She expected the dead any day now as the company pushed deeper into the craggy highlands south and west of the old capital. There were no further signs of the living save the days-old traces and tracks of the brigadier's cohort. By brush and tumbleweed fires they lunched in silence and the pale flames sent wisps of smoke ascending to the sun that grew their fuel. Mym rested with her hands back and her legs straight out and her boots undone while the woman Booky sat on the bagged head of the ogre as if it was a wayside stone and fed brush to the fire they shared.

"Ya been campaigning before," said Booky.

Mym opened her eyes and wiped them with a calloused hand. "Aye sure."

"I knows it. Ya got a gift for it. More than me and I'd say more than old Orc there. And a gift for other things too I hear. I swear god surely don't dispense justice in equal shares."

Mym looked at her and then closed her eyes again.

"It's true," said the woman. "Look at these rascals here. Look at that risen otaur."

"I've seen him plenty."

"Y'all don't think much of him. Ya don't and I can tell Orc don't neither. Can't say he's my favorite cow but he's damn good at everything asked of him. Ya saw him with that carbine same as me."

"Anyone with digits te pull a trigger can fire a rifle."

"Not like that. And he talks to stones too."

"No he doesn't."

"He sure does, same as y'all."

Mym shook her head and didn't open her eyes.

"He does as I've heard him do it."

"Ye don't have the ears for hearin stonespeech."

"That may be but I sure as shit saw what I saw. Last time, time before last, we was back with that crazy dwarf up near Thumb why that beardclad fellow hummed right up at the otaur like we was all of us up at y'alls mountain havin a parley and the otaur just hummed right back at him. Uhquah just bout fell right over. He didn't know he could talk it and neither did the rest of us. I heard Uhquah ask him where he'd learned it and you know what that otaur said?"

Mym had an eye open now. "Well?"

"Said he learned it offa stone."

Booky shook her head and leaned back from the fire. She wiped her brow. "That how y'all learn it too? Offa stones?"

Mym looked at the fire and didn't answer.

"I thought not. As I was saying god don't dispense justice any better than any man I've met and ain't that a wonder since he's a man like any other no matter what the otaur says. Ya could put it to im plain and he'd not falter of it."

"Falter of what?"

"Admitting what's supposed to have been fair is crooked as a shepherd's cane. Sometimes a woman wonders if she shouldn't appeal the devil to set fire to it all."

Booky looked over to where Orc had gone. "Lord knows I tried already."

Mym now opened both eyes and turned her head. She saw not Orc but the longhorn sitting nearby.

"Ya didn't call him a shooter til he showed it,” said Booky. “Would ya know he's the best goddamn singer I've ever heard. The stars'll come falling out of the sky for attending his piping. I've never heard a voice such as his. He can lead a fair step too. Call a dance, track an eel under ice, dowse a well in a desert, coo a lady to a certain heat enough to catch fire in a blizzard. Hell he's been all over this continent. The night the brigadier found him they sat up til the coals burned black talking politics and warfare and the metaphysicality of womanhood. I ain't heard anything like it."

Booky reached back and tossed another tumbleweed into the snapping and popping firering. "I ain't one for lordyness but there's something afoot about these parts that ain't familiar to any subject of the king except as a certain kind of providence whose realm is that of raising dead and black horsemen and a day of judgment."

Mym thought about a certain block some thousands of miles away, sweltering in a tropical sun. About her head upon it. About the secrets that marred its very stone. "The only gods that ever were are dead," she said.

"Gods of dwarves maybe. They ain't the same as him the priests kneel to. Him and his are alive even in death, and they're speaking to ya just as they're speaking to all of us, day and night."

Mym closed her eyes again. "No gods speak te me lass.”

“Oh and what do ya hear right now?”

“Just a sad woman who made a life from slavin."

Booky smiled. "Ya’ll know he’s speaking to ya the moment he stops doing and when he does ya’ll know he's never stopped speaking to ya all y'alls life."

"And what do ye expect yer god of men says te the likes of Uhquah and the otaur?"

"The otaur," said Booky.

Mym heard the woman pile another tumbleweed on. She opened her eyes for no sleep was to be had with the bookmaker in attendance. "We met him once before. Down in that rathole boomtown on the right side of the Gap."

Booky nodded. "Just about every man woman and orckin among us says they seen him someplace or other before joining the company. I met him myself as he went about saving us all. Ya know that? Just after me and ogres signed on with the brigadier. Well let’s see that was about a month after y'all burned the poor old armiger alive."

"He wasn't alive."

