It had been a day and a half and now the horse was failing. They’d dismounted, the bookmaker first and her tumbling down after, to rest the bay and it stepped three times away and sank down to its knees and onto its side. She watched the bookmaker approach it holding a pistol, barrel down. She watched and she tried not to think about what had happened the night before.

  They had come at her from all sides. There was no room to aim a rifle, no time for clean strokes. She’d swung her alpenstock in great circles and called upon the stones’ memories and her speaking and the adze’s singing did fill the night with a resonance above the crunch of the bones and the ragged whisper of the dead flesh parting. She had seen the ogre make a club of a man, had heard the legs dislocate and the neck pop out from its sockets, had seen the skull swung about like a misshapen flail with the eyes yet bulging and the mouth yet slathering though it could make no words through its torn windpipe.

  The shape of the bay now went past. She didn’t see the bookmaker. She turned her head to follow it. It held up and circled back. There was the bookmaker, putting something in the waistband of her trousers, speaking to the bay. It’s breathing rasped like a pneumoniatic. She could hear it breathing out there in the dark. The shape of it went by again, occluding the milky haze of the firmament. A shape, black upon the sky, upon the tundra. A nightmare.

  The memory took her again and she couldn’t stop it. She like one of Thayne’s wooden boats and it like the flume, it had her and she went where it willed. Her eyes wide open, growing larger. Unseeable horrors visiting in the dark where they would always await until the end of her days.

  The smell of horse brought her back. Booky was now following the bay about. Walking after it, cooing at it. How much time had passed she couldn’t say but a solitary gibbous moon had risen. She watched the bay shy away from the woman. She had it by the cheekstrap and she mounted it and it trembled beneath her with its muzzle down and knees just about knocking together. She never stopped talking to it and she stroked its neck and she leaned back and stroked its hindquarters. Soon it quit its shivering and the woman was offering out her hand and her stirrup to Mym.

  “Didn’t know ye had a thing fer horses,” said Mym.

  Booky was patting the bay along the withers as if her palm was a brush. “I wasn’t always a bookmaker.”

  The woman twisted the reins in her fist and sat forward against the pommel. The dwarf’s feet hung in space. The bay ferried them on.

  Mym watched the night. “They’re still out there.”

  “Us or them?”

  “Both.”

  She adjusted herself in the seat so that she carried the carbine with the butt propped against her thigh and the barrel toward the sky. “It’s them I’m worried about.”

  The woman made a clicking sound with her tongue and cooed again. The bay responded with a snort. They rode on.

  Some hours before dawn another horse joined them off of the plain. Mym had a bead on until she saw that it was the paint bearing the sow asleep in the saddle. The bookmaker dismounted and took the paint’s reins and tied them off on the rear D ring of the bay. She climbed back aboard and they set off. The slack went out of the reins and the paint followed at a walk.

  The bookmaker steered to Mym’s guidance. Often she spoke to the stones and they offered what indications they could in their strange vernacular. With dawn she leaned over with her hands around the bookmaker’s waist and she studied the passing tracks and traces that came from and went toward the capital as if soothsaying fallen leaves for some hope of the future: the cloven hooves of game, the shoed prints of a big destrier, a wolfpack padding perpendicular to the track of a mule. They rode on.

  The sow came into wakefulness and severed the tie off with her jaw and urged the paint off a distance. From there she mirrored them. A hesitancy in her eye. A paleness to her color. She trotted ahead a ways. The bookmaker urged the bay to close the gap but the animal was fading. There was a nervousness to its gait. As if its ankles were jointed with glass.

  “She ain’t lasting much longer,” said Booky.

  “I can walk.”

  “Best if we run her to the ragged end.”

  “Best fer ye and me but not fer the horse.”

  “Say there.” Booky held up the bay and pulled her right. “What do you make of that?”

  Mym looked northwards and saw the riders there. “I see em.”

  “Shit and there’s more behind us.”

  “Aye.”

  “How long they been there?”

  “Since last night.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  The bookmaker dug her heels into the ribs of the bay. The horse quavered and pushed into a trot with its head nodding in time. They could see the riders ahead were waiting up for them beside a row of old fenceposts lacking a fence. The ruins of the city out of a haze beyond like old bones in a shallow grave. The bookmaker spoke sweetly to the horse making promises she’d never keep. When they came up the remains of the company were sitting and laying on the ground watching their approach. Uhquah smoking his pipe. The longhorn reclined on his back with his feet crossed and his head cradled in his hands.

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  Booky dismounted and ran to the ogre. The greenskin helped the sow off the paint. No one came to Mym. The two brownskins and the cavalier Sterling were dead. Of Orc there was no sign.

  Mym nodded once to herself as if in answer to an unasked question. She unstraddled the bay and slid off its back and landed squarely on both feet.

  “No grayback,” said Uhquah.

  “No.”

  Uhquah withdrew his pipe and spat.

  “He’ll turn up,” said the longhorn.

  “You keep sayin so.”

