by D. P. Prior
To Nameless, she said, “I’m guessing you brought it here. Your blood reveals you. It seeps from your every…” She scrutinized him again, before licking her lips and finishing with, “pore.” She took two quick steps forward, then slowed to a stalk that took her in a circle around him.
Nameless’s heart beat faster. Whatever she had sensed in him exuded from her—not a scent, or anything else mundane; but it electrified the air as tangibly as a lightning strike.
“What is your name?” she asked, stopping in front of him. She ran a finger along the edge of Paxy’s blade. Unlike her sister’s, hers were not protected by gauntlets.
“Careful, lassie,” Nameless said. “She’s got a thing about other women.” He nodded to the axe. “I wouldn’t want you to lose a nail.”
Thyenna crashed a fist into his face, but he’d seen it coming and rolled with the punch. He staggered back a step but didn’t go down.
“That is for your insolence,” Gitashan said.
“A little more hip pivot,” Nameless said to Thyenna. “And try to line your elbow up with your wrist. You’ll transfer more force that way.”
Thyenna’s jaw dropped, but then her eyes narrowed and she drew her fist back again.
Gitashan raised a hand to stop her.
“Name, I said.”
“Well,” Nameless said, “I don’t know how you’re going to take this…”
Gitashan gave the slightest of nods, and Thyenna’s first slammed into Nameless’s temple. This time, he didn’t even flinch. It hurt like shog, and might even have chipped his skull, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. Even so, he’d have to be careful. A few more blows like that, and his head would be pulp. There was only so far stubbornness could get you.
“Name?” Gitashan said for the third time.
With a deft wave of her fingers, she communicated something to the soldiers surrounding them, and four ran forward to cover Kadee and the husk girl with their weapons. Two others grabbed hold of Grimwart by the arms. The implied threat was clear.
Meeting and holding the Matriarch’s gaze, Nameless ran his tongue over his teeth, made chewing motions with his mouth, like an actor warming up his voice. He blew air through his lips, each time with more gusto, until he built up to a whuff a horse would have been proud of.
Gitashan’s expression went from one of calm interest to irritation and then barely suppressed rage. Thyenna raised her fist for another blow.
“Nameless,” he said, so softly, Gitashan leaned in and frowned that she hadn’t heard.
“My name is Nameless.”
Thyenna’s punch this time connected with his jaw and spun him from his feet. His head swam, and the floor swayed beneath him as he pushed up from it with one hand. She’d put him down that time, but there was no way in shog he was staying down.”
When he’d steadied himself and blinked his eyes into focus on Thyenna, he said, “No, lassie, it is. Seriously, Nameless is my name.”
Thyenna backhanded him so hard he stumbled, and his knees buckled.
Grimwart cried out, “He’s telling the truth, you stupid—”
One of the soldiers punched him in the guts, then swore and rubbed her hand.
“Scarolite,” Grimwart said. “Thought you would have known that, being an aristocratic shog-arse and all.”
That earned him an elbow face. He spat out a tooth in a spray of pink spittle. Blood dripped into his beard, and he lowered his head.
“Take him inside,” Gitashan barked, and the two soldiers dragged Grimwart away. “Commoners speak when spoken to, and those that don’t learn their lesson very quickly. The others, too.”
The guards around Kadee and the husk girl prodded them toward the far edge of the tower, where a trap door stood open.
Kadee pulled back, opened her mouth to speak. A soldier raised a war hammer, and Gitashan nodded for her to go ahead.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” Nameless said. In spite of the pain in his skull, the dizziness, his voice came out a resonant rumble. He shook his head to clear it, but the mush of gray matter sloshed from ear to ear. To Thyenna, he waved apologetically and said, “Hit me again, lassie. I find it helps me focus.”
She punched him smack in the center of his forehead. He grunted, then growled, then stamped his feet; and as always, when he was in trouble and too exhausted, wounded, or drunk to fight, the fug was blasted from his brain by a wave of white-hot rage. Fire coursed through his veins, and his muscles grew tighter than a baresark’s clutch on a tankard.
