The Nameless Dwarf Omnibus

by D. P. Prior

  Cairn bristled at that. “Ah, so it wasn’t his fault. That’s his excuse now, is it? Sorry, everyone I hacked to death, it wasn’t me, it was my axe. I just happened to be holding it.”

  “That ain’t fair, and you know it,” Nils said. He balled his hands into fists and would have hit the shogger … if …if the dwarf’s legs weren’t broke.

  “Don’t much care about fairness,” Cairn said. “World’s not like that. I just look at the facts. Cold hard facts.”

  “But it weren’t—”

  “Wasn’t his fault? Yes, I know, you’ve already said that, but it doesn’t make any difference, far as I’m concerned. You kill my family, I kill yours. That’s what I call fair. I don’t give a shog why you did it, same as fire don’t care why you touch it; it still burns just the same.”

  Nils leaned over so he could spit his words in Cairn’s face. “Yeah? Well I don’t give a shog why a tree fell on you and broke your bleeding legs. Fact is, you can’t walk and I don’t have to stand here and listen to this shit.”

  “Then don’t,” the dwarf shot back. “I’m not making you. I already told you to leave me.”

  “Yeah?

  “Yes!”

  Nils pressed his fists into his hips, racking his brain for some clever retort. “Well shog you, then.” He spun on his heel and took two strides in the direction of the lake.

  “You ever wonder why he’s got no name?” Cairn’s voice was like a blast of frigid air. Nils turned and the dwarf propped himself up on his arms, huffing with the effort.

  “He ain’t got no memory, that’s why.”

  Cairn shook his head, his face taking on a grim set. “He forgot anything else?”

  Nils thought about that. Nameless didn’t like talking about the past, but he’d let a few things slip out. “No. So?”

  “Council took his name from him with the help of a philosopher.” Cairn spat a glob of phlegm on the ground. “Aristodeus, he was called. Bald bastard, any way you look at it, but he had some tricks up his sleeve that would make a conjurer green with envy. When your friend came back from Gehenna with the black axe and started massacring anyone who got in his way, Aristodeus was the one to trap him; and he was the one with the magic, or whatever you want to call it, that excised every trace of that cursed name from history. See, some crimes are so evil they have to be forgotten. Have to.”

  “But you know his real name, right?”

  The dwarf’s eyes glinted and then closed. “No one knows it, far as I can tell. It’s gone. The Council says it’s best that way. Best forgotten, like the shogger had never been born.”

  Nils was shaking his head, trying to understand. “That’s dumb,” he said. “How you gonna learn if you forget what happened?”

  “We’d already learned enough,” Cairn snarled, “centuries ago when Maldark the Fallen sold us out to Sektis Gandaw, when we almost brought about the Unweaving of all things. We discovered too late the shadow of the Demiurgos upon us. Why do you think dwarves don’t mix with your lot on the surface? Why do you think we hide away in the bowels of the ravine? We can’t trust ourselves to act in the world, lest we once again risk its destruction. Can’t say I like it none. Reckon the Council are too strict about non-involvement, but rules is rules, I say. Don’t have to agree with them, but you have to follow them just the same.”

  Nils was about to protest. He’d seen dwarves in New Jerusalem. Well, a dwarf. Rugbeard had been propping up the bars of the city for as long as he could remember; but come to think of it, he hadn’t seen any others. Not until the siege, that is.

  “It’s written into our statutes,” Cairn said. “We’re forbidden to act. Already there are those among us who think we’ve gone too far by fleeing Arx Gravis. Action begets error, they say, and so we must do nothing. There’s no other defence against the wiles of the Demiurgos. Your … friend broke that law when he followed in his brother’s footsteps and went after the black axe. If he hadn’t been a lawbreaker, he’d never have become a butcher.”

  Nameless had a brother? What did Cairn mean he’d followed in his brother’s footsteps?

