by D. P. Prior
Hesitantly, he started at the beginning, when he was a Ravine Guard under Marshal Thumil. He told them of the homunculus who’d broken into the scriptorium, the event that set everything else off. He’d not known it at the time, but the homunculus had exchanged a volume of the Annals of Arx Gravis for one that contained inserted references to the fabled Axe of the Dwarf Lords that would one day raise their people to new and glorious heights. Nameless’s brother, Lucius, was an Annals scholar, and inevitably, he had found the references. He’d grown obsessed with finding the axe, and eventually went after it into the bowels of Gehenna, the underworld realm of the homunculi. The Krypteia had pursued him there and killed him. Nameless—or whatever he’d been called at the time—had gone after him but arrived too late. Out of grief and respect for his brother, he completed Lucius’s quest for him and returned to Arx Gravis with the axe. Only, it wasn’t the Axe of the Dwarf Lords: it was a carbon copy, but black where the true Pax Nanorum was golden.
When he went on to describe the slaughter that had followed, the bloody butchery at the ravine, Gitashan clutched the stem of her goblet tightly, and watched him with a mixture of awe and horror. Ancient Bub put his head in his hands, as if looking at Nameless would force him to imagine the scenes in vivid detail.
When Nameless finished in a shaky voice, silence hung thickly in the air. It was Bub who eventually broke it.
“Four-hundred and twenty feet long, with a capacity for 400,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, and with two homunculi-crafted engines to power the propellers.”
Nameless looked at the old man, momentarily bewildered. As the shame of all he’d just confessed cracked and fell away from him, he realized Bub was answering his initial question, about the size of the balloon.
“That’s very specific, laddie.”
“Only thing big enough for the task. For a balloon of that size, it has to be rigid, built around a frame of transverse rings and longitudinal girders, and there will need to be a lot of individual gasbags. The specifications are in the Annals. It was the last great project of House Balloc before the evacuation: an airship that could cross the world, or at least the Sea of Insanity surrounding the known lands of Aethir. I’ve always wanted to replicate it here, but we lack the raw materials.”
“Your House started building it, you say?” Nameless said.
Abednago’s gigantic balloon at the top of the tallest tower. He’d said it was rigid, and it was over four-hundred feet in length.
Bub nodded. “Aye. Almost finished it, by my understanding.”
Nameless clapped him on the shoulder. “I think I know where it is, laddie! We can do this!” He suddenly remembered Gitashan. “That is, if the Matriarch will consider my request for aid.”
She paused before answering, swilled the drink in her goblet, and drained it. There was a flush to her cheeks, and she slurred slightly when she spoke.
“You are forgetting something, Bubanthus. You are forgetting the portal stone.”
Bub smacked his palm into his forehead. “There’s no way of getting back to Arnoch,” he said. “For centuries, we possessed the means but not the will. It was believed Arnoch was gone for good, and that the Destroyer would have been there, waiting for us. Generation after generation, our patriarchs, and now our Matriarch, debated returning. Anything, they said, would be better than this world of death, but fear of the Destroyer still runs deep in our racial memory. And so we stayed.”
“The Destroyer is no more,” Nameless said. “Paxy and I put paid to that particular monster.”
Gitashan looked at him with disbelief. When Nameless didn’t change his story, other emotions flittered across her face. He was sure one of them was horror: horror at what manner of dwarf could take down the Destroyer. She was putting two and two together, he could see. She was making the connection with what he’d told her about the Ravine Butcher.
“But without the portal stone…” Bub said, turning up his palms.
“A human called the Warlord stole it from us,” the Matriarch said. “When our people and his were on the brink of an alliance.”
“And he regrets it, lassie.” Nameless wasn’t entirely sure that was the case, but he didn’t have a lot to work with.
The Matriarch threw her goblet across the room, where it struck the floor and clattered to a stop. “You know him?”
