Orc returned to the company as they milled about the muskeg's shore tightening cinchropes and scabbarding carbines and scrutinizing the medicine going horse to horse with his chalky powder and pungent smear. The longhorn stood in the shadow of a scrub pine as if loathe of the advancing sun. When he saw Orc coming he beckoned. Orc looked over to where Tulula squatted with the other orckin grinning together in the lee of their bloodlust and taking stock of the spent arrows they had collected. She didn’t notice him. He went to the shade.
The longhorn watched him come and nodded at the orckin. "You who were cast out by Glad Nizam's campdwellers think these hardy folk will take to you."
"Perhaps."
The longhorn smiled. "You’re too rough for them."
"Don’t act like you know me."
"But I do. I know who you seek and why. I feel the mark the mother left upon you. You know of whom I speak."
Orc studied the longhorn and the glint in his eye. He said nothing.
The longhorn held out his hands, one empty and one full of the muskeg's moss upon which he chewed. "To be brought back by the elfmother. How fortunate for you."
The longhorn leaned closer.
"Is that her brother's smoke upon your flesh, or is it merely your cookfire's exhalation? No, no. There he is, father to the madlands. Curious to note him here. Curious also that he should reveal himself to you but days after the elfmother, and that an agent of the queen's should lead you to the first dwarves' mysteries circumscribing their accursed forge."
The longhorn smiled and his great flat teeth were stained green by the moss.
"Did the elfmother teach you of intention, Orc? Of the grand machine who ordered all creation, who now finds its machinations undermined by the will it bestowed them? Did she teach you of these things? No. I see she spoke of other things. An alternative education. Had I only gone to her and not my queen. Alas I knew so little then."
The longhorn leaned even closer. Close enough Orc could smell the putridity of his decaying lungs on their breath.
"Yet here you are. You feel it all the same, don't you? You and the wedwarf. The urgency inside you. The germ of power growing therein. Taken root. Seeking sunlight. Shall it shoot from your mouth and nostrils and ears and anus? Shall you become a tree as I have become a coffin, as the wedwarf becomes a mountain? We have no choice, scaler. First dwarves and martyrs and thee and me, spoken of and hurrying forth in this nonsensical revue. Know thy lines and speak them well, else another will spake them with thy lungs. Draw your breath on their unheard command. Go forth, slay, die. You see it. You feel it. Now you know the wedwarf forsakes you. Not by her volition. Did the insect now buzzing inside the pitcher plant choose to crawl inside? Watch as she returns to who she always was. You cannot stop it anymore than you could set it in motion."
Orc held up his hand and gently pushed the longhorn back until he stood upright and peering down upon him.
"She will betray you to those who neither see nor comprehend. The pyromancer. The blue dwarf. Where is she now? Wait and see."
The longhorn turned and spat his cud to the ground. He called out to the blue dwarf and then said no more. The cavaliers now were mounted and waiting. The orckin standing and listening. There came Uhquah from the rising mists, and Mym thereafter. Her eyes found his and she fell in beside him.
"Took you long enough," he said.
She looked sideways at him as if he'd struck some unknown nerve. "What's yer meanin?"
"Nothing."
They circumvented the muskeg and walked all day across an ancient spread formerly ruined by an application of seawater and now undergrown with clumps of cordgrass and pickleweed. In the afternoon they entered another subsidence that descended to the bare bedrock. The clop of the ironshod hooves rang off the bowl about and the beasts shook their heads and craned to find their phantom fellows. That night as they bedded down around their glowing embers a sharp clattering came out of the dark followed by a dull thunder of some other subsidence toward the geocentric origin of everything whereupon all possible radii intersect.
To the dark Orc said, "You hear that?"
"Aye," said Mym. "Sounded te me lek a cave in. Even the good earth's witherin up here."
Orc thought about that and about what she had told him about her talk with the blue dwarf. "The longhorn knows we've got the orcstone."
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"Aye?"
"He knows you found the dwarfstone and he knows I found the elfstone."
“You told him?”
“No.”
“Then how’s he know it?”
“The same way I’ll know when we’re getting close.”
“Well shit.” He heard her shift in her bed. "While we're talkin about it I may as well tell ye Uhquah knows we’re aimin fer the manstone."
"Great."
"I don't think he's figured why."
"Does he know about the others?"
"I told him about the dwarfstone."
"And the orcstone?"
"That's not me secret te tell."
He nodded to himself. "That it's not."
“Fair chance the longhorn’s already given ye away.”
“Perhaps.”
“He say anythin more?”
“Yeah. He said a few things.”
“Lek?”
“Nothing useful.”
“Nothin bout bringin the shards tegether?”
“No.”
“Nothin bout meltin em inte one and usin it te animate me carvins?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Aye. Probably good ye didn’t.”
“You still believe it’ll work?”
“I don’t believe nothin of the sort.”
