by D. P. Prior
“I don’t get it,” Nameless said. “How come you’ve settled here? Seems everywhere I set foot in this shogging land turns into something else.”
Weasel turned away, taking his bucket with him. “Yeah, funny that,” he shot over his shoulder. “Don’t think anyone else has worked that one out. Ask Stupid. He’s always ready with an opinion.”
“Stupid?”—the motley clad fool who’d been close to Dythin Rala, the Voice who’d preceded Thumil?
But Weasel had slipped in among the dueling children and was making his way toward Jaym and the councilor.
Nameless squinted. He was sure it was Throam Grago.
Now there was a dwarf who spoke his mind, and he was uncharacteristically decisive for a councilor. Not that that was necessarily a good thing. Grago was still head to head with the baresark, and every now and then, they’d involve nearby soldiers in their conversation. Some were wearing Red Cloaks they must have inherited from the dead. There had only been two left alive, from what he could remember. Others were more thugs than soldiers, scum from the backwaters of the ravine city. Looked like Jaym had brought along his friends, too. There must have been a dozen baresarks there, moonlight glinting from their piercings.
“Bacon bites! Get them while they’re hot!” someone shouted in among the crowd. “Truffles! Ironbelly’s Ale!”
Ironbelly’s? You’d have to be dying of thirst during a drought and have the taste buds of a dehydrated turnip to drink that piss. The insult was too much to bear. If the Council were determined to see the Ravine Butcher punished for his crimes, they could at least have cracked open a keg or two of Urbs Sapientii mead. Mind you, with a mouth feeling like it was full of sand, Nameless figured he couldn’t be such a snob.
“Over here!”
“Beer, beer, everywhere,” a lilting voice piped up. “But for the condemned there’s only guilt to drink. How now, dwarf with no name, liketh you our tragic game?”
A knock-kneed dwarf in patchwork clothes of red, green, and blue gamboled toward him, shaking a child’s rattle. He had a face that resembled nothing so much as a walnut, and a beard like tangled cobwebs. Upon his head was a tall hat, topped with a bell that tinkled as he danced.
Some names are best forgotten—The words Stupid had said to him the first time Nameless had set eyes on the fool.
He recalled a fight with three baresarks. The Krypteia, Baldar Kloon, had hired them to avenge a perceived slight. Cordy had been there. Thumil, too. And Stupid had appeared in an alley.
Something else he’d said bubbled to the surface: You must forget in order to find the truth of who you are.
But forget what? His name? He’d certainly done that, but what had that revealed about him, save that he was a nobody in dwarven society now, no better then the baresarks? A shog sight worse, when you considered what he’d done.
“Stupid,” Nameless said.
“Are we so familiar that you presume to diminish my name? Another inch and it will be just like yours.”
“Then I’ll make do with ‘laddie’, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Stupid I am, even when stupid I’m not. Dolt Dullard, I am called, and by others Dimwit Numbskull; but the name of names beyond all others would make the pieces whole, should I give it—which I shan’t, for you know it already.”
“I think you’re mistaken, laddie,” Nameless said. “I remember you from the ravine, and from Thumil and Cordy’s wedding. But I don’t recall you going by any other name.”
“You forgot your own name,” Stupid said. “No reason you’d remember mine. Say, it’s a funny thing how quickly folk grow familiar. A patter of banter, and we’re matey like mates.”
Over Stupid’s shoulder, Nameless saw Throam Grago take his place with the rest of the Council of Twelve. It seemed strange, and a little sad, to see them in their robes of office—save for Cordy, who stood out in her blue dress—but with no debating table to gather round.
It looked like they were ready for him. Grago said something, and Jaym and a couple of soldiers headed over. The baresark had a metal loop in one hand. It was attached to a length of chain. In his other hand, he held his warhammer.
“Will wonders never cease?” Stupid said. “I’d have wagered the suns would have fallen from the sky ere they were ready to begin. Something is rotten, something is afoot. The Council of Twelve making haste. The like I’ve never seen.”
“A quick question, laddie,” Nameless said, eyes never leaving the rapidly approaching group. Beyond them, the whole community, save those on sentry duty, was massing together around the Council. “Why has this place not shifted like everywhere else in Qlippoth? Is it a safe-haven?” Safe for the survivors of Arx Gravis to start anew? Safe enough to consider his task done?