Thyenna seemed to sense the change and took a step back. The cordon of soldiers brought their weapons to bear and looked to Gitashan for what they should do next.
But Nameless hadn’t orchestrated the change in order to fight. If he did that, all chance of persuading the Dwarf Lords to return to Arnoch and save his people would be gone. He only wanted his wits about him to stop them doing something they might all live to regret.
He fixed his eyes on Gitashan’s, as if she were the only other dwarf in the world at that moment.
“Dwarf Lords killing old women, Matriarch? Has it come to this?”
Her amber eyes flashed, and her jaw clenched.
“And even if it has,” Nameless said, “her son is still out there. You really don’t want to upset him.”
“Pah!” Gitashan said. She glanced at the soldier with the hammer raised to strike Kadee; looked about to give the order.
“Do you know what they call him back home?” Nameless said. Something in his tone caught her attention, and she hesitated. “Shadrak the Unseen. He’s probably watching us right now. Watching you. Waiting to see what you do. Did I mention, he’s an assassin? And not just any assassin. He’s the best of the best. The most deadly.”
“Then why did we take him so easily down below?” Thyenna said. The way her eyes flicked left and right, though, told Nameless he had her spooked.
“Because he wanted you to. Because that’s what I told him to do.”
So, now Nameless was lying, but it was all in a good cause. He’d seen enough of these Dwarf Lords—well, if that’s what you could call them, seeing as so far he’d seen only women. What did that make them: Dwarf Ladies? Whatever they called themselves, he’d seen enough to know what they were: no different to a predator with its prey. No different to a shark. In fact, they were no different to Otto Blightey, the Lich Lord of Verusia: uncaring, cruel, and assured of their own right to dominate. Show people like that an ounce of fear, and they’d take pleasure in crushing you underfoot. There were two ways to deal with this type. One involved an axe, and a bucket and mop to clean up the mess, and the other was akin to Sheriff Orton’s favorite game of seven-card. The other was to bluff.
“Shadrak doesn’t care a shog about anything, except for Kadee here. You harm her, you even so much as touch a hair on her head, and you’ll be lying in a pool of your own blood before you can say, ‘Who the shog pissed in my Ironbelly’s?’ Not that anyone would notice, if someone pissed in a pint of Ironbelly’s, but you get my meaning. Go ahead, if you must. Hit Kadee with that hammer. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Nervous looks passed among the soldiers. Thyenna’s lips were drawn into a tight line, but sweat trickled down her cheeks inside the open face plate of her helm.
Gitashan studied Nameless for an uncomfortably long moment. One of her eyebrows arched, and like the cracking of plaster, her mouth curled, painfully slowly, into a smile.
“Take the old woman and the girl to the dungeons, but see they are not harmed.”
The soldiers escorted Kadee and the husk girl toward the trap door. Kadee nodded her thanks to Nameless, but her shoulders were even more stooped. The girl beside her looked stiffer than before, and a sheen of what looked like hoarfrost coated her skin.
“Nameless, is it?” Gitashan said. She twirled the Axe of the Dwarf Lords in her hands, watched her reflection in its blades. “How is it, Nameless, you have the blood of the Immortals? Until tod
ay, only Thyenna and myself manifested it.”
“It’s a long story, lassie.”
“And I will hear it. But first you will freshen up. I like sweat on a dwarf, but not quite so much. You will join me for supper. It has been a very long time since I entertained a male of the race. Indeed, since any of us have.”
.
THE COMMONER LORD
Three dwarf women marched Nameless along bleak corridors of obsidian that would have been woefully dark, if not for the steady lime glow coming from lanterns suspended from the ceiling. Not lanterns, he realized, as he took a closer look: they were winged insects the size of his hand, twirling at the end of slender chains. They were dead, some of them desiccated, but when he asked his escort about them, he was met with stony silence.
