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

When she woke in their shack in the dark of her blindness she'd feel for her husband lying beside her. That night he wasn't there. She groped the bed. The night sounds seemed to press about her. The chittering scarabs, the croaking amphibia, the screech of some bird lost in the dark. She waited for his return. The sailcloth sheet cold in its dampness. She toed into her old boots and raised herself up. She looked for light through where the doorway must be but she saw none. She called his name. The walls of sound closed in. "He might've got hurt," she said to no one. She went out the door.

With her hands held out before her she wandered inland along the trails she knew. She called and she listened. She wandered farther than she ever had before. Dew off the canopy dropped upon her headscarf. No sunlight fell upon her face, no cool wind off the sea could cut the jungle. Then the ground changed underfoot. A stony hardness she didn't recognize. Her feet made no sound crossing its uniform surface. Like the fabled first woman stepping out the void of her prison before the devil set her upon earth. Broad flat pan where no dewdrops fell and no creatures sang. The sounds of life receded from her on all sides and she counted her every step, her hands reaching forth toward nothing, her fear and her wonder carrying her forward. She no longer called his name.

A thousand steps out she halted and turned a slow circle and listened hard to a silence she had not heard for seventy years. She knew then that she would never find her way back. At circle's end she saw a creature huddled on the ground before her that raised its head at her coming and stared at her with its eyes black and all seeing as the antisun. It spread its palms upon the stone as if to shove the world aside. Stooping there naked and luminescent, its mouth flat and its face placid as if it knew no feeling at all, as if her presence was neither a mystery nor a curiosity. The light that emanated from its beating heart pulsed through its veins and capillaries and silhouetted in black its bones and its bowels. The skull of a man behind its shimmering face. It did not speak, it did not rise. It watched her. She watched back, years since the last time she had seen anything, tears falling freely for she dared not wipe her eyes. If only her husband was here.

***

At first light Mym left the others where they slept and she walked out to the dwarfroad and surveyed the land ahead. Fog slid silently over the dark country and the sky flickered down in the yellows and blues and greens of the falling and exploding stars. She watched these with her brow furrowing lines beyond her years. She looked back at the camp and at the figures lying in their blankets. They were headed north to Seaway's End, thence across the sea. The elfstone was there. Without it the delving was dead.

She roused them when it was light enough to travel. Khaz knew the way and she left them to their breakfast and she struck out alone. The sky was a haze of smoke. Ash now fell unceasingly from the sky and spread the ground like a covering of gray mold. It whirled away from her footfalls and swirled after her heels. She studied the tracks of animals where they crisscrossed the dwarfroad. Looking for any cause for hope. Any trace of the prey animals that would be the first to suffer from the ashchoked stream and the befouled air. She pulled her wool scarf up over her nose. She pocketed her hands and walked the lonesome road. Sunlight thickened the sky and filtered down over the land. She knew only that she must retrieve the elfstone. To reunite and recast the first stone could save her folk. It could save the world.

Coming up on the span she espied the tracks of a greenskin. The creature had tried to obscure them but they were plain to her. She unshouldered her pack and set it in the middle of the road. From the lid she withdrew the last of the wild tubers the orc had cooked up the night before. She sat on the pack with the carbine lying flat across her knees and one by one she ate through the tubers and watched the hilltops reflected in the slow flow of the roadside stream. Out in the open she sat until she heard the stones speak behind her. Then she turned.

"Which one are you?" she said.

The greenskin crouched in the chaparral at the edge of the road. A bonebladed dagger clutched in his claw. When it spoke it sounded like metal bits shaken in a glass jar.

"That ye Jazza?"

The greenskin stood up on his spindly legs and looked uproad and then downroad. He regripped his dagger and came forward two steps and then resumed his crouching.

"Jazza's me brudder," he said.

She nodded and tossed over a tuber. He swept it up. Sniffed it. Bit into it.

"Yer big brudder's comin down forthwith," she said.

An hour later the others arrived. The greenskin stood up at their noise and when he saw the orc he ran to him. They spoke rapidfire and the greenskin had a way of animating his speech with both hands. They embraced and the greenskin walked toward the rear of their group where he nodded at the bosun and at Daraway and finally put away the dagger.

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Orc came to her. "Men have been hunting him," he said.

"Aye that's plain te see."

"He says they'll hunt us too."

"That surprise ye?"

The orc shook his head. "No," he said. "Not anymore."

They set out down the dwarfroad under the loft of the ashen sky, him taking shorter steps and her longer, each a buttress to the other in the days to come.

***

The party descended the seaway where it traversed the cliffside below the span. A few miles on they came to Seaway's End. They stopped short of it and studied the buildings packed on the rocky peninsula, the mastheads steady in the bestilled harbor. They went on.

