When she turned them north again the sun hung away west half hidden by the bluish coalsmoke out of the vents. A new plume was rising from the faint shadow of the fort walls. Upcountry thunderheads sagged over rocky uplands and dragged a blanket of snow behind them. The orckin blindly followed her reckoning and the longhorn brought up their rear. She led them until dusk and as soon as the sun was hid the orcs pitched their weapons upon the ground and collapsed beside them. They made no fire. Mym came to Tulula with the candle and the malachite but the sow was already asleep and Mym saw her wound was not so deep. She trudged back to where Orc lay and she unrolled her bed and slept beside him. No watch was kept.

  Midnight lightning flashed out of the upcountry steeps and the shadow of the peaks seemed to dance about in the flickering and flaring. Mym woke and watched the blue fire shimmer and saw figures of jackrabbits moving darkly upon the plain. She heard a snort and a nicker and she sat up and there Uhquah sat on his mule covered in blood and bile, the stem of his dead pipe yet clenched in his teeth. Behind him a pale horse snuffed the tundra with its catchrope trailing. The blue dwarf nodded at her with a wan liquidity in his eyes. She nodded back.

  Come sunup she saw the cavaliers Robby and Sterling curled up on the ground who had ridden double on the solitary horse. Orc stirred, checked his stitches, blinked toward dawn.

  "You got any food?" she said.

  "No."

  “None of that smoked jerky?”

  He shook his head. “It was in my bag.”

  “Well we can stitch ye another when we get back te the delvin.”

  “Her book was in there too.”

  She frowned. “I’m sorry te hear it.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  She looked north toward the mountains. "She came this way."

  “You think so?”

  “I know it. Six days past accordin te the stones’ tellin.”

  He turned to her. “You’re getting through to them.”

  “Aye and it’s about time.”

  He looked at her. She looked back. “We can depart anytime ye want,” she said.

  “Alright.”

  Stiffly he got to his feet. He put out a hand as if for balance and his face lost some of its color.

  She eyeballed his calf. Some fluid had seeped out of it overnight. “How’s the leg.”

  “Doesn’t matter one way or another. Let’s get going.”

  As Mym stood she heard the sharp whistle of the longhorn. The cavaliers started awake and Uhquah turned and pissed steam out of the frosted ground and then made his way to the mule.

  Orc looked at her. She looked back. “We’ll never be free of em,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Orc.

  They trod for days through the snow and sleet and snow again. In a frozen fog they took turns leading the mule and the horse up a subalpine snowfield. Those who followed bent forward over the slope and sank to their knees in the hoofprints. Looking up all apparent summits turned false. They passed out of the drifts and onto a facet blown clean of snowcover and through a hanging meadow of edelweiss and pygmy rhododendrons that trembled in the wind and waited for spring. Before they crossed back into the snow the bookmaker bought several longshanked scalps from the orckin and she tied these by their hair to the bottoms of the ogre’s unshod feet.

  That night they bivouacked at the top of a pass in an improbable refuge of stacked rocks assembled by some shepherd of yesteryear. The ogre couldn't fit through the doorway and was forced to huddle outside in the lee of the structure. The wind howled as it raked across the conicalled dome and it daggered through the gaps between the unhewn stones to swirl about the floor. Leaking snowmelt dripped from the ceiling and those of the diminished company sat helter skelter against the walls and listened to the tempest without.

  Mym hunkered down deep in the hood of her furs and tucked her hands under her arms and closed her eyes. For the first time in weeks she felt a kind of peace: the sound of the storm and labored breathing and murmuring stones, the sweet smell of sweat already dried and the ozone smell of cold woolens warming, the swollen fullness of her fingertips and cheeks and toes as they flushed out of numbness, all evoking a feeling in her of overnighting high on the white mountain. She almost felt she was home.

  "Goddamn this place," said the bookmaker.

  Mym felt Orc stir beside her. "Go to sleep," he said.

  "Goddamn the dark,” she said and Mym could hear the fear in her voice. “Goddamn the stink. And god fucking damn wondering every day if tomorrow's when I'm gonna get killed."

  "Welcome to the bottom of your pit," said Orc.

  The greenskin cackled.

  "Yeah well goddamn the pit too," said the bookmaker.

  No one said anything awhile. Mym listened to the regular patter of water dripping onto the sandy floor, to buffets of wind rising and falling.

