Longhorns shouldn't be born that way. He was pale and thin and covered in the placental sheen that dimly reflected his original sin. Bawling in the straw for a mother who would never come, a prong at each temple streaked with blood from ripping her apart. Outside spread reaped cornfields and strips of moonlight torn across the night's veil. Somewhere beyond stood the watchtowers and the wire fencing strung between. His folk were once plains runners and renowned hunters of beasts but his father now pulled plow and shucked corn for men who were his masters. Near to the infant that old bull languished over the dying mother, his temple scars shining like wax seals from the dehorning brand. The longhorn bawled alone.

Years passed. The father leathered thin and the longhorn calloused up. Around back subsided the mound of the nameless mother who grew inside her the son that gored open her belly. The father never talked about it. The longhorn never asked.

He was the only longhorn in camp yet wearing his widespread crown. The master men feared him. He worked alongside his father, both suncoppered and filthy. He knew neither letters nor numbers and in him burned a violence as unadulterated as the sun.

At twenty he escaped. He wouldn’t again see the unbroken soil in the predawn gloaming. The barking dogs, the manacled chains. He fled north as far as Mill Gap, a lone monster haunting that vast farmland. Men picked the rows, reaching and sweating, hands like birds flitting between the fuzzy stonefruits. Those he stole numbed his lips with sweet yielding flesh. Upon the stark horizon the fingers of watchtowers thrusted into an ambivalent sky. Another camp that interned his slowly forgetting and forgotten folk.

A year later he was beyond the Gap, squatting outside the capital that was. Sixteen days he watched the carrion coming and going. Each dawn countless buzzards spiraled thickly overhead like a living tornado. They made no calls nor singular sounds but together the cut of their wings was like the creeping hush of oblivion come. He lived under his hide and at night he went forth to the city of the dead like a creature of legend to fight with the newly risen. He was bigger than any of them and his horns impaled their flanks and he smelled their unspilling blood therein. His eyes were passive. The pullring through his septum swung opposite his sledgehammer fists. He fought all night. Barehanded and with hooves lashing. Men who died from plague. Men who died from panic. Now ghouls whose pulverization retributed his mother, his father, his folk, his self.

The seventeenth night he was knifed in the back. Swinging round to deal with the shivver he was stabbed through the heart. He sat down in the moonslit street and the blood flowed out of him. The undead passed him by. He waited for the buzzards.

Next thing he lied on the platform under the still strung gallows in the city forum. A goosedown pillow beneath his head and the necromancing queen attending him. She a noblewoman with her face masked and hair held up in a silver net. She quickened his mind, she animated his flesh. He was hers or she thought he was. Nightly now he carried others to her for her grisly work and the dead were his education and she showed him the way of things never known to them in the camps. But he owed her nothing and on a certain day he departed the old capital. He aimed for the Gap.

Now the longhorn was become something else. He was risen. His unlife commenced with the betrayal of another birther, another license to violence. Not since the godkilling and never thereafter would the world retain sufficient rawness and wildness to succor the embitterment cancering his unbeating heart. It grew therein a hell of its own.

An army of kingsmen garrisoned the Gap. Their terror caged their eyes and shut their ears to his passing. He drifted down the coast in darkness. He watched the moonslit seafoam pile upon itself. Sealions trumpeted. A citylike ship aglow in yellow lanterns that spilled across the surface like liquid gold, slooping over invisible swells from horizon to opposite horizon. He cut inland, intending to return whence he came. To free the father from the wire and from life's oppression. He studied the camp laid out beside the cornfields. He was not the first to arrive.

He walked the narrow lanes between the wooden bunkhouses. The night smelled of reaped corn and fear. He stepped over dark forms of men he had known. He dry spat on them. The trace of his kin tracked north and east, he followed its scent, cornmeal and sweat and damp leather. Underhoof trampled earth of thirsty pan. Moss hung from trees overhead like veils of the bereaved. The breeze had an autumnal cutting edge and it shivered the branches and the moss pendulumed in one direction only. He skirted north around farmsteads and villages. He saw another camp lit up in the night and the wire cut and the houses aflame and he saw the fugitives tossing on the bodies of the master men, a holocaust of black shapes boiling in the blaze.

He stepped into the firelight and he called to him, his father. The old bull backed with revulsion. The longhorn’s hide was cracked and dry. His face was pale. He would’ve wept but he could make no tears.

A woman stepped before him. She was diminutive, she was old, yet there was might about her. The others heeded her sayings and their eyes tracked her as closely as shadows follow their sunlit makers. She told him she needed him. She called herself the brigadier.

***

Father Horace had been hellfiring brimstone to a packed house for as long as the sleet had been blowing and the sleet had been blowing for a month straight. When Orc stepped into the woodframed tent there was no place left to sit or stand. The stink of unbathed humans and the derelict mad who attend such revivals nearly drove him back out again, but Mym shoved him in and squeezed in after and started wringing the water out of her hair. If it weren't for the priest drawing the throng forward it might have turned on the newcome foreigners, such was the fear he peddled. There weren't many free orcs and delving dwarves in those parts and there would have been none, but the risen had lain off Mill Gap and the now-open road into the deadlands and the old capital brought a whole lot of folks from a whole lot of places seeking fortune in land and in salvage and a certain sort of lawlessness that men called freedom.