"Oh so he was dead then? Yeah I thought not. So I was saying me and ogres were hooked up with the brigadier and we was going camp to camp in the goldlands busting out them orckin what didn't break out when Glad Nizam gone off. We'd just set alight a warden's office with the man and his staff all inside and they'd just stopped howling when out of the dark walks that otaur. Just shambles up like a bull coming home to the barn after a fine day among the heifers. Uhquah thought him one of the queen's slaves. Might have put a hole in his head if he'd had any powder left for shooting."

"Ye didn't have any powder?"

"Nah they'd fired it all up at the kingsmen the baron sent out after us. Spent a week barricaded in a storehouse down at Seaway's End. We was fifty eight when they smoked us out and we was twelve fit to walk and fight when the otaur found us. Ya know Seaway’s End?"

Mym shrugged.

"Down and up again we was looking for the magistrate of said place. The brigadier had it on authority that she's a witch of some kind or other and that's just the type of folks she's always looking for recruiting to the cause."

Mym turned her eyes to the fire and said nothing.

"So there we was on the run, fatally pursued, a wholesale regiment come after us. The brigadier pressing us on, stopping and freeing what orckin we could. Looting whatever powder there was to be had and shooting it up straightaway at the next camp we freed. The cavaliers kept going on about which hilltop or canyon or homestead we'd wind up in for our last stand. They were slathering for it. Then out of the dark walks the otaur. Fire gleaming in his eyes like the devil hisself."

Mym pulled her knees up with the palms of her hands. She watched the bookmaker.

"We'd been running all day and well into that night. Uhquah kept hurrying us from rock to rock and dropping from his mule to have themselves a conversation. He led us upon the camp and we was hoping for a quick action and that's what we got but there weren't no powder there to be had. He and the brigadier and them cavaliers was empty horned and ogres was bellowing on about dinner. They wanted to stand and wait for the regiment. Make a meal outta em I'm guessing. At any rate that sacking looked to be our last. We was all watching the night, back the way we'd come. Watching for torches, scouts, whatever. Listening to the camp's powder go a pop pop popping in that conflagration and cursing that man that'd set it.

"Then about the witching hour the otaur come out of the midnight by his lonesome. And at his coming set the blue moon. Parson Kelly said it’s cause he'd not appear in any light but firelight but I think it was the darkness that birthed him. He came with naught weapons but his spread of horn just as you see em now. Dipped in gold and etched with them words there: remember you must die. Who they're for hisself or them he skewers I can't say. There he walked. Ain’t a shirt or jacket against the cold. Everyone but the brigadier shirking back and him just grinning at us like some death's head, like he knew every one of us. Knew where we'd come from and where we were going and knew the exact moment of doom for each of our bleeding hearts. He'd a gunny sack tied off with who knows what inside it. Said he'd come out of the north but you certainly couldn't tell it. No food nor water in hand. Said that he'd come to free his pa.

"She watched him standing there the brigadier. Hell only knows what she made of the bullman. I ain’t know even to this day and I've spent weeks and months since then studying both of them together. They share something. Some terrible purpose. One of them awful pacts made in wet blood exchanged hand to hand. Beware it I say. Y'all will see soon as we catch up with her. The otaur bent her ear and before long he was calling for the wagons to be brought round. The wounded occupying em were flopped onto the ground and the otaur set to loading them wagons with all the shit he could find. Manure and horse piss and filth from the camp latrine. All manner of dungwater. A cesspool on wheels. The brigadier had words with them invalids to be left behind and Uhquah had the rest of us hauling shit barehanded wither the otaur willed. Off we went with the otaur looking about greatly satisfied as if the pa he'd set out to save was there amid the nightsoil. As if it was a fine night for a march, and marched we did.

"A mile outside the camp he done set us upon a new northerly course. When the sun came up it cast on those lonesome mountains standing some forty miles distant and we were made to reach them before the day was out. Ya ever walked forty goddamn miles in a day? Those of us unhorsed were made to follow the beasts with our canteens and pails and catch everything felled out of their assends. All that piss and shit was tossed onto the foul mixture of the wagons and if god had struck that regiment blind then and there they'd have had no trouble finding us just following their noses. At the head of the wagons pulled the otaur and I tell ya there weren't an ounce of sweat off of him, no worry whatsoever despite the eight hundred sumbitches riding down on us.

"Did noone ask the otaur what was in them mountains? Of that I can't say. I sure as hell didn't. He scared me then as he scares me now."

