Now came days of skulking and of thieving. Days of riding a stolen mule across a frontier hostile to her kind and ravaged by a generation of drought and war. This was the rising front of which she had heard. The boomtown was far behind and she tracked Orc beneath a wintering sun that shone only upon her back. Long nights and boreal winds set the frail grasses to whispering and the ice shorn stones to wallowing. Clear sky so crowded with stars the silhouettes of bats darted plainly across them, and for every bitter point that sank beneath the west two more bullied above the east.

She kept off the king's road because Orc had kept off it. The posse had also. With her eyes closed she listened to the fist sized owls screech through the night until she felt dawn peer its lidless eye into the craggy outcrop into which she'd hunkered out of the wind. The mule standing nearby swept his head into the morning glare.

The coming sun had blazed the sky through all manner of colors: from deep bestarred indigo to the thin blue shell of a robin's egg, the crimson of glorious battle that accompanied the sun itself to the present alloying of copper evocative of the forge at the heart of her home. Mounted on the mule her shadow fell for miles ahead of her. She wore her hood well over her head and her alpenstock across her back and her longarm scabbarded at her knee and she looked like some child's misunderstanding of death: silent, dark, mounted, ill-proportioned, feminine.

That evening she tracked Orc to a hovel of sorts burrowed into a frozen hillside. Its inhabitant a solitary taskmaster peering out from a rude window shaded with a layer of sod peeled back like a torn blister. He was wiry framed and the irises of his eyes were each a desolate island in a bloodred sea, as if behind them stirred the collective rage of his former charges. He seemed to study her as she stepped off of the mule with a hand on the pommel and another on the stock of her longarm. The incessant wind blew and her hood billowed off of her forehead.

"Oy there," she said. "Ye spare a scoop of water?"

The filthy man squinted and spat out of his window and dropped the sod flap. The burrow's slatwood door opened. She went inside.

It was dark and smelled of smoke. A dungfire burned in a corner and there were no furnishings but an overflowing shitcan and she was thankful for the smell of the firesmoke until she realized what sort of dung he must be burning. He half hid in the gloom, his head bent under the mud ceiling and the hanging roots of the sod roof draping over his shoulders like tendrils of albino worms.

“Ye got that water?” said Mym.

He nodded to a wood pail set dangerously close to the shitcan. Mym knelt and stirred the ladle floating therein. She dipped and the water smelled of salt and ammonia. She poured the ladle back in the pail.

"Yer well hereabouts someplace?"

The taskmaster sneered and spat again into his fire.

"I'd just like te freshen up what ye got here. Maybe water me mule too."

"I ain’t drinkin no mule spit.”

“Yer already drinkin worse.”

The taskmaster leaned in. She saw the whip coiled up in his hand. “What you say to me?”

“Where’s yer well?”

“Folla the path round the other side of my hill. Well’s at the end of it.”

She palmed through the door into the wind and a spitting of rain. Far away west lightning forked soundlessly over yellow country. The mule was gone. She cast back her downturned eyes and noted the taskmaster watching her through the window. She carried the pail down the path between shivering grass and she found the mule standing nose down over a snakehole in the hillside with rocks piled about. She heard them tell of water and wind and meanness. She asked about Orc but of him they had nothing to share and she began to wonder if they couldn’t understand her.

Between the rocks a scrap of uncured hide covered the hole. She didn’t recognize the type. Under the skin an inkblack repository with a cord of the same leather coming out of it and strung around a rock. She pulled the cord and a bucket of water emerged out of the dark. She set it on the ground and watched for the taskmaster while the mule drank its fill. Four buckets worth. She dumped the pail and tipped in the fifth and sloshed it around a bit and washed her hands and face in it. She drank out of the sixth then covered the hole and went back to the burrow with the mule trailing.

She set the pail at the door. “Thank ye fer the water.”

The taskmaster filled the dark doorway. "Why don't you just stay in tonight."

"I thank ye but no."

"It's gonna be a wet un in the open. Gonna be one of those nights them dead uns come down outta the north."

She looked northwards. "Ye think?"

