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

She hauled him on the travois he'd fashioned and she counted on the stones not to betray their trace. Occasionally she halted to catch her breath and allow her calves to quit their trembling, to stand and look out over the darkly broken land. Like walking down a worldeater's gullet. The haze had begun to rise somewhat, its ceiling now thickening a hundred or so feet above the earth. You could almost see where you were headed. The longhorn was out there somewhere. His nose scenting the wind, his eyes scanning the ground. Of this she was certain.

Orc never stirred in the litter. Sometimes she wasn't sure if he still breathed. She was desperate to check on him but the scrape of the travois against the rock was enough to rouse the dead from hell. Enough to bring their pursuer upon them at any moment. She had to go on. The travois was so loaded the frame bent and creaked under the orc's weight. It was hard to pull. She'd made a kind of harness out of a leather strap and she'd looped it across her upper chest. She hooked her hands over it as if she was a draft nak heaving forth a block of stone. A granite block from which to carve her daughter to be. Who never was. She drove her body against this and her seizing joints spasmed arthritically. The pain was intolerable but she couldn't indulge it. The scrape resounded in that suffocating silence and she listened for the inevitable tread of the longhorn's hoof.

The bottom of the gouge went on straight without deviation. Layers of crumbling substrate underfoot. The lead sky darkening. She halted. Silence. She needed to rest. She threw her blanket over Orc and pulled it up to his chin. Her hand paused on his cheek. This was the matter with her.

She woke in the night with the faint illumination of something settled behind the carbonized sky. Some backlighting. The stars perhaps. She turned her head and the popping and the cracking of it. As if all her fascia had turned to gravel. A hint of sulphur on the breeze.

She saw two convex reflections in the dark like the afterimage of snuffed lamps. His open eyes. "Yer awake," she said.

The twin lanterns seemed to waver and disappear and reappear. She imagined he was looking at her.

"Don't worry," she said. "I won't leave ye."

Then she could not see them anymore.

She got up and checked on him. His forehead too cold, his breathing too fast. Under her finger the pulse at his neck was as rapid as she'd ever felt it. She didn't know what to do. She walked a few feet out. Gathered herself. Looked out into the murk. The concave of the gouge bowling the sedimentary sky, collector and compressor of slatelike air. A smell of rain somewhere off in the distance. A rumbling like the wizened glaciers that had once processed down slopes now blasted into the lampblack void. Did they grind on in oblivion? Her da and Thayne furiously working the exhausted forge? Frictively rubbing a slick of water from flume ice? Stoning up in the outer dark? Perhaps all meteorites are dwarves now fallen to earth. All returning home.

Come morning he was awake again. She made him drink from her canteen and he drank it dry. She drew the slabs of stewed meat out of the shirt in which she'd wrapped them. She did not say where she'd got them and he was too weak to ask. His mind too addled. She fed them to him one at a time and he ate them. "I wasn't going to eat him," he said after the third portion. She didn't answer. He turned his head away in the travois. She thought she could tell him but he was so shattered already. What had Daraway said? Orcs were fatalism and guts and bitter ends. No. She couldn't let that happen. He let out a ragged breath and she leaned in close as if to make sure of subsequent inhalation. "I wasn't going to eat him."

***

She couldn't rest. She didn't have the food to. Would the longhorn rest? She pulled him on, slumped and exhausted. If she could just get them to the wynding. Get them to Khaz. He'd have food. He was alive, right? He'd be dead already if he didn't have some supply. Something to share. She just needed to get them to the wynding.

Orc slept all day. He only woke to ask for water but they were dry of it. He needed it to replace the blood he'd let. But nothing yet flowed in the bottom of the gouge. No springs jetted from its walls. None of those madland cacti whose marrow for sucking. Getting toward night she could smell a vague mustyness on this wind. Rain. Perhaps imagined. She looked up as if she might glimpse the rim of the spalling but there was only the haze. She set down the travois. She crouched beside him. Laid her palm on his forehead. Frowned at the earth. Looked up into the haze again. What chance did she have?

