by D. P. Prior
“Spirit of a dwarf,” Rugbeard said to no one in particular, “but not the stomach.” He took a long pull on Rhiannon’s drink and then fell forward. His head smacked against the bar. Within moments, he was snoring.
“Get me a bucket of water,” Shadrak said.
“Bucket?” the waiter said. “Don’t you mean glass? Mind, little geezer like you might be better off with a wooden cup, so’s you don’t cut yourself. Looks like you’ve already got more than your share of nicks. What happened to you? Someone drag you through a bramble bush?”
Shadrak growled and whipped out a knife. “I’ll give you worse, if you don’t shut your trap and do as you’re told.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.” Shadrak advanced on him, pressed the tip of his blade against the idiot’s nuts.
The waiter’s lips trembled, and a tic started up under his eye. He gulped and tried to back away, but Shadrak went with him.
“Water, you cretin. In a bucket. Understand?”
The waiter nodded and cocked a thumb over his shoulder toward the kitchen. Shadrak turned him around and booted him up the ass, sending him sprawling through the louvered doors. Someone yelled, and the waiter started blubbing.
Shadrak lifted Rhiannon’s head by the hair. Her face was smeared with puke. The sight of it nearly made him gag. He dumped her head back down with a thud. It was going to take more than a bucket of water to rouse her, that was for sure.
The kitchen doors flew open. “Knife or no knife, I’m not having that kind of carry on in my… Oh, my scutting… I mean, shag the Ipsissimus! Shadrak!”
“Think I’ll leave that to you, Albert.”
Same as ever, the poisoner was dressed in a charcoal jacket and britches with hairline stripes, but he wore a stained white apron over the top. His bald head was covered by a chef’s toque, which he removed and clutched to his breast.
“I…” Albert started, chewing his bottom lip. “I suppose you’re wondering how I came to—”
“Where’s my shogging plane ship?” It didn’t take a genius to make the connection. He should’ve known.
Albert waved his hat around, the same way he used to flap his papa’s hanky when he was nervous. “I can explain about the ship, but just look at this place, this city. Me coming here has done us both an enormous favor.”
“Where is it?”
Albert gave a delicate cough. “Safe. It’s safe. I crash… set it down a little way from the city. Hitched myself a lift here.”
The waiter peered out from behind one of the kitchen doors. “Safe, my ass. Picked him up near some boreworm holes, I did. Stupid sod nearly got himself ate.”
“Eaten,” Albert said. “And you’re exaggerating. Haven’t you got something useful to do, like fetch that bucket of water?”
“But you said—”
Albert slammed the door on him.
“Ah, my fingers! You squashed my fingers!”
Albert rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“Twat,” Shadrak said.
“That, old friend, is Buck Fargin, soon to be guildmaster of the Night Hawks.”
“What’s that, flower arrangers’ guild?”
“Entrepreneurs, Shadrak.”
“Thieves, then.”
“And assassins. This city, Shadrak, is incredible. It makes Sarum look like a village. I’ve already made a contact in the Senate, and plans are afoot to raise our friend here—”
Buck shouldered his way through the doors, sloshing water from a bucket all over the floor. He swore and set the bucket down.
“Mop, cretin. Mop,” Albert said.
“I know, I know!”
“You’re going to use him to front up the guild?” Shadrak said. “Which, naturally, you’ll control behind the scenes.”
“I could use some help.”
Shadrak looked around at the diner. He could see what Albert was up to. He’d seen it all before. “You got a nice place here, Albert. Didn’t exactly waste much time.”
“None at all. The owner was on oaf, more suited to bricklaying than cooking. He fell ill, and so I stepped into his shoes, with the blessing of my senator friend, I might add. Come on, Shadrak, what do you say? You and me, taking over the guilds one by one. You always used to talk about that on Urddynoor.”
Shadrak smiled and shook his head. It was tempting, but what good would it do if the worlds were about to end?
“I can’t, Albert. Not right now. You seen the storm outside?”
“So?”
“It’s the Unweaving, Albert. It’s started. If we don’t find a way to stop Gandaw, there won’t be no guilds for us to run.”
