Huge fireballs shot over her head as if the heavens hurled its stars upon the orcs. The thick black smoke of their contrails arced across the evening sky and wherever they struck they exploded and burned. Bare sandstone burned and bodies burned and even pools of floodwater burned, and flames engulfed the forest's enormous trunks and limbs from roots to tops and from where Mym stood near the fallen tree she could hear the holocaust of the cubs and elders therein and the shouts of the two or three orcs still trying to reach them.
Khaz watched beside her. "Stone and sky," he whispered.
Daraway sat cross legged on the drying sandstone. Mud and filth and blood stained the hem of her cloak and its sleeves and all along its front from where she had carried Cousins. She closed her eyes and laid back on her elbows and said, "I warned you. The armiger's world is a narrow one with room for only one way of being. Stray and suffer the consequence."
Mym sat down at Daraway's side and tried not to hear the shrieking. "How's the girl?"
"Fighting." Daraway put her hand against her forehead. Its fingertips were charred and cracked. "She lost a lot of blood."
"Wee thing like that didn't have much te begin with," said Khaz.
Mym unscrewed her canteen and handed it to Daraway. "Is there anythin we can do?"
Daraway shook her head. She took the canteen and drank.
Mym watched her. "We could go and see her. Maybe raise her spirits like."
Daraway wiped her mouth. "Not now. She's resting."
"Aye that makes sense."
They watched the flames sweep up and over another tree. The cries and shouts had faded. There was only the hissing and roaring of the wildfire and the turmoil of the subsiding floodwaters.
"Hate te be the man who has te explain this te the elves," said Khaz.
"There won't be any explaining," said Daraway.
"Aye?"
She shook her head and muttered, "This, all of this, was intentional."
"How can ye be sure?"
"I can't.” She took a drink. “I still know it to be true."
"That's not much of a reason."
"Look around Khaz. Look at the size of this army. At its disposition. Look where it drove the orcs. Look and think on what I've told you since we arrived. The armiger and those like him want only one thing. Of course they'll say elsewise. He'll tell you one thing and his king another and the veterans who rode headlong to die something else entirely, and they'll all be a kind of truth, true to whoever is listening, true as it passes their lips, but they all serve a singular purpose and I tell you now it isn't the good of dwarves or elves or hungry volunteers desperate for a pittance of weal and glory, nor the good of the land nor the king nor even simple peace. We all ought to reflect on our role in it."
Mym sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand and watched the flood and the fire and the great piles of bodies between them. She shook her head as if clearing it. "It's not our problem now. Let elves look after elves. We got most of what we were owed."
"Did you have any luck with da's shard?" said Daraway.
"Only the sour kind."
"What happened?"
"Angry strokes make for angry scars."
"If ye don't tell her I'm goin te," said Khaz.
She kicked her feet out in front of her and looked up at the sky. "I fouled it up. I came right up on him after their chief fell. He was no more than a yard away in the flood with da's shard leashed te his wrist and nothin but a goblin's fingernail keepin him from sweepin away. I should've just yanked him right on out of the flow but instead I sat yappin at him and the moment he saw me he bloody well let go of that goblin. Left the bugger te fend for himself and with me pick already wringin his little neck. Too coward te finish us on the span and too coward te fight for his friends."
Khaz said, "Maybe he drowned. Hell the way it's flowin he's like te be out te sea by now."
She shook her head. "Any other orc maybe. This devil's too hardy for that. Where ye think these orcs are headed next Dara? Those who aren't turned te smoke."
Daraway capped the canteen and gave it back to Mym. "These orcs aren't heading anywhere next. Not if their leader is dead. She is who united them in the camps and led them here. Without her holding them together they'll splinter along hatreds and hierarchies far older than their captivity. Those still living will destroy themselves, and the last one standing won't last a week in the desert."
Mym looked at the fallen tree. At the way the flood folded under it and rushed over it, the way it split everything apart and how everything flowed back together. An [engineer] was walking along where its crown rested against the itinerant shore carrying a length of rope. He went from limb to limb, measuring them and pulling on their ends and watching them bend.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
She looked at the sun. Four fingers from setting. She stood up and brushed the blood and mud dried into her clothing as if it would do any good.
"Where ye gettin te?" said Khaz.
"Come on."
She led them past a sour dungfire drying the last [dragoon] and she saw her javelins burning within it, past a few veterans from the rising front sitting in a circle with their horses hobbled and wearing feedbags over their mouths and blinders over their eyes as if to stifle any mutiny of horses after the day's ruin, past the now stilled ballistae and their congratulatory engineers whose clothes and hair smelled of burning pitch, past the shieldbearers who knelt rolling dice and cursing and cheering and laughing, past the mess with its line of troubled footmen carrying upturned helmets and gossiping servants holding pewter bowls and slingers no more than lads and lasses all waiting for a ladleful of stew. Finally they came to an open space fifty yards across where iron pitons had been staked directly into the sandstone and iron chains had been looped through their eyelets and the filthy and brutalized and bleeding wrists and necks and ankles had been closed in iron manacles. She searched the scores of downturned faces there until she saw a familiar one. She started toward it.
One of the armiger's knights saw her coming and strode to meet her until he was directly in her path. "Good dwarf, what do you need?"
