by D. P. Prior
“Homunculus,” Nameless said. “Had my fill of them in Gehenna. Shifty little shoggers. Still, he’s left the door open. Fancy a butcher’s?”
The instant he crossed the threshold into the vast room, Shader was freezing. Frost caked the walls, and set into the ceiling there were blue crystal globes and vents that gusted down chill air. The floor formed a walkway around a domed cage made from the same green-flecked black as Nameless’ helm. Within the cage, a red-scaled and winged reptile, easily the size of a wagon, lay curled up and unmoving. One plate-sized eye was half-open, the sclera yellow, slit down the middle by a purplish pupil. Fangs like scimitars protruded from either side of its crocodile-snout.
“It’s alive,” Nameless said. There was awe in his voice. “Listen.”
Low, rumbling breaths sent faint shudders through its scales, and plumes of steam rose from its cavernous nostrils.
“Poor ol’ Rugbeard was right,” Nameless said. “Seems there were dragons, after all. Just never thought I’d see one in such a state. Have to wonder, though…”
He pressed up close to the bars, and Shader did the same.
“About what?” Shader said.
“If there really was a Lord Kennick Barg to blow that dragon up with his balloon. If there really was an Arnoch.” Nameless snorted and then shut the door on that idea by jabbing a finger through the bars at the dragon.
Lacerations crisscrossed its thorax, and a fresh incision that had been stitched with thick twine weeped blood and pus. Its forelegs had been hobbled, and its frost-dusted wings hung limply, pierced with sparking rings. Gossamer threads pulsing with beads of light trailed down from the top of the cage and attached to the rings.
Shader moved around the walkway to the other side and instantly shut his eyes against the horror there. Half the dragon’s skull had been removed, replaced with glass, and within, glowing metallic worms burrowed in and out of its exposed brain.
He started as Nameless clamped a hand on his shoulder.
“Come on, laddie. I’ve seen enough.”
Leaving in silence that felt almost reverent, they continued past row upon row of sealed doors. Muffled noises came from behind some of them—chirps and growls, moans and gurgles. A few of the doors had windows, and through them they could see all manner of aberrations: tentacled things with the heads of women; giant clams that scuttled in frantic circles, snapping voraciously at invisible food; four-legged fish with cloven hooves; spiders with wings. In one cell-like chamber, there was an enormous mawg with a glass bowl for a head, within which the brain had been divided into segments connected by copper wire. Its eyes were set on stalks that protruded from the bowl, and one of its arms had been replaced by a pincer harvested from some gigantic insect.
When they reached a stairwell, Nameless led them up a floor to a sprawling hall, where dozens of the floating disks they’d ridden out of the poison gas carried homunculi up and down. If the creatures spotted them, they didn’t show it, and Nameless didn’t let Shader linger long enough to find out. They were immediately off into yet more labyrinthine corridors, until they reached another stairwell leading up to the next level.
Shader’s knees ached, and his calves were burning by the time they reached the top and emerged into a diamond-shaped room with a door set into one of its walls. It was open, and a sparkling silver trolley stood right outside. There were a number of steel implements on it—forceps, tweezers, a miniature saw—and a yellow sack of some glossy material hung from a hook at the top.
“Either there’s a way through here,” Nameless said, “or we backtrack; though these ol’ stumpy legs of mine might have a thing or two to say about that.”
Shader couldn’t care less either way. If the dwarf had jumped off a cliff right then, he’d have followed.
Nameless stepped through the doorway and immediately backed straight out, retching and groaning.
“What?” Shader said, grabbing his shoulder. “What is it?”
Nameless waved him away and bent double, clutching his stomach. “I will not throw up in this shogging helm. Understand? I refuse.”
Shader was sure he was talking to himself.
Nameless straightened up, and his chest rose and fell like a bellows. After a moment, he let out a long sigh. “Laddie, you don’t want to go in—”
But Shader was already at the doorway. “Nous preserve us,” he whispered, covering his mouth and nose against the stench—rot, decay, death, with something astringent that made his eyes water. Even breathing in short sniffs of air through his fingers, he had to fight the impulse to gag, but at the same time, he didn’t retreat. Couldn’t.