Never one to be put off, Nameless said to the soldier on his right, “Where I come from, a lord is a man and a woman is a lady, in title, at least.”
She glanced at him from behind her full-faced helm.
“So, what does etiquette dictate?” Nameless continued. “Do I call you Lord or Lady?”
“We are Dwarf Lords,” the woman behind him growled.
“Glad to hear it,” Nameless said. “For a moment, I thought I’d come to the wrong place. So, you’re all lords, irrespective of gender. Eminently sensible, if you ask me. Keep it simple, I always say. Well, you already know my name, or lack of one. It would help break the ice if you told me yours. Go on, lassie. What is it? Lord…”
“Silence!”
“Silence? How do you spell that?”
The soldier on the right spoke instead. “Kona, know your place. The Matriarch said he is an Immortal.”
“Pah.”
“Yyalla’s right, Kona,” the first soldier Nameless had addressed said. “Show some respect.”
“To a man? Right.”
Nameless was about to ask Kona about that, about why he’d yet to see a man, when it hit him like a bucket of iced water. “Yyalla was my mother’s name.”
The soldier called Yyalla stopped abruptly in front of him. “Your mother? What is your House name?”
“No idea,” Nameless said. “Not sure I even had one. I had a family name, but it was taken from me, along with my birth name.”
“What was your crime?”
Nameless closed his eyes and found himself holding his breath. Old horrors, old shame bubbled and boiled through his veins. If he told them, told them what he’d done, who he was, how were they ever going to trust him enough to come to Arnoch’s aid? At the same time, though, if they thought he had something to hide…
“That was rude of me,” Yyalla said. “I beg your forgiveness.”
Nameless opened his eyes, and in response, Yyalla lifted her visor. She had a strong face, chiseled and heavy-set. Her eyes were hazel, like his.
“Nothing to forgive, lassie. It’s a natural enough question. Will it suffice to say I lost a lot more than my name, that my penance has been long, and that I will do anything it takes to make amends?”
“Even at the loss of your life?”
“If that’s what it takes.” Nameless’s eyes didn’t waver from hers. He’d spoken the truth, and it came from that same place within that his rage came from, as well as his knowledge of being loved.
Yyalla nodded, satisfied. “The firstborn female of every generation of House Thane is named Yyalla.”
His heart started to skitter about his ribcage. Something throbbed within his skull, blossoming into fiery pain that fizzled out and turned to ice. He removed his helm, touched the spot on his scalp that sat above where he’d felt the sensation. Now, all he felt was numbness, both physical and something more intangible. He was left with the tantalizing feeling a memory that had sunk to the bottom of a deeper sea than Arnoch had started to rise from the murk, a dark and brooding leviathan. He was like a fisherman who’d glimpsed its shadowy passage to the surface, only to blink and see nothing there but waves chopping around the hull of his boat.
“House Thane, you say?” Nameless had heard the Matriarch’s sister Thyenna mention a Lord Thane among the dwarves King Arios had sent across the Farfall Mountains.
“My House. There’s not too many left of us now. Just myself, my sister Rhyl, and my cousin Froyla.”
Nameless put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched, and ire crossed with repulsion flitted across her face. It was swiftly masked with an expression of pure stoicism.
He removed his fingers, then covered his mouth with his hand as he thought. Almost at once, he shook his head, realizing the conclusions he was jumping to couldn’t possibly be true.
“And you are Lords, your House, but not Immortals?”
Yyalla shrugged.
The other two soldiers were growing impatient, judging by the way they shuffled their feet and sighed.
“I’m not, and neither are my sister and cousin. But that doesn’t mean to say there were no Immortals in our House. Immortals have sprung up in all the major Houses at one time or another. The blood skips one sibling and finds another. Sometimes it disappears for generations, only to re-emerge at some future time. It is what makes them—you—so special. It is a gift, not a birthright. No one can predict where it will fall.”
“But Thyenna and the Matriarch,” Nameless said. “They are sisters, and they are both Immortals.”
