He picked up his satchel and blade. Dusting his legs with his hands he followed the dwarf past the sentry and they edged into the open country. The sentry shouted lewd suggestions to their backs but they kept on. After a hundred yards they stopped at an outcrop of rock and he watched the dwarf lay her palms on the stone. Her mouth moved but he was deaf to whatever may have passed between them.

She straightened up from the rock and cupped her hands together and blew hot breath into them and then jammed them into her pockets. She nodded back at the camp. "Ye still lookin te be free of this lot?"

"It’s that or some folks are going to get killed and I can’t guarantee it won’t be us."

"Aye then. Let's get."

"Now?"

"Now."

He looked at her. "Something's changed."

She regarded the stone. "Yer pitmistress was just tellin stories and I heard one I wish I hadn't."

He turned back to the camp and saw Booky hunched over a fire with her head in her hands. Ogre sat apart as they were made to do. "We shouldn't leave her."

"Ye go back te her as ye stand and they'll know we're quittin. Uhquah and that otaur. They'll know."

“So?”

“No need for the bravado lad. Ye don’t want them chasin after us any more than I. That woman and the monster chose te follow this circus long before ye or me came te be pressed inte it.”

She unslung her carbine and checked its charges. “Ye ready?”

He looked once more at Booky, at Ogre. “You got your stone scent or whatever?”

She shrugged. “As much as I can.”

“Alright. Let’s go.”

They cut out into the upland mountains. Into a country of dark pines and the howl of the boreal wind shredding itself across their tops. He felt the fallen needles snap under his feet, the sap stick to his fingers where he brushed the trunks. There were scabs of dirty old snow in the sumps between the trees. Needles and now birch leaves like fallen shingles lying on the crust. She led him through a grove of the bone white trees and he saw how their reaching branches never intersected nor touched. The perfection of their leafless canopy wasn't lost on him. He felt something of kinship there. Something he'd not felt since he was last in the ruin of the elven forest. He closed his eyes to try to reach for it and in that moment of darkness he heard the longhorn's voice boom up the hillside.

"Not far now lads," he was calling. "There they are between the trees. See them there? Hot on the trail as I said they'd be."

Orc was sweating now despite the wind and the cold. Steam whipped away off of his back. The dwarf stepped lightly uphill and he couldn’t have gone any faster yet the longhorn's urging seemed to grow ever closer.

"Stay with them now. They're on the scent of something. Stay with them."

He saw her turn to check on him. He put his hand flat on her back and urged her forward. "Don't stop.”

They climbed a dry gulch and they passed trunks whose barks were rimed with great columns of ice as if the gale had driven a million shards of glass into their heartwood. They crossed through a col as the sun set. Swifts came up and over from the far side and plunged past their heads with their wings tucked in, shooting between the trunks and over a cliffside to the pan far below like flights of arrows volleyed off the roof of the world. Down the col’s far side they ran and into what seemed to them to be a forest of coal black trees naked of leaves or needles or any sign of life. They could hear the horses sucking air behind them, the longhorn haranguing all after them, all after as if they were bloodhounds and he their huntmaster and Orc and Mym on the trace of the last wild wolf in the world of men. The murk under the limbless posts closed about them as the first of the cavaliers caught them and his horse was slaloming around a trunk when a whisper of feathers and a slash of talons descended from overhead as a winged woman beat down upon the cavalier with her raptor’s eyes sharp on her prey.

The cavalier's horse reared and the cavalier flattened himself along its neck and reached for the carbine scabbarded at his knee. The greenskin medicine was loping behind him and the frightened horse bowled him over and he was trying to find his balance, lank arms out as if walking a rail, and the harpy's fangs opened toward him, wide beyond belief, screeching rough through its gizzard and her incisors ruddily stained from blood. The cavalier fired. The shot winged the harpy and the harpy cried again and grasped the medicine with her clawed feet and lifted him from the ground. The cavalier fired again into the thick plumage of her shoulder as she punched her wings downward and the medicine hanging from the talons bore his teeth with one hand hard about her ankles as if it was he hanging onto her. In the forest behind them came a clamor of men and women and the rebellious cries of horses. The cavalier levered his weapon once more as the harpy launched upward with the medicine writhing in her grasp like a defiant serpent coiling around an eagle's embrace and together harpy and greenskin passed over the cavalier in a rush of suncolored feathers splattering blood from their tips and rank death in the wind of her passing. The gunshot pierced up through the open canopy of that place and the report of it rang down around Orc's head. More rifles roared as did the orckin who had come up just in time to see their fellow disappear into the night sky like some kind of tribute to the night clutched by terror herself.

The longhorn was the first to speak. "As I said they were onto something.”

The cavaliers were still calming their horses yet Orc saw the orckin passing weapons and food among themselves, the tusker scout shouldering the straps of two waterskins and tossing away a powderhorn and counting a clutch of javelins, taking three, leaving three, and here came Tulula to where he and Mym stood catching their breath.

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“You’re going after him,” said Orc.

Tulula nodded. “He’s been with us since Geltwald."

He looked over at Uhquah. "They'll let you go?"

"Let? What be let? We go where we will and you be coming with us."

She looked past him and nodded at Mym. "Bring your beardling. It's said they can track a wren over bare rock." She looked at the blank sky above, too dark for color yet too light for stars, thick with the tops of the forest lost therein. "We be needing that now. Come."

"What of Uhquah and the longhorn?"

"What of them? They be nothing to us against our own kind."

"Will they come also?"

The tusker passed her a water skin and she took a pull off of it. As she drank he nodded somberly at Orc. No words between them.

