Noontime and he was alone on the tundra. He shouldered through the endless wind that galed unobstructed across that open land. He clasped a floppy brimmed hat against his head and he carried a sackful of potatoes on his back. He had taken both off the posse some days before. He talked to whatever stones he saw so they might relay his message though he wasn't sure it worked that way. He reached for the strand that had connected him and the dwarf for so long. It was gone. He wondered what that meant. He wondered if she was dead.

All afternoon he watched stormclouds sliding over the south and a haze rising northwards and widening as if settling across the edge of the world. He had nowhere to hide so he just kept on. Toward dusk the first of the herd clopped out of the dust they had made. Enormous long haired elk with antlers as wide as his arm span and dreadlocks hanging off their bellies halfway to the ground. By nightfall he knelt in the drivers' camp and ate potatoes and beans and listened to their stories.

They were coming down from a place called Arboreal some forty days north and they were headed for the Goldlands meat markets. Wolves and wild dogs and dead things hounded them. The elk trumpeted and stamped in the dark surround.

Their headman said he had never known an orc. That he had only ever heard of them from forebears who told stories of fighting alongside them. That he had heard of their honor as warriors and companions. His fellow drivers were rangy and ragged. Men all with wild beards and wilder eyes.

"You want to come on with us you're welcome to," said the headman. "We lost a man to some corpsewalkers when we came past Hartglen. Lost a fair tonnage of venison too for our trouble. You'd not think the dead would have much appetite but you'd be wrong."

"I'm looking for somebody," said Orc.

"Out here?"

"Yeah."

"You know where they headed?"

"No."

"Well there ain't much north but more of this til Hartglen. You go in there you ain't never comin out. Sea comes up some ways west. Three days maybe to Keelboard."

"It's further than that," said a driver.

"And east is as you see it there. Them mountains run to the roof of the world. The other side of em’s the deadlands. If they gone in there they'd have done so back down the way you came. Back down at the Gap."

"Are you going that way?"

"Naw. We’ll pick up the goldroad south of the Gap and them towns around. They's troublesome places with nothin but drinkin and womenin and all that costs money we ain't yet made. We'll hit em on our way back."

"Alright."

"Who you lookin for anyway?"

"A woman called the brigadier."

The headman shrugged. "Can't say as I know her. Sounds awful fancy though.”

In the morning they ate pancakes made from his potatoes with a sweet sap harvested from the trees found in the drivers' homeland. The men saddled their horses and drove on. When Orc went to gather his emptied sack he found it stuffed with venison smoked and peppered. The last of the elk followed the herd, its antlers velveting up, black eyes cast backward across the tundra. It half turned and regarded the dark shapes moving there against the endless gray lands.

He pushed to Keelboard and arrived after four days. He crouched amid the winter straw on a knoll and looked down at the harbor, the windblasted stone houses, the line of mastheads that marked the shoreline like reeds, the townsquare the road ran in and out of with oxcarts covered in waxed canvas and the stonewalled barrack and the thin steeple of a disused chapel and three silos stood up like stiff fingers in the distance. The seabreeze wafted his hatbrim. His eyes moved from one sight to the next and lay longest upon the garrison. Above him hanged two greenskins from the neck. Stoutly rigged from a makeshift gallows. Their gaunt ribs protruding like fishbones. Fugitives from Glad Nizam's campbreak perhaps, or perhaps two of the brigadier's. The dusk was gathering in the east and distinct banks of clouds banded above the sea all ablaze as if this ocean was of a kind with that bottoming the black heart of the world. He drew Booky's blade from his belt and it flashed red as it parted the ropes and the greenskins fell heavily like thunderclaps onto the stirring weeds. He stared at them where they fell to be sure he didn't know them.

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He went down a rocky path and as he went he saw an outbound cart laden with oysters piled up like gravel. A fishmonger sat on the box luminescent like a freshwater pearl so white he was in the final echo of sunlight. A horse labored between the pulls and the breeze carried to Orc the faint ammoniac of rotting fish. He watched them go. The clattering of the shells tumbling one upon the other.

