They were strung out along the edge of a muskeg when Mym saw Uhquah haul up on his mule. She watched him rest his palm on the smoothworn saddlehorn and look east where the new sun pressed off of the jagged horizon. The floor of the muskeg lay broken and mossy and the mountains in the distance seemed to stand out of its surface like stone ziggurats, their enshadowed summits like ritual altars to gods dead and forgotten.
She regarded that waste with Orc and the others. Out in the muskeg sunlight cast upon the ground and permafrost frozen these thousand years boiled off in silver steam.
"Ye hear that?" she said.
"A pack of dogs. Wolves maybe."
"Sounds more lek a pack of yer folk te me."
Suddenly Tulula and the tusker scout turned and ran up the line of the company and called out to Uhquah. The cavaliers jumped from their horses and pulled them down to the muskeg and the soggy ground that marked its perimeter and tied them off along the low lying shore pines. They threw themselves under the shrubby trees and readied their weapons. Far out in the muskeg a furrow detached from the horizon into a thin party of riders that evanesced and coalesced between the rising vapors. They crossed through the blinding sunrays and reappeared one by one in lesser light and they were black against the land and they rode off of that thawing icecap as if newly freed from its glacial tombs with the hooves of their animals splashing up slurries of snow that were not real and they were lost in the steam and lost in the sun and they faded in and out and clotted together and melted apart and their numbers were doubled by avatars reflecting out of the soddenness an antarctic inversion of their rows charging and rippling and the antihorses' legs upraising the very earth with their pounding as if they sought to breach the roof of the underworld what birthed them and constrained them evermore.
"They'll cut across our left," called Uhquah and as soon as he said so they did to favor the tactics they had learned when their minds were still pliable.
From where she lay on her belly with the carbine resting on her bag Mym saw them each raise an arm and loose their bows. The arrows slung soundlessly aloft into the white morning with the steam vorticing behind their fletching, now arcing, now gaining speed and plummeting with a faint whistle then hushed by the crack of a carbine.
Up and down the line the roar of the long rifles and hers among them. The risen passed within thirty yards, sixty or seventy of them, and rode on to the edge of the muskeg and began to dissolve in the vertical sheets of steam and to be lost in dazzling rainbowed mist and to vanish completely.
The cavaliers prone under the shrub pines recharged their carbines. Their horses stood over them bearing arrowshafts from their backs like pincushions. A goblin medicine crawled from one to the next, clawing through his pouches. The rest of the company lay watching and listening.
She watched Uhquah and Orc and the longhorn walk to where the muskeg had been trampled and turned up by so many hooves. Each divot holding a sun in its glassy pool. She saw Orc bend down and pick up a canvas wrapped shortbow studded about the lower limb with the teeth of men. A hand yet clung to its grip. The longhorn turned north and regarded the vapors of the earth into which the risen had disappeared. They went that way and after a moment she rose and went after them.
The fallen man lay on the marshy earth. He was naked to the waist. His leggings were the chainmail of the kingsmen and they were bunched about his knees. His boots were ancient leather and their soles were holed and the pale skin showed through. The moss of the muskeg was flattened where he had tumbled across it. His horse was nowhere to be seen. They stood there in the cold morning with the frigid meltwater pooling around their feet and Uhquah toed over the corpse with his boot. The contorted face came up, disanimate of the queen's necromancy, slack jaw full of mud. Mym wondered whether this was the expression he had worn in his first death. She could see the hole from where the slug of her carbine had penetrated the eyeball and exploded the top of the skull. What was left of the man's scalp was adorned with a rancid black resin upon which was stuck the hair of another, red and wavy and trembling in the breeze. There were putrid hollows in the cheeks and there was a woman's gold locket hanging from the neck. He had been old when he died and his gut bore a half healed slash and his chest was perforated in a half dozen places from gunshot received, each one a pucker big enough she could stick a thumb in.
The longhorn bent down and severed the string of the bag he carried over shoulder and under armpit and he drew its contents forth one by one and pitched them into the mud and moss. In this manner he populated the man's deathbed with the icons he had ferried throughout his wild hunt: one of the human martyrs carved from tusker ivory, a lock of the selfsame red hair tied up in a ribbon, a handful of loose feathers for fletching, a few flint arrowheads. It also held a penny of the kind human heretics gave as payment for the final voyage and this the longhorn studied and swept his thumb across and pocketed. The other castoffs he left where they lay. Lastly he pulled the second scalp off of the man's head and carried it hanging by its hair back to where the company waited.
As Uhquah turned to follow Mym placed herself before him.
"What do you want?" he said.
"I have an ask."
Uhquah regarded her and spat. "What sort o answer do you think te have a right te?"
She showed him the emblem of her station. "I hornkeep the delvin of the white mountain."
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
He lifted his hand slightly as if to reach for the emblem, then he let it drop. "So you say shit and they all get to squattin."
She frowned.
"We ain't in your mountain and I don't owe you nothin."
"I ask fer me folk."
"Fine for you."
"Who answers fer yers?"
"Me folk?"
"Aye."
The blue dwarf glanced to where Orc lingered over the body. He spat again. "Isn't none of me folk left te answer. That settle you?"
"I don't believe ye."
"And I don't care what you believe."
He tried to walk around her but she blocked his way.
"The last Keeper said he found sign of yer kind delvin about in the wynds of time."
Again his eyes drifted to Orc. "You whites and your myths o myths. The world eater gnawin at your boots too?”
She turned to Orc and tilted her head. "Go on."
