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

She sat on the ground and stared at the door. At the pockmarks left there by her gunfire. Five or six of them, not quite clustered together. She couldn't shoot straight anymore. The longarm was too heavy, she was too weak. The muttering voices came constantly now. Out of her head, out of her mouth. She couldn't make them stop.

She leaned forward and stuck her fingertip into one of the indentations. If she could just bore it out. Maybe cap what was left of her black powder inside, devise a way to ignite it. The grain was so dense. She shook her head. She had heard of trees turned to stone for these were remembered as kin in the lore of her folk, but what sort of tree grew wood as hard as stone?

She sat back. The mutterings turned to a woman's laughter. Fresh as a dewdrop hanging off a pineneedle through which the harsh and ambivalent world was inverted. She knew that laughter, that voice. She unbent her aching legs and tried to stand upon them but she could not. She stared at the doorway to the kitchen and she tried not to weep. After a time that felt longer than it was Orc appeared, a heap of kelp held on his shoulder and dripping down his elbow. His other hand was dragging something along.

"What's that then?" she said.

"Nevermind this," he said.

Daraway stepped out from behind him and ambled at her like a woman made from wicker pushed along by the wind yet she nearly cried at her beauty. She tried again to rise but could not. Daraway grabbed her up and wrapped her in her arms. Mym tried to speak but found herself sobbing.

"Are you hurt?" said the woman.

"I'm fine," she managed.

"It's alright. We're together now."

She peered out from Daraway's embrace and saw Orc standing there watching them. There were others behind him but she couldn't see who.

"Ye brought somethin more te burn."

"Forget what he brought," said Daraway. "Is this the door?"

"Yes," said Orc.

"Then stand back."

***

The ashes were yet smoldering when Mym stepped through the doorway and into the larder. Inside was filled with crate upon crate of food. Salted beef, cod, pork. Dried figs. Twice-baked biscuits. Gallons of cooking oil in amphoras taller than her. Dried oats and wheat germ. Cloves of garlic strung from pegs. Several hundred pound sacks of potatoes. She held her yearning stomach in her hand. "By the livin stones," she said. She looked back through the smoke at Orc. "Get in here," she said. "You won't believe it."

"Yeah?"

"Get in here. Get in here and see."

She turned and grabbed his hand and dragged him forward. "Look," she said.

He stopped at the doorway and he just took it in.

"There're apples there, and vinegar fer picklin. Some waxed cheesewheels up there."

Daraway now stood just beyond the doorframe wrapping her blistered hands in a length of the white bandage she carried. "That's a lot of food," she said.

Orc turned. "More than you've got?"

"Much more."

Mym pointed at a high crate. "Hand me down a slab of jerky."

"Alright."

"Me too," said Daraway.

"Alright."

He pulled down three steaks and they were gone almost instantly.

Daraway's eyes shone. "We should have a proper meal."

"Aye and we will."

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"I'll get the others," said Orc, and he ducked out of the storeroom and through the kitchen.

"What others?" said Mym.

"His friends."

"They're here?"

"Some of them."

"We thought they were all dead." She looked up at the woman. "I thought you were dead."

She smiled. "Yet here I am."

Mym looked away, looked back at the trove. She shook her head. "Where were ye?" she said. "We went back te that orc camp but ye weren't there."

"I'm sorry I wasn't there. I went after Jackal. She's a pirate who only looks out for herself. When you ran after Orc I went back down to the shore to make sure she didn't leave us."

"Aye we saw her ship hangin off a cliff."

Daraway nodded. "When I got down there she was already gone. She left the bosun with a skiff and he nearly swamped it piloting it in through the surf. We wasted hours just bailing it off of the sand. I hoped you might find us there."

"We had some dealins gettin the elfstone."

"Orc told me. Do you have it?"

"Aye."

"Can I see it?"

"Sure."

She drew out the elfstone and held it before her. Daraway took it. Her bandaged fingers running over the facets. Her eyes fixed. Her brow knitted. She stared at it as if it was a divining glass. As if in it she might glimpse enough of the near future to forget the recent past. Mym watched her and knew only that the woman was her reason for being. If she still lived in the world then the world had not ended.

