There was a fire seething against the dark. He crouched watching it for a long time but he saw nothing move within its perimeter. He continued toward it yet it seemed to retreat ahead of him. He wiped his eyes. Dark shapes crossed between him and its flaring. And again. Risen perhaps. Or kingsmen. He carried on.

  As he got closer he saw it was a tree. Last of a great forest that had once encircled the boreal latitudes. The flames runged up its laddered branches and spiraled off into a sky devoid of stars as if each had turned its back in condemnation of this terrestrial offense. He sunk to his knees before it and accepted its last gifts of light and of warmth in this land devoid of both. He would like to have asked what excited it, what winds had blown and waved and jubilantly swirled it about, to have touched it and felt its every fiber thrum and surge, to smell its sweet freshness shaken from its needles and resin. But it had no voice left to answer but with the roar, the crackle, no wood that did not burn, no odor but that of smoke and ruin.

  He knelt there with his arms spread wide and his eyes shut against the glare and there were no stars above yet pairs of orbs now glinted from the land surround. Like a beacon of the summers that used to be did this midnight sun call forth long legged plovers that tottered to and fro and soft furred pikas and lemmings and marmots with noses wiggling and their nemesis the arctic fox who sat upon his heels as if in the passing truce that accompanies calamities and slow blinking snowy owls no bigger than his fist who squatted upon the tundra like a cub’s snowballs. His eyes shut he saw none of these creatures and his mind dwelled upon the shorthorn Saand and the mother tree who had once saved him but not saved herself and he lamented the loss of this great northern forest that once held down the very earth. He opened his eyes and now saw his fellow witnesses, they who’d once depended upon the forest for everything, who were now arranged around him attending this final pyre, watching their last home burn down with nowhere left to go, and with nowhere left to go what could they do but die?

  ***

  The sun found him alone under the black snag of the tree. Ash covered his face and burned in his eyes. He wiped it away and the thin mud it made from his tears. The sky was blue and as wide as the land. He saw no sign of the risen horde or the baron’s army. No sign of the birds and game who had held vigil with him during the forest’s wake. Standing north, nearer now, towered the tremendous spires of the capital whose morning shadows must have run to the western rim of the world.

  He rose and the world swung around. He was weak from his long fast. Reaching a last time for the shell of the tree he turned north and set off. He aimed for the tallest of the spires and he passed open country, fenced country, country trampled down and turned up by the passing of armies. At a slow moving river that mirrored the sky he knelt in the sandy mud and drank. He watched for fish or for fowl but saw neither. He watched for people too but he was alone.

  Around noon he began to follow the course of the river seeking some ford or bar or bridge. His gut felt as if it was eating itself. The sun was halfway to the western horizon when he intersected a pounding of horse tracks out of the south. He saw where they’d gone down to the water and how they too followed the river as if searching for a crossing. He walked in the mud they’d made by their passing and after some time he noticed one set of prints was a mule’s. And there was a different sort of hoof walking in a different sort of pattern. And there the monstrous clubfoot he’d seen in sawdust a hundred times. He was no Ogaz but he could tell these all passed together and from their wandering they were as tired as he. He could also tell no others had passed their way. He tried to count the different horses and came up with more than five and fewer than ten, plus the mule. He wished for his old tusker friend, or for Mym. He stood with his hand against the sun and looked back the way they’d come. Turning he looked downcountry to the stark line of the city wall now edging above the horizon. As if a parallel world was uncoupling from this one to ascend some refuge in the sky.

  He walked on. He passed an incineration in the middle of the trail and he picked something stiff and charred from its waste. He ate it. A mile later he retched it back and a pint of river water with it. He stayed bent with his hands on his knees and his feet spread on either side of his vomit. He swayed slightly.

  Toward dark his feet felt like someone else’s feet and he swore he was being followed by the bosun back when he was still risen or before the orcstone had brought life back into him. He kept hearing his gagged laughter but whenever he turned around there was nobody there. Just the silent river and the mud and the frozen pan.

  He overnighted in a stand of reeds. Emerald headed waterfowl flew out at his stumbling in but he was too slow to catch them. He slept dreaming of mush and woke with the sun under a newspun spiderweb. He followed the dewy strands with his eyes until he spotted their maker. He plucked it from its perch and put it in his mouth. Then he went on.

