They had believed it to be a stormcloud. She told them otherwise, but they thirsted desperately and among the desperate prejudice reigns. They turned in its direction two nights back and she stole away by the light of the moons. The ground she crossed was slick with fresh ice of a material that was not water. It reeked and by then the moons had set and in the dim starlight she saw shapes on the ground. She didn't need to bend to know what they were. She moved on, letting the farflung stones of that place guide her. It was bitterly cold and a wind stirred up out of the north. She walked all night and even with the wind against her she could still smell the stink of what had happened to some company of men back on the plain.

At dawn she walked drymouthed toward the sole crag standing out of the horizon like a thumb. She hoped it might be the Thumb. She picked her way up the sloped field of broken shale and she heard a voice calling that was not of the stones. Looking she saw no one. She heard the voice again and she turned and saw a man climbing over the fallen boulders and ankledeep scree. He wore the uniform of a soldier and he frequently looked back down to the plain as if worried he was being followed. She could see he was alone.

The soldier wore sidebuttoned trousers with sweatstains down the crotch and a torn up bloody tunic and he held his left arm close to his body as if it was injured. At twenty yards she put her longarm on him and said, "Oy, that's far enough til ye tell me who ye are and what yer doin comin at me."

The soldier stopped and sat down on a rock. "I ain't nobody," he said. "I thought you was with the marshal’s relief and now I see you ain't."

"Yer not from here?"

"Ain't nobody's from here maam. You got any water?"

"No."

The soldier spat dryly and kept his head down. She thought she saw him sob.

"How's yer arm?" she said.

The soldier pulled it close to his side with the opposite hand. "Ain't nothin to worry about."

"Do ye know where we are?"

"The deadlands."

She put her chin at the rock outcrop. "Is this the Thumb?"

He looked up after her. "I don't know what the hell that is."

She lowered her longarm. "It's where I'm headed. Yer welcome te come on after but I don't have nothin te share but grit."

Together they made it to the base of the outcrop and drank from a seep there by pressing their dry lips to the sharp surface. The stones were ancient and they spoke of magmatic ruptures and of a time when the whole of the tundra laid under a sheet of ice a half mile thick. She listened and asked of game or birds but they made no answer and again she wondered if they understood her at all.

She and the soldier set down the far side of the outcrop and down to the floor of the tundra and they followed their shadows after a great track of beasts and men. They were small against the immensity of the landscape and the late sun had a harshness to it as if its glare might scour the sins from the land.

As they walked she asked the man, "How'd ye come te be alone?"

"Deaduns got us."

She nodded as if expecting this. "I believe they got me companions as well."

"Were y'all with the baron?"

"No."

“The brigadier?”

“No.”

"Then who were y'all with?"

"Just some folks. I don't know much about them save that they were desperate."

The soldier scanned the horizon for sign of respite. "Ain't no other reason to come out here."

"Aye."

In the evening they came upon a kind of narrowness in the plain. As if the land had once been folded there before being pressed flat again. They moved through it and found a shallow pool in its bottom. She noted the track of other animals in the thawed permafrost, wolves and buzzards. Booted feet. Shod hooves. The water was brackish and it held a greenish tint to it. They drank deeply and continued.

By and by the land changed forms. The ground subsided in long and wide rifts as if a god had imprinted his knuckles upon the earth. They stuck to the precipices and diverted their eyes now ahead now downcanyon. On one precipice they came upon a hanging.

They stopped side by side, shivering in the chill. The condemned, five, six of them, wore about their necks leather nooses made from horse tack and were hanged by these from swords hammered to their hilts into the earth. They swayed and turned gently in the breeze with their heads lolling at unnatural angles and their tongues bulged out of their heads from their last gasps. With his good hand the soldier tried a swordhandle but it wouldn't budge. He stood away from it and wiped his nose on his elbow.

"Friends of yers?" she said.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"No. Baron’s men looks like. Hanged by the brigadier or one of hers.”

They moved on.

In the afternoon they came to a walled village sited high between two rifts. The walls were newly made of frozen mud shaped by bare hands and rude trowels. From a distance it looked like a fortress. They watched and listened from outside the walls for a long time before they went around to the gate. The bar inside made from a wagon tongue, snapped like a twig. They walked through the narrow streets, looked in on the shacks and stalls, on the dead pigs and sheep and cattle, on the murdered and scalped folk. They turned down the widest street of the place and came to the chapel at which it terminated. A priest lay facedown in the yard. Beside him the pages of his open book flipped back and forth in the wind. They heard the bocking of hens and the buzzing of flies coming out of the open door. Blood pooled thickly there but from where they stood they couldn't see whence it came. The soldier put his head in but Mym had had enough. She sat against the wall of a pit oven and closed her eyes. She opened them again when the soldier returned, gray in the face.

"What do ye think?" she said.

"I think I need a drink.”

“There’ll be a well here somewhere.”

“Not that kind.”

The soldier sat down beside her holding his arm.

“Ye want te head back?”

“Back where?”

“Through the Gap.”

“That’s what, two weeks in the open with no food to speak of?”

“I can dress out the hens here and there’ll be other foodstuffs we could take.”

“We’d never make it.”

“Ye got a better plan?”

“Yeah. Not dyin to the deaduns. Someone’ll come through here sooner or later. I’ll just wait for them.”