Inch by inch, he crept into the room, taking in the grisly scene with an unblinking sweep. Tiny bodies hung from meat hooks—human bodies. Babies. More were laid out atop burnished steel tables, and still others had been crammed into jars filled with greenish liquid. The lid of a long metal chest was partially open, with an infant’s foot sticking out of it.
Shader gasped, and instantly a wave of nausea washed over him. He looked back at the doorway. Nameless was standing there, cradling his axe. The eye-slit of the great helm panned slowly across the room, drinking in the abomination. Was this what Sektis Gandaw saw as work? Was this how he wiled away the centuries?
Shader turned back to the tables. There was something about the bodies lying upon them; their necks were arched at unnatural angles. He stepped in close and touched his fingers to a stone-cold cheek so he could move the head. He flicked a look at Nameless, as if communicating his revulsion could somehow lessen it. The baby’s spinal cord had been snipped just below the base of the skull. Same with the others. And they were all so tiny, smaller than any newborn he’d seen.
He felt Nameless hovering at his shoulder, turned to him.
“Are they—?”
“No, laddie. No, I don’t think so.” Nameless lifted a baby’s waxen arm and examined it. “Proportions are wrong for a dwarf. They’re human.”
Shader started to protest that they were too small—too small to have come to term—but then he noticed the corpse had no hands, just bloody stumps with protruding nubs of jagged bone. The feet were missing, too, as if they’d been crudely hacked off.
Using the table to steady himself, he edged toward the chest and lifted the lid. The foot that had wedged it open dropped to the floor with a dull thud. There were hundreds more inside, frozen in ice that had a pinkish tinge from the blood. He lowered the lid and slid to his knees. His head dropped, and his hands automatically clasped together, as if he were going to pray. Only, he had no words; nothing but a silent scream that welled up from his guts to his ribcage. He tried to breathe, but that just forced the torrent upward into his skull, where it bubbled and seethed and pressed for an exit. But when the dam burst, it was with a whimper. He barely noticed the tickle of tears rolling down his cheeks.
“Why?” he muttered in the voice of the boy who’d lost his dog to an act of violence so casual it seemed almost banal. “Why take their feet?”
He didn’t expect an answer; didn’t even expect the dwarf to hear him, but Nameless let out howl full of despair. Shader pulled himself up using the chest, turned round in time to see the dwarf raise his axe overhead and roar. The sound reverberated through the room, but as it petered out, Nameless sagged against the edge of a table.
“This is…” He turned the eye-slit on Shader. “Even I… with the black axe… I mean, I couldn’t have done such… Wouldn’t!” He let go his axe, and it clattered to the floor as he made his way over to Shader and grabbed him by the hand.
“I killed them—my own people; hundreds of them, but not children. Not babies.”
“It was the axe, not you,” Shader said. “Never forget that.”
Nameless shook his head. “I should have been stronger. But no matter how weak I was, it couldn’t have made me do this.” He released Shader and held out an arm as he turned to take in the room. “Not even the Pax Nanorum could have made me kill a child… Could
it?”
Shader didn’t know. How could he? He’d not been there, never even clapped eyes on the black axe. He wanted so much to believe Nameless had the strength of will to resist the power of the Abyss, but he’d succumbed before. Why should the Demiurgos’s will be any less potent when it came to killing children?
He reached out, laid a hand on Nameless’ shoulder. “No, my friend. You would have beaten it. It could never have made you do something like this.”
The great helm dipped in what Shader took as a nod.
“Never,” Nameless mumbled. “I could never hurt a child.”
Suddenly, he stiffened and pressed up close. “Pray for me.”
Shader took a step back. He swept off his hat, ran his fingers through his hair. “I—”
“Thumil used to, so he said. Must’ve worked, too, when you think about it. I got this helm.” He rapped his knuckles on it. “Shogs up any chance of a flagon of ale, but it freed me from the axe. Thumil always said his god worked through people, and I reckon even ol’ baldilocks qualifies.”