"Yeah I knows it. Seen it happen aplenty. Them comin under cover of sleet and sadness and carryin away. Carryin away. My little girl carryin away."

She looked at him. He had the whip uncoiled to the width of his shoulders and he was yanking on its ends as if trying to pull it in two. She saw the sorry state of him, and in that pitiless land she felt pity, and this was her first mistake. "Alright," she said.

She collected her things and brought them in. It was darker than before and the dungfire was nigh exhausted. The taskmaster watched her come in and when she wasn't looking he eyed her body and he licked his lips in a furtive manner.

"Lay out anywheres you like," he said. "Your saddle, where's your saddle?"

"On the mule."

"That how you're taught to treat mules in your lands?"

"We don't have mules in my lands."

"You best go and get your leathers afore some comes and eats them. Ain't much for eatin up here and them critters that's left'll gnaw through them and never thank you for the feast."

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She went out and uncinched the saddle. The mule nuzzled her hand.

"I don't have anythin fer ye te eat," she said. "Plenty of grasses here fer ye. Can I trust ye te not run off on me?"

The mule looked at her with one big wet eye. Lashes long and sultry. Raindrops caught in them like morning dew in leaves of grass.

"The fellow here says there'll be risen about. I want ye te set te hawin if they come callin."

"What'd you say?" called the man.

She drew her hand down the mule's nose and turned and went back inside.

"Close that door there fore them nasties come after," said the old man.

She looked for somewhere to pull on and finally just stuck her fingers between two slats and dragged the planks skidding across the dirt til the door was as closed as it would get.

"That weather turn you round?" said the taskmaster.

"I wouldn't say that."

"You're lookin lost to me."

"I knew where I was goin until it led me here."

The man nodded. "Ain't that life then."

"Is this your land?"

"Course it's mine. I ain't to be nobody's man but my own. Ain't to pay nobody's rent. I seen how that works and I ain't to be party to it."

"Are you from here?"

The taskmaster snorted everything out of his nose into the back of his throat and turned and coughed and spat a green glob of it into the dungfire. "I come up from the Goldlands. Minded work on a corn camp and made aplenty doin it. Did a little tradin myself too fore sheriff caught me off and told me that weren't allowed no more."

"Tradin what?"

"Graybacks and greenskins and them big brown fuckers were my bread and butter til I got caught off. Still had un in irons I never could get rid of. Cost me twenty gold it did. Wait and I'll show you."

He shuffled around to a corner and rummaged through a stack of hides and cackled suddenly. He turned back and handed Mym a heavy black thing. She looked at it and turned it over in her hands. The head of an orc, dried up and small. She almost dropped it in the fire. She passed it back and the man cradled it with both hands as if it was a newborn pup.

“You let them run free and you’ll see the end of man's civilization,” he said. “Them and womens.”

"Have you seen any lately?"

"Womens?"

"Graybacks."

"Naw none of them come round here. They know better than."

"So nobody came this way in the past three or four days."

"Like to be nobody's come this way in three or four years."

"No orc? No posse of men after him?"

The taskmaster shook his head and biting a hangnail from his grimy finger he said, "Naw, naw. I'd have known it."

She studied what she could see of his face as if she didn't believe him.

"The end of civilization," he muttered. The smoke was thickening and he went over to the window and drew back the sod flap. Rain slashed outside and the wind spilled in and the smoke poured out. He clutched the head close to his chest. He replaced the window and came back.

He held the head in his palm as if to address it. "Twenty gold right there."

"That's what you paid for it?"

"That's what the boarfucker cost that it sat on top of."

He returned to the corner and squatted over the hides and rummaged until he found a gallon iron cauldron and something inside too covered in the blue fur of mold to tell what it had been.

"You got anythin for sharin?" he said.

She peered into the cauldron from where she sat and saw a haunch of something amid the spoiling. "No."

"Well I'm gonna eat."

She crumpled her nose and she couldn't be sure if the odor was out of the cauldron or out of his loins or out of the dungfire. "I'm not hungry," she said.

"Knew where you was goin." The old man shook his head.

