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

by D. P. Prior

“Yes, he’s here. Bold of him to come knocking at the front door, so to speak. It’s courtesies like that that intrigue me. Most visitors don’t make it past the barbican. Trips and traps, you know the sort of thing. You can never be too careful. I was just making a start with him when you set off the ward. Poor chap must be freezing down there without any clothes on. Come on, you can lend me a hand. I’ve not clapped eyes on a homunculus in donkey’s years. I just love all that conniving.”

  Blightey crossed to the door Shadrak had tried to flee through, and held it open. “After you.”

  Shadrak tried to resist, but his legs had a life of their own.

  He glanced at the statue on his way out. It was still once more, nothing but inanimate stone.

  “Come along,” Blightey said, following Shadrak onto a landing with stairs leading down at the other end. “Let’s not keep him waiting. I had the impression he wanted to give me a serious talking to, you know, about the error of my ways, the limitless mercy of Nous, that sort of thing. Last person who tried that was some itinerant friar or other, centuries before the Reckoning. I was young. I was heartless. But he had gumption, I can tell you. Poor fellow was still blabbing about forgiveness around the bloody tip of the spike protruding from his mouth. Well, maybe not blubbing. Gasping and frothing, more like. Let’s just hope, for your friend’s sake, that age has mellowed me.”

  THE MOAT

  Nameless glared up at the curtain walls either side of the barbican while he waited for Albert to pick the lock of the small door set into one of the two massive ones.

  “No sign of the blackguards that came at us before,” Galen said. “I don’t like it.”

  Nameless felt Galen’s looming presence behind, stifled the impulse to turn.

  Ekyls prowled about the crest of the hill they’d climbed, an open invitation for who or whatever was inside to come out and fight.

  For once, Bird stood with the group, rather than taking off and doing his own thing. Nameless didn’t know whether to be thankful or concerned.

  “Must have got a look at my axe and soiled their moldy bandages,” Nameless said, doing his best to sound grim and dour. Let on he was worried, let on he was suspicious, and it might be all the encouragement these so-called friends needed.

  Galen grunted.

  Truth was, Nameless was relieved the walking cadavers hadn’t come streaming out of the barbican a second time. Relieved, but also bewildered. Why hadn’t they come? There had been no end to them before. What if they were holed up inside, waiting for the companions to enter, and the doors to close behind them?

  “How long’s this going to take?” Galen said.

  Albert cursed under his breath. “Keep your hair on. It’s no easy matter, a lock of this complexity.” He rummaged about in his pack for a bigger pick.

  “There are wards on the door,” Bird said. He was staring at the wood, eyes flicking left to right, as if he were reading.

  “Do I need to care?” Nameless said.

  Bird made a series of sweeping gestures with a claw-like hand, and muttered incomprehensible words. When he’d finished, he said, “No. They are gone.”

  Albert stepped back from the lock. “You may thank me for my brilliance.”

  Galen put his shoulder to the door, but it didn’t budge.

  Nameless pressed his gauntleted hand to the wood and shoved. It flew open as easy as a tent flap.

  “There’s a portcullis inside,” Nameless said. A wrought-iron lattice from ceiling to floor, and whatever mechanism opened it somewhere on the other side.

  Albert sighed and shook his head.

  Done with wasting time, Nameless strode up to the portcullis and took a grip low down, as if he were dead lifting. Still not used to the power of the gauntlets, he heaved a bit too much and sent the portcullis flying upward with a clash and a clang. He half-expected it to come crashing down again, but when he looked up, he could see the metal was buckled beyond repair and lodged in the vertical grooves cut into the walls that housed it.

  The barbican opened up onto a courtyard that formed a snow-capped island around the keep. The outer walls blocked what little sunlight eked its way through the cloud cover, and threw long shadows over the ground.

  Galen headed straight for the bridge that crossed a narrow moat encircling the keep. Nameless had to jog to keep up with him.

  The courtyard was deserted, and there was no movement atop the walls. Even the perimeter towers seemed devoid of life. Blightey’s creatures had known there were intruders amid the forest of spikes the day before, and Shadrak had seen shapes on the walls through those goggles of his. The fact there was no one in sight now only served to make Nameless paranoid. He felt like a mouse walking into a trap, with Ludo as the cheese to bait him.