"Need te talk te that goblin."
"All of you?"
She looked at Khaz and at Daraway whose hood was pulled so far forward only the tip of her chin caught any of the falling sunlight.
"Aye, all of us."
"I'm afraid not."
"Just me then."
"Do you speak orcish?"
"No."
He nodded at Khaz and Daraway. "What about them?"
"I don't talk no damned orcish," said Khaz.
Daraway said nothing.
The [knight] held his plans out flat. "Well then you couldn't talk to him anyway."
"I'm still aim te try."
"I'm afraid not." He laid his right hand across his hip to rest on the pommel of his [blade].
She looked at his hand. "Really?"
"Really."
"Then I'll talk te that otaur there."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Armiger said."
"What does he care whether we do some roughin and questionin."
The [knight] smiled. "I'm sure he wouldn't mind, but I've got orders and until I hear otherwise nobody's allowed in the stockade."
"I don't see any stockade here."
"It's a figure of speech. Ain't no wood here to raise one. Just stay out, dwarf."
She flopped her hand at the guard and turned to Daraway. "Ye don't speak orc do ye?"
"No."
"Let's go see Cousins."
"Ye givin up?" said Khaz.
"Hell no. But if we keep standin around here that knight'll know it. Go on Dara. Take us to her."
Daraway led them back past the line of hungry humans and around the tremendous cauldron of boiling mystery meat to an open field hospital with hundreds of tarpaulins flat on the ground and people sleeping or dying atop them. They passed a [surgeon] as she covered the face of a man with a sheet and crouched over him as if in prayer. The girl lay three bodies down the row. Her poncho was rolled up under her head for a pillow and a thin wool blanket with gaily colored stripes covered her torso. It was folded and twisted as if flung across without thought of warmth or comfort. Her legs stuck out of it and her kneeholed trousers were stiff with her own blood.
Mym knelt beside her and touched her forehead. "Aw hell. She's awfully wan, Khaz."
"She's a fighter."
She shook her head. "We did this." She shook her head again and covered her mouth with her hand.
The [surgeon] stood and said, "Who's that?" and walked quickly up the row of convalescents. She wore an apron that had once been white but was so splotched with yellows and reds she looked like a [butcher] after a week in the slaughterhouse. Her tunic's sleeves were rolled up and tied tight around her elbows and her fingernails were bitten to nubs yet dark along their edges as if she'd filed them on a hunk of charcoal. She carried a wood handled [bonesaw] and when she saw Daraway she said, "You again? And who're you? Friends of this poor thing? Not guardians I see. Stand away from her please. She needs fresh air not second hand dwarf stink."
"Who're ye?" said Khaz.
"The surgeon of this here hospital, if you can call it that. I sure as hell wouldn't." She knelt by Cousins and held her wrist above the girl's mouth as if checking for breath then she straightened and smoothed the striped blanket. "Can you believe this? She can't be more than eight, and shot through and through. Can't believe the armiger allows them along. Children dying for what? It's folly, it's all folly, and we're the fools for living it. Who looks at this and says there's good reason for it? There isn't reason behind any of it. Meaningless suffering's all it is. We're fools for living it and letting others call it sacred. For doing all we can to keep on living it as if it'll suddenly surprise us with good reason that it hid all along. Folly and fools."
"She goin te live?" said Khaz.
The [surgeon] shrugged. "It's grave. Very grave. She hasn't woke since I cleaned her out and sewed her up. Will she live? Who can say? God?" and she laughed meanly.
Mym stroked Cousin's cheek. "Ye rest up. Ye wake up."
She felt Daraway's hand on her back.
"That's enough now," said the [surgeon].
Mym loosened her canteen and set it where Cousins could reach.
"Fine, that's fine, but it's time for you to go, and you'd best say your goodbyes just in case."
Afterward, they sat at the place they'd chosen beside the flood and the fallen tree. She watched men with axes separating its limbs and clearing them of brush and needles and hauling them away toward the stockade.
"This whole thing's a load of nak shit," she said.
"If ye mean chasin a whole race of folk te a place te wipe em off of it then I'm not arguin," said Khaz.
"I mean comin here after da's damned shard. It's just meant more folks dyin for the sake of dwarves and I don't think da'd feel any different bout it. No slip of stone is worth dyin for."
"Yer talkin bout the girl."
She looked at him. "No shit."
"She wanted te come along."
"She's too young te be makin such choices."
"Aye that may be, but it doesn't mean we're the ones te make em for her."
"Just leave me be."
"Mym."
"Just leave me be."
She walked down to the flood's high line and watched the flow wane by the orange light of the wildfire. The nearest parts of the forest sparkled shockingly bright and the places between the sparks were impossibly black and silent, as if they were the great holes of where life had been, columns absent of mass and light and air yet filled with the forest's memory of what was missing and by night's ending even the memory would cease for it was held by wood and flesh and not by stone. Farther north the sky glowed orange under a grievous cloud of smoke and in the east a sharp serrated sliver of blue horizon shone as a moon readied to rise. She thought about her da and wondered if he'd ever seen this part of the world. She'd never asked. From somewhere in the stockade an orc wailed.
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> -2 [Vengefulness]: ...for a heart of stone hers was always tender, and empathy is anathema to malice... (6/10)