They walked in the van and watched the landscape unscroll. Mounted dragoons surrounded them wearing quilted cloth coats with brightly colored panels. Clusters of short barbed javelins in leather scabbards at their knees for drawing and throwing at a gallop. In turns pairs sprinted ahead to practice the motion. Swift and precise like a longarm's sprung hammer. They didn't speak to the dwarves and the dwarves didn't speak to them.
Their last day on the plateau they came on small caravans of migrant families heading south. Humans weathered and coppered like the land with goats and burros strung nose to tail by fraying hardworked lines. The people carried woven baskets filled with sentimental things and burdened their animals with tools and foodstuffs and bedrolls and furry dromedaries of water made from goatskin with spigots of goat horn. Fathers and mothers and children cajoled their animals into the dry sages and junipers as the van came up. The dragoons called out as they passed and the fathers shared rumors of the orcs' landing in a vast painted desert to the north and wished the expedition luck. Some promised to come and fight after they saw their families to safety.
She heard Khaz tell a family, "Ye should swap yer loads with yer beasts' against losin em," and the father scowled and the mother gawked and their children hid their faces behind dirty hands.
"Maybe they'll take that girl off our hands," said Mym.
"Doubt it," he said as the man cursed at him and told him to go back to whatever hole he had crawled out of. "With the number of them headin south I'd say their kin in Here First might start pullin for the orcs."
"Ye think?"
"Why not? We're a long way from their king."
"Aye but he's still their king."
"Not te the shot of ear or sight of eye of them who's here. Humans have a way of makin new kings whenever they get tired of their old ones."
Farther along they passed a father and a daughter alone without animals or accompaniment. They held hands as the van passed. Their eyes tracked the dwarves in silence. Just them and their two packs and the big country.
"How far te this painted desert?" Mym asked a [dragoon].
"Your little feet gettin tired?" he said.
"How far?"
"Hell if I know. I ain't never been here before."
A second [dragoon] leaned over. "See them mesas yonder? They're the highlands that she orc howled about. Sailors were saying the orc ships were anchored off their coast. They won't have nowhere to run with the elves to their north."
"I'd heard elves are long gone out of this world."
The [dragoon] nodded. "They'd like you to think so. I'd rather we didn't have to deal with them neither, but if we can drive the orcs into their country maybe they'll take care of each other. Either way it won't be long now."
"Thank ye."
"Sure."
Khaz looked at her. "Did she say elves?"
"Aye."
"What the hell kind of storybook did we fall inte?"
The mesas grew to span the northwestern horizon and the van hooked right down a winding track of gritty sandstone and along a drainage picked clean of greenery whose walls [spoke] of old water. They walked its bottom and they heard the sea's sighing and stepped from the drainage onto a long beach stretching north and south whose sand was darkened by surf and by the shadow of a tall sandstone cliff that overhung for as far as they could see.
The van followed the beach north. At sunset they found sand blackened by fire and they found a long line of orc corpses half buried by the surf's haphazardry beside a narrow slot in the wall. It spat water into a channel far deeper and wider than what its meager flow suggested.
Mym didn't see any ships anchored offshore, but in the middle of the stream lay a chunk of concrete no bigger than her fist. She picked it up and turned it over. Its sharp edge was marked.
"Look here."
Khaz fingered the mark then held it to his ear. "Shard of the sky done it."
"Aye." She saw two empty crates beside the shadowed slot and she saw the rimrock's red minarets daggering the sky's clear blue cistern as if hoping water might pour from its fullness.
She tossed the chunk back into the stream. "He was here."
***
They found the corpse facedown on the slot's bottom. The shallow river rippled around it. The dragoons walked their horses past while Mym stopped and knelt and looked it over. It was a brownskin. Nude and weaponless. Its emaciated back more scar than skin.
"No wounds but these old ones, and they looked te be healin up clean," she said.
"What killed him?" said Khaz.
Daraway bent at her hips to keep her knees out of the water and touched the body here and there. "Hunger."
"Hell. That isn't no way te go."
"Hunger slew plenty back in the camps. This one won't be the last. Stay away from that dear."
Cousins had touched the body like Daraway had. She backed away and put her hands on her hips and looked up the walls and the pictographs they bore as if to demonstrate a profound disinterest in the corpse. "Them look pretty old."
"Aye," said Mym.
"How old y'all reckon?"
She glanced up from the body. "Bout ten thousand years I'd say."
"Damn."
"Watch yer mouth."
"But the world weren't made but a thousand years ago."
"Who says?"
"My ma for one. The churchfather and his sisters. Everybody."
"Kid yer listenin te the wrong everybody."
Cousins put her hand on her chin as if considering the wisdom of that. Then she said, "Well I ain't listening to y'all."
