by D. P. Prior
The other was lean for a dwarf, and much older. His ginger-gray beard barely covered his neck and was braided into a trident. He had a bronze buckler strapped to one arm and carried a viciously curved dagger.
“Shog me,” he said, gawping at the feeders scaling the slope on all fours, scampering hand over feet, mouths flaring wider than their faces and emitting their bloodcurdling howls. “There’s no end to ’em.”
Nameless put a hand on his shoulder and frowned. “You up to this, laddie?”
“Grok,” the dwarf said, moistening his lips. “Name’s Grok.”
“Grok the Garrote?” Nameless asked. The infamous assassin who’d spent a decade in the ravine city’s deepest dungeons.
“The same.” Grok patted his belt. “Ain’t got no wire no more, though. Thinking of changing my name.” He held the dagger to his face and leered at it.
“Shouldn’t you be locked up somewhere?”
“Shouldn’t you?” Grok retorted, his eyes slits that looked Nameless up and down like they were planning where to stick his blade.
Nameless felt a stony calm descend. He fixed Grok with a stern look, but the assassin’s eyes flicked this way and that so much, you could hardly call it eye-contact. Grok sniffed and shrugged off Nameless’s hand so he could get a better look over the edge.
Duck held out his hand, and Nameless grasped the wrist. “You remember me?”
“Aye, I remember,” Nameless said. “Duck.”
“It’s what they say when I swing this,” Duck said, unhooking his mace and holding it aloft.
“Aye, I remember that, too,” Nameless said, rubbing his jaw. When he’d become the Butcher and rampaged through the ravine, he’d come that close to killing Kal when someone had called out “Duck!” and he’d turned right into the path of a walloping blow from that mace. And the second time, when he’d come within an inch of slaying Cordy, Duck’s shield had got in the way. Nameless forced himself not to think anymore on it. Cordy and Duck had survived, barely. Baby Marla hadn’t.
“Real name’s—”
“No,” Nameless said. “Duck’s the lad for this job, I reckon.”
Nameless looked up, straight into the eyes of Jaym. The baresark’s jaw was lopsided and purple, and it looked like he’d got an apple lodged in his cheek. Both eyes were black, and his nose was crooked, which would make Targ’s day.
Jaym opened his mouth to speak, winced, and shut it. He put a palm beneath his chin, squeezed, and then thrust upward. There was a pop and a crack, but no scream, only a defiant growl. He rolled his head while doing a fish impression with his mouth, then tried again. “You… You… You…”
“Me. Yes, I think I get that part.”
“Nameless,” Kal said, “he’s trying to—”
“Put a boot in it, Kal. Let the man speak,” Nameless said.
Jaym’s chest expanded massively as he drew in a huge breath. “You won, Butch… Nameless. Fair and square.”
“That’s shrewd of you, laddie. And your point is?”
“Like I was saying,” Jaym said. He gritted his teeth and turned his head away.
“I tell you, he’s trying—”
“Shut it, Kal,” Nameless said. “I know what you’re up to, Jaym, and there’s no need. I’m not interested in supplanting you as top dog. The baresarks are yours to lead, and I don’t see any of them challenging you, either. No shame in coming off second best in a fight. You’re as tough as they get, and right now, I need you to focus on what’s coming up the mountain, not on your bruised ego.”
The howls and screeches suddenly grew to an ear-splitting din as a score of feeders crested an overhang and bounded with rabid fury up the last of the incline.
“If you pricks have finished,” Grok snarled over his shoulder, “it’s time to kill, assuming you got the balls for it.”
Jaym responded with a savage growl. The look he gave Grok would have cowed almost anyone, but the assassin just bared his teeth and stared daggers straight back at him.
Duck strode to the edge and began beating his mace against his shield. The resounding clangs punctuated the cries of the feeders like a sonorous death knell.
More of the creatures spilled into view, and then they stopped, upward of fifty of them clinging to the rock-face with their claws, panting, funnel-mouths quivering with anticipation.