  "We ought to check on Ogre," said Orc.

  "Be my guest," said the bookmaker.

  Mym felt Orc move. She tunneled halfway out of her hood and opened her eyes. He was kneeling beside her touching at the stitches.

  “Ye goin out?”

  “Yeah.”

  "Ye want some company?"

  He looked up. "No."

  She watched as he stared about the hut. At the meanness of it and the shambles of its once proud occupants.

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  "You still have that candle?"

  "Aye and I see where yer headed with the thought."

  He nodded and then he ducked through the doorway and into the night.

  She dug in her things and leaned forward to place the candle in the center of the hut. She lit the wick.

  "Let there be light," said the longhorn.

  A steady flickering blossomed around her and she could see the men and women and orckin all lock their eyes on the solitary tongue of flame. All except the longhorn. He held in his enormous hands a small black book. He licked his fingers with a dry tongue and turned a page and held the book toward the light of the candle.

  "That's Orc's," said Mym.

  The longhorn quit his reading. He looked at her. Then he continued to read.

  Orc blew back in out of the storm with the reins of the horse and the mule wrapped in his hand and the animals trailing after. As they stumped dripping and snorting inside Robby spat. "I ain't sleepin with no goddamn mule," she said.

  Orc had turned to the beasts and was wiping newfallen snow from their backs. "They'll die in that blow. I about lost my fingers taking a piss."

  The cavalier made to stand. "Said I ain't sleepin with no goddamn mule."

  "There's plenty of room outside." Orc turned and stared down at her. "You’re welcome to sleep with Ogre."

  "Ogre likes a cuddle," said the greenskin with a needle-toothed grin. "A cuddle and a snack."

  Robby sat back down and angled away from the animals that now filled the interior of the hut. The horse raised its tail.

  “Aw goddammit,” she cried.

  The greenskin cackled again.

  Orc returned to his spot beside Mym and now he noticed the book in the longhorn's possession. She watched his jaw set when the longhorn withdrew the pencil from the binding and made an annotation in a margin. His fists clenched as the longhorn said, “Wrong again,” and wrote another mark upon the paper. When the longhorn drew out the kerchief and held it to the candlelight Orc began to rise.

  She caught his wrist and pulled him down. He glared at her with his eyes on fire and she subtly shook her head.

  The longhorn sniffed at the kerchief and Orc tried to rise again but she held him fast with that iron grip. Flourishing the kerchief like a conductor the longhorn gestured with both hands to those beside him and to those on the far side who watched him through the legs of the animals as if they had all gathered in that place just to hear his good news.

  “All things in this world were designed to be as they are through opposition and strife,” he said. “You, this hovel, the mountain beneath you. All busted up in accord with the violence that drives creation. You ain't got to trouble yourselves with why things are how they are, or just what it is you’re supposed to do or who you’re supposed to be. The board’s all set. Each of you’s a piece. The rest of it’ll work out in the scrumming.”

  He held up the journal and he flipped from page to page where various flora and fauna had been sketched by a practiced hand and extensive notes written in a flowing script. He turned each sheet to face his audience like a schoolteacher reading a picturebook to illiterates.

  He flipped to an illustration of a muroid, belly up, incisors prominent. “Look at this little shit. Rats ain’t worrying about what it means to be vermin. Sooner or later you’ll die in the dark and they’ll gnaw what’s left of you. Your flesh is their meat and mead and from your raw ingredient they brew their milk to suckle their young.”

  The longhorn closed the book and wrapped the kerchief around it and tied it off. He held it up to his witnesses. “This here’s the folly of one obsessed with purpose and place. Of one who thinks absolution resides in knowledge of the momentary. Collecting, prodding, cataloging things as they were when she chanced on them.”

  He looked at Orc, “And discarding them after. As if they’ll stay as she found them forever. No regard for the wider view. Like a blind man groping a mammoth’s trunk and thinking he knows the serpent. Like a mother cradling an infant and thinking she knows the man he’ll become.”

  He feigned to place the book within the candleflame and Orc tore free of Mym’s grip and stood up. The longhorn looked at him with a cruel smile. “It’s all bullshit scalerboy. Better for wiping your ass with. You think knowing her’s going to give you some greater mastery over your fate. But it’s lies. All lies. I tried telling you once already that the only path to certainty is this.”

