Her da convulsed again. His head bucked against her shoulder and his hands flopped against her side and she had to wrap her arm around both his legs to keep from dropping him. She knelt to set him down and he seized and his knee slammed her jaw. Her [alpenstock] and his [longarm] fell into the grass beside the road. Blood filled her mouth. Slowly, gently, she laid him down and held his forehead with her palm and hugged his flailing arms against her chest. She braced her cheek against his.

"I've ye, da," she whispered. "Let it out of ye. All the sick and hurt, just let it out."

She talked him through the worst of it, holding his head and shoulders firm as he kicked and twisted. As his seizing lessened her voice grew quiet until she was whispering in his ear. She told him stories of adventures they'd had up and down the valley. Maybe it helped him, maybe it didn't. It helped her, so she didn't stop.

"We're gettin there. In the yellow hills now. Ye see em? Valley's comin up not too far, and the old mountain after that. Just keep fightin. Not too far now. Someone'll be comin down."

She said it like she believed it but she couldn't figure who might come. Not the Karakos. She saw them go off the edge. Nor Gom who'd been torn to pieces on the human side. "Thayne'll come. He wouldn't leave ye. Or the keeper himself. He'll know what needs doin. Ye'll mend good as the day ye were cut. How ye goin te teach yer wee granddaughter her what nows less ye mend? Thayne and the keeper are comin. Don't let worry straighten yer curlin beard."

She didn't know if he even could worry. The wound where his neck and shoulder met had scabbed over pink and clean, but his scalp was a horrid purple from where the tall orc had stove in his helm. His eyes were blank as glass whenever she pulled back their lids. He couldn't eat the scraps she saved for him. She needed them more than he did. Still she saved them. Back on the span as she held his head and her sleeve soaked his blood into a wide brown stain she'd heard him say her name. She was sure of it. So she saved them.

She wiped the saliva from his lips and beard and checked the bandage around his neck and sat him up to brush the dirt off his backside. With a grunt she raised him bodily over her shoulder and pressed to stand.

"Yer gettin heavier yet. How's it yer gettin heavier when ye won't eat?"

She stooped to grab her [alpenstock] and his [longarm] from the grass then adjusted his weight on her shoulders and trudged upriver.

"Somefuckinone better be comin down," she said.

***

She entered the long valley with him on her shoulders. Night dropped like stone between the tall walls and she needed rest but her da was even heavier and his breath weaker. She had to get to the mountain before he was too heavy for her to lift. Before his breath quit altogether. She wedged her cookstuffs and baggage and their arms in the hollow of an old fir beside the stream and pressed on into the night.

Whenever the track flattened she talked to him. Whenever it steepened she had no breath to spare so she silently sang his name. Deep in the night she saw the delving's light coming between the trees from high on the eastern wall though it was miles above yet, and days away. Its light fell across the dwarfroad and she felt its warmth on her eyelids as she tried to blink away the apparition. She stopped walking and closed her eyes and swayed on her feet.

"Get te sleepin, Mym," said her da.

"I can't," she whispered. "Ye'll die."

"Get te sleepin wee lass. The road will be here tomorrow yet. Yer little friend will be waitin."

"Don't make me go."

"Got te. Forge won't billow itself. Get on back te ma."

She opened her eyes. No light fell on the dwarfroad. She'd been sleeping standing up. She could go no further.

She laid her da in the eave of a wandering boulder and collapsed beside him. She dug for a scrap but the scraps were all gone. She rolled onto her side and tried not to sleep. She just needed a little rest. Not sleep. Never sleep. He'd die if she slept. Just rest. Her little friend would be there in the morning. She wondered whatever happened to her, that girl whose fingertips sparked. She listened to his rasping breath and the river sighing and the forest waking around them. She touched his neck, feeling for his pulse. She slept. She couldn't sleep. He would die. She slept.

In her sleep she [heard] tones both deeper than the great sea of fire that makes and moves all stone, and slower than the motion of the plates that floated upon it. And she heard the snapping and crackling and sizzling of meat cooking. She could even smell it.