“That told ’em,” Duck said. “Reckon if we shout loud enough, they’ll turn tail and bugger off back where they came from.”
“In Arnoch where dwarves ruled supreme,” Nameless bellowed the words of the Song of Founding. “There lived a king without a queen.”
The feeders swayed in unison, a wave poised to break at any moment. More of them clambered up from the overhang and waited.
Old Moary joined in the song and slapped Kal on the back until he started mouthing the words.
“His arm was thick, his beard was long, he forged an axe to smite all wrong.”
“Yeah, and got his throat ripped out,” Grok made a slicing gesture with his finger, “for pissing me off with his shogging song.”
Nameless made a show of rubbing his beard and looking between Old Moary and Kal. “No, no, no. Too many words, laddie. It’s all in the meter. Feet and stresses. Listen: ‘His legs like trees, his gut like lard, he shogged his foes and shogged them hard.’”
“Don’t want to ruin your education, Grok,” Duck said, “but I think they’re getting ready to—”
“SHOG!” they all cried in unison, and at the same time, the feeders screamed and surged toward them in a mass of claws and teeth.
Duck smashed his shield into the first of them, knocking it into a clot of feeders coming up behind.
Jaym bellowed something incomprehensible and powered in among them, cleaving left and right with his massive blade.
Kal yelled, sword dancing a dazzling blur.
Nameless was dimly aware of Old Moary chopping away with his hatchet, but then he saw the threat to Duck’s flanks and charged, shearing a feeder’s head from its shoulders. Black blood spurted out of the neck, and then the body was dragged back by more of the creatures and ripped to shreds.
Nameless glanced to his right, where Grok was stabbing and slashing with demonic fury. His face was awash with blood, some of it red, but much of it black. He screamed almost gleefully as his dagger bit into flesh again and again.
There was a rush of gray, and Nameless whirled around, crashing his axe through a groping arm, sending it twitching to the ground. Razor-sharp teeth lunged toward him, but Duck’s shield slammed them aside. Talons raked Nameless’s back, stopped only by the links of his pa’s chainmail.
“Back!” Targ yelled above the ocean of noise. “Pull back!”
Nameless chopped left and right with wild abandon, clearing a path. Moary stumbled away from the mass of feeders, robe rent in several places and soaked in blood, much of it his own. His face looked ashen, and his breaths came in ragged gasps. Duck took him behind the shelter of his shield and they withdrew together.
A screech from behind had Nameless turning, expecting to have his face ripped off, but Kal’s blade exited the feeder’s mouth like a steely tongue.
“Come on,” Kal said. “Let’s go.”
Wave after wave of feeders was crashing against the ledge, where Jaym and Grok stood against them like gods of rage. Black blood sprayed until the ground grew slippery, and the baresark almost lost his footing. Feeders swarmed around them, cutting off their retreat. Nameless saw Grok spin behind Jaym, and the two fought furiously, back to back.
“With me,” Nameless commanded, and Kal obeyed.
Together, they pressed into the sea of slavering fangs and slashing claws, hacking, punching, kicking until they reached Grok and Jaym. The assassin was drenched in black gore and spattered with crimson, but he showed no signs of weakening. He gutted a feeder to his right, and when another took the opportunity to pounce from his left, he bashed it full in the face with his buckler.
“Retreat!” Nameless
roared above the screeching.
“Shog off,” Grok snarled. “We have ’em, I tell you. Bastards!” He punched his dagger through the roof of a feeder’s mouth, up into its brain, assuming it even had one.
Three of the creatures threw themselves at Jaym, gouging his skin and hanging there so they could rip into him with their teeth. The baresark screamed his fury and thrashed around, trying to dislodge them. Nameless grabbed one by the arm and yanked it clear. It turned on him but found an axe blade wasn’t good to eat. Kal skewered another, and then Jaym got the last by the throat and squeezed with one hand while smacking the crowding creatures back with his sword.
“Ten!” Targ yelled from back in the tunnel.
