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

One time, as a lass, she tried to swim to the bottom of an alpine lake that hung off of the glacier above the vale. The water took her breath it was so cold. Yet she was young and thus believed herself invincible so she swam on. Deeper she plunged and darker it became. Pure gold sunlight refracted by a thousand waves into thin lines that shimmered across her outstretched hands, distilled to blues and greens by twenty, thirty, forty feet of depth. Still she could not see the bottom. The weight around her torso became too great and her breath burst from her in great silver bubbles. She flipped and struggled up after them. The surface so far above. She pulled as hard as she could. She thought she saw them break up there. Blue surface spotted black. Everything dimmed and she could pull no more. If it weren't for her da coming in after her she would've drowned.

She came to on the shore of a great becalmed bay. The ghoulish face of the bosun dripping cold seawater onto her cheeks. She turned and retched it out of her belly and coughed it out of her lungs. When she looked again the bosun was gone, up to his neck in the bay and paddling sideways asea. Out there the grayback one-armed toward the shore with Daraway floated up on his chest. She didn't look to be moving.

Mym rose and immediately bent, coughing and gasping once more. She knelt. Her hand stiff on the rocky shore. The stones there wholly dead to her. Silent.

When they dragged Daraway ashore Mym was still trying to get the stones to hear her. Sat on her knees with five or six arrayed before her. None answering.

"Mym," said Orc.

She held a fragment of shale to her forehead with both hands. Her eyes closed. The sacred tone sung.

"Hey Mym."

She opened her eyes. The stone made no acknowledgment. In it she saw nothing, heard nothing. Dead to her.

"Daraway's unwell."

She dropped the stone. Staggered over to where the woman lay on her side, head on her arm. Robe tore open and off her shoulders. Hair sopped. Skin tallowed. Orc was there rubbing his hands furiously over the woman's shivering body.

"Dara," said Mym.

The woman opened her eyes. "Love," she whispered.

"Ye holdin on?"

She shook too vigorously to nod. "Just cold." When she spoke her teeth clacked together.

"Can't ye warm yerself up?"

She closed her eyes again. "Fire's gone."

Mym shouldered out of her coat and tucked it around the woman's shoulders. Her skin was ice.

"Gone dead inside."

Dead. Like the stones.

Daraway opened her eyes, fixed them on a point in the blank sky. "Should've gone to the wynds first. Thought it didn't matter. Fucking know it all."

"What're ye talkin about?"

"He took it just like daddy said he would. All gifts belong to the redeemer."

"Ye mean the man in the block."

Daraway closed her eyes. "Made me into a deathbed convert." She coughed. "Goddamned banal."

"Ye aren't dyin."

The woman stopped shivering. She did not speak again.

***

It seemed fitting to give her to fire but they had nothing with which to build a pyre. In the end they wrapped her in her robe and weighted it with stones and gave her to the sea of suns. Orc and the bosun floating her out. Orc wading back to shore, watching her watch. She knew he was waiting for some sign. She didn't know how to make it. In the end she turned away. Turned toward where the peak of the white mountain had once been visible, where now there was only the wide excavation of the collision. The man in the block, Daraway's redeemer, must have dropped the moon directly on his prison. Would that she could do the same.

When she turned back they were wading up the shore. The orc twice the size of the man. The bosun grimaced and flexed his hands. She saw him ask Orc something. Orc just shook his head. Now he sat at the water's edge and pulled on his boots. Collected his musette and shouldered it on. Picked up his weapons where he'd laid them to dry. But they weren't drying. The world was too cold. Too enshadowed. Would they ever be warm again?

A wind was rising from offshore and they needed to get out of it. They walked in the dark, sightless as the old fisherman's wife who she'd once met in that place. Neither man nor orc asked how she was. There was no point to it. Orc stayed near. Close enough to keep the wind off of her back. Then she felt his hand wholly enclose hers. As if to say she was not alone.

"Don't let go," she said.

"I won't."

She wept silently and with the wind and the dark it was possible he never knew. They tottered on over the whining land until they felt a break in the wind. The lee of a boulder as big and as black as the night. She couldn't hear it and from its silence she felt both deaf and blind. They laid down beneath it and while the others slept in fits she spent all the long dark doing everything she'd ever learned to commune with the stone. In this way she busied her distraught mind.

As the sky began to lighten she heard Orc ask the bosun what he knew of the priests' religion.

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"Enough not to cross them."

"You're a believer then."

"I'm an old salt, Orc. I believe them all."

"You think that was the redeemer come out of that block."

"Aye I do."

Orc shook his head as if he couldn't believe. "Well. Maybe he'll fix the world."

"More likely he'll seek his vengeance upon it."

"I'd say he already has," said Mym.

***

She finished counting their stores. Not much left in her pack that hadn't been waterlogged. Four days of quarter rations. She crept out from under the boulder and went looking for Orc. He was sitting on the opposite side. The folio in his lap and a finger tracking words upon the page. He looked up as she came.

