by D. P. Prior
Cordy rolled her eyes and gritted her teeth.
“What?” Nameless said. “It’s better than the alternative.”
“Some choice. Kill anyone who stands in your way, or bully and intimidate them. Sound familiar?”
“That wasn’t me,” Nameless said. “Back at Arx Gravis, it was the—”
“Save it for someone who cares,” Cordy said, before pulling back the tent flap.
Nameless put a restraining hand on her shoulder and preceded her inside.
All he wanted was to sit down with her, tell her his story, and then accept that nothing could right all the wrongs. What was done could never be undone, but he still wanted her to know. He felt his mood start to dip, felt the first cloying touches of the dark, but a strident voice brought him back to the moment.
“Well, well, well, look what the the drunken gods of Arnoch have vomited on my doorstep.”
Grago was seated at the end of a long table made from the planks of a goat cart. Half a dozen gray-robed dwarves sat on each side. They were ringed in by more than twenty baresarks, who stood with tattooed arms folded over their chests and weapons hanging at their hips. Jaym was directly behind Grago’s chair, a huge broadsword slung over one shoulder.
“My, that’s a big one,” Nameless said, raising an eyebrow.
Jaym’s face reddened and creased into a mask of rage. The other baresarks drew their swords, prompting protestations of terror from the dwarves seated at the table.
Lampol Drynn and his men filtered in behind Nameless and Cordy. Drynn bowed obsequiously to Grago and coughed into his fist. His lips trembled as he struggled to get a word out.
“Oh, shut up, soldier,” Grago said. “It’s plain to everyone here that—”
Nameless flung the Axe of the Dwarf Lords.
Time ebbed to a crawl as the twin blades spun in a dazzling blur, air whistling past them in a long drawn-out dirge. Grago’s mouth continued to work in slow motion, but the words never had chance to form. Clean as a cleaver splitting a melon, the axe divided his face into two segments, which drooped each to its own side in a slick slurry of gore.
The hush about the tent was as deafening as a thunderclap.
Paxy wriggled free of the remnants of Grago’s skull and backflipped into Nameless’s hand.
“There, lassie,” Nameless said. “Problem solved.”
Cordy’s face was white with shock—a shock that quickly turned to horror.
“That is not,” she started, then covered her mouth with her hand. “Not how we… Not what you… Gods of Arnoch, you haven’t changed. You haven’t shogging changed.”
Nameless reeled with confusion, and then it suddenly struck him.
“No, you don’t understand. He was going to… You said he was…” Images of slaughter crawled up from the dark spaces of his mind: broken bodies, walkways swimming with blood, heads jammed on spikes, and Marla—little baby Marla.
He looked at Cordy aghast, his mouth hanging open and utterly disobedient.
“You blamed it on the black axe,” Cordy said in a voice barely above a whisper. “I wanted to believe you. It didn’t change what you’d done, but at least I knew Thumil hadn’t been wrong; knew you hadn’t had a choice.”
“I…” Nameless said, the word lodging in the back of his throat. It was the black axe, not me. The axe was the Butcher, I was just its victim, he so desperately wanted to say, but the dreadful reality of what Cordy was getting at had already dawned on him. It hadn’t just been the axe, the false Pax Nanorum. That had simply amplified what was already there, the spark of violence, of evil, that gnawed away at his core like a maggot in an apple.
He felt himself falling, the tent swirling into a maelstrom of ghosts from the ravine city, yelling their accusations.
Cordy’s voice cut through the horror like a lament. “I don’t know you.”
She turned away and her body was racked by sobbing.
Nobody moved for a long moment, then Drynn’s men started to eye the baresarks.
“This ain’t over,” Jaym said. “We’re still in control, even without Grago. Ain’t that right, lads.”
The baresarks grunted their agreement.
Drynn’s men didn’t look so sure.
“Councilor?” Drynn said to Cordy. “Give the word, and we’ll fight.”
Cordy didn’t respond.
