by D. P. Prior
He closed his eyes, no doubt remembering. A shudder rippled through his padded clothes, and then he blinked his eyes back into focus on Shadrak.
“Your mother came to me, taught me how to survive. When I first left the forest and was bitten and stung close to death, she nursed me back to health.”
Kadee leaned her head against his shoulder, and he twiddled with the crystals in her hair.
Shadrak stiffened, but he relaxed when it became clear there was no more to it than the affection Kadee showed him, and not only him: the husk girl, too. Nameless was starting to see why Shadrak felt such love for his foster mother. It was hard not to. As far as he could tell, Kadee had no natural children of her own, but she was utterly maternal with absolutely everyone she came into contact with.
“So, I owe her, Shadrak,” the Warlord continued. “I owe her my life; and I know there is nothing she would not do for you.”
She was already doing it, as far as Nameless was concerned. Risking everything to bring them this far, and all because Shadrak was there for Nameless, and she was there for her son.
A flicker of worry passed across the Warlord’s face. He turned to Nameless and said, “But you should know, there is bad blood between me and the dwarves. It was never easy, even before I stole the stone. They are an arrogant race, and unforgiving.”
“Let me worry about that,” Nameless said. “Just get us to them and lend us the stone.”
“That I can’t do,” the Warlord said. “It’s my only lifeline to home. You’re going to have your work cut out persuading the Dwarf Lords not to attack us. The minute they see my people anywhere close to their lands, the war will be back on. But if you can get us beyond that, if you can negotiate a truce, then I will bring the stone to the portal and see you through.”
“Then just get us as close to the Dwarf Lords as you can,” Shadrak said. To Nameless he added, “I’ll scout on ahead and see what we’re up against.”
Nameless nodded his agreement. “But whatever you do, laddie, save first contact for me. I got you into this, and it’s my responsibility.”
He didn’t like the way the Warlord made the Dwarf Lords sound. It was hard enough coming to Thanatos and weathering all this death world could throw at them. Last thing he needed was a confrontation with the very people who constituted Arnoch’s only hope.
“There is just one other problem,” the Warlord said. “Whenever I travel back through the portal, I end up where I started, at a reciprocal portal on Urddynoor, though it is permanently activated and requires no stone that I can see.”
“And your point, laddie?” Nameless said.
“Is that the portal always sends me to Urddynoor, yet you need to return to Aethir.”
Nameless felt a clump of coldness set in his guts. He hadn’t even considered that.
“There has to be a way to determine where the portal leads,” Shadrak said. “Some sort of controls or combination.” He must have been thinking of the plane ship. Give him his due, though, he’d hardly said a word on the subject since the dragon had destroyed it.
The Warlord shrugged.
“Well, if anyone knows,” Grimwart said, “it’s got to be the Dwarf Lords. I mean, they came through from Arnoch, same as we did, and they used to own the keystone, you say.”
“Stands to reason,” the Warlord said. “But that only makes my dilemma worse. It won’t be enough for me to lead you to them. My people and theirs are going to have to cooperate, and from what I’ve seen, there’s as much chance of that as a Thanatosian rolling onto its back for a tummy tickling.”
“That reminds me,” Ardo said. “On my way here, I saw huge flock of harvesters heading the same way, slow as you like, but they had most definitely picked up a trail.”
All eyes turned to Kadee, and she winced. Nameless hadn’t noticed it before, but she seemed to have aged again. Her hair was now equal portions of black and white, and the skin of her neck was rumpled. New lines, and not just from worry, crisscrossed her face, and, he was ashamed to say, her breasts had lost some of their pertness. The only thing that remained the same was her eyes. They were glistening, in part from unshed tears, partly from grim determination to see this through.
“You should go back,” the Warlord said. “Back to the forest.”
“I think it’s too late for that, Ardo said. “They have fanned out into a pincer. The only way around would involve a trek of many miles, much of it away from the protection of the ash you and your people reclaimed the untamed ground with.
