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

She halted on the path between the bracken morasses. He walked on a few yards before he noticed she wasn't coming.

"What is it?" he said.

"This is the place where we met her."

"Cousins?"

"Aye."

He nodded. "Mine's a bit further on."

"Down at the tower?"

"Yeah."

She turned away from the place. "I thought we'd be able te see it by now."

"Yeah. Hard to say with this haze."

She came up to him. Her skin covered in dust and ash and he supposed his was much the same. She looked like one of their stone children come out of the block. A thincoat of alabaster powder, freshly masoned. He could feel it scratching his throat. A thirst he could never quite slake.

"I hope she's alright," she said.

He coughed into a fist and he wiped on his leg the tarlike produce. "Khaz will have kept her safe."

"He better have."

She walked up to him and looked at the blanket he held about him. "Ye want we could cut a hole in its center. Put yer head through."

"That's alright."

"Give it here."

"There's no need to ruin a good blanket."

"Ye shiver any harder and ye'll break a tooth."

"We'll find something in town."

"Ye hope."

"We will."

Daytime. Impossible to say whether it was early or late. He had cracked the last of the shellfish and pulled off the rich white flesh and sucked out the water from its calcite vessel. The armor gnobbed with barnacles and hued red even in the diffuse light lay near to his hand. He sat against a milestone. Twelve to go by its reckoning.

He fell asleep somehow. Lately he had dreamed of the feminine that had always accompanied him. The nameless sow then the brigadier then Booky then the mother that lived on inside his mind. Now in his dream it took the form of Tulula. She wore her many scalps and her campwire bracelets and her face was paled with chalk and her eyes greased black like the sockets of a skull. He had always supposed he was different from other orckin because he had been raised by humans but now she told him it was because he had been raised by women. That if the brigadier had been a man she would not have failed in the deadlands. That if he was a man he would have finished what she had started. That if he were her son he would have been there to prevent her death.

He woke with a start. Mym was there. The next in a long line harkening back to his being born. She asked him if he was alright. He told her about the dream.

"Nakshit," she said. "I don't know anythin about bein a man but I know dragonhoard troves about regrettin and remonstratin. True as a tone that's what this is about. Ye need te fergive yerself."

"I'd have liked to have been by her side."

"Ye couldn't have been everywhere at once."

He nodded. "Yeah. She never told me why she left me in the pit."

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

He looked at Mym. She was looking at his foot coming out of the shoe. She looked torn up about something but he didn't know what or why.

"What do you dream about?" he said.

Now she looked at him. "Potatoes. Elkflank. A river of gravy so thick ye can walk across it."

He closed his eyes and his hand strayed to his stomach. "Yeah."

"Yer thinkin about yer mush aren't ye?"

He smiled. "Maybe."

"Yer a strange fellow, Orc."

They walked between Here First's bare foundations as daylight began its wasting. The homes and stalls and people had all been swept away and nothing was left but the tsunamic mud and scattered shipwrecks and the occasional stone with the mortar stuck off jagged. Fenceposts absent of their rails with inland facets damming up tangles of uprooted flora whose stems pointed straight out toward the sea as if in a gale. He made for the tower. Its turret tumbled down and flooded away to who knows where. At its gate they looked down a road lost of its pavers and the bones of orckin were strewn all the way to the harbor. Half buried in sediment. A thousand skulls and femurs and pelves come up like toadstools after a spring rain. But these were a kind of mirage for they saw no living thing.

He reached down and picked up a tusker's jawbone. "What happened here?"

She told the story as she had heard it from Daraway those years ago. Of the coming of men and the war that was its consequence. Of the forty day storm and the building of the road over the heaped up dead. Of the final betrayal committed upon those allies of men that were his ancestors.

He said nothing throughout. He just listened, noting the pain with which she related the tale. It wasn't her fault. Nor the fault of her folk. At the end of her telling he looked at the jawbone in his hand. He let it fall.

"Maybe the world's endin is the stones' blessin," she said.

"Maybe." His eyes shifted to the tower gate. "We better see what's in there."

"Aye."

Inside was dark and smelled of mildewed cloth and rotting wood. Light reflected down from the arrow loops. The bunk room was a chaos of mattresses and frames all jumbled against one of the walls. Through it they came to the mess and the kitchen and the door to the larder, it a heavy reinforced relic of military order and hard times. He examined the lock. She slapped the frame and studied the two inch hinge.

"I wonder what's in there," she said.

"You know what's in there."

She drew her alpenstock but he shook his head. He had his handax out and he knocked its blade against the wood and it rang right off as if it were stone.

"Maybe we'll find the key," she said.

They left the tower and made their way down to the harbor. Mixed in with the substrate of orckin bones were stars of the sea, purple needled urchins, anemones shriveled up like raisins, pink and tan corals, all manner of tiny legged stalk eyed crawfish and crayfish and shrimps and crabs and demicrabs, none of them moving, belly up, finned out. The smell of them was overpowering. Orc covered his mouth and nose with the blanket, looking like some sort of desert nomad come out of the windblasted wastes between this epoch and the next.

The harbormaster had lost its terracotta roof but somehow the whitewashed mudbrick walls had survived the oceanic displacement. He looked in as they passed. A floor of trash.

"Orc," he heard her say.

He turned from the doorway and saw. The gunmetal sky and the pewter sea slagged out of it, the foam of ash, the townfolk all logjammed against the jetty in their hundreds. Rising and falling with the shallow rollers. Returned by the sea to the place whence they'd been carried away. No carrion but what was floating between them, wings splayed and feathers black and curled.

"The folk of Here First," he said.

"Aye."

He looked out over it all. Listened to the dull thud of the surf break on the jetty, the wash of it up the rocky shore. The clack of the rocks as they were sucked over each other.

"All those people," said Mym.

"And everything else." He looked up at the haze. No gulls shrieking, no corvids mocking. No frantic, orgic clouds of midges lurking after his every step. Just a gradual darkening. It'd be night soon, and they would be cold.

They listened. Then off to the left he heard a kind of croaking. He turned and looked over the ruins. "It's a cat," he said.

"A cat?"

"Yeah."

He crouched and held out a hand. The thing that came out of the harbormaster's looked more like a drowned rodent. Gray ticked coat, tail low, one eye gone and the other too big for its face. More the frame of a cat than a cat. Cropped ear. It must have been desperate yet it sauntered obliquely, this way then that, getting the scent of him. Then his belly rumbled and it stopped short with flattened ears.

"Pay that no mind," he cooed.

Its hazel eyes stared at him then at the dwarf behind him. He stayed stock still.

"Ye goin te eat it?"

He didn't look at her. "Watch and find out."

She started to come up beside him. "Ye better not."

"You have any of that shellfish?"

"No."

"Give it to me."

"No."

He talked to the cat. The cat regarded him then her then him again.

He held back his other hand and he felt her place the shell in it. There wasn't but three bites left.

"There's more meat te the crab than yer furball there," she said.

He fished out a morsel of the sweet meat and he held it out low. "Don't you listen to her," he told the cat. "Come on now pretty lady. Be brave."

"I'm not watching this."

"Then don't."

He heard her walking away.

"Get a fire going," he said.