by D. P. Prior
Dave was waiting for them on a broad avenue that led out above the city, where it met a dozen other walkways at a central hub comprised of granite arches, one for each path. He glared at them, eyes bright with frenzy. “Come. We must hurry. The dwarves are slow in discerning, and we have already wasted much time getting here.”
He turned and headed toward the junction, moving so fast, despite his lurching gait, that Shader had to jog to keep up with him. Rhiannon cursed, bringing up the rear. Dave approached the hub without slowing. It was unnerving how well he knew where he was going. If this were faith, it was like nothing Shader had experienced.
The instant the hunchback passed through their walkway’s arch, brilliant red light flooded the avenue. Shader blinked and shielded his eyes in time to see lumps of rock detaching themselves from the ravine walls beside each of the doors. Blurry gray shapes stomped out onto the crisscrossing avenues and swarmed toward the center. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw that they were not rocks, but people, short and thickset, just like Maldark. They carried weapons—axes, spears, swords, and crossbows, and they were armored in heavy scales that looked to be made of slate. Thick beards smothered gnomic faces, hanging to waist level or below, and close-set pebbly eyes glinted from beneath outcropping brows.
Shader glanced behind, where more dwarves flowed toward them, as if the stone of the walkway itself were morphing. There must have been a dozen approaching from the rear, armed to the teeth and grim as death. Hard eyes glared at him, eyes as merciless as the rock that spawned them, but when they were within arm’s reach, the dwarves stopped.
Shader turned a slow circle. Easily more than a hundred of the gray figures surrounded the central hub. Rhiannon’s hand went to the hilt of the sword on her back, but Shader took hold of her wrist.
“Wait,” he whispered.
She wrinkled her nose at that and snatched her arm away, but she made no further moves.
There was no give in those hard faces. Perhaps on normal ground, Shader could have taken a few of them, but on a walkway above a bottomless drop, he doubted he’d last more than a heartbeat.
The grinding of stone and the squeal of hinges drew his attention. One of the doors swung open, and through it processed a column of white-robed dwarves. An ancient graybeard led the way, hitching his robe as he walked. He wore tattered sandals and woolen socks with holes in them. Shader counted twelve in all, tight-lipped and solemn-looking, all very much focused on the light spilling from the arch, and on Dave, who was wreathed in crimson flames, but appeared not to have noticed.
The ancient dwarf worked his mouth thoughtfully and said, “Well, I don’t know… I mean, what do you suppose—?”
“Deception!” snapped a surly-looking dwarf behind him. “The alarm does not lie.”
A ripple passed through the white-robes as they conferred.
“But it’s never been tested,” someone said.
“How many Abyssal demons have you welcomed into Arx Gravis, Councilor Garnil?” Surly said. “And you, Councilor Moary?”
“Well, I’m not sure… I mean to say… What if…?” Graybeard said.
“The philosopher warned us,” Surly said. “Warned us the day would come. Kill them, I say. Let’s be done with it.”
Graybeard’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Now, Councilor Grago, that’s a bit hasty, don’t you think?”
Clearly, he didn’t, the way his gaze swept the surrounding soldiers, gauging their readiness.
Rhiannon leaned in close to Shader. “You might have turned into a pansy, but I’m not going down without a fight.”
Shader’s hand curled around the hilt of the gladius, accepted its calming warmth. His eyes roved about, looking for Shadrak.
“Don’t bother,” Rhiannon said. “Probably halfway back to the swamp by now.”
A white-robe made his way to the front of the group. Bald patches were spattered about his scalp and beard, as if someone had yanked out handfuls of hair. He pressed a finger to his lips, commanding the attention of the other white-robes effortlessly. He closed one eye, studying Dave with the other. “That one, I’ll grant you, does seem a tad malefic, Grago, but I’d say you’re doing the others a disservice.”
“Malefic,” Rhiannon said to Shader. “I like that. Shame old stumpy buggered off. I’d love to hear what they call him.”
