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

Three days later he left, the cat come after him. Back the way he'd come what seemed like years ago. The day pale and still. The cold seemed to be in everything now and the cat caterwauled and pawed at his ankles until he scruffed it up and tucked it into the breast of his jacket. Its head out the collar face to the world. Its eyes tracking the falling ash. He felt it shift, settle in.

He had said his farewells the night before. Booky had tried to give him gold but for what? She clinked the sack down on the table before him and he sat looking at it and then swung off the bench and walked over to the stair and down into the pit. He stood in the cell they had all shared. The sack was still there when he came back up the stairs. The greenskin sat on the ruin of the bar but wouldn't look at him. There on his forehead and orbital socket the charcoal Chim had tattooed in the long ago to remind him of their brotherhood. As if he needed reminding. Orc went out the door for the last time. Booky picked up the sack and followed him into the dark.

"When ya going?"

"Dawn."

"Ain't seem to have one of those no more."

"First light then."

"Y'all can stay."

"You've not got enough food for all of us."

"Let me worry about that."

He shook his head. "I have something I need to do."

"Ain't nothing left that needs doing."

"There is for me."

"And you're off to do it?"

He shrugged. "Depends what I find."

"Down at her place?"

"Yeah."

She nodded.

"I'm not coming back."

"Nothing's for certain."

"One thing is."

"Seemed like it weren't for awhile there."

"But it is now."

"Yeah. It is now."

"Same with me going."

"I know."

He nodded at the sack in her hand. "Thanks for holding onto it all this time."

"It's yours."

"Well, keep it as payment."

"What for?"

"My freedom."

She didn't say anything.

"A return on your copper."

"That was for the rope."

"I know."

She smiled a little. "I done good for awhile there. For a woman."

"Yeah you did."

"I couldn't have done it without y'all."

"I know."

"I wished we could've saved her."

"Me too."

"I wished we could've saved everything."

"Yeah. Me too."

"Don't let it rule you kid."

"Nor you."

"You know I won't."

He nodded back at the ruin of the pit. "Be careful."

"I will be."

"I think Gobgob's going to kill you."

"He ain't beating me to it."

"He'll eat you."

"Least I'll be good for something"

He looked at her.

"Kid there ain't a world left to live in."

He looked up at the sky. Starless. Cast in iron.

"First light?"

"Yeah."

"Y'all make sure you say your byes to the ogres."

"I will."

But he didn't. He was up and out before first light. He and the cat walked the sunless day as it dimmed up and as it dimmed down again. The coming years tracked by the extension and contraction of light, the seasons like the dirty snow that had clung to the northern face of her mountain. Growing and shrinking. Slowly buried by ash. He moved on from those reaches. There was no soil left alive in that country. Trees stood in bare clusters desiccating and the husks of weeds tumbled across the Seaway and after a few years he returned to the Deadlands but it was no better there. He moved on. Hundreds of miles. Thousands of miles. Furrowing the world with his tracks until like the world his skin was cracked and gray and leathery. He had gotten old.

In the winter of his last year upon that world he was living in the wreckage of the brigadier's estate, growing mushrooms in her chambers and in the cellar where she had once stored her wine. Whenever he went outside his cough started up again and he hacked up a black tar that might've been a coagulate of ash or perhaps blood. The mushrooms finally quit of his trying. Or perhaps he just quit trying. He wasn't really sure. Two days later he went out to the plot where he was supposed to have been buried. He looked down at the excavation he'd made of it in his search for an answer. He'd long since given up trying to understand what he'd found and he set forth down the path and between the lions and onto the seaway. He carried only his weapons, the musette Mym had made, inside it the diary and scarf and malachite. The sun never did come back.

