Orc walked that day through the low hills and scrub pines in the wake of the company. Mym was somewhere ahead with the longhorn and his newfound rocks. Perhaps she was learning something of the stones about. Perhaps enough that they might leave this loathful retinue. Though it differed in kind their decadence outstripped anything endemic to the deadlands. He yearned to be rid of them. To find the brigadier and whatever powers here might repair his home and the dwarf’s. To return across the sea to his friends.

  Occasionally in that high country mule deer would scatter from the company's antitail and he would hear the pop of a carbine and the ragged cheer of the cavaliers. He would pass by the site of the massacre and the butchering and after a while an orc or two would overtake him carrying the gutted and packed carcass of some shaggy hind or hart. Over his shoulder he could often see the cadre of highland wolves now following them: a dozen or so amid the trees, patched gray and tan, bushy with their winter coats on, their alpha a tall and lean female who allowed no argument among her troop.

  He came on their camp at sunset. They had halted and spitted the deer to roast over a cookfire that snapped and flared in the wind. As darkness turned the glare of the fire occluded any stars and planets and even the moons were hidden by the orange light. He walked off a ways and placed his palms upon the ground, feeling for something familiar, reaching for whatever connected him to the relic he sought and the eternal change from which the earth was manifested. To the south he could see other lights winking with menace as if the wolves that dogged them were invested with the souls of demons and devils. But no, these were distant campfires, and there were figures moving around them. He strode back to the company.

  He searched for Mym and then for the longhorn but found neither. He came to Uhquah who sat on the ground against his saddle and who frowned at his approach.

  "What?" said the blue dwarf.

  "Tell me where Mym's gone."

  "Damned if I know or care te."

  "Did she leave the camp?"

  "Might've."

  "There's a party away south."

  Uhquah leaned over and spat. "A party of what?"

  "Whoever else is out here."

  "How do you know it?"

  "I saw their fires."

  Uhquah settled back against his saddle and kicked out a foot. "They ain't risen then."

  "The brigadier?"

  "Not lek te be."

  "Kingsmen?"

  He looked up annoyed. "If you got a bug up your bunghole about it why don't you go on and find out."

  Orc turned to leave.

  "Maybe it's your wedwarf keeper," called the dwarf.

  Orc looked around until he saw the monstrous pale form of Ogre and Booky diminutive beside them. They were readying to bed down. He whistled low to her and she looked up and saw. He circled his finger in the air and subtly shook his head. She nodded and set about packing up her bedroll.

  He walked out south again. There again were the antipodal fires glowing like teardrops of a dragon scattered upon the pitch. As he watched they seemed untethered to their locations, to shift themselves to here, to there, suddenly near and impossibly distant. Whether this was some trick of his mind or of some other means he could not tell, but deceptions are known to lie within flames burning in the dark and by their very luminescence do they draw men and dwarves and orckin away from their foreordinations and toward fates unaccounted.

  Mym came alongside him. “What’s all that then?” she said.

  “Trouble.” He turned to her. “Where'd you get off to?”

  “The otaur wanted to show me somethin.”

  “Anything worth sharing?”

  “Nothin ye have an ear fer.”

  “Alright.”

  He adjusted his hat as if its placement mattered on that darkened plain.

  She nodded out at the constellation of fires. "So who are they?"

  "I don't know and I don't plan on waiting around to find out.”

  “They might be friendly.”

  He gave her a look. “Friendly. Like this lot.”

  She shrugged. “Friendly like they won't try te skewer ye the moment ye open that fangy jaw of yers.”

  He turned toward the company’s camp. “We’re going.”

  “And what about yer old lady?”

  He stopped and he regarded her. The firelight unevenly lit his face. "You’re going to find her."

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  "I can't."

  "You once found me from across the sea."

  "Aye that was different."

  "How?"

  "I was different."

  "You still are."

  She looked up at him. She didn't say anything.

  "I know you can manage it," he said.

  She shook her head and her eyes flicked out to the strange fires abroad. "Not yet."

  "The longhorn didn't teach you what you needed to know?"

  "Otaurs can't stonetalk."

  "Yet you went with him."

  "Aye well there was still plenty te be learned."

  "About hearing rocks."

  "Aye and about other things."

  "What sort of things?"

  They stood in the wavering. After a while she looked up at the dimly twinkling stars.

  "Ye know I'm the same dwarf ye came north with."

  "Yeah."

  "I'm the same dwarf that helped ye finish off the armiger."

  "It only took us three tries.

  "And I helped free yer folk from his menacin."

  "I know it."

  "Ye know we dwarves a stubborn bunch but that's how we are and its how I am and all I know te do is stick te me words and fulfill me oaths."

  "Alright."

  "I never promised ye answers up here. Never asked yer word on them either."

  "Whatever's got you jigging about like Cousins just say it."

  She held up a hand as if she wasn't finished. "I don't believe in makin oaths just te break em. They aren't geodes and there's nothin pretty in their comin apart."

  "Alright."

  Finally she turned her eyes back to him. "Ye plannin on betrayin me?"

  He looked at her.

  "That’s what the otaur said."

  "Yeah well he said the same thing to me."

  "That’s no answer."

  He spat. Something he had picked up from the other orckin. "It might be all the one we need."

  She looked out at the fires again. "Aye," she nodded. "It just might be that."

