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

by D. P. Prior

  “Shadrak and Albert.”

  Aristodeus sighed and rolled his eyes. “You think I don’t have enough to do already? They’ll be fine in New Londdyr, and if not, Shadrak will just have to go find his plane ship.”

  “Yes, well let’s hope he drowns in the Sour Marsh looking for it,” Rhiannon said.

  “Lassie,” Nameless said. “I’m starting to consider him a friend, in an odd sort of way.”

  Shader nodded. “If it hadn’t been for Shadrak getting us into the Perfect Peak, you’d not be standing here, Rhiannon. Neither would the rest of us.”

  Nameless offered his hand, and Shader took it. “Glad we see eye to eye on that, laddie. Credit where credit’s due, eh? And don’t forget what you did, either. Makes this old dwarf proud to have been there with you.”

  Shader’s instant reaction was to withdraw, as if he still believed he had failed in some way, but Nameless tightened his grip and drew him into a hug.

  “You did well, laddie, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they’ll have my axe to… Shog, the blasted thing broke.” He turned the eye-slit of his great helm up to where the black axe lay encased in crystal. “Don’t suppose…”

  “No!” Aristodeus said, rushing over and ushering him toward the door.

  “Just joshing,” Nameless said, tapping the side of his helm. “The ol’ bucket’s still working.”

  Be that as it may, he still felt the pull of the axe, though it was diminished. It would have taken far more willpower to resist a pint of Cordy’s Arnochian Ale, or a flagon of Ballbreaker’s. In the scheme of things, his desire for the black axe was about as strong as his yearnings for Ironbelly’s.

  The door slid open, and Nameless stood there for a moment. “You have a lead, though? So we can destroy the axe and get this thing off my head. I thought you said—”

  “Yes,” Aristodeus said, “but you’ll have to be patient. There are a million and one other things to do, but I’m already working on it.”

  “Till we meet for dinner, then,” Nameless said.

  He waved at Rhiannon and gave Shader a nod of respect as he stepped outside, and then the scarolite door slid shut behind him.

  ***

  Seeing the lizard-men attacking Gandaw’s mountain had given Nameless an idea. Cooped up in the ravine all his life, he’d never seen much more than chasm dogs and goats, the flocks of birds that made their home on the Sward where he’d lived. But here, in the upper-lands of Malkuth, beneath the glare of Aethir’s twin suns, there were a myriad things to see, and first off, he was going to start with this Sour Marsh he’d heard so much about.

  The thing was, he thought, as he stepped away from the shadow cast by the Perfect Peak and out onto the bleached sand of the Dead Lands, he’d always had a begrudging interest in his brother Lucius’s research into the blurring of myth and reality. Lucius had buried his head in the Annals, trying to work out which bits were historical fact, and which were folklore. Nameless, though, had another way of dealing with the same question. He intended to travel from place to place and put it to the test.

  When he reached the mangroves skirting the swamp at the edge of the Dead Lands, he cast a look back at Sektis Gandaw’s scarolite mountain. They had indeed done well, Shader more so than the rest of them. But for Nameless, it wasn’t enough. It could never be enough to atone for what he’d done back at the ravine.

  He felt the black dog mood crawling out from its kennel at the back of his mind. For a moment, he was tempted to greet it as an old friend, simply sit down and let it numb his brain, petrify his limbs. A dwarf with no name, after all, was a dwarf most shamed. What was there left for him to live for?

  But then a rustle of the mangroves snapped him out of it. A thrill of excitement ran through his nerves. Had there been something watching him from the edge of the Sour Marsh? Could it have been a lizard-man, or something even more exotic?

  He entered the mugginess of the swamp and found himself some deadfall weighty enough to serve as a club.

  His boots squelched on the boggy ground as he edged deeper into the mire. His heart was a bracing tattoo that grew louder and faster with every step. He knew it was here somewhere, whatever it was that had been spying on him.

  A sucking, gurgling noise came from behind. He spun round, and staggered back in horror.

  A mound of mud and vegetation surged up from the marsh floor to stand towering and dripping over him. I was shaped like a man, woven from swamp grass, mud, and twining creepers. Its head was an amalgam of fungi fused together. It glared down at him with emerald eyes, then took one shambling step, and another. Slime dripped from its gaping maw, and it let out a gurgling roar.

