by D. P. Prior
“Ready?” Aristodeus said to Nameless, setting aside his teacup and standing.
“You’re sure about this?” Nameless asked. “Maybe everyone should leave, in case it goes wrong.”
“The theory’s sound,” Aristodeus said with a dismissive wave. “Either the three artifacts combined will grant you the power to destroy the axe—”
“Or?” Nameless said.
“Or they won’t, and we maintain the status quo. After all, the helm provides a buffer against the axe’s influence. You see, it’s a win-win situation. I don’t gamble with people’s lives.”
“Should I break the crystal?” Nameless said.
Aristodeus snapped his fingers.
A homunculus stepped up, tapped away at his gray slate, then slunk back again.
“No need,” Aristodeus said. “Just put your hands in.”
Nameless raised the gauntlets, splayed the fingers, looked at them long and hard.
“Enough!”
The Archon appeared in a whirling conflagration. His hooded robe was aflame with fire that did not burn, and his face was an explosion of brilliance.
“Not now,” Aristodeus said. “You agreed, remember?”
“Not to losing Ludo, I didn’t. Nor Galen. Nor any of the others.”
“Even Albert?” Shadrak said.
The Archon turned on him. “I’ll deal with you later.”
“All things come at a cost,” Aristodeus said. There was sorrow in his voice, but how much of it was genuine was anyone’s guess.
“No,” the Archon said, switching his ire back to the philosopher. “Not this time. The cost has been too high. It stops here.”
“So much for nonintervention,” Shadrak said. “Might as well fetch me Kadee back, while you’re at it.”
“You’ll get everything you deserve, homunculus,” the Archon said, “when you go kicking and screaming back to the Abyss that spawned you. You failed me. Failed me utterly. My favored one is dead by your hand. You will wear the guilt of Ludo’s passing for as long as you live.”
“He will not, laddie,” Nameless said. “Blightey’s the one that did it. He compelled Shadrak. Or are we going to have a disagreement?”
“Do not think to challenge me, dwarf. That armor you wear, those gauntlets, the Shield of Warding: they might make you mighty beyond belief among mortals, but they were crafted using Supernal lore. I am a Supernal.” Flames gouted from him as his voice took on the cadence of thunder. “I can snuff you out with but a thought.”
“Then do it,” Nameless said. Nonchalantly, he lay down his axe and turned back to the crystal. His fingers sank into it as if it were water.
“No!” the Archon stormed. “I forbid it!”
Nameless hesitated for a second, and then his iron-clad fingers encircled the haft of the black axe.
Silence fell.
Even the Archon seemed to wait with bated breath.
Slowly, inch by inch, Nameless drew the black axe out of the malleable crystal. He held it before the great-helm’s eye-slit, studied it, as if he dared it to do something.
“That’s it,” Aristodeus said. He licked his lips, circled away to Nameless’s left. “Focus now. Grip it tight. Use the full force of the gauntlets to break the haft. Don’t worry if it kicks back; the armor will protect you. And if it tries something else, something magical, you have the shield to soak it up. Concentrate now. Everything you’ve got. Everyth…”
Nameless turned. Crimson burned from the eye-slit of the great helm. In his hands, the black axe bucked, and flames of fuligin flared about its length. Inky threads crossed over to the gauntlets, the armor, the shield, and even the helm.
“You see,” the Archon said. “Its evil spreads like a contagion. Did I not warn you?”
“Deception,” Aristodeus breathed. “But I was certain.” He visibly wilted, looked around for support, but found none.
“The axe is Supernal, too,” the Archon said. “Crafted by the homunculi under the direction of the Demiurgos himself, and far greater than anything forged by his cowering son. It harnesses the power of the other artifacts; uses it to overcome the wards of your scarolite helm. You leave me no choice.”
He raised a porcelain hand. It blazed with argent.
“Yeah,” Shadrak said, drawing both flintlocks. “And you leave me no choice.” He opened fire.
