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

The stones about her trembled and murmured. She pushed her head out of the water. At her feet a mosaic of ancient tiles depicted a mountain spring and the aquamarines and turquoise rippled up its waters and in the steam off of her bath they seemed to eddy and swirl. The flumewater diverted into the soaking tub was still hot from the black heart of the world and was brown and brackish from the grit off her body. She lifted her hands to the stone foundations and she closed her eyes and listened to their accolades. The baron was dead. The stoneoath fulfilled.

Of Orc they said nothing. She waited, listening. The water grew cold around her. The perspiration dried on her forehead. All of her listened and nothing else for what must have been hours. No more was said. Perhaps the stones didn't recognize their forsworn bond. Perhaps there was simply nothing more to say about him.

She stood out of the basin and wrapped herself in a wool blanket and padded barefoot out of her home. Footprints dried on the granite. Down at the forge Thayne worked the bellows and her da and her uncle sat by watching and sweating and waiting their turn.

"Oy Mym," said Thayne. "What brings ye down?"

She looked at her da. "Did ye hear?"

"Nothin te hear but this bellower's flappin," he said.

"He did it. Orc did."

"Did what?"

"He fulfilled the oath. The baron's slain."

"He took his damn time doin."

"You were wrong about him."

"Weren't wrong bout nothin. I always knew he'd get the best o any man."

"Ye sure never talked lek it."

"Doesn't mean I don't know it. He got the best o yer ol da. What's some priestly snot against me?"

She looked at Thayne and he just shook his head back.

"The thing bout him I don't know," said her da, "is whether he thinks as highly of ye as ye think o him, aye? Whether he's lek te bring the shard o men here or he's lek te carry it on across the sea."

"He'll bring it here."

"Aye so ye say but he's got plenty o his foul smellin kin bakin in the madlands ready fer raisin up."

"He'll come."

"He left ye once he'll leave ye again." His eyes shifted to a point behind and above her. "Shovelin shit ye come te gang up on me?"

Mym turned and saw Daraway come into the forge. "The baron's dead."

The woman nodded. "Orc?"

"Aye must've been. The stones wouldn't have said anythin te me if he wasn't the one who done it."

"Good."

"Aye."

"Does he have the manstone?"

She shrugged.

"They don't know?"

"The stones of me tub don't."

Daraway frowned. "I hope he got it because we're going to need it."

"Ye sound certain."

"I am."

"Ye found somethin?"

"Khaz did."

"Well?"

"I can't explain what I can't see. Come on and he'll show you."

***

She entered the atrium where they had worked these past weeks. The stone door stood half open on its hinges and beyond it spread a square room under a vaulted ceiling with stone benches running along its walls. In its exact middle lay a solitary block, a yard square and a foot high, carved of a white marble not found anywhere on this side of the sea. Daylight pooled dimly on its surface and did not spill over the platform by even a hair's breadth. In her lasshood she used to stand upon it and gaze up the thousand yard shaft at the distant window, the single star in the great dark of the delving, and berate the sky for taking her ma. Lately she had surmounted it and made faltering speeches to the half empty benches of her plans to restore the delving, of their progress to propagate their race, yet those who remained to listen no longer seemed to care one way or the other. Even if she somehow saved the delving dwarves the black heart of the mountain was cooling, its molten flows freezing. The enshadowed wynds of the delving would ice over even as the white mountain's ancient floes thinned and thawed. What was a delving dwarf of the white mountain without the delving?

Now upon the platform in that square of daylight were arranged the disfigured plates of the Book of Cuts. Khaz sat beside these with his legs straight out and his elbow resting on the marble. In each hand he held a different plate and he studied one then the other.

"Oy ye old brewspewer," she said.

He looked up. His eyes dark in the shadow of his heavy brow. "Oy Mym. Where's yer stiltwalker?"

"Mindin Cousins at the horn."

"She tell ye what we've got."

"No."

He beckoned her with one of the plates. "Come and see."

She walked up and sat beside him.

"It's not a matter of lookin so much as listenin," he said.

"Alright."

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His eyes flicked at her.

"What?"

"Ye sound like that orc."

"Stuff it and let me listen."

He handed her the plate. Wafer thin in her hands and translucent in the sunlight. How metal could be drawn so thin was beyond her knowledge. She held it in her hands and feared it might crumble at her touch yet it was solid and sound. With her fingertips she plattered it up to her ear and she listened.

"In the light," whispered Khaz.

She shifted the plate to catch the sunlight and she heard it immediately. She looked at him and he nodded back. "Ye hear?"

"Aye."

"Can ye tell what it's memberin?"

She regarded the plate. Its ancient etchings still spoke beneath their late deformation. It whispered of tolerated destruction and prohibited restoration, of a segregating and a conjoining, of eldritch powers she could not understand for her mind was of stone not of divinity. Like a felled tree revealing in its rings its bounty and its scars did the plate show her the story she hoped to hear. She believed she understood its meaning for she knew stones of the earth did not lie and like Khaz she believed the metals laid in the Book of Cuts could only be of the earth.

She looked at him and she saw the rapture in his face. The belief that after fortysome years of failure they, the two of them, might finally fulfill the expectation of their forefathers. The shards' rejoining might save their dying race.

She smiled at him. Lastborn they might be, but not for long.

***

She rolled the carbine into her pack lid and slung over her shoulder the bandolier of charges she had fashioned for it. She patted the smokejerked fold of venison in her breast pocket and sloshed the canteen on her hip. She idly spun the alpenstock on its spike and she looked about her room. There was nothing left to pack or prepare. It was past time she went.

