by D. P. Prior
Nils wanted to say something but found his eyes drawn to the feast laid out before him. His lips were dripping saliva, and his stomach groaned like a creaking door. He snatched up a roll and tore into it, at the same time cramming in a hunk of cheese and slurping down some wine.
Silas watched him with eyes wreathed in shadow. “Enjoy,” he said, “and when you’ve finished, perhaps there’s something you can do for me.”
“What?” Nils grunted through a mouthful of food. His nose drew him to the roasting lamb, and he dropped the roll and took up his sword so he could cut himself a slice. It was awkward work that nearly cost him a finger, but the end result was worth it. He crammed as much meat as he could in his mouth and licked the grease from his fingers.
“As I said,”—Silas leaned toward him—“I am lost. I hail from the Academy at New Londdyr and lack the practical skills necessary for such a journey as I have undertaken.”
Nils chewed rapidly and swallowed, washing the lamb down with another gulp of wine. “Why come all the way out here? Don’t you know this is the borderland? There’s nothing beyond those mountains other than Qlippoth, and believe me, that’s somewhere you don’t want to go.”
“Oh, pish,” Silas said. “Stories to scare the unenlightened. There are things hidden in Qlippoth you wouldn’t believe. But first I must find Malfen. I’ve reason to believe a certain Shent may have information that could help me in my quest.”
“The Ant-Man?” Nils said. “You’ve got to be joking. I heard he eats travelers for breakfast.”
Silas laughed. It was a good-natured laugh, honest and straight from the belly. “More tales to frighten the children with. Call me an old cynic,” he said, “but I think our beloved senators put this sort of thing about to keep the slaves in their place.”
Nils impaled another piece of meat on the tip of his sword and slid it free with his fingers. “What slaves? There’s no slaves in New Londdyr. That’s why it’s the city of the free. Even when Sektis Gandaw lorded it over Malkuth, the city stayed independent.”
Silas shook his head, as if Nils were a naive child. “We’re all slaves, my friend, penned in by those mighty Cyclopean walls. Oh, I’ll agree they were built to keep Gandaw out in the first instance, but what purpose do they serve now?”
“The gates open every day,” Nils said. “People can come and go as they please.”
“Ah,” Silas said with a jab of his finger. “But who does, besides intrepid travelers like you and me? My guess is that most of the citizens of New Londdyr feel much safer holed up behind those walls, and are encouraged to feel that way by silly stories about ant-men and demons beyond the mountains. All these lands out here, all these wonders to explore, and we are kept from it by a profiteering Senate that keeps a docile slave labor force.”
“I don’t know,” Nils said. And he didn’t. He didn’t have the slightest interest in politics. Far as he was concerned, this Silas Thrall was a woolly-thinking academic with his head in the clouds. Back in the city, Nils would probably have just slit the shogger’s throat and run off with whatever was in his bag. At least, he liked to think he would’ve. But he wasn’t in the city. He was miles from anywhere, cold and hungry, and Silas Thrall had just proven his worth ten times over.
“All right,” Nils said. “I can find Malfen for you, but I ain’t sticking around while you meet Shent.”
“Excellent,” Silas said, standing and weaving his hand through the air. The fire returned to cinders, and the food evaporated into the night.
“But I’m not finished,” Nils said.
“Half now, half when we get to Malfen,” Silas said, crossing his arms.
Nils glowered but couldn’t think of nothing he could do about it. “Fine,” he said. “Follow me.”
SILAS
Silas stumbled along cursing his lack of fitness. The dismal twilight was no help, either. Raphoe might have cast a wide glow, but it smothered the landscape in a gray similitude that gave it a dreamlike quality. It reminded him very much of tales of the Void, where disembodied wraiths roamed lost and uncomprehending, with no recollection of their former lives and no awareness of anything save their insatiable longing—for something as elusive as the ghostly lights that baited travelers to their slow, suffocating deaths in the quagmires of the Sour Marsh.
Nils looked back at him as infuriatingly spritely and cocksure as he’d been from the beginning of the trek.
