He'd not bellowed like that since his first days in the pit.

  When the world stopped spinning he opened his eyes and saw some nearby cavaliers staring at him. He looked down and there was Mym now passing a sewing needle back and forth through the flaps of his skin, lacing some sort of dried gut up his leg as if it was a boot. When she reached the back of his knee she tied it off and sat back. Her fingers were black with his blood. She twisted where she sat and she rinsed them in the river never taking her eyes off of the stitch.

  "Can ye stand on it."

  "I'd rather not."

  "Well I need ye te try. We need te see if it's goin te hold or burst."

  "Alright."

  With her help he tottered up. The pain was a revelation to walk upon yet he was able. She escorted him in a twenty foot circle back to the river whereupon he sat again on the bank and she carefully washed away the blood dried at the seam. She was beginning to put away her tools when Booky and the greenskin walked up. Ogre loomed behind like a thunderhead in sunshine.

  "Hey Orc would ya look who I found," said Booky.

  The greenskin grinned at Orc and he nodded back. In their talk he said, "Yew wanna pull out her guts or maybe yew gonna let little me do it."

  "You're welcome to it."

  The greenskin furrowed his shallow brow. "Yew don't wanna?"

  He shook his head. "Not anymore."

  "Why the hell not?"

  "She let us go."

  "So?"

  "So she could've helped those kingsmen murder us."

  "So?"

  "So." He shrugged. "Hell. I don't know. I just don't think she's worth it."

  The greenskin touched a claw to his chin as if in deep contemplation and turned his head to regard the bookmaker.

  "Your brother's alive," said Orc.

  His head snapped back. "Chim?"

  "Jazza."

  "My Jazza's alive?"

  Orc nodded.

  The greenskin began to weep. Shudders wracking his skinny scarred up nakedness.

  Orc bent forward to pick up a discarded horseblanket and held it wide to drape it around the greenskin. "He's across the sea with some friends of mine."

  As he said it the greenskin stepped into the space between Orc's hands and bawled into his chest, balling up pieces of his tattered shirt and wiping them across his tearing eyes and runny nose. Orc looked down at him. Placed the blanket around him. Put a hand on his back.

  Orc caught Mym looking. There was something in her eyes between envy and sadness and he didn't understand what it was or how it came to be there nor was he given a chance to.

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  Booky clapped her hand on his shoulder. "We're bringing the crew back together ain't we. Y'all and me and hell we could even find a place for y'alls dwarfy friend there. Ya ever done much in the way of performing miss Mym?"

  Orc watched Mym. Whatever she'd been feeling was now buried behind the deepest frown he'd ever seen.

  Booky studied the dwarf. "It ain’t like that. Hell my old marks would pay a fortune ta see a dwarf in the pit. That's a thing they've always wanted they just ain't imagined it yet and they won't know it til ya show em so. We'll pit ya against Orc. Or with him since y'all are chummy nowadays. Two of ya against my ogres once we get Right stuck back on. Orc can toss ya into the fight like he was just doing with Gobgob there."

  "Toss me?"

  "Didn't ya see it? Imagine him doing it with ya holding yall’s mountain ax up there. Fly some streamers from it and ya'll be a regular carnival berserker."

  "This ax?"

  "Ya. Holding it overhead. Streamers and such. Maybe some smokers too."

  Mym looked at Orc and he saw how her face had darkened. He began the precaution of disentangling himself from the greenskin.

  "Come on little wedwarfy. Put it on up and let's see how it looks."

  "Lady the only place I'm goin te put this ax is up yer—"

  Orc hobbled up between them and put a restraining hand on Mym's shoulder. At that moment the longhorn bellowed, "Show us what you've got there."

  They all turned and saw Uhquah leading his mule from the ice with the officer's head hanging off the saddlehorn. He unwound the hair from which it hung and tossed it to where the longhorn stood. He caught it and held it in both hands and guffawed. He palmed it and held it up for all to see.

  "That ain't him," whispered Booky.

  "What'd ye say?" said Mym.

  Booky nodded at the head. "That ain't the baron."

  The longhorn bent and swept up a soldier's rifle and bayoneted through the underjaw and into the soft palate. He stood holding up the rifle by the stock and slowly spinning in place and the glazed blue eyes stared down from this new station as if impassively surveying the land for sign of a salvation that never came.

  "That ain't the baron," called Booky.

  Uhquah and the longhorn turned to her and the longhorn rotated the head as if to regard her also. Its eyes had begun to freeze in their sockets.

  "You sure?" called Uhquah.

  Booky nodded. "The baron came twice to the pit and that ain't him."

  The longhorn lowered the rifle and the long dark hair of the thing curtained downward and drifted slightly alee. He looked at the blue dwarf.

  Uhquah swung onto his mule and walked it over to where Orc recuperated with the others. The blue dwarf looked first at Booky. "Who is he then?"

  "Hell if I know. Some other lordy liege of the armiger's."

  Uhquah leaned over and spat. He looked at Orc. "Has she met him before?"

  "Has who met who?

  "The brigadier. Has she met the baron?"

  "I don't know. Probably."

  "Never when you were around?"

  Orc shrugged. "I never met any of her callers but the ones I killed."

  "She'll know," called the longhorn. He'd unstuck the head from the bayonet and was now plucking off its eyelashes one by one.

  Uhquah frowned. He clucked at his mule and kicked on into the sacked encampment. The orckin stood by with their flayed leathers all strung together like frontiersmen posing beside a rack of pelts and they watched the cavaliers move from clutch to clutch of the fallen and douse them with flagons of looted ether. The kind the kingsmen used to set their swords blazing. The cavaliers doused the grounds around the bodies and they poured a trail back to the quartermaster's storecart. The remains had begun to darken in the morning sun. A cavalier drove an iron piton into the wetted earth and he struck his sabre once upon it. The flash of sparks set a whoosh of creeping blue flame that swept across the killing grounds and sprung up in a hush upon the dead. As the flesh ignited it cooked off smoke colored like tallow. Uhquah drew his neck kerchief over his nose and into this he disappeared.

  Orc limped to where Mym stood at the camp's northmost border. He passed where the camp women were jabbering at the cavaliers who'd freed them. He passed the captive brownskin, now dead, a leg blown off by cannonfire. He came up beside Mym and together they watched the soldiers' horses and ponies race to and fro across the tundra, zigging one way then the other as a loose pack of loping wolves edged them back toward the river and the massacre. Long snouts raised to the blood and the smoke. Wet black noses working as they scented that attraction and repulsion as ancient as predator and prey.

  When Uhquah returned he rode to the orckin and he tossed the scalp of the sentry at their feet. They nodded at him. He whistled and set out north, never looking back. The longhorn punted the officer’s head into the burnings. The cavaliers fanned out to collect up and drive the king's horses. Orc and Mym fell in with the orckin. As they followed the river's course they passed through the shadow of the great column of smoke. There was no sound on the tundra save the whistles and calls of the stockdrivers, the wails and weeping of the women left behind.

  It was that night that the risen finally caught them.