They marched by night. They made no fires. Those afoot were made to walk in a single line and the horsemen rode through the track they made. Like an immense crepuscular serpent they uncoiled at twilight and the shadows hobbled to their feet and extended eastward to the edge of the world whereupon they became one with the coming night, only to reform out west as the first moon ascended the sky. Ere these second shadows shrank out of the country the other moon rose and a new shade sprang forth from their soles as if a third identity reared out of the gap between their selves and their anti-selves to discomfit them with an unseen alternative to who they were and who they sought to be. The moons fled away southward on their wintertime trajectories and the double shadows of each orckin and human and dwarf yawed out and cast together in a column parallel to their makers' and it seemed to Orc as if they walked a narrow path between the twilight of creation and the utter void of oblivion.

  Next morning they saw smoke standing out north like dust devils crawling the horizon. Uhquah sent the tusker scout and Tulula went with him. One by one the stars burned themselves out of the paling sky. When the scout and Tulula returned they stood by Uhquah's stirrup with the longhorn. Orc watched them converse while the longhorn interpreted. Uhquah nodded once and the orckin fell in and all went on.

  They came to the source of the smoke. A pile of black cremains fumigating on the tundra floor. The cavaliers swung off of their mounts and walked around the ring of glowing embers with the scorched hoops of ribs and bowls of pelvis and domes of skulls scattered among them. One of the victims was unburnt and they hung naked from a spear driven hard into the frozen ground. From his beard he must've been a man yet there was no other way of telling. Below the neck all of the front of him was gore. Shredded flaps of skin that swayed like tassels in the light airs. Chambers emptied of their organs. Viscera exploded out of him. His backside was a pincushion of entrance wounds. All of the things that had made him a man had been shot away. Dried blood where his hair had been, fallen down around his shoulders. Flies crawling about him in every place. Eyelids relaxed half shut, mouth relaxed half open, tongue hanging half out.

  Orc looked at him. Mym came to stand beside. Together they studied the ragged corpse.

  "He's missin his crook," she said.

  "You know him."

  "Aye I followed him nine days out of the Gap. Him suggestin he was a shepherd of souls, happy te help settler families navigate the deadlands. He's who led that caravan of newcomers te the middle of nowhere and left em in the night te fend against whatever was rangin about."

  He looked back at the shepherd.

  "He got what he deserved," she said. "I figured he was in league with the risen. Bringin em fresh meat, so te speak."

  "This isn't their work."

  "Aye I know it. They'd raise em up or set em aside te be done later."

  He nodded.

  "Ye know who did it?"

  There was a cub’s skull at his feet. He booted it in with the others. "Kingsmen," he said.

  Some orckin sidled up to the smoking cremation and set a pot of water to boil on its smoldering. The cavaliers took issue with this and turned away their horses and made a short camp of their own on the other side of the massacre. The orckin watched them go, redeyed from the smoke. One pulled a mortar and pestle from her kit and set to grinding a coarse powder from a handful of oily black beans. She poured the powder into a wide-mouthed waterskin and when the pot boiled over she removed it barehanded and tipped its water in with the powder and folded over the flap of the skin. After a few minutes they uncapped the spout and squirted the black mixture into small tin cups with metal handles that steamed profusely in the cold dry air. From these they drank and Orc saw a curious bliss settle across their faces. Afterward Tulula crossed to the shepherd with a smoking brand and set him on fire.

  That evening Uhquah directed them up the north road. Again the scout and Tulula went on ahead. From time to time Orc paused as Mym stopped to stare at a roadside stone or dropped to her belly to press her ear against a particular paver. She never took long in doing. Perhaps her skill hadn’t improved. Perhaps the stones just had nothing to say.

  They moved like an army stealing a march upon its enemy and the dead truth of their northerly reckoning reflected their urgent purpose. To the east the tundra ran unopposed forever and the moons were again at their conjoining and for once the fireworks between them appeared meager against the diamondheaded reaches of the galaxies that hung all around them, curtained in pinks and greens of an aurora unlike anything Orc had ever witnessed. He watched it all night.

  Next morning the scout and Tulula returned from their reconnaissance and Orc came forward to greet her and to overhear her report. She said the kingsmen were camped along the bank of a river where it bent against the road near the fiftieth milestone. They had with them their spoils and a tail of sutlers and they numbered in the hundreds. After hearing this Uhquah stepped off his mule and walked up the road and squatted for a long time with his eyes closed and head cocked and lips soundlessly muttering.

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  Orc saw to Booky’s blade, drawing a whetstone along its length and wiping an oilcloth after. Around him the cavaliers checked their pieces and talked excitedly among themselves. The orckin said nothing. The horses were fed from bags and taken out to the river for watering. Uhquah and the scout detached up the road and didn’t return. Darkness fell.

