By moonslight Mym led the orckin through the leavings of the ancient outpost. When they learned of her lie they would kill her and scalp her yet this didn’t concern her. Often she halted and feigned to consult the stones and listened to the orckin grunt among themselves. She felt the sow Tulula watching her in earnest. Their blind trust in her misdirection weighed heavily upon her. She had little skill in deception and no stomach for it. She found it intolerable. Despite the risk and despite what she had told Orc, she resolved to find the goblin. It was a matter of honor.

That's when Orc skulked upon them.

"What took ye so long?" she said.

He didn’t answer.

She meant to tell him of her change of heart but the orckin had grown restive and crowded behind them. She moved them on.

For three days they tracked the beast and its hostage. The first morning she followed splatters of blood miles apart and these brought her to where the harpy had descended to rest and to lick its wounds and in that place it may have also made its kill for there were feathers scattered about downwind. The next day they came to a rockstrewn steppe and here the trace was more visible to her, for a harpy is a large beast and from the longhorn she'd learned that the cast of a shadow can mar bare stone for days. She followed all day and at day's end the trace ended at the edge of a thousand foot cliff. She ranged back and forth along the rimrock and found no sign and no way down. They all of them slept in the lee of the escarpment and when the sun rose they looked out across the bare and frozen land spread along its bottom. Tule fog rose from thawing fens. The harpy and the goblin were nowhere to be seen. It was as if the wild country had devoured them whole beyond any amnesty or abatement. The orckin made a small sacrifice as was their custom and then turned back and cut away through the wilderness. She and Orc watched them recede down the steppe until nothing moved but the dead grass fluttering in the wind.

After they were gone Orc turned to her. "She flew him down the cliff then?"

"Aye I'd say she did."

He regarded her as if in disbelief. "Then you didn't lead them astray."

"That I didn't. Didn't seem right te me. I know I was eggin ye on about gettin as far from that company as we could but I just didn't set well with who I am and who I aim te be."

"At least you have that straight."

"What's that supposed te mean?"

"Nothing."

She looked at him. He was awful close to the edge. "Grow yerself a pair of wings and fly us down and we'll keep on after em."

"Probably better off going that way than back the way we came."

"Aye that longhorn's waitin."

"Yeah."

She looked after where the orckin had gone.

"They're quite a folk," she said.

He took off his hat and punched out the crown and tugged it back onto his head. "Yeah."

"Seem different te me than yer friends. That Ogaz and Saand and the greenskin ye knew from the bookmaker's."

"Yeah."

"Yer lookin forward te getting back to em."

He shrugged. Said nothing.

"What about these orckin. Are ye goin te miss them?"

Still he didn't say anything. He stood looking out at the tundra spanning beyond the cliff. When he spoke it wasn't in reply yet she found his answer therein. "They're folk of another time. Glad Nizam said the camps stole orcish ways of thinking and of acting and of being, but that cohort there, them coming out of Geltwald, it doesn't seem to me they've lost anything. They learned warring from their sires who learnt it by doing. They talk about Here First where their great grandsires sided with humans against rivals they've forgotten, and about their journey to this continent where their grandsires resisted a different sort of violence practiced by church fathers and school headmasters, and about the bloodletting begun a generation ago by the queen and continuing to this day."

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Mym nodded. "Dara once said what makes orcs orcs is their way of lookin at the world and their courage and the bitter endins in their hearts."

He half turned his head toward her. "What could she know of our hearts?"

"I think it's just a sayin."

He faced her now with his hand on his breast. "No child of man can know what's in here. We don't even know what's in here. It's been taken from us by men."

She watched him and knew better than to say anything.

"Monsters are here. Beasts and villains. Spite. Those aren't ends. They're beginnings."

He took the hand from his chest and with it he drew Booky's blade. She could see her reflection within it. "The only folk who's ever spoken sense to me is the woman who harnessed the monster. You know what she said?"

Mym shook her head, her eyes never leaving his.

Suddenly the blade sliced downward to strike a flint and a shower of sparks were thrown over the cliff. He followed them with his eyes as they fell and receded to nothing. "If the world doesn't give what's deserved then it deserves to burn," he said.

