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

Here was a mystery. Where the dwarfroad emerged out of the smoggy mist of the gully a shipwreck of some sort laid across it. Enormous sails settled over the hull and draped into the river and dragged in the languid current. It had begun to snow again and they stood with their hands burrowed into pockets. Studying the improbability five hundred feet below from cavernous hoods.

"Looks like a ship," said Daraway.

"Aye," said Mym.

"How'd it get here?"

Mym nodded downriver. "Thataway's the span and unless ye can beat up a waterfall yer not sailin up from there. Everythin up from here te the mountain's fraught with rocks and rapids. There's not a dwarf alive lek te boat down."

"The sea tossed it up," said Orc.

"That ain't no ship of the sea," said the bosun. "Or else she's lost of her masts and spars and keel."

"So long as she's not lost of her stores."

"Toss the lead and sound it out and what in the goddamn? Ho those portholes in the offing a fathom below her waterline."

Orc started downslope.

"Careful there grayback," called Mym. "Whatever sort of tub it is it's lek te have attracted others."

"Good," he called back.

"He needs to get ahold of himself," said Daraway.

"Aye."

"We can't keep around an orc with a deathwish."

"Aye, I know. I'll talk te him."

Mym jogged down after Orc. The woman and the bosun followed. The dwarfroad ran narrowly there between the river and the slope, the ship lying lengthwise gutter to gutter. On the far side thin sheets of ice had filmed out over the river. The sails caught under them were blooming up toward the ice and then sinking again, red and orange and yellow, a sunset in fabrics and the surface across them like leaded glass.

She listened to the noise of the river slipping over and around the stones of its banks. Stones of her youth, kissed by the flumewaters of her home. Soundless snowflakes falling. Melting wherever they touched the ground. As she descended she espied portions of the deck, a railing half hidden by the sails, a tenting aft that might've been the wheel. Resting on the pavers of the dwarfroad were burlap sacks tied off on lines that had been looped over wooden pegs carved out of the gunwales. One of the sacks had burst open and spilled a pile of something upon the road. Orc had stopped at it and was now touching it.

"What is it?" she called.

"Sand."

The wreck couldn't have been there long. An iron chain hanging off a capstan bore no rust. The sails which she first took to be of cloth were actually of some sort of skin. She could find no seams nor joinings, as if they were all of a single hide off some leviathan thrice the girth of a mastodon. The bosun now stood in the gutter with his fists on his hips and his head cocked sideways. Orc had stooped to peer in a porthole, his face reflecting off of a glass window paned across it.

She stopped beside the bosun. "What do ye make of it?" she said.

"Madness," he said. "Ain't a chance it'd float on anything but calms. The timbers are old by the look of them but they ain't seen a splash of brine or kiss of barnacle."

She frowned. Tilted her head the opposite way of his. Saw it differently.

"It's an airship," she said.

The bosun turned his head to her. Turned it back to the ship. "Slay me twice," he said.

"Ye see anythin inside?" she called.

Orc now cupped his hand beside his face to shield out the daylight as it was. "No."

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She walked up to the airship and handled the sail aside. Definitely some sort of skin. A red gloom beneath. She climbed up onto a porthole and lifted the sail off of the gunwale to peer onto the deck. She pulled herself up onto the gunwale and rolled onto deck and stood up. She held up the sail and looked around. The ship's wheel where she suspected. Rolled charts strewn about the planking. Some sort of locker open but it was empty. That smelled of black powder. She unleashed her alpenstock and climbed back onto the quarterdeck. There was an untarred damp rope coiled with a flaked grappling hook tied on. All the way aft squatted a house and its cabin door open. She went inside. The cabinets were all unfastened and they were empty. A mattressed bed, blankets strewn about. Feather pillow on the floor. Gold embroidery. She went back out on deck and looked over the starboard side where the river ran past under the huge sweep of the deflated sails. The snow must have turned to rain for it now pattered on the translucent sailskin and she could see the shadows of the drops, swollen and sliding.

She climbed down off of the deck the same way she had climbed up. The others stood waiting for her. Down the dwarfroad fifty yards the burlap and hemp of another sandbag that had exploded there. She joined the others and looked at the airship.