A meteor streaked silently across the southern sky. They stopped talking to watch it wink away to nothing.
“Oy there’s somethin te wish on.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been thinkin the blue dwarf could help.”
He watched the stars and waited for what was next and tried to not think about what the longhorn had said about forsaking and betraying.
“He’s got somethin afflictin him. Might be in his interest te help us if it’ll help him.”
“Might be.”
“I know if I can learn his way of speakin it’ll get us where we need te be, if not with the sacred tone than with findin the manstone.”
“You know or you hope?”
“Suppose yer right. Still nothin but a hope.”
They didn't speak for a while. The night grew cold about. He wrapped up in his blankets and he must have made some indication of the chill for Mym said, “If ye were a wee bit smaller I’d loan ye me coat.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m sure ye are.”
He sat up and stoked the embers and tossed on the last bit of brush. The fire flared suddenly and he saw the figures of others all asleep and the distant twinkle of it caught in the eyes of the tusker on watch. The light faded and the heat with it. He hunkered back into his bed and it was colder than before.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Dreaming of what could be when I could be out there making it.”
“We are makin it.”
“Sure doesn’t feel like it.”
“No?”
“No.”
“What do ye call what we’ve been doin this past week.”
“Following someone else’s lead.”
He brought his blanket over his head as if to hide from the determinate stars and the fate writ across them.
“Making it for someone else’s dreams.”
***
On the next day they crossed a dried salt marsh and by no intention of his own Orc found himself beside Booky for the duration. The cavaliers wore masks over their noses like bandits and the orckin had smeared animal fat across their faces and both groups blackened their eyes and the eyes of the beasts against the awful glare. Sunlight hammered down from a turquoise vault and up from the endless pan and burned the underside of Orc’s chin and nose. Out on that plain their eyes tracked a bonewhite dust devil creeping and shambling some hundred yards tall. Booky rotely repeated tall tales she’d heard of pioneers sucked into such dervishes and lifted aloft to their very tops and dropped back to the earth at their dissipation, left broken and bloodied and exposed to the elements that murdered them: relentless heat, desiccated earth, shrieking wind. As she told it he heard a kind of longing in her voice.
He looked sidelong at her after she finished. “You alright?”
“No I ain’t. I ain’t one bit.”
He shouldn’t have asked. But it was too late.
“Y’all were everything to me Orc. Them ogres and ya and the pit. I can’t leave im like that. Ya know I can’t. Tell me truly y’all didn’t bring y’alls magic rock?”
“It’s back at the dwarf’s mountain.”
“Goddamn.” Her eyes started to glisten but the incessant salt wicked her tears away. “Goddamn it all I don’t know what else ta do. I gotta make im right again. I got im inta this fix and I gotta make im right. Hell we can go right now. Y’all can take us there right? It ain’t so far as that. We can pack up Right in the salt here and he’ll keep just fine all the way back there and y’all will just touch im with y’alls rock and he’ll be whole as the day he came ta us.”
He looked at the damp sack swaying off of her back and thudding slightly against her thigh. He didn’t say anything.
“Hell that’s too far ain’t it. I’m gonna have ta go ta the queen ain’t I? She’ll put im back of a kind. I seen her creations and they ain’t pretty but at least they’re living of sorts.”
“You go to her and she’ll kill you,” he said.
“Ya think I don’t goddamn know it? What else am I gonna do? I gots nothing left. Them ogres was all I had. I lost the rest. All y’all, the greenskins, the old dogman. Y’all were everything ta me Orc. We was best friends all of us. Goddamn Donnas and goddamn his armiger for what they done ta us. Goddamn. Goddamn.”
He saw her hands were trembling and she reached one to her forehead to brush back a trace of her hair, and he saw the black blood dried under her fingernails from when she had collected the head into the sack.
“I ain’t nothing. No place of my own. No friends but that one-headed freak. Ain’t got nothing, ain’t ta be nothing. Momma ya was right all along.”
He watched her there, the woman who had enslaved him, who had forced him to fight and to maim and to kill. All for her to get ahead of the poverty that had chased her all her life, to get ahead of herself.
He snatched her wrist. Bony and fragile. Her eyes widened. Her mouth half opened. He saw the fear there, and something else he wasn’t prepared to admit.
With his free hand he reached to his satchel and untied it. His fingers fished for the copper penny, the one she had thrown down to him on the day he slew the bosun those years ago. He placed it in her waiting hand. He closed her fingers over it, her fist wholly engulfed in his.
Her tears ran freely now despite the salt. She tried to speak but she couldn’t manage a word.
From behind them Ogre said, “Orc loves us."
Perhaps he did.
----------------------------------------
> +1 [Awareness] Sometime around then he learnt there’s more to attunin to the world than lovin dirt. There’s somethin in fellowship you can’t find in bloody nature but without which you ain’t to understand what’s natural. (2/10)
> Lost item: [Copper penny]