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

by D. P. Prior

  Albert leaned back in his seat with a smug look on his face. “So, a faceless watcher, your Prior, keeping an eye on you from his castle on the hill.”

  “Oh no.” Hilda touched her forehead the same way her husband had done. “Not at all.”

  “Nothing wrong with a distant ruler,” Galen said. “Hardly anyone outside the city of Aeterna gets to clap eyes on his Divinity the Ipsissimus.”

  “No doubt all part of the mystique,” Albert said.

  Hilda and George shook their heads, tutting and muttering.

  “Well, this isn’t Aeterna,” Hilda said. “We don’t want any of that Ipsissimist tyranny here.”

  “Tyranny?” There was nothing amiable about Galen’s tone. He lay down his utensils, pulled a half-chewed rind of bacon from his mouth, and dropped it on the plate.

  “It’s all right, Galen,” Ludo said. “Different cultures…”

  “The Templum holds no sway in Verusia,” George said. “And the Prior, Nous preserve him, aims to keep it that way.”

  Galen pushed himself up from the table. “I will not eat at the table of heathens.”

  “Galen…” Ludo started.

  “No, I tell you. It’s ruddy scandalous, is what it is.” He strode across the room and ripped the door open.

  “Thank you so much for your hospitality,” Albert said. “I do apologize for our companion. We are not all of one mind.”

  They filed out of the house, and when George shut the door behind them, the lock clicked, and bolts were slammed into place.

  “Didn’t go too well, then,” Nameless said.

  “Lousy cooking,” Albert said.

  Shadrak looked at him with disbelief. Albert had been dripping with compliments only moments ago. “You two-faced scut.”

  “I, for one, will never set foot in that heretical hovel again,” Galen said.

  Ludo may actually have rolled his eyes at that.

  “Bird come back?” Shadrak asked.

  “All I’ve seen is the locals,” Nameless said. “Any more of their niceties, and I’m going to need him to do that finger-slug thing and clean my helm out again.”

  Shadrak looked over the rooftops, beyond the huge dome at the center of town, and up at the castle and the spikes set beneath it. He had an nasty feeling he knew what they were now.

  Ludo must have read his mind. “Doesn’t bode well,” the adeptus said, whipping off his glasses and wiping them on his cassock. “Only sinners going to the castle, for the most part. Poor old sinners, eh? But what if the rules are different from the norm here? What if good is bad and bad is good? What then? I’m assuming this Prior is Blightey, and it’s no secret he has a passion for impalement.”

  Shadrak swallowed thickly. Just the thought of it was… disturbing. But all the same, he felt compelled to get a closer look, see for himself.

  VICTIMS OF THE LICH LORD

  Curiosity might have killed the shogging cat, but Shadrak couldn’t help himself. He had to see if there really were bodies impaled on the spikes.

  Galen was still muttering about George and Hilda as he took the lead up the incline that rose in slopes and steps toward the castle.

  Albert seemed more concerned about the ruinous effect trudging calf-deep in snow was having on his pinstripe trousers.

  Ekyls scampered beside him, defying the hardship, refusing to accept the bluish tint that had seeped into his skin.

  Ludo’s long legs were made for the deep snow, but his spectacles kept frosting over. He repeatedly took them off to wipe the lenses on his cassock.

  Nameless trailed the group. He seemed sluggish. Reluctant, even. As if he’d seen this sort of thing before, and didn’t want to see it again.

  Even so, Shadrak had to work at it to keep ahead of him. He was by far the shortest, and the snow came up to his thighs.

  Scudding clouds dappled the white ground with shadows, and the half-smothered sun lent a sickly corona to the castle’s highest tower.

  The skirling breeze brought with it the stench of blood and shit. It only got worse as they drew closer. A couple of hundred yards from the spikes, and Shadrak had all the confirmation he needed. They were bodies all right. Bodies impaled arse to mouth on slender wooden poles whittled to vicious points.

  “By all that’s holy!” Galen bent double, heaving and puking. By the time he was done, his breakfast was a spatter of yellow and brown all over his crimson jacket. Tears bled from his eyes, and oysters of snot clung to his mustache.

