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

by D. P. Prior

  “Bollocks,” Lorgen said. “Think what you shogging like, but my people are out of here come sunrise. “Keep the shelters Stane and Yardy put up for you. Least if you’re intent on dying, it won’t be from the cold. I don’t want that on my conscience.” He took a step toward Ludo, looked right into the adeptus’s eyes. “You’re a clever one, right enough. I can tell that from the way you speak; but let me give you a word of advice: dance with the demon, and he’ll take every last dreg of hope, humanity, and dignity remaining to you.”

  Ludo swallowed and glanced at Galen for support.

  “Your funeral,” Lorgen said. He strode to the tent flap and held it open. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to catch some sleep before we break camp.”

  ***

  Outside, Lorgen’s people must have heard all they needed to, and were ducking into their tents, grumbling and shaking their heads. Any goodwill they might have had guttered like the fires left untended around the camp.

  “Miserable scutting shoggers,” Shadrak said. “I say we get this over and done with. Coming?”

  “No, laddie,” Nameless said. “We wait until morning. I gave Lorgen my word.”

  “Whatever,” Shadrak said. He stalked off to one of the newly erected tents and slipped inside.

  “Am I sleeping with you?” Albert said, scurrying after him.

  “Shog off,” Shadrak said.

  “Charming.” Albert held a hand out to Ekyls. “Looks like it’s me and you, then.”

  “You go ahead,” Ludo said to Galen. “I’ll join you presently.”

  The adeptus raised his eyebrows at Nameless. “May I talk with you?”

  Nameless nodded, and they went to sit by the remnants of a cook fire.

  “I need to know what is at stake,” Ludo said. “Galen and I have been quite swept away by events since stepping through Aristodeus’s portal. It’s all still very new to us. Even here, so close to home.” He looked up at the cloud-choked sky, where the moon was little more than a corona of filth. “Three moons on Aethir,” he mused. “Who’d have thought?”

  “How did you get mixed up in this?” Nameless asked. “That business with Shader?”

  “I used my position within the Templum to free him from the Judiciary’s dungeons,” Ludo said. “All dealt with now. He was relatively unharmed. Shader wanted to become a priest, you see. Wanted to give up fighting, but the Ipsissimus didn’t agree.

  “So, Aethir was to be my penance. Oh, they dressed it up as more than that. Said it was an opportunity to evangelize, but I was never under any illusions about that. What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the Ipsissimus granting Aristodeus permission to do with us as he likes.”

  “He told you that, laddie?”

  “Aristodeus did.”

  “Then how do you know it’s true?”

  Ludo shrugged. “There’s not much Galen and I can do about it either way. We are strangers to Aethir, and here on Urddynoor, we are loyal servants of the Templum, bound by obedience and humility.

  “But this business with you, Nameless: I’ve picked up a little, but I don’t even know the half of it. And coming back to Urddynoor in a craft that travels between worlds, coming here to Verusia, it’s like entering the world of a fairy story. Only…” A haunted look came into his eyes. “Only, there are no fairies. Just a dwarf, Shadrak, Bird, and…” He shut his eyes and took a few short breaths. “Bodies on spikes.”

  Even though Nameless knew Ludo was talking about Blightey, it felt like an accusation, as if the adeptus had somehow seen the horrors at Arx Gravis.

  Nameless started to stand, but Ludo put a hand on his arm, entreated him to stay with eyes full of compassion. Fake compassion, Nameless immediately thought, like the kind Aristodeus liked to dish out. Only Ludo’s was more practiced and less obvious.

  “What is it, Nameless?” Ludo said. “Anything I can help you with?”

  Nameless settled back down and sighed. What would it hurt to tell the truth? Ludo and the others were only here because of him. He owed it to them to at least give them answers when they asked.

  “Arx Gravis,” Nameless managed, dipping the great helm.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Of course he didn’t. How could he? He wouldn’t have had a clue where the ravine city was, let alone what had happened there.

  Ludo’s understanding nod told a very different story.

  Did he know? Had someone told him?

