by D. P. Prior
The black-coated man was there then, flinging fire in its face. The beast howled and thrashed. The man bobbed and weaved between its flailing arms and flat-palmed it in the sternum. Fire lit its body from within, and it shrieked.
Shader groaned. His face was purple, his sword arm hanging useless at his side, fingers barely retaining the gladius’s hilt.
Shadrak stepped in, skimming silver stars that lodged in the creature’s torso, head, and arms. Black-coat crumpled beneath a pounding fist. Shader began to gurgle.
Nameless pushed himself to his feet and hit the beast with an uppercut, rocking its head back. It chomped down on his shoulder, but the chainmail saved him.
Silver streaked across his vision. One of Shadrak’s stars lodged in the creature’s eye. It screamed and turned toward the assassin, and in that instant, Nameless grabbed it by the horns and twisted, twisted, twisted with everything he had. Shader’s wheezing breaths only lent him strength. Heavy arms bashed at him, tried to dislodge him, but he refused to let go.
Shadrak ran in, stabbed at its heart, but an arm came down to block, and the assassin swirled away.
“Shader!” he cried.
“I know!” Nameless grunted.
The beast bucked and flailed, reached behind to grab his forearm. Something ruptured deep within Nameless. Something not quite tangible. Magma surged through his limbs, and he put everything he had into a last desperate heave.
The beast’s neck cracked and turned to an impossible degree. At once, its coils grew flaccid, and Shader dropped on top of them.
Nameless released the monster’s horns, and it slumped to the ground.
He lay there for a moment, catching his breath. Another second, and they would have lost Shader. Nameless had the feeling that would have spelled the end for all of them. For all the worlds.
He heard the knight cough and splutter, though, and took some comfort from that.
A pallid hand clamped down on his shoulder, and then Shadrak reached down and helped him to sit.
“See what I mean? I said to leave it. What did you two think, that I was shogging joking? Does this look like a face that jokes?”
Nameless focused in on him, on the bloodless visage with its unnerving pink eyes.
“Honest opinion, laddie?”
“Only one that’s worth shit.”
“It’s an ugly mug more suited to frightening children and slurping the bodily fluids from moldering corpses than it is to a stand-up routine in Slim Shafty’s House of Grog, where all the best comedians perform.”
Shadrak’s silence cut the air like a threat, but then he shrugged. “So, fit for purpose, then?”
“I’d say.”
Shadrak helped him all the way to his feet. “They have comedy in Arx Gravis?”
“It’s a city within a ravine, laddie. It gets frightfully boring at times.”
“And I was was starting to think you dwarves were dour, with faces like cat’s arses.”
“There’s some truth in that,” Nameless said. “Which is why I hide mine behind this helm.”
He crossed over to Shader and knelt beside him.
“Are you all right, laddie?”
Shader’s breaths came in tortured wheezes, but he held his hand up to forestall anymore questions. Golden light flared along the blade of the gladius and suffused his flesh. He stiffened, then let out a long, slow breath.
“Am now,” Shader said, standing and rubbing his ribcage.
“You folks have got some explaining to do.” It was the man in the black coat. He’d found his feet and was stumbling over to them.
“Like what?” Shadrak said, fastening his cloak around his neck. “Like how we took this thing down and saved your arse?”
“I told you,” the man said, his fist starting to smolder, “this is Maresman business. That means stay out of it.”
“Laddie,” Nameless said, “I don’t mind a bit of bluster, but ungrateful…” He flicked a look at Shadrak. “I was going to say ‘shoggers’, but I feel the occasion warrants something stronger.”
“Tossers?” Shadrak suggested.
“Thank you. Ungrateful tossers will never—and I must emphasize the seriousness—never get to drink mead at my table.”
“Well, stumpy,” the man said, “let me give you some advice.”
“Not interested,” Nameless said. “Are you, Shadrak?”
“Nope.”
Shader came to stand at the assassin’s side. “What you could do is give us some answers. What was that thing, and why were you chasing it?”
