by D. P. Prior
Nameless looked from her to Nils, his mind a fog of half-formed questions.
Without thinking, he reached out and touched the black wood of the staff.
Lightning ripped through his brain, and he was flung back onto the bridge, cracking his head against a stone balustrade and groaning.
He knew he had to get up. Get up and grab Paxy. She would come to him, he realized, stretching out a hand that blurred before his vision, but all he clutched was air. He took hold of the balustrade and pulled himself up on jelly legs. Behind him, Jaym bellowed, and in front, Nils squealed and threw the Ebon Staff out into the chasm.
“I’m sorry,” he screamed at Jaym. “He made me do it. He made me!”
The staff hung in midair then drifted eerily back past Nils.
Lavender flashed again, and this time Blightey stepped forth, claiming the staff with a pallid hand. He glared at Nils, teeth clacking in some semblance of laughter, and then he started as Jaym hurtled into him.
Back on the bridge, the baresarks roared and charged, but all Nameless could do was struggle to keep his knees from buckling and pitching him over the edge.
Jaym’s momentum knocked Blightey off his feet. The baresark ended up on top of the Lich Lord, pounding away with his sword pommel because he was too close to swing.
Blightey’s skull thwacked against the ground time and again. Jaym stood and took a two-handed grip on his sword. Blightey floated upright, stiff as a board, as if an invisible string were attached to his skull. A purplish miasma rolled off the Ebon Staff. Jaym froze. He started to spasm. The instant the charging baresarks came within striking distance, they too were engulfed by the putrid cloud.
Nameless’s guts were repelled by the vapors, and icy sweat beaded his skin. His breath caught in his throat, and his pounding heart drowned out the snoring from the pit. He growled and clawed at his thigh through his britches. He knew he’d drawn blood, but he was numb to the pain. His insides were liquid, his thoughts smothered by primitive dread.
The baresarks thrashed and gurgled and then went deathly still. They stood motionless, as the last wisps of malevolence dissolved.
Jaym’s back was still to Nameless. The Lich Lord loomed over him with fire in his eyes.
Nils was staring at Nameless, lips working but making no sound. He reached a hand out, but his knees were shaking, and his feet seemed rooted to the spot.
With a shudder, Jaym turned, his movements stilted and slow. His eyes were vacant and white, but it wasn’t the crazed white of his rage. This was something different. This was something Nameless had seen before, back at the village they’d entered upon crossing the Malfen Pass. It was something he’d experienced himself when Silas had magicked him.
The rest of the baresarks shuffled round to face him. Their joints cracked like dry wood. The skin of their faces was mottled purple and yellow, and thick black veins climbed up their necks. When they opened their mouths, greenish bile leaked out, and instead of words, they emitted a maudlin groaning.
Nameless craned his neck to look back at Paxy suspended twice a dwarf’s height above the bridge. He willed her to come to him, to drive this fuggy paralysis away, but she remained as lifeless as any other metal-forged weapon. Even her voice was absent from his mind.
The scrape of the baresarks’ boots on stone drew his attention back. They lurched and groped toward him, swords and axes trailing behind.
Jaym’s head swiveled atop its black-veined neck, and when his empty eyes met Nameless’s, he gurgled a roar and took a lumbering step forward.
Blightey rubbed his bony chin then gave a sharp nod. He drew the Ebon Staff in a wide arc, and the baresarks stiffened like hardening cement. When he rapped the staff against the ground, they resumed their macabre animation, only this time, they gripped their weapons with purpose, and their movements grew as savage and sure as they had been before they’d fallen under the dark influence.
Nameless rolled back against the balustrade as the baresarks picked up their pace. Nils whimpered something and stumbled out onto the bridge ahead of them. He tugged fiercely at Nameless’s arm, yelling at him to move.
Five more paces… four… and then Nameless and Nils were squashed up against the balustrade as a dozen dwarves pushed by with Fror Bellos in the lead—Bellos, who’d made a living from polishing the glowstones that illuminated Arx Gravis’s walkways. Bellos, who’d filled the gap when Nameless had wiped out the Ravine Guard. Bellos, who’d found the courage to fight at the last, if only to keep his people alive.