“We? Surely you’re not suggesting—”
“There’s three of us.” Shadrak picked up the bucket. “And her.” With a heave, he upended it over Rhiannon’s head.
“Shog!” Rhiannon shot upright, as if she’d been struck by lightning. “Shog, shog, shog.” She tried to stand, but the stool tipped over, and she fell sprawling to the floor.
Shadrak toed her in the ribs, but she just grunted and rolled onto her side. Within moments, she was snoring as loudly as the dwarf.
“This is gonna be harder than I thought,” Shadrak said.
“What the shog?” Buck said, bashing his way through the doors with a mop. “All I spilt’s a little trickle. What you have to go flood the place for?” He tried to hand Shadrak the mop. “You clean it up.”
“Careful, Buck,” Albert said. “This is Shadrak the Unseen, probably the nastiest bastard I’ve had the pleasure of working with. He must be in a rare good mood. The way you’ve been carrying on, you should be floating down the sewers by now.”
“Still time for that,” Shadrak said.
Buck paled and set about mopping up the water with vigor.
“Don’t worry about her,” Albert said, stepping over Rhiannon on his way back to the kitchen. “I have the perfect remedy for drunkenness. She’ll be right as rain in a couple of hours. Well, not quite right, but she’ll be conscious.”
“Thanks,” Shadrak muttered under his breath. “I can hardly wait. And Albert…”
The poisoner paused in the doorway. “Dearest?”
“I haven’t forgotten about the plane ship.”
PUPPETS THAT BITE
Nameless watched numbly as Aristodeus took three metal rods from the desk and screwed them together. Within minutes, the philosopher had assembled a stand with a hook at the top. From that, he hung a pliant silver bag that bulged at one end when he squeezed it. To the bottom of the bag, he attached a length of clear tubing, and then he selected locking forceps, which he used to clamp the tube.
Next, he ripped open a packet and took out a broad needle.
“You might want to look away,” he said as he approached Nameless with it. “Actually, you might want to remove your chainmail first.”
When Nameless didn’t move, Aristodeus said, “What is it?” A flash of impatience passed across his eyes, swiftly masked with a good impression of genuine concern. “Let me guess: grief? You didn’t have time to grieve your pa, let alone Lucius, before I put you to sleep. Is that it? Or is it guilt? Guilt at the slaughter? Let me put that particular misapprehension to rest. It was not your fault. You understand me? We are all deception’s prey, only some of us are sheep and others more like wolves, who can give as good as they get.”
“I dreamed,” Nameless said in a low monotone. “On the way here, I slept beneath a tree, and I dreamed.”
“Of what?”
Nameless thought back to the cavern of coal. The stench of sulfur clung to his nostrils, as if he’d really been there.
“A gigantic figure. A man of shadows, encased in ice.”
Aristodeus took a step back.
“That’s what you saw, in your dream?”
“Violet eyes,” Nameless said, “and laughter. Mocking laughter. Derisive.”
“Pay it no heed,” Aristodeus said. He was worrying his lip, and his eyes were focused inward.”
“Easy for you to say. You didn’t see it.”
Aristodeus stooped before him, gazed in at the eye-slit. “But that’s where you’re wrong. I have seen it. I see it every day, feel its insidious whisperings in here.” He tapped his head. “But I am a wolf, not a sheep. I choose to fight back.”
“How?” Nameless asked. “How do you fight such a thing?”
“With cunning,” Aristodeus said. “With guile. By using his own tools against him.”
Nameless couldn’t shake off the feeling it was futile. Futile to take a stand against an inexorable fate. But that was his black dog mood talking. He knew he’d see things differently, if ever it relinquished its hold. “So, it was the Demiurgos in my dream?”
“He is just a being, like the rest of us,” Aristodeus said. “Powerful beyond measure, but a being nonetheless. A creature from the Supernal Realm, just like his brother, the Archon, and his sister, Eingana. The Supernal Triad, they are called in Shader’s insipid scriptures, but that’s as good a title as any. The three who fell through the Void.