  Shadrak pressed on ahead, vaguely aware the others were still following.

  Up close, the smell was even worse: ordure and rotting flesh; ammonia wafting from the pools of piss and gore slickening the bases of the spikes.

  “Forest of the dead,” Ekyls said. He licked his cracked and cyanosed lips, and glared a challenge at the carcasses.

  Nameless let out a groan and dropped to his knees. Shudders racked his frame, as if he were weeping.

  Albert studied the impaled victims with detached fascination. “This is for the townsfolk, I’d say. Keeps the sheep penned in.”

  Shadrak moved from one grisly corpse to the next, craned his head to look up at the blood-soaked tips of stakes jutting from gaping mouths. He drank in every detail, as if subjecting the horror to the same scrupulosity he applied to his work could ward him from having it happen to him.

  Ludo was fumbling through his leather-bound book with shaky fingers. He tried to read something, but his eyes kept leaving the page, drawn relentlessly to the victims.

  Albert bent down to examine the insertion point on one of them. He nodded, as if he were acknowledging fine craftsmanship.

  “Astonishing.” The poisoner looked around to see if he had everyone’s attention. He didn’t. They were all held by some dark spell. “Whoever did this found a way from the rectum to the mouth without asphyxiating the victim.”

  “Shut it, Albert,” Shadrak said. He didn’t want to think about it any more than he had to.

  “But imagine,” Albert went on. “Who could do such a thing?”

  “Your mother?”

  “Besides her,” Albert said. If he was offended, he didn’t show it. He actually seemed amused by the idea. “I mean, the poor sods probably hung there for hours, maybe even days. Every limb paralyzed, windpipe almost totally occluded. What do you suppose the cause of death was? Loss of blood? Perforated bowel?”

  The wind turned, and carried with it voices from back the way they’d come.

  A gaggle of locals had gathered at the foot of the incline. Heads were shaken, and then someone pointed up at the castle.

  Shadrak spun round to look. Scores of black shapes were pouring out of the gatehouse.

  “What the Abyss?” Galen said.

  Shadrak pulled down his goggles, bringing the tide of dark figures so close he could almost touch the front ranks. They were swathed in black cloth from head to toe, with only a narrow slit for the eyes. None of them carried weapons, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t fight. It did suggest, however, that their intention might be to capture, rather than kill. The thought of what would happen to anyone unlucky enough to fall into their hands was all the incentive Shadrak needed.

  “Let’s go.”

  “And leave empty-handed?” Nameless said.

  “We’re scouting, remember? Gathering information, so we can plan. Why is it so hard to get that?”

  Nameless stood and swung his axe at the base of a spike. It sheered right through, and both pole and corpse toppled toward him. “Oops,” he said, throwing out a gauntleted hand to hold it up. With an effortless shove, he sent it back the other way, where it crashed into another spike, which fell into another, until up to a dozen were leaning at precarious angles or half-buried in the snow.

  “You done now?” Shadrak said.

  Nameless shouldered his axe and strode through the impaled dead toward the horde swarming down from the castle.

  Something about the impalements had rattled the dwarf. He seemed forlorn,
and not a little crazy. The stupid shogger was going to fight an army by himself.

  “You stay, and I stay with you,” Galen said. “Never leave a man behind, I say.”

  Nameless stopped and turned the eye-slit on him, then looked back at the approaching horde. He made a fist of one of the giant’s gauntlets, then started to shake.

  Galen placed a hand on his shoulder. Nameless’s arm lashed out and sent him flying through the air till he hit the snow.

  Shadrak drew a flintlock.

  “No,” Ludo said. “Shadrak, no.”

  Nameless swayed on his feet. He used his axe to steady himself. “Laddie?” he said, finding Shadrak with the eye-slit. “Laddie, what’s going on?”

  “Shogged if I know,” Shadrak said.

  Galen picked himself up. He half drew his saber, but Ludo stopped him with a raised palm.

  “I’m not right, Shadrak,” Nameless said. “We should go.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Albert said.

