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

by D. P. Prior

  Galen came next, wringing the moisture from his mustache.

  Ekyls crouched at the lip of the gully before dropping lithely to the ground. Rivulets of sweat streamed down his torso, and his tongue lolled from his mouth like a dog’s.

  “Where now?” the savage asked.

  “Down,” Shadrak croaked, popping back into view. He cleared his throat. “Toward the magma chamber, Aristodeus said. Apparently, the giant likes it hot.”

  Nameless chuckled.

  Albert tutted and shook his head.

  Ludo tugged at Galen’s sleeve. “Do you know what this reminds me of?”

  “No, Eminence, I do not.”

  “Luminary Bertold.” The adeptus looked around to make sure everyone was listening. “Bertold was a stout fellow, possessed of great strength and fortitude. Actually, not too dissimilar to you.” He wagged a finger at Nameless. “A strong man, and zealous with it. It is said he marched straight to the fiery heart of the Abyss, where he glimpsed a gigantic figure entombed in ice.” He touched his forehead, and Galen followed suit.

  Ekyls sniffed. “Why go there? Sounds like a fool, this Bertold.”

  “He was serving the Lord Nous,” Galen said.

  “Nous foolish, too,” Ekyls said, “if he allow fools to serve him. Mamba Tribe throw idiots into snake pits.”

  “Makes you wonder who’s the biggest idiot,” Shadrak said. “The scut who gets thrown to the snakes, or the tosser who falls in by himself.”

  “Pah!” Ekyls pushed roughly past them and loped down the tunnel.

  The savage was on his stomach, peering over the edge of a crevasse when they caught up with him.

  Scolding air wafted up from the depths in dirty plumes. The great helm started to fill with smog as Nameless crouched beside Ekyls to take a look for himself.

  Hundreds of feet below, a slick stream of magma sloughed through a gorge. Black pillows of crust scabbed the surface of the flow. On and around them, licks of flame wavered and danced.

  “End of road.” Ekyls spat into the chasm.

  “You think?” Shadrak said from behind Nameless. “Albert, chuck us some rope, and tie the other end to your ass—the one with the ears and a tail.”

  Quintus brayed and stamped, refusing to move any nearer to the edge. He caught Albert with a hoof, sent him hopping away clutching his knee.

  Nameless turned as he stood, and raised a fist. “Stop being as stubborn as a mule, Quintus.” To Shadrak he said, “I’m winking, laddie. Not as good as yours, but who’s keeping score?”

  Albert was, judging by the sour look he gave Shadrak.

  Bird glared at the threatened fist, but Quintus lowered his head and stopped struggling.

  “See, laddie,” Nameless said to Albert. “You just need to have the knack.”

  He uncoiled a length of rope and passed one end to Shadrak, before tying the other firmly to the mule.

  Shadrak looped his end around his waist and backed onto the edge of the precipice. “Pay it out each time I push off from the wall.”

  “Right you are, laddie.”

  “It’ll chafe your hands, Nameless,” Ludo said. “Perhaps some gloves?”

  “Nothing he ain’t used to,” Shadrak said, and Nameless guffawed.

  Ludo looked to Galen for an explanation.

  Shadrak stepped back and began to rappel in steady, easy jumps.

  When the rope ran out, Nameless inched closer to the edge and peered down.

  Shadrak was hanging a few feet above a ledge. He glanced up at Nameless, then took a knife from his baldric and sliced through the rope. He landed like a cat, then disappeared through a fissure in the wall.

  ***

  Shadrak emerged into a cavern bristling with rocky fangs that twisted from the ceiling and floor. Every surface was painted with the same vivid deposits they had seen at the entrance. A yellowish haze like fetid breath left the air thick and cloying, heavy with brimstone.

  Shadrak walked among the stalagmites until he reached the banks of the lava lake. Its scabby ooze bubbled and seethed, coughed up gouts of dirty smoke.

  He heard the others hollering, and looked up to see them peering over the brink high above. Ludo tossed down a coin to phwat upon the crust, sizzle, and slowly liquefy.

  “Is there another way down?” Nameless bellowed.

  Shadrak signed for them to wait, be quiet, before he realized only Albert would recognize the hand signals. He put a finger to his lips, made sure they saw it. Last thing he wanted was to bring the giant down on them, but with the racket they were making, it was probably too late.

