High in the mountains the last of the posse squatted in his rags beneath an overhang scorched black with the soot of those who had come before. He clutched a striped wool blanket about him yet his whole body shook from the cold. At his feet lay his flint and his sword and a meager pile of damp pine duff. As she approached he tried to take up the sword but it fell from his bloodless hand. What had chased him to such heights she did not know nor did she ask.
She apologized to the stones after. They spoke in strange dialects foreign to her. She did not understand their meaning although it was plain they had hosted many comers for many centuries: brother bear and lonesome wildcat, packs of curs and slovenly men, a dwarf and a corpse. Unwilling to submit the stones to his decaying she ignited the duff and fed him to it.
Days later she rode the mule out of the dark and frozen north following the flattened track of a vast herd. It ran ahead of her as a single organism, expanding and contracting across the ranges, breathing them in, beating them down, consuming everything in its path. A million hooves trampling soil too cold to admit a plowblade, prodigious tons of waste nourishing the overturned land. Renewal in violence and desecration. The mule wore a striped blanket now under the saddle and it weathered the chill better for it. She was ready to be free of it. She patted its mane from where she sat and whispered her thanks for its companionship and higher vantage over the wide and flat tundra. She had hoped it would have made a difference. It hadn’t.
She came into the boomtown the same way she had left it. She passed along its rutted street looking neither left nor right but down as if hoping to spy the track of an orc. Here and there a dog rose from its place in the sunlight and fell in behind the mule and followed to the next intersection where it would halt suddenly while the dog of that place rose from its spot in the sun and took up the escort. In this way she passed from dog to dog until she came to a standing stone marking the town's founding. She asked the stone for news of orcs but it had nothing new to share. She dismounted onto a fencepost and hopped down to the ground and took up the mule’s catchrope and walked to the stable with the slughole in the roof. She tied the mule there, reaching overhead and scratching its cheeks one last time, rubbing its flank. She left it there and swung into the saloon under the inn. It was midday.
The room smelled stale. Something had torn up the ceiling or else it had finally molded through and red rags marbled by smoke draped down from it like carcasses hung from a meatlocker's hooks. The floorplanks were badly trued and their fixing nailheads were rusted away so that their far ends warped upward whenever stepped upon. At a corner table a farrier sipped a cup of milk and gazed out the window into the street. There was no one else there.
She dragged a stool to the bar and climbed onto it. She just about reached over to pump herself a beer when the barman emerged from the back fisting a rag into a stein.
"You're back," he said.
"Aye."
"What’ll it be?”
“News.”
He removed the rag and sat the stein on the barback. “Give me an incentive.”
She nodded at the tap. “I’ll take a half pint.”
The tap pumped into the glass more head than draught. He thumped it down before her and foam slipped over the side and slid down to ring the glass bottom. He placed both hands on the bar. “Four coppers,” he said.
She didn’t pay. She took the glass and drank it in one go foam and all. Placing the glass back in the ring she wiped her mouth and looked at him. “Ye remember that orc that was with me?” she said.
He held out a hand “Four coppers,” he said.
“Give me an incentive.”
She saw his hand slip beneath the bar. Her alpenstock flashed under his chin.
“Hey now. Easy there.”
“Ye rememberin me orc yet?”
“Sure. Not many of them kind around here.”
“Ye seen him come through?”
“Not since y’all busted up my winda.”
“That was the armiger’s man.”
“That may be but y’all drove him to it and y’all knocked him off before he paid up. Now here you are spitting to gill a man over four coppers.”
“Two coppers.”
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“What?”
“There weren't but two coppers of beer in that glass. I’m not payin fer air when I breathe it fer free.”
At this the barman started to protest until he felt Mym’s pick prick the waddle under his jaw.
“Anyone else who might’ve seen him come through?” she said.
“I woulda said if so. Nobody’s told me nothing about him. If that posse didn’t get him the old lady did.”
“What old lady?”
“The one who’s out for orcs. Don’t know what she calls herself but folks around here call her the belvedere or some such.”
“Brigadier.”
“That’s it. Sure as a loaded crapshooter she pinched your friend going in or out of the Gap. Her or one of her graybacks.”
“Where is she now?”
“Get that goddamn pick off me.”