“Almost there,” his voice cut across the night like a trumpet blast. “There’s an orange glow from beyond the ridge. Probably lanterns atop the walls.”
“Or the fiery maws of hungry devils,” Silas muttered under his breath.
His good humor had vanished with his energy. He was beginning to wish he’d learned to ride, rather than wasting away his youth picking pockets, and his adulthood in the ivory towers of academia. Physical prowess was for meatheads and morons, he’d always said, but now he was starting to see the other side of the coin.
“Why don’t you turn into a bird again?” Nils said, jogging back alongside him.
I would if I could, Silas thought. He was still swamped with fatigue and nausea from the last metamorphosis. Plebs like Nils had no idea how demanding the mantic arts could be—particularly for a beginner.
“Mustn’t squander power,” he huffed as he started up yet another scree slope. “Never know when you might need it.”
“Soon as we see the town walls, I’m out of here,” Nils said, hands on hips. “Reckon you’ve got enough power for the rest of my food?” His hand strayed to the hilt of his sword.
Silas’s eyes narrowed, and he drew his coat around him. “You’ll get what you deserve, boy,” he said in the coldest, most rasping voice he could manufacture.
Nils took a step back and tripped over a rock. “We had a deal, remember,” he said, rolling to his feet and puffing his chest out.
Silas found it all faintly comical, particularly the way Nils’s voice went from a shrill falsetto to a gruff baritone in the space of a few heartbeats. “Oh, I remember.” He drew himself up to his full height and glowered. “I never forget.”
Nils blinked rapidly. He swallowed, made a show of dusting himself off, and turned back to the slope.
Silas breathed a sigh of relief and started after him. His fingers drummed against the side of his satchel, and he felt the reassuring bulk of the grimoire. He unclasped the bag as he walked and let his hand creep inside to stroke the rough leather of the book’s binding. He fought the overwhelming urge to sit and thumb through the ancient pages right here under the pale glare of Raphoe and the distant glow of her siblings.
The grimoire had called to him every night since he’d stolen it from the Academy. The pages seemed to speak, urge him on. Every sentence was a promise that compelled further reading. He only stopped when his brain was burning with new concepts that threatened to split his sanity. One more word, it seemed to say, one more paragraph. If you get to the end of the chapter, what knowledge will be yours! What power!
Poppycock, Silas had thought when Professor Gillis had lectured on the insidious pull of Blightey’s book. A grimoire of the Eleventh Degree, so its author claimed: the blackest and most esoteric of all magical writings. It was reputedly a record and an instructional manual of the occult practices of Dr. Otto Blightey, the Lich Lord of Verusia. The bogey man. Silas had scoffed at Gillis’s melodramatic warning to the students. Another invention to frighten the ignorant.
Against the most sacred prohibitions of the Academy, Silas had used the skills he’d acquired in his youth to break into the labyrinthine scriptorium in the basement, where all the forbidden manuscripts were preserved—the records of the Technocrat, Sektis Gandaw; the Annals of the Dwarf Lords of Arnoch, the mythical lost city that had preceded Arx Gravis; the Testimonies of the Early Settlers, the people who’d been brought to Aethir from beyond the stars by Sektis Gandaw’s homunculi; and the Journals of Skeyr Magnus, the half-breed who’d stolen secrets from the Perfect Peak and sought to
rival the Technocrat’s power over machines. During a confrontation with the Senate a couple of years back, Magnus had been killed by one of his own contraptions.
“Told you,” Nils hollered from the top of the ridge. “Malfen.”
Silas struggled up beside him and looked down the escarpment. Flaming torches hung from sconces around high walls that ran across the pass at the foot of the Farfalls. The mountains rose like gigantic steps into the receding distance, never sheer, their gradient long and gentle, as if they had been poured like molten sludge upon the plains between Malkuth and Qlippoth.
“Look down there,” Nils said, pointing at the immense gate.
Silas squinted. It was more of a portcullis than a gate, probably of wrought iron, and virtually impregnable. Shadowy forms passed back and forth behind the grille. It seemed that Malfen never slept, and that it was going to be impossible to enter discreetly.