She looked upon either wall of the gouge. West lay tumbledown mountains to the dead ocean. East, the vale, the dwarfroad, the way they'd come. She dragged him left to the western wall. Laid him down there and stacked on an extra blanket. Took up her alpenstock and placed her longarm beside him.

"Anyone comes ye've got one shot," she said.

He didn't wake.

"More than one comes, ye know where to point it."

She took the canteen out of her pack and arranged the pack to block the wind upon him. There were a few fallen rocks there and she stacked these around him in a low screen. Those labors had her breathing and she had to sit a moment after. She walked twenty paces off and looked at him lying there in the evening light. She shook her head. If the longhorn came for him there'd be no hiding.

"Don't ye waste anymore time," she murmured.

She started up the western wall. It was gravely steep and she had to place each hand and boot carefully and she tried not to worry about descending back in the dark that was coming. She needed to focus. She tried not to worry about him. All but one of the fires had gone out. If his went too then what else would she have. She tried not to worry.

She rested between each step for there was no other way for her to climb. Surmounting the rim she looked back down the way she'd come. She was back in the haze of displaced planet and vaporized moon and she couldn't see the bottom of the gouge. Trudging back and forth she stacked five or six skull-sized stones into a low cairn to mark her way back. Then she set forth into the murk.

She sought the low points. The treewells. The dead streambeds. Everything covered in ash. Great ruptures rivened the land and over these she placed her ear and thought she could hear running water. But no way to descend into their chasmic dark. Not if she wanted to climb out again. She wandered longer than she intended. Night had fallen and the period between the invisible sunset and the absolute dark was shorter than it had ever been before the cataclysm. She couldn't go back with an empty canteen. She cast about for some implement to tie off the canteen, to lower it into one of the great fractures in the land. A long strand of tree fiber. An old climbing rope. Of course there was nothing.

She felt a cold drop on her cheek. She looked skyward but saw nothing for the headman's face always lies behind hood and mask. A second drop struck her and she flinched from it. A third. She turned around and began to make her way back. It was raining hard now, and she was running. Stumbling in the dark over the husks of burnt trees and debris. She'd left him in the open. It began to pour.

By the time she made it down the wall the rain had let into a constant mist and the land about spoke in the manifold voices of water. He was half off the travois, shivering violently. Longarm tossed aside. Eyes rolling, head rocking back and forth.

"I'm here," she said. She could hear the stream forming and rising down at the bottom of the gouge, the thunder of watercourses cascading off cliffs that hadn't existed in seasons past. She cast off the rainsoaked blanket. His clothes were wet and cold. She bit her lip.

"I'm sorry," he said.

She looked at him, unsure he'd said it. "Ye didn't do anythin wrong."

He didn't say any more. She peeled off his coat. His shirt was soaked through. There the holes from where the spear had cut through, big enough to stick a hand in. She couldn't get it over his shoulders. With the adze of her alpenstock she cut it off of him. She tried to get him to talk to her. She swept her hands over his naked skin and they were like ice from the long downclimb. The rain was gaining again. She threw her coat over him and then eased him off of the travois. She stacked some rockfall on a low ledge of the wall and pinned one end of the blanket under it. The other end she tensioned up with the frame of the travois. She ducked under the makeshift bivouac and continued to dry him with her hands. Them running over his many scars. The late wounds of the spear, deeply purpled to an indigo and swollen against the gut she'd stitched through. The long laddered track down his calf from their battle with the kingsmen at the riverbend. The pink pucker of the bolthole the night they'd recovered the elfstone. What she'd give for that right now. She ran her hands everywhere, wiped the damp on her own skin, and ran them again. She had a role in all of those scars. And also in those she couldn't see.

As it is with all things we regret, this now came unasked for in the dark of night: the promise she'd made to the brigadier. The promise unkept. To deliver a message to the cub she'd reared.

He shivered again. She withdrew her hands and sat back.

"Don't go," he whispered.

"I'm not."

