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

Mym brought them into the forum from the eastern side. The wildfire had passed on to other quarters and all of the buildings bordering the forum had burned down behind their stone fronts. Their scorched facades now freestanding like so many weathered headstones and behind those solemn faces ash mounded up on their foundations. The four of them skulked through these ruins like a paupers wake: the tall apostate priestess in her dark habit, the dour undertaker, the pallbearers grubby and half drunk. They passed the heap that had been the gallows and they halted finally at the site where the brigadier and her riders had made their stand. The woman watched the her search the ground for something while the others looked at the crumpled dead as if they might rise at the disturbance.

"It must have been something to live here two or three hundred years ago," said Daraway.

Mym shrugged and kept her nose in the dirt.

"This forum was a bazaar. Over there a temple to the martyrs and there the palace of the electors. The fountain a well for the citizens who lived in this quarter. People everywhere, from everywhere, mingling and bartering and breaking bread in peace."

"Thayne didn't think much of it."

Daraway drew her eyes away from the colonnade and down to the dwarf. "He came here?"

"A round millennia ago. Said it was too hot and too thick, but his recollectin isn't etched in bronze."

"It's warming back up now."

"Aye I noticed that too." She sat back from her search and wiped her brow. "Just about sweated through me drawers."

"We'll peel them off later."

She looked up at the woman to tell her now wasn't the time and as she opened her mouth she heard a whisper above the silence of the dead.

"Ye hear that?"

The woman was already crossing the grounds. Mym rose and followed her. They stepped over kingsmen and the brigadier's squadron halfburied in ash, the skulls and pelvises of the cremated risen, the huge ribcages of their stock animals. She looked closely at each and some of them seemed to be orckin and this made her pause.

"My god," Daraway said. She had covered her mouth with her hand.

Mym hurried to her side. Together they stood over the torso of a human, shot through the chest, delimbed, mutilated in the places that described its gender. Its silver hair had been shorn and draped across its upper lip and down its chest. It had been the brigadier and now its eyes fluttered and its lips moved.

"She's alive," said Daraway.

Mym shook her head. "She's risen. The bishop made off with the manstone but she was holdin it when he shot her. It must've brought her back somewhat."

"But her arms," said Daraway. "Her legs."

She looked at the woman and the woman looked back.

"The dead?" said Daraway.

"I never saw them do somethin lek this te one of their own."

A questioning came into Daraway's eyes and then it hardened to something else. She understood. As a woman among men she understood better than anyone. "He came back."

Mym began to ask who but then she knew. "The baron."

The whispering came again. The brigadier opened her eyes. One was taken off to who knows where but the other stared at Mym.

"Burn me," she whispered.

Mym looked at Daraway. Daraway began to remove her glove.

"Please."

"Don't ye worry," said Mym. "It'll all be done soon."

"Please."

Mym knelt down where the brigadier's arm should've been and she held forth her hand to the woman's cheek. She halted there in the pose of dropping seed into a hole. Finally she pushed the back of her hand against the cold face.

"Please."

With one hand bare Daraway now pulled at the fingers of her opposite glove.

Mym stroked the forehead. "It's comin."

The head shifted slightly. The eyes found hers again. "Find Orc."

She tried not to look at the bones about. "Aye I will."

"Tell him to go home. Dig up his grave. Everything is there. Dig up his grave."

She raised her eyes to Daraway. "Aye I'll tell him."

Daraway nodded.

"Please."

Mym stood up. "Aye it's time."

The brigadier closed her eyes.

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"Ye'll be home soon yerself."

"Find Orc," she said. "Saul," she said.

Fire lanced from Daraway's fingers and the remains of she who had once sworn to change the world burned out of it.

Afterward Mym nodded at the skeleton she'd been eyeing. "That him there?"

"I don't know. Perhaps."

She stepped over to it and kicked through it and the ash around it. Teeth and tusks. An ax.

"There were orckin among the risen," said Daraway. "Perhaps it's one of them."

She shook her head. "He'd not have left her so long as she was livin. Even livin ghoul lek. He'd have stayed te the end."

She looked at Daraway but the woman was looking elsewhere. She bent down and picked up from the ground a silver ring cast with a signet. She looked at it in the diffuse murk then she snapped a candleflame from her finger and by this she studied it. "This is mine," she said.

Mym watched her.

"Samuel had it." She looked now at Mym but she didn't say anything. She just looked at her and Mym looked back.

Mym said nothing and Daraway watched her say nothing. Listened to her say nothing. Then she frowned and pocketed the ring and blew out the candleflame.

"Oy there," called Khaz from his place up at the colonnade.

They turned to him and they saw his outstretched arm and they followed it to the buttressed facade of the old cathedral. There in its archway stood the silhouette of the longhorn and his arrival was so portentous it was now impossible for them to see him for anything other than what he was.

"Hail friends," he said.

"Ain't no friend of mine," called Uhquah.

