Geas of the Black Axe (Legends of the Nameless Dwarf Book 2)

by D. P. Prior

  “I never would have…” Rugbeard said. “So, it was true, about the axe?”

  “Oh, it was true, laddie. Lucius discovered it’s whereabouts, but the Krypteia killed him. Fed him to the seethers.”

  Rugbeard would have known the legends about those writhing monsters. The way he put a hand over his mouth and stared into his beer showed that he did.

  “But it wasn’t the Pax Nanorum, Rugbeard.” Nameless’s voice broke, and he started to shake with sobs. “It wasn’t the Axe of the Dwarf Lords.”

  The sound of thumping footsteps passing the windows drew everyone’s attention. There was a collective intake of breath, but when the footfalls faded away, the tension left the room.

  The door burst open, and Buck Fargin came in, dripping puddles on the floor.

  “It’s all right; wasn’t looking for you. They was on fire duty,” he said.

  “Last place they’d look is a shithole like this,” Shadrak said.

  “Do you mind?” Albert said. “If you’d seen what it was like under Chef Dougan, you’d be singing my praises.”

  Buck took in everyone in the diner, puffed out his chest, and bobbed his head from side to side.

  “Whatever,” Aristodeus said before turning to Shader. “Right now, what you need—and I never thought I’d hear myself saying this—is confession.”

  “Buck,” Albert said, “aren’t you still keeping watch?”

  “Nah, reckon you’re safe for the time be—”

  Shadrak cocked a finger at him, and Buck rolled his eyes and went back out into the rain, slamming the door behind him.

  “Can’t,” Rhiannon said. “There’s no priest.”

  “Poppycock,” Aristodeus said. “A good outpouring of the heart to your beloved Nous is all it takes. Trust me, the rest is all smoke and mirrors.”

  “Rhiannon’s right,” Shader said. “There needs to be a priest.”

  “Well, what do you expect me to do?” Aristodeus said. “Rustle one up out of thin air?”

  Another boom rocked the diner, this one much closer. Somewhere in the distance, glass shattered, and a gusting howl ripped through the street.

  “That the Unweaving?” Shadrak said.

  “Side effects,” Aristodeus said, “but when it really gets underway, expect to see distortions, and then pockets of nothingness. If I’m right—and I only have Gandaw’s early theories to go on—emptiness will coalesce above the Perfect Peak until it goes critical. Once it does, everything that exists will be snuffed out faster than you can blink.”

  “What I don’t get,” Shadrak said, “is why the scutting Archon don’t just sort Gandaw out. I mean, surely he can handle his sister. Way I heard it, the Demiurgos handled her good and proper.”

  Aristodeus gritted his teeth. “The Archon is a law unto himself. I cannot answer for—”

  “If Gandaw captured Eingana,” Rhiannon said into her drink, “couldn’t he do the same to her brother?” She looked round as if it were obvious. “Couldn’t Gandaw do the same to the Archon as he did to her?”

  Aristodeus’s focus turned inward. He hadn’t even considered that, Nameless realized.

  “Perhaps,” Aristodeus said after a moment. “But I’m certain there’s more to it than that. But as to the Archon taking any sort of direct action, we can forget it.”

  “Then sword or no sword, it’s down to us to do something,” Shader said. “Judging by the state of things out there, I doubt we have enough time to trek back to the mountain. Can you get us there?”

  “You must confess first!”

  “Can you, or can’t you?”

  “My freedom is not as total as it might look,” Aristodeus said.

  “You manage to get around right enough when it suits you,” Rhiannon said. “It’ll be a damned sight quicker if you do that magic trick you did with me.”

  “The Perfect Peak is made of scarolite, understand?” Aristodeus said. “It shields Gandaw from such ‘magic’, as you call it.” He sighed and turned to Shader. “If you won’t do as I ask, then you have failed, Deacon. Failed. You leave me no choice. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Come!” He held out a hand to Rhiannon.

  She looked up blearily from the bar. “You’re joking.”

  “And bring that with you.” Aristodeus pointed at her black sword, which was propped up in the corner.

  “But—” Rhiannon started.