Steel met steel in a ringing din that rolled out around the cavern. Bellos’s blade scraped along the length of a baresark’s sword, and with a swish of his wrist, he whipped it back and cut a deep gouge in his opponent’s neck.
Unfazed, the baresark gnashed at him with slavering jaws, but Bellos swayed aside and delivered a solid thrust that punched through the back of its head. When he withdrew the sword, gore splashed from the baresark’s mouth, but still it lumbered on, swinging its blade.
Bellos’s men, most of them Red Cloaks, hacked and slashed with fierce determination. Limbs flew, blood rained, but the baresarks were unstoppable. One lost a leg at the knee. It toppled to the ground, righted itself, and proceeded to crawl toward the bridge.
Behind Blightey, the air shimmered lavender, and feeders began to pour through, racing into the fray like rabid wolves. They weaved a path between the baresarks, avoiding the decaying flesh, as if even they felt its wrongness. They ripped into Bellos and his dwarves with the ferocity of a tidal wave. There was a brief glut of black blood, but then the dwarves were consumed in a spray of crimson.
Nameless leaned over the side of the bridge, eyes fixed on the ropes of gore dripping into the void like hellish rain. He followed a glob of red as it diminished into the dark depths. Some remote part of his brain expected to hear an echoing plop, but in the end he heard only the absence of sound.
The demon had stopped snoring.
The feeders must have noticed it, too, for they looked up from their gory feast, mouths dripping blood. Blightey held up a hand and inclined his head toward the deep. The smolder left his eyes as if he were listening intently, or perhaps reaching out with some unnatural sense.
When he looked back across the bridge at Nameless, there was a new intensity to his glare.
“Hurry, my feeders, hurry!” he cried. “We haven’t much time. A demon of the deepest Abyss is upon us.”
Forsaking their meal, the feeders jerked like puppets on strings, then launched themselves onto the bridge.
“Run, laddie, run!” Nameless said, but his voice came out as a parched whisper.
Nils was frozen in place, a deathly pallor to his skin, but then a second charge surged past them to meet the frenzied attack, this time with Duck at its head, bashing feeders from his path with his shield.
Kal was right behind, eyes burning with the focus only terror can bring. He fought like a veteran of many wars. He fought like a Dwarf Lord.
Cordy stood shoulder to shoulder with Kal, swinging a masonry hammer with controlled fury. In that instant, she could have been the woman from Durgish Duffin’s painting. She could have been Yyalla.
She was followed by a long line of dwarves, men and women, hacking, clubbing, and stabbing with whatever weapons they had found—cleavers, mallets, pickaxes.
At the rear, Weasel was waving a dagger and screaming, “Jaym, I’m coming for you, big man! I’m coming!” But when the feeders swept in among the dwarves, he turned tail and legged it back the way he’d come.
Within moments, the attack of Duck’s group faltered, and they started to retreat. Nameless felt himself swept along with them, almost lost his footing, and would have been crushed beneath their boots, had Nils not clung to him and anchored him against the balustrade.
Duck batted a leaping feeder away from Nameless before stumbling under a savage assault.
As the rest of the dwarves fell back, Nils tried to yank Nameless after them, but a swell of feeders
cut them off and began snapping and clawing at them from all sides.
The lad kicked one in the knee, backhanded another in the face.
Claws raked across Nameless’s hauberk, gouged his skin. The wounds smarted, as if acid had been spilled on them. It was the first thing he’d felt since touching the staff, but it was too little, too late. Rivulets of blood were streaking down his unprotected arms as the pack tightened around them. Nils was giving it everything he’d got, his limbs a blurry flurry of frantic blows, but it was all desperation and no skill. In another moment they’d—
With a furious roar, Jaym burst through the pack, scattering feeders by the dozen into the chasm. His broadsword scythed into them, and he kicked, butted, and bit with every last vestige of his baresark fury. The feeders snapped and clawed at his rotting flesh, not to devour, merely to protect themselves, but no matter how much they tore into him, Jaym seemed immune.
His eyes were still white, but it was the old white of rage, so incandescent that even Blightey could not contain it. His skin, was necrotic, black as a frost-bitten toe. Sores and corruption wept from every inch of his flesh.
