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

He stood on the quarterdeck, tilting and shifting in the night. The open sea a phosphorescent illumination. Another meteor fired the sky and plummeted astern to the western horizon and all the shadows of the mizzen and the rigging and the sails did blacken in the sudden light in chaotic array like a colony of bats swarming about them and their shadows shot away longer and longer and they faded into the night, the arterial foam of the water the last to lose that celestial fire. His eyes adjusted back to the dark. Mym was holding Jackal's brass telescope and she pointed it at the sky and amid the blackness of her upturned face the moonlight lensing through the tube spotlit her eye. A single blue orb gleaming earthlike in the void.

"What do you see?" he said.

"Could be anythin," she said.

"It's not anything," said Daraway.

"That doesn't mean it's somethin."

He held out his open hand. "Let me see."

"Just a minute."

She twisted the aperture and the coin of light on her eye deformed oblong and back to a circle.

"You're not usin it right," grumbled Jackal.

Mym held it away from her face and regarded it. Then she shrugged and passed it to Orc. "Good luck with it."

He hefted it and began to put it to his eye.

"Extend the focal length," said Daraway.

"What?"

"Push it all the way out."

He did. He put his eye to the glass and he pointed it here and there searching the black for the moon. A star or two streaked past in the tube.

"Ye see anythin?" said Mym.

"Not yet."

"It ain't that hard," said Jackal.

He pulled his head away and then put it back. With both eyes open he aimed as best he could as the stern of the ship crested a swell. A flash of bright blue blinded him momentarily and then it slipped away. He closed his off eye and pointed the glass where the moon had flown off to. There it was. He twisted the brass as Mym had done and he squinted against the glare. It seemed almost as bright as the sun.

"Give it here and I'll show ye," said Jackal.

"I got it," he said.

"What do ye see?" said Mym.

"Isn't there supposed to be a man in it?"

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"That's just somethin humans say."

"Well its all busted up. Holes all over the place."

"They ain't new," said Jackal.

"Then what am I looking for?"

"Do you see the fissures?" said Daraway.

"I don't know."

"They're concentric. Like ripples widening across a pond."

"Out from that hot spot?" said Mym.

"Yes."

"Aye I saw em."

Orc had both of his hands around the brass tube. He had learned a great many things coming up on the brigadier's estate. The motion of the celestial orbs was not one of them.

He lowered the tube and looked at the pale figures of the others. "What's it mean?" he said. "The one run into the other?"

"I don't see how that would be possible," said Daraway.

"They cross paths every week."

"They only appear to. Even at their closest there's a vast distance between them."

"How far?" said the greenskin.

"Not far enough," said Orc.

"They didn't collide," said Daraway.

Jackal took back the instrument. "I been watchin every night since we weighed and there's somethin else ye should know about that there cheesewheel."

"What?" said Daraway.

"It's gettin bigger."

Orc looked at the women. "What's that mean?" he said.

"You just think on it grayback."

"She means it's getting closer," said Daraway.

"That doesn't line up. How can it get closer?"

"Because it's fallin," said Mym.

"The sky?"

"The moon."

"One's part of the other."

"Not how you think it is."

He shrugged. "Alright. So what happens when it lands?"

"Depends how big it winds up bein," said Jackal.

He looked at Daraway.

"What happens?"

"I don't know."

"It don't look big," said the greenskin.

"It's fairly far away."

The greenskin lifted his claw and separated his finger and thumb as if to hold the moon between them. "Don't look like it. Little me could reach up and grab it."

"It falls to earth and you'll be grabbin somethin," said Jackal.

"It would appear that way if it was large enough," said Daraway.

"How big is it going to get?" said Orc.

"No one knows for sure," she said.

"Bigger than this tub?" said the greenskin.

Daraway turned to a whale oil lantern built into the gunwale and the wick flared up and burned steadily and the five of them were caught in its throw.

"Big as me mountain?" said Mym.

Daraway shook her head. "Quite a bit larger I'm afraid."

"How can ye know that?"

"Because the first Donnas dispatched a ship to measure them."

"A skyship?" said Mym.

Jackal collapsed the telescope. "Hasn't been one of them in centuries."

"Not a skyship. A seaship. The Badger."

"Never heard of it."

"There's a reason for that."

"Ye gonna tell us?"

"She was captained by a man called Serniccupo."

"The heretic," said Orc.

Daraway nodded. "He followed the polestar for two thousand miles out of the old capital and at the witching hour of the autumnal equinox he took his reading of the distances between the stars and the moons, both of them, and the right ascension of them, and at the same hour on the same night the royal observatory made the same measurements from the palatine grounds. When he returned to the observatory he compared the differences and from them he apparently adjudged their sizes and their height."

"Alright. So how big are they?"

"I don't know."

"But ye just said yer king had em measured."

"That king had Serniccupo staked and immolated the dawn after he got back."

"Then how do ye know they're bigger than me mountain?"

"Because canon says they're smaller."

The wind had begun to change and from away forward came the calls of the bosun running the night watch ragged. Orc looked that way. With only one moon still left in the sky its light didn't seem so bright. He gazed up. Lunar remnants streaked out of existence like sparks thrown from a fire set against the night. The last moon set among them. Perhaps it did seem bigger.

"How big do you think it is?" said Orc.

He watched the woman consider her answer. The way she dropped her chin, her eyes cast down at the deck, her arms crossing her chest beneath the cloak she wore. She looked like a philosopher herself, cast in bronze by the lantern's glow. She shook her head slightly. She did not raise her eyes. "I think we're about to find out."