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"Praise be," said the priest, "there are but two commandments: obey God and obey your king. All ye godly folk newly arrived from the martyred armiger’s holy crusade now sanctify this ground with your good graces. Go and seek thy neighbors in good faith. Spread the word they need to hear. I say to you bring them here! Take their arms and guide them away from the hellwrought north. Let not one of them go to the deadlands for that direction lies fury and violence, and the way of God is the way of peace."

"I can't see a damn thing."

Orc had been listening to the priest. He turned now to Mym. She was up on her toes with her hands pulling at the shoulder straps of her pack as if by lifting it up she might contrive to lift herself an extra inch or yard.

"You aren't missing anything," said Orc.

"Ye seein any dwarves?"

Orc scanned the crowd. All of them bore arms of some kind as if they’d never heard of any god of peace. A colossal figure hooded in cloth and clad in leather and donned in some barbarous headdress then entered the tent. He wore the horns of the bull capped in gold and he was pale and from his nose hung a massive ring you could string a rope through as if for hitching. He was a foot taller than Orc and he stood chewing a length of straw and he shook out his head and the snowmelt off of his horns wet those gathered nearby and they turned their eyes upward to see whether the roof leaked.

The priest had stopped speaking. There was no sound but the flapping canvas. All followed the priest's gaze to the hooded figure. He threw off the hood and they saw he wore no costume at all, that his body was the sole owner of the leather and his skull of the horns.

The longhorn shoved his way forward to the crateboard stand from which the priest witnessed and he turned to address the mass. His face was as wan as a moon as if no blood flowed through it. He raised his enormous hands.

"Friends," he said, "your king thanks you for sequestering this man. I know you weren’t abetting his fugivity and I’ll make sure your king knows it too. For the rest of you who, like many others, sought only shelter from the rain in this tent and perhaps solace before continuing on through the Gap to your riches and earthly rewards, I must tell you this man’s a fraud."

"Oh Lord," cried the priest. "Permit no lies!"

"He was lately defrocked from the church for handling the boys of his congregation and, you ladies there clapper your ears, and for bending one over the font of his holy water."

A woman in the front row wailed.

"The devil is here," cried the priest. "If ye have no faith then believe your eyes!"

The longhorn turned his enormous head to regard the priest. "Down at the Diggins a mere month ago he murdered the lawful purveyor of this tent in his sleep after having his way with the man's wife."

"Strike me down if I don't clove in the pollycocker," said a prospector sitting close to the makeshift pulpit, and he rose from the pewboard drawing a nailheaded club off his belt.

"Time te get," said Mym. She sliced the pick of her alpenstock across the canvas and stepped through the part and into the blow. Orc ducked after. With their heads bowed they ran through the sleet toward the stonewalled inn. Behind them they heard the cries and howls of violence and a score of seams were now bursting with folk falling out of them, men shouting, women fleeing, children stampeded over in the freezing mud. Orc and Mym reached the thatched eaves of the inn and turned and watched. The oilcloth of the tent had ignited and flames were spreading swiftly across it and thick smoke billowed opposite the downpour and the redfaced people still coming out of it fell to their hands and knees hacking. The fire ran up the wood framing and the guylines sizzled in the heat and snapped and the cloth of the tent levitated upward, burning still, thirty feet up before sliding off of the convection it had made and settling to the ground in a guttering heap.

Mym hooted at the spectacle and shook her head. "I’m surprised ye didn't try and stop that," she said.

Orc shrugged. "Sounded to me like justice served."

"Ye believed that otaur?"

"No."

She peered at him as if she hadn't understood him, then she laughed.

They ducked into the inn and saw the longhorn already leaning over the bar. On the counter at his elbow was the priest's collection dish and a small heap of coppers. In his hand he held a bottle of potato gin and its cork nowhere to be seen. They came up to the bar and Mym ordered beer. She flicked a copper onto the bar and the barman clamped it down where it bounced and slid it back to her.

"Drinks are on him," said the barman and he nodded at the longhorn.

Mym drank til her cup was empty. She looked past Orc's waist down the bar to the longhorn. Orc looked after her. The longhorn leaned with his elbow against the bar, swirling the gin along the sides of the bottle and studying its viscosity. Men were coming into the tavern, cut up, covered in mud, redeyed from the smoke. They stood there like golems of the earth staring at the longhorn as if waiting for something.

A teamster said, "What camp you come up from to know about the priest?"

"I come out of the Gap," said the longhorn.

The men looked at each other.

"Didn't you say you was bountyhuntin for the king?"

"Did I?"

"When was you at the Diggins?"

The longhorn shook his head and his damp mane swept from side to side flitting water onto the floorboards. "Never been there."

"Then how'd you know all that stuff about father Horace?"

"The priest?"

"Yeah."

The longhorn raised the bottle to his mouth. "Because it all goes without saying.”

Again the men looked at each other. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He's a priest ain't he?"

"You said he was defrocked."

The longhorn swilled the bottle and set it down empty, then he turned to them and with a glimmer in his eye he said, "He is now."

Inside was quiet. Then Mym snorted. The teamster laughed with her. Then another. By the time the longhorn paid off the barman they were all laughing together.

The longhorn just smiled at them. "Don't go peddling no peace round here boys," he said. He looked straight at Orc. "Justice lies in one direction only. Plumb along the warpath."