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

He fell and then he kept on falling. He slammed into a stone floor and he lost his wind with a groan. He sat up holding his chest and then the dwarf fell upon him and his head cracked on the stones. He lay there on his back unsure of where he was or who he was with, gasping for air.

The saber was gone. He reached out like a blind man until his fingers knocked its guard and he picked it up and looked up to search the darkness for the sliver of light from where they'd fallen, running his thumb along the flat of the blade to check for damage. His mouth was full of blood. Way up there orange light flickered in from without and it cast off a stairway that ended in nothing. They must have fallen into some basement of the broken tower. Twenty feet up a torch thrust through the hole in the wall. A man's face came after. Orc flattened himself against the side of the basement and then he reached out for Mym where she lay but it was too late. The head disappeared. There came a flurry of excited voices. Orc stooped for a chunk of broken stone. When the head reappeared he hurled it and it caught the man in the chin. The torch dropped into the basement where it guttered and smoldered and dimmed. No more voices came. He sat on the floor to catch his breath. He turned his head and spat blood.

"You alright?" he said.

She didn't say anything.

He leaned forward and gently shook her. Felt her chest for her breath. He sat back. He could barely see her. He sat forward again and ran his hands over her skull, feeling for injury.

"Mym?" he said.

Her breath rattled. Still she made no reply.

Out of the dark came a moan.

He swung up the saber and lurched to his feet. He could see vague shapes in the far corner. Pale and sheening. An iron smell that he could taste. He thought it was his own blood. He reached for the torch and held it aloft as if lighting a streetlamp. The cinders caught. A gentle warmth to the light. Crouched against the far wall were people, naked and emaciated, skin streaked in ash and filth. They held up their arms against the light and he saw that none of them had hands. Their wrists ended in stumps, cauterized and shrunken back and the twin bones of the forearms stuck through.

"Mym," he said.

The people began to lower their arms and crawl toward him on their knees and elbows and he knew that they must have been lost of their feet also.

"Help us," whispered one.

"Kill me," whispered another. "Please."

He turned and prodded Mym with his boot. "Wake up," he said. He dropped the torch. Left it there. He pointed the saber at the feasted-upon and he bent and grabbed Mym's wrist with his free hand and began to drag her away.

A haggard face bereft of its cheeks loomed over the dying torch. "Please."

He dug in his heels and dragged her through to the next room. A stair in the corner. The humans crabbed after him, moaning and wallowing

"By the slaggin earth," mumbled Mym. "Let go of me."

"Get up," he said.

She rose clutching her head. Saw what was coming after. "Stones alive."

"Go." He pushed her toward the stair. She stumbled up it, stopped short. Pounded her fist against something. Slammed her shoulder. He looked past her. A plank trapdoor barred their way. She yanked around her alpenstock and began to pry at the space between the planks when they heard the bar slide off. He shouldered beside her with his saber before him. The door swung open. A familiar face looked down on them.

"Ogaz," said Orc.

The tusker held a torch in his hand. He offered his other to Mym and pulled her up. Orc next. They stood in the vault of a half plundered treasury, coinage and bullion left scattered across the stone floor as if the looters had realized its final worth. Ogaz was cut up across his chest and a crossbow bolt was lodged in his arm but he grinned at them. Then he saw what had begun to stump up the stair. He reached for the trapdoor but Orc stopped him.

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

"We need to go."

"Ogaz waiting on you."

"You know the way out."

"Yes."

Orc turned to Mym. "You good to run?"

"What out of the glacier's backside was that?"

"You know what it was." He turned to help her but she was looking out the door of the treasury and pointing and when he looked the pit of his stomach fell out. Coming into the room adjoining the treasury were a dozen armed men. He grabbed Mym by the wrist. "Run," he said.

They broke after Ogaz through the doorway and into a wide vaulted room ringed with curtains and centered by dais and throne. A great coat of arms hung on the wall. Four or five exits, one of them spewing men. A cry went up. Orc dashed forward. The throne screened him but he knew they'd seen him and that he couldn't take them all. Mym was already halfway down the back wall toward the next doorway. Ogaz was right behind him, another bolt now sticking out of his side.