"No kiddin."
"Y'all just tell me to get home."
"Sure as stone. Best follow me now."
Mym led them further up the canyon and stopped at another body. As she knelt to check it Cousins trotted up beside her to watch. It was gruesome business but the girl didn't seem to mind. Who knew what she'd already seen in her life.
"How do y'all know them pictures are so old?"
"So now yer listenin te me."
"Maybe. I'm considering my options."
Mym looked at Khaz.
"Funny kid," he said.
"So how do y'all know?"
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"Cause I'm the one who made em," said Mym.
"Y'all are lying again."
Khaz said, "We know what the stones tell. If they say they were marked that long ago then we believe em."
"Stones don't lie?"
"No miss they don't."
"Y'all are kinda stoney."
"Aye, but we bleed the same as anyone."
"And we've produced a liar or two over the years," said Mym.
"How old are y'all?"
"Twenty," said Mym.
"Aye twenty years ago," said Khaz.
She stopped at another body. Slumped against the wall with its legs in the water and its chin on its chest. Its eyes were half open and its chest seemed to fall. She squatted back on her heels with her hands on her knees waiting to see if it would happen again. She waited there a long time before it did.
"Where're yer friends?" she said.
The orc's chest caved in and edged out but otherwise it didn't move.
Khaz unslung his pack and sliced a coin of smoked sausage into his hand.
"What're ye doin?" said Mym.
"He needs it."
"If they're starvin te death in their own country then I expect we'll need it ourselves fore too long. "
"Aye well he needs it now." He held the slice under the orc's nose.
The orc didn't move.
Daraway bent over him and peeled back his eyelids and touched his neck. "I'm afraid he's past helping Khaz. Sorry."
"Save yer sorrys. Ye all get goin. I'll catch up."
Mym said, "Let him rot. He's earned it."
He wrapped the slice of sausage with the rest of it and put it away and drew his [alpenstock]. "Said I'd catch up."
Mym didn't move. "Why ye care about this orc's sufferin? He did it te himself. Not like they care about ours."
"I can't say what orcs care about."
"Well I can. Da was lyin there and that orc bastard just stood over him and watched him sufferin. He didn't care one cut." As she said it she relived it. She remembered the tall orc's offer to end her da's misery, and she remembered her denial and her sworn revenge. She remembered these things and she realized the reason her da still suffered was because she hadn't been ready to let him go. The shame of it overwhelmed her.
"Shit Mym," Khaz was saying, "if ye cared at all about yer da's sufferin ye'd be back in the delvin."
She just looked at him.
He'd gone too far and he knew it. "This isn't somethin that girl should see and frankly I don't like what it's makin ye into."
"Cause I should make meself into whatever ye like."
"Shave me slaggy beard wedwarf. I said get on and I meant get on. This isn't any easier with ye draggin me across the damned coals."
"Fine."
She snatched the [alpenstock] out of his hand and walked up the slot. After a hundred yards she dropped it into the water. A hundred more and Daraway caught her with Cousins splashing behind. The girl's eyes brimmed like the water swirling at their feet. The woman started to say something but the snap and carom of the [longarm]'s shot made her jump.
Damn this place Mym thought. Damn that orc for livin and damn Khaz for comin and damn da for stayin when he should've ran. And for lingering after when he should've done anything else.
Khaz caught them up with his dripping [alpenstock] in one hand and his [longarm] smoking in the other. He came directly before her path and he spat fire like he'd swallowed the forge. "Don't ye ever do that again."
"Then don't tell me who te be or how te feel."
She turned and walked around him and on around a bend then over and under and around tremendous broken blocks of concrete strewn along the slot's floor and wedged between its walls. One bore a strikemark that [told] of the shard of the sky. Above it rose a gap both straight and precise where it and the other blocks once stood as a single whole, and where the signs of previous wholes were carved into the walls' faces. Their stones welcomed her her arrival in [tones] deeper than shale.
She stopped.
"Are you alright?" said Daraway just behind. "What is it?"
Khaz came next and his anger turned to wonder. "Oy Mym. They know ye."
She looked up one wall and it looked back and [recalled] memories of her youth. A band of smooth red limestone [boasted] of her handiness with a longarm and an orange outcrop shaped like a fist [asked] after her da and a yellow hoodoo [whispered] a lullaby she'd not heard since her ma still had breathing lungs to sing.
"Ma's brother," she said.
"Barzun?"
"Aye."
"Ye think? After all these years?"
She pointed. "I'll grow my beard if that's not his stonework."
"They're sayin yer name not his."
"He always liked stonetalkin while workin."
"Must've talked a lot for these te know ye by sight and sound."
"Aye, well this project's big as a stair te the sun."