“What will you do?” Nils asked.
Silas was tempted to march right up and demand a meeting with Shent, but something told him that wasn’t such a good idea. His optimism had deserted him, and the scene below was unnerving.
Malfen looked like a clump of warped and twisted structures that had been randomly thrown together. The alleyways between houses were narrow and winding, giving the whole place the appearance of a spider’s web. Shapes crept through the dark spaces and a reddish haze hung over the town like a cloak of blood.
Not for the first time, Silas wished he’d never clapped eyes on Blightey’s grimoire. If it hadn’t been for the entry about the planting of the Lich Lord’s staff in a secret place in Qlippoth, nothing would have dragged him within a hundred miles of Malfen. That, and the uncovering of a poem by the foppish Quintus Quincy, who’d claimed the Ant-Man knew of every incursion into Qlippoth, and had captured anyone lucky enough to escape the lands of nightmare and wrung their secrets from them. Silas had caught up with Quincy in The Wyrm’s Head in New Londdyr. The old soak had talked like a gossiping housewife once Silas had stood him a few rounds.
Quincy said the Ant-Man was just a nickname fashioned to terrorize the people of Malfen into meeting his demands—the usual sort of things: protection and extortion.
Quincy’s source had been the journal of some gold-digging chancer called Noris Bellosh who’d spent a year and a day in Qlippoth before falling into Shent’s hands. Bellosh had served Shent for almost a decade, and he believed the Ant-Man knew more about Qlippoth than anyone alive. Shent, he said, had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the geography of the nightmare lands pieced together from the agonized testimonies of his victims. Bellosh had claimed Shent literally was an ant-human hybrid, but Quincy attributed that to the man’s sensationalism. Bellosh had been offered a small fortune for publication of his journal but hadn’t lived to capitalize on it. He’d eaten poisoned walnut and date bread—his favorite repast—and the journal had disappeared. Quincy had bought it from a man named Albert in one of New Jerusalem’s flea markets.
Silas shook his head. It had started as a playful quest. He had rummaged around in libraries, visited the most ancient sites of New Londdyr. He’d spoken with wizards, and even flown on a mysterious air-raft with the mad mage, Magwitch, looking for the ancient portals that Blightey’s grimoire stated existed between the worlds. All a wild goose chase, Silas had concluded, but still the book urged him on.
Finding out about Blightey had proven more or less impossible. As Silas had learned from the diary portions of the book, Blightey was not from Aethir. He came from a place called London, so he claimed. From what Silas could gather from the later entries, the place had subsequently changed names many times. Blightey had subsequently ruled the country of Verusia, where he’d fought valiantly against the despotism of an evil empire known as “The Nousian Theocracy’. On several occasions, he had trodden the paths of the Abyss, and once emerged from the pit of Gehenna into Qlippoth. He’d left his staff there, planted in the loam of nightmares to await the coming of someone he called ‘The Worthy’.
Throughout all his research, Silas had been skeptical, but nevertheless, the more he learned, the more he wanted to know. He studied assiduously, and if he didn’t read through the brittle pages of the grimoire until his head was ready to burst, he couldn’t sleep. He thought of little else, and whenever he was deprived of the chance to dip into the tome, he’d find himself irascible, bordering on frantic.
“Well?” Nils’s nagging voice cut through the fug of Silas’s pensiveness. “I can’t stand here all day. I got you to Malfen, now you need to keep your side of the deal.”
Silas sighed and started to weave his hands through the air, when he spotted something off to the left at the foot of the slope.
A few hundred yards out from the town wall, the blackness pooled in a circle.
“What’s that?” Silas asked, pointing.
Nils took a step forward and yelped as he slid on the scree. The slope shifted behind him, and he was caught in a great tide of slate and rock that carried him all the way to the bottom.
Silas trudged down after him, surfing the scree in fits and starts, flapping his arms for balance. He hopped off at the bottom and offered Nils a hand up.
