by D. P. Prior
Blightey made a fist of his other hand, then opened it. Two tiny shadows hopped from the palm and quickly swelled to the size of men. One grabbed Nameless by the right arm, the other by the left, and he froze at their touch, axe clutched tight in a death grip.
Blightey’s face was a mess of bloody tatters, and here and there the invulnerable bone of his skull showed through. He glared from Nameless to Galen, to Shadrak, but he had forgotten about Bird.
A hawk swooped down and ripped out an eye. Instantly, the shadow men holding Nameless dispersed. Blightey hurled jags of lightning after the hawk, but it banked away then landed in the form of the homunculus.
Where there should have been an empty eye socket, an angry red ruby burned out of Blightey’s face. His injured arm hung useless, but the other plucked a cloud the color of bruises from the air and sent it drifting toward Bird.
Shadrak held both guns in one hand, and with the other threw a glass sphere at the Lich Lord’s feet. A concussive blast swept the chamber, and Blightey bounced off the ceiling, then hit the floor with the clunk and clatter of armor.
And still he rose.
The cloud advancing on Bird drew back around Blightey, circled him faster and faster, until the Lich Lord stood at the eye of a raging vortex.
Shadrak did a quick check of his companions. Nameless was rolling his shoulders, gauntleted fingers clenching and unclenching around the haft of his axe. Galen’s face was a mask of horror and frustration. He had reclaimed his saber and taken up a position in front of the rack, as if he thought he might still protect Ludo.
Bird shot Shadrak a glance, then nodded to himself. He stepped in front of Nameless, then dropped to one knee. He spread his arms to hold open his cloak of feathers. A sound like the chipping of stone rose from the floor. It grew louder: cracking, crunching, clacking.
The swirling storm occluding Blightey contracted suddenly, then belched forth in streamers of mist.
Shadrak instinctively flung himself into a backflip. He heard Nameless cry, “Shog!” As he landed, he saw the mist coalescing on Bird’s outstretched palm. With a shove, the homunculus flung it back at Blightey.
The Lich Lord sighed and gave a lazy wave, and the mist dispersed.
The ground in front of Bird began to vibrate as a noise like an earthquake rose to a crescendo.
Blightey sneered and held up a finger. The sound ceased in an instant. Chains once more clamped down on Shadrak’s mind. Nameless lowered his axe. Galen threw down his saber. And Bird hunched over beneath his cloak.
“Well, that was fun,” Blightey said. “I was loathe to curb your enthusiasm. I find it quite exhilarating, but not a patch on the pleasure your friend has given me.” He indicated Ludo with a flourish. “So, what do you think?”
Galen’s face was creased with strain. Nameless seemed rooted to the spot, no more than a helmed statue. Bird was hidden beneath his cloak, but down on one knee like he was, he looked cowed, utterly compliant.
Shadrak tried to raise a pistol. Perhaps a shot would distract Blightey, weaken his hold. He moved it an inch, but then found himself holstering both guns against his will.
“You,” Blightey said to Shadrak, “are a naughty homunculus. I had considered taking you as an apprentice, but now I think you deserve the spike. As do you,” he said to Galen. “You’ll probably like it.” To Bird he said, “I wonder how a shapeshifter will respond to impalement. I can hardly wait to find out. And then there’s you,” he said to Nameless. “You have annoyed me more than I’m used to being annoyed. I’m going to have to find a bigger—”
“Shog off,” Nameless growled. He shook with effort as he raised his boot a smidgen and scuffed it forward an inch. It was the same as he’d done against the goblin in the woods surrounding Mount Sartis.
Something about this dwarf, Aristodeus had said.
Nameless moved another inch, then another. “I’m coming… for… you, scut-breath!”
Like he’d been straining against bonds that had suddenly snapped, Nameless hurtled toward Blightey.
A ball of fire burst from the Lich Lord’s fingers, punched into Nameless’s helm.
Shadrak winced, but nothing happened. It was as if the helm simply drank in the impact.
“Scarolite!” Blightey said.
And then Nameless swung his axe.