"Ye up?" said a familiar voice.

Her eyes opened. Her da was there beside her, breathing yet. She sat up and saw the fire and the meat spit over it on a stripped fir branch dripping fat, and the orange glow of it on Khaz's face.

She jumped to her feet and embraced him and pushed him over all at once. "Where the hell were ye? Where the hell'd ye go?"

"Oy Mym. Oy. I'm sorry. Hey. I'm sorry. I had te. It was old Thayne."

"Ol Thayne nothin. Ye left us in the shit."

"I'm sorry. Thayne messed his arm bad. Goin te lose it looks like. Would've lost everythin if I hadn't put me adze through the neck of one of the little green demons." He looked over to where her da laid. "I'm so glad ye made it. I thought ye were done when ye didn't come up behind. I thought ye were done."

"We were done. We shouldn't be here but for a brute’s mercy. Bastard came up and over the barricade and," she dug through the few things she hadn't thrown away and found her da's cloven helm and showed it to Khaz.

He turned the helm in his hand and ran his finger over the rend. "Shit."

"Aye. Damned orc shamed him then me. I couldn't get te him. I couldn't get te either of em. Now da's shakin and seizin and gettin heavy. I don't know what te do so I'm doin the only thing I can."

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"Aye yer doin good."

"Been a few days since he last shook. I don't know if that's good or bad."

He gave her back the helm. "He can't be comfortable in that needley ditch. Let's lay him out proper."

"No time," she said. "I need te get him te the forge."

He looked at her. He scratched his cheek.

"Don't say it," she said.

"I got te."

"No ye don't."

"Ye know he's stonin up Mym."

"Stuff that, digger. I don't know shit about shit. I'm goin te get him te the forge. Get some heat into his bones. Then we'll see what's what."

Khaz dusted his hands and knees and stood. "Best ye keep yer hopes in yer feet. There isn't much good up thataway."

"What's the keeper's count?"

"More might be comin in yet. Others behind ye maybe."

"There's no one comin behind us. What's the keeper's count, Khaz?"

"Isn't no keeper's count. No keeper neither."

"Shit."

"Whole place was empty when we got in except for them who got there before us. Few more came in since. Here."

He bent over the spit and tore off a hunk of meat.

"This is just about done."

She sat at the fire and drew her knees before her and crossed her arms around them and set her chin on them. He still held the hunk out to her between thumb and finger and he eyed the beast on the spit. It was a good take. A bit funny looking. A bit of strange coloring in the coat and in the meat. But he was lucky to find it. Its fur would line a pair of boots or gloves and its horns could be used for something. Maybe a set of chessmen. Thayne would need something to keep him busy if his arm had to come off. He had a nice iron vise. One handing a chess set shouldn't be nothing. It would keep him busy anyway and that's the best cure for what was coming and what was already gone.

Mym took the meat from his outstretched hand. "Keeper wouldn't just leave the mountain less the others were gone already or he was takin em someplace."

"Can't say. None were left te tell. Don't worry bout them. Worry bout yer own. Keeper and the rest will keep the rest."

"Worry bout yer own? That what ye said te Thayne when ye left us lyin on the span?"

He frowned but didn't say anything.

She looked at him. The light filtering through the evergreen canopy fell upon his face and she saw the great circles under his eyes and the ragged state of his beard. To have already climbed the mountain and returned he must not have slept at all. She bit into the meat. "Sorry. I didn't mean it."

"It's nothin."

"Thanks for comin."

"Wish I had earlier."

"Me too but don't fire yer coal dwellin on it. Help me stand him up. Pack the rest of yer take there and catch us on up the road."

The serpentine forest filling the valley's floor glowed green and gold under the midday sun. When Khaz caught her he helped her bear her da in turns. They did not talk. They did not need to. They knew what needed doing and they set to do it and anytime something needed communicating they did so in glances and nods. Their burden grew heavier. The air colder and thinner. Whenever she took her da she huffed like a lowland man climbing to the delving. Sometimes her da went so long between breaths she thought he had died on her back. At the place where the flume's melt met the silver stream she knelt to scoop some water to her mouth. She heard Khaz whisper something to her da.

