She reached across the table and touched his wrist. She could feel the sow across the street eyeing that movement. "There's a tavern of some sort just up the way. Ye want te see what they got?"

"Alright."

She turned her eyes to the sow. "Bring along yer lady there."

"She's called Tulula."

"Whatever ye say."

They hesitated on the step of the tavern. A tobacco smell wafted out. Some chickens made warbling noises in a mud hutch beside. With the back of her claw the sow called Tulula lifted aside the roughspun wool drape that hung for a door and they went into a place of undefined dark and subtle motion. A solitary candle hung in a tin lampcage from a joist in the ceiling and dripped wax freely onto the floor. Figures shadowed in the corners sat with their cups and their pipes. Mym went across the room to a forgebrick bar. The place stunk of smoke and dried sweat. A barman came from one of the corners and stood before them with his hands splayed out on the bricks.

"Welcome," he said.

Mym unslung her pack and placed it down between her feet and tiptoed her chin over the bar. "What have ye got fer drinkin that won't leave us blind or pissin much blood?"

"What?"

"Show me yer wall."

The barman stepped out of the way and looked at the wares with her. He seemed uncertain as to whether any of it was fit for drinking.

She pointed at a squat copper keg on a sagging shelf with its pump covered in a layer of fine dust. "What's that?"

"Ale."

"Aye what kind?"

The barman] looked confused. "The drinking kind."

"That good fer ye?"

Orc shrugged. He wouldn't be drinking because he never did. She looked at the sow.

"Heyu." The sow flipped her thumb at her throat in the motion of upturning a cup.

"My girl," said Mym. She turned to the barman. "Three of em fellows."

"None for me," said Orc.

"Two?" said the barman.

"Three," said Mym.

The barman measured the pours into three thinworn pewter tankards with handles riveted on and pushed them across the bar.

"How much?"

The barman hesitated. "Nine?" he said.

"Nine what?"

"Cypriote," said Tulula. "Pennies."

Mym counted out the pieces and placed them on the bar and she drank her cup and Orc's cup and paid nine more. She pointed at all three cups. Tulula took up hers and drained it and set it down for the second round. The ale tasted sour and flat and faintly skunky as if overfermented. Mym turned her back to the bar and surveyed the room. At a table near the entrance two men sat with pipes in their mouths and a coal pulsing in the dark on a tray laid between them, a set of tongs beside it. Along the far wall sat a row of figures too dark to make out and she wasn't sure they were all of them alive. From her low vantage she could see a number of them clutching weapons under their tables. She drained her cup again and felt the liquor begin to ease the doubts she harbored, the ones festering her hope and subalternating her aim to find and take the manstone by whatever means necessary.

Stolen story; please report.

A prospector rose and shambled toward them. He carried a glass bottle of opaque spirit by the neck and he set it on the bricks and his cup beside it. He conferred with the barman in slurred speech and he uncorked his bottle and stood the cork carefully on its head. He looked at Mym. He was old and he wore a straw hat with a narrow crown of the type made in the Goldlands. He was dressed in heavy cloth pantaloons and a shirt buttoned down to his bellybutton. The way his pantaloons bloused over his boots made them look like some sort of seacucumbers ingesting him from the feet up.

"Y'all are brigadier's?" he said.

Mym looked at Orc.

"Y'all are," said the old man. "I rode with the kingsmen four years." He held up his four fingers and she saw one was missing as if he meant to show her what had happened in those four years. He clasped his bottle with that hand and it shook slightly as he poured its liquid into the cup. He drank the contents and set the cup down and turned back to Mym. He wiped his sunburnt lips on his sleeve.

"Y'all are here for warring. Different kinda prospecting."

Mym didn't answer. Covered in grime from the road and with her empty tankard in her hand she resembled a street brat orphaned by consumption.

The old man drew a sword he didn't have and raised the ghost of it overhead. He looked down at her and at the orcs. "Y'all cutting on them of the armiger's, yeah?"

Mym looked at Orc. "What do ye think he's after?"

Orc looked at the man and then at Tulula. The sow drank down her ale and looked at the old man and spat on the floor.

Out of the dim far side of the room a man moaned. Someone moved along the back wall and crouched down. The moan came again and the old man shook his head and lowered his arms. His eyes were pink from the smoke or the drink or perhaps some other thing.

"What's she paying y'all?" he said.

None of them answered.

"Y'all find the queen and put her down for good and they'll pay you a mountain of gold. Who can ride against the brigadier? No heroes here, no heroes here. She's got orcs and risen and living men. Go finish the queen and y'all will ride home dukes and duchesses. Good young Donnas will pardon the lot of you and pay double that worth in land and gold. But you best get to her before the baron does."

Mym looked at Orc. She tilted her head toward the door.

The old man looked up. "Blood," he said. "These are the deadlands now. Awash in blood. Thirsting for more. The blood of a hundred martyrs, of a thousand babes. For what purpose?"

He gestured his bottle toward the door and the darkness beyond where all the world lay hard and black and flat like a great headsman's block. He upturned the bottle to his mouth and drank.

Mym watched him. There was something about him that reminded her of her da as he had hung in the hammock. When the man had finished swallowing he held his hands wide as if to address an audience.

"God don't have enough blood to give for what's needed here so he spills the blood of others. The fathers say it's his too to give. What's he left for us? If even our blood is his then what's left of us that could be said to be ours? Nothin."

He spat and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He pointed the neck of his bottle at Mym. "Y'all may be fine warriors. Y'all go on and get them armiger's men. Spill God's blood from their bellies. But don't y'all forget there's another warrior in these here parts and ain't a soul who escapes him. I was like y'all before. I remember. I remember everything and it ain't nothing I want to. The remembering don't stop til god's given y'alls blood up for slaking the deadlands too."

The old man drank the last dregs from his bottle and shuffled softly away in his boots over to where the moaning came. He crouched down. The moaning recommenced.

Mym turned back to the bar. The barman leaned over the bricks and nodded to where the old man had gone. "It's his son," he said.

"Who is?"

"The one cut up over there."

"Aye I hear him hurtin."

"They got him good five, six days ago. The armiger's chaps. Well used to be. The baron's chaps now. I tried telling him so but he's drunker'n shit and ain't nothing sticking."

"He's been dyin fer four days?"

The barman nodded.

"Why don't they go for help?" said Orc.

The barman looked evenly at him. "Go where?"

"Somewhere that isn't here."

"There's nowhere to go that'll keep him breathing."

The barman took up their tankards and set them behind the bar. He lifted a dirty linen cloth from there and wiped it across the wornsmooth counter. He nodded at the far wall.

"Now afterwards you might see him cartin that boy up to the capital for her to raise him on up." He looked at them each in turn. "She'll be after you too you keep chasing the baron's chaps."

They didn't stay to drink a third round. They stepped out of the tavern and made their way down the guttered street. The gate ahead of them, the camp beyond. Ogre and Booky had gone and the weird too. The moons passed one by the other and mutely pummeled each other in the sky.