  He found their camp at day’s end. They were laid up in a wooden boathouse a hundred yards from an estate that had burned to the ground long before. The horses and mule staked out near the river. When he came up no one was keeping watch. Ogre was asleep in his bloodstained rags with the greenskin’s head propped on his belly and Booky tucked in under one arm. The blue dwarf was sitting on the edge of the dock sucking on his pipe.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  The longhorn saw him first, nodded at him. His eyes were darkly ringed and his horntips were crusted with blood and he now endured a pair of arrows in his left shoulder, their shafts broken off an inch above his hide.

  He saw Orc looking. He grinned. “Hooked under the clavicle,” he said. “Need to find a surgeon.”

  “Or a butcher.”

  The longhorn laughed. “About time you came back.”

  The greenskin was sitting up. Orc turned to him.

  “We thought yew was dead.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Me neither.”

  “You have any food?”

  “Naw.”

  “Are the others inside?”

  “Yeah.”

  He put his hand on the greenskin’s shoulder and they nodded at each other and he went into the boathouse.

  Rusted tackle and frayed ropes hung from the walls. The dock ran through an open wall in the far end and it piered out over the river. Down at its foot Uhquah sat with his legs hanging over the cold and flat current and a tendril of gray smoke wisped away from his pipe. From the toe of his boot a string hung obliquely to the water’s surface. Catching the sunset like a line of molten iron. Mym now stood beside the dwarf and gestured emphatically about something. At the pierhead a rotbottomed canoe had been flipped upside down. All manner of blades and long guns leaned against it and around these a quiet council was being held by a bunch of worn out folk he hardly recognized and some he didn’t.

  “You look like shit,” he said.

  The parlay turned and a dwarf he knew yet never expected to see again said, “Ain’t he just a goddamn hog.”

  It was Khaz, haggard about the face and with his beard half singed away. Across the canoe Daraway’s eyes glinted out from under her hood like a lingering wolf stalking your dinner scraps. They and the others stared at him woefully as if he had walked in with death as his shadow for their hope had been hard used in their struggle to get there. They looked at him as if he’d been caught in a lie though he could think of no wrong he’d done them. Khaz opened his mouth to speak but in that moment Mym came running up the dock and hugged Orc around the waist and said, “Ye slag brained man eatin rust sucker. Why’d ye go and get yerself gone like that?”

  Arms held awkwardly up and out he looked down at her as if uncertain what to do. He saw Khaz grab at his missing beard and Daraway furrow up her brow.

  She stepped back from him and slugged him in the thigh. “Where in the black heart have ye been? And how’re the sutures holdin?”

  She knelt down with her hands on her knees and got a look at his leg.

  “Yer lucky they didn’t infect on ye. What would ye’ve done then?”

  “Chop it off.”

  She rose. “Aye and it looks like ye've found the ax te do it.”

  He now nodded at Khaz and Daraway. “What brings you all up this way?”

  “Ye of course,” said Khaz.

  “Did something happen.”

  “Nothing like that,” said Daraway. “We thought you might need help.”

  “We should tell em,” said Khaz.

  “It can wait.”

  “I don’t know it can.”

  The woman's eyes darted down the dock to where Uhquah still sat with his pipe and his string. “It must.”

  Khaz sniffed and scratched his beard. He turned to Orc. "How’d ye find us?”

  “There were tracks and I followed them."

  "They might've run ye inte the baron or the risen," said Mym.

  "No. I knew what I was doing."

  "Did ye now?”

  He nodded. "All this wandering we've been doing I've had ample occasion to learn some things from your nosing about."

  "I knew ye were watchin."

  "Yeah."

  Mym was smiling. Khaz was glowering. Suddenly she turned to him. “What about ye ye old snaretripper?”

  "What's that now?" said Khaz.

  "How'd ye find me?"

  “The stones of this country never stopped rumblin bout the sharp tongued wedwarf stompin up their faces. I couldn’t get them te listen te anythin out of me mouth but they still had plenty te say.”

  "They weren't talkin about me."

  "By me beard they were, or what's left of it."

  Orc saw her smile at that too. He was too worn out to smile. Too beat up. "You have any food?" he said.

  "Nothin we didn't already eat," said Khaz.

  "Alright." He wanted to lie down and sleep. He looked about the boathouse. “Where are the others?”

  He turned to Mym.

  Where’s Tulula?”