“And if the risen return before then?”

The soldier coughed. Sweat had begun to bead his forehead and he wiped the sleeve of his good arm across it.

“Ye alright?”

“I’m fine.”

“Think ye can collect wood with one arm?”

“What for?”

“There’s good meat back there just needs butcherin. I’d like te roast it up.”

“Well I ain’t hungry.”

She looked at him. He had not eaten once in the days they traveled together.

“Yer sick.”

“Naw.”

“Show me yer arm.”

“Go to hell.”

Mym rose and went back up the street. The doorways were squat and were covered by wool drapes. Some of them were burned to their rods and some were strewn across the ground. A hovel’s yet hung and she elbowed through its geometric pattern and downstepped into the dugout floor. The ceiling was low and the air was warmer out of the wind. In the wall a hearth had been cut out of the mud and in an alcove above it stood figurines of the human martyrs. Carved wood from somewhere trees grew abundant. Painted faces chipped from long journeys. In the adjoining room there was a cupboard with three bone dice, a glassful of beach sand, an empty tin can smelling of coffee. Strings hung from the ceiling with tiny beads of colored glass tied every few inches and plumbed by fragments of bone. She found a ceramic pot of half raised flour in the hearth and a small box of salt in a ransacked pantry. The salt reminded her of the day she and Khaz first met Cousins. She looked at it in her hand and she questioned again why she had left the delving. Whether it was just the manstone and the blue dwarves and the promise of making her folk whole again, or whether there was something else: the prime mover of dwarvenkind that is neither their slain gods nor their mineral ontology, her vengefulness unslaked, unsated, unabated since she spared Orc. Whether it was the sacred oath she took to destroy him, her forsworn enemy, her nemesis who was yet to die. After she had perished she believed her oath had been fulfilled. Yet there she was, compelled ever after him as if on a string. Perhaps it didn’t matter that she’d forgiven him. Perhaps if the stones still remembered her grudge they might behold her to it. Perhaps that was why the stones of the place made no sense to her. She had made herself alien to them and thus alien to what it meant to be dwarven.

She stowed the unfinished bread and salt and by the time she returned to the chapel she also had a wheel of cheese sealed in wax and some sort of dried out tubers.

The soldier was gone. The sun was below the circumscribing wall and everything was in shadow. She placed the food by the oven. She steeled herself and walked into the chapel. The soldier was standing in the antechamber. A solitary crossbeam of sunset through a high window joisted the vaulted ceiling to the eastern wall. Upon the floor were heaped the bodies of those homesteaders who sought to barricade themselves in the house of their god. Whose final hope lay in its forsworn salvation. There they lay, skullshorn, awash in their communal blood now coagulated into a sticky morass. Shattered glass and splintered altar strewn within like fossils found in tar. The icons torn from the tabernacle and desecrated. Trident tracks of yardfowl imprinted upon. The air smelled metallic, of iron. Of death. It hummed with flies.

“Let’s go,” said Mym.

She led him across the street to the oven. She made a chili of the bread and cheese and tubers. They ate it all.

By first light they were a mile gone following the warpath of the risen horde. The soldier asked her why that way and at first she couldn’t say, but as dawn broke over the east she halted to examine the flattened land. The thousands of tracks of beasts and of men. The bestilled carcasses of dead flies lay like blue cornseed across the ploughed up dirt. She brushed them aside. Her eyes were drawn to a print half overtrod by an elk’s hoof and by a man’s shamble. It might’ve been an orc’s.

The soldier’s shadow fell across it. “I don’t much like followin the deaduns.”

“They know this land better than us.”

He spat and turned and looked back the way they had come.

“Yer arm stinks,” she said.

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“Ye should have washed it back at the well.”

“I did.”

“Ye should have washed it better.”

She shifted and looked at the print again. She was sure it was an orc’s. She closed her eyes and let her old feelings in.

The soldier held his arm against his side and looked down at it. “What’s wrong with it ain’t washin off.”

“Let me see it.”

“Go to hell.”

She opened her eyes and saw he was silently weeping. She looked back at the print.

“Maybe we should go back,” he said. “Wait for some other folk might be coming through. Maybe a doctor or some like.”

“Yer welcome te.”

“Maybe you can catch some of them chickens. Salt em up and roast em. I’m gettin hungry again I think.”

She traced her finger around the outline of print. “Ye know it’s got te come off.”

He didn’t say anything. She stood up from the track and swung her alpenstock around and tested her thumb against the adze. She nodded to herself and then nodded at a sizable rock with a flat surface suitable for the deed. "Best te do it now before it's too late."

The soldier shook his head vigorously, his eyes pressed shut and tears pouring out of them.

She hoped to bring him some comfort by reaching her hand to his.

His eyes flew open and a look of horror passed through them and he recoiled and he cried, "Leave them midget hands offa me! Goddamn little shit! Goddamn y’all and goddamn that grayback and goddamn the marshal what signed him on.”

She fought the urge to put a hole in his temple. “What grayback?” she said.

But his tears flowed freely now and he only shook his head and gibbered and cradled his arm. In that bitter chill she could feel the fever coming off of him. She slung up her alpenstock and turned and walked along the warpath. She didn’t look back.

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> +1 [Stonespeaking] They had so little te reveal. Maybe cause their history’s a plain one, maybe cause of some other reason.