  The dwarf seemed to read his thoughts. “Another philosopher. Not a popular profession amongst dwarves. His name was Lucius, and he was a student of Aristodeus. Should never have had dealings with him, I reckon, but even the Council made exceptions for that bald bastard. It was Lucius who first discovered the references to the Pax Nanorum in our oldest annals. He’s the one who started it. His quest for the axe constituted a grave act, one that presented the Council with a dilemma. If they did nothing to stop him, one of their own, they would have had to hold themselves complicit. He wanted to go into the pit of Gehenna to find the black axe, so that’s where they took him. They fed him to the seethers. I suppose they thought a lesser action could be justified if it prevented a greater one. Never did they imagine his brother, a stupid soldier, would pick up where he left off.”

  “Nameless ain’t stupid.”

  “Oh, he is. And a whole lot more. He didn’t just do it the once, you know. After the Council took his name, they locked him in a cell and Aristodeus used magic to hold him there. The philosopher wanted him kept alive; said the Butcher was possessed by the axe, but if it could be destroyed, he would become a powerful weapon in the struggle with the Demiurgos. In the meantime, Aristodeus had the axe encased in crystal. Years later, others came to Arx Gravis, folk fully enmeshed with the world of action. They freed your friend and took him with them. Aristodeus tried to reassure us, said he could use the situation to his advantage.” Cairn snorted his contempt. “Problem was, he was as deceived as the rest of us. When the Butcher returned to the ravine with the black axe restored to him, he was even more powerful than before. This time the butchery didn’t stop, not until there were only a few hundred of us left.” He stared off into the distance, hawked and spat. “If he ever catches up with my people—my people—that shogger will deserve everything he gets, and don’t think for one minute we’ll be sticking to the law, no matter how long the Council deliberates. After what he did, it’d be a crime not to act. I’ll be right there in the front row making sure he feels everything my ma and pa felt, every last iota of pain.”

  “You do that and you’ll have me to deal with,” Nils said.

  “Oh, I’m so scared.” Cairn tried to cross his arms and fell back, banging his head on the ground.

  Nils was sorely tempted to clear off and leave the shogger to starve; leave him to the shadows prowling through the upper limbs of the trees. Maybe at dusk the wolf-men would return and rip his stinking throat out. That’d shut him up, big mouthed, stunted little—

  An unearthly shriek sounded from up on high. Nils looked to the branches, saw one of them shake and drop a cloud of pine needles.

  “You see that?” Cairn asked, his face draining of all colour. “There’s something in that tree, black as pitch, slitty yellow eyes. You can’t leave me.”

  Nils stared up into the branches, but nothing else moved. He had that feeling again, though, like a hundred pairs of eyes were boring into him. He turned in a circle, scanning the treetops until he grew too dizzy to continue. He backed towards the prone dwarf and crouched down.

  “See anything?” Cairn whispered.

  “Nothing. What you think it was, a monkey?”

  The dwarf thumped him on the shoulder. “Monkey, my beard! Yellow eyes it had, I tell you. It was a demon. Either that or some sort of goblin.”

  Nils tutted. “Ain’t no such thing as goblins.” Demons were another matter, though. Everyone knew there were demons prowling the scummy parts of NJ at night, preying on wealthy bankers and merchants stupid enough to visit those kinds of places. Streetwalkers, his mum called them. Right put the willies up him, they did.

  “No?” Cairn said. “But you’re all right with wolf-men are you? This is the land of nightmares, boy, or haven’t you learned anything yet?”

  The dwarf had a point. Weren’t no such thing as zombies either, but they’d still bitten
him and nearly turned him into one of ’em. Practically had, according to Silas.

  “Besides,” Cairn went on. “There were goblins in the woods around Mount Sartis, according to the Annals of Arx Gravis. That’s why we ended up founding the city in the ravine, so they say, because no one wanted an endless war with the nasty little shoggers. Shame, I always thought. Nothing quite beats the lava flow beneath a volcano for smelting.”

  “So, what should we do?” Nils asked, picking up on the dwarf’s anxiety and biting his fingernails.

  “Think I’ll just lie here,” the dwarf said with a sardonic grin. “Reach inside my pack, boy. There’s flint in there, and a tinder box. Goblins in the stories can’t stand fire, and if it’s a demon, I’d bet my bristles he’s had a glut of burning in the Abyss.”

