Sometimes she looked at Orc and the bookmaker behind but mostly she watched the blue dwarf ahead. The salt pan was a day behind them and now they walked through hills and downs and the longhorn said they were halfway to the old capital. A large black raven hovered about them as if counting their number and then it cawed and flapped up and away east over a hilltop on its oilslick wings. They carried on after it and in the evening they passed through orchards of leafless husks in their orderly rows and columns, past the ruins of adobe villas and stone keeps whose mortar crumbled under their fingertips. They marched between granite tors and through straths with frozen bottoms where fluffed up ptarmigans warbled like the stones about. Finally they came through a stand of trees far older than the risen or the humans preceding them and they camped upon a cliff above a glacial cirque lost of its maker in which lay the ruin of a town called Bidwell.

The cavaliers hobbled their horses and began moving through the trees for kindling until the longhorn stopped them. There would be no fires that night. Mym watched through lidded eyes as the sow who had taken to Orc descended to the fort with the tusker scout and Uhquah sat on the cliff with his feet dangling over an iron darkness gathering in the cirque's cauldron. Mym set to sharpening the adze of her alpenstock and waited. When the scout and the sow returned at last light she sauntered closer and overheard their report. No light shown in the bowl below.

Of the town and the man for which it was named Mym knew nothing. When they entered it the next day they passed single file on cobbled streets between rows of long narrow barracks where the orckin slaves had been interred.

"Captives of Glad Nizam's rebellion," she heard a cavalier say. "Brought here last year by kingsmen aimin to make a new life in the old way."

"Where'd they go?" asked another.

The cavalier shrugged. "Maybe they heard we was comin."

Uhquah spat from his mount and wiped his mouth with the tail of his beard. "The brigadier scared em off."

Mym was eyeing the wire strung across the grounds. “Looks lek she freed the orcs while she was at it.”

They walked past a pit of refuse and a pile of rubble with a canvas tarp lashed across, past a cart of bonewhite mortar with the trowel seized straight up and down in it like the old story of the sword in the stone, past the dark inner gatehouse of the town’s keep. They crossed the remnant of a ditch and held up outside the tall square structure of stone and adobe with its battlements and towered corners. There was a lowered portcullis with a vertical rend in its crossjoinings large enough for a mounted rider to pass through, as if a titan had pulled the iron rods asunder.

Uhquah knocked the butt of his carbine against the portcullis like a hungry inmate with a soup mug. A reddish light pinked the rim of the cirque above and everything below stood in a blue shadow. The clang of his pounding reported off of the keep and off of the gutted ground. The cavaliers sat their horses. Uhquah leaned toward the portal.

Mym drew close thinking he might speak to the stones.

He threw back his head. "Come to if you ain't dead," he called.

"Who's that?" called a rough voice.

Uhquah gripped up his carbine and levered a round.

"Who's there?" they called again.

"Your goddamn savior," said Uhquah.

Mym heard the metallic ring of a chain loosely drawn followed by the crunch of it spooling under load. The portcullis shrieked as it rose to three feet. Its spiked rods dusty and dulled. A dirty man leaned out from behind the gate with a pistol ready and a dagger in his opposite hand. Uhquah cast his gaze backward at Booky and she sidemouthed something to the ogre. The monster waddled up to the portcullis and pressed it up another ten feet and the entire company processed through.

Within the bailey the cavaliers dismounted. In the murk rested the wagons of colonizers and off in a dark corner a row of five or six shallow graves, the ground turned up and over them. There was smoke wisping up from the chimney of the greathouse and some men stood in the shadow of its doorway. They nodded at Uhquah as he crossed to them and then they blanched when they saw the company's orckin enter the bailey.

"We pegged you for risen," said one. His gaze drifted to Orc, who had come alongside Mym as if interested to hear what these wretched men might say.

