It was said one of this company was too monstrous for the city. They traveled half a day to a talus heap on the plain that Mym recognized as a volcanic remnant though its stones revealed little of their history to her. Always she watched the blue dwarf at the head of the column so she didn't notice the way Orc steadily shrunk into himself nor did she see the monster sat in the talus nor the woman who handled it until they had passed them by.

Mym touched Orc's elbow and nodded at the pair on the roadside. "Oy. Isn’t she yer friend?"

He had his hand held against the side of his face. "Don't look at them."

"Orc!" called the woman.

His shoulders grew higher yet.

"Hey Orc!"

He dropped his hand and straightened. He turned to the woman. "Booky," he grumbled. "Ogre."

"Look der," said Right.

"Is dat Orc?" said Left.

"I saw him first."

"No you didn't."

The ogre’s heads, still sere from Daraway's fire, swung toward one another and their arms raised and for a maddened moment Mym thought the creature might contrive to fight itself.

Booky came alongside the company with Ogre lurching after with their heads still snarling and their arms still grappling as if neither noticed where their legs were taking them.

"Ye made it out of the wynds," said Mym.

"Sure did and I got y'all ta thank for it. Reckon I'd have never found this lout otherwise. It was a sight squeezing his lardy ass outta some of them dwarfy tunnels."

Mym glanced over at Orc and saw his discomfort. She smiled at the woman. "I'm sure it was."

"Hey listen," her voice dropped an octave, "ya still got y'alls magic rock? I've got a mighty sore coming up between my thighs from all this walking we done. It's up there and I sure wouldn't turn down any relief y'all can offer."

"Sorry."

"I mean it's way up there."

"We don't have it."

"No?"

Mym shook her head. "No."

Booky screwed up her mouth and turned and spat. She reached over Mym's head and poked Orc. "How's my boy? I heard they was calling you Nizam now."

Orc shook his head. "Not me."

"Ain't he modest. Ya know little dwarfette back when we was still eating buttered mush and sleeping on a board he'd stoke up any and every crowd we got til they was shouting his name so loud they'd heard of him two parishes over. Where's that Orc now I say?"

"I didn't stoke anything."

"Boy how I miss those days. Hey! Hey dumbshit!"

Booky had turned to where the ogre was still engaged in its absurd standoff. She slapped the ogre in the gut and a shockwave rolled through the fat and back again.

"Goddamn they just won't quit. Maybe ya could talk ta em Orc? Maybe they'd listen to ya."

"What's the matter with them?" he said.

She shook her head. "Bad blood boiling over between em. I couldn't tell ya why. When I ask they just talk one over the other so bad I could make a meal outta it."

"Ogre?" said Orc.

Mym watched their massive heads turn to him and they started jabbering in a language she didn't understand and their arms gestured wildly and the others of the company made faces and leaned away as they walked and rode past.

After they'd finished Booky looked at Orc. "Well?"

"Bad blood," he said.

"But they gots the same blood!"

"Yeah, it’s a problem."

As four they stepped after the column and caught its rear. As they walked the ogre’s right head would lean over and whisper to the left. The left head would twitch suddenly as if shaking off a buzzing pest and push on their gut as if trying to pry themselves in two, as if Right was a violation of Left and had begun some arcane ritual born of the black blood flowing through their common veins that sought to conjoin what was unnaturally separated. Right laughed and sang sweet words to Left that sounded to Mym like the crooning of lovers but she could not be sure of their meaning.

"Ye know what they're sayin?" she said.

"Some of it," said Orc. "Not all."

"Ye goin te do somethin about it?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Reason with em."

"Have you ever tried to reason with an ogre?"

"No."

He shrugged. "You can’t unspoil milk."

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"What do ye mean by that?"

He nodded over. "Look at them. The brigadier had a monsterary I’d look through sometimes trying to figure out what the hell I was. Ogres were in there too. It said that each head houses half a brain so they can only have a singular thought between them."

"I see."

"No you don't. The book was full of shit and if you saw the yarns it spun about dwarves you’d know it. I spent all day every day with Ogre for two years. Each of those heads houses a whole squish of brains just as sure as yours or mine. Problem is they've only got one heart thumping in that great lardy body they share. Not enough blood to go between."

She nodded and understood it in her dwarven way. "Yer sayin it's a problem of mechanics."

"Sure."

She slowed her step and watched the ogre to see what would happen between them. The agitation was getting out of hand but it was plain to her that no one of that company had the power to affect the outcome. The monster was too big. Too dangerous.

Come noon the blue dwarf dismounted and cut off of the road with his ear downturned to the earth as if he heard some advisement in the pulses of its magmic blood. The company followed. An hour later they came to a shack with a sod roof alone on that desolate plain. Another dwarf emerged from within, naked in the chill but for the beard he wore wrapped around his entire body like a hairy toga. Mym crept forward from their place at the column’s rear and stood at the edge of their meeting.

The blue dwarves went into the broken home and emerged carrying a tarnished metal box riveted together like compound platemail. The runes stenciled on were dwarven though the words they formed were meaningless to her. The naked dwarf took a pickaxe from the one called Uhquah and with it he pried open the box. He pulled out a long flat package tied up in thin white canvas that was so soaked with grease she could see right through it. Uhquah untied the twine and let the canvas breeze away and tumble across the tundra like a lame hare finally freed from the snare. Uhquah lifted the rifle it had wrapped in both hands as if weighing it. It was of dwarven make, but one Mym could not identify. It had neither pan nor hammer apparent, and forward of its trigger a curious orifice gaped on the stock’s underside. The naked dwarf was showing Uhquah the handmolds by which to manufacture the shot and the tools for repair and the flasks of powder and oil and the longhorn was untying another of the parcels. The cavalrymen stepped off of their horses and pressed forward. Uhquah caught the canvas wrapping from the longhorn and used it to wipe down the barrel and bore and the orifice and he pulled a kind of metal ingot from the box.

