As the west reddened he watched the tusker scout return. The humans swung out of their saddles and set their horses to graze on the thin tundra grass while the scout briefed Uhquah. Orc noticed the longhorn standing uninvited close by the conference. Uhquah roused the cavalry again and they journeyed until the day was well past and in a place that felt like the middle of nowhere they made their camp.

He settled down with Mym a few yards from the brushfires made by the others. Booky and Ogre joined them and Booky told them they had replaced two who had died in a blizzard some weeks before.

"Alright," he said.

Booky sat there and just looked at him with a stupid smile. "On the trail with my old partner. I can't even believe it," she said.

"Me neither."

Ogre grumbled something and Booky turned to them and soon they were a few yards away with Ogre clumsily rummaging through their baggage while Booky supervised.

By the light of the others' fires Orc saw Mym's eyes flick to his. "Ye sure ye want te run with this lot?"

"How's it going with your speaking?"

"No better."

"Then I'd say these are our best chance of finding the brigadier."

"Yer puttin a lot of stock in someone ye haven't seen in years by yer own countin. Someone who left yer sorry butt at the mercy of a couple slavers."

Orc nodded. "Yeah, maybe."

"Certainly."

"She knows more about the stoneshards than anyone."

"So ye say."

"Not me," he said. He dug through the satchel in his lap and pulled out the lacewrapped journal. "Her."

She nodded at the little book. "Unless that's full of lies."

He flipped it open but it was too dark to read. He knew it held a lie. At least one, written in her own hand. "We'll just have to ask her."

"I don't trust that longhorn."

"Good."

"What odds ye think he's goin te lead us to your old lady?"

"Two to one against."

"That's about what I figured."

He put the journal back in the satchel and cinched the bag up. "If he doesn't we'll be wandering the thousand mile wastes waiting until I feel something."

She looked over to where Uhquah sat his fire. "Or until I get the stones te understand me asks."

He saw her looking. "You think he'll help?"

"Maybe."

"His little friend didn't seem thrilled to have you here."

"Cause he's not."

He sat back on his elbows and was instantly too cold and so he hunched forward again. "There's safety in numbers."

"Safety." She sounded doubtful.

"Yeah. Safety. You weren't there."

"Maybe if ye'd waited around fer me I would've been."

"We'll want as many around us as we can get. I wouldn't want to run into that band of risen just the two of us out here or anyplace else."

"As many as we can get."

"Yeah."

"Even them who can't be trusted."

"You heard the longhorn. There's living and there's dying. I trust the living to want to stay that way and I trust the dying to try and force the opposite."

"That so?" she said. "What about yer sailor friend? The bosun."

He shook his head. "The risen out here aren't like him."

"Well what about the otaur there?"

"The longhorn?"

"Aye. He's risen too."

He looked at her and saw the seriousness there. He turned to where the longhorn stood, a black mass before the gathering dark. "You sure?" he said.

"Come on. Half his face is half fallin apart.

"If that's so then he should know right where the manstone is."

"Makes ye wonder why he's not taken yer old lady te it."

"Did you ask him?"

"If there's a fool sittin here it's not me."

Booky and Ogre came back to their fire. Ogre leaned forward and dropped a pile of dry brush the size of Mym.

"Burn it on up y'all," said Booky. "I'm freezin my tits off."

***

Dawn came early in such open country as this. The cavaliers were about catching and saddling their mounts and the orckin watched while huddled around the poxscars of their extinguished fires. They were all of them departed by the coldest time of morning. A jaggedness of mountains hung blue in the west and the tundra about yellowed to the coming sun and Orc heard the song of birds for the first time in weeks. The sun rose and its light caught a quarter moon at zenith and a full moon at setting so that sun and moons all lay equidistant from each other and the company seemed to form the fourth corner of a square circle within which all things burned in a common fire and beyond which darkness reigned forever. The company came single file down a subsidence and the methane smell and a jostling of tack and a clank of arms. The thawing land steamed in the sunlight. The celestial spheres revolved on.

