NOVEL NEXT 138. A Crossroads
They dropped into a rough country. A high country of some ancient desolation. Roof pendants of striped hornfels vigilant above a hard-bottomed basin scraped and scarred by glaciers long retreated upslope. Runoff alpine lakes pooling flatly in quartzose cisterns recalled the scalped skullcaps of the risen horde. The remains of ancient scrub trees now cindered to twisting black confusions like the woodcarvings of a madman. Half a day they came down out of the snowbound pass and even then snow and ice still clung to the northern facets of every jagged berg where shadows used to lurk. They needed to cross this country, to find some gap out of it along its eastern escarpment beyond which the dwarfroad might run.
The rest of them were at the mercy of Ogaz and Mym. The tusker crouched and scoured the ground with his eyes and ran his fingers across the surface. The dwarf consulted the stones. Orc watched them in their esoterica, watched Ogaz occasionally turn his head to the south. If there was a footpath through that country they'd lost it somewhere above. Somewhere under the snow.
They proceeded west by the bosun's reckoning. High peaks uplifted out of the basin and whetted sharp by ice over grinding millennia. Distant thunder out of the north and a silence lulling out of the south. No wind. Only the pad of their feet on the rock.
Ahead of him Mym raised her head and immediately after he heard the crack and report of a gunshot in the distance. He looked out east. Had it come from there?
"Sounded lek a dwarven piece te me," said Mym.
He looked at her. "I thought you said dwarves don't come here."
"We don't."
***
The pass was miles behind them and the eastern rim of the basin miles ahead. He scouted out front with Ogaz now across the slabby land of scorched bristlecones and shriveled up gooseberries. The ground cambered slightly left and forward. Just enough to propel step after step. The cat nestled in the breast of his kingsman's coat. The bosun right behind him. They walked that way until they came to a snowmelt stream that slid tonguelike down the fanned out stone, down leftward which was southward. He halted them beside the watercourse and there they waited for the woman and the dwarf. The others stooped to fill their skins and he looked back the way they'd come. There they were coming out of the haze, Mym just ahead of the witch, her shoulders hunched against her pack or perhaps against burdens unseen and unspoken. Her left hand stuck in her hip pocket.
"Ready?" said Ogaz.
"We'll wait for them," said Orc.
"Always waiting. Orc saying wait so Ogaz waiting. Waiting for crossing the sea, waiting for freeing camps, waiting for Orc to be leading brothers as Nizam."
Orc nodded back at the dwarf and the woman. "They are our brothers now."
Ogaz frowned as if considering this violation of everything he was raised to believe, everything he'd learned firsthand under rule and guard of men. He looked at the stream. "Orc knows waters like this? Waters of his scaler foremothers. See pool spinning below? Ogaz goes now and jumps in and what? He sinks, disappears as if water gobbles him up. Tuskers know nothing of scaler arts. But Orc is scaler. Before he is boycub of old lady, before he is pitfighter of bet taker, he is scaler. Go now and see the flash of speckled pinkfish in pool. See them turn and wriggle in flow, backs like blades under floorboards. In blanket rolls. Go now and grab them up. Show Ogaz Orc is true scaler. Go."
"Brother," said Orc. "I know what's in your heart. We just need to get them to their mountain."
Ogaz scooped up a handful of ash off a drift and let it sift through his fingers and into the stream. He watched it run away south. "Always waiting."
Orc placed his hand on the tusker's back. "If you wish to leave you may. You don't need my allowance."
"Orc is Nizam now. Could have been Ogaz but no, Ogaz follows Orc even though Orc is nobody. No mother, no father. Just scaler cub. Orc Nizam, noname but musheater and womanlover and grayback. Orc orcslayer they call him. Woman's plaything. Ogaz begins warrior rite and Orc bids him wait. Ogaz begins freeing camps and Orc bids him wait. Ogaz of Aag, Aag of Pahad Nizam. Third grandcub he is. Campwalker. Keytaker. First tusk to bloody. What is Orc to him? Why Orc Nizam?"
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The tusker shook his head as if in answer to his own question. Now he fingered his broken tusk. "Why doesn't Orc go to camps here? Go with Ogaz now?"
"I can't."
"Why?"
"I have to go west. To the mountain."
"To save all everything with beardling magic."
"Yeah."
"Ogaz tells Orc how beardling magic not working. Not working in Madlands. Saand says so. Saand says all is poisoned."
"I remember."
"Probably no working here either."
"I have to try."
