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

She crashed into him and they tumbled across the floor all elbows and knees and she rolled up twohanding her longarm by the barrel like a club. They listened to each other breathing in the dark. Outside the dog began to snarl and yelp. It was getting louder. It had their scent.

She shouldered her longarm, advanced to the doorway. The great stonework of the framing whispered in her ear. "Get goin," she said.

"Better to make our stand here."

"Toss that. I'm not aimin te be killed and ate. Get."

He took the opposite side of the doorway. "I'm not leaving you."

"That's good because I'm not stayin."

She leaned against the framing to steady her aim and she waited for the first of the figures to coalesce out of the smoke. Not a woman. The longarm roared and bucked. The figure fell to the ground. The dog began to bark.

"Let's get," she said. She slung her longarm and ran into the palace. The rifleshot still rang about the cavernous antechamber. Murderholes inset along the ceiling. Cracked damask tiles showed through the ash and dust. Through into the chamber and it was dreadful dark. She held up a moment and Orc about ran her over.

"Watch it," she said.

"I can't see a thing."

She grabbed his hand. It was rough, its grip firm, palm warm against hers. "Hold on."

She ran him forward. They could hear the dog's nails scrabbling on the tiles behind them. When she half turned to look she could see the silhouette of it, small against the massive doorway. Men stood outside, all of them holding weapons. One whistled and the dog stopped short, sliding across the floor, throaty panting out its nose. It whimpered once, its eyes on its quarry. Then it yipped at them and then it skittered back.

They went on, turning this way and that through doorways and rooms innumerable. Here and there dusklight flooded an opposite wall through a high window or a hallway through a caved roof, then darkness had them again. She pressed ever on only because she'd lost track of how to get back. She ran them through dark galleries and wide atriums and a dining hall set for a hundred people, the china and silvers all covered in dust. They burst into a bedroom with a corpse still lying in the bed and the covers pulled up to its chin. A man turned at their entry shouting, "This is our place!" and they flew out of it. Finally they clambered through the collapsed wall of a cloister and back out onto the terrace in a completely new place from where they'd come onto it.

They slipped across a veneer of ice that covered the pavers and they passed by an octogonal chapel bearing two bronze doors thrice Orc's height and engraved with scenes of some foretold calamity. She hung back a moment to study the craft of these and saw that their depictions didn't capture the unfolding armageddon, that even in the contemplation of their doom men undershot the mark. She passed on to where Orc stood at the precipice of the terrace looking out over the city. She saw the rain had cleared the haze somewhat, and they could see all the way down to the harbor. It was as if the city had been built on the inside of a bowl and they now occupied the privileged position of the rim. Below them stretched countless rooftops of differing hues and shapes, gaps everywhere from those that had collapsed, or burned, or had been swept away. In the silence they could hear the distant stirring of the sea. In the dark they could see firelight scattered in windows, some dim and halfhearted imitation of the constellations that were, candlelight, lamplight, lanternlight. The light of a hearth perhaps, and there the smoke rising. She pointed.

"There's me stack," she said.

"Yeah, I see it."

"I wonder what they're cookin."

"Probably best you don't think about it."

She frowned. "We need te find Dara."

"Yeah."

"We shouldn't have let her get out ahead of us."

"I'm sorry about that."

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"It's not all on ye. She chose te go off lek that. It's just somethin she does."

Just then she heard an elongated sigh. She had the longarm in her hand, began stuffing in another charge. She could hear men talking. Hear their voices rebounding between the palatial marble and the chapel's. Orc put his hand on her arm. He looked at her. How many voices were there? Three? Four? They padded to the side of the chapel. He looked at her again. Tilted his head either way as if to ask which way they were coming around. Her eyes shifted. She nodded. That way. They crept opposite. She stepped around a facet and standing across from her at ten yards was one of the men, his pants undone, pissing steam from the ground.

She raised the longarm and put it on the man and the man stood there spreadlegged, a club hanging from his wrist on a lanyard.

"Don't ye move," she whispered.

His breath sucked in and out in the cold. He started to look back over his shoulder.

"I said don't ye move. Look here. Ye so much as breathe a word and yer dead."

He looked back at her. His eyes flicked beside her and widened as Orc appeared. He began to pull his waistband over himself.

