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

They egressed the catacomb into the palatine grounds on the far side of the city and that was where Daraway found them. They ran south down streets littered with ruins and the slurry of ash and snowfall clung to the northfacing walls like moss to trees. The sky overhead oppressed them, the firelight caught darkly there and cinders blew out of it as if all the occluded stars rained from heaven and these fell upon their backs and smoldered into their cloaks and hoods. They halted for breath in a great plaza centered around a frozen fountain where a great statue of some king emerged from its ice aboard a chariot. Mym breathed hard in the lee of its stonecut team and Daraway came to her and with her thumb wiped black powder from her cheek. "No Orc?"

"No."

"He made his choice."

Mym shook her head. "That nakheaded pigfaced gemchewer didn't make any choices. His mind was made for him and he never knew it. He's like te be missin his hair by now. Or else he's been strung up by that lordy lord of yer king."

"Orcs don't die of age."

"Nor do dwarves."

Daraway nodded and looked off back the way they had come. "You want to find him."

She wiped the smoke from her eyes. "Did ye get what ye came fer?"

Daraway nodded.

"Can I see it?"

The woman looked at where the blue dwarf yet woozed and pugged off the little keg.

"Khaz," said Mym, "Why don't ye ask our lowlyin friend fer a drink."

"Aye," said Khaz. He slung up his longarm and joined Uhquah.

Daraway watched him go and she shifted her body and billowed out her cloak so that only she and Mym could see the book she pulled from an inside pocket. It was smaller than Mym expected and it looked like a bronze ingot smelted and forgotten in some ancient trove, now spotted in the pale green decay that blooms on unoiled metal like mold on bread. Daraway released some unseen catch and the book open upon its hinge like a lady's fan and she ellipsed its plates around and each was a masterwork beyond any living smith upon the world: razor thin sheets of bronze etched and gilded and inlaid with flaked rubies and emeralds and shard of the sky, each plate depicting a technique of the art, designing a bespoke instrument, describing an imbuement of power. Daraway stopped when she found the one she sought. A familiar illumination more beautiful and more precise than Mym thought possible upon such a thin metal leaf.

"That's in the old lady's book. The one Orc's been luggin around," said Mym.

"Can you read it?"

"Aye. This is a diagram of the orcstone. See here? It says 'the shard of The First lost among the firespawn,' but if the otaur's te be believed some of the meanins have changed since these runes were laid in."

"In what way?"

"Well he got te scribblin in the book and Orc's eyes about popped out of his head watchin. He put in some notations and changed the passage te say 'the shard of the creator hidden among the firespawn.'"

"Hidden."

"Aye."

"From whom?"

"Orc asked the same thing." She shook her head. "I don't have any answers."

"Someone must've sought to use it."

"Maybe. Maybe there's somethin about it on another plate."

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Daraway slid out the next plate. "What's this one?"

She studied the illuminated sheet. "There's the runes fer The First and fer hidden again and here's humankind. Look here ye can see the cuts on this facet and where they'd conjoin te the ones back here."

Mym motioned her to slide back to the plate of the orcstone. "Look at all this. What's that look like te ye?"

Daraway tilted her head. "I don't know. I suppose a bit like cells in a monastery."

"Aye but they go in these directions and those ways too. Cells without floors or ceilins."

"Like honeycombing in a beehive."

"Aye but they're missin somethin. Is there another of these?"

"I imagine there are at least two more," said Daraway as she rotated the plates around the hinge. "One for dwarves and one for elves."

Mym stopped her at the one after the manstone. "This is the one fer elves. Look, there are yer honeycombs again. And look at the way it was split there. I'd say if ye hold this one against the other two they'd make a roughcut sphere. Hollow lek, with the combin on the inside facets."

"What's inside?"

Mym looked up from the book a moment and closed her eyes to imagine The First in her mind's eye, as if she held it in her hand. She thought she understood. "It's a lattice."

"Inside?"

"Aye inside."

"What for?"

She reached and shifted to the next plate. "The dwarfstone," she said.

They looked at it together, the dwarfstone. It was simply shaped yet the intricacies of its interior were uniformly complex. Cells within cells neatly arranged and perfectly angled like a diamond examined under Thayne's cylinder of lenses. The pattern of the combing drew her in as if she was peering in the infinity between two mirrors. Her mind worked and she began to see shapes that weren't there, shapes that used to be and shapes that were to be.

"What in the heavens am I looking at?" said Daraway.

Mym squinted. Her mouth pursed. She looked up at the woman. "I can't say fer certain but I think we're lookin at a superluminary."

"A what?"

"A tesseract."

Daraway looked back at the plate. Mym looked also. She had never seen work so precise in the inlay and she imagined the dwarfstone itself must have been impossibly fine and well beyond the ability of any animate dwarf.

"What do the runes say?"

Mym hadn't noticed the script accompanying the depictions. Now she read it. "To unmake made, to unbreak broken, to abandon bandon."

They stood there staring. The snow swirled around them. Daraway slid out the next plate.

There the etchings were of a dwarflike figure splitting The First into three shards and gifting each to one of the great races of the world. The next plate showed the figure melting down the latticed center and through some ingenuity of captured convection blowing it like glass into a thinspread globe.

"We've been there," said Daraway.

"Aye that's the forge of creation."

"I think we need to go back."

Mym looked at her.

"To unbreak broken. I think the shards rejoined may have the power to imbue life to your children. Like how the orcstone paired with the sacred tone mended your da, but we'll need the others. The elfstone and the manstone."

"Well the last I saw of the manstone it was runnin off in the hands of yer baron."

"We need to find him."

"Ye sure about this? There's plenty more in this book. Maybe it'll have some answers fer ye."

"I'm sure it does but I'm also sure the baron cannot be permitted to keep the manstone, to carry it out of the deadlands. And while we stand around looking at pictures and paradoxes he's doing just that."

As she listened to the woman Mym heard the sculpted stones' approval. As if the marble king knew of her proctored oath and commanded its fulfillment. She must hunt down the baron.

A retching rose out of the wind behind her and she turned and saw Uhquah bent double and puking and the air catching it and splattering it along. Khaz made a sour face and Uhquah stood upright and wiped his mouth and spat. He leered at Mym and then at the woman and his dark eyes shifted to the book in her hands. "You lot keepin secrets from your betters?"

She and Daraway looked at him standing there shamelessly, his empty carbine clutched in his hand, slop still stuck in his beard.

"Whatever you got there he'll have it in the end. He always does."

Khaz chortled beside him. "If the baron comes after them he'll wind up with a slug through his eye and a flamebroiled arse."

"I ain't meanin the baron."

Mym shook her head. She looked away north where the wide column of smoke seemed to hold up the choked black sky. "Ye sure about this?" she said.

"Yes," said Daraway.

She turned to the others. "We're gettin," she said.

"Where te?" said Khaz.

Uhquah grinned. "Back te her piggy."

She shook her head and headed north.