The longhorn walked out of the churchyard apparently unperturbed for in the dim light they could see his huge teeth flash in a wide grin. "Four of you together and unharmed. And now five. A wholesome number to count, five. Luckier than three and less devilish than seven."

"Stop there," said Mym. "What do ye want?"

"No more than you wedwarf. No more than any other in this cold dark world."

"And what's that exactly?"

"Merely the company of my old friends."

He tilted his head slightly and his horntips shifted by inches. "Your grayback's gone missing. Best ask your stones about him. They'll give you every reason to be proud." He looked up and past her. "Is that my old campaigner there? Come down here beardling and share me a pull of yon whiskey."

"Go te hell," said Uhquah.

The longhorn laughed and laughed as if there were something to be revealed in the way it rang off the husks and the ruins. Then he looked down at the smoldering bones of the brigadier. "So small," he said. He half raised his enormous hand as if the woman yet stood before him and he would hold her face.

He dropped his hand and looked at Mym. "You saw what he did to her."

"Aye."

"I couldn't stop him. We are only permitted certain actions, you and I. Countless are the times we shall witness these events yet there is but one path through their happenings. Is that not curious?"

"Ye saw it happen?"

The longhorn nodded.

"Ye see what happened te Orc?"

"He was with her at the finale but not for the encore."

"He's not here now?"

The longhorn smiled and shook his head.

"Where'd he get te?"

"I am disallowed from answering. Make your ask to your kin."

She half turned to Khaz.

"Not him," said the longhorn. "The other one. The one who went meddling about in the wynds of time."

She turned to Uhquah. "That was ye?"

Uhquah stumbled forward in his drunkenness and spat and it hung from his beard. "Fuck off otaur."

"What might he have been up to under your mountain?"

Uhquah raised his discharged carbine. "I said fuck off demon."

"Do ye know where Orc's gone?" said Mym.

His wild eyes shifted to hers. "I don't know shit about shit."

She looked back at the longhorn.

"You can't merely ask a thief and expect an honest answer. You must make an ask."

"Ye don't understand what yer sayin."

The longhorn sighed. "Young beardling. Shall I demonstrate to you the limits of your imagination and the expansiveness of your power?"

"I'd rather ye just leave us be."

The longhorn reached one hand down and one hand to the sky and the overcast began to flicker soundlessly as if heat lightning suffused its smoke and its vapor and by its strobing the longhorn seemed not to pass through space but to instantaneously traverse it. In this manner he suddenly reared up a yard in front of Mym and as she drew her alpenstock he cast both hands forth not at her but at Uhquah and she heard the longhorn's stonesong and she saw the blue dwarf grasp his belly. The longhorn jerked his fingers as if catching a fly in his palm and behind Uhquah's clutched hands blood soaked through his shirt and the life slid out of his eyes and his gut was torn open by the emergence of the fist sized stone that was his hardened heart and this appeared to hang in the air before disappearing and Mym felt it roll against her foot.

She raised her alpenstock but Daraway pushed her behind with her eyes glowing like iron brands hot from the fire. The longhorn turned to the woman and snapped the fingers of his outstretched hands and then smiled. "You ain't got nothing to worry about witch. If I wanted you dead it'd be so."

"Why'd ye do that?" said Mym.

"The wiser question is how." He nodded to the stone at her feet. "Both answers lie in yon unburied treasure. Study it and see for yourself."

"And the wynds?" said Khaz. "What do ye know of that business?"

Again the longhorn gestured at the stone. "Study it," he said.

All of them looked to where he had indicated and Mym bent to pick up the stone. When she looked back to the longhorn he was gone. She thought she saw a glint off something back at the church entry but it was impossible to tell in the flickering moonslight.

Khaz knelt crouched over the blue dwarf and examined the remains. "Did ye hear that?"

"Aye."

"What?" said Daraway.

"He sung that flatlander's heart te stone," she said, "and wooed it straight out of his chest."

"I've never heard anythin lek it," he said. "Stonespeech doesn't work that way."

"Ye heard it clear as sighin gold."

"Aye I know what I heard but there's not a dwarf alive who can speak such things inte bein."

"Perhaps not anymore," said Daraway.

They both looked at the woman.

She reached into the folds of her cloak and she drew forth the Book of Cuts as if to consult it. But she couldn't get the plates to fan open. Mym took it off of her and it was warm in her hand. She held it up to the moonslight. The whole thing was bent as if the longhorn had crushed it with his maul. With the adze of her alpenstock she prised open the cover and the runes and diagrams and fine artistry of the first plate were a ruin. Gingerly she levered open the next plate. Like a wax tablet held to the flame the etchings had been erased. The thincut gemstones now baked into the metal.

She let the book fall from her hands. She turned and began to walk toward the curtain wall. Khaz bent and retrieved the blue dwarf's carbine and he rolled it into his pack. Daraway picked up the Book of Cuts.