"Some sort of repeater," said a cavalier.

Uhquah seated the ingot into the orifice and pulled a bolt from the top of the chamber and drove home the charge. He looked about. In that empty plain the only living things were the hunters and their mounts. Uhquah sighted the blown away wrapping now three hundred yards off and still running away. He leveled the weapon and tucked it back against his shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The report in that dead silence rang about and on and on over the plain for miles. A great plume of dust kicked up off the ground some ways short of the wrapping.

Uhquah held up the rifle and looked at his men. "We've twelve o these carbines and I'll be keepin two for meself. Any o you who think you can hole up that runner come and show us and this one's yours te keep."

The men looked at each other.

"And if we miss?" called Booky.

"I knew it was you who was goin te ask. Miss and you're guaranteed not a thing out of this here box and you'll be payin a whole gold piece for the spent shot."

The canvas now flapped out four hundred yards, snagged up on what must have been the only bush on the plain. The men shook their heads and spat. There were thirty, forty of them. "We gonna draw lots for the ten?" said one.

Mym stepped forward. The sound of her footfalls soft on the hardpan in the shackyard. Uhquah watched her come. The naked dwarf's eyes narrowed as if he'd not seen her before and wished he'd never seen her at all.

She took the offered carbine. She felt its weight. Must have been ten pounds or more. She brushed the muzzle with her fingertip and looked at what it left there. She set her pack on the ground and her longarm and alpenstock atop it. At four hundred yards the white canvas lay broadside on the bush. She backed the bolt and the casing of the last shot ejected from it and she caught it between her fingers by instinct and a sudden hush fell among the company. She pocketed the brass and peered into the chamber and saw the mechanism there and understood its function. She charged the next round and closed the bolt with a clang.

The carbine at her shoulder. The twitching white target. The wind in her hair at such velocity. She whispered to the metals in the alloying and she was surprised to hear their encouragement. She adjusted her aim and squeezed on the exhale. The weapon exploded with noise and fire and kicked violently as if it held within it the full power of a stormfront. She lowered the weapon as the wind stole off the gunsmoke. Plain as day in the middle of the white banner was a dark hole where none had been before.

Uhquah nodded at her and handed her another of the ingots. She held it in her hand and then shook it gently next to her ringing ear and she heard the charges rustle therein.

The naked dwarf made a noise like a growl and he spoke so low only the dwarves could hear. "You didn't tell there'd be whites comin."

Uhquah was picking up another of the carbines and set to loading it. "I didn't know it at the time."

"She'll solve it. Look at her. She already has."

Mym lowered the ingot from her ear and shoved it into her pack. As she turned from the box she nearly ran into the longhorn.

"Care there wedwarf," he said. He was in a shooter's stance and the carbine looked like a toy gun in his huge hands. He had rent apart the triggerguard to accommodate his tremendous finger and he aimed and fired. All looked downrange. They saw neither the telltale plume nor heard the shattering of rock. A solitary hole yet in the canvas.

As the roaring subsided some of the men shook their heads. "How far's that bullet bound to go?" said one.

"Beyond the ends of the earth," said the naked dwarf.

Uhquah turned to the longhorn and held forth his hand.

"I'll take that crown off you and another for damagin the metalwork."

The longhorn put up the weapon and bolted in another charge. "No you won't."

Uhquah's face darkened. "Let's not start on bad footin. I brought you on account of the brigadier but I'm under no obligation te keep you. You knew the rule of the game. You overshot."

"I didn't."

"You did. Give it here. Who's next?"

As this was happening Mym was watching the canvas. She was the first to spot the smoke. Soon the entire bush burned white hot and the canvas went up with it. A pillar of fire and then smoke and then nothing.

The longhorn held the carbine by the comb. "I guess that means the game's over."

"What the hell happened there?" said Booky.

"Hot lead," said Mym. She turned to the longhorn. "Ye put it straight through me own hole."

The longhorn shrugged. He was tearing one of the canvas wrappings into strips and braiding them together and feeding this makeshift strap through the loops brazed on the butt and fore. "The gun's what does the work." He slung the carbine over his shoulder and looked at the sky. "Sun's advancing."

Mym trod back to where Orc was standing with the ogre. He had Booky's blade in his hand and was looking at the open country about as if measuring the equidistance of its reach. "That was quite a shot," he said.

"Aye." She looked back at the longhorn. "Not so difficult as I took it te be."

Booky came by. "Y'all see that shooting?"

Orc sheathed the blade. "Yeah."

She nodded at it resting there on his hip. "This ain't the pit no more partner. Y’all are gonna need a longer knife ta contend with folk hereabouts."

Booky went over to the ogre. Mym turned to Orc. “She’s probably right,” she said.

He shrugged. “The marshal had an arsenal of guns and I don’t recall them making any difference.”

He walked off after Booky. Mym watched him go.

The carbines were distributed among the cavaliers. Beside the longhorn none of them were given to the orckin. As the column filed away from that place Mym turned a last time. There stood the naked dwarf before the shack, watching back. The blowing wind unfurled his beard from his form and it flagged out in a horizontal line and the hideousness of him was laid bare.

She turned away. She looked at the carbine in her hands and she wondered what other designs the blue dwarves had contrived, and why.