"She said not to move," said Orc.

The man's jaw had begun to quake.

"Bring yerself here."

The man came forward, holding his pants up with one hand. A length of rope draped through the beltloops, its fraying braids burnt together from a recent trimming. His clothes hung off of him like a coat rack. His club, the only solid thing left to him, swung from his wrist as he stepped before her. Close enough now he might use it.

"Stop there," she said.

Any minute his fellows might call for him, might come after him. His eyes hepatitic, yellowed whites pooled like urine at the bottom of two black pits. Panicky yet greedily they shifted between her and Orc. Hungrily. He tugged at a red bandana worn about his neck and upon his chest was embroidered the sigil of the monarchy that was.

"Y'all see this?" he said.

"Ye call te yer friends and yer dead."

"I'm dead already. Y'all are dead already. Y'all just don't know it yet."

"Who are ye?"

"I ain't nobody."

"I mean who're ye with."

"I tried tellin y'all. We're the kingsmen now. We run this city til he gets back."

"Back from where?"

"From savin the goddamn world."

"Aye? And who told ye that?"

"He did hisself."

"I'm sure he did." She looked at him, the state of him. "He left ye te die."

"I told y'all we're dead already. Priests been sayin it for years."

"Priests say a lot of things," said Orc.

The man had been fingering up the lanyard by inches and now reached for the handle of his club.

"Ye best not," said Mym. "I'll put one through yer eye and then ye'll really be dead already."

"You a crackshot?"

"I'm not anythin."

"We could use someone handy with a rifle." The man looked at Orc. "There's a place for your pet too."

"Ye must think we're nakheaded fools."

"I don't think anythin."

"What have you got to eat?" said Orc.

"Boy we got plenty. Roasts and sweetbread and whatever you like. We got it all. Everythin left in the palace."

"Ye don't have anythin te eat," said Mym.

The man licked his lips. "We got it all." He flicked his wrist and the club jumped into his hand and he lifted it to strike. She shot him through the eye from four feet. Gore sprayed onto the chapel wall and a chunk of his skull flew off somewhere. The man crumpled instantly and lay with blood haloing about his head. The men were shouting, calling for their comrade. Mym dropped to her knee to recharge her longarm and Orc drew the saber from its leather sheath.

"We standing or running?" he said.

She could see torchlight now reflecting off of the palace's white marble. Up against the chapel as they were she had no lanes of fire. "Runnin."

"Follow me then."

They bolted opposite the torchlight and had made thirty yards before they were spotted. When she turned back she saw the fireballs dripping upward like some evil spirits loosed upon the earth. Four or five of them. How many men she couldn't say. They ran toward the edge of the terrace but they didn't know what they'd find when they got there. A sheer drop, twenty yards. The last wash of daylight was fading out west and the scattered lights of the city had mostly gone out. The torches blazed on, arcing back and forth like Thayne's metronomes. The cultists hooted and hollered as they ran like hungry children called to dinner.

"They're fixin te eat us."

"No shit."

The clack of a crossbow echoed off of the pavers. What she'd heard snap past her ear she realized was the bolt passing and falling out over the city. She looked back and she saw one of the men with his foot already through the cocking stirrup ratcheting up the next round.

She ran them hard along the terrace's edge making a gentle curve that carried on around the bowl of the city. The palatine grounds extended ahead some distance before terminating at the city wall. Darkness settled everywhere. The city dark. They cut toward the palace. Orc slipped on ice and fell and rolled and rose twenty feet behind her. She turned and knelt. Squeezed one off past his ear. A torch fell to the ground. He caught her up and they ran on. From her ammunition pouch she thumbed up her last prepared charge and she drove it home.

"Last shot," she said.

They looked back. The cultists came on. Now some hounds baying among them. A bolt had grazed Orc's calf and he wiped his hand across it and it came back bloody. They sprinted away, searching for some way back into the palace. A postern door, a broken wall, anything. They passed the wreckage of a turret shorn from its tower and smashed to pieces upon the ground. Glass shards of some shattered instrument crunching under their boots. The turret had taken part of the wall with it and into this black gap they leapt without hesitation or forethought at what might lie beyond.