The bullets melted before they made contact, and the Archon countered with bolt after bolt of silver lightning. Shadrak backflipped out of the way, but where the Archon’s blasts struck the floor, they sent up chunks of debris, and the force of the explosion slung him across the room. He hit the wall hard, dropped both guns, but he wasn’t finished yet.
Nameless roared—a spine-chilling, demonic howl of madness. The black axe came up with murderous intent, but the Archon turned on him and unleashed a storm of lightning. Nameless blocked with the axe, but the lightning arced around it, formed a net of argent about the dwarf. Nameless fell to his knees as the sparking web began to contract.
Shadrak was up and running at the Archon, reaching into the never-full bag at his shoulder.
Holding the net of lightning steady with one hand, the Archon took aim at Shadrak with the other. Silver streaked, but Shadrak tumbled beneath it and came up holding Blightey’s skull. Mottled jaws clacked, hellish eyes hungered with crimson ire—
—And the Archon screamed.
He raised his blazing hands to shield his face, and the silver web fell away from Nameless.
The skull ignited with its own conflagration, and Shadrak let go, flinging himself out of harm’s way.
For a moment, there was a frantic war of flames, but Blightey’s fire was stronger, more demanding, insatiable. His ruby eyes glared, scorched, excoriated. In their scathing light, the skull appeared to leer, as if the Lich Lord knew he had won.
With a cry of rage, the Archon blazed hotter than a small sun. Fissures of quicksilver ran through Blightey’s skull, but still he didn’t waver in his death-locked gaze.
The Archon shrieked, as the fire beneath his cowl stuttered and went out. In its place there was blackness. The blackness of oblivion. The skull jerked toward it, as if tugged by some invisible force. Its jaws opened wide in a silent scream, and then it shot into the darkness beneath the Archon’s hood and vanished. The Archon’s empty habit dropped to the floor. Within seconds, it was nothing but ash.
“No,” Aristodeus said. “What have you done?” He trembled like a man who’d at last lost control.
And then Nameless powered into the philosopher, flung him aside like a rag-doll. Before anyone could think to act, he let out a harrowing cry and ran at the wall of the control room.
“Stop him!” Aristodeus cried as he tried to rise, but sagged down again.
Shadrak whipped out a pistol, got off a shot, but it bounced off an armored calf. A second ricocheted from the backplate.
Nameless launched himself at the wall and swung the black axe in a terrific arc. With a boom like an exploding star, the axe head sheered clean through scarolite, and smashed a hole out onto the bleached dust of the Dead Lands hundreds of feet below.
Nameless turned to face Shadrak. The red glare from the eye-slit cried murder, and Shadrak took a step back. The fire giant’s gauntlets trembled from where Nameless gripped the axe haft so tightly, as if he were exerting tremendous pressure restraining it.
“Friend,” Nameless said. His voice grated with the effort of getting that single word out.
But Shadrak understood. He nodded, and lowered his gun.
Then, with a howl of utter anguish, Nameless leapt through the hole in the wall.
Shadrak cried out. He rushed to the opening and glanced down.
Nameless landed in a squat, recovered as if it were nothing to fall so far, and set off at a sprint toward the Sour Marsh.
Shadrak looked round as Aristodeus hobbled to join him, clutching his ribs. “What’s he doing? Where’s he going?”
Aristodeus took in Shadrak wit
h a look of pure horror. His face was as ashen as the bone-dust below. When he spoke, it was in a voice devoid of hope; the voice of a man who’d thought himself smarter than everyone else, and then realized he’d been hoist by his own petard.
“The Butcher is returning to Arx Gravis.”
PART THREE
GEAS OF THE BLACK AXE
“A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.”
(G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man)
NEW AGE OF GLORY
Nameless ran till he could no longer feel his legs, till his lungs were shredded with each breath in, each breath out. And still he didn’t stop.
