Their footsteps echoed off canyonwalls and side chambers that hadn't heard an orc in half a century. Not since the invaders had come, for these were the hoodoos that had glowered as men paddled up in the dark as silent as clouds occluding the moons and with daggers in their teeth and daggers in their eyes to catch an orc between the houses and pull an edge across his throat. This was the rock that gave no warning when men stole across it toward the sow wrapped in a blanket with her cub beside her, watching the bottoms of the clouds and hoping to share the stories written in the stars. It turned its rough cheek to the sudden wrapping and smothering, the knee against her throat, the cub's whining in the blanket as thrusting knives wetted it. This was the river whose eternal hymn hid the heavy steps to the houses. It sang when they lit their hissing fuses one, two, three and they rolled their firebombs through doors of hide and of cloth to explode into conflagrations roaring fiercer than any lion, and men and a dwarf roaring also as they ran to the doorways to knife any who survived the blasts, the fires, the smoke. Smoke to stop a heart before the heat boiled it and flame scored it. Smoke that killed as surely as the blasts. It sang as the fires died and the orcs died. Their blood feeding it and succoring the junipers.

Orc and Saand passed a hollow block of the same kind of concrete that had formed the dam.

The shorthorn gestured to it. "That is their well. The reason they stopped him up and made him ill. Maybe why your kind were shipped across the sea. I know you would ask, but I have no answers."

"I wouldn't ask," he said.

She looked at him and studied his face. "I suppose not."

"You have something to say."

She hesitated. "If you opened up to those around you you would not feel as you do."

"And how do I feel?"

"Alone."

He put his chin down and tried not to wipe the heels of his hands against his burning eyes. "Missing the mark today."

"You may not share but Ogaz does."

"Not anymore he won't."

"He is only trying to help."

"Just like you."

"Yes."

He saw the hard edges of a slot rending the wall ahead. "Like you helped me through the rite."

"Yes."

"Maybe if you hadn't I'd feel different about being here and about the others back on the beach."

"You know that is not true."

"I only know what your tonic told me."

She shook her head, baubles quivering from her horns. "And you know the land is poisoned. That it now poisons the air also. Glad Nizam stays and slays her home, and her home slays she who stays."

"It's your home too."

She stopped and turned to him. "I am he and he is me. So long as he lives I live. So long as I live he does. Have you accepted such a fate? Are you willing to? Are your kin?"

He didn't say anything.

She nodded up a slot. "This way."

The slot twisted with a milky creek dribbling along its ramped bottom. They ascended its mud. Hands on either wall. They leapt over frothy pools and crept under huge boulders that hung five or ten or fifty feet up and always looked ready to fall on their heads. He wondered whose heads they awaited. Upon the rimrock ran the perfectly level black highline left by the lake. A gap in the western wall revealed a white dagger of sky that seemed to pierce the rock. It pointed at a hoodoo decorated by a hundred handprints of red and green and brown paints. In places they'd been chipped away with chisel and hammer, sharded and scattered like the rest of orcdom. Whoever had started their defacing never finished.

As they came around the hoodoo they saw a cave beckoning. They scrambled to the entrance. Its ceiling was wet and its ground sprouted green grasses and a few date palms no higher than Orc's waist. Ten paces in they ducked through a curtain of vines creeping and roots dropping from holes high in the ceiling. Cool water dripped from them onto his scalp as he crawled beneath. Long yellow rays of sunlight filtered through the holes as keen as blades, and in every place where they lit the floor sprouted masses of greenery that stretched upward bearing white orchids and purple lotuses and orange lilies.

Somewhere ahead a voice wailed.

He drew the [Skyshard]. "Lead if you know the way. I'm right behind you."

He followed her through a fissure so tight they had to wiggle through on their backs while water dripped coldly onto their faces. On the far side black lichen covered the cave's walls and swallowed daylight's last gleaming. She grabbed his hand and led him through a low passage to a chamber tall enough for them to stand upright. A carpet of mushrooms the size of fingers grew along the circumference and their caps glowed dimly green to light her legs and hands and chin and the lowest part of the walls. At the chamber's center Ogaz knelt in a shallow pool that perfectly captured each point of light as if this were the place where all the stars of the night sky hid from day. Orc felt as though his next step would cast him adrift in the heavens.