After dark he stole into the town. He crossed the empty square and walked the length of the barrack's wall, stopping at each loophole to peer into the dark interior. Crumbled plaster and skeletal bunks. The air wafting out smelled of mildew and old hay. He went back to the square and came to the well there and drew up the bucket and drank it empty. Water dripped onto his feet and its splatter seemed loud on the stone pavers. He left the bucket on the coping and went on.

The place seemed abandoned. He went on down to the boardwalk framing the harbor and there he could hear the notes of some instrument and a woman's voice lifted in song. At the far end of the harbor yellow light shone from the windows of a tavern. He walked alongside the becalmed water past the silos toward the light. He stopped at the edge of its reach.

Through the open door he saw a troupe of performers sawing away at their instruments and a costumed woman at their fore with her elbows bent and her hands upraised as if to stroke her own neck. He stood watching her sway and sing. Everywhere he could see salty men sat and stood and drank wearing tunics with deep vees and coarse hair that seemed to grow upward out of their chests and onto their chins and onto the crowns of their heads. Their pants buttoned on the right of their hip and they wore soft leather boots and long knives in soft leather sheaths. He saw no other women nor did he see children.

Although he was of the dark his history compelled him into the light and through the door. He kept his hat low across his face. Those inside barely noticed his entrance. The woman made love to the air. The men sitting and standing and drinking hid their jealousy behind their upheld and upturned cups. He worked his way over to the bar. He set his sack of meat upon it.

"Evening," he said.

The barman didn't look at him.

"I've come up from the Gap. I'm looking for an older lady who calls herself the brigadier."

"Ain't no ladies here cept one," said the barman, and he nodded at the singer.

Orc eyed the gathered men. "Is this the garrison then?"

"Ain't no garrison neither. Ain't a whiff of them since the baron took them south at the armiger’s askin last year, cept for Lonnie over there."

Orc followed the barman's gaze to a veteran sitting at the table closest to the performers wearing the colors of the armiger. Him bent forward slightly, feet flat on the floor, hands on kneecaps. He was saying something to the singer. The more he said the more her smile strained.

Orc kept his eyes on the veteran. "He stayed behind?"

"Naw he went with em. Just got back few days ago. Come back lookin for folk to go on through the Gap with. Says the baron has need for anybody whole and able."

"He's who strung up the greenskins."

"Yep. Said they had it comin. You lookin for them too?"

At that moment the song ended and it was quiet for the first time since Orc came in. The barman finally turned to him and saw what he was.

"Oh shit," muttered in the silence. A clattering of clayware cups and bottles set down. Of chairs skidding back from tables.

Orc was halfway to the veteran. A string of dried orckin ears hung around his neck and two of them still oozed onto his tunic. His face went white and he stood and immediately drew his longsword. One of the flat tipped kind. Chairs toppled as folk scampered out of the way. The instrument players backed against a wall and filed through a dark doorway there.

Orc stood in the middle of the room and the veteran lumbered across the boards like a standing bear. He lashed twice at Orc and Orc stepped twice aside. The veteran swung straight down at Orc's head and Orc stepped backwards. He drew his blade and the uncharged pistol. The veteran froze. Orc flipped the pistol so that he held it by the chamber with the triggerguard resting against his palm. The veteran grinned and raised the longsword. Orc feinted with his blade and the veteran swung and Orc smashed the pistol's brass frizzen into the man's head. Blood sprayed and the veteran drooped. Orc had already let go of the pistol and he caught it by the barrel and whipped the grip against the back of the man's skull. He downturned the blade as the veteran went down and he studied the onlookers as the man’s neck sliced open upon its edge. All were armed but none moved. They watched him. They watched the blood soaking into the boards. He went back to the bar and picked up his sack of meat and walked out the door. As he left the light of the doorframe he felt something and he looked up. There between the silos he could see the knolltop and the gallows stood upon it black against a nearblack sky. For a moment he thought he saw a figure retreating. Its hornspread as wide as an elk's.

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> +1 [Rage] (2/10) Some said he’d been seen in Keelboard.