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

They ran themselves ragged for two days and two nights. On the morning of the third day they clambered around a lake pooling where there'd not been one before. On its far side an enormous plug of earth spanned the valley as if some god of men had lopped the summit off a nearby peak and pitched it into the valley. They stumbled about its base roving for some way up. A crack they might climb. A gulch they might surmount. The river sheeted down from on high and roared past and torrented into the lake. The mist of its passing wetted them to the bone. Downvalley the drum yet rolled.

Orc slapped his hand against the solid stone blockage. He leaned back and studied its overhang. Beside him Mym rumbled and gnarred through a closed mouth, her hand cupping her ear as if to better hear over the clamor of the waterfall.

"How much farther to the mountain?" he shouted.

Her eyes flicked to him. Droplets washed down her face. She made a motion for him to wait.

He turned and surveyed the way they'd come. The haze hung over everything. The mountaintops lost within it, their jet black flanks lurking out of it like the terrestrial shields of an advancing column of titans. The drum was getting closer.

"What'd ye say?" called Mym.

He turned back to her. "How far to the mountain?"

She shook her head.

"You don't know?"

"Everythin's torn up. This schist thinks it's settin south of the sea of suns but there's nothin south of the sea of suns but water and ice."

"We need to keep moving."

"Aye."

She trudged ahead of him back to where the others waited at the edge of the water. He watched how stiffly she negotiated the screefield shoring the lake. On the far side the bosun and Daraway were waiting for them.

The woman rolled back the sleeves of her robe. "I can try to clear it," she said.

Orc shook his head. "Save your strength."

"For what?"

He nodded downvalley and they turned and saw the dark horde of men. It stretched from the riverbank to the eastern slope of the valley. Hunger and mania drove them forth and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop them. But he could slow them.

"I'm staying," he said.

He turned to the others. The bosun who leaned heavily upon a boarding pike, his eyes deep set and dry in their sockets as if painted on. The woman who handed the elfstone off to Mym. The dwarf who pocketed their hope for the world and choked up on her longarm. To her he said, "They get to me you put one through my skull."

"Upon me life," she said. Her eyes were wide and her voice calm but that was not just mist gathered upon her face. Daraway watched her.

The bosun looked on, grim. Shivering in the wet and perhaps with nerves. "It should be me."

"You have a family."

"Aye," he said. "I'll tell them of what you done."

Orc turned back to the horde. "It's not done yet."

"Doing it ain't nothing. You've been party to it plenty."

He gave the man his musette. He told the cat to go with him and it seemed to understand for it leapt from its place in his jacket and onto the bosun's shoulders.

"God damn shivvy toes," said the bosun.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Orc smiled and watched the man begin up the eastern slope. Talus clapping underfoot one upon another. He turned to Daraway and Mym. The woman held her close.

"Go on," he said.

Mym reached out to him. She opened her mouth as if to say something but he beat her to it.

"Upon your life," he said.

She dropped her hand. She was a mess. Of all the things he would miss in his becoming, her presence was foremost in his mind. This he did not understand.

He turned back to the approaching men. Clad in the custom of the kingsmen. Tabards tattered and charred, coming nearer and nearer. Spears and pikes and cudgels and blades. How had they survived the moonstrike he did not know. He did not care. He heard Mym begin to climb. She needed to get high enough to have a clear shot. He urged her on and he stilled his breath. He held the brigadier's saber in his hand. It felt alive, eager even. How many lives ended between them?

He looked up a final time, hoping to see the sun and the sky. All was gray. The waterfall coming out of the haze as if out of nothing at all. At its brink he thought he saw the shadow of a familiar hornspread. He blinked and it was gone.

The men weren't far now. Forty yards. He saw bows lifted and arrows nocked. He took cover behind an erratic to force the kingsmen to him, but now bowman had begun to ascend the eastern slope after his friends. Orc stepped from behind the boulder and bellowed and a bowman lofted an arrow and it sank into Mym's back. She cried out. The ground lurched. Orc fell to his knees.