  “Yes!” Nameless cried. “Shogging yes!”

  And with the fire of battle coursing through his veins, he lifted his improvised club and charged.

  PART TWO

  THE THREE TASKS

  “What fates impose, that men must needs abide;

  It boots not to resist both wind and tide.”

  (William Shakespeare, Henry VI, part 3)

  NIGHT OF THE GUILDS

  New Londdyr was burning.

  At least the docks were.

  Black smoke mushroomed up into the night sky, smothering the stars and choking up the air with acrid fumes. People were screaming in the distance, and someone was shouting out for the militia.

  Sad bastard. They weren’t coming; not tonight. Not in the middle of a guild war.

  Everyone had seen it coming for more than a year; ever since the name Shadrak the Unseen started to be whispered in relation to the mounting death-toll among the underworld’s leaders.

  The Senate were the first to admit these things needed to happen from time to time. Best policy was to sit it out and wait for the status quo to resume once the power struggle was over. It would either be the Night Hawks or the Dybbuks, this time round, and it didn’t matter which to them.

  Ilesa Fana breathed in ash carried on the wind, and coughed into her gloved hand. She glanced both ways to make sure she’d not been heard above the clangor of steel on steel, the cries of rage and pain. Then she slipped into the shadows of the buildings lining the water’s edge.

  The other Dybbuks up ahead had found what they were looking for: a two-story warehouse with the kind of doors you normally only saw on senatorial strongholds. They were steel-plated, riveted round the edges. It was something you didn’t get outside Malkuth’s principal city—that kind of workmanship left over by the first settlers from Urddynoor—but Ilesa had seen her fair share these past few years. Enough to know they’d lost this last desperate gamble.

  “No way,” she said, abandoning stealth and striding to the doors, where Master Plaguewind and the fat man were engaged in a hushed conversation. “No way we’re getting in there.”

  She wiped her sweaty palms on the seat of her britches, brought one hand to rest on the hilt of the sword at her hip, the other on the pommel of her dagger.

  The men—the ten they’d brought with them—were jittery, and one or two looked ready to run, or maybe make a move of their own. It had been a long time coming, this ‘Night of the Guilds’, and everything was up for grabs.

  Master Plaguewind turned toward her. He was like a particularly dense shadow in his ankle-length coat. There was fire in the glass eyes of his mask, reflected from the burning buildings on the fringes of the docks. The beak-like nose jutted at her like a dagger. If he had a mouth, it would no doubt be curled in a sneer, but none of his features were visible beneath the molding. There wasn’t even a mouth-slit. It was the tilt of the head to one side that told her what he was thinking before he gave it muffled voice.

  “You think we’d be here if we couldn’t open them?”

  The fat man took a crystal disk from his jacket pocket and inserted it into a slot at the edge of one of the doors. He glanced at Plaguewind, whipped out a handkerchief, and mopped the sweat from his glistening head.

  “That’s it?” Ilesa said. “Now what?”

&
nbsp; “Now we enter,” the fat man said. There was the hint of an accent, but mostly he sounded posh, like a lord or a senator. His clothes were posh, too: a charcoal gray suit with hairline stripes, shiny black shoes, and a necktie shaped like a butterfly. She hadn’t liked the look of him since he’d set foot in their hideout the day before yesterday, apparently at Master Plaguewind’s invitation.

  A low drone started up, and the doors slowly slid apart. The fat man collected his disk and slipped in first, like he owned the place.

  Plaguewind’s head tilt this time reeked of smugness. He leaned on his staff and waved Ilesa in next.

  She paused in the doorway, looked up into Plaguewind’s glassy eyes while angling a glance at the fat man’s back. “You trust him?”

  “Much as I trust anyone.”

  “He’s a shogging defector.”

  Plaguewind threw his arm about her shoulder, and nodded for the men to go in.

  “We’re all defectors, Ilesa. One way or another.”

  That cut her to the bone. She knew what he was referring to, and it was a cheap shot. She never should have told him about her life in Portis, about what had happened, about how she’d abandoned her brother Davy.