  He slowed as he reached the bridge and angled a look below. The moat oozed black. A large fin broke the surface and rolled back under. On the other side of the bridge, Nameless could see more fins circling, and once or twice, stubby snouts bristling with serrated teeth burst free of the tar.

  “Keep up,” Galen called from the far side. He was already in front of the door to the keep, a slab of stone three times his height and wide enough to drive a cart through. At its center was a massive carving of a lion’s head, jaws parted not in a roar but a scream.

  Nameless focused on that image of anguish so he didn’t have to think about the moat and the things swimming within its murk.

  Ekyls pushed past him, followed by Albert, who practically skipped over the bridge as if it were on fire.

  Nameless risked another look down at the dark sludge, found himself imagining what it would be like to be ripped apart by those jaws. He lurched, and steadied himself with a hand on the railing. The bridge juddered, and for a moment, he thought he’d misjudged his newfound strength again. He could have sworn he heard mocking laughter, the distant roll of thunder. There were voices, too: whispers, snide remarks; people talking about him. They coalesced into a single voice, calling out his name.

  “Nameless!”—It was Galen. “The bridge!”

  The surface beneath Nameless’s feet shuddered, and then he heard it crack. A line appeared between his feet and started to widen as the bridge split in two, each section dropping away toward the moat.

  He lunged for the side nearest the keep, reached for Galen’s outstretched hand… and fell.

  THE LIMITS OF MERCY

  Ludo was spreadeagled naked on a rack, head toward the ceiling, streaks of blood smearing his forearms and shins. He twisted his neck as first Shadrak and then Blightey entered. His eyes widened at the sight of the Lich Lord’s armored frame, and then he frowned in confusion.

  Seeing the adeptus like that brought home the full horror of Shadrak’s helplessness. Even if Blightey permitted him to draw a weapon, what would be the point? Even if he could have penetrated the Lich Lord’s armor, the skull was all that was left of Blightey, and that was invulnerable. The body was as expendable as an old coat. Destroy that, and the skull had already shown it could fly. And if it needed another set of arms and legs, it had plenty more headless bodies waiting upstairs.

  First rule in any situation, Shadrak reminded himself, trying to reclaim an iota of professional calm: locate the exits.

  There was a door on the far side, opposite the one they’d entered from. He gave it only a cursory glance. He didn’t want Blightey to know he’d seen it. It was bound to be locked, and even if it wasn’t, he suspected his legs wouldn’t obey his command to flee.

  Beside the rack holding Ludo, a thing like a man stood. It was flayed head to toe, nothing more than blood-slick muscle and sinew. Tatters of flesh failed to completely cloak the pulsating black heart in its warped and twisted ribcage. Bloodshot eyes bulged from mushy sockets, perpetually terrified.

  It dipped its grotesque head at Blightey and backed away, trailing crimson across the flagstones. Gore dripped like melting wax from its fingers, and Shadrak made the connection: the blood smears on Ludo’s limbs were not his own; they
were the marks from where this thing had touched him, held him down, and stretched him out.

  “Sorry to keep you,” Blightey said to Ludo as he clattered and creaked into the chamber. He propped the greatsword against a wall. “I took the opportunity to change.”

  From hooks in the whitewashed walls, all manner of implements hung: pincers and prongs, saws and hammers, clubs and flails. There was a selection of manacles and thumbscrews—all the regular gear the guilds employed when someone crossed them or they needed answers no one wanted to give. There were bullwhips, a cat-o’-nine-tails; there was a brazier filled with hot coals, a set of scalpels laid out on a wooden bench; rats in cages—these ones were living; glass tanks containing snakes, spiders, and scorpions. In one corner, an iron maiden stood. Its door hung open, revealing wicked-looking spikes inside. A gibbet hung from the ceiling; something rotted within. Clamps and bear traps were scattered about the floor, along with chains in sloppy piles. Stacked neatly against a wall were half a dozen stakes like the ones outside the castle.

