by D. P. Prior
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Nils said, and promptly was.
Nameless looked down at his boots. There was barely a couple of feet to the edge either side. Might not have been too big a problem had it not been for the wind, which was picking up, swirling around them with a whistling howl.
“We need to keep moving,” Ilesa said, ushering the others ahead of her. “Make it to the far side.”
She pointed in the direction Nameless had been leading them. Whereas before there had been no end in sight, now there was a freestanding wooden gate in the near distance, and a massive figure loomed on its other side.
Nameless squinted but could make out little other than it was humanoid and very, very large.
“What is that?” Silas spoke so close Nameless could smell the rankness of his breath, coppery and pungent, like a wound turned bad.
“Giant?” Nameless wondered out loud. “Let’s go and ask.”
Before he could move, a chunk of earth broke away and he slid towards the edge. “Shog!” he cried, flailing about and hoping someone would grab his hand.
No one did, and the next instant he was plunging head over heels towards the hungry sea.
***
“Nameless!” Nils screamed. He shuffled forwards, but soil and rock was still crumbling from the edge and Silas was in his way. “Why didn’t you grab him? You could’ve caught him?”
Silas turned to Ilesa, spread his palms. “Happened too fast. You saw, didn’t you? There was no time.”
“I saw,” Ilesa said. She moved along the path a little way so she could approach the edge and look over. She stared down at the sea for a long time, like she was considering something. “There was no time,” she said with a sigh. “Nothing you could have done.”
“Bollocks,” Nils said. His mouth was full of the snot dripping from his nose and there were tears streaming down his cheeks. He felt too angry to be ashamed about it, though. Too scared. “So what are we gonna do now, huh? What the shog are we gonna do?”
“Press on,” Silas said.
“Go back,” Ilesa said at the same time.
Nils wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Don’t see no point staying out here without Nameless. Thought finding the dwarves was what this was all about.”
“Then you thought wrong,” Silas said. “There were always other considerations, only you never thought to ask. You two do what you like. I’m going to speak to the giant.”
Nils didn’t like the look of the looming presence one little bit. “Rather you than me, mate. I’m off. Coming?” he asked Ilesa.
She didn’t look right. Her forehead was beaded with sweat and she’d turned a sickly grey. “Yeah, I’m coming.”
“You OK?” Nils said. “Only you don’t look—”
“Fine,” she said, shooting a glare at Silas. “Least I will be when we get back to Malfen. Don’t look so good yourself.”
Nils had been too shocked to notice. Seeing Nameless plunge over the edge had cut him deep. Not that he gave a stuff about the dwarf, he told himself. It was just … just shocking is what it was. He put the back of his hand to his head. Reckoned he had a fever. “Shog, I’m burning up. How about you, Silas?”
“No, I’m fine.” Silas leaned in close to peer at Nils. “Well, no worse than normal. You get bitten by those zombies?”
“Just scratches, mainly.” Nils’s hand went to his ear. “Think one of ’em might have chewed on my lughole.”
“How about you? Any bites?” Silas moved to examine Ilesa but her dagger was at his throat before he could lay a finger on her.
“Go shog yourself.”
Silas withdrew, holding his hands up placatingly. “Only I saw something about them in the grimoire, when it made me … when I cast that spell.”
“Show me,” Ilesa said, still brandishing her knife.
Silas unfastened his bag and pulled out the book. He started to leaf through the pages. “I know it was here somewhere. Should have made a note of the page, only it was so hectic back there.”
“Shog, Brau,” Ilesa said. “Never told me they’d taken over the village. What is it with people?”
“Somewhere around here,” Silas went on, oblivious. “Somewhere …”
Nils caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned his head to see the giant plodding down the cliff-top path towards them. Only it weren’t just a large man; it weren’t rightly human, what with only having one massive eye set in the centre of its forehead. “Uh, Silas …”
“Patience, boy,” Silas said with a tut. “Can’t you see I’m …”
“Silas!”