He reached Nameless with a press of feeders at his back. They struck at him, trying to find a way past, but he used his body as a shield. Grabbing Nameless by the shoulder, he shook with the effort of growling one desperate word:
“Axe.”
With that, he shoved Nameless further onto the bridge, and Nils stumbled after him. Then, Jaym slung his sword at the feeders, spread his arms wide, and drove into them with irresistible force.
Those that weren’t bowled over the side were scooped up or pushed relentlessly back, until he veered away and dived into the chasm, taking them flailing and screaming with him.
“No!” Nameless cried.
Nils dragged him past the remnants of Duck’s group to beneath where Paxy hung suspended in the air. The lad started to slap and punch him.
“Wake up, you shogger.” Slap. “Come on, Nameless, snap out of it.”
Duck stood with his back to Nameless, planted like a tree. Feeders pounded against his shield, but they may as well have struck a brick wall.
Cordy hammered at them from one side, Kal jabbed from the other, while behind, upwards of twenty bloodied but determined dwarves waited for their chance to reenter the fray. Between them, they’d already built a mountain of corpses out of feeders.
Back beyond the defenders, the survivors of Arx Gravis waited with bated breath. They must have known this was it. This was the moment they would all perish or, by some miracle, triumph and go on to sing songs about the last great battle.
The bridge shuddered as a tumultuous roar shook its way up from the chasm. Nameless tried to steal a look but Nils hit him again, hard on the jaw.
That one hurt, and the pain cleared his head. His limbs still felt full of treacle, though, and all he could do was look on in dismay as the last of the feeders threw themselves at Duck’s group, the baresark zombies clamoring behind them, moaning and inexorable as death.
Blightey drifted out above them on a disk of shadow to alight atop the rocky outcrop at the near end of the bridge. From there, overlooking the last of his minions, he pointed the Ebon Staff at Nameless, and vaporous black fingers swirled forth.
“Shog,” Nils said. He glanced about at the bodies of the fallen and snatched up a sword. As Duck bashed another feeder into the void, and Cordy led a charge of dwarves past to slam into the remaining creatures in front of the baresarks, Nils sliced the blade across Nameless’s forearm, and blood began to flow.
“Again, laddie,” Nameless gasped as the black threads wove their way ever closer.
This time, Nils stabbed him in the arse, and Nameless yelped like a dog.
“Shog! Shogging shog, shoggedy shog and shog!” he cried, and then spun Nils into position beneath the floating axe. “A leg up, laddie,” he said. “Now!”
Nils dropped the sword so he could cup his hands, and Nameless put one foot up and launched himself into the air. Stretching as far as he could, he shut his eyes and prayed. His fingers curled around Paxy’s haft and he sent every last ounce of strength he could muster into her.
“Courage, Paxy! It’s shogging time!”
The twin blades flared golden, even as he fell and landed in a crouch upon the bridge.
He saw Duck rejoin Cordy at the head of the band of dwarves smashing their through the remaining feeders and giving desperate battle to the baresarks, and then Nameless whirled to meet the assault of the misty fingers.
They struck the axe and snuffed out Paxy’s glow. She trembled at their touch, squirming in his grip.
Nameless held on for dear life and dredged up all the rage, all the resistance he could from a fast-emptying well. He struck bottom, but still the vapors wormed their way down Paxy’s waning haft and entered his fingers, turning them to ice.
He refused to give in, even as the malignancy spread like hoarfrost through his veins, inching its way closer and closer to his heart. He thrashed and railed at the bottom of his well, deep in the heart of his own darkness. In his mind’s eye, a crack emptier than the Void opened in the black-walled cell that had held him for so long and started to widen.
No, he wanted to cry. No, he’d gone too far. He stared into the face of his own evil, the seed from which the Butcher had grown. No! he screamed with every last fiber of his being as the icy strands touched his heart, and then with one final, suicidal act of defiance, he flung himself into the gaping maw of the black dog within.
Heat blazed through his heart, driving back the cold. Fire coursed through his veins, erupting into Paxy’s haft and igniting her blades with candent glory.
My Immortal! Paxy cried in his mind.
Blightey’s eyes flared with surprise as Nameless drew back and threw.