“He led us here. He will use the stone to send us through the portal. Please, Matriarch, my people need you. They need the Dwarf Lords to return.”
Her amber eyes simmered, and the flush to her cheeks was more of an angry red than the bloom of inebriation.
“And what of my needs? What of my people’s needs?” She cocked her head and looked him square in the eyes. “The Dwarf Lords are close to extinction.”
“Then come back with us,” Nameless said. “Return to Arnoch. With your people and mine combined, our numbers will double. More than double.”
“Are you suggesting we interbreed with common-bloods?” she said. The idea that this was as distasteful as the meal Bub had prepared was apparent in her tone.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Nameless said.
“How dare you!” She went to strike him, but Nameless caught her wrist.
“I had a gutful of being hit by your sister,” he said. “I will not tolerate the same from you.” It was strong talk, but he was starting to think that was the only kind the Matriarch would understand.
Her lips curled back, baring her teeth in a snarl. They were chipped and yellow, no doubt an effect of eating the corrosive fare of Thanatos. It seemed a symbol of what they had become, these Dwarf Lords. The Matriarch’s exterior might have been exquisite, but once those teeth were unveiled, she struck him as nothing so much as an animal doing whatever it took to survive.
No matter how much the Dwarf Lords tried to cling to a semblance of civilization, everything about their citadel reeked of survival, of an all-out will to dominate lest they be overrun. Beneath the veneer, it was a barbaric existence, atavistic, and ultimately meaningless. Kill or be killed, is how Cid had put it. But for what purpose? What was the point of surviving just for survival’s sake. Nameless had come here seeking the aid of the Dwarf Lords, but he was starting to suspect his own people could offer far more in return.
With an effort that implied a will that was anything but brutish, Gitashan softened her expression, and she worked hard at a look of contrition. She even managed a wavering smile, but her eyes remained hard.
To Bub, she said, “Leave us. There are things we need to talk about that are only for Immortal ears.”
As the old dwarf shuffled from the room, Nameless caught a glimpse of the guards in the scarolite helms, and the three dwarves of his escort out in the corridor.
Gitashan waited for the door to shut before she extricated her wrist from Nameless’s grip and spoke. All the arrogance had drained away from her voice. He couldn’t tell if she was acting, but she sounded deferential, like she had ceded dominance to him.
“It is a losing battle we fight against this death world,” she said. She waved her goblet, and Nameless topped it up for her. He wondered if her presumption gave the lie to her newfound submission.
“No other people could have lasted so long. We are Dwarf Lords, after all.”
Nameless didn’t have the heart to tell her the Warlord was making a good show of it, although, he had to admit, the Dwarf Lords had been fighting the good fight for considerably longer. Hundreds of years longer, by all accounts, if not thousands.
“According to the Annals, the first of our people to arrive from Arnoch were decimated by disease, insects, all manner of plant and beast. But we adapted quickly and bit back. Swaths of land were cleared of their hazards. The ash coating the ground of the flats, placed there by the Warlord, was originally our idea. We taught him what to do when he first came to us. But Thanatos is a relentless enemy, and we lacked the numbers to continue the fight. A decision was made to build a stronghold in the mountains and do our best to hold
on. And that’s what we’ve done, for centuries. I can only imagine Thanatos grew frustrated, for nothing this world threw at us could breach these walls. But then, a few generations ago, the rules of the battle between us appeared to change. Our birthrate declined.”
“Thanatos did that?” Nameless said.
“Thanatos, or maybe it was just something within us. Maybe, as a race, we gave up hope. Whatever the cause, we began to have fewer and fewer children, and then, the few we had were all girls. No one has produced a male child for a hundred years, and the few sired before that were weak and did not live long. When the last patriarch saw the danger, he ordered our remaining men to breed with as many women as they could, but it was to little avail. When the patriarch passed away, and the last remaining male Immortal, Lord Haxon Kly, was buried beneath a cairn of black rock, only my sister Thyenna and I manifested the blood. I was the elder, and so…”
“You were the first Matriarch? Ever?”