  “Ah, I thought you might notice them,” Blightey said with a touch of pride in his voice. “It’s something of a passion. You saw my little display on your way up, I take it? I’ll teach you how it’s done, if you like.”

  Ludo rolled his head forward and angled a look down at Shadrak. His eyes bulged above his glasses—he still wore his glasses, if not anything else. His black cassock was folded neatly upon a chair with his sandals on top. His book lay open on the bench nearest the rack. Bloody prints smeared its pages.

  “We were practicing lectio together,” Blightey said, “until you interrupted us.” To Ludo, he said, “Do you still call it lectio? Lectio divina? I do, but I’m so out of touch, I expect the nomenclature’s changed since my day.”

  The flayed monstrosity shuffled toward the book, but Blightey waved it back. “You are no longer needed. See?” He held up his hands. “Quite capable of riffling through the pages myself now.”

  “Pray,” Ludo gasped. He licked dry lips and swallowed thickly. “You pray lectio.”

  “Not me,” Blightey said. He looked at Shadrak with raised eyebrows. “Do you pray it? No? Thought as much.” He turned back to Ludo. “He doesn’t pray it, either. But let’s just call it a semantic difference.” He turned back to Shadrak and whispered, “That’s how you talk to these academic types. They love words like ‘semantic’.” Then to Ludo, he said, “What’s that other word you scholars are always slinging about? ‘Disjunction’. Yes, that’s it. Always makes me think of torn ligaments for some reason. Now, my little homunculus,”—he placed icy fingers on Shadrak’s shoulder—“help me out, if you will. Pater Ludo here—it is Pater, isn’t it?”

  “Adeptus,” Shadrak said, almost to himself. “He’s an adeptus.”

  “Is he now?” Blightey said. “Well I never. They all look the same with their clothes off. But as I was saying, I could use your help on this. The adeptus and I were having a little chinwag about scripture. I stand accused of doctoring it and obscuring the original meaning, and he thinks I have the wherewithal to remember which bit came from where so that I can—what’s the academic word for it, Adeptus?—deconstruct it and reveal what he terms the ‘Golden Thread’. Well, I’m buggered if I can recall the warp and woof of what I did, so we embarked upon a debate about what is really essential to the spirit of said original. We had reached an impasse, and I was hoping you might adjudicate.”

  Shadrak’s brain was a scramble. He clutched in vain at threads of thought that might tell him what to do. His fingers twitched over his guns, but he could not draw them. He wanted to run—after all, Ludo had gotten himself into this mess—but his legs wouldn’t obey. Every word Blightey spoke, every piece of utter crap, captivated him. He had to listen, and yet all his instincts screamed at him to cover his ears, close his eyes, and curl up into a ball.

  “Take this, for example,” Blightey said. He picked up Ludo’s book, licked his finger, and thumbed through it till he found his place. “‘The race of men is fickle, self-serving, and greedy of gain.’ Now, the adeptus here says this can’t be part of the Golden Thread, and yet I say it is the truth, and so it must be.”

  The chains holding Ludo to the rack clinked as he struggled to shift position and failed. When he spoke, he kept his voice soft, as if he were exercising patience with a slow student. “There is a pattern of giving, of generosity, of love that runs throughout the scriptures. This is what constitutes the Golden Thread. Before your alterations, there was one unified holy book.”

  “Was there?” Blightey said, with a conspiratorial wink at Shadrak. “Was there now? A single tome extolling the virtues of love? Theologians liked to think so, but even back then, it was an exercise in picking and choosing. I should know: I was like a boy in a candy store myself, memorizing all the phrases that brought me comfort, and studiously ignoring those that didn’t. It was only after life itself had tutored me in the truth that I afforded the other passages equal attention.

  “How, for example, do you account for this—I’m quoting from the original—? ‘You shall eat the flesh of your sons and grind the bones of your daughters into dust.’ Or how about this? ‘I will lay waste your cities and open the jaws of the Abyss against you.’ Does that sound golden to you?” he asked Shadrak. “The scriptures I recall were more gristle than grist, but we understood that. In the midst of the necrotic plague, or the clash of civilizations, or the cold reign of Global Tech, the scriptures held up a mirror to life in all its cruelty. If anything, my modified version softened the image.”