She thought maybe he nodded or maybe he just trembled. She crept over to the travois. The wood was dry where he had been laying upon it. She stood her pack under the canopy of the blanket. It wasn't wide enough and rain was falling on her. On his legs. She shifted them over to be out of the wet. Then she turned back to the travois and with her alpenstock she hacked it to pieces.

"What're you doing?" he said. His voice was a mess of shivered syllables.

"Buildin a fire."

She used the lengths of wet limb to brace her pack and she crawled back to him with the dry stuff under her arm. She got the fire going and dragged him as close to it as she dared. The fuel was mostly char wood and she knew it wouldn't last. She turned back to her pack and pulled up the wet pieces and laid them beside the fire. She considered this and then she took several of them and hung his clothes from them, so close the little orange flames licked their fabric and set them steaming and sizzling.

"There's somethin I need te tell ye," she said.

He didn't reply. She checked on him. He was sleeping. Still shivering but perhaps less. She was mostly dry herself but her clothes were damp. She took them off and piled them up as a wind break. She laid down behind him and wrapped her arms around him. His body jerked against hers. Their little shelter began to fill with smoke. It didn't matter. She dozed. Waking suddenly with a horrible certainty that he'd died, pressing her ear into his back to listen for a heartbeat. Sometime in the deep reaches of the night she ran out of dry wood. His clothes were still damp in parts but they were better than nothing. She dressed herself then she dressed him as best as she could with him lying there. All of the heat they'd made flew off with the breeze and it was terribly cold. The wood she'd hung his clothes upon went into the fire. It sizzled and snapped and burned very low in thin purple flames that wavered and guttered. But it burned.

She got up and left the shelter. No wind that night. She went around to her pack. Dug out the canteen. Took up her longarm. Walked down to the very bottom of the gouge where a steady rainwater flood now ran. Canteen filled she drank and filled it again and headed back. The firelight on the sagging blanket was the only visible thing on that boundless globe of dark. A polestar to any passerby. She had but one shot left to her rifle.

She tried to get him to drink. She raised his head in her hand and held the canteen to his lips. He wouldn't. She wet her fingers and drew them across his lips. They were cold to touch.

She set the canteen near the fire to keep it from freezing and she put on the last of the wood. She rubbed her eyes on the heel of her hand. There was plenty of night left and it was just growing colder. She placed her hands on his wound, left against his chest and right against his back as if to conjure a mending between them that would not manifest.

She bent forward and she kissed him. "I'll make it matter," she whispered. "And I'll remember ye."

***

She went through his musette by the firelight. A copper coin. A piece of malachite. A diary wrapped in a headscarf. She looked at the last of these. She knew why she hadn't told him. She was ashamed of it. By her knowledge and his ignorance she'd made him a kind of slave to her will. As if she was the arbiter of truth. As if the story of his life was hers to carve. She looked at his face. Sidelit in the firelight. Brow at rest, the lines of suffering entrenched across it. She was no better than those who'd enslaved him. She had to tell him. Perhaps, in the occultish accounting that governs highlander oaths of blood and stone, this broken promise induced her hardening. If only she could ask the stones. Still this was all she had and she bent to his ear and told him what the brigadier had said to her months before: "Go home," she said. "Dig up your grave. Everythin is there."

He made no sign that he'd heard.

She set the diary aside. Reached her hand to the bottom of the musette. Grasped a packet there and pulled it forth. She didn't know what it was. She'd never seen it before. Then she smelled it over the smoke. She unwrapped it and in her hand she held to the firelight three shriveled peaches. He'd been keeping them from her. No. He'd been keeping them for her. Saving them. For what? Some joyous moment perhaps. Or a last taste of pure sunlight before the long dark. That was just like him, if given a choice on how to go. How to become, he'd say.

She wouldn't weep again. She wouldn't.

It was too cold. The fire was low, the wood gone. She wrapped the peaches up again and placed them back in the musette. Then she took up her longarm. Unloaded the cartridge and stuffed it in her breast pocket. Grabbed the rifle by the barrel and placed the ashwood butt in the fire. It took a long time to catch. Years and decades of handling having hardened the wood, filled the pores, oiled the grain against wear, against flame. Who was she now without it? Who was she ever?