“It’s my shogging job, that’s why. And as to what it was, I can’t give particulars, because it’s the first of its kind we’ve seen, but it’s a husk like all the other husks that think they can cross the Farfall Mountains. Don’t know what it is that’s gotten into them, but there’s been more incursions this past few days than we usually get in a year. The Senate has every last Maresman out hunting.”
“Creatures from Qlippoth crossing the Farfalls?” Nameless said, “but that’s impossible.”
“That’s what you’re supposed to think, and you’ve already seen more than you should. You, though,”—his eyes flicked from Shadrak to Nameless—“you two have got some explaining to do. Sure you ain’t no husks yourselves? You ain’t human, that’s for certain.” His hand burst into flame. “You want to tell me where you came from?”
“My mother’s womb,” Nameless said.
“Shog knows,” Shadrak said.
“Funny.” The Maresman stepped up close to Nameless. “Take off that helm.”
“Now there’s a thought.”
The flaming fist came up. “Take it—umph!”
He doubled over, then collapsed to his knees, trying to stem the flow of blood from his crotch.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Shadrak said, holding a gore-stained dagger in front of the Maresman’s face. “Just figured if you had nothing to toss with, you’d be cured of being a tosser.”
“Shadrak…” Shader warned.
But the assassin slashed the blade across the Maresman’s throat and stood back as he slumped to the ground.
“This isn’t what we came for,” Shader said, sheathing his gladius.
“You want my help, then stop trying to tell me how to give it.” The assassin’s pink eyes flashed at Nameless. “What about you? You got something to say, too?”
A hundred questions seethed and roiled through Nameless’s mind. He didn’t understand it either, the gratuitous brutality. There had been no need. If the shogger had tried anything with that flaming fist, Nameless would have known exactly where to shove it. But to kill a man, and with such glee… He stopped himself there. He was hardly in a position to judge.
Shadrak was watching him expectantly, and Nameless knew he had to say something.
“So, laddie, you don’t have a mother?”
Shadrak frowned, then said, “Yes, I do. Only, she didn’t give birth to me.”
Before Nameless could ask who did, Shader crouched over the body of the Maresman.
“He said there’s been an unusual amount of incursions. Husks, he called them.” He glanced over his shoulder at Nameless. “You think it has anything to do with the Unweaving?”
“Can’t say, laddie, but it does seem a bit of a coincidence. Maybe the husks have got wind of what Gandaw’s up to and are trying to stop him.” If that was the case, the Maresmen were playing right into the Technocrat’s hands.
“So, the Senate employ these scuts to patrol the borders?” Shadrak said.
Nameless shrugged. “If they do, this one was doing a poor job of it. The Farfalls are said to be in the far north, and yet here we are a stone’s throw from New Londdyr.”
“Maybe the Senate will thank me for killing him, then,” Shadrak said. “Save them the trouble of firing him. Don’t know about you two, but I ain’t likely to sleep after this. I say we press on, see if we can make it there by morning.”
“Agreed,” Nameless said. “Shade
r?”
“We can’t just leave the body.”
“Watch me,” Shadrak said. “It ain’t like I carry a shovel.”
“We could find rocks for a cairn,” Nameless suggested.
“That isn’t what I meant.”
Shader knelt down beside the body and fished a leather-bound book from his pocket. Paying no heed to Shadrak’s impatient pacing, he began to read aloud.
Nameless knew he’d heard the very same words before. And then he remembered: Thumil had read them over the body of Nameless’s pa when they’d brought him back from the mines.
At the same time, one of the names he’d been hunting seeped through the cracks in his mind. His pa’s name:
Droom.
And in the privacy afforded by the great helm, he started to weep.
NEW LONDDYR
Dawn light bled atop the city’s battlements as one sun crested the horizon. The walls must have been close to five-hundred feet tall, and they extended for miles without end. The sections stretching between the scores of cylindrical towers were heavily buttressed, and embrasured on dozens of levels. Lanterns ghosted in between the merlons, and cones of stark light roved the ground outside the city. A cluster of bronze-capped minarets peeked above the walls, and way off to their left, an immense chimney billowed smoke that swirled into a dirty canopy of smog.