Booky seemed to shudder and she edged closer to the fire. "We came upon the hills barren as they were of fuel or food and up a drainage we went til the brigadier called the halt. The soles of my feet still praise her name. Next sunrise we were short three men who'd deserted in the night. We looked up and down for them but never found them. Down on the Goldlands spread below us we could see the regiment. Away south in a grand column five miles or less. Throwing up a dust storm that just sort of hung there and they ain't looking like they was in any kind of hurry for there weren't anyplace left for us to go.

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"The otaur hadn't ever slept that night and when I woke up there he was holding a tremendous cedar branch. Who the hell knows where he found it in that desolate place of rock and sun. He had it and he was standing up on the toe board of the wagon and the little two inch braces were quivering under him. He had it and he was stirring that lake of shit like he was cooking a harvest stew. Stirring it over and over on itself. Not even the horses came near to it. I tell ya wedwarf, whatever god's saying to him there ain't nothing holy about it.

"Now I told ya I saw what I saw and here's where I saw it. We got on at first light up a rough black land. A broken land. We was going up the south slope and there was all manner of lava rocks setting out along the ground. Basalts and andesites and obsidian all glassed up, stuff blown off the mountaintop in some past age. The otaur would hold up and squat with each of them awhile. Swear to god. Just setting there with the stones in his hands grunting at them like some sort of enormous buffoon. And all the while the regiment coming on in plain sight. Eight hundred of them. My eyes about fell out of my head every time the old beef stopped but the brigadier never said nothing about it.

"By and by we couldn't see the regiment as it had gone under the slope we climbed. They was down there somewheres and they was coming up of that there was no doubt. We rode and walked all day, ever upward. We came within a day's climb of the summits of that place but we ran outta sun. Nightfall come and the otaur and the brigadier and Uhquah gathered up. There was only ten of us then on account of the three gone missing. I woulda gone too but ogres wouldn't have it."

Booky affectively patted the enwrapped head upon which she sat. "We left him there. The otaur. Left him and his stinking sloshing tub in a little drainage off the snowcap. He told us to ride a lap of the mountain and to return after a day. We turned on to traverse the slope and last I looked he was pulling his wagon up the drainage. As certain as I've got ten fingers and toes I knew I'd never see him again."

Booky looked at Mym. "Leastways not before I find myself in hell. I reckoned the brigadier would quit of him. She led us on acting always like there weren't no trouble. Uhquah out front grubbing and sniffing the way across the busted flint. There weren't much to it as we were running without regard to anything but not getting caught. Next morning we found the deserters hanging off their crosses. Three of em up on a little ridge of the mountain. They'd been gutted and it was the sinews of their knotted off intestines that were strapping their wrists to the crossbars and I can tell ya that was a smell worse than the otaur's soup. Stacked at their feet were their empty powderhorns. The kingsmen knew we was out of it.

"The cavaliers dismounted and led their animals over the ground. It took every trick I knew to keep ogres from clobbering and eating the beasts. After a day we came back to the drainage and in that time the otaur had diverted the trickle to filter and leach the filth and he fashioned a kiln in the interior of a lavatube and he broke down the wagon and fired its wheels and cart and the rest of it to boil off the shit and reduce it like he was making some kind of turdy bouillon. He doused the fire and set it alight again off and on til there weren't nothing left of the wagon but charcoal. When we came on him he was lying in the brown creekwater like it was a baptismal of the very elements of his creation. Fire and ice. The regiment was nigh upon us and there he lay. He got up and shook hisself off when he saw us coming and he picked up two sacks lying by and in one was powdered charcoals black as ink and in the other was crystalline potash white as snow. He tossed em up to Uhquah and pulled on his trousers and I was relieved for it as he's a tonne of rotten hamburger if he's a pound of flesh.

"We continued up the mountain now short of the wagon. No pickets out, nothing. Just up. Dead tired and falled asleep walking. Come dusk the sky'd gone bloodred west and the otaur took up his position at the head of we ragged survivors. Every step his tail swishing and his hands pushing off his knees and as the sun touched the plain below he turned to us and began some sort of oratory and whatever he was saying I ain't understanding as I hungered for sleep and for food of any kind. The things he said I can't repeat save that in its bottom the world treasured everything good and that we may partake of them treasures only by passing into hell. Then he turned on with those sacks sagging off his shoulders and he led us up that slope of porous slag and splintered glass, and we followed his wake like the mourners of a martyr marching to a communal suicide."

The bookmaker ceased her story. Mym peered over at her and caught her looking across the fire at where the otaur sat facing away from the flames as she had seen him do before. The bookmaker turned back to Mym.