“What’s this?” the cyclops said in a voice like rolling thunder. “Nice happy family out for a blustery stroll? What brings you good folk all the way out here?”
“Dwarves,” Nils blurted out.
“Bligh … Nothing,” Silas said. “I mean, yes, dwarves.”
Ilesa just coughed up a load of phlegm, her lungs wheezing like a split bellows.
“You are ill?” the cyclops said. “You must come out of the wind.” It turned as if to lead them towards the lone gate.
“Fine,” Ilesa said with a grimace. “I’m fine. We’re just leaving.”
“That may not be possible.” The cyclops looked over their heads, back down the trail.
“Oh, it’s possible,” Ilesa said, drawing her sword and adopting a fighting stance, doubly armed.
Nils followed the cyclops’ gaze and felt his stomach fill with lead. “What the shog?”
The cliff-top path had vanished. From a few yards behind Ilesa there was nothing but roiling black mist.
“How?” Silas said, closing the grimoire and gawping like a startled turkey.
“You are new to Qlippoth?” the cyclops asked. “This is simply the way of things here.”
Ilesa sheathed her sword and dagger. “Seems we have no choice,” she said. “After you.”
“Good,” the cyclops said. “It’s been a long time since I had visitors. No one seems to just drop by these days.” He set off the way he had come from with long, languid strides.
“Come on,” Silas said. “I can look for the page about zombie bites when we get wherever we’re going.”
Nils grunted his approval and followed the wizard. It was only when they’d passed beyond the gate and started through a dense pine forest that he felt a gnawing at the back of his mind. He turned to find that Ilesa had vanished.
***
Teeth rushed up towards his face. Huge teeth. Colossal. Nameless tumbled for an eternity—far longer than he should have. Far slower, too. It took his befuddled brain a moment to realise that he’d be dead already if this were natural. Dead, or at least extremely wet, and then dead, seeing as he couldn’t swim. Wasn’t much call for swimming in Arx Gravis.
The fall turned into a wafting descent, a gentle swirl towards the maw of a gigantic fish—a fish with the biggest, sharpest, most luminescent … not teeth. Not teeth at all. They were bars of light across a cavernous opening that was certainly mouth-like, if not an actual mouth. He tried to twist around, tried to swim against whatever sorcerous current had caught hold of him, but he was pulled relentlessly down. He shut his eyes as he struck the bars of light and felt … nothing, besides a warm tickling sensation.
And then he was standing upon a tongue. No doubt about it, it was rough textured, slick with frothy spit, and black as the Void. It retracted sharply and he lost his footing, landing plumb on his backside. The tongue carried him towards an aperture that pressed wetly about him, and then he was falling again, or rather sliding deeper and deeper into the gullet of whatever leviathan had swallowed him whole.
The descent levelled out after a few seconds and he was able to rise to his feet on a squelchy, viscous floor. Goo stuck to the soles of his boots, trailed him when he took a step towards… towards…What was it, a door? Right in the middle of the sinuous tube of flesh and slime he stood within was a round portal made of wood. It even had a brass handle, which he
clasped and twisted.
Greenish light spilled through the crack, and then the door opened onto a vast spherical chamber with a gilled ceiling, like the underside of a mushroom. Clusters of wriggling uvulae dangled from above, and the floor was alive with hundreds of purplish lips, like those of a clam, opening and closing as if holding some secret conference.
Opposite the entrance there was a vast circular window with a dark spot at its centre. There were fish outside, darting in and out of coral and seaweed. Nameless gasped as he realised this was the creature’s eye, seen from the inside. A single, gigantic orb that must have been set dead centre in its head. Before the eye-window there was a stool that seemed moulded from fungi, and seated upon it was a tiny humanoid. It spun to face Nameless and he gasped again. Save for the complexion, which was swarthy, and the grey dreadlocked hair, he could have been looking at his old friend Shadrak.
“You … You are a homunculus.”