  In an instant, she relived the wolf-man’s slavering jaws, felt the change come over her, till she looked just the same. She could still taste the blood as she ripped out its throat, still smell its musty hide. She’d protected Davy that time, but those weren’t the only wolves. Second time round, she was too late. Sure, she’d made their bastard father pay for what he’d done to Davy, but the boy was ruined, and Ilesa couldn’t handle that. Still couldn’t, truth be told. That’s why she’d left him there alone.

  “You think you know me,” she said with venom. “But you don’t.”

  “What?” Plaguewind said. “What do you… Oh, Ilesa, it isn’t always about you. I meant in general, for the kind of work we do, the things we have to do to survive: jumping from ship to ship; going where the strength is.”

  “You even know who he is?” It was an effort to stay on track, because she was still seething. Trouble was, once the Davy button was pressed, it didn’t matter if she’d misread what Plaguewind was saying; it’d take an age for the fire in her veins to burn off.

  Plaguewind seemed to understand that. In the time they’d known each other, he’d become a master of deflection.

  “Remember how Shadrak the Unseen took out the Pinchers?”

  Ilesa snapped her head back toward the open doorway. She could just about make out the fat man’s bald head amid the men going in.

  “No! That’s him? Albert the poisoner?”

  “Best there is,” Plaguewind said. “And now he’s working for us.”

  “You sure about that? I mean, why—?”

  Plaguewind stopped her by raising his hand. She’d grown so accustomed to taking his orders, she bit her tongue without even thinking about it.

  “Ilesa, you are my second, and I trust you.”

  That was unexpected. Praise from the master. Suddenly, Plaguewind went down a notch in her estimation. Didn’t help her confidence in the faith he placed in Albert. All it told her was he was a poor judge of character. Trust you! For shog’s sake, she was hard-pressed to trust herself.

  “Not absolutely, mind,” Plaguewind said.

  Least he wasn’t a total shogwit, then.

  “So, I’m your second, but you don’t trust me enough to explain why our arch-rival’s top man is probably right now leading us down the garden path. Is that it?”

  “I do have secrets, Ilesa,” Plaguewind said. “Even from you.”

  He wasn’t kidding. After all the hours he’d spent training her to hone her… ability, all the jobs they’d done together, all the times he’d watched her back and she’d saved his skin, she still didn’t know the first thing about him. Save for his body-language. There was no one better at reading each subtle inclination of his head, each minute hand signal, each shrug of his shoulders. But that was the extent of her knowledge. She still had no idea who or what he was beneath that mask. Some said he was horribly disfigured after a spell had misfired. Others that he was marred by the Demiurgos in return for the gift of magic. She’d even once heard he was a Stygian from the nightmare realm of Qlippoth, somehow crossed over the Farfalls undetected by the Maresmen patrolling the border.

  “Trust me,” Plaguewind said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  He turned to enter the building, when an ear-shattering boom rolled across the water. Hot air blasted Ilesa against the warehouse wall, and her knees buckled. She felt Plaguewind’s hand on her arm, keeping her up.

  “Inside,” he said. His voice was mushy in her ears. She could barely hear him, yet he looked to be shouting. “They’re rallying!”

  Ilesa blinked her eyes into focus on the river. A barge was on fire, and there was fierce fighting on the far bank. Dozens of men were in the water, wading across, flaming torches held high, daggers glinting between their teeth.

  Plaguewind dragged her inside the warehouse, left her reeling on her feet. Her ears were ringing, and her nose and throat were thick with sulfur.

  “Shogging black powder!” Plaguewind said, singling out Albert. “You forgot to mention that, fat-boy.”

  “Black…?” Albert said, fanning himself with his handkerchief. “I had no idea. Honestly.”

  Plaguewind’s chin dropped to his chest. He was pissed off, but giving Albert the benefit of the doubt.

  “Seal the door.”

  “Good idea,” Albert said, fishing out his disk and scuttling over.

  “I know,” Plaguewind said.

  “They’ll smoke us out,” Ilesa said. “Burn this place.”

  “No,” Plaguewind said, strolling to one of the crates stacked in rows all across the floor. “They won’t.”

  He slid the lid off and beckoned for Ilesa to look. It was crammed full with dried black and brown leaves, and gave off a pungent aroma, tinged with sweetness.