"That cindercone went up for miles. My boots were shredded. Ogres feet were cut up and bleeding. Scrambling up that violated terrain ya could tell what happens so close to the sun. Stones all melted together and hardened that way, two in one like old ogres used to be. The devil hisself might've walked ahead of us over that fiery vomit, might've been disgorged with the molten rock to set about his mischief in our world. Hell for all we knew we might've been following him back to the place of his origin right then and there. A sacrifice of flesh to some eldritch god what made our god. Men and women cast into the gullet of the world like they done in the olden days before folk learned something of civilized ways.

"The otaur never looked elsewhere than ahead. The lip of the caldera like his lover's embrasure. Why we ascended there none of us knew. May to make a last stand. May to leap into the fire than be taken by kingsmen as traitors and crucified by our own bellies. Up we went. The regiment now plain below us. What breath we found was hard fought to have. I ain't breathed so hard fighting that doomstone automaton as I did bearing down to take a shit upon the heights of that mountain. We topped out around sunrise. We were finished. The regiment not a mile downslope.

"As we fell about the place in exhaustion the otaur stood tall. Like he'd climbed up just for the sightseeing. Then he knelt and began kicking the rock about with those cloven feet of his. Smashing it to pieces and ya should've seen the horrors expressed by Uhquah, bless his sentimental heart. But it was brimstone ya see. Sulfur. Bright yella and stinking. We knelt beside him and set to scaling it off and the otaur crushing it to a powder. When we'd harvested enough to his liking he found a crevice of the place and poured in that slit the sacks of charcoal and potash and with one arm he mixed these together and called for the brimstone. I myself brought it to him in handfuls and poured it in.

"What was next for us to do? There weren't no water about for binding and I feared the otaur might gore one of the horses for the blood of her, but that he didn't do. He stood over the mixture and whipped out his little chuck and set to pissing directly into the crevice. And when he'd done he waved over to the next man and called at him to piss in. Piss in he said, piss in like y'all are god hisself carving out the canyons of the world. That we did, even ogres whose piss went splashing all over. And while we did there the otaur was, kneeling over the mixture, molding it, pressing it, squeezing it together like flour for baking, piss and powder all up his arms. Everything therin turned all black and fetid and he had a madness in his eyes and the next thing I say is true though I wouldn't blame ya for doubting it. He took up the clumps of the mass in his bare hands and spread it thin across the rim of the crater, trowling it on with his fingers like he was setting to bricklay a wall upon it or a dome of sorts to cap the very volcano whose brimstone we took. After all it was spread on thin he did this thing.

"Now I said before ya didn't have to believe me and I know ya won't for ya said the otaur ain't got the ears for stonetalking but it’s what happened I swear to god and his merry martyrs. There he was watching the maw of the cone with one eye and with the other eye closed and he laid his palms on the tortured mountainside and sucked in a breath for the ages. What he done with that breath I can't exactly say as I couldn't hear, maybe ya'll find fault with my accounting, but I felt the staunch stone upon which we stood start to tremble. Trembled like a little girl before her mama's wrath. Came up through the holes in my boots like I was standing on a whole hive of bees droning mad and fixing to kill. The otaur went red in his bloodless face. The ground got warm like the summer sun had beat a full day upon it. Ya could fry an egg and what patches of snow there were melted thin to nothing. I fetched the empty sacks and socked em over ogres' feet to keep their toes from blistering up such was the heat of the earth. The piss started steaming off the mixture. Meanwhile ya could see down in the throat of the mountain what had been dark was fixing to glow. It weren't much but there it was. As if the earth herself gestated a second sun for birthing forthwith.

"Now the regiment hadn't never stopped coming. They was hungry for vengeance and if that ain't a lesson to all y'all dwarves then I don't know what is. Those soldiers of the king were ascending over every bare escarpment, rising and falling over the clattering screefields and clambering over the talus that the otaur's ministrations had set to teetering. They were but minutes away from gun range and we had not a solitary piece of cover on that bald summit.

"Right then the otaur took a whiff off of the muck he'd made and stuck a finger in it like he was taking its temperature. Then he unswung his gunny sack and laid out its effects of which I'll tell ya another time for they're the strangest things I've seen any man or monster carry. He took the empty sack and began to gather that dark crumbling paste of his in it. I pulled my knife to help trowel it up and he put up his hand and shook his head as he was afraid of any spark that might strike off the flint on which it all lay. The heat off the funnel was mighty and the wind of it had started to raise his mane off his back and neck like he was hanging upside down. With all the freshmade powder away in his sack he nodded at the brigadier who had been sitting by all the time writing in her little book. She strode on up and dipped her horn and quick as a butterfly flapping her wings she licked and folded up two new cartridges and one then two into her doublebarrel they went with the lead balls to match.