  The longhorn closed his eyes. “He always does.”

  ***

  They were running as fast as any of them could. The plague of the risen stained up the southern sky as if some god of scribes had smashed his inkpot upon its globe. Just west of it stood a blonde dust cloud, and occasionally the pop of gunshot reached them across the open plain.

  The company’s bitter ends rode and ran together but verily it was everybody for themselves. They had begun to string out a little. The mule out front then the horses and the longhorn and the ogre. Every time Mym looked at the monster she remembered the hollow crack of the dead man’s head as they’d clobbered it about. The gray fluid seeping out from the many fissures crisscrossing its excoriated skull. She regarded the memory as if from a distance. How different was she from the risen? How different her da or Khaz or Orc? They who’d been made whole again through some cousin of the occult power that moved the horde now chasing them. Were they not all of them undead? Was not every living thing remade from things once living and now dead? How different were they?

  The daylight now failed and she knew she’d been lost in her own head for hours. She cast her eyes back. The longhorn grinned at her, his lightless eyes almost level with hers. Beyond him she saw the coming armies and she saw distinct figures moving against this backdrop. Two of them. They rode quickly in the company’s traces as if their mounts were fresh or perhaps untiring in death.

  “We got outriders comin,” she said.

  Booky turned her head. “If we push this girl any harder her heart’s liable to explode,” she said. “Like to be we’ve run her to death already.”

  She looked back again and tracked the figures’ movement. One hooded and cloaked and the other grotesquely malproportioned on their steed. She called up the line. Uhquah turned his mule and waited and the greenskin halted next and he put out his claw and persuaded the paint to stop and the sow nearly teetered off its back. The bay came alongside where Uhquah waited and the blue dwarf dismounted the mule and checked the breech of one carbine and scabbarded it. He shouldered up the other and stood beside the mule and laid the barrel across the saddle while the animal bent down to forage the late winter greening of the cottongrass.

  Mym climbed down beside him and swung down her pack and unrolled her longarm. The bookmaker watched her, watched the outriders. One of them rode one handed with hand held out to the side and the other rode low in the saddle or else was a small child.

  “They mightn’t have seen us,” said the woman.

  “They’ve seen us,” said Mym.

  Mym checked her carbine and saw it had but two rounds left. Beside her the blue dwarf offered an extra of the carbines’ ingots but she declined. There were only two targets in the wide open and she had plenty of space for discharging and recharging even at the rate of their gallop. She laid the carbine on her pack. She checked her longarm.

  Uhquah was watching her. There was something of avarice in his eyes. When she noticed he nodded at her homegrown rifle. “I haven’t seen one o them in a long time.”

  “Come up to the delvin and ye’ll see plenty.”

  “I figured you whites had engineered up somethin better by now.”

  “Nothin’s better than this.”

  “You like that carbine plenty.”

  She didn’t reply. She was counting out her cartridges.

  “That thing still fire?”

  She gestured away south. “Run on out there and ye’ll find out.”

  He smiled. Withdrew his pipe as if to say something, placed it back.

  She knelt and then slithered out on her belly. She lined her cartridges up at her left elbow. The stock of the longarm rested out ahead of her on her powderhorn. The muzzle slightly skyward. The ground was freezing and she felt its cold spread into her gut. She was a creature of the cold, of its numbing power. She settled into it. She welcomed it.

  Uhquah spat. “One of them might be your grayback,” he said.

  She peered through the cottongrass and out over the tundra. They weren’t so far now. Five hundred yards. The light had faded and it was impossible to tell anything about them from the shadows that approached other than they were in a rush and they had little regard for their bodily safety.

  “He’s not out there,” she said.

  “You sure?”

  She ungloved her right hand and she pressed her cheek into the weapon and eyed down the sight. It was cold and it smelled of oil and honey, of sulfur, of home.

  “He can’t ride a horse,” she said.

  She chose her target. The small one in the back. Dropping them out of sight so the other wouldn’t know until it was too late. She brought the butt to her shoulder and waited. Three or four breaths was all she’d need.

  The oncomers held up suddenly at two hundred yards. The trailing one leaned from their saddle as if vomiting off the side.

  “They’re makin it easy on you,” said Uhquah.

  “Aye.”

  She lined up her shot.

  “Don’t hit them horses.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “Ye doublin me up?”

  He leaned into his carbine with the second one at hand in the scabbard. The sound of the mule cropping away beneath.

  “Which one?”

  “The tail.”

  “I got him.”

  She hesitated a moment. There was something about the way he sat his horse. Then she felt something.

  ”I said ready,” said the blue dwarf.

  There it was again. A slight tremoring of the earth. Of the stones. Just above the octave of her heart.

  Uhquah’s head snapped sharply down as if struck from behind. She half rolled and looked up at him. Without word they stared at each other and they listened to the thrumming of the stones about, and she knew the tenor in their voice.

  She placed her bare palm on the ground. “Khaz,” she intoned, “is that you?”