Across the cookfire Orc and the orckin drank from an amphora of pig fat that they had left to bake in the coals. Southward in the night the embers of the slaughter glowed dimly under the eaves of inferred highlands. She thought little about what she had done that day. She looked at Orc's calf and at the stitches there now taut from the swelling. The stretched out skin now shining like wax in the firelight. His rough laughter rasping, his dark eyes vanishing behind his joyful cheeks, his old goblin pal slapping his knee. Tulula was there also, her claw touching his hair, her eyes on his face. Booky brought round a pot of boiled potatoes plundered from the kingsmen. She was laughing too. Behind all the ogre loomed.

  Mym sat alone. She was a thousand miles from the mountain. Months away from her da and Daraway and Khaz and still heading in the opposite direction. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the sound of their laughter. All she heard was Orc’s.

  She opened her eyes and drew the malachite out of her pocket. The firelight coppered it. She thought to make an ask. She put it away.

  Orc was standing and now limping around the firering to where she sat. With palms against the ground and wounded leg held straight he lowered himself beside her. She leaned away slightly yet his knee bumped hers. It was warm from inflammation. From sitting too close to the fire.

  “What do you think?" he said. "Good venging today?”

  She looked at the flames. “Are ye a dwarf now?”

  “I’m just trying to find the sense of it.”

  “That orcy rage of yers isn't cuttin it?”

  He shrugged.

  She looked at him. “That lot of men back there helped te genocide the followers of yer Glad Nizam.”

  He turned his head as if taking in the other campfires. “And we killed them and scalped them and left their sutlers and servants to fend for themselves in the middle of the deadlands.”

  “Yer fellows don’t seem te mind it.”

  “Maybe they’re more orc than me.”

  “More orc than Orc?” She shook her head with the hint of a smile. “I can’t see how that could be.”

  He took off his filthy rag of a hat and used it to wipe his brow.

  "Ye sweatin?"

  "No."

  She reached the back of her hand to his cheek. "Yer feelin hot."

  "It's the fire."

  She withdrew her hand. "Ye feel a fever comin on out of that leg ye better tell me."

  "Fine."

  He placed the hat back on his head. They sat in silence and watched the orckin count their scalps. When he spoke again it was a rumble just above a whisper. “I don’t understand why the brigadier tolerates it."

  “Ye keep sayin that sort of thing yet I don't see why she'd be any different than the rest of her kind.”

  She watched him stare into the fire. From her kit she drew her canteen and loosened the cap and drank. She offered it to Orc and he took it and he held it in his lap as if he had already forgotten about it.

  “When I was a cub she taught me how to be,” he said. “Be considerate of others and courteous even to your enemies. Especially to your enemies she said, for they’d be everywhere and plentiful. Most of all I was to show compassion to those weaker than me. The young, the small, the elderly and infirm. They might not have my strength but that didn’t mean they were inferior. Maybe they’d be smarter or have more courage in deed and in thought. Maybe they’d be more honest. Or treat others better. They deserved respect. Even if they despised me for what I am. I was to obey the legitimate authority of the wise and the courageous and the honest. I was to defy what she called any rule of mere strength. Mere power. The day she sent me away she said it's better to be a slave than to die, but it's better to die than to be a slave who doesn't resist his enslavement."

  He looked at her. "Above everything I was to keep my word and to pay my debts."

  She drew herself up and regarded the fire. "Well I don't know about all that obeyin nakshit, but that last bit's awful dwarflike."

  "She said it's how orcs used to be and it's how men ought to be. It's how men imagine themselves to be. How they say they are but they aren't."

  She nodded. "Aye I've found that te be mostly true."

  "And that's how she prepared me to be chattel. To enter the pit, where compassion is weakness, honesty gets you killed, and cruelty is entertainment."

  "Ye think that's what she had in mind for ye?"

  He drank from the canteen and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. He passed it back. "Did you mean what you said about giving me a home under your mountain?"

  She turned to him in surprise with her mouth hanging open as if to speak. From across the fire Tulula growled and a rank odor suddenly overpowered even the firesmoke.

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  Orc grabbed for his blade. "Someone's coming."

  The tusker scout stumbled into the firelight from out of the dark. A black fletching protruded from his chest. He fell before the fire gurgling and Mym saw the arrowhead coming out of his back. Tulula crouched beside him and then turned to where Uhquah tended his own fire and called, "Undaud."

  Mym looked at Orc and he looked back. "Risen," he said.

  The orckin were readying to fight, the cavaliers catching up their mounts. Uhquah had come to the tusker's side and holding onto a tusk he put his ear to the scout's lips. The longhorn went from fire to fire barehanding burning fuel and pitching it south onto the plain to make a kind of picket of fire against the night. Mym stood and helped Orc to his feet.

  "Can ye fight?"

  "Yeah."

  "Can ye run?"

  "That I'm not sure of."

  She handed up his satchel and he shouldered it.

  "Shit goes sideways we stick together."

  "So long as I can keep up."

  "Even if ye can't."

  He shook his head. "You leave me if it comes to that."

  "No chance. If anyone's te kill ye it's me. The stones haven't forgotten me oath."