“Agreed,” the Warlord said. “Even armed and armored like us, you’d not last more than a few hours.”
“Then we press ahead,” Kadee said with a nonchalant shrug.
Shadrak took her hand in his, lifted it to his lips.
She smiled and stroked his hair, pulled his head into her bosom so he wouldn’t see the teardrop that broke loose to track its way down her cheek.
THE DARK CITADEL
They left the Warlord’s camp as the black sun crested the horizon and painted the sky with its crepuscular glow. It was a hard trek through the foothills of the ebon mountains. To Shadrak, the heat was as punishing as the sun-scorched bush back home in Sahul. The only relief was that the Warlord’s people carried portable light staves with them, which warded against the ever-present threat of insects.
Shadrak drifted into the lead, like he always did. He scurried up the far bank of a gully and stood surveying the sheer walls of the mountain rising into the cloud cover.
The Warlord came up next, snub-nosed mask pulled down over his face, the glowing golden eyes making him seem inhuman, something you might encounter in the Abyss. He was followed by the husk girl, to all appearances still vacant, but leading Kadee by the hand.
Shadrak’s foster mother was getting her stoop back, and gray hair multiplied on her head with every passing hour. Comforting as it was to see Kadee returning to how he remembered her, it was also a hammer waiting to fall. Shadrak knew she couldn’t have much longer left, but even if they turned back and headed for the Forest of Lost Souls, they would never make it past the harvesters.
“There,” the Warlord said, pointing about midway up the mountain.
Shadrak squinted but saw nothing. As he fished out his goggles and put them on, Nameless trudged up behind him.
“I see it, right enough, laddie. They’ve done a good job of concealing it, but you can’t hide stonework from a miner’s son.”
Shadrak slipped on the goggles and waited for them to adjust. The surface of the mountain blurred and then re-formed in stark lines. The goggles overlaid shadows and light, and piece by piece, a structure that was anything but natural stood apart from the rock face in sharp relief.
“Shog, that’s creepy,” Shadrak said.
“That’s dwarves,” Grimwart said, emerging from the gully with a clutch of the Warlord’s people in his wake.
Ardo the Great was with them, having squeezed into the same padded black outfit they all wore, a mask atop his shock of tow hair. Apparently, the clothing had an inner layer of some kind of armor, lighter and far tougher than even plate. It appeared being stung and bitten by the scut-ridden bug life of Thanatos was incentive enough for the strongman to stop flaunting his mighty thews.
Shadrak could see why the Warlord referred to the bastion of the Dwarf Lords as the Dark Citadel. The whole edifice appeared to have been carved from the shimmering black rock of the mountain. It wasn’t anywhere near the scale of Arnoch, but there were definite similarities in the architecture. Gently sloping curtain walls tapered into wedge-shaped buttresses. A squat gatehouse thrust out in front, the doors a barely perceptible hairline crack. Twin turrets flanked the gatehouse, pocked with embrasures, which showed up in the vision afforded by the goggles as darker strains of black. Above the battlements cresting the curtain walls, a third tower rose, its roof a flat expanse of stone an army could stand upon.
Maybe it was part of the concealment, or maybe it was from lack of the right tools
, seeing as the first dwarves to settle here had been evacuated in somewhat of a hurry, but the masonry didn’t seem up to par with that at Arx Gravis and Arnoch. The walls were constructed from monstrous blocks of black stone, mortared dark as pitch, but not the seamless joins of the dwarven architecture Shadrak had seen before. Maybe they didn’t have cat burglars on Thanatos, because if they did, any half-decent thief could climb the tallest tower, even wearing mittens. If it was wealth that gave the Dwarf Lords their title, same as with all the aristocratic twats Shadrak had ever met, a thieves’ guild in the villages would leave them dwarven peasants in next to no time.
“This is as far as we can take you,” the Warlord said. “We’ll wait for you down in the gully. Just be sure you tell the Dwarf Lords we’re with you, and ensure they will honor a truce.” He tapped his rifle to illustrate what would happen otherwise.