She frowned at that. "It sounds te me like we need te get ye back te yer folk back in the Madlands. Don't forget why ye came up this way, aye? Te heal the world. Te heal yerself."

"Do you know how to clear last season's crop ahead of sowing the next?"

She scratched her chin. "Can't say I do."

He looked back at her. "You burn it."

He turned from her and walked after where the orckin had gone. She followed, wondering what the longhorn had told him.

***

The pair of them retreated down through the razor ridges and enfilades of the steppe, over a furrowed ground where the stones lay flat and wide like plates of armor and solitary trees stood defiantly in the seams between them. They walked by sunlight and by starlight through high grass and in the morning they again found themselves at the edge of the escarpment now miles east and south of the harpy's course. Below them in the growing light thawed the tundra of the old capital yawing away north and east, the horizon seeming to slough off from the plain above fleeces of vapor from the permafrost thawing there a hundred years.

They turned and walked down through the solitary valley descending to the plain where the frigid wind would freeze your fingers black and where other than wind nothing was. They walked along a narrow road broken from freezing and thawing and they walked with their hands in their armpits and their faces hid from the gale and the glacial flurries it impelled, the spare shadows of them rising and falling over the jagged edges in a dynamism ill defined by their makers, as if no law of creation, of concordance of light and dark, did hold them. As if they were as autonomous as the doomstone sentinel and might at any moment leap from the earth and suffocate the lonesome figures who cast them.

Toward the bottom of this gorge the road was joined by a cascade, flash frozen in otherworldly forms like the bones of corals found about the maw of the mad, a winter skeleton of its course in white and silver. Along the roadside lay old rags and broken wagons and sculpted from the stone above them the enormous frieze telling of some emperor's reign: figures of varied folk unified before a man with the sun blazing behind his head, a long archway with depictions of fish leaping from aqueduct it bore, men and women bent over in rows and standing amid cornstalks, finally horsemen and charioteers with spears and swords charging and slashing and skewering a horned and hoofed folk Mym had never seen before. The stonework itself was too high for her to judge its quality and in places it had been shorn by weather and everywhere it had been defaced by vandals who etched their names in the smoothworn spaces and decapitated or delimbed or made crude additions in the mouths and between the legs of their hapless forebears.

They left behind the gorge and the escarpment it bisected and they entered the lowland plain upon which the old capital was said to be sited. In the days to follow they began to see fire rings on the ground where others had passed before. Refugees who'd fled south decades ago, pilgrims and fortune seekers and scavengers now on the northern track. They came upon standing stones of the same black marble, some rising fifty feet into the cold blue sky and others strewn across the road as they had fallen. After a time Mym noticed they were spaced a mile apart. The demarcation was so precise it could only have been done by dwarves.

Each morning as they tied up their bedrolls they watched the diminishing escarpment to the south and the northern road for any strings of smoke. There were none. Never did Mym see any trace of Uhquah's company. No horseshit, no recent fires, no complaint of rock. No gunshot echoing across the open land. Perhaps they were free of them at last. Each evening when they made their camp they sparked no fires. They ate the raw meat of rabbit or groundhog or quail caught during the day's walk. They settled down between the grasses and the swells with little camaraderie. She felt like she was losing him to the orc he had been before. She didn't know how to stop it.

Come one midday out east they saw a black figure stenciled against the ivory horizon. They couldn't tell if it was coming or going and after a minute it diminished into the earth and they didn't see it again. They looked at each other and without a word they set off. They pushed as far as they could into the evening and at a place like any other they struck out west of the road for a half mile and there they sat up and waited. Conjoining moons rose over the fold of the mountains blacking out the eastern firmament and the static between them seemed lessened. They watched west.

Guided out of the night by forgotten arcanities came the company. Uhquah in the fore, the cavaliers leading their horses, the orckin and Booky and the ogre fanned out behind. Mym turned to Orc to see what he would do and in that moment she saw beyond the edge of their camp, there against pale stone, reclined the longhorn. How long he had been there neither could say.

It was about this time she began to question whether some unknowable force of that land worked against them.