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

He knelt amid the empty bottles rolling around forward the mast and looked upon the steep terraces of the city. The up and down squares of the battlements. The dark chars of burnt lichen. Mortared stone. Empty iron sconces. No sound, no movement of any living thing.

"What do ye see?" said Mym.

"Nothing."

"Trade me."

He ducked back under the boom and the dwarf crawled forward.

"There's smoke there," she said.

"There's smoke everywhere."

"Aye fallin. This is risin from someplace."

He peered under the boom. "Where?"

She pointed into the gray haze that hung over everything. "That stack there. Between the warehouses."

"Yeah. I see it."

"Ye hear that Dara?" said Mym. "Someone's left cookin somethin."

He looked back at where the woman sat, red-eyed and disheveled. "I heard," she said.

"Might be some friends of yers."

Daraway shook her head though only Orc saw. "They'll be no friend of mine."

"Wonder what they're cookin."

***

They left Ogaz and the bosun and the cat with the skiff and they climbed the seawall by a stone stair to the first terrace. A broad avenue running parallel to the sea. Orc carried the saber in his fist. Daraway turned to him and Mym. "Keep up," she said.

From street to street they went, hurrying across open ground from one seaswept foundation to the next. Hunched low like thieves. Smell of roast flesh on the air. They waited below the stair to the next terrace and listened but heard nothing. They went up. Here some buildings still stood, burned out and half fallen down. They scavenged the shells, stuck their heads into doorways. Burned rags wrapping blackened bones. They found no one. Nothing to eat. They went up to the third terrace. A public house made all of stone. Inside the roof collapsed, timbers broken upon the bar. They crunched over broken glass to the storeroom, the dwarf holding her longarm in both hands. Some iron hooped kegs covered in ash. An opened crate of something, its contents already rifled. They dug through the rubble but there was nothing there to eat.

"Come on," said Daraway.

He followed the woman out. Mym behind him. He thought they must be close to the smoke they'd seen but they weren't. They went up several more terraces. The city was huge. They booted through trash and the remains of the burnt structures. Shards of pottery, bent nails, belt buckles absent their leather. It seemed only in the innermost rooms of any buildings had anything survived the skyfire, and those had mostly burned in the firestorms that raged after. The others went up the street a ways and he lifted open a door to some sort of root cellar but the rank sickliness of the dead swelled out of the dark and he let the door slam shut.

He heard the woman hiss. He looked up. She was frowning at him and drawing her thumb across her throat. Raising his hands he blew into them and eyed the sky. Eternal gray. Edging toward dark. He looked around thinking there must be something else, something they were missing. There wasn't. He made his way over to where Mym sat on a low stone wall, her elbows on her knees and the longarm leaned beside her.

"Not much left," he said.

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She shook her head. "What didn't shake down washed away. What didn't wash away burned te the ground."

"We were lucky."

She stared at him. "Were we?"

***

There wasn't much more to be found on the high terraces below the palatine grounds. Grander houses just leave grander ruins. They never did find Mym's chimney or whoever had been using it. They watched her now wander a gravel path through what must have been a garden once. Spiked iron rods fencing black splotches of ash. Figures out of marble toppled here and there reminded Orc of those guarding the delving houses. Beside him Daraway looked on in disbelief and he knew that she'd been there before.

"It's not what you expected," he said.

She shook her head. "I didn't know what to expect." She looked up the wall of the next terrace and into the haze beyond. "Perhaps the palace is much the same."

"Fair chance."

She shook her head again. They walked the path behind Mym. There was the crest of some family worked into the fencing and they stood there looking at it while Mym talked to some stones.

"Who were they?" he said.

"One of the most powerful houses in the world. Perhaps more than the king."

"You knew them."

"I did."

He regarded the crest. Partially melted. Like wax. Like meltwater frozen in rivulets and icicles. "I'm sorry for you."

She shook her head. "Don't be. They were ghouls. They warrant no grieving, especially not yours."

He looked at her. "Who were they?"

"Landowners. The whole of the green valley is theirs."

"They farm it?"

"No. They just own the land. Rent it out to families who pay for the privilege to live on it. To work it. To drink its water and breathe its air."

"I see."

"I'm sure you do," she said. She held out her hand and touched the crest. "I wish I'd been here to watch."

He stood there looking at her. Unsure what to say. She smiled slightly and clasped her hands behind her back and strolled up the path toward Mym. He looked once more at the crest then he followed after.

Mym stood at their coming.

"Learn anything?" he said.

"Nothin new."

"Night's coming. We should get back to the boat."

"The palace first," said Daraway.

As the woman padded on he put his hand on Mym's shoulder. "Wait," he said.

Mym watched him as he watched Daraway recede. Then he turned to her.

"Something's not right," he said.

She held out her hands, palms skyward. "None of this is."

"I mean with her."

Now Mym looked after her. Together they watched her process up the stairs up to the palatine grounds and as she passed under the archway and faded into the gray murk she raised her arms like some specter of the dead greeting katabasis.

"Get gettin," she said. "We shouldn't split up."

"Will you talk to her?"

"She's not been much fer it since Seaway's End."

"Will you try?"

"Aye."

"Alright."

They hurried up the stairs. The tiled risers made some sort of mosaic under the settled ash. He could not tell what it was supposed to be, but he noted the other footprints traced across them. They came to the archway at the top of the stair and here they saw their first whole and unburnt bodies. Five of them curtained the path, strung up by their ankles in the hollow of the arch. Hands bound behind their backs. Necks opened in the fashion of the celebrated martyrs. A child among them.

"We should get back down to the boat," he said again.

"Aye."

Through the archway and into the grounds. Cold rain pattering up the pavers. No other noise, nor any sign of the woman. Or of anyone else. He called her name.

"Quiet," hissed Mym.

It was too late. Something bayed out of the gloom on the left. His instinct was to go toward it but she dragged him away.

"Someone's out there," he said.

"Aye and now ye've set em te comin this way."

"What if they have the witch?"

"She's not dumb enough te get herself caught. Come on now. We need te be gettin."

He had the saber in his hand. He looked whence the sound had come. Movement there.

They rose out of the haze swiveling their heads from side to side and their mongrel pulling against a leather lead. Some of them wore masks. One an iron jousting greathelm with a red cross painted on. Bloodstained tunics. Stealing obliquely forward with swords in their hands, cudgels and torches. Dead silent.

"Get goin," she whispered. "Get on."

She dropped to a knee with her longarm shouldered. He loped five or six steps, enough he could see her but couldn't see them through the rain and the ash. He sheathed up his saber, watched the muzzle of her longarm track from right to left. Watched it lower. She scrambled up and pushed him on. "We got te run," she said. "Get goin and don't look back."

He tore across the damp pavers. Mym was muttering and cursing and trying not to cough. He slowed. He looked back. The shadows darkening, the torches flickering and flaring like sheet lightning. The dwarf spilled across the ground, her weapon clattering. He pulled her up.

"Get yer arse goin," she said.

He could see some structure through the haze and he made for it. It rose up and up beyond measure, the largest building he'd ever seen outside the old capital, towers and spires and buttresses crumbled, roof caved, two enormous doors hanging off hinges as big around as old growth trees, and it was rising still when he slid through their gap and into an inner dark.

This was the palace of the kings of men.