There was a seasonal meet in the province once called the goldlands where survivors bartered whatever extra they had. He stopped in to see what he might eat. The traders knew him for his mushrooms yet they watched him warily as if he might run them down and gobble them up. He looked in from cart to cart and at a dredger's he saw a leaky wooden pail half filled with seawater and collected bottom feeders still clawing about its sides. He pointed at it with his hideroll. The dredger brought it out of the cart and set it on the ground between them. Orc set his hideroll on the cartbed and unrolled it as if it was a rude tablecloth. The dredger tossed back the flap of it and laid bare his identity: the brigadier's saber, Booky's blade as reforged by Mym. He was long gone of the bosun's knives. The dredger pointed to the adamantine in Mym's joinings. Orc offered the saber. They shook on it. The dredger said the pail wouldn't hold no water and he was right about that.

Days later he was somewhere on the western coast. He sat in the lee of a keeled fisher wrecked fifty yards back from the water. All the other boats thrown well inland by that tsunami long ago. Twoscore foundations lost of their structures. A pierhead with no pier. Huddled there he watched a slurry come out of the north and cover everything in snow as fine and as dry as dust, obscuring those last memories of what had been. The waves passed over the rocky shore and the stones clacked in their surf like the clattering of skulls. He wrapped himself in his coat and he wished for the cat to keep him warm, but it had been gone forty years or more. Leaning against the old hull with its widened seams he tried to sleep but no sleep would come. His lungs hurt. He was older than any orc had ever been. He thought maybe the orcstone and the manstone and the elfstone that had worked and reworked his body had done something to him. He wished they hadn't. The snow stuck to the toes of his boots. He tucked his hands in his armpits and after a time he fell asleep. He saw the brigadier some thirty years old. Slowly coming up clad in silver armor that gleamed, black blood up to her elbows as if she'd reached into an oil slick to pull him bawling from his mother's loins. That was what she had worn. That and the scarf tying back her hair. It wasn't gray then. It was red. She came upon him as if to again select him out of the culling but she just passed him by. From his sight she went and he knew he would never see her again in that world, not even in his dreams.

He opened his eyes. It was darker than black. Cold. No stars, no moons. The moons lay all around him, ash falling like snowflakes from the sky. He thought of the brigadier, of Mym stoned up and never to be returned to her mountain. Of all the things he had learned of life and death and change he had been wrong. There was no change in forever.

Toward the end of night he uncurled from his hiding place and stood before the world ready for whatever it might give him. He trudged down to the waterfront and he stood before the waves, the suggestions of the waves. Always he felt as though he was being watched. After ten or twelve meager breaks he kicked off his boots and walked forward. The water was terribly cold. It swirled up his legs and around his calves and it set his teeth through no will of his own. He remembered the cold water of another time and place. He knelt down in the water and the chill of it surged up his thighs and groin and into his belly. Murderously cold and wet. He knelt there in the surf with his hands hovering in the water and he closed his eyes. He began to shiver. Drops splattered his neck, his cheeks. Pinpoint pricks of ice. Wouldbe ice but for their salinity. He felt something brush his wrist. He wondered if he had become too numb. He felt it brush his wrist again and he struck. Pulling his clawlike hand from the water he saw the pallid creature writhing there like some subterranean nightmare, mouth suckering and gills flaring. Hungry like him. He grabbed its head in his other hand and he apologized and he twisted one against the other. He walked back to the keelboat with it hanging from his hand.

From driftwood he built a fire and it staved off the night. Out over the sea and within it the indefinite horizon began to lighten. He warmed himself watching. When the coals were red he gutted the catch with Booky's blade and he butterflied out the body of it and he rested it on the coals, scales down. It there in the fire like a black heart against the dull throbbing reds and oranges seeping out the coals. He sat there watching it and he thought he heard the shrieking of gulls where they would hover up in the wind off the sea and their heads turning this way and that and always looking for their next meal and he thought of them arranged across a spar of a tall ship long ago, their heads retracted out of the wind like some variety of feathery tortoise, subtly penduluming back and forth in the swells of the tide that was and was no longer. When he looked up from the fire down to the sea he saw another such as himself standing at the edge of the surf. In the gloaming it appeared to be a man but he was not so sure.