The hardwood burned a very long time. Its radiance a final contribution to a hard life lived. She pulled it out by the barrel. The entirety of the butt had fallen to ash and her and the orc vessels now for its combustion. Fore of the chamber the stock remained. It wouldn't aim well, but it'd still fire that last shot.

Now she took up her alpenstock. She laid it into the glowing coals. Her da had given it to her and it was old. Older than him. Probably the oldest tool still in use. The iron of orcblood and manblood long augmenting its heft and hardness. Like the longarm its wood was ancient and polished by time and by handling. It would catch eventually. She frowned. "No," she said. She reached into the fire. She might as well throw herself in there. She reached in and she pulled it out by the adze with her bare hand. She could smell her palm sear, but she couldn't feel it.

The sky had begun to lighten. A clay smokefilled crucible with no flue. Where the living were tempered to weapons. It had been a world whose peace was sustained by fear and by self preservation when fraternal love was right there. It had been nations ordered by difference and not congruence. She smoothed back Orc's hair. He'd been right. That becoming he spoke of was the great unifier, the great equalizer. Even old dwarves must turn to stone. She looked at her burned hand.

"You chopped up the litter," he said.

She saw his eyes were open. "Aye."

He closed them again. "Now I'll have to carry you out."

She smiled. She wanted to believe it'd be alright for him.

***

The fire was dead. The blanket mostly dry. The sun was up there somewhere. She left him to ease himself the rest of the way into his clothes and she went down to the stream to refill the canteen. She was exhausted of whatever it is that animates her kind. Food maybe. Will. She stood at the edge of the water and watched it slide by the toes of her boots. She swayed on her feet. She went back and sat by him and offered the canteen. She held it for him to drink from. She reminded herself to tell him what he deserved to know. To tell him before it was too late.

He slept all day. She held him close under the blanket. She fell asleep. Dreams of the mountain as it had been, the snows receding, the hardy white flowers that bloomed out of the patches of marginal soil. When she woke she couldn't remember where she was at first. There was nothing left of the fire. The sound of the stream much abated. She rolled out from under the blanket and sat up. He was watching her.

"Mym," he said.

"Aye. I'm here."

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"You have any water?"

"Aye."

She unstoppered the canteen and he was able to hold it to his lips unaided.

"How're ye feelin?"

"Thirsty."

He drank again.

"You get that dead son of a bitch?"

She shook her head.

"He's still out there?"

She nodded.

He made no expression. He drank the canteen empty.

"I'll get ye some more," she said. She took the canteen and her longarm and she left.

When she got back he was up on an elbow with his chin fast against his chest and his fingers lightly probing the exit wound on his chest.

"Ye remember anythin?"

He tapped a fingertip near the wound. "I remember this."

"Ye remember me comin fer ye?"

"No."

"The rain?"

"No."

"The food?"

"There was food?"

She didn't say anything to that.

He nodded at her rifle. "What happened to that?"

"I had te keep the fire goin after the litter ran out."

"The litter?"

"Nevermind. There's somethin I need te tell ye."

He gestured to the gray desolation around them. The spinal cavity of the late world. "We're long past counting needs."

"It's no need of mine," she said.

"Whose then?"

"Your old lady. The brigadier."

He grew very still. His breath seemingly held. Then he set down the canteen. "Go on."

"She told me te find ye and tell ye te go home."

"I've been there."

"Aye I know it. She said ye needed te go home and te dig up yer grave. That everythin is there."

"Everything is there."

"Aye."

"What's that mean?"

"I don't know."

"It's just what she said."

"Aye."

He looked her in the eyes. "Why didn't you tell me before?"

"Well."

"We weren't far from her place. Back when we were at the new seat."

"Aye."

"A few days. A week maybe."

"I couldn't."

"You couldn't."

She shook her head. Eyes downcast.