Orc hesitated. His eyes shifted from her to the blue dwarf and back.
"I'll be right behind ye," she said.
He nodded and trod after where the longhorn had gone.
Uhquah sneered at his backside. "You yap so much it's no wonder the armiger went after you like a moth te flame. Keep on yappin and you'll have a lot o pigfuckin marauders on your doorstep and they’ll be the ones rootin about in your godsdamn wynds."
She nodded after Orc. "He's shown himself te be worth trustin."
"Leave it te a white wedwarf o the lofty ol mountain te fall in with a bloody pigfucker."
"Says the one standin neckdeep in nakshit."
He spat. "Aye, that ain't but true. I'd like te step to fore I sink any further so tell me your damn ask."
"I'm hopin you can teach me somethin," she said.
The corners of his lips upturned as if in a smile. "Ain't that a turnabout."
She didn't understand his meaning and not for the first time she wished she had learned more of the divergent histories of their folk. "I've a need te learn yer ways of communin with these deadland stones," she said. "They don't seem te understand anythin I'm sayin."
He studied her face. "And you think they listen te me?"
"I've seen em open up te ye like rock jasmine in the sun."
He nodded then appeared to catch himself nodding and he replaced his assent with a glower. "I can't teach you nothin about it."
In that moment she saw his sickness and she knew it came to inhabit him the same way it had afflicted her kind. "Ye heard what happened te my delvin?" she said.
“I heard you've not produced a dwarflin goin forty years."
She nodded. “It’s true.”
He regarded her face, the unerasable lines creased therein by worry and by regret. "That'd make you lastborn then."
"Aye."
“Tell me lastborn, did your forebears blast out all o the wizened veins o the vale?"
"No."
"Did you smelt their ores and slag their memories?"
"Hell no. They lay as yer kind left em, as they always have and always will so long as the delvin's warmed by the fire of dwarves.”
He looked over her shoulder at the orc disappearing in the mists. “At least you’ve got some sense left. I regret your troubles with childbearin but they don’t have nothin te do with me and mine and I've got no answer for it."
"Yer wrong," she said.
He shrugged.
"I've sung the sacred tone."
His lips parted and his jaw hung open. "The dwarfstone."
She nodded.
"You've found it."
"Aye."
"Where was it?"
"Fashioned around the black heart."
"About? It ain't no bigger than this."
He held up his fist.
"Aye but the first dwarves smelted it so fine ye can't see it at all." She cupped her hands before her and as she spoke she circled them about as if sliding them around a globe. "Thin as air and clear as glass it enspheres the black heart and when a certain tone is struck a chamber opens and the blood of the mountain flows and the heart itself is made inte a crucible fer shapin and animatin and by the stones ye'll just have te come see it fer yerself. Used it meself te raise up me da right as a mason's level. Well right as he ever was anyhow."
The blue dwarf had followed the motions of her hands with his eyes and now he screwed up his mouth as if he had an ask of his own, then he shook his head. "Good for you. Doesn't sound like you need me for nothin after all."
She shook her head. "It's somethin but it's not enough. We've about recovered every dwarf we can. Those who'd stoned up and stayed whole anyway. But we still can't figure a way past our troubles. The human way of procreatin still isn't workin. I'm hopin te learn what's needed te imbue our stonechildren."
"You've got everythin you need. The sacred tone, the dwarfstone. That’s enough should do it."
"It's not."
"Then you're singin it wrong."
She gestured at the ground. "That's why I'm here. The dwarfstone answers differently te different tones and different songs, but I've gone as far with it as I know how. A learned friend of mine says there are ways of speakin and singin and listenin known te the first dwarves but fergotten by the delvin, but she can't speak or sing or hear em herself as she's a woman. I wasn't sure at first but after bein here and seein me shortcomins with the stones about, and seein how ye've managed te commune with em, I think the answer's there. Hell yer folk's way of speakin alone might be enough te cure the troubles afflictin me folk. And yers too."
He glowered at that. "And if it ain't?"
Now she turned to look at where Orc had gone. "We've got some other notions."
"He means te nick the manstone doesn't he?"
She turned back to him. "I can't speak fer him."
“Pickin that fight's one way te die and not stay that way. He'll wind up turned like that fellow.” He nodded at the twice dead man at their feet.
"He's here of his own accord fer his own reasons. I'd not try te bring him anywhere he wasn't already headin."
"He clearly ain't here for scalps and gold."
She didn't answer.
"You come with an ask yet you're holdin back on me. About yon pigfucker and about the dwarfstone. What're you hidin?"
Away from the mists the longhorn called for Uhquah. The blue dwarf started forward again and for the last time she stayed him with a hand against his chest, and she could hear the affliction roiling beneath her palm, as if his heart had already gone to stone, as if his lungs were lead and gravel sluiced through his veins.
He slapped her hand away.
She looked him dead in the eye. "As Keeper I swear te the stones that the dwarves of the white mountain will share the boons of the forge of creation with the blues of the vale," she said.
"I ain't got no need," was all he said, and he walked away.
She let him pass. She looked down at the dead man and his things strewn about. She picked up an arrowhead and studied its flint as if it might finally yield answers of the strange land, yet it was silent. She let it drop back into the muck.
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> +1 [Stonespeaking] Aye I remember the blues livin in the vale and I remember the day they left it. All trained out and carryin all their effects I don’t think any of us knew there were so many of em. I can’t tell ye why they went as matters between dwarves stay between dwarves. I can tell ye I wasn’t sad te see their recedin backsides. (5/10)