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

by D. P. Prior

  Shadrak slung the rifle over his shoulder and leapt for the adjacent wall. Pain lanced through his injured shoulder, but he clung on, swinging from handhold to handhold, wincing against the thought of the giant’s fist pounding him into mush. He made it to a narrow ledge and rolled onto it.

  Nameless was back up, swaying like a drunkard, hoops of partially melted links disfiguring his hauberk.

  Ekyls poked his head out of a crater, snarling and hissing.

  Sartis stumbled as he looked down at them. He clutched at his stomach and belched. Dirty yellow gas billowed from his lips, and his hands went to his throat. He coughed, staggered, and fell on his face. Dust spewed into the air, and fractures raced across the cavern floor. Cracks rent the ceiling. It groaned and sagged, then dropped a ton of rock on top of the giant.

  It took a while for the collapse to subside, but when it did, all that could be seen of Sartis was a gauntleted hand and the limp tip of his tail.

  Shadrak climbed down from his perch and crunched over the rubble.

  Nameless rolled out from beneath a pile of rock.

  Ekyls was curled at the bottom of his crater, boulders all around him. With painstaking care, he straightened his limbs and tested them.

  Albert emerged from behind a stalagmite and offered him a hand up.

  The savage flipped to his feet and vaulted over the lip of the crater. Before Albert could react, Ekyls screamed like a demon and came at him with the hatchet.

  Albert side-stepped and took him round throat with the cheese-cutter. Ekyls’ hatchet clattered to the ground as he clawed at the wire, spitting and gurgling.

  “It’ll take your fingers off, if you don’t cut it out,” Albert said. He turned to Shadrak. “It would seem I’m being blamed for something.”

  Shadrak drew a flintlock. “Shrewd of you.”

  Nameless salvaged his axe from the rubble and advanced on the poisoner.

  “One more step,” Albert squealed, “and I’ll finish him.”

  Nameless raised his axe.

  “Stop! Wait!” Albert said. “I was trying to help.”

  “Try another,” Shadrak said.

  He pulled the trigger. The flintlock kicked and boomed.

  Chips of rock flew up just shy of Albert’s feet. He yelped and dragged Ekyls back.

  There was a flash of red behind him, then Galen crashed the pommel of his saber into the back of Albert’s head, dropping him like a bag of rotten apples.

  Ludo crept out from behind the oven and attempted to examine Ekyls’ wounds. The savage snarled and backed away, clutching his throat.

  Galen rolled Albert over with his boot. “Should be out for a while, ruddy blackguard. Heard the big chap fall. Terrific crash. Brought me to. Well done, everyone.”

  “Right between the eyes,” Nameless said. “That was one shog of a shot, Shadrak. I’d buy you a drink, if there was a tavern close by.”

  Shadrak scratched at his singed beard. There was something odd here. He’d hit the giant, sure enough, but the bullet had turned to molten mush the minute it struck.

  He glanced at Albert’s prone form. What if the poisoner hadn’t betrayed them? What if there had been mamba venom in the vial? It was too late to worry about that now. Either Albert would recover from the blow to the head, or he wouldn’t. Problem was, if he didn’t have his sights set on betrayal before, he shogging well would now. Albert wasn’t the kind to forgive and forget.

  “Best get what we came for,” Shadrak said, starting to roll the rocks from the giant’s body.

  “I was just thinking about that,” Nameless said. “I might have inherited my pa’s shovel-like hands, but there’s no way those gauntlets are going to fit.” Nevertheless, he set about shifting boulders with an ease that belied his size.

  Galen knelt and began to stack the rocks into neat piles.

  Ludo was obviously above such manual work. He thumbed through his book, presumably looking for some bollocks to read in celebration of their victory.

  Shadrak paused for a second as Ekyls slunk back over and squatted down beside Galen. Something passed between them. Galen gave Ekyls the barest of nods and then continued to stack rocks.

  “All we need’s the gauntlets,” Shadrak said. “Don’t worry about uncovering the rest of the scut. Just mind the heat.”

  Nameless already had a hold of one of the iron fingers, and pulled with all his might. The gauntlet slid free, and the dwarf fell on his arse. “Cool as a whore to a pauper. Same goes for Sartis. Must be because he’s out cold. Get it?”

