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

He spotted the bosun waving at them from the stern of the boat, an oar in his hand like an extension of his arm. The man had already cast off and the uncleated mainsail luffed before the wind. He was shouting and he was pointing and calling at them to hurry.

Then there came the report, muted as it was rolling across the water. Orc heard the grunt behind him and he half turned and saw Mym crumple. The witch shrieked and slid on her knees to Mym's side. He bounded back to them and scooped up the dwarf and carried her in both arms, blood down her chest, more sheeting down his hand from a hole in her back. Daraway was shouting, the bosun was shouting. Orc couldn't tell if she was breathing. Her head lolled against his shoulder. His shoulder ached as he ran. The rain clapped down.

Ogaz took her from him and laid her in the boat. The cat scampered forward and hid amid the halfempty crates stowed under the mast thwart. Puddles on the sternsheets. Orc stepped in after and turned to help Daraway but she was already midleap. Another gunshot cracked and splinters exploded off of the boom and showered the sea.

"Set you down and lock in your oars there," said the bosun. "Don't look at them mlady look to your oar. Lock it in. Like this. Now make ready to row by my counting. Make ready."

The mainsail heaved around and the leeward gunwale dropped away. Orc grabbed the thwart between his legs to keep from tumbling sideways into the water. They were moving forward, faster, faster.

"I said make ready grayback."

The bosun began to pound his fist against the deck in a rhythmic manner.

"Now together you must pull, lopsided though we be. Pull together. Freeze your spines and skewer a hinge athwart your hips mdogs and lady. Pull as I say to the drum. Don't look at them I say. Shut your eyes else cast them off. Both hands to your oars excepting you who pluck out the offenders. But save them for later. Do you hear? Seal up your lids but open your ears. Listen. Easy there mlady. Heed the pace I set you."

The occasional potshot now sounded and the bosun must have smelled something of it for he said, "Whatever you smell may it be of the friction between palm and wood. Smell the blisters coming up. Pull now. You have no noses nor tongues nor eyes. You need only listen. Pull. Listen and pull. Pull to break your back and burst your heart. Pull to taste your blood and to save your lives."

The bow threw a white whale tail that spread wide behind them in the dark water like a skein of fowl traversing a moonlit sky. Orc heard the oarlock forward of him creak and stay and he heard the woman panting and whispering with each expelled breath. Words of encouragement and of rage. He turned his head but could see little of Mym. The side of her face, the hand limp on the chest. Skin pallid, braid dewy with spray off of the ocean.

"Pull on, pull on. Mlady must pull now. Pull now or meet thy maker. Bite your tongue in two is all I need. Pulverize your bescarred palms."

The gunfire had ceased and Orc chanced a look past where the bosun pounded the transom and worked the tiller. Upon the vessels in pursuit men were then loosing arrows high into the sky and the first of these sank two inches into the deckplanks between Ogaz's feet. The tusker flinched and jumped back as if a viper had dropped in his lap. His oar flopped and the blade caught in the tearing sea and it ran out the lock until the grip slammed home and it dragged behind like the fin of a wounded whale.

"Set yourself down and don't you stop pulling until you pull this boat apart," cried the bosun. "Recover your charge man. Break your back."

Another flight of arrows tore through the sail and clattered forward the mast. He heard the whipcord snap of one severing the leeward shroud and he saw the bosun's eye track its swinging and writhing in the breeze. "Secure that mlady. Secure that. Know you a double fisherman? A flat overhand would do. Tie it off, tie it off or else we can't change tack. Tie it off. And don't you stop pulling."

They now tore into the current off the river's estuary and the boat shifted again momentarily. Blood sopped suddenly around Orc's boots. Again he looked at Mym.

"Fair effort monsters and lady. Fair effort but don't you be stopping now."

The bosun brought the mainsail close by and between it and the rowing and the right shape of the hull they made headway against those rude rafts that hunted them. Finally he cleated the mainsheet and set the tiller and crawled forward, between Orc and Ogaz, and from Mym's body he unslung her longarm and checked it. He got among her stores and collected a pouch of cartridges and loaded one and went back to the transom. He swiveled there and aimed the weapon out over the sea and waited. Plunging and rearing in the stern he waited with the barrel like some compass needle pointing true north upon its prey. He squeezed off the trigger and the weapon roared its bottled rage and out across the water a certain of the men fell from his station and the lead ship suddenly swerved alee, fouling the pursuit of the others. The bosun crawled forward again and replaced the longarm and patted the dwarf's flaccid cheek with his hand. "Thank ye, beauty," he said.

***

The wind rolled the sea up into great swells like dune drifts. Their little boat with its three peg legs clambered up them like some mutilated insect and slid down the far side into their shade from the slashing rain. Seawater surged and sucked upon the hull as it passed down and then up again to perch momentarily upon the axehead crest of the next wave, everything turning upon an axis, masthead trebucheting over, all falling profoundly down in a rush and roar, cleaving of a tissue more fragile than those encasing the terrestrial creatures who ventured into that aquascape. The one of them still lying upon the bottom. A oilskin slicker thrown across her. Her blood stymied. Her breathing the rasp of a metal file. Each swing of the mast a pendulum counting down her doom.

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"You can ship your oars there lubbers. Ain't nothing after us now but weather and wind, and you'll be paying for that effort with a pound of flesh each and us with only two pounds to spare."

