The sewerhole’s circle of daylight advanced to ovular across the floor. The pale ghosts of men and self proclaimed innocents sat up in their rags and leaned on their elbows studying the new arrivals. Pneumoniatic breathing rasping in their chests, picking at themselves like monkeys, filthy shells of men who existed loosely in their extra skin. He led Mym back to his pallet. A clopping of hooves passed the hole with a sudden shadow. In the momentary dark he pulled a heel of bread out of his hiding place and he put it in her hand.

"Thanks," she said.

He nodded at her. She looked awful.

"Ye look like shit."

"Speak for yourself."

She tore off a piece of the bread with her teeth and she talked around it. "I take ye didn't find yer old lady."

"That's a truth."

"She's up here somewhere."

"I've heard as much. How about you?"

"What about me?"

"Did you find those dwarves you were looking for?"

She stared at him. "What dwarves?"

"Whichever ones you've been after."

"I haven't been after any dwarves since we split."

"Alright."

"I haven't."

He watched her take another bite. "You were just a long time coming."

"Maybe think about that fore ye go traipsin off on yer own again."

"I had a whole township after me."

"All the more reason te not go alone."

He nodded and looked up at the other prisoners. They shifted about, watching and listening. "Well, I'm not alone anymore."

"No but ye ought te be."

He looked back at her. "I think you'd better tell me what's troubling you."

She swallowed dryly. She coughed.

"You may want to wait on eating that whole. They won't water us until they work us," he said.

"How long have ye been here?"

"Two days."

She sucked her teeth and swallowed again. "I didn't come here on purpose."

"Me neither."

"I mean te say that I didn't find ye of my own accordin."

"I thought you could find anyone anywhere."

"Aye and I could until we came north. The stones here speak mighty strange and they aren't understandin me one bit. Nor is the land right. I caught a sniff of ye once or twice but when I followed yer trace it took me places ye'd never been, least if the stones there were tellin true."

"Can stones lie?"

"Not any I've ever met."

"Maybe it's just the deadlands."

"It wasn't much better on the other side of the Gap."

She touched his arm and lowered her voice. "Ye feelin anythin?"

"A little uncomfortable with how close you're getting."

Her eyes menaced. "Ye know what I mean."

"No. Nothing."

"Ye sure it's still up here?"

"The bosun said as much."

"Then ye ought te be feelin somethin."

"Maybe. We may not be close enough."

"Bones." She dropped her hand. "I can't imagine wadin any deeper into this shit."

He shook his head. "Yeah, but we'll have to."

"Maybe it doesn't work like ye think it does."

"The manstone's out of the same as the orcstone and the dwarfstone, right?"

"Aye and that elfstone ye say raised ye up, least that's how the legend goes."

"Then I'll feel it."

She nodded once. She looked up at the curvature of the dome and down at the wretched in their corners. More than a few of them armiger's men. "Two days and ye haven't busted out."

"I've got a way."

"Then what's the holdup?"

"I was waiting on you."

She chuckled. "Well as ye were."

He nodded and looked up at the hole in the ceiling. "It's strange though isn't it?" He looked back at her. "All the wide leagues in their hundreds up here yet we still wind up side by side."

"I'd say more like neck and neck."

"You really didn't track me here?"

"Swear te the stones."

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Alright."

***

Midmorning guards entered and the prisoners were hobbled like horses and chained together on a string and were half walked half dragged out to the streets. The taskmaster was a balding man elected to it by the cityfolk and he carried Booky's blade and a ninetails with iron bits looped on to the strands. He routed them down to the gutters and harried them in the collection and separation of refuse. Human filth and pigshit into one bag for fertilizing and everything else into a cartbed for desiccating. They crawled on their hands and knees gathering it up from under the legs of the destitute and under the wheels of wagons and in the penstocks and in the toilet vaults. They were watered as promised and as the shadows grew long in the afternoon they sat together against a butchery and ate their hard bread dinner and ignored the wandering eyes of their fellow inmates.

