The setting sun left him crawling out from under a dead horse. He knelt low with a hand on its belly and he studied the land south in the failing daylight. The grassfire set by the baron paled his face. He watched the shapes of risen scalp through the dead outriders and move on. Til dark he stayed there then he rose and limped his way north.

  He walked all night across the moonslit tundra, wetting his lips from his emptying skin as he went. He kept the stillstar ahead of him as its kith drew around counterclockwise as if magnetically impelled. In the morning he could see the five spires of the old capital that roughly defined its extent and he followed a northerly trail of hoofprints scalloped out of the soft ground before the nightly freeze. Their upturned soil crunched underfoot and the dawn sky burned blood red where a tempest was boiling up. He turned his face to the warmth of the sun and like that distant fervid globe he never stopped his unidirectional procession and he dragged with him all of the ardor of what had been and all of the hope for what could be, though none yet knew this. The sun that had returned feeling to his numbed extremities now bestirred a wind upon the plain and the leaves of cottongrass swayed before it until each clump froze again in a westward reach like so many skeletal hands grasping toward respite or redemption. Then the coming storm inveiled the sun and all became dark and cold.

  He never stopped moving. The stormfront advanced to cover the ruined city and he watched two armies beset one another in its shade. The dark mass of one slicked thinly across the horizon like spilled oil and the other responded with a great outpouring of gray smoke. He could not tell which harried the other and together they receded into the violet shadow of the thunderheads leaving behind them wildfires spotted up as if from lightning strikes. When he arrived at the place of their skirmishing the air smelled like a damp firepit and he walked between the bodies of the dead and through the brittle charred grasses that disintegrated to ash wherever his feet brushed against them. After a time he noticed they’d tied kerchiefs of a certain lace and color around their right arms. He knelt by one and waved away the flies crawling upon its flayed skull. He pulled around his satchel and opened it and withdrew her book and her kerchief. He held it near the corpse’s. They were the same. He crouched there for a long time.

  Over the length of that hard day he lost count of the times the brigadier and her foe had apparently collided upon the wasted tundra. The eastern dark enveloped the west and in the last light of the day the city spires now stood to the height of his outheld thumb.

  He walked all night. He clasped his arms around his body. He blew into his hands. He stamped his feet. He sang silently to himself, a lullabye learned from her when he was just a cub. When he still believed she'd be around forever. When he still believed she loved him, still knew what it meant to love. The stars gathered around him, winking out when lightning laddered up a thunderhead as if all of their fire had been channeled into that electric furcation, as if to briefly illuminate this hateful country carried the cost of all of the light in all of creation. He was stumbling along a causeway that ran between two lakebeds and the stars returned to their fixed places and seemed to grow nearer and to double and treble in their amassing. They began to dimmer up under the stark line of the horizon and crowd around his feet. Blue will o wisps unlidded and unmovable. He proceeded under them and above them without remark as all his attention turned inward to his memories of the woman he'd crossed the world to find. Who had perhaps already perished upon the open plain in sight of her goal. A meteor blazed up the northern sky.

  ***

  He came on the bone collectors mere miles from the city. The spires rose deceptively close and all the land between him and his destination was seared inkblack. Croaking crows and knifejacketed buzzards camouflaged in the charcoaled soil scrounged for unfrozen spoils. The brigadier had lost many. More than he believed possible for she had departed the Thumb with no more than a century of riders and orckin. Over them a team of the risen dead drove a handcart whose wheels creaked parallel lines of white across the ashland. Into this wagon they tossed the freshly fallen. From where Orc approached he saw so many feet sticking out the wagon bed like stacked firewood: shod and unshod, blue and black, contorted and swole. The inanimate remains jostled in the cart as it rumbled over the chalked bones of the first war, the last war, the war that named the deadlands. He watched them draw closer. Eyesockets empty, noses shorn off. How they located the objects of their harvesting he could not say. They passed within ten yards of him and trundled off the way he had come with their load shuddering and teetering this way and that. Tiny against the spires of the old capital he could see other teams working the grounds, some driving oxcarts, some strapping their take directly onto the backs of undead beasts. He would need to pass through them.

  At the very outskirts of the city he came upon an adobe shack with its tile roof caved in. Inside the floor and hearth were forgebrick and the latter was stuffed with trash: rotten wood, broken glass and clay pots, rags, old leather. The whole place smelled of mold. There was a three legged table propped up against a wall and an empty cask for a seat. He went to the fireplace and rifled through for the leather scraps. The first one he tried was the size of a coin, stiff and dirty, and tasted of old tin. It did nothing to sate him. He bit on another.

  Toward evening he smelled then heard a group of humans approach the hut.

  “Shit somebuck’s in there,” said one.

  “Well rouse em out.”

  “I ain’t to. What if he’s a deadun?”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “What if your mom’s your sister?”

  “Come on.”

  “You come on.”

  He heard them creep closer.

  “Who’s in there?” one called.

  “Nobody,” he said.

  “Sounds like a livin man to me.”

  “Yeah and he’s in our spot.”

  “Let him. There ain’t nothin in there.”

  “He’s in there.”

  “There’s other spots.”

  “This one’s ours. I ain’t overnightin anywhere new with that deadun army abroad.”

  "You can always join up with the baron."

  "Fuck the baron."

  He drew his blade and laid it on the table. “You can come in,” he said.