  Before suspicion tore Nameless’s thoughts into a thousand spiraling descents, he looked the adeptus in the eye. He found only empathy there, and the glimmering sheen of unshed tears. This was no fake concern. Ludo seemed to be closer to him than he was to himself at that moment, as if he could see everything Nameless had done. See, and still not turn away.

  Nameless’s defenses melted. He told the adeptus the bare basics he could recall, all the while watching him for any trace of condemnation.

  Once or twice, Ludo looked up at the moon, as if he could glean understanding there, but then he returned to silently watching and listening.

  When Nameless had finished, Ludo took his hand in both of his and said, “What else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When day breaks, we may all be in grave peril. You have no choice but to go on. Galen won’t back out now, and Shadrak… He’s conflicted, but he’s your friend, I’m sure of that, no matter how hard he tries to disguise it. If Lorgen is right about Blightey—and I’m not ready to concede that point yet—there may not be another chance.”

  “For what?”

  “For you to offload the things you haven’t told me; the things that weigh most heavily on your soul.”

  Nameless tried to kid himself he’d told it all, but he hadn’t. He’d left out the gory details. First, about the heads on spears; and then there was Cordy: how ashamed he was of what he felt for her now she was out of his grasp. How he’d never noticed his feelings until it was too late; until she’d married Thumil. He recalled telling Thumil he would protect their marriage, and he would, but it wasn’t what he really wanted. He despised himself for that.

  Still Ludo watched him, waiting for him to start, like he had no say in the matter.

  Slowly, falteringly at first, Nameless began to talk again, accusing himself of all that he’d done, not just the generalizations he’d already given, but every last detail he could remember. It was like lifting the lid on a box of secrets: more and more memories came flooding back, one connected to another in a continuous stream of condemnation.

  But it wasn’t about self-pity; it was about exposure, digging away the layers of snow and ice and revealing the dung pile beneath. When he was done, he sat, scarcely breathing. The pause was so long, he thought Ludo was too shocked or too repulsed to speak.

  But then the adeptus recited a formula in Ancient Urddynoorian, as if Nameless weren’t the most cursed person in all the worlds. As if he weren’t a butcher of his own kin.

  As if he were forgiven.

  Nameless wept. He sobbed and smiled and felt the heat of gratitude rising from his guts to encompass the whole of his body.

  “You see,” Ludo said. “No one is beyond the mercy of Nous.”

  They walked together in silence until they reached the tent Galen had entered.

  “Well, good night, Nameless,” Ludo said. “And don’t worry if the guilt returns. It’s a persistent foe, but over time, you will see yourself as Nous sees you.”

  “If you say so,” Nameless said.

  But already he could feel the black dog pawing at the edges of his mind.

  It was a temporary fix, no better than getting drunk on beer. Come morning, he had no doubt things would be back to normal. How could it be otherwise? Ludo might have believed in a forgiving god, but he hadn’t done the things Nameless had done.

  Some sins just couldn’t be wiped out.

  Nameless felt sleep coming on, and at least most of the tension he wore all the time had ebbed away. He’d not felt so relaxe
d in ages.

  Before he could ruin the moment, he said goodnight and went to find himself a tent.

  ***

  Muckman Brindy was shaking like a leaf. His red cloak and iron helm—the uniform of the Ravine Guard—told Nameless he was dreaming.

  They were in a mineshaft with Kaldwyn Gray and one other… Ming Garnik, but there was no sign of him. And then Nameless realized: Ming was already dead, and the thing that had killed him was hunting the rest of them.

  “It’s in the walls, sir. It’s in the shogging—”

  Muckman screamed.

  Fingers of stone sprouted from the floor and wrapped around Muckman’s ankle.

  Nameless charged in and swung his axe. The blade shattered, and the haft went flying. He grabbed Muckman’s wrist, pulled with all his might, but another rocky hand emerged and took Muckman round the waist. Muckman let out a gurgling yowl. Blood sprayed from his lips. Bones crunched.

  Nameless woke with a start. Cold sweat streaked his face within the great helm. Something was wrong. Something about the dream taunted him. And then he realized: he’d not been Nameless in the dream. He’d had a name then, and it was… it was…

  He was in a dark chamber. There were five walls. At the apex, the shadows coalesced into the shape of a twin-bladed axe.

