It was sleeting still when Orc finally met the longhorn. He was in the bar now spooning mush and he had exhausted all his leads on the brigadier but the one through the Gap. Mym had gone somewhere after a lead of her own: rumors of dwarfsign from the stones about the place.

Through the window he could see white contrails wherever the weather fell through the lantern light. He finished his bowl and looked around at the empty tables and went out. There were slabs of stone set in the mud one after the other down to the pit toilet and he stepped along the ladder they made. The longhorn was coming the other way. His mane plastered down the sides of his face. “You best get the hell outta my way orc,” he said.

Orc stopped on a paver. He didn’t yield the path and after what he had seen in the tent he wasn't going to waste his breath in explanation. He balled a fist and slugged the longhorn in the jaw.

The longhorn staggered back and stood up again grinning. He said, "I'm going to break your skull."

The longhorn produced the gin bottle and swung it and Orc ducked under and he swung again and Orc stepped back. When Orc hit him on the nose the longhorn smashed the bottom of the bottle against the top of his head. Orc fell off the pavers and into the mud and the longhorn lunged after him with the bottle and tried to shatter it against his cheek. Orc was fencing with his hands and he felt his knuckles break. He kept trying to reach for the blade in his belt.

"Break your skull," the longhorn said. They rolled around in the pale squares of light coming out of the inn and Orc kicked away, face covered in mud. He had his blade now and they circled each other and when the longhorn lunged and swung Orc slashed his blade. The longhorn threw down the bottle and drew a huge maul from over his shoulder. His mane had fallen out of its bindings and matted locks swung about his collar and the ring in his nose flopped up and down with each feint.

Men had come out of the inn to watch them. One of them nodded at the longhorn. "He's cut."

"Break it. Break it," growled the longhorn with the maul up and its twelve pound ball salvaged from cannonshot. A gash on his belly opened wide as a mouth as he raised his weapon.

But someone else was coming out of the inn, silent but for the whistle of the wind across the eyeslits of her ivory mask. She had the bottle. She reached Orc first and when she swung he fell facedown in the mud. He would have drowned if she hadn't turned him over.

When Orc woke the sleeting had run its paces and the sun was out and he was peering up into Mym's concerned face. She was saying something.

"What?" said Orc.

"Ye alright?"

Orc looked past the face, past the muzzle of her longarm and the spike of her alpenstock slung crosswise behind her back, beyond to a buzzard wheeling high and small in a cerulean bowl. "Is my back broke?" he said.

Mym stood to her full height and looked this way and that. "Ye see who done it?"

"That longhorn from the bar." He drew his elbows alongside his shoulders then pushed up to sit and he looked at his feet and watched them move and his knees articulate.

"Yer back's fine," she said. "I wouldn't say the same about yer head though, pickin fights with otaurs thrice yer size."

He rolled his neck and looked around. "Where's my blade?" he said.

Mym squinted down at him. He saw the mud dried on her legs up to her knees and on her forearms. "Ye lookin te come at him again."

"You think he took my blade?"

"He might've."

"Then yeah."

She nodded back toward the inn. "That it?"

Orc got up off of the ground and trudged back up the pavers and swept up the blade from where it lay half sunken. With finger and thumb he wiped the mud off of it and thrust it into his belt. He came back to the paver where Mym stood and he dropped onto his backside and they looked out across the yard at where the revival tent had burned to a heap of black ashes and tin grommets.

"Ye goin te tell me what happened?”

He rubbed the lump on the back of his head. "Just as soon as I figure it out."

"Ye feelin alright?"

"Feeling something."

"Ready te throw down again?"

He rolled his neck and shrugged the pins and needles out of his shoulders. "Might be nice to."

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Come on then. I heard somethin that might interest ye." She walked toward the inn.

He stood up and scraped the mud off the bottom of his feet. "Heard from who?"

"Them stones ye were lyin on."

He caught her up. "What is it?"

"Not sure yet."

“Is it about the blue dwarves?”

“No.”

“The brigadier?”

“No.”

“The manstone?”

“No.”

“Then what’s it about?”

She deadeye looked at him. “Vengeance.”

They entered the inn through the stoneframed doorway and he imagined them speaking to her even as they passed. There was a spitoon on the floor and the ceiling was upholstered in brushed red velvet that sagged from age and rotted from mold. There at the bar stood the longhorn, hooves covered in mud. A goose egg over one eye and the cut in his belly unbleeding and unscabbed. He was hunched over a mug of something black and sharply fragranced and he didn't look at them when they came in. "She tell you what she heard?" he said as if to no one in particular.

Orc looked from him to her. "Not yet."

The longhorn nodded at his mug. "He ain't the only one of them that's here."

"Ye know about him?" said Mym.

"Sure. Him, the folks attending the priest, the priest himself."

"They were all there?"

The longhorn nodded again then hooked his finger through the handle of the mug and sipped the liquid.

