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

She woke with her face buried in his chest. The blanket kicked off of her feet sometime in the night. He smelled of dried sweat and there was something about that. She opened her eyes and the coarse hair of his chest trembled in the breeze. That gray skin of his always looked so cold yet it never was. She laid her cheek upon it again. Closed her eyes.

She woke to the shout of a man. She laid still. Held her breath. Perhaps it had been a dream. A nightmare.

"Did you hear that?" he whispered.

She didn't reply. She knew what her answer would mean. She couldn't face it. Not again.

The man shrieked.

He rolled away from her and she dug in her bag for the longarm and the shot pouch. Her powderhorn long thrown away. Quickly she draped the pouch around her neck and drew out a cartridge and loaded in. The action of the trigger would raise the hammer but she cocked it anyway. The subtle click under the pad of her thumb.

He was standing over her with the saber out and Booky's blade sheathed on his hip and the bosun's twin knives strapped over his tunic. "We could wait for them to come to us," he said.

"Do ye want te?"

"No."

She shouldered her bag. "Me neither."

They advanced together until the men hazed out of the ash and the vapor. Two, five, a dozen. More than that. Who knew how many. They were gathered around a rendering cauldron hauled up from who knows where in the back of a pullcart. The beast long since stewed inside its burden. A crowned man sitting in the otherwise empty cart. Clothing and a pair of boots piled on the ground next to the cauldron. A fire crackling beneath.

The crowned man saw them and perhaps mistook them for he made no challenge. He just leaned out over the edge of cart as if to better look into the cauldron. Hands grasping the rail.

"What do ye make?" she said.

"Fifteen. Sixteen."

"That their king?"

"Maybe. I wouldn't know."

"Plenty of room te just walk around."

"Yeah." He looked at her. "But why would we?"

She nodded. "Three shots left."

"Alright."

"Was hopin te save two."

"You mean for us."

"Aye. Just in case."

"Don't."

"Aye."

A bearded man, perhaps a captain of those who remained, now saw them. He raised his arm and called the names of the dead men they'd met some days before. Orc raised his hand back. The bearded man started toward them.

"Ye best get if yer goin te."

"Yeah."

She grabbed the wrist of his swordarm. "Orc?"

He turned his head to her.

"Don't die if ye can help it."

"I won't." He turned back, took four or five steps, and launched himself at the bearded man. A slash across his chest and a strike in the gut. The false edge a flash of red through the far side of the man, then withdrawn. In that claustral dusk it was hard to follow his movements. The man fell to the ground and rattled bleeding everywhere across the bare stone. Around the cauldron beyond a terrible massacre had begun and three more men already lay crumpled or contorted against the iron pot. A great shouting rose among them and Orc was there to meet them and down her iron sights she watched him beat his bottled rage upon them and they cried out at their lost limbs and holed bellies. He clove a man's skull to the level of the eyeballs and the saber would not withdraw without a boot to the face. In that moment of pause a bolo whirled from the far side of the kingsmen's camp and clacked about Orc's knees and he fell to the ground. They came at him then with spears. She put a ball through the first of them and as the second reared up with lance held high Orc's hand made a fluid motion across his chest as if in salute and the lance wavered and fell and the man clutched at a knife now stuck out of his throat. She had her second charge home and she fired it into a man aiming to split Orc's head with a woodsman's ax. Orc sawed through the bolo with Booky's blade and got it up just in time to parry a downward strike. Then another. And another. He could not stand. She had her last shot ready. They were all around him. Their king now standing tall upon the cart, clapping his hands together, licking his lips. A spearhead went through Orc's side. He chopped off its shaft. Another drove through his boot and pinned him to the ground. He made no noise. He beheaded the spearman. Another came up out his chest. Between two ribs. Stuck there. His eyes wide. Saber gone. He pulled at the man she meant to shoot and he slammed the man's face into the spearblade coming out of his chest. Now Orc bellowed. She shifted her aim to the king but she was too late. A figure loomed out of the haze and with a mighty swing swept off the king's head. The body stood there a moment, the shadow of an immense hornspread appearing to protrude from its shoulders. Then it collapsed and the longhorn was revealed. Overhead unseen stars fell to green fire and then nothing.