Aristodeus as a conduit for the actions of a god? Shader doubted he’d want to hear that; the mere thought would have challenged his sense of omnipotence.
He started to reach for his Liber, but instead touched the pendant the old man in the cell had given him. He held it up and stared long and hard at the image of the lady on its front. Closing his eyes, he silently asked her to help him—help him to pray, to whatever was true and right and holy; whatever it was that had been there before Otto Blightey sowed his seeds of confusion throughout the Liber.
Nothing happened, but then, he hadn’t expected it to. Not sure what else he could do, he placed a hand on top of Nameless’ great helm and made a show of moving his lips. After a moment or two, he turned away and put on his hat, tugging it low over his eyes.
“Thanks, laddie,” Nameless said from behind him. “Now you.”
“What?” Shader said.
“Pray for yourself.”
Shader scoffed at that, but Nameless grabbed him by the arm and spun him round.
“It’s what’s needed, laddie, if we’re to put a stop to this madness. Pray. For forgiveness, if that’s what you need. Pray that you break free of this stupor that’s followed you since the prison; but most of all, pray that you see this evil for what it is and have the courage to destroy it, all the way down to the roots.” He stepped back and pointed a finger at the gladius hanging from Shader’s belt. “With the tools you’ve been given.”
Shader felt the heat rise to his face. His muscles clenched, and he narrowed his eyes. “Oh, I’ll fight evil, all right, with my bare hands if I have to; but prayer… Even if I knew there was anyone listening, I wouldn’t hold my breath for an answer. And as for forgiveness!”
“So, what you did to those soldiers back at the jail,” Nameless said, “the ones who ran away…”
Shader smarted at the memory. He opened his mouth to say something, to shout, but Nameless’ words rolled right on over him.
“… You saying there’s no forgiveness for that, for what you did?”
Shader sneered and let his eyes rove around the room, drinking in the senseless death, as if it somehow affirmed him in his guilt. “How could there be?”
“So what about me?” Nameless said.
“What about—?” But Shader could already see where this was going.
Nameless thrust the great helm up close to Shader’s face. “What about me? If you’re beyond redemption for losing control, where does that leave me? You only killed a handful. I murdered hundreds. Hundreds!”
“It’s not a numbers game!” Shader said. “It doesn’t matter how many you killed; how many I killed—”
“Matters to me,” Nameless said. “Matters a whole lot.”
Shader gritted his teeth and tried to calm himself. “What I mean is, I acted from within. It’s who I am, and all this… this…” He fumbled the Liber out of his pocket and held it up. “This bullshit is just to keep me reined in, get it? Only, back at the jail, I was smarting so much, it would’ve taken a damn sight more than doctored scriptures to restrain me.”
“No,” Nameless said, walking away to the far side of the room and facing the babies impaled on meat hooks. “There’s more to it than that. Has to be.” He moved a couple of bodies to one side, and peered behind them. He pointed at the closed door he’d uncovered.
Shader nodded that he’d seen.
“Thumil’s no fool,” Nameless went on. “He’d not waste years of his life studying and praying if that’s all it was about.”
“And he’s right,” Shader said, slipping the Liber back into his pocket. “But it’s beyond me right now. I don’t even know who I’m praying to anymore.”
Nameless gave a last lingering look at the bodies then turned back. “Maybe you don’t need to know. Just pray, laddie. Head to the heart, Thumil used to say.” He bent down to pick up his axe, spat on the blade, and gave it a quick polish. “To be honest, I thought he was just drunk and rambling most of the time, but I’m starting to see the sense of it. Keep it simple.”
Without warning, he swept the axe up and brought it down hard on a table. It left a huge dent in the surface.
“This,” Nameless said, stroking the head of one of the babies, “is evil. That’s enough to tell me we’re on the right side, far as I’m concerned. You sorry for what you did to those soldiers? Really sorry?”