She passed back the skin and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. "No they be going on to the brigadier. They don't trouble themselves for matters of honor and we don't trouble them for it. Come now. Bring your beardling."

"Where is the brigadier?"

"She be not far now, but she be not the matter before us. We have business with that harpy. Come."

Mym stood idly watching this conversation and when Orc turned to her she listened carefully to what he relayed. "It's a matter of honor then?" she said.

"For the orcs it is."

She sniffed. He watched her. She looked up at where the cavaliers now reformed, the clank and rustle of their harness and arms came down through the rows of trunks out of the dark. She looked up at Uhquah, silently sat upon his mule with his own carbine across his lap.

"And the rest of em aren't comin with?"

"They don't seem to be."

"Well. Here's te honor."

"Can you track the harpy?"

"I think what ye should be askin is whether I can track square angles away from wherever that otaur's headin, and I do believe I can."

"Alright."

Uphill a torch flared. By its meager light Orc could see the orckin now gathering around him, the whites of their eyes glinting. He turned to the light. The pith of the flame was white and its pulsing limb seemed to hover down the slope as if carried by the night itself. He watched it come and Mym turned to follow its descent also. The gilded ells of the longhorn's crown now shimmered on its either side as if they bent toward its warmth.

“Here he comes,” whispered Mym.

"Go on.”

Mym looked at him.

"Lead them away. I'll come right after."

"We should go together.”

"Go."

“I’ll strike a point east of the still star,” she murmured. “Don’t take too long.”

He felt her hand on his arm and he heard her say something to Tulula. They were gone by the time the longhorn stood before him.

The longhorn smiled at him, his tremendous flat teeth pearlescent in the torchlight. "I knew you wouldn't lead us astray," he said.

"Tell it to the greenskin."

"Ain’t that perfectly timed? A matter of honor they said, thereby spoken to a wedwarf."

The longhorn tilted his head as if he was half deaf and sought to better hear his own words. "Did you know what effect that would have upon her? No. What knows the slave of honor? The scion of the arena, the son of the brigadier, for whom death is a trade plied in exchange for cold gruel. Are you hungry now, Orc? Come now and share my supper."

"I'm going with them."

"Are you? They go only away from us. Away from me."

"That may be."

"And so away from the brigadier."

Orc began to turn.

"The mother you never had."

He stopped. His rage now a hot knot in his belly like the burning torch. A blinding ball amid the bitter black of his soul.

The torch was lowered toward his chest as if like recognized like. "All your life you've borne upon your back the icon of that woman, perfect and perfectly beyond your reach."

The longhorn nodded at the satchel now resting on Orc's chest. "You carry it now in that scarfwrapped book. Her honor unattainable, beyond reproach, and so buried in your heart, excluding what she owes you. For it was by her very absence that she denied you, her adopted cub, your inheritance. More than her crumbling estate or her parched orchard. More than lessons in manhood or orchood that were never had. You who slew at her behest were banished to the solitary act of murder and were fooled into believing it honorable trial by combat. This she did so you could not see her follies, her shortcomings, the meanness of her actions that might diminish her by your witnessing, the errors of her own devising in which she now struggles. A fly in the web she spun. The world she left for you is false and now you hold yourself up against a greatness of her that never was. It paralyzes you. It makes you a slave to her false idol. Holding it up wherever you go you shan’t find your own way."

The longhorn now raised the torch and by its light Orc saw the trees were not trees but were a colonnade, the forest was not of wood but of black marble. Upon that hillside they stood in a ruin of the civilization that was before the deadlands earned their name.

The longhorn nodded after the vanished orckin. "What's true of you is true of them," he said. "It's true of all who grow old and die in this world. A world that belongs not to us but to they who came before. Look about you now. At the great height of these pillars. Their artifice yet standing as if in judgment of those who come after, who wonder at their making and see only an impossibility of remaking, who see only their present shortcomings."

Others of the company now padded around them. Cavaliers and one or two of the orckin who had stayed behind with the effects of the hunting party. The blue dwarf. The longhorn turned to the last of these. "Ask this descendant of the greatest of peoples. Where are his fathers? Now phantoms and stones fragmented across the land. Only their glories left behind and they untouchable. Unreproachable. They left you, dwarf, to wander their leavings without ever understanding how they came to be. As if it is beyond your comprehension. As if in the advancement of the world you have become less than what you once were. A seacliff diminished by the surf. Ain’t that a thing? The orc, his folk built with mud and fronds but yours raised the mountains and so sought to alter the teleios of the universe. Even you seek some reparation of them, some restoration, ever ignorant of how their ambition brought about their downfall and imminent extinction."

The cavaliers now found stones, actually crumbled and fallen segments of the entablature, a weathered frieze here, a blunted cornice there, and sat upon them as if attending a sermon. The longhorn turned back to Orc.

"The mother’s revelation yet echoes in your skull. All is change in this world. Soil shoots to flowers and falls into soil. Again and again. Your affairs of honor and justice ain’t any different. If justice ain’t met through violence then by what other means? You must set to your work as you were made to do, as you were said to be born to do, and allow the woman you chase define you. For you there ain’t no other way. Thus you remain a slave."

Now the longhorn spread his hands wide, one holding the torch outstretched and the other with palm raised as if feeling for sign of rain. "For the living are all enslaved. For the living there is no other way. Rise to the pinnacle of your achievements and fall into dust. Only your achievements shall persist and they to remind your sons and daughters of their inadequacies, the shortness of being, the meanness of it."

The longhorn lowered his hands. Those gathered about him said nothing a while. Orc stood among them and thought only of the brigadier.

Like the colonnade, his ethic began to crack. The rage in which it had been cast now sweltered.