He clung to the sheer concrete dam with [Booky's blade] hanging off his hip into open space. He drove his fingers and toes into holds sized for dwarven digits that were filled with loose sand blown therein over years and decades. He climbed hand over hand and foot over foot with the vast emptiness breathing hot against his neck and his forearms burned and calves ached and fingers twitched of their own fatigue, and there he heard the gulps and gurgles of the water he had smelled and he heard the [brigadier]'s voice walking through his petrified mind as calm and intractable as always, as if the fatal drop beneath was no more than a fever dream. He could almost feel her hand cool against his forehead.
He topped the dam and rolled onto its sunblasted catwalk and lay for a moment with hands clasped together to stop their shaking. He squinted into the west where wind rippling across the Mad shattered a million red suns from the one standing above it into a blinding pillar of light. Here then was the river. Trapped by men and used for some foul purpose. Like Orc. Like all orcs.
A metal structure of some dwarven invention rose from the glare like the jagged black spine of an ancient and forgotten monster. He paid it no mind. The sight and sound and smell of water and its promise overpowered him. Ogaz forgotten, Glad Nizam forgotten. Only his thirst mattered. He was a desiccated tongue and a cracked throat.
He lurched off the catwalk and slithered to the Mad on his belly and reached his tongue toward it and pushed a hand into it to splash it over his open mouth and head and face, and again into his mouth and he closed his eyes and tasted its pregnancy. Slick like oil between his fingers and metallic on his tongue, yet he lowered his mouth with pursed lips to drink from its surface like the orcs he had seen kissing dirt they had never known. He opened his eyes and saw his reflection and the pink and blue and green contamination swirling across its face. He drank again. He drank until he needed breath more than water and he gasped for air and pushed onto his knees like a supplicant and he saw the hard black line dried on the concrete an inch above the Mad's surface and how it ran onto the red sandstone that was once the slot's formidable rim, now diminished to a gently lapped shore, and how it continued under his knees and on and across the trunk of a fallen tree like the seared scar of a lightning strike, a tree like those buried in the sand at Glad Nizam's landing, but halved and carved and waxed with oars protruding, tied to a little wooden dock loaded with wooden casks.
He wiped his wrist across his mouth and sat up. He looked back along the rim rocks overlooking the slot. At their edge squatted a shack rendered from dried mud and old timber rolled together like a dung beetle's prize. Flattened as if melted by the sun. The riding shadow of the world blackened its walls and the last bloodred of sunset colored its eaves and reflections off of the Mad rippled across it like dewy red spiderwebs fluttering in a breeze. Before its open door a man lay on his side with his hands on his gut and blood running through his fingers. Above the man struggled Ogaz with tusks rising into the sunset and the [alpenstock] overhead in both hands. A [workman] grappled his waist holding a [knife]. A [soothsayer] reached for the upheld weapon. A [pistoleer] hollered with both feet braced and his [pistol] rising.
Orc scrambled to his feet and sprinted up the path.
Ogaz passed his tusks across the [soothsayer]'s shoulder and she cried out. The [workman] plunged his [knife]. Instinct or accident put the [tusker]'s elbow into the oncoming blade. It split his skin and slid along the bone up his forearm. The [workman] shouted and leaned all his weight into it and he shouted again when Ogaz put a tusk in his eyeball. The [knife] clattered on the ground and the [workman] fell away with both hands over his face.
Orc saw the [pistol]'s hammer fall. The [pistol] flashed and clapped and bucked, orange fire spat from its short snout and blue smoke jetted from its mechanism and Ogaz's head shot backward as the [soothsayer] fell upon him.
The [pistoleer] whirled to Orc with a second weapon charged and rising. In that instant a shorthorn came around the shack. Her hide was spotted white and her great nose wet and black and her hair gathered in two braids below her curving horns and carved bone and brass trinkets swung from her cropped ears. She reached to palm the [pistoleer]'s skull with a keratin fingertip in each eyesocket and she whipped his head backward. His neck followed and [pistol] discharged toward the sky and his arms wheeled with hands seeking anything to stop his fall. There was nothing. With an honesty rare among men he howled in terror as she threw him in. End over end he fell. He screamed until he didn't.
The shorthorn was lifting and tossing the kicking and shrieking [soothsayer] into the slot as Orc came up with [Booky’s blade] drawn. She backed away and spread her palms wide and lowered her bovine nose as if giving the benedictions of her human sacrifices to the hoodoos and the dammed river. Even thusly bowed she stood taller than Orc.
He ran past her to Ogaz. The pistol ball had shattered his tusk. Its marrow oozed over its broken end and exploded shards were stuck in his cheek and brow and shoulder. His eyes were rolling behind half lids and black blood oozed from his half flayed forearm.
