by D. P. Prior
“Cordana Kilderkin, will you—”
She smacked him upside of the head and he landed on his arse.
“Bit shogging presumptuous, don’t you think?”
“But Cordy, I was only asking,” Nameless said, scrambling to his feet.
“Not the proposal, you silly scut, the breeding. The idea that a common tart like me should be thankful to have you, and your shogging Immortal blood will eradicate any trace of the inferior muck that sullies my veins.”
“That is not what I said.”
“Not exactly, but that’s how it sounded to me.”
“Then you weren’t listening.”
“I am now.”
Nameless gradually became aware the others were still in the throne room with him and Cordana. He’d been so focused on getting the proposal right, so petrified she’d say no, that his awareness of everything else had tunneled to nothing. And then her reaction had taken him completely off guard. He didn’t know whether he was embarrassed or angry or what he was.
“What I meant, Cordy, was that we are all Immortals. All of us. There is no muck sullying anyone’s veins. And for those of us who have manifested the Immortal traits that lie dormant within every dwarf, our place is to serve, even if it is from a gaudy shogging throne atop a dais.”
Moisture collected at the corners of Cordana’s eyes. “Then allow me one question before I answer your proposal.”
Reflexively, he took a step back. “What? What do you want to know?”
She stood and looked him in the eye. She came so close, he could feel the warmth of her breath on his face, the heat of her body through her white robe.
“When you… no, when the Corrector murdered my Thumil…” Her lips started to tremble as she recalled what else he had done. “When he killed my baby, how did he feel?”
She might have thought she was sparing him by using the third person, but the effect was no less crippling. Nameless felt a hole open up within him, a bottomless black pit. He was dimly aware of being on his knees, though this time from necessity, rather than custom. All he could see was rivers of blood, Thumil’s head upon a spike, and baby Marla. All he could feel was emptiness and despair and self-loathing.
“I buried them, Cordy,” he said. “I carried them up to the Sward and left them in the Garden of Tranquility.”
And then he felt Cordana’s arms embrace him, pull him to her breast.
“But not the head,” he whispered. “Not Thumil’s… I couldn’t. It was staring at me.” It was an image that would haunt him the remainder of his days.
Cordy was kneeling now, too, and weeping openly.
“I’m sorry,” she breathed. “So, sorry. But I had to be sure. I already knew. But I had to be certain.”
He returned her embrace, both of them racked with sobs, and around them came the scuff of chairs being pushed back, the shuffle and thud of feet.
“I love you, Nameless,” Cordana said. “And yes, I will be your queen.”
“Oh, lassie,” Nameless said, his sobs slowing, then giving way before a surging wave of joy. “I always hoped, but never believed. I love you, too.”
Reaching deep into the space within that he drew strength from in his moments of need, he forced himself to his feet and helped Cordana up. He blinked his eyes to clear them, and turned to the table, saying, “Very well. With Cordana at my side, I… Well, shog me stupid, they’ve gone.”
While he and Cordana had been locked in their embrace of grief and new hope, the dwarves of Arnoch—the survivors of Arx Gravis and the Lords of Thanatos—had risen from their chairs and silently filed from the room.
“About shogging time they gave us some alone time,” Cordana said. “I’ve been up to my eyeballs since the dragon, and I’ve had about all I can take from company.”
“Couldn’t agree with you more, lass—”
Cordana grabbed him by the collar of his hauberk and dragged him about as close as two dwarves could get. “Now, shut up, and kiss me.”
***
And so, it came to pass that, in the seventh year of the re-settlement of Arnoch, and on the third day of reunification between the Dwarf Lords of Thanatos and their kin from the City of Arx Gravis, the Nameless Dwarf of the House of Thane, and Cordana Kilderkin were duly joined in sacred matrimony.
Ale flowed mightily, songs of high bawdy were bellowed in the beer halls, blending with the ceaseless sounds of revelry coming from the newly occupied throne room. And when the festivities were over, and not a dwarf remained standing, hope effused from every stone of the citadel and hung overhead like the brightening suns of a new dawn.
The fauna of Qlippoth gathered on the shoreline surrounding Arnoch, all manner of monstrous beasts of nightmare. A truce of sorts had been called for that one night. For there was a new adversary among them, and a new locus for the defense of all that was beautiful, good, and true amid the roiling insanity dreamed by the Cynocephalus.
As unified as the dwarves had once more become, the husks howled, roared, hissed, and screeched with a harmony they had never before shown, and never would again. Inchoate cries formed a greeting in a sublime language, discernible only to the gods of the Supernal Realm, but recorded by the inspired scribe of these Annals as simply,
“Hail, King of Arnoch!”