  Shadrak snorted a laugh but stopped abruptly when Nameless sat up holding a gauntlet no bigger than his own hand.

  They worked together to free the other one, and it, too, shrank as Nameless pulled it off.

  “Well I’ll be,” Galen said.

  Ludo looked up from his book and touched his forehead.

  Nameless put the gauntlets on.

  “Well?” Shadrak asked.

  The dwarf clenched and unclenched his fists, clapped the metal palms together. He took hold of the tip of Sartis’s tail and heaved. Slowly, steadily, he drew the giant’s body from beneath the rubble. He shrugged, as if the deed were nothing. With a roll of his helmed head, he stooped to pick up a small rock and closed his hand around it. There was a sharp crack, and rock dust spilled between his fingers.

  “The giant’s still breathing,” Ludo said.

  Sartis’s body was beset with fine tremors. His fingers curled, and his tail twitched.

  “Not a one-shot kill, then,” Galen said. “Shame, that.”

  “Held guts before he fall.” Ekyls looked at each of them in turn. “Seen before. Felt it myself. He cure me of it.” He jabbed a blood-soaked finger at Albert’s unconscious body.

  “The vial,”’ Shadrak said. “I saw him put something in the broth.”

  “Mamba venom,” Ekyls said.

  Well that about shogging sealed it. It was Sartis Albert had double-crossed, not them.

  “Oh,” mumbled Galen, staring down at the poisoner’s crumpled body. “Do you think he’ll be all right? It was quite a knock I gave him.”

  “You might want to sleep with one eye open from now on,” Shadrak said. They’d all have to. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  Nameless bent down to pick up a far bigger boulder than the one he’d crushed.

  “We can’t just leave Albert,” Galen said.

  “You knocked him out, you bring him,” Shadrak said. “Now come on, before Sartis wakes up.”

  Galen tugged down his jacket and started to stammer a reply, but he stopped when Nameless hoisted the boulder on high and slammed it into the giant’s head. Bone crunched, and steaming gore splashed the cavern floor. Sartis moaned, but Nameless hefted the boulder and brought it down, again and again and again.

  Shadrak couldn’t take his eyes off the butchery. Neither could anyone else. Even Ekyls was wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Ludo sank to his knees, and Galen swallowed the same lump over and over.

  Finally, the giant stopped moving, and Nameless stepped away, drenched in blood from head to toe.

  “I…” Galen said. “I…”

  Shadrak frowned so hard his head hurt. It wasn’t like he hadn’t done the same sort of thing in his time, but Nameless…

  Perhaps the dwarves of Arx Gravis had a point. Perhaps the Archon did. He had the feeling they had just taken the first step down a slippery slope, and that fulfilling the Archon’s contract, if it came to it, was now going to be that much harder.

  “Sartis was the last of his kind,” Bird said, black eyes glistening with tears.

  Nameless snatched up his axe. For a moment, it looked like he was going to take a swing at the homunculus.

  Bird drew his cloak of feathers close, and the tension broke with an almost audible snap.

  Nameless dipped his knees and sprang up to the lava vent fifty feet above.

  The others gawped at him, but Shadrak locked eyes with Bird. For an instant, he felt a sense of f
amiliarity, and he shared in a sadness bordering on despair.

  Bird blinked, and the feeling lifted. One side of his mouth twisted into a smile, then he fluttered up beside Nameless in the form of a raven.

  Albert moaned, flapped about in the rubble, and sat up, rubbing his head.

  Ekyls scampered to his side.

  “What’s going on?” Albert asked. “My head. I’m all woozy.” He blinked his eyes into focus on the blood pooling beneath Sartis. “Are we done?”

  Shadrak looked up at the lava vent as Bird flew out of sight. “Yeah, we’re done.”

  Nameless stared down at them through the eye-slit of the black helm.

  THE LICH LORD’S ARMOR

  No one spoke much on the plane ship ride back to the Perfect Peak. Nameless had the sense something sinister was going on, that maybe the others were conspiring against him. It was nothing anyone did, in particular. It was more the lowered eyes, the sullen silence, the heavy pall of tension that clogged the air of the control room.