“Abednago is my name.” The little man tapped the tips of his fingers together, almost as if he were giving a sarcastic clap. “Why so surprised? You’ve seen homunculi before. Why, your servant Bird was one of my people, not to mention a certain albino assassin.”
“Bird wasn’t exactly my servant.”
The homunculus stood and approached Nameless the way you might approach a wild animal. “Crude pretence, I know, but how else was he to get close to you?”
Nameless had known for a long time that Bird had had an ulterior motive in serving him. The homunculus had been possessed of a magical affinity with nature—talking with animals, transforming himself into their form, summoning their aid. He’d used this last power to devastating effect in the battle with Otto Blightey, the Liche Lord of Verusia, but it came with a heavy cost. Nameless forced down the memory; forced down the grumbling anger that Silas was messing with Blightey’s legacy.
“Nameless,” Abednago put a hand on his arm and led him towards the eye-window. “Bird is known to me. Shadrak only from what Bird told me of his past, and from accounts of his part in your …”
“Downfall?”
The homunculus took hold of a tuberous nodule in the wall and twisted it. Another mushroom-like stool rose up in front of the eye. He gestured for Nameless to sit, and took the other stool himself.
“Story,” he said. “You have heard of the pride before the fall? Well, is there not a tradition of the subsequent rise?”
“You’re starting to sound like Shader,” Nameless said. “Next you’ll be telling me all about the mysteries of the resurrection.”
“And why not? You wouldn’t be the first dwarf to accept such teachings. But I was speaking figuratively. Does not the hero first have to plunge to the depths before he can rise stronger and better than before?”
“Ah, then perhaps you are not familiar with dwarven tragedy.”
“Perhaps,” Abednago said.
“How long have you been following me?” Nameless asked the question with a degree of trepidation, but he already knew the answer in his gut.
“Since Arx Gravis.”
Nameless hung his head and prayed the blackness would come upon him.
“It was not your fault.” Abednago said.
“Rubbish.”
“You believe you are too clever to be deceived? Too strong?”
Nameless felt every muscle in his body tense. When he spoke, it was through gritted teeth.
“No.”
“Then what choice did you have? How could you have done things differently?”
“I didn’t have to enter Gehenna. Didn’t have to bring back the axe.”
The homunculus sighed and closed his eyes. “But that’s what you were supposed to do. You or any other dwarf who had the courage.”
“Yes, well thankfully no one else did.”
“I know. And that’s what makes you special.”
“That’s what makes me dangerous. That’s what led to the slaughter.”
“It is what gives us hope,” Abednago said. “It is what may yet save your people.”
Nameless scoffed at that. “Save them? I’m the one they’re running from.”
“A beast beaten will recoil from a raised hand, even if the intention is to stroke. The dwarves of Arx Gravis would have been killed with or without your help. It is the lot of your people. It was the lot of your ancestors who once dwelt in the most powerful citadel in all of Aethir.”
“Arnoch? That’s just a myth. And besides, they destroyed themselves.”
“Ah, but did they have a choice?” The homunculus cocked his head. “Nameless, there is something I wish to show you. Will you allow me?”
Nameless shifted uncomfortably on his stool and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Is it hot in here?”
The homunculus shook his head.
“I’m feeling slightly nauseous,” Nameless said, pinching the bridge of his nose and belching. “Are you asking me to trust a homunculus? The spawn of the Demiurgos?”
“You trusted Shadrak, did you not? You trusted Bird.”
“Yes, but—”
“We are a people divided, Nameless. Yes, our nature is deception, but there are some among us who would play our father at his own game.”
Nameless raised an eyebrow. “Why would you do that?”
“As I said, we are divided. Divided upon the issue of the dwarves.”
“Why—?”
Abednago raised a hand. “Later. Let’s just say it concerns the experiments of Sektis Gandaw.”