Shadrak had no idea how many Dwarf Lords there would be, but the Warlord had only committed an escort of twenty. Still, even with just twenty of those rapid-fire, flame-spewing guns, the Dwarf Lords wouldn’t stand a chance. Or would they? The Warlord was clearly worried about them, and he obviously couldn’t wait to retreat to the apparent no-man’s land of the gully.
Shadrak glanced at Nameless, only hoping his friend found what he was looking for here; what his people needed to survive.
As Nameless and Grimwart thanked the Warlord for his help and watched his people disappear back down into the gully, Shadrak’s eyes were drawn to Kadee. As before, when she’d lain wasting away in her bed, his stomach knotted at the thought that this might be their last moment together.
The husk girl had an arm looped through Kadee’s. Now, she was the one offering support. Her eyes retained their sapphire glow, and the nubs on her back had grown into bones the size of forearms. She was taller, too, Shadrak could have sworn, and her glittering golden hair now reached her waist. Beneath her gossamer dress, her figure had grown even more feminine, more mature, and Shadrak had to force himself to look away.
Kadee saw and smiled. It was her old familiar smile, the one she’d given him throughout their life together. The one that had remained plastered on her face when she’d breathed her last.
“This is the most I’ve aged since I arrived on Thanatos,” she said. “Usually, I don’t make it past the villages before the harvesters appear and I turn back. But those times, when I was away from the safety of the forest, were the moments I lived for, if living is what you can call this second snatch of life. For it was then that I reached out to you, fellah. Somehow, the trees blocked my spirit, but outside their confines, I was able to soar, like the Clever Men of the Barraiya people, whose souls fly free of their bodies.”
“And you were a right pain in the arse each time you cropped up in my mind,” Shadrak said. He was joking, and she knew it. He could tell from the moisture in her eyes, the trembling of her still smiling lips.
“I only wish I could plague you more,” she said. “When I am gone. Truly gone, for good.”
Shadrak felt her words like a punch in the chest. A lump worked its way up his throat, threatened to choke him.
“It’s all right, fellah,” Kadee said. “I lived my life, my real life. What we have now is a bonus. But it has never felt right to me, this half-existence on Thanatos. The Archon told me we had been snared like insects by a pitcher plant, that this isn’t my spirit’s true resting place. Maybe the only way to leave here is to die anew. I am ready for that, now that I have seen you again. Death once died loses its sting.”
“But you will still be trapped here,” Shadrak said, “a new tree in the Forest of Lost Souls.”
“A tree, yes, but I will not know it. When my body dies, the harvesters will come for my soul, if they don’t get me before that. Tarik believes they feed souls to Thanatos itself, high in the peaks of these very mountains.”
“I won’t let them,” Shadrak said.
“You cannot stop them, fellah. Same as you could not stop the cancer that first killed me.”
He spun away from her, looking for something to take his anger out on. When he saw nothing suitable, he slammed his fist into his palm and cursed.
Kadee’s hand on his shoulder coaxed him to turn back and face her.
“You will never lose me, fellah. Not really.” She touched her palm to his heart. “You will always carry me in here.”
He shook his head, fighting back the tears. “No. I’m not losing you again. If we move fast, reach the citadel, maybe the Dwarf Lords will have a way to get you back to the forest in time.”
She inclined her head and bobbed it, as if she thought that was a possibility.
“I can do this by myself, if you two need more time together,” Nameless said.
The husk girl released Kadee’s arm and glided to the dwarf’s side. She seemed to be offering to go with Nameless, do Shadrak’s job for him. More than that, something about the way she looked at Shadrak with her brilliant blue eyes said she had forgiven him. Forgiven him for wanting to sell her, and yet, he’d done nothing to warrant it. He wasn’t even sure he wanted her forgiveness. But one thing was for certain: any warming of the husk girl’s heart toward him was down to Kadee. The affection his foster mother exuded for Shadrak was contagious. It told people he was more than just a killer; that he had a heart. That he was capable of loving and being loved. He covered the realization with a scowl. That wasn’t how he wanted to be seen. It was the kind of sentimental bullshit that would get him killed.