"Where's the bosun?" she said.

"He went off at first light. Didn't say where."

She felt him watching her. The way she looked at him. The way she looked at the ground. She felt the unasked question.

"I'm fine," she said. "What do ye have there?"

He held it open, that token of her lost love's. The pages on their way to ruin. Ink bled out everywhere. "It's hers," he said. "The one she took from the palace."

"Aye I can see that." She nodded at the open leaf. "What're ye studyin?"

He tapped his finger in the margin. "These are her notes."

"Aye."

"She didn't know what was about to happen."

"Course she didn't know."

"I mean she strung us around to reforge the first stone, but she didn't know whether it'd make any difference. Whether it'd mend the world or break it. Bring back your folk or end them. She didn't know. She acted like she did. I don't understand it. It's like she was focused on something else entirely."

"Ye know all that from some notes."

He sniffed. Folded up the folio. "I don't know anything."

"Aye."

"The way this looks I'd say that headsman's block was a prison," he said. "The first stone was the key. Fragmented for safekeeping. The prisoner's power caught up in the fragments somehow. Put there by your folk and strewn across the world. Let loose upon it."

He shook his head.

"I can't feel the mother anymore. I can't feel the land."

She glanced at the boulder against which he sat. Dead.

"He's gathered them back unto himself."

She looked down at her left hand. Dead.

He followed her gaze. "I do not think we can defeat him. I do not think he's remained upon this world to be defeated."

She looked at him with dead eyes. He looked back. "I assume you made the oath."

"No."

He nodded. "When you're ready I'll witness it."

"I can't."

"You can't."

"I can't hear the stones. They can't hear me."

He frowned. "Then he took that also."

"Aye."

He watched her. Waiting as if he knew what was coming.

"I can't kill a god," she said.

He held up the folio. "She seemed to think we could."

"Not me. I'm nothin. No folk. No stones fer listenin."

He shook his head but his eyes never left her. "You're not nothing."

"Me da used te say the stones are the souls of the dwarves. In the times fore we're flesh we live in em. When they speak te us that's our kin that were and are yet te be guidin us. Protectin us. Servin us who used te be them. And when we go back te stone then it's our turn te serve. Cut of from that I'm no dwarf at all. I'm alone. All alone."

"That's not so."

She shook her head. Her eyes watering again.

He started to rise. "Let's go find Khaz."

She looked at him through unwiped tears. "I don't want te find Khaz."

He met her eyes. "Then what do you want?"

She just kept looking at him.

"You're aggrieved," he said.

"No shit."

He didn't move. He wouldn't move. She stepped to him. He was below her, his face just above her thigh, looking up at her now as she had so often looked up at him. His eyes dark, the whites surround. She placed her hand on his cheek.

"Orc!" called the bosun.

She dropped her hand and stepped back. The man came around the boulder with an upheld fist.

"What're y'all doing?" said the bosun.

Orc looked at her. "Grieving," he said.

"Ain't time for that. Look here."

He opened his fist. In his palm lay what appeared to be eight or nine black pebbles. Not pebbles. She looked closer. Carrion flies. Dead and curled up and of a kind she hadn't seen outside the deadlands.

The bosun held them out for Orc to see.

"Where'd you find those?" he said.

"Half a mile inland. They're all over."

"You know what they are."

"Aye I goddamn do. You said the queen was ashed up and her hordes all burned down to their splintering bones."

"She was," said Orc. "They were."

Mym shook her head. "Not the otaur," she said. "I told ye he was back at the black heart."

"The black heart's days from here."

"Aye."

"That means he was here days ago."

"Aye"

"Well. There's only one thing I can think of to bring him down this way."

The bosun was shaking his head. "Belay belay," he said. "Some of these were still wiggling when I picked them up. They ain't gone days since hatching out of maggots. Hours more like."

"Then he's here already," she said.

"Or there are others," said Orc. "The longhorn might still be lurking about the black heart, prodding through the first colony."

She stared at him. He stared back. Then both of them moved at the same time, him getting up and her starting back around the boulder. She retrieved her longarm and her pack. The one tarnished and the other smelling musty. He came after her.

"You running away?"

"Not from ye."

"Alright."

The bosun appeared behind him. "Where to?" he said.

"North," she said. "Up the moonstrike."

"We've already been that way."

"Aye."

"There ain't nothing there."

She noticed Orc looking at her. She didn't need to wait for him to ask anymore. There was a monster after her and he knew it. "It's somethin she said."

"Dara?" said Orc.

She nodded. There was a monster after her and if she just kept moving she might outrun it. "She said she should've gone te the wynds first."

"Didn't we just do that?" said the bosun.

She tightened the strap of her pack and she tossed the longarm from one hand to the other. If she just kept moving. "Not the wynds of creation," she said. "The wynds of time."