It was more than that. There was a knot of feelings—rage, despair, sorrow, shame—but Shader couldn’t unravel them. What he’d done was wrong, no doubt about that, but there wasn’t anything that was going to restore his honor, or his piety, for that matter. He gave the dwarf a long hard look. Nothing would bring back the dwarves Nameless had slaughtered, either.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Nameless said.
Shader’s head was reeling. This was insane. A dwarf red to the elbows in the blood of his own people lecturing him on prayer and forgiveness! He made a fist around the pendant, offered up a silent plea for help, for guidance. He didn’t know who the woman was supposed to be, but that wasn’t such a big change, considering his disillusionment with Nous and Ain. Something about the way the old man had given him the pendant, something about his serenity in the face of suffering made Shader want to believe it was a step away from confusion. Though where it would lead was anyone’s guess: a dead end, a false trail? Or maybe it was a strand of the golden thread, a hint of what lay beneath the doctrines of the Templum. That would be too much to hope for.
But one thing Nameless had said resonated with him. With the tools you’ve been given. Perhaps that didn’t just refer to the sword.
Nameless made way for him as Shader leaned over the baby, touched two fingers to its forehead, and muttered the prayer for the dead. Maybe it didn’t matter if Blightey had messed up the words. If Thumil was right—if the old man’s serenity was a witness—and there was a god worth praying to, then surely the intention was enough, whatever name you used, whether it be Nous or Ain or anything else under the sun. A true god, an omniscient god, a loving god would understand.
“Ready, laddie?” Nameless asked as Shader finished the prayer.
“Ready.” He clapped the dwarf on the back. “Now let’s go smite some evil.”
He still felt hollow; and he was acutely aware of why Aristodeus had lost belief in him; he’d lost belief in himself. But something had changed. What it was, was hard to say. He felt unburdened, somehow. Maybe it didn’t matter what Blightey had put in the Liber. Maybe it didn’t matter if he grasped all the mysteries of the Templum. Whatever had changed had started in the prison cell. There had been something fatalistic about the old man’s endurance. No, it was more than that: he’d been resigned, yet trusting, and the pendant was the key to that trust, Shader was certain.
A tingle ran through his hip, and his fingers strayed to the hilt of the gladius. When it didn’t burn, he grasped it tightly and felt it purr.
As Nameless pushed throu
gh the hanging corpses, he asked, “Why do you suppose these ones have hands and feet?”
Shader had no idea. He shook his head at the memory of the chest filled with feet. How come he’d found no sign of the missing hands?
“Makes you wonder why Gandaw chopped them off in the first place,” Nameless said. “It’s not like they were going to run away. And as for the hands, maybe he was worried they’d come back to life and throttle him for what he’d done to them.”
“Perhaps they need us to be their hands and feet,” Shader said, clenching his jaw. “Maybe we need to do to Gandaw what they can’t.”
“I’m with you there, laddie.” Nameless hunched over the door panel, trying to get a good look through the eye-slit of his helm.
“Let me,” Shader said.
It was similar to the panel Shadrak had shown him how to use to control the disk. At first glance, the glowing symbols were a confused jumble, but Shader willed himself to focus. How hard could it be to get the door to open? As if in response, a green shape drew his eye—a circle atop a triangle. A keyhole?
When he pressed it, the image expanded, and the door slid back.
“I would have had it in another second or two,” Nameless said.
The room beyond pulsed with a soft amber glow. Some kind of elliptical track ran round the center of the ceiling. Dozens of women were hung spread-eagled from it by metallic cords around their wrists, and others that inserted into a similar track on the floor. Their eyes were completely white, their mouths gaping. They each had the pallor of death, and yet their bellies were grossly distended, as if they were heavily pregnant.
The track carried them forward a few feet and clunked to a halt. Snaking tubes rose from the floor and inserted into their abdomens, delivering a brownish fluid before retracting. The track moved them on another few feet, and the same thing happened again.