The man nodded at him, his face gaunt and candlewax white. Like he'd been living in a cave. He nodded back.

"Good morning," said the man.

"Good morning."

The man rose on his toes as if to peer into the fire. "Smells like good luck."

Orc looked hard at him but there was so little light left to the world he could not tell what he saw. "You're welcome to share in it."

"Thanks," said the man. He ascended the strand and climbed the reach of broken rocks and crossed the slush to where Orc was sitting and he crouched by him and held his hands out over the fire.

"It's not much," said Orc. He licked his finger and thumb and leaned forward and extracted the charred fillet. He tore it in half and held out the headless portion.

The man nodded in his rags. "It's a kindness," he said. He wrapped his hand in his sleeve and took the offering. "A rare kindness."

Orc shrugged and bit into his share. "I thought you might be someone else."

The man set his free hand behind him and sat with his back against the hull. He kicked his feet out before him. He held up the food to the firelight and he picked out a bone or two as if he wasn't ravenous but Orc could see that he was. "Who'd you think I was?"

"Someone I knew a long time ago."

"Must have been a friend."

"Yeah. He was."

The man nodded and then bit into the fish. A kind of bliss passed over his face. "You must be a remarkable orc to count a man as your friend."

"Not really."

"Then he must be a remarkable man."

Orc nodded. He glanced again at the man's knuckles. They were gnarled up and arthritic, blank of any ink.

"Not many orcs left."

"You've met others."

The man shook his head. "Not for a while. Not for a long while."

Orc studied his face for the lie.

"It was some years back now." The man looked up at the dead sky and half gestured at it. "Who's to say how many?"

The man dropped his hand, looked at Orc.

"Where were you when it happened?" said the man.

"The far side of the world."

"Across the sea?"

"Yeah."

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"I hear things aren't as bad out that way."

"That's what everybody says about everywhere they've never been."

"Suppose so."

Orc cracked the fishhead with his eyeteeth and sucked out its tiny brain.

"I was up in the deadlands," said the man. "You ever been there?"

"Yeah."

"Since the thaw?"

"It's not thawed anymore."

"It was when it happened. The ground thereabouts was so soft you could see the wave of it coming for miles. Coming fast too, fast as a gunshot. Throwing folks a hundred feet up along with everything else. Most buried alive by the mud and those who weren't got parboiled."

"Not you."

"No, not me."

Orc noticed the man's eyes had a faraway look and the fillet in his hand had begun to shake.

"Were they like me?"

"Who?"

"The orcs you met."

"Might've been. I can't tell one of you apart from another."

"Alright."

"Excuse me for saying so."

"It's alright."

The man took another bite and chewed it scales and all. "Good sized rockfish you grabbed here."

"You fish."

"Yes."

"From a boat?"

"Mostly."

"Where's it at?"

"Beached it up at the landing."

"I don't know it."

"Just upshore. Up where it's sandy."

"If you say so."

"You're not from here?"

"Do I look like I'm from here?"

"Suppose not."

They sat in silence and watched the fire die. The man finished his portion and wiped his hands on his legs. He looked up at the sky again. "I ought to be getting out there."

"To fish."

The man nodded. "That's where I was headed when I smelled your fire."

"The fishing good asea?"

"Sometimes." He stood up. "Worse and worse every day."

Orc looked up at him. "Maybe today will be different."

"Maybe."

The man dusted off his pants and just stood there looking now at the fire, now at the dark expanse of the sea, now at Orc. "You want to go see?"

"The landing?"

"What it's like on the far side of the world."

"Can your boat make it?"

"Probably not."

"You never tried."

"No."

Orc tossed the fishbones into the embers of the fire. The man's eyes widened as he rose to his full height.

"Alright," said Orc. "Let's go."