  The longhorn now held forth his iron maul. Its cannonball’s black iron sphere underlit in the dark like a moon made of coal. Like an antimoon to those warring orbs that then lanterned the storming overstory.

  “The priests say only man can enslave man. Ain’t that the greatest lie ever told. The god of men enslaved man, for it was that god that gave them reasoning and regret. In a single stroke he made them the most vicious of nature’s creatures and the most furtive.”

  He held up the book again as if to swear upon it. “See the woman, your brigadier. In her reasoning originates all of her guilt. She voyages yon and hither jotting and scribbling. Ever chasing justice and truth in creation. Ever forgetting the one truth that all others must obey. The one that bends creation and creator to its will. Now see the vermin. It knows nothing of itself or its place in the world. It chews the flesh. It broods. It dies. It ain't creation but destruction that's the final cause of our world.”

  “Sounds like nakshit te me,” said Mym.

  The longhorn’s head swung to her. “Tell us what joy your creating has wrought, wedwarf. Deeper into this hollowland it drags you. Away from your kin, away from your home. You think by learning the secrets of life that you might dictate its terms. That you might defeat death. Ain’t that a folly.”

  He looked at the candle. Frowned at it. Gestured to it. “There’s your end. All into heat. All conflagorating toward universal tepidity.”

  Now he turned back to Orc. “Your brigadier looks for truth by knowing of the world. You seek it by knowing of her. Thus you’ve made her your world.”

  He tossed the book and the satchel to Orc’s feet. “See your error?”

  Orc squatted down and gathered the effects. The others watched until it was clear there’d be no fighting that night. They turned in and with their heads against the stone walls they tried to sleep.

  Mym sat up with Orc. She watched him pass through each of the book’s pages as if counting them, as if their ordering ought to conform to his memory of them and not the other way around.

  “Ye alright?” she said.

  He made no sign that he'd heard her. He just continued turning pages. Toward the end he found the leaf bearing the longhorn’s corrections. Mym had seen it before: the ancient sketch of the orcstone, traced from an illumination found in a particular tome held in the royal archive, densely annotated in old human script and accompanied by the brigadier’s own speculations. The longhorn’s additions were not to these.

  Above the orcstone were several dwarven runes engraved on the original plate, copied from an earlier source by the human illuminators, copied again by the brigadier into her journal. To these the longhorn had made several crudely figured emendations.

  “You can read it,” said Orc.

  “Aye.”

  He looked from the page to her. “Tell me what it says.”

  She yawned and blinked in the dim light. “Well these here are runes of the first dwarves and they appear te be talkin of the orcstone’s origin and fate. The part the otaur marked on reads ‘the shard of The First lost among the firespawn.’ Now he’s struck the symbol they used for The First, which is what they called the stone of the earth and what we know now is the first stone of the world, and he’s written in the rune for creator. Then down here he’s struck the rune for lost and put in one for hidden.”

  “The shard of the creator hidden among the firespawn,” said Orc.

  “Aye.”

  “And the firespawn are us.”

  “Aye it was their word for orckin.”

  He looked back at the page. “Hidden from whom?”

  She yawned again. “That I can’t tell ye. Nor how an otaur raised in a camp came te learn the runes of the first dwarves.”

  “Uhquah taught him.”

  She nodded at that. “Aye it’s likely. I can’t see any other way, but I can’t figure why he’d do such a thing.”

  She pulled up her hood and settled back into her furs.

  “Get some sleep,” he said.

  “Aye I plan te.”

  As she drifted off she could feel him still hunched over the book. Still worrying over the meanings of things millennia past their importance. “Oy Orc,” she said, “Don’t stay up over it. That otaur’s full of shit.”

  Some time later she felt him lean forward and she heard him blow out the candle.

  Next morning she was first to stir. She packed up her candle and ducked under the horse and strode out into the predawn. Moonslight cast the snowscape in a cerulean gloom and the thick silence and the ultramarine glint of the sky and the glittering snow made her feel as though she walked across the bottom of the ocean. Around the far side of the hut a huge drift of snow snored. She untied her trousers to relieve herself and as she squatted she could see the country they had crossed the day before. She could see the mass darkening the slope they'd climbed. She watched it creep ever closer. She tied up and poked the mound awake and went back inside to gather the others.