Orc turned from the oar to check on Mym and saw Daraway already huddled over her.

"How is she?"

"The shot went through clean." She shook her head. "I can't tell anymore than that."

He opened the flap of his musette and drew out the malachite Mym had once used upon him. He offered it to the woman. "Would this help?"

Daraway looked at the outheld stone and then she looked at Orc as if he had been the one that pulled the trigger. "No," she said. "The elfstone does the same thing a thousandfold better."

He lowered the stone. "I didn't know."

"How could you? You're a killer raised by killers."

She leaned over to address the bosun. "You. Is there some kit aboard for darning sail?"

"Aye."

"I'll take the needle and thread."

"Can I help?" said Orc.

"You can pass up what I asked for."

He turned on the thwart and the bosun placed in his hand a bundle wrapped in waxed canvas. He turned back and passed it off to the woman.

"Now what?" he said.

"Now you be quiet."

He frowned. He had his hands on his knees and he was thinking he might hold the oilskin slicker above Mym when he felt Ogaz's hand on his arm. "Hold on," he said. He watched the woman produce the elfstone from her cloak and strip Mym to the waist. She hovered over her and the rain pattered her hood and her shoulders and runneled down and down. She passed the elfstone across the exit wound above Mym's breast and then pressed against her shoulder enough to reveal the entry wound and this was more grievous. The holes seemed unaffected by the stone. That on her back had begun to bleed again from somewhere deep inside.

"Don't shift her around so much," he said.

Daraway ignored him. She had the needle out and threaded. It plunged through the skin, back and forth, impelled by conviction if not practice. Then she was biting the thread off, holding the needle in her mouth, tying off the suture. Half done. Blood seeped across the deck.

He did not ask to help. He reached forward and took Mym by her naked shoulder, the collarbone against his thumb. Her skin so soft, so cold. He felt how she had begun to tremble, she who had once kept him warm. Carefully, carefully he rotated her up and over so Daraway had the appropriate angle. There he held her, his head close to hers, his eyes on the woman's hands. Then she was biting and tying again and he thought it was finished. He whispered in the ear. He stroked the hair.

Suddenly Daraway pressed her fingertips against the suture and there was a flash and the smell of burnt skin. Mym shuddered and before Orc could say anything the woman had reached around and cauterized the other wound and Mym groaned. A knife in his heart. The melted skin like candle wax.

"Lower her."

Gently he did as he was bid. Daraway brought up the shirt collar and replaced the slicker. Mym still shivered beneath it.

Ogaz poked him again.

"What is it," said Orc.

The tusker pointed at his shoulder. The three bolts stuck in it.

Orc fished up the malachite again. "Alright," he said. "Hold still."

***

They had drifted by current and wind back in sight of shore. The gloom of ash hung over everything. Cliffsides loomed out of it, their strata laid bare and blackened by the atmospheric incineration, inverse shadows spiderwebbed like mineral veins across their charcoal faces, the afterimages of foliage once clung to their desolate sides. To Orc these monoliths were indistinguishable from each other yet the bosun seemed to wayfind by them. Finally when a particular one like any other loomed out before them the bosun put the boat in irons and said, "You get anything to eat?"

"No," said Orc.

"You get anything but a slug of lead and them shafts of steel?"

Orc nodded at Daraway. "She brought back something."

The woman looked coldly at Orc then she shifted her gaze to the bosun.

The bosun looked back. "Can I eat it?"

"No," she said.

"Can I drink it?"

"No."

Orc moved forward to the mast thwarts and poured the rainwater out of the empty crates into an amphora. Turbid with ash pulled out of the sky on its long fall to earth. The cat nuzzled her cheek against his ankle, one side then the other. He reached down and stroked her face and he looked back to where Mym slept. The slicker pulled all the way up to her forehead. Daraway hunched over her like a vulture.

Back at the transom the bosun spat over the side. "Where to next?" he said.

"The sea of suns," said Daraway.

"Like hell."

"The span has fallen, so Mym believes. The Seaway's out above the End and probably out in a dozen other places. What's left but the seven passes?"

"I ain't never heard of no seven passes but I can tell you our food won't last over one of em if it means routing through the goddamn sea of suns."

"There's no other way into dwarfdom."

"The hell there isn't."

"You know of another?"

"Aye, more than one. And they ain't got us beating two weeks up the channel and floundering the doldrums for three more."

"You're lying."

"I lockered my wife and kid under that mountain, woman. I ain't lying to get us anywhere but there." He nodded at Orc. "Old grayback there can attest true the path we took into the mountain's heart."

Orc nodded. "A lava tube off the dwarfroad."

Daraway shook her head. "Out of reach without the span."

"There's others. Ways secreted from the likes of the king's magisters and harbormasters. Inboard grottos and outboard anchordrops down the Stormbird Coast."

"Smugglers' dens and pirates' ports."

"Might be."

"What's a navy man know of those?"

"I wasn't always a navy man." He turned to Orc. "There's brigantine holds' worth of booty spoiling and no one left to aweigh it. Caches of pork and honey, molasses liquor and sacks of flour taller than a man. We'll need them to make the mountain."

Orc tried to remember the brigadier's maps of the world. "Will there be a way to get to the delving?"

"Aye." The bosun hauled up on the sheets as if a decision had already been made. "And shorter by weeks than crossing the sea of suns."

"This sounds too good to be true," said Daraway.

Orc looked at her. "What choice do we have?"