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

He knew this was where the mountain ought to be. There the glacier had menaced from its lofty perch like some primeval god. There the flumewater had icicled up in a vertical pillar. Here the mountain had towered up from the vale. Mighty and immortal.

But now there was no glacier. No flume. No mountain. Just a chasmic gouge that seemed to go on forever in the haze. Slowly filling in with ash and dirty snow.

He set down the travois. Mym had fallen to her knees at the rim of the gouge. He went to her. Put his hand on her back. Looked out upon this, the scar of the spalling. He could see the shear marks come out of the south and he wondered just how far they went. He thought at least it had happened quickly but then he remembered the way the mountain had looked as it had soared across the sky to tumble forever in the void. How long might one linger on in that cold black oblivion?

He began to tell her he was sorry but through his hand he felt the rumbling of her stonespeech. He looked down and saw her hands splayed wide. Palms down as if in some heathen blessing of the land.

"What are you doing?" he said.

She didn't answer. It seemed to him as if the wind began to change. There came a clattering of rocks falling into the gouge. He leaned forward. No bottom that he could see.

He heard more rocks clapping together somewhere. Under his feet seemed to vibrate as if the world was alive, as if the ground was a veneer of wax encasing an enormous beehive. He glanced at Mym. She had withdrawn her hands and now seemed to watch and wait. The wind was guttering in the gouge and the ash and snow wisped and swirled in the air like cauldron steam. Still Mym watched and waited and now flecks of sand and of decomposed granite were whipped up and around in their thousands, in their millions. A whirl of grit spinning and spinning and Orc took a step back from the brink and it spun faster and faster and the sky seemed to spin with it in an enormous cyclone and the faster it spun the lighter became the sky above the gouge until he could see the first notes of clear azure shine through the murk. Suddenly all of it stood still. Granules of earth hanging in empty space. Frozen there contrary to wind and gravid nature. Like a fog burning off a still pond in the morning sun.

"What did you do?" he said.

"Made an ask."

These million flecks of sand and dust also seemed to vibrate. To blur in the raw sunlight now shafting down upon the gouge. The gossamer shapes they made towered as the mountain once had. In that moment he realized that was what he was seeing.

"You asked them to show you what happened," he said.

"Aye."

The mountain rendered out of levitated detritus writhed and its surface seemed to creep and flow like sand through an hourglass. A skein of living tissue stretched over a hollow center, the great mineral organ of a bleeding earth. Then, away to the south, a wall of aether did form out of debris risen up from the gouge. Out of nowhere it came and it advanced in a singular plane along the depths of the gouge like the blade of a spade plowing a furrow, or a knife dragged through fat and muscle. Uniform was its advance and when it reached the figure of the mountain both were carried off by nothing to nothing. Then the memory was over. The ask answered. The sand and dust showered to earth and did not move again.

Behind him Orc heard the bosun softly swear.

"I've never seen anything like that."

"Me neither," said Mym.

"You did that?" said the bosun.

"The stones did."

They rested in silence a while. Mym's feet dangling off the edge. She did not weep and this worried him. It was a fifty yard drop to where the gouge began to bowl. Enough to kill a dwarf. He watched her sitting there and he remembered how he felt the night the armiger had massacred his folk. Had burned them alive. The color of the flames reflected in the smoke belled out across the sky. He reached his hand to hers. She pulled away. He didn't know what to say. He watched her in silence. A faint sulphur in the air. The creak and crumble of the earth yet settling around the moonstrike.

"Who would want te live on in this world?" she said.

He looked skyward. The blue all but gone. He looked at her again. "Depends who's left for company," he said.

She turned to him. She looked at his hand, empty upon the ground.

"Mym," said a voice behind him.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

She met his eyes again. Then she got up and went to the travois.

The bosun crouched now beside him. The cat poured out of the man's shirt collar and onto the ground. It looked down into the gouge and lowered its head and sniffed the rim. It walked to Orc's outlying hand and lowered its head again and rubbed one cheek then the other across it. It flopped onto its side with its rump against his hip and began to clean itself. He laid his hand upon it and gently worked his fingers through its fur.

"What'd you come here for?" said the bosun.

"Same as you."

"I had a wife and two fledglings under that mountain."

Orc looked away. "Sorry," he said. "I just meant I came hoping to bring back what was."

"I knew they were dead. I've known it all along. They're berthed with their redeemer now. As I expect we will soon all be."

"You don't believe that."