“Why they fell is anybody’s guess. A conflict, from what I can gather from the Archon: the Demiurgos’s challenge to the Supernal Father. But when they arrived in our cosmos, what an opportunity for them to impersonate that ineffable god that sired them. Eingana seeded the worlds with creatures of myth and magic, while the Archon set about imposing Supernal laws and morality. The Demiurgos, though, had a one-track mind back then. He pursued and raped his sister. The Archon drove him off using the very sword Shader now wields. Drove him back to the Void, where nothing can exist. But he did not know his brother as he should have. The will of the Demiurgos is without peer. He threw up his own realm about him, preserved his essence on the cusp of the Void. He created the Abyss. That’s what you saw: the Demiurgos frozen within his own creation, powerless to act save by an extension of his mind, and by the generation of offspring to do his bidding.”
“The homunculi?” Nameless asked.
“Among other things. Demons and their ilk.”
“But why me?” Nameless said. “Not just the dream, but the black axe. He intended it for me, I feel that now.”
“Because you are special, Nameless Dwarf. Just how special is for you to find out. I have an inkling, but I have been wrong about things before.”
“Aye, laddie,” Nameless said. “Aye, you have.”
Aristodeus turned away. “I saw the ploy, but too late. Too late to prevent Lucius from going into Gehenna.”
“And yet you still aided me in following him.”
Aristodeus whirled round. For an instant, his eyes seemed to plead for understanding, for forgiveness, but they swiftly hardened over with icy blue.
“What would you have had me do? Abandon him? He was my friend, you know. Not just my pupil. And he was your brother. Would you seriously have left him to his fate?”
Nameless’s legs buckled, and he stumbled. Strength was no longer bleeding from him; it was pouring away in torrents.
“But it made no difference. They killed him, Aristodeus. They fed him to the seethers.”
Aristodeus steepled his fingers beneath his nose. He sighed, and for a moment closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was the telltale glisten of moisture.
“I know. I once thought nothing was written in stone. Now, I am not so sure.”
He looked away, suddenly depleted of his usual arrogance. He cut a forlorn figure, a figure on the cusp of despair.
“But if that is the truth of things,” Aristodeus said, “it is a truth I will oppose till my dying breath. I cannot accept a world without the will to act freely. We must fight—me, you, Shader—and keep on fighting, until we have exhausted every option. If we are but puppets, then we can at least be puppets that bite.”
“But fight for what?” Nameless said.
Aristodeus opened his mouth to answer, but then set his jaw.
“Fight for what?” Nameless repeated.
“Do you believe in evil? Do you believe in right and wrong?”
Nameless gave a slow nod of the great helm.
“Well, I never did. Not until I met Sektis Gandaw. Oh, it was on Urddynoor an aeon ago, when his Global Technocracy had hegemony over the entire world. I was sent to meet with him, reason him on to a less rigid path. I failed. For all my skill with logic, my reputation for never losing an argument, he just sat there and observed me like a specimen in a petri dish. You have petri dishes here?”
Nameless shrugged.
“No, of course you don’t. I was a specimen to him, something to be vivisected. You see, Sektis Gandaw didn’t believe in evil, either. But during that meeting, to my mind, he came to embody it. Don’t you see? Gandaw is as deceived as Lucius, as you were when under the sway of the black axe. He’s just another tool of the Demiurgos.
“The things that man did in the name of his so-called science, to animals, to people, to children… I am not squeamish by nature, but somewhere, in some hidden strata of my being, I knew that everything about Gandaw was plain wrong. I suspect it’s what they used to call Natural Law. Shader and his beloved Templum still do. It was encoded in my genes—forgive me, the fabric of my being—: the sense that made me recoil in horror. And then he let slip his dirty little secret: his plan to harness the energy of a Supernal being, so he could unweave all of Creation. I thought him mad at first, but then he showed me the schematics, and a millennia’s worth of algorithms he’d meticulously worked out from the almost limitless amounts of information he’d collated. Data on everything, extrapolated from what he called the Pandora event, the unified first cause from which all existence came.”
“And now you want us to do your dirty work for you,” Nameless said. “You prepared Shader to stop him from bringing about the Unweaving. You think that’s not evil? Taking a child and honing him into a weapon?”