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Those spearmen still able turned from Orc to this new threat. They, veterans of the risen front, stooped to the cauldron and came at the longhorn with fire. He laughed, grand and terrible, and plucked the crown from the decapitated and donned it across his forehead. With his bare hand he slapped down the firebrands shocking explosions of sparks from their ends. Men reeled from his wheeling hornspread or else were spit upon it. In his opposite hand he bore the bloodied ax and they did not see it until it was too late. They began to run then. First one then another as he hacked their comrades to pieces. This he was doing as she came to Orc's side and dragged him back into the cover of the gloom. A trail of black blood smeared across the stone.

***

He was so heavy across her shoulders, so tall his toes and hands sometimes brushed the ground. The spearblade still protruded from his chest and the flat of it was cold and wet where it pressed against her cheek. She staggered as far as she could. Not far enough. She lowered to her knees to rest but could not press again to stand. She knelt there breathing. She was too weak.

"Leave me," he whispered.

"And do what?"

Carefully she leaned backward and got him to the ground. Alpenstock out, adze down, she chopped off the spear haft. She went around to his front. She could hear the kingsmen crying and dying, one by one their groans cut short. She crouched close over him and put her face where he could see.

"I have te draw it," she said.

"I'll bleed."

"Yer bleedin already."

"It'll kill me."

She looked away but he must have seen.

"Yeah, I know," he said. "Just leave it in."

"It'll turn yer blood."

"We both know I won't last that long." He placed his hand on the ground and lifted himself to sit. His teeth clenched, his eyes closed. "Just leave it."

She watched him. She knew he wouldn't accept her help. Not now.

"You see my water?"

She slung around her canteen and pulled the cap. He drank and the overflow dripped out of the corners of his mouth and ran down his chest. A marbling of blood leeched in and it dripped onto the stone.

"Can ye stand?"

He shrugged and swallowed. His eyes watered from the pain or perhaps from something else.

"It hurts to breathe," he said. She could hear the rasp in his voice. "Even if I can stand I can't run."

"Ye need te let me draw it."

Off in the distance a man yelped like a dog as he was slain.

"You should go."

"I'm not leavin ye."

He handed back the canteen. Put his hand to his chest. Fingered the spearblade there. Felt the bosun's empty knife sheath below it and the full one above it. Many times in their years together she had seen him act as if by premonition. As if he had some foreknowledge of what would come by what had just passed. Although this was so she lacked a beggar's justification for it. She had only a vague sense and she had it again in that moment as he raised his eyes and looked at her and then out into the gray slurry. He drew the knife.

"Greetings to thee, my old compatriots," called the longhorn. His voice distant out of the void, as if hailing some latecomers to the massacre.

Orc looked at her. "No magic rock this time," he said.

"No."

"Go now please."

"I won't."

"You must." He rose to a knee and pushed her and she staggered back. Even grievously wounded he was still quite strong. "You know you must."

"No."

He knelt there looking at her. She felt things she couldn't explain. Things she'd never felt before. As if her blood was molten gold. As if her heart was a forge and he the silent smith toiling for years in the oppressive heat, working the anvil, banging away, clattering away, transmuting hard black iron into shard of the sky.

"Don't make me drive you off," he said.

She shook her head. She watched him. After a while the longhorn called out again. "Come on back now," he called. "There's plenty of meat for everybody."

Orc had pressed off his knee and stood tottering. "Which way's the wynding?" he said.

She nodded the direction of the longhorn's voice as if she couldn't speak. Why couldn't she speak?

"Of course he's between us and it," said Orc. "You know what needs doing. Go and do it."

"Come with me."

"I'll give you as much time as I can."

"Orc."

"You go and just keep going no matter what."

"Orc, please."

"No matter what. Say it."

"Orc."

"Don't throw away the future on your damned dwarven honor. Don't throw away the past."

"I won't."

"Say it, Mym."

"No matter what."

"Alright. I'll take him right. You go left."

She nodded. She had so much to tell him.

"Give me the count of a hundred."

She nodded again.

"No going off half count this time."

"I won't."

"Alright. I'm going."

"Orc."

"Farewell, Stoneheart."

But her heart wasn't stone anymore.