  There was a rustling as they came on up to the doorframe, two wretched men and a woman. They dragged gusseted sacks full of junk and they wore coats stitched from wolf pelts and reindeer hide and the men each bore axes and the woman had a kingsman's sword, the sere blade broken a foot past the hilt. "That ain't no man,” she said.

  He regarded them. Made a gesture suggesting their entry. "Come in."

  They edged inside. They stayed close against the wall with the hearth.

  "Who you with?" said a man.

  "He ain't here for scavengin."

  "You got anythin to eat?"

  He pointed to the old leathers.

  "Nothin to drink either I bet."

  "You ever knowed an orc to drink?"

  "I never knowed an orc at all."

  "Don't think they drink."

  "Some do," he said.

  "What brings you up this way?"

  "Bet it's a woman."

  "He's an orc dumbshit. What's he going to do with a woman?"

  "Same as me I reckon."

  Both of the men turned to look at the woman. She spat on the floor between them and they all set to laughing.

  "You're right," he said.

  "What's that now?"

  "I'm here for a woman."

  That shut them up.

  "Where she at?"

  "I hope to find her in the city," he said.

  "You been there before?"

  "No."

  "She alive or dead?"

  "I don't know."

  "Well if she's alive then she ain't down in the city. Now if she's dead you might find her there."

  "He might."

  "I said he might. That burg is full of deaduns. Overflowin with em."

  "They been diggin up all the old churchyards, all the cemeteries. Don't matter how old they are."

  "So long as there's an inch of gristle what's stringin the bones together."

  "Yeah they got to have somethin there to move em along. Bit of muscle. But of gut."

  "They'd have dug up the crematoriums otherwise. Dug up the butcher's yards."

  "You got somethin for your nose?"

  He shook his head.

  "You're gonna want somethin for it."

  "Yeah you'll be gaggin up your leathers there elsewise."

  "They's everywhere. Settin up in them old houses. Settin on the balconies and porches. Just settin there like they was watchin the day turn."

  "Like they was sharin sips off a kettle of tea."

  "All them folks goin back to their old homes, ten, twenty generations of deaduns altogether in a single house, each one thinkin its theirs and ever one of em right in that assessment."

  "Makes scavengin lousy. Turn a corner there's another stiff to fry."

  "Don't run out of ether.

  "He don't have none."

  "That he don't."

  He shrugged. "I've had no need of it."

  "Have no need? Brother it's your sacred duty to kill and burn ever deadun you meet."

  "He ain't no brother of ours Karl."

  The one called Karl spat. "Nary a notion of sacredness nor duty neither."

  He looked at them. The other man shaking his head and Karl with his hands on his hips and the woman looking at the brick floor, wiping her nose with her hand. "You like killing?" he said.

  "You can't kill what's dead already," said Karl and he nodded at Booky's blade. "Looks you done your share."

  His hand moved toward the grip and stopped short of it. "Some."

  "What do you call that sort of thing?" said one.

  "Ain't no sword," said Karl "Too short for usefulness in a line fight. Too thin to be much good. Hell. First fight you're in it's like to snap like Jilly's done."

  Now he touched the grip. "It's held up."

  "Only cause you ain't fought nothin worth fightin back."

  "Don't call him a liar Karl."

  Karl leaned in and got a look at the metal. "Looks like it's broke once already."

  He shrugged. "It's done fine by me."

  Karl choked down his ax as if to swing it and flipped it once in the palm of his hand. "Hold it on out and I'll show you."

  The woman's eyes widened and she looked at him uneasily. "I think we should go."

  "Hold it out there fellow."

  He sat motionless. Only his eyes moved from the blade to the axehead, held down and out as if frozen in the moment of contact.

  "You knows it won't hold. Sloppy mendin job. Sloppy old pigfucker settin in my spot. Hold it out now boy."

  The other man hissed at Karl. The woman had backed to the door.

  "Done fine by you. Cuttin on your pigs. You eat em after you finish fuckin em?"

  "Shut up," said the woman.

  His eyes held low. "I'd heed the lady."

  "I bet you would." Karl laughed. "Lady bullshit. Lady thinks she knows somethin. You come up here after some woman like you pigfuckers got somethin on offer we don't. Our womens ain't for you shiteater. Hold it on out now and I'll remember you what happens to piggies that lie."

  Karl took a half step forward and placed his free hand on the table. It shifted on its three legs and Booky's blade rolled over and laid wobbling and the sound of it back and forthing over its fulcrum was the only noise in the place.

  "Your woman's dead piggy. Hold it out."

  The other man and the woman saw something Karl didn't or else Karl saw something they couldn't. The woman was out the door, the other man's head through the doorway and both of his hands dragging on its frame as if ready to shove off.

  Orc watched the rocking blade. "Your friends are waiting on you," he said.

  Karl leaned forward over the orc and said something the others couldn't hear and whatever it was they saw the orc flinch and as the ax began to fall they saw the orc was faster than the man and his claw swept upward and caught the haft of the ax and he leapt from the keg holding the man by his neck and tore the ax from his grasp and the man's fist became an open palm as if beseeching, as if lamenting, and as the axehead passed through the wrist and the skull the hand and the melon slice fell side by side. Upon the table the blade rested of its rocking.

  He allowed them to take the body. They dragged it out beside their sacks and they burned it there with the woodscrap out of the hearth. He left them standing by the rude bier. Under one moon he walked with the blade tied on his hip and the ax thrust through the strap of the satchel. If the brigadier was dead he would never know why she abandoned him. She would never be able to tell him she had no choice, to tell him it was for some reason, any reason, besides that he was an orc.