"What's he talking about?" said Orc.

Before Mym could answer the longhorn set down the mug and said, "Not one of them is worth an ounce of your mercy, orc called Orc. Not a single one."

The longhorn turned to face them. "Ain’t no light where you're headed," he said. "The way you're going there's naught a thing but decay and misery. You keep on that way and you'll soon see the limitations of what makes orcs orcs and dwarves dwarves."

"Whatever ye say," said Mym. "Which room’s he in?"

"Upstairs. Last on the left."

Mym went on and Orc followed.

"Orc," called the longhorn.

Orc looked back.

A track of mud spanned from the entrance to the bar and now halfway to the stairs. The longhorn held his mug out to him as if in toast. "You strike me again and I'll put you in the dirt."

Orc went on up the stairs.

The second floor opened onto a narrow landing and a hall with an oilless lamp burning at the far end. Set into the walls on either side were woodpaneled doors and one of them was ajar. Orc looked in as they passed and saw the coilspring mattress and the tin squatpot and the leaded window distorting the ramshackle structures beyond the pane.

"Who we after?" he said.

Mym halted outside the last door on the left. "Ye remember the messenger I told ye about?" she whispered.

"The armiger's man?"

"Aye."

"The one who sent your folk against us that night?"

"Aye."

Orc nodded at the door. "He's in there?"

"Sure as nakshit."

He looked at her. "You need me to do it?"

She shook her head. "I can handle it."

"I don't want you getting all roused up."

"No hope fer that," she said. "You heard what that otaur said."

"Yeah but I don't know what he meant by it."

She tried the knob. It wouldn't turn. She unshouldered her alpenstock. "There's a thousand men between here and the Gap and two thousand more already gone through."

"There are men everywhere."

"Not these."

He understood. "They were the armiger's too."

"Every last one of em. Shieldmen who covered the engineers as they immolated yer folk up in the forest. The engineers themselves who fired the ballistae and crucified yer survivors. That king of theirs got hold of em and sent em up here te see what sort of trouble they can bring the risen. Put em under command of a baron or duke or some sort of manly lord. I don’t pretend te understand their great chain of bein."

She tested the pick of her alpenstock on her finger. "Still think we were right leavin that scurvy risen friend of yers behind?"

"He's not risen anymore."

"Exrisen then."

He frowned at her. “If you wanted more firepower you could’ve brought your witch.”

“Aye but ye know she’s got better things te do.”

“She offered.”

“That’s cause she doesn’t trust ye.”

“Yeah. Neither should you.”

She shook her head and hoisted the alpenstock.

He nodded at the door. "There's a window in there. As soon as your man hears you kicking in he's liable to fly right out of it."

"Cover it off?"

"That's what I'm thinking. Slow count to a hundred before you get started."

He started down the hall and at the top of the stairs he heard her say, "Oy!"

He turned to her.

"Be ready to fight."

"Always."

"Once the rest of em know what we're about they're goin te turn on us."

"I'll be ready."

"I'm not lookin te die here."

"Then you better start counting."

He ran down the stairs two at a time and he went through the bar and out the doorway. He noticed the longhorn was gone.

He ran around and looked up at the window as he came. He had counted up to fifty four when the window shattered and a halfnaked man fell out of it with a pistol in his hand. The man dropped ten feet to the yard and landed in the mud and he rose with the mud wholly covering him as if he was a figure molded from clay. He raised the pistol at Orc's face and there was the crack of the shot and the whites of the man's eyes turned red as the capillaries burst and he teetered forward as if the outheld pistol drew him on and he splatted again in the mud.

Up in the windowframe Orc saw the barrel of a longarm withdraw.

Men and women were gathering in the street behind him and more were streaming out of the inn with all manner of weapons in their hands. He strode up to the dead man and saw the hole in the back of his head. He reached down and took the singleshot pistol. Short barreled brass and a cherry handle. He tucked it into his belt on the opposite side of his blade.

"Hey!" called a man at his back.

Orc looked up at the windowframe and it was empty. Shards of glass hanging out of it with their mated ends stuck in the mud. Behind the inn he saw a crateboard stable with its stalls opening out into the yard.

"Hey, orc!"

He ran toward the stable with the mud sucking his feet. He heard others coming behind. Inside the stable he drew his blade and one by one severed the leather straps haltering the dozen horses and mules therein. He brandished the pistol and fired it into the ceiling. The beasts shrieked and bolted in a dozen directions and Orc went out the back. As he jogged down the lane he watched for Mym but saw only the lone figure of the longhorn who had over his shoulder the cannonballed maul. As Orc went past the longhorn turned and watched him. When Orc looked back the longhorn smiled. Orc ducked around a picket fence and stole out of the boomtown along the road to the Gap.

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> +1 [Rage] (1/10) I searched for him, you know. Even before the armiger’s demise, even on the far side of the Gap, we had heard rumblings of his coming…

> Item Gained: [Pistol]