  Next, he was descending a sloping passageway. Rows of skulls on spikes lined the way. Dwarven skulls with their beards intact. They looked impossibly ancient.

  One rose into the air and burst into flame. When the fire died down and the smoke dispersed, all that remained was a mottled skull with chattering teeth. It turned smoldering eyes of crimson on him. They swirled like the eddies of the Sea of Insanity, until they were vortices of blood sucking him in. Sucking. Sucking…

  ***

  Hands grabbed him roughly by the shoulders, shook him.

  “Wake up!” It was Galen.

  Nameless sat bolt upright, blinked his eyes into focus.

  “Ludo’s gone,” Galen said.

  “Gone?”

  “You were with him last,” Galen said.

  “I saw him to your tent,” Nameless said. But he’d not seen him enter. As a sinking dread gripped him, he uttered, “Lorgen and his people?”

  “Left at dawn, like he said they would.”

  “Could they have taken him?”

  Galen shook his head. “They headed west. Shadrak found a single set of footprints going in the opposite direction.”

  “Toward the castle?”

  Already the warmth of absolution was giving way to the chill of foreboding.

  “But why?” Galen said. “Why would he do such a thing?”

  No one is beyond the mercy of Nous.

  Nameless gasped. Ludo had not just been referring to him. But this was crazy. More than that: it was suicide.

  “He thinks he can save Blightey, and by doing so, save us in the process.”

  Galen looked too dumbfounded to speak at first, but then his eyelids drooped shut, and he swallowed thickly. “Oh, Eminence.”

  Shadrak poked his head through the tent flap. “It’s Ludo, right enough. The prints enter the mist. He must’ve lost his shogging mind.”

  “Damn it,” Galen said.

  “Let’s go,” Nameless said.

  “No,” Shadrak said. “I’ll go. Give me a couple of hours. If I ain’t back by then, come running, and tear that scutting castle to the ground till you find me, because no one’s shoving a spike up my arse.”

  “We should all go,” Galen said.

  “Fine,” Shadrak said. “But still give me a head-start. Stealth first, hammer later.”

  And with that, he ducked outside.

  WOLFMALEN CASTLE

  Shadrak retraced Ludo’s footprints to the fringes of the mist that lay like a blanket over the snowy ground. Wispy tendrils snaked toward him, but he skirted around them.

  The sun slid from behind a cloud; was swiftly smothered again. A sinuous rope of mist separated out from the main body and quested in his direction. Others followed, sprouting like insubstantial branches to block his advance and forbid his retreat.

  Shadrak backed away and then broke into a run. A feeler lashed at him, but he tumbled beneath it and kept on running, boots crunching through the snow. Others slithered in pursuit, and behind them, the entire carpet of mist changed its course like the turning of the tide.

  A tendril tried to trip him. Shadrak leapt over it, swayed aside from another coming at him head-height. He danced between two more strands, twisted and backflipped over a third, and kept on flipping feet over head until he made the tree line.

  Once there, he glided from trunk to trunk. Mist seeped over the roots, always just a heartbeat behind. Breaking into a sprint, he slipped and slid down a low bank. Vaporous threads curled over the ridge then began to worm their way down after him.

  Shadrak rummaged in a belt pouch for a glass sphere. He palmed it for a second, then threw it at a tree. A flash of brilliance lit up the gloaming, and the mist recoiled.

  Insubstantial plumes and streamers thrashed and intertwined. They began to feel every inch of the tree’s bark, as if they might find some trace of their elusive prey there.

  That was all the distraction Shadrak needed to creep away unheeded. He cast fleeting looks over his shoulder, but the mist seemed to have lost him. As they fell away from the tree, the individual tendrils retracted into the swirling smog already rolling away across the forest floor. He lost no time making a beeline for the town.

  Wolfmalen was eerily silent as he entered the main street. Either the people had been told to remain indoors in the wake of the battle with Lorgen’s people, or some other fate had befallen them.