Boggy ground squelched beneath their boots as the trio trudged the last few miles toward New Londdyr. Eventually, the second sun rose to join its twin, and they both climbed at their usual hectic rate, setting the domes of the minarets aflame and limning the smog with gold.
Nameless angled the great helm back the way they’d come, where the sky was bruised with a patch of mauve. It must have been way past Arx Gravis, perhaps as far as the Perfect Peak.
Shader, too, was looking back to the west. A frown furrowed his face.
“Reckon it’s started?” Shadrak said.
“Either that, or there’s a storm coming,” Shader said.
“You get twisters here, mate?” Shadrak asked Nameless.
“Only bad winds we get in Arx Gravis are from drinking Ironbelly’s,” Nameless muttered, more to himself than anyone else.
Whether it was from trekking through the night, or from the worsening hunger gnawing away at his innards, the black dog mood was starting to worry away at the novelty of being outside the ravine. That was the cruel truth of things: no matter how wondrous, how awe-inspiring a new experience, it became mundane before you knew it, and then the hound of depression crept out from the dark spaces and gnawed the last scraps of flesh from its bones.
Lightning flashed in the distance, forking and branching across the mauve stain like cracks in a mirror.
“Storm it is, then.” Shadrak shrunk into his concealer cloak, merging with the browns and greens of the fens that were beginning to cede ground to the freshly plowed fields skirting the city.
“Nah, laddie.” Nameless said. “Not a storm.” At least, not any storm he’d seen. While living below ground had sheltered the dwarves from the worst of the winds that sometimes raged across the upper-lands, he’d seen his fair share of thunderstorms. The lightning arcing down the chasm sometimes struck the Aorta in coruscating sparks, and set the ravine walls flickering. Those were the moments of almost supernatural dread that nevertheless fueled his imagination and told him there was more to life than Arx Gravis.
But this… this was something different. The lightning he knew came down. These flashes traveled upward from the ground. And where they met the sky, specks of blackness were left in their wake, as if they scorched the very air and hardened it into scabs.
“We need to hurry,” Shader said. “There’s no telling how much time we have.”
The shadow cast by the walls fell over two or three acres of farmland. It smothered the blaze of the twin suns and sent a chill into Nameless’s bones.
Shader tugged his coat tight about him and pressed on. Shadrak glanced at Nameless, pulled his hood up, and together they set off after the knight.
“What we gonna do, knock?” Shadrak said as they approached the barbican thrusting out from the curtain wall between two towers. It was big enough to be a castle in its own right. In place of gates, it had huge double-doors of stone etched with cursive script. The writing was old dwarven.
Nameless walked right up to the doors and scanned the letters through the eye-slit.
“Something from the time of Maldark,” he said. “Old Dwarven’s not too good. No call for it, except for scholars, and Thumil, of course. Dead language, if you ask me.”
“Maldark?” Shader squinted where Nameless pointed. He started to translate out loud: “The last act of the dwarves of Malkuth, a gift for the first of the free.” He turned to Nameless for an explanation.
Nameless was momentarily stunned that the knight could read Old Dwarven, but then he recalled Shader reading over the Maresman’s body, and Aristodeus once saying a similar language existed on Urddynoor.
“Malkuth’s everything this side of the Farfalls, laddie,” Nameless explained. “The first of the free, though… I can only guess that’s the colonists. Legend has it they were brought to Aethir by Sektis Gandaw in magical ships that crossed the stars.” Now he was starting to believe the tale, though he’d bet his hind teeth they were plane ships, and they’d set out from Urddynoor.
Shader glanced at Shadrak, who merely narrowed his eyes and gave an almost indiscernible shrug.
“What’s the rest say?” Nameless asked.
“May this city vouchsafe the protection of these, our brothers, our fellow victims; and may it serve as an acceptable penance for our sins.”