Orc had fallen in beside a scaler sow from one of the armiger's camps. She was called Tulula and she had come north after Glad Nizam's uprising. She was missing some fingers and some teeth and she wore the splintered bones of men pierced through her eyebrows and had cuffed both forearms in barbed campwire. She invited him to walk with her though he couldn't say why. Perhaps she saw in him a kinship in their shared lineage.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

"You know that ogre?" she said.

"I used to."

"There's a pool going which head will kill the other."

Orc glanced back at where Ogre walked. "It won't go like that," he said.

"No?"

"No."

She spat to one side. "Could be they've changed more than you be accounting."

Orc looked at her. The human hair fringed across her bust looked like dried rivergrass. She was slim and meanlooking and one of her elbows crooked where it had been broken by an overseer's discipline and she bore arms of every kind, sharp and spiked and blunt. She wore an embroidered leather harness and she carried a fine oaken bow but it was strung with animal gut and she carried its arrows in an old boot slung from the harness at her hip.

"You've not hunted risen before," she said.

"Not on purpose."

"I can tell."

Orc didn't answer.

"You be awful different you know that?"

"I've been told"

"You went over with Glad Nizam?"

"Yeah."

"Did you know Grukluk?"

"I don't think so."

"What about Hadoh?"

"No."

"Both came out of Geltwald, same as me."

He shook his head. "I didn't get to know many of those who went."

"You heard what happened over there?"

"Yeah I heard."

"Too bad."

"Yeah."

She reached over and brushed back the brim of his hat. He started at first but allowed her to do it.

"That skull cover makes you look human," she said. "So which camp did you come out of?"

"I didn't."

She studied his face as if she didn't believe him. "Didn't know there be any orcs living outside the camps."

"There weren't many."

"You and that ogre."

"Yeah. Some greenskins too. A dogman."

She nodded. "So that be how you know the bookmaker."

"Yeah."

"She's told stories about you."

"Best you don’t believe them."

"She said you went off to heal the Madlands with some beardling magic."

He shrugged.

She tilted her head in a way that made her seem demure. "Didn't work?"

"Not like I'd hoped."

“So you came here.”

“I came to find the brigadier.”

She smiled. “You came here hoping to steal the necromagic. You be hoping it works where beardling magic didn’t.”

“She tell you that too?”

“No.” She fingered the strap of his satchel where it crossed his chest. “It be easy to see.” She dropped her hand. “Many others be here for it. Thousands even. The army that burned Glad Nizam. The kingsmen. Many thousands.”

“I haven’t seen any of them.”

“You will,” she said. “It be big country. The risen corked the bottle down at the Gap and now they’re gone all be coming in wanting to get rich. Wanting other things too. You will see plenty up here you thought you were done with.”

He looked back at Booky and Ogre. "There’s two right there.”

She nodded. They walked in silence for a while.

“How long have they been with your company?" he said.

"Longer than me. She be here already when I came in. Says she knows the brigadier from before. Some of the riders say she sought her out for some reason or other. You want to know more you'd be better off asking her."

"Alright."

"But it be best if you wait on that."

"Why?"

She took his arm. "Because I want you here for now."

He looked at her eyes. Her skullcap rode all the way down on her brow and she tugged it back better to see him. The dew of sweat lay across her forehead and there was a flush to her cheeks which Orc would nightly see by pale moonslight and finally when the fire consumed her as she lay dying on their bearskin in the wastes of the old capital the following spring.

They climbed out of the subsidence through crumbling land held together by brush and smooth round stones and chattering scrub birch losing the last of their yellow leaves, around a prominence of bare rock and down a gentle slope adorned with crowberry bushes whose bunches hung like dried up eyeballs and rattled in the wind. Along the slope were built walls of stones that followed the contours of the land to the ridgelines where they terminated. He walked alongside Tulula and could feel behind him Mym’s rumbling at the stones of the walls and the stones of their path. They skipped lunch and didn’t halt for any occasion and by the time the sun sank behind the southwestern mountains a full moon reemerged above the southeastern horizon and chased them to its apex whereupon it seemed to stop and glare down at them treading the murk in absolute silence as if across a blue seafloor. Orc looked up at it. Its face now appeared cracked like old pottery. That was new.