  “The Golden Thread doesn’t obscure suffering,” Ludo said. “It reminds us of the context of suffering; it weaves a path of hope, of love, of redemption through what otherwise would be unbearable.”

  “Yes?” Blightey said. “Go on. Oh, before you do… Shadrak, do be a dear and fetch one of those stakes. I would do it myself, but this armor makes me so clumsy. You might ask why an invulnerable skull needs a body and armor. I ask myself such things all the time. But there are only so many options open to a skull. It’s amazing the difference a stout pair of arms and legs can make.”

  He waggled his fingers, and tongues of shadow sloughed off them, leaving trails of fuligin in the air. With a flick of his wrist, Blightey flung the shadows.

  The flayed man stiffened and began to putrefy. He let out a gurgling cry of pure anguish, then collapsed in a pool of slime. Another wag of Blightey’s fingers, and fire consumed the mess, leaving nothing but dust and ash in its wake.

  “Come on now,” Blightey said to Shadrak. “Chop chop.”

  Shadrak did as he was told and fetched a spike. Even without the display of magic, he doubted he’d have had a choice; Blightey had already demonstrated more or less total control over Shadrak’s limbs. It was as if the Lich Lord wanted to foster the illusion he might refuse, if he’d not been such a coward.

  “Sorry about that,” Blightey said to Ludo. “Please, go on. You have my undivided attention.”

  Ludo’s eyes tracked Shadrak’s return with the stake, but at the same time, he pressed on, as if he took hope from Blightey’s words. “The Lord Ain created man, out of all creatures, with free will.”

  “Ain means ‘nothing’,” Blightey said.

  “No-thing,” Ludo countered. “The infinite no-thingness that preceded the primal manifestation of Nous and the subsequent creation of all things.”

  “Touché,” Blightey said. “So, you have cleared the first hurdle. Well done. Most people assume, when I tell them, that the meaning of Ain affirms them in their lazily reasoned atheism. There is, as you have so articulately asserted, a being who is not a thing like the rest of us things; or rather, the ground of all being, the unmoved mover, that which has no need or cause. Do you know what we used to call such a being?”

  Ludo nodded. “The Templum forbids the use of the name.”

  “Oh, pish,” Blightey said. “Deus is not a name. It’s a descriptor. Now, there was indeed a name it was forbidden to utter, but it
was brought to the light of day anyhow and dissected, permutated, and made the basis for interminable conjurations. But the reason for me dropping ‘Deus’ from the scriptures was purely political: as a word, it was about as popular as smallpox. You can credit that to the efforts of my erstwhile pupil, Sektis Gandaw. Do go on.” He nodded enthusiastically at Ludo, and at the same time waved Shadrak closer to the rack with the stake.

  Ludo licked his lips and again tried to shift position. Blood seeped from beneath the manacles holding his wrists and ankles. Despite the impression he tried to convey, he was struggling. Like Shadrak, he was terrified. He opened and closed his mouth several times, as if he didn’t know what to say. Eventually, he said, “So, you believe in Ain?”

  “Of course,” Blightey said. “Although, the name was my little joke. It may also come as a surprise to you to learn that I agree with the basic Nousian position about free will giving rise to the fall that produced so much cruelty and suffering. And yes, I accept the argument that the anger, the wrath, the vengeance attributed to Ain is all a matter of gradualness, of imperfect understanding and attribution on behalf of the writers. What was it they used to say? Ain writes straight with crooked lines?”

  “And His mercy?” Ludo said. There was a rasping quality to his voice, like he was almost holding his breath. He reminded Shadrak of nothing so much as player of seven-card, trying not to let on he held a hand that would trump Blightey’s.

  “Yes, yes,” the Lich Lord said. “The ocean of forgiveness, in which we all swim.”

  “All of us?” Ludo said. He was watching Blightey like a hawk.

  “It has its limits.”

  “Ain’s mercy is infinite.”

  “No, it is not.” Blightey’s tone remained affable, but there was a finality to his words. Ludo started to protest, but Blightey held up a hand for quiet. “A moment, please, Adeptus. This is crucial.”

  He stood at Ludo’s feet and beckoned Shadrak to join him.