“No,” Shadrak said, eyes meeting Kadee’s and now shedding tears freely. “I said I’d scout ahead, so that’s what I’ll do.”
Nameless squeezed his shoulder, and Kadee nodded.
Shadrak held her fingers for a long, lingering moment, then pulled up his hood and ran for the nearest incline without looking back.
He worked his way up a series of natural steps, careful to avoid the scorpions skittering between cracks, and the vipers nesting in depressions. When he reached a long, winding path worn into the rock, he looked down to see his companions slowly progressing up the steps. Rather than follow the wend of the path, he chose instead to climb the vertical rock face. It was less likely that approach was being watched. Let the Dwarf Lords observe the others coming up the obvious route, but he intended to see them before they saw him. That way, he could gauge the threat to the others, and if need be, hit the Dwarf Lords hard, when they didn’t expect it.
Down below, Nameless was singing—some jaunty ditty about a whore he once knew crushing boulders between her hairy breasts. Whatever struck your fancy, Shadrak supposed. If it had been anyone else, he would have cursed them for an amateur, but Nameless knew what he was doing: showing the Dwarf Lords he wasn’t a threat, that he wasn’t sneaking up on them unannounced. And, he was also telling them he wasn’t scared. Nameless might have convinced a stranger, but Shadrak knew just how worried his friend was. Not just due to what the Warlord had insinuated about the Dwarf Lords, but because they might not be all he had envisioned, what he needed to save his people.
Shadrak had to choose his handholds carefully. Ants and centipedes crawled out of the many nooks and crevices, and he didn’t want to chance a bite or a sting. His cloak seemed to draw the heat of the dark sun, and his back was drenched with sweat. His grip grew slippery from it, and he had to make frequent stops to catch his breath.
When he reached the top, he saw that he’d alighted on the same meandering pathway, only fifty feet or more above.
A hundred feet further up, skirted by a bank of scree, he could see the buttressed base of the citadel’s walls.
The mountain path was wider here, broader than the main streets threading their way through New Londdyr. And there was nothing natural about it now. The black stone was uniformly flat, though there were grooves worn into its surface, following its course up the mountain. They looked like scars in the rock, but then Shadrak realized what they were: the impressions of cartwheels etched into the road from years, if not centuries, of use.
/> The first thing he did was get off the road. He crossed to the other side and set about climbing another, higher, wall of rock. Nameless’s song was now an echo on the breeze, muffled and far below.
Halfway up, Shadrak found a narrow ledge and stopped for a breather, pressing his back to the wall and gazing out across the dour skies.
That’s when he saw a black shape drifting toward him. At first, he thought it was the motion of the clouds, making it seem the black sun was moving his way, but as the goggles whirred and clicked into focus, he saw it wasn’t round, as he’d first thought; it was shaped like a teardrop, and beneath it hung a basket. He cycled the goggles through various modes until the teardrop burned crimson in his vision. Whatever it was, was filled with intense heat. Below it, in the basket, red splotches moved about: people. More than likely, dwarves.
Shadrak pulled off the goggles and tucked them in a belt pouch. He didn’t need their help to see what it was now, it had drifted so much closer. Above him, at a level with the base of the citadel, a massive balloon slowly descended. Ropes were slung over the sides of the basket, snaking down the rock face. Two figures climbed out and started rappelling toward him.
Shadrak cursed and began to head back down. There was no time for caution, and once or twice he missed his handhold and almost fell. It didn’t matter how fast he went, though, for the ropes continued to pay out, and the pair of figures pushing off from the rock face in long, graceful bounds were almost upon him.
With a look below to gauge the distance, Shadrak let go and dropped the rest of the way. He rolled as he hit the path and came up running. Before he’d gone ten paces, boulders separated out from the mountain walls and surrounded him. Only, they weren’t boulders. They were dwarves.