Nameless’ brain was flipping somersaults trying to fathom what on Aethir the homunculus could mean. The Technocrat had laid claim to creation of the dwarves, said he’d altered the basic makeup of humans he’d kidnapped from Shader’s world, Earth. They were engineered for mining scarolite; useful tools and nothing more. That usefulness had ceased when Maldark and his Order had betrayed Sektis Gandaw and thwarted the first attempt at the Unweaving of all things. The dwarves were discarded as easily as the ant-man and his pets.
“Don’t dwell upon it now,” Abednago said. “Some things are better shown than told.”
He stared straight ahead through the great eye of the fish-ship, and a ripple passed through the chamber. The view outside shifted as the craft began to move.
***
“I tell you, I don’t bleeding like it,” Nils whispered, tugging on Silas’s sleeve.
Silas was starting to agree with the lad, but what could they do? They’d followed the cyclops through acres of woodland, and now they could be anywhere, for all he knew. He couldn’t even tell which was east and which was west, so dismal were his wilderness skills. And as for Ilesa—
“And what about Ilesa?” Nils continued in his whingeing whisper. “What do you suppose happened? I mean, did she fall like Nameless? Did that fog-shit take her?”
“Maybe she just took the chance to save her skin.”
Nils looked dumbfounded. “Nah, she wouldn’t do that. Would she?”
“She was quite prepared to leave Nameless, remember? We have no reason to trust her.”
The cyclops ceased his mile-eating strides and turned to loom over them. He made a show of counting them with his fingers and then frowned. “Thought there were three of you. What happened to the other, you know, the female with the succulent … in all the leather?”
Silas shrugged and turned his palms up. “No idea. One minute she was there, the next she was gone. That’s two companions we’ve lost today.”
“Two?” the cyclops said, looking out through the forest.
“Yes,” Nils said. “We were travelling with a—”
“So have we arrived yet?” Silas said, clapping his hands together.
“We have.” The cyclops pushed through the last of the trees until they stood before a cave set into a craggy bank. “Welcome to my home.” He ducked inside the opening then poked his head back out. “Coming?”
Silas looked at Nils and the boy merely shrugged and went into the cave. The lad’s condition had worsened during the trek
through the woods. His skin was ashen, his hair slick and matted with sweat. He seemed to be having difficulty breathing, the air rattling in and out of his lungs with a worrying wheeze. It had to be the zombies. Had to, otherwise how come Silas was the only one not to be infected? If the blasted cyclops hadn’t come upon them when he did, Silas felt sure he could have found the reference to zombie bites in Blightey’s grimoire. He’d only seen it in passing, during the casting of whatever spell had cut a swathe through the cadavers. He probably should have paid more attention at the time, but the book had unnerved him. Damned thing seemed to have a life of its own. Even now he had the nagging sensation it was whispering prompts at the back of his mind, not loud enough to be fully discernible. Messages below the threshold of awareness, although not quite so deep that they didn’t ring alarm bells.
He should have listened to the warnings back at the Academy. Maybe it was for good reason Blightey’s grimoire was off limits. Then again, so much in Silas’s past had been off limits, but he’d always prevailed in the end. No, he wasn’t about to let the scaremongering of a bunch of ivory-tower academics keep him from his research. He was onto something here, and the book’s obvious power only confirmed that. Magic was like anything else worth knowing. You had to proceed with caution, one step at a time; had to get to know each stage thoroughly, harness it to your will, and then move on only when ready. Had to show it who was master, that was all. Fear was for the weak and the ignorant.
With a rap of his fingers on the bag that held the book, Silas followed Nils inside. The entrance bore into the rocky bank some way, and then converged on a tunnel mouth, where Nils and the cyclops were waiting. The three of them descended half a dozen natural steps until they reached a far larger cathedral cavern. The skins of different animals covered much of the floor, their bones stacked in piles upon ledges at various heights. Two massive ensconced torches shed their guttering glow across one corner of the cavern, and this is where the cyclops led them, gesturing for them to be seated on a fur hide so large it could have belonged to some kind of elephant.