  When they reached the scarolite mountain, Mephesch was once more waiting for them outside. The homunculus sent Albert, Galen, Ludo, and Shadrak ahead to Aristodeus, but he detained Nameless, saying the philosopher had asked him to check the feeding tube coiled on his belly.

  Mephesch led Nameless to a disused laboratory and seated him in a padded black chair. Nameless began to raise his chainmail hauberk, but the homunculus shook his head.

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  Something twisted in Nameless’s guts, and it wasn’t the tube.

  “Aristodeus didn’t really ask you to examine me, did he?”

  “Not exactly.”

  It should have come as no surprise the homunculus was a lying, cheating little toe-rag, but Nameless hadn’t seen this coming. He curled fingers encased in Sartis’s gauntlets around the charred haft of his axe. With the barest of squeezes, he knew he could have snapped it in two. Uncanny strength suffused every limb. In the cavern where he’d killed Sartis, he had jumped so high, it was almost like flying.

  “So, laddie,” he said in a low rumble, “what’s this all about?”

  “Checks and balances,” Mephesch said. “It was my people, the Sedition, who put Aristodeus onto this scheme to free you from the helm. Three artifacts created by the Cynocephalus with which to counter and destroy the black axe of the Demiurgos.”

  “Which your people made for him,” Nameless said.

  “Homunculi, yes. But not us. The Sedition procured a lore book from our rivals that details the process used to forge the black axe, and it is from them that we found hints of the way to destroy it.”

  “By procured, I take it you mean stole,” Nameless said.

  “Some of us are skilled in such things.”

  Nameless thought back to the forgeries in the Annals that had led Lucius to go after the black axe. “How do you know you weren’t meant to steal this lore book? What if this is all an elaborate trap?”

  “We may be opponents of the Demiurgos, but we are still homunculi. Deception is the air we breathe.”

  “Even self-deception?”

  Mephesch raised an eyebrow but gave no answer.

  “So, you’re not really sure this is the right course of action, are you?” Nameless said. “You wanted to check on me, check on the gauntlets.”

  Mephesch took that as his cue to examine them. He ran his gaze over first one then the other.

  “Could you please release the axe and splay your fingers?”

  Nameless did as he was asked, leaning the axe against the chair.

  “Make a fist,” Mephesch instructed. “Good. So, full articulation. And strength: do you feel any different?”

  “Like I could move mountains,” Nameless said.

  Mephesch nodded and pursed his lips. “Anything else? Any other changes you’ve noticed?”

  “I killed him, Mephesch. Crushed Sartis’s head to pulp.”

  “But it was necessary, no?”

  Nameless was starting to wonder. He’d not even thought about it at the time. There had just been this insurmountable rage. Fear did that to him. But had there been anything to be afraid of at that moment? Sartis was already down. Couldn’t they have just left?

  “Checks and balances, you said, laddie. What is it you are checking for?”

  “Changes in you. Any sense you might be reacting as you did with the black axe.”

  “I’m not seeing demons, if that’s what you mean.”

  “And your desire for the axe hasn’t increased?”

  “I want it destroyed, laddie. And out of my life. And once it is, once this bucket is off my nonce, I intend to get mightily and unashamedly drunk on whatever ale I can get my hands on. Shog, I’ll even take a flagon of Ironbelly’s, if that’s all there is.”

  That answer seemed to satisfy Mephesch, and he visibly relaxed.

  “Now that I’ve got you alone,” Nameless said, “perhaps you can help me with something I’ve been wrestling with for quite some time.” Since Arx Gravis, when the philosopher had insinuated his way into Lucius’s life. “Who exactly is Aristodeus?”

  Mephesch shrugged. “He is a human from Urddynoor.”

  “He’s awfully long-lived, though, even by dwarf standards. My pa said Aristodeus was there before I was born; that he knew my mother.”

  Mephesch studied Nameless for a moment, as if weighing up how much to tell him. Finally, he said, “On Urddynoor, there was a cataclysmic event known as the Reckoning. The power of the Statue of Eingana was unleashed against the Global Technocracy of Sektis Gandaw. Nightmares from the realm of Qlippoth poured through the portals between worlds and devastated the civilization of the Ancients. But not everyone suffered. There were some who learned to use the influx of the Cynocephalus’s dreaming to enhance and extend their own lives.”