  When he was sure he had Albert’s attention, he signed for them to stay put while he did a quick recce.

  He searched around the walls of the cathedral cavern, ducked in and out of tunnels, and had climbed part way up a winding vent, when he heard cries from above.

  “Scutting arsewipes,” he muttered. “What the shog now?”

  Someone screamed—Albert?

  A sound like the roar of flames. In its wake, the rumbling wheeze of air echoing through the lava tunnels. Was there a surge coming? An eruption?

  Shadrak dropped back down into the cavern. He swirled his cloak around him and slipped behind a stalagmite.

  There was a shift in the play of light coming off the burning crust.

  Steeling himself, Shadrak chanced a look.

  A column of flame stood within the flow. It rose and fell. A second followed in its wake, wading through the magma, lifting, bending—

  They were legs. Giant legs, wreathed in lava.

  Slipping from one stalagmite to the next, Shadrak approached the bank.

  Thunderous breaths blasted across the cavern. Laughter boomed and rumbled.

  It was a man. A colossal man with charcoal skin and fiery veins. Heavy brows hung like outcrops of coal above blazing eyes. His hair was a raging conflagration, his beard a molten cascade. A tail of lightning skimmed the lake behind, and in his hands, held cupped before his face, were the bodies of Shadrak’s companions.

  THE FIRE GIANT’S OVEN

  Shog, it was darker than Ballbreaker’s Black Ale.

  Stifling as a stout lassie’s chest hair, too.

  Nameless’s skull was a burning agony radiating from a thudding pain between his eyes. His stomach knotted, but not from hunger this time. A hard floor pressed into his back. He tapped it with his fingers.

  Metal.

  He remembered heat. Tremendous heat, and then… nothing.

  Not strictly nothing: an acrid stench first. The sensation of being hoisted aloft as the glow coming off the lava swirled away to a pinprick, and then even that went out.

  He still had hold of his axe. That struck him as odd.

  He sat up, relieved he had the head-space to do so. Rolling to his knees, he crawled ahead, pushing the axe in front of him. It stopped against something soft and giving. Someone groaned in response.

  In the darkness beyond, he could see the hairline of a square etched in reddish light. He scrambled toward it until he reached a metal wall. Tracing the edge of the square, he found a little purchase and pulled. There was an answering rattle, but it didn’t budge. He pushed, but there was no give. With a swell of curses pressing up against his clenched teeth, he began to pound at it with the haft of his axe.

  People started to moan and cough. He stole a look behind.

  Bright yellow eyes stared back at him through the dark. There was soft hoot as they drew nearer.

  “Calm, Nameless. Do not let on that we are awake.”

  The blackness shimmered and danced with tiny lights—living lights that banked and twirled, drifted and hovered. More and more of the creatures swarmed into the air, casting their orange glow about the cramped room and the huddled bodies shifting and moaning on the floor. They were insects—fireflies, swarming from the beak of an owl.

  Nameless climbed to his feet.

  There was enough light now to see that they were in some kind of iron chamber, with just the one o
utline of a door but no visible lock or handle. A thicker ridge of metal skirted the walls. It was dotted with the mouths of tubes.

  “Better,” said the owl, as the air around it buckled and folded, and Bird stood in its place.

  “Where the ruddy Abyss are we?” Galen said as he lurched to his feet.

  Behind him, Ekyls hissed and rose to a crouch. He still had his hatchet, and Galen his saber. Clearly, their captor didn’t see them as a threat.

  Ludo, was starting to stir. Albert was sprawled against the unmoving body of Quintus the mule.

  There was no sign of Shadrak. The assassin had been below when that monstrous face burst from the lava, its cavernous mouth spewing fumes over them.

  “Right,” Galen said. “Observations.” No one said anything, so he pressed on. “Well, the way I see it, we’re trapped in a chamber of sorts—could be a cell.” He rapped the wall with his knuckles. “Iron, I’d say. Now, the first thing to do in a situation such as—”

  “Shut your mouth, fool!” Ekyls said.

  Galen stuttered to a stop.

  The savage got down on his belly beside Nameless and started scratching around the bottom of the door.

