Revenge of the Lich (Legends of the Nameless Dwarf Book 3)

by D. P. Prior

  The tunnel was too low for Nils to stand upright. Good thing was, Blightey was that much taller, he had to bend almost double as he walked. Not that they were doing much walking, mind, what with the feeders packed together so tight they moved at a snail’s pace. They were ravenous, by the looks of them. Always so ravenous, their lipless mouths stretching, reaching for whatever meal they sensed up ahead. Nils had a strong feeling it was gonna be raw, most likely bearded, and short enough to walk these tunnels on tiptoe.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Blightey said, finally losing patience with the feeders blocking the tunnel in front of them.

  There was a sickening crack, like dry wood trodden underfoot, and then Blightey’s head twisted round full circle. Nils would have thrown up, if there’d been anything in his belly. The feeling only grew worse when the skin on Blightey’s face shriveled away to nothing, and his hair fell out in clumps, until all that remained was the flaming skull.

  With a clack of its teeth, the skull detached itself from Silas’s body and flew between the feeders. The creatures immediately stopped their fighting for position and pressed themselves back against the walls.

  The headless body tugged on the leash and led Nils past them, through the narrow corridor Blightey’s skull had created. Once they reached the head of the pack, the skull screwed itself back onto the stump of Silas’s neck, and the skin and hair re-formed.

  “See,” Blightey said, “even the feeders fear something. All the while I have this fleshy frame, they believe, somewhere in those atavistic brains of theirs, they have a chance to sup. But a skull impervious to all attack, mortal, magical, or otherwise, makes them just a little nervous.”

  “I can see why,” Nils said. “What I don’t get, is why you need a body in the first place.”

  Blightey looked thoughtful for a moment. “That, my dear Nils, is a good question, and why you interest me as a potential apprentice. Familiarity, perhaps? A desire to fit in? To belong?” He let out an explosive laugh. “Or is it just the thrill of deception, seeing the look of surprise on people’s faces when I reveal my true self?”

  Maybe it was something else, Nils thought, catching a shadow of sadness flitting over Blightey’s face. Maybe it was because there was so little left of him, just his bony nonce between life and oblivion.

  “Other thing I don’t get,” Nils said, “is what you need that staff for.”

  “Need?” Blightey said. “Who said anything about need? Although, I’ll grant you, it was somewhat indispensable for my return from the Void.”

  He looked off into the distance of the tunnel, as if remembering. When he turned to Nils again, his expression was at first vacant, but then he frowned.

  “Do you have any idea what nothingness feels like, Nils?”

  Nils shook his head.

  “Nothing,” Blightey said. “It feels like nothing, because it is nothing. No place, no time, no light, no sound, no heat, no cold, no… awareness.” A light breeze must have coursed down the tunnel, ruffling Blightey’s coat. Either that, or he was shivering, because, in any event, Nils couldn’t feel nothing.

  “Then how did you escape?” Nils asked. “What with having no awareness and the like.”

  “A great deal of forethought,” Blightey said, and then he rapped the staff against the ground. “And the acquisition of my friend here. You have been properly introduced, haven’t you?”

  “Properly enough,” Nils said.

  No, said a chill voice in his mind.

  An itch started at the base of Nils’s skull and spread over his scalp, seeping beneath the flesh into his brain. He shuddered and scratched his head, but nothing he did stopped the staff from probing deeper and deeper. It felt wrong, somehow. Vile and utterly evil.

  “Comforting, isn’t it?” Blightey said. “Makes you feel all snuggled up, like slipping between clean sheets with your favorite teddy.”

  The sensation ceased, and Nils gasped. The dark wood of the staff rippled and pulsed with tendrils of blackness then settled back into stillness.

  It was now the turn of the feeders to become impatient. They pressed up as close as they dared to Nils’s silver sphere, snarling and yapping like hungry dogs. Blightey pointed the staff at them, and the first three dissolved into steaming pools of pus.