  “Somnificus?” she said. “In all of them?” There must have been more than a hundred crates. If they all contained somnificus, why, that would mean—

  “Millions of denarii,” Albert said, ambling back from the door. “If you know how to eke out sales and control the flow.”

  Plaguewind nodded, his beak-nose slicing the air, making him look like a demented bird. “He who controls the somnificus…”

  “Controls the guilds,” Ilesa finished for him. It was a cliche often spoken of, but no one really believed there was a stash like this. She looked from Plaguewind to Albert. “How…?”

  “The Night Hawks have been shipping it in from Portis for donkey’s years,” Albert said. “My job was overseeing the overseers, make sure none went missing. Shadrak’s idea. He’s what you might call a control freak.”

  Portis. Ilesa couldn’t think of it as home anymore. Too many bad memories. Too much left behind. Let those old wounds open up, and she’d likely bleed to death.

  “But he’d know,” Ilesa said to Plaguewind. “Shadrak. If fat boy’s got access to this warehouse, and now he’s gone over to the other side, then…”

  She trailed off when she recognized Plaguewind’s nodding for a conceited, “All part of the plan.”

  Albert was grinning like the cat that got the proverbial. “He’s no fool. They’ve been following me for days, waiting to see what I do.”

  “So, it’s a trap,” Ilesa said, her sword already halfway from its scabbard.

  Plaguewind stopped her with a sharp look. “For Shadrak, not for us.”

  The rumble of voices came from outside, muffled by the steel door Albert had closed just in time.

  “Don’t worry about them,” Albert said. “No one sets foot in here save Shadrak and my successor.”

  “Who is?” Ilesa said.

  Albert sniggered and looked to Plaguewind, but the master had stiffened. Had he sensed something? Or was it just the thrill of being so close to what he had planned.

  “Buck Fargin, I imag
ine,” Albert said. “A nauseating little toe-rag who’s destined to one day lord it over the unified guilds of New Londdyr.”

  “Was,” Plaguewind said, almost absently. “Was destined.”

  “Naturally,” Albert said. “Until your own stupendous ascension. My point is, there’s no way that flaccid little prick is going to risk his scrawny neck coming here in the middle of a guild war. So—”

  “Shadrak will come,” Ilesa said. Her breathing quickened, and she licked her lips. Was this the moment she finally got to see Shadrak the Unseen. His name was whispered everywhere. It was common knowledge he had the run of the Night Hawks and had moved in on all the other major guilds, save for the Dybbuks, and Koort Morrow’s outfit. Master Plaguewind still had a tight grip, largely on account of the fear his sorcery engendered. They might be a bunch of thieving, backstabbing cutthroats, but the Dybbuks were far from ripe for the taking.

  Albert was nodding enthusiastically, but Plaguewind was all business. He gathered the men together and spoke quietly with each in turn. They all produced glass bottles and started to uncork them.

  “Why doesn’t he wait?” Ilesa thought aloud. “Why not starve us out?”

  “Because of the other secret I haven’t shared with you,” Plaguewind said, coming back over. “One of several, actually.”

  Albert’s grin was starting to get up Ilesa’s nose. She’d half a mind to punch him. “But fat boy knows, clearly.”

  “We planned it together,” Plaguewind said. “No one knows Shadrak like Albert. No one knows his operations better, either. This… battle over the docks is nothing but a ruse. Oh, they’ve pushed us back, and we’ve lost a lot of men, but it’ll be worth it.”

  “It’s a diversion?” Ilesa said. “You always were a devious bastard.” He’d beaten her at chess more times than she’d care to remember; even cheated on occasion, she was sure of it.

  “Albert’s given us the locations of every Night Hawk stronghouse in the city. You wondered why I hadn’t been around much these past few days. Well, it’s because we’ve been to meeting after meeting, shoring up a last ditch alliance to stop Shadrak from taking absolute control. While our forces have been clashing in the docks and we made our way here, hundreds of assassins have been moving in on Night Hawk positions. But that’s not all. Albert knows Shadrak. Knows what he looks like, where he stays. Chances are, we won’t have to use those potions the men have, but it’s always good to have insurance.”