He saw a dwarf sat there amid the reflections. The dwarf looked sickly in the dim sheen. His hair flowed into a beard that wrapped twice around his body and curled on the chamber's floor where a cluster of mushrooms sprouted from each of its strands as if the alchemy of that place transmuted his tissues to others. As if the differences between things living and dying and dead are entirely and merely down to arrangement. This dwarf moved from one to the next and was very close to the last. He clutched to his chest a metal box with dented hinges and panels and a smashed mechanism.

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Ogaz said, "Ogaz thinking dwarf's wanting death, but who can tell?" and he levered the box's door with the tip of a [javelin] he'd made from driftwood and sea glass.

The dwarf twisted it away and said something in his guttural stonetalk.

Ogaz put the [javelin]'s shaft across the dwarf's neck and pushed him back. "See? Wanting it."

"Can you speak to him?" said Saand.

Orc said, "I don't know dwarf. I can try man talk."

"Ask him what that is," said Ogaz.

Orc said to the dwarf. "Show me the box."

The dwarf glowered at him but didn't move from the wood pressed against his neck.

"Give it to me,” said Orc.

"Never." The pool rippled away from the dwarf and sent waves of faint green light shimmering up the walls like aurorae above a boreal winterscape.

Orc hefted the [Skyshard] where the dwarf could see. "I'll open it for you."

The dwarf's eyes widened and his mouth opened amid his wild beard. He reached toward the tool and drew a trembling finger across the top of its pick. "Ye brought her back te me?"

Orc smelled the dwarf's foul breath and he saw the bits of mushroom caught in his beard. The dwarf's eyes held a kind of wildness made wilder by the spectral glow. Orc didn't know him, but he knew who he was. [Builder] of the dam. [Builder] of the well. Something was wrong with his face.

"I'm keeping it for someone," said Orc.

"Who?"

"Waz."

The dwarf nodded. His whole body seemed to move with it. "Explains how an orc got me shard. How's that old stonekisser?"

"Unwell."

"Expected as much. He likes nothin more than gettin in trouble, and that lass of his is a walkin talkin cave in."

He pointed the [Skyshard] at the box. "What do you have there?"

"That's a story we don't have time for."

"Waz wants to know."

"Oy Waz. How I miss him. How's the old dwarf?"

He looked at Saand and Ogaz. They looked back with brows furrowed though they couldn't understand what was being said.

"Unwell."

"Aye that's te be expected. Always was a troublemaker."

"You don't seem much better."

"Me? I'm fine. Never been better. Stouter than a tapped keg of Stour's stout. Ye didn't happen te bring any? I've been drinkin creek water for as long as I can remember."

"Tell me how you came by the box."

"This thing? Workin on me dams. The concrete kept dissolvin after it set. I built two of em te be sure and sure enough they melted like snow in sunshine. I told the armiger it was no good. Somethin in the water made it untamable. Was a relief te tell it true. Never sat right with me what they did to yer kind. Never sat right. The brigadier didn't like it none either."

Orc leaned forward. "Who?"

"Who what?"

"You were saying something about a brigadier."

"Is she with ye?"

He shook his head and muttered, "If only you knew."

"Oy? What ye meanin?"

"Tell me what's in the box."

The dwarf trembled and started talking faster. "Ye won't believe it. Ye won't. It was here in this cave. They must've set it up here. Did ye ever see the canyon fore we finished the dam?"

"No."

"Aye well it took some doin te get one te finally set and not run out te sea like melted wax. Ye missed quite a sight. This here was infusin the headwaters and yer lot were growin anythin they wanted. Everythin they wanted. Ye never seen such beauty in the color green."

Orc studied the dwarf’s face for sign of deceit. "It's all dead now."

"Aye well that's what happens when ye plug up a river. I told em not te. I told em no amount of crude was worth a whole nation of folk. One of the four great nations no less. I told em so. The brigadier, she's a woman of grace. She and me tried to tell the armiger, but there's no gettin through te him. I can’t tell ye how many of his boys he got killed just divertin water ahead of buildin. Don't matter now though. I got it. What it did for the orcs it'll do for us. Waz'll be thrilled. He's been goin on bout a granddaughter for as long as I can remember, and I got the longest memory in the delvin."