  “Certainly comes in handy when one needs to preserve one’s own juices,” Blightey said. “Most importantly, though, the staff is a semi-manufactured entity, a creature once not dissimilar to our quarry, melded into an artifact of untold power, believe it or not, for the express purpose of opposing the Demiurgos and his spawn. Funny how even the best laid plans can go arse about face, if you’ll excuse my expression. What was it you called your creator?” Blightey asked the staff. “The Supernal Father! Of all the infernal impudence.”

  “Super what?” Nils said. “What’s that even mean?”

  Ain, said the cold voice in his head.

  “Ain?” Nils said. “Really?”

  Blightey sucked in a deep breath and looked down at him. “Nils, Nils. What did I say God was?”

  “Nothing?”

  “No-thing. Our friend here,” he patted the staff, “was wise enough to recognize hubris when he saw it and rebelled with a zeal I found irresistible. Interesting thing about his design, is that the wood of the staff holds the imprint of a soul, everything, barring the body, of the being who was altered. The staff’s capacity to record memories was by no means exhausted by the initial melding, and so I was able to… what would you say? Program? Imprint? I was able to infuse it with my own essence, my thoughts, feelings, recollections, so that, in the event of my own obliteration, the staff would be the key to my resurrection.”

  “So it was a trap,” Nils said. “You used that grimoire to lead Silas to the forest of tar, so that he’d find the staff and bring you back.”

  “That’s about the long and the short of it,” Blightey said. “Now, have you noticed anything unusual about these tunnels?” He ran his gaze along the walls.

  Nils hadn’t noticed, but now that Blightey mentioned it, there were black seams running through the rock, glistening with flecks of green.

  “Ain’t that scarolite?”

  “The same,” Blightey said. “The fossilized sap of Gehenna, they say. Crystallized magic.”

  Nils’s heart skipped a beat. “Magic?” So Ilesa was right about the pen. Pity she didn’t have the balls to do what she said she was gonna do. Mind you, balls wouldn’t be quite appropriate on Ilesa.

  “Oh yes, with its origins in the fog rolling off of the Abyss. There are ethereal paths, Nils, connecting Gehenna to the Abyss. The whole subterranean atmosphere of Gehenna is permeated with the miasma of the Demiurgos’s realm. Where Gehenna touches the world above, as it clearly does here, the fog sets, fuses with the roots of mountains and forms these streams of scarolite.”

  “So, it’s evil?”

  Blightey gave a little chuckle. “You still have so far to ascend, my boy. But even if it were evil at its point of origin, the contact with the world of the Cynocephalus alters its nature. The son of the Demiurgos bears more of his mother than his father. He’s a raving lunatic, and scared of his own shadow, but you could never describe him as evil.

  “Something I don’t expect you to know, is that once, long, long ago, these tunnels beneath the volcano were mined by an ancient and, though it pains me to say it, noble race. The Dwarf Lords of Arnoch were born from the last vestiges of the Cynocephalus’s sanity. They were the champions of his resolve to keep back the dark.

  “Alas, the dog-head has some pretty nasty dreams, and there was one his champions could not defeat. My staff here tells me, though, that there have been new developments, that another artifact has risen from the depths of the ocean—a sister of his. If the Axe of the Dwarf Lords has returned, then the beast that destroyed the people of Arnoch must have finally been bested. If I had known that when I came back from the Void, I might not have lost my hand.” He wriggled his fingers.

 
“Silas’s hand, you mean.”

  Blightey’s eyes widened, and he gave a slight nod. “It would seem the dwarves have returned to their old stomping ground. I wonder if they plan to resume the role of their forebears.”

  “Nah,” Nils said. “They’re just running. You see, Nameless…” He checked himself, feeling like he was betraying his friend.

  “Quite the killer,” Blightey said. “Brutal and efficient, but lacking any finesse. Death should be something creative, an art form, like frescoing or crochet. It needs to be savored like a fine wine, swished around the palate and swallowed while its bouquet lingers in the nostrils.