"What was it?" said Daraway.
"Looks te be a dam," said Mym.
"Least til a few days ago."
"Then this is the Mad," said Daraway.
"What's that?" said Cousins.
"A great river. They say the first orc was born here of smoke from the sky and dust from the earth."
"Isn't that a bit of poetry," said Khaz.
"Who says?" said Cousins.
"Orcs," said Daraway.
Mym laid her palm against the stone. "And old uncle Barzun drowned it with a bit of concrete. He always liked understatin things."
Khaz came beside her. "Strange thinkin he passed this way." Then it just keeps gettin smaller."
Her eyes drifted down one wall and across the floor of the slot and up the other side. She saw how Barzun had used the wall's bending and warping to buttress the work. She marveled at the foresight and skill there.
"Ye see where it failed?" said Khaz.
"Aye. Two blows by shard."
"Mighty blows."
"Aye." They were mighty indeed.
He looked at her. She saw his eyes and the reflection of the water caught in them. Sliding over the globes slow then fast then slow as if rushing over a stone just beneath its untroubled surface.
"I'm sorry bout before," he said.
"Aye and ye should be."
"I'm worried yer goin off. Ye were quiet as a snowdrift when ye saw that she orc hangin from the post with her wee lad beside her, and just back there ye forgot everythin da taught ye bout sufferin prey."
"Hell Khaz. Orcs aren't prey. Prey don't know what they do. Prey don't know when there's lead inside it nor why it's hurtin nor what that fur faced wrinkled sot is standin over it. Those orcs that came te the span knew what they were about."
He looked downriver then up the walls then back to her. "I'm not sure they did."
"Course they did. They made a choice te leave their camps and te stand against us."
"I don't remember it that way."
"What way?"
"Them standin. They were runnin and we got in their way cause humans asked us te. Not meanin anythin against yers, Dara, but after seein that harbor of yers still standin like it'd never smelled an orc fart I can't figure why the king came askin for our help. Seems like a whole lot of dwarves died for nothin."
Mym balked. "It's only nothin if ye let it be nothin."
He shook his head. "Was nothin, less ye think this shit desert is worth somethin, or that vengin for vengin's sake is worth somethin."
"Thought ye came for vengin."
"Aye, but good vengin's got justice te it."
"Ye just dispensed some justice back there."
"That I did, but the further we go into this hellhole the more it seems like their armiger isn't here for anythin less than killin a whole folk. That isn't vengin. That's somethin else."
"Orcs just about killed our whole folk."
"We made em. And we were dyin already."
"And they took our best hope for livin when they carried off da's tool."
He went back to looking up the slot's walls as if at any moment they might shift like breaking clouds and show a piece of blue sky. "Ye puttin a lot of stock in the shard when ye don't much believe in stonecuttin."
"I got nothin left te pin me hopes on."
He turned to her. "There's still the other way."
Mym felt her cheeks flush. She glanced at Daraway then back to Khaz. "Fire from the mountain, Khaz. Halfway round the big bloody world and ye won't let off that. It's the shard or it's nothin. If I have te pull the belly out of every orc on this side of the sea te get it back then that's what I'll do and te hell with their sufferin."
Cousins put her hands over her ears.
Mym felt Daraway reach a hand to her shoulder and say her name.
"That kind of bloodlustin is goin te get someone killed," muttered Khaz.
"Then maybe its ye who should stay behind and let me do what needs doin."
"I'm not leavin ye. We're the last son and daughter, and we owe it te dwarves still delvin te keep tryin til we can't try no more."
"Te hell with them and te hell with that and te hell with ye. If ye won't leave me then I'm leavin ye."
She spun and strode away through the gap. There the slot opened into a tremendous basin of stone and silt and the foundations of some ruined structures and her eyes started to water from the foul dust in the air. She followed the dragoons up a winding track and jogged through their horses then passed a mud hut with opened casks and torn sacks and loose grains all over the ground then passed the dressed out and halfeaten bodies of two humans and as the sun set in a thin bloody line out west she jogged into the northern wastes of the Madlands. She had left the others behind. She knew it was a mistake, but she wasn't turning back.
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> +1 [Vengefulness]: ...I couldn't help myself and neither could he. There's something gravid about a dwarf consummating a blood oath. Something very real that pulls along everyone in their orbit whether they will it or not... (10/10).
> [Vengefulness] Title Gained: [Huntress] Denotes she who always finds her quarry.
> +1 [Stonespeaking]: ...aye she wasn't the first te go crossin the wide sea. Her own uncle blazed that path. But as far as I know not a single dwarf went after. Gone vengin alone in a faroff land with only stranger stones te guide ye. Can ye imagine?... (5/10).