  Come midnight the longhorn roused the company and pressed them north with a knowing smile as if all that had happened and was to happen accorded with his designs. They reached a long bar of the river by first light. The water was frozen black along the banks and they could hear bergs crunching against the gravel on their way downstream. The pinpoint glows of the kingsmens’ fires lay before them, curved along the riverbend like the aligned stars of the Hunter’s bow.

  Out of the murk rose a solitairy figure. It was the tusker scout and he turned without a word and led the company to a stand of reeds coming out of the ice a quarter mile from the encampment. Uhquah waited there. Blinders clapped about the eyes of his mule.

  “They’ve one picket between us and them,” he said. “When we ride in swing left te pin em against the watercourse. Once you’re in it’s every dwarf for his own, and don’t take no prisoners.”

  “How many are there?” said a cavalier.

  “Lower your goddamn voice.”

  “Two centuries or more,” said the longhorn.

  "They the baron's?"

  "Looks like."

  "He there with em?"

  "He fucking better be."

  Orc looked about until he saw Booky. She was watching the ground. The familiar sight of her counting odds. She saw him looking. She held up four fingers on one hand and her thumb on the other, slowly shaking her head. He was thinking the same thing.

  “We’ll have caught em out,” said Uhquah, “but there’ll be plenty o fight in em. Shoot what shoots back. Leave the hand te handing te the orc choppers. Truth fer telling if we don’t drop every one of em we ought te turn in our guns.”

  No more was said. They waited in silence for the span of an hour. Uhquah unclappered his mule like an executioner unhooding the condemned. The mule raised its head and sniffed the air. The cavaliers mounted. The orckin placed their effects in piles on the firm shore. Somewhere toward the river a snow goose called. Carbines and rifles were drawn. Javelins and handaxes counted, kept in hand. Uhquah glanced back once and kicked forth his mule.

  The beasts trotted up the gravel and onto the tundra. As they passed into the bend of the river they caught the sentry sleeping under rosewood shrubs and a cavalier cut him down with a sabre. His dogs began to yammer and follow on about the legs of the horses and bolt ahead of them. The cavaliers rode each with a hand wrapped in reins and an arm out wide holding whichever weapon they’d chose for the slaughter to come. The din of the dogs and the now galloping horsemen and the loping orckin behind all together looked like some wild hunt erupting forth from the jowls of hell, fifty two marauding souls hammering down on kingsmen numbering two hundred.

  The longhorn stampeded completely through the first row of tents trapping the occupants in the canvas and trampling them underhoof. Men emerged from others in their long johns and with charged pistols and glass bottles held by the neck. The cavaliers rode through them all and at the camp’s edge they wheeled and returned. A captain dove out of their path and rose with a pistol and Uhquah shot him through the forehead. Three more men stumbled out of a tent and the dwarf shot them dead as they emerged, each falling on the last so that they laid one upon another.

  The orckin leapt from soldier to soldier hacking and stabbing and clubbing the newly roused. Orc moved among them. Silent, intent, his blade piercing and sliding through unarmored skin. Men were shouting and the dogs bayed unceasingly and a lieutenant wandered into the melee holding a white kerchief in one hand and a bleeding belly in the other. Orc left him untouched and he heard behind the crack of the skull as the longhorn clobbered him with his cannonball. Another soldier came at Orc with sword and knife and as the swordblade passed before him he hollowed his back like a dancer and watched it slice open his shirt. The knife came after in a downward plunge at his groin and he just got Booky’s blade before it and it deflected down the inside of his knee and flayed open his calf. The soldier was overbalanced and Orc flipped his blade and thrust it into the same place he had the old dwarf on the span. The man slumped forward and didn’t move again.

  In a corner of the camp Orc saw two or three orckin manacled to stakes pounded into the frozen ground. A tusker and a brownskin and a greenskin. Behind them the latrine was on fire and the camp was becoming a stinking dusk of shitsmoke. The crimson sun glared through. He cut his way toward the captives, his leg a white hot agony.

  Already a cavalier rode from tent to tent with a torch lowered then raised then lowered again. Smoke billowed everywhere. Screams from the burning tents. Filthy women with hands bound and feet hobbled did shuffle and worm out of a fired pavilion and throw themselves on the ground before the horsemen. Someone had cut the tie ropes of the king’s horses and they raced off oblique to the massacre as if aflame themselves and their manes and tails whipped behind. The panicked kingsmen began to rally around an officer on the far side of the camp and from there they fired their arms at the disarray without discernment for their beset comrades.

  The air about Orc’s head snapped like wildfire as he arrived at the stockade. The orckin there were covered in welts and their shoulders and necks were heavily scabbed and scarred from whatever burdens they’d been made to bear. Orc went from one to the next jamming the handle of his blade into the manacles and levering apart the links. As he freed each the tusker slunk from a pistolball passed through his naked chest and the brownskin charged immediately into the fight with his hair smoldering like some sort of berserker and the greenskin slunk backward and stared up at him.

  “Orc,” he said. “Is that yew?”