  Pink stained the snow piled up along the road, but there were no carrion birds, and no bodies. It was as if the dead had simply dusted themselves down and walked off.

  The stench from the forest of impaled victims carried to him on the rising breeze before he’d made it halfway up the slope on the other side of town. This time, he gave it a wide berth, angling toward the castle in the cover of snow drifts and outcroppings of rock. He pulled up his hood and drew his cloak tight, trusting he’d appear nothing more than a shadow in the perpetual gray that passed for daylight.

  In the shelter of the looming curtain walls, he edged around the perimeter, pausing only to listen, then moving off again. All his senses strained for the merest glimpse of movement, whisper of noise, waft of smell. Once or twice, he thought he heard muffled screams from deep beneath the foundations of the castle.

  The smell of blood and shit coming off the forest of spikes never left his nostrils, but here, it was absorbed into the general odor of decay. It was the same smell that had haunted Kadee’s bedroom in the months after her death. The same smell that had finally forced him to leave and find a new home.

  For a moment, the recollection fired his anger, fueled his resentment that the Archon had used Kadee to get him on board. If it hadn’t been for that scut, and if it hadn’t been for Nameless, Shadrak would never have dreamed of setting foot in Verusia. It was almost enough to make him turn his back on Ludo, refuse to play other people’s games anymore. It wasn’t like he owed the idiot anything, and no one had made Ludo come to the castle by himself, like a lamb to the slaughter.

  But the memory of Kadee still had hold of him. Images of her cancer-wracked frame gave way to the glimmer that had never left her eyes, up until her last breath. It seemed to Shadrak she pleaded with him to go on, not to lose out on what the Archon had promised: that he’d see her again; that in some way, she endured after death.

  He came to a low wall that jutted out from one of the buttresses. On the other side, it fell away into a pit. At the bottom, a tunnel mouth led beneath the castle.

  Shadrak dropped into the pit and pulled on his goggles, blinking as they whirred and clicked into focus. He peered into the tunnel, seeing its bricked cylindrical walls in stark green outline.

  The floor was packed with broken rock and strewn with
dead rats that looked like they’d been throttled. Most had missing limbs.

  The air was dank and musty. The walls sweated water and slime, and the rubble on the floor was slick with drenched moss.

  Walking was so treacherous, he took to his hands and knees, until he came to a grille blocking the passage from floor to ceiling. A slender pick made short work of the rusted padlock holding it shut, and then he pushed the latticed iron open a crack and slipped through.

  The floor was smooth on the other side: gray flags, neatly mortared and flanked with fluted pillars that were truncated by the low ceiling.

  His footfalls here were hollow, muted, but their echo was unnaturally loud. When he moved more stealthily, the scuff and scrape of his boots was like a man shoveling snow.

  He followed the corridor for long, tense minutes, until it opened onto a vaulted chamber. Three ribbed archways, left, right, and center, led from it to spiral staircases. Guttering torches were ensconced either side of the arches. They threw flickering shadows across a mosaic floor depicting a cross atop a triangle.

  Shadrak raised his goggles now there was more light.

  A plinth stood within the triangle, and chained to it, one leg clamped in a heavy iron band, was a living gargoyle. Its long face terminated in a snaggletoothed beak. Rough nubs atop its head were all that remained of horns. Wings like a bat’s—though cruelly lacerated—were furled upon its hunched and spiny back. The stub of a scorpion’s tail hung beneath them. The tip seemed to have been severed some time ago, and had healed over as a misshapen club of scar tissue.

  Shadrak slid a flintlock free and cocked it.

  He edged closer, expecting the thing to pounce at any moment. It had enough slack in its chain to reach him, if it so wished.

  That’s when Shadrak noticed it wasn’t a plinth it was secured to; it was a spool for yard upon yard of chain. On the top was some kind of ratcheting crank. With someone to turn the handle, the gargoyle had enough chain to get to the mouth of the tunnel, maybe even the pit. Probably, it was allowed there to feed on the limbs of rats from time to time. But why not the whole rat? Either rodents’ legs were its favorite delicacy, or it had the appetite of a sparrow.