"Looking at this I find it hard not to."

Orc watched him pick up a handful of small stones and begin to toss them one by one into the gouge. Watched them recede to nothing.

"We're all hostages in this world, Orc. The redeemer's buying our ransom piece by piece." He nodded into the gouge. "Sometimes all at once. Creation got hold of us and showed us things men were never meant for. A cold plunge at sunrise. The birth of a child. Jealous is the redeemer, so says the priests. He's got no form for swimming. He's got no wife for bearing. The priests say he knows everything but he ain't never known how to swim if he's never done it. He ain't never known a woman. Not unless the priests are all blasphemers and it's your tree who's got it square. Not unless you're the redeemer and I am too and so's this great goddamn tragedy."

He dropped another stone into the gouge. The silence thereafter profound.

The man looked at him again. "So what'd you come here for?"

"I told you."

"Aye and what's it mean to bring back what was? Bring back the camps? Bring back that old lady of yours?"

The bosun turned his head and looked back at the travois and at the dwarf kneeling there. "Seems like you're aiming to bring back something else," he said.

"You can't bring back what never was."

The bosun doled out another stone like he was counting copper. "Don't be an idiot." He watched the dwarf and the woman but when he spoke it was for Orc alone. "I don't remember where I grew up. A consequence of my time in the dirt I suspect. I remember my father. A few things. Hoisting me aloft his shoulders and showing me his boat on the moorings. Of my mother there is nothing left. Like she never was. But every man has a mother."

He looked at Orc. "I was given so many chances you'd think it was a charmed life. Til today. I got married where I grew up. Built a house too I'm told. Had a kid then another. Two boys. My old man lost his boat to the owners so I shipped out. He would've too but the king's navy didn't want him. Too old. Too drunk. A shame like that hanging over a man will drive him right out of the world. I never did see him again. I was pressed in by six thugs the day after the groupers come. Best mates I ever had. Clubbed me abaft my head. I came to in the hold of a galleon ten leagues offshore. First month in we were shipping kingsmen to the Rising Front in a bell ringer and I was pumping the bilge when a block of tackle off the mizzen drops thirty feet onto my head. Cookie cut me open and plated lead in my skull where the break was. I still have the scar."

"I've seen it."

"You want to feel it?"

"That's alright."

The bosun shrugged. "I can't remember a lick of it. Funny ain't it? You can't remember what you can't remember. They say the redeemer remembers but that ain't any good to anybody."

Orc looked over at Mym. "The stones remember," he said.

"There ain't any stones asea. When I came to I wasn't the same. That's what they all told me. I wasn't the same. Two years on four of the six were dead. Suspicious circumstances. Swept overboard upon a failed lifeline. Suicided in his berth his own sea knife harpooned through his heart. Fell from the tops with a halyard twice fast around his neck. The last of them shot by a risen arrow unloading stores. Maybe less suspicious that one, but that the one arrow contrived to hole him twice here and here."

The bosun pointed once at his neck and once at his ear.

"Three years we ran food and oil and arms and men from the new seat to the front. Three years I never saw my wife and sons. I had no likeness of them but what I carried in my memory and that was a ruin. I wasn't the same. That arrow slew my mate on the wharf at Half Harbor and I just walked away. Walked away home. I couldn't tell you the course but my feet knew it. Took me to my doorstep. I didn't remember it. Went inside, nobody home. Things about the place that must've belonged to me but weren't mine anymore. Heirlooms and such. My church clothes. Baby shoes cast in bronze. I was cut off from everything before and therefore everything that might've come after. When I found them they were living with some old man down in the Goldlands. I still had that arrow. Spliced the head of it onto a length of cane. I was ready to do it. Had everything set up for it. Then the sheriff caught up with me."

The bosun stood up from the rim. Orc watched him, saw how thin he'd become. The man let the last of the stones fall and Orc watched them speed away to nothing. Down there in that vast chasm of shattered earth he saw a face looking at him. A tiny figure of a person, white as the newfallen snow and wrapped in a blanket the same color as the rocks about them. Orc stood up. The bosun had begun to speak again but Orc was watching for the figure. There they were again.

He pointed. "Someone's there."

The bosun came over to look.

"Mym," said Orc. "Someone's there."

"What?" he heard Mym say. "Where?"

"They were there. Just went into that pit. Maybe they'll come out again."

"Oy dwarves holler dwarves of the white mountain!" called Mym.

They listened. There was nothing. Then they heard something. The roll of the drum.