  “If I had been in the slightest like this brute, he’d have been dead in the forest of tar, and the rest of his race would have been slaughtered on the way to the volcano. But where’s the fun in that? The sport? Let’s see what they do under the threat of extinction. Will they flee until their bodies give out and the feeders pick them apart where they lie? Will they muster a heroic last stand, that no one, besides us will witness? Will they turn on each other and do the job for us? Or will they find themselves in the bowels of the earth, forge weapons of scarolite, and hit us where it hurts.” Blightey seemed invigorated by the idea.

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” Nils said. “If you could’ve killed them, you would have.”

  “Where is the thrill, my boy, if there is no chance of losing? I’ve had a lifetime of caution—a hundred lifetimes—but it was a caution that kept me from the heights of existence. No life in skulking reclusion, I tell you. No life at all.”

  “So you couldn’t do it, then? You couldn’t kill them, because it’s your nature to string this out.”

  Blightey looked genuinely surprised. He nodded thoughtfully a couple of times and chewed on a thumbnail—Silas’s, not the other one.

  “Good, Nils. I like that. It is my nature to milk the moment. Yes, I think you’ve nailed it. Reminds me of what someone once said about Ain: did he have a choice to create the world, or was it an inevitable extension of his nature? Excellent. I see my instincts about you were correct. Now, have I told you about my penchant for impalement?”

  Nils shrugged. “Don’t know what that is.”

  “Don’t know!” Blightey said. “My dear boy, impalement is the most delectable hobby. I sometimes think it’s the only thing capable of instilling me with the slightest spark of life. You take a sturdy length of wood, shape it into a stake, and push it through the anus until it comes out of the mouth. The real trick is to keep the victim alive when you plant the stake in the ground. It’s all about the angle of insertion.”

  “Too much information,” Nils said, trying not to visualize the process. He did for an instant, and thought he was gonna puke his arse out of his throat.

  “It’s all just holding a mirror up to nature, Nils. The cruelty lies in the inexorability of death and decay, not in the act itself. You could say impaling is an enlightening experience.”

  “No more,” Nils said. “I don’t care who you are and what you’re planning to do with me, I don’t have to listen to this shite.”

  Blightey looked heartbroken, albeit only for a moment. “Oh, up your bum,” he said, and followed it with a lascivious grin.

  “Scut,” Nils said.

  Blightey pulled the leash taut and set back off along the tunnel, hunched over like a man of ninety, although, come to think of it, he was probably a hundred times that age, if not more. “Come on, slave boy, the feeders are getting hungry.”

  “Getting?” Nils said. “They ain’t stopped being hungry, even for a minute. And come to think of it, neither have I.”

  Blightey paused and took hold of Nils under the chin. “Would you like a little nibble, Nils? Would you?”

  Nils was tempted to say yes, but he had a bad feeling Blightey might have been offering something other than food.

  “Nah, it’s all right. I’ll survive.”

  “Suit yourself,” Blightey said, continuing on his way and pulling Nils along behind.

  They followed the tunnel for what seemed an age, probably because they could only go so fast when they had to stoop.

  Nils’s attention shifted completely to his grumbling guts. He felt dizzy and irritable. Not quite enough to let on to Blightey, but it was sure getting close.

  “… the mandrake root,” Blightey was saying. “They say it’s born from a dead man’s semen. Screams like a girl when you pluck it from the…” Blightey held up his finger for silence. “Hush now, my boy. We have perhaps been a bit too garrulous.”

  “What the shog’s that… Oh, I see,” Nils said as a stern-looking dwarf stepped from an alcove brandishing a shortsword.

  The corridor beyond flared open into an oval-shaped chamber, within which two more dwarves were waiting, watching their approach. All were armored and cloaked in red, and all looked like they meant business—right up until they spotted the mass of feeders pressing in close behind Nils and Blightey.

  “Shog,” the one who’d stepped from the alcove said. He turned and ran toward his colleagues, who’d already dashed across the chamber, out of sight.

  Blightey strolled after them, using the Ebon Staff like an old man’s walking stick, rapping it against the stone as he went. The leash pulled taut, and Nils stumbled in his wake.

  The feeders grew frenzied, shrieking and snapping at the air, but they never came within an inch of the silver sphere.

