Numbering two and fifty when it set out from the Thumb the company was now a ragged dozen worming down the eastern slope of the mountains toward the outskirts of the old capital. Orc watched this band descend ahead of him: Uhquah out front aboard his mule and Mym walking behind with her hood thrown back as if better to hear his mutterings, Robby and Sterling the erstwhile cavaliers and the one horse between them, Ogre who hefted Booky in the crook of their arm and the greenskin who kept cackling as if at the absurdity of this the first freedom he'd ever known, Tulula and two big brownskins who were the last living orckin tribulated by Geltwald. Orc watched them stumble and stutter over the ice and snow and jutting rocks. He watched them but all of his attention was saved for the longhorn who now trailed behind him like the confessor who attends the condemned to the executioner's block. He turned then, hand wrapped in the brigadier's kerchief, opened his mouth to speak.
"Not now grayback," said the longhorn. He nodded ahead.
Downtrail processed a rag of twenty four colts hauling scrap and salvage out of the old capital. Orc could smell the sweat off them and off the six or seven scrounges who whipped them up the narrow cliffside. The colts scrambled across a screefield up an old mining track and the humans who harangued them wore the faded colors of the armiger. When the first of the scavengers spotted the company he held up his mount and draped his leather cat over his shoulder and touched the longarm at his knee. He half turned his head and called back to the others interspersed between the horses. His rag was strung together nose to tail and it wound down out of view behind one sheer arete and back into view around a second. This column of wouldbe studs were fleabitten and dappled and blue roan and they smoked in the cold morning and you could almost hear the vapor sizzling off of them, and each of them bore canvas panniers overstuffed with junk had out of a palace of some sort. The nearest carried a cracked vanity and six down pillows bundled together and a hickory cask of some grape vintage and a bride's mannequin with the mothballed dress still on and the lace veil falling over the hindquarters and dragging along the ground. The horses were bonily hipped and the track they climbed was no wider than a handcart there and the man at their head was plainly surprised to see another party sharing it. Already Uhquah was upon him. The stockman leered at the dwarf and tried to see past at who else was coming. Uhquah spat into the thin air as he passed and he nosed his mule into an imagined gap between the stockman and the rock of the mountain. The stockman's mount sidled precariously to the cliff's edge. The man reeled and for a desperate moment the mule and the colt became entangled. The man reached for Uhquah's reins but the dwarf had already kicked forward and as he passed he swept his hand knife along the colt's face and belly and the bridle began to unravel and the cinch strap split. The saddle and the man sat in it teetered and from where Orc stood there was a sudden dip of the horse's head and it reappeared free of its bridle. The man had vanished over the escarpment.
Orc peered over. There he saw in open space the man soundlessly racing away still stirruped to his saddle and gripping the untethered and flapping reins and rotating slowly in the air and exploding on a rock, the blood of him spraying out into a sheet and separating into globules that glistened and wobbled as they spun and shed smaller forms of themselves in a kind of crimson mitosis and dropped yet farther into ravines unseen like the liquified result of some shamanistic ritual, the quickened essence of life separated from flesh and fleeing down down down into the chasms of the world to consecrate ground untrod and unseen by any living thing, to coagulate and clot and harden the earth with the base elementaries of violence: salt and iron.
Orc reached for his blade.
“Hold there,” said the longhorn. “Ain’t no cause for that yet.”
He looked up and indeed the other drovers whipped on and whistled at the colts as if none had seen their leader fall or had heard the horrible smack of his body against the stone that sundered it to pieces. Their eyes were on their charges and on Uhquah who now disappeared around the first arete.
“Those are armiger’s men,” said Orc.
“Every one of em. Now I know you’re hungering for revenge like yon wedwarf, but there’s a truer path to it than those eight inches.”
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The longhorn nodded back up toward the high pass whence they’d fled that very morning. “A fair thousand of their putrefied folk are come to welcome them. What say we let these go and meet them.”
