He had bathed in the harbor and tied up his hair and he wore a set of the sidebutton trousers and the tunic given to him by a quartermaster whose hands shook every time he looked at him. The squire led him out of town riding a painted horse that skittered and shied at the smell of him. Orc fell in behind the animal and it kicked out at him. He came around to fall in ahead and the animal snapped its teeth at his hands. He snapped back.

A half mile inland at the raw edge of the town spread the relief camp. Low lying tents of waxed canvas draped over wagon yokes, several stone sided huts roofed with sod and between them a circular stonewalled paddock in which a number of gaunt horses nosed the bare ground. Orc watched these.

“Sargeant,” called the squire.

“He gone off,” said a voice from one of the tents.

The squire dismounted and crossed to the tent and stuck his head under the canopy. Orc stood at armslength from the squire's horse. Two soldiers were sitting against the paddock's wall and one punched the other on the arm and nodded at him. He pretended not to notice.

"Hey," called one. He was rising. "Hey orc!"

Orc nodded at the man.

"What are you, why are you," flustered the man.

"Why am I what?"

The squire came out of the tent and turned to the soldier. "Where's the sergeant?"

"He gone into town sir. Who's that?"

"Your new comrade."

"Ain't no comrade of mine!" cried the man. "I ain't ridin with no orc sir."

"I don't ride," said Orc.

The soldier turned to him. "I ain't talkin to you boarfucker." He turned back to the squire. "I didn't sign on to be no taskmaster sir. I came on to cut up on orcs not ride beside em."

"The marshal done already signed him on," said the squire.

"I ain't splittin no shares with him sir. I ain't sharin no tent nor pot neither. Goddamn filthy assed boarfuckers you can't get away from em. I can smell his stinkin undercarriage from here."

"I said the marshal done already signed him. You take an issue you go on up and take it to him."

"So you ain't defendin him then?"

The squire looked at Orc. Orc watched to see what he would do.

The squire spat. "Not on his account."

Grinning the soldier drew his shortsword. "It's you or me orc. Walk on outta here while you can."

"Leave off him Randall," said the second soldier.

"I ain't doin. Well boarfucker? You gettin or you gonna make me widen your stinkin bunghole?"

Ghostly faces appeared under the fly of the tent. The squire rested a hand on the handle of a blade. Orc saw these things and he saw the hate in the soldier's eyes. He turned and walked the path back to town. At the marshal's quarters men were shifting and packing gear. Elk milled in the yard on a string. He found the hussar there who had recruited him. Together they went to the quartermaster whose head shook now more than his hands and then they went on into Keelboard. It was a holy day and in the fountain square the band had assembled with their instruments and the woman with her voice and her sultry trembling. The salt of the sea gathered around celebrating the holiday and the departure of the relief. Orc and the hussar turned down a street past the disused barrack and past a shuttered teahouse and came to a plaza where painted signs and figures indicated the little shops of clothiers and cobblers and leatherworkers and metalsmiths and traders and butchers and a gamehouse.

They tried an armorer's hut first but no one was there. Next the hussar rapped on a pharmacist's stall and the pharmacist hustled around wearing an apron chalked with powder and a little peaked hat. He had most of what was needed: tobacco papers, beeswax, black powder, lead slugs. He jimmied the lock on the armorer's and fetched a smallbore casing. When he asked for payment the hussar suggested Orc give up the dwarven satchel or Booky's blade. He declined. The three of them stood staring at each other. The music from the square marched on.

"His tooth," said the pharmacist.

"His tooth?" said the hussar.

"He can pay with his tooth. Orctusk's aphrodisiac effect is well documented. Ground fine and mixed in a tincture of vinegar and rum it will keep a man in the appropriate state for many hours. Many many hours."

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

They just looked at him.

"If he will submit I have the necessary tools. A quarter ounce shaving should cover the bill."

"You use my folk's teeth for medicine?" said Orc.

"Of course."

The hussar looked wildly from the pharmacist to Orc. "Hold up a moment," he said.

"You have the tools for it here?" said Orc.

"As I said."

The hussar fished through his pocket and came up with a whole silver coin stamped with the head of the king. He slapped it on the counter between them and the lead slugs hopped. "That'll cover it. Take all that mess Orc. We've gotta get."

Orc didn't move. He was looking at the pharmacist and slowly the pharmacist came to understand his peril. His forehead flushed and he took a half step backward and bumped against the wall backing his stall. All the little jars of powder and specimens jangled on their shelves.

The hussar opened Orc's satchel and swept the contents of the exchange therein. He tugged Orc by the arm. "Come on. Marshal's settin off and we don't wanna get left behind."

Orc leaned over the counter, his hands placed thereupon as if he was to hoist himself over it. "What do I care if he uses our bones to make your men feel more like men?"