“So?” Kona said. “In the past, a single House could boast dozens of Immortals, sometimes every child of a single generation.”
“It responds to a need, some say,” the third soldier said. “In every age, the Supernal Father grants enough Immortals to see us through.” She scoffed at that, hawked up some phlegm and spat.
“Shinnock doesn’t set much store by our legends,” Yyalla said.
Now it was Kona’s turn to scoff. “Who does, these days?”
“Why not?” Nameless said. “In my experience, there’s more truth in legends than much of what we take for truth in life.”
“Really?” Shinnock said, already turning away and starting to walk ahead. “So why are we a dying race, then? Why aren’t Immortals ripping their way out of our wombs left, right, and center, smiting our enemies, and leading us into a golden dawn?”
If she expected an answer, she didn’t wait to hear it. The other two gestured for Nameless to go ahead of them, and they followed Shinnock’s lead.
Yyalla leaned in to Nameless and said, “We have already said too much. It is the Matriarch’s place to speak thus to strangers.”
“Understood,” Nameless said. “But one last question, if you will. You said the firstborn female of every generation of House Thane was named Yyalla. How far back does that go? How many generations?”
“As many as are recorded in our Annals.”
“From before the Dwarf Lords came to Thanatos?”
She frowned as she thought it through, and then nodded. “Long before. You should speak to Ancient Bub about it, if the Matriarch permits it.”
That name again. “Ancient Bub?”
Yyalla pulled down her visor. Apparently, the conversation was over.
But what Nameless had learned was enough to keep him occupied for the rest of their journey through the citadel.
A Dwarf Lord named Cranek Thane had left Arnoch and been among the founders of Arx Gravis. Every firstborn female of House Thane was named Yyalla. The blood of the Immortals could skip siblings or entire generations. Nameless’s brother, Lucius, had shown no signs of speed, strength, of courage, but no amount of false humility could persuade Nameless that he lacked those qualities himself. And that pain he’d felt beneath his skull, in some closed off part of his brain: was that the desolated region that his name had been stripped from? Had the burning sensation been a response to something lost that should not have been heard again? Was it one piece of the jigsaw of his missing past, the family name that had been taken along with the one he’d received at birth?
It can’t have been. The way he understood it, his punishment had not been merely to forget; his name ha
d been removed from every mind, not just his own; from every record. It was the only punishment that was worse than death. A name was everything to a dwarf, a family name even more so.
Or was Thanatos outside the ambit of the curse or whatever it was that had expunged his name from every place and time? Even the Technocrat had not charted the death world’s location, and it was a mystery, Shadrak had told him, to the Archon as well.
No, he was clutching at straws. He shouldn’t get his hopes up about his mother being a descendent of Lord Thane. Because that’s what it was: a hope that he’d found one part of his name. The most important part. The one that restored his family’s true place in history.
Family names were passed down from mother to child, and like all male dwarves who married, Droom would have taken his wife’s name for his own. Droom Thane… It sounded kind of clunky. Not half as bad as Nameless Thane, but then, he wouldn’t have been called Nameless back then, would he? He’d have been called something else. He’d have had a real name.
But wait a minute. If there was even a grain of truth in the idea, wouldn’t that mean…
“Lassie,” Nameless said to Yyalla. “With you and my mother sharing a name, and with what you said about House Thane naming the firstborn female of each generation Yyalla, is it possible we are related in some way? Is it possible we are family?”
Shinnock snorted, Kona chortled, but Yyalla merely paused in her step for an instant, before continuing on in silence.
Finally, they arrived at a door of polished black stone, and Kona knocked.
As it creaked open, Yyalla whispered to Nameless. “If you get the chance, you should speak with Ancient Bub. If anyone knows about these things, it is him.”
The soldiers stepped back from the door and ushered Nameless forward.
An elderly dwarf stood in the entrance, stooped from the waist and supporting his weight on a walking stick. A magnificent white beard trailed over his feet and snaked away across the floor.