“That’ll be about Maldark’s betrayal,” Nameless said. “From then on, my people mistrusted themselves so much, they withdrew from the world above. It’s why we have the Council, bunch of procrastinating codgers that they are.”
“Think they’ve noticed we’re here yet?” Shadrak looked up at the crenellations atop the barbican, where there appeared to be a change of guard taking place. “Want me to climb the walls, slit a few throats, and open them doors from the inside?”
“Can’t been done, laddie,” Nameless said. “Dwarf stonework. Mortar’s thinner than a gnat’s hair. Even with fingers as dainty as yours, you’ll find no purchase.”
Shadrak gave a tight-lipped smile and patted one of his belt pouches. “Then you don’t know much about my line of work.”
“Don’t know much about anything since I woke up,” Nameless said, rapping his knuckles on the great helm. “Noddle’s numb as a leper’s knackers.”
Shader shook his head as he looked at the walls, taking in the massive blocks of stone, each the size of a house. “Must’ve had some skill to build this. Your people, I mean.”
“Aye, laddie. Aye, that they did. You’ll not find stonework like that even in Arx Gravis. They call these the Cyclopean Walls. I heard it said a race of one-eyed giants lifted the blocks into place.”
Shader chuckled.
“I’m serious, laddie. Mind you, there’s more than one version of the tale. Some say Gandaw made the cyclopes from the raw stuff of humans brought from Urddynoor, same as he claims he did with my peop…”
He tailed off. That was a belief that had slowly taken hold of the popular imagination in Arx Gravis. Since Maldark’s day. Before that, if Lucius were to be believed, folk had considered themselves descendants of the Dwarf Lords, and they had worshipped a higher power that most certainly didn’t reside in a mountain of scarolite. “Gandaw did a lot of experimenting here in Malkuth. When he’d exhausted all he could do with a species, he exterminated it, and that’s what they say happened with the cyclopes.”
“Doubt he was chuffed them helping out with the walls,” Shadrak said. “Not if they were supposed to keep the colonists safe. I take it you mean safe from him?”
“Aye, you’re not wrong there. Course, there’s another legend that says the cyclopes were natives of Qlippoth on the other side of the Farfalls
, but no one believes that anymore.”
A trumpet blast sounded from the barbican, and a soldier peered down at them through a crenel. His face was framed by a bronze helm with a white horsehair crest.
The soldier made a funnel of his hand and threw his voice. “Salvete, amici. Quo vadis?”
“Shog’s he say?” Shadrak said, hand slipping to his Thundershot.
Shader called back, “Ave, amicus. Quaeramus Academiae. Nos intrare?”
“Hold on, hold on,” the soldier said. “Not so fast, mate. All I know’s the greeting, and that’s only coz the bloody Senate’d have my job if I didn’t learn it right. Say again.”
“We’re heading for the Academy,” Shader said. “May we enter?”
A heavy clunk sounded from inside the barbican, followed by squeaking and groaning as the stone doors opened outward.
Shadrak started forward, but Nameless put a restraining hand on his shoulder. The assassin’s eyes flashed dangerously, and his hand crept inside his concealer cloak.
“Might want to take that off,” Nameless said.
“Yeah? And why’s that, then?”
“Folks see you blending with the surroundings, and they’ll assume you’re up to no good. Don’t want to get off to a bad start now, do we?”
Shadrak gave a curt nod and removed the cloak, bundling it under his arm. It looked like he was carrying a boulder the same color as the city walls.
“Give it here, laddie,” Nameless said. He took the bundle and stuffed it up the front of his hauberk. “They’ll either think I’m up the duff or a bit too friendly with the beer. Don’t worry,” he said as Shadrak gritted his teeth and shook his head. Nameless produced the drawstring purse Aristodeus had given him and shook it so that it clinked. “Big city like this, there’s bound to be a rogue’s outfitters. I’ll buy you a new one. All I ask in return is a pint in the nearest watering hole.”
“Just give it back when we leave,” Shadrak said, starting through the doors. “After you’ve washed the dwarf sweat off it.”