"Why not?"

"Because there's somethin else."

He watched her. Waiting. When she didn't speak he said, "That woman knew how to demand more of others than they could ever expect from her."

"No," she said. "It's not te do with her."

"Alright."

"It's te do with us."

"With us."

"Aye."

He looked up from where he lay. The whites of his upturned eyes like the old crescent moons.

"Do ye know what I'm tryin te say?"

"Yeah."

A scattering of rockfall echoed down the gouge from somewhere ahead. A smell of rotten eggs on the light morning airs.

He turned his head and looked out over the wastes. Surveying them for something lost. Time perhaps. "I wish you hadn't waited so long to say it."

***

Next day he was able to stand, but only just. It was the same with her. She was so tired. She tried to hide it as she shuffled around breaking their meager camp. Scattering their fire ash to fool anyone coming after. Booting down the windbreak and tossing away its stones. He sat against the wall watching her all the while.

"You're hardening," he said.

She clumsily rolled up the blanket and in the end just stuffed it into her mostly empty pack. Then she remembered her da telling her the moment one stops caring is the moment one has given up. She withdrew the blanket to do it right.

"Stop," she said.

"What?"

"Yer watchin me."

"You're the best looking thing out here."

"That's not why yer watchin."

"No?"

She finished with the blanket. She turned to him. "I'll be alright."

"We need to get you something to eat."

"It won't help with the hardenin."

"We should find something anyway."

"Aye."

"Your folk leave any caches anywhere?"

"Aye."

"Whereabouts?"

"Down in the vale. Under fallen trees. Under stones. All burnt up now."

"Anywhere else?"

"In the uplands. Along hunting paths." She thought of her and her da and her ma. "At the high lakes."

"Can you take me to them?"

"Can ye climb the heavens?" She shook her head. "They're off with the rest of me mountain. Off this world. Off into nowhere."

He watched her hand. She had tried to gesture at the sky. Instead her fingers had gnarled into a burl. She shoved it into her coat pocket. She looked north along the bottom of the gouge.

"We need te get te Khaz," she said.

"Alright."

"Can ye walk?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"No."

He raised himself up. Slung his musette on the side opposite his wound. They toiled on.

***

He was stopping to rest every hundred steps. She was grateful for it. The walls of the gouge scrolled by. Their tops still hidden by the anthracite plume. In the latter half of the day they arrived back at the cauldron, the cart, the massacre. When the huge black potbelly emerged out of the land ahead he turned to her. "Is this the right way?" he said.

"Aye."

"Then what's that doing there?"

"After I came back fer ye it seemed sensible te go opposite of the otaur."

"He's ahead of us then."

"Aye."

"Between us and the wynding."

"I expect so."

He looked back at the cauldron as if considering this. "How much farther?"

"Depends. We're not movin very fast."

"I'm hungry."

She nodded at the bodies of the kingsmen, the king among them. "Might be somethin worth eatin there."

He looked at the dead. She looked at him. He passed inches from her and she could smell the sweat of him. The long road they'd traveled together. Unwashed blood and lambswool. The creosote of his ancestral home. He nodded as he passed or perhaps he only lowered his head to watch his step, the slightest movement of his dark eyes, the slightest flex of his jaw. She felt as if she'd had a shot of whisky. As if she'd accepted the world's ending until that moment. She stumbled after him, her hips pained in flexion.

She saw him bend and stand back again, now with the saber in his hand. He did it again and came up with Booky's blade. These he returned to their sheaths.

The bodies were black and swollen in their clothes as if inflated from the inside. In their own skin like a bellows at the moment of compression. He moved toward the nearest one, crouching gingerly and checking the hip pockets.

"Ye need te talk te me," she said.

"About what?"

"Anythin."

He threw open the coat and stuck his hand into a flap pocket sewn inside. "Talking about anything's like talking about nothing."

"Us," she said.

He moved to one side and placed both hands on the body as if to roll it over but he lacked the strength. He reached for a small bag that had fallen nearby.

"Do ye want me te start?"

