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

Death blew south on a savage wind. A vortex of fire and embers ripped around in an infernal funnel that towered above the city and its gales sucked up the roofs of buildings and its flames annihilated their walls down to the dwarfwrought foundations. Entire houses spiraled through the air like fiery meteors and she saw none of them return to earth before they were wholly consumed. Everything in the path of this flame whirl exploded to ash and thick plagues of sparks jetted forth from its black funnel and enkindled its spawn in the suburbs and the cottongrass fields beyond the curtain wall. The mistral blizzard which had been building now seemed to balk at the inferno and its slurries of snow steamed off five hundred feet above the ground and its thunderheads further fattened and darkened. Smoke and steam and vapor visited midnight upon the day and from within the colonnade she witnessed this, the final ruin of the human civilization that was.

The baron's men were readying to come at them again. She had a clear line of fire up the boulevard they'd chosen yet her eyes were drawn to the tornado of fire. It seemed to grow ever wider and its orbiting wreckage transited its face like so many planets across the disc of the sun. Silhouetted against its glare the colonnade's pillars stood darkly like the obelisks of fallen giants eternally beseeching a god who was no longer there, who had gone up in flames.

Beside her Khaz nodded. "Look there."

She turned away from the spectacle and saw the ogre bounding back from the blinding pyre that had been the gallows. They had Orc flung over their shoulder.

"He dead?" said Khaz.

"He better not be."

Uhquah spat. "That lout'll be carryin the manstone too. Mark me words."

In the reddened distance a kingsman crept onto the alleyway between the rowhouses and the mews. She let him cross.

"How much shot ye got there digger?" she said.

Khaz patted the pouch hanging off his belt. "A dozen cartridges ready made and enough powder and lead fer twoscore more but I daren't open me horn with all these livid sparks swirlin about."

She reached out and picked one from his beard and flung it into the night.

"Oy thanks."

"Aye." She turned to the blue dwarf. "If ye have any extra of these magazines I'd gladly take em off ye."

Uhquah snorted and pulled from the keg and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket. "Ain't got nothin but what's in me mag," he said. "Godsdamn baron took the animal packin the molds back at Flame Eternal. What you've got is all you'll get."

Khaz looked at him and then looked at her. "I'd say this diggin's roundly exhausted."

"Aye I hear ye."

"He's not worth holdin out fer."

She watched the calamity northward and she looked for the baron's men who'd started it. She didn't say anything.

"They come at us again and we'll be down te throwin stones," said Khaz. "Let's get on te findin Daraway and leavin while we've still got the skin on our backs."

"Not yet."

"Mym."

"I've still got me longarm and a dozen charges I wrapped before I won this repeater."

"Lend me half."

She gave him half of what she had and then she sat with her back against a pillar and watched the ogre come. They placed Orc upon a marble plinth like he was a corpse laid out on a slab and they stood back as if he might rise from the dead. The greenskin came up and wrapped his hand around one of their pinky fingers. The bookmaker and the brigadier moved toward them also and as the bookmaker knelt at Orc's side the brigadier went to the ogre.

Uhquah nodded at the brigadier. "That'll be her gettin what she came for."

"The manstone?" said Mym.

"As I said."

The brigadier now held something in her hands. Something given to her by the ogre. She held it aloft as if examining it by the firelight. She turned to the earl who shambled nearby and she gestured to it and to him. If he made any reply Mym couldn't hear.

"She's askin that stiff whether his fellows will follow her now," said Uhquah.

"Will they?"

"Hell if I know."

The bookmaker now had her hands on Orc and was shaking him. His head yawed limply to one side. She could see his eyelids fluttering, his scalp smoking.

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Khaz shouldered his longarm. "Here they come."

She tore her eyes back to the alley. Kingsmen dashed from doorway to doorway ahead of a shieldwall seven men wide with nary a gap between them. Mym bore up and settled her carbine across the base of the pillar and aimed for the captain of that element. His dyed horsehair plume muted by the redness of the sky.

"Ain't that a peach," said Uhquah.

She saw the blue dwarf shift his aim to an adjacent street whence came another column of shields and a forest of spears raised up behind them. She glanced down the boulevard and saw the main of the baron's army marching slowly up it.

"They're comin three sides," she said.

"Aye I see em," said Khaz.

Men and women along the boulevard put their guns on the brigadier's twenty and began to potshot at them. The vestige of her brigade scattered to the pillars of the colonnade and fired back and despite the shoddiness of their smoothbores they couldn't miss for the sheer numbers of the advancing kingsmen.

"Time te get," said Khaz.