They were a half dozen out of twoscore men that had come through the Gap the year before to live after the way of their slavetrading forefathers. They had left their families in the boomtowns on the far side of the Gap and they intended to send for them the next spring. They came for the unclaimed parcels and for the lawlessness, and they drove their slaves before them: stragglers from Glad Nizam's revolt who had never made it to the ships, fugitives caught and secreted north and into the deadlands where no armiger might kill them and no sheriff might cause their return to internment. The men had hid themselves in the keep and bailey for the last eight days, having fled there from the outer fort when the brigadier stole their property. One of the them was arrowed in the belly and he sat against the bricks of the hearth in the great hall. The goblin medicine looked in on him with his bowl of smear clutched between his claws.

"What've you done for him?" said Uhquah.

"We ain't got no doctors or nothing," said a slaver.

There was a raised voice and the slavers in the bailey and the cavaliers turned toward the door of the greathouse. The medicine emerged thence.

"Well?" said Uhquah.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The goblin was tucking the bowl back into his pack. "He said he didn't want no shiteater's healin."

"So?"

The goblin shrugged his little shoulders. "So now he don't need it no more."

The slavers clustered about the door and pushed inside and one hollered murder. The medicine shrugged again and returned to his place among the orckin. The longhorn laughed and excused himself to go explore the old mine of the place. Uhquah spat on the ground and glowered.

"Who you with?" called one of the slavers.

Uhquah ignored him.

One of the cavaliers, the woman Robby, said, "The baron," and grinned at her mates.

"Awright. How much you askin?”

“Hey?”

“For your stock. How much per head?”

“Which ones you eyein?”

The slaver turned and regarded the orckin. He licked his lips. “We’ll need one for the each of us and two for Matray there. That sow will do for me. She’s got a raw look about her as I like.”

Mym heard the sow gnash her jaws and say something in their speech that made her fellows laugh.

Robby was doing everything she could to keep her mouth flat. “How’ll you be payin?”

The slaver came over and took her stirrup. “We got silver, and minin rights open for licensin. We can settle any arrears out of the haul.”

“Enough of that,” called Uhquah.

The slaver turned. “How’s that?”

Uhquah spat from the back of his mule and said no more.

“Goddamn chode,” said the slaver.

Mym started to walk over to the man to knock him flat but at that moment Orc grabbed her arm and gently turned her away. He looked up at the towers of the keep. "Wretched bunch," was all she heard him say through the roar of blood in her ears.

She dragged her eyes from where the slaver was chafing by Robby who now hooted unabashedly. She breathed, she calmed. “Aye,” she said. “I met one lek them on me northerly way lookin fer ye."

"On the road to Keelboard."

"Aye."

“Living in a sodgrass hovel.”

“That’s him.”

"I met him too."

"I know ye did seein as I tracked ye there. I'm surprised ye didn't gut him."

Orc regarded her. "I'm surprised you didn't."

"Well," she said. "I might've done."

He nodded as if he already knew. "This won't end much different."

They watched the slavers and the slavers watched the ground. Presently the sunlight began creeping across the bailey toward the greathouse. Two of the men went in and dragged the dead man out into the open and over to the corner hosting the other plots. A third asked Uhquah if he had anything to eat. Anything to drink. The blue dwarf continued to ignore him. Mym saw this and began to wonder just why the company had come to that place.

She walked the grounds with Orc beside her. There was a stinking halfeaten ox in the corner opposite the makeshift cemetery. The sun lit its hacked upon haunch and swarms of flies teemed in and out of its open mouth and sunken eyes and nostrils, gathering and feasting and mating on the bared muscle and fat that was to be the slavers' next meal. A cow was tethered nearby and it faced the wall as far away as it could get on its leash. Its flanks heaved and its breath wheezed as they approached. It stood heavily on three legs and gingerly on a forehoof. The skin had split open at the ankle and the broken bone shown through yellowish white and jagged.

Orc nodded at it. "Poor girl."

"Aye."

"They ought to end her misery."