"No."

"Why not?"

He pulled a stip of dried meat out of the bag and he looked at it. He smelled it.

"Why not?"

He threw away the meat. "There's no point to it."

He stood up slowly and moved to the next body. She stumped after.

"You could tell me what yer feelin," she said.

"You already know what I'm feeling."

"And there's nothing more to it than that?"

"No."

"So we're just going to meet our endin without talkin about it."

He looked at her deadeye. "Truly Mym that might be best."

"For ye maybe."

He shook his head and bent over the next body. Rifled it.

"How long've ye spent holin yer feelins inside ye?" she said.

"As long as I can remember." He turned from where he knelt. "How long have you?"

"I don't know. Since me ma passed."

"That's a long time."

"Aye."

Finished with the second body he moved on to the next. It wore a long doublebreasted coat buttoned fast against the cold.

"Why do we do it ye think?"

"I was taught happy feelings are for sharing. Hard ones aren't."

He drew Booky's blade and slipped it into the gap between buttons. With a single motion he severed them all and they went flying off in every direction.

"Aye. I was taught somethin similar."

"Is it happy for you? The feeling?"

"Well."

"Because it's hard for me."

"Aye. It's hard."

"No point in sharing then, is there?"

"Of course there is."

"Why?"

"Because otherwise me endin's goin te just be pickin over dead humans fer bits of their half-eaten selves, and that's a shit way te go out."

He sat back now. Wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. "What's it matter how we go out." He turned to her and she could see the welling in his eyes. "What's it matter once we're gone?"

"It matters te me because ye'll still be here."

"Not for long I won't."

"Nakshit that. Yer goin te stay and live because there's nobody left te fix what we've fucked, and when ye do meet yer endin I don't want ye goin thinkin ye were never loved. Ye were loved, Orc. Maybe not by yer old lady or that bookmaker or that one-eyed sow ye followed west, but by me. By me. I love ye, grayback."

Now he looked down. It seemed as if he would speak but he did not.

"Ye aren't alone anymore. Ye haven't been since the night ye tossed one of yer own onte me head."

"But I will be soon."

"Not yet."

She waited for him to say something. To say one thing. He moved onto the next body. Had she the strength she would have taken him then. Pinned him. Put the fear of dwarves into him.

He looked up from the body. He had something in his hand. A sackful of something the size of a man's skull.

"What's that?"

He opened it up and held it out to her. It was filled with dried oats.

"Mush?" she said.

He grinned at her. "Mush."

***

She sat by the little cookfire he'd built and she watched him. He'd taken a hatchet off of one of the dead and had begun to size up the pullcart for more wood. He disappeared around the far side and when he came back around he palmed something that sparkled by the firelight. Back at the fire he tossed it to her and it landed at her knee. It was the crown of the monarch. She picked it up and looked at the goldsmithing and the cut gemstones inlaid. He bent over the tinware pot now steaming on the fire.

"So he was their king after all," she said.

"Looks like it." He dipped his pinky into the meal and pulled it out again. "This is ready."

"Yer mush."

"Oat mush."

"That good?"

"It's the best."

"Aye, well, there any spoons in that kit?"

He shook his head. "Use your fingers."

"Me fingers."

"It'll be better that way. Since we don't have any salt."

He took the pot off of the fire. She sidled up next to it. He tilted it toward her. "Try it."

She reached out her hand and then saw its state. Withdrew it. Crossed it under her armpit. "I'm not hungry."

"Mym."

"I'm not."

In the rising wind the cookfire cracked and snapped and hissed and spit. He had made it out of the remains of the cauldron's and it'd be dead in minutes.

"Yer mush is gettin cold," she said.

He looked at her. Looked into the pot. He reached in and pulled out a pinch of the food. She could smell it and for all her teasing it now made her mouth water. He just held it there. She looked at him.

"Open wide," he said.

***

He pulled around the cart and laid its pulls carefully across the mouth of the cauldron. Then he spread out their blankets in the plankwood bed. She was almost able to climb in on her own but in the end he had to help her up.