He felt her lean against his side. "There's somethin I didn't tell ye before," she whispered.

He kept eating and made no sign that he'd heard.

"That church facade is dwarfmade. Same with some of these foundations, and the dungeon too. Maybe they're local."

"I've seen the locals and they aren't it."

She looked up at him. At the sweat beading down from the hat he wore. "Where'd ye get that dead thing?"

"Came off the posse."

"It's ridiculous."

"I was trying to look a bit more human."

"Like I said."

The taskmaster strolled past with his hands on his weapons. He spat at Mym's feet. Orc could feel her spirits rising.

"I saw him first," said Orc.

"Who?"

He nodded at the taskmaster. "You leave old slickskull to me."

"Oy we finally done playin shit shoveler?"

"Just about."

"Ye tell me when."

He laid a hand on her shoulder. "Not here," he said. "When we get back to the oubliette."

"The what?"

"The oubliette."

"Orc sometimes I swear I don't know whether yer puttin me on."

The taskmaster whistled sharply through his teeth and kicked at any prisoner who got up too slowly. Orc and Mym stood against the wall. A squadron of cavalry were dashing up the lane to the old governor’s mansion. The taskmaster’s side man lowered his spear at the prisoners as if they might break their shackles and chains and rise up in general revolt. “Git you back! Git you back!” he called. The tattered and broken felons shuffled over to where Orc and Mym stood. The riders came trotting past and Orc had his eyes on the taskmaster and didn't notice the brigadier until it was too late. She passed five feet away and held her fineboned face aloof of the deplorables. Her blue eyes ever on her destination though perhaps she lowered them slightly to note the downtrodden, just the slightest tilt of her chin. She passed by and her head barely moved on the trot and she rode the horse as if she was born to it. The lace in her hair was the bright pink of a new dawn. Then she was gone.

"What's the matter with ye?" he heard Mym say.

He was standing alone against the wall. Mym waited on the street before him. The other prisoners were moving along the gutter with their hands thrust into the filth piled therein.

"That was her," he said.

"That was who?"

"The brigadier."

"I couldn't see anythin over the grubbers." She peered up the lane and then turned down the lane. "She's not the only one comin in."

At the end of the street where it bent toward the city wall he now saw a pack of barbarous looking hunters, bearded men and wiry women mounted on warhorses riding half drunk ahead of an infantry of brownskinned orcs and longnailed sows and bawdy little greenskins and a pitchblack tusker with ivory tusks, all of them vicious and clad in the furs of wolves and bears and bearing weapons of all cultures and customs, talonlike sickles and singleshooters of ancient design and onehanded blades the size of bastards and doublebarreled handcannons with bores wider than shotglasses and the bits in their horses' jaws were of pure gold and silver and their saddleskirts fashioned out of tanned manskin and they bore their teeth like mongrels and their riders' coats fringed with leathery scalps stitched in with the hair still on and draping down over their knees, the orckin walkers among them halfnaked and great thick ink tattooed across their chests and arms and thighs as if the patterns themselves would ward a blow and their eyes flashed with danger, brutality, hunger, the whole of the company like a flesh and blood nightmare stalking by day their midnight victims.

At the head of it all, lumbering as if out of a distant memory with his face ashen and eyes in shadow, strode the longhorn. The tips of his horns were painted gold and he was grinning and winking at the street waifs who had gathered to watch the procession. The enormous spread of his horns swept over the heads of those around him like a headsman's ax rising before the fall. His head turned to where Orc stood and he nodded. Orc nodded back. The longhorn and the rowdy horde around him rambled by the stupefied citizenry and halted before the governor's mansion where their big man, a stout and bald dwarf whose beard dragged between his feet, stamped at the huge alder door with the bottom of his boot. The door swung open and the dwarf led all of them in, and the door was barred again.

Orc turned to Mym. "I didn't expect to see one of your kind up here."