Teeth bit into Nameless’s shoulder, snapping a link in his mail. He cracked Paxy’s haft into a gray skull, and the creature dropped.
“Nine!”
“What the shog?” Grok said.
More feeders poured onto the ledge. They climbed over each other in their desperation to taste flesh, a rolling, undulating landslide that threatened to smother the defenders at any moment.
“Eight!”
Something about the urgency in Targ’s voice smashed through the fog of battle, and Nameless cursed himself for a stupid shogger.
“Run!” he bellowed, and charged headlong through the outflanking feeders with Kal in tow.
Duck and Old Moary had made it by the looks of things, which left only—
Jaym hurtled into him, Grok under one arm.
Nameless snatched hold of Kal’s cloak, and the four of them tumbled through the tunnel entrance to land in a heap at Targ’s feet.
“Ah, shog it,” Targ said. “Detonate!”
He pressed down on a plunger, and a concussive explosion shook the mountain.
The feeders’ screeching crescendoed, and then the ceiling collapsed on top of them in an avalanche of rocks and dust.
NILS
There was a muffled boom that made Nils’s heart leap into his mouth. His first thought was that the volcano was erupting, but the thought was short-lived. He slipped on a slick rock and the only thing that stopped him falling on his ass and cracking the back of his head was the tightening of the leash about his neck. Blightey held the other end effortlessly, suspending him like a grisly puppet.
The Lich Lord was staring up the volcano, to where the tunnel the feeders had been swarming into was supposed to be. Smoke rose in spiraling plumes above a tumbling, clattering sea of rock that scattered the creatures before it.
Nils tried to get his fingers between the leash and his skin, but it had already cut too deep. His eyes felt ready to burst from their sockets, and he choked and gasped like a fish on the hook. The peak of the volcano swayed above him, and his guts swilled up into his throat, bottlenecked by the constriction.
Blightey swung the Ebon Staff toward him, fingers of chill mist roiling from its tip and numbing his flesh where they touched. Nils kicked about wildly, legs seeming like they had a life of their own, feet an inch off the ground. The staff shuddered, and Nils could have sworn he heard it slurp.
“It senses the nearness of death,” Blightey said. He let the leash run through his fingers, and Nils pitched to his hands and knees. “Yours mostly, but also that which lies ahead.”
Nils glanced up at the feeders clambering over the settling rubble, half-expecting them to turn toward him with those huge gobs hungering for his flesh. Good thing was, the silver sphere still surrounded him, and the shoggers paid him no heed. Made him want to ask what this death was that was so close. Maybe Blightey had got tired of him, because he didn’t want to be no apprentice. Course, it could have been the staff itself that had it in for Nils. Thing like that probably had all manner of evil intentions. It was best not to think on it, best to change the subject.
“That noise…” He rubbed his throat and coughed. “What was it?” He’d seen the flash of blades in the tunnel mouth but couldn’t make out who was wielding them. Then, all of a sudden, boom.
Blightey worried his lip and shrugged. “Resistance, I’d say. Dwarves must have blown the entrance.” He turned away and yanked on the leash.
Nils cried out as the knees of his britches tore, the skin beneath shredded by a jagged rock.
The Lich Lord let out a sigh of pleasure. It was enough to make Nils clamp his mouth shut. He weren’t gonna give the shogger nothing he didn’t have to. His eyes watered with the pain, and hot blood oozed down his neck from where the leash continued to bite. With a staggering lurch, he got one foot under him, then the other, and managed to stumble closer to Blightey, so the leash had a bit more slack.
The Lich Lord tapped the base of the Ebon Staff against the ground. Nils’s heart thudded in time with the raps then picked up pace as he waited, waited, waited for… he didn’t know what. A slap? A punch? That’s what he’d have gotten from his dad, if he’d done wrong. Only, he hadn’t, far as he could see. He hadn’t done nothing. He wanted to protest to Blightey, open his mouth and whine like he’d done as a kid, “It weren’t me. I didn’t do nothing. It ain’t fair.” But what would be the point? One thing was becoming clear: Blightey weren’t interested in fairness, and more’n likely the whining would give him some kind of pervy thrill.