Nobody challenged their coming. The windows all sealed up against the smoke and the ruinous skyfall. The doors barred. Daraway led them now. Down through the warehouses and the whorehouses, down past the harborfront where the ships in were all strangely quiet with sails furled and hatches battened, as if waiting for something, as if weathering a storm. But there was no wind, no rain. She led them up a street and toward the old church that was the harbormaster's hall.

A man stepped into the street before them. He wore a steel breastplate and a blue silk shirt beneath and his gloved hand held a loaded and wound crossbow. He made the salute of a kingsman and although he appeared alone Mym could see the others of his company watching through the unpaned windows above and skulking in the doorways on either side. "Here's a bunch I'd rather not see," he said.

Daraway nodded at the man. "Watchman."

"Mlady."

"What's happened to my town?"

"Nothing yet by the grace of his majesty and the almighty above, reminding mlady that it's not her town no more."

"Where is everybody?"

His eyes turned upward to the rooflines of the buildings about. "They're around, just put up where they're safe."

"You've curfewed them."

"It weren't me exactly who done it."

"Why?"

"I said to keep them safe didn't I? There's collaborators among them. Folk ready to help the orckin loosed about. Ready to help the witches what caused this calamity."

"Witches."

The man nodded and took a half step forward. "Mlady I'm to bring you in irons or else to shoot you."

Mym began to reach for her shoulder strap and the man raised his crossbow at Daraway's chest. "Don't," he said.

"What about my friends?"

"The little ones can come along. The orckin we'll take care of."

Mym glanced at Orc. He seemed to be looking up at the open windows.

"I'm afraid not," said Daraway.

"M'lady if I let you step to any of my men here would tell the top and he'd swing me off the gibbet for dereliction."

Now Daraway took a step forward. "It's Crassus, isn't it?"

The man hesitated. "Yes mlady."

She just looked at him. He began to pale.

"I can't," he said. "What you done before."

"What I did before," she repeated.

"What I do now."

"What you do now."

"The gulls'll peck out my eyeballs."

She kept looking at him. Slowly he lowered the crossbow. He looked down and away as if to study the filth in the gutter.

"Who's out today?"

The man shook his head. "Nobody's willing to risk his vessel on account of the gonewrong tides and the ill luck besides."

"I saw Stranger's berthed."

"Aye she's been setting going on a month."

"Jackal penned up aboard?"

"She's in irons too."

"Go and get her."

The man raised his eyes back. Daraway took another step forward. The man turned and eyed his fellows, inclined his head. Two went off down the street. None spoke. Mym saw Orc had edged to the far side of the street and now leaned with his back against a window, both elbows resting on the glass.

The kingsmen returned with a woman held between them. She wore a piece of cloth tied off over her head and her hair cascaded out of it in every direction. She looked at Daraway but she said nothing.

"Is Stranger set?" said Daraway.

"Bergs and bottles it's been thirty days by the platters brought and them's not. She may be lockered on the seabottom for all the sight of her I've had."

"And your crew?"

"Blightfully enjoyin their month off I expect. Drinkin up our freight under the master's nose and the remainder's done soured up if I'm not a genteel woman. Thirty days in the goddamn brig."

The man shook his head. "You know the laws against public lewdness."

The woman spat at the man's feet. She wiped her mouth on her hand and her hand on her knee. She turned to Daraway. "Ye need charterin?"

"Yes."

"Bark on down to Stranger and we'll see about it. You," she pointed a closed fist at the bosun.

"Yeah?"

"Ye good for those inkjobs?"

"Yeah."

"Then step on after. There'll be drunkards need dippin and thieves need keelin by my swingin tits."

The bosun smiled. "Lead on."

Together the woman and the bosun walked back up the street and cut the corner toward the harbor and were gone from sight.

Khaz came beside Mym. She turned at his coming.

"I'm headin back," he said.

"Aye I thought ye might."

He nodded. "Ye don't need me here as much as ye do up at the delvin."

"Aye."

"Someone's got te watch that lass."

"And someone's got te keep the mountain."

"Aye and I thank ye fer the honor of it."

She leaned in and spoke so only he could hear. "If there's any sign of the comin end ye round em all up and go deep. Talk te lastkeeper and he'll show ye the way down. Don't stop where he did. Ye just keep on delvin til there's nowhere left te delve."

"What about the delvin? The forge?"

"Better te have yer folk than yer home."

"And ye?"

"If the end beats me back then I've failed. Don't ye come lookin fer me."

He looked at her. She put her hand on his shoulder and leaned forward and kissed his cheek. He put his hand there. Then he nodded again and turned back the way they'd come.

She watched him recede. The kingsmen dispersed. The street was empty but for her and the greenskin and Orc and Daraway.

She turned to them. "Let's get," she said.