Paxy windmilled toward the Lich Lord with terrifying speed. Instinctively, he threw up the Ebon Staff to protect himself, but the Axe of the Dwarf Lords sheared straight through, knocking Blightey from his feet and spinning back into Nameless’s outstretched hand.
Blightey recovered and leapt back up with preternatural speed, clutching one dead piece of wood in either hand. Glaring into the depths, his eyes once more registered his shock.
A hellish glow was emanating from the abyss, and a sound like the gnashing of millions of teeth rose up.
Blightey threw the pieces of the staff into the chasm, and there was an answering belch. He leapt into the air and floated down to the bridge, light as a feather, to stand behind the baresarks.
Cordy was thrown back by a bludgeoning fist, blood trickling from her lips. She was up in an instant, but Nameless charged past her and cleaved her attacker from head to groin.
Fallen dwarves littered the bridge before him, but he stepped grimly over them, hammering Paxy into putrid flesh until he reached Duck.
Duck’s shield was a warped mess of mangled metal, but still it protected him from the savage blows of the three baresarks in front of him, who were all that stood between Nameless and Blightey.
Cordy swept up a sword and screamed a battle cry, scything right through both legs of a baresark. Its torso landed upright, the arms still groping, jaws still crunching.
Nameless dispatched another before kicking the living torso from the bridge.
Duck slammed the last baresark repeatedly with his shield, pulverizing its face until brains spilled, and it stopped moving.
Nameless advanced on Blightey, beating down his fear with thoughts of vengeance for all the dwarves lying dead upon the bridge, for Bellos and Jaym, for Grok, Targ, and Cairn Sternfist, and last but not least, for Silas. Besides himself, only Duck, Kal, and Cordy were still standing, and them only just.
Back behind them, Nils cried out, and all eyes, even Blightey’s, turned to the chasm.
Steam hissed up from a hideous aberration that bubbled and squelched just below the bridge. It was a vast island of undulating flesh, textured like a jellyfish, its body a compacted mass of gigantic heads, gibbe
ring, screaming, grinding their teeth. A thousand sets of eyes glared in every direction, bloodshot and wide with madness. Insanity rolled away from the monstrosity in waves that battered at Nameless’s newfound courage, eroded who he was, where he’d come from. The only thing it couldn’t touch was his name. That had already been taken.
When he’d given himself to the black dog within, he’d found nothing but strength, and now, under the assault of the demon’s presence, he cocooned himself in that cloud of unknowing that had come to define him. He was no one, no thing. He had no core to be ripped from his center and dissolved in this sweeping tide of chaos. And in the same instant, he realized the reverse was true: with the surety of an axe through the skull, he knew from the marrow outward what it was that lay at the heart of his very being: he was the Nameless Dwarf, and no Abyss-spawned blob of stinking jelly was going to convince him otherwise.
Nils was gibbering, pale as a ghost. Duck cowered beneath his battered shield, as if that could ward off the madness. Kal’s face was petrified in a never-ending scream. Cordy looked like the corpse of her baby hung in the air before her. Back across the bridge, the dwarves of Arx Gravis seemed like a host of the damned.
Nameless bundled Duck to his feet and clanged the flat of Paxy’s blades against his shield. Duck’s eyes popped halfway out of their sockets.
“Run,” Nameless said, pushing him toward the far end of the bridge. He raised his voice to take in Cordy, Kal, and Nils. “All of you, run. I’ll hold this skull-headed shogger.”
Duck stumbled away on wobbly legs, but Nils just clung to the balustrade, staring inanely. Cordy’s eyes remained fixed to the invisible horror floating before her.
“Ha! You’ve awakened the Malady!” Blightey said. “You poor benighted fools, even I would think twice before pitting myself against an elder of the Abyss.”
Nameless spun round, and Blightey started cackling. Nevertheless, the Lich Lord edged away from the side of the bridge nearest the demon, scarcely taking his eyes from it.
Hatred bubbled up from the base of Nameless’s spine.
Blightey showed no concern for the loss of his feeders, the destruction of the zombies he’d made of Jaym and his baresarks. He stood as certain of his own invulnerability as he had in Verusia, although, this time, he lacked the Cynocephalus’s armor.