The riderless colt now passed where Orc stood. Its eyes downturned it wheezed and snorted and never stopped its forward progress. The first of the string close behind with its beggar’s spoils widening its load. Orc flattened his back to the rock and sucked in his gut as it passed by. He looked ahead to where Ogre stood twice as wide as the trail. As he watched they bodily picked up the next downhill horse and swung around and placed it on the trail above them, laughing all the while the colt looked like it couldn’t conceive of any equine reply to the violation.
The lead horses had already climbed out of sight in that severe terrain when the next of the riders came by. Her eyes were hugely white by the nearness of the orckin and by her encounter with the ogre. Orc tipped his hat to her as she passed and she did the same so stiffly she might’ve already been dead and risen again. In this manner did he and the longhorn allow the rest of the humans past and once past all went on as before.
***
They came out of the mountains in the cold darkness of the predawn gloaming and with the risen’s plague droning overhead. They ran ragged and hungry down the talus of an alluvial fan and through the crumbling adobe structures of an old mining settlement. The streets were pitted and silent. They never ceased their flight and as the sky tented up with the light of the coming sun they cut out of the town and onto the plain.
Orc and the others dashed into the open tundra without regard for stealth or subterfuge. The terrible mercy of the risen impelled them to recklessness. Ahead of them the hazy shapes of the old capital laid out on the horizon. Away left were arranged the forward elements of the baron’s army, come to finish the queen’s horde once and for all. With little cover on that frozen waste the baron’s outriders easily pursued them on horses once belonging to the company and headed them off and rode all of them to a standstill. There was but a minute where Uhquah’s gang and the outriders might have retreated together to the safety of the baron’s camp. This they wasted in a faceoff. In the face of the coming risen the kingsmen were too timid to start a fight and the fugitives too exhausted to finish one.
Orc found his way to Mym’s side. She shouldered up her carbine at the outriders. There were twenty or thirty of them. She drew her bead on their captain and she offered for Orc to take her longarm out of her pack.
“I don’t know how to use it,” he said.
“We ought te have taught ye.”
"It's too late now."
"Pull it out. It's charged up. Ye can get at least one shot off if it comes te that."
"That's alright."
"What if they start shootin?"
"What if the world breaks in two?" he said. "Consider it."
"I have plenty."
The first of the carrion flies now buzzed about his face and landed upon his arm. The outrider captain, a man with a dragoon pistol pointed at Uhquah, called for them to lay down their weapons. That they would not be harmed.
“How close are those risen?” said Mym.
He looked across her. The cloud of the plague now occluded the mountains. “Quarter mile.”
“They see the army here?”
“I can’t tell.”
“Are they turnin?”
“No.”
“Slowin?”
“No.”
“Well,” she said, “I guess that doesn't mean anythin either way.”
“No it doesn't.”
Perhaps because the scouts were human or perhaps because she recalled the weird’s prophecy the woman Robby now threw down her rifle and crossed over to the line of kingsmen. From the company’s only horse Sterling half lowered his bird gun and swore after her. She gestured rudely back. He kneed his mount around to present a narrower target to the outriders. Then he looked to Uhquah.
Orc looked also and saw the blue dwarf sagging in his saddle. Even the mule seemed finished, its back bowed, its head down, its nostrils flared wide and wheezing. Uhquah aimed his depleted carbine one handed and with his other hand he waved off the flies and wiped his eyes.
“What say you?” called the captain.
Orc watched Uhquah. The dwarf seemed to be fumbling at his belt.
“How close now?” said Mym.
His eyes flicked south and he saw the motion of their arms. “Bowshot.”
“You ready?”
“Just waiting on you.”
Uhquah’s fist now rose and as all watched he placed the stem of his pipe into his mouth. “Alright then,” he called to the captain.
A horn pealed flatly as the sun breached the rim of the world. Orc noticed Mym’s barrel lower slightly and he heard the whistle of the arrows overhead. He felt the sweat bead down his underarm as he choked up on Booky’s blade. He watched the captain turn his head from the dwarf to the risen to the picket whence he’d come. The man stood in his stirrups to give some order and his head jerked oddly and his hand reached to the knife now sticking out of his throat. Robby was at his stirrup grasping at his thigh and all at once Orc charged and Mym fired and the glass tipped raven fletched arrows began to fall among them all.