***

One morning they both lay in the bottom of the boat. The lighting sky like a gray tumor growing about the periphery of the world. Their several lines were set over the stern trolling the last of their baitfish. Orc could smell the blood in the boards from the guttings and he watched the breeze ruffle the patched up sheet the man used for a sail and he listened to the sea slosh and slap the hull. His stomach felt like a great faultline cavern, collapsed and churning against itself. He felt as if he was waiting to die. He'd been feeling that way for so long he couldn't remember feeling any other way.

"You ever think about how things were?" said the man. He lay on the other side of the thwart with his bare feet side by side up on the gunwale like two molerats and they were all Orc could see of him.

"Sometimes."

"I dream about it all the time. Every night for years."

"Alright."

"It's so real, Orc. It's like I'm there. My wife, my kid. My friends. Even my horse is there. I can smell her, the feed, the hay. I can smell the sunlight come into her stable. The dust floating up in the light like, like I don't know. Like flecks of gold at the bottom of a stream."

Orc tried to not imagine those things but how could he not?

"It's all right there waiting for me," said the man. "All those things not in the world no more. Like there's another world where they all went to. Or maybe another world where it didn't happen at all, and it's right there, just on the other side of waking. You understand what I mean?"

"Yeah."

"All those things we remember are still out there somewhere. Just on the other side."

Orc said nothing to that.

"I know it's real. It has to be. There are things I've seen there that I didn't remember anymore. That couldn't be if it wasn't real. If it wasn't separate from my remembering."

The boat rocked gently in its passage. Orc tried to remember what the sun looked like.

"You ever wonder where we go when we die?"

"Not really."

"You would if your kind had somewhere for them to go to. We men wonder about it all the time. Some men spend their whole lives wondering and some of them even arrange out their lives according to those fantasies in hopes that they'll meet them. But no one knows. They're not supposed to. Not even the martyrs knew. That's what made them martyrs. If they knew where they were going, if they knew with certainty what was going to come after, then they weren't really making any real sacrifice were they?"

"They knew what came after," said Orc.

"What?"

Orc closed his eyes. "Nothing."

"Sometimes I think when I stop waking that's where I'll be. In that other place. Sun and moons where they're supposed to be. Green things. My wife and kid."

"Your horse."

"Yes. And I'll ride her there everywhere and forever."

***

Orc went ashore at the same place he had before. He pulled the boat out of the surf as if there were still tides to come up and carry it off and he left it and the man there with the last of their catch. He walked up the wadi alone. The man had heard it was better here but it wasn't. Orc knew it wouldn't be better, yet he had still hoped that it might be different.

His patchwork clothing was stiff with salt. His skin felt like chalk. A memory of climbing this place with the witch and the greenskin and the bosun. The dwarf hiking ahead of him toward the setting sun. The blaze of it incandescing strands of her flyaways like hot fuses, her trousers snug to her hips, her heavy tread surefooted as one of her naks. This memory existed within him. It had happened. Just because he remembered it did not mean its occurrence yet existed in this world or any other. Did it?

He passed from the wadi to the plateau and from the plateau to the felled snags of the ancient forest. Uniformly lying in one direction only like victims of a volcanic blast, fossils buried by a pyroclastic flow, root balls fisted up toward the east and crowns downcasted westward. He entered their hallowed ground as if crossing a flooded graveyard whose coffins and caskets had been upraised and waterlogged one upon the other and he stepped and straddled his way over their hardened effigies and mummifications. He proceeded haltingly. Now taking a rest after each passing. Splinters in his hands that he couldn't draw out. In his thighs. Surmounting the husks became too much and he began to walk around each treefall. Their tibial limbs cracking underfoot. Each a minute exhumation of dust. A world yet green, filled with birdsong, just the other side of slumber.

He hoped she would be watching and indeed she was. She came to him as he rested in a small clearing. It had been a camp before. There a wrecked smokehouse. A well ringed with stones with the dipper hung off of a brittle rope. He was sucking water from its pan when her shadow fell across him. A different memory of a different time gone forever. Just the other side.