“Answer me.”
“Can’t tell what I don’t know. She’s a long way gone. A long way from here. Not been round in months. Not since she gone up the Gap looking for them camps.”
“What camps?”
“Them ones left for dead when old Donnas cut out.”
She lowered the alpenstock and the barman brought his hand back above the bar. She saw gouges in the palm made by his fingernails. He touched his neck and then looked at the spot of blood on his finger. “Goddamn,” he said.
She knew of Orc’s history with the brigadier. If he knew she was around he would've headed straight toward her and to hell with the manstone and everything they had come here to do. “What’s the best way in?” she said.
“Into the deadlands?”
“Aye.”
“Why the hell should I tell you?”
“The sooner ye do the sooner I’ll be goin.”
He considered this. “Ain't no best way in. They’re all of em shit.”
“Then which is fastest?”
“Reckon going up the Gap alone is fastest. You'll get there quick and you'll die there quick.”
"I don't plan on dyin."
"Then best you don't go alone.”
She turned around and saw only the farrier sitting at his table and looking at his milk. Outside the window an empty street.
“There’s a prospecting caravan heading in tonight.”
“When are they due te go?”
“They just went fore you came in.”
She slapped two coppers on the counter and jumped off the stool and stamped toward the door with her alpenstock balanced over her shoulder.
“Don’t you ever come back,” called the barman.
***
A mile ahead she saw the caravan entering the Gap. The sun low behind her warmly lit their canvas covered wagons and they looked like molars jawing at the maw of the world fronting a gullet bereft of light. She caught the tailing walkers as they passed from the day into the night. They were scavengers pushing three wheeled carts stacked with pry bars and empty sacks, a speculator shouldering a leather folio of musty maps and wiping the lens of her theodolite, a train of settlers wagoning in clutches of pensive wives and dusty-faced children, a company of latent trophy hunters and scalpers riding steeds that were wild but six weeks ago that reeled and snorted as she passed.
She outpaced these and other strangers and outcasts and a few surly looking folk who she thought must be refugees seeking solace in death for they appeared dead already. At the head of their column rode a cloaked shepherd holding a yew crook across his knees and promising his followers riches and new lives to be found in a country abandoned by the laws of men and of their god. He spoke in the cadence of a sermon and those who rode closest leaned in to hear his words. He didn’t notice her. Her head only came up to his stirrup. She waited for him to stop speaking and when it seemed he never would she reached up and tapped his ankle.
His head swiveled around and then down. “Warm evenings little one. Have you come to join our family?”
“Depends on whether yer goin where I need te be.”
“And where is that?”
“Do ye know of the brigadier?”
He nodded. “Our paths have crossed.”
“Think they will again?”
“God willing. She's often in and out of the Thumb."
"Where's that?"
"Why it’s our destination. It’s an outpost but two weeks past the Gap."
"And folk there will know where te find her?"
"Likely they will. You aren't with the baron are you?"
"I don't know any baron."
"Good. I don't want any of his brand of trouble." He turned in his saddle as if to survey the hodgepodge that followed. "Robinsen's wife never did show. He'll have space in his wagon for when your feet tire. He's six back. Got four lovely children with him. They could use some womanly company."
"I'm no woman."
He looked down at her. "That may be but it has little bearing on your femininity."
"If ye say so."
He shrugged. "Go only if it suits you. Walk wherever you like. We push to the mill tonight. I expect we'll arrive toward midnight. We’ll be lighting torches forthwith and you ought not to stray beyond their light."
She looked up the deep trench through which they rambled. Mountains overhung both sides as if a god had raked their finger across the land. Along their strata were ancient glyphs and runes and pictographs of divinities and magics and orcs and men and animals as well as symbols and wordless expressions that had lost whatever meanings they once held. She listened to the wind blowing across their faces and the voices it lent the stones and the beings drawn upon them. She smelled the decay it brought. As loss and failure cleaves lives forever into the before and the now the shadow of the horizon fell upon the caravan and the dwarf trudging among them.
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> +1 [Stonespeaking] She'd learned new ways of talkin and hearin from the stones about the firelands and she aimed te learn whatever she could from yon northernly rocks. We couldn't talk her out of it. (1/10)