“’Tis a footprint, among footprints. You should know—you’ve left your own. Stepping stones across the chaos. I have a map—”
“Good,” Jaym said, shoving Stupid out of the way. “Need something to wipe my arse on.” He glowered at Nameless. “How’s the jaw? Bet you never felt a punch like that before.”
“Punch?” Nameless said. “Never felt a thing. It was your breath that knocked me out.”
Jaym’s face twisted into a snarl. His knuckles whitened from gripping his warhammer so tight, and he started to shake.
“Steady, big man,” a Red Cloak said. “He’s got it coming, Jaym, just you wait and see.”
“Kal?” Nameless said. “Kaldwyn Gray? Gods of Arnoch, you’re alive!”
“Not a word,” Kal said, drawing his shortsword and touching the point to Nameless’s throat. “Not a shogging word.”
Jaym stepped behind, and Nameless tensed, expecting a crushing blow to the back of the head. Instead, an iron collar clicked into place, and Jaym came back in front holding his length of chain like a leash.
“Come on, doggie. We gonna have us some fun.” He yanked on the chain and strode toward the waiting Council, Nameless in tow, a guard on either side holding his arms, Kal bringing up the rear.
The crowd parted to admit them, and Nameless dipped his head so he didn’t have to look anyone in the eye. He caught the whispered curses, though, and felt his people’s fear and hatred like blows.
Stupid danced alongside, bell tinkling, hands clapping a jaunty rhythm as he sang:
“I once met a dwarf who liked gin,
I know it’s a terrible thing;
He swigged it like ale
And told a tall tale
Of axes and dead dwarven kings.”
Nameless craned his neck to look back at the fool, who had stopped in his tracks and was staring, a fixed grimace on his gnomic face.
Axes and dead kings? Did he mean Arios, seated on his throne at the heart of Arnoch? The Axe of the Dwarf Lords? How could he—
Jaym tugged the chain hand over hand, reeling him in like a fish. Someone behind—Kal?—hit him across the back of the legs with a heavy blunt object, and Nameless fell to his knees. The guards released him, and Jaym dropped the chain, spat on him, and stood aside.
Nameless looked up, straight into the sardonic eyes of Throam Grago.
“Ah, the Nameless Dwarf,” Grago said. “A case for expedient action, if ever there was one.”
“We have already made extraordinary haste, Councilor Grago,” Old Moary said. He’d been a councilor as long as there’d been dwarves in Arx Gravis, or so it seemed. If the Council was cautious, Moary was positively scrupulous. And yet, it had been Old Moary who’d made the decision for the dwarves to leave the ravine.
“That’s what makes for such a fascinating dialectic,” a young councilor said. He was slight of frame, yet held himself with the stiffness of an old soldier, and his chin had a haughty tilt to it. No doubt born with a scarolite spoon in his mouth, or an axe haft up his nethers. “Thesis,” he nodded to Grago, “and antithesis.” Somebody groaned—Nameless was sure it was a councilor. “Distill the disparate threads, bind them together, intermesh them, and we arrive at—”
�
��Councilor, if you please,” Old Moary said.
Grago rolled his eyes. “For once we are in agreement, Moary. Now, do be a good boy, Garnil, and leave the grownups to do the talking.”
“Garnil?” Nameless said. “Nip Garnil, son of Tor?”
Garnil blanched. “You remember? Remember what you did to him? To my father?”
Nameless’s gut clenched. There’d been so many. It was all one bloody haze, one grizzly assortment of severed limbs, all of them just as nameless as he was. All of them faceless. All save for Thumil. Dear old Thumil and his beautiful daughter.
His eyes found Cordy glaring at him, as if she could burn him from existence with the strength of her hatred. The blood thickened in his veins, slowing to a torpid ooze. His heart beat a lagging tattoo.
“I never questioned what had happened to your name at the time,” she said in a voice like an icy flow. “Stupid really. We were both stupid—me and Thumil.”
Old Moary placed a hand on her shoulder.
Cordy faltered for a second and then pressed on.