  "Why would I betray you?"

  "There’s only one manstone."

  "The same as the orcstone and I didn't sink eight inches in your heart over that."

  "That may be but we’ve got it locked away in the delvin."

  "So?"

  "So I know that doesn’t sit right with ye."

  “So long as it’s back where it belongs come spring we’ll have no quarrel."

  "And after that?"

  "Ask me then."

  She tilted her head toward him. He couldn’t see her eyes against the glare of the company’s fires. “So ye aren’t quittin me?”

  “We came up here together for a reason. I don't see that's changed."

  "Aye."

  He jutted his chin at the company's camp. "I’m not sure how much longer I can stand it."

  "Stand what?"

  He opened his mouth to answer her as Booky stumbled on them with tears streaming down her face. "You comin back or what cause y'all need to put a stop to it."

  "Put a stop to what?"

  "Come on and see."

  Back in the camp amid the warmth and yellow light of the fires the longhorn sat breaking rock samples with Right's brow. He wielded the head with both hands as if it was an oversized mortar on the pestle of the frozen ground. The twice baked metamorphics crushed upon the earth in which he read the world's histories like the weird crouched over her tealeaves. The origins in the layers of twisted sediment now hardened, the notches and striations of supposed fossils, the cavaliers standing around nodding between drinks of whisky and spitting tobacco into the nearest campfire. One, a preacher from the midlands called Sterling, stood by and recited canonical passages to repudiate the longhorn's genesis of all created things from accidental causes.

  The longhorn smashed the next stone with the ogre's forehead. "Your church lies."

  "God doesn't lie."

  "No," said the longhorn. He looked up at Orc's approach. "She don't."

  "God ain't no she you fuckin cow."

  The longhorn ignored the preacher and looked straight at Orc. He held up sheet of broken shale. "She don't lie and here are her words, spake in the laying of stones and the growing of trees and in the ordering of predator and prey."

  The cavaliers nodded and muttered to each other of the sense made by this apostate among them. The preacher spat. Orc forced his way through them until he stood before the longhorn. He picked up the foul canvas sack and opened it.

  "Put him back," he said.

  The longhorn stood up smiling. He lifted Right's head and for a moment it appeared as if he would clobber the orc with it. Instead he let it tip and roll from his hands into the sack.

  Orc smelled the decay of the head as it fell in. He wouldn't retch. He cinched the sack and tied it off and handed it back to Booky.

  "You wish to be going?" said the longhorn.

  Orc turned back to him. He said nothing.

  "Go on and tell them what you've seen."

  Orc looked to where Uhquah loitered by his fire with a wineskin laying unstoppered in his lap and his eyes red as fire. Still he said nothing.

  The longhorn nodded over his shoulder. "There's another company afield."

  "Hey?" called one of the cavaliers. "What'd he say?"

  The longhorn continued. "It would be better if they met us ahorse than sleeping in our bags."

  The cavaliers now turned to Uhquah. The blue dwarf watched them through skulking eyes. His beard damp, his forehead sweating.

  The longhorn nodded at the others, never once looking at the dwarf who was their captain. "Time to go."

  ***

  They broke camp and rode into the night leaving their fires burning for no one. A mile into those uplands Orc saw a company much like their own tracking opposite their path. The otherworldly violence one moon visited upon the other lighted this terrestrial conjunction. Uhquah pulled up on his mule and the cavaliers and orckin halted behind him. The other party kept on. When they came within fifty yards they too stopped and waited stock still in the strange celestial flaring that pulsed soundlessly across the landscape and all waited for the other to speak.

  "Who ye be?" called Uhquah.

  "Friends, living friends."

  They each counted the number of the other. How many rode, how many afoot. There were orckin among both companies.

  "Where are you comin from?" called the others.

  "Where you're headed," called the longhorn.

  Their leader approached and the others came after. They were a band of hunters out of the north, their animals pulling wagons filled with smoked meat and clay amphoras of fat sealed in congealed grease and pelts and furs of every kind. They were outfitted in cured hides mended with the tendons of the beasts they had slayed and they bore their weapons with the familiarity of men seldom without them. Those weapons were longbored muskets of human make and a kind of steelhead lance for hurling and with the latter they hunted the great herds of bison and the seaborn mammals native to that region and its icebound coast. Their weapons and their saddles were decorated with the tailfeathers of great raptors and garish tassels now muted by the night. From horseback and with these arms in hand they conversed with the blue dwarf and matches flared behind upheld hands as two or three of their company lit short stemmed pipes of tobacco. Their leader told that they were headed to the Thumb with their take. Uhquah's scalphunters might have bartered for a share of the meat but with what? Not their carbines nor other weapons, not with the scalps of the dead, not with food or whisky for the hunters had no need of these things. They were more likely to take the meat by force and they might have but for the weapons held by the hunters. And so each company went their own way on that midnight highland, each bound whence the other had come.

  Orc was last of the company and was last to pass the shorthorn guarding the hunters' rear. He held a hand up to her in greeting and farewell and she nodded in return.

  "Have you seen the brigadier?" he said.

  She shrugged as if ignorant of such titles and their meaning.

  "And the risen?"

  Her eyes widened. In them he could see the glimmering of the plasma lancing from moon to moon. "You'll come to them shortly," she said.