Nils thought back to Nameless standing still as a statue outside The Grinning Skull, just before that shogging wizard Jankson Brau tried to kill them. Didn’t matter how hard the rain pelted, how fierce the wind blew, the dwarf just stood there and took no notice. Perhaps if he did the same, didn’t do nothing, not even make a sound, Blightey would grow bored of him, maybe even let him go.
With a slowness filled with terrible threats, Blightey turned back to face Nils. For an instant, his eyes smoldered like hot coals, but then they faded to doleful brown, and the sternness of his face relaxed into a kindly smile.
Nils grew painfully aware of his need to piss and winced with the effort to hold it in.
“Exciting, isn’t it?” Blightey said, as if he were talking about some childish game. “The hunt, I mean.”
Nils said nothing.
“Oh, Nils, but I’m doing it for you.” Blightey stepped in close and held his splayed fingers before Nils’s face, as if he meant to stroke him, or pluck out his eyes. “Do you have fox hunting here? No, of course you don’t, silly me. It was once a passion of mine, but like so many entertainments, it loses its appeal over time. When you’ve lived as long as I have, everything grows dull, and you have to keep probing, pricking away at things to elicit anything like a pulse.”
He withdrew his hand and patted his chest above the heart—Silas’s heart. Got Nils wondering if it was still beating.
“Tell me, Nils,” Blightey said, the glint of expectation in his eyes, “what gets you going? What is it that makes you feel alive?”
Nils stared straight ahead, as if he hadn’t heard.
“Is it pleasure?” Back came the hand, this time a little too close to Nils’s crotch.
For a second, Nils thought the shogger was gonna touch him there. If he did, that would be the time to let his bladder go. He wouldn’t stand for that, no way. No shogging way.
“Perhaps it is pain.” Blightey walked a tight circle around Nils, looking him up and down and smacking his lips.
Nils felt like a slab of meat being appraised by a butcher. Any second now, he expected a knife to slice into him, a cleaver to fall.
“So, Nils, you don’t approve of my dwarf hunt? Just give the word, and I’ll call it off. It’s your choice. You are the one in control.”
Nils opened his mouth to say something but swiftly shut it again. He weren’t falling for that. Better to keep quiet and take what was coming.
“I like a man to tell me what he thinks.” A harder edge had crept back into Blightey’s voice. “I like a man who commands his own destiny, at least up unto a point.” He came round to the front and brought his face close to Nils’s. His breath smelled of rot and mildew. “What do you think, Nils? Should we pursue the dwarves, or should w
e let them live?”
Nils shook his head ever so slightly.
“No, we shouldn’t let them live, or no, we shouldn’t pursue them?”
“Leave them be,” Nils blurted out. “They ain’t done nothing.”
“Would you say the same thing to a plague? To an earthquake? Death is inexorable, Nils, and life is inherently cruel, or do you disagree?”
Nils had thought a lot about such questions lately, what with studying Nameless’s Liber Via. Most of it made no sense to him, but he reckoned it was right about one thing.
“All life is good,” he said.
“Ah, the Good.” Blightey nodded and backed away a little. “But where does it come from, this goodness? Chance or a benevolent creator?”
“Ain,” Nils said. That’s what the Wayists spouted in New Londdyr, and the Liber Via seemed to agree with them.
Blightey grinned. “Have you any idea what Ain means?”
Nils unshouldered his pack and pulled out the book, started thumbing though it.
Blightey’s eyes widened.
“Says somewhere that Ain is good,” Nils said. “He’s great, all knowing, all powerful. Here.” He ran his finger beneath the words and squinted at them. “In abscondi de dissimulatae, which means something like, ‘hid’ or ‘hidden in’.”—What was it Silas had said?—“The Con… Conce…”
“Concealed,” Blightey said, sounding just like Magistra Archyr.
“The Concealed of the Concealed.” Nils continued to read aloud. “Antiquum dierum…”