"Run," said Orc.

"Since when does Orc Nizam run?"

Orc wrested the torch from the tusker's grasp. "Since now. Go."

Ogaz hissed but he went. Down the wall after Mym. Orc saw sparks spray from where the bolts ricocheted off of the stone. They would be on him in seconds. How many could he kill? How much time would that buy the others? Not enough.

He stepped from behind the throne and tomahawked the torch at the center of the mass of men. He heard the shuck of their crossbows and he bolted at a dead run. He tore at the curtain as he passed and it swept down behind him and he put out his hand and gripped the doorframe and swung into the hall after Ogaz. His left shoulder had a burning fullness to it but he didn't stop. He looked back but could see nothing. If they came to the hallway they'd have a clear shot at him running away. They couldn't miss. They would eat him piece by piece. His boot caught something as he ran and he went to ground.

He tried not to make any noise. His breath was deafening. He tilted his head. Light flared up at the entrance to the hall. He turned further, trying to see. The throne was a blinding pillar of flame, the curtains all engulfed. It was like looking at the sun back when it still occupied the sky. Light bright enough to scar a hole in your vision. A lone woman emerged out of it reeking of charred flesh. As it came it seemed to be tossing a plasmic sphere into the air and catching it again.

He got up. "Daraway," he said.

"Orc."

"We were looking for you."

"And here I am."

She was now only a few feet from him, her face starkly uplit and enshadowed by a fireball that seemed to be levitating off of her upheld palm. He regarded the apparent sorcery. He would not recoil from it. He would not.

"Where's Mym," she said.

He nodded down the corridor. "That way."

She rotated her palm around the fire and she appeared to push it forth. Down the hall it soundlessly passed. All shadows leaping away from it. A fragment of the lost sun itself.

She gestured after it. "Shall we?"

He went down the hall ahead of her.

"You've a projectile in your back," she said.

"Yeah."

"I should've come sooner."

"Where were you?"

"With the royal archive."

"I'm surprised they didn't cook him up and eat him."

"They did from the neck down."

He looked at her.

"They roasted him upon his books," she said. "But not all books burn."

She reached into the folds of her cloak and drew out some bound papers and a slender folio whose cover gleamed by the light of the fireball.

"What is it?"

She handed it to him. "A manuscript of the first dwarves."

"Made of metal?"

"Made of metal."

He nodded at the papers. "And those?"

She shuttled them back into some interior pocket of her cloak. "Some notes of mine."

He opened the folio as they walked. Ran his fingers over the etchings. "This to do with the Book of Cuts?" he said.

"Yes."

He shut it and handed it back. "It say how to rejoin the folkstones?"

"Perhaps."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"There is in them a record of what was and what has passed, just as there is in any stone anywhere. Through them one with training may visit any moment of the very near or very distant past."

"You mean traversing time."

"Metaphorically, yes. By the doctrine of uniformity we know that which happens upon this earth is of the same type and duration as that which has happened. It is one of the laws of creation."

"If you say so."

"You have yourself witnessed the dwarves exercise this principle countless times. It is their manner of stonespeech."

"Alright. What's that have to do with rejoining the folkstones?"

"Within the folkstones' strata and in the Book of Cuts' contemporary depictions there is an expression of the tesseract. Do you know what that is?"

He stopped suddenly between two closed doors. Held up his hand. "Quiet," he whispered.

The woman stopped beside him. The folio clasped in her hand, her forefinger hooked into the seam between two pages.

"You hear that?" he said.

The door on their right slammed in its frame. It slammed again as Orc readied his blade and then it burst asunder and Mym and Ogaz fell through in a cloud of splinters and dust. The tusker had his arms grappled about her and she was erupting in an unbroken stream of solemn oaths, her thumb pressed into his eye, her hand wrenching on one of the bolts still stuck out of his arm.