She woke under the baptismal of an abandoned mission erected to the god of man. Above her sunlight shafted through shattered glass into a spiderweb of prismed rainbows on the far wall. Mosaics adorned the vaulted ceiling in iconic designs she had never seen yet were vaguely familiar. The floor was covered in shit. Bat guano, the little turds of vermin, chattel droppings. Some sort of scat out of something big. Barrel chested white snowbirds flapped over the pews and strutted along their backrests. A wild dog snuffed around the carcass of a goblin down at the nave.

Her shoulder was a swollen torment. She sat up and pulled down the collar of her shirt and she peeled away the stiff bandage. A seeping of blood. Her head spun. Her throat was dry with thirst. She sat with her eyes shut, sweat beading on her chest. The dog looked at her and stepped away from the bones and trotted off into the transept. She rose and went out with the bandage hanging there.

Outside she looked for the mule but it was nowhere to be seen. The yard spread about twenty acres enclosed by clay brick. Goats and swine grazed on scraggly vines. Headstones teetered off their mounds. Above the keystone of the arched gate a cracked bronze bell pealed irregularly as its clapper swayed in the wind.

Places like this preceded the camps. Of places like this they were born.

Orcs and goblins and otaur dwelled yet within the walls. Lean-tos of stacked rocks mortared with clumps of soil, cottongrass growing from them as if the wild tundra itself had crept into the mission’s grounds and burled up tussocks to decolonize the zealotry of men. Some orckin gathered around a cookfire that flickered thinly in the morning light. They gazed at her when she came out and watched her go round the side of the church and enter the kitchen. Crows stilted through the dust and threadbare burlap once sacking flour and germ. The potbellied stove was overstuffed with handbooks: breviaries, their pages rotting, waiting for a spark. In the hall was a wooden table missing a leg and some broken clay pots and in the abattoir hung the bones and tendons of some retired beast of burden, all its flesh long turned to chaff and fallen away. She went into the transept and turned her eyes up at the teeming and chittering cauldron hung upside down from the domed ceiling. The baptismal overflowing with its hardened eliminations. She rolled up her bed and tied it on the saddle and took it and the scabbard out into the yard.

The signs of revolt were everywhere. The oaken doors hung off of their hinges with great parallel gouges in their stained wood. Pedestals topping the gate stood empty of their martyrs. Icons taken from alcoves lay strewn across the yard, headless, limbless, disembodied heads with agonistic faces portraying some sacrifice, mouths agape, since made to be urinals by those squatting in the ruin. Winding through these she saw the mule's trace. Fine hoofprints across the pan and through the gatehouse. With her teeth she pulled up her collar and she hitched the saddle high across her good shoulder and she followed the tracks.

Six or seven crows sunning themselves in the road hopped over the gutter until she had passed and then hopped back. She followed the road down to where it forded a river. Two sows and an orc were dressing their morning catch on the bank and she came to within a few yards of them and watched.

"Any of ye seen a grayback?" she said.

The orc looked up at her as he flung a clawful of rubbery guts into the flow. "What?"

"Have ye seen a scaler come through this way?"

"Some."

"This one's tall. Taller than any of ye. Would've come through in the last week or two."

"He done something to you?"

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The two sows were watching her now. Their eyes red and their hot breath billowing clouds in the cold daybreak.

"Nothin but run away," she said.

"That's true for everyone here. It’s no crime to be free, beardling."

"I don't want him for anythin like that. He's a friend."

The two sows grinned at the orc and the orc guffawed as if he knew something she didn't. Mym looked upriver. She saw the mule standing there to its knees with its mouth against the glass and the reflection of itself. It and its double watched her come up through the alder shrubs and splash through an eddy and catch their trailing rope snaking away downstream. The reflection rippled away. She tossed down the saddle and tied the rope off its horn and she sat against it with her feet in the water. After a while she leaned forward and bent over her knees and washed the water over her face and drank deeply from it. She drew her hand across her mouth and looked at the mule.

"Don't ye be pissin now."

She bent and drank until she was slaked. Then she took off her shirt and threw away the bandage and splashed the frigid water over the wound. It stung. It was cold. It was a kind of bliss. She took off her boots and her trousers and she waded out nude, feeling her skin tighten in the terrible chill, feeling it all go numb. She waded up to her chin and she closed her eyes and considered what had happened. She considered whether Orc might have gone through the Gap without her. Whether she would have known it if the posse of armiger's men had caught him. Which he wanted more: the manstone to heal his homeland or the brigadier to heal his heart. She waited until her shoulder was as numb as a stone and she opened her eyes and saw the orcs watching her from the other side of the road.

She rose from the water. She didn't cover herself. On the bank the sun and her bodyheat dried her fully. She dressed and collected the mule and she went back up to the mission with it in tow. Outside the gate she pulled her longarm from the scabbard and rested it on her good shoulder which was her bracing shoulder. She went through the gate.

The orckin by the fire watched her come.

“Good morn,” she said to them.

They nodded to her then looked back to the fire. The haunch of some beast roasted within. Ash stuck to its blackening skin. A one-armed longhorn who might’ve been their leader reached in and rotated the flesh and swung his massive hand in the air as if to cool it. “You’re a long way from home,” he said.

“Aye and don’t I know it.”

“What brings you here?”

“Just stayin low while I figure where I’m goin next.”

“Can’t go home?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Well this far north there’s not many places for going to. Not unless you’re dead or tryin to get that way.”

“Ye know this country?”

“Some.”

“If ye were an orc all alone up hereaways and had a posse of men tailin ye where would ye go?”

The longhorn looked back at the meat in the fire. The tongue of flame lashed before his eyes. After a while he said, “I’d hope I wound up here.”

She watched the fire. She thought again about why she couldn’t track him the way she used to. She could find just about anyone anywhere. She’d once found him from halfway around the world. Perhaps it was because she no longer hunted him. Not in the vengeful way.

“Where could a dwarf go te hunt men?”

“Hunt men?”

“Aye.”

The longhorn looked at her and she looked back. The other orcs around the fire kept their eyes low but were listening intently.

“You stick around here long enough and what you’re looking for is likely to come to you,” the longhorn rumbled.

“I don’t have time te wait.”

“What’s hurrying you?”

“For starters we’re aimin ye fix up yer home before spring.”

“I don’t call this shithole home.”

“Not here. The home of orcs. The Madlands.”

The longhorn might’ve been impressed by this. “And how do you aim to do that?”

“Ye know of the orcstone?”

The longhorn made no sign either way.

“I’ll just say it’s got te do with me partner.”

“And the men?”

“They’re goin te lead me te him.”

The longhorn nodded as if he expected this. “Your orc.”

“Aye. My Orc. Have ye seen him come through? He’s a scaler near yer height.”

The longhorn shrugged. “I don’t keep track of who comes and goes.”

She knew he was lying. “Which way would ye suggest I go lookin.”

“Nobody that comes up this way stays long.”

“South then?”

The longhorn reached into the fire again and flipped the meat again. “South.”

She nodded at the fire. “Is that elk?”

“Yep.”

“Smells overcooked.”

The longhorn shrugged his stump.

She went back to the mule and scabbarded the longarm. After two tries she mounted. Her shoulder white with pain. She left the mission out the north gate and turned the mule east toward the mountains ramparting the deadlands. She watched for mansign. By noon she had found it.