Flames erupted from Blightey’s head, and Nameless froze, suspended in mid-strike. The skin of Blightey’s face sloughed away, until all that remained was the skull, its ruby eyes blazing.
The Lich Lord pressed up close to Nameless, glared straight into the eye-slit of the great helm. Smoke plumed out in response.
Nameless began to shudder. He dropped his axe and pawed at the sides of the helm with the giant’s gauntlets, desperate to get it off, as if it were filled with maggots.
Blightey’s eyes bathed Nameless in their infernal glow.
The dwarf started to rattle and groan. He arched his back away, but at the same time forced his hand up with excruciating slowness. Gauntleted fingers fastened on Blightey jaw, and with a violent roar of “Ku-na-ga!” Nameless twisted the skull away from him, then pounded down on it with his other hand.
Instantly, the spell was broken, and Nameless slumped to the floor.
Galen snatched up his saber.
Shadrak whipped out a gun, got off a shot.
Blightey spun toward him, but Nameless was up in a flash, and thumped the Lich Lord in the back. As Blightey pitched forward, Galen hit him with a thunderous chop to the skull, but the saber rebounded.
Blightey gave a slight shrug and clacked his jaws.
Galen, though, was relentless, striking blow after glancing blow.
Shadrak fired repeatedly, not caring if anyone got in the way. He was beyond that. Things were too desperate.
Blightey’s eyes blazed crimson.
Nameless wrenched the Lich Lord away from Galen, bashed him skull-first into the floor, over and over and over.
Galen hacked uselessly at Blightey’s back with all his prodigious strength. Anyone else would have had a thousand broken bones, but not Blightey. The Cynocephalus had made his armor too well.
The air above the Lich Lord was rent, and a black-wrapped cadaver materialized. Shadrak shot it, but instantly, another appeared, then another.
Galen stopped hitting Blightey to defend himself, as dozens of mummified corpses appeared out of thin air.
Shadrak fired again, even as he realized the futility. They had to stop them coming. Had to—
Two cadavers lurched toward Bird. The homunculus was still hunched beneath his cloak, focused on the floor, which was once again vibrating amid a fearsome din.
Shadrak blasted twice, put them both down.
Galen, though, was on the back foot, pressed hard by a swell of mold-blackened mummies.
A group of them buried Nameless and pulled him off of Blightey. The dwarf flung them from him with the giant’s might, but that was all the time Blightey needed to resume his feet.
More and more cadavers appeared around the Lich Lord, smothering him in a protective phalanx.
A lightning bolt streaked from within the press of bodies and struck Bird. The homunculus’s cloak of feathers flared golden, and the lightning rebounded, arcing from mummy to mummy and dropping them in smoldering heaps. For an instant, Blightey stood exposed—
—and Bird thrust a palm toward him.
The ground at Bird’s feet ruptured, and thousands of silver beetles swarmed toward the Lich Lord.
Not beetles, Shadrak realized: stone-eaters.
Blightey stiffened as the swarm reached his armored feet and rolled over him in a seething carpet of argent. As he vanished beneath the tide, the remaining cadavers winked out of existence.
Bird stood, directing the stone-eaters with sweeping motions of his hands. More and more poured from the fractured floor, swelling the mass that covered Blightey. Shadrak could do nothing but watch with bated breath. Would it work? Had Bird found a way?
Slowly, one step at a time, Bird advanced, until he stopped before one of Blightey’s solleret-clad feet protruding from the mound of insects. He kicked it, and nothing happened. Satisfied, he lowered his arms, and the stone-eaters drained away from the Lich Lord’s prone body like water. Within moments, they had swarmed back through the fissure in the floor.
Shadrak stepped in for a closer look. The others did the same.
Blightey’s skull was rocking gently off to one side. It had been separated from the neck of the borrowed body. Then Shadrak saw that there was no neck. The stone-eaters had devoured it, along with every other scrap of flesh and bone beneath the invulnerable armor. They must have squeezed through the gaps, gotten within and did what only moments ago had seemed impossible.
Even as the others let out collective sigh of relief, Shadrak saw the danger.
The skull lifted into the air and came straight at Bird. Its ruby eyes blazed like hellish coals.