“The first woman to rule, yes, and who knows, maybe the last. It is expected I will produce an heir to give hope to our people, but there is no one left to mate with, save Cidruthus and Ancient Bub, and I will not rut with anything less than an Immortal.”
Nameless edged away a little more, as discreetly as he could. This wasn’t going to be as easy to get out of as he’d led Paxy to believe.
“What about your sister? She is an Immortal, too, isn’t she? Does she share your reluctance to mate with what’s on offer?”
“Hah!” Gitashan said, but there was no humor in the sound. “Thyenna, like so many of our women, has had too little exposure to men, and none at all to men of her own age. Bub and Cid repulse her, even more than they do me. I fear my sister would not bare a child even were we to be inundated with male Immortals.” She sighed and watched Nameless for his reaction. “She takes her pleasure from other women.”
Nameless shrugged. “Whatever floats your boat.”
Gitashan smiled as she shook her head. “Well, it doesn’t. Mine, that is.” She shuffled closer and put her hand on his knee. It was the same move Dame Consilia had made on him that one time, though she’d had the mead to back it up. Say one thing for distilled creeper vine: it was like condensing twenty kegs of strong brew into a single shot, but it had as much chance of encouraging his dwarfhood as a hogshead cask of Ironbelly’s.
“Lassie,” Nameless said, gently lifting her hand off. “I am already spoken for.”
Gitashan looked sharply away and dipped her chin. “You are?” It sounded nonchalant, but there was an edge to it.
“A friend,” Nameless said. “Well, more than a friend. I think. I hope.”
Gitashan turned back to face him again. Her face had set into a mask, inscrutable. “She is an Immortal?”
“No.”
“A Lord?”
Nameless shook his head.
“A common blood?” Spittle flew this time. “How could you sully yourself so?”
“If you said that to Cordana, she’d break your teeth.”
Gitashan’s eyes narrowed, but she said nothing.
“No,” Nameless said. “She’s no Immortal, and no Dwarf Lord. She is the Voice of the Council, though.
“Voice?”
“Their spokesperson. A sort of first among equals.”
“Utter nonsense,” Gitashan said. “And these are the people you would have me aid? The people you expect me to risk my own for?”
“You are already dying out,” Nameless said. “What do you have to lose, save a few more miserable years?”
“Likewise,” Gitashan countered. “What do they have to lose, besides bucket loads of common blood and the governance of those not fit to lick my arse.”
“Lassie,” Nameless said, “if arse licking is what you’re into, I fear, even if I were available, our tastes might render us incompatible.”
“If you were available? You are available, until I say you are not.”
“I beg to differ,” Nameless said. “Even if you kept us imprisoned here, you can’t make my dwarfhood do anything it doesn’t want to. I have a hard enough time telling it what to do myself. Shogging thing has a mind of its own.”
“There are ways,” Gitashan said. “Creeper vine has many uses. How do you think Ancient Bub and Cid managed to go on performing for so long? And they weren’t always keen, either.”
“Then I see no point carrying on our discussion,” Nameless said. He stood and faced the archway the Matriarch had entered from. Holding out his hand, he whistled for Paxy.
Nothing happened.
“Oh, shog,” he said, remembering the case he’d put her in. “Scarolite.”
Gitashan set down her goblet, rose, and wobbled toward him unsteadily. Partly, it was the distilled creeper vine, but partly it was her ridiculously high sandals.
“We are Immortals, you and I,” she said, now slurring more than ever. “Have you ever slept with an Immortal? Can you even imagine what that would feel like, the coming together of our flesh, our blood?”
He was trying not to, but his blasted dwarfhood was doing all his thinking for him the closer she got.
He tried picturing Cordana, thought about that time beneath the volcano when they had come so close. He dwelt on the memory of her lips pressed to his, the softness of her breasts. It was the wrong course of action. It only made things worse.