  Nils got down on his knees and rifled through Cairn’s provisions. He’d barely set the kindling and gathered some deadwood when a chorus of shrill chattering pealed out across the treetops. Scores of yellow eyes flashed like sickly stars up in the branches, which started to bow and rock with rhythmic movement.

  “Either they know what you’re doing, or they’re just getting ready for dinner,” Cairn said.

  Nils drew his sword and glared up at the heights, but the chattering only grew louder, more frenzied.

  “Go on, lad,” Cairn said. “Be off with you. No sense in you staying.”

  “Just shut up and go back to sleep,” Nils said, ramming the sword into the earth. The dwarf made a face and then lay back, eyes flitting this way and that, watching the treetops.

  Nils struck flint to steel and muttered encouragement to the sparks under his breath. The tinder smoked but wouldn’t take.

  “Must have got damp,” Cairn said.

  “Spilt beer on it, no doubt.” Nils cast about for something else he could use and then remembered Granny putting pine cones in the hearth to get a good fire going on chilly nights. He gathered a bunch from beneath the closest trees, and plucked others from low branches. He added them to his pile of deadwood and tried again, and within moments he had a blaze you could roast a pig over. The thought reminded him of Silas and his magical meals. He hoped the wizard was all right. Hoped he’d understand why Nils hadn’t come back.

  The chattering in the treetops turned to hissing and clacking and then ebbed away to silence.

  “That shut them up,” Cairn said.

  Nils tensed, straining to hear. Maybe the fire had frightened them off. Maybe he could leave Cairn and get Silas. Maybe even find the dwarves and bring—

  The treetops shook like a hurricane was ripping through them. Yellow eyes flashed from the branches, and then dark shapes began swarming down the trunks, screaming like all the demons in the Abyss.

  ***

  Two hundred and twenty-one gates. Silas counted them all—above, below, to either side; each formed from spinning letters hewn upon intangible pillars; letters that flashed like lightning. Warm fluid oozed from his tear ducts, rolled down his cheeks. A hundred thousand needles stabbed his pupils, screamed at him to shut his eyes, but he refused even to blink. His rapt focus impaled the letters directly before him, scrutinising their endless juggling—reversals, augmentations, rotations. They jostled for position, dismantling the words they formed and assembling new ones through sequences of giddy permutations. They chiselled themselves into his brain, streamed down his spine and bounced back up again, running and returning in an endless cycle that bore him up into a language beyond speech. His field of vision stretched, elongated, doubled back around his head, revealing every direction in one omniscient revelation. The gates swirled around him, cocooning him in an egg of light, intersecting vortices that melded and blurred. He was the infinitesimal point, the limitless circle. The all and the nothing, the microcosm and the macrocosm. He was the Worthy, the One, the Pleroma, the Void. He was … he was … he was the silence.

  The gates revolved faster and faster, their letters a myriad flashes of argent leaving silvery trails in their wake. They throbbed behind his eyes, vibrated at his sternum, ignited in his belly. He gave himself to them, let them consume him, let them tear him asunder. He was the black hole, eating them hungrily, until nothing existed but the darkness.

  The darkness of the cave.

  He pressed his palms to his weeping eyes, slowly withdrew them, blinking at last until he could see once more. Harsh sunlight filtered through the opening between the wispy strands of his ward. The grimoire lay open on the ground, crimson spatters daubing the occult diagram. He looked at his palms—as red as a murderer’s—and knew that he had wept blood, not tears.

  The pages turned of their own accord, exuding a chill. They came to rest upon a passage he had read before; read but never understood. Now, the words as meaningless as ever, he knew it all; knew exactly where to find the ebon staff, the key that would unlock the last secrets of Blightey’s book. He saw a vision of it, tangled in vines at the centre of a forest of tar. Unspeakable horrors skirted the forest’s edge, and a blade of hellfire spun in the air above the solitary track that led to its heart.

  The image shifted, giving way to a lake by a wooded shore. In the middle of the lake, an island of rock jutted skywards, and around this swam a giant serpent. Silas gazed without feeling at the disgorged remains frothing redly across the water. Bobbing to the side was a severed head with a matted bloody beard, white eyes staring upon the Void. Some remote part of Silas’s mind registered that this was Nameless.