“Great!” Nils said. “Shogging great! Now I’ve gotta climb—”
Silas pressed a finger to his lips for silence as something emerged from the circle of blackness. It was the size of a horse but with a segmented body and thin articulated legs. Antennae twitched upon a bulbous head, and twin eyes the size of saucers shone cyan in the pale moonlight.
“What is it?” Nils fumbled with his sword and tried to back up the slope. The way the scree slid under his feet, it may as well have been a waterfall.
Another creature darted from the aperture, mandibles clacking like shears. Silas’s heart thumped in his chest as scores more poured forth and scuttled toward them.
“Ants,” he said with as much awe as fear.
Nils was looking frantically to left and right, but there was nowhere to run.
Silas put a calming hand on his shoulder. “Let’s just hope the stories are true this time,” he said. “For if there are giant ants, maybe there’s also an ant-man to command them.”
The ants were so close that Silas could hear the clacking of their mandibles. They stopped mere inches away, their antennae twitching, front legs pawing the air. Nils was trembling so much, Silas thought the lad was going to faint.
Behind the wall of ants, two men approached. Moonlight glinted from the blades of a pair of daggers the smaller man carried. The other, a big man with a hooked nose, brandished a long knife and swished a net before him. The ants parted to let them through, and the small man spoke.
“Trying to sneak in under cover of darkness?”
“Absolutely not,” Silas said in his most innocent voice.
“Shut it!” the man snarled. “We ain’t stupid here, whatever you civilized types might reckon. And we ain’t rude, neither, are we Venn?”
The man with the net flashed a crooked smile. “No, we’re most hospitable, Carl. That’s why we came to greet you.”
Silas didn’t like the look in Venn’s eyes: calculating and full of threat, like a crocodile poking its head above the surface of a swamp. He reached into the depths of his mind, clutching for some strand of magic he could use.
“You the Ant-Man?” Nils asked in a shaky voice.
Carl laughed, a ghastly guttural sound. “No, I ain’t the Ant-Man, boy, and neither’s Venn here.”
Silas closed in on a black misty thread at the edges of his awareness and let its puissance start to blossom.
“That,” Carl said, turning to look over his shoulder, “is the Ant-Man.”
Silas froze at the sight lumbering toward them. He hardly noticed the burgeoning magic slip from his grasp and disperse back into emptiness.
A hulking man lurched past Venn and Carl. Only it wasn’t a man. It stood on legs that bent backwards, with spines jutting from the shins. The torso was a thick carapace like a black
breastplate, and the cuneate head was dominated by the same saucer-like eyes and clacking mandibles the ants had. Knotted muscular arms—human arms—folded over the chitinous chest.
“Shent?” Silas whispered.
With a whoosh of air, Venn’s net smothered Silas, and something heavy crashed into his skull. As he was buried in blackness, he heard pleading, as if it came from a fading dream.
“Please! I brought him to you. I’m your friend.”
Nils, Silas thought as awareness left him. You little—
NAMELESS
Each stroke of the razor sent black hair to the floorboards. Rodents as tame as house cats scampered and gamboled through the growing pile. Besides the scraping of the blade, the breathing of the barber, the only other sound was the squeaking of valves on the oil lamps as a boy killed their flames. A hooded lantern hung above the barber’s head, throwing grotesque shadows across the shop—a twisted demon with a sword that hacked the scalp of a squatting aberration.
“Beard as well, d’you say?”
“Aye,” Nameless muttered through the mummifying strictures of his depression.
The shadow demon hesitated, its sword held aloft for the killing blow.
“Just want to be sure,” the barber said. “Don’t get many dwarves in here. In fact, you’re the first.”
The barber came round the front holding the razor beside his ear. Shadows fled before him.
“Sure you’re comfy? I can get Mikey to fetch a box to rest your feet on.”
“No.” Nameless’s voice was little more than a rasp.
He tried to focus on the barber, but it was like squinting through a long, dark tunnel. With the effort it would have taken for him to climb out of a hot tub on a cold day, Nameless willed himself beyond his clotting memories and forced his attention back into the world.