Dave whirled on her, red flames licking at his skin. Shader felt a wave of nausea wash through his guts. The hunchback’s face was writhing, in a state of constant flux—lengthening, shortening, broadening, narrowing.
“See,” the one called Grago cried. “It works! The beast reveals itself.”
Hair sprouted from Dave’s chin then retracted. His nose went from hooked to straight, to bulbous, then stubby. His eyes were smoldering like burning coals, and when he opened his mouth, it was lined with jagged teeth, and a forked tongue flicked out.
“Save me.” Dave’s voice was a parched croak. He advanced on Shader in tortured, lumbering steps. “Pray to Nous for my deliverance. They have cursed me. Have you no faith?”
Shader reeled. He stared uncomprehendingly at the warping hunchback, but it was the words that paralyzed him. Not their content, but something more visceral. They were enfleshed, tangible, ripping into his mind with the force of barbed arrows.
Rhiannon backed into him as she drew the black sword, trying to get away from whatever Dave was becoming, but there was nowhere to go.
Dave’s arms cracked and lengthened; his feet burst free of his sandals, lengthening into talons, and his sackcloth tunic burnt away, the flesh beneath bubbling with tar that cooled into necrotic scales. “She has… killed your… faith!”
The words punctured Shader’s galloping heart, made him stagger, and then Dave sprang at Rhiannon, claws like sickles slashing at her throat.
The black sword came up to deflect them, but tentacles snaked from the demon’s back and wrapped around her arms and legs. Rhiannon gasped, the veins on her neck popping out as she fought for breath.
Killed… faith… Killed… faith. Sweat dripped from beneath Shader’s hat, trickled down his nose, seeped across his vision. In sudden shock, he wiped his eyes and stared at the red staining his fingers. Killed… faith. She had done it, yes. She was the one who’d kept him from Nous. He tried to pull the gladius free from its scabbard, but it was stuck—as if it refused him. He was about to give up, batter her with his fists, when there was a succession of hisses and thuds, and the demon’s body was peppered with quarrels.
The tentacles whipped clear of Rhiannon, and she stumbled back. Dave snarled and thrashed about, but the dwarves kept a safe distance, reloaded, and fired again. Dave recoiled this way and that, turned on the white-robes and prepared to spring.
“You don’t touch me, shogger!” Rhiannon screamed. “No one does!” Before her words had settled, she stepped in and clove him in two with the black sword. Each half of the demon slid away to the side, still writhing, still gibbering. Both halves of the face cackled and drooled, and then fleshy tendrils lashed one to the other and drew them together. All the way down the demon’s body, the mortal wound was knitting itself closed. A gasp went up from the dwarves, and armored troops took up defensive positions in front of the white-robes.
Dave laughed and turned his hellish eyes on Rhiannon as he started to sit up. “Stupid whore,” he said. “You are damned, and you don’t even know it. You think to slay me with a brother of the Abyss?”
Rhiannon flung Callixus’s sword from her, hands shaking, lips trembling.
The scales fell from Shader’s eyes, and certainty flooded him as he gripped the gladius. This time, it leapt from the scabbard. “I abjure you, Father of Lies!” he yelled, and flung the sword with all his might.
Dave screamed and jerked backward, the pommel jutting from his gaping mouth, the blade exiting the back of his head in a spray of putrid gore. His demonic frame shook and shuddered then was consumed in a burst of golden radiance.
When Shader st
ooped to pick up the gladius, it was as if Dave had never been there.
A hushed silence had fallen over the dwarves. The only sound was the slap of Rhiannon’s sandals as she approached the black sword. She drew her foot back to kick it from the walkway but then went rigid. She craned her neck, as if listening to something, screwed her face up tight, and then sucked in a sharp breath between her teeth. She glanced at Shader like a frightened child, eyes moist and ringed with darkness. Finally, she picked up the sword and returned it to its scabbard on her back.
“What happened to you?” Rhiannon asked, narrowing her eyes, lips curling into a sneer.
Shader bowed his head in shame. “It was the words… What he said.”
“He was a shogging demon, for Ain’s sake. What do you expect?”