EPILOGUE
Matriarch Gitashan—former Matriarch, she reminded herself—left Arnoch by the main barbican. The guards on the gate, common-bloods in red cloaks, tried to tell her it wasn’t safe at night, especially alone, but she silenced them with a glare. Whatever else she might have lost, she still had her innate authority. It’s what defined her, what made her who she was. And it was intimately bound up with her blood: the blood of the Immortals.
And now that blood seethed as she left the safety of the ancient citadel that should have been hers by right. It wasn’t that she disputed Nameless’s ascension. He might have been a commoner in his bearing, but he shared with her the blood of kings. She knew her place in the scheme of things, and didn’t even mind that tradition demanded it was a subordinate one. But Nameless showed no respect for custom, and neither did the brewer’s daughter he’d married. The King of Arnoch should have taken an Immortal for his wife. He should have taken her.
The shoreline surrounding the citadel shimmered under the glare of the largest of three moons. At first, the ground seemed like a rippling extension of the waves lapping at the breakwater, but as she entered a silvery patch of moonlight, she saw that it looked to be formed from melted glass as black as the mountains on Thanatos.
She started, and her hand flew to the scimitar hanging from her hip, when the ambit of the moon’s glare shifted, and a figure emerged from the dark, swinging an axe. When it didn’t move, she took a few deep breaths to slow her pounding heart. She released her grip on the scimitar’s hilt and stepped closer.
It was the charred skeleton of a dwarf frozen in action. Behind it were more skeletons, some aiming crossbows at the sky. Gitashan walked between them, running her fingers over bones, helmed skulls, weapons. It was a compelling diorama, a vignette of heroic defiance in the face of some unspeakable horror.
“Personally, I was a little disappointed.”—A man’s voice, accented and ever-so-slightly lisping. It carried to her effortlessly above the burgeoning wind.
She hadn’t noticed it before, but a short way back from the statues stood a block of granite like a sarcophagus. Not a sarcophagus: it was a burning block, the remains of a funeral pyre. She could tell from the ash and the charred kindling that littered the ground around it.
The night sky seemed to coalesce about the top of the pyre, but as she blinked and her vision adjusted, she could see the voice had issued from a figure seated atop the pyre. He was bigger than a dwarf, perhaps a human like the Warlord. The black cloak wrapped around him merged seamlessly with the night, and a drooping cowl was pulled low over his face.
“A dragon that size, and with five heads, no less, should have wreaked a bit more devastatio
n. And to think, all the trouble I went to encouraging the dog-headed ape that sustains this world in existence what to dream. Perhaps I should try again. What would you suggest, Matriarch, a basilisk? An army of undead? A liche?”
His use of her name was at once unsettling and intriguing. Gitashan drew her scimitar and approached him in a wary arc.
“How do you know who I am?”
“I’m very observant,” the man said. “I greatly enjoyed your reign on Thanatos, and it is my hope that you can do the same thing here. Once we have dealt with our mutual problem.”
“My issue is with a common-blood sharing a bed with the King of Arnoch,” Gitashan said.
There, it was out, the root of her ire. It wasn’t that Nameless had rejected her, or that he’d supplanted her as ruler. It was the thought of centuries of tradition being trodden underfoot on the whim of an Immortal who neither fully understood or appreciated what he was. Rut with the lowlifes if you had to, by all means, but marry one…
“I agree,” the man said. “It’s terrible. Life is so cruel. You should have been the one beside him. More than that, you should have been the one on the throne.”
“Arnoch needs a king,” Gitashan replied.
“Pish. I’m all for tradition, but one has to have the discernment to know those that reflect the good, the beautiful, and the true, and those that propagate the myth that men are somehow like gods, and women are their playthings.”
Hearing it said by another shocked her like the thrill of plunging into ice-cold water. She’d only done it the once, back on Thanatos. The things that lived in the mountain lake were anything but thrilling, and she’d been lucky to survive.
“Come, sit beside me,” the man said. He tapped the granite block he was seated on.
Gitashan returned her scimitar to its thong on her belt and did as he bade. It occurred to her she was being foolish. She didn’t know this man. She didn’t know the risks. But in the same way her commands had been obeyed on Thanatos without anyone daring to question her, she found she had to comply. No, not had to: wanted to.
“That’s better,” the man said, patting her on the knee.