He looked up at her. She was much changed. Her mane a dull silver and her horns absent of their vernal growth. Naked to the waist. Skin hung off her bones like one out of the camps so long ago. "You have returned," she said.

"I said I would."

"Yet that is not why you came."

"No."

"You thought it might be better here."

"No."

"Then why?"

"For you," he said. "For whoever's left."

"No one is left."

"And your master?"

"I cannot feel him. Not since the days after the moonstrike. Whatever sight of him I had was snuffed from my being."

"I'm sorry."

"I believe you." She raised a hand to his cheek. It was cold. "You did what you could. He flows yet movement alone is not life. We might have saved him but for the ash. The entombment of his self realization."

"The entombment of us all."

She lowered her hand to his shoulder. "What is a world without father sun?"

He wanted to remember what the sun looked like. "Can you do something for me?"

"I am afraid there is little I can do for anyone anymore."

"Do you remember the place you sent me that night on the strand? The night you met Glad Nizam."

"Yes."

"Was it real?"

"Everything remembered has a reality."

"Where was it?"

"It was wherever you needed it to be."

"And if I asked you to send me again where would I end up?"

"Wherever you needed to."

"Not the same place?"

"Who can say?"

He thought about her uncertainty but didn't change anything. "I need you to send me back there."

She withdrew her hand from him. She looked down as if in thought, as if in mourning. "This is why you have come."

"I'm starting to think it is."

"It will be the end of you."

"Everything I ever had is ended already."

She nodded.

"You don't have to help if you don't want to," he said.

"How do you know?"

"You don't have to do anything you don't want to."

She looked into his eyes. "He taught you better than that."

"Yeah."

"Come with me."

It was nearly dark when everything was finally ready. He had fallen asleep while he waited and now she woke him to the world. She held before her a stone pestle and within it a fine dark powder that smelled of fungal origin. He followed her to a small firepit and a dull red glow within for that is the latent color of all creation. He toed out of his boots and undressed completely and he sat before it as he had once sat before a bonfire in the long ago. She covered him in a cloak stitched up from a menagerie of fibers and hides and it laid heavily across his shoulders. She shook up her alchemy in a waterskin and she handed it to him. Her eyes each held a redness of their own though he could not say from where.

"I wish you had come sooner," she said.

"Me too."

He took up the skin and he drank and he tasted an earth long passed. He crushed it in his hands and he twisted it empty. He let no drop fall.

"Farewell old friend," she said.

The orc called Orc passed from that world.

***

In absence of promethean light we scribe infinite circles upon the dark. The bosun had tried to tell him once, a lifetime ago. And a lifetime it had been. Yet he knew this place of his dreams: the weeping walls of cold stone, the scent of must and of mold and of creatures gone there to die, the blinding egress to a world of unrelenting sun. Sweet golden light just beyond his reach, warmth for his flesh and his bones. Renewal in fire. He began to walk toward it.

He realized that he was not alone yet this did not surprise him. He turned expecting to see the elder that he knew resided in this place. But there was only a young orc asleep against a rock. He padded over to it. Not much more than a cub. He looked again at the maw of daylight and then down the black root of the world. He bent as if to wake it but he stopped short. He staggered back, his eyes wide. He said its name.

The young orc stirred then opened his eyes then drew his weapon. "What is this place?" he said.

Orc said, "Whatever you need it to be," without hesitation and he could feel the rut through which he traversed what had been and what was to become.

"This isn't real."

Some part of him reached out, touched the high walls on either side, saw the steep downward slope, knew the shrouded path that wound and wound yet offered no forks. "No more or less than your mind."

The young orc lunged at him but he knew it was coming for that was what he had done. He backstepped.

"Why'd you bring me here?"

Orc thought about that. He knew what he was to say and he now understood why he said it. "I was a fool. Ask your question."