  The instant they stepped into the chamber, two dwarves flung themselves at Blightey, slashing with their swords. The blades sparked and flew from their hands. The dwarves grew wide-eyed and ashen faced. The third had hold of the top rung of a ladder that led down through the floor.

  Blightey raised his hand and splayed the fingers.

  Nils’s ears popped, and at first he couldn’t work out what had happened.

  The three dwarves were frozen in position, one in a half turn toward a tunnel opposite the one they’d entered by, the second locked into a gawping stare, as if he’d just eyeballed Death himself and didn’t much like what he saw. The third paused in his descent of the ladder.

  “Well, well, well,” Blightey said. “Whatever could lie below?” He cast a butcher’s down the hole. “Presumably the other side of the rock fall. Imagine! Very soon the feeders we left outside will have cleared a passage and will start pouring through to lap up those poor dwarves who thought they’d gotten away. Just think of the dismay when more feeders come streaming down this ladder. I must confess, I feel a bit of a cheat. What do you think, Nils? Am I being unfair?”

  Nils couldn’t think of what to say to that, but before he could even try, half a dozen or more dwarves came charging out of the other corridor.

  Blightey merely released his grip on the staff, and it hung there in midair. A cloud of purplish vapors spilled from its tip and billowed over the dwarves. Their screams resonated around the chamber and made Nils sick to the stomach. When the cloud dispersed, all that was left of them was pools of pinkish ooze that bubbled and squelched.

  “Now,” Blightey said, snatching the staff from the air and turning to watch the feeders lope into the chamber, “it would of course be more sporting to release the other three—”

  Before he could finish, the feeders surged out of the tunnel and tore into the motionless dwarves. The chamber was packed wall to wall with slavering jaws and raking claws.

  Nils was an island in his silver sphere, which looked like it could wink out of existence if he so much as sneezed.

  Blightey chuckled away as the feeders bounced off whenever they touched the magical shield, and the air around Nils fizzed and popped, smelling like it did after a thunderstorm.

  Blood mist sprayed the walls, flesh was devoured, bones were crunched, and then the dwarf on the ladder had his arms ripped off, and he fell.

  Nils heard the splattering thud even above the feeding frenzy, and it was immediately followed by a chorus of screams from down below.

  NAMELESS

  Grok the Garrote lef
t a trail of blood with each scraping drag of his feet, but it did nothing to stop him taking the lead. Duck was beside him, probably to catch him if he fell, but he’d never dare tell Grok that. The cutthroat looked every inch a shambling corpse from where the feeders had ripped into him with tooth and claw, but he still exuded enough anger to fuel a couple of major wars. It was easy to imagine him rising from the grave to vent his fury. Even the baresarks were suckling lambs in comparison.

  Nameless was tucked in right behind Targ, lost in the ruminations of his black dog mood. The fluctuations were getting harder to predict, and it made him doubt his ability to make good on his self-imposed duty to protect the dwarves.

  It didn’t help having Kal right behind him. The Ravine Guard might have altered his tune since the circle fight, but people didn’t change that easily. Least of all people like Kal. He was a good enough lad, in his way, a career soldier who lived for his orders, but it seemed to Nameless he expected too much of others, needed them to be perfect.

  When Nameless checked the rest were still following, Kal gave a weak smile. Maybe he was nervous. Shog, he should have been, traipsing through endless tunnels looking for whatever it was Targ expected to find, while the last of their kind, the people they were meant to protect, were holed up back in the cathedral cavern.

  Old Moary was behind Kal. The councilor had insisted on coming, even though his talents were needed more among the people. He’d got it into his head that he was one of “the Seven”, the stalwart defenders of the survivors of Arx Gravis.

  That left just Jaym, sullen as a gloaming sky, trudging at the rear of Targ’s group of four sappers, each of whom was heavily laden with packs and tools.

  Targ drew up so suddenly, Nameless walked right into him. The old sapper held up a hand as he peered at the wall to his left.

  Kal muttered something and pushed on by.

  Up ahead, Grok and Duck hadn’t even noticed, and continued without a backward look.

  The rest of the group filtered past Nameless and kept on going.