"Show me."

"Show ye what?"

"What's in the box."

"Oh ye got te see it. The way it glows and shifts is like nothin else. Here." The dwarf leaned back and looked down at the box and grunted. His arm and the box it held stayed close to his chest. He grunted again. "Ye may need te help me, dwarf friend."

He took the dwarf's hand. It was as cold as the water in which he sat and as tough and useless as a tumor. The fingers didn't bend. Nor the wrist. He nearly unsocketed the elbow to move it an inch. If the dwarf felt pain he gave no sign.

The box slid into the dwarf's lap.

"The damned armiger made me do it," the dwarf was saying. "He promised it'd be mine after. We need it more than him, more than the shard even. It'll change everythin. There'll be lads and lasses again. I tried leavin te take it back te the delvin, but this place. This place."

He watched the dwarf shudder and cover his face with his good hand.

The dwarf said, "I can't walk. Ye must take it, dwarf friend. An orc dwarf friend. I wished I seen Waz's face when he met ye. Did I tell ye how much trouble he used te get into way back when the glacier was still lickin the nose of the delvin? That old dwarf's half the reason it's half melted."

Orc levered the [Skyshard]'s spike into the mechanism and pressed his weight into it and with a wretched shriek of metal on metal the box snapped open. He reached in, then looked in, then said, "It's empty."

Ogaz peered over his shoulder and said, "It's empty."

The dwarf never looked. Perhaps his neck no longer bent. "He must've taken it. It doesn't matter. The secret's here. This place, this water. It's here."

The dwarf cupped the cave's water in his good hand and giggled as it leaked between his fingers and down his wrist then forearm then dripped from his elbow back into the pool.

"What does he say?" said Saand.

"He's mad," said Orc.

"Yes, but what does he say?"

To the dwarf Orc said, "Tell me what was in the box."

"The secret te life."

"Alright."

"The bleedin orcstone."

"The orcstone."

"Aye. But it doesn't matter. Orcstone, elfstone, manstone, dwarfstone. They don't matter. Shard of the sky, stone of the earth. Ye need te make life from death? All ye need's this." The dwarf ran his tongue along the water's path down his upraised hand and wrist and forearm

Ogaz said, "Ogaz learns sticking in human camps. Maybe Ogaz sticks him some? Maybe helps get him talking straight?"

"Thought you didn't want to be like them," said Orc.

"Ogaz doesn't. They're dreadful."

"There are as many sorts of humans as there are orcs."

Ogaz looked at him. "Funny thing Orc says."

He frowned. "It was, wasn't it?"

Ogaz ran a finger across the end of his broken tusk. "Maybe Orc does the sticking."

The dwarf suddenly sat up straight and his pupils filled his eyes. "We're dyin. The decay is killin us. Killin us here, killin us there. Ye see? It's comin out of the black heart. We can't get te it this way. It doesn't go deep enough. I tried already. Ye got te go through the mountain. Got te go te the source. Let's get goin, Waz. Bring yer stock. Wait. Who's that there? Oy orc. That ain't yers. Give it te me."

The dwarf reached for the [Skyshard].

Orc laid a palm against the dwarf's chest to still him. He saw the dwarf shudder as if struck and his head fell forward and he coughed and coughed again. He felt something dark and wet come up all over his hand. The dwarf fell against him and slid off sideways to land facedown in the pool. Water filled his open mouth.

Saand touched his neck. "He's dead."

Ogaz sighed. "Ogaz saying dwarf wanting death, but no one believes."

"Did any of that make sense to you?" said Saand.

"Some," said Orc. If he could recover the [orcstone] he could heal the land. His folk could grow the food they needed as their forebears had done. Never seen such beauty in the color green he'd said. He wiped the dwarf's insides from his soiled hand and he felt sharp grains like tiny stone pebbles scraped his skin there.

"What did he say?" said Saand.

"I'll tell you on the way."

"On the way where?"

"Back to Glad Nizam."

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> +1 [Renown]: ...that tusker always hangin on him said he slew a dwarf underground without any help from anyone. Little me said that's like a snake killin an eagle midflight but I guess that happens too maybe, and if anyone could do it it'd be him... (1/10)