  He smiled some. "Alright."

  Uhquah whistled and whirled an upheld finger in the air as he strode back to his mule. The longhorn passed brands from the fires to mounted cavaliers. Several orckin bore the tusker between them. The others lit torches from the fire.

  "Maybe they can carry ye too."

  "Maybe."

  "We could stick ye on one of the horses."

  "Fuck that."

  They rode and ran from that place sometime before moonsrise. They rode true north with the flames of their torches flailing against the emptiness ahead and advancing a meager light upon the tundric grasses and frozen soils. Their shadows danced madly in every direction, themselves projections of the darkness held within each man and dwarf and orc that would persist until all of the land and the creatures upon it were enveloped by night.

  The wolves that haunted them were ranged out across the tundra and as the company swept past they gathered behind according to their primal ordering. The fires of their abandoned camp flickered out of the abyss as those who were once dead passed before them and when Mym looked back she could see their grayish shapes circumventing the firelight like nightmares lurking at the edge of consciousness.

  As dawn broached the coming day Mym looked over her shoulder and saw they had made some ground upon the enemy. When she said so to Orc the bookmaker overheard and just shook her head. "Y'all don't take no comfort in that," she said.

  "Aye?"

  "It's six days marching to The Last Fort."

  "So?"

  "So I've rid with halfpint there long enough yet to know why he's on a mule and not a horse."

  "Because he's short."

  "That ain't it miss."

  Mym looked from the bookmaker to Orc. "Ye want te tell me what she's tryin te say?"

  Orc winced every time he stepped onto his bad leg. "The dead don't need to rest."

  "Even the stones must rest."

  "The dead ain't stones,” said Booky. “That mule will go twice as far with half again the weight as any of them horses, and it won't stop until its heart explodes."

  She looked at the mule, at the horsemen, at the orckin still bearing the tusker, at the bookmaker afoot. Finally she looked back at Orc. "It's like walkin in bear country."

  "What's that mean?"

  "Make sure ye take someone slower than ye."

  He looked at her. She looked at his bum leg.

  "Well then off you go you little maggoteer."

  Just then two cavaliers fell out of the column and dismounted. One held out a flagon of ether and she shook it along the ground and the other waited for the rearguard to pass and then set the fire. Quickly it spread across the short dry grasses of the place. The cavaliers mounted and rode back onto the column. Every few miles they repeated this ritual. Soon the risen had fallen further behind and the great cloud that accompanied them broadened across the horizon and blended in with the smoke.

  At dusk the two cavaliers hazed two unladen horses out of those rustled from the kingsmen. They saddled them and struck out east to build fires far out on the horizon. The others lay down in the dark. No fires were permitted, no cooking. They buried their refuse in the frozen ground like cats. The wolves prowled in close and no one shied them off. It had been nigh forty hours since they last slept. The tusker died in the night. They could not burn the body so the orckin dismembered it and piece by piece they tossed it to the wolves.

  They broke camp before sunup and in that golden hour the runragged horses blew great clouds of sunlit vapor. The dustcloud of the risen rose no longer behind them but alongside them. By noon the firebuilders had rejoined from the east and by evening the black haze of the dead had begun to fill the southeastern sky. They set more fires the following day and for four days straight they rode their mounts into the ground and fired each new carcass until the ether ran dry.

  Early on the sixth day as the sun issued from paperthin mountains Mym saw a gray cloud scudding up the northern sky. The risen were now less than two miles behind them and the ether was long gone. No beast but the mule could manage more than a hurried walk. By noon she could see the tumbledown walls of The Last Fort quivering in a sourceless heat and the treetops rising out of its courtyard and the men stood on its stone parapets. The risen teemed now a scant five hundred yards and the cavaliers occasioned to twist in their saddles and fire their rifles at their harrying. An hour later the company was turning along the smoke-venting rends that ringed The Last Fort and up a trail through a gap in the chasms. A sentry strode out of the gatehouse as far as the second ring of vents and he hollered at them. Uhquah hollered back. The sentry looked down along the vents where laborers tied off to stakes in coal-stained smocks stood working long poles up and down into the chasms as if stoking the earth's inner fire. The sentry looked back south. The risen outrunners, one or two hundred of them, were just coming to the first ring of the vents and threading through the safe path and into the second ring.

  The sentry called back to the laborers who left their poles where they stood and cut their ropes and began to run toward the gatehouse. He looked at Uhquah and said something to him. The cavaliers urged the last from their fainting horses as the first of the flies buzzed about them. The last Mym saw of the sentry he had pulled a flask of ether from his neck and had begun to douse his longsword.

  Mym followed Uhquah through the gatehouse's archway and beyond as if parading in a kind of triumph. A wall of raised voices chorused beyond the threshold. Ash fell from the sky like white rose petals. Children ran alongside the horses. Their procession was like a coronation. Men and women thronged them and others ran to the ramparts' defenses and ever did Mym look among them for sign of the brigadier. She saw only the device of the baron and the colors of kingsmen, and she knew within those walls they would find no solace for they'd arrived at the last bastion of the armiger's army.