A day and a night he had run, fueled by nothing save Aristodeus’s liquid feed. A day and a night since he’d left the bleached sand of the Dead Lands, since he’d smashed his way free of Sektis Gandaw’s mountain with such strength surging through him—more than the first time he’d held the black axe, when he’d been all but unstoppable.
The giant’s gauntlets, the Lich Lord’s armor, and the Shield of Warding seemed to amplify the axe’s power. It thrilled and jolted through his veins even now, even after his body had been taken beyond every limit, beyond the point his heart should have ruptured from the strain. Unbounded strength. Preternatural. Godlike.
He balked at the acknowledgment. Every fiber of his nature rebelled against the thought of what he had become. It terrified him, and yet he wanted it. He needed it.
The scarolite helm was a mountainous weight all the way through his traps and down his spine. The Lich Lord’s armor was one moment a chitinous oppression, stiff in the joints and threatening to drag him beneath the earth, and then the next, it was light as a gossamer-woven garment.
The shield was the same. It promised protection and inspired terror. It made him want to hide beneath it, like the Cynocephalus, but at the same time, it promised it could ward him from any spell.
The gauntlets were gloves either of granite or silk. It depended on his mood, on whether the axe fed him fear or rage.
He was torn between the desire to burrow below ground and hold his breath in case anyone heard him, or to take the fight to Arx Gravis, do to the dwarves what they had wanted to do to him. What they still wanted to do.
Because that was the way of it: kill or be killed.
Only, did he have the strength? Did he have the courage?
The black axe balanced perfectly in his right hand barked at him that he did. It screamed for him to head straight for the ravine city and bathe its walkways in blood. That was the only way, it inveighed—not through his ears like any ordinary voice, but from a fissure deep within.
The long, gnarled line of hills above the scarolite mines flanked him to the left, while to the distant south, Mount Sartis belched clouds of mustard-colored gas high above the smudge of the forest that skirted it.
Nameless chanced a look behind, but there was nothing. A cluster of dark dots in the sky was all—vultures, most likely, or a murder of crows. No sign of pursuit, but that didn’t mean a thing. Shadrak was called the Unseen for a reason, and as a homunculus, he was canny enough to lull his victims into a false sense of security.
It didn’t matter that a thready thought told him Shadrak was his friend. The effort of restraining himself from putting the black axe through the assassin’s skull back at the Perfect Peak had used up every last ounce of resistance he had left.
Or was it resistance? Maybe it was the last gasp of beguilement leaving him.
With a will, Nameless looked ahead and forced his legs to keep pumping.
Never look back, Thumil used to say.
Thought of his old friend almost brought a smile to his face. There was a dwarf he could trust. Him and Cordy both. They were as close to family as Nameless had these days, and to think he’d almost killed them last time he’d held the black axe.
Not this time. He was scared, same as before; but this time he knew what to expect, and something told him he could handle the rage. They’d help him, Thumil and Cordy. They’d understand.
Wild hope flooded him with new energy, heaped atop the unnatural vitality the axe bled into him.
“Thumil!” he cried out across the hills. “Cordy, I’m coming home!”
Stupid, a thunderous voice boomed from the base of his skull. You really think they’re going to welcome you with open arms?
Nameless slowed to a jog; slowed again to a walk, then a stumble.
“You silly shogger,” he mumbled. His voice seemed somehow distant, far removed from the mind that thought the words.
The Krypteia’s assassins would be waiting for him, should he be foolish enough to return. Dwarves had long memories, and what he’d done would linger longer than most.
The inner voice was right. He couldn’t go back.
His gaze through the eye-slit was wrenched to the black axe.
For an instant, he perceived them: almost tangible threads of darkness linking the blades to his head, to the exact same spot within that gave rise to the voice.
His heart thudded at the realization. He tried to throw down the axe, but it stuck like glue to his fingers.
