She followed the shepherd and the wagons away from the ruin of the mill and along the stream that had turned its wheels. They continued upcanyon and they passed the rampart where the kingsmen had halted the risen and they crunched over the bones and ashes of that decisive confrontation. They forded the cold stream and they forded it back as it snaked against one wall then the other. Finally they exited the Gap with outriders posted ahead and the scalpers to the rear. The deadlands howled around them.
They beat the dawn to the trail and first light saw them strung out in a long line over the tundra, the wagonwheels creaking and snapping around their hubs. A low moan of laboring hardwood and the constant soft percussion of hooves and feet. Save for stands of alpine foxtail and thickets of pendant grass overgrowing the riverbanks the land was an expanse of hairlike sedges and grasses. It grasped at their feet and the road ahead was no more than a subtle flattening of their growth.
They saw no game those first days, no birds but a solitary grouse sprinting away through the cottongrass. In the distance they saw herds of elk or bison shifting along the horizon shrouded by scarves of snow blowing up off the ground and they ate out of the stores they brought in sealed casks. The speculator carried in her folio a heavy set of binoculars that mounted polished convex glass in copper tubing. With them she watched the herds cross the tundra and later when they began to see the suggestions of faraway forests she would halt in her saddle with the sun at her back and detach one ocular from the other and screw the nearside of one into the farside of the other on threads crafted for that purpose and through the long telescope they formed she would study the dispositions of the trees against the maps she carried. One of the Robinsen girls would stand at her knee and ask her questions of what she could see and the settler men would wait until she had identified the parcel on her map and its owner on her register and their status: living, dead, corporate, otherwise. She must have called two dozen open parcels yet only a single settler advanced a claim on any of them. They watched his solitary wagon rumble south, ironclad wheels jiggering, two children’s faces looking back at them through the hole in the bonnet.
They rode armed. Each horseman and horsewoman with a bladed weapon and wagoneers with pikes or spears or guns smithed in poor imitation of the dwarven style that shot askew of their aiming. The shepherd carried his crook athwart his saddle and had slung a leather sheath across his back holding a weapon of some kind.
Mym carried both her longarm and alpenstock across her back in that open land. Those weapons had withstood many years of such journeys and they were well worn from adventures had before her birth whose histories were told by their metals. All she had to do was ask and they would take her to campaigns now ancient yet readily recalled in their gouges and rends and scars.
Well before dark the wagons made their circle on the open plain. The trophy hunters and scalpers escorted the scavengers pushing their carts to a lone tree naked of bark and colored of bone. The settler families combined grain and water and slapped out the dough on the seats of the jockey boxes. The scavengers returned with cartfuls of wood and brush and commenced to draw armlength branches from their loads and snap them as if they were the skeletal remains of the risen they sought to keep at bay. They sundered the limbs and they boasted of what they would do to the first undead they met. Their teeth flashed in the low light when they laughed. By full night the body of the dead tree leaned in pieces over the glowing coals they had made and in the families’ iron pans roundbreads rose and there was a flow of spirits from clay amphoras and of water from clanking canteens. They slept in their wagonbeds or under them on the near-frozen ground wrapped in thick wool blankets. Overhead the stars were much the same as they had been west of the Gap, and the yowl and yammer of the distant wolves there evoked the same foreboding and exposure, yet they could feel a certain change in the world and in themselves.
The fourth day they began while it was yet being made. Long exhausted of firewood they ate in the dark. Salt meat and mush mixed with frigid riverwater. Already they were worn of the trail and the smell of the place. By now the speculator had named a hundred parcels available for claiming. The settlers had all stayed on but the one. The scalpers’ erstwhile mustangs trod heavily and their masters kept their eyes always on the horizon and often asked the speculator to turn her glass toward some object or other. The courage of the party was quickly run out in the infinite of that landscape and there was no courage either for the pale rider who pursued them unseen and unheard for his deed is without passion and its effect is inevitability. In countless wells and waterholes across the wide blue world does he swim and beside a thousand cookfires does he slake his patrons for his final fee. A scavenger fell sick first and died in the night. By the noon following two more were puking and shitting every drop of water yet in their bowels. A settler’s family shifted to another wagon and the sick rode aboard among the furniture and foodstuffs and heirlooms of that patrilineage. By the following morning Mym was scraping her adze over the frozen ground and stuffing the bodies of the men into six inch graves. The shepherd held a kind of service and some who gathered turned to Mym for they had lately heard the rumor of a dwarven resurrection. She kept her head down. The shepherd said a few words and they covered the dead with dried grasses and set them on fire.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
They stirred as the coming dawn flushed the east with pale rays of light that fanned into the colorless abyss. A jagged cut of red spread across mountaintops there like blood seeping out of the world and running into the sky and between two enshadowed summits rose the naked head of the sun. The twin shadows of the peaks reached across the plain ahead of them like fangs engulfing the world and the shadows of the mounted humans and the wagons and the solitary dwarf progressed obliquely ahead like vestiges of the night desperate to escape the day, like filaments of black iron drawn by magnetic forces from one darkness to the next, yoking them forever to fate of night. A fourth man vomited himself to death before midmorning. They shuttled him out of the wagon and ignited him where he landed and pressed on. The black smoke of him a solitary beacon in that lightening land.