"Come try with Ogaz. Come save kin."
"I don't think there are any left to save."
"There are. Ogaz knows. Pahad tells Ogaz all about them. Blood cousins there."
Orc shook his head. "Even if those camps were real," he began. He lifted his hand to the land, to the sky. "Look at this brother. Nobody survives this."
"Ogaz and Orc do. Ogaz and Orc survive many things together. Come now and help your kin survive."
"Ogaz."
The tusker grabbed his hand. "Come now."
"I can't."
"Come little ways. Come see where water ends."
He shook his hand free. "I can't."
"Ogaz goes."
"Wait," he said. He turned to the bosun, but the man had strayed down the watercourse a ways and looked to be rooting about behind a dead tree. Orc walked over to him. His hands were black. Laid out on the ground beside him were several shelves of fungi, white as snow, fine gills running down the stubbed stems. He plucked the last one from the trunk of the tree and set it beside the others.
"What're those?" said Orc.
"Oysters."
"They safe to eat?"
The bosun rinsed his hands in the stream and then picked up one of the mushrooms and tore off a piece. He held it up to Orc. "Try it."
Orc took it. Bit into it. Spongy and earthy. "Not bad."
"There might be more sprouting up the dead trunks."
"You know this country."
The bosun wiped his hands on his legs. Began to collect up the oysters. "Not first hand."
"What's that mean?"
"It means I knew a monger who occasioned the footpath after the dwarves cut ties with the king. Took mules over it thrice a year."
"He still around?"
"She. And no, I suspect she ain't. That was her hole we sacked in for rest and recuperating. Those were her stores we ate out of."
"Do you know where this stream goes?"
"No. Where's any stream go?"
"And the footpath?"
He stuffed the oysters into his pack. "Roundabouts somewhere. If the tusker and the dwarf ain't sure then I'd say we've tacked too far south. The way the monger put it she come out of the hills onto the dwarfroad. Piloting her mules across the shallows of some river. Not this drip here. Something substantial."
The bosun sat back. "Course she could've been selling me on."
Ogaz had come upon them. "Ogaz going now," he said.
"Wait a little longer," said Orc.
"Always Orc says wait."
"Someone's out there with a longarm. We shouldn't split up until we know who it is and where they're at."
"We never find them we'll never know."
"We'll find them. Or they'll find us."
"Ogaz done waiting. Water is here, flowing south. Easy to follow. Orc comes."
Orc shook his head.
"Feels like I've seen this before," said the bosun.
"Yeah."
"He's set to go then."
"Yeah."
"You better stop him this time."
Orc turned to look at the man.
The bosun shrugged. "Seemed to me like you regretted not stopping him last time."
"I can't stop him from doing what he thinks is right."
"Ain't you his leader?"
"No."
"He thinks so."
"Because he still thinks there's a race of our kin left to lead."
Orc turned back to Ogaz. "Follow me until the day's end. I don't want you getting shot."
Ogaz looked downstream. "No more waiting," he said. "Going now. Orc is coming?"
"No."
"Then Ogaz is Nizam after all." The tusker sighed, his eyes following Mym and Daraway. "Orc spending too much time with humans. Forgetting what it means to be orc."
"What's it mean to be an orc if there are no other orcs?" he said. "What's it mean to be one of any kind. I'm the last of the scalers, brother. What it means to be scaler is what it means to be me."
Ogaz lowered his head. "He thinks too much."
He continued as if he hadn't heard though he very much had. "What it means to be tusker is what it means to be you. We are it, brother. You and me, Gobgob and Jazza, Saand. A sack of potatoes in the ground. I don't want you to die out there."
"We all die out there. Orc will never be orc until he understands this."
"You think I don't know?"
Ogaz raised his head. Squinting south.
Orc stepped forward and embraced him. "I hope you find them," he said.
He stepped back. He tried to give the tusker Booky's blade but he wouldn't take it. Without farewell Ogaz began to walk away.
The bosun called after him. He didn't stop.
"Goddamn troll," said the man. He ran out and caught him, slung around his pack and opened it. Showed him the oysters. Pointed at the tree whence he'd plucked them. Communicated with signs to watch for them. Offered his hand. Ogaz grasped it by the forearm and went on. He never looked back. By the time Mym and Daraway had come to the stream he had almost disappeared downslope.
"What's he doin?" said Mym.
"Leaving," said Orc. He watched him fade away. A marvel of courage to cut out across that alien land with naught but a few days of food on his back. Once the future and now the last Nizam of all orckin.