They camped in a paddock of stone whose grounds were strewn with sunbleached bones and all night men and orckin traded watches at its four corners. Uhquah ordered a goat out of the string to be slaughtered and so it was done within the paddock walls while the horses trembled and threw their heads. A cookfire was set from brush and chips and by its flaring two men cut out the meat with their knives and roasted it skewered upon a long spear with a leafshaped head. As the steaks finished first men then orckin partook and licked their fingers and slept in turns within the low walls.

Toward dusk on the thirr day they came into the remnant of a township once called Forge. Its ruins were nestled against the foot of a mountain severely holed with tunnels like a great slab of cheese where earth of a particular kind had been quarried and brought down to smelters whose chimneys fingered up from the rooftops. From there bricks had been made and sent throughout the kingdom of humankind and beyond to such extent that he heard Mym recognize their type and remark upon their renown. They entered through a field of ash settled out of the sky from centuries of smelting and the air was still thick with soot though no smelters had burned for thirty years. The sun shone red and globular through the smoke and in the twin strips of water that filled the ruts along the road. The thrice-cast light made the brick houses glow as if they were themselves set inside the belly of the smelter that was the world’s molten core. The structures of the place did swelter and crumble in that crucible, save for those of the brick. The brick endured as unmarked as the day it was laid.

The company settled in a square to camp around fires of potash scrounged from the ovens. In the morning as they prepared to move on a family of runaways emerged from an outlying barn and approached them about safe passage upcountry. Uhquah stared down at them from the back of his mule. What was left of their baggage was lashed onto the backs of three ragged oxen and they were a sow weird and her two grown cubs. They were dressed in all of the garments that they owned and their cart had blown a wheel and as her mate repaired it the axle snapped and crushed his skull. She told all this and other things to Uhquah through the longhorn who spoke for her.

Booky came beside Orc and Tulula as they watched the scene. "I was wondering when y'all would meet," she said.

Tulula glared at the woman and went to where the other orckin squatted and awaited the day's journey. Orc watcher her go.

"She's just y'alls type. Just a handsome couple of graybacks together. Ya best go and get her fore one of them other orcs does."

He turned to the woman. "She said there's a pool going around Left and Right."

"Oh yeah?"

"She said folks are betting which is going to kill the other."

Her eyes shifted. "Folks'll bet on anything."

He stood head and shoulders above her and now he leaned over her. "You wouldn't know anything about it, would you?"

She put up her palms as if to fend off his question. "Hey now partner I've gotta recoup my costs somehow. Losing ya and the pit and then losing that pretty little stone y'all filched offa the armiger. Ya know we was there too helping in our way and y'all didn't share a penny of it with us."

"You started the pool."

"Hell ya know it ain't cheap feeding two mouths on a two ton body."

"Are they in on it?"

"Them ogres? Sure."

"You're lying."

She frowned. "They was ta start with. I don't know bout no more. They got a bit carried away with it couple of days before ya showed up. Right said some nasty stuff about Left's mother and they tore a kid in half ta beat the other, one with the ass end and one with the head and horns."

"They have the same mother."

"No shit but ya know they never were best at remembering little things. Now I gotta pay a damn goat outta our shares."

"What did you expect to happen?"

"I figured this troupe of inbreds would've died and undied some three weeks ago and Ogres and me would've been halfway back ta the pit by now with their bets in my bags."

He shook his head. "Call them off it."

"I tried already." She looked up at him. "Maybe y'all could talk to em?"

"And tell them what?"

"For starters not ta kill each other."

At that moment Uhquah whistled and made a roundup motion with his upraised finger. The weird and her cubs stood by as the company set forth and they fell in behind Ogre at the very rear of the column. They watched wide eyed as Right clapped a forgebrick off the back of Left's skull.