"Where'd ye skiff off te?"

At first she didn't answer.

"Dara?"

She looked up. "Sorry," she said. "We waited for you as long as we could before we took to the sea. The bosun drove us downcoast and what a foolish thing to do for there's no place more dangerous during storm surges. Yet there we were. The sea running high and a wind had come up and was blowing the whitecaps off the tops and straight into my lap. I told him we must tack windward, tack asea, and he turned to me and said I was welcome to dive off and swim that way, but that he wasn't going to turn us. The blow was monstrous, had the both of us standing on the gunwale, had us hanging off the shrouds to keep the skiff from capsizing. Near half the damned deck was running under at every crest and righting in every swell and it was madness. Absolute madness. The bosun is not a sane man. He'd fixed the sheets and the larboard shroud was pulling loose and half stranded and when I said we must strike he denied me. Lash it, he said. If he could drive me into the deck and set a spinnaker from my clamped jaw he'd sway me on up then and there, he said. I could've used the keel as my diving board and maybe I should've, but I've never been so scared in my life. The ocean was a demon, the sky turned hellfire. I begged him to heave us to or fro or anywhere but in that margin before the rocks alee. He just looked out into the spray and made some noise about not being no skipper of some trash barge. He laid on the tiller to keep it true and I confess I shut my eyes and held on for my life. All this in the night with the falling moon scraping the sky, but that boat, that boat was and is our only way back home. I couldn't abandon it. Then the real waves started coming in. You could see them off asea, the horizon standing up like a risen ghoul, stars winking out, and us barrelling upon the maw of the Mad like a slug fired from your rifle there. Like the slug shot out the barrel only to be caught by the wind and stuffed back in again. I'd never been so wet in my life and here came the ocean to snuff out my candle forever. But the bosun, he's called that for good reason and my ongoing life's a testimonial to it, he careened us into the slot as neatly as slipping a scamp. And all the wind of the wide ocean funneled into that canyon bestilled around my ears though it roared off the rimrocks. We were perfectly before it and our boom out perpendicular as a gallows and wide as it was never did he allow it to brush the wall of the slot. Upon horse or ship I've never gone so fast in my life. Our bowwave could've overtopped the canyon itself and it might've for I never turned to look because ahead of us I saw ourselves dashed upon the rocks a hundred times, yet a hundred times he clove around them and faster than what should be possible we were through the canyon and in the wide basin of the lake that was. There the evidence of the old orc settlement, the workings of the new one beside it, the orckin all outdoors for by then the earth had begun to tremble, rocks falling off the high walls, huts falling in on themselves. I called out to them, urged them to take to high ground. I don't know that they did. I don't know that it mattered."

"I'm sure it did. I'm sure some of em made it."

Daraway shook her head. "They didn't. The firewind blew fiercely there."

"The firewind?"

"Yes. Orc said you were inside the mother when it happened. It engulfed everything."

Mym shook her head. "I never knew."

"He didn't either."

She looked at the woman. "I never knew ye knew so much about boatin and sailin either."

"I had to learn. The good people of Seaway's End don't have much use for lubbers. They swung my predecessor from a yardarm for some landsman's ignorance that killed some folk."

"Ye never told me any of this."

"We've not seen so much of each other, love. Not with everything that's happened since the day you showed up in my town. Not with you chasing Orc to every corner of the world but one."

"I'm sorry fer that."

Daraway shook her head. "Don't be sorry for being yourself."

The woman held up the elfstone. "Besides, if you hadn't then we wouldn't have this last shard of the stone of the earth, or any of the others for that matter. If we can get it back to the black heart we may yet save the world."

"Ye think there's anyone left there?"

"Yes. You two made it. So did we. So did some of the orcs. I'm sure more did. Doesn't mean they should've. None of us should be here. The whole damned world should have flown apart."

"Aye, but it didn't."

"I can't fathom why. The strike must have glanced. There's no other way we aren't all burnt to bits or knocked into the sky or buried under the earth."

"Aye," she said. "Yet here we are."

The woman smiled and clasped Mym's hand in hers. It was warm. It was always warm. Their eyes met. "Here we are," she said.