  Going down was far quicker than coming up. Shadrak stumbled, slid, and tumbled through the snow drifts, gathering speed near the bottom and hitting the flat at a run. The others came down on their arses. All save for Nameless. He just strode for the bottom like ice wouldn’t dare make him slip.

  Shadrak led the group straight toward the onlookers from the town. He knew the type, knew they’d scatter, and he wasn’t disappointed. Scuts like that were timid as sheep without a sheepdog.

  A flurry of movement along the main concourse made Shadrak falter, then stop.

  More figures in black were lurching out of the domed basilica. Every inch of their bodies was bound in strips of cloth that looked like it had once been white, but was now mottled black with mildew.

  “Oh, cripes,” Albert said. “Tits up one way, fanny fart the—”

  Shadrak cut him off with a pistol blast. He dropped one of the figures like a big black turd in the snow.

  Nameless stepped to one side of him, Galen the other. Albert and Ekyls started to back away, leaving Ludo standing there mouthing the words of a prayer.

  The sound of Ekyls whining like a frightened dog made Shadrak glance behind.

  The tide of dark figures from the castle had reached the top of the slope. There were hundreds of them, and yet there was no sound as they began to stagger and stumble down.

  “Between a ruddy rock and a hard place,” Galen muttered.

  An owl hooted, then swooped overhead.

  In its wake, a colossal roar went up from the other side of the basilica. It was followed by the tramp of booted feet.

  Dozens upon dozens of men and women surged onto the main concourse and ripped through the lurching horrors, hacking, cleaving, thrusting with spears. They were swathed in animal pelts, and wielded spears, swords, and wooden shields. The men were long-haired and bearded, the women tall with blonde hair twisted into ropes that whirled about their heads like flails as they fought. The newcomers flowed past Shadrak and the others and clashed with the shambling army coming off the slope.

  The initial attack was devastating, but swiftly, the fallen creatures were replaced by more pouring in from the back.

  Shadrak groaned. Against an endless sea, even a force of—what?—upwards of a hundred would ultimately tire and fail.

  A giant of a man, bearded to the waist and wielding a long single-bladed axe, broke away from the fight and ran toward them.

  “Follow me,” he said in a voice like a bear’s growl. “The others will pull back once you’re safe. The Prior’s cadavers won’t pass the borders of the town.”

  “They won’t?” Nameless said.

  “Don’t ask me why. Either following orders, or they can’t. Like most things in this hellhole, they ain’t exactly natural.”

  Wings flapped, and Bird appeared behind Shadrak. “You can trust Lorgen,” the homunculus said, barely audible over the clangor of battle. “We share a common foe.”

  “Move it,” Lorgen said, striding toward the far side of town. “I don’t want to lose any more of my people than I have to, and I don’t like the look of that.”

  Shadrak followed his gaze, to where streamers of smoke were spilling from the castle and drifting toward them against the wind.

  He didn’t need any further prompting.

  Ludo, Albert, and Ekyls were already setting off after Lorgen.

  Bird gave a grim smile before once more taking to the air in the form of an owl.

  As soon as Shadrak started to move, Galen and Nameless came with him. He had the sense that, if he were stupid enough to turn back and fight, they would have followed.

  He cast a final look at the clashing forces.

  Lorgen’s people had already lost their advantage and were starting to withdraw.

  Beyond the battle, closing with terrible swiftness, tendrils of mist were coiling about each other, thickening, coalescing, darkening into a vile brume that threatened to roll right over them.

  THE MIST

  Fingers of mist groped the edges of the promontory, tickled the nubs of rock poking through the snow, then recoiled, as if that wasn’t what they were looking for.

  Because they were looking, Nameless was sure of that. He’d watched them questing, snaking, creeping through the trees since the setting sun had tinged the clouds with red.

  At first, the mist had come on fast, harried them from the town of Wolfmalen, but then it had slowed in its pursuit, as if it had lost them. It still came on, though, feeling its way through the pines systematically, leaving no stone unturned. And it was getting closer. So close it made Nameless’s skin crawl with a thousand invisible insects.