Shader sighed and shuddered. “The Demiurgos always traps us with truth.” They weren’t his words, they were Ludo’s. How many times had he heard them and not understood? He’d come so close. So close to doing the enemy’s work for him. If it hadn’t been for the gladius being jammed in its scabbard…
“Take them!” Grago shouted.
Confused looks passed among the soldiers. Some of them advanced a step until an older dwarf in a red cloak and horned helm raised a hand to still them. He turned to the white-robes and shrugged.
Graybeard coughed into his fist and then said, “You get above yourself, Councilor Grago. We have yet to—”
“Discuss? Debate? Deliberate?” Grago said, playing to the crowd. “Haven’t we seen enough? The philosopher’s arch revealed the threat. What will it take, councilors, for you to actually do something?”
“A demon was unveiled, Grago, and it was dispatched. But of these others, we can say very little.”
“She has a black sword, Garnil!” Grago fumed. “You heard the demon; it’s an instrument of the Abyss.”
“Yes, well,” Graybeard said, “but what if—”
“No!” Grago yelled. “No, no, no, Councilor Moary. No more ‘what ifs’. Arx Gravis came this close—” He held his hands up to illustrate. “—this close to allowing the enemy inside. Have you forgotten what happened last time exceptions were made? I bet you haven’t, Councilor Thumil, for it was your friend, after all, who nearly destroyed us.”
The dwarf with the bald patches in his hair and beard bit down on his lip. He looked furious—or distressed to the point of despair.
“And let’s not forget how he did it,” Grago continued, whirling to take in all the assembled dwarves. “With a demonic axe not so different to the sword this woman carries!”
“Nevertheless…” Thumil said in a quiet voice. All eyes were immediately on him, and when he continued to speak, not a word was missed by the white-robes and the soldiers. He had their rapt attention. “…we are a cautious people, Grago, and the Deceiver is prowling round like a roaring lion, looking for someone to eat.”
There were grunts of agreement from the white-robes, although Shader noticed a couple of them leaned their heads together and whispered something. The soldier in the red cloak folded his arms across his chest and nodded, and a palpable calm settled over his men.
“We cannot afford rash action, not when we’ve seen today how close he is to our gates.”
“But we never act at all!” Grago said. “Uggghh!” He threw his hands in the air and then slumped, shaking his head.
“I propose that we lock them up until we’ve had time to confer,” Thumil said. “All those in favor say ‘aye.’”
There was a chorus of assent from the white-robes, and then they all turned their eyes on Grago.
“Aye,” he grumbled. “If we must.”
“Good,” Moary said, scratching his beard. “Captain Stolhok, would you mind terribly relieving our guests of their weapons?”
“Counfilor!” the red-cloak barked with a pronounced lisp. He approached Shader first and reached for the gladius.
Shader tried to warn him. “I’d take it—”
“Ouch!” the captain cried and flapped his hand about, blowing on it like he’d just stuck it in a blazing fire.
“—by the scabbard,” Shader finished. He re-sheathed the gladius, unfastened his sword-belt, and handed it over.
“What’f thif?” Stolhok lisped, fiddling with the belt.
“Prayer cord,” Shader said.
Stolhok looked to Moary, who looked to Thumil, who nodded. The captain handed it back, and Shader put it in his coat pocket.
Rhiannon sullenly pulled the black sword from its sheath and held it out, but the captain blanched and recoiled. He nodded for her to lay it on the walkway and then gestured for soldiers to take hold of her and Shader.
“We’ll leave it where it is,” the captain explained to Moary. “Better’n bringing it inside the city.”
Moary looked to the other white-robes for approval, and they nodded, all the while eyeing the sword warily.
Stone manacles were snapped over Shader’s wrists, and then Rhiannon’s, and they were bundled away through the arch and onto a walkway leading across the chasm. The stone door at the end ground its way upward, and Shader was shoved into a dank and musty corridor that felt like it hadn’t seen the light of day for a very long time. There was some kind of dim illumination, barely enough to see by, emanating from the stone walls themselves.