Daraway, ere magistrate of Seaway's End, countess of an ancient house, daughter of the king's own emissary, rose from where Mym lay. Her eyes blazed. Her hair aflame. Her hands clawed the heavens in invocation, her blackened fingers drawing an enormous sorcery in the air that wavered and whined. She stepped into it and vanished from Orc's sight.

The thaumaturgy broke free of its phantasmal anchors and began to roll downslope. Like a waterwheel loosed of its axle it spun faster and faster and a plasmic, alchemical shimmering flung off of its rotation and splattered upon the hillside. The bowman scattered before it yet it seemed to alter its course and soar over outcrops and slam down upon them and by twos and threes they caught fire and it trundled on and into the mass of kingsmen and within its wild gyration Orc saw the woman herself. Men flailed away from her and fell and hid their faces from the rampant tumult and their tarnished helmets melted upon their skulls and the plasma soaked their clothes and ignited within their mouths and ears and nostrils and anuses and those who fled slipped wherever it smeared the ground and caught fire. He had lost sight of Daraway and her conjuration but the men now surged around something and suddenly the woman was uplifted upon their pikes. All burst into blinding hellfire and an instantaneous boiling of smoke and steam.

Orc charged across the dwarfroad and cut down the stricken kingsmen with the saber. He swept around their flank and ran headlong into the smoke and laid about him with both blades. He drew a red stripe across a man's neck and pulled Booky's blade across a hamstring and blood spilled thickly to slake the avaricious pavers. Men died with every step behind him and were burned alive before him. More were coming up the road from somewhere and he saw the woman witch radiant as a newborn star, standing upon her fire. As he watched she turned red then collapsed and began to blacken and would soon not resemble a woman at all. He decapitated an immolate writhing between them and he pulled her out of the flames. Her body limp and bleeding everywhere from a dozen wounds, her beautiful face half stove in, her hair burned away. He threw her over his shoulder and stormed up the slope. Arrows fell around them and he heard her sigh in his ear as one punctured her lung. His legs trembled upon the steeps. The drum cadenced faster and a passing slug snapped overhead and the roar of a longarm came after. He glanced under his shoulder at his pursuers. They were closing the gap. Mad-eyed. Silent as the dead. All the wailing and gibbering coming from those poor souls chained to wagons at the rear of the column. Another gunshot sounded and he saw a man crumple. Another immediately took his place. They were closing the gap.

"Put me down," wheezed Daraway.

"Can't."

He felt her weak blows upon the small of his back. "Put me down," she said again.

"I'm not leaving you." He spun around and set her down on a slab of shattered talus that teetered under her. The kingsmen saw this and those out front climbed ever faster. He made himself large and clapped his saber across Booky's blade and droplets of mansblood flung off and splattered across the hillside.

He felt the woman's hands, wet as they were, clasp the back of his neck, her fingers gentle around his throat.

"What are you doing?" he said.

"Hold still."

He stood there wide eyed, coat flapping in the updraft, smoke wisping about his face. He grew suddenly cold. At his feet the broken shale began to rattle, to quake, to rise. His vision dimmed and he drooped and downslope seemed to steepen precipitously as if the hill below him had sucked in its gut. Down there the kingsmen had their hands out as if crossing a narrow bridge or had driven their pikes into the ground and leaned heavily against them. He felt as if he would fall headlong into them. He was lost of his strength. He could no longer hold his blades and they dropped from his grasp but they did not fall. He did not fall. Those hands around his neck, those searing, probing fingers held him upright. His very life a font for her imbuement. The fire of his blood channeled through her and into the upheaving stones. Ton by ton they gathered upward in a wave and they seemed to levitate forth two hundred yards in an instant and then they dropped, and she dropped, and he fell hard upon his back and the boom of it all echoed on and forever. If one listens long enough and has the gift they can yet hear its echo from that ancient past.