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

At his awakening he called out for Mym. The queen said he could only save one and he was foolish enough to believe her, as if the future was foretold and unalterable, as if a world where stones could raise the dead was bound by this limitation of one or the other. Nonetheless he believed her and he called first for the dwarf and the moment the brigadier was slain he knew that was why. He had not fulfilled his oath and the man he was sworn to kill took that which was most dear to him. Blood for promised blood. Hers on his hands, on the ground, soaked up into the forum's pavers. Perfectly square and flat, perfectly spaced. The work of dwarves long gone from that place. He had watched her die with her eyes fixed on his and her regret unspoken on her lips and now he was the one to live with it, to carry it forward and to visit it upon another and another and this he did not wait to do.

They came to despoil her as they had despoiled her household and he killed them. They came to burn her body as he had burned Tulula and he shouted them away. They came to calm him as she would have calmed him and only the sight of their familiar faces stayed the shaking hand that pressed the blade against the place between his ribs where death was known to come swiftest. He lowered the blade. Fluid rose up with his every breath and he hacked up blood and pus and spat it onto the very stones that held him to account, as if to say take me, take mine, spare hers. But it was too late for that.

He came back to himself. His lungs burned as if they were still on fire. Booky had him by the shoulders. The greenskin patted his knee with his little claw. Ogre reposed nearby with a halfeaten horse across his lap.

"What am I now?" he said. "Who am I now?"

"Yew're Orcy boy like yew always was. Same old Orcy yeah?"

"She's who gave me that name."

"Maybe but yew're Orcy to little me and my brudders too."

"And ta me," said Booky.

He looked at the bookmaker. "She sent you to me."

"What? What do ya mean?"

"Down with the yeomen those years ago. She sent you."

"It weren't nothing like that. There was a bill I answered. Cost me my last copper ya did."

"She sent you to put me in your pit. To make me into what I am."

Orc looked down at the body, the eyes open but half lidded, the mouth agape and drying in that smoky air. He had never stopped trying to be what she had wanted him to be. He touched the cheek. Slack, getting cold. "I should've gone with her. Been with her the whole way."

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Booky stroked the back of his neck. "Ya were with her just now. Laying inta them king's shitholders. Ya were right where she asked ya ta be."

"And I let the baron shoot her."

"Hey now that wasn't yall's fault. That wasn't yall's fault. Ain't nothing your blade's gonna do ta stop a pistolball."

He had stopped listening for in his heart resided an imaginary of the brigadier who was tender and just and right in all things including those over which they had argued. Again he found himself looking at the pavers, at the blood colorless in the red light of that night. He laid his hand upon it and he closed his eyes and he remembered the words Mym had him say and the guttural chant she had made and these he did his best to reproduce. In this manner he forswore his remaining life to vengeance. He would not waver from that end. He opened his eyes. He studied the flecks of some metal caught in the stone. They glinted in time with the pulse of the wildfire as it flared up roof after roof.

"Did ya just do what I think ya done?"

"Yeah."

"Aw hell Orc ain't I learned ya better than ta double up on a bad bet."

He withdrew his hand.

"Ya shouldn't fool around none with them dwarven magicks."

"Did you see which way they went?"

"Them dwarves?"

"Yeah."

"Naw I wasn't keeping no track of them."

Orc looked at the greenskin but he only shook his head and his long ears waggled.

Orc turned toward the colonnade where he had last seen Mym. He mounted the shallow stair and saw the brass casings littered about the concrete. That was dwarven too. The whole city seemed to be built upon a dwarven foundation, perhaps a ruin, now revealed by the wildfire. It was advancing upon the quarter the baron had gone, obliterating all things before it. He felt its heat in his bones and his lungs. It throbbed against his cheeks and it blinded him. He knew it for what it was, and he would become it.

From down at the body Booky called up. "What do we do with her?"

He turned to her and began to walk back. "It doesn't matter."

The bookmaker looked at the body then at the ogre's reattached head then back at Orc. "Don't it though?"

He reached down and unwrapped the scarf from the brigadier's simple coiffure. He searched her pockets and her bag, then her saddlebags, then he cupped her face in his hand. She looked terribly old.

"You can burn her if you feel compelled."

"Me? I figured you'd wanna."

He tied off the scarf on his arm just above the campwire. He took up her twohanded saber. He remembered the time she first let him hold it. He began to pull its sheath from the body then he stopped. If she had wanted him to have it she would've given it to him. He restored it to the lax hand and he stood back from where she had died.

"You going somewheres?"

He nodded. "I've got promises to keep."

"There's riches ta be had and shared hereabouts so long as we get ta em afore they burn up."

He put her effects in his satchel and he walked off into the night.