Shadrak fired, but his bullet ricocheted off.
Bird screamed as his eyes began to smoke.
Galen stepped in, but Blightey’s skull flared incandescent, and he was driven back, shielding his face against the glare.
Bird flopped to the floor beneath his cloak of feathers, and Blightey’s skull pivoted toward Nameless.
The dwarf swung for it, but it was like striking rock. Nameless had no choice but to back away.
Galen darted between the Lich Lord and the dwarf. “Run!” he cried.
The glare of gemstone eyes bathed Galen’s face in scarlet.
Nameless shoved him aside. “You run!”
Galen dropped his saber and lunged for the skull. He recoiled with singed fingers.
But he had the right idea.
Holstering his pistols, Shadrak pulled out the never-full bag from his pocket, opened it wide, and brought it down over the skull.
There was no resistance. Nothing. And the bag remained flat, as if the skull were no longer there. Shadrak clutched it tight and held it at arm’s length.
“Laddie?” Nameless said. “Is it—?”
Shadrak handed him the bag and knelt beside Bird.
Immediately, tears spilled down his cheeks. Warm tears. Hot. Any other time, any other place, he’d have knifed anyone who saw, but he couldn’t stop himself. Didn’t want to. He didn’t care.
Bird had carried him as a child. That much he’d learned, but there must have been more. Bird had deemed him worthy of being saved, and had disregarded the homunculi’s desire to throw him to the seethers in the chasms of Gehenna. It was Bird who’d taken him to the snake-man in the plane ship, and so it was Bird who had ultimately sent him to Kadee. For that act alone, he deserved to be eternally thanked.
And yet Shadrak hadn’t thanked him. He’d barely had time to process what little Bird had told him. And there was so much more to ask. It was the same with everything in his life—his blood-drenched, throat-slitting life: everyone he should have cared about took second place to the task in hand; then second place again to the next task. And it never stopped: he just kept on doing what he did, as if stopping would be the death of him.
Metal fingers pressed down on his shoulder, squeezed with a gentleness that belied their strength. He looked up into the eye-slit of Nameless’s great helm. He didn’t need to see the face to know what the dwarf was thinking, what he was feeling, what he was trying to offer.
Shadrak put his hand on top of Nameless’s gauntlet and nodded that he understood, that he was grateful. And in that moment, he knew beyond all shadow of a doubt, the Archon could go shog himself.
The agonized moan Galen let out opened Shadrak to pain that was not his own. It was something he’d not felt before: a bond of suffering, the disturbing clutch of empathy.
Galen’s hand hovered over Ludo, as if touching the adeptus might infect him. But then Shadrak realized he’d been wrong: It was horror that made Galen falter. Horror bordering on despair.
Nameless let go of Shadrak’s shoulder.
“Oh, shog, laddie,” he said, taking a stumbling step toward Galen. “Laddie, I’m so sorry.”
Galen’s chest rose and fell with suppressed sobs.
Ludo’s hand twitched, and he touched Galen’s lightly.
Galen leaned in as the adeptus gurgled around the spike sticking out of his mouth, but he was beyond all speech.
Two days, Blightey had said. Maybe even three.
Shadrak pushed himself to his feet with a wispy streamer of rage. He took a step toward the rack. Then another.
Galen whispered to Ludo, but the room had grown so still, Shadrak heard every word like he was hearing voices.
“A life is an orchard.” Galen paused to swallow. “You told me that once, Eminence.”
Ludo tapped the back of Galen’s hand once, telling him to go on.
Galen looked into his bloodshot eyes for a long moment, then nodded.
“Perfect fruits come like gifts. They ripen, they fall, but they do not linger.”
He stepped back and held out his hand for Nameless’s axe. His fingers were shaking, and tears streamed down his cheeks. The ghastly look on his face screamed that this was way beyond horror, or the loss of a man he considered a friend. Galen considered this an act of mercy, but at the same time, he saw it as an unpardonable sin.
Shadrak pushed past Galen, palmed a pistol, put it to Ludo’s head, and pulled the trigger.