The hussar had him around the waist. "I'm glad for your enlightened position on it."

Orc leaned over the quaking, cowering pharmacist. "We use your bones to pick your flesh from our teeth," he said, and he opened his jaw wide as if to show the man or perhaps to swallow his head whole.

The pharmacist wailed and fled out of the stall on hands and knees and tripped over himself ducking down an alley and out of sight.

Orc turned to the hussar. "Thanks for the loan."

The hussar straightened his jacket and wiped his brow and blew through his mustaches. "Against the spoils comin," he said. "And don't you tell a soul about it."

***

Some days later dusk bestirred the boomtown. Buzzards swooped to their overnight roosts on the roofs of the public buildings standing center. Windowlamps cast upon the streets adjacent the inns and brothels. The dark was full of the smell of cookfires. Youngsters and street dogs patrolled the muddy alleyways and a cat hunted a tree squirrel up the trunk of a leafless alder. Orc and the hussar walked below it. Orc watching the cat leap to a low branch and wondered if it needed a home.

Plucked strings strummed faintly from the saloon. They passed a lichen-peppered standing stone and they passed a hole in the ground in which an old man stoked an open forge and worked his hammer to bend and flatten horseshoes from iron rods. They passed a woman framed by a window who was applying paint to her lips and chalk to her eyelids. Her eyes tracked them as they went by and her irises were a deep dark color made invisible by the gathering night.

At last they arrived at the saloon of the inn. Across the street where the revival tent had stood the ground was bare and blackened. The hussar was first into the saloon through the swinging doors where a thousand palms had tarnished the wood, where fools in their hundreds had pushed in brazenly and an equality of drunks had tottered out in song and slipped in vomit. The lamps inside were lit with scores of moths circling and bouncing and they crossed the dusty planks to the high bar.

A farrier studied them from a low corner table. A thickset man in a sleeved canvas shirt, a thin book of common prayer in the breast pocket, an undereye hollowness that told of sleepless nights or habiting pipe dens or creeping consumption. The hussar ordered a glass of whiskey and drank it down and ordered another. Orc looked from under his brow at each table for anyone he knew or anyone who might remember what he'd done just out in the street a month before. The hussar turned from the barman with his drink in hand and eyed a tableful of whores who were looking him up and down. In a battlefield voice he spoke loudly of the relief force and the mission through the Gap.

The farrier snorted in his corner. "You ain't going nowheres," he said.

“Who you talkin at old man?” said the hussar.

“You ain’t going nowheres. They’s going to stop you fore yon Gap widens up.”

“Who will.”

“She will. The brigadier.”

“The hell she will.”

“You been told. Pray she does.”

The hussar looked at Orc but Orc was staring intently at the farrier. “What’s that supposed to mean old man?” said the hussar.

“If you and that Marshal go acrossing that Gap you ain’t never crossing it back.”

“We don’t aim to settle the deadlands.”

“You will. Settle it with your bones.”

The hussar grabbed his blade and drew far enough for the steel to shine. “Why you wishin ill upon we who ain’t done nothin to you?”

The farrier watched the pale liquid in the cup before him. He sniffed and looked at the ceiling and his mouth made the shape of silent words. The dark rims of his eyes wettened. “God’s awoken. Them dwarves knocked him out ten thousand years before men ever were and made their hallowed oaths he’d stay that way. Now what? See him shivering bones. See him quickening flesh. He’s up now. He’s waiting there for them whose rage and vengefulness bestirred him. You hear me? He’s hungry and his gut ain’t but half full. You enter the deadlands carrying such spite as you have and he’ll repay it on you like for like in hellfire.”

The hussar looked again at Orc and he missed the intensity there and instead he mocked the farrier and the goatmilk he sunk into. He made himself as tall as he could and berated the man with a sly eye on the watching whores. Others of the relief came in and bellied up to the bar and at every swinging of the doors the hussar pointed out the farrier and told the newcomers of his cowardice and ill luck.

Orc said nothing and heard nothing such were the clamor of his thoughts.

That was their last night in the lands of the living. Exceptionally proclaimed but remember yours approaches also. Theirs ended as it always shall in confusion and blood and ultimately exhaustion. The recruits drank away their doubts of the windfalls to come and so gladly exchanged their coin in alcohol and gamesmanship. The mud in the streets froze into miniature ranges and the eternal stars blazed through the mortal coil of the world and fell toward land. The morning found Orc and the hussar and the farrier crouching in the street over the form of the soldier called Randall. His lips and eyes were blue and his head lay in a red ice slick, skull split wide open. The hussar sideyed Orc but said nothing about it. Somewhere a rooster called forth the sun.

“What joy there is in life shan’t be found at its end,” said the farrier. He had been holding open his prayer book and now he closed it and placed it back in his shirtpocket and turned and went up the street.