  Aristodeus turned back to Shader. “Do what you can, but it’s wasted effort without the Sword of the Archon. Just remember, on your head be it.”

  Rhiannon sauntered over with the black sword clutched in both hands. Aristodeus grabbed her in a rough embrace, green light swirled, and they vanished.

  “What, now he’s gonna use her to save the world?” Shadrak said. “You gotta be having a laugh.”

  Albert gave a dry chuckle, but then he picked up the stacked plates and headed to the kitchen. Nameless heard him mutter as he passed, “So, our bald friend likes olives, does he?”

  “I can get you there,” Rugbeard said.

  All eyes turned to him.

  “I can get you to the mountain, and I can get you there real quick.”

  “How, Rugbeard?” Nameless said. “We’ve already tried Arx Gravis.”

  “And there’s no way in above ground,” Shadrak added.

  “Old miner’s secret.” Rugbeard tapped the side of his nose and winked at Nameless. “Kept since afore you was a twinkle in your daddy’s eye.”

  THE ANT-HILL

  They left the city in a covered wagon. Nameless sat up front with Rugbeard, who insisted on driving, despite being too drunk to walk in a straight line.

  Shader rode in the back with Shadrak and Albert. He’d suggested they hid in empty crates, in case they were stopped at the gates. After the jail break-out, there were patrols on every street, it seemed. Rugbeard said there would be no need. It was a guild wagon on loan to Buck Fargin, and the guards didn’t question guild business. After all, it was the guilds that supplemented their wages and gave them gifts for their families on all the major feast days.

  Once they left the shelter of the Cyclopean Walls, unnatural winds buffeted the wagon, and the air about them shrieked, as if it were a beast being torn apart. Lightning flashed, and every now and again, the horse pulling them would balk and whinny.

  Rugbeard was a mass of gray hair and beard tousled by the wind. He held the reins in one hand, a bottle in the other. The journey seemed to revive him, though, and he had a lot of talking to get out of his system. Nameless was the first dwarf Rugbeard had seen for more than a year, and it sounded like he needed to explain himself, justify leaving the ravine.

  “I got out as soon as the blood started flowing,” Rugbeard said. “It was like the end of the world had come, and I just had to flee. I tell you, I’d have thought twice if all the Red Cloaks and Krypteia were at their posts. But when you started butchering… I mean, when the butchery started, they had their hands full, and I slipped away. I ain’t proud of it, but at the same time, what could I have done? I know what I am, same as everyone else knows: a drunken sot.

  “I headed to the mines, took the train to the headframe, and then I made use of a little secret I’ve kept to myself all these years: there’s a ghost wall in the upper cavern. It leads to a fissure that takes you all the way to the hills on the surface.”

  Up ahead, a whirling vortex of black—Nameless could only call it light—crossed the road and went spinning through a field, carving its own path and leaving bizarre patterns in the crops. A shadow passed across the face of one of the suns, and its twin started to strobe, making their progress appear stilted, staccato.

  “What happened, son?” Rugbeard asked. “What exactly happened?”

  A cold fist closed around Nameless’s heart. He tried to reach inside, wring the truth from the maelstrom of memories that never seemed to settle long enough for him to make sense out of.

  “I’ve been piecing it together up here.” He tapped the helm. �
��But I can’t tell dreams from reality. I have no sense of having done what they say I did, even though I’m convinced it is the truth.”

  Rugbeard cocked him a look. It was hard to tell if he was disbelieving, or simply curious.

  “I see blood,” Nameless said. “Lots of blood. And I remember there being demons in the ravine. Though now I’m sure there weren’t.”

  “Demons, eh?” Rugbeard grimaced, started to shake his head, but turned it into a nod, encouraging Nameless to go on.

  “There was an axe rising and falling, over and over. It was golden. The blades shone like the suns.”

  “Did they now? But you say it wasn’t the Pax Nanorum, the Axe of the Dwarf Lords?”

  “I see another axe, one made of shadows.”

  “That’s what they were saying,” Rugbeard said, “the Red Cloaks clearing the walkways of people. A butcher with a black axe, cutting down our boys like they were so much chaff.”