  Albert rolled away from the mule and sniffed the air.

  “Rotten eggs.” He pulled a copper coin from his pocket and turned it over, examining it keenly before tossing it to Nameless.

  There was a slight discoloration to the metal, nothing more. Nameless shrugged and flipped it back.

  “Sulfur Dioxide.” Albert held the coin up, turning so the others could see. “It would seem our friend from the lava lake has a bad case of halitosis.”

  “Bad breath?” Ludo said, coming into a sitting position.

  “Stank like shit,” Ekyls growled.

  “You know what I think this is?” Albert said, indicating the walls. “A furness. See, these are gas vents. If I’m not very much mistaken—and I sincerely hope I am—we’re in a massive oven.”

  The blood drained from Ludo’s face.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Galen said.

  “Be silent, idiot!” Ekyls was wide-eyed and shaking. “You get us out?”

  Albert rubbed his chin. “I’ll do my best. The irony of the master chef becoming the main course is not altogether lost on me.”

  He began to rummage around in the packs on the mule, who was looking increasingly dead. He found a pick and ran it around the edge of the door.

  Nameless decided to inspect the vents. They were more likely inlets that might start streaming fire at any moment.

  “I will take a look,” Bird said. He warped and shrunk into what Nameless took for a bee at first, but when it flew into one of the pipes, he could have sworn it had feathers and a slender beak.

  Galen slipped out of his backpack and unfastened the straps. He removed something like a trumpet with a wooden stock and a trigger.

  “Brother,” Ludo said, “that goes beyond the spirit of Berdini’s definition of proportionate resistance, don’t you think?”

  Galen blew into the trumpet, coughed, and then upended the contraption to peer down its length. Satisfied, he gave it a shake and a pat, and then pulled a pouch from his pack.

  “After what we saw in the lava, Eminence, I say to the Abyss with Berdini.’’ He poured some black powder into the trumpet. Then, like he had all the time in the world, he unclipped a metal rod and used it to ram the powder home.

  Ludo snatched off his glasses and rubbed them on his cassock. “Shouldn’t you ask yourself something first, Galen, before you go blasting a creature that may mean us no harm? I mean, has no one even wondered why we are still alive?”

  Albert paused in his efforts to get the door open. “To keep the meat fresh, I’d imagine.”

  “Assuming this is an oven,” Ludo said. “So far, the evidence is not persuasive.”

  “That’s what I said when Papa tried to convert me to your insipid religion,” Albert said. “It was just his bad luck Mama agreed with me, though I shall never forgive her for what she did to him.” He took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes.

  Ekyls sprang up from the floor. “Something come.”

  “Remember its breath,” Albert said, taking a couple of steps back from the door. “Prepare to cover your mouth and nose.”

  Nameless flattened himself against the wall to one side of the door. If the vapors didn’t overcome him, he’d take one shog of a swing at that ugly face. Maybe he’d get lucky and crush the shogger’s nose, drive bone-splinters into its brain. He was starting to puff up with the anticipation of a fight. The luck was upon him. He could feel it.

  Ekyls crouched in the opposite corner. His fingers curled and uncurled around the handle of his hatchet.

  Albert squeezed in behind the savage.

  Galen waved Ludo to the far side of the dead mule and gestured for him to get down. When he was satisfied the adeptus was as safe as he could be under the circumstances, he swung back to the door and raised his trumpet-barreled weapon.

  “This,” he said to Nameless in a stage-whisper, “is how we do it on Urddynoor.”

  A grating and clanking came from beyond the door. The oven juddered, and wafts of rank gas rose from the tubes.

  The tiny yellow bird came flying out.

  More grating, the screech of tortured metal, then the door started to open outward.

  “Steady,” Galen muttered like a ventriloquist. Only the twitching of his mustache gave him away as the speaker.

  Gigantic fingers curled around the door.

  “Steady…”

  Smoke billowed into the chamber, but Nameless was already holding his breath.

  With a final scream of dry hinges, the door swung open, and an enormous head thrust into the entrance, eyes flashing from cavernous sockets. Lava sloughed around the mouth and nose, falling from the chin in a steaming beard. The lips were crusted magma. Vapor spilled from them in swirls and puffs.

  Galen pulled the trigger.