She was shaking with excitement or rage or some other emotion. "He's not one of me kind," she said.

He looked back at the door as if the dwarf might reemerge at any moment. "Could've fooled me."

"That ironsided fellow there is a blue dwarf. They're nothin like us and if ye couldn't tell from here just wait til ye meet one."

"What's he doing here?"

"Skulls and stones if I know. Nothin good by the company he's keepin."

“You saw the longhorn then?”

“Aye I saw.”

The taskmaster noticed them idling and came at them screeching and shaking his ninetails and pointing to the filth in the gutter. Orc eyed Booky's blade on the man's hip. It would have been nothing to simply draw it and run it into the taskmaster's heart.

He felt Mym's hand on his wrist. "Easy there," she said.

She pulled him down until he found himself on his knees. The taskmaster hovered there fingering the braids of the ninetails until they began to scoop and slop out the gutter. The next time they looked up the taskmaster was gone and the longhorn stood with his shadow across them. He chewed a stalk of cottonweed with dirt still clumped on the roots. He withdrew the sprig from his teeth. "Well well," he said. "Look at the two of you."

"What do ye want?" said Mym.

"It ain't about what I want. It's about what you want."

She looked at Orc. He shook his head.

The longhorn smiled at them, or appeared to smile. "You ready to cut out of this shithole?"

"You're who stuck me in it," said Orc.

"Now now blame for that lies with the last man you took up with. Whom you joined free of coercion or succor. Whose men you abetted in their singular genocide. You ain't an owned slave anymore scaler. You’re responsible for your decisions. Now pray tell who stuck whom?"

Orc watched him.

"You want to meet her?" he said to Orc. "You want to meet him?" he said to Mym.

They looked at each other under filthstreaked brows. Shit up their arms and under their nails. A pair of reeking indigents.

Mym turned to the longhorn. "And what are ye askin fer yer intervenin?"

"Sign on with us."

"Doin what?"

The longhorn grinned. "God's work. Cleansing the land."

"Of the risen?"

"Of any who don't belong."

Mym squinted at him. "Whose side are ye on?"

"There ain't any sides wedwarf. There's living and there's dying and down in the shit there it looks like you ain't doing much of either."

"Who leads you?" said Orc.

"The company is Uhquah's."

“Who?”

“The dwarf.”

"And what about her?"

The longhorn smiled coyly. "Who?"

Orc felt his rage begin to rise like a midsummer sun on the back of his skull. The manacles were heavy on his wrists and there was plenty of slack chain between them to garrot a man, perhaps enough to loop it over six feet of horns.

The longhorn's smile deepend. "You mean Kathryn."

"Fuck off."

The longhorn threw back his head and laughed deeply from the belly. The stalk flitted up and down from his open mouth. The laughter died away down the street. The longhorn's eyes had in them the red glaze of alcohol as if fired and sealed under a thinspread enamel of blood. "Thus shall I intervene."

The taskmaster sauntered up to them. "What's all this then? Git on otaur else I'll put you down there with em."

The longhorn drew Booky's blade from the man's hip and slid it in beneath the burnished nickel emblem he'd pinned onto the vest he wore. The taskmaster's eyes widened and then rolled back and he collapsed into a heap of stacked shit that splattered out from under him in brown globules to land on the wall and in the street. The side man had run up and when he saw the taskmaster's body sinking into the heap he dropped his spear and fled into an alley.

Two days later they filed through the streets trailing the longhorn afoot and the blue dwarf on a razorbacked mule and the cavalry of humans and the motley of orcs and their kin. The locals lined the streets smiling and waving at the hunters. Young women hung from windows throwing down kerchiefs and kisses. The street imps scampered alongside the horses shouting and cheering. The hardmen and hardwomen of the city nodded knowingly. Out past the city wall by an ancient stonecairn a wizened wrangler standing among his herd called out his thanks to the fabled company of the brigadier. She had taken her squadron by that road just the day before. So the longhorn had said.