Above him the portcullis began to rumble shut. Through the gatehouse the cavaliers and their blown horses seemed to float upon a sea of upturned faces. They held flasks given to them by the crowd of townsfolk and they shouted bawdy solidarities at the defenders now manning the parapets against the coming horde.

  Orc and his kind were received somberly and without mirth. The multitudes stepped back from them, regarded them, sneered at them, would not touch them in their bloody clothes and sundried scalps and fangy smiles. Tulula raised an awful song. An outcry of deliverance. Relieved at the end of their dayslong flight Orc smiled down at Mym. She looked back and shook her head.

  "What?" he said.

  She nodded at the ramparts. "They're all kingsmen."

  He looked about. The portcullis was closed. Atop the walls archers lit arrows from braziers and aimed and fired them down at the unseen enemy. Counterfired bolts and arrows overshot in a flurry like spray off broken surf or else clacked off of the battlements and fell back to earth. Within the grounds a trebuchet groaned as it hurled burning pitch into the sky to the precise calls of a spotter up on the gatehouse. Its engineers sweated over its crankarms as they ratcheted up the counterweight of netted stones. There was a composed ease among their number, as if the current action was as regular an occurrence in their daily lives as whetting a blade or farriering a horse. Aware of the lethality present, practiced as to its handling.

  He turned back to the dwarf.

  "They're the armiger's," he said.

  "Aye. The selfsame who debarked at Here First to slay Glad Nizam and set her lads and lasses afire."

  He raised his eyes to the hero's welcome. Someone had taken up piping a horn and beating a drum. "Seems they're our allies now."

  She huffed. "If yer plannin te live in the delvin then ye need te learn how te keep a hardy grudge for vengin."

  It was the first time she'd mentioned that in a week. He found himself studying her, searching her hardlined face for sign of jest or joviality. There was none that he could see. Perhaps she had meant it after all.

  The tattered cavaliers had dismounted and were all of them being led to a squat bathhouse more ancient than the fort built around it. It was masoned of forgebricks and tiles and when its oaken door swung open steam flooded out of it. A dispatch of stable boys grabbed up the reins of their horses and led them along the broadside of the bathhouse to a corral where they were to be fed and watered from the stores of the fort, courtesy of the captain who garrisoned it. Men and women of the company leaned their arms against the walls and disrobed from their filthy rags and piled them at the door. Naked but for the dust and ash on their faces they ducked inside.

  Orc could feel Mym drawn after them. "Go get cleaned up," he said.

  She looked back at him. "I think it's best we stick together."

  "They won't let me in there."

  Over by the trebuchet Ogre carried an enormous iron cauldron with water splashing over the sides and once at the brazier he dropped it into the coals. The loaders gathered around the monster flapping their arms and yelling like angry ducks but what could they do about it. Ogre stood with his bare hands held to the heat and an oafish smile on his solitary head. Soon the water began to steam. The orckin gathered by and waited as Ogre plunged his head into the cauldron and withdrew it immense and gleaming, water sheeting down his face and streaming from his chin like an alpine cascade, his eyes blissfully closed, his pallid skin flushed and seeming to smoke from an inner fire.

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  Ordered by a hierarchy unknown to Orc the orckin then bathed in the now seething water. They dashed it over their reeking bodies and into their armpits and down their loins. Orc and Mym went last. The water scalded their hands. He found himself turning away from her when she undressed although she was unashamed of her figure and form. Still he turned as the brigadier had taught him to do.

  Now the cauldron boiled. The cold air drove them wet and naked to the very edge of the brazier. All of them threw their raggedy garb into the pot and with a stout pikeshaft Tulula agitated the foul brew. A brownish opacity thickened the water so that it appeared now to be a pot of boiling clay. After some minutes of this she nodded and two other orcs came to her side of the brazier and together they levered the cauldron onto its side and all of the water spilled out hissing over the frozen ground. The orckin collected their sopping articles from the hot maw of the iron.

  In nothing but his boots Orc wrung the water out of his clothes. Tulula and the others now levered the empty cauldron back onto the coals and, again according to a particular order, the orckin each draped their rags over the rim of the pot where they steamed and hissed. Again Orc and Mym were last. He had begun to shiver. She wrapped her arm around him and pressed her side against his, the wing of her hip against his thigh. Tulula, now clad, came to his other side and threw her cloak over him. His leg throbbed maddingly. Ten minutes later he pulled on his trousers and shirts, hot and stiff as if they had laid all day in the Madlands sun and their heat radiated back into him.

  All the while the cavaliers had begun to reemerge from the bathhouse. In the yard before it pilferers and spoilers had spread tarps of their salvage. Some of it was plundered from risen warriors, most of it they said was looted from the old capital: a breastplate gouged through the sternum with the seal of the monarch engraved on, cutlery and dishwares of tarnished silver and bronze and massive pewter steins carved and enameled with hunting scenes, countless rings alloyed from copper and tin with purported imbuements that would turn their wearers invisible or immortal or immaterial, painted portraits held open with stones at their curled up corners and tapestries pictographing the histories of families long dead and perhaps risen again. Some of their engines and arcanities made no sense to Orc and he doubted their value. One, a glass orb of some sort, he watched Mym hold against the sunlight and examine the colors it splayed on the ground. She bought it for half a silver. Beside them the orckin paid for their trinkets with scalps.

  As they waited without the bathhouse for the cavaliers to dress Mym palmed the orb like a fortune teller and studied the stones about while he sat beside her and looked at the string of stitches thatched up his leg.

  “The bath’s older than the fort,” she said.

  He turned to her.

  She one handed the orb and pointed to the place where the brickworks met the ground. “The foundation’s older yet. Dwarven made by the look of it.”

  He looked where she was pointing. "I can't tell."

  "Look at those cuts there. See how straight they go? And if ye listen just right ye can hear the sound of the chisel that made em still ringin away."

  He cocked his head as if to hear but of course he could not.

  "Not much left of it," she said, "but it's there. By the pitch I'd say those slabs were hewn two or three thousand years ago."

  He looked up at the wall of the bathhouse. "It doesn't look that old."

  "Well that isn't, but the foundation is. These bricks aren't older than six hundred. Looks te me like men threw em up over whatever stood here before."

  "So what stood here before."

  She appeared to think about that. "A temple maybe. A forge. Hell it could've just been another bath."

  "Doubtful."

  "Dwarves like te be clean just as well as yer kind."

  "You wouldn't know by the smell of them."

  "Har har."

  He bent over and looked at the founding stones. Through generations of caked ash and dirt he thought he could tell the difference in the material and workmanship. "So who built the temple or whatever?"

  "Not us. Blues maybe. Maybe others."

  Now she held the sphere to her chest and bent beside him to draw her finger across the seam of the mortar. "Dwarves aren't supposed te have lived this far north. Not now nor ever."

  “Yet here they were.”

  “Aye.”

  "What's it mean?" he said.

  "I don't know yet." She stood up. "Maybe nothin."