NOVEL NEXT 150. A Last Stand
"Grayback," called the longhorn. "Lastborn."
Orc had kept the knife in his right hand because he couldn't feel his left. He held it loosely and nearly dropped it. Upvalley the wind sighed over the bare rock. He heard voices in it. He knew there were none. He knew what that meant.
When he slogged across his trail of blood he saw the dwarf's bootprints upon it. He tracked along that trail of his diminished life and halted for a few breaths and listened. His shirt was cold where it was bloodsoaked and his back was throbbing in time with his pulse. How it had missed his heart he had no idea. Just lucky, he thought. Or unlucky. There was a crunch come out of the murk directly ahead of him. When the longhorn spoke it was as if he was only a few feet away. "My teeth ain't made for this," he said. "Come forth, friend grayback. Your tusks are required."
Orc's hundred count ended and he took a step forward. He nearly fell over from the pain. He stepped again. He heard a snap and thought perhaps he'd broken some bone. Felt like his back. "Got it," he heard the longhorn say. "Now get you on up here and share the spoils like that black blooded orc I know you to be."
Orc saw the round shape of the huge rendering cauldron first. The bodies around it like piles of rags. He stooped and collected Booky's blade. The longhorn bore the brigadier's saber and was using its keen edge to slough muscle off what might've been a femur. Orc smelled the sour decay of him, rank on the wind. Saw where his face had been half burned away by the skyfire. Flies buzzed off and around him and landed back. Orc stepped close enough to be sure the longhorn saw him. Then he circled right thirty, forty yards and stopped. Thought about crouching but the spearhaft through him back to fore was an agony against that kind of movement. He stood as tall as he could. Stock still.
"Look what they did to you," said the longhorn. "You'd be in this pot were it not for me."
Orc watched the longhorn. Watched the cookfire shimmering off the brigadier's saber blade. A thin lancet of orange like a monstrous fang he'd wrested from the maw of some fire serpent.
"Come now. Step closer. Partake of your ancestral booty. Replace with blood the blood you have spilt."
Still Orc watched him. And he watched the haze beyond the fire and the pot for any sign of the dwarf passing by. He would stand as long as he could. Give her the longest lead possible.
The longhorn beckoned again. "Come and eat. I do not need it. The consumption of flesh does not sustain me you see. Thus shall I inherit the earth. This the reward He hath bestowed upon me. Come now and enjoy yours."
Orc spat.
"I forgot you are not tempted by flesh, even earned at such high cost." He said it with a look in his eye that suggested he had forgotten no such thing. "Tell me grayback, where have you hidden the lastborn? Does she still mourn her witch?"
Orc watched past the cauldron. The limbs and lumps bubbling up in it. Fat pooling between the roiling bubbles. He saw no movement in the haze. No movement but the ash carried off by the wind.
The longhorn shook his head, his horntips twin exaggerations of the motion. "Shame the woman didn't survive. She would test better than you. Skewered as you are with that shiv coming out of you. How might you have tasted?"
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"Why are you here?" said Orc.
"He speaks. His yoke cast off. Freed himself from himself, but for what?"
The longhorn tossed the femur back into the pot. He stood to his full height. In places his unliving skull visible through his desiccated hide. Like a hardboiled yolk showing through cracks in an eggshell. "Tell me, Orc. Tell me your good and your evil. Show me you have fulfilled the Mother's mandate and may now free us now from this eternity."
He raised Booky's blade and the pain from that simple movement darkly bespotted his vision. "I can free you."
The longhorn regarded him. "Not with that you can't." He came around the cauldron. "So I must say what I am made to. That you were spared for abetting Him. You and the lastborn. Reuniting the Creator without behest. Enrolling the Mother against the fragmentation of this world. Restoring to Him that which had been taken. Prime movements to end His imprisonment. He bid me to thank you after His fashion. That too is my reward. Are you ready?"
Orc was having a hard time focusing. "Ready for what?"
"To receive His thanks."
He thought he saw her move on from that place but it could've been anything. When he heard the clop of the longhorn's hoof he raised his head and flung out his blade. The longhorn caught the thrust between his arm and leathery flank and he pinned Orc's wrist there and stepped in to embrace him. The spearpoint sliced into the longhorn's unarmored chest, clacking across the ribs.
The longhorn spoke past his ear. "We share a path, you and I. Your lastborn is there, and He that men call redeemer. All walk it for there is no other. Mutely we stride it, exhausted and lost although it neither forks nor turns. And here, now, do our processions cross. One overtaking the other. The long lane behind us extending to eternity, the way ahead another eternity. Forever abuts forever here in our moment together, yet it lies in opposition to itself. In both directions everything that can have passed has already passed an infinite number of times. So those opposing paths, those opposing forces, are indeed selfsame. And we upon it who have been here before and will be again are selfsame. In the forever all things that can pass must pass. Thus have you been me and I you, thus has your lastborn loved you and hated you, thus has the world ended and has it begun anew."
The longhorn drew about him more tightly. Orc tried to shake free his hand but what strength he had had long poured out upon the ground. He stood only because the longhorn held him up.
"We must run our course eternally. We must act our roles without rest. Thus it is not only life that is a prison, Orc. It is existence of every kind. For even the flattest of planes is subtly curved. Even time itself. Only He who can traverse the curve can destroy it. Yet He never shall. Do you know how I know this thing?"
Orc twisted. The embrace tightened. "You're mad," he grunted.
"It is our existence that is mad, grayback. And it shall go on unceasing because it yet goes on unceasing. That is how I know He fails. Everything that can pass must have passed, yet here we have our moment again for an uncounted time. If He could end this cycle it would be ended. Yet here we are."
Suddenly Orc was falling. His knee split on the rock. His head smacked the ground and everything went black.
"It seems as though everywhere and always I encounter only myself. Perhaps the lastborn will test better. Farewell, orc called Orc. Until our next passage."
He did not hear the longhorn depart. The sky darkened. The cookfire burned out. A breeze fluttered the hair of the dead. On the ground before his eyes there was a spider creeping across the rock with her egg sack held before her like the beclouded orb of another world. She paused in front of him long enough to set down her burden and suck it dry. She went on.
It was the first living thing he'd seen in a very long time.
Sky the color of bathwater and the smell of smoke. A pressure released from his chest. The life drained out of him. By the last of daylight he felt two hard hands lift him up as if he was a cub again. What was left of his mind reached for something, for anything, and settled on an image of the brigadier. Is it not said that we who are dying become like children? And at the end we all seek the one from whom we were issued?