“That’s not strictly true. Thumil and I talked about it once, shortly after you came back the second time. You see, he struggled with the idea that we’d all been friends for so long, and yet we didn’t know your name. We knew how you’d lost it, same as everyone did, but there was never any sense that you’d had a name in the first place. Shog knows what that philosopher did, but it wasn’t natural. It was like you’d never existed—as a person; never been anything but the Butcher and then the Corrector, and yet Thumil remembered you from the Ravine Guard, and I remembered you from the Ephebe, and at our wedd…” She shut her eyes and tensed, her fingers clenching and releasing. “Wedding. Take away a person’s name, though, and they become a thing, an object. That’s how everyone came to see you—no more than a plague that took away our loved ones, a blight on our society, a terrible storm that killed indiscriminately.
“Thumil saw that and felt it was wrong. He knew it was the axe’s doing, and he tirelessly defended you, saying you’d had no choice but to go after Lucius into Gehenna; that you were a victim, same as the rest of us. But look where that belief got him. Look where it got my Marla.”
Old Moary turned to Grago and gave a self-satisfied nod.
“He thought…” Cordy winced and swallowed. “He thought no evil, no magical force, could override the heart of his greatest friend. He thought… My Thumil thought the love of friends could win out against the wiles of the Demiurgos. You know how much he cherished the ancient scriptures that had been abandoned in disgrace since the time of Maldark the Fallen. You know how he turned to them for guidance. Well, if he’d lived to see where they’d led him, he’d have burned them. Burned them all to shog!”
Old Moary tried to pull her into a hug, but Cordy pushed him away.
“Some things can’t be forgiven,” she snarled at Nameless, jabbing a finger at his chest. “Some things shouldn’t!”
Nameless spoke through a cloud of cloying darkness. “I know.”
Cordy raised her fists and threw her head back, screaming at the night sky. “You don’t know! You don’t shogging know! You killed my baby. My sweet, sweet baby.”
Tears fell in torrents down her cheeks, soaked into her beard.
Grago stepped forward and held his hands up, looking out over the crowd. “Then, we’re all agreed? If there’s no forgiveness for his crimes, surely there can be only one—”
Gold streaked down into the canyon, arcing its way above the Council until it came to hover before Nameless, moonlight glinting from the double-bladed head of the Axe of the Dwarf Lords.
A gasp went up from the crowd, and off to the back somewhere, Stupid was singing, “A dwarf’s best friends are a hardy axe, a tavern to drink in, a foe to hack.” There was a sharp slap and he cried out and went quiet.
“Gods of Arnoch!” Grago said in hushed awe. “Gods of Arnoch, preserve us!”
The rattle of crossbows being raised was like a faraway distraction. Mouths gaped, eyes popped out of heads, and the thrum of fear rose palpably, as if Nameless could hear the pounding of hundreds of horrified hearts. Hearts that remembered. Hearts that knew what was to come.
He reached out his manacled hands, the chains connecting them to his ankles pulling taut with a clink. The inscription on the axe’s haft glinted and pulsed in the moonlight: Pax Nanorum. Peace of the Dwarves.
“Stand back,” a soldier said, taking a step toward Nameless with a shaky crossbow. It looked like he’d forgotten to cock the weapon.
Nameless’s hand paused a hair’s breadth from the axe’s haft. Warmth came off of it in waves. He could feel its yearning deep in his veins. It wanted him. It needed him.
“Don’t touch it!” another dwarf hissed. This time, the crossbow was primed and aimed at Nameless’s face. “Move and you’re dead.”
The axe twirled, gold sparking along its blades. The crowd drew in a collective breath as it readied for a chop.
No! Nameless tried to say, but his lips wouldn’t respond.
The axe faltered and spun from the soldier to Nameless and back again.
Numbness seeped into his limbs, started to set like concrete.
“No,” he mouthed silently, the fingers of his outstretched hands kneading the air, as if it were dough.
He ground his teeth, working his jaw until it cracked. His hands shook with the effort of trying to lower them. The chains clanked, and the axe responded, striking at one wrist, then the other in swift succession. Silver sparks flew, and the manacles fell away, the chains snaking to the ground. The axe made short work of his ankle bonds then flipped itself into his grasp. Golden fire streamed through his veins, burning away the paralysis.