"You didn't find a way into the hold," said Orc.

"No."

"There might be food in there."

"Aye. I'm not sure we're the first ones here. Or else the sailors ransacked everythin before leavin."

"It's not burned," said Daraway.

"Plainly."

"The skyfire should've cooked it."

She shrugged. "Yer the expert in that sort of thing."

"I wonder why it didn't."

"I don't know."

Orc stepped up and put his ear against the side of the hull. "We should try to get inside."

She looked at the nearest porthole and held both arms before her as if measuring its diameter. She took up her alpenstock and smashed its adze against the glass. It bounced right off. A slight chip, nothing more. She swung again with the pick and the glass shattered. She took off her coat and laid it across the porthole and clambered up and got her head in and then both arms. The scars of her wound a blinding pain, her frozen hand on fire and that made no sense. It was almost all she could do just to hang there. She kicked into space and humped herself forward and fell through.

Inside smelled of sour nakmilk and black coal. The light of other portholes filtered red by the overhung sail. There was a metal engine of some sort and a bin on tracks, full of coal. She tried the handle on the engine. Polished cherrywood. It wouldn't budge. There were other handles and she thought to try them also but then Orc put his face in the porthole and she lost her light.

"What's in there?" he said.

"I'm not sure. Somethin lek that machine of the armiger's."

"Any food?"

"None yet."

His face disappeared. She could hear him grumbling at the others. At least he was finally talking again. He'd barely said two words together since the tusker cut out.

The engine seemed built into the floor and into the ceiling. She edged around it. She studied its joinings. The way the metal had been rolled and sheeted. It was marvelous. Her porthole seemed a long way back. She held up her hand against its glare and saw runes imprinted into a panel. They were dwarven. She looked back into the aft of the hold. Bodies there of a kind of folk she didn't recognize. Heaped together. Rotting. She drew the back of her bad hand under her nose. A face appeared again before the porthole and all went dark again.

"Well?" said Orc.

"I'm comin out."

***

Back outside they pitched some of the sailcloth out from the hull and under this they took their day's meal. They ate the last of the oysters and the last of the meat. Outside their makeshift canopy the rain swept down in sheets that shattered upon the stone pavers and flashed upward in droplets and broke themselves again upon the ground. The questions came in a similar manner.

"Who piloted it?"

"I can't say what they were."

"Elves?"

"Not lek the two I've seen."

"You sure?"

"Yer welcome te go and look fer yerself."

"Well, how'd they come to be here?"

"I can't say that either."

The sky boomed as if cracking in two and the rain came so thickly she could no longer see the far side of the road. As she looked there she thought she saw a figure on the move. "Look there," she hissed.

The others turned but whatever it was had passed on.

"What was it?" said Daraway.

She shook her head. "I thought I saw someone."

"Did they see us?"

"I don't know. Probably wasn't anythin te begin with."

The afternoon waned and the light was sucked out of the stark world. The rain let. The edge of the sail dripped into a puddle standing on the pavers, the overgrowth from their seams like a lattice of bunds demarcating flooded fields.

"I could eat again," said Mym.

"Yeah," said Daraway.

To get past the shipwreck they'd need to duck under where its prow had sunk into the hillside. Orc squatted in that space and was now looking down at the gutter. "There's a print here," he said.

The bosun went up and looked. "Might be a horse."

Orc looked up the hillside. Black and empty. "There's no forage for such." He looked at her. "Mym?"

She went over to see. He pointed. The hard rain had ruined most of the print but she saw how it was cleft. "It's not a horse," she said.

"Yeah. I didn't think so."

She looked at him. "You know what it is?"

"I want to know what you think."

She looked at the print again. Careful to reach for it with her good hand. "It's otaur."

Orc frowned.

"Someone's coming," said Daraway.

They stood and looked at the woman. Past her. There was nothing to see but the river and the road. Then from out of the distance they heard the roll of a drum. The river chattered in the silence that followed. When the drum percussed again it was much closer. They looked at each other. There was something else too. Hundreds of deranged voices gibbering. Chanting.