He cast a final glance over his shoulder, hoping against hope for some sign that Shadrak was still out there, but all he found was Rhiannon glaring at him like she wanted to scratch his eyes out and throw him from a great height.
He was almost relieved when they were separated. Rhiannon was dragged through an open doorway opposite the one they’d entered by, but Shader was taken down a winding staircase and along a series of low passages that forced him to stoop. At one stage, the soldiers up front walked straight through a wall. Shader tensed as he was thrust after them, then he was on the other side, as if the wall wasn’t there. He looked back at it, and sure enough, it appeared to be solid. He lifted his manacled hands to touch it and encountered cold hard stone. Soldiers grabbed his elbows and set him moving once more.
They marched him along a sloping tunnel that bored deeper and deeper into the ravine. After an age, they stopped outside an iron door with a grille set into it at head height for a dwarf. Three bolts, each as thick as a forearm, reinforced a sturdy lock. A soldier unhooked a ring of keys from his belt and noisily matched one to the lock, while another wrestled with the bolts. The door squeaked open on rusty hinges, and Shader was thrust inside. His heart sank when it clanged shut behind him. The key was turned to a trio of answering clicks, and then the bolts clunked into place, one after the other.
A dim, greenish glow suffused the walls, lending its sheen to the draping cobwebs and spiraling motes of dust.
It was a circular cell, empty, save for a shadowy shape seated on a stone bench. As Shader’s eyes adjusted to the low light, he could see it was a dwarf, powerfully muscled, wrists manacled to the bench. A black great helm covered his head, and chainmail hung down to his knees. His britches and boots were spattered with something dark that may have been blood, and he was coated with so much dust that he could have been mistaken for a statue. He was certainly as still as one, frozen in the rigidity of death.
The air was stale and musty, just like that in the domed tomb Shader and Barek had discovered in Fenrir Forest. His fingers automatically touched his forehead in memory of poor Osric, banished to the Void by a mawg shaman. Maybe this is what it had been like for him, all those centuries of captivity at the hands of Dr. Cadman. Shader fought to calm his pattering heart, told himself this was only temporary, until the dwarves had discussed what to do.
The brooding presence on the bench told another story, though. How long had he been left there before he finally died? And then the thought struck Shader: What if he wasn’t dead? There was no stench, no sign of rot. A prickling sensation fanned out beneath his skin. What if this wasn’t so different to what Osric said had happened to the Elect?
S
hader edged nearer and reached out with a finger, gently touched an exposed forearm. Cold. Lifeless. He checked the fingernails for blueness, but there was none, leaned in close to the helm and listened for breathing, but all he heard was his own reflected back at him.
It had the feeling of wrongness, of some dark magic he couldn’t explain.
He stepped back and stared at the eye-slit of the great helm. Green flecks glistened on the black casing, which appeared to be fused with the skin of the dwarf’s neck. Was it for protection in battle, or part of his imprisonment? Why would they need to chain him in such an impregnable cell, particularly when he was virtually fossilized? Even in such a docile state, the dwarf radiated immense strength.
Shader took another step back. Maybe this was some kind of demon, even worse than Dave. Perhaps they hadn’t been able to kill it and could only bind it and lock it away in the bowels of the city. That didn’t bode well for Shader, though. What if they planned on doing the same with him, leaving him here for all eternity, or until the next victim was shoved in the cell and found his petrified body, or more than likely, his skeletal remains?
A great pit opened up in his stomach, and his hope plunged into it. He groaned and whirled about, vainly seeking a window, a vent, the merest crack. A desperate cry began to well up within him, and he opened his mouth to let it out but then slapped himself in the face. He couldn’t give in to panic. One howl like that would be an admission of despair, and that would help no one.
He lowered himself to the cold floor and pulled the prayer cord from his pocket. As he picked away at the lesser mysteries, he sent up mental pleas to Nous. He ran through the litany of holy names in the vague hope that one of them might trigger a miracle, all the while knowing there was as much chance of Sektis Gandaw converting to religion and confessing his sins.