"It'll be warmer up here than on the ground," he said.

"Aye."

He sat down next to her. The cart swayed some. She stretched out on her back and settled in. She noticed the wind died between the boxboards. He must have aimed them broadside to the blow.

"Ye'd have made a good mountaineer," she said.

"You think?"

On the blanket between them lay the saber and Booky's blade. Above her head he'd stowed her pack and alpenstock. What was left of her longarm. All the way forward, just behind the pulls, were two twenty pound crates. These were filled with dried oats and a weevil husk or two.

He sat beside her. His own sort of king. After a while he said, "I've shown you, haven't I?"

"Shown me what?"

"It's not all hard. Some of it's happy."

"Aye."

"A lot of it, even."

"Some of it."

"Well. That counts for something."

He moved the weapons to the outside of the blanket and then he pulled it across him and laid it over her. He drew up very close to her and though it must have hurt his wound he pulled her in very close so that her back burrowed against his chest. He rested his chin on the top of her head. She closed her eyes. His hand lay on her hip but she did not feel it.

***

She wanted them to stay there another two or three days so that he could eat up and regain his strength. She could tell he was worried she wouldn't last that long. He never said as much. Still she could tell.

"Stop frettin," she said.

"I'm not fretting."

"Aye ye are and I need ye te stop."

"Alright."

But he didn't.

They left the next day, Orc lumbering forward between the pulls of the cart and Mym lying against the crates watching the land recede behind them. The gouge ran through the foundation of the white mountain where sand had drifted against the windward sides of rubble and rockfall. This was where the stones had heeded her ask and shown them what had happened. What a wonder that had been. What a dream. What else might they have done for their animate kin? Before the redeemer stole their power to listen and to speak.

The cart crashed and squealed as it trundled along. She turned her head and called forward. "That otaur's goin te hear us comin a mile off."

Orc halted a moment. "I hope he does."

She turned further to look at him.

"I hope it fills him with the dread of his coming annihilation."

She didn't say anything to that. He watched her and then she saw his realization and his eyes fell suddenly to the ground.

"Sorry," he said.

"It's alright."

"I wasn't thinking."

"Somethin orcs are known fer."

"Yeah. You're not going to get better?"

"No."

"Nobody ever has?"

"Not without stonespeakin. Not without the orcstone."

"I'm sorry."

"Stop frettin."

"Yeah. Sorry."

She shook her head and turned away. He began to pull the cart again.

"The bouncing hurt?" he said.

"It's fine."

"You got enough water?"

"Orc."

"Sorry."

She leaned back. The bleak world rumbled by. A geological catalog laid out and glassed smooth from the friction of its violent revelation. Gold veins and silver. Feldspars and nickel. Iron and silicate. She looked at these and wondered what stories they would've told. She missed that, and she missed the trees who needed no voice but the wind.

Night of her second day in the cart they came to the exposed wynding. It was too narrow for the cart to pass. She would have to walk. She could no longer stand.

"I can carry you," said Orc.

"I'll just slow ye down."

He looked down the wynding. "How will I find my way?"

"Just turn left at the fork."

He looked back at her. "And after that?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know."

"I never went left before."

"You're sure Khaz is down there?"

"No." She shifted in the cart. "But his mark was there last time. And the stones told of his passage."

"Last time."

"Aye."

"A fortnight ago."

"Thereabouts."

He nodded. He reached into the cart and took hold of his weapons and slung them on. Next he broke apart one of the crates and built a small cookfire from three or four of its planks. Put the pot on and fixed some hot mush in it. Snuffed the fire to save the wood. Ate. Made her eat. Withdrew the longest of the planks from the remains of the fire. The coaled end of it still glowing like a hot copper wire of light, a thin gray wisp smoking off. This he held before him like a totemic ward. A burning of sage. Evil beware.

She could feel the tightness settling across her chest. The difficulty breathing. "Ye need te go," she said.

He nodded. Already peering into the maw of the wynd. "I'll be right back."