  He took a step toward it, axe gripped tight in the giant’s gauntlets. Better to face a thing than to fear it, he’d always said. Same as with the cadavers in mildewed wrappings that had come lumbering down from the castle. He knew he should have gotten out of there as soon as Shadrak said. Knew he’d placed his companions at risk. But it was fear that had almost made him stand and fight, and no natural fear at that. He’d felt something similar when he’d been under the spell of the black axe: a terror that could only be assuaged by blood.

  Was it the gauntlets?

  He splayed the fingers of one hand, held it up to the eye-slit of his helm. Made no sense. They’d granted him the strength of a giant. More, even, for they’d made Sartis the mightiest of all the Jötunn, given him the power to destroy his kin. The stronger you got, the less you had to fear. That was as plain as plain could be. But Sartis had been afraid, hadn’t he? So afraid of Sektis Gandaw, he’d hidden for centuries in the roots of the volcano. And the maker of the gauntlets, the Cynocephalus: wasn’t he said to cower in the bowels of Gehenna, right on the brink of the Abyss? A trembling god. A paranoid one, petrified by his ceaseless nightmares.

  “Anything?” Lorgen said as he came up the hill from the camp.

  It seemed his people had scores of similar hideaways scattered throughout the woods. They split themselves into small groups, the better to avoid detection, and employed runners in snow shoes for communication. More than that, Nameless hadn’t picked up. He’d not been in a listening mood.

  “Nothing I can get a good swing at, laddie.”

  And maybe that was the problem. Give him something to fight, and he’d not have the time to worry. But here, in the relative safety of Lorgen’s camp, all they had been doing was waiting.

  Lorgen laughed deep down in his belly. It sounded good-natured enough, but that didn’t mean it was.

  “Fighting’s not always the answer. Not here in Verusia. Kill one of those black-garbed pieces of dung, another replaces him. Seen it before, I tell you. There’s no end to them. Dark theurgy gives them the semblance of life, same as it conjures this bastard mist.”

  “The Prior?” Nameless took a step away from the ghostly carpet still inching toward him. Talking had cost him his resolve.

  “Aye, that’s what the lackwits in Wolfmalen call him. To the rest of us, he’s still Otto Blightey, the Lich Lord.”


  “And what is it with the townsfolk, laddie? I found them a little…” Nameless struggled to find the right word.

  “Docile?” Lorgen offered.

  “Aye, that about sums it up.”

  “Deluded? Beguiled? Because I tell you, they weren’t always that way. They were our people. They were free folk, till the Lich Lord put a glamor on them. Fodder’s all they are now. Well, not all. There’s more going on, but I can’t fathom it. He has them all believing he’s some holy man.”

  “You think he’s starting a cult?”

  “That’s just it,” Lorgen said. “To do that, he’d need more devotees, but Wolfmalen’s population never changes. Once a year, people go up to the castle. They don’t come back. But then the Lich Lord captures more, and within days, they’re as compliant as the rest.”

  “What do you think he’s up to?” Nameless asked.

  His question was met with silence.

  Lorgen’s face was expressionless, his eyes focused inward. Either he was still trying to work out the mystery surrounding the townsfolk, or he had some sinister reason for not answering.

  A creeping dread told Nameless it was the latter.

  Lorgen was a big bastard. Big, and ugly with it. Face more scars than skin, outcropping forehead, and a beard even dwarves would have found ostentatious. He had an axe, too: a long-hafted single blader. Ordinarily, it would have been hard not to like him, on account of that alone. But Nameless was caught up wondering if that axe would be used on him; if he could take the big man down, should it come to it.

  Why? he asked himself. Why think that? Lorgen had come to their aid; been nothing but friendly.

  But other thoughts wormed their way into his mind:

  That’s how it always begins. How do you think he got those scars? Are the giant’s gauntlets going to be enough, if he starts on you?

  “I’ve a question for you,” Lorgen said. “What brings you to Verusia? Because you’re clearly not from round here.”

  “Oh, laddie?” Nameless said. “And what makes you think that?”

  Lorgen stooped to look down at him. “Your height, for one thing. Yours and the little fellow’s who came to me for help; not to mention the pale-faced midget in the cloak. Then there’s your accents.”