A blur of movement caused Nameless to sway, and a beefy fist glanced from his temple. Jaym snarled and reached for the axe’s handle—but his fingers passed right through it.
“What the shog?” The baresark stepped back, eyes darting left and right, as if someone might tell him what had happened.
Nameless went with him, releasing the axe with one hand and crashing his elbow into Jaym’s nose. Blood sprayed and Jaym reeled away clutching his face. The twang of a crossbow made Nameless spin, the axe coming up of its own accord and deflecting the bolt with its blades. He raised it to fling it at the crossbowman, but then a blue-garbed figure stepped into his field of vision.
“That’s right, do it all again, you animal,” Cordy said in a voice full of sleet. “Slaughter the few of us that remain.”
Nameless tried to say something, but the unformed words stuck in his throat like half-chewed meat.
“Go on.” Cordy pushed up close. “Cut my head off, like you did Thumil’s. Stick it on a shogging spike, and while you’re at it, grab a baby so you can… So you can…” Her chin quivered as tears streaked down her cheeks.
She punched him full in the face. He rocked back but felt nothing. Nothing besides the bursting of his heart. “Come, on!” Cordy screamed. “Kill me, you evil shogger. Kill me!”
Nameless let go of the axe, but it just hung there in the air. He saw Jaym bend down and come up with his hammer, stride toward him. Somewhere in the crowd, a baby cried. He searched it out, finding a mother clutching a newborn to her breast. It looked just like Marla, squinty-eyed as it grizzled, the first downy growth of hair on its head and face. He wanted so badly to smile, but already the mother was hugging the child tighter and turning her back on him.
The rest of the dwarves gawped at the axe with ashen faces. They looked horrified, but no one ran. They’d seen this all before—that was what it looked like to Nameless—seen it and despaired. Theirs were the faces of people who knew there was nothing they could do. How could he tell them, make them believe he meant no harm?
“Hearken to a fool!” Stupid shouted, slipping out from the crowd. “It’s the axe, but it’s not. Hearken! Arnoch’s real, and swimming like a kipper.”
Baffled looks passed through the onlookers, but Stupid had eyes only for Jaym.
“That hammer-head’s made of stone. What’s your excuse?”
Jaym backhanded him out of the way and hefted his hammer. The axe flashed golden and split it in two. The baresark dropped it and threw his arms up to protect his face, but when he lowered them, his eyes were completely white, and froth was spilling from his mouth. His shoulders bunched up to his ears, and veins popped out along his neck. Lips curling back in a roar of rage and frustration, he charged, and the axe drew back to strike.
Nameless’s hand snapped out, wrenching it from the air, and Jaym sprang like a crazed gibuna.
Only, it wasn’t a spring: it was more of a tumble. He hit the ground hard and rolled.
Stupid stepped back with one hand covering his mouth.
“Oops,” he said. “It wasn’t me, it was my foot.”
“Scarolite,” Nameless croaked. He sought out Old Moary among the councilors. “A chest lined with scarolite.”
Old Moary’s rheumy eyes stared dully back, but then something sparkled within them.
“The Casket of the Law!” He snapped his fingers at a Red Cloak. “Fetch it.”
The crowd parted to let the soldier through, and Old Moary held up his hand for calm. “Stand down, everyone,” he said. “I think I know what he’s doing.”
Hardly a sound came from the onlookers. All Nameless could hear was the pounding of his heart and the ragged panting of Cordy’s breath. The axe squirmed and wriggled in his grasp, but he tightened his hold. He ran a finger along the edge of a blade, wincing as he drew blood. The effect was instantaneous: it was like waking from a deep, refreshing sleep. His mind cleared, his muscles swelled with anticipation, and the axe settled like a contented babe.
“You think you know what he’s doing?” Jaym climbed to his feet. He rolled his neck, and it gave an audible crack. His face was flushed as red as his hair, and pinprick pupils now sat at the center of his white eyes. “Well, let me show you what I’m gonna do.”
“A tap dance?” Nameless said, folding his arms across his chest, the axe resting between them. “A spot of crocheting?”