  “And Aristodeus was one of them, presumably,” Nameless said. “But what about when his tower was poking through the floor of the conical chamber? Sektis Gandaw said Aristodeus was in two places at the same time, and that one of those places was the Abyss.”

  “And that is true,” Mephesch said. “During the first attempt at the Unweaving, Aristodeus was defeated, and the very same chasm that you saw was opened by the power of Eingana. He fell into it, and has been trapped in the demesne of my father ever since.”

  “But he’s not trapped. He comes and goes at will.”

  Mephesch smiled at that. “He does and he doesn’t. The Demiurgos allows him a taste of freedom, but only so more chaos can be sewn by his futile attempts to escape. Aristodeus thinks he has outwitted the Demiurgos, that he has found a way to project himself wheresoever he wishes through the power of his own will. But always, his essence remains in the infernal city at the heart of the Abyss, running in endless circles. He is not even aware of it. He believes he has insulated himself from the flames by constructing an ivory tower through the power of his mind. And to some extent, he is right. He has, I believe, thwarted my father to a degree, but not so much as he believes.”

  Nameless’s head hurt trying to understand all that he was hearing, but one thing was coming sharply into focus: “So, Aristodeus is responsible for all that has happened? For Arx Gravis? For Lucius, the black axe, the butchery?”

  Mephesch shook his head. “No, that would not be fair to say. At times, he has fallen prey to the scheming of deception, but he still possesses free will. At first, he used it poorly. That business with Shader—interfering with time, and engineering the child’s upbringing so he could wield the Archon’s sword—is the sort of thing the Demiurgos craves.”

  “And yet it worked,” Nameless said. “Shader prevented the Unweaving.”

  “In large part due to you.”

  “No, laddie. No, no, no. I was the one yelling at Shader to keep fighting, to heap power upon power and kill Sektis Gandaw. If he’d heeded me, everything would have been lost.”

  “Even so…” Mephesch said, but if he had an answer to Nameless’s contention, he kept it to
himself.

  There was a brief spell of awkward silence. When it became too much to bear, Nameless asked, “So, what’s next for us, laddie?”

  A shudder passed through Mephesch’s tiny frame. His pebbly eyes were wreathed with shadows.

  “I’ll let Aristodeus tell you.”

  ***

  The philosopher’s bald head was awash with the flickering glow coming off the mirrors that wound their way up to the top of the conical chamber. Thousands of pinpricks of light danced within wires snaking all around the spiraling walkways.

  He was seated in an armchair, slurping tea, while discoursing with his usual condescension.

  Ludo seemed to be lapping it up and giving as good as he got. Galen was at his shoulder, scowling, for the most part.

  Ekyls, prowled around the perimeter, hissing with impatience. He looked like he could use a session with the weights to burn off all that pent-up energy. He received the occasional warning wag of a finger from Albert, who was jealously guarding some jerky he’d apparently found in a storage room aboard the plane ship. He chewed with evident relish, but the stink of garlic coming from him was overpowering.

  Shadrak noticed Nameless enter behind Mephesch and showed him his middle finger. Nameless did the same back. It must have been an Urddynoorian greeting.

  Bird was perched on the edge of a console, wrapped in his cloak of feathers. Nameless couldn’t help thinking he preferred the bat-winged women Gandaw used to keep wired into the screens. They were certainly easier on the eyes.

  As he stepped into the chamber, icy cords wrapped around his mind and drew his gaze to a metal stand, on top of which was a block of crystal.

  He started toward it, but Mephesch put a restraining hand on his arm. When Nameless turned to look at him, Mephesch shook his head.

  “Not yet. Wait until all three artifacts are assembled. It may be that the gauntlets alone are not sufficient to combat the axe’s pull.”

  “But the scarolite helm, laddie. The crystal. They were enough to ward me before.”

  “Maybe the axe is growing in strength,” Mephesch said, though his frown told Nameless he wasn’t convinced. “Or maybe the efficacy of the helm and the crystal diminishes over time.”