She turned back toward where Orc now sat up with his hand clutching his chest. Beyond him the brigadier stood her horse reckless of the gunfire that snapped the air around her. The longhorn at her stirrup watched her, watched the trinket that she held overhead in her balled fist. She was shouting something. Calling to someone. As if at her behest the remnant of the queen's scalphunters emerged upon their steeds from a side street and turned onto the boulevard. Their plagues desiccated in the heat and spilled like hayseed through slugholes in their sacks, their flesh broiled under their armor, their silent mounts engulfed in flames. Their headman looked upon the brigadier and then looked upon the baron's advance. Perhaps he gave some command or perhaps his kind were afflicted by a singleminded purpose for as one they wheeled their crackling and halfmelted steeds and launched themselves at the baron's shields with their stolen hair curled up and flapping in and out of the black smoke that billowed off of the horses' hindquarters. Now the body of that eldest legion obstructed all view of its violence and the dwarves saw only the speartips wavering and falling never to rise again.

"We goin?" Khaz called over the clamor.

She looked again at Orc. He was casting about, his mouth opening and closing around a name she couldn't hear. He had a foot off of the plinth and his new longsword in his hand.

A ricochet caromed off of the entablature and fragments of marble rained down upon her. The kinsgmen had surged up the alley. They ducked into two storied brickhouses on the edge of the forum and they appeared in the windows and fired down upon the brigadier's men. She sighted one and shot him through the eye and another immediately took his place.

Uhquah pitched his carbine to the ground. "I'm empty," he said as he drew his hammer. The kingsmen coming up his street now ran freely into the forum and they sprinted directly toward the brigadier. Toward Orc.

She watched it all happen. She watched Orc stand from the plinth and draw himself slowly up. She watched the first of the kingsmen reach the brigadier and she watched her upward stroke nearly decapitate the man and she watched the dark blood glitter in the arc scribed by her blade. She watched the woman put her horse sideways as the second man thrust his spear at its head and she watched her catch the shaft of the spear in the one hand and yank him into reach and before he could let go she had separated hand from arm and spear and hand and man all fell at once. She watched the others come, the dozens, the hundreds, and she watched the orc finally stand at her side in that place of honor which he had sought for as long as she had known him, had sought since the day the old woman and her old husband had found him, had sought all his life if only to finally have it at the moment of death. She watched them fight together as she had never seen, a fluidity of motion and an intuited harmony of purpose and each of their weapons was part of a singularity of swirling and swooping and striking, one feinting one shielding, one luring one skewering, the prime orc and the old woman flowing together in a bewitching dance of death. She watched and she wondered at them and yes there was envy in her watching but there was also admiration, a sense of sublimity, of looking into the face of some god for she knew no other person in which violence could be so perfectly formed. Kingsmen fell before them headless, limbless, grasping at opened throats, reeling from staved skulls. She might have watched them fight until the end of the world but the queen's legion got there first.

"They're comin back this way," said Khaz.

The first of the risen reached the brigadier's squadron and massed up and over them and flooded into the kingsmen. At this the brigadier turned and in her bare hand held forth the manstone as if that would stop them yet they beset her and the longhorn among them crushing the faces of kingsmen and snapping their bones upon his maul and now the living fought together against the dead. More of the baron's men poured out of the alley and their captain donning his horsehair led them into the fray with firebrands ready and clayware of ether thrown upon the burning legion to explode in a sharp conflagration that scattered body parts into the air.

"Who we shootin?" said Khaz.

A dead soldier laden with burning scalps that dripped molten fascia upon the ground had come before Orc and as Orc beheaded the soldier the earl crept up behind him with a dagger pointed at his back and with her last round Mym shot out the earl's brains. Gray and rubbery they bounced upon the ground and she saw Orc cast his eyes to the report and something then passed between them, some regret, some apology, both shared and never acknowledged but in that split second the baron of the kingsmen stepped into the gap of Orc's hesitation and raised a pistol and shot the brigadier's horse in the head then fired again square into the woman's chest. The baron spoiled the trinket wrapped around her wrist and then receded back into the ranks of his men.

The cry of the orc shook her to the bone. He no longer looked at her he looked only at the crumpled up brigadier. He leapt over the fallen and kicking horse and cradled her head in his hands. He wailed again and as one of the brigadier's squadron came to him he raised his arm and put his blade through the man's heart.

Mym laid down the carbine and picked up her old longarm. She shortleashed her alpenstock to her wrist and thrust it through her belt.

Khaz's eyes were on her. "Are we gettin or are we dyin?"

She looked back to where Orc had been and she saw only bedlam. The risen nearly burned to cinders, the baron's shields flashing in the light of the firestorm, the ogre laying about with a kingsman held in each hand by the ankles and swinging both together before their chest as if closing a massive book and the crack of the colliding skulls.

She shook her head. "The stones always get theirs," she said.

"Oy?" said Khaz.

She turned to him. "We're gettin."

Amid the holocaust and in the dancing light between the staccato shadows pitched by the colonnade three dwarves filed silently to a certain of the pillars. The one who led them touched it in a certain place and without once looking back she and the others disappeared from the suttee of Orc and his brigadier.