There at the brackish delta piled the alluvial washes of silt and mud and bones, so many bones: sun whitened bones of men and women and children, tallowed bones of horses and mules and oxen, blackened bones of the dead risen up and burned away. More heat out of their fulmination than the meek southern sun yielded to those dark figures fording that mire between the deadlands and the old capital. Into a land beyond reckoning they passed and traversing the sluggish stale end of the river they now left the suburban stretch and entered the erstwhile center of the world that was. A wasteland of broken homes and abandoned arcades and trash strewn streets as if all the worldly possessions left behind had since been dragged out for a great market at the end of time. Frost spread in the shadows cast and the wet soles of those gaunt pilgrims stuck to the icy pavers so that they gaited heavily and disjointedly as if through thick mud. They picked a way around rotten crates and shattered glass and moldy rags now so stiff they kept their twisted and bundled forms when lifted off of the ground and tossed back upon it.
Following the longhorn’s spread they turned down an alley and behind them vanished the flattened country, the stomped down fields, the burned down orchards, the hoarfrosten fens. Lands once fertile and selfless now cracked open and laid bare, disassociate of life and its vast web, malevolent. Everything there now long lost. Ahead of them rose the stone wall of the capitol and its spires, impossibly high, higher even than the mountain of the dwarves that he might one day call home. They appeared as unweathered as the sheer palisade from which they shot even as the harsh wind and nightly freeze did abrogate this first and last outpost of civilization. A half million homes being ground to dust by the simple apocalypse of abandonment. A million people slain by their own bowels, burned to ash and blown to tumble endlessly across the tundra or sink into the sea. Or raised to serve the manstone's mistress.
In the morning shade of this wall they skulked. Above their heads distinct strata of the bricklayer’s trade passed through differing principles and methods and quarries. Orc recognized the forgebrick about forty feet up and from this reckoned the wall and the city it circumscribed must be thousands of years old. From this one ribbonous structure he for the first time understood the implacable withering of humankind and the king’s intention to retake his grandfather’s seat. That which was before now surpassed everything to come. In art and artifice, in study, in tracts both built and wild, in civility. Why live on in the decline you decayer, you gnawing beetle, you slickbacked destroyer of grandeur and collector of shit?
The longhorn now climbed a place where the wall had suffered a breach and its earthwork core was exposed. Up they went with feet and hands, the animals made to climb like mountain goats. From the catwalk atop the wall they could see the tremendous bergs that silently slipped into the harbor like ships of old yet taller and vaster, floating keeps with sparkling icicle turrets and blinding white parapets and desiccated moulins plumbing their dungeon depths below the waterline. Heaped upon the jetty and jammed along the berths buoyed the spars and masts and timber remains of hulls smashed to pieces by the incursive ice. Waterlogged with bloated slickgray shapes casketed between them, come down the river from the deadland plain and eddied into the open mouth of the harbor, rising and falling with the tide, rising and falling at their mistress’ command.
A mile up the catwalk, past the tumbledown bastions and buzzard rookeries, the nearest of the city's spires thrust skyward as if in defiance of the degeneracy afoot. Its subtle curve and taper and razor edge reminded him of Ogaz’s tusk. A white banner of vapor or perhaps snowdrift streamed from its pinnacle and as they halted and leaned back to peer at its heights he thought he could hear the wind crack and scrape as it was torn asunder. The facets were obsidian black and oblique and regularly recessed for defense or aesthetic or some other intent and in these recesses a sparkling suggested of deposited snow and ice. Beside him the dwarves murmured wondrously to one another and he felt as though he would never see its like again yet there were four more of them standing at irregular intervals along the curtain wall. Their purpose a mystery to him.
Within the curtain wall the metropolis jumbled, splaying to no discernable plan from below his feet to the far side where the distant thin flatness of the wall began to retract upon itself and encompass humanity’s downfall like a grayscaled serpent ouroboros.
“City of the damned,” said Daraway.
He turned to her. She too looked out over the expanse with her hood up against the breeze and he could see the air before her mouth shimmer with every breath.
“You came a long way to join them,” he said.
She turned her face to him and her irises seemed to spark out of their recess. “As did you.”
She looked off again. At the spires, at the city, at the rest of the company now filing along the parapet in and out of the merlon shadows in alternation of light and of dark. He thought she might say more but she did not.
Watching the others recede he said, "Come on."
She put her hand on his arm. "Not yet."
Where she touched him was warm like sunlight. He looked at her fingertips. They’d been blackened again.
He nodded at them. “You fought your way up.”
“Your track didn’t give us much choice.”
He adjusted his hatbrim and he turned to her square as if he might shove her off the parapet. “You didn't come up here for us.”
“No.”
She looked once more at where the company had gone, now disappeared into a gatehouse. “Do you know of the palatine archive?”
“The man?"
"The place."
“Yeah I know of it. The brigadier had scrolls out of it from before. She shared those she thought useful in my education.” His gaze turned back to the cityscape. “It's down in there somewhere.”
“What of the man?”
“Of him I know only that he exists in the same way I know there's a king out there someplace with me topping his shitlist.”
She laughed and in that moment it seemed to him as though the sun burned a little brighter. There was something about this woman beyond her tricks and her power.
"The brigadier used to say he could read a whole book without having ever seen it."
She nodded. "He's as wondrous as these towers. Too birdboned to walk anywhere nowadays and blind as a mole, but he knows every volume, every scroll, every scrap of writing indexed in the old palatine library. What stack, what aisle, what’s beside it, what’s above it, below it, how many copies were scribed, by whom, where in the world they were last known to be.”
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
"That's a lot to know."
"It is."
"And he's why you came up this way."