Nameless looked up with bleary eyes. He was aware of Jaym’s snarling face, the ready threat of his thugs. He looked blankly at the Red Cloaks, all trying to appear tough and resolute, but clearly worried about what was to come. Baresarks might have been ugly shoggers, but they were as hard to put down as an angry bear. Even if you stabbed one in the heart, he’d keep on fighting for a minute or two until his crazed brain realized what had happened.
All the strength was seeping from Nameless, and he just wanted to drop to the ground and roll into a ball.
But Nils, a voice cut through the fug. What about Nils?
That triggered a memory of the Lich Lord, his skull settling onto Silas’s body, his sneering self-confidence, and the aura of despair he gave off. Nameless recalled the terrible screeching of the feeders, and that was enough to set his heart racing and remind him why he’d come here.
“You and me,” he said to Jaym. “In the circle. Let’s settle this, once and for all.”
Jaym blinked rapidly. “You’ve got to be joking.” He looked to his comrades and gave a laugh full of bravado. “You seriously want to fight me? In the circle? You are so dead.”
Nameless shrugged. “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
The baresarks looked like they were going to attack.
Jaym’s eyes flicked over the tent, taking in his men, Drynn’s, and finally coming to rest on Nameless.
“I think I can hear that lump of meat you call a brain squelching this one over,” Nameless said. “Don’t be ashamed if you’re frightened. I get that way myself sometimes. Tell you what, let’s leave it to the boys to slug this one out. I’m sure you would have given a good account of yourself in the circle, but I guess we’ll never know now.”
All eyes were on Jaym. The tension was palpable. Clearly the baresarks wanted to be unleashed, but without Jaym’s say so, they would do nothing. Nameless was counting on it. It was better he risked a beating in the circle than put Drynn and his lads in peril. It wasn’t as if the survivors of Arx Gravis could afford any more casualties.
Jaym had a big dumb grin on his face as he shook his head and tried to get the baresarks to see how ridiculous the challenge was.
No one was laughing.
“I already beat you once, Butcher,” Jaym said. “What makes you think you’ll have a better chance this time?”
“Do you have any cotton wads?” Nameless asked.
“Uh?”
“Something I can stuff up my nose, stop the stench from getting to me again.”
Jaym started to shake. “Why, you shogging c-c-c…” He looked around and caught Cordy watching him. “Coward. I was gonna say ‘coward’.”
“Uh, Jaym,” one of the baresarks said. “How come he’s a coward, if he wants to fight you?”
“Shog off, Garth, you know what I mean.”
Garth furrowed his brows, obviously deep in thought; so deep in fact, that he needed to come up for air with a baffled look on his face.
“Could make me a coward picking an easy fight over an all-out brawl with the lads here,” Nameless offered helpfully.
“That’s it,” Jaym said, starting to froth at the mouth. “Circle time.”
“Splendid,” Nameless said with a forced jollity he didn’t feel.
He glanced at Cordy, who was watching him with an inscrutable expression on her face. Did she approve? Did she know what he was trying to do? Or was this further confirmation of what she thought of him?
“Well, I suggest we summon the pipers and have a good old shindig.” He looked to Drynn and his men. “Make sure to tap a keg or two; I’m always parched as a land
ed fish after a good fight.” He went through a few upper cuts and jabs.
“There ain’t gonna be no after for you,” Jaym said. “If I was you, I’d grab a drink now, because that’s the last chance you’ll ever get.”
That was certainly a sobering thought.
Nameless tried to will a bit of good cheer into his heart, tried to thaw some of the stiffness that had crept into his limbs along with the depression.
He stole a look at Cordy, but her eyes were already there waiting for him, like a serpent’s watching its prey.
The last dregs of energy ebbed away like wine from an upturned bottle. Nameless tried to face Jaym, at least put up a show of bravado, but the baresark looked suddenly massive, his muscles swollen and ridged with thick veins.
Jaym bared his teeth in a grin that said it all. He knew he had Nameless, and the fight hadn’t even started yet.