She kissed her da and her uncle goodbye and they grumbled dourly about the keeper's responsibilities but she was already out the door walking alongside the flume to the home Khaz shared with Thayne. Khaz stood up from the porch as she came up and his pack was half again his height and leaned precariously over the top of his head. Down the walk he marched and together they continued to the old residence of the emissary. Mym and Khaz halted at the gap in its stone hedge and there they waited for what seemed like forever, blinking in the gathering light and smelling the hot iron and listening to the whispering stones.

"Oy ye longshanked grubber," she called at the doorway. "Sun's up and slushin the slope. Let's get."

At her calling the bosun leaned out of a home across the flume. It had once belonged to a honored lineage of dwarves, the last of which had gone to stone and been slagged back to the mountain three centuries before.

Mym nodded at the man. "Ye here te see us off?"

He smiled back at her and although there was a rough handsomeness to him she still saw by the light of the forge the stretched sallow grin of the dead man that was. "I heard you're weighing to find my boy."

"Aye."

"You know where he's lying by?"

"No."

"You know how long you'll be gone?"

"As long as it takes."

He nodded as if he already knew these things then he ducked back through the too low window.

"Gettin te be a menagerie under here," said Khaz.

"Ye start in and I'll gladly leave ye here with me da and ye can wallow bout it tegether. Oy Daraway! Oy Oy Oy! Sluice it on out now!"

She turned back to Khaz and found herself staring at the two knives sheathed across the bosun's chest and she about fell backward from the shock of it.

"Shatterin stalags man. Next time I catch ye sleepin I'm collarin a bell on ye."

He grinned at her again and offered no apology.

She saw the sailcloth sack resting on the ground beside him, the harpoon and the longarm laying atop it. "Yer old lady lettin ye off this time?"

"I told her I didn't want no more regrets between us and I already got the one from staying behind last time. I told her I don't want our boys comin up under a father who don't keep his word. She don't neither but you know how women get when it comes to goodbyes."

She looked over at Daraway's house. "I'm not sure I do."

"Well you got a rare one because let me tell you. She'd be coming with if I let her, but someone's got to stay home with the boys."

"Ye could stay home with the boys."

He stared at her. "We're mighty glad you took us in and I know you lot live different from us, but I'd appreciate if you keep your voice down else she'll get some ideas I rather she didn't."

"She's already got those ideas."

"Well she can keep them to herself. I'm the one who gave the word. I'm the one that's got to go."

"And she's fine with it."

"The hell she is." He looked back at the house he had left. "Either she'll still be here when we get back or she won't and I'll have to go and find her again."

"Ye wouldn't have te."

"I certainly would little miss and if ye were married ye'd know why."

"A man keeps his word."

He nodded. "That's right."

She looked at Khaz. "Dwarflike enough fer ye?"

Khaz hiked up his pack. "It's not me mind ye got te change Mym."

She looked back at the house and Daraway appeared in the door in her splotched and singed and many times mended cloak and beneath it a small leather satchel like Orc's that she carried across her body.

"Yer late."

The woman checked that the door behind her was left slightly ajar as if inviting the return of another. "No bell for watch," she said. "No campanile for mass. No sun to speak of whatsoever. I met a scholar who theorized time is just a construct of mortals. He would be pleased to know you dwarves have proved it."

"Hear the lady," said the bosun.

Mym nodded up the delving road at the snowcovered slopes without the entrance shining brilliantly at the dimness within. "See the dawn?"

Daraway wound through the stone children posed in the yard and she covered a yawn with her hand.

"That means it's mornin."

"And good morning to you too love."

"It'd be good if we were halfway down the face. Things softenin up out there and we're lek te have a slide."

"Sorry. I was up late."

"Yer always up late."

"I had a letter from the archive."

"And what's he got te say?"

"I wrote him about the manstone and the climatic changes we observed leaving the deadlands."

"Aye."

"He agrees with my assessment. Somehow the manstone transforms heat, which is after all expended energy, into potential energy. The deadlands froze over when the manstone channeled up the heat into the risen, and they began to thaw once the risen fulminated and released their energy back into the world. Now if we could figure out how it works, how it pushes energy into inanimate flesh, we might attune it to your needs."

"By the singin stones," said Khaz, "she speaks but I don't understand a lick of it."

Daraway looked at him and began to explain again.

Mym grabbed her by the elbow and shuttled her along. "Keep yer legs spinnin faster than yer mouth's flappin."

As they began to walk up the rule straight delving road there came the echoed pattering of small feet off the vaults and the ceilings. Mym squinted against the morning light. Silhouetted against the entrance ran the figures of two children.

"Wolfy," hollered the bosun. "Wolfy you best not be running."

"Sorry sir," came the reply but neither of the children slowed. The girl arrived before the boy and the boy stopped before the bosun with his hands on his knees. "We was racin," he said.

Daraway adopted a stern face and regarded the girl. "Cousins you can run as fast as you want."

"Aw but that ain't fair," said the boy.

"You'd better take it up with your father."

The bosun frowned at the woman. "It's for his own good m'lady. It ain't easy raising them up proper without more of our folk around. You don't need to make it any harder."

Daraway shook her head. "Your sheltering your boys from hazards and change may save their lives but you'll lose their souls."

"Maam," said the girl.

Daraway peered down at the girl. "Yes Cousins?"

"Someone's comin up the face."

Daraway looked at Mym. Mym looked back.

"Might it be Orc?" said Cousins.

Mym reached for the girl's hand. "Let's go find out."