  Closer to the shore, Nils floated, a bloated water corpse trailing blood in a grizzly slick. Of Ilesa there was no sign, but that was nothing to be surprised about.

  With a jolt of awareness, Silas knew for certain that this scene had not yet come to pass. He started as the grimoire slammed shut, leaving him with the compulsion to act, and act swiftly, if he were to prevent the deaths of his companions.

  And why would you want to do that? the voice of his cynicism asked, colder and more uncaring than before.

  The ebon staff, set amid its black forest, returned unbidden to mind. The roars of the abominations guarding it sent icicles stabbing into his bones. The swish, swish, swish of the hellish sword warding the path made him falter in his resolve. And in that instant, he knew beyond a shadow of doubt why he’d met the dwarf and accompanied him on this trek into nightmare.

  Silas grabbed Blightey’s book, rose shakily to his feet, and banished the ward from the entrance. He ducked out of the burrow with feverish purpose. He had to get to the lake before it was too late, and with an uncanny sense as clear as his newfound prescience, he knew exactly where to go.

  If he were to claim the Liche Lord’s staff and unlock the mysteries of his book, he needed Nameless with him. For who else would have a chance against the horrors he had seen standing in the way?

  ***

  Nameless shielded his eyes to peer across the lake from the highest point on the island’s rocky finger. The treetops were shaking, and it sounded as if the forest were alive with the screams of the damned.

  “What is it?” Ilesa said, standing on tiptoe lower down.

  “Shogged if I know, but it doesn’t sound good.”

  He thought about Nils creeping back into the forest with his sword drawn, wondered what he’d heard or seen. He didn’t like it one bit. He’d heard a commotion like that before, in the foothills of Mount Sartis.

  “Goblins,” he said. “Gods of Arnoch, I hate goblins.” That meant Nils was really in trouble. He made his way down the pinnacle to stand at the water’s edge. “Hope your observations are correct, lassie.”

  Ilesa pointed to the rear of the island where the shadow of the serpent was coming into view. “Sure you wanna go back over there with that din going on?”

  “Damned right I’m sure.”

  “Well, get ready then. Head should be coming up right about … now!”

  The serpent broke the surface, water cascading from its writhing neck as it glared straight at them.

  “Wait for it,” Ilesa said, lowering hers
elf to sit on a rock with her feet dipping into the lake. “Wait for—”

  The monster splashed down out of sight, and at the same instant, Ilesa slid into the water. She turned and held out a hand. Nameless’ heart was jack-hammering around in his ribcage, and he gripped his axe so tight his knuckles stood up like white pebbles. A scream that turned into a battle cry cut across the screeching of the goblins. Was it Nils? He couldn’t tell, but the mere thought of a friend in danger had him clutch the axe in one hand and pinch his nose with the other as he jumped in.

  He sank like a stone, opened his mouth to cry out and took in water. Ilesa grabbed his wrist and pulled. His head popped above the surface and he gasped in air.

  “My armour—” he spluttered.

  “Idiot! Now keep still and lie back.” Ilesa put an arm around his neck, cupping his chin in her hand. “I’ve got you.” She fumbled around with the straps securing his hauberk, then kept hold of the collar as she dunked Nameless’ head below the surface.”

  He struggled like a lunatic, sending up streams of frothing bubbles. The hauberk came over his head and Ilesa let it go. Taking hold of him under the arms, she pulled him back up.

  “There,” she said. “Now all you need to do is float.”

  “Float?” Nameless thrashed about, barely managing to keep hold of the axe.

  “Keep your head back in the water.”

  He tried to relax, let her take control, but his instinct was to drop his feet down so he could be upright.

  Ilesa kicked for the shore, half on her back, half on her side, paddling with one hand, holding Nameless under the chin with the other. She was as good as her word, moving through the water like a seal, even with a dwarf for a burden. Nameless hadn’t thought to count, but it can’t have been more than a dozen seconds.

  “We’re gonna make it,” she grunted through the effort. “Just a little further.”

  A wave rolled over them and Nameless panicked, dropping the axe and slapping the water with his hands in a desperate attempt to stay afloat. “Shog,” he spluttered. “Shog, shog!”