NILS
It was shogging pissing it down, and Nils weren’t happy about it. Even less so, because not a single drop touched Blightey. The cloud was a heaving belly of blackness, and the rain pelted everything in sight like the hail of a thousand arrows, but the Lich Lord sat in his pocket of sunshine on a field chair he’d plucked from the air, sipping wine, and nibbling on some brown muck in a peculiar shiny wrapper.
That was the other thing that irked Nils. He was so hungry, it felt like his guts were out. The thought threw up an image he didn’t want to think about: one of the zombies back at the village at the end of the Malfen Pass had been shambling around holding in what looked like a string of sausages.
Blightey took a big slurp of wine, and the sound made Nils heave.
“Why so glum?” Blightey said, licking his lips and peeling back a little more of the wrapper, so he could take another bite of the brown thing.
Looked like shite, if you asked Nils, and from what he’d seen, he wouldn’t put it past the Lich Lord to eat shite. Shog only knew he spoke a lot of it.
Blightey leaned out of his chair and put his hand on Nils’s knee. Right made Nils’s skin crawl, it did, but he still found himself drawn to the Lich Lord’s gaze. Eyes like pools of fire, he had, swirling, tugging, and terribly, terribly hungry. So hungry, in fact, that nothing in all the worlds could satisfy their need.
A shift came over Blightey’s face, the merest hint of… sadness?
“I am not so bad, Nils.” Blightey gave his knee a light tap and withdrew his hand. He continued to lean uncomfortably close—so close that Nils could smell something loamy and musty on his breath. “Chocolate?” Blightey broke off a piece of shite.
Nils turned his head away, and Blightey settled back in his chair.
“Don’t know what you’re missing,” he said, popping the shite into his mouth and running his tongue over his lips.
Nils found himself eyeing the wrapper, stomach rumbling.
“Sure you won’t?” Blightey offered him the last piece.
Nils snatched it and shoved it in his mouth. Its velvety smoothness on his tongue made him sigh. He bit into it and swallowed, licking the sweetness from his teeth.
“Good boy,” Blightey said, sounding every bit like Nils’s mom. He raised an eyebrow, and one corner of his mouth curled into something like a smile. “Quite whets the appetite, doesn’t it?” He was watching Nils like a bird studying a worm.
“Ain’t that wet. It’s not like I’m dribbling or nothing.”
“Whet, not wet.” Blightey enunciated the first like a whiplash. “Hones it to a keen edge; prepares it for what is to come.” The last word lingered heavily on the air.
He fixed Nils with an unblinking stare, as if awaiting an appropriate response.
Nils had none to give and turned away. All he knew was that he felt awkward and not a little creeped out. His cheeks burned, and he didn’t reckon it was from Blightey’s fiery eyes, neither.
The wind gusted and howled, and in its wake there came a million answering shrieks. He winced and tried to screen them out, hands over his ears. It had to be the feeders, rousing from their sleep.
“Look at me, Nils,” Blightey said.
Nils shook his head, buried his face in his knees.
“Look at me.” The Lich Lord didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t need to. His words were clipped and precise, and his tone expected obedience. Demanded it.
It took forever for Nils to twist his neck round to meet Blightey’s gaze. If he’d had any say in the matter, he’d have shut his eyes, or maybe found the guts to leg it, but his head may as well have been in a brace, like some torture device that ratcheted it into unnatural positions till ligaments and bones snapped under the strain.
Twin tunnels of flame probed deep inside him, touched things he’d have never admitted to himself, never mind shared with no one.
Nils started to rock back and forth, and tears of shame streaked down his cheeks, mingling with the snot trickling from his nose.
He was a child once more, back in the cradle, starting at the crashes and the yelling. With a flinch, he was thirteen and scared to look Betsy Cormen in the eye in case she could tell what he did when he thought about her at night. He blinked to make the memories move along, and Blightey’s face came sharply back into focus. The fires flickered and died, giving way to doleful brown eyes, full of concern, full of pity. Just like Mom’s eyes, they were. Or was it Nameless’s? He half-expected the dwarf to slap him on the back and offer him a swig of mead. Half-expected Mom to hug him, ruffle his hair, and dab away the tears. It was the look of a parent who knew everything, every last secret, and yet still loved him for who he was.