"What question?" said the young orc. So defiant. So angry. Born of fury and trained for murder.

Orc tried to remember what that had been like. Would that he could feel such now he might part this inevitable path, but such a thing must be impossible. "Your question," he said. "Your question. The reason you're here. Ask it so I may go back to dying."

"You're dying?"

"The whole world's dying, cub. And that's not your question."

Orc watched him. He knew that the young orc was thinking about her. He was always thinking about her. As if she would be his salvation. Orc pitied him. Regretted the choices he would make. Even now he couldn't stop her coming to his mind to deliver one of her tired maxims: a regret is but a lesson unlearned.

But it was too late to learn any lessons. Too late to make any difference. If only there was a way to alter what had happened, but even in this fictive moment he could feel the inescapable flow of time. It was a river with many tributaries but no deviations, all dumping into an ocean of entropy. No way but forward. No when but what was coming next.

"Get on with it."

"Who are you?"

He might've said I'm you. The mother's intonation ran through his mind as if he was still locked in her embrace: Nothing was is or will be distinct from all other things, as all things are changeable so all things are interchangeable. I am the you to be, if you fail.

But that wasn't what the young orc wished to know. "That's not it either," said Orc.

The young orc came at him again but he had already backed deeper into the cave. Now in total darkness, faded from any glimmer of the light, the world. Soon to die. To become as the mother had promised. Perhaps then he would be able to see things as they were. Not through this lens colored by decades of rage and regret. Or perhaps this young one could do something. Use the rage to undo the regret. Perhaps.

"You don't know me," said Orc.

"No."

"You will." Orc knew the question the young orc wouldn't ask. He knew how it filled his mind. How it guided his every action. How it consumed him as fear consumes all creatures from the highest kings to the meanest grub humping and slithering away from the shadow of the fuligin crow come to eat it.

Become, she had said. Become.

"Ask. Selfish cub. That's the answer, not the question."

"You're not making sense."

"It's your mind," said Orc, and for one fleeting moment he grasped the paradox in which he was caught: the young orc had summoned Orc to his mind and Orc had summoned the young orc to his mind. Which was the first cause?

"Sense and nonsense alike."

Orc watched the young orc turn toward the mouth of the cave and walk away. "Ask your question," he called after him. But the young orc didn't turn back. He never turned back. Orc started after him, walking across the searing desert of his ancestral home. He waited within an infinity of himselves as the young orc conferred with the manifestation of Booky and clambered up an adjacent ridgeline. Orc and his unseen precedents and antecedents approached Booky. She saw him coming and nodded.

"Is a dream within a dream still a dream?" he said.

She spat onto the sandstone. "What else would it be?"

"I'm not sure. The future? The past?"

"Which are ya looking to change?"

He looked up the ridge. Followed the young orc with his eyes. Watched him stop at a yucca. "Both."

"What would ya change?"

"Everything."

"That ain't possible."

"I wouldn't let her die."

"Who's that then? Y'all's old lady?"

He shook his head. "Someone else. Someone you've not met yet."

"That may be but I still know her."

He looked at the bookmaker. He wondered if she was still alive in the world. If that world still existed in any meaningful way.

She looked back at him. A hint of a smile about her lips. "Ya forgot how this place works."

"I never knew to begin with."

"Y'all came here for a reason." She nodded at the young orc, still standing at the tree. "Same as him."

Orc watched the slope below the ridge until he spotted a man moving upon it. "As soon as I figure it out I'll let you know."

"Ya won't have to."

He took off.

"I'll already know!" she called.

Like his predecessor before him he went up the slope without looking back. Near the top he met the man stood waiting his turn with destiny. His jaw dislocated and hanging. His skin pallid. Orc said his name.

The bosun turned. Looked him up and down. Gurgled.

"You know me for who I am," said Orc.

The bosun nodded vigorously. His jaw swinging along.

"I'm sorry for what happened to you."