The crack of the flintlock was a deafening roar that echoed off the walls, fled through the ruined door Nameless had smashed apart, and reverberated down the corridor in muffled retorts. Finally, it found its peace in the cold air outside the castle.
“Come on,” Shadrak said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He turned toward the doorway he and Blightey had entered by.
Nameless handed Shadrak the bag containing Blightey’s skull and took gallows steps across the floor to where the plate armor lay. “Go on ahead. I’ll bring it.”
Numbly, Shadrak headed for the door. When he reached it, he looked back.
Nameless began to remove his chainmail hauberk, like he aimed to put the Lich Lord’s armor on there and then. He caught Shadrak watching from the doorway.
“Don’t worry, laddie. It’ll be all right. And if not, it’s too late to turn back now. Too much has been lost.”
Shadrak wasn’t so sure. As Nameless started to buckle on Blightey’s breastplate, he suspected the Archon was right to be worried. More and more of his old friend was being hidden beneath craftings he could only guess the nature of: first the scarolite helm; then Sartis’s gauntlets; and now the Lich Lord’s armor. Would that cling to him like the gauntlets did? Would he be unable to remove it, like the helm?
Bit by bit, Nameless was becoming as obscured as his name.
Shadrak knew it would be his last opportunity for a shot, before Nameless was as impregnable as the Lich Lord had been.
What if Aristodeus was wrong, as the Archon believed? What if this was just another trap, a deception of the Demiurgos? After all, the armor and the gauntlets had been forged by the Cynocephalus, and he was the Demiurgos’s son. And the scarolite helm: had Aristodeus designed it, or had he borrowed from the lore of the homunculi, who now seemed to serve him, as they had once served Sektis Gandaw? Children of the Deceiver, they were. As riddled with deception and betrayal as the Father of Lies himself.
But wasn’t Shadrak the same? Isn’t that what Bird had tried to tell him?
His gaze wandered to Bird’s corpse on the floor, eyes no more than burnt-out cavities. Maybe Bird would have known what to do, because he was shogged if he did.
He shouldered the bag rather than fold it and put it in his pocket. Although there was no bulk, no indication of the monstrosity it contained, he shuddered.
As to what he was going to do with the skull, he hadn’t thought it through yet. All he knew was he couldn’t leave it here. Last thing they needed was for someone or something to set Blightey free, so he could come looking for them.
Ga
len had his head bowed in prayer beside the rack.
Shadrak turned and left the room.
He didn’t need to see Nameless armored head to toe. Didn’t need to see his friend lost behind all that eldritch metal.
BETWEEN FRIENDS
When they arrived back at the plane ship, Shadrak didn’t join the others in the control room, and after a while of sitting there going nowhere, Nameless went in search of him.
He found the assassin alone in his cabin, red rims surrounding his pink eyes. He held an empty glass in his lap. There was another glass on the table before him, along with a half-empty bottle.
Nameless entered, and the door slid shut behind him.
Shadrak glanced up and said, “That fat shog Albert’s been helping himself to my cognac again.”
“You let him in your cabin?”
Shadrak hurled the glass against a wall. It shattered. “No, I do not.”
“Laddie,” Nameless said, “what happened back there at the castle… with Blightey…” He couldn’t find the words to express his revulsion, the horror that clung to him like the blood that had coated him when he’d awoken in Arx Gravis. No matter how much he scrubbed, he doubted he’d ever get rid of the stink of it.
Shadrak nodded toward the bag he’d put over the skull. The odd thing was, it looked empty.
“You sure he’s still in there?” Nameless asked, scanning the cabin and instinctively raising his axe, for all the good it would do.
“I’m sure. Don’t ask me how it works. Some kind of weird homunculus lore, no doubt. Like this scutting plane ship.” He scoffed at some private joke. He looked up into the eye-slit, and when he spoke, his lips trembled. “What I did to Ludo… before you arrived… the stake…”
“Blightey made you do it, laddie.” Nameless knew exactly what it was like to be compelled, although in his case he’d also been duped. Shadrak had known exactly what he was being forced to do: you only needed to look at his face to see that.
“I should have been stronger, Nameless.”