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Orc felt the shorthorn behind him. He heard her say, "Tell me who you are,” in a voice deeper than his own.
"I'm Orc."
She looked down at Ogaz then back at him. "Does he trick me with such visions?"
"I'm as you see me."
"Where did you come from?"
"Glad Nizam sent us."
"I do not know this name."
Orc patted Ogaz’s uninjured cheek. "We're looking for a brownskin scout."
She nodded at the mud hut. "They butchered him to read his guts." As she spoke a striped insect flew from somewhere on her person and landed on a vine of thorns that wrapped her horns like a laurel and pushed its chubby abdomen into a blue flower budding there. She said, "I am Saand and this is my country. Its sun is my eye and its rocks my body and its waters my blood. Have you come to free them?"
"If you're meaning whether I aim to bust down this dam then yeah that's what I aim to do."
She nodded. "Then we serve the same master."
"I serve no masters."
"Then you kill for yourself?"
He looked at the dead left there and at the darkening slot that had consumed the others. "I'd rather not kill at all."
Saand tilted her head. "Strange thing for an orc to say."
A stone near Ogaz's head shattered into pieces that flew into the sky. Orc dove across him. The gunshot's report passed over and on as if running to the end of the world. Orc looked down toward the lake and saw a barge filled with humans paddling out of the glare. A flash and puff of smoke and the air above him snapped and he felt the heat off of the slug. He slung the [alpenstock] around his neck and rolled Ogaz up to sit and looked for cover. A shot rang short and showered his knees in orange sparks. Saand hefted Ogaz under the armpit and threw his arm over her shoulders and together they bore him toward the casks stacked on the dock. Gunshots slashed the air around them as if the world sought to burst at the seams of its creation. They dumped Ogaz behind the casks. Orc heard the humans laughing and shouting odds as if he was back in the pit. He smelled sulfur coming off the casks. He looked between them and he saw the humans pulling long flat bladed oars and rifle butts and bare hands through the water. A [taskmaster] among them called out. He saw her with a foot on the barge's prow and hair waving behind and a man crouched beside her with a black mustache and eyes made for murder and another beside him and another and another and a puff of smoke and the air cracked and a chunk of the cask splintered away. Black powder poured from it onto the dock's slats and slipped through into the water.
He told Saand, "Wake him up,"
"He's been shot."
Orc gripped the top of the powder keg with both hands. "That’s nothing. He just needs a drink." He heaved over the keg and rolled it to shore as fast as he could and it spilled powder in a long tail that gapped in the places where it fell between the slats. A volley of fire snapped all around him and he felt a surge of hot blood down his cheek and he stood the cask on the dam's catwalk and sprinted back to the dock and dove behind the others. A gunshot split a cask and black sludge gulped from it and lurched across the planks and poured into the water where it caught fire in low blue flames that swept out over the Mad's surface and back up onto the dock to lick the other casks. Blood flowed over his cheek but he felt no pain. He knew that would come later.
He saw the prow of the barge emerge now onto the burning water and he saw the humans rowing and reloading, the sweat shining on their backs and the powder blackening their fingers. Booky had thrown so many into his pit. These came freely. He would do what he did best. For kin who didn't want him. For a home that was dead already.
He drew [Booky's blade] and slid the [alpenstock]'s adze along it. They shrieked harshly and a cone of yellow sparks spilled off and into the gathering dark and landed in the powder and sizzled and smoldered.
"Why do you wait?" said Saand.
He looked only at the powder. He struck sparks again into it. Nothing.
Suddenly Saand slapped [Booky's blade] out of his hand and she grabbed the [alpenstock] by the shaft and shoved it against his chest. "Free him," she said.
In that instant a slug struck the [alpenstock]'s pick with a terrible clang that jarred his teeth and the hot lead dropped onto the dock and bounced between the slats and hissed when it hit the water.
He looked down at the [alpenstock] against his chest and saw what needed doing reflected in its faultless black mirror. He ran onto the catwalk with shots biting his heels. He planted his feet and raised the pick overhead. With all his strength he swung it into the concrete and a firm jolt ran up the shaft and into his hands and arms with the sound of a thunderclap. Cracks shot like lightning down the face of the dam. He twisted the pick free and chunks of the gray stone dropped straight down for fifty feet to ricochet off a ledge in the slot's wall and out of sight.
When he rose to swing again they shot him.
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> +1 [Rage] ...up to that point he spent his whole life being told he was too different. We called him Orc of all things. Might as well have named him Other. Suddenly he was among those who constantly reminded him of all the ways he was not orc enough. How do you think he felt? How do you think it would make you feel?... (6/10)
> [Da's Alpenstock] Gains [Unbreakable]: The unstoppable force.
> [Da's Alpenstock] Identified as the [Skyshard].