No light but starlight yet shone upon that country and the sounds about him heralded the day to come. The splish of steelhead breaking through the Fingerling and the exploratory chirrup of a jay up in the aspen and the whispered cropping and shortened step of the horses blanketed and hobbled amid the grass. The Lorderic roosters began. The glen smelled of horse droppings and extinguished fires. Orc sat up. Starlight and skylight conclaved around. In their gloom he saw children following the horses and piling the droppings in burlap sacks stained from that purpose. Men and orckin began to stir.

When the company went back through town he peered into the keep's shortyard. The dead veteran was gone. The ground stained red. Upstreet the weird's badger pelt was rolled up against the frost and the lanternwick slumped black in its housing. One of the cubs who had been collecting brush straightened up and waved as they passed.

They marched through the veteran's camp at morning's end, the tents guyed out and their flaps swaying in the breeze. Raw wolf pelts were draped over branches or bushes with flies attending their undersides. The firepit an ashen crater filled with bones. Orc nodded at the dead in the places they had fallen.

"Kingsmen," he said.

"Aye," said Mym.

"Still wearing their hair."

As they passed by Tulula draw her knife.

"Not fer long."

At the first rasping scrape Mym winced. “I never heard of yer kind doin that before,” she said.

“No.”

“Ye didn’t on the span and ye didn’t in the Madlands.”

He looked at his hands, turned them over, looked at them as if they weren’t his own. “No we did not.”

“Is it some sort of orcy thing I should know about?”

“Not that I’ve heard of.”

"Do ye know what it’s about?"

“Well,” he began. He reached up and doffed his hat and punched out the crown and donned it back. “You know that hussar?”

“Aye I remember ye tellin me about him.”

“He said something about marking the fallen so as to tell between those killed during the war and those killed before the rising began."

"Ye buy that?"

"No."

She drummed her fingers on the stock of her longarm where it slung low at her hip. “Maybe there’s a bounty on em.”

“On the dead?”

“Aye, on the risen dead.”

There came another grating scrape.

“Course these kingsmen aren’t risen,” she said.

He shrugged. “Whoever’s paying the bounty doesn’t know that.”

"Didn't ye say the risen were doin it too?"

"Yeah."

"I’d not think they’re lookin fer a payout."

He shook his head. "No. They hang the pieces of others on themselves like they're trying to replace what was taken from them."

Mym nodded in contemplation. “Aren’t we all.”

He looked at her as if she knew that was the exact reason he had come. She watched him back a moment.

She looked down at the nearest corpse and toed it. "Surprised yer brigadier didn't burn em.”

"That'd be a mercy against what's coming."

"She isn't one fer mercy?"

He remembered that day at the estate when the kingsmen had come for him. What she had done to them. What she had him do. "Not when mercy would be wrong," he said.

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That evening there was some question of where Booky and Ogre had got to as they weren't at camp. The longhorn hunted through the smoke of the cookfires and came up to Orc and Mym.

"Where's that woman and monster?" he said.

"Maybe they left off," said Orc.

"Left off."

"Maybe."

"Did they accompany you this morning?"

"No."

"It was my understanding you had some history."

Orc shrugged. "We've all got some history."

"When did you last see them?"

"Last night with the weird in that tumbleweed of a town."

"And this morning?"

"I never saw them this morning."

The longhorn regarded him. "Never saw them," he said.

Mym blew a nostril into the dirt. "Quite a feat losin twelve feet of meat with two yappers stuck onte it."

The longhorn turned to her. "There's a pool going."

"Aye we heard."

"The bookmaker is carrying a small fortune in bets laid."

"Sounds like someone ye would want te keep track of."

The longhorn looked at her. He looked at Orc again. Then he stood and went back up the camp.

Next morning the tusker scout was gone and two cavaliers with him. The rest went on. By midmorning they had crossed a great salt pan and started up a plateau on its far side. They walked up through purple glory-of-the-snow and saxifraga under the igneous rimrocks. The sudden crash of rockfall from a horned chamois that had bounded away from the vanguard resounded downslope and Orc and Mym looked out to track its wild descent of the jumbled crag. They climbed up through sedges and clear running streams and they surmounted the plateau through a notch in the rim and walked north along the mileslong promontory.