She looked at him, at his open face and his inquiring eyes.
He understood. "He sent you here."
"You sent me here. You and Mym. Your kin whose homeland I helped to incinerate. Her folk who hope to repopulate.”
"What's that supposed to mean?"
She threw back her hood and reached back and gathered up her hair in both hands and ran her fingers through it and draped it over her shoulder. She pulled up her hood once more. "You said somewhere down in that mess is the old palatine library."
"The place, not the man."
She smiled as if he was trying to be funny. "In a certain of its wings is shelved a certain book with a bronze cover and goldcast pages and runes etched by the first dwarves."
"The Book of Cuts."
She brought a hand to her hood and she looked hard upon him. "You know of it."
He uncinched his satchel and withdrew the brigadier’s journal and opened it to the page with the longhorn's corrections. He held it there with his thumb in the gutter and he held it at arm's length so that they could both look upon it. "Here's a trace made off it."
The woman's fingers reached out to the sketch of the orcstone and the annotations around it. As she began to read what was written there he said, "What do you need with the Book?"
Her lips moved for a time. Then she looked at him again.
"You're not going to tell me."
She didn’t answer.
“You still don’t trust me.”
"You might die."
"You mean I might be made risen."
"Yes."
“Did you tell Mym?”
“Yes.”
“She might die too.”
“She won’t die.”
“She might.”
“She won’t.”
“And if she does?”
“It won’t matter. She can’t be raised. The queen cannot raise stone.”
“That out of the Book too?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. "Alright."
She pointed at the page and its struck runes and their substitutions. "Whose hand is that?"
"Yon longhorn," he said. He nodded ahead to the gatehouse. She let go of his arm and began to walk toward it. He replaced the book and cinched back the satchel and his long legs caught her up.
“What about you?” she said.
“What about me?”
“Why are you here?”
“I’ve got my reasons.”
“Is the manstone one of them?”
“Once maybe.” He looked out from under his hat at the tundra away south and west. “Given the forsaken state of this country I doubt it would do the madlands any good. I had a year with the orcstone and it didn't make a damn difference."
"It helped some."
"Not enoug." He shook his head. "I should've known better."
"How could you? Nobody alive knows what they're capable of, what their limits may be."
"And that's why you want the Book."
She nodded.
"Because you think there’s more to their restorative power than what’s evident in their use."
"Who told you that?"
"Mym."
She frowned.
He adjusted the ax where it laid against his side. “It was a long time getting up here. There's lots she shared you'd probably wish she hadn't."
The woman pinked up and quickly turned her head as if to survey the city below them.
"It goes both ways," he said. "There's plenty I told her I'd rather have kept to myself. That’s what happens when there’s trust.”
Neither spoke again until they reached the gatehouse. At its doorway she turned to him. "You're here for the brigadier."
“That’s no secret.”
“Do you think she’ll take you in?”
“I’m not a lost cub mewing after his mother.”
“One needn’t be young to be a fool.”
“You think I’m a fool?”
“Are you here to join the brigadier?”
“She sent me off to be a slave.”
“She sent you off to save your life.”
“Or to save her own.”
She looked at him. At the blade at his hip and the ax slung over the satchel. “Are you here to kill her?”
He shook his head slowly from side to side. “You've never seen her fight.”
"In fact I have. Five or six years past. Donnas took the court down to the Goldlands for some festival or other and I was there in the company of," she stopped short. "In someone's company."
"The earl."
Now she eyed him.
"I said it was a long time getting up here."
"Next time she opens her mouth feel free to shut it."
"Believe me I've tried. Tell me what you were doing with the brigadier." He heard the hunger in his voice.
"I wasn't with her. I just saw her fight. The local lords held a tournament among themselves and their champions and she was there among the combatants."
He looked off again and tugged down his hatbrim as if hiding some emotion. “How many rounds?”
“Seven.”
“And she won them all.”
The woman nodded.
“She always won them all,” he said.
He looked down at the backs of his hands. He turned them over as if examining their calluses and scars but he wasn’t seeing them. Not really.
“From the day I was old enough to wield a wooden blade I tried to best her. Twice a day, every day. I never held back. It wasn’t until the kingsmen came for me did I understand what she’d made me into.”
“A killer.”
“A paler version of herself.”
“You were younger then.”
“And she’s older now. And I’ve had two years in the pit and another fighting men and fighting orcs and fighting risen. It doesn’t make any difference. I wouldn’t cross blades with her unless I was ready to die.”
He nodded ahead. “Let’s go.”
She blocked his way with her hand. “Why do you come for her?”
He looked at her hand, at her. “You got gloves Id keep them on.”
She dropped her hand into her cloak.
“You don’t want them to know what you are. That foreign dwarf or that longhorn.”
She tilted up her chin. “Tell me why you’re after the brigadier.”
"She's got something I want."
"Which is?"
“An answer.”
He looked at her and in his eyes the woman saw his stare into the oblivion of the past. In the wells of his pupils lay the bottom of the pit and in the sclera reddened by unslept nights simmered the rage, always the rage, for something she could not understand.
“I need to know why she left me there,” he said. “Why she never came back.”
“But you know the answer.”
“I need to hear it from her.”
She nodded and proceeded into the gatehouse. Echoes of hooves clopped up a spiral stair. They descended treads fractured and riven by blasts shaped like starbursts and past sconces long dead and past the skinbag of a body laid out upon a landing all dried up and going to dust.
He heard a shout come up from below. A great scraping of metal. He jumped past Daraway and he ran to the bottom of the stair and he came into the yard of the gatehouse where a squadron of bloodstained horsemen surrounded the company and watched the longhorn reaching toward the one woman among them who called herself the brigadier.
