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

He thought he could hear the pop of her longarm but perhaps it was just the earth settling around him. Absent the hundred-billion-ton mountain overhead, the delving's magmic underbelly had come alive. The runes moulding the wynd glowed red in their strange geometry. The ground under his feet had turned slightly uphill and now its pavers radiated heat and the thick air stifled his every breath. He could feel himself coming to the end of his strength, yet the woman he bore seemed to breathe more easily. She watched the way ahead with her one good eye. Her arms wrapped around his neck as if she was his bride.

They ran for hours or days. The bosun always a few steps ahead, following the runes or perhaps some memory of a prior passage. Orc flagged. Less and less aware of the world around him. Daraway flopped in his arms muttering abominations and necromancies whose incantations he couldn't understand yet they bisected his mind with dark claustrations: the blackest nights in Booky's pit, the smoke thrown high by Tulula's cremation, the brigadier's blood pooling in the remotest north of the deadlands. She lamented the stones and raved of a triad whose three corners were health and animus and purity. Whose restoration was the redeemer's will. Whose exertion would rebirth the kingdom. Raise up its slain subjects. Reorder the forms that oppressed her kind. Perhaps she meant those with her gift. Perhaps she meant those of her gender. She did not say.

He carried her to the wynd's ending. A vast empty chamber whose unseen ceiling was uplifted by colonnades of pillars carved in the images of dwarves, or else whose floor was downheld by those same columns. This was the black heart of the world and in that room a monstrous stone dwarf had once stood sentinel. There had sat Booky, and there he had watched the orcstone raise up the dwarf called Khaz. At the far end of the chamber the great doors to the forge of creation stood wide open. He could see the enormous anvil chained over the river of fire. The cradle upon which his life had been restored. Beside it a stonecut child lay as they had left it. The bridge spanning the forge was half gone. Collapsed into the hellfire. Only the near side remained, suspended over the gap by the bonds of its ancient mortar.

The rifleshot reported again. Closer than ever.

"Hurry," said Daraway. Her eye was open and fixed upon the anvil.

Orc trudged forward. Across the doomstone's chamber and through the doors. There the bosun had stopped.

"I ain't chancing out on that," he said.

"Watch behind us," said Orc.

Up the bridge he carried the witch. Past the scorch marks where the armiger had died. To the apex over which the anvil hung. The orcstone and manstone rested heavily upon it as if magnetically charged to its surface. The skyshard alpenstock lay between them. Beyond the anvil he could see the gap where the remainder of the bridge had fallen away. Flumewater spilled down the far bridgehead where it boiled to steam above the molten river.

Daraway raised her hand toward the anvil and he placed her down beside it. She let go of him and he suddenly saw things more clearly, more vibrantly. She had been feeding on him the whole time. Now she shuffled around the anvil like an old woman, one hand grasping feebly toward the two stones at its center. Breath rasped out of her.

He stepped past her and collected the stones.

She reached for him. "Please," she whispered.

He offered her the orcstone. She took it. The transformation was immediate. Her blackened skin flaked and crumbled away. Hair grew from her scalp and from her eyebrows. Her melted eyelid parted and blinked open. She sank to her knees. Her back against the anvil's side. She put her hand to her chest, to her hip, to the other places she'd been stabbed. "By the redeemer," she whispered.

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"Belay there," hissed the bosun. "Someone's coming."

Orc turned back toward the tremendous doorway and drew his saber.

"Oy!" called a voice.

He saw the bosun lower his knives and then he saw Mym emerge from the doomstone's chamber at a run. Dried blood on her forehead. Braid half undone and hastily retied. Longarm in hand.

"Ye get yer stones?" she said.

"Yes," said Daraway.

"Good cause there's a score of them nakfuckin kingsmen comin up and I'm out of shot."

"How long do we have?"

She knelt and unslung her pack and rolled up her longarm. "A turn of the glass."

"Get up here," said Daraway. "Give her space, Orc."

He ducked under one of the suspending chains and shifted to the far side of the anvil. The heat of the river searing up his back. Mym came up. Dark rings under her eyes. Her alpenstock borne in her hand. She looked at him and he looked back.

"Were ye worried about me?" she said.

"No."

"Liar."

He smiled. He would have drawn her close but for the anvil between them. Now she looked to Daraway.

"Take the stones," the woman was saying. There was a haggardness in her voice. She outheld the orcstone and the manstone and the elfstone and they shook in her hands. As if she could barely support their weight.

Mym laid her alpenstock upon the anvil and took up the stones.

"See how they fit?"

She turned the stones this way and that and ran her fingers upon their edges. "Aye."

"You have to recast them."

"I can't dry forge em."

"Call forth the lava."

"It won't be enough."

"I'll make sure it is."

"Can I help?" said Orc.

"No," said Daraway.

"Here they come!" called the bosun.

Mym was shaking her head but it could have been at anything. She grabbed Orc by the wrist and pulled him halfway onto the anvil. She shoved the stones in his hand. "Hold these lek this," she said.

He laid there and did as she asked. The bosun was now running up the bridge. Orc could feel it sway under the man's footfalls. Mym picked up the skyshard and held it aloft. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were moving and he watched her larynx work up and down her throat. She was stonespeaking. Then she dropped the head of the skyshard upon the anvil with a resounding clang.

The mechanism opened and molten slag and metal poured from its chamber directly overhead and spread out to encompass the crystalline orb of the forge. The heat was intolerable. Everything tinted red. He began to sweat everywhere and he tried to keep his grip steady. Mym was now fully upon the anvil. Daraway leaned in and drew her finger over the seams of the stones and it was as if all the firmanent's stars did occupy the point of her fingertip. Mym squinted against the blinding point of light and she hammered the head of the skyshard in a fashion to bind one stone to the other. "Rotate toward ye," she said and he did so. She hammered on. Any misplaced strike would have broken his hand. He watched her. Dirty faced, exhausted, determined. Beautiful. "Again." He rotated again. The bosun was there now, shouting something. Kingsmen were coming up the bridge. The king himself. At that Daraway's finger wavered and she looked up. Orc grabbed the woman's hand and directed it to the last seam. The skyshard hammered a final time. Ten thousand years after its separation the first stone was now reforged and the world could well and truly end.

The first stone slipped out of Orc's hands and hovered up to the precise center of the crystalline orb that encompassed the forge. Daraway clambered up onto the anvil to retrieve it. The orb cracked. Shards of its crystal and redhot pearls of magma plummeted down from above and levitated up from below toward the first stone as if drawn there by some hidden force. Orc rolled off of the anvil and rolled under it and Mym was there beside him and he heard the bosun suck in air as shrapnel cut through his neck and he heard Daraway scream. In that moment the kingsmen assaulted the bridge and the old mortar finally gave way and all fell toward the river of fire.