He ladled water from the pail into the cauldron and set it in the fire. He put his hand in a burlap sack and fed several desiccated chips into the fire.

"Ain't an easy thing preservin civilization out here by my lonesome. Cancerous orcs breakin outta them camps and poisonin the blood of men and them deaduns crossin outta the deadlands rapin and infiltratin and you don't know where theys gonna come out of or when. They'll be comin down here. They'll be comin down tonight and you can count on it."

"Alright."

"God made this world with men in it for his good reason. Someones gotta stand against the boarfuckers and deaduns. He didn't make them. Reckon thems the makins of some devil."

He coughed from the gathering smoke.

"That's why I gotta keep the fire goin. There's the light of civilization. You see it? Right in there."

"Burnin on yer shit," said Mym.

He turned to her. "What'd you say?"

"I said it's burnin on yer shit."

He had his hand on the whip again. Her alpenstock and longarm were across the burrow with her saddle.

"What are you some sorta orcfucker?"

"I'm just sayin what I'm seein."

He looked at her. His bloodshot gaze a sheen of firelight in the dimly lit burrow.

She stood up. "I'm goin te check me mule."

"You do that."

She went out and found the mule back around at the well cropping the weeds there. She slapped its flank and looked up at the sky and it wet her face. Rain she could have just waited for and not gone begging for a scoop of water. The sky carried out of the west by the wind flickered with electricity and the blackness between the flashes seemed to swallow the world entire. She would have gone then but she had left her weapons inside.

The taskmaster knelt at the far end of the room as she shut the door. Her longarm was not in its scabbard. He had it crooked in an elbow as he spooned up his slop. He looked up at her and around a mouthful he said, "I'll take this for the water and thank you to be leavin now."

"Ye know how to operate that?"

He set down the slop and shouldered the longarm and pointed it at her. The hammer cocked.

"Hate to waste a cartridge but if you don't go straightaway I'll hafta."

Her alpenstock rested two steps away wrapped in the bedroll tied on the saddle.

"Get on orcfucker. Get on after your grayback and see what they done to him."

Slowly she took up the saddle by the horn and the bedroll. She turned to face him as if to say something and this man of civilization couldn't help himself. "Goddamn halfling," he said.

She threw the saddle at the man's head as the longarm fired. Gunsmoke filled the burrow. The sulfur of it. She bled from her shoulder and she leaped into the air and hooked her alpenstock around the taskmaster's neck and slammed both of her knees into his chest. They crashed through the fire. Embers of flaming shit pattered off the wall. She brought the serrations against his throat. The man was trying to get his fingers around the pickhead but he couldn't. Mym lay on him pressing forward and pulling upward. The smell of burning flesh. The taskmaster started flailing, legs walking in one direction like a pinwheel with the dwarf at its center, kicking over the cauldron, kicking out at the saddle, kicking over the shitcan. Brown liquid raced down the dirt floor. His thumb in her eye socket. Blood across his neck and filling his throat. He gurgled through it as he drowned on it. His kicking slowed and his hands fell limply away. Mym knelt on him, her shoulder dripping on his forehead. He lay half turned in a bed of fiery shit with snuffed embers clung to his back and others strewn across the floor and pulsing in the air she had stolen from him.

When she got up she retrieved her longarm from where it had fallen. Carefully she took off her shirt and she felt for the exit wound. The cleanest fabric around was her bedroll and she tore a strip from it and wrapped under her armpit and over her shoulder as tightly as she could bear. She searched through the hides then turned to the remains of the fire and set the dried out orc head among them. She waited until it caught and then she pushed open the door and went out into the rain.

The first pale light in the east found her astride the mule moving north. All day she studied the horizon. It stood motionless there despite her procession. The rain had cleared the ground of orcsign, but she had stopped searching for it and she had stopped asking the frightened stones to tell her what had passed. She had slain two men in as many weeks. Men, not orcs, had reawoken the ancient drive in her. The one her da and Khaz had warned her off of. She recognized it and she recognized there was something different about it since the last time. She knew the way to Orc was through men. So she would hunt men.

A hundred leagues north and west the longhorn smiled.