He knelt beside her. "He won't last."

"He will."

His eyes searched the road ahead then the wall above then the side canyon that wound to the base of the flume's falls. "We should take him the other way."

"What other way?"

"The wynds."

"Yer jokin."

"There's an entrance behind the lower falls."

"No."

"It'll be faster. Warmer too."

She looked that way. Sheer granite walls and tall trees and the flume's silver ribbon flecked by copperback trout. "I don't know."

"I do."

"How much faster?"

"A day or more."

"Unless ye get us lost."

"I won't."

She pressed to stand. "Show me."

He led her up a narrow game track that wound under fallen trees and around standing trees and through drifts of winter's first snows, and there, where the flume's pillar of blue ice grew out of the sky thicker than any tree, where its white ice melted to a merry silver creek, where the white mountain's wall overhung for a thousand yards of granite carved and polished by mile deep monsters since departed drop by drop to the sea, there at the foot of all things sacred to the delving's dwarves squatted a stone door rendered invisible by their artifice. No human would find it nor any dwarf save one who stumbled on it from its inside or knew where it lay by other means.

Her da's hands lay folded on his chest where she'd arranged them and his eyes closed as she'd shut them and his back stiff as a stout branch. Yet like a branch still pliable. Still alive. He'd grown too heavy for her alone or Khaz alone, so they carried him together as they might an anvil or a stonechild or the slab of a tomb. Past the ever freezing and thawing pillar and through a pile of marble and obsidian and other stones found deep within the delving that peeked their slaggy metals from under a sage sheet of creeping lichen.

At the foot of the overhanging wall they collapsed in a heap. Khaz flexed his hands then ran them along the wall and [spoke] to it in whispers. She looked up and up and up the wall until her unwinding braid touched the ground behind her.

She yelled, "Oy dwarves holler dwarves of the white mountain!"

"None there te hear ye," he said. He stopped searching and knelt amid the piled stones. "Look here at these. Tailings from tunnelin, ye think?"

She came beside him with her hands on her hips. "Don't know don't care. Where's this wynd of yers?"

"It's here, just need te find it. Lot's been lost. What'd yer girlfriend say of dwarves and secrets? Lots of secrets left te stone, lots of stones left alone. Well look at this lot. Holy bones of the earth. Maybe they member the wyindin's gate. Traitor's gate it's called. Guessin these are the traitors."

He put his foot against a big stone and pushed it over. A dwarf's face with a beard of stone and blank eyes and lichen covering his chin and cheek looked back at them. His forehead was cleft and his neck too. The rest of him could've been anywhere.

"What tales would he tell?" said Khaz.

The face was smoothed in places and roughed in others. Eaten by the mosses or washed away by weather and wind. Looking upon it a terror welled up in her and all the pain of the past two weeks welled up in her. She pried her eyes away from the head and stared at Khaz. He needed to find the way inside. He was just standing there.

"Not a bad way te go," he said. "Back into the world's shape a grain at a time. Might be nice bein a plant awhile. Grabbin stone with yer roots and movin it this way and that before goin back into stone yerself. Waitin for some lass te come along and speak life back into ye again."

She kicked at him. "Get up."

"Sunderin canyon Mym. Watch yer feet."

She kicked him again. "Da isn't goin like this. He's supposed te break the world not whimper into dumb mosses. I'm not goin te drop one bead of sweat gettin ready for yer doom so long as he's breathin. Not one drop. Now get off yer ass and find your damned wynd or I'll put ye beside them traitors and ye'll be gettin yer wish."

Shaking his head he went back to the wall.

She kicked the stone head and it rolled over in the dirt. One eye still showed. Looking straight through her.

----------------------------------------

> Lost Item: [Mym's Alpenstock]

> Lost Item: [Da's Longarm]