The bosun shrugged.

"I was just thinking of something you told me. A long time ago now."

The bosun eyed him. Waiting.

"You said we cross through life by moonslight. That only what we can remember is real. Everything else behind isn't anymore. Maybe never was. And everything ahead's no more real than a dream."

The bosun just watched him.

"This isn't just a dream, is it?"

The corners of the bosun's blue grub like lip upturned. His eyes smiled.

"How do I change what has already happened?"

The bosun held up a finger and tapped the side of his skull. Then he touched Orc's shoulder and walked up the slope to the yucca tree.

Orc watched him go. Then he waited. He sought any clue from his remembered life. The fulcrums and the levers. Those he met and those he slew. Those who sought his death. The brigadier, the yeomen brothers, the bookmaker, those of the pit, the dogman and the ogre and the greenskins, his kin and Glad Nizam, Mym and her da, Ogaz and Saand, the armiger and his knights, Khaz, the longhorn, the blue dwarf Uhquah and the scaler Tulula, the bishop, the queen. The queen of the risen. What had she said the moment before she self-immolated? Return to us only after you have seen the mother. This he had done the day the world as it was had ended. Ash and dust long blown into the wastes and scattered across the frozen sea. How could he return to that which had burned to cinders and was long gone from the world?

He watched the bosun meet the young orc in the shade of the yucca. Thought about the world to which they would return. The mother yet presided over her forest there. The queen over her horde. The redeemer over his block.

Mym was yet the lastborn.

"Well look at this hog," said an ancient voice.

Orc turned. There was Waz. Father of the lastborn.

"Ye don't belong up here," said the old dwarf. "Ye best get back ye yer cave fore the sun fries yer shanks te bacon."

"I can't go back."

Waz didn't stop. "Aye and that's the problem, eh? No other way but forward fer us. And forward I go te me turn at the bellows."

Orc watched the old dwarf cross to the yucca and to the figure beneath it. Watched him pluck a leaf off the limb.

Go to the mother, the queen had said. So he had, and she'd wrapped him in her arms as she consumed her children to save the world. Go to the mother. It was too late for that. There was no way back. Saand had sent him here and here he would remain. Unless.

He looked up at the yucca. At the dwarf and at the young orc. He tried to remember the things they were saying. How long before the pick fell? He began upslope, his tired and malnourished legs creaking and complaining. He began to run.

As he arrived the dwarf swiped the alpenstock out of the young orc's hand and swung it overhead to strike. Orc caught it by the haft and twisted it out of the dwarf's grasp. The dwarf's eyes opened wide and his mouth a gaping black hole as if he'd just watched the universe break in half and the young orc backpedaled once and the sun in his eyes and Orc plunged the pick and it sunk into the flesh of the chest and pierced the young orc's heart.

The dwarf gazed at the black blood splattered across his arms and hands. He looked up at Orc. "What'd ye do?" he whispered.

"What was needed."

Orc held forth the alpenstock and the dwarf took it uncertainly.

"Now you do me."

The dwarf sighed. He seemed sad as if hallucinations can feel such things. "Aye, course."

"I'm sorry about your daughter."

The dwarf slowly shook his head. "Whatever ye done hasn't happened yet."

"It has for me."

The dwarf hefted the alpenstock. His eye twinkled in the endless sun. "Fer ye but fer nobody else. Watch."

The axehead fell. Orc's chest split asunder. The blood coal black and sooted out everywhere in great pulsing clots. The world began to dim. Above where he'd fallen the dwarf held up the tool and regarded it lovingly. "Ye really don't know what ye've got."

Orc closed his eyes.

Become.

Orc opened his eyes. He lay on his back in the sand. Cold sweat poured off of him. The diamond stars belled above in their remembered places. The half faces of two moons lit by the unrisen sun. A third face passed into a terrestrial firelight. It was Glad Nizam's.

"Musheater," she said, and she grinned.