  Fire and thunder blasted from the trumpet. The recoil flung him back against the mule. The giant bellowed as tiny craters spattered its cheek.

  Nameless swung into the opening and crashed his axe into the giant’s nose. Heat shot along the haft, singeing his palms, but he held on. A second chop opened a crevasse between its eyes.

  Ekyls screamed and hacked at its nose repeatedly.

  Gouts of flame roared from the giant’s mouth, driving them back.

  The blade of Nameless’s axe was burning with white heat, the haft smoldering. It was becoming a shogging habit, what with the burning wyrm he’d faced outside of Arnk.

  The massive head withdrew, and in its place, an iron-clad hand pushed inside, feeling about with splayed fingers.

  Albert stepped away from the wall. He glanced at a scrap of paper in his hand, then thrust it in his jacket pocket. “Sartis,” he cried out. “Sartis, Lord of the Jötunn, Son of the Flame, Rightful King of Aethir.”

  Someone had been doing their homework.

  The giant’s voice erupted from a cloud of soot. “I am known?”

  Albert edged toward the opening. “I bring you gifts, o mightiest of the Jötunn.” He swept his hand out to encompass the oven. “A feast of flesh, and with it, the finest culinary skills on Aethir.” He bowed deeply, as the flickering shadows of Sartis’s face fell over him.

  Ekyls glared daggers at the poisoner.

  Galen struggled to his feet and tugged his jacket straight. He raised a questioning eyebrow at Nameless.

  Ludo sat up, one arm resting on the mule. He seemed to have grasped the situation. His eyes narrowed with what looked like resignation, as if betrayal were always the inevitable outcome. He could have been right, too, but Nameless was willing to give Albert the benefit of the doubt. If the shogger was indeed a turncoat, there was little chance of him outrunning a flung axe, not with a physique like that.

  “How do you know of me, fat man?” the giant rumbled. “I thought the world had forgotten.”

  Nameless stud
ied the charred face, watched the flames lapping across its brow. Globs of magma formed around the pockmarks left by Galen’s weapon, the damage done by hatchet and axe. They seeped and rolled like quicksilver. Sartis ran a finger as big as a man through the blaze of his beard.

  “The world remembers, Lord Sartis,” Albert continued to fawn. “It remembers your stand against the Jötunn, the pain you endured.”

  Sartis nodded and looked at his hands. They were encased in gauntlets of red-hot metal with wide flaring cuffs and articulated bands extending over the fingers.

  “My people. I killed my people.”

  The words echoed about inside the great helm, as if Nameless himself had uttered them.

  Sartis’s eyes were clouded by steam, and a rumble like an earthquake sounded at the back of his throat. With a flicker of flame, his eyes cleared, and he said, “The Technocrat sent his metal men against me, once my people were out of the way. I hid from them here, inside the volcano.”

  The bee-bird flew over to the mule and landed inside an ear.

  Sartis dabbed away the drying magma on his face to reveal perfectly restored flesh. “I rue the day the Demiurgos’s son made me a gift of these gauntlets.”

  Albert attempted to regain center-stage. “The Cynocephalus, you mean?”

  “Powerful beyond all reckoning is the Cynocephalus. All Aethir owes its existence to him, but even so, he came to me in the semblance of weakness, tiny, like you—no more than a loping baboon with the head of a dog. In such a guise of humility, he offered me these gauntlets, the strength to best the combined might of the Jötunn.”

  “Clearing the way for Sektis Gandaw,” Albert said.

  Sartis inclined his head. “My people were once mighty, but they posed no threat to the Cynocephalus. He did not see it that way. He is a pitiful god, afraid his own creations seek to destroy him. He wanted them removed, and in return, I was to have dominion over the world. It was a hollow promise, and you are right,” he said to Albert. “The Technocrat filled the void left by the Jötunn. The dog-head never saw that coming, and he fled back to Gehenna, where his nightmares grew worse than ever before.”

  Ekyls tried to slink from the chamber unnoticed, but the giant’s beard was a cascading curtain of fire filling the doorway. The savage’s skin reddened and grew slick. At first, he was pressed back by the scorching heat, but then he covered his eyes with an arm and lunged for a gap. He might have made it, if he hadn’t slipped in his own pooling sweat.