"Somebody's coming," said Orc.

"Risen?" said the marshal.

"I can't tell yet. Could be."

The marshal sniffed and spat dryly and wiped his mouth and mustaches with the back of his wrist. He unbuttoned his trousers and after much grunting and huffing produced a brief stream of urine upon the rock. A fly buzzed out from someplace and landed its bloated body adjacent to that froth and drank from it with its thorax pulsing. The marshal swung his glove but the fly was already gone and the piss now soaked into the leather.

They waited for what seemed like hours. Orc climbed down from their craggy perch into the parallel rifts looking for liquid water but he found none. Nothing grew from the frozen wasteland except bare stones and the windswept tor on which they lay. By noon they could see the individual figures leading horses and mules up the stone run of the rift below them. They were some of them orcs and sows. It was the longhorn that led them.

The marshal was sitting with his head in his hands. "I was worried about my nephew outliving me," he said. “I told his mother it was a certainty.”

He looked at Orc. "Get on out of here."

They had backed up into the shade of the ledge above them. Orc didn't move. Soon they could hear the clop of the hooves and the scrabble of sliding rocks and the coughing of one and the gurgle of another. The first one to pass their vantage was a sow leading the marshal's big destrier by a hackamore, the saddle nowhere to be seen. The marshal bellied out beside Orc to watch them pass. The company looked ragged and half-frozen trudging by in the wind and their heads were down as if they had no hope at all. There were a dozen of them. They wore rawhides and the furs of several beasts stitched together and they carried spears and lances and blades on their persons and in their hands. As they went past the longhorn looked up at the espying refugees and nodded severely to them and walked on.

The marshal and Orc looked after them. Orc called out and the marshal had begun to clamber down the tor.

Those of the company turned. The longhorn regarded the marshal's descent and then called up to Orc in the language of their kinds. "What's he want?"

At that moment the marshal slipped and slid down the face of rock and landed hard on his back in the stone run. The sow with his horse strode out to where he had fallen and she chopped rudely at her crotch. The others grasped their bellies and laughed and threw back their heads and their howling was doubled by the echoing rocks. They clapped each other's backs and turned and regarded the man with fangy grins.

"Still hunting risen?" said the longhorn.

With this the orcs guffawed and punched each other and slapped their knees. They bent over the marshal with their mouths hanging open and looked up at Orc as if eagerly waiting for some reply. The longhorn smiled at Orc, his thick teeth flat and white and made for grinding grain and chewing cud.

"Water," coughed the marshal.

The longhorn stopped smiling. "Water?" he said in mantalk.

"Water," echoed his companions, their mouths awkwardly forming the word. They shivered with mirth.

"Please," said the marshal.

"Brave of you to travel without water in this place where there ain't none but what you can suck out of the ground,” said the longhorn. "Almost as brave as hunting the dead in their own lands."

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The longhorn turned his massive head slightly and reached back. Between his furs an orc produced a leather waterskin and handed it to him. He held his ear against it and squeezed. He offered it to the marshal who unplugged it and turned it upward and drank.

Orc jumped down from the tor and came beside the marshal, waiting a turn. The marshal's eyes were rolled back and he couldn't see the longhorn's frown. The longhorn slung out his arm and knocked the waterskin straight out of the marshal's hands leaving him there in a frozen stance of kindling an invisible pipe with the waterskin flying and turning and globes of clear and sweet water shining in the daylight like suns in miniature before they splashed upon the rocks. Orc lunged after the waterskin and caught it as it fell and began to drink. The marshal coughed and frowned at the longhorn. Orc sucked and twisted out the last of the water.

The longhorn stepped forward and drew his enormous maul from its place on his back and leaning forward he ran the cannonball head through the strap of the waterskin and he raised it up. The head passed within a few inches of the marshal's face and the sow licked her lips. Orc let go of the skin as the longhorn raised the maul and he watched the strap slide down the shaft and onto the longhorn’s wrist. The longhorn studied his face and smiled. He stoppered the skin and without looking he tossed it back to the orc who had produced it.

"You should have hid," said the longhorn.

"Would it have mattered?" said Orc.

The longhorn nodded at the marshal. "For him it would have."

The marshal seemed not to have heard this exchange. He looked past the longhorn at the sow who had taunted him, at the horse whose lead she held. "That is mine," he said.

She looked at him then at the longhorn.

"She understand me?"

"Yes," said Orc.

"I am not sure she does. Tell her that horse is mine Orc."

"She knows it."

"I want it back."

"I'm sure she knows that too."

"Well?"

"Well what."

The marshal looked at him with the patience of one used to dealing with incompetence and in the belief that was what he now faced. He held out his palm. "Give me your dirk."

Orc didn't move.

"I said give me your dirk recruit and that is an order."

Orc crossed his arms over his chest.

The marshal now turned to him. "How do you think they came by these animals? They're in league with the risen," he hissed.

Orc sideyed the longhorn and saw his dusty eyes glimmer and his lip curl with a subdued elation.

The sow looked back at her peers and then took a half step forward and held out the hackamore as if in offering. When the marshal reached for it she let it fall and it swung from the horse's head out of the marshal's reach. He drew himself up as tall as he could and looked at her as cooly as he could and he took another step toward the destrier. His back now to the sow she sidestepped as the longhorn onehanded the maul around and shattered the marshal's skull. His brains splattered upon the horse and the rocks.

The longhorn looked at Orc. "Kittens separated from their mother know better than to cry after her. Sometimes the mother comes. Sometimes the cur." He smiled at him and wiped the head of the maul on the marshal's coat and then he shouldered back the maul. He clucked at the orcs and they turned their horses back up the path. The sow took up the hackamore and regarded Orc for a moment.

"Sorry for your friend," she said.

"He was no friend of mine."

She smiled and she followed the company. Orc watched them go. He looked down at the marshal lying there. He shook his head and fell in after the sow. They did not restrain him nor did they mark his movements. Where else could he have gone in that great alien void?

They descended the ridge into the next rift. They went down over the stone runs with their arms about them for warmth and their shadows fractured on the jumbled terrain. They were like creatures in the time after the sun’s making yet before the ordering of creation, embracing themselves for some feeling of their form, seeking some common identity. They reached the bottom of the rift and climbed the top of the next and they continued across the top of the world, a westward crack in the dusk hinting at the mountains that delineated the deadlands from the northlands.