“It’s more than that,” Aristodeus said. “You couldn’t possibly understand.”
“On account of my being a miner’s son, is that what you mean? Lucius was Droom’s boy, too. He’d have understood.”
“Maybe,” Aristodeus said. “Maybe not. I never told him the whole story. And I don’t intend sharing it now. Suffice it to say, Gandaw commenced the Unweaving once before. Your ancestor, Maldark the Fallen, aided him at first, swallowed his lies; but then together, Maldark and I, along with the children of Eingana, hybrid creatures, part man, part beast, confronted him within the Perfect Peak. Confronted him and lost.”
“Lost?” Nameless said. “But Maldark retrieved the Statue of Eingana and hid it from Gandaw.”
Aristodeus nodded. “True. Maldark averted the Unweaving. But there was collateral damage. To me. Damage that to this day is still being worked out.”
“What kind of—”
Aristodeus silenced him with a raised hand. “Chainmail. If you’re going to emulate Maldark and help put a stop to the end of all things, you’re going to need to be fed.”
With heavy hands, Nameless tugged the hauberk over his head and removed his gambeson.
Aristodeus pulled out a chair from Arecagen’s desk and bade him sit.
“Now, this is going to hurt.”
The philosopher pressed the needle to Nameless’s belly and pushed. Nameless winced and bit his lip, but he refused to let a sound escape his lips. The needle went in deep.
“All the way into the stomach,” Aristodeus said. “Now, just need to attach the tube to the cannula, and we’re away.”
Blood seeped around the needle, but Aristodeus just ripped open another packet and stuck a patch of something glossy and sticky over the site. Then, with the tube from the bag connected to the needle embedded in Nameless’s stomach, Aristodeus released the clamp, and whatever was in the bag began to flow.
“It’ll take awhile,” the philosopher said. “But look at it this way: you’ll not need another feed for a few days. And if we are successful, if Gandaw is stopped, I’ll put together a denser, slow-release formula that should see you fine for a mo
nth or so between feedings. Call it a miracle of the Ancients from Urddynoor, if you like. You might even want to thank Sektis Gandaw for his part in its development.”
“And the helm?” Nameless asked. “Because, shog help me, I’ll not spend the rest of my days without feeling the wind on my face, or a lassie’s bristles pressed up against mine. And the beer: no amount of gunk in a tube can make up for Ballbreakers’ Black Ale.” He would have said Cordy’s Arnochian brew, but the memory was too painful. A missed opportunity. A friend lost. And not just her, but Thumil, and everyone else he’d known in Arx Gravis.
“You must have patience,” Aristodeus said. “I am following up on leads that may yet see you out of that helm, and the black axe destroyed.”
“Does it involve your dissident homunculi?”
He saw them now, in his mind’s eye: the two deep gnomes carrying off the black axe encased in crystal. One of them had turned to him and said, “See you again, Nameless Dwarf.”
“The Sedition? Yes.”
“How did that work out for you last time?”
“These are complex issues. So many variables. So many interconnected patterns. By the time my contacts in the Sedition confirmed my suspicions about the inserted passages in the Annals that spoke of the Axe of the Dwarf Lords, Lucius had already gone off to look for it. Last thing I’d have expected of dwarves was a loose cannon. Always so staid and predictable. But apparently not you and your brother.”
“So, it’s our fault, is that what you’re saying? That if Lucius had been an obedient pup, and if I’d kept a closer eye on him at Cordy and Thumil’s wedding, so he couldn’t slip away unnoticed, you could have averted the massacre, and struck a blow against the Demiurgos?”
Aristodeus crossed to the window and peered outside. Nameless had the impression he wasn’t really looking; he was masking his need to think; he was pondering the truth of what he’d just heard.
Finally, the philosopher turned back to the room. “It would be folly to think so. Like I said, some things, despite what I formerly believed, seem indelibly written in the book of time. And yet, I have to believe outcomes can be altered, choices can be made, otherwise, what is the point? Are we all simply to lie back and let preordained events wash over us? Are we to be passive observers of our own drama?”