“There is nothing mundane about what we are, Nameless,” Gitashan said, coming up behind him and sliding her arms beneath his, clasping her hands over his chest.
Every time Nameless breathed, he was swamped by her musky scent. And every time, it inflamed him. He forced her hands apart and crossed the room to get away from her.
“There is nothing mundane about Cordana,” he said. “Or any of the rest of my people.” Even as he said it, the thought struck him: “There’s a point. Immortal blood doesn’t just appear out of nowhere, does it?”
“It is a gift, divinely bestowed by the Supernal Father,” Gitashan said. She tracked him with doleful eyes now. If anything, she looked pissed out of her skull and ready for bed. Just not the kind of bed she was angling for.
“But it’s not magicked out of thin air,” Nameless said. “It’s in the blood. Passed along through the generations.”
She nodded.
“But it skips some, and re-emerges in others,” Nameless said. “Sometimes, it misses one sibling and manifests in another. It’s fickle, I’ll grant you, but it is not without cause or continuity.”
Now Gitashan was frowning, as if she couldn’t keep up with what he was saying.
“Let me make this easy for you,” Nameless said. “Three Dwarf Lords accompanied the common-bloods out of Arnoch and went on to found Arx Gravis. One was from the House of Thane. The firstborn daughter of every generation of House Thane is named Yyalla. That was my mother’s name.”
He gave Gitashan a sharp, penetrating look, but the denarii still hadn’t dropped.
“I’m guessing that’s how the blood passed to me. But what of the other two Lords? What if they took mates among the common bloods? There’s nothing in our annals to say they didn’t.” Actually, Nameless didn’t know about that, having never read them, but it seemed to help his case, throwing in a reference to the history books. “What if the Immortal blood has lain dormant among my people all these centuries, waiting for the right time to show itself?”
“Then why has it not—”
“My point is,” Nameless said, talking over the top of her, “that when it manifests, the blood of the Immortals overwhelms so-called common blood. That’s how the Immortal blood can pass from generation to generation without being diluted. Maybe it’s already there, in each of us, and yet in some, in most, it never extends beyond latency?”
The sour look that wrinkled Gitashan’s face gave the impression she’d just chewed on a lemon.
“If I’m right,” Nameless said, “you have nothing to fear from interbreeding. Your people and mine could come together. This could be what both our peoples
need to survive.”
“No,” Gitashan said. She swooned and staggered.
Nameless hurried to her side, caught her by the elbow.
“You know it makes sense, lassie. Please don’t be a shogger about it. You need us as much as we need you.”
“No,” Gitashan said again. She found her balance, and in an instant her whole demeanor changed. Any chink in her armor he thought he’d found closed over with a carapace of scarolite. “Guards!” she called, and the door ground open.
Still without their swords, the scarolite-helmed women entered, this time more tentatively. Gitashan seemed to realize how cowed they were. She might have mentioned Nameless no longer had his axe, but instead she called over their shoulders to the three women of the escort.
“You three, in here. You two, back on the door.”
As Kona, Shinnock, and Yyalla bowed and scraped their way into the room, Gitashan said to Nameless, “You’ve had a fair hearing, and you’ve come up short. You will be taken to a cell, fed, and kept clean. When I send for you, and I will send, you will be given creeper vine, and you will do your duty with gusto, am I understood?”
“What about the others?” Nameless growled. “What about my friends?”
“Not that it is any of your business,” Gitashan said, indicating to Kona and Shinnock that they should grab Nameless’s arms, “but the old woman and the girl will be thrown from the mountain. Since the Warlord stole from us, that is how all strangers of no value are dealt with. For a while, I thought they might aid in your willful compliance, but now I see that any compliance from you will have to be forced. As for the common-blood dwarf, I take your point about the Immortal blood lying dormant in everyone. Perhaps he will be rewarded with a worthy child, even if you are not. He will service the other Lords, but you I shall keep for myself.”