Orc watched the low country to the west unfurl. The sun stood above it in an explosion of color where a miasma of steam transpired from the thawing land and at the northern perimeter of the world smoke was blowing down the tundra like the dust of an approaching army. The shattered glass mountains arranged in sharp distinctions across the half globe of the sky and between the plateau's edge and the world's a multitude of buffalo was pounding south like an outburst flood, chased over the plain by the great white wolves of that country who were but specks upon it.

He stopped in place and looked out upon this scene. Against his thighs the lupin rattled in the wind as if the earth remembered the clashing banners and spears and lances of old. The harrying chase moved silently into the growing shadow of the mountains. A plume of bats sojourned blindly from some overhang or cave below him and scurried across the darkening sky after the setting sun. Mym stopped a few yards ahead and turned to watch him through the dry weeds about her eyes. The company turned right and rode away from the cliff's edge and toward a darkness without definition. Into this they vanished.

They camped on the open plain. Their fires flared and their smallness and brightness made an infinity of the night around them. From the murk the scout emerged and thrust Booky into the camp. She was covered in dust from the road. Ogre loomed just beyond the firelight. The scout faded away again.

"Did you get lost?" said Orc.

She looked at him red-eyed and disheveled. She shook her head. "I can't stop im. I tried Orc. Ya know I tried."

Ogre stumbled forward as if each of their limbs were in disagreement as to their direction and purpose. One leg and arm moved to sit and the others stiffened up and from these motions they tipped over sideways and onto the ground in a disunity of frustrated grunts. They pushed off of their side to sit, half covered in broken grass and dust, half in dark, their knees splayed wide and their gut sagging on the ground between their thighs. Left was blinking at the fire, face wet with his tears and now streaked with mud. Right was in darkness.

"Stop doin," said Left.

Orc heard the whispered slurs from Right.

Left covered his ear with their hand and closed his eyes. "Said stop doin," he said.

Right's grin reflected the firelight. A sudden orange crescent in the dark now vanishing to form new torments.

Left opened his eyes again. From where Orc sat they didn't reflect the fire. They were blacker than the night, black as the oblivion said to lie beyond creation, black as the tunnels through which the souls of men and women are ferried naked to their eternal rest.

"Naw, naw it’s not like that," said Left.

Ogre reached forward and plucked a carbine from where it lay among a cavalier's effects. Booky had her head buried in her hands but Orc and Mym clambered up to their feet.

Orc heard Right say, "Dis fire's mine. Now you go find your own."

"You goin shoot me?" said Left.

"Goin shoot you dead."

Left looked to where Booky sat weeping. She had gathered her hair into fists and she rocked back and forth.

"You make us do things I dun want," said Left.

"You die then you dun want nothin no more. Maybe best I shoot you dead."

Left looked once more at Booky then Ogre set their hand down and scooched themself around until Right was closest to the campfire. They placed the carbine across their lap. Mym sat back at the fire. Right grinned at her, hand lying across his belly. When the other hand came out of the darkness clawlike and rigid as if disembodied Mym started to rise. Right peered up as if its appearance was a skygod’s revelation and the hand palmed Right's head and with a single movement yanked it off.

A column of wet fascia and a half dozen vertebrae clacked upward after the decapitation and thick ropes of blood spurted from the stump of the neck and sputtered the fire. The hand let go of the head and it bounced and rolled against a cavalier's foot with the grin intact. The cavalier hollered and kicked out and scrambled away. The fire hissed steam like a boiling kettle and black blood pooled at the base of the skull and began to evaporate into the bitter air. Ogre sat as before as the others looked on aghast. Then the great arms moved and pivoted the fatty body around until Left's face came back into the firelight. His dark eyes found Orc's and he winked. Booky sobbed on.

In the morning the bettors came for their payouts but Booky was too distraught. Orc took the book and read the figures and doled out the coinage from the sack Ogre carried. Afterward the sack was empty but for Booky's percentage. She made him keep the money meanwhile she rolled Right's head into the sack and tied it off to a loop of the pack she wore. There she carried it when they set out, penduluming like a bullsack as she walked beside Ogre at the rear as they had always done. His singular head offset, his shoulders now too wide. They had not gone an hour from that site before the risen found them.