But its advice was sound, wasn’t it? If anything, it had cut through the fug of his insanity, told him the cold hard facts. The only way he could go back to Arx Gravis was as a conqueror.
As a killer.
Better to not go at all, then, he decided, forcing himself to look elsewhere, anywhere but at those hungry blades. He should hide himself away for a very long time, just as the fire giant Sartis had done.
There… Was that a cave mouth low down on the craggy range? A long-forgotten entrance to a mine, from a time when the dwarves had walked upon the surface?
He started toward it, intending to run, but the armor felt like he was carrying a house on his shoulders. The gauntlets, too, seemed to pull him the other way, and the Shield of Warding grew heavy on his arm.
He’d gone barely twenty yards when scree cascaded from an incline. Fingers of shadow he’d not been aware of till then streaked across the gully, sent ice through his bones. He scanned the hills for any sign of what had caused the rock fall, but there was nothing. Had he imagined it?
Slower even than before, and with even greater caution, he inched forward and stepped onto a boulder beneath the opening. From there, he could see granite joists supporting the walls inside.
Something glinted.
His breath caught. Was it a blade? Was someone lurking in—No, it was the light of the twin suns reflecting off a length of chain hanging down from the ceiling. There had likely been a pail attached to it at one time, so the miners could lower down ore. Probably, they had taken it with them when the order came to retreat from the outside world.
Inside, he felt safer, less exposed. Thin cracks webbed through one or two of the joists, but they didn’t look ready to ditch the roof on him just yet.
Heaped at the back was a pile of rocks that seemed to have come from the rear wall being collapsed—deliberately, most likely, by sappers with instructions to make the mine unusable to anyone else.
The thought struck him there would be no way out if anyone tracked him here. It was no more than a cave now, maybe twenty feet wide and thirty deep.
So be it, he felt rather than heard the axe say this time. It was as if it had grown more familiar of a sudden. More intimate. The thought warmed him as much as it chilled.
There lay the crux of the matter: his attitude toward the axe. Everyone told him it was evil, on account of what it had made him do, but how much of that was true? How much had been him, with the axe merely providing the power to follow through on it?
Had it really changed him so much? Could it?
Surely, if he understood the nature of the beast, honed it to his will, it could be a force for good. Maybe,
with enough time holed up in the mine entrance, he could figure it out, and then, if he still wanted to return home, he could do so with the might to protect himself. And it was a power he could use for the good of his people. Maybe one day, he could make them great again, give them the courage to leave the ravine.
That was a thought he could live with. A good thought, presaging all manner of glory to come. A hard path, no doubt, to convince them, but once he’d mastered the axe, and once he’d shown them the truth of it, they’d thank him, maybe even give his name back, if there was a way to find it again. If not, they could give him a new one, and to show their gratitude, maybe they’d even make him a king, like the mythical kings of Arnoch.
He settled down on his haunches and held the axe to his chest. It sighed, and then it soothed him with a silent threnody that rippled and pulsed through his marrow.
He knew then just how wrong he’d been before. How wrong they had all been. All save for his brother Lucius, who had known it all along.
This was no cursed weapon forged in the Abyss. If he had done wrong before when he wielded it, that was because the homunculi had tricked him and made him see dwarves as demons. And then Aristodeus had persuaded him and everyone else the axe was to blame.
“Pax Nanorum,” he whispered, and the axe purred in response.
Suddenly, he knew without a shadow of a doubt, he was right, that it was the true Axe of the Dwarf Lords he held.
“Sleep now,” it crooned. “Sleep.”
With a yawn, he lay himself down and rolled to his side. The metal encasing him scraped on rock, but it was a consoling scrape. He let his head loll one way then the other, till it found a comfortable resting place within the great helm. He drew the Shield of Warding on top of him like a blanket, and hugged the axe to his chest.
And when sleep claimed him, he dreamed of the glories of Arnoch, of fighting dragons and beating back the worst of the Cynocephalus’s nightmares.