  “I think they were one and the same,” Nameless said. “The golden axe was really the black one. It distorted everything I saw, heard, and felt. It only stopped when I came close to this helm.”

  “Yyalla’s helm,” Rugbeard said. “Your ma’s. A great woman.”

  “You knew her?”

  Rugbeard nodded, then took a swig from his bottle. “Aye, I knew her. Knew she died giving birth to you.”

  Recollection came like a pickaxe breaking through granite and revealing the ore-seam within.

  Of course! That was why Nameless couldn’t swim. With no mother to teach him, and his pa too busy in the mines, some skills were bound to get left behind. And the painting, the portrait of Yyalla in oil Droom had commissioned from Durgish Duffin: every year it formed the focal point for the reading of the family’s roll of names, all the way back to the Founders. It was the torturous ritual Droom insisted upon to mark his wife’s passing, and the birth of his second son.

  Yyalla.

  Yyalla was his ma’s name, but try as he might, he couldn’t remember the House she was descended from, which Droom would have become a member of, along with his boys. He thought about asking Rugbeard, but what would be the point? It was gone. The name-stripping had been complete, and it shamed his family almost as much as it did him. Even Droom’s family name from before he was married would have vanished from time. If the scroll of genealogy still existed, it would list only given names followed by blank spaces, and in Nameless’s case, there would be nothing at all.

  “It was your ma that saved Arx Gravis when the goblins came,” Rugbeard said. “She was marshal of the Ravine Guard then, and I still say she was the best of them. But that was her helm, right enough. Scarolite. No shogger knows how to work the ore nowadays, but at one time or another, we possessed the lore. Handed down to her, she claimed, a family heirloom from back beyond the time of the Founders.”

  “Yyalla… my mother,” Nameless said. So, the blankness concerning her was quite natural. He’d never known her. “And Droom was my pa; Lucius my brother.”

  “That’s it, son. It’ll come back in time. It’s the same for me. The grog’s rotted my brain so, I can’t always place a name to a face, but I get by. You greet folk a certain way, nod a lot and that sort of thing, they come away thinking you know who they are.”

  “But you knew my family. You know me.”

  “Me and Droom went back a long way. And your brother Lucius, we didn’t see eye to eye on the Annals, but he was a good lad. You were, too.”

  Rugbeard stared at the great helm for a long while, as if he expected Nameless’s name to appear there, emblazoned across the crown.

  Nameless looked off into the far distance, where a greenish brume roiled above some hills. And the hills themselves were stretching, contorting, as if they were putty in invisible hands.

  Rugbeard took a long pull on his drink and tossed the bottle over the side. “Reach under the bench, son. Grab me another.”

  Nameless pulled a bottle from a crate and unstoppered it before he passed it to Rugbeard.

  “The Annals spoke of a punishment so terrible, most dwarves would take death over it any day. It’s thought to be a morality tale, but with what’s happened in your case, you have to wonder. Name-stripping, they called it. Don’t ask me how they did it—some fusion of homunculus lore and scarolite is what I can gather—but the Founders were said to deal with the worst criminals in that way, the kin-killers and crazies who would have been put to death, had the population not dwindled so far. Names were removed, taken from history, like they’d never been. You know how important our rolls of names are, our heritage, our family traditions. Your name’s not on that roll, you ain’t got no place in society. You have no House or family name, you’re like the baresarks in the underbelly of Arx Gravis: one step removed from the beasts. You become an outsider, a nobody, a nameless dwarf.”

  Nameless could feel the breath of the black dog on the back of his neck. He imagined its teeth breaking the skin, its tongue lapping at his blood. He was cold, so cold. Numbness spread through his limbs, as if he were slowly petrifying.

  “But whatever they’ve done to you, son, don’t forget this: you are Droom’s boy. Yyalla’s son. Lucius’s brother. And if you forget, I won’t. Not all the booze in Arx Gravis could erase that from this pickled old brain. Some folks are special. Too special to be forgotten. And I tell you, I won’t ever stop thinking about what you did in the mines, when we lost Ming and Muckman to that golem, and when, in spite of the Ravine Guard and the Krypteia being torn apart, you managed to—”

  Shader pushed through the canvas covering the wagon bed.