“You are forgiven,” the eyes seemed to say. “You are loved.”
Nils reached toward those pools of compassion, straining to touch…
Fire sprang up, and he yelped, snatching back his hand and sucking the heat from his fingertips.
Blightey stood, and his chair and glass vanished in a swirl of dirty yellow smoke.
“I’m disappointed in you, Nils. So much potential wasted, and why? You will not take ownership of your innermost desires. You hide behind mediocrity and the expectations of others. You are like all the other cattle, a slave, rather than a free man determining his own destiny. Silas was the same.”
Blightey ran his hands down his borrowed torso, left them hovering over his groin.
“Couldn’t go far enough. Always fettered by twisted standards of decency. Do what thou wilt, Nils. That is the only law you need concern yourself with. If you are hungry, steal a loaf of bread. If you need money, burgle a rich man’s house. You’ve done these things, or do you deny it?”
“No point denying it,” Nils said.
Blightey had seen everything.
Nils shuddered and curled up into a ball, rocking and whimpering, and all the while, the shrieks of the feeders grew louder and louder. It didn’t matter no more what they might do to him. Couldn’t get much worse if they ripped the flesh from his bones. Least it’d be over quickly.
Cold bit into his shoulder, frigid and numbing. He flinched and lifted his head to see Blightey’s bloodless hand resting there like a malevolent spider, a hairline scar circling the wrist. Nils tried to pull away, but fingernails dug into his flesh and held him like a hooked fish.
“I understand what you are going through,” Blightey said, releasing him and nodding. He looked suddenly serene, gentle, a kindly old priest granting absolution. He raised a hand, as if he were going to give a blessing, but then the eyes flared again. “In the meantime, if you choose to act like a slave, that is how you shall be treated.”
One end of a leash appeared in Blightey’s hand, and the other snapped toward Nils and wrapped around his throat. It pulled so tight, he struggled to breathe.
Blightey inclined his head and studied him for a long moment, and then the leash slackened off, but only slightly.
“Please me,” Blightey said, “and I shall feed you. Disappoint me, and you will starve. At least that will afford me some minuscule spark of pleasure, if nothing else.”
<
br /> Blightey tugged on the leash, and Nils stumbled after him.
The valley walls seemed to close in like a corridor. Up ahead, red-tinged clouds parted like a curtain to reveal a shimmering heat haze covering the summit of the volcano they’d passed on the way to the forest of tar.
“Like badger baiting,” Blightey said with a thin-lipped smile. “Dwarves scurrying down holes, and in pursuit…”
A sphere of silvery light winked into existence around Nils, and Blightey continued on, tapping the Ebon Staff before him, as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
Nils cast a look behind. The screeching swirled down the valley. Pressure built in his ears, until he thought his head was going to burst. He started screaming, swaying as if he were one of the damned in the Abyss.
And then the feeders poured into the valley and swarmed toward them like a plague of locusts.
NAMELESS
It was a little disconcerting how quickly dwarves laid down tools when there was the prospect of a good fight to be had.
Nameless slammed the head of his axe into a boulder that may as well have been butter. He sat on a gnarled slab of rock that looked like it had been melted from the skirt of the volcano. His fingers played through the new growth of beard that had sprouted from his chin within days of him finding the Axe of the Dwarf Lords.
Blightey’s feeders could be upon them at any moment, and here he was waiting for bets to be taken, before he could slug it out with a dwarf who was as big and scary as he was stupid.
Jaym was over on the flat atop an incline, where even now the shield bearers were assembling, ready to hem the fighters in until one of them lay broken and bloody on the hard earth. The baresark was working up a sweat, squatting down with a boulder clutched to his chest. Each time he stood, he raised the rock above his head then started back into another squat. He was stripped from the waist up, skin glistening with moisture, the thick hairs on his arms and chest slick and matted. The tattoos etched all over his torso expanded as his muscles filled with blood, swelling so much, the skin looked ready to split.