Now beasts had come to follow them, great white wolves with red eyes that loped over the tufts of grass and laid in the dusting of dew ice that sparkled in the winter noon. Trotting on again with their noses in the wagon ruts. Late evening when the caravan made its circle she could see them out there, ears forward, eyes winking, waiting. Next morning as the caravan ambled on she could hear them yipping and snarling over the scraps of the camp and the next dead man still on fire.
A week out and five men dead. They filled casks with water from the river and they left its course. The grasses now were hidden entirely by a veneer of ice or snowdrifts that wandered across the tundra like dunes of sand.
"He sure this is the way?" said a trophy hunter.
"Don't see nothin for the horses to eat," said a scavenger.
"Them settler folk have sacks of grainseed.”
“Ain’t that for homesteadin?”
“Probably.”
“So what? You gonna take it off em?”
The trophy hunter spat through his teeth and said no more.
The following day they began to drive past bones and discarded implements of war. They saw the husk of a covered wagon with its metal bows arched over the coal black bed like the ribs of a cremation and they saw the acres of immolated heaps of which they had heard as far south as seaway’s end and they saw the bodies of an ancient race now emerging from the thawing tundra, mummified shriveled and black and hard as iron from the permafrost. The wolves skittered after, nosing the twisted forms and lifting their snouts to the scent of the caravan. Night over night the wagon circle tightened. The settlers shared their grainseed and the horses ate out of the emptying sacks. Mym laid on the ground among the many hardmen seeking their fortunes and future and she missed the fortune and future she’d left in the delving. She watched the acrimonic moons conjoin and the whitehot flashes upon their darksides. The mysterious lights there seemed to flare from nothing and suck away to nothing. The permafrost glinted blue and green by the moonslight and the iron wagontires shone in crescents that bowed ever toward the moons and their silent violence, and as the embattled rivals wheeled overhead the light caught in the tires followed them in a terrestrial description of their orbits. She listened to the stones somewhere under the ice and she heard the subtle wheezing and whimpering of the horses. She was glad to have spared the mule this journey.
She woke in the night to a thicker silence. She rose and took up her longarm and crept to the edge of the circle. Away north the land and sky were electric. Lightning fluttered soundlessly in sourceless sheets behind witching thunderheads that throbbed in and out of being. Strange shapes on the sudden skyline emerged black and menacing and were sucked back into oblivion and sprang forth again some other place inches or miles away. She felt the hair on her arms rise and she looked down and saw a strange soft blue fire spreading across them, simmering up the hoops of the tires, snaking along the metal bits of the horses and pooling beneath their ironwrought shoes so that they kicked up a multitude of winking eyes. It perched in the pan of her longarm and she placed this upon the ground and kneeling there she held her hands outstretched above the floor of the tundra as she had seen Daraway and Orc do each in their own fashion. She tried to feel as they might but there was only the cold radiating off the ice. She listened and heard the trembling of the stones and it seemed in that place their geology was ordered not by nature but by fear and perhaps that was what had stoppered them from her gifts. She slept no more that night.
The tenth day she trudged on at the head of the wagons for the shepherd had vanished in the night. She sought him overland but there was no sign of his going nor of his coming. Either he had never been or what skills she had were foiled by the otherness of that place. She led the caravan along the solitary track crossing the tundra and mile by mile the track diminished to nothing. There were no more wolves. There on the open plain the country extended uniformly in all directions like the universe which is said to be expanding forever so that nowhere and everywhere are in its singular center, equally sealed within the vast cold tomb of creation. By the time she realized they'd all been betrayed it was too late.
> +1 [Stonespeaking] I don’t think it ever occurred te her that the stones themselves might be servin some higher deception… (2/10)