  Rugbeard grew silent, but his eyes kept flicking to Nameless, as if he couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of the suffering being unnamed caused him.

  “What’s this plan of yours?” Shader asked. “You said it was a miner’s secret.”

  The wagon lurched as a tremor ran through the road.

  “Got to know the mines better than most after I gave up teaching.” Rugbeard looked over his shoulder at Shader, watery eyes checking to see he was being heard. “Had my uses once, you know.”

  “You were a teacher?”

  “Taught the Annals, till no one but scholars cared a shog about the past. The Council didn’t exactly encourage history. It was too dark in places, and there was things in them records most folk simply didn’t want to know.”

  Nameless turned to watch him then.

  “Aye, you know what I’m talking about, son. See,” Rugbeard said to Shader, “there was life on Aethir long afore the Technocrat came. Oh, it was all dreamed, they say; dreamed by the Cynocephalus, the dog-headed ape at the heart of the world; but they was powerful dreams, and they shaped all this.” He made an expansive gesture. “There was creatures, too, and races, just like us; just like you. But when Sektis Gandaw came and started his experiments, the races were either wiped out or altered.

  “It’s said even the Cynocephalus was scared of Gandaw and what he was planning, and he was terrified enough already. With a father like his, you can hardly blame him. The Cynocephalus’s screams caused the earth to groan, and the Farfall Mountains was thrown up, a dividing line right down the middle of our world. Them races that Gandaw hadn’t already warped or killed fled over the mountains into Qlippoth.”

  Rugbeard took a swig then held the bottle over his shoulder to Shader.

  Shader waved it away.

  Rugbeard shrugged, then poured the contents down his throat. He growled, shuddered, and slung the bottle from the wagon. After he’d wiped his mouth on his sleeve, he took the reins in both hands again and cocked his head toward Nameless.

  “You believe in the Lords of Arnoch, son?”

  A body of water glimmered some way off to the left, and a low range of mountains could just be made out to the right. Nameless thought he recognized the route they’d taken on the way to New Londdyr.

  “Are we heading toward Arx Gravis?”

  “Them’s the Cooling Crags, son.” Rugbeard nodded toward the mo
untain range. “Arx Gravis lies straight ahead, but we’ll be stopping a long ways afore that. Once we’re by the Great Lake of Orph,”—he looked over toward the ever-nearing water, which was reflecting the turmoil of the skies and sending up a shimmering haze—“we’ll pull up shy of the hills above the mines.”

  “But we’ve been denied access to the mines,” Shader said.

  “By the Council,” Nameless added.

  Rugbeard chuckled. “What those old codgers don’t know can’t hurt them. You see, there’s more than one way into the tunnels that lead beneath Gandaw’s mountain.”

  Nameless swiveled on the bench to face him. “The fissure you came out of?”

  “Nope,” Rugbeard said. “That ain’t what I mean. You remember what Gandaw created to make sure no one else got their hands on the scarolite till he was done with it?”

  “Giant ants? That was just a legend,” Nameless said.

  “Was it?” Rugbeard said. “Just you hold on and we’ll see if you’re right about that. But you never answered my question. You believe in the Lords of Arnoch?”

  Nameless sighed. “Another legend. False history. False hope.”

  “Yes, yes,” Rugbeard said. “An alternative to the truth that Gandaw made us; made us from Urddynoor humans and something else.”

  “Is that true?” Shader asked. “Gandaw altered humans to make the dwarves?”

  “It’s what some folk believe,” Rugbeard said.

  Nameless looked out at the boiling waters of the lake as they finally passed along its shore. It wasn’t just a haze he’d seen earlier; it was steam. Heat stung the exposed skin of his arms and made him sweat within the helm.

  “That normal?” he asked.

  Rugbeard sucked in his lips and made a popping sound. “Nope. Can’t say that it is. Grab us another beer, son. All that steam’s drying my throat out.”

  When Nameless handed him the bottle, Rugbeard took a long swig. Then, with a raised eyebrow, he said, “They say the Lords of Arnoch once killed a dragon.”