She shivered at his touch. It chilled her down to the bone. There was an odd scent about him, too: the odor of dank earth and the hint of something pungent. All she could compare it to was the livid meat dishes Ancient Bub had served her at the Dark Citadel.
“You and I share a common cause,” the man said.
Gitashan wanted to gag at his rancid breath on her cheek, but she was too rapt, too fascinated to turn away. Beneath his cowl, eyes like garnets smoldered. She felt drawn to them, felt them pulling at her, drinking her in.
He turned his head away, and she snatched in a gulp of air, as if she’d just survived drowning. Her heartbeat was a torpid boom, boom, boom in her ears.
She should have run, then, she knew it. Put as much distance between herself and this stranger as she could. But even as she thought it, she knew she couldn’t. She wasn’t sure if it was some invisible hold he’d snagged her with, or her own inner longings to set things straight, to put things back to how they ought to have been.
“I assume from your silence, you are not interested,” the man said, slipping from the edge of the block and straightening his cloak. “I understand, and I will not trouble you again.”
“No,” Gitashan breathed as he started to walk away.
He turned and waited.
“No,” she said again. “You are right: life is cruel.”
“Understandable you should experience it so, having lived your entire life until now on Thanatos.” He flowed toward her like a shadow.
“Yes,” Gitashan said. “A life surrounded by death in all its forms. I have done nothing but fight to survive.”
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world you were born into,” the man said. “And whatever they say, this one is no better. Oh, the perils are better hidden maybe, and subtle to a degree you would not guess, but Aethir can be a cruel world, just the same. And its people can be even crueler.”
“Yes. Yes, they can.”
“It is a language, cruelty, one universally understood. I am something of a scholar in this respect, well-versed in all its many dialects. Do unto others what they would otherwise do to you, used to be my maxim. But these days, I say, do to others what they deserve. Or rather, do to them whatever it pleases me to do.”
The words sounded wrong to Gitashan, evil, depraved; but the feelings they evoked—strength, justice, righteousness—sent evanescent thrills through her veins. Her mind balked, tried to turn away, but the rest of her was euphoric, flushed with a bubbling heat that was impossible to refuse.
“You like that, don’t you?” the man said from behind her, his chill breath on her neck. He caressed her cheek with a solitary, clammy finger. She shuddered and bucked, and he withdrew his hand. “Then, are we agreed?”
Gitashan’s limbs grew flaccid. She dropped to her knees, panting for every breath. “Agreed?” she gasped. What had she agreed to?
“Your issue is with the Queen, and mine is with the King. I’m all for efficiency, for killing two birds with one stone. All it will take is one well-aimed arrow from my lectionary of cruelty, one masterstroke of pain. And, do you know, after this stimulating little talk with you, I think I have it. I’ll be in touch.”
There was the ruffle of cloth, the swift patter of feet on rock.
Gitashan swayed on her knees for a second, dazed and bewildered, as if waking from a dream. She shook her head to clear it, then grunted with the effort of climbing to her feet. She turned a quick circle, scanning the darkness threatening to swallow up the shoreline, but the man was gone.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you especially to:
Amber Leigh, Anthony Prior, Barbara Prior, Chris Taylor, Conrad Bucsis, Dayve Walsh, Frederick Holbrook, Jared Johnson, Kenny Howell, Melinda LeBaron, Mitchell Hogan, M.R. Mathias, Paula Prior, Ray Nicholson, Roel Cisneros, Scott Morrison, Zak Reynolds, Bob Neufeld (“Voice of the Nameless Dwarf”), Anton Kokarev, Mike Nash, Patrick Stacey, Laurie McLean, and Valmore Daniels.
Cover art: Mike Nash: https://mike-nash-art.squarespace.com
Cover Design: Alisha, Damonza.com: https://damonza.com
Editor: Paula@Quills2Keyboards Editing Services: http://bit.ly/1MFsdR6
Literary Agent: Laurie McLean: http://www.fuseliterary.com
ALSO BY D.P. PRIOR
LEGENDS OF THE NAMELESS DWARF
1. CARNIFEX
2. GEAS OF THE BLACK AXE
3. REVENGE OF THE LICH
4. RETURN OF THE DWARF LORDS
SHADER
ORIGINS 1. WARD OF THE PHILOSOPHER
ORIGINS 2. THE SEVENTH HORSE
1. SWORD OF THE ARCHON
2. BEST LAID PLANS
3. THE UNWEAVING
STANDALONES
HUSK
THE ATTIC (writing as Derek Prior)
www.dpprior.com
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