the flames as if their flesh might extinguish the fire or as if they sought to end their interminable enslavement. They writhed silently together as the fire spread among them, curling their hair and blackening their flesh and carbonizing their skulls. Their fascia and whatever ichor remained in their bodies now hissed and burned off through their mouths and nostrils and ears like kettles set directly into a cookfire. He slashed at them with his sword and delimbed them with his ax but none of them yielded an inch. They burned from the shoulders up and they hugged on each other and thronged in a single mass. There was no way through.

He turned to the queen. Beside her the spike of blood had halfway melted and a red mist steamed off it. She watched this and she watched the arm of the gallows collapse and she raised her hand to her face for her eyes had begun to boil and in that manner she wept for the first time in decades and for the last time.

"Why did you spare me?" he shouted over the conflagrating roar.

She opened her mouth as if to speak and thence a jet of fire spewed forth. He fell away from her and he crawled upon the ground but there was no escape from the heat and it seared his lungs and his hair ignited and he clawed at the earth like an animal, like the queen must have done. The fire sucked the air out of the place and left nothing but smoke and poison and he choked and spat into the mud made by the blood of folk long dead. He couldn't breathe or see and his only hope was to charge through the coagulate torsos and limbs and bones of the common cremation now withering on all sides. Then the scaffold above him suddenly broke to pieces and in the flaring of the fallen timbers he saw a great sallow faced terror with waxen eyes and a toothless sneer and beside it Left bellowed and with one hand reached through the engulfed planks and pulled Orc free.