"Aye." Mym looked back at the great hall where the slavers were now clustered in the doorway. "I expect they're keepin her alive te keep her fresh."

Orc looked at her and looked back at the cow. "For eating." It wasn't a question.

"Aye."

Suddenly he stepped to the side of the animal and she watched him draw his slender blade and thrust upward through the furrow of the neck and in a single motion sever the carotid and the jugular and withdraw. The animal sank forward onto its knees and then collapsed completely in the dirt. Blood poured from the narrow wound and pooled red in the pale morning light.

Mym heard an uproar behind her and she turned to meet it. The five slavers rushed them, gibbering and screaming in their rags about property and justice and other ethics for which they had no reckoning, brandishing their weapons at Orc who stood motionless with the dripping blade in his hand. One raised a pistol and fired point blank and she saw the slug pit the wall behind Orc's head and carom away with the gunshot's report. By the time the man realized he had missed Orc was on him. She sprung after. Ten seconds later three were dead and one was drowning in his own blood from a hole in his throat and one had disappeared back into the great hall. She could feel the rage radiating off Orc. She wiped the blood off her hands.

Uhquah spat from the back of his mule. "Fall you in," he said. "We're headin on."

The cavaliers mounted and turned their horses toward the gatehouse portcullis which the ogre had propped open with a fallen timber. As they rode through the surviving slaver ran out to where his companions lay in their rigors and knelt by the last one to die. The head drooped backward as the man lifted the shoulders and a second smile yawned wide across the neck and drooled what blood had been left in the brain. The ridges of the cirque beyond the keep walls shone brightly in the ascendant sun and the wavering hum of the insectual orgy unfailing. As the orckin filed past the dead they spat upon them. Finally Tulula shoved over the last living slaver and mounted him and scalped him alive. Then she scalped the others.

All this Mym saw. She turned to Orc as they passed under the portcullis and back into the wide deadlands. “They deserved it.”

He frowned. “You keep saying that.”

“Cause it keeps bein true.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

He turned from the path and went into the gatehouse. She stopped to wait. The ogre stood nearby, his exhalations whistling through the stump of the decapitation. Orc emerged with the bookmaker half over his shoulder and her sack dangling from his fist. She looked ill. When the sow trotted past with the fresh trophies swinging from her harness the bookmaker wheeled around and bent over and was sick.

Orc patted the woman’s back and looked at Mym. She nodded after the company. "We better get goin fore they leave us behind," she said.

“On to the next camp of folks to kill,” he said.

Now Mym frowned. “Ye adverse te killin slaver men?”

“No.”

Booky wiped her mouth. “It’s that mercy of his gifted on im by that brigadier. I warned im bout it for years didn’t I? Told im it’d get im stuck by some villain someday.”

The woman looked sideways at the orc. “Course he never did listen to me. Now he’s all on about goddamn justice. Getting close enough ta smell his old lady and forgetting what I learned him.”

He looked back. “That I ought to kill slavers?”

“That’s right.”

“All of them?”

“Well,” she hesitated. “Leastways those of em who ain’t reformed.”

He shook his head at her. Mym saw the hint of a smile about his mouth.

The woman looked at Mym. “What he needs is ta spend some time with y’all up in y’alls mountain yonder. Learn something of vengeance and grudgery and all that squat dwarfy shit. Maybe y’all could fix im up with a heart of stone. Just slot it straight in for the gold one he’s carrying around.” She stood straight and coughed. “No cause for waiting, hey?”

She grabbed the sack from Orc.

“Let’s get on back thataway presently. Ain't take us but a month ta get there. Ain't no deaduns worth fearing with my old partners between us. Aw hell. Speaking of villains.”

Mym turned to where the woman was looking. There the longhorn stood in the cold sunlight of the abandoned fort: naked to the waist, sweat steaming off his hide, a hundredweight of stones in a stout leather bag over his enormous shoulder. He was watching Mym. She felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck.

“Wedwarf,” he said, “now you come and learn the speech of secrets.”