"He tells her to go on and she lowered herself to sit on the ground and make a study of the wind and the slope as if she ain’t never shot nothing in her life."

"It's a difficult thing firin down a steep," said Mym.

"Yeah well I'll defer to y'alls expertise. So she's sitting there and we're all waiting unsure whether the otaur's apothecating will amount to anything. She cocks both the hammers of her piece and she pointed and fired em both together. I ain't never heard a roar like it in my life. Gives me chills just recollecting it. The powdersmoke wept off and as we watched one of them soldiers among soldiers slumped over and never stood again. His fellows took notice and fell down beside him. The brigadier just looked over at the otaur and he just smiled back at her. He was busy grinding out the powder in the bag and one by one he called us over to fill our horns and one by one we did as he behested. When I came up to him ya know what he said to me? Borrowed time, he said. Against what, I said. He grinned his chappy black lips at me and wouldn't say no more. It didn't take long to learn what he meant.

"That regiment was but crawling now. They was only five hundred yards downslope and even with full horns we afforded neither the shot nor the powder to fell the seven hundred and ninety nine yet breathing. At any second they'd reckon it and come all at once and we'd be jumping into that hellish chimney. But right then they had a pause, and that gave us time to load up and draw arms and commence to kill them fuckers. Ya know some of them was who came to my pit that night? They was who split us up? Well we laid into em there. Butchered em. At the first volley I myself saw ten of em drop like women’s favors thrown down on old Orc there. They was at two hundred yards when my balls ran out and I swear on my god and your stones about that they were but half the number that set out that day from their fort. But now they was firing back, and even one at a time four hundred guns blazing makes for a heady stream of gunshot."

She laid a hand on her makeshift stool. "Ogres was hit in the arm what with his size and I was on my hands and knees casting about for a place we could hole up when the otaur touches my arm and nods to the far side of the rim. Now to pay what's owed, he says. Some of the others were already scampering around and we ran after. The otaur followed us. And the brigadier. She covered the withdrawal, popping away with her double shot. You never seen a woman's hands move so fast. Like all she done all day every day was charge and fire and recharge and fire. At that rate she shot herself dry and soon came after. The regiment saw her get and they bellied up a shout and their bugler sounded a charge and they stood and ran crabwise right on up the smoothest draw of the place.

"I hadn't noticed, none of us had, the prodigious belching of smoke billowing out of the spout. The rocks on which we hunkered had begun to tumble down and clap one another in a kind of congratulation for what was coming. What had come. Higher than the sun itself a geyser of red hot slag rose and fell darkly about us and every bare ass stone upon which it landed burst into flame as if it were one of these tumbleweeds. What pieces of the regiment we could see were then scattering. It was as if, as if a dragon stretched out of the belly of the world and laid ruin about the land. Then that side of the cone we’d climbed up just burst right asunder. We weren't in a place to see it directly, but we saw it after. The whole goddamn slope of the mountain done caved on itself and then blew outward with such violence as hasn't been seen since the world was made and heaven and hell erupted the sky warring over its dominion. About a million rocks spewed off and you could see the uniformed kingsmen among them. Rotating and revolving like they was dancing underwater and they flew on and on until you just couldn't see them anymore. Like they never hit the ground. Like they's still flying out there somewheres."

The bookmaker paused a moment and Mym wondered what else she knew that she hadn’t said. Finally she turned and looked at Mym. "And that's how the otaur fell in with us."

"Sounds te me more like you fell in with him."

"We fell in with him?"

"Aye."

Booky's eyes flashed across the fire. "Quiet there wedwarf. If he's got ears to hear the silent stones then he's bound to hear y'all jabbering away there."

Mym looked at where the longhorn sat. She cast her eyes about the camp and at its very edge she saw Orc coming in. She raised her hand to him but either he didn't see or he didn't care for he went to where the sow called Tulula knelt among her kin. He sat down on the ground beside her.

Mym laced her boots and rose from the fire shouldering her kit. She crossed the camp to Orc.

"We need te talk."

He looked up at her. "Alright."

She kept her eyes on him though she felt the gaze of the orckin upon her. "Not here."

"Alright."

He started to get up and walk with her.

"Bring yer shit."

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> +1 [Stonespeaking] It’s only after old ways o thinkin stop makin sense that new ways are allowed te emerge.